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1449-2490 privacy policy from penrith to paris (extracts) katherine elizabeth clay portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal clay penrith to paris portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 clay penrith to paris portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 clay penrith to paris portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 katherine elizabeth clay portaldedicationintrospecialissuefinal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. special issue details: global climate change policy: post-copenhagen discord special issue, guest edited by chris riedy and ian mcgregor. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. the late stephen schneider © linda a. cicero / stanford news service. global climate change policy: post-copenhagen discord special issue dedicated to stephen h. schneider it is with both pleasure and sadness that we dedicate this special climate change issue of portal to the late dr. stephen h. schneider. steve, as he was known to his friends and colleagues, was as rare a bird as any he sought out in his passion as a birdwatcher. a brilliant climate scientist, author of countless books and papers, path breaking inter-disciplinarian, eminent public communicator, mentor to dozens of young scholars; the list of roles and adulatory adjectives could fill an ipcc special report. steve would have appreciated this special issue, with its multidisciplinary approach, and its quest for solutions based on analytical scholarship. he understood better than most the inseparability of normative and descriptive concerns, the need for academics and scientists of all kinds to be involved with public processes of communication, policy design and deliberation. while his last book was called science as a contact sport, the unspoken title of his career might have been ‘science as a public service.’ he was endlessly testifying, consulting and giving interviews, and encouraged others to learn to do the same. notwithstanding a battle with lymphoma in his last decade (chronicled in the wonderful book the patient from hell), steve maintained a frenetic level of activity and was still going strong when he was felled by a pulmonary embolism in july 2010 at the age of 65. he leaves behind a legacy embodied in his publications, institutions like the intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc) and the journal climatic change,1 and in the hearts and minds of the countless persons he interacted with, mentored, and loved. exuberant, passionate, full of warmth and good humor, steve was a mensch among mensches.2 he will be sorely missed. paul baer, with the assistance of terry root and ian mcgregor. 1 publisher url: http://www.springer.com/earth+sciences+and+geography/atmospheric+sciences/journal/10584 2 mensch, a yiddish word meaning ‘a person of integrity and honor’ (wikipedia, accessed 28 nov. 2011). edwelcomev7n2july2010 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. editor’s welcome to portal, vol. 7, no. 2, 2010. this issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies comprises five articles in its general essays section, and two works in its creative works section. we are delighted with the inclusion of the first three essays: “‘a bit of a grope’: gender, sex and racial boundaries in transitional east timor,” by roslyn appleby; “undermining the occupation: women coalminers in 1940s japan,” by matthew allen; and “pan-pan girls: humiliating liberation in postwar japanese literature,” by rumi sakamoto. these essays were presented in earlier formats at the two-day workshop, “gender and occupations and interventions in the asia pacific, 1945-2009,” held in december 2009 at the centre for asia pacific social transformation studies (capstrans), university of wollongong. the workshop was convened by christine de matos, a research fellow at capstrans, and rowena ward, a lecturer in japanese at the language centre, in the faculty of arts, university of wollongong. the editorial committee at portal is particularly grateful to christine and rowena for facilitating the inclusion of these essays in this issue of the journal. augmenting those studies is “outcaste by choice: re-genderings in a short story by oka rusmini,” an essay by harry aveling, the renowned australian translator and scholar of indonesian literature, which provides fascinating insights into the intertextual references, historical contexts and caste-conflicts explored by one of indonesia’s most important balinese authors. liliana edith correa’s “el lugar de la memoria: where memory lies,” is an evocative exploration of the newly emergent latin(o) american identifications in australia as constructed through selfconscious memory work among, and by, a range of latin american immigrant artists and writers. we are equally pleased to conclude the issue with two text/image works by the vancouver-based canadian poet derek symons. paul allatson, editor, portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies. portal layout template i have two words for you, or when words collide derek simons, simon fraser university, canada portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. simons two words portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 2 simons two words portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 3 simons two words portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 4 simons two words portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 5 simons two words portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 6 simons two words portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 7 simons two words portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 8 simons two words portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 9 simons two words portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 10 simons two words portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 11 simons two words portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 12 i have two words for you, or when words collide derek simons, simon fraser university, canada portal layout template to work derek simons, simon fraser university, canada portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 2 simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 3 simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 4 simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 5 simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 6 simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 7 simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 8 simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 9 simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 10 simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 11 simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 12 simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 13 simons to work portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 14 to work derek simons, simon fraser university, canada welcome to the inaugural issue of portal welcome to the inaugural issue of portal on behalf of the executive editorial committee of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, it is a great pleasure to announce the virtual birth of this fully peer-reviewed journal under the auspices of utsepress, the exciting new electronic publishing enterprise housed at the central library at the university of technology, sydney (uts), australia. portal itself is edited by staff from the institute for international studies, a dynamic research and teaching centre at uts. the launch of portal's inaugural issue will take place simultaneously in sydney, australia, and guadalajara, méxico, on january 28 (sydney) / 27 (guadalajara) 2004. the trans-pacific axial enabling this twin launch is emblematic of the many axes of dialogue that, it is to be hoped, will characterize the content and reception of this and future issues of portal. we are grateful to the many people at the center for social sciences and humanities at la universidad de guadalajara, méxico, for their provision of the technologies and tequila that will facilitate portal's digital launch in a different space and timezone to its 'homebirth' in sydney, australia. as portal's 'focus and scope' statement indicates, the journal is dedicated to publishing scholarship by practitioners of-and dissenters from-international, regional, area, migration, and ethnic studies. portal is also committed to providing a space for cultural producers interested in the internationalization of cultures. with these aims in mind we have conceived portal as a "multidisciplinary venture," to use michel chaouli's words. that is, portal signifies "a place where researchers [and cultural producers] are exposed to different ways of posing questions and proffering answers, without creating out of their differing disciplinary languages a common theoretical or methodological pidgin" (2003, p. 57). our hope is that scholars working in the humanities, social sciences, and potentially other disciplinary areas, will encounter in portal a range of critical and creative scenarios about contemporary societies and cultures and their material and imaginative relation to processes of transnationalization, polyculturation, transmigration, globalization, and antiglobalization. our use of scenario here is drawn from néstor garcía canclini, for whom the term designates "a place where a story is staged" (1995, p. 273). garcía canclini's interest lies in comprehending the staging of stories at "the intercrossings on the borders between countries, in the fluid networks that interconnect towns, ethnic groups, and classes, … the popular and the cultured, the national and the foreign" (1995, p. 273). such stories indicate some of the many possible international scenarios that portal will stage in the future. a key to our ambitions for portal is an editorial commitment to facilitating dialogue between international studies practitioners working anywhere in the world, and not simply or exclusively in the "north," "the west," or the "first world." this fundamental policy is reflected in our editorial board, with members drawn from respected academic and research institutions in many countries and continents. we would like to extend our warmest thanks to the many people across the globe who, site unseen, graciously agreed to support this publishing and intellectual endeavour by joining the editorial board and wholeheartedly endorsing the journal's editorial brief. portal's commitment to fashioning a genuinely "international" studies rubric is also reflected in our willingness to accept critical and creative work in english as well as in a number of other languages: bahasa indonesia, bahasa malaysia, chinese, croatian, english, french, german, italian, japanese, spanish, and serbian. we anticipate that this list will grow. portal is also committed to the timely and constructive provision of feedback to submitted work. there will be two issues per year: one in january, the other in july. these editorial protocols make portal a uniquely "international" publishing venture. immense gratitude is due to the team at utsepress for their dedication to, and faith in, this project. in particular, we would like to thank alex byrne, fides lawton, richard buggy, and shannon elbourne, for their hard work, support, and understanding. thanks go to all the members of the portal editorial committee for their contributions. finally, special thanks to our editorial assistant wayne peake, research assistant john mcphillips and editorial committee member kate barclay who did so much to ensure the appearance of this inaugural issue. paul allatson, chair of editorial committee “he wants to go to the centre portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ going for the centre of the world moses iten ‘he wants to go to the centre!’ exclaims the man i’ve just asked for directions, winking to his friends. they are laying a cement foundation for a house, amongst wooden huts with dirt floors. an upgrade. they giggle and wave for me to continue along the only road. at each house spaced fifty metres from each other i keep asking for the same directions. ‘el centro?’ a lady asks me at one of the many wooden kiosks that all seem to sell the same few things, ‘bueno, just take a left at the next crossing.’ at the next crossing five boys are playing marbles on the gravel road. i stop to watch if they play by the same rules that i used to follow. but i can’t remember our rules. they ignore me, continuing in intense concentration, hopping about like little frogs to measure distances and retrieve strays. a group of men standing some distance away, though, watch me like i am watching the boys, while the boys watch their marbles. i look at the men watching me watch their boys. how could i be so curious about some boys playing marbles, when i was obviously the most curious thing in town? they are just boys with marbles. not wanting to alarm anyone, i continue down the wide road. going to the center, just to be going somewhere. anywhere. look for action. i could just stand still, lie in a hammock, read a book. but i don’t. i stop at an ‘upgraded’ market: tiled floors and half a dozen stores housed in a cement building. the seller can’t change my fifty-peso note for some exotic soft drink with guarano, and goes from shop to shop in this empty market until he finds someone who can give him the change. there’s some action. iten going for the centre ‘there are people with vices, with alcohol, with drugs, entering through palenque, a city you should stay away from,’ proclaims an evangelical voice in castilian, blasted through megaphones. tourists, like myself, also enter through palenque. some years ago from the opposite direction there were thousands of refugees fleeing massacre, but now mainly contraband enters from guatemala. just like any other border. i tune out as the megaphone discharges. the centre is crowded with dozens of men on bicycles, appearing to be listening, but more likely just talking amongst themselves. they are sitting on the back of their bikes, on the racks, looking like gangs of harley drivers. they are farmers, some with baseball caps, others wearing more traditional or straw cowboy sombreros, all with rough hands, sinewy bodies and worn but friendly faces. i appear to be ignored, but catch frequent glances. i’m being observed. the voice through the megaphones switches from castilian to chol and back, and i could understand it as it spoke of vice emanating from the city of palenque. in palenque – a tourist town and agricultural centre i had left behind groups of european, israeli and north american youths who spent days, weeks, months even – who cares about time? time is just time, you know? – on hammocks, with a joint in one hand and a lonely planet in the other, perhaps reading about ‘this spread-out, edgy frontier town’ in which i now find myself. ‘maaan, that sounds like a crazy place!’ back on the hammocks i had asked around if anyone was interested in coming along to the ‘frontier’; several people expressed interest in crossing the frontier to the next hammock hang-out in guatemala. but stay at the frontier? at least i’ve found the centre, at last. sheltered inside the building to which the megaphones are fixed, women and children are listening to the evangelical youth sermon. looking around in the dawn, i think i get the joke and giggle to myself: ‘ha! he wants to go to the centre!’ cruising amongst the crowds of chol men milling about on bicycles, i spot two short, stocky, dark-skinned youths – one of them distinct in his tank-top and the other wearing a hooded jumper from northern mexico giggling in castilian, crouching behind baskets of apples. an exotic fruit in this tropical outpost. i crouch down with them and it turns out they are portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 iten going for the centre from the sierra of puebla and veracrúz. we embrace each other like paisanos, indigenous compatriots from up north and a güero, me, who has adopted veracrúz as home. business has been slow, and these two have a whole truck of apples to sell in tropical chiapas before heading home. accepted by these fellow foreigners, we giggle together about the absurdity of dozens of grown men on pushbikes, speaking to each other in hushed groups. laugh about the heat, the pious sermon. mourn the absence of any female inhabitants in the open spaces. eat apples. occasionally a man ambles over to buy one of the tiny but tasty apples, only showing polite interest, if any, in the jokes of the jolly guy from veracrúz. in front of the local choles, i feel boisterous, ignorant. but tolerated. ‘¿qué se sembra en … australia?’ ‘what do they grow in australia? … bueno ... everything,’ i reply to the first question that follows my introduction to one of the groups of campesinos mounted on steeds of metal. ‘it depends where you live; in the tropical north they grow bananas, cane, everything you’d expect in the tropics. further south we have apples, wheat, and everything that grows in more temperate climates,’ i stand there explaining to a growing audience. the sermon has turned towards me, so quickly have i become a preacher. it is bound to be better over there, hopes rise. the megaphones fade with the cackle of birds, gradually growing silent at dusk. curious faces, but none the wiser, study me. we continue talking about the rural reality of australia and frontera corozal, chiapas. don’t know if you can call it talking, though, given their stunted castilian and my gringo world of plenty that seems to represent all their dreams. all these men have either migrated here from the highlands, or been born to recent pioneers. their mayan forebears once lived in these regions, but the spanish settlers carted them off from the unfamiliar tropics to tend to highland haciendas. upon return, some may have found wealth (comparative to starvation) as they turned jungle into farms, but i expect most did not. with each mentioning of a price or salary their eyes grow wide, and fail to narrow again as i raise a negative point about the society i’ve come from. or am i just justifying an economic wealth largely credited to a colonial and neo-colonial system put into place by so-called westerners? any philosophical points i could utter sound crude, as i translate them in my head and words melt before they pass my lips. i no longer feel boisterous, but gluttonous. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 iten going for the centre it gets too dark to sell apples and people are leaving the centre. i walk back with the apple-seller from veracrúz towards the hut in which my hammock is suspended. around his neck hangs a fierce-looking canine tooth. ‘it is from a boar,’ he says, noticing my admiration. ‘i swapped some apples for it, over in guatemala.’ you’ve been over there? ‘yes, yesterday i crossed the river with some apples. it wasn’t worth my while, but you know, i couldn’t be so close and not cross! i wanted to visit guatemala.’ he proudly shows me some copper and silver quetzal coins, fingering them like pieces of gold, putting them back in his pocket. with a look of incredulity why had he sold good apples for mere lumps of decorative metal? he advises me: ‘these are no good here, but i want to keep them anyway, como recuerdo.’ recuerdo, a castilian word connoting both ‘memory,’ and its physical manifestation, ‘souvenir’. he mouths the word with a certain pride, like he can afford to be frivolous, make some memory tangible – even if there is no point in it. before parting in the darkness, he confirms the price of a boat across the river. from there, he tells me about the existence of a once-a-day bus service into the interior of guatemala. it leaves at 11am from the collection of huts i had spotted on the opposite side of the river. howler monkeys are roaring like fierce jaguars, somewhere in the uninhabited jungle towards guatemala. kids and their parents sit on the side of the road, watching one of the tvs that live on the counters of raw timber at every little kiosk here. they only sell expensive snack food. presumably people here grow staples themselves, or barter. it is evident that most homes don’t have a tv, or even access to electricity. they sit outside on the dirt, in front of those windows into other worlds. the few huts that do possess power are nonetheless exposed like sieves, light shining through the cracks between the thin boards making up the walls. the floors of the huts are dirt, and i can see hammocks through the doorways. after passing each tv my eyes have to readjust to the darkness and the silence of the night once again. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 edwelcomev6n1jan2009 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. issn: 1449-2490: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. ‘the space between: languages, translations and cultures’: special issue edited by vera mackie, ikuko nakane, and emi otsuji. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. editor’s welcome to portal, vol. 6, no. 1, 2009. ‘the space between: languages, translations and cultures’ is a special issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies guest-edited by vera mackie (university of melbourne), ikuko nakane (university of melbourne), and emi otsuji (university of technology, sydney). as vera mackie and stephanie hemelryk donald (university of sydney) say in the introduction to the special issue: all of the contributors to this special issue have reflected on the stakes involved in negotiating differences in language and culture. in their research and professional practice they inhabit the ‘space between’: the space between languages, the space between cultures, and the space between academic disciplines. while many of our contributors are located in the australian university system, we also have contributors from outside that system, as well as contributors who are theorising disparate sites for the negotiation of difference. the most exciting aspect of the papers presented here is the ability to move between the spheres of cultural theory and the everyday. analytical techniques originally developed for literary and cultural analysis are brought to bear on the texts and practices of everyday life. in addition to the critical essays, three cultural works also intervene in the discussion over what it means to inhabit the ‘space between’ languages, cultures and countries. the guest editors and the portal editorial committee would like to acknowledge and thank the following institutions and individual for the support that made this special issue possible: the australian research council’s cultural research network; the former institute for international studies at the university of technology, sydney; the school of historical studies at the university of melbourne; and the arc cultural literacies node convener, mark gibson. allatson editor’s welcome portal 6.1 (2009) portal, vol. 6, no. 2, january 2009. 2 * * * i am delighted to announce that the january 2010 special issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies will be ‘fields of remembrance,’ guest edited by matthew graves (university of provence, aix-marseille i) and elizabeth rechniewski (university of sydney). the guest editors have provided the following description of the special issue’s scope. fields of remembrance special issue ‘en ces temps de débauche mémorielle, j’ai pensé qu’il était bon de revenir à des situations de base.’ jean-yves potel, préambule, la fin de l’innocence: la pologne face à son passé juif, autrement édns, 2009. across the world over the last 20-25 years nation-states have paid renewed attention to the observance of national days, and have undertaken campaigns of education, information, and even legislation, in order to enshrine the parameters of national remembering and therefore identity; while organisations and institutions of civil society and special interest groups have sought to draw the attention of their fellow citizens to their particular experiences, and perhaps gain national recognition for what they believe to have been long overlooked. described by pierre nora as the ‘era of commemoration’ or by jay winter as the ‘memory boom,’ or, more polemically, as in the quote above, as débauche mémorielle or inflation mémorielle, these developments have been accompanied by a realignment of the status of history and memory. memory may challenge official history; it may be brandished as a weapon in the quest for community identity, political rights, or financial compensation; it may be deployed as a tool of international diplomacy. it lays claim to the authenticity of lived experience and yet it calls on history for legitimacy. the historian is thus confronted with new responsibilities called upon by the victim, the journalist, the judge, and the legislator to pronounce on the validity of their claims. if there has been a world-wide turn to commemoration in recent years, there are nevertheless significant differences between countries in the relationship between memory and history and in the uses—and abuses—of memory. the articles in this issue will explore some of these particularities through the lens of a number of situations de base, concrete situations, that shed light not only on the policies and allatson editor’s welcome portal 6.1 (2009) portal, vol. 6, no. 2, january 2009. 3 practices of particular countries but on the methodological and theoretical issues involved in studying transcultural remembrance. the issue will include articles by robert aldrich (‘remembrances of empires past’), matthew graves (memory on the national periphery), judith keene (on cinema as prosthetic memory), george parsons (on memories of the somme), lindi todd (on the truth and reconcilation commission in south africa), and elizabeth rechniewski (‘remembering the battle for australia’). * * * finally, i would like to acknowledge the important contributions made to portal by the many peer reviewers of articles submitted to the journal in the first five years since its inception in 2004. deep gratitude therefore goes to the following people: virgilio almeida timothy amos ien ang bill ashcroft rita barnard andrew beattie andrew benjamin linda bennett tim bergfelder ron blaber jean-pierre boulé timothy brennan anne brewster jeffrey browitt craig browne ian campbell james cane-carrasco barry carr beatriz carrillo luciano cheles feng chongyi jon cockburn leanne cutcher bronwen dalton francesca da rimini stephanie hemelryk donald tanja dreher kuntala dutt louise edwards adriana estill helanor feltham david william foster yvette fuentes edmund fung debjani ganguly mobo gao devleena ghosh heather goodall david s. g. goodman james goodman julián graciano matthew gray damian grenfell kiran grewal aleksandra hadzelek joe hardwick panos hatziprokopiou baogang he adrian hearn anselm heinrich katherine hepworth winton higgins christina ho christine inglis robert mckee irwin helene jaccomard roslyn jolly amarjit kaur claire kennedy stewart king shuyu kong sue kossew lars kristensen lily lee barbara leigh adam lenevez colin lewis xia li allatson editor’s welcome portal 6.1 (2009) portal, vol. 6, no. 2, january 2009. 4 olga lorenzo yixü lü vera mackie kama maclean nicholas manganas lillian manzor jonathan marshall vicki mayer jo mccormack anne mclaren phil mcmanus sandro mezzadra maja mikula keiko morita stephen morris stephen muecke stefan mummert ian neary brett neilson michael o’brien obododimma oha ricardo ortiz lyn parker joy paton raul pertierra duncan petrie leopold podlashuc murray pratt kalpana ram francesco ricatti eliana rivero rosemary roberts mina roces stuart rosewarne antonia rubino raúl rubio wendy sargent lyn shoemark frank stilwell gerry turcotte robert van krieken ilaria vanni silvia vélez yiyan wang virginia watson chris worth monica wulff marivic wyndham guoxin xu jingqing yang yi zheng paul allatson, editor, portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies. scsaxolotlportaljuly2012 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. axolotl/bichos raros crónica susana chávez-silverman, pomona college buenos aires/los angeles 29 julio, 2001/25 mayo, 2010 para julio cortázar y alejandra pizarnik, in memoriam and for wim lindeque and james zike, for (y)our way of seeing viéndome sentada allí, en ese vinyl-topped, uncannily casi ’50s califas-style table, gazing embrujada into the little tank,—¿qué son? me pregunta una casi-hip, slightly concheta mujer. me lo pregunta a mí, cual si yo fuese la dueña del lugar, de este pomo lite, matte oxblood-red painted bar en el ‘pop hotel’ [sic] boquitas pintadas, owned by una romántica pareja de young germans y del cual había estado leyendo todo mi año en buenos aires pero i’d never actually made it here, y ahora. now, just days before leaving quiero engushirlo, engushirte buenos aires. toda. anygüey, esta mujer asks me, casi como si yo fuese la dueña, también, de ellos. de los axolotl. son axolotls, le digo. ajolotes, les dicen en méxico. como en el cuento de cortázar, ¿te acordás? son aztecas. la mujer smiles distractedly, pero she’s already backing away from me, slowly, cual si fuese sho la eccéntrica, backing up back to her comfortable table para comentar a su boyfriend que esa mujer staring into the fishtank a esas raras criaturas está chiflada. seguro que le está diciendo something like that. ¿pequeñito reptil? no. minúhculo anfibio. about 10 inches long. hay dos. pale yellow (son albinos, luego me contará el hipster german hotel owner), entre banana slug y baguette. y oh, cómo te encuentro aquí, at last, chiquititos, bichitos raros, with your chávez-silverman axolotl/bichos raros crónica portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 2 pale, smooth, mottled skin, tus teensy froggy forelegs y cuatro deditos like a doll’s starfish. los bracitos extendidos, posed like a miniature gila monster, like a south african likkewaan through the looking glass, mirando fijamente hacia arriba, hacia ninguna parte. tienes tres star-prong branquias above each would-be oreja. de repente, rítmica, involuntariamente se caen patrás, flat to your triangular head. se agitan las cilias delicadas, ínfimas, rosadas como mucosas, like the inside of a chirimoya o una guayaba. your tiny, gold-disk eyes de centro rosado siguen mirando fijamente. en eso, julio, about their eyes, tuviste razón. pero no sé (ay, argentinihmo) … no sé si en todo lo demás. aquí, ahora, here in buenos aires, vengo a descubrir que eso que escribiste eras todo vos. (well, what/who the hell else did you expect it to be, nena?) bueno ok, sí, admito que hay una fuerte pulsión de espiritualidad in that gaze, en esa praying mantis, mini-legavaan pose, en este absolute stillness que mira, looks right into me, through me, past me. suddenly, out of the acuario-shadows otro de uds. se lanza en movimiento. (de esta modalidad, julio, nunca escribiste.) rapidísimo te desplazás, meneando la colita de polliwog like a hula dancer. vos, black beauty, i’ve never heard of your kind. (pero ¿de qué color se supone que deben ser? no me acuerdo) me tinca que sos varón. además, hombre atrapado. contenido. ahí dentro. como boxeador. like an outclassed middle-weight against the ropes. o un toro acorralado entre picador y banderillero. ay, black beauty. acometés, branquias flattened, teensy tiburón. tu flat, wide aztec boca slightly open, tus negros, pencil-lead ojos straight ahead. i bend and crane my head. mi café irlandés se enfría en la otra mesa. pero i can’t get inside esos ojitos negros. ay, mini-dinosaur, te lanzás. tropezás contra el cristal. tus delicados dedos rozan, no penetran. tus blondas girlfriends estólidas, fofas y vos tanto embiste tanta ansia, insatisfacción en tu pequeño cuerpo. pero no sos mutable. ninguna metamorfosis posible. tanto rozar y chocar pero no lográs salir de ahí ni sho entrar. en vos. julio, you were wrong, carnal. o este no es el que vos viste, the one you switched places with en aquel jardín des plantes de parís. chávez-silverman axolotl/bichos raros crónica portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 3 a vos, black beauty, te bautizo mi axolotl porteño. sos como yo. bicho oximorónico, fronterizo, uncomfy, intersticial. en constante movimiento. los de julio apenitas se movían, sluggishly rozándose, politely asumidos en esa su essential inmobilidad parisina. pero vos no. can’t keep track of you. mercurio. tu pasión es palpable. y ahora heme aquí. en el boquitas pintadas pop hotel en la calle estados unidos en el barrio de monserrat, buenos aires. y estas rubias, calladas criaturas, mos def femeninas. raised up on their fragile, transparent forearms. parece que rezan. meditan en el más ashá … axolota: versión #2 or: are you the girl, black beauty? ¿me habré quedado identificándome inconsciente, pendejamente con el (sha superado, ob-vio, y tan politically incorrect) lector macho? the horror, the horror… ay, why did i do this? pero tan poco inspiring la otra alternativa, ¿no? la insípida, ‘irracional,’ predictably feminine, dreaded lector hembra. just the word makes me tremble with rage, con toda esa y su fuerza atávica, biológica. how could you, julio? la poeta andrea gutiérrez insiste en que el negro—mi negro—es hembra. y no sólo eso: she says she’s big like that—henchida—y activa porque she’s pregnant y busca escaparse de los confines del aquarium para parir. the blond ones, en cambio, según esta versión muy a lo monique wittig, muy amazónica, serían unos concubinos súbditos. y por eso tan teensy, so docile. me intriga esta teoría. pero confieso que i’m shaken. no sé si me convence del todo... ¿seré una convencional? una boludehcamente happily-ever-after kinda girl, after all? la dueña alemana concuerda contundentemente con mi versión, pero she freely admits que they’ve never had babies. y finalmente, after much quizzing, confiesa que directamente no se sabe si son machos, hembras, hermafroditas o in-between. y el dueño alemán, her hipster hubby, tells us emphatically que lo único que se sabe es que no se sabe. chávez-silverman axolotl/bichos raros crónica portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 4 here i am, gazing embelesada a estos prehistoric mexican axolotl, pero no en un acuario en parís: so much your city, julio, y la tuya, alejandra. and, for a brief time, en ese icy, cold-water flat winter de 1983, my city too, con mi prima lee, remember james? ahora estoy en un hotel bar en buenos aires, city of my sueños. this city still (y)our city, aquí en el sur, oh, a pesar de, no obstante—o quizás por—vuestra, nuestra indiscutible extranjería. sin explicación posible (ni necesaria), then. sho. buenos aires. vos. y ellos, los axolotl. buenos aires: the force of inevitability pero pronto, ay, way too soon, la partida. perhaps por eso esto ahora, entonces. the dense, compact perfection of this rush of experience and memory. toda esta desconcertante, bewitching, non-coincidental simultaneidad. ambiguas criaturas. bichos raros. ambas readings, entonces. both/and. y más. siempre más. welcome to ‘other worlds’ special issue welcome to portal ‘other worlds’ special issue paul allatson, chair, portal editorial committee welcome to the first appearance of portal for 2006 (vol. 3, no. 1), a special issue entitled ‘other worlds’ guest edited by james goodman and christina ho from the faculty of humanities and social sciences, university of technology sydney (uts). the papers collected in this special issue focus on what the guest editors call “the transformative power of social movements” that respond to the processes and discourses of globalization and globalism by generating alternative sites and spaces of agency, or ‘other worlds.’ the contributors to the issue originally presented papers at a conference held in april 2005 in sydney, with the title ‘other worlds: social movements and the making of alternatives.’ that conference was organized by the research initiative on international activism at uts, and supported by the research committee on social movements and collective action of the international sociological association. the editorial committee of portal would like to thank both institutions for their support of the event that led to this special issue. i would also like to thank wayne peake, kate barclay, and murray pratt for their editorial efforts in seeing this issue through to publication. the editorial committee is pleased to showcase in the cultural works section a short meditative piece by local writer joel scott, who is currently undertaking studies in pamplona, spain. when considered in the context of the special issue’s discussions of ‘other worlds’ that precede it, scott’s ‘god, we’re not immigrants! a reflection on moving and staying,’ provides an evocative insight into the sociocultural and imaginative limits that may preclude the construction of alternative ‘worlds.’ portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal finally, we are delighted to announce two calls for papers for future special issues, as per the following guidelines. as always, we are happy to consider general submissions from international studies practitioners and cultural producers working in any of portal’s languages for future issues. paul allatson. call for papers 2007年一月中文（简体或繁体）专辑 中国文化民族主义的复兴 自五四运动以来，曾有过数次文化民族主义的回潮。但六四以来的文化民族主义 复兴，即使算不上五四以来的高潮，也是中华人民共和国史无先例的现象。 对于文化民族主义兴衰的评说大多两极分化，同情者欲其兴，反对者欲其亡。欲 其兴者或夸大其影响，以壮声威，或矢口否认文化民族主义的复兴，旨在告诫同道人 ：“革命尚未成功，吾辈尚需努力。” 欲其亡者也采用同样的策略，目的则是为了提醒人们对文化民族主义提高警惕，认真 对待，或者把它说得微不足道。于是，对于文化民族主义的兴衰莫衷一是。 对于文化民族主义的性质和特点的分析同样两极分化，其中不乏对立的价值判断 。如果这些判断以实证分析为基础，也许无可厚非。但是，假如分析以此为先导，结 论就不难想象了。这本是小学基本常识，然而真正的客观分析为何如此少见？何况， 民族主义是一个尤其容易情绪化的话题，更难做到客观冷静。 翻开有关中国民族主义的文章，空论多于实证分析，看到的是它的是与非，对与 错，合理不合理，明智不明智，它应该如何如何。到头来却难以看清民族主义究竟为 何物。为了进一步了解中国的文化民族主义，似乎有必要强调对具体案例，具体现象 的分析，避免空论。 本期portal在线期刊将集中讨论中国文化民族主义复兴的背景和性质，而不关心 “应该”一类的问题。讨论的中心是文化民族主义复兴的直接文化政治动因和它的具 体表现，特点，诉求，以及各类文化民族主义者的意识形态，话语，目标，策略，组 织结构，协调方式和具体活动。考察的范围可包括，社会活动，学术活动，教育，出 版，广播，电影，电视，文学，艺术，等等。 portal实行在线投稿。文稿一般在4000字到8000字之间（包括脚注），繁体简体 均可。稿件必须符合学术规范，所有援引的资料应详细注明，包括作者姓名，书名或 文章题目， 期刊号，出版社，出版社所在地，出版年月和页码。（关于这方面的详细要求及其他 方面的说明，请参看portal在线期刊网页：http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/inde x.php/portal/user/register.）portal在线期刊不接受已经发表的文稿，也不接受已 经在别处投递的文稿。作者自负文责。无稿酬。投稿截止日期是2006年六月30日。 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal 联系人：郭英杰 电邮：yingjie.guo@uts.edu.au 通讯地址：institute for international studies, university of technology, sydney, australia po box 123 broadway nsw australia 2007 the resurgence of cultural nationalism in the prc: a new synthesis or regression? a special issue of portal (january 2007) in chinese (full-form or simplified) edited by yingjie guo submission date: june 30, 2006 while there is no consensus that cultural nationalism has developed into a formidable force in china, few would deny that it has been on the rise since june 4th and that it is a culturalpolitical movement with no parallel in the people’s republic, if not since may fourth. quite often the debate on cultural nationalism, as on nationalism in general, is polarised by a number of theoretical positions, value judgements, practical concerns and methodological choices. advocates of nationalism typically justify it on the grounds that it is indispensable for china’s national autonomy, unity and identity in the global nation-state system and the current international order, whereas its critics condemn it as ‘extremist’, ‘regressive’, ‘aggressive’, ‘chauvinistic’, ‘conservative’, ‘irrational’, ‘irredentist’, ‘narrow-minded’, ‘reactionary’, ‘traditionalist’, ‘xenophobic’, and so on. although it is hardly possible to have a value-free debate, perhaps a more meaningful one could start from the recognition that ‘deeper patterns of collective identity and pride are given form by nationalism as a way of talking and thinking and seeing the world’ a world at a basic level made up of nation-states, that whether this way of talking and thinking and seeing the world turns out to be flawed is an empirical question, not a conclusion to be foreordained by the adoption of a particular theoretical position or approach to the problem in question. for these reasons, this special issue will focus on what is going on in the world of events. of central concern in this special issue are particular aspects of the cultural nationalist ideology, movement and language; specific nationalist projects; and the causation and portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:yingjie.guo@uts.edu.au future prospect of cultural nationalism. particularly welcome are papers that address what cultural nationalism is and does, why it has re-emerged in post-tiananmen china, how it is related to political nationalism and the party-state, and in what ways it is likely to impact on china’s future development. all papers must be submitted online. only papers in chinese will be accepted. papers should be between 4,000 and 8,000 chinese characters in length including footnotes and accompanied by an abstract of up to 300 words in english and a list of up to six key words in english and chinese. papers should conform to portal author guidelines: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/user/register. the special issue will appear in january 2007. contact: dr yingjie guo e-mail: yingjie.guo@uts.edu.au address: institute for international studies, university of technology, sydney, australia po box 123 broadway nsw australia 2007 european values: visions of union and competing voices: a special issue of portal (july 2007) edited by dimitris eleftheriotis and murray pratt submission date: december 15, 2006 european values are increasingly identified by the european union (eu) as the area where ‘work needs to be done.’ the eu is thus preparing for its ‘2008 year of intercultural dialogue,’ an explicit bid to forge a sense of belonging and common citizenship. in the wake of the 2005 rejections of the eu’s draft constitution by france and the netherlands, politicians and media commentators have also called for (re-)visions of europe, with an emphasis on multiple europes, divergent and flexible borders, and new definitions of european values and belonging. current eu president wolfgang schüssel argues that the eu’s first priority is ‘to accentuate more clearly the identity question’ and to send the message that ‘there is no european uniform mass, but more identities, that constitute the european sound.’ analysts responding to the results have also called for new ways to conceive europe’s values, borders, and citizenship. in the french socio-political context portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:yingjie.guo@uts.edu.au alone, manent posits that europe’s cultural borders might be better characterized as indeterminate, while boutang asks that we (once again) consider europe as ‘something in the making.’ many observers regard such developments as proof that europe and the idea of europe are, if not yet ‘dead’ (as seen from the greek-australian perspective of novelist christos tsiolkas), at least in crisis. this special issue of portal reflects on the eu’s move toward (re-)discovering, establishing, and promoting shared cultural values. the issue seeks to unveil the historical contexts and traditions in which current inventions of cultural identity occur. the issue also aims to discover and listen to competing voices and visions—be they cultural, social, political, textual, collective, or other—that give different shape to europe and its models of union, commonality, belonging, and value. the special issue thus questions the eu discourse on values, the branding of europe in the global marketplace, and the marginalization of discordant euro-voices. it calls for theorizations of ‘value’ in the european region, and alternative mappings and visions of european belonging and identity. papers that consider europe as a locus of consensus, tension, contestation, and possible reconciliation, are especially welcome, as are those that envisage europe from or beyond its borders. contributions may come from practitioners in the humanities, social sciences, cultural studies, and international studies. we also welcome creative submissions on the topic from visual, literary and other cultural practitioners. papers must be submitted online. they may be in any of the portal languages of publication (bahasa indonesia, chinese, croatian, english, french, german, italian, japanese, serbian, or spanish). papers should be between 4,000 and 8,000 words in length including footnotes, and accompanied by an abstract of up to 300 words in english and a list of up to six key words, also in english. papers should conform to portal author guidelines: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/user/register. the special issue will appear in july 2007. contact: dr murray pratt e-mail: murray.pratt@uts.edu.au address: institute for international studies, university of technology, sydney, australia po box 123 broadway nsw australia 2007 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:murray.pratt@uts.edu.au this special issue of portal reflects on the eu’s move towar portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. issn: 1449-2490 ‘the space between: languages, translations and cultures’: special issue edited by vera mackie, ikuko nakane, and emi otsuji. http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress., sydney, australia. entre ausencias gabriela coronado, university of western sydney winmalee, 31 de diciembre de 2007. querida mamá, ya se que vas a decir que me tardé demasiado en escribirte. siempre te parece que no te tengo en cuenta, pero no, no es eso. es sólo que se me van los días y como de todos modos las niñas te cuentan lo dejaba pasar. antes no era tan importante; aunque fuera caro podía hablarte en cualquier momento pero ahora es como un pendiente. necesito contarte tantas cosas que no te he contado y sobre todo sobreponerme a la pena. eso de tener que regresar inmediatamente y sin un respiro volver al trabajo fue muy extraño y todavía me pesa. fue como si en realidad nada hubiera pasado y en un tiempo cuando vuelva me estarás esperando. estando acá como que nada ha cambiado. puedo seguir platicando contigo como siempre. aunque te escribí varios emails, siento que fueron muy a la carrera y como que no es lo mismo. es curioso, se supone que tenía más tiempo pues no tenía que hacerme cargo de nadie, pero los días se me pasaban sin un respiro. lo más pesado fue tener que aprender inglés. nada que ver con lo que aprendí en las clases. cuando yo hablo como que puedo controlar lo que digo y siempre sirve eso de que si no se alguna palabra pronuncio en inglés la palabra en español, pero lo difícil es entenderles a ellos. en la universidad tengo que lidiar con estudiantes y no sabes que difícil. ellos hacen como que me entienden y yo como que les entiendo y ahí la llevo. coronado entre ausencias portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 2 además eso de todo el tiempo conocer gente diferente es muy cansado, sobre todo en reuniones. por un lado el que me identifiquen más como mexicana hace que las conversaciones siempre giren alrededor de méxico, tengo que ser experta en todo, desde historia hasta la última noticia sobre política. es lindo que les interese pero al mismo tiempo no me siento yo misma. por otro lado si pierdo alguna palabra ya no se de que están hablando y llega un momento en que mejor me desconecto. especialmente cuando todos están platicando me pasa que de repente sólo oigo ruido, un ruido que me enloquece. es entonces que me quedo allí bien calladita, haciendo como si entendiera y sonriendo. por suerte bob no es muy sociable y más bien pasamos el tiempo juntos, cada quien en lo suyo. en esos momentos es como si el mundo fuera sólo el que traigo adentro. esos ratos los disfruto mucho. me recuerdan mis escapadas a la azotea cuando me sentaba en la oscuridad haciendo nada, sólo mirando y dejando que las estrellas fueran mis palabras. si, ya se que no lo entendías, pero al menos nunca te metiste. con eso de que yo si sabía lo que hacía y estaba bien. muchas veces me pesó que lo creyeras. ahora me pregunto si también pensaste que estaba bien que migrara a australia aunque mis hijas se quedaran en méxico. tantas veces sentí que no me lo perdonaste, y ni siquiera pudiste decirlo. ahora mi vida aquí es diferente y ya casi no tengo esos momentos sola conmigo. los días se me pasan trabajando. casi no puedo creer como todo ha cambiado. si me hubieran dicho que iba yo a acabar mi vida dando clases y en inglés hubiera pensado que era una mala broma. tanto que lo odiaba. como que el destino me jugó una mala pasada. no sabes como resiento no estar segura de que lo que escribo está correcto. mis amigos ya se acostumbraron a mi espanglish pero como que hay cosas que no puedo; me da pena. aunque los australianos son buena onda como que siempre se achica uno si no domina el idioma. es como ser niñita de nuevo y tener que depender de otros. bob es un santo y cualquier cosa que necesito me la corrige. pero yo añoro escribir en español. poder decir, sí, ya está listo y nomás mandarlo. además, es siempre como que doble trabajo. todo lo hago más lento, incluso leer. de por si nunca fui veloz pero ahora cada página se me hace eterna y no tengo ni un tiempito libre. no sabes como añoro los días en que llegue a australia y mi única actividad era hacer mi tesis. fue la purita felicidad. como si hubiera empezado mi vida de nuevo, y con una nueva mirada, o como dicen mis hijas, con el ojo del muerto. fue como si para volver a coronado entre ausencias portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 3 ver después del transplante de corneas hubiera necesitado nuevos paisajes. por cierto, quizá ahora puedas ver lo bonito que es australia; ¿verdad que es un bonito diferente? todo vasto. hasta el cielo se ve inmenso. creo que nunca había mirado tan lejos. cuando los extraño con sólo mirar p’ arriba es como si se me abriera el alma, y todo, todito el mundo cupiera. aunque también duele pues el vacío también es grande. ¡si tan sólo estuvieran aquí mis chiquitas! la nostalgia luego luego se me pasa y no sabes como disfruto el silencio. silencio, ruido, silencio, ruido. ¿se te ha ocurrido que son lo mismo? aquí me pasa que se me confunden. cuando estoy trabajando en la universidad y no hay nadie el silencio me deja descubrir ruidos diferentes, pájaros e insectos que nunca he oído, el viento moviendo las plantas, la lluvia en las ventanas y las voces lejanas de estudiantes en la alberca. ah, y por supuesto los pensamientos que se hacen palabras, taca-taca, taca-taca. en cambio cuando hay gente cerca y platicando las palabras se amontonan. el ruido en inglés es diferente. los sonidos pierden su sentido y entonces todo es silencio, tanto que no puedo escuchar ni mi aliento. * no sabes como duele tenerlos tan lejos. cada cosa que veo me imagino como la verían mis niñas; lorena con su entusiasmo ruidoso y explosivo, mariana con sus interminables silencios queriendo atrapar el mundo con su mirada. y tú que te cuento, estarías feliz con el culto a los perritos. y además ahora mis chiquitongos. sabes que marti dice que quiere venir de quince años a australia. tú quizás entiendes lo que siento pues sabes lo importante que fue ser abuela lo malo es que me las mal acostumbraste. mariana siempre me reclama que sea la única abuela de marianito y esté tan lejos. te extrañan tanto, siempre hablan de su abuela. como que todavía, no se la creen y siempre me cuentan que andas por ahí, haciendo maldades. ¿es cierto que le hablaste a mari el día de su graduación? patri dice que ve a una viejita y lore le cuenta que es su bisabuela. no se si creerles pero en el fondo quisiera que fuera cierto y que pudieras conocer mi mundo, compartir mi vida. nunca se nos hizo que vinieras. aunque pudieras visitarme ahora, ya no conociste mi primera casa. estaba increíble. era como si estuviéramos en medio del ajusco, rodeada de árboles y nubes que entraban por las ventanas. había pericos y unos tlacuachitos que correteaban por el techo. aquí se llaman possums. en la noche, cuando estaba sola, me daba mucho miedo, se oían coronado entre ausencias portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 4 como pasos en la azotea. ahora ya me acostumbré y también en donde vivo hay uno. les mandé la foto y martí le puso lolita. había también unas ranitas que entraban por la regadera y en el baño crecían hongos pues el agua era de la lluvia y no tenía filtro. artus se lo puso cuando él y lore vinieron de visita. decidimos cambiarnos pues no había casi transporte público y eso no me gustaba. aquí no es como en chilangolandia en donde sólo sales a la esquina y le haces la parada al pesero. y no hay tienditas que crecen como hongos, una en cada esquina. imagínate que para comprar leche tenía que caminar como 20 minutos a la gasolinería. si, ¡en la gasolinería venden leche! como todavía no me atrevía a manejar del otro lado me sentía como atrapada, sólo deseando tomar un tren e ir a sydney a empaparme de urbe. no es que extrañe el tráfico o el smog. de hecho ahora que puedo casi no voy p’allá. no, lo que extraño es la gente, mi gente. aunque te cuento que en chinatown me siento como en casa, no sabes como nos parecemos a los chinos, menos rasgados pero igual chalitos. me gusta ver los parecidos de mis amigos con la gente caminando en las calles. * el otro día que hablé con las niñas nos acordábamos de jaime. no sabes que susto tuve cuando me contaron del cáncer. lorena todavía como que no lo perdona, sigue furiosa con él y me imagino que con la vida. como es posible que lo haya dejado pasar. ¡ay! mi hermanito siempre tan pendejo. no sabes que miedo me dio cuando le hablé por teléfono y oí en su voz la muerte. casi no lo reconocí como que se le fue el entusiasmo. pero me dio tranquilidad cuando me dijo con toda certeza que me esperaría. parece absurdo pero se lo creí y aunque faltaban algunos meses y las niñas sentían que se estaba extinguiendo como velita algo en el fondo me decía que llegaría a tiempo. de todos modos si me hubieras dicho que sentías que se nos iba, te juro que en ese momento me hubiera ido al aeropuerto y llego de volada. ¡ay! no sé, de por si la muerte es canija, y no poder estar con ustedes me pesa en el alma. creo que es lo que más me pesa. por suerte pudo esperarme. no sabes como me gusta tener aquí su guitarra, ya no sirve pero de todos modos canta sus sueños. ay, hijina, tampoco te dije como te agradezco que ayudaras a mi lore. nunca me contaste como te cayó la noticia, aunque creo que los gemelos te dieron nuevos ánimos. coronado entre ausencias portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 5 todavía tengo la foto en la que estás cargando a los dos chiquitos. me acuerdo de la cara de lore, sosteniendo el aire, como ayudándote a que no te venciera el peso, y yo ahí cerquita por si las dudas. a mi casi me dio el soponcio cuando me dijo que estaba embarazada. y a mariana no te cuento. no sabes que angustia. aunque tenían la casa donde vivir estaba difícil que de repente artus consiguiera trabajo o que ella pudiera hacer algo, ni la tesis había terminado. lo bueno es que la oí bien contenta aunque si un poco asustada. y con eso de que son gemelos, pensé, ora si que mi chiquita va a dar un crecidón fenomenal. al principio ni podía dormir de la angustia y como que tenía ganas de llorar. no se si porque estaba acá o por la vida. mi primera reacción fue salir corriendo pero con los días como que me tranquilicé. siempre les he tenido confianza. en el fondo sabía que aunque me necesitaban también tenían que arreglárselas entre ellos. y para colmo también mi marianita con su jaime y su amor complicado. no se si hubiera sido mejor estar allá, o como dice el dicho, ‘ojos que no ven corazón que no siente’. menos mal que al final todo salió bien. es tan difícil dejarlas crecer. bueno, yo que te cuento. es en momentos como esos que me pregunto si podré sobreponerme a la ausencia. ¿será cierto que la distancia no es el olvido? como dice la canción, o ¿es sólo mi fantasía dejándome creer que puedo ser de aquí y ser de allá? no sabes el alivio que me da saber que te tienen cerca. siempre ha sido así. aunque medio tullida siempre contaron contigo. no es por nada que les duele tanto su viejita. tu ya no estabas cuando se casó mariana. te hubiera encantado verla vestida de reina con su antifaz de cristales. ¿te lo enseñó cuando llegó de australia? ¿o ya tampoco te tocó? como que el tiempo se me confunde y ya no sé que pasó antes y que después. no sabes que difícil fue eso de negociar el permiso en el trabajo para estar en su boda; como era a la mitad del semestre me la hicieron de tos. y peor aún, para estar con ella en el parto de mariano. con marti y patri pude estar más tiempo pues todavía tenía trabajo en méxico. te juro que fue increíble y como que siempre me recordaron. cuando vinieron de visita tenían casi dos años y patri me reconoció en el aeropuerto, me vio a lo lejos, esperando. pero con marianito fue muy difícil. te juro que estuve a punto de renunciar. eso de estar en dos países con mis amores separados por un océano me está doliendo en el alma. aunque puedo ver sus fotos y les hablo por teléfono no sabes como quisiera verlos, tocarlos, sentir como crecen. su vida se me escapa a saltos. coronado entre ausencias portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 6 el gusto de ser abuela me empezó a crece como enredadera. es completamente loco, es casi como si de repente te prendieran el switch. igual que tú nunca fui muy niñera pero cuando son tus nietos te transforman. estando acá mi ilusión fue comprarles ropitas, o modernidades que nunca había visto por allá. todavía cuando voy a las tiendas me gusta ver las cositas de bebés, aunque ya ni al chiquito le quedan. ya sabes, una maleta pa’ los regalitos y la otra pa’ mí. viajar así es muy cansado pero no sabes como me ilusiona ver sus caritas esperando ver cuales son las sorpresitas. cada vez que regreso cuento mis días pensando en los que me faltan para volver. sí que me da mucha tristeza no poder estar más tiempo con ellos. a ti, no importa donde esté te tengo cerca pero a ellas las extraño tanto. es como si me perdiera parte de su historia. aunque me cuenten, no es lo mismo. no sabes como lamenté no poder ver como sus panzas se llenaron de vida, o no haber estado en sus exámenes profesionales, toda orgullosa. o en las exposiciones de mariana viendo como poco a poco crece mi artista. aquí tengo algunos de sus cuadros y cada vez que voy quisiera traerme más pero ya casi no tengo paredes. por cierto, te encargo le eches una mano pues como que de repente la siento tristeando. * eso si te digo que ya me anda por jubilarme. espero que la salud no me defraude como a ti y pueda seguir viajando. tengo planes de pasar un tiempo aquí y otro allá. te cuanto que la última vez que fui a méxico fuimos a malinalco y estamos planeado comprar una casita, con alberca para que nos visiten los nietos, a ver si nos alcanza. si no te veo por acá espero que allá si me visites. pensarás que por qué no me quedo en el df. te digo la verdad. ya no puedo, como que ya me acostumbré a la calma, y también creo es bueno que cada quien tenga su espacio. estar de visita es lindo pero cada quien ya tiene su vida. con los años como que todo parece más difícil y me aumenta el miedo de enfermarme o morir en australia. me da pánico. imagínate que casi ni se como explicarme cuando voy al doctor. por más que les describo siento que no me entienden. como que lo que se siente en el cuerpo es algo muy íntimo que no se enseña; se aprende con la vida. cuando me operaron del pulgar fracturado fue muy difícil. incluso bob no sabía como tratarme. en el hospital me sentí desolada. con eso de que nadie quiere molestarte, ni quien te visite o te eche una llamadita. y luego cuando bob se fue a comer se me hizo eterno. coronado entre ausencias portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 7 ¡imagínate! se fue a la casa y yo espera y espera y nada que no llegaba. pensó que era bueno que estuviera sola para dormir y recuperarme. ¿te acuerdas tú? todos haciendo chacota cada vez que te operaban; casi parecía pachanga, risa y risa con las bromitas de la familia. acá más bien parecía velorio, pero de huérfano. * ah, se me olvidaba decirte como te agradezco hayas sido tan generosa conmigo. como que parece de familia eso de planear la muerte. ¿será una cosa cultural? ojala y yo pueda hacer lo mismo, no quisiera morirme sola. ni tampoco que mis hijas se queden con el gusanito. yo todavía no puedo creerlo y a veces pienso que fue sólo mi imaginación. todavía me acuerdo lo enojada que estabas con chacho porque se iban de vacaciones cuando yo llegaba de mi viaje a chiapas. me quedaban sólo dos semanas y de regreso a australia. tu mal humor me pareció completamente incomprensible. hasta llegué a pensar que lo estabas manipulando, haciéndolo sentir culpable. sabias que yo me quedaría en tu casa esos días. ¿no siempre me chantajeabas que no estaba contigo cuando iba a méxico? y ya hasta habíamos planeado la comida del domingo con todos; mari y jaime iban a traer carnitas y lore, artus y los niños el pastel. yo compraría las chelas. ¿no era eso lo que a ti te gustaba? la pura pachanga con las niñas. pues no, dale y dale que no se fueran. seguro querías morirte con tus hijos y tus nietos cerca. nunca me dijiste que el doctor quería que te quedaras en el hospital y tú te negaste. siempre tan necia. ¿o es que yo no quise enterarme? con eso de que cada vez que iba te enfermabas para que yo te atendiera. la medicina no te sirvió de nada. ¿o es que no te la tomaste? ya no quisiste comer, ni agua aceptaste que te dieran. si no es por lore que es medio brujita no nos hubiéramos enterado a tiempo. chacho y sus hijos ya se habían ido y nos fuimos de volada. yo no sabía si llamarlo o esperar a ver si reaccionabas. con el suero a lo mejor te recuperabas. fue inútil. ya te habías decido a morir. te quedaste dormida, sólo esperando que regresaran para dejarte ir. no se si nos escuchaste. no se si algo quedó por decir. solo sé que cuando uno vive fuera uno quiere volver y estar ahí cuando alguien se te muere. la né entre ausencias template for 2003 conference papers portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal introduction to portal ‘other worlds’ special issue james goodman and christina ho, co guest-editors, faculty of humanities and social sciences, university of technology sydney portal opens 2006 with a special selection of papers focusing on the transformative power of social movements. in an age of globalisation and of ideologies of globalism, we debate sources and potential for alternative scenarios, for ‘other worlds.’ many commentators have proclaimed this the global age, where humanity lives under one world power, one world market, and one world order. yet many other worlds find new and fertile ground in this age, flourishing against the norm. social movements set new agendas, inspire participation and crystalise solidarity. at the centre of contestation, they can create emancipatory knowledges—knowledges for change. in this issue of portal we ask how social movements generate new ways of being, new subjectivities, or new modes of existence. we debate the role of affective meaning, of symbolic action and collective conscience, and discuss the place of reflective action. contributors debate the dialectics between power and counter-power, and the role of strategic conflict and dialogue. they analyse sources of revolutionary and transformative change, discussing the praxis of counter-globalism. the papers in this issue were presented at a conference held in april 2005 in sydney, on the theme of ‘other worlds: social movements and the making of alternatives.’ the conference was hosted by the research initiative on international activism at the university of technology sydney, and was supported by the research committee on social movements and collective action of the international sociological association. the conference was aimed primarily at researchers interested in debating the creative power of social movements. forty papers were presented, with participants from india, canada, usa, taiwan, china, the philippines, zimbabwe and south africa, as well as goodman and ho introduction from australia. topics included: rural reconstruction in china; the emergent maoism in south asia; young women and consumerism in australia; student groups in taiwan; anti-racist community media in sydney; organisations of undocumented migrant workers in france; movements challenging coal extraction in australia; anti-dam movements in taiwan; the role of slum-dwellers’ organisations in africa and asia; community action and sustainability in the philippines and canada; the internet as a realm of creativity; art as political expression; the role of spirituality in acting for sustainability in india; the emergence of ‘the commons’ as a social movement agenda and practice; and the experience of mutual understanding in building shared alternatives for global justice. there were plenary contributions from kevin mcdonald (university of melbourne), saroj giri (centre for human sciences, new delhi), and lau kin-chi (asian regional exchange for new alternatives, hong kong). two key themes emerged at the conference. the first related directly to the central concerns of the organisers, namely the ways in which social movements create emancipatory knowledges and the role of affective engagement and reflective action in that process. several papers centred on the praxis of counter-globalism, discussing how social movements relate with one another in a counter-globalist or alter-globalist ‘movement of movements.’ these discussions spilled over into discussion of specific contestations, where the question of solidarity within and between movements was encountered in a wide range of specific contexts. the second theme emerged partly as an outcome of the debate on emancipatory process, and centred on questions of developmentalism. several papers addressed this issue, directly investigating specific challenges to developmentalism, both in the ‘north’ and in the ‘south.’ coalitions of social movements centered on variants of environmental justice were analysed in india, south africa, the philippines, canada, china, taiwan and australia. the specificity of ‘southern praxis,’ and its alignment with northern agendas and movements as expressed in north-south relations, were discussed in several contexts as a key dimension of counter-globalism. the conference ended with a plenary discussion on the state of social movement research in australia, and in the region. participants resolved to establish a social movement research network to draw people together on a more regular basis, to share perspectives and research agendas. a large number of papers that were presented at the portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 2 goodman and ho introduction conference do not appear in this issue of portal, but the full list of paper titles and abstracts from the conference can be found on the web at: www.international.activism.uts.edu.au. in keeping with the theme of this issue of portal, the bulk of the papers debate the emergence of alternative scenarios of globalism through social, cultural and political action. the first ten papers share a concern with the creative role of social movements; the remaining two papers are more general in orientation, but are included for the special insights they offer. our interest is both with the principles and practice of social movements. accordingly we have consciously sought to bring these two threads together. the twelve papers are divided into three broad categories, the first focused on ‘themes and channels,’ the second on ‘sectors and spaces,’ and the third on ‘values and alternatives.’ the first two sections focus most directly on social movements, and are designed to be complementary. while themes may emerge as principles for action or aspiration, and while channels may open-up for movement action, it is only in the concrete context of social movement sectors, and in the material spaces where mobilization occurs, that these principles or aspirations are enacted. the third section is less centred on social movements, but focuses on broader processes of constructing social and cultural alternatives to globalisation. themes and channels the issue begins with an overview by hamed hosseini of the dilemmas and possibilities of cross-movement solidarity within the ‘alternative globalisation’ movement. hosseini’s focus is on the emergence of what he describes as an ‘accommodative consciousness,’ where movements address tensions between reform and revolution, build inclusive structures and find common ground in addressing the dynamics of globalisation. hosseini takes us beyond the levelling effect of simply invoking a ‘movement of movements,’ and instead emphasises the process of constructing shared consciousness across profound differences. the paper constructs an interpretative framework building on social movement theory to distinguish attributes of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ praxis. it applies this schema to social portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 3 goodman and ho introduction movements that seek to mobilise against corporate globalisation, and in the process develops the concept of ‘accommodative consciousness’ to understand how alterglobalisation movements overcome divisions between these modes of praxis through forms of engaged dialogue and solidarity. the paper offers a comprehensive engagement with this process, and its specificity in terms of how the commitment to multiplicity is operationalised politically. as a political tool, accommodative consciousness opens up ‘global fields of resistance.’ the scope of this field defines a foundational consensus, in the first instance, that there is a problem, and that it has to be addressed along the lines of common principles, namely that any alternative globalism must in some sense be democratic, have some commitment to shared dignity or rights, and must take us away from corporate commodification. in the second paper one of the co-editors, james goodman, picks up this debate about the process of constructing a shared consciousness and capacity to act against corporate globalism. his primary concern is with the spatial logic of solidarity, and the extent to which it marks a shared imaginary ‘frontier’ between protagonists on a global scale. as globalism is contested in particular places, resistance is necessarily embedded in specificities. such specificities generate particular narratives. these become mutually aligned, and thus map out global lines of antagonism. such antagonism is seen as a key element of the emergence of what goodman refers to as ‘counter-globalism.’ marking a point of difference with hosseini, goodman insists that resistance to corporate globalisation is in the first instance ideological resistance. the ideology of globalisation—globalism—is vested in structures of material power, to make a normative claim on society. opposition to that claim is not only vested in the idea of an alternative globalism, but also, argues goodman, in a variety of antiglobalisms. conceptualizing resistance more broadly as a ‘counter’ movement, goodman explores its spatial dynamics. goodman argues that three themes are central to resistance—the appeal to deep democracy, the assertion of livelihood and the commons, and the creation of autonomy with solidarity. each of these has a specific spatial logic: the commons are extended through north-south dialogue in campaigns for de-commodification; democracy is deepened through forms of multipolar disengagement and trans-localist re-linking; portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 4 goodman and ho introduction autonomies and solidarities are elaborated through forms of affective engagement and radical re-embedding. goodman concludes by asserting the centrality of these forms of connectivity for constituting the ‘frontier’ of counter-globalism. the third paper, by james arvanitakis, picks up on the role of social movements in producing alternatives to globalisation, focusing on debates about the ‘commons.’ arvanitakis develops an inclusive schema for understanding the commons as the broad swathe of life that is not wholly subsumed by the private market, and by commodification. while the commons have traditionally been understood in material terms, arvanitakis suggests that they should be thought of as a deeply variegated space, ranged across categories of socialised provision, including, for example, the ‘cultural commons’ and political debate. the paper mobilises some evocative themes, such as scarcity versus abundance, and opening up versus enclosing, in order to reverse the conventional idea of the ‘tragedy of the commons.’ rather, arvanitakis argues, the more pressing problem in our globalised world is the ‘tragedy of enclosure.’ the fourth paper shifts the focus to a discussion about channels for resistance, as against principles. jon marshall uses the work of antonio negri and michael hardt to debate the possibilities for ‘distributed governance’ amongst social movements, understood as mutual arrangements for self-governance in contesting globalism. the specific channel marshall explores is the much-debated field of digital exchange, and specifically the extent to which that field generates an intellectual commons that resists subsumption by capital. the paper powerfully challenges commonplace and often uncritical equations between networks, interdependence, and democracy. instead, marshall argues that networks can extend central power as much as weaken it. free and open source software movements, for example, are often comprised of self-constituted technical elites who tend to be politically unaware. likewise, the internet is shown to be a deeply problematic model for a future form of democracy. contra hardt and negri, marshall contends that information technology, always susceptible to colonisation by corporate and military interests, is not automatically imbued with transformative potential. sectors and spaces having discussed some broad themes and channels we move to examine the specificity, portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 5 goodman and ho introduction in terms both of the specific social movement sectors and spaces in which globalist alternatives are constructed. an important aspect of this is the dynamic of interculturalism, where mutual recognition enables a form of reciprocal action that brings new alternatives to globalisation into view. there are five papers this section, taking us from the labour and community sector, to refugee solidarity, indigenous environmentalism and self-determination, and ethno-cultural community mobilization. the issue’s fifth paper, by amanda tattersall, operationalises some of the broader themes by examining the links between two social movement sectors—the labour movement and the community sector. the focus of the paper, ‘four shades of political coalitions,’ is on trade union organisations and community-based organisations, and how they relate. ultimately, tattersall sees the relationships between workplace and community as both necessary and productive: trade unions and community organisations clearly have different imperatives and priorities, but their relationships are capable of producing new social formations and political configurations. they thus act as crucibles for producing global alternatives, where elements are combined, reassembled and reordered to create new forms of resistance. tattersall identifies four types of political coalitions between unions and community organisations: ad hoc, support, mutual-support, and deep. this framework allows us to understand the range of engagements between unions and community organisations, from episodic, instrumental partnerships, which build useful short-term relationships without altering the pre-existing organisational trajectory of each party, through to long-term, grassroots-based mobilisations, which open up decision making structures and frames of vision. the sixth paper, by diane gosden, offers an account of a social movement sector centered on solidarity, namely the movement for asylum-seeker and refugee advocacy. her focus is on the resurgence of this movement in australia, in the face of especially restrictive and oppressive government policies from the 1990s. it particularly highlights the inter-subjective process that these initiatives generated, and discusses some of the political dynamics within which they were embedded. what is remarkable about the movement, as gosden highlights, is its diversity, ranging across distinct geographical, institutional and ideological groupings of individuals and organisations. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 6 goodman and ho introduction the factor that knitted the movement together, she argues, was the imperative to take action in the face of government policy, thereby, in melucci’s terms, constituting ‘collective action expressing a conflict.’ the seventh paper, by david ojakorotu, focuses on the spatial dynamics of oil exploitation and local resistance in nigeria. taking a thirty-year perspective, ojakorotu maps the tensions between local peoples on the one hand, and multi-national oil companies and the nigerian government on the other, highlighting the rise of resistance politics through a charismatic local leadership geared to local ancestral claims and linked with international environmental agendas. ojakorotu outlines the dynamics of claims for self-government and self-determination, defined against both corporate interests and unitary national interests. his emphasis is on the distributional question and its environmental side-effects; that is, on the conditions under which oil is exploited, rather than oil exploitation per se. reflecting this, in the closing section ojakorotu offers a series of prescriptions, for creating a stakeholder constitution in nigeria through to safeguarding minority interests, along with the statutory enforcement of environmental safeguards; code of responsible conduct for mnc’s toward local populations; uncompromising governmental attention to the welfare and survival of its citizens in priority to its relations with profit directed mnc’s; and dialogue as vehicle for conflict resolution rather military force with the emphasis on consensus building. the integrated master plan for the niger delta is (with certain reservations) commended for its attempt to resolve some of the issues at stake. the eighth paper, by w. f. lalich, focuses on ethno-cultural movements in sydney. centring on the cultural dynamics of ‘collective action of “others” in sydney,’ the paper examines how minority ethnic communities construct collective cultural places, geared to meeting social needs. these culturally-specific social resources are patterned by different capacities and orientations of ethnic communities, and the paper debates how they differ in their capacity to construct a collective cultural meaning, and to deploy human and material resources. lalich argues that through the collective creation of social space, migrants add a new portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 7 goodman and ho introduction and dynamic dimension to the social environment, effectively enacting multiculturalism. the post-1945 expansion of migration to australia brought dramatic changes to sydney’s demographic and cultural structures. in the three decades after 1945 over 450 ‘other’ (ethnic) collectives mobilised through grass-roots efforts, and created collective spaces, such as places of worship, clubs, schools and aged-care facilities. lalich shows these ethnic communities constituted themselves as cultural collectives, creating communal roots and various forms of inclusion in a dynamic culturally diverse society. ethnic communal places thus came to signify collective conscience, participation, and the embeddedness of transplanted cultures in a transforming social environment and transnational social space. values and alternatives a number of additional papers presented at the ‘other worlds’ conference discussed global values and alternatives, without directly focusing on social movements. a small selection of these papers appears in this section, debating the required policies for sustainability, the process of changing environmental value-systems, the importance of women’s spirituality in the construction of sustainable urban living, and finally, the importance of recognising religious belief-systems as a key factor in socio-political transformations. the ninth paper, by ian mcgregor, takes up the question of sustainability. the focus here is on the corporate barriers to sustainable practices, and on the economic preconditions for a more socially and ecologically sustainable scenario. a starting point is that the current crisis of sustainability is especially intense in high-income countries such as australia. a key cause of this crisis, for mcgregor, is the reckless pursuit of economic growth, a ‘strong and continuing societal focus on economic growth partly driven by business corporations’ focus on profit growth.’ the paper focuses primarily on the business sector and proposes a range of policies to ensure all businesses, especially powerful global corporations, contribute to sustainability. mcgregor outlines the ‘natural step’ model to identify required societal changes, and changes in governance structures. a range of proposals are floated, including business and product licensing, restrictions on use of non-renewable resources, policies to ensure that renewable resources are only harvested at or below their replenishment rate, ecological tax systems, work-time reduction, income guarantees and international governance portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 8 goodman and ho introduction measures to encourage ecologically sustainable behaviour by society, business and consumers. the tenth paper, by david worth, takes the reader to a tightly focused case study of environmental consciousness in the local areas of western australia where there are still substantial stands of ancient ‘old-growth’ forests. worth questions the extent to which changing social and environmental values can be explained by highly local demographic and socioeconomic shifts. specifically, the paper explores a link between the growing opposition to the logging of ‘old-growth’ forests and three factors – falling employment in the timber industry, rising educational levels and, interestingly, falling religious observance. environmental consciousness, worth speculates, appears to emerge as a form of cultural or spiritual fulfilment for relatively highly educated people working in the newly-emergent mining, tourism and wine-growing industries, and related services. in this respect, worth suggests, such forests become our ‘our new cathedrals’. the eleventh paper, by yamini narayanan, dora marinova, and jeffrey kenworthy continues the discussion of consciousness. again, the focus is on a specific urban context—in this case, delhi. the paper is primarily concerned with the preconditions for urban sustainability ‘in a city like delhi,’ and focuses on the role of spirituality, especially amongst urban women, in generating the required consciousness. the paper asserts in the first instance that women’s experiences of the city are one of the key indicators of ‘community success,’ and of sustainability. in the case of women, cities must create a safe and empowering environment if women are to play crucial community leadership roles—developing the idea of what a city’s spiritual sustainability might look like. such experiences in india, the authors argue, centre on issues of spirituality and community. the paper asserts that delhi offers a model for spiritually-grounded sustainable development, and is an appropriate reference point for developing the concept of women’s urban spiritual sustainability. the paper concludes that urban spiritual sustainability requires continuous effort, and moreover that such effort is an embodiment of what it is to be human. the final paper, by john rees, continues the discussion of consciousness and spirituality, debating the respective place of religious and secular institutions in a portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 9 goodman and ho introduction democratic polity. his focus is on the post-invasion democracy in iraq, and on claims that religion and democracy cannot coexist. rees debates how the secular assumptions of analysts and commentators might be challenged and corrected by the inclusion of religious actors and perspectives. focusing on the shi’ite community as central actors in an emerging iraqi democracy, the paper deconstructs secularist views that the world of the mosque exists in a ‘parallel universe’ to the liberal democratic west. by reframing the shi’ites as essential actors in the democratic project, the paper brings the ‘other’ worlds of religion and secularism into a ‘sphere of interdependence.’ rees ends by asserting the importance of bringing ‘post-secularist’ conceptualisations structures into discourses on democratic change. taken as a whole the collection of papers offers a series of insights into the process of social and political change under globalism. it does not so much present a comprehensive picture as generate a series of avenues for the critical investigation of social and political praxis. in different ways the papers show how social movements envisage and enact global alternatives, constituting themselves and broader social relations, and thereby constituting society. in the tradition of engaged sociology, we see in such scenarios the sociological imagination at work, producing knowledge for social change. across the various dimensions debated, from themes and channels of mobilisation, to more specific sectoral and spatial dynamics, to broader globalist alternatives and values, we see a shared concern to both imagine and contribute to the construction of ‘other worlds.’ portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 10 themes and channels microsoft word walkergalley20131changes made.docx portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. cultural works section, australians abroad special issue, guest edited by juliana de nooy. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. i, migrant? amelia walker, university of south australia 1. vreemdelingen (strangers) / we are them who are we? where do we come from? and why? late morning, den haag. the wind sighs, makes listless swipes at its hand-me-down toys. first, a crushed tin can, rattling round the icy feet of a grey stone statue. then, scraps of catalogues, a newspaper article that somebody clipped out—purposefully, carefully—its trimmed edges say that much— its rain-blurred print offers no suggestion why … finally, the mousey brown hair of a woman who watches her feet as she walks, one foot, then the other, then … beneath her arm, a yoga matt, clutched like a sucked and fraying blanket. walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 2 at the nearby library, a man hunches his way into a book, knuckles white, in fists he doesn’t realize he has made. ten, sometimes fifteen minutes pass between … … each … … turn … … of … … page … the book says ages eight and up. meanwhile it’s happy hour at o’shamrockigans —not that time means much in a place where it is always guinness o’clock and speaking of guinness, my goodness! jimmo’s already falling down. ‘the name’s not jimmo,’ he blabbers, ‘it’s …’ streets away, a young woman slips from shop to shop, looking at everything, buying nothing. when assistants approach, she smiles, shakes her head, scurries through the cold streets into the next store. three floors up, within four walls, someone shoves a vacuum cleaner, droning and grumbling over forty square metres of floorboards that will never be clean. and walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 3 at the same time, down on the square, a man finishes his black coffee, stubs his cigarette, checks his watch, exhales a wobbly grey oblong, then orders another black coffee, rolls another fag. maybe he fell in love with a dutch girl, maybe she is married to a diplomat, maybe in their past lives they ran businesses, held degrees, worked fifty hour weeks. maybe they have applied for jobs here as cleaners, or in cafes. maybe, just maybe, they’ll be lucky enough to even get those jobs … or maybe it was work that brought them here. perhaps he’s with shell. perhaps she is the diplomat. perhaps it’s not money, but friends they long to make … i am all of these people. i am none of these people. none of these people are me, though i have done the things they did, been seen as they were seen (un seen). i am one of the them or one of the us depending where you stand. i am … walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 4 2. hello! pleased your meeting to make! i am three weeks in this country. i look work. i have degree. what degree have i? c … c … com … … myooo … neck—nock—nick—ja, nick … com myoo nick … … ca—ayte—eee – uh—uh—uhn! com myoo nick cayte eee uhn. honours class first. i writing teacher. i learn children to use words good. sometimes i learn teachers to learn children to use words good. and i books. i mean i do books. my own books. i have five books. i mean. i don’t mean. i not just have five books. i have five books wrote. i mean wroten. i mean, know you what i mean? i mean, i writer … well … no. i still no can read no can write. but … i can lots jobs do. i want any job do. *ring ring* *ring ring* hello. pleased your meeting to make. i call about poster job. for toilet lady. i want apply but i have one asking. does ‘literacy essential’ mean i need to be literacy walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 5 or that literacy important not? hello? hello? 3. out of the sky you fall out of the sky and into the twilight zone of time zones. zoned out, you go about the business of getting down to busy-ness except that everything here is none of yours. thus household chores become a matter of life—or at least that’s what you’re calling it. you make the kitchen spotless. you make the bathroom spotless. you make the bedroom, the lounge room spotless. then you bake a cake, take a shower, jump on the bed, steal the neighborhood’s hairiest cat and rub it all over your sofa. you leave the house when it’s necessary to stock up on food and supplies for cleaning. you walk the same few streets to the same few stores where you know walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 6 your same few words will get you by, get you out and back, quick as you can via the exact same route. you thought travel would broaden your experiences. instead you find yourself tugging at the edges of each day like a victorian woman at the strings of her corset —tighter—tighter … as if making something smaller could actually make it lighter … 4. woorden en worden (words and becoming) the dutch word horen means both ‘to hear’ and ‘to belong.’ to inschrijven is literally ‘to write yourself in,’ which you do when you register with your council or take a membership with a gym, club or library. the dutch word for ‘to be’ and / or ‘become’ is worden. ik word jij wordt walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 7 wij worden. outside of words, what where when why how in this world can we be and come? dutch is not essential in den haag. there is always someone around who speaks english, at least, some version of it. a nine-to-five english, a high-school-text-book english, a drilled-in, practical necessity good for you like brussels sprouts and algebra english an english that, to me is not english not my english. ‘ik wil graag een koffie, alstublieft,’ i ask a waitress. ‘large, small or medium?’ she replies. ‘uh … small please …’ i don’t have the words in any language to explain, i’d rather speak dutch like a fool than english like an outsider, would rather trip and stumble over my broken sentences than scale these sheer soapstone exchanges —a slippery wall, no cracks for handholds, no way over, under or through, no glimpse what lies beyond. 5. denial i am not going to be one of those ‘engelse mensen.’ nuh uh. no way. walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 8 i didn’t come half way around the world to go anything less than the whole way with this culture. i am gonna eat what the locals eat and speak what the locals speak, or at least kill myself trying—which might not be too difficult given the dutch penchant for deep fry. oh sure. i’ve heard there are parties where everybody speaks english as their first language, dreams, thinks and feels in it, understands what you mean, not just the words you say … bah! who needs parties? who needs friends? and understanding? who needs their hairdresser to know that a couple of centimeters means off—not total? and their dentist …? the white ghetto of den haag! don’t need it. nuh uh. not me. no way. not even every now and then just to make it through—no. not even one tiny little nagging little eency weency little bit … walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 9 6. okay okay. so i’m paler than a dead albino axolotl under ten feet of snow. it don’t matter. so i just signed a job contract that i could read eight words of. it don’t matter. i’ve been sick three times in one month and the only tv i understand is teletubbies … okay, so maybe ‘understand’ is a slight exaggeration … it don’t matter because i love rugby and soccer and hockey and cricket and tennis balls zooming back and forth and back and pretty much any excuse to surf the screaming sea of corner pub pulse rates, the whole bar filled with best mates, glowing faces—names i can’t place right now—but anyhow that’s not what counts, not what it’s all about. i’m just here to yell stuff out an irish pub packed with english and welsh and scottish and americans and kiwis and yeah even a couple of irish, my fella and i the token aussies. walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 10 that’s right! right now i am for the first time in my life without doubt au-stray-lee-ahn. in the blur of my fourth drink it’s crystal clear: you’re never really from a country ‘til you leave it. i mean, what would be the point of an irish pub in ireland? a guy in a full kilt —sporran and all— leaps on a table, gives a bonny battle greeting. the chick from california just, like, so totally can’t believe it. meanwhile the walls are a molly-blooming with shamrocks, pots of gold, and danny boy, the pipes, the pipes … we’re the same in that we’re not the same, together in that tomorrow we’ll all wake up alone out of pocket, just like place wondering how the hell did i get here? but laugher is a place tomorrow can’t touch. here and now, who you are is a matter of when you scream and when you boo. the biggest question: walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 11 what are you drinking? the only answer: guinness. 7. that guy slash woman slash couple i am constantly hearing stories about the guy slash woman slash couple who has slash have lived in den haag for twenty years slash more. and he slash she does slash they do not know one single word of dutch. everybody knows at least one of these men slash women slash couples. it’s only a matter of time before i too get to meet him slash her slash them … and boy, am i looking forward to that. i have so many questions—like— how the heck did you walk past the street signs every day for 20 years and not figure out what they meant? did you wear a fricken’ blindfold? and how did you resist temptation to such extent that you never ever even spoke of trying oliebollen, stroopwafels, hagelslag or speculoos? walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 12 and in english, even, have you never concluded that your car slash bike slash television was finally kapot? months pass. i never manage to meet this man slash woman slash couple. until one day, walking into a store and speaking english straight up because what’s the point even trying, i glance to my left and there they are the whole lot of ‘em, dancing in the glossy glass shop front like the sixth freakin' sense—i am that man slash woman slash couple. ik! ja! ik! ik kan helemaal geen nederlands spreken. wat vreselijk! wat stom! 8. salvation now comes in a tube nobody liked it, the first time —though we’ll swear thick brown salty that we did, that it’s in our blood a daily ritual, the very essence of who, of what we are. in truth we were forced to swallow it over and over, told like orwell’s epsilons that we loved it. of course we loved it. loving it was—is—our birthright. walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 13 and if we don’t? well, then there’s obviously something very, very wrong. a la clockwork orange, we were pinned to couches in suburbia, shown 1950s technicolour red cheeks on black and white glowing bright as bright can be, that jingle like a tropical fly that lays its eggs inside your ear and over six months they devour all the porridge in your skull ‘til you finally exclaim yes i love vegemite! give me more … when homesickness hits, every aussie has a plan. step one: get vegemite. step two: huddle in bedroom with said vegemite. open lid … ... and ... ... sometimes you don’t even have to eat any. the stuff’s not cheap here, after all. when two aussies meet, it’s ‘oh … so … you’re from australia too? well … mate … you ain't getting any of my vegemite.’ but when we meet anybody who is not from australia, it’s ‘come on come on try my vegemite i dare you double dare you, be your best friend, walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 14 honest, cross my fingers, hope to die, just a tiny spoonful …’ tempting as it may seem at that point, the one thing you must never ever ever do to an aussie is to tell them, vegemite is really nothing more than a rip off of marmite born some ninety-odd years back when a group of colonists sat round a table and said, ‘well well good show old chap, we’ve got this country quite near sorted. let’s see … we’ve got four beaches named brighton, seven streets named after queen victoria … we have pigeons and we have rabbits—very important that one. what don’t we have? oh of course. a salty brown yeast extract that’s filled with vitamin b and gives us something to do with the by-products of beer manufacturing—and because it’s filled with vitamin b and salt it’s also rather good to eat by the spoonful when dealing with the morning after effects of said beer …’ … because that is a filthy mean horrible cruel untrue made-up lie! 9. it figures i never topped my class in maths. even if i had, it’s safe to say i’d struggle to calculate the shape, weight, dimensions of who i am. it’s safe to say, though, it does not weigh 22.5kg and fit into a space no longer than 90cm no wider than 75. believe me—i gave it a shot. having split the zip of a 70l backpack, i accepted the impossibility of bringing myself walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 15 —baggage handlers being so careless with fragile items and security so quick to confiscate anything even vaguely resembling a terrorist threat. self went on a list underneath tv, yoga matt and bicycle —search for replacement on arrival. i’ve been in den haag four months now. i have my tv, yoga matt and bicycle. and … i … am … sitting in a downtown chinese food court that looks, smells, sounds identical to the one in adelaide’s central markets. the staff here speak dutch as well as i do. our broken exchanges rock like small boats back and forth on a sea of cantonese. it is not dutch, really, but our own new language, one we create as we go. we have read the same phrasebooks learned the same idiosyncrasies. ‘expat dutch,’ i’ve heard people call it. a dutch shared by foreigners. a dutch the real dutch don’t understand. it’s a mooring point we can all tie to, however loosely, a place to exchange some simple, precious cargo. we all stammer, all stumble, repeat and rephrase. somehow, we all understand. inhaling concoctions of honey, soy and ginger, i manage to hitch a ride walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 16 on someone else’s nostalgia bus. destination: not home, but the idea of home—any home. what is home in cantonese? in dutch it is thuis. except i’m not sure a thuis is a home. thuis is the building where you live. it is not a land or town or suburb or smell or person or the songs of tiny birds … there is no such thing as ‘thuis sick.’ local. foreigner. nederlander. buitenlander. these are all words just like ‘them’ and ‘us’ are words. the word ‘we’ is really i and i and i and i and sometimes i is ik or ich or ek or je or ja or tôi or aku or ego … and as for me? well, i never topped my class in maths, but through a lot of messy working out it seems, there is no who i am, only the whos i am becoming. these cannot be plotted on an xy graph and joined, dot to dot in some pretty zig zag that peaks and crashes but inevitably returns to the same basic trend lines, the same patterns like a dancer who only knows so many moves. walker i, migrant? portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 17 even if you live in the same place your whole life, the points are departures never an arrival— we ain’t the economy baby though baby, don’t we sure sometimes try? 10. coda late morning, den haag. the wind, growing over-tired now, tries to smash all its second-hand toys. it kicks the tin can into a gutter, sends its catalogues down a canal. it goes for, but can’t snatch the mousey brown hair of a woman who pushes on, despite the bluster, a woman who decides, right now, to stop watching her feet as she walks, decides to stare her city in the eye. template for 2003 conference papers portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal the dynamics of oil and social movements in the niger delta of nigeria victor ojakorotu, university of kwazulu-natal, south africa nigeria, a major black state in the world today, is currently grappling with youth militancy and unmitigated violence on a large scale, particularly in the niger delta where oil exploration and exploitation have occurred for years without proper care and protection of the environment. as a consequence, local people have reacted in volatile ways to oil activities in the region, and the niger delta has become more conflict-prone than any other region in nigeria. the region has been the epicentre of numerous overlapping conflicts: between oil bearing/host communities and oil companies (mainly over land rights or compensation for ecological damage); between oil producing communities and the government (over increased access to oil wealth); and between and among ethnic groups (over claims to land ownership and sharing of amenities). the long-standing niger delta crisis has had serious consequences, including the loss of lives, wanton destruction of property, and disruption of oil activities. the nigerian state is seemingly overwhelmed by the complexity of this quagmire in spite of successive governments’ efforts to address the structural dynamics that underpin the region’s problems. in addition a democratic opening (since 1999) seems to have provided an outlet for increased militancy by the youth of the region, thus posing an enormous challenge to national stability, which historically has been sustained by state force. indeed, the state at different times has employed force to suppress the agitation or aspiration of local peoples. for instance, the attempt by the niger delta volunteer force, led by isaac adaka boro, to secede from nigeria in 1966, was crushed by federal government forces. ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements this paper highlights the plight of the people of the niger delta, the interests of the principal actors, and the sudden upsurge in the number of social movements in the 1990s to challenge the state and oil companies’ activities in the region. causes of conflicts in the niger delta it is not difficult to fathom the overt causes of the conflicts in the niger delta region. broadly speaking, it can be claimed that federalism as practised in nigeria has failed to take into account the fears, needs and aspirations of the minorities that make up the niger delta region. the skewed structure of the nigerian state has precipitated fiscal centralisation that favours the federal government and the country’s ethnic majority. the overbearing domination by the federal government has made it difficult for the oil-bearing communities to gain, as they would define it, equitable access to the wealth derived from their own resources. as a result, the people of the niger delta have led a wave of agitation for greater control of those resources. such agitation has, more often than not, assumed violent dimensions. therefore, it can be said that resource disparity in access, control, and wealth distribution, has been the basis of the conflicts between the oil companies, the nigerian government, and the communities in the niger delta, for decades. at the heart of the persistent crisis in the region is the deprivation and marginalisation of the local people by the state as a consequence of the distribution of the wealth emanating from the oil produced from local lands and waters. the agitation has reacted against the dearth of critical infrastructures that support life. the people of the region complain of lack of good health care, poor infrastructure, unemployment, and endangered livelihoods. in addition, they have argued that the wealth from their lands and waters is being used to develop big cities and areas in other parts of the country where oil is not produced. from my on-the-ground assessment of the region, the delta peoples and their environment have been neglected for so long that many local people claim they have nothing to live for; moreover, in doing what they can do to make ends meet, more often than not, their activities are against the law, a case in point being the vandalisation of oil pipelines. the exclusion and deprivation of whole communities from access both to oil wealth and to the physical development of the area has naturally contributed to the region’s tensions, violence and conflict. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 2 ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements it goes without saying that oil exploration and exploitation have far-reaching consequences for the environment. oil-related activities have done much damage to the fragile niger delta region, and to the health of its people as well. notable impacts of oil extraction have been the loss of biodiversity, ecological devastation/degradation, and the destruction of mangrove forests. the popular perception in the region has been that the operations of the oil companies have led to the gradual destruction of the region’s fragile ecosystem. and whenever the oil companies fail to take responsibility for the damage done to the environment, the state’s incapacity to address the demands of the local people has been responsible for the conflict between the people of the community (particularly the youth) and the oil companies. in addition, the seeming failure of governments at all levels to tackle the problem has engendered conflicts between the local people and the oil companies, on the one hand, and between the local people and the government on the other. as a result, ethnic identities and relations have become weapons for contestation in the niger delta. ethnic identities have assumed the character of a mobilizing factor for contesting access not only to oil wealth but also to political power. ethnicity has also been staked in the organisation of social forces in the struggle against perceived injustices (obi 2002a). ethnic identities have further divided the people of the niger delta, often resulting in fratricidal warfare. in the recent past, ethnic groups have acted politically in defence of their interests vis-à-vis those of competing groups. in most cases, inter-ethnic rivalry has arisen over land ownership. the series of clashes between the ijaws and itsekiris of the niger delta are a case in point. from the author’s interviews with the people from afiesere and uzere communities in the niger delta, it is clear that the people of the niger delta have been disempowered and disinherited from their land through the instrumentality of legislation such as the petroleum act (1969), the land use act (1978), and the lands act (title vesting) (1993). these laws vest ownership and control of lands, navigable waters, and the resources found therein, in the hands of the federal or state government. environmental activists in the region argue that such legislation stifles local initiatives at protecting the environment. community agitation aimed at the abolition of the portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 3 ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements legislation, and the reluctance of the government to accede to such requests, have all intensified the activism for resource control, protests, brigandage, and violence. given the assistance of oil multinationals to the nigerian police and the nigerian navy in the region, and the total dependence of the state on oil since the 1970s, it is arguable that there exists an ‘unholy alliance’ between the federal government and the oil companies. people from the oil-bearing communities contend that the government almost always identifies with, and defers to, the interests of the oil companies. the governor of nigeria’s akwa ibom state, obong victor attah, posits that in doing so, the federal government gives the oil multinationals the impression that local communities and states in the niger delta do not matter, and that all that is needed is continued collaboration and understanding between the central government and the transnational oil companies. clearly, the government’s participatory interest in the oil companies is an impediment to fulfilling its obligations to the people of the niger delta. as a result, the niger delta has seen both the militarisation of and the proliferation of arms throughout the oil-producing region. successive governments have sought to contain the violence through troops and weapons deployment. the aggrieved communities have, in turn, taken up arms against the security forces to counter what they have long regarded as an uncalled-for siege on their communities. the militarisation of the region by the government finds expression in the several cases of military invasion of oil-producing areas experiencing social unrest. often, massive troop mobilizations by the state have followed cases of agitation by the people against environmental disasters and perceived neglect. oil multinationals in the niger delta it must be pointed out that the nigerian oil industry has been strongly dominated by foreign oil companies and their expatriate workers for decades. lack of required technology and massive capital involvement in oil exploration have given the foreign oil multinationals an edge over local corporations, a development that has been interpreted by some commentators as a strategic means of denying the people and niger delta states the dividends of the resource that belongs to them. the scenario in the oil portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 4 ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements industry is that of an alliance between the state and foreign oil companies that does not need to take into consideration the interests and aspirations of local peoples. historically, the involvement of oil multinationals in the nigerian economy predates independence with the granting of the mineral oil concession to the shell-d’arcy petroleum development company by the british colonial government in 1938. the discovery of oil in commercial quantities by this company stimulated the interests of other oil companies in the late 1950s, namely: mobil exploration nigeria ltd, an affiliate of the american socony-mobil oil company; tennessee nigeria inc. (1960), an affiliate of the american tennessee gas transmission; nigerian gulf oil co (1962), an affiliate of american gulf oil company; and nigerian agip oil co (1962), an affiliate of the italian government-owned eni (schatzl 1969). the incapacitated nature of the nigerian state after independence (attained october 1, 1960), gave room for a series of joint ventures between these oil companies and the state through the nigerian national petroleum corporation (nnpc). the companies that are in joint venture agreements with the nnpc are the shell petroleum development company (spdc), chevron nigeria limited (cnl), mobil producing nigeria unlimited (mpnu), the nigerian agip oil company limited (naoc), elf petroleum nigeria limited (epnl), and the texaco overseas petroleum company of nigeria unlimited (topcon). apart from these oil companies, which operate a joint venture with the nnpc, others also operate in nigeria. these companies include pan ocean, british gas, tenneco, deminex, sun oil, total, statoil, and numerous other local firms (ojakorotu 2003, fieldwork findings). the precarious situation in the niger delta occurred once oil became the economic mainstay of the nigerian state. the ascendancy of oil changed the political equation of the entire country in favour of the major ethnic groups that reneged on the initial derivation principle, which had given advantages to the regions at a time when cocoa, groundnut and other agricultural produce were the main sources of foreign exchange in the country. the cumulative effect of this new development has been the recurrence of violence among the ethnic groups of the niger delta as they have emerged to challenge the ‘political schism’ between the dominant and minority ethnic groups in nigeria. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 5 ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements relations between the minority and the major ethnic groups now reflect the ‘weagainst-them’ logic. the plight of the minority ethnic groups in nigeria is structurally linked to the creation of the nigerian state in 1960. however, making that link supports and validates the naïve premise that the colonial enterprise precipitated all subsequent troubles in colonised spaces, while denying historical antecedents and predating tensions. oral histories suggest otherwise, pointing to an enduring legacy of ethnic conflict and tribal conflict around territory and modes of production. internecine slave castes/tribal servitudes and land wars testify to this. one aspect of the colonial encounter was often the co-production of an overarching alliance between colonised ethnicities to evict the coloniser, thus making the unitary state congruent to colonial boundaries. it must be stated that the initial resistance by many of nigeria’s ethnic groups was uncoordinated and without proper focus. however, a change to the modus operandi of the struggle became evident in the early 1990s with the movement for the survival of ogoni people (mosop), which emerged to challenge the state apparatus and foreign oil companies, and to assert the need to address the demands of the local people in the oil region. given the defective nature of nigerian federalism, with the centralization of power and domination of minorities by the three dominant ethnic groups—the hausa/fulani, yoruba and igbo—and given the double standards of foreign oil multinationals, as well as other internal contradictions within the nigerian state, the people of the niger delta were left with no option but peaceful protest, and later, violence, in their struggle against the state and foreign oil companies that operate in the region. the emergence of social movements in the niger delta the globalisation of capital has played an important role in the confrontation between oil multinationals and the social movements that emerged in the region, especially the ogoni movement and the ijaw youth council. multinational corporations represent, and are positioned at the centre of, a ‘global structure of material accumulation which simultaneously concentrates wealth and energy in certain locales’ (saurin 1996, 42). the rise of ethnic militias in the niger delta region in the early 1990s (as was discovered by the author in fieldwork) was informed by the marginalisation and social deprivation of the minorities. however, various internal policies propounded by the portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 6 ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements state and oil companies that gave rise to underdevelopment, combined with external factors like the globalisation of the international system, also strongly influenced the formation of these social movements. the interplay between the internal and external factors thus established a strong linkage between local non-government organizations (ngos) and social movements, and international non-government organizations (ingos), and created the setting for the internationalisation of the niger delta crisis. with this scenario, local resistance seems to have taken shape and become locally grounded, a reflection of the fact that the very existence of the ogoni and other minorities in oil-bearing communities had come under serious threat. the environment was destroyed, there was no basic infrastructure, and the ogonis and other minority groups also faced repression from both the multinational oil companies and the federal government. more importantly, the nigerian legislation dealing with oil and mineral resources removed control of the land from the people: the land, and its oil reserves, had been ‘co-opted into the globalised capitalist economy’ (giddens 1990, 18). the transformation of the niger delta struggle into a mass social movement found expression in the presentation of the ogoni bill of rights to the nigerian state in 1990 by mosop. attempts by the ogoni people to stem further degradation of their environment and other negative consequences of oil production, along with the neglect of the region by the state, provided the impetus for the bill. the nigerian civil war (1967-1970), and the creation of a federalised state to address the demand of the minorities, failed to secure for the oil minorities the control of oil resources. at the same time, the structural adjustment that widened social and power cleavages within the region, and changes in global politics in the post-cold war era, which emphasized the right to self-determination and autonomy by minority ethnic groups (obi 1999), gave impetus to the struggle in the region. given these factors, mosop, under the leadership of ken saro-wiwa, assumed a more dynamic and purposeful character as it adopted far-reaching tactics in the cause of the ogoni. the organization sensitised the ogoni people to their predicaments and enabled their mobilization against the state and shell petroleum development company (spdc) through demonstrations, the blockade of oil installations, conferences, press releases, and articles in local and international media. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 7 ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements in order to strengthen their chances for self-determination, the ogoni focused on gaining the sympathy and necessary attention from the international community about the need to address the exploitation, repression and ecological devastation the community was confronting. the organization appealed for support through lecture tours, documentaries, and eyewitness accounts. it also used the platform of international human rights organizations to put pressure on shell and the nigerian state to recognize and respect the rights of the ogoni (omoweh 1994). however, the ogoni failed to consider that the military, which dominated the nigeria political terrain in the 1990s, appeared to have little regard for the concepts of human rights and moral principles upon which they (the ogoni) based their campaign (carr, douglas and onyeagucha 2001). the adoption of non-violent methods by the ogoni in the face of military opposition severely curtailed the organization’s capacity to influence the relationship between the local people and their ‘foes’—the multinationals and the nigerian state. it is interesting to note that the ogoni adopted these methods or strategies because earlier methods used by the local elites before mosop’s inception had failed. explanations for that failure lie in the elite control of national political parties, and the organized electoral fraud that made a nonsense of the voting system. for example, the elite in the ogoni central union (ocu) and kagote1 refused to involve the masses in the struggle for self-determination. in mosop, by contrast, the youth in the region had been given more political roles to play; indeed, a key strategy adopted by the group was to provide every member of the community an opportunity to help in reversing the imbalances of the nigerian federation. despite the huge success of this movement in bringing an otherwise local issue to the platform of international discourse, the struggle of the local people in the 1990s witnessed a severe set back with the death of ken saro-wiwa, which greatly reduced international support for local resistance. ken had personified the struggle. more importantly, the political divisions that erupted after the saro-wiwa’s death confused the international community in directing its support for the struggle of mosop and portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 8 1 the precursor of mosop, kagote was an ogoni elite-leader organization that was active in delta politics following federal government murders of ogoni leaders in 1994 and 1995. ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements other ethnic groups in the region. moreover, since the nigerian state was not democratic until mid-1999, the ingos were forced to hold consultations with the military. unfortunately, the military leaders were not accountable to the people, nor was there any forum in which local peoples could discuss the pressing issues of the niger delta. it is pertinent to state that mosop was able to achieve considerable success due to the commitment of its leaders to the struggle. prior to the formation of mosop in the early 1990s, local leaders were not totally committed to the struggle, as was later the case under mosop. ken saro-wiwa’s early experiences with the igbo ethnic group in his days in nsukka awakened his ethnic consciousness in the 1960s. he had given his full support to the federal side during the nigerian civil war as a way of overcoming the ibo domination of the niger delta minorities. increasingly, however, he realised that the liberation of ogoniland could not be achieved through the nigerian mechanism of state creation that followed the civil war. therefore, saro-wiwa, an intellectual, environmentalist and writer, gradually came to support the self-determination of all ethnic nationalities, including the ogoni. apart from his wholesale support for mosop, he established the ethnic minority rights organisation of africa (emiroaf). he was an apostle of non-violence; his weapons were his pen, brain, faith, and commitment to the liberation of the ogonis, and, by extension, of other minorities. ken saro-wiwa was able to use his popularity to garner both national and international support for the cause of the ogoni, but he was eventually defeated: on november 10, 1995, he was executed by the general sani abacha dictatorship. there is an intriguing historical irony among the prominent actors in the niger delta, isaac boro, ken saro-wiwa and dokubo asari, who have struggled for self-determination, as the editorial in the nigerian guardian noted: ‘the first and third led armed struggles against the nigerian state [and] they escaped with their lives and were later reconciled with the state. the second, an intellectual, preached and practised non-violent protest but he lost his life in the hands of the state’ (2004). as a consequence, the minorities began to realize that the non-violent method was not a viable option in the struggle for justice and self-determination in nigeria. against the above background, it is necessary to understand the relationship between the state and the ogoni communities. some of the major protests in ogoniland, and the portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 9 ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements responses of the state and the foremost oil company (shell) between 1990 and 2003, are quite telling. as can be inferred from the state response to ogoni protests, state violence can be broadly categorised into three types: harassment of ogoni leaders through arrests, detention and surveillance; masterminding of violent conflicts between ogoni and their neighbours (used as a pretext to repress the ogonis), and direct violence, the use of the armed forces and police and extra-judicial killings, as occurred with saro-wiwa and the ‘ogoni 9’ (nine ogoni leaders killed by the nigerian government in 1995) (ibeanu 2000). as noted above, the death of ken saro-wiwa changed the course of events in the niger delta. it has been rightly argued that his death has given the ethnic minorities of the region the leverage to speak in a ‘new voice and demand … that their wishes and aspirations be factored into the nigerian projects’ (okonta and oronto 2001). this development has also encouraged the local people to insist on self-determination, for a structure within the nigerian federal framework that will promote true federalism, equity, justice and negotiated cooperation. that said, shell has also been called to account and compelled to pay reparation for environmental devastation in the niger delta. resistance by the ogoni against oil production has historically been considered a direct threat by the nigerian state and shell, which is answerable to its headquarters in britain. against this background, the centrality of oil to the survival of nigerian state, and the oil companies’ drive for profit maximization, lay behind the militarisation of, and gross violation of human rights in, the region by the state and oil multinationals alike. the internal contradictions and disputes that emerged within the mosop in the late 1990s eventually caused the mantle of leadership in the struggle for the niger delta to be passed to the ijaws. however, it must be stated that, for the ijaws, this struggle began in the 1960s. the ijaws are the fourth largest ethnic group in nigeria, after the three dominant ones, and are the largest ethnic group in the delta region, with a population of about eight million, most of whom are dependent on fishing. the earliest attempt by any ethnic group to challenge injustice within the nigerian federation was carried out by the ijaws under adaka boro during his ‘twelve day revolution’ in february 1966. the ‘twelve day revolution’ of the niger delta volunteer force (ndvf) was an attempt to end the marginalisation of the region’s minorities within the portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 10 ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements nigerian federation, and arose from suspicions that the military government of general aguiyi ironsi would take control of the region’s oil resources (okpu 1977). adaka boro, an ijaw man born in kaiama, an ancient town in the present bayelsa state of nigeria, lived for only thirty years (1938-1968), but his cause was later championed by fellow ethnic groups in the 1990s, some three decades after his death. in remembrance of his vision and struggle for his people, the ijaw liberation charter was named the kaiama declaration in december 1998. the struggle of mosop, however, laid the foundation for a resurgence amongst the region’s ethnic groups in challenging the state’s and oil multinationals’ policies. as obi has argued, the resurgence of the ijaw in under the leadership of the ijaw youth council (iyc) ‘built upon the lessons from the ogoni experience … [it] sought to put an end to the divisions among the ijaws in the six states of the federation, as the fourth largest ethnic group in nigeria, and the most preponderant oil minority group’ (2002b, 6). since the 1990s young ijaw activists have regrouped into different groups in the multiple struggles against economic exploitation, corporate violence, environmental degradation, and political oppression in the niger delta. these groups include the egbesu boys of bayelsa, the chicoco movement, the ijaw youth council, the federated niger delta ijaw communities, and the niger delta volunteer force. the impact of oil exploration on the environment, and the policies of the state and oil companies in the niger delta, led the various groups of ijaw youth in the niger delta to issue the kaiama declaration on december 11, 1998. the declaration demanded the immediate withdrawal of all military forces from ijaw land. in addition, the declaration averred that any oil company that employed the services of the nigerian security services to protect its facilities was viewed as an enemy of the ijaw. the ijaw declaration also strongly expressed solidarity with other ethnic groups that shared its vision of self-determination and justice, such as mosop. the internationalisation of the niger delta crisis has thus forced the key players in the crisis—the nigerian state and the oil multinationals—to rethink their stance on the people’s plight. however, their response has been two-fold and contradictory: hard and soft. on the soft side, the state has made some efforts to address the developmental needs of the people through agencies like the niger delta development commission portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 11 ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements (nddc), while some of the oil companies (shell in particular) have increased their support for community development programs and adopted an ethos of social responsibility. however, while this marks an improvement compared to the preinternationalisation period, these efforts are still insufficient when viewed against the backdrop of what is being done to the niger delta region in economic and environmental terms, and against the massive poverty that still persists in the region. on the other hand, both the state and the oil multinationals have overtly and covertly continued their hard response of militarising the region under the guise of security, thus inflicting more violence on the people. there is thus great need for a renewal of sustained efforts to further internationalise the niger delta crisis by exposing the exploitation and environmental despoliation not only of ogoniland, but also of other communities that suffer the same, if not worse plight, than the ogoni people. closing reflections as this paper suggests, a redefinition of the parameters of coexistence within the nigerian state has become imperative. this reflects calls made in 2005 to convene a national conference of ethnic nationalities at which all stakeholders in the polity could come together and discuss the future of nigeria. such a conference, advocates claimed, could fashion a workable mechanism for restructuring the country in such a way that each region would have its own fair share of available opportunities and resources. the conference would thus address the fundamental question of nigerian federalism by calling for a federal restructuring that would adequately take care of and acknowledge minority interests. the national political reform conference (nprc) that was eventually convened in 2005 in abuja, nigeria was initially conceived as an opportunity to redress these concerns and the structural imbalances in the nigerian state. however, the lack of consensus on issues that affect the niger delta not only stalled proceedings but also undermined efforts at building national solidarity. the people of the niger delta rejected the recommendations of the conference as far as the issues affecting the niger delta were concerned. the nprc, in the opinion of the people of the niger delta, had failed to address the fundamental issues that threaten the continued existence of the nigerian state. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 12 ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements despite these failures, it remains clear that achieving a true federalism in nigeria must be an integral part of the project to create and nurture democracy and good governance, and to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of ethnic minorities as well. the nigerian government should devise a workable environmental policy that would regulate oil operations in the niger delta. setting up environmental agencies is not enough. effective machinery should be put in place for the strict enforcement of environmental legislation. in addition, the operations of multinational oil companies should be made more accountable to the local people. the government should not compromise the welfare and survival of its citizens for the sake of its profit-motivated partnership with the oil companies. recent efforts at preparing an integrated regional master plan for the development of the niger delta are commendable. the people of the region have, however, been expressing strong reservations about the plan since the integrated regional master plan agreement was signed in october 2001. if it is to succeed, the initiative must be people-centred and must adopt the bottom-up approach. both government and the oil communities in the niger delta should embrace dialogue. the present crisis in the region is partly being fuelled by the lingering militarist disposition of both sides. the frequent deployment of military forces to the niger delta to quell local riots in recent years has further militarized local ethnic militia. in order to stem the tide of violence and armed confrontation in the region the government should systematically deemphasize the use of force, and embrace the aggrieved communities in meaningful dialogue. there should be delegitimisation of force in favour of legitimisation of dialogue and consensus-building in order to promote a true federalism that would allow the minorities to benefit from the system. reference list carr, s., douglas, c. & onyeagucha 2001, ‘the ogoni people’s campaign over oil exploitation in the niger delta’ in a. thomas, s. carr, and d. humphrey (eds) environmental policies and the ngos influence, routledge, london, pp. 150170. ‘editorial’ 2004, the guardian lagos, 21 october. giddens, a. 1990, the consequences of modernity, cambridge university press, cambridge. human rights watch 1999, ‘the price of oil: corporate responsibility and human rights violations in nigeria’s oil producing communities’, human rights watch, new york. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 13 ojakorotu dynamics of oil and social movements kaemi, t. 1982, isaac boro: twelve day revolution, benin city, nigeria. obi, c. i. 1999, ‘oil, environment and conflict in the niger delta’, the quarterly journal of administration 30. 1 (june 1999): 15-34. obi, c. i. 2002a, ‘environmental movements in sub-saharan africa: a political ecology of power and conflict,’ paper presented at the united nations research institute for social development/university of witwatersrand conference on environmental conflict, participation and governments, johannesburg, august 30. obi, c. i. 2002b, ‘new wine in new skin? generation dimensions to the struggles for resource control in the niger delta and the prospects for the nation-state project in nigeria,’ paper delivered to laureates of the codesria 2002 governance institute, codesria, dakar, senegal, august 12-16. okpu, u. 1977, ethnic minority problems in nigerian politics: 1960-1965, uppsala, studies historical upsaliensa. omoweh, d. a. 1994,’ the role of shell petroleum development company and the state in the underdevelopment of niger delta of nigeria’, phd thesis, obafemi awolowo university, ile-ife, nigeria. saurin, j. 1996, ‘international relations, social ecology and the globalization of environmental change’ in j. vogler & m. limber (eds), the environment and international relations, routledge, london, pp 46-66. schatzl, l. h. 1969, petroleum in nigeria, niser, nigeria. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 14 lt_100110finalportalvol6no22009tombagalley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. post-mao, post-bourdieu: class and taste in contemporary china, special issue, guest edited by stephanie hemelryk donald and yi zheng. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. middle classes in china: force for political change or guarantee of stability?1 luigi tomba, australian national university a well-off society most of the recent literature on the new rich and the middle class in china has been focusing on the potential consequences for newly emerging social strata to produce change, or to embody social change. but whose interests does a growing middle class really serve? and why is its emergence accompanied by an increasing support by official discourses, policies and practices at both the local and central level? this article argues that a dramatic status enhancement for wage-earning chinese professionals was among the major determinants of social change in the late 1990s and that it happened despite the market more than because of it. the development of a high-consuming urban society has been as much the outcome of the social engineering project of the contemporary reformist state and its agencies as it has been a consequence of the opening up of the economy and society (li & niu 2003; tomba 2005). at the same time, the idea that wealth is not for everyone has been engraved in china’s reform policies since deng xiaoping formulated the target of a ‘well-off society’ (xiaokang shehui) and the strategy of allowing some to ‘get rich first’ (xian fuqilai) in 1979. in the 1980s and early 1990s the chinese who benefited most from this strategy were those with the ability to extract public resources from the economic system and to reinvest these in productive activities in the form of private or collective enterprises. in 1 part of this article was originally published in tomba (2004). tomba middle classes in china portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 2 the 1990s, however, the picture of the high achievers became more complex and began to include a larger group of urban professionals and skilled employees in both the public and private sector. the problem of what the middle class means for political stability or political change requires a much more significant analytical effort than i can provide in this essay, and significant contributions have recently appeared that deal with the complexity of the chinese middle classes in a much more substantial way (goodman 2008). at a recent conference organised by the brookings institution in washington, the discussion seemed to be between ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’ or better between those who believe that the middle class will bring democracy to china and those who believed that the middle class will bring stability. the core of this discussion, it seems to me, should not be as much about quantity, as it has been in many cases until today—how large is the middle class, how democratic, how motivated or right-conscious?—but rather of quality: what kind of autonomy has it achieved through wealth, what kind of participation, right consciousness? things in china are changing rapidly but where they are leading, for the moment, is anyone’s guess. in thirty years of reforms, however, they have not lead to democratization, and the middle classes do not seem to be pushing the government towards such an outcome. picking the winners the 16th party congress in november 2002 marked the strengthening of a policy, in the words of jiang zemin, of ‘building a well-off society in an all-round way’ (jiang, 2002). among the features of this strategy, the idea of co-opting private entrepreneurs into the party has been the most eye-catching, because of its revolutionary implications for the very foundation of party ideology. nonetheless, while the role of entrepreneurs as power brokers and supporters of economic liberalization must not be underestimated, the project of a middle-class society is of greater importance as it has focused on expanding the purchasing power and status of significantly larger groups of urban employees and professionals. the rationale behind the policy to stimulate consumption, first and foremost, stems from the need to sustain economic growth. as much as the initial stage of reform in the 1980s entailed a ‘liberation of productive forces,’ the later drive away from ‘heavy production and light consumption’ (zhong shengchan qing xiaofei) is hailed as the tomba middle classes in china portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 3 necessary ‘liberation of consumption forces.’ a recurrent opinion in china’s academic literature is that the traditionally low consumption rate constitutes a major bottleneck for economic development (only in 2007 the contribution of domestic consumption to gdp growth surpassed that of investments, but overall china remains one of the countries with the lowest consumption rate). a second and possibly equally important reason, however, is embodied in the argument—supported by a now imposing academic literature on ‘middle classes’ and ‘middle strata’—that a large middle class improves social and political stability. the idea that ‘only if a large number of people will enter the middle income strata will it be possible to protect the existing stability of the social structure’ (zhou 2001: 2) has repeatedly appeared in the recent public discourse and academic research on stratification. during the second half of the 1990s, groups of beijing public employees whose income had been stagnating during the early reform years experienced a sharp increase in salaries. employees in the healthcare sector, for example, saw their salaries rise by 168 percent between 1995 and 2000, and their average salaries are now around 40 percent above the average (they were average in 1995). the same thing happened in tertiary education and in scientific institutions (increasing 158 percent in five years, 31 percent above the average, whereas they stood below average in 1995). shortages in specific areas of the labour market also contributed to the competitiveness of professionals’ salaries. a breakdown of salaries among the professions shows that skills often provide higher remuneration than do administrative responsibility. such highly demanded occupations as telecommunication technicians (42,305 yuan/year), software engineers (33,201 yuan/year) and even bank clerks (24,100 yuan/year) today earn higher salaries than the average state factory director (24,070 yuan/year) (labour yearbook, 1996 2001). while the market amplified the advantages of certain social groups, government policies also played a major role in picking winners, and in lifting the livelihoods of skilled personnel in the public sector. while enjoying a shorter working week since 1995, employees in the public sector have seen their salaries raised four times between 1999 and 2003, in what zhu rongji himself described as attempts ‘to boost consumption demand’ (2003). tomba middle classes in china portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 4 for some positions in the administration of public affairs, the call for a clean and efficient government modelled on singapore and hong kong has also been behind the policy of paying a ‘high salary to foster honesty’ (gaoxin yanglian). while many of the 45 million public servants are benefiting from this boost, some especially sensitive categories such as judges—where bribe-taking would be particularly egregious—are expected to experience a fourfold increase in salary by the end of this decade. in beijing, the city with the largest concentration of officials, the effect on public employment has been remarkable: the capital’s employees in public administrative units (shiye danwei), who are recruited today on the basis of examinations and educational credentials, saw their average salaries more than double in the 1995–2000 period (an increase of 133 percent) (labour yearbook 1996-2001). another indication of a state commitment to increase consumption is the post-1995 policy to provide additional leisure-time. with the declared aim of increasing consumer spending, in may 1995 a compulsory 5-day working week (shuangxiuzhi) was introduced that suddenly brought the number of non-working days in a year among urban employees to 115, while major national festivities were progressively extended to week-long holidays. according to one recent study carried out in three major cities, the average amount of leisure time available to urban employees has already surpassed actual working time. those who have been given the greatest number of days of leisure time happen to be skilled employees (in the cultural, health, research and education sectors) as well as party cadres. after being portrayed as perennial under-achievers until well into the reform era, these public employees, professionals and skilled employees are sharing the experience of sudden upward economic mobility. this includes more than higher salaries. equally important are their perquisites in accessing resources such as education, welfare and housing, which depend on their type of work-unit and their administrative status. under these conditions, it is not surprising that high-income households in beijing have a higher than average number of their members employed in the state sector, as well as a higher level of education and professional training. this emerging social class enjoys the economic stability that is increasingly slipping from the hands of the working class, at a time of massive layoffs of unskilled and redundant personnel. workers in beijing’s manufacturing sector, for example, were at the short end of a growing income gap. tomba middle classes in china portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 5 their salaries expanded less than the average (up 72.5 percent, against a general average salary growth of 93.1 percent between 1995 and 2000). the manufacturing sector lost over 520,000 employees in the same period (labour yearbook 1996-2001). middle class spaces: homeowners and housing reform ‘if you look for the chinese middle class,’ i often heard from my interviewees in china, ‘look no further then the gaodang xiaoqu,’ the high-class neighborhoods that are springing up like mushrooms in china’s metropolises.2 in fact, with the cities almost entirely built around the idea of gated spaces and large-scale neighborhoods, the residential settings where the new citizens are concentrated provide some idea of what people might be behind the gates. a large number of middle-to-high income earners live in such private spaces (giroir 2006; miao 2003; read 2003; wu 2005; webster et al 2002). residents share the relatively new experience of home ownership, are generally highly educated and put substantial resources into education, and are largely employed in positions that imply some levels of responsibility, either managerial, technical or administrative, often in the public sector. they have in common a well-defined consumer identity and share the benefits of privileged access to the real-estate market and an awareness of the rights that this arouses. to borrow an evocative expression used for japanese professionals, these residents are overwhelmingly ‘salary men’ (vogel 1963), and are vociferous about the difference between those who have earned a deserved high salary thanks to their skills and loyalty to an employer and those who earned early riches through means that, in their view, were often corrupt. somewhat surprisingly, it is not only the entrepreneurs who succeed in inhabiting these compounds, but increasingly public servants, technicians and public employees. while successful entrepreneurs might in some cases have accumulated greater capital, the salaried professionals have been well positioned to obtain the most out of recent efforts by the central state to create a consumer society. while the progressive privatization of the economy and growing urban unemployment meant for many in the traditional urban working class a ‘downward’ social mobility and an ‘informalization’ of their work situation, with less job security and fewer guaranteed benefits, those who managed to maintain a good position within the formal employment system could take 2 in depth interviews were conducted in numerous beijing neighbourhood with residents, local officials and property managers, between 2001 and 2003, as part of a large project on neighbourhood politics in china that involved work in other cities. tomba middle classes in china portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 6 advantage of policies aimed at increasing their consumption. in the emerging market environment they have also cashed in on status privileges inherited from the socialist distributive system. marketization amplified the original policy intentions. for example, early access to the privatization of housing has become a major discriminant between social actors and groups, and it often determines social status more than income does. in the words of geographer wu fulong (2002: 1591), ‘the privatization of real estate itself becomes a source of socio-spatial differentiation, because through the real-estate market households are able to capitalize properties that were not distributed equally during the socialist period.’ but beyond the macroscopic effects of a differential access to housing (wang & murie 1999; tomba & tang 2008), the emergence of a professional middle class was also the consequence of intensive, ideologically justified and coordinated policymaking. the state’s social engineering to enlarge the ranks of a consuming middle class has had the most visible effects in housing policies. at the present stage of china’s development, higher salaries and a better bargaining power in the labour market would not be enough to account for the dramatic rise in status and consumption levels experienced by some employees and professionals. the patterns of housing acquisition are also proving to be decisive in changing the lifestyles and consumption abilities of the professional middleclass. even after the dismantling of the virtually free allocation of rented accommodation that prevailed until the early 1980s (wang & murie 1999), both housing and the financial tools necessary to make its purchase possible have been circulating in a less than perfect market. the administrative role of urban gate-keeping institutions and the interest structure inherited from the earlier socialist modes of distribution have helped to decide who was going to ‘get rich first.’ despite the progressive decline of traditional redistributive institutions such as work-units, other agents of the state’s project to ‘create’ a middle class—such as state-owned real-estate developers and state commercial banks—have contributed to shaping this strategy. the massive sale of public housing to employees throughout the 1990s occurred at highly subsidized prices for the existing housing stock, or alternatively employees were tomba middle classes in china portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 7 given the option of buying newly built houses while the work-unit carried the lion’s share in the construction or purchasing costs. although the share of housing directly built by work-units declined from the first part of the 1990s, to the advantage of major real-estate developers, public employers remained the engine of the real estate market, buying extensively to cater for the needs of their professionals and other employees. contracts often included clauses that link the property rights to a long-term working relationship with the employer. beijing’s experience is emblematic. according to 2001 data, about 58 percent of the city’s resident families purchased properties from or through their work-units. almost 90 percent of all residential housing units sold by beijing work-units to their employees went for less than 100,000 yuan (around us$12,000), a very low price considering the average costs of housing in the capital.3 this selling-off of public housing stock at uneconomic prices enabled well-placed employees to obtain a low-cost entry into the real-estate market, effectively boosting the new owners’ incomes. according to a 1988 survey, the housing situation at the beginning of the labour-market and housing reforms was greatly affected by employment status: cadres had a per capita living space about 30 percent higher than that of workers, party members did better than non-party members by a margin of 20 percent, employees in centrally administered units had more space than those in locally managed units, and state enterprise employees’ housing was more spacious than that of employees in the collective sector (li 2002: 81). since the housing reform was carried out on the basis of actual housing conditions, rights to subsidized sales of existing housing or newly built apartments varied greatly among employees and between work-units. its effects were to amplify an old distortion with the help of a new market environment. while in the early days of housing reform buying the apartment one was already living in virtually for free seemed a waste of money, in the second half of the 1990s a speculative rent market, an emerging mortgage market and a secondary property market finally turned these properties into wealth multipliers. in order to boost a secondary market, the beijing government progressively reduced restrictions on property rights, and properties bought at ridiculously low prices became marketable at increasingly inflated market prices. 3 china economic information, 9 august 2002 tomba middle classes in china portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 8 however, the introduction of housing provident funds in the 1990s did not enhance egalitarian distribution of housing assets. the funding schemes ended up advantaging employees in the financially and economically most viable enterprises and, within this group, privileged employees with a high level of employment stability and prestige who could rely on a long-term relationship with the enterprise and were less at risk of sudden unemployment. enterprises with a better economic performance were able to make higher contributions to the funds, helping the accounts grow faster. collective and private enterprises largely did not participate in the scheme, thereby excluding most of the non-state-sector urban employees, numbering about 45 million (li 2002: 81) a policy step that improved the chances of middle-income earners becoming homeowners was enacted in 1998 when all major cities were instructed to begin construction of so-called ‘economy housing’ (jingji shiyong fang). this is not public housing but a subsidized form of commercial buildings, comparable in quality and location to commodity housing, but whose price is kept in check following an agreement between the local government and the developer. when assigning land-use rights to the developers (which in most cases are state-owned companies), the local authority stipulates that, in exchange for free or cheaper land and reduced fiscal charges, the developer must sell a portion of the units at a discounted price decided by the local authorities. access to this indirectly subsidized housing is formally granted only to households with a yearly income below 60,000 yuan, who have no property of their own and who have been occupying substandard rental housing. also stimulated by government policy, a commercial mortgage market emerged rapidly after 1998. in china as much as anywhere, mortgages typically reward those with stable incomes and pre-existing property. ownership of assets or an employer’s endorsement are important credentials in accessing commercial bank loans, enhancing the chances of the usual suspects. reformed commercial banks in search of relatively low-risk private consumption markets began to enter the arena aggressively from 1998, relying on the long-term consumption-stimulus policy of the central bank. the outstanding balance of individual housing loans issued by commercial banks countrywide increased from 190 billion yuan in 1999 to 2.6 trillion yuan in october 2007 (liu 2007). tomba middle classes in china portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 9 exemplary middle class while consumption stimulus and economic growth might be the reasons behind some of the policies to promote a high consuming cluster in chinese society, the emergence of a middle class also serves the long-tem civilizing mission of the present regime and indirectly contributes to underpin its legitimacy and authority. significantly, the language of the middle class has been promoted as a marker for the construction of modern, post-industrial cities (tomba & tang 2008; tomba 2009). in urban settings increasingly characterized by a complex population, an increase in stratification and a growth of residential segregation, the language and the idea of a the middle classes is used for different purposes. first, the ‘middle class’ (zhongchan) produces monetary value. in mao’s time, cities were destined to be cities of production (shengchan chengshi) and to facilitate the concentration of industrial activities. today, chinese cities are competing with one another to become post-industrial cities. almost entirely, production is being moved to the periphery or to a wide array of ‘special zones,’ while the centre of the city is being redeveloped to provide residential, commercial and business facilities. in this re-design of the city, district governments compete to define themselves as the preferred ‘middle class heaven.’ obviously, being able to attract the middle classes means higher returns on land use rights, and a lower risk of social instability. in almost every city entire areas are being redefined from dilapidate industrial districts to ‘high quality’ neighbourhoods. daily, traditional neighbourhoods built for the workers on what, today, have become prime real estate locations, are knocked down and re-branded as the next big thing for the middle classes (bray 2006; zhang 2006). second, this process does not only produce an increase in economic value. with the middle classes comes the rhetoric of quality (suzhi) (anagnost 2004; yan 2003; kipnis 2006; jacka 2006). both developers and local governments use the idea of quality to sell the new areas to would-be homeowners. residential areas are sold not only for the quality of their buildings but also for the quality of the people who inhabit them. services provided by management companies (parks, sporting facilities, social clubs) and by the local government (quality primary schools, easy access to amenities), are all designed to be attractive for a certain idea of a middle-class lifestyle. by inhabiting these areas, the loosely defined ‘middle classes’ will end up adding value to areas that tomba middle classes in china portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 10 would have been considered inhabitable a few years earlier, and attract other ‘people of quality.’ in this respect ‘middle class’ is a discourse more than it is a reality. the idea of the middle class (with its better lifestyle, better education, higher income and better overall ‘quality’) becomes almost a contagious force that produces value wherever it decides to settle down. finally, the high-quality middle class is a behavioural model, one that is expected to improve social cohesion, as well as maintain social and political stability. the idealized and ‘civilized’ behaviour of the urban middle classes is reproduced in countless handbooks on ‘how to be …’ that aim to instil urban manners in the migrants arriving in large cities; it features in advertising campaigns that encourage quality consumption; and is a prominent characteristic of all social campaigns by local governments. the exemplary role played by this greatly differentiated group—from entrepreneurs to academics to public servants and professionals—therefore, is crucial to the way society is governed and to how individuals and communities, including residential communities, govern themselves. increasingly, becoming a member of a higher cluster of society is connected directly to behavioural norms that inevitably imply that there is a ‘civilized’ way to resolve conflicts. conclusions the creation of a consumption-oriented professional middle-class has been among the key objectives of china’s economic reforms in recent years. public policies, economic conditions and the allocation of resources have all contributed to the rapid upward socioeconomic mobility of professionals. this middle class, however, is far from the champion of democratization that western observers have often relied on to predict china’s impending democratization. rather, the middle class remains deeply intertwined with the destinies of china’s political and economic elite and it is perceived as a force for social stability rather than one for political change. it is also broadly conceptualized as a tool of the process of modernization and civilization that drives china’s economic and social development. the need to boost consumer spending and to stimulate economic growth, the quest for social and political stability, and a desire to foster a more efficient and dynamic bureaucracy have convinced the state to raise salaries and improve conditions for officials and to professionalize their recruitment processes. the middle-class strategy of tomba middle classes in china portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 11 the chinese government has employed a redistribution of public assets—especially of housing—based on the interest structures that existed during the years of planned socialism, in a way that has greatly favoured sectors of urban society with strong ties to the state and to public employment. the social legacy of the traditional distribution of welfare and of the housing patrimony has put those with skills who ‘held on’ to the state into a position of earning higher incomes and of profiting from a relatively inexpensive acquisition of valuable resources. the middle classes are also playing an important symbolic and discursive role in the creation of a new china as one of the new ‘value-makers’ of china’s new cities. these values are at once economic, behavioural and symbolic, and encourage individuals and groups to govern themselves, thus contributing substantially to the ability of the present regime to maintain control of a changing society. reference list anagnost, a. 2004. ‘the corporeal politics of quality (suzhi),’ public culture, vol. 16, no. 2, 189-208. bray, d. 2006, ‘building communities: new strategies of governance in urban china,’ economy and society, vol. 35, no. 4, 530-549. labour yearbook, 1996-2001, zhongguo laodong he shehui baozhang nianjian (china labour and social security statistical yearbook), zhongguo laodon he shehui baozhang chubanshe, beijing. giroir, g. 2006, ‘the purple jade villas (beijing): a golden ghetto in red china,’ in private cities: global and local perspectives, (eds) g. glasze, c. webster & k. frantz, routledge, london, 142152. goodman, d.s.g. (ed.) 2008, the new rich in china. future rulers, present lives, routledge, london. jacka, t. 2006, rural women in urban china, me sharpe, armonk, ny. jiang zemin, 2002, ‘jiang zemin tongzhi zai dang de shiliu da shang suozuo baogao de quanwen’ (full text of comrade jiang zemin report at the 16th party congress). online, available: http://news.xinhuanet.com/ziliao/2002-11/17/content_693542.htm (accessed 10 jan 2010). kipnis, a. 2006, ‘suzhi: a keyword approach,’ the china quarterly, vol. 186, 295-313. li bin. 2002, “zhongguo zhufang gaige zhidu de fenge xing” (the unequal nature of china’s housing reform), shehuixue yanjiu (research in the social sciences), no. 2, pp. 80-7. li jian and niu xiaohan. 2003. ‘the new middle class(es) in peking: a case study,’ china perspectives, no. 45, january, 4-20. liu shiyu. 2007 “earnestly strengthening commercial real estate management to adjust real estate credit structure and prevent credit risks”, speech by liu shiyu, vice governor of the people’s bank of china. online, available: http://www.pbc.gov.cn/english//detail.asp?col=6500&id=160 (accessed 10 january 2010). miao pu. 2003, ‘deserted streets in a jammed town: the gated communities in china’s cities and its solution,’ journal of urban design, vol. 8, no.1, 45-66. read, b. 2003, ‘democratizing the neighbourhood? new private housing and home-owner selforganization in urban china,’ the china journal, no. 49, january, 31-60. tomba, l. 2004, ‘creating an urban middle class: social engineering in beijing,’ the china journal, no. 51, january, 1-26. tomba, l. 2005, ‘residential space and collective interest formation in beijing’s housing disputes,’ the china quarterly, vol. 184, 934-951. tomba, l. 2009, ‘of quality, harmony and community: civilization and the middle class in urban china,’ in positions: east asia cultures critique, vol. 17, no. 3, 591-616. tomba middle classes in china portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 12 tomba, l. and beibei tang. 2008, ‘the forest city. homeownership and new wealth in shenyang,’ in the new rich in china. future rulers, present lives, (ed.) d.s.g. goodman, routledge, london, 171-187. vogel, e. 1963, japan’s new middle class: the salary man and his family in a tokyo suburb, university of california press, berkeley. wang yaping and a. murie. 1999, housing policy and practice in china, macmillan, london. webster, c.j., g. glasze and k. frantz (eds). 2002, ‘the global spread of gated communities,’ special issue editorial, environment and planning b, vol. 29, no. 3, 315-320. wu fulong. 2002, ‘sociosopatial differentiation in urban china: evidence from the real estate markets,’ environment and planning a, vol. 34, no. 9, 1591-1615. wu fulong. 2005, ‘rediscovering the ‘gate’ under market transition: from work-unit compounds to commodity housing enclaves,’ housing studies, no. 20, 235-254. yan hairong. 2003, ‘neoliberal governmentality and neohumanism: organizing suzhi/value flow though labor recruitment networks,’ cultural anthropology, vol. 18, no. 4, 493-523. zhang li. 2006, ‘contesting spatial modernity in late socialist china,’ current anthroplogy, vol. 47, no. 3, 461-484. zhou changcheng (ed.). 2001, shehui fazhan yu shenghuo zhiliang (social development and quality of life), shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, beijing. zhu rongji. 2003, government work report to the 10th national people’s congress. online, available: http://app1.chinadaily.com.cn/highlights/nbc/news/319zhufull.htm (accessed 10 january 2010). the “global popular” and “quality” culture: lotr and pavement portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ in search of authenticity: the ‘global popular’ and ‘quality’ culture—the case of the lord of the rings trilogy and pavement hilary radner, university of otago in the era of the global, we often forget that lived experience takes place at the local level. variety, published in the usa, with an arguably global readership, looking at new zealand from abroad, facetiously (and quite probably erroneously) reported that ‘three percent of the country’s population attended the new zealand premiere’ of the return of the king, which was filmed in that country (variety, 8 dec. 2003, 79).1 the national media landscape that variety evokes is an impoverished one in which new zealanders are sent rushing to the theatre at those rare moments when new zealand achieves global prominence. though new zealand and new zealanders only occasionally make it to the big screen, the need felt by new zealanders to read about themselves results in the regular consumption of magazines, conceived and tailored to its market by parent companies such as australian consolidated press (acp). the new zealand distributor, gordon and gotch entices prospective clients: ‘did you know that new zealanders are world leaders in magazines? we read and purchase more magazines per capita than any other country in the world!’ (http://www.gordongotch.co.nz). magazines published in new zealand for a new zealand readership dominate the new zealand market (http://www.abc.org.nz; see also http://www.business.vu.edu.au/bho2250/top20media/topmedianz.htm). the new 1 the return of the king is the third film in the lord of the rings trilogy (commonly referred to as lotr). the trilogy, directed by new zealander peter jackson, includes: the fellowship of the ring, 2002. the two towers, 2003. the return of the king, 2004. http://www.abc.org.nz/ radner in search of authenticity zealander’s desire to see himself or herself verified through print arises, perhaps at least in part, from the fact that the new zealander is so rarely depicted on the big screen. i will argue that by looking at the way in which a very ‘narrow cast’ publication—in this case a life-style magazine—covers a mass-market production (what i call the lord of the rings [lotr] phenomenon), we can better understand the relationship between culture that might be considered popular within a global context (such as lotr), and culture that by definition, in terms of its readership, is local and limited. this examination of very particular texts demonstrates how larger concepts such as nation and identity must be understood in the context of particular lived experience if we wish to comprehend the complexity of these concepts and their tragic exceptions; their blind spots. for the purpose of illustrating this point, i choose to examine here a publication so local that it does not figure on the radar of marketing experts—pavement. this new zealand magazine, which is published out of auckland, devoted three special issues to the lord of the rings trilogy; 50th issue: the lord of the rings special (december 2001/january 2002); the lord of the rings: the two towers special (december 2002/january 2002); the lord of the rings: the return of the king special (summer 2003/2004). as a local publication addressing local readers, these issues offer an example of how global and local cultures are constructed for specific readerships. a glossy, large format magazine, pavement describes itself as ‘new zealand’s leading contemporary culture magazine’ and reports a readership of 12,350 (http://www.admedia.co.nz/showcase).2 it would be a mistake, however, to see pavement as a non-commercial enterprise on account of its very modest readership; it displays ads from high-end new zealand designers, as well as from international lines such as gucci. in the following analysis, i will attempt to suggest the importance of examining publications like pavement in order to understand how national identity is constructed and circulated at a local level with a global context. pavement’s treatment of lotr, being symptomatic of a larger discursive formation, illuminates how the larger phenomenon of ‘textual formations’ or ‘reading formations’ as portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 radner in search of authenticity defined by bennett and woolacott (1987, 262, 278) operates to define the parameters of interpretation offered to a given readership—which may differ from readership to readership. importantly, the pavement case indicates how notions of domination or cultural hegemony cannot be understood in terms of the global/local dichotomy. pavement’s discourse about culture evolves from tensions between global popular culture and quality global culture, often termed ‘high’ culture. by attracting a mass readership, the global popular dominates ‘high’ culture; however, historically the position occupied by high culture in a post-colonial context such as new zealand served to maintain the status of new zealand as a colony and as subservient to europe, and to great britain in particular. this is one of the primary conflicts that pavement attempts to negotiate as defining terms of the reading formation out of which it is generated and which it reproduces. a close reading of the first special issue devoted to the lotr phenomenon demonstrates that this is not necessarily a productive tension. ultimately, pavement marginalizes the indigenous voice—or perhaps more accurately, the tensions between the european and the national, between high culture and mass culture, hide the ways in which local publications such as pavement may occlude and elide the place of indigenous culture. ultimately, these tensions focus the readers on binary oppositions that do not encourage a more heterogeneous definition of culture capable of being expansive rather than reductive. reading formations bennett and woolacott argue that meaning is produced through a significant intertextuality, ‘a constantly mobile set of inter-textual relations’, that produces the interpretation of a given text by a given reader (1987, 6). meaning as interpretation is multiple and culturally produced, defined by historical and social contexts—by, in the words of bennett and woolacott, ‘the varying social and ideological relations of reading’ that permit, encourage and regulate ‘the consumption’ of ‘texts’ (6). they argue that: the relations between texts and readers...are always profoundly mediated by the discursive and inter-textual determinations which, operating on both, structure the domain of their encounter so as 2 as a point of comparison, according to the abc magazine audit results, the new zealand listener has a historic nz net circulation of 75, 177, new zealand woman’s day, 142,610, fashion quarterly, 22, 620 (http://www.abc.org.audit/index.html, consulted 28/06/05). pavement is not listed in the audit results. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 radner in search of authenticity to produce, always in specific and variable forms, texts and readers as the mutual support of one another. (1987, 249) meaning within the paradigm established by bennett and woolacott is dynamic and participatory; however, it does not empty the ‘text’ itself of meaning. the text, rather than offering meaning in isolation, becomes the site around which meanings are produced according to parameters manifested in a number of ancillary texts that a given reader brings to bear upon any given text or situation and that, as such, constitute the context of a given reading. bennett and woolacott explain: ...texts are productive of meaning only within particular and determinate reading formations—a concept we have ventured as a means of specifying the inter-textual and discursive conditions which mould and configure the text-reader encounter. (1987, 262) these contexts are manifested (available as symptoms) in the ancillary texts that are brought to bear upon a primary text. the notion of primary text is one that must be understood in terms of a given reading. for example, in a movie theatre the film may be read as a primary text that is informed by ancillary texts such as magazine articles about a given star. in the context of a living room, the magazine text may be read as the primary text that is informed by the film narrative, which the reader may or may not have seen, as the case may be. woolacott and bennett note that: ‘there is no fixed boundary between the extra-textual and the intra-textual which prevents the former from pressing in upon the latter and reorganising it’ (1987, 263). i would argue further that there is no initial hierarchy that might determine a text of origin that might exercise primacy over other texts. the reading context and the reading formation establish provisional hierarchies that can be transformed or reversed. ‘reading formation theory’ (see for example erb, 1991) posits that material about lotr becomes part of the lotr phenomenon and that lotr as popular fiction inevitably includes this material. i chose here to focus on a very specific and perhaps narrowly defined reading formation as manifested through the magazine pavement because of the way that it illuminates the problems of producing ‘local’ readings in a global context— that is to say in a context, to quote benedict anderson, in which ‘substantial groups of people were in a position to think of themselves as living lives parallel to those of other substantial groups of people—if never meeting, yet certainly proceeding along the same portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 radner in search of authenticity trajectory’ (1991, 188). for anderson, this sense of parallelism initially develops in the eighteenth century and is manifested in the proliferation of geographic names such as london and new london in which the ‘new’ location existed ‘synchronically’, ‘alongside’ the old location (187). i would argue that pavement exemplifies the multiplication of reading formations in new zealand that revolve around developing and interrogating the capacity of new zealanders to ‘imagine themselves as communities parallel and comparable to those in europe’ (92). the vexed discursive position of the local in this process of ‘imagining’ suggests why the project that anderson describes as emerging in the eighteenth century remains unfinished today. global popular and quality global culture pavement’s treatment of lotr underlines the complexities of a new zealand reading formation that defines itself as such, as ‘of new zealand’. the magazine pavement is modelled on european magazines such as i-d magazine. in this sense the magazine could be seen as part of a ‘global’ or ‘international’ style; however it focuses on self-identified new zealanders. in comparison with more commercial publications such as next, a woman’s magazine published by the mega-company acp, pavement underlines an aesthetic that is international or, perhaps more accurately, evokes ‘international-ness’. in a magazine such as next, the reader is more likely to read about local events and to see the depictions of specific local landscapes (see radner, 2004). while pavement stresses the ‘creativity’ of new zealanders and positions itself as aligned with the new ‘creative industries’, it does not depict the local as local; it operates in terms of producing discourses that are defined aesthetically rather than geographically. coincidentally, the special issue devoted to the fellowship of the ring is also the 50th issue of the magazine. looking back over the last few years, the magazine defines its mission as: ‘to take pieces and write stories on people who aspire to be the very best they can be at their special skill’ (pavement, december 2001/january 2002, 98). it defines itself against the popular. ‘generally the mainstream is oblivious to their importance, except in terms of the impact of their work as it filters through to the mass market in a diluted, plundered, disenfranchised form’ (98). the magazine showcases new zealanders portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 radner in search of authenticity ‘with many based in major cities overseas’. ‘...[t]hose who are from overseas themselves understand the sensibility of pavement’(98). peter jackson is celebrated as a new zealander, a ‘humble but incredibly hardworking “hobbit”’ (pavement, 98). peter jackson as a cute hobbit stands in contradistinction to the heroic artist evoked in the paragraph above. the ‘hobbit’, however, like the heroic artist, is not indigenous to new zealand. both ‘figures’ are imported from europe and from britain in particular. though both imports, they represent two distinct strands that define the ‘creative’ individual, according to pavement. both figures are nostalgic renditions of european ideals identified with high culture and the educated classes. it is typical of pavement that it produces these contradictions between heroic artist and hard-working hobbit, between aesthetic fulfilment and financial gain. in its encomium of peter jackson, pavement cannot prevent itself from suggesting that the genius of jackson itself may have been ‘plundered’, diverted from its initial purely aesthetic ambitions. this uneasiness is manifested through the clash of visual styles that characterises the representation of lotr in pavement. peter jackson’s lotr trilogy challenges the aesthetics of pavement by overtly appealing to what simon during calls the ‘global popular’ (during 1999, 211). by this i mean that the films were self-consciously conceived with the goal of creating a work within a specific reading formation that would, along with its associated promotional materials, guarantee an international blockbuster audience, rather than to promote, in arnoldian terms, ‘the best of what has been thought and said’. it is not necessarily obvious that these two goals (mass audience and quality) are mutually exclusive; however, within the arnoldian paradigm, favourable reception of a work by a mass audience inevitably casts doubt upon its quality. the defining term of the blockbuster is, arguably, its favourable reception by a mass audience. thus, films produced for mass consumption on a global scale are immediately viewed with suspicion by contemporary gatekeepers of culture. simon during, as a professor of english literature, strives to create a new hierarchy of culture, in which he privileges ‘the global popular’ as an authentic form of mass culture, characterising his discussion of the phenomenon as an attempt ‘to think the global portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 radner in search of authenticity popular affirmatively’ (1999, 211). in particular, he calls into question ‘cultural studies’, ‘welcome to difference, hybridicity and subversion’ as the sole authentic location of the popular (1999, 211). the notion of the ‘global popular’ is useful here in elucidating the cultural conundrum faced by a publications such as pavement (which strive for ‘international’ standards of excellence within a local context) and the difficulties inherent in a carte blanche affirmation of local culture as the adequate antidote to ‘globalisation’. during comments that ‘only hollywood produces systematically for world-wide export’ (during 1999, 214) but that not all hollywood films are made in hollywood. he also notes that ‘cultural globalisation’ (which he distinguishes from the ‘global popular’) encourages hollywood to produce globally in terms of location and financial backing (214, 215) and further explores the financial stakes of the global popular as an international project (215). the notion of a ‘global popular’ as defined by during underlines the way in which ‘hollywood’ in the twenty-first century is best understood as a transnational category. (see miller, et al 2001.) it is not my goal here to detail the finances that produced lotr or the means by which it was distributed to a global audience. nor am i concerned with debating whether these are new zealand films or hollywood films. rather, i wish to raise the issue of how the ‘global popular’ is inscribed as part of a reading formation that is properly of new zealand. the films are heralded as new zealand films, but as pavement’s treatment of peter jackson demonstrates, they do not fit easily within the parameters of new zealand culture as ‘best of what has been thought and said’. i would argue that pavement, in contradistinction to lotr, self-consciously attempts to speak within an idiom that might be termed ‘global high culture’ or ‘quality global culture’ to a specifically local readership. both textual productions (lotr and pavement), then, attempt to exploit self-consciously the manner in which global and local are linked. like two sides of a sheet of paper, the conceptualisation of the one demands the other, and vice versa. in other words, the very notion of the local is impossible without the pre-supposition of the global—the dimension of parallel synchronicity portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 radner in search of authenticity described by anderson above. i argue then that pavement signifies within a discursive system that might be called ‘quality global culture’. i am well aware that this discursive system does not exist independently of the economic and political conditions that produce it; however, i would argue that this system qua system is worthy of examination on its own terms because it illuminates the position that new zealand culture occupies in the imagination of new zealanders. in particular, the discursive system of pavement operates to elevate new zealand culture per se as ‘cultivated’ and the result of a discerning, and hence ‘niche’, sensibility—as part of a project that sustains and develops ‘the best of what has been thought and said’. the appreciation of new zealand culture may be international in scope and new zealand culture itself may be represented within a global arena; however, this arena is that of a quality global culture rather than of the global popular. lotr as a discursive structure challenges the discursive structure that characterizes pavement. its double status as ‘global popular’ and as new zealand culture means that the films occupy a vexed position within the ‘quality global culture’ discourse of pavement. because the films are prominent and represent new zealand within an international context, pavement must seek to include a discussion of the films as part of its mission to promote new zealand ‘creative’ talents. yet, the ‘popular’ dimension of these films, as expressed through their visual sensibility, for example, runs counter to that of pavement. this tension is reflected in the particulars of pavement’s representation of lotr. cover stories pavement features the films as ‘cover’ stories in three issues. the ‘popular’ imagery for the two-page advertisement for the film that opens each of these three issues contrasts with the general austerity of the publication. in contrast with the cover photo, the advertisement is decorative, dramatic and evokes the complicated narratives of the films. it looks as if it were ‘drawn’—an illustration from a nineteenth century book of fairy tales. in this sense, the advertisement is nostalgic rather than forward-looking, evoking the world of rudyard kipling and other such chroniclers of a colonial past, including portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 radner in search of authenticity j.r.r. tolkien himself. it seems distinctly out of place in the publication as a whole and contrasts with the cover photos that precede it. the cover photograph, in each of the three issues, is of an international film star—liv tyler, orlando bloom and viggo mortensen respectively—depicted without reference to their roles in the film. bloom and mortensen are shot with relatively flat lighting against a stark background. tyler is shot with a softer focus and softer lighting; however the effect is still stark in comparison with the typical fashion magazine cover shot.3 the covers resemble slick high fashion cover shots (such as those shot for vogue and harper’s bazaar) but most closely recalls the counter-fashion style of i-d magazine. this ‘anti-style’ style is now recognizable and has become a ‘style’ itself associated with high-end experimental designers such as prada, costume national, etc (see jones & mair 2003). these ‘star’ shots differ from the cover shots featured on tabloids such as new weekly because of the emphasis on aesthetic or formal attributes of the image in the pavement photographs. for example, the flat background of the images (the stars appear to be backed against a wall) serves to emphasize the two-dimensional quality of the photographic image as image. similarly, the figures cast shadows on the wall behind giving the photo an ‘untouched’ look, which emphasizes its status as a photograph. at the same time, the figures look posed—artificially placed and ‘still’ for the camera. in contrast tabloid photographs are obviously cut and pasted for dramatic effect and the photographs often appear to have be taken without the knowledge of the subject. often the full body is shown in movement, giving the feel of ‘reality’ to the image. tabloid representations of stars evoke a narrative or story in which the image features. in this sense, in terms of narrativity, the advertisements for the films are closer aesthetically to the tabloid; however, tabloid ‘stories’ are often not about the films in which these stars feature, but about the stars’ personal lives. furthermore, the grainy coarseness of the 3 the use of the ‘head shot’ and the dominance of the face as a visual trope within contemporary media is not in and of itself insignificant; however, the topic is too broad to broach within the confines of this intervention. see, for example, davis, 2004. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 radner in search of authenticity images are in sharp contrast with the soft, nostalgic imagery and technique used by the lotr advertisements in pavement, which set the ‘film world’ apart, as distinct from the ‘world’ of personal life (the tabloids), and the ‘worlds’ of fashion (fashion magazines) and culture (pavement, itself). pavement minimizes the story-telling function of the image on its covers, encouraging the pavement reader to recover the ‘film’ from the other world of fantasy and to place its ‘stars’ (at the very least) in the world of the pavement reader. in this sense these images seem closer to fashion images than to the images proliferated by the tabloids. pavement, however, in terms of style, also distinguishes itself from the typical commercially oriented fashion magazine (such as vogue and harper’s bazaar) as a means of signalling its affiliation with the world of ‘the best of what has been thought and said’. unlike vogue fashion cover photographs, pavement does not provide a list of products that might be used to achieve the cover look. the ‘stars’ appear to be dressed, coiffed, and made-up in a manner that would reassure the reader that these stars dress and look ‘just like you and me’, or rather, just like the ‘hip’ readers of pavement. similarly, the pavement cover shots do not use glamour lighting, such as ‘back lighting’ or ‘butterfly lighting’, giving instead a ‘real-life’ effect. rather than featuring a list of products associated with the cover image, pavement tells its readers that it will present ‘liv tyler & elijah wood photographed in new york for pavement by bryce pincham’. the focus, then, is on the photographer as a representative of new zealand creativity abroad. the interview itself does to some degree echo the types of issues raised in similar interviews in women’s magazines. somewhat unusual is the emphasis on new zealand, the landscape, and the culture. liv tyler, for example, explains what she did in new zealand: ‘i shopped at zambesi’ [a high-end new zealand designer located in wellington, advertised in pavement] (pavement, december 2001/january 2002, 102). her comments about the film and the role were thin. the mythic elements that appealed to the male actors were less significant to tyler. (see interview with elijah wood in the same issue, 104-105.) again, in the interviews, pavement finds it difficult to completely sever its discourse from a popular discourse. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 radner in search of authenticity the 'feminine' star is defined by 'shopping', for example. not coincidentally, both discourses, the global ‘quality’ and the global ‘popular’, are intertwined in a manner that produces reading formations that allow and even require the marginalisation and occlusion of indigenous culture. conclusion: aotearoa/new zealand—the occluded term the vexed nature of this intersection of the global popular and quality global culture is illustrated by the marginal representation accorded indigenous culture by pavement in this same issue. lawrence makoare—the only māori and the only new zealand actor figured in the pavement feature on the first film in the trilogy—is also the only representative of indigenous culture in this issue. his photo is in black and white, and thus set apart from those of the other actors. given that he is heavily made-up for his two roles as lurtz in the fellowship of the ring (2002), and as the witch king in the final film, the return of the king (2004), he is unrecognisable in the film. his make-up required ten and a half hours to put on and four hours to remove (pavement, december 2001/january 2002, 113). his position illustrates the ambivalence with which both the global popular and global high culture incorporate indigenous culture. pavement mentions lawrence’s subsequent role in the māori merchant of venice (2002) in passing. pavement indicates that this film is ‘another local feature film’—but one to which pavement does not accord the same attention as lotr. in conclusion, if we return to benedict anderson’s notion of ‘imagined’ ‘parallel’ ‘communities’, we can observe that pavement functions within a reading formation that seeks to ‘imagine’ new zealand on a european model. this model accords a marginal position to indigenous culture and to the bi-cultural community signified through aotearoa/new zealand as the ‘other’ nation or parallel, imagined community. lotr as the global popular fails insofar as it cannot ‘imagine’ the role of indigenous culture in the global popular and allows its representation only ‘in disguise’ as ‘monstrous’. within pavement’s treatment of the fellowship of the ring, the contribution of the māori to new zealand culture remains on the margin, presented yet again as monstrous and disguised. this failure of the imagination produces a ‘local’ culture that is seemingly portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 radner in search of authenticity without specificity, that is not grounded and that finally relies on the global popular for its identity. this failure, i would argue, suggests limitations in the ways in which the arts are understood. the arts remain defined in terms of a largely global model and an aesthetic of high culture, rather than in terms of the geographic concerns of place, with important political and economic consequences. both popular culture and high culture may reach a global audience—but the voice of the indigenous peoples, their very language, may languish under the pressures of a global imagination. this analysis focuses in detail on a particular moment of ‘reading’—one that may be subjected to multiple transformations (and even corrections) as it circulates through space and time. i am aware of the dangers of what is typically a micro-analysis. the examination of a single symptom cannot be the terms for the diagnosis of a culture as a whole. i would argue, however, that this particular symptom suggests the need for further examination of local reading formations across a broader terrain of textual configurations. the important issue raised by this reading may not be about global culture per se at all, but about recognizing and reclaiming indigenous cultures that often find themselves situated somewhere outside the local/global debate, rather than at the heart of that debate where they belong. reference list anderson, b. 1991, imagined communities, london, verso. arnold, matthew 1903-1904 (1882), ‘literature and science’ (rede lecture), the works of matthew arnold vol. iv, macmillan, london, 340-341. bennett, t. and woolacott, j. 1987, bond and beyond: the political career of a popular hero, macmillan, london. davis, therese 2004, the face on the screen: death, recognition & spectatorship, intellect books, bristol uk. during, s. 1999, ‘popular culture on a global scale: a challenge for cultural studies’, in the media reader: continuity and transformation, eds h. mackay and t. o’sullivan, sage, london, 211-22. erb, c. 1991, film and reception: a contextual and reading formation study of king kong (1933), phd dissertation, indiana university, bloomington. harper’s bazaar, hearst magazines, new york. jones, t. and mair, a. 2003, fashion now: i-d selects the world’s 150 most important designers, köln, taschen. miller, t., govil, n., mcmurria, j. and maxwell, r. 2001, global hollywood, british portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 radner in search of authenticity film institute, london. new zealand fashion quarterly, acp new zealand, auckland. pavement, c&p publishing, auckland. radner, h. 2004, ‘“rural glamour”: reading fashion in the new zealand context’, in leisure, media & visual culture: representations and contestations eds. e. kennedy and a. thornton, eastbourne, leisure culture association, antony rowe ltd., 3-20. the lord of the rings: the fellowship of the ring (motion picture) 2001, new line cinema and wingnut films. the lord of the rings: the return of the king (motion picture) 2003, new line cinema and wingnut films. the lord of the rings: the two towers (motion picture) 2002, new line cinema and wingnut films. variety, reed business information, 2005, new york. woman’s day (new zealand edition), acp new zealand, auckland. women’s weekly (new zealand edition), acp new zealand, auckland. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 finalportalvol6no22009zhenganddonaldintrogalleydec28 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. post-mao, post-bourdieu: class and taste in contemporary china, special issue, guest edited by yi zheng and stephanie hemelryk donald. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. introduction. post-mao, post-bourdieu: class culture in contemporary china stephanie hemelryk donald, rmit university, yi zheng, university of sydney. this special issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies explores the relationship between taste, choice and social stratification in contemporary china. it is premised on the observation that the past thirty years of accelerated reform policies have initiated a system of authoritarian capitalism, which fosters a network of social values, focussed on opportunity and struggle figured through financial achievement and consumption, and given affective meaning through nationalism. not all chinese enjoy the full gamut of these experiences, although most partake in struggle in some form. opportunity arises mainly from the cultural capital, financial and social position of one’s parents, and, to some degree, from innate talent and hard work, an urban upbringing, and national provisions for educational advantage. pre-existing forms of influence and power—local networks, party membership, sufficient funds for education—are the strongest determinants of sustained success. in some cases, the opportunity for wealth creation has allowed some social mobility for entrepreneurial minds, whilst also re-establishing privilege amongst those whose status was already high through long term political or intellectual activity. our research interviews in sichuan and guangzhou in 2005-2007 suggested that those who responded to the description xiaokang (well off) ranged from multi-millionaires, to couples with an architect designed home and access to expensive education for their child, to those who had scraped together enough to purchase an apartment in the city, donald and zheng introduction. post-mao, post-bourdieu portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 2 and perhaps a car. at the same time, cheap labour, domestic migration flows, the disestablishment of state owned enterprises and the welfare net that they represented, have thrust millions into uncertainty and the particular poverty of a precarious client relationship with the marketised state. although the actual economics of status are not the main focus of this special issue, they are of course crucial to the conditions through which a newly forming idea of class, if not class itself, is managed and performed. in all of these discussions it is important to bear in mind that status does not necessarily translate into fixed class positions, but that class is generally characterised in part by high or low status. we are interested here not just in how an idea of class is made and unmade by wealth and relative poverty, but how it is claimed and reproduced through the actions of the state and of individuals, or indeed bypassed by short term self interest. arguably, the absence of clearly defined class categories and attendant class interest groups and strategies makes the status seeking behaviour of chinese elites, middle-income workers and the working poor even more important. one hypothesis for china’s idea of class might be that status is the end point of consumer endeavour, and that self-interest has deferred class interest. further, the rise of nationalism and the central policy of harmonisation allow this deferral to continue, with the social energies of the people being deflected into larger scales of rhetorical belonging. our question then might be: will the practice of taste differentiation gradually create mutually acknowledged social groups and relations, or is consumption hiding a chaotic and atomistic meltdown of the social and political order? using the terminology of class is therefore vexed, and slippages occur easily. erik wright olins has recently acknowledged that class is usefully theorised (in three traditions) vis-a-vis social position and economic opportunity, power and exploitation, materiality access and behaviour (2009: 102). all are relevant to the chinese case, although we also suggest that class may be elided by the presumption of the state’s interests, even as these processes continue. a way into this conundrum might be to consider the degree to which class consciousness is at work in socio-political interactions. there are certainly levels of attainment and privilege in china, which are based on birth opportunity more than on inherent merit. provincial origin and immediate family background still matter in one’s life chances. the poor are many and various however; if there is class consciousness donald and zheng introduction. post-mao, post-bourdieu portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 3 among them, it is sporadic and localised. there are also those who are not poor as such; they have average expectations for themselves and their children, and they might in other contexts be defined as working class. now, they are inevitably caught up in the aspirational culture of a consumer driven urban market—which in turn determines the nature of their struggle and opportunity, and which also dissipates class interests in favour of the immediacy of adaption and survival. there are the well off, the rich, and the super-rich, and their sense of class is stronger insofar as they both understand their exposure to instability both politically and financially, and are able to work politically to protect themselves. their grouping, the articulate elites in reform china, is more an act of organisational will by the leadership of the party than it is an organic achievement of the market, and these upper/middle populations are thus vulnerable to shifts in politics as well as to the vagaries of global finance. this last group is frequently lumped together as the new middle classes of china, a misnomer that nonetheless has purchase overseas, and that serves at home to ‘vanish’ real class description and potential from the political field. ‘when we speak of the ‘chinese middleclass,’ to whom and to what do we refer?’ asks doctoroff, in his bestseller guide to marketing in china, billions: selling to the new chinese consumer (2005: 14). it is a question that is asked frequently in developed economies, as china’s new business partners look for points of familiarity to reconcile their worldview to the shift in global power. whether or not the question is a reasonable one, it persists. the answer, for doctoroff, is the populations referred to previously as the xiaokang, those who are enjoying increased wealth in urban areas, and whose class practices are rhetorically aligned to the key growth strategy of the chinese communist party. postreform affluence is in line with the blueprint for a future china launched by the sixteenth-congress of the chinese communist party held in november 2002. there, the ‘parlance of the sixteenth people’s congress … wink [ed] at a robust, yet pliable, xiao kang (relatively wealthy) society’ (doktoroff 2005: 14). china’s future would be built on the construction and stabilisation of a comprehensive ‘relatively affluent (xiaokang) society,’ with the understanding that over time there would be a steady increase in the national ratio of middle-income earners to the poor, thus marrying growth to social harmonisation. so, in defining middle class-ness in china, doctoroff describes a policy situation that defuses class interests in favour of a national interest strategy described by state capitalism and authoritarian developmentalism. the idea of middle-class-ness is an donald and zheng introduction. post-mao, post-bourdieu portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 4 anti-class deployment of status and economic survival for a large minority. the voices of the well-off, the wealthy and the rich combine to drown out the voices of the poor, whilst promising a nationally inspired parity for everyone. again a paradox, it is the exploitation model of class used to deny class division at the level of the nation’s selfimage. the new utopia the party’s vision of a harmonious xiaokang one-class/no-class society responds to the need to consolidate and harness the successes of the economic reform, and addresses the traumatic social differentiations that have been caused in the process. ‘harmonious society’ promises redress, over time, for the increasing gap between the rich and poor. in this sense the chinese middleclass-to-be is similar to the new middle classes of other areas of recent affluence in asia, described by stivens as ‘the children of these hypertrophic states’ (1998: 13). they are both real and important, but not quite what they are made out to be in the political rhetoric of the state. these are not the middle classes in the sense that they are challenging a ruling class; they are rather commanded and compounded as a legitimising product and constituent of the ruling elite’s political and economic power. the inclusion of their relative success is crucial to the narrativisation of china’s economic miracle. the rhetorical insistence on harmonising economic disparity and social difference reveals both political anxiety and a new utopian vision. in some quarters, it reinvokes the spectre of old-style class conflict, which has been the cause and subject of deeply violent episodes over the past century. elsewhere, this ‘wink’ at class opens up new commercial and personal opportunities. it promises access to the dollars of economic reform, through a newly mobile social field and competitive cultural aspirations. different urban and provincial environments, and alternative developmental rates and opportunities are obvious but not theorised in party rhetoric. the chinese middleclass(es) as an idea is thus an approximate vision of the new chinese utopia. while in popular, especially commercially driven, representation it is often used to signal ‘all that is desirable and tasteful in life’ (chen & yi 2004: 1), politically it is spelled out as a foundational project by the leaders of state-planning bureaux. in a forum called ‘cutting-edge academic discussions’ in beijing 2002, for example, the vice-director of the state bureau for statistics he ken stated that ‘middleclass’ should donald and zheng introduction. post-mao, post-bourdieu portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 5 signify ‘relative affluence’ and ‘civilised.’ it should be a social stratum that will form the mainstay of the citizens of a future chinese xiaokang society. as leading members of a ‘relatively affluent’ future china, he further elaborates, the middle class should be not only economically well off, but also high in spiritual-cultural quality (jingshen wenhua suzhi). middle-class-making, as the foundational project for post-reform affluent china, not only depends on state-led economic development, but also involves normative cultural practices which necessitate the active participation of the state and society at large, from the economic sectors to individual aspirants. taste is thus allied to social value and in turn to the harmonisation of cultural and political behaviours. post-mao class conceptualisation in china is not necessarily only tied to social stratification and economic divisions, which of course also exist and have done so in the past. it is also about the harmonious ordering of the social body as a tapestry of correct behaviours and placements. such social ordering was corrupted in the recent history of the people’s republic of china (prc). mao zedong’s class analysis and social categorisation oscillated between self-serving political strategies, and the notion of class struggle became the basis for endless campaigns against enemies of the party-state (schram 1984). maoist class struggle did not refer to active social divisions but to roughly applied concepts of blood lineage, and expediency. mao’s notion of class is thus inherited but deviates from its classical chinese precedent. jieji, the neologism for class in modern standard chinese is taken from modern japanese, which in turn was translated from classical chinese. it denotes distinction and structural classification but in a different sense. while jieji originally connotes ‘hierarchical degrees on a continuum’ (kuhn 1984: 17), it does not classify groups of people but mark their places in a given order. in its early form it points to a fixed order of aristocratic distinction, ‘linked to a routinized system of political preferment’ (kuhn 1984: 17). the important point here is that classically jieji highlights distinction based on political preferment. but though the image of jieji as fixed degrees in a continuum persisted, its actual reference changes in time. the use of jieji has its own history. for instance, ‘by late imperial times, the meaning of ji had shifted entirely away from inherited aristocratic status and was associated with the eighteenth-rank system of bureaucratic distinctions’ donald and zheng introduction. post-mao, post-bourdieu portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 6 (kuhn 1984: 18). this suggests that since late imperial times (1368-1912) jieji was no longer a fixed system of distinction in china, as advancement in bureaucratic distinction through personal political effort, rather than through birthright, became the determining factor in social classification. it was not a system that relied on inherited social origins; but, while prioritising political preferment, it also presupposed, in fact, relied on, social mobility based on education and practices of personal as well as group cultivation. the economic factor only figured indirectly in this shifting grid of preferment and status, though that also became increasingly important. the jieji system of distinction was generally supplemented by the division of society into occupational status groups, such as the four categories of shi nong gong shang: scholar-gentry, agriculturalists, artisans, and merchants. if this latter socially hierarchical system was economically differentiated, it was so in terms of a universal economic priority determined by the state’s fiscal interest rather than by individual or group wealth (kuhn 1984: 20). when liang qichao first used the term in 1899 to introduce european thought on social and economic power through japanese interpretation, he meant it as the gradient that separated society whilst binding it closely together (liang quoted in kuhn 1984: 20). this first ‘modern’ use of class is still more akin to a grading system rather than a social grouping based on economic status. mao’s grasp and articulation of chinese social relations in the twentieth century centered on class and class struggle. as an absolute principle it steered half a century of chinese political and social life. this was a combination of the marxist precept of economically determined class, and the shifting politically volatile grid of jieji, which was both exploitative and socially imagined. its deployment was thus contingent and fraught with conceptual contradictions and political tension. that tension continues today, but the focus is on consumption of goods and the production of national wealth within a discourse of state legitimation, rather than on the incorporation of political doctrine into the self as an end and means. the self is still a political body, but the performance of class attributes supports the nation-state as an organisation, and not an ideological habitus. post-bourdieu in debates on class and social stratification outside the chinese system, there is common reference to pierre bourdieu’s theorisation of ‘the habitus’ (1984: 169). by situating donald and zheng introduction. post-mao, post-bourdieu portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 7 discrete lifestyles and practices of cultural distinction in ‘the social space’ (1984: 169), bourdieu’s formulation, based on empirical sociological studies of twentieth century french class culture, retains the notion of structural change but redefines it as a process of social historical formation. the focus on the social space of culture and lifestyles highlights that sociocultural relations are cultivated, lived and embodied. it makes clear how they take on a particular form, which correlates with, but is not reducible to, economic capital. bourdieu’s theorisation, while offering insights into the social formation of french society at a given period, provides at the same time a useful analytical grid for thinking about the interrelation between particular cultural forms and long term sociohistorical structural change. its emphasis on the importance of social origins as a determining factor in cultural distinction, and its relative reliance on the historical longue durée, however, makes it unable to serve as a complete model for understanding post-socialist chinese social formation and cultural distinction. so, this collection goes beyond bourdieu in that while we recognise the importance of his work for drawing attention to the cultural, we must insist on the specificity of the local conditions of chinese social systems and political expedients in bringing the cultural to a new fruition. post-socialist chinese social restratification, for instance, as one direct consequence of the party-state’s reform policy, demonstrates dramatic time compression—a condition neither understood nor elaborated in bourdieu’s model. problems of disadvantage and inequality are to be expected in accelerated development. the chinese state offers normative social and cultural programs of betterment as a palliative to disadvantage, such as the various campaigns (in the 1980s, 1990s and through till today) to cultivate spiritual quality of the population at large, and the popularisation of the vision for a ‘harmonious society’ based on the coming-to-be of a middleclass-centered society, which has been the key rhetorical impulse to policy design in the present century. in recent academic work on middleclass formation and its significance in china, very few analysts find that the structural foundations of a middleclass-centered society are in place (lu xueyi 2002). but many critics conclude that those who loosely fit the descriptor of the new one-class are largely urban, and that a majority is concentrated in state-controlled professions and institutions, surpassing the more visible management personnel or white-collar workers for foreign cooperations and private entrepreneurs (li donald and zheng introduction. post-mao, post-bourdieu portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 8 chunlin 2005: 510). the implications of this ‘middleclass formation with chinese characteristics’ are two-fold. first, the concentration of metropolitans in key, often state-related, professions, makes clear again that the emergence of middle class interests in post-socialist urban china is closely tied to the state. second, as insiders of economic, governing or professional bodies they can more easily influence government policies and initiatives, and as a consequence move their own emerging collective interests and aspirations into the social mainstream. their envisioned function is thus exemplary to society at large, even though they also represent discrete clusters of political or social interests. what also emerges from these observations is that this body of ‘class’ influence is most obviously demonstrated in the cultural arena. urban avant-gardes and trend-setters— such as elite media industry personnel, government cultural agency workers, statesector and multinational business professionals—control the soft media. they lead social and cultural fashions, and have the means to spread their attitudes and value systems to the whole society. under such circumstances, though their numbers are limited, and their cultural values cannot function to provide comprehensive social cohesion, nevertheless they represent an expansive cultural tendency that operates as a political and social force for the maintenance of the state (li 2005: 511). contributions to the special issue this special issue seeks to locate and describe how the newly forming class interests of the wealthy and aspirational emerge both as exemplars and as aspirants to the security of the new utopia. the papers include contributions covering aspects of post-reform1 social stratification and cultural formation, and which reflect on the significance of reinvention and resurgence of class discourses in the realms of culture, social consciousness, and commercial practice. the issues are dealt with both at the macropolitical and the micro-everyday level. together the papers shed light on specific configurations of the category of class and the role of status in a post-bourdieu and post-mao context. 1 whilst the reform era started after the death of mao in 1976 and took distinctive shape as a result of new economic policies under deng xiaoping from 1978, post-reform is more nebulous: it refers to the midlate 1990s and the 2000s—as the results of change on the organisation of daily life become more apparent. for a short contextual overview of this era and its implications for ‘class-ness’ and gender, see donald and zheng (2009: 501-3). donald and zheng introduction. post-mao, post-bourdieu portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 9 in ‘life spectacles: media, business synergy and affective work in neoliberal china,’ hai ren examines the way in which chinese media communicate the meanings of everyday life. he also discusses how operators of theme parks, theme shopping malls, and residential communities deploy spatial planning and engineering techniques to train their users to behave like appropriate citizens in an ideal one-class society. ren makes clear that his analysis is set against the backdrop of china’s gaige kaifang (reform and opening) policy since the late 1970s, which extracted individuals from the social institutions developed under socialism and re-embedded them within a new sociopolitical system. the essay demonstrates that within the social space by which the state’s middle/one class project is envisioned, not only are the institutional structures of socialist china disappearing but forms of practical knowledge, common sense, and guiding norms associated with socialism are no longer legitimate tools of empowerment. nyiri pál’s cultural anthropological study, ‘from starbucks to carrefour: consumer boycotts, nationalism and taste in contemporary china,’ probes the motivations behind the series of nationwide consumer boycott campaigns against several foreign companies in the 2000s. the article discusses the dynamics of consumer boycotts and asks whether, beyond being a vehicle of nationalism, the emerging politics of consumption is also becoming a tool of expressing emergent class taste. nyiri observes that the chinese case is different from the cultural politics of the soviet union or eastern europe under state socialism, where cultural protectionism tended to be a preserve of the high priests of high culture. in china, attempts to link a highbrow discourse of taste with cultural protectionism find less resonance with nationalists, and their effects are harder to predict. in nyiri’s analysis, the recent proliferation of consumer boycotts is part and parcel of the wave of popular nationalism in china that is subject to the complex symbiosis between market and state in which the official discourse of the nation is coopted in commercial advertising and percolates down to internet bulletin boards. nyiri concludes that, although there is ample evidence of state manipulation and control of consumer nationalism, the boycotts have been grassroots movements. the politics of consumption are moving to the centre of chinese nationalism; and they provide an arena for emerging discourses of taste that allow individuals to sidestep or modify dominant versions of the state and the nation. luigi tomba’s essay looks directly at the production of a chinese middle class during donald and zheng introduction. post-mao, post-bourdieu portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 10 the reform period and the factors that have contributed to it. he highlights the role of a growing group of big spenders and consumers in china’s economic growth and political stability. tomba argues that a dramatic status enhancement for wage-earning chinese professionals has been among the major determinants of social change in the late 1990s and that this process happened despite the market more than because of it. tomba’s essay shows that the development of a high-consuming urban society has been as much the outcome of the social engineering project of the contemporary reformist state and its agencies as it has been a consequence of the opening up of the economy and society. in the section ‘new perspectives reports,’ our two authors engage directly with cultural debates in prc on class taste, the media and social change. their cultural commentaries reflect on post-reform social restratification and the resurgence of class culture. in his case report and analysis ‘mapping society: the new function of print media in mainland china—the case of new weekly,’ xiaolu wang links the changing aims and functions of chinese print media today with the conceptual and social changes of prc intellectuals as a knowledge class. new weekly is one of the most influential illustrated chinese magazines focusing on social issues and phenomena. analysing the magazine’s design and content, the author argues that the taste-based innovations of new chinese print media reflect the changes in social formation and conceptual shifts of the intellectual class. songyu lin’s ‘mix and match or confusion?: middleclass taste in china’ also looks into the contested terrain of taste formation in the popular media. examining in particular the so-called fiction of petit bourgeoisie sentiments, popular among whitecollared workers and young aspirants to new iterations of tasteful lifestyles, lin points out that cultural trends and taste patterns refer also to the influence and interests of old cultural traditions, post-authoritarian polity and the new state-capitalist economy. the mix and match, or flagrant confusion, in matters of class and taste, testify not only to the obvious spiritual homelessness of a post-socialist society, but more importantly foreground the contest for social and cultural leadership in the one-class or middle-class utopia. lin concurs with some of the leading chinese cultural critics that we are witnessing the emergence of a taste elite, comprising the new generation of highly educated youth, who seek to benefit from post-reform economy and polity. donald and zheng introduction. post-mao, post-bourdieu portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 11 in all these papers, the use of the term middle class is strategic rather than absolute, insofar as the term already refers to an empty categorisation, and a shifting set of practices, habits and aspirations. the use of the term is nonetheless helpful in that, although it does not indicate a class structure or indeed class habits familiar to other societies (or not necessarily), it aptly captures both the deployment and elision of class consciousness in china post-mao. acknowledgements this introduction and the special issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies is a result of a funding grant from the australian research council, 2003-2005: ‘the making of middle-class taste: reading, tourism, and educational choices in urban china.’ both authors thank the respondents in that work, which is further reported in articles we have written on education, print culture and film (see, for example, donald and zheng 2008 and 2009). donald would also like to thank jerome silbergeld for his hospitality and an illuminating conversation on class and politics that took place in princeton, november 2009. reference list bourdieu, p. 1984, distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste, routledge, london. chen, guanren & yi yan. 2004, zhongguo zhongchanzhe diaoca (investigations of the chinese middleclass), tuanjie chubanshe, beijing. donald, s. h. & yi zheng. 2008, ‘richer than before—the cultivation of middleclass taste,’ in the new rich in china: future rulers, present lives, (ed.) d. g. s. goodman, routledge, new york and london, 71-82. donald, s.h. & yi zheng. 2009, “a taste of class: manuals for becoming woman,” positions: east asia cultures critique, vol. 17, no. 3, winter, 489-521. doctoroff, t. 2005, billions: selling to the new chinese consumer, palgrave macmillan, new york. hofstadter, d. 2007, i am a strange loop, basic books, new york. kuhn, p.a. 1984, ‘chinese views of social classification,’ in class and social stratification in postrevolution china, (ed.) j. l. watson, cambridge university press, cambridge, 16-28. li, chunlin. 2005, duanlie yu suibian: dangdai zhongguo shehui jiechen fenhua sizhen yanjiu [cleavage and fragment: an empirical analysis on the social stratification of contemporary china], social science academic press, beijing. lu, xueyi (ed.) 2002, research report on the current social-economic structure of china, chinese academy of social sciences press, beijing. schram, s.r. 1984. ‘classes, old and new, in mao zedong’s thought,’ in class and social stratification in post-revolution china, (ed.) j. l. watson, cambridge university press, cambridge, 29-55. stivens, m. 1998, ‘theorizing gender, power and modernity in affluent asia,’ in gender and power in affluent asia, (eds) k. sen & m. stivens, routledge, london, 1-34. wright, e.o. 2009, ‘understanding class: towards an integrated analytical approach,’ new left review, no. 60, december, 101-116. japanese government policy portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal japanese government policy and the reality of the lives of the zanryū fujin rowena ward, university of technology sydney the 残留婦人 (zanryū fujin, or stranded war wives1) are former japanese female emigrants to manchuria2 who, for various reasons, remained in china at the end of world war two. they were for a long time the forgotten members of japan’s imperialist past. the reasons why the women did not undergo repatriation during the years up to 1958,3 when large numbers of the former colonial emigrants returned to japan, are varied, but in many cases, their ‘chinese’ families played some part. the stories of survival by these women during the period immediately after the entry of russia into the pacific war on 9 august 1945, the civil war that followed, and throughout the years of the cultural revolution, are testament to the strength of the senzen no onna (pre-war women). at the same time, the history of how the zanryū fujin came to be in china is useful for understanding the japanese government’s colonial policies as well as its wartime attitudes to women. the stories of survival by the zanryū 1 the term zanryū fujin is not an official one used by the japanese government. rather, zanryū fujin is commonly used to distinguish between the women stranded in china and the zanryū koji (abandoned war children). the usual translation of the term is ‘war wives’ but i have chosen to include the word ‘stranded’ so as to reflect the reality of the women’s circumstances. i acknowledge that the word fujin can have sexist connotations. 2 ‘manchuria’ refers to a region that was a construction of the japanese imperialist state and is not recognised as a place name by the chinese government. the region is presently known as “northeast china’. 3 the official repatriation program ran from 1946 to 1948. an additional repatriation program, under the auspices of the japanese and chinese red cross, was in place from 1953 to 1958. this program was terminated following an incident in nagasaki when a chinese flag hanging outside an exhibition of postage stamps was pulled down. the ‘nagasaki incident’ shattered the already fragile diplomatic relations between the two countries. ward japanese government policy fujin also highlight the lack of understanding by the japanese government of the realities of the experiences of the zanryū fujin in the aftermath of the russian invasion. until well into the 1990s, the japanese government maintained policies of differentiation between them and the残留孤児 (zanryū koji – abandoned war children) on the basis that the zanryū fujin were judged to have ‘freely’ chosen to remain in china. as illustrated by the stories below of three women, the zanryū fujin did not necessarily initially decide to stay in china; rather, the circumstances they faced often meant they had little choice but to remain. this paper argues, then, that the stories of survival by three zanryū fujin in the period immediately after the russian invasion are important not simply for demonstrating the reality of their lives, but for confirming that the japanese government’s view that the zanryū fujin had ‘freely’ chosen to remain in china is unjustified. political background it is estimated that at the time of the russian invasion of manchuria in 1945 there were around 2.15 million japanese living in the region. by this time, many of the male settlers had been conscripted and therefore a large proportion of the civilian japanese population in the country were women, children and the elderly. it was estimated that when the last repatriation boat left china in 1958, more than 10,000 japanese women and children remained behind (ōba and hashimoto 1986, 66). it was not until 1972, when diplomatic relations between the people’s republic of china (prc) and japan were established, that many of these people had the opportunity to migrate/return to or visit japan. with the establishment of diplomatic relations, the japanese government was forced to develop policies on how to manage the migration of the japanese whilst simultaneously maintaining an immigration policy that restricted the inflow of people to those with specific skills. an added complication was that many of the japanese in china had lost portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 ward japanese government policy their japanese citizenship in 1959, when a new law reduced the period before which a missing person could be declared dead.4 in developing its policy on assistance to the japanese wishing to migrate to japan, the japanese government chose to use age to differentiate between people who would be entitled to government assistance and those who would not. the decision was justified on the basis that people who had ‘freely’ chosen to remain in china should not be entitled to assistance since they had made a decision not to return to japan. in contrast, it was thought that those who did not make the decision to stay of their own free will should be allowed to receive assistance. the age of thirteen was set as the dividing line between those who could receive assistance and those who could not. people who were 13 and over at the time of the russian invasion and who were registered in a mainland family register5 were deemed to have ‘freely’ chosen to remain in china and therefore were eligible to receive only very limited levels of government assistance. restrictions on the number of visits they could make to japan were also imposed. when asked on what basis the government had decided on 13 years, a japanese government official replied, ‘that the government needed to draw a line somewhere and the age of 13 seemed as good as any’ (ogawa 1995, 36). people who had not turned 13 years old at the time of the invasion—popularly known as the zanryū koji—were provided with assistance in their self-identification process and locating their families.6 importantly, gender was not used as a means of differentiation. rather, because no males were found to be in a similar predicament to the women, the word fujin (meaning ‘wife/wives’) came into general use. the lack of males in a similar situation can be attributed to the fact that any males found by the russians were either killed or taken to labour camps in siberia. 4 as a result of this change in law, the number of officially listed non-repatriated civilians fell from 77,000 to 31,000 (quoted in trefalt 2003, japanese army stragglers and memories of the war in japan 1950-1975, 32). 5 registration of births, deaths and marriages of japanese citizens must be registered in family registers located in the local administrative offices. 6 due to their young age and / or the circumstances surrounding their separation from their families, many zanryū koji could neither remember anything nor present concrete evidence that could be used to identify their japanese names or family details. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 ward japanese government policy policy initially, the japanese government policies on the permanent migration of all 中国残留 邦人 (chūgoku zanryū hōjin – japanese citizens abandoned in china) required that returnees had a personal guarantor in japan who was willing to cover resettlement expenses. finding a guarantor was often difficult, and some zanryū hōjin were unable to migrate to japan because they could not find anyone willing to act as a guarantor. this policy covered all zanryū hōjin including those who still held japanese citizenship. in 1989, the need for a guarantor was replaced by that of a supporter or someone who was not required to provide the same level of financial responsibility as a guarantor. this change in policy made it easier for the zanryū hōjin and their families to migrate to japan. until 1991, short-term visits by the zanryū fujin had to be partially self-funded as the japanese government only provided the return airfare. since 1991, the government has also provided accommodation expenses. short-term visits by the zanryū fujin were also limited to one every 10 years, with a cap of two visits by each zanryū fujin. in 1993, the government increased the number of visits allowed by an individual zanryū fujin to once every five years and, in 1995, agreed to fund annual visits to japan. by contrast, from the late 1970s the japanese government provided administrative assistance to zanryū koji searching for their biological families. in 1981, it also introduced a program whereby zanryū koji could travel to japan on fully funded short-term visits for the purpose of looking for their biological families7. how did zanryū fujin come to be in manchuria? encouraging the emigration of japanese citizens to manchukuo formed one part of the japanese government’s policy for the development of the country. many of the japanese living in the area had migrated with their families as members of pioneer groups, which were formed as part of the government’s 1936 plan to have the japanese 7 due to a fall in the proportion of zanryū koji being identified through this program, a more restricted program was introduced in 2000. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 ward japanese government policy population make up 10 per cent of the population of manchuria within 20 years. around 50 per cent of pioneer groups were sent to areas close to the russian border (kinoshita 2003, 23). that is, they were effectively used as human shields. many of the women who became stranded in china had migrated with their husbands or families as members of pioneer groups, or had been members of women’s volunteer groups. the rationale behind the formation of the latter groups, sometimes known as hanayome (bride groups), was to provide the overwhelmingly male settler population with brides. in the aftermath of the russian entry into the war, large numbers of japanese people died of starvation, in mass suicides, or in attacks by russians or local chinese. others underwent repatriation. an unknown number of women who survived the initial invasion decided to marry a local man for safety for themselves and/or their families. some of these women were married to japanese men who had been conscripted but, without any means of contact, they did not know whether their husbands were dead or alive. others had never married, whilst yet more were separated from their families or the people they were travelling with in the chaos of trying to escape. the following narratives outline the lives of three women in the period immediately after the russian invasion. each of these women returned to live in japan in the 1970s and 1980s. consequently their stories are not necessarily representative of all zanryū fujin; particularly given that many remain in china. nonetheless, these women’s stories were chosen to represent women who had migrated as members of pioneer groups as well as members of volunteer groups. the women also came from different parts of japan and were of different ages at the time of their migration to manchuria. kurihara sadako’s story8 (栗原貞子) sadako migrated to manchuria from okayama prefecture in 1944 as a member of a women’s volunteer group.9 she was 17 years old. sadako agreed to go to manchuria when asked to do so by her school principal out of a sense of duty to the emperor. her decision to go to manchuria was made despite opposition from her family. sadako had 8 this biography is an abridged translation of kurihara’s biography in ōba and hashimoto 1986, 58-76. the original is in the third person. 9 okayama prefecture faces the inland sea. it is located between the cities of kobe and hiroshima. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 ward japanese government policy every intention of returning to japan after the eight-month enlistment period. nevertheless, the underlying assumption behind the women’s groups was that the members would marry settlers. thus when she received a marriage proposal from a man from miyagi prefecture, sadako was given no option but to accept, despite repeatedly stating that she had promised her mother that she would return to japan. sadako was married in a mass wedding ceremony in the grounds of the boli (勃利) administrative offices in late 1944. she had been in manchuria just six months. the couple went to live in kokuryūkō province (黒龍江省) where they built a house. her husband was conscripted in july 1945 and less than a month later, with the russians approaching and six months pregnant with her first child, sadako was forced to flee. she believed that she would soon return. together with about 20 other people, she walked for about four days to boli where they boarded a freight train headed for mudanjiang (牡丹江). shortly afterwards however, the train was attacked and everyone on board headed for the hills. concerned that with her bulging stomach she would be easily seen, sadako hid out during the day and walked at night. captured by a chinese person the next morning she was taken to what had previously been a japanese camp but that now served as a barracks used by the nationalists. sadako stayed there for about a month before she was put on a horse-drawn carriage bound for boli. however, the carriage was attacked by the russian army before it reached its destination and sadako was taken prisoner. not long afterward, she and three others escaped from the barracks where they were being held. around october, she found herself at the house of a landowner where she helped out on the farm in exchange for food. without any means to contact the japanese mainland, sadako was unsure as to whether her husband was dead or alive. one day, a korean living nearby asked what she intended to do and suggested that she get married for her own sake as well as that of her unborn child. thinking that she needed to at least ensure that her unborn child survived, she agreed to marry a chinese farmer. ten days later she gave birth to a son whose birth was met with much jubilation by her husband and his family. unable to breastfeed him, she asked her husband to give the child away; he refused and daily went to fetch milk for the child. sadako learnt chinese and became a member of the family and the community. she had a further five children to her husband who encouraged her to visit portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 ward japanese government policy japan when diplomatic relations were established. in 1975, sadako and one of her daughters visited japan. accompanied by two daughters, sadako migrated permanently in 1980. sadly, her husband had passed away in the meantime. in summary, circumstances prevented sadako from returning to japan during the years when repatriation was an option. in the initial months after the russian invasion she tried a number of times to escape the region but was unable to do so. without any means to contact japan, she decided to marry a chinese man in order to provide security for her unborn child and herself. once married, she became focused on her family. to assume that sadako freely chose to remain in china does not do justice to the circumstances that led to her remaining in china. yamada tami’s story10 (山田タミ) yamada tami was born in nagano prefecture in 1927.11 her father migrated to manchuria as a member of the yomikaki pioneer group (読書開拓団) in the spring of 1939.12 the rest of the family followed in the summer of the same year. tami was 12 years old. on 9 august 1945, a telephone call to say that all men between the ages of 18 and 45 years were to be conscripted, effective immediately, was received at the local village office. with this call, the villagers became aware that the russians had entered the war. to the background of ‘banzai’, the men were farewelled the next day. tami’s father, eldest brother and second-eldest brother were conscripted at the time. tami said that she began to feel some concern about the war situation when she saw smiles on the faces of the chinese onlookers as the japanese men departed for the war. on the evening of 11 august, a telephone call from the police told tami’s family that everyone was to evacuate to mudanjiang. tami and her mother collected some valuables and, with her younger sister on her back, tami and her family set off for 10 abridged translation of tami’s story in hayashi 1986, 12-14, 25-53. details about tami’s life both in china and japan that are not directly relevant to this paper have not been translated. 11 almost 12 per cent of the japanese emigrants to manchuria were from nagano prefecture. figures from young (1999, 329-30). 12 pioneer groups were often named after the districts in japan from where the members originated. yomikaki village merged with two other villages in 1961 and is now part of nagiso town. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 ward japanese government policy mantetsu yanjia (満鉄 閻家) station.13 about 3,000 people gathered on the platform waiting for the order to board a train that was standing at the platform. after some time, tami suggested to a person near her that they should get on but when they made a move to do so, someone yelled ‘hikokumin! (un-japanese!) running away is unjapanese’ (hayashi 1986, 26) at them and they decided not board. the train left the station shortly afterwards with nobody on board. tami and her family returned to their home, which had already been taken over by a local family. on 14 august a second evacuation order was received and the family gathered at the local administration office once more. around 16 august everyone who had gathered at the administration office headed into the mountains where they became lost and ended up walking in circles. her mother wanted to commit suicide,14 but tami encouraged her to keep going; with her five-year-old sister on her back and her younger sister carrying their one-year-old sister, the family kept walking. her mother was unable to feed the baby so tami chewed any food as much as possible and fed it to the baby to keep her alive. in crossing one river, the family’s clothes got wet and since all other clothes had been lost in the turmoil of an attack, the family was forced to walk naked. tami found some clothes beside the road, which she made the family wear. since she was short, tami was able to wear boy’s clothes. this proved fortuitous as she was not recognised as a girl and therefore was not raped by the russians, as many of the other females were. upon leaving the mountains, the group was attacked from the air by the russians. sometime in early september, tami was captured by the russians and put into a camp. at night the russian soldiers raped the women and shot people indiscriminately. the camp became the venue for the buying and selling of women and children to local chinese families. due to the lack of food tami decided, against her mother’s wishes, to become the wife of a local man on the proviso that her family could live with her. in this way, tami became the wife of a second son from a very poor family. her husband (in australian idiom a ratbag) regularly beat and raped tami, who gave birth to nine children. although the villagers were initially quite antagonistic towards tami, she 13 mantetsu is the common abbreviation of manchukuo tetsudō or manchuria national railways. 14 an unknown number of people committed suicide, often by drinking cyanide, rather than be caught by the russians or chinese. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 ward japanese government policy worked hard and helped them with various chores; as a result they began to support and protect her. nevertheless, as a japanese person, her situation was vulnerable. once when her husband was taken in for questioning, tami asked for a divorce but the authorities refused.15 tami believes this denial arose because she was japanese and had no registration papers; therefore the authorities did not know what to do with her, and chose instead to ignore her request. at the time, she should have been eligible to receive a divorce. not long after she married, her mother, sister and younger brother died. her second eldest brother, who had been conscripted in august 1945 and was subsequently captured by the russians, managed to escape and find his way to where tami was living. he got a job in the forestry industry and lived nearby. in 1953, he decided to take up the opportunity for repatriation and returned to japan, taking one younger brother with him. tami’s younger sister was very ill at the time and could not go with them. she died shortly afterwards. at the time that her brother returned to japan, tami decided to remain in china for the sake of her own children. once in japan, her brother sent her a letter to say that her father and eldest brother had died. this was the first time that she had heard any news of them since they had been conscripted in august 1945. in summation, tami decided to marry a chinese man in order to keep her family together. later, she chose to remain in china for the sake of her children whom she knew she would not see again if she returned to japan16. it is hard to justify either of these decisions as ones freely made. ikeda hiroko’s story17 (池田広子) ikeda hiroko was born in 1930 in kagoshima prefecture, on the island of kyūshū, the southernmost island of japan’s four main islands. she migrated to manchuria in the summer of 1944 with the other eight members of her family as part of the ikantsū 15 one of the reforms instituted by the communist government was the freedom to request a divorce. 16 under japan’s patrilineal citizenship laws at the time, tami’s children, should they have been able to accompany her, would not have been entitled to japanese citizenship because their father was chinese. 17 abridged translation from hayashi (1986, 103-112). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 ward japanese government policy pioneer group. on 9 august, 1945, the people living in the village headed into the mountains, from where they moved to harbin on the 15 august. after some twenty days of walking, the guard accompanying them said that it was too dangerous for them to go any further and ordered everyone back. the return journey was more difficult, and the group was often attacked by locals. just before they made it back to their original departure point, a number of russians looking for women appeared. hiroko escaped into a field of millet and waited until morning. the group reassembled the next day and continued their journey. when they drew close to their village, they discovered that it had become a refuge for other japanese groups and so they did not return to their homes. instead they slept in the fields and kept warm by digging a hole in the ground. people stole guns, food and cooking utensils from a former japanese army warehouse located nearby. once when hiroko and a few others went there to steal some food, all but except hiroko were caught by the russians who killed and/or raped the women. in january 1946, at the age of 15, hiroko sold herself to a man who became her fatherin-law in return for two cobs of corn. shortly afterward, her second youngest sister and only surviving brother died. her parents also died. hiroko’s husband was 23 years old and although a kind man, he was physically very weak as a result of having done hard labour in a japanese aircraft factory during the war. within some five months, hiroko could converse in chinese. nevertheless, she felt lonely: she had sold herself to save her family but nonetheless, they had died. the village where she lived became the scene of intense fighting between the communists and government forces. in the summer of 1946, the communists took control of the village and hiroko and her husband were forced to flee to a village further into the mountains. when they returned to the village in 1947, they found their house had been destroyed. hiroko’s father-in-law and her husband were captured and put in prison. her husband was badly beaten and as a result was unable to work for sometime thereafter. hiroko was also taken in for questioning and was repeatedly interrogated about the location of weapons and details of the family’s finances. hiroko continuously answered that she did not know anything but was sentenced to death. at portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 ward japanese government policy the time she had a three-month-old daughter. upon hearing the verdict of death, her sister started crying. speaking in japanese, hiroko told her sister not to cry as she had lived more than enough for her seventeen years. on hearing her speak japanese, the cadres started calling her a japanese imperialist. when asked whether she had a last request, hiroko asked that they spare her daughter since she was part-chinese. a leader who heard the verdict stated that ‘japanese imperialism is wrong but since she was a member of a civilian pioneer group, she is effectively a worker and therefore should live’ (hayashi 1986, 109). as a result, the verdict was overturned. the leader effectively saved hiroko’s life. for about a year after his beating, hiroko’s husband was unable to work, so hiroko begged for food to support the family. in 1948, the family started to receive food from the interim government and, with the establishment of the prc in 1949, her husband became a free farmer. hiroko worked at home and had three children. in summary, hiroko made the choice to marry a chinese man for the sake of her family. although many of those family members later died, their deaths did not free hiroko from her initial decision to marry for their sake. in effect, hiroko was never in the position whereby she could choose between staying in china and returning to japan. conclusion in short, the stories of these women indicate that the japanese government’s initial assumption that the zanryū fujin ‘freely’ chose to remain in china is difficult to justify. it is true that some women may have chosen to remain in china but an overwhelming number had few choices other than to marry local men if they wished to survive. once married, many of the women had children and became focused on their ‘chinese’ families whom they could not take with them if they had decided to return to japan. at the same time, the women were forced to deny their ‘japanese-ness’ and japanese histories in order to protect themselves and their families. the geographical remoteness of the villages where the women lived also meant that they had few opportunities to avail themselves for repatriation. added to this, the civil war that continued until 1949 meant that many zanryū fujin would have few if any opportunities to transit to places portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 11 ward japanese government policy where they could organise repatriation. finally, although the japanese government belatedly removed many of the barriers that prevented the zanryū fujin from visiting and / or returning to japan after the establishment of diplomatic relations with china, it should not be forgotten that many may have ‘chosen’ to return earlier if diplomatic relations had been better and if the japanese government’s initial policies governing their return had not been based on an arbitrary decision to differentiate between citizens whom it judged to have ‘freely’ chosen to remain in china and those who had not. this decision effectively made the zanryū fujin ‘victims’ of japanese government policy twice: first, when sent to manchuria, and again when prevented from returning to or visiting japan in the early years after diplomatic relations were restored. reference list hayashi, iku 1986, manshū: sono maboroshi no kuni yue ni, chikuma bunsho, tokyo. kinoshita, takao 2003, chūgoku zanryū koji mondai no ima o kangaeru, chōeisha, tokyo. mori, takemoro 2003, ‘colonies and countryside in wartime japan’, in farmers and village life in twentieth-century japan, waswo ann and nishida yoshiaki (eds), routledge, new york. ōba, kaori and susumu hashimoto (eds) 1986, haha to ko de miru: chūgoku zanryū nihon koji, kusanone shuppankai, tokyo. ogawa, tsuneko 1995, sokoku yo, “chūgoku zanryū fujin” no hanseiki, iwanami shinsho, tokyo. trefalt, beatrice 2003, japanese army stragglers and memories of the war in japan 1950-1975, routledge, london. young, louise 1999, japan’s total empire: manchuria and the culture of wartime imperialism, university of california press, berkeley. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 portaltaylorcopyedit2011finalwithimages portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. terpsichorean architecture special issue, guest edited by tony mitchell. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. post impressions: music writing as bent travelogue hollis taylor, muséum national d’histoire naturelle, paris there’s someone you should meet, kb told me in paris. jon rose—he’s this wild virtuoso who plays the violin like nobody else, makes bizarre violins, invents stuff. he’s australian, but he lives in berlin. this guy’s all over the map, even founded his own violin museum—i mean he’s mr. violin. a violinist myself, i was intrigued. i wrote a letter asking to interview this jon rose for a music magazine. i took a november train and a warm coat. when he opened his kreutzberg loft door, a shock of prematurely grey hair framing cary grant bone taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 2 structure greeted me. he had factor. he also had the horned-rimmed glasses and the worn and wrinkled clothes of a tragic intellectual. i read it right in one glance and determined to resist it: un coup de foudre. would you like a coffee? he asked. no, thanks, i only drink water or wine. water will do. there’s plenty of wine. there are concerts here in this room, and there’s always wine. it’s a little early … [i was distracted by the six violins hanging above the grand piano on the wall behind him: blue, white, green, and original in colour, one had a sitar-like neck, another had double necks sharing a violin body, and yet another consisted of two violin bodies sharing a neck, siamese twins of a sort.] we settled on wine. the dog fence at night. after six years in separate cities with separate lives, the two of us decided to travel together. we began with the obvious (to jon): bowing fences, trading in the devil’s box for the devil’s rope. i first saw jon concoct a musical fence at a berlin arts festival. although indoors, his construction passed for a standard five-wire stock barrier, beginning with a barbed top strand, but the careful eye stopped at the second that was really five-in-one, a platform of closely strung wires forming a 75–foot long hawaiian guitar. the lower three strands were again straightforward, the bottom wire sitting just an inch off the floor. jon stamped on it with both feet as he moved along, giving new meaning to the term ‘walking bass.’ he bowed the fence and even violined it, meaning he ran an upside-down violin along the length of wire. melody did not figure in his bold taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 3 exploration of bare wire sounding out a broadband drone. clearly an avant-garde activity, i thought. two years later in the outback of western australia, he mesmerized the local folks one morning by bowing a rusty sheep station fence. jon rose bowing sheep station fence, wa. i began to reconsider this obsession of his—perhaps bowing fences is not so outlandish, and together we erected one in paris for a techno and dj crowd half our age that claimed it as their own. who is the fence audience? i don’t know what to think. neither do my friends. cajun fiddler michael doucet has convinced himself and others that my partner is named bob wire. are you hung up on bob wire?, he emails. playing a fence is so out there!, says lana. yes, in fact the sound travels down the wires for hundreds of feet on straight stretches of a simple five-wire fence. hasn’t bowing fences been overdone?, tim teases. lateral spider webs blowing in the wind, oodnadatta track, coober pedy, sa. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 4 jon began bowing fences in 1983 as an extension of his experimental instrument making. he puts it this way: the wind is our universal musician and has been recognized as such for millennia. twenty-five years ago i had an epiphany in outback new south wales: if the wind could play a fence as an aeolian harp, then as a violinist armed with a bow i could also cause these gigantic structures to sing. strings function in a similar way, whether the string is 20 inches, 20 feet, or 20 yards long. you could say that a string is a string is a string. however, size does matter. usually, a string is a trigger for a resonating chamber such as a violin. in a fence the string can be so long that it becomes the resonator as well as the trigger. what is happening at one end of a fence wire will often sound quite different to the sonic story at the other end. playing fences reveals a sound world embedded in the physical reality and the psyche of our culture. it’s a language that speaks directly to us if we are prepared to listen. australia is full of collapsing and dysfunctional fences. gravity gets its way in the end. some fences just fall over and die; others are eaten by the saltpans in which they stand. lonely fence posts, unattached, unstrung, dot the landscape. sunset at snowtown, sa. first fence trip. after landing in sydney within an hour of each other (me from portland, oregon, and taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 5 jon from amsterdam), we must immediately pick up the rented campervan and be off. first stop: the adelaide festival for his concert; then we’ll continue on round the continent. prone to road rage, he no longer drives. as chauffeur, i’ll have two days to get him, rested, across the thousand miles from sydney to adelaide. time for a kiss but none for jet lag. we pick up the van and set off in the rain. kangaroos, emus, and parrots the unnatural colour of cheap felt tip pens are quick to announce themselves. we stop at the side of the road after six hours of driving, across from the sign shire of bland. it’s a misnomer. our 360-degree view is anything but dull. tonight we dine alfresco. a bottle of méthode champenoise (marking jon’s fiftieth birthday the week before) accompanies avocado halves with olive oil, salt, and a dash of cayenne, then peanut butter and vegemite sandwiches. part gastronomes, part backpackers. i improvise a shower, and we fall asleep to the dense, pulsing presence of cicadas. misty (a fence at hay plains, nsw). eight hours later dawn is almost upon us. i intend to slip out for another alfresco event of a more personal nature but can’t see well enough. jon accompanies me with a flashlight only to find that our private roadside is actually a popular truck stop. before we fell asleep, we noticed these benign space ships zooming by with their netherworld searchlights, but in our jet-lagged state we never heard a one pull in. now in the 5.30 a.m. half-light, we can make out at least eight parked trucks. i perform posthaste, with every hope that the truckers are still asleep, and then we make our getaway. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 6 coming from the pacific northwest, i’m always surprised by a treeless landscape; it puts me on edge. here the sky is so big, the land so flat, nothing with the possible exception of being at sea could compare. oregon is with me often as i begin to explore this continent, providing comparisons and contrasts, bringing references of every sort. jon rose and hollis taylor bowing a dune fence in the strzelecki desert, sa. as we drive by these long fences, i remember guitarist mason williams quipping while our banjo player tuned onstage that the banjo is only one step above the barbed-wire fence on the evolutionary ladder. i smiled every time, not even bothering to figure how many steps above it my violin must be. it was just a joke. you couldn’t coax a sound from a fence. moon with barbed wire, barrier highway, nsw. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 7 i’m not alone. people cannot imagine the sound, except jon. for most of us, an object is an end in itself, an answer. for him, an object is something affixed with a question, and a well-formed question inevitably generates a burst of creativity from him. all the better if he can get a number of questions rubbing up against each other in a sea of ambiguity—his brain is a parallel processing machine par excellence. to uncover beauty in unexpected places, to tickle (some would say irritate) the borders of the imagination, to violate expectations—these are his inclinations. bleached barbed wire, mitchell highway, nsw. playing a fence proposes new ways of looking at things for the audience and for us. although we have a few ideas from all the fences we have played, ones we have made and others we have come upon, fences differ sonically quite significantly from one another. violins also have a range of sound quality, but not nearly that of their longer string cousins. hollis taylor and jon rose playing ‘the melba,’ victorian arts centre, melbourne, vic. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 8 cello and bass bows, both hair and stick, bring out the fence song and dance, although we’ve been known to employ found objects such as stones and bones. the acoustic sound of a fence varies, from scarcely audible to as loud as a violin. we rely on small contact microphones stuck into the wooden posts to amplify our efforts. in bowing fences, accident, improvisation, and intuition take over. (this assumes 90 years of collective experience wielding bows.) luck can surface, and we go to great efforts to encourage it. we play barbed-wire fences—the barbs add a jingle. we play electric fences that click click click. they also send a signal up your arm, which i reserve for jon. we excite (the technical term for making a string vibrate) taut fences and slack ones, new and old. we occasionally put percussion instruments to wooden fences, which can be difficult. due to nonstop traffic noise, we rarely record in a city before midnight. then, jon will play these fences while i keep watch for aggravated residents or police. imagine our parents reading the record cover: jon rose, fence; hollis taylor, midnight watch. it’s not what our costly lessons or youthful talent promised. we’re here to play, record, and photograph every fence that takes our fancy, cartographers making a sonic map of the great fences of australia. i size up the range of sounds you can draw out of a five-wire fence; it staggers the mind. it can mimic most any instrument from any family: string, percussion, woodwind … even an avant-garde jazz trumpeter blowing burp-squeak-fart music to an audience of three in one of those alternative spaces. in turns ethereal and explosive, playful and plaintive, atmospheric and angular—the fence manages all this without electronic effects. an amplified acoustic fence can easily outplay a synthesizer going to town; this country cousin can pretend city ways. the sound hangs in the balance between nature and artifice. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 9 near penong we come across a group of 17 windmills. it’s a windmill convention, a theme park for—well, just for the likes of us, i suppose. being studious tourists, we look for a clue to put it in perspective. jon moves out to survey the sound potential, recording as he goes. the wind, the primary nutrient for the mills, is an irritant to the sensitive recording equipment. eventually, he stuffs the microphones up his shirt. each windmill has its own slurping soundprint.1 lake monger barrier fence, narndee station, wa. the morning tiptoes in, all pastel except parrots whose plumage shocks in the rich hues of satin evening gowns. this pageant is of little interest to jon, who is well on his way to becoming a fence nerd. he is anticipating yalata and our arrival at the dingo fence, about an hour away as near as he can tell. it’s the world’s longest man-made structure, he rattles off, traversing 3300 miles across three states, well more than twice as long as the great wall of china. i’ve been slow to warm to it. this fence doesn’t figure on most maps, and when it does, it’s a vague dotted line progressing in fits and starts as if the unsure hand of its cartographer had erased the displeasing bits, or as if some parts of it flow through prohibited areas under state censorship. it’s downright un-american, this subtlety. where are the t-shirts, the bragging billboards? who will write its tourist text? if the dingo fence does not command a sign, a shop, or a tv screen, i won’t believe a word of it. as we roll over a grid, jon shouts, back up! back up! 1 see supplementary file: windmill and fence. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 10 dog fence, wa. something clicked in his brain: grid = fence. yes, it’s here, well before we expected it. we pull down a steep gravel embankment and get out for an inspection. its six feet of wire mesh conclude with six inches of rabbit netting embedded in the ground. warning signs hang from it: keep out, danger: poison, entry by permit only. jon never bothers obtaining permission. this will not even slow him down. first grid at the dog fence, wa. the fence spans both sides of the highway, not so much interrupted by as continued by the unusual grid, a massive framework of widely spaced, narrow metal bars about 10 feet long. i can barely walk on it; clearly it’s meant to stop something more agile and wily than cattle. when the heavy trucks roll over it, the grid rings out like a symphonic gong.2 jon records every truck for 20 minutes and then performs a drum solo on the grid with sticks and brushes. next, he plays the attached fence, which the grid amplifies as 2 see supplementary file: last grid at dog fence. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 11 well. farther down, we improvise a double bow solo on the dusty, barbed fence proper. target practice. several days later, we’re heading toward the sea on the rabbit proof fence road. our contract with the campervan rental agency prohibits us from driving on unsealed surfaces. this one is nothing but, all gravel and corrugation. i proceed cautiously. rabbit-proof fence road sign, wa. after half an hour we see the fence on our left doing double duty as a sheep barrier. as we set up to film and record, a stockman appears, acting like it’s perfectly natural to be bowing an isolated fence in the outback heat. we want to trace it to the coast, we tell him, and he adds his local knowledge to our sketchy map. in all, we see three rabbits hopping at the bunny fence, wrong side. on the road from lake king to lake grace, salt lakes keep popping up for miles, purest white to the left, almost khaki to the right. then, an eggshell-blue lake insinuates itself against the crimson earth. lakes alternate with deep violet bushes, then suddenly the bushes turn up in the salt lakes. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 12 dingo skull on a fencepost, wa. jon plays and records a fence past here, an electric one that shocks him. he likes the sound if not the feel, the steady snap-snap-snap of the current coursing through the wire. but darling, it’s powered by a 10-gallon drum of fermenting grapefruits, he enthuses. jon rose playing the ‘trumpet fence’, wa. just after wubin we stop to play the trumpet fence dividing end-of-summer wheat from bare red soil. we bow it until i notice two dead sheep nearby.3 fence wire, wogarno station, wa. 3 see supplementary file: trumpet fence. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 13 lj and david at wogarno station in western australia’s outback ... normally they run woolly-backs on these 152,000 acres of spectacular granite outcrops and breakaway country. it’s the kind of place where they assign acres to a sheep rather than sheep to an acre. but on this easter weekend they were hosts to our music festival, violins in the outback. people pulled up all day out of nowhere, and by the first night under the moon, stars, and minimal set lighting, 700 people had amassed. the stage was built in front of the shearing shed. the next day began with jon bowing some traditional easter fence music. at about 7:00 a.m. tent flaps flung open and hung-over campers struggled out to the sound of amplified fence with broadband feedback. the audience was both captive and captivated. the last standing rabbit-proof fence post at starvation bay, wa. onward! having found the southern end of the rabbit-proof fence, jon wants a go at the northern end. it doesn’t figure on our maps but looms large in his imagination; he’s gotta have it. mount magnet and cue (once site of western australia’s richest gold fields) get crossed off our list, followed by meekathara with its mournful hits and rumbles fence. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 14 hardwood stock fence, alice springs telegraph station, nt. we reach alice by twilight and check into a trailer park. this high desert town was the main stopping point for the historic telegraph, which ran from adelaide to darwin. from there an underwater cable was extended across the sea to java and on to london, connecting australia to the rest of the world in 1872 by a single strand of fencing wire. there were 12 repeater stations in the telegraphic lifeline; four survive. the other three are in ruins, but alice’s station is a proper museum. on our tour of the buildings, we come upon a piano that bumped up from adelaide in 1870, making the final haul at rail’s end on the back of a camel. (consider the plight of the camel.) two other uprights have also retired here. we pry them open and look inside, finding all three in various stages of distress. a small termite mound inside the camel piano crowds its inner workings, echoing the hump of the beast of burden that transported it. could we record on them? how is tomorrow morning? great! we’ll be back. the simple harmonies of hymns realized on messed-up pianos could be useful to us in some future project, jon figures. let’s find a hymnal. we stop at the closest lutheran church and, trusting god and our ardent faces, the brethren send us away with a hymnal in hand. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 15 ‘the camel piano,’ alice springs telegraph station, nt. the next morning at the telegraph station we begin on the yellowed, uneven keys of the camel piano. i choose classic hymns like onward christian soldiers and abide with me, which i pound out with the revived earnestness of my youth when i had to rally the congregation to song. the three pianos vary from detuned, to detuned and some keys don’t sound, to detuned and many keys don’t sound, that one bringing more percussion than pitch to the soundprint. and the tuning—it’s quite a shock to my perfect pitch ears to read the hymns in one key and hear the music come out a haphazard six or seven semitones lower, akin to biting into an apple turnover and discovering it’s really a meat pie. jon improvises on the worst two (the best in his view). he gives the farfetched pianos expiring in this obscure little room as thorough a going-over as a forensic physician expected to produce a report.4 there’s a huge wasp worrying a corner of the room. when i play a few more hymns, the stinging machine takes some dives at me, obviously attracted by the finesse of my clang-tinkle-thuds. mr. obsessive nods for me to buck up and continue recording. i look up pleadingly from the piano. just play, he barks. and i do. 4 see supplementary file: camel piano. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 16 flooded fence, nt. we attend the school of the air to watch a class in session. the teacher talks into a microphone to her isolated outback students, their radio receivers powered by generators. founded in 1951, the school covers an area of 386,000-square miles (or 1,000,000-plus-square km or easier still, 34 belgiums). today’s lesson is on spiders, and i’m touched by the hesitant young voices piercing the hissing static. we’ve gone back in time, and yet we’re au courant: our soloist for today is child soprano with distorted, modulating, phasing white and pink electronic noise, based on a surrealist text on an eight-legged predatory arachnid. straying stock sign. jon writes: when drivers see the sign unfenced road ahead, it usually means time to ratchet up the powers of observation and try to avoid hitting animals who have not studied their highway code. in our case, however, it is time to relax a little, knowing that the fence watch can be downgraded and we can start taking in other aspects of the big outdoors. the eyes usually wander to the horizon, that land-and-sky schism where color theory is tested and tested again. but just as you’ve been lulled into a false sense of sit-back-and-accept-all-incoming-visions, there is a fence alert. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 17 1. stop! the shout should be loud and clear but not so the driver thinks a wheel has fallen off, thus upsetting her. 2. in the space of two to three seconds, you run a sped-up movie, which takes you through all forms of fences that you have previously played and/or photographed. if the newly observed fence is considered quite generic, lacking any extramural qualities and anyway previously documented, restrain activating the stop! response. if after scrolling through some 3000 images of fences and 20 hours of recordings, you consider that this fence will add to the experience that is fence, activate stop! code immediately. failure to do this, which results in you shouting stop! some five or even ten minutes after the fence event, causes the driver to slide into a bad mood for some hours, as turning around on unstable ground or reversing up a single-lane highway is potential cause for much anguish. this lady has an aversion to the past. near eucla, sa. 3. some relief, as it is discovered that the fence looks like no other. 4. no time to waste, as it is mid-day and the temperature is about 120 f. 5. grab equipment. there are two options: take digital photographs and record audio to dat or minidisc; or the full monty—all of the above plus the video camera, tripod, and toolbox. 6. open door, jump out of car, and swear at flies already awaiting you. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 18 wogarno station, wa. 7. walk quickly to potential fence interest, checking ground for snakes. 8. take photographs, then tap fence wires and posts for a quick sonic assessment. if response is good, yell at driver to come quick (as you are already overheated) and bring cello and bass bows. 9. while waiting for fence assistant to attend, find holes or splits in fence post in which to insert contact microphones. set up video camera. try possible shots. you are now completely covered in flies, and sweat is pouring down your face, covering your prescription sunglasses and making it impossible to see anything through the video viewfinder. after a fire near halls creek, wa. 10. inquire as to where your assistant has got to (yell again). 11. a squadron of flying, biting bugs has located your activities. 12. consider musical strategies for fence: rhythmic potential, bottom end stuff, harmonic clusters, natural reverb—long or short and gated? taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 19 13. assistant arrives looking unhappy, checks every step for snake attack but agrees to perform. 14. press red button, produce performance or else. sunset with barbed wire, sa. or else we do it again. south australia police department police ancillary report. non-offence details occurred at 0705 hrs on 7 june 2004 stuart hwy, coober pedy, south australia * officers cunningham and abbott, coober pedy criminal investigation branch, while proceeding in a southerly direction saw one jonathan antony rose acting suspiciously at the dog fence 45 kilometers north of coober pedy. * investigated and saw that rose had electrical apparatus attached to fence. * checked his bona fides and learned he is a professional musician. * he was engaged in recording the “sound of the wind on the fence.” examples of his work produced. * was in company of hollis taylor, same address. * was in possession of a toyota landcruiser rego. no. woa263. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 20 hollis taylor and jon rose at woomera, sa. on a trip to the top end, we construct and play a fence at the darwin festival; then it’s off to the nauiyu aboriginal community for one more musical fence. lock your gas tank, advises the car rental agency rep. don’t know if they sniff it on that reserve, but no use takin’ a chance. bernadette tjingiling, marita sambono-diyini, and christina yambeing painting the musical fence for the 2004 merrepen arts festival at nauiyu, nt. when we get to nauiyu, we’re the only whitefellas around; we feel like we’ve suddenly arrived in a foreign country—and we have. the locals are intent on cheering a number of concurrent football games. there is an immediate sense of community. small, naked children are on the loose, as are serious, sturdy mid-sized dogs. we look up david shoobridge, the white town clerk, who loads us in his rig for a drive round. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 21 the small community of nauiyu is located on the banks of the daly river, he tells us, 230 kilometers southwest of darwin. our population normally averages 450 but can swell to over 700 in the wet season or when ceremony or other special events act as a drawing card. curious aboriginal children flock to us as we design the where and how of our musical fence. jon unpacks his bass bow. he’s gonna use that stick to play the fence, says david. you liar one, kirin retorts. painters and onlookers at nauiyu, nt. the musical fence is three treated posts and several lengths of piano wire. the kids hang around the edges, just waiting to give the stretched wire a tug. other than having to guard our instrument, it’s all going well—but then several women approach jon with a concern. you can’t play music with these. them posts dead ones. well ... we gotta bring ‘em back to life. we paint ‘em up. really? yes, please. bernadette, marita, and christina have never painted together before. sharing a pie plate of acrylics, they sit on the ground around a post and communally cover one at a time. every available space on the vibrant posts celebrates some living thing. there’s magic with ‘em, we’re told. the three women work late into the night. taylor post impressions portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 22 the next day, after we perform on the fence, the kids can hardly wait to give it a good thrashing ... then the painted posts get auctioned off along with the year’s best crop of paintings. christina yambeing painting at nauiyu, nt. it sets me reflecting on how it might have been here when every feature of the landscape was woven into song. this land was a giant travel book … a history book … a natural science book. the great australian songbook stretched back and forward in time. sunset with barbed wire, sa. full on riot portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ full on riot moses iten ‘16/02/04 02:42am: hey moses full on riot in lawson st the station’s on fire! been going since 4. molotov and more. full on.’ this is the first sms i have ever received informing me of riots and molotov cocktails. all this is happening in front of the house i had lived in, until a few weeks ago, before returning to tasmania. apparently my old local train station there is on fire. i’m trying to imagine my ex-flatmate tapping this into his phone. full on. i imagine the people i had lived beside saw daily – throwing burning bottles stuffed with petrol-soaked rags. i doubt anybody is asking why? i don’t want to see the ‘news’ once off this bus. i don’t know what to think. switch off my mobile and put it in my bag on the bus seat beside me. ---------------------------------- ‘what a bastard, this white man, who likes neither my voice nor my colour, yet wants me to come up with a miracle that will make him a god. i shouldn’t have got myself into this, but…what can you do? when you’re black, no one asks you how you want your own life to be led,’ writes b. wongar – a serbian-born writer who apparently adopted this name whilst living with an aboriginal family in the northern territory in ‘girigiri, the trap.’ iten full on riot this is from a story about the last man of a tribe condemned to die on a small island, employed by a whitefella who arrives weekly by helicopter for him, to prospect uranium with a geiger counter. the aboriginal man is dependent on the food handout, as local food sources have been contaminated by the mining. but his wife has destroyed the counter and , anyhow, there is no uranium on the island: ‘there’s not a single stone on the island like those of the mainland hills that the whites blasted and dragged away; every gunavidji man could tell you that, but all of them have gone to bralgu and i’m the only one left.’ sitting on a bus from tranquil rural to chilled urban tasmania, i am reading the track to bralgu. bralgu being both the word for the edible ‘yams’ and ‘mythological island, land of the dead’, according to author b. wongar’s glossary. the track, therefore, a matter of both life and death. on the back of the book a critic from the ‘spectator’ promises: ‘these stories are poignant, deeply committed, plangently mourning the genocide by rapacious white capitalism of a people more deeply in touch with the earth they inhabit than most of us’. on a more sombre note, thomas keneally also commends the short story collection as ‘arresting chants’, and alan paton admits ‘these beautiful stories open up a new world for me.’ these stories come from a book set, printed and bound in great britain. the beauty in the stories lies in both the adversity and the sense of belonging to a community of other human beings and the greater natural world. the reality portrays these same people as the ‘victims’ of ‘rapacious white capitalism’. it is depressing, and whilst i begin enjoying such stories i am exhausted by the reality portrayed; of incessant victimisation. horrible stories, i feel. an unresolved conflict that will meander on through history, until the last trickle of aboriginal life dries up in the desert. as if the first inhabitants of this continent only ever settled remote deserts and tropics, coincidentally the leastfavoured climes for the fresh arrivals from the north. horrible, i feel, because so often indigenous australia is portrayed in this light in a literature aiming to ‘preserve’ and ‘raise awareness’ of an ancient culture, but has been more effective in doing the portal vol. 2., no. 2, july 2005 2 iten full on riot opposite by relegating the people in the stories to the shelves of history, the glass cases of museums. horrible, i feel, but i don’t know what to think. ---------------------------------- metallic scraping resonates, increasing to such intensity you want to turn off the stereo spitting it out…spitting out words…english buccaneers…miseries whites inflicted upon blacks…denials…land grabs…massacres…the lot… ‘she died on the 8th of may, of 1876, in hobart. and her one desire was that she should not be given over to the surgeons to dissect her, the way they had cut up king billy. she wanted to be buried at sea. but the white tasmanians had other plans for her: they boiled her body down, cleaned down the bones, wired them together and stuck them in a glass case at the hobart museum,’ explains a voice cutting through the metallic resonance, smoothing the creases in the track the truth about tasmania by curse ov dialect. i have heard this song, i went to school in tasmania and learned truganinni had been the last full-blood indigenous tasmanian to die. the melbourne boys from australia’s first hip hop outfit to be signed to a us label curse ov dialect are in hobart. they have just toured the us, europe and japan. their music doesn’t get much airplay in australia. drizzle becomes rain, and we are in the foyer of the hobart museum. it is their first trip to tasmania. there are hundreds of glass cases. ---------------------------------- ‘we have enough sadness in our lives,’ a palestinian woman whispered to her husband in arabic who was looking to hang up a picture of palestinian mothers in mourning in their washington dc home. i hope you’ve seen some of the pbs documentary series called ‘the new americans’ for it may equally be called ‘the new australians’. is that why it’s screened by the special broadcasting service, and not ‘our abc’? portal vol. 2., no. 2, july 2005 3 iten full on riot the palestinian husband in that episode is one of america’s leading palestinian civil rights activists, doing speeches at nader rallies to shouting ‘free palestine’ in street protests. ‘i don’t see an end to the conflict, so what’s the point,’ blurts out his wife in her new-found american ‘freedom’. ‘so you’re gonna give up just like that, on your people,’ responds the husband, flabbergasted. the wife just got a job taking care of preschoolers in a predominately jewish neighbourhood, and loves it. the husband can’t believe it, muttering the arabic words ‘in the name of mohammed’ under his breath. ‘do you really believe in god?,’ the wife ultimately challenges her husband on camera. the man is silent, the camera switches off. she makes me think, this woman. i feel numb. i want to curl up. ---------------------------------- ‘these snails are not tasmanian,’ says a friend who is just about to complete a phd on tasmanian land snails. he hands the book back to me and i stare at the cover: a black hand full of snail shells is all it looked like to me. ‘to be honest i hadn’t even noticed the shells,’ i reply, smiling, followed by an awkward silent moment. ‘well, that’s interesting, thanks. seeya!’ the book is called the child of an ancient people, and has been translated from the french language. the author, anouar benmalek, is an algerian mathematician, living in exile in france. ‘to truganini, who died on 8 may 1876, the last representative of the aborigines of tasmania, a people wiped off the surface of the earth by a perfect genocide: its victims forgotten, the murderers free of blame.’ understandably, this dedication as you open the book didn’t go down well in australian literary circles; least of all – presumably, for i haven’t yet seen any critiques from their perspective with indigenous tasmanians, truganinni’s descendants. so i had asked the snail friend for his opinion, and he made the interesting observation about the inaccurate cover. showing the black hands (and a blurry body behind it) of other black portal vol. 2., no. 2, july 2005 4 iten full on riot people, yes, but people of a distinct culture, language and climate zone thousands and thousands of miles away from this island. ---------------------------------- today as i look at these notes, i am sitting on a bus on my way to hobart. i live on a farm, one hour south. in hobart i have an interview scheduled with israeli writer etgar keret for midday. i’m searching for something that should connect us, make it a great chat. ‘keret is not afraid of anything; his brilliant stories are like the pricking of needles – traumatic and dreamy, melancholy and replete with humour, never superficial and always precise’, proclaims the german newspaper ‘die welt’, on the back sleeve of keret’s paperback the nimrod flip-out. my kinda guy i think, and like the track to bralgu (although not with benmalek), i gambled on interesting cover critics and won. but keret’s stories also speak of beauties and beasts, making the reader squirm and chuckle. ‘the fact you live in an area where taking a bus and getting home alive is something that is not taken for granted on both sides puts you in a very existential state of mind. every day, strong and difficult moral and humanistic problems are thrown in your face – questions that you usually can not offer solutions for. all this certainly affects my writing,’ says keret in an interview on the press release. can’t suppress a yawn, it is early morning. a few other passengers are dozing away on their way to work. the bus turns left off the highway and grinds to a halt. ‘good morning,’ mumble the new passenger and driver simultaneously. the doors close and on we go. keret is not offering solutions, finality is horror. questions are raised instead of answers handed on a platter. but that’s why i like this bloke. i empathise with things being complicated, nothing simple. one of his stories speaks of a heaven only catering for the afterlife of those who have committed suicide. imagine the implications of this idea in israel. portal vol. 2., no. 2, july 2005 5 iten full on riot i had once seen myself as a journalist and headed with a recording device to redfern ‘the block’ the scene of yesterday’s riots. in this open wound of australia’s unresolved past (and future) there was a young jewish-aussie photographer, rick, aged barely fifteen, scooting amongst the locals, deftly. the photographs were brilliant slices of life as it is, unlike other photos i’ve seen in newspapers of local kids throwing rocks at the camera of a provocative photographer. what makes kids throw rocks at the camera, when without a camera you walk by unhindered? but rick had no photos of rocks being thrown, he looked like just another kid. moving like a shadow, it took a while for me to notice him, crouching at a fire and focusing his impressive lens on the flames. when i first approached him and asked why he was taking photos at ‘the block’, rick replied, after a moment’s silence: ‘i want to be a war correspondent, and this is australia’s war zone.’ ultimately rick illustrated some of my articles. for him it was a thrill to be published, but i felt it wasn’t doing his work justice. ultimately i stopped writing articles, reverting to stories [how about testimonies instead of stories?] like this one. i have no idea where rick is today, we lost contact. i don’t know if it’s important to call yourself ‘journalist’ or ‘writer’, because i currently classify myself as neither. when i decided to move to redfern last year, i had moved beyond my original naïve intentions of ‘changing the world’ like stopping the flow of water. to progress to just living in a place to write what i feel, swim with and against the current, perceiving with all my senses like a receptor, a human ‘geiger’ counter. a prospector spitting on miners. ---------------------------------- in the german language section of a king street shop, i’m prospecting for rare books. in other languages i could often find books that don’t exist in english, disposed by someone who only reads english, dumped in the darkest corner. i recognize a spine as the title of a film i had once borrowed from a video store in mexico. in german, with spanish subtitles; the cover of the video (like this book i’ve just found) shows a group of indigenous australians dancing in front of a mound of dirt pushed up by a bulldozer. they have stopped mining prospectors from any further digging on a sacred site. the portal vol. 2., no. 2, july 2005 6 iten full on riot title of this werner herzog film – and book is ‘where the green ants dream’. i am yet to meet an australian who has seen or even heard of this title, although at a university lecture hall we were shown a herzog film, showing the rapacious spanish conquistadores doing similar work in south america. the back cover says, orange letters on empty black: ‘what would you say, if in rome we entered the st. peter’s basilica with bulldozers, and began to dig?’ ---------------------------------- the cover of the track to bralgu on the other hand, shows a naked indigenous boy running from a bulldozer rapidly coming towards him. how will i talk to etgar keret about israel? what would i ask him about last night’s ‘redfern riots’, screamed in headlines by all the newspapers, suddenly finding room for indigenous australia on their front pages? as humorous as some of keret’s stories are, they portray a reality of suicide bombing, the military. stories set in a climate of resilience, yet soaked in a rag of fear and uncertainty. we all know that, are saturated with those headlines from the tumultuous middle east (middle? east?). i click to last night’s sms message again: hey moses full on riot in lawson st the station’s on fire! been going since 4. molotov and more. full on. i select options. they are erase, reply, chat, edit…i don’t press ok, take no action and save the message. portal vol. 2., no. 2, july 2005 7 moses iten portal submission 2 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal solidarity and recognition: the ‘long frontier’ of counterglobalism1 james goodman, university of technology sydney globalism is a contested concept, but perhaps best understood as a spatial strategy, which disempowers those unable to transcend the fixity of place and social context. under globalism fluidity becomes a key source of power, enabling the powerful to liquefy assets, to disembed, and thereby displace political, social or ecological impacts. the infrastructures of globalism enable the disembodied extension of power across territory, to the extent that one model, universally applicable for all societies, is positioned as supreme. this power-grab for globalist hegemony was succinctly expressed in 2002 when the us national security strategy asserted the universality of ‘a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise’, values that ‘are right and true for every person, in every society’ (white house 2002, 18). the only possible challenge to globalism perhaps, is through a similarly disembedded countermovement, that mirrors the global reach and power of mainstream globalism. such a perspective is found, for instance, in michael hardt's insistence that 'the alternative to the rule of global capital and its institutions will only be found at an equally global level, by a global democratic movement' (2002, 3). the praxis of counter-globalist movements, though, suggests a different tendency, one that centres on the assertion of particularity against universality. expressed in the legitimacy of ‘many worlds’ against ‘one world’ globalism, such resistance centres on 1 an earlier version of this paper was presented at the ‘other worlds’ conference, and at the macquarie university sociology seminar series. thanks for comments from participants at the both events, and from referees. for further discussion of these issues see: www.international.activism.uts.edu.au http://www.international.activism.uts.edu.au/ goodman long frontier of counter-globalism exposing the material effects and foregrounding concrete and material experiences of globalism. movements mobilise against the disembodied logic of globalism on the basis of co-presence and inter-subjectivity, and are embedded in relational concepts of selfhood. they are often intensely embodied and are radically emplaced through militant localism and trans-local dialogue. counter-globalism thus does not seek to defeat geography; rather it embraces it, as the starting-point of mobilisation. whether configured as everyday lived experience, or as revolutionary struggle, the ‘real’ thus impinges on the abstract globalism: universal claims to transcendence are always mythical, and can be overturned. the starting point of this article is to analyse globalism as a spatial strategy, a strategy of displacement grounded in material power. globalism thus signifies the capacity to exploit and dominate at distance, from the sanctity of corporate boardrooms, military briefings and media cutting rooms. the claim is to universal market, military and normative power, but the impact is of extended and deepened division. centres of power appear more as islands, or enclaves, defined against the backwash effects of counter-globalism, and the logic of offensive defence. counter movements gain traction as paradigmatic challengers, grounded in the aspiration to alternative ways of being. as outlined below in table 1, and in detail later in this discussion, the three key power sources under globalism—corporate, imperial and normative—are presented with profound contradictions: corporations are confronted by an advancing crisis of social and ecological exhaustion; dominant states and inter-state organisations are confronted by legitimacy crises; claims to universal norms implode in the face of their own particularity. we find alternatives emerging across all three fields: asserting livelihood and the commons; demanding deep democratisation; and claiming autonomy with solidarity. as discussed in the closing section to this article, each is expressed in various counterglobalist spatial strategies, across multiple movements. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 2 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism table 1: dimensions of globalism and counter-globalism power sources resistance basis alternative themes corporate (tncs) exhaustion crisis livelihood and the commons imperial (us/igos) legitimacy crisis deep democracy normative globalism value crisis autonomy with solidarity this article discusses these counter-globalist strategies using a spatial motif, that of the ‘long frontier’. in his book ‘spaces of hope’, david harvey invokes this ‘long frontier’ metaphor as ‘a politics of multiple theatres on the long frontier of insurgent action’ (2000, 12). the idea of the long frontier is particularly evocative for the politics and geographies of counter-globalism. the long frontier is a financial frontier, a frontier of opportunity for the venture capitalist, between commodification and its others. it is the frontier of values, between circuits of capital and cycles of reproduction, between exchange value and use value. it is also a social frontier between a transnational capitalist class and a conglomeration of subordinate social forces. the long frontier is also the frontier for strategy—between business associations lobbying for deeper marketisation, and between counter-globalist movements constructing links and solidarities. the frontier is ‘long’ in the sense of being writ-large across the globe, from one capitalist incursion and counter-globalist conflagration to the next. it is also 'long' in terms of its roots, embedded in the first instance within consciousness and from there generating dynamics of aspiration and inspiration. it thereby connects the theatres of counterglobalist action, linking places where its politics are enacted. the conglomeration of social forces and places that it marks out are necessarily variegated and diverse, defined by differences as much as by similarities. the concept of the ‘long frontier’ then, is always in the making, never fully formed. its power rests on the assertion of ‘other worlds’ against one world globalism, and in the capacity to link these in the imagination of the movements. for it to be effective, as harvey argues, ‘insurgent political practices must occur in all theatres on this long frontier’ (harvey 2000: 13). the long frontier is thus a fluid and contingent entity, grounded in places but constantly shifting—a hard frontier in the sense that all lines of confrontation are 'hard', but defining portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 3 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism an imagined political community that is shifting and permanently up for negotiation. central to this is the creative role of the movement, what harvey calls the ‘insurgent architect’, a force engaged in ‘dialectical utopianism’, in resisting but also envisioning. this normative praxis stands at the core of counter-globalism, in opening fields for the speculative imagination. the key to such strategisms though, is the capacity to mediate localised insurgencies, defining an imaginary frontier of antagonism. in this spirit, harvey calls for the active ‘construction of political forces to engage in such dialogues’, to create trans-local infrastructures that link and mediate militant particularisms. the task is a ‘crucial mediating step in bringing the dialectic of particularities and universalities into play on a world stage characterised by uneven geographic developments’ (2000, 15). this article takes a brief excursion on the long frontier, exploring its spatial logics, and its political dynamics. the starting point in section i is definitional—simply to ground the concept of ‘counter-globalism’. section ii debates the logic of global division, harvey’s ‘uneven geographic developments’, principally between north and south. division, as argued in section ii, is overlaid by shared dynamics of commodification and by a deepening ‘exhaustion crisis’. these themes are drawn together in section iv, which outlines some of the emergent spatial dynamics of counter-globalism. such dynamics are seen, in the closing section, to drive shared perspectives and connections, that inject a praxis of translocalism with counter-globalism. throughout there is a strong emphasis on the material dimensions of ideology, as expressing social relations and how they arrange social life. globalism, as an ideology, thus expresses and reproduces material power, whether exercised through market power or military coercion. i. definitions of counter-globalism terminology is loaded: the label ‘anti-globalisation’ has been deployed to marginalise critiques of globalisation. by taking ‘globalisation’ as a given, the ‘anti’ label suggests an orientation that is oppositionalist and backward looking. to act against globalisation is to act against the future, against ‘openness’ and ‘freedom’. it is as if by acting against globalisation we act against modernity—we are new-age luddites, or worse, xenophobes. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 4 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism there are a variety of attempts at shedding this ‘anti-global’ label. the first, and most prevalent, is to assert the need for a different globalisation. the emphasis is on shifting from oppositionalism to critique, and then to alternatives. the starting point is to emphasise that it is a particular type of globalisation that is opposed: corporate globalisation, or imperialist globalisation, not globalisation per se. with the terminology of globalisation accepted, debate moves onto what the different globalisation might look like. often the legitimacy of ‘globalisation from below’ is asserted, along with an emphasis on ‘global justice’. the recent emergence of the ‘alter-globalisation’ concept encapsulates the position: the alter-globalisationists call upon us to oppose the prevailing globalisation model with an ‘alternative’ globalisation. from this perspective we are all globalists: the future is of more, not less, globalisation. but how useful is this approach in developing an understanding first of the logic of ‘globalisation’, and secondly, of the potential for resistance? if forces for opposition and transformation are to be drawn to the centre of analysis, the very concept of globalisation has to be approached critically. by embracing globalisation, whether mainstream or alternative, we accept it as a reality. in doing so, the centrality of a process that inexorably leads us to the condition of globality is assumed. in large part, then, the ideology of globalisation, as an inevitable and in large part desirable fact of life, is accepted. counter-suggestions, that perhaps what is claimed as globalisation is in fact simply the extension and exertion of discursive power, are sidelined. it may be argued then, that with alter-globalisation and global justice concepts we see the deepened collapse of ‘freedom’ into globality, as a broadly disseminated global norm. the ease with which that collapse occurs perhaps reflects the hegemony of globalist ideology, rather than any inherent globalisation trajectory. bringing a more sceptical orientation to bear requires that we name globalisation as an ideology. globalisation rhetoric embodies an implicit normative claim about the merits of globality as well as about the existence of globalisation that is linked to a particular worldview and therefore to particular interests. such rhetoric needs to be named as ‘globalism’. as with all ideologies, globalism is rooted in the social process, as a product portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 5 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism of particular social forces. it has a purchase on the world as a reflection of dominant practice: the act of naming it as an ideology thus does not require us to deny the existence of processes of globalisation. reframing globalisation as ‘globalism’, though, does force attention onto the exercise of power and counter-power, rather than simply on 'alternatives'. equally important, deploying the concept of globalism opens up a critical space. through its globalist orientation, alter-globalisation can erase, or worse, condemn, non-globalist alternatives. furthermore, reducing the scope of inquiry to ‘alternatives’ can distort the picture, as proactive or ‘project’ initiatives are privileged against what are presented as reactive or defensive positions. an example is the false distinction between ‘defensive’ national industrial relations and ‘offensive’ transnational labour solidarity—approaches that in practice are bridged through various tactical manoeuvres. analysis of possibilities for challenge and transformation requires a broader scope that allows globalist and non or anti-globalist perspectives to come into play, allowing us to understand alternatives to globalisation as much as alternative globalisation. here, localist or nationalist confrontation and translocalist resistance can be brought into the analytical frame with, not against, global justice and alter-globalisation approaches. the need to embrace the broad parameters of opposition also forces analysis beyond oppositionalism, but not to leave it behind. the approach should not assume that ‘antiglobalism’ is the order of the day. neither should it assume that the refusal of globalism—the assertion of veto power—is to be superseded. in many respects, the politics of refusal is becoming increasingly powerful, and may be seen as a precondition for building alternatives. alternatives to globalism thus cannot be separated from the conditions of their existence, that is, from the process of generating emancipatory knowledges against the exercise of hegemonic power. they are embedded in the social and political process—not blueprints delivered from on-high, but rather alternative practices, values and principles that acquire significance in the process of mobilisation. counter-movements are thus a precondition for any movements for alternatives. indeed, portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 6 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism it is in the process of constructing such movements that alternative orientations emerge. counter-movements are necessarily multifaceted, drawing multiple players into blocs of social forces; they unavoidably reflect the hugely variegated nature of the political field. they rest not so much on the capacity to subsume themselves into a single orientation, but rather on the capacity to draw differently aligned groupings together, bringing them into dialogue. such dialogues are generative in the sense that they allow shared analysis of the problems of globalism, of strategies for contestation, and possibilities for transformation: in a real sense they produce the alternatives. the concept of counterglobalism thus gives deeper critical purchase on globalisation rhetoric. it also offers a breadth of scope drawing on anti-globalist as well as alter-globalist orientations, foregrounding the realm of mobilisation and social praxis. ii global division as a spatial strategy, globalism can be understood as an ideology of displacement, from strong to weak, from rich to poor, on a global scale. with weakened systems of social regulation, both in low-income southern and high-income northern societies, the key social logic becomes one of forcing risks to the margins, of ‘third-worldising’ the costs of accumulation. peripheralisation is thus driven by deeply drawn power relations, writ large as a global dynamic of class domination. in the first instance the displacement process operates at a planetary level, marking out an unprecedented consumption and development divide between north and south, leaving one fifth of the world’s population to account to for four-fifths of global consumption, a ‘huge and growing polarisation of wealth between the immiserated bulk of humanity and extremely wealthy social groups within the core countries’ (gowan 2003: 59). displacement on this scale creates northern insecurity. the socio-cultural backwash from three decades of neo-liberalism destabilises social relations, implodes societies, threatening even the capitalist heartlands with ‘contagion’. ecological side effects have become inescapable as mal-development in the north brings us to the brink of planetary exhaustion, leaving northerners dependent upon the conservation of southern resources. there are parallel social side effects, as social collapse within zones of southern poverty portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 7 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism rebounds in the form of ‘failing’ states, transnational political violence and peoples fleeing from hunger and militarism. the elite response is not to re-think the model, but to impose it more coercively. cognitive dissonance is the order of the day, and militarism has returned to the centre of the imperialist project, with the direct imposition of power by command. in the backwash of neo-liberalism, the responses of northern elites have become increasingly inadequate, and their failure has forced the creativity of social movements to the fore. the more that dominant states insist on market freedoms, the more that alternative agendas proliferate and grow. in this context of radical displacement, the polanyian ‘double movement,’ where socialisation of costs proceeds hand-in-hand with marketisation, is critically impaired (polanyi 1944). lacking the scope for accommodation, political conflicts are fought on a 'paradigmatic' level, and increasingly transformative agendas are forced onto the agenda (see sousa santos 1995). command and control become increasingly indispensable for northern elites, but also increasingly inadequate. the more that dominant players seek to deny global ecological insecurity, for instance retreating behind a climate shield, as the pentagon recently proposed, the more the risks and insecurities escalate (schwartz and randall 2003). likewise, the more that dominant states insist on market freedoms—for instance in the world trade organisation’s (wto) ‘development round’—the more that peoples of the south mobilise around demands for self-reliance in terms of ‘food security’ or ‘food sovereignty’ (dunkley 2004). even the ‘war on terror’ itself can be seen as a panic response, as callinicos argues: ‘the response of the bush administration to 11 september—to declare a permanent state of war implicitly directed against potential as well as actual adversaries—indicates the anxieties at work even at the top of the greatest power in history’ (callinicos 2003: 64). reflecting uneven development, the logic of globalism is borne out in deepening spatial as well as social divides. it is also borne out in the logic of resistance. powerful links exist between southern and northern forms of agency but these are embedded in spatial portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 8 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism divides. the largely northern-based counter-globalist movement that emerged from the mid 1990s reflected the imposition of neo-liberal ‘adjustment’ in the north, a process meted out on the south over the previous decades. reclaiming the legacy of antiimperialism, subordinated peoples in southern contexts have defined alternative agendas against neo-liberalism. these are increasingly articulated in conjunction with subordinated social forces in northern contexts, which face similar structures, under very different conditions. the claim to sovereignty, and to the limited autonomy it offers, is especially pursued in southern contexts: this should come as no surprise as the structures of domination are invariably northern-based, and the logic of ‘systemic chaos’ as arrighi puts it, is primarily visited on the south, not the north (2003). the asymmetry cannot be wished away: it has material effects. globalist imperialism has a spatial as well as a social logic: resistance to imperialism is thus both national and transnational. as saul argues, ‘the fact is that “empire” (the world of capitalist globalisation) and “empire” (the world of western imperialism) coexist’ (2003, 227). iii globalism and reproduction globalisation is best understood as an outcome rather than a cause of social change. it signifies a spatial reorientation that itself is a symptom of a large-scale reorganisation of societies driven by capital accumulation (rosenberg 2000). globalism, then, is a strategy of an emergent transnational capitalist class, to deepen and broaden capitalist relations. the key vehicle of globalism is the corporation, the key outcome is the integration of more and more aspects of existence into the circuit of capital, through commodification (sklair 2000; pieterse 2004). unavoidably, then, it is the realms of reproduction— uncommodified or decommodified realms on the frontiers of accumulation—that are the chief targets of globalism. this latest ‘intensive’ mode of accumulation erodes the 'social and natural substratum' of life, driving reproduction to exhaustion. exhaustion spreads across socio-cultural relations, ‘private-personal’ spheres for instance, ecologies and living environments, the structures that reproduce political legitimacy, such as welfare states, rights regimes, representative structures. all are re-geared to the demands of commodification. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 9 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism in both northern and southern contexts the erosion of socialised provision and of regenerative capacity first affects those least able to buy themselves out. it is the flexibilised employees and out-workers, the public sector and welfare-dependent communities, the piece workers and cash-croppers, informalised workers of every kind, and peoples required to live exposed to the ‘out-sourced’ ecological costs of accumulation, who bear the burdens. intensive accumulation recasts these as social agents contesting the reduction of social, cultural, political and ecological relations to the cash nexus. in contrast with industrial accumulation, where resistance manifests primarily in workplace-based distributional conflicts, intensive accumulation creates conflicts that are literally ‘struggle[s] for survival’ (van der pijl 1998: 47). the exhaustion crisis thus subsumes other antagonisms as questions of cultural, social and environmental exhaustion begin to dominate. following hard on the heels of neo-liberal marketisation, then, class conflict is deepened and widened far beyond the industrial sphere. tensions between different movements are blunted, opening new grounds for connection. a multiplicity of social forces, formerly assumed to be secondary to capitalist social relations, move to the fore, acquiring both the capacity and the consciousness to engage in transformative action. ariel salleh names this as the ‘meta-industrial class’, a class of peoples engaged in caring for people and nature, in nurturing, parenting and subsistence roles, various forms of labour that are ‘metabolic’, contrasting with the ‘instrumental’ productive labour. peoples engaged in such labours historically have been marginalised by productivism, but in the current crisis they move to occupy centre-stage. in the field of social labour for instance, social use-value—the ‘use value of affect’ as negri calls it— confronts exchange value through the politics of care (negri 2004). likewise, where nature is reduced to a measure of value flow, societies are confronted by the materiality of ecological survival and insecurity, generating a reciprocal mobilisation for the commons against exchange value (goldman 1998). in northern contexts efforts to reclaim leisure time, to secure the liberation of time from exploitation, are reflected in a pervasive so-called ‘work-life collision’ (pocock 2003). in southern contexts a parallel deformalisation of work reduces security and threatens livelihoods, producing broad-based movements for survival (diwedi 2003). portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 10 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism the question of social forces also raises the question of places. exhaustion, and resistance to exhaustion has a specific spatial logic: grounded in the uneven exhaustion of reproduction, patterns of action crystallise in particular sites. there are spatial concentrations of agency where ‘holding labour’ acquires particular symbolic potential. sites of social, cultural, political and ecological reproduction become radically valorised. social movements become adept at recognising and deploying such potential, bringing in a multiplicity of localised conflagrations. here the new configurations of subordinated classes gain a shared consciousness and capacity to act for themselves. movements become centred on building trans-local agendas grounded in cross-culturalism, as the foundation for contestation. what are the prospects for this grass-roots challenge? for biel, writing in 2000, there were real opportunities: as the neo-liberal project unravelled, grassroots organisations could occupy the ideological vacuum (biel 2000: 303). something of this tendency is revealed in the burgeoning social movements centred on fields of reproduction, and their increased transnational articulation, for instance through the social forum, a process of seeking alternatives through inter-movement dialogue, initiated in 2001 through the world social forum. such forces find new allies amongst the disaffected in the ‘official’ sectors, including within departments of state, and have made some headway in influencing, if not capturing state power. such alliances are crucial in translating aspirations into programs, especially in southern contexts (saul 2004). one example at the national level is the brazilian landless peasants movement, the movimento sem terra (mst), and its relationship with the governing workers party in brazil; at the international level, the defeat of the wto’s ‘millennium round’ in 1999, and then ‘development round’ four years later demonstrates the potential of this political conjunction. these ideological agendas and strategies, coming into view from grassroots movements north and south, are inspired by a radical rejection or ‘refusal’ of neo-liberal orthodoxy. central is the process of subordinating markets into society, enabling a collective portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 11 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism delinking from market dependence, embedding markets for societies, rather than the reverse (mcmichael 2000). at the international level such an agenda may expand the concept of the right to development into a ‘right to wealth’ (inayatullah 1996), an agenda of repaying the north’s ecological debt, for instance, that could pose real challenges to the current model of distribution. they involve the assertion of both autonomy and solidarity, geared to deep democratisation, and to agendas for decommodification, including the assertion of the commons. such agendas can acquire a purchase over state policy, framed for instance as the defence of people’s needs against corporate power in the battle over pharmaceuticals and intellectual property rights. the creative power of movements can thereby find traction, in a productive contradiction with state authority. such creativity rests on the capacity to mark out fields of autonomy—an anathema in a world of intervention and marketisation—that can up-turn existing hierarchies of wealth and power. such an agenda must address structures of global inequality, enabling peoples to determine their own future, what may be understood as a ‘multipolar strategy of delinking’ (amin 1997:150). iv spatial dimensions of counter-globalism the exercise of power under neo-liberal globalism has set the pace for counter-globalism. three specific targets are evident—corporate power, embodied in transnational corporations, normative globality expressed in global norms, and imperial power exercised by governmental and intergovernmental institutions. all three are under challenge: corporations are confronted by campaigns for decommodification; global norm-formation is assaulted by the assertion of diversity and plurality; intergovernmental organisations are forced to address demands for deep democratisation. in each aspect, as outlined in table 2, counter-globalist praxis has a particular spatial logic reflecting the geographic dynamics of globalist power and counter-power. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 12 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism table 2: spatial dimensions of counter-globalism alternative themes practices spatial logic examples livelihood and commons de-commodification north-south dialogue contested ‘codes of conduct’ deep democracy multipolar disengagement trans-localism delinking wto/world bank autonomy + solidarity affective engagement radical reembedding anti-gm + refugee solidarity in all three dimensions, counter-globalist movements find new ways to politicise power sources. globalism strips the legitimating framework from corporations, norms and political institutions. shorn of domestic legitimacy as ‘national assets’, the power of transnational corporations greatly exceeds corporate legitimacy, opening a gap to be exploited by popular movements. the logic of inter-governmentalism is likewise exposed and politicised as the political regimes of globalism widen the vacuum between national systems of representation and globalist policy-making. furthermore, as globalists construct a single set of global norms, orientated to possessive individualism, consumerism and ‘free enterprise’, such norms are politicised and destabilised. they are exposed as the false universals of dominant powers, thereby validating multiple alternative orientations. against sources of global power, counter-globalism constructs new political spaces, generating new themes and alternatives. decommodification, the first of these, involves a radical refusal of marketisation. under the rhetoric of ‘market access’, globalism is generating manifold movements for decommodification. movements are often offensive and proactive, seeking not only to defend presently uncommodified zones, but also to decommodify presently privatised aspects of social life (choudry 2003). two relatively new pressure points have emerged—mass consumer activism, emerging from the success of cross-national corporate branding, and investor activism, emerging from the volatility and sensitivity of highly inter-connected finance markets. both of these approaches are heavily contested across northern and southern contexts, with intense debate about the worth or otherwise of corporate codes of conduct that are often grounded in northern consumer or investor campaigns, acting in the name of southern workers and communities (see amrc 2004). north-south dialogues have been forced to the fore in such corporate campaigns, with portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 13 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism much effort at reconciling otherwise counter-posed positions. deep democracy—the second theme—involves the assertion of popular participation in the emerging frameworks for rule. it thus denotes the assertion of common realms of collective management and control beyond the increasingly minimalist public sphere. key drivers are a sense of powerlessness, at various levels of association. there is household resistance to consumerist ethics and the assertion of alternative modes of consumption. there are efforts to democratise the workplace, forcing other actors into the arena of corporate decision-making. there are moves to deglobalise financial and productive relations, creating local embeddedness and accountability. but most noticeable are the many efforts at wresting popular sovereignty from inter-governmental institutions, and from liberalising states, delinking in order to claim or reclaim structures of governance for popular participation, invigorating locality within globality, including through rhetorics of progressive anti-imperialist nationalism (laxer 2003). a key strategy here is the practice of multipolar delinking, where the political institutions of globalism are rendered irrelevant as multiple social forces collectively construct their own autonomous mechanisms. these may be built ‘from below’, in the form of translocal subsistence movements, expressed in ‘via campesina’ for instance, that rejects the assumption that agricultural trade should be regulated through the wto, or in ‘slumdwellers international’, which is a movement of urban poor dedicated to strengthening the autonomy and power of slum communities. there are also moves ‘from above’, in the form of inter-state multilateral delinking, mostly from blocs of southern countries, which impose limits on the wto, and offer the possibility of sidestepping international finance institutions such as the world bank. significantly, these trans-local and inter-state delinking strategies enact autonomy and sovereignty, not against, but with, multilateralism and trans-localism. contesting global norms, the third theme, involves a value orientation, where diverse localised ways of being are counter-posed against the simple idea or ideal of globalised marketisation. this simple assertion of multiplicity or plurality poses a powerful portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 14 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism challenge to the uniformity required and promoted under neo-liberal globalism. it is especially powerful when multiple demands for embedded or localised difference are brought together across cultural and national contexts, to challenge the absolutism of corporate globalism. here the politics of solidarity and recognition enters by the front door: transnational social movement unionism, ‘third wave’ feminism, environmental justice, for instance, all centre on the process of working across cultural contexts. these ethics of solidarity offer frameworks for living together centred on mutual recognition and are an expression of the kind of sociability necessary for paradigmatic change. from this perspective there is often a process of enacting and embedding local values, while bringing them into relationship through trans-local multipolar interactions. again the process reflects and challenges global divides, for instance, in the politics of refugee solidarity movements, where northern-based counter-globalists challenge the global apartheid system, often in the name of local or national traditions of humanitarianism. north-south divides are again evident, for instance, in the normative politics of campaigns against genetically-modified foods, where southern campaigners are primarily concerned with the loss of autonomy, with bio-piracy and with corporate neo-colonialism, rather than, for instance, with consumer or health rights (farhat 2002). again, there is no collapse into an unvariegated global movement; neither is there a break-up into fragmented autonomies. instead, what emerges is an intense imperative for dialogue and reflexive strategising. the very success of globalist ideology presages new contradictions and instabilities. in some ways these are more intense than those they replace, and have greater potential of opening up possibilities for social and political transformation. as political community finds a new fluidity in the dynamics of contesting globalism, new connections are forged. the political infrastructures of globalism are confronted by multifarious instances of local action, constituting a powerfully reflexive counter-globalism. in a double-sided and contradictory way, neo-liberal ‘globalism’ contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. the seeds have been planted and nourished, extending politics into new realms. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 15 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism conclusion: the long frontier of connection the phenomenon of counter-globalism foregrounds issues of division and dialogue. the frontier it constructs is necessarily contingent, but is the foundation for counter-globalist praxis. the long frontier is an invisible frontier of shared consciousness and connectivity that links movements challenging globalism, generating and disseminating world-views that directly counter official versions. localised ‘bush-fires’ mark-out the frontier across peoples and contexts, across north-south divides between the agents and subordinates of corporate globalism. it is enacted by loosely connected localised actions, and is the first key precondition for sustained mobilisation in confronting neo-liberal globalism. asserting the legitimacy of non-commodified social and cultural relations in particular localities immediately raises issues of solidarity and recognition. how can localised struggles connect to constitute counter-movements capable of overwhelming capitalism? what is it that drives peoples to find common cause, despite what may seem irreconcilable differences? a starting point is the emergence of a clear frontier between ‘us’ and ‘them’, a process of what amory starr calls ‘naming the enemy’ (2000). a shared imperative to act in concert may emerge as a tactical manoeuvre, a form of connection contingent on a particular arrangement of political forces. beyond this, connectivity emerges as a strategic necessity, forcing mutual realignments and rethinking, grounding new visions and alternatives. the latter move creates and forces new agendas, offering a genuinely counter-globalism capable of taking us beyond the current malaise. as tactical manoeuvre moves to strategic confluence, movements are forced to engage with each others’ differences. universal commitments can no longer be assumed, and dilemmas of constructing counter-hegemony across ideological, national and sociocultural contexts rise to the top of the agenda. there is a flowering of movements grounded in these processes of cross-nationalism and cross-culturalism, forcing the emergence of a relational model for identity and politics. in becoming relational there is no absolute universally applicable position: absolutism is displaced by solidarity, solidarity simultaneously qualified by autonomy and recognition. visions for change portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 16 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism emerge from the creative interaction across differing perspectives, forcing new ideological and political programs into view. here the process of addressing—not settling—differences becomes the key issue. in different ways, for instance, ‘third wave’ feminism, human rights activists, environmental justice movements and social movement unionists seek to balance universality with particularity—feminist unity with gender difference, human rights with cultural rights, eco-globality with living environments, worker solidarity with differing development priorities. new visions and aspirations are generated out of these realignments, and in the process movements find new frameworks for social action and transformation. these ethics of solidarity are the founding stone of a paradigmatic alternative, in establishing frameworks for living and acting together. internationally, the methodology of mutual engagement and solidarity building has its most impressive manifestation in the ‘social forum’ process established through the world social forum in 2001 at porto alegre, brazil. here the politics of the ‘program’ and the ‘mass’ gives way to the politics of interacting programs and interacting masses, forcing mutual reorientation and transformation, building shared agendas for the new sources of class power. no surprise, then, that the social forum model has proliferated across the globe as a vehicle for a new mode of democratic participation, a tool spurring collective consciousness and action. in the present period reproduction, in all its facets, is the target of an ‘intensive’ mode of accumulation. in the process, class conflict is being deepened and widened. the key challenge for counter-globalists has been to crystallise an emergent consciousness, bringing the meta-industrial classes to act for themselves against intensive accumulation. the models, programs and strategies appear permanently provisional and transitional, yet they mark new frontiers of contestation and transformation, in a fluid and creative praxis. forging connectivity across the emergent social forces is now the prime concern—it is the mantra of counter-globalism, and its greatest asset in the struggles for survival now being waged. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 17 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism reference list amin, s. 1997, capitalism in the age of globalisation, zed books, london. asia-monitor resource centre 2004, corporate codes of conduct: southern perspectives, asia-monitor resource centre, hong kong. arrighi, g. 2003, ‘the social and political economy of global turbulence’, new left review, 20, march-april. biel, r. 2000, the new imperialism: crisis and contradiction in north/south relations, zed books, london. callinicos, a. 2003, an anti-capitalist manifesto, polity press, london. choudry, a. 2003, effective strategies in confronting transnational corporations, asiapacific research network, manila. dunkley, g. 2004, free trade: myth, realities and alternatives, zed books, london. diwedi, r. 2001, ‘environmental movements in the global south’, international sociology, 16, 1. farhat, r. 2003, bio-piracy, aidwatch, sydney. goldman, m. 1998, privatizing nature: political struggles for the global commons, pluto press, london. gowan, p. 2003, ‘the new liberal cosmopolitanism’, in debating cosmopolitics, ed. d. archibugi, verso, london. hardt, m. 2002, ‘porto alegre today's bandung’, new left review, 14, augustseptember. harvey, d. 2000, spaces of hope, university of california press, los angeles. ——— 2003, the new imperialism, oxford university press, oxford. inayatullah, n 1996, ‘beyond the sovereignty dilemma: quasi-states as social construct’, in state sovereignty as social construct, eds t.j. biersteker, & c. weber, cambridge university press, uk. laxer, g. 2003, radical transformative nationalisms confront the us empire, current sociology, 51, 2. mcmicheal, p. 2003, globalisation, cambridge university press, uk. negri, a. 2003 (1982), ‘time for revolution’, trans. m mandarini, continuum, london. pieterse, jan n. 2004, globalization or empire?, routledge, london. pocock, b. 2003, the work/life collision, federation press, sydney. polanyi, k. 1944. the great transformation. octogon, new york. rosenberg, j. 1993, the empire of civil society, verso, london. salleh, a. 2001, ‘the capitalist division of labour and its meta-industrial class’ in conference proceedings, sydney, the australian sociological association, sydney. saul, j, 2004, ‘globalization, imperialism, development: false binaries and radical solutions’, in the new imperial challenge, socialist register 2004, eds l. panitch, and c. leys, merlin press, london. sklair, l. 2000, the transnational capitalist class, polity, cambridge. sousa-santos, b. 1995, toward a new common sense: law, science and politics in the paradigmatic transition, routledge, new york. starr, a. 2000, naming the enemy: anti-corporate movements confront globalization, zed, london. van der pijl, k. 1998, transnational classes and international relations, routledge, london. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 18 goodman long frontier of counter-globalism white house 2002, national security strategy of the united states, president of the united states, washington dc. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 19 reference list portalgalleywyndham&read2010 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. the cemetery, the state and the exiles: a study of cementerio colón, havana, and woodlawn cemetery, miami marivic wyndham, university of technology sydney, and peter read, university of sydney cementerio colón, havana, is one of the great historical cemeteries of the world, and is generally held to be the second most important in latin america—in historical and architectural terms—after la recoleta in buenos aires. it was built in 1869 by the galician architect calixto arellano de loira y cardoso, a graduate of madrid’s royal academy of arts of san fernando, and who became colón’s first occupant when he died before his work was completed. yet for all its elegance and grandeur cementerio colón conceals as much as it displays. empty tombs and desecrated family chapels disfigure the stately march of cuban family memorials even in the most prominent of the avenues, and away from the central cross-streets, ruin. many of these are the tombs of exiled families, whose problems with caring for their dead have been complicated by residence in new countries. in this article we consider both the earthly remains of the ancestors and how the cuban-american diaspora of miami tries to come to terms with what it is powerless to prevent. the first impact of cementerio colón is a seemingly endless succession of tombs blinding white in the midday heat, few shade trees and nowhere to sit. in front of the main entrance, at the axes of the principal avenues avenida cristobal colón, obispo wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 2 espada and obispo fray jacinto, stands the central chapel apparently modelled on il duomo in florence. on every side rectangular streets lead geometrically to the cemetery’s 56 hectares, designed by loira to define the rank and social status of the dead with distinct areas, almost city suburbs: priests, soldiers, brotherhoods, the wealthy, the poor, infants, victims of epidemics, pagans and the condemned. the best preserved and grandest tombs stand on or near these central avenues and their axes. some two million cubans have left the island by one means or another since 1959. selfimposed exile began that same morning of 1 january at the dawn of the revolution and has continued to the present. in the early years, those weighing the possibilities asked themselves—will it get any worse? few imagined that they would not be allowed to return. the first organised mass-emigration scheme, pedro pan (1960–62), allowed 14,000 children to leave for miami. the next significant wave was some 125,000 marielitos in 1980, after the cuban government, following an economic downturn, announced that anyone who wanted to leave could do so. the most recent massemigration reached its peak in 1994 when the balseros (rafters), those despairing of a future in cuba during the so-called ‘special period,’ left illegally during terrible economic and physical hardship following the collapse of soviet aid to cuba (chávez 1999). in the last decade the chief constraint on emigration or escape is the disinclination of the usa to receive any more exiles or refugees, and the financial cost of leaving for mexico or other latin american countries. the small number of those allowed to leave will usually have to raise a huge ‘exit tax’—perhaps $7,000—imposed on them by the government (ordóñez 1998).1 whatever the motivations, the pain of leaving family and friends seems immediate and sharp. other costs become apparent over months or years, and may include the awareness that cuban-american society is by no means the paradise imagined by some who have never been there. finally comes the realisation to most of the full cost: the departure was forever, the homeland is locked in fading memories, and links once severed can never be reforged (pérez firmat 1995; arboleya 1996; grenier & pérez 2003; wyndham 2008). our paper concerns one of these latter-day, but nevertheless profound, costs in a culture 1 see also the virtual exhibit, ‘ the cuban rafter phenomenon: a unique sea exodus’ (2004). wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 3 that continues to take seriously its ancestors and its respect for the dead. it deals with the exiles’ inability to protect, from deterioration or vandals, the family tombs in cuba, and their parallel inability to decide how to preserve the remains of those who have died in the new country. our argument is largely drawn from reading the cemeteries as social artefacts. there are not many models on how to read cemeteries in this way. the anthropologist lloyd warner (1959), the rabbi and author rudolph brasch (1987), the architect howard colvin (1991), and one of the authors of this paper, the historian peter read (2003), have gone some way to explore their social meaning, but the vast literature on cemeteries is largely (and astonishingly) apt to present cemeteries in terms of tombstones, genealogies and locations only. in the end, as is perhaps proper in matters of the spirit, social scientists must draw their models on exploring cemeteries from the poets. while warner prosaically saw tombstones as ‘the hard enduring signs which anchor each man’s projections of his innermost fantasies private fears abut the certainty of his own death’ (1959: 280), to henry handel richardson, only richard mahoney’s perishable body was absorbed by the ‘rich and kindly earth of his adopted country,’ for his ‘vagrant, wayward spirit’ remained elsewhere and peregrine (1954: 831). federico garcia lorca was one of very many people of intuition who sensed the spirits of the buried dead nearby (gibson 1989: 385–86). we begin the journey a stroll of fifty metres in any direction reveals the same pride and achievement in the city’s and the nation’s culture reflected in the official guide, not matched even by descriptions of the city cathedral. the massive monument to the fuerzas armadas revolucionarias (far, the armed revolutionary forces) is a graceful marble open air pantheon containing the remains of national heroes guarded by two saluting bronze figures. what the cuban government wishes the visitor to absorb is contained in the handsome cemetery guidebook, the guide to the cristóbal colón necropolis in havana (1999). the text begins: just a hundred metres from the most cosmopolitan area of havana, 23rd street, and going up to 12th street to zapata; amid the curious contrasting combination between frenzied movement and placid seclusion we come across the majestic entrance to the cristóbal colón (christopher wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 4 columbus) necropolis. with a surface area of 56 acres it is considered to be the best monumental architectural cemetery in the world … and it offers a domain of extraordinary magnificence and beauty which fascinates the visitor (1999: 2). now follows the general description, exuberant even by the standards of cuban tourist literature: the cemetery is ‘a domain of extraordinary magnificence and beauty which fascinates the visitor,’ the carrara marble is of ‘virgin white richness,’ the monuments are of ‘incalculable’ worth; note the ‘magnificent greek pavilions’; here the ‘belligerence of the medieval castle emulates with [sic] the robust strength of the pyramids’ (2–3). while in cultural terms the cuban state has no quarrel with its spanish-catholic heritage, such an enthusiastic response to the religious reliquaries are as striking as they are rare on the island. but beyond the imagery, the piety, the quaintness and the anecdote, the guidebook seeks to amplify the material remains of the national heroes of cuba. cementerio colón is the nation’s principal repository for its heroes of independence and revolution. it desires its visitors to be instructed in, and to celebrate, the disjunction between colonial/republican failures and revolutionary achievement. like the permanent exhibitions of the museum of the revolution in central havana, the colón guidebook follows a precise and didactic agenda. each of the guidebook’s four suggested cemetery walking tours is designed to impress upon the visitor the inevitability of modern, especially revolutionary, history. the third itinerary, for instance, includes the tomb of gerardo abreu fontán, the pro-castro saboteur and insurrectionist who, in 1958, was ‘captured and tortured with all the horrors and cruelties imaginable until he died in silence.’ next is a monument to young spanish soldier conscripts, ‘the true cannon fodder of the colonial wars of spain,’ mobilised by the obligatory military service; then the martyrs of the 13th of march 1957, who ‘attacked the presidential palace in order to execute president fulgencio batista, the dictator who had flooded the country with blood’ (the guide 1999: 108–19). elsewhere visitors are invited to inspect the monument to the republican hero antonio guiteras holmes (actually buried in matanzas province), whose death ‘symbolised his bloody battles against the united states imperialist expansion in cuba’ (79), and the site at which people ‘worship’ at the tomb of the parents of josé martí, cuba’s foremost revolutionary hero of the wars of independence with spain. the general pantheon of the veterans and patriots commemorates the ‘glorious deaths of the leaders in the battle for independence’ (1). nor is victory at the bay of pigs omitted from the national wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 5 narration. fe de valle, who died in the incendiary attack on the famous department store el encanto two days before the failed invasion, is awarded this ponderous eulogy by the guidebook: [de valle was] the first victim in operation pluto …the military plan organized against cuba under the name ‘operation pluto’ by the central intelligence agency of the usa saw an air-sea invasion of the bay of cochinos, accompanied by a wave of sabotage and subversive internal actions during the days after the landing. this sabotage included setting fire to one of the largest department stories of the city. fe de valle, a humble worker, was carrying out the work round when this disaster struck. not realizing the danger she was in she tried to recover the money which the syndicate had collected for the infant schools, but she did not have time to get out of the building before it came crashing down on top of her. (154) our perambulation so far has done nothing to suggest the sudden and permanent departure of the many thousands of sons and daughters whose task it was to care for the family tombs of their ancestors. such evidence will not, however, be far to seek. much more is to be found in the colón cemetery than the state’s depiction of its heroic or pietistic monuments. as much as mourning a buried presence, the cemetery is a memorial to absence. to find the evidence of the departure of more than two million cuban citizens since the revolution one must put away the guidebook and explore a little further than the main thoroughfares. another street or two away, then, the cemetery begins to offer the historian, and the returning exile, more than national heroes. colón’s calculated resemblance to a real city, of central plaza, administration, grand avenues, humble streets and suburbs from very rich to very poor, speaks the life which in pre-revolutionary havana existed both outside and inside the cemetery walls. in the latin american catholic tradition, the monument erected above the coffin was held to be as important as what the tomb contained. in the richer precincts, monuments to the dead once competed with each other in opulence, architectural daring or familial piety, or trumpeted the family achievement. they do not compete in opulence any longer. we continue strolling down to this quiet corner in calle 10, where a man has stepped from his 1956 chevrolet to place a bunch of flowers on a well-kept grave. clearly at least one of the descendants of this family has remained after fifty-one years of revolutionary government. two streets away an exhumation is taking place, for a coffin has fulfilled its allotted two years in the ground and the space is needed for another burial next week. an extended family group of a hundred people are taking part in what is effectively a second funeral as the coffin wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 6 emerges from the ground. in the next few days the bones will be placed in a cement box and stored with the hundreds of thousands of others that can be seen stacked in several more or less discreet parts of the cemetery. no one can be certain of identities, especially of those who no longer have protectors. after seeing a program depicting an exhumation in cementerio colón on television, nedda g. de anhalt wrote: unas manos desgajan los restos de carne putrefacta de un esqueleto que aseguran es el de mi padre. pero yo se que esos huesos pertenecen a una desconocida. cubro con un pañuelo mi boca y nariz mientras con la otra mano sostengo en alto una rosa. (hands tear off the rest of the putrefying flesh of a skeleton they assure me that it belongs to my father. but i know that these bones belong to an unknown woman. i cover my mouth and nose with a handkerchief while with the other hand i hold out from above a rose.) (de anhalt n.d.) here in calle 14 a group of cemetery workers are unceremoniously disinterring half a dozen coffins of—who knows who they were? they seem to have no identification; surely they are the remains of those whose descendants departed, perhaps, decades ago. the men toss the coffins around as they lever off the more valuable lid from the unwanted pine box. the contents spill in ungainly heaps over the ground. the contents of the coffins, clothes, bones, loved objects, faded letters blow about in the wind or as the casual pedestrian steps over them, wait to be shovelled into the trailer. one cannot imagine such off-hand public treatment of the dead in la recoleta, or the general or municipal cemeteries of santiago de chile. such sights should not be altogether surprising in a nation at times desperately poor, without a crematorium, in an overcrowded cemetery with attitudes to death rather more frank and disclosed than in anglo saxon countries. few cubans have had the resources to spend on the preservation of family graves. the best that the mourners who remain can hope for is to keep the tomb swept and tidy, to change the flowers and to replace the wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 7 funerary objects decaying with age. it is not surprising that the guidebook authors make nothing of the thousands of decidedly unkempt or deteriorated graves of the cemetery. to do so would be to draw attention to the families of the exiles, the gusanos—the worms—whom the state takes such pains to diminish. the cuban nation will restore the abandoned or collapsing tombs of the heroes of the wars of liberation, but neither its finances nor its growing professional heritage consciousness will fill the empty tombs, replace the photographs, or do anything to restore the personal honour that once belonged to the families who began leaving their ancestors in 1959. nor in colón will it spend any money repairing the tombs of those judged to have been enemies of the revolution, whatever their status in republican times. consciousness of unfulfilled obligations and besmirched honour hang heavily on exile communities. to preserve those obligations was the reason why for many decades cuban exiles in miami drank a toast each christmas eve to ‘next year in cuba.’ not to do so was to show that one had given up the hope of return, or as years went by, the pretence of the hope of return. not to do so signified that they had forsaken the sacred trust to care for their inheritance, not least the tombs of their own parents and grandparents. surreptitiously—to avoid accusations that any money spent in cuba would serve to hold up the regime a little longer—some cuban americans began to send funds for tombs to be rewaxed to prevent the entry of moisture, or to repair the chapels and mausoleums, or to have the word clausurada (closed) inscribed upon them. (clausurada indicates that someone has paid a sufficient sum for the coffins inside to be left undisturbed.) others, from abroad, paid the management or remaining family members to place flowers on the grave of their mother on mother’s day, or her birthdate, date of death, or christmas. to the cemetery explorer the sense is confirmed that the state guidebook will speak only for the tombs of those whose families remained in support of the revolution. more revealing of whether or not a tomb has a local family protector is the condition of the shrine associated with the tombs of the once wealthy, the little chapels on the tombs, usually with windows and a glass or metal door. in these were placed, at the time of interment, perhaps a madonna, devotional objects, a shelf holding several photographs, urns, flowers—and a broom. some contain curtains, a chair or personal items of the deceased, so that the tomb of the dead becomes simultaneously a private living room wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 8 sealed—it was hoped—for eternity. while a tomb well kept by local families may be in disrepair, the vases and photographs will still be dusted, rust and water stains scrubbed off. the family members will be too busy keeping their heads above the nation’s perilous economic waters to spend money on further upkeep even if the materials for repair were available. but the chapels without a local protector, whose carers now live in the usa, spain or latin america, will soon be apparent. still disregarding the guidebook we continue our walking tour to the northwestern quadrant. almost the first tomb we encounter has been stripped of everything movable. the remaining urns, once white and fixed to the floor, are stained with lichens or dust. a few paces away in the next tomb, a jagged triangular piece has been ripped from the floor of this chapel, which forms the roof of the tomb below. the door is locked, making it impossible to see what lies beneath. pieces of the smashed segment lie about, and there is a lump of cardboard. at some point the space has been swept, to leave a neat but mysterious pile of grey and white stony rubbish on what remains of the roof of the tomb. in this next grave, twenty metres further, the curtains once adorning the chapel-tomb have rotted and turned dark with age. the sagging holes and blackening fragments dropping onto the marble bench beneath lend the tomb an aspect more of macabre mutability than perpetual peace. a photograph on the shelf has inexplicably fallen on its face. opposite, another tomb is entered by an exterior staircase that appears not to have been disturbed for forty years: one would need a machete to make an entrance. in the next avenue, the glass door of a chapel is smashed: only an iron grille prevents entry to the colourfully painted madonna, who, standing on a plinth, almost touches the barrel vaulted roof. still beautiful, she presides over a wheelbarrow, tools, cement bags, boxes and lumps of monumental masonry. oddly she does not seem so out of place here amidst the detritus, as the madonna in that empty violated tomb who now has nobody to protect. the glass windows in a tomb nearby have evidently been broken and crudely replaced with hardboard. cement falls off a corner to reveal the mundane brick beneath. an adjacent chapel has a smashed and broken door. one can enter to peer four metres to the bottom of the vault. all its former occupants have been removed. why? where to? when? attitudes to the catholic church in cuba, as in other socialist systems, have wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 9 varied between ungracious tolerance to intense persecution; during the worst repressions churches that managed to remain open at all, might have to be entered through a back door; the faithful, always known to the local workers’ collective, would have found promotion in their employment, and sometimes even to keep their job, difficult. at such times the devout used colón tombs as a private or family shrine, and perhaps still do. but why remove the coffin if the space was not intended for another? perhaps that topless, empty chamber was robbed first of its carrara marble. perhaps someone in downtown havana is enjoying dinner on a very heavy white tabletop; more likely the slabs have been broken up for carving. the cuban people have lived through some desperate times since 1959. the sudden cut-off from the long dynasties expected and assumed by their members to flourish in cuba forever, is never so clear as in the mausoleum of the family núñez gálvez. gracelessly the guidebook describes the tomb as ‘the result of tendencies which marked the guidelines of cuban architecture during the mid-1950s an architecture which used daring designs in search of modernity’(61). what may be clumsy translation does scarce justice to this strikingly avant-garde, though now deteriorating, 1950s piece of architectural bravura. the guidebook photo depicts the elegant, soaring roofline but it does not reveal the interior façade where are listed, in barely half a column, the names of the six of the deceased family names. the procession of the dead halts abruptly six months before the revolution: núñez álmaguer ago 3 de 1898 núñez pérez abr 4 de 1903 quintero carrión ene 12 de 1908 núñez pérez nov 22 de 1912 núñez quintero ene 12 de 1932 núñez basulto jul 17 de 1958 evidently for the núñez gálvez family the revolution came suddenly and unexpectedly. had the same slow rate of mortality continued, the columns would not have been filled for perhaps a thousand years. the photographs of several other striking tombs are presented in the guidebook, but not referred to in the text. presumably the authorities do not want attention drawn to them. one is that of the mother of carlos prío socorrás, the last democratically elected president of the cuban republic. another, strikingly modern tomb, and one of the most wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 10 beautiful 1950s tombs in the cemetery, is the mausoleum of the journalists of the newspaper el país, the reporters association pantheon. the above ground level section is a semi-elliptical glass, three metres deep. glass panels form both sides of an entrance chamber, perhaps to represent the transparency of truth. the reinforcing beams allude dramatically to the shape of a cross. although the architect has installed a little inspection window into the tomb at knee height on calle j, it was possible in 2000 for visitors to enter through the smashed glass door to explore. the guidebook photograph is angled to hide it. below the entrance level area a staircase descends to two levels below ground. barely half a dozen steps below the entrance the strong havana sun weakens and filters into airy columns of dust, the atmosphere grows sinister and strange. the shadowy darkening staircase continues downwards to invite the curious and the strong minded. in the bottom chamber, two levels below the ground, lies perhaps what one should expect in a country that has endured more than one special period of starvation and neglect. strange groups of letters are painted on the roof: kkk, and a word beginning neor. lidless cement boxes of bones lie everywhere. about half the chambers reserved for the boxes along one wall are filled, the names of the deceased daubed crudely on the outside. a dozen boxes lie on their sides or upside down, their contents spilling onto the floor. at the bottom of the stairs to one several human bones lie scattered on a pile of the same tiny white and grey fragments we saw in the empty tomb on calle f. these fragments are the decayed flesh of exhumed and destroyed bodies. one can imagine the course of events: a coffin in the empty tomb in the northwestern quadrant evidently was raised and emptied onto the floor of the chapel and the corpse ransacked, perhaps in the hope of extracting its gold teeth or jewellery. probably workmen discovered the calle f robbery and desecration a few days later. they perfunctorily swept the remains into a cement box, left the rest in a pile on the floor, and locked the grille. round the corner of this bottom chamber is a pile of another dozen boxes, their contents spilling over each in a pile of leg bones, clothes, hands, skulls, and other unrecognisable body pieces. sprawled on top of this singular heap is what appears to be the blackened bottom half of a naked human form. yet such apparent disrespect is arguably not the desecration of the dead, but reflects moments in the mundane life of a cemetery worker. clearly the bottom level of the tomb of the reporters has been resumed by the wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 11 cemetery employees as a work room, a preparation and disposal area more casual than disrespectful, where labourers reminiscent of hamlet’s sardonic gravedigger go about their diurnal business. ascend the stairs where the opaque filtering light reveals strange inscriptions, mysterious poems inscribed on the roof, walls and supporting pillars. we are in a huge, high chamber, one side of which holds the words and markings, the other a grid of burial chambers. a metre square, they resemble the spaces on the level below but bigger: here a full sized coffin was intended to be pushed and the entrance sealed. some spaces are indeed still closed. the generous proportions and elegance of the chamber mark the interior as well as the glass ellipse as one of the most exquisite mausoleums in the land. thus the first glance reveals what the tomb was meant to be. a second glance reveals what it now is. a third pinpoints the nightmare of all those charged with the care, across many continents and many centuries, of the revered and solemn dead—and must leave them behind. some of the spaces intended for coffins are empty. several others retain a casket that has been broken into with a pick or a sledge hammer. some coffins seem to be almost intact, the others only hold black and shattered remains. pieces of desiccated human bodies, perhaps decades old, lie athwart the smashed boxes or lie on the floor. what looks like a rib cage is half inside a coffin, half out. small and large pieces of bone and dark flesh are scattered in the shadows. written on the wall, mainly in what looks to be the same elegant hand, in black paint, are a number of verses. some are inscribed four metres from the floor. all are weirdly poetic reflections on death and cemeteries. one reads: al fin de la vida pensamientos hasta entonces no pensados surgen claramente del espíritu son como genios dichosos que se posan deslumbrantes en la cima de lo passado. (at the end of life thoughts unimagined until now rise clearly from the spirit they are like joyful beings which throw dazzling light on the summit of what has been.) wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 12 another reads, ’la vida no es solo un camino, sino una forma de vivir para aquellos que saben vivirla.’ (life is not only a track; rather it’s a form of living for those who know how to live it). the most sinister of all, hard to read because it must have been written by someone balanced on the shoulders of another, declaims: ‘aquellos que son condenados a morir no deberían ser condenados por defender el derecho a vivir’ (those who are condemned to die should not be condemned for defending the right to live). who could have inscribed such sentiments in such bizarre surroundings? was the tomb of the reporters—is the tomb of the reporters—a chamber of torture as well as death? were the reporters selected for some after-death punishment, and by whom? several explanations are possible, but the source of the desecration is probably linked to santería or other african-cuban religions. alonso cites a national sample of 5000 showing that 85 percent of cubans in 2000 admitted a belief in, or reliance on, the supernatural, while only 16 percent belonged to an organised religion (2010: 149, 154). before and after after the revolution santería and similar african-derived religions remained defined as cults. the more esoteric rituals were often practised in secret. el palo, for example, demands the ingestion of pieces of skull or finger tips whereby the living initiate becomes at one with the dead: no skulls or fingers are to be seen lying amidst the human remains scattered on cement floor (‘palo (religion)’ 2009). other cults, protestant in origin, also conduct rituals out of sight among the cemetery tombs. a prominent cuban anthropologist was eye-witness in 1995 to a nocturnal police raid on the tomb of the reporters in which a group of gay cultists were arrested for purported satanic practices. it is possible that some of the wall inscriptions were written by members of this group (anon. pers. com., jan 2004). a havana resident—his website name is ‘venus’—who visited colón in 2000 was appalled at what he found when, by chance, he ran into what he called ‘a mausoleum or something like it’ of marble and glass, marked only with the letters abc: their meaning was a mystery to him. everything, he said on his website, was in a state of disarray: si te asomabas a los cristales que servian de techo, podias ver todos los osarios en desorden, parecia, que en aquel lugar, lejos de encontrar reposo los difuntos, tenia el aspecto de haber sufrido una gran batalla. (if you looked through the glass ceiling, you could see that all the boxes had been disturbed; it seemed that in that place, far from finding rest, the dead had been through a great battle). (venus 2000) when he inquired of nearby workers as to ‘the motives for such violence,’ the answer wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 13 he received was an urgent appeal for him to write of what he had seen and in so doing alert those with loved ones buried there. the website continued: ‘es necesario que lo hagan sin falta y si tienen familiares en ese mauseoleo, por llamarlo de algun modo, vengan a cuba con urgencia a tratar de mejorar las condiciones de aquel lugar’ (it is vital that you do this without fail, and for those with relatives in that mausoleum, that they come to cuba urgently so as to improve the conditions of that place) (venus 2000). a second visitor to colón despaired at what he called ‘these acts of barbarism’: ‘la de tu difunto puede ser la próxima, nadie ve nada y parece que a nadie le interesa’ (your dead relative could be next, and no one sees anything and it seems no one cares). and yet, to what public authorities could he denounce such things?: en el cementerio colón, parece que los encargados de su conservación, no tienen ni ojos ni voz, pues los que descansan ya no parecen ser tenidos en cuenta y los que alli vigilan, solo tienen ojos para cuidar aquel lugar por el cual reciben algún dinero. (at colón cemetery, it seems that those in charge of its conservation have neither eyes nor voice, as those who rest there are not taken into account, and those who watch over them only have eyes to care for that place for which they receive some money) las verdaderas fotos de cuba, serían las que se publiquen una vez que cualquiera de las personas que visite ese lugar, con una camára en mano y sin ser profesional ponga a la vista de todos, lo que escasamente pueda alguien describir con sus palabras (the true photographs of cuba will be those published once anyone—it does not have to be a professional—who visits this place, with a camera in hand lays bare for all to see what can scarcely be described with words). (de flores 2000) not surprisingly, the degenerated state of the colón cemetery is by no means unknown to cuban-americans. one wrote, after visiting the cemetery: ‘al parecer serán tomadas medidas inmediatas de vigilancia con un cuerpo de serenos para que los disfuntos puedan descansar en paz … y sus familiares también’ (it appears that they will take immediate measures to establish cemetery viligantes so that the dead can rest in peace … and also their families.) (de la cova n.d.) another cuban american website on cementerio colón concludes with the observation that ‘el cementerio colón es un testigo mudo del deterioro de nuestro país después de la revolución de la desgracia del comunismo’ (the colón cemetery is a mute testimony to the deterioration of our country since the revolution of the disgrace of communism) (vizcaíno n.d.). the same website asserted that a robbed skull will cost between us$20 and $30. it alleged that a grandmother saw a child wearing the burial clothing of her granddaughter three days after her funeral. the webpage author, maría argelia vizcaíno, writes: wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 14 i don’t wish to alarm my compatriots in exile who have left their family dead behind, but to denounce the horrible fact … it is a sorrow that one of the most famous and beautiful cemeteries in our continent, the totalitarian system who holds power in cuba has brought to these extremes. may god take pity on the souls of our dead because their bones have not been able to rest in peace. (vizcaíno n.d.) but to limn the gathered darknesses of the tomb of the reporters is not necessarily to make a political judgement on the cuban state. there is no indication that the government wishes the cemetery to be in such a state; indeed the advance of afrocuban mortuary practices is decidedly unwelcome to the regime. nor is it surprising that an official text on el palo says nothing about its links with death rituals (barnet 1995). however, its priorities to first restore the spanish colonial architecture is obvious throughout the city. the cemetery of the exiles yet cuban-americans do not come to the desecration of colón with their own histories untroubled by trauma and doubt. exiles living in miami for much of their lives have been haunted by the memories of their unfulfilled deep filial obligations, and as they aged some became preoccupied with the dichotomy between their own future american resting places and those of their ancestors resting in cuba: in the case of my own family, when the unthinkable happened, and my parents’ ageing generation of cuban american exiles found themselves marooned indefinitely on foreign shores, the spectre of death in someone else’s land seemed the cruellest blow of their long years of exile. they were not the first cuban exiles to die so near, yet so far from their beloved island. exile has a long history in cuba. but they were our parents. these were our dead and something perverse seemed to overtake the natural order of things. (wyndham 2008: 268) probably the majority of cuban exiles who have died in miami are buried in woodlawn park cemetery, dade county. the contrasts with havana are striking. where cementerio colón is grossly overcrowded, with scarcely a tree or bench to succour the weary mourner, woodlawn is green and spacious. while colón families may expect their older family graves, at least, to be grouped together, woodlawn families may have to walk half a kilometre from one grave to the next, and frequently cannot remember the location of all the tombs they wish to visit. there are more visitors in colón, but fewer cars. there are many more architectural marvels, family plots, beautiful ornate chapels, eloquent statements of public service and effigies of la virgen de la caridad del cobre, the patron saint of cuba, but no cuban flags. in woodlawn the visitor will find more seats, lawns, trees, spaces, but fewer, far fewer, religious sculptures. a few tombs stand out—of the bacardí family, for example, or of jorge mas canosa, the founding wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 15 president of the cuban-american national foundation. the family names of the deceased are abbreviated down to two or three rather than, in the spanish style, perhaps as many as a half a dozen, in answer to an unspoken, ‘well that will do for now, until we get back to cuba.’ to construct an elaborate tomb after 1959 was to signal to the world that this family did not expect to return to the island soon. a lavish display would clearly imply that the future of cuban exiles was permanent united states residence and citizenship. many of those who first fled from castro’s revolution had already spent periods of exile in mexico, or in the dominican republic or the usa. often women and children did not bother to leave as the men endured—or enjoyed—a year or two away from domestic or workplace responsibility. from 1959 the exiles left castro’s cuba in the same expectation that they would triumphantly return within a year or two. the unspoken message of the dead was: ‘we do not wish to lie here permanently. do not enshrine us here.’ the failure of the bay of pigs invasion in 1961 was the first intimation that they might remain in exile in the long term, their lost places forlorn, their culture truncated, the graves of their ancestors uncared for. while the family of núñez gálvez expected to be inscribing the names of the family dead on their modernist tomb for hundreds of years in colón, the woodlawn dead were not expected to remain buried there even for the lifetime of their own children. some did not want even the impermanence of woodlawn. it is said that sprinkling the cremated ashes of exiles into the florida straits between miami and cuba is by no means unknown among the ageing first generation of exiles. such a practice is disdained in cuba itself, where contiguity with one’s family dead is still held firm. some explanations for the differences are obvious. miami’s cuban lifestyle is cars, money, multiple jobs, distance, ambition, declining religious rituals, rush. many second-generation cuban-americans would find it unreasonable to be asked to drive a parent or aunt to woodlawn to visit a grandmother, and they are not asked to do so. as in many other areas of the usa, the ceremonies of death have become less ritualised, less overtly religious, more commercialised. while, as in havana, most cubanamerican families will hire a funeral home for the wake over two or three days between the death and the burial, the cemetery service itself is usually short. there may be a police escort of the hearse requested, and paid for, in the will. it may be secular, just a wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 16 single eulogy, immediately after which almost all the mourners will retire as if insulating themselves from the more confronting ancient rituals of lowering the coffin and casting earth upon it. after the ceremony, woodlawn custom is to mark the burial site only by a bronze plaque and a removable metal flower holder. during a large burial service, people may stand, unknowing, on a grave covered by a mat for the duration of the service. woodlawn has inevitably claimed its own permanence in the lives and deaths of generations of cuban exiles. in the case of my family, an earlier political exile in the early 1950s had taken us to miami. there my paternal grandmother died and was buried. this was to be her temporary resting place, awaiting the time when things in cuba ‘improved’ and we could transport her remains to their rightful place at the family plot at cementerio colón. it was never a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when.’ as it happened, we returned to cuba until the revolution—and she stayed in woodlawn. before long, another period of exile had overtaken our plans to re-settle in cuba and, in 1959, we found ourselves once again living ‘temporarily’ in florida. where pilgrimages to her grave-in-exile became a regular part of family life. it was only with the death of my father in the early 1990s that we realised that my grandmother’s temporary grave had now become her final resting place: my father’s grave in the same cemetery ironically conferring permanence on hers. (wyndham 2008: 275) if the colón guidebook carries a photograph of (but makes no comment upon) the tomb of the mother of prío socorrás, in woodlawn stands the much more eloquent tomb of her more famous son. beneath a tiled cuban flag on the woodlawn cement monument is inscribed, ‘carlos prío socorrás 1903-1977,’ followed by ten lines of homily.2 could a guidebook explain why a cuban flag was thought to be necessary on his tomb, but not that of his mother? nowhere are the troubled and complex emotions of cuban exiles more apparent than in the configuration and the wording of the collective memorials. the grave of the unknown soldier reads: rendimos tributo a los martires de la patria en la tumba del cubano desconocido descansen en gloria eterna que todo un pueblo los recuerda y pelleará hasta vencer o morir 2 see the photograph of the tomb on the prío socorrás page on wikipedia (‘carlos prío socorrás’ 2010). wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 17 (we pay tribute to the martyrs of the patria in the tomb of the unknown soldier. rest in eternal glory that a whole nation may remember them and fight until victory or death) the call to arms evidently was not considered necessary for non-speakers of spanish for the bronze plaque in english at the other end of the tomb is factual rather than pleading: here rests in glory a cuban freedom fighter known only to god the main cuban woodlawn memorial to the unknown soldier is a huge slab of black marble on which is etched, in white, an outline of the island. its remarkable inscription reads: en memoria a todos los que por su amor a dios, a cuba y a la familia se unieron en el altar de la patria y nos precedieron en el sacrificio que dios les de su eterno descanso y a nosotros nos niegue la paz hasta que conquistemos para cuba la victoria in memory of all those who out of love of god, cuba and family met on the altar of the patria and went before us in the sacrifice. may god grant them eternal rest and deny us peace until we have won for cuba the victory the shame that ought to be felt by those who did not so sacrifice themselves is almost palpable. the area is enclosed to form a square bounded by hedges and flanked at the formal entrance by the cuban and us flags—legally necessary, but also serving to remind the americans that cuba must also be reclaimed by the efforts of the usa. despite the initial impermanence of woodlawn, probably no former havanan is planning to repatriate the remains of their ancestors to cementerio colón at the moment when the cuban communist regime falls. how long a period of political stability would be necessary to ensure that a returning exile might not be forced abroad again? nobody knows. nor, indeed, are the ageing generations of exiles planning to have their own wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 18 remains repatriated to the land of their birth. they wish to be honoured by their grandchildren, who, born in the usa, have made it obvious enough that they intend to remain citizens of the united states, not the new cuba. if the tie to the patria remains for older people firm, the link with ancestors has been broken. cuban-americans seem to prefer to have their remains placed close to family members who died since 1959— siblings and parents—rather than amongst more ancient descendants whose remains by now could have been destroyed. most young cuban-americans have no desire to be sacrificed to any overseas cause; their victory will be to prosper in the land in which they were born and to which they now believe they owe their first allegiance. indeed, the strong oppositional nature of cuban exile may well diminish rapidly for all the exiles without its nemesis, the castro brothers (grenier & pérez: 120). the chasm between the two cemeteries, the two peoples, the widening generations, may never now be bridged. acknowledements we acknowledge the helpful response of two anonymous referees to the first draft of this article. portions of this article are adapted from peter read, ‘and the dead remain buried,’ humanities research, vol. 10, no. 3 (2003): 47–55. reference list aruca, n. g. menocal, l. & shaw, e. 1996, ‘the cristóbal colón cemetery in havana,’ the journal of decorative and propaganda arts, vol. 22, cuba theme issue, 37–56. arboleya, j. 1996, the us-cuba migration conflict. melbourne: ocean press. arenas, r. 1995, antes que anochezca. barcelona: tusquets editores. barnet, m. 1995, cultos africanos: la regla de ocha. la regla del palo monte. la habana: artex. brasch, r. 1987, permanent addresses. sydney, collins. ‘carlos prío socarrás’ 2010, wikipedia. online, available: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/carlos_prio_socarras [accessed 1 july 2010]. chávez, e. r. 1999, ‘the migratory crisis of the summer of 1994,’ cuban migration today. havana: josé martí. colvin, h. 1991, architecture and the after-life. new haven, cn: yale university press. ‘the cuban rafter phenomenon: a unique sea exodus’ 2004, university of miami digital library program. online, available: http://balseros.miami.edu [accessed 2 dec. 2010]. de anhalt, n. g. n.d, ‘ritmos,’ elate.com. online, available: http://www.elateje.com/0307/ poesia030701.htm [accessed 1 july 2010]. de flores, d. 2000, ‘cementerio.’ realidad cubana, conexion cubana. online, available: http://www.conexioncubana.net/realidad/urbanismo/cementerio.htm [accessed 1 feb. 2010]. de la cova, a. n.d., ‘santería, huesos.’ rose-hulman college. online, available: http://www.rosehulman.edu/delacova/religion/santeria-huesos.htm [accessed 12 july 2003]. garcía, m. c. 1996, havana usa: cuban exiles and cuban americans in south florida. 1959-1994. berkeley: university of california press. grenier, g. j., & perez, l. 2003, the legacy of exile: cubans in the united states. boston: allyn and bacon. wyndham and read the cemetery, the state and the exiles portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 19 the guide to the cristobal colón necropolis in havana 1999, la habana: com-relieve sa, fid-escudo de oras, sa eec. ordóñez, c. g. 1998, como éramos y por qué nos fuimos. miami: original impressions. ‘palo (religion)’ 2009, wikipedia. online, available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/palo_(religion) [accessed 2 dec. 2010]. pérez firmat, g. 1994, vida cultural cubanoamericana. madrid: colibri. _____ 1995, next year in cuba: a cubano’s coming-of-age in america. new york: doubleday. read, p. 2003, haunted earth. kensington: university of new south wales press. richardson, h. h. 1954, the fortunes of richard mahoney. melbourne: reprint society. venus 2000, ‘una visita al cementerio.’ realidad cubana, conexion cubana. online, available: http://www.conexioncubana.net/realidad/urbanismo/ cementerio.htm [accessed 1 feb. 2003). vizcaíno, m. a. n.d., ‘el cementerio de colón.’ cubanmotives.com. online, available: http://www.cubanmotives.com.espanol/articulos/maria_vizcaino/elcementerio_de_colón [accessed 1 feb. 2003]. warner, l. 1959, the living and the dead. new haven, cn: yale university press. wyndham, m. 2008, ‘dying in the new country,’ in p. allatson & j. mccormack (eds), exile cultures, misplaced identities. amsterdam & new york: rodopi, 267–76. our new cathedrals: spirituality and old-growth forests in western australia our new cathedrals: spirituality and old-growth forests in western australia david worth, national native title tribunal this essay explores why two western australian (wa) social movement organisations (smos) on opposite sides of the logging debate have continued to contest the forest policy issue after thirty years.1 implicit in this focus is an understanding that other major australian environmental debates were concluded more quickly.2 during my research i analysed census data gathered by the australian bureau of statistics (abs) for the period 19712001. i chose this starting point as it coincided with an intensification of the debate over the appropriateness of wa’s forest policy following the formation of the campaign to save native forests (csnf) in 1969 (mills 1986, 229). this paper reports the findings from my research and subsequent exploration of other data sets to investigate particular social and economic factors about the people living in the south-west of western australia. i utilise the new social movement (nsm) theoretical approach (inglehart 1977; maheu, ed. 1995; melucci 1980) and propose that the demographic and economic factors identified from the abs data may provide an explanation for some of the change in public attitude toward the logging of the remaining native forests in wa. the new public attitude became more obvious in the late 1990s and assisted the anti-logging smos to achieve the end of logging after a 32year campaign. at the 2001 state election the australian labour party gained power and swiftly moved to stop the logging of old growth native forests (the west australian 2001, 1). i unexpectedly discovered that the level of reported religious affiliation had fallen dramatically in the south-west of wa throughout the period of the anti-logging campaign. i 1 the debate over the logging and woodchipping of native forests in australia has been traced by dargavel (1995) back to the seminal publication by the routleys of the fight for the forests (1973). 2 for examples of particular australian environmental campaigns, see hutton and connors (1999). portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol.3, no.1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal worth our new cathedrals suggest that those west australians who now report no religious affiliation fulfill their spiritual needs by a greater connection to the aesthetic qualities offered by the natural environment, particularly old-growth forests. theoretical framework while some authors contest the nomenclature of ‘new’ (cohen 1985, 663), most agree that there is something worth studying about the range of social movements (such as peace, antinuclear, gender and environmental) that have proliferated in developed western societies since the mid-1970s. cohen identified the rapidity of their formation, their replication in many western countries, and their influence on political systems, as defining factors of these movements. the new social movement literature assisted me in understanding how changes in public values affected the external political and social environment in wa and in exploring how the changes in values are linked to particular socio-demographic changes in wa. the labeling of movements involved in campaigning on issues, such as the environment, as ‘new’ is often made against the approach to ‘older’ movements as movements of the working class opposed to the power of ‘capital’ (burgmann 1993, 5). thus, the nsm approach defies earlier marxist class-based understandings of social movements, such as burgmann’s, and focused on factors that developed new values. burgmann claims that nsms are mainly supported by people from the middle social class, and their activists and intellectual core supporters were often well-educated public sector employees, such as teachers. further, she claims that the nsm support base consisted of social classes that were immune from the commercial and economic pressures that were a characteristic of the older movements (1993, 1-6). berger et al. (1973, 170) highlight how the importance of ‘intellectuals’ or ‘elites’ derives from their origins in a social class that acted as a ‘carrier group’ for new ideologies and values in western societies. likewise, scott (1990, 138), while recognising that the new politics appeal to more than class interests, state that nsms ‘are typically either predominantly movements of the educated middle classes, especially the “new middle class”, or of the most educated/privileged section of the less privileged groups.’ the involvement of society’s welleducated sector is an important point of focus in this paper. inglehart’s (1977, 28) empirical analysis of surveys in the early 1970s in six european portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 2 worth our new cathedrals community countries led him to propose that individuals brought up in western countries under conditions of peace and relative prosperity since world war ii (such as australia) would be most likely to have ‘postmaterial’ values. according to inglehart, the shift in values away from ‘materialist’ concerns about economics and physical security caused ‘the decline of elite-directed political mobilisation and the rise of elite-challenging issue orientated groups’ (1977, 28). in inglehart’s view, policy formation on many issues (such as the environment) has thus moved from that led by mainstream political parties, with their traditional allegiance to labour (in australia the australian labor party, alp) or capital (the liberal party/national party coalition), to a situation whereby nsms construct new policy ideas and approaches. in other words, inglehart suggests that changing values within a society facilitate the emergence of new social advocacy organisations that, in turn, shape new government policies as the policy elite respond to these new pressures. pakulski and crook (1998, 5) cite other researchers’ concerns with inglehart’s reliance on value categories, as well as his inability to explain how new individual values translate into a coherent environment movement. however, gundelach (1984, 1049) supports inglehart’s ideas of postmaterial values and develops them further by arguing that ‘new’ movements have common features and are related to the transition from an industrial society to a postindustrial one. inglehart and abramson (1995, 3) conclude that the major long-term force driving the increase in postmaterial values was generational replacement. they report that about 40 percent of the adult european population was replaced between 1970 and 1990, and argue that these older people were replaced with younger people with more postmaterial values. i utilise this idea of different generational values to understand changes in the southwest of wa. research setting the federal government’s resource assessment commission (rac) conducted research in 1991 that is unique in that it is the only research that has utilised inglehart’s framework in an australian setting. in a national poll conducted during its inquiry into the australian forest industry, the rac (1991, 1) found that the majority of australians were in favour of the halting of logging in national estate forests, even if it caused economic hardship. they also found that the poll respondents most frequently nominated ‘the environment’ as a national problem, surpassing economic issues such as unemployment and interest rates. a multivariate analysis of their survey data indicated that involvement in social movements and personality portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 3 worth our new cathedrals values were the strongest predictors of individual attitudes towards the forests. these results (rac 1991, 8) also confirmed inglehart’s earlier findings (1977, 28) that people aged over 55 years have a far less postmaterial orientation than younger age groups. one critical outcome of the rac’s research in relation to attitudes to environmental issues was that it found that opposition to using native forests for economic purposes (e.g. logging and woodchipping) was strongly related to three factors: socio-economic status, such as having a university degree; being female; and having visited a native forest in the previous year (rac, 1991, 44). the australian bureau of statistics (abs) has been tracking australian environmental attitudes every two years since 1992 with similarly worded questions to those asked by the rac. its latest report provides data over a range of issues and finds that australians with a higher weekly household income have greater concern for environmental problems than other socioeconomic groups. in line with the rac poll, the survey found that concern for environmental problems increases with education levels: 70 percent of people with skilled vocational training expressed environmental concern, and this figure rises to 90 percent for people with postgraduate university degrees (2001, 20). both of these findings from the abs support inglehart’s findings that income and education levels predict postmaterial attitudes toward the environment. quekett (2000, 20) suggests that wa people were ‘the most environmentally-aware people in australia.’ table 1 presents data from the 2001 australian election survey to show that higher percentages of wa electors agree that environmental issues are extremely important to them. table 1: state ranking of the importance of protecting the environment wa sa vic act nsw tas qld nt extremely important 49% 49% 48% 47% 46% 45% 42% 67% quite important 45% 41% 43% 45 % 45% 40% 48% 17% not important 6% 10% 9% 7% 9% 16% 11% 17% (anu 2002)3 3 the wording of the question was: “here is a list of important issues that were discussed during the election campaign. when you were deciding about how to vote, how important was each of these issues to you personally? environment”. these results include the responses from only 6 voters from the northern territory. that nt sample was only 15 people. portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 4 worth our new cathedrals the total population in wa in 2000 was about 1.89 million people, with most (1.39 million) residing in the capital city of perth and its surrounding suburbs (abs 2002). approximately 19,000 people lived in the south-west region that contains most of wa’s remaining native forests—the small area bounded by the coast and an imaginary line between busselton in the west and albany in the south (see the map below). the data reported below examines some of the changes that occurred to population, education, religious affiliation and industry in the south-west region of wa during the period 1971-2001. in particular, it focuses on three local government areas (lgas) about 400km south of perth. these are: manjimup, which contains the majority of wa’s native forest reserves, and the denmark lga to the east and the augusta-margaret river lga to the west. western australia’s south-west local government areas research results population changes table 2 (below) identifies the static nature of population growth within the manjimup lga over the 1971-2001 period compared with the lgas on either side of it. the lower population growth rate of 15 percent over the 30 year period for manjimup can be explained by two factors: the greater use of technology in lieu of labour in logging forests; and the overall declining output of the wa timber industry. the higher growth rate of the augusta-margaret river lga to the west (320 percent) can be explained by the dramatic growth of new portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 5 worth our new cathedrals industries in that region (e.g. the tourist, mining and vineyard industries, described in more detail below). table 2 indicates that all three lgas suffered a slight population slump in the early 1970s and their later population growth seems to coincide with the period after the first vineyards were established in the region in 1968 (zekulich 2002, 12). table 2. south-west regional population growth (1971-2001) 2,000 4,000 6,000 8,000 10,000 12,000 19 71 19 76 19 81 19 86 19 91 19 96 20 01 year p op ul at io n manjimup a-margaret river denmark (abs 1976; abs 1986; abs 1996; abs 2002) the higher population growth in the denmark and margaret river lgas seems to be due to people migrating to these regions rather than from internal population growth. this is shown in table 3 (below), which compares the numbers of people born in each lga in 1971 and the number in the corresponding 30-34 age group in 2001. this table shows that in 2001 there were less people in the latter age group in manjimup than were born in 1971, while this cohort has nearly tripled in the augusta-margaret river lga due to migration. migration to these areas can be explained by a number of factors, including the greater number of perth people retiring to live in the south-west, a beautiful region that is close to both the coast and the remaining native forests. additionally, younger and better-educated people were attracted by new employment opportunities in the new industries in the region. the economic growth over the period 1970-2000 has seen the coastal region between bunbury and augusta host a new range of industries, services and employment opportunities. table 4 (below) compares the population distribution for all three south-west lgas, and shows a higher percentage of the population in the margaret river lga for people in the prime employment age cohort portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 6 worth our new cathedrals (30-50 years). this migration to the margaret river and denmark lgas will have brought people with higher education levels, such as professional support service staff (e.g. doctors, teachers, government staff and managers). such people are likely to be more supportive of postmaterial values toward the environment (burgmann 1993; scott 1990). table 3. lga comparison of population cohorts (1971-2001) local government area no. of people in 0-4 age group (1971) no. of people in 30-34 age group (2001) % of original 1971 pop. group in 2001 manjimup 968 670 69% denmark 145 271 187% augusta-margaret river 286 804 281% (abs 1971; abs 2002) table 4. lga population distribution (1996) 0.000 0.020 0.040 0.060 0.080 0.100 0.120 0_ 4 5_ 9 10 _1 4 15 _1 9 20 _2 4 25 _2 9 30 _3 4 35 _3 9 40 _4 4 45 _4 9 50 _5 4 55 _5 9 60 _6 4 65 _6 9 70 _o ve r age groups % o f p op . manjimup den. mr (abs 1996) education authors writing about nsms have found an association between education levels and attitudes supportive of these nsms (burgmann 1993; crook & pakulski 1995). table 5 (below) identifies an increase in university qualifications4 for all three south-west lgas over the last 30 years. in 1971manjimup had a similar level of residents with university 4 these abs education figures include people with bachelor degrees, postgraduate diplomas and higher degrees (eg phds). portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 7 worth our new cathedrals qualifications compared to the margaret river lga and twice that of the denmark lga. by 2001 it had less than 6 percent of its residents with university qualifications while the two lgas on either side had nearly 50 percent more. table 5. level of university qualifications in lgas (1971-2001) 1971 qualifications 2001 qualifications region no. % no. % manjimup 56 0.6 572 5.7 denmark 6 0.3 402 9.2 augusta -margaret river 24 0.8 911 9.2 wa 12,728 1.2 174,001 9.4 australia 177,639 2.0 1,918,913 10.1 (abs 1971; abs 2002) religion an important demographic change is the reported religious affiliation of those living in all three lgas. in 1971 the south-west lgas had a similar proportion of christians and those reporting no religious attachment to the figures for wa and australia as a whole.5 however, by 2001 all three south-west lgas had fewer christians and more people with no religious attachment than either the wa or australian average (table 6, below). manjimup, of the south-west lgas, was the closest to the national and state averages with 60 percent reporting themselves as christian compared to the state average of 63 percent. table 7 (below) tracks the changes in religious affiliation for the three south-west lgas over the 30 year period. this indicates that the changes in religious affiliation plateaued in 1996, but remain at very high levels compared to other wa and australian lgas. the denmark lga has nearly twice the national average of people reporting no religious affiliation. 5 respondents are asked to identify their religion by the major beliefs (e.g. christian, buddhist) as well as ‘no religion’ which includes agnosticism, atheism, humanism and rationalism. portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 8 worth our new cathedrals table 6: reported religious orientation (1971-2001) 1971 christian other religion no religion region % of pop. % of pop. % of pop manjimup 7,685 88% 0.1% 595 7% denmark 1,518 85% 0.1% 131 7% a-margaret river 2,650 85% 0.0% 254 8% wa 869,878 84% 0.6% 90,361 9% australia 10,990,379 86% 0.8% 855,676 7% 2001 christian other religion no religion region % of pop. % of pop. % of pop. manjimup 6,073 60% 0.5% 2,445 24% denmark 2,138 49% 1.4% 1,364 31% amargaret river 5,059 51% 1.0% 2,782 28% wa 1,160,787 63% 2.2% 361,011 19% australia 12,764,342 67% 2.9% 2,905,993 15% (abs 1971; abs 2002) table 7: changes in religious affiliation (1971-2001) 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% d en m ar k 19 71 19 76 19 86 19 91 19 96 20 01 m an jim up 1 97 1 19 76 19 86 19 91 19 96 20 01 m ar ga re t r 1 97 1 19 76 19 86 19 91 19 96 20 01 christian no religion (adapted from abs 1971; abs 1986; abs 1996; abs 2002) portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 9 worth our new cathedrals industry changes in the south-west by the end of the twentieth century, the export value of timber products (excluding woodchips) had fallen dramatically to $19 million, or less than 0.1% of wa’s total exports (abs 1998, 309). at the beginning of the twentieth century timber exports represented about 10 to 12% of wa’s annual exports and in 1910 they were valued at $500 million in 2000 australian dollar terms (forestry department 1969). other export commodities developed in the later part of the twentieth century, such as iron ore ($3,800 million per annum), petroleum products ($3,800 million per annum) and natural gas ($1,900 million per annum), had annual export values far greater than those for timber exports (abs 2002, 13). within the period 1920-70 timber had moved from being a critical wa export product to a peripheral one. in contrast, tourism and vineyard industries have grown in significance. a report by the wa tourism commission (2001) indicated that the value of domestic visitors to the south-west region was as high as $422 million, with over 1.5 million domestic visitors staying overnight.6. importantly, in terms of my research, more than 76 percent of the visitors to the south-west were from the perth region with 90 percent travelling to the region by car (watc 2001, 3). nearly half of these domestic visitors to the region had an annual household income of more than $52,000 per annum—substantially higher than the average annual income for wa (watc 2001, 5). these figures indicate the easy access and use of the south-west region for holidays and recreation by middle class and wealthy people from perth. popular activities enjoyed by these domestic visitors included visiting parks and the forest. this indicates a strong attachment between perth residents and the natural attractions of the south-west. the west australian premier reported that by the late 1990s the tourism industry employed 7,000 people in the south-west, while the forestry industry employed just over 1,000.7 similarly, in 2000 overseas grape export volumes from wa increased to more than 40 times that of 1990 levels (abs 2001b, 3). the export value of $31.1 million (dlgrd 2002, 13) was twice that reported for timber exports in the same period (calm 2000, 95). the economic value to wa, however, is not limited to its overseas exports: interstate wine exports in 2000 were valued at $72.3 million (dlgrd 2000, 13) and the wine industry also contributed to the growth of the south-west tourism industry outlined above. the wine 6 some people made more than one visit to the south-west and it was visited by 72,000 international visitors. 7 hansard wa legislative assembly 4 may 1999, 7756/2. portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 10 worth our new cathedrals industry’s value to south-west regional economies is also important in terms of employment. wine-related employment is centred on the margaret river lga, which has nearly 50 percent of the wine employees in the south-west. further data on key factors the information gathered above indicates that the changes in anti-logging attitudes between 1971 and 2001 in the south-west lgas can be explained by an influx of younger, better educated people who came to work in the new non-forest-based industries. in terms of the nsm literature, important factors are the high level of non-religious affiliation, gender, and the education levels of these intra-state migrants. the falling level of no reported religious affiliation in the south-west lgas is unusual for the state. the only other lgas in wa with levels above 30% are in remote lgas with smaller mining populations consisting of young and well-educated men. i do not further discuss the importance of gender as a factor in the development of new values toward the natural environment and participation in nsms but have done so elsewhere (worth 2004). table 8: concern for logging, by religious affiliation no religion catholic anglican uniting orthodox presbyterian not urgent 1 3.2% 5.0% 5.1% 9.6% 3.4% 8.3% 2 9.5% 14.0% 12.7% 9.0% 19.0% 15.5% fairly urgent 3 15.6% 27.7% 26.9% 28.8% 27.6% 26.2% 4 20.4% 20.0% 17.2% 23.1% 17.2% 16.7% 4 20.4% 20.0% 17.2% 23.1% 17.2% 16.7% very urgent 5 51.3% 33.3% 38.0% 29.5% 32.8% 33.3% (anu 2002) 8 the link i suggest between the absence of a religious affiliation and the development of new attitudes to the logging of forests in wa is supported by the results obtained from the national 2001 australian election study (table 8). this shows that voters reporting no religious affiliation have a far higher concern about the logging of native forests than do those with various christian religious affiliations. more than 86 percent of those surveyed with no religious affiliation rank their concerns for the logging of forests as fairly or very urgent. this 8 the wording of the question was ‘in your opinion, how urgent are each of the following environmental concerns in this country? logging of forests.’ portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 11 worth our new cathedrals survey also indicates that those with post-secondary education qualifications have a greater concern for the logging of native forests than those without one (table 9), supporting my proposal that rising levels of higher education in wa also helps to explain the change in values toward the logging of native forests in south-west lgas between 1971-2001. table 9. concern for logging, by education qualification post-graduate graduate diploma other none not urgent 1 1.7% 2.9% 4.9% 4.2% 7.8% 2 7.5% 15.0% 11.5% 14.1% 10.9% fairly urgent 3 27.0% 17.0% 21.3% 24.1% 28.1% 4 21.3% 24.8% 19.7% 20.5% 16.7% very urgent 5 42.5% 40.3% 42.6% 37.1% 36.4% (anu 2002) there appears to be no research data about a person’s attitude to the environment and their spiritual needs. i argue that those west australians who report no religious affiliation have their spiritual needs met by non-religious sources, such as the aesthetic qualities of the natural environment in the south-west. the anti-logging smos seem to have recognised this and a key part of their campaign was the use of images of old-growth forests in newspaper advertisements, campaign posters and tv news stories. these images formed an important part of their campaign to particularly reach west australians who had not recently visited the native forests in the south-west. for example, on 4 june 1998, a large colour photo of wellknown football coach mick malthouse beside the stump of a large karri tree that had been logged, appeared on the front page of the west australian. the accompanying story announced his opposition to the logging of old-growth forests (miller 1998, 1). this photograph, placed in a prominent location in wa’s only daily newspaper, was an example of reich’s suggestion that new public attitudes can be altered by images rather than by reasoning and the statement of facts (1988, 79). the effective use of images in environmental campaigns in australia dates back to the franklin dam campaign in tasmania (the wilderness society 1983). the anu data above supports the argument that new spiritual values that encompass the natural environment are also linked to the opposition to the logging of old-growth forests. there needs to be more research undertaken to see how an attachment to the natural environment might provide a person’s spiritual needs and how it might differ from just a new aesthetic approach to the environment. a recent example from the uk supports the argument portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 12 worth our new cathedrals on the importance of an attachment to the natural environment rather than an industrial or human-made structure. this example also provides some non-australian evidence against the argument that people support environmental causes because their higher levels of education gives them a better understanding of the science behind the issues. environmentalists have been strong supporters of renewable energy but in this case from the uk they have joined the campaign against the development of wind power. the guardian noted the comments of one green opponent of a new wind farm: but it essentially comes down to this. the colour, shape, form and movement of the physical infrastructure is obviously man-made. it introduces an angular, lined and discordant visual impact into a landscape which is valued precisely because it is one of the few pieces left in the uk where such development is noticeably absent. to make matters worse, the movement of the blades has the additionally harmful impact of constantly drawing attention [to itself]. there is no condition which will mitigate or limit the harm. (ward 2005) conclusion one clear finding reported in this paper has been the identification of major demographic changes in the south-west lgas on either side of the manjimup lga. intra-state migration to the south-west from perth has included a generation of younger people with a university education, without a religious affiliation and presumably new values in relation to the remaining native old growth forests. a common comment from both the anti-logging and prologging supporters i interviewed was a confirmation that the increase in population in the south-west over the past two decades was associated with an increase in the number of antilogging local environment groups (e.g. the south coast environment group). data presented from a national survey (anu 2001) support my finding that people in the south-west with no religious affiliation and a university education strongly supported opposition to the further logging of native forests, rather than a more material approach to the natural environment. these demographic changes in the south-west of wa have been associated with new industries such as tourism, wine-growing and their related services industries, such as shortstay accommodation. in line with inglehart’s theories of social change, these industries are associated with a post-industrial society. however, their location in a region with high environmental values could also place them as ‘postmaterial’ industries in that people watching whales, visiting vineyards and bushwalking through the old-growth forests are not receiving material benefits from their efforts. a high proportion of those now living in the south-west have no religious affiliation and i have argued that these new industries provide them with experiences that meet their spiritual needs. portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 13 worth our new cathedrals obviously, religious affiliation and spirituality are different, but related, concepts. the information i have presented in regard to the recent development of a new anti-logging forest policy in wa suggests that the relationship between levels of religious affiliation, development of spiritual feelings, and new public values to native forests and the broader natural environment, is worthy of more detailed research. reference list abs 2002, [online]. available at: www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs%40.nsf/94713ad445ff1425ca25682000192af2/0db74c39e ee3a02fca256b350010b402!opendocument [accessed 14 aug., 2002]. —— 2001, australia’s environment: issues and trends (4613.0), australian bureau of statistics, canberra. —— 2001b, australian wine and grape industry (1329.0), 15 mar., australian bureau of statistics, canberra. —— 1998, west australian year book no.34 (1300.5), australian bureau of statistics wa office, perth. —— 1996, census of population and housing, clib96 [online]. available at: http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/database/db.edo/brief?sid=clib96 [accessed 24 may 2001]. —— 1992, labour statistics, australia (6101.0), australian bureau of statistics, canberra. —— 1986, census: profile of legal local government areas usual residents counts, wa (2473.0), australian bureau of statistics, canberra. —— 1976, census: characteristics of the population and dwellings in local government areas, wa (2427.0-2434.0), australian bureau of statistics, canberra. —— 1971, census: characteristics of the population and dwellings in local government areas part 5 wa (2.89.5), australian bureau of statistics, canberra. anu 2002, australian election study 2001ssda study no.1048, australian national university, canberra. berger, p. et al. 1973, the homeless mind: modernization and consciousness, random house, new york. burgmann, v. 1993, movements for change in australian society, allen & unwin, sydney. calm 2000, annual report, 1999-2000, department of conservation and land management, perth. cohen, j. 1985, ‘strategy or identity: new theoretical paradigms and contemporary social movements,’ social research, 52.4, 663-716. crook, s. & pakulski, j. 1995, ‘shades of green: public opinion on environmental issues in australia,’ australian journal of political science, vol. 30, 39-55. dargavel, j. 1995, fashioning australia's forests, oxford university press, oxford. dlgrd 2002, western australian wine industry in 2002, 2nd ed, department of local government and regional development, perth. forestry department 1969, 50 years of forestry in western australia, wa government printer, perth. gundelach, p. 1984, ‘social transformations and new forms of voluntary associations,’ social science information, 23.6, 1049-1081. hutton, d. & connors, l. 1999, a history of the australian environment movement, cambridge university press, cambridge. portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 14 worth our new cathedrals inglehart, r. & abramson, p. 1995, value change in global perspective, university of michigan press, ann arbor. inglehart, r. 1977, the silent revolution: changing values and political styles among western publics, princeton university press, princeton nj. maheu, l. (ed.) 1995, social movements and social classes: the future of collective action, sage publications, london. melucci, a. 1980, ‘the new social movements: a theoretical approach,’ social science information, 19.2, 199-226. miller, n. 1998, ‘coach fuels logging row,’ the west australian, 4 june, 1. mills, j. 1986, the timber people: a history of bunnings limited, bunnings ltd, perth. pakulski, j. & crook, s. (eds.) 1998, ebbing of the green tide? environmentalism, public opinion and the media in australia, university of tasmania, hobart. quekett, m. 2000, ‘forests row spurs wa's green fears,’ the west australian, 1 january, 20. rac 1991, community attitudes to the environment, forests and forest management in australia, forest and timber inquiry report 91/09, resource assessment commission, canberra. reich, r. 1988, the power of public ideas, ballinger, cambridge, mass. routley, r. & v. 1973, the fight for the forests: the takeover of australian forests for pines, woodchips and intensive forestry, australian national university, canberra. scott, a. 1990, ideology and the new social movements, unwin hyman, london. the wilderness society 1983, franklin blockade, the wilderness society, hobart. ward, d. 2005, ‘battle of the turbines splits green lobby,’ the guardian, 20 april [online]. available at: www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1463589,00.html [accessed 20 apr. 2005]. watc 2001, south-west tourism research review: overnight domestic visitor activity in the region: 2000, wa tourism commission, perth. west australian, the, n.a., 2001, 23 may. western australia 1999, parliamentary debates, legislative assembly, 4 may, 7756/2 (r. court, premier). worth, d. 2004, reconciliation in the forest: an exploration of the conflict over the logging of native forests in the south-west of western australia, unpublished phd thesis, murdoch university, perth. zekulich, m. 2002, ‘vigneron turns fishy to enhance a white,’ the west australian, 22 january, 12. portal vol.3, no.1 january 2006 15 our new cathedrals: spirituality and old-growth forests in w theoretical framework while some authors contest the nomenclature of ‘new’ (cohen research setting the federal government’s resource assessment commission (rac population changes table 2 (below) identifies the static nature of population g local government area no. of people in 0-4 age group (1971) no. of people in 30-34 age group (2001) % of original 1971 pop. group in 2001 manjimup 968 670 69% denmark 145 271 187% augusta-margaret river rivriver 286 804 281% (abs 1971; abs 2002) christian other religion no religion christian other religion no religion industry changes in the south-west by the end of the twentieth century, the export value of tim further data on key factors the information gathered above indicates that the changes in conclusion one clear finding reported in this paper has been the identi reference list the way to entrepreneurship: the way to entrepreneurship: female entrepreneurs’ education and work experience in jiaocheng county, shanxi province, the people’s republic of china1 minglu chen, university of technology, sydney the workshop of a private clothes factory in jiaocheng this paper examines the education background and work history of a newly emerged group of entrepreneurs in the people’s republic of china (prc)—women.2 1 i would like to thank david s.g. goodman, elaine jeffreys, and the two anonymous reviewers of portal, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal 2 the findings in this paper are part of a larger project, china’s invisible economic leadership: women in family enterprises, funded by the australia research council, which analyzes the social development and chen way to entrepreneurship understandably, those who study women in china would desire to reach a conclusive picture of the overall situation of women’s status in this country. however, considering china’s geographic vastness, the enormous population and the unequal economic development between the north and the south, the mountainous and coastal areas, different provinces and even different regional areas within one province, such a conclusion seems to be impossible to achieve. moreover, the rapid economic development in the reform era adds to the complex situation. available literature on the educational background of female entrepreneurs in the prc offers a contradictory picture. a survey conducted by the china female entrepreneurs association between 1996 and 2001 claims that 55.8 percent of female entrepreneurs had received a college or university education (‘zhongguo nü qiyejia: weishenme tamen geng rongyi chenggong’, 2003). augmenting the suggestion that education has contributed to female entrepreneurial success, research on chinese women executives conducted by the guanghua school of management, at beijing university, states that more than 90 percent had attended college or university (guanghua school of management, 2006). however, a survey on female entrepreneurs in nanjing city, conducted by a branch of the all-china women’s federation (acwf) in gulou district, suggests that only 17.5 percent of their respondents had received a college education and none had been to university (zhu minyi, 1994). hence, it is difficult to ascertain from the existing literature whether the educational background of the surveyed group of women contributed to their success as entrepreneurs or not. accounts of the professional background of female entrepreneurs in the prc provide an equally contradictory picture. karen korabik (1994) maintains that ‘most chinese women who are currently managers have backgrounds in science, accounting, politics, or engineering’. in contrast, a survey conducted by the china female entrepreneurs association contends that 53 percent of chinese female entrepreneurs have a background in finance and management, and 31.4 percent in science (‘zhongguo nü qiyejia: weishenme tamen geng rongyi chenggong’, 2003). thus, existing scholarship provides neither a detailed profile of the educational background and work history of the role of women in that process in shanxi province, hainan province and sichuan province, prc. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 chen way to entrepreneurship female entrepreneurs in china today, nor an adequate assessment of whether a higher education and professional background is a necessary component of their path to entrepreneurship. this paper sheds further light on the way to entrepreneurship for women in china by examining the education background and work experience of 62 private female entrepreneurs in jiaocheng county, shanxi province. it is based on interviews conducted between october 2003 and may 2004. twenty-seven women were private enterprise owners, twenty-seven were wives of private enterprise owners, and eight other women were working in private enterprises as managers, workshop leaders, shareholders or de facto managers. private female entrepreneurs are defined as women enterprise owneroperators, wives of enterprise owner-operators who, while not being the designated entrepreneurs (a role assigned to their husbands), are still active in the enterprises’ operation, as well as other women playing a leading role in private enterprises as managers, workshop leaders, shareholders or de facto managers. the interviewees were identified with the help of local government officials and members of the acwf, an organization that was founded by the chinese communist party in 1949, and which is charged with the task of advancing the position of chinese women. the interviewees were asked about their place and date of birth, their highest level of education, and their work experience, as well as information about their families. their enterprises varied from shops with capital of 50,000-60,000 yuan and three employees, to larger enterprise groups with capital of 120 million yuan and 2,000 employees. their diverse businesses covered cosmetics, fashion, building materials, glass crafts, food, cloth, studio work, stationery and gifts, jade carving, steel casting, coal and coke production, magnesian alloy production, hotel operation, department-store management, breeding farms, motorcycle sales, brick manufacturing, supermarkets and pharmacy development. the results suggest that higher education is not an important element in the making of these female entrepreneurs, but literacy still matters for those who are seeking higher positions in private enterprises or setting up their own business. the interviewees’ work experience corresponds to their education background, as most of them used to be engaged in jobs requiring less education. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 chen way to entrepreneurship research locale and interviewees: female entrepreneurs in economic-reform china and jiaocheng county, shanxi province why study the education background and work experience of female entrepreneurs in china? one answer is that the pattern of women’s employment has followed and helps to illuminate wider trends of social change in the prc. china’s reform policy since the late 1970s has drawn global attention to the biggest existing communist country in the world. ever since deng xiaoping (1994) pointed out that a market economy could exist within the communist state, the planned economy has gradually given way to a market economy, although bureaucratic influences on the economy continue to be strong. by the end of 2001, the private sector had become a significant part of the chinese economy, making up six percent of domestic gross output value and contributing 11 percent to domestic employment (national bureau of statistics of china, 2002, 117). with the prc’s opening-up to the outside world, the secondary and tertiary industry sectors of its economy are developing faster and thus more employment has been created. as a result, increasingly more women are employed in non-agricultural activities. as their education levels have improved with the introduction of educational reform, more women are working in technical occupations and some are even taking leadership positions. nowadays, in trades requiring specialist technology and knowledge, such as computer science, communication, engineering, design, finance, and so on, the number of women employed is five to ten times more than that before the introduction of the economic reforms (‘funü jiuye’, 2004). some women have even taken advantage of the economic reforms to set up their own business. at present, 20 percent of china’s entrepreneurs are women (‘funü jiuye’, 2004) and the china association of female entrepreneurs has 34 subordinate provincial and city level associations and as many as 7,000 outstanding female entrepreneurs as members (http://www.cawe.org.cn/index.html, accessed on 06 april 2006). according to the people’s daily, the official media voice of the central chinese government, among the female labour force in china today, approximately 20 million are enterprise owners or portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 http://www.cawe.org.cn/index.html chen way to entrepreneurship juridical persons and an impressive 98.5 percent of their enterprises are making a profit (‘nüxing huati xilie fangtan: chenggong nüxing’, 2004). this paper seeks to draw a broader picture of the way to entrepreneurship for women in china by examining the age, education, and work experience of 62 female entrepreneurs in jiaocheng county, shanxi province—an area that is characterized by both urban and rural development, and by a history of strong party-state influence, yet strong growth of private enterprise in the reform era. following the establishment of the prc in 1949, shanxi province developed under the influence of party-state controls, not least because it played a significant part in the chinese communist party’s (ccp) success in the antijapanese war. in 1937, while japan had occupied north and central china and the kuomingdang government had retreated to the interior and set up a capital at chongqing, the ccp remained active in their base areas in the vast chinese countryside. the party had a stronger control in shanxi, as it was included in three (jin-cha-ji, jin-sui and jinji-lu-yu) of the eight major ccp base areas (‘kangri zhanzheng zhuyao genjudi’, 2003). the province was also the base of one of the most elite ccp military troops at that time, the 129th division led by liu bocheng and deng xiaoping that was known as the liu and deng troop (goodman, 2000). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 chen way to entrepreneurship map 1: china apart from its historic links to the ccp, shanxi is famous for its coal reserves, which are buried under about 40 percent of its area, counting for one-third of china’s whole coal reserves (‘meitan ziyuan’, accessed on 03 oct 2004). more than 80 percent of cities and counties in shanxi are coal producers. consequently, from the 1950s onwards, the province was developed by the central state as its heavy industry base for coal and power (goodman, 1999). as a result, the province’s economy has been characterized by strict central control and planning for almost 50 years. in the early 1980s, shanxi was the biggest coal producer and one of the biggest electricity producers in china—nowadays, 70 percent of china’s coal exportation is still contributed by shanxi (‘shanxi meitan gongye gaishu’, accessed on 13 july 2006), and it also has one of the country’s most advanced steel factories. until recently (1992) most of its industry was state-owned and the private sector was underdeveloped. by the end of 2001, the non-public sector counted for nine percent of the province’s economy—15 percent less than the national average. by 2001, the province’s gdp was about 178 billion yuan, ranked twenty-second among china’s 31 provinces and municipalities (‘mei zhai fu zhang’, accessed on 26 march 2004). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 chen way to entrepreneurship map 2: shanxi jiaocheng county, consisting of nine townships under the jurisdiction of lüliang city, is the least economically developed district of shanxi province, although jiaocheng itself is located near the richest city of the province—the provincial capital, taiyuan. a highway built in 2003 links jiaocheng and taiyuan, which are about 20 minutes’ drive apart. located on the eastern side of the lüliang mountains and the western edge of the taiyuan basin, jiaocheng’s land areas include both a mountainous area (92.8 percent) and a plain area (7.2 percent) (jiaocheng xianzhi 1994: 2). unsurprisingly, the portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 chen way to entrepreneurship mountainous area is less developed, while the plain area is the county’s agricultural and industrial centre, as wealthy as the rest of the taiyuan basin. the county has resources of coal and iron and has developed its industry accordingly. my research looks at enterprises at county level: an administrative level between city and township, which thus is expected to combine the features of urban and rural area. before undertaking interviews in jiaocheng in 2003, i assumed that the county’s economy would be dominated by the state-owned sector, not least because of its historical close ties to the party-state. however, to my surprise, it turned out that the county’s industry is almost completely non-state-owned. actually, even as early as 1985, only 22.74 percent of the county’s industry was owned by the state, while a majority of 64.84 percent was collectively owned (jiaocheng xianzhi 1994:172). by 1995, when ownership reform took place in the county, two thirds of its industry was already privately owned. currently, according to the director of the jiaocheng enterprise administration centre (personal interview, 18 may 2004), more than four-fifths of jiaocheng’s enterprises are private. the only exceptions are the county’s tobacco company, oil company and running water company, which are state-owned instead. the high profits brought by tobacco production ensure the country government’s revenue, while water and oil are resources crucial to the country’s economic production. thus, understandably, the state maintains control over aspects of the economy that are regarded as more crucial to either its own income or security. female entrepreneurs’ age women’s education and employment in china closely follows wider trends of social change. on the one hand, following the country’s reform and opening-up, education has become more widespread and more affordable in china and the significance of education is increasingly emphasized both by individuals and society in general. on the other hand, the state has loosened its control over employment and population flows. consequently, it would be reasonable to expect that older and younger generations of female entrepreneurs will have different educational backgrounds and work experience. to test this hypothesis, as part of the interviews conducted with 62 private female entrepreneurs in jiaocheng portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 chen way to entrepreneurship county, shanxi province between october 2003 and may 2004, interviewees were asked to reveal their age in order to provide a more comprehensive profile of this particular group of female entrepreneurs. the respective ages of the 62 female entrepreneurs interviewed in jiaocheng county are depicted in table 1. eighty-point-six percent of the total number of interviewees was under the age of 50 at the time of interview, with the youngest being 31, and the oldest being 58. the majority of these women (43.5 percent) were between 40 and 49 years of age, with a slightly smaller proportion (37.1 percent) being between 30 and 39 years of age. the average age of the interviewees was 42.8 years. table 1: jiaocheng female entrepreneurs: age at the end of 2004 30-39 40-49 50 average age at the end of 2004 wives of enterprise owneroperators 10 10 7 43 women enterprise owneroperators 12 11 4 41.5 women leaders 1 6 1 42.4 total 23 (37.1%) 27 (43.5%) 12 (19.4%) 42.8 although the respective average ages of the three groups of interviewees (namely wives of enterprise owner-operators, women enterprise owner-operators and other women working in private enterprises as leaders) were close to each other, women enterprise owner-operators were comparatively younger than the other two groups. forty-fourpoint-four percent of women enterprise owner-operators were under the age of 40 and 40.7 percent were between 40 and 49, both percentages higher than those of the other two groups of women. this statistic suggests that women are starting to become entrepreneurs at a relatively early age. education backgrounds of female entrepreneurs does education play an important role in the making of chinese female entrepreneurs? do women need an excellent educational background to be able to set up and run their own business? in cosmopolitan areas such as beijing and shanghai, higher education is portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 chen way to entrepreneurship more likely a necessity, as more university graduates go to these places to seek opportunities and thus there is more severe competition. however, interview results from female entrepreneurs in jiaocheng county tell a different story. they suggest that higher education is not an important element in the making of these female entrepreneurs, as only a small percentage of the interviewees had been to junior college or university. however, literacy does matter when women look for leading positions in private enterprises or set up their own business. during the interviews, female entrepreneurs in jiaocheng county were asked about the highest education they had received. since 1986, the chinese government has pursued a nine-year compulsory education policy and people having completed nine years of education are considered to be equipped with the basic literacy required to seek employment. as is shown in table 2, 11.3 percent of the female entrepreneurs interviewed in jiaocheng county did not possess this basic level of literacy, having only completed primary school or else dropped out of junior middle school. nearly half of the female entrepreneurs interviewed in jiaocheng county (48.3 percent) had received education at a higher level than the compulsory schooling, but 41.9 percent of them had only been to senior middle school or secondary technical school. among the four women with higher education backgrounds, three had finished junior college through the provincial party school by correspondence. only one of the 62 interviewees had passed the entrance examination to university and completed the four years of formal university education. table 2. jiaocheng female entrepreneurs: age and education < junior middle school junior middle school high school secondary school college university 30-39 1 10 8 3 1 - 40-49 3 9 10 4 -1 503 6 1 -2 - total 7 (11.3%) 25 (40.3%) 19 (30.6%) 7 (11.3%) 3 (4.8%) 1 (1.6%) table 2 details the education background of the female entrepreneurs by three age groups (30-39, 40-49 and above 50). it is reasonable to assume that the younger generation of portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 chen way to entrepreneurship female entrepreneurs must have been better educated than the older, as both socially and individually there is increasing emphasis on the significance of education nowadays. the interview results partly support this view, as the interviewees above 50 years’ old turned out to have the biggest percentage without the basic literacy and the smallest percentage with senior middle school or higher education. however, the youngest group of female entrepreneurs was not better educated than those between the ages of 40 and 49. though a smaller proportion of the former had not finished compulsory schooling (4.3 percent and 11.1 percent respectively), the percentage with an education higher than junior middle school is smaller than the latter as well (52.1percent and 55.6 percent respectively). there are two possible explanations for the overall low education level of female entrepreneurs in jaiocheng county. first, young people nowadays, after finishing higher education, tend to seek work opportunities in the better-developed areas of china such as the four municipalities (which are beijing, shanghai, tianjin and chongqing) or the rich southeast coast area or at least the provincial capital taiyuan, instead of staying in their native county of jiaocheng. secondly, about a decade ago the state-government’s policy regulating the population floating was much stricter and students were still assigned employment upon graduation, which limited the mobility of the better-educated women of the 40-49 generation. table 3. jiaocheng female entrepreneurs: educational background < junior middle school junior middle school high school secondary school college university wives of enterprise owneroperators 3 (11.1%) 14 (51.9%) 7 (25.9%) 2 (7.4%) 1 (3.7%) - women enterprise owneroperators 4 (14.8%) 9 (33.3%) 9 (33.3%) 4 (14.8%) 1 (3.7%) - women leaders -2 (25%) 3 (37.5%) 1 (12.5%) 1 (12.5%) 1 (12.5%) portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 11 chen way to entrepreneurship table 3 lists the education background of the three groups of wives of enterprise owneroperators, women enterprise owner-operators and other women playing leading roles in enterprises. women leaders are the best-educated group, as all of them are equipped with the basic literacy of junior middle schooling. and this group has the largest proportion with senior middle school or secondary technical school education (50 percent) and the largest proportion with higher education (25 percent). women enterprise owner-operators, though not as well educated, were nevertheless more literate than the wives of enterprise owner-operators, as a significantly higher percentage of the former (51.8 percent) had finished their formal after junior middle school education, compared to the latter (37 percent). the interview results indicate that higher education is not an important element on these women’s way to entrepreneurship, as only a small percentage of the interviewees had been to junior college or university. however, literacy does matter when women look for leading positions in private enterprises or set up their own businesses. work experience of female entrepreneurs table 4 shows the varied occupation background of the jiaocheng interviewees before they started to work in the enterprises. as is detailed in the table, while the biggest proportion (41.9 percent) used to be blue-collar labourers, only 20.8 percent had been employed in the comparatively white-collar jobs of storage keeper, accountant, cashier, teacher, government clerk or official. the rest had been working as peasant/housewife, opera singer, waitress, or shop assistant, none of which requires a good educational background. this also contributes to the overall low education level of these women, and restricts them seeking employment in more professional jobs. comparing the three groups, the best-educated women leaders occupied white-collar positions (50 percent) and the least educated, the wives of enterprise owner-operators, had the highest percentage with a manual labour background (48.1 percent) and peasant/housewife background (16.1 percent). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 chen way to entrepreneurship table 4. jiaocheng female entrepreneurs: work experience p ea sa nt /h ou se -w if e f ac to ry w or ke r o pe ra s in ge r w ai tr es s sh op a ss is ta nt st or ag e ke ep er a cc ou nt an t / ca sh ie r t ea ch er g ov . c le rk /o ff ic ia l o th er wives of enterprise owneroperators 6 13 1 -2 1 1 1 2 - female enterprise owneroperators 4 9 -1 6 --1 3 3 female leaders -4 -- -1 1 2 - total 10 26 1 1 8 1 2 3 7 3 li, the only interviewee with a university background, majored in stockbreeding. after graduation in 1982, she was assigned to work in one of jiaocheng’s government departments. after several transfers, she was promoted to be the vice-director of another department in 1998. not long before the promotion, li set up a private chicken farm, which was registered in the name of li’s father-in-law, as she and her husband both had government positions. though nowadays private entrepreneurs are allowed to join the party, they are not allowed to take positions in government departments. however, li was the de facto farm manager. another interviewee, tian, started to work in the fields after finishing her junior-middle-school education. after getting married and moving to the county town, she stayed at home doing housework and looking after her working husband and five children, born over nine years. when her husband set up his enterprise in 1994, tian left home to work in the enterprise. now tian is the second ranking leader (the first being her husband) and chief financial officer of the group with a capital of 120 million yuan. widowed female entrepreneurs: a difficult way to entrepreneurship there is a commonly heard phrase, ‘behind every successful man, you can always find a woman.’ the interviews with female entrepreneurs in jiaocheng county suggest that portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 13 chen way to entrepreneurship behind every one of these successful women, there is always a man to be found. fifty-six out of the 61 interviewees were married. the rest of them were either divorced or widowed (which suggests they all married at some time). when asked about their husbands and their activities, these women suggested that husbands might ‘help me with housework’, ‘cook for me’, ‘we make decision in business together’, ‘we never quarrel’, ‘when i encounter difficulty in work, i go to him for help’, or ‘when there are different opinions, the one who is more reasonable makes the decision.’ despite the majority of happy wives, there were several single female entrepreneurs who were running their enterprises alone without the backing of a helpful man. among them, three used to be wives behind their entrepreneur husbands. after the death of their husbands, these women had no choice but to take over the enterprises and enter into business on their own. they were owner-operators of a steel factory, a brick factory and a repair shop respectively, none of which is viewed as a ‘womanish’ trade in their part of the world. these women recalled their husbands’ death, the initial difficulties in entering an unknown business, and the inconvenience of being a businesswoman, with tears. zhang took over her husband’s steel casting factory after he died of liver cancer in 1995. ‘in the first several years without my husband, i was all in a flutter. whenever i saw people, i wanted to cry.’ despite the sadness and nerves, she managed to develop the enterprise from a factory with 300,000 yuan capital into one with 1 million yuan fixed assets and 1 million yuan circulating fund. zhang talked in an articulate and straightforward way, because ‘i am forced to behave like this.’ when talking about her husband, jia could not keep from crying. after he died in a car accident, jia was left with her husband’s brick factory in 1999, when she ‘didn’t know anything and had to completely depend on people’s help’. nonetheless, the enterprise from an initial capital of 200,000 turned into a fixed capital of more than 500,000 yuan and a circulation capital of 30,000~40,000 yuan under jia’s management. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 14 chen way to entrepreneurship another widowed entrepreneur, liu, used to stay at home, while her husband was operating an automobile repair factory. her husband’s death in 2002 forced her into the business. liu indicated that the factory was not as profitable in her hands as before her husband’s death. ‘sometimes i cry alone, but i still have to solve the problem myself.’ not long before being interviewed, liu bought into a restaurant and a second-hand tip truck in the hope that the two new businesses could turn more of a profit. the three widows invariably talked about the inconvenience and difficulty they encountered after their husbands’ death. zhang said, ‘it is not easy for a single woman to do business outside [i.e., in the public (male) world]. i can’t entertain people at dinner table by drinking, so i can’t help but pay more money than others…it’s so difficult for women to do things alone.’ jia expressed a similar opinion. she said, ‘i don’t drink and don’t want to entertain people, so it is difficult for me to do things. and when i first took over the business, people looked down upon me as i was a widow.’ liu admitted that she never felt any difficulty before her husband’s death. but when she started to do the business, she found innumerable difficulties in her way. as a widow, she became the target of personal slander and gossip. moreover, in what is supposed to be an economic environment characterized by fair competition, she was often treated unfairly. compared with others, these widowed women are taking a tough road to entrepreneurship. conclusion though the 2003-04 interviews with 62 female entrepreneurs in jiaocheng county drew on women aged in their 30s, 40s and 50s, most interviewees were under the age of 50. the interview results suggest that higher education is not an important element in the making of these female entrepreneurs, as a great proportion of them were barely equipped with basic literacy and few had received higher education. however, literacy still matters for women seeking higher positions in private enterprises or setting up their own business. it is additionally worth noticing that the younger group of female entrepreneurs were not better educated than the older, which might be the result of the improving mobility of contemporary chinese society enabling well-educated youth to look for opportunities in the well-off areas. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 15 chen way to entrepreneurship these female entrepreneurs’ work experiences correspond with their educational background. limited by their education level, most of the interviewees used to be engaged in jobs requiring less literacy. the more literate interviewees clearly were more likely to have had a white-collar background. one specific group formed by the experience of becoming entrepreneurs is suggested by the interviews and examined in this paper. where widowed women took over their husbands’ enterprises after their death it is clear that they had experienced considerable hardship in running the business without their husbands behind them. reference list deng, x. 1994, ‘shehui zhuyi ye keyi gao shichang jingji’ (‘market economy can exist in communist scheme'), in deng xiaoping, deng xiaoping wenxuan (‘deng xiaoping analects’)[online], renmin chubanshe, beijing. available: http://www.ccyl.org.cn/theory/dspws/page2/she.htm. [accessed 06 april 2006]. ‘funü jiuye’ (‘women’s employment’) [online]. 2004. available: http://www.china.org.cn/chinese/zhuanti/woman/681220.htm. [accessed 06 april 2006]. goodman, d. s. g. 2000, social and political change in revolutionary china, rowman & littlefield publishers, oxford. ———. 1999, ‘king coal and secretary hu: shanxi’s third modernisation’, in the political economy of china’s provinces, h. hendrischke & c. feng (eds), routledge, london. guanghua school of management (beijing university) 2006, zhongguo nüxing guanlizhe xianzhuang diaocha baogao (report of chinese women executives situation investigation) [online]. available: http://www.gsm.pku.edu.cn/store/object/200627204257report.pdf, [accessed 06 april 2006]. jiaocheng xianzhi (jiaocheng county chronicle) 1994, shanxi guji chubanshe, taiyuan. ‘kangri zhanzheng zhuyao genjudi’ (‘major base areas in the anti-japanese war) 2003. available: http://news.xinhuanet.com/ziliao/2003-07/02/content_948530.htm, [accessed 30 sept 2004]. korabik, k. 1994, ‘managerial women in the people’s republic of china’, in n. j. adler & d. n. izraeli (eds), competitive frontiers: women managers in a global economy, blackwell, oxford, 114-126. ‘mei zhai fu zhang’ (‘the debt from coal’) [online]. 2003. available: http://www.scol.com.cn/economics/cjxw/20030424/200342485351.htm. [accessed 26 march 2004]. ‘meitan ziyuan’ (‘the resource of coal’). available: portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 16 http://www.ccyl.org.cn/theory/dspws/page2/she.htm http://www.china.org.cn/chinese/zhuanti/woman/681220.htm http://www.gsm.pku.edu.cn/store/object/200627204257report.pdf http://news.xinhuanet.com/ziliao/2003-07/02/content_948530.htm http://www.scol.com.cn/economics/cjxw/20030424/200342485351.htm chen way to entrepreneurship http://www.huaxia.com/zhsx/d/00153508.html, [accessed 03 oct 2004]. ‘nüxing huati xilie fangtan: chenggong nüxing’ (‘a series of interviews on the issue of women: successful women’) [online]. 2004. available: http://www.people.com.cn/gb/14641/14643/29161/, [accessed 17 march 2004]. ‘shanxi meitan gongye gaishu’ (‘a brief introduction of shanxi’s coal industry’) [online]. available: http://www.sxcoal.gov.cn/sxcoal_new/new_website.do?action=detail&&id=205, [accessed 13 july 2006]. zhongguo guojia tongjiju (national bureau of statistics of china) 2002, zhongguo tongji nianjian (statistical yearbook of china), zhongguo statistics publication, beijing. ‘zhongguo nü qiyejia: weishenme tamen geng rongyi chenggong’ (‘female entrepreneurs in china: why are they more easy to succeed’) [online]. 2003. available: http://www.people.com.cn/gb/shenghuo/78/1933/20030415/972172.html, [accessed 27 march 2006]. zhu, m. 1994, ‘nüqiyejia de fazhan rengxu guanzhu’ (the development of female entrepreneurs needs attention), zhongguo fuyun (women’s campaign in china), 8, 24-26. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 17 http://www.huaxia.com/zhsx/d/00153508.html http://www.people.com.cn/gb/14641/14643/29161/ http://www.sxcoal.gov.cn/sxcoal_new/new_website.do?action=detail&&id=205 http://www.people.com.cn/gb/shenghuo/78/1933/20030415/972172.html minglu chen, university of technology, sydney table 1: jiaocheng female entrepreneurs: age at the end of 2 wives of enterprise owner-operators education backgrounds of female entrepreneurs table 2. jiaocheng female entrepreneurs: age and education table 3. jiaocheng female entrepreneurs: educational backgro wives of enterprise owner-operators table 4. jiaocheng female entrepreneurs: work experience portalformattingyamfinalspecialissuesep2011-1 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. health and borders across time and cultures: china, india and the indian ocean region special issue, guest edited by beatriz carrillo garcía and devleena ghosh. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. cross-border childbirth between mainland china and hong kong: social pressures and policy outcomes bernard yam, university of technology, sydney introduction hong kong lies on the south coast of mainland china, bordering guangdong province in the north and facing the south china sea in the east, west and south. it had been a british colony for 156 years before it became a special administrative region (sar) of the people’s republic of china (prc) on 1 july 1997. in spite of the outbreak of the asian financial crisis that same year, hong kong’s economic growth continued in the wake of the unprecedented developments in the chinese economy. accompanying the rapid industrialization and economic prosperity of many mainland provincial cities starting from the 1980s, more and more hong kong residents have been recruited to work in china. many of these predominantly male workers eventually settled and married women from the mainland. in tandem, increased business activities between chinese cities and hong kong have allowed mainland visitors to cross the border once mainland authorities endorsed their travelling arrangements. visitors with an approved exit-entry permit for travelling to and from hong kong may stay for a period from 7 to 90 days. apart from business travellers, there have been an increasing number of women from the mainland entering hong kong for the sole purpose of giving birth. through the use of secondary sources, official statistics and government documents, this paper analyses the trend of cross-border childbirth in hong kong and the subsequent public outcry about overcrowded obstetric facilities that brought about changes to how and to whom obstetric services are provided. yam cross-border childbirth portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 2 the health care system in hong kong the food and health bureau of the sar is responsible for formulating policies and allocating resources for running hong kong’s health services. the cornerstone of the government policy is that no one will be denied adequate medical care due to lack of means (hong kong yearbook 2010). these policies and statutory functions are executed through the department of health. while a range of primary healthcare facilities are managed by this department, all public hospitals and healthcare facilities (41 hospitals, 48 specialist out-patient clinics and 74 general out-patient clinics) are run by the hospital authority (ha), a statutory body established in 1990 to provide secondary, tertiary and specialized healthcare services. a total of 13 private hospitals, run independently from the government, also provide a wide range of medical services to healthcare consumers who can afford the costs. all private hospitals and five major public hospitals have been awarded full accreditation by international health care accreditation organizations such as the australian council on healthcare standards, the joint commission international and the trent accreditation scheme (hospital authority 2010; wong n. d.). while meeting world-class standards of healthcare, fees for public hospitals and clinic services for hong kong residents are kept low; the public health system is subsidized by the government at about 95 percent of their full operating cost. residents with financial difficulties are assisted through a fee waiver scheme, while people receiving welfare payments are exempted from payment (hong kong yearbook 2010). local residents are expected to pay an all-inclusive fee of hk$100 (us$13) per day as in-patients in an acute care hospital while non-local residents pay hk$3,300 (us$423) per day (hospital authority n. d.). the benchmarks of health care in hong kong often exceed many advanced economies in the world, as indicated by various health care indicators. common indicators used to measure maternal and newborn health are the neonatal mortality rate and maternal mortality ratio. neonatal deaths are intricately linked with maternal deaths; when a mother dies during delivery, the foetus is also likely to die. these deaths can be prevented if there are adequate maternal health care services. other indicators, such as infant mortality rates and the incidence of low birth-weight babies, also reflect the quality of maternal and infant health, but they are beyond the scope of this paper. yam cross-border childbirth portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 3 the neonatal mortality rate (nmr) represents the number of deaths during the first 28 days of life for every thousand live births in a given year. it is a useful indicator of maternal and newborn health and care. according to the world health organization (who), neonatal deaths ‘stem from poor maternal health, inadequate care during pregnancy, inappropriate management of complications during pregnancy and delivery, poor hygiene during delivery and the first critical hours after birth, and lack of newborn care’ (who 2006: 2). as indicated in table 1, nmr in hong kong has been under 2.0 per 1,000 live births since 2000—this compares very favourably with developed countries like australia, canada, the uk and the usa. by contrast, nmr in mainland china was at least ten times higher than that of hong kong for the same period, reflecting an apparent lack of or access to good maternal and newborn health facilities. country/region 19951 20002 20043 20084 hong kong 5 2 1 1.15 china 35 21 18 11 australia 5 3 3 3 canada 5 4 3 4 uk 5 4 3 3 usa 5 5 4 4 world 36 30 28 26 table 1: neonatal mortality rate (per 1,000 live births). note: nmrs for the year 1995 must be seen as discrete evaluations due to different methodologies used in the estimation. maternal mortality ratio (mmr) is the number of maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births during a set time-period. it is used to measure pregnancy-related deaths from direct or indirect causes. direct obstetric deaths can be due to obstetric complications of the pregnancy or anaesthesia during delivery, while indirect obstetric deaths are those resulting from pre-existing conditions or diseases that developed during pregnancy (who 2010a). as seen in table 2, maternal deaths in hong kong are consistently lower than the selected countries in the western world, reflecting good quality care given to mothers and newborn babies. by contrast, the mmr in china is much higher, even though the rate has declined markedly over the past 20 years. 1 perinatal mortality: a listing of available information (who 1996: table 1, 4, and table 4, 16–22). 2 neonatal and perinatal mortality: country, regional and global estimates (who 2006: table 6.1, 18 and table a1.1, 29–34). 3 neonatal and perinatal mortality: country, regional and global estimates 2004 (who 2007: table 2, 4 and table 4, 6–14). 4 world health statistics 2010 (who 2010b: part 2, table 1, 48–57) except hong kong. 5 this is a 2007 figure adapted from department of health 2007/2008 annual report (2008: tables on health status and health services 2007, table a3). yam cross-border childbirth portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 4 country/region 1990 1995 2000 2005 2008 hong kong 4.3 7.3 5.6 3.5 2.5 china 110 82 60 44 38 australia 10 13 9 8 8 canada 6 7 7 12 12 uk 10 10 12 13 12 usa 12 11 14 24 24 world 400 370 340 290 260 table 2: maternal mortality ratio (per 100,000 live births)6 despite the differences and limitations in reporting and classification amongst different countries, empirical data routinely collected by developed countries can be used for international comparison. these two widely used standardized indicators (nmr & mmr) confirm the enviable record of obstetric and newborn care as well as the efficiency of general and public health services in hong kong. giving birth in hong kong it is not uncommon to have non-permanent residents giving birth in hong kong in the well-equipped hospitals staffed by qualified health care providers. this could arise as a result of emergencies such as premature labour or an expatriate’s planned childbirth. such situations are usually handled well as long as the number is manageable and the hospital expenses are covered. from the 1st of september 2005 the standard obstetric package in a public hospital for non-local residents was set at hk$20,000 (us$2,564), and included all the services in the first three days of hospitalization; special services or extra hospital stay would attract additional charges. women who prefer to have their own obstetrician in a private hospital are expected to pay more. many local expectant women opt for this option as well. table 3 shows a breakdown of the number of live births by eligible persons (persons who have permanent residency in hong kong) and non-eligible persons (non-permanent residents of hong kong) in public and private hospitals. although there is no further breakdown in the various categories of noneligible persons, there is adequate evidence to support the assertion that there has been a significant increase in demand in obstetric service by non-permanent residents. between 2004 and 2005, the number of live births in public hospitals for this group of women 6 maternal mortality rates for hong kong, 1990–2005, were adapted from department of health 2007/2008 annual report (department of health 2008: table a3). maternal mortality rate for 2008 was adapted from hong kong yearbook 2008 (2008: 154). trends in maternal mortality for all other countries and the world, 1990 to 2008, derive from estimates developed by who, uniceff, unfpa and the world bank (who 2010a: annex 3, 28–31, and appendix 7, 39). yam cross-border childbirth portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 5 increased by 25 percent and by 137 percent in private hospitals. in 2005 alone, one in three newborns in hong kong were delivered by non-resident women. year public hospitals nep* ep* total n (%) n (%) n (%) private hospitals nep* ep* total n (%) n (%) n (%) 2004 11,116 26,552 37,668 (30%) (70%) (100%) 2,377 9,765 12,142 (20%) (80%) (100%) 2005 13,917 27,342 41,259 (34%) (66%) (100%) 5,639 10,201 15,840 (36%) (64%) (100%) % increase 25% 3% 10% 137% 5% 31% table 3: live births in public and private hospitals in hong kong, 2004–2005. * nep = noneligible persons (e.g. foreign passport holders, people’s republic of china passport holders or illegal entrants from mainland china. according to au yeung (2006: 43), the latter group of passport holders constitute the majority of nep deliveries in public hospitals); * ep = eligible persons (local residents or residents with the right of abode in hong kong). while detailed information from private hospitals can be difficult to access, it is common knowledge that many local and expatriate pregnant women prefer the comfort and services of private hospitals while those from mainland china will settle for the less expensive public hospitals to have their delivery. as seen from table 4 the percentage of live births born to mainland women increased from 10.2 percent in 1995 to 45.4 percent in 2009. year total live births no. of live births born to mainland women % of total births 1995 68,637 7,0251 10.2% 1996 63,291 6,4941 10.3% 1997 59,250 5,8301 9.8% 1998 52,977 6,0151 11.4% 1999 51,281 7,0811 13.8% 2000 54,134 8,1732 15.1% 2001 48,219 7,8102 16.2% 2002 48,209 8,5062 17.6% 2003 46,965 10,1282 21.6% 2004 49,796 13,2092 26.5% 2005 57,098 19,5382 34.2% 2006 65,626 26,1322 39.8% 2007 70,875 27,5742 38.9% 2008 78,822 33,5652 42.6% 2009 82,095 37,2532 45.4% table 4: number of live births born to mainland women in hong kong, 1995–2009. 1 demographic trends in hong kong 1981–2001 (census and statistics department 2002: table 3.9, 35). 2 hong kong population projections 2010–2039 (census and statistics department 2010: table 4, 32). the birth rate in hong kong has continued to drop since the 1990s and it reached a trough in 2003 (table 4). obstetric units in some public hospitals were either closed yam cross-border childbirth portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 6 down permanently or amalgamated with other units, resulting in a reduction in the number of obstetric beds. similarly, three out of four midwifery schools gradually suspended intake of students from 1999 and the number of new trainee specialist obstetrician positions in public hospitals were at the lowest in 2004. all these factors contributed to the crisis in obstetric services and manpower shortage that erupted in 2006 (au yeung 2006). the obstetric crisis of 2006 in 2001, after a tortuous political and legal process the hong kong sar government granted residency rights to babies born in hong kong to chinese parents (m. cheng 2007; leung 2009). these residency rights include permanent residency, full access to free public education, subsidized healthcare and social welfare services (m. cheng 2007). in 2007 the census and statistics department conducted a population projection survey on babies born in hong kong to mainland women. it was found that for babies born to parents without the right of abode in hong kong, 91 percent of parents planned to bring their babies back to china; 29 percent of these babies were expected to return to hong kong at or before age 3 and 49 percent at or before their sixth birthday, to commence pre-primary and primary school education respectively. for babies born to mainland women whose spouses are hong kong permanent residents, 65 percent would stay in hong kong. although the remaining 35 percent would return to china, 72 percent of these babies would eventually return to hong kong at or before the age of 3, and 84 percent at or before 6 years of age (legislative council press release 2008b). these results confirm the common belief that these mainland women crossed the border to give birth, not only because of the superior health care facilities in the territory but also for other entitlements provided by the government to its permanent residents (yam & au 2004). since hong kong became part of the prc in 1997, mainland residents are now allowed to visit the territory with less travel restrictions. travel agencies on both sides of the border have mushroomed, including those offering maternity packages to mainland expectant women that include transport, accommodation and assistance to emergency room when in labour (m. cheng 2007). as noted in table 4, the number of babies born to mainland women in hong kong increased dramatically from 5,830 in 1997 to 26,132 in 2006, an exponential growth of 348 percent in ten years. coinciding with the closure yam cross-border childbirth portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 7 of maternity beds and the lack of qualified midwives and specialist obstetricians, such a staggering influx of unplanned admissions not only lead to overcrowding of emergency departments and maternity wards, it also flows onto other hospital units such as neonatal intensive care units and operating rooms. it has been reported that many overstay visitors and illegal entrants from china are less likely to seek antenatal care until birth is imminent for fear of repatriation (yam & au 2004). this is especially true if the parents want to evade china’s one-child policy (leung 2009). these women usually turn up in the emergency department in an advanced stage of labour (leung 2009), and usually at nighttime to avoid being identified by law enforcement personnel. moir (1998) has also reported that these pregnant women are more than three times as likely as local women to give birth before arrival at hospital. with no antenatal record or information on past medical history, these women place themselves and their unborn child at risk of complicated labour or undiagnosed foetal anomalies (leung 2009). similarly, staff risk contacting unidentified communicable diseases. in a letter addressed to the panel on health services of the legislative council, the secretary for health, welfare and food bureau acknowledged that about 85 percent of mainland pregnant women were admitted through the emergency department, and over 80 percent had little antenatal care or were unable to produce satisfactory evidence of such care. furthermore, between 2005 and 2006 the rate of defaulted medical fees by pregnant mainland women was 15 percent (p. cheng 2007). during the 2004–2005 financial year, 1,670 mainland women failed to pay hk$12.64 million (us$1.63m) in hospital fees. by 2005–2006, 2,138 women defaulted hk$28.58m (us$3.68m) in medical fees (m. cheng 2007), an increase of 126 percent in just twelve months. the exploitation of medical resources by pregnant mainland women, the overcrowding of obstetric services and the lack of public accountability of the sar government and the hospital authority (ha) sparked a public outcry and intense media coverage in 2006. on 19 november 2006, a group of 50 local pregnant women took to the streets and protested outside the government headquarters to complain about the shortage of maternity services and the decreased standard of care, the failure of the government and the ha to safeguard taxpayers’ money and the lack of planning to curb the influx of mainland expectant mothers giving birth in hong kong. as a result of heated yam cross-border childbirth portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 8 discussions amongst the media and the public earned this public health issue the number one spot in the ‘10 major health news’ contest held by radio television hong kong, the government-funded broadcaster (lee 2007). on 16 january 2007 the government announced new arrangements for obstetric services aimed at ensuring that local expectant women would receive proper and priority treatment. a central booking system to manage all antenatal bookings was implemented by the ha on the 1st of february 2007. it would reserve sufficient places for local pregnant women and if extra places were available, the ha would accept bookings from non-local expectant women. once service capacity is reached, bookings from non-local pregnant women cannot be made. similarly, all private hospitals offering obstetric services were to provide the same booking procedure. in tandem, a new revamped obstetric package was introduced, consisting of one antenatal visit, vaginal or operative delivery and three days of in-patient services. while local women continue to pay the standard fees, non-local women must pay hk$39,000 (us$5,000) in full at the time of booking. women without a prior booking must pay hk$48,000 (us$6,154) before they can be attended by healthcare personnel. border controls have also been stepped up; women who are pregnant beyond 28 weeks’ gestation are denied entry unless they can provide documentary evidence showing that they have made a booking with a public or private hospital. additional training for health care providers has also been expanded (government information centre press release 2007). in a review of this new obstetric package, the ha conducted an audit based on the number of births in public hospitals. between february and december 2007 the number of deliveries by local women in public hospitals increased by 8.6 percent from the same period in 2006; representing a total of 28,062 births (table 5). deliveries by non-local pregnant women decreased by 29.4 percent to 7,711 in the corresponding period. since non-local pregnant women were only allowed to book obstetric services at public hospitals when service capacity was available, the booking system was successful in meeting the needs of local women. in order to quell non-local expectant women from seeking emergency hospital admissions through emergency departments shortly before labour, a higher service charge was also set. this strategy proved effective; from february to december 2007, out of 7,771 births by non-local women, only 1,171 (15.1 percent) sought emergency hospital admissions through the emergency departments. in yam cross-border childbirth portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 9 the same period in 2006, the figure was 88.8 percent. compliance with the booking system amongst non-local expectant mothers also increased significantly, an increase of 229 percent since the booking started. the majority of these women had attended an antenatal visit; therefore the risk of obstetric complications and unrecognized congenital anomalies of the foetus would have been detected earlier. this not only benefited the women and the unborn babies but also eased the workload of health care providers. with an up-to-date central booking system mapping the likely utilization pattern of public obstetric services, better service planning was facilitated to meet the needs of expectant mothers and staff allocation. year by eligible persons (ep) by non-eligible persons (nep) booked non-booked nep cases cases subtotal total 2006 (feb. – dec.) 25,834 2,007 8,997 11,004 36,838 2007 (feb. – dec.) 28,062 6,600 1,171 7,771 35,833 % change + 8.6% + 228.8% − 87% − 29.4% − 2.7% table 5: review of the obstetric service package based on the number of births in public hospitals. source: legislative council paper (2008a). with 6,600 bookings between february and december 2007 in public hospitals alone, the ha secured a total of hk$257.4m (us$33m) in advanced payments. unless there were complications requiring an extended hospital stay, this system helped limit the amount of unpaid hospital fees as well as the costs of debt recovery. under the new scheme the bill settlement rate for booked and non-booked cases was 99.8 percent and 61.8 percent respectively (legislative council paper 2008b). according to the same legislative council paper, in the period from february to december 2007, the total number of booking certificates issued to non-local expectant women by public and private hospital was 11,084 and 24,551 respectively. this translated to hk$432.3m (us$55.4m) for public hospitals and hk$957.5m (us$122.8m) for private hospitals with maternity facilities. with china’s phenomenal economic development, more and more chinese parents with the financial means have the choice of selecting in which overseas country they want their baby to be delivered. with a similar culture and short travel time, giving birth in well-equipped hospitals in hong kong appears to be a popular choice. the advanced payment has not deterred their decision. as noted in table 6, the percentage of babies yam cross-border childbirth portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 10 born to parents who are not permanent residents in hong kong increased from 68.2 percent when the new obstetric package was introduced in 2007, to almost 80 percent in 2009. year number of live births born to mainland women number of live births whose fathers are not hong kong permanent residents 2001 7,810 620 7.9% 2002 8,506 1,250 14.7% 2003 10,128 2,070 20.4% 2004 13,209 4,102 31.1% 2005 19,538 9,273 47.5% 2006 26,132 16,044 61.4% 2007 27,574 18,816 68.2% 2008 33,565 25,269 75.3% 2009 37,253 29,766 79.9% table 6: number of live births born to mainland chinese parents in hong kong, 2001–2009. source: hong kong population projections 2010–2039 (census and statistics department 2010: table 4, 32). certain predictable phenomena will happen if this growth trend continues. apart from the tourist dollars, there will be a steady clientele for private hospitals and obstetricians in private practice and more training places and job opportunities for midwives, neonatal intensive care nurses and trainee specialist obstetricians. to go beyond these obvious predictions can be problematic as there is no precedent to go by. as indicated by the population projections survey noted earlier, these babies are likely to be brought back to hong kong for primary and secondary education. there will be a demand for teachers, as well as an urgent need to improve their language ability. teachers will need to learn mandarin or putonghua, the official language of the prc, in order to communicate effectively with the children and their parents or carers. the impact of the arrival of these children on hong kong’s local community should not be underestimated. additional demand means social services such as housing, education, health care, welfare and employment services must be put in place. in view of the many uncertainties and the absence of historical trends for reference, it is difficult to project more precisely on government planning except to monitor the situation closely and carry out population projections regularly. on a more positive note, however, this population ‘explosion’ in a low birth rate society like that of hong kong could become an asset for the ageing population if these children remain in the territory. they may even contribute to the prosperity of hong kong. such optimistic predictions remain to be seen in the years ahead. yam cross-border childbirth portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 11 limitations of this paper as a research tool, secondary data analysis uses information that was either collected by agencies such as governments and research institutions or for some other purposes than the one being examined. researchers using this research method can only work with the data that exist, not what they would like to have (stewart & kamins 1993; boslaugh 2007). population statistics used in this paper come from data routinely collected by the government under the supervision of qualified statisticians. these data are often forwarded to global organizations like the world bank and the who for compilation of population reports. despite certain limitations on data collection methods, this information is reliable and is frequently used in cross-national comparisons. when researchers want to examine specific local data, information can be difficult to obtain because these information is not always collected. for example, the sex ratio of babies delivered by local and mainland mothers at the time of birth is not published in the reports. moreover, even if the information is available, the cost of data extraction from various databases could be prohibitively expensive. another example of gaps in the data is highlighted in table 5, where government departments provided data related to questions raised by members of the legislative council. in its response to the review of the obstetric package, the government released information on the number of births by local and non-local women in public hospitals collected 11 months before and after its implementation. however, since private hospitals have no legal obligation to provide more than the basic information, there is a gap in the picture. had the legislators followed up on their earlier questions in subsequent council meetings, the efficacy of this policy could have been further established, at least in the public hospital system. such an approach would make the government more accountable to its people. the major weakness in the use of secondary data is the fact that they cannot reveal personal values, beliefs or reasons behind the actions of individual actors. controversial topics such as baby gender selection, selective abortion and social factors influencing the choices of expectant women are not available from these data sources. if the attending obstetricians are not interested in collecting data outside their scope of medical practice, this information is not collected. even if this information exists, the rigour of its collection is unknown and hence it is inappropriate to generalise beyond the yam cross-border childbirth portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 12 primary source. furthermore, patient records are confidential documents that can only be released with the written authorization of the women. all these important social issues are relevant to researchers interested in bridging this gap. this paper can only complement further qualitative research activity using primary data collection such as in-depth interviews. conclusion this paper demonstrates the use and validity of secondary data in trend analysis on an important social issue. it documents the rising trend on cross-border childbirth between mainland china and hong kong, the enormous strain this poses on local obstetric services, as well as policy changes implemented by the sar government to rectify the situation. apart from giving local expectant mothers priority of care, the new policy also brings more business opportunities for private hospitals and obstetricians as well as job opportunities for health care providers, from mainland chinese seeking better healthcare services. the residency and various entitlements (better education and access to better employment opportunities) available to those born in hong kong, are also envisioned as a means to keep these new citizens in hong kong. this could add new impetus to the economic growth of hong kong and alleviate some of the issues posed by the ageing of hong kong’s population—the ultimate gift those newborns can give back to their place of birth. further research to bridge the gaps identified in this paper should be encouraged and supported by governments and social research institutions. reference list au yeung, s. 2006, ‘impact of non-eligible person deliveries in obstetric service in hong kong,’ hong kong journal of gynaecology, obstetrics & midwifery, vol. 6, no. 1: 41–44. boslaugh, s. 2007, secondary data sources for public health: a practical guide. cambridge university press, cambridge. census and statistics department, hong kong special administrative region 2002, demographic trends in hong kong 1981–2001. online available: http://www.censtatd.gov.hk/products_and_services/products/publications/statistical_report/populat ion_and_vital_events/index_cd_b112001701_dt_latest.jsp [accessed 9 november 2010]. ______ 2010, hong kong population projections 2010–2039. online available: http://www.censtatd.gov.hk/products_and_services/products/publications/statistical_report/populat ion_and_vital_events/index_cd_b112001504_dt_latest.jsp [accessed 9 november 2010]. cheng, m. 2007, ‘hong kong attempts to reduce influx of pregnant chinese,’ lancet, vol. 369, no. 9566: 981–982. cheng, p. 2007, impact of use of obstetric services by mainland women on public hospital resources. 9 january. online, available: http://www.legco.gov.hk/yr0607/english/panels/hs/papers/hs0108cb2-833-1-e.pdf [accessed 12 november 2010]. department of health, the government of the hong kong special administrative region 2008, department of health 2007/2008 annual report. tables on health status and health services yam cross-border childbirth portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 13 2007. online, available: http://www.dh.gov.hk/english/pub_rec/pub_rec_lpoi/pub_rec_lpoi_thshs_2007.html [accessed 2 november 2010]. government information centre 2007, press releases. new measures on obstetric services and immigration control announced. 16 january. online, available: http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/200701/16/p200701160184.htm [accessed 12 november 2010]. hong kong yearbook 2008 2008, online, available: http://www.yearbook.gov.hk/2008/en/index.html [accessed 2 november 2010]. hong kong yearbook 2010 2010, online, available: http://www.yearbook.gov.hk/2010/en/index.html [accessed 23 september 2011]. hospital authority 2010, press release. two more public hospitals awarded international accreditation. 4 november. online, available: http://www.ha.org.hk/haho/ho/pad/101104eng.pdf [accessed 15 november 2010]. _____ n. d., fees and charges. online, available: http://www.ha.org.hk/visitor/ha_visitor_index.asp?parent_id=10044&content_id=10045&ver= html [accessed 23 september 2011]. legislative council, hksar 2008a, legislative council panel on health services. review of the obstetric service package charge for non-eligible persons. 18 february. online, available: http://www.legco.gov.hk/yr07-08/english/panels/hs/papers/hs0218cb2-1050-3-e.pdf [assessed 12 november 2010]. _____ 2008b, press releases. lcq17: babies born in hong kong to mainland women. 9 april. online, available: http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/200804/09/p200804090257.htm [accessed 12 november 2010]. lee, k. 2007, motions: non-local pregnant women giving birth in hong kong. online, available: http://www.leekoklong.org.hk/e_index.htm [accessed 12 november 2010]. leung, w. 2009, ‘social obstetrics: non-local expectant mothers delivering babies in hong kong’ hong kong medical diary, vol. 14, no. 3: 13–14. moir, j. 1998, ‘illegal immigrant mothers at risk from lack of check-ups.’ south china morning post, 22 june: 3. stewart, d. w. & kamins, m. a. 1993, secondary research: information sources and methods. 2nd ed., sage, newbury park. wong, w. n. d., trent and jci hospital accreditation. what for? and why both? online, available: http://www.wongsworld.org/dad_web_presence/trent%20and%20jci%20hospital%20accreditatio n%20-%20what%20for%20and%20why%20both.pdf [assessed 15 november 2010]. world health organization 1996, perinatal mortality: a listing of available information. who, geneva. _____ 2006, neonatal and perinatal mortality: country, regional and global estimates. who, geneva. _____ 2007, neonatal and perinatal mortality: country, regional and global estimates 2004. who, geneva. _____ 2010a, trends in maternal mortality: 1990 to 2008. estimates developed by who, uniceff, unfpa and the world bank, who, geneva. _____ 2010b, world health statistics 2010, who, geneva. yam, b. & au, s. 2004, ‘comparison of the experiences of having a sick baby in a neonatal intensive care unit among mothers with and without the right of abode in hong kong,’ journal of clinical nursing, vol. 13, no. 1: 118–119. portalformattinggarveyfinaloctspecialissuesep2011-1 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. health and borders across time and cultures: china, india and the indian ocean region special issue, guest edited by beatriz carrillo garcía and devleena ghosh. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. the transmission of chinese medicine in australia mary garvey, university of technology, sydney introduction chinese medicine is a complex field with a very long history and a great many diverse currents. today, mainland chinese still use chinese medicine (cm) for the treatment of a wide range of medical conditions, and china’s medical students study cm alongside western biomedicine because the nation’s integrated healthcare system delivers both. australians also use cm for all kinds of acute and chronic illnesses even though australian cm practitioner training qualifies its graduates to practice chinese acupuncture and herbal medicine only. a brief overview of cm in china and australia below will highlight some of the factors that have influenced its evolution over the last century, its transmission to australia, and the continued challenges to its transmission in australia. the transmission of cm within and outside of china has historically been possible largely due to the textual legacy that has recorded its conceptual and therapeutic developments. while there are a few earlier sources from the warring states period (476–221 bce), china’s literary medical traditions really began in the han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) with the compilation of its earliest and most famous medical classics: the yellow emperor’s internal canon (黄帝内经 huangdi neijing c.100 bce); the canon of difficult issues (难经 nanjing c.150 ce); and the treatise on cold damage and miscellaneous disorders (伤寒杂病论 shanghan zabing lun c.200 ce). garvey transmission of chinese medicine in australia portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 2 in chinese libraries today there are over 12,000 pre-modern medical texts covering the period since the han, but only a few have been translated into modern languages in a philologically serious way (unschuld 1993: 24). moreover, translations, technical language and terminology to date have been largely interpretive, idiosyncratic and difficult to cross-reference. because the practitioner’s image of the medical body guides their approach to treatment, education and training have consequences for clinical practice and for the development of cm as a distinct discipline and healthcare profession. in australia, english language historical and philological research gives english speaking students and practitioners our best access to cm’s textual tradition. this kind of research, however, rarely assists cm clinicians with issues of medical practice. the model for medical history research separated scholarship from practice in the nineteenth century, so the historical and textual research of china’s medical traditions normally avoids discussing the implications of medical theorising for therapeutic interventions. nevertheless, it can show how current concepts and practices developed from cm’s pre-modern literature; how cm’s early texts reveal a unique image of the body; and how the chinese medical body image gives internal intelligibility to the discipline’s conceptual models and therapeutic methods. in an era where we recognise the integration of physical, psychological and social factors in health management, cm’s representations of the medical body have explanatory insight and therapeutic potential for contemporary clinicians and healthcare users. china’s early notions of qi (气), for example, bridge the distinction between energy and matter, and as a medical concept, qi organises bodily phenomena into qualitative and directional influences and substances. qi-influences and substances form the basis of the chinese medical perspective on physical, cognitive, sensory and emotional conditions, and cm’s conceptual language is linked to its therapeutic methods (felt 2008). cm’s traditional conceptions are detailed and holistic, and they explain important features of body-mind physiology, disorder and treatment. within this context, the paper explores some of the broad issues concerning the education and training of english speaking practitioners of cm in australia. those issues relate primarily to the translation of chinese cm texts, the transmission of cm garvey transmission of chinese medicine in australia portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 3 knowledge–practice, and the relevance of cm for contemporary westerners. the translation of chinese language texts in this case includes the complex cultural connotations of language, as well as the translation of classical chinese into modern languages; the transmission of historical texts and practices from their original circumstances into twenty-first century medical practice; and the relevance of a foreign medical system and body of knowledge for the australian healthcare context. chinese medicine in china in pre-modern china there was a great diversity of health, medical and self cultivation practices and learning. medical practice was passed down familial lines and consisted of secret remedies and herbal formulas that were prescribed symptomatically. students of medicine undertook apprenticeships with reputable doctors and the first step for literate and scholarly medical training was to memorise the medical classics by heart. however, by the early twentieth century, many influential chinese considered all traditional medical practices backward and superstitious relics of imperial china (croizier 1975 & 1976), and with the end of the imperial era in 1912, scientific medicine from the west began to take hold of the public mind. at that time, cm was far from being standardised, institutionalised or scientific. it was not a single, cohesive, coherent system of medicine, but a mass of complex and disparate currents that seemed to neglect objective methods and data, and even anatomical structures and physical mechanisms. proponents of western bioscientific medicine almost convinced the new chinese republican government to eradicate it altogether, but instead cm was modernised. to achieve this, the modernisation of cm during the twentieth century instigated a number of significant changes that have affected the way we encounter cm in the west. during china’s revolutionary period in the middle of the last century, cm was transformed into a more systematic medical discipline. the communist government instigated a wave of revisions that were ideological and designed to integrate cm with ‘western medicine,’ a term used by the chinese to refer to the scientific medicine that had begun to filter into china via european missionaries and merchants well before the twentieth century. the two main revisionary influences during the twentieth century were modernisation and integration; with the coming to power of the communist garvey transmission of chinese medicine in australia portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 4 regime in 1949, much of the impetus for modernisation came from the new government policies to integrate cm with western medicine. recognising that the successful integration of chinese and western medicine required a fairly seamless and coherent approach to healthcare, the chinese communist party (ccp) undertook an enormous effort to archive, research, revise and modernise cm. for that purpose the ccp initiated the collection of pre-modern texts; produced new editions of classic texts and reprinted some ancient collections that had been unavailable for centuries; and it made a concerted effort to record the folk and family lineage practices of the masses because it was felt that all these materials and practices were the communal property of the chinese people (porkert 1976; taylor 2005). with the ccp’s sociopolitical agenda behind it, the modernisation of cm comprised a number of major changes which can be encapsulated under three broad processes: institutionalisation, standardisation, and scientisation and research (for more on these changes see farquhar 1992; hsu 1999; scheid 2002b & 2007; taylor 2005). these had the effect of organising and systematising cm, while at the same time emphasising its ‘scientific’ aspects. their application to cm helped to adjust traditional concepts and methods and to make cm more suitable for integration with western medicine. institutionalisation today, and for the first time in china’s history, cm is fully institutionalised: chinese medical training, qualification and practice are run by the state, and chinese medical care is mainly hospital based. cm colleges and clinics were first established on a nationwide scale in the late 1950s and early 1960s as government run work units (hsu 2000: 207). today, those colleges and clinics are cm universities and cm hospitals. in the latter half of the twentieth century, the new centralised training curriculum needed a suite of teaching materials, and cm textbooks were created for the first time. the architects of china’s twentieth century revisions sought areas of crossover between cm and western medicine and these were reflected in cm’s new curriculum and materials. standardisation twentieth century revisions in the people’s republic of china’s (prc) included a garvey transmission of chinese medicine in australia portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 5 number of projects aimed at standardising cm, starting with education and training and extending to terminologies, theoretical principles and therapeutic content. cm textbooks had to adjust their representations of chinese medical concepts to demonstrate their connections with biomedical terms and categories, and all the new topics, theories and applications were standardised to comply with the centralised training curriculum. the standardisation of terms and concepts adopted biomedical connotations where possible and this trend spread to their translation into english. for example, 病 bing (illness) is translated as disease; 证 zheng (pattern) as syndrome; 消渴 xiaoke (wasting and thirsting) as diabetes. other projects have standardised the location of acupoints, the analysis of illnesses and diseases according to their 气 qi patterns, and the strategies for treatments. in the twenty-first century, china’s internal revisions are going global: in beijing, the cm state administration has developed a ‘world standard of chinese medicine undergraduate education’ document to guide cm training outside china (shan 2009). scientisation and research the general acceptance of the scientific approach today has meant that its methods and the knowledge produced by them are thought to be factual, unbiased, reliable and widely applicable. to call a medical system ‘non-scientific’ today is to damn it as ‘arbitrary, irrational, unsystematic, misguided, ineffective and probably a danger to health’ (cunningham & andrews 1997: 7). science was applied to cm to eradicate content deemed to be superstitious and out-dated, to correct pre-modern concepts and diagnostic methods, to align cm with bioscientific methods and cm terms with biomedical terms, and to evaluate the safety and efficacy of cm treatments. some medical scientists have argued that it is possible to use and test cm from within a bioscientific framework, while also arguing that scientific clinical research could establish the efficacy of cm therapies and help develop a raft of new pharmaceuticals. the application of bioscientific methods usually meant removing cm’s traditional principles and concepts, and this was considered a win-win process. science would make cm more efficient and more effective; and science could show the world that cm has a great deal to offer medical care systems everywhere. garvey transmission of chinese medicine in australia portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 6 considering cm’s historical legacy, its complex and disparate currents, its neglect of physical structures and mechanisms, its incompatible assumptions and methodological dissonance with biomedicine, the application of bioscientific principles to cm is a persuasive option for the contemporary healthcare industry. pragmatists argue that cm should jettison the traditional packaging and adapt its therapeutic tools and substances to the biomedical paradigm. many chinese medical texts nowadays are written to this end, for clinicians and researchers who want to utilise cm within a western biomedical framework (such as chang 1992; chen 1994; chen & chen 2004; hou 1995; liu & liu 1998; zhang 2003). even before the twentieth century, china’s indigenous medicine already had a long history of revisions that were designed to eradicate dogma and superstition. the prc’s programs of scientisation, standardisation and institutionalisation characterise the latest overhaul, which began about one hundred years ago. twentieth century changes have ‘modernised’ cm, making it a more suitable discipline for integration with western biomedicine. chinese medicine in australia in the mid-1800’s chinese gold miners began to settle in australia. by 1887, ‘there were fifty chinese herbal medicine practitioners on the victorian goldfields, and by 1911 chinese herbal remedies were available in australia with english labels and directions’ (bensoussan & myers 1996: 22). but it was not until the early 1970’s that chinese medicine began to attract mainstream interest, after the opening of australia’s diplomatic relations with china and the beginnings of acupuncture training in sydney. late in the 1980s, a sydney acupuncture college developed its four-year part-time course into an undergraduate degree program for accreditation by the nsw higher education board. from 1992 that program, followed by others incorporating chinese herbal medicine was absorbed into the science and health sciences faculties of four universities in sydney and melbourne. some of the prc’s first training program textbooks became the precursors of some of the first english language textbooks available in australia and the west. for example, manfred porkert’s the theoretical foundations of chinese medicine (1974) was based on the outline of tcm and compendium of tcm (nanjing academy of tcm 1958; nanjing college of tcm 1959); john o’connor and dan bensky’s acupuncture: a garvey transmission of chinese medicine in australia portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 7 comprehensive text (shanghai college of tcm 1981) was a translation of the textbook of acu-moxi-therapy (shanghai college of traditional medicine, acu-moxi-therapy teaching unit 1962 & 1974); and nathan sivin’s traditional medicine in contemporary china (1987) included a discussion and partial translation of the revised outline of tcm (beijing college of tcm 1972). during the 1970s and 1980s these three books were the only prc-based cm texts available in english. they introduced australians and other westerners to the twentieth century’s revised cm, known outside china as ‘traditional chinese medicine’ (tcm). today, tcm is the chinese medical orthodoxy in china and the west. from its modest beginnings in australia in the 1970’s the training of cm clinicians has moved from privately owned colleges into the university system (1992) and the profession is moving towards national registration in 2012. australia’s much smaller scale institutionalisation of cm has nevertheless led to some significant gains for the discipline and the profession, such as more access to university resources that can provide greater opportunities for teaching and research. the tertiary education and training of practitioners in australia has also improved cm’s public profile, aligned it more closely with ‘mainstream’ healthcare, and when combined with national registration, public safety and confidence in cm will be enhanced. nevertheless, in the australian context cm is still only one tiny fish in a very large tertiary education and health services pond; and, unlike china’s integrated medical degree model, which trains chinese students in both cm and biomedicine, australia’s cm degrees qualify their graduates to practice cm only. moreover, china’s medical graduates study and practice within a health system that supports both cm and biomedicine. in australia there are no universities and hospitals solely devoted to cm; within universities cm remains too small to merit school or faculty status; and there are also no cm facilities within australia’s government run hospital system. thus, while in china cm has an established academic profile, a large base of reference and research, and the support of government policy and instruments, in australia cm’s move into the university setting has by default, aligned it with bioscientific health and medical programs and their research agendas. standardised concepts, terms, translations, acupoint locations, diagnostic parameters and therapeutic strategies have made some significant inroads into english language garvey transmission of chinese medicine in australia portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 8 education materials. for a discipline whose discourses and methods have been developing over many centuries, standardisation offers a number of benefits. it gives cm a firm foundation for education and clinical learning; and it improves communication for education and medical practice, and between chinese and english speaking countries. standardisation often means biomedicalising cm’s content and categories, which allows clinicians and researchers to apply cm therapies to biomedical diagnoses. thus, from a biomedical perspective, standardisation should improve the inter-examiner reliability of cm practice and research. however, the biomedical re-interpretation of traditional terms that has taken place through the standardisation of terminology has lead to a sense that cm is essentially similar to biomedicine (waldram 2000). when guided by bioscientific disease classification, the standardisation of cm terms displaces polysemous terms with more fixed, biomedical meanings and relations. it removes their original contexts and meanings and decouples them from the chinese medical archive—their conceptual histories and contexts. biomedical standardisation thereby erases thousands of years of diversity, and in doing so it removes the tradition’s inbuilt flexibility (farquhar 1987). the precision of biomedical technologies and research methods promise objective, factual information, and they offer a systematic way of investigating complex systems by isolating and testing its more simple parts or factors. evidence based medicine relies on these methods and technologies and overrides all other criteria for therapeutic safety, efficacy and best practice. because scientific clinical research determines therapeutic safety and efficacy, it also determines ethical medical practice. the investigation of cm using bioscientific research methods, however, has proven to be problematic in a number of ways. the research applied to cm often consists of unpacking a clinical event, which is itself a collection of complex processes, to systematically test an isolated factor. for example, measuring the effects on a biomedical disease entity of a single acu-point, or a fixed protocol, or a single active constituent derived from one of cm’s medicinal substances. cm’s practice methods and therapies are largely incompatible with this kind of research. classic herbal formulas are complex interventions that are structured to address patterns of illness and dysfunction; and both acupuncture and herbal prescriptions are adjusted to individual presentations that change from one clinical appointment to the next. garvey transmission of chinese medicine in australia portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 9 furthermore, cm diagnosis does not rely on quantitative data derived from measuring technologies and other objective methods. in fact, ordinary sensory information—the patient’s subjective experiences and perceptions, and the clinician’s own observations and interpretations—were thought to be sufficient to understand the nature of illness and discern the mechanisms of dysfunction. the methodological constraints required by scientific research ignore cm’s diagnostic reasoning and basic principles of practice, alter traditional methods and standardise treatment protocols (to reduce variables for example), and remove cm’s flexibility and responsiveness to clinical changes and variations (bian & moher 2008). the options for chinese medicine in australia cm in australia does not have the depth and maturity of cm in china. in australia we have only a few decades of marginalised practice, a very small senior practitioner population, limited access to pre-modern texts, and a relatively slight hold on the public mind. our ability to study and practice cm in australia is affected by the transmission of cm from its traditional contexts. specifically, these factors are related to cm’s language and literature, its history and development, its philosophical and methodological assumptions, and its viability in the contemporary sociopolitical medical setting. to address the problems of language and translation, english speaking students of cm could learn and translate chinese. however, china’s early medical texts are notoriously compact and difficult, even for native chinese speakers. consequently, an enormous number of editions, revisions, commentaries and interpretations have accumulated around them over the centuries, and the few english language translations we have of these materials are of variable quality (sivin 1993: 207). westerners who wish to practice traditional cm strive to gain an understanding of the discipline that corresponds to its established therapeutic methods. traditionalism and idealism aside, there are some pragmatic reasons to study traditional discourses. our ability to recognise and understand the traditional chinese medical body and its representations in the pre-modern literature fundamentally changes our clinical encounters with our patients, and has ramifications for diagnostic and therapeutic decision making (farquhar 1994; scheid 2002a & 2006; zhou & zhang 2005). by garvey transmission of chinese medicine in australia portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 10 studying chinese medical history and its pre-modern texts we expand our understanding of how health, disease and the medical body can be conceptualised: this connects us with the tradition and allows us to incorporate a raft of time-honoured clinical methods and techniques. however, the odds against contemporary english speaking practitioners understanding the chinese medical tradition are high. to facilitate the educational and clinical transmission of cm today china has ‘scientised’ its textbooks, and many of the historical and cultural contexts and meanings of their content have been removed. similarly, cm textbooks in english have changed traditional concepts: the biomedicalisation of pre-modern terms and concepts dislocates them from cm’s established therapeutic methods and disrupts the discipline’s internal intelligibility. the changes and issues described above present a significant challenge for the transmission of cm and its preservation as a distinct medical system in contemporary english speaking countries such as australia. while it is difficult to predict the course of cm’s global emergence in any detail, commentators such as volker scheid (1999) postulate three possible scenarios. i mention them since they broadly apply to the australian context where all three to some extent are underway. the first would see cm institutionalised. although it is unlikely australia will follow china’s model of integration and institutionalisation, australian universities now have cm degree courses; the victorian state government currently registers its practitioners, and national registration will be in place in australia in 2012. a second possible scenario would see biomedicine assimilate cm. biomedicalpharmaceutical researchers would selectively ‘discover’ the active constituents in chinese medicinal substances and employ chinese medical techniques wherever they might benefit health outcomes. assimilation would replace traditional diagnostic reasoning and methods with bioscientific ones, and effectively dismantle cm as a distinct form of medical practice. scheid’s third scenario sees cm ignoring mainstream political and economic power, and continuing its traditions ‘for the sake of clinical efficacy’ (1999: siv10). with little knowledge of its historical trends and developments cm practitioners today must either reinvent the wheel or replace it with dissonant constructs. conversely, with a firmer grasp of the chinese medical tradition the profession would be in a better position to negotiate what is learned, taught, practiced, garvey transmission of chinese medicine in australia portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 11 and researched. conclusions today, western biomedicine is the dominant medical discourse in healthcare systems worldwide. in china and in the rest of the world, cm has been revising its content and concepts to adopt a more mainstream, bioscientific perspective. these revisions make cm more suitable for integration or assimilation with biomedicine, and for investigation using scientific perspectives and methods. the revisions that took place over the last century are ongoing—they have aligned cm with a more biomedical perspective, they have had important consequences for the transmission of cm in australia and the west, and are changing cm worldwide. twentieth century changes to cm have organised and systematised many of the disparate medical currents that developed in pre-modern china. over the last hundred years cm’s overhaul within china was driven by the sociopolitical imperatives to modernise and integrate its healthcare system. this push to modernise cm is not inconsistent with previous state instigated revisions that occurred periodically over its long history and that were designed to eradicate dogma and superstition. in australia, cm as a distinct medical discipline does not have a strong cultural basis or presence, and cm training is only a few decades old. thus, in contemporary western settings, cm must prove itself to a sceptical biomedical health industry while at the same time promoting its complementary approach to the practice of medicine (chi 1994). the education and practice of cm and biomedicine are likely to co-exist independently in australia for quite some time, and the question for the future of cm in australia is how best to professionalise the discipline and negotiate our way. the path of least resistance politically and educationally is to biomedicalise cm. however, even though biomedicalisation offers some sociopolitical kudos and some practical educational shortcuts, it has also lead to unworkable simplifications and methodological failures. instead, building access to the tradition’s primary sources can reveal internal principles and intelligibility that support its methods of practice and continue the evolution of the field and its traditions. allied with biomedicine, the distinctive features and methods of traditional cm may well provide real benefits for the australian healthcare system, users and costs. garvey transmission of chinese medicine in australia portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 12 reference list beijing college of tcm 1972, revised outline of chinese medicine, beijing college of tcm, beijing (in chinese). bensoussan, a. & myers, s. p. 1996, towards a safer choice: the practice of traditional chinese medicine in australia, university of western sydney, macarthur, sydney. bian, z. & moher, d. 2008, ‘clinical studies and randomized controlled trials in chinese herbal medicine: a historical and contemporary review part two,’ chinese medicine times ejournal, vol. 3, no. 3. online, available: http://www.chinesemedicinetimes.com/ [accessed 1 september 2008]. chang, m. y. 1992, anticancer medicinal herbs, trans. y. bai. hunan science and technology press, hunan, china. chen, j. d. 1994, treatment of diabetes with traditional chinese medicine, trans. y. k. sun, s. h. zhou & y. b. lu. shandong science and technology press, jinan, china. chen, j. k. & chen, t. t. 2004, chinese medical herbology and pharmacology. art of medicine press, city of industry, california. chi, c. h. 1994, ‘integrating traditional medicine into modern health care systems: examining the role of chinese medicine in taiwan,’ social science and medicine, vol. 39, no. 3: 307–332. croizier, r. c. 1975, 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no. 1: 59–71. _____ 2007, currents of tradition in chinese medicine 1626-2006. eastland press, seattle. garvey transmission of chinese medicine in australia portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 13 shan, j. 2009, ‘new tcm standard created,’ china daily: the national english language newspaper, october 13: 1. online, available: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ [accessed 1 november 2009]. shanghai college of tcm 1981, acupuncture: a comprehensive text, trans. j. o’connor & d. bensky. eastland press, chicago. shanghai college of traditional medicine (acu-moxi-therapy teaching unit) (1962 & 1974), textbook of acu-moxi-therapy. shanghai science and technology press, shanghai (in chinese). sivin, n. 1987, traditional medicine in contemporary china: a partial translation of revised outline of chinese medicine (1972): with an introductory study on change in present day and early medicine. center for chinese studies, university of michigan, ann arbor. _____ 1993, ‘huang ti nei ching,’ in early chinese texts: a bibliographical guide, (ed.) m. loewe. society for the study of early china; institute of east asian studies, university of california, berkeley: 196–215. taylor, k. 2005, chinese medicine in early communist china, 1945–63: a medicine of revolution. routledgecurzon, london. unschuld, p. u. 1993, ‘history of chinese medicine,’ in the cambridge world history of human disease, (ed.) k. f. kiple. cambridge university press, cambridge: 20–27. waldram, j. b. 2000, ‘the efficacy of traditional medicine: current theoretical and methodological issues,’ medical anthropology quarterly, vol. 14, no. 4: 603–625. zhang, d. z. 2003, treating toxico-side effects of radiotherapy and chemotherapy with integrative traditional chinese and western medicine, trans. w. lu & p. lin. people’s medical publishing house, beijing. zhou, f. w. & zhang, q. w. 2005, ‘the path of the old chinese doctors,’ the lantern, vol. 2, no. 2: 6– 13. microsoft word maravillasgalleyjan2013issuefinal.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. boats, borders and the geo-imaginaries of the south francis maravillas, university of technology sydney asylum seekers arriving by boat off the coast of australia continue to provoke much debate galvanizing the efforts of successive governments to repeatedly assert and delimit the boundaries and contours of the nation. significantly, amidst the dramas played out in australia’s oceans and coastlines, images of boats acquire a particularly potent mnemonic and affective force in the public imagination. as a mediatized spectacle, these images etch themselves against a national consciousness already inured to—though still prone to panic at the sight of—the flotilla of rickety boats packed with people heading south towards australian shores. this paper activates a mode of spatial inquiry into australia’s identity through an analysis of a number of frames through which the passage and interdiction of boats off the coast of the nation may be viewed. by focusing on contemporary artistic representations and practices that explore the various ways this mediatized spectacle may be apprehended and understood, i show how these frames foreground a distinct set of transnational relationalities shaped by the tensions between australia’s history and its geography. in particular, i examine the way in which australia’s peculiar and paradoxical geographical location as south of both the west and asia play a key role in affixing the horizon within which a conception of the nation and its relationship with the world was—and continues to be—defined and shaped. significantly, i not only critically probe the constitutive fears and anxieties that underlie bounded conceptions of the trope of the south, but also examine how such a trope can articulate itself as a site of exchange and negotiation, a distinctive borderland that engenders new cartographies of difference and belonging in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world. i maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 2 argue that these frames overlap and converge on the wider questions of space, place and identity at the very moment when the process of globalization and migration has done so much to shake any certainties about australia’s identity as a geographically distinct and spatially bounded nation-state. in so doing, they represent crucial sites for articulating and enacting a transcultural politics of mobility and spatiality that attends to the ways in which the trope of the south may been imagined not as a sphere of containment or an enclaved territory, but as an evolving cartography, the shifting outlines of which opens up new horizons of possibility for rethinking the spatial and temporal coordinates of australia in a globalizing world. imagining the south in the first decade of the current millennium, boats have taken centre stage, sweeping into public consciousness and prompting renewed efforts by the australian government to control the flows of migration by remaking of the nation’s ‘borderscapes’ to its north through practices and discourses of security and sovereignty (neilson 2010; perera 2007). this defensive response to the southward bound migratory journey across ravenous seas not only registers an ongoing sense of the racialized tenor of our times, it also alludes to the historically embedded cartographic anxieties of the australian body politic. for the implementation of hugely popular measures to keep refugees out of australian territory by successive australia governments is reminiscent of the garrison mentality of white australia that held sway at a time when the desire to maintain a closely guarded boundary around australia as a distinct and separate island-continent was the order of the day. significantly, the various defensive responses to the southward-bound movement of refugees arriving from ‘asia’—the region which has been described as our ‘near north’—can also be seen as symptomatic of the fears and anxieties that have historically defined the psychic terrain of the ‘big island’ in the ‘south.’ as an index of australia’s antipodality, the trope of the south marked not just the site upon which a raft of speculative utopian and colonial fantasies were historically projected—from a land that was unknown (terra incognita) to one that was uninhabited (terra nullius)—it also constituted a relational node that marked australia’s anxious location as white settler colony on the fringes of asia. as david walker observes: ‘for well over a century, australians have had “asia” on their mind, nervously aware that their “title deed” to the last continent for migration was not impregnable’ (1999: 11). maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 3 moreover, the anxiety of antipodality that marked white australia’s spatial imaginings has arisen partly as a result of the geo-imaginative articulation of the terrestrial and maritime space of the south. indeed, shortly after the celebrations of federation, alfred deakin observed that australia ‘is certainly a very self-conscious nation that has just made its appearance in the centre of the southern seas’ (cited in macintyre 1986: 25). here, the ‘southern seas’ appears as a geo-elemental trope that is coterminous with the idea of australia as a singular and self-contained ‘island-continent’; that is to say, the oceanic appears as the ‘constitutive outside’ of the terrestrial, as the moat that surrounds the unassailable fortress of the newly inaugurated modern nation-state of australia. this defensive geo-imaginative articulation of a bounded and territorially demarcated space of the nation is, moreover, grounded in a ‘insular imaginary predicated on the territoriality of an island geo-body,’ one that has shaped—and continues to shape— some of the peculiarities of australia’s view of itself and its place in the world (perera 2009: 23). of particular interest to this paper then is the way australia’s anxious experience of antipodality has emerged as a result of its geo-imaginative emplacement in the space of the south. in recent times, various cultural critics and theorists have evoked the trope of the south as a pivotal space for imagining an alternate cartography for directing the flow of dialogue and exchange, beyond the confines of centre-periphery relations. the cuban art critic, gerardo mosquera, for instance, argues for the need to develop horizontal routes, connection and dialogue between the various cultures of the south as a means of bypassing the mediation of metropolitan centres (mosquera 1994). likewise, nikos papastergiadis contends that the south is a ‘spherical concept’ that harnesses the relational energy underpinning what he calls ‘south to south’ circuits of contact and exchange across spaces with similar histories of displacement and colonization, such as australia, south africa and south america (papastergiadis 2010). in a similar vein, connell deploys the south as a relational category to highlight relations of power in the realm of knowledge so as to challenge the dominance of metropolitan epistemologies (connell 2007). yet, while these efforts to delineate affirmative understandings of the south play a role in unsettling the dominance of metropolitan mediation, they nevertheless tend to diminish the significance of australia’s engagement of asia, a region that papastergiadis problematically asserts ‘has done little to re-orient the mapping of [australia’s] cultural imaginary’ (2003: 3). maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 4 in her account of the transnational relations that characterize the asian diaspora in australia, audrey yue has sought to recast australia’s dual location ‘south of the west’ and ‘south of asia’ in terms of the cognate geographical and theoretical trope of ‘going south’: inscribed in a migratory movement of literal displacement and reoriented in the racialized landscape of a postcolonial settler australia, the trajectory of ‘going south’ aligns itself with (australia as) south of the west, (australia as) south of asia, and (both australia and asia as) south of the east and west. implicit in the trajectory of ‘going south’ is an interrogation of how australia, as south of the west has also come to construct itself as specifically south of asia. (yue 2000: 192) by tracking a specific migratory movement and trajectory from asia to australia, the trope of ‘going south’ points to the way these movements and flows do not take place in empty space, but move across the already constituted space of the island-nation of australia, a ‘racialized landscape’ marked, as it were, by multiple faultlines and checkpoints, and uniquely defined by a heightened sense of decenteredness in relation to ‘the west.’ the terrain of the south—nominated as ‘australia’—is thus a deeply fraught and contested one; a ‘dubiously postcolonial’ geo-body whose internal fissures and boundaries appear as the gaping legacies and after-effects of a haunting past (morris 1992: 471). at the same time, as stuart hall observes, faultlines and borders are also productive ‘sites of surreptitious crossings’ where new relations, practices and forms of connection emerge (hall 2003: 34–35). the south is thus not just a historically constituted site, but also an evolving cartography, a product of the interrelations of a multitude of histories and trajectories and one that is open to remapping as a complex, multidimensional living spatiality. indeed, the critical and geographical trope of the south may perhaps be productively understood as a mode of location and epistemic category marked by the deep-seated tension between australia’s history and its geography. as a mode of location, the trope of the south is a marker of australia’s postcolonial predicament and its anxious experience of antipodality and decenteredness south of both the west and asia. it thus foregrounds a distinct set of transnational relations shaped by the tension between australia’s history (as a white settler colony) and its geography (as located in or on the edge of asia). as an epistemic category, the trope of the south brings into view a set of vectors that intersects with the making and remaking of the spatial and temporal coordinates of the paradoxically located entity of ‘australia’ as south of both the west maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 5 and asia. in this sense the south can be understood as a site, in the sense described by john frow and meaghan morris, that is ‘the point of intersection and of negotiation of radically different kinds of determination and semiosis’ (1993: xv). as a site at which a mutiplicity of forces—determinations and effects—are articulated, the south is never a closed, coherent and integrated place or territory, but rather is always in the process of being made, a product of the interrelations of a multitude of histories and trajectories. the south is thus always pluralized and hybridized, as well as partial, provisional and open to contestation. it is a space-time configuration that is both a historically and geographically constituted site and a dynamic, relational and multiply inflected spatiality. frame one: the box in august 2001, some weeks before the september 11 attacks and in the lead up to australia’s federal elections, a norwegian cargo ship, the m.v. tampa, rescued over four hundred mainly afghan and iraqi refugees from a boat that had began to sink off the indonesian archipelago en route to australia. as the tampa made its way towards the island-continent, it was refused entry into australian waters by a government declaring it was not ‘a soft touch and [not one] whose sovereign rights in relation to who comes here are going to be trampled on’ (howard 2001: 30235). within days, the image of the giant ochre hulk of the tampa was projected onto the national imaginary, sweeping into a national consciousness already inured to the sight of overcrowded boats making landfall on australian shores. in a ‘cosmopolitan’ age of increased travel, mobility and global interconnectedness— facilitated by enhanced technologies of transport (the airplane) and communications (the internet)—the container ship appears almost anachronistic. nevertheless, the ship and its heavy-duty cargo has long been a vital force in the movement of objects and people, carrying with it human fears and hopes as well as the projections of the imagination. reflecting on the great colonial voyages of discovery and trade, michel foucault describes the ship as an exemplary form of heterotopia that juxtaposes several contradictory spaces and which results in the formation of new spaces; a vessel that is pregnant with heterogeneity and the potentialities of the imagination: the ship is a piece of floating space, a placeless place that lives by its own devices, that is selfenclosed and, at the same time, delivered over to the boundless expanse of the ocean, and that goes from port to port, from brothel to brothel, all the way to the colonies in search of the most maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 6 precious treasure … from the sixteenth century up to our time, the ship has been at the same time not only the greatest instrument of economic development … but the greatest reservoir of the imagination. (foucault 1998: 184–85) the complex imaginings and multiple narratives engendered and embodied by the cargo ship as it traversed the oceans in a mercantile age have only been heightened by the increased volume and intensity of trade in commodities that characterize the era of globalization. indeed, the cargo ship with its treasure-trove of objects from afar has been one the main drivers of globalization in the post war era, dynamically transforming local cultures and economies and configuring new modes of identity and belonging. as a mobile space that traverses across the earth’s vast oceanic surface, the ship as heterotopia does not merely mirror the world; it also partakes in a process of worldmaking, one that foregrounds multiplicity in the movement and co-existence of objects and people as well as the lines of force that direct their flow. in this context, the modern shipping container—stacked high on deck or packed into the hull of bulk freighters—can be understood as metonym for the stark disjunctions and shifting geographies that inscribe globalization. in his photographic work, panorama, mid-atlantic (1993) (figure 1), the us artist and critic alan sekula powerfully deploys the image of the shipping container as part of his pictorial exploration of the conquest of figure 1: allan sekula, panorama. mid-atlantic, 1993 (from fish story, 1988–1995), cibachrome print, 33 1/2 x 62 1/2 inches, 85.1 x 158.8 cm © allan sekula. courtesy of the artist and christopher grimes gallery, santa monica. maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 7 maritime space in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world marked by the deterritorialized flows of capital and the exploitation of labour. sekula describes the shipping or cargo container in this way: the contemporary maritime world offers little in the way of reassuring and nostalgic anthropomorphism, but surrenders instead to the serial discipline of the box. the cargo container … transforms the space and time of port cities, and makes the globalization of manufacturing possible. the container is the very coffin of remote labor power, bearing the hidden evidence of exploitation in the far reaches of the world. (sekula 2000: 411, my emphasis) here, sekula’s figuring of the globally mobile cargo container as a coffin may be understood in two ways. firstly, by depicting the standardized shipping container as a tomb that subsumes and disciplines labour through containment, sekula recalls marx’s description of ‘cosmopolitan’ capital as ‘dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour’ (marx 1976: 342). an index of both mobility and enclosure, sekula’s shipping container thus represents a powerful attempt to critically comprehend the stark, grinding realities of an ever more disposable and remote labour force that lies in the shadow of the relentlessly expansive, unconstrained and virtually frictionless world of global capital and commodity exchange. its passage through the seas and across multiple frontiers is, moreover, tracked and scanned by technologies of control, surveillance and logistics at various points of entry into the national body, a process that increasingly reveal the traumatized bodies of undocumented subjects clandestinely inserted therein (neilson & rossiter 2010; verstraete 2003). the shipping container not only exposes the way the free flow of capital is predicated on the restricted movement of people; it also discloses the asymmetries of power that mark the experience of global mobility and migration deploying the schema of global cultural flows developed by arjun appadurai (1996) one could argue that the refugees on the tampa were caught in the yawning gap between australia’s economic and cultural aspirations, a gap that marks the disjuncture between what appadurai describes as the ‘ethnoscape’ and the ‘financescape’ that shape the flow of people, money and goods in and out of australia. nevertheless, the movement of capital and people across national borders does not take place across empty space or in a completely random and chaotic manner; rather, the routes and contours of these flows are powerfully affected and refracted by the historically and culturally specific topographies over which they traverse. that is to say, the global maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 8 cultural flows move across always already constituted space. the spaces traversed by these flows thus need to be historically and culturally situated within a particular geography. as shu-mei shi puts it, ‘[f]low is always affected by topography—it must follow specific contours, layouts and routes which affect its speed, direction and density. the direction of flows are also historically marked’ (2000: 89). from this perspective, the particular space or topography across which these flows traverse is not a continuous and given ‘surface’; rather, the space of flows needs to be understood as always already constituted by particular historical, social, economic and cultural relations that shape, configure and enable (as well as constrain) such flows. how these complex relationalities shape and configure the space of flows, then, follow particular national histories and cultures as in the case of australia, whose settler colonial history and island topography have moulded its peculiar view of itself and its place in an increasingly globalized world. the space of the south nominated as ‘australia’ is thus a deeply fraught and contested one, marked by multiple faultlines and checkpoints, and uniquely inflected by its anxious experience of antipodality and decenteredness. moreover, australia’s insecure footings—its experience of groundlessness—in the south define its predicament of postcoloniality and its paradoxical geographical location south of both ‘the west’ and ‘asia.’ what is therefore now increasingly at stake in the spatial (re-)imagining of ‘australia’ is the relationship between sovereignty, territory and identity that girders the geo-imaginary of the nation-state. frame two: sovereign hospitality sometime around 4 p.m. on a cool wintry day in 2010, along the steps of the iconic sydney opera house, starts to gather an assemblage standing and mingling furtively as an anticipating crowd awaits their instructions. in the ensuing minutes, the crowd dutifully proceeds to unfurl an australian flag, slowly wrapping it around their heads and standing still in silence against the crisp air of the late afternoon sun (figure 2). as an aberrant assemblage, the crowd and its act of collective stillness distracts; unsettling the familiar, picturesque image of the iconic building and disrupting the touristic gaze cast upon it. with parts of their faces covered by the union jack and the stars of the southern cross, the crowd is rendered silent and anonymous by the very emblem of national sovereignty and the violent acts of exclusion enacted in its name. yet rather maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 9 figure 2: boat-people.org, muffled protest, 2010. photo cc by-nc-sa ilaria vanni, creative commons. maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 10 than passively acquiesce to silence and erasure beneath the drape of the flag, the crowd enacts a particular modality of stillness amidst the shock of its spectacle—one that simultaneously ‘stands out’ and ‘takes a stand’ (bissell & fuller 2011: 2). conceived as a series of ephemeral interventions, ‘muffled protest’ is a work by the artists collective, boat-people.org, that was also enacted a few weeks earlier in melbourne’s federation square as well as at various public spaces across the nation and culminating in an exhibition of video and photographic documentation of the work on cockatoo island in sydney (figure 3). the work seeks to register a ‘dispersed collective manifestation of dismay’ against the blinding forces of nationalism that continue to shape the australian political landscape (hepworth & kelly 2010: 45). it is a ‘statement of ambiguous, personal and silent declarations that quietly linked borders and interventions, the edge and the interior under the flag’ (45). moreover, underlying this most recent effort to creatively bring into focus the border panic directed against refugees, is the collective’s premise that ‘everyone who is not aboriginal is a boat person’ (44). as one of the members of boat-people.org puts it, muffled protest came out of discussions that explored the link between the northern territory intervention and the tampa crisis. it was felt that both these events inscribed the colonial state, making australian indigenous people—like refugees—outsiders to that state. the individuals that stand collectively with their heads wrapped in the flag signify those that are symbolically included within the colonial state. the ambiguity of the piece—and the time it takes to unfold—was intended to give space and time for contemplation of our own relationship to the state and its politics. it was a moment to recognize our own privilege and perhaps even the complicity that is entangled with that privilege. (hepworth 2012) in this way, the work can be understood as a performance of complicity through silence that creatively opens up a space to reflect on the complex ambiguities of hospitality and the tenuous grounds upon which it is enacted by the nation. indeed, a sense of australia’s insecure and precarious footing in the space of the south may be gleaned from the complex ambiguities that mark the practice of extending hospitality to the figure of the stranger who calls upon it. these ambiguities can be discerned in the collective’s earlier tactical and interactive media art intervention, ‘we are all boat people,’ and its website http://www.boat-people.org, a web-based project initiated a decade earlier in 2001. while the group’s website served as a platform for distributing ‘tools’ and resources— in the form of downloadable images, pamphlets, stencil templates, fact-sheets and maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 11 figure 3: boat-people.org, muffled protest, 2010. image courtesy of antonella biscaro and nik midlam. archives of past events—to assist the broader public in initiating their own actions and events, the primary organizing principle of the project centred on the words, ‘boat people’ that was juxtaposed against an image of a tall ship. this jarringly incongruous image was projected onto a sail of the sydney opera house and stenciled on pavements and walls across various parts of the city in a manner akin to the situationists’ practice of détournement (‘diversion’ or ‘semantic shift’) (figure 4). in his account of the aesthetic strategies of the situationists, peter wollen described the practice of détournement as the ‘break[ing] down [of] the divisions between individual artforms, to maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 12 figure 4: boat-people.org, untitled, october 2001. documentation of projection event, sydney opera house, photo: tina fiveash. courtesy of the artists create situations, constructed encounters and creatively lived moments in specific urban settings, instances of a critically transformed everyday life (wollen 1993: 121). by deploying the tactic of détournement through acts of appropriation and doubling, the ‘we are all boat people’ intervention adopted the principles of reinvention, ephemerality and temporariness that inform much agit-prop, guerilla art and tactical media art practice (miekle 2003; lovink 2002). in this way, their practices of détournement were tactical in de certeau’s sense, as insurgent practices that ‘operate in isolated actions, blow by blow’ and ‘can be where [they] are least expected’ (1984: 37). significantly, by juxtaposing the words ‘boat people’ against a triumphalist image of a tall ship reenacting the colonial voyage to australian shores, the intervention’s key imagery draws its deeply unsettling political and ethical force by conjuring the spectre of the nation’s foundational incursion by sea, the ghostly image of a still unsettled colonial past that present-day fantasies of ‘invasion’ seek to exorcize. indeed, the maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 13 incarceration of refugees in detention camps across australia reflected the nation’s own abject origin when the island-continent itself served as the gulag repository for ‘convicts’ from its ‘homeland,’ great britain, to which it still pledges allegiance and fealty. in contrast to muffled protest, the intervention’s injunction to practice hospitality towards those nominated as ‘strangers’ is predicated on the assertion of an (self-) interpellative pronoun, ‘we,’ that is unequivocally equated to a homogenizing ‘all.’ as such, it problematically assumes a national integrity that is difficult to sustain, particularly in a settler and multicultural society like australia marked by the privileging of the anglo mainstream as well as the absence of a formal acknowledgement of, and engagement with, indigenous sovereignty (hage 1998; moreton-robinson 2000). in her discussion of the fraught protocols and ethics of ‘sovereign hospitalities,’ katrina schlunke critically explores the complexly entangled enunciative positions and modes of address that underpin the call to offer refuge in a country that has yet to acknowledge aboriginal presence and indigenous sovereignty. according to schlunke: the indigenous person, the refugee and the new and old ‘settler’ sit in an awkward arrangement of relationship which is radically exposed through the reality of indigenous sovereignty. indigenous sovereignty insists the question is asked: who are strangers? the situation of the refugee insists the question is asked: who is able to practice hospitality? all of these questions within australia move between the imaginary of a continent simultaneously surrounded by beaches and shores. (2002: part 1) from this perspective, the unheimlich appearance of the abject body of the refugee on the ambiguous shores of the island-continent of australia poses a traumatic question about the identity of the australian subject and the ground upon which it stands. the interrogation that emerges from the presence of the stranger is thus—in a deeply ontological sense—a fundamentally unsettling one. to confront this radical interrogation or questioning is neither simply a case of belatedly acknowledging the history of negated bodies nor one of offering succour to alterity (chambers 1998: 34– 38). rather, it entails examining the very ground upon which one stands in defining and excluding the other and offering it hospitality. as chambers puts it: [b]eyond the immediate response that may offer temporary hospitality to alterity, a more adequate and sustained reply to the question of exile and migrancy can surely only emerge from considering the ground that place—both the previous place from which the migrant comes and the present place that hosts it body, her history, their culture—nominates (1998: 38, my emphasis) maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 14 in a postcolonial settler society such as australia, the question of how place is grounded, how it is conceived and constructed—in short, what and how it ‘nominates’—inevitably focuses attention on the question of sovereignty and the practices of hospitality it predicates. indeed, the fraught political and ethical ambiguities of hospitality has precipitated what many have referred to as a ‘crisis’ of a certain idea and formation of sovereignty (burke 2002; nicoll 2002; pugliese 2002; watson et al. 2002). in particular, the complex ambiguities of hospitality calls into question the modern idea of sovereignty that prescribes ‘a bounded territorial realm in which national authority is absolute [and] which provides a representative and political principle through which states and their people can manage and control the forces that affect their lives’ (burke 2002: part 1). that is to say, the idea of sovereignty, as it was imagined within modernity and tied to the bounded and exclusive territorial authority of the nation-state (as the embodiment and agent of sovereign power), have been called into question by the figure of the refugee precisely because of its reliance on a fundamentally essentializing claim: that the state’s sovereignty forms a legitimate site of authority based on its status as a representative signifier for the nation, ‘the people.’ significantly, such a status—and the authority and legitimacy it confers to those who invoke it—is particularly difficult to sustain in a settler society like australia, whose very modernity rests upon the illegitimacy of its colonial foundations. indeed, the existential fiction of a sovereign australian nation and identity is both asserted and questioned in the high seas in ways that not only exposed the moral bankruptcy of the form and exercise of australian territorial sovereignty, but also revealed its very reliance on the constitutive violence that attended the trespasses and incursions of the nation’s still unsettled—and unsettling—colonial past. in this context, the figure of the refugee interdicted in the open seas both affirm and undo the logic of the border, reinforcing the line in the sea while also, importantly, marking the possibility of complex and multiple histories and spatialities, ones that acknowledge the past and present struggles for indigenous sovereignty. to put it differently, the southward-bound figure of the refugee both affirms and confounds a bounded and territorial conception of the space of the south in ways that helps to engender new relationalities and alternative geographies of sovereignty and social and political responsibility. as mckenzie wark has observed: ‘those who seek refuge are a critique of the limits of sovereignty … it is the rule of the border itself that every refugee maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 15 challenges … it is the justice of national sovereignty itself that every asylum seeker refutes’ (2001: xix).1 frame three: terror australis this is particularly true if the justice of national sovereignty is anchored in the territorial logic of terror. for at this point one may reflect upon the etymological ambiguity of the word ‘territory.’ william connolly has argued that while the word ‘territory’ is usually taken as a derivative of the latin terra (earth or land), it is also derived from terrere: to frighten, or—to use a term with wild currency—to terrorize. in this sense, ‘territory’ is a place from which people are warned (1995: xxii). i want to suggest, however, that the assertion and maintenance of sovereignty over national territorial space is not just a violent act of exclusion that requires constant vigilance and the mobilization of threat; it is also symptomatic of the national geo-body’s own tremulous sense of fear and anxiety in relation to space and place. historically, a utopian and phantasmic space, the space of the south nominated as ‘australia’ now appears—from a different cartography, though in an equally phantasmal register—as a ‘safe haven’ or refuge for those seeking succour from the ravages of war, famine and economic collapse. yet, as we have seen, the geo-imaginary of the south has also historically been a space invested with complex racial anxieties that articulate with fantasies of invasion and engulfment. this sense of anxiety and fear about the invasion of national space, along with the attempt to re-assert sovereign control over the nation’s space and territory is well captured in trepidation continent (figure 5), a work that was produced in 2003 by guan wei, an artist whose own journey from china to australia in the late 1980s followed the archetypal migratory trajectory from north to south (but also from a differently loaded set of bearings, from east to west). in this body of work, guan wei explores notions of space and identity by figuring the geography of australia as a site of migration in an increasingly fraught and racialized, geo-political world. his work depicts a continental landmass that is both strange and familiar, overlaying the rational representational forms 1 for wark, the figure of the refugee also calls into question the ‘justice’ of the global economic order. according to him: ‘migration is globalisation from below. if the overdeveloped world refuses to trade with the underdeveloped world on fair terms, to forgive debt, to extend loans, to lift trade barriers against food and basic manufactured goods, then there can only be an increase in the flow of people …t he most telling human critique of globalisation is not the black-clad protestors in seattle or genoa, it is still the silent bodies of the illegals, in ships, trucks or car boots, passing through the borders’ (2001: xix). maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 16 figure 5: guan wei, trepidation continent 2, 2003. drawing on map, 98 x 82 cm. image courtesy of the artist. and symbols of modern cartography with stylized animal, humanoid and mechanical figures. more ominously, guan’s work also feature military cross-hairs or target points as markers of death and destruction, overlapping with weather isobars whose tremulous ripples appear as a portent of the renascent threat of ‘invasion’ from the north. significantly, trepidation continent depicts not just the flows and itineraries of human movement across the vast terrestrial and maritime territory of australia, but also the enunciative acts of sovereignty that attends the militarization of the nation’s borders. in this series, local vernacular interdictions—‘not welcome,’ ‘piss off’—are inscribed onto the continental territory, alongside the injunctions of officialdom—‘urgent,’ ‘confidential,’ ‘secret document.’ in this way, guan foregrounds the performative character of both the sovereign’s powers of decree and the collective national assent to the exercise of these prerogative powers under the mantle of sovereignty. in her account of the concept of performativity, judith butler argues that ‘performative acts are forms maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 17 of authoritative speech: most performances, for instance, are statements that, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power’ (1993: 225). moreover, the power of the performative act of sovereign enunciation lies in its capacity to ‘produce the effect it names.’ one such effect that is installed in the act of sovereign nomination is the dissolution of categories—refugee/illegal immigrant, human/nonhuman—through such legal contortions and sleights-of-hand as the excision of parts of australia’s territories from its migration zones to create a ‘space of exception,’ a place that is ‘not-australia’ (perera 2002b; agamben 1998). in guan’s work, then, the once fabled island-continent of australia is figured as a place marked by both anxiety and fear as it seeks to violently reassert control over its territory through a performative assertion of its sovereignty in an increasingly turbulent and dislocated world order. taken together, the disparate visual signs, figures and markers of trepidation continent coalesce into a narrative of invasion and engulfment while simultaneously making an oblique reference to bad feng shui, a ghostly geo-elemental trope aggravated by the forces that have unsettled the balance and harmony of the environment.2 in this fictive scenario, the imagined geography of australia is figured as a site of haunting, where spectres of both purity and contagion ominously cast their shadows. in particular, ‘australia’ as the space of the south is figured as haunted as much by the spectre of invasion from its north—a haunting that resonates with earlier anxieties about the spectre of asianization (as well as sinicization) of australia that the white australia policy sought to exorcize—as by the ghostly presence of chinese geoelemental forces that flow across the anxious landscape of the nation. in this way, guan’s work points to not just the complex entanglements of multiple histories, but also the possibility of imagining other kinds of spatial relations. indeed, trepidation continent figures the bounded and heavily militarized space of australia as a contested space. in particular, his graphic reworking of the map of australia challenges the claims to singularity, stability and closure that characterizes the modern cartographic representation of the nation. in contrast to this modern practice of cartography, guan’s work foregrounds precisely the very conditions that have given rise to the modern map of australia. in this way, trepidation continent can be viewed as a 2 guan wei had explored the chinese practice of geomancy—the discipline of arranging space in order to affect the flow of energy and currents—in his earlier work ‘feng shui’ (1999). maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 18 form of anamnesis, a recollection of the spatial practices of colonialism (such as the violent ‘naming’ of indigenous land by the early settlers) that the modern-day map of australia has—through its taxonomic and ordering procedures—sought to forget or consign to the order of (repressed) memory. in particular, it highlights the way in which the journey towards, and across, the space of the south is not just an unsettling echo of australia’s own violent history of settler colonialism, but is also a revenant of the nation’s own founding incursion by sea. significantly, this southward-bound migratory journey towards australia also fundamentally reconfigures both the space and time of the south, giving rise to new spaces of relationality and differing planes of temporality that defines the condition of diaspora in australia. frame four: the boat—refuge, refugee, refuse the complex configuration of relations and trajectories that constitute the multiple spaces and times of diaspora is evident in dacchi dang’s the boat (2001) (figures 6 and 7), a life-size reconstruction of the boat in which the artist and several of his siblings undertook their southward-bound journey to australia. an austere yet imposing work, dang’s boat can be viewed as both a presence and a narrative. the presence of the boat is registered by its enormous wooden frame that was clad entirely with rice paper, which functioned as a fragile and permeable outer membrane wrapped around the solid figure 6: dacchi dang, the boat, 2001. plywood and silk print. site installation, 4a centre for contemporary asian art, sydney. image courtesy of the artist. maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 19 surface of the boat’s structure. projected onto the rice paper in the hull of the boat were a series of photomontages depicting the sea and the sky, bound hands as well as families separated or reunited by their voyage across the high seas. figure 7: dacchi dang, the boat, 2001. plywood and silk print. site installation, 4a centre for contemporary asian art, sydney. image courtesy of the artist. this visual narrative of loss and hope, composed from the fragments and imaginary glow of memory is re-enacted and dramatized by the very act of encountering the work. in order to view these images, viewers had to enter through a hatchway at the rear of the boat, whose passage across was such that one had to crouch down, and thus vicariously experience the claustrophobic swell of bodies confined in a space often reeking with urine (which in the high seas is a lot more drinkable than sea water) and the stench of fear as the boat to freedom also held out the grim possibility of turning into a coffin, one of many floating sarcophagus that never made it to shore. indeed, the presence and narrative of dang’s boat resonated in ways that elicited identification with both the pleasure and pain of a cultural memory, one that is understood neither as an individual memory writ large nor as a buried memory that is ‘recovered,’ but as a particular constellation of shared memories that is negotiated and mediated through one’s own present corporeal encounter with the work. by registering and embodying affect through memory, dang’s work engages in what jill bennett refers to as a ‘poetics of sense-memory.’ bennett describes the workings of sense-memory in this way: ‘[s]ense memory is about tapping a certain kind of process experienced not as maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 20 a remembering of the past but as a continuous negotiation of the present with indeterminable links with the past. the poetics of sense memory involves not so much speaking of but speaking out of a particular memory or experience’ (bennett 2005: 38). in dang’s boat the poetics of sense-memory is engendered by the complicated positioning of the work, the artist and the viewer(s) across and between the ‘present’ and the ‘past,’ ‘here’ and ‘there.’ this complex positioning and negotiation across differing planes of temporality and spatiality, moreover, speaks of a particular kind of double-consciousness and ambivalence afforded by the condition of diaspora. by registering and embodying the southward-bound journey from asia to australia, dang’s boat thus presents an alternative geo-cultural configuration of the south, one that foregrounds its complex and heterogenous topographies of difference, identity and belonging. in so doing, dang’s work refigures australia, not as an island-continent entirely unto itself and separate from asia, but as a landscape of encounters, a site constituted by its multiple and complexly entangled histories, spatialities and trajectories. dang thus participates in what derrida calls a ‘politics of memory and inheritance,’ a form of remembering that challenges the boundaries between australia and asia by creatively reconstructing the past and reinserting it within the vastly different context that his present being inhabits (derrida 1994: xix). conclusion in this paper i have shown how the various frames through which the passage of boats heading south to australian shores converge on the wider question of the space, place and identity of the south in an increasingly globalized world marked by geographically extended and uneven spatial flows of peoples, objects and cultures. through its critical focus on works of art that engage with and reflect on the heavily mediatized spectacle of boats arriving on australian shores, these frames highlight not just the complexities of mobility, hospitality, sovereignty and memory; they also draw attention to the complex and shifting geo-imaginaries of the south as a symptom of australia’s paradoxical geographical location as a white settler colony, far from europe and on the edge of asia. at the same time, they also foreground 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derrida, j. 1994, the spectres of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. routledge, new york. foucault, m. 1998, ‘different spaces’ in michel foucault: aesthetics, method and epistemology, essential works of foucault 1954-1984, (ed.) j. d. faubion. new press, new york: 175–85. frow, j. & morris, m. 1993, ‘introduction,’ in australian cultural studies: a reader (eds) j. frow & m. morris. allen and unwin, sydney: vii–xxxii. hage, g. 1998, white nation: fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. pluto press, sydney. hall, s. 2003, ‘maps of emergency: fault lines and tectonic plates,’ in fault lines, contemporary african art and shifting landscapes, (eds) g. tawadros & s. campbell. institute of new international visual arts, london. hepworth, k, 2012. personal communication. hepworth, k. & kelly, d. 2010, ‘boat-people.org,’ local-global: identity, security, community, vol. 8: 44–49. howard, j. 2001 ‘speech on illegal immigration: mv 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fisher. iniva, london: 105–12. neilson, b. 2010, ‘between governance and sovereignty: remaking the borderscape to australia’s north,’ local-global: identity, security, community, vol. 8: 124–40. neilson, b. & rossiter, n. 2010, ‘still waiting, still moving: on labour, logistics and maritime industries,’ in stillness in a mobile world, (eds) d. bissell & g. fuller. routledge, new york: 51–68. maravillas boats, borders portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 22 nicoll, f. 2002, ‘de-facing terra nullius and facing the public secret of indigenous sovereignty in australia,’ borderlands e-journal, vol. 1, no. 2. online, available: http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no2_2002/nicoll_defacing.html [accessed 20 july 2010]. papastergiadis, n. 2003, ‘south-south-south: an introduction,’ in complex entanglements: art, globalisation and cultural difference, (ed.) n. papastergiadis. rivers oram press, london: 1-17. _____ 2010, ‘what is the south?,’ thesis eleven, no. 100: 141–156. perera, s. 2002a, ‘a 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‘globalisation and minoritisation: ang lee and the politics of mobility,’ new formations, no. 40: 86–101. verstraete, g. 2003, ‘technological frontiers and the politics of mobility,’ in uprootings/regroundings: questions of home and migration, (eds) s. ahmed, c. castañeda, a.-m. fortier & m. sheller. berg, oxford: 225–49. walker, d. 1999, anxious nation: australia and the rise of asia 1850–1939. university of queensland, st. lucia. wark, m. 2001, ‘preface’ to a. burke, in fear of security: australia’s invasion anxiety. pluto press, sydney: xvii–xx. watson, i. nicoll, f. neilson, b. & allon, f. 2002, ‘on what grounds? sovereignties, territorialities and indigenous rights,’ borderlands e-journal, vol. 1, no. 2. online, available: http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no2_2002/editors_intro.html [accessed 20 july 2010]. wollen, p. 1993, raiding the icebox: reflections on twentieth-century culture. indiana university press, bloomington. yue, a. 2000, ‘asian-australian cinema, asian australian modernity,’ in diaspora: negotiating asian australia, (eds) h. gilbert, t. khoo & j. lo. university of queensland press, st. lucia: 190–99. microsoft word portalvol10no2speckgeneralfinal.docx portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. the ‘frontier’ speaks back: two australian artists working in paris and london catherine speck, university of adelaide the two women artists who are the subject of this paper, hilda rix and nora heysen, worked from the 1900s to the 1940s in cosmopolitan paris and london, at a time when it was almost obligatory to do so. this was part of the career pathway of any aspiring artist then, and as long-time ‘expatriate’ geoffrey batchen commented recently, ‘australians of ambition have always left to work and gain experience overseas. this is especially so for our better artists’ (2007: 11). while that is so, it was australian women artists in particular who circumvented a restrictive masculinism in local visual arts patronage, and headed overseas to develop their modern practice in this era. this expatriate group included not just rix and heysen, but thea proctor, margaret preston, gladys reynell, dorrit black, grace crowley and anne dangar, amongst others, and it is widely acknowledged that these women, in the main, ushered in modernism to australia. this situation of women being the purveyors of modern style is a unique australian phenomenon linked to travel, expatriatism and suffrage (jordan 1994: 30). artists like hilda rix and nora heysen belonged to this cross-generational group of australian women who travelled and immersed themselves in international modernism, an urban and metropolitan movement premised on the ideals of authenticity, autonomy and originality (meesham & sheldon 2001: 1). international mobility defines engagement with this strand of modernism; hence the expatriate process of artists living outside their country of birth to complete their training, further their career or gain new experience was fundamental to their careers as modern artists. speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 2 expatriatism was a liberating period for women, especially women artists, and the strategies colonial women employed in living and working in metropolitan centres such as london have been explored in recent times (woollacott 2001). however, the language used to describe it as fuelled by ‘intellectual frustration’ and ‘alienation’ from one’s country’ (alomes 1999: 8); and as rather quaintly ‘taking classes overseas’ as a prelude to doing the ‘real’ work done back home, has masked key features of time spent in the metropolis. the first is that insufficient attention has been given to the work artists produced elsewhere. in turn, the process by which artists working in the metropoles were transformed by this experience, has been insufficiently explored. moreover, the language of expatriatism as a deliberate turning of one’s back on country, rather than that of a dialectic process between home and away, has meant that the nature of modernism, as an international movement spread unevenly between the centres and peripheries, in which artists frequently moved from periphery to centre and back again, has been ill appreciated (smith 2007: 7). current transnational approaches to writing about artists and art histories are beginning to focus on the reality of this, and how artists from the mid-nineteenth-century operated in a more international ethos due to the ‘growing infrastructure of international congresses, exhibitions and organisations’ (brockington 2009: 7). this paper probes how just two of these women artists from differing generations and in differing locales, hilda rix in paris and nora heysen in london, tapped into this environment, and how their work changed.1 once in metropolitan centres, both women artists immersed themselves in cosmopolitanism, an outlook and condition that rests in the social imaginary, and does not operate in opposition to or transcendence of nationalism (calhoun 2008a: 433). cosmopolitanism was a central tenet in turn-of-the-century modernism, and it was an early form of globalism involving ‘the movement of objects, signs and people across regions and intercontinental spaces,’ with ‘patterns of reciprocal interaction’ developing between those in the cultural centres and those coming to such centres (held, mcgrew, goldblatt & perraton 1999: 328). what writers now refer to as a global consciousness was a feature of life then, due to transnational secular ideologies such as marxism, liberalism and science, as well as international conflicts and new international communication systems (cuddy-keane 2003: 539–40). it constituted ‘an outlook of cultural open-ness and receptivity to difference,’ it signalled a ‘direct connection 1 hilda rix nicholas worked in paris as hilda rix: this was prior to her marriage. speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 3 between the individual and the world as a whole’ (calhoun 2008a: 442), and it was facilitated by engaging in transnational networks with fellow cosmopolitans. this form of cosmopolitanism, grounded in modernism with its various inflections in centres and peripheries, has taken on a somewhat different usage in postcolonial discourse (meskimmon 2011: 6–7, calhoun 2008b: 105).2 expatriate women artists in the modern era shifted in and out of this complex entity of cosmopolitanism. it was a role to be performed, what amelia jones and andrew stephenson describe as ‘an aggressive resurfacing of the artist’s persona through the enactment of her or his body in or as the work of art’ (1999: 4). it was also a means of making contact, and enabling new forms of practice. paris, as a major metropolitan centre, affected the making of art because artists working there from numerous nations had consciously moved away from all that was comfortable and familiar. these metropolitan influences played on hilda rix in paris and nora heysen in london. both found their identities in these two cities more fluid; they engaged with new styles and new subjects, and turned away from questions of their own nationality towards performative notions of hybrid individual identities. their cosmopolitan experiences were almost incomprehensible to their peers who had stayed home and forged local inflections of modernism disembodied from metropolitan culture. hilda rix was in belle époque paris from 1907 to 1914, having moved there with her mother and sister where they soaked up cosmopolitan life. the city was a beacon to artists of differing nationalities and modern persuasions, americans being the largest non-french contingent. many academies were on offer, and artists’ studios were purpose-built for the foreign artists market, so expatriates transformed its art scene (wilson 2002: 51). the rix family lived in a pension at 7 rue joseph bara in fashionable montparnasse, an area studded with artists’ studios and ateliers. within a year hilda rix had taken classes at two of the most well-known parisian art schools frequented by the large population of expatriate artists, académie delécluse in late 1907 and académie de la grande chaumière in 1908. the cosmopolitan ethos with which she was confronted, one of freedom and impulsiveness, initially unsettled her. her restrictive colonial sensibilities caused her to 2 the contemporary usage of ‘cosmopolitanism’ extends these ideas across geographical, racial, national and religious borders and is infused with an ethics of responsibility within a world community. speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 4 question her new-found autonomy, and she even wrote to a friend, ‘one can do anything on wants in france.’3 she was surrounded by a sophisticated and flamboyant lifestyle and during the pre-war years, a smart set thrived on its internationalism. they enjoyed the portraits of sargent, the sculptures of rodin, the music of chopin, schubert and grieg, the dancing of madame sadayakko and the ballets russe, and they wore dresses by worth and paquin. rix’s the pink scarf, 1913 [figure 1], which was painted in the latter part of her paris years, is framed around these cosmopolitan sensibilities of figure 1, hilda rix nicholas, the pink scarf, 1913, oil on canvas, 80.5 x 65.0 cm, gift of mrs roy edwards through the art gallery of south australia foundation 1993, art gallery of south australia, adelaide. 3 hilda rix to meg line, 4 december 1907, papers of hilda rix nicholas, ms 9817, national library of australia. all subsequent letters cited from hilda rix are from this archive. speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 5 pleasure, leisure and beautiful surfaces. its subject, a fashionably dressed woman, is an overt display of the high life of belle époque paris. it was painted when it was believed such portrayals would give pleasure to the general public (galbally 2004: 120). the image is steeped in the edwardian fascination with the reflective figure shown in interior domestic space. this is what ann galbally calls ‘the subjectless subject,’ in which the focus is on the figure, not as a psychological study but more ‘as representative of a way of life’ (2004: 118). rupert bunny, also an australian expatriate artist in belle époque paris, painted women in similar situations, but engaged in the high culture pursuits of listening to music or reading poetry within the domestic arena, whereas rix’s woman is passive, posed, waiting, and contained. the filmy pink organza scarf trailing around the beautifully adorned young woman frames her, and accentuates her creamy off-the-shoulder gown. her expansive uncovered back and shoulders are the focus of the gaze. the decorative flowery wallpaper screen behind her again creates a shallow space forcing the viewer’s eyes onto the subject herself. rix had a fascination with fancy dress and masquerade, an interest which was part of a wider pre-war fascination with dress-up. artists’ parties too were often fancy dress affairs or costume balls.4 anne gray suggests that ‘artists wanted to show that art was artifice, a separate realm from reality. but they were keen also to show that the life of many around them was lived as a masquerade’ (2004: 60). while steeped in these practices, rix’s sumptuous and highly coloured and patterned la robe chinoise, c.1913 [figure 2], also drew on the fashion for non-western dress. both hilda and her sister elsie enjoyed dressing up, hilda even collected oriental costumes, but in a real sense wearing the dress of ‘others’ took what was then widespread cultural colonisation a step further to that of possession, and ‘reinforced hierarchies of power’ (pigot 1994: 164). the model is hilda’s sister elsie who projects a high sense of theatricality in her pose, as if she is self-consciously wearing an exotic gown, head-dress and jewellery. she prominently holds a bracelet and chinese medallion for all to see. the bold outline around the gown further defines the figure against the shallow background. the dramatic lighting falls on the model’s face and robe, while the pose shows every aspect of the gown to its utmost, harking back to what she learnt from claudio castelucho at the académie de la grande chaumière. this painting was exhibited at both the société des artistes français, and the société des peintres orientalistes français in 1914. 4 when rix returned from europe she brought back costumes she had collected on her travels. speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 6 figure 2, hilda rix nicholas, la robe chinoise, c.1913, oil on canvas, 185.3 x 115 cm, state art collection, art gallery of western australia, purchased through the sir claude hotchin art foundation, art gallery of western australia foundation, 1994. speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 7 the artist’s interest in the orient was part of a larger fascination for ‘the exotic,’ which manifested itself in a french fashion for the oriental imaginary as subject matter in art work. this in turn was underpinned by french colonialism in north africa and the middle east, and supported by a dedicated society of french orientalist painters, galleries and exhibitions. thus while orientalist art was shown unproblematically in paris, it nonetheless brought ‘the richness of colonised cultures to the attention of the metropolitan public’ (benjamin 2003: 62). these factors prompted rix to travel to morocco in 1912 and again in 1914. she made her first visit with african-american henry tanner, his wife and an extended group, and on the second occasion her sister elsie accompanied her. the location inspired her to capture the light and atmosphere of life there. she also developed a great respect for the people whom she described as beautiful and dignified (rix 1914: 41). soon after arriving in tangier she wrote to her friends that it was like being in dream: ‘i’m afraid to wake up in the morning and find it all gone … it is more splendid than i thought … there is such quantity and richness of wonderful picturesqness; everyway one turns the head there is a new picture.’ rix sketched mostly in the market place, the soko, adjacent to her hotel where some were happy to be portrayed, but others avoided the artist’s gaze. this was a safe area for western woman to work in, and frequently the local people would gather around and watch her at work. two women in the market place, 1912–1914 [figure 3], is typical of her work there. it is an impressionistic painting containing gestural features of the figures, with few details, and space is flattened and compressed. the high-keyed light shimmers. rix studied the women carrying heavy loads on their backs, looking as she said like ‘huge snails bent forward’ (rix 1914: 35). the women are diminutive in size but proud. the painting is a symphony in white light, and typifies john pigot’s observation: ‘north africa’s brilliant light transformed and modernised her work (2000: 26). rix’s time in paris had been a defining time. the liberties of parisienne life shocked her at first. the ‘cut-and-thrust’ of working under the us modernist teacher richard miller, who was not always complimentary, meant she was always striving to improve. her comment of his criticism—‘if i’m successful with them won’t i jump for joy’—implies many an occasion when she was not. unfortunately her time in france was cut short by the declaration of war in 1914, and from their summer base in étaples she and her family had to evacuate to britain. working in a cosmopolitan centre had transformed speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 8 figure 3, hilda rix nicholas, two women in the market place, c.1912–1914, oil on canvas on board, 25.8 x 32.5 cm, purchased 1994, art gallery of south australia, adelaide. her practice, but we look to raymond williams to explain the exact nature of this change. he has observed that the ‘complex and open character’ of the major metropoles differed greatly from provincial areas where there was a ‘persistence of traditional social, cultural and intellectual forms’ (1992: 91). in his view the ‘complexity’ and ‘miscellaneity’ of this modern urban environment liberated artists and resulted directly in changes in form: thus the key cultural factor of the modernist shift is the character of the metropolis … [and] its direct effect on form … this underlies in an obvious way, the elements of strangeness and distance, indeed alienation, which so regularly form part of the repertory. but the decisive aesthetic effect is at a deeper level. liberated or breaking from their national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase found the only commonality available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practices. (williams 1992: 91–92) this same phenomenon of the liberating character of the city applied to london, even though the city itself was represented then as ‘home’ to australians because it fell within the spatial imaginary of the british empire (blunt & dowling 2006: 143). each speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 9 of paris and london provided this spark of creativity for cosmopolitan artists removed from provincial influences, with the only factor in common being their art practice. the consequent feelings of alienation, lack of belonging and, paradoxically, freedom from all ties saw artists making breakthroughs (blazwick 2001: 9). these influences were highly conducive to their making of modern art. those in the cosmopolitan centres found their identities more fluid, and they changed accordingly, and often radically. artists there engaged with new styles and new subjects in universal or cosmopolitan spaces. they turned away from questions of their own nationality towards performative notions of hybrid individual identities. hence, london, as the heart of the empire, was only ever superficially familiar as ‘home.’ it operated at a deeper level as ‘strange’ and thus worked to liberate many artists, including the australian nora heysen. she was in london from 1934 to 1937, arriving when the worst years of depression has passed. nora too worked in a cosmopolitan ethos, but one very different from hilda rix in the belle époque. heysen set out to find her own painting style, self-funded by sales from a solo exhibition she held in adelaide before leaving, and then from two loans from her father. prior to relocating to dukes lane in kensington in 1934, she had lived a very british-australian life with her family at ‘the cedars’ in hahndorf. her father, the well-known artist hans heysen, subscribed to papers like the illustrated london news, corresponded with british artists, and recommended british works for acquisition by the art gallery of south australia. however, her transition to her new life in london was confronting, as her self-portrait, 1934 [figure 4], painted a few months into her first year there, shows. this modern and visually arresting image of herself at 23 years of age feels like a statement made at the beginning of a journey, knowing she must be self-reliant and prove herself, but unsure what lies ahead. the brown jacket she is wearing underscores her aloneness; it seems to sit on her shoulders as if to suggest she is dressed in one of her few possessions, ready to confront the world. this painting is about more than loneliness. it illustrates how the cosmopolitan experience not only required immersion in metropolitan culture, which in itself requires ‘an outlook of … cultural openness’ (calhoun 2008a: 442), but also that it involved listening to criticism. heysen’s first teacher at london’s central school, bernard speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 10 figure 4, nora heysen, self-portrait, 1934, oil on canvas, 60.8 x 53.5cm, purchased 1999, national portrait gallery. meninsky, was a highly respected modern artist who mixed with like-minded moderns including jacob epstein, lucien freud and the bloomsbury group (tickner 2000: 149). he told her that she had been taught incorrectly. his criticism struck at the core of her confidence, and caused her to question her father’s tutelage. she described this incident as ‘the worst most damning criticism i’ve ever had.’5 his harsh criticism was due to the fact that each approached drawing from a different perspective. meninsky, she said in a letter, ‘draws with a heavy line and square modelling, handling the pencil like a pen, whereas i draw with a single line and use shading to emphasise certain forms.’ her style had underpinned earlier and more conventional self-portraits like her 1933 pre-london a portrait study, which had won her the south australian society of arts melrose prize. 5 nora heysen to her parents, 12 november 1934, hans heysen papers, ms 5073, national library of australia. all subsequent letters cited from her are from this archive. speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 11 heysen was unsure whether to follow her own instincts or accept meninsky’s advice. she wrote home that her dilemma was that ‘he draws very well and i admire the solidity and movement he gets, but i don’t want to draw like him.’ she did, however, take on board some of his suggestions. the square modelling and sculptural solidity that were his trademark style carried over into her 1934 self-portrait. two weeks after meninsky’s criticism, she had come to terms with his comments—‘i think i will gain from his criticism, it hurts no-one to be pulled to pieces and thoroughly faulted’—while again iterating her desire not to end up emulating his style. she was in a transitional space, open to new ways, but still in the process of finding herself having moved away from all that was familiar. as iwona blazwick comments, ‘it is a paradox of the metropolis that its scale and heterogeneity can generate an experience both of unbearable invisibility and liberating anonymity; of alienating disconnectedness, indeed impotence; and of the possibility of unbounded creativity’ (2001: 9). heysen was very aware of the opportunities working in london offered. she spent long hours drawing from the model at both art schools she attended, the central school of arts and crafts and byam shaw. when not enrolled, she hired a model. she worked in still life, interiors and portraits, in each she was experimenting with light. by september 1935 she wrote home to her parents that she was now selecting modern frames for her paintings, a veiled way of letting them know she was changing: ‘i’ll wonder what you think of it. probably think i’m going modern. i want things simple.’ another major impetus to her art was meeting orovida, daughter of lucien pissarro and grand-daughter of camille pissarro,6 whom she initially met in the course of arranging the purchase of orovida’s mother and son for her father hans heysen in 1935.7 that financial transaction led to orovida agreeing to look over nora’s work of which she was critical; she found it old fashioned. nora wrote home to her father about miss pissarro’s comments in october 1935: she came in like a bomb dropped out of the blue—she slated me right and left—she said my paintings were muddy and 50 years behind time and advised me to change my palette—she admitted that i could draw and had talent but that is all she allowed me. she thinks i use too much brown and black and yellow ochre and keep my colour too low in tone—i who pride myself on my fresh bright clean colour! you can imagine my surprise on hearing that—she hates yellow ochre, 6 orovida felt burdened by her artistic lineage and ceased using her family name pissarro and used her given name orovida until the 1940s. by then her father had died. 7 hans heysen was in london in 1934 and he saw this painting by orovida at the 1934 royal academy exhibition, and decided to purchase it. he had an impressive art collection. speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 12 and i love it and use it in everything almost—that is where we disagreed. she likes the interior i have just finished, and thought it the best bit of work—i agree there. she gave me a list of colours, an entirely new palette—mostly of cadmiums, excluding ochre, black and browns. heysen duly went out and purchased the new colours suggested of ‘white, cadmium, red and pale ultramarine, vert composé, cobalt and crimson,’ adding in her letter to her father, ‘it is amazing the depth and richness of colour that can be got without using brown or black.’ those were the dark colours her father had taught her to use. the consequent change in style from her new colours and approach is apparent in heysen’s self-portraits, which can be read as a coded language of defining herself as a modern artist and modern woman. to mark her twenty-fifth birthday and her transition to ‘womanhood,’ which she said had been hastened by ‘living here by myself in london and making my own decisions,’ she painted a self-portrait, 1936. she wrote home ‘i am doing myself in a blue smock against the wall with my pink roses—the colour scheme is beautiful and i hope to make something good out of it.’ her use of paint is looser, with broken areas of colour in the face and in the background. her palette, tipped forward for the viewer to inspect, shows her new colours on display. the subtext is that she has gone well beyond her early training. by february of that year, heysen reported home that her new mentor orovida was ‘partly condemning, partly encouraging,’ and that ‘she likes the self-portrait, thinks it is far the best bit of painting i have ever done.’ she was moving from mimesis to a more expressive mode; and wrote home on easter sunday 1936 that she wanted to abandon what she called a photographic outlook: i feel in sympathy with the impressionists who wanted to break away from all the old traditions, and find a new way to express beauty in nature. i feel i am getting nearer to that. i ultimately want losing a little of my hitherto rather photographic outlook, and getting more art and feeling into things. i feel freer and surer of myself, and know what i want. in 1937 heysen was soaking up the challenges of working in a metropolitan centre, and announced that she would not return to australia until she could prove herself and find herself in london: ‘i want to work out my life here … i want to absorb as much as possible and experiment and learn.’ she praised ‘the education and stimulation’ of living and working in a cosmopolitan city, and said that she wanted to exhibit there too. she had indeed come to terms with what georg simmel called metropolitan culture’s ‘patina of indifference,’ resolving to rise above it (1902–1903). but like many an artist, five months later she had no money left and had to head back to australia. her last speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 13 london self-portrait down and out in london, 1937 [figure 5], alludes to her impoverished state, and shows her in modest domestic environs perched on the kitchen bench, the stove close by and laundry hanging behind her. the luscious greens of her clothing and the calm, relaxed pose imply that she has found her painting style; her hand resting on her palette points to the modern colours and areas of broken colour she has employed in her painting. figure 5, nora heysen, down and out in london, 1937, oil on canvas, 55.0 x 40.0 cm, south australian government grant 1994, art gallery of south australia, adelaide. nora’s work had changed, she had responded to the anonymity and fluidity of life in the metropolis, immersed herself in art and, in the process, confronted her own style. at speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 14 times this was painful, as she wrote home in may 1936: ‘it is funny in australia i had a surfeit of praise, here i get nothing but adverse criticisms and jolts in all directions. pity they couldn’t be mixed a little more to even things out.’ she came back and painted a loose, confident and assertive self-portrait in 1938 [figure 6]. by early 1939 she won the archibald prize for her portrait madame elink schuurman; a goal she had set herself in london. then in 1942 she won the royal south australian society of arts melrose prize for the second time for her painting figure 6, nora heysen, self-portrait, 1938, oil on canvas laid on board, 39.5 x 29.5cm, purchased 2011 with funds from philip bacon, am, through the queensland art gallery foundation, queensland art gallery © lou klepac. speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 15 motherhood. in 1943 she was appointed as an official war artist. none of that would have occurred without the impetus of the liberating cosmopolitan experience in london. hilda rix’s world, on the other hand, had been turned upside down by events of the first world war. when she returned to australia in late june 1918, she was a war widow. she married major george matson nicholas in 1916 in london, but he died near the battlefield five weeks later. while overseas, she also lost her sister from enteric fever, then her mother; and came close to personal despair. however, she brought back an extraordinary cache of paintings and drawings which, when shown in melbourne and sydney, were extremely well received by the critics. the age critic commented on 12 november 1918 on ‘the influence of modern french impressionism in their fearless handling of sunlight.’ on the same day, the argus noted her ‘high accomplishment in colour and composition,’ while the sydney morning herald observed on 11 june 1919 that ‘her style is forcible and direct, her figures were full of character, her drawing virile in it certainty and boldness of effect.’ her paris work became her high water mark. feeling obliged to honour the memory of her late husband, her work thereafter pursued a more national agenda, and was uneven. the key impetus to change in rix nicholas’s paris work and heysen’s london work was the character of the metropolis, the alienation and cultural dislocation it initially produced, and how each artist responded with cosmopolitan openness to new ways. like raymond williams, angela woollacott points to how the emotions of strangeness and alienation associated with migration to the metropolis are central to the emergence of cultural modernism in the work of expatriate women. in her view (2001: 212), women artists from the colonies who embraced cosmopolitanism contributed significantly to metropolitan culture. but it was much more than that. rix nicholas and heysen each brought back from ‘the frontier’ modern work that was testament to their time away. travel, and living and working in the metropolis had facilitated artistic shifts of style, but for each a world war intervened. following the first world war, rix nicholas though was back in paris from 1924–1927, and after the second world war, heysen was back in britain: liverpool then london in 1948. each was between nations, enriched and transformed by working at the ‘frontiers’ of modernism, their art produced there integral to australian modernism. speck the ‘frontier’ speaks back portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 16 reference list alomes, s. 1999, when london calls: the expatriatism of australian creative artists to britain. cambridge university press, cambridge. ‘art exhibition’ 1918, age, 12 november. batchen, g. 2007, ‘from elsewhere,’ in love it and leave it, (ed.) n. latham. national portrait gallery, canberra. benjamin, r. 2003, orientialist aesthetics: art, colonialism and french north africa 1880–1930. university of california press, berkeley. blazwick, 1. 2001, ‘century city,’ in century city: art and culture in the modern metropolis, (ed.) i. blazwick. tate modern, london: 8–15. blunt, a. and dowling, r., home. routledge, london, 2006. brockington, g. 2009, ‘introduction: internationalism and the arts’ in internationalism and the arts in britain and europe at the fin de siecle, (ed.) g. brockington. peter lang, bern: 1–26. calhoun, c. 2008a, ‘cosmopolitanism and nationalism,’ nations and nationalism, vol. 14, no. 3: 427–48. _____ 2008b, ‘cosmopolitanism in the social imaginary,’ daedalus, no. 3: 105–14. cuddy-keane, m. ‘modernism, geopolitics, globalisation,’ modernism/modernity, vol. 10, no. 3: 539– 58. galbally, a. 2004, ‘reflected selves: australian expatriate artists in an edwardian world,’ in the edwardians: secrets and desires. national gallery of australia, canberra. gray, a. 2004, ‘the edwardians,’ in the edwardians: secrets and desires. national gallery of australia, canberra. hans heysen papers, ms 5073, national library of australia. held, d., mcgrew, a., goldblatt, d. & perraton, j. 1999, global transformations: politics, economics and culture. polity press, cambridge. jones, a. and stephenson, a. 1999, ‘introduction,’ in performing the body/performing the text, (eds) a. jones & a. stephenson. routledge, london: 1-10. jordan, c. 1994, ‘designing women: modernism and its representation in art in australia,’ in strange women: essays in art and gender (ed.) j. hoorn. melbourne university press, carlton: 28–37. meecham, p. and julie sheldon, 2001, j. modern art: a critical introduction. routledge, london. meskimmon, m. 2011, contemporary art and the cosmopolitan imagination. routledge, oxon. papers of hilda rix nicholas, ms 9817, national library of australia. pigot, j. 1993, capturing the orient: hilda rix nicholas and ethel carrick in the east. waverley city gallery, victoria. _____ 1994, ‘les femmes orientalistes: hilda rix nicholas and ethel carrick in the east,’ in strange women: essays in art and gender, (ed.) j. hoorn. melbourne university press, carlton: 155–68. pigot, j. 2000, hilda rix nicholas: her life an art. mieugunyah press, melbourne. ‘rix nicholas: australian artist’s return: notable successes abroad’ 1919, sydney morning herald, 11 june. rix, h. 1914, ‘sketching in morocco,’ the studio, vol. 63: 35–41. smith, b. 2007, the formalesque: a guide to modern art and its history. macmillan, south yarra. tickner, l. 2000, modern life and modern subjects: british art in the early twentieth century. yale university press, new haven. williams, r. 1992, ‘the metropolis and the emergence of modernism,’ in modernism/postmodernism (ed.) p. brooker. longman, london: 82–94. wilson, s. 2002, paris: capital of the arts 1900–1968, royal academy of the arts, london. ‘work of mrs rix nicholas: paintings of distinction’ 1918, argus, 12 november. woollacott, a. 2001, to try her fortune in london. oxford university press, oxford. sussexgalley2013finalpa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. australians abroad special issue, guest edited by juliana de nooy. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. a gum-tree exile: randolph bedford in england and italy lucy sussex, university of ballarat london has for most of australian history served as a magnet for the gifted and aspirational. this feeling was particularly strong and optimistic at the turn of the last century, when melba was queen of the opera. many followed her example in travelling north: musicians and theatricals, but also artists, writers, and journalists. of those who felt this siren call, very few would actually succeed. henry lawson would become the most famous example of this failure, with his sojourn in england something from which he would never recover, personally and artistically (tasker & sussex 2007). lawson’s friend randolph bedford (1868–1941) was a very different case. a gifted journalist and crime writer, bedford had talent, ingenuity and boundless energy. like lawson, he made the trip to england, and emerged from it with a preference for australia. it might at the time have been considered heresy, but he profoundly rejected the motherland. instead he chose to employ his considerable abilities in australia and for australia. the decision was pragmatic, emotional, and proudly nationalist. unlike many of his contemporaries, it was not fired by a sense of failure in england, the dire financial necessity of return. bedford was of independent, approaching wealthy means. moreover, he would place two novels with english publishers. the leaving of london was perhaps the strongest expression of his identity—for he had a powerful personality, being of strong opinions, an australian of the type positively categorized in keith dunstan’s 1979 study ratbags. bedford as a writer has not received much recent criticism: he makes a small appearance in peter morton’s lusting for london (2011); and has attracted scholarly sussex a gum-tree exile portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 2 assessments by ros pesman cooper (1990) and cheryl taylor (1999). he deserves more attention, for he was a unique phenomenon, equally skilled with the pen, mining speculation, and politics. as a teenager he ‘tramped to broken hill with carlyle’s french revolution in his swag. that book coloured his life’ (l. lindsay 1967: 61). politically he was the eternal socialist. he began his writing career as a journalist, on the broken hill argus, and from it learned about mining, from which he made several fortunes, whilst still retaining his socialism. he ended up as a queensland politician, of nationalistic, protectionist politics, and a ‘big hat’ as his son eric later described him (1957). bedford was a poet, not only voluble, but also highly articulate. in his autobiographical novel, true eyes and the whirlwind (1903c), bedford is the whirlwind, which pretty much sums up his effect on people. he also used the pseudonym randolph the reckless. perhaps the best depictions of bedford emerge from his association with a family of artists, the lindsays, who drew him acutely, both visually (figures 1 and 2) and in prose. figure 1: bedford by norman lindsay, from bohemians of the bulletin © h., c. & a. glad. sussex a gum-tree exile portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 3 lionel lindsay made a lifelong friend of bedford, from which arose his marriage: jean dyson (of the dyson family of illustrators) had accompanied the bedford family as a companion to europe, and when lionel met up with them, romance blossomed. norman lindsay thought bedford something of a bully, and noted his ‘hooked, predatory nose … hard, coarse mouth’ (1965: 101). but in the best of bedford’s writing, his autobiographical journalism, he proves a sensitive observer with a strong aesthetic appreciation, whether of art or nature. most commentators on the man note his chivalry and generosity to those in need, all the better if he could cock a snoot at the same time—as when he danced with an old matchwoman outside london’s press club, gave her ‘half a sov.’ and paid for her cab ride home (l. lindsay 1967:198–99). the blustering man of action was only one aspect of his character. both brothers agreed that bedford was a master of entertaining narrative. lionel recalled that ‘no one since adam pitched a better or a merrier tale’ (1967: 61). norman provided more detail: ‘most of all, he was gifted with a flow of words delivered with such speed, precision, emphasis and lucidity as i never heard equalled by any other exercise in volubility. truculence was its accent, and there was a punch in every phrase of it … he was magnificent company and the best raconteur i ever listened to’ (1967: 102, 106). figure 2: bedford with the lindsays and a. g. stephens, with caption by eric bedford (e. bedford 1957). copyright h., c. & a. glad. sussex a gum-tree exile portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 4 by the 1890s bedford had established an identity both as a successful mining journalist and speculator, and as a writer for the bulletin. he had only narrowly failed at being elected as a liberal to the victorian parliament, despite having labor sympathies. he would call labor the ‘only australian party,’ and join after federation (boland 1979). that same year, 1901, he took himself and his young family to england. he had various speculations to offer to english backers, he had a novel, and also a sick child for whom a sea-voyage had been recommended (bedford 1976 [1944]: 326). bedford’s lively autobiography naught to thirty-three (1976 [1944]) ends just before his trip to england. however, records of his overseas trip exist in two forms. he wrote back his travel impressions to the bulletin and other periodicals from 1902 to 1904. the articles can be described as applying furphy’s dictum of ‘temper democratic, bias offensively australian’ to the travel memoir.1 taylor notes they ‘perfectly matched the bumptious energy of the bulletin’s style’ (1999: 39). these texts, which will form the basis for the examination of bedford’s abilities as a travel writer in this article, were collected and published together as a book, explorations in civilization, in 1914. the reason for the delay in book publication is unknown. lindsay’s cover summed up its figure 3: lionel lindsay’s cover for bedford’s explorations in civilization, national library of australia, 2351277. 1 joseph furphy, letter to j. f. archibald, april 1897, cited in barnes (1981: xv). sussex a gum-tree exile portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 5 content perfectly: the swagman in front of rome’s arch of constantine with his billy and dog, and his swag probably containing carlyle’s french revolution (1837). the cover (figure 3) perfectly expresses bedford’s self-image, although he was not visiting italy as a swagman or tourist, but rather investigating the possibilities of italian mining. when the original articles are compared to the 1914 book, it can be seen that generally bedford saw no need to rewrite—passages re-appear word for word in the collection. he did however cut, losing entire articles. his original sub-title, which appeared at the top of each bulletin instalment, also went: ‘being the letters of an australian in exile.’ it had been a statement of intent, deliberately inverting the conventional attitude of the first generations of colonial australians, the ‘exiles we.’ homesickness for australia pervades his travelogue; in italy he wrote: ‘do not look upon the gum-trees—we are here exiles also’ (bedford 1914: 114). bedford took a dislike to england from his first sight of the cliffs of dover, which he found ‘not white but a dirty grey. up to the feet of the cliffs the saddle-coloured channel staggered and there was neither colour nor sunlight in the scene.’ on taking a train to london, he was met by fog, and commented: ‘so the miracles that brought me over 12,000 miles of sea had really happened, and this was london. it seemed such a weight of endeavour for such a light result.’ other expatriates, such as louise mack might have found england initially unprepossessing, then revised their opinions. bedford did not: unimpressed he quickly moved to dislike and even loathing. ‘and i begin to feel like howling for a sight of australian sun—to lust for a clean atmosphere as a sailor for port and shore leave, or a bullock for milk-bush in drought-time’ (1914: 20; see also 21, 27). his concern with sun and clean air was not simply nostalgia. he was concerned for his sickly son eric, and elsewhere noted the effect of england on australian expatriates in decidedly unhealthy terms: ‘i met two girls who were born australian and become english. they loafed in fluffy tea gowns in a heated sitting-room where the air was an unnatural as chiffon. i was so depressed by the change from healthy women to demoralized dummies, that i left the house feeling the shame of a cat going home in the dawn’ (1914: 35). the conservative, pro-empire magazine the british australasian noted bedford’s arrival and his hopes of a long stay ‘where the versatile scribe hopes to exploit a novel, a book of verses, and a gold mine’ (1901: 1986). the ‘exploit’ was sussex a gum-tree exile portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 6 probably a verbatim quotation from bedford. in his quite justified self-confidence, he regarded himself as a rich resource in several apparently disparate but related fields. mining speculation was his living, and informed his journalism, his autobiographical writing, and even his crime fiction. in coming to england, unlike lawson, he had several strings to his bow, and could move between them with ease. what would the english make of this larger than life bon viveur, so boisterous and noisy that he gave lionel lindsay’s bloomsbury landlady the shudders (palmer 1963: 21)? and more importantly, what would he make of them? the bulletin reported his first public appearance at london’s press club: ‘randolph bedford, on australian experiences, lied lovingly and absorbingly—so much so that the club rose in a body and knighted him as an honorary member’ (1902: 13). although he impressed the journalists, the publishers were another matter: my novel has been read by two publishers, and one of them has strangulated hernia, and the other an aneurism as a result … they wouldn’t mind my being unconventional if i were imperialistic, but, as a publisher’s reader said to me the other day: ‘to be unconventional and conservative, all right; to be conventional and republican, good, but to be unconventional and republican—it’s too much.’ (bedford 1902: 2) true eyes was overlong at 250,000 words (bedford 1976 [1944]: 272). a likely issue also would have been its sheer australiana. lionel lindsay, whose time in europe overlapped with bedford’s, recalled a sub-editor telling him: ‘actually the british public is not a scrap interested in outside things’ (1967: 193). finding london backers for his mining and other projects also proved difficult. bedford recorded other hopeful australian speculators passing time in pubs waiting for the boer war to end (1914: 26). he fruitlessly courted financiers whom, in the conventional, unthinking anti-semitism of the era, he categorizes as ‘jews,’ but with less venom than he described the non-whites he encountered during the steamship voyage to australia. ‘and when i see the sloth that comes to the white, from long association with the black, the hope that australia will keep herself white becomes almost fanatic. for the slave owner is lower than the slave’ (1914: 16.) elsewhere he was insulted by the assumption that australia was a poor investment prospect because of its socialism. he retorted: ‘new zealand has had a bellyful of socialistic legislation, as you call it, and has vastly sussex a gum-tree exile portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 7 improved under it; and england has had tory legislation always, and couldn’t be worse than it is’ (1914: 153). if he didn’t get money for his mines or a planned massive northern territory agricultural venture, then he got material for his columns, and the sheer pleasure of insulting the self-important. one financier he visited had an office bedford described as a ‘packing-case.’ bedford’s proposal was too small for him, he claimed, condescendingly, for he only dealt with millions. not in notes, surely, bedford responded, for ‘you couldn’t find room for anything bigger than a cheque in your office’ (1914: 31). then, his luck turned, with a consortium including london’s lord mayor sending him to italy to investigate mining prospects (l. lindsay 1967: 208). here like many australians, such as his contemporary, sydney writer louise mack, he fell in love with the country. he and mack were pioneering in this regard, their enthusiasm for the food, the art, the architecture precursive of many later artistic tourists from the antipodes. at the time the climate of melbourne and sydney was not termed mediterranean, but bedford would note the similarity to italian weather. his rebellion against england and attachment for italy were part of his radical nationalism, but also stemmed from his dislike for the empire’s stifling conventions. he recalled being told by an english writer in australia that ‘no australian would write good literature’ until they had visited westminster abbey (1903b: 35). what he said in response he does not say, but the abbey left him unimpressed, and with no apparent effect on his writing. in italy, a country in which he and mack had no ancestral links, they felt at home. at monte rombolo this irreligious man felt such an affinity with history and place that he found himself speculating on his past lives. in a striking passage he travels in time, from being merely a tourist at a ruined castle to imagining its thirteenth century brigands, besieged by the papal armies: ‘i felt i had been in the fight’—which he describes in melodramatic and bloody detail, in the first person, even imagining the robbers slaughtering their women lest they starve or end as spoil for the papal forces. he writes the past, with himself as participant, then notes: ‘given interest and imagination, many lives before this life seem very real’ (1914: 39–40). sussex a gum-tree exile portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 8 the next paragraph goes further, both in time and bloodshed, with bedford a roman slave in a copper mine: ‘one day i killed the overseer, and fled—through the oak-scrub and the gullies of cyclamens to the fields of lupins and the ripening grapes; and so to the sea. there i found a boat, and would have put safely from shore; but seeing a woman bathing—her white body argented in the moonlight—i waited’ (1914: 40). his past self attempts abduction, with a resultant bloodbath, in which both slave and the woman die. ‘these are but two of the things i think i did,’ commented bedford, quite unabashed at the alarming glimpse he has offered of his psyche (1914: 40). more typical was his insistence on seeing italy in australian terms. taylor has commented that: ‘by relocating the field of conquest in the coloniser’s own countries, these articles impose an aggressively colonial system on bedford’s old world experience’ (1999: 39). but equally italy conquers bedford, aesthetically and emotionally. the psychological term ‘transference’ is applicable here, as bedford’s sentimental australian nationalism finds a new home. south of genoa he found ‘curiously like tasmania. there is a bay like penguin and another like emu bay’ (1914: 37). he never expresses this sense of déjà vu with english landscapes. in italy his powerful nostalgia—to take the word apart and examine its roots—is a nostos, a homecoming without the pain of algia, but rather with pleasure reinforced by the perceived familiarity. even when the classics inform his perception of the landscape, as might be expected from the contemporary well-educated traveller, he still manages a plug for australia: ‘there were more horatian groves and anacreontic rocks, and all the outlook was wide and deep and high and majestic for space: all with the inspiration of a big country like australia, which is a name to be said with trumpets’ (1914: 38). back in london briefly to consult a medical specialist, he saw ellen terry play beatrice in much ado about nothing. its sicilian setting aroused his emotions: ‘italy tugged at my heart strings’ (1914: 166). although quite ill, he immediately fled back there, a non-stop journey of over forty hours. bedford, with his socialist, bohemian, irreligious propensities, might find italy both priestand aristocratridden, but his descriptions of it are among his finest writing. it would be italy rather than england that released his aesthetic sensibilities. the travel writing he produced there is vivid, as when he accompanies three working-class girls on a frog-hunt: sussex a gum-tree exile portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 9 i went with them to a swamp, where many frogs made raucous music; and with a disregard for my presence, which was very unflattering, the girls kilted high their skirts and entered the swamp, sweeping bog, and rush-hummock, and water, and green slime with their lanterns. frogging is very simple. the frogs—great, green, swollen, swaggerers—came to look at the light and were seized and put into the bags. we started on the return journey and in an accession of chivalry i asked to be given a burden. angela assured me i wouldn’t like the experience, and i didn’t. i carried that bag fifty yards and then gave it up. can you imagine the awesome clamminess of carrying a thin bag, stuffed with palpitating, squirming, swelling frogs, and green pap? the kitchen, when the bags were opened, was like egypt during the mosaic plagues. the frogs were very ugly in their green clothes--and looked uglier when with one sharp knife-stroke they were gutted, and with another, beheaded. some of them escaped and leapt blindly in the light. i trod with my bare foot on one brute, in all his necropolitan clamminess when i went to bed that night. but next noon, for collation, there was a great dish of them—mostly of hind legs fried in batter—and they were good. i ate many a score of them—they taste between chicken and murray cod. (1914: 96–97) as ever, he anchored his italian experience with a reference to australia. but the sojourn in italy was not all pleasure: it also involved hard work and heartbreak. he wrote, in one of the few mentions of his family and domestic life: ‘there was a death, and the grave of a child of my name in gelsomino’ (1914: 151). later, when seriously ill, he experienced a nightmare in which florence became the setting for a thoroughly disturbing and violent expression of his grief. like his imagined past lives, it is revealing of his psyche. in his dream, bedford walked the historic streets, twenty-five feet high, and with joints of steel. around him clustered children, no more than a foot high, which he trampled, and even dismembered. a final child he recognized as his baby son florio—‘and as i awoke i caught that child and killed him.’ the whole is delivered to the reader without self-consciousness or much self-reflection. bedford blamed his illness, with the jarring explanation that: ‘there is still exudation of the lower surface of the intestine.’ his opinion of freud is unknown, but his self-image as a man of action would probably not have permitted being a subject for psychoanalysis, despite the dream’s obvious symbolism (1914: 174–75). the tragedy apart, and not making any money out of italy (except via his writing), the experience delighted him. it sharpened an aesthetic sense already heightened by the association with friends like the lindsays. he rhapsodized about italian art as much as its landscape, even when cocking his typical snoot by insulting ruskin, and making comments like: ‘the bourgeoisie [sic] idea of art is the same the world over—they love only the pictures that a wesleyan could paint’ (1914: 93) sussex a gum-tree exile portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 10 if anything the overseas sojourn increased his love for australia, in italy by the affinity he felt, and in england, the absolute reverse. nor was he alone in this opinion of england. during a brief sojourn in england, between episodes of italian mine-hunting, bedford and his wife mary visited the lawsons. bertha lawson would write that the visit ‘gave us tremendous joy’ (1943: 74). bedford left an account of this meeting, not in the book, nor in the bulletin, but in the adelaide magazine the critic, whose editor, alfred mckain, also had a mining journalist background. although lawson is not named, it seems possible that the mention may have kept the piece out of the bulletin, which was slowly coming to terms with the perception that lawson had returned from england a broken failure, and a drunk. i went to see a friend—an australian writer who has made a bigger stir in australia, where his work is known and rewarded, than he ever will here. he lives beyond islington, and curses england, crying to be delivered from the body of this death and to be set down in an australian sun again. if ever he says a good word of the country it will be from sheer perversity. after leaving him i walked for two miles through a street which was like the way between the stalls in old paddy’s market, sydney; squalor everywhere—two women to every three men in the drinking shops; cheap and nasty fruit and suspicious vegetables in barrows—oil torch-lamps flaring over all, and chilblain-faced people, wet-nosed people, cold people everywhere. (bedford 1903a: 13) and so bedford ends as he began, with not a kind word for england. bedford was a generous man, and it seems that some of the joy bertha lawson reported was financial. lionel lindsay recorded that bedford ‘found lawson and his wife living in a slum, and helped them.’ he added that ‘how they managed to get back to australia i never learned.’ one possible interpretation here is that bedford at least partly footed the bill. only five pages earlier lindsay records his own exit from europe, paying for his third-class passage with money he had borrowed from bedford. other australians abroad attested to his generosity. illustrator frank nankivell, when in new york in 1923, and needing ‘a few hundred dollars … very badly’ asked randolph, not knowing the big man was ‘short.’ nankivell got the money, and found out later bedford had cancelled his berth on a good ship and travelled home via a tramp steamer. did bedford similarly help the lawsons to get home? (l. lindsay 1967: 216; 211–12; e. bedford 1957: 49) if so, this shrewd businessman gained by the transaction, for lawson recommended bedford’s manuscript to his literary agent, james brand pinker. true eyes and the whirlwind was published by heinemann in 1903, after revision advice from edward garnett, which involved cutting the manuscript to 100,000 words (barnes 2007: 102; sussex a gum-tree exile portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 11 bedford 1976 [1944]: 272). the bulletin would describe it as having a ‘fairly big success in london’ (1903: 13). true eyes would be followed by a novel for duckworth in 1905, the snare of strength, which was less of a success. both books were autobiographical, very australian, and with mining figuring large. bedford’s homesickness shows in the name of the latter’s heroine: australia (shortened to ‘stralie’). of the two, true eyes reads best, vance palmer terming it ‘very dashing and robust … at the time.’ the snare of strength devolves into melodrama, if not quite as violent and self-revealing as his past-life imaginings in italy. the hero elopes with australia on his big black arab stallion, only to die after a fall from the horse. palmer also justly describes explorations as ‘dazzling and delightful’ (22). the melbourne magazine table talk imagined bedford in england ‘floating a mine, starting a paper or standing for a seat in parliament.’ rather more improbably it predicted he would ‘try for a knighthood’ (1902: 5). in the end he achieved none of these things, but did sell his novels. he also achieved a major journalistic scoop by interviewing the pope—despite not being catholic. it can be said that writing-wise he succeeded in england, though not with lasting literary fame. but he probably did not care. he had disliked england from first sight. pesman comments that: ‘in many ways italy was for randolph bedford a stick by which to beat mother england’ (15). it was what he found in italy that enriched him the rest of his life. he had even had the opportunity to buy a castle in italy, rejecting it because the mine that came with it was rubbish. but to stay was probably not an option for this staunch australian patriot. bedford, tea with mussolini? not likely. after his return bedford would never publish another novel in england. he did write a nationalistic play ‘white australia,’ produced in melbourne in 1909, and placed three fiction books with the new south wales bookstall company. of these the most interesting was billy pagan, mining engineer (1911), a series of short detective stories which anticipates arthur upfield’s vivid outback settings. it has been much appreciated by crime aficionados. but perhaps he did not feed the hunger to write fiction. he would be elected to the queensland state parliament in 1923, the same year he got involved with a worthwhile mine, at mt isa, and remained a parliamentarian until his death in 1941. he did not change his masculinist stripes; being an effective, active, individualist and australian patriot, his contradictions intact to the end. sussex a gum-tree exile portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 12 he paid the italians he encountered in his mine-hunting his highest compliment, wishing they could share australia too: ‘[t]he rural italian—hard-working, sober, and frugal—will be a fine settler for australia. there are few english agriculturalists worthy the name whom we are likely to get—the bulk of the english have been stunted and starved in the cities and a great many of them are not worth the passage money’ (1914: 132). had he lived longer he would have regarded the post-world war ii italian migrations to australia with pleasure. in fact overwhelmingly he associated italy with pleasure, from the sybaritic to the aesthetic: i had thought that having once felt the beauty of the art of italy that never again should i be satisfied with a country that is sordid in many ways. but art merely imitates the beauty of primitiveness; and my land is beautiful in its every rock and tree—even if only because of its illimitable spaces. and all are of equal value in their kind; ghiberti’s doors and freeling heights; giotto’s tower and pichi richi pass, the brown walls of florence and the hills at patsy’s springs; fowler’s gap and the simplon arch that dominated milan. (1914: 240) italy had enhanced bedford’s life, and he would remember it affectionately ever afterwards, not least for enhancing his appreciation of australia. he would never return to italy; but his sojourn there had had the effect of producing of what can be regarded, in retrospect, as his best writing. acknowledgements the research for this article was undertaken through an australian research council grant, with associate professor meg tasker, university of ballarat, victoria. reference list barnes, j. 2007, ‘henry lawson and the “pinker of literary agents,”’ australian literary studies, vol. 23, no. 2: 89–105. _____ (ed.) 1981, joseph furphy. university of queensland press, st lucia. bedford, e. 1957, ‘the man in the big hat,’ bulletin, 7 august: 32–33: 49. bedford, r. 1902, ‘explorations in civilization,’ bulletin, 15 november: 32. _____ 1903a, ‘letters from exile,’ critic, 10 october: 13 _____ 1903b, ‘london glimpses,’ bulletin 13 june: 35 _____ 1903c, true eyes and the whirlwind. heinemann, london. _____ 1905, the snare of strength. duckworth. london. _____ 1914, explorations in civilization. syd. day, sydney. _____ 1976 [1944], naught to thirty-three, 2nd edition. melbourne university press, melbourne. boland, r. g. 1979, ‘bedford, george randolph (1868–1941),’ australian dictionary of biography, national centre of biography, australian national university. online, available: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bedford-george-randolph-5181/text8709 [accessed 23 november 2011]. british australasian 1901, 7 november: 1986. bulletin 1902, 4 january: 13. _____1903, 14 april: 13. carlyle, t. 1837, the french revolution. 3 volumes. chapman & hall, london. sussex a gum-tree exile portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 13 dunstan, k. 1979, ratbags. golden. sydney. lawson, b. 1943, my henry lawson. johnson, sydney. lindsay, l. 1967, comedy of life. angus and robertson, sydney. lindsay, n. 1965, bohemians of the bulletin angus and robertson, sydney. morton, p. 2011, lusting for london: australian expatriate writers and the hub of empire, 1870–1950. palgrave macmillan, london. palmer, v. 1963, ‘randolph bedford,’ overland, no. 26: 21–22. pesman cooper, r. 1990, ‘randolph bedford in italy,’ overland, no. 120: 12–16. table talk 1902, 9 january: 5. tasker, m. & sussex, l. 2007, ‘“that wild run to london”: henry and bertha lawson in england,’ australian literary studies, vol. 23, no. 2: 168–86. taylor, c. 1999, ‘randolph the reckless: explorations in australian masculine identity,’ in australian writing and the city, (eds) f. de groen & k. stewart. association for the study of australian literature, sydney: 38–45. microsoft word 1643-9540-1-ce portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. health and borders across time and cultures: china, india and the indian ocean region special issue, guest edited by beatriz carrillo garcía and devleena ghosh. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. medical connections and exchanges in the early modern world michael pearson, university of technology, sydney introduction the articles in this special issue discuss patients and medical knowledge crossing frontiers. my contribution is intended to provide some historical background by sketching interactions and connections between european, islamic and indian medical knowledge in the early modern period. what i can show is that interactions across borders have a very long medical history. today we sometimes think that globalisation and concentrated exchanges of knowledge are a new phenomenon. yet, in fact, exchanges at all levels were commonplace in earlier periods in, for example, religion, military technology, and mathematics, at least across the vast eurasian region. my task is not to show the superiority of one medical system over another, let alone to sketch the rise of chemicalised modern western medicine. it is merely to provide background to later articles that demonstrate contemporary interactions, with a view to showing that these have a hoary history going back many centuries. three levels of medical practice need to be distinguished. at the book level, more theory than practice, there was copious circulation and mutual borrowings. at the practical level, where trained healers confronted diseases, there is a more complicated picture. again there was much commonality, but also recognition of geographical specificity. some diseases were treated with different methods in different places. on the other hand, some diseases were considered to be localised, so that an incoming pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 2 healer would use methods already familiar in the area. sometimes a mixture of methods, combining those of the incomer with those of the locals, was tried. below this relatively sophisticated book-based level was folk healing, often dispensed by women drawing on local nostrums, varying widely over space and, often enough, at least as efficacious as book-based medicine. norman owen (1987) has reminded us of the difficulties of historical accounts of illness. these accounts are, of course, transmitted through cultural lenses. diseases themselves are mutable, so that the sources might be describing a syndrome that no longer exists, such as the mysterious english sweating sickness that came and went in the sixteenth century (braudel 1979: i, 78–88; jones 1981: 140–141). further, each account is based on assumptions about what illness meant, something very different in sixteenth-century eurasia as compared with today. finally, some diseases are more dramatic (cholera especially) than others. owen thus distinguishes between crisis mortality and background mortality. the former, the dramatic and much described causes of mortality, include cholera, smallpox, influenza and various ‘fevers,’ such as malaria and typhoid. however, maybe three-quarters of deaths were, in fact, caused by the less glamorous background category of ailments, such as tuberculosis, dysentery and infantile diarrhoea (owen 1987: 4, 12). there is another category of mine-fields in the area of medical history in general. it is too easy to be overly influenced by what we think are modern medical methods, and to test the past in accordance with what we, social historians with only a spotty expertise in medicine anyway, think is ‘correct’ and ‘scientific’ practice today. andrew wear claims in his edited collection, medicine in society: historical essays, that ‘the nineteenthand twentieth-century values of the medical profession which in past history of medicine had been applied to earlier periods to condemn empirics, quacks, magical and religious practitioners have been discarded. in the process a much richer medical world has been uncovered’ (wear 1992: 2). in the early modern period it is clear that there was much commonality in the practices recommended by medical writers, which were based on the universal eurasian reliance on humoural pathology. european medicine was a blend of latin, arabic, greek and hebrew knowledge. for example, in portugal the most widely quoted authors were galen, hippocrates, isaac and ibn sina (avicenna). underlying european medical pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 3 practice was the notion of the four humours or bodily fluids, which indeed remained influential in western medicine until the mid-nineteenth century. disease was a result of an imbalance or impurity of one of the four cardinal humours, namely blood, phlegm, choler (red or yellow bile) and melancholy (black bile); these, in turn, were analogous to the four elementary substances of earth, water, air and fire. in a healthy person the four humours were in equilibrium. the relative balance of the four was tested by means of urine samples, which were widely used in diagnosis. any perceived imbalance was cured by enemas, purging, the use of stimulants, tonics and drugs compounded from medicinal herbs and plants, and especially by bleeding, which was something of a universal specific and was done not only to cure illness but also as a preventative, being done routinely perhaps every two months or so. renaissance doctors thought that the body contained 24 litres of blood, and that 20 of these could be bled away without harm. (the average human adult body actually contains about 5 litres of blood.) the time to bleed was often determined by astrology. as we will see, although the notion of humours was basic in asian medical systems as well, bleeding was much rarer in islamic systems, and never practised in hindu systems. european medicine drew heavily on islamic knowledge, and this points to the wellknown phenomenon of a considerable exchange of medical information between europe and asia in pre-modern times. europe’s main contact was, of course, with muslim medicine, but this in turn had been influenced by hindu achievements as well as by those of the greeks. india’s earliest texts, the vedas (c. 1500 bce), show a very primitive medical knowledge, but by 600 bce, at least, the ayurvedic system was established. this hindu system thus pre-dated the classical greek system associated with hippocrates, who was born around 460 bce, and galen, who lived from 129 to 199 ce. in india, by the early centuries of the christian era we find a fully evolved system. the basic texts are by caraka (1st and 2nd centuries ce, or possibly much earlier) and susruta (around the 4th century ce), both of which, in fact, merely codified existing knowledge dating back some centuries. caraka’s work consisted of a massive eight books. moreover, this system was not as static as the european one. for example, at first indian doctors used only drugs, mostly vegetable products, but from around the seventh century metals were used too, especially mercury, but also compounds of iron and other minerals. by the thirteenth century indian practitioners were examining the pulse, and in the sixteenth century an important ayurvedic doctor in varanasi, bhavamisra, identified the pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 4 new form of syphilis that had been introduced by the portuguese. significantly, he called it ‘the frank [european] disease,’ and said it was usually caused by intercourse with frank women (gaitonde 1982: 82–88). as in medieval europe, the underlying focus in indian medicine systems was based on humours. five elements were recognized in ayurvedic medicine: earth, water, fire, air and ether. health was maintained through keeping an even balance between the three vital bodily fluids, wind, gall and mucus, to which some added a fourth, blood. bodily functions were maintained by five winds. food digested by one of these, the stomach, became chyle, which proceeded to the heart and thence to the liver, and so to blood, which in turn was converted to flesh. there was no clear idea of the brain because, like homer, hindu doctors believed that the centre of consciousness, thought and feeling was the heart. nevertheless, the importance of the spinal cord was recognized, and cleanliness was acknowledged to be medically valuable. there was copious use of drugs. a major problem was the caste-based hindu taboo against contact with dead bodies. there was thus very little dissection, and obviously anatomy suffered as a result. the sixteenth-century portuguese botanist and doctor garcia d’orta noted this, claiming that the indians did not even know where the liver or spleen were. yet despite this assertion, some writers claim that hindu india did have good empirical surgery in certain specific areas. caesarean sections were performed, as well as bone-setting, and even plastic surgery. it is important to stress the way medical ideas circulated freely in the pre-modern world. in the case of india, some hindu medical texts were influenced by galen and hippocrates. these indian texts, in turn, affected such great muslim writers as ibn sina, and his works, in latin translation, were standard authorities for centuries in medieval and early modern europe. in the period of the abbasid khalifat in baghdad (750 ce onwards) muslim scholars travelled to india to study medicine, and also recruited hindu doctors to come back with them to baghdad, where some of them became influential physicians at court, and translated sanskrit works on medicine, pharmacology and toxicology into arabic. but the arabs were most influenced by greek medicine. as they conquered persia in the seventh century they acquired greek treatises, especially those of galen and hippocrates. during baghdad’s golden age, several decades each side of 800 ce, the rulers pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 5 established a translation bureau, and collected greek texts by hippocrates, galen and others. arab doctors built on them, thus producing the yunani or unani (that is, ‘greek’) school of medicine, which later spread to india and was the system used by indian muslims. rhazes (al rhazi, b. 865) in the ninth and tenth centuries ce wrote on smallpox, measles and other diseases, and challenged the authority of galen long before this was done in europe. his main work was a vast compilation of greek, arabic and indian knowledge. a century later avicenna (ibn sina, b. 980) wrote his monumental canon of medicine (al-qanun), the most influential text ever written in either asia and europe. these arab works, using but improving on greek works, were then translated into latin and widely used in european medicine right up to the nineteenth century. ibn sina’s canon made its first appearance in europe by the end of the 12th century, and its impact was dramatic. copied and recopied, it quickly became the standard european medical reference work. in the last 30 years of the 15th century, just before the european invention of printing, it was issued in 16 editions; in the century that followed more than 20 further editions were printed. the abbasid rulers, who controlled a vast empire centred on baghdad from 750 ce, also established hospitals, in the modern sense of the term the first in the world (tschanz 1997: 20–31). as in the european and indian systems, notions of humours and elements were important to arab medicine. the arab version was the same as the european one: the four humours of blood, phlegm and yellow and black bile were considered to correspond with the four elements of earth, water, air and fire. illness was a sign that the balance of the four was disturbed. in 1637 in persia a european visitor saw a man who had become gravely ill from drinking too much brandy, and as he ‘lay a dying, i saw a moorphysician, who had the sick party in hand, order a great piece of ice to be laid on his stomack, maintaining his procedure by this general maxim, that a disease is to be cur’d by what is contrary thereto’ (olearius 1662: 338). but the arabs were not skilled in gynaecology, given sociocultural norms of female modesty. for example, from the memoirs of the adventurer niccolao manucci, it seems that diagnosis of muslim women in india had to be done by touch rather than sight; only the affected part of the female body, say the arm, would be exposed for observation. as a variant, a wife of prince muhammad azam shah died in 1705 of an abscess on the breast. it had been suggested to her that she be examined by a skilled indo-portuguese woman, but the begam refused to be examined by a woman who drank wine: her touch would be defiling (sarkar 1989: pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 6 56). nor were they good surgeons, as dissection was abhorred, as indeed it was in europe until about the fourteenth century, and again in hindu society till much later. the history of the three variants of plague provide a good example of a disease with a pan-eurasian spread. pneumonic plague retreated in europe in the early eighteenth century, the last major occurrence ravaging marseilles in 1720. bubonic plague, with the characteristic symptom of buboes, was older and lasted much longer. it was recognized that the plague was infectious. counter measures included quarantine and isolation. as early as the fourteenth century italian cities had introduced quarantine measures to keep out ship-borne bubonic plague brought from the middle east. once the disease appeared, affected areas were cordoned off; in the sixteenth century national policies evolved to achieve this . the rich could afford to flee, and did so at the first sign of an outbreak. the poor stayed behind and died (braudel 1979: 78–88; jones 1981: 140–141). as a specific example, there was a major epidemic in lisbon in 1569–70. in june 1569 mortality was 50–60 a day, in july 300–400, and later up to 700. in this city of about 100,000 souls, some 50,000 died in this epidemic. in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and indeed both before and after, the plague was the great killer in northern india (ovington 1929: 203–204), but in the south cholera seems to have been the greater threat. the second decade of the seventeenth century saw several calamitous outbreaks of the plague. as in europe, it is clear that indians knew the plague was infectious, and even that rodents had something to do with its spread. several accounts mention the buboes that appeared, as the emperor jahangir noted, ‘under the armpits, or in the groin, or below the throat.’ he also described how a girl touched an infected mouse, and soon after the buboes of the plague appeared in her. she had a high fever, her colour changed to ‘yellow inclining to black,’ and on her last day she vomited, had a motion, and died (jahangir 1968: i, 442; ii, 65, 66–7). reliance on bleeding (or venesection or phlebotomy) constitutes one of the most important variations. europeans, as noted, used it extensively, even in india. christopher farewell wrote a vivid account of his bout with ‘a burning fever’ near surat in 1614: i here suddenly fell sicke of a burning fever and (thankes be to god) as sodainly recovered. for, fearing the extremity of that raving and uncomfortable sicknesse, against his will i prevayled with our chyrurgion to let me bleed till i fainted againe, as foreseeing it to be my remedy; applyed all comfortable things to my head; tooke my bed; and, full of perplexity to dye sencelesse, i commended myselfe to god. after some idle talke to my friends about me, i fell into a slumber; but pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 7 quickely wakened by a desire to ease my stomacke, and had at least a dozen vomits naturally, which gave mee a most comfortable night. (downton 1938: 135) in the portuguese settlement of daman in the 1690s a french visitor found a young portuguese girl with fever, whose ‘indian physician, instead of letting her blood, had covered her head with pepper’ (priolkar 1961: 14). the european insisted on bleeding her with leeches, and perhaps surprisingly, she recovered quickly (priolkar 1961: 14). in the 1670s in south india the abbé carré fell ill with a fever, and insisted on being bled. great quantities were hacked out of him by enthusiastic but amateur bleeders, with the following result: this made me so feeble that i cannot bear to speak of it. yet, though i felt very weak, i was not surprised that the fever grew less, as it no longer had the cause [that is, excess of blood] which had kept it up; and i further reduced it by refusing for eight days to eat many little delicacies that i would have liked—sometimes one thing, sometimes another, though i must confess i refrained with very great difficulty. for eight or ten days i still had my sight, my memory, and my senses, but so feebly that i did not remember anything that happened to me. (abbé carré 1948: 284–285) there were clearly problems with this method of dealing with fevers, especially when it was used so often; patients in the royal hospital could be bled thirty or even forty times. earlier european practice had combined bleeding with feeding up the patient. in the following description of medical practice in the goa royal hospital from the 1640s, we find that the europeans had now decided that a scantier diet was more appropriate, as noted above in the case of the abbé carré’s self-cure: the hospital at goa was formerly renowned throughout india; and, as it possessed a considerable income, sick persons were very well attended to. this was still the case when i first went to goa; but since this hospital has changed its managers, patients are badly treated, and many europeans who enter it do not leave it save to be carried to the tomb. it is but a short time since the secret of treatment by frequent bleedings was discovered [he presumably means in goa, for bleeding was of course universally practiced in europe]; and it is repeated, according to need, up to thirty or forty times, as long as bad blood comes, as was done to myself on one occasion when at surat; and as soon as the bad blood is removed, which is like an apostume, the sick person is out of danger. butter and meat are to him as poison, for if he eats them he puts his life in danger. formerly some small ragouts were made for the convalescent, but they must nowadays content themselves with beef-tea and a basin of rice. (tavernier 1977: i, 160–161) indian practice was quite different, and was described as follows by a french doctor in the mid-1600s. on physic they have a great number of small books, which are rather collections of recipes than regular treatises. the most ancient and most esteemed is written in verse. i shall observe, by the way, that their practice differs essentially from ours, and that it is grounded on the following pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 8 acknowledged principles: a patient with a fever requires no great nourishment; the sovereign remedy for sickness is abstinence; nothing is worse for a sick body than meat broth, for it soon corrupts in the stomach of one afflicted with fever; a patient should be bled only on extraordinary occasions, and where the necessity is most obvious as when there is reason to apprehend a brain fever, or when an inflammation of the chest, liver, or kidneys, has taken place. (bernier 1914: 338– 339) bleeding, then, is an example of europeans bringing a method with them to india, and with dubious validity. more often they accepted that indian diseases needed indian remedies. that some indian diseases were different and peculiar to the subcontinent was widely acknowledged, and not just by europeans. one muslim author considered that there were major problems in applying the perso-islamic yunani (greek) system to indians (ikram 1966: 183). the eccentric alchemist and important early medical innovator paracelsus in a book published in 1537–1538 stressed that asian and african prescriptions did not work in europe, and he also was not certain that his prescriptions would work outside europe (lach 1977: 424). in the late seventeenth century a french visitor said that for local diseases european medicines were of no use: ‘for this reason the physitians that go out of portugal into these parts must at first keep company with the indian surgeons to be fit to practice; otherwise, if they go about to cure these distempers, so far different from ours after the european manner, they may chance to kill more than they cure’ (careri’s account in sen 1949). the acceptance of these beliefs meant that for most of the early modern period. indian medical practice was described, but usually without comment. even though some of the ‘cures’ prevalent in india at this time seem today to be bizarre in the extreme, europeans apparently found them different, but not qualitatively better or worse, than what they knew. the related notions of a lack of qualitative difference, and that indian diseases were ‘different,’ meant that in portuguese goa even governors and clerics used hindu doctors because of their supposed better local knowledge. in 1548 an indian brahmin doctor was practicing in the jesuit college of st. paul, and another vaidya (healer) was doctor to governor barreto in 1574 (pacheco de figueiredo 1967: 52–53). linschoten, in the 1580s, noted that: there are in goa many heathen phisitions which observe their gravities with hats carried over them for the sunne, like the portingales, which no other heathens doe, but [onely] ambassadors, or some rich marchants. these heathen phisitions doe not onely cure there owne nations [and countriemen] but the portingales also, for the viceroy himselfe, the archbishop, and all the monkes and friers doe put more trust in them than in their own countrimen, whereby they get great [store of] money, and are much honoured and esteemed. (linschoten 1885: i, 230) pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 9 the reverse of this sensible arrangement was that most governors brought their own doctors out with them from lisbon as part of their vast retinues of relatives and hangerson, all of them hoping to make a fortune in india during the three-year term of their patron. these newly arrived portuguese doctors were nearly always rewarded by being made the chief doctor of the important royal hospital, but several contemporaries noted that this was a prime cause of mortality, for they knew nothing of indian diseases. moreover, those who had began to acculturate returned to portugal with their gubernatorial patron. in 1610 the king ordered that this practice cease and that the doctors and surgeons who went out with the viceroys not be allowed to practice in the royal hospital, ‘because they have no experience of the region and its medical methods.’ this order seems to have provoked a storm of complaints from goa, and three years later it was lifted (bulhão pato 1880–1935: i, 304; ii, 300). this sort of exclusivity was unusual. it was much more common for various medical techniques to mingle. dysentery was a great, if unglamorous, killer in goa. most often treatment started by a vigorous purge. apparently not all healers did the purging first, but regardless there were several other methods to cure patients and build them up. some used a type of dog-bane, others a more complicated mixture. neither indians nor portuguese gave any wine. rather kanji, rice broth, was provided, with chicken pieces soaked in it (markham 1913: 27). a portuguese doctor said all doctors, brahmin, canarin, and malabari, used the skin or husk of nutmeg, mixed with butter milk (‘leite azedo’), for all kinds of dysentery. this was given twice a day, in the morning and at night, and then the patient was given to eat some boiled rice without salt or butter (that is, kanji), again with chicken mixed in. if the attack was severe opium might have been given, though this was done more by muslims than by hindus (costa 1964: 28). garcia d’orta wrote the classic colloquies, the first extensive account of disease and curing in india by a european. as such he provides invaluable data for our study. his work, much translated, was extremely influential in europe, though not in his native land of portugal, for he was a converted jew. d’orta, however, differentiates between various hindu practices on this matter. the portuguese method was different from malabar and again from malayalam. (i am not sure what this distinction is based on as malayalam is of course the language of the malabar, now kerala, region.) the malabar treatment was much more rigorous than the portuguese one, while the malayalis mixed opium with the pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 10 nutmeg. on this matter d’orta thought that the native methods had much to commend them when compared with portuguese treatments (markham 1913: 27). garcia d’orta was thoroughly grounded in greek learning, and this, in a way typical of the time, shaded off into less reliable notions. of opium he noted that its long term use produced impotence, despite its popular use as an aphrodisiac. but he also claimed that the use of opium could help conception. this was because its use delayed ejaculation by the male by ‘slowing down his imagination.’ as women are slower in ‘the act of venus,’ this meant ‘they both complete the act at one time.’ ‘the opium also opens the channels by which the genital seed comes from the brain, by reason of its coldness, so that they complete the act simultaneously’ (markham 1913: 41). he knew of yunani medicine from its local practitioners, or hakims, and had a cordial relationship with these people at the court of the nizam shahs in ahmadnagar. d’orta in fact claims that his cures were often more efficacious than those of the muslims. the general point is that he was much more attuned to yunani methods than to ayurvedic, and this for the obvious reason that many of the authorities he quotes, such as galen, ibn sina and al-rhazi, are also prime texts for yunani medicine; indeed the second and third of these were of course muslim healers. there was then a large degree of commonality between his european knowledge and that of the yunani practitioners. he had much more to learn from hindu healers, for their system, while not totally discrete from his own, was more different than the yunani one. he usually appreciated the abilities of the local vaidyas with whom he had contact, often considering their cures to be superior to those he knew. however, he had no inkling of the vast and ancient body of ayurvedic theory. great names like susruta and caraka were unknown to him. all he knew of hindu medicine was the actual practice of possibly not very well informed healers in goa. he claimed that the hindu doctors ‘are men who cure according to experience and custom’ (markham 1913: no. 36), but in fact this merely shows that he was unaware of the ayurvedic scholarly tradition that was passed on through the generations by its followers. d’orta had a quite objective attitude to other medical systems. in a general passage, which describes well his attitude to diverse medical knowledge, he noted how his patient, the ruler of ahmadnagar: pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 11 “taught me the names of illnesses and medicines in arabic, and i taught him the same in latin, which pleased him very much.” the hindu doctors often used portuguese methods too, “but most of them not correctly. for they say there is bleeding, and they never bled before we were in the land; but they used cupping-glasses, sawing and leeches … they were never accustomed to look at waters [i.e. do urinalysis]. i can tell you that they cure dysentery very well, can tell you whether there is fever or not from the pulse, and whether it is weak or strong, and what is the humour that offends, whether it is blood or heat or phlegm, or melancholy; and they give a good remedy for obstruction.” (markham 1913: 35) sometimes they classify things incorrectly within the humoural spectrum, he says, such as getting the heat or dryness of particular drugs wrong. he considered that their knowledge of anatomy was very weak. however, d’orta himself took many things from both ayurvedic and yunani healers. in general he would try european methods first, but if these failed he would then use ‘brahmin’ ones (markham 1913: 36). indeed he modestly claimed that he was the best informed healer in goa, for in the colloquies he has a hindu doctor say: ‘dr. orta knows better than all of us; for we only know the gentios [sc. hindu], but he knows christians, moors [sc. muslim], and gentios better than us all’ (markham 1913: 54). a succinct statement on mingling was provided by a traveller in persia in 1637. he wrote that ‘in physick, or medicine, they follow the maxims of avicenna and their physicians are all galenists’ (olearius 1662: 338). a final example of a quite nonjudgemental mingling, again from goa. we noted above that patients were ferociously bled in the royal hospital. one account from the 1640s concludes by noting that: i forgot to make a remark upon the frequent bleedings in reference to europeans namely, that in order to recover their colour and get themselves in perfect health, it is prescribed for them to drink for twelve days three glasses of pissat de vache [cow’s urine], one in the morning, one at midday, and one in the evening; but, as this drink cannot but be very disagreeable, the convalescent swallows as little of it as possible, however much he may desire to recover his health. this remedy has been learnt from the idolators of the country, and whether the convalescent makes use of it or not, he is not allowed to leave the hospital till the twelve days have expired during which he is supposed to partake of this drink. (tavernier, 1977: i, 160–161) alongside these practitioners who to varying degrees drew on book-based knowledge were a host of alternative healers and people who pronounced on medical matters without a scintilla of training. for example, people thought nutmeg had a host of beneficial properties. it could be used for all cold illnesses of the brain, and paralysis, and other nervous problems, and also for infirmities of the womb (‘enfermidades da madre’) (costa 1964: 23). this was also the case with the famous bezoar stone. this stone, widely described in the popular lore of many cultures, was thought to have been pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 12 formed by encrustations built up around a foreign body in the stomach of ruminant animals. wild goats from persia were especially fecund in producing these invaluable stones. they were believed to be an excellent antidote to poison, a purgative, a means of preserving one’s youth and virility, and also a cure for the plague, bladder complaints, and so on. the jesuits jealously guarded the recipe for their cordial stone, a bezoar stone with an amazing list of other ingredients added. it was used for heart problems, and was a good example of a mixture of indian and european practice. taken back to portugal, these bezoar stones were widely used by the elite for their medicinal and amulet qualities (markham 1913: 45; amaro 1988–1989: 82–10–3). such nostrums were found everywhere. in portugal badger powders were a very popular remedy. one began by inebriating a badger on a wine filtered through camphor and blended with a compound of gold, seed pearls, and coral. the animal then was decapitated, all of his blood drained, and his heart and liver removed. the mixture of the blood with the powders should be effected under a ‘slow sun’ or in the ‘heat of a fire’ . . . two ounces of paté resulting from pulverizing the heart, liver and even the skin and teeth of the badger completed the mixture. this compound, dissolved in wine or in water seasoned with vinegar, was given to the patient. (oliveira marques 1971: 143–144) several european visitors reflected the state of folk medical knowledge in europe when they commented on popular practice in india. cholera was probably the most feared disease, especially on the west coast and in the south. the british in india thought that cholera was caused by eating fish and meat together. they treated it by applying a hot iron to the ball of the patient’s foot. if the patient winced, he or she would soon recover, but if no pain was felt the patient would soon die. for fevers in general the remedy was to ‘take an iron ring about an inch and a half in diameter and thick in proportion. then heating it red hot in the fire, extend the patient on his back, and apply the ring to his navel, in such a manner that the navel may be as a centre to the ring. as soon as the patient feels the heat take away the ring as quick as possible when a sudden revolution will be wrought in his intestines’ (kincaid 1973: 37). a seventeenth-century venetian healer, niccolao manucci, showed in some of his stories how little difference there was between his knowledge and folk medicine. he had no formal training, noting blandly that he simply took up doctoring because the demand was there: ‘little by little i began to turn myself into a physician.’ in bassein, he tells us, there was a woman of good station who produced a girl after a pregnancy of three years. pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 13 the girl married at twelve years and also had a pregnancy of three years. as to rabies, a newly married man on his wedding night cut his bride to pieces, gnawing her breasts, plucking out her eyes, and biting her face and body. the reason was that he had been bitten by a mad dog three months before. the remedy for rabies was to cauterize the wound at once. alternatively, if the bitten person went on a sea voyage he would recover immediately (manucci 1966–1967: iii, 114, 117). several european travellers in the seventeenth century noted a pronounced shortage of local doctors in india, the reason presumably being that most villagers relied on nonprofessional healers, or merely dosed themselves with local drugs and simples. tavernier, commenting in a very valuable passage on health care in a very extensive area of india, said: it should be remarked that in all the countries we have just passed through, . . .there are hardly any physicians except those in the service of the kings and princes. as for the commonalty, when the rains have fallen and it is the season for collecting plants, mothers of families may be seen going in the mornings from the towns and villages to collect the simples which they know to be specifics for domestic diseases. it is true that in good towns there are generally one or two men who have some knowledge of medicine, who seat themselves each morning in the market-place or at a corner of the street and administer remedies, either potions or plasters, to those who come to ask for them. they first feel the pulse, and when giving the medicine, for which they take only the value of two farthings, they mumble some words between their teeth. (tavernier 1977: i, 240) when we look at pre-modern medical practice in eurasia, it is important to be aware of three different levels. at the book based, often non-practicing, level, men wrote books that drew variously on medical traditions from scattered areas. the greatest dissemination location was baghdad under the abbasids. here greek learning was preserved, alongside some indian elements. this amalgam was augmented, so that the ‘greek’ science returned to europe had been improved on and transformed in the arab world. the crudities of hippocrates and galen were refined and improved by al-rhazi and ibn sina, and then transmitted back to europe. yet underlying all medical theory from india to western europe was the notion of humours and balance. actual practitioners drew to varying degrees on this book knowledge. this is to be seen as a continuum, with some healers having studied extensively, others very little. these last shaded off into ‘folk’ medicine, which typically did not draw on book knowledge. it did, however, draw on very detailed and valuable illiterate learning passed down through generations, experiential learning which was not necessarily inferior to or less efficacious than practice based on some degree of familiarity with book based pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 14 prescriptions. doubtless this level was more localised than was the text based one, yet it is revealing that there seems to be no assumption of superiority from one locale as compared with another in this early modern period. all this of course changed dramatically with the rise of ‘scientific’ western medicine from the late eighteenth century. working hand in hand with western imperialism, medical relations between europe and asia were transformed and any notion of commonality was abandoned. reference list alavi, s. 2008, islam and healing: loss and recovery of an indo-muslim medical tradition, 1600–1900. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. amaro, a. m. 1988–1989, ‘goa’s famous cordial stone,’ revista de cultura, no. 7–8 (oct. 1988–march 1989): 82–103. bernier, f. 1914, travels in the mogul empire, 1656–1668, (trans. & eds) a. constable & v. smith. oxford university press, london. braudel, fernand (1979) civilization and capitalism, 15th–18th century, vol. i, the structures of everyday life, the limits of the possible. collins, london. bulhão pato, r. a. de, ed. 1880–1935, documentos remetidos da índia, ou livros das monções, 5 vols. academia das ciências de lisboa, lisbon. carré, abbé 1948, the travels of the abbé carré in india and the near east, 1672–1674, vol. iii. hakluyt society, london. costa, christovão da 1964, tratado das drogas e medicinas das india orientais, por christovão da costa, (ed.) j. walter. junta nacional de ultramar, lisbon. downton, n. 1938, the voyage of nicholas downton. hakluyt society, london. figueiredo, j. m. p. de 1967, ‘the practice of indian medicine in goa during the portuguese rule, 15101699,’ luso-brazilian review, vol. 4, no. 1: 48–57. figueiredo, j. m. de 1984) ‘ayurvedic medicine in goa according to european sources in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,’ bulletin of the history of medicine, vol. 58: 224–230. gaitonde, p. d. 1983, portuguese pioneers in india: spotlight on medicine. sangam books, bombay. ikram, s. m. 1966, muslim rule in india and pakistan, 2nd ed. ashraf, lahore. jones, e. l. 1981, the european miracle. cambridge university press, cambridge. kincaid, d. 1973, british social life in india, 1608-1937, 2nd ed. routledge & kegan paul, london. kumar, d., ed. 2001) disease and medicine in india: a historical overview. tulika books, new delhi. lach, donald f. 1965, asia in the making of europe, vol. 1. university of chicago press, chicago. _____ 1977, asia in the making of europe, vol. 2. university of chicago press, chicago. _____ 1993, asia in the making of europe, vol. 3. university of chicago press, chicago. linschoten, j.h. van 1885, the voyage of john huyghen van linschoten to the east indies, 2 vols. hakluyt society, london. manucci, n. 1966-1967, storia do mogor, or mogul india, 4 vols. editions indian, calcutta. markham, c., (trans. & ed.) 1913, colloquies on the simples and drugs of india by garcia da orta. henry sotheran, london, olearius, a. 1662, the voyages & travels of the ambassadors sent by frederick duke of holstein to the great duke of muscovy, and the king of persia. begun in the year mdcxxxiii and finish’d in mdcxxxix, trans. j. davies, t. dring & j. starkey. no publisher, london. oliveira marques, a. h. de 1971, daily life in portugal in the late middle ages. university of wisconsin press, madison. ovington, j. 1929, a voyage to surat in the year 1689, ed.) h. g. rawlinson. oxford university press, london. owen, n. g., ed. 1987, death and disease in southeast asia: explorations in social, medical and demographic history. oxford university press, singapore. pearson, m. n. 1995, ‘the thin end of the wedge: medical relativities as a paradigm of early modern indian-european relations,’ modern asian studies, vol. 29, no. l, 141–170. pearson medical connections portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 15 ______ 1996, ‘first contacts between indian and european medical systems: goa in the sixteenth century,’ in warm climates and western medicine: the emergence of tropical medicine, 15001900, (ed.) d. arnold, editions rodopi, amsterdam: 20–41. ______ 2001, ‘hindu medical practice in sixteenth-century western india: evidence from the portuguese records,’ portuguese studies, vol. 17: 100–13. pearson, m. n. 2001, ‘the portuguese state and medicine in sixteenth century goa,’ in the portuguese and socio-cultural changes in india, 1500–1800, (eds) k. s. mathew, t. r. de souza & p. malekandathil. fundação oriente, tellicherry, 401–419. pearson, m. n. 2006, ‘portuguese and indian medical systems: commonality and superiority in the early modern period,’ revista de cultura, macau, vol. 20: 116–141. porter, r. (ed.) 1996, the cambridge illustrated history of medicine. cambridge university press, cambridge. priolkar, a. k. 1961, the goa inquisition. a. k. priolkar, bombay. sarkar, jadunath 1989, studies in aurangzib’s reign, 3rd ed. sangam books, london. sen, s. n. (ed.) 1949, indian travels of thevenot and careri. national archives of india, new delhi. sharma, v. 2010, ‘life and death: life of early english settlers at bombay, 1663–1760,’ in coastal histories: society and ecology in pre-modern india, (ed.) y. sharma., primus books, delhi: 155– 180. silva gracias, f. da 1994, health and hygiene in colonial goa: 1510-1961. concept publishers, new delhi. singh, a. k. 2010, ‘disease, morbidity and mortality in the indian ocean world, 1500-1800,’ in coastal histories: society and ecology in pre-modern india, (ed.) y. sharma. primus books, delhi: 107– 153. tavernier, j.-b. 1977, travels in india of jean-baptiste tavernier, 2 vols, trans. v. ball & w. crooke. munshiram manoharlal, new delhi. tschanz, d. w. 1997, ‘the arab roots of european medicine,’ saudi aramco world, may–june: 20–31. wear, a. (ed.) 1992, medicine in society: historical essays. cambridge university press, cambridge. portalattfiekldcopyedit2011final portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. terpsichorean architecture special issue, guest edited by tony mitchell. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. punk rock and the value of auto-ethnographic writing about music sarah attfield, university of technology sydney many of the books on punk rock are written from a subjective, personal perspective and come with what could be described as punk attitude. they focus on the experiences of the writers as fans and musicians and contain memoir and interviews alongside varying degrees of critical analysis. these type of texts raise interesting questions; what kinds of critical value have the colloquial and sensationalistic diary entries of nils stevenson in vacant: a diary of the punk years 1976–79 (1999) when compared to a ‘scholarly’ article on the rhetoric of class by david simonelli (2002) in the journal contemporary british history? can we learn more about the punk scene by knowing that stevenson used drugs and was romantically involved with siousxie sioux, or is it more useful to read the sections on punk in the recent performing class in british popular music, which aims to ‘unravel certain facets of class that appear within punk’ (wisemantrouse 2008: 144)? and what do these texts actually tell us about the music? it is interesting to consider the ways in which popular music is written about. various genres of popular music are written about from within different fields such as musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies and sociology. there are studies based on the textual analysis of songs, analyses of the structure of the music, and those that are focused more on the dynamics of the subcultures, but how many studies of hip hop, pop music, rock music, country music and so on are written from the perspective of fans and musicians? how many of these works offer an insider’s view of the music and subculture? and what difference does it make when they do? attfield punk rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 2 in some respects scholarly writing on punk rock seems like a contradiction. how can music so rooted in anti-establishment sentiment be appropriated into an institutional setting? the auto-ethnographic approach found in many of the studies of punk might be an answer to this question. the writers have used their own experiences as musicians and fans to reflect on and analyse the music and scenes which arguably provides the reader with an ‘authentic’ and immediate insight. i would suggest that this approach to writing about music, especially anti-establishment music such as punk and hardcore— music that by its very nature challenges institutions—is potentially more useful to readers interested in understanding the music, the specific circumstances of its creation and how it has inspired and endured. according to roy shuker, since the 1990s there has been an increase in ‘confessional memoir’ retrospective accounts of music scenes from various eras (2005: 22). he suggests that within studies of popular music, biographies have had an important function and have been particularly useful in the ‘construction and maintenance of fandom’ (22). ethnographic approaches to music have also increased and this shift has occurred alongside a growing interest in the study of ‘consumption and audiences’ (shuker 2005: 96). this may be linked to the emergence of ‘new’ ethnography—a style of anthropology favoured by anthropologists such as kathleen stewart (1996), which follows on from the work of james clifford and george marcus (1986). clifford and marcus advocated a style of ethnographic writing that acknowledged its role in the creation of ‘true fictions’ (1986: 7), and allowed for ‘hybrid textual activity’ (26) that included the writing of ‘insiders’ who could ‘offer new angles of vision and depths of understanding’ through auto-ethnographic accounts (9). this was to be a self-reflexive style of ethnography creating accounts that could be both ‘empowered and restricted’ (9). stewart’s approach to ethnography focuses on narratives. she sees stories as ‘productive’ and suggests that culture needs to be examined through such ‘mediating form(s) through which meaning must pass’ (1996: 29). for stewart, ethnography must reject claims to be authoritative and she advocates an ethnography that is capable of ‘displacing the rigid discipline of the “subject” and “object” that sets us apart and leaves them inert and without agency’ (1996: 26). history in this model is an act of ‘remembering’ (stewart 1996: 90) and resistant to the kinds of ‘master narratives’ (96) that attfield punk rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 3 ‘speak a war of positions’ (97). it is possible that this ‘new’ ethnography favoured by stewart may have led to a growing interest in what karen o’reilly (2009) calls ‘ethnography at home’ (110), as ethnographers turn to their own communities as objects of study. the popularity of ethnographic approaches has also led to an increase in autoethnographic studies of culture. chan points to trends in ethnography that include ‘writings focusing on self’ (2008: 31) and a self-reflexivity that allows for ‘cultural analysis and interpretation with narrative details’ (46) which has the potential to ‘enhance cultural understandings’ (52). in these ‘reader friendly’ works, the author has first-hand knowledge of their subject matter and the narratives lead the reader into ‘selfexamination’ (52) therefore collapsing notions of critical distance. taking the idea of auto-ethnography a step further is tami spry who describes her own practice of performing auto-ethnography as the ‘convergence of the “autobiographic impulse” and the “ethnographic moment” … interpreting culture through the self-reflexive and cultural refractions of identity’ (2006: 183). within this type of auto-ethnography the ethnographer weaves qualitative data collected in the field with their own experiences and may include elements of creative non-fiction such as poems and prose and is a combination of analysis and self-observation. historian greg dening (1996) writes of history as performance and advocates creating history through narratives. for dening, historians should endeavour to write from experience because participation and active observation is necessary for reflection and to give authority to the words written. and scholars within the discipline of workingclass studies also point to the value of narrative and autobiography in writing history and cultural analysis. british labour historian tim strangleman (2005) describes how autobiography has been devalued in some academic circles and dismissed as ‘superficial and nostalgic’ and unreliable due to the ‘production and content (being) driven by popular demand from a general audience, rather than scholarly concerns’ (2005: 142). strangleman makes a case for autobiography as it allows an insight into the ‘full depth and breadth’ (150) of life and bridges the gap between lived experience and academic culture. it is possible to critique the personal approach to studying culture though and there are various pitfalls to consider when adopting an auto-ethnographic, autobiographic or attfield punk rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 4 memoir style of writing about music. there is a danger of overly focusing on the self and therefore becoming self-indulgent at the expense of analysis (chan 2008). it is also possible to place too much emphasis on narration, again at the expense of analysis and there can be an over-reliance on personal memory which can be unreliable (chan 2008). and ‘subjective involvement’ (o’reilly 2009: 111) may make the study too close to allow for useful critical analysis. these potential limitations need to be acknowledged both by the writer and the reader when approaching a text about punk. with these ideas in mind it is interesting to note some texts on punk and hardcore. looking through a list of books on punk it becomes clear that many of the authors were involved in the scene in some way or other, and although most of the accounts of punk have been written retrospectively, music journalists of the time such as julie burchill and tony parsons were writing about the scene as it happened—notably in their jointauthored ‘the boy looked at johnny’: the obituary of rock and roll (1978). punk rock an oral history was written by punk musician john robb (2006), while punk diary is the work of dj and producer george gimarc (2006). concert promoter steven blush has written american hardcore: a tribal history (2006) and many other books have been written from the perspective of fans such as craig o’hara’s the philosophy of punk (2000) and stephen colgrave and chris sullivans’s punk: a life apart (2001). and pretty vacant: a history of punk by phil strongman (2007), and simon reynolds’s rip it up and start again (2006) and his co-authored the sex revolts with joy press (1995) include the authors’ perspective as fans of the scene under investigation. the list continues. rock journalist greil marcus has put together his writings on punk in in the fascist bathroom (1999), helen reddington lays down her punk musician credentials in the lost women of rock music (2007), and roger sabin vouches for the fan status of the authors in punk rock: so what? the cultural legacy of punk (1999). in an australian context there is stranded by former fanzine creator and saints fan, clinton walker (1996), and bob blunt’s blunt (2001), which recounts his experiences as an inner city music fan and fanzine maker. it appears that the position of the author having been involved in the punk and post punk scene as fans, musicians, promoters, and rock journalists is seen to be significant, especially in the marketing of such books. it is interesting to contrast this approach with that of writing on hip hop. global attfield punk rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 5 linguistic flows: hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language (alim, ibrahim & pennycook 2009) is a well put together and a very useful book on hip hop, but while the academic credentials of the writers are listed in the notes on contributors, there are no references to the contributors being fans of the music they are writing about, despite the (slightly unconvincing) ‘shout outs’ in the acknowledgments. other important books on hip hop such as tricia rose’s black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary america (1994), despite its obvious engagement with the topic, maintains a distance from the subjects of its analysis. and it is also interesting to note that writing on hip hop and rap music is marketed in a rather dry fashion. the blurb for adam krims’s 2000 book rap music and the poetics of identity, states: this is the first book to discuss in detail how rap music is put together musically. whereas a great deal of popular music scholarship dismisses music analysis as irrelevant or of limited value, the present book argues that it can be crucial to cultural theory. it is unique for bringing together perspectives from music theory, musicology, cultural studies, critical theory, and communications. it is also the first scholarly book to discuss rap music in holland, and the rap of cree natives in canada, in addition to such mainstream artists as ice cube. (krims 2000: cover blurb) this can be contrasted with the blurb for sabin’s 1999 punk rock: so what?: it’s now over twenty years since punk first pogoed its way into our consciousness. punk rock: so what? brings together a new generation of writers, journalists and scholars to provide the first comprehensive assessment of punk and its place in popular music history, culture and myth. combining new research, methodologies and exclusive interviews, punk rock: so what? brings a fresh perspective to the analysis of punk culture, and kicks over many of the established beliefs about the meaning of punk. (sabin 1999: cover blurb) some marketers are also guilty of making books on punk sound rather unexciting, although this is more likely the case when the book in question is written in a more detached, academic fashion, such as stacy thompson’s punk productions: unfinished business (2004), which takes a marxist approach and appears to be based on thorough research rather than the author’s firsthand accounts. so what are the reasons for this phenomenon? it is possible that the number of punk texts written by those with first-hand experience can be explained, in part, by the length of time elapsed since punk emerged. with the origins of punk traceable to the very early 1970s, there has been quite a bit of time for those involved in the scene to become educated and start careers as writers and academics. authors such as simon reynolds, roger sabin and helen reddington work as professional writers or academics (reddington currently lectures in music at the university of east london, and roger attfield punk rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 6 sabin lectures in cultural studies at central st. martins in london). because punk’s ‘moment’ was relatively short-lived (although its legacy and influence has continued to the present) some participants in the subculture moved on, gained tertiary educations, and began professional lives. it should be noted, however, that ageing doesn’t necessarily lead to a complete withdrawal from a subculture: many fans have maintained their interest in the music (bennett 2006), and some have remained active within the scene as musicians. older fans of punk may no longer be seen displaying the ‘spectacular’ style described by hebdige (1979), but this is not necessarily an indication of lack of commitment to the music and subculture in general (bennett 2006). writing about punk, even from a position as an academic, might therefore be a method of participating in the subculture as an older fan. having said this, it is true that hip hop has also been around for a long time (with its origins in the late 1970s and early 1980s), and the artists and fans from the original scene have had a similar amount of time to forge academic careers. yet fandom does not come across in the texts on hip hop in the same way as in critical works about punk. this may be partly explained by the fan and musician demographic of punk compared to hip hop—with punk fans and musicians generally being white and, therefore, having more access to education and the kind of cultural capital required to develop an academic career. even though many of the participants in punk culture were working class, they were of the generation (at least in the uk and australia) for whom higher education was free. and it also possible that while the legacy of punk continues, the scene as it exists today is underground. hip hop, especially in the usa, is an ongoing and current scene, and participants are involved in more hands on ways as artists and producers. this means that the distancing necessary for reflection has yet to occur. hip hop artists aren’t ready yet to hang up the mic. looking inside the books on punk can provide some clues as to why the authors have chosen to incorporate their own experiences into their studies. roger sabin states in punk rock: so what? that he was conscious of the perspectives of fans and the value of ‘history from below’ (1999: 6) in choosing what to include in his edited collection of essays. he wanted to create a narrative based on the experiences of those who had actually been there—and this would help to ‘relocate’ (2) punk and open up new understandings of punk culture and history. in his introduction he points to the attfield punk rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 7 contributors as having been the ‘right age’ to have participated as ‘musicians, fanzine writers and designers, journalists or simply as fans’ (12). and he states that this is in contrast to the ‘typical’ academic writer who ‘takes the stance of an anthropologist exploring an exotic terrain’ (12). likewise, simon reynolds (2006) in rip it up and start again, explains that part of his reason for writing the book was that he wanted to convey his memory of the post punk era as ‘superabundant, a golden age of newness and nowness that created a sensation of moving at high speed into the future’ (xii) and because he recognizes how the music and scene impacted on his identity and subsequent choice of career as a music writer. and helen reddington (2007) in the lost women of rock music suggests that the firsthand experiences of musicians and fans, especially females one, can question the ‘given histories’ (2) of the period and can amend the omissions found in the documentation of the time. she acknowledges that her work relies on her memories and her involvement as a musician in a punk band. books such as reddington’s arguably provide a balance between detached, academic writing and the more intimate, immediate recounts of personal experience and the narratives fill some of the gaps in more ‘official’ histories. in reddington’s case it is the omission of women’s experiences that is of particular interest. so, what are the effects of such an approach? there is something potentially valuable in recounts from those who were involved with the punk scene, and this can be seen when looking at specific examples. in vacant: a diary of the punk years 1976-79, nils stevenson (1999) presents a series of diary entries alongside images of (later) handwritten pieces by other participants in the scene such as steve severin, don letts and gaye advert. the book is illustrated with candid photographs of artists and fans taken by nils’ brother ray. although stevenson’s diary entries are rather salacious at times, there is much to learn about the experiences of a young person within a subculture through their own words rather than the detached, anthropological tone as critiqued by roger sabin (1999). stevenson’s book captures the atmosphere of the early london punk scene – the decadence, the chaos and the attitude of the young people involved. it gives an insight into the workings of the bands and the ways in which their music was received. the following extract is typical of the diary entries: attfield punk rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 8 siouxsie and the banshees take to the stage at the 100 club punk festival for their first-ever performance. siouxsie who can’t sing, steve severin who can’t play bass, marco pirroni who can play guitar and sid vicious who can’t play drums, make a wonderful racket for about fifteen minutes, as siouxsie shouts lyrics from the “lord’s prayer,” “twist and shout,” “knocking on heaven’s door,” and “deutschland, deutschland uber alles,” while marco pulls out a catalogue of familiar riffs. it reminds me of yoko ono’s album “fly.” everyone hates them. i want to manage them. bernard won’t let the banshees use the clash’s equipment because of sid and siouxsie’s swastikas. this incenses sid who berates bernard from the stage, calling him a “tight old jew.” (53) this extract provides the reader with a vivid account of a punk gig and the diy nature of the music. there is an indication of the randomness of the performance and a sense of how provocative the performers, and the attitudes and behaviours they displayed, were. there is immediacy in this account that would arguably be lost in a more detached academic observation. helen reddington describes herself in the introduction to the lost women of rock music as ‘one of the participants in what (she) had thought was going to be a revolution in rock music’ (2007: 1). she states that she felt ‘indignant that the image of punk that had been set in stone was not what (she) had experienced firsthand’ (1), and she wanted to redress the exclusion of women musicians from the histories of punk. reddington uses a combination of academic analysis, anecdote and oral histories, and the result is an engaging and convincing re-write of the british punk scene from a female perspective. in a section on her own experiences of forming a punk band reddington points to the importance of including subjective experience. she writes that her memoir is ‘typical of young women’s experience at this time, and in writing this way (she) is following the precedent of valerie walkerdine, who uses her own experiences as a case study in her book daddy’s girl almost as a direct alternative to the quasi-objective stance taken by some writers’ (73). whilst not as sensationalist as stevenson, reddington does paint an interesting picture of her experiences: in late 1977, the occupants of the basement of the squat i was living in started to become rather noisy. two girls (they were very young, probably about fourteen) had moved in. they had run away from a children’s home. one of them wore a dog-collar, a corset and suspenders, the other wore an old black jacket and a mini skirt, and they both wore lots of black eye makeup. a band had been formed and these girls were the backing vocalists. the name of the band was descriptive rather than ironic: they called themselves the molesters. the only time the band stopped playing was when social services came round looking for the girls … and when someone wired up their door handles to the mains to attempt to give them a fatal electric shock as they entered their rehearsal room. they remained alive and noisy; at times, we used to bang the floors above their rooms with a hammer to try and shut them up. (74) according to her account, reddington’s band was formed initially to prove that they attfield punk rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 9 could do better than the band that lived downstairs. the extract here tells us not only again about the diy nature of the music and apparent ease of forming a band, but also gives the reader a taste of life for young working-class people (and specifically girls). here are young teenage runaways living in a squat, dealing with unfriendly neighbours and being chased by the authorities. again, the first-hand narrative recounts a lived experience and shows what everyday life was like for young women within the scene. there is arguably a potentially empowering effect for the young marginalised women whose position may have been lost within an academic ‘outsider’ analysis of their subculture. steven blush’s american hardcore: a tribal history (2001) includes interviews with many artists and fans on the scene at the time and is written and compiled from a fan’s perspective. blush himself was a gig promoter and intimately involved in the us hardcore punk scene which ran from about 1980 to 1986. the introduction to the book is constructed from interviews with participants and interviewees, such as kevin seconds from 7 seconds and ian mackaye from minor threat, and these first person accounts provide immediacy. kevin seconds describes how he and his friends were influenced by earlier punk bands such as the ramones and gives an idea of how some of the bands started out: we’d sit on our bed and play along to punk records. the best to play along to was the ramones’ first record—if you turned down one side of your stereo, you could just have the bass and drums and on the other side you have the guitar—almost like having this instructional record. we’d tape record ourselves playing to it. (seconds 2001: 14) the oral histories in the book create a clear picture of the scene and provide insightful analysis into the music and the culture of american hardcore. the book and subsequent film version (rachman 2006) explains, via those involved, how the music emerged and evolved from punk, and the reasons for the decline of the american scene. it thus provides a political and social context for the music and fan culture. the film version also incorporates footage from the gigs, which helps recreate the urgency and raw power of the music. writing from the first person arguably makes sense when the subject under investigation belongs to a subculture. it is tempting to label such accounts as authentic, but this can be problematic, for what does authentic mean? suggesting that one version is more attfield punk rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 10 authentic than another could be exclusionary. rather than ‘authentic,’ perhaps clifford and marcus’s aforementioned ‘true fictions’ is a preferable term (1986: 7). this takes into account the fabricated nature of ethnography and acknowledges that the cultures being written about are subject to invention through the narrative. clifford and marcus note that these fictions are linked to systems of power. even when writing about a scene that operated at the margins of mainstream society, there are still hierarchies of power involved when one account becomes privileged (published) over another. many of the authors discussed in this paper do acknowledge the bias of their accounts but see it as inevitable. in stranded, clinton walker begins the book by stating that the ‘inevitably personal’ history in his book initially made him uneasy (1996: ix). this changed when he realised that he was in a ‘privileged position to offer a unique insight’ (ix), and his first-hand experience allowed him to ‘illustrate the way history can be rewritten’ (x). bob blunt also points out that his version of the australian alternative music history in blunt is ‘personal and biased’ (2001: xi), and this may be a way around the pitfalls of auto-ethnography. having said this, the temptation to claim these accounts as authentic remains strong. despite the potential problems associated with the unreliability of memory, or the limitations of the focus on a specific field (which may not acknowledge exclusions), i would suggest that to be able to hear from those involved in the music and scenes as insiders is insightful: their accounts helps maintain some of the original and continuing attitude of punk and hardcore. punk was music that challenged authority and was ‘in your face,’ and to observe and analyse from a purely academic perspective potentially dampens the original spirit of the scene. reference list alim, h. s., ibrahim, a. & pennycook, a. (eds) 2009, global linguistic flows: hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language. routledge, new york & london. bennett, a. 2006, ‘punk’s not dead: the significance of punk rock for an older generation of fans,’ sociology, vol. 40, no. 1: 219–235. burchill, j. & parsons, t. 1978, ‘the boy looked at johnny’: the obituary of rock and roll. pluto press, london. blunt, b. 2001, blunt: a biased history of australian rock. prowling tiger press, northcote, victoria. blush, s. 2001, american hardcore: a tribal history. feral house, los angeles. chan, h. 2008, autoethnography as method. left coast press, walnut creek, ca. clifford, j. & marcus, g. e. (eds) 1986, writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. university of california press, berkeley. colgrave s. & sullivan, c. 2001, punk: a life apart. london: cassell. attfield punk rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 11 dening, g. 1996, performances. melbourne university press, melbourne. gimarc, g. 2005, punk diary 1970–1982. backbeat books, san francisco. hebdige, d. 1979, subculture: the meaning of style. routledge, london. krims, a. 2000, rap music and the poetics of identity. cambridge university press, new york. marcus, g. 1994, in the fascist bathroom: writings on punk 1977-1992. london: penguin. o’hara, c. 2001, the philosophy of punk: more than noise. oakland: ak press. o’reilly, k.n 2009, key concepts in ethnography. sage, london. press, j. & reynolds, s. 1995. the sex revolts: gender, rebellion and rock and roll. london: serpent’s tail. rachman, p. (dir.) 2006, american hardcore: the history of american punk rock 1980–1986. documentary, ahc productions. reddington, h. 2007, the lost women of rock music: female musicians of the punk era. ashgate, , aldershot. reynolds, s. 2006, rip it up and start again: postpunk 1978–1984. penguin, new york. robb, j. 2006, punk rock: an oral history. london: ebury press. rose, t. 1994, black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary america. university press of new england, hanover, nh. sabin, r. 1999, punk rock so what? routledge, new york & london. shuker, r. 2005, popular music: the key concepts. routledge, london & new york. simonelli, d. 2002, ‘anarchy, pop and violence: punk rock subculture and the rhetoric of class,’ contemporary british history, vol. 16, no. 12, 121–144. spry, t. 2006, ‘performing auto-ethnography: an embodied methodological praxis,’ in emergent methods in social research, (eds) s. hesse-biber & p. leavy. sage, thousand oaks, ca, 183– 211. stevenson, n. 1999, vacant: a diary of the punk years 1976–79. thames and hudson, london. stewart, k. 1996, a space on the side of the road: cultural poetics in an ‘other’ america. princeton university press, princeton. strangelman, t. 2005, ‘class memory: autobiography and the art of forgetting,’ in new working-class studies, (eds) j. russo & s. linkon. cornell university press, ithica, 137–152. strongman, p. 2008, pretty vacant: a history of punk. chicago: chicago review press. thompson, s. 2004, punk productions: unfinished business. state university of new york press, new york. walker, c. 1996, stranded: the secret history of australian independent music 1977–1991. pan macmillan, sydney. wiseman-trouse, n. 2008, performing class in british popular music. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. microsoft word portalcoadycopyeditaugust2011final_checked portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. terpsichorean architecture special issue, guest edited by tony mitchell. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. from gospel to gates: modal blending in african-american musical discourse before the signifyin(g) monkey christopher coady, sydney conservatorium of music the 1988 publication of henry louis gates’s the signifyin(g) monkey: a theory of african-american literary criticism provided a new analytical tool for the study of african-american music. while gates’s primary concern was to the literary arena, his deconstruction of the cultural act of ‘signifyin(g),’ a rhetorical process utilizing figurative speech and double talk, was immediately seen to have implications for the study of formal processes in african-american music. over the past 20 years, artists as diverse as funk bandleader james brown, iconic jazz trumpeter miles davis and orchestral composer william grant still, have all met academic assessment through the lens of gates’s theory. and while gates bears responsibility for catapulting the idea of metaphorical communication to the forefront of african-american music studies, it is important to acknowledge that this cross-over success would not have been nearly as total if not for the efforts of people documenting linguistic/musical parallels in africanamerican culture decades earlier. this article highlights the manner in which these earlier works set the stage for the application of gates’s theory to the musical realm. in the signifyin(g) monkey, gates traces the roots of african-american signifyin(g) to the rhetorical tropes of a shared trickster figure prevalent in the folklore of nigeria, benin, cuba, haiti, south america and the usa (gates 1988: 4). he refers to the figure by its yoruba name, esu-elegbara, but argues that the archetype is encoded in, among others, the figures exfi in brazil, echu-elegua in cuba, and papa legbas in haiti (gates coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 2 1988: 5). the geographic dissemination of the archetype is linked to the cross-cultural milieu of the trans-atlantic slave trade and while incarnations of the figure are often modified physically, its propensity for rhetorical strategies involving ambivalent speech is manifest universally. in yoruba culture, the figure presents as an interpreter between god and man. he is responsible for decoding the texts of ifa, ‘the god of determinate meanings’ (gates 1988: 21), during the process of divination. esu’s interpretation is complicated however by ‘the human being’s curse of … indeterminacy or uncertainty of fate’ (21). this results in enigmatic translations full of double meanings. in practice, the enigma is often further interpreted by the ‘babalawo’ (diviner) for the benefit of the client yet the message is understood by both to remain indeterminate at its core. in the pan-african diaspora, esu archetypes tend to deliver their ambiguous messages in the context of ‘sacred myths as do characters in a narrative’ (gates 1988: 52). the african-american permutation of esu however appears in contrast as an overarching narrative voice. gates holds that: esu’s functional equivalent in afro-american profane discourse is the signifying monkey, a figure who seems to be distinctly afro-american, probably derived from cuban mythology, which generally depicts echu-elegua with a monkey at his side. unlike his pan-african esu cousins, the signifying monkey exists in the discourse of mythology not primarily as a character in a narrative but rather as a vehicle for narration itself. (52) the mode of discourse gates refers to in this quote can be observed in the multiple settings of the ‘signifying monkey,’ an african-american toast, or oral narrative, in which the rhetorical strategy of misrepresentation plays an ubiquitous role. the following version of the toast text is taken from goss and barnes’s (1989) talk that talk: an anthology of african-american storytelling and is re-printed below in its entirety: said the signifyin’ monkey to the lion one day: “hey, dere’s a great big elephant down th’ way goin’ ‘roun’ talkin,’ i’m sorry t’ say, about yo’ momma in a scandalous way!” “yeah, he’s talkin’ ‘bout yo’ momma an’ yo’ grandma, too; and he don’ show too much respect fo’ you. now, you weren’t there an’ i sho’ am glad ‘cause what he said about yo’ momma made me mad!” signifyin’ monkey, stay up in yo’ tree you are always lyin’ and signifyin’ but you better not monkey wit’ me. coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 3 the lion said, “yea? well, i’ll fix him; i’ll tear that elephant limb from limb.” then he shook the jungle with a mighty roar took off like a shot from a forty-four. he found the elephant where the tall grass grows and said, “i come to punch you in your long nose.” the elephant looked at the lion in surprise and said, “boy, you better go pick on somebody your size.” but the lion wouldn’t listen; he made a pass; the elephant slapped him down in the grass. the lion roared and sprung from the ground and that’s when that elephant really went to town. i mean he whupped that lion for the rest of the day and i still don’t see how the lion got away but he dragged on off, more dead than alive, and that’s when that monkey started his signifyin’ jive. the monkey looked down and said, “oooh wee! what is this beat-up mess i see? is that you, lion? ha, ha! do tell! man, he whupped yo’ head to a fare-thee-well!” “give you a beatin’ that was rough enough; you s’pposed to be the king of the jungle, ain’t dat some stuff? you big overgrown pussycat! don’ choo roar or i’ll hop down there an’ whip you some more.” the monkey got to laughing and a’ jumpin’ up and down, but his foot missed the limb and he plunged to ground, the lion was on him with all four feet gonna grind that monkey to hamburger meat. the monkey looked up with tears in his eyes and said, “please mr. lion, i apologize, i meant no harm, please, let me go and i’ll tell you something you really need to know.” the lion stepped back to hear what he’d say, and that monkey scampered up the tree and got away. “what i wanted to tell you,” the monkey hollered then, “is if you fool with me, i’ll sic the elephant on you again!” the lion just shook his head, and said, “you jive… if you and yo’ monkey children wanna stay alive, up in them trees is where you better stay.” and that’s where they are to this very day. signifyin’ monkey, stay up in yo’ tree you are always lyin’ and signifyin’ but you better not monkey wit’ me. (goss & barnes 1989: 456–457) in the toast, the monkey can be seen to persuade the lion through misrepresentation twice. in the first instance, the lion is driven to attack the elephant either through the fabrication or the manipulation of the elephant’s comments about the lion’s family as coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 4 related to him by the signifyin(g) monkey. distressed after being trampled by the elephant, the lion attacks the monkey in an act of revenge. at this point, the monkey commits his second act of misrepresentation, convincing the lion to let him go with the promise of relaying a secret he ‘really need[s] to know.’ the secret ultimately ends up being to the lion’s detriment: ‘if you fool with me, i’ll sic the elephant on you again!’ the use of this rhetorical strategy not only drives the action of the text, it demonstrates the potential for ambivalent speech to serve as a strategic device in the subversion of established power structures. gates uses the african-american term ‘signifyin(g)’ to refer to the spectrum of devices that comprise the rhetorical approach of the monkey in this toast. the term is a homonym for the english language word ‘signifying’ and its etymology remains unclear; gates places it ‘anonymously and unrecorded in antebellum america’ (gates 1988: 46). he explains the difference between the english and african-american vernacular terms as follows: the english-language use of signification refers to the chain of signifiers that configure horizontally, on the syntagmatic axis. whereas signification operates and can be represented on a syntagmatic or horizontal axis, signifyin(g) operates and can be represented on a paradigmatic or vertical axis. signifyin(g) concerns itself with that which is suspended, vertically: the chaos of what saussure calls “associative relations,” which we can represent as the playful puns on a word that occupy the paradigmatic axis of language and which a speaker draws on for figurative substitutions. these substitutions in signifyin(g) tend to be humorous, or function to name a person or a situation in a telling manner. whereas signification depends for order and coherence on the exclusion of unconscious associations which any given word yields at any given time, signification luxuriates in the inclusion of the free play of these associative rhetorical and semantic relations. (49) simply put, ‘signifying’ operates in a linear manner as a cause and effect relationship; there can be only one meaning for something that is signified. the act of ‘signifyin(g),’ by contrast, necessitates multiple meanings. it is the process of saying two or more things at once. this act, according to gates, serves as ‘the rhetorical principle’ of ‘african american vernacular discourse’ (44). it is the ‘trope of tropes,’ the overarching ‘figure for black rhetorical figures’ (51), and the universal ‘double-voiced utterance’ that allows for a charting of ‘discrete formal relationships’ imbedded throughout the scope of ‘african-american literary history’ (88). coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 5 while gates’s theory is the first to assign such overarching status to signfiyin(g),1 he is not the first scholar to attempt a definition of the term. abrahams (1964) had earlier endeavoured to set parameters on the word’s meaning by cataloguing its many occurances: the term “signifying” seems to be characteristically negro in use if not in origin. it can mean any of a number of things; in the case of the toast [the signifying monkey] it certainly refers to the monkey’s ability to talk with great innuendo, to carb, cajole, neddle and lie. it can mean in other instances the propensity to talk around a subject, never quite coming to the point. it can mean “making fun” of a person or situation. also it can denote speaking with the hands and eyes, and in this respect encompasses a whole complex of expressions and gestures. thus it is “signifying” to stir up a fight between neighbours by telling stories; it is signifying to make fun of the police by parodying his motions behind his back; it is signifying to as for a piece of cake by saying, “my brother needs a piece of that cake.” it is, in other words, many facets of the smart alecky attitude. (abrahams 1964: 52) abrahams’s list of signifyin(g) events is expansive, and although it touches on the ambiguous principles of the trope viewed to be paramount by gates, his emphasis seems less on rhetorical function and more on a general aesthetic of ‘naughtiness.’ of particular interest is abrahams’s claim that engaging in obscured mock gestures of authority figures is typical of signifyin(g) behaviour. mitchell-kernan critiques this aspect of abrahams’s definition, claiming that ‘many would label the parodying of the policeman’s motions ‘marking’’ (mitchell-kernan 1972: 310), an entirely different approach to commentary in african-american discourse involving the use of caricature rather than semantic play. mitchell-kernan’s understanding of the trope instead places signifyin(g) squarely in the realm of metaphorical communication. equal weight is placed on both the signifier’s assembly of words and their interpretation by the intended audience. only after successful decoding has occurred does mitchell-kernan believe an act of signifyin(g) has taken place. she explains: ‘a precondition for the application of ‘signifying’ to some speech act is the assumption that the meaning decoded was consciously and purposely formulated at the encoding stage’ (mitchell-kernan 1972: 312). this act of communication relies heavily on the recipient’s ability to reassemble the contextual relationships implied by the signifier: the hearer is thus constrained to attend to all potential meaning-carrying symbolic systems in speech events—the total universe of discourse. the context embeddedness of meaning is attested 1 the word signifyin(g) will appear without quotation marks from this point forward. i have adopted gates’s spelling in an effort to clarify usage of the respective homonyms. coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 6 to by both our reliance on the given context and, most important, by our inclination to construct additional context from our background knowledge of the world. (mitchell-kernan 1972: 311) this reading of the trope is further supported by geneva smitherman’s claim that signifyin(g) necessarily requires direct engagement with the person signified upon: signification has the following characteristics: indirection, circumlocution; metaphoricalimagistic (but images rooted in the everyday, real world); humorous, ironic; rhythmic fluency and sound; teach but not preachy; directed at person or persons usually present in the situational context (siggers do not talk behind yo back); punning, play on works; introduction of the semantically or logically unexpected. (smitherman 1977: 121) smitherman’s support of the communicative primacy of the trope is evident in her claim that ‘siggers do not talk behind yo back.’2 the communicative aspect is combined with its educative properties (‘teach but not preachy’) and its double voiced tendency to create a rhetorical linguistic device and it is this unified process that gates views as paramount in the construction of african american literary works. it must be noted, however, that gates’s reliance on this trope as a fundamental organisational construct was not only unique, but was highly contentious. myers (1990) takes aim at what he perceives to be afro-centrism in gates’s work, apparent in gates’s failure to detach the literary device of signifyin(g) from the racial domain: the sad fact is that gates’s intentions in the signifying monkey are mutually exclusive. gates cannot specify principles of interpretation inside the black tradition without simultaneously upsetting the whole notion of “black difference” upon which the claim for a black tradition rests. for once a principle is stated it becomes literary, available to any number of writers and critics, and not merely to blacks. gates recognizes this. as a “principle of language use,” he says, signifying is “not in any way the exclusive property of black people ...” to his credit, then, gates perceives that it would be an error to ascribe the unique characteristics of afro-american literature to race. but he is not sure what else to ascribe them to. his reasoning runs in circles. black writers form a tradition. how do you know? they all use the “trope” of signifying. what makes this trope distinctively black? all black writers use it. (myers 1990: 63) the circularity mentioned by myers does prove to be problematic if participation in the african-american literary tradition remains exclusively tied to race. at issue is the question of whether a non african-american can contribute to the tradition or whether participation in this tradition requires racial pedigree. similar questions arose in early jazz discourse and have been partly answered through the process of canonization. with the benefit of a constructed jazz history (deveaux 1991) an apparent consensus now 2 smitherman uses the term ‘siggers’ in reference to those who employ the signifyin(g) trope. the term is an obvious conflation of a familiar racial slur and the word signifyin(g). unsurprisingly, a plurality of associations emerge from this pairing, including an acknowledgment of an environment hostile to african american progress and a simultaneous nod towards the reappropriation of objects of oppression in the preservation of african-american culture. coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 7 exists that the genre remains both grounded in the aural tradition of africanamericans—discussed at length by berliner (1994)—and simultaneously open to the contributions of artists other than african-americans (atkins 2001; jones 2001; austerlitz 2005).3 if there are parallels between the african-american literary and music traditions (and as discussed in the next section of this paper, gates assures us there are), then it seems plausible that the literary tradition might also be embraced and developed by non african-americans. yet another facet of the afro-centric critique calls into question the african-american origins of the signifyin(g) trope itself. fenstermaker (2008) views the act as closely related to what linda hutcheon (1989) refers to as ‘complicitous critique,’ a device through which an author ‘draws on a historical figure or event and simultaneously undermines the historical accuracy of that representation’ in an effort to highlight ‘the ideology behind that representation’ (fenstermaker 2008: 1). she goes on to assert that ‘whether one calls the artistic process “complicitous critique” or signifyin(g), the term one uses is, to some extent, dependent upon the author’s race’ (fenstermaker 2008: 1). while these devices may appear similar in the written word, it should be noted that the first level of signifyin(g) in african-american literature emerges from the transposition of an oral tradition on to written narrative. this is a unique facet of the device and an origin quite different from that of ‘complicitous critique.’ the connection of the device’s literary use to the rhetorical tropes of african-american speech may not definitively establish all uses of signifyin(g) as grounded in african-american culture, but it does speak strongly to the culture’s affinity for and facility over the device’s application. indeed, there can be little doubt that signifyin(g) is a rhetorical trope embraced in african-american spoken vernacular. abrahams (1964), mitchell-kernan (1972) and smitherman (1977) all draw on interviews and personal anecdotes from the africanamerican community to illustrate their multi-faceted definitions of the device. the role of signifyin(g) in interpreting african-american literature must, therefore, be 3 the books referred to here are taylor atkins’s blue nippon: authenticating jazz in japan (2001), andrew jones’s yellow music: media culture and colonial modernity in the chinese jazz age (2001), and paul austerlitz’s jazz consciousness: music, race, and humanity (2005). these works are significant examples of what andy fry refers to as a ‘diasporic approach’ to jazz research that provides a ‘powerful’ tool for ‘analysing both the musical transformations that take place across borders and the unexpected significations the music sometimes takes on’ (fry 2007: 340). coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 8 reconciled with both its frequent use as a rhetorical trope in african-america speech and the uncertainty of its origins. this can be accomplished by accepting that gates’s the signifying monkey is successful as one theory of african-american literary criticism but may not serve to define all aspects of african-american literary process. if in applying one theory to a particular issue a certain understanding emerges and in applying another, a separate understanding emerges, the net knowledge of these interpretations frames the next empirical question. i acknowledge that this reading of gates’s theory undermines part of the agenda on which it is built. as ramsey dutifully points out, gates’s hypothesis needs to be viewed ‘with respect to the cultural work it is performing for its creator[s] and its audience’ (2001: 33). in following this line of thinking, the agenda of the signfiying monkey can be seen as an extension of a particular political bent, one in which the unification of african and african-american history is prioritized as the vehicle for scholarly ratification of african-american literature. passages of the signifying monkey speak strongly to this hypothesis. as gates’s states in the preface to his work: i had at last located within the african and afroamerican traditions a system of rhetoric and interpretation that could be drawn upon both as figures for a genuinely ‘black’ criticism and as frames through which i could interpret, or ‘read,’ theories of contemporary literary criticism. after several active years of work applying literary theory to african and afroamerican literatures, i realized that what had early on seemed to me to be the fulfillment of my project as a would-be theorist of black literature was, in fact, only a moment in a progression. the challenge of my project, if not exactly to invent a black theory, was to locate and identify how the ‘black tradition’ had theorized about itself. (gates 1988: ix) gates’s insistence here that ‘genuinely ‘black’ criticism’ can only be found by looking to africa elevates the importance of a particular racial strain in the development of african-american culture over strains indigenous to the caribbean, the americas and europe. this connection in turn bestows authority on gates’s work by providing his theory with an historic (if potentially simplified) grounding in the already established field of african studies. rojas’s from black power to black studies (2007) offers several examples of similar strategic alignments in the development of african-american studies programs at us universities during the 1990s. unsurprisingly, gates features prominently in this discussion as head of the african and african-american studies department at harvard, a tenure beginning in 1991 and ending in 2006. rojas describes the restructuring of the coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 9 department under gates as one of the more successful endeavours in establishing a black studies presence at the university level. he attributes this success to gates’s creation of ‘tracks allowing students to concentrate in either african or african american studies,’ thus permitting ‘africanist and african-american scholars to use the same resources and interact with each other’ (rojas 2007: 125). in addition, rojas points to the contributions of students and faculty to research projects promoting the relationship between africa and the african diaspora as evidence of a strategic shift under gates and kwame anthony appiah’s editorial leadership. africana: the encyclopedia of the african and african american experience (1999) is singled out as the definitive project of these collaborations. if the goal of an essentialist alignment between africa and afroamerica was the establishment of academic bodies willing to engage culturally appropriate tools in the analysis of african-american literature (or in fact to accept african-american literature as a legitimate field in the first place), then gates appears to have been successful. rojas indicates that the ‘continuing existence of black studies programs’ serves as evidence that social movements, like the one endorsed by gates, have created ‘durable spaces within mainstream institutions’ (rojas 2007: 220). certainly the derivatives of gates’s theory found in contemporary music scholarship discussed below demonstrate comfort with a less afrocentric/activist view of the methodology. this is not to say that the fight for equal recognition of african-american cultural products is over; rather, it is simply meant to place the use of musical theories derived from the signifyin(g) construct into a context that acknowledges the historical trajectory from which they emerged. signifyin(g) in african-american musical discourse gates foreshadowed the appropriation of his trope into the domain of musical analysis through his claim that ‘there are so many examples of signifyin(g) in jazz that one could write a formal history of its development on this basis alone’ (gates 1988: 63). he follows this comment with a depiction of jazz as a language akin to black vernacular english, developed through the identification of overlapping practices regarding repetition and revision in both mediums. gates so confidently assumes the affinity of these aural traditions, he uses an allusion to the music of count basie to summarize the connection between african-american aural practices and his newly identified literary trope: coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 10 indirection is the most common feature of the definitions of signifyin(g) that i have outlined in chapter 2. basie’s composition allows us to see signifyin(g) as the tradition’s trope of revision as well as of figuration. throughout his piece, basie alludes to styles of playing that predominated in black music between 1920 and 1940. these styles include ragtime, stride, barrelhouse, boogiewoogie, and the kansas city “walking bass” so central to swing in the thirties. through these allusions, basie has created a composition characterized by pastiche. he has recapitulated the very tradition out of which he grew and from which he descended. basie, in other words, is repeating the formal history of his tradition within his composition entitled “signify.” it is this definition of signify that allows for its use as a metaphor of afro-american formal revision. (gates 1988: 124) gates does not distinguish between african-american spoken and musical traditions in this passage, instead conflating them both in the sentence ‘basie’s composition allows us to see signifyin(g) as the tradition’s trope of revision as well as of figuration’ [italics mine]. (124) by depicting african-american music as synonymous with africanamerican spoken vernacular, gates negates the need to bridge a theoretical gap in applying his literary theory to the musical realm. ethnomusicologist steven feld had warned against this modal blending more than a decade earlier, claiming that: ‘most of the activity involving linguistic models in ethnomusicology falls into the hocus-pocus category’ (feld 1974: 211). feld’s critique was aimed mainly at ethnomusicologists who derived overarching theories of musical construction based on perceptions of culturally specific linguistic parallels. the main problem with this approach was that researchers ignored ‘issues like the empirical comparison of models, a matatheory of music, evaluation procedures, and the relation of the models to the phenomena they supposedly explain’ (feld 1974: 210). although feld’s critique significantly predates gates’s work, it adumbrates a valid critique of signifyin(g) as a master trope for the study of african-american music. much like the ethnomusicologists feld takes to task, gates does not pursue any routes towards an empirical evaluation of his theory, instead allowing his many examples to stand as selfevident. in his assertions on music, the effects of this omission are even more extreme as the qualitative examples are fewer. however, if the linguistic/musical cross-over gates refers to is removed from the context of an all encompassing theory of artistic expression and woven into the fabric of a complex array of devices available for use by african-american artists, then an imperative for empirical verification seems less urgent. or more to the point, acknowledging that there may be multiple readings of what exactly comprises african-american artistic expression allows those of us working in culture studies to more freely indulge in the findings of qualitative researchers. coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 11 in the area of linguistic/musical links in african-american culture, these qualitative studies have historically focused on the blurred lines between spoken and sung text in gospel services. garland’s (1969) account of the development of soul music draws partly on this concept, describing the fusion of rhythmic speech and song as an important facet of soul musician aretha franklin’s style. he claims that the ‘incantatory use of rhythm’ in her father’s sermons ‘ineradicably impressed’ her style (garland 1969: 24), and supports this assertion with the following personal observation: in her singing and in her playing i have heard many of the techniques familiar to my own baptist upbringing. similarly, when ray charles comes to the end of a chorus and lets loose with a halfchanted and half-sung cluster of improvised lyrics building up to a screamed “yeeeeee-aah!” that seems to batter at the very gates of heaven, whipping the audience into a state of deliciously unbearable tension that inflames it to the point of shouting back its own unison “yeah” i am more than a little reminded of the prancing, perspiring, hymn-humming preachers of my youth who could take a list of biblical names, linking them only with the rhythmically injected word “begat,” and produce such an intoxicating effect that the ‘sisters’ of the church would “get happy” and “shout,” springing up from the pews. (garland 1969: 24) garland’s analysis is plainly subjective yet his description of similar rhetorical devices utilized by both the musician and the preacher are echoed in heilbut’s (1971) discussion of the vernacular practices of gospel singers: ‘when they talk among themselves, their language is a compound of tradition and innovation. like the singing itself, it employs all manner of nonverbal aids—moans, hums, chuckles—to enhance communication’ (heilbut 1971: xxxii). such early observations paved the way for more methodical investigations of linguistic/musical links in gospel services. williams-jones’s work models an ideal aesthetic for gospel singing based largely on the singer’s extension of the preacher’s rhetorical approach: in seeking to communicate the gospel message, there is little difference between the gospel singer and the gospel preacher in the approach to his subject. the same techniques are used by the preacher and the singer – the singer perhaps being considered the lyrical extension of the rhythmically rhetorical style of the preacher. inherent in this also is the concept of black rhetoric, folk expressions, bodily movement, charismatic energy, cadence, tonal range and timbre. (williams-jones 1975: 381) one linguistic element given particular focus by williams-jones is the use of the folk expression ‘worrying the line,’ as described by henderson (1973: 41), in which one alters the pitch of a note in a spoken passage. after claiming that ‘black speech is a significant aspect of the gospel performance idiom’ (williams-jones 1975: 383), williams-jones demonstrates how worrying the line manifests in a musical context: ‘as a solo technique, worrying the line is most often encountered in the gospel selections coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 12 which are in slow tempo. this allows the maximum opportunity for the inventiveness of the soloist in improvisation and building an emotional climax’ (williams-jones 1975: 383). like garland (1969) and heilbut (1971), the comparative approach undertaken by williams-jones highlights links between the spoken and musical realms. however, by choosing a specific device instead of an overall aesthetic approach, she is able to more successfully argue for the connection. snead utilizes a similar method in his essay ‘on repetition in black culture’ (1981). drawing largely on qualitative evidence assembled by chernoff (1979), snead concludes that repetition in black literature is informed by ‘‘musical’ prototypes in the sense that repetition of words and phrases, rather than being overlooked’ are ‘exploited as a structural and rhythmic principle’ (snead 1981: 151). these prototypes, in turn, link to rhetorical practices of the black church. to illustrate his point, he focuses on the musical device of ‘the cut,’ applied frequently in the music of james brown: the format of the brown “cut” and repetition is similar to that of african drumming: after the band has been “cookin” in a given key and tempo, a cue, either verbal (“get down” or “mayfield”—the sax player’s name—or “watch it now”) or musical (a brief series of rapid, percussive drum and horn accents) then directs the music to a new level where it stays with more “cookin” or perhaps a solo—until a repetition of cues then “cuts” back to the primary tempo. (snead 1981: 150) the type of repetition discussed here is utilized for the structural purpose of shifting between textures in the work. the result of this approach is that brown’s music remains repetitive horizontally but manifests variation vertically (in this example snead refers to the addition of a soloist as one textural permutation). snead then turns to the pulpit of the black church to describe the rhetorical origin of this device: both preacher and congregation employ the “cut.” the preacher “cuts” his own speaking in interrupting himself with a phrase such as “praise god” (whose weight here cannot be at all termed denotative or imperative but purely sensual and rhythmic—an underlying ‘social’ beat provided for the congregation). the listeners, in responding to the preacher’s calls at random intervals, produce each time they “cut,” a slight shift in the texture of the performance. at various intervals a musical instrument such as the organ, and often spontaneous dancing, accompanies the speaker’s repetition of the “cut.” when the stage of highest intensity comes, gravel-voiced “speaking in tongues” or the “testifying,” usually delivered at a single pitch, gives credence to the hypothesis that all along the very texture of the sound and nature of the rhythm—but not the explicit meaning—in the spoken words have been at issue. (snead 1981: 151) snead’s assessment of the use of ‘the cut’ in this context demonstrates similarity to its use in the musical realm: it is employed to produce ‘a slight shift in the texture of the performance’ (1981: 151). while it may be impossible to demonstrate a fundamental coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 13 principle of similarity in african-american linguistic and musical approaches— especially with the limitations of qualitative analysis outlined by feld (1974)—snead’s observations do identify the use of similar structural tools in both mediums. the effect of these observations in combination with the comparative study of williams-jones (1975), and early observations of garland (1969) and heilbut (1971), result in a general consensus over the fundamental nature of african-american performative practices. this context of established affinity between linguistic and musical models set the foundation for the use of gates’s theory in the arena of musical analysis. while it is not my intent to overemphasise the influence of research into gospel practices as opposed to research into african-american linguistic practices on this methodological shift, it is worth noting that many of gates’s most vocal champions in the musical realm supported their use of his theory by referring to accepted linguistic/musical links in african-american religious settings. this type of legitimization permeates the comments of speakers during a 1993 roundtable discussion hosted by the center for black music research (cbmr), of which the expressed goal was to investigate the use of gates’s theory as a ‘common mode of inquiry for the study of black artistic expression’ (floyd 1995b: 5). participant james winn argued for the legitimacy of such pursuits by pointing out that: ‘black culture in america, both spoken and sung, did a remarkable job of transform[ing] … the king james bible.’ he continues by explaining that the text had been ‘taken and made into something living and … very often into something powerfully musical’ as a result of the ‘multior interdisciplinary process’ (winn 1995: 16). jon michael spencer concurred, referencing the concept of transmodal african-american cultural products soon to be put forth in michael harris’s book the rise of the gospel blues (1994). mari evans in turn cited the research on ‘worrying the line’ discussed in this article, claiming that ‘tonal memory as poetic structure’ and ‘mascon structures endemic to both music and poetry’ begged a ‘common scholarship’(evans 1995: 30).4 even more directly, cbmr convener samuel floyd would use african american religious practices to justify his reliance on signifyin(g) analyses in his 1995 book the power of black music. this seminal work begins by exploring ‘aspects of african 4 the term ‘mascon structures’ is frequently used in african-american vernacular discourse as a synonym for past models of expression that continue to exert influence over artistic production. coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 14 expressions in religious, musical and narrative contexts’ in order to ‘set the stage’ for an ‘understanding [of] how these expressions were transformed’ in the world of africanamerican music (floyd 1995a: 10). floyd establishes a link between language and music early on, drawing on burlin’s (1919) account of spoken and sung call-andresponse figures in black worship ceremonies, tonsor’s (1892) claim of ‘slave songs … disappearing “before the triumphant march of gospel hyms,”’ and tindley’s (1905) modelling of hymn arrangements on african american rhetorical practices, from which he concludes: ‘the spiritual and the black declamatory style went hand in hand, simply because they both emerged from the same source: african intonations, inflections, and rhythmic conventions applied to a new language and linguistic style in the context of a new religion’ (floyd 1995a: 62). with this parallel established, floyd infers the existence of an all-encompassing african-american artistic tradition, replete with shared tropes and universal rhetorical principles. he supports this claim through further documentation of cross modal african-american cultural practices, building a foundation on which to base his appropriation of gates’s literary theory. the use of gates’s theory in floyd’s work is pivotal in the history of african-american music studies because it provided the field a tool it had long been without. not only was the theory able to explain syncretic strategies prevalent throughout the history of african-american music development; more importantly, it was also able to bestow complete ownership to african-americans syncretic products supposedly derived from european cultural practices. in support of this latter point, floyd uses houston baker’s (1987) work on afroamerican modernity to link the systematic use of ‘metaphorical masks’ during the harlem renaissance with gates’s concept of signifyin(g). baker uses as evidence the oratory style of booker t. washington, claiming that his success as a harlem renaissance figure stemmed from an ability to advocate for the advancement of african-americans ‘by stepping inside the white world’s nonsense syllables with oratorical mastery’ (baker 1987: 25). the ‘masks’ washington wore may have appeared to be white, but by taking up the ‘tones of nonsense to earn a national reputation’ washington was able to win ‘corollary benefits for the afro-american masses’ (baker 1987: 33). this type of subversion links directly with floyd’s reading of the signifyin(g) trope: signifyin(g) is a way of saying one thing and meaning another; it is a reinterpretation, a metaphor for the revision of previous texts and figures; it is tropological thought, repetition with a difference, coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 15 the obscuring of meaning, all to achieve or reverse power, to improve situations and to achieve pleasing results for the signifier … in african-american music, musical figures signify by commenting on other musical figures, on themselves, on performances of other music, on other performances of the same piece, and on completely new works of music. moreover, genres signify on other genres—ragtime on european and early european and american dance music; blues on the ballad; the spiritual on the hymn; jazz on blues and ragtime; gospel on the hymn, the spiritual, and blues; soul on rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll, and rock music; bebop on swing, ragtime rhythms, and blues; funk on soul; rap on funk; and so on. (floyd 1995a: 95) in this explanation, floyd identifies a musical strategy for the advancement of africanamerican music. he suggests that syncretic african-american musical works are, in fact, purpose built vehicles utilizing the veneer of other genres in order to expand their reach and commercial presence. this argument fits easily inside baker’s concept of afroamerican modernity and it is a process that floyd believes can be evidenced through musical analysis. indeed, his discussion of william grant still’s afro-american symphony (1930) [1970] demonstrates a manifestation of the double-voiced utterance in a musical work. this is achieved by illuminating the interaction of opposing forms, ‘orational rhetoric and conformational structure,’ evident in the integration ‘of an original twelve-bar blues’ within ‘a sonata-allegro format’ (floyd 1995a: 253). the effect of this conflict creates, in words borrowed by floyd, ‘structured structure’ (kramer 1990), ‘concatenated’ (bonds 1991) with the goal of ‘making “correct” the black presence within the larger sonata-allegro structure’(floyd 1995a: 254). as a strategy for expanding the reach of african-american music, floyd views still’s approach as a success, summarising its impact in the following terms: ‘fraught with dialogical, rhetorical troping, the entire work carries considerable semantic value … the afro-american symphony effectively realized the goals of the harlem renaissance, with still vindicating the faith of the movement’s intellectuals and establishing himself as the first black composer of a successful symphony’ (floyd 1995a: 110). floyd’s development of gates’s theory in turn served as the theoretical foundation for guthrie p. ramsey’s (2003) conception of ‘afro-modernism,’ in which competing social ideologies are seen to synthesize in musical works of the 1940s. the recent use of ramsey’s (2003) theory to contextualize the presence of contrasting musical tropes in the works of duke ellington and miles davis (howland 2007; magee 2007; green 2008) stand not only as a testament to gates’s legacy but to the body of work that allowed gates’s ideas to be incorporated into the musical sphere in the first place. coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 16 the point of this short article is not to prove that there is a connection between the rhetorical devices of african-american spoken vernacular and the formal structures of african-american music; rather my aim is to show that regardless of the empirical evidence, a consensus existed within the cultural studies community before the publication of gates’s theory regarding the affinity of these domains. this consensus allowed gates’s signifyin(g) concept to be applied with such frequency and confidence. perhaps this popularity, at least as it manifests in the musical arena, is due to the fact that gates’s theory provided those of us who study african-american music with a tool we had long required. the tool allows us to explore the linguistic/musical cross-over from a perspective of encoded meanings rather than pure formalism. it is both culturally appropriate and well supported by decades of qualitative research, and it carries political weight for african-american studies as well as the means of uniting racial groups, as demonstrated eloquently in gary tomlinson’s article ‘cultural dialogics and jazz: a white historian signifies’ (1991). in any case, the signifyin(g) tool has become ubiquitous to the study of african-american music despite its origins in the literary realm and this transition should be attributed not solely to gates’s intuition but also to the work of those documenting african-american gospel practices in the decades before the signifyin(g) monkey. reference list abrahams, r. 1964, deep down in the jungle: black american folklore from the streets of philadelphia. folklore associates, hatboro, pa. appiah, k. a. & gates, h. l. 1999, africana: the encyclopedia of the african and african-american experience. basic civitas, new york. atkins, t. 2001, blue nippon: authenticating jazz in japan. durham, duke university press. austerlitz, p. 2005, jazz consciousness: music, race, and humanity. connecticut, wesleyan university press. baker, h. 1987, modernism and the harlem renaissance. university of chicago press, chicago. berliner, p. 1994, thinking in jazz. university of chicago press, chicago. bonds, m. e. 1991, wordless rhetoric: musical form and metaphor of the oration. harvard university press, cambridge, ma. burlin, n. 1919, ‘negro music at birth,’ the musical quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1, 86–89. chernoff, j. m. 1979, african rhythm and african sensibility: aesthetics and social action in african musical idioms. chicago, university of chicago press. deveaux, s. 1991 ‘constructing the jazz tradition: jazz historiography,’ black american literature forum, vol. 25, no. 3, 525–560. evans, m. 1995, ‘the roundtable on integrative inquiry,’ lennox avenue, vol. 1, no. 1, 5–61. feld, s. 1974, ‘linguistic models in ethnomusicology,’ ethnomusicology, vol. 18, no. 2, 197–217. fenstermaker, a. 2008, bridging the gap between (white) metafiction and (black) self-reflexivity. unpublished ph.d. dissertation, university of rochester. floyd, s. 1995a, the power of black music: interpreting its history from africa to the united states. oxford university press, new york. floyd, s. 1995b, ‘the roundtable on integrative inquiry,’ lennox avenue, vol. 1, no. 1, 5–61. coady from gospel to gates portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 17 fry, a. 2007, ‘review of jazz consciousness: music, race and humanity by paul austerlitz,’ music and letters, vol 88. no. 2, 335–340. garland, p. 1969, the sound of soul. h. regenery co., chicago. gates, h. l. 1988, the signifying monkey: a theory of african-american literary criticism. oxford university press, new york. green, e. 2008, ‘it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that grungestalt!—ellington from a motivic perspective,’ jazz perspectives, vol. 2, no. 2, 215–249. goss, l. & barnes, m. 1989, talk that talk: an anthology of african-american storytelling. simon & schuster, new york. harris, m. 1992, the rise of the gospel blues. oxford university press, new york. heilbut, a. 1971, the gospel sound: good news and bad times. simon & schuster, new york. henderson, s. 1973, understanding the new black poetry; black speech and black music as poetic reference. morrow, new york. howland, j. 2007, ‘the blues get glorified: harlem entertainment, negro nuances, and black symphonic jazz,’ the musical quarterly, vol. 90, no. 3/4, 319–370. hutcheon, l. 1989. the politics of postmodernism. routledge, new york. jones, a. 2001, yellow music: media culture and colonial modernity in the chinese jazz age. duke university press, durham, nc, & london. kramer, l. 1990, music as cultural practice, 1800–1900. university of california press, berkeley. magee, j. 2007, ‘kinds of blue: miles davis, afro-modernism, and the blues,’ jazz perspectives, vol. 1, no. 1, 5–27. mitchell-kernan, c. 1972, ‘signfiying, loud-talking and marking,’ in signifyin(g), sanctifin’, & slam dunking: a reader in african-american expressive culture. 1999, (ed.) g. d. caponi, university of massachusetts press, massachusetts, 309–330. murphy, j. p. 1990, ‘jazz improvisation: the joy of influence,’ the black perspective in music, vol. 18, no. 1/2, 7–19. myers, d. g. 1990, ‘signifying nothing,’ new criterion, vol. 8 (february), 61–64. ramsey, g. 2001, ‘who hears here? black music, critical bias, and the musicological skin trade,’ the musical quarterly, vol. 85, no. 1, 1–52. ramsey, g. p. 2003, race music: black culture from bebop to hip-hop. university of california press, berkeley. rojas, f. 2007, from black power to black studies. john hopkins university press, baltimore. smitherman, g. 1977, talkin and testifyin: the language of black america. wayne state university press, detroit, mi. snead, j. a. 1981, ‘on repetition in black culture,’ black american literature forum, vol. 15, no. 4, 146–154. still, w. g. 1970, afro-american symphony, score, revised edition. novello, london. tindley, c. 1905, new songs of paradise. e.t. tindley, lansing, mi. tomlinson, g. 1991, ‘cultural dialogics and jazz: a white historian signifies,’ black music research journal, vol. 11, no. 2, 229–264. tonsor, j. 1892, ‘negro music,’ music, vol. 3, 119–122. williams-jones, p. 1975, ‘afro-american gospel music: a crystallization of the black aesthetic,’ ethnomusicology, vol. 19, no. 3, 373–385. winn, j. 1995, ‘the roundtable on integrative inquiry,’ lennox avenue, vol. 1, no. 1, 5–61. applebygalley2013finalpa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. australians abroad special issue, guest edited by juliana de nooy. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. singleness, marriage, and the construction of heterosexual masculinities: australian men teaching english in japan roslyn appleby, university of technology sydney recent scholarship has highlighted the global industry of english language education and teaching (elt) as a site for the production of racialised, sexualised, and gendered professional identities. in japan, white western1 men have been identified as objects of occidentalist desire, symbolising a romantic ideal associated with western culture; but at the same time, white men working as english language teachers in japan face the challenge of negotiating competing discourses that threaten their social status. a reputation for sexual promiscuity, and employment in a lowly regarded but ubiquitous occupation, potentially position western male language teachers as the ‘white trash’ of asia (interviewee cited in farrer 2010: 84).2 this article draws on data from interviews with white australian men and examines how they negotiate conflicting discourses of masculinity in their accounts of living and working in japan as english language teachers. it focuses, in particular, on the 1 i recognise that terms such as ‘white’ and ‘western’ are contentious, and have been extensively analysed and problematised in critical whiteness and race studies. in line with contemporary scholarship, i see both ‘whiteness’ and ‘western’ (and ‘heterosexuality’) as discursive constructions and ascribed identity markers that have significant material and structural consequences. in this paper i adopt these terms because they are the most widely used in the scholarship of english language teaching (elt). here, they are used to denote english language teachers who are so-called ‘native speakers’ of english from what is considered to be the anglophone centre, that is, the usa, uk, canada, australia or new zealand, where english is regarded as the dominant first language. in the global english language teaching industry, ‘white native speaker privilege’ has been widely documented. 2 the term ‘white trash’ and other derogatory phrases have been used to refer to the low status of nativespeaker english language teachers, and to their widespread employment—particularly in the lower echelons of the elt industry—in countries where english is not the majority language (see cho 2012; lan 2011; stanley 2012). appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 2 discursive construction of marriage as a means of projecting an acceptable account of oneself as a western male in japan. more broadly, this study seeks to contribute to an ongoing discussion of the ways in which gender, heterosexuality, and heteronormativity are manifest in contemporary geopolitics (bell & valentine 1995; hubbard 2000; philo 2005), at the intersection of public and private domains, and in global flows of gendered and sexualised labour (cho 2012; farrer 2008; lan 2011; mcdowell 2008; robinson 2007; stanley 2012). occidentalist desire and english language teaching in japan in recent years a contentious body of research has investigated the attraction expressed by some japanese women for the west, for western men, and for english language as a means of access to the west (bailey 2006, 2007; ichimoto 2004; kelsky 2001; kubota, 2011; ma 1996; ono & piper, 2004; piller & takahashi 2006). according to these accounts, japanese women’s agentive desire, underpinned by a newly found economic independence and propelled by glamorous media images of western romance, has accorded western masculinity a privileged place in the japanese imaginary. japanese women’s agency is said to subvert, at least partially, earlier colonial and orientalist discourses (said 1978) in which a dominant, masculine west is set in contrast to a submissive feminised east. the gender imbalance in marriages between western men and japanese women3 in recent decades (yamamoto 2010; mhlw 2010) is, perhaps, a testament to the material consequences of these contemporary discourses and desires. the english language teaching industry has played a fundamental role in ‘creating and sustaining occidentalist mythologies of people and place among japanese’ (bailey 2007: 601), and western male english language teachers stand at the intersection of the practices in which those desires are realised. however, past research on the dynamic effects of occidentalist desire has primarily attended to the experiences of japanese women, and little is known about the embodied responses of male teachers in this context. some insights can be garnered from bailey’s discussion of his experiences as a white, male english-speaking language instructor and ethnographic researcher in several japanese eikaiwa gakkô (english language conversation schools). according to bailey, 3 marriages between japanese and non-japanese show marked patterns of gender and ethnicity. in 2009, for example, 89 percent of japanese and north americans were between a japanese bride and an american groom (mhlw 2010). appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 3 conversation schools enrol a majority of female students,4 and tend to favour employment of young white male teachers as a ‘key selling point’ (seargeant 2009: 96; piller & takahashi 2006; kubota 2011). in this eroticised space, ‘male gaijin [foreign] instructors were often elevated to movie icon status’ (bailey 2007: 598) and ‘crosscultural romantic / sexual / marital partnership … was normalized by students, staff and other instructors’ (600). in a similarly personal reflection on his experience as an american english teacher in japan, kelly (2008: 268) recalls that ‘it was pleasant to have status, money, and popularity merely on the basis of being white’ and notes that ‘for western men, the availability of japanese women has been a big attraction.’ apart from these brief insights, in scholarly literature there is relative silence on men’s responses to these dynamics. perhaps a clue to this silence can be found in western men’s reluctance to situate themselves in relation to two damaging discourses that are associated with the eikaiwa industry and threaten to devalue the teachers’ personal and professional standing. first is the lowly status ascribed to english language teaching as an occupation readily available to ‘native speakers’ of english, who may have a bachelor’s degree of some kind in any discipline, but in most cases are not required to have teaching qualifications or experience.5 the second problematic discourse, dating back to colonial times and notions of orientalist, euro-masculine potency, concerns western men’s historical and discursive reputation for the sexual pursuit and exploitation of asian women (kubota 2008; ling 1999; stoler 1995). negotiating this discourse may be particularly problematic for male teachers, since the spectre of embodied heterosexual desire sits uncomfortably with principles of pedagogical propriety (valentine 1997) and ideals of ‘selfless, sexless nurturance’ that define the role of the ‘good teacher’ (gallop 1995: 83). given these conflicting discourses, it seems that male english language teachers in asia occupy an awkward space that is shaped, in part, by their positioning and performance as heterosexual men. my questions, then, concern how the white australian men in my study mobilise and manage a range of competing heterosexual identities, and how those 4 while accurate enrolment data for commercial eikaiwa schools are not publicly accessible, several studies have noted the predominance of women as students, and as the target of eikaiwa gakkô marketing (see, for example, piller & takahashi 2006). research also suggests that this pattern of female enrolment in english language learning is repeated in tertiary institutions in japan, and in study abroad programs (see, for example, ichimoto, 2004; kobayashi, 2002). 5 see recruitment information on the websites of major eikaiwa gakkô. appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 4 identities produce distinctions and boundaries—between body and mind, self and other, home and abroad—across a geography that links individuals to institutional places, practices and privileges. i have written elsewhere about the opportunities and challenges these men face during their employment in the eikaiwa industry (appleby 2012). in the present article, i focus more specifically on how they use normative constructions of marriage to map ‘the moral contours of heterosexuality’ (hubbard 2000: 191) and to distance themselves from unpalatable stereotypes. male english language teachers in popular culture the ambiguous position of white western men in japan has featured in popular culture, particularly in the notorious comic strip character of ‘charisma man’ (rodney & garscadden 2002, 2010; see also the charisma man website 2013).6 charisma man is a skinny, chinless weakling who finds himself transformed into a handsome, muscular ‘superhero’—at least in the eyes of adoring japanese women—when he arrives in japan. in the comic strip series, japanese women are doting sexual partners for charisma man, and his arduous employment as an unqualified english language teacher is tolerable only because it provides access to japanese women as language learners. marriage emerged as a new problem for charisma man in 2010, when the second compilation booklet of comic strips appeared. one new episode depicts marriage as a ‘nightmare,’ and an article in the japan times (lewis 2010) announcing the 2010 publication was accompanied by an image of charisma man in later life: instead of the young party-goer, we see a doleful charisma man carrying a baby, pushing an infant in a stroller, and with his japanese wife by his side. has the hyper-heterosexual, single charisma man of the 1990s now become, in mid-life, a downcast married man trapped in domesticity? contrary to these dire ‘ball-and-chain’ depictions of family life, the accounts of the men in this study suggest that intercultural marriage offers, instead, a way to construct a respectable masculine self, and to cast off potential association with a problematic charisma man identity. at the same time, my analysis suggests that the discourses of marriage invoked reflect and reproduce normative assumptions about proper masculinity, and tend to reinforce a spatially, socially and professionally 6 the ‘charisma man’ comics were produced by two canadian men and originally appeared in the alien, an japanese english language magazine, from the mid–1990s to early 2000s. the charisma man website (2013) showcases several of the original comic strips and advertises charisma man merchandise such as books, t-shirts and condoms (though the latter always appear to be ‘sold out’). appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 5 marginalised position for teachers who do not conform to heteronormative expectations, including those who remain single, or might not identify as heterosexual. an empirical study of white western men’s narrative accounts a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with eleven white australian men form the basis of this paper. these interviews represent part of a larger project (appleby, forthcoming) that originally set out to investigate how white western male language teachers experience and negotiate the so-called ‘fetish of the white man’ in japan (kelsky 2001). in the interview context, the comic strip character of ‘charisma man’ served as a trigger for questions about men’s experiences in japan, and the extent of their identification with the charisma man stereotype. although i had not originally set out to examine discourses of marriage and singleness, these emerged as salient features in the men’s accounts and were inherent in their constructions of an acceptable masculine self, and a moral geography of western heterosexuality in japan. nine of the eleven interviewees were married (including one de facto relationship) to japanese women, four of whom had been either a colleague or student. only two participants, mike and lenny, were single. brief information about the men is given in the table below, but potentially identifying details have been omitted; all names are pseudonyms. name age (at interview) work history in japan paul early 30s 5 years: teacher in eikaiwa gakkô, then promoted to curriculum support david late 40s 11 years: teacher in eikaiwa gakkô, then in tertiary institution joel mid 30s 18 years: teacher in eikaiwa gakkô, then in university tim early 50s 22 years: teacher in vocational college, then in university eddy late 30s 10 years: teacher in eikaiwa gakkô; now seeking work dan# early 40s 15 years: teacher in eikaiwa gakkô, then in university ben* mid 40s 10 years: teacher in eikaiwa gakkô, then in high school luke* mid 50s 21 years: teacher in high school; then in university gus* mid 30s 5 years: teacher in eikaiwa gakkô, then promoted to manager mike* late 40s 3 years: teacher in eikaiwa gakkô, then promoted to teacher-trainer and manager lenny* mid 40s 2.5 years: teacher in eikaiwa gakkô; then teacher in high school * had returned to live in australia at the time of interview. # interviewed by a research assistant: an unmarried north american male. since the interviews were interactional and co-constructed, the effect of my own subjectivity and presence on the interview process and data analysis requires some explanation. in common with my participants, i am a white australian, and have worked in australia and overseas as an english language educator. but as a woman, an academic, and a researcher, i expected i would be viewed by my interlocutors with appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 6 some degree of caution. this expectation was confirmed in an email from one participant, joel, whose male friends declined to be interviewed on the grounds they suspected i was ‘just another comfy shoe wearing gaijin woman with her nose out of joint.’ nevertheless, several participants indicated that they had found the interview afforded a sense of therapeutic relief and catharsis. the interview extracts, and my interpretation, should be read with this in mind. discursive analysis of gender and heterosexuality my analysis of men’s interview accounts draws on butler’s (1990) understandings of gender as a discursive achievement: a repeated, stylised performance within a highly regulated ‘heterosexual matrix’—‘that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders and desire are naturalized’ (butler 1990: 115). the men’s interview accounts are not taken as a reflection of some external or objective ‘reality’ in, or about, japan; but instead are taken as discursive practices that produce and project the subject as a particular type of heterosexual masculine self, through highly contextualised talk that entails the ‘social positioning of self and other’ (bucholtz & hall 2005: 586). as bucholtz and hall explain, such positioning can be accomplished linguistically in the interview context by labelling and categorisation of various social actors; by attaching to those categories meanings that invoke particular social and political discourses; and by positioning oneself in relation to those categories and discourses. positioning the self is broadly achieved by indicating dis/identification with relevant available discourses, and by indicating sameness or difference in relation to various labels and social categories. the discursive analysis adopted in this study highlights how the men’s articulation of socially constructed meanings about proper and improper heterosexual masculinity echo heteronormative ‘hierarchies of respectability among heterosexuals’ (jackson 2011: 18), and serve to project a particular version of an appropriate masculine self. the analysis of interview data in the following section is divided into four parts that together seek to demonstrate the ways in which marital status affects the construction of masculinity for the men in this study. the first illustrates the way a commonsense married/single binary was produced and deployed in descriptions of white australian men in japan, and identifies the divergent meanings and practices attached to these two categories. the second illustrates how the practices associated with singleness were appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 7 attached to a ‘past self,’ and how the subsequent transition to marriage was produced as a normative condition of adulthood. the third shows how marriage was aligned with assumptions of maturity, respectability, and professional responsibility. the final section considers the personal and professional marginalisation experienced by those who do not conform to the heteronormative expectations of marriage. in each section, i have selected the extracts that illustrate these emergent themes most clearly. producing the married-single binary luke and gus in participants’ accounts, representations of acceptable and unacceptable western heteromasculinity were achieved, to a significant extent, by distinguishing between the behaviours typically associated with married and single men. in luke’s narrative below, a naturalised binary distinction was constructed between these two categories of foreign men in japan: on the one hand, those who are married, implicitly monogamous, and working to ‘look after their families,’ and on the other hand, those who are single, promiscuous and the object of critical social scrutiny. leading into this first extract, luke had described a group of foreign adults—mostly men—who were studying for a graduate teaching qualification at a japanese institution with the aim of securing higherlevel jobs within the english language teaching industry in japan. luke: a number had come through jet,7 or had done a two year stint with say nova8 or something, and had met their wives, married, and they wanted to get a degree, a licence, so they could get a secure job, in the university usually … or a college, that was their main aim, to look after their families basically. ros: so were all the foreign nationals married? to japanese? luke: oh no … i would say one in ten it wasn’t the case, there was an israeli couple last year for example, she was greek descent american-canadian and he was israeli; … there was an american couple … so … ros: but were they all married? no singles? luke: oh, single males, yeah sure … and the ones i knew of course they all played the game, you know they were all out diddling themselves stupid basically most of the time … having sex with girls (laughs), women. ros: how did you know that? luke: oh, because their classmates, women, would make comments about them and how they were serial sleeper-ers [with japanese] women they’d met somewhere. to illustrate his narrative of single men’s hypersexuality, luke then told a story about one young western male in the program, brett, who was the subject of gossip amongst 7 jet refers to a government-sponsored program that employs foreigners to teach english in japanese schools. 8 nova was a large japanese chain of english language schools that went into liquidation in the early 2000s. appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 8 luke’s students and colleagues and was known as ‘a tart.’ in presenting this story, luke had switched from an account that characterised all single men as ‘diddling themselves stupid’ to one that isolates brett as the only ready example of promiscuity. this slippage demonstrates the way a particular stereotype of singleness can potentially categorise all single men in this context as sexually promiscuous. in continuing this narrative, luke located promiscuous behaviour in tokyo’s roppongi bar and nightclub district, a place where foreign men ‘go for picking up [japanese] girls.’ the narrative then returned to the contrast provided by married men, presenting luke with an opportunity to distance himself from the unacceptable behaviour that brett represents. luke: most of the fellows there were family men, or were committed to living in japan, yeah. i mean, i was there [in japan], i was married, you know, [with a] japanese wife, i was never part of that sort of roppongi scene, never … so it was never sort of part of my psyche, i was there to live in the culture and to work, you know. but a lot of guys go there who haven’t been [in japan before], young fellows … and older too, who have no connections, just, they go there to meet [women] in pubs and stuff. luke’s narrative thus set up a series of distinctions that, first, separated singles and spouses spatially, sexually, socially, and in terms of an internalised disposition; and, second, had significant implications for the constitution of gender politics in social and professional life. an unbridled performance of heterosexuality amongst single western men in japan was an oft-repeated trope in participants’ reports and a cornerstone of stigmatised singleness. while luke’s account presented singles’ behaviour as relatively innocuous and amusing, most illustrative examples of men who fit this stereotype of ‘playing the game’ were presented in disparaging terms: participants described them as self-deluded, inauthentic ‘romeos’ or ‘lotharios’ whose unappealing physical appearance was deemed unworthy of their attractive japanese girlfriends. their behaviour was ‘ugly,’ ‘disgusting’ and ‘exploitative,’ they were ‘animals,’ ‘dogs’ and ‘sleaze-buckets,’ and they were frequently referred to as ‘people i don’t want to hang around [with]’ either inside or outside the workplace. these negative assessments of men’s sexual behaviour echo the moral panic that had, in earlier decades, seen japanese women labelled ‘yellow cabs’ in derogatory media reports that decried their pursuit of western men (kelsky 2001). in the men’s accounts, an unacceptable western masculinity was constructed through an excessive concern with sexual pleasure, and cast single men as a category ‘at risk of spinning out of control and becoming deviants’ (depaulo & morris 2005: 75). appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 9 oversexed and irresponsible behaviour associated with single men was also linked to a particular type of behaviour in the workplace, where an interest in sleeping with japanese women was seen by most to be incommensurate with any degree of expertise or interest in teaching. as gus observed, english language teaching in japan, particularly in the commercial conversation schools, has been seen as a temporary occupation for those who ‘don’t know what to do with their lives, so they’re going to fill in a year and they just get into whatever comes their way.’ conversation schools, and some lower ranked tertiary institutions, were places that ‘are not known for having real teachers’; instead, according to gus, such organisations relied on a steady stream of unqualified, footloose, young western men attracted by the lure of easy money and pretty women. such employees were exemplified in gus’s description of a colleague who ‘was basically in japan for the girls. he wasn’t there because he wanted to teach. he certainly wasn’t interested in english.’ normative transitions from singleness to marriage joel and ben for interviewees who had in the past enjoyed a series of casual sexual relationships with japanese women, including students, singleness was characterised as a transition phase, a temporary state of bodily excess to be superseded by marriage, which was presented as the next life-stage in the development of a ‘normal’ adult heterosexuality. for ben and joel a normative discourse of youthful excess served to explain their past behaviour, and both identified a promiscuous past self that belonged to ‘a rite of passage almost, like a phase you go through.’ for each, this excess was a phase heightened by the disjuncture between home and abroad. joel: i’d gone from rather a sheltered sort of life with my parents in sydney to one where i’m suddenly, you know, the reins are let loose and i’m 18 and … if ever i was going to display tendencies of being a charisma man, they would have been the conditions: you know, young, stupid, immature and drunk on freedom for the first time. given the unflattering discourses of promiscuity that accompanied most descriptions of single western men, it is not surprising that joel’s account of his younger self as ‘stupid’ and ‘immature’ was self-deprecating and apologetic. but joel also offered several mitigating justifications for this sexual activity as a younger man. the first was that ‘most young, working-holiday people are like that, i don’t think i’d be an exception,’ a justification that reflects and reproduces commonplace understandings not appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 10 only of young men’s sex drive (terry & braun 2009; mooney-somers & ussher 2010) but also of sexual adventure among travellers and expatriates (male and female) away from the constraints of home (see, for example, appleby, 2010; hubbard, 2000; walsh, 2007; walsh, shen & willis, 2008). a contributing factor, widely mentioned amongst interviewees, was that young single western men, far from being calculating and predatory, were commodified and, in joel’s words, ‘scalped up’ (taken as trophies) by calculating japanese women bent on exploiting naïve single foreign men for sexual or instrumental gains (piller & takahashi 2006). as a consequence, according to several participants, single western men were often left ‘heartbroken,’ ‘duped’ and then ‘dumped’ by japanese women who had always intended to marry a japanese man. this overturning of normative gender hierarchies contributed to the sense of marginalisation conveyed by several men when describing their prior relationships with japanese women. in joel’s account, ‘growing up’ entailed a shift from the confusion of youthful heterosexuality, towards a moral ‘centre,’ defined around heteronormative ideals of marriage and family life. for joel, the shift was accompanied by an increasing selfawareness about the positioning of western men in a new sexual geography: joel: when [western men] first get here, they think it’s all wonderful and they’re great … they’re desirable and all the rest of it, but most normal people, they soon realise a lot of those relationships aren’t going to go anywhere meaningful, and it’s a growing up time, change, maturity i suppose, and evolving as a person and being honest with yourself too. for ben, too, a transition to marriage was situated within a normative progression of adult heterosexuality. from his point of view, sexual relationships with japanese women were, in the early years, fun and strictly casual, but as he approached mid-life he started to consider marriage. ben’s account suggested his change of mind was primarily an internalisation of perceived social ‘pressure [for] people to get married after 30,’ a pressure he depicted as particularly strong in japan: ben: it’s funny though, in japan there is pressure on people to get married after 30, and women in particular. you’ve heard the christmas cake idea? … the idea, if you get to a certain age … and you’re not married, you were a christmas cake, which means: the japanese, at christmas time, they buy christmas cake … but you put it on the shelf, cos no one wants to eat christmas cake (laughs) they’re too rich. so actually you end up being a christmas cake, left on the shelf, and that’s it (laughs) so there’s pressure on people to get married after that point, and i think for men at the time it was about 30, and i guess it started to cross my mind, yeah perhaps, meet the right person after i’m 30, i’ll get married perhaps, but until that time there was no interest at all. and so yeah it just didn’t occur to me. appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 11 ben’s account articulates a set of beliefs and expectations—about the natural progression to marriage, and the consequent ‘problem’ of singleness in mid-life—that are not confined to japan. a naturalised discourse of evolving maturity combines persistent societal expectations of age-appropriate heterosexual behaviour in both japanese (charlebois 2010; dales 2010; nemoto 2008) and western contexts (reynolds & taylor 2004; terry & braun 2009; reynolds 2008) where, as sassler (2010: 557) observes, despite ‘dramatic changes in the timing and sequencing of relationship stages,’ marriage ‘increasingly serves as a relationship capstone.’ for men such as ben, an internalised ‘social clock’ (depaulo & morris 2005: 10) appeared to shape notions of appropriate sexuality and defined an age-graded entry to stable coupledom and marriage as a dominant, normative sign of legitimate adulthood: out of the pubs and into the family home. but for western men in japan, marriage could also be deployed to mark a separation from the licentious sexual behaviour associated with single white men, hence separating them from a potentially problematic stereotype. social, economic and professional implications of marriage david, dan, paul and tim the men’s accounts of married lives demonstrated the ‘mature’ side of a binary distinction, and articulated the social, economic and professional privileges associated with marital status. whereas singleness was linked with ‘playing around,’ and a lack of personal and professional commitment, marriage was presented as a natural choice for men committed to adult responsibility and the rigors of work. in this section, i describe some of the advantages that the men associated with marriage (or even assumed marriage) to a japanese spouse. on the whole, the speculation and critique directed towards single men’s (and women’s) lifestyles stood in stark contrast to both the taken-for-granted ordinariness and respectability of married life, and the relative silence and opacity surrounding marital sexual relations. although several participants spoke of married men who continued to have sexual relationships with multiple japanese women, including students, these instances were usually presented as unacceptable aberrations rather than the norm. for the most part, marriage was conflated with commitment and devotion in both personal and professional arenas. luke’s opening narrative, and david’s account of ‘older guys’ below, illustrates this conflation. appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 12 david: i know a couple of guys who work at [a well-known] conversation school, so a similar kind of thing to what nova used to do. but they’re all older guys, you know, they’re all married with kids and settled down type of thing. they’re pretty diligent about their work and they’re interested in teaching well, so they’re not really interested in picking up students any more. outside the workplace, a significant spatial separation between singles and spouses, illustrated in luke’s opening reference to roppongi, also supported the presentation of a respectable married identity. for example, dan recalled his younger, single self ‘going out to bars and … hoping to meet someone,’ but ‘now that i’m married with three kids … i don’t go out much anymore.’ this assertion of retreat into the domestic domain was balanced by a complementary shift into a different set of social practices shared with married friends and colleagues. in particular, dan asserted that marriage to a japanese spouse offered a significant entrée into japanese society by way of integration into a spouse’s family-centred cultural life. this opportunity was a key reason given by dan for choosing a japanese wife. dan: that’s how you learn about the culture and that’s how you learn the language and everything opens up to you … the best thing about being married to my wife is just, her family, and being part of her family life and being part of obon [bon festival] and oshôgatsu [japanese new year] and miyamairi [a shrine visit] and going to the temple, and going to the grave, and [when a] big issue comes up, [there’s a] family meeting, i’m included in the family and it’s all in japanese and everyone interacts and it’s fantastic. in dan’s view, assuming a married identity in japan offered access to exclusive places and practices, and enabled dan to position himself as a privileged cultural insider. marriage to a japanese spouse also allowed dan to position himself as a dedicated, responsible citizen, an individual who had chosen self-improvement and hard work to achieve japanese linguistic, familial and civic integration. such integration was implicitly either unavailable or unappealing to singles, whom dan characterised as frivolous, transient sojourners and permanent outsiders in relation to japanese society and professional life. as such, marriage as a sign of mature masculinity was not only a foil against suspicions about western promiscuity, but was also, in turn, associated with men taking up a range of socially validated positions in the gendered public world of work (see connell & wood 2005; roberson & suzuki 2003). dan: all my friends, pretty much all my friends, except for one, are married to japanese women, they all speak very good japanese … they know things about japanese culture, they’ve studied hard, they’ve worked hard, you know, and they love being here … they’re all my images now, they’re the stereotypes of the white male in japan that i have now. they’re fathers, they’re husbands, they’re respected, and … a lot of them have tenured positions in universities and they’re on committees, … they’re guys who have worked hard to make a place and make a life in very difficult culture. … and i’ve worked hard too. so i guess if, you know, i get hit with this appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 13 stereotype that you might just be, you know, ‘playing the field’ … of course anyone’s going to be a bit offended by that. this cloak of social and workplace respectability was also articulated by paul, who said that his publicly celebrated marriage not only freed him from the suspicions that applied to single western men, but also allowed him a certain amount of interpersonal liberty in his workplace interactions with female students. paul: there wasn’t any sort of uncertainty, you know, ‘oh when he says [that], did he just try to pick me up? or is he sort of checking out women in the class?’ like there wasn’t anything like that. and when we [got] married the school threw a party for us as well … so everyone knew i was married and so it was quite easy to talk to people after that. i could be myself, i could make jokes, i could comment … on people’s clothing or hairstyle whatever, ‘oh no you’re looking really nice today’ or ‘it’s a really cute top’ or something like that, and they know that i’m not trying to pick them up because i’ve got the wedding ring on. moreover, several of the men asserted that marriage offered a secure social position specifically recognised by japanese employers as worthy of economic investment. paul’s marriage was therefore presented as a prerequisite for promotion beyond entrylevel classroom teaching work: paul: the company saw me as less transient after [i married]. if you’re single or if you’ve got a girlfriend well big deal, everyone and their dog’s got a girlfriend … but when you get married and you settle down like people see that you’re here for the long haul, you’re not likely to just get up and leave. and around the same time i did make it known to my bosses … that i was looking to move up in the company … i wasn’t just going to skip off from them. according to tim, a conflation of adult masculinity and marriage was associated with particular professional advantages that relied, in turn, on assumptions about men’s favourable position in a gendered domestic hierarchy. indeed, in tim’s account, opportunities for professional advancement into university teaching were seen as being predicated on japanese institutional expectations about the men’s domestic arrangements. tim: if i were to apply for a good position in a japanese university and i was competing with a woman similar to myself from my own society with identical qualifications, in the japanese situation i think they’d always give me the nod. the justification is they feel that the male is more likely to slot in with what they want, which is basically you’re going to be 16 hours a day if need be to hang around for meetings and you aren’t going to rush off because there are domestic attachments. in the discourses tim articulates, marriage is the taken-for-granted state for a mature, qualified man, and related assumptions about the division of labour are seen to allow men to participate fully in the workplace. the responsibility for this arrangement is appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 14 projected onto japanese employers who, in turn, are seen to represent japanese social norms. in this way, marriage as an interpersonal, domestic relationship has been translated into masculine privilege in the public domain of work. tim’s account reflects widely circulating discourses, supported by statistical evidence, about the gendered division of labour in japan (see, for example, lee, tufis & alwin 2010; wef 2011),9 and in japanese universities where men occupy 83 percent of all academic positions (mext 2006).10 in sum, the men’s identification of workplace privileges attached to martial status, together with the enticements of social and cultural integration, afforded a key to respectable heterosexual masculinity for white australian men in japan. as a consequence, these narratives served to cement and reproduce heteronormative ideals. whereas singleness was constituted in terms of an excessive, embodied sexuality and a frivolous approach to work, marriage enabled identification with a more socially acceptable masculinity: an ideal associated with maturity and professional engagement. implications for mid-life singleness luke, david, lenny and mike the elevated professional status, cultural integration, and images of maturity evoked in the accounts of married men left singles, and particularly older singles, as a problematic category in need of explanation. the effects were demonstrated in luke’s description of japanese mid-life singles who, by failing to comply with age-appropriate heterosexual expectations, were seen as ‘weird’: ‘if [men are] in their 30s or 40s, and they’ve never married, there’s something wrong … and if they’re in their 30s or 40s and women, there’s something wrong.’ luke added that these were ‘generalisations’ that are ‘changing now’ with postponement of marriage to a later age, and as a consequence of what dales calls the ‘emergence of a positive discourse of independence for women’ (dales 2010: 2). nevertheless, the notion of ‘wrongness’ luke deploys also reflects the persistence of discourses that regard singleness as a temporary condition, with marriage as the ‘normal’ end point. such discourses are evident in japanese studies showing that the proportion of singles who intend to marry has remained at around 90 percent 9 as fujimura-fanselow (2011) points out, despite gains made by japanese women, particularly in the 1990s, japan continues to perform poorly on international measures of women’s workplace participation and opportunity, and in measures of political and economic empowerment. 10 in contrast, men occupy 57 percent of all academic positions in australian universities (deewr 2011). appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 15 (kaneko et al. 2008), and interview studies with single japanese women confirming that despite expressed desires for independence, ‘marriage still occupies central ground in ideals of feminine life-course’ (dales 2010: 10; see also nemoto 2008; charlebois 2010)11. mid-life singleness, then, occupies an ambiguous position, and may attract social opprobrium: in japan, the rise of so-called ‘parasite singles’ (adult children living at home their with parents) (yamada 2000) and ‘herbivore men’ (unassertive men who are indifferent to marriage) (otagaki 2009) has been blamed for japan’s economic recession and falling birth rate. for david, mid-life singleness following divorce was described as ‘torturous’: with his bodily signs of ageing, including baldness, he felt he was not ‘guaranteed any privileges’ that might otherwise be available to young white western men as targets of japanese female desire. moreover, he eschewed bar-hopping promiscuity, though not on moral grounds, and described himself as ‘a real monogamous type.’ david: i was a bit tortured when i got divorced and started looking for a mate again in japan. because youth is so highly valued here you know, like it is everywhere i think, mostly that’s attributed to being a positive characteristic of women, like youthfulness, youthful beauty. but it’s certainly a requirement for the stereotyped charisma man type of male, i think. so, you know, when i got divorced and was like 40 and, yeah, not really fitting into the charisma man stereotype it was pretty tough, actually. from david’s perspective, because singleness was associated with youth, older western singles who stayed on in japan risked being marginalised as ageing social misfits. in particular, men who lingered at the lower echelons of english language teaching, while continuing to enjoy ‘a reasonable turnover of [japanese] girlfriends,’ were described by lenny as being ‘stuck in a little bit of a rut … it seems almost like an extension of their adolescence.’ as a result, failure to marry could be seen as a matter of social and professional shame, and lenny, who returned to australia unmarried, expressed disappointment that he had remained single despite the purported desirability of white western men in the eyes of japanese women. for men who chose to remain single, stigmatising discourses had to be carefully negotiated. mike, for example, had described himself as single, sober, serious, and keenly committed to teaching, characteristics that served to deflect potential alignment with a charisma man stereotype; however, he believed his unmarried status had 11 similar studies in the usa and uk show that despite changing relationship patterns and increasing tolerance of diversity, singleness in adult life continues to be stigmatised (de paulo 2006; reynolds 2008). appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 16 hindered his career progression: mike: i made pretty good progress with this company, i got to a certain stage, and they said ‘you’ve got to get married, you’ve gotta get a japanese girl and marry her.’ i thought it was a joke, i was just laughing my head off, but it became quite the thing, it became a sticking point, careerwise i topped out at assistant supervisor … i couldn’t get to the next stage, which was shunin rank, unless i got serious with a japanese women and i wasn’t willing to do that. my bosses … all had japanese wives, all the guys, the westerners that i knew … to kind of remain in that world, i guess the wife was part of it. mike presented this expectation of marriage as a turning point. unlike other men in this study, he resisted the ideal of the transnational, heteronormative couple and constructed instead a western masculine self based on an agentive and trenchantly independent singleness. i was into cultural maintenance in a way, in terms of identity i was firmly a western person, i kind of rejected the idea of learning how to speak, like a baby, in japanese, it didn’t interest me … i felt it was in my best interest to maintain my identity as an australian man, rather than a bollywoodjapanese-western male, a japanese-speaking western male. mike actively chose not to date japanese women, and imagined such relationships— conducted in elementary english or japanese—as infantilising. he rejected the singles scene located in bars and nightclubs, and constructed an alternative single, mid-life masculinity by drawing not only on discourses of professionalism, but also on discourses of an embodied cultural ideal that relied on refusing the possibility of transnational, transcultural, and translinguistic hybridity and integration (connoted in the phrases ‘bollywood-japanese-western male,’ and ‘japanese-speaking western male’). however, these two ideals—of a competent professional self and a culturally distinct single self—were, in mike’s experience, ultimately incompatible: a ‘good worker’ meant a married worker; commitment to japan meant marriage to a japanese woman. and so, unwilling to conform to corporate and cultural demands, mike ‘started to make plans to leave,’ and shortly afterwards returned to australia. conclusion this article has shown the ways in which a group of white australian men in japan mobilise meanings attached to singleness and marriage to resist being positioned within negative stereotypes: as promiscuous heterosexuals ‘playing the field,’ lurking at the margins of professional legitimacy, in a global industry that circulates workers from english-speaking to non-english-speaking countries. the analysis of the men’s accounts demonstrates how, in this transnational context, discursive distinctions between appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 17 singleness and marriage affect the construction of a socially and professionally legitimated masculine identity, and enable these australians abroad to position themselves and others within moral geographies of sexuality. this study is small in scale, and at this stage, the implications i present in relation to white australian men in japan are inevitably tentative, specific to english language teaching, and designed to invite (or incite) further research. distinctions between married and single masculinity the first implication is that the men’s distinction between ‘single’ and ‘married’ tends to reproduce conservative and institutionally sanctioned discourses to do with the central place of marriage in society. marriage, as a socially constructed category, provided a safe place for the construction of masculinity, and so supports ‘notions of the self [and the other] as an appropriately gendered person’ (wolkomir 2009: 496) for these men. marriage was discursively associated with maturity, fidelity, family and civic responsibilities, and prestigious integration into japanese social, cultural, and domestic life. such discourses suggest the influence of an underlying ‘couple culture’ (budgeon 2008) and a taken-for-granted heteronormative ideology of marriage and family (depaulo & morris 2005: 65; walsh, shen & willis 2008) that persists in many cultures, with potentially damaging effects for those who fall outside these conventions. marriage and professional advancement the second implication is that the discursive association between marriage and men’s readiness for professional responsibility and career advancement tends to reproduce wider structural patterns to do with a gendered division of labour. this is not to say that individual men held gender-conservative views, nor that the individual marriages of the men in this study were organised along gender-conservative lines. (indeed, in one instance, a participant identified as both an english teacher and, during a temporary lull between contracts, a full-time father and house-husband.) yet a projected identity as ‘married man’ afforded the opportunity for interviewees to define themselves as part of a foreign community of teachers who were distinguished by their conscientious and professional work ethic, and also, in turn, present themselves as closely incorporated into patterns of institutional recognition and workplace participation (ongoing contracts, tenure, committee work and so on). in this particular context, marriage to a japanese spouse is far more likely for western men than for western women (yamamoto 2010; appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 18 mhlw japan 2010), and western men are far more likely than western women to hold a secure english language teaching position in a japanese university12. the perceived alignment between men’s marriage and career advancement raises questions about the possibility of ‘complicit masculinity’ (connell & messerschmidt 2005), whereby white western men are potential beneficiaries—however unintentionally—of male-dominated employment patterns in japanese universities. producing the abject single the third implication arises from the production of a respectable white western (married) masculinity achieved at the expense of an ‘abject’ singleness. as hubbard explains, drawing on kristeva, abjection prevents ‘boundary violation’ of the self by mapping ‘stereotypical images of repulsion’ onto particular social groups (hubbard 2000: 202). as abject ‘others,’ western singles were frequently represented as perpetual outsiders, positioned as transients and failures in both interpersonal and institutional domains. from the perspective of the few men in this study who remained or became single in mid-life, this categorisation was associated with significant barriers in terms of career advancement in japan, or personal hurdles in meeting suitable partners. for these adult men, then, singleness remained a difficult category, with very few positive representations on which individuals could draw to produce an acceptable masculine self. while research suggests that discourses of celebratory freedom may offer positive alternatives for single women (reynolds & taylor 2004; reynolds & wetherell 2003), for mid-life men in this study, there was little evidence of positive and publicly sanctioned discourses to describe the state of singleness. for single white western men, and particularly for those in mid-life, discourses of immaturity, age-inappropriateness, professional stagnation and lack of integration into an adult japanese society and culture remained the most prominent explanations of their uncoupled state. as jackson (2011: 18) notes, ‘we are only at the beginning of understanding how hierarchies within heterosexuality, among heterosexuals and between heterosexuals and others interconnect in the framing of intimate relationships and wider parameters of 12 official data on the exact number of non-japanese men and women employed as english language teachers in japan is neither collected nor published. however, hayes (2013) estimates that men occupy 71 percent of foreign english language teacher positions in japanese universities, a figure replicated in membership of the japan association for language teaching, where men represent 73 percent of nonjapanese membership. this contrasts with the female dominated membership of equivalent professional organisations in the usa and australia. men represent only 36 percent of members in tesol (international) and 15 percent of nsw (australia) tesol. appleby singleness, marriage portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 19 social life.’ by exploring the geography of white australian heterosexual masculinities, and the persistence of heteronormativity at the confluence of domestic and professional domains, this article has contributed, in a 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http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. prospects for the general election of 2020: tradition and transition in chinese politics david s. g. goodman, university of sydney in 1943 when the deservedly little-known university of sydney china scholar, richard ormsby martin, published his monograph on tradition and transition in chinese politics, he could little know that for the next eighty years china’s political development would remain dominated by the twin themes of tradition and transition.1 even after the establishment of the people’s republic of china (prc), politics was no more noticeably characterised by stability than it had been when he was writing. the excitement of the great leap forward was succeeded by the sturm und drang of the cultural revolution. the first attempts at reform and openness culminated in the tiananmen square events of june 1989, only to be followed by three decades of exceptional economic growth that have significantly altered most aspects of life in china. through this process china’s past has been in constant tension with its future as china seeks to negotiate an understanding of where change may lead. as everyone now knows, general secretary hu jintao thought long and hard before his landmark speech at the opening of the 18th congress of the chinese communist party (ccp) in october 2012. he was about to announce the political bureau’s decision to hold open direct national elections. it would be fair to say that this speech came as 1 ormsby martin (1901-1987) was on the staff of the university of sydney in various capacities from the start of the second world war until the early 1970s. in the early 1940s he was an acting lecturer in the department of history. his other book was a translation of poetry, shan shui: translations of chinese landscape poetry (1946). goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 2 something of a surprise to the rest of the world and particularly to political scientists outside china, given that the leadership of the ccp remained united and faced no state crisis, and that there had been no significant increase in mass unrest.2 in the full glare of the world’s press and television hu turned to deng xiaoping theory, quoting his boyhood hero from deng’s days in establishing a border region government in the taihang mountains in 1941. then deng had proposed an elected border region assembly as an extension of the program to encourage political participation through elections. war-time conditions had made direct elections impossible so the assembly only became a provisional assembly when elected in 1941. hu reminded his audience that direct elections were postponed only until the second half of 1944, with the directly elected border region assembly eventually meeting in march 1945. hu jintao proceeded to quote deng xiaoping’s precise words: we communists always oppose a one-party dictatorship … the ccp certainly doesn’t have a program to monopolise government because one party can only rule in its own interests and won’t act according to the will of the people. moreover, it goes against democratic politics. (deng 1941) hu acknowledged that sometimes, as mao zedong had said, ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’3 at the same time, he reminded his audience that elections had always been, and remained, an essential part of the political system introduced by the ccp. without elections, hu emphasised, quoting the discussions at the 3rd plenum of the 11th central committee of the ccp and its central work conference in december 1978, come the kinds of abuses of power such as occurred during the cultural revolution. these can only be prevented if ‘the masses become the real masters of the country’ and ‘the people elect government leaders of their own choice’ (people’s daily 1978). hu also quoted chen yun’s speech at the same central work conference: ‘only democracy can provide stable norms for political behaviour and ensure the mobilisation of popular initiative for economic growth’ (people’s daily 1979). as a result of the changes introduced by the 3rd plenum, direct elections to the county level of the territorial administrative hierarchy were introduced in the middle of 1979 (goodman 1985), and village and township elections, as well as those at the county level, had been 2 these are the three simultaneous conditions required for successful regime change in the 20th century according to the comprehensive research undertaken by ted robert gurr and jack goldstone (1991). 3 mao zedong (1938). those familiar with alabama three will note that the official translation of this quote was employed. goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 3 a major feature of local politics during the previous three decades (he 2007; o’brien & zhao 2010). the proposal from the political bureau provided for the convening of a constituent assembly in 2013 to examine and make recommendations on a suitable form of election. on the basis of the political reform program that emerged, a number of political parties announced that they would compete in the first national general election in 2015. two issues were not capable of resolution at that time—the extent of autonomy in the tibet autonomous region; and the possibility of federal reform—and have been submitted to referenda at the time of the 2020 election. the constituent assembly the constituent assembly met in beijing shortly after spring festival in 2013. its members were nominated by the provincial level (including municipalities and autonomous region) people’s congresses and political consultative congresses, the chinese communist party, organs of the central government and the people’s liberation army (pla). the major questions scheduled for discussion centred on the changes that should be introduced into the political system in order to ensure the effectiveness of electoral reform; and the electoral system to be adopted. the choice of political system essentially came down to either a washington model of direct presidential government, where the executive would be accountable to, but not part of, the legislature, or a westminster model, where the executive would be part of the legislature, and the prime minister would be elected because of majority support in the national people’s congress (npc). the ccp favoured a westminster model on the grounds that presidential elections delivered either military leaders (france under de gaulle), faceless ciphers (calderón, mexico), or outsiders who rapidly lost support (obama, usa), and which under all circumstances were simply populist beauty-contest type competitions devoid of political ideas. in their view, a westminster model was more democratic because it allowed voters more say at a more local level in electing constituency representatives. in contrast the minority view held that the westminster model led to more easily paralysed government, especially through coalitions, and that only the presidential model could deliver strong and purposive government. goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 4 when considering the electoral system to be adopted, at one point it appeared that a majority of the delegates to the constituent assembly favoured a system of absolute proportional representation where the number of votes cast nationally would lead to the proportion of delegates elected to the npc. their initial view was that this was the fairest and most democratic system. the ccp successfully argued that this would lead to unstable and weak government, where the interests of the minority would be trampled underfoot. far better, they said, to have a uk style ‘first past the post’ voting system in single constituencies. this would, they argued, always ensure at least two strong political parties in the npc able to pass legislation and support the work of government. the ccp pointed to an analysis of the results of the 6 may 2010 general election in the uk demonstrating the effect of different electoral systems on the political outcome to prove their point (table 1).4 the leaders of the ccp dismissed the various opposition claims that a first past the post electoral system ensured their political futures as ‘sour grapes from those who do not have the national interest at heart.’ as the leaders of the ccp frequently argued, in a multi-party system it is necessary to ensure that a political party can achieve a majority of power with only 34 percent of the popular vote, as has long been the case with the uk electoral system (johnston et al. 2001; johnston & pattie 2006: 273). party vote (%) seats by electoral system first past the post proportional representation alternative vote single transferable vote additional member conservative 36 47 36 43 40 42 labour 29 40 29 40 32 36 liberaldemocrat 21 10 21 12 25 15 table 1: analysis of electoral systems, uk general election, 6 may 2010. the constituent assembly agreed that direct provincial-level (autonomous regions and directly subordinated municipalities as well as provinces) elections should occur at the same time as direct national elections. at the same time it could not agree on whether 4 first past the post is the uk system, based on single member constituencies. proportional representation is a list system for the entire country, as in israel. australian elections run on the alternative vote, in single member constituencies. the single transferable vote is a multi-member constituency system practiced in ireland and tasmania. germany has a variety of additional member system where competitions in single member constituencies are supplemented by deputies elected through a list system elected by proportional representation. goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 5 the tibet autonomous region should be permitted a greater degree of autonomy, as some delegates argued; or whether a federal constitution would be more appropriate, as members of the taiwan democratic self-government league petitioned. both these issues were slated for referenda to be held at the time of the 2020 general election. the political parties one remarkable feature of the party system as it has developed since 2012 is the extent to which it has been shaped by organizations that emerged in the late 1940s just before, and during, the establishment of the prc. in that era the ccp recognized a number of the other political parties as its partners in a national coalition. these parties all came together in the china people’s political consultative conference during the late 1940s, and remained active during the prc, though perhaps more nominally during the cultural revolution (seymour 1987). with the exception of the federation of peasants parties, and its localised member organisations, these are the only political parties to have gained representation in the new electoral environment. in the words of an editorial in the people’s daily: ‘china’s new political party system suits national conditions’ (2009). the various political parties founded outside the prc during the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century to campaign for change within china (often associated with the democracy activists of the late 1980s) disappeared without trace once direct national elections were introduced, as did the few established secretly inside the prc.5 the most likely explanation for their failure is their lack of organisational clout compared to the more established political parties. those that were established outside the prc always ran the risk, emphasised by their opponents, of being labelled as ‘outsiders.’ some voters may have felt a degree of resistance to being lectured to by chinese who had chosen to live overseas for more than two decades. others, particularly younger voters, may simply not have recognized the need for, or contribution of, the political exiles. for their part, those parties that had been established within the prc in those years were somewhat similarly open to criticism either for being anti-chinese in their embrace of 5 there were a number of these including the chinese democracy and justice party; the china democracy party; the china new democracy party; the party for freedom and democracy in china; china green party; human rights party; and the united peoples’ party of china. two clandestine political parties that formed within the prc were the union of chinese nationalists, and the chinese nationalist party (reformed), though little is known about their activities except their position of opposition to the ccp and stated goal of uniting the prc and taiwan. goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 6 ideas and values such as human rights and green politics that could be portrayed as not having emerged from china’s experience; or for having regarded the variety of chinese nationalism practiced on taiwan as somehow superior. of the political parties that successfully contested the 2015 national election the largest and best organised was the ccp. active in all provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, it fielded candidates in all 2750 constituencies at the 2015 npc election, and for all sub-national levels of government. it gained 64 percent of the popular vote and 83 percent of the seats in the npc. this was considerably higher than the proportion of the ccp elected to the npc through the previous indirect system, where only about 70 percent of the deputies were ccp members. the ccp carried almost all the provincial-level elections. the exception was qinghai, where the election produced such a complex result that no electorally-produced government proved possible despite prolonged negotiations. the political parties that contested the election were entirely community-based: six separate tibetan clan-based parties were very unwilling to cooperate with each other, and one tibetan party opposed any form of political system; a political party for the centuries-established chinese community, and another for the more recent (since the early 1950s) migrants; and political parties for the hui, salar and tu communities.6 the numbers of those elected approximated the proportion of each community in the province’s population, so that no potential coalition was able to command a majority. qinghai has, in consequence, been ruled from beijing since 2015. no election was held in xinjiang because of concerns about community violence; nor was one held in the tibet autonomous region, pending the outcome of the 2020 referendum. in general ccp support was stronger in the provinces to the north (friedman 1993), though shanghai as expected remained the company town it had become during the late 1990s (huang 2008). the revolutionary committee of the nationalist party (often referred to as the left nationalists) won a large number of seats in the post-1949 nationalist party (on taiwan) leadership’s former support areas of jiangsu and zhejiang, as well as parts of fujian, guangdong, shandong, and shanghai (particularly kunshan, where it won both seats), but in none of those locations did it come close to challenging ccp domination. 6 on the sociopolitical complexity of qinghai see: goodman (2004). goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 7 its support is significantly higher in areas characterised by inward investment from taiwan. the china democratic league campaigned hard in the major cities, and did especially well in areas dominated by universities and higher education. it gained a large number of votes across the country but despite receiving fifteen percent of the vote, only won 50 of the seats in the npc, all in highly urban areas. membership of the china democratic national construction association (cdnca) grew substantially in and after 2012. entrepreneurs who had previously joined the ccp as a result of jiang zemin’s formulation in 2000 of the ‘three represents,’ now left the ccp and joined a political organisation they considered more likely to reflect their business interests. in 2015 it campaigned hard but only won rural and peri-urban constituencies where its businessmen-politicians had enterprises and profile. determined to model itself on the successful examples of the business-oriented conservative parties of europe, the cdnca has recently turned to the german cdu and british conservative party for assistance and advice. the china association for promoting democracy, previously strong among teachers, renamed itself as the china social democrats and proved surprisingly strong in smaller urban centres away from beijing, tianjin, shanghai and chongqing. the china public dedication party was, and remains, the political organisation for overseas chinese (barabantseva 2005). unsurprisingly, given the geographic concentration of overseas chinese and those with long term overseas links, it was particularly successful in the 2015 election. its strength is to be found in guangdong where it gained a third of the vote (centred on chaozhou, shantou, taishan, zhongshan and zhuhai), and fujian, where support is similarly substantial. in hainan support is concentrated on the largely once indonesian overseas chinese community based in the centre of the island. the remaining three of the older parties represented in the 2015 npc had few delegates. the taiwan democratic self-government league was always a small taiwanesespeaking political party, and so it remained after 2015, with limited success in those parts of south fujian with which taiwan has close social and cultural links. two nationally high profile artist members of the september 3 society were elected to the npc, one each in hangzhou and changsha, in constituencies where the local fine arts goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 8 academy is located. the chinese peasants and workers democratic party proved electorally ineffectual and was successful in only one constituency in hubei, where its candidate was a local mayor and owner of a flour mill. the only success outside the ranks of the earlier established parties came from the newly established federation of peasants parties (peasants federation). this loose association of peasant groups and political associations from a variety of provinces delivered several hundred delegates to the npc, and in one or two provinces ran the ccp closer than expected. in hainan, for example, where the mainstream vote was largely split between the ccp and the china democratic national construction association, with the china public dedication party gaining a further fifteen percent of the vote, the hainan peasants’ party found itself within a reasonable statistical distance (less than ten percent) of the number of provincial delegates elected for the ccp.7 the prospects for the 2020 election are that the smaller parties may cease to be represented in the npc as party politics become more nationalised. the challenge to the ccp essentially comes from the cdnca and the peasants federation, with the left nationalists, china democratic league, china social democrats and the china public dedication party remaining as small political market niche organisations, if each in different ways. issues of public policy a number of public policy issues have become particularly salient since the 2015 election and these are likely to carry into the election campaign: corruption, which remains high in the public consciousness; housing, a significant indicator of class and class divisions in politics; and regional development. corruption one of the problems with public debate on corruption has been the lack of agreement about its definition, causes and remedies (liu 1983: 618; ma 1989: 40; rocca 1992: 402). everyone knows it exists but there is little agreement on precisely what ‘it’ is. the ccp has long seen corruption as a moral problem and so prescribes that its cadres should be educated and trained to be virtuous (goodman 1987). a further significant 7 on the sociopolitics of hainan see feng & goodman (1997). goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 9 problem is the legacy of the past. although it is now more than four decades since the curtain was brought down on the cultural revolution, still many citizens regard businessmen and their activities as corrupt. it is a very definite example of a love-hate relationship: people are generally fascinated by the life styles of the rich and famous and attracted by their wealth; at the same time businessmen and entrepreneurs have exceptionally low status and their wealth is seen generally in zero-sum terms as someone else’s poverty, and for this reason not just undesirable but corrupt (zang 2008). public perception of corruption focuses to a large extent on the relationship between government and business (ting 2006). the problem though for government, the ccp and indeed to some extent all politicians is that not all relationships between government and business are corrupt. while government (and to date the ccp) has attempted to ensure its cadres do not act corruptly, it also has to educate the electorate in this respect. paradoxically, executing a few leading cadres occasionally may actually encourage others to either be less greedy or not to act corruptly, but at the same time it does little to convince citizens that there is less corruption or that the government is under control. simply put corruption might be regarded as the private use of public resources, or the engagement in actions knowing them to be either socially or legally unacceptable. there is, however, always a problem of boundary maintenance. social acceptability may be highly relative, as is legal practice. moreover, the circumstances under which corruption becomes a focus of public concern are always highly politicised and raise questions about who controls the forum and methods of public debate and concern. in chongqing, for example, in and after 2007 the new ccp leader bo xilai (son of former political bureau member bo yibo) committed himself and the local ccp to fighting organized crime and to the related ‘weeding out of local corruption,’ claiming it had deep social roots, which presumably had gone undetected for some considerable time. this campaign then became a cause célèbre propelling the ccp leader in question to further national prominence. there was even speculation that the campaign represented his bid to become general secretary of the ccp in the next round of leadership succession (cara 2010; dyer 2010). goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 10 still there is no doubt that corruption exists and that it is a matter of public concern. there will be candidates who campaign in some areas on specific anti-corruption platforms, and a few are likely to be elected if the experience of elections elsewhere is any guide. although corruption is not a programmatic issue it is more likely to damage the ccp than any other party, simply because it has been in government for so long and exclusively. unfortunately for the cdnca and its attempt to turn itself into a eurostyle conservative party, the issue may also have some negative impact on its success, because of its inherent links with the business world. populist parties, such as the peasants federation, always benefit more from debates on corruption. housing housing has become increasingly a marker of social division since the emergence of a significant private housing market in the 1990s, and one which has considerable potential for class conflict even if mediated through electoral politics. two trends have occurred simultaneously. one has been the demise of the social unit as a provider of community and social service, including housing (bray 2005). before the reform era all government organisations, educational institutions, and economic enterprises provided housing (and other services) to their staff. the neoliberalist turn has introduced greater economic efficiency into resource management at all levels and in all sectors (lee & zhu 2006). one consequence is that previously work-supplied housing has been turned into private housing that is rented or sold on a housing market. the second trend has been the development of new gated community housing estates (tomba 2004). the evidence is that this has become an almost inalienable principle of urban planning perhaps, at least partially, for reasons of social control. almost all of these new housing estates are gated regardless of status, though there are clearly class and income differences in access to specific gated communities (tomba 2005). before the 1990s housing already was a marker of social distinction with better public supplied housing being much appreciated. in the past, however, housing quality was essentially a function of career and appointment, and less under the individual’s control. differences in quality were also less visible, as well as probably less in absolute terms. housing reform, the growth of an entrepreneurial class with greater real disposable income, and the inevitable development of a luxury housing market, has made housing differences both highly visible and also matters of public debate. the development of goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 11 european ‘national villages’ in songjiang, in shanghai’s southern suburbs, is a good case in point. at the start of the 21st century the shanghai authorities decided to invite architects and planners from a number of different european countries—england, italy, the netherlands, germany—to build housing estates representative of their architecture. the italian architect built an estate of ‘tuscan villas.’ the english architects designed ‘thames town,’ with buildings and streetscapes drawn from london and various parts of the uk, including a whitby public house, an anglican church, and a copy of the thames near battersea bridge complete with bridge. when thames town was built in 2005-2006 the entry price was approximately 5000 yuan per square metre. in 2006 average gdp per capita in urban china was 11,759 yuan per annum and average rural gdp per capita was 3,597 yuan per annum (xinhua news agency 2007). issues of debate are somewhat surprisingly not about the right to conspicuous consumption but about land use in development, equity of access, and questions of community self-government. land use has become a major issue in some areas as previously agricultural land is rezoned for housing development, and then effectively compulsorily purchased by local government either for development or for onward sales to developers (hsing 2006). in the 2015 elections the various parts of the peasants federation campaigned solidly behind a program of equitable treatment for peasants whose families had farmed land for centuries, only to see it disappearing in new housing developments. interestingly, an analysis of the election results shows that anticipation was more electorally potent than when such fears were actually realised. communities that had actually experienced what had been seen as land confiscations were less likely to still be around and so were less able to be mobilised by the peasants federation than peasants in peri-urban areas who felt threatened. it was in those areas that the peasants federation did exceptionally well in the elections. equity of access to new housing estates has become an issue of public debate in some cities, particularly large cities (though not mega-cities) such as shenyang and taiyuan. and where public resources may be seen to be, or may have been, in some sense involved in an essentially private housing development, the argument can be made that some of the housing made available in this way should be subsidised either by local government or the developer to enable the less wealthy to participate (tomba & tang 2008). interestingly this pressure for equity in new housing developments appears to goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 12 have been limited to the rust, iron and coal belts of north and northeast china. here the ccp itself has campaigned for equity of access in nominally joint private-public housing developments, and to have built at least part of its support base this way. the development of gated communities has led to concerns of control by some of the residents’ groups. residents are always asked to pay for security and other community services. at the same time, for both political and economic reasons, local governments will not surrender their involvement in, or oversight of, some community functions. clearly where local government has been centrally involved in the development of new housing communities, it will retain an interest in their operation. equally this is likely to be a point of tension between residents and local government. the cdnca has been particularly active in mobilising support from residents in new housing estates, and not just those that cater for the very wealthiest. regional development regional development is probably the most important and longest established public policy arena in china. there are essentially two separate matters of debate. one is the rural-urban divide (christiansen 1990; chan 1994; cheng & selden 1994; chan & zhang 1999). the other is the question of severe spatial inequality across china, highlighted by hu angang and wang shaoguang in their reports to the state council during the 1990s.8 while the peasants federation is keen to play a central public policy role in the former debate, the latter debate is dominated by a perdictable coalition of the old left and the new entrepreneurial conservatives. there can be no doubt that the standard of living in rural china remains low, and that there are far from equal life chances between those living on and off the land and those living in towns and cities. rural gdp per capita is about one quarter of urban gdp per capita and service provision—schools, clinics, hospitals—in the countryside is well below that in the towns and cities. before the emergence of the peasants federation and its various locally and provincially organised groups, these differences were acknowledged but little action was forthcoming. most of the central government’s 8 wang shaoguang and hu angang’s’s zhongguo guojia nengli baogao [a report on china’s state capacity] (1993) was published in english translation in two parts in chinese economic studies (1995a; 1995b); and hu angang, wang shaoguang and kang xiaoguang’s zhongguo diqu chaju baogao [a report on regional disparities in china] (1995), was also later published in english translation (wang shaoguang & hu angang 1999). goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 13 poverty alleviation went to nationally designated poverty counties rather than in programs to deliver specific benefits to rural areas. more determined action is still to occur but at least now there is fairly open debate about the need to amend the 1958 household registration regulations. these are the regulations that effectively tie peasants to the land in perpetuity, by classifying them in terms of their rural household registration and by refusing peasant migrants (who move ‘temporarily’ to towns and cities in search of work) the wider benefits of their own labour. the matter had been widely discussed during 2008-2009 in certain circles within china and a petition was submitted to the npc on 25 march 2010 but without immediate result. as is often pointed out the household registration regulations essentially ensure a reserve pool of labour for the burgeoning capitalist sector while leaving those who travel for work unable to access urban benefits (especially health care and education) for themselves and their children, regardless of their residence. the issue of spatial inequality was first highlighted during the 1990s by those concerned about the impact of the reform era’s policies on the interior of the country away from the eastern seaboard. in general, during the mao-dominated years of china’s politics, each province and region was expected to be self-sufficient (larsen 1992). the regional development policy introduced with the reform era in the early 1980s changed all this by requiring provinces, and indeed localities, to build on their competitive advantage. the result was that provinces with relatively easy access to the wealth and potential of the east asian region prospered dramatically. by the mid-1990s gdp per capita in guizhou, the poorest province, was only 8 percent of that in shanghai, the wealthiest provincial-level jurisdiction. in 1999 the reports by hu and wang, and the public debate they generated, fed into the formulation of a new regional development policy to ‘open up the west,’ which largely failed to deliver the desired results (goodman 2002). few additional national resources were devoted to the west’s development, with instead an expectation that external (to the prc) investment would fuel growth. not least because locations in the west had poor infrastructure and communications with the rest of the country, let alone the rest of the world, foreign investors were understandably reluctant to become involved (holdbig 2004: 341). goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 14 electoral reform has again placed the issue of the development of the interior provinces firmly on the agenda. this time support for investment in the interior provinces to support their economic growth comes from a usual alliance. one part of this support is the old left of the ccp. they have concerns about the inequalities that emerged with the policies of the last forty years. moreover, they see a more balanced regional development strategy as a desirable end in itself, though few would prefer a return to mao’s insistence on provincial self-reliance in case of invasion. the other support has come from the cdnca. they see the opportunities for economic enterprise that may result if government support and resources are devoted to the development of the interior provinces. referenda two referenda have been scheduled to occur at the time of the 2020 general election. one is to consider a proposal for substantial autonomy of the tibet autonomous region. the other is for the adoption of a federal constitution. there is little possibility that either will receive majority support. tibet autonomous region the issue of autonomy for the tibet autonomous region came to a referendum because of the deadlock that emerged at the constituent assembly. there was nothing like a majority at that meeting favouring greater autonomy in the tibet autonomous region. the problem was that all but a handful of the delegates from the tibet autonomous region were vociferous in their support for an autonomy vote, with debate being carried out in the full view of the world’s media. the solution was a national referendum, with a majority being required across china’s voters as a whole if greater autonomy is to be granted. one of the more interesting features of international law appears to be that a territory can join another jurisdiction on the basis of a decision in that territory alone; but that same territory cannot leave a jurisdiction of which it is part without the approval of the jurisdiction as a whole.9 the battle lines for this referendum are fairly clearly drawn. on one side are the voters of the tibet autonomous region who overwhelmingly favour greater autonomy. on the 9 this was the fate of western australia in 1933, which voted to leave the commonwealth of australia having joined only belatedly. in the event the privy council ruled the necessity of an all-australia vote on the state’s secession, and this was never held. goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 15 other are almost all the other parties represented in the npc. there is a view, spearheaded by a minority in the china democratic league, that the tibet autonomous region is a costly project to maintain and it should be left to its own devices. there are also some extreme nationalists in a number of parties who have tried to argue that total independence, if accepted and implemented, would be a good idea since the tibetans are not ethnically chinese. at the same time, the majority view seems to be that of the ccp. it has pointed out that even with greater autonomy the tibet autonomous region is not economically viable. as a landlocked country with a poorly performing economy, it will be looking not simply for allies, but also for aid and assistance. there are basically two places that support could come from. one is china, and having just achieved greater autonomy, tibet would be unlikely to approach china in that way, irrespective of china’s likely refusal. moreover, china does currently provide aid and assistance, so that in the ccp’s view there is little need for the greater autonomy being proposed (zhou 2011:60). support could also come from the usa. however, that possible relationship might also entail us military bases being established in the eastern part of the tibet autonomous region—anathema not only to the ccp but also to most chinese. federalism the issue of federalism is possibly more complex, though no more likely to lead to an acceptance. a referendum has been suggested by two political tendencies. one comprises the lawyers in the political parties, and particularly in the npc, who argue that a federal system provides a superior system of checks and balances for a sophisticated modernised political system. it would also, of course, replace a single legal system with several systems at the federal and constituent state levels. the other consists of those in china who think that federalism will prove attractive to political forces on taiwan and encourage them to consider reunification. these include, as might be expected, the left nationalists and the taiwan democratic self-government league. the prospects for a federal china are far from new elements in debates on public policy. federalism was debated as a possible model in the early days of the republic, and the ccp was initially a federal organisation (van de ven 1992). by 1930 federalism had become equated with feudalism in contemporary chinese political discourse and so it was unlikely to be regarded favourably by modernising nationalists (fitzgerald 1998). goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 16 economic federalism was easily embraced and implemented in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the economic reformers (montinola, qian & weingast 1995). there was some discussion of possible federal configurations for china’s political system at the same time (zhao 1982), but these seem to have just disappeared like bamboo shoots without spring rain. the ccp remains opposed to political federalism on the grounds of practicality. although it has embraced the project of direct elections, it has articulated concerns about another series of elections, which federalism would almost certainly necessitate, to a second chamber for the national people’s congress. the ccp has also articulated fears that a federal political system might impede the work of government. it has pointed to its world’s best practice new superfast rail network as an example of what centralised government can achieve. as the ccp pointed out, both the usa and australia barely have a long distance inter-city rail system let alone the latest generation bullet trains (the economist 2010; feng 2010). election 2020 at this distance even directors of china institutes would be hesitant to assay the results of the approaching election. after all, the element of uncertainty will have millions of chinese viewers glued to the cctv election night tally room broadcast. the ccp remains likely to be the dominant political party. at the same time, with the passage of time one would expect both the cdnca and the peasants federation to increase both their share of the vote and their numbers of deputies in the npc. there will, however, be much to appreciate, notwithstanding prominent politicians being voted out of office and high-profile celebrities being elected. election night 2020 will make for great television. goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 17 glossary of chinese for terms used in the text china association for promoting democracy 中国民主促进会 china democratic leag 中国民主同盟 china democratic national construction association [cdna] 中国民主建国会 chinese communist party [ccp] 中国共产党 chinese people’s political consultative conference 中国人民政治协商会议 chinese peasants and workers democratic party 中国农工民主党 china public dedication party 中国致公党 housing estate 社区 household registration 户口 left nationalist party 中国国民党革命委员会 national people’s congress 全国人民代表大会 september 3 society 九三学社 social unit 单位 sturm und drang 风雨 taiwan democratic self-government league 台湾民主自治同盟 three represents 三个代表 goodman prospects for the general election portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 18 reference list barabantseva, e. 2005, ‘the party-state’s transnational outreach: overseas chinese policies of the prc’s central government,’ greater china occasional paper series, no. 2, institute of chinese and korean studies, university of tubingen, august. bray, d. 2005, social space and governance in urban china: the danwei system from origins to reform. stanford university press, stanford. cara, a. 2010, ‘china official shows off rare public trait: charm,’ associated press, 6 march. chan, k. w. 1994, cities within invisible walls: reinterpreting urbanization in post-1949 china. oxford university press, hong kong. chan, k. w. and zhang, l. 1999, ‘the hukou system and rural-urban migration in china: 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4. 1035-4159-1-le portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. ‘the space between: languages, translations and cultures’: special issue edited by vera mackie, ikuko nakane, and emi otsuji. issn: 1449-2490: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. knowing the place for the first time: a cuban exile’s story alejandra moreno and roberto milanes1 and know the place for the first time. and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. ts eliot ‘little gidding’ marta gómez lived with her parents and her two elder sisters in the suburb of vedado, havana, cuba. her mother held a phd in psychology, her father was a doctor. she attended an exclusive girls’ school, managed by the sabina order of nuns, known as las sabinas. her classmates were largely the children of bureaucrats, politicians and senior civil servants. marta—had there been no revolution, she was ten years old at the time— might have expected a life of material prosperity, higher education and a professional career. and a sense of belonging to a land she could confidently call ‘home.’ married to her mother’s sister, marianita, was the property developer pepe postino. he lived with his wife and their two sons ricardo and julito in the more up-market suburb of biltmore. pepe admired the know-how and the standard of living of north americans and possessed the money to acquire it. half a dozen times a year he visited his land of deep admiration, by plane, by ferry, or in his own cruiser. living in a politically unstable nation, he knew that his continuing support of president fulgencio batista’s regime 1 alejandra morena is a pseudonym. she works in modern australian history, and on contemporary cuba and chile. her publications are in the fields of memory and memorialisation, custodianship of place, and trauma and reconciliation. roberto milanes is a pseudonym. he works in australian aboriginal history, and on contemporary cuba and chile. his publications are in the fields of trauma and reconciliation. moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 2 carried the threat of retribution in the event of yet another change of government. politically astute havanans like pepe understood well enough, years before fidel castro’s open declaration of communism in 1961, the inclinations of los barbudos, the bearded ones, the rebels. the astute also knew, or thought they knew, that there was no way in which the united states government would permit a red rebellion to topple president batista, unpopular though he was. a mansion in the top suburb, prestige, fine cars in the garage, were worth the risk of a brief coup d’etat by the undeclared communists. pepe’s family looked forward to a life of ever-increasing prosperity and material well-being. in 1953 pepe himself was looking for ways to invest outside the city. an hour away on the coast to the west, in a quiet fishing village called palo, lived two young people in their twenties. they expected in their lives the achievement of basic necessities rather than prosperity. the main road to varadero—the famous beach resort of the cuban and north american rich—was not far from the town, but few people in their own village possessed cars. while only one or two people in the village had ever been to havana, the endemic political and financial corruption affected them all. the names of these villagers were felipe and maría. they looked in the 1950s newspapers at the advertisements for north american cars, buildings, domestic appliances. they heard on the radio about television, but nobody owned one, and only one person in the town claimed to have ever seen one. if one worked hard, and kept working, the rewards of rural village life were available to all: pigs, goats, a rooster, a donkey, a home, a family, a secure community. ten kilometres from palo lay the dazzling sands of a secluded area known as playa abierta: a protective bay, a narrow coastal strip, a high eroded cliff, a sumptuous hinterland. in 1954 nobody lived there save a few fishermen and their families, but the area had been visited for centuries. fifty metres above the coastal plain of playa abierta was a deep and mysterious cave. from sacred sites like this, it was believed by cuba’s indigenous people, the sun, the moon and humankind had taken their origins. at about the same time as felipe and maría reached their mid-twenties, pepe postino found his rural hideaway at that playa abierta of bay, beach and sacred cave. in 1955 he and his consortium bought some 1,000 acres, primarily, in his mind, as a development investment. but soon pepe was gripped by the notion of his own estate in which his family would spend their weekends, and where, ultimately, a whole community of moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 3 kindred spirits might live in safety and splendid isolation. developing the estate as his private paradise became his obsession. throughout 1956, leaving havana on thursdays, he would be on the headland an hour later to plan, direct, employ and build, until saturday when his wife marianita and the boys arrived. ‘sombra’ (shadow), the small cottage built to house the family on visits to the site, was their first foothold in playa abierta. the family selected the best view for what was to be their own, much grander, house to be designed by the best miami firm of architects from the latest materials. once installed in the big house, pepe bequeathed ‘sombra’ to marianita’s sister, her husband and the three girls laura, ada and marta gómez. ‘sombra’ lay on the western end of the beach and across the creek, where pepe planned the dwellings he would build for close family and friends. just here would be a house for elena, his mother, just behind it, the cottage of her servants; over there would be the home of his sister elenita. further away and above the narrow coastal plain would be placed the holiday houses for sale to the north american and cuban company executives of gillette, coca-cola, pepsi and materva. pepe’s plans widened in proportion to his energy and enthusiasm. month after month he and marianita travelled to miami to select furnishings from the best of the north american way of life and its technology, material richness implanted upon the breathtaking scenery of playa abierta. for those who could afford it, a love affair with the united states epitomised the cuban 1950s. the adults had the verandas, the beach, the fine cars, the cruisers. children had volleyball and baseball on the beach, ping-pong and swimming in the house. pepe’s son ricardo, aged eleven, was given a golf cart to take him and friends on joy rides around the estate; julito got a mercedez benz for his sixteenth birthday. everyone got rides in the golf cart and ‘merceditas,’ as julito baptised his new sportscar. ricardo was my age and often a few of us would pile into his toy-car, whizzing around the sand and the bushes, with no one to spoil the fun. playa abierta’s borders were invisible but impenetrable. they reassured the adults, and liberated us to be children, such as we could not be in our troubled city. for now, in the midst of his 1956 development, arrived news that castro’s tiny rebel forces had landed in oriente province and were conducting a guerilla war from the mountains. oriente was about as far as one could get from havana; more worrying to the better suburbs of havana was their success in raising revolutionary cells amongst workers, activists and soldiers much closer to the capital. marta’s father, who together with pepe moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 4 had already spent two periods of self-imposed exile abroad, did not have the confidence of his brother-in-law, and preferred to invest in bonds and shares and keep his assets fluid. political assassinations were becoming more common. i remember overhearing conversations that suggested my father and pepe might be the targets of retaliation. both were men of considerable wealth, and had been approached to make donations to the revolutionary cause. or else. it was blackmail and they knew it. i remember their outraged voices. of course they would not contribute to the downfall of cuba! that would be treason! i also remember my mother’s and aunt marianita’s support of their menfolk: how dare those rebels threaten their machos. these were instructive lessons for a young cuban girl to learn. at the time i just thought they were all so brave, though i worried for my father’s and pepe’s safety. through 1956 political life grew steadily unstable. in 1957 castro’s local cell of supporters tried to storm the presidential palace, and though they failed to take it, batista’s government remained tense. i don’t ever recall a time in my childhood when the political did not intrude into our personal lives. both my father and pepe had held high offices in a previous government. they had made large gains as well as powerful enemies and had twice to leave the island for short periods. exile was among the first words i learnt as a child! many of my early childhood photographs are set in mexico and in miami: not on vacation, but on family reunions visiting my father and pepe. as the revolution gained momentum across the island, a new threat—and the possibility of yet another exile—loomed large. escaping those tensions was impossible. at home the conversations often revolved around ‘the situation.’ and increasingly ‘the situation’ assumed personal dimensions: a friend of my father’s was assassinated while enjoying a cabaret show at tropicana; suspicions that some of the domestic staff harboured revolutionary sympathies and could turn on the family when the barbudos came down from the mountains. las sabinas reflected the tensions, for the possibility of the kidnapping of children could never be ignored. at school, the same thing. several of my classmates came from families even more politically involved than my own. one was the daughter of the chief of the armed forces; another, the daughter of the head of police. the pecking order was all too clear when—as it increasingly happened through the late 1950s—a crisis somewhere in the city would prompt the unexpected arrival of the family chauffeurs: on instructions to get us home to safety as quickly as possible. over the intercom came the voice of our principal, calling for us—one by one—in order of our fathers’ political rankings. i was usually called third. the crises mounted. a popular student leader was shot on the steps of the university. moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 5 every week brought news of attacks or ambushes. worse still were the suspicions of extended family members ‘crossing over’ to fidel’s side. i remember my mother’s and marianita’s outrage: a terrible sense of betrayal that lingers unspoken but unforgiving in family circles to this day. above all, this blurring of the lines of loyalty meant the enemy was everywhere; the next ambush might be just around the corner. my sister’s fifteenth-birthday party— principal rite of passage of well-to-do cuban girls and typically a sumptuous occasion in which a family’s social standing was showcased extravagantly with live orchestras and a guest list of hundreds—had suddenly to be dramatically downsized: a smaller venue, fewer guests, high security. the fear of ambush, kidnapping, even assassination was everywhere. meanwhile at playa abierta the few inhabitants of the beachfront fishing village had been forcibly relocated to palo: this was now private property. pepe needed labour. felipe was recruited as a handyman; later, when pepe’s new house on the headland was occupied, he became one of pepe’s ‘watermen’ in charge of keeping the tanks full. maría’s first employment on the estate began as soon as pepe completed a house for his mother: she became one of several of elena’s maids who would remain in residence, in their own modest cottage, whenever the señora returned to havana. by 1957 the houses, the new road to varadero and playa abierta and most of the infrastructure of the settlement were complete. to show his gratitude to batista for diverting the road near his property, pepe threw one of the prodigious parties for which he and marianita were famous in the city. president batista came, the press reported it excitedly, photographs of pepe and batista adorned the walls of the playa abierta mansion. after the triumph of the revolution on the first of january 1959 this close association between developer and disgraced president was not forgotten. marta’s family came to stay on most weekends. her most treasured memory from her eleven years in cuba is of a stroll on pepe’s beach sucking a mango juice through a straw. life seemed so secure that it seemed that pepe’s world must last forever. weekend and holiday visits to playa abierta were the highlights of my last three years in cuba. routine as they were, i never took them for granted. not because i sensed its impermanence—none of us did—but because it meant escape from the political tensions in havana. it was such relief to leave havana behind and know that the guardhouse to my uncle’s estate awaited us, with its promise that everything beyond that point was protected and safe. no harm could come to us in playa abierta. the gods would not allow it. moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 6 in playa abierta, i was free to roam on my own, walk barefoot on the sandy beach, explore the bushland, lose myself in a world diametrically opposed to my regimented, over-protected life in havana. i could never walk the streets of my city: even to school, a few blocks away from home, we were driven by our chauffeur. no wonder on my first return visit to cuba, i could not find my way around even the most familiar places. it was only in playa abierta that i really set foot on the land of my birth, directing my own steps, enjoying a sense of belonging such as i never had in havana. i think my relationship with playa abierta was forged above all in gratitude. it gave me a chance to grow and to fall in love with cuba on my own terms. i don’t know that i ever thought beyond the present in those days; the present was complicated enough for a child to absorb. but i know that i carried with me the conviction that playa abierta was mine forever: the impromptu cruises in my uncle’s yacht when family and friends would come together for a day’s fishing expedition; the volleyball games with a mobile community of young people who seemed to just drift in and out; the horseback rides, the picnics. my sisters, eight and nine years older than me, engaged in big-girl activities: canasta games with their friends, playing romantic cuban boleros and sharing intimate chats about boyfriends. i was the spectator, but those vicarious experiences fed me a sense of my tomorrows in playa abierta. that’s what it would be like for me in a few years’ time. that would be me at fifteen and sixteen years old, and beyond. i could almost touch that me: she and her future seemed so real, so clear, so secure then. playa abierta and its possibilities fired pepe’s imagination. the workers were busy with the cobbled roads and concrete gutters, the new cottages, the stone water tower, and a concrete pier for the boats and to hold the sand in place. no churchgoer himself, pepe built a chapel for playa abierta’s growing community of fellow holidaymakers and anyone in his large workforce who wished to attend. on the highest point of the cliff above the chapel pepe constructed the bell tower, la campana, to sound the new year and as a focal point for his visitors. beside it his work brigade constructed a folly for picnics, a summer house with little paths and unexpected seats to catch the panorama extending twenty kilometres east and west. pepe’s tours of his estate always ended here as a kind of pilgrimage to beauty and achievement. today the view is as splendid as ever. most of today’s photographs advertising the pleasures of playa abierta are taken from this vantage spot. pepe fashioned himself as a latter-day feudal lord, extending largesse to his workforce on special occasions. marta remembers him in a santa claus suit and white beard, dispensing christmas presents to all the children of his workers: big american dolls for the girls, boxing gloves and baseball bats for the boys. indeed, marta now marvels at how much us culture flavoured that world. it was not simply the material and professional resources used to design, create and furnish pepe’s imposing mansion on the hill. special moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 7 family occasions were typically a seamless combination of the cuban and the north american. the floor-to-ceiling christmas tree that was the centrepiece of the playa abierta family living room at nochebuena revolved to the tune of jingle bells and silent night. a surprise eighteenth birthday party organised for pepe’s son featured a special performance borrowed from bing crosby’s recently released movie ‘white christmas.’ the landlord’s extravagance grew. for marianita’s surprise fiftieth birthday party a hundred guests hid in the garden. in the distance marianita thought she heard a band playing. chinito, ¿qué pasa?—asked marianita of pepe—what’s happening? up rumbled a flat top truck containing la riverside, havana’s top dance band. everyone jumped out of hiding, the party lasted till dawn, in marta’s memory, only ending in most of the guests dancing a conga into the swimming pool! i have been to many extraordinary parties in my life: from embassy balls to wedding receptions set in some of new zealand’s most magical landscapes. but they all fade into shades of gray in comparison to marianita’s fiftieth birthday party. it’s hard to know whether it’s the child’s imagination that refuses to yield ground to the adult’s experiences, colouring everything that happened that day brighter, more intense, more beautiful than anything could ever be again. or whether it was as i remember it: an occasion unrivalled in elegance and style, but especially in boundless cuban joy. the sight of those women, in their long gowns and diamond necklaces, slipping away graciously from their conga line into the sparkling blue waters of pepe’s pool, with no care for their coiffeurs or their makeup, thrills and haunts me to this day. was i really part of such a moment in time—and in place? the world i’ve got to know since makes me wonder if i haven’t imagined it all. playa abierta bequeathed us many things. among them is a stubborn sense of anticlimax that will not budge. remote though playa abierta was, in those uncertain days of 1957-58 security had to be maintained. pepe’s family’s dwelling was the only one constructed on the eastern side of the beach, protected by an armed guard. pepe kept one of his two cruisers always at playa abierta, for pleasure—but also for an emergency evacuation, allowing two means of hurried egress should the need arise. on the lofty heights above the beaches, he allowed batista’s troops to carry out manoeuvres and coastal surveillance, and to construct a massive concrete bunker for their equipment. throughout 1958 castro’s barbudos were fighting their way, in street fights, cells and propaganda from the oriente mountains. overwhelmingly cubans supported rather than opposed them. the loyalty of much of the government army was at best doubtful. by mid moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 8 december havanans were asking themselves when rather than if batista’s government will fall. there were few regrets; he was much hated. but the nochebuena (christmas eve) of 1958, a mere week before the revolution, still delights the memories of those who to this day discuss it in miami. nochebuena 1958 had a special quality about it. in retrospect, it’s tempting to think that, like passengers in our own titanic, we must have known the end was near. but i don’t remember it like that. sure, ‘the situation’ was grim and life had become a series of newsflashes about the latest outrages perpetrated by the barbudos on innocent cubans: my family’s version of what was happening. but since the advent of the republic, cuba had confronted many such crises before and somehow overcome them. besides, the americans knew what was going on and would not allow a communist revolution to succeed. not our friends, the americans. such thoughts were reassuring, and i think they made the adults feel better. all was well. uncle sam was in charge. whether the adults knew more than they admitted to us— or to themselves—it’s hard to know; or whether perhaps with the passage of time, we have collectively chosen to remember that time through rose-coloured glasses: who knows? but that last christmas in playa abierta is now enshrined in the family mythology as a gift of the gods, the gods who knew better, yet still chose to protect our innocence: one last time. that december 24 the whole community came together to attend midnight mass – la misa de gallo. adults and children and staff formed a candle-lit party procession towards the chapel, carolling. the scent of the uva caleta bushes and the candles, the wash of the sea, the soft cuban night, the exciting tales of the green monster who haunted the small lagoon at the foot of the chapel, the spanish carols: they still dwell vividly in a memory fifty years old. esta noche es nochebuena vamos al monte, hermanito, a cortar un arbolito porque la noche es serena … tonight is nochebuena come to the hills, little brother, to cut a christmas tree for the night is serene … the last carol sung, the last present unwrapped, the last turn of pepe’s christmas tree as it plays jingle bells for the hundredth time that night. the curtain is coming down on pepe’s playa abierta and still the family lingers. moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 9 there was now no getting away from the fact that ‘the situation’ had reached crisis point. pepe pondered the deteriorating position. he knew well enough that the first few months after any coup d’état were good times for sympathizers of the old regime to be absent! not wanting to be caught out of range of instant news, pepe and marianita for the first time in three years held año nuevo, new year’s eve, not at playa abierta, but in their city mansion at biltmore. it is 31 december 1958. the end came quicker than anyone imagined. though the rebels were still at some distance from the capital, it was clear that the regime could not last. the story runs that batista was celebrating the new year at the havana hilton (now the habana libre). the guests crowded the terrace to admire the midnight fireworks, which, unaccountably, lasted longer than they should. unease gripped the party: these were not fireworks, but gunfire! by three am on the first of january 1959, president batista abruptly abandoned his government by helicopter to the dominican republic, thence to the canary islands where he remained for the rest of his life. the city was overjoyed. pepe rang marta’s father to warn him of batista’s departure. by four a.m. pepe’s escape plan was operational. he would leave his havana and his playa abierta by the dawn ferry to key west in florida. was it escape, flight, dignified departure or protest? marianita’s interpretation of these rushed events is that her husband certainly did not flee: he already had a ticket to miami postponed until after the new year, and did not want to be caught in the crossfire. it is a question of male pride. no, her man was not fleeing out of cowardice, but convenience. exile has a long and honourable history among cubans, and is the only course for any self-respecting cuban man in the face of an oppressor. but the idea of the us government allowing a communist movement to take control over the island was unthinkable. to his family, pepe was thus neither a fugitive nor an exile. the first would have been unmanly, the second would have granted the barbudos a status they did not deserve. whatever one’s interpretation, the revolution had come so fast that transport services were still normal, but soon enough that everyone in the city was aware of their president’s unseemly departure. pepe took his cadillac and light baggage. he had packed in a hurry and with the absolute certainty that his absence would be a matter of days or weeks, until the u.s. government sent in the marines to ‘sort out the mess.’ the ferry drew him away from his birth country. arriving at key west a few days later he was moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 10 greeted derisively, this time by exiles from batista’s government now preparing their triumphant return to revolutionary cuba. pepe told his family, ‘i’ll be back next week,’ but he never saw cuba again. the perennial toast of the israelites, ‘next year in jerusalem,’ became ‘next year in cuba’ for the growing exile community in miami. for pepe and his family, the toast would always be the same, ‘next year in playa abierta.’ it was probably only a few days later, and via the remaining servants, that felipe and maría heard the news of pepe’s departure from havana. their memories of three and a half years of excitement with their volatile employer they held in silence. before long castro’s soldiers arrived in playa abierta and pepe’s house was locked. by the end of january the estate was looking drab, weeds were starting to overgrow the roads, the chapel was empty and the bell silent. like many of the former staff, felipe and maría wondered about the family’s return, which they knew was not likely while the revolutionary government remained in power. yet the phones stayed open. pepe kept in touch with several of his old employees—especially his boat crew david and francisco. in revolutionary cuba, playa abierta and its proprietor symbolised the privilege and corruption of the old regime. the indonesian president sukarno stayed in pepe’s house in 1959, but the newly installed cuban president manuel urrutia, showing what a good socialist he was, refused to enter that icon of bourgeois indulgence, and stayed instead in elena’s house. marianita chose not to join pepe in miami but remained in havana, while pepe rang to say that it might be another week or two. the confiscations of property, the imprisonment and execution of batista supporters continued. the first return towards the end of january, when things did not look like getting resolved that quickly, marianita decided to visit playa abierta. she took julito with her for moral support. i just went for the ride. partly, i guess, marianita wanted to reassure herself that it was business as usual in playa abierta, and partly she wanted to send a message to the revolutionary government that the family’s hold on the estate was unwavering. she is a very tough lady and i don’t remember her at all frightened that day. she was coming home and god help whoever stood in her way. but the early warnings of what awaited us came as we approached the coastline of playa abierta. it was devastating. clotheslines, intimate clothing and rubbish lay everywhere about the beach. this was not the beautiful pristine playa abierta we moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 11 had left a mere month ago. it was like a horde of barbarians had been let loose here. the guardhouse, we noticed, was empty. approaching the big house, we saw the unkempt garden, and more ominously, felipe, maría and the other staff were nowhere to be seen. we approached the front door. marianita was in a rage and wanted explanations. her key to the house no longer worked. she knocked on the door and there in front of us was raquel, one of marianita’s personal maids of many years, blocking our entrance. there was no respectful greeting, as in the old days. instead raquel uttered the words that have resounded in every revolution in every age and in every country, señora, ésta no es tu casa. ‘madam, this is not your house,’ followed by the sound of a slamming door. it would not open again for us. all the way back to havana, i remember that all marianita could do was to recount the many favours she had done to these people, the many times she had come to their families’ aid. ‘these people pretended to be part of the family,’ she repeated over and over again. all she could see was their betrayal. and i understood her. there was in cuba a certain understanding between master and servant that softened the edges of that relationship and gave both sides a glow of reassurance that, despite the obvious differences in status, we were all family. they looked after us and we looked after them. marianita felt she had fulfilled her side of that contract and for what? marianita’s forced retreat was the very last visit by the family to their sacred beach site. the revolutionary government commandeered pepe’s havana cruiser for pleasure trips by dr urrutia, the new president of the republic, and sent marianita the bill for the fuel. pepe grew increasingly anxious. his faithful boat crew—david and francisco—now became the family’s lifeline as to what was happening in playa abierta. vowing vengeance, marianita returned to her biltmore mansion in the city, where the prognosis was worse. at any moment the police or the militia were likely to arrive to count the number of inhabitants of the house while warning her that big houses like hers were needed urgently for schools. marta, her two unmarried sisters and her mother left their rented property to offer mutual support. with her eldest son nearing the age of the army draft, and with marianita as the wife of the despised pepe postino, it was clear that some of his family at least were at increasing risk of arrest, his house and goods of confiscation. ten months after the revolution, in october 1959, the boys hurriedly were bundled on to a plane to the united states. marianita herself followed two months later. marta’s family left in april of the following year. of all that she left behind, the little girl mourned her beloved stuffed rabbit that she was not allowed to bring on the plane. it will be there when we get back. moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 12 those last few months that we shared together at marianita’s house in havana were terrible at the time but have become very precious since. i was the youngest there, and my sisters and cousins were too busy with their own lives to pay much attention to me. what i remember most of that time were the two women— marianita and my mother—and the magnificent way in which they carried themselves throughout this crisis. with their men away, it fell on them to protect everything they held dear: their families, their properties, their honour. it was all under threat. and every time one of the militia groups paid us a visit and started probing into the number of occupants and the number of rooms in the house—a clear signal that they were thinking of requisitioning the place any minute— marianita and my mother stood firm. they lied and wove fanciful stories of more family to come, they invented ‘high officials in the government’ whom they knew intimately and would not be impressed to hear that they and their families were being harassed in this way. they gave their visitors lessons on cuban history and the true meaning of patriotism. they preached to them about respect for their elders and for the sanctity of the cuban family. they appealed to their machismo by portraying themselves as women-in-distress. in short, they both manipulated them and exhausted them. the house and staff remained marianita’s for some time after we had all left for miami. for me, it was a wonderful lesson in cuban womanhood. it taught me that the word ‘macho’ does not exclusively relate to the male, but to those gender-free virtues of courage, dignity and honour that we cubans value so much. i resolved to be a ‘macho’ during those difficult months: a vision that would never have occurred to me if my previous world had not been turned upside-down just a few months before, and circumstances had not offered me role models like marianita and my mother. not everything that i endured in revolutionary cuba was a nightmare. some experiences proved very precious indeed. now reunited with his family in miami, pepe postino continued to believe that it could not be long before castro fell or was overthrown. when the bay of pigs invasion failed in 1961, he raged and plotted. it was rumoured that che guevara himself had taken up residence in the big house at playa abierta. pepe considered hiring someone to fly to playa abierta and bomb the place. marianita prevailed upon him that this course was much too dangerous, then hit on a better plan. why not get david and francisco, their boat crew still in the island, to break into the big house, pack pepe’s cruiser with as much of the house goods as they could fit in to the craft—and sail it to miami? they did so to a heroes’ welcome—before returning to their birthplace. the champagne bottle from which a toast to the downfall of the regime was drunk at julito’s wedding became a family icon. today marianita’s dearest pleasure is to walk around her apartment identifying the silver, the glassware, the objets d’art: they came over on the boat! moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 13 the second return for all the family’s intimate connections with playa abierta—or perhaps because of them—it was, and is considered a family disgrace that any of us should re-visit cuba while still under castro’s rule. my sisters especially see it as nothing short of betrayal of ‘the cause’ and have wanted nothing to do with my plans to re-visit the island. only the fact that i have lived in new zealand for over a quarter of a century has helped to explain—not excuse—my behaviour. as my miami family chooses to see it, new zealanders are too far away and too enamoured with socialism to appreciate the realities of castro’s cuba. nonetheless, in january 1996, marta became the first—and so far the only—member of her family to re-visit, or as she puts it, to reclaim, her uncle’s estate playa abierta. she travelled by taxi through palo, down the via blanca to the entrance to pepe’s house. a guard denied her entry, for the building was, he said, occupied by soldiers. her determination only grew. she would find another way into the big house. she crossed the concrete road bridge spanning the playa abierta creek to leave the area of the family houses, now operated as a tourist resort by a french consortium. this was the former entrance to the beach. at one point, i was not sure i was in the right place: the sand had been grassed, houses had been added, old houses ‘improved.’ to me the guiding star was pepe’s house: set high on the hill: hugging the landscape. this was the heart of playa abierta. it was not until i stood on the edge of that creek that i looked up to find the house: unmistakably 1950s ultramodern. i swam across the 200-metre channel impelled by forces i had no idea i harboured. there was electric wiring all around. whether it was live or not i didn’t know and didn’t care. then i walked across the beach and found a cluster of large rocks that i climbed. at the other end lay the foot of the long staircase that i knew led to the house. and there it was. i reached the top and looked to the left to confirm that the house stood as i remembered. i decided to approach it through the front door more as an act of defiance than anything else. i was going to help myself to pepe’s house as i always had. i did not need permission from the usurpers to enter our family’s sacred site. it was indeed a military establishment. my uncle’s house had evidently been turned into a rest and recreation camp for junior officers. notice boards as i entered announced the day’s activities: billiards, and swimming. i looked to the left—the living quarters where my uncle and aunt, and my two male cousins each had their rooms looking down on the beach head. the walls were torn, the rooms were locked. no sign of life here. i turned to the right: the dining room, where our christmas dinners had been had, filled up with more notice boards. the kitchen was locked. this was no family residence any more. i walked down the set of stairs that led from the dining room down to the large living room. gone were the large bear and tiger skins that had covered much of that floor space, and instead of the old familiar setup of lounge chairs were two billiard tables and a juke-box going flat out. at one moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 14 table were two men playing billiards, while women outside played with small children in the filthy and half-empty pool. i had walked through the house and reconquered this space unannounced and uninvited! as i went to leave by the door i knew so well one of the soldiers put his cue across the exit to stop me. i stood and waited for him to remove it. i knew that if i opened my mouth, my cuban-miami accent would betray me. i resolved to remain calm and say nothing. his colleague, anxious to get on with the game, told him to let me pass. impossible to describe the feeling as i left pepe’s house! it was unspeakable joy and sweetest revenge. after thirty-seven years of family rage and mourning over what we had lost, i had repossessed the place with a glance—the sheer fact that i was there had conferred ownership on it. in havana i was the little girl returning to visit the country of my childhood. in playa abierta i was the son repossessing for my family our stolen land. the third return marta has revisited playa abierta several times since january 1996. a guard remains at the entrance to pepe’s mansion, still protecting the junior officers resting and recreating. there are now barbed wire entanglements in place making it impossible to enter from the seaward side. she likes to think that this was prompted by her clandestine visit and a belated alarm raised by that unknown woman—dripping wet and with hair and clothes soaked with sand—who was last seen leaving the house and the grounds as if she owned the place. in 1998, on her third visit to playa abierta, marta met felipe and maría. i was approaching the chapel, and had stopped by the lagoon to remember the old tales of the green monster who lurked there. this man approached me and asked me who i was. i felt very threatened. before i could decide what to say, he remembered who i was. i could hardly believe it. i was not ready for his warm embrace the moment that i confirmed that i was indeed pepe’s little niece marta. this was not what i had been told to expect from the family about the ungrateful servants who had denied marianita entrance to her own house. a rebuke of the family, a sermon on the triumphs of the revolution, a reminder that this was no longer ‘our’ playa abierta: none of these things would have surprised me. but felipe’s obvious delight at finding me—the only member of pepe’s family he had met since that christmas of 1958, he told me sadly—stunned me. he remembered the life at playa abierta: the order, the excitement and newness of everything, the whizz-bang american technology, the sense of community, the small but regular salaries. it didn’t do to cross his employer, that was well known, but if the staff were respectful and worked hard, they would be rewarded. then suddenly, a million questions about the family: each and everyone, by name. ‘and how is pepe? and marianita? and ricardo? and julito? you must give them a hug for me and tell them we remember them always. we’ve worried about them, not having heard moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 15 anything for many decades now.’ i did not have the heart to tell felipe that his fond memories were not reciprocated, that the family still held him and the rest of the staff responsible for the loss of their playa abierta. marianita’s words—repeated many times in bitter conversations in miami—rang in my ears: ‘where were they when the house was being taken over by the government? where was their loyalty?’ felipe and maría offered to take me on a tour of playa abierta. i had no idea what he meant and was suddenly seized with resentment that he should now pose as the host and me as the guest. old habits die hard, and the idea that anyone in today’s cuba should offer to ‘show me around’ playa abierta was an affront. but it is hard to maintain the rage when the person before me was so clearly thrilled to see me, and with loving reminiscences of the family flowing out of him as if he really meant them. felipe disarmed me. with fearful thoughts running through my mind of what my family would think of this encounter, we set off. it is only in retrospect that i can appreciate fully felipe’s sensitivity that first time. he could have chosen to show me all the new ‘improvements’ to the place. instead, he took me on an exclusive tour of my playa abierta. we visited only the places he knew would mean something to me: the chapel, the bell, the cave, elena’s house, and from a distance, pepe’s house. he apologised for not taking me to what he knew was the most important site for me. ‘no one is allowed to go there unless you’re in the military.’ felipe, i’ve realised since, held two mental maps of playa abierta. one was pepe’s and the other was post-pepe. he knew which playa abierta i wanted to see, and which playa abierta he should withhold from me. as i walked around with him, exchanging memories of those three years we had shared there, i was gripped with great sadness: that in miami our tour would be greeted with derision and contempt. ‘who is this man to be assuming the role of memory-keeper of our playa abierta? we are the only custodians of that memory.’ i am also conscious of the fact that i am the only one from that playa abierta community to have returned. my memories have since come into dialogue with the realities of a place that, whether it remembers us or not, has moved on. i learned this—first with resentment, then with envy—from felipe’s and maría’s tales of their half century of living and working there. yet i won’t tell my family this. i would not want to be the one to shatter the illusion of those in miami who still harbour visions of a playa abierta awaiting our return: its physical beauty intact, its material environment finally liberated from ‘enemy occupation.’ business as usual after an absence of nearly fifty years no longer works for me. suddenly, another ambush. felipe is illustrating the socialist numbering of houses, rather than following the frivolous capitalist custom of giving houses names. ‘look! sombra. remember? it’s now no. 7 d.’ and from the warm camaraderie of a few seconds before, i go into an unspoken rage. doesn’t felipe realise what ‘sombra’ means to me? shouldn’t he be apologising for what happened to it? or does he think i no longer care? this rush of raw exile emotions surprised me. who was feeling this? on whose behalf was i bearing witness to this chance encounter with our old little cottage? felipe sees playa abierta as one integrated whole. mine, pepe’s, the family’s, his, maría’s and everyone else who has lived and loved it over moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 16 the years. i am still the representative of an aggrieved family with no recourse to anything but resentment and anger to appease our sense of loss. we take the steep road to the left, pass the quarry and keep up the track to the top of the cliff that leads to pepe’s pleasure ground. the stone area is still cleared, though the vegetation is advancing. felipe takes us past the stone seats and what looks like a wishing well where the path narrows. we turn back to take in the whole of pepe’s vision, the astonishing dazzling light blue of the florida straits, the solitary pine tree, the scattered red-roofed houses, the rocky cove, the beach. pepe’s big house, the architectural marvel and rumoured one time residence of che guevara himself, sits snugly on the headland. i am surprised to hear felipe speak yet again of the big house and its owner with such warmth. ‘those were wonderful days and we have thought of you all so much through the years.’ that night felipe offered me the opportunity of renting accommodation in one of pepe’s old cottages, now—like most of playa abierta—state-owned. i did not remember it, which was a relief. no memories to haunt me here. it all felt comfortable and secure. then nightfall, and the bushland turned that deep bottle green of playa abierta’s nightscape i had forgotten until then. day tourists come and go, but only close family and friends—our community—had known the secrets of the playa abierta of the night. a desperate longing for absent family and friends engulfed me. another ambush. i did not have the key to connect with that playa abierta on my own. my family’s playa abierta lay buried, layers and layers beneath those bushes, overlaid by almost half a century of a playa abierta soil we had neither known nor nourished. but memories don’t feed the soil of a loved place. only being there does. felipe and maría have taught me many things during our on-going conversations about the playa abierta that was and has been since we left. one vital thing now occurs to me—a fact they are too gracious to articulate—is that their roots too are buried in that soil. but unlike mine—and my family’s—theirs have deepened and widened over fifty years of walking and working and loving that soil. being there has allowed me to see these things more clearly. but how do i explain that to my family and friends in miami without sounding like a traitor? they have not been back. they would not understand. i often wonder about the process of mourning and remembering loved lost places. how different it might have been if we had not lost playa abierta to a communist revolution, but to a natural disaster or simply migration to another country. we are not the only ones to have lost and mourned a sacred family site. dispossessed indigenous peoples know all about that. so do the victims of tsunamis. so do many diasporic groups all over the world. but creating a sense of perspective or, worse, a sense of hierarchy of loss and suffering, is not very useful when inside a particular family’s history lies a half-century-old wound that will not heal. and that family history—and that wound—are mine. an earthquake, a planned migration: they also leave wounds, but of a different kind. ours we blame on particular individuals— with human faces and names. it is they who are responsible for our misfortunes. the wound is personal, and so is the hatred. indeed, what would the family think of my staying in such a place, an establishment moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 17 that brings dollars to castro’s empty pockets? what would pepe think? actually, i know what he—and the family—would think. they would regard this as treason. it is bad enough to have visited playa abierta ‘under enemy occupation.’ but to lend my presence and my dollars to a state enterprise in playa abierta is sacrilege of the most grievous kind: i have disgraced the sacred family site by my presence there, and in so doing, the family itself. you see, family honour overrides even patriotism and cold war politics. ultimately, it is the only thing left to cuban exile families to protect and defend at all cost. more than any other visit to playa abierta, this most recent visit left me confused and torn. where do i belong in this war of memories? and who draws the lines of belonging and ownership of a coastline? and for how long? it saddens me that my more recent memories of playa abierta will not enrich or enlighten the old family memory album, and in so doing, bring my grieving relatives closer to the complicated realities of playa abierta today: that it still belongs to us; that it also belongs to felipe and maría; that playa abierta both thrives and remembers. we do not need to ‘move on’ in anger from those memories. like me, they can always come back and renew their relationship with it again and again. but these are thoughts i keep to myself. not being allowed to share my experiences of playa abierta with the family is part of their imposed punishment on the recalcitrant member who moved to new zealand. pepe died in 1985. he did not want a christian service, nor to be buried in the family plot in miami’s woodlawn cemetery. instead, he directed that his ashes be scattered unceremoniously in a nearby florida bay. who knows why? pepe loved the sea, and the sea connected him to the island. perhaps he hoped that his ashes might wash back across the florida straits to playa abierta. marianita is a feisty nonagenerian living in miami. exactly how pepe acquired the funds to buy and develop his paradise is not her concern. playa abierta was the pinnacle of her cuban family happiness. you’ll never get to the heart of it. pointing to a painting of the beach, she says, look at this open beach where no predators threatened, a safe and private life from which no one was excluded. we were not the oppressors, she asserts angrily, everyone was privileged, everyone was happy. but her family no longer toasts ‘next year in playa abierta.’ when eventually marta confided to pepe’s boys that she had been back to the big house, neither cousin appreciated her symbolic reclaiming of their lost paradise. that is man’s business. her gesture was an affront to their dignity and had shamed them. i too feel shamed by that gesture, if for a different reason. it has taken many years for those emotions to clarify. as i see it now, i did not go to pepe’s house out of love for the old place. i went there for revenge. there were family scores to settle with the usurpers. and once i was in and out, like a man who had helped himself to a woman’s body for his momentary pleasure, came the arrogant rush of conquest. ‘i moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 18 don’t ever have to be here again. done!’ shedding the political instincts that impelled that first reunion has been a long process. exorcising the personal shame for violating that precious moment will take much longer. pepe’s house was the heart of my playa abierta, my love-place, my safe harbour. not some chance encounter, to penetrate and then discard. reflections 2008 my visits to playa abierta and the reflections they have prompted about things i had long set aside as a new zealander have both entrenched me in my cubanness and distanced me from it. they have forced me to re-think my values and my priorities, my sense of fair play and my abiding commitment to my family and the family memories that we share. honour remains the key to the way i understand human relations. but playa abierta—with all its ambushes and complications—has pressed me to re-define what it means. i once thought personal and family honour were one and the same thing. that family honour was personal honour. sharing with family a sense of what is right and what is wrong was once a reassuring place to be. and until my return visits to cuba—and playa abierta—began a decade ago, my sense of belonging rested comfortably on the knowledge that, despite my physical distance from my family in miami, these people held my identity and my history. their values were my values. and if exile had divided us further—i in new zealand, they in the united states—stronger bonds united us: among them, shared passions and shared hatreds. i no longer see it that way. yes, i still hold to the same passions of the little girl who thought playa abierta was hers forever and curse the gods who mocked her innocent illusions. but i can no longer justify the hatred of individuals, and hold them responsible for a course of events that has its roots deep in cuba’s long tragic history of political corruption and entrenched disrespect for the most basic human rights: preand post-revolution. it comforts me to think that playa abierta will outlive both those passions and those hatreds, that future little martas will enjoy their moments walking along its beaches, sipping a chilled mango juice and thinking life is beautiful. marta’s reflections on playa abierta remain caught between her loyalty to pepe and a family that still mourns—and rages—over their lost paradise, and the felipes and marías who have dedicated their lives to caring for that same loved place. she wonders how she would feel if the revolution had fulfilled its promise of returning to ‘the people’ their land and their dignity. would she have felt the same urge to storm the barricades of pepe’s house and reclaim it symbolically for her family? or would she have rejoiced at seeing that splendid coastline now shared equally and freely amongst all cubans? the revolution’s betrayal of that promise has made it easier for me to share my family’s grief and rage over the loss of our sacred site. playa abierta was never intended for ‘the people,’ neither during pepe’s time, nor under the revolution. where pepe and his business associates once vacationed in splendour, now military moreno and milanes knowing the place for the first time portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 19 officers at one end of the coastline, and wealthy tourists at the other, do likewise. only the rich and the powerful were—and are—welcome guests to playa abierta. felipe and maría were never destined to live there, except in the service of those guests. that one brief shining moment that was playa abierta of the late 1950s remains intact: both in the child’s romantic memory and in the adult’s social conscience. this is more than the story of a contested beach site. this is also the story of an exile family entrenched in memories, passions and hatreds fed and bred since the dawn of that new year of 1959 when they were set adrift from their futures in a homeland and a sacred site they thought was theirs forever. they will not forgive those they hold responsible for this tragedy. half a century in exile has only magnified their rage. to continue to belong to my family demands that i share that rage—or remain silent. i can do neither. but there’s a third option. that is why i have changed the names of all the characters and places. including my own. including playa abierta’s. the rest of this story remains, sadly, true. portalv7n1introgalleymay212010final portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. fields of remembrance, special issue, guest edited by matthew graves and elizabeth rechniewski. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. from collective memory to transcultural remembrance matthew graves, university of provence, and elizabeth rechniewski, university of sydney in memory of françois poirier (1947-2010), director of the centre for intercultural research in the englishand french-speaking worlds (university of paris xiii) who showed the way. ‘whispering lunar incantations dissolve the floors of memory’ (ts eliot) the crisis of history and the turn to memory we can identify a ‘turn to memory’ in both the policies and practices of state and community organisations and the attention of the academic community over the last thirty years or so, a period that roughly corresponds to what, in the 1980s, pierre nora described as the ‘era of commemoration.’ there are many explanations offered for this turn; its existential origins include the ‘crisis of history,’ a particular example of the broader crises in representation that flow from the collapse of linear conceptualisations of time and progress and of the grand narratives of the past two centuries. david harvey refers to this transformation of concepts of temporality as ‘time-space compression’: the acceleration of time and shrinking of space through globalisation that affects our sense of our place in the world, and our very idea of self (2001: 123–24). resort to memory is one form of resistance to the ‘utopia’ of globalisation, a way of re-anchoring ourselves in space and time; the redemptive power of memory is compensation for the social and psychological disruption of ‘super modernity’ and the ‘loss of place,’ of rootedness, that accompanies it (augé 1995). memory seems to offer the authenticity that history has graves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 2 lost, one that claims to be based on direct transmission, lived experience or family or community tradition. and yet the turn to memory is in itself a symptom of its own decline: students of collective memory have long recognised that it is precisely when memory begins to lose its power and its salience in determining individual and communal daily life that it becomes necessary to consciously promote it, to concretise it in ritual and record, to revive or reinvent it through the construction of ‘traditions.’ on the political level, this ‘era of commemoration,’ this ‘memory boom’ in jay winter’s words (2006), has been characterised by the recovery and confident assertion of memory by groups and communities who oppose their counter-memories to the official narratives. the brassage of populations, as the inhabitants of former colonies migrate to the metropole to work, creates a focus for organisation in the heartland of the former oppressor; and the rise of the ideology of multiculturalism allows alternative voices to be heard. memories of once oppressed groups are marshalled in demand for financial compensation (damages, pensions), redistribution of political resources (representation in parliament; treaties), and symbolic recognition (apologies), and for their presence to be made visible and public (monuments; museums). the imminent end of communicative memory, as personal recollection of events such as the two world wars passes into ‘cultural memory’—representations that lack the immediacy of firsthand experience—has resulted in an unprecedented crescendo of contestation over the interpretation of the past and the content of the future cultural memory. for example, rechniewski’s article in this issue on the successful campaign to inaugurate a ‘battle for australia day’ illustrates the crucial inter-generational role of veterans’ organisations in seeking to ensure recognition of their role and perspective on world war ii. while far from espousing technological determinism, we can cite the role of technological advances, beginning with the invention of the compact audio-cassette recorder in the 1960s, which have made the collection and dissemination of data such as oral history much easier, and which today make it possible for groups to set up web sites as virtual lieux de mémoire for marginalised memories and that give a world-wide platform to interest groups and communities campaigning to have their memories heard: veterans, for example, who feel that a war or battle has been forgotten (the korean war) or misrepresented (the vietnam war). graves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 3 ‘take-off’ of the academic study of memory this ‘turn to memory’ has been paralleled in the academic field as memory studies has emerged over the past two decades as an interdisciplinary field in its own right, with specialist journals, conferences, research centres (the centre for the study of cultural memory at the university of london offers degree programs) and publications such as memory studies (from 2008) and the longer-established history and memory (from 1990). early work in this period on the topic of memory and commemoration often focused on the national scale. we could cite the example of benedict anderson, whose influential imagined communities (1983) focuses on the role of the state and nationwide institutions (vernacular print media, education, royalty, museums) in fostering remembrance and therefore national identity, albeit in a transcolonial or postcolonial context. another example is pierre nora (1984–1992), who is responsible for the notion of the nation-mémoire: this nation-memory is materialised in the lieux de mémoire, each site—place, object, event, or category—representing metonymically the whole of france. these and other studies—stretching back to émile durkheim and his notion of the conscience collective (1893), which applied to society as a whole and was the glue that bound it together—tend to assume a coherent ‘spread’ of collective memory across society that hegemonically fills up the national space and ends at its borders. more recently, however, there has been increasing awareness of the dangers involved in reifying the concept of collective memory, and of the need to recognise the fractured and conflictual nature of memory within and across state borders. critics of nora’s project, such as alon confino (1997), hue-tam ho tai (2001), and perry anderson (2004), condemned its focus on the nation-state and its suppression of countervailing voices—its ‘bureaucratic centralization’ in ho tai’s words (2001). in the context of globalisation and access to an ever-broadening range of media, as the ‘same’ events are constantly being represented and commented from different points of view, exposing the relativity of national perspectives and encouraging the comparative framework that should always have been present, ‘transnational’ and ‘transcultural’ have come to challenge the dominance of national viewpoints. there is an important and useful distinction to be made between transnational and transcultural. the term transnational can leave national boundaries intact; a transcultural approach refuses to acknowledge national boundaries and allows us to consider not only cultures that may transcend graves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 4 national borders, but those multiple and diverse subcultures that exist within them; it reminds us of the need to examine not only the suprabut the infra-national level.1 the european context of much recent academic research challenges the ‘ideal of national cultural integrity’: ‘transcultural diversity ha[s] by now become an integral aspect of the social landscape of europe’ (robins 2006: 276). moreover, developing study of cities and cosmopolitanism ‘provide better cognitive tools than nations for reimagining the new interdependencies and flows of contemporary societies’ (meinhof & triandafyllidou 2006: 13). such studies draw attention to the significance of influence between and across cultures, recently evoked in michael rothberg’s multidirectional memory (2009); they recognise the role of intermediaries, passeurs, who introduce and interpret acts and narratives of memory within the communities/cultures in which they hold power, authority or symbolic capital. the role of influence and imitation across cultures is recognised by andreas huyssen (2003) who has diagnosed a ‘globalization of traumatic memory discourses’ in which the tropes and rhetoric of the holocaust played an increasingly prominent role in different national and political contexts. researchers themselves are transcultural operators who interpret remembering cultures to themselves and others, and contribute to disseminating practices of remembrance across cultures. it is only very recently, however, that the term transcultural as been used in memory studies, as some researchers—notably astrid erll—have begun exploring an approach, a ‘specific research perspective,’ that recognises the ‘inherent transculturality of memory.’ in february 2010 erll gave an address to the conference on transcultural memory at goldsmiths college, in which she develops the idea of ‘travelling memory’ to represent ‘the incessant wanderings of content, forms and media of memory across linguistic and national boundaries’ (erll 2010). it is important, nonetheless, to avoid personifying memory: memory doesn’t travel, but people do, carrying and spreading memory. and if in the title to this article we use the expression ‘transcultural remembrance,’ it is because, as jay winter argues, the term ‘remembrance’ lays the emphasis on the act of remembering; it focuses on ‘specifying agency, on answering the 1 the extensive theoretical discussions since 1940 in other disciplines, notably latin american, latino and postcolonial studies, around the notion of ‘transculturation’ have as yet had little impact in the field of memory studies. we use the term in the limited sense defined here. for a detailed discussion of the term’s origins in latin american critical discourse and its subsequent applications, see allatson (2007: 229–32). graves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 5 question who remembers, when, where and how’ (2006: 3), and it draws attention to the actors involved in the production but also the dissemination and the reception of memory across and within national boundaries. if the production and consecration of memory by the state and civil institutions has been well studied in many countries, the problem of the dissemination and reception by different sections of the population has been much less so (and is less easy to study). it is increasingly clear that the responses to official commemoration and memorialism vary widely according to cultural difference, ethnic identification, generation, class and gender. we could cite as an example the differential response of women and men to the slaughter of world war i. unlike other studies in this area, joy damousi (1999) considers how mourning affected men and women in different ways, and analyses the gendered dimensions of grief and memory. these are not necessarily essential gender differences but cultural differences based on social position, socialisation and the historical tendency for women to be associated with, if not confined to, the private, domestic sphere, and men with the public. the collection of essays edited by sylvia paletschek and sylvia schraut (2008) provides other examples of how the social position of women in a range of cultures affects their memory practice. moreover, the ‘national orientation of public memory in connection wth the norms of the bourgeois gender-model’ (23) tends to militate against the participation of women in official forms of public remembering. can the difference between male and female remembering be represented as the distinction between the official and vernacular made by john bodnar (1992), the official ‘male’ remembering propagated by state and voluntary institutions, such as the returned and services league of australia (rsl), through public, organised, narrativised events; while female remembering is the vernacular, unofficial memory kept alive within the family and community sphere, often not finding expression in the larger arenas? cultural differences in remembering are also evident in eugen weber’s study of the peasants in late 19th century france (1976). weber revealed that the peasants simply did not recognise (or misinterpreted) the events and figures that memorialised the national unity so assiduously constructed by the middle classes and the elites these examples indicate the potential role of subcultures as the source of countermemories, opposing official narratives. however, it is important not to credit countergraves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 6 memories as being necessarily more ‘authentic’ than official narratives. calling for a new history in 1971, foucault ‘celebrated the transgressive aspects of counter memory as ‘liberating, divergent and marginal elements,’ but in later years ‘developed an analysis of power that explicitly argued against romanticising the margins as inherently liberatory’ (bal et al. 1999: 216). there are no spaces ‘outside power,’ and counter memories always exist in relation to the dominant paradigms they contest. they can, moreover, be taken over, absorbed into the mainstream in a dynamic process of reinterpretation, appropriation and recuperation. such is the power and spread of the national and international media today that few ‘(sub)cultural memories’ are untouched by national, transnational, and transcultural perspectives. the term transcultural draws attention finally to the intersection and confrontation of cultures. it opens new lines of inquiry into the ways in which memory sites and figures of memory may become the subject of a struggle for ‘ownership’ on the part of different groups, a struggle for ‘symbolic capital’ in bourdieu’s terms (1993), but a struggle that may also, as we have suggested, have financial and other implications. the articles in this issue illustrate the kinds of conflict that take place around the ownership of memories: who has the right and the means to impose their memories in wider arenas? what stories are they allowed to tell? what political ideologies and vested interests promote or oppose the re-examination of the past? as le goff writes: ‘memory is a stake in the power game’ (1992: 114). rechniewski’s article in this issue on the ‘battle for australia day’ illustrates how much can be at stake in conflicts over the right to remember the past, and the right way to remember the past; and the ways in which memory can be used as political strategy, to condemn political opponents as cowardly and incompetent, or to justify current policies, such as the war in iraq. judith keene’s article illustrates how cold war attitudes—crystallised in the film the manchurian candidate—have for so long dominated the remembrance of the korean war in the usa and elsewhere, despite the protests and campaigns for recognition by the war’s veterans. memory as praxis jeffrey ollick poses the question: ‘are individual memory, social and cultural frameworks and collective representations really separate things?’ and he answers in the negative, arguing for the need to reframe collective memory as a wide variety of graves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 7 mnemonic products and practices that define, stabilise through repetition and ritual, and instantiate individual and collective identities (2008: 158). to emphasise that collective memory is something we do rather than something we have, as ollick does, allows us to recalibrate the study of memory as a series of questions about agents and actions: who oversees the practices, who are the participants, what rites and rituals are observed, what stories are told? but whereas ollick describes memory as a ‘fluid negotiation between the desires of the present and the legacies of the past’ (2008: 159)—a pacific description—we would see it rather as a site of interaction, tension, even of conflict. timothy ashplant et al. (2004) distinguish three aspects of the struggle to articulate the memory of war, which we can extend to the study of memory more generally: narratives, arenas and agencies of articulation. narratives of articulation ‘refer to the shared formulations within which social actors couch their memories’—from hegemonic official narratives, through oppositional counter memories, to locally shared or individual accounts (16). such narratives often call on templates offered by existing national but also religious and political discourses, and increasingly by the discourse of human rights (69). arenas of articulation refer to ‘the socio-political spaces within which social actors advance claims for the recognition of specific [war] memories’ and for associated benefits. they range from networks of families or kinship groups, through communities of geography or interest (returned soldiers of a particular unit or battle), to the public sphere of nation states and transnational power blocs (17). agencies of articulation ‘refer to those institutions through which social actors seek to promote and secure recognition of their war memories’ (17)—they encompass the official bodies of the nation state, the organisations and movements of civil society and more informal localised face-to-face groupings. to these categories should be added ‘modes of articulation,’ the channels through which memories are revived, constructed and reconstructed: monuments and museums (including the virtual); cinema and television series and documentaries; fiction, song and poetry; mapping and graphic design; biographies and autobiographies; the writings of professional and amateur historians; and, increasingly nowadays, the internet and websites.2 judith keene’s article in this issue on the korean war, seen through the lens 2 the growing importance of the internet as a vector of memorialism is illustrated by the multiplication of virtual monuments, like the data bank compiled by the french ministry of defence’s service historique de la défense (shd) of soldiers who ‘died for france’ in world war i and the colonial wars of indochina, graves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 8 of cinema as ‘prosthetic memory,’ illustrates the manufacture of collective memory through film. channels influence not only the possibilities of dissemination, but the symbolic weight attached to the articulation of memory, in proportion to the prestige and authority attached to the mode of transmission. equally, agency to some extent conditions the modes of articulation: official agencies, such as departments for veterans’ affairs, are able to marshal audiovisual resources within the mainstream media that are inaccessible to small scale non-institutional associations. however, the emergence of new popular modes of articulation like the internet has arguably democratised the field of memory by enabling peripheral agencies to reach wider audiences. a fifth category of analysis concerns the anchoring of memory in material objects such as monuments and memorials, and topographical sites. the expression lieu de mémoire, as pierre nora uses it (1984–1992), covers a range of items, some material, others abstract—books, people, slogans. but the preservation of recollections rests, above all, on their anchorage in space, in what nuala johnson calls ‘the geographies of remembrance’ (2003), be they formative or framing (graves 2009), or what we would term ‘fields of memory.’ the objects that surround us, ‘natural’ and human-made, landscapes and architecture, battle-sites and monuments, even when modelled and exhibited as diorama (as in the galleries of the australian war memorial in canberra), are invested with the imprint of the human past: they become a field for recollection, a framework for rituals of remembrance. the very topography of the place, or the form of a monument, can become a metonymic representation of the event, imposing a context, channelling certain forms of remembering. moreover, once concretised in space, memorial places then acquire a life and significance of their own. matthew graves’s article in this issue on the monument to the assassination of the king of yugoslavia, alexander i, by croatian ‘terrorists’ during a state visit to marseilles in october 1934, offers a striking example of how unpredictably the social and political meanings of a monument can evolve as the historical context changes. in the pre-war period period, the national and regional memorial agencies came into conflict over the site, form and content of the ‘pax’ monument and who algeria, morocco and tunisia, which has recently been extended to include the fallen of world war ii, controversially including soldiers who served the vichy régime (wieder 2010: 2). graves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 9 should build it. political tensions in the popular front years reached such a pitch that the official inauguration was shelved, only to be confidentially expedited under the vichy administration. during world war ii, the monument became the focus for opposition to vichy by the marseilles resistance movement and a site of spontaneous popular protest, diverting its memorial meaning to hitherto unintended and unpredictable purposes. robert aldrich’s article in this issue also offers many examples of the diverse objects and places that, recently mobilised and constructed to recall empires past, have become sites of present, previously unimagined struggle: ‘monuments and museums act not only as sites of history but as venues for political agitation and forums for academic debate.’ they also provide architectural and design models, like maya lin ying’s vietnam veterans war memorial in washington dc (inaugurated in 1982), which, widely admired and imitated, has influenced memorial forms transculturally in fields far removed from the original commemorative context. memory and history the nature of the relationship between history and memory has been a major preoccupation of the era of commemoration. should we see them as one and the same, history as memory with pretensions to the universal, but just as biased, partial and incomplete as memory? and memory as ‘present history,’ just a decade or two short of critical mass? or can we draw a distinction between the warm subjectivity of memory, the immediacy of lived experience, of family and community tradition and the cold, dispassionate objectivity of the historian, the seeker after truth? while it is impossible here to retrace in detail the defences that history has erected against the ‘tidal surge’ of memory, it is important to acknowledge the changing nature of the role of the historian, now drawn into an uneasy relationship with the agents of memory. the association liberté pour l’histoire, founded by the late rené reymond in 2005 and chaired by pierre nora, is part of a broader movement among historians campaigning against the european-wide trend for governments (in france, spain and russia notably) to promote memory laws that may impinge upon the citizen’s freedom of thought and expression. liberté pour l’histoire (which has its own website) was the prime mover behind the 2008 blois appeal, which counts eric hobsbawm and public intellectuals like timothy garton ash among its signatories. its declared aim is ‘to put a stop to this movement toward laws aimed at controlling history memory’ (‘blois appeal’ 2008). comparing such legislation to the soviet practice of deciding which pasts were to be remembered, graves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 10 eric hobsbawm has opposed the historians’ freedom of conscience to the duty of remembrance by decree: ‘the past is not a matter of political compulsion’ (2008). pierre nora has said that the historian is now rivalled by the witness, the victim, the journalist, the judge, and the legislator, in the context of the increasing trend towards the valorisation of ‘survivor testimonies,’ the trials of war criminals, and the campaigns to acknowledge past wrongs (2008: 19). but if greater weight is now attached to the value of memory and testimony, historians are often still called upon to arbitrate, or to support one side or another: their advocacy is sought because they alone can grant the imprimatur of scientific validation. paradoxically, in the era of commemoration and the memory boom, when everyone’s memory is to count, the historian still plays a crucial role—one of legitimation, the ultimate recourse in the war over memory. ashplant et al. write: ‘arguably the historian has a place in the commemorative culture of late twentieth century as privileged as that of the war poet or monument designer in midcentury’ (2004: 49). in his survey of 1980 olivier mongin talks of the ‘consecration of the historian’ and suggests that historians have filled the void created by the disappearance of the intellectuel engagé (quoted in jackson 1999: 242). however, this privileged position is not, perhaps, an easy one to occupy, as the virulent so-called ‘history wars’ of recent years in australia indicate. and there are occasions when history and memory collide and cannot easily be reconciled. rechniewski’s account of the conflict over the ‘battle for australia day’ offers an illustration of the confrontation between memory and history: the wartime memories of the australian population are mobilised to support the argument that the threat of japanese invasion in the 1940s was real—the civilians, the residents of darwin, the sydneysiders who experienced an attack from a japanese submarine, perhaps the soldiers who fought along the kokoda track in what is now papua new guinea, believed the threat of imminent japanese invasion to be genuine. should their memories weigh as heavily in the balance of history as the clinical analyses of historians such as peter stanley who marshal arguments that contradict the remembered reality of this threat? lindi todd’s discussion of the south african truth and reconciliation commission (trc), in a paper given at the ‘histories of forgetting and remembering’ workshop held at the university of sydney in october 2008, reveals an inquiry uneasily poised between the historian’s task of representing the past accurately, the judge’s task of graves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 11 apportioning blame and guilt, and the psychologist’s task of bringing ‘closure,’ forgiveness, the ability to ‘move on.’ her paper also illustrated the problems that may result from transferring concepts from the individual to the collective level—thus a psychoanalytical concept: the ‘working through trauma through talk’ model of psychoanalysis was transferred to the level of the nation as a whole. but as molly andrews asks: ‘what correspondence, if any, is there between the healing of a nation and the healing of individuals who participate in truth commission mechanisms?’ (andrews 2007: 154). there is no unified national psyche that can heal itself. the trc proved no exception to marc ossiel’s conclusion that the ‘fashioning of national identity through the cultivation of collective memory is almost inevitably conflictual’ (1997: 255): whose memory is to be accredited, whose stifled? in the case of testimony to the trc, who is allowed to speak? and what stories are they allowed to tell? what censorship, self or external, is exercised? andrews suggests that only certain kinds of stories could be told, that the requirement was to identify villains and victims, rather than the shades of grey that inevitably characterise the actions of those caught up in situations of oppression of one group by another. devoir de mémoire, devoir d’oubli? the devoir de mémoire—the duty of remembrance—has provoked much discussion in france over the last few decades. the debate has been in part provoked by the role the french parliament has assumed—under governments of different political hues and with diverse agendas—in legislating for history: to penalise holocaust denial (loi gayssot, enacted in 1990) and the denial of the existence of the armenian genocide (enacted, 2001); to ensure that slavery would be recognised as a crime against humanity (loi taubira, enacted 2001) and even to recognise the benefits of colonisation (enacted, 2005), a law that was eventually vetoed by the president. but do we also have a devoir d’oubli, as marc augé suggests, so that the individual can live in the present (2001: 119–22), and so that the nation can be reconciled with itself (renan 1882), so that the individual, the community, the nation can forgive and move on? for ricœur, on this point, forgiveness and forgetting, and their relationship, constitute ‘the horizon of our entire investigation’ (2004: 412). graves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 12 to capture the processes of forgetting is highly problematic, however, for forgetting is the silent, unacknowledged partner of remembering. the south african truth and reconciliation commission is a rare example of the overt setting-in-place of processes designed to encourage forgetting and forgiveness. rarely can the evidence be found of the texts that command forgetting: official narratives overwrite private memories without acknowledging them; monuments and memorials are built over earlier sites of memory; new school curricula focus on one area and neglect another. robert aldrich’s article in this issue is all the more interesting, therefore, for the examples he gives of the attempts by colonial states after world war ii to erase the representations, close the institutions, and mothball the artefacts that were evidence of their colonial pasts. that process continues today. thus, to name one example from france, the vast anthropological collections of the museum of the arts of africa and oceania and the museum of man—gathered under the aegis of colonial france—were relocated in 2006 to the new musée du quai branly: ‘relooké’ as the french say.3 return of the national? the focus of academic study on remembering may have shifted in recent years to include the transnational and transcultural levels, but while the arena of public remembering remains so heavily invested by the state and national organisations— indeed the intensification of memorial activity at the national level seems to be characteristic of the contemporary world—much research remains to be done on the agents of memory at work in the national domain who control access to the resources, channels, and arenas of memory. there is a need for more research into these gatekeepers of memory, the powerful institutions at regional, national and supranational level—city councils, ministries, national and international media, veterans’ organisations; as well as of the interaction and conflict between these institutions and interests—in order to better understand the agendas of remembering and forgetting. matthew graves’s account in this issue of the political struggle between the paris and marseilles authorities over the right to build the pax memorial is a case in point. for australia we can cite the key role played by gatekeepers of memory, such as the australian war memorial, the federal and state departments of veterans’ affairs and 3 as the museum’s website states: ‘le musée du quai branly ... permet de consulter l’ensemble de sa collection d’objets, soit 267 417 objets. 236 509 objets proviennent du laboratoire d’ethnologie du musée de l’homme et 22 740 de l’ancien musée national des arts d’afrique et d’océanie’ (‘le musée du quai branly 2005). graves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 13 education, the teachers’ unions, and the rsl. the current debate over the proposed national history curriculum for high-school students promises to reveal much about the current balance of forces in the arena of memory in australia. as we write these lines, australia is commemorating anzac day with the heightened media coverage and official sanction that have come to characterise the present era of commemoration. at the same time, a new skirmish in the so-called ‘history wars’ in australia has been provoked by two publications: zombie myths of australian military history (stockings 2010), which includes a chapter by peter stanley once more seeking to debunk the ‘myth’ of japanese invasion; and marilyn lake and henry reynolds’ edited what’s wrong with anzac? (2010), which inspired a virulent denunciation from mervyn bendle in the april 2010 issue of quadrant. meanwhile, in france the screening of rachid bouchareb’s hors-la-loi at the 2010 cannes film festival in the wake of the anniversary of the setif massacres of 8 may 1945 has revived francoalgerian tensions over the commemoration of the victims of colonial repression and prompted an impassioned debate about the very possibility of reconciling the agents of a shared, but contested, past to the ideal of a common history (‘cinquante ans après’ 2010: 8–9). these often acrimonious confrontations demonstrate just how much is at stake in conflicting narratives of national history; memory, history and individual and collective identity are inseparably bound together. as ricœur writes: ‘the narrative configuration contributes to modelling the identity of the protagonists of the action as it moulds the contours of the action itself’ (2004: 85). reference list allatson, p. 2007, latino/a cultural and literary studies. blackwell, malden ma & oxford. anderson, b. 1983, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. verso, london. anderson, p. 2004, ‘union sucrée,’ london review of books, vol. 26, no. 18 (23 september), 10–16. andrews, m. 2007, ‘south africa: told and untold stories,’ in shaping history: narratives of political change. cambridge university press, cambridge, 148–76. ashplant, t., dawson, g. & roper, m. 2004, ‘the politics of war memory and commemoration: contexts, structures and dynamics,’ in the politics of memory: commemorating war, (eds) t. ashplant, g. dawson & m. roper. transaction publishers, london, 3–85. augé, m. 1995, non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. verso, london & new york. _____ 2001, les formes de l’oubli. edns payot et rivages, paris. bal, m., crewe, j. v. & spitzer, l. 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(eds) 2010, what’s wrong with anzac? the militarisation of australian history. new south books, sydney. le goff, j. 1992, history and memory. trans s. rendall & e. claman. columbia university press, new york. liberté pour l’histoire website. 2005, online, available: http://www.lph-asso.fr/index.php?option=com_ content&view=category&layout=blog&id=1&itemid=5&lang=en [accessed 26 april 2009]. meinhof, u. & triandafyllidou, a. (eds). 2006, trans-cultural europe: cultural policy in a changing europe. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, england, & new york. le musée du quai branly website. 2005, online, available: http://www.quaibranly.fr [accessed 26 april 2009]. nora, p. 1984–1992, les lieux de mémoire. gallimard (bibliothèque illustrée des histoires), paris, 3 tomes : t. 1 la république (1 vol., 1984), t. 2 la nation (3 vol., 1986), t. 3 les france (3 vol., 1992). nora, p. & lanzmann, c. 2008, interviewed by jacques julliard, ‘pourquoi légiférer sur l’histoire,’ le nouvel observateur, 9-15 octobre, 16–19. ollick, j. k. 2008, ‘from collective memory to the sociology of mnemonic practices and products,’ in cultural memory studies: an international and interdisciplinary handbook, (eds) a. erll & a. nünning. walter de guyter, berlin & new york, 151–62. ossiel, m. 1997, mass atrocity, collective memory and the law. transaction publishers, new brunswick, nj. paletschek, s. & schraut, s., 2008, the gender of memory: cultures of remembrance in nineteenth and twentieth century europe. campusverlag, frankfurt & new york. renan, e. 1882, ‘qu’est-ce qu’une nation,’ lecture delivered at the sorbonne, 11 mars. reproduced in oeuvres complètes de ernest renan, (ed.) henriette psichari. vol. 1. paris, calmann-lévy, 887– 907. ricœur, p. 2004, memory, history, forgetting. translated by k. blamey & d. pellauer. university of graves & rechniewski from collective memory portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 15 chicago press, chicago. robins, k. 2006, ‘a cultural policy for european cosmopolitanism,’ in trans-cultural europe: cultural policy in a changing europe, (eds) u. meinhof & a. triandafyllidou. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, uk, & new york, 254–83. rothberg, m. 2009, multidirectional memory: remembering the holocaust in the age of decolonization. stanford university press, stanford. service historique de la défense. 2010, ‘mémoire des hommes.’ ministère de la défense, france, website. online, available: http://www.memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr/index.php [accessed 20 may 2010]. stockings, c. (ed.) 2010, zombie myths of australian military history. university of new south wales press, sydney. todd, l. r. 2007, ‘collective responsibility and the politics of social remembering in post-apartheid south africa,’ paper delivered at the ‘histories of forgetting and remembering’ workshop hosted by the transforming cultures research centre, university of technology sydney, and the faculty of arts, university of sydney, held at university of sydney, 27 october. weber, e. 1976, peasants into frenchmen: the modernization of rural france, 1880–1914. stanford university press, stanford. wieder, t. 2010, ‘un monument aux morts virtuel pour 39–45,’ le monde, 20 mai, 2. winter, j. 2006, remembering war: the great war between memory and history in the twentieth century. yale university press, new haven & london. exile: rupture and continuity in jean vanmai's chan dang and fils de chan dang portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 1 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ exile: rupture and continuity in jean vanmai’s chan dang and fils de chan dang tess do, university of melbourne, australia unlike the hundreds of thousands of vietnamese refugees who have settled in many western countries, most of them having fled their country to avoid persecution after the communist take-over in 1975, the few thousand vietnamese migrants who live in new caledonia today did not leave their homeland for political reasons. most of them left as voluntary workers in the 1920s and 1930s when vietnam was still a french colony, and signed a five-year contract with the french ministry of indigenous affairs, which recruited them for the mining companies and landowners of new caledonia. others were descendants of previous generations of miners who came in the 1890s. legally speaking, these workers were not living in exile as, according to the terms of their contract, they would be repatriated after five years and have their return organised and paid for by the french government. two factors, however, turned their temporary stay in new caledonia into a long period of exile during which an expatriate community emerged and established itself in the new country. the first factor was a combination of geographical and cultural displacement, social isolation and exclusion from public life in new caledonia, and mistreatment and exploitation in the workplace that made them feel that their human rights and dignity had been violated. the second factor was a combination of unpredictable political events that put a halt to their repatriation: the outbreak of the second world war, the french defeat at dien bien phu in 1954, the decolonisation of indochina, and american military involvement in vietnam. for those young vietnamese who left their villages do exile: rupture and community in the thirties, hoping to return five years later with enough savings to help their family and start a new life, exile was experienced as a particularly trying and painful period of change, rupture and separation. because of the war in vietnam contact with loved ones back home was lost, husbands and wives suffered decades of separation, and marriages were threatened by infidelity and betrayal. in the new country family and traditions are broken and new caledonia-born children grew up culturally uprooted. against this historical backdrop new caledonian-born writer jean vanmai chooses to describe the life and working conditions of the chan dang, the voluntary workers from tonkin (north vietnam), in his first two novels, chan dang (1980) and fils de chan dang (1984). descended from a chan dang family, vanmai wishes to preserve the memory of the chan dang’s past. in his “récit de vie” [life story], he points out that the repatriation of the majority of the chan dang in the 1960s prompted him to take up writing: … je pense qu’il faudrait bien que quelqu’un de chez nous se décide, un jour ou l’autre, à écrire l’épopée des vietnamiens en nouvelle-calédonie. il est inconcevable de laisser disparaître cette période dure, pénible, difficile, vécue par tous ces gens, sans laisser la moindre trace écrite. (2004, 82) [i think that one of us must decide, one day or another, to write the epic tale of the vietnamese in new caledonia. it is inconceivable to let this hard, painful and difficult period that was lived by all these people disappear without any written trace.] in writing their story, vanmai, who has not joined his compatriots in leaving new caledonia, sees himself as the guardian of the chan dang’s collective memory, a keeper and defender of their common past. his courageous act not only breaks the silence that envelops this difficult colonial period, but it also allows the younger generations of vietnamese in new caledonia to reconnect with their parents’ and grandparents’ past, their country of origin, and to be proud of their cultural legacy. it is not a coincidence that for vanmai, his foremost and dearest reader is his own daughter. he said in an interview that i conducted with him in december 2003 that he wrote all his books for her, and that she was a passionate reader and a good critic. in the 1960s when, as a young man, vanmai started collecting documents and interviewing the old chan dang about their personal experiences as “coolies,” he encountered significant resistance from his own people who preferred to forget such a portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 do exile: rupture and community shameful past. while memory is central to the exilic experience, memory can be painful; thus, vanmai’s act of resurrection of the past is not an easy task. not only does he risk hurting the chan dang, but he is also in danger of offending the french caledonian community by exposing the colons’ cruel exploitation of the vietnamese workers. even twenty years later, in 1980, when chan dang was published and when the descendants of the migrant workers were well integrated in new caledonian society, it was still very delicate to publicly touch upon such a controversial and sensitive topic that could open old wounds and rekindle old conflicts among members of both the vietnamese and the french sides. functioning as a detention camp for convicts and prisoners condemned to hard labour by the french government, and as a land of exile for foreign workers from indochina, java and japan who came after the closure of the hard labour camps in 1896, new caledonia’s early history of violence, exploitation and poverty was far from glorious. this shameful history includes the war between france and vietnam, and the retreat of the french after their defeat at dien bien phu that later fuelled the anti-vietnamese movement in new caledonia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, thus prompting the repatriation of most vietnamese people on the island. such events probably provided the main reasons for vanmai’s decision to recall the past in a fictional way rather than in the form of a documentary or memoir. while a memoirist involves him or herself and real people in the narration, possibly stirring up raw emotions, the novelist creates plots and characters, shielding him or herself and others from direct connection to reality. yet vanmai is also aware of the need to present his fiction as an authentic and accurate piece of evidence of the past, a witness’s account that is to be taken seriously and accepted by the wide new caledonian public as part of their common history, a shared past that no one should be ashamed of. it is significant to find that, on its back cover, chan dang is introduced in bold capitals as “un roman, mais aussi un document historique, et un temoignage social” [a novel, but also a historical document, a social account]. according to gérard genette in seuils, this introduction is called a paratext; it surrounds the narrative text and influences the way the reader approaches the novel. in this case, both the fictional and documentary aspects of chan dang are emphasised. thus, to read vanmai’s chan dang and fils de chan dang solely as historical documents and to focus on the authenticity of their portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 do exile: rupture and community related events (as did george pisier in his foreword to chan dang) is to ignore the carefully constructed narrative plot and to reduce the characters into types. indeed, in pisier’s reductive reading, all chan dang are lumped together as a bunch of poor and hungry tonkinese “coolies” who migrate to new caledonia, motivated by greed and material wealth. the ambiguity of vanmai’s books, written on the one hand as a fiction, documented on the other hand by personal photos as a memoir, reveals the difficult position of this vietnamese-caledonian author vis-à-vis his audience. in spite of the overall message of chan dang humanity, harmony and reconciliation, this book has not been well received by the french caledonian community. without any doubt vanmai’s bleak and disturbing description of the chan dang’s inhuman exploitation at the hands of their french foremen upsets “la bonne société de nouméa [qui] continua de bouder l’auteur jusqu’à ce qu’il commette des histoires de plus en plus édulcorées et aseptisées” [the good society of noumea [who] continued to keep away from the author until he toned down and produced more and more sterilised stories] (1992, 57). although many readers, themselves descendants of foremen, received the book with enthusiasm and agreed that “les évènements relatés à travers les 387 pages du livre étaient encore en dessous de la vérité” [the events related through the 387 pages of the book were understated] as vanmai has quoted in his “récit de vie”, the reviewer george pisier shows a much more reserved attitude toward chan dang, winner of the prix de l’asie awarded by the association des ecrivains de langue française (association of writers of french language) in paris in 1980. in his foreword to the novel, pisier tries his best to defend french colonial policy and practice. he puts part of the blame on the chan dang themselves, who he describes as “frondeurs et violents, et qui paraissaient hypocrites” [anti-authoritarian and violent, and seemingly hypocritical], and emphasises the extreme poverty of these “coolies”, their determination to get rich at any price, and their desperate need and willingness to apply for work in new caledonia. poverty and greed, as hinted by pisier in his foreword, were the main motives behind the vietnamese workers’ migration. thus, he asserts, the wealth they succeeded in accumulating and in taking back home to vietnam after so many years in new caledonia could be considered to be a fair compensation for their mistreatment: portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 do exile: rupture and community les partants emportèrent des tonnes de biens mobiliers et de grosses sommes d’argent. (…) la valeur des biens rapatriés [fut estimée] à 20 millions de francs. (…) le moins que l’on puisse dire est que si ces gens souffrirent sur mines ils profitèrent au delà de leurs espérances de leur passage en calédonie. (n.p.) [those who left took with them tons of furniture goods and large sums of money. (…) the total value of the repatriated goods [was estimated] at 20 millions francs. (…) the least one can say is that if these people suffered on the mines, they have profited beyond their expectations from their time in new caledonia.] according to pisier’s argument, any feeling of guilt from the french side should be wiped out and the french government could comfortably wash its hands of any responsibility for the exploitation of the vietnamese workers. the interest of this paper is not so much to prove whether pisier’s argument about greed and gain is right or wrong, or whether the related accounts of the foremen’s cruelty are accurate. it is much more relevant to the understanding of vanmai’s novels to treat them as texts and fiction. this textual approach allows us to carefully examine vanmai’s narrative, his construction of the vietnamese characters and his elaboration of the plot. how does he portray his compatriots and the chan dang, of whom he is a direct descendant? how does he construct their life in exile and present their social and cultural integration? what endings does he reserve for his protagonists and what interpretation can be drawn from such endings? this paper aims to answer these questions by offering a reading of chan dang and fils de chan dang in their historico-cultural context and by examining vanmai’s point of view on exile and change, guilt and betrayal. for the young vietnamese peasants from tonkin who had probably never set foot outside their own villages, the exhausting two-week voyage by sea to an unknown land – new caledonia – and an unknown future constituted the first painful condition of exile: separation from loved ones and the loss of a familiar environment. the prospect of spending five long years away from their family did nothing to boost the chan dang’s morale, who realised the full meaning of their expatriation as soon as they set foot in new caledonia. stuck on an island thousands of miles away from their country, surrounded by unfamiliar landscapes, trapped by their contract, defenceless in the hands of their employers, and denied means of escape, the chan dang had little to relieve the overwhelming sense of dispossession, weariness and portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 do exile: rupture and community despair. even the striking beauty of the new caledonian landscape with its sparkling blue lagoons, its white sandy beaches, and its green mountains, could not dispel their disheartening feeling of displacement. these peasants were used to working in rice fields and living in the country: now they were confined to labouring in underground mines and living in the mountains. under the cracking whips of their foremen they were constantly reminded that they were slave-workers, not tourists, and even if their work had brought them to some paradise beach, they were unable to enjoy the scenic seascape. as strangers, they did not have the same knowledge about the land as the locals and had no warning about the dangers that they might encounter in their new environment. in the eyes of the foreign migrant workers, the beautiful landscape could turn into a deadly trap for those who did not belong there. out of ignorance, the newly arrived chan dang did not know, for example, that some lagoons were infested with stingrays and sharks, that sea snakes came up to shore at night to nest on the beach, and that the red ants’ stink could be fatal. such incidents are chronicled by vanmai: one young boy who went swimming was stung by a large stingray and narrowly escaped a shark attack; many chan dang who slept on the beach were bitten by sea snakes; a baby left under a tree while his parents were working nearby was later found dead, killed by red ants. by recalling these incidents in his book, vanmai conveys the chan dang’s feeling of exile, vulnerability and estrangement in a foreign country, and their lack of connection to the land, thus underlining the strong bond the exiles kept with their homeland. for vanmai’s characters, the homeland is where they feel welcome and connected. this strong sense of belonging and connection transcends attachment to the new caledonian place of birth as seen in the example of hong in fils de chan dang. although he was born and raised in new caledonia, hong always knows where his roots are and immediately feels at home the moment he sets foot in vietnam. besides the unfamiliarity of the environment and the dangerous fauna, another direct consequence of exile that can be considered a form of hostility endured by the chan dang was their cruel exploitation at the hands of french foremen and employers. the migrant workers’ rights to dignity and respect were largely ignored. in spite of their legal worker status, the chan dang were treated no better than the “bagnards”, or convicts, whom they replace in many instances. as isabelle merle explains, the portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 do exile: rupture and community vietnamese workers rather than the kanaks became the real successors of the convicts: the rules and regulations described in the order in 1895 are so similar to the ones that have been applied to the convicts in the penal colony. if we set aside the question of voluntary work and that of the workers’ repatriation, we have to underline the parallelism between the workers’ conditions and that of the convicts who were recruited by the colonial government or who were employed in the mines. so, in an amazing continuity new caledonia substitutes the convicts with the immigrant workers who were submitted to the same conditions of hard labour (1995, 316). the (slave) worker status of the vietnamese was compounded by their status as a colonised people. merle adds that because they came from a french colony (indochina), vietnamese workers were treated as an indigenous people and not awarded the same respect as “real” foreign workers such as the japanese. restrictions on the chan dang which included bans on alcohol, on leaving camp, or on entering any european centres after eight o’clock in the evening, were not applied to the japanese workers (merle 1995, 318). this different treatment was a clear indication that the vietnamese were treated as colonised people and exiles rather than free foreign workers. furthermore, the chan dang had little idea, upon signing their contracts, of the many indignities and losses they would suffer in new caledonia, one of which was the dispossession of their personal names. claiming that vietnamese names were either “trop longs ou trop compliqués” [too long and complicated] (vanmai 1980, 25) or simply impossible to pronounce (a reason put forward by pisier), the french colonial administration in new caledonia reserved the right to replace the name and surname of each worker with a “numéro d’immatriculation” [an identification number], a practice that was still applied in 1953 according to louis-josé barbançon (35). with the loss of their freedom, then their names, the chan dang felt increasingly deprived. after receiving his new identification number, 3141, ming, a young migrant worker from hanoi bitterly wonders: “chacun de nous a perdu son nom, sa personnalité. que nous reste-il donc?” [each of us has lost his or her name, his or her personality. what is left to us then?] (vanmai 1980, 63). ming’s question is a poignant reminder of how, in a symbolical sense, the migrant worker’s body was colonised. sold to the colonial employers who could beat, starve and even kill it, the body no longer belonged to the portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 do exile: rupture and community migrant, in the same way that colonised countries no longer belong to their indigenous inhabitants. during the colonial period, vietnam, for example, was divided into three separate regions: tonkin in the north, annam in the centre, and cochinchine in the south. together with laos and cambodia, the three vietnamese regions constituted for the french a larger colonial entity, indochina, the land situated between india and the china sea. vietnamese people from these regions were thus called tonkinese, annamese, cochichinese, or simply indochinese. indeed, the parallels between the colonised land and the colonised body point to the deep feeling of estrangement and exile experienced by ming and his friends not only in new caledonia, but also back home in indochina. a consequence of colonisation, this double exile becomes a vicious trap from which no colonised people could escape. as phuc, an older chan dang says in chan dang: aurions-nous plus de bonheur, plus de liberté en ce moment dans notre propre pays? sous le régime actuel? (…) non! car si tout était parfait chez nous, aurions-nous été contraints de nous expatrier ainsi ? au bout du monde! (1980, 105). [would we have more happiness, more freedom at this very moment in our country? under the current regime? no, because if everything was perfect in our country, would we be forced to expatriate like this? to the other side of the world.] in this sense, the chan dang’s double exile will only end with decolonisation. it is no coincidence, then, that many chan dang waited impatiently for the day when they could really go home: the day peace is restored and their country ceased being a french colony. unfortunately, for some of vanmai’s characters like phuc or toan, that day comes too late. face with his friend’s death that abruptly ends the latter’s hope of going back home, ming laments: mon pauvre phuc, mon ami! tu ne reverras plus jamais notre pays, toi non plus!… toi qui voulais tant confier ton corps, au dernier jour de ta vie, à la terre de ton village natal!… tu as combattu avec acharnement pour atteindre ce but… le jour de la victoire, de ta victoire, est enfin arrivé et tu t’en vas, nous laissant le bénéfice de ton combat! (vanmai 1980, 371) [my poor phuc, my friend! you will never see our country again, either!… you who wanted so much to confide your body and the rest of your life to the land of your home village!… you have fought relentlessly for this goal… now that the day of victory, your victory, has finally come, you go away, leaving us with the benefit of your battle.] portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 do exile: rupture and community besides the geographical displacement of the migrant workers and the indignity they suffered at the hands of their employers, the social isolation they encountered during their contract constituted another sad condition of exile. upon arrival, the chan dang were taken to an isolated camp in the mountains and lumped together in crowded dormitories and wooden huts, away from both kanak and european communities. normal social contact with the locals was almost impossible, as the law forbade the workers to wander outside their camp after dark. between the chan dang and the french employers who lived in “ces belles maisons (…) entourées de jardins bien entretenus” [these beautiful houses surrounded by well-kept gardens] (vanmai 1980, 57) there was a world of difference. on the one hand, the migrants’ working contracts bound them to a master-slave relationship with their foremen. on the other hand, the language barrier stopped them from reaching out to others, such as the kanak, the javanese or the japanese communities. as a consequence of their isolation, their limited mobility, and their language difficulties, the chan dang were cut off from the rest of the new caledonian society. this situation led to further withdrawal and isolation, the only social contact available to the chan dang being with people from their own community. this dependence on one’s ethnic group bred misunderstanding and suspicion between the vietnamese workers and the other communities who, as pisier argues, saw them as sly and untrustworthy. it also created difficulties within the vietnamese community itself, among the most obvious being questions of change and adaptation, and even resistance. with a population of a few thousand workers and a ratio of one woman to five men, the chan dang did not belong to a colony of settlement, let alone a traditional vietnamese settlement. at least in the early stage of their exile, they were unable to reproduce the extended social and family structures of the homeland, whereby each individual was supported by strong ties of kinship and a strong sense of belonging. young men and women were expected to marry and have children, while still living under the same roof as their parents or grandparents. in new caledonia, where the migrant population was mostly male, many single men were unable to marry due to the shortage of women. those few lucky enough to find a wife did not have the moral support of parents or extended family. as described in vanmai’s books, some of the workers who had to live alone suffered serious depression, became portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 do exile: rupture and community alcoholic or turned violent. others were tempted to have affairs with other men’s wives while others looked for relationships with non-vietnamese women. the exiled chan dang faced serious disruptions to their traditional family life and, in order to survive prolonged exile in new caledonia, were forced to make changes that would allow them to adapt to their new life. although exile gives them the excuse to break away from their traditions and principles, not all changes lead to successful integration or a happy outcome, as we can see later with tuyen in fils de chan dang. by reserving a sad ending for tuyen’s life and a happy one for his friend hong, vanmai appears to emphasise clearly which vietnamese ancestral moral values and traditions he believes should be preserved under any circumstances: ancestor worship and filial devotion head his list. according to this perspective, exile is ambivalent, a situation that both encourages and discourages change. when exile promotes resistance to change, it becomes a moral testing ground for the protagonists. away from the homeland, exposed to new values and principles, vanmai’s exile moral struggles and achievements are measured and judged against their acts of filial devotion. in vanmai’s books the chan dang’s moral test starts before they actually set foot in new caledonia. if we analyse their motive for exile, filial devotion is precisely the underlying factor behind the chan dang’s decision to leave vietnam for new caledonia. derived from ancestor worship, filial devotion has been one of the fundamental vietnamese moral codes and corner stones of vietnamese society. generally speaking, filial devotion consists of several duties a son or daughter must fulfil during his or her parents’ lifetime, as well as after their death. the most common duties are showing care, respect, gratitude, and obedience towards one’s parents. a son or daughter is therefore indebted to his or her parents since without them and their gift of life, he or she would not be here. this gratitude also extends to grandparents and ancestors. according to vietnamese moral standards, a good person is first of all a dutiful son or daughter, and anyone lacking in filial devotion will be severely criticised and condemned by society. in other words, filial devotion is a means to judge and evaluate a person according to the way he or she lives, thinks and acts. in exile in particular, where a person is constantly exposed to other cultures, and therefore to different moral values and changes, failing one’s filial duty can be portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 do exile: rupture and community interpreted as an act of betrayal. it follows that the undutiful son or daughter can be considered a betrayer, not only of his or her parents and family, but also of his or her ancestors and origins. thus, in the face of the multiple adversities presented by exile, vanmai’s protagonists are divided into two groups: those who live by the traditional moral code of ancestor worship and filial devotion, and those who do not. to overlook this vietnamese fundamental moral code and suggest, as pisier does, that the poor tonkinese peasants were motivated by the idea of going abroad to get rich, hence their willingness to endure hard living and working conditions, is to ignore the key factor behind the chan dang’s expatriation. for a people who lay great importance on keeping face, abandoning one’s home to search elsewhere for food is considered a final and shameful resort precisely because it can be interpreted as a public declaration of one’s poverty. “tha phuong cau thuc,” to wander to a foreign land praying for food, as a vietnamese saying goes, means just that. given this attitude toward economic migration, the pain of separation and the undignified treatment of the migrant workers, we need to look beyond the greed and gain motives, and find out what alleviated the suffering of the chan dang. vanmai’s novelistic descriptions of the vietnamese workers clearly show that, even in their darkest moments, the exiles were most happy not when making a lot of money for themselves, but when they could send this money home to help their parents and the family they left behind. as the narrative outcomes of several characters reveal, filial devotion is evidently a major driving force behind the chan dang’s efforts and perseverance in a new setting. if lien, a young migrant worker whose separation from her lover thang nearly makes her go insane with pain, does not resort to suicide, it is because her friend lan has reminded her about her filial duty: no matter what happens, she must live and work hard to take care of her parents. lan, the eldest daughter of a poor peasant family, also places her family interest above her own and readily sacrifices her personal comfort for her parents and siblings. hoping that her wages would provide for her loved ones more adequately than if she stayed at home, lan decides to go to new caledonia. her unconditional love for her parents and younger siblings, and her unwavering determination to fulfil her duty towards them, give lan the strength to suffer in silence numerous humiliations, including verbal and portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 do exile: rupture and community physical abuse, erroneous accusations of theft, and sexual assault. her sacrifices and selfless use of money not only make her a dutiful daughter; they also guard her against temptation and moral corruption, two evils associated with exile, especially when the poverty-stricken migrant is exposed to wealth and luxury. courted by many men much richer than her penniless boyfriend ming, lan flatly rejects them all, although she knows that marrying somebody like ngach will immediately guarantee her a wealthy life. her seemingly contradictory attitude toward money (on the one hand she needs money to send home; on the other hand, she refuses the opportunity to have more of it by marrying ngach) clearly proves that in spite of her poverty, greed and material gain neither motivate her to go to new caledonia nor guide the moral principles by which she wants to live her life. with his descriptions of this highly righteous and self-respected chan dang, vanmai shows us a different aspect of filial devotion that goes beyond sending money home or taking care of ageing parents. in lan’s case, by upholding her moral principles and dignity, by being true to herself and faithful to her principles, and by preserving her purity, she honours her parents and the family name. with the protagonist ming, vanmai presents us with another aspect of filial devotion. the only of son of a wealthy family, ming does not migrate out of need. his parents do not expect him to prove that he is a dutiful son by helping them financially or by taking care of them (at least not when he is still living with them). what they ask of him is obedience, one of the key filial duties. but this duty is something that ming cannot and will not give them, since it would require him to marry a woman not of his choosing. as mentioned earlier, he prefers to leave home (which causes great grief and pain to his parents) rather than sacrifice his life and personal happiness to please them. in disobeying and disappointing his parents, and placing his own interest above theirs, ming appears at first sight to be an undutiful son, the opposite of his wife lan or her friend lien. however, as the story unfolds, ming expresses his filial devotion on more than one occasion, and finally makes amends for his initial disobedience. shame is the first sign of his repentance: he is never proud of or happy about having left his parents in such an undignified way. although he refuses to accept his father’s decision to marry him off against his will, ming never really blames anyone, only the portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 do exile: rupture and community obsolete tradition of arranged marriage. as soon as he learns that his father has fallen seriously ill because of him, he is overwhelmed with guilt and distress. after shame, his sense of guilt provides his second step towards redemption. when his own new caledonian-born son, hong, refuses to return to vietnam with ming and his wife, and runs away on the day of departure to stay with his (french) girlfriend, ming feels the same pain, anger, and despair that his father felt twenty years earlier when he left home. through his suffering, ming is able to reconnect with his father, and his life comes full circle. by coming home after a twenty-year stay in new caledonia, ming fulfils his parents’ last and most fervent wish and takes the final step towards redeeming himself in their eyes. his return liberates him from the burden of guilt that haunts him for having run away behind his parents’ back “comme un voleur, comme un fils indigne” [like a thief, like an unworthy son] (vanmai 1980, 65). thus, the renewal of filial devotion now largely makes up for his past disobedience. he has proven to be, after all, a good and loyal son and, now a father himself, he now expects that hong, a son he raises dutifully for many years, will not run away from his roots or forget his filial duty toward his parents. “il viendra nous voir un jour… j’en suis sûr. c’est un bon garçon” [he will come to visit us one day… i am sure of it. he is a good boy] (vanmai 1980, 385), ming assures his devastated wife on their day of departure from new caledonia, a statement that confirms like father like son. of the second generation of the chan dang migrants, hong is the only one of vanmai’s protagonists who pushes through the complicated paperwork and bureaucracy to make the journey home as soon as the vietnam war comes to an end; he is the only chan dong who answers immediately his mother’s urgent call. although vietnam is not his birth country, hong’s deep love for his parents extends to their homeland, a land he has never seen but to which he already feels a strong emotional attachment. it is the place where his parents were born and where they will die, like so many generations before them. through his parents, through the family line, hong traces his roots back to his vietnamese ancestors and is proud to reclaim his place as one of their descendants. his earlier refusal to go home with his parents, his marriage to a non-vietnamese woman, and his western life in new caledonia, do not mean he has changed and betrayed his origins or become an undutiful son. he does not forget or deny his past. far from hindering his integration into new portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 do exile: rupture and community caledonian society, hong’s recognition of his cultural and ethnic origins enables him to live harmoniously and happily with his french wife and his mixed-race children. he is, after all, a “good boy”, like his father before him. his conscience remains unburdened by guilt because he does not emotionally abandon his parents when he decides to live in new caledonia. in vanmai’s eyes, hong thus represents the good son who manages to fulfil his filial duty towards his father and his ancestors while at the same time constructing a new happy life for himself and his family in his birth country. it is evident that hong’s success is not based on wealth or social status (he is an ordinary employee in a commercial industry) but rather on his willingness to preserve the vietnamese tradition of ancestor worship and filial devotion. in this light, hong is not only worthy of the family name he carries, a name given to him by his father that he, in turn, proudly passes on to his children (he has a son), but also of the title given by vanmai to his second book: son of chan dang. for hong and ming, the fulfilment of filial duty is the key to their happiness and success in new caledonia, a means to counter the disruption and loss that are closely associated with exile. in their friend tuyen’s case, cultural assimilation does not reflect a personal achievement and his interracial marriage is not the happy outcome of a successful integration. as vanmai seems to tell us throughout fils de chan dang, neglecting one’s filial duty and failing to maintain one’s cultural and moral integrity in the face of change, as did the protagonist tuyen, inevitably leads to a tragic ending. compared to the other chan dang such as ming, hong, lan and lien, tuyen’s greatest sin is his greed and his refusal to return to his homeland. when the opportunity for repatriation presents itself, tuyen decides to stay longer in new caledonia with the aim of making more money, instead of going back to vietnam with his family: his wife, their two young children and his old parents. the desire to make “more” money and the decision to let money stand in the way of the return home creates feelings of guilt in both tuyen and his wife hoa. deep down, they both know they are making a mistake and that one day they will have to bear the consequences. on the ship that takes her back to vietnam without her husband, hoa is sick with worry and keeps wondering “si leur separation n’était pas en fin de compte une folie? oui, folie que de se laisser séduire par la perspective de gagner un peu d’argent” [whether their separation was not simply foolish? yes, it is foolish to let portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 14 do exile: rupture and community oneself be seduced by the prospect of earning a little more money] (1983, 31). separated from his family, tuyen for his part feels “terriblement coupable et fautif envers les siens” [terribly guilty toward his loved ones] (vanmai 1983, 34). however, unlike ming, his guilt does not compel him to return to his home country and does not stop him later on from betraying his wife. tuyen relies on money to ease his mind and, consequently, is caught in a vicious circle of greed and need, in which he has to accept risky business ventures and investments in order to catch up financially. by letting material gain become the driving force in his life, tuyen loses what is most important to an exile-turned-migrant: his sense of self and his moral principles. tuyen’s acculturation and change of character, described by vanmai as a series of transformations and transgressions, begin with him driving, then acquiring, a truck. this allows him to enter the industrial sector and the extremely competitive, ruthless world of truck drivers. but tuyen’s new status as a truck owner seems more like a failure than a success; he succumbs to the “hystérie collective” [collective hysteria] (vanmai 1983, 62) occasioned by the new caledonian economic boom and becomes obsessed with the idea of getting his share. the possession of a truck is a doubleedged sword; tuyen is not only its owner, but also its slave. he no longer controls how he lives, works or relaxes; everything is tied to his new job and, indirectly, to his truck: tuyên tenta de conserver tout d’abord le rythme qu’il pensait raisonnable de dix heures de travail par jour. mais il dut se rendre à l’évidence: on ne raisonnait pas dans ce metier (…) très vite il fut donc lui aussi happé puis entraîné dans une ronde infernale (1983, 66) [at first tuyen tried to keep to what he regarded as the reasonable workload of ten hours work per day. but he had to yield to the evidence: one could not reason in this job. very quickly he, too, was grabbed then dragged into a vicious circle.] somewhat like the infernal train in zola’s la bête humaine, tuyen’s truck acts as a demonic force that dehumanises him and drags him with it into the mad race for profit. driver and vehicle became inseparable, an extension of one another, to the point where the merest dent or puncture is experienced by tuyen as a personal injury. thus, through tuyen’s identification with this symbol of western technology and modernism, his transformation begins and he takes his first step towards assimilation: portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 15 do exile: rupture and community c’est bizarre, mais je finis par m’identifier à ce véhicule… je souffre terriblement lorsque je le vois ainsi blessé. sans doute parce que je suis responsable de cet outil de travail que l’on m’a confié ; sans doute que nous formons tout simplement une équipe indivisible (1983, 71). [it’s weird, but i end up by identifying myself with this truck. i suffer terribly when i see it wounded like this. surely it’s because i am responsible for this working tool that has been entrusted to me. but also because we simply form an indivisible team.] while the other, more dutiful chan dang like lan and ming bond with family and detach themselves from material possessions, tuyen moves in the opposite direction and bonds with his truck, to the detriment of his wife and children. in his truck, in the company of his non-vietnamese truck-driver friends, tuyen’s character begins to change and he starts to lose his old personal values and principles. one day, during which torrential rains forces tuyen to remain inside his truck, he abandons his rigid moral standards and allows his friends to introduce him to alcohol and unbridled pleasure-seeking. from wine to dog meat and from bat meat to women, tuyen is transformed by the rapacious consumption of foreign food and casual sex with kanak women. although eating dog meat is not uncommon in vietnam, tuyen’s real transgression lies in the fact that he eats a pet dog, and a stolen one at that: “il oublia ou négligea ses bons principes, le respect qu’il avait pour tout animal domestique, le chien en particulier. il avait trop faim, une faim de loup” [he forgot or neglected his good principles, the respect he used to have for all domestic animals, dogs in particular. he was too hungry, as hungry as a wolf] (1983, 94). tuyen may have been hungry, but in vanmai’s hands, this does not justify his moral weakness. if poverty and hunger are what lead the chan dang to migrate in the first place, neither lan nor ming abandons their moral integrity. loneliness and grief do not turn thang and phuc into casual sexual partners of kanak women. by eating unfamiliar or forbidden food and by indulging in sexual relationship with the indigenous women, tuyen drifts further and further away from his old self. the road accident that destroys his truck and leaves him in a long coma completes his metamorphosis. the man who wakes up to find sylviane (his friend robert’s deserted wife) at his bedside is no longer the traditional vietnamese peasant who arrived in new caledonia with his family years before. and when tuyen moves in with sylviane and her two daughters, he is no longer the trustworthy husband that hoa left behind on the quay on the day of her return to vietnam. besides his truck, tuyen comes to associate himself with yet another symbolical figure of western culture: portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 16 do exile: rupture and community sylviane, a french woman. judging from appearances, his new life seems to be successful and harmonious. financially he is doing very well in his clothing business and emotionally he seems happy with his new partner and their newborn son. however, from a vietnamese perspective, his achievement is deeply flawed: not only is his happiness with sylviane founded on betrayal, but his cultural integration is achieved at the expense of broken principles. tuyen’s selfish new life cuts him off from his past and origins, leads him away from his war-torn homeland, and renders him insensible to the suffering of his people. through the tragic narrative outcome that ends tuyen’s life, vanmai portrays this character as a problematic figure and a sad counterpart to hong. while both protagonists are living between two cultures, hong recognises his roots and is happily reunited with his parents in vietnam, whereas tuyen betrays his family and origins and, as a consequence, has to pay dearly for his mistakes. happily settled in his new home with sylviane, tuyen no longer wishes to go back to vietnam or to see his vietnamese wife and children again. instead of going home to visit them, tuyen asks hong to take a large amount of money for hoa and to tell her to leave him alone. money, as we have seen, has always been the currency with which tuyen tries to make amends for his mistakes and to ease his conscience. money, however, cannot buy him redemption for having been an undutiful son to his parents and his ancestors. moreover, money, in this case, is no longer an indication of success, as pisier would suggest, but a sign of shame, betrayal and guilt. stemming from a guilty conscience and not from love, the very act of sending money home, when the exilic son could have gone back, brings more shame and grief, and not pride and joy, to the parents. failing his duty, tuyen is no longer a worthy son and, as such, has also failed to be an exemplary father. his lack of filial devotion returns to haunt him in the guise of khanh, his sixteen-year old son, who travels with his mother all the way to new caledonia to find him. insolent, defiant and rebellious, the teenage boy shows his father no respect whatsoever. like his father, he is greedy and cares only about money. history thus repeats itself as avarice breaks tuyen’s family apart for the second time. sixteen years before it was tuyen who did not return home with his wife and children portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 17 do exile: rupture and community because he wanted to make more money; sixteen years later his eldest son leaves vietnam with the sole aim of extracting more money from his sinful father. rebuked by the latter, khanh disowns tuyen and, with a violent blow, breaks all bonds between them: tu m’a mis au monde, ensuite tu m’as abandonné pendant des années. tu n’as même pas daigné me faire venir ici. il nous a fallu nous débrouiller par nos propres moyens. et aujourd’hui tu me déshérites! (…) eh bien, moi je te renie ! je ne te reconnais plus pour mon père! oui! tu es déchu désormais de tes droits parternels sur moi (1983, 287). [you put me in this world then you abandoned me for years. you did not even try to bring me back here. we had to do it all by ourselves, by our own means. and today, you disown me. very well, i renounce you. i don’t recognise you as my father any longer. yes, from now on, you are relieved of any parental rights on me.] with this dramatic breakdown of family bonds and hierarchy, tuyen’s fate is sealed; even before his disappearance (suicide?), his son has announced his father’s symbolic death. tuyen, who refused to board the eastern queen some sixteen years before to go back to vietnam, now takes his own little boat out to sea. does this reverse sequence represent his last attempt to run away from the past, or his first real – and desperate – attempt to run back to his parents? is his death a planned suicide or an accidental drowning? vanmai does not elaborate. however, if suicide is the motive, tuyen has committed yet another offence against his parents. while they remain alive, his duty is to look after and care for them; by taking his own life he commits a shameful breach of filial duty and proves that he is, again, thinking only of himself and his own pain, not of his parents’ grief or his duty towards them. in fact, since failing to care for one’s parents during their lifetime is a serious breach of filial duty, whatever the cause of tuyen’s death, he remains an unworthy son who leaves his ageing father and mother (not to mention his wife hoa and their two children, who have just migrated to new caledonia) unattended and uncared for. such neglect cannot go unpunished. in this respect it is significant that tuyen’s body is never recovered. it is as if he will forever remain a lost son to his parents, both during his lifetime and after his death. without a body, there can be no proper burial for tuyen – either in his homeland, vietnam, or in new caledonia – and therefore no rest for his soul. as a person who has spiritually betrayed his ancestors and ancestral land, tuyen’s soul cannot join them after death and his body will not deserve a resting place even in a foreign land. thus, his spirit is condemned to wander portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 18 do exile: rupture and community at sea, forever lost, forever trying to redeem himself by crossing the ocean and reaching the shore of his homeland. in death as in life, tuyen remains homeless and in exile, his soul trapped in perpetuity between the two worlds, new caledonia and vietnam. far from setting him free, tuyen’s death perpetuates the conditions and the suffering of exile, and precludes all possibility of redemption. through tuyen’s tragic end vanmai reveals his reservations about change and acculturation and stresses the duty that each and every vietnamese migrant must display towards his or her parents. for the exile, to return home in order to pay respect to one’s ancestors is one of the surest ways to redeem oneself and thus find inner peace and reconciliation. setting up the final scene with two grieving wives (hoa and sylviane) rooted on top of a mountain, looking out to sea in search for their common husband, vanmai probably wants to use the well-known vietnamese legend of the waiting wife mountain to convey both his sympathy toward tuyen’s weaknesses and his humanist viewpoint on exile. by linking the undutiful son character to the husband of the myth, a guilty and incestuous brother who, upon discovering that his wife is his long lost sister, goes out to join the king’s army never to return, vanmai appears to shift part of the blame for tuyen’s betrayal to fateful circumstances. that the incestuous brother finally redeems himself and becomes a patriotic hero who dies in battle for his country can be interpreted as vanmai’s wishful thinking: his character tuyen will be forgiven, one day, by his two families, and also by his readers. in the modern western world where individualism, independence and personal freedom are encouraged, filial duty is often neglected and the authority of one’s parents questioned. for a vietnamese migrant, this type of moral and cultural environment represents a real challenge since it is at odds with the traditional vietnamese moral values that subject the individual to the family, and the children – especially the sons – to the father. in vanmai’s view, however, it is evident that any migrant who neglects his filial duty towards his parents (and on a larger scale, towards his country of origin) is an unworthy son and human being. no amount of westernisation or assimilation should cause a son to neglect his filial duty, and no transcultural change should be made at its expense. this is the foundation of vanmai’s moral integrity; it is solely through the relationship with his parents that a portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 19 do exile: rupture and community son or daughter will be judged as a person. in the difficult conditions of exile, filial devotion not only safeguards the morality of the migrant but also provides him or her with continuity and an invaluable sense of belonging. since going back to one’s parents also means going back to one’s origins, filial devotion is one of the key cultural practices that can transcend political and social differences and bring together the vietnamese people of the diaspora. vanmai, in telling the story of the chan dang and their descendants both as a documentary and a fiction, has attempted to achieve that unity in two ways. first, by sharing with other vietnamese migrants and refugees his representations of the life and experiences of tonkinese voluntary workers in new caledonia, vanmai breaks the silence surrounding the colonial exile and exploitation of this little known exile community. he thus provides an account of the chan dang’s exile that can be integrated into the contemporary history of vietnamese migration. second, by using different narrative resolutions for each of his protagonists, vanmai stresses the need to fulfil one’s filial duty among the young vietnamese generations. with this symbolic filial act, the new caledonian-born author pays homage to his vietnamese ancestors and earns himself an honourable title, that of a true dutiful “son of chan dang.” reference list barbançon, louis-josé. 1992, le pays du non-dit: regards sur la nouvelle calédonie, la mothe-achard, offset cinq edition, nouméa. genette, gérard. 1987, seuils, seuil, paris, 1987. merle, isabelle. 1995, expériences colonials: la nouvelle-calédonie, 1953-1972, belin, paris. vanmai, jean. 1980, chan dang, publications de la société d’études historiques de la nouvelle-calédonie, nouméa. ______1983, fils de chan dang, edition de l’océanie, nouméa. ______2004, “récit de vie”, in jeunes littératures du pacifique: réflexion et création, université de nouvelle-calédonie, nouméa. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 20 in search of the postmodern utopia: ben okri’s in arcadia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ in search of the postmodern utopia: ben okri’s in arcadia alistair fox, university of otago as one of the early reviewers of ben okri’s most recent novel—in arcadia (2002)— affirmed, ‘you cannot fault okri for confronting the big issues and asking questions of our secular age that few of his contemporaries have the innocence or bravery to attempt’ (adams 2002). beyond conceding that, however, most commentators have slammed the novel as inflated in its philosophical pretensions, and defective as a work of literary art. writing in the independent, helen brown concluded that ‘in arcadia reads like the ramblings of a stoned sixth former’ (brown 2002), sentiments echoed by another group of readers who labelled the work ‘so much pseudo-philosophical piffle’ (http://www.calderdale.gov.uk). on another tack, jeremy treglown lamented that the novel ‘has no narrative tension and the characters are ciphers’ (treglown 2002), while another reviewer criticized it for having ‘a thin under-developed plot and even thinner characters imposed on it,’ judging that okri has presented ‘a sloppy, poorly written novel which starts out by accusing the reader of being too stupid to understand the grand plan of his work, and ends with more incomprehensible speculation on the nature of life, reducing his characters to mere inscriptions’ (ball 2002). critics who admired okri’s earlier novel, the famished road (1992), for which he won the booker prize, almost universally see in arcadia as a sad falling away from that accomplishment: ‘in arcadia is the antithesis of that book. where the famished road was african, expansive and generous in spirit, in arcadia is european, thin and mean in temperament’ (hickling 2002). my contention in this essay is that readers who interpret the novel this way have missed the point, largely because they have failed to understand the tradition within which okri has taken pains explicitly to locate his work. having done so, they then read it as if it were an exercise in another type of novelistic genre, and hence miss the deeper reflections on the fox in search of the postmodern utopia human condition that in arcadia has to offer. these, in turn, can only be fully understood through the lens of a particular reading formation, given the large number of significant intertexts that are invoked in the course of the novel. when the intertexual dimensions of in arcadia are acknowledged, it becomes clear that okri— in contrast to what he was attempting in the famished road and his other works set in nigeria—has attempted no less a task that to reinterpret the perennial human aspiration to seek utopia (imagined poetically, following virgil, sannazaro, and others as ‘arcadia’) in the light of the destruction of determinate ethical and religious certainties wrought by the influence of postmodernism. as such, in arcadia is a work that situates itself squarely in one of the most durable intellectual traditions of western thought, from plato and st augustine through virgil, thomas more, and beyond, rather than in the more specific locale of postcolonial nigeria, or in the reading formation of popular fiction. it is not merely more ambitious than anything okri has written previously, but also presented as a work that challenges the reader to consider okri’s reflections in relation to what others, in different contexts, have propounded with regard to some of the most significant issues that confront humankind. it is little wonder, then, that commentators who may have been expecting a different kind of novel have found difficulty in acknowledging what this extraordinarily innovative exercise in fictive philosophy has attempted to communicate. 1 what, then, are the generic elements that set in arcadia apart from what its reviewers may have been expecting? in the course of the work, okri represents and interprets the condition of the contemporary world, which is found to be unsatisfactory, and contrasts it with an alternative condition that is viewed as being an antidote to the first one. it is thus a classic exercise in the speculative literary utopia represented by such works as thomas more’s utopia (1516), or francis bacon’s new atlantis (1626), both of which are alluded to in okri’s text (okri 2002, 18). like those earlier exercises in the genre, in arcadia presents a literal journey that suggests a metaphorical one. more’s speculative traveller, raphael hythlodaeus, and bacon’s narrative persona both travel to an island in the south sea. similarly, okri depicts his narrator and his companions, the members of a film-crew making a documentary, as setting off on a journey to a literal location: arcadia in the peloponnese. okri has portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 fox in search of the postmodern utopia based this journey on a real-life trip he made from london to arcadia in 1996 to present a film in the bbc’s ‘great train journeys’ series. in all three cases, the journey is dressed up with the trappings of verisimilitude, but, as okri affirmed in an interview with judith palmer given in 2002, ‘the book inhabits a real journey to say something quite parallel, in the same way that a dream is parallel to a life, and all the possibilities of our lives run parallel to one another’ (palmer 2002). as an exercise in the utopian genre, the novel is much more than it seems. indeed, in arcadia is more than simply a literary utopia. in constructing the fictive vehicle for his philosophical speculations, okri blends the utopian genre with a number of other intertexts and fictive modes that deepen the significance of the representation at the symbolic level. the thematic framework for the whole book is provided through allusions to dante’s la divina commedia and milton’s paradise lost which allow okri to invoke the idea of a paradise lost, and a paradise to be regained. following dante, okri describes the modern world as an ‘inferno,’ in which men and women are ‘lost in the dark woods of reality’ (okri 2002, 5, 36). following milton, he evokes the idea of a ‘garden of eden’ that has been irretrievable lost, but to which we long to return: ‘we had all lost something, and lost it a long time ago, and didn’t stand any chance of finding it again. we lost it somewhere before childhood began. maybe our parents lost it for us, maybe we never had it, but we sure as hell didn’t feel that we could ever find it again, not in this world or the next’ (6). the appeal to dante and milton allows okri to represent the literal journey depicted in his novel as an archetypal one—representing an attempt to escape from the inferno, through purgatory, to a recovered ‘true’ paradise that transcends the sordid and debased imperfections of the fallen world: ‘when everything is said and done, given the anxiety and stress, the nightmare in which we stewed, escape is what it was all about. we would have escaped from life if we’d had the courage, but we were all cowards…’ (6). by the end of in arcadia, lao, the narrator, along with several of the other characters, have found their recovered paradise, but it is, as i shall argue, conceived as one that is invested with a postmodern distinctiveness in comparison with its antecedents. the third great literary tradition upon which okri draws is that of the arcadian earthly paradise, depicted by the greek poet theocritus and the roman poet virgil, and then portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 fox in search of the postmodern utopia later by poets writing in the pastoral tradition, especially during the renaissance. okri himself succinctly summarizes the main lineaments of this tradition: virgil refined the pastoral form, and raised the potent beauty and ambiguity of the arcadian notion till it became, in his eclogues, a landscape of shepherds, a refuge for exiles, a place of disordered passions, a place of dispossession, a realm of love poetry, of singing matches, of an encounter with the tomb of the famous and beautiful daphnis. it also became a setting for one of the most mysterious and messianic poems in literature, a terrain for the celebration of a god, a territory for the praise of the powerful, and a place of departure. in short, virgil transformed arcadia into a landscape of the human spirit, where love, history, politics, religion, work, poetry, and power converge and live. with virgil, arcadia became the seed of an ideal, a dream, and a lyric meditation on the mystery of creation and creativity (207). within okri’s novel, this arcadian vision is used to construct the image of the recovered paradise that lao comes to realize is available to human beings even while they are imprisoned within the labyrinth of this world. it resides in the ability of the mind to ‘develop wings and soar,’ and it is the creativity of art that allows this to happen—in the ‘painting of the mind, where you first create the complete form of a thing or dream or desire and feed it deep into the spirit’s factory for the production of reality’ (okri 2002, 209, 189). this creative process, which, in okri’s vision, constitutes the salvation for humankind, is figured forth in the novel by his evocation of the image of the arcadian earthly paradise. to the topoi drawn from these three major european literary traditions, okri also adds elements of the magic realism he had used earlier in such novels as the famished road and songs of enchantment—particularly in the suggestion of a parallel mythical universe—combined with narrative techniques derived from the african oral tradition, including poetic evocations and lyrical ‘intuitions’. the mythical journey accomplished by the narrator, lao, also bears some resemblance to that undertaken by the abiku spirit-child in the famished road. even though some readers have felt betrayed by okri’s apparent abandonment of his earlier nigerian preoccupations in in arcadia, an attentive reading of it will detect the blending of earlier postcolonial attributes with some of the most persistent themes in the western literary tradition. it is this attempt to achieve an aesthetic and signifying ‘hybridity’ that gives the novel its very distinctive character, that commentators have found so perplexing. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 fox in search of the postmodern utopia to summarize, then, the simultaneous presence of elements from these three great european literary traditions, combined with elements from the african cultural tradition, gives in arcadia a great depth of signifying resonance. the purpose of this particularly complex amalgam of the european and african cultural traditions is to undertake a journey that is speculative and mythical as well as literal and real, designed to find a way of responding to the postmodern condition of humankind that can provide the individual with an alternative to despair. it remains now to trace how the fiction works to accomplish this extremely ambitious aspiration. 2 in his interview with judith palmer, referring to in arcadia, okri declared that ‘we inhabit a middle track we call our lives, but on either side arcadia and death are also running concurrently, and we are never far away from either plane. the book tries to encompass all these three layers’ (palmer 2002). the paradigm okri offers here suggests a useful way of approaching the novel’s complexities. in the first instance, the notion of our lives as a ‘middle track’ is literally figured forth in the railway track upon which the eurostar train rolls on its journey as it carries lao and the film-crew towards the peloponnese, where they intend to make a documentary film on arcadia. the reader is soon made aware that ‘within our journey there was another secret journey, a cryptic journey,’ that involves ‘a dying of the old self; a birth of something new and fearless and bright and strange’ (okri 2002, 17, 32). many aspects of the literal train journey are invested with symbolic significance. the crowding of people at waterloo station where the journey begins was ‘the crowding of anxiety and stress,’ on the part of voyagers who had all ‘lost something.’ similarly, the baggage they had brought with them represents their psychic baggage: ‘they had brought their ghosts with them, had brought their fears, their failures, the problems that had haunted their fathers, the nightmares that troubled their mothers…we never travel alone. an extended family of unacknowledged monsters follow us. and they don’t die with us; they become part of our children’ (35, 36). it is significant that on this journey ‘there are no destinations. destinations are illusions’ (49). that is why lao and the filmcrew never actually arrive at the literal geographical location of arcadia—which, instead of indicating that okri simply ran out of steam, as most of his reviewers imply, underlines the philosophical point that he is trying to make. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 fox in search of the postmodern utopia the philosophical point is informed by okri’s awareness of the radical shift in consciousness wrought by poststructuralist thinking in the later twentieth century—a shift that has produced the age of postmodernism. the effects of this intellectual revolution, in okri’s view, have rendered solutions propounded by earlier traditions less easily attainable for people living in the new millennium. the dilemma of the postmodern subject is depicted in the condition of the characters before they set out on their journey of self-discovery; they are living in a world that has become characterized by fragmentation, loss of identity, dislocation, and the delegitimization of the determinate belief and value systems to which human beings used to appeal. as okri puts it, this is a world marked by a ‘welter of meanings and signs and auguries,’ in which the individual subject has been left with a ‘loss of belief’ and a sense of an ‘empty universe where the mind spins in uncertainty and repressed terror.’ it is ‘a life lived at speed, with many gaps in perceived reality’ (okri 2002, 120, 119). this is a world that is far removed from the optimistic one posited by modernism as described, for example, by marshall berman: to be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are . . . modernity can be said to unite mankind. (berman 1983, 15) instead, it reflects the breakdown of modernism proper that berman sees as marking its third and final historical phase—which is one reason why okri is more properly regarded as a postmodernist, rather than modernist, writer: ….as the modern public expands, it shatters into a multitude of fragments speaking incommensurable private languages; the idea of modernity, conceived in numerous fragmentary ways, loses much of its vividness, resonance and depth, and loses its capacity to organize and give meaning to people’s lives. as a result of this, we find ourselves today in the midst of a modern age that has lost touch with the roots of its own modernity (berman 1983, 17). in short, the world okri describes is one in which heterogeneity has become so expanded that people’s existence is defined, as jim collins has put it, by ‘competitive interpellation,’ in which the subject is ‘bombarded by competing messages simultaneously,’ necessitating discursive practices that lead to fragmentation and decentred subjectivity (collins 1989, 143). in the social sphere, postmodernist thinking has assumed that ‘culture does not have one center or no center, but multiple simultaneous centers,’ with resulting configurations that ‘do not form a planned or well-managed pluralism, but a discontinuous, conflicted pluralism, creating tension portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 fox in search of the postmodern utopia filled environments that have enormous impact on the construction of both representations and the subjects that interact with them’ (27). to okri, echoing dante, this contemporary world comprises nightmarish ‘dark woods’ in which people have become lost (36). i am not going to enter into the debate about whether postmodernism is distinct from modernism, or whether it is merely the detritus of a failed modernist vision.1 as far as the present discussion is concerned, the point is that whether one sees the characteristics of the world described in okri’s novel as the consequences of the breakdown of the modernist project, as berman does, or as the effects of a postructuralist valorization of heterogeneity, as collins does, the phenomenon itself is the same—and this is the condition from which lao and his crew are seeking to escape: ‘the only thing for us was the journey, the escape, the way out’ (6). at the same time as okri develops this depiction of the postmodern dilemma as the dominant reality of the ‘middle track’ his characters inhabit, he also intimates the parallel presence of death on this journey in a variety of ways. on the platform at waterloo station, for example, it seems to the narrator as if ‘death wandered everywhere.’ death is personified: ‘as we collected our luggage, death came and helped everyone like a friendly porter.’ even the train itself is identified with death: ‘death is the train on which we travel, the bus on which we journey, the car that speeds us there, whether we arrive safely or not. death is the vehicle of the voyage…’ (48-9). perhaps the most powerful evocation of the idea of death resides in the symbolism given to the passing of the train through the channel tunnel: ‘in tunnels we rehearse dying. tunnels are a little death, a death with the senses wide awake, an open-eyed borderline between dying and living’ (70). death, in fact, is an omnipresent reality in this novel, even to the extent of being figured forth in queen marie antoinette’s quaint pastoral hamlet that lao and mistletoe visit at versailles— a false arcadia that ‘concealed from her the guillotine that would chop off her head’ (177). its most arresting representation is contained in the climactic inscription on the tomb depicted in poussin’s painting, les bergers d’arcadie: ‘et in arcadia ego’—‘i too [i.e. death] have lived in arcadia’ (203-04). 1 for the debate over modernism and postmodernism, see eagleton 1986, hutcheon 1989, and jameson 1991. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 fox in search of the postmodern utopia the effect of the repeated intimations of the presence of death—which are designed to fill the reader with a sense of memento mori—is reinforced by references to another sinister figure, malasso, who is never actually seen, but who is suspected of delivering the mysterious ‘inscriptions,’ or messages, that the characters receive in the course of the journey. malasso, whose very name contains the root ‘mal’, conjures up the idea of malevolence and evil. he is described as a ‘malign prospero figure,’ and thus constitutes a parodic antitype to the benign prospero (whose name means literally ‘i shall prosper,’) encountered in shakespeare’s play the tempest. okri makes explicit the hints contained in malasso’s name when he suggests that malasso is a character who serves as a personification to explain all the ‘inexplicable mishaps, disasters, and tragedies’ that befall men and women (okri 2002, 25). in this guise, he stalks through the novel with a presence like that of an assassin. in another era, malasso might have been depicted as milton’s satan, or more’s antichrist; here, however, okri shows him in his secularised, postmodern guise. just as okri develops this powerful sense of death running concurrently on one side of the ‘middle track’ of the lives of men and women, he takes equal pains to intimate the presence of arcadia, in its deepest metaphorical sense, on the other. the first sign of it comes in the reference to the hidden ‘treasures’ in arcadia to which the inscriptions the film crew is to follow will lead, and in the suggestions that arcadia represents ‘a sort of garden of eden, our lost universal childhood’ (5, 7). the nature of these treasures is intimated in many small instances, such as the description of the train-driver’s little garden, which lao and the crew go to visit in the seedy suburbs of paris. even though there ‘was nothing particularly spectacular about the garden,’ it moves lao, because of the ‘spirit of care and humility, of shaping beauty within life’s chaos.’ he sees ‘the terracotta pots of flowers on empty wine barrels. he saw the forsythias, the apple tree on the left next to the gate, the wisteria on the front fence, and grape vines trailing from the railings. lao marvelled at the variety of flowers and their cheerful intermingling.’ there had been nothing there before, but, as the traindriver’s wife explains ‘with a gentle pride,’ the love of her and her husband had transformed the urban sterility: ‘such was the way of the creative hand, flowering life where bare stones lay, domesticating barrenness, beautifying concrete’ (126). okri’s handling of this episode turns it into a microcosm of what is possible as a result of the portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 fox in search of the postmodern utopia arcadian creative impulse generally: it is a miniature eden wrought through art in the midst of the wreckage of the modern world. the potentiality symbolized by ‘arcadia’ is also intimated in the development of the character of ‘that crazy girl who fell in love with one of us,’ and in so doing prevented the members of the film crew from needing to ‘stew in hell till the end of time’ (okri 2002, 7). this girl turns out to be mistletoe, a red-haired painter who, having begun a life ‘in happiness,’ fell into a ‘love of rebellion’, becoming ‘misused by men,’ and then ‘disillusioned and disenchanted. talents not developed early, lost on the way, wandering, beautiful, optimistic still, and lost.’ the language here evokes the great myth of the fall from paradise recited in the poetry of milton’s paradise lost. there are hints that mistletoe has replicated the falls of both satan and eve. but unlike satan, however, she is able to follow eve and adam in the regaining of another paradise—by following ‘the slow journey back, through art, to sanity’ (80-1). mistletoe plays a key part in okri’s novel because the pattern of her experience, combined with her emotional and intellectual responses to it, turns her into an exemplar of what is possible for the other characters, and of what they should imitate—even though some of them, notably jute, refuse to do so. in this regard, the role of art in mistletoe’s life is all-important. it is seen when she alone, of all the other characters, remains unaffected by the sordidness of the paris hotel in which they find themselves lodged: only mistletoe was unaffected. the gloom provided her with dark shapes, the sense of failure with hades-inspired images, and hunger fuelled the flight of her mind into a realm of enchantment. it was a realm she was able to enter at will because she had lived a life so rich with misery, mistakes and love that she had gradually found an art of creating pleasant places in her mind where colours are astonishing, where life sings, and where possibilities lurk behind all evil shapes. unhappiness had taught her the art of happiness. and art had taught her the saving graces of escape into the enchanted countrysides of her mind (130-1). this passage, in capturing the paradox that the kind of happiness which is attainable through the creative imagination is made possible by the experience of unhappiness, and even tragedy, foreshadows the epiphany that lao, the main character, will have as he contemplates the poussin masterpiece in the louvre. art, in fact, is depicted as the means by which humankind can regain paradise: painting is human love transcending human forgetfulness. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 fox in search of the postmodern utopia there is painting of the mind, where you first create the complete form of a thing or dream or desire and feed it deep into the spirit’s factory for the production of reality. painting is the mirror of healing, the base of creativity, the spring-board of materialisation (189). in okri’s summation, ‘painting is one of the most mysterious metaphors of arcadia’ (190). 3 as the film crew progress their journey on the ‘middle track,’ therefore, there are constant intimations of a parallel ‘arcadian’ creative possibility that offers humankind a means of counteracting the negative potentialities of the other parallel death-driven alternative. in the final part of this essay, i shall track the extent to which the various characters succeed in perceiving the existence of this creative possibility, and then speculate on what it implies in the context of postmodernity. what do the characters learn? the journey presents each with an opportunity to interpret the meaning of mysterious messages that are passed to them, and of inscriptions that they encounter. messages and inscriptions have a key significance in this novel. according to okri, every now and again life sends us little messages. the messages are meant for us alone. no one else can see them. no one else perceives them as messages. they may seem perfectly banal to the world, but to you, for whom they were intended, they have the force of revelation. much of the failure and success of a life, much of the joy or suffering in a life, depends on being able to see these secret messages. and much of the magic, or tragedy of life depends on being able to decipher and interpret these messages (okri 2002, 22). in lacanian terms, these messages arrive at the moment when the addressee becomes the addressee when he or she recognizes himself or herself as the addressee (žižek 2001, 10-12). for okri, however, these messages come from behind ‘a mysterious veil that separates the living from the others. and this veil is made of perception’. the messages themselves ‘come in daily life, in as many forms as there are ways of reading the world,’ and are ‘projected through this veil’. similarly, ‘inscriptions appear on the fabric of the world’ (okri 2002, 22-3). in the course of the novel, various of the characters receive messages that appear to constitute a potential realisation that they are predisposed to have as a result of their prior experience and temperamental dispositions. for example, jute, the accountant, is a humourless gorgon of moral rectitude, for whom work is her real arcadia. when she receives her message she is too horrified by its contents to show it to anybody else, portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 fox in search of the postmodern utopia and ends up remaining trapped in a nightmare. towards the end of the novel, she is described as being unable (literally and metaphorically) to ‘get to the party,’ because she ‘was looking for her mother in the winter of her being and could not find her.’ soon, she finds herself ‘a prisoner in the block of ice of her own being’ (okri 2002, 198). jim (the director), by way of contrast, receives a message instructing him that the crew are to approach the train driver and conduct an interview with him at his house in the suburbs of paris, and then to proceed to the louvre. this message activates (or reflects) jim’s openness to discovering a deeper meaning in their journey than is apparent on the surface: ‘for the first time, jim sensed their journey was an arcane voyage, the interviews and places forming an inner script, a sacred script even. he felt that they were all unwitting parts of a sublime riddle, a mystical conundrum, a travelling cryptograph’ (75). riley, the assistant camerawoman, receives a sinister message ‘soaked in blood, or red ink,’ which, even though she does not share it with the others, fills them with ‘a sense of doom or of awe’ which predisposes them to recognize the perversion of the arcadian ideal in the false arcadia of versailles: ‘death sang through the sublime vanity of it all,’ and as mistletoe comes to realize, ‘hades dwells in false arcadias’ (162, 169, 179). all the messages received by the characters are associated with malasso, and serve to activate an awareness of the characteristics of the modern world that impart to it a kind of death-in-life, and generate a desire to rectify it by seeking the place of true enchantment. the ability to get to that place of enchantment depends upon the ability of the characters to interpret the ‘inscriptions’ they encounter, and, above all, the literal inscription on the tomb within the poussin painting in the louvre that presents the most important, climactic inscription in the novel. the idea of a tomb in arcadia first appeared in virgil’s eclogues v when mopsus, a shepherd, exhorts all shepherds to rear a tomb to daphnis, who has been ‘cruelly slain’ (virgil ll. 42ff in smith, n.d.). in selecting his iconography, poussin also drew upon jacopo sannazzaro’s imitation of this topos in la arcadia of 1504, in which the shepherd, barcinio, describes the tomb of phyllis, a nymph who refused to requite the love of his friend, meliseo: i will make thy tomb famous and renowned among these rustic folk. shepherds shall come from the hills of tuscany and liguria to worship this corner of the world solely because thou hast portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 fox in search of the postmodern utopia dwelt here once. and they shall read on the beautiful square monument the inscription that chills my heart at all hours, that makes me strangle so much sorrow in my breast: ‘she who always showed herself so haughty and rigid to meliseo now lies entombed, meek and humble, in this cold stone’. (sannazzaro 1952, ll. 257-267). in both these earlier literary versions, the idea of a tomb in arcadia serves to intensify the pathos arising from the death of a lover, with a strong sense of ‘carpe diem’—that is, that lovers should ‘seize the day’ before death removes the possibility. okri sees a much deeper significance than that in poussin’s les bergers d’arcadie. lao, his narrative persona, identifies it as ‘an open painting, impossible to decipher completely,’ pointing to the fact that ‘the beauty does not reside in the landscape, which is rocky and mostly bare,’ but in ‘the structure, the colours, the harmony of the lines of force in the painting, and in its mood.’ it is unclear as to who is the ‘i’ alluded to in the inscription, ‘et in arcadia ego,’ and ‘the shepherd who points forms the shape of a man with a scythe in his shadow’ that serves to unsettle any possibility of indulging in arcadian melancholy as a pleasurable gratification. the effect of this blending of harsh, incongruous elements is, in lao/okri’s words, to fill the onlooker with peace, ‘but within that peace it plants the seeds of restlessness, of unease, of subtle disturbance, like a meaningful dream not fully understood, filling your waking hours with question marks’ (okri 2002, 203-6). indeed, of all the characters, it is lao himself who is most affected by the painting, and when he views it, ‘the message that had been sleeping within him since the beginning of the journey now awoke and sprang into life’ (okri 2002, 206). what he realizes is that the painting ‘gives the code for continual development in living, and in thinking,’ in its ‘complexity, its hope and its despair, its power and its humility’ (203). specifically, it emphasizes—through the presence of the tomb with its enigmatic inscription ––that ‘arcadia and death are inextricably intertwined. immortality and death are conjoined. beauty and death are linked, happiness and death are coupled’ (206). moreover, there is no hint of transcendence in poussin: the fact inscribed on the tomb—‘i [death] too lived in arcadia’—‘is a labyrinth without any exit. it is closed.’ confronted with this reality, lao decides ‘that he would be among those who learn to live within the labyrinth, that he would join those who develop wings and soar’ (209). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 fox in search of the postmodern utopia this, then, is the climactic point towards which the metaphoric journey has been tending. there is no need for the novel to pursue the rest of the literal journey to the real geographical arcadia, because the nature of the true arcadia has already been revealed in this climactic epiphany that lao experiences: induced by his contemplation of the great painting by poussin that ponders the condition of existence of this nurturing myth of the human imagination. 4 when all the elements of this subtle fiction are viewed in their complex interrelations with one another, it is apparent that ben okri has made an important new contribution to the conceptualisation of utopia. utopia, for okri, is a state of mind—a condition of activated responsiveness to, and engagement with, life that is made possible by the arcadian vision that the creative imagination can construct. this vision is attained through art, which okri views as ‘a dream of perfection.’ even though it is ‘many realms away from the reality,’ this dream can nevertheless lead to redemption, because it replaces ‘what we have lost in spirit’ (okri 2002, 165, 83). okri’s concept of utopia, in fact, is very close to kant’s idea of aufklärung (enlightenment) as expounded by michel foucault (foucault 1994, 303-19). in foucault’s words, ‘aufklärung …is neither a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment. kant defines aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way, as an ausgang, an “exit,” a “way out”.’ this ‘way out’ is a process that releases us from the status of ‘immaturity,’ which is ‘a certain state of our will which makes us accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for.’ enlightenment, in foucault’s reading of kant, is defined by ‘a modification of the pre-existing relation linking will, authority, and the use of reason.’ this means, in turn, that ‘enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally. men are at once elements and agents of a single process. they may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors’ (305-06). the arcadian vision, in okri’s view, is an aestheticized version of enlightenment as defined in foucault’s redaction of kant. as such, it has the potential to ameliorate the ‘anomie’ and ‘mass silent despair’ of the modern world—the world of: portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 fox in search of the postmodern utopia wars across nations. refugees across borders. . . . families dying of starvation. . . . environmental disasters everywhere. pollution everywhere. . . . emptiness and absence of religion. humiliation and no sense of redemption. just work and television and sex and entertainment. loves that fail. marriages that die. hopes that perish with the onset of adulthood. knowledge that drives away the freshness of innocent dreaming’ (okri 2002, 219-220). the exterior world, in okri’s account, mirrors the condition of our being: ‘so the cosmic illness, the anomie, the despair, the terror, the nausea, the emptiness are all within. we are the sickness. we harbour our own malaise, and then we project it onto the world.’ conversely, when we seek to shape the world in accordance with ‘this better and juster dreaming’ of arcadia,’ life can become ‘a place of secular miracles,’ where ‘amazing things can be done in consciousness and in history’ (okri 2002, 2223). it is all relative, however. even if the external world can never be perfected, the interior regeneration that is brought about by the dream of arcadia is capable of leading the individual, within the range of his or her ability and will, to do ‘little things’ that make a difference (229). although okri does not develop the idea to any great extent, it is implied that the political and social well-being of a nation will be commensurate with the strength and depth of the arcadian impulse as expressed in its art, since: civilisations are . . . measured by their dreams, by their aspirations in stone, in words, or paint, or marble. it is the artistic ideals of civilisations that signal where those civilisations hope the human spirit can go, how high it can ascend, into what deeds of astonishment it can flow. art is the best selves of a people made manifest, one way or another (166). the problem that is left unaddressed is how to convert the members of a society into sharing this understanding, and okri’s parting gesture in the book is to invite the reader to view his alter ego, lao, and mistletoe as inscriptions waiting to be read by ‘a world looking in’ (okri 2002, 231). in terms of the logic of the representation that has been unfolded, their experience constitutes a message for those who might discover that they are the addressee. this invitation is reinforced by the dedication of the work, which is ‘to you’—that is, to every person who has chosen to traverse in arcadia. in some respects, in arcadia is strikingly similar to certain of its antecedents. okri’s recognition of the paradox that while reality is imperfectable, the experience of its imperfections generates an impulse to strive towards its perfection, is very close to that of thomas more in utopia. his notion of the arcadian dream providing ‘its own heaven, unrealisable in the world, but found within’ (120) is similar to the promise portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 14 fox in search of the postmodern utopia that the regenerate adam and eve receive from the archangel michael in book 12 of paradise lost that they will find a ‘paradise within’ that will compensate them for the loss of eden, the original earthly paradise (milton 1957, 587). the idea that art can provide an experience that lifts one above the perturbing limitations and sordidness of the ordinary world is reminiscent of the aestheticism of matthew arnold and walter pater. where okri differs from his christian-humanist forebears is that the spiritual regeneration set in motion by the experience of arcadianism is not instrumental to the attainment of a heaven beyond this life—it is of limited value unless it translates into ameliorative intervention in the here and now, because there is no transcendence. more and milton would have agreed with the first of these propositions, but would have parted company with okri over the second. similarly, while okri’s political and social conscience allies him with arnold’s version of aestheticism, it is far too strong to allow him to identify with pater’s doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake;’ for okri, art is for the world’s sake. most obviously, the conceptualisation of arcadianism as a relativised process located in the individual subject as a result of ongoing interpellation that arrives in different ways, and at different times, clearly situates in arcadia as a distinctively postmodern rewriting of utopia. in conclusion, one would say that okri has attempted to construct a utopia out of ‘the best that has been thought and said’ in that genre, but one that has sought to update these notions to accommodate the relativisation and rejection of determinate certainties of postmodernism. in arcadia aspires to be a truly postmodern utopia, and far from being the incoherent ‘ramblings of a stoned sixth former,’ succeeds, i believe, in being so. reference list adams, t. 2002, ‘grope springs eternal,’ the observer [online]. available: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,796400.00.html [accessed 29 oct. 2004]. bacon, f. 1909–14 (1526), the new atlantis. vol. iii, part 2. the harvard classics. new york: p.f. collier & son. ball, m. 2002, ‘a review of in arcadia by ben okri,’ the compulsive reader [online]. available http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=ne ws&file=article&sid=367&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0 [accessed 26 oct. 2004]. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 15 http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,796400.00.html http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=news&file=article&sid=367&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0 http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=news&file=article&sid=367&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0 fox in search of the postmodern utopia berman, m. 1983, all that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity, verso, london. brown, h. 2002, review of in arcadia, the independent, cited in ‘ben okri (1959),’ books and writers [online]. available: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/okri.htm [accessed 20 nov. 2003]. collins, j. 1989, uncommon cultures: popular culture and post-modernism, routledge, new york and london. eagleton, t. 1986, ‘capitalism, modernism and postmodernism,’ in against the grain: essays 1975-1985, verso, london. foucault, m. 1984, ‘what is enlightenment,’ in the essential works of michel foucault 1954-1984, ed. p. rabinow; vol. 1: ethics: subjectivity and truth, ed. p. rabinow, trans. r. hurley and others, the new press, new york. hickling, a. 2002, ‘tunnel vision,’ the guardian [online]. available: http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858, 4521773-110738,00.html [accessed : 20 nov. 2003. ‘in arcadia by ben okri,’ [online], n.d. available: http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/libraries/books/reviews/bookreviews.jsp?id=741 [accessed 26 oct. 2004]. hutcheon, l. 1989, the politics of postmodernism, routledge, london. jameson, f. 1991, postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, verso, london and new york. milton, j. 1957 (1667), ‘paradise lost’, in complete poems and major prose, ed. m. y. hughes, the odyssey press, indianapolis, new york. more, t. 1989 (1516), utopia, eds george m. logan & robert m. adams, cambridge university press, cambridge uk. okri, b. 1992, the famished road, anchor, 1993. ———2002, in arcadia, phoenix, london. palmer, j. 2002, ‘ben okri: “great art tries to get us to the place of true enchantment”,’ the independent [online]. available: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/interviews/story.jsp?story=329903 [accessed 26 oct. 2004]. treglown, j. 2002, ‘past glories prove elusive,’ the spectator [online]. available: http://web6.infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/932/553/55071628w6/purl=r cl_eaim_0_a92806302&dyn=4!xrn_5_0_a92806302?sw_aep=otago [accessed 26 oct. 2004]. sannazzaro, j. 1952 (1504), ‘arcadia’, in opere de iacopo sannazzaro, ed. e. carrara, turin. smith, p. n.d., ‘et in arcadia ego’ [online]. available: http://priory-ofsion.com/psp/id17.html [accessed 7 nov. 2004]. žižek, s. 2001, ‘why does a letter always arrive at its destination?’, in enjoy your symptom! routledge, new york and london. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 16 http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/okri.htm http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/libraries/books/reviews/bookreviews.jsp?id=741 http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/interviews/story.jsp?story=329903 http://web6.infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/932/553/55071628w6/purl=rcl_eaim_0_a92806302&dyn=4!xrn_5_0_a92806302?sw_aep=otago http://web6.infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/932/553/55071628w6/purl=rcl_eaim_0_a92806302&dyn=4!xrn_5_0_a92806302?sw_aep=otago http://priory-of-sion.com/psp/id17.html http://priory-of-sion.com/psp/id17.html alistair fox, university of otago microsoft word 2324-9541-1-le[1] portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 2, january 2011. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. among absences gabriela coronado, university of western sydney winmalee, december 31, 2007.1 dear mama: i know you are going to tell me i took too long to write to you, as if i do not take you into account, but it is not so. it’s only that the days passed too quickly, and since the girls told you my news, i just let it go. earlier, it was not so important. even though it was expensive i could phone you at any time, but now i am unsettled, with a continuous concern. i need to tell you things i did not mention before, above all, to overcome the grief. having to come back immediately and begin working without time for a breath was very odd, like carrying a load. it was as if in real life nothing happened, and in a few months when i returned to mexico, you would be there waiting for me. being here it seems nothing has changed. i continue talking with you as always. even though i wrote you emails, it was always rushed, and it’s not the same. it is funny, i was supposed to have more time then, since i was not in charge of anyone, but the 1 ‘entre ausencias,’ a spanish-language version of this work, was published in portal, vol. 6, no, 1, 2009. coronado among absences portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 2 days passed without me having a minute to myself. the hardest part was to learn english, nothing like what i learned in the classes. when i speak i feel i control my words, and if i don’t know something it always works to pronounce the spanish words as if they were in english. but it is difficult to understand their replies. at the university i struggle to make sense of my students. you cannot imagine how hard it is. they pretend they comprehend me and i fake my understanding of them; that’s how i deal with the situation. besides, to meet new people all the time is tiring, especially on social occasions. to be identified as mexican forces me to always chat about mexico. i have to be an expert on everything, from history to the latest political news. it’s nice that they are interested, but i do not feel i am myself. besides, if i miss a word i do not know what they are talking about, and i reach a point at which i disconnect myself. when everyone is talking i sometimes only hear noise, maddening noise. then i stay quiet, smiling, pretending i get them. luckily bob is not very social and we would rather spend time together, each on our own affairs. then it’s as if the world is only what i have inside me. i greatly enjoy those moments. they remind me of my escapes to the roof, when i would sit in the darkness doing nothing, staring, letting the stars be my words. yes, i know you did not understand it, but since you believed i was always sure about what i was doing and they were ok, you were never intrusive. many times i felt upset at that foolish belief. now i ask myself: did you also think it was right for me to migrate to australia while my daughters stayed in mexico? so many times i felt you never forgave me, but you could not tell me. now my life here is so different and i do not have moments alone. the days go by with work. everything has changed. if someone had told me that my life was going to finish coronado among absences portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 3 with me teaching, in english, i would have thought it was a bad joke. how much i have hated it! it’s as if my destiny played a cruel trick on me. and how much i resent being unsure that what i write is correct! my friends are used now to my spanglish, but there are some situations when i lack confidence; i feel embarrassed. even though australians are cool it’s like being a lesser person if one does not master the language, like becoming a little girl again, dependent on others. bob is a saint; whatever i need he corrects it, but i yearn to write in spanish, to be able to say, ‘it’s ready’ and send it off. also, it’s double work. i do everything more slowly, even reading. i was never very fast, but now each page feels endless and i do not have a minute free. i miss the days after i first arrived in australia; my only duty was to write my thesis. it was complete happiness, as if my life was beginning again, with a new gaze, as my kids used to say: ‘seeing with the eyes of the dead one.’ it was as though to see again after the cornea transplant i needed new landscapes. by the way, maybe you can see now how beautiful australia is; it is a different beauty, no? all vast. even the sky looks immense. i think i have never seen such distance. when i miss you all, i look up and it’s as if my soul opens and encompasses the entire world. but it hurts; the emptiness is also huge. if only my little ones were here! the nostalgia quickly goes away and then i enjoy the silence. silence, noise, silence, noise. have you ever thought they are the same? here i sense they get confused. when i am working at the university and no one is there the silence allows me to discover different noises, birds and insects i have not heard before, the wind moving the bushes, the rain on the windows, the far voices from the students at the pool. ah, and of course the thoughts that become words, taca-taca, taca-taca. but when people are around and coronado among absences portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 4 chatting the words get crowded. the noise in english is different. the sounds lose their meaning and then all is silence, so much that i cannot hear my breath. * it hurts to have you all so far away. i imagine how my children would see everything i see, lorena with her noisy and explosive passion, mariana with her unbroken silence, wishing to trap the world with her gaze. and you, what can i tell you, you would be so happy with the cult of dogs here. and now the little grandkids as well. do you know that marti says she wants to come to australia for her fifteenth birthday? you surely understand what i feel, since it was so important for you to be a grandmother. unfortunately you spoiled them. mariana always complains that i am marianito’s only granny, and so far i am. they miss you so much, they always talk about you, as if they cannot believe it happened. they tell me you are always around, doing tricks. is it true that you phoned mari on her graduation day? patri said he saw an old lady, and lore told him that it was his great grandmother. i do not know if i should believe them but i would like it to be true. if so, you might be able to visit my world, share my life, finally. we never managed to bring you here. even if you could visit me now, you wouldn’t see my first house. it was incredible, like living in the middle of the forest, in ajusco, surrounded by trees and clouds, which entered the windows. there were parrots and some tlacuachitos, who run on the roof. here they called them possums. i was fearful at night, when alone. it sounded like footsteps on the roof. then i got used to it. where i live now there is another one. i sent a photo to marti and she named it lolita. little frogs came in through the bath, and because we used rainwater and didn’t have a filter, fungi grew in the shower. artus solved that problem when he and lore came to visit me. coronado among absences portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 5 we decided to move because there was no public transport and i did not like it. here it is not like mexico city, where you can stop a bus at any corner. there are no little shops growing like mushrooms in each block. imagine, to buy some milk i needed to walk for twenty minutes to the closest gas station. yes, you could buy milk in the gas station, or the garage as they are called here! at the beginning i didn’t dare drive on the other side of the road; i felt trapped, just wishing to catch a train to sydney and fill myself with urban life. i was not missing the traffic or the smog. in fact, now that i can drive i rarely go there. no, what i missed were the people, my people. but in chinatown i felt at home. you won’t believe how much we look like chinese people; the eye shape is less marked, but still alike. i enjoyed looking at chinese people walking in the streets and finding resemblances to my friends. * the other day when i spoke with my girls we talked of jaime. i was terrified when they told me about his cancer. lorena still cannot forgive him, she is still mad at him and, i guess, at life. how could he have left it unattended? ay! my dear brother, always such an idiot! it was shocking to speak with him by phone and hear death in his voice. i didn’t recognise him, as if his enthusiasm had disappeared. but i was calmed when he told me he would wait for me. it sounds silly but i believed him, and although it was months before i could travel, and my girls felt he was expiring like a spent candle, something told me i would arrive on time. still, if you had told me that he was leaving us i swear i would have driven to the airport at that moment. ay! i don’t know … if death is so hard, not to be with you all is even worse, a heavy load on my soul. that hurts most. fortunately he waited for me. i love so much having his guitar here; it’s broken but it still sings his dreams. coronado among absences portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 6 ay, dear mum, i didn’t tell you either how much i appreciate your support for my lore. you never told me how you received the news, although i think the twins gave you new life. i have the photo of you carrying the twins. i remember lore’s face, holding her breath, as if helping you so that the weight did not break you, with me close just in case. i almost collapsed when she told me she was pregnant. and mariana, i’d better not mention! how much anguish i felt. even though they had my house to live in, it was hard for artus to get a job, for her to do anything to help. her thesis was far from finished! it was good, however, to hear her sound so happy, even if scared. and besides, given it was twins i thought: now she will have to grow up fast. at the beginning i could not sleep with so much anguish. i wanted to cry. i am not sure if that was because i was here, or just because of how life was. my first reaction was to run away but as the days passed i grew calm again. i always trusted my daughters. i was sure that even if they needed me they could deal with the situation themselves. to make things worse, there was also my little mariana with her jaime and her complicated love. i am not sure if it was better to be there or accept, as mexicans say, ‘eyes that cannot see, a heart which does not feel.’ happily, all finished well. it is hard to leave them to grow. i do not need to tell you that. in those moments i ask myself, can i overcome absence? can it be true, as the song claims, that absence is not oblivion, or is that only my fantasy, letting me believe that i can be both here and there? i am relieved to know you are so close to them. it has always been like that. even half crippled you were unconditionally there. it is understandable how much they grieve for your absence. you were not there when mariana married, however. you would have enjoyed seeing her dressed like a queen with her mask of crystal. did she show it to you when she returned from australia? or were you absent then too? as time passes i get confused coronado among absences portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 7 and have no idea what happened before or after. it was difficult taking leave from university to be at her wedding: it was the middle of the semester, and they made it so hard. it was even worse trying to be at mariano’s birth. when marti and patri were born i stayed in mexico for longer, because i was still employed there. it was wonderful, and they always remember me well. when they visited me in sydney they were almost two years old, and patri recognised me in the airport. he was the first one to see me, in the distance, waiting. i nearly resigned my job with the hassles over mariano. to be between two countries, with my loved ones separated by an ocean, hurts my soul. although i can see their pictures and speak on the phone you cannot know how much i want to see them, touch them, feel how they grow. their life escapes like water between my fingers. the joy of being a grandmother began growing in me like a weed. it is absolutely crazy, as if something or someone turned on the switch. like you, i was never keen on kids, but grandchildren transform you. since i was in sydney my fantasy was to buy clothes for them, modern things i never saw in mexico. today when i go shopping i still look at baby things, though they would not fit even my littlest one now. you know, one case for the presents and the other for my clothes. to travel that way is tiring but it brings such pleasure to see their faces as they discover the surprises. whenever i return to australia i count the days until i return. it is sad not to stay longer with them. with you it doesn’t matter. now i have you close, but them, i missed so much. even though we talk by phone, it is not the same. i lament not to have witnessed their bellies grow full of life, to miss their graduations, to display my pride, to attend mariana’s exhibitions, watching how my artist grows. i have some of her paintings here. coronado among absences portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 8 i would like to bring back more but have no more walls for them. by the way, can you look after her? i sense her sadness. * i am eager to reach my retirement. i hope health won’t cheat me as it did you, that i can continue travelling. i plan to spend some time here, some there. the last time i was in mexico we visited malinalco, and we would like to buy a small house there, with a pool to lure the kids to visit us with their friends. i hope we can afford it. if i can’t see you here, i hope you will visit us there. you might ask why i do not stay in my house in mexico city. to be truthful, i can’t. i am used to a quiet life and it’s good for everyone to have their own life. visiting is nice but everyone has their own affairs to attend to. as the years pass everything feels more difficult, and my fear of being sick or dying in australia grows. i panic, imagining i cannot explain myself to the doctors. even if i describe what i feel in detail, it’s frustrating, they do not understand me well. what one feels in the body is intimate; it cannot be taught. it’s learned through life, and my life was in spanish. when i had the surgery for my fractured toe, even bob did not know how to treat me. i was devastated. because of the idea they have here of not being intrusive, no one visits, you don’t even receive phone calls. and then when bob left it felt like an eternity. imagine! he went to have lunch at home, and i waited and waited and he did not return. he thought it was good to leave me alone to sleep and recover. do you remember how it was with you? all of us were there, making fun. it looked like a party, laughing and laughing over family jokes. here, it was like the funeral of an orphan. * coronado among absences portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 9 ah, i have forgotten to tell you how grateful i am for your generosity. it looks like a family custom to plan our deaths. do you think it is cultural? i hope i can do the same. i would not like to die alone. nor have my daughters be stuck with grief for not being with me at the end. with you, i imagined it was a trick. i remember how angry you were with chacho, just because he had planned his holidays for after i got back from chiapas. i had only two weeks before returning to australia. your bad mood was incomprehensible. i thought it was manipulative, making him feel guilty. you knew i would stay with you. wasn’t your constant complaint that i was not with you enough when i visited mexico? so, why? we had planned the sunday meal with everyone. mari and jaime were bringing chicharrón and carnitas, and lore, artus and the twins the cake. i was buying the beers, the chelas as we call them in mexico. was that not what you wished? partying with the girls? no, you insisted that chacho and his kids not go. surely you wanted to die with your children and grandchildren close to you, but we didn’t know that. you never told me that the doctor wanted to keep you in the hospital and you refused. always so stubborn. or is it that i did not want to know? that was nothing new; you always got sick when i was there, just so i would take care of you. the medicine was useless. or didn’t you take it? you didn’t want to eat anymore. not even sip water. if it wasn’t for the fact that lore is a little witch, we would not have got there on time. chacho and his children had gone and we drove to your house as fast as we could. i was not sure whether to call him, or wait to see if you responded. with the serum you might have recovered a little, but no, it was useless. you had decided to die. you fell asleep, waiting for everyone to be there and allow you to go. coronado among absences portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 10 i do not know if you listened to us. i do not know if something was missing that needed to be said. i only know that when one lives abroad one wants to get back and be there when a loved one dies. la né 1826-11795-1-le_edited 15-11-12 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. imagined transcultural histories and geographies special issue, guest edited by bronwyn winter. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. epistemology as politics and the double-bind of border thinking: lévi-strauss, deleuze and guattari, mignolo timothy nicholas laurie, university of sydney ‘epistemology’ is a fraught term for what walter d. mignolo calls ‘de-colonial’ critique. two uses of the term are most often encountered in the social sciences and post-colonial studies. on the one hand, borrowing from the kantian philosophical tradition, epistemology is understood as a method of knowing and imputes to its subject an orderly and consistent faculty for reason and concept-building distinct from pleasures and inclinations. on the other hand, in structuralist frameworks influenced by michel foucault, louis althusser and others the episteme (without its -ology) can be a powerful critical concept for historicising and politicising the institutional basis of ‘methods of knowing’—that is, by locating knowledge-formation within its practical milieu of actions, habits, dispositifs, and so on. this difference between epistemology and the historical episteme can be fruitful as a means to denaturalise the cognitive norms of social scientific inquiry, but also raises some peculiar difficulties for a historiographical and political project like that proposed by mignolo, to which this article is addressed. how can one criticise the projects of governance through knowing (episteme), linked historically to anglo-european state enterprises of imperial expansion and colonialism, without also according to these states the capacity to think in an orderly and consistent manner distinct from their pleasures and inclinations (epistemology)? or, to what extent is the critique of colonial reason dependent on a normative definition of colonialism as, first and foremost, a method of reasoning about the world? laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 2 this article explores this duality of epistemology and episteme in the academic study of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and what mignolo calls ‘coloniality/modernity,’ taking interest in contemporary anxieties about social scientific methods that were often carved out during periods of european colonial expansion. i want to show that the disjunction between epistemology and the episteme leads to some difficulties in accounting for the work of gathering sources and organising knowledge claims that are required to critique others’ ways of knowing. in particular, i note some difficulties involved in the gendering of historiographical methods that grant mignolo and others access to the colonial archive, and argue that the focus on ‘ways of thinking’ can limit sensitivity to the social character of knowledge formation and transmission. the article begins by revisiting claude lévi-strauss’s structural anthropology as a cultural relativist response to colonial violence, then considers the work of gilles deleuze and félix guattari as critics of epistemology tout court, who argue for a different account of power formations informed by their engagement with psychoanalysis. finally, the article surveys walter d. mignolo’s critique of coloniality/modernity as an epistemic configuration and looks at the solutions he offers by focusing on the geo-politics of textual production. feeling and communicating with claude lévi-strauss drawing on a variety of ethnographic methods, lévi-strauss’s structuralism is ostensibly grounded in an extensive, sometimes obsessive, ‘observation of facts’ (1977: 280), and is thus ‘based on the sincerity and honesty of him [sic] who can say … “i was there; such-and-such happened to me; you will believe it to be there yourself”’ (1966: 117). faced with an excess of fieldwork observations in ‘exotic’ cultures, lévi-strauss’s own analytical method mirrors that of his own ‘bricoleur,’ taking ‘to pieces and reconstruct[ing] sets of events (on a physical, socio-historical or technical plane) and [using] them as so many indestructible pieces for structural patterns’ (1972: 33). structural anthropology is a humpty-dumpty procedure: break things apart, taxonomise, then put back together as a set of relations, a social totality defined in terms of internal logical principles. for lévi-strauss, the unity of the ‘scattered fragments’ (humpty-offthe-wall) with which the anthropologist deals is in the subjective consciousness of ‘primitive man [sic]’ himself, whose thought ‘is founded on [the] demand for order’ (10). in this way, the method of anthropology is not simply one among others, but is a social scientific translation of the ‘method’ of ‘primitive peoples,’ some of whom lévilaurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 3 strauss describes as ‘sociologists … as colleagues with whom one may freely confer’ (1987: 49). from which universal human need does the ‘demand for order’ derive? for lévi-strauss, the social provision of a language for human emotions can help us ‘undergo in an ordered and intelligible form a real experience that would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible’ (lévi-strauss 1977: 198). unconscious classifications may involve accommodations to ‘social powers’ from outside, certainly, but they also help us to overcome the threat from within, for the transition to ‘verbal expression’ can induce ‘the release of the physiological process, that is, the reorganization, in a favourable direction, of the process to which [a person experiencing pain] is subjected’ (1977: 198). cultural institutions based in collective social participation allow human beings to transfer disorderly affective experiences into orderly sign-structures (1987: 7). lévi-strauss thus offers a compelling argument for cultural relativism, because the human capacity to stabilise ambiguous or volatile experiences depends on the community-based affordances of language, habit, and art. in this context, lévi-strauss’s critique of colonialism, expressed circuitously throughout tristes tropiques (1955) but more explicitly in later lectures and papers (lévi-strauss 1966), is not simply that cultures should be preserved; after all, different peoples have constantly modified their shared systems of communication. rather, it is the synchronicity of an internally organised community that guarantees no person will be exposed to inarticulable or inexpressible cruelties—destitution, abject poverty, starvation and so on. following french sociologist marcel mauss, lévi-strauss is concerned that western colonialism displaces shared cultural codes with unsustainable motives—profit, exploitation, unchecked military growth—creating a european ‘humanity alienated from itself’ and making ‘so many men [sic] the objects of execration and contempt’ (1966: 122). although confident in the virtues of european social sciences, lévi-strauss is a critic of a eurocentrism that holds the global expansion of money, labour and commodities as an unquestionable good for humanity as whole, and points out—as many have done since—that the communal ethic structuring social relationships among europeans were not extended to the treatment of the non-european peoples with whom colonialists and imperialists had (often coercive) exchanges. correspondingly, lévi-strauss is optimistic that a community not alienated from itself would be incapable of treating ‘a single race or people on the surface of the earth … as an object’ (123). laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 4 since at least the 1960s cultural relativism has often been viewed as a politically reactionary stance, not only because the cultural status quo is implicitly preferred against radical social transformation, but also because it de-politicises the space of cultural translation, such that the political circumstances of professional inquiry into colonised peoples are hidden by rhetorical invocations of absolute otherness (see fanon 1963; mignolo 2007). lévi-strauss’s data was grounded in the basic claim that ‘i was there,’ but ‘there’ was always a product of contemporary struggles over political power, in which colonial administrators’ own ‘ethnographies’ created ‘fertile ground’ for professional ethnographers’ accounts of unresolvable cultural differences (pels & salemink 1994: 11, 14). what frantz fanon criticised as the ‘cultural congresses’ of ‘bourgeois intellectuals’ deflected questions about the legitimacy of colonial states by fetishising the correct or incorrect administration of traditions and customs (fanon 1963: 43). the ensuing challenge to social anthropology was twofold: firstly, how does one conduct ethnographic research when both the object of research and the objectivity of the researcher can no longer be taken for granted? secondly, how does one distinguish between the social scientific search for cultural order, and the political search for ways to justify ordering others—even, or especially, by way of ‘culture’? the first problem is one of renewing objectivity, but the second pierces the membrane between descriptions of ‘how things really are’ and the professional imperative to carve out spaces of legitimacy from within state-sponsored institutions. lévi-strauss speaks from the vantage point of a state intent on securing knowledge for the purposes of, as he himself would often claim, salvaging local cultures (lévi-strauss 1966), but the salvation workers also ascribe to themselves legitimacy and authority in the process. in tristes tropiques, the subject of western modernity is at once convicted of abusing state instruments and interpellated as responsible for fixing the ‘native situation’ by the redeployment of those same instruments. in the following section i examine one attempt to circumvent the self-legitimising exercises of the european social sciences in the philosophical work of deleuze and guattari. two orders of politics deleuze and guattari published anti-oedipus (the first volume of capitalism and schizophrenia) in 1972, responding in part to the limitations of ideology critique in accounting for the weaknesses of the french radicalisms associated with the may 1968 laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 5 student-led uprisings. for activists trained in althusserian marxism, lacanian psychoanalysis and lévi-strauss’s structuralism, the social mediation of the unconscious was blamed for the reproduction of social domination: whether in the bedroom or the boardroom, injustice was accounted for by failures in the language of representation. yet for deleuze and guattari, too many examples abounded of ‘segregative’ territorialisations within the left itself, ‘enclaves whose archaism is just as capable of nourishing a modern fascism as of freeing a revolutionary charge’ (2004: 279). the authors’ concern with revolutionary movements is not over matters of principle or political representation, but in the informal conduits of desire that multiply microfascistic sedimentations around whatever principles or representational strategies are chosen—even benign or peaceable ones. communal living can be terrifying, but this does not mean the ideologies have failed—they may even have worked too well: the masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they ‘want’ to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by ideological lure. desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from micro-formations already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems ... it’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective. (deleuze & guattari 2004b: 237) this is an important departure from structuralist reason. for lévi-strauss, social relations are formed through shared structures of communication, such that collective toxicities are assumed to be manifested within a group’s sign-systems. for example, social violence would be expected to show itself through everyday semiotic codifications of self and other, the rulers and the ruled, the permissible and the prohibited, and so on. for deleuze and guattari, by contrast, qualitative variations in the affective bonds between people make revolutionary groups capable of becoming microfascistic, or transform a sound principle into a damaging social practice. political desire involves not only systems of ideas but also direct investments into the social field, history, and mythology, and also into events, affects, and ‘partial objects’ (an ear, a tune, fractured memories). structuralism bites its own tail because it accounts for ‘order’ only in the grammar of signification, so that even a critique of order is always a re-ordering, a demystification of one arrangement by way of another, ad infinitum. thus the noncoincidence of social logics with political ideologies strikes at a great weakness of structural anthropology, because within mass social and political mobilisations ‘the laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 6 most contradictory ideas can exist side by side and tolerate each other, without any conflict arising from the logical contradiction between them’ (freud 1949: 18). there are many examples where deeply flawed ideologies have enabled positive political affiliations (liberalism and the us civil rights movement), or where noble ideologies have become implicated in, if not directly causing, authoritarian territorialisations (marxism and stalinism in the ussr). the proper response to bad ideologies may not be counter-ideologies, but political activities shifted to another level, by other means, with new resources. what distinguishes deleuze and guattari’s critique of organisational desire from, say, earlier iterations of these themes by sigmund freud, wilhelm reich or herbert marcuse, is that fluid groups are no better than inflexible ones, for it is ‘possible that one group or individual’s line of flight may not work to benefit that of another group or individual; it may on the contrary block it, plug it, throw it even deeper into rigid segmentarity’ (deleuze & guattari 2004b: 226). deleuze and guattari replace cultural typologies with what they call ‘multiplicities’, themselves containing a mélange of different ideals, myths and logical systems (2004a: 45–46). a multiplicity need not signify evenly across its surface to be organisationally robust; conversely, the stability of signifying systems over time often disguises deeper transformations at the organisational level (165). there is no tradition, heritage or historical memory that is not always-already doing something in the present. even contemporary nostalgia or re-invented traditions are not necessarily anachronistic, but rather imply ‘a political situation’: ‘what about the possibility of a resurgence of regional languages: not just the resurgence of various patois, but the possibility of new mythical and new referential functions? and what about the ambiguity of these movements, which already have a long history, displaying both fascistic and revolutionary tendencies?’ (deleuze 2007: 69, emphasis in original; see also deleuze & guattari 1986: 24). adequate responses to cultural nationalism, for example, must complement the critique of signification with heighted sensitivity to ‘reorganisation of functions’ and ‘re-grouping of forces’ transposed from homes to workplaces to schools (deleuze & guattari 2004b: 353). signification is not the enemy: as dorothea olkowski has observed, sometimes the most pernicious microfascisms feed on communication breakdown and political confusion, as when the ku klux klan affectively disrupted an organised citizens’ commemoration of martin luther king jr. (olkowski 1993). slogans, symbols and even epistemes can, in some small way, laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 7 accommodate participatory interlocution, but many other socialised practices of violence are not so transparent. micro-politics between the cracks can be far more dangerous than politics in public. deleuze and guattari extend this framework in their discussions of colonialism. in antioedipus the authors borrow the term ‘internal colonialism’ (first proposed by gonzalez casanova) to describe the ‘interior colony’ of the bourgeois european household: ‘oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at home, where we europeans are concerned, it is our intimate colonial education’ (deleuze & guattari 2004b: 186). closed circuits of investment in familial hierarchies do not simply anticipate the ‘paternalistic’ violence of the colonial administration, but rather it is the global character of nationalism, nativism, and political antagonism that insinuates itself into families, schools, workplaces and informal private spaces, for ‘oedipus depends on this sort of nationalistic, religious, racist sentiment, and not the reverse’ (deleuze & guattari 2004b: 114; see also laurie & stark 2012: 23-24). there is thus a back-and-forth movement between public mythologies of conquest and ethnocentric entitlement, and the banal habituations of ‘cultured’ social relations that slide beneath imperial ideologies proper: we will always be failures at playing african or indian, even chinese, and no voyage to the south seas, however arduous, will allow us to cross the wall, get out of the whole, or lose our face … these are eastern physical and spiritual exercises, but for a couple, like a conjugal bed tucked with a chinese sheet: you did do your exercises today, didn’t you? (deleuze & guattari 2004b: 209; see also 106, 305) informal ‘affective’ economies and their attendant significations are not necessarily stable insofar as capitalism tends towards the absolute ‘deterritorialisation’ of persons, objects, places and values. furthermore, deleuze and guattari are careful to show that all societies exhibit some oscillation between the ‘filial’ reproduction of social relationships (‘administrative and hierarchical’) and the supple reworking of values, identities and geographies through lateral ‘alliances’ (‘political and economic’) (2004a: 161). there is no reason to be suspicious of doxa, routine or discipline except insofar as they participate in toxic institutional activities and their social extensions—something we can never completely know in advance, because these relations of participation are constantly changing. correspondingly, whatever academic tools we use to study political power—whether sociological, anthropological, philosophical or otherwise—are subject to all types of appropriation at the borderline (‘all that counts is the constantly laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 8 shifting borderline’), especially in periods when academic institutions are misaligned with political interests, or when ‘the state as organism has problems with its own collective bodies’ (deleuze & guattari 2004b: 404). gendering politics depending on one’s viewpoint, deleuze and guattari either provide a remarkable insight into important differences between existing social multiplicities and the orderly ‘epistemological’ subject of the kantian tradition, or they paralyze the critical obligation to condemn nefarious ideologies, an obligation that depends on producing some evaluation of conflicting positions or perspectives. a peculiar kind of relativism can certainly be detected throughout a thousand plateaus, the second volume of capitalism and schizophrenia, in which deleuze and guattari consistently remind their reader that no type of organisation is ‘better’ than another. for example, the micropolitical ‘line of molecularisation’ can be distinguished from macro-political identitybased movements, yet ‘we will not say that it is necessarily better’ (2004b: 217); between the state and the ‘affective’ social mobilisations of the ‘war machine,’ the latter ‘answers to other rules. we are not saying that they are better, of course’ (395), and then later, ‘who could say which is better and which is worse? it is true that war kills, and hideously mutilates. but it is especially true after the state has appropriated the war machine’ (470); and finally, in the case of the state and social stratification, the question ‘is not whether the status of women, or those on the bottom, is better or worse, but the type of organization from which that status results’ (231). philosophy inevitably addresses itself to problems that admit some profound ambivalence or uncertainty: this is, perhaps, its professional and pedagogical virtue. yet there is a risk here of under-determining social analysis by reaching the same conclusion—’we cannot say’—regardless of circumstance. in order to perform an adequate sensitivity to ambivalence, deleuze and guattari deploy a reading strategy so attentive to indeterminacy that any denunciation of categorically objectionable violence or inequality becomes immediately suspect. in producing the question, ‘who could say which is better and which is worse?,’ deleuze and guattari must first evict this ‘who’ of any potential occupants, so that no person could simply respond, ‘i can say which is better and which is worse.’ let’s consider an example from anti-oedipus. deleuze and guattari cite edmund leach’s discussions of ‘groups of men residing in the same area, laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 9 or in neighbouring areas, who arrange marriages and shape concrete reality to a much greater extent than do systems of filiation’ (2004a: 161–62). the alliances sustaining kinship practices emerge as a ‘perverse tie of a primary sexuality between local groups, between brothers-in-law, co-husbands, childhood partners,’ impelled ‘by the action of the local lines and their non-oedipal primary homosexuality’ (180–81). deleuze and guattari find in leach’s ‘groups of men’ another example of ‘micro-fascisms,’ or the affective bonds of persons that can shape political discourse, without speaking a coherent language of its own. anticipating questions about the gendering of alliance, deleuze and guattari speculate about why female homosexuality had not led to amazonian women trading men and conclude, in casual dialogue with georges devereux’s reading of mojave (not amazonian) kinship practices, that ‘women’s affinity with the germinal influx … [results] in the enclosed position of women in the midst of extended filiations’ (2004a: 180). the germinal influx is repressed by ‘the great coders,’ those men who ‘meet and assemble to take wives for themselves, to negotiate for them, to share them’ (178–80). the ‘germinal influx,’ and women’s biological relationship to it, is described only in oblique terms as an intensity of desire, to be contrasted with investments in extensive social networks and alliances, implicitly aligned with the male political sphere. returning to the example prompting deleuze and guattari’s discussion, leach’s ‘groups of men’ were the product of ethnographic study conducted partly while on active military service in burma (leach 1961: v–vi, 114–23). leach’s volume is fiercely critical of generalisations from one society to a narrative about ‘politics’ in ‘primitive societies’ (1–2), and no firm conclusion is reached that jingpaw ‘alliances’ actually eclipse ‘filiation’ (or that indirect political circuits take priority over systemic and hierarchical reproductions of social unities). searching for ruptures that testify to the singularity of political desire over social structure, deleuze and guattari fall back on a methodological dogma that aligns femininity with reproduction and masculinity with politics and/or the primordial ‘male bond.’ drawing on feminist methodologies in archaeology, key and mackinnon argue that, in the case of the maya, the shift from non-state to state society and the subsequent collapse of the mayan empire involved frequently overlooked transformations of women’s roles (key & mackinnon 2000). far from being a natural separation, the division of labour between men and women was contested at a political level, and the omission of women’s involvement in politics laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 10 results more from the ideological slant of male researchers than from clear documentary evidence (key & mackinnon 2000: 113–14; see also slocum 1975: 36–37, and pyburn 2004). more generally, lila leibowitz argues that the popularity of man-the-hunter anthropologies in the 1960s—eg, lee and devore’s collection man the hunter (1968) and lionel tiger’s best-selling men in groups (1969)—emerged as part of a revived interest in physiological sex-differences in reaction to liberal, ‘nonbiogenetic’ challenges to sex-role differentiation (leibowitz 1975: 22). my criticism here is not only that deleuze and guattari’s pay insufficient attention to women in anthropology. indeed, the burgeoning anthropology of women in the 1970s was fraught with many of the methodological problems extant in deleuze and guattari’s own work (ebron 2001: 225). it is also the fetishisation of structural indeterminacy that is troubling here, although its immediate casualties are undoubtedly those elided from the authors’ ‘experimental’ reading practices. christopher miller’s criticisms of a thousand plateaus illuminate such concerns about the philosophical elegance of deleuze and guattari’s readings of second-hand anthropologies, insofar as the authors elide the historical ‘outsides’ of their own personal libraries: [depending] on someone else’s ethnography in order to build one’s own interpretation in the discourse of the humanities is an insecure business at best. the pitfalls of this dependency are everywhere: how was the information obtained? is the author reliable? were his/her sources biased? in what political context did the inquiry take place? what epistemological baggage comes in with the source? behind all these questions and behind all uses of anthropology lurks the condition without which anthropology would not have come into being: colonialism and its project of controlling by knowing. (miller 1998: 190) deleuze and guattari do recognise many of these concerns in their discussions of ethnologists (see 2004b: 473–74), but the extent to which philosophy is granted exemption from such criticisms is important here. in a final collaboration, what is philosophy? (1994), deleuze and guattari note that ‘[without] history experimentation would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but experimentation is not historical. it is philosophical’ (1994: 111). the subsequent commentary is littered with geophilosophical characterisations of the english (who ‘nomadise over the old greek earth’), the french (who ‘build’) and the germans (who ‘lay foundations’), in turn separated from the ‘prephilosophical’ thought of chinese, hindu, jewish and islamic thinkers (as a minor concession, these are later positioned ‘alongside’ philosophy) (1994: 95). in ‘what is the creative act?’ (deleuze 2007), deleuze has also remarked that ‘[if] philosophy exists, it is because it has its own content’ (318), and that within laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 11 the discipline proper to philosophy, ‘[anyone] can speak to anyone else’ (319). compare this with the slavish exposition of shaman rituals and ‘primitive’ codings that fill-out ‘savages, barbarians, civilized men’ in anti-oedipus and several lengthy commentaries in a thousand plateaus. only philosophy escapes the otherwise rigorous treatment of knowledge formation as entangled with political desire found throughout deleuze and guattari’s earlier engagements with the social sciences. the exceptionalism of european philosophy begins with the exceptional absence of ethnographic attention to philosophical alliances (its ‘politics and economics’) that deleuze and guattari’s apply so liberally to others’ ways of thinking. however, self-reflexivity would not necessarily provide an instant corrective to the ethical inconstancy of capitalism and schizophrenia. reflexivity in the kantian epistemological tradition can introduce so much self-doubt that the only certainties become a priori syntheses of categorical imperatives, removing the positive historical sensibility necessary for de-colonial or post-colonial critique. it is also important that concepts borrowed from deleuze and guattari have often helped to unsettle theoretical doxa in history, anthropology and other disciplines, and scholars such as todd ramon ochoa (2007), bhrigupati signh (2008) and meaghan morris (1998) have drawn on deleuze or deleuze and guattari in developing innovative methodologies. but i do wonder whether the language of ‘experimentation,’ and its tacit alliance with the pronounced ambivalences developed throughout capitalism and schizophrenia (‘we cannot say …’), may lead to its own territorialisations, or to what deleuze and guattari elsewhere denounce as ‘solitary work, irresponsible, illegible, and non-marketable, which on the contrary must pay not only to be read, but to be translated and reduced’ (2004a: 146). irma mcclaurin notes that often ‘those who are “authorized” to speak on what constitutes innovation in the discipline are those already recognized as authorities’ (2001: 50), and we should ask whether rhetorical uncertainty at one level is simply certainty of a different kind at another—that is, certainty that all political desire will be ambivalent and inconsistent. rather ironically, deleuze and guattari’s refusal of ideology critique contains the germ of a new doxa, one that could render any firm social criticism ontologically suspect a priori. in the next section, i examine an alternative approach to epistemological critique in the work of mignolo that attempts to counterbalance the exhaustive (and exhausting) ambivalences of post-structuralist argumentation. laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 12 walter d. mignolo and the geo-politics of translation this article cannot do justice to the broad scope of mignolo’s oeuvre, but will focus instead on his framing of epistemic differences with respect to modernity/coloniality. in the collection writing without words: alternative literacies in mesoamerica and the andes, mignolo ties the judeo-christian consecration of the holy book as divine depository of knowledge to the episteme informing spanish representations of amerindian writing practices. mignolo argues that colonial epistemologies based on the book served to subordinate the complex writing practices of the mayans, aztecs and incas to unflattering terms of comparison, especially when amerindian terminology was translated into imagined spanish equivalents. with a continuing focus on amerindian experiences, mignolo argues in the darker side of the renaissance that the ‘locus of enunciation,’ the position from which the speaker speaks, ‘is as much part of the knowing and understanding processes as are the data for the disciplinary … construction of the “real”’ (mignolo 1995: 21). developing this theme, the philological attention to maps, books, the quipu and the amoxtli (among many others) in the darker side are invaluable for any historical understanding of diverging european and amerindian literacies in new world colonial encounters. in two chapters devoted to spanish cartographies, mignolo literally ‘maps’ the ways in which european ideas about spatial organisation fed into politically expedient discourses naturalising the european ‘center’ against the colonial margins (1995: 219–313). in addition to the subordination of indigenous amerindian languages, the ‘colonial matrix of power’ (1999: 239) also privileged certain institutional apparatuses of knowing and managing others’ knowledges: ‘cultures of scholarship were precisely what people outside europe either lacked ... or if they happened to possess them (like china, india, or the islamic world), they became an object of study’ (mignolo 2000: 304). echoing lévi-strauss’s modified cultural relativism, mignolo concedes that ‘there is nothing wrong in the fact that a given group of people put forward its own cosmovision,’ and advocates ‘a world in which many worlds will co-exist’ (2007: 499). in keeping with the thesis of tristes tropiques (1955), problems arise ‘when a limited number of people feel they are appointed by god to bring (their) good to the rest of humanity. that is … the provincial pretense to universality’ (mignolo 2007: 493). but mignolo is not interested in retrieving ‘an authentic knowledge from chinese, arabic or aymara,’ but instead seeks to include in the foundation of knowledge ‘subjectivities laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 13 that have been subjected in and by the colonial matrix of power’ (2007: 493). it is not those outside academia who are ‘traditional,’ but rather epistemic fixtures within social scientific inquiry that sediment distinctions between ‘our’ intellectual advances and ‘their’ backwardness, so much so that ‘the traditional defense of traditions should be constantly contested at all levels, including the cultures of scholarship and the parochial defense of disciplinarity, even under new paradigms’ (2000: 203). as long as colonialism and neocolonialism are cast as problems to be solved from within european social scientific epistemes, solutions will always be found in the renewal of state power, rather than in the questioning of its geo-political preconditions. even the post-structural play with ‘the discourse of the coloniser’ forgets ‘to ask how the colonised represent themselves … without the need of self-appointed chronists, philosophers, missionaries, or men of letters to represent (depict as well as speak for) them’ (mignolo 1995: 332; see also 2000: 308–9). proposing an epistemic cure to the ills of intellectual ethnocentrism, mignolo borrows from gloria anzaldúa’s discussion of the ‘borderlands,’ those institutional spaces that engage non-western audiences, languages and experiences, and are thus forced to inhabit in-between spaces from which ‘an identity based on politics (and not politics based on identity)’ can emerge (2007: 492, emphasis in original; see also 1995: xiii; 2000: 271). this ‘border gnosis’—and elsewhere, ‘“barbarian” theorizing’ (303)—aims to displace the institutional fetishisation of european philosophy as the yardstick by which credible critique is measured. the appropriate response requires that the ‘grammar of de-coloniality … [begins with] languages and subjectivities that have been denied the possibility of participating in the production, distribution, and organization of knowledge’—that is, from the ‘institutionally and economically dis-enfranchised’ (2007: 492). only a reorganisation of epistemic premises enables mignolo to ‘avoid the eurocentric critique of eurocentrism and to legitimise border epistemologies emerging from the wounds of colonial histories, memories and experiences’ (2000: 37). the important point is to politicise epistemology from the experiences of those on the ‘border,’ not to develop yet another epistemology of politics. although not interested in advertising any personal ‘victim status’ as such (1999: 240), mignolo reminds his reader that ‘[scholarship], like travelling theories, wandering and sedentary scholars, in the first or the third world, cannot avoid the marks in their bodies imprinted by the coloniality of power, which, in the last analysis, orient their thinking’ (2000: 186). this laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 14 last point requires qualification: in a more recent piece, mignolo hesitates before a strict typology of episteme by citizenship, providing broader parameters for ‘de-coloniality’ as ‘working toward a vision of human life that is not dependent upon or structured by the forced imposition of one ideal of society over those that differ’ (2007: 459). as already noted, this ‘modified’ relativism shares with lévi-strauss the belief that all social ideals are equal, except those that insist themselves upon others through expansionist and authoritarian dictates. a raft of criticisms have been made of mignolo’s border thinking, including the elision of class differences and institutional privilege in the ‘loci of enunciation’ (browitt 2004; hulme 1999: 224–29); the over-emphasis on top-down ‘manichean’ accounts of conflict that are unable to explain violence or oppression guided by no single ‘logical design or plan’ (cheah 2006); the implicit ‘nostalgia for some unadulterated amerindian “voice”‘ found in mignolo’s philological studies, one that posits european logocentrism as the ‘original sin’ (michaelsen & shershow 2007: 43, 48); the imposition of false continuity between pre-enlightenment and enlightenment notions of modernity and/or colonialism (hulme 1999: 220–21); and finally, the alleged inattention to the methodological problems posed by mignolo’s reconstruction of histories through textual analysis (schwaller 1996). many of these criticisms depend on social scientific epistemes that are themselves being criticised by mignolo, so my initial focus here will be on the status of the episteme itself. the normative implications of this term are often unsatisfying: a possible implication of mignolo’s ‘border thinking’, for example, is that those with a non-colonial episteme are not held to be complicit with objectionable violence, whether colonial, neo-colonial or otherwise. but clearly this has happened at least once before, for the ‘colonial matrix of power’ did not spring up sui generis and neither did the state form or capital enterprise, the key social technologies that mignolo identifies with the acceleration of colonialism. the critique of colonial epistemes addresses itself to a historical configuration in which knowledge is central, but must pass outside the episteme to explain how that historical configuration came into being. the problem here is not a lack of historical rigor. mignolo is persuasive that ‘positivist’ histories can reveal a multitude of truths, none of which necessarily challenge the episteme through which they are produced. more important is that the imputation of laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 15 moral failing to those complicit with the ‘colonial matrix of power’ allows the decolonial critic to simply refuse the epistemic ‘choice’ that others are purported to have made. for example, in his commentary on the ‘epistemic turn’ in colonial studies, ramón grosfoguel (2007) blames the ‘arrogance’ of the subject who claims the ‘godlike’ status of epistemic omnipotence (215), while mignolo also warns against ‘the modern and imperial temptation of the good and best uni-versal’ (2007: 500, emphasis in original). elsewhere both the ‘spell and the enchantment of imperial modernity’ and ‘fundamentalist responses to imperial global designs’ are held responsible for the perpetuation of modernity/coloniality (mignolo & tlostanova 2006: 219). in each case, a subject is positioned behind universal thinking that has ‘entered into’ poor thinking as either a motivational error or a political mis-judgment. but what leads to arrogance and by what is the subject of modernity tempted? as rey chow has pointed out, arguments of this kind can be convoluted into a fetishisation of the question, ‘who speaks?,’ with the commonplace presumption that the discovery of power is itself ‘a kind of moral and/or rhetorical victory,’ as rhetorically compelling as it is inefficacious (chow 1993: 146). unless we wish to indict eurocentrists for being arrogant and celebrate noneuropeans for lack of arrogance—a cultural relativist distinction that mignolo and grosfoguel furiously reject—then some other explanation for the development of eurocentric epistemes is needed. mignolo’s de-colonial critique has at its core a version of human subjectivity so orderly that his or her capacity for violence becomes almost unimaginable, except outside submission to maleficent epistemological temptations. violence cannot exist without first being mediated by a system of signs: on this point, lévi-strauss and mignolo are in complete agreement. there is also a more subtle methodological sympathy here that should not go unnoticed. in the darker side mignolo tells us that ‘[since] i am dealing with signs, i need philological procedures’ (1995: 9), but later insists the ‘use of the tool is as ideological as the descriptions invented to justify its use’ (24). these conflicting assertions can only be resolved through a reversal of terms: since mignolo is dealing with philological procedures he needs signs, just as lévi-strauss’ method both requires and produces structures. the practice of philology as a scientific enterprise promises to reconstruct human behaviour from the ideas and grammars of a period (from letters, manifestos, treatises, public declarations or other ‘epistolary’ materials), not from the lives of the people required to act upon or respond to those ideas. thus the reader laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 16 searches mignolo in vain for subalterns, but does find the ‘epistemologically subaltern’ (1999: 240); wants to understand how ‘theories’ relate to peoples’ actions in the world but finds only ‘theoretical actors’ (mignolo & tlostanova 2006: 206); seeks to understand colonialism but is left trying to work out which set of orderly premises best fit the colonial grammar. had colonial administrators ever been confused in their morality or passionate in their exercise of government, mignolo’s philology could not reveal this (see cooper & stoler 1997 on this point). philology is anti-experiential. so while we must agree with mignolo that ‘one should ask whether people in la paz, bolivia, are living the life world in an experiential space that gets further away from the “horizon of expectations” of people in munich, germany’ (2007: 495), mignolo is not actually asking this question. the immediate conclusion is simply that ‘in munich, you do not see or feel coloniality’ (495), a conclusion that not only erases the ‘experiential space’ of many different migrant groups and displaced ‘illegal’ workers throughout germany and the european union, but forgets that many wealthier residents in la paz might see coloniality without feeling coloniality as mignolo does. to make this point clear, i do not intend to dispute the common experience felt by many subalterns of racial classification (497), humiliation and marginalisation (492), and exploitation (498), but i do want to recognise that as lived experiences with psychological and social resonances, the causes and consequences of colonial violence cannot be indexed back to individuals’ agreement with or disputation of the dominant episteme or its institutional locale. these are serious limitations to mignolo’s focus on ‘writing’ and the episteme as the key lens through which cultural differences are understood and negotiated, ones that are also significantly marked by the gendered character of mignolo’s own research. irene silverblatt interrogates the positions of power occupied by ‘native informants’ within incan communities: ‘indigenous authors wrote in a highly politicised, contradictory milieu which saturated their work. they too have often been idealised, presumed to speak of and for a “pure” inca past’ (1987: xxv). silverblatt’s argument is not only that the colonial situation shaped incan story-telling for spanish audiences (a point made by mignolo throughout the darker side), but that the choice of incan representatives was also shaped by spanish cultural attitudes. in particular, men ‘were considered innately more suitable to public life by the spanish. their values, imposed on the colonies, favoured men as society’s representatives, administrators, and power brokers’ (xxx). in writing without words, john monaghan also argues that the meanings of ‘signs’ are laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 17 tied up in the body and expertise of learned men, and that our ‘disembodied’ understanding of graphic semiotics precludes any holistic analysis of the internal cultural politics of amerindian societies (monaghan 1994: 96–97). in the three-page section of local histories/global designs entitled ‘gender and the coloniality of power,’ mignolo does quote at length sara suleri’s analysis of the ‘figurative status of gender’ in orientalist narratives, and concludes that introducing ‘gender and feminism into colonial cultural studies confirms the epistemological breakthrough being enacted by postcolonial theorising’ (2000: 126). the ‘politics and sensibilities’ of his own discourse are, according to mignolo, ‘comparable’ to those engaging with gender, race and class configurations (124). he also suggests that in the (apparently separate) field of women’s studies, norma alarcón’s recovery of ‘woman’ as a subject of knowledge ‘mirrors’ the positioned subject of colonial discourse (119). yet throughout, mignolo excludes the possibility that gender might have social and methodological consequences within postcolonial research practices, ones not easily overcome by attributing gendered violence to the temptations of ‘modern’ and ‘imperialist’ thinking. like deleuze and guattari, issues of gender are never allowed to disturb the epistemological scaffolding of political philosophy, a discipline that must frequently gauge social consciousness from borrowed ethnographic or historical research. working between philology and political philosophy, mignolo encounters comparable problems to those raised in deleuze and guattari’s discourse on gender and alliance. on the one hand, he is suspicious of cultural relativism and its propensity to neutralise power by appealing to ahistorical cultural worldviews (mignolo 1995: 15; 2007). on the other hand, mignolo draws on a methodological procedure deeply imbedded within structuralist anthropology; namely, the indexing of ‘culture’ to a collection of signs supposed to express the epistemes shared by all members of a given community. these are not fatal flaws in mignolo’s argument, but they do shed light on some crossroads in his own borderlands. the resounding strength of mignolo’s work is to create a space where multiple anti-colonial, post-colonial and de-colonial knowledges exist side-byside and stretch across many centuries. deleuze, guattari and mignolo all challenge the paradigms of cultural relativism and force political engagement with the legacies and trajectories of social scientific inquiry. however, these same critics can also be found reshuffling old cards, turning the ‘raw materials’ of social scientific inquiry into figurative topes, whether the mythical personages that populate deleuze and guattari’s laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 18 prose or mignolo’s border gnostic, who has long ceased to be an epistemologically bounded research participant in universities or other machineries of knowledge production. the somewhat facile epistemological questions—how does one come to learn about colonialism, through which social contexts and lived experiences, and what are the important ethical objections to coloniality or its legacy?—are so greatly eclipsed by epistemic anxiety that the ‘discourse on colonialism’ becomes a ‘discourse on the discourse on colonialism.’ from this latter position it can be impossible to become disentangled. postscript on the public intellectual during an interview conducted in 1989, deleuze responded to a question about a debate surrounding the wearing of veils in french schools. he suggested that the ‘spontaneous will of the young girls involved seems particularly reinforced by the pressure of parents who are anti-secular,’ and then considered some possible ramifications of the debate: it’s a matter of knowing just how far the islamic associations want to take their demands. will the second phase be to demand the right to islamic prayer in the class room? and then will the third phase be to demand a reassessment of the literature taught in the class room, claiming that a text by racine or voltaire is an offense to muslim dignity? (deleuze 2007: 365) deleuze cited, as his preference, ‘a secular movement among the arabs themselves.’ the interview is entitled simply, ‘a slippery slope.’ tradition is not critiqued in itself, but is understood as a movement within a european frame of reference, in which the french national became both commentator and potential victim of the racial and cultural other. deleuze’s final court of appeal becomes the freedom of great literatures, but we do not know for whom racine and voltaire are worth defending (the french? professors of literature? penguin classics?), nor are we told of the numerous exclusions from french classrooms of books considered an affront to christian sensibilities or those of european secularism. the doubt cast speculatively on the girls’ commitment to their veils—’we can’t be sure that the young girls feel all that strongly about it’ (deleuze 2007: 363)—only obscured the fact that deleuze, rather than the young girls, was being interviewed by libération. what deleuze is saying certainly bespeaks an episteme, but is also inconsistent with his own claims elsewhere about the dangers of authority and speaking for others. it is in part the inconsistency introduced by the situation of speaking (in this case a magazine, an audience, the professional motivations of a philosopher and so on) and not the speaker’s published epistemic commitments that laurie epistemology as politics portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 19 contains the danger, because political violence can pass as much by way of caprice and contradiction as it does by doctrine and dogma. reference list browitt, j. 2004, ‘(un)common ground? a comparative genealogy of british and latin american cultural studies,’ in estudios culturales y cuestiones globales, (eds) c. castillón, c. santibáñez & m. zimmerman. university of houston, houston. available online: url: http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/zimmerman/lacasa/virtualpublication2.html [accessed 11 august 2012]. cheah, p. 2006, ‘the 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press, new york, 36–50. stoler, a. l. & cooper, f. 1997, ‘between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda,’ in tensions of empire: colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, (eds) a. l. stoler & f. cooper. university of california press, berkeley, vii–x. microsoft word davidsongalley final.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. indian ocean traffic special issue, guest edited by lola sharon davidson and stephen muecke. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. woven webs: trading textiles around the indian ocean lola sharon davidson, university of technology sydney since ancient times, india has been a major exporter of textiles, sitting at the centre of a complex regional network of exchanges which inserted indian cottons and silks as prestige items into the textile regimes of societies all around the indian ocean. the balance between indigenous production marking local identity and indian imports marking elite status and trans-local identity was disrupted by the spread of the competing globalisations of islam and christianity. the european powers sought control over the production and movement of textiles as part of their larger struggle to dominate the trading system of the indian ocean. they expanded networks and forged new connections, redirecting a significant portion of production through metropolitan centres towards a global market and facilitating a dynamic process of cultural exchange. within this new system particular networks continue to connect the disparate communities of the indian ocean and to play a complex role in negotiating identification with and resistance to competing globalisations. trade networks of the ancient world the history of the textile trade is bedevilled by the fragility of its subject matter. although we know from written sources that india was already a major manufacturer and exporter of textiles in ancient times, apart from a few fragments from archaeological sites, the oldest indian textiles are 14th century fabrics preserved in indonesia (maxwell 2003: 3). india’s textile dominance arose from two factors: abundant supplies of cotton and an early use of mordants to fix and vary vegetable dyes. to these advantages was added a plentiful supply of cheap, skilled labour. herodotus (c. davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 2 425 bce) mentions indian cotton while fragments from egypt show that by the 3rd century bce a wide range of cotton cloth was being imported from india to supplement the local cotton and linen fabrics. plain cotton came from northwest and southern india and sri lanka and finer cotton from the east coast and the ganges valley (wild & wild 2004). the periplus of the erythraean sea, a navigational and trade manual from the 1st century ce, describes the trade route from egypt through the red sea to india and as far down the african coast as modern zanzibar (prabha ray 2004). this sea route complemented the north arabian land route joining the mediterranean to india and to china along the silk road. although the periplus mentions indian cotton and silk, india’s main exports to the west in the ancient period were not textiles but ivory, ebony and spices, the latter including a wide variety of substances but especially pepper and indigo, named by the greeks for its land of origin (balfour-paul 2006: 360). in exchange india received arabian resins and various metals, particularly gold. control of the spice route gradually passed from the nabataean arabs to the nestorian christians of persia who came to dominate trade in the northwest indian ocean and by the 7th century had settled in kerala and tamil nadu (prabha ray 2004: 22–23). in the eastern indian ocean trade was accompanied by a gradual diffusion of indian religious and cultural influences from around the 3rd century bce. by the 4th century ce hindu kingdoms based on trade were flourishing in java and among the champa who dominated the coast of vietnam. whereas textiles exported from india to the middle east and mediterranean addressed a wide market and covered a full range of materials, from silks and the finest muslins to the coarsest of sailcloth, the eastern textile trade showed a high degree of market segmentation determined both by the textile regimes it encountered and the cultural context in which it had spread. for the austronesian cultures of southeast asia and the indonesian archipelago, textiles held ritual as well as social importance. weaving, specifically of continuous cloth on a back-strap loom, was a quintessentially female activity and textiles played an essential role in all rituals, where they represented the female principle needed to balance the male principle in order to achieve the ideal of harmony (maxwell 1990: 74–76, 146; 2003: 4). imported indian textiles were also classified as female and were held in similarly high esteem, although they were not initially accorded the same ritual status davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 3 (maxwell 1990, 170–72, 214; totton 2004). the consumption of indian textiles formed part of a broader cultural influence in which southeast asian elites gradually adopted hinduism and buddhism together with indian styles of dress and state organization (maxwell 1990: 206–16). traded for spices, indian textiles served as visible manifestations of wealth and elite status. rather than being absorbed as anonymous elements into a general market system, indian textiles marked and defined courtly culture and its translocal connections. sometime between 200 bce and 500 ce, seafarers from borneo sailed their outrigger canoes across the indian ocean to settle madagascar where their textile tradition continued its development in substantial isolation for several centuries (kreamer & fee 2002; kusimba, odland & bronson 2004; fee 2004: 85–90). as in southeast asia, textile production was women’s work, ritually contrasted with the male work of agriculture and warfare (fee 2002: 34–35). cloth played a central symbolic role in all social exchanges, particularly between rulers and ruled, women and men, and the living and the dead. women wove cotton, raffia and indigenous silk into a warp-striped cloth called a lamba which was used as either a skirt or a shawl. blue-black and red, from indigo and madder, were the preferred colours. the back-strap loom and ikat (warpdyed) weaving with figurative designs are found nowhere else in africa and point to the continuity of this tradition with south east asia (picton & mack 1989: 131–40; peters n.d.; kusimba et al. 2004). at the very centre of the indian ocean, sri lanka was remarkable for its almost total absence of an indigenous textile tradition, doubtless due primarily to its proximity to india. all cloth for the traditional dress of sarong and sash was imported from india in exchange for sri lanka’s exports of gemstones, rare woods, ivory, elephants and cinnamon. sri lanka itself produced only rough undyed cotton cloth, woven by a caste of astrologers and musicians. attempts to establish a weaving industry on the island foundered upon the far higher status sri lankan buddhist society accorded to agricultural pursuits (cohen 2006). by the 7th century, control of the eastern route through to china was dominated by srivijaya, a buddhist maritime empire originally centred in sumatra, which dominated the sunda and malacca straits and extended throughout the greater part of the davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 4 indonesian archipelago and the malay peninsula. its wealth was based on long-distance trade and the levying of tolls on merchants (totton 2004; kerlogue 2004). the spread of islam with the rise of islam in the 7th century, the new caliphates took over the network of the nestorian christians in the western indian ocean, and control of the spice (and textile) trade passed once again to the arabs (prabha ray 2004). islam spread to the trading settlements that the swahili and persians had established on the islands off east africa, most notably zanzibar, and from there traders moved on down the coast of africa, exchanging indian textiles for slaves, gold and ivory (prabha ray 2004: 22–24). in madagascar conversion to islam was limited to relatively small numbers in the trading settlements on the northwest of the island. imported indian textiles were gradually adopted by the elite as signs of status but, lacking the wider cultural and religious associations that had accompanied these fabrics in southeast asia and the indonesian archipelago, the imported textiles were accorded no particular symbolic value, and indigenous textiles continued to play the central role both in rituals and in everyday life. elsewhere the cultural practices associated with islam affected the textile trade in a variety of ways. slavery for domestic and sexual purposes played a central role in islamic society and indian textiles were needed both to purchase african slaves and to clothe them. the islamic custom of veiling women increased the demand for fine cottons, as did the fashion for turbans, while the insistence on complete bodily covering for both sexes stimulated the demand for cloth overall. shia law forbad men from indulging in the luxury of pure silk garments and this in turn increased the demand for silk-cotton mixes (chaudhuri 1990: 307). silk was nevertheless regarded as a higher status textile than cotton and continued to be preferred for clothing by those who could afford it. the conversion of gujarat in the 8th century brought one of india’s main textile areas under muslim influence. in the course of time, the islamic prohibition on depicting the human form and a consequent aversion to figurative art influenced the design of textiles, particularly those for export, by moving it away from sensuous depictions of the davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 5 adorned human body towards geometric and floral motifs suited to the tastes of the expanding muslim market (zebrowski n.d.). block printing made possible the mass production of patterned textiles imitating the decorative features of more expensive, labour-intensive cloth. block printing was, moreover, particularly well suited to the repetitive geometric designs favoured by the muslim market. the textile fragments found at al fustat suggest that a bulk trade in printed cottons developed throughout the muslim world from gujarat across to egypt and thence to the maghreb from where they filtered down to western africa (bérinstain n.d.). the technology of block printing also spread from gujarat to the muslim trading towns of east africa, most notably zanzibar. by the 13th century the shona of greater zimbabwe were spinning and weaving cotton, though not to an extent that could compete with imported textiles (guille n.d.). further from muslim influence, coromandel stayed faithful to the pen and brush which remained the dominant medium for executing the elaborate devotional hangings depicting hindu gods and goddesses which adorned southern indian temples (gittinger n.d.). in any case religious conversion did not necessarily entail aesthetic transformation and traditions remained mixed in many areas. under tolerant muslim rulers, the deccan kingdoms of golconda and hyderabad produced exquisite embroidered and painted temple hangings celebrating krishna as well as mughal-style miniature paintings (safrani n.d.). muslim traders also ventured across the indian ocean towards china, trading indian textiles for spices and spreading their religion. southern china, already abundantly supplied with both cotton and silk, proved relatively indifferent to both, but in the indonesian archipelago religion spread with trade (kunz 2006). the northern tip of sumatra converted to islam towards the end of the 13th century and was soon followed by the royal courts of java. the last hindu kingdom on java fell at the end of the 15th century, leaving the island of bali as a hindu outpost. the conversion of much of the indonesian archipelago to islam was not immediately accompanied by profound cultural change. traditional styles of dress and textile production were initially unaffected. despite the change of religion, the courts long remained faithful to both the indic ceremonies and the indian textiles whose symbolism had been crucial to their process of state formation (maxwell 2003). in java, sumptuary laws prescribed which nobles were entitled to wear which designs. court dress, davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 6 characterised by the overall patterning typical of indian cloth, was identical for males and females while the peasantry continued to wear striped homespun which expressed gender, age and group membership (maxwell 1990: 218). specific imported textiles enjoyed particular importance, chief of which was the double-ikat silk patola from gujarat, a luxury fabric in which the tie-dying of both warp and weft threads permitted an extreme clarity of design. block-printed and painted cottons were also imported from west india and the coromandel coast. there was some reciprocal influence in design since the prized patolas were imitated by indonesian weavers while the coromandel producers catered to their market with repetitive symmetrical designs in muted colours and by incorporating motifs such as the balinese geringsing (maxwell 2003; kahlenberg 2006; barnes 2006; majilis 2006). the block-printed cottons gujarat exported to the west asian and indonesian markets exhibit general similarities, particularly in their use of standard motifs such as the floral roundel and the goose or hamsa (guy 1998: 48–51; riello & roy 2008: 4). however the very different roles they were allotted in the textile regimes of these two cultural areas, cheap material for tailored clothing and furnishing in the west, luxury status marker and ritual object in the east, inevitably led to a stylistic divergence. the indonesian market came to favour a more sombre and densely packed decorative field, while the continued use of untailored wraps required borders and elaborate saw-toothed end sections (maxwell 1990: 153, 218). the malays, already fond of silk chinese jackets, adopted tailored tunics and turbans along with islam but, outside the malay peninsula, southeast asia remained largely buddhist, with court ceremonials echoing brahminical hinduism. palaces were adorned with hangings depicting indra surrounded by ethereal attendants, status and gender were exhibited in the particular cloths given and worn in systems of formalised exchange, royal agents commissioned court textiles with siamese motifs and themes from the cloth-painters of coromandel, and the king both controlled and profited from the lucrative trade in indian textiles (guy 2003). the thais favoured maroons, blacks and dark red in grids with nervous white resist lines (lemire 2009: 369). indeed, the mere presence of a white border was sufficient to render cloth unsaleable to malays, who scorned it as clearly destined for the siamese market (guy 1998: 67). davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 7 the impact of european colonialism the arrival of the europeans in the indian ocean substantially increased the demand for indian textiles both by opening up new markets and by intensifying trade with existing markets. it is claimed that when vasco da gama arrived in calicut in 1498 some helpful north africans took him aside and explained the indian ocean trading system to him. to buy pepper in calicut he needed gold, which he could obtain from kilwa in east africa in return for textiles from gujarat (pomeranz & topik 1999: 228). for the portuguese merchant adventurer the problem is obvious. what is he going to use to buy the textiles? europe itself had always suffered from a lack of desirable resources to exchange for the fabled riches of the orient. europeans wanted spices but these could only be obtained from india in exchange for gold or from the spice islands in exchange for textiles. europe itself produced an abundance of high quality textiles but plain, heavy woollens and sturdy linens initially held little appeal for a market accustomed to light, brightly coloured and decorated cottons and densely woven silk. in establishing their colonial empires, the european powers were competing for economic advantage but they were necessarily constrained by the existing systems of exchange. in his suma oriental, written in india and malacca between 1512 and 1515, tomé pires estimated that before the arrival of the portuguese, malacca received annually 5 vessels from gujarat and southern india plus several from bengal, all laden with cloth. an idea of the scale and variety of this trade may be gathered from the comments of a dutch observer almost a century later. in 1602, augustin stalpaert, surveying the market at banda, by then the main market for spices in the archipelago, described 21 types of cloth from coromandel, 8 from gujarat and 6 from bengal. of the 70,000 pieces of cloth sold there annually, 85% was indian (reid 2008: 36). the rest was chinese silk or locally produced fabric, including silk from aceh with a metallic supplementary warp design, which was traded back to india (leigh 1989: 81). pires further observed that ‘cambay chiefly stretches out two arms: with her right arm she reaches out towards aden and with the other towards malacca’ (quoted in pearson 2000: 125). by the time the portuguese arrived, these two arms were operating independently and indian ocean trade had returned to its ancient segmentation. the arabs, turks and persians stayed in the arabian sea, trading from aden and hormuz to cambay in gujarat, while the chinese, whose move into the indian ocean had begun in the 12th century and culminated in the enormous fleets of zheng he in 1404 and 1433, had withdrawn into davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 8 the south china sea, trading only as far as malacca, founded by a srivijayan prince at the beginning of the fifteenth century. the intermediate trade was handled by indian merchants, generally gujaratis, who connected cambay with calicut, coromandel and southeast asia. victory at the battle of diu in 1509 established portuguese domination of the indian ocean and by 1571 a string of forts and trading posts linked lisbon with nagasaki. thus while clearly the most significant impact of the portuguese in the indian ocean was their success in imposing restrictions on a previously free mercantile system through armed force, a secondary effect, noted by om prakash, was a limited resumption of long-distance maritime trade (prakash 2000). gujarati merchants still operated, but they were obliged to do so in portuguese boats under the control of the portuguese crown and in competition with private traders from the portuguese colonies. the arrival of the english and dutch brought an end to portuguese domination of the indian ocean. the english east india company (eeic) was founded in 1600 and the dutch vereenigde oost-indische compagnie (voc) two years later. the eeic initially followed the official portuguese estado strategy of focusing on the asia-europe trade while leaving the intra-asian trade to private individuals, but the voc immediately entered the intra-asian trade, sourcing pepper, cloves, nutmeg and mace from the indonesian archipelago in exchange for indian textiles from coromandel where they set up factories in 1606 and 1610. before long the voc’s intra-asian trade was as important as their euro-asian trade. the voc adopted this strategy to solve the balance of payments problem. this had been less of a problem for the portuguese who had been able to pay for their spices with silver from japan and gold and silver from west africa and south america. following the expulsion of the portuguese from japan in 1639, the voc took over selling silk and silk-cotton textiles from bengal to japan in exchange for bullion, as well as trading cotton and silk textiles from coromandel and gujarat for spices from the indonesian archipelago for export to europe. once in control of the indonesian archipelago, the dutch imposed a monopoly on the import of indian textiles, ousting the gujarati traders. they allocated textile quotas to indigenous rulers and, following established practice, used indian textiles as gifts to create and cement alliances (kerlogue 2004). in addition, the voc is estimated to have used over a million pieces of cloth simply to clothe their slaves, quite apart from the cloth used to pay salaries, let alone that required for buying the spices themselves davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 9 (prakash 2009: 154). the muslim sultans of jambi in sumatra, who had drawn their revenue from the spice-textile trade, resisted the dutch by retreating upriver and using an overland route to continue their exchange of forest products for indian textiles (kerlogue 2004). over time dutch rule supplanted the local elites who had provided the main market for the imported textiles while plantation crops replaced the indigenous system of spice production which had paid for the textiles. with the triumph of the dutch in the archipelago, the portuguese and the english shifted their focus westwards. although there was some indigenous textile production in east africa, most cloth was imported from gujarat. even so, alpers has estimated that only 4 percent of the total export trade of western india went to east africa (cited in pearson 2000: 125). most gujarati cotton textiles went to the persian gulf, while the silk brocade patolas were specialist items for southeast asia. nevertheless, particular towns in gujarat, such as jambusar, were totally dedicated to producing cloth for the east african trade in accordance with the specifications relayed back by the merchants (machado 2008: 75). cloth had long been a standard item of exchange for slaves in both east and west africa and the growth of the slave trade from the sixteenth century greatly expanded this market. although portugal itself was not a cloth-producing nation, it dominated the coastal trade of west africa from 1480 to 1540, exchanging dutch, flemish and english cloth for moroccan cloth that could then be sold for gold and slaves in west africa more cheaply than the trans-saharan land route permitted (vogt 1975: 635). cloth functioned as the standard unit of currency in both east and west africa—in the 1520s a slave cost between 20 and 24 cloths, defined as a piece of unbleached linen ¾ yard in length (vogt 1975: 648; roberts 1996: 143). following the death of manuel i in 1521, conflict in northern africa resulted in a shortage of textiles for the west african trade, so the portuguese substituted indian cottons (vogt 1975). both in response to growing demand and as a solution to the balance of payments problem, transhipped indian textiles played an increasing role in this market (subramanian 1998; arasaratnam 1990). spices, having a high price to volume ratio, left ample space aboard ship for a bulkier but still valuable commodity. shipped round the cape to europe, indian textiles were sold on to their established markets in muslim north africa, turkey and the levant, bypassing and to some extent undercutting, though never entirely replacing, the overland routes across arabia, persia and the middle east (marg n.d.: 83–84; riello 2008a: 326). west africans were particularly davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 10 fond of blue, red and blue striped, and red and blue checked cottons which came to be known as guinea cloth, although english red wool fabric continued to be popular and was often unravelled to provide material for indigenous weaving (kriger 2009: 105-27; roberts 1996). guinea cloth, produced in pondicherry, was the standard currency of senegal in the 18th century and the only product that could be exchanged for the gum that was essential for europe’s own textile industry (roberts 1996). textiles made up 50% of the goods exchanged by french traders for slaves in 1755 and 1788 and comprised nearly 2/3 of england’s exports to africa during the 18th century. some of this cloth was linen and woollen cloth from europe but a substantial portion was transhipped indian cotton (pomeranz & topik 1999: 228; alpern 1995: 6–12, fns. 11 & 34). with greater exposure and a fall in price, europeans too developed a taste for indian textiles, particularly for colourfully decorated bedspreads. whereas the first textiles sent back by the portuguese from india had been chinese silks purchased in malabar, by the end of the 16th century approximately 10 percent of the cargo shipped back to lisbon consisted of textiles, predominantly indian cottons (riello 2008: 317). until the 1660s, most of the textiles purchased by the voc in india were for the asian trade, but by the end of the century two-thirds were being sent to holland (prakash 2009: 152). the 1680s, in particular, saw a boom in exports of plain cotton and muslin from bengal to england, as indian production increased and tariffs against french goods rendered indian fabrics more cost competitive. bengal had traditionally produced finely woven cotton and silk-cotton mixes but its levels of production had always been far behind those of coromandel and gujarat. expanding markets both lowered standards in the traditional textile producing areas, struggling to meet demand, and stimulated production in other regions. the eastern half of bengal was still largely jungle in 1500, when the portuguese started trading there, but by the late 17th century bengal had become the largest textile manufacturing region in the indian subcontinent (parthasarathi 2009: 41), while textiles had become the most important commodity traded by the chartered companies between asia and europe, supplanting the spices that had started it all (riello 2008: 320; riello & roy 2008: 6). in 1700, concern for local production led the british to ban the import of indian silk and silk-cotton fabrics. this merely caused an increase in imports of plain cotton fabric davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 11 which was then printed in england. another act in 1720 duly prohibited the wearing of printed calico but allowed imports for transhipment. this led to indian cloth being used predominantly for interior decoration and domestic clothing such as the banyan (lemire 2009) but proved insufficient to stem the flood. in 1769 the weavers of spitalfield rioted, leading to further protectionist legislation (chaudhuri 1974). from 1689 to 1759, the french followed the english example and banned the import and wearing of indian textiles while allowing transhipment (lemire & riello 2003: 898; riello 2008: 322–23). indian cloth made up ¾ of the cargo brought back by the french east india company and accounted for almost 30% of its profits. australia, too, provided an enthusiastic, if small, market for indian textiles from european settlement in 1788 until the imposition of trade restrictions in the 1830s (broadbent 2003). the shift to plain cotton marked an innovation in the indian textile trade, as previously all fabric for export had been printed, dyed or decorated in some fashion (parthasarathi 2009). europeans also manifested a strong preference for white backgrounds, again contrasting with the asian and african markets which favoured a completely coloured field. moreover, whereas the southeast asian market had been profoundly conservative, in deference to the ritual and status role of the textiles, europeans, like africans, were fickle and individualist. they insisted on a wide variety of fabrics and changed fashion annually (chaudhuri 1974: 266; machado 2008: 66). sample patterns were sent from england to agents in india and a hybrid decorative style developed which in its enthusiasm for floral motifs and depiction of birds and animals complemented the tastes of the muslim courts of the mughals and the deccan while simultaneously appealing to the enthusiasm for nature that was an essential aspect of 19th century european romanticism (lemire & riello 2008: 894). not only cotton and silk but also indian wool shawls were fashionable in europe, russia and the ottoman empire throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. the most luxurious were the kashmiri shawls woven from the under-fleece of the himalayan mountain goat and decorated with an ancient persian motif called a boteh. attempts to produce equally fine wool in europe failed but in the 1780s edinburgh and norwich started producing cheaper imitations of the prized shawls. the introduction of the jacquard loom to the scottish town of paisley in the 1820s made its name synonymous with both the motif and the shawls featuring it, though this mass production did not davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 12 displace the luxury end of the market. indian shawls and their scottish imitations were a popular accompaniment to the neoclassical empire line dresses of fine muslin and silk fashionable from the 1790s to the 1820s but fell somewhat from favour when women’s dresses moved to the fuller shape of the crinoline in the 1830s and then to the bustle in the 1870s (reilly 1987; rizvi 2006). a combination of protectionism and technological innovation encouraged european manufacturers to imitate indian textiles for both local and export markets (lemire & riello 2003: 897–905). as the industrial revolution took off in england, india became the main source of raw cotton for the lancashire textile mills and the united states, benefitting from slave labour and a superior indigenous form of cotton, emerged as a competitor. by 1820, english cotton had supplanted indian chintzes for everyday dress throughout southeast asia, with over half of the trade being in white cotton for use in making batik (reid 2008: 46). batik, which is first mentioned in the 17th century, adapted indian print designs to local javanese tastes. the wax-resist dying of the fabric, as opposed to its weaving, became an important cultural practice, employing a particular imagery and muted tonal range expressing both abundance and self-restraint. batik became a characteristically javanese cultural product (maxwell 1990: 325–27). once milled cotton became available, locally dyed material undercut the indonesian market for indian textiles. by the 19th century, imitation indian chintz was being produced in northern java (kerlogue 2004). men moved into commercial textile production which had previously been an exclusively female, and ritually significant, occupation (maxwell 1990: 404). the ancient dichotomy between imported cloth expressing elite status and indigenous cloth expressing local and ritual status, together with the classification of all cloth as ritually female, gave way to the use of batik as a signifier of national and cultural identity (maxwell 2003: 145ff). weaving identities the circuits of communication opened up by colonialism, combined with the tensions it created, enlarged the role of textiles as dynamic signifiers of changing cultural identities, negotiating the balance between local identity and the competing globalisations of islam and the west. decoratively, islam and europe pulled in opposite directions, the former towards abstract design, the latter towards natural realism (maxwell 1990: 328–29, 377–93). on the other hand, their modesty conventions converged, leading to the davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 13 adoption of bodices for women, tunics for men and jackets for both sexes, although the basic rectangular sarong that had served as dress around the indian ocean for so long initially remained unaltered. by the late 1880s, elite indian males wore european dress in public combined with indian headgear while females remained faithful to the hindu sari and the muslim kurta pyjama (prabha ray 2004). in 1869, king chulalongkorn of siam europeanised court dress and by the late 19th century observers in northern thailand noted that the traditional sarong and scarf were being supplemented with jackets by both sexes (guy 2003: 80; bowie 1992: 819). at the same period, siamese noblewomen took to weaving their own silk brocade wraps, partly as an assertion of cultural superiority and partly in response to a decline in the quality of indian and chinese silks which were increasingly targeted at a mass market (guy 1998: 147–50). for the lower classes, english towels competed with bombay shawls as preferred scarves and were still popular for sashes and turbans in nepal in the 1970s. in both indonesia and madagascar, the shift to tailoring meant a rejection of the reverence for the uncut cloth produced by the traditional back-strap loom. in the mid-20th century, the government of the maldives prescribed european dress for male public servants while offering women the choice of two dress styles, one muslim and one european, but both obeying islamic codes of modesty (maloney 1980: 171–74). the bare breasts that so offended ibn battuta, along with the fine textiles that so impressed him, are a distant memory. throughout the indian ocean region, both sexes have tended to adopt european styles for everyday and work wear while reserving traditional dress for domestic and ceremonial occasions. alternatively males wear european dress while females wear modified versions of islamic dress or else express an ambivalent adherence to islam and the west by wearing headscarves with western clothes. the spread of western clothing has been further promoted by the trade in second-hand clothes, donated to charities and sold in underdeveloped nations, incidentally undermining local textile production. used clothing and linen played a minor role in european exports to africa from the earliest period but the scale of this trade has grown as charities have transformed themselves into international businesses (vogt 1975: 646–47; alpern 1995: 11). at the same time transhipment and imitation have nurtured new networks. as travel has become accessible to larger numbers of people the haj has become a significant circuit of textile distribution. many of the textiles brought back from the markets of mecca by pilgrims are produced in india. davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 14 their trajectory through the sacred space adds to their cultural value and they are accordingly treasured and imitated in their ultimate destinations throughout the islamic world. couched velvet embroidered with gold and silver thread is a particular favourite in this trade (kerlogue 2004). gandhi’s call for the boycotting of english textiles and the wearing of homespun as part of the indian independence movement is probably the most famous example of political power expressed through clothing. further from the shores of the indian ocean, tibetans manifested their opposition to chinese domination by their preference for indian brocade which began replacing the imported chinese version in the mid-19th century when tibetan monks commissioned it from muslim weavers in benares (ahmed 2006; graham 2006). during the 17th century, women of the merina tribe in the madagascan highlands responded to imported cloth by weaving silk wraps for export to the rest of the island (fee 2004; fee 2002: 46). this coincided with an extension of merina’s political influence, expressed in part by gifts of this cloth to subordinate chiefs. in the 19th century, merina commoners dressed in american white cotton as a sign of free status while the rulers used red english broadcloth and indian red silk parasols. other ethnic groups, particularly the betsileo, affirmed their independence from merina by continuing to dress in cloth made from hemp, bark and raffia. as the pressure of european colonisation increased, the merina court changed its dress style from european to arabic (fee 2004). after the french takeover in 1883, merina nobles stopped wearing red and reserved the royal colour for shrouding the dead, again using cloth to express their resistance to foreign domination (fee 2002: 51). following independence, the traditional silk lamba was revived as a shawl to provide a luxurious indigenous accessory to western clothing. just as the indonesians had adapted indian textile motifs for local production, the dutch appropriated indian and indonesian motifs for use on printed, machined cloth that they then exported to other colonies, a strategy also followed by the british. the haarlem cotton company made the first attempt at imitating javanese batik following the napoleonic wars. the javanese were unimpressed, so the dutch sold their prints to a glasgow merchant, ebenezer brown flemming, who shipped them to west africa. flemming then developed and patented designs which incorporated west african motifs, such as ashante swords and proverbs, into indonesian batik designs. his british davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 15 successors expanded the repertoire to include prints commemorating significant events. meanwhile, by the end of the 19th century the dutch had developed a separate market in east africa where german traders in mombasa, dar es salaam and zanzibar commissioned textiles with large-scale motifs in bright, contrasting colours, unlike those previously imported from india but closer to indigenous aesthetic traditions. these european textiles, printed to suit specific markets, undercut indian textiles in africa and, indeed, swamped local production until the establishment of textile mills towards the end of the 20th century (picton n.d.). inland from the coast, the masai continue to affect distinctive dress while rejecting both islam and christianity. their tourist paintings invariably show them clad in the single red woollen blankets originally imported from england, although they now drape themselves in an average of four lengths of thick striped or checked cotton, called shuka, which is produced locally for sale to both the masai and the tourists. the gujarati wood-block prints have a more direct east african descendant in the kanga. this female garment, consisting of two matching pieces of rectangular cloth, was dubbed guinea-fowl in kiswahili, because the original kangas were speckled black, white and red. they were first produced on the swahili coast around zanzibar in the 1850s in imitation of textiles from kutch imported by muslim traders. they have a symmetrical design with a central motif and a border featuring writing. a sunni muslim from sindh, abdullah essah, who set up in mombasa in 1887, claimed to be the first to print sayings on the cloths, using arabic proverbs. however, from the early 20th century the sayings have been in kiswahili using roman script and the nature of the messages has become personal and explicitly sexual (parkin 2004). women aspire to possess as many kanga as possible and employ them as a form of indirect communication where direct statements would be socially inappropriate (hamid n.d.). attempts to ban the kanga have been unsuccessful. as in west africa, commemorative designs are also popular and are commissioned by political and social parties. local production suffered from foreign competition but has revived with the introduction of rotary print mills and the main competition now is from indian silk-screen printed cloth (hilger n.d.). the kanga is made of very thin cotton so can be worn as casual dress for the home or can be draped over other clothing as a form of veiling, an alternative to the head-to-foot black buibui or the arabian hijab for wear in public. thus it simultaneously asserts both islamic identity and local identity while enacting a paradox between islamic demands davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 16 for female modesty and swahili traditions of sexual expressiveness. the islamic identity of the kanga has been weakened due to its adoption by non-islamic women as a local alternative or decorative supplement to western dress and this in turn has led to an arabisation of outdoor dress among wealthier islamic women (parkin 2004). rmhk, or real madras handkerchief, also known as george, from fort george, was a cotton plaid dyed with indigo and madder produced in andhra pradesh and exported from chennai to england from where it was sent to west africa to exchange for slaves, gold, ivory and palm oil. a swiss firm developed an industrial imitation for the same market. at the beginning of the 20th century, the swiss firm and an english competitor opened branches in chennai and then, a few decades later, in nigeria. this resulted in a more effective flow of information about stylistic preferences. after the second world war a new version of george was introduced, rmhk fancy, which paradoxically left a plain space to be filled with embroidery in africa in accordance with local islamic traditions. trade boomed until 1976 when the nigerian government banned textile imports, throwing 30,000 indian hand-loom weavers out of work. the trade continued clandestinely until import restrictions were eased. the west african market women then made their way to chennai to place their orders directly. they brought velvets embroidered with metal thread in the islamic style, which they wanted copied and which joined george as the staple of the india–west africa textile trade. by this stage, the english and swiss firms had merged and passed into indian ownership. the elimination of the european middleman has led to a blending of west african and indian designs (lutz 2006). nevertheless the original indian textiles remain symbolically important, at least for some groups. the kalabari, a tribe in the niger delta, regards george as the most valuable textile and uses it both for clothing and ceremonial purposes. they never wear the printed cotton cloth popular with neighbouring ethnic groups. the mother and baby are wrapped in george and for a funeral the mourners wear george and three successive rooms are decorated, the first with george, the second with hand-loomed west african textiles, and the third with islamic embroidered velvets (eicher 2006), achieving thereby a threefold identification. the homogenizing effect of international trade is undeniable. the tourist shops of zanzibar sell the same europeanised clothes from india as do the shops of delhi, singapore and sydney. cushion covers with designs copied from the spanish painter davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 17 miro are chain-stitched to order in kashmir and sold over the internet to the world. indigenous textile production continues to sustain local identity in groups resistant to globalising forces, such as the many tribal groups still existing in the indian ocean region. the numerous non-vietnamese ethnic groups of vietnam, for example, continue to produce and wear indigo-dyed cloth decorated with appliqué and embroidery (vietnam museum of ethnology 1981). for many of these groups, sale of their textiles to outsiders is a major source of income and even the continued local consumption for clothing is increasingly linked to the global phenomenon of mass tourism and the commodification of ethnic identity. these ethnic textiles follow international trade routes of their own, passing through middlemen to the national market and thence to the global market while at the same time buyers, in the form of tourists, come from the other side of the world to purchase the goods at source. the trade in ethnic textiles is minuscule in the context of the textile trade as a whole, but its association with cultural identity and with the global tourist market endows it with significance beyond its material or commercial size. bhutan offers 14-day weaving tours; luang prabhang hosts a nightly market displaying a fabulous array of hand-made textiles, mixing the traditional with those adapted to more modern tastes; the hmong have little to offer beyond their elaborately dyed and embroidered costumes, but these are now recycled by traders as jackets and backpacks for tourists. textiles, their production, their display and their ritual uses, remain potent ways of creating and expressing ethnic identity. the malaysian government sponsors craft production of batik and songket, textiles associated with traditional malay court culture whose adoption as national symbols asserts the dominance of malays as definers of national identity at the expense of other ethnic groups, such as the chinese or indians. malaysian batik, which dates from the 1920s, differs from indonesian batik in both technique and design—it is painted rather than resist-dyed, more colourful and predominantly floral. only government protection prevents it being swamped by the cheaper product from its more populous neighbour. songket, a silk fabric with metallic supplementary warp, was associated with the malay sultanates from the 16th century. both fabrics now feature as formal dress and in tourist promotion (leigh 2000 & 2002). it is not only nations that pursue such a strategy. the kedang of eastern indonesia were a non-weaving tribe who exchanged forest products for ceremonial textiles with one davidson woven webs portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 18 neighbour and for everyday textiles with another, a pattern repeated throughout their immediate region and that, moreover, reproduced the original structure of the indian ocean textile trade. in recent years, a kedang woman with connections to both neighbouring groups has not only introduced weaving to her village but has developed ‘traditional’ costumes for both men and women. these costumes are now worn for the animist ceremonies in honour of the ancestors, ceremonies that themselves have been greatly expanded, in particular to include the use of these new ‘traditional’ textiles (barnes 2004b). throughout its long history, the changing networks of the indian ocean textile trade have served as circuits of material communication, transmitting cultural values embodied in cloth, defining and redefining identities and relationships. coloured cottons and fine muslins to drape greco-roman ladies, double-ikat silk patolas and painted coromandel cottons for the courts of south-east asia, block-printed gujarati cottons for the markets of north africa and the middle east, fine cottons for the veils of muslim women and the floating neo-classical gowns of european women, coarse blue cloth to clothe african slaves and blue and red checked and striped cotton to buy them with, floral motifs with birds and animals for the mughal courts and the european romantics, cashmere shawls for europe, russia and the ottoman empire: all these textiles participated in a process of cultural exchange that altered fashions and hence material cultural expressions. the uncut cloth of the austronesians yielded to tailoring and full bodily covering, patolas and block prints gave birth to indonesian batik, cashmere shawls transmuted to paisley, gujarati block-prints were enlarged and exaggerated for east african tastes and adorned with arab proverbs to create the kanga, and indian and indonesian motifs contributed to the west african cotton print. even as western clothing styles become ever more ubiquitous, the multifarious networks of the indian ocean textile trade continue to sustain the creation of cultural identities in an interconnected world. reference list ahmed, m. 2006, ‘brocade for the buddhists: the textile trade between benares and tibet,’ in textiles from india: the global trade (ed.) r.y crill, seagull, oxford, 9–26. alpern, s.b. 1995, ‘what africans got for their slaves: a master list of european trade goods,’ history 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egypt,’ in textiles in indian ocean societies, (ed.) r, barnes, routledge, new york, 11–16. zebrowski, m. n.d., ‘the hindu and muslim elements of mughal art with reference to textiles,’ in marg, vol. 40, no. 3: ‘legendary themes of weavers and dyers—textiles of india and persia,’ 26–35. finalgravesandrechniewskigalleyportaljuly2012 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. imagined transcultural histories and geographies special issue, guest edited by bronwyn winter. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. mapping utopia: cartography and social reform in 19th century australia matthew graves, aix-marseille university elizabeth rechniewski, university of sydney all utopias require mapping, their social order depends upon and generates a spatial order which reorganises and improves upon existing models (cosgrove 1999: 15–16). this article examines the close relationship between cartography, utopianism and colonial dispossession in 19th century australia. critical geographers such as j. b. harley1 have transformed our understanding in the last twenty years of the relationship between maps, knowledge and power, drawing attention to the role of maps in the expansion of empires, in preparing the colonists’ symbolic appropriation of land, before the explorers had ever trodden the ground. in the case of the writers studied in this article—thomas j. maslen (1787–1856) and james vetch (1789–1869)—their cartography was a tool to appropriate the ‘empy continent’ of australia by projecting onto it utopian social and political solutions to problems at home. in constructing their utopias, they drew on a range of resources : maps, grid patterns, nomenclature, iconography and mathematical formulae in order to achieve the ideal divisions of territory and distribution of land that would realise their quest to establish a ‘new britain.’ after a brief discussion of the influential work of edward gibbon wakefield (1796–1862), who described the ideal division and distribution of land by applying economic theory and mathematical formulae, the article will focus on two examples of the exercise of utopian thinking through cartography, in the work of maslen and vetch. 1 a number of his most important articles, including ‘maps, knowledge, and power,’ are collected in harley (2001). graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 2 these three writers are of particular interest for a number of reasons: their projects were devised almost contemporaneously, in the late 1820s, when large parts of the australian continent were still unexplored by europeans; their maps were not however presented as imaginary or fictional, they were speculative certainly, but ‘speculative geography’ was sanctioned by the royal geographical society, founded in 1831, as a means of exciting curiosity and stimulating inquiry, so long as the theories put forward were ‘supported by reasonable probabilities’ (prospectus, rgs 1831: vii). the authors we study here believed that they had a sound, rational basis for their speculations; they drew on the full resources of the scientific, geographical and cartographical knowledge of the time to draw up their maps of australia and their projects for reform. as we shall see, however, they did not escape the assumptions, ethnocentrism and the illusions that marked the european mindset of the colonial era at this time of transition to a new form of imperialism. the 1830s can be considered, argues john darwin, as the ‘crucial decade’ in the transformation of the british empire ‘from a straggling mercantile empire into a world system’; wakefield, maslen and vetch are at the forefront of the ideological developments that accompanied the ‘spectacular expansion of this entrepôt empire into a world system in the making’ (darwin 2002: 45). the early explorers of the continent had viewed and described the country through the mental grid of the landmarks and topographical references of their countries of origin, and according to what they were expecting or hoping to find. as geoff king writes: ‘the early maps and journals were filled with misnomers: ‘meadows’ and ‘mountains’ that owed little in appearance to what usually went by the names, but that provided a form of spatial punctuation’ (king 1996: 62). the significance of such practices goes far beyond the misleading naming of features: mapping and naming was also a tool of possession and dispossession. one of the founding objectives of the royal geographical society, which became the principal body initiating, funding and disseminating the work of exploration in the colonies, was to establish a geographical nomenclature, ‘a more uniform and precise orthography’ which arguably came to be used as an instrument of the imperial appropriation of space, as much as a tool of science (prospectus, rgs 1831: vii–xii). the delineation of space, the drawing of frontiers, the description of land, were designed to support english pastoral, agricultural, mining practices and interests, graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 3 as the drawing of goyder’s line illustrates.2 the surveyors,3 cartographers, engineers and explorers who gradually extended their activities across the continent were ‘buttressing the claims of effective and moral proprietorship by demonstrating to the colonists and the outside world that they had conquered the landscape’ (day 2005: 141). the issue of place names was no less significant in the process of possession and dispossession. on the one hand it might appear that giving european-derived names—of famous people, explorers, places from the mother country—must signify the most total form of dispossession, since such practices over-wrote and erased the aboriginal presence. on the other hand, david day argues that the use of traditional names did not necessarily indicate any greater respect for the rights and prior occupancy of the land by the aborigines. their use might be a means to remove from the map the traces of previous explorers; it could also have a practical purpose, to allow easier verification and identification of landmarks ‘so long as any aborigines can be found in the neighbourhood’ (143). the process of naming (in this context) is itself utopian: in the first place, it attributes to the mapmakers and explorers the right to name, and thus to create, as cresswell (2004) terms it, ‘place’ out of space;4 it participates in the creation of an ideal place, rendering it coherent and rational, since names are selected through the exercise of reason; it creates an idealised relationship between the original and the new, the past and the present (the natives and the colonisers) by supposing a peaceful transition from an inferior, irrational stage to the next, superior stage, of human occupation. these issues: the naming of places, the (often conjectural) identification of topographical features, the rational division of land, are central to the exercises in mapping and to the symbolic appropriation of space to which our writers devoted themselves. an integral tool in the ideological realisation of possession and dispossession, the ‘practical utopias’ proposed by our authors could perhaps only be envisaged on the ‘blank page’ that was australia in the european imagination of this 2 goyder’s line, drawn across the map of south australia in 1865 to indicate the limit of the area suitable for agriculture, is an example of division with a view to english pastoral practice. 3 norman etherington cites examples of the hostility with which surveyors were met by colonised peoples in new zealand, australia and south africa (etherington 2007: 3–4). 4 ‘by the act of place-naming, space is transformed symbolically into a place, that is, a space with history’ (carter 1987: xxiv). graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 4 period, and on the ‘waste land’ that defined its legal status.5 it is all the more significant that none of our three writers had ever been to australia when they drew up their maps and projects; their knowledge was based entirely on second-hand accounts or on extrapolation from their experiences in other countries. of the three writers, wakefield was the first to publish his proposals and by far the most influential. wakefield’s first major venture into the field of colonial reform was his letter from sydney (1829)—written in fact while he was a prisoner in newgate, serving a three year sentence for the abduction of a schoolgirl heiress, and first published, for this reason, under the name of another colonial reformer, robert gouger. the letter from sydney, which received considerable public attention and critical acclaim, has generally been remembered as the first exposition of wakefield’s theory of ‘systematic colonisation,’ a theory that he developed over the following twenty years and that rests on three principles: land sales controlled by the authorities for a ‘sufficient price’; the proceeds of the sale to be used to support selected immigration; the prospect of selfgovernment. wakefield’s system would later be put into practice in colonies in australasia and canada, with varying degrees of faithfulness to his doctrines, and varying degrees of success. but whatever his responsibility in their success or failure, there can be no doubting the extent of his influence (even if he often had to operate behind the scenes, because of his dubious reputation) as he persuaded colonial officials, government ministers, governors and political economists to adopt his ideas. he was a highly influential member of a generation of colonial reformers, including bentham and john stuart mill, that sought to overturn the prevailing orthodoxy of the 1820s, which held that colonies were an expensive burden on the mother-country, that further colonial development should be discouraged, and that the independence of the colonies might be envisioned with equanimity (mills 1915: 19–22). we have discussed elsewhere the kind of society that letter from sydney envisaged for australia, a vision that sought certainly to eliminate from the continent the excessive poverty of the mother country but nevertheless to reproduce a class-based society that would protect the landed gentry to which wakefield aspired (graves & rechniewski 5 simon ryan emphasises the political agenda behind the cartographic process: ‘i have argued that maps have played a significant role in the visual production of the continent as a tabula rasa, and that the cartographic emptiness is not simply a display of geographical ignorance but has important political implications’ (ryan: 123). graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 5 2010–11: 39). it might be described as a nostalgic, rural vision, seeking to reproduce a way of life that was already threatened by the twin pressures of industrialisation and urbanisation in britain.6 its realisation depended on achieving an ideal proportion of population to land, and an ideal distribution of population across the territory, which necessitated placing restrictions on the availability of land to new settlers. his system must be based, he argued, on the most precise calculation: the price of land must not be too high (which would discourage migration) nor too low (for this would allow settlers to acquire land too easily, thus reducing the available workforce), and it must moreover be sufficient to subsidise the continued migration of desirable, selected, free colonists. however as r.c. mills argues: ‘at this point the theory, consisting of the two doctrines of a sufficient price and the application of the whole of the proceeds to emigration completely breaks down. its pretended character of mathematical precision, of scientific accuracy must be denied, and its claim to be self-regulatory dismissed’ (mills: 337). wakefield’s work is significant in regard to this article because of the predictions he makes about geography, terrain and climate and his supposition that precise mathematical calculations can engineer a certain type of social relations. he supposes— like maslen and vetch after him—that the land will be productive and fertile, and the climate clement, and he discounts as irrelevant, and condemned to disappear, the native populations. like his contemporaries, he assumes that australia is a ‘waste land,’ a tabula rasa, waiting to be filled up by productive inhabitants. his letter from sydney, moreover, is cited by maslen in his appendix (with the author shown as robert gouger) as one of the books that he considers required reading for any expedition to explore australia—thus are perpetuated and disseminated typical assumptions about the nature of the australian terrain that characterise the work of maslen and vetch amongst others in this period. thomas j. maslen was the author of the friend of australia or a plan for exploring the interior and for carrying on a survey of the whole continent of australia, first published in london in 1830. this book of some 480 pages included a map, town-plans and the design for an australian flag. though his stated aim was to put forward a practical plan for exploring the interior of the continent, maslen’s cartography and 6 david spurr (1993: 30) points out that the visions projected onto the colonised landscape may already have been outdated representations of the homeland. graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 6 iconography seek to imaginatively construct a society that would be an exemplary expression of the british race. maslen had retired from service with the east india company in 1821 because of ill health and by the late 1820s was living in yorkshire, which he describes at the end of the preface to friend of australia as the ‘siberian wilds.’ missing the warm climate of india, he had asked the army to pay his pension in australia to enable him to emigrate there, but his request was declined. he compensated for this disappointment by reading everything he could on australia and devising a detailed and ambitious plan for exploring the whole of the interior of the continent. the bulk of the chapters are devoted to laying out in extraordinary detail the equipment, planning and organisation necessary for a successful expedition, which he claimed would take no more than 14 years (maslen 1836: 22).7 he tells the reader that he had explored widely in india, taking lesstravelled routes as he pursued his duties as a public servant; nothing however suggests that he had undertaken anything even approaching the ambitious expedition he outlines for australia. the modern reader is bemused by the painstaking appraisals of, for example, the reasons why bullocks or camels are more suitable than horses; the necessity for light chainmail to guard against attacks by savages; the rotation of sentry duties etc. these details, and in particular the measures to be taken to defend the party against the natives, are a stark reminder of the link between colonial exploration, cartography and dispossession.8 maslen advances in the opening pages a number of arguments in favour of exploring australia, the last ‘great blank in the map of the world’ (1). there is the argument by science: it is in the interests of humanity to extend our knowledge of this ‘most singular country,’ its ‘interesting topographical features,’ its ‘strange productions.’9 moreover there is still the danger posed by the french: that they may explore and perhaps take 7 page numbers in brackets refer to the 2nd edition published in 1836. the 1st edition was published in london by hurst chance in 1830. maslen reveals in the appendix that his book was written in the autumn of 1827 but publication was delayed because of the ‘indifference’ of the public; the discovery of the darling river having confirmed some of his predictions, he had been encouraged to proceed with publication. 8 a chapter is devoted to the ‘treatment of hostile indians’ (ch vi), with advice on how to frighten them away, preferably without having to kill them, since it is the europeans’ duty as the representative of civilisation to seek to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. 9 ‘from a european point of view, australia was one of the last sites for speculation, one of the last places yet to be known. it was seen to be one of the last untilled tracts in the field of knowledge’ (gibson 1992: 6). graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 7 possession of parts of the country (2). however an important reason is a social one: maslen believes that exploration will open up the country to continuing expansion and settlement, extending the ‘thriving colony’ of new south wales. he, like wakefield, is very much in favour of the migration of free settlers: australia offers the opportunity for britain’s poor to make a new life, at no loss to the mother country where there is no work for them since the return of peace. government and local authorities should help ‘our willing enterprising poor’ (4) through heavily subsidised or free transport this assisted migration will be of benefit to the british populations, by reducing competition for work, and to the local authorities who will have fewer unemployed and destitute to support, and it will supply labour for the colonies (233). the moral benefits of this scheme will also be considerable, for poverty leads many young men in britain to ‘prefer a life of libertinage to that of marrying’ (6) with the consequent numbers of illegitimate children. his plans for exploration involve then a much broader aim: the construction of an ideal society on the ‘empty’ land of australia. australia is described in the opening pages as an ‘uninhabited’ country (2), a ‘wilderness’ (xii), although later chapters deal at length with the aborigines and in the appendix he accepts that there are good grounds for believing in the existence of a ‘numerous population of indians’ in the interior (377).10 it is in the context of his social aims that we need to analyse his speculative map of the continent. his optimistic assessment of the continent’s material promise is an incitement to take possession of it and an encouragement to settle there. his speculative geography thus involves an idealised portrayal of the geography and topography that emphasises the fertility of the soils, the clemency of the climate, the comparative ease of exploration, the lack of hostility of the natives. eastern australia he writes, from his house on the yorkshire moors, is ‘without any exaggeration or stretch of truth, the paradise of the southern hemisphere’ (313). maslen’s map shows extensive and accurate detail around the coast of australia but considerable imaginative construction in the centre, where he promises water and fertile soils. he is persuaded that there must exist a great river, flowing through the centre of 10 he often, as in this passage, refers to the aborigines as ‘indians,’ referring not to the indians with which he was familiar but to those of north america: ‘the term indians, as used in north america, seems most suitable, because, to call people blacks who are not black, is improper, many being fair, and all being brown. to call them savages is a libel on the quiet tribes’ (132, footnote). graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 8 the continent into the ocean off the north west coast of australia.11 his map shows therefore at the heart of the continent, the delta and the route of a ‘beautiful’ river ‘of the first magnitude.’ a navigable river must exist, he insists, not only because of the analogy with other continents but because: ‘it is impossible to contemplate the works of a bounteous creator and believe that any imperfection can exist on the face of our planet; which would certainly be the case if such a continent had no outlet for its waters’ (136). he also shows on his map purely fanciful ranges of mountains in the western half of the continent, and supposes that beyond the first hundred or so miles from the west australian coast, the country becomes rich and fertile (49). maslen’s recommendation of the principles to be used in choosing place names may also be seen to reflect a utopian impulse, a desire to ground its unique identity: ‘let australia have a nomenclature of her own’ (256). he explains that he is strongly opposed to the practice of naming new places after old ones. it is ‘absurd,’ he writes, to use european names in new colonies, with the result that there are so many windsors, richmonds, etc. now dotted across the empire. he proposes that aboriginal names should be used where possible (254) and in default of an ‘indian’ name, recourse should be made to the list of places situated at the equivalent northern latitude, in order to ‘ascertain what remarkable place is situated on the precise corresponding latitude’ (255). if even this does not offer a solution, then the names of european individuals of note can be used, but only if they are not already in use for places in europe. his own practice in naming is rather more ambiguous than this injunction might lead the reader to expect: in naming the large divisions of the continent he is in part content to accept existing practice, with some rationalisation. however, while he uses the neutral terms ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ australia in place of new holland and new south wales, in pursuance of his aim to eliminate european references, for the north he invents ‘australindia,’ and for the south ‘anglicania.’ he does not explain his choice of these latter terms, but perhaps they refer to the distribution of population, the north of australia still being largely populated by ‘indians’ alone, the south already undergoing colonisation by whites. but another explanation for the choice of ‘australindia’ may lie 11 michael cathcart (2009: 102–4) argues that the widespread belief that early explorers were searching for an inland sea is a myth; the majority believed or hoped that they would find a river. maslen vacillated over whether a river or a sea might be found in the heart of australia, but returned in the second edition of his book in 1836 to his initial assumption that a great river would be discovered there. graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 9 thomas j. maslen, sketch of the coasts of australia and the supposed entrance of the great river … 1831.12 in his assumption that the northern interior of australia ‘will be found to be a second india’ (379). the choice of ‘anglicania’ stakes a claim and perhaps assigns a religious identity. his detailed plans for the new colony extend to the suggestion that australia might one day have its own coat of arms and flag and he provides a colour plate representation of what the flag might be, almost certainly the first flag ever designed for australia, and designed at a time when the concept of a politically and administratively united australia lay far in the future. we can perhaps explain maslen’s ability to conceive of australia in this way as the result of his cartographic labours: his representation of the 12 sketch of the coasts of australia and the supposed entrance of the great river …1831, t. j. maslen, fecit. mitchell library, state library of nsw. call no. m2 804/1831/1. digital order no. a128149. link to record and online image: http://library.sl.nsw.gov.au/search~s2/?searchtype=c&searcharg=m2+804%2f1831%2f1&searchscope= 2&sortdropdown=&sort=d&extended=0&searchlimits=&searchorigarg=amaslen%2c+t.+j.+%28thomas+j.%29. graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 10 continent, which includes the tributaries of the ‘great river’ stretching out across the land and binding it together, creates the conceptual framework necessary to imagine it as a whole. the flag, against a yellow background,13 displays britannia written on a standard brandished by a rearing lion at the top, with australia written in much larger characters across the bottom. in the shape of a crest, it is divided into four squares showing top right a lamb bearing a cross; below, a ship at sea (‘the emblem of commerce’); bottom left, 14 wheat sheaves (‘the emblem of agriculture and plenty’) and at top left, in the most prominent position, a black and a white hand grasped in a handshake, encircled by palm-leaves, an ‘emblem of goodwill between white men and their sable fellow creatures’ (427). the flag is utopian: it represents a country at peace with its native inhabitants, a christian land, and a land of plenty. thomas j. maslen, ‘a colonial flag,’ 1830.14 13 in a hand-written addition to the 1836 edition of the work (reproduced in several copies we have seen), maslen explains that he has chosen yellow, the imperial colour of china, in order to symbolise that australia too will become a great imperial power in the region. 14 ‘a colonial flag,’ in the friend of australia, or, a plan for exploring the interior … of australia by a retired officer of the hon. east india company’s service, thomas j. maslen, 1830. mitchell library, state library of nsw. call no. ml 980.1/58a3 pl.5. digital order no. a128149.link to record and online images: http://library.sl.nsw.gov.au/search~s2?/amaslen%2c+t.+j.+%28thomas+j.%29/amaslen+t+j+thomas+j/ -3%2c-1%2c0%2cb/frameset&ff=amaslen+t+j+thomas+j&3%2c%2c5. graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 11 this pictorial representation of the relationship between europeans and aborigines is belied by maslen’s proposal to solve the ‘tasmanian problem’ by turning tasmania into an all-white colony, transferring the natives to uninhabited islands or other parts of the continent and ‘for the future not to allow any other than a white population to habit tasmania, which would then be a second england, and of course the bulwark of all the british settlements in the southern hemisphere’ (241). this policy was indeed carried out by george robinson in the early 1830s.15 moreover maslen is possibly the first writer to call explicitly for a white australia: he enjoins australians not to ‘import strangers of all languages, colours and creeds’—‘speaking as an australian of the year two thousand, my boast should be, ‘we are of a pure white stock; we are no mongrels’’ (313). the concept of a ‘white australia’ is in itself utopian—the ideal of a ‘pure’ race is not only unrealisable but also assumes, as maslen makes clear, the imminent demise of the aborigines.16 maslen draws up not only a map to encourage exploration, not only a flag for the new colony, but town plans to construct the ideal settlement. michael williams points out that a number of reformers with utopian ideas for town planning were active in the early nineteenth century, seeking to discover, whether at home or overseas in the colonies, the ‘ideal settlement form,’ that might promote ‘the health and happiness of the greatest number.’17 maslen certainly belongs to this current of thought since he devotes half a chapter and a detailed plan to explain his proposals for the lay-out of an ideal australian city (chapter xiii)—perhaps the first published town plan for the continent.18 maslen can be held to have introduced the idea of a green-belt around australian towns: ‘a belt of park about a mile or two in diameter should entirely surround every town’ (263); this 15 by 1833, george augustus robinson had persuaded the approximately 300 surviving tasmanian aborigines to surrender, with assurances that they would be protected and provided for. they were transferred to flinders island where most of them perished. on other issues too, maslen seems to presciently announce some later policies: in chapter xiii ‘civilising the indians should begin with their children’, maslen argues that they should be taken from their parents and community when young and sent to madras, to be educated with children of ‘their own colour but very different in manners’ (244–45). some, trained as teachers, would return to their communities to educate the next generation. another plan is to buy the female children (the indians are ‘not over affectionate to their female children’ 242) and train them to be wives for the convicts (243), a plan that would, of course, rapidly ‘breed out’ the aborigines. 16 some critics have argued for the link between utopianism and racism, see for example wetz (2003). 17 michael williams (1966: 67–69) speculates that proposals from maslen, robert owen and john sinclair may have influenced the design of adelaide. 18 in 1843 he wrote a book on improvements to town planning in britain and the colonies, suggestions for the improvement of our towns and houses. this book includes the section from friend of australia on town planning. graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 12 would contribute to the health of the inhabitants and their physical and aesthetic pleasure. but he offers far more detail than this, suggesting a grid pattern for the town, with the widest streets, for the better-off, at the centre, then narrower streets extending further out.19 narrow lanes and alleys must be eliminated altogether from the centre of towns for ‘they are the hiding places of thieves, the abodes of misery, the manufactories of every species of vice and wickedness’ (264). his city is class and hierarchically based, but is designed to keep the classes separate as much as possible, physically and even visually, to reduce the resentment that the poor might feel towards the rich when confronted with the evidence of their wealth (269). maslen goes beyond wakefield in proposing not merely to preserve the classes of workers and landed gentry, but in setting out the criteria for the creation of an aristocracy based on the possession of land (324). james vetch: mapping the ‘great hiatus.’ captain james vetch, an engineer and a cartographer by vocation, was a fellow of the royal society and a founding fellow of the royal geographical society. his principle contribution to early nineteenth century knowledge of the australian continent was a paper published in 1838 in the society’s journal entitled considerations on the political geography and geographical nomenclature of australia (1838a), which discussed not so much australia as it then was, but as it might be once the exploration of the interior was completed and a systematic colonization of the continent begun. vetch’s utopian vision takes the form of a territorial division of australian space which is explicitly political and implicitly social. like maslen, vetch had never visited australia. his knowledge of australia’s geography came from early reports of exploration to the royal geographical society, but primarily from ‘study of the map’ (159) and calculus. there is no evidence that vetch belonged to the national colonization society and his 1838 blueprint for australia seems to have been independent of the wakefield-inspired lobby for systematic colonization; unlike maslen, he never dedicated a book-length study to the continent. however, he did publish numerous papers and reports on geology, antiquities, geography, navigation and engineering; notably in 1843 a plan to build a canal across the isthmus of suez which anticipated and partly inspired ferdinand de lesseps’ later project. while the considerations is the sole publication he devoted exclusively to australia, it invites comparison with an earlier paper he presented to the 19 he gives greek names to the wide streets at the centre of town for the better off: corinthian, ionic, doric, and mauresque for the narrow streets for the poor, on the outskirts. graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 13 royal geographical society: on the monuments and relics of the ancient inhabitants of new spain (1837). his first map to represent australia is a mappemonde entitled projection of the globe on the cylinder of a meridian and its accompanying memoir, published between 1821 and 1825, which adopts a variation on the mercator projection of the world known as a transverse mercator perspective where the polar regions (absent on a conventional mercator) are drawn towards the centre of the map, enhancing the parts of the world in the vicinity of the poles, such as australasia, which have been ‘unreasonably neglected’ (vetch 1825: 1). it shrinks the tyranny of distance by linking europe and australia along a north-south maritime meridian arcing through the then still-to-be-charted antarctic continent, while at the same time suggesting the proximity of the new world geographies of the american and australian continents. it also inscribes the utopia of a new britain in the south seas by tracing the holographic, upside-down figure of the british isles off the south coast of new zealand at an equivalent latitude to its position in the northern hemisphere. two zones in each hemisphere between the latitudes 50° detail of james vetch’s ‘projection of the globe on the cylinder of a meridian,’ c.1831, bibliothèque nationale de france.20 20
there are only two extant copies of james vetch’s mappemonde: the british library copy is dated circa 1820, while the version held by the bibliothèque nationale de france is circa 1831. the mappemonde was accompanied by an explanatory memoir that the british library dates as circa 1825. if the latter date seems the more reasonable, vetch would have drawn the mappemonde while on working leave from the ordnance survey in mexico (from 1824 to 1835), where he surveyed previously unmapped regions of the country. graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 14 and 55° are marked in red, establishing ‘the latitude of england’ as a standard where the same environmental conditions are expected to prevail at opposite ends of the earth. finding promotion slow in peacetime, vetch had taken leave of his regiment to become a manager for anglo-mexican mining interests. he lived in mexico from 1824–1829 and returned to work there as a surveyor and engineer from 1832–1835. in the course of his travels in mexico, vetch gathered a substantial collection of pre-columbian antiquities, which he later gifted to the british museum and mapped broad swathes of the country. his subsequent writing on australia alludes repeatedly to the americas in general and to central america in particular, so that he tends to read australian space and its indigenous peoples through the lens of his mexican experience. in so doing, vetch displays an epistemological trait also apparent in maslen’s work: his understanding of australian space draws on analogical reasoning which projects the environment and topography of the americas (or india for maslen) onto the island continent, in an inter-colonial transposition of experience. as in continental america, he supposes that the frontier will be opened up and domesticated by horses and mules (1838a: 165). utopian systems and surveys vetch’s premise is that australia, as a new world, provides a unique opportunity to draw up a scheme of political division while the territory is still an unknown quantity (in 1838a) beyond the boundaries of the fledgling settlements of new south wales, van diemen’s land, the swan river colony, victoria and south australia. like wakefield or maslen, ‘system’ is the key word: the blank map of the interior—the ‘great hiatus’ as vetch calls it—invites geographical projection and systematic survey on a grand scale. he observes that territorial divisions are generally the result of historical accident and are capricious in their outcomes with detrimental effect on ‘the laws, the peace and prosperity of the people.’ on his map, in contrast, ‘political divisions (are based) on principle and system’ (157); the (near) perfect symmetry of his territorial divisions, which sought to ensure equality of natural advantage, access to the coast, and size, will foster ‘general peace and individual prosperity’ (158). for vetch, the great ‘empty’ continent is a land of unbounded opportunity: where in the old world, political organisation followed discovery and settlement, in the new it will precede it. indeed ‘the plan should be adopted and reduced to practice ere conditions or circumstances graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 15 may arise to render the same either impracticable or difficult’ (159). in other words, before discovery disrupts the perfect symmetry of theory. in vetch’s geography, nature imitates science. the continent is a geometrical form, oblong in shape, twice the length of its breadth. the author laments the creation of the colony of south australia (159), which alone disrupts its natural symmetry. the territories are to be of equal area, compact and self-contained, each with access to the sea. accordingly, he maps the land by halving it longitudinally and slicing the resultant moities transversely into four equal parts, creating nine divisions (with a further state, guelphia (today’s victoria), squeezed into the south-eastern corner of the continent), to make ten provinces overall including van diemen’s land. a larger or smaller number of divisions ‘would not be likely to ensure so good a government or so much happiness to the people’ (159). each division is 1/4th larger than spain and portugal combined: like the british isles in vetch’s earlier mappemonde, the iberian peninsula is transposed james vetch’s map of australia, 1838, from his ‘considerations on the political geography and geographical nomenclature of australia,’ royal geographical society journal, vol. 8 (1838): 157–69. graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 16 holographically to the great australian bight as a measure of scale. demography is predicated upon the symmetry of space, with each sub-division to accommodate a peak population of 19 million inhabitants (proportional to the then population of the iberian peninsula). extrapolating from the european experience to a new world the size of continental europe, vetch predicts that one day the population of australia will match the demographic potential of the usa: ‘if we reckon the population of europe at 186,000,000 australia may at a future day, on the same scale of density, possess a population of 153,000,000’ (158). vetch’s considerations are at their most utopian in the conformity of territorial and demographic outcomes to mathematical principle and rational expectations. like wakefield, the declared purpose of vetch’s scheme of division is to facilitate the allotment of title (160), in what is ab origine a vacant plot, a no man’s land or waste land. unlike maslen, vetch does not believe that an inland river or sea lies waiting to be discovered in the heart of the continent,21 but he half-expects interior exploration to uncover the relics of decayed civilisations, by analogy with the aztec ruins in mexico (165). he expresses surprise that, in spite of its proximity to india and china, or java (167), and new world analogies with distant peru and mexico (168), the australian continent has yet to reveal any trace of an ancient civilisation and speculates that a natural barrier may once have isolated the australian continent, or a cataclysmic event may have destroyed both the cities and their makers. one of the purposes of systematic exploration is to uncover the evidence of their presence ‘for we are still allowed to expect in the interior traces and proofs of the ancient dominion of civilised nations’ (168). vetch’s speculative geography a recurrent term in vetch’s vocabulary is ‘conjecture’ (1838a: 165, 168) and the related semantic field of supposition and inference. faced with the lack of verifiable knowledge of the australian interior, conjecture is adopted as a legitimate epistemological tool of enquiry. in so doing, vetch followed to the letter principles enunciated by the founders of the royal geographical society in their instructions to geographers. to project conjectural figures onto the uncharted interior, to fill ‘the great hiatus’ with imagined geographies, to posit inland rivers (maslen) or ancient civilisations (vetch), far from 21 ‘in a continent like australia, without inlets of the sea and great navigable rivers’ (165). graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 17 being unscientific, is to advance working hypotheses in the cause of discovery. given the continent’s position on the globe, it seems reasonable to deduce that the climate is temperate—‘the general climate is so mild’ (165)—the terrain hospitable. ‘the genial climate and thinly-peopled tracts of australia’ are judged to be more attractive than the frozen shores of north america (165). in australia, the ground requires less clearing than in america; ‘the country is generally free from thickets and dense forests’ (166), open and transitable; travel into the interior will be easy by foot, on horseback, or by carriage. in these conditions, horses will flourish (166) and become the main means of transport, as in central america. with the geometrical precision of the engineer, vetch proposes a framework for verifying his speculative geography. three outposts, or staging posts of exploration, are to be established in the interior, each 500 miles from the nearest sea-coast (166). these equidistant ‘inland points of appui’ are terrestrial variants of the british admiralty’s harbours of refuge which vetch would be appointed to oversee later in his career. indeed, in his correspondence with the journal’s editor he describes them as ‘ports in the interior’ (vetch 1838b: 1). they are lettered a, b and c, and they overlay the map in a triangular grid pattern (1838a: 165), allowing the geographer to operate a triangulation of the territory (166) with a fourfold objective: 1) to take possession of the country and acquire knowledge of its natural resources; 2) to provide a place of refuge and resupply for exploration; 3) to acquire information about the natives and control them by ‘bridling (their) numbers and power’; (166) and 4) to check the movements of europeans (convicts, subversives, or colonial rivals). among potential rivals, the threat of france (while never made explicit) looms large and with it the fear that ‘some rival nation, establishing a colony on the shore, shall push on discoveries of the interior’ (167). to counter that threat, the inland outposts are to provide a modicum of territorial government. for vetch, the equilateral division of the territory and the general principle of equilibration seen in his mapping of the continent are synonymous with political equality and a guarantee of good governance. his concern with territorial reform as a check upon the monopoly of the landowning interest in the british parliamentary system and a curative for the abuses of rotten boroughs can be traced back to a radical pamphlet he authored in 1831 during the debate over the great reform bill (vetch 1831). finding graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 18 no audience for his comprehensive plan of legislative devolution for the british isles, he would later reformulate and project its geopolitical framework onto the blank map of the australian continent, prefiguring the idea that australia is a laboratory for social and democratic reform. in place of knowledge or understanding of the first peoples, vetch adopts a nominalist strategy, or a native name protocol, in imitation of the spanish colonists in the americas (162), whereby aboriginal place-names should be preserved for ‘the sacredness of antiquity’ (161). however, he recommends that the nomenclature of the greater divisions—the provinces or colonies—should be modern, because as ‘the circumscribed knowledge and power of the present native races cannot be supposed to reach, or to have any motive for reaching, to so great a grouping of land (162), there is no native name for the whole of australia. the principles for determining nomenclature are to be discovery, antiquity and novelty (163), by order of preference, so that of the ten provinces eight are named after navigators, and two after british sovereigns (george iii and victoria, patron of the royal geographical society), but none after the first peoples. vetch’s choice of names, which recognises the contributions of european explorers of different nationalities to the ‘discovery’ of australia, implies the existence of a common, collaborative european enlightenment project to extend the boundaries of science and knowledge, a description that can also be described as utopian. conclusion as pierre jourde notes, utopias are often situated on islands, where the natural maritime frontiers allow for a homogeneous, self-contained society to be conceived and maintained: ‘la forme la plus simple, et l’une des plus répandues des mondes imaginaires, en particulier des utopies (notamment more et campanella) est l’ile, dont la planète dans le récit de science fiction peut dans une certaine mesure être considérée comme un avatar’ (1991: 20).22 australia offers such a closed world—isolated and surrounded in the european imagination by uncharted seas and foreign and even savage societies. the maps of vetch and maslen do not include the continent’s immediate geographic surroundings but, in so far as the authors seek to situate and represent the continent on the globe, they endeavour to demonstrate that australia is closer to britain 22 ‘the simplest and one of the most widespread forms of imaginary worlds, and in particular of utopias (those of more and campanella notably) is the island. the planet in science fiction stories can be considered to some extent as an avatar of the island.’ graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 19 than is generally imagined, through manipulation of the mappemonde, in vetch’s case, or through metaphor and anecdote in wakefield’s.23 their utopian imagination thus extends to include britain in a close and mutually beneficial relationship with the new continent, as both gain from the transfer of population and the growth of commerce. this article has explored the role of cartography, nomenclature and iconography as tools of the ambition to build a ‘new world,’ one based, their authors claimed, on rational principles. dividing up the continent along scientific lines, using geometrical tools or mathematical formulae; speculating on the topographical features, natural advantages and divinely bestowed ‘blessings’ of the continent; planning the distribution of the european settlers uniformly and rationally across this ‘uninhabited’ country to produce a certain form of social relationships; predicting the huge population it could support … these authors provided an incentive to exploration and settlement, projects for social reform and a framework for the european imagination, making the unknown familiar before ever a european had set foot in the ‘great hiatus.’ these aspects of their work— the cartographic, the colonial and the utopian—are inextricably linked: their utopias were of course concerned with european problems, they ignored the native populations as if they did not exist, or assumed they would not exist for much longer, where they did not actively put forward proposals for eliminating them. the utopian dimension of their speculative geographies, which sought to realise the most perfect form of british civilisation—although each had his own version of what that form might be—provided an implicit justification for the takeover of a continent whose destiny it was to serve as the field of its construction. reference list carter, p. 1987, the road to botany bay: an exploration of landscape and history. faber & faber, london. cathcart, m. 2009, the water dreamers: the remarkable history of our dry continent. text publishing company, melbourne. cook, k. 2008, ‘thomas maslen and “the great river of desired blessing” on his map of australia,’ the globe: journal of the australian map circle, 11–20. cosgrove, d. (ed.) 1999, mappings. reaktion books, london. cresswell, t. 2004, place: a short introduction. blackwell, oxford. darwin, j. 2002, ‘globalism and imperialism: the global context of british power, 1830–1960,’ in gentlemanly capitalism, imperialism and global history, (ed.) s. akita, palgrave macmillan, london, 43–64. day, d. 2005, claiming a continent: a new history of australia. 4th ed., harper perennial, sydney. etherington, n. 2007, mapping colonial conquest: australia and southern africa. university of western australian press, perth. 23 in his letter from sydney, wakefield conjures up the idea of a bridge linking britain and her colonies. graves and rechniewski mapping utopia portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 20 gibson, r. 1992, south of the west: post-colonialism and the narrative construction of australia. indiana university press, bloomington. graves, m. & rechniewski, e. 2010–11, ‘essays for an empty land,’ cultures of the commonwealth: essays and studies, ‘horizons,’ no. 17, 37–51. jourde, p. 1991, géographies imaginaires de quelques inventeurs de mondes au xxe siècle. josé corti, paris. king, g. 1996, mapping reality: an exploration of cultural cartographies. st martin’s press, new york. harley, j.b. 2001, the new nature of maps: essays in the history of cartography. johns hopkins university press, baltimore & london. maslen, t. j. 1836, the friend of australia or, a plan for exploring the interior and for carrying on a survey of the whole continent of australia. 2nd ed.,smith, elder & co., london. _____ 1843, suggestions for the improvement of our towns and houses. smith, elder & co., london. mills, r. c. 1915, the colonisation of australia, 1829–42: the wakefield experiment in empire building. sidgwick & jackson, london. ryan, s. 1996, the cartographic eye: how explorers saw australia. cambridge university press, cambridge. spurr, d. 1993, the rhetoric of empire: colonial discourse in journalism, travel writing and imperial administration. duke university press, durham & london. vetch, j. c.1825, memoir to accompany a projection of the globe on the cylinder of a meridian. london. _____ 1831, letter i to lord viscount althorpe on the ruinous consequence of an oligarchical system of government. hume tracts, london. _____ 1837, ‘on the monuments and relics of the ancient inhabitants of new spain,’ journal of the royal geographical society of london, vol. 7, 1–11. _____ 1838a, ‘considerations on the political geography and geographical nomenclature of australia,’ journal of the royal geographical society, vol. 8, 157–69. _____ 1838b, ‘letter to capt. washington,’ 1 february, the royal geographical society, cb2/540, 1837–1840. wakefield, e.g. 1829, a letter from sydney, the principal town of australasia. joseph cross, london. williams, m. 1966, ‘the parkland towns of australia and new zealand,’ geographical review, vol. 56, no. 1, 67–89. portalv7n1aldrichgalleymay22 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. fields of remembrance, special issue, guest edited by matthew graves and elizabeth rechniewski. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. remembrances of empires past robert aldrich, university of sydney half a century has passed since the era of colonialism turned into the age of decolonisation. most of the asian possessions of britain, the netherlands, the usa and france gained independence in the decade after the second world war, and independence came to the majority of countries in northern and sub-saharan africa in the following ten years, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. from the late 1960s, the smaller island territories of the caribbean, the indian ocean and the pacific followed suit. the onset of the 1990s saw what could be characterised as the decolonisation of the soviet empire in the baltic and central asia, and of the serbian empire in the balkans.1 this process was drawn out, ragged and, of course, incomplete. many colonial powers held out against decolonisation—france in algeria, the netherlands in west papua, the portuguese in africa—and the decolonisation of rhodesia and the end of apartheid in south africa were agonisingly long. some fifty outposts around the world may still be considered ‘colonies’ of the old imperial powers, from britain’s tiny pitcairn in the south pacific to denmark’s giant if sparsely populated greenland in the north atlantic.2 various groups around the world, including tibetans, tamils, western 1 for an overview, see aldrich (2007). two excellent recent studies of decolonisation are thomas, more and butler (2008), and shipway (2008). 2 see aldrich and connell (1998). changing relations between metropolitan states and these residual ‘mini-empires’ provide a minor continuing theme in domestic and international politics. mayotte, a french outpost in the indian ocean, is set to become a fully-fledged département d’outre-mer of the french republic in 2012. the netherlands antilles, a group of five islands administered as a single unit, will disaggregate in october 2010: curaçao and sint-maarten as semi-autonomous countries within the kingdom of the netherlands, and the three other islands becoming ‘special municipalities’ of the netherlands. aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 2 saharans, palestinians, ossetians, southern sudanese, continue to demand selfgovernment or outright sovereignty. nevertheless, from the perspective of the great imperial powers that ruled huge overseas empires at the start of the twentieth century (britain, france, portugal, the netherlands, germany, italy, the usa, japan), the flags had been lowered, independence granted even if sometimes reluctantly, and a new world order more or less established by the mid-1960s. the old colonial powers could get on with other business: the economic and social modernisation championed during the trente glorieuses of the post-war boom; european integration; and the jockeying for position in the newly christened third world. president de gaulle memorably said that decolonisation had become french policy because it was in the french interest, and leaders elsewhere echoed those sentiments. the photographs of colonials sitting on the veranda with their long drinks in the ‘good old times’ faded, the ‘curios’ brought back from exotic places gathered dust in museums, and colonialism drifted from lived experience to memory and on into history. europeans, for the most part, forgot their colonies, in a fit of absence of mind, through an attack of amnesia or by wilfully erasing or occluding the colonial traces in their midst. in some instances, this proved quite literally the case. the italians lost their empire after the second world war, and the grandiose building mussolini had commissioned for the ministry of italian africa was given to the un to house the food and agriculture organization (fao). the french sandblasted the names of colonial heroes from the outside of the mauresque colonial training academy, the école coloniale, in paris, and for a time they closed off the salle des fêtes in the old colonial museum with its now dubious murals of the benefits france gave to the colonies (education, law, science); old colonialist paintings in the collection were mothballed and then shipped out to a suburban museum. in the 1970s the dutch, for their part, redid the exhibitions at the tropenmuseum in amsterdam to remove references to holland’s overlordship of the east indies, transforming a triumphalist colonial museum into an ethnographic one. the british had already closed the imperial institute, opened, as were similar museums, to exhibit and celebrate empire, and the new commonwealth institute in kensington, with its modernist architecture and the flags of independent member states flying, aimed to symbolise a new family of nations.3 3 see aldrich (2005; 2009) for further references. aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 3 the landscape nevertheless remained littered with streets named for the great and good of colonialism, museums jam-packed with the booty of empire—in the case of london, the benin bronzes in the british museum, the indian textiles in the victoria and albert museum, the orientalist paintings of the national gallery—while war memorials, ministries where men had ruled the empire, churches from which missionaries set out to spread the gospel, and buildings decorated with exotic motifs copied from africa or asia, bore witness to europe’s domineering engagement with the wider world. many of these survived despite the efforts at monumental and museographical revisionism. two cities provide notable examples. in rome, inheritor of the monuments of antiquity and capital of a modern empire, at the head of the avenue leading to the foro italico (itself an extraordinary stadium topped by homoerotic statues representing athletes from various corners of italy) still stands an obelisk inscribed ‘mussolini dux’ and a series of marble plaques recounting in detail the italian conquest of ethiopia in the 1930s. outside the old ministry for africa (now the headquarters of the food and agriculture organization of the united nations, fao) stood until recently—more on this presently—a tall ethiopian stele from axum, brought back by mussolini’s troops. just off the piazza dei cinquecento, near rome’s rail terminal, a passerby can still see a monument marking italy’s heroic defeat at adwa on the horn of africa in the 1890s. the esposizione universale roma (eur) quarter built by the fascists contains the pigorini museum, many of whose ethnographical artefacts were brought back to italy by explorers and conquerors. modern italy’s overseas empire may not have been either extensive or long-lived compared to those of other powers, but it, too, left vestiges among the ruins of rome.4 near lisbon, capital of one of the world’s longest-lived imperial nations, the suburb of belém hosts a virtual colonial theme park. the beautiful tower (the symbol of lisbon) that guided the explorers’ ships down the tagus river to the atlantic stands a few steps away from the jerónimos monastery, built with the profits brought back from the indies; inside the monastery are the tombs of the explorer vasco da gama (whose statue looms over the praça do império outside) and the poet of exploration and world-traveller luís de camões (rendered camoens in english). on the riverfront, an enormous monument to the explorers, a vestige of antonio salazar’s 1940 exhibition of the lusophone world, 4 see von henneberg (2004); labanca (1992) discusses museums and other colonial-era collections. aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 4 features prince henry the navigator, seamen, missionaries and other figures from the cast of colonialists. nestled behind the monastery is lisbon’s colonial botanical garden, boasting busts of africans and asians, colonial-inspired azulejo tilework, and a chinese gate marking the entrance to a plot of asian flora reminiscent of macao. visitors to belém also see a more recent addition to the monumental landscape: a stark memorial to portuguese soldiers who died in the wars of decolonisation in the 1960s and 1970s— portugal did not withdraw from its colonies until 1975—in the form of an open topped, un-triumphal arch (léonard 1999).5 that relatively recent marker to the end of empire has joined a proliferation of other new or recycled monuments in europe. in germany, a monument to a colonial hero in lübeck was rededicated in 1990 as a monument to anti-colonialism,6 emblematic of a reassessment of germany’s imperial past. queen beatrix in 2002 unveiled a monument in amsterdam to slaves in the dutch empire, and subsequently the municipal council erected a statue of the surinamese anti-colonial activist anton de kom in a migrant neighbourhood of the dutch capital. in 2005, president chirac unveiled a monument, on the quai branly, to french soldiers who died in the franco-algerian war of 1954-1962, and in 2007, he dedicated a monument in the luxembourg gardens in memory of slaves and slave emancipation. meanwhile, the italian government, after decades of procrastination, in 2005 finally returned the axum column, the end of a long effort by ethiopians to repatriate the monument stymied by italian arguments that it would be too costly or fragile to transport, that it risked harm in the midst of ethiopia’s unstable political situation, or that it was rightly now part of the italian monumental patrimony. colonialism even returned to the museums. several years ago, the tropenmuseum reintroduced a section on dutch colonialism, using an interesting mise en scène that thoughtfully provokes and instructs visitors by focussing on individual biographies of dutch imperialists and indonesian nationalists. the national maritime museum in greenwich for several years had a controversial exhibition showing a genteel tea party—but with the hand of an african thrust through the floor as from the hold of a slave ship. for its current iteration of the exhibition on the atlantic world, which 5 among other colonial lieux de mémoire in lisbon are the museum of the fundaçao oriente and the macau museum. 6 on colonial vestiges and monuments in germany, see van der heyden and zeller (2002), poiger (2005), kössler (2006), bertout (2006), steinmetz and hell (2006), and vanvugt (1998). aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 5 includes a number of vitrines on slavery, the museum commissioned a guyanese poet, john agard, to write reflections on the various artefacts included in the display cases (2007). king leopold’s grandiose africa museum in tervuren, outside brussels, is belatedly being brought up to date. some of the more gruesome photos of the belgian congo that certainly were not displayed in colonial times and for long afterwards are now mounted on the walls, and the museum, as part of a large-scale renovation now in progress, has developed a new, and critical, section on henry morton stanley (whose papers the african museum holds). a museum of the british empire and commonwealth opened in bristol in 2002, though it struggled to attract visitors; its main galleries closed in 2008, and the museum foreshadows a reopening in london. in france, with much controversy, the collections of the old musée des arts d’afrique et d’océanie (itself the old colonial museum opened in 1931) and the musée de l’homme (established a few years later) were combined into the new musée du quai branly in 2006.7 the old colonial museum, somewhat paradoxically, has now become a centre on the history of immigration into france; its inaugural exhibition focussed on foreigners in france at the time of the 1931 exposition coloniale internationale for which the building was constructed. plans for a national museum of colonial history, to be sited in marseille, were scuppered because of arguments among those who considered themselves moral stakeholders—national and local authorities, curators and historians, and the public, including pieds-noirs and the descendants of those colonised by the french. the case of the proposed marseille museum is revealing about wider debates on monuments and museums with some connection with colonialism, and about ‘ownership’ of the colonial past. there have been vitriolic debates, in particular, around the yasukuni war memorial in tokyo, the shinto monument where the souls of the japanese war dead, some of them convicted war criminals, are enshrined.8 the memory of the japanese imperialist occupation of korea and china, the ‘rape of nanking,’ the ‘comfort women,’ and japan’s war record all remain extremely sensitive issues both in japan and in the countries invaded by the japanese. on the other side of the world, conflicts have erupted in the baltic over monuments honouring soviet soldiers as 7 see thomas (2008), amato (2006), and ‘le moment du quai branly,’ a special issue of le débat (2007). 8 see seraphim (2006), sturgeon (2006), hasegawa and togo (2008), breen (2008), and miyoshi-jager and mitter (2007). aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 6 liberators in the second world war, when present-day latvians and lithuanians are more apt to see the forces of the ussr as armies of colonial-style conquest and occupation. official statements on incidents from the colonial past have accompanied the controversies of monumental commemoration. the japanese emperor and various prime ministers have expressed regret at wartime atrocities committed by their soldiers and administrators, though never to the full satisfaction of the chinese and koreans. in 2004, a german minister, speaking in namibia, made an official apology for the attempted genocide of the herero people carried out in german south-west africa exactly a century before. in the case of italy, the government placed money where its mouth was; in august 2008, the government signed an agreement to pay a sum of $5 billion (including $200 million per annum in investment and infrastructure projects) over the next twenty-five years as compensation to libya for the ill effects of colonialism. meanwhile, in australia in february 2008, labor prime minister kevin rudd memorably said ‘sorry’ to the ‘stolen generation’ of aborigines removed as children from their families, part of a process of national reconciliation with australia’s indigenous population that followed many years of debate on such issues as aboriginal land rights and bitterly fought ‘history wars’ about a ‘black armband’ versus a ‘white blindfold’ view of australia’s colonial history (macintyre & clark 2004). these examples of present-day confrontations with the colonial past could be multiplied, both for official statements by political leaders and in the representation of colonialism in public monuments and museum collections. the record of the past and differing interpretations in words, commemorations or exhibitions today illustrate how strongly colonialism marked the landscapes, the cultures and the psyches of the colonising countries, and also how the colonial record has become an object of contemporary contention—the ‘return of the colonial’ (retour du colonial), as it has been referred to in france. monuments and museums, those highly charged material repositories of collective memory in the public sphere, serve as flashpoints for issues that extend to academic debates, parliamentary acts and legal decisions, public demonstrations and even riots. calls for official apologies underscore the ways in which symbolic gestures gain importance in the debate on the colonial record, and how the decision on whether to say ‘sorry,’ recognise colonial wrongs in law, and appropriate funds for aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 7 compensation are bound up with current political, social and cultural conditions in both the former colonial powers and in the countries that were colonised.9 the colonial has reappeared in other forums as well; the audiovisual media provides a major venue for rediscovery of the empire. in france films of the early 1990s, such as indochine (wargnier, dir., 1992) and l’amant (annaud, dir., 1992), the latter adapted from marguerite duras’s best-selling novel (1984), presented a bittersweet, nostalgic look back at the colonial period, while pierre schoendoerffer offered a heroic portrayal of the end of the french empire in diên biên phú (1992). bertrand tavernier and patrick rotman’s film documentary la guerre sans nom (tavernier, dir., 1992) and bernard favre’s documentary television series for antenne 2, ‘les années algériennes’ (1991), played a major role in sparking renewed public discussion on the algerian war of independence (1954-1962). rachid bouchareb’s film indigènes, the story of north african soldiers who fought for france in the second world war, attracted enormous attention in 2006, with newspapers filled with articles about the film and the history of colonial troopers in the liberation of france, with president chirac reportedly so moved by a screening that he initiated revisions in administrative regulations to extend further veterans’ benefits and public recognition to the old soldiers. alain tasma’s 2005 film for television,‘nuit noire, 17 octobre 1961,’ focussed attention on the bloody suppression of a demonstration against the algerian war in paris on 17 october 1961, and the austrian director michael haneke’s prize-winning film caché, also from 2005, looked specifically at an incident of the repression of a traumatic colonial-era memory of algeria. the obvious question to ask is why the colonial ghosts have returned from the past to haunt the postcolonial present at this particular time. several of the precipitating factors are specific to individual countries, but others seem more commonly shared as part of the political, social and cultural conjuncture of our generation. 9 this essay looks at european colonial countries, primarily france, but there have also been reappraisals of colonialism in the former colonies. in recent years, for example, algeria has allowed a conference to be held on the pied-noir nobel prize-winning writer albert camus, a monument with statues of french and african first world war soldiers, ‘demba et dupont,’ has been reconsecrated in dakar, and the government of the ivory coast built a grandiose mausoleum for the remains of pierre savorgnan de brazza, credited with the french conquest of the country. aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 8 perhaps one banal reason for the re-examination of the colonial past has been the commemoration of anniversaries. in spain, in the hispanophone world and in north america, the quinto centenario of columbus’s voyages led to heated arguments about explorers and conquest, indigenous populations and settlers. the five hundredth anniversary of the voyages to the indian ocean and brazil of the portuguese mariners da gama and cabral initiated similar commemorations of the ‘discoverers’ (as they were always called), though with seemingly less attention paid to the colonial aftereffects of exploration. the four hundredth anniversary of the dutch east india company in 2002 was marked widely in holland, and scholars have published analyses of exactly how that occasion was celebrated (oostindië 2003; blussé 2003). the two hundredth anniversary of the end of the slave trade in 2007 led to various commemorations and reassessments in britain and other countries involved in slavery.10 the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the indochinese war precipitated a spate of books and articles in france.11 one might speculate on the exact role of anniversaries in the cycles of historical study and public debate, but it seems clear that they provide what are at least convenient opportunities for historical and political stock-taking. historical work also prompted reassessments of the colonial heritage, although with a certain chicken-and-egg aspect to the links between public events and academic research.12 colonial history has experienced a great revival in the last couple of decades, in what amounts to a resurrection of a field once considered as dead as the empire. the opening of archives (in many cases, thirty years after the events that occurred at the time of imperial retreat) has provided new primary sources. edward said’s crucial book orientalism (1978) played a revolutionary role in turning the historian’s gaze to imperial encounters, even if many historians disagree with his sweeping conclusions.13 the ‘cultural turn’ in scholarship focussed attention on the broadly cultural history of empire, with countless books on images, clothing, food, music, landscape. innovative themes of the ‘new colonial history’ include colonial medicine, colonialism and the environment, and gender and colonialism. the emergence of postcolonial studies produced a field of great influence; even when many historians express reservations 10 on the commemoration of slavery, see wallace (2006), reinhardt (2006), vergès (2006), bongie (2001), and schmidt (1999). 11 see ruscio and tignères (2005) and cooper (2004). 12 the most perceptive analysis of the linkage between history writing and politics, and the use of the colonial past, is coquery-vidrovitch (2009). 13 for instance, see the critique by mackenzie (1995). aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 9 about the methods it used and the generalisations advanced, postcolonial studies has posed challenges about how to read the colonial archive and how to think through the history of colonial contacts. more recently, perhaps suggesting another turn in historiography, interest has revived in more traditional topics such as the history of law, citizenship and institutions, as well as the economic history of empire. other current approaches, such as trans-national, international and global history, have also focused on colonialism and its aftermath. all of these perspectives have produced a more nuanced and comprehensive inquiry into the phenomenon of colonialism, illustrating the extent to which colonial expansion permeated metropolitan life and revealing how european knowledge, attitudes and policies in many previously unappreciated ways were formed in a colonial context. the new scholarship has also identified the significant and enduring connections between the colonial past and the present. colonialism, for most specialists, made a major impact both on the societies that were conquered and on the colonising states. though expansion never enjoyed a consensus of support, a wide range of people were involved in empire. it inflected political debates, and both made and broke political careers. it provided opportunities for commercial profit, contributed to new academic disciplines from egyptology to anthropology, provided the terrain for missionaries, educators, engineers and others hoping to ‘civilise’ the peoples of the wider world, and inspired trends in art and literature, food and fashion. the end of empire left scars in national memory, and the sometimes conflicted relationship between the colonising countries and the former colonisers continues to influence international relations.14 historical research has coincided with the ‘outing’ of old colonial memories, and the old skeletons tumbling from the closet have sparked new controversies. in the case of france, in the year 2000, interviews given to the press by a superannuated general, paul aussaresses, offered shocking revelations about the practice of torture by french troops in the algerian war. although writers at the time, notably henri alleg in la question (1958), had alerted the french public to such practices, aussaresses’s fresh revelations, coupled with his own seeming lack of remorse, led to much public debate and historical investigations on torture in the colonies (aldrich 2006). research on the mau mau 14 on the british case, see thompson (2005), though porter (2004) provides a somewhat different view. on france, see lebovics (2004). aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 10 rebellion, revisited in a pulitzer prize-winning study by carolyn elkins (2005) that drew on the reminiscences of participants, reminded the british of a not always glorious record of peaceful decolonisation. adam hochschild’s (1998) exposé of the brutal belgian colonialism in the congo caused an uproar when it appeared in belgium in the late 1990s. in italy, angelo del boca’s italiani, brava gente?, published in 2005, challenged the memory of italians as largely benign colonisers, and a volume by a journalist, eric salerno, charged italians with genocidio in libia (2005). history and memory are different realms, of course, but mention of memory points to the role of identity politics, and what might be called ‘communitarian commemoration,’ in the return of the colonial. this connects with various forms of militancy, the politicisation of colonial history, and the manipulation (or instrumentalisation) of colonial issues for present-day political purposes. in some cases, particular groups have sought acknowledgement for colonial deeds or misdeeds. returned soldiers in france long campaigned, with no success until 1999, for the algerian conflict to be declared a ‘war,’ and thus for recognition of their status as fully-fledged anciens combattants. the harkis, muslims who fought with the french in the algerian war, similarly claimed acknowledgement, not only of their war service, but of their mistreatment in france, where many who had fled their homeland (as many others were being killed by the victorious nationalists) languished in resettlement camps until the 1970s. the descendants of slaves campaigned with success, in 2001, for a declaration by the french parliament (in the loi taubira) that slave-trading and slavery constituted ‘crimes against humanity.’15 at one extreme, this militancy can become historically revisionist, even negationist, as when some pieds-noirs in france call for the rehabilitation of the diehard defenders of algérie française who turned to terrorism. the organisation armée secrète (oas) burned the city library in algiers, attempted scorched-earth tactics to keep ‘french’ infrastructure from being passed on to algerians, and even tried to assassinate de gaulle; extremist groups in france have recently been trying (with occasional success) to erect monuments in memory of oas terrorists executed by the french state, whom they see as martyrs. on the other side, groups such as les indigènes de la république 15 among a number of works on the memory of colonialism in france, see blanchard, bancel and lemaire (2005), bertrand (2006), lorcin (2006), jahan and ruscio (2007), and stora and hémery (2007). aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 11 have intentionally used polemical rhetoric to popularise their arguments about the plight of migrants and their descendants in french society, and some journalists and other writers prove quick to link almost any present-day issue to the evils of the colonial past. community groups throughout europe, radical or more moderate, have thus taken a lead in returning colonialism to widespread public attention, especially when they are able to use media savvy to spread the word. the internet, in particular, has provided a powerful forum for airing views, with a proliferation of sites expressing the remonstrances of groups with some brief linked to colonial questions, spanning the spectrum from the far left to the extreme right. the presence of many populations in europe with colonial antecedents, it goes almost without saying, and their rising militancy, constitute additional reasons for the rediscovery of colonialism. many settlers poured back into europe after the end of the colonial empires—a million pieds-noirs, but (as is less well known) also over half a million portuguese and mixed-race people from portugal’s empire, and 250,000 dutch, eurasian and pro-dutch people from the east indies. largely quiescent at first, over recent years these groups, ageing first-generation migrant cohorts, have striven to secure their reputation and heritage, record their memories and histories, and gain redress for lingering grievances. such efforts have extended to those who thought themselves unthanked servants of the empire, such as the harkis in the case of france, and the gurkha veterans of britain’s imperial army (who in may 2009 gained the right of abode in britain thanks partly to the energetic work of joanna lumley). in 2007, another colonial group, the ilois, scored a court victory in london as well; these former residents of diego garcia displaced to mauritius when london decided to rent the british indian ocean territory to the usa as a military base, gained recognition of their status and the right of return, though a quick repatriation seems unlikely. the gurkhas and ilios are numerically small populations, but the declining years of empire witnessed an accelerated large-scale migration that subsequently continued. authorities in the years of decolonisation and soon afterwards, which coincided with an economic boom in europe, sought cheap subaltern labourers from the empire, and continued to favour migration from the former colonies. these migrants now make up substantial communities in europe, especially north africans and black africans in france, south asians in britain, and west indians in both countries and in the aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 12 netherlands. their experiences have varied, with a number of notable successes by migrants who have achieved fame and fortune in europe, but the failed economic advancement, and social and cultural incorporation of a large proportion of these ‘colonial’ migrants, have been painfully apparent. particular incidents have illuminated clashes between migrant groups and the wider society: in france, the affaire du foulard around 2004 and then the rioting in the banlieues16; in britain, riots in notting hill and brixton; in spain, italy and elsewhere, the issue of clandestine arrivals from north africa. everywhere, especially since ‘9/11’ and the later terrorist attacks in london and madrid, the question of islamism in europe has arisen, accompanied by the charge, or fear, that a potentially violent and anti-western islam finds a congenial home among the disenchanted descendants of migrants from the old colonies to the european metropoles. in a less catastrophic sense, heightened communitarianism and militancy among marginalised groups have challenged the structures and ideologies of national life. this is particularly the case in france, which has the largest muslim population in europe. yet the republican values of universalism and laïcité, for better or worse, create strict limits to expressions of particularistic cultural identities, such as the wearing of traditional head-scarves (and, even more so, burqas) by muslim women, even when that policy aims to ensure liberty of belief and behaviour as well as separation between church and state. the republican virtue of egalitarianism forbids preferential treatment, or positive discrimination, with the result that those issuing from the working class or migrant milieux (and women) remain substantially underrepresented at the highest echelons of the state, private business and education. reaction against migrants from xenophobic groups has also threatened to replace the sacrosanct fraternité proclaimed in the slogan of the revolution. and the very existence of an increasingly variegated mosaic of residents from diverse backgrounds has launched a debate on what it means to be french. contemporary problems in europe, such as migration, unemployment, social unrest and integration of diverse populations, often relate more to social and economic conditions than to ethnic background or a direct colonial legacy. therefore, analytical links between these problems and colonialism need to be drawn very prudently; but the point is that contemporary problems are seen by many to have roots in the actions and 16 among a burgeoning number of works on migration and multiculturalism in france, see winter (2008). aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 13 ideologies of colonialism, the conduits of migration opened by colonial population movements, and the unresolved questions of national identities and policies created by postcolonial heritages. individuals and lobby groups of all political persuasions can evoke such connections for electoralist and demagogic purposes. the links that they easily make underline the way in which it is possible, dangerously, to draw on fears induced by the postcolonial demographic make-up of european countries—from enoch powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ in 1960s britain to latter-day manifestations, such as pim fortuyn’s political campaigns (leading to his murder) in the netherlands, jean-marie le pen’s national front movement in france and the british national party—all with platforms based on opposition to migration (especially from the old colonies and from outside europe) and multiculturalism. on the other side of the ideological spectrum, the imputation that all of the problems of contemporary european societies or of their ‘ethnic’ populations, as well as the problems of the developing and formerly colonised world, stem from colonial, neo-colonialist and postcolonialist ideas and policies makes for a simplistic and ultimately unconvincing analysis of the state of particular nations and the world in general. debates on the colonial legacy have nevertheless occasionally taken on aspects of polemics and provocation, with dramatic interventions by politicians and parliamentarians, as has notably occurred in france. the aussaresses affaire in france that began in 2000 led to a number of carefully documented works on the use of systematic torture in algeria, and other exposés of colonial crimes and excesses. to some, this seemed an attempt (often blamed on ‘leftist’ journalists, historians and politicians) to impugn the integrity of the french state, the institution of the army, the soldiers who had served in north africa and the settlers of algérie française. in 2005, députés in the right-wing dominated parliament adopted a law paying homage to french settlers in north africa with an article mandating the teaching of the ‘positive role’ of colonialism, a provision that caused such an outcry that the algerian president accused the french of ‘negationism’ (a term generally applied to denial of the holocaust), and historians organised petitions and demonstrations against the interference of parliamentarians in the teaching of history. president chirac ultimately was pressured to abrogate the specific article. however controversy continued over the interpretation of the imperial balance-sheet when chirac’s successor, nicolas sarkozy, delivered a speech in 2007 in dakar (capital of the former french west africa), which seemed an aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 14 apologia for colonialism. the speech caused an angry response in africa and in france (gassama et al. 2008; ba konaré 2008; chrétien 2008), and several prominent historians collaborated on a book on sarkozy’s misuse of history (de cock et al. 2008). not only did the reactions underline the divisive and sensitive nature of pronouncements about colonialism, especially if considered unreasoned (rightly or wrongly), they also raised questions about whether the statements of politicians or ‘memory laws’ passed by parliaments advance either real understanding of the phenomenon of colonialism or lead to any sort of national or international reconciliation or justice. ‘colonialism’ as an area of history and an object of debate represents a broadly based and long-lived movement that involves traders and missionaries, soldiers and settlers, bureaucrats and adventurers. it encompasses european actions overseas and the emergence of colonial interests and a colonial culture at home, support for expansion but also continued opposition to colonialism, the mission civilisatrice and the export of european notions of constitutionalism, parliamentarianism, revolution and socialism that ultimately contributed to the undoing of empires. even as the number of those with a personal experience or memory of empire inevitably dwindles in europe, many are those whose lives colonialism touched. the french population, for example, includes the descendants of several thousand vietnamese refugees who arrived after the defeat in indochina in 1954, and the million pieds-noirs ‘repatriated’ to the mainland, along with around 90,000 harkis and their families, in 1962. many now retired french men and women served overseas in one or another capacity; some of the most prominent french cultural figures of the last generation, from fernand braudel to pierre bourdieu, had formative experiences in the colonies. more than a million french conscripts fought in the algerian war. millions of migrants to france and their descendants claim ancestral ties with countries colonised by france, and 2.5 million french citizens now live in the outposts that still form part of the republic. the effects of that colonial heritage do not necessarily dominate the personal lives and daily activities of every french man or woman with some link to colonialism—or those in britain, portugal or other countries with a similar connection—but as frantz fanon (1952) and albert memmi (1957) showed long ago, colonialism impressed a longlasting psychological imprint onto those whom it affected, from bitter rapatriés and invalided returned soldiers to migrants from the antilles, the maghreb and sub-saharan aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 15 africa seeking a better life in france. it would take a psycho-historian to analyse the emotional dimensions of the retour du colonial, but the psychological implication is clear in language about the ‘trauma’ of colonialism and the ‘scars’ and ‘wounds’ that it left, in the need for certain groups to position themselves as victims, in openly expressed fears about national decline and a dissolution of an idealised national identity, and in calls for (or opposition to) repentance for the misdeeds of the colonial past.17 in both reality and perception, many feel colonialism and the attitudes of the colonial age to be pertinent to their contemporary situations and problems. many european countries are products of their recent or more distant colonial past, though undoubtedly to greater and lesser degrees. to take, once again, the example of france: for hundreds of years, and especially from 1830 to 1962, the french nation and state were conjoined with an overseas empire, and imperialism formed part of the nation-building project, france and la plus grande france, the greater france that at its apogee encompassed 11 million square kilometres of territory and 100 million citizens and subjects. france’s economic prosperity and geopolitical influence, several generations of colonialists told their compatriots, depended on the conquest and mise en valeur of colonies. france’s culture and ideals were universalistic, colonial boosters added, a mandate and a legitimisation for the expansion of that culture. since the early 1960s, by contrast, nation-building in france has meant the construction of a nation without an empire. yet france never abandoned its ‘imperial’ ambitions, underpinned with often neocolonial relations with former colonies, nurturing of privileged links with francophone countries, supplies of cheap labour from the former possessions, and the maintenance of a dozen overseas outposts that provided sites for nuclear testing, space exploration and the rayonnement of french culture. president de gaulle positioned himself as the great decoloniser, and his successors posed as champions of the third world, intermediaries between the north and south and, during the cold war, between the east and west. such leverage, along with france’s economic strength, its place on the un security council, its role in the european union and other advantages, secured grandeur after the end of empire. since the mid-1990s, however, this postcolonial structure has begun to come apart with the end of the cold war, the rise of islamism, the crisis in 17 moreover, the notion of ‘repentance’ touches on religious practices. aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 16 françafrique,18 the rapid advance of china and the asian economies in general, the final triumph of english over french as the international lingua franca, and the globalisation that the french have often seemed to resist rather than to capitalise on. meanwhile, at home, persistently high unemployment, fears of economic decline and budgetary collapse, the reconfiguration of the political landscape, the debate around migration and multiculturalism, and soul-searching about ‘national identity’ have further disoriented a country no longer anchored by even the tenuous points of reference of the postcolonial order set in place from the 1960s through the 1980s. the retour du colonial does not thus consist solely in the simple recovery of the history of a lost empire, or even the issue of ‘memory politics’ evidenced by laws, monuments and rhetoric, or the moral imperative of a devoir de mémoire, a duty to recall the bad as well as the good. it relates to the individual, collective and national experiences of colonialism and its aftermath, and it takes places within the context of the tectonic transformations of domestic and international politics. the retour du colonial does not just affect france, even if the experience has been more acute there because of the importance of empire in french nation-building (it had, after all, the world’s second largest empire), france’s reluctance to decolonise and the fratricidal violence of decolonisation in algeria, and the disaggregation of a postcolonial order that france installed after the fall of the empire. the colonial legacy is mightily present throughout contemporary europe, particularly so for those countries that claimed overseas empires, but, in fact, is present for all european countries in the context of international migration, relations between europe and its neighbours across the mediterranean and further afield, and social relations in ethnically diverse and fractious societies. for a generation, most europeans (at least those of a european ancestral background) largely tried, publicly, to forget the colonial past, or remembered it only through the rose-coloured lenses of nostalgia. now the pendulum has swung towards a greater remembering of that past—in the views of some, to a surfeit of memory, where each group agitates for its own version of history, 18 the notion of françafrique is associated with the works of françois-xavier verschave, such as la françafrique: le plus long scandale de la république (1999). on france’s partial disengagement from africa, see smith (2010), who dates the change to 1994, the year of the devaluation of the french african franc, france’s non-intervention in the genocide in rwanda (and its support for the hutus there), and the death of one of its longest-lived african supporters, félix houphouët-boigny, president of the ivory coast. aldrich remembrances of empires past portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 17 recognition in laws and ceremonies, commemoration in museums and monuments, and the valorisation or repatriation of its art and artefacts. words such as ‘invasion,’ ‘racism’ and ‘genocide’ are emotional terms that provoke emotional reactions. whether leaders should apologise for wrongs of the past (and which wrongs, and indeed which leaders) remains a highly sensitive issue. the ‘return of the colonial’ thus has to do with ethics and politics as well as with history, linked to apologies, legislation, compensation, repatriation of objects, and perhaps most importantly redefinition of national identities and social policies (barkan & karn 2006). the colonial flags may have been lowered, but many barricades seem to have been raised. the retour du colonial is not just a rediscovery of a lost chapter of europe’s history, but also an instigation to reevaluate the future political, social and cultural contours of countries still shaped by the colonial experience. 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(dir.) 1992, indochine, motion picture, bac films. winter, b. 2008, the hijab and the republic: uncovering the french headscarf debate. syracuse university press, syracuse. portalsakamotovol7no22010galley (2) portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. pan-pan girls: humiliating liberation in postwar japanese literature rumi sakamoto, university of auckland introduction the relationship between gender and militarism has become an important subject for feminists globally in recent years. in particular, numerous studies exist on the sexual violence of women that seems to go hand-in-hand with militarism and war. the ‘comfort women’ of the japanese military during the pacific war is a case in point; as the victims of military, colonial, and gender violence, the comfort women seem to embody the harrowing brutality that is mobilised when hierarchical colonial relations are expressed through another such hierarchical relation—that of gender. less discussed in this context, however, is the case of the so-called pan-pan girls. this is the derogatory term for the street prostitutes who served the soldiers of the allied forces, mostly from the usa, during the occupation of japan from 1945 to 1952, and who sometimes became the local girlfriends of gis.1 extending our consideration of military apparatuses and gender hierarchies to the pan-pan girls, i hope to add to the existing work on comfort women and the sexual exploitation of women by the military in postwar japan. in particular, i draw attention to how ‘pan-pan girls’ resist being reduced to pure signs of ‘victim’ or ‘sacrifice,’ given that they embody complex articulations of interracial desire, material ambition and opportunism, as well as victimhood. in order to explore that embodiment, this article examines a number of postwar literary representations of the pan-pan girls. rather than directly addressing the historical reality of pan-pan girls during the occupation period, i prefer to look at how they have been 1 the etymology of the word ‘pan-pan’ is unclear. john dower suggests that its origin may have been a us imitation of a south pacific island word for easily available women (dower 1999: 132). sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 2 represented in post-occupation japan, particularly in literature. this is because the rich literary representation of the ambivalence and complexity of the pan-pan girls’ experiences allows us to consider aspects of the occupation of japan and postoccupation japanese history in relation to such sociocultural forces as national rehabilitation, economic prosperity, and ultimately, americanisation. since the intersection of military occupation and gender is at once a cultural, historical and political phenomenon, it is important to understand the complex patterns of meaning production around gender and occupation beyond the mere collation of historical facts. this approach is required in the japanese case because the meanings, understandings and interpretations generated by a specific event or issue continue to influence the national psyche long after the political and historical event itself is over. indeed, cultural production relating to the pan-pan girls continued after the women disappeared from the japanese social landscape. by deciphering the structures of meaning constructed around the image of the pan-pan girls since the end of the physical occupation, i hope to address not just the direct sexual violence of 65 years ago, but also the textual violence that ensures the trauma recurs in the present. as recent work on trauma and historical memory shows us, it is not only individuals but also groups of people that suffer trauma from historical events such as war and colonial domination. and, as in individual cases, collective trauma necessitates some processing and working though of the experience, for example, by compulsively repeating the stories of the trauma or reformulating it into a collective memory.2 the following discussion, then, is an attempt to read literary texts as a site of such repetition compulsion, understood as a working through and an acting out of the collective trauma of the occupation.3 there are a few studies of how the pan-pan girls have been represented, including mike molasky’s pioneering work in english (molasky 1999), as well as studies in japanese (chasono 2002; arai 2007; yoshimi 2007). molasky and chasono focus on social and journalistic representations from the contemporary period, whereas arai looks at japanese christians’ attitudes towards prostitution during the immediate postwar period, demonstrating how representations of the pan-pan girls emerged from the intersection of 2 see, for example, caruth (1996), neal (1998), lacapra (2002), and kaplan (2005). 3 a special issue on war and trauma in positions (2008) contains a number of articles that consider trauma in the asian context. in particular, marilyne ivy (2008) and thomas lammare (2008) address how traumatic memories or war and devastation are repeated in contemporary japanese manga and anime respectively. sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 3 religious and gender metaphors. yoshimi shunya, citing dower and molasky, analyses the ‘americanism’ of the pan-pan girls in literature and society as a ‘subversive threat to national masculinity’ (2007: 109). no study systematically examines the literary representations of the pan-pan girls after the occupation period. the following analysis of the representations of the pan-pan girls in postwar japanese literature begins by discussing the role of these women in occupation history. typical portrayals of the pan-pan girls in literature are then examined, with a focus on how panpan girls function as a narrative trope for remembering the occupation. i discuss three popular novels: murakami ryu’s kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū (almost transparent blue, 1976); shimada masahiko’s taihai shimai (decadent sisters, 2005); and kumagai tatsuya’s itsuka x-hashi de (someday on the x bridge, 2008). in these novels i identify three distinctive patterns of representation and thus demonstrate how the panpan girls function as a trope for remembering the occupation as a ‘humiliating’ liberation. kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū was published in 1976, when political tension around us-japanese relations was still palpable, if not intense. set in a town hosting a us military base in the 1970s, the novel evokes the memories of the occupation. taihai shimai and itsuka x-hashi de, on the other hand, were published in 2005 and 2008 respectively. by then the americanisation of japanese everyday life, as well as the japanese state’s commitment to its political alignment with the usa, had become an established fact, with memories of the war and occupation receding into a distant past. significantly, however, this was when post-1990s revisionist history and xenophobic nationalism established themselves within public discourse, thereby challenging the dominant narrative of postwar japanese history as a seamless prosperity achieved under us protection. this revisionism provided a context for a rereading of postwar history with an emphasis on japan’s subjection to the usa—a possible context for the allusions particularly in the latter two novels to the ‘humiliating’ liberation brought by the occupation. finally, i discuss briefly the relevance of cultural imaginaries embedded in literature for broader politico-historical concerns with gender and militarism in contemporary japanese history. some history: raa and pan-pan girls immediately after the second world war, the japanese government established the recreation and amusement association (raa), a euphemism for brothels arranged for sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 4 us servicemen. because of the widespread sexual violence committed by japanese soldiers during the war, the japanese government assumed that a similar situation would occur when the occupation started in japan (yoshimi 2007: 104). three days after japan’s unconditional surrender to the allied forces, the home ministry sent a secret memorandum to the police chiefs, ordering them to establish seiteki ian shisetsu (comfort institutions) that would handle the sexual demands of the incoming soldiers (lie 1997: 257). through private traders and public appeal, several thousand women— mostly poverty-stricken and without the economic means to survive—were employed to become japanese comfort women (tanaka 2001: 147). in a short time occupying soldiers were queuing at their doors. by providing sexual services for those soldiers, the comfort women were expected to protect the ‘purity’ and ‘chastity’ of regular japanese women from rape and other acts of violence by the ‘sex-hungry’ occupation troops. as koikari points out, ultimately, raa was designed as a ‘defence of the nation’ by maintaining the racial and sexual purity of the ‘respectable’ japanese in the face of the ‘foreign invasion’ (1999: 321). the irony of the system was that poverty-stricken middle class women often ended up as prostitutes, thus blurring the line between ‘respectable women’ and ‘not-so-respectable women’ (aruga 2005: 86). in this situation, the pan-pan girls emerged where the interests of the occupying force and the japanese government met. when the raa was closed down in 1946 due to us government concerns over widespread vd amongst its occupying forces, many of the women who lost their jobs became private and illegal prostitutes—the pan-pan girls. the occupation authorities tried to regulate the so-called fraternisation between gis and these women. a 1946 edition of time magazine, for example, reports that a gi was banned from taking japanese girls to dinner or a movie, and from offering them us cigarettes, chewing gum or chocolate bars. indeed, time noted that ‘any public display of affection may subject a gi to arrest’ (‘japan: prostitutes’ union’ 1946). still, despite the official line, gis did fraternise with the pan-pan girls, and public displays of intimacy, and the exchange of cigarettes, chewing gum and chocolate, were commonplace in occupied japan. pan-pan girls in literature: an icon of the occupation period with their red lipstick, lucky strike cigarettes, nylon stockings and high-heeled shoes, and often holding on the arms of tall, uniformed gis, the pan-pan girls became an icon sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 5 of the occupation, and have been textually reproduced throughout the postwar period. in this section i analyse images and representations of the pan-pan girls in postwar japanese literature in order to identify how they have functioned as disturbing metaphors for sexual corruption, that is, as agents who contributed to the negative construction in the public japanese memory of the allied occupation. while the representations of the pan-pan girls are neither unified nor stable, recognisable patterns, stereotypes, and common codes of representation recur throughout the postwar period. pan-pan girls have signified eroticism and decadence, as well as sexual freedom and materialism. but they have also appeared as symbols of victimisation, humiliation and national trauma—in particular, the trauma of the defeated nation as experienced by male japanese citizens. my aim here is to demonstrate that, during the 60-plus years since the end of the second world war, the highly gendered and sexualised bodies of the pan-pan girls have functioned as a discursively burdened repository for japanese memories of the occupation. i suggest that certain representations of the pan-pan girls have perpetuated the survival of a simplistic and selective remembering of the occupation as an external corruption, a remembering that has glossed over the historical influence of traditional japanese patriarchy itself on postwar japan. common to all written and visual representations of pan-pan girls is the focus on their appearance. even during the occupation, when censorship precluded reference to us gis in japan, pan-pan girls were clearly codified with their red lipstick, nail polish, cigarettes, high heels, strong perfume, and provocative dress codes. they are often described as ‘women of the night’ who wore brightly coloured western-style dresses, chewed gum and spoke coarsely in ‘panglish.’4 such women invariably appear in literary representations as highly sexualised beings. interestingly, existing photographic images of pan-pan girls tend not to portray them as sexually glamorous. despite john dower’s comment that the pan-pan girls were the closest thing japan had to hollywood movie stars (1999: 137), many of them were more like heavily made-up teenagers. yet, it is arguable that the postwar japanese scholarly and literary imagination has conceived of the pan-pan girls as the hypersexualised, larger-than-life icons per se of occupied japan itself. a number of historians have mentioned the contemporary envy 4 ‘panglish’ was the postwar colloquial english term for the purportedly elementary, unsophisticated and slang-dominated english that the pan-pan girls used in their delaings with allied servicemen under the occupation (dower 1999: 134–35). sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 6 for the pan-pan girls and their material possessions. this is evident, for example, in the contemporary comments of primary school children, such as: ‘i’d like to be a pan-pan when i grow up. they have beautiful dresses and expensive shoes, and ride in cars—it looks like fun’ (chasono 2002: 94). but this kind of envy and desire rarely exists in the postwar literature. what dominates, instead, is a strong sense of the pity, contempt and general discomfort felt by the other characters around the women. the pan-pan girls’ ostentatious looks and possessions certainly stand out from the other characters’ shabby clothes, poverty and hunger. but their dresses, cosmetics and bags full of px (post exchange – shops within the us military bases) goods are almost always accompanied by a sense of threat, amorality and disapproval. for example, in hotta yoshie’s story ‘kumoribi’ (cloudy day, 2004), a pan-pan girl called yoko is living a ‘plush life’ filled with material goods—an ‘electronic record player … two wardrobes … food in shiny tins’—but she is also characterised as having a ‘vulgar mind’ and a complete lack of modesty. in one notable scene, for example, she yells to the male protagonist: ‘get me the scissors! … i let the bastard lick me because he was so insistent, and now i cannot get the chewing gum off my [pubic] hair’ (2004: 286).5 in abe akira’s story ‘sennen’ (one thousand years, 1980), reiko, the main character’s cousin who has become a pan-pan girl, is described as ‘loose’ and ‘scandalous.’ she has an ‘arrogant hairstyle with a perm as if threatening her parents,’ and wears a ‘ring with a ridiculously large blue stone’ and a ‘gaudy dress.’ although reiko’s family and relatives benefit from her new job in the form of ‘px tins, soaps … lucky strike and half and half,’ her transformation into a pan-pan girl is a ‘taboo’ topic no one dares to discuss. the main character, vaguely aware that reiko is an object of sexual exploitation by ‘hairy yankees,’ simply rationalises his lack of sympathy towards her situation by thinking ‘[unlike another cousin who is a student] that one is a cousin who does not mind this sort of thing’ (1980: 72–76). pan-pan girls are thus constructed as having an unsettling difference from other, ‘respectable’ women who live within the ‘good wife, wise mother’ norm. generally speaking, the ‘pan-pan girls’ are not marked with traditionally available feminine gender codes such as shyness, modesty, naivety and loyalty. instead they are characterised as having flippant manners and vulgar speech, and as rejecting the ‘good 5 all translations are the author’s own. sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 7 wife, wise mother’ ideology. they ‘sit with their legs wide open like a man’ and ‘drink in the middle of the day’ (nishino 1954: 390), ‘use toilet[s] … with the glass door more than half open’ (abe 1980: 70–71), make socially unacceptable sexual advances, and tease and challenge men. their non-reproductive sexuality sets them apart from the normative japanese gender role of wives and mothers in the novels under discussion. although it is at least theoretically possible to represent their non-reproductive commercial sex as a resistance against male control of sexuality, all in all, pan-pan sexuality is depicted not as liberating or empowering but as immoral and dangerous, especially when considered in light of how other women are represented in the novels. for example, in abe kazushige’s novel shinsemia (sin semillas [without seeds]), an influx of pan-pan girls turns a whole town into ‘pan-pan town’ or an ‘obscene sex town’ (2006: 223), and culminates in a series of horrendous crimes. the rumour among the town’s housewives that one of the pan-pan girls was sleeping with a married japanese man precipitates a tragic suicide of the accused girl following four days of gruesome assault by the townspeople (2006: 225–32). we can read this episode as a story of the punishment of pan-pan sexuality that threatened the traditional position and status of housewives, who embody normative japanese femininity. in other stories, too, the panpan girls are located at the very margin of society, constituting the opposite pole of the ‘good wife, wise mother.’ in the next section, however, i use examples from each text in order to discuss how pan-pan representations are used to inscribe complex and disputed memories of the postwar occupation. kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū: japan’s subjection to the usa murakami ryu’s 1976 novel, kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū uses a pan-pan woman as a symbol of japanese humiliation and us domination. by 1976, the narrative of japan’s postwar history had already solidified around the key theme of japan’s democratisation as americanisation. according to this narrative, the usa cured japan of fanatic militarism and taught her a lesson of democracy and individual rights. along with this line, japanese women’s history published in the 1970s typically focused on women’s liberation and empowerment; pan-pan girls were either completely ignored or treated as an embarrassing postscript to the grand narrative of women’s liberation (see, for sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 8 example, ito [1974], and itoya and ezashi [1977]).6 kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū challenges this mainstream perspective by using the metaphor of sexual subjection to problematise the unequal power relations between the usa and japan. via a pan-pan image, the narrative (re)inserts the memory of the traumatic occupation into the narrative of democracy and liberation. the story describes a group of japanese youths living near a us military base in the 1970s, leading a reckless life filled with drugs and sex. towards the end of the story, the main character, ryu, has a flashback from his childhood, when he used to collect the rent from a us doctor living in his aunt’s house: every time i was there the american doctor showed me the vagina of a japanese woman who was thin like an ape and very hairy. … the japanese woman with heavy make-up showed me between her legs while thrashing about on her back … the doctor stuck different objects between her scrawny buttocks and made me look at them. she smeared some lipstick on the sheet and glared at me, yelling ‘give me a cigar’ (in broken english) in a loud voice. the doctor was laughing his head off, with a whiskey bottle in his hand. (murakami 1978: 142–43) this scene, and in fact much of the novel, is saturated with an intense and painful sense of humiliation stemming from us power and japanese loss of power. in this particular flashback, ryu, as a young boy, is metaphorically emasculated, unable to compete with the us doctor who humiliates the pan-pan.7 ryu’s loathing and disgust, however, are not directed towards the doctor but towards the pan-pan, whom he calls ‘a retarded japanese woman’ (murakami 1978: 144). he seems powerless in relation to the doctor, who embodies both the occupation and us military power. the ‘retarded woman’ herself is not in the least disturbed by the violation, seemingly unable to feel the humiliation she ‘should’ feel from ryu’s perspective—the humiliation ryu is feeling so desperately, on behalf of her. the image of a pan-pan here functions as a poignant 6 ito’s book on the postwar history of japanese women refers to the pan-pan girls in the context of an episode where two japanese female members of the cinema and theatrical workers union of japan were arrested because they were mistaken for pan-pan girls. whilst ito commends the assertiveness of the women who complained to the authorities about the incident, she does not discuss the plight of the panpan girls themselves (1974: 64). itoya and ezashi’s study of women’s liberation after the war mentions the pan-pan girls only terms of their negative influence on village communities and their young people and children (1977: 116, 118). 7 emasculated japanese male characters are commonly linked to pan-pan girls in the literature. another example appears in sakaguchi ango’s short story, ‘machi wa furusato,’ where the japanese male character who befriends a group of pan-pan girls is referred by them as ‘brother,’ ‘uncle’ and ‘teacher.’ he is also somewhat feminised (variously described as being ‘like a prince,’ having ‘weak eyes,’ ‘innocent young man’ and, on one occasion, ‘not a man’) and not regarded as a sexual object by the girls (sakaguchi 1950: 4-5). in the case of decadent sisters byshimada masahiko, the father—the household head—is in prison and absent for much of the story, implying the weakened position of the japanese male and patriarchy at the time (shimada 2005: 81–82). sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 9 reminder of japan’s subjection and collective trauma, experienced from the subject position of the men of the defeated nation. what this kind of representation conceals, however, is the complicity between the usa and japan in the operation of the occupation. the supreme commander of the allied powers (scap) ruled through the existing japanese government and bureaucracy, and was supported and welcomed by the majority of the japanese. when the occupation is represented as a one-sided power relationship of domination/subjection, the realities that the occupation was a co-production between japan and the usa, or in part the outcome of a voluntary choice on the part of japan, are glossed over. depicting a pan-pan as a somewhat monstrous and ‘retarded’ figure, and letting a male character despise her, confirm a certain historical forgetting and displacement at work in these literary texts. the male character is spared from experiencing humiliation directly. rather, the ‘shameful’ japan that welcomes us domination is externalised onto the body of the pan-pan and then rejected by the male, national, subject position. taihai shimai: the self-imposed pain of occupation although humiliation and suffering are regularly projected onto the pan-pan representations, the pan-pan girls are rarely depicted as naïve victims of sexual violence under the occupation. i am yet to find a pan-pan girl in japanese literature who suffers a violent rape by us soldiers. on the contrary, pan-pan girls are often pictured as willing accomplices of their own violation, as women who knowingly participate in the humiliating act of prostitution for the sake of material gain even if they may also be depicted as lacking a sense of self-worth. this again seems to suggest the merit in regarding the occupation as an undertaking managed jointly by both japan and the usa, however hierarchical the relation between the countries may have been. a telling scene, for example, appears in shimada masahiko’s 2005 taihai shimai. one of the main characters, kumiko, decides to become a pan-pan after her father is imprisoned as a war criminal for having made war-propaganda films. although the description of her first experience of intercourse is unromantic, forceful and violent, and on the surface appears to depict a rape, kumiko is fully aware of her agency in the act, construing her motive for losing her virginity to a us soldier in this manner: ‘i want to do something useful for defeated japan’ (shimada 2005: 101). her act appears as a selfchosen initiation into pan-pan ranks in exchange for a pair of nylon stockings. as she sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 10 loses consciousness from the pain of the intercourse, she tells herself: ‘this is a path everyone has to go down; the virgin kumiko has just died, and a new kumiko is born; this is a gift from me to america’ (128). the blood-stained sheet under her body is then described as a ‘crumpled rising sun flag’ (129). it is easy to read this rebirth of kumiko as a gendered metaphor for japan’s painful rebirth as a nation via the occupation, whereby all japanese walked the same path in order to achieve postwar prosperity. japan’s ‘gift to america’ was the new japan, politically subservient to the usa, and accepting the establishment of military bases throughout the country under the mutual security treaty. old-style national pride may have crumbled, but complying with postwar us hegemony was a self-conscious choice. japan, like kumiko, was not simply a naïve victim of the us occupation. the pan-pan girls, who readily sold their bodies in exchange for a pair of stockings or a packet of cigarettes, seem a fitting trope for remembering the occupation as neither a gift nor a curse, but both. kumiko’s choice to become a pan-pan girl cannot be read as simple victimhood; instead it suggests both self-determination and complicity with the occupiers. while the above scene from taihai shimai uses a pan-pan girl as a metaphor for japan’s painful complicity with the usa, pan-pan girls in the novel are also depicted as agents of resistance to the us occupation. as kumiko’s pan-pan friend puts it, ‘even though tokyo is occupied by the americans, we are now going to occupy the americans’ heart and purse’ (shimada 2005: 137). kumiko understands that they are faced with the choice of ‘whether to join in the group of “us,” the pan-pan girls who declare a body-tobody battle against the occupying soldiers, or remain passively occupied,’ and decides that ‘since she was not going to get her virginity back, she might as well make the american soldiers pay for it’ (137). when it comes to japanese men, the novel simply states that ‘for the men of the defeated nation, proving their loyalty to the victors of the war became a matter of life-or-death’ (51), again suggesting male opportunism. the task of resisting the occupation is given to the women, their weapon of choice being commodified sex. japanese male characters are thus spared from directly engaging with the humiliation of the liberation via occupation as taihai shimai assigns the job of overcoming the ambivalence of humiliation-liberation to the pan-pan girls. unlike kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū, where the pan-pan woman bears the humiliation and trauma of occupation on behalf of the male national subject, taihai shimai accords the role of national subject, at once complicit and resistant, to the pan-pan girls themselves. sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 11 someday, on the x bridge: rescue narrative when a japanese male character is not metaphorically emasculated (like ryu in kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū) or absent (like kumiko’s father in taihai shimai) in relation to the pan-pan girls, he may appear as their rescuer. set in the immediate postwar period of 1945-1947, kumagai tatsuya’s 2008 itsuka x-hashi de narrates the rescuing and redemption of a pan-pan girl. yusuke, the novel’s teenage protagonist, bumps into his earlier love interest, yoshiko, who has become a pan-pan girl. in their earlier encounter a year before, yoshiko was dressed in simple trousers and a white blouse, her hair in pigtails; her manners were shy, her speech polite. to yusuke’s shock, however, on their second encounter she is ‘dressed like a pan-pan girl from head to toe’ (kumagai 2008: 156), wears heavy make-up and shows off her cleavage, and her language is coarse. although yusuke has a glimpse of the old, innocent yoshiko (for example, she buttons up her dress on noticing his gaze), she rejects his offer to provide her with a place to stay and leaves without a word. about half way though the story, yusuke discovers that yoshiko has become a us soldier’s ‘only’—that is, his exclusive lover—and he helplessly looks at them disappear, arm in arm, into the darkness. however, it turns out that the soldier has a wife and children back home, and has also selected a new pan-pan girl as his new ‘only,’ forcing yoshiko back on the street. yusuke’s love and patience eventually change yoshiko from a promiscuous and damaged pan-pan girl to an honest and chaste woman who is committed to yusuke. she quits pan-pan work and falls pregnant. since motherhood is the antithesis of the panpan’s non-reproductive sexuality, yoshiko’s transformation into a mother-to-be implies the taming of her dangerous sexuality and the reinstatement of the gender norm of ‘good wife, good mother.’ put simply, this is a story of a japanese man rescuing a japanese woman from the hands of an exploitative american. concealed in this story, however, is the unequal power relationship between the japanese man and the japanese woman, and that the purported rescue of the pan-pan girl amounts to yoshiko’s (re)subjection to japanese patriarchy. the ideology of ‘good wife, wise mother’ characterises femininity exclusively in terms of domesticity, wifehood and motherhood; a woman’s existence is defined by, and depends on, her relationship with a man and staying within the household, her sexuality thus yoked to reproduction and her husband. it is thus doubtful that a japanese woman’s subjection within japanese patriarchy would be any better than subjection to us occupiers. sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 12 in the rescue narrative of itsuka x-hashi de, the evolving relationship between yusuke and yoshiko partially works through the humiliation of the occupied male, who then regains control by possessing a japanese woman. this contrasts with the scene from kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū, where the japanese male is left metaphorically emasculated and powerless in front of the us soldier. it also differs from ishikawa jun’s short story, ‘golden legend,’ in which the male protagonist, witnessing his former love interest who has become a pan-pan girl holding onto a black soldier with a healthy, strong body in stylish clothes, feels ‘so shameful that he could have died’ (ishikawa 1946: 52).8 in comparison with those narratives, the rescue trope in itsuka x-hashi de can be read as a form of therapy for a wounded japanese male ego in the face of the sexual and military occupation by us forces. the pan-pan girls as a trope for remembering the occupation sex is commonly used as a metaphor for power relations between the ruler and the ruled in colonial settings. as sakai naoki says, it is thus crucial to determine whether this relationship is represented metaphorically as rape or romance (sakai 2005: 277). for example, for the us-led occupying forces, it was important that the ruler-ruled relation be represented in the format of romance. sakai points out that this is apparent in several us films made in japan during the 1950s, such as house of bamboo (fuller 1955) and sayonara (logan 1957). in these orientalist interracial romances, a japanese woman’s love for an american is construed as the acceptance of us rule, thus obscuring the often violent nature of the occupation (2005: 277–78). however, in japanese pan-pan literature, as we have seen, neither romance nor rape provide a major interpretive framework for the us-japanese relationship. sex between the pan-pan girls and gis is depicted predominantly as a commercial transaction of sorts, where women willingly take part in their own exploitation and abuse for the sake of material gain. on the whole, the pan-pan girls are portrayed simultaneously as victims (though not of rape) and willing participants (though not of romance), but never clearly one or the other. such representations reflect the inherent ambivalence about occupied japan. the wartime hardship under militarism meant that the occupying forces were given the status of liberators. many japanese welcomed the occupation, general 8 this story was censored by the occupation authority because of its explicit reference to the us soldier, and did not get published until after the occupation. sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 13 douglas macarthur and democracy, thus earning japan the reputation as the ‘best student’ of us democracy. this view was to be repeated and reinforced by us policymakers who regarded the japanese occupation as a ‘successful’ model for the occupation of iraq in the early 2000s (dower 2003). at the same time, the occupation was—and had to be—about defeat, power and foreign control. beneath the official discourse of the japanese acceptance and embrace of the occupation, and the changes it brought, was a deep sense of humiliation and subugation. this contradiction was clearly seen in the predicament of japanese women in the postwar period. while the allies liberated them by giving them voting rights, they also exploited their sexuality.9 representations of pan-pan girls often allude to this unresolved tension between the memory of the occupation as a humiliating liberation, and the repressed memory of japan’s complicity with the occupiers. however, as i have noted, the humiliation and shame that often frame the representations of pan-pan girls are felt predominantly by male characters. the memory of the occupation as a national trauma, as a shameful experience of disempowerment, is arguably thus constructed from the position of a male subject. on the one hand, the highly visual, sexualised and iconic pan-pan girls function as a trope for the complex interrelations between materialism, desire, victimhood and humiliation. the trope allows the occupation to be remembered as a liberation that established democracy and yet as also somehow an obscene and humiliating period in japanese history. inscribed on the bodies of the pan-pan girls in literature is the repressed memory of the occupation as a humiliating liberation, which problematises the dominant japanese understanding of postwar history as a process of willing and successful americanisation. on the other hand, the use of the pan-pan girls as the symbolic bearers of a repressed memory of the occupation normalises chastity and closes off the pan-pans’ potential to challenge the mores of japanese patriarchy. as yoneyama lisa argues, it is problematic to regard japanese women’s postwar history as a story of coloured women liberated by white men, who gave them the vote and rescued them from oppression by men of colour (2003: 74). indeed, the literary texts discussed in this essay, in part challenge such a view: men of colour have the revenge, or perhaps dominate the textual postscript. 9 in the immediate postwar period, there were many cases of japanese women being raped and assaulted. see svoboda (2009) and tanaka (2001). sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 14 such depictions of the pan-pan girls also indicate that for many japanese authors the shameful acceptance and assimilation of the victor’s culture can be explained in relation to feminine desire, which thus distances the national male subject from a shameful position. the male characters’ pitying, despising and/or rescuing of pan-pan girls relieve the japanese male subject of his agency and responsibility for the violence of the occupation, and leave the mores of japanese patriarchy unquestioned and unchallenged. in so far as this kind of representation silences the pan-pan girls’ voices, and subordinates them to male voices and subject positions, it also functions at times as a form of textual violence. conclusion the interrelationship between gender and occupation/militarism is very much a vexed political concern in the contemporary world, and underwrites such issues as the continuing use of sexual violence in wars and occupations, the institutionalisation of prostitution around us bases, and entrenched discrimination against female soldiers. literary texts, too, have potential relevance for how we think about these matters. in postwar japanese literature, representations of the pan-pan girls often evoke and allude to multiple power relations: between the us and japan; between us men and japanese men; between japanese men and japanese women; as well as between middle-class and lower-class women. while such power relations are not unique to japan in the period between 1945 and 1952, the pan-pan girls were products of the symbiosis between the japanese government and the us occupation at a specific moment in japanese history. the appearance and ambivalent uses made of pan-pan girls in postwar literary texts thus sheds light on the specific construction of a japanese national narrative anchored in the purported advances brought about by the allied occupation. acknowledgements the research for this article was supported by the university of auckland’s grant-in-aid in 2009. an earlier version was delivered at the ‘gender and occupations and interventions in the asia-pacific 19452009’ workshop at the university of wollongong in december 2009. i am grateful to professor matthew allen, university of wollongong, and the members of the women’s writing group, faculty of arts, university of auckland, for their valuable comments on the earlier drafts of this article. i would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous and thoughtful suggestions for revision. sakamoto pan-pan girls portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 15 reference list abe, a. 1980, ‘sennen,’ in umi kara no kaze. sakuhinsha, tokyo, 9–108. abe, k. 2006, shinsemia iii. asahi bunko, tokyo. arai, e. 2007, ‘kirisutokyō-kai no “panpan” gensetsu to magudara no maria,’ in senryō to sei: seisaku, jittai, hyōshō,’ (ed.) keisen jogakuen daigaku heiwa bunka kenkyūjo. inpakuto shoppankai, tokyo, 149–78. aruga, n. 2005, ‘amerika senryō-gun muke “ian-shisetsu” ni mirareru jendā, jinshu, kaikyū—on 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(dir.) 1957, sayonara, motion picture, warner bros. shimada, m. 2005, taihai shimai. bunshun bunko, tokyo. svoboda, t. 2009, ‘u.s. courts-martial in occupation japan: rape, race, and censorship,’ the asiapacific journal, vol. 21 (01-09). online, available: http://www.japanfocus.org/-teresesvoboda/3148 (accessed 24 aug. 2010) tanaka, y. 2001, japan’s comfort women: sexual slavery and prostitution during the world war ii and the us occupation. routledge, london. yoneyama, l. 2003, ‘hihanteki feminizumu no keifu kara miru nihon senryō,’ shisō, no. 955, 60–84. yoshimi, s. 2007, shinbei to hanbei. iwanami shinsho, tokyo. marinelligalleycivilisingpolitics&aestheticschinanov2012issuefinal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. politics and aesthetics in china special issue, guest edited by maurizio marinelli. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. civilising the citizens: political slogans and the right to the city maurizio marinelli, university of technology sydney happiness for the people is like flowers. the people and the party shall create the proper environment for the flowers to grow. (wang yang 2011) figure 1: billboard ‘one world—one dream.’ beijing, 2007 © maurizio marinelli marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 2 preface one evening in august 2007, chinese artist zhang dali 张大力 was riding his bicycle back home. when he reached the fourth ring road east he saw a mega-billboard with the slogan tongyi ge shijie tongyi ge mengxian 同一个世界 同一个梦想. this chinese language image-word is usually translated as ‘one world—one dream.’ however, if one respects the etymology, it should be translated as: ‘same world—same dream.’1 this slogan conveys the crucial idea that china today is not only part of the world, but is also assertively positioning itself as a leading global player in the twenty-first century. zhang dali pondered upon the deeper content of this slogan and found it ‘absolutely shocking’ (juedui zhenhan 绝对震撼). the slogan helped zhang realise that the imminent opening of the olympic games’ mega-event (8–22 august 2008) offered the best possible opportunity for the chinese state to exhibit to the whole world both its economic achievements and the political strength of the party. at the same time, besides acknowledging the chinese state’s strategic intention to use the beijing olympics as a public relations opportunity, zhang dali’s ‘shock’ also derived from his recognition of the use of traditional revolutionary-style mobilisation tactics. this twofold shocking experience led zhang dali to conclude that, if one compared the incredible transformation of the economic productive structure with what had happened in the world of ideas (sixiang 思想),2 the mode of thinking of the government (zhengfu de siwei 政府的思维) had not significantly changed. according to the artist, although the chinese government in 2007 was organising the olympic games, the techniques to coin the present slogans and the realm of ideas from the revolutionary era onwards had remained mostly unchanged. the sameness concealed by the slogan was exactly this: the same ideology had pervasively persisted (jiu shi tongyi sixiang 就是同一思想). this article will begin with an analysis of the political context in which the beijing olympics were conceptualised. this will shed light on their rationale, and provide a full understanding of the government-created logocentric model to hail the mega-event and proclaim china’s success story. the analysis of the official slogans in the first part of the article will provide the necessary background to investigate the origin of zhang 1 the slogan echoes the typical expression: xiang tongyi mubiao qianjin 向同一目标前进, which literally means ‘to advance towards the same goal.’ 2 personal interview with the artist, july 2011. in chinese, sixiang 思想 refers also to ideology, and therefore to the realm of political thought and political awareness. marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 3 dali’s artwork entitled ‘the slogan series.’ the artist is particularly interested in exploring ‘the real society (shehui xianshi 社会现实).’ his denunciation of the violence of the olympics hegemonic language, led him to appropriate the official slogans to create thought-provoking text-images, with the aim of preventing collective amnesia. the analysis of zhang’s work will reveal the aesthetics and socio-political implications of his artworks, which originate from his dual intention to problematise what happened to the ‘real society’ in the city where he lives and, at the same time, to bridge the gap between art and ‘real’ space, asserting the right to a new language to inhabit the city. figure 2: billboard ‘welcome the olympic games—stress civilisation—establish new habits.’ beijing, 2008 © maurizio marinelli the olympics: dream of a strong nation from the summer of 2007 to the summer of 2008, the streets of beijing were covered with billboards spreading slogans hailing the imminent olympic games. one of the most popular slogans used during the civic political campaign to promote the olympics was: ‘welcome the olympic games—stress civilisation—establish new habits’ (ying aoyun, jiang wenming, shu xinfeng 迎奥运、讲文明、树新风). this tripartite motto was meant to have a precise performative effect: the chinese government expected from its citizens absolute and unflinching support for the olympics (landsberger, kloet, & chong 2010; brady 2009). the ‘games’ (in the chinese sense of youxi 游戏) were marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 4 transmogrified, from the notion of skilled sportive manifestations able to create a spectacle for the viewers’ pleasure, to a new geopolitical great game—in the climactic sense of the chinese word yundong 运动—with the final aim of strategically asserting china’s primacy in the brave new world of the twenty-first century. to understand the civic political campaign for the olympics, it is necessary to inscribe it within the dominant national discourse of ‘civilising the citizens.’ the starting point was a general idea of citizens’ subjectivity, in the chinese sense of citizens as gongmin 公民—literally public subjects—allegedly more inclined to perceive themselves as part of a polity, and therefore carrying a stronger sense of ‘rules consciousness,’ as opposed to a single individual with a developing sense of ‘rights consciousness’ (perry 2008). the strategy of promoting ‘civilised’ (wenming 文明) behaviour and instilling patriotic education in beijing’s citizens has been a dominant trait of the capital’s civic political campaigns over the last twenty years, beginning with the campaign to build a ‘socialist spiritual civilization’ in the 1990s (landsberger 2004; 2005). since 2001 the campaign changed tone and the ‘new citizenship’ campaign took gradual shape. high schools all over china witnessed the introduction of a new mandatory text: a new citizenship reader (yang 2005). this new textbook incorporated notions of citizenship in circulation in official intellectual discourses in the previous two decades, but it also contrasted with previous texts in that it moved away from official ideology, morality or suzhi 素质 (quality) to focus on civics. the new concept of citizenship embedded in the reader has thus encompassed more civic values, such as civility, tolerance, social trust, liberty, independence, democracy, the ‘rule of law’ and peaceful development, transmogrifying, without totally abandoning, the ‘socialist ethics,’ particularly the loyalty to the ccp and love for the people and socialism. starting from 2006–2007, the pollination of the olympics’ seeds of patriotic euphoria and national rejuvenation moved one step further: the propaganda apparatus integrated and incorporated all the key elements of the slogans that had been used in the previous historical periods, including the attempt to resurrect the fervour of the revolutionary era, and employing both vertical and horizontal propaganda techniques (brady 2007). during the 2008 coming out party of the chinese state on the global stage, previous slogans were reinvented and became part of a thorough and all-encompassing strategy to produce the ‘new (civilised) citizen.’ the litmus test for the new citizen’s proper marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 5 behaviour automatically became the demonstration of an organic and absolute support for the government-led mega-events: this required the enthusiastic upholding of the underlying political rhetoric tropes, aimed at projecting images of ‘china’s peaceful rise’ (zhongguo heping jueqi 中国和平崛起) and the alleged construction of a ‘harmonious society’ (goujian hexie shehui 构建和谐社会). as geremie barmé has poignantly argued, china used the beijing olympics as an opportunity ‘to tell its story to the world’ (2009: 64). at the same time, the olympics presented an opportunity for the chinese government to operate a selective re-elaboration of the country’s history, and tell its own success story to its public subjects (gongmin 公民). this was demonstrated by the olympics’ opening ceremony, which obliterated any reference to the maoist era. the olympics great game capitalised on the branding of the built environment, and the chinese state imposed its carefully constructed patriotic-civilising language onto the cityscape. those arriving at the customs checkpoint of the new beijing capital international airport terminal 3,3 were greeted by a gigantic, red-hot great wall image, accompanied by the words ‘welcome to beijing!’ (huanying dao beijing 欢迎到北京). from the airport to the city centre, omnipresent images of the olympic mascots (fuwa 福娃),4 commodified in every shape and form, incessantly and obsessively repeated the slogan: ‘new beijing, great olympics’ (xin beijing, xin aoyun 新北京, 新奥运).5 beijing’s urban space was elected as the showcase of a success story of the whole nation, which was proposed, imposed, and exposed by means of a revolutionary-style slogan-like political language, covering images of highrise buildings on large billboards. 3 terminal 3 was opened in march 2008, with an investment of us$4.6 billion and the ‘collateral damage’ of the forced relocation of ten thousand villagers. it embodies a numeric message of international competition: built in record time (only three and a half years) using 50,000 workers, half a million tonnes of steel and two million tonnes of concrete, terminal 3 extends for almost three kilometres. it is often compared to heathrow’s terminal 5 (completed around the same time), but it is six times larger. 4 fuwa 福娃 are the friendlies or good luck dolls, whose names are repeated syllables: beibei 贝贝, jingjing 晶晶, huanhuan 欢欢, yingying 盈盈, and nini 妮妮. through the mechanism of chinese characters’ combination, they create the phrase ‘beijing welcomes you’ (beijing huanying ni 北京欢迎你). they are easy to memorize and mimic small children’s nicknames. they ‘carry a message of friendship and peace—and blessings from china—to children all over the world,’ and ‘also embody the natural characteristics of four of china's most popular animals—the fish, the panda, the tibetan antelope, the swallow—and the olympic flame’ (http://en.beijing2008.com/37/03/column211990337.shtml). a 100-episodes olympic–themed cartoon series featuring the fuwa (‘the fuwa olympic cruise’ fuwa aoyun manyouji 福娃奥运漫游记) was released in china on august 8, 2007. 5 the literal translation of this slogan in english should have been ‘new beijing, new olympics.’ however, the decision to translate it using ‘great olympics’ instead derived from the chinese state’s perception that the foreign readers might have misinterpreted the use of ‘new olympics’ as alluding to the fact that the olympics needed to be ‘renewed.’ ‘new beijing, great olympics’ also became the title of a travelling exhibition, which opened in sydney in april 2006 and reached berlin in september 2007. marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 6 figure 3: the olympic mascots (fuwa 福娃). beijing, 2008 © maurizio marinelli. figure 4: billboard hailing the ‘humanistic’ olympics and the construction of a ‘civilised’ chaoyang district in beijing. beijing, 2008 © maurizio marinelli marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 7 this strategy originated also from the ccp’s hubristic pride of telling its own story of the world: this was the master narrative of great nations that had been carefully rewritten and tactfully ‘harmonised.’ the popular television series daguo jueqi 大国崛起 (the rise of great nations), which was shown on china’s state network cctv across twelve episodes on 13–24 november 2006, was crucial to this strategy. moving away from the previous emphasis on the condemnation of the ‘imperialist sin’ of the past, when the foreign powers aimed at ‘getting rich from the blood of others,’ the argument of the tv series was a more positive appraisal of national experiences, in an attempt to represent the ‘imperialist sin’ of the past as a driving force and a sine qua non for the rise of the ‘great nations’ to global status (cctv 2006, 2007). the olympics primarily intended to promote a unified image of national identity. to this aim, the government utilised a marketing campaign of ‘en-worldment’ (terkenli 2002): the creation of an urban landscape simultaneously ‘encompassing multiple worlds,’ in harmony with the olympics’ main slogan ‘one world, one dream’—even though the ‘outside’ worlds were mostly limited to the branded iconic venues created for the games and the international audience was carefully scrutinised and selected. this spectacle was produced in line with the national master narrative of ‘linking up with the international track’ (yu guoji jiegui 与国际接轨) (wang 2007: 1–23). the final aim was to emphasise how china, which had been ‘excluded’ from the world stage for so long, had finally rejoined the world and self-consciously intended to reposition itself, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, at the centre of the global stage (wang 2003, 2009). the olympics claimed to demonstrate that the dream of the strong nation (qiangguomeng 强国梦) (li 2006) had finally come true, as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy embodied in beijing’s spectacle. the image of the ‘strong china’ was based on the following syllogism: since the eyes of the world were now focused on beijing– china, ergo china had finally regained its well-deserved centrality. however, the china at the ‘centre of the world,’ the china that wanted to attract the international viewers’ gaze and be marveled at, paradoxically embodied the alter ego of a previously well-established, and at least debatable, teleology of modernity that had been proposed and imposed by the western powers in china’s colonial entrepôts in the nineteenth century. the china exposed, imposed and proposed to the rest of the world today seems to have appropriated specific discourses of power and space, which belonged to the west. in the urban settings, these discourses have been articulated through radical marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 8 transformative practices, leading to the deliberate murder of home with physical and psychological implications. the terms coined by porteous and smith (porteous and smith 2001: 10–23), ‘domicide’ (the destruction of home) and ‘memoricide’ (the destruction of historical memory), are particularly suitable to describe what became the norm in urban china’s bio-politics of socio-spatial transformation, reflecting hegemonic narratives of progress, rationality, efficiency, forwardness, and globalising ‘newness’ that are not new. against this background, a discussion on the form and content of state propaganda and art, at the time when the capital beijing became the olympics’ city, requires a particular attention to the ‘right to the city’ (lefebvre 1995). david harvey poignantly interprets lefebvre’s call for ‘a transformed and renewed access to urban life’ (lefebvre 1995: 158) adding: ‘the right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. it is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanisation. the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, i want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights’ (harvey 2008: 23). in the chinese context, the discussion of the ‘right to change ourselves by changing the city’ has to start with an investigation of the politics that produce and frame the official image of the city. the hegemonic language of the olympics in his work painting the city red, yomi braester explores the shift in visual practices that accompanied urban material transformation. he uses the concept of urban contract ‘to draw attention to a particular power structure’ and to investigate ‘the complex networks and collaborations’ that seem to make possible the creation of ‘better cities to engineer better citizens’ (braester 2010: 6).6 i argue that language has played a crucial role in this process. during the political campaign for the promotion of the olympics, the size of the chinese characters composing the slogans varied considerably, but in all cases the large characters played the dominant role in the billboards, being uncannily juxtaposed to the rendering of a ‘modernising’ urban landscape that was visible underneath the characters. 6 braester dedicates particular attention to the ‘cinema’s mediation between different visions of the city.’ marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 9 the cityscape’s images belonged to beijing, although some of them could have also been drawn from other generically globalising chinese metropolises. fragments of high-rise buildings appeared and disappeared, partially concealed by the characters. in terms of scale, the dimension of the characters, and their relevant visual effect, was overwhelming. figure 5: split billboard juxtaposed to a gate outside a development site. beijing, 2008 © maurizio marinelli. ultimately, the subject of the campaign was always one and the same: beijing, the citystage of the 2008 olympics was the centre stage of national politics. government power produces reality through ‘rituals of truth,’ which create specific systems of ‘knowledge’ (foucault 1991: 102; 2004; 2007). beijing became the symbol par excellence of the glorious global destiny of the chinese nation that, with the olympics, had finally become an axiomatic ‘reality.’ the omnipresent slogans asserted that beijing ‘welcomed you,’ and the five olympic mascots repeated this message in unison. in this context, the citizens became part of the normalising force: they both had to internalise the myths, which represented the source of power, and, simultaneously, they were subject to mechanisms of surveillance and reinforcement, which aimed at conforming marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 10 their behavioural patterns to the explicit and implicit rules of the grand design of the state. some slogans sang the praise of the ‘first class,’ the ‘civilised’ and ‘green olympics,’ others referred to the ‘hi-tech olympics,’ while others emphasised the ‘people's olympics.’ starting from a year before the mega–event, the official version claimed that: ‘celebrating the games in beijing in 2008 will afford a unique opportunity to inspire and educate a new generation of chinese youth with the olympic values, and to promote the olympic spirit and the cause of sport in china and the world.’7 the olympian dream-come-true was portrayed ‘as a catalyst for exchange and harmony between various cultures and peoples.’8 across the major intersections and at metro stations, the sensory perception of citizens and visitors alike was bombarded by posters, banners, and giant billboards advertising the ‘civilised olympics’ (wenming aoyun 文明 奥运). the medium conveyed the message of civilised, and ultimately docile, citizens as the sine qua non for the success of the political campaign of the olympics and, more specifically, required these subjects to sustain, both domestically and internationally, the projective positive image of the nation, which was functional to reassert the legitimacy of the ccp. starting from 16 march 2007, a so-called non-profit commercial was continuously broadcast on beijing television, showing a schoolgirl who explained in an innocent but proud tone the sea change that occurred in her family after the international olympic committee’s historic decision: ‘my dad is a taxi driver and he is learning english to serve the foreign passengers when olympics come. my mum is smiling to every customer visiting her counter at the shopping mall. and my granny is making pieces of olympics craftwork at home!’9 beijing’s taxi drivers were expected not only to learn english, but also to abide by the three crucial civilising maxims: ‘brush your teeth often. bathe regularly. change your clothes.’ the elimination of foul-smelling cabs was part of the sanitising and civilising campaign (cho 2007). on the official website, the president of the beijing organising committee for the olympics (bocog) liu qi declared: ‘it is crucial that the public should strive to desert all uncivilised behaviour, 7 see the official vision of the olympics at: http://61.135.180.163/eolympic/xay/xay_index.htm (accessed 20 october 2011). 8 see: http://61.135.180.163/eolympic/xay/xay_index.htm (accessed 20 october 2011). 9 blog dated 16 march 2007: http://www.blognow.com.au/beijingsexyfish/55017/olympic wenming.html (accessed 20 october 20011). marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 11 and work vigorously toward creating a civilised and harmonious society to host a successful olympic games.’10 following the eruption of violent street protests in tibet on 14 march 2008, which coincided with the 49th anniversary of the tibetan uprising of 1959, more ‘civilising’ slogans were coined. in april 2008, omnipresent red banners associated the olympics with the patriotic slogan to oppose any tibetan claim to independence, while at the same time boycotting french goods (ying ouyun, fan zangdu, dizhi fahuo 迎奥运、反藏 独、抵制法货). the internal structure of this slogan, which consists of 3 + 3 + 4 characters, is quite unique: the final four characters reveal the real aim, but they do so in an asymmetric and asynchronous way, unveiling both the problematic coinage and, ultimately, its less civic and more political overtone. the fundamental binding element of all these slogans was the primary relevance of ‘welcoming the olympic games (ying aoyun 迎奥运),’ which essentially meant upholding the success story of the nation. the ultimate requirement for the expression of a correct and civilised behaviour was the full embracement of the ‘olympic spirit.’ the juxtaposition between this particular kind of language, which was indicative of a precise governmentality discourse, and beijing’s cityscape was strikingly apparent, and did not go unnoticed by chinese artist zhang dali. the origin of zhang dali’s ‘slogan series’ in his artwork called ‘the slogan series,’ zhang dali uses juxtaposition in a unique way, creating in the viewer a twofold effect: a sense of aesthetic hyperbole and emotional-psychological claustrophobia. in some ways, this reaction is a projection of the artist’s response itself to the paradoxes of the civic political campaign to promote ‘the olympic spirit’ via civilising the citizens. from that evening in august 2007, when zhang reflected on the ‘same world—same dream’ slogan that he saw on the fourth ring road, the artist started taking more and more photographs of civic political slogans. he selected the following slogans from the myriad that were plastered on large billboards in the streets of beijing in 2007 and 2008: ‘effortlessly build up a saving society. implement a sustainable development.’ 10 see: http://en.beijing2008.cn/ (accessed 20 october 2011). marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 12 ‘seek the truth and be pragmatic. open up to innovation. promote the balanced development of the three cultures.’ ‘study ceremony and propriety and you will make yourself more cultivated. behave according to ceremony and propriety and you will make (your) life more beautiful.’ ‘enhance an advanced culture. promote the social development.’ ‘take to heart the study, the implementation, and the fulfilment of the spirit of the party’s seventeenth congress. push forward the construction of the harmonious socialist society.’ ‘strengthen the construction of morality in the way of thinking. elevate the cultural quality of the citizens.’ figure 6: billboards in the streets of beijing in 2007–2008 © maurizio marinelli. in zhang’s artwork, the slogans are juxtaposed with images of human faces that are also deriving from photographs. the human faces are those of common people. zhang dali was buying rejected passport-size photos from photographers’ studios. these photos essentially carry an ephemeral connotation: they capture a moment in time that is markedly brief, they are meant to serve a precise function since they are meant to be used for passports, id cards, etc. the ‘life’ of these photographs is metaphorically protracted by the photographer’s decision to keep a copy of them for a little bit longer, just in case the clients needed a reproduction. after a while, the photographer puts them all together in a plastic bag and throws them away. zhang’s decision to purchase them, somehow further extends the life of these photographs. the artist buys these bags of mixed photographs of common people, and then selects some of them, based on the light, or on the position of the face. zhang uses a technique similar to pointillism to provide the opportunity to these human faces to re-emerge, and not be forgotten. the texts are actually creating the images, since the chinese characters, which repeat the marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 13 civic political slogans photographed on the streets, are painted by brushstrokes in different tonalities of color so as to produce portraits of anonymous individuals. the results are highly stylised, formal portraits of nameless men and women, posing for the first time for the camera, and here again, unconsciously repeating that pose through the artwork. they seem to be looking the viewers straight in the eyes, challenging them to distinguish between the human images and the series of phrases that are juxtaposed with them. in one sense, the human faces are objectified by the slogans, now that they are artistically reproduced. almost mechanically the original individuals seem to regain, but then actually lose their identity. they are branded by the chinese characters: supersigns of their state-sponsored chineseness (zhongguoxing 中国性) (yang 1998).11 this is a clear indication that individuals cannot escape the official civic political discourse, since they intrinsically belong to the chinese state and are subject to its propaganda. zhang explains: ‘people’s experiences and thoughts are formed by the world they live in, and the “slogan series” draws attention to the influence that external forces exert on society, and to the circumstances of people subjected to those forces’ (zhang 2008b). however, zhang’s artworks could also be interpreted as a demonstration of how the constative (embodied by the grammar of state propaganda) is pushed away by the performative (the grammar of artistic resistance), since the artist’s text-images allow the viewers new possibilities for seeing and speaking back. but does this offer a way out, or is it more a denunciation of the importance to resist the subservient acceptance of hegemonic language, and develop awareness to oppose collective amnesia? there is another important element in the juxtaposition of slogans and human images. if it is true that the artworks offer a second life to the photographs that had been taken in a lively moment and then discarded, once the chinese political characters are juxtaposed with the portraits, the expressions of these individuals change and they look more like dead people. that unique moment in time of the pose in the photographer’s studio, charged with emotions and potential beauty, is gone forever. the chinese characters recreate the humans but their semblance of normality has disappeared: these human faces appear ghost like. by so doing, zhang’s artwork unmasks the risk of collective 11 chinese poet yang lian, in his poignant discussion on ‘chineseness’ emphasizes the distinction between two terms: the chineseness as state (zhongguoxing 中国性) and the chineseness as language (zhongwenxing 中文性). zhongguoxing 中国性 indicates the chinese culture as a state-sponsored ideology, a socio-political entity functional to the creation of a prescriptive form of ‘correct’ citizenship via a codified schemata of culture-language. zhongwenxing 中文性 indicates the possibility to build a personal chinese culture via the search for a personal language. marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 14 amnesia of the minds of the citizens to the techniques of governmentality that are embedded in the dominant political language, and are ultimately meant to produce ‘civilised’ and ‘harmonized’ docile bodies. zhang’s intentional juxtaposition invokes the necessity to reflect on the internal paradoxes that lie behind the repeated use of political formulations (tifa 提法) (schoenhals 1992: 6–29). he seems to invite the viewer to delve more deeply into the archaeology of knowledge-power (foucault 2002) that characterises the campaign to ‘civilise the citizens’: with a critically inquiring mind in an attempt to disclose the ways in which the language of power is manufactured, articulated and performed according to a ‘ritual of truth.’ the relationship between the language and the discursive formations creates a space of order, where a system of knowledge is constituted, proposed and imposed. however, even dissecting zhang’s figure 7: zhang dali, slogan no. a6, ‘one world—one dream,’ 180 x 200 cm, 2008 2007 © zhang dali.. marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 15 artwork, reading aloud the characters, both horizontally and vertically, does not ‘make sense.’ it does not allow the viewers to ‘save’ the human beings compressed behind them, although it partially allows them to decipher the traces, and to grasp the implicit rules that dominate civic political language and frame the map of the world around us. the scope of language is strictly related to the ‘capillary form of existence’ of political power. in foucault’s words, there is a point in which power ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives’ (foucault 1980: 30). this specific point seems to be embodied in zhang’s ‘slogan series’ artwork: it is a point of no return. the artist elaborates on photographs to shed light on an epistemic space, and in this way reveals both the continuity of the language-power hegemony across time, and the possible discontinuities of the human condition, between past, present and possible future awareness. this is crucial to zhang’s struggle against collective amnesia, conducted through his photography-based artwork. text-images: the violence of language as susan sontag poignantly argued, ‘photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood’ (sontag 1977: 3–4). it is an act of appropriation that responds to a visual elicitation associated with a sensorial solicitation. therefore, picture-taking creates a triangular relation between the photographer and his experience of the world ‘that feels like knowledge -and, therefore, like power.’ sontag adds: ‘a photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights—to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on’ (1977: 11). picture-taking has always been an essential part of zhang’s artistic creation, as demonstrated by his 1990s graffiti artwork (marinelli 2004), and his meticulous study of the doctored photographs (zhang 2006). one could argue that, for zhang, photographing an event is strictly connected with his ‘sense of situation … articulated by the camera’s intervention’ and this is integral to his ‘ethics of seeing’ (sontag 1977: 3). but what is the relationship between images and texts? michel foucault, in his study on magritte’s ceci n’est pas une pipe, argued that images and texts are antagonistic semiotic systems (foucault 1973). therefore, they cannot coexist in a single work since one would always try to subdue the other. however, in marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 16 china, during the maoist era (1949–1976), images and texts effectively coexisted, to the extent that the text framed the ritual of truth of a claimed reality (apter & saich 1994; ji 2004; marinelli 2009). in mao’s china, the slogans effectively set the boundaries of linguistic expression, within the framework of a skilfully constructed epistemological and ontological universe. in the chinese historical tradition, the ‘correctness’ of language has always been considered a source of moral authority, official legitimacy and political stability. political language has always had an intrinsic instrumental value, since language control is the most suitable way to convey and maintain the orthodox state ideology. formalised language has also functioned as a powerful means to figure 8: zhang dali, slogan no. 6, ‘strengthen the construction of moral thought,’ 182 x 223 cm, 2007 © zhang dali. marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 17 standardise the range of expressiveness of the subjects. wittgenstein argues that words have the power to set the limit for the ‘expression of thoughts,’ because the boundaries of language indicate the boundaries of one’s own world: ‘it will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense’ (wittgenstein 1961: 5–6). in zhang’s ‘text-images’12 something unique happens. there is indeed a sequence of characters that generates a text, but that text has a physical, emotional and psychological resonance. as noticed by stephanie bailey: it ‘creates a dizzying effect that evokes spinning, hypnotism, radars, targets, and magnetic fields’ (2011: 99). the repetition of the chinese characters creates a tight and claustrophobic grid that imprisons the portrait of the human face. the characters cannibalise the individual’s somatic traits. the viewer has to engage into a physiognomic exercise to detect the human features of these persons and cannot be immune from their psychological discomfort. there is a strong element of violence in these paintings. violence is a common trait to zhang’s work. but here the violence of state propaganda is appropriated by the artist to produce quite a different message. zhang’s artwork brings to mind lu xun’s image of ‘man-eating-man’ that dominates the ending of the ‘diary of a madman’ (kuangren riji 狂人日记) (lu xun 1918: i, 422–33). looking at zhang’s large paintings showing human faces covered by repeated political slogans, one could say that the characters are eating these young men and women alive, corrupting their soul by denying any possible claim to prolong their existence as they originally were, and ultimately negating their opportunity to find a language to express their ‘right to the city.’ the artist launches his call to arms, perhaps hoping that somebody will hear and ‘save’ the human beings portrayed here from oblivion, oppressed as they are under the burden of civic political propaganda. heidegger argues that ‘language speaks man,’ in the sense that language pre-exists man, and man could not exist without language. the idea that language is the creator of human consciousness leads heidegger to conclude that only language manifests the perceptible traits of things of the world (ereignis, meaning ‘appropriation’). language, therefore, is the facilitator of thoughtful perception. in other words, language must be considered as the progenitor of thoughtful perception: the 12 this expression is more accurate, since the most basic unit of word structure in chinese grammar is the morpheme, which is the smallest combination of meaning and phonetic sound. marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 18 internalisation of outside reality in the mind. but when language becomes ossified, when formalised language is repeated ad infinitum—although emptied of any relevance and any resonance—language ceases to originate thoughtful perception and, in that sense, language ends up not speaking man, but eating man. at the same time, to continue paraphrasing lu xun, one could also say that zhang’s work on the interplay between political language and the violence of the city, indicates that ‘a road is made’ (lu xun 1956: i, 75; 1921: i, 485): the road here points at the uncanniness of a language that clearly embodies a chinese element (yang 1998), but does not express the ‘right to the city’ for the human beings that are phagocytised by it. the human faces seem to struggle to emerge, compressed as they are by the chinese characters which obscure their somatic traits and tend to annihilate their subjectivity, by branding them with repeated civic political propaganda lines. from the very beginning, zhang’s artwork carried a powerful iconoclastic connotation, striving to create a dialogue with the violence of urban destruction. in the year 2000, zhang began the first ak-47 series covering similar human faces with the tag of the soviet assault weapon ak-47. he had used this war-signifier for the first time in the 1990s, in ‘the dialogue series,’ spraying the ak-47 tag on the walls of beijing that were doomed to be torn down (marinelli 2004). he was shooting, using spray-paint and hammer instead of a real gun, ak-47 to represent the violence (baoli 暴力) of a community being ripped apart: ‘if i use this name, i make people think about the third world, the violence of the cities, and the wild hooligan culture. that’s not what people want to think about in beijing today!’ (cited in marinelli 2004: 436). ak-47 was a powerful way to draw attention to the destructive violence assaulting the city of beijing and their inhabitants: in beijing, during the last twenty years, thousands of old buildings have been erased at a pace faster than that of wartime berlin and london, hundreds of thousands of people had to be relocated, while millions of migrant workers have entered the city. zhang is also exposing a dialectic war of signifier (the sound-image ak-47) and signified (the violence of the city and in the city), a war of style (the repeated slogans) and content. in his new artwork, which is often referred to as ‘the slogan series,’ zhang seems to indicate that violence is embodied in the chinese characters themselves, in a language that is omnipresent and charged with an aura of political marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 19 authority, associated with a claimed reality and the construction a specific ‘ritual of truth.’ the time/s of the city and ‘the people’ zhang’s painting technique allows for the human faces to emerge from the different tonalities of the brushstrokes of colours. therefore, the characters somehow precede the images, lead up to them, but they also appear as if they were inside the images. texts and images once again coexist: they are so intertwined as to become indivisible. apparently, the characters conceal the human faces. although they recreate them, they also make them lose their identity. but ultimately, what is lost is the sequential and logical meaning of these words. they become words-non-words, echoing the way in which the material transformation of the city generates a place-non-place, an uncanny universe of different truths, different spatialities and temporalities, where the individuals struggle to find an appropriate language to express, symbolically, their right to the city. in a personal conversation with the artist, in the spring of 2008, zhang dali was reflecting on the multiple ways in which the olympics’ construction projects ultimately revealed the multiple temporalities of china’s multiple layers of presents. first, there is the futuristic present, exemplified by the glittering internationally branded and aweinspiring olympic games’ venues: this temporality indicates china’s aspiration to the new-new and the ultra-postmodern era. however, the positionality of the branded venues on the same locale where other buildings previously existed is a reminder of the erasure from memory of the hundreds of thousands of dwellers who have been forcibly removed (chaiqian 拆迁). this is the second layer: the present-pastness that had to be annihilated in the name of progress, forwardness and the claimed logic of the biopolitics of modernity. the third layer is the present-present, which is characterised by a contrasting time: the rhythm of the lives of the migrant workers, who have been the real craftsmen of the ultra-celebrated olympic games’ infrastructure and the iconic buildings. understanding these processes requires an investigation of the ‘currents of contemporaneity’: only the exploration of multiple and processual modernities will allow us ‘to grasp the complexities of the present’ (smith 2008: 35). modernity indicates a division of the world between the old and the new, the past and the present, marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 20 while contemporaneity indicates the coexistence of conditions, the coexistence of spatialities in the presentness of the cityscape.walking in the streets of beijing in the year before the olympics, one could see, right next to the emerging iconic venues, hundreds of migrants working 24/7 shifts and sleeping only a few hours in dust-covered sleeping-berths, precariously assembled on the street pavements: here lived the migrants, and here their possible dreams took shape. their dreams were most certainly alien to the olympics’ grandeur, but here they were; partially protected by a ripped tarpaulin, but ultimately exposed. one might wonder if the olympics’ civic political ‘civilising’ campaign had these migrants in mind. more likely, they were not even meant to be seen: in fact, their permits to stay in beijing were revoked at the beginning of the summer of 2008 (broudehoux 2008). but until then the migrants were everywhere: inside and nearby the iconic building sites, working on the train tracks of the new ‘harmony trains (hexiehao 和谐号)’ leading to and from beijing railway stations to some of the other six cities hosting specific olympic events.13 beijing is a city that resists being framed. paraphrasing walter benjamin, one could define it as a site of ruin (benjamin 2000). zhang’s artwork invites the viewer to see beyond the allegorical gaze, since the city that on the eve of the olympics was depicted as the triumph of national hubris and long-standing civilisation, is also the city where many can experience estrangement, alienation and spatial-psychological displacement. beijing has become an uncanny space. the civic political campaign is supposed to provide behavioural guidance to the ‘new citizens.’ zhang defines the slogans as ‘the parents of the people.’ he observes that the slogans are omnipresent, from the government documents to the public space, with the function of ‘teaching us what we have to do, just like parents teach a young pupil.’ he argues that the incessant reproduction of slogans seems to have generated a collective anesthesia: ‘the citizens watch them but do not really see them.’ this is the reason why zhang decided to juxtapose people with slogans. the history of zhang’s artwork on slogans indicates a progressive awareness: the slogans ‘are adjacent to our bodies (zai wo shenbian 在我身 边),’ they fill and dominate our physical space: ‘from every point of view, they guide our actions (zuowei 作为) and our way of thinking (siwei fangshi 思维方式).’14 they 13 qinhuangdao, shanghai, shenyang and tianjin hosted the football competition. qingdao hosted the olympic sailing regatta. hong kong hosted the equestrian events. 14 personal interview with the artist, july 2011. marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 21 often carry a stern or imperative tone, using adverbs like ‘resolutely’ (jianjue 坚决) or auxiliary verbs like ‘must, have to’ (bixu 必须), or expressions such as ‘absolutely must.’ zhang argues that these slogans ‘sound like a severe father who is educating his child who has not yet come of age (wei chengniande haizi 未成年的孩子),’ to the extent of telling him what he has to do.15 these slogans also carry an emotive capital: they demystify the fear and the sense of insecurity, which derive from alienation and displacement, by projecting a firm image of stability and civility. they are evidence of the decision of the state to be seen. they are the sign of policing the public space in the name of ‘civility’ and, ultimately, requiring the ‘new citizens,’ exemplified by the 70,000 olympics’ volunteer, to sing in unison ‘we are ready’ (zhunbeihaole 准备好了),16 and contribute to the success of the olympics’ spectacle. in zhang dali’s words: the slogans are meant to be ‘telling and educating us, telling the people (renmin 人民) how we should think and how we should behave,’ as if ‘we, the people, were unable to reach a level of maturity (chengnian 成年) … we were continuously making mistakes, our thoughts were naïve, we were unable to understand how to live properly.’17 in this sense, zhang’s work prefigures the main theme of the famous novel 盛世中国 (the fat years 2011) by shanghai born, hong kong raised, and long term beijing resident, chan koonchung. chan’s political satire focuses on how hegemonic power can manufacture ‘reality’ and induce a feeling of sustained happiness and well being among its subjects (barmé 2011).18 in a hypothetical china, in the year 2013, most of its citizens are happy and content, enjoying their good fortune to live in an ‘epoch of prosperity,’ while having no memory of the past hardships. but there is something sinister in this widespread cheerfulness and complete collective amnesia. a small number of individuals have the feeling that something strategically premeditated took place: in 2009 the chinese leviathan decided to delete a whole month from the public memory to argue that the beginning of the global financial crisis (gfc) coincided with the beginning of china’s golden age of ascendency. this small group of out-ofsync, strangely ‘unhappy’ souls are determined to solve the riddle of the political 15 personal interview with the artist, july 2011. 16 ‘we are ready’ was the theme song for the celebration of the beijing 2008 olympic games one-year countdown. it was sung by 100 chinese singers in tian’anmen square on 8 august 2007, to exemplify the motto ‘i participate, i contribute, and i enjoy.’ it can be seen on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soxk0e9zjki (accessed on 3 march 2012). 17 personal interview with the artist, july 2011. 18 barmé s special issue of china heritage quarterly on ‘china’s prosperous age’ (2011) offers the most complete analysis of the novel and its scope. marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 22 mystery that lies behind the new prosperity policy, and discover what happened to that month and why everybody else seems to be so happy. the ccp propaganda department has intentionally rewritten the past to suit its present interests and lead the chinese people to believe that they now live in ‘le meilleur des mondes possibles’— thanks also to the ccp’s semi-divine character being simultaneously omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient. chan koonchung, in an interview, reminds us of the famous tang dynasty’s songstress jiang shu, who was able to sing two songs simultaneously through her mouth. this kind of super-natural ability is necessary today to fill what he sees as a wide ‘perception gap between the idea of china and the reality on the ground.’ chan explains that the inspiration to write this novel derived from a poster that he saw in a post office in beijing, with the characters shengshi huadan (盛 世华诞) to celebrate the ‘prosperous’ 60 years of achievements of the prc. chan emphasises that the so-called ‘prosperity’ is also built on ‘the harsh exploitation of the farmers-workers’ and ‘repression’ (goldkorn 2010). in the last few years, the message of china’s gilded age has been sung loud and clear by the ccp, especially with the 2008 beijing olympics, with the 2010 shanghai world expo, and again in 2011 with the celebration of the party’s ninetieth anniversary. the message is that china has reached a new stage of prosperity and surpassed many developed countries. the right to the city as political ideal? zhang dali’s work is characterised by a strong critical aestheticism that points in the direction of defending the ‘right to a language’ to inhabit the city. in his analysis of the ‘accumulation by dispossession,’ that dominates the hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, david harvey engages with the global struggle on the urban question since ‘the metropolis is now the point of massive collision’ between the affluents’ colonisation of enclaves and the undeserving poor. as a way to unify the relevant crises that ‘repeatedly erupt around urbanization both locally and globally,’ harvey suggests adopting ‘the right to the city as both a working slogan and political ideal, precisely because it focuses on the question of who commands the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use’ (2008: 7). harvey’s argument for the ‘right to the city’ as a new and fundamental type of human right is based on his discernment of the fallacy of the political economic imperatives of global capitalism and, in the chinese case, of ‘the hegemonic command of capital and the state’ (2008: 7). marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 23 in a context more connected with the aesthetic realm, but nevertheless ultimately committed to the search for a critical way to contrast this hegemonic command that has led to indiscriminate urban destruction, zhang’s artwork can be interpreted as a ‘call to arms’ for ways of challenging the strategy of presenting the city as a unified whole (de certeau 1984). zhang’s powerful juxtaposition of texts and human images echoes harvey’s argument, since they both claim a democratisation of the ‘right to the city.’ in zhang’s case, he asserts the right of the people to break away from an ossified and formalised language, since this is the sine qua non to be able to express multiple opportunities of walking in the city. like the decerteausian walker at street level, zhang’s portraits seem to struggle to overcome the fixity of their pose and the prepared look on their faces. these human beings seem to strive to break through the overwhelming sense of oppression imposed by the slogans, as if they intended to set themselves free, escaping from the imposed textual grid and advocating their right to a language that allowed them to move in ways that are not fully determined by the plans of the organising body politics. zhang’s work concretely illustrates de certeau’s argument that everyday life works by a process of encroaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in that culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products. in his short but incisive artistic statement on ‘the slogan painting series,’ the artist insists on the intimate relation between all his artwork and ‘the real society (shehui xianshi 社会现实)’: ‘reality is the spiritual force and the origin of my creative work’ (zhang 2008a). the adjective ‘real’ and/or the noun ‘reality’ appear eight times, reflecting the artist’s concern with finding a way to relate to the ‘real’: ‘with regard to the relation between reality and symbols, i cannot indulge in a fantastic world. what i have at heart is the reality: the description of reality is the crucial issue in all my artwork.’ in his previous work called ‘a new history,’ on the alteration of photography and images for political purposes, zhang dali had reflected on the layers of reality and the complicated attempts to distinguish ‘the real’ from ‘the fake.’ the reflection on the real takes zhang dali in the direction of drawing a parallel between his previous artwork on the war-signifier ak-47 (the tag that he had also used to cover human faces in his paintings made in the year 2000) and the ‘slogan series,’ concluding that ‘the slogans are now substituting the former weapon’s name’ (zhang 2008a). marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 24 conclusion this article analyses the relationship between state propaganda and art, through a detailed study of zhang dali’s text-images entitled ‘the slogan series.’ it also sheds light on the artist’s relationship with the city where he lives, investigating zhang’s provocative response to the state’s linguistic engineering to produce ‘civilised citizens.’ throughout the 1990s, the history of beijing had been re-written to annihilate the image of the desecrated city, covered with the bloodshed that tainted the political capital on june 4, 1989. beijing was progressively recast into an international stage city. the newly imposed glittering image reached its climax on the eve of the 2008 olympic games. however, there was something that architecture and infrastructural projects could not obtain by themselves. the renegotiation of beijing’s identity as an international metropolis had to be matched by the production of the ‘correct’ image of new citizens. these two intertwined discourses became fundamental strategic components of the ccp’s agenda, and have become particularly crucial to the hu jintao-wen jiabao regime’s articulation of the master narrative of china’s ‘harmonious epoch of prosperity (hexie shengshi 和谐盛世).’ beijing’s success story was initially constructed on the basis of two pillars: urban renewal and commercial redevelopment programmes. however, the production of space (lefebvre 1991) continues to reveal that there was a gap to fill: both beijing’s local residents (beijingren 北京人) and the outsiders (waidiren 外地人) alike were not deemed to be the appropriate agents of this newly imagined and constructed society of spectacle (debord 1967). a fundamental necessity emerged: the reinvention of beijing and its urban aestheticisation as dominant components of the municipal political discourse, could not be separated from a systematic programme of civic political education, with the aim of instructing the public subjects to behave according to precise hygienic norms and a sanitised system of values and civility, which ultimately would have reinforced their patriotism. this is the reason why, on the eve of the olympics, the three main components of the dominant rhetoric of beijing as a modernised international metropolis progressively became: 1) beautification of the physical environment; 2) civilising reforms; and 3) social disciplining. zhang dali’s artwork originates from his dual intention to problematise what happened to the ‘real society’ in the city where he lives and, at the same time, to bridge the gap marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 25 between art and ‘real’ space. on the eve of the olympics, beijing’s cityscape was officially promoted via the spectacle of branded sport venues and iconic buildings.19 the architecture of a city is essential to its identity: the city is a sort of museum without walls. walking through the built environment every day we build the city a second time, so that it exists both physically around us and virtually in our memories. therefore, the destruction of the dominant architecture has devastating effects on the identity of the place and the individuals who call it home. zhang dali’s previous artwork, and in particular ‘the dialogue series,’ had called the attention of the viewers to the human dimension of the deliberate domicide and memoricide that has occurred in beijing. however, with the preparation for the celebration of the olympics something apparently ‘new’ happened: the chinese government saw an opportunity to move the campaign to ‘civilise the citizens’ to a higher level. actually, this is not new. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, the british colonial power in kolkata, before the capital was moved to delhi in 1911, had used the grand architecture to inspire awe in the natives and progressively transform them into docile bodies. in a similar fashion, the chinese government used an inversionary discourse of language and power. the ‘civilising the citizens’ campaign went hand in hand with the branded architecture of the olympics. civic political language has been used as the tactical instrument to produce a collective amnesia, with the aim of inspiring awe in the international arena for the economic triumph of china in the celebrated ‘new asian century’ and, at the same time, make the domestic audience proud of china’s prosperous present-future (chan 2011). zhang dali’s ‘slogan series’ appropriates the slogans of state propaganda, repeats them ad infinitum and juxtaposes them with portraits of common people. thus, the artist demystifies china’s awe-inspiring story, and opens a new space to explore the possibility of speaking in different tongues. acknowledgements my grateful thanks to the anonymous peer-reviewers who offered helpful comments for the revision of this article. i would also like to thank dr patrizia galli, for her careful reading with suggestions, and zhang dali for his thought-provoking work, and the stimulating conversations that i had with both of them in beijing. 19 on the importance of the spectacle as ‘social relation between people that is mediated by images’ as opposed to a mere collection of images, see debord (1995: 12). marinelli civilising the citizens portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 26 reference list apter, d. e. & saich, t. 1994, revolutionary discourse in 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http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. zhang ziyi and china’s celebrity–philanthropy scandals elaine jeffreys, university of technology sydney zhang ziyi is arguably china’s most famous female celebrity, being ranked after basketball player, yao ming, at number two on forbes’s (mainland) china celebrity list in 2009 and 2010 (‘2010 forbes china celebrity list’ 2010).1 forbes issued its inaugural list of china’s top 100 power-ranking celebrities in 2004, demonstrating the growing importance of the people’s republic of china (prc) in global cultural markets. as with the us list, china’s celebrities are ranked by combining income from salaries and endorsements with the number of times they appear in various media formats (jeffreys & edwards 2010: 2). zhang ziyi rose to international fame via her starring role in ang lee’s martial arts movie, crouching tiger, hidden dragon (2000). a global cinematic phenomenon in 2000 and 2001, crouching tiger earned more than us$200 million worldwide, becoming the most commercially successful foreign-language film in us history and the first chinese-language film to find a broad american audience (klein 2004: 18). since then, zhang has gone on to enjoy critical acclaim for her starring roles in hollywood films, such as memoirs of a geisha (dir. rob marshall 2005), and in chinese-language blockbusters, such as hero (dir. zhang yimou 2002) and house of flying daggers (dir. zhang yimou 2004). voted as one of the ‘most beautiful people in the world’ by many fashion and celebrity magazines, she has appeared as the ‘face’ of 1 forbes extended its china list in 2010 to include celebrities from taiwan and hong kong, as well as mainland china. ranked at number five, zhang ziyi was the first-ranked female celebrity on the list and the first female celebrity from mainland china. the order of the 2010 list is as follows: 1) jackie chan, actor, hong kong; 2) jay chou, singer, taiwan; 3) andy lau, singer, actor, hong kong; 4) yao ming, sports, mainland china; and 5) zhang ziyi, actor, mainland china (cheng long 2010). jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 2 international cosmetics giant, maybelline, and as an ‘ambassador’ for omega watches (‘actress zhang ziyi’ n.d.; ‘our models’ n.d.; ‘zhang ziyi’ 2010). zhang ziyi at the 2006 baftas in london. © caroline bonarde ucci. (creative commons). as an a-list celebrity, zhang ziyi has been the focus of praise and criticism in china. in 2006, zhang yiwu, a literature professor at peking university famously summed up the political significance of transnational celebrities such as zhang ziyi and yao ming for promoting a positive image of modern china internationally, by declaring that they were worth more than ‘10,000 of the philosopher-sage confucius’ (xiao 2010). adding to an impressive list of industry awards, zhang ziyi was also voted as being among the top 10 chinese celebrities with the best public images at china’s annual huading awards in may 2010 (‘actress zhang ziyi wins public image awards’ 2010; ‘zhang ziyi’ 2010). this award recognizes the public images and social influences of chinese jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 3 celebrities from the entertainment field, based on the results of nationwide polls and the decision of a jury panel. zhang ziyi at the 2006 cannes film festival. © georges baird (creative commons) however, zhang ziyi has also been the focus of negative domestic publicity, chiefly in the context of quasi-sex scandals. she was accused of rising to fame by sleeping with zhang yimou, the director of three films in which she played a starring role: the road home (1999), hero (2002) and house of flying daggers (2004) (yuan lei 2007). she was lambasted in china’s media for her role in memoirs of a geisha (dir. rob marshall 2005). the original release of this film in china was cancelled because of strong antijapan sentiment flowing from the ongoing failure of the japanese government to offer a jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 4 formal apology for world war ii-era military atrocities. these atrocities included the massacre of an estimated 300,000 people in nanjing between late 1937 and early 1938, and the abuse of thousands of chinese women as sex slaves. in this context, zhang’s portrayal of a woman selling her virginity to the highest japanese bidder was viewed as a national insult (bezlova 2006; ‘china bans memoirs of a geisha’ 2006; ‘china cancels release of “memoirs of a geisha”’ 2006). more recently, zhang ziyi has been called ‘unpatriotic and shameless’ for becoming engaged to an israeli venture capitalist, vivi nevo, and enabling the paparazzi to circulate semi-nude photographs of the couple sunbaking on a beach (song et al. 2010; tan 2009). along with the taint of sexual promiscuity, zhang ziyi became the focus of intense public scrutiny in the prc between january and march 2010 for allegedly defaulting on a pledge to donate one million yuan to the sichuan earthquake disaster-relief fund. the earthquake of 12 may 2008, which measured 7.8 on the richter scale, not only killed an estimated 70,000 people and left five million homeless (‘sichuan earthquake: facts and figures’ 2009), but also produced a dramatic rise in individual and corporate philanthropy in china. philanthropic donations in 2008 amounted to a total figure of 100 billion yuan or 0.4 percent of china’s gross domestic product (gdp),2 exceeding the documented total for the preceding decade (wang zhuoqiong 2008; ‘zhongguo cishan paihangbang fabu “lai juan qiye heimingdan” liuchan’ 2009). zhang’s ‘failed pledge’ led fans and critics to accuse her in bilingual blogs and online videos of charity fraud and bringing shame on philanthropy causes and the chinese nation (alexandra099tianya 2010; dogonfire2005 2010; mylara 2010; ‘open letter to zhang ziyi about “fake” donation’ 2010; ‘zhang ziyi 100 wan meijin de 5.12 dizhen juankuan ta zai nali?’ 2010; zong he 2010). dubbed ‘donation-gate,’ the associated controversy obliged zhang ziyi to hire a team of us-based lawyers, to give an exclusive interview to the china daily, and to engage in renewed philanthropic endeavours, in an effort to clear her name (zhou 2010a, 2010b). this paper examines the politics of philanthropy in contemporary china with reference to the zhang ziyi scandal and its sichuan earthquake disaster-relief precursors. it first 2 by way of comparison, the total number of donations in the usa and the uk in 2006 amounted to 2.2 percent and 0.9 percent of gdp respectively (national philanthropic trust 2009; ‘uk charitable donors’ n.d.). the estimated figure of total donations in australia in 2004 was 0.68 percent of gdp (australian government department of family and community services 2005). jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 5 explains how the scandal came to public attention and the nature of its development and resolution. it then locates the origins of that controversy in an escalating series of scandals associated with the disaster-relief efforts, in order to demonstrate how public distrust of the wealthy and famous poses problems for the development of a philanthropic culture in china. critics of us-based celebrities often claim that celebrity philanthropy is a cynical marketing exercise designed to improve a star’s brand power and an apolitical mode of philanthropy that thrives on adoring fans, not on accountability (wood 2007). in contrast, i show that public individuals who engage in mediatized philanthropic activities in the prc are subject to intense public scrutiny and demands for accountability. moreover, rather than exposing the self-centred egoism and fallibility of modern-day celebrities, the nature of those demands highlights the problems surrounding recent calls to cultivate a philanthropic citizenry in present-day china. zhang ziyi’s celebrity and philanthropy scandals on 12 may 2008, when the sichuan earthquake took place, zhang ziyi was at the cannes international film festival. upon hearing of that disaster, which triggered an outpouring of nationalist sentiment in china (watts 2008), zhang initiated three philanthropic activities to assist the relief effort. first, she announced that she would personally donate one million yuan to the disaster-relief fund, citing the traditional chinese saying: ‘guojia you nan, pifuyouze’ (when the country is in trouble, everyone must do their duty) (‘zhang ziyi xuanbujuan 100 wan’ 2008). second, she established the ziyi zhang foundation, a non-profit charity organization registered under the laws of california, usa, with a bank account for donors to deposit funds for transfer to the chinese red cross foundation (care for children 2010). finally, zhang hosted a fundraising event at cannes, which journalists claimed raised between us$500,000 and seven million dollars (‘2008 sichuan earthquake donations’ 2010). zhang ziyi became the focus of intense public scrutiny in january 2010 for allegedly defaulting on her pledge to donate one million yuan to the disaster-relief fund and misrepresenting her other philanthropic activities. the ensuing donation-gate scandal followed speculation about another scandal involving zhang ziyi and hints of sexual impropriety—the so-called ‘black paint incident,’ a series of events that took place on the evening of 23 december 2009. a group of unidentified men entered the lobby of the jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 6 park hyatt hotel in beijing, where zhang reportedly owns an apartment. they demanded that security guards tell them where the actor resided, claiming that she had seduced a married man and cheated other people of their money by accepting gifts worth more than us$29 million from him (‘who’s behind the zhang ziyi “black paint incident”?’ 2009; zhou 2010b). shortly after, another group of unidentified men drove up to the hotel and splashed black paint on a giant omega advertisement board featuring zhang ziyi. these events were observed by a waiting crowd of paparazzi who had gathered at the park hyatt following a tip-off that hong kong actor, maggie cheung, and her german boyfriend, ole scheeren, were getting engaged at a restaurant in the hotel that evening (huang 2010). the black paint incident sparked speculation in the press about who had orchestrated the incident and why. it also generated debate on internet sites, initially on tianya.cn, which is china’s biggest blogging forum, about zhang ziyi’s moral character. this speculation prompted an unspecified number of netizens to start investigating the actor’s life, resulting in the discovery of discrepancies relating to her philanthropic activities (huang 2010). an article posted on the tianya bulletin board system in late january 2010 disputed zhang ziyi’s claim to have raised over one million dollars towards the earthquake disaster-relief fund, saying that she had only contributed 840,000 yuan of that money (‘zhang ziyi 100 wan’ 2010). this claim prompted other members of the public to contact the prc’s ministry of civil affairs, the chinese red cross foundation, and other organizations, in diverse efforts to verify (or disprove) zhang’s philanthropic track record (‘donation details released’ 2010). apart from confirming that zhang ziyi had only donated 840,000 yuan to the disaster-relief fund, in two separate payments of 400,000 and 440,000 yuan, these investigations revealed that money raised by zhang at the cannes international film festival amounted to the paltry sum of us$1,300—not the more than us$500,000 reported in the media. the ziyi zhang foundation was also called into disrepute via suggestions that its lack of transparency implied that it was merely a front for charity fraud and personal profiteering (zhou 2010b). zhang and her agent, ji lingling, had already attempted to quash associated criticisms by issuing a public statement denying net-based allegations and promising that accounting records would be made available to the public on 3 february (‘zhang ziyi jui dizhen’ 2010; ‘zhang ziyi shan kuan zhijin xialuobuming’ 2010). however, zhang’s jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 7 subsequent silence on the issue, and ji’s failure to provide the relevant records by the specified date, simply added to mounting public criticism of her ‘fake philanthropy’ (schwankert 2010). ji’s ultimately bungled attempt to ‘clear the record’ added more fuel to the controversy. on 5 february, he issued a statement to sina.com, one of china’s most popular web portals, stating that zhang ziyi had contributed the promised one million yuan in cash to the disaster-relief fund. on 8 february, ji retracted this statement by making a public apology to the effect that zhang had just contributed another 160,000 yuan to the chinese red cross foundation after discovering that her management team had been careless. as a result, they had failed to pay the third and final sum required to meet the original pledge of one million yuan (li 2010; ‘q & a: zhang ziyi’ 2010). zhang ziyi’s perceived failure to respond adequately to public criticisms of her philanthropic activities sparked widespread debate on interactive media forums. apart from posts on the tianya.cn blog, which had received over half a million hits and 90,000 replies by that time (zong he 2010), online videos were posted in early february in both english and chinese on youtube demanding that zhang account for her actions (e.g. alexandra099tianya 2010; dogonfire2005 2010; mylara 2010). an open letter was also posted in chinese on the people’s daily website on 1 march 2010, asking zhang to answer a series of questions about her donations and to make her philanthropic records available to the public. that letter informed the actor that chinese ‘netizenscum-detectives’ would ensure that she could no longer ‘hide’ behind the laws of other countries and take advantage of the ‘tolerance’ of the chinese people (pan yuan 2010). zhang ziyi’s international celebrity is reflected in the bilingual nature of these activities, which, unsurprisingly, attracted further comment in the general media (pan yuan 2010; zong he 2010). faced with mounting criticisms of her ‘fake philanthropy,’ zhang ziyi gave an exclusive interview to the china daily, a state-run english-language newspaper, on 12 march 2010. in that interview, the transcript of which was posted on the china daily’s website in both english and chinese, zhang affirmed that she had donated one million yuan from her personal finances to the chinese red cross foundation for the sichuan earthquake disaster-relief fund (zhou 2010b). following two initial payments amounting to 840,000 yuan, she made up the shortfall of 160,000 yuan on 8 february jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 8 2010. zhang attributed the delay to her failure to follow-up on instructions that she had given to staff and denied accusations of fraud and embezzlement. regarding confusion about the amount of money raised in cannes, zhang stated that she had only raised us$1,300 in cash because of the hasty nature of that fundraising event. although only us$39,000 of pledges from a total of us$400,000 had been honoured, she was still negotiating a project with potential donors, whose names she was unable to reveal for privacy reasons (zhou 2010b). responding to accusations of embezzlement, and inadvertently offering another example of her ineffective philanthropic efforts, zhang ziyi noted that a full-page advertisement paid for by the hollywood reporter, in which the editor-in-chief and zhang had appealed for funds for the relief of the sichuan earthquake, had not induced anyone to contribute to her foundation (‘q & a: zhang ziyi’ 2010). zhang vowed to make up for any shortfall if contributions pledged towards the building of a children’s centre in sichuan province were unforthcoming. zhang further insisted that she had never tried to enhance her public image by intimating that she had raised between one and seven million dollars—those figures had been arbitrarily cited by journalists (li 2010; ‘q & a: zhang ziyi’ 2010; zhou 2010b). zhang maintained that she had kept silent about the controversy for two months because she had hired a legal team in the usa to investigate the issues raised by china’s netizens, which had taken longer than anticipated (‘q & a: zhang ziyi’ 2010). however, she was now in a position to confirm that there had never been anything untoward about the running of the ziyi zhang foundation—it is a not-for-profit organization, handled by a professional accountant in a transparent and legal manner. monies pledged to that foundation through zhang’s fundraising efforts in cannes and elsewhere were earmarked for the building of a children’s centre in deyang city, sichuan province, under the auspices of the uk-based international charity, care for children. as relevant government authorities had only approved that project in november 2009, the building of the centre had not started and hence care for children had not received any funding from the ziyi zhang foundation. funds would be transferred once the building work began, which according to subsequent press releases took place on 1 june 2010 (‘zhang ziyi to use funds’ 2010). zhang ziyi concluded the interview by saying that the donation-gate scandal had taught her five things about philanthropy and celebrity. first, effective philanthropy requires jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 9 more than personal passion: it needs a professional team with the right approach. second, celebrities have a duty to engage in philanthropic work because they have a public profile, not because they want to boost their image. third, this necessitates a mediatized approach to generating philanthropy, rather than a low-key or anonymous approach, which she would otherwise prefer. fourth, the act of giving-back through philanthropy is important to someone whose achievements are the result of time and money invested by the chinese nation and the chinese people. finally, and responding to additional questions about the links between the donation-gate scandal and the black paint incident, zhang stated that the public has a right to know within ethical limits about the private lives of celebrities. however, members of the public should understand that celebrities are ordinary people and not moral exemplars, even though their domestic and international standing as representatives of china requires them to conduct themselves as perfectly as possible. in short, zhang ziyi affirmed that she had a social obligation, both as a celebrity and as a patriot, to engage in high-profile philanthropic activities, and she vowed to respond to public exposure of her inexperience by righting her errors. in june 2010, zhang ziyi made good on that claim by appearing in the earthquake-affected area of deyang city to announce that work had begun on the construction of a centre for orphans and vagrant children. zhang further revealed that funding for the centre came from the proceeds of her 2008 fundraising drive in cannes, indicating that the pledged sum of us$400,000 to the ziyi zhang foundation had been honoured. reportedly choking back her tears, the actor expressed relief that after two years of hard work, the project had finally begun (‘zhang ziyi to use funds’ 2010). while some netizens maintained that their actions had obliged the actor to fulfil her promises by exposing her cynical efforts to ‘cash in’ on the wave on patriotic sentiment that accompanied the sichuan earthquake (‘open letter to zhang ziyi’ 2010), the available evidence suggests a more complicated story. contrary to the accusations levelled against her, zhang’s involvement in the deyang project was confirmed in a press release by the care for the children organization as early as 8 february 2010 (care for children 2010). that involvement contributed to the jury’s decision to recognize zhang’s efforts at the huading awards in may (‘actress zhang ziyi wins public image awards’ 2010). this award arguably demonstrates zhang’s masterful jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 10 manipulation of the public from the start to the end of the donation-gate scandal. however, a more plausible explanation for that scandal is the one zhang provided in interview with the china daily (zhou 2010b). she had neither the experience nor the professional team required to manage the issues and delays imposed by the lack of a developed institutional framework for philanthropy in china. in any case, the ‘fall-out’ from the donation-gate scandal indicates that it offers more than a tale of personal redemption. concerned netizens promptly proceeded to question the disaster-relief efforts of a wide range of chinese entertainment stars. actor li bingbing was accused of only donating 500 yuan out of a pledged contribution of 300,000 yuan. singer hu yanbing allegedly donated a mere 50 yuan of a publicized 50,000 yuan. zhao wei, a movie star, reportedly only gave 20,000 yuan of a 100,000 yuan pledge and actor liu xiaoqing was criticized for donating 4,300 yuan rather than 100,000 yuan as promised (‘2008 sichuan earthquake donations’ 2010). as the escalating nature of such allegations on interactive media forums would suggest, celebrity philanthropy in china is a political affair. the politics of philanthropy in reform-era china although china has a long history of philanthropy (‘about us’ n.d.; albertson 2008– 09; tsu 1912), the practice of voluntarily offering time and money to ‘strangers’ is a relatively recent phenomenon, flowing from the nation’s post-1978 shift from a centralized to a market-based economy. after the founding of the prc in 1949 and throughout the maoist period (1949–1976), the curtailment of the monetary economy, combined with state ownership and distribution of public resources, prevented the private accumulation of wealth and, to some extent, reduced the need for private philanthropy. urban residents, in particular, came to rely on the state for the provision of education, housing, employment, health-care and other forms of welfare. at the same time, the communist party leadership launched a continuous series of massmobilization campaigns to promote its guiding ideology and develop a collective socialist citizenry based on the understanding that state workers were ‘the masters of the state’ and, as such, they collectively owned the nationalized assets of the formerly private industrial and commercial sectors (zang 2008: 61–62). economic reform since 1979 has produced remarkable improvements in the living standards, education, health and life expectancy of nearly all of china’s citizens, while jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 11 also generating a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots (candelaria et al. 2009: 1). a standard index of inequality is the gini coefficient, which ranges from 0 (perfect equality) to 1. in 1978, china had a gini coefficient of 0.22, making it one of the most egalitarian nations in the world: everyone was equally poor. by 2007, china had a gini coefficient of 0.496, making it one of the most unequal nations (goodman & zang 2008: 2). some sectors of the population have seized the opportunities created by the commercial expansion of the economy to become newly rich, while other sectors of the population face new forms of social exclusion and systemic disadvantage due to the withdrawal of former state provisions. hence, china at the turn of the new millennium faces social problems that resurrect andrew carnegie’s (1889: 657) famous contention regarding the philanthropic responsibilities of an emerging stratum of self-made entrepreneurs. ‘what is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded [competition and private property] have thrown it into the hands of the few?’ advertising billboard in hong kong of zhang ziyi fronting omega watches. no date. (creative commons) jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 12 yet the economic and ideological legacies of state socialism continue to influence reform-era china as reflected in public distrust of the rich and famous, and the newness of the prc’s philanthropic culture. ‘wealth hatred’ is a documented phenomenon in china today because ‘ordinary people’ tend to assume that those who have become newly rich along with the partial privatization of the economy are ‘immoral,’ having obtained their wealth through corruption or the ‘theft’ of formerly communal assets (zang 2008: 55–60). even where personal wealth is arguably the result of talent and good fortune, rich people are still viewed as morally suspect for spending their surplus money in acts of conspicuous consumption, rather than distributing it appropriately to those who are less fortunate. celebrities such as zhang ziyi, for example, are easily opened to criticism as the envied, yet denigrated, idols of hedonistic capitalist consumption when compared with the nostalgically imagined model citizens of an era defined by socialist collectivism and production (jeffreys & edwards 2010: 18). public distrust of the rich and famous has created problems for the development of a philanthropic culture in reform-era china. the following list of events illustrates the newness of philanthropy in the prc. in october 2004, the first government-run publicbenefit website, china charity information center (juanzhu.gov.cn 2009), was launched by the ministry of civil affairs (‘china launches 1st official charity website’ 2004). on 20 november 2005, the first annual china charity awards were held at the china charity conference in beijing (‘first china charity awards’ 2005). the first list of china’s top 50 philanthropists was compiled in 2004; and the first list of china’s top 50 philanthropic companies was produced in 2005 (‘china: philanthropy overview’ 2006). as the recent nature of these activities suggests, thirty years ago there was no private wealth in china, but now private wealth exists and some of the new rich are prepared to give away voluntarily portions of their surplus money (mackey 2005). then, on 5 december 2008, president hu jintao made prc history by making philanthropy an integral part of the nation’s public policy agenda during a speech to announce the winners of china’s fourth annual charity awards (liu weitao 2008; ‘zongshuji de jiakuai cishanshiye fazhan dongyuanling’ 2009). this speech, which the people’s daily described as a mobilization directive, called on chinese citizens from all walks of life to speed up the development of a philanthropic culture in the prc, in order to ensure the realization of an all-round well off (xiaokang) and harmonious society jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 13 (hexie shehui) by the year 2020. deng xiaoping first used the classical term xiaokang, which evokes modest prosperity, to describe china’s modernization and the goals of economic reform in 1979. jiang zemin subsequently revitalized the term in a report that he delivered to the sixteenth national congress of the chinese communist party in 2002, entitled ‘build a well-off society in an all-round way and create a new situation in building socialism with chinese characteristics.’ in that report, jiang stated: ‘we need to concentrate on building a xiaokang society of a higher standard in an all-round way,’ which means an estimated per-capita gross domestic product of more than us$2,000 by the year 2020 (‘all about “xiaokang”’ 2002). the current ‘hu jintao–wen jiabao’ leadership’s vision of xiaokang socialism continues to evoke sustained economic growth as a means to realize prosperity, but it also sees the need for that prosperity to be broadly distributed and for economic growth to be balanced with social equality and environmental protection (jeffreys & sigley 2009: 11). in his december speech, hu jintao praised the enormous contributions of people in providing relief to the millions of victims of the 2008 sichuan earthquake, suggesting that the disaster had heralded the birth of a philanthropic citizenry in china (bao wanxian 2009; wang zhuoqiong 2008). however, hu proceeded to qualify his praise for the rapid growth in domestic philanthropy by noting that chinese philanthropy—in terms of public motivation and the number of philanthropic organizations and donations—lags behind that of developed countries and behind the state of economic development in the prc. he therefore called on party members, government departments and business enterprises, as well as ‘aixin’ (compassionate) chinese people, to develop a philanthropic culture in the prc as quickly as possible, in order to supplement its inadequate social security system (liu weitao 2008). while putting philanthropy ‘on the map’ in china, the disaster-relief efforts were dogged by scandal from their inception. the sichuan earthquake of 12 may 2008 immediately generated public condemnations of corporate philanthropy, initially flowing from the circulation of the so-called ‘guoji tiegongji’ (international iron rooster list). in colloquial chinese, an ‘iron rooster’ refers to a misanthrope, a bird that will not give up a single feather. between 14 and 19 may 2008, an sms was circulated in china that called upon concerned and patriotic citizens to boycott multinational companies, such as coca cola, kfc, mcdonald’s, nokia, and samsung, because of their allegedly jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 14 ‘puny’ contributions to the diaster-relief efforts. the sms called upon concerned citizens to spread the contents of the list and to update it as events unfolded, resulting in widespread debate on interactive media forums such as msn and qq (‘5.12 sichuan wenchuan’ 2008; hei ma 2008). chain letters posted on the internet and disseminated via mobile phone networks soon translated into civil protests, with an estimated 100 people gathering outside a mcdonald’s enterprise in nanchong city, sichuan province, to protest the company’s lack of genuine philanthropy. similar protests were waged against kfc in the provinces of sichuan, shaanxi, and shanxi, resulting in the temporary closure of various businesses (‘companies rush to show generosity’ 2008; ‘the story of donations gate’ 2008). public condemnation of multinational companies for their allegedly miserly donations to the disaster-relief efforts quickly translated into praise for local chinese companies that were seen to have contributed generously. wanglaoji, an herbal tea soft drink, became famous overnight and reported a significant increase in sales after its parent company, the jiaduobao group, donated 100 million yuan at the 18 may china central television station disaster-relief gala (fong 2008; mcginnis et al. 2009). this contribution was viewed as providing a concrete demonstration of the company’s claim to ‘give back’ some of its profits by ‘zealously’ participating in ‘public welfare activities and philanthropy’ (‘brief introduction’ 2005). a post subsequently placed on the tianya website called on chinese consumers to reward the company for its demonstration of ‘social responsibility’ by buying wanglaoji products. netizens also devised and circulated advertising slogans in praise of the company. one slogan stated that ‘if you want to donate, you donate 100 million [yuan]; if you want to drink, you drink wanglaoji,’ while other slogans parodied coca cola advertisements to indicate that wanglaoji was the better product (‘the story of donations gate’ 2008). as it turned out, the perception that multinational companies were busy exploiting business opportunities in china and unwilling to ‘give back’ chiefly flowed from a lack of transparency and clarity in the reporting of donations, and the time-delay required to obtain company board and/or shareholder authorization for donations that exceeded the established corporate social responsibility policies of international companies. many of the ‘international iron roosters’ had not only made immediate contributions to the disaster-relief efforts, but also sought authorization to increase their original donations. jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 15 for example, kfc’s parent group, the mdgb group, pledged a donation of 3 million yuan immediately after the earthquake, that pledge increased to 15.8 million yuan on 19 may with an additional contribution of 5.2 million yuan from its employees. contributions from other multinationals such as coca cola, mcdonalds, nokia, and samsung, also increased dramatically in the same period (‘china: multinationals hear it online’ 2008; ‘the story of donations gate’ 2008). however, public criticisms of the ‘international iron roosters’ only abated following concerted efforts by the prc government and the us–china business council. the prc’s minister of commerce convened a press conference to confirm their actual donations on 22 may. given the limited efficacy of that press release, the us–china business council began recording the donations of its member companies on its official website and releasing those figures to the prc’s ministries of foreign affairs and commerce for dissemination in china’s media (‘us company contributions for earthquake relief’ 2008). nevertheless, accusations of ‘donation-stinginess’ soon extended to criticisms of two of china’s most famous sporting celebrities in the run-up to the 2008 beijing olympic games. yao ming, a professional basketball player with the houston rockets in the us national basketball association, was criticized for initially pledging 500,000 yuan, which was viewed as insignificant compared to his reported earnings of 56.6 million yuan in 2007 (yao bin 2008). liu xiang—china’s first male olympic gold medal winner in the track and field—was similarly subjected to public criticism for initially pledging, along with his coach, the perceived paltry sum of 500,000 yuan. these criticisms, as with those directed at the ‘international iron roosters,’ proved to be premature or unfounded. the yao ming foundation was established under the auspices of the giving back fund on 10 june 2008 to help raise funds and awareness in both china and the usa of children’s wellness and welfare issues in the earthquake-affected areas. yao ming personally contributed an initial start-up fund of two million dollars to the foundation, which went on to raise nearly three million dollars in the usa within a year (‘yao ming foundation to help rebuild schools in sichuan’ 2009). liu xiang went on to contribute a further 2.5 million yuan and personally visited the earthquakeaffected areas (‘liu xiang teaches quake students to run hurdles’ 2009). however, by early 2009, china’s netizens were calling on government departments and philanthropic organizations to publish earthquake-related ‘donation lists,’ in order to jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 16 halt the perceived tactic of ‘free and dishonest advertising’ by companies and celebrities (‘charity’s best and worst’ 2009). this debate was exacerbated by claims that the china association of social workers, which was responsible for issuing the 2009 ‘china philanthropy list,’ intended to publish a ‘name and shame list’ of companies that had failed to honour their pledges, one that did not eventuate in practice (sun xunbo 2009). opponents of the publication of such a list pointed out that it was in effect a ‘blacklist.’ its publication would not only impugn the brand reputation of certain corporations and celebrities, but also encourage moral blackmail, being based on information that was out-of-date and lacked clarity, and a failure to understand that pledges were often given in stages rather than as a bulk sum (yao bin 2008). but, an online survey of netizens’ views on netease.com, a chinese web portal dedicated to delivering ‘“power to the people” by using the latest internet technologies to enhance meaningful information sharing and exchange,’ concluded that nearly 70 percent supported the ‘blacklisting’ of companies and celebrities that had failed to honour their pledges. only 26 percent of those who responded to the survey opposed the publication of such a list on the basis that it undermined the spirit of philanthropy by turning it into a social obligation (netease 1997; tao tao 2009). by 2010, as the zhang ziyi scandal attests, the ‘naming and shaming’ of the rich and the famous on interactive media forums for their allegedly ‘fake’ philanthropy had begun to focus on china’s entertainment stars. while pointing to the democratizing influence of the internet, by giving a voice to those who were previously voiceless and providing citizens with an unprecedented degree of participation in china’s media, the ‘lead-up’ to and the ‘fall-out’ from the zhang ziyi scandal highlights a simple fact. the growth of user-generated content, and the rise of the blogger, in particular, does not necessarily contribute to the production of responsible citizens and democratic politics. it also fuels populist denigration of public individuals. conclusion an examination of the zhang ziyi scandal and its precursors suggests that the economic and social legacies of the maoist era have created problems for the development of a philanthropic citizenry in china by encouraging an emphasis on philanthropy understood as a social obligation of the wealthy and famous. celebrities and major corporations in china are expected to ‘give back more’ precisely because they have jeffreys zhang ziyi portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 17 surplus money and brand power. at the same time, it is assumed that the philanthropic activities of public individuals should be open to public scrutiny because their money and status requires them to accept responsibility for leading positive social change. this remains the case even though the structural problems associated with the undeveloped nature of china’s philanthropic sector prevent them from ‘doing philanthropy professionally,’ thereby placing them at risk of public censure. the proliferation of celebrity–philanthropy scandals on interactive media formats further indicates that china’s netizens view public criticism as a positive incitement for public individuals to do more and better rather than a potential or actual discouragement. an evident problem here is that the effective transposition of philanthropy from a desire to assist the public good into an obligation to ‘give back’ undermines both the principle that people are free to determine how much of their resources they wish to use on ‘public endeavours’ and the underlying voluntarism of philanthropy. if public individuals are obliged to give back more and publicly, rather than doing so voluntarily based on personal sentiment and a sense of reward, then, philanthropy is simply a different and largely unexamined means for ensuring the 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available: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2010-03/16/content_9596922.htm [accessed 29 june 2010]. zong he 2010, ‘zhang ziyi shouci huiying “juankuanmen”’ [zhang ziyi responds to the ‘donation-gate scandal’ for the first time], nanfang zhoumo. 16 march. online, available: http://www.infzm.com/content/42651 [accessed 29 june 2010]. ‘zongshuji de jiakuai cishanshiye fazhan dongyuanling’ [general secretary issues a mobilization order to speed up the development of philanthropic undertakings] 2009, zhongguo wenming wang. 4 feb. online, available: http://www.ahwenming.com/newsinfo.aspx?contentid=1194 [accessed 29 june 2010]. template for 2003 conference papers ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ the rise of asylum seeker and refugee advocacy in australia diane gosden, university of new south wales this paper examines the rise of an asylum seeker and refugee advocacy movement in australia in recent years. a harsh policy with mandatory detention had already been in existence in australia since 1992, as part of the onshore component of australia’s refugee program.1 this regime had been contested since its inception by small numbers of concerned individuals and core refugee, human rights, professional and church groups. however, further hardening of the policy by the australian government in much publicised events in 2001, made it a highly contentious public issue. the government’s actions were supported by a majority of the population. at the same time however, myriad asylum seeker and refugee support groups sprang up spontaneously across australia to contest the policy. the paper examines this latter phenomenon utilising alberto melucci’s theoretical framework as a guide in ‘an attempt to listen to the voices’ and ‘read the signs’ of the message and mode of being of this particular social collective (1996, 1). in this endeavour, the paper explores the ‘everyday practice’ of participants in their struggle to bring change not only to the detail and the logic of the contested policy, but also to the way in which ‘the other’ as asylum seeker and refugee is perceived, represented and received. the policy at the core of asylum seeker and refugee advocacy contention concerns the onshore component of australia’s refugee program (maley 2004). this policy is portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 1 see pickering and lambert (2002, 65-66) for a description of the onshore and offshore components of australia’s refugee program, and an analysis of the way in which ‘deterrence, as it has been positioned within refugee policy, is aimed at onshore asylum seekers’ (66). issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ based on australian legislation, which applies to people seeking refugee status and protection from within australian territory. as crock and saul explain, ‘most of these applicants arrive on valid visas as tourists or students, or on short-term visas, and then seek to change their status to that of permanent resident on the basis that they are refugees. a smaller number enter australia without valid visas and then seek protection as refugees. these are the people referred to as ‘asylum seekers.’ they are, in fact and as a matter of law, seeking asylum, refuge, or protection in australia’ (2002, 10). there is evidence that many aspects of the policy toward asylum seekers are inconsistent with international human rights agreements, such as the refugee convention, the convention on the rights of the child, and the international covenant on civil and political rights (amnesty international australia 1998, 2005; glendenning et al. 2004; hreoc 2004). the policy has long enjoyed support from the two major political powers in australia, the coalition of the liberal party and the national party that has been in government since 1996, and the australian labor party, which introduced the policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers in 1992. the policy has provided political advantage to both political groups in various periods. it has proved valuable for international political purposes for a labor government in the early 1990s (mcmaster 2001), and valuable for national political reasons for the coalition government in the early 2000s (goot 2002; warhurst and simms 2002; manne 2004). for more than a decade, a small number of refugee and human rights ngos, and professional and church groups have been involved in opposing the policy. in more recent times, because of the publicisation of the issue both nationally and internationally, and the overt utilisation of it in national politics, there has been a much larger uprising of passionate opposition (coombs 2004). however, although polling has indicated some shift from 2001 to 2004 towards a more tolerant position on asylum seeker and refugee rights (saulwick and assocs. & muller and assocs. 2004), advocates remain in the minority in terms of national public opinion.2 drawing portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 2 2 throughout this paper, i use the term ‘advocate’ as a generic term for advocates and activists. the range of activities undertaken is a particular feature of the collective action of the ‘later wave’ of engagement—from political activism to lobbying; to public advocacy in the form of community education; to practical, financial, social and emotional support for asylum seekers and refugees affected by the australian onshore refugee policy. though some people may do only one of these activities, the gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ from the australian election study 2004, dodson (2005) notes that 54.4% of those polled strongly agreed or agreed with the government policy of turning back all boats carrying asylum seekers, while 28% strongly disagreed or disagreed with this policy. this can be contrasted to polling on a similar question in acnielsen polls in 2001 (31 august-2 september and 9-10 october) indicating a 77% strong agreement or agreement with the government’s policy of preventing boats carrying asylum seekers from entering australian waters and 18-20% strong disagreement or disagreement with the policy (goot 2002, 72). in examining the rise in collective action around asylum seeker and refugee advocacy in australia as social movement action, i follow melucci’s definition of a social movement as ‘collective action expressing a conflict’ (1981,176). on first appearances, this seems to be an overly simple definition that could apply to many forms of social action. but a closer examination of melucci’s definition of ‘a conflict’ introduces much more exact criteria to this definition. a ‘conflict’ is not just conflictual action, nor deviance, nor crisis behaviour, although all of these may coexist within the practice of a social movement. rather, a conflict denotes a challenge and a struggle at the level of the logic of a system. collective action as social movement action questions the legitimacy of the logic of that system. in melucci’s schema, what must be defined in analysing collective action is the arena of conflict, the challenge to the logic of the system, and the empirical features of the collective action. the arena of conflict conflict within a system is often brought to the surface by particular crisis situations. in australia this occurred dramatically in relation to refugee policy, through a series of events in 2001 and 2002 (mares 2002; weller 2002; corlett 2002; marr and wilkinson 2003; kevin 2004; manne and corlett 2004). of all these events, the 2001 actions of the australian government in refusing entry to asylum seekers on board the norwegian vessel tampa, and the subsequent development and implementation of ‘the pacific solution’ and ‘border protection’ in the 2001 pre-election period, were majority of people involved may do a number of them or all of them. thus the activism that ensues may be informed by the personal relationships with asylum seekers and refugees, and the public advocacy that is undertaken may be impassioned into activism by the needs of asylum seekers and portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 3 gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ the most politicised and publicised, both nationally and internationally. the demonisation of asylum seekers in government and media discourses that accompanied the government actions, ensured that the issue became an increasingly polarised one for the australian public (pickering 2001; maley 2004; manne 2004). this period saw increased levels of hostility directed toward asylum seekers, refugees, and their advocates (piper 2002). it also resulted in passionate and committed advocacy for asylum seekers and refugees by people across australia who had not previously been active in this area. whilst polling showed majority support within the australian public for the government’s actions (manne 2004), groups opposed to the policy and supportive of the rights of asylum seekers and refugees sprang up across australia during this period, and brought a new energy to advocacy in this area. although the majority of these ‘new’ groups began from late 2001 onwards, public awareness of the harshness of the policy had been increasing in the preceding period. in this sense, the tampa event and other 2001-2002 events crystallised what was an already disturbed element of public opinion. for the year 2000, peter mares (2002, 334) has detailed the occurrence of events such as hunger strikes, mass break-outs and riots at australian immigration detention centres; the abc four corners television program about the use of sedatives in immigration deportation proceedings; and public allegations of sexual abuse in woomera immigration detention centre. for the mid 2001 period, mary crock and ben saul regard the ‘groundswell of public support for the 50 or so asylum seekers who escaped from villawood detention centre in july 2001’ as signalling ‘a new direction in the refugee debate—towards subversion and civil disobedience of laws which are unbearably harsh’ (2002, 5). one month later, national television footage of a traumatised child inside the villawood immigration detention centre brought another dimension to that public awareness, and the group chilout (children out of detention) was formed in august 2001 in response. in addition, the period following the tampa incident and the period of legislation for portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 4 refugees. gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ ‘the pacific solution’ and ‘border protection,’ was one in which the australian public was exposed to the ‘children overboard’ affair, and learnt of the drowning of 353 people (seeking asylum) on board the siev x (kevin 2004). throughout 2002, hunger strikes and self-harm, including ‘lip-sewing,’ continued within australian immigration detention centres, as did escapes from woomera immigration detention centre. by this time, thousands of australians who had written to columnist and commentator phillip adams signing up for a ‘civil disobedience register,’ had provided funds for a national organisation of australians for just refugee programs, otherwise known as a just australia (mares 2002, 257). at one level, both the earlier and more recent social mobilisation around asylum seeker and refugee advocacy can be understood as responses to particular events and to particular aspects of the policy (mcmaster 2001; corlett 2002). at another level, the advocacy as a whole can be understood as a challenge not just to the detail of the policy, but also to the logic that has guided and continues to guide the development and implementation of the policy. at another level again, what has been engaged in is a struggle for the future direction and values of australian society. the asylum issue thus exposes an underlying cultural tension within australian society. on the one hand, for some years, sections of australian society had been aggrieved around issues of immigration and asylum seeker and refugee arrivals (blainey 1984; hanson 1996; hage 1998; jupp 2002; burchell 2003; poynting et al. 2004). for these sections of the australian public, there was a sense in which their identity as an australian had become violated and diminished, through government policies that they perceived favoured multiculturalism and reconciliation (hage 1998; manne 2004). the australian government’s actions of 2001 and 2002, which outraged old and new asylum seeker and refugee advocates, resonated positively for this section of the population in accordance with long held grievances and fears, thus ensuring their electoral support (manne 2004). on the other hand, both the practices and the logic guiding the australian onshore refugee policy are perceived by asylum seeker and refugee advocates, supporters and sympathisers as un-australian, and as a violation of the identity that they had previously associated with australia in terms of a shown respect for human rights portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 5 gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ values and a sense of social justice. in a questionnaire study circulated in 2004 by professor margaret reynolds for the united nations association of australia (unaa), many advocates mentioned both their personal outrage and its connection to their australian identity, as well as their desire to redeem the good name and behaviour of australia.3 the following are some examples: i remember being overcome with shock and even disbelief…i remember thinking, no this is not going to happen. the australian people will not allow it. how wrong was i! i found it unbearable that politicians who are supposed to be representing me could maintain such a harsh policy against innocent people. i needed to have some way of expressing my support for asylum seekers, and my disgust with our government’s policy. i wanted to let them know that not all australians agreed with their detention. for many of these ‘new’ advocates, it was the beginning of a process of educating themselves about a policy that had already been in existence for a decade. that this was so, only heightened the outrage of the situation for them.4 i first became aware of australia’s detention policy when i saw a report in 2001 on the abc four corners program where a little boy named shayan’s story was aired. i vividly remember the images shown of this little boy who would no longer speak and of his distressed parents. i remember jacqui everitt the family’s lawyer being asked by the journalist ‘how could something like this be happening in australia?’ jacqui’s response was ‘well, bad things happen when good people do nothing.’ i couldn’t sleep that night and felt very angry to learn that australia was locking up children for years on end. how come i didn’t know about this? as a middle class, forty something, ordinary, average aussie mum, i simply could not believe that the country i loved so much could allow something like this to happen. how naive i was. as soon as the program finished, i got onto the web and found websites dedicated to helping those people our country has almost demonised. that began my belated education. the challenge to the logic of the system the asylum seeker and refugee advocacy movement challenges the politicaladministrative logic exemplified in the theory and practice of the policy, and it does so in the name of the legitimising values of justice and human rights. in challenging the particularity of this policy, the cultural norms that the policy represents, and the cultural directions it has provided for australian society, also come into question. in this sense, social movement actions may ‘spill over into the general social arena, and if strong and persistent, become harbingers of general social change’ (pakulski 1991, 39). 3 unless otherwise attributed, quotations in this paper are from reynolds (2004). 4 for some people, there was a sense of déja vu in remembering the lack of knowledge that many australians had about atrocities done to indigenous australians. see reynolds (1999) for an exploration of this history. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 6 gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ asylum seeker and refugee advocates have responded to the much publicised crisis events mentioned above, and they continue to respond to the ongoing crisis events that are the legacy of this policy. this legacy includes the traumatic effects upon asylum seekers and refugees of detention in australia’s immigration detention centres (silove et al. 2000; steel and silove 2001; sultan and o’sullivan 2001; mares et al. 2002; zwi et al. 2003; hreoc 2004), the effects of diminished benefits of ‘second class’ visas accorded to refugees in the community (barnes 2003; phillips and manning 2004), and the effects of deportation (glendenning et al. 2004). across a diversity of groups and styles of engagement, advocates have challenged the policy that these events disclosed, and have protested and lobbied against the current policy, whilst also developing alternative policy models (jas. 2002; rcoa et al. 2004; nasa-vic. 2005). in addition, while ostensibly fighting a defensive battle against this policy, the societal logic underlying the policy has been challenged, and there have emerged new visions of and desires for an australian society more respectful of human rights (corlett 2002; burnside 2004; brennan 2003 and 2004). agnes heller has observed that the future of a society is, to a large extent, dependent ‘on the actors of the present, since they reinforce one logic of society as against another’ (heller 1982, 284). in terms of the logic of australia’s onshore refugee policy development, david corlett, amongst others, looks towards a more humane society in calling for a needs-based rather than fear-based approach to the development of this policy (2002, 354). such a policy would only be possible within a political and social context ‘in which asylum seekers’ humanity is viewed as part of a common humanity’ (2002, 359).5 the achievement of this is the challenge with which advocates are engaged. as melucci has noted, social movements may act as a ‘sign’ (1996, 1), ‘allowing society to openly address its fundamental dilemmas’ (10). in australia, these include a society that has become increasingly unequal in terms of its citizens’ access to opportunities, and the utilisation within that social environment of a politics of fear portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 7 5 see also benhabib’s (2004) discussion of this. gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ that demonises and scapegoats ‘the other’ (manne 2004; dodson 2004; mcmaster 2001; maley 2004; brennan 2003 and 2004). in this regard, the asylum seeker and refugee advocacy movement has signalled a renewed interest in, and commitment to, an inclusive model of social justice in australia. while a number of those involved in asylum seeker and refugee advocacy may well have had prior involvement in other social justice issues, the ‘on the ground’ experience of human rights abuses in this particular advocacy has brought home in a very tangible manner the dangers of complacency and non-involvement in terms of general social justice advocacy within their own country (higgins 2003). in the context of a conflict in which there has been historical bipartisan political support for a hard line on asylum seekers, corlett suggests that ‘it is at the level of localised interaction that hope … resides’ (2002, 358). the empirical features of the collective action the essence of the collective action the asylum seeker and refugee advocacy movement can primarily be understood as an issue-based movement. across a wide spectrum, advocates and supporters are opposed to the assault on human rights that has occurred within the australian government onshore refugee policy (oxfam/caa 2002; bhagwati 2002; hreoc 2004). in this sense, this mobilisation can be understood as ‘other regarding’ social action, as elaborated in burgmann’s 1993 discussion of ‘other regarding’ and ‘self regarding’ social action).6 the policy is perceived as unjust and inhumane, and advocates have felt a moral responsibility to respond to the situation. the social action engendered is aimed at both ameliorating the effects of the policy and at bringing change to the policy. social action aimed at ameliorating the effects of the policy includes the provision of social, emotional, practical, lobbying and medical and legal support. associated activities can range from letter writing to people seeking asylum who are being held in the immigration detention centres, to visiting them there, to practical support for portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 8 6 burgmann has noted that ‘other regarding’ social movements often also contain ‘self regarding’ components (1993, 17-18). this is true of the asylum seeker and refugee advocacy movement in australia. there is a concern for the defence of humanitarian values as a central component of australian national identity. this can be seen as ‘self regarding’ in terms of a vested interest in the future direction and values of australian society. gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ them in the form of telephone cards and other small items, to social and emotional support. it can also involve lobbying for individuals or groups of asylum seekers and refugees; and involvement in their legal assistance either by finding legal representation for them, or if that is not possible, assisting them with their submissions and applications. in some cases, supporters may do one of these things. in many cases, they will do all of them.7 the following answers to reynolds’ questionnaire give some idea of this involvement: 8 i really wanted to do something to change the policy or make it a bit more bearable for these poor imprisoned people somehow. in a personal sense, i write to detainees in baxter detention centre … i also visit detainees in the perth detention centre. i work with a small informal group (the freemantle support project) who try to help asylum seekers. here, i set up an email based group of people who wanted to help. generally, people transfer $2.50 a week or $5.50 a week directly into x’s account. others who are not in a position to help financially simply give their emotional support. the list has now grown to 70 people. i work to organise legal help. i put people in touch with people who can help them. i have sent phone cards and parcels … i have organised for affidavits that might be helpful for appeals. i phone one person every second night for eighteen months now, and give counselling and relaxation when he is suicidal. i have travelled to port augusta four times and stayed to make a total of seventy visits to people in the centre by now. i have had some people on temporary protection visas stay with me, one for ten months and others for just a few days. social action aimed at challenging and bringing change to the policy includes political activism, lobbying, community education, and the development of alternate policy: i campaign to change policy. i collect and present petitions to members of parliament. i write to newspapers. on invitation, i have spoken to school groups and church groups about refugees. i work about eight hours a day most days from home, helping to organise information stalls, sending out newsletter, campaign to change government policy, contact people in detention, try to find lawyers for those who need this, liase between lawyers and detainees, research country information, help with appeals to the minister for immigration, maintain a database to monitor needs of persons in baxter detention centre, organise for letters and parcels to be sent to those in detention, write to politicians, work with a refugee activist committee. i work on the no deportations campaign. it also includes, through a role modelling and ‘signing’ dimension, the previously mentioned actions aimed at ameliorating the effects of the policy. as illustrated in the following comments and as noted above, involvement may include all of the above: i have done all the normal things; lobbied federal government ministers personally, written letters to the prime minister and the minister for immigration, attended rallies, joined and helped set up action groups. i have spent a lot of time educating myself and then evangelising for the cause. i speak to people every day and make them aware of the facts on the matter. i have accommodated a person on a temporary protection visa in my home for the past 18 months at no expense to him at all. i have organised his medical and psychiatric care and his 7 see clausen (2005) for details of some of the ‘legal work’ done by volunteers. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 9 8 see stubbs (2004) and coombs (2004) for an illustration of the range of activities undertaken by groups such as chilout and rar. gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ visa applications. i have attended meetings in the department with him and argued with the government officials about the accuracy of the information they were trying to put across as to the security of sending my friend back to where he came from. i have found him work and i have tried to be a good friend to him. the awareness ramifies. you can start by wanting to do something about detention, which leads you to an awareness of the determination process, the politics of mandatory detention, the problems for refugees after you get them out of detention, the threats of deportation, etc. one aspect leads to another. it tends to become a systemic questioning.9 the everyday practice in the asylum seeker and refugee advocacy movement, the personal relationships established between asylum seekers and refugees and their supporters have become a central aspect of the milieu of the movement and the social action emanating from that. within the closely woven fabric of relationships between asylum seekers and refugees and their advocates, the social action of advocates becomes informed and directed: i realised the despair that this poor boy felt when he asked me to tell john howard to free him … i felt his despair as he told me about his father in the nauru hunger strike, and he asked me ‘when will i be free?’ the support that i give to my friend in detention is very basic. i simply visit whenever possible to sit and have a chat. this may not sound like much, but it can make a world of difference.… it is the value of the knowledge that there are australians who care, and that australia as a whole is not trying to reject him, that is important. this contact has occurred despite the psychological obstacles erected to interaction between asylum seekers and the australian public by government and media discourses of demonisation of those people, and despite the practical obstacles that militate against the realisation of that contact, such as the physical isolation of immigration detention centres, and the limitations placed on communication with asylum seekers in australian immigration detention centres. across these barriers, a ‘common humanity’ bridges the gap: they are real human beings with needs common to us all, not the demons they are made out to be by politicians. i’ve been in personal contact with asylum seekers since 2001, and have maintained contact throughout this period with so many people i couldn’t count, but i’d say around 100. young men, young women, children, fathers, mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers detained in centres around australia, as well as people in nauru. the penetration of secrecy a respondent to reynolds’ questionnaire outlined the shock of meeting people used to portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 10 9 personal communication from ian rintoul, refugee action coalition, 22nd april 2005. gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ identifying themselves within the administrative system of australian immigration detention centres, by their numbers: i drove the first freedom bus around australia, gathered ‘numbers’ thrown to us over fences, and painstakingly tried to write down foreign names to line up with the numbers. the people didn’t give their names first up. they just told us their numbers. the memory still makes me cry. it was truly shocking. in order to make contact with asylum seekers in immigration detention centres, people have acted to access information about these people and their situation, and to share this information with others.10 as dr. aamer sultan, a detained iraqi doctor, observed in the august 2001 abc television program four corners, which showed video footage of a traumatised young child inside one of the immigration detention centres, ‘after a time, i realised these fences are not to prevent us from escaping … no. these fences have been set to prevent you, the australians from approaching us’ (abc 2005). in the course of social action aimed at ameliorating the effects of the policy on asylum seekers in australian immigration detention centres, a significant penetration of the censorship and secrecy associated with the policy, has been achieved. the resultant information, which has been gained and shared across and outside of the movement, has become a major aspect of the functioning of the movement. from the efforts of those in the ‘freedom bus’ which travelled around australia in 2002 visiting detention centres and ‘raising public awareness of the plight of refugees’ (crock and saul 2002, 5), many advocates in urban and rural area of australia became informed of the details of this policy for the first time. dedicated advocacy communications groups relay email information about happenings within immigration detention centres, as well as media and current events updates in regard to asylum seeker and refugee policy.11 melucci has noted that the social actions within movements often become intimately interwoven with everyday 10 for literature in which the voices of asylum seekers and refugees can be heard see: tyler (2003); leach and mansouri (2003); lonely planet (ed.) (2003); and scott and keneally (2004). for an account of work inside an immigration detention centre, see mann (2003). for the voices of young australians on this issue see: dechian, millar and sallis (2004); and dechian, devereaux, millar and sallis (2005). portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 11 11 the 2005 discovery of an australian permanent resident detained in baxter immigration detention centre was sparked by asylum seekers’ pleas to advocates on her behalf, and by the subsequent media article on the case by andrea jackson in the age and the sydney morning herald (quoted in marr et al. 2005). gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ life and individual experience (1989, 71-72). this is particularly apparent within the asylum seeker and refugee advocacy movement in australia. by their determination and persistence in making contact with asylum seekers and refugees, and in their everyday habits of interaction with asylum seekers and refugees, these movement actors, along with the asylum seekers and refugees they interact with, model relationships of common humanity that transcend the ‘national boundaries’ of australian sovereignty. in this sense, advocates both model and live the future they work for. as anne coombs of rural australians for refugees (rar) observes: the thing that keeps people going in the refugee movement is the personal contact with asylum seekers meeting people behind the razor wire, hearing their stories, seeing their despair. we are involved in a struggle that is both political and humanitarian. the politics makes us angry; the people make us care. rar and the rest of the movement will keep on going as long as there are people in detention and as long as australia refuses haven to refugees who simply want the chance to rebuild their lives. (2004, 135) the shape of the social collective coombs (2004, 125-6) has described the asylum seeker and refugee movement in australia as: a vast mosaic of overlapping networks: lawyers, church people, human-rights advocates, welfare workers, political activists, and ordinary people; from highly skilled professionals with specific expertise to the many thousands who have joined a grassroots movement to oppose the government’s treatment of asylum seekers. (my emphasis) the patterned vista to be observed in this mosaic of networking and overlapping is best understood in reference to its beginnings. the previously mentioned core refugee, human rights and religious ngos and agencies, along with small numbers of individuals and groups (ranging from professional to political involvement), had been struggling with aspects of this policy with little media coverage and public knowledge before the 2001 events brought wider awareness of and engagement with the issue. the ‘grass roots’ engagement of the ‘later’ wave of advocates is best compared to the effect of a sudden scattering of seeds of awareness across australia where, following the much-publicised events of 2001 and 2002, a plethora of ‘new’ groups sprang up in support of the rights of asylum seekers.12 the orientation of people within these portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 12 12 the members of these groups are volunteers in the sense that they are unpaid, and indeed spend much of their own money on their support of asylum seekers and refugees. however, the word ‘volunteer’ does not capture the degree of passionate advocacy and activism of their social action. the numbers of people involved in a range of social action of advocacy and activism is difficult to estimate since individuals may belong to more than one group. however, as an example, groups such as rural australian for refugees (rar) count an email member list of approximately 15,000 people, a just australia (aja) of approximately 8,000 people, and the communications group project safecom lists gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ groups could be characterised by a sudden shared sense of the urgency of the situation, and of the need for the taking of individual responsibility in opposing and bringing change to this policy. although many of these people did look to contribute by adding their energies to established refugee, human rights, and church campaigns by ngos and established agencies,13 many others felt a need to take immediate and direct social action in whatever way they could, and wherever they were situated. in addition, social action that led to personal interaction with asylum seekers in immigration detention centres and later with refugees living in the community with second-class protection visas, such as temporary protection visas and bridging visas, reinforced and heightened the already perceived urgency of the situation. because of this orientation towards the need for immediate social action, groups were often initiated in a ‘local’ or ‘associational’ manner, that is, groups began ‘locally’ in myriad locations across australia in places of residence, work, and social, religious, political and professional interaction. a pattern of autonomous social agency observers looking for a familiar tree branching structure of a major centralised group coordinating the strategies and responses of other groups, will be disappointed in the shape of this social collective. the scattered pattern of asylum seeker and refugee advocacy groups reflects the history of the periods of earlier and later engagement with the issue; and the nature of the ‘later’ wave of advocacy in terms of the spontaneous response that occurred in multiple sites across the nation. those people suddenly galvanised into action from 2001 onwards did not say to themselves, ‘what are other people doing about this?’ they asked, ‘what can i do about this? what can we do about this?, and, what can we do here, and now?’ in this manner, groups sprang up from multiple locations, and their resultant action has been correspondingly organic and exploratory in nature, with contributions as supporters 5000 database contacts and 10,000 general other e-list readers (project safecom inc. 2004). portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 13 13 some examples are the asylum seeker support networks associated with hotham mission, melbourne, the circle of friends network associated with the australian refugee association, adelaide, and amnesty international australia’s nsw refugee network. gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ specific to the nature of particular groups and particular individuals. this has produced the remarkable diversity within the movement, ranging from long standing peak refugee, human rights and church and welfare groups, to arts, media, theatre and educational groups, social and practical support groups, agencies;14 medical, legal and academic professional involvement, political activist involvement, communications groups, specific focus groups, urban and rural groups, refugee groups, unions, and many individuals who cross through the group actions and dynamics. emanating from this diversity comes collective action that is both ‘local,’ in the sense of an individual’s or group’s primary advocacy identity, and part of a whole. contributing to the whole—a work in process if the shared concern for the rights of asylum seekers and refugees acts as the binding glue of the movement, it is primarily the technology of email and ‘the web’ that facilitates the ability of these dispersed and localised networks to function collectively.15 as coombs (2004, 133) notes for the group rural australians for refugees: rar could never have grown into a movement as quickly or as geographically dispersed as it is without email. people can feel included in the work of the network regardless of where they are located. we can respond quickly to unfolding events—targeting politicians or sending out requests for help for specific detainees. the website has been invaluable and one of the main ways that new supporters find us. while there have been many examples of individuals and groups travelling across and outside of australia to make contact with asylum seekers and refugees and with advocacy support communities, email and ‘the web’ provide a nationwide forum for the various campaigns initiated by different individuals or groups. email newsletters, petitions, updates, calls to action, and websites provide both knowledge of and access to the larger collective. this forum, which in addition to the personal contact with asylum seekers and refugees and the ‘local’ networks of social action of individuals and groups, maintains and invigorates the collective. through this access to the social action initiated by other groups and individuals, advocates can come to ‘know’ the nature of the larger social collective of which they are a part. 14 the asylum seeker resource centre in melbourne is an example of an agency that began as a volunteer organisation, and that now functions with paid and volunteer staff providing asylum seekers with a wide range of holistic care. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 14 15 see stubbs (2004) on the utilisation of web and email by the group chilout (children out of detention). gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ tensions within nonetheless, tensions can be observed between various movement actors within the asylum seeker and refugee advocacy movement. these tensions reflect often observed patterns within social movements between more reformist and more radical approaches to social action and social change (burgmann 1993, 251; pakulski 1991, 173). with the reasonably sudden entry of numerous groups into this domain from 2001 onwards, tensions have also been played out between earlier and later groups. as advocates involved for some time in the arena observed, the earlier groups had the knowledge and experience of the field, while the later (2001 onwards) groups brought tremendous energy into their new engagement with the issue.16 tensions have included differences around expectations and strategies. at the same time, there is cooperation between the various sectors with combined actions, plus an understanding of specific marking of territory in terms of what each sector can contribute to the whole, and can provide as resources for other groups’ utilisation: it was just a thing where people had to gradually come together, and realise what’s been going on, and what was happening in both groups. ngos have funding and paid staff—with time and expertise to network with each other and develop policy. the other groups operate on the good will of people and they realise their resources are better placed to mobilise people at the grass roots level. i think they do complement each other in a lot of ways.17 the focus of the social action of this collective ultimately lies in the particular contribution that can be made from a particular location with the particular expertise at hand. as one advocate observed of the engagement against the australian onshore refugee policy, ‘it’s not so much a war, as a series of battles,’18 and these battles can be fought on different fields, simultaneously. what binds advocates together is a shared concern with the logic and the detail of the australian onshore policy and the human suffering that has resulted and continues to result from it. the entity of the asylum seeker and refugee advocacy movement melucci has observed that social movement actors frequently spend a lot of time deciding who and what they are (1989, 218). yet this can hardly be said to apply to 16 interview with james thomson, national council of churches of australia, 6th december 2004. 17 as above. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 15 18 interview with junie ong, chilout (children out of detention), 25th february 2005. gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ the australian asylum seeker and refugee advocacy movement as an entity. as coombs has noted (2004, 134), advocates are generally too busy with the task at hand—too busy with the ‘emergency work’ of ameliorating the effects of the policy on asylum seekers and refugees. in addition, this kind of capacity building or identity building enterprise when it occurs, tends to again have an emphasis on the ‘local,’ whether in terms of place as geography or as an ‘associational’ locale (for example, as in associational locales of profession, politics, religion, and so on).19 the asylum seeker and refugee advocacy movement is a multidimensional and fluid entity that can best be understood at present as ‘the sum of its parts.’ advocates from many sites and many orientations combine their particular focus and expertise to contribute to the multiple tasks associated with ameliorating the effects of australia’s onshore policy; challenging the logic and practice of the policy, and struggling to redefine the values of a compassionate australia. it is apt for the members of the movement to consider burgmann’s opinion that social movements are only strong politically in so far as they are ‘unified entities’ and ‘coherent forces’ (1993, 19). yet, the multifaceted nature of the resultant advocacy may well ultimately prove to be the movement’s greatest strength in terms of its many tentacled reaches into different sections of australian society. conclusion ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ with the weight of popular support for australia’s on-shore refugee policy, this fear has galvanised advocates’ social action around the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees under the australian onshore refugee policy. this fear has come for younger australians from the reading of history, and for older australians from the living memory of the genocides and other human rights atrocities that have occurred in the twentieth century. the dangers posed by the non-responsiveness of ‘ordinary citizens’ to human rights abuses, is perhaps a spectre that continues to haunt twenty first century societies. as one respondent to reynolds’ survey asserted, ‘i couldn’t portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 16 19 groups such as rar have engaged in capacity building in the form of annual conferences that have provided a meeting point not only for rar members but for people from different groups across the nation. however more generally, capacity building will occur through joint campaigns and projects, meetings with fellow advocates at events, rallies, and while visiting immigration detention centres, that is, ‘on the job.’ gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ complain and do nothing, or i’d be guilty of complicity’ (reynolds 2004). many australian people (though they remain a minority in australian society) have spoken out against this policy and in passionate and dedicated support for asylum seekers and refugees. they have done this in many venues: personal conversations with friends and acquaintances; community education; creative art, theatre, film, literature and music; professional life; political parties and parliament; protest rallies; church groups; academic forums; international human rights forums, that is, wherever they happened to find themselves and wherever their expertise could be utilised in this regard. they continue to speak out against this policy. klaus neumann points out that the bipartisan political support for a hardline australian approach to asylum seekers is not unprecedented. as he shows in refuge australia, it has a long history. what is unprecedented, he argues, ‘is the willingness of many ordinary australians in the last few years to assist asylum seekers and refugees.… they consider it their personal duty’ (2004, 113). as one of the respondents to reynolds’s questionnaire asserted: it is impossible to ignore the issue once one becomes friends with people who have been through this appalling regime, all of them following horrors perpetrated in their places of origin. the blatant and ceaseless lies of the government, whilst sometimes draining one’s energy, more often serve as impetus to continue. the truth must come out one day (reynolds 2004). through the dimension of bearing witness to this period, the voices of asylum seekers and refugees and their advocates may well be heard not only in the present, but also into the future as part of australia’s historical record. the analysis of this particular collective action has situated it within melucci’s description of ‘reticular and diffuse forms of collective action … located at several different levels of the social system, simultaneously’ (1996, 4). the paper has explored the way in which diverse sections of the australian asylum seeker and refugee advocacy movement both cohere around a shared concern with australia’s on-shore refugee policy, and also diverge in their respective strategies for achieving change to the policy. in the process of exploration of the way in which such ‘multiplicity’ co-exists as a collective actor, aspects of ‘the local’ and ‘the personal’ have been found to have had particular significance for the social action that has portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 17 gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ evolved. in this regard, there can be observed to be a re-ordering of the nature of a relationship with ‘the other’ as asylum seeker or refugee, which is counterposed against the state and majority discourse and practice. in this analysis, melucci’s definition of a social movement as ‘collective action expressing a conflict at the level of the logic of the system’ (1981, 176) has provided a guiding rigour. it has necessitated a defining of the particularity of this collective action in terms of its arena of conflict, the challenges it has made to the logic of the system, and the empirical features of its structure and practice. i argue that such a process contributes to a more informed understanding of the reality of the social movement action. reference list abc (australian broadcasting corporation) 2005, four corners [online], available at: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/s344246.htm [accessed 13th april 2005]. amnesty international australia, 1998, australia, a continuing shame: the mandatory detention of asylum seekers, amnesty international australia, sydney. ——— 2005, the impact of 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20012002 annual report, rcoa, sydney. poynting, s., noble, g., tabar, p., and collins, j. 2004, bin laden in the suburbs: criminalising the arab other, institute of criminology, sydney. project safecom inc. 2004, ‘annual report,’ project safecom inc., narrogin, western australia. refugee council of australia, national council of churches in australia and amnesty international australia, 2004, complementary protection: the way ahead, rcoa, ncca and aia. reynolds, h. 1999, why weren’t we told?: a personal search for the truth about our history, viking press, penguin books, ringwood, victoria. reynolds, m. 2004, australians welcome refugees: the untold story, report to the 60th session of the united nations commission on human rights april 2004, united nations association of australia inc., available at: http:// safecom.org.au/welcome-report.htm (accessed 20 may 2004). saulwick, i. & assocs., and muller, d. & assocs. 2004, job futures/saulwick employee sentiment survey, job futures, sydney. scott, r. and keneally, t. (eds.) 2004, ‘another country,’ southerly, 64.1: 5-96. silove, d., steel, a. & watters, c. 2000, ‘politics of deterrence and the mental health of asylum seekers,’ journal of the american medical association, 284.5: 604611. steel, z., and silove, d. 2001, ‘the mental health implications of detaining asylum seekers,’ medical journal of australia, 175.11/12: 596-599. stubbs, d. 2004, ‘children out of detention: chilout’ in social movements in action portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 20 gosden ‘what if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ 2004, conference papers, research initiative in international activism, university of technology, sydney, 89-92. sultan, a., and o’sullivan, k. 2001, ‘psychological disturbances in asylum seekers held in long term detention: a participant-observer account,’ medical journal of australia, 175.11/12: 593-596. tyler, h. 2003, asylum: voices behind the razor wire, lothian books, melbourne. warhurst, j., and simms, m. 2002, ‘introduction’ in 2001: the centenary election, eds. j. warhurst and m. simms, university of queensland press, brisbane, 1-8. weller, p. 2002, don’t tell the prime minister, scribe publications, melbourne. zwi, k., herzberg, b., dossetor, d., and field, j. 2003, ‘a child in detention: dilemmas faced by health professionals,’ medical journal of australia, 179.6: 319-322. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 21 microsoft word jeffreys2187-10288-1-ce1.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. modern china’s idols: heroes, role models, stars and celebrities elaine jeffreys, university of technology sydney this paper examines a virtual commemorative artefact called ‘the search for modern china’ to consider the evolution of celebrity in the people’s republic of china (prc). the website was launched in late september 2009 by sohu.com, china’s biggest internet media company, to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the prc under the leadership of the chinese communist party (ccp) on 1 october 1949 (‘zhuixun xiandai zhongguo’ 2009). as with other commemorative sites, including ‘60th anniversary’ (2009) on people’s daily online, which is the official media voice of the ccp, the website provides links to webpages that celebrate the history and combined achievements of the party and ‘the people’ in realizing china today—a modern superpower. unlike other sixtieth anniversary websites, it incorporates a celebrity section called ‘evolution of the idol’ (‘ouxiang jinhualun’ 2009, hereafter idol). the idol website presents a narrative describing the evolution of celebrity in the prc as shaped by six decades of social change, and shifting along with china’s post–1978 adoption of market-based economic reforms from the collective admiration of socialist heroes towards the alienated adoration of commercial celebrities. idol subsequently calls on china’s netizens to confirm or challenge this introductory and degenerative account of fame and fandom. each generational decade of the prc’s sixty-year history is represented by a webpage containing a statement about the nature of idol worship during that period and images of selected idols. visitors can click on each image to read jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 2 biographical information and concluding statements about the idol’s achievements. they can also click on a caption next to the image of each idol to register a vote for which public figure they most admire. voters can select only one idol per decade, with the total number of votes updated daily. an associated statement tells readers that ‘the power of examples is infinite; each generation of youths has their own idols’ (‘zhuixun xiandai zhongguo’ 2009). it then enjoins visitors to post their age, the name of their idol, and to explain how that idol has influenced their lives. a comparison of idol voting figures and those amassed on other entertainment and anniversary websites demonstrates that idol’s ‘idols’ are more popular than might appear at first glance, given that idol attracted only 62,474 votes by 21 october 2009 (see appendix). super girls, a chinese television pop idol competition, received 840 votes on idol, whereas a search for the 2005 winner, li yuchun, on china’s most popular search engine, baidu.com, generates over seven million hits. similarly, lei feng, a model soldier, received 6,426 votes on idol, but obtained more than three million votes on a people’s daily anniversary website called ‘china’s top “double hundred” personages’ (‘quanguo “shuangbai” pingxuan’ 2009, hereafter ‘china’s top 200’). like idol, china’s top 200 calls on visitors to vote for their idols. unlike idol, it focuses exclusively on the prc’s founding heroes and exemplary citizens, rather than including entertainers and famous people from china and around the globe. this paper interrogates and contextualizes the idol website as a means to provide a preliminary account of the evolution of different historical conceptions of fame and celebrity in the prc, and associated constructions of ‘modern china.’ the idol website is a useful starting point for understanding the evolution of conceptions of fame/celebrity in china for three reasons. first, in the absence of any definitive surveys or literature on the history of fame and celebrity in china from 1949 to 2009, it offers a cross-section of famous personages throughout the prc’s history that is as representative and inclusive as many other possible concise listings. this remains the case even though the suitability of the choice of famous individuals displayed on idol is debatable, as it is decided unilaterally and possibly in an ad hoc fashion by anonymous website designers. second, idol’s categorization of the prc’s history in terms of six generations offers broad insights into popular understandings of the values and aspirations of different groups of chinese youth. i say ‘broad’ because referring to a jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 3 generational decade as an homogeneous group with a common relationship to popular culture downplays the fact that young people experience different situations flowing from the specific social divisions and contexts associated with age, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and urban and rural residency. finally, idol is a patriotic ‘edutainment’ website. netizens ‘searching’ to understand modern china are enjoined to ‘learn’ that in contemporary china the historical experiences of the early prc and the influences of global capitalism have converged to create a superpower that is driving the world economy and will help to shape the popular cultures of the future. the next section briefly compares the narrative presented by the idol website to popular models of the evolution of celebrity in contemporary media and cultural studies. the rest of the paper proceeds by charting, contextualizing and analyzing the website’s stylized depiction of the evolution of celebrity in china on a chronological basis. the final section provides some concluding remarks. comparing evolutions the history of idol worship in the prc is portrayed in idol’s introductory narrative as shifting away from the collective admiration of socialist heroes of production towards the alienated adoration of commercial celebrities or idols of consumption (see figure 1). in the 1950s, china’s youth reportedly idolized heroes (yingxiong), as symbolized by an image of huang jiguang, a revolutionary martyr. in the 1960s, they idolized political role models (mofan), as illustrated by an image of lei feng, a model soldier. in the 1970s, they idolized symbolic role models (yangban), as represented by an image of li tiemei, a revolutionary-opera character. in the 1980s, they idolized famous people or stars (mingxing), epitomized by an image of zhang haidi, author and chair of china’s disabled persons’ federation. in the 1990s, they idolized disaffected youth (fenqing), as symbolized by an image of rock star, cui jian. today, they idolize celebrities, ordinary people who have performed no exceptional deeds (bu jingying) but are simply ‘famous for being famous,’ as demonstrated by an image of supergirl li yuchun. the idea that idol worship has evolved in a degenerative fashion is neither new nor unique to china. daniel boorstin (1972: 6) provides a classic example of this position when he denounces contemporary celebrities on the grounds that: ‘their chief claim to fame is their fame itself.’ comparing modern-day celebrities in the usa with former jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 4 ‘heroes,’ he concludes that ‘the hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. the hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name’ (boorstin 1972: 61). this style of argument implies that many contemporary celebrities deserve derision, not acclaim, because their fame is achieved primarily through media exposure and the media-fed trivia of lifestyle and personality, rather than through talent or great accomplishments (redmond & holmes 2007: 8). this negative conceptualization is intimately entwined with the history of celebrity in the usa, with the inventions of silent cinema (late nineteenth century), sound movies (the late 1920s), broadcast television (the 1940s), the internet (the late 1970s), and social media (the 2000s), being key staging points or phase shifts in the narrative. the creation of ‘talking’ pictures ushered in a new age of movie stars, with an accompanying focus on the physical attributes and media-created persona of the star. broadcast television intensified and extended this process by creating television stars and ultimately making ‘ordinary’ people temporarily famous via the proliferation of reality television programming and associated interactive formats in the late 1990s and figure 1: evolution of the idol screenshot © ‘ouxiang jinhualun’ 2009, sohu.com jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 5 early 2000s. graeme turner (2009) has coined the expression ‘the demotic turn’ to describe the increasing visibility of ‘ordinary people in the media’ and their apparent desire to celebritize themselves, via reality television shows, diy websites, talk radio, and user-generated materials online. the story told by the idol website, while similar, differs in terms of the cultural and historical context which frames the narrative—the founding of ‘new (socialist) china’ in 1949 and the prc’s entry into the global economy after december 1978. given that the early years of the prc followed a period of intense violence, poverty, and famine, and the virtual elimination or impoverishment of the wealthy classes, the elevation through the state-controlled media of revolutionary heroes and martyrs (still living or not long dead) into popular youth idols is plausible, if not inevitable. the professed commitment of the socialist state to ‘egalitarianism’ also ensured that proletarian political role models were propagandized and popularized throughout the 1950s and 1960s. during the great proletarian cultural revolution (1966–1976), the emphasis placed on ‘continuous revolution’ guaranteed the reduction of state-controlled cultural production to ‘politically correct’ symbolic role models, although handwritten broadsheets, novels, poems, and other forms of popular cultural production also flourished. the narrative of the idol website only converges with that of conventional western narratives from the 1980s onwards, with the expansion of commercial television, digital sound technology, and the internet gradually generating popular cultural idols in the form of television and popular music stars, counter-cultural figures, writers and rock stars, and people who are ‘known’ for their ‘well-knownness’ (boorstin 1972: 49, 57). idol ultimately celebrates the prc’s sixtieth anniversary and attempts to appeal to youth audiences by refusing to condemn contemporary commercial celebrity per se, concluding that twenty-first century china has the capacity to manufacture celebrities that ‘sell’ both products and inspiration. heroes the narrative presented by idol begins with the victory of the communist party in 1949. that victory followed the end of the second sino–japanese war (1937–1945) and decades of civil war between the ccp and the rival nationalist party. freed from imperial oppression, and enjoying their hard-earned life as members of new china, people began to commemorate the deeds of those who had fought for its founding, jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 6 especially those who had sacrificed their lives. after the korean war (1950–1953), where chinese ‘volunteer’ soldiers fought in aid of north korea against the usa, they also commemorated those who fought against cold-war aggressors. hence, idol states that china’s youth of the 1950s idolized heroes, and images of war and struggle dominate the 1950s webpage (see figure 2). figure 2: the 1950s – heroes screenshot © ‘50 niandai’ 2009, sohu.com the four revolutionary heroes of the 1950s, displayed in descending order from the top right-hand to the bottom right-hand side of the webpage, are revolutionary martyrs— dong cunrui (1929–1948), huang jiguang (1930–1952) and liu hulan (1932–1947)— and film actor, sun daolin (1921–2007). dong cunrui (2009) is a hero from the second chinese civil war (1945–1949). on 25 may 1948, the advance of dong’s unit of the people’s liberation army (pla) was blocked by a nationalist bunker built on a bridge. the 19 year-old dong volunteered to blow up the bridge, and, armed with a package of explosives, he ran towards the enemy lines, sustaining a broken leg from gunfire in the jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 7 process. unable to leave but realizing that his comrades had already begun their advance, dong held up the explosives and lit the fuse. his sacrifice enabled the communists to take the bridge. idol underscores the remarkable nature of dong cunrui’s heroism by referring to his slight stature and poor background; unlike conventional heroes whose accomplishments are, in part, a function of their privileged socio-economic status, he is a people’s hero who had the courage to make the ultimate sacrifice because of his love of the ccp and the chinese people. dong features in a 1955 movie, re-released as a dvd in 2008. he was upheld as a national role model during a campaign to ‘learn from the pla’ in the mid-1960s. he is also commemorated via various statues and memorials and on a website celebrating the eightieth anniversary of the pla in 2007 (‘dong cunrui’ n.d., 2007, 2008; ‘geming yingxiong dianying’ 1955; gittings 1964). voted idol’s most popular hero of the 1950s, dong received 58,315 votes on china’s top 200, demonstrating his longevity as a symbol of selfless service (see appendix). liu hulan (2007, 2009) is a female revolutionary martyr from the chinese civil war. liu joined the communist children’s corps at the age of ten and later participated in training classes for rural women and mobilized her fellow villagers to support the ccp’s military efforts and agrarian land reform. nationalist troops occupied her village on 12 january, 1947, confiscating the harvest and gathering the remaining villagers together. the commander then asked a villager to expose communist sympathizers, which included the fifteen-year-old liu. the commander told liu that he would spare her life if she named other sympathizers, but liu refused and was decapitated with a sickle. liu hulan’s posthumous, gendered celebrity as the youngest female member of the ccp to die for the revolution is confirmed by the more than half a million votes she received on china’s top 200 (see appendix). the heroism of chinese servicemen during the korean war is personified by the revolutionary martyr huang jiguang (n.d.; 2009). during the battle of shangganling in october 1952, his unit attacked an enemy blockhouse. injured and with the battle going against the chinese soldiers, huang threw himself against the machine-gun slit of a dugout manned by us troops, blocking enemy fire and forfeiting his life. his sacrifice enabled his comrades to win that battle, gaining him the posthumous award of ‘specialclass hero a feature film, shang ganling (1956) [battle on shangganling mountain jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 8 (2007)] was released in 1956 and re-released as a dvd in 2007. as with dong cunrui, huang was promoted as a model for public emulation during a 1960s campaign to ‘learn from the pla’ and is honoured on the pla’s eightieth anniversary website. sun daolin (2009) is not a ‘real’ hero, but rather is included on idol as a film actor who inspired other people through his portrayal of revolutionary heroes, thereby highlighting a perceived disparity between meaningful stars and contemporary celebrities. as idol explains, sun daolin found inspiration from the revolution and communicated that inspiration to the nation. his portrayals of revolutionary heroes made him a model of courage for countless young men. likewise, his good looks and intelligence made him the ‘dream lover’ of many young women. as a university-educated man, his public performances further helped to unify the nation by blending the different masculine personas of ‘the scholar’ and ‘the soldier. in celebrating the revolutionary heroes of the 1950s as authentic, idol downplays the significant role played by the publicity/propaganda machinery of the newly formed party-state in presenting ‘real-life’ individuals for public consumption as role models (jeffreys & edwards 2010: 3). throughout the maoist period (1949–1976), china’s citizens were offered a series of enhanced depictions of revolutionary heroes to emulate and learn from, by comparing their personal behaviours and thoughts with those of a preferred or prescribed idol and subsequently transforming their thoughts and behaviours in accordance with that role model. the use of nationwide mobilization campaigns to promote those models also meant that all children and adults were emulating the same hero at the same time (sheridan 1968: 47). in short, the ccp was a major creator of popular culture and youth icons at the time, (re)presenting revolutionary heroes for mediatized consumption to promote political cohesion rather than commercial goals. idol’s description of 1950s youth as a generation of young revolutionaries united in their admiration of authentic heroes is highly stylized; to the extent that this was true it was largely an effect of state control of the media and cultural production. yet many of these idols have since been re-presented as emulation models via commemorative events and the distribution of feature films, as part of a campaign launched by the ccp in 1991, and expanded in 2004, to promote patriotic education by re-remembering the ‘makers of the chinese revolution’ (zheng jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 9 2008: 794–97). films and activities with patriotic content are promoted, especially during chinese celebrations and holidays. political models in the 1950,s and especially throughout the 1960s, the ccp began promoting a series of ordinary yet exceptional workers as political role models for young people to learn the spirit of the revolution and unify the nation. such models embodied what it meant to be a good communist and imitating their personal example showed members of the public how to become one. good communists were young people from poor backgrounds who, unafraid of hard work and adversity, selflessly served the chinese people and the associated task of socialist development as best they could and in any manner that the ccp required. these models were promoted, along with the heroic ‘makers of the revolution,’ to create a new generation of ‘revolutionary successors’ for socialist china. the idol narrative consequently states that chinese youth in the 1960s idolized political role models in the form of people who dedicated their lives to serving the people and national construction whole heartedly (‘60 niandai’ 2009). the top half of the webpage shows an image of three smiling children next to lei feng, a soldier renowned for his altruism (see figure 3). displayed from left to right across the bottom of the webpage, the five icons of the 1960s are pavel korchagin (literary bolshevik hero); shi chuanxiang (1915–1975, model sanitation worker); lei feng (1940–1962, model soldier); wang jinxi (1923–1970, model industrial worker); and jiao yulu (1922–1964, model cadre). pavel korchagin is the fictional hero of the socialist realist novel how the steel is tempered, by the russian author nikolai ostrovsky (1904–1936). despite experiencing extreme poverty as a child and later becoming blind and losing the use of his left arm and both legs from illness, korchagin fought for the bolsheviks during the russian civil war (1918–1921) and, after his illness, used the written word to inspire others to become good communists (‘baoer kechajin’ 2009). korchagin, a teenager transformed into a resolute revolutionary or an ‘iron man’ in ‘the crucible of war and revolution,’ became a popular symbol of the soviet ‘new man’ and a youth icon in early maoist china (cheng 2009: 34, 36). chapters from the ‘red classic’ were translated into chinese in 1937 and the entire text was translated in 1942, selling an estimated 2.07 jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 10 figure 3: the 1960s – political models screenshot © ‘60 niandai’ 2009, sohu.com million copies by 1952 (cheng 2009: 76). it inspired wu yunduo, a revolutionary war hero who sustained multiple injuries, including being blinded in one eye, to write a semi-autobiographical text, totally devoted to the communist party (ba yiqie xiangei dang), earning him the accolade of ‘china’s nikolai ostrovsky’ (cheng 2009: 36). how the steel is tempered is the subject of three feature films in the ussr and was adapted into a chinese television series in 2000 (‘how the steel was tempered’ 2009). lei feng is a model soldier celebrated in china to this day for his willingness to serve the party and people. an orphan, lei died in an accident in 1962 aged twenty-two years. he achieved posthumous fame after his alleged diary was published in 1963, which celebrates mao zedong and the socialist ideals of altruism, and studying and working hard for collective goals (edwards 2010: 26–30). as idol explains, extensive promotion via the media and through collective activities has ensured that everyone in china is familiar with the lei feng spirit of selfless public service (‘lei feng, putong shibing’ jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 11 2009). these promotional activities include: learn from lei feng campaigns; an annual lei feng day; cultural memorabilia in the form of t-shirts and shoulder bags; videogames; and a thirty-episode animation series, called ‘the story of lei feng,’ which aired on china’s central television station on 1 june 2009 to coincide with international children’s day (‘lei feng’ 2009; ‘lei feng chuanren’ n.d.; ‘lei feng heritage’ 2009). voted idol’s most popular icon of the 1960s, lei feng’s domestic celebrity is evidenced by the more than three million votes he received on china’s top 200 (see appendix). shi chuanxiang (2009)—a man ‘who spent more than 40 years of his life shoveling and carrying manure from hole-in-the-ground public bathrooms’—is a model worker who allegedly championed the idea that ‘one person gets dirty so that tens of thousands of people can stay clean’ (aiyar 2005). his story became compulsory primary-school reading after president liu shaoqi received him in 1959, and he became the subject of a feature film in 2008 (‘shi chuanxiang’ 2008). idol concludes that shi’s willingness to work proudly for the chinese people in a traditionally stigmatized job is an integral part of the prc’s ‘spiritual’ heritage. wang jinxi (2009), china’s first national role model in the industrial sector, is an oilfield worker renowned for his iron man spirit—his inspirational courage to work hard in difficult circumstances to aid national development. wang and his team drilled the first well of china’s largest oil field in daqing, while working in subzero temperatures without cranes and piped water, and they manually carried 60 tonnes of equipment from a railway to the field (‘china’s “iron man”’ 2009). in 1960, wang became the focus of a national campaign to ‘learn from the iron man’ and he was made a labour model in 1967 (‘“iron man” wang jinxi’ 2009). he is the subject of a feature film called iron man (tieren 2009), released on 1 may 2009 to coincide with international labour day. his life and actions are also commemorated in an iron man memorial museum that receives around 3,000 visitors a day (‘china’s “iron man”’ 2009). jiao yulu (2009a; 2009b) is a grassroots cadre who devoted his life to serving the party and chinese people. according to idol, as party secretary of lankao county, henan province, jiao worked ceaselessly to combat local environmental problems such as frequent waterlogging, sandstorms and soil salinization, until his death from liver cancer, a fact recalled with pride by his children in testimonials. in 1966, a campaign to ‘learn jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 12 from comrade jiao yulu: good student of comrade mao zedong’ was launched to rally people to work harder to overcome difficulties. cadres were especially encouraged to follow jiao’s leadership style by investigating local conditions. in the early 1990s, jiao became the subject of an award winning feature film (‘jiao yulu’ 1990). voted idol’s second most popular icon of the 1960s, jiao yulu received nearly 800,000 votes on china’s top 200 (see appendix). as with the revolutionary heroes of the 1950s, many of the political models of the 1960s are being re-remembered today via the creation of memory sites associated with the expansion of china’s patriotic education campaign, such as websites, films, dvds, video games, museums, historic monuments, sculptures and nostalgic memorabilia. however, the prc’s rejection of maoist politics in the early 1980s has ensured that the production and consumption of such role models has become disconnected from the particular conception of revolution and national identity that they once embodied. moreover, unlike the heroes of the 1950s who retain foundational importance for the prc nation-state, the contemporary political relevance of idols of the 1960s has been undermined by their connection to a now-denigrated period in the ccp’s history. with the exception of the odd television special, their presence in popular culture has mostly been reduced to circulating as niche market products for tourists in the form of revolutionary kitsch. symbolic models the cultural revolution (1966–76) is denigrated in china today as ‘10 years of disaster,’ and a period when the personality cult of chairman mao zedong was used to incite (brainwash) china’s youth into becoming revolutionary successors by attacking party members who were accused of emphasizing material over ideological incentives, and thus taking the ‘capitalist road reinforcing this emphasis on ideological conformity, the right-hand side of the idol webpage for the 1970s is dominated by images of figures from the legend of the red lantern (hongdengji), one of the eight modern beijing operas produced by mao’s wife jiang qing (see figure 4). the operas aimed to inspire a new generation of revolutionaries by replacing traditional stories of emperors, generals, and concubines, with stories that celebrated the deeds of early chinese communists, and were promoted extensively (some say ad nauseum) via state-sponsored music, theatre, film, and radio. hence, idol characterizes the early 1970s as a period when china’s jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 13 youth idolized ‘symbolic role models’ chiefly because they were provided with few alternatives, and describes the idols of that generation in collective terms as ‘our idols’ rather than ‘my idol’ (‘70 niandai’ 2009). the 1970s webpage has two introductory notes that underscore the shift away from maoist-style socialism towards the acceptance in december 1978 of deng xiaoping’s market-based economic reforms and open door policy (‘70 niandai’ 2009). as the first note explains, young people in the early 1970s admired the characters portrayed in the modern beijing operas for epitomizing the revolutionary politics of class struggle (love and hate, struggle and self-sacrifice). however, the chaos and violence associated with the cultural revolution undermined support for this mode of revolutionary politics and continued class struggle. as the second note explains, young people in the late 1970s began to admire pioneers in literature and science, fields that had fallen into decline during the height of the cultural revolution, when schools and universities closed to allow students to engage in political activities. separating these two notes, and displayed from left to right across the bottom of the left-hand side of the webpage, the four symbols of the 1970s are: li tiemei (fictional character, revolutionary-opera), yang zirong (1917–1947, combat hero, revolutionary-opera), guo lusheng (1948–, underground poet), and chen jingrun (1933–1996, mathematician) (see figure 4). li tiemei (2009) is a fictional character from the modern beijing opera, the legend of the red lantern. adapted from the 1963 movie, the revolution has successors (geming ziyou houlairen), the opera tells the story of li tiemei and her father, a railway signaler who used his red lantern also as a device to communicate with communist guerrillas during the second sino-japanese war. when her father is captured and executed by enemy soldiers, li tiemei accepts his last failed mission of smuggling information to communist forces, enabling an important victory and demonstrating her willingness to follow the family tradition of raising ‘the red lantern’ and risking her life for the revolution (clark 2008: 35–6). yang zirong (2009) is a combat hero from the chinese civil war whose ingenious actions are celebrated in the modern beijing opera, taking tiger mountain by strategy (zhiqu weihu shan). adapted from a novel about yang’s life, the opera depicts a communist reconnaissance soldier who disguised himself as a bandit and used bandit jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 14 figure 4: 1970s – symbolic models screenshot © ‘70 niandai’ 2009, sohu.com argot to infiltrate and capture a gang of bandits in 1947. yang’s life and actions were the subject of a 1970 feature film (‘zhiqu weihu shan’ 1970) and are now commemorated in a yang zirong memorial (‘yang zirong memorial commentary’ 2008). thousands of these memorials were created post-1994 as part of the patriotic education campaign and have become popular tourist destinations via the red tourism program, which was launched on a national scale by china’s national bureau of tourism in 2004 (zheng 2008: 797). of the limited votes given to idol’s icons of the 1970s, yang zirong received the second highest and he is the only idol icon from that era to feature on china’s top 200 (see appendix). guo lusheng or ‘shizhi’ is an underground poet known as ‘china’s dante’ (zhang 2002). guo’s poems were circulated unofficially during the cultural revolution through handwritten copies taken by some of the 17 million urban youth with a secondary or tertiary education who were ‘sent down to the countryside’(‘shizhi’ 2009). sent-down jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 15 youth theoretically assisted with rural construction while learning from the peasantry. however, the relocation of urban youth to ease the pressures of urban unrest and unemployment became a source of resentment post-1968, because they often experienced not only personal deprivation, but also major difficulties in relocating back to the cities before 1981 (‘mixed memories of “zhiqing”’ 2004). as idol puts it, guo’s 1968 poem ‘xiangxin weilai’ (trust the future) captured the imagination of a generation of educated youth whose revolutionary idealism had been dampened by personal hardship and who wanted a different future (see also davies 2007: 166–92). chen jingrun, idol’s most popular icon of the 1970s (see appendix), is one of the most famous mathematicians of the twentieth century due to his theorem ‘on the representation of a large even integer as the sum of a prime and the product of at most two primes’ (chen’s theorem) (‘chen jingrun’ n.d., 2009). chen is celebrated on idol in text and associated images for reviving the interest of china’s youth in science and technology and solving one of the world’s most famous mathematical problems while working in basic conditions—living in a small room and working on rough paper under the dim light of a kerosene lamp. he is thus portrayed as following in a tradition of people who were willing to overcome hardship to assist china’s national development and pioneer a new path of scientific modernization. the juxtaposition of revolutionary opera heroes and early pioneers of post-maoist literature and science is symbolic of the striking shifts in chinese politics and society that started to occur in the late 1970s. guo lusheng’s and especially chen jingrun’s fame represents the shift away from revolutionary politics, wherein scientists and other intellectuals were condemned as members of the ‘stinking ninth category’ who did not contribute to society, and towards the adoption of a model of national construction based on innovation and technological development. through this example, idol downplays the standard categorization of the youth of the cultural revolution as the ‘lost generation’ (shiluo de yidai). instead, their loss of faith in maoism, and desire for personal and national advancement, signifies china’s newfound capacity to undertake the reforms required to become a superpower. while the selection of exemplars given by idol is again very stylized, perhaps more important is the implicit assertion that the seeds of fundamental change in the nature of the prc’s role models lay in the political jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 16 and popular turmoil of the 1970s, which would come to fruition as the party-state’s grip on the means of production was gradually relaxed in the reform period. stars china’s abandonment of revolutionary maoism and entry into the global economy in the 1980s not only encouraged the formation of a new breed of famous domestic personages, but also introduced chinese audiences to commercial popular culture from other parts of the world. as idol explains through words emblazoned on a television screen to denote the creation and growing accessibility of commercial popular culture in the prc, china’s youth of the 1980s idolized a new generation of ‘stars’ (see figure 5). displayed from left to right across the bottom left-hand side of the webpage, the six stars of the 1980s are: jet li (1963–), martial arts master and film actor; zhang haidi (1955–), disabled role model; sanmao (1943–1991), travel writer; zhang hua (1958– 1982), controversial role model; lai ning (1974–1988), controversial child hero; and michael jackson (1958–2009), pop star. figure 5: 1980s – stars screenshot © ‘80 niandai’ 2009, sohu.com jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 17 zhang haidi, zhang hua and lai ning are early reform-era role models, the controversy associated with both of them highlighting the continued production but diminished popularity of state-manufactured idols. zhang haidi (2009) contracted a spinal cord disease at five years of age that left her a paraplegic. undaunted, she went on to complete undergraduate and masters degrees, and authored and translated numerous literary works. she also taught herself acupuncture, offering free medical services to over ten thousand people. in recognition of these services, president hu jintao called zhang haidi the ‘lei feng of the 1980s.’ a former member of the chinese people’s political consultative conference, zhang is married and promotes independent living for the physically challenged as chair of china’s disabled persons’ federation (zhang shun 2005). medical student zhang hua (n.d., 2009) died in 1982 aged twenty-four years after jumping into a septic pit to rescue an elderly peasant who had fallen in accidentally, with his posthumous promotion as a model of service and self-sacrifice attracting criticism. people questioned whether zhang had really saved the old man, whether his sacrifice had any social utility, given that he would have saved more lives as a doctor, and whether he would have received official recognition if he had lived. idol suggests that this questioning of socialist role models took place in a context of flux—china’s youth were confused about the nature of appropriate behaviours and ideals, flowing from the prc’s entry into the global economy—and introduces testimonials from zhang’s colleagues to imply that such confusion was neither universal nor long-lived. zhang hua (2009) reportedly wished to join the ccp but had deferred temporarily, believing that he lacked the heroic qualities of a worthy member. following zhang’s death, the fourth military university of medical sciences erected a bronze statue in his honour, at which first year students still swear a ceremonial oath to save lives. lai ning died in 1988 aged 14 years fighting a forest fire and allegedly protecting state property: lai and his classmates were ordered to help fight the fire. while not explicitly mentioned on idol, the ccp launched a ‘learn from lai ning’ campaign following the brutal suppression of the student protest movement in tiananmen square in june 1989, in order to offset the image of protesting students with other young role models (‘lai ning’ 2009a). idol describes lai ning (2009b) via testimonials as a mischievous and awkward child transmogrified inappropriately into a fire-fighting hero, concluding that jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 18 ‘forgetting him’ is perhaps the best course of action because laws protecting minors, and governing schools, now forbid student involvement in rescue-style activities. however, lai is idol’s most popular idol according to voting preferences and he received nearly 200,000 votes on china’s top 200 (see appendix). this popularity reflects the fact that around 60 percent of china’s netizens are under 30 years of age (china internet network information center 2010). most idol voters would have been born in the 1980s and educated about lai ning at school; moreover, they were prepared to engage with ccp-inspired versions of national solidarity, as demonstrated by their willingness to explore the anniversary website in the first place. jet li, sanmao and michael jackson represent china’s gradual entry into the global economy and associated engagement with international popular culture. voted the sixth most popular icon on idol (see appendix), jet li, a rag-to-riches international film star, was a national martial arts champion in the maoist 1970s, representing the prc at international athletic and cultural events, including performing on the white house lawn for president nixon in 1974. he became a regional film star portraying warriorheroes in the early 1980s through the china–hong kong production, shaolin temple (dir. zhang xinyan 1982), and a global superstar in the 2000s via transnational films such as hero (dir. zhang yimou 2002) (farquhar 2010: 103–23). while intimating that jet li’s popularity in china faded when he left (unpatriotically) for hollywood in 1999, idol concludes that li has since salvaged his reputation by establishing the one foundation, china’s first independent public-funding raising charity (the official jet li website 2010; ‘li lianjie’ 2009). sanmao (author, pseudonym) was born in mainland china in 1943 but raised in taiwan, making her a symbol of the political divide between communist china and nationalist taiwan. she is famous both for her chinese-language poetry and writings about travel and for her personal misfortune—her german fiancée and subsequent spanish husband both died tragically and she hanged herself in 1991 (chen shaohua 2007). according to idol, sanmao (2009) is remembered for her writings, life, and alleged yearning for home (china), as encapsulated in poems such as the ‘olive tree,’ which originally was prohibited in taiwan for alluding to the prc. taiwan only began to allow individual travel abroad for tourism in 1979 and travel to mainland china for family reunification in 1987. similarly, the opportunities for prc citizens to obtain passports and travel jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 19 overseas were highly restricted until the mid-1980s and remained limited throughout the 1990s because of cost and difficulties in obtaining visas (liu, g. 2009). sanmao’s writings thus opened a window for prc citizens into a little known outside world. idol’s final icon of the 1980s is michael jackson, the ‘king of pop,’ whose highly publicized death on 26 june 2009 presumably coincided with the website’s construction. allegedly more famous in china than elvis or the beatles, idol describes jackson as a cultural icon that everyone knows of even if they dislike his music and what he stands for (‘maike’er jiekexun’ 2009). jackson’s checkered history is used to imply a contrast between the prc’s tentative opening up to the outside world, scarred by global condemnation of the 1989 political crackdown, and its present-day status as a postbeijing olympics superpower. most notably, a quotation from jackson reiterates for chinese audiences the official representation of the ‘tiananmen incident’ as having been exaggerated by the international media to maintain china’s former political and economic inferiority vis-à-vis the usa: ‘they did everything they could to turn the public against me. it is a [media-led] conspiracy!’ (‘maike’er jiekexun’ 2009). jackson also symbolizes china’s generation y, an estimated 240 million people born between 1981 and 1995 whom idol describes as destined for glory by leading china’s modernization (‘80 niandai’ 2009). generation y is typically contrasted with the cultural revolution generation because of its newfound optimism for the future, and active engagement in entrepreneurship, consumerism and popular culture. jackson’s epitaph on idol—a superstar who shook the world and whose death signifies the end of an era—is thus a metaphor for the death of ‘old’ new china and the rise of new millennium china. disaffected youth in the 1990s, china’s growing integration with the global economy, the emergence of self-made entrepreneurs (the newly rich), the return of hong kong to chinese sovereignty in 1997, and expanded cultural exchange between the prc and taiwan, encouraged a shift away from the state-led emphasis on entertainment as education and towards commercial entertainment for entertainment’s sake. hence, idol states that chinese youth in the more liberal political climate of the 1990s idolized ‘disaffected youth’ for their countercultural questioning of former communist orthodoxy (‘90 niandai’ 2009). displayed from left to right across the bottom of the webpage, the nine jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 20 icons of the 1990s are: xiaohudui [little tigers], taiwanese boy band; cui jian (1961–), chinese rock star; luo dayou (1954–), taiwanese singer-songwriter; wang shuo (1958–), chinese author and television producer; stephen chow (1962–), hong kong film director; liu huifang, prc soap-opera character; bill gates (1955–), entrepreneur, usa; michael jordan (1963–), basketball player, usa; and mary kay ash (1918– 2001), entrepreneur, usa (see figure 6). figure 6: 1990s – disaffected youth screenshot © ‘90 niandai’ 2009, sohu.com xiaohudui, cui jian and luo dayou epitomize the changing face of chinese popular music and the alternative ‘voice’ of a new generation. taiwanese boy-band, xiaohudui (2009) were asian pop idols from 1988 until the band split up in 1995. cui jian (2009), often dubbed the ‘father of chinese rock,’ is renowned as a countercultural voice of idealism and discontent. he shot to fame in the late 1980s when his song ‘nothing to my name’ (yiwusuoyou), an implied criticism of the claim that socialism provides a better quality of spiritual and material life, became an anthem to student protestors in jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 21 tiananmen square (hom 1998: 1013). luo dayou (2009), the ‘godfather of chinese popular music,’ is a taiwanese (folk) singer-songwriter. these idols represent the influence of commercial music from western societies, hong kong and taiwan on mainland china. this influence was praised and condemned for introducing new (raucous) sounds and a focus on the personal, rather than the ccp-led cultural emphasis on asceticism and socialist modernization (gold 1993); for example, love songs containing what were viewed at the time as sexually explicit lyrics (moskowitz 2009: 69–70). wang shuo, stephen chow and the soap opera kewang (yearnings) represent the expansion of commercial literature, film and television programming in 1990s china. contrary to the emphasis of state-funded writers on ‘educating the masses,’ wang shuo is a self-described ‘literary entrepreneur’ concerned with entertainment and sales, not morals or politics (kong 2010: 131–36). wang made his fame and fortune by publishing stories and novellas, many of which were adapted for film and television, about street-wise antiheroes whose playful use of colloquial dialect highlighted the disjunction between china’s revolutionary past and the newly commercialized present, and mocked the former as ‘not cool’ (barme 1992). while praising wang shuo (2009), idol concludes that wang xiaobo (1952–1997), a satirical writer who eschewed (usstyle) literary commercialism, is more ‘authentically creative.’ idol similarly celebrates stephen chow as a comic genius, while concluding that ‘inexperienced youth’ should be wary of idolizing his cynical blending of tradition and innovation because it may result in confusion and depression (‘zhou xingchi’ 2009). an a-list hong kong actor, comedian, screenwriter, and film director, chow is famous for his slapstick parodying of martial arts and other aspects of chinese culture. chow’s movies shaolin soccer (2001) and kung fu hustle (2004) both made history as the highest grossing films in hong kong. liu huifang is the central female character in china’s first domestically produced soap opera, kewang, which broadcast in october 1990, attracting a record audience of 550 million people (wang et al. 1992: 177–92). the 50-episode series followed the stories of several ordinary families from the cultural revolution period into the early 1980s, foregrounding issues relating to family relationships, class conflict, gender, and social morality. its popularity stemmed in part from unprecedented media coverage. in 1980, jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 22 there were 5 million television sets in the prc; by the start of the 1990s there were 160 million (wang et al. 1992: 181). china’s print media extensively debated the show in columns on ‘what have i learnt from kewang?’ as idol concludes, kewang struck a chord with the entire nation. faced with the social and moral ambiguities introduced by the market economy and western culture, it presented a newly nostalgic portrait of a time when human relationships purportedly were more innocent and based on ‘chinese values’ of care and community (‘liu huifang’ 2009). bill gates, michael jordan and mary kay ash represent china’s embrace of the global market economy, especially entrepreneurialism, commercial sports and cosmetic beautification. these areas were restricted or simply did not exist in maoist china— industry was nationalized and the monetary economy was curtailed, sport was funded by the state to demonstrate national strength, and the ideal revolutionary beauty was an asexual and naturally rosy-cheeked (peasant) worker. idol celebrates bill gates for cofounding microsoft and becoming one of the richest people in world history, thereby changing the way people live, work and communicate, and inspiring a new generation of self-made chinese entrepreneurs (‘bier gaici’ 2009). michael jordon is celebrated as a model of success in sport and commercial sports advertising and for introducing china’s youth to basketball, the most famous and unmentioned of which is yao ming (‘maike’er qiaodan’ 2009). finally, idol celebrates the founder of mary kay cosmetics, which opened a china subsidiary in 1995, under the heading ‘spreading the rebirth of feminism,’ as a successful female entrepreneur in the context of china’s changing views about feminine beauty and sexual liberation (‘meilinkai aishi’ 2009). the prc is now the eighth largest cosmetics consumer in the world (‘chinese women go “crazy” for cosmetics’ 2005). as in other societies, china’s ‘fashion revolution’ is both praised for introducing heterogeneity and individual freedoms and condemned for turning women into sex objects. in short, the spread of entrepreneurialism and commercial popular culture, incorporating new influences from hong kong, taiwan, and ‘the west,’ further loosened party-state control of the economy, media and everyday life and brought a new dynamism to the mainland economy and cultural market. at the same time, the belated entry of the prc into the global economy placed china as an imagined centre of civilization in a peripheral position both regionally and globally. the 1990s thus also represent a time jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 23 when concerns about china’s future and how china’s past might contribute to a better (as in non-western) imagining of that future began to emerge. celebrities as with degenerative accounts of the evolution of celebrity in western societies, idol notes that older members of chinese society, in particular, view the 2000s as an era dominated by commercial celebrities and consequently as an era without true idols and ideals (‘00 niandai’ 2009). while bemoaning the death of ‘real’ heroes, idol attempts to appeal to youth audiences by concluding that the longevity of contemporary idols and what they stand for is uncertain; it is up to the youth of china today to provide the answers and hence to define the nature of modern china. displayed from left to right across the bottom of the webpage, the six icons of the 2000s are: meteor garden (liuxing huayuan), taiwanese teen drama; jay chou (1979–), taiwanese pop idol; big big wolf, chinese cartoon character; super girls, chinese pop idol competition; harry potter, fictional adolescent wizard; and, xu sanduo, the central character in a chinese television drama (see figure 7). figure 7: 2000s – celebrities screenshot © ‘00 niandai’ 2009, sohu.com jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 24 while harry potter (2009) is included into the pantheon as a global phenomenon highlighting the cosmopolitanism of contemporary chinese youth, meteor garden, jay chou and super girls represent the emergence in 2000s china of teen-orientated entertainment and a corollary shift away from venerating heroes towards idolizing highly commoditized performers who are usually young, good-looking and may possess little or no talent. meteor garden, a taiwanese tv drama based on a ‘live’ version of the japanese manga, hana yori dango (the boys more than flowers), was first broadcast in april 2001. its popularity throughout asia resulted in two sequels, meteor rain and meteor garden ii. the show revolves around four rich and popular boys at an elite college (f4), who gradually gain in wisdom and maturity through facing romantic and other crises (‘liuxing huayuan’ 2009). meteor garden became popular in the prc via the medium of dvds, with f4’s transformation into east asia’s hottest ‘boy-band’ at the time resulting in sold-out concerts in china being cancelled due to hysterical crowds (huat 2004: 210). jay chou and supergirls embody the new chinese teenage fantasy of ordinary but talented youths being ‘discovered’ and transformed into megastars (‘zhou jielin’ 2009). a taiwanese musician, singer-songwriter and actor, chou came to public attention after winning a talent show in 1998 at the age of nineteen (‘zhou jielin’ 2009). he has won at least three world music awards for his chinese-western fusion of jazz-influenced rhythm and blues, pop and hip hop, with song lyrics in mandarin (moskowitz 2009: 72). super girls was a hugely popular national singing contest for 18 to 20-year-old female contestants organized on an annual basis by hunan satellite television between 2004 and 2006, around 80,000 pop ‘wannabes’ auditioned for the show in 2006 and 280 million people watched the final heat (‘footage from banned chinese “pop idol”’ 2007). idol celebrates super girls as a cultural phenomenon that not only demonstrates china’s capacity to create its own idols, but also provided ordinary young women with ultrasuccessful role models, such as 2005 winner, li yuchun, named by time magazine as one of asia’s heroes (‘chaoji nüsheng’ 2009; jakes 2005). commentary by cultural critics variously praise the show for marking the rise of youth popular culture and the defeat of elite culture in china; and, since winners were elected by sms voting, for helping to create an active citizenry. however, idol concludes that the popularity of jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 25 super girls ultimately stems from successful business marketing, implying that the talent of the show’s winners is inauthentic and an over-rated product of media hype. huitailang [big big wolf] represents the prc’s policy goal as expressed by the ministry of culture of achieving international animation status by around 2015 (‘huitailang’ 2009; li qiaoyi 2009). big big wolf is a central character in xiyangyang he huitailang (pleasant goat and big big wolf), a chinese 3d cartoon animation film and box-office success based on a cartoon series of the same name. the relatively lowbudget film by shanghai media group is the largest grossing chinese feature animation, beating dreamworks’ madagascar 2 (dir. darnell & mcgrath 2008) and disney’s bolt (dir. williams & howard 2008) at china’s box offices in 2009 (song hongmei 2009). big big wolf is reportedly popular because he represents an ideal man from a chinese woman’s perspective. born a wolf and thus unfortunately having a wolf’s nature, he is also a smart, capable, loving, uncritical, and loyal husband who cooks. the narrative presented by idol concludes with ‘xu sanduo’ (2009)—the central character in a chinese television drama titled soldiers sortie (shibing tuji), and voted idol’s third most popular figure after lai ning and lei feng (see appendix). the show’s plotline is simple: xu’s father forces him to join the army, viewing him as a cowardly dullard in need of military training. while experiencing numerous ritual humiliations during rigorous training, xu makes close friends, finds himself and becomes an outstanding soldier. soldiers sortie was broadcast with low ratings in december 2006, but developed a cult following in 2007 as 30,000 dvds went on sale and ‘soldier fans’ began posting commentaries about the show on baidu.com. fanbased internet surveys suggest that the show’s audience comprises people from all walks-of-life and age groups, although 20 to 30 year old viewers comprise the largest audience. men reportedly ‘love it’ because they see the protagonists as ‘true men’; and women ‘love it’ because they see them as ‘ideal men’ (zhang ming’ai 2007). the evolution over the prc’s history from idolizing ‘real’ soldier-heroes to worshipping fictional ones is intended to highlight the cosmopolitan yet unique nature of contemporary chinese youth. attributing the popularity of soldiers sortie to the ‘hunger’ of chinese youth for spiritual role models, idol suggests that xu sanduo’s unexceptional nature—his honesty, lack of sophistication and perseverance—is exceptional (as is china). it reminds young people, who are living in an era of overt jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 26 materialism, and perceived moral decline, that financial success is not the sum total of human existence. successful people have a sound moral character and are content with their lives and at peace with others. in short, modern china can create celebrities that ‘sell’ both products and inspiration to a new generation of aspiring young people and future (world) leaders. conclusion the history of celebrity and idol production in the prc can be viewed crudely as marked by disjuncture: the decline of heavy-handed party-state involvement in the propagandistic manufacturing of socialist idols of production, followed by the graftedon rise of western-style media-manufactured celebrities as idols of capitalist consumption. this framing narrative informs the selective collection and categorization of idols presented on the ‘evolution of the idol’ component of ‘the search for modern china’ anniversary website. idol presents a degenerative account of chinese popular culture and idol worship as shifting somewhere between the mid-1970s and 1980s from the production and veneration of authentic heroes to the production and idolization of consumer-style celebrities, following the gradual discarding of maoist principles and adoption of market-based economic reforms. at the same time, idol somewhat glibly concludes that the associated decline in the reform era of social(ist) values and the rise of individualistic materialism presents neither a serious nor ongoing problem, because the recent creation of inspirational celebrity-commodities shows that china is capable of reinventing the past to serve different present and future needs. more interestingly, perhaps, analyzing the idol pantheon highlights the diversity of china’s celebrity-constructions and the continued vitality of state-produced socialist icons in commercial popular culture. although some idols from the maoist and early reform period have been relegated to the realms of fiction or, revolutionary kitsch, or are now simply passé, the state-led project of promoting patriotic education by reremembering selected ‘makers of the chinese revolution’ has ensured that others remain very much alive in the popular imagination via contemporary memory sites associated with broadcast television, dvds and the internet, and the historical locations, museums and monuments of ‘red tourism revolutionary heroes, for example, are a nightly presence in films, documentaries and dramas shown on contemporary chinese television, juxtaposed beside variety and reality shows featuring popular entertainment jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 27 stars of the 2000s and celebrity news. as advertising for a celebrity-hosted ‘lei feng day’ marathon on beijing television station on 5 march 2012 put it: ‘lei feng was and always will be with us’ (lei feng yizhi zai women shenbian). acknowledgements the australian research council supported this research. jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 28 appendix: voting patterns on anniversary websites† idol* people’s daily** 1950s – heroes dong cunrui ♂ 2,885 58,315 huang jiguang ♂ 779 26,760 liu hulan ♀ 1,906 508,883 sun daolin ♂ 292 51,374 1960s – political models pavel korgachin ♂ 740 — shi chuanxiang ♂ 202 6,460 lei feng ♂ 6,427 3,375,400 wang jingxi ♂ 537 28,974 jiao yulu ♂ 1,238 773,257 1970s – symbolic models li tiemei ♀ 447 — yang zirong ♂ 1,138 16,172 guo lusheng ♂ 296 — chen jingrun ♂ 3,497 — 1980s – stars jet li ♂ 4,197 — zhang haidi ♀ 2,515 7,414 sanmao ♀ 871 — zhang hua ♂ 317 18,443 lai ning ♂ 7,304 195,812 michael jackson ♂ 3,394 — 1990s – disaffected youth little tigers ♂ 1,635 — cui jian ♂ 547 — luo dayou ♂ 426 — wang shuo ♂ 227 — zhou xingchi ♂ 4,580 — kewang 299 — bill gates ♂ 1,400 — michael jordan ♂ 1,991 — mary kay ash ♀ 154 — 2000s – celebrities f4 ♂ 365 — jay chou ♂ 1,538 — big big wolf ♂ 4,794 — super girls ♀ 840 — harry potter ♂ 510 — xu sanduo ♂ 5,186 — † total number of votes, accessed 21 october 2009. * ‘ouxiang jinhualun’ [evolution of the idol] (2009) ** ‘quanguo “shuangbai” pingxuan’ [china’s top ‘double hundred’ personages] (2009) jeffreys modern china’s idols portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 29 reference list ‘00 niandai: wo de ouxiang bu jingying’ [the 2000s: my idols are ‘celebrities’] 2009, ouxiang jinhualun: zhuixun xiandai zhongguo [evolution of the idol: the search for modern china], sohu.com (hereafter ouxiang). online, available: http://news.sohu.com/s2009/9616/s266391777_1/ [accessed 8 february 2012]. ‘50 niandai: wo de ouxiang shi “yingxiong”’ [the 1950s: my idols are ‘heroes’] 2009, ouxiang. online, available: http://news.sohu.com/s2009/9616/s266391504_1/ [accessed 8 february 2012]. ‘60 niandai: wo de ouxiang shi mofan’ [the 1960s: my idols are (political) role models] 2009, ouxiang. 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http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. synthesis of climate change policy in judicial, executive, and legislative branches of us government robert brinkmann, hofstra university, and sandra jo garren, university of south florida introduction developing a comprehensive global warming and greenhouse gas policy has been difficult for the usa. while many other developed countries have implemented greenhouse gas initiatives, the usa became mired in the debate over the actual existence of global warming (mccright & dunlap 2003), the prudence of developing policy in the perceived lack of scientific information in support of global warming (leiserowitz 2006), and the ways to go about reducing greenhouse gas emissions (mccarl & schnieder 2000; rose & oladosu 2002). indeed, while global warming was largely accepted by the scientific community by the early 1990s (ipcc 1992) throughout much of the clinton and george w. bush administrations (ipcc 1995, 2001; ipcc 2007a, 2007b), no serious efforts to develop national greenhouse gas policies emerged. several us leaders, including leaders in the executive and legislative branches of the government, doubted the existence of global warming and used evidence outside mainstream scientific inquiry to justify their position (armitage 2005). thus, the approach taken by the usa, until the election of president obama, was largely one of debate with little policy development. during this period, the absence of leadership at the national level led to a number of innovative initiatives by individuals, state and local governments, non-profit brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 2 organizations, and private businesses. for example, governor schwarzenegger supported strong controls of emissions in california (cayan et al. 2008), the us council of mayors developed goals for greenhouse gas reductions in cities (schreurs 2008), the us green building council began enhancing procedures for certifying green homes (yudelson & fedrizzi 2008), the american college and university presidents developed strategies for reducing the impact on their campuses (rowe 2007), the chicago climate exchange (ccx) organized a mechanism for carbon trading (labatt & white 2007), walmart developed aggressive green business practices (freidman 2005), and businesses participated in voluntary greenhouse gas reporting and reduction programs (for example, the us epa’s climate leaders program and the us doe’s voluntary reporting of greenhouse gases program) and made a legally binding emission reduction commitment in the ccx (carpenter 2001). however, while each of these actions is important for a number of reasons, none of them has the impact of an allencompassing national policy on greenhouse gas emissions. therefore, much of what developed in recent years through local governments, non-profits, and businesses did not have a major impact on overall greenhouse gas outputs at the national scale. within this context, there have been several court challenges to the us government inaction as well as lawsuits against state governments and private organizations and individuals. these lawsuits have focused on a variety of policies including statutory issues such as the clean air act, challenges to individual projects, state vehicle emissions standards, and common law claims. although only a handful of these cases have been successful, they have resulted in a variety of interesting outcomes that have a direct impact on us greenhouse gas policy. at the same time, the us epa, under the direction of the obama administration, recently took significant actions to regulate greenhouse gases under the clean air act, and the us congress developed legislation that would have had far-reaching impacts for the future of greenhouse gas policy. this paper reviews and synthesizes actions taken in the three branches of government, including some of the key national lawsuits that have impacted current us policy; it assesses pertinent actions to regulate greenhouse gases from the current presidential administration and the us epa; and it summarizes the current congressional stalemate by reviewing the proposed climate legislation that passed the house of representatives and was considered in the senate prior to the 2010 elections. the paper adds to the brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 3 current literature in that it summarizes key actions taken within the national policy framework and synthesizes climate policy options within the us government system. greenhouse gas litigation (judicial branch) many cases have been brought before the courts that attempted to address problems associated with greenhouse gas litigation (gerrard 2007). they can be divided into categories of law: federal statutory law; challenges to individual projects using federal and state statutory law; vehicle emissions standards; common law claims with injunctive relief; and common law claims with financial relief (arnold & porter llp 2011). each category will be discussed briefly to highlight the major cases and their outcome. federal statutory law lawsuits have been brought forward that utilize the provisions of the clean air act, the clean water act, the global change research act, the alternative motor fuels act, the endangered species act, and the energy policy act to test current practices of the us government actions within the courts. perhaps the most tested aspect of federal statutory law is the failure of government to regulate greenhouse gases. many of the proceedings have sought to compel the government to use its statutory power to reduce or prevent injury from climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. bringing such a claim to court is difficult in that the litigant must demonstrate legal standing to bring the case (that is, they must experience direct damages) and they must be able to demonstrate the link between inaction by the government and resultant damage. the most successful of these cases is massachusetts et al. v. us epa et al. (united states supreme court 2006). in this case, the state of massachusetts and other petitioners brought forward a lawsuit to require the us epa to regulate greenhouse gases from tailpipe emissions to eliminate future damages. the case challenged us epa’s contention that it did not have congressional mandate to regulate greenhouse gases. in addition, the us epa’s stated policy was that even if it was decided that they had regulatory authority over greenhouse gas regulation, they would opt not to regulate the gases due to the unique nature of the pollution. they also stated that the scientific link between greenhouse gases and global warming was not clear. eventually, the case was heard in the us supreme court where it was decided by a 5 to 4 majority that us epa was required to regulate greenhouse gases. brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 4 there were several key points to this case. first, the court decided that massachusetts and the other petitioners have standing to bring the case. this has proven difficult (as discussed further in the analysis of kivalina v exxon et al. below) in greenhouse gas cases. in this case, the state of massachusetts was held to have standing due to direct or imminent threats to its territory due to the impact of global warming. another important aspect of the case is the court’s recognition that global warming brought on by greenhouse gases is a real and recognized threat to property. this countered the us epa, which at the time stated that the links between greenhouse gases and the effects of global warming were not clear. in addition, the court also asserted that us epa’s failure to regulate greenhouse gases contributed to the injury experienced by the state of massachusetts and that the us epa had a duty to attempt to slow or reduce greenhouse gases by regulating emissions. the result of the supreme court decision is that the us epa must consider greenhouse gases as regulated pollutants. this decision, prior to the 2008 presidential election, caused the us epa to develop a policy in the midst of significant political change in which the new obama administration was likely to work toward a comprehensive national greenhouse gas policy. in response to this ruling, the us epa has initiated a flurry of regulatory initiatives and rulemaking activities to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from not only tailpipes, but from other sources of greenhouse gas emissions (see below for more details). in addition to the regulation, the us epa signed the endangerment finding and cause or contribute finding for greenhouse gases under the clean air act in december 2009, widely known as the greenhouse gas endangerment finding. in these findings, the us epa concluded that six greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride threaten the public health and welfare. in addition, the us epa noted that carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and hydrofluorocarbons emitted from vehicle exhaust contribute to climate change and must be regulated. the more conservative congress elected in 2010 has made attempts to reverse the us epa’s actions via legislation, and ten petitions for reconsideration, including petitions from the chamber of commerce and the state of texas, were submitted to the us epa for evaluation. to date, these attempts and petitions have failed and the us epa has held steadfast in upholding the findings. brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 5 the endangered species act is another law that was tested through litigation to attempt to force the federal government to address global climate change. perhaps the most well-known case involved the center for biological diversity’s case against the department of the interior and other defendants for a lack of protection for the polar bear (united states district court for the northern district of california 2007a, 2007b). polar areas are at great risk from global warming as subtle changes in temperature can melt sea ice and greatly alter ocean conditions. the polar bear, which is partly dependent on sea ice as a habitat, is particularly vulnerable to global climate change. in 2007, the center for biological diversity sued the federal government to take action. while the bush and obama administrations have not supported the use of the endangered species act to address climate change, the bush administration did settle the lawsuit by designating 200,000 acres of land, sea, and ice as critical habitat for the polar bears. another center for biological diversity groundbreaking lawsuit associated with global warming involved the use of the clean water act in trying to regulate ocean acidification off the shores of the united states (craig 2009). a substantial proportion of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere from human activities is absorbed in the oceans and this is causing a process known as ocean acidification throughout the world’s oceans (hoegh-guldberg et al. 2007). among other things, ocean acidification leads to decreased shell and skeleton production by many species of marine life which depend upon calcium carbonate (hays, richardson, & robinson 2005). in 2007, the center for biological diversity commenced a lawsuit contending that the oceans off a portion of washington state were being impaired due to ocean acidification. they noted that the us epa did not list the waters impacted by the ph change as impaired in their listing of impaired water bodies in washington. designated impaired water bodies require particular action. thus, the center for biological diversity contended that the us epa’s decision not to list the water bodies had a direct negative impact on the nearshore water quality. indeed, the lawsuit notes that ph declined 0.2 points on the ph scale since 2000, which violates washington’s water quality standards. not surprisingly, there is great concern for the future of washington’s fisheries. in early 2009, the us epa wrote to the center for biological diversity stating that they would initiate a comprehensive examination of ocean acidification in order to arrive at a better assessment of water quality attainment in marine waters (united states environmental brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 6 protection agency 2009). to that end, the us epa sought has sought data, public comment, and other information in an effort to understand ocean acidification better (federal register 2009). the public comment period ended in may 2010 and a memorandum was issued in november 2010, which requires states to list waters as impaired if there is evidence for ph decreases beginning in 2012 (us environmental protection agency 2010). another area of litigation has gone in the direction of requiring the federal government to release documents and follow existing law to assess greenhouse gas impacts. for example, the global change research act required the us government to develop regular reports on the current state of greenhouse gas research in the united states. in addition, the reports were to assess implications for the environment in order to guide national and world climate policy. the government did not complete the report in a timely fashion under the g. w. bush administration. thus, the government was taken to court and compelled to complete the work as per a court order (united states district court for the northern district of california 2007a). likewise, the freedom of information act was used in a successful lawsuit brought forward by the center for biological diversity and others against the us office of management and budget (omb) that asked the courts to require the omb to release documents associated with the development of fuel economy standards for us vehicles without a fee (united states district court for the northern district of california 2008). in a similar lawsuit using the us energy policy act of 1992, the center for biological diversity once again sued the federal government for not complying with the reporting requirement of the us energy policy act (united states department of energy energy efficiency & renewable energy 2010). because the us government was not publishing the required reports, it was difficult to ascertain whether it was complying with the requirements of the act, which, among other things required the government to develop a fleet of alternative fuel vehicles. the center for biological diversity largely won the case and the government was required to comply with the strict reporting requirements. while this may seem like a small victory, the suite of lawsuits discussed here demonstrated the lack of transparency in government. indeed, there was a perception that the federal government was hostile to the issue of climate change and preferred to work on other areas of environmental policy. in the face of limited or no brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 7 progress in implementing national policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions, environmental non-governmental organizations have felt obliged to pursue numerous cases concerning document access and compliance with reporting requirements. challenges to individual projects another form of greenhouse gas litigation is in the form of challenges to individual projects. most of these cases have challenged the construction of coal-fired power plants. these cases are challenging for applicants in that they must demonstrate direct injury to an individual or property owner due to global warming, and they must prove that the power plant would be responsible, in part, for climate change. the political context for these lawsuits is often brought into question by respondents. defendants have argued that within the present political situation, when there is no guidance from the us government on greenhouse gas issues, they should not be regulated by the courts. indeed, in one decision handed down by the supreme court of south dakota upholding the right of the otter tail power company to proceed with construction of a new power plant, the court noted that ‘as members of the judiciary, we refrain from settling policy questions more properly left for the governor, the legislature, and congress. no matter how grave our concerns on global warming, we cannot allow personal views to impair our role under the constitution’ (supreme court of south dakota 2008). nevertheless, several lawsuits have impacted the nature of power plant construction in various locations around the country. perhaps the most interesting of several power plant lawsuits and challenges occurred in georgia where longleaf energy associates wished to construct a 1,200 megawatt coalburning power plant in early county, georgia. challenging the construction in the superior court of fulton county, georgia, the friends of the chattahoochee and the sierra club sued longleaf energy associates for failure to conduct appropriate analysis and modeling on air pollution (superior court of fulton county 2008). one of their key arguments was that they did not conduct any analysis of carbon dioxide emissions. they claimed that after the supreme court decision of massachusetts v. us epa requiring the us epa to regulate carbon dioxide, those constructing a power plant must conduct a best available control technology (bact) analysis to determine how best to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the power plant. longleaf energy argued that the us epa had not yet published guidelines and that they should not be held responsible for brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 8 bact analysis since there was not yet any clear federal guidance on the issue. however, the court sided with the friends of the chattahoochee and the sierra club in noting that the clean air act specifically defines an air pollutant as any pollutant subject to regulation. the court argued that since the publication of massachusetts v. us epa carbon dioxide was defined as a pollutant subject to regulation and thus must be addressed in any bact analysis. thus, the court ruled that the project could not proceed until a bact analysis that included carbon dioxide was completed. while many cases challenging the construction of power plants have been dismissed due to the lack of regulatory guidelines on greenhouse gas emissions, this case brought forward the possibility of greater regulation of carbon dioxide at sources as a result of massachusetts v. us epa. a case from 2006 foreshadowed us epa v. massachusetts and the longleaf power plant case. owens corning corporation, while constructing a polystyrene foam insulation facility in gresham, oregon, was challenged by the northwest environmental defense center, the oregon center for environmental health, and the sierra club (united states district court for the district of oregon 2006). the plaintiffs argued that the site was not permitted correctly since it was going to emit more than 100 tons per year of a regulated pollutant. in addition, they argued that the gases emitted, particularly 1-chloro-1, 1-difluoroethane (hcfc-142b), were greenhouse gases and ozone depleting substances that could prove harmful to residents in the community in a variety of ways. owens corning argued, in part, to dismiss the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not have standing and that there was no injury caused by global warming to the litigants. interestingly, the court noted that even though greenhouse gases from various sources are mixed in the atmosphere, local sources do contribute to local impacts. thus, the emissions of one particular plant, combined with all other emissions around the world can impact local conditions such as sea level or snow pack. therefore, the individual source should be regulated to reduce local impacts, even though there are multiple sources. state vehicle emissions standards another branch of greenhouse gas law focuses on controlling emissions standards of vehicles. in recent years, there has been much focus on federal corporate average fuel emissions (cafe) standards for auto emission requirements for auto manufacturers brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 9 (austin & dinan 2005). the us epa is the organization that sets cafe standards. however, because california was involved with fuel economy standards prior to the passage of the clean air act, the state was given special status and can apply for waivers to the us cafe standards for stricter rules. such waivers were granted many times since 1968. however, in 2005 and 2006, the california air resources board sought permission from us epa to increase fuel efficiency once again. this time, in 2007, the request was denied and lawsuits followed. many us states are interested in tightening federal guidelines (lutsey & sperling 2005). however, when california attempted to implement its new standards, several lawsuits were filed. in these lawsuits, various players in the automobile industry questioned california’s right to develop cafe standards. manufacturers and dealers also argued that the development of multiple emissions standards would be a hardship on the us auto industry since multiple standards would require multiple designs and thus drive up the costs of production. while the courts have been mixed in their reviews of this branch of law, for example, central valley chrysler jeep and others sued the california air resources board over emissions standards (united states district court for the eastern district of california 2008), the bush administration did not support california’s new guidelines. however, with new presidents come new policy approaches. in 2009, president obama supported california-like standards for different states, but required that they be managed by the us epa and not the states. new flexible standards that allow trading was approved in 2009.thus, the lawsuits had a distinct effect on the development of a new approach to manufacturing fuel-efficient cars. yet, when the city of new york sought to require that all taxis be hybrid vehicles, the metropolitan taxicab board of trade sued on the grounds that the city did not have the right to set cafe standards (grynbaum 2011). the case ended up in the us supreme court that essentially confirmed that the federal government was the only organization that can set cafe standards. thus, new york city was not allowed to enact a hybrid-only rule for cabs. common law claims with injunctive relief another avenue for greenhouse gas litigation is the use of common law claims, in some cases involving a request for injunctive relief. injunctive relief may be sought by a litigant in order to stop a person or organization from doing something that they brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 10 perceive as harmful. in some environmental cases, injunctive relief has stopped emissions of a pollutant or caused the development of environmental policy. for example, in 2005, connecticut and several other states sued american electric power and several other power companies in attempts to force greenhouse gas emission reductions from their power plants (united states supreme court for the southern district of new york 2005). the plaintiffs asked the court to cap emissions from the power plant and to develop a schedule of reductions for emissions due to greenhouse gas pollution. the nature of these types of cases makes it difficult for courts because they do not like to adjudicate cases that are political in nature. if there are large policy issues at stake, courts prefer that the issues be addressed at the legislative or executive branches of government. in the connecticut v. american power case, this is exactly what the court decided. the issue was too big for the courts to manage effectively and the case was won by the defendants in district court. interestingly, the case was overturned at the circuit court in september of 2009 when the court ruled that the case was judiciable under the political question doctrine (the united states court of appeals for the second circuit 2005). this turnabout, similar to that provided by comer et al. v. murphy oil usa et al (united states court of appeals for the fifth circuit 2009), provides opportunities for individuals and organizations to bring greenhouse gas emission nuisance claims forward in the court. in a similar case, korsinsky v. the us epa et al. (united states district court for the southern district of new york 2005), the plaintiff petitioned the court to require us epa to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to address health threats from global warming. however, the court found that the plaintiff’s injuries were not enough to grant him standing to bring this suit. common law claims with financial relief one of the most controversial areas of greenhouse gas litigation has been the seeking of damages due to the result of greenhouse gas emissions. there is growing evidence that some communities have been deleteriously impacted due to global warming (patz et al. 2005). according to an abundance of national and international law (organization for economic co-operation and development 1992), a polluter is responsible for damages caused as a direct result of the pollution. however, greenhouse gas emissions and concomitant global warming are dispersed across the planet from multiple sources in all brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 11 countries of the world. thus, the challenge is to show the direct link between global warming and associated damages. nevertheless, some cases have tested the courts to seek damage claims against producers of petroleum products. the line of reasoning for this argument is similar to that used in the tobacco lawsuits, which claimed that tobacco companies continued to produce a product that they knew was harmful to human health. therefore, a key aspect in any lawsuit of this type is that the litigant must demonstrate that the petroleum companies knew of damages they were inflicting on the environment through the burning of their product. perhaps the best-known case that tested this area of law is kivalina v exxon et al. (united states district court for the northern district of california 2009). kivalina was a small native alaskan village that existed on a small spit of land offshore of alaska. the community was a traditional fishing village with less than one hundred households. in the last decade, the ice surrounding the village began to disappear, leaving the shore susceptible to wave erosion, particularly during fall and spring storms when sea ice, which normally would be present, was absent. the village sued a number of petroleum producers and energy producing companies for the costs associated with moving the village, arguing that they were partly responsible for past and ongoing contributions to global warming and that the defendants were responsible for perpetuating a conspiracy to suppress the knowledge of a link between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. as noted, the lawsuit had several political hurdles, and it was dismissed by the united states district court for the northern district of california. the court decided this case on two grounds. first, the court argued that the case dealt with matters that have not been decided politically. the court concluded that the legislative and executive branches of government were the best avenues for developing policy on greenhouse gases. in addition, the court noted that everyone on the planet is in some way responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and that it is difficult to develop sound policy under such circumstances. in addition, the court ruled that the village did not have standing to bring the case since the pollution could not be ‘fairly traceable’ to the defendants. in other words, the court felt that there must be more direct proof that the emissions put out by the defendants had a direct link to the coastal erosion that caused the damage to the village. the court felt that the links were too weak to make the defendants responsible brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 12 for the damages to kivalina. the plaintiff in this case has appealed the decision. it seems apparent that the village was destroyed as a result of changing temperatures in the arctic region. the question is whether the courts will assert a link between emissions and global warming and assign damage recovery. the implications of this type of lawsuit are significant. if won, it would set a precedent for financial recovery caused by greenhouse gas emissions and an onslaught of court cases would be filed that could potentially harm the energy industry and its linked economies. presidential action and the us epa (executive branch) as introduced in the previous section, the supreme court ruling from massachusetts v. us epa resulted in authorizing the us epa to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipe emissions. while the case was decided in 2007, no change in policy occurred until recently. as already discussed, this inaction was mostly a function of a lack of leadership in former presidential administrations. however, a shift occurred when barrack obama pledged in his presidential campaign to ‘fight climate change, invest in clean, renewable energy, and chart a new energy future’ (organizing for america 2009). to date, the president has made great strides in following through on his commitment. for example, in october 2009, the president issued an executive order to ‘lead by example’ by committing all federal agencies to set greenhouse gas reduction targets within 90 days as well as a number of other sustainability goals (council on environmental quality 2009). additionally, president obama made several key appointments (for example, steven chu in the department of energy and lisa jackson in the us epa) to agencies and has directed these agencies to take significant action to transition to clean energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions (the office of the president elect 2008). chu and jackson have led their organizations to develop the president’s agenda to move the country towards addressing climate change. the american recovery and reinvestment act provided over us$800 billion in stimulus funds, much of which was intended to facilitate the usa’s transition towards clean energy while at the same time jump starting the economy. additionally, the president signed a memorandum to improve energy efficiency of appliances. lastly, the president signaled to congress that he would sign into law legislation with significant greenhouse gas reduction targets of 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2017 and 83 percent by 2050. brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 13 the greenhouse gas reduction targets were announced just prior to the post-kyoto meeting in copenhagen in december 2009, which along with the house of representative’s-passed climate bill the summer 2009 (see discussion below), showed some progress on federal climate change in the usa. however, since the climate bill had yet to pass the senate prior to copenhagen, the obama administration was limited in becoming a powerful negotiator at the meetings (samuelsohn 2009). regardless, one outcome of the copenhagen negotiations is that the usa, along with brazil, china, india, and south africa, signed the copenhagen accord (united nations framework convention on climate change 2009). by signing the accord, delegates pledged to emission target reductions, agreed that climate change is ‘one of the greatest challenges of our time,’ and concurred that deep cuts are needed to avert a dangerous increase in temperatures. it is unknown what the impact of the usa signing of the copenhagen accord will be since the accord is non-binding and the usa’s reduction targets have not been legislated through congress. however, by signing the accord, the president sent the message to the international community that the usa is serious about addressing climate change, and participation was thought to have improved the president’s chances for swaying the senate in passing climate policy (samuelsohn 2009). in durban, the usa reported progress towards the reduction target and highlighted two recent actions from the obama administration (i.e., increase in the fuel economy standard and investments in clean energy technology through the stimulus bill) (sheppard 2010). under the direction of administrator lisa jackson and the backing of the obama administration, the us epa has taken significant regulatory action to address climate change under the clean air act (united states environmental protection agency 2009). first, rulemaking to regulate emissions from stationary sources began by setting thresholds for greenhouse gas emissions and permitting requirements for new and existing industrial facilities (known as the tailoring rule). the ruling will cover approximately 70 percent of industrial facilities (i.e., electricity providers, refineries, and other high energy users). second, the us epa finalized a mandatory ruling whereby facilities in selected sectors that emit more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (mtco2e) must publicly monitor and report greenhouse gas emissions annually beginning in 2010. a carbon dioxide equivalent is a standardized term used to account for all non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases in the reporting of brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 14 emissions in a regulatory scheme. non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases are converted to equivalents by multiplying by its respective global warming potential (ipcc 2007a, 2007b). this ruling will cover about 85 percent of greenhouse gas emission sources. third, a final ruling was announced in april 2010 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from new cars and light trucks. finally, a number of voluntary programs have been continued and proposed to aid other organizations in measuring and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. the obama administration’s agenda and strong actions taken at the us epa are thought to have spurred congress into drafting comprehensive energy and climate policy (see discussion below). while the us epa has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions using traditional ‘command and control’ regulatory methods, many think this method is inadequate to effectively address the complexity of climate change. additionally, us epa regulation does not provide incentives and mandates to transition the usa away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy or for adaptation planning. additionally, the us epa is not equipped to address higher consumer costs of electricity and fuels or the potential loss of industry to developing countries. according to a recent study, a consensus (that is, 91.6 percent) among economic experts is that market-based mechanisms such as a carbon tax or cap and trade program is the ‘preferred or strongly preferred’ approach over traditional regulation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and that significant risks to specific sectors in the usa and abroad exists if emissions are not reduced (holladay, jonathan, & swchwarz 2009). it appears that neither the presidential administration nor any one federal agency (for example, the us epa or the us doe) is fully equipped to implement a market-based system. this approach, or a carbon tax, are more suited to be legislated through congressional action. therefore, greenhouse gas litigation, presidential action, and us epa action have effectively moved congress to move beyond debate and begin to take action to enact legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. congressional national climate policy (legislative branch) while a national climate policy was introduced in former congresses prior to the obama administration, these bills have not progressed in any significant manner. however, due to actions taken by the courts, president obama’s initiatives, a democratdominated congress, and new us epa regulations, the 111th congress had initiated brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 15 significant action. in the summer of 2009, the american clean energy and security act of 2009 (referred to as the waxman-markey bill) narrowly passed the us house of representatives with a vote of 219–212 (congressmen waxman and markey 2009). following the passage of the waxman-markey bill, a similar bill was advanced in the senate, titled clean energy jobs and american power act (referred to as the kerryboxer bill) and passed the environmental and public works committee on november 5, 2009 (senators kerry and boxer 2009). the senate bill initially showed promise of reaching the senate floor and ultimately being sent to the president for ratification; however, the bill stalled. additional bills were brought forth later in the 111th congress. however, at the close of the congressional section, no senate bill was passed leaving the passage of federal climate policy up to the incoming 112th congress. the shift to gop leadership in 112th congress has not only ceased the possibility of enacting a federal climate bill, but has resulted in the reverse, namely threats to delay or outright repeal the us epa authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the clean air act (koch 2011). the bill with the most momentum is the energy tax prevention act of 2011 (also known as the upton bill), which would not only remove the us epa’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, but would also repeal the endangerment finding (upton 2011). the upton bill, with 46 co-sponsors most of which are republican, passed the house subcommittee on march 11, 2011 and is scheduled for debate in the full house energy and commerce committee in march 2011 (koch 2011). us epa administrator lisa jackson testified to the subcommittee on march 11, 2011 that the upton bill would ‘overrule the scientific community on the scientific finding that carbon pollution endangers americans’ health and well being’ (jackson 2011). the bill passed the house on april 7, 2011 and was referred to the senate the next day where it was read twice and referred to the committee on environment and public works. if the senate passes this bill, this legislation would stop regulatory initiatives in progress at the us epa and would likely be sent back to the courts for further hearings. while neither the waxman-markey nor the kerry-boxer bills were ultimately ratified, it is worthwhile to evaluate the provisions contained in the bills as they provide a framework for federal climate policy. in addition, these bills will likely provide the foundation for the next climate bill submitted in the next congress. both the waxmanmarkey and kerry-boxer bills were strikingly similar and both have the same stated brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 16 purpose, which is, ‘to create clean energy jobs, achieve energy independence, reduce global warming pollution, and transition to a clean energy economy.’ it is important to note that the waxman-markey bill is 1,498 pages in length, and the kerry-boxer bill that passed the environment and public works committee totals 821 pages; therefore, a comprehensive analysis of both bills is limited in this article and the reader should refer to the original bills for more detail (senators kerry & boxer 2009; congressmen waxman & markey 2009). the remainder of this section provides a summary of both bills and is organized by the four major titles of the waxman markey bill, namely clean energy, energy efficiency, global warming reduction (cap and trade program), and the clean energy transition plan. each section contains a summary table of the major provisions followed by a discussion of key provisions from waxman-markey. where different, the kerry-boxer bill provisions are also discussed. clean energy (title i) since consumption of fossil fuel energy represents the majority of greenhouse gas emission sources in the united states, transitioning to clean energy sources would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. both the waxman-markey and kerryboxer bills include policies and programs designed to promote the development and rapid deployment of clean energy. table 1 provides a summary of the key clean energy provisions of the waxman-markey bill: key provisions o establishes a nationwide combined efficiency and renewable electricity standard (ceres) o establishes the supply targets (6% supply in 2012 and is gradually increased to 20% in 2039) o establishes the breakdown of supply (¾ from renewable energy and ¼ supply from energy efficiency) o establishes a federal renewable energy credit (rec) program o spurs r&d and the rapid commercialization of carbon capture and storage (ccs) from the combustion of coal o incentivizes the transition to the large-scale electrification of vehicles o establishes state accounts to distribute emission allowances to be used to fund energy projects o improves the distribution of clean energy with smart grid technology and transmission planning o establishes and funds research, education, and training facilities (i.e., energy innovation hubs and centers for energy and environmental knowledge and outreach) o establishes revolving loans to fund research of advanced technologies as well as nuclear o requires miscellaneous studies, determinations, and new agency development table 1. clean energy (title i) key provisions in the waxman-markey bill brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 17 notably, the waxman-markey bill specifies a nationwide combined efficiency and renewable electricity standard (ceres)—this is also referred to as a national renewable portfolio standard (rps). the kerry-boxer bill differs in that it does not designate a national standard, but rather provides incentives to states that have adopted an rps. a national standard would create uniform goals across the nation. currently, 33 states have voluntary or binding rps programs in place and the targets differ significantly (us department of energy energy efficiency & renewable energy 2010). while the senate version would encourage more states to develop an rps, a nationwide system would be a more comprehensive approach and would require that all states participate, thus creating equitable solutions in transitioning towards clean energy in the country. both bills are full of provisions to improve our current electricity production in this country, particularly coal. for example, both bills will require coal-fired power plants to meet performance standards with targets of 65 percent greenhouse gas reduction for plants permitted after 2020. the bills also provide for significant research to advance carbon capture and sequestration technology. both bills have provisions to increase electrical capacity, including the large-scale electrification of vehicles, smart grid, and transmission technology. the waxman-markey bill only briefly mentions nuclear energy under the heading of ‘advanced technology,’ while the kerry-boxer bill included more provisions for the nuclear industry, including additional training for the nuclear workforce and research and development for nuclear facilities. energy efficiency (title ii) both bills provide for policies whose goals are to improve energy efficiency in the built environment as well as to improve transportation efficiencies. table 2 provides a summary of the key provisions contained in title ii of the waxman-markey bill. as stated in table 2, the waxman-markey bill stipulates an initial 30 percent improvement of energy efficiency in buildings with an ultimate goal of achieving ‘zero-net-energy’ consumption. the bill proposes to achieve these goals through the development of stringent building standards and incentives. the kerry-boxer bill differs in that it does not specify energy efficiency targets, but rather assigns that responsibility to the us epa administrator to establish beginning in the year 2014. the waxman-markey bill is far more aggressive with immediate targets and an ultimate goal of zero energy brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 18 consumption. in addition, the waxman-markey bill contains a national energy efficiency goal that stipulates an overall 2.5 percent improvement by 2012, a provision that is absent in the kerry-boxer bill. key provisions o establishes building energy efficiency programs o sets an average energy efficiency reduction targets for residential and commercial buildings (30% initially with ultimate goal of zero-net-energy building) o establishes a national energy efficiency building code for new buildings o establishes and funds a retrofit for energy and environmental performance (reep) program o establishes standards and programs to improve energy efficiency in lighting and appliances o improves transportation efficiencies o sets greenhouse gas emission standards for new heavy-duty and non-road engines and vehicles o promulgates national greenhouse gas reduction targets for surface transportation sources o requires state transportation plans to set greenhouse gas reduction targets o spurs innovation in industrial manufacturing processes with programs and incentives o improves energy savings performance contracting o establishes a low-income community energy efficiency program and research on consumer behaviors o includes various miscellaneous provisions o establishes a national energy efficiency goal beginning with 2.5% improvement in 2012 o calls for a national products disclosure study o establishes numerous policies to provide green resources for energy efficiency neighborhoods o sets new energy efficiency standards for hud, rural, and federally-covered properties o includes numerous incentives, grants, demonstration/pilot projects, finance mechanisms, and requirements table 2. energy efficiency (title ii) key provisions in the waxman-markey bill the waxman-markey bill would require that greenhouse gas emissions standards be set for new heavy-duty and off-road engines and vehicles within three model years commencing four years after bill enactment, a provision that is absent in the kerryboxer bill. however, both bills will require that national transportation greenhouse gas reduction goals be established within 18 months of enactment of the bill. lastly, both bills contain a number of other incentive programs as well as investment in research, technology advancement, and education. reducing global warming pollution (titles iii and v) the third title establishes a national cap and trade program that includes greenhouse gas emission reduction targets and flexible compliance mechanisms for covered entities. brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 19 title v addresses carbon offset projects related to forestry and agriculture and has been included in this section because offsets are one of the flexible mechanisms included in the cap and trade program. table 3 provides a summary of the key provisions contained in titles iii and v of the waxman-markey bill. key provisions o creates a cap and trade system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions o establishes global warming pollution reduction goals and targets o establishes cap and trade program rules, including carbon offset and supplemental reductions from reduced deforestation o describes the distribution and allowable uses of emission allowances o establishes greenhouse gas standards for uncovered sectors; exempts certain pollutants from the cap and trade program (e.g., criteria air pollutants and certain hfcs); and other miscellaneous provisions o provides assurances for the regulation and enforcement of the allowance market and establishes a carbon derivatives market o establishes the usda as having authority of offset credit program from domestic agricultural and forestry table 3. cap and trade (titles iii and v) key provisions in the waxman-markey bill for both bills, the greenhouse gas reduction target begins at 3 percent of 2005 levels by 2012 and then is ratcheted up to 83 percent by 2050. the kerry-boxer bill has the same beginning and end targets, but has different interim targets. both bills allow two billion carbon offsets to meet the overall reduction target; however, waxman-markey allows for one billion carbon offsets originating from international projects whilst kerry-boxer limits offsets to one-half billion. both bills lay out detailed rules for the implementation of a cap and trade program including how allowances will be distributed and how the program and markets will be regulated and enforced. an important provision in both bills dictates how revenue generated from the sale or distribution of emission allowances must be passed through to the consumer to offset the higher cost of energy. this provision will help alleviate hardship to those that are most affected by higher electricity costs, specifically low-income residential consumers. standards and rules will be promulgated to regulate greenhouse gases in non-covered sectors, which would include greenhouse gas sources that fall below the threshold and sectors that have the potential to enhance carbon sequestration, such as forestry and agriculture. both bills outline how the cap and trade program will be strictly monitored to ensure real and additional greenhouse gas emission reductions. additionally, significant portions of generated funds from the program will be directed to various incentive programs, adaptation programs, research, and education. brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 20 clean energy transition plan (title iv) title iv outlines a transition plan that would move america towards a clean energy economy. table 4 provides a summary of the key provisions contained in titles iv of the waxman-markey bill: key provisions o ensures real greenhouse gas reductions in industrial emissions by providing rebates to eligible industries o establishes funding to develop green jobs and assists workers affected by the transition to clean energy o establishes an energy refund program to provide relief from higher electricity costs to eligible low-income consumers o provides assistance to developing countries to transition to clean energy o provides resources to adapt to already committed climate change o domestically, calls for a number of studies; establishes a national climate service office/program; requires states to develop a climate adaptation plan; and calls for national strategic plans to be developed to address public health issues and conservation of natural resources as a result of climate change o internationally, establishes a climate change adaptation program to assist developing countries address climate change o clarifies that programs will be deficit neutral and funds can only be used for intended purposes table 4. transition plan (title iv) key provisions in the waxman-markey bill the waxman-markey bill contains rebates to american industry to ensure that they remain competitive in the global markets and that industry ‘leakage’ does not occur (that is, industry is not exported overseas). in addition to standard rebates for all consumers dictated in title iii, additional energy refunds will be given to low-income residents and specific industries that will be the hardest hit from increased energy costs. both bills establish programs to train workers to enter the green workforce and help workers that might lose their jobs as a result of the transition. the bill also provides assistance to developing countries to facilitate the transition to clean energy. lastly, both bills have significant provisions to prepare for domestic and international adaptation that require state plans that not only address the direct impacts from climate change, but also address public health and natural resources. discussion and conclusions the use of the court systems to attempt to change environmental policy is not new. until recently, the lack of leadership in the executive and legislative bodies in solving the problems associated with climate change left little recourse but the courts for those brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 21 concerned with the impact of global warming. several court cases, particularly massachusetts v us epa, forced the government to address climate change within the executive branch through us epa regulation. the legislative branch has been slower to act. the 111th congress acted largely due to the pressures from the executive branch and the outcome of judicial court cases, while the 112th congress is acting to uses its regulatory power to attempt to repeal both executive and judicial action. clearly, the fate of national climate legislation is unclear at best. ‘institutional gridlock’ appears to be the roadblock that may thwart federal legislative action on climate change (byrne et al. 2007). in short, it is usually easier to prevent legislation than it is to pass it. in the 111th congress, this gridlock, along with the untimely loss of the democratic super-majority (from the replacement of senator kennedy’s seat), a troubled economy, and an exhaustive healthcare debate very likely prevented legislative action from occurring. and now, the gop-led 112th congress is using the economy as a major argument to pass legislation to stop regulation of greenhouse gases altogether (koch 2011). yet, the national climate change policy passed in the house of representatives (waxman-markey bill) and proposed in the senate (kerry-boxer bill) provides a comprehensive approach to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy efficiency, provide incentives to develop clean energy, and plan for the transition to a clean energy economy. this national climate policy includes clear greenhouse gas reduction targets with a timeline and provides for flexible compliance mechanisms for covered sectors to comply with the proposed legislation. economists nearly all agree that a national climate policy that utilizes cap and trade is the lowest-cost approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the united states (chettiar & schwartz 2009). cap and trade programs for other pollutants (for example, acid rain) have been shown to be an effective and fair approach to address the problem. additionally, cap and trade programs can be implemented at relatively lower costs than traditional ‘command and control’ regulations because covered sectors can select the most cost effective solution to meet its compliance target. however, some economists favor a carbon tax because they believe that a carbon tax would be simpler and quicker to implement (avi-yonah & ulmann 2009). regardless of the approach, neither market-based policy instruments are anywhere near implementation through legislative means, and neither approach is brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 22 being considered by the us epa under the current clean air act initiatives. as discussed above, the president has issued executive orders to reduce greenhouse gas emissions within federal agencies. he could exercise the same power to set greenhouse gas reduction targets that are within the jurisdiction of the executive branch. past presidents have often used this power to enact policy and strengthen their administrative powers (mayer 1999). however, the authority to implement such a comprehensive policy would be limited to the executive branch and would likely be challenged for its constitutionality and statutory authority in the courts. neither the courts nor the president have the ability or clear authority to implement a comprehensive cap and trade program that includes incentives for clean energy and a plan to transition american toward a carbon constrained economy that congressional legislation outlined in its bills. in the absence of such legislation, the us epa has set into motion significant and binding regulation of greenhouse gases. since legislation was not enacted, the us epa regulation is the only real us greenhouse gas policy and is in danger of being stopped in its tracks if the gop is successful with legislation (i.e., if the upton bill passes in the senate). while the legislative and executive branches are the best places to resolve political national issues like management of greenhouse gases and associated climate change, the courts have as of late been one way to influence greenhouse gas policy. massachusetts et al. v. us epa directly resulted in the development of the endangerment finding and the pending regulations of greenhouse gas emissions by the us epa. the lack of a clear legislative greenhouse gas policy weakens the us epa’s regulatory authority and puts many issues such as transitioning to clean energy and implementing a cap and trade program in limbo, particularly given the recent congressional effort to limit epa’s authority over greenhouse gas emissions. even in light of the conclusion that greenhouse gases may be regulated regardless of congressional action, detractors of any national climate policy remain focused on continuing the debate on whether climate change is real thereby attempting to delay meaningful national policy. for example, a recent controversy, referred to as ‘climategate,’ whereby a set of emails and files that apparently point out flaws in a small set of climate-change research has been used by advocates of climate policy to cast doubt with the us public (fahrenthold & eilperin 2009), even though us government scientists and the rest of the climate community say that the emails/files do nothing to negate the brinkmann and garren synthesis of climate change policy portal, vol. 8, no. 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http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder jonathan paul marshall, university of technology, sydney given the obvious dangers of climate change, the failure of the 2009 copenhagen climate conference requires social theorists to investigate reasons for the breakdown that go beyond pointing out the fear of change, describing denial, talking of conflict between particular power-blocks, demanding justice, or positing that the ruling class is determined to make money at the expense of the ecological system and their own survival. if we are to talk of ‘interests’ we need to talk of how people come to know their interests, and how they frame the world so as to make those interests seem real and possible. in taking this step we move into the interwoven realms of cosmology and psychology. i assume that human social dynamics grows out of the nature of human being and cannot be completely abstracted away from that being. at the same time i want to be attentive to matters arising around ‘disorder,’ so that disorder is not considered a residue, a pathology, or something to be bypassed as inessential. disorder is at the heart of our problem and needs to be part of our theory. this essay looks at responses to climate change as psycho-social responses mediated through myth and disordered networks. it begins with an account of editing a book on climate change (marshall 2009), and takes the insights from this process to an analysis of the copenhagen conference and its aftermath. within the international process, i particularly investigate whether myths of justice provide useful templates for behaviour. disorder disorder, as implied by the early writings of mary douglas (1969), is that part of the marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 2 world which slides out of our ego-based conceptual categories, and that we then recognise or label as bad. this includes both internal and external orders and disorders—which can appear to mesh together. disorder that is repressed does not go away; it returns and disrupts our hold on order. what is labelled as disorder always has troubling internal resonance: it becomes a source and object of projections of what we deny or repress in ourselves (in jungian terms our ‘shadow’), and contributes to the process of those selves and the varied (and conflicting) systems they are part of.1 social theory immersed in this view does not discard disorder, rubbish, exceptions, aberrations, or individual oddities. when compared to other disciplines, anthropology’s strength has been its interest in those things which others have ignored—magic, gifts, kinship, and so on. here this welcoming of discards is simply extended, and i attempt to refuse the violence that is done to the material through explanations which order through excessive simplification; turning mess into perfect structures; reducing variants to a single story; looking for simple abstract models or core elements; or building ideal types and discarding everything which does not fit. with sufficient ingenuity anything can be made to resemble almost anything else, but the differences and disorders may remain significant. a disorder sensitive social theory would not be just a typology of disorders, although the attempt might teach something. it would not aim for simplicity but for complexity; for not making the discard taboo, but knowing it probably would do so anyway. perhaps it might become symbolic-poetic itself, in order to make the lack of clarity clear. each attempt would be a different ‘way in’ and self confessedly incomplete. however, it would recognise that disorder and resistance to ordering is a vital part of psychosocial dynamics, just as culture conflict is a vital living part of culture. a metaphor a ‘thrum’ is the fringe of warp threads left on a loom after the cloth has been cut off; the unwoven ends of warp thread remaining on the loom when the web has been removed; a short or loose end of thread projecting from the surface of a woven fabric; the odd bits of waste; the knots and negatives on the back of the carpet that make the decorations. without the discard or underneath thrum there is no weaving. afterwards 1 this is necessarily a brief schematic outline of the relevant psychology. for more detail see marshall (2009). marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 3 thrums can be ordered or felted together and used elsewhere. waste can serve a purpose. socially a thrum is a company or body of people (or animals), a crowd, a bundle (of arrows); it suggests mess. oddly it could once mean ‘magnificence’ and ‘splendour.’ it can also mean careless playing or a smooth sound. thrum is paradoxical—a linkage in rhythm and resonance—it implies the background sound, the decaying resonance of piano notes as they shift into their own musics—the interactive space hanging between notes which is usually discarded in the rush to the next notes. it implies that the momentary makes the moment, the waste makes the product and that the order there is not necessarily an order underlying anything. such an order is just another thrum, elsewhere. climate change as a symbolic event climate change might be ideal for our purpose in exploring thrums and sociopsychology given that it is multifaceted, falling into many contested categories, and a subject for inner and outer life. climate is already highly symbolic and can encapsulate our inner storm, frosts, droughts, floods, fires or desert. it is already part of our inner lives and dreams; we cannot feel dispassionately about it. we respond deeply to these events and they map both our inner awareness and our unconsciousness. these psychological resonances cannot be stripped away from the reality of climate change, however much we might try; they disorder pure ‘rationality’ and provide its driving thrum. we are in the middle of several major pollution and ecological crises—declines in arable land, over-population, the sixth great extinction, and transgenic escapes for example—yet it is climate change that has taken hold of the imagination, becoming the centre of argument—perhaps because it has such symbolic resonances. it is, as levistraus remarked in another context,‘good to think with’ (1967). perhaps the first thing to say about climate change is that it is big. it cannot be conceived in its entirety. at the least, it involves the mysteries of: the world, nature, social and political action, morals, our psychology, the future, death, and the distribution of suffering. it joins together a whole series of otherwise disparate existential issues and problems. as such it is precisely the kind of ‘thing’ that becomes ‘numinous’ and becomes caught up in the mythic narratives that we use to make sense of the world, such as ‘justice’ or ‘apocalypse.’ marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 4 furthermore, change in climate is inherently disordering of previous orders. indeed previous orders might be the waste thrum not yet discarded. there is no known state we can pretend is equilibrium. taking disorder seriously and not thrusting it aside, we can say that climate change and the sense of disorder it encapsulates do produce psychological disordering. we can start to trace this particular disorder, not as an aberration, which might otherwise not be happening, but in itself, or in its selves. climate change resonates with social and psychological disorder, provoking ego breakdown or increased rigidity, and threatens organisational breakdown. it is usually defended against in relatively predictable ways, given particular social backgrounds and mythic vocabulary. this defence may further reinforce the disordering and its effects. this paper attempts to tease out some of the threads, knowing that they are not the weaving, yet that without them the weaving could not come to be, and to relate this to both the process of editing a collection of essays on depth psychology and climate change and then the copenhagen conference and its aftermath. the book the book, depth psychology, disorder and climate change (marshall 2009) grew out of a panel on climate change organised by sally gillespie, then president of the jung society of sydney. the panel was successful enough for the society committee to try and persuade more people to contribute and turn the event into a collection of essays. i sent around a call for papers to people who were suggested to me, and whom i knew through the society or through gillespie. the call was enthusiastically received and nearly everyone who was approached stated they should easily be able to find something to write about. we moved out of the local jungian circle as people were suggested by other people. some people who gave talks to the society were also approached, perhaps too many people: it resulted in a messy book. we had network and contact based sociality in action. tenuous threads became temporarily concrete; yet the network was never closed, in the sense that communication never proceeded amongst all participants—or, if it did, i was not included. probably most contact, but not all, was via email or attempted, but missed, email. sometimes, the weaving was through people visiting, or conversations occurring quickly and hesitantly ‘elsewhere’ in passing. the network was never clear; people saw knots rather than patterns. this was a temporary, marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 5 semi-contingent, network, woven out of other ties—in other words the network existed for a function and was likely to break when the function was fulfilled or failed. this temporariness is common in contemporary social formation. it was not an ordered network, nor a resilient network, simply the thrum of the potential book, without which the book would not exist and of which the book is the trace; itself a thrum of this passing network. i would suggest that this temporary thrumming, (edges, passing knots and resonance) is the way we generally act together in contemporary western society, while nostalgically or projectively (paranoically) thinking others act in a more orderly, coordinated, or rigid manner. this formation had a temporary hub in myself and the jung society. this hubbing had something of a radial formation. some of the contacts continued in other forms later, or carried on, in a slightly transformed manner the loose ties previously existing. thrums that persisted perhaps—of which new orders were made and then left no trace? it faded in and out like a wave on other waves. although it is tempting to claim networks are orders, they are often at best temporary, hidden orders, easily broken by even one person. the knot holding it all together gets cut and the weaving unravels. the more central the knot or the person the more it unravels, or the more it separates into other parts. networks are hard to rescue once broken. they need endless maintenance and repair to keep existing, so as not to fragment into individual threads, or rather for the threads not to be caught in other projects and pulled apart. gaps and forgetting occurred, people who should have been asked were not; the consequences never certain. it would seem especially that networks are always unravelling themselves as well as being unravelled by others. in copenhagen the powerful also found that sociality slips away, hanging into nothingness. power relations are a network, with pathways and patterns which are easily triggered, yet always unstable, so we can never tell where the unravelling will begin. in this weaving we also have the shifting thrums of sense-making, of bodily stolidity, symbols and psychology—a base perhaps, or just a bass line, figured but improvised, depending on what comes next from the others thrumming along. then the book network started to get complicated in a repetitiously disordered manner—the interference became the thing or, again, the thrum that made the process. marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 6 most of the contributors seemed concerned about climate change. many of them showed, what seemed to me, a surprising familiarity with official reports and public science—more surprising still given the ‘anti-science,’ poetic and religious bent of a fair number of those contributors. the contradictions, or edges of disturbance, emerge continuously. many of the contributors, including myself, repeatedly felt themselves being called to write, but blocked as to the actual writing in many different ways. in some cases people had to drop out as other things took greater precedence, or their lives were consumed by chaos and other networks. this is, of course, what you expect. nobody ever finds editing a collection is smooth, especially with a one-year deadline, but we composed a collection of people who were aware of the importance of the issues they were supposed to conceive, but many of whom found speaking or writing close to impossible. they were often stuck, and stuck quite badly. promising starts flattened into halting ventures. vagueness, even to readers familiar with jungian discourse, was common. there were clear gaps in argument. repeated corrections and changes of direction were presented. our ideas often appeared disordered, disconnected, dislocated, disoriented, disjointed, disrupted, disorganised and sometimes disengaged. the chaos supposedly located within the external world leaked into a chaos of the internal world and was not easily separated out. it constituted us as individuals socially engaged and sharing. ‘internal’ and ‘external’ mirrored and perhaps magnified each other. yet how else can conception occur, other than through symbols, the thrum not yet discarded as people reached out, or the symbols reached out of them, to deal with the disordering and the unknown they were immersed in? frequently contributors ignored my request not to list the facts of climate change. i felt we already had enough books about ‘the facts.’ however, some people felt compelled to write at length about how climate change was appalling, or to tell readers, or themselves, that the situation was urgent. they listed facts. quite often this listing had no discernable connection with the rest of their paper. i have since been told this urge for listing and condemnation (or ‘moral clarity’) is common in climate change projects and i, certainly, have heard people give academic presentations in which they repeat these facts and their anger about them, without ever reaching what they had declared to be the point of their papers. it is as if, in the face of horror, or visceral uncertainty, people feel compelled to recap what is known, as if this will clear something up, or reassure us—as if the repetition will give us an order in which to act. the chaos slides marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 7 away, under the litany of what we call reality. or perhaps the repetition reinforces the ego by its nature; the ego dwelling in repetition, it reweaves or restates. listing becomes ritual, which serves to let ourselves ride through chaos, or state yet again where we are, and state that we are right and good. perhaps it prevents us confronting the turmoil within and allows us to see the turmoil as outside? the crisis induces frantic attempts to solve the issue within the framework we already have, and perhaps to condemn others. the binary seems to be marked here. whichever ‘side’ we are on, we have to be both right and righteous—and while ‘side’ does not have to be binary, it usually falls that way for us. politics ideally has two sides, so does football; in business it tends to be ‘us’ versus the world—which it would seem already stacks ‘the world’ up as an enemy, to preserve the order that orders us. morality slides in, in other ways as well. as writers, people involved in the project often seemed swayed by morals or common sense, knotting beneath and making linkages between symbols. sometimes the argument seemed to be that climate change is bad and therefore we should change our behaviour (and this from depth psychologists—if only therapy was that easy). sometimes the argument seemed to be that as climate change was bad then our behaviour might change automatically. these arguments and repetitions, by naming the iniquity, could be seen to be attempts at creating unity both in ego and group simultaneously, by finding or making an evil or an immoral other, and expelling it by making a scapegoat and turning it to thrum. once the scapegoat, whether internal or external, was gone then all would be well, at least until the pattern perishes. morals are an ordering (which often prevents exploration) and which require things to fall out of them to be condemned and prove those morals worthwhile: this is the pattern of justice. however, with morals the psyche could pretend to harmony, the ego would be temporarily safe, at least until the ritual could be performed again. but each time is different, and the cutting of the weaving to finish off, leaves remains behind—it is not whole cloth, our disorder is not gone. the moral argument when deployed by people convinced that climate change is real, often implies that those who deny climate change are deliberate and often conscious deniers, people who take a stand against social change, or who lie in favour of capital, or just want to have fun, or something. i am deeply uncomfortable about this kind of argument, as despite the ease of seeing the deniers of climate change as destroying us marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 8 through their greed, or protecting their profit and status, it seems to me, that if you read their writings and listen to their speeches, that the ‘bad guys’ are also consumed by panic, incoherence, uncertainty and repetition. frequently everyone is searching for order and justice where none can exist. justice oppositions to capitalist orders of climate change are frequently woven together in terms of justice. there is the ‘climate justice movement,’ for example, and this is not just an opposition but, as we shall see, a not inessential knot of the copenhagen negotiations, which helped them unravel. justice is a myth that ‘justifies’ one’s moral superiority over others, and allows the projection of ‘evil’ onto others. in the myths of states and empires, justice occurs when the divine sets aside its proclaimed love, compassion or benevolence and engages in retribution. it excludes the unjust and often destroys them; something which might not be possible if we recognise our connections, or don’t want to authorise war. justice can also allow one to continue what one does, as: ‘everyone is more or less a bad guy because everyone contributes to climate change, and controlling it goes to the heart of every national economy’ (m’gonigle 2009). concepts of climate justice seem inadequate for the project of reducing climate emissions. let us take two examples of arguments from australia. first, barnaby joyce, a national party member, before the talks began: penny wong [australian climate change minister] is arguing countries like china should be entitled to produce more emissions and set their own targets because they are an emerging economy. if that is the case, then why can’t parts of rural and regional australia, with their developing economies, be allowed the same concession? (joyce 2009) second, tony abbott, leader of the liberal party and the federal opposition, in december 2009: ‘now we have about one per cent, or a little over, of global emissions. we could reduce our emissions to zero and china would make up the difference in less than a year given its increasing rate of emissions’ (abbott 2009). similarly, it was reported that the g77 nations, did not want binding emissions targets for themselves, only for the developed nations, ‘arguing that they need to keep access to cheap, plentiful fossil fuels to haul themselves out of poverty’ (‘un climate talks’ 2009). labor primeminister kevin rudd responded: ‘go to the future, if we the developed countries became carbon neutral tomorrow let me tell you the combined impact of china and marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 9 india into the medium term future would be huge’ (rudd 2009b). something likewise stated by jonathan pershing, the us deputy special climate change envoy, who said that china, india, mexico, brazil, and indonesia ‘will be responsible for 97 percent of the future growth in emissions’ (corn 2009). there is nothing particularly illogical about these positions, and they are making claims about justice and about fairness. emissions can be both just and unjust depending on where you are. if you look at china and india’s actual emissions and potential emissions, then they constitute a large proportion of the actual global emissions. if you look at emissions per head then they are quite small. further, if you regard emissions as essential for relieving poverty then, by objecting to their emissions, you are also condemning their people to poverty. yet, if they don’t make cuts then other people in small island states and in africa will probably suffer. ideas of justice cannot get you out of this position as there are competing and conflicting ideas of what is just and what is fair. justice can also be incapacitating and lead to positions demanding purity, which can imply that as everything must be done to be effective, nothing can be done. an ap report in the sydney morning herald quoted nasa scientist james hansen’s argument that: dealing with climate change allowed no room for political compromises. “this is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by abraham lincoln or the issue of nazism faced by winston churchill ... on those kind of issues you cannot compromise. you can’t say let’s reduce slavery, let’s find a compromise and reduce it 50 per cent or reduce it 40 per cent.” (‘global warming “godfather”’ 2009)2 everyone has different notions of justice, but each surely thinks that they are just and the others criminal. justice, indeed, requires a criminal other—which is always likely to make some people nervous and attack in return. by demanding a scapegoat, it also panders to our own ‘shadows,’ our own ego defences and blindness. we also have to ask ‘who it is that determines what is just or not? who is to enforce it? what kind of hierarchy of violence will make that enforcement work? how are we going to adjudicate between competing claims? is it just for developing countries to have their chance to pollute? and so on. it might be possible to argue that, in the same way as it is easier to get agreement on what constitutes disorder than it is to get agreement on what constitutes order because disorder can occur in many more ways, it might be possible to get people to agree on what is unjust. however, such agreement will not change the 2 besides, slavery was not ended all over the world at one time; it was reduced in parts. marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 10 disagreement about what is fair and just, what time frames should be involved, what the continuum of emissions should be, the relationship between development and emissions, or the relationship between current and ideal emissions. it simply enables us to eliminate states of affairs that are not actually probable or existent. for example, we might agree it would be unjust if an already highly polluting country (however we separate high from low polluters) doubled its greenhouse pollution in less than two years, when all other countries had decreased their emissions. such elimination does not remove conflict from justice, the thrum of our own repressions, or the need for enforcement. justice demands that all worldviews and social formations are uniform, or else it risks being unjust; yet without recognising that forms of life conflict, it cannot deal with reality. choosing justice as the rubric for action, is possibly better than choosing the myth of apocalypse, because apocalypse immobilises altogether, but it does not let us deal with the mess of climate or power relations. justice requires a unity and coordination which has not yet been woven, and cannot be built out of the clash without risking war. copenhagen itself before we even get to the likely impossibility of anyone weaving an all-encompassing plan out of the copenhagen meeting, we need to look at the complexity of the patterns of participation—the mess, the knots and thrum without a pattern. this account is something of a broken patchwork of presentation but it expresses the reports; and the expression of that disorder is more necessary than use of unexamined assumptions that the truth is whole and hidden. there were a total of 194 registered state parties to the conference, with 10,583 delegates. there were another two observer states, 900 registered observer organisations with a further 13,482 participants and another 3,221 media people (unfccc 2010: 2). among the observers were the world trade organisation and the world bank. this was reduced from the numbers who wanted to attend: ‘the unfccc secretariat revealed last night that 34,000 people had applied for accreditation to the meeting, taking place in a conference centre which only holds 15,000’ (mccarthy 2009a). although background negotiations and alliances had been building up over the year and people have relatively clear ideas of what can be done (even if they differ), the marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 11 provisional timetable is confronting in the amount to be done (see unfccc 2009). just to give some further idea of the mix; the official norwegian delegation included parliamentarians, public servants, diplomats, scientists, business people, unionists, environmental activists, members of charities, and unmarked individuals (unfccc 2009: 154ff). coherence was not always that marked even within state delegations. the recognised power blocks at the conference were:  the g-77, a loose coalition of 131 “developing nations,” including china, india, afghanistan, indonesia, sudan, cuba, papua new guinea and saudi arabia.  the 41 industrialised (annex 1) countries. annex 1 was defined in earlier treaties. it not only includes the usa, australia, the uk, germany, japan, russia etc, but liechtenstein, bulgaria, estonia and romania and other relatively poor small states. at the united nations earth summit in rio de janeiro in 1992, it was agreed that only these countries had to reduce emissions.  the 38 small island developing states who make up about 20 percent of the un general assembly, with another 14 non-un members.  the least developed countries bloc.  and, the opec block, which could be expected to oppose any limits on selling oil.  some sources also mention an african climate-negotiating group headed by ethiopia. on top of this there were simultaneous international activist forums, the most notable being the klimaforum09, again with a roughly joined patchwork of players. george monbiot (2010) commented: i came back from the copenhagen climate talks depressed for several reasons, but above all because, listening to the discussions at the citizens’ summit, it struck me that we no longer have movements; we have thousands of people each clamouring to have their own visions adopted. we might come together for occasional rallies and marches, but as soon as we start discussing alternatives, solidarity is shattered by possessive individualism. there was also the so-called climate group, which focused on a meeting of regional governments with at least 60 premiers, governors and ministers, featuring al gore, prince charles and helen clark. this meeting asked the main meeting to recognise that ‘up to 80 per cent of mitigation and adaptation actions are implemented at the subnational level’ and awarded the ‘inaugural state leadership award for action on climate change’ to arnold schwarzenegger (posner 2009). a trade union delegation led by sharan burrow, then president of the australian council of trade unions (actu), claimed to represent ‘168 million workers in 154 countries,’ and attempted to lock in ‘labour standards and good quality jobs’ (baggio 2009). finally, there was also a parallel meeting, of climate sceptics. as ian plimer (2009) writes: marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 12 two copenhagen climate conferences took place last week…. the conference i attended used science to understand the past, present environments and pollution. this was essentially unreported because journalists are scientific illiterates and this is not sensational news … the other conference, the un’s political conference, is about the redistribution of your money through sticky fingers. the tearing web while there are ‘ecological’ connections between all these people, there are not going to be ‘human’ connections; the sheer numbers and potential differences involved have to be acknowledged. there are few simple coherent networks here. these are knots without a visible tapestry. so not only do people face the kind of psycho-social disruption we have discussed, but it is likely that groups will fragment, networks dissolve, and alliances will fracture, making little basis for mutually agreed justice. for example, there are obvious overlaps in block membership; the categories are not coherent or mutually exclusive. india and china are not easily classified as ‘developing’ or powerless when compared to some annex 1 countries. china is somewhere between the second and third largest economy in the world with a gdp of close to us$8 trillion, tuvalu’s gdp is us$15 million (borofsky et al. 2009). estonia, an annex 1 country has a gdp of less than us$22 billion. annex 1 countries don’t have much in common, or many historical unities, but the most obvious conflict amongst them over reduction targets was between the usa and the eu. conflicts also manifested between relatively poor states with large forests (papua new guinea and indonesia) and those without, as redd proposals are of little use if you have no industrial emissions, limited agricultural emissions or no forests. the small island states argued that they faced destruction with the treaties being proposed, and broke with china and india. venezuela and bolivia, seemed to consider themselves a separate independent marxist block, but venezuela is an oil producer. categories like ‘west’ and ‘the rest,’ or ‘north’ and ‘south,’ don’t begin to capture the complex patterns of alliance and fracture manifested here or, perhaps more importantly, the potential change in the world’s power balance. the usa has in less than twenty years gone from being the world’s only unchallengeable superpower, to a troubled player amongst many. furthermore, countries themselves were not coherent. members on both sides of the us senate were openly opposed to restrictions on us activities. the conservative opposition in australia opposed the government’s scheme for carbon reduction as did the greens. there was a vocal and popular ‘climate sceptic’ movement in the usa, marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 13 australia and the uk supported by much of the mainstream media, which was largely hostile to any action at all; it can be seen in any online newspaper article of the period that allows comments. frequently sceptics argue that action hurting the economy would hurt the poor and cost jobs, and thus, by implication, be unjust. there was no web at the conference, only potentials and broken patterns. one of the problems that arose repeatedly was the problem of sovereignty. climate change cannot be solved nationally and thus it changes the relationships between states. india and china objected strongly to the idea of their emission cuts being inspected, just as much as the usa objected to other states putting limits on them. there is a suspicion of unjust freeloading by others, which implies that generous actions would be unfairly exploited. the same fragility exists elsewhere; even in an era which has celebrated neo-liberalist ‘free trade,’ it is notable that multi-party trade talks have continually broken down, and that most trade agreements have been bilateral, cutting down the number of participants and limiting complexity. even these, such as the 2004 australia–united states free trade agreement, have frequently been attacked as giving too much leeway to one or the other side, and overpowering local legislations. categories of national self and national ego are challenged by international regulation. incidentally the world trade organisation’s seventh ministerial conference in geneva, took place in the weeks before copenhagen, with the focus on increasing world trade and hence on increasing carbon emissions from transport. conflict and incoherence reign everywhere—this is part of the politics that must be dealt with. confusion is not only present in the interactions. process is also confused. thus in one article from 6 december environmentalist bill mckibben argued that climate change was unlike other political problems in that it could not be solved by incrementalism: the adversary here is not republicans, or socialists, or deficits, or taxes, or misogyny, or racism, or any of the problems we normally face—adversaries that can change over time, or be worn down, or disproved, or cast off. the adversary here is physics … physics doesn’t just impose a bottom line, it imposes a time limit. this is like no other challenge we face because every year we don’t deal with it, it gets much, much worse, and then, at a certain point, it becomes insoluble. (mckibben 2009a) a mere four days later, perhaps faced with deadlock, he compared climate change to the fight for health care in the usa, and said that something is better than nothing (mckibben 2009b). marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 14 demands i do not want to reiterate the science here, as that is well known. what is significant is that the small island states captured a large amount of publicity for their plight, and for demands that temperature rises should be kept to less than 2 degrees centigrade and co2 be restricted to 350 parts per million or less. this was never going to be agreed to by the big emitters, such as the usa and china. one commentator wrote: the dispute is fundamental because the amount of greenhouse gases already in the air condemns the world to an increase of at least 1.5 degrees. meeting the victims’ demand, therefore, would mean either stopping all emissions immediately, which would be impossible, or reducing them much faster than expected and finding a way of getting carbon dioxide out of the air. (lean 2009) we are arguing as the world weave tears. conference moods the conference moods and conflicts display the psychological processes. geoffrey lean stated that the conference ‘started in a more optimistic frame of mind than any i can remember in four decades of similarly tricky negotiations’ (lean 2009). interviewed on the abc on 8 december, sydney morning herald correspondent marian wilkinson said there ‘is a hell of a lot of energy here and there is a buzz around this conference. there’s no doubt about that. the optimism/pessimism is very difficult to judge because, frankly, people swing quite wildly between the two extremes’ (‘copenhagen climate change summit’ 2009). a day or so later time magazine reported that: ‘already, grinding diplomacy and criticism have overshadowed the good feelings and pageantry of the opening day of the summit’ (walsh 2009). australian climate change minister penny wong agreed with the statement on 10 december that ‘the atmosphere that you have flown into is not promising … the conflict between developing and developed nations and even within the developing nations themselves, a lotta harsh words going around?’ (‘penny wong live’ 2009). afterwards todd stern, the us state department climate change envoy, said that the summit was ‘a snarling, aggravated, chaotic event’ (watts et al. 2010). richard black of the bbc noted that the danish chief negotiator was sacked as a result of conflict between danish premier lars lokke rasmussen and the climate minister connie hedegaard. ‘this destroyed the atmosphere of trust that developing country negotiators had established with mr becker’ (black 2009). the danes, probably marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 15 worried that there was too much to get through, hurried people along, leaving players feeling their position had not been taken into account: ‘china’s chief negotiator was barred by security for the first three days of the meeting … this was said to have left the chinese delegation in high dudgeon’ (black 2009). rasmussen also offended people by implying he could not trust some delegates: ‘criticism of [rasmussen] has been backed by china, india—and brazil, which denmark has viewed as an ally’ (rothenberg et al. 2009). this fragmentation of expected alliances and organisation could be expected to produce paranoia-like analysis. the release of emails hacked from the east anglia climatic research unit, which allowed climate sceptics to claim climate science was ‘cooked,’ led un officials to claim the hackers were probably paid to undermine the copenhagen summit (totaro 2009). similarly, a day after the conference started, there was a leaked document: ‘a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as ‘the circle of commitment’—but understood to include the uk, us and denmark [which] has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week’ (vidal 2009a). the document was supposed to indicate that the agreement had already been stitched up, and that the conference was to hand power to the ‘rich countries.’ fury was expressed at the document. one anonymous diplomat said: ‘clearly the intention is to get obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. it effectively is the end of the un process’ (vidal 2009a). on the other hand it was reported that: ‘u.s. delegate jonathan pershing played down the implications of the document. “there is no single danish text, there are many danish texts.” he went on, “if there was no danish text, i would be appalled [since the delegates’ …] job is to bring something to the table’ (stone 2009). marian wilkinson reported further fears: we’ve been told by negotiators here that there is a fear from the chinese and the indians. they fear that the verification measures put in place could be used against them, especially by the us congress, also perhaps by some of the european parliaments, to impose carbon tariffs on them; that this will be used as a weapon to slug them in the international trade sphere (‘crunch time’ 2009). india’s environment minister, jairam ramesh, accused australian prime minister kevin rudd of lying about his position on climate change and pulled out of a meeting with australian climate change minister penny wong. she reportedly said that ‘she did marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 16 not know why mr ramesh pulled out of the crucial meeting. “you will have to ask him’” (wilkinson 2009). ramesh claimed he had been too busy. ramesh also called australia an ayatollah for wanting a single treaty to bind everyone (wilkinson 2009). in other talks, members of the g77 walked out to protest about the apparent abandonment of the kyoto protocol, and australia ‘then shut down the talks on emission cuts for rich countries’ (wilkinson 2009). about the same time, lumumba di-aping, a sudanese diplomat who was the official chief negotiator for the g77 group, said: ‘the message kevin rudd is giving to his people, his citizens, is a fabrication, it’s fiction’ (alberici 2009). after the event, a journalist asked penny wong if she got ‘the feeling that india is really boasting that it has sort of put one over the larger nations?’ (wong 2009). reports of the final day of negotiation suggest that there was a clash between china and the usa, in particular, and that there was also an attempt to generate a sub-conference to make things more controllable. a guardian report claimed that after ‘eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to barack obama and wen jiabao, the chinese premier, to broker a political agreement’ (vidal 2009b). the independent reported that the ‘day’s most remarkable feature was a direct and unprecedented personal clash between … barack obama, and … wen jiabao’ (mccarthy 2009b). the reporter explains the clash as stemming from obama’s public insistence that the chinese should allow their announced cuts to be inspected, and that without such verification an agreement was worthless. wen sent subordinates to all further meetings and obama was deeply annoyed (mccarthy 2009b). if this were the case, then this was not a new demand. many annex 1 countries wanted everyone to make cuts and have them verified; it could seem the chinese were ‘seeking’ to be insulted and insulting. people were not happy with the process of the final day. journalist george monbiot said: obama went behind the backs of the un and most of its member states and assembled a coalition of the willing to strike a deal that outraged the rest of the world. this was then presented to poorer nations without negotiation: either they signed it or they lost the adaptation funds required to help them survive the first few decades of climate breakdown. (monbiot 2009) richard black of the bbc, agreed that the deal was struck behind closed doors: ‘the end of the meeting saw leaders of the us and the basic group of countries (brazil, south africa, india and china) hammering out a last-minute deal in a back room as marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 17 though the nine months of talks leading up to this summit, and the bali action plan to which they had all committed two years previously, did not exist’ (black 2009). the most detailed account of part of the final day was given by mark lynas (2009), the climate advisor to mohamed nasheed, the president of the maldives. he said about 5060 people were in the room, and that wen jiabao did not attend. the chinese insisted that the previously agreed upon 2050 targets be taken out of the deal: ‘“why can’t we even mention our own targets?” demanded a furious angela merkel. australia’s prime minister, kevin rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone.’ (lynas 2009). the chinese further insisted that statements that emissions should peak by 2020 be removed: [t]he chinese delegate [also] insisted on removing the 1.5c target so beloved of the small island states and low-lying nations who have most to lose from rising seas. president nasheed of the maldives, supported by [gordon] brown, fought valiantly to save this crucial number. “how can you ask my country to go extinct?” demanded nasheed. the chinese delegate feigned great offence—and the number stayed, but surrounded by language which makes it all but meaningless. (lynas 2009) later on, kevin rudd said: at about one o’clock this morning in copenhagen, after seventeen hours straight of negotiation today, we agreed on a copenhagen accord on climate change. this was agreed in a negotiating group of about twenty-five nations … this last round of negotiations with that group began at 11pm last night. it ran through to three this morning, with myself in attendance, and then penny wong remained through the night. i resumed at 8am this morning and we have just concluded at 1am the next day. it has been a long day … the truth is, as of twenty four hours ago, these negotiations stood at a point of complete collapse. (rudd 2009c) with this level of exhaustion, it is improbable that anyone was thinking straight. obama left immediately, ironically and officially because of weather issues, but leaving distanced him, or attempted to distance him, from the mess of the involvement and the potential insecurity of his position, when not backed by congress. networks fractured, and perhaps had little chance of holding the threads of coherent constructive power in these psychosocial circumstances; unthreading was more likely. aftermath john sauven, executive director of greenpeace uk, said: ‘the city of copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport’ (vidal 2009b). lumumba di-aping, chairman of the g77, and thus notionally a supporter of continuing chinese emissions, stated that the agreement ‘is asking africa to sign a marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 18 suicide pact, an incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dependence of a few countries. it’s a solution based on values that funnelled six million people in europe into furnaces’ (batty 2009). indian and chinese representatives tried to explain the breakdown in unity, and their power, in the g77 by conspiracy: “there have been some efforts to deliberately divide us,” one of the senior chinese negotiators, qingtai yu told the bbc. “we have seen such moves here and this is nothing new” … an indian negotiator echoed the same message, adding, “in fact some of the poor countries have been threatened (by some developed countries not to toe the line of the g77) and we know there will be many such efforts” … “the allegation that we are trying to divide them is baseless and incomprehensible,” said karl falkenberg, a representative of the european commission. “you can see how divided they are on issues like average temperature rise and blaming us for that state does no good.” (khadka 2009) the guardian reported that a chinese government think tank reinforced chinese conclusions after the talks: ‘“a conspiracy by developed nations to divide the camp of developing nations [was] a success,” it said, citing the small island states’ demand that … brazil, south africa, india, china … impose mandatory emission reductions’ (watts et al. 2010). mark lynas, climate advisor to the president of the maldives, said in response: it’s astonishing that this document suggests the chinese really believe the absurd conspiracy theory that small island states were being played like puppets by rich countries. the truth is that the small island states and most vulnerable countries want china and its allies to cut their emissions because without these cuts they will not survive. bluntly put, china is the world’s no1 emitter, and if china does not reduce its emissions by at least half by mid-century, then countries like the maldives will go under. (watts et al. 2010) i’m not entirely convinced that uk prime minster gordon brown was not right to say: ‘this is the first step we are taking towards a green and low-carbon future for the world, steps we are taking together. but like all first steps, the steps are difficult and they are hard’ (batty 2009). perhaps too much was expected, and expectations also disrupted the process. in march 2010 it was reported that: many countries resented that it had been thrashed out and imposed on them outside the formal un negotiation process. but 114 countries have backed up their initial support by formally associating themselves with the accord and 74 have submitted targets to cut or slow greenhouse gas emissions. nearly 80 per cent of the world’s emissions are included. (morton 2010a) marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 19 in june 2010 claims were made that china’s leaders were preparing ‘the ground to exceed china’s pledge to reduce carbon emissions intensity by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020” (garnaut 2010). advice from the australian department of climate change suggested that ‘steps being taken by china might be equivalent to australia cutting emissions by 25 per cent” (morton 2010b). china cannot be accused of simple reluctance and resistance; things are much messier than that. in terms of comparative complexity we need to remember that the kyoto accord was initially signed as a framework in 1997. the rulebook was completed in 2001. it took effect in february 2005. it was ratified by australia only in 2008, and was never agreed to by the usa. reports of the tianjin conference, which appeared as i wrote the first draft of this essay (october 2010), suggest that the fracture, weaving and unravelling, the discarding and the felting, the ordered and the contingent, the distress and cries of injustice, continue to have play and will not fall into a simple order. yet out of the chaos has come something, the thrum has become felt. perhaps it is not useful, and perhaps it will be unthreaded, perhaps it did not matt thoroughly enough, but at the same time this disorder and dismembering is part of the politics and part of the social process and cannot be ignored by attempting to render what happened simple and coherent. conclusion and suggestions this paper has attempted to show that disorder is inherent in climate change and our psychosocial responses to it. with climate change, our certainties, alliances and social categories breakdown, as do the ways we organise our egos and our realities. the metaphor of thrum allows play with the intertwined mess and order, and shows that disorder cannot be ignored. networks, personal and political tend to be fragile. use of power disorders as much as it orders. old guiding myths such as justice are no longer useful for ordering this course of events. justice fails because it seeks a scapegoat, demands elimination of disorder and requires a uniformity, agreement and enforcement that cannot be present. on the other hand, disorder can be a sign of something neglected, of the unconscious or the unknown, as well as of a burgeoning creativity that can look like vandalism. depth psychology suggests that it is useful to listen to the disorder rather than discard it. it suggests that, with listening, this disorder can be symbolically synthesised with one’s ordering, so as to produce a new state that allows the person, or group, to better deal marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 20 with their problems. this renders disorder, no longer simply disorder but something symbolically conceivable, or recognisable, which is neither obstacle nor discard. disorder is no longer trash, but incorporated, transformed, as part of the pattern. depth psychology does not claim to know what this new order is in advance; that has to be formed, and uncertainty accepted during this process. the new order does not mean that there is no longer disorder. disorder is always present because our conceptual apparatus is always limited, and there is always something left over. just as we cannot describe anything completely in a finite period of time, so we cannot order everything. we can only work within the limits of what is orderable at the time, hoping for a minimum of relevant or repressed disorder. we move from one disorder to the next, which hopefully will test out as more adaptive and more moral. rather than demanding fairness and justice, perhaps we can ask all who are concerned to act now, to cut back emissions, to find new lives and morals which apply to them rather than are demanded of others. this is not denying the social power in a group of people moving together, but a wariness of a group that exists against another. such a group will create this ‘other’ and is likely to unconsciously become it. similarly we can ask people to respect the disorder of reality; not to demand or rush to an order which is not present, but rather to seek to listen to the thrumming, however much it appears to be part of the background, the mess, or the breakdown. we may likewise need to learn how to deal with disordered, fragmentary and fragile networks, as opposed to ordered institutions, and to keep them unravelling long enough to serve their momentary purpose. calling for ourselves and our leaders to listen to disorder rather than demanding certainty and ultimatums, may seem as impractical as calling for justice, but it may also be less destructive and more productive of new solutions which are not locked into our current ways of being and relations of power. reference list abbott, t. 2009. ‘interview with fran kelly.’ radio national, 16 december. online, 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the tyee, 6 december. online, available: marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 22 http://thetyee.ca/opinion/2009/12/06/copenhagencontradictions/ [accessed 9 october 2010]. monbiot, g. 2009, ‘if you want to know who’s to blame for copenhagen, look to the us senate,’ the guardian, 21 december. online, available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/21/copenhagen-failure-us-senate-vestedinterests [accessed 9 october 2010]. _____ 2010, ‘after this 60-year feeding frenzy, earth itself has become disposable,’ the guardian, 4 january. online, available:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/04/standard-ofliving-spending-consumerism [accessed 9 october 2010]. morton, a. 2010a, ‘climate can-do in cancun?,’ the age, 27 march. online, available: http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-cando-in-cancun-20100326r33g.html [accessed 10 december 2010]. _____ 2010b, “australia’s wake-up call on emissions target”, sydney morning herald, 30 november. online, available: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/australias-wakeup-call-onemissions-target-20101129-18dxb.html [accessed 9 october 2010] ‘penny wong live from copenhagen,’ 7.30 report, abc, 10 december. online, available: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2009/s2768309.htm [accessed 9 october 2010]. plimer, i. 2009, ‘the copenhagen charade,’ abc ‘unleashed.’ online, available: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/28144.html [accessed 9 october 2010]. posner, r. 2009, ‘emissions terminator shows how to inspire a crowd,’ sydney morning herald, 17 december. online, available: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/emissionsterminator-shows-how-to-inspire-a-crowd-20091216-kxlo.html [accessed 9 october 2010]. rothenberg, m., aagaard, m., & andersen, e. o. 2009, ‘løkke har problemer med topmøde-formen,’ politiken.dk, 18 december. [translated via google translate] online, available: http://politiken.dk/klima/klimapolitik/article862988.ece [accessed 9 october 2010]. rudd, k. 2009a, ‘transcript of coag press conference,’ 7 december. online, available: http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/node/6380 accessed 9 october 2010]. _____ 2009b, ‘transcript of interview. abc am,’ 14 december. online, available: http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/node/6395 [accessed 9 october 2010]. _____ 2009c, ‘transcript of joint press conference with the minister for climate change, copenhagen,’ 19 december. online, available: http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/node/6403 [accessed 9 october 2010]. stone, d. 2009, ‘the ‘danish text’ disrupts copenhagen: what you need to know,’ newsweek, 8 december. online, available: http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-gaggle/2009/12/08/the-danishtext-disrupts-copenhagen-what-you-need-to-know.html [accessed 9 october 2010]. totaro, p. 2009, ‘un blames professional hackers’ sydney morning herald, 8 december. online, available: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/un-blames-professional-hackers20091207-kffs.html [accessed 9 october 2010]. ‘un climate talks: the key players,’ the independent, 30 november, online, available: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/un-climate-talks-the-key-players-1831330.html [accessed 9 october 2010]. unfccc 2009, overview schedule, 8 december. online, available: http://unfccc.int/files/meetings/cop_15/application/pdf/overview_schedule_cop15.pdf [accessed 9 october 2010]. _____ 2010, list of participants. part one. parties (a–o). fccc/cp/2009/inf.1 (part 1). online, available: http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2009/cop15/eng/inf01p01.pdf [accessed 9 october 2010]. vidal, j. 2009a, ‘copenhagen climate summit in disarray after “danish text’ leak,’ the guardian, 8 december. online, available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/copenhagenclimate-summit-disarray-danish-text [accessed 9 october 2010]. _____ 2009b, ‘low targets, goals dropped: copenhagen ends in failure.’ the guardian, 19 december. online, available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-deal [accessed 9 october 2010]. walsh, b. 2009, ‘copenhagen’s real challenge: technology to meet the targets,’ time, 9 december. online, available: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1929071_1929070_1946649,00.html [accessed 9 october 2010]. watts, j., carrington, d., & goldenberg, s. 2010, ‘china’s fears of rich nation ‘climate conspiracy’ at copenhagen revealed,’ the guardian, 11 february. online, available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/11/chinese-thinktank-copenhagen-document [accessed 9 october 2010]. marshall climate change, copenhagen and psycho-social disorder portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 23 wilkinson, m. 2009, ‘india lashes out at climate stance’ sydney morning herald, 17 december. online, available: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/india-lashes-out-at-climate-stance20091215-kuof.html [accessed 9 october 2010]. wong, p. 2009, ‘transcript of press conference adelaide 23 december 2009.’ australian parliament house, canberra. online, available: http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlinfo/download/media/pressrel/dfkv6/upload_binary/dfkv60.pdf;fil etype=application/pdf#search=%2200aou|reporterid00aou|speakerid00aou%202000s%20m edia%22 [accessed 9 october 2010]. microsoft word 1672-8100-1-le[1] portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. terpsichorean architecture special issue, guest edited by tony mitchell. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. collapsing (new) buildings: town planning, history and music in hubertus siegert’s berlin babylon (2001) andrew w. hurley, university of technology sydney introduction hubertus siegert’s impressionistic documentary, berlin babylon, illuminates the demolition and urban renewal of berlin during the mid to late 1990s. this was a critical phase in the city’s history, as it prepared, amidst a flurry of excitement and anticipation, to become the united germany’s seat of power. siegert’s film seeks to give pause for thought, but deliberately eschews a ‘voice of god’ voiceover, opting instead for a poetic audiovisual montage. this includes shots of the cityscape (and its lacunae), archival footage documenting the wartime devastation and subsequent dynamiting of buildings, observational cinema of the city’s busy building sites, and of verbal snippets from various architects, developers and politicians––following the film title’s cue, the agents in a rerun of the construction of the tower of babel––as well as epigraphs from the bible and walter benjamin, and a prominent soundscape and musical score. as this article demonstrates, the film’s (mostly) sombre soundtrack plays a critical role here, commenting on the footage, and, beyond that, on the whole project of the new ‘berlin republic’ and its attitude to architectural heritage and twentieth century history. refiguring the theme of this special issue of portal, berlin babylon’s music is a form of writing about (collapsing, old) architecture and history. and yet, the soundtrack is not as unambiguous as a voiceover might have been, and thereby allows creative space for the audience’s interpretation, a matter that was very important to the film’s director. this article focuses, in particular, on three elements: the use (and treatment) of historical recordings in the film; the use of silence; and finally the way in which tracks from the hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 2 berlin band, einstürzende neubauten, use music, noise and text to comment on the project of the new berlin. berlin before and after the wall among europe’s capitals, berlin had a tumultuous 20th century history, to say the least. physically, it was severely damaged during the course of the second world war; indeed only ten percent of the capital’s buildings survived unscathed (siegert and stern 2002). for numerous reasons, the city would not be rebuilt according to its pre-war design. many ruins were in a precarious state and safety, combined with a lack of funds to allow for restoration, dictated their demolition. ideological concerns compounded certain decisions, such as the demolition in 1950 of the eighteenth century stadtschloss (figure 1), the ruins of which occupied an important site in the heart of east berlin, capital of the then recently founded german democratic republic. besides the exorbitant cost involved in renovation––east and west germany were both states under economic construction––the stadtschloss was associated with the old prussian state and was therefore thought not entirely worthy of the new socialist state (colomb 2007). far more appropriate was a project like the karl-marx-allee (east berlin’s main east-west thoroughfare), which was initially conceived as a 70th birthday present for joseph stalin (figure 2). figure 1. the stadtschloss during demolition, 1950. photographer: unknown. image courtesy of the deutsches bundesarchiv (bundesarchiv bild 183-07964-0001; creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0). hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 3 figure 2. the frankfurter tor, karl-marx-allee (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/5/5a/pic00716.jpg). public domain. not all of east berlin’s buildings were designed in this grand style, however. rather, a far plainer ddr moderne (gdr modernism) or ‘soviet version of modernism’ (neill 2005: 338) came to hold sway. during the 1960s and 1970s, in particular, demolition–– what ralph stern calls ‘urban erasure’ (2002: 128)––continued apace, as older buildings were demolished and modernist buildings, including many plattenbauten (prefabricated high rise constructions), were erected in their place (figure 3). these buildings were far cheaper than a restoration of the buildings they replaced, and also offered modern amenities. the division of the city, consummated by the building of the berlin wall in august 1961, contributed to the urban scarification, particularly of the inner city, which now accommodated both the wall and, on the eastern side, a sizeable ‘death strip’ or buffer zone patrolled by dogs and armed guards ordered to shoot any east german citizens who might try to escape. this is not to say that west berlin was in a completely different situation. it too faced housing problems, and there was considerable redevelopment in the west, again in a modernist style. however, this did not hold for all of west berlin. the kaiser-wilhelm hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 4 figure 3. plattenbau under construction in chemnitz (karl-marx-stadt), 1975. photographer: eugen nosko. image courtesy of the deutsche fotothek (fotothek bild df n-07 0000047). gedächtniskirche, which occupies a special place on the kurfürstendamm, west berlin’s main street, had been severely damaged in the war; it was the subject of a ‘renovation’ which made a feature of its bombed state (figure 4). on the other hand, the inner city suburb of kreuzberg, located close by the wall, was allowed to decay. it became home in the 1970s to both a large contingent of turkish work migrants, and to students, artists, squatters and anarchists, who took advantage of the low rents, or squatted in abandoned buildings (figure 5). hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 5 figure 4: kaiser-wilhelm-gedaechtnis-kirche. (http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=datei:ged%c3%a4chtniskirche1.jpg&filetimestamp=20051 112144939). public domain. figure 5. squatters in berlin, kreuzberg (1981). photo: tom ordelmann (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/datei:instandbesetzer_berlin_kreuzberg_1981.jpg). creative commons. hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 6 the rather unexpected fall of the wall in november 1989, and the rushed unification of germany the following year, threw up all sorts of issues that would have seemed unthinkable only a short while before. in particular, there was the question of the status of berlin––the capital of germany up until 1945, and until 1990, the (former) east german capital and rival to the west german state’s seat of power, bonn, an unassuming city far removed from the cold war’s frontline and the ghosts of the german past. in retrospect, the decision to move the seat of power back to berlin seems inevitable, yet it was a close decision when put to a bundestag vote in 1991. that move, which took place between 1998 and 2000, was momentous for the city’s built environment. as david clay large noted in 2001: ‘no other city in modern times has witnessed such a far-reaching overhaul in so short a time. but berlin’s makeover was unique in spirit as well as in scale; … the task presented a singular complex of political, psychological, and moral dilemmas’ (586). two competing processes were at work here, as claire colomb identifies: ‘the politics of collective memory and identity (re)construction through architecture and planning … [and] the renegotiation of the social uses and public nature of … strategic inner-city site[s] in a market economy’ (2007: 283). central to the former, and to the debates about the appropriate form of urban renewal were two ways of approaching the capital’s history. was berlin a ‘city that “is always becoming and never is” … [or one] that “already exists and need not be discovered anew”’ (large 2001: 586).1 these questions of rupture and flux versus continuity and restoration resonated also with fundamental questions of german historiography. how ought one to view the nazi period and authoritarian rule in the gdr: as a central part of the fabric of germany, or as an exceptional phase, somehow counter to a more respectable broader trajectory of german history? this matter had been in mainstream circulation at least since the mid-1980s and the so-called historikerstreit (historians’ debate).2 however, the problematic question of a ‘return’ to german ‘normalcy’ was necessarily thrown up again by the unification of germany, and especially by the return to berlin––if one were inclined to listen. svetlana boym notes that, in this context, reflective moral discourse was ‘on the verge of disappearing in the hectic pace of development’ (quoted in ledanff 2003: 49). 1 large is quoting die zeit. 2 the term historikerstreit signifies the divisive debate between conservative historians and politicians who made ‘historicizing’ comparisons between the holocaust and other acts of genocide, and those leftists who refused to do so, maintaining that germany was a scar that should not be able to heal. on the historikerstreit, see, for example, augstein et al (1987). hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 7 ‘critical reconstruction,’ two central sites, and a void? hans stimmann, the city of berlin’s building commissioner between 1991 and 1996–– and a figure who appears several times in hubertus siegert’s film berlin babylon (2001a)––represented a restorationist tendency in the debate (figure 6). he championed a planning scheme that sought to plug the gaps in the cityscape, and gave precedence to a ‘classical modern’ aesthetic––a ‘mix of karl friedrich schinkel’s classicism and peter behren’s once daring modernism, with heinrich tessenow as modernist thrown in to secure an anti-avant-gardist and anti-weimar politics of traditionalism,’ as andreas huyssen puts it (1997: 67–68). by 1995, stimmann’s policy of ‘critical’ or ‘historical reconstruction’ had been settled, and marked a definite ‘aesthetic turn’ (ledanff 2003: 56). stimmann’s policy had its critics as well. these included daniel libeskind, the polish-born jewish architect who was responsible for the design of the city’s jewish museum, which also features in siegert’s film (see below). libeskind accused stimmann of nostalgia, of ignoring an alternative history of innovative architecture, and of ‘the total erasure of fifty years of history of this city. it is going back to a time when figure 6. hans stimmann, 2006. photo: hans praefcke (http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=datei:hans_stimmann.jpg&filetimestamp=20070521081753). public domain. hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 8 things were not problematic, coupled with an authoritarian ideal of how to develop the city’ (quoted in large 2001: 588–589). descending briefly from the abstract to the particular, several important sites that are depicted in siegert’s film ought to be introduced. the potsdamer platz, which had been an important hub prior to its destruction in the second world war, had, given its proximity to the border, become fallow land, a sort of ‘city prairie.’ in the eyes of the city’s fathers, it was a particular ‘void’ needing to be filled, though, as andreas huyssen notes, it was a ‘void filled with history and memory’ (1997: 75). its development was decided upon very early in the 1990s; and the land was sold off to a number of corporations (including daimler-chrysler and sony) that engaged various worldrenowned architects (including renzo piano, helmut jahn and others) to design their german headquarters (figure 7). for stuart taberner, the slick yet bland potsdamer figure 7. the kolhoff tower under construction, potsdamer platz, 1999. photo: roger koslowski (http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=datei:potsdamerplatz5.jpg&filetimestamp=20060712213306). creative commons. hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 9 platz redevelopment represents what he calls a trend in the berlin republic towards a global, ‘ahistorical normality.’ it alludes vaguely to the architecture of the 1920s, but it does so in a way that is largely stripped of any historical specificity (taberner 2005: xviii). hence, the redevelopment of the potsdamer platz threw into relief a conflict between the historical city of berlin and a new thrust towards global consumerism, as represented by sony and the other firms that set up shop there (ledanff 2003: 49). the schlossplatz, which had been a focal point of the old centre of the city (and was an important site in the east german capital), was a far trickier matter. it was, to use strom’s coinage, a heavily ‘burdened landscape’ (quoted in colomb 2007: 284). formerly the site of the old stadtschloss, it had, since the mid-1970s, accommodated the so-called palast der republik (palace of the republic), which housed the volkskammer (peoples’ chamber) and other amenities, including an entertainment complex (figure 8). this ddr moderne building was––in the eyes of its detractors––both ugly and tainted. it was also riddled with asbestos. and yet the demolition of the building, which was decided upon in 1993 (but subjected to a stay in 1994), and then finally commenced only in 2006–2007, was not unproblematic.3 it seemed to ride roughshod over the sentiments of many east berliners, including those who had fond memories of the building, or who otherwise resented the cavalier attitude of the new west-german masters. it also raised uncomfortable questions about what to construct in its stead: a new building or a reconstruction of the stadtschloss?4 would this be revanchist, and/or a ‘falsification of history’ (colomb 2007: 298)? the site seemed to focus ‘rival nostalgias’: one ‘ostalgic’;5 the other yearning for a period prior to the 20th century, and its ruinous history and architectural modernism (large 2001: 600). yet attitudes did not necessarily cleave along east/west lines. (ledanff 2003: 40; colomb 2007: 302). this site also stood as a cipher for the issue of how, if at all, to accommodate ‘uglier’ parts of berlin’s and germany’s recent history. and, of course, that history extended beyond the relatively short life of the gdr. 3 on the steps leading to the demolition, see colomb (2007). 4 this was the decision ultimately voted through by the bundestag in 2002, after a report presented by an international commission of experts (kommission historische mitte berlin) under the leadership of the austrian politician hannes swoboda. 5 on the many iterations of ostalgie, that is, nostalgia for the former east germany, see cooke (2005). this is not to say that ostalgie alone explains the palette of east german sentiment against the demolition of the palast. many east berliners had good reason to resent the way in which their country seemed to have been simply taken over by west germany. hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 10 figure 8. the palast der republik, 1980s. photo: lutz schramm (http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=datei:palast_der_republik_berlin_ddr.jpg&filetimestamp=2 0080211205921). creative commons. in addition to the question of what to do with various sites tainted by association with the national socialist regime, there was the issue of if, and how, the city should physically mark its jewish history and the holocaust. the idea of a jewish museum was raised in the 1980s and became the subject of an architectural competition in 1989. however, construction of libeskind’s winning design was delayed by various controversies, and the building was only completed in 1999 (figure 9). the architect specifically foregrounded the notion of the ‘void’ in his design: empty space was incorporated so as to ‘draw attention to the vacuum in berlin left by the disappearance of tens of thousands of its jews’ (large 2000: 636). this design stood to ‘articulate memory and our relationship to it in its very spatial organization,’ as huyssen puts it (1997: 75). the possibility of a holocaust memorial was also raised in the 1980s and it, too, was a live issue throughout the 1990s, although its design was only settled in 1999, and construction completed in 2005, well after siegert’s berlin babylon was shot.6 6 a design by the us architect peter eisenman was settled upon in 1999, after an exhaustive but unconcluded/unconcludable debate, which related, inter alia to the ‘dilemma of commemoration’, that is to how to weigh up the imperatives for aesthetic and cognitive commemoration (christhard hoffmann hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 11 figure 9. the jewish museum, berlin. photo: studio daniel libeskind (1999) (http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=datei:jewishmuseumberlinaerial.jpg&filetimestamp=200807 23023831). creative commons. hubertus siegert: city and film as open text siegert (born in 1959 in düsseldorf7) is an autodidact filmmaker. he is also one for whom film music is extremely important, especially given that it is able to engage the audience on an additional, non-visual level.8 siegert moved to west-berlin in 1980, where he studied history, art history and theatre, as well as landscape planning. he first conceived of berlin babylon in the early 1990s, when he was struck by the sense of openness and transition attaching to berlin’s physical character, and particularly to the district of mitte, which was a central location in the city, but which very much bore the scars of the recent past. his feelings were quite ambivalent and certainly accommodated an appreciation for what hoffmann-axthelm called ‘beauty in the form of destruction’ (quoted in ledanff 2003: 53). to his eyes, the city was ‘broken in many respects, but [it] was unique and had the beauty of the incomplete and the unfinished. it was in this quoted in ledanff 2003: 39). the ‘memorial to the murdered jews of europe’ (completed in 2005) is built on a large site to the south of the brandenburg gate. it is a field of 2700 stone pillars of varying heights, which engenders in the individual a sense of disorientation. the site of the future memorial does feature briefly in berlin babylon, shortly before we see footage of the jewish museum. see the special edition of german politics & society (1999) and neill (2005) for a summary of the debates about the memorial. 7 siegert’s heritage as a düsseldorfer is not without significance. that city had been subjected to its own unprecedented urban rebuilding program since the 1960s, at precisely when siegert was growing up. 8 biographical information was provided by hubertus siegert in a telephone interview with the author on 6 november 2009. future references to this interview will take the form: (siegert 2009). hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 12 very emptiness that everything seemed open, and [so] much possible’ (siegert 2001; my trans). it was that sense of openness that siegert initially wished to document (siegert 2001). however, his project developed into a study of the bauwut (building fury) that descended over berlin after its status as future capital was settled, and the policy of ‘critical reconstruction’ was decided upon (siegert 2001). the filmmaker now set about observing the players in the ‘babylonian’ redevelopment of berlin––the tale of the tower of babel is included as an epigraph at the beginning of the film and gives it its basic orientation––as well as gently exposing the hierarchy of power and interests involved in (re)development.9 his new concept was also to explore: ‘just how much … architects and politicians are really aware of what they are doing … i felt that there was no, or not enough reflection on this question [of how to handle the lost past] among architects and those who would rebuild berlin’ (quoted in stern 2002: 127–128). siegert’s project is therefore also about history itself, as his inclusion in the film of a passage from walter benjamin’s 1940 ‘on the concept of history’ further reinforces. the extract refers to the ‘angel of history’: the angel of history his countenance faces the past where we can see a chain of events he sees a single catastrophe. rubble piles up relentlessly. layers of it are hurled at his feet. he longs to linger, to wake the dead and reconstruct the rubble. but a storm has brewed in paradise. the tempest has unfurled its wings it is so strong he cannot lower them again. the storm drives him pell-mell into the future. he turns his back on what’s to come. meanwhile the pile of rubble grows sky high before his eyes. the phenomenon that we call progress is this mighty storm. (benjamin 1940, quoted in neill 2005: 339) siegert, the erstwhile history student, operating in the spirit of benjamin’s lines, complicates the notion of ‘history’ as it was commonly applied in the debate about berlin’s renewal, where twentieth century history was often neglected in favour of reinstalling an earlier image of 19th century berlin. his is not an inherently 9 this focus reflects the essential point made by jacobs in 1993 that ‘[p]lanning controversies are discursive battles in which certain interests, reliant upon or loyal to specific discourses, have different political leverage within a discursive field predisposed to arguments of architectural aesthetics’ (quoted in colomb 2007: 297). hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 13 ‘preservationist’ attitude—although this term is of limited use in such a layered city as berlin: which historical layer of the city ought to be preserved? at the expense of what other layer?10 indeed, siegert adheres to the possibility and inevitability of change; his starting point is simply that the new building which replaces the old must be an improvement on the old, and that this question should not be approached in too reductive (or functionalist-aestheticist) a fashion. for, following a panofsky-inspired approach,11 a building is not just an aesthetic object or form, it is also the accretion of memory/its history: the starting point [in the philosophy of critical reconstruction] was firstly that a functionally better state is always the correct one, and, secondly, that the historically earlier form of the city needed to be reconstructed. it was all about the idea of completing the new city. each and every building which can measure up to some lowest common denominator of ‘beautiful’ and ‘historic’ is renovated to the point where the last remnant of memory is polished from the stone. everything that is scraggy, grey or ugly––qualities which can certainly have gravitas and dignity––gets torn down, built upon or destroyed, until the city can no longer function as a repository of memory. (siegert 2001)12 despite his strong underlying views, siegert’s intention with berlin babylon was nevertheless primarily a documentary one, in which he used contrast as his central organising principle in order to sustain an interesting, yet dramaturgically open texture (siegert 2001). siegert expressly wished to present a range of perspectives, and to avoid from labouring any particular opinion: ‘it was important to us with the montage [of the footage] that we did not illustrate any [particular] opinion, but rather that we combined a multitude of perspectives’ (siegert 2001). it was vital that the film had a texture capable of engendering active interpretation by an audience member: if a scene were to be obvious in terms of a statement, then, what with my mode of observation, it would become dead and abstract …. if anyone is looking to have his or her own critical attitude verbalised, then those expectations will not be accommodated. however, the contrasting perspectives allow everyone to develop his or her own perspective. (siegert 2001) in other words, siegert hoped that his film would spur its viewers to ask questions about the redevelopment of berlin, and beyond that about german history. the way in which music and sound is employed in the film is also consistent with this aim. 10 susanne ledanff points out that the debates about berlin raised ‘conflicting preservationist ideas’ (2003: 38). 11 siegert has confirmed the influence that the art historian erwin panofsky has had on him (siegert 2009). panofsky is perhaps best known for his development of aby warburg’s notion of iconology, in which the deep levels of intrinsic meaning or content in a given artwork, rather than its form, are explored. see, for example, panofsky (1939). 12 translations from siegert are mine. hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 14 music and history the use of historical music in berlin babylon, a film concerned with the past (and with the obscuring thereof) ought not surprise. nor should the form in which the citations occasionally take place; or the way in which the historical material is sometimes commented upon by other parts of the soundtrack. just as berlin babylon contains archival footage (of the bombing of the city at the end of world war ii and of ruined buildings being dynamited in the late 1940s and 1950s), its soundtrack features music from earlier eras, composed by beethoven, wagner, and brahms, as well as by hanns eisler. however, apart from a short extract from the overture of wagner’s götterdämmerung—suitably alienated by the addition of threatening, diegetic helicopter noise, recorded whilst the accompanying aerial footage was taken, but also included as an intertextual reference to apocalypse now (1979)—only one such piece is included on the commercially released soundtrack; a rather scratchy 78 recording of beethoven’s trauermarsch (funeral march) from his 3rd symphony, eroica. i focus on that piece here.13 roger hillman has shown that in german art film since the 1960s the incorporation of music from the classical tradition contributes an extra dimension in which the film text can be read. classical music, or at least certain pieces of it, has often accreted a thick range of associations, such that german film audiences will typically be able to read that range of associations in conjunction with, or indeed against, the visual dimension of the film. in the new german cinema in particular, filmmakers were adept at playing those two aspects off against each other in highly productive ways (hillman 2005). like the old buildings that we see being demolished in berlin babylon, beethoven’s multivalent music especially has history accreted to it. it had, along with wagner’s 13 i note, however, that all of the pieces of classical music used in the film are highly significant. the berlin-based musician thomas krinzinger acted as adviser to siegert here. the extract from brahms’s deutsches requiem—‘selig sind, die da leid tragen’ (blessed are those who mourn)—is, like beethoven’s trauermarsch, melancholic and funereal, and was consonant with siegert’s intention to introduce a sobering note into the popular celebration of berlin’s reconstruction. the extracts from wagner’s götterdämmerung (trauermarsch and walküre vorspiel) are multiply coded. wagner’s associations with national socialism (his anti-semitism, and hitler’s proximity to the bayreuth circle) are notorious. nevertheless, as siegert points out, wagner’s hero, siegfried, is the master of his own downfall. the filmmaker intended to use this association to suggest that the destruction of the stadtschloss, which is shown in the film via archival footage accompanied by one of the wagner extracts, was germany’s own fault. in another aerial shot of the karl-marx-allee, siegert opts for hanns eisler’s and johannes r. becher’s national anthem of the gdr. the anthem specifically refers to the way in which the east german state has ‘risen from ruins’; its quoting after the demise of the east german state is not without irony, yet it lends a gravitas to the footage of the still impressive karl-marx-allee. thanks to hubertus siegert for pointing out some of these resonances (siegert 2009). hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 15 music, been a favourite of the national socialists (but of course not only of them).14 contrastingly, the ode to joy from his 9th symphony was also performed on the eve of reunification. the form in which the trauermarsch is quoted in berlin babylon, the way in which it mutates at the end of the track, and the way in which it is combined with the film’s visual images are quite significant. the historical 78 selected for the soundtrack was recorded in berlin, under the conductor hans knappertsbusch, in 1934, in the year after hitler’s ascension to power. however the piece does not stand on its own, as an uncommented-upon citation of a previous era. knappertsbusch’s trauermarsch segues violently into the sound, first of rubble, then of smashing glass. at the same time, the visual track cuts from archival footage of the opening of the brandenburg gate in november 1989—where the sombre tone of the trauermarsch and the gloomy weather counterpoint the jubilation usually associated with images of the fall of the wall; perhaps even as a reminder not to forget the reasons for germany’s division—to shots of segments of the wall being disposed of, and then to a collapsing ‘ddr moderne’ building as it shears in slow motion across the screen, its windows shattering one by one. this smashing glass sound, i would argue, is multiply coded. not only is it diegetic, but smashed glass is also historically resonant in germany, especially when heard in association with a recording from the 1930s. as is well known, on the night of 9 november 1938 the so-called reichskristallnacht (night of the broken glass) occurred, when violence was perpetrated against jewish lives and property. this event––occurring 51 years, to the day, before the opening of the wall, which the film has just depicted–– is obliquely referenced by the 1934 trauermarsch and its brutalised ending. just as the 1930s proceeded towards the reichskristallnacht, and barbarism emerged from german culture, knappertsbusch’s historical recording metamorphoses into breaking glass. this aspect of the soundtrack aptly portrays the discontinuities and ruptures in twentieth century german history, as does the way in which silence is employed in the film.15 14 large reports that the 9th symphony had been used, for example, at hitler’s public birthday celebrations in april 1942 (2001: 590). on the fate of classical music under national socialism, see, for example, kater (1997). 15 it should be noted, however, that siegert had not specifically intended the knappertsbusch recording and its ending to reference the so-called reichskristallnacht. he had primarily wished to use the music and its sombre tone to counter the jubilation generally associated with the fall of the wall. the selection of an historical recording was based on the fact that no licensing fee needed to be paid. siegert has noted, however, that associations with the reichskristallnacht may well be made by audience members aware of german history (siegert 2009). hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 16 silence as aural ‘void’ as we have seen, the idea that berlin was a city with voids was important in the 1990s. whilst, for the most part, the proponents of redevelopment had seen voids as an opportunity, or even a mandate to rebuild, others like libeskind argued that they should be retained, in part because voids can engender memory and the retention of moralhistorical discourse (huyssen 1997). a void can be an empowering thing for the (historical) imagination, as siegert also recognised early in the 1990s. berlin babylon’s dvd soundtrack employs silence as acoustical void in a similar fashion to the way in which libeskind conceived of the void in the jewish museum.16 here the soundtrack is in keeping with, rather than contrapuntal to, the footage. footage of the empty site of the future holocaust memorial and then of the just completed, but still empty jewish museum is shown, accompanied by a silent soundtrack (although increasingly, a ghostly “rushing” sound may be discerned as the footage progresses). this strategic use of silence, which in conjunction with the portrayal of libeskind’s ‘void’ draws attention to absences in german culture, is heightened by the high profile of sound elsewhere in the soundtrack. the immediately preceding scene is a crescendo of menacing clouds passing overhead, speeding up all the while, as walter benjamin’s passage on the ‘angel of history’ is recited against an increasingly loud and tempestuous storm-soundscape. it abruptly cuts to silence and to footage of the void. this strategic use of silence is also consistent with einstürzende neubauten’s musical practices in recent years, especially on the 2000 album silence is sexy, which sought to provoke the musical imagination not so much by noise, as had been the case in the past, but by silence and its juxtaposition against sound (see borchardt 2003: 118). ‘what is the lay of the land?’: einstürzende neubauten’s film music if there were a band perfectly qualified to provide a soundtrack for a film that thematises berlin, demolition and architecture, then it would have to be einstürzende neubauten, the berlin group based around the singer blixa bargeld (born, like siegert, in 1959). indeed, one could almost imagine the film being tailor-made as a vehicle for 16 this is a point also made by neill (2005: 344). it should be observed that the cinema version of berlin babylon does not contain silence at this point. instead, it features luigi nono’s 1955/56 composition il canto sospeso, itself conceived as a commemoration of the victims of fascism. it was too expensive to license this recording for the dvd, and for this reason silence was used. siegert noted, however, that this was also an appropriate way of sonically representing the gap in berlin caused by the holocaust (siegert 2009). hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 17 the band.17 from the beginning, the band has had a focus on architecture and the built environment, which was partly a result of the alternative squatters’ milieu, in which several members of the band were involved in the early 1980s, and where there was a highly politicised sense of reclaiming disused buildings and opposing development.18 in line with this tradition, the band not only ‘reclaimed’ junk objects and noise as potential sources of music, it also made a point out of performing in a series of significant, disused spaces. sometimes these spaces were selected to draw attention to the surrounding (post-)industrial environment. (an early concert took place in a steel roadway underpass, for example). on other occasions, historically burdened sites were used. in 1986, for example, the group performed in the disused ‘golden chamber’ at the nuremberg parade ground, in a provocative ‘exorcism’ supposed to be an ‘objection to hitler’s words in stone’ (borchardt 2003: 38. my translation). textually, the group has also long engaged with architecture, and with buildings, old and new. the most obvious textual reference is the band’s name itself, ‘collapsing new buildings,’ a seeming contradiction in terms, which can nevertheless be associated with the squatters’ anti-development philosophy.19 the titles of various pieces have also taken a critical, if not always un-cryptic, stance towards architecture. this is evident, not only in the group’s long-running series of compilations, ‘strategies against architecture,’ but also in the notion that architektur ist geiselnahme (architecture is the taking of hostages), first referred to in 1981, and then picked up again for the berlin babylon soundtrack (see below). of the band’s music on the soundtrack, there are only two songs (‘architektur ist geiselnahme’ and ‘die befindlichkeit des landes,’ which will be examined below); otherwise it is instrumental. that instrumental music has several important characteristics, which make their own comment on the project of the berlin republic. firstly, there is the manner in which noise is employed. one is often never quite sure where the line between diegetic noise (inter alia from the loud building sites depicted) 17 in fact, the band had already recorded, prior to its involvement in the film, ‘was ist die befindlichkeit des landes’ (‘what is the lay of the land’), a song that reflects on the redevelopment of berlin (see below). 18 on the squatters’ movement, see for example, large (2001: 492–495). on the history of the band, and on their early links with the squatters’ movement, see borchardt (2003) and dax and defcon (2006). 19 the contradiction of a collapsing new building was soon put into question, however; some months after the group selected its name, the roof of the newly built berliner kongresshalle collapsed, giving that name a special piquancy. hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 18 and non-diegetic soundtrack music can be drawn, which is partly also a function of the sound engineer alexander saal’s montage skill. as with einstürzende neubauten’s broader oeuvre and its use of noise, this encourages us to consider our preconceptions about what music and noise are, and about aesthetics more generally. this thrust is quite complementary with siegert’s points, made in interview, about the ‘beauty’ of disrepair and discontinuity in berlin’s immediate post-wall cityscape. secondly, the pace of einstürzende neubauten’s music is noteworthy. it is often quite slow, and this keys in especially with several of the film’s early accompanying sequences––of largely empty city streets around mitte––which were shot in slow motion. there is room in this ‘slow’ aesthetic for contemplation, which is in stark contrast with the pace of berlin’s re-development during what siegert calls a ‘hurried decade,’ where pace seemed to exclude contemplation (siegert 2001). in fact, siegert conceived of his film as an attempt ‘to slow down this overly quick epoch’ (dvd cover notes. my translation), and einstürzende neubauten’s music generally contributes to that slowing down. this is not to say that pace has been excluded from the film; indeed certain scenes have been sped up. speed is associated, not only with the tumultuous ‘angel of history’ scene, for example, but also with time-lapse footage of the opening of the glitzy potsdamer platz, which exemplified the superficial direction in which the berlin republic seemed so speedily to be heading.20 finally, einstürzende neubauten’s instrumental music allows itself a wry comment on some of the ‘star’ architects, including helmut jahn, designer of the potsdamer platz’s sony centre (figure 10). while the filmmaker did not express any particular opinion of berlin’s redevelopment (at least in relation to the visuals), the recurring use of a subtle but rather sinister and menacing musical motif––an alienated triangle sound––in some of the scenes featuring jahn and others evokes a distinct feeling of unease about the high profile developments. perhaps that musical choice guided audience members to think about potential ‘villains’ in the story. i would suggest it certainly contributed to what one critic called the film’s ‘thriller-format’ (berliner zeitung 2001). the sense of unease evoked here is also compounded by the generally melancholic tenor of einstürzende neubauten’s music, and by the lyrics of its two songs. 20 the music accompanying this sped-up footage––included in an ironic, if not downright humorous quotation––is the upbeat rondo-allegro from beethoven’s piano concerto no. 1 in c opus 15. hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 19 figure 10. helmut jahn; still from berlin babylon. (www.berlinbabylon.de/media.sumo/bbjahn.jpg). image courtesy of hubertus siegert/ s.u.m.o. film. the song ‘architektur ist geiselnahme’ contains a series of critical yet somewhat cryptic textual fragments on architecture and development. apart from the title’s notion of architecture as the ‘taking of hostages,’ it refers to ‘building fury,’ to fassadenschwindel (façade-dizzyness/façade-fraud) and ‘façade-liars,’ as well as to the idea of ‘a plumb-bob as the protractor [or measure] of history’ (my translations). on its own terms, the song’s emphasis on facades might be interpreted as a comment on the redevelopment of the potsdamer platz, with its prominent glass curtain-wall buildings. however, whilst we see some footage of building sites over the course of the song, it is mainly disused old buildings devoid of human life that we see, and the song––at least as it has been employed by siegert––seems therefore to be commenting on previous eras of development, or development in general, rather than the 1990s phase of bauwut in particular. for siegert, the song’s title notion conveys a sense of the ‘tragedy of modernity’ whereby the individual is overwhelmed by the sheer scale of modernity and late capitalism, just as some of the individual workers in the film, such as those working at the building site of the new hauptbahnhof are dwarved, ‘taken hostage’ even, by the massive machines and constructions at which they labour. that there is a link between the ‘tragedy of modernity’ and the ‘tragedy of german history’ is established by the way in which the footage of the hauptbahnhof construction is quickly followed by hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 20 sombre black and white footage of the opening of the renovated reichstag building, another historically ‘burdened’ structure (siegert 2009). the second song, which is heard during the closing credits, actually predates the film. unlike ‘architektur is geiselnahme,’ ‘die befindlichkeit des landes’ (2000) does relate specifically to the 1990s bauwut, and expressly references the potsdamer platz redevelopment.21 einstürzende neubauten had been associated with an alternative (west) berlin scene which was, by the 1990s, being marginalized along with the ‘historical aura’ of the cold war era city. as bargeld recently noted, ‘the city in which i grew up and with which i and the neubauten were associated is no longer there. it simply no longer exists’ (quoted in dax & defcon 2006: 249. my translation). under the circumstances, bargeld held critical views towards the redevelopment of his hometown, and once even said that he ‘would like to tear down the stadtschloss again, before it has even been erected’ (quoted in dax & defcon 2006: 246. my translation). however, ‘die befindlichkeit’ is not a protest song, even though it did hold that character when first conceived. from bargeld’s perspective, the song only shed that mantle––with which he was never comfortable––when he introduced the textual motif of melancholia (borchardt 2003: 117–118). his song marks the passing of the ‘scarfaced terrain’ of the old city, and the construction of the new. however, it does so with melancholia, an affect which bargeld now transfers onto the whole of germany (this is the answer to his rhetorical question ‘what is the lay of the land?’). he suggests that despite the speed of construction in the berlin republic, the past refuses to go away (war-time bunkers still exist; the ‘traitor’ marlene dietrich is still unwelcome22). the new buildings are, despite their appearance, actually no more than ‘future ruins.’ as siegert would do in his film, bargeld also incorporated into his text the figure of benjamin’s ‘angel of history,’ suggesting that (s)he continues to watch these frenetic developments with concern. 21 the reference in the lyrics to the red ‘info-box’ is to a display pavilion that was erected at the potsdamer platz prior to construction on the site. citizens could climb into the ‘info-box’ and view a range of materials illustrating the proposed re-development. 22 in 1930, the berlin-born dietrich emigrated to the usa. convinced that she should take an active role against the national socialist regime, she gave numerous wartime concerts for american gis stationed in europe and north africa. this earned her opprobrium in some quarters of postwar germany as a vaterlandsverraeterin (traitor to the father land). even after her death in 1992, some isolated voices still regarded her in this light and the decision of the berlin senate in 1996-1997 to name a street and then a prominent square (the marlene-dietrich-platz, adjacent to the potsdamer platz) after her, met with controversy. hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 21 by recourse to the notion of melancholia, bargeld’s text retreats from the polemic of a naïve protest song (just as siegert’s refusal to use a voiceover eschews polemics). it thereby makes the song’s critique slightly more oblique, and demanding of interpretation on the part of the listener. what exactly was the cause of the melancholia of which bargeld sang? how should it be weighted? the notion of melancholia has, of course, a long history in the german-speaking context. in freud’s ‘mourning and melancholia’ (1917), for example, he theorised that, in contradistinction to transitory grief, the melancholic was unable to grieve the passing of a love object, and come to terms with it, because he or she identified so strongly with that object. this notion was then applied by alexander and margarete mitscherlich, in their 1967 work the inability to mourn, to postwar german society. the melancholia they diagnosed in their patients related to a strong attachment to the figure of hitler, whose passing they were socially prevented from mourning. whilst bargeld retains in his song the notion of a german past that, notwithstanding the city’s superficial face-lift, will not and cannot disappear, he is personally more positive about the creative processes which a state of melancholia might allow (schlüter 2000). siegert, who himself has spoken of a sense of having an ‘geerbte trauer’ (inherited mourning) in relation to the german past, similarly recognises a value in melancholia, which could be brought to bear against the misplaced mainstream enthusiasm––if not downright euphoria––for a new germany in the wake of unification (siegert 2009). this explains his motivation for using generally sombre, melancholic music in berlin babylon. coda and conclusion three years after berlin babylon was completed, einstürzende neubauten performed live in the (then) still standing palast der republik. this was in keeping with the band’s tradition of performing in historically significant disused spaces, as well as with bargeld’s opposition to the palast’s designated successor, a replica stadtschloss. it was also part of the volkspalast (people’s palace) initiative that sought to make interim use of the palast in a manner counter to the dominant trend towards the commercialisation of culture and leisure, which has become part of the berlin republic’s agenda (ledanff 2003: 62–63; colomb 2007: 305). instead of commenting on the project of the berlin republic, as had been the case in their soundtrack to siegert’s film, the band was now practically and subversively involved in re-imagining and re-functionalising one of the city’s historically burdened buildings, on the eve of its destruction. hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 22 twenty years after the fall of the wall, the phase of berlin’s rapid re-development is over; the battles over the most difficult buildings and sites seem to have been had (even if some sites designated for development are still fallow, and the question of where the funds for reconstructing the stadtschloss will come from remains open). the notion of maintaining the physical scars of berlin has largely retreated from the mainstream discourse.23 siegert’s film stands as a worthy monument to the initial post-wall phase, and to the moral issues relating to the collapse of buildings and of history, in the anxious drive to fill the voids. yet it does not make its points in a cudgel-like fashion. the audience is not presented with fully formed arguments that would remove from it the obligation to engage in active interpretation. whilst the film’s visual montage expressly avoids labouring an opinion, its soundtrack contains various suggestive cues for thought (in silence, historical quotation, melancholic tenor and lyrics) which are occasionally more explicit than the visuals––and which give the film a ‘moral kick’ (siegert 2009)––but which still contain space for and mandate the creative imagination, and an engagement with recent german history. acknowledgements i would like to thank hubertus siegert and boris wilsdorf for agreeing to be interviewed for this article, and s.u.m.o. film for permission to use stills from berlin babylon. this article results from an arcfunded research project. reference list augstein, r., et al (eds.) 1987, ‘historikerstreit.’ die dokumentation der konstroverse um die einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen judenvernichtung. piper, munich. berliner zeitung. review of berlin babylon, precise date and page number not known, quoted on the dvd cover of the film. borchardt, k. 2003, einstürzende neubauten. hannibal, höfen. colomb, c. 2007, ‘requiem for a lost palast. “revanchist urban planning” and “burdened landscapes” of the german democratic republic in the new berlin,’ planning perspectives, vol. 22 (july), 283–323. cooke, p. 2005, representing east germany since unification: from colonization to nostalgia. berg, oxford. dax, m. & defcon, r.t. (eds.) 2006, nur was nicht ist, ist möglich: die geschichte der einstürzenden neubauten. bosworth, berlin. einstürzende neubauten 2000, silence is sexy. zomba records/rough trade. ____ 2001, berlin babylon (original soundtrack). grand harbor. freud, s. 2005 [1917], ‘mourning and melancholia,’ in the future of an illusion, (ed.) s. freud, trans. s. whiteside, penguin, london. 23 ledanff observes that by the time the vote was taken in 2002 to demolish the palast der republik, the ‘old arguments of berlin as a city of dissonances, the cult of wounds in the fabric of the city, were briefly raised in the bundestag debate and swept aside’ (2003: 60). hurley collapsing (new) buildings portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 23 german politics & society, special issue, vol. 17, no. 3 (fall 1999). hillman, r. 2005, unsettling scores: german film, music and ideology. indiana university press, bloomington. huyssen, a. 1997, ‘the voids of berlin,’ critical inquiry, vol. 24, no. 1, 57–81. kater, m. 1997, the twisted muse: musicians and their music in the third reich. oxford university press, new york. large, d.c. 2001, berlin. allen lane, london. ledanff, s. 2003, ‘the palace of the republic versus the stadtschloss: the dilemmas of planning in the heart of berlin,’ german politics and society, vol. 21, no. 4, 30–73. mitscherlich, a. & mitscherlich, m. 1975 [1967], the inability to mourn: principles of collective behavior. trans b. r. placzek. grove press, new york. neill, w.j.v. 2005, ‘berlin babylon: the spatiality of memory and identity in recent planning for the german capital,’ planning theory and practice, vol. 6, no.3, 335–53. ockman, j. (ed.) 2002, out of ground zero: case studies in urban reinvention. prestel, munich et al. panofsky, e. 1939, studies in iconology: humanistic themes in the art of the renaissance. oxford university press, new york. schlüter, c. 2000, ‘als ruine vollendet. 20 jahre einstürzende neubauten: ein gespräch mit blixa bargeld,’ die zeit. april 20. online, available: http://www.zeit.de/2000/17/als_ruine_vollendet [accessed 18 september 2009]. siegert, h. 2009, telephone interview with andrew w. hurley. nov. 6. ___ (dir.) 2001a, berlin babylon. absolut medien. ___ 2001b, ‘blickwinkel,’ online, available: http://www.berlinbabylon.de/pages/berlinbabylon2.html [accessed 18 september 2009]. siegert, h. & stern, r. 2002, ‘a discussion of berlin babylon,’ in out of ground zero: case studies in urban reinvention. (ed.) j. ockman. prestel, munich et al. 126–31. stern, r. 2002, ‘berlin: film and the representation of urban reconstruction since the fall of the wall’ [introduction], in out of ground zero, (ed.) j. ockman, 117–24. taberner, s. 2005, german literature of the 1990s and beyond: normalization and the berlin republic. camden house, rochester, ny. * * * * * original berlin babylon dvd available (region: codefree). please contact: et@sumofilm.de * * * * * microsoft word portalformattingintroductionspecialissuehealthandborderssep2011-1 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. health and borders across time and cultures: china, india and the indian ocean region special issue, guest edited by beatriz carrillo garcía and devleena ghosh. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. health and borders across time and cultures: china, india and the indian ocean region special issue: introduction beatriz carrillo garcía, university of sydney, and devleena ghosh, university of technology, sydney, guest editors this special issue of portal brings together papers examining the intersection of health and borders. in this analysis health is understood not only as the absence of illness, but also as knowledge, as a right, and as the pursuit of identity and self-transformation. similarly, borders here are used as both physical and mental constructs. as michael pearson—in this issue—tells us, medical connections and exchanges have been a constant in human history. however, over the last few decades the process of globalisation, which has seen a growing number of people moving across national boundaries, has made medical exchanges and migrations not only more extensive but has also presented new challenges for the ways in which we understand and regulate public health, health rights, and identity. charis thomson (2011: 205) has described medical migrations as ‘part of the very fabric of the transnational world order,’ which she sees as the reason behind the current political but also theoretical importance of medical travel. on the one hand, health has increasingly become a private good that can be sold and bought in the global market; while on the other hand, the right to be healthy is also increasingly being recognised not only as an inalienable human right but as a precondition to the fulfilment of all other rights. grounded within the existing global carrillo garcía and ghosh introduction portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 2 trade system and the inequalities that underpin it, the commercialisation of health services have presented national health systems around the world with both challenges and opportunities (leng & whittaker 2011). the commercialisation of health related ‘goods’ and the retreat of the modern state from this traditional area of intervention implies a certain inequity in the way in which such health ‘goods’ are distributed. the temptation for the corporatized health institutions of emerging economies to capitalise on state subsidised medical infrastructure to earn huge profits has been documented by many scholars (godwin 2004, for example). according to them, such practices shift medical resources from the global south to the global north, creating an asymmetric dualistic system of healthcare where the poor are left to the care of traditional practitioners or inadequate public health services or have to eschew treatment altogether while the rich can afford the high-end medical technology and state-of-the-art infrastructure. the articles in this special issue were originally presented at a workshop on health and borders in china, india and the indian ocean region, organised at the university of technology, sydney (uts) in october 2009. both the workshop and this special issue represent a multidisciplinary effort that looks at health from a social science perspective through historical, socio-economic, and cultural approaches. they are also concerned with the health inequities across and within national borders, due to economic imperatives, changing technologies and environments. the articles in this special issue explore lessons learned and new ways of understanding health across international and internal borders, with specific reference to the cases of india, australia, hong kong and china, pakistan, and thailand. they are concerned with three main themes:  the triumph of biomedical practices over traditional medicines; and the incorporation of biomedical practices and technologies (under the premise that technology is value free) into traditional medicines, which have in turn undermined the practices of the latter.  a recognition that medical migration can provide opportunities for vulnerable or less well-off social groups to access better care; while at the same time recognising that without appropriate planning and regulation the commercialisation of health services and human organs and tissue can actually be to the detriment of health care services for local populations. carrillo garcía and ghosh introduction portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 3  the ways in which medical tourism—and cosmetic surgery tourism in particular—represent part of a new makeover culture in which identity seeking (through bodily transformations) is tied up with economic imperatives and global health markets. the special issue starts off with a historical account of the medical connections and exchanges that took place during the early modern world between europe and asia. using the example of portuguese goa (nowadays the smallest state in india, but also the state with the highest income per capita in the country), michael pearson gives us a rich and detailed account of the context and nature of the medical exchanges that took place between the 15th and 18th centuries ce. pearson’s main argument is that during that early modern period—given the strong reliance of european medical texts on latin, arabic, greek and hebrew medical knowledge—there was much commonality in the medical practices recommended by european medical writers with those of the east, and no one system was perceived as being more effective than any other in curing disease. pearson does tell us, however, that some diseases were considered to be geographically determined, and they were thus thought to be curable only by using local medical knowledge. and yet the prevalence of some diseases across asia and europe spread the idea across europe of potential universal remedies, which would eventually become the foundation of the early markets in medicinals (cook 2011). for pearson this was symptomatic of the rise of ‘scientific’ western medicine from the late eighteenth century, emerging in the context of western imperialism and mercantilism and which were to dramatically change medical relations between europe and asia where any notion of commonality was abandoned. pearson’s article reminds us of the hierarchies of knowledge set up by postenlightenment philosophies which re-natured certain medical traditions (for example the transformation of the arab physician ibn sinna into the latin avicenna) and purified the doubts out of western scientific medicine, thereby creating hegemonic discourses of health and well-being that have dominated the world in the last century. for example, isabelle stengers, amongst others, have traced the exclusion of hypnotism as a ‘medical’ practice to two french commissions of 1784–1785, one headed by lavoisier. hypnosis was declared to be a product of the imagination, hence not science. carrillo garcía and ghosh introduction portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 4 more than a century later freud would also exclude hypnosis from his practice (chertok & stengers 1992). scholars such as stengers (2000) argue that european science and medicine converted the narratives (‘stories’) of science into ones that are different from other stories because of the demand that ‘inventions’ become ‘discoveries’ that can be tested or are replicable in a laboratory. thus medical science must submit to tests that cause health narratives to lose their fictive status and become detached from specific individuals and places. but, as the social studies of science and medicine have shown, such tests involve creating and stabilizing networks of social relations and practices. european medicine’s faith in its own scientific objectivity thus led to certain experiences and ideas being privileged and others (especially those from non-european cultures) ignored or relegated to the realm of ‘traditional’ or ‘alternative’ medicine. european philosophies of knowledge therefore created and still reproduce a set of social relations and cognitive structures which shape current knowledge and the conditions of human existence (stengers 2000). those discourses ring through mary garvey’s paper, which outlines the issues faced by practitioners, educators and students of chinese medicine in australia. garvey argues that chinese medicine may be at risk of losing its distinctiveness as a medical practice through the current attempts to align it with western biomedical perspectives in order for it to ‘fit’ within existing mainstream medical curricula and regulatory practices. while agreeing that chinese medicine is a diverse practice even in china, where it has undergone revisions and reform throughout its long history, she argues that by excluding chinese medicine’s strong cultural bases and eclectic diagnostic practices— wwhich do not conform to western scientific testability, in that their efficacy cannot be established through the isolation of each of its practices—from the curriculum and the practice will result in its outright integration into biomedical practice. the paper by bernard yam deals with the issue of health inequities and entitlement across a particular border—that between hong kong and mainland china—which divides one people (the chinese) through differentiated citizenship rights. the article maps the incidence of mainland chinese expectant mothers who go to hong kong to give birth there, not only to take advantage of the superior medical services available in the island but also for their children to gain access to the entitlements available to carrillo garcía and ghosh introduction portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 5 children born there. the pressure exerted on hong kong’s hospitals from the increasing number of these cross-border births was doubly challenging given that obstetric and midwifery departments had been downsizing as the island experienced a downward birth rate during the 1990s. local protests against the cross-border births eventually pushed the hong kong hospital authority, in cooperation with authorities on both sides of the border, to introduce a new obstetric package, which effectively barred non-local women from giving birth in the island. yam acknowledges that while effective from the point of view of the hong kong authority, the prevalence of last-minute hospital admissions and the high health risk faced by those women crossing the border needs to be addressed and further investigated. continuing on the theme of health inequities and the commodification of health services, the third paper by dominique martin examines pakistan’s recent attempts to stop unregulated cross-border organ trafficking. the commodification of the body for medical purposes and the financial transactions that surround this process have ranged from the free/forced selling of body parts such as corneas and kidneys to paid gestational surrogacy. again, the transfer of corporeal potential and resources from the global south to the global north points to a form of neo-imperialism that is virtually imposed through the necessities of poverty and the demands for profit. the dark history of transplant tourism in pakistan demonstrates the hazards of unregulated cross-border markets in human organs. martin examines the impact of pakistan’s 2007 transplantation of human organs and tissue ordinance and the sustained efforts of transplant professionals and societal groups led by the sindh institute of urology and transplantation, to show how organ trading has been effectively discouraged, while gradually giving way to a program of self-sufficiency in organ transplantation that is more equitable and non-exploitative. martin stresses that the case of pakistan highlights the need for countries to protect their own organ and tissue providers who may be vulnerable in the global healthcare market. the final paper of this special issue brings to the fore the complexities of an expanding flow of medical migrations. in meredith jones’s account, for those undergoing cosmetic surgery overseas this represent much more than an opportunity to take advantage of cheap medical services (in facilities of comparable or even better quality than those available in the global north) and tourist deals, but is part of a journey of selfcarrillo garcía and ghosh introduction portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 6 transformation and identity seeking. this for jones is part and parcel of a new makeover culture that collapses cultural change (identity seeking) and economic imperatives on to global health markets, epitomising thompson’s (2011) point that medical migrations have indeed become an integral part of our transnational world order. reference list chertok, l. & stengers, i. 1992, a critique of psychoanalytic reason: hypnosis as a scientific problem from lavwoisier to lacan, trans. m. evans in collaboration with the authors, stanford university press, stanford. cook, h. j. 2011, ‘markets and cultures: medical specifics and the reconfiguration of the body in early modern europe,’ transactions of the royal historical society, no. 21: 123–145. godwin, s. k. 2004, ‘medical tourism: subsidising the rich,’ economic and political weekly, vol. 39, no. 36 (sep. 4–10): 3981–3983. helble, m. 2011, ‘the movement of patients across borders: challenges and opportunities for public health,’ bulletin of the world health organization, no. 89: 68–72. leng, c. h. and whittaker, a. 2010, ‘guest editor’s introduction to the special issue: why is medical travel of concern to global social policy?,’ global social policy, vol. 10, no. 3: 287–291. roberts, e. f. s. and scheper-hughes, n. 2011, ‘introduction: medical migrations,’ body & society, vol. 17, nos 2–3): 1–30. stengers, i. 2000, the invention of modern science, trans. d. w. smith, university of minnesota press, minneapolis. thompson, c. 2011, ‘medical migrations afterword: science as a vacation?,’ body & society, vol. 17, nos 2–3: 205–213. template for 2003 conference papers god, we’re not immigrants! a reflection on moving and staying joel scott, university of technology sydney the first time we went there the guy at the front told us that we had to come back the following day, at eight in the morning, to take a number. like a patisserie. we weren’t impressed with the idea, but to be honest we were happy to have understood him. every successful piece of communication takes on greater significance here. often you don’t really care what has been communicated, only that it has been communicated successfully. but when we returned to the policía nacional the next morning, we knew immediately something was wrong. we sensed it. we couldn’t know exactly what had gone wrong, because there were plenty of weak links in the chain. maybe the guy at the desk had misunderstood my faltering spanish. maybe i had misunderstood his disinterested reply. maybe we had both understood each other, but the guy had told us the wrong thing. yeah, that must have been it: he’d just told us the wrong thing. he probably doesn’t work there. if you saw the place you’d understand how entirely plausible that is. as far as i was ever able to find out, there never was a mistake. there was no fault in communication. this is how the system functions. you line up from maybe seven thirty in the morning, until they open at nine. at which time, they begin handing out numbers; a maximum of eighty per day.1 the number tells you at what time you can return to see someone. in our case, all we wanted was to see someone to get a list of documents that we would need to bring to our next appointment, which we also hoped to organise, in order to obtain our official student-residency cards. i began to understand what orwell was talking about when he said 1 i don’t know if the policía nacional is always this way. i’m assuming that it is a little busier at the moment owing to the regularisation of migrants sin papeles [without papers]. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal scott god, we’re not immigrants! that if fascism were to be installed in spain, it would take on a comparatively benign form, if only due to the inefficiency of spaniards (2001, 162). i mean, i get the feeling that this is the same system they would use to organise a holocaust.2 how did we know, without asking a single question, without making eye contact with anyone who was there, that something was wrong? it wasn’t just the number of people lined up. if we’d seen one hundred frustrated twenty year-olds with frosty breath and elegant clothes we’d have known we were in the right place. we’d have been annoyed, but we would have joined the queue. to be honest, the answer is simple: colour. if i had to state from memory, i’d say the majority of the people there were probably from different parts of latin america, probably a few from different parts of northern africa, but pamplona doesn’t seem to have the same level of migration from these parts as does the south of spain, or even a bigger city like barcelona. it was actually quite a diverse ethnic mix, but the problem was that they didn’t look first world. they looked positively other. *** i expected feelings of unbelonging in spain. i’ve used the term unbelonging here because other terms such as isolation or alienation suggest too much a state of being acted upon by one’s environment. as if we are passive victims in the process. on this particular morning we definitely felt that we didn’t belong there, but we had not been excluded by those in the queue. we had refused them. we refused to believe that we could possibly be a part of that group. as one of the girls in our group said: god, we’re not immigrants, we’re australians!3 it’s strange because i think this incident generated the most extreme and immediate feeling of unbelonging i’ve felt since arriving in spain. that’s not to say that there haven’t been others. the first was probably on the streets of barcelona. it was a specifically corporeal unbelonging. it was the unbelonging of a sydney boy in a spanish winter, which comes from realising that i really hadn’t packed the right clothes. this unbelonging subsided quickly, with 2 orwell thought that most spaniards lacked the ‘damnable efficiency and consistency that a modern totalitarian state needs.’ 3 of course i see the inherent irony in this statement. i also saw the offensiveness in it. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 2 scott god, we’re not immigrants! a new vest and some better planning. within a week or so my body had made some minor adjustments, and i wasn’t feeling the cold so violently any more. i also felt for a while that i didn’t belong amongst the erasmus students at my university. between my usual standoffishness and a slight longing for certain people back in sydney, i was on the verge of alienating myself from this group. but then, at the end of our organised excursion around pamplona, a group of french students dragged me off to a bar. and there i was, a serving of patatas bravas [cooked potato chunks] and a caña [beer] in front of me, belonging, more or less. i can think of only one other sense of feeling out of place here that can compete with that morning at the policía municipal: an earlier night at a discoteca called marengos. at three in the morning, with bad trance from five years ago, bad pop from ten years ago, and a few hundred happy people dancing around me, i thought to myself: i do not belong here. but at least i had other people there with which to bitch about the music. besides, i’ve felt that way a hundred times on nights out in sydney as well. the sensation was in no way new or specific to pamplona. there was something more forceful, more brutal and arrogant, about my sense of unbelonging that morning at the policía municipal. we stood on the other side of the street, looking at the people in the queue. each of them precariously positioned here, attempting to root themselves into the landscape. to legitimise themselves. they all looked bored, but not impatient, the boredom of people who have accepted the situation. our boredom would have been impatient and indignant. our boredom would have bitched and moaned. but the thing is, we never got bored, because we never crossed the road. we looked for about thirty seconds, exchanging worried glances, and then went to get a coffee to warm ourselves up. maybe buy those textbooks so the day wouldn’t be a complete waste of time. there were so many cultural assumptions tied up in that turning of bodies back to the café. it gives away a lot about us. we’d been told to join the queue. it’s not as if this is a culturally foreign concept for us. we know all about lining up in australia. we’re experts in the discourse of the justice of the queue. or more importantly, of that morally repugnant act of jumping the queue. had we been the good little australians that my compañera [female companion] suggested, we should have been happy to line up. to wait our turn. the truth is portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 3 scott god, we’re not immigrants! we never considered it. we expected the spanish bureaucracy to create a new queue for us. they should have been able to differentiate between us, the australian students, and them, the immigrant workers, the others. indeed that differentiation is not simply a racist construct of our australian imaginaries. it’s a recognised bureaucratic strategy. straubhaar and martin (2002, 72) speak of the need in a country like romania of ‘modernizing border management to facilitate the movement of legitimate travellers and goods while discouraging illegal migration’ [emphasis mine]. and that’s what interests me so much about this: the way travellers expect to be treated differently to migrants. and generally we are treated well. people tell us how great our spanish is when our spanish is not great. they say things like, you’ll have to speak a bit slower, he’s australian. and then they smile an unpatronising smile and enunciate with charming clarity. they say, ‘ooh, australia, i really want to go to australia’, and smile at us as if just meeting us takes them closer to those beaches and those cute little animals. in part, we travellers conceive of ourselves as engaging with space differently to migrants. and we expect to be treated accordingly. we’re visitors, guests even. we’re unthreatening because we come and we go. like a refreshing breeze on a summer’s day. enjoy your time here, the woman at the desk said when a few days later we finally got to see someone (without lining up). the implication of that statement is that our time here is finite. there could almost be a subordinate clause: but make sure to leave. *** if travellers are a cool breeze, or perhaps a gentle cycle of ripples, migrants come in waves.4 in australia we like to talk about waves, or floods of immigrants. and after boxing day (december 26), 2004, we all know how destructive waves can be. a wave can flood a landscape and alter it permanently. travellers pass through, whereas migrants enter deeply into the landscape, they take root, de/reforming the previous makeup. in the maldive islands, after the 2004 tsunami in south east asia, commentators spoke of the need to redraw the maps, because the tsunami had actually altered the form of the islands. the old maps wouldn’t represent the current shape of the coastline (‘tsunami alters shape,’ 2005). the same thing 4 certainly there can also be waves of travellers. i'll see that when the festival of san fermín comes around. but we may assume that the wave of travellers will disperse and recede. after the running of the bulls, pamplona will re-form itself into the quiet city of 200,000 people that i know at the moment. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 4 scott god, we’re not immigrants! happens with a census after periods of significant migration. a new image of the national body and landscape is required. migrants are seen as affecting every aspect of a society and its landscape; economics, urban sprawls, unemployment, birth rates, and through these births, the bodies of a nation are altered. because migrants remain, and so do their children, they have the capacity to alter the physical appearance of the navarrese. in this way neo-fascist groups like to speak of migration as a form of genocide, with the white race being, in a sense, diluted. the negative idea of the wave that deforms the landscape is often spoken of by those who knew the old landscape. my grandparents grew up in campsie, in western sydney, when it was white. every now and then i hear them talk about how you wouldn’t even recognise the place now. it seems that this wave of migration from outside spain is now cresting in pamplona. a lot of people here seem to have that sort of ethnic ignorance that made my grandmother believe that my sri lankan-australian friend would definitely know her sri lankan friend who also lives in sydney. the other day i was instructed to go to los chinos to buy a phone card (which meant the zapatería [shoe shop] two doors down). the shop’s name almost doesn’t seem racist, just completely naïve about ethnic complexities. i’d like to tell you how migrants feel here. how they are treated, if they feel that spaniards perceive them as invading the landscape. it’s possible that the navarrese aren’t too fussed. the basque population has already seen waves of internal migration that have radically altered the social landscape of a city like pamplona.5 perhaps migrants enter differently into a heavily and openly contested landscape like that in pamplona. but of course, i can’t tell you any of that. i never found out. essentially this is a silent ethnography. dumb and blind. we rendered everyone else speechless and invisible by going to get coffee that day. when we saw the queue we were expected to join, we looked away. i wanted to look at the differences between my experience and that of migrants here (especially the most precarious of these, those without papers). but i 5i fell into a trap the other night, when in a discoteca a guy asked me how i liked their country, the basque country. i said, yeah; i like it a lot here, but i haven't been to the basque country yet. he pointed out that pamplona is the capital city of the basque country. luckily i was able to charm him with my knowledge of football, the difference between athletic bilbao and real madrid. and later on when i mentioned the revolt in asturias in october 1934, i thought he was going to faint. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 5 scott god, we’re not immigrants! walked away from them. because it was cold and there was no way we were going to wait all morning in the cold like they had to. reference list martin p., and straubhaar t., 2002, ‘best practice options: romania,’ international migration, 40.3: 72-86. orwell, g. 2001, orwell in spain, penguin, london. ‘tsunami shape alters maldives,’ 2005 (12 january), [online] available at: http://www.tsunami.maldiveisle.com/maldives/tsunami_maldives_shape_36.htm [accessed 22 march 2005]. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 6 http://www.tsunami.maldiveisle.com/maldives/tsunami_maldives_shape_36.htm over my dead body portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal over my dead body! media constructions of forced prostitution in the people’s republic of china elaine jeffreys, university of technology sydney in late 1997, 24-year-old tang shengli became a household name in the people’s republic of china (prc) after she threw herself out of a six-metre high window to escape being forced to sell sexual services in a nightclub. her actions, which resulted in first-degree spinal damage, are now immortalized in a chinese dictionary. the dictionary defines a new term, sanpeinü, as referring to an illicit form of female worker, namely, a ‘hostess’ who accompanies men to sing, drink, and dance, in public entertainment venues, and is often associated with the provision of commercial sexual services. explaining how to apply this term, the dictionary states: ‘this year the case of sichuanese rural migrant worker, tang shengli, who jumped from a building saying “i would rather die than become a ‘hostess’”, made a sensation’ (‘xinhua xin ciyu cidian ye “bao” ernai’ 2002). the chinese media has since covered more than 30 cases of women who have followed tang’s example.1 these women are reified by some sectors of the chinese media as resistant heroines or new millennium female chastity martyrs (lienü), that is, as women who are prepared to terminate their lives in order to defy ‘masculine oppression’, but whose virtue lies as much in their old-fashioned determination to defend their ‘virginity and reputation’ as in their modern-day ‘feistiness and strong will’ (sun 2004, 114). hence, other commentators have criticized this focus for 1 wang yueguo (2003) refers to 22 cases by 2003. i am aware of more than nine cases since that time. for details of other cases, see dai and liu 2000; gong 2002; guangzhou lienü liu qinqin zuo dedao lianhe fayuan” 2005; li and li 2004; li xiaobo 2002; lin 2004; liu and zhang 2001; meng 2000; pu 2004; ran and he 2004; su 2001; wan and liu 2004; and zhang 2004. jeffreys over my dead body! endorsing confucian or feudal-patriarchal conceptions of the ideal (virtuous) woman, and for contributing to the longstanding cultural denigration of women-in-prostitution by eliding the male side of demand and suggesting that those who sell sex in a voluntary capacity are truly ‘fallen women’ (sun, 2004, 114-16; he 1998; lü 2001; wang xiaobo 2002). this paper examines some of the tensions surrounding the prc’s official policy of banning prostitution by focusing on two highly publicized cases of deceptive recruiting for sexual services—the ‘tang shengli incident’ and the ‘liu yanhua incident’. both cases involved young rural women who had migrated from their native homes to other more economically developed parts of china to look for work. both women were required to sell sex and both resisted. however, whereas tang shengli jumped from a building rather than be forced into prostitution, liu yanhua escaped from conditions akin to sexual servitude by physically assaulting her ‘employer’. an examination of these cases highlights some of the problems associated with efforts by the chinese women’s media to protect and promote women’s rights in a country marked by rapid, yet unequal, economic growth and an expanding, albeit banned, sex industry. publicizing the ‘tang shengli incident’ prostitution comprises a new object of governmental concern in the prc in that following its assumption of political power in 1949, the chinese communist party (ccp) embarked upon a series of campaigns that purportedly eradicated prostitution from the mainland by the late 1950s (jeffreys 2004, 96). the extraordinary nature of this feat, irrespective of its actual validity, meant that the eradication of prostitution was (and still is) vaunted as one of the major accomplishments of the new regime. indeed, a chinese government white paper describes it as effecting an ‘earth-shaking historic change in the social status and condition of women’ (‘historic liberation of chinese women’ 2000). following engels ([1884] 1972), the early ccp viewed the institution of prostitution as an expression of the exploited and denigrated position of women under capitalism-patriarchy, and hence as incompatible with the desired goals of building socialism and establishing more equitable socio-sexual relations. since the early 1980s, however, along with the shift from a planned to a market economy, china’s governmental authorities have acknowledged that the phenomenon of portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 jeffreys over my dead body! prostitution has not only reappeared on the mainland, it also constitutes a widespread and growing problem. in fact, it is now considered that the introduction of new laws and regulatory measures has failed to curb the prostitution business, especially its proliferation throughout china’s new and burgeoning hospitality and service industry (jeffreys 2004, 96-102). the story of tang shengli thus bears recounting because it is the first widely publicized case in economic-reform china of a woman who was prepared to risk her life rather than be forced into selling sexual services in a nightclub. in keeping with the labour mobility demanded by market-based reforms,2 on 23 november 1997 tang shengli, the 24-year-old daughter of a poor coalminer from wangcang county in sichuan province, and her friend, jiang hongmei, traveled approximately 300 km from their native homes to a labour market in chengdu city to look for work (‘lienü tang shengli chengdu xinhun’ 2004). 3 the two women were approached by what appeared to be a married couple with two teenage girls, who offered them employment as waitresses in a restaurant for 300 yuan per month, plus accommodation and food. the presence of the teenagers, combined with the fact that the proposed salary was around three times more than they might expect to receive from working closer to home, persuaded tang and jiang that it was both safe and appropriate to accept employment with hu shuiyuan, a man in his 40s. however, upon their arrival at the tianya nightclub in meishan county, approximately 150 km from chengdu, they discovered that they were expected to work as hostesses. the two women refused but were kept under close personal surveillance, forced to watch pornographic videos as an instruction for prostitutional sex,4 and obliged to accompany male patrons of the venue, all of whom expressed no interest in them, 2 during the maoist period (1949-1976), and for some time after, chinese citizens were geographically fixed to their place of abode in order to suit the requirements of centralized planning, hence labour mobility is a new feature of the post-1978 or economic reform period. for a discussion of the impact of this mobility on rural chinese women, see gaetano and jacka (eds), 2004. 3 labour markets are gathering places for employers and their agents and people who are looking for work. employers often want skilled or semi-skilled labour, whereas a significant number of people who attend such markets are looking for unskilled work in the hospitality and service industry, for example, as domestic maids, factory workers, garbage collectors and construction workers. despite efforts to regulate china’s labour markets, both unskilled migrant workers and ‘unregistered’ agents and employers continue to use these markets as an informal meeting place, primarily by avoiding official registration fees and checks and simply moving around the busy venues to look for potential workers and employers (sun guangxun 2005). 4 the production and dissemination of pornography is prohibited in china, but pornographic materials are increasingly available. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 jeffreys over my dead body! preferring the company of other women in the nightclub. after two days of being afraid and confined in this fashion, tang attempted to escape by leaping from a window on their first-floor sleeping quarters,5 with the result that she became paralyzed from the waist down. jiang reportedly intended to jump after tang but desisted when she saw that her friend had sustained serious injuries (‘lienü tang shengli chengdu xinhun’ 2004; tan 1998). following local media coverage, tang shengli’s story became national news on 27 december 1997 when the all china women’s federation (acwf) published an article entitled ‘the ‘tang shengli incident’ shocks chengdu’, in its media flagship, the china women’s news (zhongguo funü bao), a weekly paper with a circulation of 110,000 copies. the acwf was founded by the ccp in 1949 and is charged with the task of representing and safeguarding women’s rights and interests and promoting equality between women and men. although the feminist credentials of the acwf are often disputed, due to its historic and continued role in promoting the goals of the chinese party-state, it remains the largest and most influential organization working for the protection and promotion of women’s rights in the prc, acquiring consultative status with the united nations economic and social council in 1995 (hsiung et al. 2001). the editorial staff at the china women’s news turned tang shengli into a national heroine by making her the focus of a small-scale media campaign designed to attack the resurgent phenomenon of prostitution (especially its rapid expansion in the form of the provision of hostess services throughout china’s hospitality and service industry), and thereby garner public support for the official policy of banning it (wu 2003). organizing, inducing, introducing, facilitating, or forcing, another person to engage in prostitution is a criminal offence in china, punishable by up to five or up to 10 years imprisonment with the possible addition of a fine, according to the prc’s first criminal code, promulgated on 1 january 1980, and the revised 1997 criminal code of the people’s republic of china (see articles 358-9, 1998). although first-party participation in the prostitution transaction is not criminalized, it is banned on the 5 here, i am using the australian and british practice of counting the number of floors in a multi-storey building by commencing with the ground floor, followed by the first floor, second floor, and so on. in china, as in the usa, the ground floor is described as the first floor. hence in chinese-language accounts, tang shengli jumped from a second-storey window. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 jeffreys over my dead body! basis of legislation that the acwf helped to formulate, namely, the 1991 decision on strictly forbidding the selling and buying of sex, and the 1992 law on protecting the rights and interests of women (quanguo renda changwu weiyuan hui 1991; zhonghua renmin gongheguo hunyin fa, zhonghua renmin gongheguo funü quanyi baozhang fa 1994). these laws ban engagement in and facilitation of the prostitution transaction as a social harm and a violation of the rights of ‘woman-as-person’, punishable by a maximum of 15 days detention for investigation and the possible addition of a fine; and, in more serious cases, by between six months and two years detention for reform through education and/or labour with the possible addition of a fine, according to stipulations outlined in the former chinese system of administrative sanctions. the chinese system of administrative sanctions came into being during the maoist period (1949-1976), when the legal system fell into disrepute as a tool of class-based oppression. following the promulgation of the prc’s first criminal code in 1980, it was used, and not without criticism, alongside the formal legal system to police the activities of those who were deemed to have committed social offences, but whose criminal liability was not deemed sufficient to bring them before the courts (starr 2001: 204-19). this meant that the vast majority of prostitution-related offences—i.e., the processes of investigating, determining guilt, and suitably penalizing, the activities of sellers and buyers of sex—were handled by china’s public security agencies, with only serious cases, such as those relating to the organization of prostitution, forced prostitution, and trafficking in women and children, being handled through the courts and criminal justice system. the prc’s new security administration punishment law of 1 march 2006 continues to ban first-party engagement in the prostitution transaction as a social harm, but it significantly reduces previous penalties. it states that offenders may be punished by a maximum of five days administrative detention or a fine of 500 yuan; and, in more serious cases, by 10 to 15 days administrative detention with the possible addition of a fine up to 5,000 yuan (quanguo renda changwu weiyuanhui 2005). hence, the emerging body of chinese prostitution law can be technically described as abolitionist not prohibitionist in that it criminalizes third-party involvement in the running of prostitution businesses, rather than firstparty participation in the prostitution transaction (jeffreys 2004: 138-49). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 jeffreys over my dead body! in keeping with the abolitionist impetus of chinese prostitution law, the china women’s news proceeded to publish an estimated 24 reports that upheld tang shengli as embodying the perceived spirit of chinese women—their resilience, self-respect and refusal to be downtrodden—and attacked the resurgent prostitution industry for encouraging violations of women’s rights (wu 2003). hampered by complaints from government authorities in sichuan that their focus on tang was promoting an unnecessarily bad image of the province, the acwf published a series of localized case studies that exposed the links between forced prostitution and the provision of hostess services across the nation (wu 2003). articles entitled ‘hostessing has to be stopped’, ‘women’s dignity should not be violated’, and ‘labour markets are in need of regulation’, focused on the plight of vulnerable young women from poor agricultural provinces, who had been recruited, either in their native villages or at labour markets, by people offering comparatively well-paid work as waitresses and receptionists in the urban hospitality and service industry (wu 2003). as with tang shengli, many had arrived to discover that they had been deceived about the nature of the work they were expected to perform. their recruiters had then used a variety of means to prevent the women from leaving, such as threats, beatings, rape, and forcing them to sign promissory notes akin to debt-bondage to cover the costs of their travel and accommodation, i.e., debts that could only be paid off by their engagement in prostitution. additionally, their recruiters had not only withheld the women’s personal identity cards, thereby depriving them of the ability to leave and gain a legitimate livelihood elsewhere in china,6 but also ensured that their victims would be reluctant to seek help by playing on their physical dislocation, lack of finances and social connections, and the shame that would follow from public knowledge of their situation (wu 2003). thus, while occurring within china’s domestic borders, the situation of these women conforms to international definitions of the crime of trafficking in persons for the purposes of sexual exploitation.7 6 in china, internal migrants who lack identity cards and proper documentation, stable residence, or secure employment, can find themselves the focus of police attention and may even be detained for police investigation. for a discussion of this issue see gaetano and jacka eds, 2004: 14-20. 7 the united nations convention against transnational organized crime and the protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children, defines people trafficking as the: ‘recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 jeffreys over my dead body! by focusing on the links between deceptive recruiting for sexual services and the provision of hostess services, the acwf suggested that local-government authorities were insufficiently committed to the combined task of safeguarding women’s rights and eradicating the prostitution industry. this suggestion was buttressed with reference to the perceived failure of law enforcement authorities to punish traffickers and organizers of prostitution businesses according to the full letter of the law. for example, hu shuiyuan, the man who recruited tang shengli, initially was not penalized on the basis of criminal sanctions, but rather in accordance with the theoretically more lenient provisions outlined in the chinese system of administrative sanctions. on 31 december 1997, hu’s business license was revoked and he was sentenced to one year of re-education through labour for keeping women in prostitution (‘lienü tang shengli chengdu xinhun’ 2004, 1). media outcry over the seeming leniency of this sentence, which the acwf actively encouraged, resulted in hu’s case being re-opened for investigation and potential handling by the criminal courts. consequently, on 28 september 1998, the local people’s court in meishan county imposed a sentence of five years jail and a fine of 5,000 yuan on hu shuiyuan for illegally operating a prostitution business (hou 2004; jiang 1998, 3). apart from demanding criminal penalties for organizers of prostitution businesses, the acwf’s promotion of the ‘tang shengli incident’ aimed to counter local government quiescence by garnering support for the introduction of new legislation designed to halt the provision of hostess services in recreational venues. during 1997-8, the question of whether or not ‘hostessing’ should be tolerated in order to develop local tourism and leisure industries, as well as to generate much-needed local government revenue, attracted considerable controversy in the chinese media (fan 2002). this controversy centred on the decision of certain municipal authorities to levy individual income tax on women who derived an income from ‘tips’, service fees, or informal consumption taxes, in entertainment venues. representatives from local government and tax departments justified their actions by arguing that prostitution and hostessing were fundamentally different in nature (wang fengbin 1998). whereas prostitution sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs’ (article 3a, united nations 2000). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 jeffreys over my dead body! constituted a social harm, hostessing simply referred to the provision of (voluntary) dancing and singing companions, in venues that are predominantly patronized by private businessmen and male government officials, due to the high consumption costs involved. proponents of this view further insisted that they were obliged by the prc’s taxation laws to levy individual income tax on citizens who met the tax threshold criteria; but they were not required to determine whether that income was legally generated (wang fengbin 1998). as far as the acwf and china’s public security agencies were concerned, these actions complicated the already difficult task of policing the ‘grey area’ between the provision of hostess services and prostitution, because it granted a quasi-legal status to the activities of hostesses by treating them as equivalent to any other citizen-as-worker. in consequence, the acwf submitted a report to china’s main legislative body, the national people’s congress, requesting stricter controls over commercial recreational enterprises and clarification of the duties of all relevant departments with regard to the control of prostitution businesses (jeffreys 2004, 145-7). although acwf representatives originally maintained that this proposed initiative would not directly affect women who merely accompanied male patrons of recreational venues, they also insisted that stricter controls were necessary to deter the provision of sex-related hostess services by leading to a renewed crackdown on prostitution (‘women’s lobby tackles bar sex’ 1999). the acwf’s request was supported by similar requests from china’s public security agencies, on the grounds that the indeterminate nature of hostess services, combined with the emergence of new kinds of commercial sexual practices, had made the task of policing prostitution virtually impossible. in fact, as far as china’s public security agencies were concerned, the quasi-acceptance of hostess services abetted prostitution by encouraging the practice of ‘accompanying first and engaging in prostitution later’, a practice that simultaneously evaded official prostitution controls, whilst financially benefiting the owners of recreational business enterprises (jeffreys 2004, 147). the acwf’s successful lobbying of the national people’s congress resulted in the promulgation of the 1999 ‘regulations concerning the management of public places of entertainment’ (hereafter the entertainment regulations) (zhonghua renmin gongheguo guowuyuan 1999). these regulations turn on the understanding that portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 jeffreys over my dead body! prostitution and the provision of hostess services are indivisible, with the latter not only constituting a ‘breeding ground’ for prostitution, but also encouraging corruption in the form of local government collusion in the running of prostitution businesses, and the widespread expropriation of public funds by male government officials to wine, dine and buy the services of women in recreational venues (fan 2002). the entertainment regulations therefore forbid all forms of commercial sex-related activities in recreational enterprises by stipulating that anyone who participates in, promotes or profits from, and/or fails to report the existence of such activities, will be made subject to criminal or administrative penalties (zhonghua renmin gongheguo guowuyuan 1999). they further aim to restrict the available pool and turn-over of labour within china’s hospitality and service industry by reinforcing the longstanding stipulation that all personnel must possess a residency permit, or a temporary work and residency permit, and hence be ‘known’ to the local police. police-led campaigns directed at controlling illicit business operations and the provision of hostess services subsequently were implemented throughout the prc in late 1999 and 2000, resulting in the closure of nearly one million recreational businesses operations of miscellaneous forms, even though they failed to eradicate prostitution and hostessing activities in toto (jeffreys 2004, 177-9). the acwf also promoted the ‘tang shengli incident’ to demonstrate that victims of sexual exploitation require public and state assistance. this goal was realized through its coordination with other governmental departments, news agencies, and legal specialists, and ultimately with the chinese rehabilitation research centre at the prestigious bo ai hospital in beijing, which offered tang free medical treatment as part of its own public relations campaign (hou 2004). upon hearing of tang’s predicament and reportedly inspired by her moral courage, representatives from the centre contacted the china women’s news to ask for its assurance, as a ccpaffiliated organization, that the facts of the case were authentic (zhongguo kangfu yanjiu zhongxin 2003). once it was established that tang and her family were unable to pay for either continuing or specialist medical care, tang was invited to come to the centre for free rehabilitative treatment, including the cost of accommodation, drugs and food, as well as financial support for her visiting family. the pay-back for the centre was tang’s agreement to become the focus of a nationwide media blitz designed to improve the centre’s public visibility and attract more clients, thereby portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 jeffreys over my dead body! improving its financial viability, as necessitated by the removal of state-funding in the privatized era of economic reform. in what proved to be an award-winning public relations exercise, tang shengli arrived in beijing on the evening of 6 january 1998 and was duly met by a welcoming committee of representatives from the chinese rehabilitation research centre and over 20 news agencies (zhongguo kangfu yanjiu zhongxin 2003). photographs of this reception and a prepared news statement entitled, ‘the chinese rehabilitation research centre offers to treat and cure tang shengli, the woman who was willing to die rather than become a “hostess”’, were publicized and televised throughout the nation. during tang’s four-month stay at the centre, a wide range of senior government officials paid her formal visits that attracted ongoing media coverage, including senior representatives from the acwf and china’s disabled federation. additionally, the centre received thousands of letters and money donations from members of the public, and donations from overseas pharmaceutical companies. despite initial doubts over tang’s capacity to walk again, by the end of her stay, she was able to walk with the aid of supports and manage her own daily needs. in conjunction with the acwf, the centre also organized skills training for tang to learn how to knit and realize a livelihood upon her departure, giving her a parting gift of 10,000 yuan and a knitting machine valued at 8,000 yuan. as with her arrival, tang’s discharge from the centre on 15 may 1998 was accompanied by a large press conference, involving 38 news agencies and more than 50 reporters, and an elaborate farewell ceremony. the chinese rehabilitation research centre subsequently won a commerce and industry prize in 2003 for one of the most successful public relations exercises conducted by a government and non-profit organization in reform-era china, since the national media reported on tang shengli’s case approximately 120 times, and the centre attracted a significant number of patients on the basis of that coverage (zhongguo kangfu yanjiu zhongxin 2003). in fact, the centre capitalized on tang’s media currency throughout late 1999 and early 2000 by offering similar help to dong shujun, a 23-year-old woman from a poor rural family in changshou county, chongqing municipality, who was deceived about the nature of her employment in may 1999. dong was raped because she refused to engage in prostitution, suffered portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 jeffreys over my dead body! paralysis in her lower limbs following a failed attempt to escape by leaping out of a window, and then was recaptured and gang-raped before being set free (deng hongyang 2001). the interest of party and government organizations other than the acwf in cases such as that of tang shengli suggests that media constructions of china’s ‘new millennium female chastity martyrs’ serve a variety of purposes, not strictly the acwf’s goal of promoting the prc’s official ban on prostitution. this point is highlighted by the case of hong zhaodi. in june 1998, hong zhaodi, a twenty-yearold woman from a village in suxian county, anhui province, was admitted to hospital after being badly beaten for refusing to engage in prostitution and having been deceived about the nature of her employment. when hospital staff ignored hong’s requests to call the police and her ‘employer’ came to collect her, she jumped in desperation from a second-storey window, resulting in first-degree spinal damage (cai and yuan 2005; ‘jiuzhi tekun bingren’ 2005). as with the chinese rehabilitation research centre’s promotion of tang shengli, hong’s case was made the focus of a public relations exercise designed to highlight the importance of humanitarian cooperation between different party and government departments, as well as the general public. for example, due to the personal intervention of the secretary of the guangdong provincial government, hong, as a poorly educated, rural migrant worker, was given the extraordinary opportunity to engage in higher education and to join the communist party. her ultimately successful physical rehabilitation also received widespread publicity in the guangzhou evening news, initially to elicit public donations to help with hong’s medical expenses, and later as part of public health campaign entitled ‘100 party members give special medical treatment to 100 needy cases’ (‘jiuzhi tekun bingren’ 2005). hence, although the china women’s news played an instrumental role in promoting the ‘tang shengli incident’, media constructions of tang shengli and other women as ‘new millennium chastity martyrs’ perhaps owe as much to the utility of tragedy and moral outrage as a means of promoting charity and benevolence towards those sidelined by china’s increasingly privatised and cash-strapped public health system, as they do to the acwf’s historical and continued opposition to prostitution. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 11 jeffreys over my dead body! debating the ‘tang shengli incident’ chinese media accounts of tang shengli tend to celebrate a tale of personal success in the face of extreme adversity and the utility of cooperation between different government agencies in the changed era of economic reform. to begin with, the acwf’s active coordination with other governmental agencies, including news agencies, legal specialists, and ultimately the chinese rehabilitation research centre, helped to realize at least two goals outlined in international conventions on preventing trafficking in women for the purposes of forced prostitution and sexual servitude (a situation wherein the use of force and threats prevent a person from ceasing to provide sexual services or leaving the place where those services are performed). united nation protocols on the prevention of trafficking in persons contend that states shall consider measures to provide for the physical, psychological and social recovery of victims of trafficking, in part, by providing victims with medical, psychological, and material assistance (united nations 2000). states are further enjoined to promote a greater awareness of people-trafficking matters in the general community, primarily by working with the media in order to encourage responsible reporting of the subject. the acwf clearly advanced both of these objectives by making tang shengli the focus of a small-scale media campaign designed to oppose the resurgent prostitution industry. in addition, personal testimonies from tang shengli praise the role played by the acwf and the chinese media in ensuring her physical and social recovery. tang became the focus of national headlines once again in january 2004, when the china women’s news reported on her marriage to luo qijia, a 39-year-old former security guard, in the xinguang hotel of chengdu city. at the reception, tang thanked attending representatives from the acwf and the chinese media as a whole for giving her a ‘second shot at life’ (hou 2004). during the period of her hospital treatment in beijing, tang had told reporters that one of her few remaining regrets was that she would probably remain single due to the long-term consequences of her injuries (tan 1998). these included bowel dysfunction, ongoing medical expenses, and presumably an inability to bear children. however, upon her eventual release, tang had abandoned the anticipated source of her income—the knitting machine— and started looking after a small convenience store run by her step-mother, which proceeded to attract a reasonable business, chiefly on the basis of her public portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 jeffreys over my dead body! reputation. concomitantly, luo had written to tang after being inspired by media accounts of her heroism; and, following six years of mutual correspondence and various meetings, the couple had decided to wed (hou 2004; ‘lienü tang shengli chengdu xinhun’ 2004). but the fact that more than 30 chinese women have followed tang shengli’s example has generated criticisms of the media strategy of reifying such women as modern-day chastity martyrs-cum-heroines. a major complaint is that this focus inadvertently reinstates the traditional cultural value on female virginity in china, and the ensuing stress on monogamous, heterosexual marriage, by implying that chastity is more important than life (lian 2002; lü 2001; wang xiaobo 2002; wang yueguo 2003; zhou 2002). in doing so, it suggests that women who find themselves at risk of rape and/or being forced into prostitution should act in the same manner as tang, chiefly by failing to provide any alternative strategies. critics further aver that the individualized focus on such women as ‘chastity heroines’ entrenches the ‘whore stigma’ by giving implicit support to the broader media representation of women who prostitute or hostess in a voluntary capacity as ‘fallen women’. in the process, it deflects critical attention away from a serious consideration of the broader socioeconomic factors that encourage the existence of prostitution businesses and practices in china today (he 1998; pan 2003; sun, w. 2002: 109-28). compounding these problems, a recent survey on ‘women and the media’ suggests that the most disliked category of media reporting according to female respondents is the topic of female chastity martyrs (li and wang 2003: 7; sheng 2003). critics thus conclude that the professed goal of the so-called women’s media in china—to improve legal protections for women, especially for rural migrant women—might be better achieved by denouncing the existence of forced prostitution and simultaneously challenging the traditional value accorded to female chastity and ‘ideal’ womanhood (sheng 2003; zhou 2003). these complaints are often and somewhat erroneously directed at the acwf as a perceived ‘mouthpiece’ for moralistic party-state rhetoric and a ‘failed’ voice for women’s issues in china (sun, w. 2004: 109-28; zheng 2004: 97). i say ‘erroneously’ in that journalists associated with the acwf are responsible for raising precisely the same issues that are used to criticize the organization. for example, the portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 13 jeffreys over my dead body! women’s media watch, a media-monitoring group that was established with the active involvement of the acwf, explicitly criticizes what it describes as the mainstream media’s tendency to eulogize tang shengli and women in similar circumstances as female chastity martyrs (cai et al. 2001: 216-17). as the group notes, this focus reinforces patriarchal conceptions of women and fails to promote new understandings of women’s rights as human rights, by emphasizing the ‘innocence’ of the women in question, rather than the fact that their health, life, and freedom, were being abused (see also lü 2001; wang xiaobo 2002). other commentators associated with the acwf further contend that the strategy of focusing on female chastity martyrs is problematic because it contributes to the historical elision of the male side of the demand for prostitution, and deflects attention away from the more serious question of exactly who demands the services of female sex sellers in the first place, i.e., men with money and power (bo 2001; he 1998). these criticisms suggest that acwf-affiliated journalists believe that their promotion of the ‘tang shengli incident’ as an example of the need to combat sexual exploitation and violence against women was co-opted by the broader media and turned into a personalized tale of ‘chastity martyrdom’, even as it does not exclude the possibility that this complaint may have been targeted at sectors of the acwf from within the acwf itself. at the very least, it suggests that it is analytically unproductive to treat the acwf as a unitary ‘mouthpiece’ for party-state rhetoric, and therefore as an organization that promotes ‘false’ and ‘unfeminist’ approaches (i.e., approaches that always compare negatively with those proffered by something arbitrarily designated as an ‘unofficial’ and more ‘socially responsible’ sector of the commercial chinese media). the misguided nature of some criticisms of the acwf’s promotion of the ‘tang shengli incident’ is highlighted by debates surrounding the previously mentioned survey on women and the media. some commentators explicitly cite this survey to criticize what they describe as the focus of the women’s media on tang shengli and women in similar circumstances as female chastity martyrs (li and wang 2003: 7; sheng 2003). they further contend that the erroneous underpinnings of such a focus are patently obvious since the most disliked topic of media reporting on the part of female respondents was ‘female chastity martyrs’ (li and wang 2003: 7; sheng 2003). one problem here is that the same survey indicates that an equally disliked portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 14 jeffreys over my dead body! category of media reporting on the part of female respondents was the subject of domestic violence (li and wang 2003: 7). given the absence of any additional information as to why female respondents dislike media coverage of such topics, or even what topics they could choose to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’, that professed disdain may owe more to feelings of abhorrence at the flagrant abuse described in media coverage of such cases than its problematic underpinnings. likewise, it is not clear what exactly is meant by the ‘women’s media’, even though it presumably refers to the china women’s news and related publications, since the survey itself was conducted under the auspices of the acwf. this is not to deny that representations of women like tang shengli in both the china women’s news and the broader chinese media are frequently didactic and ascribe little if no agency to rural migrant women workers (sun, w. 2004: 109-28). nor is it to deny that the acwf’s official adherence to marxist-style conceptions of prostitution as a reflection of the feudal-patriarchal oppression of women, exacerbated by the introduction of market-mechanisms, following the ccp’s contention that china has only just entered ‘the primary stage of socialism’, has left them unable to conceive of women-in-prostitution as anything other than ‘victims’ or women who have been seduced by materialistic values (sun, w. 2002: 188-93; zheng 2004: 90). it is simply to suggest that the acwf is not unaware of the problems associated with reinstating traditional conceptions of the ‘virtuous (chinese) woman’, as demonstrated by the decision of the china women’s news to follow its media campaign on the ‘tang shengli incident’ with coverage of another victim of deceptive recruiting for sexual services—liu yanhua. publicizing the ‘liu yanhua incident’ according to a former journalist with the acwf, the editorial staff at the china women’s news made an executive decision to follow their media campaign on the ‘tang shengli incident’ with what resulted in 29 reports on the ‘liu yanhua incident’, a case that coincided with the launch of a nationwide police-led campaign against the kidnapping of and trafficking in women and children on 1 april 2000 (wu 2003). like tang shengli, liu yanhua had left her native village following the promise of a job in a more economically developed part of china only to discover that she had been deceived about the nature of her employment and was expected to portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 15 jeffreys over my dead body! ‘work’ as a prostitute. unlike tang shengli, who risked her own life rather than be forced into prostitution, liu escaped from conditions akin to sexual servitude by physically attacking her ‘employer’. hence, media coverage of liu yanhua’s story in the china women’s news highlighted the typical details of the case—yet another example of a young rural woman who had been lured and tricked into prostitution— whilst drawing attention to its atypical finale. the aim of such media coverage was to justify liu’s violent response, not only by suggesting that she had acted in selfdefence in circumstances of extreme duress, but also by implying that it was necessitated by the existence of local-government complicity in the running of prostitution businesses, and the absence of enforceable legal protections for victims of trafficking and violence against women (wu 2003). to underscore the latter point, the china women’s news drew public attention to the fact that the incident took place in accommodation rented from local court authorities (deng and liu 2000). the ‘liu yanhua incident’ made national headlines on 27 march 2000 when the china women’s news printed a front-page article written by deng xiaobo, an acwf reporter, and liu hongyi, an independent journalist, in conjunction with a letter written by liu yanhua’s father on 3 march to the hainan provincial government and the national people’s congress begging legal clemency for his daughter (deng and liu 2000). according to these reports, in late october or early november 1999, a 43year-old woman named tang xi’er had returned to her native village in yongxing county, hunan province, ostensibly to recruit service personnel for a hotel that she had established in haikou city, hainan province. persuaded by the offer of 800 yuan per month, plus accommodation and food, 17-year-old liu yanhua and several other young women left for haikou with tang. liu found this offer attractive because she had already left school in order to work and help finance her brother’s schooling (tiannan 2004). however, on the evening they arrived, liu was raped by one of tang’s ‘bodyguards’, a man named chen, and forced to service male clients at local hotels and residential homes on a regular basis thereafter (deng and liu 2000). as with tang shengli, the article in the china women’s news indicated that liu’s recruiters had used a variety of measures to ensure the compliance of liu yanhua and other young women in acts of sexual exploitation. most notably, tang xi’er took away their personal identity cards, demanded a monthly commission or ‘receiving portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 16 jeffreys over my dead body! customer fee’ of 2,500 yuan, and forced them to sign promissory notes stating that they already owed her expenses of several thousand yuan for travel, food, and accommodation (deng and liu 2000). those women who failed to pay their monthly commission were beaten and berated by tang or one of her accomplices. tang xi’er also told the women that she would inform members of their native village of their involvement in prostitution, if they attempted to leave (zhao 2000). this threat of public shaming proved effective. liu yanhua fled back to her home in january 2000, but returned when tang xi’er telephoned liu’s neighbour and told liu that she would reveal her involvement in prostitution, if she did not return to haikou immediately. liu later stated that she had returned to haikou because she did not want to destroy her personal reputation and shame her parents (zhao 2000). this revelation underscores the high value that continues to be placed on pre-marital female chastity in china, particularly in rural regions, even though that value is increasingly at odds with actual social practice. unlike its coverage of the ‘tang shengli incident’, the china women’s news stressed that liu yanhua was a victim of sexual exploitation and violence, even though she had acted as a seller of commercial sexual services for several months. following her return to haikou, liu had continued to ‘work’ for tang xi’er until she contracted a sexually transmissible infection (sti) and refused to further service any clients (deng and liu 2000). tang subsequently informed liu that she would have to pay a ‘training and reception’ fee of 12,000 yuan if she intended to stop ‘working’ for her. on the evening of 24 february 2000, liu asked another young woman to return a loan of 400 yuan so that she could go to see a doctor and look for independent accommodation and alternative work. when tang overheard this request, she told liu that she should service male clients if she wanted money. later that same evening, a reportedly desperate liu grabbed a cleaver and attacked tang (possibly when she was sleeping), striking her repeatedly and causing serious injuries to her hands and face (tiannan 2004). liu then ran out of tang’s rental accommodation, which was shared by all of the women tang had recruited, and used a public telephone to call emergency services, saying: ‘i’ve killed someone; come and arrest me’. liu yanhua later told the chinese police that her motives were clear: tang xi’er had ruined her life and she wanted to kill her (deng and liu 2000; tiannan 2004). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 17 jeffreys over my dead body! at this point, the story of liu yanhua becomes fused to the story of liu hongyi (hereafter hongyi), an independent journalist who first stumbled upon the case during a family holiday with his wife and child in haikou (liang 2005). originally also from hunan province, hongyi heard about liu yanhua from a local resident on the morning after the incident took place. he proceeded to investigate the story by going to the nearby site and discovered that a further 10 young women, and a 12-year-old girl, were staying at the premises that tang xi’er had rented from the yangpu local court. upon hearing their respective stories, hongyi and his wife took the 11 young women under their own personal care, taking them to a local medical centre to be treated for sti’s and offering them accommodation in their holiday home. hongyi then traveled to liu yanhua’s native home to conduct further investigations and apprise liu’s family of the situation. with hongyi’s assistance, liu’s father composed a letter pleading legal clemency for his daughter. this letter was presented along with hongyi’s report on the case to representatives of the acwf in hainan and hunan; and, subsequently, to representatives from the hainan provincial government and the national people’s congress (deng and liu 2000). these actions culminated in the publication of the previously mentioned front-page article in the china women’s news and attracted national television and print media coverage of the case proceedings, with representatives from more than 40 news agencies attending (liang 2005). as with tang shengli, media coverage of the ‘liu yanhua incident’ in the china women’s news aimed to secure legal justice for liu, construed as both a victim of sexual exploitation and a socially disadvantaged person. on 31 march 2000, liu yanhua was formally arrested on the criminal charge of attempted murder, based on her verbal confession that she had intended to kill tang xi’er (deng and liu 2000; zhao 2000). lawyer, li wuping, who agreed to represent liu pro bono, successfully defended this charge, arguing instead that liu should be tried for malicious assault, not only because she was under 18 years of age and had turned herself into the police, but also because she had been harmed and deprived of her freedom, and therefore acted under duress and in self-defence (zhao 2000). representatives from the acwf in yongxing county also presented guarantees to the effect that they would ensure liu’s good behaviour upon her release (deng xiaobo 2000b). liu yanhua accordingly was sentenced on 13 july to two years imprisonment, suspended for three portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 18 jeffreys over my dead body! years, for malicious assault and ordered to pay tang xi’er 16,000 yuan in medical expenses (liang 2005). based on the testimonies of other women who voluntarily presented themselves at the local police station to give evidence that they had been tricked and then forced into prostitution, tang eventually was sentenced to five years jail for the crime of luring, accommodating and introducing others into prostitution (deng xiaobo 2000a, 2000b). an additional five people were charged as tang’s accomplices: but, only three were arrested, with two people absconding, including the man named chen who was charged with rape (deng xiaobo 2000a, 2000b). hence, while some commentators expressed satisfaction with the lenient sentence meted to liu, they also expressed dissatisfaction over the fact that tang xi’er was not sentenced according to the more serious criminal charges of trafficking in women for the purposes of forced prostitution (xiao 2000). although the involvement of the acwf ensured that liu yanhua’s conviction for attempted murder was quashed, her story continued to attract media publicity throughout 2000/01 and, once again, in 2004/05, because of allegations of localgovernment corruption and complications associated with the legal resolution of the case as a whole. for instance, tang xi’er originally was released from hospital and police custody on 16 march 2000 due to lack of evidence against her, and she proceeded to resume residence in the property rented from court authorities. liu’s father, and media reporters alike, promptly accused local government authorities of refusing to follow-up the case against tang due to the existence of corruption (deng and liu 2000; xiao 2000). accusations of local government complicity in the act of running or ignoring the existence of prostitution businesses were further whetted by the fact that, on 8 april 2000, the hainan provincial government asked the acwf and central government authorities to halt the media blitz on liu yanhua’s case because it was ruining hainan’s reputation as a tourist destination (tiannan 2004). as with the ‘tang shengli incident’, therefore, the china women’s news was pressured to ‘drop’ liu yanhua’s story on the grounds that media coverage was damaging broader social interests by hindering the all-important task of developing the local economy. pressure from local government authorities in hainan for the acwf to halt media coverage of the ‘liu yanhua incident’ proved to be more acute than pressure from portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 19 jeffreys over my dead body! sichuanese authorities over the ‘tang shengli incident’, as indicated by the fact that hongyi was harassed and made the target of a smear campaign for his role in breaking the story (tiannan 2004). following his initial investigations, hongyi received threatening phone calls and was stalked by several of tang xi’er’s accomplices. he was also brought in for informal but hostile questioning by the haikou police and required to demonstrate his media accreditations. then, on 12 july 2000, the day before the court was to reach a verdict on the charges against liu yanhua, the hainan daily, a local government newspaper with a circulation of 150,000 copies, ran an editorial report that accused hongyi of being a ‘fake journalist’ who had made up stories to misguide the public, cause trouble for the police, and damage the reputation of the province (liang 2005; tiannan 2004). these accusations resulted in hongyi becoming the subject of formal investigations by the haikou police. in the face of such pressure, hongyi suffered a nervous breakdown and, in august 2000, was institutionalised for rehabilitative treatment. his wife, cai jinwen, with the help of various media and legal representatives from the acwf and the national people’s congress, then commenced a three-year-long legal battle to have hongyi’s reputation reinstated (liang 2005). despite the lodging of an estimated 104 appeals, cai successfully sued the hainan daily for defamation of character and damages of 700,000 yuan; and went on to sue a supreme-court judge for deliberately delaying the successful resolution of the case, resulting in the judge’s dismissal for malpractice in november 2004 (liang 2005). the protracted nature of the legal resolution of the ‘liu yanhua incident’ highlights the obstacles faced by defenders of victims of forced prostitution, irrespective of whether the women involved are constructed as hapless victims of poverty and exploitative traffickers or as partially empowered agents. in doing so, it underscores the difficulties faced by promoters of national policy. despite the prc’s theoretical commitment to abolishing the resurgent prostitution industry, it appears that the acwf’s efforts to garner public support for this official policy goal are often conducted without explicit ‘top-level’ support and in the face of local government opposition. conclusion the stories of tang shengli and liu yanhua are marked by a number of similarities. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 20 jeffreys over my dead body! both women were victims of unscrupulous recruiters who sought to profit from the exploitation of the forced prostitution of others. both cases were made the explicit focus of media campaigns initiated by the acwf designed to promote a greater awareness of the issues associated with the deceptive recruiting of women for sexual services among the general community; to realize legal and material aid for the women involved; and to highlight the need for legislative and other reforms in order to protect and promote women’s rights and interests (wu 2003). both cases were also accompanied by local government calls for the acwf to halt such campaigns, on the grounds that media coverage was destroying the reputation and hence the healthy development of local economies. in addition, both cases were accompanied by problems associated with their successful legal resolution. these problems were related not only to the successful prosecution and appropriate punishment of perpetrators of violence against women, but also to the existence of local-government quiescence with regard to the existence of prostitution businesses, and even to accusations of local-government complicity in the running of such businesses. justice for tang shengli and liu yanhua alike was only achieved through the active involvement of members of the acwf and their coordination with both other government organizations and the chinese media. despite these commonalities, the ‘tang shengli incident’ and the ‘liu yanhua incident’ are distinguished not only by the different nature of their denouement for the individual women concerned, but also by the fact of liu’s ongoing involvement in prostitution flowing from her rape and temporary submission to acts of physical and verbal violence. unlike tang shengli, the story of liu yanhua highlights some of the problems that accompany the successful resolution of cases of trafficking in women for the purposes of forced prostitution, flowing from what is often construed as the active complicity of such women in the creation and perpetuation of their situation. like tang shengli, liu yanhua may have been a naive rural maiden when she left with tang xi’er to work in haikou, but this demonstrably was not the case when she first attempted to leave prostitution by returning to her native home. moreover, even though liu’s eventual return to haikou was achieved through threats of public shaming, the fact that liu had been able to return to her native village in the first place, and had money to offer other women in the form of a loan, suggests that she had some freedom of movement and some degree of financial autonomy. in defending portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 21 jeffreys over my dead body! liu yanhua, therefore, the acwf was far from promoting a tang shengli-style ‘chastity heroine’. on the contrary, the very nature of the acwf’s defence of liu yanhua, encapsulated in media reports entitled ‘is it criminal to use violence to combat violence?’ (wu 2003), presents a different model of female agency from that captured in tang shengli’s claim that, as an ‘old-fashioned girl’, she would rather die than engage in prostitution (tan 1998). nevertheless, the china women’s news continued to present liu yanhua as an agentful-victim of domestic trafficking for the purposes of forced prostitution for three good reasons. first, liu initially had been deceived about the nature of her employment. second, tang xi’er had proceeded to exploit liu through acts of violence and coercion. finally, tang xi’er effectively had exerted rights of ownership over liu’s labour, and thereby placed her in a position of enforced sexual servitude, through the imposition of a debt-contract. the acwf’s defence of liu yanhua thus opens the space for public recognition in china of the fact that women who consent to work in the sex industry may still be victims of sexual exploitation and violence. this understanding usefully foregrounds the issue of violence against women and questions the egregious dichotomy between ‘the whore’ and ‘the virtuous woman’— the woman who supposedly ‘gets what she deserves’ as opposed to the woman who merits public sympathy and help—even though it fails to displace that dichotomy. it suggests that that the sexual conduct of women in cases of deceptive recruiting for sexual services is not an appropriate target of media concern. rather, the media should seek to ensure justice for the women involved in such cases by directing its attention to those who organize and create the demand for commercial sexual services. as hong zhaodi reportedly said: ‘china does not need female chastity martyrs; this tragedy should not have happened in the first place’ (zhang 2004). this is a statement with which members of the acwf indubitably concur, even though their ongoing support for the prc’s official policy of banning prostitution recently has been called into question. in keeping with the pro-sex work lobby of the international feminist movement, many commentators now argue that decriminalization, i.e., removing the voluntary prostitution transaction from the purview of the chinese system of administrative sanctions, constitutes a preferable policy because it will not only portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 22 jeffreys over my dead body! empower women-in-prostitution as workers, but also limit corruption, facilitate hiv/aids prevention, and enable the chinese police to focus their resources on the problems of trafficking and forced prostitution (zhang heqing 2006, 139-158). conversely, in keeping with feminist ngos who lobby for the abolition of prostitution, other commentators contend that china’s governmental authorities should turn a ‘blind eye’ to the activities of female sellers of sex, whilst making it a punishable offence to obtain casual sexual services against payment as per the policy adopted in sweden (zhu 2003). according to promoters of this view, the adoption of such an approach will not only limit the widespread expropriation of public funds by male government officials to buy the sexualized services of women, but also reduce the problem of forced prostitution by enforcing the legal and social unacceptability of sexual exploitation (zhu 2003). while the question of which side of the ‘feminist prostitution wars’ the acwf might veer towards remains open to debate, media support for, or criticism of, the organization’s promotion of tang shengli and other victims of forced prostitution is unlikely to halt the occurrence of further incidences while the inequalities and exploitation associated with the rapid development of china’s economy remain unresolved. the widespread nature of such problems is indicated by the fact that a group of migrant male workers threatened to 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wenzhaibao, 3 june. zhao shilong 2000, ‘maiyinnü daopi laobao: qing yu fa jiduo xixu’ [a female sex seller knives a brothel organizer: the contradiction between law and human feelings], wenzhaibao, 11 may. zheng, tiantian 2004, ‘from peasant women to bar hostesses: gender and modernity in post-mao dalian’, in on the move: women in rural-to-urban migration in contemporary china, eds. a. gaetano and t. jacka, columbia university press, new york, 80-108. zhongguo kangfu yanjiu zhongxin [chinese rehabilitation research centre] 2003, ‘kuangfu zhengyi fengxian aixin kangfu zhongxin jiuzhu “sanpeinü” fei yingli jigou gongguan anli’ [the case of a non-profit rehabilitation centre that helps to restore justice for a ‘hostess’] [online], 13 march. available: http://market168.8u8.cpm/pral.html [accessed 12 may 2004]. zhonghua renmin gongheguo hunyinfa, zhonghua renmin gongheguo funü quanyi baozhang fa [the marriage law of the people’s republic of china and the law of the people’s republic of china on the protection of women’s rights and interests] 1994, zhonguo fazhi chubanshe, beijing. zhonghua renmin gongheguo guowuyuan [state council of the prc] 1999, yule changsuo guanli tiaoli [regulations concerning the management of public places of entertainment], wenhua chubanshe, beijing. zhou shijun 2003, ‘“lienü” baodao weihe bushou nüxing huanying?’ [why are reports on ‘female chastity martyrs’ not welcomed by women?], renminwang [online], 2 jan. available: http://past.people.com.cn/gb/guandian/30/20030102/9 [accessed 13 aug. 2004]. zhu jiaolong 2003, ‘saohuang yinggai zhua jinü haishi piaoke?’ [should campaigns against prostitution and illegality target the sellers or buyers of sex?], nanfang dushi bao, 2 dec. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 27 http://www.people.com.cn/gb/paper83/1059/154635.html elaine jeffreys, university of technology sydney debating the ‘tang shengli incident’ publicizing the ‘liu yanhua incident’ pressure from local government authorities in hainan for the the protracted nature of the legal resolution of the ‘liu ya conclusion reference list 1997 criminal code of the people’s republic of china, 1998, cai min and yuan yiheng 2005, ‘anhui nühai ningsi bu maiyin cai yipeng, feng yuan and guo yanqiu 2001, ‘the women’s medi portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 4, no. 1 january 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal footprints, imprints: seeing environmentalist and buddhist marie byles as an eastern australian allison jane cadzow, university of technology, sydney this paper is a response to a challenge posed to me: to find ways of thinking of australia as asian, rather than an island culture tenaciously clinging to british ancestry and identification despite indigenous and eastern influences. what different understandings of australian lives and subjectivities might emerge when australian lives are seen as asian also? it seemed appropriate to undertake this experiment in thinking within the context of the life story of a figure who challenged easy definitions, spent much of her life between asia and australia and belongs to the histories of many places in the region and relationships between them. this paper uses historical, cultural and textual analysis to explore the life of marie byles, a significant conservationist and buddhist, as simultaneously eastern1 and australian through her travel writing, her interpretations of buddhist texts for english reading audiences, and her environmentalism. background marie byles (1900-1979) is usually introduced with a string of roles trailing behind her name: pioneer feminist, early woman solicitor of 1920s, explorer and lone female traveller in late 1920s. it is often mentioned that she was an environmentalist, and, from 1 the terms ‘east’ and ‘eastern’ are used in this essay to indicate a european-derived cultural perspective of an imagined ‘other’ contrasting with the ‘west,’ rather than as literal, geographical descriptions. cadzow footprints, imprints the 1940s onwards, a buddhist. she helped to promote a similar version of herself in her unpublished autobiographical work, many lives in one. born in england, she moved to a bushy area of northern sydney, australia with her parents and two brothers at the age of eleven, was raised by unitarian and unorthodox parents. her mother was a suffragette and artist, who encouraged her to be economically independent and to pursue her education, while her father was a fabian socialist railway engineer who delivered criticism of private property, encouraging his children from a young age to chant ‘down with the blasted landowners!’ (byles 1944, 2). this brief background does not do justice to the connections between these elements of her life or her simultaneously international and australian outlook. although she was born in england in 1900 and lived in australia for most of her life, byles travelled through china, burma and northern vietnam in the 1930s, india in the 1950s, and japan in 1960s, forming ongoing connections with these places. her perspectives on the environment were profoundly shaped by buddhist philosophy as well as by her experiences of australian landscapes. given that she was among the instigators behind the establishment of several national parks in australia and a contributor to international debates on buddhism and gandhian thought, it seems important to value the relationship between place and ideas that animated her life and work. some studies of byles’s life broach her relationships with the region and buddhist ideas. the documentary film by gillian coote, a singular woman (1985), has done much to arouse interest in her life and addresses her spirituality. byles was celebrated in an exhibition at the national trust of australia (nsw) in conjunction with its 60th anniversary.2 she appeared in an anthology of australian writing about the east, albeit briefly (gerster 1995, 176-9), and in paul croucher’s epic history of buddhism in australia. these testimonies are invaluable in showing the richness of byles’s life and work, but there is certainly room for more thinking about her as at once eastern and 2 the exhibition marie byles: a spirited life was curated by julie peterson and drew heavily upon the research of myself, gillian coote and julie peterson as well as the contributions of numerous relatives and friends of marie byles. the exhibition toured sydney, the n.s.w. central coast and bathurst. <http://www.nationaltrust.org.au/properties/ahmisa/default.asp> portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 2 cadzow footprints, imprints australian, and about her ongoing relationship with asia and its influence on her thinking. in this paper i canvas one way of understanding the influence of spirituality, particularly on byles’s approach to the environment, by focusing on her life as an eastern australian. this term suggests her primary location for most of her life on the eastern australian seaboard, and also hints at differences within australia due to its different environments, histories and communities interacting over time. reflecting on eastern australian identities can encourage us to consider australia in asia, australia as asian, connections across oceans and time, looser groupings, and identifications that allow for movement. the term draws attention to the value of looking at how place is made through social connections in time and space, following feminist cultural geographer doreen massey’s work (1995). edward said’s insight that due to imperialism’s influence on cultural exchange, no one is ‘one pure thing’ and that crosscultural connections enable survival, rather than a rigid insistence on sharp differences, is also relevant here (1993, 407-8). by focussing on byles’s life and the historical and cultural context in which she lived, it is possible to highlight the complexities of so-called anglo, eastern and australian identities. a close study enables consideration of connections and belongings, which are not necessarily ethnicity based, or dilettantish, and that thus cannot be dismissed simplistically as ‘orientalist.’ it seems especially pertinent to argue this position against such reductive profiling as that directed at lebanese australians, muslim people, and refugees in much popular debate in australia today. in this paper, then, i look at four facets of marie byles’s life as an eastern australian: her travels in australia and china; the design of her home in sydney and its use as a hub for early buddhist meetings; her publication of texts discussing eastern philosophy; and her environmental activism. this is by no means a comprehensive look at her rich life and writings, or a detailed dissertation on buddhist theology; rather, my aim is to point to some areas worthy of closer examination. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 3 cadzow footprints, imprints marie byles’s travels in australia, china, burma, vietnam and japan marie byles was fascinated by the east coast australian bush from a young age and walked around sydney’s bushlands with her family and with various clubs. she was an early member of groups like the sydney bush walkers, which formed in the late 1920s as interest in recreation and conservation grew with industrialisation and as urban areas expanded into bushland. she wrote for newspapers and walking journals about her trips and took many photos, bringing these areas into wider western knowledge networks. in her writing she promoted australia as a worthy place to explore, proposing that the australian landscape was lesser-known than the english landscape, and relatively unmapped and little known or valued in an anglo-australian society at the time. she also lobbied for the environmental protection of bush areas from the early 1930s, most notably in nsw (cadzow 2002, 219-220). her major passion in her younger years, however, was finding ‘real mountains’ to climb. after climbing in norway, england, canada, and new zealand in the late 1920s, as recorded in by cargo boat and mountain (1931), she wanted to do another major trip. she started reading and planning for a trip to yunnan, in south western china near the border of tibet, in the late 1930s. her textual encounters with the east began there when her approach to travel as an educational experience took an eastern turn. she painstakingly organised an expedition to climb mt sanseto, with a group of women and men. as a consequence of wartime tensions and nearby fighting their route involved going through burma to china. before she arrived in china, geographical and cultural differences within australia became more apparent to her. she took the train across the vast nullarbor plain in 1938 in order to board the boat heading overseas from perth, and appears to have been surprised and disoriented by how different the west of australia was from the east. this trip may have provided some of her earliest encounters with aboriginal people rather than representations of them, and she was shocked by their poverty and, it seems, by their presence as well. further north in western australia she noted the population comprised a ‘league of nations’ (of mixed backgrounds). her letters to her parents revealed the gulfs in middle-class anglo portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 4 cadzow footprints, imprints understandings and knowledge about australia’s diversity and past, despite the claims of unified anglo national identity promoted at the time (byles, papers 1914-1979). the experience also foreshadowed her limited experience and contact with asian people, despite her efforts to research for the trip. byles dated her interest in eastern religion from her trip to burma, before completing the climb. she was particularly interested in pagodas and shrines and stayed overnight in some of them (byles 1963). she presented images of chinese landscapes in walking magazines (which often made their way to british, canadian and us walkers and environmentalists) and talks. the sydney morning herald published her travel accounts, which partly funded the trip, thus contributing to the circulation of information in australia about china. in these media articles, attention was drawn to the novelty of her expedition, not only as a woman mountaineer, but also as an anglo-australian interested in china. as alison broinowski (1996) points out, since the early twentieth century a steady stream of australian artists, writers and commentators had been travelling to china, india and the eastern-asian region, and bringing ideas and insights back into their own work and the country as a whole 6. yet ‘asia’ was still represented as exotic and ‘other,’ and thus separate and distinct from popular anglo conceptions of australianness; this was compounded by fears of japanese invasion during the second world war (broinowski 1996, 3, 14). some of byles’s comments might make a contemporary reader flinch, such as her attitudes towards local bargaining and the all too familiar juxtaposition of ancient china with the ‘modern’ west, which also occur in much western travel writing about the east (byles 1939, 41). nonetheless, byles was aware that the activity of mountain climbing seemed unusual rather than laudable to chinese people and noted uncomfortably that she was being watched as ‘a pink-kneed animal.’ the women on the trip adopted long blue chinese gowns to avoid being ‘stared at like animals in the zoo’ (1938b). such self-consciousness and self -deprecation is remarked on by many analysts of british women’s travel writing, such as sara mills (1993, 22) and alison blunt (1994, 72-78) as they note, western women accustomed to being observed and subjected to the ‘male portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 5 cadzow footprints, imprints gaze’ within their own culture were inevitably aware of their appearance and differential position in relation to men. marie byles’s writing demonstrates her genuine interest and desire to learn about local people, and a willingness to adapt and adopt elements of cultural practice, which appealed to her. after her trip to china, byles took to wearing chinese clothing for comfort and practicality, including an outfit—deep blue pants and matching top—that she wore to work in her legal office in sydney, and that aroused varied reactions among sydney’s anglo population (sydney morning herald, 19 july 1938, 13). she tried to learn about the mountains and the climate around her in china, noting the presence of the ‘black dragon,’ the deity responsible for rain, and mt. sansato ‘a great white dragon’ the snow clad 20, 000 foot mountain she aimed to climb (byles 1939, 40-41). she seems to have developed a deep reverence for the mountains, as expressed in her dramatic description of the area: those peaks! those knife edges of rock enfolded one within the other. how could one approach them, let alone climb them? i have seen mountains in norway, canada and new zealand, but never anything to touch the icy inaccessibility of those virgin dragon queens whose serrated and ice covered walls protected them. for eight months of the year the winds howl around them and the snows drape them. for the other four their naked splendour is veiled in rain and mist which the black dragon hardly ever lifts. (byles, many lives, papers, 1914-1979, 119-120) in contrast to other trips where she was more interested in mountains alone, this trip found her keen to learn about people, particularly the status of women and gender relations in the countries she visited (byles 1940, 3). unlike her other published accounts of travel overseas, there were more pictures of the people she met in towns and villages, and the guides they hired, such as mr shi who was in charge of their camp (1938c). funerals, weddings, temples and family life featured in her images, and she showed interest in local religion. this could well be regarded as ‘othering,’ typical tourist behaviour and representation of other cultures as repositories of the spiritual to be tapped into at will by jaded westerners. but more than this seemed to be occurring; she was being influenced and transformed by these experiences. she wrestled with her position as a traveller in china and local responses to her presence, mocked her own mixed-up instructions in broken chinese, and was acutely aware of cultural differences portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 6 cadzow footprints, imprints when seeking accommodation and bargaining (1938c). such trade and negotiation was not a purely financial transaction, but a form of cultural exchange as well. byles’s accounts did not uniformly celebrate britishness, although she occasionally cast herself as part of an exploratory people, in a pro-empire celebration. mixed with these ‘bold british’ moments was a fascination with the difference in gender relations elsewhere in the world, which is not surprising considering her interest in feminism. among the nashi people of china, she noted that the women did the physical work and were seen as strong, while the men remained at home caring for the children (1938b). she observed colonial divisions of labour in haiphong, vietnam, acerbically noting that the european women basically did nothing compared to their vietnamese and chinese counterparts (byles 1940, 3). the climbers finally made it to the base of the mountain and started an attempt on mt sansato after numerous delays. snow and rain set in during a narrow window of climbing time and byles was unable to reach the summit, leaving her ‘bitterly disappointed.’ she made sense of this failure by highlighting other discoveries (with the hindsight that autobiography allowed). she alluded to new ways of looking at situations in her descriptions and moved beyond the aim of climbing the mountain: ‘what i had striven for and desired above all lay dead. i should never climb the mountain or feel again the touch of its rough limestone rocks…but the sun was still shining. there was something beyond the loves and sorrows of this world that had gone on through all the ages of geology. i did not understand; for the time being i left it at that’ (byles, many lives, papers 1914-1979,126). after this she spent more time with her fellow climber marj and the guides/muleteers, wang and magato. she taught them how to climb in what she described as ‘gloriously happy’ times, enjoying their company, especially their lack of arrogance compared to others in the party. her mountaineering friend dot butler believed that the male climbers dominated the trip, much to byles’s annoyance, portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 7 cadzow footprints, imprints as she liked to lead.3 in her autobiography she represented herself as learning from her guides’ conduct, admiring their smiling helpfulness and good temper, qualities she tried to develop within herself through meditation training (byles, many lives, papers 19141979, 121). according to byles, her ‘ripening karma’ took effect in australia after this trip to china, in the 1940s. she became more interested in spirituality and started reading the bhagavad gita, the inspirational sanksrit text central to hinduism where paths to enlightenment such as devotion, meditation, action and knowledge and transcendence of ego are discussed. this interest was accelerated by foot injuries she suffered in 1941, which curbed her walking, and forced her to find other ways of relating to the environment and herself (byles 1963, 18). byles’s work thus became reflective and inward focussed, marked by shifts in her relationship to landscape in an attempt to cope with depression and illness, as she was not able to walk as easily. in a very fundamental way her trip to china sent her on another journey once home in australia: it prompted a revision of self. in her own analysis, she attributed this to reaching mid-life and the reflections and questions it brought to the surface. in her later reflective work paths to inner peace (1965, 12), byles discussed this time of emergence from a confused and dark time to a calmer place: ‘inner peace is now becoming an increasingly real experience. the mountain peaks are still a very long way off, but the path is clear and sometimes even easy to follow.’ symbolically, what mountains and landscapes represented and meant to her changed; they became part of an intricate interplay of experience and thinking, with the place memorable for the experiences she had there rather than its aesthetic qualities alone (riley 1992, 19). these experiences in china stimulated ongoing travels between sydney and india, burma, and japan, as she sought further inspiration, meditation and guidance. her struggles with her position as a westerner interested in eastern philosophy, and her desire to share knowledge gained from this travel, emerge in print 3 in a 1997 interview i conducted with dot butler, she said of the new zealand men climbers on the china trip: ‘they rather brow beat marie when it came to getting out and exploring. they were the men and they were going to do it and i think marie didn’t enjoy that much.’ portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 8 cadzow footprints, imprints in her various spiritualist works. marie byles’s buddhist interpretations and engagements with eastern spirituality when she returned from her china trip in 1939, byles’s reading of the teachings of buddha seems to have stirred her interest in explaining them for english reading audiences and local markets. yet, there were certainly buddhist influences afoot in australia before byles’s work, as her own reading of tasmanian f. l. woodward’s some sayings of the buddha (1925) shows. croucher’s history draws attention to 1848 chinese indentured labourers who worked in australia and constructed joss houses, while japanese pearlers in the north also practiced buddhism. buddhism was of interest to anglo theosophists, especially from the late 1890s, and singhalese queenslanders were also selling buddhist works (croucher 1989, 2-5). like woodward, with whom she corresponded, byles was involved in interpreting and popularising information about theravada buddhism (based on the original teachings of buddha about suffering and the means to alleviate it) for westerners who knew little about buddhist practice and insights. she did this as a feminist from a particular position of valuing women’s history and as a westerner with a christian background. byles was raised in a religiously tolerant environment, which she regarded as making her more open to buddhism. she saw buddhism’s rationality as a neat fit with science and modern ways of thinking, and set it alongside christian insights, a tendency she shared with other western-based ‘convert’ buddhists. byles developed an enthusiasm for daily vipassana (breathing/‘insight’) meditation and yoga as part of her explorations of buddhism. she also tried to live by the eight-fold path as prescribed by buddha: right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration (spuler, 2003, xii). byles’s anglo-australian interpretation of buddhism marked a confluence of interests and practices, both western and eastern: it has not been an easy journey. it might, or it might not, have been easier if i could have retired as a nun to the sacred hills of burma. but even if this would have been easier, westerners cannot do this, and no spiritual training or philosophy can have any value for us unless it can be put into practice amid the ordinary everyday life in which we find ourselves. that the practice and portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 9 cadzow footprints, imprints philosophy learned in burma and japan can be put into effect in the west, is what makes them important to us. (byles 1965, 12) her interpretation suggested a valuing of difference but also of connections and adaptability. it is a version of buddhism that incorporates, as well, the eastern practices and principles of theravada buddhism, western psychology, democratic and feminist principles, and features of buddhism as practiced by europeans in america (spuler 2003, 2; tsomo 1999, 28-9). she became keenly aware of the pitfalls of romanticising eastern spirituality, drawing mocking attention to her initial obsession with finding an indian swami or yogi who would show her a quick path to inner peace. an indian colleague pointed out to her that an american artist, earl brewster, living in india had, by his example, richer spiritual guidance to offer than many of the yogis (byles 1965, 207). such realisation came later. her first substantial religious work in 1957 was footprints of gautama. it provided her interpretation of the adult/ministerial life of the buddha, through the eyes of his disciples, both male and female. byles went to north india in 1954 to research the book, visiting places where the buddha had travelled after his enlightenment, and returned to australia via sri lanka. the author of the foreword to footprints, lalita rajapaske, minister of justice in ceylon, who had guided other early australian buddhists, noted the particularity of byles’s feminist approach to buddhism: ‘naturally, miss byles focuses attention on an aspect which a male is apt not to emphasise very much namely the attitude of the buddha towards women, and the part played by them in the development of the dhamma’ (1957, 12). her work covered the conversions and contributions of women neglected in many interpretations of buddhist texts—both eastern and western—which focussed on men’s contributions. figures such as patacara, renowned for her knowledge of the rules of discipline, bhadda, a talented debater, and visakha, known for her generosity and munificence, are given due attention. byles made sure women figures associated with the buddha in his preaching life were mentioned and valued, rather than written out. this was in keeping with her recognition of women’s work throughout her life, in the workplace and socially. this often took the practical form of acts like acknowledging the work of male portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 10 cadzow footprints, imprints mountaineers’ wives in new zealand, which allowed their partners to go climbing, and consciously employing single mothers and married women who needed economic independence in sydney (ronalds 2005). the buddhist women’s stories and the lack of warfare in the name of the buddhist religion appealed to both byles’s feminist sensibilities and her pacifism, a linkage between long-held ‘western’ interests and buddhist philosophy. it was not always a benign and joyous experience of cultural exchange, however. she noted that monks tended to ‘belittle’ women in their interpretation of the buddha’s words, something she attempted to redress in her own work (1957, 14). indeed, byles mounted a sharp critique of the sexism apparent in monk worship, which clashed with her firmly held belief in gender equality: all this monk-worship and nun servility would be merely a source of amusement to the tourist…the western man, even though a meditator, would probably hardly have noticed it unless he were very unusual. but when you are a woman mediator and a member of the servile community, you notice it very much indeed. and when you have been trained to abhor sex and class superiorities the abhorrence upsets your equilibrium and causes pain. (byles 1962,110) a review of footprints in the journal world buddhism by margaret barr, a buddhist practising in india, suggested that byles’s work should be appreciated for the all too rare attention paid to women’s importance in buddhism, as well as its accessibility for westerners interested in discovering more about buddha (barr 1960). byles’s writings indicate her importance in australia and beyond in terms of debates and interpretation of buddhism. she stated that she wrote for ‘ordinary’ readers, and provided further references for self-guided study on how to end suffering, encouraging readers to seek out the translations themselves (byles 1957, 14-15). she also included a guide to the eight-fold path as an entry point into buddhist principles and practice for curious readers. some scholars, such as anagarkia sugatananda, disputed her understanding of buddhism, arguing that she made the typical westerners’ mistake of reducing buddhism to a system of morality and diluting it (1960, 3). local critics nonetheless recognised the value of her work in terms of its accessibility, even when portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 11 cadzow footprints, imprints they were dismissive of her writing style, or, in the case of the masculinist bulletin, found her representation of buddhism to be escapist and ‘a submissive, feminine way of life’ (terry 1962, 40). her books and articles in publications like metta (sydney), world buddhism (colombo), the middle way (london), and gandhi marg (new delhi), as well as her discussions on spirituality on sydney radio, reveal byles’s commitment to life-long learning beyond the academy, and her importance as a populariser of buddhism. she contributed to debates on pacifism, interpretations of buddha’s insights, as well as gandhi’s work, through these journal and magazine publications, which also became part of a wider international and regional debate. she also corresponded with activists and scholars interested in buddhist and zen thinking, such as thomas merton in the u.s.a., regarding peaceful protests and anti-war activism. she left her mark on the lives of filmmakers like gillian coote and fellow walkers who became interested in buddhism after discussions with her. byles further developed her investigations in the lotus and the spinning wheel (1963), which examined the life of buddha and his disciples’ knowledge of him, and compared buddha’s life with that of gandhi, exploring connections between their thinking. she saw both men as inspiring figures, but acknowledged that her interpretation of the links between them was highly personal, and not necessarily shared by other buddhists. she pointed out features they shared, such as a focus on present life and the road to enlightenment, the latter in the buddha’s case requiring meditation and inner peace, for gandhi consisting of good works, applied buddhism, outward peace, and reforms. byles concludes that a synthesis of both approaches was best for daily life guidance, and in order to connect philosophy and practice (252). her interest in both leaders was shaped not only by her expeditions and the effects of her accident, but also by world events. like several fellow walkers who were pacifists, she was deeply disturbed by the second world war; the appeal of buddhism at this time was partly a search for an end to war. she sought a shift of consciousness more broadly to eliminate the causes of warfare and violence. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 12 cadzow footprints, imprints byles travelled several times to complete meditations in mandalay, burma, which she narrated in journey into burmese silence (1962) and numerous other works, beyond the scope of this paper, as is her trip to japan where she starts to explore zen and ittoen ideas at kyoto monasteries. this trip encouraged her to promote tenko-san’s teachings in a new road to ancient truth, published in english in 1969. many of her later writings and articles argue for a synthesis of ideas and practices from many teachers and sources. byles was not a slavish follower of any one tradition, which made her an outsider in many ways, yet also gave her a critical edge drawn from diverse perspectives. she seemed to tread the same steps and themes almost meditatively in her writing to convince herself and others of the merit of her findings: the value of loving kindness, humility, service, and the diminution of ego. byles’s journeys took her deep into ideas and connections with the asian region. she provided interpretations of buddha’s life that valued women’s contributions, and wrote comparative work about the philosophy of gandhi and the buddha for australian and other english speaking readers. this work and her eastern travel marked and shaped her environmental concerns, from regarding the australian environments as her homesite and meditation space to her struggles for the preservation of bushland. byles’s sydney home ahimsa & the hut of the happy omen in a grounded and physical way, byles’s eastern australian approach is evident in her design and use of her home and property ahimsa (taken from gandhi’s premise of nonviolence or harmlessness) in northern sydney. in 1949 she enlisted the assistance of young quakers (another religion in which she was interested) to help her construct the hut of the happy omen, a large meditation hut built next to her home. the hut served as a place of quiet reflection accessible to like-minded people, but also demonstrated her public mindedness and ideas inspired by buddhist and ittoen notions of service to others. as a co-founder of the buddhist society of nsw (1952) with leo berkeley, a london based bookseller who came to australia in the 1940s, byles offered her property for portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 13 cadzow footprints, imprints society meetings and meditations (croucher 1989, 32-33). by 1956 the group had grown to include 200 members, and had become a vital contact point, source of information, and a key organisation for australian buddhists that still flourishes today (1956, 3). byles also supported one of the earliest visits of a buddhist nun to australia in 1951 when anglo australian buddhism was in its formative stages. sister dharmmadinna, who had trained in what was then ceylon, came to sydney to present buddhist practice and beliefs to european audiences (adam 2000). her stay with byles was fraught with tension; she found byles’s accommodation too spartan, while byles found her dogmatic. byles and interested anglo contemporaries celebrated key events in the buddhist calendar such as vesak (buddha’s birthday) and the moon ceremony (celebrated earlier by buddhist chinese australian communities) at ahimsa. this was well before the arrival of numerous buddhist vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and the subsequent mass multicultural public celebrations of the tet and moon festivals in sydney’s southwestern suburbs. for these practical steps in nurturing interest in buddhist practice, as well as her writing, many buddhist writers (lyall, n.d.; pearce 1981) regard her as a central figure in the establishment of european-based buddhism in australia today. byles’s property became a meeting place for those interested in buddhism, for forging community, and for fostering debate. the property was a focal point for sydney and nsw-based buddhists and byles helped to literally make a place for buddhism in sydney. she regarded sydney bushland as an ideal place in which to meditate, and valued the interaction with other buddhists: for those who like peace and solitude sydney is wonderfully situated, for it is surrounded by barren sandstone country unattractive to the farmer, so that within fifteen miles of what is spoken of as ‘the second city of the empire,’ there are wild bushlands, or forested hills. in winter and spring they are sprinked with wildflowers and the air is filled with bird song. probably our little group did not learn much about meditation, but the fellowship was good and also good was the practice of sitting still and being forced for a little while to try and quieten the busy intellect. (byles 1963, 28) despite her reputation as a serious person, there were some light-hearted moments in portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 14 cadzow footprints, imprints her spiritual journeys too, including adventures with hatha yoga, where she fell out of difficult poses and almost landed in the fireplace of her hut. byles also attempted to establish other public places of reflection beyond her own home such as buddhist retreats. she was involved in planning a retreat in victoria in the late 1940s, which did not eventuate (croucher 1989, 35, 56). later she found land in northern sydney and arranged for the buddhist society of nsw to purchase it in 1956. she did all the legal work for free, as with her work for national park preservation with bouddi national park, garrawarra and numerous other bush places around sydney. on a more personal level, byles recalled that it was ‘a great delight’ to return to ahimsa after the disappointment of her chinese mountain quest. she selected the land in 1937 before the china trip. her passion for the sydney sandstone bushland and knowledge of it is abundantly clear in the choice of location: high up on a ridge, dry and airy, with a garden brimming with plants native to the area. the house was oriented to capture the winter sun’s warmth and light, and the windows invite the outside in, dissolving boundaries. byles deliberately bought the bush land all around it so it couldn’t be subdivided. her creation of such a place marked her increasing attachment to australian environments, which she had initially found alienating and disappointingly flat (byles, many lives, papers 1914-1979, 130). today, byles’s place makes a sharp visual contrast to many other blocks in northern suburbs where private property is celebrated with fortress style walls and hedges are designed to keep people out. it is still a place of quiet and retreat, and her generosity in giving it to the national trust of australia (nsw) has meant continuing public access to the hut. byles’s design of her home and approach to building (low maintenance and with minimal environmental impact) was part of a wider movement to live more in harmony with the australian bush surroundings, and to foster better social relations (stephenson 1999, 49). this movement was partly stimulated by federation, urban expansion, and a growing number of non-indigenous australians being born in australia and spending much of their lives there. with some important exceptions, the australian bush had portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 15 cadzow footprints, imprints been seen by invader-settlers to need taming and refashioning along british lines in what amounted to a kind of ecological imperialism; thus, valuing it as byles did represented quite a departure (griffiths 1997, 3). byles was friends with clare stevenson and stella james who had a burley griffin home designed for them in bushland on sydney’s northern beaches. according to stephenson, the design of the stella james house in avalon reflected the relationship between these women as equal partners and their desire to fit in with their surroundings rather than dominate them (1999, 45). byles’s pleasure in bushland dovetailed with her interest in simplicity and respect for nature that had been inspired by her interest in eastern philosophy. she was deeply attached to her home, which seemed to nurture her sense of self as well as her thinking. like several other women writers and artists of the time, as well as fellow walkers such as dorothy lawry, she drew a sense of strength and personal identity from her relationships with certain landscapes. janice monk and vera norwood found that women from a range of backgrounds in south-western usa were drawn to desert landscapes and felt liberated and creatively stimulated by them, in a way comparable to the relationship of byles and other australian women with east-coast bushland (monk et al 1987, 229). byles’s attachment to the australian bush was expressed through homesickness for the gum trees, scents and comforts of ahimsa when she was in india (byles 1963, 56). yet her home and meditation bungalow at binsar was held in similar esteem: i have never had the slightest desire to acquire that ‘proper house’ and of all of my places i have stayed during my travels only the bungalow at binsar in the himalaya hills with its visions of snow peaks, could compare with the beauty of the bushlands seen from my own cottage. (byles, many lives, papers 1914-1979, 130) it seems that she felt in some senses at least as ‘at home’ in parts of the east as she did in east-coast australia (172). this sense of belonging to several homes at once thus raises questions about the complex connections between people and place and the motives on the part of people such as byles to care for and look after those places. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 16 cadzow footprints, imprints byles was interested in the concept of sanctuary for herself, and other people, partly as a result of her interest in bushwalking and camping. this was an element of bushwalking she had always valued, but was less able to pursue after the accident. in setting up places for buddhists to meet, there appears to be a convergence of her practice and approach; the very western practice of bushwalking to escape the city and industrialised society now met with an eastern valuing of forests and mountains as sacred places for meditation and revelation, where people can be in harmony with nature (cuc 1999, 71; dinh 2003, 578). marie byles’s eastern australian environmentalism perhaps byles’s most lasting legacy was her contribution to environmental debates. she had been interested in environmentalism and vegetarianism from a very early age, influenced by her mother and english traditions. as a child in britain she had a keen interest in hiking, and later in the romantic poetry of wordsworth, tennyson, keats and coleridge, which celebrated the natural world and spiritualism (byles, scrapbook). living in eastern australia and witnessing changes to the environment around her increasingly shaped her views. she also drew upon her travel experiences, to promote protection strategies from her observations in canada, usa, and england. numerous walks in the blue mountains, west of sydney, stimulated her desire to protect areas from roads and suburban encroachment, including what is now bouddi national park on the nsw central coast. after the 1940s shifts and changes in byles’s approach to the australian environment were evident, influenced by her accident, travels and increasing interest in spirituality. as the ways in which she could physically engage with her surroundings changed, so did her thinking about environments and the relationships of people with nature. her writing for bushwalking magazines and newspapers became decidedly less recreation oriented, with fewer claims of ‘discovery’ and ‘firsts,’ and a greater emphasis on valuing of all living things (cadzow 2002). portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 17 cadzow footprints, imprints in 1942, inspired by english writer h. g. wells’s modern utopia, in which citizens spent seven days alone in the ‘wild’ without creature comforts in order to clear their minds and rejuvenate themselves, byles spent a week in an isolated favourite camping spot at kosciuszko, in the snowy mountains. she had few supplies: matches, a tent, compass, and a map. she went there not to walk or go ‘peak-bagging’ as before, but to meditate. she claimed it was hard but re-creative, and took immense pleasure in observing life around her, the chance to be still and think, and to escape news of the second world war for a while: gradually, too, the world and its happenings got further and further away, and history passed like a cinematograph film to a god on olympus. the hills with their knowledge of the last ice age, ten thousand years ago, took no account of empires – babylonian, roman, spanish, british, german or japanese, what did they matter? the only thing that counted and persisted in that cinematograph film, and grew as the years passed, was the little slender plant of human kindliness and helpfulness, and that had nothing to do with empires or wars. (1942, 36) byles also adopted a cave near her brother’s home in the blue mountains for meditation. she increasingly saw bush and forest landscapes as conducive to the reflection and inspiration celebrated in much eastern and romantic writing. buddhist influences on her environmentalism led her into opposition with myles dunphy, a key conservationist, mapmaker and walker. despite their differences, they worked together on many environmental projects. myles wanted to establish a kosciuszko ‘primitive area’ with access for bushwalkers, while byles regarded his ambition as selective and self-important (meredith 1999,160). ‘primitive area’ is a term that now seems very dated, but which is nonetheless revelatory. it suggests museumlike forests and landscapes, untouched by humans. these areas had, in fact, been managed by aboriginal people for centuries. aboriginal people were displaced and forced off the land around sydney in places like the burragorang valley (a favourite spot for bushwalkers including byles); their leases were often revoked in the twentieth century, and not earlier as is popularly imagined and suggested in many angloaustralian histories (goodall 1996, 123-24) byles argued that myles dunphy and his supporters had to agree to cater for all nature portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 18 cadzow footprints, imprints lovers, or exclude people altogether, because allowing people in would lead to expectations of infrastructural improvements, such as roads and toilets. she articulated and wrestled with some of the dilemmas facing non-aboriginal australians who were attempting to look after and preserve eastern australian landscapes. the federation of nsw bush walkers, a peak body, took her position; it valued nature and regarded the setting aside of such places as compensation to nature for other damage done: the vast majority of bushwalkers have ruled that a primitive area must be for the wildlife which shall flourish there, not for our pleasure but for its own. after all, why should man in his arrogance say that primeval lands are of value only in so far as they subserve his ends? is this not the vicious old profit motive coming out in another form? the romans stripped the dalmatian hills in quest of timber to build their empire. kidman blasted a trail of ruin across australia to build a fortune. it is true that people who want a primitive area only because it satisfies a human desire, would not ruin it like kidman or the romans, but their motives are the same, profit to themselves, mental or physical, if not material. (byles 1945, 5) in a blistering critique of capitalist and imperialist relations with the bush byles argued that other living things had rights too. she questioned the elitist and people-centered approach of the myles dunphy position, which lobbied for ‘wild’ areas to be set aside primarily for bushwalkers. byles was not against people using such areas to interact with nature; rather, as she explained it: ‘human beings will not be excluded from the primitive area but no facilities for entering it will be given, and the flowers may blossom and the kangaroos and wombats enjoy their lives there, whether any one sees them or not’ (1945, 5). the influence of her eastern travels is apparent in this reevaluation of her relationship with the bush and her understanding of the mountains as her teachers (byles, many lives, papers 1914-1979, 153). in other texts, such as ‘our attitude to nature,’ she argued that nature was a living entity like people, and thus ought not be treated as inanimate or existing solely for profit. this viewpoint was inspired by her consideration of chinese and vietnamese ideas of nature as inhabited by spirits (byles, papers 1914-1979, box 1). in a similar vein, and with sharp foresight, she saw through the panic caused by the power of the atom bomb unleashed on hiroshima; though horrified by it, she argued that the destruction of nature through clearing and ‘the rape of nature’ was more of a threat than the atom bomb. byles issued challenges to fellow walkers (who often considered themselves to form portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 19 cadzow footprints, imprints the environmentalist vanguard) in texts with deliberately challenging titles, such as ‘can bushwalkers save the bush?’ (byles, papers 1914-1979, box 1). in this piece she argued that the destruction of nature came from the mind, suggesting that instead of asking ‘do i want this,’ people needed to ask ‘do i need this,’ and to recognise the interconnectedness of all life. she suggested that a shift in thinking was essential for a reduction of consumption and in order to address such problems as pollution and mining devastation. byles thus defined herself clearly as an eastern australian environmental critic, pointing out that in places like britain, the damage caused by sand mining and cement production was not as evident as in australia, where national park areas were being reduced in order to increase mining revenue (byles papers, 1914-1979, ‘wanting little’ box 9).4 byles critique of materialism connected with her buddhist beliefs, which rejected the perpetuation of insatiable desire because of the ways it feeds suffering. in other writings byles debated the lofty claims of bushwalkers that the bush had intrinsic spiritual value. she asked whether it made a difference in terms of how those walkers engaged with life’s struggles. she suggested learning from nature in order to apply buddha’s wisdom of accepting suffering and seeking harmony with nature: as i sat alone in the bush i wondered whether the forest had helped him [buddha] find that wisdom. perhaps it had. for natural things accept what life brings; they don’t “want”; they play their part and pass on. and perhaps too, amid the vastness of nature the pettiness of our troubles falls into proper perspective… i do think that if we relax and let go and seek harmony with the natural things around, then nature may be the goddess to us…can the bush help us keep smiling? that is the test of its “spiritual value.” i think it can – if we let it! (bona dea 1945, 11) western writers before her like thoreau and whitman had investigated eastern philosophy as an alternative to destructive thinking about the environment. paradoxically, however, eastern philosophy does not necessarily stop environmental damage in predominantly buddhist nations, as callicott and ames point out (1989, 279, 286). nonetheless, such ideas have been drawn upon in western contexts in conjunction with other arguments for greater care of environments. some of byles’s environmentalism stemmed from western thinkers, but it took a decidedly eastern turn 4 this appears to be a reference to the colong and bouddi national park (nsw) preservation campaigns. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 20 cadzow footprints, imprints after the 1940s when her interest in buddhism saw her revise her approach to life. croucher’s epic and invaluable study of buddhism in australia points out that links between pacifism and a non-domination approach to the environment were crucial in the appeal of buddhism to early anglo-australian naturalist writers. croucher described byles as writing works of ‘buddhist inspired ecology’ and as being a soul mate of e.j. banfield, a journalist and author of confessions of a beachcomber, who abandoned city life to become an environmentalist on dunk island in queensland in the 1940s. croucher connects both banfield and byles with the contemporary poetry of robert gray, which argued for acceptance of the australian landscape as it was, as opposed to remaking it in a british or european mould (croucher 1989, 86). as an english migrant to australia, byles struggled with nostalgia for the mountains, snow and shady forests of britain. initially she saw the australian bush in terms of its lack; later she grew to value its unique offerings. in addition to pacifism and buddhism, byles, and many of her fellow walkers, were also influenced by feminism as they developed gendered approaches to ecology. various editors of the sydney bush walker, and colleagues and friends of byles, such as dorothy lawry, were very interested in writers like thoreau and whitman, as well as in the u.s. novelist willa cather, who queried the logic of profit and the ego driven relationships with nature (lawry 1932, 12). byles was part of a community of thinkers interested in these issues, a number of whom were feminists and critical of power relations in their own society. convergences of buddhism, feminism, pacifism, and early environmentalism, occurred in her writings about the australian landscape. conclusion marie byles explored complex connections and composite knowledges in her thinking and writings on travel and environmentalism. examining her work afresh in an australian and asian context is a reminder that biologically and ethnically defined identities may overdetermine contemporary readings of past lives. revisiting the work of byles, and tracing her shifting positions and changing identity, is a case in point. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 21 cadzow footprints, imprints although she was deeply implicated in imperial and modernist thinking, byles’s work also shows the possibilities of a broader, transnational humanitarian and intellectual framework and self-identification. byles’s approach was born of lived experience. she witnessed changes in the australian bush and developed critiques of power relations from an entwining of feminist and socialist, pacifist and buddhist/spiritualist revaluation of environments. from these influences she challenged her fellow walkers, environmentalists, other buddhists, and society at large, to rethink their relationships with nature and each other. the significance of her writings, and the possibilities raised by her spiritual and environmental analyses, have yet to be valued sufficiently. this article barely touches on some of her insights. in footsteps byles notes that the presence of the buddha was once announced by his footprints, rather than by the statues that are so familiar today. footprints is an appropriate image for someone as interested in bushwalking, travelling and spirituality as marie byles. the footprints’ image suggests the ‘take only photos, leave only footprints’ mantra of recent eco-tourism, and a grounded connection with the earth, rather than separateness from it. the imprints of spiritual and ecological thinking can be traced through byles’s life’s work, and provide intriguing directions for future explorations of eastern australian beliefs and environments, and for valuing the work of women in asia as thinkers and activists. acknowledgements this paper was originally delivered at the women in asia conference, uts, 27 september 2005. thank you to dr devleena ghosh for posing the challenge of thinking australia as asian. thanks are also due to prof. heather goodall, dr denis byrne, and assoc. prof. stephen wearing for many fruitful discussions about landscape , spirituality and migrancy. i am also grateful to friends and acquaintances of marie byles for discussing their memories of her with me and to the referees of this article for their suggestions. reference list. bona dea, 1945,’if we let it,’ sydney bush walker, 141, november, 11. ‘news of the month: buddhist centre in australia,’ 1956, world buddhism, june, 3. ‘walking through china: sydney woman realises her dream,’ 1938, sydney morning herald, 19 july, 13. adam, e. 2000, ‘buddhist women in australia,’ journal of global buddhism, 1, 138-143 [online] portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 22 cadzow footprints, imprints available: http://www.globalbuddhism.org/1/adam001.html. accessed 30 august 2005. adam, e. and p.j. hughes. 1996, the buddhists in australia, edited by p. j. hughes. bureau of immigration, multicultural and population research, canberra. ‘australian women fact file: marie beuzeville byles 1900-1979,’ 2001, [online article], available: http://www.jessiestreetwomenslibrary.com/ accessed 3 september 2005. barr, m. 1960, ‘quest for the 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(director), p. tait, d. haslem, 1985, motion picture, a singular woman: the life of marie byles, australian mountaineer, author, pacifist, conservationist and buddhist, women’s film fund and npws, sydney. croucher, p. 1989, buddhism in australia: 1848-1988. university of nsw press, kensington cuc, l.t. 1999, ‘vietnamese traditional cultural concepts of human relations with the natural environment,’ asian geographer: a geographical journal on asia and the pacific rim special issue: eco-consciousness in asia and the pacific, vol. 18 (1-2). dinh, t.h. 2003, ‘social sciences and biodiversity connections between the global the local in viet nam.’ international social science journal 55 (4): 577-81. gerster, r. (ed) 1995, hotel asia: an anthology of australian literary travelling to the east, penguin, melbourne. goodall, h. 1996, invasion to embassy: land in aboriginal politics in nsw 1788-1988, allen & unwin in association with black books, sydney. griffiths, t. 1997, ‘introduction: ecology and empire: towards an australian history of the world’ (eds) t. griffiths & l. robin, ecology and empire: environmental history of settler societies, keele university press, edinburgh. lawry, d. 1932, [untitled] in sydney bush walker, april, 12. levins, c. and c. macarthur, j. ecob, r. marni, and t. gilbert. 1995, ‘ahimsa cheltenham background paper, board meeting no. 55, agenda item 5j,’ national trust of australia, nsw, portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 23 cadzow footprints, imprints sydney, national trust archives, sydney. lyall, g. n.d.’buddhism and the future of humanity,’ [online]. available: www.buddhstcouncil.org/budfut.htm, accessed 30 june 2006. massey, d. 2005, for space, sage publications, london. meredith, p. 1999, myles and milo, allen & unwin, sydney. merton, t. 1966-1967, section a: correspondence: byles, m.b. 1900-1979 file, thomas merton available at merton corpus and bellarmine merton collection, www.merton.org/research/correspondence/z76b3.html, accessed 3 october 2006. mills, s. 1993, discourses of difference: an analysis of women’s travel writing and colonialism, routledge, london. first published 1991. monk, j. and v. norwood (eds), 1987, the desert is no lady: south western landscapes in women’s writing and art, yale university press, new haven. national trust of australia (nsw), 2005-6, marie byles: a spirited life: a celebration of the life of a committed conservationist, pioneer in law and buddhist, travelling exhibition, septembermarch, sydney, central coast, bathurst, http://www.nationaltrust.org.au/properties/ahmisa/default.asp pearce, m. 1981, ‘the beginnings of buddhism in australia,’ karuna, february, 4-8. riley, r. 1992, ‘attachment to the ordinary landscape,’ in place attachment, eds. a. irwin and s. low, plenum press. ‘review, paths to inner calm,’ country life, 1965, 28 january. ronalds, c. 2005, marie byles – a reflection on her life as a legal practitioner, paper presented at the national trust of australia (nsw), sydney, 13 september. available: http://www.nsw.nationaltrust.org.au/chrisronalds.pdf said, e. 1993, culture and imperialism, chatto & windus, london. spuler, m. 2003, developments in australian buddhism: facets of the diamond, routledge, curzon, london. stephenson, i. 1999, ‘in joy and affection: walter burley griffin and the stella james house’ in avalon: landscape and harmony: walter burley griffin, alexander stewart jolly and harry ruskin rowe, ed. j. roberts. ruskin rowe press, avalon. sugatananda, a. 1960, ‘the purpose of the buddha’s teaching’ world buddhism, march, 3. tenko-san i. 1969, a new road to ancient truth trans. makoto ohashi in collaboration with marie beuzeville byles, foreword by m.b.b, allen & unwin, london. terry, d. 1962, ‘road to mandalay,’ (review of journey into burmese silence), the bulletin, 28 july, 40. tsomo, k. l. 1999, buddhist women across cultures: realizations, state university of new york press, albany. waib, n.d., ‘female buddhist scholars’ available: http://members.tripod.com/~lhamo/3schol.htm [accessed 25 september 2005]. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 24 finalriedyandherrimanportaldec72011 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. special issue details: global climate change policy: post-copenhagen discord special issue, guest edited by chris riedy and ian mcgregor. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. deliberative mini-publics and the global deliberative system: insights from an evaluation of world wide views on global warming in australia chris riedy and jade herriman, institute for sustainable futures, university of technology, sydney introduction in december 2009, more than 25,000 people converged on copenhagen’s bella center for the united nations climate change conference, cop-15. they came together to discuss the international response to climate change, to try and influence the discussions, or to observe or report on them. among the participants were 120 heads of state empowered to act on behalf of their citizens, supported by delegations of ministers and bureaucrats. dimitrov (2010: 18) contends that cop-15 brought together ‘the highest concentration of robust decision-making power the world had seen.’ yet this unprecedented gathering of global decision-makers was unable to deliver an effective global response to climate change. the copenhagen accord that emerged from cop-15 was not legally binding and was not formally adopted under the united nations framework convention on climate change. while climate scientists warn that the rise in global average temperatures must be kept to less than 2° c to avoid dangerous climate change (allison et al. 2009; rockström et al. 2009), and this is the stated goal riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 2 of the copenhagen accord, the pledges contained in the accord are not sufficient to prevent global average temperatures from rising by more than 2° c (dimitrov 2010; rogelj et al. 2010) and perhaps as high as 3.5° c (kartha 2010). the subsequent united nations climate change conference in cancun, cop-16, gave formal status to the copenhagen accord but did not make it legally binding or increase its emission reduction ambition. the outcome of cop-15 fuelled existing debates about the ability of current systems of international governance to satisfactorily respond to global challenges like climate change. there is a large and diverse body of literature proposing normative global governance systems. some, like james lovelock (hickman 2010), propose more authoritarian responses to environmental challenges. frustrated with the performance of the united nations, some propose the replacement of multilateral negotiations with an exclusive ‘minilateralism’ (naim 2009), reducing the number of negotiating nations to a smaller set, such as the group of twenty (g20) or major emitters. others see the extension of market mechanisms delivering more effective global governance of climate change (pearce 2008; stripple 2010). still others are committed to democratisation of global governance, through the institutionalisation of cosmopolitan philosophy (held 2009), establishment of frameworks for earth system governance (biermann 2007; biermann et al. 2010), reform of the united nations (figueres 2007), development of new global representative bodies (raskin & xercavins 2010) or the promotion of global deliberative politics (dryzek 2006, 2011; bohman 2010; dryzek & stevenson 2011). in this paper, our focus is on the potential contribution of deliberative democracy to more effective—and more democratic—global environmental governance. the ‘deliberative turn’ in democratic theory has ‘put communication and reflection at the center of democracy’ so that democracy ‘is not just about the making of decisions through the aggregation of preferences’ but ‘also about processes of judgment and preference formation and transformation within informed, respectful, and competent dialogue’ (dryzek 2011: 3). thus deliberative democracy puts talking, rather than voting, at the heart of democracy (chambers 2003). in addition to an expanding body of normative theory on deliberative democracy, there is also growing empirical and practical experience with its application to environmental governance (e.g. backstrand et al. 2010) and with the design and implementation of temporary deliberative riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 3 institutions (fung 2003; chambers 2009; smith, g 2009; dryzek 2011). the latter are often discrete, facilitated events that bring together relatively small numbers of ordinary citizens to deliberate, typically on issues that are controversial or defy more conventional decision-making processes. fung (2003) calls these deliberative events mini-publics; they include diverse techniques such as deliberative polls, citizens’ juries and consensus conferences, often involving randomly selected citizens (smith, g. 2009). mini-publics offer a practical means to investigate the conditions for facilitating deliberation but the contribution of discrete mini-publics to the normative goal of creating a more deliberative democracy remains uncertain (chambers 2009; dryzek 2011). chambers (2009) argues that an exclusive focus on such discrete deliberative initiatives risks abandonment of larger questions about how civil society relates to the state. dryzek (2011) is generally supportive of mini-publics but locates them within large-scale political systems where they may or may not contribute to the emergence of more deliberative systems. our intent in this paper is to examine the role that deliberative mini-publics can play in facilitating the emergence of a global deliberative system for climate change response. we pursue this intent through a reflective evaluation of the australian component of the world wide views on global warming project (wwviews). wwviews was an ambitious attempt to democratise cop-15 by giving people from around the world an opportunity to deliberate on international climate policy and to make recommendations to the delegations meeting in copenhagen. the danish board of technology (dbt) and the danish cultural institute (dci) initiated the project as a way of feeding public deliberative opinion into national and international climate change decision-making processes (danish board of technology 2009b). held on 26 september 2009, with roughly 4,000 participants across 38 countries, wwviews was the first attempt to create a deliberative mini-public at a global scale. the australian wwviews event brought 100 randomly selected citizens from across australia to sydney to deliberate for a day and a half. as an example of a deliberative mini-public, wwviews provides an opportunity to reflect on theoretical concerns about the role of mini-publics in furthering the cause of deliberative democracy. further, as a global mini-public, wwviews potentially reveals new challenges for deliberative democratisation of global governance systems. riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 4 therefore, the objective of our evaluation is to draw out lessons for the design of future mini-publics, particularly at a global scale. we reflect on wwviews from the perspective of one of the national partners in wwviews, responsible for organising the australian wwviews event. as such, it is not our intention to evaluate the entire wwviews project across all of the participating countries. instead, we evaluate the australian event and our partial experiences of the international project. we do not provide detailed descriptions of the project and its outcomes, except where these are needed to support our evaluation. full reports on the australian wwviews event (atherton & herriman 2009) and the global wwviews project (danish board of technology 2009b) are available to interested readers.1 normative characteristics of deliberative systems to reflect on the contribution of wwviews we first need to establish an evaluative framework. to do this we reflect on existing evaluative frameworks for public participation processes in general and deliberative events in particular, and existing approaches to assessing the deliberativeness of socio-political systems. from this we draw a set of evaluative criteria to apply to this case. evaluative frameworks for public participation processes (e.g. burton 2009; rowe & frewer 2004; rowe & frewer 2000) and sets of principles for community engagement (international conference on engaging communities 2005; ncdd 2009) are readily available. however, few of these frameworks and principles specifically draw attention to the quality of deliberation. one exception is the brisbane declaration of the international conference on engaging communities, which identifies integrity, inclusion, deliberation and influence as the core principles of community engagement (international conference on engaging communities 2005). drawing on carson and hartz-karp (2005: 122) and the text of the brisbane declaration, these principles can be expressed as follows: • integrity: there should be ‘openness and honesty about the scope and purpose of engagement’ (international conference on engaging communities 2005). • inclusion: the process should be representative of the population and inclusive of diverse viewpoints and values, providing equal opportunity for all to participate. • deliberation: the process should provide open dialogue, access to information, respect, space to 1 additional information can be found at the australian (http://wwviews.org.au) and international (http://wwviews.org) websites. riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 5 understand and reframe issues, and movement toward consensus. • influence: the process should have the ability to influence policy and decision-making. these principles provide a useful starting point for evaluating wwviews as a community engagement process. however, more specific literature on the normative characteristics of deliberative processes helps to flesh out these principles, particularly the latter three. edwards et al. (2008) offer a more detailed evaluation framework, developed specifically for deliberative events. they propose and apply 37 evaluation criteria covering inputs (for example, diversity of participants, training for facilitators), process (covering quality of dialogue, participant knowledge and logistics) and outputs (i.e. new discourses and networks developed, and influence over policy). the criteria align well with the four principles above but provide more detailed questions to ask when evaluating a deliberative process, like wwviews. we believe that these evaluative frameworks are more useful for our current purposes when considered within the context of a normative deliberative system. mansbridge (1999) introduced the idea of a deliberative system that stretches beyond any single deliberative event and dryzek (2009, 2011) developed a generally applicable scheme for analysing deliberative systems comprising: • public space, ideally allowing free communication with few barriers or legal restrictions on what can be said. designed citizen forums like wwviews occur in public space, as does media commentary, political activism, public consultation and informal conversation. for discussions on global climate change response, global civil society provides an important deliberative arena within public space (brassett & smith, w 2010). • empowered space, ‘home to deliberation among actors in institutions clearly producing collective decisions’ (dryzek 2011: 11). these institutions can be formal or informal and include legislatures, cabinets, courts, or international negotiations like those at cop-15. • transmission refers to ‘some means through which deliberation in public space can influence that in empowered space’ (dryzek 2011: 11). transmission can occur through advocacy, criticism, questioning, support or other means. • accountability, ‘whereby empowered space answers to public space’ (dryzek 2011: 11). elections are one form of accountability and others can occur through public consultation processes or simply giving a public account that justifies decisions. • meta-deliberation, ‘or deliberation about how the deliberative system itself should be organized’ (dryzek 2011: 12). dryzek argues that a healthy deliberative system should have the capacity for self-examination and potentially self-transformation. • decisiveness captures the idea that a functioning deliberative system should be able to make collective decisions that are responsive to the other five elements. bohman (2010a) draws further attention to the elements of a deliberative system when he argues that both communicative freedom and communicative power are essential to democratisation. communicative freedom ‘is the exercise of a communicative status, riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 6 the status of being recognised as a member of the public. communicative freedom is transformed into communicative power when it is incorporated into institutionalised processes of decision making’ (bohman 2010a: 432). communicative freedom is an aspect of dryzek’s public space and the existence of mini-publics is a testament to communicative freedom. however, the transformation of communicative freedom into communicative power is very challenging. dryzek identifies mechanisms of transmission and accountability through which communicative power could be developed but says little about how citizens in public space can accumulate the power to effectively use these mechanisms. thus issues of power need to be taken into account in our evaluative framework. dryzek (2011) argues that a system has deliberative capacity to the extent that it can accommodate deliberation that is authentic, inclusive and consequential. deliberation is authentic if it is ‘able to induce reflection upon preferences in noncoercive fashion and involve communicating in terms that those who do not share one’s point of view can find meaningful and accept’ (dryzek 2011: 10). this notion of authenticity adds a new dimension to the principle of deliberation from the brisbane declaration above. dryzek’s (2011) other two criteria, inclusivity and consequentiality, align closely with the principles of inclusion and influence respectively from the brisbane declaration. however, dryzek and niemeyer (2010: 43) point out that deliberative democracy ‘can entail the representation of discourses as well as persons, interests, or groups’ and inclusion of diverse discourses may be as or more important than demographic representation (although demographic representation remains important for both procedural fairness (brackertz & meredyth, 2008: 11) and as a way to deliver diversity of discourse). this leads to a richer understanding of the principle of inclusion. following on from the above discussion, our evaluation of wwviews will proceed in two stages. first, we will situate wwviews as a component within a normative global deliberative system for decision-making on climate change. second, we will evaluate wwviews against four principles that integrate the above sources: • integrity: the origins and purpose of the deliberative process should be transparent and the process should be adequately resourced and respectfully facilitated without any attempt to influence the outcomes. • inclusion: the process should be representative of the affected population and their diverse discourses and provide equal opportunity for all to participate. • authentic deliberation: the process should support communicative freedom by providing access riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 7 to information, space for open and respectful dialogue between participants and sufficient time for reflection. it should encourage but not coerce reflection on preferences. • influence and consequence: the process should develop the communicative power to make a difference, whether by influencing policy and decision-making or facilitating broader sociocultural change (e.g. new discourses or networks). these four principles capture a normative ideal for a deliberative mini-public. as others have pointed out (backstrand et al. 2010a), real practice inevitably falls short of the deliberative ideal, yet these principles do provide a useful evaluative vantage point for suggesting future progress towards such an ideal. wwviews in a global deliberative system dryzek’s (2009) conception of a deliberative system was first published in april 2009, when the wwviews process had already been designed. consequently, the organisers around the world did not have the benefit of this thinking and terminology to conceptualise how wwviews could contribute to a deliberative global system. what follows, then, is not intended as criticism of the project for failing to apply this concept but an attempt to use this emerging concept to open up a broader conversation about the future of global mini-publics. we analyse wwviews as an element within a global deliberative system, which helps to both explain what wwviews sought to achieve and to highlight the challenges it and future mini-publics face. public space the global wwviews project brought together 44 separate mini-publics in simultaneous events run by local organisations in 38 participating countries.2 each event involved around 100 participants and together the events brought together a global minipublic of more than 4,000 people. although the dbt and dci provided global coordination of the project, the national implementation was the responsibility of partner organisations in each country, which were typically universities or nongovernment organisations with interest in citizen engagement and democracy. wwviews took place in public space as an exercise in communicative freedom—a response to the perception of a democratic gap between citizens and policymakers and a need to involve citizens more directly in deliberation on global climate change policy 2 australia, austria, bangladesh, belgium (flanders), bolivia, brazil, cameroon, canada, chile, china, chinese taipei, denmark, egypt, ethiopia, finland, france, germany, india, indonesia, italy, japan, malawi, mali, mozambique, netherlands, norway, russia, saint lucia, south africa, spain, sweden, switzerland, the maldives, uganda, united kingdom, uruguay, usa, and vietnam. riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 8 (danish board of technology 2009b). it did not have any formal decision-making status itself but sought to exert influence on decision-makers. as an exercise within global public space, wwviews entered into a clamorous climate policy debate, populated by multiple competing discourses (dryzek 2011). some of the challenges for mini-publics in such a crowded public space include being heard at all, and being seen as a legitimate voice of global civil society. this latter challenge is particularly difficult given the diverse discourses that play out within global civil society (brassett & smith 2010). empowered space according to the danish board of technology (2009: 10), the ‘target groups for receiving the wwviews results are politicians, negotiators and interest groups engaged in the un climate negotiations leading up to cop15 and beyond.’ the empowered space addressed here is a complex one, comprising decision-making bodies such as parliaments and cabinets within nation-states and formal and informal negotiations under the united nations framework convention on climate change. wwviews sought to influence this empowered space in multiple ways, outlined in more detail below. we believe, however, that the project did not develop sufficient understanding of the mechanisms of this empowered space. for example, despite long lead-time in planning the global project, all of the wwviews deliberative events were scheduled to take place only two months before cop-15, when negotiating positions for many countries had already firmed. earlier engagement with empowered space at national scales could have increased the potential to influence negotiating positions. instead, there was a strong emphasis on influencing the negotiations themselves, which was perhaps an unrealistic goal given that negotiators would have limited flexibility to alter their position at cop-15 based on their mandate from national empowered space. transmission the organisers of wwviews were very aware that a mini-public can only influence empowered space if it works to develop a means of transmission to empowered space. consequently, much effort was put into development of dissemination strategies in each participating country. in australia, we sought to influence government decision makers by engaging them directly with the results and process, and also sought to influence policy indirectly by introducing new discourses into public space. the dissemination strategy had three components: riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 9 • political engagement strategy: engaging directly with politicians and policy makers through meetings and provision of reports, and supporting participant outreach to politicians. the goal was to influence politicians and policy makers to at least reflect on their own positions and perhaps adopt positions more consistent with those expressed by the mini-public. • media and communications strategy: use of a website, media releases, social media and direct contacts with journalists to increase media coverage of wwviews and introduce the positions expressed by the participants into public debate. this was accompanied by a strategy of communications that engaged directly (via project newsletters and invitations to become involved) with key stakeholders such as environment ngos, senior bureaucrats and businesses. the goal was to disseminate a new discourse that could shift the public debate and increase pressure on decision-makers within empowered space to deliberate on their positions. • research strategy: this included critical reflection on wwviews and provision of information about the wwviews process to business leaders, teaching and learning institutions, professionals from varied fields, researchers, and citizens. the aim here was not to influence empowered space on climate change policy but to build awareness of deliberative mini-publics so that others might consider this kind of approach in the future. the success of this transmission strategy will be considered in a later section. here, it is sufficient to point out that the conversion of communicative freedom into communicative power is difficult for a mini-public operating with limited resources in a crowded public space. accountability following on from this last point, a mini-public convened in public space has few avenues to hold empowered space to account. elections are the main accountability mechanism in liberal democracies and politicians are unlikely to feel that the views of a mini-public convened on a single issue are going to make much difference to the choices of the voting public. mini-publics often turn to other forms of accountability, such as asking decision-makers to ‘give an account’ of how they will respond to the views of the mini-public. we were not able to persuade any australian politicians to accept the results from wwviews and make a statement on how they would respond. we did, however, obtain a letter and video message endorsing the event, prior to it being held, from the federal minister for climate change and water, penny wong. in addition, australia’s climate change ambassador, louise hand, spoke in person at the event. this association of politicians with a mini-public opens up the potential to hold them accountable through the public sphere, by pointing out their support for the event and drawing their attention publicly to the results. nevertheless, this is a weak and tenuous form of accountability and establishment of reliable accountability mechanisms is perhaps the single biggest challenge for mini-publics contributing to the development a deliberative system. riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 10 meta-deliberation there was no significant reflection in advance about the role of wwviews in facilitating the establishment of a broader deliberative system, except for the optimistic intent that holding a global, linked series of events would raise the profile of citizen deliberation and highlight its potential benefit to policy makers and citizens. this intent was mirrored in the australian event in which organisers identified two linked but distinct communication messages—the policy preferences of citizens, and the value of such processes for future policy making. one of the purposes of this paper is to contribute to meta-deliberation about the role of events like wwviews in a normative global deliberative system. decisiveness as dryzek (2011) points out, the global deliberative system has not been particularly decisive in its policy response to climate change, with global emissions continuing to rise and a lack of binding commitments to halt this rise. given the problems of transmission and accountability identified above, wwviews offered little to improve the decisiveness of the global deliberative system. the position that emerges from analysing wwviews as a component in a broader deliberative system is that minipublics are excellent examples of bohman’s communicative freedom but due to problems of transmission and accountability they fail to convert that freedom into communicative power. in the case of wwviews, it is very difficult to point to any real influence of the project on the empowered space that decides on climate change policy. we will take up this point again later in the paper. evaluating wwviews against norms of deliberative democracy above, we identified integrity, inclusion, authentic deliberation and influence and consequence as normative characteristics of deliberative democracy against which to evaluate wwviews. this section evaluates wwviews against these norms and discusses lessons that emerge. integrity the origins and purpose of the deliberative process should be transparent and the process should be adequately resourced and respectfully facilitated without any attempt to influence the outcomes. the organisers of wwviews in australia sought to be open, honest and transparent riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 11 about the objectives of the project, the reasons for involving participants and what the project could realistically hope to achieve. participants were given information prior to the event about the kind of process being used, why using this kind of process is important, who was responsible for initiating and organising the event and how the information about climate change and climate policy provided to participants was developed. participants received information about the purpose of the event through newsletters, a website,3 a dedicated participant support person and information packages. for example, the second newsletter for the australian event stated that ‘a full report on proceedings will be prepared by isf and disseminated widely to decision-makers and other interested groups in the lead up to cop-15 in december.’ it was also stressed to participants that there was no guarantee that the results of the project would influence decision-makers at cop-15. beyond misrepresentation of the purpose of an event, the main threats to the integrity of a mini-public are systematic bias in the information provided to participants or facilitation that influences the deliberations in particular directions. to address the first threat, the dbt established a rigorous process for developing the information provided to participants before and at the event. participants in all countries received the same information—a booklet of background reading material in advance of the event and a set of videos shown during the event—translated into local languages. the material was based primarily on the intergovernmental panel on climate change’s fourth assessment report (ipcc 2007). the dbt established an international scientific advisory board to review the information and the material was tested at an early stage of its development in citizen focus groups in different parts of the world. partner organisations in each country were not allowed to add to the provided material or develop country-specific information for participants. these processes sought to eliminate any systematic bias in the information provided to participants. to minimise the risk of facilitation that would influence the deliberations in a particular direction, the dbt sought to recruit partner organisations that were ‘unbiased with regards to climate change’ (danish board of technology 2009b). although the institute for sustainable futures is an independent research institute, many of its researchers have commented in the public domain on what constitutes an effective response to 3 see: http://wwviews.org.au [accessed 1 sep. 2011]. riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 12 climate change and taken critical positions against government policy on climate change. therefore, to avoid influencing the views of the participants, the institute for sustainable futures and wwf (one of the sponsors) did not take on facilitation roles during the event. instead, a neutral lead facilitator was engaged and volunteer table facilitators were drawn from sponsors and other organisations perceived as having a more neutral position on the issue of climate change response. whether the association of the institute for sustainable futures and wwf with the event was itself enough to influence the deliberation in a particular direction is an open question, and one that we did not set out to test in our evaluation. evaluating the integrity of an event that you have designed is difficult. however, we can point to some evidence that the event did have integrity. first, the australian results on issues such as the urgency of climate change response and the strength of the proposed policy responses did not differ substantially or systematically from those in other developed countries (atherton & herriman 2009; danish board of technology 2009b), indicating that the facilitation in australia did not influence the participants to take a stronger position than their international counterparts. second, the quantitative evaluation surveys completed by participants and qualitative feedback comments revealed no significant criticism of the way the process was conducted or its objectives. to give one quantitative measure from the survey, 98 percent of survey respondents agreed that ‘the event used my time productively. 4 qualitative feedback indicated that participants felt the event was a good investment of their time, was well run, followed good process and made a meaningful contribution (atherton & herriman 2009). inclusion the process should be representative of the affected population and their diverse discourses and provide equal opportunity for all to participate. wwviews sought to include a representative group of countries in the global project, and to include citizens within each country that reflected the demographic distribution in that country ‘with regards to age, gender, occupation, education, and geographical zone of residency (that is, city and countryside)’ (danish board of technology 2009: 8). the dbt (2009: 8) also specified that participants ‘should not be experts on climate change, neither as scientists nor stakeholders.’ beyond these criteria, the dbt left the 4 this combines results for the three answer categories: absolutely agreed; agreed; or somewhat agreed. riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 13 specific details of participant recruitment to the national partner organisations. wwviews did not specifically seek to include a representative set of discourses in the deliberations, as advocated by dryzek (2011), although there was a tacit assumption that demographic diversity would deliver discourse diversity. we will start by evaluating inclusion within australia, before broadening to evaluate inclusion at the global scale and then considering dryzek’s challenge to achieve discourse rather than demographic representation. for the australian wwviews event, australian citizens were randomly recruited by a market research company to match national demographic quotas based on australian bureau of statistics data for location, age, gender, ethnicity, income, household composition, employment status and education. the market research company randomly generated 5,000 telephone numbers and recruited a shortlist of 250 people via telephone interviews within this sample. the shortlist of 250 people was sent a complete information pack about the event and a participant agreement form that they were asked to return if they wanted to participate. from the pool of returns, 110 participants were selected to match demographic quotas as closely as possible. on the day of the event, 105 participants took part. despite operating from a principle of inclusion, the participant recruitment process specifically excluded some groups and unintentionally excluded others. dryzek (2011: 156) notes a general tendency for mini-publics to ‘disproportionately attract politically active, highly educated, high income, and older participants.’ similarly, halvorsen (2006: 153) finds that public meetings and other community engagement activities ‘frequently generate viewpoints from a group of people older, whiter, more affluent, more educated, and more likely to be male than the citizens within their community.’ wwviews australia was somewhat typical in this respect. table 1 summarises the ways in which representation fell short of the demographic ideal. first, children under the age of 18 were excluded to simplify permission and supervision processes. while this is standard practice in many mini-publics it is not ideal, particularly on an issue like climate change that will strongly impact today’s young people. as the worst impacts of climate change are projected to occur in the future if action is not taken, the children of today have a greater stake in decisions on climate change and their voice deserves to be included. riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 14 for wwviews australia, the exclusion of children was exacerbated by underrepresentation of people aged 18–34. sarkissian et al. (2009: 134) note that young people often don’t become involved in community engagement approaches because they find them ‘irrelevant, a waste of time and boring’ and because they do not experience results relevant to their concerns. however, it is possible and important to find ways to engage youth in mini-publics and various guidelines are available for doing so (for example, ministry of youth affairs 2003). characteristic issues geographic location while all australian states and territories were represented, including both metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas, participants from metropolitan new south wales (nsw) were under-represented (15% of the total compared to the quota of 21%). the event was held in metropolitan nsw (sydney) and we assumed that participants would want to stay with their families rather than in a hotel close to the event, and designed our level of reimbursement for these participants accordingly. this lower level of support for out-of-pocket expenses may have contributed to under-representation of these participants. age participants under 18 were excluded to simplify permission and supervision processes. participants aged 18-34 were substantially under-represented (19% of the total, compared to the quota of 36%) and participants aged 50-64 were over-represented (31% of the total compared to the quota of 21%). gender no issues – approximately equal representation of males and females. ethnicity participants born outside australia were under-represented (18% of the total compared to the quota of 24%). indigenous australians were represented in line with the quota. household income no issues – income bands (from under $20,000 to over $120,000) were appropriately represented. household composition participants in the “other” household category (which includes, for example, share houses) were under-represented (8% of the total compared to a quota of 16%), but families with dependent children and couple/single with no dependent children were over-represented. work status no issues – different types of work status (working, unemployed, student and retired) were appropriately represented. education participants with highest level of education “some secondary” were under-represented (11% compared to the quota of 16%) and participants with highest level of education “completed tertiary” were heavily over-represented (41% compared to a quota of 24%). table 1: summary of representation problems for wwviews australia. second, following the instructions provided by the dbt, participants that were professionally involved with climate change were excluded. the intention here was to ensure participation by ordinary citizens in a non-partisan forum and avoid a repeat of the partisan debates already prevalent on climate change. partisan deliberation has different characteristics to non-partisan deliberation and is generally less able to achieve quality deliberation (hendriks, dryzek & hunold 2007). in a random selection process like that used in australia, exclusion of climate change experts is unnecessary, as few would be recruited and they would have little opportunity to unduly influence the deliberations. however, some of the other participating countries used processes other riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 15 than random selection to recruit participants and these processes could have been more open to dominance by partisan stakeholders if such stakeholders were not excluded. third, the recruitment process itself inevitably leads to exclusion of some groups of citizens. people not listed in telephone directories or with poor english communication skills would not have been recruited. this is reflected in under-representation of people born outside australia and people with less formal education in the final group. we would expect people with higher levels of education and stronger english language skills to be more likely to understand what is being asked of them and to feel confident in their ability to participate, making them more likely to take up the offer. fourth, while ethnic diversity was sought through the recruitment category ‘born outside australia,’ the participants did not fully reflect australia’s ethnic diversity. participants on the day observed that the group was predominantly ‘white’ and, although we did not collect specific data on language groups, it appeared that most of the people born overseas were of european origin. this raises questions about the most appropriate recruitment variable to use to capture ethnic diversity, and whether there are significant cultural barriers to participation in an event of this type even within a single country. a more diverse and representative result could potentially be achieved by setting quotas for specific language groups, or countries of origin. as brackertz & meredyth (2008: 16) suggest, increasing participation in relation to characteristics that pose a barrier to participation requires thinking about how and where members of these groups already come together, which existing information networks already exist, who they trust, who influences the group, and how other organisations facilitate access. however, this increases the time and cost for recruitment and potentially adds the need for interpreters, time to build relationships, and time for learning about and communicating through existing networks—making it difficult for mini-publics that are often already stretched for resources and may not have been designed with adequate timelines for engagement of this nature. a further area of research for australian events could be the framing during recruitment or designing of such events to increase participation of culturally and linguistically diverse participants. fifth, as mentioned above, education levels represented at the event did not mirror the distribution within the population; there were proportionally more people with tertiary education and less with only some secondary education. education levels can be a proxy riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 16 for ensuring socio-economic diversity and representation of a range of life experiences, including that of work. interestingly, income and ‘types of work’ categories were still representative, and we achieved representation of a variety of household types, despite the under representation of participants with less formal education. the group that participated in wwviews did constitute a diverse cross-section of australian society that was demographically representative in most categories. in those categories in which representation fell short of the quotas, it is reasonable to assume that representation was better than it would have been without the efforts to meet the quotas, although it is not possible to prove this. the participants themselves felt that the minipublic was diverse; comments relating to diversity were one of the most frequent given to an open-ended ‘what did you like best about today?’ question posed at the end of the first half-day session. for example participants said: ‘surprisingly brilliant job of mixing up the cross-section of participants, definitely added to the interest and diversity of discussion,’ ‘meeting people from a range of areas and different points of views has been very insightful and interesting’ and ‘lovely to meet such a diverse bunch of australians.’ nevertheless, the important exclusions identified above, most of which are typical of mini-publics, mean that wwviews fell short of an ideal of including the views of all stakeholders in climate change policy. additional problems of inclusion and representativeness emerge as we turn our attention to the global scale. if achieving demographic representation is difficult at a national level, as outlined above, then it becomes even more challenging to bring together a group of participants that is reasonably representative of the world demographic profile. in wwviews, the approach taken to this challenge was to recruit a representative group of nations into the project and to ask each nation to identify a representative group of participants within that nation. recruitment of nations was opportunistic, drawing on networks of deliberative democracy practitioners around the world and requiring organisations to source their own funding to run a national event. there was targeted recruitment of developing nations and specific efforts to secure funding to allow poorer countries to participate. in the end, 38 countries participated, including 18 developed and 20 developing nations. all continents were represented, but there were important regional gaps; most notably, despite attempts to identify suitable partner organisations, there was no participation from the middle east or central asian countries. riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 17 apart from these gaps, the group of participating nations was reasonably representative of the diversity of world nations. it also included many of the major players in international climate change negotiations, such as the united states, china, india, brazil, south africa and several european union members. however, it is questionable whether this model of national representation, closely paralleling the united nations model, is the best way to achieve representativeness and inclusion at a global scale. to illustrate, china’s population of more than 1.3 billion and st lucia’s population of 170,000 were both represented by a single event, giving the views of st lucians disproportionate weight when the global results were aggregated. a more representative model would be to seek to match the global pool of participants to a world demographic profile, using similar techniques to those described above for australia. this may be an ideal to work towards but would pose substantial logistical difficulties to implement, with many countries lacking the detailed and comprehensive databases required to support such an approach. although falling short of this ideal, an improvement over the wwviews approach would be to ensure that the number of participants from any country is proportional to the population they are representing and/or that the views expressed in particular events are weighted to take into account the population represented. these proposed changes to recruitment processes might improve global demographic representation but they would likely suffer from the same exclusions that we identified above for australia. thus we would expect low participation from the global poor, oppressed or linguistic minorities, young people and those with less formal education. a possible response is to reconceptualise what inclusion means in a deliberative democratic system. dryzek and niemeyer (2010) argue that representation can be usefully conceived as representation of discourses. diverse discourses exist on issues like climate change and ensuring that all of these discourses are represented in a minipublic may be a more practically inclusive approach than seeking demographic representation. for example, if there are concerns about directly including children in a mini-public, adult participants could be recruited that can represent the discourses in which children participate. further, participants could be recruited to represent the discourses of unborn future generations who cannot possibly participate in a current mini-public but have the riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 18 greatest stake in climate change response. the marginalised discourses of the global poor and disadvantaged can be brought into a mini-public through specific discourse representation rather than simple demographic weight of numbers. while the concept of discourse representation is an attractive one, more work is needed to investigate the practical implications for design of mini-publics and the balance between demographic representation and discourse representation. there are important questions about how discourses requiring representation would be identified, how representatives of these discourses would be selected and who should make these decisions. these questions would themselves be suitable topics for deliberation. wwviews did not make any attempt to identify the discourses that would need to be represented in a mini-public on global climate change response. nor did it attempt to identify the discourses that participants adhered to. consequently, it is not possible to evaluate whether wwviews achieved a reasonable level of discourse representation. we can state, however, that participants in wwviews in australia and internationally exhibited greater levels of concern about climate change and called for stronger action than is typical in public debate as revealed through the media or opinion polling (danish board of technology 2009b). this may indicate that the wwviews mini-publics did not have sufficient representation from diverse discourses as a starting point, or that substantial shifts occurred through the process of deliberation. it is to the quality of deliberation that we now turn. authentic deliberation the process should support communicative freedom by providing access to information, space for open and respectful dialogue between participants and sufficient time for reflection. it should encourage but not coerce reflection on preferences. gundersen (1995) describes deliberation as an active process of challenging unconsidered beliefs and values, encouraging individuals to arrive at a defensible position on an issue. for dryzek (2002: 1), it is a non-coercive, reflective and pluralistic process, allowing ‘argument, rhetoric, humour, emotion, testimony or storytelling, and gossip,’ through which people arrive at a particular judgement, preference or view. for carson and hartz-karp (2005: 122), as noted previously, deliberation requires ‘open dialogue, access to information, respect, space to understand and reframe issues, and movement toward consensus.’ riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 19 numerous engagement methods are now available for facilitating deliberation by minipublics (fung 2003; smith, g. 2009). wwviews used a hybrid method that drew on the dbt’s several decades of experience in engaging citizens in deliberation within political decision-making processes. the method combined elements of deliberative opinion polling (fishkin 1997), the 21st century town meeting process developed by america speaks5 and the voting conference process used by the danish board of technology.6 partner organisations were given opportunities to contribute to the development of the wwviews method, which was then documented in a process manual (danish board of technology 2009a) that all national partners were expected to follow. participants in each country were provided with information to support informed deliberation in the form of written material prior to the event and video presentations during the event. they were divided into small groups around a table, each with a facilitator. the groups discussed a series of pre-established questions directly relevant to the cop15 negotiations in four themed deliberation sessions. facilitators provided participants with space to express and defend their views and gently encouraged them to question their existing beliefs and those of other participants at their table. at the end of each themed session, participants chose their preferred response to each question from a set of pre-established choices. in a final session, the groups at each table collectively wrote a recommendation to their climate negotiators through a process of consensus building. all participants then voted on their favourite recommendations from those developed by each group. no attempt was made to systematically measure the quality of the deliberation in the wwviews australia event, although methods such as the discourse quality index (steenbergen et al. 2003) are available for this purpose. however, it is clear that the process supported more deliberation than the participants would normally engage in on climate change by providing them with information and a facilitated space to engage with other views, consider questions they would not normally consider, and reflect on their own preferences. in a survey of participants, 99 percent felt that the recommendation developed by their group reflected an open and thoughtful discussion 5 see: www.americaspeaks.org [accessed 1 sep. 2011]. 6 see: http://www.tekno.dk/subpage.php3?article=469&toppic=kategori12&language=dk [accessed 1 sep. 2011]. riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 20 based on diverse views from a diverse group of people (atherton & herriman 2009). nevertheless, the process could have been more deliberative in some important ways. to make efficient use of limited time and to allow easy quantitative comparison of results across different countries, the four themed sessions required participants to express their views by voting on a set of predefined questions with multiple-choice answers. the use of predefined questions and answers closed down opportunities for participants to reframe issues or express responses in their own words. the limited set of available responses may not have adequately reflected the real diversity of opinion within the participating group. in addition, the voting process resorted to aggregation of views rather than seeking to move discussions towards consensus. this meant that participants could opt out of reflecting on their views or having them challenged by other participants, as they did not have to participate in reaching a consensus. these process limitations were consciously addressed through the inclusion of the final session in which participants worked together in small groups to develop a recommendation to the cop-15 delegates. this process did encourage consensus and allowed participants to express themselves in their own words. a second point to note is the impact of the pace of the deliberations. the process established by the dbt in consultation with partner organisations encouraged national organisers to fit the entire process into a single day. again, this was meant to maximise the issues that could be covered while keeping costs down to make the process more accessible around the world. for the australian event, we added an extra half-day to the process to provide more time for deliberation. however, each deliberation and voting session only allowed 45 minutes for participants to discuss the information provided, the questions and the possible responses. this is not sufficient time to fully reflect on and think through the consequences of decisions. this is perhaps echoed in some of the voting results. for example, 31 percent of australian participants supported greenhouse gas reduction targets of more than 40 percent by 2020. such targets would have a substantial impact on energy prices and bills in australia. although table facilitators relayed many participants’ stories of weighing up the personal impacts of increased prices versus their responsibilities to future generations, it is unlikely that all participants had time to make these personal connections to an issue; those that did would have had little specific information on the magnitude of personal impacts. riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 21 making such connections was further hindered by the decision to focus all of the information provided to participants on the international negotiations. provision of country-specific information was not allowed. this decision was made both to reduce time requirements and to ensure that participants from around the world received the same information to inform their deliberation. however, there is strong evidence that people are more able to connect with the issue of climate change and more likely to change their behaviour if they see it as a tangible, local issue, rather than an abstract, global issue (cred 2009). in addition, the implications of international decisions only become apparent by shifting focus to the national level. participants in wwviews had no opportunity to reflect and deliberate on how their decisions would play out in their own countries and the results are consistent with low awareness of national and local impacts. future global-scale deliberative democracy processes on climate change will need to find ways to connect issues across scales, from global to local and vice versa. the difficult question that needs to be asked here is whether bigger is necessarily better for global mini-publics. the choice to use standardised questions and responses, to limit the length of the event and to avoid country-specific discussions certainly reduced costs and allowed countries to participate that would not have been able to do so otherwise, but deliberative quality was sacrificed to achieve this. while in australia we have anecdotal evidence that the scale of the project gave it a point of difference when trying to get the attention of decision makers (and potential funders), it is unknown whether the sheer number of people and countries involved made the project any more influential. a longer, smaller process, perhaps prioritising good discourse representation rather than number of participants, could have delivered greater deliberative quality without sacrificing the potential to influence. the organisers also justified standardisation of the questions, answers and process as a way of supporting comparability of the results across participating countries. we question whether comparability is sufficiently important to justify the resulting loss of deliberative quality. indeed, we question whether comparability is even possible across different cultural and linguistic contexts. in the case of wwviews, all the decisions made to achieve comparability and standardisation were undermined by allowing (appropriately) local translation of the information materials and local design of participant recruitment processes. we contend that authentic deliberation requires riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 22 process flexibility to account for differences in culture, resources, democratic tradition and political system (dryzek 2011). for example, different cultures have different expectations about regularity of breaks, allowing time for religious practices and how men and women should interact. a more flexible and culturally responsive process would have delivered greater deliberative quality without having to sacrifice potential for comparability or influence. our final evaluative discussion addresses this question of influence. influence and consequence the process should develop the communicative power to make a difference, whether by influencing policy and decision-making or facilitating broader sociocultural change (e.g. new discourses or networks). a starting point for evaluating the influence of a mini-public is to understand what influence the project sought to achieve. ostensibly, wwviews sought to influence the outcomes of cop-15 and measured against this ambitious aim it was a failure. the outcomes of cop-15 fell far short of what the participating citizens demanded and there is no evidence that wwviews had any influence on negotiating positions at cop-15. in reality, most of the organisers had more modest aims for the project. in australia, we certainly sought to influence the positions held by politicians and other decision-makers in relation to climate change, but we also sought to build discursive awareness of deliberative democracy and the potential of mini-publics. there is no definitive evidence that the former objective was achieved, but there is some evidence that the latter was achieved. as noted above, wwviews australia developed a dissemination strategy that sought to influence politicians, bureaucrats and the media to adopt the positions advocated by the mini-public. we sought face-to-face meetings with australian government climate policy-makers and negotiators, other influential bureaucrats, and politicians from the three major political parties (the australian labor party, the liberal-national coalition, and the greens). gaining access to key politicians and climate change negotiators during the period of the dissemination efforts (oct.–nov. 2009) was difficult. key individuals had limited availability due to the demands on their time of preparation for cop-15 (including attending preparatory talks elsewhere) and the (thwarted) passage through federal parliament of domestic climate change policy. meetings were ultimately held with public servants in the department of climate change (one of riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 23 whom was on the cop-15 negotiating team), some advisers to ministers and shadow ministers, the australian greens deputy leader and the lord mayor of sydney (herriman, white & atherton 2011). reports were also mailed to all federal politicians (both houses), all state government ministers and selected state government mps, and senior federal and state civil servants, including federal climate negotiators. while we hope that at least some of the politicians that received reports read them and are now a little bit more familiar with deliberative mini-publics, there is no evidence in the public domain that wwviews australia had any influence at all on their views on how to respond to climate change. if anything, the views expressed by politicians now are less consistent with the outcomes of wwviews than they were at the time it was held, as the politics of climate change in australia has become more partisan and oppositional in the intervening period. further evaluation of the influence of wwviews would require investigative research with key politicians and decision-makers, which has not been undertaken. the lack of apparent influence on climate change policy is perhaps not surprising, and it could be argued, in hindsight, that the strategies that the global project established and that we employed in the australian context were politically naïve. first, we assumed that it would be possible to influence negotiating positions two months out from cop15, when these positions had already firmed through the preceding ten months of negotiations. second, we assumed that a one-off event like wwviews could create enough noise in the public space to hold those occupying empowered space accountable. in reality, sustained pressure over a longer period is more likely to deliver communicative power. wwviews did not even deliver enough communicative power to secure meetings with some of the key participants in empowered space, let alone to influence their positions. the conversion of communicative freedom to communicative power is a critical challenge if mini-publics are to achieve any influence within deliberative systems. deliberative theorists tend to underplay the difficulty of challenging existing power structures (brassett & smith 2010) and there has been little thinking to date about how mini-publics can be designed to increase their likelihood of achieving influence. as noted above, one of the key strategies for making wwviews an influential and consequential project was to maximise the credibility and perceived legitimacy of the riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 24 event with policy makers through rigorous standardisation and broad participation. the intent was to make the wwviews method above reproach and the weight of numbers compelling. unfortunately, as also noted above, deliberative quality was sacrificed in favour of this model of influence, yet it is doubtful that either standardisation or the numbers involved delivered any more influence. one of the reasons that standardisation is unlikely to help to deliver greater influence is that different countries have substantially different political systems and, as a result, the appropriate role for mini-publics differs across countries (dryzek 2011). dryzek (2011) distinguishes between four different types of state based on their orientation to social interests; that is, whether they include or exclude interests, and whether they do so actively or passively. the path to achieve influence is very different in each type of state. actively inclusive states, like denmark, work to create formal channels for public participation in decision-making, including mini-publics. there is a tradition of public deliberation and decision-makers are expected to heed the results of mini-publics. in contrast, in a pluralist (passive-inclusive) state like the usa (or australia), there are few formal opportunities for participation but all are free to advocate their interests and achieve influence. being heard above the resulting clamour is difficult. any voice, including that of a mini-public, becomes just another voice at the bargaining table; there is limited potential for influence unless this voice is loud and persists over time, which is rare for mini-publics. the pathways to influence are different again in exclusive states. wwviews did not take into account these political differences in its process design. rather, the design was modelled on processes that work well in actively inclusive denmark but may be less suited to other types of state. future attempts to convene global mini-publics would do well to avoid standardisation in favour of developing country-specific deliberative designs that are tailored to achieving the type of influence that is appropriate in each country. while there is no evidence that wwviews australia influenced the positions taken by decision-makers, there is some tentative evidence that it did contribute to a stronger discourse on deliberative democracy in australia. television, radio and print media covered the event, nationally and locally, exposing new audiences to the idea of deliberative democracy. the lord mayor of sydney, after a meeting about wwviews, went on to chair a session on citizen participation at the copenhagen mayors’ summit riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 25 during cop-15. finally, in her 2010 election campaign, the australian prime minister julia gillard announced plans for a citizens’ assembly on climate change (morton & arup 2010), which would have been the first time the australian government had convened a mini-public to directly inform policy. given the work done to inform politicians about wwviews, it is possible (although not proven) that communication about wwviews helped to make the idea of convening a mini-public sufficiently plausible for a political announcement. unfortunately, the plan was later abandoned following media and public criticism (franklin 2010), so it seems there is a long way to go before mini-publics become an accepted part of the australian political landscape. conclusion: the future of global mini-publics the outcome of our evaluation of wwviews is decidedly mixed. the event was delivered with integrity, was reasonably successful at bringing together a representative group of citizens from around the world to deliberate, and received substantial media and practitioner attention. wwviews demonstrated that it is feasible to convene a global mini-public and that citizens are capable of deliberating on complex global issues. for the australian organisers and participants, feedback on the event was almost universally positive. on the other hand, as a transient event, its contribution towards the emergence of a global deliberative system for climate change response was limited and it achieved little influence on global climate change policy. in part, this was due to the lack of attention to appropriate pathways and strategies for achieving influence in different countries. the quality of deliberation was compromised by attempts at standardisation that seem misguided in light of cultural and political differences between the participating countries. despite these negatives, we continue to believe that global mini-publics can make a contribution towards a more deliberative global governance system on climate change and other issues. future global mini-publics have the opportunity to learn from wwviews, so it is worth summarising the key lessons here. first, if a mini-public is to contribute towards a global deliberative system then the quality of deliberation is paramount. this means that events must allow sufficient time for reflection on preferences and that methods relying on voting on pre-determined responses should be avoided. participants should be given as much opportunity as possible to frame issues in their own terms, formulate their own responses and express riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 26 these in their own words. second, representing discourse diversity instead of, or in addition to, a demographic profile may be a more appropriate goal for mini-publics, particularly at a global scale. identifying the discourses that need to be included and finding suitable discourse representatives will be challenging but potentially offers a more feasible pathway to legitimacy for global mini-publics. further, through discourse representation it may be possible to find innovative ways to use special representatives to incorporate the presumed discourses of future generations, or even other species. third, where global mini-publics are made up of smaller national mini-publics, flexibility to respond to cultural and political differences is critical. mini-publics are more likely to deliver authentic deliberation and to achieve influence if they have freedom to respond to the local cultural and systemic context, even if this means the results from different countries are not directly comparable. strategic thinking about how best to achieve political influence needs to be at the heart of mini-public design. fourth, mini-publics may be more likely to achieve influence if they are long and loud, forcing empowered space to be accountable. one-off events can potentially be loud, in that they may get a lot of media attention, but the effect quickly dissipates without sustained action. processes that bring mini-publics back together for multiple events over a longer period of time have greater potential to build discursive momentum and influence empowered space. in other words, designers of mini-publics need to consider their role in building a movement for change that can accrue sufficient communicative power to force a response. finally, there are many other ways in which a global mini-public could be convened and these need to be explored. wwviews essentially mimicked the united nations system by convening discrete mini-publics at a national scale and simply aggregating national results. an alternative way to convene a global mini-public would be to involve participants from across the globe in a single process, where the views of the rich can be challenged by those of the poor and the full global implications of decisions become clear. wwviews insulated participants in each country from each other, missing an opportunity for cross-cultural deliberation. riedy and herriman deliberative mini-publics portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 27 global mini-publics are certainly not the only way to democratise systems of global governance, or even the only way to bring more deliberation into global governance. there is space for more deliberation in all elements of the global deliberative system, whether through new permanent or temporary institutions, reform of existing institutions, or the messy debates of global civil society. what is critical, if we are to develop governance systems that can effectively respond to climate change, is that we continue to experiment with diverse approaches to democratisation and learn from the successes and failures. acknowledgements the authors thank all the organisations and individuals who helped to make world wide views possible. in particular we are grateful to: the partners in the international world wide views alliance, especially the danish board of technology and the danish cultural institute; the world wide views australia sponsors (university of technology sydney, pricewaterhousecoopers, national australia bank, wwf australia and the department of sustainability and environment victoria) and other supporting individuals and organisations; the facilitators and event logistics team; and the world wide views participants themselves. the world wide views australia core project team included staff of the institute for sustainable futures at the university of technology, sydney: alison atherton, amber colhoun, jennifer croes, jade herriman, dr chris riedy, nicole thornton and professor stuart white; and independent contractors: dr kath fisher (lead facilitator) and rebecca short (media officer). we also thank two anonymous reviewers for detailed and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. reference list allison, i., et al. 2009, the copenhagen diagnosis: updating the world on the latest climate science. sydney, australia. atherton, a. & herriman, j. 2009, the world wide views on global warming australia story. the institute for sustainable futures, university of technology, sydney. backstrand, k., khan, j., kronsell, a. & lovbrand, e. 2010a, ‘environmental politics after the deliberative turn,’ in environmental politics and deliberative democracy: examining the 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modes of governance, (eds) k. backstrand, j. khan, a. kronsell & e. lovbrand. edward elgar, cheltenham, uk and northampton, ma, 67–84. microsoft word portalvol10no2barrettgeneralfinal.docx portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. so it vanished: art, tapu and shared space in contemporary aotearoa new zealand jonathan barrett, open polytechnic, new zealand in february 2012, the dowse art museum (‘the dowse’) in lower hutt, new zealand cancelled an exhibition by internationally renowned mexican artist teresa margolles on the ostensible grounds of culture offence. this article analyses the cancellation of margolles’s so it vanishes and situates it in the context of previous conflicts between indigenous beliefs and exhibitions of transgressive art. background information is firstly provided and margolles’s work is sketched and compared with other taboobreaking works of transgressive art. the māori concept of tapu is then outlined.1 a discussion follows on the incompatibility of so it vanishes with tapu, along with a review of other new zealand exhibitions that have proved inconsistent with indigenous values. conclusions are then drawn about sharing exhibition space in contemporary aotearoa newzealand. background the dowse the dowse is situated in lower hutt,2 which has traditionally been a dormitory suburb for wellington, but today is technically a city with an increasingly cosmopolitan population. in 2006, more than one fifth of residents were born outside new zealand 1 in this article, the words ‘taboo,’ ‘tabu’ and ‘tapu’ refer to polynesian beliefs. taboo, in roman font, refers to the western adoption of the concept. the distinction lies between (literal) taboo and (figurative) taboo, the first and second definitions of ‘taboo’ provided in the oxford english dictionary (see simpson & weiner 1989: 521). 2 the lower hutt council has adopted the name ‘hutt city,’ but this self-designation is not recognized by either the new zealand geographical board or central government in the local government act 2002. referencing the hutt river that reaches the sea at petone (originally pito-one), the māori name for the area is awakairangi (maclean 2012). in email correspondence (10 april 2013), ērima hēnare, inter alia chairman of te taura whiri i te reo the māori language commission, advised that te atiawa understand awakairangi as ‘[t]he river that consumes the sky.’ barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 2 (hutt city council 2007: 26). in contrast with the newcomer population, indigenous people, who are principally associated with the te atiawa iwi (tribe),3 constitute fifteen percent of residents (hutt city council 2007: 20). despite its roots in local arts and crafts (bell 2011), as a publicly funded institution the dowse promotes itself as ‘a dynamic institution which pairs an internationally recognized contemporary programme with meaningful community engagement’ (the dowse 2010).4 the dowse is also custodian of various māori taonga (treasures). of particular note, the museum houses on permanent display and is kaitiaki (guardian) of nuku tewhatewha, an important pātaka (storehouse), which was ‘constructed by the ngati-porou tribe in 1856 for wi tako ngatata, a wellington district chief’ (best 1916: 22). such elaborately carved pātaka are ‘rich in symbolism,’ particularly with regard to chiefly prestige (see neich 1996: 102–3), and may themselves carry the mana (prestige) of ‘their former owners or makers’ (te awekotuku 1996: 27). it is also noteworthy that māori art is believed to have ‘divine origins’ (mead 2003: 259). as well as permitting the museum to house such taonga, iwi perform ceremonial functions, such as blessing new public art, and have concluded a memorandum of understanding with hutt city council which provides for consultation on cultural issues.5 so it vanishes in december 2011, the dowse announced that from 25 february 2012 until 17 june 2012 it would host an exhibition by acclaimed but controversial mexican artist, teresa margolles, entitled so it vanishes, as part of the wellington-based, biennial new zealand international arts festival (the dowse 2011). securing a work by margolles, who represented mexico in the 2009 venice biennale, was undoubtedly a major coup for a small, regional art museum, such as the dowse, particularly since an attempt by 3 in this article, translations of māori words are taken from williams (1992), macalister (2005) or ryan (2008), unless indicated otherwise. the term iwi refers to people holding mana whenua (power from and over land) in a particular area, notably te atiawa in relation to awakairangi. māori denotes the general indigenous population. following metge (2010a: 60), pākehā refers to all non-māori since māori tend to ‘include all non-māori when they couple māori and pākehā together in a single phrase.’ 4 the dowse is principally funded through local rates. for the year ended 30 june 2011, hutt city museums (the dowse and the much smaller petone settlers museum) earned revenue of less than nz$500,000 but, with operating costs in excess of nz$3 million, required a rates subsidy of around nz$2.5 million (hutt city council 2011: 71). 5 the port nicholson block settlement trust was established in august 2008 to receive and manage the settlement package for taranaki whanui ki te upoko o te ika (a collective comprising members of te atiawa and other taranaki iwi whose ancestors migrated to the wellington region): see the port nicholson block (taranaki whanui ki te upoko o te ika) claims settlement act 2009. the memorandum of understanding is between hutt city council and this trust. barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 3 the auckland arts triennial to exhibit margolles’s lengua (tongue) in 2004 was unsuccessful (see burgess 2004). the planned installation comprised eight ceilingsituated machines dispensing bubbles into an empty, silent room. over the 12 weeks of the exhibition, in what might be likened to a homeopathic degree of dilution, 20 millilitres of water previously used to wash corpses would be mixed with 260 litres of bubble solution (dastgheib 2012: a3). similar exhibitions had been staged in brisbane, frankfurt, liverpool, los angeles and zurich. it is likely that margolles’s work would not have been well-known to many visitors to the dowse. however a media release explained that the exhibition employed morgue water and included a link to coulson (2004), an article that discusses the challenging nature of the artist’s work. in terms that might be interpreted as braggadocio, it was also announced that ‘just for the dowse, a series of abstract portraits of the dead, containing a similar essence of run-off water and blood, will be displayed on a billboard outside the gallery’ (the dowse 2011). the media release did not receive significant publicity.6 conversely, the newsletter distributed to friends of the museum spoke only of ‘a scene of unearthly beauty that is underscored by a sense of unease’ (stephenson 2012: 4). likewise, the widely distributed season brochure did not mention morgue water and merely described how margolles ‘delicately deals with violence and death’ (the dowse 2012). indeed, the cover for the season brochure featured a photograph of a similar installation, en el aire (in the air), which was exhibited in zurich in 2003. in the foreground, a woman contemplates the source of the bubbles; her expression appears serene, certainly not shocked or disgusted. to one side, a man’s hand reaches out to catch a falling bubble, and, in the background, another woman is laughing, it seems, with delight. since the key message of the media release was substantively different from that of the season brochure, it may be inferred that the extent to which people previously unaware of margolles’s work were forewarned of the true nature of so it vanishes depended on the type of communication they received. amanda coulson observes of margolles’s 2003 frankfurt exhibition of en el aire: in the museum’s soaring hall children play under bubbles … running, laughing, catching, they are fascinated by the glistening, delicate forms that float down from the ceiling and break up on their skin. a common motif in art history, the bubble has long been used as a memento mori, a reminder 6 it appears that only scoop media, a news aggregator; the manawatu standard, a provincial newspaper; and the specialist magazine, art news new zealand, republished the media release. barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 4 of the transitory nature of life. the children’s parents, meanwhile, studiously read the captions. suddenly, with a look of disgust, they come and steer their offspring away. the moment of naive pleasure turns into one of knowing repulsion: they have learned that the water comes from the mexico city morgue, used to wash corpses before an autopsy. it’s unimportant that the water is disinfected; the stigma of death turns the beautiful into the horrific. (2004) commenting on a similar installation in brisbane, greg hooper says entering ‘the room is to breathe in tiny little bits of the dead, molecules from the skin, watery homeopathic vibrations’ (2007: 46), an experience that many visitors responded to with ‘a cringing “yuck”’ (sorensen 2007). the sense of unease and queasiness that parents might experience on witnessing their children’s exposure to morgue water, notwithstanding the infinitesimal traces in the bubbles, is radically different from the reaction of māori. for them, such contact would be a breach of tapu, which is discussed below, and would genuinely imperil gallery-goers. when sam jackson, a te atiawa kaumātua (elder), was invited as a matter of normal protocol to bless this important exhibition, he declined. jackson and the port nicholson block settlement trust, which acts as the local iwi authority, sought to stop the exhibition on the grounds that it would be ‘culturally unsafe’ (dastgheib 2012: a3). in the face of this opposition, cam mccracken, director of the dowse, announced the ‘difficult’ but ‘important’ decision to cancel the exhibition despite remaining ‘utterly committed to the relevance and importance of [margolles’s] work’ (2012). margolles’s work before considering why so it vanishes would have been offensive to māori, margolles’s oeuvre is outlined. coulson (2004) observes of the artist’s first large-scale european solo exhibition: despite the show’s title, ‘muerte sin fin’ (endless death), death itself is not directly visually displayed; it is only in the viewer’s psyche that the silent, minimal, often quite beautiful work is transformed into something appalling. in ‘aire’ (air, 2003) the viewer simply moves through a humid room; in ‘llorado’ (wept, 2004) water drips from the ceiling. in the former, it is the same disinfected morgue water moistening the room; in the latter, it is plain tap-water. we are appalled at the idea that we have absorbed the tincture of death. so it vanishes would have constituted a restrained piece relative to other examples of margolles’s work but may be situated in the western tradition of taboo-breaking art. rachel spence (2009) describes how margolles’s venice biennale exhibition what else could we talk about? used fabrics soaked with blood from mexican drug war executions mopped up by volunteers and hung in the elegant salons of a venetian barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 5 palazzo. and michael nungesser outlines in the following terms some of her more controversial works: ‘lengua’ (2000) consists of a killed youthful heroin addict’s pierced tongue, which margolla (sic) conserved and put on show. for the artistic use of this genuine body part, margolles gave the bereaved family some money with which to bury the rest of the body. then—as later in berlin— margolles used human fat siphoned off in the anatomy institute in mexico city, from which she had smuggled it. she smeared it onto public buildings in cuba to ‘restore’ them (‘ciudad en espera,’ havana 2000). (2007) nungesser concludes that the artist ‘touches taboos with her carefully dosed artistic transformations, spectacular and full of pathos. her work with corpses handed over for autopsies draws attention to widespread anonymity and poverty, which does not allow bodies to be buried with dignity’ (2007). in her review of margolles’s oeuvre, rachel scott bray observes that ‘the dead restlessly mingle, and there is no culturally convincing farewell to them and no alibi for us; there is no excuse for us not to pay attention’ (2011: 946). treatment of dead bodies varies across cultures, but john finnis is plausible when he argues that all cultures manifest valuing the human body through, inter alia, ‘respectful disposal of the dead’ (1980: 83). margolles’s point is that the rites and associated prohibitions of respectful disposal of the dead have been lost in the context of the slaughter that has beset certain parts of mexico in its drug wars (see grillo 2011). for many mexican artists, such re-humanization of the countless victims of violence has, as damien cave observes, become an ‘obsession: visualizing victimhood or, more broadly, turning cold, mind-numbing data back into real people’ (2012: a6). margolles does, however, express a singular and unorthodox way of respecting corpses. smearing smuggled human fat on buildings, for instance, seems incompatible with any traditional manifestations of valuing the dead human body, despite her intention of restoring dignity to corpses. indeed, for rubén gallo, her ‘work can be read as an effort to draw attention to the breakdown of the taboo against corpses in mexican society and to its dehumanizing effect’ (2006: 126). once presented with her arguments and motivations, a cosmopolitan gallery goer might well appreciate margolles’s intentions, albeit with vestigial discomfort. and shock is indubitably both intended and expected. nevertheless, her political aim is to confront apparent indifference to quotidian human slaughter. her art may engender distaste or disquiet, and it may break taboos, although once we understand her intention is to re-humanize those to whom dignity has been denied in barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 6 both life and death, it may prompt political action. indeed, ‘her métier has been, simply put, the social and political economy of death (viveros-fauné 2012: 131). spence (2009) concludes ‘passionate and shocking yet tightly focused this is political art at its best.’ margolles is not alone in using corpses for artistic purposes and, indeed, may be among the most respectful. gunther von hagens’s körperwelten (body worlds) uses human bodies in a taboo-breaking ways (see, generally, institute for plastination 2006–2012). however, according to konstanze kutzbach, von hagens’s purpose is not to shock but to empower people based on the rationale that his plasticisation and exhibition of corpses represents an ‘important source of power for laypersons, enabling them to better make their own decisions about medical matters’ (2007: 287). the artist cannot, however, be unaware of the likelihood of his art actually shocking or being construed as prurient, whatever his stated motives. rick gibson’s work human earrings is an apparent example of human material used in art, without a specific purpose beyond the technical (see gibson 2011), but with an obvious shocking effect. this work incorporated earrings made from freeze-dried human foetuses. both gibson and peter sylverie, proprietor of the london gallery where the work was exhibited, were successfully prosecuted for outraging public decency (lewis 2002), thereby indicating that not all taboos—albeit those formalized as law—may be broken with impunity. western art, particularly in the twentieth century, has commonly attacked convention and prevailing moral norms (see, generally, hughes 1991). breaking taboos through artistic expression can be seen as a way of rebelling against the current structures and order of society so as to re-establish identities and the regulation of aesthetics (holden 2001: 21). iconoclastic art, such as marcel duchamp’s fountain (a urinal as readymade sculpture) may, of course, invoke violent reaction or, indeed, unexpected praise (de duve, polan & rajchman 2005: 110) but is not, in the western view, inherently dangerous to the self. indeed, over time, the shock of such works is neutralized and they become accepted into the canon of western art. thus, as jürgen habermas observes, ‘a modern work becomes a classic because it has once been authentically modern’ (1998: 6) and, in robert hughes’s words, in the field of transgressive art, ‘[n]othing remains unacceptable’ (1991: 268). indeed, little seems to shock contemporary new zealand gallery goers (burgess 2004). however, while taboo-breaking art may be offensive to barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 7 certain members of the community, notably conservative christians (spcs 1999), for māori, breach of tapu is dangerous, indeed, potentially fatal. tapu joan metge observes that tapu is one of the words that ‘have important meanings in the māori conceptual system which are largely, if not wholly overlooked in the context of new zealand english’ (2010a: 62). indeed, the word tapu is ‘one of the most widely known though only partly understood by pakeha’ (metge 2010b: 58). a full understanding of what tapu means to māori is, then, elusive for pākehā. thus michael shirres observes that ‘the logic behind a word which can be applied to many disparate and apparently contradictory things continues to puzzle the scholars’ (1982: 29), and anne salmond (1978: 7) concedes that ‘maori speakers do not appear to find these associations difficult’ but ‘their logic has eluded scholarly analysis.’ despite these problems, the concept of taboo ‘has often been a subject of anthropological inquiry since captain cook first used the word in his account of the polynesians’ (evanspritchard 1967: 12). according to franz steiner, taboo is concerned (1) with all the social mechanisms of obedience which have ritual significance; (2) with specific and restrictive behaviour in dangerous situations. one might say that taboo deals with the sociology of danger itself, for it is also concerned (3) with the protection of individuals who are in danger, and (4) with the protection of society from those endangered – and therefore dangerous persons. (1967: 20–21) for margaret mead, the notion of tabu fundamentally relates to ‘a prohibition whose infringement results in an automatic penalty’ (1937: 502) but, illustrating its polysemy, salmond observes that tapu ‘can be applied equally to high descent, ritual and sacred lore, and to death, darkness, menstrual blood and filth’ (1978: 7). despite this potential uncertainty of meaning—for pākehā, at least—jean smith argues that tapu is ‘a single, not confused but ambivalent concept embracing both the notions of ‘pure’ and ‘impure’’ (1975: 93). metge distils anthropological observations on tapu as follows: tapu is a condition or state of being affecting people, places, things and actions that results from association with the spiritual realm, especially the in-dwelling of mana [prestige, authority]; involves being set apart from ordinary life under ritual restriction; is dangerous unless treated respectfully according to prescribe rules; and exists in a complementary relationship with the state of noa, which provides relief and freedom from restrictions of tapu. (2010a: 65) tapu and noa, which salmond identifies as ‘unrestricted, profane’ (1978: 15), ‘together form an exhaustive classification: what is not tapu is noa and vice versa’ (metge 2010b: 59). furthermore, ‘everything designated as tapu must be either avoided or handled barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 8 with care according to prescribed rules. breach of these rules is believed to result in sickness, trouble or even death, through the action of an offended god or spirit or as an automatic reflex’ (metge 2010b: 59). cleve barlow confirms that people ‘who are careless in these matters then are likely to suffer some kind of affliction’ and should therefore ‘ensure against possible harm’ (1991: 129). breach of tapu may lead to human as well as divine sanctions; thus raymond firth observes that offence against tapu could lead to the offender being stripped ‘of all his goods’ and even being ‘speared in the arm or leg into the bargain’ (1959: 154). barlow identifies different categories of tapu and describes tapu māheuheu as a type of personal tapu to do with personal hygiene: sweat, bodily hair, scales, mucus, and other bodily fluids and excretions … the personal clothing of deceased persons must be washed and treated with respect so that the living are not adversely affected by the tapu māheuheu of the individual. if people are careless in these matters they are likely to suffer some kind of affliction. (1991: 129) this manifestation of tapu is of critical significant in relation to dead bodies, which must be treated in particular ways (smith 1975: 86). hēnare, in an email observes that, for māori, ‘all things are normal as is life itself except the sensibilities around death.’ dying ‘escalates the level of tapu to maximum levels’ (mead 2003: 49). practical reasons may determine the extent to which ‘controls are practiced and how observance of the traditional practice might be amended’ but most māori would not, say, take cooked food (noa) into a hospital room where a deceased person lies (tapu) (jansen & jansen 2013: 48). furthermore, as metge observes on leaving the cemetery, most mourners ritually cleanse themselves by washing their hands with water or bread provided in basins for the purpose. back at the marae [meeting house], the elders lift the tapu from the place where the dead lay by reciting karakia [incantations] and consuming a token amount of food or liquor on the spot. (2010b: 263) these protocols and rituals may have arisen from an ancient desire to prevent enemies from gaining psychological advantage by usurping the body parts of kin (best 1902; best 1926) but, for māori, tapu, which ‘comes from the gods, and embraces all the powers and influences associated with them’ (barlow 1991: 129), remains a critical concern. here are some opinions of māori experts on tapu in relation to so it vanishes reported in wellington’s dominion post (see dastgheib 2012: a3): ‘it is inviting death in the door, more or less. i think about our children, and kids love bubbles. it would be inviting them into a situation that to children would be unsafe’ (liz mellish, inter alia, barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 9 natural resources adviser); ‘[p]eople would have inadvertently placed themselves in danger and maori would have treated the people as being contaminated … maori don’t muck around with issues of tapu’ (peter adds, head of the school of māori studies, victoria university of wellington). consequently, margolles’s (mis)use of dead bodies, even though no more than a tincture of morgue water was involved and used with a purpose of reasserting the dignity of the dead, was not simply offensive, it was dangerous for māori. following bruno latour, beliefs, such as tapu, should be ‘given epistemic dignity if not intellectual authority’ (smith 2012: 26). indeed, margolles’s reaction to the cancellation of her exhibition was ‘one of sympathy, empathy and understanding’ (dastgheib 2012: a3). why should it not be? the fundamental purpose of her art lies in revitalising lost taboos about death (gallo 2006), which are, at core, concerned with group safety and human dignity. it seems unthinkable that she might seek to assert such a peculiarly western idea as individual freedom of expression, without concern for consequences, in the face of māori culture that persists in respecting the dead in occasionally obstinate and inconvenient ways. cultural clashes and accommodations iwi opposition to the margolles exhibition might indicate a propensity on the part of indigenous people for insularity and a desire to preserve their culture in aspic. such opposition might be generalized as an antagonism between modernity and tradition but there is ample evidence to the contrary. māori television, for example, is the only free to air channel in new zealand that provides access to cosmopolitan, foreign language films, and a heterogeneous contemporary māori arts scene is well established (see, for example, ihimaera 1996). furthermore, as roger neich (2001) observes, historically māori artistic representation of christian imagery was adjudged to be unacceptably transgressive by europeans. nevertheless, the cancellation of so it vanishes is not the first instance of a planned art exhibition being cancelled in new zealand apparently in deference to māori sensibilities. treasures and pastiches in 1998, the waikato museum of art and history cancelled dick frizzell’s exhibition, portrait of a serious artiste. frizzell’s works, which were to be displayed alongside tainui—the journey, a collection taonga of the local tainui iwi, included the four barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 10 square shopkeeper (a new zealand commercial icon) with a māori moko (facial tattoo) and tiki (charm) reinvented in european styles. the exhibition was reportedly halted because waea mauriohoho, a tainui kaumātua, ‘did not want it “tampering with the spiritual climate” surrounding tainui treasures’ (“spiritual” tampering not artist’s intention 1998). for pākehā, it is, of course, a matter of conjecture whether the juxtaposition of pop-art pastiches of māori icons against original taonga is tapu. we might speculate whether opposition was grounded in a desire to protect the integrity of the cultural treasures—an idea, it is submitted, wholly compatible with western sensibilities and, arguably, moral rights under copyright law—or to protect museum goers from supernatural harm—an idea incompatible with western sensibilities. no article in a code of restrictions exists that positively provides that treasure and pastiche must not be juxtaposed: that is a matter for kaumātua to decide and for outsiders to respect, without being able to enter into the closed cultural discourse. nevertheless, an egregious lack of cultural sensitivity is indicated by expecting tainui to, on the one hand, allow public access to their taonga and, on the other hand, have those treasures parodied under the same museum roof. indeed, according to mauriohoho, frizzell chose to withdraw his exhibition after the spiritual significance of the tainui taonga was explained to him (te anga 1998). treasures and bodies in addition to tapu concerns, the display of human bodies as specimens, objets d’art or curios has a particular resonance for māori, since many of their ancestors have been displayed, in whole or part, as ‘artefacts’ in museums around the western world (mccarthy 2007). consequently, museum exhibitions involving dead bodies present the prospect of cultural clashes but also indicate how accommodation can be reached. the auckland war museum tamaki paenga hira, for example, includes an egyptian mummy in its collection. however, local iwi, ngati whatua, do not object to display of the mummified body because, according to danny tumahai, a ngati whatua kaumātua and chairman of taumata-a-iwi, an indigenous advisory board to the museum, ‘the right protocols and decisions were put in place’ (mccarthy 2007). in 2006, when the museum of new zealand te papa tongawera (‘te papa’) planned to display the mummified body of keku, a young woman who died some 700 bce in pharaonic egypt, as centre piece of its exhibition egypt: beyond the tomb, kaumātua of barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 11 the ngāi tahu iwi raised concerns (ihaka & stokes 2006). at the time of the egyptian exhibition, te papa was also hosting mō tātou: ngāi tahu whānui, a two-year showcase of ngāi tahu taonga. a display of tūpāpaku (corpses), even if mummified and ancient, would be considered, at first face, tapu. in the event, the exhibition went ahead, with keku being displayed in a separate room ‘with signage warning those offended by the display of human remains not to enter’ (ihaka & stokes 2006). it is understood that various precautions were undertaken to ensure the safety of the exhibition, notably ablution facilities for visitors, and that due respect was shown to her body. the protocols followed ensured that keku was treated with the dignity due to a dead person, not simply an as exhibit, and risks for museum goers were minimised. seddon bennington, te papa’s then chief executive, countered accusations of hypocrisy in displaying keku, while seeking repatriation of māori human remains from overseas museums, in the following terms: the consistency of these two positions lies in our adherence to respecting the culture of origin of the human remains. egyptian authorities, whom we have consulted extensively, feel that we are honouring their ancestors by their preservation and display, with reverence, in a public museum. maori do not want their human remains to be displayed and we would always honour that wish. we have carefully considered how keku can be displayed with appropriate dignity and have provided visitors with a conscious choice as to whether they view her. (2006: 4) and so it seems, if appropriate processes are negotiated, dignity respected and risks minimized, western expectations that, under certain circumstances, dead bodies may be exhibited and tapu are potentially reconcilable. indeed, anna neil concludes that ‘te papa’s sustained commitment to biculturalism, demonstrated in careful consultation with iwi about all matters pertaining to maori taonga, and in the effort to maintain maori representation internally constitutes a real effort at partnership and a genuine act of decolonisation’ (2004: 182). korurangi: new maori art prefiguring the so it vanishes dispute, in 1996 the auckland art gallery toi o tamaki hosted the exhibition korurangi: new maori art. the works displayed were not traditional, indeed, artist george hubbard characterized himself and his fellow korurangi exhibiters as ‘outcasts and misfits,’ ‘detribalised and dysfunctional,’ with broken whakapapa (genealogy) (cited by brunt 2004: 239). this is a significant assertion since, as hirini moko mead advises, pūmanawa (creative talent) in the traditional view ‘comes to the individual through the parents and down through one’s barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 12 ancestry … whakapapa determines the distributions of talents’ (2003: 254–55). certainly tensions between traditional and modern māori artists were evident at the time of korurangi (mead 1993: 4); nevertheless, the gallery sought to incorporate certain traditional protocols into this exhibition of contemporary indigenous art. but it did so unsuccessfully. in a reflective essay, alexa johnston, the gallery’s chief curator at that time, describes ‘a deeply distressing cultural faux pas and the cause of great tension for those who attended’ when, in a basic failure to honour manaakitanga (hospitality), food for sharing was not provided after a blessing of the exhibition (1996: 9). however, far more significant than a ‘cultural faux pas,’ in an egregious breach of tapu, an exhibition space adjacent to korurangi was planned to host julia morison’s ten “monochromes” (also referred to as 1,monochromes), an alchemy-inspired project that included blood and excrement as its basest elements. morison agreed to removal of the offending items ‘but was distressed and angered by the perceived downgrading of her work. she asked that 1,monochromes not be available for viewing until it had its own separate viewing a week later’ (johnston 1996: 9). parallel with morison’s exhibit breaching of tapu, diane prince’s installation for korurangi, flagging the future, included a prostrate new zealand flag on which viewers were invited to step. this element of her work was considered illegal and both the gallery and prince were threatened with prosecution under the flags, emblems, and names protection act 1981. whether or not prosecution was likely to lead to conviction, given new zealand’s robust freedom of expression jurisprudence, ‘after considerable consultation,’ the flag was removed, an act which led to accusations of ‘cowardly censorship by the gallery’ (johnston 1996: 9). johnston concludes that the crises ‘prompted an institutional shift in attitude and ways of doing things’ (1996: 11). conal mccarthy cautions that ‘one size does not fit all—solutions to problems are specific to local conditions and it is difficult to generalise and apply these to other situations’ (2011: 246); nevertheless the lessons of korurangi were both relevant to so it vanishes and well-known in curatorial circles, but they seem to have gone unheeded.7 local art commentator mark amery concludes ‘[g]iven its disturbance of maori 7 has the dowse deliberately courted controversy? in august 2012, the museum hosted the world premiere of sophia al-maria’s cinderazahd: for your eyes only, a video depicting women without hijabs or veils preparing for a wedding. compliance with the artist’s wish that men should not be allowed to view the video prompted ‘outrage from locals’ and complaints to the human rights commission (hunt 2012: a5). barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 13 tikanga [custom] and that the dowse is guardian of this pataka, [cancellation] was the only course of action’ but adds ‘[t]hat processes didn’t see this come to a head earlier is regrettable’ (2012: 11). mccracken (2012) says that the dowse had ‘been in close consultation’ with te atiawa ‘in the months leading up to the opening’ of the exhibition. however, in the light of the korurangi precedent, the apparent assumption on the part of the dowse that a kaumātua might routinely bless an exhibition that could endanger people’s health and lives was, in the kindest interpretation, naïve; but it also acted to allow iwi intransigence to be implied. reflecting on korurangi, johnston says ‘another appropriate move would have been to discuss the issues with the kaumatua and ask them directly to make the decision’ (1996: 9). but this would effectively make the kaumātua a censor—an unenviable and unnecessary role if protocols are in place that incorporate māori beliefs. un-sharable spaces contrasting māori approaches to death with the mexican josé guadalupe posada’s satirical calavera (skull) cartoons, arts commentator hamish keith observed that with the cancellation of so it vanishes ‘a chance seems to have been lost to explore that other [mexican] view of death’ (2012: 43). an exercise in comparative anthropology might, indeed, be interesting but the extent to which margolles’s work represents a typical mexican approach to corpses is far from obvious. keith further argues, ‘[i]f art museums are not places to safely explore that, then it would be hard to think where else might be’ (2012: 43). however, as amery observes, taonga, such as the sacred pātaka, do not belong in a contemporary arts space, consequently the expectation that public exhibition spaces should play ‘multiple cultural roles can place limits on having valuable safe spaces that allow work by artists such as margolles to challenge our thinking’ (2012: 11). conversely, galleries may be inappropriate places to exhibit the work of certain contemporary māori artists. thus, supporting his translation of tapu, john macalister cites an interview from city voice: ‘maori artists consider their art tapu and do want to have food or drink consumed nearby, or displayed near work for sale’ (2005: 126). it is a matter of counterfactual speculation whether or not so it vanishes would have been cancelled had it not been for the proximity of the sacred pātaka. frizzell’s portrait of a serious artiste was cancelled in hamilton but exhibited at the wellington city barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 14 gallery (swain 1997). moreover, his playful (but affectionate) adoptions of māori imagery are widely available in new zealand: for example, a sequence portraying a cartoon ‘mickey mouse’ changing in stages to a ‘maori tiki’ is a bestselling print (mickey to tiki by dick frizzell mens tee 2008).8 mummified bodies have been exhibited in leading museums and transgressive artworks can be found in new zealand’s regional art galleries, such as the govett-brewster contemporary art museum in provincial new plymouth. it seems unlikely, then, that an exhibition of margolles’s work in a private wellington art gallery would have attracted iwi action, particularly as pākehā are believed to be immune to the risks of breaching tapu (mead 2003: 49). mellish noted that ‘iwi would have been unhappy at the installation being shown in any gallery, but there was greater concern because of possible contamination of the pataka’ (cited dastgheib 2012: a3, emphasis added). while māori and pākehā may generally share public spaces with a degree of harmony, some places are not suitable for sharing at all times. consequently, institutions, such as the dowse, face considerable difficulties in meeting the occasionally conflicting demand for cosmopolitan exhibitions and the duty to maintain the integrity of indigenous treasures. as jim and mary barr observe what has complicated the situation for the dowse is the question of its identity. originally called the dowse art gallery in the 1970s, it veered into the territory of community museum in the 1980s expanding its commitment to local taonga by taking in nuku tewhatewha. now it is struggling to redevelop its role as a contemporary art museum. all these different identities and expectations make for contradictions as well as conflicts. (2012) indeed, the identifier ‘art museum’—optatively both, yet, in fact, neither quite museum nor gallery—indicates the problem. the art gallery as a haven of free expression that greatly lies beyond public censure and state censorship holds a special place in the modern imagination. as stuart culver argues, ‘anything is art if it is found in an art gallery, and an art gallery is wherever art lovers gather to respond aesthetically to objects’ (1994: 151). in contrast, the multi-functional ‘art museum’ is not a space that taboo-breaking art might easily share with another culture’s treasures or challenge its beliefs. 8 since new zealand copyright law does not protect pastiche, or, indeed, traditional indigenous artwork, we might wonder whether the artist is at greater risk of the disney corporation asserting its intellectual property rights than māori seeking to protect their taonga. barrett so it vanished portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 15 conclusion this article has sketched the cancellation of so it vanishes and indicated the difficulties of juxtaposing transgressive art and indigenous treasures, although it appears that māori concerns principally related to the risk to people, not to things. if margolles’s artistic aim with so it vanishes was to revitalize attenuated taboos about corpses, then, ironically, it was found that tapu remains potent in aotearoa new zealand. the response to the cancellation of the exhibition has generally been muted, perhaps because it happened at the periphery of the noisy and busy international arts festival. nevertheless, those interested in contemporary art were denied the rare opportunity to engage with the compelling but challenging work of an important artist. but it would be wrong to characterize the cancellation as a victory for indigenous over cosmopolitan values. the establishment of protocols for bi-cultural involvement by major museums and galleries has permitted solutions to ostensibly intractable problems to be 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(1997, march 8th), ‘frizzell month shows us work by ‘a serious artiste,’’ the dominion: 24. te anga, n. 1998, ‘exhibition wasn’t banned: kaumatua,’ waikato times, 10 february: 1. te awekotuku, n. 1996, ‘maori: people and culture,’ in (ed.) d. starzecka, maori: art and culture. david bateman, auckland: 26–49. the dowse art museum. 2010. ‘our history,’ the dowse art museum. online, available: http://www.dowse.org.nz/en/visit/visiting-the-dowse/history-and-culture/ (accessed 1 march 2012). the dowse art museum. 2011, ‘teresa margolles’ delicate dealings with death at the dowse,’ 12 december (media release). _____ 2012, ‘the dowse art museum season 1,’ (brochure). viveros-fauné, c. 2012, ‘the new realism,’ art in america, vol. 100: 126–32. williams, h. w. 1992, a dictionary of the maori language, 7th ed. gp publications, wellington. whitegalley2013finalpa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. australians abroad special issue, guest edited by juliana de nooy. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. time travel: australian tourists and britain’s past richard white, university of sydney tourism is often under-rated as a causal factor in the sweep of history. in postcolonial histories of developing nations inbound tourism is acknowledged as a key dynamic— another form of imperialism—and the grand tour is recognised as transforming english culture in the eighteenth century. but in other histories, despite the growing body of work by historians of tourism, neither inbound nor outbound tourism is normally considered as a force for change, perhaps because many historians share the disdain for the figure of the tourist that is so embedded in the history of travel (buzard 1993). yet in australia, for example, the impact of outward bound tourism has arguably been one of the decisive factors in transformations in australian culture through the twentieth century. the omission might be understandable in introspective nationalist histories but even with the transnational turn, tourism is often relegated to the margins. australians are among the world’s most travelled peoples, despite the fact that historically it has been harder to travel the world from australia than just about anywhere else, particularly when europe was the primary destination as it was until the 1970s. there has been an enormous investment in overseas travel—an economic, cultural and emotional investment—and the figure of the australian abroad has long had a resonance in australian culture. the impact of overseas travel appears in all sorts of unexpected places. it plays a large part in shaping and maintaining bourdieu-esque notions of distinction, taste and sophistication: the capacity and desire to travel have long depended on class identities and the travel experience is still a marker of social status. national identity can be forged in stories about innocent australians abroad white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 2 (white, r. 2001; sobocinska 2011). transformations in the food we eat have come less from migration than from international tourism, which has introduced different food experiences and associated them with sophisticated taste (symons 1982). and in foreign policy, it is arguable that the humble tourist preceded the professional diplomat in reviewing notions of australia’s britishness (trinca 2009; 2010) and engaging with asia (sobocinska 2010a; 2010b). together such examples show both that travel complicates any simple teleologies from britishness to australianness and that australians abroad—travellers, tourists, even businessmen in their face to face meetings—are the makers of history. with the conviction that the experiences of ordinary travellers can tell us much about cultural assumptions, this article examines the relationship australians had to britain, looking through the prism of their understanding of the past. it argues that the australian tourist’s response to britain’s past was often deeply emotional, but that it was more the product of personal nostalgia and a broader sense of a generic past than an expression of empire loyalty. this response seemed to cross age, gender and political divisions and persisted over time. the focus is on the ordinary run of australians, rather than expatriates or intellectuals, visiting europe between about 1900 and the 1970s (pesman et al. 1996b).1 they produced a range of travel accounts, from published works to diaries and letters. there are differences between published travel writing and tourist diaries, but they are fewer than might be expected. australia’s most popular travel writers tended to reject the tourist-traveller distinctions that usually infect published travel accounts (holland & huggan 1998), claiming to be more ‘tourist’ than ‘traveller’ (white, r. 1997, 2009, 2012). at the beginning of the twentieth century, australia’s best-known travel writer was nathan spielvogel (1874–1956), a country schoolteacher who spent his savings of £120 on a trip to europe. his gumsucker on the tramp of 1905 had sales comparable per capita to mark twain’s innocents abroad (pesman et al. 1996a: 69). spielvogel represented what might be called a bulletin school of travel writing, sharing the radicalism and strident nationalism of the influential weekly, which took him up. other significant figures were j. h. m. abbott (1874–1953), another bulletin writer, who 1 expatriate intellectuals have already been well-served by, among others, stephen alomes (1999) and ian britain (1997), as have been earlier tourists (hassam 2000). white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 3 published an outlander in england: being some impressions of an australian abroad in london in 1905, and randolph bedford (1868–1941), whose neatly titled explorations in civilization appeared as bulletin articles in 1901–1904 and in book form in 1914. these writers played up their australianness, asserting their difference from britons with an insistent though not uncritical nationalism. they were middleclass liberals, staunchly democratic and nativist, supporters of so-called ‘colonial socialism.’ they saw the novel social arrangements of the new world as superior to those of the old, which they identified with rigid class hierarchies, poverty and stultifying tradition. britain was history: when spielvogel’s ship was in the bay of biscay, he felt the wind ‘blowing me a welcome from england and the past’ (spielvogel 1907: 5). they admired the enormity of the past they found in britain, but also saw it as a burden. and so when it came to an understanding of the relevance of the past, they could play on the relationship between the old and new world in ways that challenged the assumption that old europe was necessarily superior. abbott inverted it altogether. he began his book with the conceit that to an australian, australia is the old world and england the new. sailing out of sydney he felt his own country was the ‘old land.’ and at sixteen knots an hour you were making your way to another that was older than your own by thousands of years, and yet to yourself was new and unexplored and pregnant with possibilities of undiscovered and inexperienced things … the country where any man is born is the old land to him, whether it have a history of two thousand or of fifty years. if its only ruins are broken-down fences, or the rotting corner posts of stockyards erected a generation ago, they must be to him the milestones of such civilisation as he knows of. (abbott 1905: 9–11) the importance of ruins will be a continuing thread, as we will see. for now we should note that this bulletin strand of assertively australian travel sat alongside the many other australian travellers who thought of themselves as british and shared the assumption of australia’s inferiority. however the gulf between the radical nationalist and the conventional colonial should not be over-stated. most travellers—nationalist or imperialist—were ready to balance admiration with criticism, reflecting both positively and negatively back on australia. australians of all political stripes criticised english food, for example (white & oldmeadow 2009), while most were in awe of the history.2 in this reverence for britain’s past, we might see something of what one group of historians has categorised as a shared ‘british race patriotism’ (meaney 2001; ward 2 this is in complete contrast to britons in australia, who generally ignored the past (white, r. 2013). white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 4 2001: 2; curran 2004: 18). if we probe this more deeply however, there emerges, among these tourists and travellers, a more complex picture in which emotion and social memory are entwined and in which overt patriotisms have very little place. connecting to the past for much of australia’s history—well into the second half of the twentieth century i would argue and with resonances that linger in the tourism industry even today— australians have crudely but conveniently categorised the world into three. the world’s peoples were british, foreign or native (white, r. 1987a). the british world, including the united states and the british dominions, was english-speaking, sensible and civilised. continental europe was civilised, containing world powers that competed with the might of britain, with cultures that even outshone britain in music and art, but the people were unpredictable, their politics unreliable, their religion impossible. and then there was the rest of the world, the object of europe’s imperial reach, uncivilised or semi-civilised peoples who could only benefit from the gift of british civilisation or modernisation. this tripartite division of the world corresponded roughly to three ways of understanding the past. the british past was ennobling, a living past that was the heritage of english-speaking people around the world, a pattern of steady progress in the whig tradition. the european past was romantic, bloody, inexplicable: think of all the complex associations of that term ‘continental’ —sophistication, cosmopolitanism, a degree of sexual licence (barr 2009). it lent itself more to a regency romance bodice ripper, a perspective that perhaps dates to the grand tour for men and to byron for women. the ‘native’ past was traditional and unchanging, with such a weight of history that inertia was the normal condition requiring the galvanisation of a european presence to be jolted into movement.3 obviously these are very crude categories and this perspective on the world is not limited to australia, but the pasts that australians explored beyond australia do seem, at least for much of australia’s white history, to have fitted this pattern.4 3 these have interesting parallels, though are not entirely consistent, with hayden white’s ‘emplotments’ of romance, comedy, tragedy and satire (1973). nietzsche’s trio of monumental, antiquarian and critical histories could be manifested in each historical setting (1980). 4 and it is still visible: see, for example, the fairfax press japan travel supplement, ‘japan: land of beauty, mystery and living tradition,’ sydney morning herald (27 january 2011: 4, 6, 12, 14–15, 16, 20). white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 5 needless to say, australians readily identified with the british past, as something they could connect themselves to. it was something they imagined sharing or even owning. jessie sisson, in a travel guide written for the bank of new south wales in time for the coronation of 1953, was the most bluntly proprietorial: ‘the history of the country … is magnificent and lends a romance and enchantment that can be felt. and above all, it is ours. it is our heritage. from some corner of this little land, we, or our forebears, came. its history and its beauty are ours and in its present and in its future we are concerned’ (1953: 1). this sense of belonging and connectedness to britain’s past often had a personal dimension, reflecting a direct family tie still part of family memory. for one enthusiastic family historian researching ‘my line of people’ in penzance in 1960: ‘it seems a little strange and unreal for me to be walking in the roads and streets where my maddern forebears walked 400 years ago, and almost certainly for hundreds of years earlier than that.’ he visited the parish church, which we had not visited for 104 years. that is a celticism, if you like. i’m afraid i did not listen very carefully to the sermon, but rather dreamed about my people baptized, married and buried at the church for centuries. i suppose my grandfather, old solomon maddern, went to church here on his last sunday in … cornwall, 104 years ago, and we are the first members of his family to return here.’ (1960: 22–23, 26) elite travellers with family vaults to visit naturally felt a particularly personal connection. in worcester, lady street thought the street monument ‘very fine and quite worthy of the family’ (1929: 4 september). washington soul, of the pharmaceutical dynasty, visited ‘abney park cemetry [sic]—i found the old grave at once—it is an immense place—the stone is not in very good order, gave dunkley instructions to get it right and add father’s and mother’s names’ (1899: 6 june). others were happy enough simply ‘to see the graves of our ancestors’ and take ‘snap-shots of a couple of headstones’ (millear 1902: 135). more often the connections to the past were less direct and indeed it is surprising how little active family history there was until late in the twentieth century. nevertheless many insisted that what they saw had to do with ‘memory,’ even though most had never visited britain before. in 1913 the new zealand politician j. r. sinclair commented that ‘the colonist instinctively seeks things that have age, around which memories cling’ (sinclair 1913: 10). london promised ‘the marvellous fascination of this old place of so many memories’ (sommerlad 1939: 20 july). in edinburgh ‘memories of burns and scott, knox and a dozen other well known names, meet one at every corner’ (james, white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 6 florence 1928: 12 august). the nature of this memory needs unpicking. in one sense it is the prosthetic social memory derived from the anglo-centric culture they grew up with, especially through reading and lessons learnt at school and stories told at home. but its real nostalgic power came from the way the nebulous social memory of british history could be confused and entwined with quite specific personal memories of schooldays and childhood reading. allan brown, an australian soldier training at wareham in 1916, was taken with nearby corfe castle, ‘a very ancient castle which we read about in the history books at school … the castle the roman soldiers could never take … i visited this place a few times, as i fell in love with the old fashioned little village’ (brown 1916–17: 78–79; white, r. 1987b). there is a sense of a soldier’s homesickness here, that takes us back to the original meaning of nostalgia: the little village represents less a social memory of the old country than a personal memory of schoolbooks buried somewhere in an australian childhood. thus tourists linked their experience of britain’s past with their own memories of younger days and youthful yearnings back in australia. allison howorth was thrilled by ‘all the historical memories of our school-days’ (1937: 52). in 1928, at lanrick mead, the ‘muster-place’ of the lady of the lake, mabel dowding exclaimed ‘how that old school book lived again today!’ (1928: 28 may) and on another trip, 28 years later, found herself again driving ‘thro’ history book country’ (1956: 16 july). for stuart gore, plymouth hoe was ‘a magical name to australians, nurtured in school-days on the sea-faring tradition of their mother country’ (1958: 79). in the tower of london in 1909, lindon brown ‘could hardly realise that i was walking through places associated with the earliest times of england, and that to me previously had only existed in “little arthur’s history” or “magnall’s questions”’ (1910: 53). even julien nixon, who had not paid much attention to his schoolbooks, had some idea of what was in them: ‘scotland and england are chock full of old castles—and a number of them must be refer’d to in our school histories’ (1928: 29 february). being there brought to life the english history that dominated the australian curriculum until the 1960s, but more importantly the emotional attachment to britain’s past acquired a significant edge because it could conjure up a nostalgia for a personal past. australian tourists generally marvelled at how the past known through books came alive in britain: one of the conventions of australian travel abroad was how it was like white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 7 entering a schoolbook or a play (white, r. 1986). and there was just so much of it: ‘history hits you everywhere’ (garnsey 1930: 7 august); ‘something fascinatingly old is always turning up … every common thing is alive with history’ (sommerlad 1939: 20 july); london was ‘throbbing with historical life’ (dowding 1928: 27 june). in westminster abbey in 1953, esther corsellis could even smell it: ‘it smells of age … a smell i have never known at home’ (1953–54: 4 december 1953). on a second visit, in 1975, when her host apologised for the prospect of a boring drive, this enthusiastic member of the national trust protested: ‘but of course it was not so for me, with at least 3 wars of the roses battlefields, 3 mouldering castles, & a few stately homes’ along the route (1975: 5 september). from london, sheila glading wrote that ‘all the buildings look as though they are reeking with age and interest, which of course they are.’ she was pleased with that phrase: in her next letter it was windsor that ‘looked as if it was reeking with age and interest’ (glading 1946: 11 august, 17 september). with connections to famous historical and literary names scattered along the standard tourist routes, travel provided fertile ground for celebrity-spotting, long before it was noticed by cultural studies. literary tourism was well-established in the nineteenth century (watson 2006), and historical figures also attracted the tourist’s attention. in 1901 they were spotted in westminster abbey, ‘the last resting place of many celebrities’ (lloyd 1901: 27), and in 1922 in st paul’s: ‘what an accumulation of decayed genius rests within these ponderous walls’ (moss 1922: 51). elliott napier was impressed by the ‘veritable army of famous names’ associated with the temple courts (1933: 82). leonard kendall was thrilled that ‘bath has probably more associations with celebrities of the past than any place in the country, excepting london’ and that oxford’s colleges, all ‘steeped in history and tradition,’ had ‘turned out hundreds of famous men’ (1951: 151, 99). it was less a matter of rubbing shoulders with the famous as rubbing shoulders with the past. what crucially distinguished british from ‘foreign’ history for australians was the way in which, at least until well into the late twentieth century, it was part of a flow of history that they understood as relevant to them, a whig dynamic of progress connecting the past to the present. moreover it was a history into which they could readily insert themselves. many scholars have drawn distinctions between a remote bookish history and the lived pastness of everyday life (nora 1989; samuel 1994; white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 8 lowenthal 1985; atkinson 2003). the history presented to tourists is often seen as packaged, commodified spectacle, dissociated from real life. but what is striking is how actively many australians identified with a flow of history that nevertheless was so distant from their ordinary lives. judy brett has brilliantly analysed this sense of connection to a living british past in the worldview of robert menzies (brett 1992: 135–55). certainly staunch monarchists found in the lineage of british monarchs a direct, relevant line from the past to the present. as edith lahey put it, ‘speechless’ in the cathedral at canterbury, ‘the “mother city” of the british empire,’ on the eve of war: ‘think of the many monarchs who have gone through, the penitent henry ii walking through the crypt in his linen robe, bare footed and weeping, and so and on to our own king’s time’ (1941: 51). at chepstow, washington soul found ‘a perfect old ruin—only good joining the past with the present’ (1899: 25 may). in 1929 sir philip street, chief justice of nsw, dined in middle temple’s ‘old historical hall in which shakespeare produced his twelfth night before queen elizabeth’ and found the opportunity for a homily to his son ernest: the more that i see of the continuity of the history of the people of england and of the mingling of the past with the present the more impressed i become with the stimulus that such things should be to their educated young men and women of england and with the inspiration that they should draw from them to live worthily and to become useful members of the community. (1929: 16 june) but this sense of history flowing through the present certainly was not the sole preserve of the british-to-the-bootstraps brigade. in 1905 for example, j. h. m. abbott found it visiting oxford. there he returned to his trope of australian ruins, against which oxford was ‘unreadable’: to us who find an old georgian verandahless house a quaint survival of bygone days; who ride past the grey posts of broken-down stockyards, idly wondering what kind of prehistoric people branded cattle in them; who have marked captain cook’s landing-place at botany bay as a monument to the dawn of our civilisation, oxford is a little unreal … it is so old, so quiet, so beautiful. the grey walls of college and hall, chapel and cloister … and worn stone pavement, are of to-day and of yesterday, and of many yesterdays … somehow, in some way you can only vaguely realise, past and present and future are united here. (abbott 1905: 78–83) in 1958, the youngish and mildly mischievous journalist, stuart gore, was uncharacteristically sentimental when contemplating plymouth hoe. after lampooning americans’ devotion to the mayflower and family trees, he nevertheless felt he owned plymouth’s past: we, whose ties with the old country are more recent, strong, and binding have no special interest in thus accurately pinpointing our ancestry. perhaps wisely. white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 9 but we can and do, have the best of both worlds on plymouth hoe. faith in the future of the new country which is ours mingles equally with pride in the past exploits of the old country—which is also ours. (1958: 80) journalist florence james found an instinctive fit in 1927: ‘this is so curious to be in these old historical places at last, and yet so natural’ (1927: 4 november). even when the history was as barbarous as that found in the dungeons of carlisle castle, the connections could still be made, placing the tourist in a stream of history flowing from barbarity to civilisation: ‘there certainly were brutes living in past ages and one hates to think they were our ancestors’ (james, a. h. c. 1930: 7 august). in the tower of london in 1901, one was grateful that ‘our lot was not cast in those days of darkness and barbarity’ but lived ‘in an age when our land has received the blessings of enlightenment’ (lloyd 1901: 28). just over a decade after the somme, young julien nixon wrote to his mother: ‘did these early people of this isle ever dream that we moderns would be idling on their crumbling castle -, living in a very different and more civilised world?’ (1927: 18 december). many went further than simply sharing a common british connection to the past: they claimed that australians appreciated it more intensely than the british themselves. frank clune, that pugnacious irish-australian nationalist, on his first trip to england at the age of 53, was shocked at english indifference to the past: ‘londoners, i’m told, take very little interest in their abundant memorials of past days and bloody deeds, but it’s enchanting to a visitor from the antipodes’ (clune 1949: 15). in 1900, washington h. soul saw cleopatra’s ‘needle’ and complained that ‘the smoke of dirty london has done it more harm than centuries in egypt’ (1899: 16 may). edith lahey was saddened: ‘how the people of england can bear to see the beautiful old buildings torn down and the garish new ones put up in their places i do not know’ (1941: 43). and for james penn boucaut, judge and ex-premier, who travelled in 1892, it was ‘a daily grief to me on visiting these dear old churches to see what indifference there has been in the past to our glorious history and interesting relics’ (1906: 86). being ‘ours’ gave additional edge to the regular complaint of having to pay for it: ‘what i hate most about these venerable places is being charged to go here and there’ (brown, l. 1910: 50); ‘it is mean’ grumbled wealthy washington soul (1899: 4 october). more commonly though, in the cost-benefit accounts of the tourist, britain’s past was white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 10 considered ‘well worth it’ (corsellis 1953: 4 december; campbell 1932: 10 december; lahey 1941: 163). these travellers were even more outraged when australia was not given its rightful place in this shared saga of british history. they were always on the lookout for australian connections and captain cook, as the british ‘discoverer’ of australia, was the touchstone that confirmed their sense of belonging. sites connected to cook were being marked out in the mid-nineteenth century, though the ‘captain james cook heritage trail’ was not opened until 1978 (walton 2009: 222–24). jack moss found himself in mile end road in 1922: ‘somewhere here captain cook lived, so this street is of interest to all good aussies’ (1922: 50). the failure to acknowledge australians’ claim on captain cook was a particular concern. in cambridge in 1930, a. h. garnsey ‘discovered’ the graves of cook’s family and a plaque on the chancel wall: ‘only he was simply described as a great navigator who was killed at owyhee, and his discovery of australia is not even mentioned’ (1930: 30 october; cf 21 august). in 1953, esther corsellis was put out by the fuss made of the fact the mayflower sailed from plymouth: ‘so, i think did captain cook, although there is no tablet to him. i took it up with the information bureau, but i was not sure enough of my facts—he may have sailed from southampton’ (1953: 27 april).5 at the naval museum in greenwich, her frustration boiled over: ‘was disgusted with the captain cook section. the discovery of australia was passed off as “other important discoveries in the south seas.”’ (1953–1954: 4 april 1954). such omissions were taken as personal affronts. so australian travellers not only felt personally connected to the british past, but claimed their own rights to it, rights that were distinct from and often superior to those of britons. the necessity of ruins britain’s past—and the passing of time in general—was most tangibly expressed in the ruin. humankind has long enjoyed the pleasure of ruins, as rose macaulay put it (1953), and tourists have long sought them out. romanticism added considerably to the frisson. ian ousby noted that ‘ruins were admired as witnesses to the triumph of time and nature over man’s handiwork’ (despite henry viii’s hand in their creation). the ‘pleasant, pensive melancholy they provoked’ was perhaps most fully expressed in gray’s ‘elegy written in a country churchyard’ (ousby 1990: 126). the churchyard 5 she should have had more faith in herself: he sailed from plymouth. white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 11 itself, at stoke poges, was a popular stop on the literary tourist trail (sinclair 1913: 11– 12; sanders 1928–1929: 42; twigg 1968: 17 july; watson 2006: 39ff).6 to these travellers from the new world, ruins had further meaning, and those in england, where the cult of the ruin was most thoroughly celebrated, meant more than any others. the contrast between the decay of the old world and the lack of ruins in the new reinforced the temporal connection between britain and australia and gave it an emotional edge. but they did not come to gloat about britain’s decline. the idea of the new world gazing on the ruins of the old became a renowned cliché after 1840, when lord macaulay7 placed his solitary new zealander ‘on a broken arch of london bridge to sketch the ruins of st. paul’s’ (macaulay 1840; skilton 2004). to victorian britain the image was symptomatic of deep anxieties about the decline and fall of empires. in the colonies, however, britain’s might and glory was simply an ever-present, immutable fact. few antipodean tourists saw ruins through the nationalist prism of their own future eminence. instead they came in awe of britain’s past: britain’s past glories were one with its present. ruins were necessary as a sure sign of the depth of a civilisation. hence abbott’s affection for australian ruins, despite their paucity (1905: 10–11, 78). hence the popular enthusiasm for the ivy-clad convict ruins of port arthur (young 1996: 36– 37). hence the facetious proposal, by the bohemian nationalists of the 1890s, that they ‘establish a society for the erection of ancient ruins in australia’ (taylor 1918: 10–12; white, r. 1981: 95–96). the inadequacy of ruins in australia exposed the thinness of its culture. so most australians were enthusiastic about britain’s ruins. ilsa blomfield passed netley abbey not long after arriving: ‘it was the first ruin i had ever seen, to one who has lived in a new country without generations of historical landmarks the ruined abbey brought up pictures of many things i have read of england as a child’ (1909: 92–93). flora blakie, on a cook’s tour in scotland in 1903, visited melrose ‘and went over the abbey which is so well known to all lovers of ruins … there is something very sad in these dear old ruins how sad that they should be ruins’ (25 july). at glastonbury, allison howorth’s experience bordered on the mystical: ‘i cannot tell you how these 6 as an aside, when i first typed this line a serendipitous typo transposed the r and a in gray and illustrated how australian ruins could never match the gravitas of british ones: ‘gary’s elegy written in a country churchyard’ does not have quite the same ring to it. 7 rose macaulay’s grandfather’s cousin. white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 12 ruins affect us—they must be seen. a strange peacefulness pervades the whole place.’ in the kitchen, where the monks or abbots, or whatever they were called, used to cook their food. i closed my eyes for a moment, and at once i saw them, in their long cloaks and cowls, standing round an old brazier in which red charcoal was burning. they were stirring something in a big iron pot, which looked like porridge … i felt better for having seen them, and was at peace with the world. (1937: 29–30) even washington soul’s entrepreneurial utilitarianism was confused by tintern abbey: with all its uselessness it would be a pity to take it all down—it is a fine old place of the long past—immensely strong—the same old wooden door admitted us that admitted those of hundreds of years ago—this old ruin … is also to be sold it is said—should it be taken down—tintern is done for—fairly an old ruin but the sole support of a small town—for sight seers, but pompeii is the same … where the old floors have been, we could fancy the monks of old—with the nonsence (sic) of the roman catholic church enactments … a splendid show—now a show ruin. (1899: 25 may) they became connoisseurs of ruins. conway castle had ‘fine ruins—the finest, i think, that i have seen’ (sinclair 1913: 6) and chepstow was ‘a perfect old ruin’ (washington soul 1899: 25 may). they measured them up against each other, commented on the aesthetics of ivy-covered walls, the relative merits of grass or gravel floors, the effect of their setting in the landscape: ‘the fine ruins of the well-placed castle’ at rochester (sinclair 1913: 7). gertrude soul also admired chepstow and contributed to its ruination: it is a grand ruin now … destroyed by order of cromwell. in some places the walls are about 2 yards in thickness, so it must have taken some time to destroy it as we see it now, but of course time has also spent its ravages there … i broke a little piece of the wall off with the end of my parasol, but it was hard. (1899: 25 may) in contemplating the ravages of time, a few admitted to assisting the process by souveniring the past. gertrude was incorrigible. not only was there this bit of chepstow castle: at camp hill, with its associations with the wars of the roses, ‘i picked up a few stones from there, and then we went down again’ (1899: 31 may). to own a bit of shakespeare, her husband at least paid for ‘a slip of paper with infusion from the grave.’ and 70 years later: ‘at a church at stoke-poges where thomas gray wrote his elegy under a yew tree which is about 900 years old. des snitched a piece of the tree which is pressed herein’ (twigg 1968: 17 july). there were australians less enamoured of britain’s history, probably far more than admitted it in writing. there were moments such as that at jedburgh, when a tour group white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 13 jacked up and ‘bellowed we’d seen enough ruins’ (dowding 1928: 25 may). boucaut admitted ‘museums and picture galleries make my head ache’ (1906: 122). washington soul also had his limits. he had had a solid two months’ sightseeing, noting ‘fine’ old places 12 times (‘fine’ being his favourite word, usually applied to intact oldness). at newbury he cracked: the place is an old one, some old ruins are to be seen, for my part i have seen enough of rubbish— some are pretty but they want to come down—and then they charge you to look at old stones— anyway there is a charm in age—dickens said ‘he had never seen a man who liked to boast of and retain an old hat or boots, but old ruins and crazed crockery fetched fancy prices.’ (1899: 12 july) perhaps he felt the discovery of that quote from dickens licensed his impertinence. at tintern stuart campbell was even blunter: after all one ruined abbey is very much like another to me. i can’t honestly say i was a bit interested … arthur tickle [his host] has the history of it all off pat and also the history of numerous other places round here. he poured out a lot of it on me but frankly i was bored. i wonder if i’m really as much of a unique philistine as i seem or do other people adopt a pose over history (1933: 31 june). joan boxall’s letters home show her gradually becoming fed up with history. on an early excursion in 1952, canterbury was ‘very ancient and interesting.’ but a year later she was yearning for ‘the barely touched freshness of alice springs and the striveness [sic] of pioneers rather than this preoccupation with the past’; a month later ‘i don’t want to stay here forever its all too ruddy museumlike—fancy living in a museum’; and eventually: all looks forward in aus—here its flaming old abbey—st paul’s statues and decorations being eaten away with smog & not a square inch of virgin land anywhere—everywhere king alfred sat or ellen terry slept—& their ruddy stately homes (1952: 17 april; 1953: 28 june; 21 july; 11 november). but such admissions were rare. the vast majority looked on britain’s past with wonder, ‘overwhelmed by the riches of the centuries and the weight of time’ as esther corsellis put it (1954: 16 january). apart from deploring its brutality, few brought any social critique to their largely rose-tinted appreciation of history. arthur garnsey, from a family of socially-progressive clergymen, was unusual in seeing the past cheek by jowl with poverty: ‘everybody knows that chester is old, historical and picturesque. i am sorry to have to add that is has some horrible slummy quarters, miserable tiny terrace houses abutting right on to the streets’ (1930: 18 june). a great many other australians condemned old world poverty when commenting on other aspects of british life white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 14 (roberts, a. 2008; white, r. 1986), but the past tended to be kept sacrosanct and safe from such unpleasantness. allison howorth’s view was more complicated: then, of course, what makes an old country so interesting from the tourist’s point of view, are its traditions and history—but surely much of it is a history no new country wants. our little bit of convict history is sad and dreadful enough. much as i enjoyed seeing the old castles, i was always conscious of the horrors that had taken place there. (howorth 1937: 151) howarth, the happily gushing author of ‘cooee’ england, was hardly a radical nationalist yet, exceptionally, she suggested the burden of the past might be too heavy. a history of the emotions how do we explain the depth of emotion that so many australians brought to their encounters with such a rich past? they were certainly deeply moved. elliott napier, a digger-journalist who walked ‘the homeland’s history-haunted ways’ on leave during the great war, had all my life hoped to visit england, and, of all english towns, i had most wished to walk the streets of stratford. and here it lay … and at the sight i felt that swift, heart-stopping shiver which, as upon the hearing of majestic music, accompanies the rarest ecstasy that man may know—the perfect consummation of a deep and long-sustained desire! (1933: dedication, 69) somewhat less articulate, julien nixon felt similarly fulfilled in the cottage of dr livingstone, a childhood hero: ‘little did i think i would one day glimpse this venerable spot … livingstone’s room … gives use to very strange feelings to ones fibre’ (1928: 29 october). not long after the blitz, leonard kendall was stirred by big ben: that clock seems a citadel of strength in a chaotic universe. the wonderful sound of its deep mellow chimes, even relayed on the radio … continues to thrill myriads who hear these tones. the very sight of it is inspiring. everywhere it is the same in this enchanted land. centuries of eventful history and tradition seem to be so much bound up in some of these things that the mere sight or sound of them has a strangely stirring effect. (1951: 24) many diarists recorded that ‘thrill’ of history and, though they often descended into cliché, they seemed to be striving to suggest the depth of the emotion when encountering a past long identified with and previously only imagined—napier’s ‘heartstopping shiver’ (1933: 69).8 the changing of the guard was ‘thrilling’ (pattinson 2007: 38); an original dickens manuscript was ‘rather thrilling’ (dowding 1928: 29 june); living in a castle was ‘really very thrilling’ (pattinson 2007: 78). exeter had a ‘thrilling history’ (kendall 1951: 85); middle temple ‘never fails to thrill me’ (james, florence 8 freud read the emotional intensity of such occasions as oedipal (1936; white, r. 1986). white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 15 1933: 22 march); york minster ‘was a thrill to see … & to learn its ancient history’ (sommerlad 1939: 10 july). for arthur garnsey, the site of the old tolbooth in the heart of midlothian was ‘thrilling’ and then ‘the next thriller was the pass of killiecrankie (get out your historybooks again)’ (garnsey 1930: 22 june, 29 june). the scottish border ‘thrilled us to the marrow … with all the historical memories of our school-days’ (howorth 1937: 52) and at bannockburn ‘one couldn’t help a thrill in passing thro’ this old historical country’ (dowding 1928: 28 may). ‘hampton court has quite an interesting and thrilling history and i shall later send you a very descriptive pamphlet on it’ wrote faye pattinson on a working holiday in 1954 (2007: 47). the laconic reveda lawrence ‘went to see dickens house in doughty st. thrilled’ (lawrence 1930: 29 june). this was not simply a corporeal sensation, as might be triggered by sublimity in nature—or a ride at luna park—though it did seem to include a physical component. nor was it often bound up with expressions of loyalty to the empire or race patriotism. the emotions went deeper, partly the culmination of something long anticipated, partly nostalgia for the imaginative world of schooldays, but also a sense that it was through history, not through geography, through time not space, that they had reached another world. other favourite adjectives were gentler. the emotional connection was personalised and proprietorial, as we can see particularly in the use of the adjective ‘dear,’ so simple and so intimate in the ‘dear old ruins’ (blakie 1903: 25 july). ruins were not all: there were ‘dear old churches’ (boucaut 1906: 86), ‘dear old’ villages (lahey 1941: 43), other ‘dear old places’ (boucaut 1906: 103) and of course ‘dear old england’ itself (spielvogel 1907: 33), enough for ‘dear old england’ at times to be used satirically (hinder 1911–12). and what gave added intensity to the emotion was their frustration at their distance, the necessity of leaving the english as guardians of this past and the knowledge they were not very good at it.9 so edith lahey lamented: the dear little old village now has a new suburb close by, a blaring, glaring place … the little old place is being allowed to fall to pieces, no paint where a little would revive, no plaster where little repairs would keep the old world beauty. that place seemed to me just a little, gentle old place waiting and suffering patiently and quietly until ‘progress’—so called—smashes its way in and kills it. (1941: 43–44) alongside the ‘dear old’ past were ‘quaint old’ customs (kendall 1951: 122; menzies 9 the same sentiment that led so many us philanthropists and some australians to underwrite historical preservation: see lahey (1941: 51). white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 16 in brett 1992: 139), ‘quaint old’ gateways (kendall 1951: 124), ‘quaint old’ houses (lahey 1941: 72), ‘quaint old’ inns (lahey 1941: 55; nixon 1928: 24 april) and ‘quaint old’ inn signs (cohen 1938: 8 october; spielvogel 1907: 29), ‘quaint old’ streets (cohen 1938: 11 october; lahey 1941: 55), ‘quaint old’ alleys (james, florence 1928: 12 august), ‘quaint old’ churches (garnsey 1930: vol. 1, 49; kendall 1951: 130), ‘quaint old’ rooms (washington soul 1899: 4 october) and ‘quaint old half-timbered over-hanging houses’ (kendall 1951: 86); keswick was ‘very very quaint’ (dowding 1928: 23 june) and chichester was ‘most quaint and winsome’ (garnsey 1930: 10 june). old houses (girl guides 1937: 8 december; roberts, h. g. 1937: 14 may), squares (garnsey 1930: 21 august), cottages (james, a. h. c. 1930: 1 june; glading 1948: 4 april), buildings (lawrence 1930: 28 june), corners (kendall 1951: 82), fireplaces (lahey 1941: 56), farmers (nixon 1929: 27 july), church fonts (napier 1933: 10), towns (nixon 1928: 26 september) and windows (falkiner 1938: 13 july), along with wells (mcdonald 1944: 148), york (sommerlad 1939: 10 july) and the brighton pavilion (garnsey 1930: 3 june), could all be ‘quaint.’ so could the beefeaters (falkiner 1938: 13 july). the past was picturesque too. chester (donnell 1917: 1 march; garnsey 1930: 18 june), durham (lahey 1941: 70), exeter (napier 1933: 26), the menai strait bridge (cohen 1938: 19 october) and anne hatherway’s cottage (cohen 1938: 26 october), the ruins of rosslyn castle (garnsey 1930: 22 june) and castle urquhart (garnsey 1930: 2 july), salisbury cathedral (james, a.h.c. 1930: 1 june), hexham market place (lahey 1941: 72), warwick castle (sanders 1928–29: 36) and stonegate in york (street, sir p. 1929: 11 august) all scored that accolade. craigmiller castle was ‘a wonderful old ruin, very picturesque, and covered with ivy’ (reid 1900: 17 july) and, again, the beefeaters were ‘picturesque’ (richardson 1904: 12 august). while ‘quaint’ and ‘picturesque’ are standard tourist clichés and might not suggest the depth of emotion plumbed by ‘thrilling’ and ‘dear,’ they were nevertheless terms not readily applied to australia. britain’s past allowed the indulgence of unfamiliar sentiments. similarly it awakened such other atrophied sensations as ‘reverence’ and ‘veneration.’ oxford (abbott 1905: 83), st paul’s (brown, l. 1910: 50), dr livingstone’s cottage (nixon 1928: 29 october) and the temple (napier 1933: 78) were discovered by the australian tourist to be ‘venerable’; ‘veneration’ was to be had in westminster abbey: ‘even if, in black mood or otherwise, he thinks or cares little for the england of to-day … he cannot but stand white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 17 here in awe and veneration’ (abbott 1905: 82-83). westminster abbey also inspired ‘reverence’ (donnell 1915: 30 june; abbott 1905: 72; lahey 1941: 48), as did windsor castle (napier 1933: 100), bothwell castle (nixon 1927: 18 december), middle temple hall (napier 1933: 82) and edinburgh cathedral (boucaut 1906: 101). tintern abbey was ‘capable of forcing reverence into one’s mind, whether one realises it or not’ (lahey 1941: 59). in oxford abbott noted how this newfound veneration contrasted with ‘the characteristic irreverence which we have been assured australians possess to a degree’ (1905: 81). what all these responses to british history have in common, i would argue, is that sense of ready personal connection, rousing the intimate emotions of an almost domestic relationship that enables the tourist to sit comfortably within a flow of history. for a century australians of the class with access to overseas travel had shared a relaxed and comfortable middlebrow culture in which british history specifically provided many of the signposts. they knew its celebrities and sacred sites intimately. british history was not exotic, dashing, sublime, anarchic, irrational, romantic, dramatic, scandalous or sensual. such terms would be fitting for the past they found in the rest of europe, but not for the domestic atmosphere of britain. in britain it was picturesque rather than sublime, and all very chaste. on this point at least australian tourists stood in stark contrast to one of their favourite travel writers, h. v. morton, in whose in search of england and other books between the wars travel became erotic adventure. among his papers he kept a list of over 100 sexual conquests made while conducting his research (bartholomew 2004: 24, 30; white, r. 2009: 11.4). gender, age and political persuasion did not seem to matter in this. men and women, young and old, radical and conservative seemed to share the feeling for the thrilling, the quaint, the dear, the picturesque, the venerable. but this ‘travelling class’ was not representative of australia (white, r. 1987a). they were an elite with the leisure and means to get to europe before the advent of jumbo jets, though that elite could be surprisingly broad (woollacott 2001: 17). they generally possessed the cultural capital of the middlebrow: they were the ones who had paid attention to history lessons at school. their mind-set—the ‘structure of feeling’ to use raymond williams’s term (1961)—carried weight and permeated australian culture more thoroughly than other perspectives, and part of the reason for their cultural dominance was that as travellers white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 18 they could claim all the spurious authority of the eye-witness (white, r. 2008). but it did not add up to ‘the’ australian view of britain. in fact it was something more. it is a mistake to read their deeply felt responses to the british past as merely expressions of empire loyalty. some—liberal prime minister robert menzies the supreme example (brett 1992: 145)—did recruit their emotional attachment for ideological purposes and certainly this sentimentality gave added potency to imperial allegiances. but we reduce too much to merely geopolitical identity, be it national or imperial. when these tourists engaged with the past they were not lying back and thinking of england: the emotional attachment to the past was not simply attachment to empire. we might say the intensity of emotion was the equivalent of that felt by later australian tourists visiting gallipoli: another past discovered on the other side of the world (scates 2006; mckenna & ward 2007). in both cases the emotionalism points to something deeper than merely expressions of imperial or national loyalty. their attachment to britain’s past represented a nostalgia for deeper meaning, a sense of escape from the everyday, a pleasure derived not just from ruins but also from entering the imagination and associating with popular culture’s historic celebrities. they cherished their experience of escaping to the past precisely because, as in another country, ‘they do things differently there.’ doing the continent like so many australian tourists throughout history, i have no time to ‘do’ the continent adequately here, but some of the contrasts between tourist responses to the past on either side of the channel are instructive. first, the past did not loom as large on the continent. there were of course visits to old sites, to castles and cathedrals and palaces, but the architecture tended to receive more attention than the historical associations. generally it was not felt to be a past of which they could claim ownership: it offered a sense of otherness rather than connection. for some that otherness was alienating; for others, as cosmopolitanism became a sign of cultural sophistication and a means of delineating social distinctions, the continental past was exciting. whether alienating or exciting, history was to be watched as if in an audience, always with a distance from the stage. history there could be entertaining, curious, romantic, but it was not a history that connected the past to their particular present. history in europe was much more about oddities and irrational hot-blooded temperament. dr hinder contemplated the difference white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 19 when he visited the tower of london in 1911: ‘i noticed that my women folk seemed to dwell most on the horror side of the show. no doubt they would deny this. blood and torture i have no time for … served up hot like in madrid it was different but not this way’ (1911–12). violent hot-blooded history was what was expected on the continent, but not in britain. allison howarth shared the distaste for the ‘horror side’ and made a similar distinction: ‘this feeling is even worse on the continent, where the palaces are magnificent beyond description’ (howorth 1937: 151). it looks like a non sequitur but it was of a piece: horrors and magnificence were continental, not british. frank clune, that hugely popular and populist mid-century travel writer, stridently antiintellectual, anti-communist and pro-australian, summed it up, admittedly not long after the end of world war ii: europe is very interesting, but— it has too many people, too many different kinds of people in it. too much excitement, too many wars, have made the europeans slightly crazy, maybe … they are panicked with fears, hates and jealousies … they kill one another in millions now, and smash one another’s houses and temples to smithereens in spite and hate. (1950: 200–1) along with continental over-excitement went a sensuality. history across the channel was far more sensual, if not downright erotic. it is difficult to eroticise the history of school books, but easier, perhaps, a history discovered as a 20 year old, through university or through a more sophisticated cultural diet: the seamy reputation of the french novel and theatre in the mid-nineteenth century applied just as much to french cinema a century later. so if australian tourists retrieved their childhoods in britain, they found their adolescence on the continent. consider the overwrought excitement of nina murdoch, a prolific australian travel writer of the 1930s, describing the ‘rapture and the wonder of the first exodus from a new world to the old … sometimes in italy joy rose to such a pitch in me that it was only by the grace of god and early discipline that i did not career—a maenad drunk with delight—screaming with ecstasy across the face of the continent!’ (1930: 1–2). not a response commonly elicited by britain’s past, despite the emotion it could kindle. waking on her first morning in europe, in nice, murdoch flirted outrageously with old europe: white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 20 ‘il fait beau ce matin pour ma’moiselle!’ says the waiter as he puts my petit déjeuner beside the bed. sweet insinuation that the morning should make itself fine on my account! and ‘ma’moiselle!’ with the scratches of nine years’ service on my wedding ring! … i have had my bath, and am clad in a single stocking when there rises from beneath the little white balcony of my room, the light music of a guitar. enchanting! … the guitar plays softly on; and now above it rises the warmth and passion of a baritone voice, in a rich little song of love, swelling with passion … i am constrained to drop my other stocking and execute a spanish pas seul—not as practiced or as graceful as his song, but, i assure you, no less filled with joy. (5-7) that morning she sat in the hotel garden where a frenchman in a strawboater … never takes his eyes from me in the hope that i may be feeling flirtatious on such a delicious morning … and now at luncheon the waiter—groomed like a michael arlen hero on the eve of romantic adventure—pours my humble glass of water as if it were an oblation. (9). needless to say nina murdoch preferred to travel without her husband (edgar 1986). or consider colin simpson, the most popular australian travel writer in the 1960s, for whom being sophisticated meant being frank about sex (white, r. 1997; 2012). he opened his best-selling 1959 book on europe with a word picture. it was midnight and he was eating his first smoked eel on toast with a ‘klm air hostess’ who had agreed to show him around amsterdam. they listened to a ‘gilded old clock-tower’; it had been chiming the hours when ‘sydney was still gum-trees and goannas.’ sitting there, ‘the picture-book had come to life, and you were in it’ and he could tick off the typical images: tulips, volendam, original rembrandts and ‘those eye-popping living pictures, the girls who nightly sat framed in the front windows of the brothel houses down by the zeedijk.’ in a telling phrase, ‘it was a little like being out of school at last, and a kind of coming of age’ (simpson 1959: 3–4). similarly, in france, he played on the romance of paris in the springtime. he looked out for young lovers (290) and regarded the man selling dirty postcards outside cooks as ‘a touch of true-to-label paris’ (286). he lingered in the folies-bergère, the lido (‘a big bevy of beautiful showgirls … without a brassiere between them, or in need of one’ 315), strip-tease shows (320) and red-light districts (321). with all that sophisticated romance, there was relatively little time for history. in contrast, arriving in london for the first time was ‘a crossing from what was white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 21 foreign to what is familiar; for, though the eye may be seeing it for the first time, the mind has known much of it for years’ (365). there he would find much more history and much less sex. coming home i suggested at the outset that tourists were important as agents of history. their discovery of deep feelings for a deep past in britain had ramifications for australian culture. some returned to seek out that same sense of connection to the past in australia. a number of historians—keith hancock, manning clark, noel mclachlan—have noted how being in europe inspired them to look to australia as a field for their history. but well before them, popular writers, mere tourists, had followed a similar path. randolph bedford began turning his own past into historical novels even while travelling. then, ‘just after my return,’ when camped in central australia, he conceived a project that would combine autobiography and australian history: ‘relating a boy’s dreams, his mental processes and his development would be the story of the development of the boy’s environment and therefore of the passing australia and its scenes worthy of remembrance’ (1976 [1944]: xi). j. h. m. abbott returned to australia to write newspaper articles on australia’s colonial past and a series of novels: sally: the tale of a currency lass (1918), castle vane: a romance of bushranging on the upper hunter in the olden days (1920) and sydney cove (1923). and nathan spielvogel, who had spent his life’s savings ‘to see the lands of the past’ (1907: 4), returned to write popular histories of eureka. as he slipped back into ‘the once disliked, but now appreciated, routine,’ he decided that ‘all the wonders i have seen,’ existing as they were alongside poverty and militarism, were no match for ‘the blue sky above, the spreading gums around,10 the innocence and the simple faith of my little people ... my own land is the best land. adieu’ (124). such sentiments were fairly common among australians surveying the european past: admiration tempered by democracy. but spielvogel’s travels were not over. after ‘another attack of the wanderlust,’ he spent four years as a relief teacher exploring victoria, the ‘land of the gumsucker,’ before publishing a gumsucker at home in 1914 (9). the interplay between the global and the local paralleled that between past and present. in castlemaine, he recalled being in rome and visiting the coliseum in the hope of communing with ancient history. ‘but 10 he was an enthusiast for the gum tree, writing poetry to the mighty gum (kaldor 2010: 61). white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 22 i could summon up no spirits from the past’ he said. interrupted by an annoying american,11 ‘the ghosts would not walk. all i caught was a cold, so with a sigh i wandered back to my hotel’ (81). but in castlemaine he discovered ‘the men who did to victoria what these romans did for rome … the pioneers of one of the goldfields … the failures, who missed their chances, and are now in the shadows … pitching their tales of “them good old times.”’ in castlemaine he discovered ‘a chapter of victorian history’ (81–82). so spielvogel’s travels in europe kindled an appreciation of the past in australia, one largely limited to gold rushes, pioneers and bushrangers but also redolent of what he called, in a wonderful phrase, its ‘ruins, architectural and human’ (1914: 85). acknowledgements this article draws on research associated with two arc discovery grants, on australian tourism in britain and the development of ‘historic’ tourism in australia, for which i would like to thank the arc. it owes much to alex roberts, an excellent research assistant, and benefited from a harold white fellowship at the national library of australia in 2011 and a senior research fellowship at monash university in 2012. finally i would like to thank juliana de nooy for the invitation to present a keynote paper at the ‘australians abroad’ conference in 2011 and the anonymous referees and others who provided comments on earlier drafts. reference list abbott, j. h. m. 1905, an outlander in england: being some impressions of an australian abroad. methuen & co., london. alomes, s. 1999, when london calls: the expatriation of australian creative artists to britain. cambridge university press, melbourne. atkinson, a. 2003, ‘heritage, self, and 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press, melbourne. brown, a. d. 1916–17, diary, 7 january 1916–3 november 1917. ml mss 17. brown, l. 1910, letters from an australian abroad. the cumberland argus printing works, parramatta. buzard, j. 1993, the beaten track: european tourism, literature and the ways to culture, 1800–1918. oxford university press, oxford. 11 the figure of the crass american abroad was an even more potent emblem of nationality than the australian, not least for australians for whom it provided some solace in their anxieties about their own philistinism. interestingly the australian abroad could play the same role for americans—in, for example, f. scott fitzgerald’s tender is the night (2009: 272–75). white time travel portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 23 campbell, s. 1932–1933, diary of his voyage to england and his time there (2 volumes), with two loose tables of expenses, diaries and related papers, 1928–1949. ml mss 7215; cy 4317. clune, f. 1949, land of hope and glory. angus & robertson, sydney. _____ 1950, all roads lead to rome: a pilgrimage to the eternal city, and a look around war-torn europe. invincible press, sydney. cohen, a. j. 1938, diary, cohen papers, 1899–1973. ml mss 6032. corsellis, e. 1953, letters to her father, family and friends, corsellis papers, 1887–1989. ml mss 6555/2. _____ 1954, letters to her grandmother mainly from england and europe, corsellis papers, 1887–1989. ml mss 6555/2. _____ 1953–1954, diaries, corsellis papers, 1887–1989. ml mss 6555/1. _____ 1975, diary (transcript), corsellis papers, 1887–1989. ml mss 6555/1. curran, j. 2004, the power of speech: australian prime ministers defining the national image. melbourne university press, melbourne. donnell, sister a. 1915–1918, circular letters, 25 may 1915–1918 july 1918. ml mss 1022/1; cy 2459. dowding, m. 1928, diary, dowding papers, 1928–1956. ml mss 4249/1; cy3444. ____ 1956, diary, dowding papers, 1928–1956. ml mss 4249/2. edgar, s. 1986, ‘murdoch, madoline (nina) (1890–1976),’ australian 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australian historical studies, vol. 32, no. 116: 76–90. millear, m. m. 1902, the journal of a wandering australian. melville & mullen, melbourne. morton, h. v. 1927, in search of england. methuen, london. moss, j. 1922, my diary of a short trip to england. ruskin press, melbourne. murdoch, n. 1930, seventh heaven: a joyous discovery of europe. angus & robertson, sydney. napier, s. e. 1933, walks abroad: two australians in the wilds of england, scotland, and ireland, 3rd edition. angus & robertson, sydney. nietzsche, f. 1980 [1874], on the advantage and disadvantage of history for life, (trans.) p. preuss. hackett, indianapolis. nixon, j. 1927–1929, letters, nixon family papers, 1889–1942. ml mss 7813 nora, p. 1989, ‘between memory and history: les lieux de mémoire,’ representations, no. 26: 7–25. ousby, i. 1990, the englishman’s england: taste, travel and the rise of tourism. cambridge university press, cambridge. pattinson, f. 2007, send more money please daddy: letters from abroad 1954–55. holmesglen institute of tafe, melbourne. pesman, r., walker, d. & white, r. (eds) 1996a, the oxford book of australian travel writing. oxford university press, melbourne. _____ 1996b, an annotated bibliography of australian overseas travel writing, compiled by t. mccormack. alia bibliographies on disk, canberra. reid, e. 1900, diary. ml mss 6565. richardson, mrs m. 1904 manuscript diaries covering her years of study abroad 1899, 1904–1906. ml b1687; cy973. roberts, a. 2008, ‘lessons in social progress: what australian tourists learnt in britain,’ british australian studies association biennial conference, university of london, unpublished paper. roberts, h. g. 1937, journal of a trip from sydney to europe. ml mss 2602. samuel, r. 1994, theatres of memory. verso, london. sanders, w. 1928–1929, my trip abroad. ml mss 7446. scates, b. 2006, return to gallipoli: walking the battlefields of the great war. cambridge university press, melbourne. simpson, c. 1959 [1965], wake up in europe: a book of travel. angus & robertson, sydney. sinclair, hon j. r. 1913, the homeland revisited: the hon. j. r. sinclair’s impressions. daily times print, dunedin. sisson, j. 1953, a tour by car through england, scotland and wales. bank of nsw, sydney. skilton, d. 2004, ‘contemplating the ruins of london: macaulay’s new zealander and others,’ london journal, march. online, available: http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/londonjournal/march2004/skilton.html [accessed 4 november 2011]. sobocinska, a. 2010a, personal engagements: australian travel to asia 1941–2009, phd thesis, department of history, university of sydney. _____ 2010b, ‘the language of scars: australian prisoners of war and the colonial order,’ history australia, vol. 7, no. 3: 59.1–59.20. _____ 2011, ‘innocence lost and paradise regained: bali and australia’s place in the world,’ history australia, vol. 8, no. 2: 199–222. sommerlad, e. c. 1939, circular letters, sommerlad family papers, 1857–1992. ml mss 6012/3–4. soul, g. 1899, journals of gertrude a. soul. soul family papers, 1856–1972. ml mss 6197. soul, w. h. 1899, journal of a trip to europe and america leaving sydney 29th march, 1899—and returning to the same place january, 1900, soul family papers, 1856–1972. ml mss 6197. spielvogel, n. 1907, a gumsucker on the tramp, 4th edition. g. robertson, melbourne. _____ 1914, the gumsucker at home. g. robertson, melbourne. street, lady b. 1929, letters from sir philip and lady street to ernest and norah street, street family papers. ml mss 1933. street, sir p. 1929, letters from sir philip and lady street to ernest and norah street, street family papers. ml mss 1933. symons, m. 1982, one continuous picnic: a history of eating in australia. duck press, adelaide. taylor, g. a. 1918, ‘those were the days’: being reminiscences of australian artists and writers. tyrrell’s, sydney. trinca, m. 2009, ‘part of the pageant: australian tourists in london,’ in australians in britain: the twentieth century experience, (eds) c. bridge, r. crawford & d. dunstan. monash e-press, melbourne. online, 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& s. bryan, proceedings of the 15th symposium of australian gastronomy 2007, hobart: 28–35. williams, r. 1961, the long revolution. chatto & windus, london. woollacott, a. 2001, to try her fortune in london: australian women, colonialism and modernity. oxford university press, oxford. young, d. 1996, making crime pay: the evolution of convict tourism in tasmania. tasmanian historical research association, hobart. “writing past the wall”: chen ran’s a private life, tiananmen square and the aftermath of trauma portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal writing beyond the wall: translation, cross-cultural exchange and chen ran’s a private life kay schaffer, university of adelaide xianlin song, university of adelaide translation need not guarantee the reciprocity of meaning between languages. rather, it presents a reciprocal wager, a desire for meaning as value and a desire to speak across, even under least favourable conditions. (liu 1999b, 34) the past decade has witnessed an unprecedented rise in the global flow of knowledge, nowhere more apparent than in the exchange of ideas between china and modern western democracies. since the late 1970s, when deng xiaoping introduced the open door policy, china has experienced an influx of western ideas that have been instrumental in the country’s emergence on the global stage. at the same time, china’s increasing economic and political dominance has spurred a growing interest in modern chinese culture in the rest of the world, including a desire to know more about chinese philosophical traditions and cultural practices. our interest concerns one aspect of this global flow—the translation of chinese women’s autobiographical writing into english. this recent phenomenon has many benefits for chinese and english-speaking readers; it: enables access to the ways western concepts like individualism, feminism, modernism, democracy, etc. have impacted upon chinese women’s lives and texts; facilitates an exchange of feminist theories and critiques between chinese and englishspeaking audiences; allows aspects of chinese culture censored ‘at home’ to be aired in foreign arenas; and makes possible the expression and an awareness of indigenous chinese feminism for english-speaking readers. access to this body of writing raises many decisions concerning cultural translation, among them: whose stories are told and translated, what themes are deemed relevant by western publishers, how the books are marketed to western audiences, how the texts are schaffer, song writing beyond the wall received and interpreted once they begin to circulate in economic, ideological and cultural fields distant from their point of origin. in her extensive work on translingual practice, lydia liu (1995) refers to this as a problem of translation between ‘guest’ and ‘host’ languages.1 liu is interested not only in linguistic aspects, but also cultural ones of exchange, including the background of unequal power relations between ‘guest’ and ‘host’ languages, the universalising processes of modernity, as well as problems of difference and incommensurability that affect the reception of chinese texts in the english speaking world. she defines translingual practice as ‘the process by which new words, meanings, discourses, and modes of representation arise, circulate, acquire legitimacy within the host language due to, or in spite of the latter’s contact / collision with the guest language’ (liu 1995, 26). liu’s concern is that the translation of chinese concepts derived from the chinese guest language when translated into the english host language inevitably entails a loss of ambiguity, difference, and incommensurability. the act of translation itself becomes a site of struggle where meanings are negotiated, often on an unequal terrain where the power structures within the context of the host language can control, manipulate and dominate the processes of translation, dissemination and reception of the guest text. while this paper acknowledges liu’s insistence on the asymmetrical power dynamics involved in the translation process, it also recognises other possibilities for the expression of alternative chinese values and beliefs disallowed at home that the process of translation permits. keeping these concerns in mind, this paper explores the process of translation asking what is lost when translators excise sections of the original text in order to make the translation more compatible with the knowledge, capacity and desires of an imagined host readership. in addition, we consider the additive potential of the host text. it is sometimes the case that the translation can make certain veiled references, metaphors and textual ambiguities more explicit. sometimes this decision might be attributed to pragmatic, market-driven motivations, at other times it might arise from more complex political, historical, and cultural considerations. these negotiations of meaning that 1 lydia liu coined the terms ‘host’ and ‘guest’ languages rather than target and original languages, which are commonly used in translation circles. in so doing she registers an unequal dichotomy between the language of reception and the originating language and implies an imbalance of power inherent to the translation process itself. liu maintains that in the chinese cultural context, the ‘host’ language carries more weight, in that it is more likely to address the aesthetic standards and cultural expectations of the potential readers (1995, 26-27). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall occur in the translation process can reverberate on the critical reception of texts in both host and originating domains with open-ended, incomplete and indeterminate effects. the english translation of chen ran’s a private life provides an ideal point of departure from which to explore these issues. to illustrate the complexities, this paper attends to a short passage of three scant paragraphs that appear in the chinese edition in a critical chapter about two-thirds of the way into the text. these paragraphs reference (implicitly in the chinese version, explicitly in the english translation) the tiananmen square massacre in 1989, an event denied by the chinese authorities and censored from public discussion. in the english translation this section differs in significant ways from the original chinese text. the english translation eliminates the rhetorical device of a parenthetical break in the narrative and cuts or relocates several paragraphs from the original chinese version. these alterations may seem slight at first glance. but they substantially change the substance of the original text in ways that both enhance and limit its radical potential. through an examination of the differences between the chinese and english editions, the paper argues that the chinese edition offers readers a more radical text, both (a)politically and philosophically, than the english translation which, while being more overtly politicized, fails to convey the multiple registers of meaning contained within and available to readers of the chinese edition. nonetheless, the english translation also offers additive features in an economy of what liu refers to as ‘meaning-value’ (1999a, 2), in the transcultural exchange.2 chen ran chen ran is one of china’s foremost avant-garde writers. her short stories began to appear in literary journals in the 1980s, grounding a reputation for serious philosophical investigations, particularly those concerning women’s changing roles and identities. a film, yesterday’s wine, adapted from her novella, ‘a toast to the past’ (yu wangshi ganbei) premiered at the fourth international women’s congress held in beijing in 1995, bringing her work to the attention of an international feminist community. her semi-autobiographical novel a private life, first published in 1996, has never been out 2 in the introduction to tokens of exchange, liu writes that her study ‘is centrally concerned with the production and circulation of meaning as value across the realms of language, law, history, religion, media, and pedagogy, and, in particular, with significant moments of translation of meaning-value from language to language and culture to culture’ [ital in original] (2). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall of print in china. in 2004, an english translation appeared, and a new, richly illustrated edition, including the artwork o shen ling, was released in china. f chen is especially appealing to western feminist readers, as john howard-gibbon, the english translator, points out in his note that introduces the english edition. he describes chen as ‘a unique and important female voice…[whose] unique and personal postmodern feminist story has created a different and very challenging image of women within chinese literature of the 1990s’(2004, xii, xiii). her writing is particularly interesting to western feminist readers because it offers an insistent critique of patriarchal relations in china that follows in the disrupted tradition of the protofeminist writings of the 1920s and 30s, lost during the cultural revolution but reintroduced to a contemporary readership.3 her work is also linked to psychoanalysis and french feminist strands of western feminism, variously read, adapted, appropriated, construed and misconstrued by writers and critics as representative of a ‘“translated” modernity’ in china (liu 1995, 28; see also zheng yi 2004, 53). in her unique fusion of western and chinese influences, the themes and style of chen’s work not only challenge the perceived histories and mythologies of the state, but also provide readers with ‘a genuinely alternative feminist aesthetics’ (zheng, 2004, 53). her work, as zheng notes, contributes to the chinese feminist landscape ‘a writing of alterity, an attempt at aesthetic otherness, against both the inherited but still dominant male-centered literary standards and the all-consuming post-socialist cultural market, which constitutes much of this alterity’s critical and commercial misconception’ (62-3). the translation a private life into english provides an opportunity for new critical conceptions of chen and chinese feminism beyond the parameters of the chinese state. 3 the nature, influence and heritage of the proto-feminist writers of the 1920s and 30s on contemporary chinese women writers are a matter of critical debate. while their critiques are far more complex than a footnote can allow, toni barlow describes the relationship in terms of a ‘discontinuous engagement’ (2004, 9) while amy dooling traces ‘startling continuities’ (2005, 2). wang lingzhen treats the writing as related but specific to the different politics and historical contingencies of the times (2004, 123), while zheng yi finds a heritage marked by different vertical and horizontal relations between early and late twentieth century female writers (2004, 48). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall a private life a private life introduces reader to an intensely introspective protagonist, ni niuniu, in a present temporality, as solitary figure suffering undefined pain and loss, existing in a state of ‘emptiness, estrangement, separation, and longing’ (chen ran 2004, 6) in an unspecified ‘old city’ (2) apartment. 4 the poetic and introspective dialogue of this opening sequence segues into a bildungsroman that details ni’s early history, childhood and adolescence in a time frame that includes the cultural revolution (1966-76) and the tiananmen square ‘incident’ of 1989. chen’s complex, multilayered narrative of childhood and adolescence, remembered as ‘the little disconnected fragments of my past life’ (33), juxtaposes an inner turmoil with an external life narratively marked and structured by death—including that of the protagonist’s mother, neighbour, close friend and boyfriend. this melancholic text builds to a climatic scene in which the young narrator, for no ‘discernable reason at all…[is] struck by a stray bullet from somewhere’ (130). in the denouement the character of ni niuniu finds respite through the creative act of writing that rescues her from what she experiences as a dissolution of selfhood. unlike the original, the english edition of a private life attaches the narrator’s initial condition of solitude and fragmented subjectivity to the tiananmen square incident of 1989. this framing begins with the dust jacket description of the novel as a ‘riveting tale of a young woman’s emotional and sexual awakening . . . [that is] set in the turbulent decades of the cultural revolution and t tian’anmen square incident . . .[and] exposes the comp and fantastical inner life of a young woman growing u during a time of intense social and political upheaval.’ this paratextual introduction, repeated in the ‘translator’s note’ (howard-gibbon, xii), immediately cues the reade to anticipate a tale of political intrigue that climaxes with the tiananmen mas this framework emphasizes the political and thus mutes the philosophical undercurrents and stylistic aesthetic experimentation that characterises chen’s work, he lex p r sacre. 4 all quotations are derived from the english version unless otherwise indicated. they have been checked against the hong kong chinese (1998) and beijing (2004) versions and, unless otherwise indicated, convey an approximately comparable sense of meaning. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall although the translator anticipates for the reader a narrative that includes ‘a great number of seemingly disconnected interior monologues, fragmentary recollect reveries that flit back and forth through time and space’ (xii). at the same time, the introductory elements frame the novel through a western aesthetic of individualism, interiority, split-subjectivity, political resistance, and liberation through sexuality, typical of feminist coming-of-age stories in the west in the late twentieth century. thus the host language readership gains access to a multivocal narrative through a west political framework that voices what is silenced in the original text, but also, in so doing, diminishes other radical, philosophical registers of the original. ions, and ern the chinese language editions adhere to the government’s strict prohibitions against specific mention of the tiananmen square ‘incident.’ 5 they make no overt political critique. perhaps to manoeuvre herself through the web of political censorship,6 large portions of chen’s chinese version allude to tiananmen square without actually or overtly mentioning ‘tiananmen’, the democracy movement, the student protests, or the massacre. instead, references are made to ‘the square’ where ‘the significant event’ occurred; the student protests of may and june that ended tragically in the massacre on 4 june 1989 are referred to as ‘that tragic period’ in ‘early summer’ that changed the protagonist’s life. chen admits, however, in an interview with huang lin, that the external event of ‘tian’anmen’ constitutes the background for this personal reverie.7 in the text the narrator explains: ‘the reason my focus persistently returns to the bits and pieces of the past is that they are not dead pages from history; they are living links that connect me to my ever-unfolding present’(73). the publisher’s dust jacket and ‘translator’s note’ of the english edition explicitly frame the narrative against the 5 the chinese government calls what happened on 4 june, 1989, when armoured troops were sent in to clear tiananmen square and quell the student demonstrations, an ‘incident’. the government has never acknowledged a massacre, claiming that only 23 people lost their lives during the ‘anti-revolutionary riot’. western scholars, however, estimate that somewhere between 300 and 2700 people were killed and tens of thousands were injured (buruma 2001, 5). 6 with the liberalization of the 1990s writers in china enjoyed more freedom to experiment with new forms of poetic expression, as long as they avoided any direct criticism of the government or its policies. critics are divided as to the ‘radical’ nature of contemporary literature and art. some scholars argue that the state coopts artists and pacifies dangerous cultural forms while others hold that the new freedoms allow for a politics of resistance. nonetheless, chen is a rare writer who has dared to challenge the ban on tiananmen. for a discussion of these issues including reference to post-tiananmen narratives by diasporic writers, see schaffer and smith 2004, 187-222. 7 huang lin, the editor of feminism in china, interviewed chen ran during the spring festival of 2001. she provided us with a copy of the interview in april 2005. a portion of this interview was published in 2002 as ‘wenben neiwai’ [interview with chen ran] in wenxue, yishu yu xingbie [literature, arts and gender],eds li xiaojiang, et. al.) jiangsu renmin chubanshe, nanjing, 91-102. the section we quote remains unpublished. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall backdrop of tiananmen square and the summer of 1989. these paratextual elements guide readers to interpret the work as a reflection on the politically infused, posttraumatic after-effects of the massacre. the insertion of specific references to ‘tiananmen’ in the english edition of a private life, whether driven by market forces or more nuanced cultural considerations, effectively alters the text as a cultural o and its potential modes of circulation, reception and interpretation. bject chinese and english versions compared in both the chinese and english versions no overt reference is made to ‘the tragic summer’ until chapter 15 (of 21 in total), the beginning of the protagonist’s ‘tragic period.’ it is here (and in the next three chapters) that the text becomes most explicitly political, or rather where the political is enfolded into the personal. chapter 15, entitled ‘endless days’, opens with the tiananmen incident. written in fragmented prose that frequently shifts between different temporalities, points of view, generic codes and conventions, it textually reproduces some of the repetitive experiential features of deep traumatic memory, replaying remembered images and sounds of a tragic moment as if the event were an enduring condition of life. this section in the english translation of 2004 differs most dramatically from the chinese versions. in the chinese versions chapter 15 opens with a descriptive passage of three paragraphs in which the protagonist describes an incident that happened to her during her third year of university when she was hit by a stray bullet. this narrative ends abruptly and is followed by three further paragraphs that are separated from the main text by a parenthesis. it is the parenthesis and the text within it that concerns us here. in deploying the parenthetical device chen signals a discursive and temporal gap within the text itself. none of the parenthetical material from the chinese version appears in the english edition in this place, although some of the content is relocated elsewhere in the chapter. these changes to the english edition may seem insignificant and could be explained simply because of the difficulty of translating the rhetorically challenging material or out of a desire to create a more linear narrative. the three paragraphs enclosed within portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall the parenthesis do not ‘make sense’ in english. they cannot be rendered logically through the english language. in addition, these three paragraphs, contained in the parenthesis in the original, break the flow of the preceding narrative and mark a shift in the text’s generic codes. they challenge the reader in their conflation of the voices of the protagonist / narrator and the presumed author. in addition they confuse point of view and ask to be read not experientially, as the protagonist ni niuniu’s introspective reverie, but as the author’s critical commentary on the writing process itself.8 in the english version, the opening passage of chapter 15 (that describes the narrator’s wounding from a stray bullet) is followed by a progressive, linear description of what happened after the summer of 1989: the heroine’s difficult university years, her meeting with her lover, yin nan, a political dissident whose skeletal figure suggests his involvement in a hunger strike, his exile to berlin, and her repressed memories of a tragedy that she sublimates into poetry and romance. in the chinese versions, however, the parenthetical commentary interrupts this narrative sequence, fracturing the linear textual flow.9 in the parenthetical material chen ran adopts a direct authorial address to the audience, expressing a personal reluctance to speak out against ‘the recent trauma’ in a complex and carefully deliberated choice of words. this section, literally enfolded within the text through the use of parentheses, gives some evidence of the ironic and polyvocal tenor of the text. in what follows we translate the three parenthetical paragraphs missing from the english edition and examine each paragraph in some detail. our analysis is intended to allow english readers greater access to several stylistic, political and philosophical elements present in chen’s original text, including: 1) the fusion of western concepts and philosophical perspectives with indigenous chinese myth and traditions; 2) the elliptical nature of chen’s references to sensitive issues or tabooed topics in china; and 3) the radical deconstructive playfulness of the text. the first parenthetical paragraph of the chinese version opens with a self-deprecating passage that makes reference to the significant event in the summer of 1989 and the 8 zheng yi describes this conflation between the voices of the narrator and the author as a common technique of contemporary chinese women’s writing. in a passage that reflects upon lin bai’s writing as compared with chen ran, she notes a sceptical point of view that entails ‘the overlapping of multiple relational points of view manifested often, for example, in the frequent switch between the narrative role and voice of the first-person narrator, the heroine of the story, and the author’ (zheng 54). 9 the three paragraphs that follow have been translated by song xianlin and are taken from the hong kong chinese version, 1998, 155-156. a facsimile reproduction of the paragraphs is included here as an appendix. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall possible ‘fallacy’ of the author’s judgements. this opening gambit is overlayed by ‘fate’and underscored by a detour through the predictions of nostradamus, attached to the author’s millennial fears of world collapse. composed perhaps ten years before the 2004 english edition,10 and written to enfold the voice of the author into that of the protagonist, it translates as follows: with regard to this significant event, i think i should deliberate until 1999 before expressing my ‘fallacy’; that is, if the apocalyptic prophesy of nostradamus fails to materialize and this world still exists by then. now it is still too early, i am still too close to it. it remains a heap of shapeless memories. just like a huge wave formed on top of an abyss, you must wait till the two clashing currents disperse towards their opposing sides, and the surging white wave subsides. only then we will be able to rediscover the place of the abyss. in addition, if my pen ventures to dwell upon this space, i fear that my purely descriptive narrative could be falsely read as ‘the story of a heroine’. that would be a most absurd result, because i understand that political storms, like love, can sometimes make people blindly embark on a passionate, insatiable pursuit. i have the right to determine when my life ‘begins’, and where it ‘ends’ (chinese version, 155). there are many confounding elements in this paragraph. chen appears to drop the persona of niuniu and represents the ‘i’ in the voice of the author of the narrative. the text stops short of commenting directly on ‘the significant event,’ but allows it to be registered through its effects: the shapeless, fragmented memories which clash and collide, like waves above an abyss, gesturing towards an (im)possible future of recovery. chen signals a fragmentation of subjectivity and also implicates her audience in a space of post-traumatic transition through the shift of pronouns from ‘i’ to ‘you’ to ‘we’. here, the text mimes something akin to the fluidity of irigarayan feminine sex/textuality (registered in her famous essay ‘this sex which is not one,’) within a narrative catachresis containing both temporal and spatial elements. then, after alluding to the remembered event and the narrative through a spatial metaphor of an abyss [‘if my pen ventures to dwell upon this space’], chen, in the voice of the author, describes the text under construction (the one the reader has before her), as a ‘purely descriptive narrative’. a psychoanalytical reading might interpret this textual manoeuvre as a symptom of deep traumatic memory that is under erasure. in the chinese vernacular this move could be read as the author distancing herself from any political intentionality, even as she calls attention to it. in this passage chen sets up a binary that opposes her ‘purely descriptive narrative’ to what it is not: ‘the story of a heroine’. in chinese language the phrase ‘story of a heroine’ would be understood to 10 a hint of when this passage was written appears in the english version quite late in the text. in the penultimate chapter, niuniu, the heroine, whose voice has been conflated with that of chen, the author, relates that she was thinking about the nostradamus prophecy of millennial apocalypse in 1992 (200). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall refer to the traditional notion of a heroine who stands up for truth, freedom and justice. we read chen’s purpose here, as elsewhere in the text, as being ironic as she disassociates herself from the ‘heroic’ leaders (i.e. of the tiananmen square movement).11 while expressing sentiments that might appear to be consonant with the ideals of the student protest movement, and certainly ones that left the author / narrator traumatized by its tragic outcomes, chen’s text focuses not on the political event so much as on a deconstructive feminine consciousness emanating from it. adopting a position of radical alterity in the text, chen contains and disengages, while it claims to exceed, the political. 12 through the images of clashing currents and surging waves over a hidden abyss chen makes poetic reference to a political turmoil but contains it within introspective memory underscored by the rhythms and impulses of feminine writing that can be attributed differently to chen ran, the writer, and ni niuniu, the heroine. the last two complex sentences of the paragraph translated above are altered and appear in another place in the english translation. in the 2004 english edition the whole paragraph is reduced to a simple temporal logic attributed to niuniu that reads as follows: in my mind, political events remain a heap of overblown, amorphous memories. they are very much like huge waves that meet over great depths. you have to wait until the opposing currents are finally absorbed into each other, until the frothing peaks finally subside, before you can again discern the depths. much as it is with love, political instability can encourage the pursuit of blind passions, but as with love, i have a right to choose when i want to be involved and when i want to break it off (english edition, 132). this translation evades the complexity of the original text, translating it into a banal instance of individual free choice. it avoids the double narrative of chen as author and niuniu as narrator; sublates imaginary fantasies into the logic of the symbolic; represents the ideas as those of niuniu, removing the doubling of subjectivities and the textual ambivalence of the passage. the english translation adopts metaphors of linear progress (wait till opposing currents subside), vision and clarity (discern the depths), and reason (in a binary division that juxtaposes the logic of politics to the ‘blind passions’ of love). it contains none of the imaginary pulsations of turmoil (clashing currents . . . surging waves), spatial metaphors of the void (the place of origin with the [m]other), multiple subject positions (i, you, we), and references to imaginary lack (the 11 in another place she writes: ‘i was both enveloped in this atmosphere and apart from it. that night of flames had not yet released me’ (171) 12 for more detailed discussions of chen’s deconstructive stylistics and stance of alterity / disengagement see zheng (2004) and schaffer and song (2006). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall patriarchal abyss) present in the chinese version, and indicative of chen’s stance of radical feminine alterity. the english translation rationalizes the political events and relegates them to personal passions, disconnected from the author, or from issues of writing. it simply grants agency to niuniu’s character and her choice of involvements. in this instance, the translation process involves a dilution and reduction of the textual ambiguities and the cultural incommensurabilities of the originating text, an issue of transcultural practice highlighted in the work of lydia liu (1995, 26). it also reduces chen’s double-voiced and insistently chinese text of feminine alterity in a posttiananmen era to a western-styled political allegory.13 the english version also rectifies the slippage between temporal and spatial metaphors. chen’s odd construction of the last sentence from the chinese version: ‘i have the right to determine when my life “begins”, and where it “ends”’ (chinese version, 155; italics added) requires an ungrammatical translation in english. the translator chooses to rectify this problem with his translation: ‘i have a right to choose when i want to be involved and when i want to break it off’ (english version, 132). but in removing the ambivalence, the english version also elides the narrative complexity of chen’s statement and reduces the double voice of author/narrator to that of the narrator alone. the ‘i’ in the chinese version refers to both the author and to the life of a character temporally and spatially created in and through the narrative of a private life. that is, chen, through her writing, can determine ‘when my [author/niuniu—conflating author with protagonist and granting niuniu authorial agency] life begins, and where it ends.’ chen, as the reputed author, can decide what aspects of ‘that tragic period’ to leave in and which to omit. she can craft the spatial and temporal dimensions of the text. the original version creates a confusion that allows the author to escape possible political incrimination by the censors by attributing agency to the indeterminate ‘i’ of the narrator, the ‘i’ as an indefinite signifier, a sign under erasure. these subtle layerings 13 a discussion of the implications of this change exceeds the boundaries of this paper. zheng yi provides some direction here, offering a complex and perceptive analysis of ‘the creative possibilities’ of alterity in chen’s a private life. she argues that chen’s writing evades the ‘doctrinal dichotomy’ between ‘the personal’, (e.g. small/ lesser) as rendered through an introspective ‘personal’ narrative, and social or historical perspectives, (e.g. large/ national and collective) as rendered through ‘serious’ literature. she insists that chen’s ‘personal’ writing is ‘anti-allegorical’, continuing: ‘the allegory chen refuses to write or allow her heroines to participate in is the all-embracing national collective’ (59). in general we are in sympathy with zheng’s argument and her insistent claim that ‘chen is trying desperately but stubbornly to create a place for alterity for marginal beings . . . that cannot be subsumed into the national allegory’ (60). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 11 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall are missing from what becomes the agentic voice of niuniu in the english translation. it could be argued that chen’s playful subterfuge would almost certainly be lost on english readers. further, the textual complexity, partially in deference to political sensitivities, would be unnecessary in the host language contexts of the text’s reception. but the english translation, in removing or altering the nuanced meanings of the text in this instance, also loses the important multiplication of voices, the poststructural feminine positioning of alterity, and deconstructive elements of the original as well. the second paragraph that appears within the parenthetical space of the original chinese version but not the english translation continues the double narrative. importantly, it evokes the poetically charged and symbolically powerful image of ‘a collapsed wall’: at the moment, i continue to lean against a collapsed wall. i don’t have the strength in my chest to constantly shout. my voice, like a statue shattered into pieces, still has not regained its mature and deep timbre. for the time being, let’s take that wall as a gigantic backdrop—the ‘scenery of a broken wall’ in the distance. we will move towards it. history will be carved there, on the wall, as a kind of ‘immortality’ (chinese edition, 155). chinese readers would, no doubt, immediately register the cultural symbolics of a silenced woman leaning against a collapsed wall. the great wall, in all its connotations, constitutes the larger historical backdrop against which chinese history, legend and tradition are measured. chen, here, writing in the early to mid-1990s, refers obliquely to a wall, one on which chinese history has been and is still to be carved. the narrator, now silenced but attempting to regain her voice after suffering great trauma, imagines a time in the future, the future anterior, the yet-to-come.14 in this passage chen writes a promissory note to the future growing out of events in the present in ways that strongly invoke the past. and, the chinese text promises: ‘we will move towards it’ (155, italics added). 14 these phrases invoke concepts derived from lacanian psychoanalysis and derridian deconstruction. lacan’s concept of the future anterior refers to a symptomology and a process of recovery within language in which trauma from the past can be reconfigured from the vantage point of the present that anticipates the promise of a future in which liberation is possible. derrida’s phrase the ‘yet-to-come’ refers to a haunting from the past—what no longer is; (and) what is not yet. the present then can be understood as a place of a double enunciation, one conjoined in two directions of absence—towards the unrecognised past and the unknowable future. see lacan (1988) and derrida (1994). our invocation of these concepts is consonant with the philosophical and psychoanalytic inclinations of chen ran, as discussed in zheng (2004), and several contributors to the critical anthology, criticisms of the 1990s (chen shihe and yang yang, eds., 2001) among others. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall for chinese readers, the silence of the wounded female protagonist, which nonetheless portends changes to come, might well conjure up a third intertextual voice, that contained within the famous legend of meng jiangnu. this ancient legend concerns the building of the great wall under qin shihuang, over 2000 years ago. according to the well-known legend, meng jiangnu’s husband was conscripted by qin shihuang (the first emperor of the qin) on the night of their wedding to build the wall. hearing nothing from him for five years, meng jiangnu suffered bad dreams and embarked on a journey to look for him. arriving at the wall, she learned that he had died from his enforced backbreaking labour and had been buried beneath the wall. she began to wail for his loss, crying for endless days and nights until her tears caused the wall to fall, revealing the skeletal bones of her beloved. among other elements, the legend demonstrates that the yin power of the woman, often considered weak and inconsequential, can sometimes overcome the yang power of the emperor. the cry of one lone female brings down the almighty wall. although chen ran makes no overt reference to the legend of meng jiangnu, her evocation of a collapsed wall on which history will be written both echoes back to the legend and points forward in relation to events of the recent past. specifically, the protagonist of a private live struggles to come to terms with a personal trauma, a wounding by a stray bullet, and the loss of her skeletally-thin student protestor boyfriend, yin nan, in a narrative set against the backdrop of an unspecified historical event. with the government’s silencing of the tiananmen protest, her voice is like that of ‘a statue shattered into pieces.’ she has lost her ability to wail. this simile for the narrator voice could also refer to the shattered statue of the goddess of democracy, erected in tiananmen square by the student protestors and demolished by the state, a symbolic act that marked the end of the democratic movement. chen references both the legend of meng jiangnu and the fallen goddess of democracy, whose fates are intertextually linked to the struggles of the protagonist, to underscore the capacity of apolitical elements of chinese culture, signified in the feminie, to confront the forces of history. this embeds a specifically chinese feminist critique of patriarchal relations, while also gesturing towards not a renewed engagement with history but a strategic withdrawal into a philosophical stance of alterity. these nuances, however, are lost in the english edition. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 13 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall readers familiar with cixous might also register the rhythms, forms, and substance of chen’s prose as consonant with cixous’ explorations of écriture féminine, and specifically her essays in coming to writing (1991). there she deploys the metaphor of breaking down walls in order to challenge masculine prerogatives, unities and logics. one of cixous’ passions is to ‘break down’ the wall, ‘daring to throw off the constraints, inner and outer’ (suleman 1991, ix). in the flow of her writing, in her dissolution of generic boundaries, in her philosophical deconstruction and critiques of masculine political and libidinal economies, cixous ‘breaks down’ walls of many kinds. chen ran’s writing shares affinities with cixous’ écriture féminine, in which knowledge hierarchies that divide political from private life, inner from outer worlds, theory from experience and history from time dissolve.15 as the paragraphs lost to the english edition indicate, chen’s text challenges self/other binaries and severs the boundaries between narrator and protagonist, the writer and her subjects, time past and time present. the third and final paragraph under consideration is not missing in the english edition but the content appears elsewhere in the book. in the chinese original it appears immediately after the aforementioned paragraphs. it is here that the author, in an unusual move, challenges the nature of political life in china: i used the word ‘innocent’ earlier because i am a person who is inherently weary of/bored with participating in any activity that is related to politics. the reason why i detest politics is because it very often stands in contradiction to the word ‘honesty’, a word i have loved all my life. when i was a student, all my exam results for courses in politics were extremely bad. once, perhaps during my second year at the university, there was a question on a political exam: ‘ do you ardently love politics?’ i replied, ‘not unless i am allowed to lie’. as a result, the leaders of the university16 subjected me to a protracted lecture. (chinese version, 155-56) in this paragraph chen represents herself to the reader as speaking through the direct voice of the author and expresses a disdain for ‘politics’, which she juxtaposes with ‘honesty’. it is ironic that chen attempts to distance herself from politics at the same time as she makes an overtly political statement. in the english translation, this irony 15 cixous was one of the first french feminists to be translated into chinese. a number of critics have traced her influence on contemporary women writers, including that of chen. subsequent to the publication of the critical anthology criticism of the 1990s some feminist critics have argued that cixous has been misunderstood, and therefore some (male) interpretations of her influence on chen’s writing also suffers from misinterpretation (zheng yi 2004, 53-55), a perspective shared by the author herself (huang lin, interview, 2001). 16 the ‘leaders of the university’ are not academics, per se, but members of the chinese communist party who oversee the political life of the students. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 14 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall disappears. the translator changes this double-voiced passage to a recollection by the narrator ni niuniu alone. in both the chinese and english versions of the larger narrative readers can detect chen’s disdain for politics transposed into other thematic and symbolic dimensions of the narrative. the erotic drive that underlies this transposition relates to the narrative strand that traces the trajectory of the passionate love affair between niuniu and the political dissident, yin nan. at the outset, the relationship is rendered in idealised and loving terms. at one point, however, the narrator expresses another dimension of the relationship—a ‘desire to be his prisoner’ (145). the epigraph to the chapter reads as follows: with his eyebrows and his fingers, he attacked me. he was the house i built out of my fantasies. (130) here, the text engages readers in a sado-masochistic reading of ‘love’ that defines an erotic pull of desire that is as compelling as it is destructive.17 chen delivers an attack on women’s desires and imaginary relations forged within patriarchy. those desires can only lead to loss and lack within a masculine economy of desire. the trajectory of heterosexual love, like the political commitments of students at the square, ends in failure and personal disillusionment. niuniu absorbs the masculine force of desire within herself and returns, with longing, to the apartment of her friend, widow ho, with whom she has formed an intense, eroticised bond, just before terror engulfs the city and a conflagration in ho’s apartment leads to the widow’s death.18 the english version, although attempting in other places to reproduce some of the complex stylistic features of the original chinese text, maintains a more modernist politics, divorced from other feminist, aesthetic, psychoanalytic or philosophical registers. even so, the english translation carries a high political charge, but one that contains less reference to 17 to some degree chen ran’s critique echoes the criticism of women’s powerlessness in traditional society that has been made by other proto-feminist writers since at least the may 4th movement. dooling discusses this dimension of women’s writing in regard to bai wei and her conviction that sexual and romantic love entraps women who then become complicit within the structures of power that alienate them. for bai wei, as for chen, romantic love entails emotional and physical bondage rather than personal liberation (134-135). chen’s more radical philosophic position, however, avoids the essentialist reduction to ‘the final certainty of the body’ that may have characterised feminist writing of the earlier period (zheng 52). 18 this passage echoes and defers to the earlier shanghai writers of the 1920s and 1930s. it also resonates with irigaray’s more recent feminist critique of nietzsche (1982, 1991) where irigaray takes nietzsche to task for his elemental subjection of the feminine in his writings. she develops a theory of fluid feminine subjectivity connected to repressed elemental aspects of feminine embodiment, attached to the elemental forces in nature, divorced from masculine imperatives and idealisations. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 15 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall chinese myth, history and traditions and avoids the rhetorical playfulness, the multiple points of view and the deconstructive tendencies of the chinese original. chen’s original chinese narrative, infused with philosophic musings and psychic states of melancholy, gives chinese readers access to the censored tiananmen square event through other registers beyond the political, as defined by the government. chen reflects on the political incident and transforms its significance into a philosophical stance, what zheng characterises as a ‘poetics of vision’ (53), a ‘writing against death’ (61) that exceeds both the personal and the political and offers a uniquely contemporary chinese meditation on gendered positionalities in post-tiananmen china. stylistically, chen adapts a feminine deconstructive stance, aligned to the supposedly weak and insignificant yin force, to address the wall of chinese history, to sublate yang authority from the position of an outsider who nonetheless carries the scars of that ‘stray bullet.’19 like meng jiangnu’s tears of lament for the loss of her bridegroom to the emperor, chen carves her words onto the wall of history. she does so with reference to chinese history, culture, mythology and contemporary events—infused with reference to eurocentric discourses from philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and deconstruction and transformed by her own poetic vision and embeddedness within but distanced from the currents of contemporary chinese culture. of course, chen’s complex stance and vision would be better conveyed in the chinese editions of the text. the english version, directed towards a western-oriented, feminist and politicised audience, lacks the subtle complexities of the chinese narrative. although in many ways respectful of the textual challenges of the original, it nonetheless reduces the stylistic complexities and presents the narrative within the theoretical constraints of western modernism, respectful of the binary divisions between logic and passion, personal and social life, political and philosophical commentary. conclusion at the beginning of this paper, we signalled our interest in the translation of chen ran’s a private life in relation to chinese women’s life writing. underlying our analysis is a concern with how translation might affect a number of information flows, including the global flow of feminist theories and critiques; the cross-cultural exchange 19 we address these dimensions of the text in our article ‘narrative, trauma and memory: chen ran's a private life, tiananmen square and female embodiment’ (schaffer and song, 2006). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 16 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall between western and chinese feminisms; and an awareness in english and modern european contexts of an indigenous chinese feminism as it emerges on the global stage. this study of the english translation of a private life has provided an opportunity to reflect on these overlapping processes of exchange as well as issues of meaning-value in relation to one particular instance of translingual practice. the translation of a chinese text into english, like a private life, involves many acts of negotiation—some pragmatic and market-driven, others involving the meaningvalue of the text as it circulates within different political, historical and cultural domains. as we signal, citing liu, in the opening epigraph, ‘translation need not guarantee the reciprocity of meaning between languages.’ these acts of translation entail a ‘reciprocal wager’ between guest and host languages and within different contexts of reception (1999b, 34). this paper refers to only one dimension of the translation process where a negotiation of meaning occurs—namely the omission of a brief parenthetical section of three paragraphs from one chapter of the chinese edition of a private life. yet, even that small emendation changes the original text as a cultural object and alters the potential modes of its reception in the host language. translation from the guest to the host language can result in a loss of ambiguity, difference and incommensurability, as we demonstrate in regard to the stylistic alterations to the three paragraphs under review. in a different context of reception, however, the translation process can offer additive potentials that enhance the generation of new meanings in the translingual exchange, here with reference to aspects of recent chinese history that remain censored within china and to critical readings of chen’s radical poetics of vision, both of which can perhaps be best registered in cultural and feminist contexts beyond china’s borders. in this case, the english translation may limit access to some of chen’s more deconstructive techniques while also offering new interpretative frameworks for the narrative as received in globalised contexts of reception. the english edition of a private life joins a growing canon of post-tiananmen texts, mainly by diasporic chinese women writers, that build an archive of memory.20 the circulation of these 20 schaffer and smith examine several post-tiananmen narratives by diasporic women writers. they argue that these semi-autobiographical texts of rediscovered selfhood ‘transmit an “impossible memory” to another cultural space…speak[ing] to the rupture affected by the massacre, the betrayal of youth, the limits of politics, and the interplay of identity and desire’ (2004, 218) portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 17 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall narratives resists the cultural amnesia demanded by the chinese government and enables a process of recognition and healing from the trauma of tiananmen that is both personal and communal. chen’s text also offers a unique indigenous chinese feminist voice; it prompts new strands of feminist commentary that cannot be reduced to or contained within the parameters of western feminisms. this paper has examined a number of additive possibilities for the reception of translated texts in the lost context. the translation process provides channels for writers to address traumatic memory in multiple ways, for readers in diverse locations to extend diasporic chinese and crosscultural feminist communities, and for readers, writers and theorists within china and beyond its borders to communicate across gaps of difference—despite the inhibiting factors of local prohibitions, the universalising pressures of western modernity, and asymmetrical relations of power between guest and host language contexts. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 18 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall chen ran 2004, a private life [siren shenghuo], beijing, beijing writer’s publishing house, 117-18. this is a facsimile of the three paragraphs as they appear in the 2004 chinese edition. reference list barlow, t. e. 2004, the question of women in chinese feminism, duke university press, durham. buruma, i. 2001, bad elements: chinese rebels from los angeles to beijing, random house, new york. chen ran 2004, a private life, columbia university press, new york; ———1996, siren shenghuo, writers' publishing house [zuojia chubanshe], beijing; ———1998a, siren shenghuo, universal publishing co.,ltd, hong kong; ———1998b, siren shenghuo, maitian co., ltd., taiwan; ———2004, siren shenghuo, revised ed. with colour illustrations by shen ling, beijing writers' publishing house [zuojia chubanshe], beijing. chen shihe and yang yang (eds.) 2001, criticisms of the 1990s, the chinese dictionary press, shanghai. cixous, h. 1991, ‘coming to writing’ and other essays, ed. d. jenson, trans. s. cornell, et al, harvard university press, cambridge. derrida, j. 1994, specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international, routledge, new york. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 19 schaffer, song writing beyond the wall dooling, a. d. 2005, women's literary feminism in twentieth-century china, palgrave macmillan, new york and houndsmills. howard-gibbon, j. 2004, ‘translator’s note,’ a private life, columbia university press, new york, i-xv. irigaray, l. 1982, passions élémentaires, minuit, paris. ——— 1985, this sex which is not one, trans. g. gill, cornell university press, ithaca. ——— 1991, marine lover of friedrich nietzsche, trans. g. gill, columbia university press, new york. lacan, j. 1988 the seminar, book i. freud's papers on technique, 1953-1954, ed. j-a miller ed., j. forrester trans., w.w. norton & co., new york. liu, l. h. 1995, translingual practice: literature, national culture and translated modernity china, 1900-1937, stanford university press, stanford. ——— 1999a, ‘introduction’ in tokens of exchange: the problem of translation in global circulations, ed. l. h. liu, duke university press, durham & london, 112. ——— 1999b, ‘the question of meaning-value in the political economy of the sign’ in tokens of exchange: the problem of translation in global circulations, ed. l. h. liu, duke university press, durham & london, 13-41. schaffer, k. and s. smith 2004, human rights and narrated lives: the ethics of recognition. new york and london, palgrave macmillan. schaffer, k. and song xianlin 2006, ‘narrative, trauma and memory: chen ran's a private life, tiananmen square and female embodiment,’ asian studies review, vol. 30, no. 2 (june), 161-73. suleman, s. 1991, ‘introduction’ in ‘coming to writing’ and other essays, d. jenson ed., harvard university press, cambridge. wang lingzhen 2004, personal matters: women's autobiographical practice in twentieth-century china, stanford university press, stanford. zheng yi 2004, 'personalized writing' and its enthusiastic critic: women and writing of the chinese 'post-new era,' tulsa studies in women's literature, vol. 23, no. 1 (spring), 45-64. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 20 kay schaffer, university of adelaide xianlin song, university of adelaide chen ran chen ran is one of china’s foremost avant-garde writers. her a private life a private life introduces reader to an intensely introspecti chinese and english versions compared challenges and opportunities of globalization and regionalization in the pacific rim out of the blue: the pacific rim as a region arturo santa-cruz, la universidad de guadalajara, méxico in 1993, in advance of what was to be the first asia pacific economic cooperation (apec) leader’s summit, united states president bill clinton gave a lecture at waseda university in japan. in his speech, clinton called for the creation of a “community of the pacific” (ravenhill 2001, 94). the idea of a pacific community is neither clinton’s nor the democratic party’s invention. in the previous decade ronald reagan had already used it, going even beyond clinton’s call, by referring to the 21st century as the pacific’s century (department of state bulletin 84, 18; kohona 1986, 399). but this prophecy concerning the great ocean was not new in the 1980s then either. in 1900 us secretary of state john hay wrote: “the mediterranean is the ocean of the past, the atlantic the ocean of the present and the pacific is the ocean of the future” (mcgee and watters 1997, 4). in a more general manner, as christopher coker has observed, what has made the notion of the “century of the pacific” so plausible is that it is consistent with the idea, popularized by hegel, that the spirit of civilization is moving toward that part of the globe (2003, 33). thus, the century of the pacific has become a kind of zeitgeist. in this paper i undertake a conceptual, historical, and theoretical journey through the “pacific rim” or “asia-pacific,” as it has been called more recently. although i will question the utility of the term, i want to make clear at the outset that i am not belittling the literature that employs it, and nor am i suggesting that the term should be anathema. my purpose is only to undertake a critical survey of “the pacific.” as in any trip, however, one portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 1 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ santa-cruz out of the blue needs a starting point. but what is the starting point of the pacific rim, that geographic zone that arif dirlik (1992, 15) compared to pascal’s sphere: “with periphery indeterminable and a center that may be anywhere”? in this paper i will attempt to provide an answer to this seemingly elusive matter. i. terra firma it would seem that the continental referent of the second term, asia-pacific, could assist in starting our journey. after all, as gerald houseman has suggested, the term “is meaningless in all but a strictly geographic sense,” and it makes more sense when it is “confine[d] to the asian nations that border the pacific and other nearby countries” (1995, ix). nevertheless, a sense of uncertainty besets us: what exactly is being referred by “asia”? moreover, what is the epistemological legitimacy of anchoring a concept on the division of land when, subject to closer scrutiny, the connection appears to be a frayed rope. as geographers martin lewis and karen wigen have pointed out in their now classic the myth of continents, even in the field of geology continental divisions are of minor utility. according to them, “ if continents are simply irrelevant for physical geography, however, they can be positively pernicious when applied to human geography. pigeonholing historical and cultural data into a continental framework fundamentally distorts basic spatial patterns, leading to misapprehensions of cultural and social differentiation” (1997, 36). for lewis and wigen, “nowhere is such misrepresentation more clearly exemplified than in the supposed continental distinction between europe and asia” (34-35). indeed, the continental status of europe is based on such a conceptual scheme, and not on geological evidence of any sort (36). it is not surprising, as lewis and wigen note, that “neither ‘asia-pacific’ nor ‘pacific rim’ has yet joined the roster of geographers’ standard world regions, but both have gained wide currency in journalism and social science research.” there are, of course, good reasons for the geographers’ reticence. lewis and wigen argue that the term “asia-pacific” centers on east and southeast asia, sometimes stretching south to include new zealand and australia, and sometimes reaching as far as the eurasian core of india, and eastern russia. the portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 santa-cruz out of the blue expression “pacific rim,” on the other hand, is an equally plastic concept. theoretically it includes all the landmasses bordering the pacific ocean, but conceptually it is anchored in the united states-japan trade link (204). as richard higgott, richard leaver, and john ravenhill note, “the japanese-us commercial relationship” provides “the very backbone of the pacific economy” (1993, 2). the lack of consensus about the geographic referent of the two terms in question is significant, to cite a few illustrative examples from the international press. the new york times, for example, brings news together under the term “asia pacific,” which refers basically to the countries of east asia, but sometimes extends all the way to afghanistan. for the international herald tribune, the “asia/pacific” [sic] ends in india. no pacific shore country of the americas belongs to asia pacific, according to these two periodicals. in the academic literature, the lack of consensus on what countries to include under the terms “asia pacific” and “pacific rim” is also the norm. for the asia-pacific development journal the region has little to do with the pacific rim. its scope encompasses new zealand, australia, japan, china, and the koreas, all traditional pacific rim countries, but it extends in the less conventional cases, to india and afghanistan, and goes all the way to what is still considered the periphery of europe: turkey. on the other hand, countries on the south-eastern side of the ocean, are not included. similarly, while to judge from the map illustration its cover the pacific review defines “asia-pacific” as including all countries in the pacific ocean, its focus is on the asian part of the pacific and the united states. in the last two years that journal has published only one article dealing explicitly with latin america (faust and franke 2002). the tendency to reduce asia-pacific to its asian component is widespread. for richard stubbs the asiapacific is limited to a few countries of east asia; likewise, for michael aho the asiapacific is equivalent to east asia. stephen cohen, on the other hand, following the more conventional line, treats the pacific rim as synonymous with asia pacific—but his research covers only ten asian countries, plus the united states (2002). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 santa-cruz out of the blue furthermore, while some specialists on regionalism with positivist inclinations simply take the region as a given (aggarwal 1993), without bothering to define it, others of a rather postmodern bent explicitly refuse to define it. philip kelly and kris olds argue that since “perhaps more than any other world region, the boundaries of the asia-pacific are indeterminate and open to contestation and social construction ... we therefore avoid the need to place definitive boundaries on the locus of our attention” (1999, 2). the terminological confusion just sketched is not surprising. over a decade ago, higgott noted that “while the pacific is much more than an ocean, it is not a coherent region” (1993, 291). similarly, rave palat has observed that “the very catholicity of terms such as asia pacific ... empties them of all analytical coherence by collapsing the enormous social heterogeneity of some 70 percent of the world population who live within these designations” (1996, 304). this conceptual heterogeneity is telling in that, to go back to solid ground in this erratic journey, “scholarly writing on the pacific rim has historically been concerned with the integrity of continents as the basis for the constructions of regions” (1997, 12). as a consequence, it would be better to start our itinerary again, but this time not from terra firma. ii. the world of ideas 2004 marked the fiftieth anniversary of arthur whitaker’s the western hemisphere idea: its rise and decline (1954). its author argued that by the end of the nineteenth century the western hemisphere had constituted itself into a region of the international arena, that is, as a “system of interests” independent from the european one. more concretely, with the “western hemisphere idea,” whitaker referred to “the proposition that the peoples of this hemisphere stand in a special relationship to one another which sets them apart from the rest of the world” (1). the creation of this region was, fundamentally, a political project of the elites of the “new world” (1). it is worth noting, however, that this integrating project implied neither the existence of a community of interests amongst the states of the americas, nor an institutional framework. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 santa-cruz out of the blue as whitaker noted, “the distinction between the idea and its various political expressions… should be constantly kept in mind” (5). the world of ideas as a starting point for this excursion through the pacific is germane because one scholar of the phenomenon under consideration, dirlik, has recently applied the concept developed by the us historian, whitaker, to the pacific rim. dirlik asserts that what whitaker said about the process of regional development in the americas “may be said of the ‘pacific region’ idea” (1992, 62). he argues that although the precise membership of the region in question is a matter of debate, that does not prevent it from being a region (75). however, dirlik himself notes that the pacific region—unlike the american continent—“emerged as primarily an economic region” (76). this last feature should alert us to the dangers of conceptual extrapolation. for whitaker the creation of the hemispheric region was fundamentally a political project around a specific idea: the constitution of a system of interests independent from still dominant european ones. as dirlik notes, in the case of the asia pacific, not only is the diverse membership a matter of dispute, but the engine of the regionalization process is of an economic character. but ideas and their crystallization, be it in the american land mass or in the fluid pacific, are hardly the work of merchants; a political ethos is needed to take them to safe harbor. the problem is not that the ideational realm, the world of ideas, is a poor departure point for a trip through asia pacific. the problem is taking ideas as mere palaver. it might sound paradoxical, but a good deal of the postmodern literature, in spite of the importance it attaches to discourse analysis and deconstruction, is guilty of precisely this mistake. dirlik’s work is a case in point. in his edited volume what is in a rim: critical perspectives on the pacific region idea (1988a), he and his collaborators rightly question the conventional treatment of the pacific rim as a natural region. nonetheless, they assume that the region has materialized simply because some scholars and politicians use the term constantly as part of their rhetoric. all regions are social constructs—that is plainly true. what is questionable is the assumption that a discourse has the potential to create a region. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 santa-cruz out of the blue with regard to the region under inquiry, kenneth pyle has pointed out that “in the asiapacific region, unlike europe, there is no historical basis for an international state system: there have been few multilateral organizations in the region; there is too much diversity; there are no common cultural traditions; asians prefer an organic approach rather than an a priori, rules-based approach” (1997, 98). mere discourse, therefore, is not going to produce this region. unlike human beings, not all ideas—or all terms—were created equal. perhaps that explains, for instance, the failed attempt in the first half of the twentieth century by the us state department officials to include iceland in the western hemisphere. as then president roosevelt made them notice, “the strain on the public idea of geography would be too severe” (whitaker 1954, 160). words are important—and discourse is certainly partially constitutive of social reality—but they have certain limits. the ideas that animate any discourse must be validated by social practice. socially shared ideas—which durkheim called “collective representations”—produce useful constructs that might help us move further in our intellectual excursion. however, assuming that the mere enunciation of concepts has constitutive effects does not take us very far. iii. the rim of history, or the history of the rim the third attempt at putting to sea departs from a historic standpoint. the pacific, as various specialists have rightly noted, is a european construct. dirlik, for instance, has observed that, “from the very beginning, it was the europeans who gave meaning to an area in terms of european (later euro american) concepts, visions, and fantasies” (1998a, 4-5). it is no coincidence, then, that the english weekly the economist has referred to the south pacific as a sort of eden whose existence “is important for the mental well-being of the world” (dirlik 1998b, 352). more to the point, as bruce cumings has put it, “‘rim’ is a euro american construct, an invention just like the steam engine” (1998, 55). with the rise of the united states—and its consequent metamorphosis into a pacific power—the north american influence in delimiting the asian pacific became paramount. later on would come the advent of japan as the only asian great power, and the portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 santa-cruz out of the blue proclamation of the “asian co-prosperity sphere,” which lead to two major powers disputing each other’s hegemony in the area. nevertheless, the 1945 defeat of the goose leading the asian flock, as the metaphor of japanese economist kaname akamatsu had it (1962), and the turning of the united states into one of the two poles of international politics, did away with any doubts about who was the true hegemon in the pacific. as one us secretary of state described it, that hegemon was like “a fan spread wide, with its base in north america and radiating west across the pacific” (baker 1991/2, 5). nevertheless, in some respects favorable treatment the united states gave to its clientele on the other side of the great ocean had some unexpected effects. among the most remarkable ones were the re-emergence of japan as an economic powerhouse in the 1970s, and the advent of the so-called asian “tigers” (hong kong, singapore, south korea, and taiwan). to an important extent, the transformation of these countries into industrialized, highly exporting economies—with the united states being one of their main markets— generated wider interest in what would become the asia-pacific. that said, the change was gradual. for instance, “southeast asia” started to acquire prominence in geopolitical terms in the 1950s, when president ike eisenhower approved the directive leading the security apparatus of the united states to consider the countries included under the southeast asian rubric as an area subject to a common policy (singh 2000, 134). but the conception of the region evolved. hari singh argues that after the revision of the us global objectives as expressed in the 1969 nixon doctrine, “the united states began to conceive of its theatre of operations in the wider context of a ‘pacific rim’ strategy, which was essentially a retreat to its traditional role as a naval power in the pacific” (2000 138). five years later, gerald ford would articulate what came to be known as the “pacific doctrine”—although it is worth noting that in the speech he gave, the understanding of the pacific was limited to the bilateral relationship between his country and a few countries of asia. nevertheless, it was not until the economic “miracle” experienced by several of the socalled tiger economies became evident that the discourse on the “pacific rim” properly portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 santa-cruz out of the blue emerged in the united states. as david linna has noted, the official u.s. interest in economic “cooperation” in the pacific originates in the late 1970s (1995, 825). in 1979 the house of representatives held a series of hearings, to which several experts on the nascent “region” were summoned, about “the pacific community idea.” the motive for the interest of legislators in the area in question was crystal-clear: the impressive economic achievements of japan and the “tigers,” as well as the increasing trade relationship between the united states and these countries (higgott, leaver, and ravenhill 1993, 1). indeed, lester wolf, president of the sub-committee on asia and pacific affairs, said at the hearings’ opening on 18 july 1979: “a number of factors have contributed to the gradual emergence of the pacific community idea. first and foremost has been the economic development of the region ... u.s. trade with the asia-pacific region today exceeds our trade with all of western europe” (u.s. house of representatives 1979a, 1). paradoxically, within this economic success lies a weakness of the otherwise successful creation of the pacific on the part of the euro-americans. toward the end of the twentieth century there was an area of the world shaped by the former colonial powers—an area that was not conceived two centuries earlier. the contradiction is that this same region came to challenge the hegemony of its progenitors (dirlik 1998a, 6-7). that is why, as manuel castells has written, “‘the pacific’ is a sort of cipher which expresses the decline of western economic and technological supremacy” (999, 244; my translation). be that as it may, toward the end of the 1970s it was evident that some east asian countries required the western hegemon to pay special attention to them. in the us house of representatives hearings of july 18 1979 it was stated that the “central premise that the united states is a pacific nation and its future is inextricably bound with the future of the asia-pacific region” (u.s. house of representatives, 1979a, 1). how exactly the pacific community was to be comprised, however, was still left to be defined. for cumings, in the late 1970s, “‘pacific rim’ was a discourse searching out its incipient material base, targeted upon exporters with asian markets, or importers of asian products” (1998, 53). on this point the experts convoked by congress agreed. thus, everett kleinhans, president of the east-west center said: “certainly the very concept of a pacific community is very much in portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 santa-cruz out of the blue the early stages of both theoretical planning and practical association building.” what was needed, therefore, was an open attitude, and for this reason kleinhans himself recommended “a kind of creative ambiguity in our use of pacific community” (u.s. house of representatives, 1979b, 100; emphasis added). similarly, in his preface to a directory of institutions in the “region,” abraham lowenthal argues that “the very notion of the pacific rim has been more a mental construct than a political reality” (1998, xv). yet this is a very broad mental construct indeed, for international policy institutions around the pacific rim (1998) includes organizations from argentina and brazil. more recently, neantro saavedra has noted that “other geographic areas,” such as the southern cone common market (mercosur) formed by argentina, brazil, paraguay and uruguay, could be included when considering the political economy of the pacific rim (2004, 78). such approaches return once more to the realm of projects and ideas, the pacific community idea. if it is clear from what historical context the discourse around the pacific rim emerges, and why it is talked about, nonetheless the theoretical value of this ubiquitous yet fleeting concept—which starts to look like the cheshire cat in lewis caroll’s novel—is still in question. i wouldn’t want to think that, just as alice fell asleep under the tree, i might have inadvertently fallen into the conceptual waters of the pacific, adrift, and not started the promising and promised conceptual, historic, and theoretical tour through the rim. as a last resort, i turn now to three theories within the international relations discipline that may better help traverse the pacific rim. iv. theoretical rafts the concept of the region—exactly the kind of animal the asia pacific is supposed to be— has turned into one of the buzzwords in this area of knowledge since the emergence, in the 1980s, of the so called “new regionalism.” as greg fry has noted, region has multiple political roles. it is sometimes an independent political agent, it sometimes acts like a political community, and it is sometimes called up as a political identity. it is always an important arena, and a portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 santa-cruz out of the blue significant analytical and policy category. each of these roles has arguably become more important since the end of the cold war, suggesting that the ‘new regionalism’ does increasingly matter as a locus of world politics. (2000, 124) however, one should proceed cautiously in the pacific. barry buzan has warned us that, “if we are to consider this huge expanse as a region, then we must identify what ties it together sufficiently to justify differentiating it from the rest of the international system” (1998, 69). three contending approaches elucidate the phenomenon of concern here: realism, in its hegemonic stability theory rendition; liberal institutionalism; and constructivism. for better or worse, students of world politics tend to prefer concrete referents, especially if they posses an institutional apparatus, to conceptual entelechies. fortunately, one institution, apec, does assure that the pacific rim offers some buoyancy. apec epitomizes the pacific rim partly because it brings together the “economices,” as its contracting parties are known, from either side of the ocean, in addition to others located in the body of water itself.1 thus, ravenhill, author of one of the best books on the organization, apec and the construction of pacific rim regionalism, uses apec and asia-pacific interchangeably (2001, 233). similarly, the editors of a recent book on apec assert that the creation of this institution allows us to talk about regionalism in asia-pacific (rüland, manske and draguhn 2002, xii). it is appropriate to present a brief sketch of the creation of this unique association, before inquiring into what each of the theories mentioned above says about the construction of a region in the pacific rim. in the beginning… the idea of creating a transpacific institution originated four decades ago. in 1965 japanese economist kojima kiyoshi proposed the creation of a pacific free trade area, which was to include, in addition to his country, those of southeast asia, plus new zealand, australia, 1 although the “fluid” contours of the region were still evident a few years after apec’s founding. for instance, at the third ministerial meeting in seoul in november 1991, non-pacific countries such as argentina and india applied for membership in the transpacific organization (uscanga 2001, 11). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 santa-cruz out of the blue canada, and the united states. the project did not prosper at that time, but the idea remained in a latent state. a decade later japanese prime-minister ohira masayoshi and his australian counterpart malcolm fraser called for an international conference in canberra, which lead to the creation of the pacific economic cooperation conference (pecc). from that moment on, the australians kept alive the project of creating an organization that would group the countries of a pacific rim still-in-the-making. significantly, the australian proposal considered the exclusion of the united states, since the members of the association of south east asian nations, asean, feared the potential hegemonic ambitions of washington. in july 1989, after u.s. secretary of state james baker stated that any economic multilateral project in the region without the participation of his country was doomed to failure (dosch 2000, 95), the australians were able to convince asean members to agree to us membership in the nascent body (otto 2000, 49). in 1989 apec was formally established in canberra. thus, the transpacific institution materialized as a sign of the times, in the very year that the berlin wall came down. as valera quisumbing has put it, the integration project in asia pacific is one whose “whose putative parents are japanese and american and whose midwife is australian” (dirlik 1998a, 8). unfortunately, the new-born organization was not particularly charming, as is suggested by the fact that its creators did not rush to gather around it. based on two clearly opposed approaches to economic integration, apec evinces the integration problems experienced by quote different societies—which are, in the final analysis, where the member economies are embedded (ravenhill 2001, 103). yet, precisely because it has made transpacific cleavages evident, apec epitomizes the pacific rim. the transpacific organization to date does not seem to have constituted itself into a bridge between the eastern and western shores of the great ocean, let alone create another region out of existing ones. as saavedra notes, “the process of trans-pacific convergence is possibly the most debatable [of regionalization processes], and undoubtedly the weakest, and the one with the least agents committed to its success” (2004, 79). this point may be illustrated briefly by referring to the cases of the two latin american countries with the most pro-active pacific rim policy: chile and mexico (faust and franke 2002). both were admitted to the pacific basin economic council in 1989, both have been portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 santa-cruz out of the blue members of the pacific economic cooperation council since 1991, and both have belonged to apec since 1993. chile has arguably been more serious in developing a state policy towards asia-pacific countries, and has also been the forerunner in the matter (guttman and laughlin 1990). in the commercial realm, for instance, chile’s exports to apec members amounted to 56.5 percent of its total exports in 2002, while its imports from that group of countries in the same year were 40.7 of total imports. nevertheless, it is worth noting that over half of the trade with apec members (52 percent in the case of exports and 56.5 in the case of imports) stayed in the americas. transpacific trade amounts to only a quarter of chilean foreign trade, and two thirds of it is with two countries: japan and china.2 the mexican case is even more illustrative of the frailty of the “pacific rim factor” in latin america. mexico remains firmly anchored—economically and politically—in north america. its acceptance into apec can be largely explained by this fact. as keiichi tsunekawa has written, “mexico was not admitted to apec as a result of having close linkages with asian countries. it owes its admission instead to recognition of its status as a north american economy with membership in nafta” (in faust and franke 2002, 312). washington backing of the mexican application was indeed decisive for its admittance into the transpacific body (uscanga 2001, 12). although mexico’s trade with apec countries amounts to approximately 90 percent of its total foreign trade (92.4 of its exports and 87.5 of its imports in 2000), the united states alone participates in about 80 percent of that trade (88.7 and 73.1 of mexican exports and imports, respectively, for the same year; international monetary fund, direction of trade statistics, 2001). policy developments in mexico confirm the scant attention it gives to countries on the other side of the pacific, with a few exceptions, such as china, japan, and new zealand. for instance, the asia-pacific department has been downgraded under the current fox administration, and has been placed under the general directorate of africa, asia, the middle east and the pacific. as jörg faust and uwe franke observe, although “the original intent [of mexico’s asia pacific policy] had been to upgrade the importance of ties between mexico and asia pacific in relation to its links with the united states ... 2 my calculations are based on official chilean central bank figures. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 santa-cruz out of the blue [but] actual developments led to the exact opposite of what was originally intended” (faust and franke 2002, 316).3 but leaving aside the traits of the transpacific organization, or its often assumed role as a transpacific bridge, it is an undeniable fact that, at the end of the 1980s, a bridge was already in existence. the question now is how to make theoretical sense of its conception and birth. realist rim for realist and neorealist perspectives, which emphasize egoistic state actors and power resources, the hegemonic stability theory is apparently the most plausible explanation for the creation of an international regime in the pacific. the existence of an hegemonic power in the international system increases the probabilities of an open and stable economic system worldwide. the assumption is that the hegemon will bear the costs of creating such a system not for altruistic reasons, but for its own interest. however, for aggarwal, the extension and diversity of actors in the huge ocean is not conducive for the united states to incur the short-term costs that the creation of a solid international regime would imply (1993, 1039). jörn dosch observes that “america’s foreign policy attitude towards multilateral institution-building has indeed been the single most crucial factor determining the outcomes of multilateral cooperation in the area… open dialogue cooperation [such as apec] has never really exceeded the stage of providing a loose framework for an exchange of ideas” (2000, 107). the neorealist joseph grieco has recognized that “the concept... of hegemonic leadership cannot, by itself, account for regionalism itself nor for the variations in its character” (1996, 178). similarly, robert 3 the state of affairs in other latin american pacific rim countries is obviously even more dismaying, to judge by a cursory review of their government’s web pages (particularly those of the ministries of trade and foreign affairs). in general terms, it can be surmised that asia-pacific does not exist for the five central american countries, while ecuador and colombia are aware that such a region is supposed to exist. the other three pacific rim countries, apec-members chile, mexico, and peru, on the other hand, at least have information regarding “asia-pacific” and apec on their government websites. likewise, an analogous exercise in the sites of the four “tigers” plus australia, china, japan, and new zealand evinces a general disdain for latin america. only the last three countries’ web pages present information on policy and administrative efforts aimed at the region in their foreign ministry web pages (which, in the case of new zealand, is the ministry of foreign affairs and trade). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 santa-cruz out of the blue gilpin, one of the founders of this approach, claims that “although the asia-pacific region has developed with amazing rapidity, many of the conditions that have supported greater economic and political regionalization elsewhere do not yet exist here... mutual political interests seem to be totally absent as a motivating force for greater regional cooperation” (1995, 18). more to the point, ravenhill points out that hegemonic stability theory is not very useful in explaining the emergence of apec (2001, 9-12). institutional rim if realist navigation instruments are not helpful in this voyage through the rim, liberal institutionalism, which privileges transaction-cost-reduction in interstate dealings as the engine for integration processes, would seem more appropriate to the task. according to this critical stance, self-interested state actors have incentives to collaborate in the creation of the institutions needed to increase their welfare, or, failing that, a willing and capable leader (the hegemon of the previous theoretical perspective) takes responsibility for providing the public goods necessary for reducing transaction costs. the emphasis on taking advantage of the potential of international intercourse is relevant because, as already noted, economic transactions in the pacific rim have increased notably in the last decades. therefore, a liberal approach would expect the creation of institutions in order to manage such interdependence. as ravenhill observes: “in the asia-pacific region in the 1980s, the growth of interdependence not only changed governments’ attitudes toward regional collaboration but had a profound effect on their thinking about the shape that the region should take” (2001, 72). the founding economies of apec decided then to limit themselves to the economic realm. nevertheless, carsten otto stresses that it is worth asking “whether there ever was a common understanding concerning apec’s economic objectives” (2000, 50). on the basis of a liberal stand on international regimes, otto concludes that “apec is no free-trade regime at all” (61). the question seems to be moot as to whether or not apec would become “a community in the popular sense of a ‘big family’ of like minded economies” (berger 1999, 1016), as a liberal-functionalist perspective, such as the one taken by the eminent persons group, indicates. economic interdependence, says david timberman, “is portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 14 santa-cruz out of the blue a necessary but not sufficient condition for establishing a common feeling of interdependence within the region” (1981, 596). as a dissenting state department official put it: “the growing sense of community is not rooted in economic interdependence. it is rooted in political and power considerations” (596). the liberal approach, then, does not seem to endorse consideration of the pacific rim as an analytical category. constructed rim since the matter of transpacific economic transactions raises the issue of community, do constructivist approaches help explain a pacific rim that looks more and more like el dorado? for starters, constructivism would seem to be better suited to describe the emergence of asia pacific as a region, even if it lacks the geographical attributes mentioned earlier, since this theoretical approach states that all regions are socially constructed. as peter katzenstein has put it, “geographic designations... are not ‘real,’ ‘natural,’ or ‘essential.’ they are socially constructed and politically contested” (1997, 7). the pacific rim would thus appear to be yet another case of a constructed region. however, as a structural or “third image” approach, constructivism emphasizes the socially constructed identities and norms that make society—be it national or international—hang together. but these norms and identities should have real effects in order to find a place in the constructivist discourse. among these effects would undoubtedly be the construction of mutual interests, for as manfred mols says, “it is at this point that the story of a constructed region begins” (2000, 12). when considering the pacific rim as a region, the apposite questions are: is there a normative peculiarity distinguishing this alleged region? do its members share an identity linking them to the supposed pacific rim project? does a sense of community in the region therefore exist? if the answers to all three questions are affirmative, then it makes sense to talk about asia-pacific as a region from a constructivist standpoint; otherwise, one could talk about the pacific rim until one turns blue, with only inveterate optimists or a few confused postmodernists taking the discourse seriously. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 15 santa-cruz out of the blue considering the empirical issue at stake, shaun breslin and his colleagues observe that in apec “there is a clear disjuncture between the enthusiasm for the process [of integration] among regional corporate and bureaucratic elite and the disinterest, if not hostility, of the wider communities in many of the member states” (breslin, higgott, and rosamond 2002); the most conspicuous transpacific institution is still limited to “transnational policy élites” (higgott 1993, 298). moreover, as ravenhill has noted, “the evolution of apec has arguably had the unintended consequence of weakening transpacific loyalties.” he also asserts that “rather than contributing to the reinforcement of an asia-pacific identity, apec itself, perversely, and in conjunction with the asian financial crises, has had the opposite effect. it has encouraged the asian members to see their interests as distinct from those of the west, and its western members to differentiate themselves from the east asian” (2001, 174 & 214). as gerald segal argues in his rethinking the pacific, published when apec was just taking its first steps, “there is no important cultural, ideological, political, economic, or even military sense in which it is particularly useful to talk of ‘the pacific’” (1990, 377). hence, as castells notes, “there does not exist a region in the pacific as a distinct or integrated entity and, consequently there will not be a pacific century” (1999, 339; my translation). the constructivist raft, then, prefers to stay in port rather than venture into the shallow, theoretical waters of the asia pacific-as-a-region discourse. coming full circle, or running fast to stay in the same place this conceptual, historical, and theoretical journey in search of the pacific rim seems to have failed. i am back where i started. but this hurried circuit has at least shown that one should be wary of travelogues that describe wonderlands, that social constructs do not become meaningful just because academics and policy makers write and talk about them, and, most importantly, that regions in the world political economy do not appear out of the ether. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 16 santa-cruz out of the blue reference list aggarwal, vinod k. 1993. building international institutions in asia-pacific. asian survey 33 (11): 10291042. akamatsu, kaname (1961): a theory of unbalanced growth in the world economy. weltwirtschaftliches archiv, hamburg, 86: 196-217. baker, james a. 1991/2. america in asia: emerging architecture for a pacific community. foreign affairs 70 (5):1-18. berger, mark. 1999. apec and its enemies: the failure of the new regionalism in the asia-pacific. third world quarterly 20 (5):1013-1030. breslin, shaun, richard higgott, and ben rosamond. 2002. regions in comparative perspective. in new regionalisms in the global political economy: theories and cases, edited by s. breslin, c. hughes, n. phillips and b. rosamond. london: routledge. buzan, barry. 1998. the asia-pacific: what sort of region in what sort of world. in asia-pacific in the new world order, edited by a. mc grew and c. brook. london: routledge. castells, manuel. 1999. la era de la información: fin de milenio. 3 vols. vol. 3. mexico city: siglo xxi. cohen, stephen. 2002. mapping asian integration: transnational transactions in the pacific rim. american asian review 20 (3):1-29. coker, christopher. 2003. surfing the zeitgist. in meaning and international relations, edited by p. mandaville and a. williams. london: routledge. cumings, bruce. 1998. rimspeak; or, the discourse of the "pacific rim". in what is in a rim? critical perspectives on the pacific region idea, edited by a. dirlik. lanham: rowman and littlefield. dirlik, arif. 1992. the asia-pacific idea: reality and representation in the invention of a regional structure. journal of world history 3 (1):55-79. dirlik, arif. 1998a. introduction: pacific contradictions. in what is in a rim: critical perspectives on the pacific region idea, edited by a. dirlik. lanham: rowman and littlefield. dirlik, arif. 1998b. there is more in the rim that meets the eye: thoughts on the "pacific idea". in what is in a rim? critical perspectives on the pacific region idea, edited by a. dirlik. lanham: rowman and littlefield. dosch, jörn. 2000. asia-pacific multilateralism and the role of the united states. in international relations in the asia-pacific: new patterns of power, interest, and cooperation, edited by j. dosch and m. mols. new york: st. martin's press. faust, jörg, and uwe franke. 2002. attempts at diversification: mexico and pacific asia. pacific review 15 (2): 299-324. forbes, dean. 1997. regional integration, internationalisation and the new geographies of the pacific rim. in asia-pacific: new geographies of the pacific rim, edited by r. f. watters and t. g. mcgee. london: hurst. fry, greg. 2000. a 'coming age of regionalism'? in contending images of world politics, edited by g. fry and j. o'hagan. new york: st. martin's press. gilpin, robert. 1995. apec in a new international order. seattle: apec study center at the university of washington/the national bureau of asian research. grieco, joseph m. 1996. institucionalización económica regional: la experiencia de américa en una perspectiva comparativa. in regionalismo y poder en américa: los límites del neorrealismo, edited by a. borja, g. gonzález and b. j. r. stevenson. mexico city: porrúa-cide. guttman, william and scott laughlin. 1990. “latin america in the pacific era,” the washington quarterly 13:2 (electronic edition). higgott, richard. 1993. competing theoretical approaches to international cooperation: implications for the asia-pacific. in pacific economic relations in the 1990s: cooperation or conflict, edited by richard higgott, richard leaver, and john ravenhill. boulder: lynne rienner. higgott, richard, richard leaver, and john ravenhill. 1993. introduction: political economy and the pacific. in pacific economic relations in the 1990s: cooperation or conflict, edited by richard higgott, richard leaver, and john ravenhill. boulder: lynne rienner. houseman, gerald. 1995. america and the pacific rim: coming to terms with new realities. lanham: rowmand and littlefield. katzenstein, peter j. 1997. introduction: asian regionalism in comparative perspective. in network power: japan and asia, edited by p. j. katzenstein and t. shiraishi. ithaca: cornell university press. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 17 santa-cruz out of the blue kelly, philip f., and kris olds. 1999. questions in a crisis: the contested meanings of globalisation in asia-pacific. in globalisation in the asia-pacific: contested territories, edited by k. olds, p. dicken, p. f. kelly, l. kong and h. w.-c. yeung. london: routledge. kohona, palitha. 1986. the evolving conept of a pacific basin community. asian survey 26 (4):399-419. lewis, martin w., and kären e. wigen. 1997. the myth of continents: a critique of metageography. berkeley: university of california press. linnan, david k. 1995. apec quo vadis? american journal of international law 89 (4):824-834. lowenthal, abraham. 1998. preface. in international policy institutions around the pacific rim. boulder: lynne rienner. mcgee, t. g., and r. f. watters. 1997. introduction. in asia-pacific: new geographies of the pacific rim, edited by r. f. watters and t. g. mcgee. london: hurst. mols, manfred. 2000. asia-pacific: why theory and what type of it. in international relations in the asiapacific: new patterns of power, interest, and cooperation, edited by j. dosch and m. mols. new york: st. martin's press. otto, carsten. 2000. "international regimes" in the asia-pacific? in international relations in the asiapacific: new patterns of power, interest, and cooperation, edited by j. dosch and m. mols. new york: st. martin's press. palat, ravi arvind. 1996. pacific century: myth or reality? theory and society 25:303-347. pyle, kenneth b. 1997. the context of apec: u.s.-japan relations. in from apec to xanadu: creating a viable community in the post-cold war pacific, edited by d. c. hellman and k. b. pyle. armonk, n.y.: national bureau of asian research-m. e. sharpe. ravenhill, john. 2001. apec and the construction of pacific rim regionalism. cambridge: cambridge university press. rüland, jürgen, eva manske, and werner draguhn. 2002. asia-pacific economic cooperation (apec): the first decade. london: routledgecurzon. saavedra, neantro. 2004. las nuevas afinidades regionales en el pacífico. ensayo de construcción de un marco conceptual. estudios internacionales 144: 67-80. segal, gerald. 1990. rethinking the pacific. oxford: clarendon press. singh, hari. 2000. hegemons and the construction of regions. in the state and identity construction in international relations, edited by s. o. vandersluis. new york: macmillan. timberman, david g. 1981. in search of a pacific basin community. asian survey 21 (5): 579-598. uscanga, carlos, “mexican economic diplomacy in the pacific rim: actions and strategies for becoming a member in economic cooperation frameworks.” paper prepared for the udeg-uts workshop “regional integration in the pacific rim: the economic impact,” sydney, australia, 23-25 july 2001. u.s. house of representatives, 1979a (18 july), committee on foreign affairs, subcommittee on asian and pacific affairs report. u.s. house of representatives, 1979b (31 october), committee on foreign affairs, subcommittee on asian and pacific affairs report. whitaker, arthur p. 1954. the western hemisphere idea: its rise and decline. ithaca: cornell university press. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 18 quoting christina ho <christina ‘if most men are against us, can we call ourselves feminists?’1: young people’s views of feminism—east and west2 chilla bulbeck, university of adelaide introduction based on a ten-nation study funded by the australian research council, this paper suggests the value of studies which compare feminisms of the ‘east’ and ‘west’, and of the ways young people (in this case) respond to the discourses of gender equity and women’s development in their countries. i argue that there are clear gender differences in each sample, women in general being much more supportive of feminism than men, portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal 1 female, school student, beijing 140171680. 2 acknowledgements: i have benefited from feedback on interpretation of my results from audiences in new delhi (thanks to patricia uberoi), mumbai (thanks to veena poonarcha), perth (thanks to krishna sen) and tokyo (ueno chizuko, yui daizaburo, toshiko ellis and my colleages in the centre for pacific and american studies, tokyo university); thanks also to meera kosambi for enlightening conversations and hospitality in pune; and most recently the two anonymous reviewers who helped me work out what i really wanted to say and how to say it. my thanks go to the participants in all the localities involved in this research and to my local researchers, dou wei in beijing; suryono gentut in yogyakara; alok ranjan jha in new delhi; parul khampara in mumbai; phung thu thuy in hanoi; kumna jung in seoul; sukanya pornsopakul in chiang mai; chonmasri patcharapimol in bangkok; aya kimijima, miya suga, yukako shibata, yukiko tani, iida hiroyuki, kazuko tanabe, nakao hidehiro and kazuyo kamikubo in japan; mark moritz and bayard lyons in the usa; mireille huberdeau in winnipeg; in australia sharon rouse, daniela bogeska, simon davey and especially lara palombo, jenni rossi and saul steed, as well as the teachers who assisted with questionnaire distribution and collection in each school and youth centre, colleen tomlian, bob bowes, patrick cronin, annie hanson, tammy edwardson, michael darley, sharon morrison, susanne owen, erica baker, dr adrian brown, elizabeth fitzgerald, liz kelton, neville stapleton, carolyn grantskalns, angela falkenberg, chris searle, charlie allen, sharon rouse, karen walters, jill faulkner, dorian marsland, caroline ninnes, christine shetliffe, margaret jackson, helen temby, lenore layman, kathleen pepall, jane long, tanya dalziell, barry tognolini, kelly o’mara, ingrid klein, dan mccormack, christine roper, anita hobbs, chris parry, barbara wright, barrie wells, phil allen, veronica lake, jacqueline van gent, tanya dalziell, julia ryan, kate cameron dorothy hoddinott, jenny wilkins, linda garrad, jenny baldwin, christine howe, matthew barry, dr john de courcy, david bourne, paul dolan, fiona forsyth. bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? but also using different vocabularies or justifications for supporting the women’s movement. in particular, i focus on the different use of notions of gender equality, gender difference and national development feminism in the different samples. while some gender differences are a feature of almost every national sample, it is less easy to divide the samples into ‘west’ and ‘east’, either in terms of their support for feminism or their justifications for supporting or opposing the women’s movement. the results challenge a simple claim that western feminism favours the discourse of gender equality in its liberal variant and combative opposition to men in its radical variant, while asian women’s movements endorse gender difference and compatibility, or men and women working together, for example under the banner of national development feminism. following a discussion of basu’s criticism of three tendencies in cross-national studies, the paper summarises the results from my study before exploring the different meanings of terms such as ‘equality’, ‘difference’ and ‘national development’. the paper concludes by suggesting that the ‘transnational turn’, going beyond western feminist discourses to question western feminist assumptions, suggests that the western feminist impasse between ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ is not such a strong feature in the vocabularies of young people in a number of the asian samples in my study. ‘international’ feminisms? with the increasing privatization and corporatization of public life, it has become much harder to discern such a women’s movement [vibrant, transnational] from the united states (although women’s movements are thriving around the world) (mohanty 2003, 221). in the challenge of local feminisms, amrita basu (1995, 1) suggested three ‘tendencies’ in the ‘vast literature on women’s movements’. the first is a bifurcation between scholars of the west and the east. studies that focus on ‘western europe and the united states and ignore women’s movements in the postcolonial world’ are contrasted with ‘studies of women in the non-western world’ which ‘tend to be preoccupied with the problem of development’. as a result, women’s movements in india or china, for example, are rarely brought to bear on an analysis of women’s portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? movements in say the usa or germany, a comparison which can throw light on the specificities of each (an exception is gelb 2003). the second tendency ‘is to characterize women’s movements as products of modernization or development’, their success thus due to approximating the features of western nations rather than developing ones. despite mohanty’s (1991) trenchant critique of this presumption that women’s emancipation is only available as nations progress down the development path, western triumphalism has re-emerged with a vengeance, famously captured in francis fukuyama’s (1992) ‘end of history’ thesis. it is propounded by writers who assert a happy compatibility between capitalism, democracy and women’s advancement. in rising tide, the political theorists inglehart and norris (2003) use cross-national data sets to claim that women’s status is enhanced as countries move from agricultural, authoritarian religious-fundamentalist regimes to postindustrial, democratic, secular (or christian) liberal regimes3. recent titles by feminists are readily co-opted into the triumphalist rhetoric when they claim the world split open (rosen 2000), or that there will be no turning back (freedman 2002) from the tidal wave (evans 2003) of women’s equality. indeed, estelle freedman (2002, 1-2) bluntly asserts, ‘in short, the market economies and democratic systems that now dominate the world create both the need for feminism and the means to sustain it’. the third tendency noted by basu (1995, 1) is to assume ‘a commonality in the forms of women’s oppression and activism worldwide’. robin morgan’s sisterhood is global4 is the example chosen by basu because of ‘its seminal importance in reflecting and shaping the dominant approach to women’s movements in the west in the 1980s. 3 the authors support their claim that women in the third world remain ‘undeveloped’ by measuring women’s status with ethnocentric indicators, such as involvement in paid work rather than involvement in the subsistence economy or control of land and its resources, or in terms of women’s access to divorce rather than to inheritance rights. inglehart and norris use the stock-in-trade of economists measuring women’s status, for example the united nations’ gdi (gender development index) and gem (gender empowerment measure). saskia wieringa (1999, 25) argues for the need to go beyond measures of income, education and workforce participation to embrace women’s access to human rights, for example in the incidence of gender-based violence; women’s access to sexual and identity politics such as tolerance for transgender practices; and comparisons of how men and women use their time differently, particularly in relation to available leisure time (wieringa 1999, 30,27,33-34). 4 robin morgan’s sisterhood is powerful, published in 1970 and in print until 2001, was succeeded by sisterhood is global, published in 1984, still in print and ‘still the only text that proclaims itself as the anthology of the international women’s movement’ (mohanty 2003, 110). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? morgan eschews the development model for a focus on grassroots activism: ‘women share a “common world view,” morgan repeatedly asserts, as a result of “a common condition”’ (basu 1995, 1,2). as basu (1995, 3) puts it, morgan’s ‘oppressed majority’ perspective combines a ‘magnitude of suffering’ ‘with the magnitude of women’, universalising women through the suffering they all share. in comparing women’s movements in a number of countries from ‘east’ and ‘west’, my project seeks to avoid the various pitfalls identified by basu. particularism studies only one women’s movement and tends, thus, to treat it as utterly unique. dualism assumes a distinction between west and ‘the rest’, studying only movements in one or other category. universalism presumes all national movements are roughly the same (ray and korteweg 1999, 485). my project responds to sang’s (2003, 8-9) call for a ‘transnationalist turn’ (although she is speaking of gay and lesbian studies), in which western feminists look elsewhere for inspiration, particularly given that our own movements appear quiescent and as we ponder the shoals of gender equality/sameness and difference. rather than imagining a one-way imperial flow in the discussions that constitute international feminism, cross-national studies allow the empire to strike back, encouraging western feminists to question the limitations of possessive individualism or of human rights discourse. ‘post-feminist neo-liberalism’, as rosi braidotti (2005, 171) calls it, combines smug postfeminism with the arrogant ethnocentrism of us foreign policy. in this formulation, the united states is the overwhelmingly dominant force in so-called ‘international’ or ‘global’ feminism6, the hub from which feminism flows out along the spokes to the benighted women ground down on the rim7. ‘white supremacy’ assumes that ‘women 5 the authors note only four comparative studies that avoid these three problems, including jayawardena’s (1986) significantly titled feminism and nationalism in the third world. 6 for example, freedman’s (2002) ‘international history’ of feminism is found largely in the first 87 pages, with the remaining 260 pages of text being very us focused. ‘women in development’, the first international aid approach which took account of the needs of women, is described by irene tinker as, ‘we wanted to take the second wave [of feminism] to the rest of the world’ (in ramamurthy 2000, 243). 7 i am grateful to debra liebowitz, drew university, usa, for this image, which she uses in her teaching to model her students’ understanding of ‘international feminism’. the women on the rim are ground down by internal oppression, but never oppressed by us foreign policy or us economic relations (comment made at the national women's studies association conference, held from 13 to 17 university of minnesota in minneapolis, 13-17 june). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? who are non-western, non-christian, mostly not white and alien to the enlightenment tradition’ ‘need to be targeted for special emancipatory social actions or even more belligerent forms of enforced “liberation”’. post september 11, so-called rights and democracy are delivered abroad at gunpoint by the only remaining world superpower. american foreign policy combines ‘historical amnesia’, forgetting ‘the sense of common connection to other women’, with profound ethnocentrism (braidotti 2005, 171). in fact, it could be claimed that women’s movement activism is more vibrant in many asian nations than it is in the west, where even feminists now worry about what the media has claimed for a long time: that feminism is ‘dead’ (pozner 2003, 31). in australia, anne summers (2003, 6-7) deplores the fact that ‘we have stopped even having the national conversation about women’s entitlements and women’s rights’. ‘we’ refers both to the government and a once robust women’s movement now tamed by consumerism and liberal individualism into commodity feminism, do-it-yourself feminism and self-help feminism (see also segal 1999, 1 for britain and epstein 2001 for the usa). in the anglophone west, women are encouraged to express their ‘equality’ and ‘liberation’ through capitalist forms, such as consumer spending (skeggs 1995, 478; wolf 1993, 29; bail 1996). by contrast, asian legislatures have established equal opportunities laws and commissions (e.g. ng and ng 2002, 7 for hong kong; gelb 2003 for japan) and introduced legislation to prevent domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape (the first such example in an asian country being malaysia in 1994 (foley 2003, 142-5). korea has the goal of being number thirty in the world in the un’s women’s human rights index by 20088. by contrast with the abhorrence of quota systems among western nations, in india 30 per cent quotas for women in local government bring one million women into elected seats with every nation-wide election (kapadia 2002, 16). in indonesia, the women’s movement has burgeoned into a proliferation of ngos taking a 8 proudly announced by the president’s wife, kwon yang-suk, first lady of republic of korea and conference patron, at the 9th international interdisciplinary congress on women, asian center for women’s studies, ewha womans university, seoul, 19-24 june 2005. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? prominent role in protest and democratic transformation (suryochondro 2000, 232,236). while women’s studies departments in anglophone universities close down or morph into cultural or gender studies, women’s studies programs are ‘one of the fastest developing academic fields in asia’, including an international project to strengthen women’s studies across the region instituted at ewha women’s university (kim and kang 2001, 113). on the other hand, paeans to asian women’s emancipation should not be overdrawn, a ‘backlash’ against women’s advancement being noted in india, japan, vietnam and china. in japan, members of the dominant liberal democratic party have assumed the task of dismantling gender equality legislation, and, along with others, call to replace article 24 of the constitution concerning gender equality with a clause asserting the importance of the family as the smallest unit of society (hardacre 2005). as in the us, in india the dissatisfaction caused by widening income inequalities is channelled into religious fundamentalism, a resurgence of community politics and communitarian violence (chaudhuri 2000, 276; ganguly-scrase 2000, 99) in which both hindu and muslim women participate (kapadia 2002, 11,13). in 2003, the government proposed to rename women’s studies centres as ‘centres for women and family studies’, believing them to be just another form of outreach rather than having a role in theory development and the critical evaluation of programs (john 2005, 58). in korea, the employment equity promotion program to expand equal employment legislation into the private sector does not cover non-standard workers, those who are part-time, migrant and so on. this means that middle-class korean women remain the major beneficiaries of feminism (lee 2005). in china and vietnam, economic reform has produced a steady decline in women’s participation at all political and managerial levels, as well as growing female unemployment, wage disparity and discrimination against women in hiring and promotion. the chinese government urges women to ‘return home’ to their nurturing functions, which eases the pressures of unemployment as state enterprises collapse in the face of global competition (zhang 2005 for china; see pettus 2003, 127,129 for vietnam). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? some asian women also assert a complacent postfeminism, a claim that gender equality has been achieved and feminism is no longer needed. middle-class singaporean and hong kong women claim they are more liberated than their western sisters, and so do not require gender equality machinery (lee 2003b, 93; owen 2002, 889). in 2002, the indian university grants commission took a postfeminist stance when it proposed the establishment of women’s studies centres in rural areas because ‘urban gender equality has already been ensured’ (in john 2005, 58). this is akin to the claim made by australian prime minister, john howard: ‘we are in the post-feminist stage of the debate…of course women are as good as men’ (summers 2003, 21). meanwhile his government has gutted the gender-equity machinery painstakingly erected by femocrats over thirty years (see bulbeck 2005). adding weight to ‘western triumphalist’ claims concerning the ‘end of history’, statistics indicate many asian women’s improved education, increased engagement in paid employment, marriage delay (and even refusal: e.g. williams 1998, 16 for singapore, hong kong and jakarta; tantiwiramanond and ranjan 1996, 96 for bangkok), more self-arranged marriages and neolocal nuclear residency (e.g. brasted 2000, 200 for a number of asian countries; tantiwiramanond and ranjan, 1996, 96 for thailand; jones 2002, 226-227 for indonesia). such statistical changes are expressed in breathless discussions of modernisation in asia. louise williams, the sydney morning herald’s asia correspondent, claims of the asian countries discussed in her book: ‘what they all have in common is inevitable, far-reaching social change’ (williams 1998, 19), a shift in one generation to another from subsistence rice farmers to industrial workers, from feudal politicians to corporate business managers; and for women, access to contraception and paid work, as well as the outlawing of traditional practices such as polygamy (14). indeed, there is growing academic interest in the ‘new’ middle classes of asia, bustling aside the western imaginary’s previous focus on village women as the 9 eliza lee (2003a, 7,16) suggests that ‘economic individualism’ has emerged with capitalist development in hong kong, a combination of ‘utilitarian familism’ and ongoing patriarchy. the state’s role is primarily the material advancement of individuals and families while women continue to endorse the essential importance of marriage and motherhood. the latter role is supported by domestic help in middleclass families, allowing professional women to pursue their careers unencumbered (lee 2003b, 94-95). on this point, christina ho (2005) found that chinese and hong kong female migrants to australia initially criticised australia’s ‘conservative’ gender norms, but then came to embrace them, saying that not staying home to care for one’s children was unnatural. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? embodiment of religious worth and tradition and the ‘electric girls’ of the free trade zones (e.g. see collections edited by sen and stivens 1998 and munshi 2001). like their ‘can-do’ sisters in the west (harris 2004), the new urban female middle class of asia are professional workers and avid consumers of household white-goods and beauty products (stivens 1998, 92-3 for malaysia; sen 1998, 47,35-6 for indonesia). on the other hand, in most asian countries most women are still villagers (e.g. stivens 1998, 96 for malaysia; hooper 1998, 168 for china; cook 1998, 259 for thailand). furthermore, ‘the dominant national discourses of “development”, “globalisation”, and “modernization”’ (roces and edwards 2000, 2) are not always realised in the same mode as in the west, vervoorn noting ‘unprecedented rates of industrialization and economic growth, demographic transition, multilateral treaties and regional cooperation, and a shared resistance to western dominance’ (vervoorn 2003, 4, italics mine). commentators thus speak of ‘other modernities’ (rofel 1999), ‘flexible citizenship’ (ong 1999, 1-3,6), ‘flexibility of identity’ (kelsky 2001, 12) and ‘divergent modernities’ (stivens in roces and edwards 2000, 1). my research explores how young people in different nations understand their own particular ‘other modernities’. i aim to present a more complex picture than is painted when the focus is on only one nation’s feminism, or only one ‘type’ of women’s movement (so-called ‘developed’ or ‘developing’) or assumes an undifferentiated ‘global feminism’. even so, my focus on ‘national’ women’s movements contains its own dangers. women’s movements spill beyond national borders, and have done so since the middle of the nineteenth century (desai 2002, 25). with the advent of the united nations and the retreat of national governments from humanitarian commitments, international non-government organisations (ingos) have grown in prominence, contributing to the ‘transnational feminist counter-public’ (mackie 2001, 189; see also roces and edwards 2000, 7). some of these border crossings occur among my respondents, revealing that there are no unified national discourses in relation to feminism and the women’s movement. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? methods and summary of results the findings derive from a survey of largely young middle-class urban dwellers in ten countries in the asia-pacific region. due to the funding constraints imposed by the australian research council grant, eight of the national samples are tiny (see table 1 below). in each country i secured a local researcher who, when necessary, translated the survey instrument, a questionnaire, into the local language and translated the comments back into english for me (in the anglophone samples, a handful of japanese respondents, the indian university and one delhi and the mumbai high school class, respondents completed their questionnaires in english). i asked local researchers to administer the questionnaire during a school or university class set-aside for this purpose, with a researcher on hand to answer questions. besides an opening section on identity (completing ‘i am …’ ten times) and a concluding section on socio-economic data, there were two major sections, one on gender issues and one on the women’s movement. gender issues covered role reversal, sharing housework, abortion rights, same sex sexual relations, nudity/pornography, gender equality (most of these questions were adapted from pilcher 1998). the section on the women’s movement, which is the subject of analysis in this article, sought respondents’ selfidentification as feminists, their image of feminists and what they felt the women’s movement had achieved for women and men in their country (adapted from the timecnn survey reported in bellafante 1998). respondents were asked to express a level of agreement with each item on a four point scale: ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree more than disagree’, ‘disagree more than agree’, and ‘strongly disagree’, with a fifth option of ‘no opinion/don’t know’, and to make any comments they wished. clearly the questionnaire was informed by western understandings of feminism and women’s issues, while nuances were lost in translation. even so, this is a rare cross-national study of young people’s attitudes to the women’s movement. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? table 1: sources of young respondents at school or university by gender (numbers in brackets) source female male high school university per cent of total australia #(south australia) (western australia) (new south wales) 65% (511) 66% (295) 57% (145) 79% (71) 35% (279) 34% (149) 43% (111) 21% (19) 84% (664) 80% (357) 84% (216) 99% (91) 16% (127) 19% (85) 16% (41) 1% (1) 46.4% (791) 26.2% (444) 15.0% (256) 5.3% (91) usa usa (portland) (santa monica) 63% (59) 66% (31) 62% (28) 37% (33) 34% (16) 38% (17) 10% (9) 18% (9) 0% (0) 90% (86) 81% (39) 100% (47) 5.5% (95) 2.8% (48) 2.7% (47) canada (winnipeg) 50% (21) 50% (22) 49% (21) 51% (22) 2.5% (43) india (mumbai) (new delhi) 61% (79) 72% (44) 52% (35) 39% (50) 28% (17) 48% (33) 60% (79) 48% (30) 71% (49) 40% (52) 52% (32) 29% (20) 7.6% (131) 3.6% (62) 4.0% (69) vietnam (hanoi) 58% (33) 42% (24) 15% (9) 85% (51) 3.4% (60) rep. of korea (seoul) 52% (31) 48% (29) 50% (30) 50% (30) 3.5% (60) china (beijing) 51% (25) 49% (24) 49% (24) 51% (25) 2.9% (49) #thailand (bangkok) (chiang mai) 50% (61) 50% (30) 50% (31) 50% (61) 50% (30) 50% (31) 49% (40) 50% (20) 48% (20) 51% (42) 50% (20) 52% (22) 7.2% (123) 3.5% (60) 3.7% (63) indonesia (yogyakarata) 66% (37) 34% (19) 49% (29) 51% (30) 3.3% (59) japan (tokyo) 66% (197) 34% (100) 27% (138) 73% (163) 17.5% (301) total 62% (1055) 38% (641) 61% (1043) 37% (628) 100% (1711) notes: due to some respondents failing to indicate their sex, gender and source sub-totals are not always the same and gender sub-totals do not sum to total respondents. # 4 australian, 20 (bangkok) and 21 (chiang mai) vocational student respondents not shown in the table. the results discussed in this paper relate to five statements, the first three concerning feminism and the latter two the women’s movement: 1. feminism today is relevant to me personally. 2. feminists share my values 3. i would call myself a feminist 4. the women’s movement has achieved good things for women of my country. 5. the women’s movement has achieved good things for men of my country. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? i first discuss attachment to feminism (using question 3 above as representative of the general pattern) and the women’s movement (using question 4 above as representative of the general pattern) across the samples, before moving on to a comparison of the ‘vocabularies’ or reasons offered for approving or disapproving of feminism. attachment to feminism and the women’s movement results for question 3 and question 5 are shown in charts 1 and 2 below. some of the results are unsurprising, for example females’ greater willingness to self-identify as a feminist and greater support for the women’s movement by contrast with males (although note that gender difference in support for the women’s movement is lower than in self-defining as a feminist). on the other hand, the level of support may come as a surprise to some commentators: at the agree level (which sums ‘agree strongly’ and ‘agree more than disagree’), more than 40 per cent of females in every sample, apart from the japanese, self-define as feminists. in most samples, around 80 per cent or more agree that the women’s movement has achieved good things for women of their country (chart 2). again, it is no surprise that ‘feminism’ appears to be a more negative concept than ‘women’s movement’, although some australian respondents’ comments suggest that this result is partly due to the safe location of the achievements of the women’s movement’s—and therefore of the need for feminism—in the past: [n]o, i wouldn’t call myself a feminist, i mean i think that we (women) have come a long way since the early 1900s and before. i am quite happy with where women stand now (female, high school student, adelaide). more surprising is the lack of evidence to suggest that ‘feminism’ is a western-inflected concept and therefore rejected by the women of asia. thus the percentage of young people who agree strongly with the statement ‘i would call myself a feminist’ is greatest for the indian sample (about half). vietnamese and thai females are more likely to selfdefine as feminist than are the canadian and australian samples (at the agree level). the japanese sample is the least supportive of feminism, the japanese males also rejecting the value of the women’s movement for japanese women. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 11 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? chart 1 'i would call myself a feminist' 0 20 40 60 80 india usa canada thailandaustraliaindonesiavietnam japan china korea 0 40 80 female strongly agree male strongly agree female agree male agree note for chart 1: the bar columns indicate the percentage of respondents who agree strongly with the statement ‘i would call myself a feminist’. the lines indicate the percentage of respondents who agree with the statement (‘agree strongly’ plus ‘agree more than disagree’). chart 2: 'the women's movement has achieved good things for women of my country' 0 20 40 60 80 100 in di a us a ca na da th ail an d au st ra lia in do ne sia vi et na m ja pa n ch in a ko re a 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 female strongly agree male strongly agree female agree male agree note for chart 2: the bar columns indicate the percentage of respondents who agree strongly with the statement ‘i would call myself a feminist’. the lines indicate the percentage of respondents who agree with the statement (‘agree strongly’ plus ‘agree more than disagree’). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? gender vocabularies in supporting or rejecting feminism as noted above, there was space for respondents to make comments in relation to each statement. i classified these in terms of ‘gender vocabularies’ (adapted from pilcher 1998, 129-130) or the discourses by which young people understand gender issues. five gender vocabularies were significant for the feminism and women’s movement questions (see chart 3 below): feminist, equality/fairness, rights, development/progress and traditionalist. these are ordered in chart 3 from most to least supportive of feminism or the women’s movement. chart 3:gender vocabularies used to discuss feminism and the women’s movement feminist women have come a long way, better than it was, ‘gradual’ change; approves the gains of the women’s movement for men or women; identifies feminist issues such as childcare support, domestic violence, rigid masculinities; uses terms developed by feminism such as ‘oppression’, ‘harassment’, ‘discrimination’; identifies the needs of women as collective group equality, fairness supports equality between the genders, or equal opportunities, using terms such as equality or fairness rights women’s (and men’s) rights or choice, e.g. to vote, work, an education development, progress women’s movement contributes to national development or social progress; gender equality is a mark of modern society (sometimes used to oppose a change in gender relations) obligation, responsibilities to others, a duty to protect, support others, e.g. men to support family, parents their children; obligations of citizens to their country (sometimes used to assert gendered division of roles in which women are subordinated) traditionalist men should be in dominant, have superior position in society; men and women have different roles or positions in society, because of religion, biology or psychology; feminism is too radical, has gone too far; hostility or indifference to feminism charts 4 to 6 below show the use of gender vocabularies in comments made in response to all five questions itemised above. in relation to the deployment of gender vocabularies, again there is no clear-cut dualism between western and asian discourses. chart 4 reveals that all the female samples primarily used a feminist vocabulary to endorse the women’s movement: hence a cluster of ωs, representing comments in relation to the two women’s movement questions (questions 4 and 5) in the first column (representing the use of the feminist vocabulary). one female sample only, the us, also used the feminist vocabulary to endorse feminism (♀ in the first column). the males were more evenly split, four indicating support for the women’s movement via a feminist vocabulary (ωs in the second column for the usa, korean, vietnamese and portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 13 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? chinese samples) and four indicating their opposition to the women’s movement via a traditionalist vocabulary (ωs in the last column for the canadian, australian, japanese and thai samples). the canadian males (who were in many ways more ‘pro-feminist’ than the canadian females—e.g. see the agree result in chart 2) were the only male group to use a feminist vocabulary to endorse feminism. much more commonly, both females and males used a traditionalist vocabulary to oppose feminism (this can be seen by the clustering of ♀s in the last two columns). chart 4: major deployment of gender vocabularies in relation to feminism and the women’s movement by gender feminist equality/ rights national development duty/oblign traditionalis t females males fem males females males fem males fem male s usa ω ♀ ω ♀ canada ω ♀ ♀ ω australia ω ♀ ω ♀ japan ω ♀ ω ♀ korea ω ω ♀ ♀ thailand ω ♀ ω ♀ vietnam ω ω ♀ ♀ china ω ω ♀ ♀ india ω ♀ ♀ (rights) ω indonesia ω ♀ ♀ ω legend ♀ denotes the major vocabulary used by sub-sample to comment on answers to feminist questions (questions 1-3 above) ω denotes the major vocabulary used by the sub-sample to comment on answers to women’s movement questions (questions 4 and 5 above) these patterns express the fact that about half the male samples rejected the women’s movement and feminism, using a traditionalist vocabulary. half the female samples also rejected feminism (but not the women’s movement): as too radical, going too far in reverse discrimination against men and so on. male respondents in particular described radical ‘femi-nazis’ as akin to ‘racists’. they rejected feminists as ‘pathetic’, portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 14 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? ‘ridiculous’, ‘angry’, ‘bra-burning’, ‘militant’, ‘man-hating’, ‘extremist bitches’, ‘a scourge on society’. by contrast, all female samples and half the male samples endorsed the women’s movement rather than rejecting it, the surprising point being that they did so with the feminist vocabulary. respondents usually approved the gains made by feminism, asserting that women had ‘come a long way’, and some respondents suggested that there was still much ground to cover. as opposed to commentators who claim that ‘equality’ and ‘rights’ are ‘western’ inventions imposed on asian countries, chart 4 suggests that the thai, vietnamese, indonesian and indian female samples were most likely to use the equality vocabulary to discuss feminism, the indonesian males also using this vocabulary and the indian males focusing on the rights vocabulary. indeed, the thai and vietnamese female samples were the most enthusiastic in their use of the equality vocabulary, as shown in chart 5. chart 4 reveals that the indian and indonesian males preferred the national development vocabulary to endorse the women’s movement. this is also shown in chart 6, which shows that the national development vocabulary is most often deployed by the indian, indonesian, vietnamese and chinese samples. furthermore, and apart from the chinese sample, males find the national development vocabulary more comfortable than the female respondents. chart 5: equality vocabulary (percentage of respondents by sex and national sample using this vocabulary) 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 indiaindonesiachinavietnamjapan koreathailand usa canadaaustraliaweighted av. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 females males total portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 15 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? chart 6: national development vocabulary (percentage of respondents by sex and national sample using this vocabulary) 0 10 20 30 indiaindonesiachina vietnam japan koreathailand usa canadaaustraliaweighted av. 0 5 10 15 20 25females males total thus the charts reveal interesting gender differences in the use of vocabularies, the females favouring the feminist over the traditionalist vocabulary, and the equality over the national development vocabulary. the next section explores why this might be so, via a more detailed discussion of respondents’ comments. this section also explores the apparently different understanding of ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ among respondents in the different samples, suggesting one way in which western feminists and women can take a ‘transnational turn’, interrogate our own understandings of ‘equality’ (sameness) and difference (which we often take to mean inferiority). vocabularies of gender activism [feminism is] relevant to all humans whether they know it or not (female, high school student, portland) i am a strong believer of ‘girl power’ (female, high school student, sydney) men in general are chauvinistic pigs and men in india all the more worse and since india is a male dominated society/culture women have equal opportunities and rights only on paper (female, university student, mumbai) national development vocabularies link the advancement of women to the progress of the nation, due to the historical involvement of women in anti-colonial struggles, as in india and indonesia, and/or women’s engagement in revolutionary struggles to introduce communism, as in vietnam and china. thus nguyen thi dinh (1984, 729), president of the vietnam women’s union, in her contribution to robin morgan’s sisterhood is global, states ‘the history of vietnamese women is closely linked with portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 16 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? the thousand-year history of the construction and defence of the country’. charts 4 and 6 suggest that national development feminism incorporates men into feminist goals, at least rhetorically. male, and fewer female, respondents echoed their governments’ claims concerning women’s contributions to liberation or economic development: in practice, vietnamese women are good in any invasion, wars, and, at the moment, in the renovation (male, university student, hanoi) feminists help indonesia develop/progress (male, school student, yogyakarta). the women’s movement has enhanced the cohesion among chinese women, which is significant to the rise and decline of the nation (male, high school student, beijing). a country can only progress when both the forces work together’ (female, school student, mumbai). as this last comment suggests, and a particular feature of the indian respondents, linked to a commitment to national development feminism is a sense that women and men can and should work together to achieve their goals, that this is indeed the definition of feminists: willing to help all women to give them their rights (male, school student, mumbai) if i had made my contribution then the women in my village would have been in a much better social position (male, high school student, delhi) human beings are not omnipotent, so there is always something beyond your reach. don’t exert yourself too much. why not ask a man to do the things that you can’t do (female, university student, beijing) if most men are against us, can we call ourselves feminists? (female, school student, beijing) if national development feminism suggests that men should contribute to the improvement of women’s status, why was this vocabulary favoured more by men than women (as revealed in chart 6)? perhaps, like titi sumbung (1984, 322), in her contribution to sisterhood is global on indonesia, women realise that the ‘modernization process’ has not distributed the rewards of development equally and attitudes need to be changed so women become ‘equal partners with their menfolk’. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 17 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? furthermore, expressions of gender compatibility were also found among respondents in the anglophone samples, particularly an argument that the women’s movement was good for men as it increased their understanding of women’s experiences and needs: it has made them be more open-minded and they have now lost a few of their stereotypes (female, vocational student, adelaide). elaborating on the notion of working together, perhaps, a number of the japanese, indonesian and thai respondents asserted that the genders could be both equal and different at the same time, an almost impossible construction for western feminists to get our heads around: the man has to take care of the woman because he is a gentleman (but it doesn’t have to do with women being equal to men) (male, chiang mai, university student, male). women are weak—though they have equal rights (male, chiang mai, vocational college student) while these male respondents claim women’s weakness, females more often refer to male weakness: men know about women’s power because women are not weak and take care of them (female, university student, chiang mai). the presumed strength of thai women, derived from their economic independence, was also claimed by mallica vajrathon (1984, 672) in her contribution to morgan’s sisterhood is global. women talk about men ‘as though they were all fragile beings, behaving like children, needing to be looked after and cared for’. however, unlike the respondent just quoted, vajrathon (1984, 573,674) is aware that women’s requirement to ‘be pleasing’ imposes a double workload and makes thai women unwilling ‘to engage in confrontation with the male establishment and structure’. japanese and indonesian respondents also readily combined equality and difference: ‘same value’ means different treatment between men and women. considering this difference, society treats women as ‘equal’ to men (female, high school student, tokyo) god created men and women as equal. they may have different missions but none the less they are equal (female, high school student, yogyakarta). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 18 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? as western feminists have elaborated at length, difference is often translated into inferiority. this is hinted at by the two japanese female respondents who condemned feminists who make ‘ridiculous statements’ about equality (female, university student, tokyo) or ‘simply cry for equality’ when ‘it is natural that men and women are different’ (female, high school student, tokyo). little wonder, then, that one respondent suggested: i feel that the idea of treating women as inferior to men still remains deeply rooted in japanese society (female, university student, tokyo). anglophone respondents, by contrast, have difficulty bringing equality and difference into the same equation. western feminists have thus tended to quit the field for essentialists who view the sexes as preformed categories, whether the differences are determined biologically, socially or psychologically (connell 2000, 18). instead of aligning equality and difference, anglophone feminists note the contradiction between wanting to be like the boys (in terms of equal pay) but still wanting to be liked by the boys (in personal relations), by contrasting feminism and femininity. however, such combinations appeared less contradictory to some of my anglophone respondents: i get by using my femininity to my advantage but i like that this can’t hurt my chances of doing whatever i choose (female, university student, santa monica). i think awareness of women’s talents and capabilities is a good thing but not at the expense of losing being feminine … where are the manly men? good they are more sensitive, but not at the expense of losing their masculinity (female, university student, winnipeg). similarly, several young indian women, akin to ananya jahanara kabir’s (2005) identification of the artist nilima sheik as a ‘feminine feminist’, described themselves as ‘a female who is a feminist’, and combined this with being a respectful ‘daughter of my parent’, ‘a good dancer’ or a desire to become an ‘air hostess’, seeing no contradiction in these identities. an indonesian respondent described herself as: a tomboy, more comfortable with male friends than female friends, … in favour of equal rights, against women’s exploitation, against male violence, feminine (female, university student, yogyakarta). other indonesian respondents claimed that women must be ‘assertive’ and ‘wise’ but also ‘nonjudgemental’, ‘patient’, ‘gentle’ and ‘accommodating to society’. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 19 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? a japanese female averred: i insist on a woman’s rights but not everything should be equal with men. i want to enjoy dressing up. i think a brassiere is necessary and pretty. extreme feminists give up the pleasures of women (female, high school student, tokyo). it is tempting to interpret comments concerning gender complementarity—each ‘taking care’ of the other—as the naïve statements of those who do not really understand equality as a legal or formal concept. in the west, difference discourses are often uncomfortably resonant with conservative religious discourses. furthermore, the lower participation rates of women in management in japan and the persistence of domestic violence in asian countries give us pause. soon chan park’s (1984) justification for women’s heroic subservience to the goal of national emancipation in korea contrasts starkly with green’s (1984, 706) us contribution to sisterhood is global, calling for the nation to make good to us women its promise of ‘a country founded on principles of equality, democratic freedom, and respect for diversity of belief and action’. the australian and other anglophone respondents rarely phrased the benefits of the women’s movement in terms of national development or progress. such has rarely been the rhetoric offered by feminists themselves, while the individualistic nature of our identity constructions and citizenship engagements preclude such discourses. as one australian respondent put it, ‘if you want some thing bad enough you can achieve any thing you want’ (female, high school student, sydney). among the australian comments which saw the women’s movements as of national benefit were those who mentioned ‘good for business’ which will ‘make a difference in the world/australia’, a rhetoric deployed by femocrats to introduce australia’s affirmative action legislation (see braithwaite 1998). others were less specific concerning just how the women’s movement ‘made us the country we are today’ (e.g. female, catholic girls school, adelaide), or the us respondent who simply wrote ‘god bless the usa’ as her comment on the women’s movement. of course, western nations have their own versions of national development, with feminists implicated in racialised nationalism in settler colonies such as australia, the usa and canada, but we don’t call it national development feminism. this means that portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 20 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? most of the time feminism is seen as more combative in relation to the state than in countries with an official women’s movement (e.g. see vickers 2006). however, where morgan’s 1984 anglophone contributors rejected their patriarchal, militaristic and racist states10, such trenchant radicalism has been muted by the rise of neo-liberalism. as ueno chizuko (2004) argues, in her comparison of us integrationist and japanese segregationist feminists, us feminists applaud the equal participation of women in the united states army (the main mechanism by which disadvantaged people can secure public service jobs and entitlements—as recruits), while japanese feminists maintain a segregationist position, both in terms of front-line fighting and hard-line equality in the workforce. us feminist organization now (national organisation of women) argued that women be included in the military fighting in vietnam (ueno 2004, 167) and on the front during the 1991 iraq war. the world has witnessed white women participating in the humiliation of prisoners of war at abu-graib prison in iraq (enloe 2005). one us respondent echoed this position: i feel when it comes to equal job opportunity women are more or less treated equally but as seen in the recent war on iraq, men more or less dominated the scene. why aren’t women out there on the front line? in that aspect, women aren’t treated equally (female, university student, portland). conclusion women are treated terribly in many muslim countries (male, high school student, adelaide). there are still ethnic groups which are not allowing young or older females the right of freedom …[the women’s movement] helps those whose families are culturally still against women’s rights (female, high school student, sydney). feminism is unique to ‘western cultures’ (female, vocational student, adelaide). as noted above, jill vickers (2002, 248) suggests that western feminist discussion of national development feminism often assumes that national development feminists are ‘co-opted’ while western feminisms are not influenced by wider national programs and ideologies. feminist nationalism is something ‘they’ have, while western feminisms are seen as anti-capitalist and therefore anti-state. vickers finds otherwise in her crossnational comparative study of the sort that basu recommends, a study which compares 10 see green’s (1984, 711) critique of ‘militarism, pacifism, the nuclear-arms race, and western and multinational corporate imperialism’, and, for australia, dowse and giles’ (1984, 66,67) condemnation of the militaristic ‘patriarchal state’ and its ‘racism and sexism that forged australian patriotism’. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 21 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? so called ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations, but does not find them all the same, nor does vickers suggest that ‘developing’ nations’ feminism is a more primitive version of the ‘developed’ nations’ achievements in gender equality. vickers concludes that most feminists in the dominant majorities in western nations also practised ‘national development feminism’, looked to ‘their’ nation-state for ‘rights, welfare programmes, prosperity and security’ (vickers 2006, 89). in return for white women’s early incorporation into white australia as citizen mothers, they were expected to produce babies for the new nation and exercise a civilising influence on indigenous women and asian-background women, women who were denied the same citizenship rights, such as suffrage and maternity allowances, or even being allowed to keep their children. similarly, white anglophone women in canada between 1880 and 1920 were exhorted to contribute to the task of assimilating immigrants, francophones and first nations people (vickers 2006, 98). the comments that introduce this section reflect the implication of the australian women’s movement in australian nation-building, easily asserting the advanced status of anglo-australian women by comparison with benighted ‘others’, thus mobilising braidotti’s ‘post-feminist neo-liberalism’. however, vickers (2006:98-101) does suggest that difference-based feminisms fit more snugly with most nation-building projects, whether these be white anglophone women in canada or feministas in the philippines (who resisted two colonial regimes, the japanese occupation and an internal dictatorship). difference feminisms express the value of communalism and focus on women’s socially different but equally valued gender roles, primarily as sustainers of social solidarity through family, kin, community and nation. this is echoed in the strongest support for feminism among my indian sample, linked to a nationalist development vocabulary with a particular focus on men and women working together. by contrast, modernist or equality feminism is often more combative. in its focus on individual rights for women, it can reject the family as an oppressive institution or put women at odds with men (vickers 2006:101). within this framework it is harder to align feminist and nationalist goals, although it can be done, as the femocrat experience in australia and canada, and to a lesser extent the usa, reveals. in the 1970s and the 1980s, national progress was associated with a better deal for women and a more inclusive state, expressed also in a formalised commitment to portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 22 bulbeck can we call ourselves feminists? multiculturalism. indeed, two australian respondents deployed the femocrats’ national development rhetoric in noting that affirmative action legislation was good for business. however, more commonly, the combative nature of equality feminism was rejected in the predominant use of the traditionalist vocabulary by young australian and us men, who saw feminists as too ‘aggressive’ and ‘anti-male’. however, the pro-feminist canadian male sample suggests that western liberal feminism can be ‘sold’ to men in the west. while national development vocabularies encourage the participation and support of men in a way that the more assertive western feminist vocabularies do not, national development or official feminism limits men’s and women’s participation to nationally prescribed activities, for example excluding aspects of bodily autonomy such as the freedom to express different sexualities or choose among the complete range of reproductive strategies. in showing less enthusiasm for this vocabulary, it appears that the young asian women in my research perceived the potential for vocabularies of duty to be turned against them, to require their self-sacrificing engagement in revolution and economic growth, often without men’s reciprocal commitment to family labour. the ‘transnational turn’ offered in this paper, not only challenges western respondents’ belief in their greater advancement towards gender equity, but also suggests that individualization framed around consumerism has its limits for women’s freedom and opportunities. this is revealed in the translation of western feminisms into commodity feminism, or in now’s demand for an equal right to kill other women and men. the celebration of gender difference in japan, korea and thailand highlights the ways in which western feminism has been straitjacketed by a version of liberal feminism, allowing women either to be like men and demand equal treatment or to be different from men and condemned to inferiority. would a different set of possibilities open up if western feminists, like some of the asian respondents quoted above, had a vocabulary that enabled us to demand difference at the same time as we asserted equality, proclaiming an equal worth that did not collapse into subordination even as we pursue different, possibly even gender-differentiated, projects? 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matriarchs: asian women today, allen and unwin, sydney. wolf, n. 1993, fire with fire: the new female power and how it will change the 21st century, random house, new york. zhang, l. 2005, ‘development of women and gender studies in china’, gender and sexuality: journal of the center for gender studies icu, no 0, 39-59. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 28 chilla bulbeck, university of adelaide introduction methods and summary of results gender vocabularies in supporting or rejecting feminism negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software jon marshall, faculty of humanities and social sciences, university of technology sydney introduction this paper investigates the idea that governance has changed in the contemporary world so that there is no longer, if there ever was, simply a dominant power, or set of powers, which are able to exert control. governance is distributed, rather than centralised or territorialised, so it is not clear where responsibility lies or where the fulcrum of control resides. michael hardt and antonio negri describe this situation in their books empire (2000) and multitude (2004), under the rubric of ‘empire.’ at the same time, they claim that this situation both manifests and aids the democratic ‘multitude’ of people. however, while distributed governance may offer new strategies of radical or democratic subversion, there is no cause for easy optimism that these new systems of power will automatically lead to democracy. information and communication technology is a central tool in distributing governance, but this technology is not inherently destabilising of arbitrary power. the opposite is as likely as the former. furthermore, there are radical differences within the multitude, which in turn is capable of constructing new elites and discriminations. the distribution of governance, with its concurrent disguise of responsibility, may indeed help established powers increase their power. this paper proceeds first by briefly describing the autonomist history of negri’s thought, his earlier pronouncements more overtly ambivalent than his recent works. then hardt and negri’s ideas about empire are described within the context of prevalent views about the information society. examples of distributed governance marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software being used to reinforce power are presented to show that distribution is not necessarily democratic. networks such as the internet developed more out of the needs of military and corporate expansion and mobility rather than democracy; thus they may retain features of their original purpose as much as they may challenge the dominant powers. finally, open source groups do not replicate the democratic features assumed by negri and hardt. while agreeing with the general sentiment of negri and hardt’s work, this paper aims to shift the analytic emphasis in discussions of distributed governance, and to temper over-optimistic views of its democratic potential. autonomist marxism—struggle and technology autonomism grew out of the radical marxist operaismo (‘workerism’) movement in mid-1960s italy. both movements claim that the prime conflict is between those who create and those who appropriate, or between those who impose work and those who have to work (cleaver 1981). in these theories there is no clear line as to who is in the working class, and there is no easy assumption that all members of this class have uniform interests—divisions can be imposed upon them by capital (cleaver 2000, 113ff.). however, it is the workers, in this loose sense, who drive capitalist development, for the need to disrupt and defeat the workers spurs capital to develop new defences. therefore, the political history of capital is the ‘history of the successive attempts of the capitalist class to emancipate itself from the working class’ (tronti 1965). in this spirit, panzieri (1981) argued against ideas of the independent development of technology, proposing that capitalism develops technological innovation both as a weapon against the working class, and to reproduce and impose its own form of objectivity and rationality. this innovation may lead to opportunities for subversion, but it is never automatically emancipatory. as cleaver (1989) regards this situation, ‘[i]t is often the failure of a given technology to serve its intended purpose of social control which gives rise on the part of capitalist managers to the demand for the development of new technologies and the funnelling of resources into the appropriate fields.’ capitalist technology constantly increases the amount of production possible by a single worker, but it rarely decreases that worker’s need to work. ‘the efforts of business to convert technological change into higher profits and more work is the desire to maintain its control over society.’ thus, the skilled factory workers of the early twentieth century provoked developments in de-skilling portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 2 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software workplaces, and this led to the semi-participatory welfare state as an effort to control and contain revolutionary activity. then, as these ‘mass workers’ refused to limit their demands for wages or for participation in the state, the dominant class attempted to repeal welfare, replacing it with discipline by austerity: trade unions were attacked, factories become more robotic with less workers (or with workers controlled or under surveillance by computers), and middle class work was deskilled and its privileges eroded (negri 1989, 89-101). capital became more mobile to escape workers’ demands, and more money was invested in speculative activities: ‘beneath the rosy images of the information society lie the stark goals of “control and reduction in the costs of labour”‘ (negri, quoted in dyer-witheford 2004). the whole of organised society, then, is geared towards the replication and reproduction of capital. this system is sometimes labelled the ‘social factory’ or the ‘diffuse factory’ (negri 1989, 204). thus contestation with capitalism moves beyond the actual factory (dyer-witheford 2004; cleaver 2000, 70) and the antagonism is polyvalent and multiple (negri 1989, 87). this leads to hardt and negri’s replacement of the ‘working class’ with the category of ‘multitude.’ the dyad: empire and multitude like a number of contemporary thinkers, hardt and negri propose that the world is being divided into two. the governing terms of their discussion are ‘empire’ and ‘multitude.’ the importance of empire, which hardt and negri distinguish from imperialism, is that ‘empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. it is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers’ (2000, xii). elsewhere, negri defines empire as ‘the transfer of sovereignty of nation-states to a higher entity,’ but not to a world nation, or to an existent nation like the united states (2004, 59). while empire contains the dynamics of capitalism, the concept is not restricted to capital alone, for it is intended to capture the diffuseness of contemporary power. negri and hardt’s use of the term ‘empire’ is unfortunate as it may imply a single center of power, and many critics attempt to refute hardt and negri’s idea by arguing that the current u.s. government is attempting to establish a conventional empire or portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 3 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software is acting as if it already had one. however, it is not clear that this u.s. empire will be attained; it depends on the cooperation of other states, and some claim that the bush administration’s attempts to extend and enforce u.s. control will destroy u.s. dominance (johnson 2004; soros 2003). the corporate world seems split on the war in iraq rather than uniformly behind the u.s.a. the iraq war favours some corporations (haliburton, mci, bechtel) over others (microsoft, coca cola) who fear destruction of their markets in the middle east. furthermore, while the u.s.a. is very powerful, other states also have power, as do ngos, and the movements of capital and chaos in markets are other sources of influence outside the control of any state. to some extent, power has always been distributed. political scientists discuss the ‘balance of power,’ which implies there is never a sole power and that power arises in ‘ratios,’ to use norbert elias’s term. elias claims that power ratios ‘are bi-polar at least, and usually multi-polar’ (1978, 74-5, 131). even dictators and absolute monarchs are not completely free to act, being constrained by the activities of others (elias 1983, 277ff.). power ratios are an expression of the dynamic patterning of human coaction. those patterns, which are easily activated, express the established modes of power. once power is looked at in this way, rather than in terms of a thing that someone possesses and other people do not, then it can be recognised that there is always contestation. what is different in the contemporary world is that many of these power ratios operate over almost the whole planet simultaneously, rather than being confined to particular areas. because the term ‘empire’ lacks clarity, i will use the term ‘distributed governance’ to refer to power being diffused through a system, displaying distributed responsibility, and of appearing in places with no apparent origin. in negri and hardt’s analysis‘multitude’ is a term with several meanings. firstly it refers to an irreducible multiplicity of subjects (negri 2004, 111). as such it is opposed to the supposed unitary conception of ‘the people’ that has been the conceptual basis of western sovereignty (hardt and negri 2004, 79, 99). second, multitude is the ‘class of productive singularities, the class of the operators of immaterial labour’ (negri 2004, 112). this is an unfortunate definition as it presumably excludes unproductive singularities or people who engage in ‘material labour’—leaving out much of the world, which earlier autonomist theory did not. the multitude is all those who labour portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 4 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software and produce under capital, and hardt and negri assert that the differences dividing labour no longer exist (2004, 107). as they put it, ‘the creation of the multitude, its innovation in networks, and its decision-making ability in common makes democracy possible for the first time today’ problems of difference and separation are essentially dismissed. finally, the multitude appears to have the singular desire ‘to recreate this world in its image and likeness.’ (2004, 340). so, empire creates multitude and multitude creates the empire of distributed power, in mutuality. hardt and negri claim that, ‘the creative forces of the multitude that sustain empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges’ (2000, xv). it appears that the term ‘multitude,’ through its connotations of multiplicity, entails the fall of the implied singularity of empire when itself it makes up part of the distributed dynamics. if taken seriously as intertwined, then no overthrow or freedom need arise from mutual participation, any more than the hegelian dependence of masters on slaves means that slaves can easily rebel. rather than agreeing with hardt and negri’s techno-optimism, i argue that empire and multitude are not separable into power and democracy. in the autonomist sense, although capitalist social formations may arise as defence from the actions of the multitude, this does not mean that liberation is automatic, although a new stage of struggle may arise. power being distributed or networked does not automatically mean democracy. the more powerful the node the more alliances it may be able to make, the more entrenched pathways of action it can activate. networks can extend central power out into the world as much as weaken it. networks interact and thus ‘communicate,’ but there is no need for these communications to be meaningful, and they may not enable us to find commonality as hardt and negri suggest (2004, xiii, xv). groups can interact and polarise or separate. they can increase mutual hatred as much as ‘community’. communication and connection is not an unrelieved good always bringing harmony or unity. popular resistance can also be oppressive of others, as happens with the christian right’s resistance to secularism and the nonrighteous, or in neo-fascism’s resistance to race mixing. resistance can become institutionalised, in ‘rituals of rebellion’ and allow people to let off steam and engage portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 5 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software in minor rebellions, which do not affect the overall patterns of power (gluckman 1956, 1963). we can usefully compare negri and hardt’s division between empire and multitude, with benjamin barber’s (1996) mcworld and jihad division. by ‘jihad’ barber does not refer to islamic fundamentalism, but to militant localisms or responses to globalisation that bricolage resistance out of traditions in order to oppose the ‘mainstream’ west. by mcworld he refers to the uniformities of western corporate capitalism and its overtaking and over-riding of local economies and ways of life. to barber the forces of ‘wild capitalism’—which are described in terms of universal unregulated markets, spread and coordinated by innovations in communication technology, and which reduce freedom to consumer choice while fragmenting ‘community’—are intimately bound up with a process of rejection; of localised tribalisms and frustration verging into violence, often based in religion, or ideologies of ‘blood.’ these rejections often make use of the information technologies necessary for the spread of modern capitalism, so that jihad arises via mcworld. modern localism depends on globalism and vice versa. barber comments that since ‘neither jihad nor mcworld promises a remotely democratic future ... the consequences of the dialectical interaction between them suggests new and startling forms of inadvertent tyranny’ (1996, 220).1 the point is simple: interdependence and networks do not of themselves generate democratic process. information society hardt and negri suggest that empire, multitude and distributed governance are vitally dependent upon communication technology, and they use a fairly standard information society model to describe this situation: ‘empire takes form when language and communication, or really when immaterial labor and cooperation become the dominant force’ (2000, 385). that is, ‘the development of communication networks has an organic relationship to the emergence of the new world order – it is, in other words, effect and cause, product and producer. 1 castells similarly distinguishes between those who inhabit the global ‘space of flows’ and those who inhabit the local ‘space of place.’ or, as he puts it, ‘elites are cosmopolitan, people are local’ (1996, 415). there may no longer be a capitalist class but a network, ‘a faceless collective capitalist, made up of financial flows operated by electronic networks’ (474). thus, ‘at its core, capital is global. as a rule, labour is local’ (475). portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 6 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software communication not only expresses but organises the movement of globalisation (32). hardt and negri also point out that information technology ensures that ‘[c]ommunication and control can be exercised efficiently at a distance,’ but rather than conclude that this could extend centralised control directly to the periphery, they only accept the idea of distributed control, suggesting that the internet makes a good model for multitude (hardt and negri 2004, xv). they further imply that informational networks free liberation movements of the necessity of becoming organised in hierarchies, or of having to impose order after the chaos of revolution and thus assert that revolutionary freedom will finally be possible (68-78). the idea that the economy has fundamentally changed over the last 40 to 50 years from a basis in industry to a basis in knowledge or symbol manipulation, is not new. it goes at least as far back as management writer peter drucker’s age of discontinuity (1968), and, more popularly, but more hidden in academia, to the writings of alvin toffler, particularly the third wave (1980), and powershift (1990). in some ways the claims that negri and hardt make for this change resemble the claims toffler made, and which were embraced by the u.s. republican party’s newt gingrich and the procapitalist progress and freedom foundation. ‘big government’ (the welfare state) and ‘big unions’ are thus frequently represented by right wing proponents as outmoded relics in the information economy. similarly, bill gates claims that the availability of information and networking equality will make capitalism frictionless and finally able to work (1995, chapter 8). this is not to suggest that hardt, negri or toffler are right wing theorists or dupes, but that perhaps we are dealing with widespread utopian longings rather than radical analysis—especially given the bypassing of negri’s early writings and the autonomist awareness of the struggles around technology. central to these standard arguments has been the rise to power of the ‘knowledge worker,’ or in this case, the immaterial worker, or worker with immaterials (ideas, symbols, images, art, and so on). referring to service work, hardt and negri write that ‘since the production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labor involved in this production as immaterial labor—that is, labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication’ (2000, 290). they explicitly tie this to computers transforming portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 7 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software ‘laboring practices in such a way that they all tend toward the model of information and communication technologies’ (2000, 291). negri (2004) argues that the transition ‘from material to immaterial production’ means that the main instrument of production is the worker’s brain (a formulation that deletes the rest of the body). this is supposed to mean that the owners of capital no longer own the means of production and can no longer confiscate the fruits of production (negri 2004, 91). in fact, workfor-hire provisions are part of all modern copyright law, and it is more real to claim that capitalists now own, for only as long as they want, the ‘brains’ of the workers. standard contracts forbid people from working on projects that are similar to projects they have previously worked on, so employee’s capacity to build up and use valuable knowledge is restricted. furthermore, contemporary knowledge management systems seek to replace the specialised knowledge of particular workers with programs—a classic example of the autonomist theory of capitalist development. hardt and negri imply that knowledge workers will cooperate democratically as multitude to oppose capital. in contrast toffler argues that whereas industrial production required standardisation and uniformity in the workplace, allowing the workforce to find a common cause out of a common experience, information work requires change, innovation and individually oriented production; therefore, the workforce has no sense of commonality and finds it hard to organise (1984, 38). knowledge workers tend to unite only on certain issues rather than around groups of issues. people mix ideas from both ‘left’ and ‘right’ and can splinter on fundamental points. lack of permanence in a workplace and constant competition between work groups also fracture bonds between people. another early theorist of the information society, daniel bell, proposed that knowledge workers are divided into ‘four estates, the scientific, the technological, the administrative and the cultural’ with large operational disjunctions between them (1976, 374-6). again, this suggests that the multitude is not necessarily brought together. as autonomist theory argues, the multitude can be both divided and rendered replaceable by capitalist innovation. hardt and negri go on to suggest that this information economy challenges traditional ideas of property, as: [p]roducing increasingly means constructing cooperation and communicative commonalities … in the context of linguistic and cooperative production, labor and the portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 8 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software common property tend to overlap. private property, despite its juridical powers, cannot help becoming an ever more abstract and transcendental concept and thus ever more detached from reality. a new notion of ‘commons’ will have to emerge on this terrain. (2000, 302) the information economy’s central paradox is that it encourages and requires quick and easy distribution of information, but capitalists need to restrict access in order to charge consumers and generate profit. the internet may thus seem radical as it allows data-products to be copied and distributed easily, causing panic to manufacturers who claim ownership of such products and who make their money selling them. although the ways property is viewed may be changing, the ways property is implemented or appropriated may not change as a result of new views—any more than the idea that property is theft, or the idea that property is alienated from the worker, had long term effects on the ways property operates. society can encompass several different ways of defining property. it could be argued that rather than property exploding under new ideas of digital commons, corporate property is being successfully extended into fields in which it would previously have been legally unjustified, such as patenting genes or other ‘natural’ products. james boyle (1996) claims that the notion of the corporate author does for information what economic notions of natural markets did for the industrial revolution, by providing a method of appropriating what is really an intertwined production, or a naturally occurring phenomenon. if information equals property, then information cannot be free as in the old hacker slogan. workers have to create, but what they make is rarely their own. instead it seems as if workers are appendages to some kind of program, which uses them only for as long as they are not replaceable. in similar fashion ‘ordinary people’ do not own information about themselves and, due to the risk of leaks, many information workers are under surveillance and control. there is a tendency for intelligence agencies and the corporate sector to work together to beat national competitors. this in turn leads to increased counter and pre-emptive surveillance. toffler warned that ‘if intelligence operations … become so intertwined with the everyday activities of society, so decentralised, so fused with business and other private interests, as to make effective control impossible, democracy will be in mortal peril’ (1990, 318). the new economy has intensified patterns of capitalist dominance—the corporate sector has portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 9 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software more relative power than it used to. work has become total and inequalities of income have increased. internationalisation is used as an excuse to increase the salaries of high level executives and decrease the wages of workers. the tax burden has shifted from the corporate sector onto the multitude (johnston 2003; wolff 2004). the rollback of the state has mainly occurred in those areas in which it helped people, or in which it acted as a check on corporate action. distributed governance as stated previously, hardt and negri imply that the network of distributed power ultimately generates democracy. unfortunately there is little evidence that this is necessarily so. this section considers some cases in which distribution has not reinforced democracy or democratic accountability. it is doubtful that al-qaeda, as network, is democratic, or particularly open, even though hardt and negri cover this point by claiming, without reference, that al-qaeda is a centralised hierarchy like a drug cartel (2004, 89). the military can also organise as a network in response (2004, 59). again it is unlikely this response will undermine hierarchy, although it may diffuse responsibility. commanders now appear to have little responsibility for the behaviour of those under their command who supposedly ‘act at their own initiative,’ as at abu ghraib where prisoners were abused in full view of troops who wandered casually around them. yet it was not, we were told, the responsibility of the army, or of the commander of the gaols, or of the intelligence operatives who implied this might be the best procedure, but rather of a few people who happened to be photographed. the network diffuses connections of power. even if the command encourages something, or tacitly approves it, they have no responsibility for the results. this vagueness may well help the centre maintain control in ways it could not do otherwise. this is in line with negri’s statement that since ‘the world elite decides, but it never considers itself responsible,’ its decisions are blamed on, or simply portrayed as accommodation to the universal, and politically neutral, realities of the market; as with decisions about supplying aids drugs to africa (2004, 92). responsibility is distributed while the impact of power focused. power is seemingly emptied out of place so that power can become total, as in guantánamo bay, where people are sequestered by the u.s.a. while outside the jurisdiction of that country’s laws. this is liminal governance. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 10 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software the australian government likewise claims that it will not be blackmailed by refugees killing themselves, or by dying while being incarcerated by the government. the power of the government acts by denying its power. ‘we’ are victims, not the refugees. the government excised parts of australia from its official control, so that it could excise the rights of refugees arriving there, thus increasing its own power at the same time as diminishing its responsibilities, and incarcerating refugees outside the law. although the temptation to accuse the australian government of lying is strong, perhaps it is true that the prime minister, john howard, really does know very little of what is going on, and his constant appeals to ignorance are reflections of a government that finds it hard to negotiate a course amidst overwhelming and conflicting streams of information. perhaps the left ascribes the right an unrealistic omnipotence. a business parallel is the james hardie case, whereby an australian company knowingly poisoned its workers with asbestos for profit. the corporation walled off its responsibility in order to let the profits be unmolested by its victims. eventually the company’s responsibility was defined by the courts, but a year later no compensation had yet been paid. and although the director was sacked for this, he received far more money than any of the victims would. in daily life we may note that businesses ‘fall over’ if their network fails, and we are often told ‘the computers are down’ and nothing can be done, or that the computer does not allow a certain type of response. telephone service centres seem designed to cause people to hang up after long periods of waiting, and the workers generally have little knowledge beyond that provided by the computer. fault and responsibility is distributed elsewhere. this distributed responsibility does not increase representation, rebellion or resistance, but confusion and frustration. the political left also distributes responsibility. the left in australia was voted out of high office; it no longer has any party with appeal (both the main parties in australia and the usa being of the right), and it yields to the inevitabilities of the market and globalisation. the left often refuses to accept how much it had penetrated the state. the left can even see its own achievements, such as social security, simply as modes of state control, and thus surrendered to the right’s rollback of these portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 11 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software achievements. the autonomist position, as opposed to the operaismo, has always been to find power out of the state rather than within it, but this may simply surrender control to the right. it might well be strategically better to see the state as a site of struggle (although not the only such site), rather than just a site of control. to some extent, the success of the popularist religious right in countries such as the u.s.a. demonstrates something else. they have not sat passively back, but have organised and taken responsibility for their cause. certainly they have been co-opted by the corporate right, largely because the right is historically capable of using religion while the left is not, and the right can be openly authoritarian and repressive while the left cannot (until it achieves power at least). meanwhile the conservative critique of capitalism has been forgotten to the extent that most people do not seem to know of its existence. without exploring this in detail, or denying the complexities involved, i would suggest that the success of the religious right involved people meeting regularly offline, and in seeing their identity as involved in their actions. their churches and groups are organised in a fairly traditional cell arrangement, under various organisations that have national reach and national figures. they are elitist. they communicate through mainstream broadcast media (mainly radio and tv) to promote their aims, as well as through internet groups. they act on specific widely promoted issues—not in terms of a uniform policy. this means that if people disagree with a particular action they do not participate in that action; but they do not have to split from the group. the issues are chosen with wide appeal. whatever the complexities involved here, the success of the religious right does point to the fact that surrendering to distributed governance, or engaging only in action outside the state, may limit the left’s potential for success. actions such as those used by the religious right, however, are not the spontaneous organisation of negri’s multitudes. in fact distributed power causes a problem for revolutionaries as the adversary seems to have disappeared (negri 2004, 92). all negri can council is withdrawal, although this may not be possible for everyone (2004, 93). resistance can be discovered at a private level; there are possibilities beyond oneself (94). faced with the vagueness of distributed governance, we retreat portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 12 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software away from others. this too is based on an autonomist tradition (tronti 1965) whereby the workers were to withdraw co-operation, or to engage in strikes and sabotage. however, in a system in which everyone is intertwined, to where do people withdraw? negri’s suggestion is that people withdraw to the internet, especially the areas apparently outside corporate control. the internet and radicalism at the beginning of empire, despite their reliance on information society-type theorising, hardt and negri are sceptical about the internet. they write about various intense struggles over the world: first, each struggle, though firmly rooted in local conditions, leaps immediately to the global level and attacks the imperial constitution in its generality. second, all the struggles destroy the traditional distinction between economic and political struggles. the struggles are at once economic, political, and cultural-and hence they are biopolitical struggles, struggles over the form of life. they are constituent struggles, creating new public spaces and new forms of community …. [however,] the struggles do not communicate despite their being hypermediatized, on television, the internet, and every other imaginable medium. once again we are confronted by the paradox of incommunicability. (2000, 56) later hardt and negri seem to forget the uncoordinated nature of single-purpose pressure groups, or of groups gathered together over a slogan or over a particular point presented in the media (as in the protests in the u.s.a. over the death of terri schiavo through removal of her life support). by the end of empire optimism reigns: in political terms, the global information infrastructure might be characterized as the combination of a democratic mechanism and an oligopolistic mechanism, which operate along different models of network systems. the democratic network is a completely horizontal and deterritorialized model. the internet, which began as a project of darpa (the u.s. defense department advanced research projects agency), but has now expanded to points throughout the world, is the prime example of this democratic network structure .... this democratic model is what deleuze and guattari call a rhizome, a nonhierarchical and noncentered network structure. (2000, 298-99) in his informal conversations negri also points to the internet as a source of collaborative freedom: ‘levels of cooperation and sharing exist everywhere, even writing an article on a computer means having to rely on a common knowledge, which is to say the internet’ (2004, 27). and, ‘[c]ontrary to what is believed, people have become more communist than before’ (2004, 27). seeing collaboration as evidence of incipient communism is as misguided as seeing all trade, or exchange, as capitalist. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 13 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software the history of the internet is more complex than portrayed by negri and hardt. although the internet was largely built by programmers using exchange of information in a way resembling open source groups, it has to be recognised that the internet grew within the framework of military, academic, corporate, and governmental action, as well as through the activities of programmers. it was already embedded in power, and in pre-existing usages and pathways. many histories of the internet ignore the overwhelming early use of the arpanet by the military (demonstrated by the extent to which this network diminished when the military separated from it); or the sheer number of independent corporate based computer networks, and their expansion, in the same period; or the volume of state expenditure in this field. this emphasis on programmers could serve a political-identity creating purpose by portraying programmers as supposedly free from external imposition and restraint, and perhaps helps relieve any unease about accepting the imperatives of those for whom they actually worked—especially in the 1960s and 1970s. the discourse of net history has been governed by the rubrics of individualism and futurity, which are among the most popular ways of describing capitalism and technology. however, this perspective is not the only possible way to view net history. for example, the u.s. federal communications commission inquiry into the matter of regulatory and policy problems presented by the interdependence of computer and communication services and facilities, which began in 1966, was told that the number of non-defence computer systems had risen from 91 in 1953 to more than 35,000 in 1966, and that more than 2,000 online systems were in use with more than 45,000 data terminals (schiller 1982, 22). representatives from the petroleum, aerospace, computer, banking, insurance, transport and retail sectors all testified before the inquiry into the importance of data transmission and computer networks in their forward planning. they all uniformly complained that the transmission services offered by at&t hindered this computerisation (23-34). commercial networks were widespread and militant before the arpanet was even begun. similarly, in 1980, the international communications association submitted to the fcc that ‘international telecommunications provides the pipeline which enables u.s. industry to extend its enterprise to the vast world markets’ (schiller 1982, 99). a 1982 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 14 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software business week article stressed how communication was seen as essential to the internationalisation of corporations. it claimed ‘us multinationals are locating their foreign offices in cities with the most accommodating ptts [post, telgraph and telephone providers]’ (1985, 129). one example would be ford setting up its communications office in britain because british regulations both allowed it to establish a private email system (business week 1985, 129), and to use computer services back in the u.s.a. (schiller 1982, 100). all of these developments in networking were concerned with speedy control of widespread operations, with processing huge volumes of information to aid in that control, and facilitating centralised response. such developments also show that despite hardt and negri’s arguments to the contrary, distributed governance and capitalistic networking preceded the multitude’s use of the internet. perhaps in autonomist terms this process can be seen as part of the mobile liberation of the corporate sector from local borders and local workers. although it is tempting to think of hackers in terms of deleuze and guattari’s nomadology, the critical art ensemble points out that it is actually the elite who uses cyberspace to make a diffuse power field without location, and a fixed sight machine appearing as spectacle ... hostility from the oppressed is rechannelled into the bureaucracy which misdirects antagonism away from the nomadic power field. the retreat into invisibility of non location prevents [the definition] ... of a site of resistance .... no longer needing to take a defensive posture is the nomad’s greatest strength. (1994, 15-6) as sterling’s book the hacker crackdown (1994) demonstrates that hackers were at the mercy of a more mobile authority. hackers were generally caught in their bedrooms. of course, this history of the internet being entwined with distribution of corporate, state and military bodies does not mean the internet could not be commandeered for other uses. more to hardt and negri’s point are the free and open source software movements. they, supposedly, more clearly challenge capitalist ideas of property and show the democratic potential of the multitude. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 15 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software free and open source software (foss) movements hardt and negri write that ‘we might also understand the decision-making capacity of the multitude in analogy with the collaborative development of computer software and the innovations of the open source movement’ (2004, 339). open source allows people to read and modify the source code of computer programs. the openness theoretically means that software bugs are fixed quickly and better programs produced as more people can see into the code and modify it. as hardt and negri argue, ‘the democracy of the multitude, then, is as an open source society, that is a society in which source code is revealed so that we can all work collaboratively to solve its bugs and create new, better social programs’ (2000, 340).2 it is not, however, clear that open sources actually work like this. even the notion that capitalist property rights are challenged by open source is disputed within the movement (raymond 1998, 1999). following on from their assertions about open source, hardt and negri claim that ‘in the multitude the right to disobedience and the right to difference are fundamental’ (2004, 340). this is not the case in open source groups, because technical ability has to be recognised and the groups are organised, at least partially, through attributing this recognition and through its contestation. as such they are rightly not only hierarchical, but also elitist with respect to those with no expertise. ideas that do not translate into technical terms are discounted. we may consider the common elite programmer refusal of post-modernism (morningstar 1993), and their common assumptions of being able to solve all social problems without knowing any sociology or anthropology, or even knowing much about societies other than their own. in some ways the foss movement is a closed or limited culture, and has to be. it is not open in the sense of welcoming all comers. furthermore, if there is a dispute that is not easily resolvable by agreed technological criteria, disputes are often resolved by a ‘fork.’ the groups separate, and largely ignore each other from then on. that may not be possible in large interdependent social groups. variants of open source are common online. for example, the wiki model of distributed authorship has no person to ‘blame.’ cynically we can observe that the 2 this is also the message of programmer pekka himanen’s work the hacker ethic and the spirit of the information age (2001b). for a criticism of this book see marshall (2003). portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 16 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software founder of wiki was planning to sell versions of wiki, and remarked that he should be able to ‘kill’ encyclopaedia britannica, because he does not have to pay his writers (goetz 2003). this kind of thing lead terranova (2000) to suggest that the main function of open source is to provide free labour to be exploited within the capitalist economy. many corporations from aol to ibm have considered themselves unthreatened by using open source or volunteer labour. it means that the sales base is implicated in keeping the product they use moving and improving, acting in some ways like a self-service store. to participate in open source people have to have some other source of income. it has often been remarked that foss, despite the actions of some notable figures, and despite fierce internal debate about the differences between free and open source software and their social consequences (say between richard stallman and eric raymond), is almost deliberately non-political. thus coleman, writing in support of foss in general, states that ‘one might suspect foss of having a deliberate political agenda, but when asked, foss developers invariably offer a firm and unambiguous “no” – usually followed by a precise lexicon for discussing the proper relationship between foss and politics’ (2004, 507). coleman goes on to suggest that this apolitical stance is one way in which the movement tries to work politically: [it] facilitates the broad mobility of foss as artefacts and metaphors and thus lays the groundwork for its informal political scope, its key role as a catalyst by which to rethink the assumptions of intellectual property rights through its use and inversion (2004, 508)…. [however, some of the appeal of apolticism may be because] it has afforded a wider cultural and political language by which to objectify to themselves and larger publics the nature of their technical life world, an objectification buttressed within a hacker public sphere and as a political vector to make claims against the aggressive application of intellectual property restrictions, primarily in the defence of other programmers. (2004, 511) the ideal of open source groups is technical meritocracy, that is, an elite to some extent separated from political and social issues, using its position to criticise those not of the elite. as coleman puts it: politics tend to be seen by programmers as buggy, mediated, and tainted action clouded by ideology that is not productive of much of anything while it insidiously works against true forms of free thought. you can’t tweak politics in an elegant and creative way to achieve something immediately gratifying, and thus it goes against everything programmers think and love about computing (2004, 513). portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 17 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software this isolation could even cripple their own effectiveness in their own projects. chan describes the way people within the peruvian state acted to ensure that peru would forsake microsoft and embrace open source or free software for its main computer systems. this success was portrayed by foss people overseas not as a local politicised event but as an inevitable part of the international success of free software, a point made by chan: far from presuming free software’s steady advancement, the proponents of peru’s free software legislation undertook various forms of local and non-local work, advocacy, and activism to propel the visibility of their movement. further, their practices departed from the language of technical and economic rationality that had been repeatedly invoked to explain free software’s adoption. they insisted instead on a new framing of free software as necessarily engaged and invested in processes of governance and political reform…. peru’s free software advocates actively sought to build relations with bodies of governance, demonstrating a willingness to engage with traditional political channels. (2004, 532) in other words, this was not the multitude abandoning the state and paths already established for something else. it is true they established contacts throughout the world, and especially in south america to engage in their activism, but it was not a product of electronic networks alone—they were an adjunct. prominent u.s.-based foss people were not supportive of the political action in peru, as chan notes: tony stanco, a senior policy analyst at the george washington university’s cyberspace policy institute… [warned] against the imposition of politics over rational markets. writing in linux today, stanco asserted, ‘it is much better for governments to set up a real level playing field in procurement policy and then let the market decide on merit. if a product can’t make it in the market without government mandates, then history has shown that it won’t make it with government mandates either.’ … stanco was echoed by other free software supporters, who, in a brookings institute publication aimed at government policy makers themselves … collectively urged governments to maintain a stance of neutrality in software acquisition policy. some insisted that free software would advance without the need for government involvement … while others argued that free software preferences would compromise consumer freedom of choice. (2004, 534) even richard stallman, who is usually considered to be the ‘raving communist’ of the free software movement, reacted by asserting that ‘energies would be better spent preventing governments’ over-regulation and infringement on user freedoms, than on fostering ties to legislative bodies’ (chan 2004, 543). apathy to anti-capitalism is not uncommon. pekka himanen said in an interview on this matter: portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 18 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software there is not any irreconcilable contradiction between hackerism and money. as long as the linux companies still work through the open source model the hacker spirit rules. even the radical richard stallman stresses that ‘free software’ or ‘open source software’ is not about money but freedom or openness. he says that we should think of freedom (or openness) in the sense of the expression ‘free expression,’ not ‘free beer’…. even if you just want to win the competition, the best strategy for your greedy goals is not closedness but openness.’ (2001a) given that these people tend to see markets as neutral, not political, and as providing the best solution as determined by a technical elite, they are perhaps not the best model for open activism. are foss groups even open to those with the technical abilities? although research has not been detailed, it appears that these groups are male focused and not open to gender differences. given the history of hacking (programming), as it has been described by turkle (1984) and levy (1994), this is not surprising. most of the available comment is written by women who participate in open source and, while defending open source groups, they portray a society that is patronising, aggressive, sexually obsessive, and discriminatory. val henson (2002) writes: i also used to believe that sexism was dead. shortly after joining several women in computing mailing lists, i realized how wrong i was. week after week, women have new stories about how they were discriminated against and insulted because they were women. these stories aren’t decades old, nor do they involve people who grew up when sexism was more acceptable. these are day-to-day experiences of today’s women, in modern settings, who are being driven out of their chosen profession by sexism. henson tells of how women who attend offline meetings may be pointed at, or greeted with silence, as they enter the room. and yuwei lin writes: i have observed that when allison [randal, president of the perl foundation] spoke at the italian code jam 2004 activity, she acted, and also was treated, rather as an assistant for larry wall than being an outstanding programmer whom would be granted as much respect as her male peers. (2005, 4) a survey of the foss movement states ‘the floss survey on os/fs developers confirms the findings of the widi project that women do not play a role in the development of open source and free software; only 1.1% of the floss sample is female’ (ghosh et al, part 4, 8). it might be mentioned that this is the only sentence in the report with the word ‘gender’ in it. the gender equalities that hardt and negri report from latin american resistance movements, and which they advance as the way of the multitude, are not present in foss movements. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 19 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software structurally the foss groups tend not to be so equitable amongst men either. lerner and tirole remark that ‘the top decile of contributors accounted for fully 72% of the code,’ and this was accepted by the group (2002, 204). they also note that ‘important contributors are few and ascend to the “core group” status, the ultimate recognition by one’s peers’ (205). these groups also have leaders who have been described, to me, as ‘benevolent dictators.’ bosco remarks: it should be noted that there is a central figure called ‘project leader’ or ‘maintainer’ who is in charge for accepting, reviewing and integrating new features or fixes into the main source code. once the project leader has reviewed and accepted the contribution, it is eventually integrated and delivered to the large public of users in the next software version. (2004, 12) lerner and tirole suggest that a leader must convince ‘contributors … that their leader’s objectives are sufficiently congruent with theirs and not polluted by egodriven, commercial or political biases’ (2002, 222). the initial leader seems usually to be the person who can present enough source code to suggest that the project is viable to enough people who might want to help. bosco continues: in addition, a project leader provides a coordination service to the participants of the project; he makes sure that contributors working on the development of the same functionality are in contact with each other and hopefully collaborate; he makes sure that the development goes smoothly and tries to ease up tensions between disagreeing developers. (2004, 19) occasionally, as with the apache server, the software may be controlled by a small group of people who vote on particular changes and developments (bosco 2004, 20). these projects do not automatically arise out of the equitable uncoordinated functioning of the multitude. a leader is essentially responsible for decisions even though these leaders cannot fire, imprison, or execute people, and have to rely on their abilities to culturally convince others, to maintain their position and prevent forks. this is helped by what bosco calls a taboo on forking (25), although this could also be explained by the reluctance to engage in duplicate work. bosco argues that people perceive leaders as good if they are technically competent, are dedicated (expend time), have a vision of the project’s future, correct bugs, and are patient (48). programmer alan cox (1998) commented on the leadership elite factor when describing an effort to port linux to an 8086. he suggests that good programmers are ‘relatively unusual. not only that but the difference between a true ‘real programmer’ and the masses is significantly greater than that between ‘great’ and ‘average’ in portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 20 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software many other professions. studies have quoted 30 to 1 differences in productivity between the best and the rest’ (1998). cox complains that the project was inundated with bad programmers ‘with opinions—not code, opinions.’ as a result ‘the real developers have many of the other list members in their kill files’ and the group turned into a core team that ignored the rest. interestingly cox seems to think this was both inevitable and sad. it takes work to ‘separate useful people from the noise.’ in this sense technical elitism can be seen as pragmatic—it enables the groups to function. elitism is also obvious in the technical competency necessary to be able to use open source products. the products are not suited for beginners. sometimes this complexity is so great that even open source guru eric raymond (2004) has commented on the difficulties of implementing the software. apart from technical elitism, what other kinds of social structures or political processes emerge in foss communities? crowston and howison examined 120 project teams and suggest ‘that it is wrong to assume that foss projects are distinguished by a particular social structure merely because they are foss’ (2004, 1). they assert that larger projects may tend to become more modular, with groups less connected to the general network. again this suggests that our models for understanding networking are not complex enough. it may well be that all networks are not the same, and that the way communication is structured effects the dynamics of the groups that arise (marshall 2004). technology both enables and restricts actions, and so its potentials must be considered carefully. vague assumptions about how difference arises, and reducing all difference to the same difference, as in negri and hardt’s use of the term multitude, obscure these problems. conclusions with the idea of empire, negri and hardt point to the importance of distributed governance in the contemporary world. however, empire and multitude are not separable and opposed but intertwined, and distributed governance is not inherently radical; it can legitimate and extend the control of those who already have more power, and reinforce easily activated pathways. negri and hardt seem not to perceive the real diversity of the multitude, or that resistance to empire could be localised, reactionary, or oppressive. people could seek fundamentalist certainties in the face of a chronically fluid dominance. even if multitude is composed of knowledge workers, portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 21 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software or workers in the immaterial sense, who need to collaborate on projects and produce with their own creativity, those workers may still be fragmented as a group, and the forces that allow them to collaborate may also keep them apart—especially if action is confined to virtual realms. foss movements are not an unproblematic model for democratic, non-hierarchical revolutionary, action. people in the movements tend to self constitute as a hierarchical technical elite (which is not necessarily a bad thing), and they tend to view politics as something they should not be involved in, perhaps as a way of generating unity amongst themselves. they favour quietist and technical solutions, and when technical solutions within their framework are not immediately obvious, they tend to lose interest. they are also inclined to ignore people who are not of the same group, and to ignore issues of promulgation. what can activists learn from all this? firstly, it is probably advisable not be seduced by technology in itself. as the early autonomists emphasised, technology may result from a reaction to a perceived lack of control by dominant groups. any beneficial freeing effects taken up by the multitude may produce more attempts at control. thus struggle is dynamic within the technology. technology enables and restricts. it is not entirely positive or negative; the effects have to be created. it is possible to learn from those who have succeeded, such as the foss supporters in peru who continued ‘normal’ political action within the state. the success of rightwing christians in mobilising cannot be ignored—left-wing christians have not been as successful. this is remarkable, as the differences splitting these organisations are at least as great as differences within the left, and their potential differences with the corporatist right could be explosive. as i have implied earlier the religious right does not let responsibility lie elsewhere; it takes action. the religious right also takes action within the official power structures of the state, rather than hoping that new structures will arise. in that sense the religious right claims the power structures of the state for itself. taking responsibility, rather than allowing that responsibility to be distributed, and acting within a particular place, rather than only within vague online spaces, is portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 22 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software important. the idea of distributed governance suggests that those in power are not always in control; they are also confused, and governance can escape them. the network is complicated. thus they may well tend to be either over-reactive or helpless in the face of a prolonged active and vocal opposition that assumes it can actually do something about the situation in question. finally, from the hackers themselves we can learn from cox’s idea that everyone who is interested can do something, but not everyone has to do everything. some people make the tea, or write the manuals, and these actions are important. the internet can provide a medium for action, but it is not in itself radical or a model for that action, and neither are all the groups that have used the internet as their basis for communication. the internet, or communication technology more generally, is also a site of struggle, as autonomist theory points out. it is a tool that can be coopted, implemented and changed to support the dominant groups. it can help to fracture the multitude, thus transforming the tool back to its origin as a mode of extending corporate, military and state power. the world is shaped by ongoing political struggle, not by the inevitable forces of society and technology. reference list barber, b. 1996, jihad vs. mcworld: how globalism and tribalism are reshaping the world, ballantine books, new york. bell, d. 1976, the coming post-industrial society: a venture in social forecasting, penguin, harmondsworth. bosco, g. 2004, ‘implicit theories of “good leadership” in the open-source community,’ version 0.1.7. masters thesis in economy and business administration, department of manufacturing, engineering and management, technical university of denmark. boyle, j. 1996, shamans, software and spleens: law and the construction of the information society, harvard university press, cambridge. business week 1985, ‘telecommunications liberalization,’ in t.forester (ed.) the information technology revolution, blackwell, oxford, 120-36. castells, m. 1996, the rise of the network society, blackwell, oxford. chan, a. 2004, ‘coding free software, coding free states, free software legislation and the politics of code in peru,’ anthropological quarterly, 77.3: 531-45. cleaver, h. 1981, ‘technology as political weaponry,’ in anderson, r. s. (ed.) science, politics, and the agricultural revolution in asia, westview press, boulder [online]. available at: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/cleaver/hmctechasweaponry.htm [accessed 12 december 2005] ——— 2000, reading capital politically, ak press, new york. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 23 marshall negri, hardt, distributed governance and open source software coleman, g. 2004, ‘the political agnosticism of free and open source software and the inadvertent politics of contrast,’ anthropological quarterly, 77.3: 507-19. cox, a. 1998, ‘cathedrals, bazaars and the town council’ [online]. available at: http://slashdot.org/features/98/10/13/1423253.shtml [accessed 12 december 2005]. drucker, p. 1968, age of discontinuity, harper & row, new york. dyer-witheford, n. 2004, ‘autonomist marxism and the information society,’ multitudes, jeudi 3 juin. 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‘the luxury of ignorance: an open-source horror story’ [online]. available at: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html, or http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/luxury-part-deux.html [accessed 12 december 2005]. schiller, d. 1982, telematics and government, ablex publishing, new jersey. soros, g. 2003, the bubble of american supremacy: correcting the misuse of american power, public affairs, new york. sterling, b. 1994, the hacker crackdown, law and disorder on the electronic frontier, penguin, harmondsworth. terranova, t. 2000, ‘free labor, producing culture for the global economy.’ social text, 18.2: 33-57 toffler, a. 1980, the third wave, william collins, london. ——— 1990, power shift, knowledge, wealth and violence at the edge of the 21st century, bantam, new york. tronti, m. 1965, ‘the strategy of refusal.’ [online]. available at: http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/tronti_refusal.html [accessed 12 december 2005]. turkle, s. 1984, the second self: computers and the human spirit, simon & schuster, new york. wolff, e. 2004, (ed.) what has happened to the quality of life in the advanced industrialized nations?, edward elgar, cheltenham. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 25 the internet and radicalism microsoft word davidson_mueckeintro_portalspecialissueindianoceantrafficgalley.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. indian ocean traffic special issue, guest edited by lola sharon davidson and stephen muecke. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. indian ocean traffic: introduction lola sharon davidson, university of technology sydney, and stephen muecke, university of new south wales, guest editors like the mediterranean, the indian ocean has been a privileged site of cross-cultural contact since ancient times. in this special issue, our contributors track disparate movements of people and ideas around the indian ocean region and explore the cultural implications of these contacts and their role in processes that we would come to call transnationalisation and globalisation. the nation is a relatively recent phenomenon anywhere on the globe, and in many countries around the indian ocean it was a product of colonisation and independence. so the processes of exchange, migration and cultural influence going on there for many centuries were mostly based on the economics of goods and trade routes, rather than on national identity and state policy. the motivations and circumstances in which people embarked upon hazardous sea voyages to strange lands were many and varied, though the most common was obviously the hope of material gain. for many people, the unfortunate victims of the slave trade, choice did not enter into it. others were driven to seek a better life elsewhere by poverty or violence in the lands of their birth, and still others were attracted by the prospect of the large profits to be made in a bustling trading economy. whatever the motivation, these movements resulted in the creation of heterogeneous, multiethnic, multicultural communities whose various elements often strove to remain in contact with their communities of origin while at the same time necessarily interacting with their immediate neighbours and thereby creating new social and cultural forms. davidson and muecke indian ocean traffic: introduction portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 2 our first three articles concentrate directly on movements of people, ranging from slaves, convicts and indentured workers to prosperous planters, artisans and soldiers. richard allen highlights the scale of the indian ocean slave trade, often overlooked in comparison with that of the atlantic. this ancient trade underwent a massive expansion following the entry of the european powers into the indian ocean, followed by a contraction as britain embarked upon its global abolitionist program. however abolitionism affected the form rather than the scale of labour migration, with slave labour being replaced by convict and indentured labour. in time this developed into the modern system of migrant contract labour which continues to play a large role in the economy of the region and, indeed, of the world. next, karin speedy investigates some of the consequences of the sugar crisis of 1860 which caused thousands of people to abandon reunion and settle in new caledonia. elsewhere speedy has examined the role of the rich planters who emigrated en masse, taking with them their production equipment, their indentured workers and assorted dependants. in this paper, she concentrates on the many artisans, tradespeople, manual and unskilled workers who also made this move at this time. they were drawn from the ranks of the affranchis (freed slaves) or the petits blancs (impoverished whites), both of whom faced poverty and social exclusion on reunion. in moving to new caledonia they could hope not only for greater prosperity but also for a degree of assimilation into a mixed-race society where social status was determined more by economics than by race. anjali gera roy focuses attention on the sikhs who have tended to be confused or conflated with hindus, afghans and muslims in previous discussions of subcontinental migration. although the sikh homeland, the punjab, is distant from the sea, integration into the imperial capitalist economy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries prompted rural sikhs to migrate throughout the indian ocean region. roy argues that the colonial construction of the sikhs as a martial race facilitated this migration and connects the movements of soldiers and policemen to shanghai, hong kong, the straits settlements and kenya with those of skilled artisans to mombasa and uganda. like speedy, roy uses family histories to reveal the specificities of this migration and explore the connections migrants maintained both with their homeland and amongst themselves. davidson and muecke indian ocean traffic: introduction portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 3 in the fourth article, lola sharon davidson addresses the pivotal role played by the textile trade both in motivating cultural contact and in creating an area of negotiation for the manifestation of ethnic identity. from ancient times, india was a major exporter of textiles, sitting at the centre of a complex regional network of exchanges which inserted indian cottons and silks as prestige items into the textile regimes of societies all around the indian ocean. indian textiles were the principal good exchanged both for spices and slaves, an essential element of the wider indian ocean trading system. the balance between indigenous and imported textiles, together with the symbolic and aesthetic values manifested through cloth and costume, has permitted the expression of a complex and changing relationship between local and translocal identities in a relentlessly globalising society. from the exchange of material goods carrying symbolic value, we move to the exchange of ideas, with the next three papers focusing on the circulation of newspapers and literary texts throughout the region and interrogating the way these contribute to changing notions of identity and belonging. meg samuelson explores an almost twentyyear long correspondence between the white south african archivist and poet, marie kathleen jeffreys, the first agent of the colonial government of india in south africa, v.s. srinivasa sastri, and sastri’s personal secretary, p. kodanda rao. although sastri was only resident in south africa for two years before returning to india, the lifelong correspondence served as a vehicle for the transmission of literary and philosophical texts as well as political newspapers and broadsheets and nurtured a joint mission of championing universalism and opposing the repressive forces of segregation. in directly connecting the intellectual worlds of india and africa it bypassed the hegemony of the european metropolitan in favour of the recognition of a multiracial indian ocean identity. the role of the journalist in contemporary india is the subject of our next paper. ursula rao argues that the rapid commercialisation and professionalisation of the indian english-language press have affected the reporting of political news by emphasising the role of the journalist as political commentator, encouraging criticism of prevailing forms of vernacular democracy and leadership. at the same time, corporate pressure and the aspirations of india’s expanding middle class have led to a positive endorsement of private enterprise. the parallel celebration of consumerism and devaluation of politics is davidson and muecke indian ocean traffic: introduction portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 4 the result of a compromise accommodating the critical ethos of a writing profession within a commercialised space. as the people, the materials and the texts circulate around the indian ocean, so too do the stories and the music. srilata ravi asks what connects various literary works referencing the indian ocean and answers through the image of banaras in the work of the mauritian writer and filmmaker, barlen pyamootoo. the connections created in the literary universe of pyamootoo reveal to us the dynamic, multilayered and polyphonic nature of indian ocean island culture, the dynamics of creolisation in action. the issue concludes with two articles examining creolisation from the perspective of a characteristic cultural product, the music of maloya. in october 2009, unesco declared the culture of maloya, a genre of song and dance from the island of reunion, to be an item of international heritage. in his paper, stephen muecke investigates what unesco thinks it is protecting and why it might have decided to do so. he points out that this formal endorsement of creole culture coincides with an upsurge in creole nationalism, a political stance exemplified by the manifesto of françoise vergès and carpanin marimoutou with which our issue concludes. the text by vergès and marimoutou is translated from french and provides a valuable counterpoint to the anglophone discourse with which we are more usually familiar. it offers an interpretation of creolisation from the perspective of reunion as an indian ocean island. opposing the political and cultural hegemony of france, it seeks a recognition of the island’s past that can support a celebration of reunion’s cultural and historic connections with other indian ocean societies. in this, it joins forces with various anticolonial and transnational movements that are increasingly evident in the indian ocean. in this special issue on the indian ocean, the contributors have sought to elucidate just a few of the multifarious, complex relationships that connect the many widely different human societies that inhabit the ocean’s shores. dissolved by its waters, swirled by its currents, driven back and forth by its monsoon winds, identities unravel and are woven afresh in a continuing process of creative communication. muecke_portalspecialissueindianoceantrafficgalley[1] portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. indian ocean traffic special issue, guest edited by lola sharon davidson and stephen muecke. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. créolité and réunionese maloya: from ‘in-between’ to ‘moorings’ stephen muecke, university of new south wales an old malbar is wandering in the countryside at night, and, seeing a light, approaches a cabin.1 it is open, so he goes in. he is invited to have a meal. no questions are asked; but he sings a ‘busted maloya’ [maloya kabosé] that speaks of his desire to open his wings and fly away, to accept the invitation to sleep in the cabin, to fall into the arms of the person narrating the ballad, and to weep. the whole company sings the ‘busted maloya.’2 malbar is the name for tamils descended from indentured labourers from parts of south india including the malabar coast and pondicherry, where the french had another colony. estimated to number 180,000, these diasporic tamils had lost their language and taken up the local lingua franca, creole, spoken among the madagascans, french, chinese and africans making up the population of réunion in the indian ocean. creole, as a language and set of cultural forms, is not typical of many locations in the indian ocean. while the central islands of mauritius, the seychelles, rodriguez, agalega, chagos and réunion have their distinct varieties of french creole language, creole is not a concept that has currency in east africa, madagascar or south asia. versions of creolized english exist in northern and western australia; at roper river in the 1 thanks to elisabeth de cambiaire and the anonymous reviewers of this paper for useful additions and comments, and to françoise vergès and carpanin marimoutou for making available the unesco dossier de candidature. 2 see http://www.wat.tv/audio/davy-sicard-maloya-kabose-2zo_2f1lx_.html, for a music clip. the text of the song follows as an appendix. muecke créolité and réunionese maloya portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 2 northern territory, where kriol is an official language name. creole culture, as in the caribbean also, depends for its evolution on a single powerful colonizing culture and language, with a subaltern and linguistically diverse population of slaves or indentured labourers with the need for a lingua franca. creoles were less likely to develop in those parts of the world without a slave trade and/or with robust institutions such as royalty. at the beginning of october 2009, unesco announced that the culture of maloya, a genre of song and dance from the island of réunion, would henceforth become an international heritage item (‘fet kaf 2009’). the geneva committee placing this endangered form of culture under their protection defined it as a ‘type of music, song and dance native to the island of réunion’ (dossier 2008). there is nothing unusual in the fact that a marginal item of immaterial culture, originating from a tiny speck of france in the indian ocean, should be brought to the notice of an international organisation and ‘protected’ in this way. what this short discussion paper is investigating is what unesco thinks it is protecting, what sorts of pressures it might be responding to, and what it might think is the nature of the creole culture it has formally endorsed in this way, along with 76 other diverse practices and traditions from around the world that the committee identified in the same sitting. local réunionese musicians like firmin viry and davy sicard had been lobbying for years for the recognition of this heritage. françoise vergès and carpanin marimoutou prepared the unesco document for its recognition, calling it the ‘major expression’ and the ‘symbol’ of réunionese identity (dossier 2008: 3–4). the unesco statement went on to make explicit that maloya is an evolving form, and they used the phrase il se métisse [it is mixed or blended], the same term, métis, that is used for ‘mixed race’: maloya was once simply a dialogue between a soloist and a choir accompanied by drums, but today it is taking on new and more varied forms, in terms of lyrics as well as instrumentation (the use of djembes, synthesisers, drum kits). it blends with rock, reggae and jazz and feeds into poetry and slam performances. it was created by sugar plantation slaves from madagascar and africa, before spreading to the whole population of the island.3 3 jadis dialogue entre un soliste et un choeur accompagné de percussions, le maloya prend aujourd’hui des formes de plus en plus variées, au niveau des textes comme des instruments (introduction de djembés, synthétiseurs, batterie). il se métisse avec le rock, le reggae ou le jazz, et inspire la poésie et le slam. il a été créé par les esclaves d’origine malgache et africaine dans les plantations sucrières, avant de s’étendre à toute la population de l’île (dossier 2008: 4). muecke créolité and réunionese maloya portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 3 this ‘mixed’ cultural form is recognized neither as a fixed tradition nor as a merely recent invention, even though it has come to prominence only since the 1970s (dossier 2008: 4). the creole origins of the form are being celebrated as typical and specific forms of culture in france. regional identity is a great french nationalist tradition, one that can conceivably include forms of oppositional culture within the french nation. in this case, the opposition takes the form of the ongoing struggle to build a new reunionnese identity in the contemporary era, as understood by vergès and marimoutou in ‘moorings: indian ocean creolisations,’ translated and included in this special issue of portal (2012). the unesco initiative underscores the international significance of créolité and creolization as cultural movements. neither indigenous nor nationalist, such movements are more the ‘creations’ of an identitarian politics. creation is at the origin of the term creole in spanish (criollo, descending from the verb criar—‘to breed’ or ‘to raise’— ultimately from the latin, creare, ‘to produce, create’). something of this spirit of creation—given unesco’s promotion to keep the culture ‘alive’—is at the heart of this discussion. we know that cultural hybridity as developed by bhabha—as in his brilliant 1994 article, ‘how newness enters the world: postmodern space, postcolonial times and the trials of cultural translation’4—and then celebrated by robert young, as a cultural theory of the ‘in-between’ (1995), has been hotly contested and fallen out of favour (modood & werbner 1997).5 one suspects that the metaphors of syncretism and blending (métissage) are not working hard enough either. okwui enwezor et al. make grand claims for the metaphorization of the concept of creole beyond its simple linguistic application. now, for the créolité literary movement, it will come to represent a new kind of consciousness: beginning as a full-fledged literary movement in the late 1980s in the french caribbean, créolité ventured into the ‘chaos’ produced by history to reclaim nationalist creole identities. as a hypothesis of cultural production, the subsequent process of creolization reaches far beyond the plantation cultures of the caribbean, towards a conceptualization of a non-totalitarian consciousness of preserved diversity that has its contested terrain within language, identity, politics, religion, and culture. transcending still entrenched postcolonial and imperialist narratives of domination and resistance, center and periphery, creolization as a theory of creative disorder analyses active urban contest and contact zones in flux. it expresses a need for particularization that, by embedding creole dynamics into sociopolitical and sociolinguistic histories, reformulates 4 homi bhabha’s the location of culture (1994) analyses the liminality of hybridity as a paradigm of colonial anxiety. his key argument is that colonial hybridity, as a cultural form, produced ambivalence in the colonial masters and, as such, altered the authority of power. muecke créolité and réunionese maloya portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 4 territories of art, architecture, dance, film, music, poetry, cuisine, oral literature, magic, and carnival. (okwui enwezor et al. 2003: 1)6 moving away from models of emancipation and resistance, they posit a ‘theory of creative disorder.’ this has the effect of splitting the stake, as it were, in one’s investment in forms of culture. first, there is an ontology of cultures where we might want to speculate on all the environmental factors that make them come into existence and then persist, in other words, their very being, which is quite observable (for example with ethnographic methods). at this level maloya might be described as having its origins in madagascar or east africa, and then flourishing today with the 300 or so troupes of musicians playing in the genre. the second ‘investment’ is constituted around the intellectual discourses, the languages of reference and analysis, which pitch their associated concepts (‘safeguarding of heritage,’ ‘hybridity,’ ‘creative disorder’) as arguments into domains that have nothing to do with the worlds where songs like maloya ones are created. this is theory as a vehicle for political action. it is the way in which the argument is pitched to unesco that allows for the heritage listing of maloya. what is at stake is not the ontological status of forms of culture like maloya (which in its practice is blissfully unaware of how advocacy on its behalf is being formulated); what is at stake is reason, reasoning for culture. if you like, you could say that the existence of an intellectual culture, the international language of theory, is invested and exposed at these international crossroads of theory and cultural policy. intellectuals, some well meaning, others self serving, are in the business of translating the cultural experience of maloya into the languages that creatively engage an agency for the culture in question. in which case, one may argue that intellectual cultures are specific in their application, broken away from their organic relations to such local cultures as maloya, and yet still linked in some way. therefore it is possible that without the help of linguistics, historical studies, anthropology, and musicology (converging in postcolonial studies), maloya might still be languishing alone, unrecognized and unrecognizable, in a far-flung corner of the world, without its intellectual allies who created the language and the ‘disorder’ that enabled it to be ‘valorized’ by unesco (dossier 2008: 10). 6preceded by: ‘increased and accelerated processes of cultural syncretism have produced new configurations of identity for which theories of hybridity, métissage, and cosmopolitanism have been deployed and reworked in order to capture the polycentric and polysemic aspects of a new political philosophy of the other. under pressure from localized resistances, these terms no longer provide adequate frameworks for articulating the critical issues of difference and the asymmetry of evolving contemporary cultures’ (okwui enwezor et al. 2003: 1). muecke créolité and réunionese maloya portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 5 françoise vergès and carpanin marimoutou, in ‘moorings: indian ocean creolisations,’ personify a productive link between theory and advocacy. their version of creolization is neither the distanced analysis of the linguist contemplating a form of language, nor an instance of the play of theory acting for itself, exploiting creolization as a pretext. it is passionately and intimately linked with political processes that make creole forms visible at the same time as their representatives speak on behalf of them. this is possibly why they are attracted to the metaphor of mooring; it is antitranscendentalist: creolisation is not an accumulation or a sum of differences. it has the dynamism of an unfinished process that is subject to mutations and loss. it borrows mimetically and creatively. it has no problem with putting down roots, because a root is not necessarily stultifying, if it is a mooring that allows us more easily to move on. we do not idealise movement. the mooring is a relation that accepts the link, that has no fear of submitting to meaning, to desire, and is happy to let things go. (vergès & marimoutou 2012: 34) it is a beautiful maritime metaphor of binding and release, arrivals and departures. each link in this network is singular and precise, because values have to be exchanged as cultural capital is imported (in the colonial moment, typically from france) or exported in exchanges about ‘indianoceanness,’ as they say, within the region. it retains the idea of heterogeneity and reinvention via negotiation and exchange, so in this sense it is a long way from the biological metaphor of hybridity in creolization. bricolage and inventive creation is much more rapid in this context than evolution can be: we reject the particularisation of religions, civilisations or philosophies. we defend a philosophy of borrowing, forgery, imitation, and a dynamic of patching up, making do, of fixing up, of mending. a world quick to imitate, but which creolises the imitated thing to make something else of it, which invents the quotidian. this is a dynamic of alterity where we see no alienation or submission, rather a creativity of a world subject to continual conflicting inputs. (35) creation, then, at the root of the word creole, has a ‘heterogeneity that presides over its development’: ‘heterogeneity bursts forth … in crossings and appropriations … it bursts forth in a maloya by firmin viry where the heroine of an indian epic, sìtà in the ràmàyana, transformed into a female plantation worker, meets an ancient french romance’ (36). and they also remind us that maloya is a performance: maloya is a stage for the space of processes and practices of indian oceanic creolisation, a common ground for a réunionese ethos. the lyrics of the maloya take on meaning and value in a festive or ceremonial context, where there is internal interaction (singer, chorus) and external interaction (players/participating audience). the lyrics of the maloya, often improvised from a base of uncertain origin, are infinitely variable, according to the conditions under which it is uttered, the public’s role, how the singer is feeling, and how the chorus is made up; in short, muecke créolité and réunionese maloya portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 6 maloya is a performance. it is both a social practice and a discursive practice, with its own internal logic. it can be read as a text, it has deconstructions/ reconstructions of established collective speech, it has lexical shifts, and is the unique text of a unique artist. (36) this is quite different from homi bhabha’s notion of the performative, written in 1994, putting the critical move of ‘the in-between’ firmly on the agenda: what is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, ‘opening out,’ remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference—be it class, gender or race. such assignations of social differences—where difference is neither one nor the other but something else besides, in-between—find their agency in the form of the ‘future’ where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. it is, if i may stretch a point, an interstitial future, that emerges in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the present. (bhabha 1994: 219) compare the spatial metaphor of ‘in-between’ to ‘moorings.’ the latter concept is concrete, rather than, in the derridean language that bhabha has inherited, ineffable or deferred. it is not the gap between the ship and the wharf that is celebrated by vergès and marimoutou, it is the link which moors one in a place, a connection that one can also decide to abandon. in the invention and (re)composition of maloya, elements can be ignored or abandoned (for instance, french popular music from european france, of the charles trenet variety), while others can be taken up, giving maloya’s many variations: ‘rap/maloya, folk/maloya, rock/maloya, malogué (maloya and reggae), blues/maloya’ (dossier 2008: 10). so we might use, to underscore the theoretical point, johnny mercer’s famous refrain from 1944 ‘ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive‘7 against those who romance, cheapening bhabha, the concepts of ambivalence, openness, ambiguity and the in-between. the appeal to the perennially open does not do the necessary work any more. its transcendental absences are a residue of heideggerian phenomenology. against that dominant philosophy, let us put in place a more realist, or multi-realist architecture of thought that would tell us the details of cultural translations, and how such movements of culture are supported by allies, and let us detail the hard work (which needs much more research than has been done here to discover) that gets them from one place to another, from réunion to unesco via the agency of certain advocates who have been 7 johnny mercer was brought up in savannah, georgia. mercer’s exposure to black music was perhaps unique among the white songwriters of his generation. as a child, mercer had african-american playmates and servants, and he listened to the fishermen and vendors about him, who spoke and sang in the creole dialect known as ‘geechee.’ muecke créolité and réunionese maloya portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 7 able to positively valorize concepts like ‘cultural creolisation’ (dossier 2008: 5) in the context of globalization, so that cultural forms like maloya are not blocked on the basis of lacking putative cultural purity. cultural creolization, or indeed hybridity, by this account, lies not in the thing as an ontological quality, it is created in the networking process that is a real territory: a part of the indian ocean, and a part of a specific history, including its affective history. vergès and marimoutou speak of the ‘robust modernity’ of the form, which is so often ‘a story of loss which opens the way to melancholy, to an impossible task of mourning’ as we have seen so clearly in the text of the maloya kabosé discussed here. the lone roving malbar (one thinks of a marron, a runaway slave) is welcomed back into community to shed his tears of suffering: these are the feelings, territory and history of maloya. ‘theory’ becomes the conceptual ally of an organic cultural form by being ‘moored’ to it, not by looking at it dispassionately across the ineffable gap of representation. at its best it will continue to be inspired by the metaphysics of evolving cultural forms such as maloya. both organic and theoretical conditions assist in their creation and then cultural life as they move through the worlds of the island, and then the wider world. a cultural form is now understood as traces of life engendered by partners. these are constituted as chains of intimately connected transformations that work with alterities, as vergès and marimoutou say: ‘a creativity of a world subject to continual conflicting inputs.’ here there are no metaphors of depth or transcendence, just a ceaseless trying things out with others. to say that a culture lives in a place is to refuse modernist universalisms, and to engage the facts and values of its particular existence as a local voyager. theories also have to be created (creare) (criar) raised and sustained in their own places. they are not the neutral language of reference, they too must perform, otherwise we will keep singing the same old songs as a homi bhabha, a foucault or a marx. the mode of analysis sketched here is a tracing of pathways, via the cultural translations, that take us from maloya to unesco; or from maloya to warner music, as the song in question is promoted and sold. and there is another pathway which is the one followed by the intellectual whose practice allows her to ‘read’ or observe a maloya performance, link it to a struggle over national or regional identity, and various other elements in a hybrid assemblage, eventually leading to a piece of writing that is submitted for publication. the politics of cultural heritage is not conceived, therefore, as the muecke créolité and réunionese maloya portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 8 application of a human agency or will to a more inert social situation or thing (like maloya) in need of transformation, mastery or redemption. cultural politics and advocacy involves an on-going participation in such worlds. appendix davy sicard maloya kabosé tèl ou ‘a vi la limièr baya/tèl ou ‘a nï po gardé/tèl ou ‘a vi té rouvèr baya/tèl ou ‘a vï ou ‘a rantré na pa rod konèt out zistwar/ni kisak ou lé/na di aou jïs la pa granshoz mounwa/mé vyin manj in boushé/e la dinkou konma ou la ral in maloya kabosé/sa la ariv tousle/sa i té d’a ou la zèl/ki koté sa i té sort/la amèn a li dvan nout port’/sa i té ral aou lwin/la ousa ou té san aou byin/sa i té d’a ou lo tan/tèl li ariv tèl li sava tèl ou té fini manjé baya/tèl ou ‘a rod po alé/tèl ou ‘a sort da la kaz baya/tèl la nuit la tombé la na di aou poukwé ou dor pa la/ou lé tro fatigé/la ou la tonm dan mon bra/out larm la koulé e la dinkou konma ou la/ral in maloya kabosé tèl lannmin la rive/tèl ou té fine gaya/tèl na di anou adie/tèl ansanm nou la ral o tèl ansanm nou la ral/ral in maloya kabosé translation into french comme tu as vu de la lumière, vieux malbar/tu t’es approché pour regarder/tu as vu que c’était ouvert vieux malbar/donc tu es entré nous n’avons pas cherché à connaître ton histoire/ni qui tu étais/nous t’avons dis que ce n’était pas grand-chose mon vieux/mais manges avec nous et d’un seul coup tu as/commencé a jouer un maloya abimé/c’est venu tout seul/ça t’a ouvert les ailes/d’où qu’il venait/il est arrivé devant notre porte/ça t’a emmené loin/la ou tu te sentais bien/comme il arrive il s’en va une fois que tu as fini de manger, vieux malbar/tu as voulu t’en aller/tu es sorti de la case vieux malbar/la nuit était tombée nous t’avons invité à dormir/tu étais trop fatigue/la tu es tombé dans mes bras/et tes larmes ont coulées et d’un seul coup tu as/commencé à jouer un maloya abimé comme tu es arrivé ici/comme tu te sentais mieux/comme tu nous as dis adieu/comme ensemble nous avons joué oh comme ensemble nous avons joué/joué un maloya abimé translation into english since you saw the light, old malbar/you came closer to look/you saw that it was open, old malbar/so you went in we didn’t ask you your story/nor who you were/we told you it was no big deal old friend/but eat with us and all of a sudden you/began to play a busted maloya/it came by itself/it opened your wings/from whence it came/it arrived at our doorstep/it took you far away/where you felt good/just as it came it went away once you had finished eating, old malbar/you wanted to go away/you left the hut, old malbar/night fell we invited you to sleep over/you were too tired/then you fell into my arms/and your tears flowed and all of a sudden you/began to play a busted maloya since you came here/since you felt better/since you said good-bye to us/since together we played oh, since together we played/played a busted maloya reference list bhabha, h.k. 1994, ‘how newness enters the world,’ in the location of culture. routledge, london & new york, 212–35. muecke créolité and réunionese maloya portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 9 dossier de candidature présenté par le conseil régional de la réunion au ministère de la culture et de la communication pour une inscription du maloya sur la liste représentative du patrimoine culturel immatériel, convention de l’unesco pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel immateriél, june 2008. enwezor, o. et al. (eds) 2003, créolité and creolization. hatje cantz verlag, ostfildern. ‘fet kaf 2009, le maloya à l’unesco’ 2009, december 20. online: available: http://archiveslepost.huffingtonpost.fr/article/2009/12/20/1849526_fet-kaf-2009-le-maloya-a-l-unesco.html [accessed january 1 2012]. modood, t. & werbner, p. (eds) 1997, debating cultural hybridity. zed books, london. vergès, f. & marimoutou, c. 2012. ‘moorings: indian ocean creolisations,’ portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 1: 1–39. [in this special issue] young, r. 1995, colonial desire: hybridity in theory, culture and race. routledge, london. microsoft word finalflowersandswangalleyportaljuly2012.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. imagined transcultural histories and geographies special issue, guest edited by bronwyn winter. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. eating the asian other? pedagogies of food multiculturalism in australia rick flowers and elaine swan, university of technology sydney introduction there is a long history in australia of concerted efforts to construct food as a medium through which people learn about other cultures and as a sign, when they eat diverse cultural foods, that their cities and regions are more tolerant of difference. we call these efforts a public pedagogy for ‘official multiculturalism’ (gunew 1993). australian multiculturalism is highly contested and can refer to ‘a theory, a policy and way of describing the fact of ethnic diversity in australia’ (carter 2006: 333). official multiculturalism refers to policy attempts to ‘promote’ ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity as ‘positive’ (carter 2006: 333). by contrast, our use of public pedagogy signals the sites, processes and technologies of learning that happen outside of formal educational systems. these can include popular culture, museums, the internet, magazines, social movements, mass media, social media and the home (luke 1996; sandlin, schultz & burdick 2010). our work focuses, in particular, on food pedagogies (flowers & swan 2012a, 2012b, 2013), and how food is used as a public pedagogy of multiculturalism. by this we mean the ways in which educational policy makers, the tourist industry, government and media promulgate the idea that by eating ethnic food we can learn about ourselves, the other and their culture, or what audrey yue calls ‘multicultural eating’ (2003). one pertinent example of how this occurs in australia was the 2011 blacktown multicultural fiesta in western sydney, which aimed to ‘celebrate blacktown’s diversity through … food stalls … to generate awareness, build relationships and foster harmony amongst the different communities residing in flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 2 blacktown and elsewhere’ (wow blacktown! 2011). as sneja gunew puts it, food has long been the banal, acceptable face of multiculturalism (1993: 13). nevertheless, such food multiculturalism has been subjected to trenchant critique by australian academics (hage 1997; probyn 2000; duruz 2010). these writers suggest that eating ‘ethnic’ food is a form of ‘eating the other’ with problematic politics. the term eating the other comes from the us critical race theorist, bell hooks (2001). she argues that the consumption of racial difference by white people is now seen as a source of pleasure. in particular it represents disaffection with dominant white culture. thus, she writes, ‘within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture’ (1992: 21). she asserts that eating the other is a narcissistic project of self-development for the white person. drawing on hooks’s idea, several writers on food and multiculturalism argue that white people’s practice of eating the other is not de facto learning about the other. hence, you can have ‘multiculturalism without ethnics’ in which food is abstracted from any notion of cultural history, colonialism and inequalities (hage 1997). in this view, culinary cultural exchange is not progressive: the proliferation of eating ethnic food is not seen as a signifier of understanding or a shared future (cook 2008). you can eat the other but keep your border (bost cited in cook 2008: 3). this view, however, is subject justifiably to some debate. some writers see possibilities that eating and cooking ethnic food can facilitate productive inter-cultural exchange in spite of uneven power relations. this may be understood as a result of emphasising ‘ethnic power.’ uma narayan (1997), for example, emphasises the ways in which ethnic restaurateurs have agency in deciding what food to serve white people, inventing new recipes, using different ingredients and making hybrid dishes to make a profit. she argues that while eating ethnic food may be ‘shallow, commodified and consumerist … it seems preferable at least to the complete lack of acquaintance’ (1997: 180). other critics argue that the consumption of ethnic food shows white agency to be more fragile and fragmented than may sometimes be imagined. thus, jean duruz’s (2007) work suggests that the white person in an ethnic restaurant is not always the active subject and that there is more blurring and ambivalence in food encounters than some authors credit. yet others argue, as does ian cook (2008), that eating the other reproduces reductive, purist, static and essentialist flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 3 notions of ethnic groups and their ethnic foods. the work of narayan, duruz and cook draws our attention to everyday multiculturalism. this is the multiculturalism that does not just happen in public events like festivals or public places like restaurants, but also in the intercultural encounters that take place in day-to-day happenings at work, in the family, or on the street. and so we think it important to focus on everyday intercultural food pedagogies, and not just public pedagogies of official food multiculturalism. our focus on everyday pedagogies is not, however, to presume that the everyday is innocent but to ask how power and politics play out in concrete ways in everyday, daily multicultural interactions (hage 1998; martin 2003). as hage notes, everyday multiculturalism includes conflict and racial intolerance that official multiculturalism occludes from its national pride stories; but it also includes matter of fact, intercultural and interethnic encounters that do not smack of triumphalism (hage 1998; see also carter 2006). we argue in this paper that what needs more examination in other-eating is the process of othering and the specificities of the other in these everyday interactions. influenced by narayan, duruz and cook, we do this by emphasising the importance of examining anglo-australian whiteness and white food as ‘ethnic.’ we think these writers encourage us to think about less usual, and perhaps more productive, ways of understanding the complexities of ethnicities. we also reflect on the specificity of the other’s ethnicity and gender in relation to australian history and racism and individual memories. sanjay sharma (2006) argues that we need to differentiate between the ontological abstract general other and the concrete other in life. multicultural pedagogies, in his view, have scarcely considered on what ‘ethical’ grounds otherness has been engaged. everyday multicultural theories focus on this concrete other in terms of social agency (sharma 2006). self and other are thus better understood in identity formation theory as relational, and in this paper we ask how we can understand othereating when relational identity formation involves and implies a range of personal relations, for example, when the other may be your mother, wife, best friend, fellowstudent or child? what happens to the idea of eating the other when you live, work and eat in other countries, as opposed to merely eating out in restaurants in australia? what might this more complex understanding of everyday eating the other mean for food as a pedagogy for understanding multiculturalism? flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 4 research focus to these ends, in this paper our discussion is grounded in a study of frank (pseudonym), a white australian man who married a chinese student from singapore in the 1950s. the data in this paper draws from a research project on food pedagogies that includes a study of mixed-race family eating. this paper draws on one story in this study: that of frank. his narrative stretches over 70 years, covering different multicultural moments in australia’s history and across the many different countries in which he lived and worked. we chose to study frank because the sort of intercultural encounters he experienced are paid relatively little attention by writers in the field of multiculturalism. he not only formed friendships with chinese people in australia that endured from his early 20s to the present day, but he married ching yu (pseudonym), a chinese student with whom he had two mixed race children. frank had a career as a senior administrator that included overseas business travel starting in the 1960s, and postings on foreign aid projects for several years at a time in kenya, tanzania and indonesia, living as an expatriate worker with the privileges that this bestows. his second marriage was to cory (pseudonym), a filipino migrant in the 1970s with whom he also had two children. it is important to note that frank’s story involves friendships with asians, living with asian women and living in parts of asia. we recognise the problematic nature of the generic terms asian and asia but use them to highlight how they operate in the white australia imaginary (ang 2000). thus, australia has a history of profound ambivalence towards asia, at once ‘anxious’ about asia, asians and in particular the chinese, and yet also keen, in some quarters, to embrace asia economically, culturally, and somewhat more complexly, erotically and sexually (walker 1999). the white australia policy of the early 20th century reproduced the idea that ‘the very presence of asians was considered a blemish on the ideal image of the white island continent’ (ang 2000: xiii). as catriona elder writes ‘the fantasy of a clearly bounded and inviolable national space has underpinned many of the ideas that white australians carry with them of what it means to be “australian”’ (2003: 223). the chinese were constructed as profoundly other in the tradition of orientalist knowledge, a ‘western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the orient’ but inflected in particularly australian and colonialist ways (said 1978: 3; anderson 1999). there has been for many years in australia, then, the view of an ‘obvious and threatening otherness of asians’ (perera 1999: 189), although there has also been a turn to asia flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 5 from the mid-20th century onwards in which a new pro-asia australia was seen as representing a break from britain and its racist past and the embrace of a new multiculturalism and independence (carter 2006), this stance was particularly strengthened in the 1990s under the labor prime minister paul keating. elder (2003) has highlighted the ambivalence of australia’s desire for and fear of others. she reminds us that this desire and fear is gendered: female asian others were seen as less threatening than their male counterparts. in spite of the idea of ‘australia in asia’ and ‘asia in australia,’ several commentators note that there is still a deep-rooted fear of the asianisation of australia (ang 2000; docker & fischer 2000). frank’s life needs to be understood against this backdrop. the variegated intercultural food encounters with their specific ethnic and gendered dynamics in frank’s life, and the historical and cultural conditions through which they were produced, is under-researched in the literature on food and multiculturalism. much of that literature has focused on white australians who have superficial or commodified food relationships with the other. frank’s story represents a more complex story of other-eating at home and in the public domain, the dynamics and character of which are unusual but not unique. to start exploring these issues, our article is structured as follows. first we provide an in-depth review of three influential accounts of ‘eating the other’ and the debates on this as a politics of anti-racism. we follow this with an in-depth discussion of our methodology and its rationale, and then a close reading of frank’s story, asking what difference his memories, relationships and travels makes to eating the other across different historical and cultural moments. eating others in this section we provide a close reading of three influential authors who write on the politics of eating ethnic food. none of these authors position their analysis through an educational frame; but influenced by what michael welton calls a ‘learning optic’ (2003), we as adult educators can see a strong theme of pedagogies underpinning the writers’ arguments that we amplify in our paper to examine multiculturalism and food. we kick off with the work of the us philosopher, lisa heldke (2003), who has interrogated the colonial politics in the middle-class project of cooking and eating ethnic foods. she observes that it is often foods of ‘economically dominated or “third world” cultures’ that are so readily consumed by white, middle-class americans. we have flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 6 already mentioned heldke’s and hooks’s widely cited argument that white, middle class people are ashamed of their white food heritage. an influential concept in heldke’s work is the idea of ‘food adventuring.’ she uses this to get at the way that white people experiment with eating ‘novel,’ ‘authentic,’ ‘exotic’ and ‘dangerous’ ethnic foods. she defines food adventuring as ‘in part an attitude, a particular spirit or disposition’ (2003: 5) to reading cook books, talking about food, and going to restaurants. colonial food adventuring is a pedagogical project inasmuch as gaining knowledge about food, ingredients, chefs and the ‘latest thing’ is central. for heldke food adventuring is a middle class project of pursuing status distinction and cultural capital. capital comes from the counter-cultural status of displaying knowledge about new ethnic ingredients, foodstuffs or restaurants. it also has a firmly masculine ethos. this is evident, for heldke, in the ‘bravery’ required to try new foods, and the ‘quest-like nature of food adventuring involving single-mindedness and drive’ (2003: xxiii–xxiv). in the food adventuring project, people who are not white become a resource that aids white food adventurers in the quest for novelty and their desire for authenticity. the equalising of novelty with notions of the exotic is quintessential for the food adventurer in heldke’s view. eating exotic foods is an exclusive and excluding project. status must always be out of reach for other groups. thus, displaying ethnic food knowledges— experiential, book and gustatory—is always a ‘catch-up tool’ given that there will be invariably another obscure or strange foodstuff on the colonial horizon (heldke 2003: 17). it is a moving feast. the novel food can all too soon become the familiar and the dull, just like mainstream white food. novelty has a shelf-life. for the food adventurer, according to heldke, food, ingredients and restaurants also need to be ‘authentic.’ but authenticity is in the eye and tastebuds of the white eater. the pursuit of authenticity can lead white adventurers to essentialise the other because they seek some ‘pure, unchanging, authentic essence’ that, in fact, ‘does not exist’ (heldke 2003: 33). it is the preservation in aspic of a fantasy of the other. for heldke, then, food adventuring today is following a white colonial practice of exploiting the other. it abstracts the presence of ethnic food from historical and political context. for example, sitting behind the availability of burmese food in north america is a history involving the enforced dislocation of migrants or refugees from their own country. the other’s cultures are taken out of people’s lives, traditions and continuities and reduced flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 7 to a resource for a white project of self-realisation, development and status enhancement. culture is ‘as a source of materials to be extracted and used to enhance our own cultures’ (heldke 2003: 43). food adventurers, like colonisers, have always seen everything they found as a resource to take and use. there are moments, however, when heldke emphasises the agency of the other. ethnic restaurateurs can direct eater’s tastes. this may be on the basis of cost, profit or labour intensity. as she says: ‘members of colonized societies are [not] all and only helpless pawns in the exoticisation process’ (2003: 20). in her book exotic appetites, while critical of middle-class food adventuring, heldke wants to hold onto some crumbs of comfort by articulating what we might call a pedagogy of anti-colonial eating: a way to have your ethical ethnic cake and eat it. she argues, in a somewhat jejune way, that this mode of eating is about fostering respect for one’s own traditions and cultivating an openness to others without objectifying them (2003: 168). heldke’s work takes the aphorism and metaphor of eating the other and investigates it empirically and autobiographically. the context, however, is clearly us-centric with its own colonial histories and particular indigenous, ethnic and migrant relations. we need to ask how these insights relate, or can be translated, to an australian context. how do the eating practices of australian white food adventurers differ from non-white restauranteurs—those whose food is being eaten? is it possible to have different intercultural food encounters that are not simply dismissable as colonialist? to respond to some of these questions, we turn to the australian cultural studies critic ghassan hage (1997) and his influential account of the classed and racialised politics of food multiculturalism as they modulate what he calls migrant home-building in australia. cosmo-multiculturalism and home-building multiculturalism drawing on interview data with lebanese migrants, restaurant staff and white australian customers who visit restaurants that serve asian and middle eastern cuisine, hage (1997) coins the term ‘multiculturalism without ethnics’ to get at a number of dynamics in ethnic food eating amongst the white middle classes in inner sydney. in particular, he sees a conflation between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism in australian policies and the self-presentation of middle-class eaters. in his argument, this leads to an elision of cosmopolitan eating, multiculturalism and anti-racism, a disposition he calls cosmo-multiculturalism. cosmo-multiculturalists assume that if you flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 8 eat ethnic food then you will learn about different cultures. although hage does not use the term pedagogy, we can situate food cosmo-multiculturalism in a longer trajectory of australian multiculturalism pedagogies, in which food is seen as mechanism for enabling empathy, tolerance and connection across different ethnic groups (gunew 1993; swan 2007). hage argues that the celebration of ethnic food becomes about tourism and marketing, not intercultural encounters: ‘cosmo-multiculturalism, like cosmopolitan eating elsewhere in the world, has more to do with the market of foreign flavours than with the market of “foreigners”’ (1997: 120). furthermore, when multiculturalism becomes a marketing project it becomes something that white, middle class people control, rather than what migrants do in everyday settings. at the centre of this project, for hage, is the treating of the other as an object for personal enrichment and class distinction. thus he writes ‘the cosmopolitan relation of consumption is itself grounded in an inter-ethnic power relation which [sic] allows for the availability of ethnicity as an object of appreciation by the cosmopolitan subject’ (1997: 100). one element of this relation is ‘that the dominant multicultural discourses of food are eater-centred, and they vary in the degree to which they emphasize ethnic feeders as active central subjects’ (1997: 118). white working-class residents in outer western sydney, who do not frequent ethnic restaurants as much as middle class residents in inner sydney, are seen by middle class ‘adventurers’ as less multicultural, even racist ‘on the basis of their assumed inability to appreciate cultural diversity’ (1997: 100). he writes that ‘such claims are only possible from the vantage point of a reality which involves minimal inter-cultural interaction between cultural subjects’ (1997: 100). the consequence is twofold: first, actual homebuilding and the eating practices of migrant groups are not seen as part of multiculturalism by food adventurers. in contrast, hage writes, ‘multiculturalism in australia is, or at least ought to be, above all about migrant lives and intercultural interaction’ (1997: 118). hage draws on his data with lebanese migrants to argue that another version of multiculturalism takes place in people’s homes. these are ‘encounters that constitute a homely and an interactive culinary multiculturalism, based on interaction between different cultural subjects’ (1997: x). this is home-building multiculturalism and it involves making traditional and flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 9 new types of food at home, for the family and lebanese friends, and sometimes, for anglo-neighbours. although hage claims that he does not want to romanticise homebuilding multiculturalism or denigrate cosmo-multiculturalism wholesale, the overall effect of his argument is to set up a binary where home-building multiculturalism is seen as good and cosmo-multiculturalism seen as pejorative. hage’s argument that cosmo-multiculturalism is practised without migrants begs the question: what happens if an australian descended from white scottish and english descendants who came to australia four generations ago, and a recently arrived chinese, and then a filipino, migrant are in the same family? hage writes about lebanese migrants who make friends with and marry other lebanese migrants, and likewise white australians whose family and friends are also white. his analysis rests on a contrast between homely multiculturalists who eat in, and cosmo-multiculturalists who eat out. but what if we examine an eater who not only does both, but also has inter-cultural encounters in both domestic and public settings? we note, too, that in spite of much feminist writing on gender and food, hage does not examine the gendered dynamics of feeding and eating across these different sites, nor the specificities of what we might call ‘gendered cosmopolitanisms.’ in contrast heldke describes food adventuring as masculinist. to challenge some of these critical assumptions, we turn to the work of jean duruz. fragments of memory jean duruz is an australian cultural studies theorist with an extensive body of work on food, memory and ‘exotic eating.’ her overall project is to trouble analyses about eating the other. she does this by problematising certain taken-for-granted categories and binaries in writing on race, food and colonialism. for example, duruz (2010) questions assumptions (both popular and scholarly) in which the ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘migrant’ are positioned as fixed, opposing categories. central to this methodology is the power of memories and imagination in making food identities, cultures and places. race, gender and difference are critical to her analysis. she is interested in tracing ambivalence and blurring in the ‘minutiae of everyday life’ and what those traces mean for racialised and ethnicised politics and relations. duruz’s work examines both public and everyday pedagogies of food and multiculturalism. she aims to use everyday narratives to disturb the ‘celebratory flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 10 discourse of food writers, tourism professionals, community histories, local councils’ (2010: 52). her intention is to ‘seek out unpredictable or disruptive moments of storytelling to “unsettle” assumptions that eating from the so-called “mainstream” does not also have its own “ethnic” boundaries to confront’ (2010: 54). she wants to scrutinise ‘the everyday, lived experience associated with “mainstream” … “australianness”’ (2010: 57). this is a political and intellectual project that involves emphasising the ambivalence of inter-cultural food encounters, the agency of different ethnic groups and the openness of identity. this means, for duruz, ‘the need to reincorporate “mainstream” identities and experiences into images, discourses, and the meanings of ethnicity’ (2010: 57), but at the same time to show white ethnicity as fragile, fragmented and complex. in similar vein, we focus our discussion on frank’s stories and the nature of his fragmented and complex, white anglo-australian ‘ethnicity.’ duruz analyses what she calls fragments of memory: data on dreaming, remembering, reflection and storytelling. but these are not simply individualistic or psychological but ‘fragments of personal mediations of public meanings’ (2010: 53). thus, they constitute ‘memories of other times and places: landscapes of imagined possibilities, threaded through with the dense imagery of global and local media discourse’ (2010: 53-54). these stories offer a glimpse of power but are not intended as definitive or representative ones: ‘instead, stories are both complicated and speculative, their details allowing reflection on broader questions’ (duruz 2001: 29). across duruz’s work, we meet a number of different people as they talk about markets, favourite foods, shops, ingredients and meals. the gender, race and class of the narrator affect whether one is seeing what she calls the ‘cook’s eye view’ or the view of the one fed, comforted and nurtured. as she sums it up, ‘crudely put: it’s often better to eat than to cook, to be served than to serve’ (duruz 2001: 24). duruz suggests that if we listen to these stories closely with our ear to the ground, they offer ‘curious and disturbing nuances’ (duruz 2010: 45). there is an ‘oddness’ to such stories that encourages us to think about less usual, and perhaps more productive, ways of understanding the complexities of ethnicities. duruz (2010) draws on post-colonial writers to emphasise entanglement and ‘inbetween.’ these complicate such binaries as ‘homely’/’exotic,’ ‘style’/‘embodiment,’ flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 11 and ‘british’/’asian.’ she emphasises how the blurring of identity boundaries might enable us to ‘imagine different politics of eating and different “entangled” cartographies of transnational belonging’ (duruz 2010: 48). building from ien ang’s work (2000, 2004) duruz wants to underline that all cultural groups are ‘impure’ and all cultural boundaries are potentially ‘porous.’ cuisines, too, for her are ‘hybrid’ and involved in ‘messy boundary crossing,’ rather than being ‘fixed’ or unproblematically ‘authentic.’ methodology in this next section we provide a comprehensive summary of our research approach and methodological decisions, giving more information about frank. in particular, we focus on four aspects of our research: background to the research on which this paper is based; biographical information about frank; a summary of our method and our focus on food memories; and our approach to interpreting the data. the data in this paper is drawn from a wider program of research that explores what we call food pedagogies in which we are interested in the proliferation and intensification of public, family and everyday pedagogies of food (flowers & swan, forthcoming 2013). this program covers a range of sites, media, and ‘teachers’ and ‘learners’ from social activist films (flowers & swan 2011) to ethnic food tours (flowers & swan 2012). in this particular study we focused on one anglo-chinese australian mixed race family and undertook interviews with the anglo-australian father and two mixed race sons. our study was motivated by our sense of dissatisfaction with the some of the discussions on ‘eating the other’ in the literature, the lack of attention given to men, masculinity and mixed-racedness in food studies and family studies. our intention at the start of our work was not to research food memories in a mixed-race family but this developed as we interrogated some of the assumptions in the literature, and were motivated by our own interest in processes of racialisation and gendered hierarchies. frank was chosen because he is from a mixed race family and we wanted to investigate what happens when white australians have friendships, work alongside and marry the other as a way of ‘testing’ out current thinking on eating the other. there were pragmatic reasons for choosing this family: they are known to one of the authors and we were able to contact them and organise the interviews with them relatively easily. this paper focuses on frank rather than the family per se, for three reasons. first, we want to analyse distinct ethnicities and their specificities in some depth. jean duruz has flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 12 written about the importance of using individual storytelling to ‘unsettle’ assumptions that eating from the so-called ‘mainstream’ does not have its own ‘ethnic’ boundaries to confront’ (2005: 54). thus, she suggests that an important political project is to scrutinise ‘the everyday, lived experience associated with “mainstream” “englishness” and “australianess”’ and ‘the need to reincorporate “mainstream” identities and experiences into images, discourses, and the meanings of ethnicity’ (2005: 57). we agree that it is an important political project to relativise and denaturalise the stories, experiences and meanings of white ethnicity in relation to food. hence, we focus on frank’s anglo-australian masculinity in relation to food and multiculturalism. second, in focusing specifically on his stories, we wanted to interrogate the dynamics, specificities and relations of othering rather than assume a static dominant-other relation. third, frank has lived through various official and everyday multiculturalisms, and in various colonial and postcolonial countries. these experiences are rich and complex, and present a challenge to theorise. it is usual practice in life history and memory work to focus on one single individual story (cresswell, cited in miller & deutsch 2009). we felt, therefore, that we could do justice to frank’s stories and those of the sons by separating them into two separate papers.1 our method has been termed culinary biography interviewing (duruz 2010; 2011). culinary biography interviewing draws on people’s stories and memories about food and their lives. it can focus on the meaning that food, food rituals, food preparation, food consumption and food products have in individuals’ lives, and it may be presented chronologically and thematically (miller & deutsch 2009). we were particularly inspired by duruz’s notion that dreaming, remembering, reflection and story-making in relation to food—what she calls ‘fragments of memory’—are important. they offer insights into ‘everyday imagined geographies of ‘englishness’ and ‘australianness’ and offer ‘personal mediations of public meanings’ (2010: 53–54). the connection between what have been called ‘small stories’ and ‘micro-histories’ and an imagined ‘macro’ context is much discussed in the narrative literature (cameron 2012). these small stories can be affective and political in their own right, not simply as exemplifications of larger scale discourses, but important for their detail, smallness and everydayness (cameron 2012). 1 the second paper is entitled ‘potatoes in the rice cooker: mixing through family food pedagogies,’ and is currently under review for journal publication. flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 13 we undertook two interviews with frank totalling five hours. we were interested in frank’s memories of food in his childhood, his mother and her cooking, his adult family life, his business and personal travels. we asked frank to talk about eating in (at home) and out (in restaurants and functions). more specifically, we designed a semi-structured set of questions—informed by literature on gender and cooking (sheridan 2000; supski 2007)—which sought to encourage frank to recall accounts of food he ate, made and purchased. we had hoped, having read the evocative and sensuous accounts of eating in duruz’s respondents (2005) and sutton’s anthropology of greek women (2001), that frank’s memories of the women cooking in his life would be rich. but contrary to other food memory research, frank did not present his memories of either food at home, or the women cooking home-cooked food, in a sensuous idiom or detailed language. even with our feminist training, we were surprised by the lack of concrete detail in frank’s accounts of eating food at home. as a result, during the interview and in a follow up interview, we moved our focus more directly to talking about frank rather than the women in his life. methodologically we started to examine different literatures for our analysis and interpretation. there are, of course, ontological and epistemological debates on the interpretation of data, and in particular data drawn from individual memories. there are also, as feminists have argued for many years, a politics of interpretation. it is to these two issues, we now turn. the ontological nature of memories has been much debated by oral historians and other social theorists (polkinghorne 1998: plummer 2001; holtzmann 2009). there are two key foci in these debates. one refers to the nature of narrative truth and the other, the nature of memory. for plummer (2001), the nature of ‘truth’ is about the intersections between lives as lived, lives as told and lives as written. he argues that most life history researchers agree that it is not possible to get at historical truth though oral history. the key issue for many researchers is that life is not simply lived, it is told. so a life as it is lived is created through autobiography. as plummer writes, ‘our lives are constructed, fabricated, invented, made up—this does not mean all the stories we hear have to be seen as equally valid or invalid, truthful or deceptive’ (2001: 238). this means that we need to understand ‘truth’ in life history as a multifaceted concept. italian oral historian, allessandro portelli, says that life stories are always ‘artificial, variable and partial’ flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 14 (1998: 72). yet, even factually inaccurate statements can have a psychological truth. this truth, he emphasizes, ‘may be as important as factually reliable accounts’ (1998: 68). plummer (2001) sums up it by saying that life historians need multiple criteria for understanding the nature of truth that mediates living, writing and telling. there is an important ontological question about the nature of memories. like truth, memory is a multi-faceted concept, which refers to distinct dynamics and processes that are framed by cultural conditions and practices. as the anthropologist jon holztman has written, the term memory can include ‘events that subjects recall or emotionally reexperience, the unconscious (perhaps embodied) memories of subjects, how a sense of historicity shapes social processes and meanings, nostalgia for a real or imagined past, and invented traditions’ (2009: 363). our focus is on memory talk—narrative memory—rather than other more sedimented memories because memories are not just cognitive (sutton 2001). they can be embodied and rely on emotional experiences that are provoked by smells, sights and touch. this is the particular significance of food in relation to memories. food is potentially sensuous. as holtzman says, ‘food, offers a potential window into forms of memory that are more heteroglossic, ambivalent, layered, and textured’ (2009: 373). in sum, recalling memories is active, and performed through cultural genres including culinary biographic interviewing. the second methodological issue we wish to discuss is the politics of interpretation. there are, of course, debates about the political and ethical relations and processes involved in research, theory and knowledge production. these include discussions on the methods of collecting data, the choice of respondents, the editing of materials, the selection of quotes, and the use of theoretical sources in the interpretation of respondents’ accounts, and the methodological narratives of the research. as feminists such as beverly skeggs (1995) and jackie stacey (1995) have noted, research is not the smooth, linear, seamless process that is often presented as cleaned-up methodological sections in academic papers and books. these accounts may occlude ‘the dead-ends, the u-turns, the frustrations and the despair,’ and under-represent the ‘haphazard and arbitrary’ (stacey 1995: 100). these aspects of research describe our own experience in this study. for example, we began with the aim to analyse memories of women cooking in families, and yet we had to change the focus of our study when our respondents had wills and minds of their own, and did not fit their responses to our initial, neat and tidy flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 15 research question. we had been inspired by the sensory and evocative data in the work of sutton and duruz; but we were perplexed when frank did not invoke food in sensual or colourful detail, and nor did he talk much about his mother. this had two effects: first we were impelled to undertake a second interview to ensure that our questioning technique was not responsible for frank not talking about food as we had hoped; second, we were obliged to draw on a different range of conceptual resources for our interpretation. the interpretation of data is much discussed in feminist theory. there are concerns about the power of the researcher presenting the ideas and feelings of their respondents and using the theoretical resources to interpret the material. this is usually in relation to women interviewing women, in which there has been a tradition of assuming rapport and common ground between women. more recently, that stance has been subject to some critique particularly in relation to the power of researchers to interpret data. in their take on these issues, jackie stacey (1995) and ann gray (2003) are committed to the importance of critical distance between researcher-account and respondent-account. gray, for example, argues that ‘there is a fine line to be negotiated between the desire to honour and acknowledge the … personal accounts given by individuals…and the desire to analyse and critically interpret those stories’ (2003: 124–25). bridget byrne (2006) makes the point that researchers may be interested in areas that interviewees do not see as significant and will sometimes see the need to analyse the interview with a quite different emphasis from the interviewee. for stacey, the role of the researcher is to produce new or refined categories by working dialectically between data and theoretical sources. in her view, the researcher has a political and ethical obligation to ‘use a critical framework which is appropriate to the material and which is made explicit and which can be contested’ (1994: 157). none of this means that ethical considerations in relation to interviewees and data are not important. as byrne argues, it means being sensitive to the complexities of the interviews and involves ‘careful, and sometimes painful, work’ (2006: 38). our data analysis and interpretation mirrors this approach. our interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. we analysed the data in several stages, using traditional methods of reading, highlighting and coding themes in the interviews and working dialectically with literature. as a result, we coded frank’s interview in a fairly traditional way, by identifying themes and doing a close thematic flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 16 analysis of the transcript data. we chose quotes that we felt best exemplified themes or contradictions in his account, and that connected back to our reading in some explicit or even tangential way. below we provide a detailed reading of the data through a number of themes. we have organised these structurally to relate to the literature review. this may give an overly tidy and teleological ‘feel’ to the paper; but we want to be clear here about the ideas that motivated the research, and with which the data is put in dialogue in order to extend, challenge and build new categories and understandings. white food we used to go to … my grandmother’s place often of a sunday night for dinner. one of the features was her pear tarts and apple pies. we enjoyed that. she put on a prolific spread on a sunday night. cold meat … scones and pies and things. this quote from frank about food from his childhood is in line with one construction of traditional australian anglo-fare as good, ‘hearty, filling, tasty’ (duruz 1999: 236). as duruz notes, food writers and historians suggest that the ‘pudding’ is central to the earlier australian diet given its ‘overtones of indulgence and excess’ and key place in nostalgic remembering (1999: 236). the other construction of anglo-food is as bland and poorly cooked, ‘a cuisine of conformity, curiosities and leftovers’ (1999: 237), in contrast to ethnic foods that are depicted as interesting, modern and spicy. one theme in the literature about food cosmopolitanism is that white people are bored and even ashamed of their food heritage (hooks 1993; heldke 2003). this type of narrative underpins theories that suggest certain classes of white people are keen on ethnic food because it offers them a way of escaping their heritage. in frank’s case, he has fond memories of the anglo-food of his childhood: then we continued the tradition that had been part of the family eating history where saturday night was roast dinner. so we had usually beef or lamb, occasionally pork, and we would have that almost always with baked potato, baked pumpkin and one other vegetable… there was always more that could be eaten in one meal, so it constituted the basis of cold meat and salad on sunday night. frank describes his mother’s home-cooking in more detail than that of his asian wives. this could be interpreted as evidence of pride and affection for his anglo-australian food cultural heritage. several authors (sutton 2001; duruz 2005; chan 2010) have flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 17 written about the nostalgia for childhood food in cookbooks and memories. as selina chan (2010: 212) puts it ‘imaginary reconstructions of the past are created’ as nostalgia for the extended family. she goes on to suggest that ‘nostalgic food remembrance often reveals a contrast between a golden past and a present loss, in which psychological comfort is derived from remembering the past’ (2010: 210). but does frank’s data do this kind of ‘comfort remembering’? we suggest not. in opposition to much recent writing on the sensuality of food memories, the way frank presents his account is spare and ‘factual.’ he lists foods rather than describing them in today’s discourses of middleclass embodied foodiesm and the retro-romanticisation of home-cooking (duruz 2001). rather the litany in frank’s accounts of anglo-foods and the repeated word ‘always’ point to a repetitive rhythm of food habits in his early food biography. unlike alice, the anglo-australian female respondent in jean duruz’s research, who is of a similar age to frank and continues some of her mother’s anglo-food traditions, frank presents himself as having little inclination in upholding anglo-food habits: quite the contrary. thus, in this next quote, frank talks about food with his first wife who was chinese. when asked whether she learned to cook anglo-food, he said: ‘i never expressed any need to have an australian type menu in the house. so ching yu determined what happened. but after ching yu died i can’t remember that i cooked potatoes at any time either. rice was the staple.’ freighted by patriarchal gender relations, this quote represents a clear refusal of his anglo-australian food heritage. it contrasts with the bounty listed by him of his mother’s house. we observe that frank does not present memories of meals, let alone smells and colours, and gives a terse account only of one ingredient, namely rice. ang (2004) suggests that culturally potatoes are the signifier of celtic-anglo food and rice of the ‘asian.’ of course, millions of descendants of the incas who first cultivated it in the andes also identify closely with the potato. rice has long been eaten widely across latin america, the caribbean, spain, italy and greece. but in much of europe and australia, as ien ang writes: ‘rice arguably sets asians apart from westerners as well as from other non-westerners such as arabs and africans. indeed, rice is a widely applied popular marker for asianess in the west … [it is] the prime emblem for asian cultural specificity and difference’ (2004: 149–50). frank’s description needs to be understood in the context of rice not being commonly eaten in savoury dishes—notwithstanding the longer history of rice puddings—in australian households until the 1980s. susan sheridan reminds us that from the early 1960s recipes flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 18 and advertisements in the australian women’s weekly—an iconic and popular magazine—tried to ‘persuade australians to consider rice as one of their staple dietary ingredients’ in order to demonstrate being modern and cosmopolitan (2000: 323). in contrast, frank suggests that eating rice was a mundane everyday fact of life. rather than presenting himself as educated by a feminine domestic pedagogy to eat rice, frank positions his own turn to asian food in the context of public masculine friendship in the 1950s, which we discuss below. ethnic food socialities one of the criticisms in the literature around eating ethnic food is that white people have superficial relationships with the other when they eat in restaurants in the public domain. for hage the migrant’s home is where there can be a more genuine, uncommodified and meaningful multicultural sociality around food. the fieldwork hage drew on for his paper, ‘entrails of the west,’ was undertaken in the 1990s. frank married a chinese student in the 1950s. over the span of his adult life, frank did not make a habit of going to ‘ethnic’ restaurants. instead he went to ‘ethnic’ countries, made friends with ‘ethnics,’ and married two asian women. of course, power relations of variegated kinds are part of these food relations. the specificities of imperial-colonial, gendered and racialised power relations are important to think through when examining food multiculturalism and its socialities. unlike hage’s and heldke’s critique of food adventurers and cosmo-multiculturalists as doing food multiculturalism without ethnics, frank presents himself as being introduced to chinese food through friendship. ‘so my best friend ng yen hock was the one who took me for my first chinese meal. we went to lygon street, carlton and we had egg fuyung. i thought that was very exotic at the time.’ they are eating out; but what we see is an ‘ethnic’ in melbourne taking a white australian to a restaurant. this represents a different picture of the 1950s from that summarised by duruz: ‘it is a sober thought that for many australians, the fifties are emblematic of the longing to return which involves a celebration of conservative relations, particularly of gender and ethnicity—a celebration of ‘wogless,’ white australia and of ‘family values’ (1999: 250). frank then tells us a different 1950s story about australian multiculturalism, namely, a turn to asia exemplified by the colombo plan, the women’s weekly cosmopolitan modernity project, state-sanctioned pride in food diversity at the 1956 olympics, and flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 19 increasing embarrassment with the continuation of a white australia immigration policy (jayasuriya & pookong 1999; ang 2003; elder 2003). as elder writes: ‘this decade was one where the “white australia” policy had to be represented to the world and to the nation. the horror of the holocaust made blatant and crude racism more difficult to present as good government policy’ (2003: 235). frank does not treat asian immigration with suspicion, or as a narrative of national decline; he presents us with a story of ethnic food socialities taking place earlier in the history of multiculturalism that is relatively under-discussed in the literature. these food socialities are further complicated in this next quote in which frank talks more about his chinese friend: ng yen hock used to eat greek food, particularly a restaurant immediately opposite the melbourne public library. it was greek food with rice as the staple and with lamb. he and i used to go together to that particular restaurant. i don’t remember going to another one, but we often went there because it was opposite the public library. i don’t know how he discovered it but he took me there. so it became a fairly regular part of our thing. is this food adventuring (heldke 2003) or multiculturalism without ethnics (hage 1997)? frank’s narrative does not seem to exemplify either critical approach. here we see a chinese student based in melbourne adventuring into greek restaurants. in her discussion about ethnic friendships and food between women, duruz (2005) shows how alice and stella, anglo and indonesian australian friends, interact through a feminine exchange of recipes, ideas, knowledges, caring through shopping, eating out and eating in. frank and yen hock participate in a masculine economy of exchange in their eating out. but in contrast to duruz’s respondents, frank gives sparse accounts of his food exchanges: there is little recounting of taste, smell and colour or the nature of the friendship. for fiske, hodge and turner (1997), historically anglo-australian masculinity is marked by inexpressivity; in frank’s case, this represents a pre-foodie, pre-jamie oliver masculininty. frank had a life long friendship with yen hock, so there is a deep relationship here despite frank’s sparse and matter-of-fact narration. an important aspect of frank’s story is that it enables us to begin to historicise food multiculturalism in australia. first, historic forms of white anglo-australian food masculinity may not be rich in detail and sensuality unlike those of tv chefs today and the women in duruz’ research. second, this historicisation points to the emergence of deeper and earlier forms of inter-cultural food interactions than has been discussed in flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 20 some of the literature (hage 1997). hence, in his story we see a white australian man who turns to asia in an everyday, lived and embodied manner not only through friendships, but through marriage, and living and working in asia starting in the 1950s. is this multiculturalism with ethnics, home-building multiculturalism avant la lettre? in the following section, we discuss another part of frank’s story that displays close similarities to heldke’s notion of a colonial food adventurer. classic food adventuring? in his early 20s frank lived and worked in british borneo, a colonial outpost at the time. he presents a classic account of food adventuring: while i was in the cathedral compound i befriended the … cook who was chinese from hong kong. he used to go shooting for flying fox. so i ate flying fox. he said it’s very important in skinning it not to let the skin come in contact with the meat because of—there’s a particular disease which bats give, the name of which escapes me. that would—if the meat were contaminated you could get very sick. so i took the chance that he’d skinned it properly. according to heldke, a quintessential part of food adventuring is the eating of ‘strange’ meats and this can be seen as a display of bravery and intrepidness. strange meats can include the non-customary part of animals, animals not usually eaten by food adventurers such as dogs, or game animals such as antelope or zebra. exotic meat can comprise those animals that involve some form of danger, such as the fugu fish or animals that are rare or endangered. these tropes are present in this account as is a fear of less-than-hygenic food preparation. cecelia leong-salobir (2011: 132) writes about british colonialists in asia relying on and respecting ‘local’ domestic servants to run their home kitchens, yet at the same time fearing they may bring dirt and disease. it was an unresolved tension and one could read this to be present in frank’s adventuring with flying fox meat. we note, however, that frank tells us he lived in a kampong alongside local malay and chinese families, and this suggests his relationship to the other was not as abstract as the caricature of the colonial food adventurer indicates. at that time, he had a new-born and mixed-race child with his chinese wife. the dynamics of othering and food adventuring here are complex. frank is a white anglo-australian expatriate in a british colony. at the same time, he is home-building with ethnics. of course, home-building mixed-race multiculturalism can be inflected by gendered flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 21 colonialism and exoticisation, the specificities of which do not come through frank’s self presentation in relation to asia, but were part of circulating ideas in the anglocolonial imagination in australia and british colonies. frank was in british borneo for two years and then returned to australia. his ability to be mobile in these ways is also part of a certain kind of gendered, classed and white anglo-racialised privilege. twenty years later, he was appointed to australia’s first foreign aid project in subsaharan africa, specifically in kenya. he worked and lived there for six years and then for four years in tanzania as ‘mobile professional’ and ‘privileged migrant’ (fechter & walsh 2010). although frank is australian and his nationality matters, he is also a ‘western migrant’ in the sense of benefiting from racialised social hierarchies established by british colonialism and drawing on ideas and technologies in his work and home life informed by the ‘collective imagination of westerners’ (fechter & walsh 2010: 200). he describes living in compounds that separate him from the locals. and so while kenya and tanzania were both newly independent of british colonial rule, frank describes living a classically expatriate and colonial lifestyle in terms of employment packages that included flights, paid schooling, segregated living arrangements with servants, and membership of golf and fishing clubs. colonial society is not singular but is itself stratified by occupation—missionaries, civil servants, administrators, retired white farmers—and class, and across this diversity there can be ‘remarkable cohesiveness’ as expatriates often share the same attitudes, past-times and common sense of purpose (korpela 2010: 1312). against this backdrop we can read the next quote, in which frank is recounting eating habits in africa where he worked as an expatriate aid worker: i don’t say i’m a connoisseur of game meat but i can say that eland and impala are good to eat. warthog is as good as pork; less fatty but it’s quite good. african cape buffalo is terrible. it’s stringy and red and hard. we tried it twice and each time my wife developed a severe migraine. so we decided that wasn’t really what we—but sometimes that was what they brought back. we decided not to have any more of it. the quote, with its ‘colonial tropes’ of african wildlife (fechter & walsh 2010), seems quintessential food adventuring: here are all the hallmarks of exotic meats, intrepidness, masculinity and colonialism. in a more contemporary reference of eating in singapore, the next quote is more flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 22 ambiguous. ‘i learned to eat durian … but durian i like. you’re not supposed to— europeans are not supposed to like it. it does have a bit of a smell of rotting flesh but it’s very—i find it very sweet and the texture is very good. i do have a story about durians that.’ durian is notorious amongst many white people as being difficult to eat. in fact, for heldke, this fruit constitutes the quintessential asian food adventure for white people. of course, while durian is not universally popular among asians, it does have an iconic status as an asian fruit. indeed for many asians, it is the prince of fruit, and western white demonisations of durian are seen as evidence of racism. frank says he deliberately taught himself to learn to like a food that ‘europeans’ are not supposed to like. whilst this can be seen as an instance of eating the other for self-distinction, his family and friendship connections to asia have to be remembered when we analyse this data. this account can also, at the same time, be interpreted as a way to show respect for a valued food and to foster inter-cultural connections (narayan 1997). as ian cook (2008) has noted, it is possible to be colonial and anti-colonial in our eating habits at the same time because people’s biographies are heterogeneous and self-disruptive: ‘there are experiences, sensations, dreams, memories and stories that can be told about little bits and bobs of deliberate and accidental border crossing and cross-cultural food solidarities in different people’s lives’ (2008: 828). a more straightforward form of eating the other according to heldke and hage is that of white people circumscribing what authentic ethnic food should be like. food, ingredients and restaurants need to be ‘authentic,’ defined as unchanging and unmodern. thus, the food adventurer may know ‘better’ than the ethnic cook what a dish should be like. we can see some of this below, when again, frank as a white mobile professional, this time in india recites a story about curry. so i enjoyed the food that i had in india but i did make a curious observation. the indian food which i discovered then that i it’s not even popular in sydney now is mughlai food. mughlai being the way of describing the food that the mughal’s ate. they call it a curry but it’s not it’s almost not what i call a curry; it’s a soft, creamy, white mixture flavouring. i find the taste much to my liking. i’m not that strong on very strong curries. frank reproduces distinction for himself through his ability to authenticate. as heldke points out what constitutes authenticity in relation to food is actually confusing and contradictory. nevertheless, white food adventurers like to see themselves as ‘outsider experts on an ethnic cuisine, more knowledgeable than most insiders, and thus able to flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 23 point out the inaccuracies in insiders’ presentations of their own cuisines. such adventurers seek to become the honorary insider, the outsider whose knowledge gives them the right to special treatment’ (heldke 2003: 29). as duruz (2010) writes, we need to attend as researchers to the dishes or ingredients invoked in accounts of food adventuring. curry is a highly symbolic dish in relation to british colonialism. the term itself is complex and is not used by indians in the same way as white british or australians do; in fact, its very ‘authenticity’ is questionable (narayan 1997). curry powder itself is a british colonial ‘invention.’ curry in britain— now more popular than roast beef—is trumpeted by the state and popular media as the signifier of white britain’s ‘tolerance.’ but as gunew and others note there are strict limits on what kind of, and how much, difference will be tolerated. domesticating difference different dynamics of eating the other and food adventuring are evident in frank’s account, in which are calibrated food relations connected to ethnic groups and historical moments. yet, the prospect that some food adventures would punctuate frank’s home living has not proved to be the case. thus an interesting theme in frank’s story is the way in which eating at home with the other is rendered unremarkable and undetailed. of food with his first wife he says: ‘i’m not sure there was anything notable about springvale [a suburb in melbourne] in terms of cuisine. we just—well of course by then that was—we’d already established in the house that my wife cooked rice and we went to china town for meals. so that was more of the normal type of fare that we had.’ of his return from africa to australia with his second wife he comments: ‘then we went back to canberra. i worked in canberra for five years. there was nothing terribly remarkable about that. i really tried to think if there was anything that was different ... so in canberra we just lived normal australian lives.’ given the ‘enthusiasm’ for asian foods he displays from his travel accounts, one could expect a continuing excitement about the food his asian wives prepared. instead there is a repeated rendering of this food as ‘normal.’ one way to read these quotes is as confirmation of everyday multiculturalism (wise & velayutham 2009). in this regard, we might see frank as normalising the other as ordinary, as ‘fully’ australian. interpreted this way, he does not represent asian food as something that spices up the blandness of white culture. however, there is so little flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 24 colour in these accounts. difference appears to be completely invisibilised. these are not the rich stories of everyday multicultural encounters seen and critiqued in other studies (duruz 2005, 2010; wise & velayutham 2009). how do we understand this? frank’s talk about food is more detailed when he enters the public domain. the domestic realm and food are culturally coded as feminine, particularly in an era before television programs like masterchef, which embodies a new ebullient ‘foodie masculinity.’ so in some ways it is not surprising frank gives little detail. however, we need to understand the racialised relations in his accounts. in one orientalist version of eating the other, the other is interesting and important insofar as he or she serves to illuminate the white person, to render his or her life more authentic. the other can do this because they are seen as more exciting, intense, dangerous, authentic, spiritual, sensuous: they are radically other (heldke 2003: 148). but frank does not reproduce this orientalist narrative in relation to eating at home. he does not mark his food as strange or other; but in so doing he erases difference. he invisibilises not only the domestic labour of food-work by women, but also their otherness. this suggests that while frank relishes certain food and ethnic difference in the public domain, he presents an account of containing difference in the private domain. when authors like hooks and narayan discuss the domestication of the other, they are pointing to the containment of difference: its rendering as safe and knowable. in relation to food, this can be seen as devaluing food as cultural capital at home in a process of producing the cosmopolitan white self. this story on mixed race home-building multiculturalism complicates hage’s privileging of home-building as a form of ‘good’ multiculturalism. the gendered dynamics of food-work missing from hage’s theorising; so too are the specificities of various inter-cultural interactions. another way of understanding frank’s silence about the details of food in his home life is that while he clearly has turned to asia in relation to the public domain, it is possible that he is also continuing to position his angloethnicity as the active subject and the asian other as passive object. for hage and others, this rendering of the object of another’s power is at the centre of much othering in ethnic food encounters. athena nguyen (2005) refers to the other in this dynamic as ‘object-people’ (2005: 52). we are not suggesting that the women lacked agency, but rather that this is how they are constructed in frank’s account. flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 25 so how do we understand the dynamic here? as we have indicated, australia’s particular perception of asia is inflected by orientalism, fear and desire, in that the category asian is seen as profoundly and irresolutely other. at the same time, for political, economic and security reasons australia has also sought to interact with asia. as nguyen writes: ‘this at times weighed heavily on the white australian psyche which has struggled to negotiate between the competing tensions of “multicultural” and racially tolerant policies and a lingering fear of “the teeming millions” of its asian neighbours’ (2005: 45). in frank’s story we have a white anglo-australian married to two asian women, in an era when parts of australia were turning to asia while other parts remained fearful. indeed, it is important to remember here that the white australia policy was in formal force until 1972. however, frank does not seem anxious about how his wives experienced themselves as food-makers or what he and they ate at home; rather, he is disinterested in those experiences. rather than white food being presented as routine and mundane, in frank’s accounts asian food is. the capacity to be disinterested is in itself a privilege afforded not only by masculinity but by anglo-ethnicity as well. it hints at the domestication of the threat of difference and a denial of the lived realities of these women’s racialised lives in australia. hage suggests that home-building multiculturalism can still be experienced as homely even when it is grounded in what he calls a ‘dominant mode of patriarchal homely interactions’ (1997: 117). feminists would argue that hage’s construction of the homely is problematic. in frank’s case, we have inter-racial homebuilding multiculturalism in which power dynamics are not only gendered but racialised against a historical backdrop of australia’s orientalism, its fear of asia and a desire to be seen as multiculturally tolerant (nguyen 2005). thus, we might gloss this story as multiculturalism with ethnics but without ethnic subjects. frank’s story challenges neat discourses about australia’s fear of asia, but it illustrates the nuanced ways in which australia’s relationship with asia has, and continues to be, tinged with the politics of racism embedded in histories of colonialism. conclusion in this paper we have presented frank’s ‘entangled’ story. entangled here are skeins of white expatriate masculinity, eating out and eating in multiculturalism with ethnics and colonial food adventuring. as with other stories of everyday multiculturalism eating, flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 26 (duruz 2005, 2010), frank’s story troubles neat categories. through our themes of white food, ethnic food socialities and domesticating difference, we have shown how his storying disturbs notions of cosmo-multiculturalism without ethnics and of homebuilding multiculturalism with ethnics. in particular, we have emphasised the importance of theorising different racialised and gendered food encounters and their multicultural histories. thus, it matters how that frank imagines asia, asians, africa and australia and his gendered relation to those parts of the world. putting it bluntly, what we eat with which other, and in which context, matter analytically and politically to our conceptualisation of eating the other. our overall argument is that we can see frank positioning himself from the 1950s in a turn to asia that marks him as a proto-australian food multiculturalist. frank turned to asia at a time when the white australia immigration policy was still robust, when britain still governed numerous asian colonies, and when various authors claim there was a strong sense of nostalgia among australians for anglo-comfort food. one side of frank developed a sense of identity that challenged and indeed subverted dominant anglo-white identities. he did not proclaim this was a project of resistance; but he certainly went far beyond the patronising claims to inclusiveness of australians who pride themselves when adventuring into asian restaurants. at the same time, frank fits into classic food adventuring, the colonial ‘food savant’ (narayan 1997), trading in cultural knowledge about ethnic food and its authenticity and reproducing a certain white anglo-masculinity. this is not to say that frank is unique in the confusion of his multicultural self-presentations: many of us are contradictory in how we understand ourselves, particularly in relation to race. our argument is that frank represents a messy blend of cosmoand home-building multiculturalism. in this, we can the contours of what we might call an australian ‘cosmopolitan modern masculinity.’ this is a complement to sheridan’s notion of cosmopolitan modern femininity. the idea of being modern and cosmopolitan through cooking the other’s food at home was promulgated in australia by the women’s weekly magazine from the 1950s. what we might call australian cosmopolitan modern masculinity represents the turn from britain to asia, [actually, wasn’t the significant turn from britain to the usa and hence the asia-pacific world after world war ii, and during the cold war era?] and is performed through food in the public domain across flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 27 different countries. in this mode of masculinity, there is an inexpressivity around food, and eating at home with asian women offers the least capital for performing a multicultural self. whiteness and masculinity are produced relationally; frank’s version of masculinity is enabled by contrast to an everyday asian domestic femininity and a non-multicultural anglo-australian masculinity. shona hunter (2010) has written of the turn away in britain through its state multiculturalist policy from the idea of civilising the colonised other to the need for civilising the white man. what she means is that white men are now seen as in need of producing a more ‘multicultural’ masculinity. in relation to australia, the so-called egalitarian ethic and the idea of hospitality and giving opportunity to migrants can be understood in term of white masculinity. the australian take on this version of masculinity and whiteness is critical. in frank’s case, it is produced through an openness to asia through male friendship and heterosexual relations with asian women. what does this mean for food multiculturalism pedagogies, and discussions on education around ethnic food. heldke proposes an anti-colonial food pedagogy (2003). she argues that white food adventurers can be less colonising if they better understand the ethnic cultures of those whose food they eat. a more sophisticated view of how eating ethnic food has possibilities for public pedagogy comes from narayan (2007). she suggests that heldke’s approach is at best naïve; and at worst dangerous, in that it can produce superficial, culturalist, depoliticised understandings of food and race. in her view, heldke’s anti-colonial food pedagogy cannot undo the structural privilege of colonial eaters. in fact, knowing culturalist information about food can lead to a renewal of white status. for narayan, food multicultural education needs to more explicitly place food production and consumption in a material and political economy frame. this means examining the political, colonial, historical and cultural conditions under which ‘ethnic food’ is made, eaten and by whom. for narayan, this approach may lead to a more collective project of social change. how might we see frank’s story as offering us another way into looking at food, multiculturalism and pedagogy in australia. food relations with the other need to be placed in the context of specific colonial and imperial histories. at the same time, the specificities of the other and the nature of their othering needs examination. frank’s flowers and swan eating the asian other portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 28 culinary biography contains various intercultural interactions with different others. racialised and ethnicised specificities matter. there are different power dynamics to the ethnic and colonial relations being presented in frank’s account. gender is critical here, as masculinity and femininity intersect with race and ethnicity. as a result, we can see that through food anglo-masculinity can be ‘multicultural’ in different ways from anglo-femininity. in particular, the private and public operate in different ways as places for food inter-cultural encounters and claims about identity. food itself is unevenly valued as cosmopolitan capital. french food is imagined differently from indonesian food. it also matters what version of state and popular multiculturalisms are circulating for the kind of subjectivities which can be presented. what is critical then is there are many forms and contents of othering. what we need to develop, extending the work of ang and duruz, is a ‘pedagogy of multicultural entanglement.’ this would get at the oscillations and variegations in eating the other and the colonial and anti-colonial dynamics we can see at play between masculinity and femininity, specific ethnicities, multiculturalism and imperialism, eating in and eating out, anglo and other, and other and other. this means we can interrogate more closely what we imagine to be the connection made through food with, and to, the other, at concrete and ontological levels. what other, in fact, are we eating? this new pedagogy, to redeploy sharma’s words (2006) would think through the kinds of encounters with otherness that multicultural pedagogies perform and engender. acknowledgements we are grateful for the financial support we received from both the cosmopolitan civil societies 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(eds) 2009, everyday multiculturalism. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. wow blacktown! multicultural fiesta 2011. online, available: http://au.wherevernow.com/?event=137651589635180 [accessed 15 june 2012]. market-oriented conceptualisations of social citizenship: citizenship = employment (mclaren and dyck 2004: 42) women crossing borders: the changing identities of professional chinese migrant women in australia christina ho, university of technology, sydney women are crossing borders at an unprecedented rate. moreover, especially in asia, women are increasingly migrating not only as the traditional ‘trailing spouse’, but as skilled professionals in their own right. australia has been a major destination for skilled asian women, largely because of the government’s push to meet a domestic skills shortage with the migration of skilled professionals. guided by a marketoriented approach that views migration through the lens of economic efficiency, the government has constructed its ideal migrant as an educated and highly employable professional who will not become a ‘drain’ on the public purse. however, while skilled migrants have been successfully recruited to australia, there is much evidence that migrants’ skills and knowledge are under-utilised and undervalued in the australian workforce. this is particularly the case for women, who typically experience blocked or downward occupational mobility. these kinds of difficulties faced by migrants in re-establishing their careers have been well documented in australia and other western countries. researchers have documented problems with securing recognition of overseas-gained qualifications and work experience, language difficulties, discrimination, and other problems in transferring careers across borders (e.g. chapman and iredale 1990; evans and kelley 1986; friedberg 2000; hawthorne 1997; iredale 1997). this paper explores the consequences of this career disruption for migrant women’s identities and values. ironically, although admitted to australia for their economic portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal ho women crossing borders attributes, migration can ultimately lead skilled women towards a much less marketbased orientation in their lives, as they identify less and less as ‘career women’ and come to develop other aspects of their identity in their pursuit of ‘quality of life’ in a new country. this analysis challenges the dominance of economistic research on migrant settlement in australia and elsewhere, informed by human capital approaches that define migrants in terms of their occupational skills and qualifications (jupp 2002; kofman 2000). as kofman (2000, 56) argues, ‘the theorisation of skilled migration is not only poorly developed, but is also resolutely economic. it needs to be less compartmentalised and more integrated, recognising the breadth of human experience.’ this paper attempts to redress the dearth of research into the social dimension of migration and the perspectives and subjective experiences of migrants themselves. ultimately, such an approach also challenges the australian government’s marketoriented understanding of social citizenship. while the government sees citizens first and foremost as economic beings that are either productive taxpayers or welfarereceiving ‘burdens’ on the state, an analysis of the complex, evolving identities of migrant women exposes the conceptual poverty of this economistic framework. this paper also examines the shifts in identities and values for women migrating to australia from hong kong. in the lead-up to the 1997 handover of hong kong sovereignty from britain to china, educated professionals left hong kong in their thousands, mostly bound for the us, canada and australia. although the chinese government had agreed to preserve hong kong’s legal, economic and social systems for 50 years under the ‘one country, two systems’ formula, many hong kong residents feared that the handover would seriously threaten civil liberties and disrupt hong kong’s economy, education system, and way of life generally (chan 1990; cheng and lo 1995; mak 1991; wong 1993). the hong kong government estimates that the level of emigration increased from an average of approximately 20,000 per year between 1980 and 1986, to around 60,000 in the early 1990s, peaking at 66,000 in 1992 (skeldon 1995). thus, in the 1980s and early 1990s, hong kong was one of the largest sources of skilled migrants to australia. women comprised a large proportion of these skilled professionals, having portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 ho women crossing borders been nurtured by hong kong’s economic boom and strong culture of female labourforce participation. hong kong women therefore represent one of the most highly skilled cohorts of female migrants to australia. this paper uses australian government quantitative data and qualitative data gained from interviews with 27 hong kong women in australia, most of whom migrated with their families, to explore how they experienced settling in a new country. targeting the best and the brightest: a market-based migration policy around the western world, governments have increasingly viewed migration according to economic criteria, and have been increasingly selective in their admissions policies. in this age of globalisation, governments claim, migrants need to be selected on the basis of their ability to contribute economically to the country. thus by the early 1990s, most traditional migrant destination countries had introduced legislation placing greater emphasis on migrant skills (united nations 2002, 21). australian governments have been strongly committed to this economistic approach since at least the 1980s. australia was one of the first countries in the western world to introduce a ‘points test’ for prospective migrants (reitz 1998), and by 1999, noneconomic factors had been largely eliminated from the points system (jupp 2002, 150). moreover, the ‘pass mark’ for skilled visa categories is regularly lifted by the government to ensure the selection of increasingly higher-skilled migrants (vanstone 2004). in addition to passing the points test, skill-based immigrants must meet ‘basic requirements’: they must be under the age of 45, be proficient in english at the vocational level, have post-secondary qualifications recognised by australian authorities as suitable for their nominated occupation, and meet australian requirements for (and have recent experience in) an occupation set out on a skilled occupations list (dimia 2003). since the late 1990s, the majority of new arrivals to australia have been admitted according to these economic criteria. the howard government proudly heralds this reorientation towards skilled migration as a significant achievement. during the 2001 federal election campaign, the liberalnational coalition proclaimed, ‘australia’s skilled migration program is properly targeted to meet australia’s labour market and economic needs…under the coalition, portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 ho women crossing borders australia’s most recent migrants are younger, better skilled and more likely to get employment than ever before’ (liberal-national coalition 2001, 7). announcing the 2004-05 migration program, the federal government asserted that it was delivering ‘the largest skill stream in australia’s history’ at around 77,000 people (vanstone 2004). figure 1 below shows the gradual shift in emphasis, from the late 1980s, from family to skilled migration. figure 1: migration program outcomes by stream: 1983-84 to 2002-03 source: ruddock 2002: 3 where do women fit in this picture? as feminist scholars of migration have argued, skilled migration programs are masculinist in their assumptions of what constitutes a ‘skill’ (creese and dowling 2001; fincher 1997; kofman 1999). although migration selection criteria apply equally to men and women, in practice, men are more likely than women to possess the required educational and occupational skills. as fincher (1995, 212) argues, most points are awarded for people who have been employed or trained in those occupations in which men are most likely to be found, both in australia and overseas, such as managers and administrators, professionals, paraprofessionals and tradespersons. no admission points for skill are awarded for the occupations of clerk, salesperson, plant or machine operator or labourer, the first two of these occupational categories being the ones in which women are heavily concentrated. no points are given for domestic labour. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 in addition, men are more likely than women to have the requisite work experience and be able to show a record of career advancement, because they have not taken time ho women crossing borders out of the workforce to raise children (fincher 1997, 226). men are also more likely than women to possess better english language skills, another important selection criterion. nevertheless, the migration of skilled women is growing, as women gain greater access to higher education and as households come to rely on two incomes (kofman 2000). the expansion in the movement of professional women also reflects rising demand in feminised labour market sectors, such as nursing and teaching (raghuram and kofman 2004). skilled women are also increasingly migrating as part of skilled households, where both men and women’s credentials are assessed by receiving countries (man 1995; raghuram and kofman 2004). women from hong kong typify these trends in many ways, as the next section shows. migration and deskilling: chinese women’s experiences of settlement in australia women migrating from hong kong to australia tend to be highly educated, with a sizeable proportion coming from professional backgrounds, with high levels of qualifications and work experience. according to the 2001 census, hong kong-born women were almost twice as likely as all australian women to hold a higher qualification, as table 1 shows. table 1: highest educational qualification of migrants from hong kong, and total australian population (aged 15 years and over), 2001 (%) qualification hong kong-born total australian population male female male female bachelor degree or higher 30 25 13 13 diploma, advanced diploma or certificate 15 15 29 15 no post-school qualifications 55 60 59 71 source: unpublished abs census data (totals may not sum to 100% because of rounding) hong kong women are also accustomed to playing an active role in the workforce. this is partly a result of the colony’s industrial development, oriented firstly around light manufacturing, and then around services, both of which have been substantial employers of women. women’s labour force participation also reflects a consistently buoyant economy and shortages of labour. declining birth rates, restrictions on flows portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 ho women crossing borders of mainland chinese migrants and the ‘brain drain’ of professionals moving abroad all contributed to labour shortages in the late 1980s and 1990s, creating abundant employment opportunities for local workers. until the recession of the late-1990s, unemployment rarely exceeded two or three per cent (man 1997, 196). the shortage of professionals in particular caused many employers to become relatively genderblind. educated women therefore have been able to enter managerial and administrative positions, enjoying good salaries, attractive fringe benefits and promotions (man 1997: 194).1 despite this culture of workforce participation, migration to australia results in a substantial decline in employment levels among hong kong women. this is evident in the government-commissioned longitudinal survey of immigrants to australia (lsia), which surveyed migrants arriving between 1993 and 1995. participants were interviewed three times, providing a useful longitudinal portrait of settlement experiences (see dimia 2002 for more information about the lsia). the figures for female primary applicants2 from hong kong show that while the vast majority (84 per cent) were employed prior to migration, this more than halved (to 39 per cent) after arrival in australia, and even after three and a half years in australia, only 55 per cent of women were employed (see table 2). meanwhile, the proportion of women engaged in ‘home duties’ more than tripled after migration, signalling that many women became full-time housewives in australia. table 2: main activity of female primary applicants from hong kong, before and after migration (%) main activity 12 months prior to migration 6 months after migration 3½ years after migration employed 84 39 55 unemployed 6 2 home duties 10 37 35 other 6 18 8 total 100 100 100 source: unpublished lsia data (waves 1 and 3) 1 this does not mean that there is no sexism in the hong kong labour force. in particular, nonprofessional women such as secretaries and blue-collar workers often confront blatant sexism. for example, recruitment advertisements for secretaries typically specify a preferred age (usually between 20 and 25), and women risk being laid off for requesting maternity leave (man 1997: 194). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 ho women crossing borders a fall in employment levels was also present among male primary applicants. however, migration to australia widened the gender gap in employment rates. prior to migration, men and women had very similar employment rates (84 per cent for women, 85 per cent for men); after three ***and a half years in australia, the male rate was 79 per cent, almost 25 percentage points higher than the female rate of 55 per cent.3 thus although hong kong women are highly educated with strong employment histories, their skills are obviously not being fully utilised in australia. despite the fact that their occupational skills helped them gain entry into the country, the act of migration can result in ‘de-skilling’, as up to half of recent entrants do not engage in paid work. how are we to understand this process of de-skilling? there is a substantial australian literature that documents the downward mobility of migrants because of a ‘transferability gap’ that prevents migrants from continuing their career trajectories in a new country. researchers have pointed to such factors as the lower return on overseas education (evans and kelley 1986; friedberg 2000; tram-nan and nevile 1988), non-recognition of overseas gained qualifications by the government or employers (beggs and chapman 1988; chapman and iredale 1990) or the devaluation of migrants’ overseas work experience (friedberg 2000; stromback 1984, 1988). they cite various reasons to explain these practices, including preference for the native born, lack of knowledge about overseas education and training systems, prejudice, inadequate processes for formal recognition of overseas-based qualifications, and migrants’ lack of local experience and english proficiency (hawthorne 1997; iredale 1997: 100). migrant women face additional hurdles re-establishing their careers, notably because of their family responsibilities (creese and dowling 2001; lary et al 1994; man 1995; ng 1982). within migrant families, women’s careers are often considered secondary. this means that upon arrival, men’s employment generally assumes priority within 2 primary applicants are those upon whom the migration application was based. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 3 this gendered effect of migration may be seen as consolidating traditional gender roles within households, a process i have analysed as ‘feminisation’ of roles (ho 2006). ho women crossing borders migrant families, while women’s primary responsibility is to facilitate the settlement of the family into a new environment. adjusting to life in a new country typically intensifies women’s domestic workload, both in terms of emotional and physical labour. concurrently, in migrating, women usually lose sources of domestic support, such as extended family members and hired domestic workers. researchers on gender and migration have shown that women migrants tend to bear the brunt of the loss of social and domestic networks engendered by migration (eastmond 1993; kay 1988; man 1995, 1997; meintel et al 1987; rowland 1991; yeoh and khoo 1998). consequently, as we have seen in the quantitative data above, migration often results in an escalation in women’s roles as wives and mothers, and a reduction in their role as income earners. this pattern sits uneasily with the australian government’s economistic assumptions about the migration of skilled professionals. while its market-driven migration policy views prospective migrants only as economic beings, the impact of migration on many women is a redefinition of the self away from an economic framework. while they were active ‘career women’ before migration, the obstacles to re-establishing careers in australia can mean that women find themselves moving toward non-workoriented spheres of life. the next section explores this from the perspectives of my respondents. re-orienting identities: chinese women move away from market-oriented identities as migrants cross borders, they also cross emotional and behavioral boundaries. becoming a member of a new society stretches the boundaries of what is possible in several ways…one’s life and roles change. with them, identities change as well (espín 1999: 19). my respondents, who were aged mostly in their 30s and 40s, and lived in sydney at the time of interview, in many ways typified the experiences of hong kong women in australia. most had worked full-time prior to migration, and had been extremely career-oriented, continuing to work when their children were young. as mentioned earlier, this work-orientation among hong kong women reflects the abundance of portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 ho women crossing borders employment opportunities for women in the hong kong economy. it also reflects the high cost of living in hong kong, caused by high property prices and a materialistic culture centred around high levels of consumer spending, whether in the form of expensive apartments, electronic consumer items, eating out, or other staples of the hong kong middle-class lifestyle. women’s ability to work full-time is made possible by domestic support from relatives and hired domestic workers. it is not uncommon for households in hong kong to consist of grandparents, parents, and grandchildren, residing together, sharing finances, resources and household labour (lee 2002). extended families who do not live under the same roof usually live within close proximity of each other, again enabling the sharing of resources and labour. man (1995, 313) explains the rationale for such arrangements: this pseudo-extended family arrangement is as much an adherence to the confucian ideal which stresses one’s duty to care for the old, as a pragmatic arrangement in response to the high cost of housing, and the shortage of provision by the state of subsidized homes for the aged. very often, however, the arrangement could be mutually beneficial for all parties. the grandparent (typically the grandmother) or the unmarried aunt is provided for; in return, they are able to help out in housework and child care. in addition to receiving domestic help from relatives, hong kong women often hire domestic workers for daily housework and childcare. middleand upper-class hong kong households have hired domestic workers since the 1970s, when the hong kong government allowed foreign nationals, mostly from the philippines and other southeast asian countries, to enter the colony to work as ‘helpers’ (constable 1997, 29). in 2003, there were approximately 250,000 foreign domestic helpers in hong kong, more than half of whom were filipinos (torres 2003). the popularity of hiring domestics is enhanced by their low wages. in 2003, the hong kong government cut the already low hk$3,670 (us$470) minimum monthly wage for foreign maids by hk$400 (torres 2003). in some cases, hong kong women choose to work even when their income is only slightly higher than the cost of hiring a domestic worker (constable 1997, 21).4 portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 4 it is important to note that the hiring of a domestic worker does not generally absolve hong kong women of responsibility for household labour. while they may delegate tasks to hired workers, women still need to manage household labour, and are blamed by other family members if the work is not done adequately. a 1990s hong kong survey found that 72 per cent of wives, compared with four per cent of husbands, were responsible for household chores, while 14 per cent shared the tasks (cheung et al 1997, 210). as man argues (1997, 219), while domestic workers relieve middle-class women from ho women crossing borders migration to australia significantly alters this lifestyle. the loss of domestic support compounds women’s difficulties in re-establishing careers, often resulting in a reorientation away from paid work. after migration, many of my respondents left the workforce to assist their families settle in a new environment. when they returned to work, they often did so part-time, structuring their paid work around their family responsibilities (see table 3). table 3: employment status of respondents, before and after migration before migration after migration* employed full-time 25 7 employed part-time 16 not employed 2 4 total 27 27 * at time of interview in seeking work, most women had difficulties gaining positions that were comparable to those they had left behind. in some cases, they accepted lower positions in their field; others changed their occupation or industry completely. many women spent lengthy periods unemployed. it was rare for them to simply arrive in australia and continue along their previous career trajectories. thus, some kind of career sacrifice was experienced by the majority of my respondents. on the domestic front, many of the women expressed their initial shock and frustration at having to deal with household labour that was previously done by hired domestic workers. some had never even really acquired skills in cooking, for example, because their lives were so career-oriented in hong kong. most did not know how to drive because they were accustomed to a comprehensive and reliable public transport system. in australia, being suddenly responsible for domestic tasks in typically large suburban houses, with the extra challenges of looking after gardens and ferrying their children to school and other activities, was unfamiliar terrain. daily household labour (thus polarising and dividing women along class and racial dimensions), this arrangement ‘does not resolve the problems posed by the separation of paid work and housework, and the relegation of housework to women’. instead, it ‘diverts attention from the struggle for an equitable division of household labour between husbands and wives, the provision of socialized services, and portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 ho women crossing borders despite this, most of my respondents said that they did not regret coming to australia, because australian life, while not providing the same kind of domestic support, nor being necessarily supportive of their careers, did open up new sources of personal identity not connected with employment. while previously their lives had been overwhelmingly work-oriented and materialistic, the australian lifestyle provided more time with the family, more space for leisure and self-development, and ultimately allowed the women to become more independent, away from the influence of family and friends. for example, wendy,5 a former nurse who migrated to australia with her husband and two children, took two years out of the workforce while her family adjusted to life in a new country. at the time of interview, wendy was working part-time as a counsellor. while migration meant putting her career on hold, wendy had no regrets. in fact, she had come to appreciate australians’ less materialistic lifestyle and ability to ‘enjoy life more than the chinese’. although migrating to australia had reduced her family’s income, she believed that this was more than compensated for by the extra time they had to spend with the children, for example, on family holidays, which she said they never had in hong kong. she explained, ‘[now] we’re more into the australian style of having holidays a few times a year, you know. but we are still hard working! [laughs]. but we’re aware that we have to enjoy life as well.’ working less and having a less hectic lifestyle also allowed wendy to pursue her personal interests: ‘i can have more time to myself, to do studying and maybe to read bible or whatever. i’ve got the time—but in hong kong it seems like you never have enough time, i don’t know why.’ for these reasons, wendy said she had noticed a change in herself, such that she was now more concerned with quality of life, and more equipped to make decisions and determine her own fate. while she missed being able to rely on her extended family for support and advice, she had found herself gaining ‘emotional independence’ and developing the skills to become more assertive in meeting new people and re-establishing her social life. more flexible work arrangements’ (1997, 219). thus the employment of domestic workers reinforces the traditional gender division of labour (lee 2002, 251). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 11 5 all names are pseudonyms, and details may have been changed to preserve anonymity. ho women crossing borders nicola, a young teacher, has a similar story. she migrated to australia to be with her australian husband, leaving behind a well-paid position in an elite hong kong international school. in australia, her income was reduced to a third of what it was, and at the time of interview, nicola worked in two part-time teaching jobs in order to look after her young daughter. however, she considered herself ‘really lucky’ because although re-establishing work and social networks in australia was challenging, nicola believed her quality of life had improved immeasurably: in hong kong i was more highly paid, and the conditions were better, but everything’s expensive in hong kong, and living conditions are better here. lots of fresh air and sunshine. hong kong’s so crowded and polluted. but because i was full-time before, so i felt more belonging, i had more support and resources… i felt i’d made a sacrifice at the beginning but now it’s on track. i feel i have freedom to enjoy life here. we have a lovely house right next to the zoo. sitting on our verandah with the kookaburras and the sunshine, it’s like being in a café. although she still enjoyed teaching, nicola felt that she had learnt to appreciate other non-work-related spheres of life that had not been as open to her in hong kong. carolyn, a nurse who migrated with her husband and daughter, also found that australian life allowed her to explore other aspects of life besides work. a ward manager in hong kong, carolyn worked in two part-time jobs in australia, one in a nursing home, and the other as a casual nurse in a public hospital. although migration had certainly limited her career opportunities and reduced her income, carolyn felt that life in australia freed her from the need to conform to the materialism and workorientation that was the norm in hong kong: coming here, life becomes more simple…in hong kong, i would just be working very hard. i would be only one of the normal people. i very pity that sort of life… people in hong kong are facing different pressures. you just can’t see a good view of your whole life. you don’t have perspective. it’s only about getting more money. it’s a different culture, different norms…i’m better off in terms of the mind—your mind belongs to you yourself. you don’t have much pressure. similarly, sally, an accountant who had migrated from hong kong with her family, felt that living in australia allowed her to ‘be herself’, away from the pressure to ‘keep up with the joneses’ in the competitive social world of hong kong: you can more be yourself… you are unlikely to be affected by other people’s influence… there’s less peer pressure – what car you drive, what clothes you wear, what job you have, how portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 ho women crossing borders much money you have and that kind of thing. i think there’s less comparison, or less competition. so you can really be yourself more. for all of these women, despite the downward mobility associated with migration (or perhaps because of it, in some cases), australian life was a source of greater personal space, away from hong kong’s work culture, and simply away from the expectations and norms of their social and familial circles. life in australia gave these women opportunities to pursue personal interests and define their own lifestyles.6 conclusion the australian government’s market-oriented approach to migration sits uneasily with the experiences of hong kong women in australia. while governmental discourses view citizenship in terms of economics, for these highly skilled, educated migrants, settlement and citizenship in a new country often take them away from market-based identities, and although this entails downward mobility, it can also be simultaneously experienced as liberating. at one level, hong kong women’s shift away from a career orientation reflects a labour market failure—although admitted into the country on the basis of their skills, australian workplaces are not utilising or rewarding these skills in practice. this ‘transferability gap’ has been the subject of much academic work. what i have documented in this paper is another, more subjective, outcome. the shift in hong kong women’s identities is in many ways a reaction against the highly materialistic, competitive world of their former homeland. in australia, they see opportunities for living differently—lessening the value placed on economic status and careers and opening up spaces to spend time with loved ones, pursue personal interests and a better quality of life. 6 it should be noted, of course, that these opportunities were available because of the economic status of these women’s families. although their household incomes had invariably fallen after migration, they were still financially comfortable, if not well off, usually because their husbands continued to earn reasonable incomes, and sometimes because of accumulated savings. thus women’s deskilling did not threaten households’ financial viability, unlike the experience of many migrant groups, including other chinese migrants (for example, see ho 2006 for a comparative analysis of the settlement experiences of women from hong kong and china). indeed, in many ways, the changes in values and lifestyles experienced by my respondents could be seen as an alternative mode of middle-class life, centred more around leisure and the home rather than careers and the workplace. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 13 ho women crossing borders this is not an argument for neglecting the real labour market problems that exist for many skilled migrants to australia. in many ways, the decisions that hong kong-born women make are not free choices, but rather adaptations to limited opportunities. it could also be argued that some of these women’s accounts of their lives are simply putting a positive spin on their experiences. more research is needed to investigate these complexities of migrants’ subjective experiences of the process of settling in a new country. ultimately, all of these questions, and the transition in values and identities documented in this paper seriously challenge the conceptual framework of government policy, which still only sees people as economic beings. reference list beggs, j. j. and b. chapman 1988, immigrant wage and unemployment experience in australia, discussion paper no. 200, canberra: centre for economic policy research, australian national university. chan, d. w. 1990, ‘emigration: stress and adaptation in the 1990s,’ hong kong journal of mental health, 19, 2-4. chapman, b. j. and r. r. iredale 1990, immigrant qualifications: recognition and relative wage outcomes, discussion paper no. 240, centre for economic policy research, australian national university, canberra. cheng, j. y. s. and s. s. h. lo (eds) 1995, from colony to sar: hong kong’s challenges ahead, the chinese university press, hong kong. constable, n. 1997, maid to order in hong kong: stories of filipina workers, cornell university press, ithaca. creese, g. and r. dowling 2001, ‘gendering immigration: the experience of women in sydney and vancouver’, working paper series, 01-04, research on immigration and integration in the metropolis, vancouver. dimia (department of immigration and multicultural and indigenous affairs) 2002, the longitudinal survey of immigrants to australia [online], available at http://www.immi.gov.au/research/lsia/index.htm [accessed: 1 march 2002]. ——— 2003, skilled occupations list, form 1121i, commonwealth of australia, canberra. eastmond, m. 1993, ‘reconstructing life: chilean refugee women and the dilemmas of exile’, in migrant women: crossing boundaries and changing identities, g. buijs (ed), berg, oxford, 35-54. espin, o. m. 1999, women crossing boundaries: a psychology of immigration and transformations of sexuality, routledge, new york. evans, m. d. r. and j. kelley 1986, ‘immigrants’ work: equality and discrimination in the australian labour market’, australia and new zealand journal of sociology, 22, july, 187-207. fincher, r. 1995, ‘women, immigration and the state: issues of difference and social justice’, in women in a restructuring australia: work and welfare, a. edwards and s. magarey (eds), allen and unwin, sydney. ——— 1997, ‘gender, age, and ethnicity in immigration for an australian nation’, environment and planning a, 29(2), 217-236. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 14 http://www.immi.gov.au/research/lsia/index.htm ho women crossing borders friedberg, r. m. 2000, ‘you can’t take it with you? immigrant assimilation and the portability of human capital’, journal of labor economics, 18(2): 221-251. hawthorne, l. 1997, ‘the question of discrimination: skilled migrants’ access to australian employment’, international migration, 35(3), 395-417. ho, c. 2006, ‘migration as feminisation? chinese women’s experience of work and family in australia’, journal of ethnic and migration studies, 32(3). iredale, r. r. 1997, skills transfer: international migration and accreditation issues. a comparative study of australia, britain, canada, new zealand and the united states, university of wollongong press, wollongong. jupp, j. 2002, from white australia to woomera: the story of australian immigration, cambridge university press, cambridge. kay, d. 1988, ‘the politics of gender in exile’, sociology, 22(1): 1-21. kofman, e. 1999, ‘female “birds of passage” a decade later: gender and immigration in the european union’, international migration review, 33(2): 269-298. ——— 2000, ‘the invisibility of skilled female migrants and gender relations in studies of skilled migration in europe’, international journal of population geography, 6: 45-59. lary, d., c. inglis and c. wu 1994, ‘hong kong: a case study of settlement and immigration,’ in immigration and refugee policy: australia and canada compared, h. adelman, a. borowski, m. burstein and l. foster (eds), vol 2, melbourne university press, melbourne, 405-44. lee, w. k. m. 2002, ‘gender ideology and the domestic division of labor in middle-class chinese families in hong kong’, gender, place and culture, 9(3): 245-60. liberal-national coalition 2001, ‘the howard government, putting australia’s interests first, election 2001: immigration—its role in our future’ (policy document). mak, a. s. 1991, ‘from elites to strangers: employment coping styles of new hong kong immigrants,’ journal of employment counselling, 28(4): 144-56. man, g. c. 1995, ‘the experience of women in chinese immigrant families: an inquiry into institutional and organizational processes’, asian and pacific migration journal, 4(2-3): 303-326. ——— 1997, ‘women’s work is never done: social organization of work and the experience of women in middle-class hong kong chinese immigrant families in canada’, advances in gender research, 2: 183-226. meintel, d., m. labelle, g. turcotte and m. kempineers 1987, ‘the new double workday of immigrant women workers in quebec’, women’s studies, 13(3): 273-293. ng, r. 1982, ‘immigrant housewives in canada: a methodological note’, atlantis, 8, 111-17. raghuram, p. and e. kofman 2004, ‘out of asia: skilling, re-skilling and deskilling of female migrants’, women’s studies international forum, 27, 95-100. reitz, j. g. 1998, warmth of the welcome: the social causes of economic success for immigrants in different nations and cities, westview press, boulder. rowland, d. t. 1991, pioneers again: immigrants and ageing in australia, australian government publishing service, canberra. ruddock, p. 2002, ‘minister announces 2002-03 migration (non-humanitarian) program’, media release, 7 may. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 15 ho women crossing borders skeldon, r. 1995, ‘emigration from hong kong: 1945-1994: the demographic leadup to 1997’, in r. skeldon (ed.), emigration from hong kong, the chinese university press, hong kong, 51-77. stromback, t. 1984, ‘the earnings of migrants in australia’, conference paper no. 46, bureau of labour market research. ——— 1988, migrants, ethnic groups and the labour market, policy options paper prepared for the office of multicultural affairs, canberra. torres, m. a. 2003, ‘gma bans hk deployment for pinays’, the manila times, march 6. tran-nam, b. and j. w. nevile 1988, ‘the effects of birthplace on male earnings in australia’, australian economic papers, 27(50): 83-101. united nations (department of economic and social affairs, population division) 2002, international migration report, united nations, new york. wong, s. l. 1993, ‘hong kong migration to australia,’ paper presented at the asiapacific migration affecting australia conference, 14-17 september, darwin. vanstone, a. 2004, ‘australia’s skills and migrants to increase’, media release, 1 april. yeoh, b. and l. khoo 1998, ‘home, work and community: skilled international migration and expatriate women in singapore’, international migration, 36(2), 159-84. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 16 targeting the best and the brightest: a market-based migrati figure 1: migration program outcomes by stream: 1983-84 to 2 imagining union: cultural identities in pre-federal europe portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ imagining union: european cultural identity in the prefederal future perfect1 murray pratt, institute for international studies, university of technology sydney introduction as a generation of former statesmen from the member states of the european union (eu) has discovered, old politicians don’t die, they just go on to become eurocrats. thus it is that in june 2003, prior to his ultimate humiliation by the france that—for reasons largely suspected to have little to do with eurodesires or otherwise—said ‘non’, the former president of france, a reincarnated valéry giscard d’estaing, presented a draft constitutional treaty for the european union to a summit in thessalonica. the subject of continued referenda and wrangling, and in the wake of the ‘no’ votes in the early summer of 2005 by both france and the netherlands, perhaps never to be fully endorsed by member states, the document proposed a number of internal reforms in line with the expansion of the union, notably concerning the election of an ad hominem president rather than allocating the position to the head of each of its member states in turn. at the same time, the constitution set a framework for increased cooperation, particularly in the areas of foreign policy and defence. debate about the extent and parameters of the measures and instruments of the new greater union outlined in the draft began almost instantaneously: at first split predictably around the competing interests of larger versus smaller members, and between federalising europhiles and secessional skeptics, but by 1 versions of this article were given at two conferences in 2004: ‘strange localities’ at the university of otago, dunedin in january, and the (uts) institute for international studies annual workshop in wollongong in december. my grateful acknowledgements go to those who participated in the discussions on these occasions, in particular to alistair fox, heleanor feltham, david goodman, james goodman, winton higgins and maja mikula for their comments on earlier versions of the article. pratt imagining union 2005 becoming much more complex, aligned to resurgent national interests in the wake of the war in iraq, unmanageable socio-economic situations, and, significantly, an increasingly xenophobic positioning of the eastern reaches of the union (former soviet satellites, a turkey characterised as un-european on religious grounds).2 whether welcomed as a significant achievement, or—more often—critically dissected, the document was largely considered, at least by the eu and its acolytes, as a milestone in the march towards european commonality, a ‘constitutive moment’ (chopin 2003),3 in that it made explicit a concern about european cultural identity, which, hitherto, had been subordinated to economic or political concerns. in particular, the preamble to the constitution attempted to locate a shared cultural identity for all europeans, or more accurately for all those peoples and nations contained within the supranational entity of the european union. the unveiling of the constitution, in line with the logoisation of the national political arena, was as much about style as substance. giscard d’estaing’s media appearances were characterised by a search for the right image to project, something suitably monumental to define the work of establishing a base document for european union. he came up with the metaphor of a building, comparing the draft document to ‘an edifice, a construction, an equilibrium, a balance’, one which emerged, above all, as ‘a synthesis’ (quoted in griffin 2003). within a fortnight, the edifice of media spin, if not exactly crumbling, was at least revealing the shakiness of the foundations of cultural unity on which many of its key assumptions were built. first, following the inauguration of his presidency of the european union, italian prime minister silvio berlusconi found himself embroiled in a particularly nasty eurospat with a number of german members of the european parliament (meps). after having been compared to attila the hun, berlusconi took issue with a german socialist who questioned his political impartiality, to some extent an extension of issues already confronting him in italian domestic politics. berlusconi’s response, suggesting that the socialist mep would be ideal for a role as a concentration 2 throughout france during may 2005 in the lead up to the referendum on the constitution, right-wing parties’ political posters urged the good people to vote ‘no’ in order to prevent turkey joining the european union. 3 all quotations from french language sources have been translated into english by the author. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 pratt imagining union camp commander in a film (guardian unlimited, 2 july 2003), opened the way for a series of exchanges revealing that, in terms of culture and identity, the european family home is not quite as harmonious as giscard d’estaing would like us to believe. shortly on the heels of this domestic incident, the european family was confronted with a further split in its ranks, this time seemingly imposed externally. confronted with divergent responses from its european ‘allies’ to the second gulf war, donald rumsfeld elaborated further on his commander-in-chief’s ‘with us or against us’ dictum by redefining europe as two competing camps: european nations were either ‘old’ (read irrelevant, overly independent—perhaps even over-partial to cheese—simian and cowardly, as the ideological rhetoric escalated) or ‘new’ (read largely ex-communist, ripe for economic and ideological ‘development’ and about to become imbricated in military debt to the world’s remaining superpower). as claire demesmay writes in an article entitled ‘do the europeans exist?’, ‘however schematic this division may appear, it effectively undermined those partisans of a common foreign and defence policy who wish to see the union taking up a clear position on the international scene’ (demesmay 2003, 774)—and undermined as well, i would add, the hope of a common cultural home unproblematically emerging. rather than offering a detailed analysis of the contents of the draft constitution, a consideration of the extent to which the eu is hampered in its ability to posit a counterbalance to the usan empire, or indeed a reflection on the economic and political ramifications of the document’s proposals, the aim of this article is to take a step back from the construction that is europe, and pause to consider the utopian assumptions about cultural identity which subtend the notion of union, as expressed within the draft constitution and more broadly across discourses about ‘europeanness’ as shared destiny which underpin the european project. in order to do so, i draw on theories of national identity and belonging, at the same time interrogating the applicability of the national paradigm to that strange locality, the transnational, pan-regional, post-state, and potentially pre-federal entity which the eu is becoming. in the process, i offer readings of both the constitution, and a less official eu text, namely an online comic entitled ‘captain euro’ which was used to promote the single currency. i am particularly portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 pratt imagining union interested in investigating the narrativisation of culture and identity as a process of unification or union, and in opening up a space to consider the ideological imperatives which suture this master(ful) narrative. slavoj žižek’s theorisation of the moment of narrative possibility as one which occludes its own foundational basis is then considered as one which applies to a form of status denial inherent within the official european narrative of union, and through suggesting a queer reading of the euroseminal myth of zeus and europa, i trace this žižekian moment of ‘inherent transgression’ as a counter force undermining european cultural unification—paradoxically, perhaps queerly or strangely, a concomitant desire for the discrete and the separate, a drive towards distinction and difference which arises as a necessary complement to its signaled togetherness. constructing post-nation europe benedict anderson has pointed out the arbitrariness, constructedness and indeed emptiness within the artifact of the ‘nation’. in imagined communities (anderson 1991), anderson identified the centrality of historical process of legitimization in securing not just consent, but ‘deep attachments’ (4) to particular nations, and, one might add, deep antipathies to their ‘others’. his definition of the nation as ‘an imagined political community’ (6) draws on ernest renan’s description of french villagers sharing the same memories, and equally forgetting the same moments of shame in the nation’s history. what anderson adds is a framework for understanding the work of imagining as one which produces nations as ‘limited’ (their borders cannot expand indefinitely), ‘sovereign’ (and therefore immune to competing claims of allegiance) and ‘a community’ (‘conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship’) (7). homi bhabha (bhabha 1990) takes anderson’s work one step further, qualifying the imagining of the nation as a set of ongoing sequences of narration. by attending to the ‘conceptual indeterminacy’ of the nation, ‘its wavering between vocabularies’ (2) bhabha allows for articulations of what he calls the ‘nation-space’: where meanings may be partial because they are in media res; and history may be half-made because it is in the process of being made; and the image of cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of ‘composing’ its powerful image (3). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 pratt imagining union the effect of bhabha’s work on narrating the nation is to actualise chronologically the symbol, proposed by tom nairn, of the nation as janus-headed, rhetorically looking both backwards to its heritage, and forward to the shape it is willing itself to come. one version of this shape as it applies in the eu context is already clearly mapped. in dominique strauss-kahn’s eu-commissioned report, building a political europe, delivered in april 2004 after the deliberations of ‘eminent figures from political and academic spheres and civil society’ (strauss-kahn 2004),4 the past is succinctly characterised in terms of perceptions of european ‘construction’ as ‘primarily a technical affair’. ‘in the future’, strauss-kahn predicts, ‘the challenge faced by european construction will be primarily a political one’ (28). more specifically, the threats to the building work, ‘eroded from within and attacked from without’ (30) are identified, albeit in temporally quite uncertain ways, as twofold. firstly, the question of legitimacy and the democratic deficit is raised as needing to be addressed. strauss-kahn and the round table consider the draft constitution as a document which ‘aims to’ or ‘will’ (29) answer these concerns. three paragraphs later however, the question re-emerges: ‘is it legitimate for the union rather than the member states to be entrusted with achieving a large part of our common objectives …?’ in this form, the question certainly seems a ‘legitimate’ one still to ask—indeed, it is beginning to sound very much like a cheshire cat of the question world: when asked from the perspective of wider concerns about social and political representation, it seems quite realistic; when rephrased from within the internal discourse of the euroworkshops which engineer the eu’s future, it disappears into the realm of the already answered, leaving behind little more than a huge satisfied grin. strauss-kahn’s second(ary) threat emerges only in filigree in the introduction to the report—the vexed issue of shared values. here, the firm belief of the round table is that such entities do exist, founded on a model of indivisible dignity for the human. moreover, ‘europeans are proud of this model and want to set an example by promoting a just world’ (30). (pride comes, it would seem, before a further shift in the status of the 4 this description of the composition of the round table is taken from strauss-kahn’s covering letter addressed to ‘dear romano’ (presumably prodi), which is unpaginated. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 pratt imagining union legitimacy question, for following fast behind this assertion we discover that ‘europe as a political union is therefore legitimate’). the concern here is less temporal—shared values are taken, perhaps just a little too readily, for granted—than spatial, in that europeans ‘want to set an example by promoting a just world’ and ‘build a political europe as a foundation for a world of justice’. such an elision from eurovalues to universal ones, although considerably more reflected, is central to slavoj žižek’s defence of eurocentralism (žižek 1998; see also žižek 2004) in terms of its interplay between the specificities of local injustices and sufferings and their systemic representation of the general. however, as gerhard richter points out (richter 2002), concerns about the europe projected by žižek are never fully eradicated from his model. pertinently, richter considers the extent to which ‘the meaning of the political is always already decided upon in advance’, while: the vexed connection between the particular and the universal is implicitly and unproblematically cast not as a shifting relation but as a transparently readable one, the political here is always already a metonymic figure for those determined political investments in whose future name it was first put into circulation (54). richter goes on to query the necessity for such a pre-determined understanding of the political, discovering, by way of walter benjamin and jacques derrida, a more fluid politics, one which opens out onto ‘a thinking of a multitude of different relations between certain geopolitical spaces and the promise or hope that might still be found in them’ (63). for strauss-khan, and indeed standing as the very basis on which the endlessly draftable constitution is posited, such a europe of the ‘arrivant’, marked by ‘an ethics of difference and a culture of heterogeneity’ is far from the official eu prescriptive purview. however, by attending to the temporal and spatial discrepancies which disrupt its tendency towards the pronouncement—which are perhaps intrinsic to that very tendency itself as žižek (wearing another, less eurofocused, hat) will help us understand—the construction of european culture identity can be considered as a work still very much in progress, and whose common builders might always (already, of course) find their spanners differentially deployed in its workings. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 pratt imagining union a constitutive moment the preamble to the draft constitution, selections of which are quoted below, can be read, against its grain, as a moment of confident hesitation, looking both backwards to the perceived legacies of earlier europes, and forward to the post-state it is aiming to will into being. discussed first as a work of post-nation building, and then reconsidered in terms of its status as constitutive moment, the eu’s foundational treaty, i argue, is underpinned by an unreflective, and ultimately quite anti-universalist form of eurocentrism at the core of the european project. the key premises of the preamble are introduced by subordinate clauses, situating and enacting the document’s ‘constitutionality’ (that is, it is a presentation, an act of constituting in the present): [...] drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of europe, which... has embedded within the life of society its perception of the central role of the human person and his inviolable and inalienable rights, and of respect for law […] believing that reunited europe intends to continue along this path of civilisation, progress and prosperity, for the good of all its inhabitants, including the weakest and most deprived [...] convinced that, while remaining proud of their own national identities and history, the peoples of europe are determined to transcend their ancient divisions, and, united in an ever closer fashion, to forge a common destiny, […] reflecting the will of the citizens and states of europe to build a common future, this constitution establishes the european union, on which the member states confer competencies to attain objectives they have in common.5 it is clear from the preamble that forms of imagining, narrating and constructing european identity on which the document is based have much in common with the processes outlined by anderson and bhabha. the lead in to the document, characterised by a gerundive pile-up of situating clauses, projects constitution as a work-in-progress, looking back to a past—a constructed past—(‘the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance’, ‘embedded within the life of the society’) while at the same time keeping an eye on the road ahead (‘intends to continue along this path’, ‘the will … to build’). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/2938272.stm5 citations from the draft constitution, from . a full, and latest at the time of writing, version of the constitution (“provisional consolidated version of the draft treaty establishing a constitution for europe”) can be accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/21_07_04cg00086.en04.pdf. one change made between the 2003 and 2004 drafts affects the phrase ‘united in an ever closer fashion’, which becomes ‘an ever closer union’. the twenty-fourth report of the united kingdom’s select commission on european security ‘regrets’ this change. (article 66, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmeuleg/63-xxiv/6307.htm ). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/21_07_04cg00086.en04.pdf http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/21_07_04cg00086.en04.pdf http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/21_07_04cg00086.en04.pdf http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/21_07_04cg00086.en04.pdf http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmeuleg/63-xxiv/6307.htm pratt imagining union effectively, and according to anderson’s schema of imagining nationality as ‘limited’, ‘sovereign’ and ‘communitarian’, europe’s constitution can be seen as proof that it is already behaving as if it were a nation in all but name. despite the recent admission of new member countries, the document recognises that europe cannot keep go on expanding indefinitely by restricting its purview to ‘the citizens and states of europe’. however contested an entity the continent may be—in bismarck’s often repeated phrase it is merely a geographical expression6—outer europe is nonetheless contained somewhere west of the urals and north of the sahara by dint of the more culturally specific definitions within the preamble. ‘the central role of the human person and his inviolable and inalienable rights’ has arguably been mobilised to block turkish membership on something other than strictly geographical grounds. the universalism implied by the construct of ‘inviolable and inalienable’ is deployed here as a criteria for exclusion, a foreclosion from the political, based on an appeal to values which emerge as ‘properly’ european. at the same time, even a perfunctory analysis of the phrase ‘religious inheritance’, perhaps more vehemently contested than any other in the preamble, reveals forms of political limitation in line with global alignments as a fundamentalist west sets its sights on islam. anderson’s second form of imagining the nation, as ‘sovereign’, despite having been theorised in transnational terms as having application beyond the traditional nation state (cheah 1998), is more clearly resisted for reasons of political contingency where member states, within their own contexts, attempt to juggle national sentiment against posited federal windfalls. avoiding the ‘f-word’ entirely, the careful wording of the final paragraph appears to situate sovereignty at the national level, yet prior to this the concept of transcendence which emerges as the narrative resolution of ‘ancient divisions’ sits perfectly within a post-freudian reading of the coming together of warring tribes for a greater good, that ‘good of all its inhabitants’ evoked as the righteous path. on another level, one might wonder just how ancient are events such as the second world war, the 6 the quotation attributed to otto von bismarck in a ‘marginal comment on a letter, november 1876, from the russian chancellor gorchakov’ is ‘whoever speaks of europe is wrong: it is a geographical expression.’ (see andrews, biggs, and seidel,. n.d.) portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 pratt imagining union balkan conflict, the split allegiance to bush, or the spat between berlusconi and random german meps. thirdly, for anderson, the nation is imagined as a community. the ‘common destiny’ and ‘common future’ signaled in the draft constitution indicate the centrality of community within the european project. there have indeed been highly respectable attempts to define the common heritage of europe as a set of core values, by paul valéry for example, who locates european identity within a collective experience of the influences of christianity, greece and rome (valéry 1957). it is perhaps of note that, despite viable candidates from africa and latin america, and real political exigencies for looking beyond europe, the catholic church’s 2005 choice of vatican-based pope was once again european. yet, in many ways, this is also the form of euro-imagining where the most work remains to be done. given the social, political and linguistic diversity between the member states, not to mention within them and the multiple historical crossings of a continent shaped by trade and warfare, the concept of a shared european identity—especially one which to any real extent supercedes or supplants national identities—is something which is actually fairly difficult to envisage at all, far less imagine as part of the process of pre-federal nation building. realistically, the constitution is marked by a recognition that further commonality can only be found once its citizens start to feel a cultural sense of being european, as distinct from italian, czech, greek, irish or whatever. stephen wood, writing in the journal of historical sociology, argues that even despite the commission’s projects to celebrate and unify the multilingual diversity of the content, national sentiment still clearly predominates individuals’ sense of belonging in ways which pan-european roots are far from matching (wood 1998). here wood is referring to the sense that while it is possible to envisage multiple loyalties, so that while a person can be for example, from leeds, yorkshire, england, britain and europe, each of these identities still needs to be anchored in a common myth or belief system for it to come into play as the deep loyalty required to activate anderson’s sense of community. wood contends that europe has no such system of belief or conviction, meaning that a danish person for example would have no cultural portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 pratt imagining union imperative, no historically embedded obligation to support greece say, in any potential conflict with, say, turkey. in other words there is not a strong enough emotive tie to the concept of europe for any of its citizens to add european identity on to their existing ones.7 recognising the need to construct affinities across national borders, the eu’s prioritisation of the erasmus student exchange scheme encouraging academic mobility between member states serves as much a cultural imperative as an economic one, recreating in small measure the processes of linguistic and cultural homogenization which has occurred in france since the revolution. the 2003 film, l’auberge espagnole (klapisch 2003), with its portrayal of a french erasmus student exchange in barcelona, captures the utopian imperatives of the scheme by assembling in one chaotic shared flat students from across europe. however, while the educational and ultimately economic imperative of the exercise (he needs near-native spanish for the job he wants to apply for) are eventually met, the processes of cultural dislocation and the sense of displacement which the student undergoes, and the strength of his bonds to france, evoke uncertainties at the heart of the european project. the microcosmic community of the apartment is characterised by strained relations around fridges, phones and philandering, its inhabitants resorting to stereotyping and mistrust, and forms of linguistic competitiveness which emerge when obliged to cross territories beyond their national or linguistic home.8 as bhabha’s reconceptualisation of nationality as a process of becoming indicates, belonging and identity, rather than fixed for all time, are ambivalent, in flux, and, one might add, open to appeal, there for the making. caught in the act of nation building, the eu is deploying the rhetoric of national imagining and the terminology of the nation 7 in fact, often when the idea of europe is mobilised it can be seen to be serving the interests of other kinds of identities. one good example would be the rhetoric used by václev havel, the ex president of the czech republic, who appealed to common european values precisely as a way of trying to anchor his former communist satellite demi-country within the european family. havel, v. 29 june 1996, ‘the hope for europe’, the new york review, 40-4. 8 moreover, while the film nods in the direction of the catalan/castilian divide in the city, the barcelona it projects is by and large a monoculturally white european space, conveniently cleared of almost all immigrants from the south – ironically so given that the mediterranean accord between the eu and north africa is known as the barcelona process. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 pratt imagining union state, precisely because it is not (yet) one. the draft constitution, in this sense, conforms both to the small subset of truly performative speech acts (the word which inaugurates) and to the paradox of the utopia, bringing into being a space which is not. in the sense of an appeal, a marketing exercise, perhaps a concession to its member states, to the citizens who belong both to these states, and in some still undefined sense to the european suprastate, the eternal present evoked by the constitution’s preamble can be considered to function as both a space of non-definition, the work of reflection which it enacts, and a defining moment—it seizes a particular version of europeanness which does not (yet) exist, and works backwards from its willed existence. what is perhaps most frightening about the purpose revealed in the marginal space of the document’s preamble however, is the claim for cultural supremacy which it repeatedly makes, and against which bhabha’s focus on transversal readings of national narratives is positioned. europe as an imagined unity is here far from neutral. instead, this is a constitution for superlativity. allowing the process to congeal for just a moment, we find ourselves in the territory of lofty abstract concepts such as ‘inspiration’ ‘belief’, ‘conviction’, ‘pride’ and ‘will’. much could be said about each of these values in turn, or about their combined potential as pillars of something more akin to a new age religion. to do so, however, would be to give further credence to the official monolith of european nation-building, take its words at its word. the aim instead is to move further into the margins of its text, its marginalised texts, as a way of exploring the ambivalence of the project. united untied if the zeno’s paradox of the draft constitution is tucked away adverbially in the marginal clause, ‘united in an ever closer fashion’, a pre-realisation of its coming together, then so too do the marginalia of the eu machine make explicit the assumptions underlying its posited narrative of cultural identity. emerging online as one component in the familiarisation campaign accompanying the marketing of the euro, a comic series with a serious intent provides an amazing adventure in imagining the union. the ‘marketing and licensing’ section of the website attempt to make its aim perfectly clear: ‘millions of portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 pratt imagining union people are keen to identify with what they perceive as the future: a united europe’. employing a similar tricksiness around temporality as the constitution, the future already actualised in ‘keenness’, the comic’s mission seems to be to successfully eradicate any possibility for divergence from the common vision. captain euro to the rescue indeed. however, far from a redundancy, the strategy appears expressly designed to convince readers to join the eurobandwagon, aligning their perception with the constitutional conviction that secures the ‘ever closer fashion’ of union. the first frame of the ‘intro’ section of captain euro shows ‘the rest of the world’ in clouds, the sun shining on europe, and—no joke—storm clouds brewing over turkey. in the next frame, a mysterious light emanates from brussels. the text reads: as the 21st century dawns the world is changing more rapidly than ever before. the old structures are disappearing as new ones take their place, bringing with them uncertainty for the future. / in this climate of constant change the european union, a union of prosperity and innovation has emerged as a global superpower. (captain euro, www.captaineuro.com, frames 1 and 2; see also allatson et al, 2002) the metamorphosis from old to new is set up as already in place, and it is the role of the eu to secure peace, harmony and unity. the comic, following where captain america left off, enlists wholeheartedly in this cause, in the time-honoured epic genre central to nation-building enterprises, by forging a myth, one which pulls together in superhuman (and ‘ever closer’) fashion the peoples from across the continent—a myth about paneuropean identity. the good captain’s adventures take him from the frozen baltic, to sunbaked greek islands, and giant caves in majorca, as he discovers a mysterious force which transforms, krypton-like, plain adam andros (no commentary needed) into the first all european superhero. the message is of unity across the continent, as the captain and his team discover a runic text and other clues which, they comment, ‘throw […] all our ideas about european history into doubt’. rather than discrete national trajectories, the european heritage which the stone tablet reveals…but at this point the message is erased as the tablet smashes to the deck of a mysterious viking vessel, smashing appropriately into 12 gold stars, with the message left to be reinvented by the powers in brussels. ‘thousands of portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 http://www.captaineuro.com/ pratt imagining union years of history smashed…no, it looks like it was meant to break like that’. andros’s nemesis, the evil david viderus, better known as dr d vider, chuckles gleefully in the margins. the explicit message was lost.9 all that remains, in the european symbol into which it transforms, is the trace of its function—foundational, transcendent, a moment of re-constitution, of re-vision. when not making leftist pleas for eurocentrism, the slovenian cultural theorist slavoj žižek is interested in moments such as this. in the plague of fantasies (žižek 1997), he illustrates how the ideological fantasy scenario is always ambiguous—much like the inflight safety demo, in which, he finds, ‘fantasy conceals [the] horror [of the real], yet at the same time it creates what it purports to conceal, its “repressed” point of reference’ (7). the expression of fantasy in ideology, he continues, follows a schema of kantian transcendence. ‘fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates; that is, it literally teaches us how to desire’. moreover, for žižek, fantasy as narrative: […] emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its terms into a temporal succession. it is thus the very form of narrative which bears witness to some repressed antagonism. the price one pays for that narrative resolution is the petitio principii of the temporal loop—the narrative silently presupposes as already given what it purports to reproduce. (žižek 1997, 10-11) the ‘public text’ on which power grounds its appeal as natural, is structured phantasmatically. ‘split from within’, ‘[p]ower is always already its own transgression, if it is to function, it has to rely on a kind of obscene supplement’ (žižek 1997, 26-7). at the core of the draft constitution, the imagination of unity in common destiny, is situated as such an act of transcendence, an overcoming of ancient divisions. it is a determination, rather than a fait accompli, in other words, a desire, a fantasy about union, necessarily incomplete, but shot through with the true horror at its heart. in the same way, in the legend of captain euro, at the centre of the moment of revelation of united destiny, 9 in fact doubly so, since the website appears to have altered since originally accessed and this episode written over with a somewhat different version of the same story. i have been unable to find any information regarding the revision, or to locate any remaining traces of the earlier version which contained the storyline and quotations in this paragraph. various internet searches however unearth a level of underlying concern about the comic, including accusations of propaganda, racism and poor quality, across a range of blogs and other sites. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 pratt imagining union is an act of destruction, the narrative is lost, to be rewritten, its only remnants the splintered segments of a text once set in stone but now never to be known. in its place, the star-shaped fragments evoke the divided nations always again to be reunited in the work-in-progress of imagining europe as a union. the phantasmatic foundation of european power as unity aims to suppress the horror of ancient, or not so ancient division. yet, in line with žižek’s reading, the split is ‘mirrored back into the power edifice itself, splitting it from within, so that the gesture of self-censorship is consubstantial with the exercise of power’ (27). the fantasy of pan-european harmony, then, can only be founded at the same time as it calls into being a concrete manifestation of division and destruction, precisely the formative horror it purports to avoid. what then is concealed within the draft constitution’s transcendental moment of imagining ‘union’, the ‘ever closer fashion’, exactly what horrors are censored, and simultaneously constructed as supplement, by the division it evokes only to disavow? the myth of europa queering the union in order to pin down the object of the eu’s horrors, the aim of this section is to investigate the notion of union more closely, and in so doing unearth a further moment of constitution, that is the concealed metaphor of marriage, of coming together as man and wife. long before the advent of ‘captain euro’, legend has it that europa, following a dream in which she is drawn away from her mother, personified as asia, was playing by the beach, when zeus fell in love with her (as was his wont). in order to win her, he disguised himself as a bull, and carried her away through the seas to a cave in crete, where he cast off his bull appearance (throwing it into the sky where it became the constellation taurus), and made europa his wife. ‘she that had been a maid forthwith became the bride of zeus and bore children’. this union is greeted as one of great moment—europa is told, ‘thou shalt bear famous sons and all shall become kings among mortal men’ (moschus [of sicily] ca. 150 bce, quoted in hassan and dadi 2002, 418). zeus’s abduction of europa is, while still an act of patriarchal violence, also a natural progression away from the maternal towards the matrimonial, even a rescue from an portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 14 pratt imagining union overwhelming relation with the mother. the joyous nereids and dolphins which accompany the bull and europa on their journey across the sea seem to be celebrating europa’s awakening to her sexuality, however brutally this is enforced. the abduction of europa, in the words of the west wind who witnessed the event in lucian’s retelling of the myth (lucian 1961), is ‘a magnificent pageant’, ‘a most delightful spectacle, the likes of which you’ll never see again’. read in this way, the founding myth of europe becomes a legend which inscribes a particular form of patriarchal heterosexual union, and a particular attitude to marriage, as central to the way in which the continent sees itself. first of all, there is an act of choice, of preference, as europa is selected by zeus from among her companions as desirable. moreover, the selection is characterised by celebration, a sense of pride and value in identity over other alternatives. the south wind, which has been blowing aimlessly over parts of india, on hearing of zeus’s exploits congratulates the west wind on his attendance at the nuptials—‘how lucky you are, zephyrus, to have seen all that! all i saw was griffins and elephants and black men’ (lucian 1961). here is the founding moment of orientalist thinking on which much of europe’s history has turned, depending on a fantasy of the continent as privileged, civilised compared to the barbarians outside its borders. europa’s destiny is secured, and celebrated, as a sexual union with the gods, carried off from other parts by the appearance of a white bull, and taken to zeus’s cretan homeland. in many ways, then, the myth of europa stands as the cornerstone of eurocentric thought, ultimately the establishment and preservation of racial purity as lineage, as a barrage against the fear of undifferentiation, a heterosexual male fantasy of defence against the merged maternal identity of her dream. for, at the same time as a coming together, the foundation of a common destiny, as marriage, the union of europa with zeus is also a moment of differentiation. the western paradigm of marriage as monogamous and indissoluble serves to bring the private relation into the public domain, marking it symbolically, as foucault discovered and queer theory has elaborated, with ideological functions which normativise particular forms of heterosexual identity within specific, often national, contexts. to the extent that portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 15 pratt imagining union a public union with one chosen other formally occludes the possibility of other sexual relations, marriage is as much a process which differentiates, distinguishes, delineates according to the patriarchal system of heritage and inheritance, as an egalitarian merger, a coming together, or union. returning to the text of european union, the censored supplement which has been straining behind the official version, emerges as an occluded narrative of differentiation and privilege. the ‘ever closer fashion’ in which union is imagined has, as the ‘inherent transgression’ which it occludes, an equal and opposite instance of separation. yet, rather than the stated obstacle of internal division, the founding myth of european cultural identity is one which locates its horror externally—in the same way as europa’s abduction saves her from the threat of undifferentiated otherness, the establishment of the eu narrates its coming into being in terms of a separation from those others (to the east and south) which are excluded from the party. in other words, the hidden narrative of the draft constitution’s preamble contains a story intended to secure europe’s position in the world as naturally pre-eminent, select, and beyond question. the eu’s nation-building rhetoric, as it utopically imagines union, far from moving towards universal harmony, is engaged in a supplementary and ultimately statist construction of its limits and sovereignty as barrages against alternative models of diasporic allegiance, unofficial displacements, and local autonomies which threaten its predominance. such an unimaginative and inappropriate vision of the federal future of europe, as the recent referendum rejections in france and the netherlands illustrate, fails to chime with the more diffuse desires of its citizens, and reinforces the need for more complex, consentbased models of covenant or confederation, as identified by political theorists such as daniel elazar (elazar n.d.). while the concepts of conjunctions, unities, congruencies and collectivities could be imagined in forms which pave the way for real and effective social change (in the areas of labour mobility and the conditions of employment, migration and asylum, diversity and equal rights, cultural policy and education to name but a few), as argued by etienne balibar (balibar october 4 1999), the model of union subtending the constitution fails to accommodate such visions, or live up to more multitudinal visions of politics such as that inherent in richter’s response to žižek’s ‘leftist plea’. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 16 pratt imagining union it is in this light that recent contributions to the european debate from outside the framework of the european fantasy can best be understood. dipesh chakrabarty’s call for the provincialization of europe (chakrabarty 2000), for example, is positioned as a bid to: write / over the given and privileged narratives of citizenship / other narratives of human connections that draw sustenance from dreamed-up pasts and futures where collectivities are defined neither by the rituals of citizenship nor by the nightmare of ‘tradition’ that ‘modernity’ creates (193). chakrabarty recognises that ‘[t]here are of course no (infra)structural sites where such dreams could lodge themselves’, but that ‘they will recur so long as the themes of citizenship and the nation-state dominate our narratives of historical transition, for these dreams are what the modern represses in order to be’ (194). by interrogating the place of cultural identity beyond the official text of european union, the aim of this article has been that one such alternative dream-time, telling of the horror at the dark heart of constitutional identity—rather than yet another draft future perfect, unrealised in its erasure—has been given the space to recur. reference list allatson, p., le nevez, a. lu, y., mikula, m. and pratt, m. 2002, ‘”average stray aliens”: an average australian conversation on eurocentrism’, culture, theory and critique, vol. 43, issue 1, (april), 17-32. anderson, b. 1991, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, verso, london and new york. andrews, r., biggs, m., and seidel, m. n.d., the columbia world of quotations [online]. available: http://www.bartleby.com/66/27/7327.html [accessed 30 sept 2004]. balibar, e. 4 october 1999, ‘at the borders of europe’ [online] available: http://www.makeworlds.org/node/80 [accessed 30 june 2005]. bhabha, h. 1991, ‘introduction: narrating the nation’, in nation and narration, ed. h. bhabha, routledge, london and new york, 1-7. captain euro [online]. n.d., available: www.captaineuro.com [accessed 1 july 2005]. chakrabarty, d. 2000, provincializing europe: 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1997, the plague of fantasies, verso, london and new york. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 18 http://www.jcpa.org/dje/articles/eur-fed-bruges.htm http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/21_07_04cg00086.en04.pdf http://www.worldpress.org/europe/1232.cfm http://www.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,7369,989630,00.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/21_07_04cg00086.en04.pdf http://www.eiropainfo.lv/files/petijumi/dsk_report_summary_en.doc http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmeuleg/63-xxiv/6307.htm http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmeuleg/63-xxiv/6307.htm http://www.ellopos.net/politics/valery-esprit.htm pratt imagining union ———1998, ‘a leftist plea for “eurocentrism”’, critical enquiry, vol. 24, no. 4. 9881009. ———1 may 2004, ‘what does europe want’, in these times [online]. available: http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=716_0_4_0_c [accessed 30 sept. 2004]. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 19 http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=716_0_4_0_c imagining union: european cultural identity in the pre-feder introduction constructing post-nation europe a constitutive moment united untied the myth of europa queering the union portalvol7no12010strongman&barrettgalleyfinal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. time-capsule: explorations of concepts of time and law in colonial new zealand jonathan barrett and luke strongman, the open polytechnic of new zealand1 ‘law organizes and reproduces an essentially temporal myth.’ (greenhouse 1989: 1631) introduction the history of relations between māori and pākehā2 casts a shadow over contemporary politics and lawmaking in aotearoa new zealand. for example, when in opposition, the centre-right national party sought to reduce the 2005 general election debate to a ‘kiwi/iwi’ duality,3 effectively demonising the labour-led government for its alleged privileging of māori over pākehā interests. paradoxically, the extinguishment of indigenous customary rights via the foreshore and seabed act 20044 led to a schism in 1 the authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments greatly improved this article. any errors are solely attributable to the authors. 2 ‘pākehā’ means ‘a non-polynesian new zealand-born new zealander especially if pale-skinned’ (orsman 1997: 567). king (1999: 10) argues that the term ‘simply denotes people and influences that derive originally from europe but which are no longer “european.” pakeha is an indigenous expression to describe new zealand people and expressions of culture that are not maori.’ in this article, the term will be restricted to the meaning contemplated by king. 3 ‘kiwi’ denotes a new zealander and ‘probably originally applied to white males’ (orsman 1997: 414). while noting the possibility of eurocentric categorising, iwi is usually translated as ‘people’ (belgrave et al 2005: 394), ‘tribe’ or ‘a people recognising a common eponymous ancestor’ (orsman 1997: 375). māori may also be referred to as tangata whenua (people of the land or a given place) and pākehā as tangata tiriti (people of the treaty). 4 in attorney-general v ngāti apa (2003), the court of appeal (the then highest domestic court) held that the jurisdiction of the māori land court (te kooti whenua māori), which hears matters relating to māori land, extended to the foreshore and seabed. this decision indicated that some customary rights could trump the crown’s assumption of radical title to all land in new zealand. in reaction, the labour-led government (1999-2008) enacted the foreshore and seabed act that vested in the crown full legal and beneficial ownership of the public foreshore and seabed, to preserve it in perpetuity for the people of new zealand. see boast (2005) for an analysis of the case and the legislative reaction. as part of the relationship and confidence and supply agreement between the māori party and the national party, barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 2 left politics with the creation of the māori party. issues of inter-cultural conflict linger despite—or, perhaps, because of—the treaty of waitangi (‘the treaty’), which in 1840 appeared to establish equitable grounds for relations between the british crown and the indigenous population by granting all rights of british subjects to māori and guaranteeing their ‘full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands and estates forests fisheries and other properties’ (the treaty 1840: art 2).5 the settlers’ means of acquiring land is an obvious root cause of tension; but, we argue, concepts of time and law in colonial new zealand, particularly in relation to land, may also contribute to an understanding of the contemporary relevance of persistent problems.6 opening the ‘time-capsule’ throws light on why the equitable engagement promised by the treaty did not eventuate as the colonists failed to recognise tikanga māori (customary rights and duties) as part of new zealand law. eurocentric notions of time were inextricably implicated in the process of colonisation and the complex relationships involving the inhabitancy of space. the recognition of such an ‘originary moment’ continues to provoke questions about understandings of time in contemporary politics and lawmaking. thus, rather than a balancing of minority indigenous rights with pākehā expectations, the foreshore and seabed act can be read as an example of how the continuing influence of european modernity signifies the absorption of the indigenous culture into the same legal and temporal framework as the coloniser at the same time as it re-inscribes political domination in terms of space. rather than trace lines of power structures implicit in such a discourse in the foucaultian sense, this article explores how colonial law and notions of time congruent with tenets of victorian anthropology could occlude indigenous interests. as jonathan friedman notes, ‘[a]nthropology is born out of the ideological representation of the center/periphery/margins structure of our civilization as an evolutionary relation which was elected as the lead party of government in 2008, the foreshore and seabed act has been subject to a ministerial review. the review panel has recommended that ‘the act must be repealed’ (durie et al 2009: 152) but no decision has been made by the government. 5 in accordance with orthodox legal doctrine, the treaty is an international treaty concluded between two sovereign nations. while the principles of customary public international law are incorporated into the common law, the provisions of a treaty only apply domestically (as opposed to between the countries themselves) when the provisions are legislated (joseph 2001: 61). 6 there is some evidence that this problem exists forward in time as well as retrospectively. in 2009 a national debate ensued over the value of historic forestry settlements to some māori iwi which are challenged by the new requirements of the environmental emissions trading scheme. the scheme has the effect of imposing penalties and circumscriptions over future land use (see ‘ngāi tahu settlement could unravel over ets restrictions’ 2009). barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 3 between civilization and its less developed forerunners, a mistranslation of space into time’ (friedman 1994: 5). in a secondary sense, this exploration delineates how the pathway to alternative histories from the postcolonial present might be redrawn by revealing the mechanism of historical appropriation as based on the concept of spatiotemporal occlusion. j.g.a. pocock argues, ‘if we look at the paradigm of appropriation from the state of nature, the two things we ought to notice are that it was constructed by jurists and that the technology it presupposes is the heavy plough’ (2001: 42). but pocock omits the fourth dimension from the paradigm of appropriation in the colonies—the ‘technologies of time’—which separated the appropriators and the dispossessed in terms of spatio-temporal dislocation. this article first outlines the dissonance between european and māori conceptions of time, revealing a disconnection ‘between the old ways and the new’ (pearce 2003: 13). second, we consider the relationship between time and law. third, we apply the interlinked concepts of law and time to land. finally, we consider how postcolonial jurisprudence seeks to engage with historical problems in new zealand, and air the possibility of a counter history. conceptions of time henri bergson recognised that notions of time are culturally specific. developing kant’s (1781) idea that space is endowed with an existence independent of its content, he postulated that time is a social construction involving the manipulation of the phenomenality and materiality of space. time and space are malleable because the empirical experience of the physical world and abstract ideas coincide: ‘the empirical or genetic explanations have thus taken up the problem of space at the very point where kant left it: kant separated space from its contents: the empiricists ask how these contents, which are taken out of space by thought, manage to get back again’ (bergson 1889: 93). bergson (95) further proposed that, given human differences and the interpretation of culture-specific ‘local signs,’ simultaneous experiences of time are never identical. such dissonance arises from the ‘diversity of the organic elements which they effect’ and brings into question the idea of time as a clear homogeneous medium. thus, the experience of time and space for the individual and in the social sense are no more located ‘within human consciousness than without it’ and are themselves a work of time and space. barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 4 the application of english law to colonial contexts reflects externalised eurocentric concepts of time that are implicit in the regulation of physical culture and social relations. bergson (1889: 236) suggested how this function is achieved: ‘on the one hand by getting everything ready for language, and on the other by showing us an external world, quite distinct from ourselves, in the perception of which all minds have a common share, [foreshadowing and preparing] the way for social life.’ crucially, law and time are conjoined inasmuch as the law satisfies the two criteria of being ‘language based’ and ‘preparing the way for social life.’ furthermore, by creating actionable title and records (deeds or registries) that link specific parcels of land to specific individuals, who then enjoy a comprehensive and permanent set of rights over that land, positive law constructs a framework for spatio-temporal transaction and ownership. at the time of initial engagement, like other indigenous peoples, māori held different conceptions of time to europeans. linda tuhiwai smith observes how ‘western observers were struck by the contrast in the way time was used (or rather, not used or organized) by indigenous peoples’ (1999: 53). for example, a european trader in the early colonial period, joel polack, reported ‘time was not accounted by a native as any importance’ (1840: 104). māori developed compendious, oral whakapapa (genealogies), and so the ever presence of ancestors would have had the effect of compressing time and constantly recycling and renewing distant events. indeed, michael jackson observes that pre-colonisation, ‘the maori lived in a world in which the past was continually recreated, in myth, ritual and art’ (2003: 46). but it is cyclical time—‘the times of reproduction’ and ‘the unfolding cycle of the seasons, the turning of the earth; the time in which our daily lives are set’ (massey 1993: 144)—that would have principally informed māori practices and customs. in contrast, the europeans had developed the awesome cultural weapon of linear time. contemplating this development in the context of early colonial australia, stephen muecke argues that ‘[t]he european settlement of australia occurred at precisely the time in history when the european enlightenment in the late eighteenth century created a new temporality via a major philosophical rupture to usher in an age of european modernity and scientific rationalism that would put all “primitive” superstition behind it’ (2004: 9). unlike cyclical time, the concept of linear time is independent of natural processes and permits ideas of history as sequestered intervals (greenhouse 1989: 1637). linear time barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 5 is an intellectual construct that enables measurement in noncyclical ways and also contains ideas of singularity, uniqueness and supremacy. as carol greenhouse (1989) suggests, in borrowing the notion of time in relation to eternity from the church, secular temporal discourse located time as something independent from individual experience. this experience also made the regulation of space, as well as of social order, possible by the union of time and place. similarly, notions of time facilitated the creation of institutions by locating regularised temporal contractions in symbolic form. thus, secular institutions became timekeepers in society, regulating the social relationship between law, time and space. linear time is embodied in institutions, industrial workshops, the state, courts and contracts, schools, even the church. each becomes an independent arbiter, keeper and regulator of time juxtaposed in contiguous social landscapes. time itself, like law, becomes a central construct of legitimacy. linear time also permits ideas of universal progress. thus, māori, because of their premodern lifestyle, could be consigned to a ‘fictitious’ past—a ‘denial of coevalness,’ which johannes fabian refers to as the ‘allochronism of anthropology’ (2002: 32). conceiving global history in terms of universal progress, this allochronic logic identified and constituted nineteenth-century ‘savages’ as ‘survivals,’ inhabitants of more or less ancient stages of cultural development. victorian colonial discourse, which incorporated, inter alia, notions of time and religious doctrine, effectively relegated māori to a pre-modern past, and thereby justified european cultural ascendancy through a claim to spatio-temporal legitimacy. this discourse was based on the excentric agency of modernity and the rule of law. linear time also acted to ‘seal off’ or separate the ‘object’ of māori from the time of observation, rendering māori culture as ‘frozen’ or ‘taken out of time’ (thomas 1996: 2). at the same time, allochronism established a ‘civilised’ west as the pinnacle of universal human progress, an argument that helped legitimise various imperialist projects (bunzl 2002: xi-xii). allochronism arose from the hegemonic way in which victorian anthropology viewed its subject and consigned the myths of indigenous races to a temporal ahistoricity. this narrative continuity irrupted between the different cultural typologies of māori and european cultures. māori adapted their worldview to accommodate aspects of christianity and settler culture. for example, ngāti rangiwewehi iwi member wiremu te rangikaheke’s nga tama a rangi (the sons of heaven), published in 1849, sought barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 6 to record māori creation myths, but did so with recognition of aspects and terminologies borrowed from christianity that demonstrate an adaptation to the settler worldview. conversely, european migrants sought to sanitise and commodify the epistemological view of māori myths and legends in publications such as george grey’s polynesian mythology (1854). grey’s book was based on te rangikaheke’s writings, and, while preserving māori narratives for posterity, did so in the mode of victorian ethnography that accorded the narratives ahistorical status in contrast to the christian historical view. christianity was thus co-opted as the discourse enabling māori access to modernity, and christianity, in turn, became a sub-text of historical loss and occlusion. furthermore, preand post-conversion practices could be compared in a way that revealed traditions as ‘uncivilised,’ if not ‘diabolical.’ thus richard boast quotes nopera te ngiha, a rangatira (chief) of the nga toa iwi, admitting in 1868 ‘that before the advent of christianity maori had kept slaves, but stressed that this was “in satan’s time,” before the coming of the gospel’ (1998: 11). western temporal structures inevitably became the pre-eminent rationales of social organisation in european colonies. indeed, as polack (1840: 105) observed, the extent to which māori adopted european time usage determined their level of incorporation into the cash economy. the advent of literacy also played an important role. ‘literacy enabled legends to be “frozen,” to assume the authenticity of european-style history’ (jackson 2003: 46) but in ‘freezing the past, literacy makes it more difficult to assimilate the present into the past. changes or recital become more obvious and are less easy to mask. literacy introduced new ideas to the maori and produced an hiatus in the continuity of traditional time’ (46). this also had an impact on customary law. as david williams notes, ‘of course tikanga [customary law] had developed since the time of european contact and, if allowed would continue to do so’ (2005: 375). the social problems that underlie european expansionism may be overlooked in the vigour of cultural transplantation. the utopian ideology of ‘escape’ and the sanctity of new beginnings punctuate and eclipse the accommodation of social difference on the part of the coloniser. the view that the indigenous people were ‘primitive’ contains a double jeopardy, which brings the colonial culture fast against a past that european modernity was supposed to have left behind. the discourse of religious salvation is employed to mitigate the humanitarian effects of the changes implemented by the barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 7 imposition of european law. under this conception, the european ethnocentric discourse held that, while the european pagan was already marked for salvation, the native was not ready for civilization. however, in the colonial māori context this view was contradicted by prophets, such as te kooti arikirangi te turuki and te whiti o rongomai, who, despite leading early guerrilla and passive opposition, melded māori religious views with christianity and the bible. the subsequent teachings of the ringatu and ratana faiths forged the belief that māori could be likened to the lost tribe of israel and thus were eminently ‘civilisable.’7 law and time for current purposes, three aspects of the legal interpretation of spatio-temporal inhabitancy are of pressing relevance: the first is the relationship between law and linear time; the second is the way the law’s temporality constitutes ‘the other’; and the third concerns the utopian aspects of time and law. law and linear time in the western conception, law gives linear time a path from the domain of public life to the construction and regulation of social experience. through a succession of intersubjective, personal experiences, and public, performative functions, the individual comes to understand the temporal nature of law—reversible (since prior decisions can control present ones but also prior decisions can be reversed), infinite and linear—in contrast to the irreversible, finite temporality of her own lifetime. law expands constantly in a linear framework, through precedent and the ordering of social events. temporality and legality are conceptually fused in the west through their mutual implications of a total order in relation to which social life acquires meaning (greenhouse 1989: 1631). however, indigenous time is archetypically non-linear. as ingela bergman suggests, for indigenous peoples, ‘[t]he revolution of the sun and moon, reappearance of the seasons, and the cyclical death and revival of plants formed the conceptualisation of time as being circular rather than linear. there was no beginning and no end’ (2006: 153). however, the very possibility of law lies in memory and the recognition of history as a linear construct. thus, for locke, who, like kant, based his reasoning on the principle of transcendental deduction, individual moral and legal 7 from the other side of the ethnographic discursive divide, fabian (2002: 83) has argued for the posited authenticity of a past as savage, tribal, peasant-like while serving to denounce an inauthentic present as uprooted, evolved, and/or acculturated. barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 8 accountability derives from the capacity to remember deeds of the past and to take responsibility for them (brunner 2006: 293). the individualised ‘ought’ of positive law is no longer coterminous with the ‘is’ of the group under customary law. for greenhouse (1989: 1631), the law manifests a flexible symbolism as a means of social control, which is by definition complete, yet its completeness does not preclude change. indeed, the law’s regulatory function should not be discounted from a progressive political perspective. law can enact a restorative form of social regulation such as with bodies established to address historical grievances, for example, the waitangi tribunal. greenhouse (1989: 1631) also points out that the law’s legitimacy is partly derived from an historical secularisation of the sacred quality of time that locates the end of time outside of collective experience. law manifests timelessness in that legal systems may carry out some regulatory functions under the sign of justice. justice, like time, is, in part, a transcending ideal. if the endpoint of law in time is neither fixed nor envisioned, symbolically it is coterminous with national life, which it interprets in temporal terms. constitution of the other karl popper argued that since no society can far-predict its future states of knowledge, there can be neither a predictive science of human history nor an historical determinism. expressed in his notion of the ‘politics of time,’ for popper (1945; 1963), ‘society’ in the collective selects and orders the facts of history in a self-correcting manner. as muecke (2004: 1) suggests, ‘[t]hinking of cultures synchronically, rather than in terms of competitive historical progress, means one has to consider how co-existing cultures, in the same country, are related to each other structurally and how their values are ordered.’ it follows, then, that the time-bearing notions those knowledge gains contain may be malleable to regimes of discursive authority. in the dialectical constitution of a cultural ‘other’ there is a need to recognise the concrete temporal, historical, and political conditions by which such concepts are formed. furthermore, law becomes a body of rules in which terms of identity in space and time are rendered political. the ideology implicit in both victorian anthropology and law served to keep ‘the other’ outside time. just as law is capable of enacting forms of separation, be this financial or physical, in colonial new zealand lawmaking, the empirical presence of the other turns into theoretical absence which is reinscribed into a material absence. paradoxically, then, barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 9 the event of the treaty’s signing established a precedent for diplomatic intervention that, as denis walker notes, favoured the european construction of māori as ‘other’ (1983). the regulatory function of law acts as a system for temporal control by placing limits on the pace at which the traffic of commerce and human flow is carried out in society. therefore much of colonial lawmaking served to disallow the cultural memory of the colonised, to place it out of the bounds of law, to de-temporalise it, or to reinterpret it only under the cultural system of the colonised. it may have been too difficult or troublesome to seek to comprehend the māori view of time and its relationship to the inhabitancy of space during the process of colonisation. in their determination to occupy the present, it seems the colonisers overlooked one of the principal characteristics of law—its lockean backward looking temporal logic—or rather they refused to acknowledge this capacity in māori culture. by retrospectively privileging the european social system,8 colonial law disengaged māori from their own spatial-temporal understanding in a revolutionary way. law, or rather the political force that impels it, is thus sometimes one of revolution: this is true of the imposition of european law in colonies or any other situation in which one set of beliefs are swept aside by another, or in a situation whereby only one set of beliefs become legitimated when two or more are in view. in new zealand this ‘quiet revolution’ was asserted over tribal norms by the the treaty of waitangi (brookfield 2006: 18). utopianism jonathan lamb identifies two themes that emerge in the cultural fabric of new zealand during the era of colonial legislation (1999: 80). one is a ‘machiavellian’ theme, illustrated by certain cases heard in the late nineteenth century in which the treaty was declared a ‘nullity’ in terms of ‘native rights,’ notably wi parata v bishop of wellington (1877), or invoked to waive its pre-emptive right of purchasing land from māori. (this self-serving denial of the treaty’s status as a pact between nations was broadly accepted until a rekindling of māori activism, exemplified by events such as the bastion point occupation of 1977-78). the second theme is a ‘utopianism’ that impels society to provide laws that idealise the relation between pākehā and māori in ‘godzone,’9 8 the english laws act 1858 deemed the laws of england to have applied to new zealand from 14 january 1840. as durie (1996: 459) states, ‘[t]he advent of english law thus in fact pre-dated the treaty of waitangi, the proclamation of sovereignty and effective settlement.’ 9 the term is associated with a poem by thomas bracken written circa 1890, entitled ‘god’s own barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 10 premised on mutuality, fair play, and progressive social welfare legislation, which bind the nation together. lamb’s analysis of samuel butler’s early colonial dystopic novel erewhon (1872) is illuminating in this context in the way it discusses the utopian ideas held by the originator of the new zealand company, edward gibbon wakefield, who brought immigrants to settle in new zealand around the time of the signing of the treaty. as lamb (1999: 87) explains: ‘lodged in a vista where space expands as time dwindles, and beginning to think that self-knowledge accompanied by uncoerced sociable tendencies might be preferable to the push and shove of the life-struggle, butler is acting as the beneficiary and exponent of a theory of colonialism inaugurated by wakefield.’ time should not be necessary in utopia but spatial relationships make it so. the wakefieldian solution was to invest in colonies that might reproduce the social advantages of the source country, in a space large enough to alleviate the effects of competition. however, as lamb (1999: 88) points out: wakefield was committing a circuit of illegal, or at least non-legal, transactions: he was issuing stock in a company that had no tradeable asset but a speculative land-purchase; he was acquiring land for trifles from maori who were ignorant of the terms of european sale; and he was arranging for settlement on land in new zealand, which, even if it had been fairly bought, had no basis in law, since the territory lay in a foreign country in which the british crown had declared no interest, and with which it had not yet signed a treaty. arguably, wakefield’s utopianism is oblivious to the hobbesian idea of law as a scientifically planned regulatory system which allows future-orientated, continuous security: hobbes’s social contract is a spatio-temporal negotiation between desires and their realisation in which future satisfactions are contracted in a trade-off between the attainment of desire and social control in the present. when conceived of in this way, law is the instrument of utopianism. by moderating harmful desires in the present, law may produce future happiness. however, the law was also an instrument of division. whilst a strong congruence may be claimed between the politics and lawmaking, colonial ideology and a cultural experience of time, the notion of a temporal horizon is not confined to european culture, though linear time may be distinguished from organic or circular time. for yacouba konaté, the division between country,’ which referred to the sublime landscape of new zealand and implied an element of puritanism towards it in the settlers’ minds. richard seddon, new zealand’s premier between 1893 and 1906, popularised the term (orsman 1997: 300). barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 11 past and future is substantiated by an ‘asymmetrical principle’ in which time may be part of social design in which ‘it is necessary to depart from projects, from factual programs, in order to detach virtually from the real present and introduce a discontinuity while realising a series of retentions between present and past’ (1996: 149). so, thinking about time involves a conceptual divisiveness that lends itself readily to legal categorisations. such a mechanistic view sees law as an independent arbiter regulating human needs and desire in social space (brunner 2006: 305). law primarily shapes futures but also expresses historical consciousness. this is an empiricist secular temporal view that regulates human action toward the future. it is also premised on the idea that the past is equivocated; yet much of law conducted under secular time depends on reassessing past wrongs, in effect, of reinterpreting history so that a different, more just view prevails. this has been the essential task of postcolonial jurisprudence in new zealand. māori land rights the power of european nations to intercede in the temporal inhabitancies of colonial space became juridified as the doctrines of an imperial common law were developed during the eighteenth century. in the anonymous (1722) decision (cited by hepburn 2005: 5), the privy council held that, as a ‘birthright,’ english subjects carried the english common law with them to any new and uninhabited territory they might settle, thereby limiting the crown’s ability to make different laws in such ‘settled’ colonies. in contrast, the king could impose law by decree in any country conquered by britain. as a matter of practice, territories occupied by tribal people became treated as ‘settled.’ this lead to the paradoxical situation whereby new zealand was treated by the colonial office as unoccupied, notwithstanding the treaty having been concluded by the crown and māori occupiers of the land (mchugh 1991: 42). after 1840, new zealand became part of the common law community ‘in which tribal polities hardly qualified for membership. to the extent that the common law spoke of tribal societies, it necessarily occurred within the context of this exclusion. the tribal presence in common-law speech acts was largely a passive one’ (mchugh 1999: 126-7). any cognisance that might be taken of māori law would thereafter be interpreted through the prism of the common law into which it was subsumed. yet, as edward taihākurei durie notes, ‘a mono-legal regime had not been contemplated during the execution of the treaty of barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 12 waitangi. on the contrary, māori were specifically concerned that their own laws would be respected’ (1996: 460). the treaty represented a watershed in legal fortunes. before 1840, tikanga māori was ‘the only cognisable law in new zealand’ (waitangi tribunal 1997: 392), but posttreaty indigenous customary law was either ignored by the colonists or understood in terms of the ill-fitting doctrines of the common law. furthermore, governance was negligible. thus, according to r. j. walker, ‘[i]n the first twenty years after the treaty, no resident magistrates were appointed in the native districts. left out of the machinery of government, untouched by the promised law and order of the kāwanatanga [governance], and finally outnumbers in their own land, the māori turned to nationalism’ (1989: 271). however, by this time, the interlocking co-ordinates of spatiotemporal relations that informed settler land law had brought māori experience of time and place within its cartographic imprint. the treaty effected the transition between māori kāwanatanga to european sovereignty through a fork in interpretation, which saw claims to an indigenous law occluded at the same time as the instruments of a british legal revolution were symbolically and practically instantiated in new zealand by the politics of population volume and human migration. to put the tsunami of european settlement in perspective, ‘[t]he maori population equalled the european in new zealand in 1858, but was less than a tenth of it by 1890, despite only a modest absolute decline’ (belich 2009: 553-54). it seems that in early colonial new zealand, australia and canada, native or aboriginal title was for many years little more than a legal nicety, referring more to identity than to any legal purchase an individual may lay claim to. this changed with the establishment of the waitangi tribunal in new zealand in 1975, with mabo v queensland (no 2) (1992) in australia, where no treaty existed, and in r v van der peet (1996) in canada, each of which development reaffirmed some concept of native title (walters 2001: 137). land and the treaty article 2 of the english version of the treaty provides: her majesty the queen of england confirms and guarantees to the chiefs and tribes of new zealand and to the respective families and individuals thereof the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands and estates forests fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession; but the chiefs of the united tribes and the individual barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 13 chiefs yield to her majesty the exclusive right of preemption over such lands as the proprietors thereof may be disposed to alienate at such prices as may be agreed upon between the respective proprietors and persons appointed by her majesty to treat with them in that behalf. boast (2005: 370) explains that, ‘at the proclamation of the crown’s sovereignty in may 1840 the crown did not acquire full title to all land in the country; what it did acquire was, rather, the sole right to extinguish maori title [through pre-emption] and to issue grants.’ 10 māori could enjoy possession of the land they occupied, but could not alienate the land by leasing or selling it, other than to the crown. technically, article 2 was unnecessary as it merely confirmed imperial common law (boast 2005: 49). however, problematically, many māori entered into direct transactions with pākehā before and, indeed, after the signing of the treaty. in response, the land claims ordinance 1841 was enacted, which provided that ‘all titles to land claimed by virtue of pre-annexation purchases from maori were null and void’ and provided for government inquiries into claims. additionally, the land purchase ordinance 1846 prescribed penalties for settlers who entered into land deals with māori. the imperial common law position, reiterated by the treaty and legislation, embellished the crown’s selfperception of even-handed treatment. however, while the treaty ostensibly granted all rights of british subjects to māori, those formal rights were in substance inferior in so far as political sovereignty was non-justiciable except in the ‘haphazard’ incorporation in common law and statute (mchugh 1991: 45). by guaranteeing interests in land as they existed in 1840, an allochronism was created. whereas settlers enjoyed individual property rights and could engage in free market exchanges, māori interests in land were preserved in legal aspic as exotic curios, despite the clear ability of customary law to evolve in order to take into account changing circumstances. the long-term effects of this approach have been significant. thus, until recently, in aboriginal title discourse, common law courts have emphasised and recognised the ‘native title of usufruct,’11 whereas ‘government has unilaterally rejected any possibility of māori exclusive or ownership interests’ (williams 2005: 381). since 10 a more important point is made by williams (1989: 83): while commentators commonly emphasise how the treaty affirmed the crown’s right of pre-emption, the treaty ‘was primarily about the maintenance of māori title to their lands—not its extinguishment.’ 11 justinian, the roman jurisconsult, defined usufruct (ususfructus) as ‘the right to use and enjoy the things of another, their substance remaining unimpaired’ (thomas 1976: 203). the usufruct, as such, has not been received into english land law. barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 14 māori were obliged to sell their land to the crown under the treaty, a monopsony market was created in terms of which government could effectively determine the prices paid for land. by 1860, ‘māori title to nearly two-thirds of the country was extinguished’ on this basis (boast 2008: 26). treatment of indigenous interests in this way was of course remarkably convenient for the colonists. private contracts between māori and settlers could endanger the peace of the colony because of uncertainties about title to land and the meaning of contracts. furthermore, serious disruption of colonial development could result if māori were permitted to lease on the open market, as they would then be unlikely to sell their lands to the crown. the rhetoric of the civilising mission was thus pressed into service for colonial ends. as ann parsonson puts it, ‘what was a legitimate source of income for a colonial gentleman was a ticket to social degradation for maori’ (2001: 177). at the time of the new zealand wars12 in the 1860s and subsequent government confiscations of land (raupatu), crown policy on indigenous land holdings was reversed. despite the doctrines of imperial common law, article 2 of the treaty and relevant provisions of the constitution act 1852, the natives land acts 1862-65 permitted aboriginal title to be converted to feudal tenure,13 once entitlement to the land was established by the native land court. as claudia orange explains, a certificate from the native land court, validated by the governor, could be exchanged for a crown title, whereupon customary title would be extinguished leaving māori free to sell, lease or exchange land (2004: 80). however, rather than distinguishing what belonged to the tangata whenua (original people of the land), the effect of native land court adjudication may be seen as identifying for european settlement what did not belong māori. as richard dawson observes, ‘to the despair of chiefs and many other māori, the court became an effectual instrument—especially in its first thirty years of operation—for colonists to acquire rights pertaining to “their” land’ (2001: 85). consequently, settlement and development of land in the north island (te iki a māui) accelerated with a concomitant hastening of amalgamation and assimilation of māori 12 as sinclair (1957) indicates, these conflicts were historically referred to as the ‘māori wars’ but, more recently, and particularly following the success of belich (1986) and an ensuing television series, as the ‘new zealand wars.’ however, as keenan (2002: 107) observes, ‘of all issues that then weighed heavily upon maori, none was as important as the fate of the land. this is why maori have viewed the wars as “nga pakanga whenua o mua—the land wars.”’ 13 under english law, the crown is assumed to hold radical title to all land. while a grant of freehold is practically equivalent to ownership, technically, it is a form of tenancy (megarry & wade 1984: 12). barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 15 into a colony, driven by ‘genuine, if blinkered, idealism’ (boast 2008: xv). boast (2004: 72) argues ‘no evidence [exists] that māori regretted the demise of crown pre-emption and there is some evidence of māori support for the right to sell on the free market.’ nevertheless, in the light of the evidence of dispossession it caused, policy predicated on the crown exiting the māori land market was abandoned by 1869 (boast 2008: 6), and, crown pre-emption was formally reintroduced by the native land court act 1894. in r v symonds (1847), judge chapman held that native title was ‘entitled to be respected’ and not extinguished without indigenous consent. however, english law (and settler politics) determined how far native title was to be respected. before 1865, māori had two options: to subsist or to sell their land to the crown, but were precluded from becoming landlords. after 1865, they were subject to the untrammelled ambitions of a settler government and the irreversibility of free-market transactions. what was not available was a legal system that recognised māori customs as parallel law or which equitably developed new zealand common law as a synthesis of māori and english norms. in the first regard, although there were never separate courts of law and equity in new zealand, until 1873 the administration of common law and equitable jurisdictions were separate in the united kingdom. even after merger of the administration, as patricia loughlan notes, ‘there was no merger of equitable and common law rules and principles, no joining of substantive legal and equitable doctrines and no alteration of legal and equitable principles’ (1996: 21-22). in w. ashburner’s famous metaphor, ‘the two streams of jurisdiction, though they run in the same channel, run side by side and do not mingle their waters’ (cited by loughlan 1996: 22). there was, then, ample precedent of english law accommodating distinctly different normative systems within one overall framework of law and justice but only within the terms set by british parliament. differing conceptions of transactions māori may have sought to incorporate europeans into their communities, out of courtesy or to avoid conflict that might result in the alienation or appropriation of their land. they may have welcomed cultural exchange. as margaret mutu explains, māori ‘had decided that their people could benefit from the knowledge, skills and goods that europeans could offer’ (1999: 319). in land dealings made before 1840 and for some time after, argues alan ward (1973: 29), māori may have believed they were granting barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 16 rights of occupancy, or may have included land ‘disputed with neighbouring hapu [subtribe, extended family group]’ or ‘recently conquered and tenuously held.’ māori customary tenure was based on a different concept of inhabitancy from the individual title of the common law. as aileen moreton-robinson expresses the aboriginal worldview, ‘although the concept “property” commonly refers to things owned by persons, or the rights of persons with respect to a thing, it is more than a relationship to the tangible and material. it embraces metaphysical and intangible rights’ (2005: 126). waerete norman explains that a claim to land ‘was fixed at the outset when people bestowed their mana on the land by naming it after themselves or after some event enhancing their mana [authority, prestige, pride, or status]’ whereas physical control ‘was secured by the process of “ahi kā” (keeping the fires of occupation burning)’ (1999: 200-1). according to mchugh (1991: 74) dispossession through migration could take as many as three generations as the ‘fire became cold’ (ahi mātaotao). the custom of tuku whenua was widely practised in pre-colonial new zealand, in terms of which, tribal leaders who held the mana whenua for the tribe could allocate lands for a particular individual and his family for them to live on and use’ (mutu 1999: 319). ‘the mana whenua (that is, very approximately, the spiritual power and authority for the lands vested by the gods in a tribe, in particular, its chief) remained always in the tribe’ (318, footnotes omitted). as māori engaged with settlers, whom they might have presumed to be sojourners, the practice of tuku whenua was extended in respect of land ‘for the use of a particular european and his descendants’ (318). after the treaty and the declaration of crown pre-emption, mutu (1999: 319) observes, the nature of the land transactions changed in one essential respect. they were still tuku whenua, but the agreements being entered into by the tribes were no longer with individual europeans. the tribes were now dealing with the queen of england, the highest chief of all english chiefs, and hence, also the paramount chief of all incoming settlers … there would have been no reason to have any misgivings about entrusting a person of such high rank with lands for her subjects for as long as she and her descendants were kings and queens of england. māori would not, then, have seen any inconsistency between their own continued access and ‘radical title’ to land and the exercise of rights by a newcomer. ironically, whereas imperial common law has traditionally restricted aboriginal title to use-rights, this may have been precisely the nature of the privileges māori presumed they were extending to europeans. barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 17 the arrangements hapū (sub-tribes or extended family group) initiated concerning land highlighted the gulf between māori concepts of the nature of their relations with settlers and the latter’s perception of such relationships. from the māori perspective, transactions with early traders and missionaries were almost certainly personal, and, later, māori continued to believe that the government could not introduce a third party to the land who had not been approved by them (durie 1996: 461). but bad faith is not required for inter-cultural misunderstanding to arise, as durie (1996: 457) argues: ‘the same transaction could be seen in different lights. where maori allocated land, the settler imagined a purchase. where vacant possession was thought to have been taken, maori continued on the land as before. while payment was seen as final, subsequent tribute was in fact required. where pakeha saw friendship, maori saw obligations.’ in the terminology of contract, there was no consensus ad idem (meeting of the minds). being such fundamentally different systems, māori custom and the common law would necessarily conflict over spatio-temporal occupancy. andrew erueti characterises english land law as ‘a body of clearly defined and simplified rules that facilitated the private use of and enjoyment of land’ that ‘provided the title-holder with virtually all rights in the land’ (2004: 42). in contrast, under māori custom, ‘competing claims of right coupled with the intricate system of overlapping and intersecting rights held by members of different kinship groups makes it difficult to say who “owned” the land, or waters of lakes, lagoons, rivers, and the open seas’ (43). whatever, mutual incomprehension prevailed initially, the consequences of settler individualism and instrumentalism came to be recognised by māori. angeline greensill quotes an 1873 prediction by te ataria of the ngāti kahungunu iwi: the plains and the mountains are being removed from under our feet; the hundred pathways of heretaunga are being trampled by angry greedy people. soon all we may have left will be the sea and the beaches although even now pakeha covet our fish, drain the waters that feed the sea, and take away the rocks and sand…the ocean is in danger of being taken like the rest of the whenua [land]. (2005: 159) time and the treaty revisited contemplating colonial new zealand law, it is easier to identify breaches of māori land rights, confiscations and fraudulent purchases, than to recognise policies that made māori culture victim of a worldview that incorporated social and symbolic measures dissimilar from their own (parsonson 2001: 173). nevertheless, the effect of policies, well-meaning or otherwise, was to deny māori the right to deal with their land in a way barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 18 consistent with (evolving) customary law. the bicultural and bilingual waitangi tribunal (‘the tribunal’), which was established in 1975 ‘to make recommendations on claims relating to the practical application of the treaty and to determine whether certain matters are inconsistent with the principles of the treaty’ (long title of the treaty of waitangi act 1975), has investigated historical grievances and draws attention to the kinds of assumptions that underlay the colonial governments’ māori land policies. the tribunal seeks to interpret and redress identifiable instances of legal imbalance and give new weight to the māori worldview, the māori custom and value system, and law and policies. recent treaty scholarship argues that māori concepts of time were and are culturespecific. while the treaty continues to be seen by some commentators as a ‘developing social contract’ between new zealand peoples, which recognises the treaty’s ‘timeless’ nature—not only as a compact between māori and the crown but also as a founding document of colonisation which also looks forward to national cohesion—it has no independent standing in domestic law. postcolonial lawmakers are dependent on contemporary interpretations of the treaty for the settlement acts of parliament following from the reparative justice procedures of the tribunal hearings, consultation process, deliberations and negotiations with the crown. these interpretations, as giselle byrnes has pointed out, often coalesce around māori concepts of time (2006: 2). deliberations of the tribunal almost always understand the treaty, implicitly or explicitly, as a forward-looking social agreement rather than a ‘synchronic’ historical document. according to byrnes (2006: 3), following the treaty of waitangi amendment act 1985, which expanded the tribunal original remit to include claims from the signing of the treaty in 1840 to the present, the tribunal has emphasised the timelessness of the treaty thereby permitting māori to test orthodox assumptions regarding the nature of change over time. in the context of the tribunal’s interpretation of allocation of radio frequencies report (1990), a diachronic view of māori time is taken by the tribunal which acknowledges changes in relations through time and protection for many kinds of material and taonga (treasures), such as haka (dances) and whakapapa (genealogies), though it has yet to pronounce on intellectual property. the conclusion inferred from this report is that the principles of the treaty are understood to be ‘out of time’ barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 19 providing arguments for contingencies that could not have been envisaged at the treaty was concluded. similarly, in the muriwhenua land report (1997), the tribunal asserted that the canons of justice and protection should ‘apply to all ages’ (byrnes 2006: 5). however, it is not that, ‘the space between past and present is eliminated as they are compressed into a single entity’; rather, māori notions of time, although culturally specific, are embedded in physical space rather than abstracted out of it in the predominant european sense. for example, in the whanganui river report (1999), māori conceptions of the river resource as a tapuna awa (living ancestor) were recognised. inclusion of the flow of life in relationships between things in the dimensions of tangata whenua (people of the land) is implicit in this culture-specific interpretation of time. there are, then, at least two separate histories or synchronicities that meet their diachronic point in each enactment following the deliberations of the tribunal—a history of remembering that is also forward-looking, and one of forgetting that may or may not involve a culture of assimilation. these narratives are defined by cultural and political as well as sociological differences (byrnes 2006: 2). the tribunal interprets the treaty as functioning as a distributive contract that is suspended between enduring cultural values and their demographic proportions. as m.p.k sorrenson observes, ‘so long as the tribunal retains its retrospective jurisdiction to 1840, it will continue to recover a hitherto largely submerged māori history of loss of resources and mana, supposedly protected by the treaty. the tribunal’s findings may not be palatable to many new zealanders, but it would be perilous to ignore them’ (1989: 177). conclusion in the face of european settlement, ‘indigenous peoples did not stand idly by, give up or become passive objects; instead they resisted, temporised, changed, adapted, tried to exploit the european presence to get even with traditional enemies, adopted christianity and in some ways made it their own, changed their material culture, and even defined and invented or reinvented themselves’ (boast 2008:16). nevertheless, time was fractured, and māori adaptation to european ways meant adoption of european concepts of time. colonial law created a division between the agents and beneficiaries of modernity by regulating as far as possible the pace of māori adoption of the newly transplanted european culture. being effectively outside of time meant the space of the barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 20 tangata whenua (people of the land) could be occluded also (durie 1996: 34). if locke foresaw the need to devise a political structure able to cope with the fallacies and mistakes that result from human misadventure, it would seem fair to say that such a structure was not established in colonial new zealand. the frontier mentality of settlement conflicted with the politics of nation formation and created the possibilities for temporal disadvantage. could things have been different; was a result other than domination by colonial law possible? to pose such questions is not to invite imaginative speculation but rather to consider how the terms of the treaty should have been actuated in relation to the normative systems of indigenes and settlers. ani mikaere observes that ‘tikanga māori was the first law of aotearoa’ (2005: 153), and, for durie (1996: 39) it is new zealand’s original lex situs (the law of the place property is situated). in his view, the treaty guaranteed māori their own laws, just as the english were guaranteed theirs. this is not a revisionist fancy. the english laws act 1858 provided that the laws of england applied only ‘so far as applicable to the circumstances of new zealand’; indeed, measures were taken in the colony’s early years to accommodate notions of collective responsibility—so alien to european individualism yet so natural to the māori sense of community (patterson 1992). these measures had been abandoned by 1858, a casualty of the feud between attorney-general william swainson and george clarke (a missionary appointed chief protector of aborigines) over the establishment of native districts. as ward (1973: 61) notes, ‘the declaration of native districts would also have involved a de facto acceptance of the maori social system, and allowed maori people to adapt to the western world, at a pace and manner more of their choosing.’ furthermore, early laws provided the option for different regions to create locally appropriate laws, although this opportunity was never taken up. there is also the practical issue of recognition of law. thus belich (1996: 224) observes that ‘even in the late 1860s, when the power balance had shifted considerably in favour of the pakeha, a great many maori did not consider themselves obliged to obey pakeha law when it did not suit.’ there were, then, in the early colonial period two sets of laws involving different peoples and different ontologies of time. it is likely that, at the signing of the treaty, these were intended—at least on the part of māori—to co-exist, and indeed, it is barrett and strongman time-capsule portal, vol. 7, no. 1, january 2010. 21 plausible that they could have done so. in the event, the alien system prevailed when it could have co-existed, and the concepts of transcendental symbolism, which united the european experience of self in time and space under law, were denied to māori occupation of space. these temporal-spatial occlusions are not historical artefacts; 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coleborne, manchester university press, manchester, 125-139. ward, a. 1973, a show of justice: racial ‘amalgamation’ in nineteenth century new zealand, auckland university press/oxford university press, auckland. williams, d. v. 1989, ‘te tiriti o waitangi—unique relationship between crown and tangata whenua?,’ in waitangi: māori and pākehā perspectives of the treaty of waitangi, (ed.) i. h. kawharu, oxford university press, auckland, 64-91. williams, d. v. 2005, ‘unique treaty-based relationships remain elusive,’ in waitangi revisited: perspectives on the treaty of waitangi, (eds) m. belgrave, m. kawharu & d. williams, oxford university press, south melbourne, 366-387. wi parata v bishop of wellington (1877) 3 nz jur (ns) sc 72. chancellor angela merkel chancellor angela merkel: a celtic satire anthony stephens she leads all germany. wagner’s vision splendid trots through the gore of the party-room, choosing the slain like fruit for a glacé tart. ‘no bavarian quinces this time round! imagine: poor, dear chirac broke a filling on that sour stoiber!’ but as well she’s catherine the great – and guess who’s coming to stralsund: yes! bush no less! all the star-force boys togged-up as peasants, happily lining the empty streets, waving flags, folk-dance the great friend by. no girls in the act? but how would bush notice, when next to him angela outshines the rest of her sex? – whispers sweetly: ‘my potemkin, my pumpkin, my strudel!’ into the president’s ear… what a shame it’s turned off. meanwhile germany greys. not even a grand coalition can get them breeding again, and always: more and more turks. angela has the nation’s top chemists all slaving on project late afternoon, a schwarzwälder torte so aphrodisiac that even affluent singles will go it like rabbits, while unused condoms uncurl amid cake crumbs and spilled coffee: her legacy to the nation. ‘shall i call it donner und blitz or coup de foudre? such a strain to be so european – and keep the place clean! and pensioners – more and more piggy-back on one worker! what’s wrong with the joys of motherhood? it’s subsidised! god knows: they’ve been told off to show me surrounded by kiddies: the nation needs procreation – just nibble this cake!’ ‘schröder left messes – him and his russian gas! – he made too many of them germans, just for filling the schools with offspring who can’t learn grammar! and mess multiplies: portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 the banks are all selling each other over the border; issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal stephens chancellor merkel volkswagen’s gone to brazil and mercedes in mysore’s using child labour – more plum cake for spiegel to scoff! and – all the time – the yeasty deficit rises; scandals, turncoats, critics sour the mix. the west’s still cruel to the east, health’s too dear, brussels is brutal – really, i’ve so little time to bestride the world stage, waving my spear, like the valkyrie i am – let alone ride! such a shame wagner left out the grand coalition. at least i’ll be offstage before götterdämmerung, calming my nerves – baking cakes!’ portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 anthony stephens eighth women in asia conference women in south korean politics: a long road to equality heike hermanns, australian national university over the last 60 years, the republic of korea (hereafter south korea or simply korea) has undergone a dramatic transformation process. within 40 years, the country developed from an agrarian society to one of the world’s leading trading nations, in which economic development, modernisation and democratisation changed korean society substantially. however, the position of women in korean society changed at a slower pace, perpetuating gender inequality, particularly in politics and the economy. in terms of human development, korea ranks among the industrialised countries (rank 28 on the united nation’s human development index; hdi) but on the gender empowerment measure (gem) index, korea holds a much lower position (68; undp 2004).1 the latter measures the position of women in politics and the economy and thus shows the low levels of women’s participation at decision-making level in korea. this paper focuses on korean politics and argues that democratisation has not yet delivered equal representation for women. women make up only 13 per cent of national assembly members, which is below regional and world average (ipu 2005). without the pressure from female politicians, legislative changes in favour of gender equality are thus low on the agenda of parliament. nonetheless, korea has promulgated several advanced women’s policies, including legislation outlawing domestic violence. the legislative changes are driven by an active women’s movement under the portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 1 the hdi is compiled using three indicators: longevity, knowledge, and a decent standard of living. for the full report and more information see http://hdr.undp.org/ [accessed 10/08/2005]. the gem measures the degree of political and economic participation of women by looking at the percentage of seats held by women in parliament, women’s gdp per capita, plus the percentage of female administrators and managers, and of female professional and technical workers. http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://hdr.undp.org/ hermanns long road to equality leadership of academics and feminists rather than female politicians. as part of their demands, measures of affirmative action for women including quotas have been introduced; leading to an increase in the number of women politicians in recent elections, but indications are that their advancement will be slow and gradual rather than by a sudden substantial expansion. changes in women’s policies will therefore continue to depend on pressure from outside representative institutions, showing the interdependence of political and civil society in korea. since liberation in 1945, south korea has developed almost beyond recognition. in the 1950s, korea was an agricultural country slowly recovering from the destruction of the korean war (1950-53). by the mid-1990s, korea had become the 11th largest trading nation in the world as a result of the ambitious industrialisation programme started in the 1960s. per capita gdp increased from us$100 in 1963 to over $10,000 in 1995. with industrialisation, female labour force participation increased steadily to 49 per cent. educational levels have risen dramatically, with 80 per cent of high school girls planning to enter college in the early 2000s. as koreans flooded to the cities, urbanisation led to the decline of cohabiting multi-generational families in favour of nuclear family units. in spite of these dramatic changes, traditional values have continued to define the position of women in korean society well into the 1990s. the public-private dichotomy prescribed by confucian teachings influenced attitudes towards a woman’s role in family and public life (lee 1996). a woman is expected to become a wife and mother, working within the realm of the household while a man represents the family to the outside world. women are largely excluded from the political process by both the conservative elite and the electorate as the prevailing traditions look unfavourably on the political activity of women and question the ability of women in politics (kim and chin 1996, 127; moon 2003). in line with these attitudes, women remain under-represented in higher positions in business and administration as well as in politics (lee 2005, 136).2 since the position of women in society is difficult to measure quantitatively, the presence of women in these areas gives some indication of gender equality and differences. 2 at ministerial level women comprise 0.1 per cent of all positions. they make up 6 per cent of legislators, senior officials and managers, and 39 per cent of professional and technical workers (undp 2005). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 hermanns long road to equality since the early 2000s, the situation of women in korea has undergone a transformation. attitudes towards marriage and family are changing: koreans are now older when they marry, have fewer children and are more likely to divorce.3 women are also more likely to work and continue to stay in the workforce after marriage. with growing levels of education, women have been exposed to feminist ideas from abroad, leading to an active women’s movement in korea. women’s organisations have pushed for changes in attitudes and legislation that are slowly showing some effects. the gradual transformation of the position of women in korean society is reflected in the increase of the gender empowerment measure from rank 90 in 1995 to 68 in 2004 (tables 1 and 2), although korea remains at a lowly position surrounded by countries far less advanced economically. table 1: gem and hdi, 1995 1995 gem hdi top ranking sweden canada australia 11 2 malawi 89 126 south korea 90 30 tunisia 91 80 source: undp (1995) table 2: gem and hdi, 2004 2004 gem hdi top ranking norway norway australia 8 3 georgia 67 97 south korea 68 28 cambodia 69 120 source: undp (2004) 3 the average number of years in school for women rose from 6.6 years in 1980 to 9.8 years in 2000. one-fifth of korean women have attended college or university. the urbanisation rate climbed from 28 per cent in 1960 to 82 per cent in 2000. the average age of marriage rose from 21.6 years for women in 1960 to 27.5 years in 2004. single-person households have more than tripled since 1975 to over 15 per cent in 2000. the birth rate fell from on average of six children in 1960 to 1.16 in 2004, one of the lowest rates in the world (data from korean national statistical office, korean women’s development institute, various years and databases). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 hermanns long road to equality in response to pressure from women’s organisations measures of affirmative action have been introduced, resulting in an increased success rate of women in elections since 2000. women gained 9 per cent of seats in regional assemblies in the local elections of 2002 and 10.7 per cent in 2006. in 2004, female representation in the national assembly more than doubled to 13 per cent (from 16 to 39 female lawmakers). despite these increases, the majority of korean women show little engagement in politics but serve only as an audience. the political process in south korea thus continues to lack in descriptive representation and is inadequate in reflecting society and its various components.4 this in turn influences the political agenda, as a legislature’s composition impinges on its activities. in the literature on women’s representation, strong links between the percentage of female legislators and women's policy outputs have been confirmed (carroll 2001; swers 2001, 173). despite low levels of female legislative representation, however, south korea has introduced progressive women’s policies that are more advanced than in other countries with higher levels of female representation. this suggests that there is more than one way of influencing political procedures and policies in favour of women and the number of women in representative positions alone cannot be used to assess the progress of women’s advancement. the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation needs to be investigated further. this paper examines the causes and timing of the changes affecting women in korea in more detail, in particular the different avenues for women to enter politics and to change women’s policies. political, socio-economic and cultural factors all play a role, including changes in political procedures, the accelerated speed of attitudinal change, in particular among young women, more outspoken women’s organisations, and more progressive government policies. events in korea illustrate that women’s policies can be promoted through other channels besides direct representation, showing the need to look beyond institutional representation for a fuller understanding of women’s policymaking and measures to advance gender equality. democratisation and procedural changes the korean sixth republic (since 1988) is often cited as a successful model of democratisation (e.g. diamond and kim 2000). since the mid-1980s korea has undergone a successful transformation from military rule to representative democracy, 4 see pitkin (1967) for a discussion of representation. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 hermanns long road to equality and free and competitive elections are held regularly at every level of government. successive governments maintained and extended political rights and civil liberties. the consolidation of democracy in korea is, however, not completed, as shortcomings remain with regard to democratic attitudes and behaviour, political parties and the dominance of regionalism in election outcomes (shin 1999). political parties are dominated by the personality of their leader, rather than programme or ideology. due to the lack of distinguishing features among parties, regional voting became an important factor in korean elections. until the late 1990s, political parties had a conservative outlook, as progressive ideas were considered to be communistic and pro-north korean. this has changed to some degree since 2000, when a generational change brought younger politicians into parliament (see kihl 2005). the democratisation process did not address the issue of gender inequality.5 in 1987 the conservative political elite was able to negotiate a peaceful transfer of power without the participation of more progressive forces, although the latter had initiated the transition process. the existing power structure and political culture dominated by conservative forces were transferred to the sixth republic. the number of female national assembly members actually declined in the first three rounds of democratic elections (1988-1996; table 3). from the republic’s foundation in 1948 until early 2004, only 72 women have been members of the national assembly and only 25 of these have been elected directly. in this period the share of female representatives in the national assembly averaged 2.5 per cent. in 2000, female representatives won 5.9 per cent only of the seats in the national assembly, while the world average reached 13.9 per cent and the regional average 15 per cent (for single or lower houses). even north korea (dprk) has a higher number of women in parliament (20.1 per cent; ipu 2005). 5 gender equality is largely overlooked in the democratisation process, by actors as well as by analysts. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 hermanns long road to equality table 3: female representatives in the national assembly: term total representative s total wome n women % elected women prop. list/ appointed 1948-50 200 1 0.5 1 1950-54 210 2 1.0 2 1954-58 203 1 0.5 1 1958-60 233 3 1.3 3 1960-61 233 1 0.4 1 1963-67 175 2 1.1 1 1 1967-71 175 3 1.7 1 2 1971-72 204 5 2.5 0 5 1973-79 219 12 5.5 2 10 1979-80 231 8 3.5 1 7 1981-85 276 9 3.3 1 8 1985-88 276 8 2.9 2 6 1988-92 299 6 2.0 0 6 1992-96 299 7 2.3 1 6 1996-00 299 11 3.6 3 8 2000-04 273 16 5.9 5 11 2004-08 299 39 13.0 10 29 source: korean national election commission, www.nec.go.kr, various sites, author’s tabulation formal female representation is influenced by democratic procedures. during the democratic transition in korea in 1987, the discussion regarding the electoral system was dominated by concerns about each party’s chance of gaining the largest share of votes. the representation of minorities—including women—was given little consideration despite the appeals of korean women’s organisations, which had long demanded positive discrimination to address gender inequality in politics (kim and kim 1993, 233; paek 1997). the constitution of the sixth republic stipulates single-member constituencies and includes a provision for proportional representation for about 20-25 per cent of the parliamentary seats, following the german model. the effects on female representation were not immediate, as korean parties used the lists for other ends during the 1990s. candidate rankings were influenced by a person’s standing with the party leader and their profile in society. nominees were generally expected to make a large donation to the party in return for a high ranking, so they were effectively buying a seat in the national assembly and the prestige that came with it. parties ran non-party members, such as women in leading positions in society and academia, to broaden the appeal of the party. proportional lists have been an important avenue for women to enter the national assembly and sub-national councils since very few women were successful in directly elected constituencies. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 hermanns long road to equality comparative studies of gender inequality in legislative representation conclude that the electoral system plays an important role in determining the number of seats held by female representatives (norris 1987; lovenduski and norris 1993; lijphart 1994). women are found to make greater progress in electoral systems with multi-member districts and/or proportional lists (darcy, welch and clark 1994).6 in single-member districts, parties aim at promoting a candidate acceptable to a majority of voters in order to win the seat. putting a woman forward may jeopardise the party’s success, so parties are reluctant to nominate female candidates (matland and studlar 1996: 709). in multimember districts, votes are more evenly spread between candidates, and second and third placed candidates are also successful, increasing female candidates’ chances of success. moreover, voters are more likely to vote for a party rather than individual candidates, so that female candidates become more acceptable. however, multimember constituencies are not per se favourable for women: in a country where parties with several factions exist (as in japan) multi-member seats can accommodate each faction, negating the (perceived) advantages for women. in proportional systems, a set number of seats are allocated in accordance with the overall result of parties. prior to the election each party creates a list of candidates, in order of importance, to take up these seats. this gives the central party administration greater influence on candidate selection and provides an opportunity to include women or other minorities in their list (if so inclined). a balanced list is more likely to appeal to a larger number of voters and can show the party’s commitment to equality as well as compensate for potential shortcomings in the selection of directly elected candidates. the outcome for women can be manipulated by strategic decisions, including quotas and favourable positioning. since party lists are normally longer than the number of seats actually won, positioning women in the lower section of the list reduces their chances. quotas are often introduced to ensure that a certain number of seats are allocated to women, but different applications affect the outcome and success of affirmative measures. in international comparison, quotas are most frequently used for seats allocated through party lists. the share reserved for women usually ranges from 20 per cent to 50 per cent, with a list that alternates between male and female candidates 6 there are a number of possible variations: multi-member districts where each candidate seeks individual votes, multi-member districts with votes for party lists, and mixed systems of single-member constituencies and proportional lists. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 hermanns long road to equality bringing the highest success rate for women. quotas can be implemented either by law or by internal party rules and can be applied at different stages of the recruitment and selection process, i.e. during the process of short-listing candidates for selection within a constituency, in the selection process for electoral lists, or with a set number of parliamentary seats. the highest level of female representation can be expected in a system with a high quota for women in parliament, while a low quota for female applicants in the selection process would result in much less favourable results (norris 2001). countries around the world, in particular in scandinavia, prove that quotas on proportional lists promote women’s representation (dahlerup and freidenvall 2005, 27; darcy, welch and clark 1994). the usefulness of a quota system is contested on the grounds that there is a danger that women with insufficient qualifications may be chosen, who could stigmatise the reputation of female politicians per se and tarnish their image. other critics see no gender differences and favour the selection of women on merit rather than on gender (norris 2001; ross 2002, 196). there is also a danger that quotas may be used as window-dressing when no action beyond implementing a quota is taken. under these circumstances, female representation remains dependent on legislation and proportional lists without any attempt at removing barriers for women and creating a structure to support female politicians. in asia, taiwan provides an example for the positive effect of quotas prescribed by legislation. the election law stipulates that at least one-fifth of the seats in local councils has to be filled by women. should one party win more than four seats but fail to nominate a woman, the seat is automatically allocated to a female candidate from another party. hence, parties are inclined to nominate women and consequently these women have a chance to gain political experience (chou, clark and clark 1990, 194; clark and clark 1997, 15). as voters become used to female politicians, cultural objections to female representatives can decline. the number of female representatives in taiwan has constantly been higher than the required percentage. in 2002, the percentage of women in city and county councils reached 22 per cent (with a higher percentage in the big cities). at the national level, women also gained 22 per cent of the seats in the legislative yuan in 2001. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 hermanns long road to equality south korea has experimented with several electoral systems since 1948. while for most of the republic’s existence the electoral system prescribed single-member districts, larger multi-member districts were in use during the fifth republic (19811988). this improved the chances of success for women: in the 1985 elections, and in fact two women were able to enter the national assembly after achieving the secondbest result in their constituencies. however, when the electoral system reverted to single-member districts in 1988, these two representatives lost their seats, although they again gained the second highest vote in their district. a brief experiment with twomember districts for newly introduced regional elections was abandoned in the mid1990s. in 2005, the election law was changed again, re-introducing multi-member districts for city, county and district councils as well as proportional lists at this level of administration. this increased the share of women in local councils from 2.2 per cent to 15 per cent, with 75 per cent selected from proportional lists.7 a brief analysis shows that multi-member districts brought mixed results for women: the share of successful women in direct elections increased from 2.2 per cent to 4.3 per cent. however, the number of women winning their constituency actually declined by one-third (from 77 to 50; 2.2 per cent to 2 per cent of the total number of elected councillors), as more than half of the successful candidates (55 per cent) came second or third in their constituency. the reasons for this warrant further analysis. forms of proportional representation have been used in the national assembly since 1963. in the 1960s and 1970s, candidate lists were compiled by the government, and often included persons with little political experience but high public profile. during the early 1980s, seats were allocated from party lists in accordance with the number of seats each party had won. due to this system of preferential allocation, the number of female representatives increased but they had little effect on the promotion of women’s issues and policies. these women were described as little more than ‘ornaments on the political arena’ (sohn 1996, 116). the number of seats allocated proportionally was reduced in the sixth republic but they are still an important means for women to enter parliament. female appointees have developed greater awareness as representatives for women but their small number limits their influence. 7 there is the limitation that local elections are often decided on local issues, with no regard for gender equality. on the other hand, local politics are described as being more relevant to women and thus more likely to attract more female candidates (e.g. elkin 1999). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 hermanns long road to equality in the late 1990s, political parties began to show greater commitment to reducing gender inequality in order to project a modern image and to attract female voters. in the run-up to the presidential elections of 1997, the major parties introduced voluntary quotas for the allocation of seats on proportional lists, leading to the first occurrence of positive discrimination in the 1998 local elections. two opposition parties vowed to allocate 30%30 per cent of the seats on their proportional list to women, while the ruling party promised a 50 per cent share. the commitment of local leaders to equal representation was an important factor in the implementation of quotas. although korean parties are generally highly centralised, local branches were given some leeway in this issue. politicians at the local level were unsure about the exact percentage of the quota and it was not always enforced, particularly in more conservative rural areas (hermanns 2000, 217). after persistent pressuring and lobbying by women’s groups and government members, the national assembly promulgated changes to the political party act that included an obligatory quota for women in 2000. parties were required to allocate at least 30 per cent of the places on proportional lists to women, but there were no specific measures of enforcement or sanctions for non-compliance. the measure led to a moderate increase in female representation. in the 16th national assembly (2000-2004) the number of female lawmakers increased from 11 to 16, raising their share of seats from 2.3 per cent to 5.9 per cent. there were further changes prior to the 2002 local elections, which required that at least 50 per cent of the nominations for proportional seats and 30 per cent for direct candidacies had to be allocated to women. this latter regulation can be relatively easily circumvented by nominating women in areas where a party has little chance of winning anyway due to other factors such as regionalism. while more women entered parliament and councils on proportional lists, the success rate in directly contested constituencies increased very slowly. so far, there has been little evidence that the female representatives form a coalition across party allegiances to promote women’s issues, as they tend to follow their respective party lines. cooperation of representatives with women’s organisations is also only developing slowly and on the basis of personal contacts (that are often already established). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 hermanns long road to equality the public sphere while quotas on proportional lists play an important role, they do not explain fully the increase in women parliamentarians in the early 2000s; other factors also play a role. as mentioned above, korean society is currently going through a rapid transformation.8 economic development, modernisation, democratisation and better education and welfare have weakened traditional values and led to some rapid changes in the attitudes of korean women, but equality is far from being achieved (kendall 2002, 6; lee 2005). despite their high levels of education, many women have difficulties in finding adequate employment, so staying at home after marriage is still a preferable lifestyle for many (lett 1998; kim 2002b, 211).9 however, a growing number of women continue to work after marriage, often out of economic necessity, but their progress into higher positions such as managerial posts is slow. women are increasingly becoming more conscious about sharing economic, social and political rights and the male monopoly in the public sphere is no longer acceptable for many (lee 2005). this is expected to have long-term effects on female representation, as women’s advancement in the economy increases the pool of potential candidates for political office. korean politicians often have a background in business, academia and the government administration but women are currently still under-represented in these professions.10 results in scandinavian countries show that only when women are widely accepted as equal players in all aspects of society as well as the economy are they successful in politics (dahlerup and freidenvall 2005, 31).11 recent years have seen a change in korean political actors. in the new millennium, the old guard of politicians who had developed their political tools under authoritarian regimes is retiring. younger politicians and voters bring ideological and political change. in the second half of the 1990s, voters under the age of 40 became the largest voting block and more made inroads into political office. born after the korean war, they grew up without direct experience of poverty and deprivation and place more emphasis on democracy and human rights than on economic development at any cost 8 the changes in korean society are far too wide reaching to be covered here; for a more detailed analysis see for example kihl (2005). 9 more than half of the female workforce is employed in non-permanent positions, often in small family businesses. 10 in 2005, 10 per cent of entrepreneurs are women, 15 per cent of university teachers and 7.4 per cent of bureaucrats at level 5 and higher. 11 interestingly, in scandinavia, quotas were introduced voluntarily, and after women had already gained about 20 per cent of parliamentary seats. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 11 hermanns long road to equality (shin and rose 2000, 34). globalisation and the financial crisis of 1997 brought an end to the dominance of the conservative development model. as a result of these developments, kim dae-jung, a long-standing dissident, won the 1997 presidential elections. kim favoured more progressive ideas and personally supported gender equality in various aspects of the public sphere. the government and women’s organisations raised awareness of gender inequality and brought women’s issues into the mainstream agenda. cultural change changes in attitude towards women among voters and political parties also played a role in the increase in women politicians. in the run-up to the 2004 elections, women projected an image as possible alternatives to the existing male-dominated politics, tarnished by corruption and power struggles. incumbent female lawmakers had better performance records than their male colleagues, overcoming some of the prejudices about women’s ability to perform successfully in politics. women with parliamentary experience fared better than their male colleagues in elections: while two-thirds of the representatives in the 17th national assembly are newcomers, seven out of the ten female winners had previous parliamentary experience. by 2004, political parties had become more concerned with projecting a modern image that integrated women in their line-ups. this change resulted not only in a greater number of women in higher positions on proportional lists but also the selection of a woman as party spokesperson and thus the public face of the party. in the weeks leading up to the parliamentary elections in april 2004 all the three main parties designated a female speaker, while the main opposition party (the grand national party, gnp) also elected a woman, park geun-hye, as party president.12 these selections of female spokespersons were the first in which korean parties did not wait for legislation to promote women but did so voluntarily. 12 park is the daughter of park chung-hee and profits from a feeling of nostalgia about his presidency (mostly among older and conservative koreans). park remained in office for more than two years. this is one of the few cases where a female politician could build on family connections. in contrast to other asian countries such as japan and the philippines, few korean women have (so far) ‘inherited’ a seat vacated by a family member. one exception is hyun kyung-ja who was elected to the national assembly in 1994 after her husband lost his seat following a conviction for election law violations. she did not build a lasting career on this success. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 hermanns long road to equality women’s organisations with increasing levels of education more women have been exposed to ideas from abroad, including gender equality and feminism. the growing number of women’s studies programmes at korean universities (starting with ewha womans university in 1977) raised gender awareness in general and the number of women with genderspecific training in particular. various women’s studies departments in korea and abroad have produced prominent feminist activists, bureaucrats and policy experts. one of the distinctive features of the korean women’s movement is the extensive involvement of feminist scholars in women’s organisations and other civil groups as well as in the country’s administration. feminist academics at universities or research institutes have been involved in policy agenda setting and policy formation through participating in government committees and women’s organisations, but few have become involved in legislative politics to date. since the late 1990s, female legislators have had little influence on the promotion of women’s interests, the main actors being non-governmental organisations (ngos) representing women’s interests. historically, women’s organisations have been active in korea throughout the 20th century. during the japanese colonial rule, nationalism and liberation rather than women’s rights dominated the agenda. women were granted suffrage in 1948 but remained largely excluded from politics by cultural conventions. women’s organisations were used by government and opposition for political purposes and mobilisation. the ‘korean national council of women’, an umbrella organization founded in 1959 by middle-class women, for instance, was used as an agency to promote government policies, in particular family planning. women workers were active in labour struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s but women’s issues were regarded as being of lesser importance compared to the problems of national division, military government and suppression of the working class. under the authoritarian regimes of park and chun, women’s organisations aimed at mobilizing women to the democracy movement and chose to collaborate with male-dominated groups rather than emphasize their autonomy and independence (kim 2004, 471). due to their roots in the opposition movement, there was a general reluctance among women’s organisations to work with government agencies and to become involved in the political process. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 13 hermanns long road to equality following the successful struggle for democracy in the late 1980s, women’s organisations began to focus on women’s individual freedom, equality and human rights. democratisation allowed women’s organisations to become more professional and to diversify to reflect various strata, concerns and interests of women. genderspecific issues, including equal opportunities and equal employment, rape and trafficking in women, and sex slavery during world war ii, have come to dominate the agenda of women’s organisations. single-issue women’s organisations play a critical role in advocating women and circulating new discourses on women’s issues. the first rape crisis centre, for example, was established in 1991, bringing sexual violence onto the public agenda. however, many groups have a small number of active members and are dominated by one or a few leaders. progressive women recognised the importance of cooperation for the advancement of women’s issues and founded an umbrella organisation called ‘korean women’s association united’, with 28 members nationwide in early 1987. more conservative groups were assembled under the umbrella of the aforementioned ‘korean national council of women’ after it had gained greater independence from government influence. the two organisations cooperate to pursue their goals, unlike many other civic groups and political parties in korea that are frequently plagued by factionalism and an inability to work together. by the second half of the 1990s, most women’s groups no longer saw the state as an antagonist, and concluded that engagement in legislative politics is a suitable means of gaining influence on politics and policies. since the local elections of 1995, women’s groups have actively supported female politicians with financial contributions, manpower (!) and education. several women’s ngos have set up campaign schools to identify potential talents and train women to be successful as politicians (with moderate success). but given the low number of female politicians in korean politics, other avenues of influencing government policies are more significant. the kim dae-jung administration (1998-2003) emphasised the relationship of state and civil society and consequently, prominent ngo-leaders joined his administration, either as ministers, high-ranking officials or as advisors. in 1998, the ‘presidential commission of women’s affairs’ was created, which reported directly to the president and had ministerial status in the cabinet. by 2001, it developed into the ministry of gender equality with greater prestige and funding. the active participation of women’s groups portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 14 hermanns long road to equality in the policy-making process was encouraged. as a result, women’s organisations emerged as a new and influential social force. the women’s movement had produced a pool of well-qualified and trained activists who were willing to cross over into the political sphere, although not as elected representatives. some activists have been invited on to government committees, which are one of the major mechanisms in the policy-making process. the appointment of two veteran leaders of women’s groups to kim’s cabinet strengthened the ties with women’s organisations. academics, women’s movement activists and legal experts were recruited for the ‘presidential commission of women’s affairs’, ministries and also for the new women’s offices in selected ministries. other women activists act as advisors to a number of committees and ministries and also to the ‘special committee for women’s affairs’ in the national assembly, which serves as a channel to support the enactment and revision of the laws relating to women. in addition, feminist academics conduct government-commissioned research and thus promote women’s policies. ngos are permitted to submit proposals for legislations to the committee and these are often accepted by both the committee and the national assembly with few changes. korean legislative practices help: there is often only limited scrutiny and debate over proposed legislation, which is passed quickly to be amended later. in the case of the family violence prevention act, over 95 per cent of the original ngo-draft was accepted, although its outlook was far more progressive than that of the general populace (jones 2004, 10). proposals for legislations submitted by the ministry of gender equality are also often influenced substantially by women’s organisations (yang 2002, 80). the cooperation between feminists within government, feminist academics and women’s organisations enabled the development and implementation of innovative and radical policies in korea, including amendments to equal employment acts, the abolition of the family-register system and legislation outlawing sexual violence, prostitution and domestic violence (south korea is the only country in east asia with relevant legislation). women’s organisations influence government policies not only through well-qualified and trained activists but also undertake efforts to mobilise the general public for their causes, using diverse strategies such as lobbying, signature collections, demonstrations, and issue fighting. while women’s organisations are portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 15 hermanns long road to equality relatively well organised, groups that could present opposition are less coordinated. conservative associations such as confucian organisations have only a small active following that cannot muster substantial opposition. political parties are also in a weak position to oppose legislative changes in favour of women. they depend on a broad basis of voters and thus aim at appealing to as many voters as possible, including women. despite the advances in women’s policies there remain some concerns. the involvement of women in the policy making process alone does not lead to societal change. the new policies were implemented relatively quickly and without general societal consensus. the discrepancy between the laws and policies promulgated and the reality remains a problem as there is a significant gap between de jure and de facto gender equality. the public as well as government officials often lack information and understanding of new policies such as anti-harassment measures. the administration is habitually slow in implementing policies as bureaucrats are (sometimes) resisting change. this situation is reminiscent of the government’s economic policies following the financial crisis of 1997. while the government promoted the economic opening up of the country, including foreign investment, many koreans remained opposed to such policies (jeon and ahn 2000, 37). as a result, both investors and koreans felt disadvantaged and little change occurred. to overcome these shortcomings the government and (women’s) ngos need to increase public education and information and lead by example. the institutionalisation of the women’s movement and its interdependence with the government has been criticised on several grounds, including concerns about the weakening of the movement’s orientation, the diluted role as a critical edge and activities tailored by government-funded projects. activists who joined the government were reprimanded for their decision to change sides and ‘abandon’ civil movements. there was even a joke that ngo stood for ‘next government official’. the departure of several leading figures left some women’s groups with a much-weakened leadership. this is a precarious development as the presence of a strong, autonomous women’s movement has been identified as a necessary condition for further progress in women’s policy (hassim 2003, 24). not only the existence, but also the autonomy of women’s groups is important for their success in influencing policy (weldon 2002, 1161). only portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 16 hermanns long road to equality an autonomous women’s movement can criticise government policies and improve substantive representation in the policy-making process. the autonomy of the women’s movement with its many members is also undermined by funding issues. many of the more progressive groups had been denied government funding previously but became eligible for support from the government in the late 1990s, although at a very low level.13 major women’s organisations, including ‘korean women’s association united’, became incorporated in order to secure their formal legitimacy and gain access to state funds. other civil groups, however, have declined government support to maintain their independence (most prominently one of the biggest ngos ‘people’s solidarity for participatory democracy’). since there is only finite funding available, competition for government sponsorship erupted, leading to friction within the women’s movement. government support is also targeted at certain types of projects, steering activities in one direction, so that some groups have changed their focus in order to be able to access government funds (kim 2004). critics also point out that institutionalisation brought a less democratic decision-making process and increased the ‘oligarchy’ of a few organizations in the movement (kim 2002a). another point of criticism is that the concerns of the most disadvantaged women, such as working-class women, women in poor and rural areas, migrant women and sexual minority groups tend to be given less priority. this is partly explained by the background of activists and feminist academics who are mostly from a middle-class background and well educated (many have a post-graduate degree from overseas). still a long road ahead democratisation so far has failed to empower korean women and lead to substantive representation. the political process continues to be dominated by a masculine public sphere that largely excludes women from the decision-making process. gender discriminating attitudes among the political elites continue to function as important barriers to women’s representation in politics. the pace of increase in female participation has been slow, indicating that in terms of descriptive representation in legislatures the process of democratic consolidation in korea is still far from 13 the main funding body, the ministry of gender equality, received only 0.28 per cent of the total government budget in 2002. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 17 hermanns long road to equality completed.14 it was only in the late 1990s that the effects of modernisation reached korean politics and political parties recognised the importance of female voters and of gender equality in representation. a combined effort by very active women’s organisations and a progressive government was necessary to break down some of the barriers to female representation. women’s organisations play an important role in bringing women’s issues onto the mainstream agenda and in promoting women’s policies. female politicians profit from this directly through government appointments and indirectly through the implementation of quotas that increase female legislative representation. while the cooperation between government and women’s organisations has been successful so far, in the long term a cosy relationship between government and ngos does not further democratic consolidation. in a representative democracy, elected legislators, rather than ngos, should drive policy decisions. the korean example also demonstrates that the number of female representatives in legislatures alone is not a good measurement for the position of women in a society in general. gender equality in politics and society is not reached in a linear process, simply requiring a larger number of women in parliament to promote women’s policies. substantive representation does not necessarily require descriptive representation or a large number of female representatives. societal changes are induced by a number of interdependent factors. the gem for korea reveals this: despite the success of female representatives in 2004, korea climbed only nine ranks to 59 in the 2005 report (undp 2005), as korean women remain under-represented in professional and technical fields as well as in administrative positions. further changes in attitudes about a woman’s role in society are necessary to overcome this. gender equality has to enter the public discourse as a major concern; one that is actively addressed by all societal groups. the democratic process alone is not sufficient to engage and promote women politicians through active recruitment and strategic development. women are far less politicised and thus less inclined to become politically active than korean men (shin 1999, 112). the government, political parties and ngos have to make a concerted effort to increase women’s representation. they need to provide the financial, educational and political support necessary to launch female political careers. moreover, 14 see also shin (1999) and kihl (2005) on the slow progress of korean democratic consolidation. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 18 hermanns long road to equality the public has to become more supportive of female politicians. currently, most female politicians have a background in civil society movements but they provide a limited pool of candidates. without new recruits there is the possibility that female representation will plateau at its current level without further sustainable growth. quotas have been successful in bringing more women into the national assembly, a trend that continued in local and regional elections in may 2006. however, the majority of women entered the assembly via proportional lists, which highlights the difficulties to win in direct electoral contests. the results indicate that there still is a long road ahead before equality is achieved in korean politics. reference list carroll, s.j. 2001, ‘representing women: women state legislators as agents of policy-related change’ in the impact of women in public office, s. j. carroll (ed.), indiana university press, bloomington, 3-21. chou, b., clark, c. & clark, j. 1990, women in taiwanese politics: overcoming barriers to women's participation in a modernizing society, lynne rienner, boulder. clark, j. & clark, c. 1997; ‘women and democratization in taiwan: a beginning more than a culmination’, paper presented at the 19th international political science association conference, seoul. dahlerup, d. & freidenvall, l. 2005, ‘quotas as a 'fast track' to equal representation for women’, international feminist journal of politics, vol. 7, no. 1, 26-48. darcy, r., welch, s. & clark, j.1994, women, elections, and representation, university of nebraska press, lincoln. diamond, l.j. & kim, b. (eds) 2000, consolidating democracy in south korea, lynne rienner, boulder. elkin, s.l. 1999, ‘citizen competition and the design of democratic institutions’, in citizen competence and democratic institutions, s.l. elkin and k.e. soltan (eds), pennsylvania state university press, university park, 385-404. hassim, s. 2003, ‘the gender pact and democratic consolidation: institutionalizing gender equality in the south african state’, feminist studies, vol. 29, no. 3, 504528. hermanns, h. 2000, ‘the state of democratic consolidation in korea: decentralisation and participation in local politics, 1988-1998’, phd thesis, university of newcastle-upon-tyne. international parliamentary union (ipu) 2005, women in national parliaments, world classification [online] available: http://www.ipu.org/wmne/arc/classif151200.htm [accessed 10/05/2005]. jeon, b. & ahn, s. 2000, ‘korean attitudes toward foreign firms’, in the two koreas in 2000: sustaining recovery and seeking reconciliation, p. köllner (ed.), korea economic institute of america, washington, 29-41. jones, n. 2004, ‘institutional windows: assessing the scope for civil society-state engagement in democratizing south korea’, paper presented at the international conference on political challenges and democratic institutions, taipei, department of political science, national taiwan university. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 19 hermanns long road to equality kendall, l. 2002, ‘introduction’ in under construction: the gendering of modernity, class, and consumption in the republic of korea, l. kendall (ed.), university of hawai'i press, honolulu, 1-24. kihl, y. 2005, transforming korean politics: democracy, reform, and culture, m.e. sharpe, armonk. kim, s. 2002a, ‘a frame analysis of women's policies of korean government and women's movements in the 1980s and 1990s’, korea journal, vol. 42, no. 2, 536. ——— 2002b, ‘gender policy and the new status of women in south korea’ in korea in transition: three years under the kim dae-jung government, c. moon and d. i. steinberg (eds.), yonsei university press, seoul, 207-226. ——— 2004, ‘consolidating women's rights in south korea: the role of women's movements in the democratization’, korea observer, vol. 35, no. 3, 463-483. kim, s. & kim m. 1993, ‘evaluation report on korean women's participation in politics’, women's studies forum, vol. 9, 231-245. kim, y. & chun k. 1996, ‘a study of the political and social consciousness of korean women’, women’s studies forum, vol. 2, 117-147. lee, m. 1996, ‘women's education, work, and marriage in korea: women's lives under institutional conflict’, phd thesis, university of california. lee, k. 2005, ‘evolution of women's employment and gender discrimination in korea’, korea focus, vol.13, no. 5, 136-148. lett, d.p. 1998, in pursuit of status: the making of south korea's "new" urban middle class, harvard-hallym series in korean studies, cambridge. lijphart, a. 1994, electoral systems and party systems: a study of 27 democracies, 1945-1990, oxford university press, new york. lovenduski, j. & norris, p. (eds) 1993, gender and party politics, sage, london. matland, r.e. & studlar, d.t. 1996, ‘the contagion of women candidates in smd and pr electoral systems: canada and norway’, journal of politics, vol. 58, no. 3, 707-733. moon, s. 2003,‘redrafting democratization through women’s representation and participation in the republic of korea’ in korea’s democratization, ed. s. s. kim, cambridge university press, cambridge, 107-154. norris, p. 1987, politics and sexual equality: the comparative position of women in western democracies, wheatsheaf, brighton. norris, p. 2001, ‘breaking the barriers: positive discrimination policies for women’, in has liberalism failed women? assuring equal representation in europe and the united states, j. klausen and c. s. maier (eds), palgrave, new york, 89-110. paek, y. 1997, ‘politics of implementing the beijing commitments in selected countries: the korean experience’, paper presented at the 19th international political science association conference, seoul. pitkin, h. 1967, the concept of representation, university of california press, berkeley. ross, k. 2002, ‘women's place in a 'male' space: gender and effect in parliamentary contexts’, parliamentary affairs, vol. 55, no. 1, 189-201. shin, d. 1999, mass politics and culture in democratizing korea, cambridge university press, cambridge. shin, d. & rose, r. 2000, new korea barometer survey 1999, vol. 327, studies in public policy, university of strathclyde, centre for the study of public policy, glasgow. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 20 hermanns long road to equality sohn, b. 1996, ‘uphill battle for women's representation’, korea focus, vol. 4, no. 3, 116-118. swers, m.l. 2001, ‘research on women in legislatures: what have we learned, where are we going?’ women and politics, vol. 23, nos. 1-2, 167-185. united nations development programme (undp) 1995, human development report 1995 [online] available: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/1995/en/pdf/hdr_1995_ch1.pdf [accessed 10/08/2005]. ——— 2004, human development report 2004 [online] available: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2004/pdf/hdr04_complete.pdf [accessed 10/08/2005]. ——— 2005, human development report 2005; gender empowerment measure [online] available: http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/indicators.cfm?x=238&y=2&z=1 [accessed 12/12/2005]. weldon, s.l. 2002, ‘beyond bodies: institutional sources of representation for women in democratic policymaking’, journal of politics, vol. 64, no. 4, 1153-74. yang, h. 2002, ‘unfinished tasks for korean family policy in the 1990s: maternity protection policy and abolition of the family-head system’, korea journal, vol. 42, no. 2, 68-99. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 21 women in south korean politics: a long road to equality heike hermanns, australian national university table 1: gem and hdi, 1995 democratisation and procedural changes women’s organisations still a long road ahead reference list beyond the practical dilemmas and conceptual reductions: the emergence of an ‘accommodative consciousness’ in the alternative globalization movement portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal beyond practical dilemmas and conceptual reductions: the emergence of an ‘accommodative consciousness’ in the alternative globalization movement s. a. hamed hosseini, australian national university a simple survey of participant groups and organizations in the recent mobilizations against the neo-liberal corporate-led globalism, generally known as the anti-globalization movement, can show that many supposedly contradictory orientations have contributed to the field of resistance. groups of reformists and revolutionaries, localists and universalists, identitybased and ideologically motivated initiatives, particularists and universalists, communitarian and pluralists, modernists and postmodernists, together have structured the multitudinous nature of the global resistance against neo-liberal policies, international leading organizations such as the world trade organisation (wto) and the new imperialist developments (starr 2000). however, what needs examining is the movement’s potential for new perspectives that imply a progressive accommodation between the contradictory orientations in alliances and solidarity networks. initial manifestations of such potential have come into view in recent protest events in the form of coalitions, solidarity networks, affinity groups, in the growing number of social and online forums, and in the form of networking and exchanging ideas aimed at developing alternatives to the current capitalist globalization forces. as this article argues, these growing manifestations in the anti-globalization movement can hardly be understood in terms of mainstream approaches in social movement studies. rather, scholars are required to reassess dominant lines of theoretical controversy—rooted in the division between the so-called new social movements and old social movements—as means of understanding current global movements and their historical context. they are also required to set up efforts to characterize global movements in terms of the possibilities that hosseini alternative globalization movement these movements themselves are endowed with, in order to synthesize their practical orientations. many theoretical and intellectual controversies over the cognitive nature of the post-1960s democratic movements have persisted unresolved and extended into arguments about the characteristics of global social movements. table 1 represents the ideational attributes of the current global social movements in the form of ten extracted polarities around which both the controversial academic description of the movement and the ideological trends are constructed. table 1: lines of controversies about the cognitive features of the post 1970s democratic movements 1 the bipolar axis of description in current social movement studies soft praxis more subjective in orientation hard praxis more objective in orientation the individual the communal, collective recognition redistribution the personal, private the political, public reform revolution, abolition the local the global fluidity, diversity solidarity, unity, certainty identity, life-style politics ideology, emancipatory & strategic politics the social-cultural the political-economic the postmaterial the material the particular the universal more agential and more structural more post-modernist and more modernist as the table shows the ten polarities or the bipolar continua of controversy about the cognitive features of recent movements can be summed up in a general axis that i label as the axis of soft praxis—hard praxis. soft praxis includes those features that are more subjective and agential in nature, such as being more identity-based, self-recognition based, 1 these are at the same time the polarities around which the modes of in-praxis thought are constructed. in order to make it easier for readers to follow the argument around the dichotomic concepts, they are all typed in italic throughout this article. 2 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement postmaterialist, or being more cultural rather than being more materialist, resource-oriented, or political-ideological in orientation. all these polarities have shaped the main lines of controversy between the scholars influenced by the culturalist turn in social sciences, on the one hand, and those who have retained structuralist approaches over describing the post1960s democratic movements, on the other.2 despite their contrasts, the new social movement (nsm) approach, post-modernist perspectives, and social constructionism have provided a subjectivist-culturalist shift in social movement studies since the 1970s. the common feature among these subjectivist tendencies is that they consider an historical discontinuity or a paradigmatic shift between two phases of modernity, or in the case of post-structuralism, between modernity and post-modernity. they argue that this historical shift has happened in modern society as a whole, that is, a new totality has taken place, which implies new ways of theorizing its social forces. albeit with different emphases on the polarities, the scholars influenced by the culturalist shift have argued that the recent movements, including the anti-globalization movement, should be categorized as soft praxes, rather than hard praxes, in dealing with the new totality of modern society (see melucci 1995; melucci 1996; melucci and avritzer 2000; mcdonald 2002; castells 2004; farro 2004). for instance, for melucci (1989; 1996), the newly emerging totality is the ‘semiotic aspects of a postmodern information society’ and the numerous ways in which these elements are reflected in an increasingly individualized context of activism. for the early castells (1983), this structural transformation during the 1970s is summed up in the capitalist transformation of urban space alongside the state’s role in collective consumption. nonetheless, for the late castells (1997), the shift during the 1980s-1990s is the emergence of the ‘network society’ in which information production increasingly dominates the production of wealth and free capital from restraint. for habermas (1984; 1987), there is a principal tendency in advanced capitalist political economy to instrumentally dominate the communicative lifeworld. therefore, his understanding of the post-1970s’ movements is more concerned with their potential in defending the lifeworld which is essentially cultural and intersubjective in nature. 2 although scholars have shown different emphases on the polarities, i deal with them equally since the unit of my review is not personal views but the metatheoretical paradigms, i.e. the soft and the hard praxis. 3 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement and, for touraine (1971; 1981; 1985), it is the post-industrial programmed society as a new context in which social movements challenge authorities for control of knowledge and information. touraine claims that there is a central contradiction for each social formation and accordingly there is one predominant social movement (sm) in response to the contradiction (see touraine 2000). this postist orientation towards soft praxis, drawing on the participation of identity-based and particularist movements in the global field of resistance, has finally entailed overemphasizing fluidity, subjectivity, diversity, individuality, and particularity. such an ideological shift may be seen not so much as an overthrow of rationalist approaches, but more as a switch from the ‘objective’ to the ‘subjective’ pole within the core dualism of western modern thought (see tew 2002: 22). in contrast to the culturalist approaches, however, some scholars by drawing on the cosmopolitanist and rationalist trends within the diverse global field of resistance attribute the hard praxis characteristics (table 1, right column) to the current global movements. though with different emphases on different hard praxis attributes, they believe the movement is better characterizable as ideology-based, political, universalist, emancipatory and redistribution-oriented (see della porta and kriesi 1999; cohen and rai 2000b; laxer 2001; busby 2002; chase-dunn 2002; burgmann 2003; johnston and laxer 2003). 1. from ‘anti-globalization’ as a label to ‘alter-globalization’ as an ideal-construct despite the abovementioned dualist arguments, the newly developed perspectives inside the global field of resistance convey a new mode of social thought, coined here the accommodative cognition. in this article, in order to overcome the difficulties of examining the whole diverse global field of resistance for its newly evolved ideological elements, i start by constructing an ideal-type of the so-called anti-globalization movement. the ideal-typical description of the movement is constructed by accentuating those notions of the movement which cannot be easily understood based on dominant theoretical frames. i call this idealconstruction the alter-globalization movement, which can be used as an analytical tool to examine different participant groups, organizations, individuals, and intellectuals within the global field of resistance for the novelty of their styles of thought. 4 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement what i mean by alter-globalization is an ideological trend within the current global resistance to redefine globalization in an alternative way. alter-globalization, therefore, attempts to rebuild global governance and transnational relations not just through institutional reforms but also, and mainly, through the plural participation of grassroots from below in transnational solidarity networks. it aims to put the totality of globalization on a genuinely democratic track. it has some features analogous with both identity politics and cosmopolitanism. like cosmopolitanism, it consists of a type of internationalist ambition. however, it is not based on a proposition of the possibility of one single emancipatory subject (like the working class), one conflict, one universal alternative, or even one institution-based reformist model for the increasingly complex world. neither is it based on an ignorance of localities and people’s identities on the ground. universalist demands are particularly associated with the socialist movement. however, some new forms of universalism are recently re-articulated by scholars such as held (1995; 2003; 2004), mcgrew (1997), falk (1993; 1997; 2000), and holden (1999) and the think tanks of liberal internationalism, like the commission of global governance.3 based on these political demands, the movement should put pressure on international institutions to merge towards reforming their structures based on a moderated social democratic model, as in the case of attac. in contrast, the particularist strands have mainly reconstructed their resistance against uneven globalization based on particular/local concerns. the particularist trend is a desire to resist globalization processes with hegemonic or homogenizing dispositions, by publicizing them as devastative for specific identities and civil rights, such as women’s reactions to the organization of workplaces in the global south, or homosexual reactions to the far right initiatives associated with neo-liberalism. at the same time, it is a desire for particular-local concerns, such as the ecological concerns about the impact of international trade agreements on the environment, job security, employment, and 3 ‘in january 1995 the commission on global governance (1995a; 1995b) published its report on how to strengthen and reform global governance in order to manage global affairs in response to the security needs of all people and the planet rather than the needs of states only. according to the commission, the un will have to play a vital role in future global governance. most of the proposals thus focus on reform of the un system. however, observers agree that no matter how overdue reforms are, the commission has failed to put any of its reform proposals on the political agenda’ (steen and tryggestad 1996, 85). falk criticizes the report as falling ‘between two stools: it is too reformist and populist to appeal to elites, but it is not radical enough to satisfy activists in global civil society’ (falk 1995, 563). 5 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement health issues in a particular region. this sort of resistance introduces some alternative ideas but not as comprehensive as the globalization process. therefore, the particularist projects tend to be particularistic in substance although transnational in structure, as in the case of jubilee 2000 and the international campaign to ban landmines. most of the contributions to recent global resistance by so-called nsms, or their legacy, can be categorized as the bearers of global particularism when they reconstruct and rearticulate their collective identities, concerns and democratic orientations in relation to recent global changes (‘think global, act local’). however, the alter-globalization mode of contention does not see an indispensable antagonism between universal norms and particular demands for autonomy. similarly, the alter-globalization trend does not consider antagonism between other dualist orientations such as unity/diversity, material/postmaterial, socio-cultural/political-economic, local/global, communal/individual, identity/ideology, private/public, reform/revolution, lifepolitics/emancipatory-politics, and recognition/redistribution. the assumption of antagonism between these interrelated dichotomies had been dominant in both post-1970s social activism and sociological theories in differentiating between new and old social movements. during the 1990s, many and various movements—including environmental, women’s and indigenous people’s movements—started creating transnational affiliations and exploiting sources of transnational leverage. through these processes of transnationalization, the movements opened a new scope for transcending the dualities between local and global, and universal and particular. this is a specific form of logic based on which local autonomy and universal norms are not seen as contradictory (for some exemplary cases in this stage of transformation, see carr 2002; goodman 2002; grenfell 2002; sales 2002). however, the outcome of such conversion can be interpreted as a process of reconstructing particular concerns in relation to global issues rather than a significant evolution in the basic assumptions of cognition. the alter-globalization trend has developed since the late 1990s out of such paradoxical experience of transnational coalitions around particular concerns and their particularist failures in addressing the systemic problems. it can provide a challenge to all predominant modes of social knowledge. the trend, as i will discuss, has a strong 6 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement cognitive capacity to develop a new historical subjectivity that is able to balance the dualities and inclusively accommodate lines of social polarization such as class, gender, race and so on in systemic interpretations of global complexities. the cognitive elements of this new mode of subjectivity-consciousness can be found disparately among analytical and normative discourses raised by the movement through both confronting the current processes of globalization and contesting the retroactive forces of resistance, i.e. particularism and cosmopolitanism. those who evidence such a mode of knowledge usually call for democratization at both the local-community and the global levels. there are common and universally confirmed themes such as solidarity, co-operation, consensus, affinity, openness, autonomy, equality, participation, and diversity among wellidentified identities (ashman 2004, 148-9). at the level of social consciousness, as köhler and wissen say of the urban branches of the movement, ‘while criticizing and acting upon very local/material urban issues, they often explicitly relate and politicize these issues in a broader context and articulate their criticism on various spatial scales—not only on a local but also on a global scale’ (2003, 943). there are also other strong continuities between the movement and the particularist trend, in terms of their anti-authoritarian, self-determinist, and autonomist perspectives. however, the movement is a field for building consent and coordination among differential and fragmented goals. the alter-globalization movement has shown a systemic consciousness about social problems, by attributing them to the endogenous and inherent features of current social organization. yet, it is awkward to expect the emergence of any single comprehensive political programme for systemic change that will create a clear anti-systemic consciousness at a massive level, as is anticipated by fotopoulos (2001) and others. the label, alter-globalization, in this article, also roughly refers to the whole global resistance, since the present field of ideational contention will be better identified with its newly proactive prospect in challenging dominant reductionist modes of thought. in addition, the movement has entered an affirmative stage (‘another world is possible’), whether with reformist or radically transformative proposals. although it is impossible to identify the alterglobalization trend as a unified, independent, and consolidated movement, there are 7 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement significant signs of an evolving accommodative mode of cognition among various initiatives that are beyond pragmatic alliances against a common enemy. the features/dimensions of this mode of thought that determine its ‘accommodative’ or ‘synthetic’ nature are as follows: 1. transcending the polarity of soft-praxis/hard-praxis and its associated intellectual dualisms—that are rooted in the 1970s-1980s’ controversies between modernists and post-modernists, structuralists and post-structuralists, and marxists and post-marxists. 2. going beyond the incompatible conceptions of social differentials—around issues like gender, race, cultural identity, individuality, and community—in establishing a flexible solidarity based on a collaborative inclusion of the other into the definition of self. 3. understanding the complexity of globalization processes, and the world system in terms of their unevenness, contradictions, and multidimensionality: this is associated with a systemic conception of particular events in relation to the main globalization processes without overlooking their specific socio-cultural contexts. 2. the alter-globalization movement: beyond or between hard and soft? concerns about the paradoxical nature of the current global field of resistance are not restricted to academic arguments. similar to abovementioned academic debates, the concerns are explicitly reflected in the form of dual concepts within a variety of activists’ descriptions of the whole movement. is the movement wandering between these paradoxes or able to go beyond them by inventing new practical models and concepts? the activist editors of the book the world social forum: challenging empires vigilantly pose a question about whether a new internationalism is taking place, and whether such an internationalism could be based on a ‘plural global solidarity’ (sen, et al. 2004, 1). thomas ponniah and william f. fisher (2003, 8-9), two american academic-activists, analyzing the 2002 conference documents of the world social forum (wsf), derive five contradictory orientations within the field: ‘revolution versus reform’, ‘environment versus economy’, ‘human rights versus protectionism’, the ‘universality of values versus cultural diversity’, and ‘local versus global.’ 8 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement such concerns are also normatively reflected in the alternative solutions drawn by activists. the activist carola reintjas introduces solidarity economy, as discussed in a set of workshops in the third wsf, as an accommodation between contradictions. ‘solidarity economy designates all production, distribution, and consumption activities that contribute to the democratization of the economy based on citizen commitments both at a local and global level. solidarity economy is a dynamics of reciprocity and solidarity which links individual interests to the collective interest’ (reintjas 2002, my emphases). hilary wainwright, an activist veteran of the late sixties, compares the global movement with both the so-called old and new social movements. as she declares, the global movement is tackling the problems that defeated the post-1960s movements, like feminism and environmentalism. for her, the common cognitive features between the global movement and the movements of the 1970s-1980s—in contrast to the old labour movements—can be summarized as understanding the importance of practical knowledge and transformative power of the people organized from below. this is a shift from considering structured relations—such as political-economic institutions—as the major sources of social change towards considering human agency itself as the premium basis (see wainwright 2004, xviii). however, for the alter-globalization trend, in contrast with the 1970s-1980s movements, the organizational challenge is more related to the modes of sharing the abovementioned knowledge and power of creativity across all groups. therefore, different new horizontal networking initiatives for sharing knowledge and experience have been invented, and still more need to be created. yet, what is obvious is that this situation has resulted in the emergence of a broader conception of alliance among activists. at the same time, many groups, in order to preserve the openness of opened spaces, attempt to ground these organizational structures in the principles of a deeper, participatory democracy. in sum, the alter-globalization movement has incorporated many of the orientations and practices of radical 1970s-1980s movement activism. however, the capacity of the movement to imagine the interconnection between different social issues at different levels of reality has resulted in the emergence of a new project to oppose capitalism. this project resembles the original demands of early labour and anarchist movements before wwi which was abandoned mainly after wwii by the social democratic compromise of labour and capital, 9 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement until the recent retreat of the welfare state in the 1980s (see burgmann 2003 for the incorporated labour elements; and see day 2004 for the subsumed anarchist logic of affinity). the other feature of the alter-globalization movement is its special strategy in changing prevalent political and economic institutions, which is beyond the dilemma of revolution and reform. as the possibilities of both revolution and reform have been exhausted, practices of structural renewal are being implemented by some of the most energetic movements involved in the global field of resistance (day 2004). following gorz (1967), one may call it a ‘revolutionary reform’ or ‘non-reformist reform’ (referenced by macewan 1999, 15). for academic-activist peter waterman, both reformist and radical trends need to accommodate each other in the context of current global resistance (2003). eschle points out that the global democratic schemes developed out of recent resistance have offered ‘an alternative to both reformist complacency and the revolutionary model of change, one that aspires to transform social and political structures through complex processes of societal selforganisation’ (2002, 331). in early protests like those of seattle 1999 and washington 2000, the slogan ‘fix it or nix it’ gained popularity, meaning that international financial institutions like the wto must either change their ways by addressing non-trade issues like human rights, or be abolished (healy 2000). such slogans might seem a catch-cry or a strategic choice facing the movement, but as munck (2003) mentions, they convey an ‘all or nothing’ perspective. instead, fundamental reforms in global rules are needed to facilitate the emergence of alternative institutions. for unger, ‘reform is radical when it addresses and changes the basic arrangements of a society: its formative structure of institutions and enacted beliefs’ (1998, 18-9). adler and mittelman (2004) in surveying protesters’ attitudes about reforming or abolishing the international financial institutions (ifis), find that many protesters believe that both the reformist and abolitionist positions are bound up with a broader protest against capitalism and us policy. most prefer to describe their reasons for joining the protest in terms of overall ‘ends’ like a ‘democratic, just and ecologically sane economy’, rather than in terms of ‘means’ like reform or abolition. however, when they are forced by the interviewer to choose between reform and abolition, just 6 percent identify the abolition and 20 percent identify the reform of ifis as the main reason. 10 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement in contrast to both reformism and revolutionism, the alternative orientations raised by the alter-globalization movement focus on building parallel independent institutions not only for organizing actions but also for articulating new ideas, establishing democratically executable political-economic projects and alternative media. the first wsf in porto alegre itself was established as a parallel event at the same time as the world economic forum meeting in davos, switzerland. by stressing the ‘social’ rather than the ‘economic’, the ‘political’ and even the ‘political economic’, the forum gives priority to those aspects of life that have always been reduced, if not totally ignored, in rationalist and neo-liberalist interpretations of social life. the ‘social’ cannot be as easily divided into private and public as the political and economic have been divided so far in dominant discourses. the other outstanding instance is the independent media centre (indymedia),4 which is a network of collectively run media outlets, established in 1999 by various independent and alternative media organizations. it now has branches all over the world’s major cities in parallel to corporate media. discussing the reemergence of the anarchist logic of affinity among the youngest forces of the alterglobalization movement, day summarizes the key element of such logic as follows: a desire to create alternatives to state and corporate forms of social organization, working ‘alongside’ the existing institutions; proceeding in this via disengagement and reconstruction rather than by reform or revolution; with the end of creating not a new knowable totality (counter-hegemony), but of enabling experiments and the emergence of new forms of subjectivity; and finally, focusing on relations between these subjects, in the name of inventing new forms of community. (2004, 740, my emphasis) the antagonism between the politics of emancipation or total liberation, attributed to the movements in the era of modernism-industrialization, and the politics of life style or local resistance is also questionable, regarding the current forms of cognitive resistance and the evolution of the concept of emancipation itself. pieterse shows that although emancipation dates from the enlightenment through appeals to freedom and equality, progress and reason, it has been reconstructed and redefined in a diversity of projects even during the culmination of new social movements and postmodern theories. reason, equal rights, liberal ideas, religious thoughts, history and self-determination are among sources of emancipatory movements (see pieterse 1992, 16-7). 4 its website address is: www.indymedia.org . 11 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 http://www.indymedia.org/ hosseini alternative globalization movement the concept of emancipation is the subject of consideration inside the intellectual field shaped around global resistance. according to the ‘reinventing social emancipation’ website, an international research project defined by a scholar-intellectual network:5 the paradigm of social emancipation developed by western modernity is undergoing a deep and final crisis. social emancipation must, therefore, be reinvented. it must be understood as a form of counterhegemonic globalization relying on local-global linkages and alliances among social groups around the world which go on resisting social exclusion, exploitation and oppression caused by hegemonic neoliberal globalization. (reinventing social emancipation website 1999) for waterman, the concept of ‘emancipation’ is still relevant especially in a self-reflective manner to free ‘ourselves’, as the subjects of the process we are trying to project, from our history and old paradigms, such as the emancipation of labour internationalism from trade unionism, socialism and marxism. therefore, hegemonic neo-liberal globalization as an external factor is not the only source of subjugation. while in both reformist and revolutionist paradigms problems are defined as externally oriented, the accommodative definition of emancipation is more transformative and self-reflective. another feature of accommodative cognition is the pluralistic reconciliation between material interests and moral (so-called post-material) values. many of the issues that emerged in the post-cold war era are constructed in relation to the biased processes of globalization, the rise of economic interdependence, and globalist ideological values (see busby 2002). the resistance against neo-liberal globalization is not a self-interested class movement; nor is it for the sake of its participants’ particular styles of life (alfaro 2004). rather it is a massive struggle against all unequal and homogenizing global relations of power that have aimed to suppress a variety of both material interests and life-styles. hence, such a resistance could be interpreted as a massive struggle by the variety of identities and interests to save diversity itself, whether bio, cultural or social, as an actual norm and even a natural endowment. the multi-scalar nature of globalization processes and the asymmetrical interrelations between the scales or levels—local, national, regional, and global—are acknowledged in many analytical and strategic accounts expressed in the field. the call for equality and justice between localities by the alter-globalization movement is also a call for ending dissonance 5 see http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/emancipa/en/ . 12 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/emancipa/en/ hosseini alternative globalization movement between the scales due to the unjust exchanges of resources and unequal distribution of income. munck (2003) argues that it is necessary to move beyond the simple binary opposition of ‘globalization from above’ versus ‘globalization from below’ or the even simpler ‘global=bad, local=good’. not only do these conceptions entail a geographical fetishism but they also imply ‘levels’ in society in a way that is quite disabling. santiago (2004), a filipino feminist activist, calls for more attention to the issue of ‘structure’, i.e. organizing participants into more protractile organizations, in the wsf (2004: xvi). according to her, activists must not be so concerned with their own use of power that it goes against diversity. such a demand for the structuration of an open space requires a compromise between the fluidity of networks and the structural stability of the whole movement. post-anarchist activist ezequiel adamovsky (2005) argues that the movement has reached a crossroads. it needs a new political focus, i.e. inventing ‘institutions of a new type’ that embody not hierarchies of power but cooperation among equals. the commoner, a new autonomist marxist-libertarian web journal,6 which has developed new conceptions of ‘common’, ‘enclosure’ and ‘community’, with regard to the contemporary capitalist globalization processes argues for the relevance of these concepts in addressing current hegemonic processes and oppositional forces.7 the initiators of the journal, known as commoners, who have been active in the european social forums, do not see a contradiction between their new conception of community and individual subjectivities, whereas both the particularity and universality of the conditions are reserved in this conception. franco barchiesi (2003), a commoner, distinguishes between ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ uses of the concept of community in the context of globalization. the retrogressive sense of community is grounded on authoritarian and exclusionist values, imposing a homogeneity that necessarily associates any vision of the local community defined as a mere opposition with the global. de angelis, a london-based italian academic behind the commoner, defines an alternative definition of community as ‘social networks of mutual aids, solidarity, and practice of human 6 the journal is an italian edited but english language free access online journal on: http://www.thecommoner.org.uk . 7 ‘the very concept of community can still be a useful tool of analysis in spite of all its limitations’ (barchiesi 2003). 13 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 http://www.thecommoner.org.uk/ hosseini alternative globalization movement exchange that are not reduced to the market form’ (de angelis 2003, 1). as he emphasizes, the place of these networks does not need to be bound to locality, but such communities can operate both in local and through trans-local places. many social practices using modern communication technologies create trans-local spaces in which communities operate to complement local places. therefore, in this definition of community, the public and private spheres of life, and individuality and collectivity are not regarded as contradictory polarities, since they are linked in human interactions around ‘commons’. as is obvious, these conceptions of ‘community’ and ‘common’, regardless of critiques about their plausibility and validity, differ from static and traditional definitions. these theorized ‘communing collectives’ in the context of global resistance, named as communities by commoners, are considered as real social agents of change which are as individual as they are collective, as local as global, and as personal as political. in some, underlying accommodative consciousness and solidarity is a new general weltanschauung in which reductionist modes of thought are renounced. 3. accommodating the other: beyond fragmenting conceptions of social divisions the social divisions of class, gender, ethnicity, race, nationality, sexual orientations, etc. lie at the very heart of today’s societies (anthias 1999). they are central in socio-cognitive constructions of relations between self and other and thereby in structuring socio-political solidarities. in turn, the mode of solidarity experienced among participants can influence processes of constructing their identities and their conception of otherness. therefore, understanding the way individuals and groups conceptualize their relations with others— especially alongside the socially constructed and conditioned differences—is important to configure the mode of solidarity they create across their differences. the second dimension of the cognitive transformation revealed by the accommodative tendencies is related to such an aspect of constructing cross-identity solidarities. the expansion of communication among social subjects with different identities and the growing interdependence of social inequalities due to globalization processes have caused more complications in relations between self and other. these complications may cause uncertainty and thereby antagonism (as in the case of fundamentalist and racist 14 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement particularisms) through the ‘dogmatization of difference’ (connolly 2002). however, they can also facilitate flexible solidarities through the expansion of the self’s moral constitution to include the other’s concerns and interests against shared structures of disempowerment, without dissolving otherness (as in socialist and liberalist cosmopolitanism). regarding current cases of transnational solidarities, the endogenous conception of identity articulated around social divisions may no longer be the most crucial motivating and organizing principle for movements in responding to globalization as a looming multidimensional phenomenon. amory starr (2000), considering anti-corporate movements in a very broad scope, speculates that recent movements confront corporations on many fronts at once and they recognize allies with different identities with the same feelings of oppression. as a result, they centre the idea of multiple oppressions in their analyses of the enemy and in their visions of rebuilding the world. they also usually establish allies and define their enemies in ways that do not depend on identity as the basis of understanding and allies in ways that do not depend on a subtle and fragile ‘politics of difference’ (see starr 2000, 166-7) ulrich beck declares that, in the second age of modernity, categorical principles like collectivity, territoriality, and identity are being challenged (beck 2000a, b). this suggests that these principles will be the subjects of two treatments: deand/or reconstruction. globalization blurs and suspends boundaries and therefore implies revisions for defining identity. integrative approaches have to consider these situations seriously in studying collective identities and contemporary social movements. identity-based social movements have two options before them: reactively insisting on the boundaries, or proactively redefining their relationship with other identities and with the system as a whole. the latter option requires developing oppositional consciousness which critically addresses any form of oppression developed in conjunction with any social polarity like gender, class, race, ethnicity, and so on (see dixon 2001, 15). with different points of view in their published and online documents, the alter-globalization activists attempt to redefine corporate-led or capitalist globalization in terms of gender, race, or class relations. how are women, indigenous people, workers, and communities being exploited in the processes of uneven globalizations? how do these social groups typically 15 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement defend their rights and resist? these are the main questions raised and answered in the collections of activists’ articles that have been published in growing numbers of edited books or in open access magazines/journals like z magazine8 and the commoner.9 starhawk, an activist and award-wining author, who has been active in peace, direct action, ecofeminist and global justice movements for thirty years, in her article calls for encompassing the whole axes of oppression in the analysis of the system (see starhawk 2004, 49). in the same collection of articles (edited by solnit 2004), elizabeth martinez (2004), a postanarchist academician, defines globalization from an anti-racist point of view. for her, the main victims of global economic integration are the nations and people of color as shown by the vast increase in migrant labor. studying the demographic structure of transnational migrations simply evidences the interconnection between race, gender and class (martinez 2004). by stressing the ‘communal control of means of subsistence’ as the basic notion in understanding current global class struggles, midnight notes collective—an originally marxist activist group—extends its vocabulary to enclose all sorts of social-economic enclosure and exploitation in capitalist globalization (midnight notes 1998; midnight notes collective 2004). as roman and arregui depict the zapatistas’ movement: ‘with neo-liberalism as the clearly defined enemy, the movement constantly opposed multiple oppressions such as race, gender, and sexual orientation, while emphasizing the centrality of economic exploitation and the crucial role of workers in the struggle against neo-liberalism’ (1998, 133, 139, cited by burgmann 2003, 242). michael hardt and anthony negri, two renowned figures on autonomist marxism and the authors of a very influential book, empire, claim that the left needs to leave behind outdated concepts like the proletariat and working class as the main forces of change, which vastly oversimplify the gender, racial, ethical, class diversities of today’s world. instead, they propose the term ‘multitude’ to capture both communality and singularity of those who stand in opposition to the wealthy and powerful. the constituent power of the multitude relies on its unique structure; the multitude involves communities of 8 http://zena.secureforum.com/znet/zmag/zmag.cfm 9 http://www.commoner.org.uk/ 16 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 http://zena.secureforum.com/znet/zmag/zmag.cfm http://www.commoner.org.uk/ hosseini alternative globalization movement various types working together in a circulation of versatile struggles that are simultaneously against capitalism and for the construction of an alternative to it. the black radical congress (brc), an organization sparked in 1998 in the us by black activists and scholars to rebuilt black radicalism against neoconservative political and economic programs, introduces its mission on its website as follows: recognizing contributions from diverse tendencies within black radicalism — including socialism, revolutionary nationalism and feminism — we are united in opposition to all forms of oppression, including class exploitation, racism, patriarchy, homophobia, anti-immigration prejudice and imperialism.… we must see the struggle in global terms.… we need to meet people where they are, taking seriously identity politics and single issue reform groups, at the same time that we push for a larger vision that links these struggles. (black radical congress 1999, webpage) salleh (2004), an academic and community activist, talks about the ‘meta-industrial worker’, as today’s appropriate ‘agent of history’. for her, recognizing the workers that constitute the majority of workers in the 21st century global capitalism as a new class is based on stressing the systems of reproduction besides those of production. therefore, this concept avoids being restricted to white male workers, but rather accommodates other victims of social polarizations, such as householders, farmers, and even hunter-gatherers. the more actors with different social backgrounds are experiencing common predicaments, the more likely the cross-boundary nature of social problems will be translated into identity (re)formation and the accommodative mode of knowledge. by cutting through the socially constructed polarities around gender, race, class, status, ethnicity and so on, the alter-globalization trend shows a cognitive capacity to resolve the self/other dualism and thereby other associated oppressive dualisms such as individual/collective, private/public and difference/equality. this capacity can be achieved through rejecting any privilege given, theoretically and/or practically, to difference over those things that people have in common and vise versa (solomon 2002). 4. towards systemic conceptions of globalization and its complexities the third idealized aspect of the accommodative mode of consciousness is the growing tendency to develop multidimensional and systemic conceptions of global complexities, including the asymmetry and unevenness of globalization processes. arguments around the 17 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement newness of the post-1960s democratic movements have increasingly been replaced with the description of recent movements as ‘global’ and ‘transnational’ (cohen and rai 2000b). global social movements (gsms) are defined as ‘conscious efforts to build transnational cooperation around shared goals that include social change’ (smith 1997, 59; keck and sikkink 1998; see also cohen and rai 2000a; o'brien, et al. 2000).10 it was believed that these movements could be very influential by developing a plural ‘global civil society’ and thereby influence public opinion around different challenging issues, such as women’s or environmental issues, at a global level (see falk 1997; 2003). however, these trans-nationally shared efforts, during most of the last two decades, remained non-systemically restricted to some specific goals like reconstructing differential identities in a global problematic, whilst articulating central concerns across borders—for instance, the women’s transnational networks, the peace/anti-nuclear and human rights networks, and environmentalist networks (for some cases see sturgeon 1999; moghadam 2000). but very soon, this interand transnationalization of resistance opened new visions and new spaces of exchanging experiences in confronting the global agents of disempowerment and subjugating global structures. the mobilization of economic and cultural capitals on an increasingly uneven global scale has forced a number of activists to move beyond the specific and fragmented origins of identity, concern, and interest. as callinicos (2003, 15) mentions, recent transnational movements are motivated by a sense of the interconnection between an immense variety of different injustices and dangers. besides, as david held and anthony mcgrew argue (2002, ch. 5), the present era of globalization marks a shift towards a system of multilayered regional and global governance, with key supranational, intergovernmental and transnational bodies of authority such as g7, wto, imf, eu, world bank, apec (asia-pacific economic cooperation), nafta (north american free trade agreement) and so on. according to both moderate and radical intellectual arguments in the resistance, these bodies have enforced the rules of globalization, in undemocratic and irresponsible manners, which give advantages to the transnational corporations and the economic concerns defined by the 10 transnational activism against neoliberal globalism is nothing new (rucht 1999). neither are international solidarities and alliances across borders (routledge 2000). yet, only since the late 1990s have scholars in sm studies made important efforts to understand the recent advancements in transnational mobilizations and solidarities. 18 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement ruling class over the social rights and environmental concerns of citizens (see for example, george 2001; cavanagh and mander 2004). the new rules also, on a global scale, privilege the interest of citizens of those nation-states that host the bulk of these corporations against the rights and interests of less developed countries. the growing gaps between social classes within and between nation-states during recent decades are the best examples for the results of such newly established rules. the economic, cultural, and political globalization of capitalist systems, together with the exclusionary interventions of powerful states and corporations, implies the globalization of social and environmental problems. this in turn actualizes the need for the development of social alertness. the recognition of shared problems could eventually lead to insight about, and even intellectual demands for, shared efforts towards developing explanatory understanding of the totality of glocal social relations.11 the growth of world public awareness of the interdependence of many global and local social and environmental problems has been translated into the global field of resistance, despite many intellectual contentions in analyzing the problems and their causes. the multi-dimensional, multisphered, multi-polar, multi-scalar, and multi-subjective nature of globalization requires actors to give up reductionist and dualist perspectives in explaining the events as far as this nature is itself experienced and self-reflectively acknowledged by the actors. among the diverse transnationalizing networks of resistance against the interventions by such sources of power into the diverse realms of social subjects, there is a growing mindful convergence that sees the fragmented intrusions as systemic, rooted in the networks of capitalist corporations and elites themselves (see starr 2000; danaher and mark 2003; yates 2003). ‘it is this developing consciousness of the system that more than anything else, characterizes the movement’ (callinicos 2003, 15). however, such a newly created capacity is not free from uncertainties, disputes, and weaknesses. involved in the current organizational configuration of the movement, which is shaped around flexible networks of communication, the actors on the one hand experience flexibility 11 for instance, on the issue of global pandemics and public health, yach and bettcher reflect such a requirement: ‘the transnationalization of disease and health risks will require global awareness, analysis, and action and indicates a need for global cooperation’ (1998, 738). 19 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement and autonomy in representing their own ideas, while on the other they experience uncertainty in defining their relationship with other groups’ perspectives. these paradoxical experiences of both positive and negative aspects of the growing globalization from below have shaped new aspirations for poising between a sufficient degree of flexibility and a satisfactory level of certitude (for example, recall the attitude of irene santiago, cited in this article). as melucci (1992) argues, the loss of certainties is the starting point and the potential foundation of a new awareness. in social relations, not everything is subject to the calculus of an absolute rationality. therefore, ideational diversity and uncertainty can become cognitive bases for a new mode of solidarity (accommodative solidarity). conclusion as shown in this article, with regard to the recent structural and agential changes, the growing prospects for developing accommodative consciousness questions the reductionist assumptions behind the rival mainstream paradigms such as the materialist and postmaterialist, structuralist and post-structuralist, modernist and post-modernist assumptions. current global alternative movements, including the alter-globalization trend, are not simply reducible to either soft praxis or hard praxis. although they carry many paradoxes caused by persisting undigested experiences of past practices, experiencing this uncertainty or confusion itself has resulted in the emergence of new intellectual demands in the field to convey accommodative modes of thought. i have presented a sample of these demands in this article. rejecting any artificial compromise or unification, these new intellectual demands—though from different points of view—are grounded in the necessity of: articulating integrative visions without sacrificing singularities, affirming collectivities and commons without sacrificing individualities, strategically challenging the system as a whole without ignoring identities and particularities, targeting redistributive and material issues without refraining from the recognition of life-styles and post-material concerns, transforming society and its very basic cultural elements without being trapped into a dilemma of reform or revolution. 20 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement these balances in the practical visions within the alter-globalization movement have been associated with two other parallel extensions in worldviews. the first, as discussed in the second section, is the extension of the self to the other, not just by developing imaginary empathies and sympathies, but also through practically developing webs for exchanging particular experiences of all forms of oppression. the second extension of worldviews is rooted in conceptualizing structural complexities of globalization processes in terms of their inherent interdependences, inequalities, and asymmetries. at the practical level we can conclude that while the 1980s and early 1990s movements provided a field for the improvement of an actor’s agency or historical subjectivity12, the alter-globalization movement has afforded prospects13 for the solidarity of self-defining social subjects. this solidarity is no longer based on self-sacrifice, but rather inclusively accommodates the other subject and comprehensively recognizes the totality of objective conditions. this situation has had similar implications for the activists’ cognition of social reality and goes beyond the dilemmas of both the soft and hard praxes at the theoretical level, again similar to the 1960-1970s cultural-linguistic turn in both the realm of theory and practice, contemporary processes of both structural and agential changes —namely what is known as globalization from above and from below—have implied significant requirements for modifying sociological studies of current social movements. whilst accepting that the requirement of these integrative demands for the realm of theory is the subject of controversial arguments and explorations at both the levels of activism and sociological knowledge, the rock-bottom conclusion is that there are greater prospects than ever for developing synthesizing approaches towards overwhelming artificial controversies at the level of theory, i.e. the dilemmas made by dichotomies such as social structuralism/constructionism, infra-structuralism/ super-structuralism, new sms/ old sms, materialism/culturalism. one may call this prospective turn the ‘post-dualist turn’ in the social theory of collective actions. 12 by this i mean that the 1970s-1980s movements, by focusing on identity and self-regulation demands, have provided the cognitive ground for individuals and communities to identify themselves as the major authentic sources of social change more than before. 13 by prospects here i mean, ‘a mental looking forward; consideration or knowledge of, or regard to something future’ (oxford 2003) 21 portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 hosseini alternative globalization movement acknowledgements i am grateful for the valuable suggestions of the anonymous reviewers of this article, and i wish to acknowledge helpful comments by dr. gail craswell and dr. lawrence saha. reference list ‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎ adamovsky, e. 2005, beyond the world social forum: the need for new institutions [online], open democracy. available: http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-6-91-2314.jsp, [accessed 7 feb 2005]. adler, g. & mittelman, j. h. 2004, 'reconstituting “common-sense” knowledge: representations of globalization protests', international relations, 18, 2, 189211. alfaro, v. 2004, 'social movements facing the processes of 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reflections on michel serres and the natural world mary zournazi, university of new south wales who thinks like the dying sea? what writer, other than homer or conrad, thinks like the wind? michel serres, biogea (2012: 88). tell me the difference between soul and wind. michel serres, the five senses (2008: 172). michel serres’s recently translated book into english, biogea, is a plea to the world. serres is a lover of language, myth and the world. biogea appears to be a composite word, invented for us: bio meaning life and gea of the earth. between bio and gea, serres explores poetic, mystical, philosophical and scientific accounts of how listen to the world. who listens like the wind? what stories can make us think with it? what mysteries? what loves? for serres, without this connection to the world we will not survive the onslaught of human violence and malfeasance toward it. serres traces stories of the natural world through his own experience as a seafarer and naval officer. his relationship to the sea is a fundamental element of the book as well as his family legacy. for serres, the sea embraces the most primordial category and experience, for it is the water that flows, and it is the water that carries life—we are made of hard and soft things, he says. zournazi cosmocracy portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 2 interconnected by sea stories and influenced by ancient philosophies and myths, the book explores the fundamental elements of the world such as fire, air, water and earth as well as other significant phenomena. each chapter bears the relation to these elements and the chapters are appropriately titled earth and mountains, three volcanoes, winds and atmospheric phenomena, flora and fauna, and lastly encounters, loves. in essence, the book explores previous incarnations of ‘bio-technologies,’ as well as networks of confluence and communicative channels in the world, but we have yet to fully comprehend our limited vision of it. we must work against our own destructive and invasive tendencies. he writes: once again, we cannot claim to be subjects in the midst of a world of objects, for our behavior resembles that of other insects, other rodents or poisonous plants. not separated, but plunged, immersed in the biogea, in cousin company. i want to think like that company, in it, by it, with it, for it. warning! we can no longer resolve ourselves to this war of every man against every man, fatal in the final analysis to the entire biogea and consequently to us. peace. would a new eden emerge if we agreed to a natural contract? which? drawn up in what language? (2012: 107). we might think of serres’s writing as a kind of ‘geographical writing’1—a writing about the earth. at the same time, we might consider his writing as ‘angelology’—a writing that moves between unknown and known phenomena and perceptions. through his writing movement and perception are reconfigured. and throughout his books, this ‘method’ sustains him. he states this effort in the following way: my effort consists of abstracting, throughout the duration of relations, the different mailmen or messengers—represented by the god hermes or the host of angels—who serve as delivery persons for prepositions. this is the reason for my attraction to topology—the science of proximities and ongoing or interrupted transformations—and my attraction to percolation theory and to the notion of mixture. (serres & latour 1995: 105) biogea is a very personal work just as much as it is a treatise for a different ontology of being and perception, knowledge and justice. serres asks us to consider the natural world outside of the usual human appropriation of it. in this regard, the book continues a path signaled by his earlier works. this path is concerned with how to relate to the 1 see stephen connors’s introduction to michel serres’s the five senses (2008). zournazi cosmocracy portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 3 world rather than to struggle and control it. in his conversations with bruno latour (1995) he continues: it’s better to paint a fluctuating picture of relations and rapports—like the percolating basin of a glacial river, unceasingly changing its bed and showing admirable network of forks, some of which free or silt up, while others open up—or like a cloud of angels that passes, or the list of prepositions, or the dance of flames. i want to finish drawing this navigational map, this inventory—fluctuating and mobile—before i die. once this work is done it will be clearly seen that all the rapports i traced out either followed or invented a possible road across the ensemble of movements from place to place. note that this maritime chart, an ocean of possible routes, fluctuates and does not remain static like a map. each route invents itself. (serres & latour 1995: 105) * throughout biogea, serres inverts our relation to the natural world. calling upon images of the mother earth, he suggests that humanity can no longer be viewed as floating in the mother’s amniotic fluid; rather the earth floats like a foetus itself. in this foetal state, the earth is connected to a thousand different networks, cords and bonds, all of which are essential to the earth’s survival. and through these different bonds, serres looks at the earth as the intermingling of different voices and images: a daughter, mother, lover—all of these networks and connections that joins forces with us, not against us. the world speaks, it converses with us, but we rarely hear it. like biogea, his earlier books the natural contract (1995) and the five senses (2008) question our usual understandings of identity, empiricism and knowledge. recounting his experience of an earthquake in the natural contract, serres eloquently observes the intermingling of life and force to challenge us: who am i? a tremor of nothingness, living in a permanent earthquake. yet for a moment of profound happiness, the spasmodic earth comes to unite herself with my shaky body. who am i, now, for several seconds? earth herself. both communing, in love she and i, doubly in distress, throbbing together, joined in a single aura. i saw her formerly with my eyes and my understanding; at last through my belly and my feet, through my sex i am her. can i say that i know her? would i acknowledge her as my mother, my daughter, and my lover together? should i let her sign? (1995: 124) altogether, in biogea he looks at the symbiotic relations of earth and bodies, and their intermingling through different phenomena and myth. as serres recasts the mother in biogea, he reminds us of the fluidity of the ‘soft.’ the soft remains. it endures. his zournazi cosmocracy portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 4 fundamental thesis is: ‘the hard does not last, only the soft lasts’ (2012: 192). he gives a horrifying image of the graveyards of the ‘hard.’ hard things wear away, but the soft elements continue. he asks: who has seen the cemeteries of the soft, ‘for breaths and sounds, music, letters and codes, signs and meaning?’ the hard is what remains and is polluting: i invite you to visit the places where the history of technology is read best: ship graveyards, railroad yards, downgraded cranes, whose masses border the typewriters and computers of the first and even the more recent generations… rusted ironmongery fit for making scrap metal merchants rich. let’s pass from these iron scraps, hard as dirt, to streaming liquids, water. let’s repeat that time flows … (2012: 190–91) i can attest to the graveyards of the hard and their effects. only yesterday, i saw a pigeon dazed and confused in the middle of a busy road. obviously it was injured and in a state of shock. i was concerned for the bird, but could see no way of helping it. i could predict its fate, which was disturbing. amid the constant movement of large trucks and cars, drivers could not see the bird’s shocked status even though i could see it; briefly a car stopped, its driver aware of the bird, but the others behind it had no such vision. within an instant the bird was run over. soft flesh splattered on the cold hard asphalt; one of its wings fluttering in the wind. the bird may have been run over twice: in the first instance shocked but not dead yet, in the second instance, assuredly so. the pigeon had no real chance of survival. i lamented the brutal technology of speed and the indifference of cars and trucks at that moment. this might seem like an inconsequential encounter. who cares about the pigeon? but this question of care must be asked of our relations to the world. every moment. every encounter. in the bigger picture, the bulldozers of technology destroy the earth through the thoughtlessness of speed and indifference. who thinks like this bird? what of the soft and the fluid? for serres, we are only interested in our own stories; we never hear the plentitude of the soft. the sea is dying, is polluted. we are unable to see the languages or codes that are not our own. we only ever acknowledge language and convention; and when language boils down to convention and contracts without soul or connection, we create stories zournazi cosmocracy portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 5 about places and things, rather than with them. we do not see what we encounter in this world; nor are we able to comprehend it. in this violence, we lose the path of relation. we lose the ability to connect to the networks and threads that exist and surround us. we lose the potential for rebirth, and ultimately the link between the past, present and the future: [ … ] we’re only interested in ourselves and our properties. never in others. i’m not only talking about other ourselves, those who, resonating with languages said to be foreign, nevertheless buzz with human languages. but other others: belling or howling living things and resonating things. yet we’re beginning to decipher the codes of living things—true living languages, authentically foreign—and the inert things of the earth, both of which, like us, receive, transmit, store and process information. formerly philosophers understood that everything conspires or consents. we now know that the biogea converses. scientific or imagined, my brief short stories have tried to make the foreignness, no doubt still unfelt, of these languages heard by building a first megaphone for gea: seas, rivers, lands, glaciers, volcanoes, winds; then for bio: rats, wolves and jackals— fauna, apple trees, wisteria, oaks and lindens—flora; lastly by connecting these megaphones to our own encounters and cries. swirling, the ascent goes from the hell of noise to the smaller and smaller paradise of the said. at the summit: the non-written or the non-said. (2012: 196–97) * serres considers the need for an intuitive global philosophy that invents and creates, rather defends and destroys others. he argues that we fight against the unsaid of the world, in our fear and through our knowledge. in the hobbesian account of nature as the ‘war of all against all,’ the basis of sovereignty and law that are aimed to protect us from nature but in doing so creates a fundamental schism in our living relations. writing against this hobbesian worldview and its legacies, serres demands a ‘natural contract.’ in the first chapter of the natural contract, he gives a striking image of this dialectical world. using goya’s painting men fight with sticks: where two duelists are fighting in the mud, serres demonstrates how the duelists are sinking in the quicksand that surrounds them. the more aggressive their strikes, the faster they sink. he writes that these combatants are representative of a humanity where wars are fought and lost, and blood is spilled over occupied territories. but this ground can never be owned by any man; even though humans violently appropriate everything in their own image and name. in his account of the goya painting, ‘the earth will swallow up the fighters before they and the gamblers have had a chance to settle accounts’ (1995: 1). zournazi cosmocracy portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 6 according to serres, this societal contract of a ‘war of all against all’ leads us nowhere and is murderous to the living world. thus, in biogea, he explicitly states that humanity as a collective under this worldview must be put on trial: how does it happen that society accuses and punishes an individual who, perchance, has killed, while no society, no individual accuses society which, for its part, always kills? for, killer, the collective collects itself by killing. what authority one day called together will accuse every group of murder? the abolition of the death penalty takes the first step in that direction. you, society, you no longer have the right to kill. (2012: 21) * how do we understand this profound disjunction between the world and ourselves? the world has awesome and terrifying qualities that require respect; the earth speaks even though we render it conceptually and contractually silent. serres wants a different understanding of the term ‘contract.’ etymologically speaking, serres argues that the word contract includes the notion to ‘com-prehend.’ in this comprehension, we come together—we are ‘intercorded’ as he suggests—or put differently we exist within a whole natural system that is connected but its language has yet to be understood. therefore, contracts must not necessarily presuppose language: a ‘set of cords can be enough,’ he writes. just like his foetal earth that requires its bonds and cords to evolve and to endure, the dynamics of the natural world, its energies, fluctuations and turbulences are part of the unfolding contract. it is necessary that we com-prehend it: we are apprehended together and we apprehend one another, intercorded, even when mute; better yet, the contract blends our constraints and our freedoms. the information that we each receive through our tip of the cord informs us, in the end, not only about everyone else who’s encorded, but about the overall state of the whole system to which we belong. the bond runs from place to place, but also, at every point, expresses the totality of sites. it goes, for sure, from the local to the local, but above all from the local to the global and from the global to the local. the contract thus affects us as individuals by making us immediate participants in our entire community. it blends solitaries into communities. (1995: 107) how we navigate these ‘cords’ and bonds shape the force and power that can enslave or liberate us. serres continues: when flexible, it embraces topology, only to describe geometrical forms once it stiffens. by means of brief little pulls, it conveys information, at low energy levels, whereas, when continuously pulled taut, it transmits force or power, high energy levels. at its constraining limits it imprisons, but it leaves elbowroom prior to this maximum. in the cord, we find the sciences of space and the genesis of their objects, a well as the technologies of force or energy; who can be surprised that the cord also binds together rigorous knowledge and law? (1995: 108) * zournazi cosmocracy portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 7 serres argues that the interrelatedness of all things has been lost through the specialisation of our knowledges; and in this specialisation, we create conceptual hatreds and hardness as well as the fragmentation of time and space: our analytical hate bursts into these little puzzle pieces, into these texts armored with compelling, aggressive, defensive citations. in fragmented lives, we think a world burst into technologies, sciences, separated languages. our meaning lies in scattered limbs. by dint of quartering the subjective, the cognitive, the objective and the collective, how can we say the right word and live a happy life? the analysis that unties these four components comes from the hate that divides. what love will reunite them? that’s the project of a thought, the program of a language, the hope of life. (2012: 75) serres is inspired by various myths and philosophies that bring unity and hope in even in the midst of death. in particular, he cites the ancient greek philosopher empedocles who, as the legend would have it, jumped to his death in the volcanic crater of mount etna. for serres, empedocles was exemplary—he was a serious scholar of science, poetry and phenomena. his approach to the world unites us and prepares a path of rupture, and invention. for empedocles, what unites is love, what separates us is hate (but we might say what truly separates us is indifference). for serres, empedocles death marked his profound belief in the world. he believed in the vital elements of earth, air, water, fire and the constant movement and cycle of these elements; life as the continual force of movement and energy: when empedocles wrote about love and hate, he meant at once physics and society, the living body and the surrounding world, myth and knowledge, music and exactitude, moving emotion and untrembling rigor, my soft girlfriend and the implacable hardness of things. i want to speak like him, at the global dimension of the world in which we live and think like guests. (2012: 75) how to think and speak like empedocles? for serres, this is a serious question; it is a question of time and how we view our connection to the earth. even more so, it is how we understand the enduring rhythms and qualities of the earth as well as the love that unites our time and place of belonging to it. he writes that as humans we live in temporary locations, for no one really owns the earth. in some ways, this view of temporary inhabitation as well as the enduring qualities in which pass onto others is the paradox of our humanity. but it is with a different sense of time that we must acknowledge the transience of life as well as all that endures beyond our limited visions of it. he puts it this way: we will always depart and leave the earth to others than us, whose habitat will continually pass to others and to others, indefinitely. we live in a rented location; not only on the earth, in gea, but also in bio, i mean in our bodies, which carry within them what, indefinitely, makes the opening zournazi cosmocracy portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 8 for the relay of the species. the body is not only for itself, it carries in itself for those that follow, as well. i live my body in transitive rented location. the new habitation. for if we, renters, have to assume the responsibility of maintaining a merely temporary habitat, quite common to everyone across space and time, in order to pass it on to successor as habitable and beautiful as we received it from our predecessors, without soiling it with blood or other stains so as to appropriate it for ourselves, we must live, in some way, at the same time there and outside the there, between here and elsewhere, in the opening between two worlds, in the place of our loves and our works, certainly, but at the same time apart, in the symbolic and the concrete, the second receiving its meaning from the first. failing this temporary rented locations, thus open and gapped, a third death would arise on the horizon: the eradication of our species, the disappearance of the human race. that is a limit-hell whose current pregnance induces us to frequent an elsewhere. no doubt we have our feet on the earth, hard, and our heads in the soft. (2012: 49–50) * the thrust of biogea is that we have to change our perceptions of the natural world. as in his previous book malfeasance (2011), as well as in the natural contract, he writes that the natural contract engages ‘peace with us’ and peace for the world. and in this peace-making it is our perception that must become ‘res nullius’—the ‘object of noone.’ that is, no one can make a claim on behalf of the earth, our perceptions must be the object of no-thing. he writes: ‘the new contract becomes a rental agreement. once we have become mere renters we will be able to contemplate peace—peace among humans because peace with the world. may this cosmocracy come soon’ (2011: 72). i take this cosmocracy seriously. serres’s cosmocracy is a hymn for the world that relies on a different speech and invention than usual philosophical and scientific languages. in recent philosophical and cultural debates, we may be more familiar with the ‘cosmopolitics’ of isabelle stengers and bruno latour’s considerations of it. but serres tacitly informs latour and stengers view of the cosmos and their philosophies and sociologies of science,2 and he asks us to bear witness to the world and the unity of love. he invites us to consider the interrelatedness of all things through the intermingling of different systems of knowing and feeling, and myth and poetry. * thinking with serres is a task of suspending our preconceived ideas about science and philosophy. for me, his work offers a kind of relief. it allows me to think a kind of rebirth of action, thought, and knowledge. but this requires patience and love. love in 2 see bruno latour’s conversations with michel serres, conversations on science, culture and time (1995a), and isabelle stengers, cosmopolitics 1 (2010) and cosmopolitics 11 (2011). zournazi cosmocracy portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 9 its uniting sense, not as a romantic or a filial state, but a deeper sense of unity and connection. calling forth different legends and myths, serres reminds us of the cycles of birth, life and death as well as the energy and connection we have with this planet. to end: is serres a visionary? maybe. for me, his book is a love letter; a hymn for the world. reference list serres. m. 1995, the natural contract, trans. e. macarthur and w. paulson. university of michigan press, ann arbor. _____ 2008, the five senses: a philosophy of mingled bodies, trans. m. sankey & p.r cowley. continuum, london. _____ 2011, malfeasance: appropriation through pollution, trans. a.-m. feenberg-dibon. stanford university press, stanford. _____2012, biogea, trans. r. burks. univocal, minneapolis. serres, m. with latour, b. 1995. conversations on science, culture and time, trans. r. lapidus. university of michigan press, ann arbor. stengers, i. 2010, cosmopolitics 1, trans. r. bononno. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. _____ 2011, cosmopolitics 2, trans. r. bononno. university of minnesota press, minneapolois. zournazi, m. with serres, m. 2003, ‘the art of living,’ in hope: new philosophies for change. routledge, new york, pp. 192–209. les dfinitions de la francophonie portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal francophonie et études francophones: considérations historiques et métacritiques sur quelques concepts majeurs françois provenzano, université de liège introduction il ne sera pas question ici de livrer un panorama exhaustif et bien circonscrit de ce qu’il est souvent convenu d’appeler le ‘champ de la francophonie’. l’expression recouvre tantôt un chantier disciplinaire, tantôt un enjeu institutionnel, tantôt encore un projet académique (chacun de ces ensembles n’étant pas exclusif des deux autres), dont il nous est bien malaisé de tracer les contours. cette difficulté provient sans aucun doute, pour une part, de notre expérience récente de la francophonie en tant qu’objet d’étude. mais elle est liée également à l’extrême diversité des dimensions constitutives de la francophonie, qui semble résister à l’ordonnancement conceptuel rigoureux et tendu vers la neutralité idéologique. pour ces raisons, le propos que nous tiendrons dans les pages qui suivent ne manquera pas de paraître lacunaire, tant les a priori sur cette réalité fuyante qu’est la francophonie sont forcément partiels, et donc partiaux. nous nous efforcerons cependant de présenter, suivant un parcours à la fois chronologique et théorico-disciplinaire, quelques grandes perspectives possibles sur la francophonie, quelques formes de discours repérables, quelques grands choix épistémologiques ou pragmatiques qui sont à la base de nos appréhensions de la francophonie. nous chercherons à attirer plus provenzano francophonie particulièrement l’attention sur les principaux concepts privilégiés par les spécialistes de la francophonie dans leurs terrains d’investigation respectifs1. en guise d’introduction, il n’est pas inutile de nous interroger un instant sur cette expression de ‘champ de la francophonie’, que nous avons trivialement utilisée plus haut. peut-on considérer la notion de ‘champ’ selon l’acception sociologique qu’en donne pierre bourdieu dans sa théorie de l’action sociale (c’est-à-dire à la fois ‘un champ de forces, dont la nécessité s’impose aux agents qui s’y trouvent engagés, et comme un champ de luttes à l’intérieur duquel les agents s’affrontent, avec des moyens et des fins différenciés selon leur position dans la structure du champ de forces, contribuant ainsi à en conserver ou à en transformer la structure’ (bourdieu 1994, 55))? la francophonie peut-elle être conçue comme un ensemble circonscriptible et décrite en termes de forces structurantes et de luttes transformatrices? à l’autre extrémité de cette conception théoriquement dure du ‘champ de la francophonie’, nous avons une autre interprétation, beaucoup plus proche du sens commun, qui consiste à dire que cette expression renvoie à un ensemble de locuteurs de langue française, et éventuellement, du même coup, aux littératures écrites dans cette même langue. la question qui se pose alors n’est pas moins épineuse que celle soulevée par la première interprétation: qu’estce qui autorise, en effet, à faire de cette série de locuteurs et de littératures un ensemble clôturé; en quoi, et pour qui, la francophonie fait-elle sens comme ensemble clôt et appréhendable comme tel? ces deux acceptions—avec les questionnements qu’elles soulèvent—peuvent représenter deux positions extrêmes quant au ‘champ de la francophonie’, d’un côté celle de la modélisation scientifique, de l’autre celle de l’évidence du sens commun. il ne sera pas question ici de trancher pour l’une ou l’autre de ces positions, mais plutôt d’esquisser le continuum qui les relie. c’est donc plutôt d’un champ de recherche sur la francophonie dont il s’agit de parler, d’un discours sur un ensemble de locuteurs ou de littératures, dont on a pu penser, pour diverses raisons, qu’ils gagnaient à être considérés selon ce type de découpage et ce type d’étiquette, ‘francophones’. 1 on retiendra, pour un inventaire autrement plus complet, la récente publication d’un vocabulaire des études francophones (beniamino & gauvin 2005). il vise à répondre aux nouvelles exigences pédagogiques en fournissant un outil de référence adapté aux particularités des études francophones. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 provenzano francophonie or ce discours, comme tout discours, s’alimente et se justifie (en somme, se construit) de diverses manières, notamment en produisant des concepts. nous en pointerons quelques-uns, en les situant dans la charpente discursive qui les supporte, dans le point de vue sur la francophonie dont ils dépendent, et en privilégiant un peu les propos qui concernent la production littéraire. on verra en effet que la littérature a pu constituer un phénomène cristallisateur pour ce type de discours. deux pionniers onésime reclus: francophonie et impérialisme il est de tradition de faire remonter les origines de la francophonie aux années 1880 et au personnage d’onésime reclus. c’est en effet ce géographe français qui aurait, le premier, forgé le mot ‘francophonie’, dans ses ouvrages de géopolitique sur la france et ses colonies. l’historiographie francophone officielle retient de reclus essentiellement deux conceptions maîtresses. d’une part, il aurait eu ‘l’idée de classer les habitants de la planète en fonction de la langue qu’ils parlaient dans leurs familles ou dans leurs relations sociales’ (deniau 2001, 10). d’autre part, ce découpage linguistique s’accompagnerait d’un projet humaniste, puisque la francophonie selon reclus serait un ‘symbole et résumé de la solidarité humaine, du partage de la culture et de l’échange’ (11). l’un des titres des ouvrages de ce ‘pionnier’ indique cependant que les visées du géographe étaient nettement plus pragmatiques que cela: lâchons l’asie, prenons l’afrique, où renaître, comment durer? (reclus 1904.) autrement dit, le projet ‘francophone’ de reclus se définit bien plutôt a) par sa perspective franco-centrée, b) par sa conception démographique et territoriale, c) par sa visée impérialiste. en effet, ce ‘nous’ qui s’exprime dans le titre ‘lâchons…prenons…’ renvoie bien exclusivement à la france seule, et non à la communauté de locuteurs que reclus appelle bien ailleurs ‘francophones’. ceux-ci, d’ailleurs, ne sont pas simplement désignés comme tels, mais sont, pour reprendre les mots du géographe, ‘acceptés’ comme tels par la france: ‘... nous acceptons comme francophones tous ceux qui sont ou semblent destinés à rester ou à devenir participants de notre langue’ (reclus 1886, 422; nous soulignons). la francophonie est ainsi désignée ailleurs par reclus comme ‘la france intégrale’ (reclus 1917, 165). il faut sans doute rappeler également que portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 provenzano francophonie l’œuvre géographique de reclus consiste, pour l’essentiel, en une description minutieuse des beautés du sol français. deuxièmement, l’aspect linguistique de la conception de reclus n’est en réalité que secondaire par rapport aux aspects démographiques et territoriaux. dans ses écrits, le géographe se montre en effet constamment obnubilé par les chiffres de population et par leur proportion relativement à la superficie couverte. on peut citer par exemple ce passage, assez révélateur de l’obsession de grandeur qui anime le géographe français: nous ne laissons ... à la france que 57 millions d’hommes sur 52 857 200 hectares. or la terre a 13 milliards 484 millions d’hectares, c’est-à-dire 255 fois notre pays. si l’on peut comparer des surfaces à des hauteurs, la france est à l’ensemble des terres ce qu’une tour de 34 à 35 mètres est au gaurisankar, pic indien que ses 8840 mètres élèvent au-dessus de toutes les montagnes. (reclus 1886, 7) dès lors, le projet francophone est avant tout un projet d’accroissement des territoires, et plus précisément, d’accroissement du rapport nombre d’habitants/territoire couvert. pour contrer la stagnation des chiffres de natalité à l’intérieur du pays, onésime reclus voit dans ‘la france d’afrique’ l’occasion d’assurer à la france une part de terres suffisante pour conserver un rôle de premier plan à l’échelle internationale. ceci nous amène ainsi à évoquer le troisième aspect du projet francophone d’onésime reclus, sans doute le principal, à savoir son caractère impérialiste. avec l’espagnol, le portugais, l’italien et le roumain, le français est, selon onésime reclus, l’une des cinq langues qui participent à l’empire ‘latin’. la part de la france, cependant, ‘n’est pas digne d’elle et le nombre des hommes de langue espagnole, et même de langue portugaise, grandit avec plus de vitesse que celui des hommes de langue française’ (reclus 1886, 410). le projet francophone s’inscrit donc dans une lutte de concurrence avec les autres grandes puissances linguistiques et économiques du monde. dans cette lutte, la politique coloniale que propose reclus a pour objectif de maintenir la france au-dessus de ‘cet humble trentième’ (424) que représente la francophonie, vers 1890, à l’échelle mondiale: ce sont le canada, mais surtout l’afrique du nord qui devront permettre l’accroissement quantitatif de la francophonie. la francophonie, dans cette acception initiale, n’est donc pas un espace de partage, mais bien un projet d’expansion. lorsqu’on cite l’occurrence du mot ‘francophones’ portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 provenzano francophonie dans le passage que nous avons déjà cité tout à l’heure, on s’arrête souvent avant la fin de la phrase, livrant pourtant l’essentiel du propos de reclus: ‘... nous acceptons comme francophones tous ceux qui sont ou semblent destinés à rester ou à devenir participants de notre langue: bretons et basques de france, algériens et berbères du tell dont nous sommes déjà les maîtres’ (reclus 1886, 422; nous soulignons). il faudrait livrer ici quelques éléments biographiques qui éclaireraient sans doute la genèse du projet d’onésime reclus. contentons-nous de mentionner que son intérêt pour l’afrique trouve son origine dans l’expérience qu’il eue au service militaire comme zouave, en algérie. c’est d’ailleurs à ce fait particulier qu’ont été attentifs les contemporains d’onésime reclus, lorsqu’ils présentent son œuvre, bien plutôt qu’à la mention du terme de ‘francophonie’: ce premier contact d’onésime reclus avec l’afrique, avec l’algérie, marque une date capitale dans son histoire intellectuelle. ... franciser l’afrique du nord, la civiliser, y susciter une vaste renaissance française, tel est le but qu’il va se proposer à lui-même et proposer à ses contemporains. (reclus 1917, 14) le même préfacier-biographe indique ensuite clairement qu’il qualifie son contemporain comme ‘le philosophe de l’impérialisme français’ (reclus 1917, 58). il y aurait sans doute encore nombre d’éléments à fournir à propos de ce ‘pionnier de la francophonie’, autant à propos du paternalisme, du racisme latent et des contradictions de son discours (baggioni 1996), qu’à propos des aspects parfois très novateurs que présente sa pragmatique linguistique. l’essentiel était pour nous de souligner que, à son origine revendiquée, la francophonie est le propre d’un discours franco-centré, porté par un projet d’expansion démographique et territoriale et motivé par des rivalités symboliques avec d’autres grandes puissances colonisatrices. virgile rossel: francophonie et littérature nous évoquerons à présent le discours d’un contemporain d’onésime reclus, nettement moins cité par l’historiographie postérieure, et cependant lui aussi énonciateur d’une certaine francophonie avant l’heure. il s’agit du suisse virgile rossel, juriste reconnu, mais surtout auteur de plusieurs ouvrages d’histoire littéraire, parmi lesquels une histoire de la littérature française hors de france (rossel 1895). son travail, qui portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 provenzano francophonie manifeste une largeur de vues assez exceptionnelle pour son époque, est précurseur à plus d’un titre et annonce quelques-unes des grandes orientations épistémologiques que suivront par la suite les études littéraires francophones. rossel est en effet le premier à considérer d’un même regard les littératures produites en français hors de l’hexagone et fait ainsi implicitement apparaître l’idée que ces différents ensembles—il s’attache prioritairement à la belgique, à la suisse et au canada—peuvent être décrits en fonction du rapport homologue qu’ils entretiennent avec la france. il témoigne en effet d’une grande lucidité à l’égard des conditions institutionnelles déficitaires de ces littératures hors de france et anticipe certaines analyses sociologiques des institutions littéraires francophones: les écrivains se heurtent, dans des pays de territoire restreint et de faible population, à des obstacles presque insurmontables. ... condamnés à vivre sur une scène étroite, sans échappée sur l’étranger, et à s’adresser à des lecteurs clairsemés, ils sont placés dans des conditions très défavorables à la naissance d’œuvres fortes et de grandes œuvres [sic]. ceux-là même qui se sentent supérieurement armés pour la gloire ne réussissent guère qu’en s’expatriant, ou qu’en exportant. et puis, la littérature ne donne le pain quotidien à personne, en sorte que romanciers, critiques, poètes, doivent se résigner à n’être que des amateurs; ils ne peuvent accorder à l’art que leurs loisirs, les moments perdus de l’administration, du barreau, du professorat, du journalisme. (rossel 1895, 3-4) nous abrégeons ici une analyse qui se poursuit par des considérations sur le rôle de la critique, le type de sociabilité littéraire et les dispositions du public lecteur propres à ces zones de littérature française hors de france. certes, rossel ne fait pas vraiment œuvre de comparatiste. dans l’exposé des matières, il conserve en effet une nette séparation entre les différents ensembles considérés et entend ‘marquer les caractères généraux et les particularités des littératures locales étudiées’ (rossel 1895, vii). mais, par cet aspect également, il annonce une foule de travaux consistant à faire de la francophonie littéraire la juxtaposition des spécificités culturelles propres à chaque zone envisagée. le découpage en ‘aires culturelles’ constitue en effet, nous allons le voir, l’une des grandes options d’un certain discours sur la francophonie. ces propos de rossel sont encore intéressants au moins par deux aspects. avec onésime reclus, nous avions affaire au discours du dominant, pour ainsi dire, ou de l’énonciateur central. rossel représente au contraire la position périphérique dans le débat sur la francophonie. cette position l’amène à faire apparaître nettement ce qui portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 provenzano francophonie définit la précarité matérielle et symbolique de ces territoires qui n’ont pas connu le développement d’une institution littéraire à part entière, mais qui doivent pourtant assumer l’héritage d’une langue littéraire prestigieuse. c’est bien l’idée de ‘périphérie’ qui émerge des propos de rossel sur les littératures qu’il examine. ainsi, le second aspect qu’il convient de pointer ici est précisément le caractère métalittéraire du discours de rossel sur cet embryon de francophonie. comme nous l’avions annoncé, la littérature s’avère être un poste d’observation privilégié sur l’objet francophone (onésime reclus lui aussi développe d’ailleurs quelques considérations sur l’histoire de la littérature française, que nous ne pouvons ici que mentionner en passant (reclus 1886, 407-409)), dans la mesure où la littérature constitue un objet de discours déjà chargé de prestige symbolique, déjà nourri d’une aura de sacralité et déjà attaché à l’image d’une france éternelle, à son rayonnement international et au raffinement intrinsèque de la langue qui, au fil des siècles, a servi de support à cette littérature. ainsi, le point commun entre les discours de ces deux pionniers de l’idée francophone est une certaine mystique de la langue. aussi bien chez onésime reclus que chez virgile rossel, aussi bien chez le géographe impérialiste français que chez l’historien de la littérature jurassien, la langue française est investie d’un génie qui lui est propre et qui doit, chez l’un, commander aux destinées des peuples colonisés, chez l’autre servir d’idéal d’expression et de trait d’union entre les usagers périphériques et la civilisation française. chez onésime reclus, par exemple, ‘le français rachète son indigence présente par sa grâce et par sa clarté ...c’est bien l’idiome supérieur, digne de sa réputation de langage le plus vif et le plus civilisé d’europe’ (reclus 1886, 413). de même, rossel souscrit à cette conception de la langue française comme entité transcendant les différences et unissant les peuples ‘par une sorte de lien mystique et puissant’ (rossel 1895, 2). le corollaire d’une telle conception sera l’expression d’un purisme linguistique, les écrivains périphériques se devant d’être particulièrement attentifs à ‘conserver intact le patrimoine de leur langue’ (8). la définition institutionnelle c’est sur cette mystique de la langue française que se fonde ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler la ‘définition institutionnelle’ de la francophonie. celle-ci trouve sa première portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 provenzano francophonie formulation dans le célèbre numéro de la revue esprit, consacré, en novembre 1962, à la langue française2. des personnalités du monde culturel et politique y livrent un plaidoyer ardent en défense de la langue française et y évaluent les possibilités d’actions communes pour assurer le maintien et la croissance de la visibilité et du prestige internationaux du français. parmi ces différents intervenants, la postérité retiendra surtout les accents lyriques de léopold sédar senghor, le président poète, qui situe sur le plan strictement ‘culturel’ ‘la principale raison de l’expansion du français hors de l’hexagone, de la naissance d’une francophonie’ (senghor 1962, 838). ‘[r]ichesse du vocabulaire’, ‘syntaxe’, ‘stylistique’ (‘le style français pourrait être défini comme une symbiose de la subtilité grecque et de la rigueur latine, symbiose animée par la passion celtique’), enfin ‘humanisme’ (‘le sceau du génie français demeure ce souci de l’homme’): voilà ce qui, pour le président sénégalais, doit justifier l’idée d’une francophonie, qu’il définit comme ‘cette symbiose des “énergies dormantes” de tous les continents, de toutes les races, qui se réveillent à leur chaleur complémentaire’ (839-44). autrement dit, le concept clé qui supporte cette définition de la francophonie est bien celui d’universalité, tel que l’a exposé rivarol dans son célèbre discours, dès la fin du xviiie siècle (rivarol 1936). par le concours de circonstances historiques, géographiques et psychologiques particulières, la langue française jouit d’un privilège d’universalité, c’est-à-dire d’une reconnaissance unanime comme langue de prestige. privilège qui est encore justifié par les qualités intrinsèques de la langue, par ‘son propre génie’, qui la rend conforme à la raison elle-même et en fait un instrument utile à tous les peuples. ce concept d’universalité, en 1962, permet d’imposer l’idée de francophonie comme une évidence historique, comme un projet déjà-là, indépendamment des enjeux socioéconomiques dont il dépend (baggioni 1996, 800). en fondant le projet francophone sur une nécessité d’ordre culturel, senghor et les autres participants à ce numéro de la revue esprit, refusaient de considérer les rapports de pouvoir et les disparités matérielles entre l’ancienne métropole et les anciennes colonies, la langue française valant pour enrichissement et trésor commun. 2 le français, langue vivante, esprit 1962, no 311, novembre. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 provenzano francophonie c’est ce qui explique que ce type de définition francophone a mis quelque temps avant de trouver sa traduction politique effective. pour passer de l’utopie d’une ‘civilisation de l’universel’ (senghor 1962, 844) à la reconnaissance de la diversité des situations de francophonie, il a fallu substituer au concept d’universalité celui de ‘dialogue des cultures’, qui caractérise, comme l’indique daniel baggioni (1996, 801), un deuxième moment dans le mouvement francophone institutionnel, au cours des années septante et quatre-vingt. la francophonie se conçoit dès lors comme l’assemblage de différentes ‘aires culturelles’, chacune porteuse de ses spécificités et participant à l’édification d’un exotisme francophone. nous ne pourrons aborder ici le détail des problèmes soulevés par une telle conception de la francophonie; problèmes qu’examine déjà longuement michel beniamino dans sa synthèse la francophonie littéraire (1999). soulignons simplement, avec l’auteur cité, que ‘“l’aire culturelle” n’est pas un concept, mais un enjeu politico-idéologique’ (beniamino 1999, 66). le découpage d’une portion de territoire, auquel on attribue une série de traits culturels homogènes, et ensuite le transfert de ces traits aux productions symboliques de ce territoire sont en effet des opérations critiques souvent liées aux revendications des acteurs eux-mêmes. le ‘dialogue des cultures’ s’apparente ainsi à une version euphémisée des luttes pour la reconnaissance symbolique qui animent les minorités francophones, tel le québec par exemple ou les jeunes états africains. on peut dire que l’évolution de cette conception de la francophonie va dans le sens d’une majeure prise en charge politique du phénomène francophone. aux discours humanistes et tiers-mondistes succèderont les volontés politiques de faire de l’idée francophone un vaste réseau d’alliances diplomatiques. dès lors que se multiplient les instances strictement bureaucratiques qui supportent la francophonie et lui assurent une certaine visibilité internationale, se perdent du même coup de plus en plus les justifications ‘culturelles’ du rassemblement francophone. comme le notent daniel baggioni et roland breton à propos des dernières annexions francophones en date: ‘... les arguments manquent pour justifier intellectuellement l’adhésion de la bulgarie ou de l’angola. seuls les critères politico-diplomatiques peuvent expliquer ces curieuses extensions de la francophonie.’ (baggioni & breton 1996, 900.) portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 provenzano francophonie ainsi, au-delà des contradictions que peuvent représenter ces différentes phases, il me semble possible de pouvoir considérer l’unité d’une ‘définition institutionnelle’ de la francophonie, précisément parce que ces contradictions sont rachetées par la légitimité des instances institutionnelles qui formulent la francophonie et produisent une doxa destinée au public le plus large possible. cette doxa s’apparente, schématiquement, à la fois à une posture de défense vis-à-vis d’un capital culturel conçu comme un patrimoine commun, et à une posture d’émergence, dans la mesure où ce patrimoine vise à être recapitalisé à l’échelle mondiale. la définition linguistique c’est comme contrepoint à ces types de posture qu’il faut comprendre un autre grand registre définitionnel de la francophonie, à savoir la définition linguistique, ou plutôt sociolinguistique. le contrepoint porte au moins sur deux aspects. d’une part, la mystique de la langue et la conception essentialiste et puriste du français seront très vite irrecevables pour les linguistes qui s’attacheront, dans les années quatre-vingt, au phénomène francophone et mettront en évidence sa dimension plurilingue (baggioni 1996, 801). d’autre part, la définition institutionnelle s’accompagne d’une obsession démographique, dont on a vu qu’elle caractérisait déjà le discours d’onésime reclus. or ce type de comptage se heurte inévitablement à des problèmes d’ordre administratif (non-systématicité des recensements dans les différents états francophones), mais aussi d’ordre théorique, qu’il appartiendra aux linguistes de mettre au jour en développant une réflexion sur les différentes façons d’être francophone. comme le souligne roland breton, ‘... l’espace francophone, morcelé politiquement, l’est particulièrement quant à l’attitude face à la langue’ (breton 1996, 850). cette diversité des attitudes face à la langue peut être appréhendée soit sur le plan collectif, soit sur le plan individuel. sur le plan collectif, les concepts que nous retiendrons ici sont ceux de ‘diglossie’ et de ‘politique linguistique’. contrairement à la définition institutionnelle, la définition linguistique met en avant non seulement la variété des français possibles, mais aussi la variété des situations dans lesquelles le français, ou l’une de ses variétés, est actualisé, le plus souvent en concurrence avec d’autres variétés linguistiques. à l’idée d’une langue imposant son génie unanimement s’oppose ainsi l’idée d’une francophonie en portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 provenzano francophonie continuum (maurer 1996), faite d’usages plus ou moins codifiés et métissés plutôt que d’adhésions spontanées et complètes. ce concept de diglossie ouvre la voie à de nombreuses tentatives de typologies de la francophonie (ou, plus précisément, des situations de francophonie), dont nous ne pourrons retracer le détail ici. notons simplement que ces typologies se définissent toujours par le choix d’un point de vue particulier sur la francophonie, qui ne peut jamais épuiser la totalité des situations possibles, ni rendre compte de toutes les distinctions effectives entre les différentes pratiques du français. à la dimension strictement sociolinguistique, autrement dit à l’appréhension synchronique des situations de francophonie, s’ajoute la considération diachronique du type de présence du français sur tel territoire, mais aussi la prise en compte des investissements identitaires variables dont peut faire l’objet telle variété du français (baggioni & breton 1996; baggioni & kasbarian 1996). il est également possible de prendre pour critère prioritaire, dans ces tentatives de typologie, le concept de ‘politique linguistique’, qui, intrinsèquement lié à celui de ‘diglossie’, désigne l’action menée par les pouvoirs publics dans le but de réglementer l’usage de la langue dans le cadre d’un état. cette action, implicite ou explicite, recouvre évidemment toujours, d’une manière ou d’une autre, des enjeux d’ordre plus idéologique que strictement linguistique. le meilleur exemple est sans doute fourni par le québec, dont la célèbre ‘loi 101’, qui proclame en 1977 le caractère unilingue du québec, est l’instrument d’une reconnaissance politique de la minorité francophone du canada. l’étude comparée des politiques linguistiques permet ainsi, d’une part de relativiser l’idée d’une communauté d’intérêts dans laquelle se reconnaîtraient les francophones du monde entier, d’autre part de contrôler l’usage des concepts ‘identitaires’ par un examen des réalités institutionnelles. sur le plan individuel à présent, l’approche sociolinguistique de la francophonie pointe le doigt sur un phénomène qu’on hésite encore aujourd’hui à qualifier de concept (bretegnier 1996, 904): l’insécurité linguistique. mise en évidence, dès les années septante, par les travaux de l’américain william labov, l’insécurité linguistique caractérise le rapport particulier d’un locuteur à sa langue. il y a, dira-t-on, insécurité linguistique lorsque le locuteur a, tout à la fois, conscience de l’existence d’une norme portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 11 provenzano francophonie a et conscience qu’il pratique une variété b. sans pouvoir aborder ici les nombreux problèmes théoriques soulevés par l’usage de ce concept (qui mêle considérations identitaires, stratification sociale, représentations épilinguistiques), on peut souligner que l’insécurité linguistique est certainement une clé d’entrée féconde pour étudier la francophonie, et ce au moins pour trois raisons. premièrement, l’histoire du français montre que cette langue a connu comme aucune autre sans doute un processus de standardisation extrêmement puissant, relayé notamment par un pouvoir politique très centralisé. ce processus a ainsi abouti à l’imposition à large échelle d’une variété légitime et donc à la conscience nette, chez les locuteurs, de l’existence d’une telle norme. deuxièmement, la francophonie, sur le plan linguistique, se caractérise encore par la multiplicité de ses situations de contact entre variétés de langue. si la norme est une, elle est abstraite; la pratique francophone atteste quant à elle, sur des territoires parfois très restreints, la co-présence de variétés régionales, créoles ou non françaises, avec la variété française légitime (il est par exemple significatif que l’un des travaux les plus importants sur l’insécurité linguistique porte sur le cas de la belgique francophone, carrefour linguistique par excellence: francard 1993). enfin, à une plus large échelle, l’insécurité linguistique trouve sa pertinence dans le cadre de la francophonie par le sentiment de ‘menace’ anglo-saxonne, que nourrit notamment le discours institutionnel, et qui accroît la conviction d’une nécessité de protéger la variété française légitime, seule à concourir sur le marché international des langues. par ces concepts de diglossie, de politique et d’insécurité linguistiques, l’approche sociolinguistique définit ainsi la francophonie comme un espace de conflit, bien plutôt que comme un espace de consensus ou d’échange désintéressé. la réalité francophone, sur le plan sociolinguistique, émerge de la tension complexe et à chaque fois unique entre des situations sociales et institutionnelles, des variétés pratiquées en concurrence et des représentations fantasmées de ces variétés. la définition poétique le concept d’insécurité linguistique et l’appréhension des situations de francophonie au niveau individuel dont il dépend nous amènent à aborder à présent une définition de la francophonie que nous pourrions appeler ‘poétique’. en effet, au-delà de la simple portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 provenzano francophonie description sociolinguistique des situations d’insécurité, l’usage de ce concept débouche sur la mise en évidence des stratégies compensatoires mises en place par le locuteur face à son insécurité, des réactions propres à qui la pratique de sa langue est vécue de façon problématique. on peut bien sûr analyser ces stratégies et réactions chez le commun des locuteurs francophones. ce type d’approche a cependant été particulièrement privilégié par l’étude de la francophonie littéraire et des poétiques développées par les écrivains francophones face à la donne linguistique qui est la leur (klinkenberg 1993; denis & klinkenberg 2005). on situera ainsi la gamme des choix d’écriture entre, d’une part un excès de contrôle de l’expression, d’autre part un libre cours laissé aux particularismes ou aux tours illégitimes. d’un côté donc, l’écrivain fait preuve de purisme à la fois littéraire et linguistique, en adoptant les formes littéraires les plus consacrées et en exagérant son respect de la correction grammaticale de sa langue; de l’autre, l’écrivain assume son irrégularité et en fait démonstration, en usant librement de variétés peu légitimes ou considérées comme peu littéraires. même s’il peut paraître réducteur, ce couple purisme/aventurisme constitue une clé d’entrée assez puissante pour décrire les littératures francophones. il permet de comparer, sans toutefois les assimiler, par exemple, la situation d’un poète belge forgeant des néologismes à celle d’un romancier québécois usant du ‘joual’3. on invoque également, pour traiter de ces problématiques, le concept de ‘conscience linguistique’ de l’écrivain, au centre de son projet créateur. celui-ci s’apparente dès lors à une gestion des différents modèles disponibles, dont les codes sont réinvestis d’une fonction particulière dans l’économie du roman. c’est ainsi que les spécialistes des littératures francophones ont forgé leur propre concept, parallèle à celui d’insécurité linguistique, utilisé par les sociolinguistes, et ont désigné par le terme de ‘surconscience linguistique’ cette situation particulière des écrivains francophones face à leur langue 3 ce mot désigne une variété du français pratiquée au québec surtout par les classes populaires urbanisées. le joual fut, à partir des années soixante, utilisé par certains écrivains québécois comme langue d’écriture et devint le symbole d’une certaine autonomie à l’égard des normes littéraires françaises. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 13 provenzano francophonie d’écriture. la francophonie littéraire se définirait ainsi par cette contrainte spécifique, à la fois subie et subsumée par les écrivains, que constitue l’inconfort linguistique. cette définition de la francophonie procède donc, en quelque sorte, par retournement du stigmate en emblème, puisqu’il s’agit de faire de l’aliénation du francophone (ou francographe) vis-à-vis des modèles linguistiques dont il perçoit l’imposition, le lieu d’une créativité particulière, en somme, comme le dit lise gauvin, d’un ‘imaginaire de la langue’. celui-ci ‘donn[e] lieu à des poétiques irriguées par le sens du ludique et du transitoire, plus proches de la fête carnavalesque et de l’esthétique baroque que des conventions du réalisme’ (gauvin 2003, 110). la définition sociolittéraire ce que nous avons nommé la ‘définition poétique’ de la francophonie est complémentaire d’une ‘définition sociolittéraire’ du même espace; autrement dit: l’analyse du texte francophone, des procédés exotisants ou carnavalesques qu’il met en place, ne prend tout son sens que lorsqu’elle est corrélée à une certaine cartographie du marché littéraire en question et des rapports de légitimité qui le structurent. selon cette définition sociolittéraire, la francophonie se conçoit essentiellement à l’aide du couple notionnel centre/périphérie. au centre, la france, et même plus particulièrement paris, où sont concentrées toutes les instances de consécration et où sont fixées les valeurs en cours pour la reconnaissance littéraire; à la périphérie, les autres zones de production littéraire francophones, dont le propre est alors de monnayer leur différence spécifique auprès des instances parisiennes, ou encore de développer ce que pierre bourdieu a appelé, à propos de la belgique francophone, un ‘marché protégé’ (bourdieu 1985, 5). cette approche de la francophonie, on en trouve les traces dès 1938, lorsque gustave charlier évoque la question des ‘littératures secondes’, qui ont à gérer ‘le poids de la tradition littéraire de la langue qu’elle[s] emploie[nt]’ (charlier 1938, 9). maurice piron parlera quant à lui, à propos de la belgique, de la suisse et du québec, de littératures ‘marginales’, dont il cherchera à dégager les dynamiques de développement communes (piron 1968). mais c’est essentiellement après les travaux sociologiques de jacques dubois sur l’institution de la littérature (dubois 1986) et de pierre bourdieu sur le portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 14 provenzano francophonie champ littéraire (bourdieu 1998) que le cas francophone semblera particulièrement pertinent à une approche sociolittéraire. on cherchera ainsi à décrire le fonctionnement institutionnel de ces littératures périphériques, à caractériser leur degré d’autonomie, par rapport à la france, mais aussi par rapport au politique. ce type d’approche, à vrai dire, s’est surtout développé sur les cas belge et québécois, sans toutefois avoir donné lieu encore à de véritables synthèses comparatistes. pour les francophonies sud, c’est un autre appareil critique qui semble davantage s’imposer: reprenant l’héritage critique anglo-saxon, des spécialistes tels jean-marc moura utilisent la théorie postcoloniale comme clé d’entrée dans le corpus des littératures francophones. il s’agit ici encore d’une définition sociolittéraire de la francophonie, dans la mesure où les concepts convoqués cherchent à articuler la production textuelle aux conditions propres à son contexte d’émergence. la notion de ‘scénographie’, par exemple, héritée de l’analyse du discours, permet de rendre compte de l’espace d’énonciation tel qu’il est figuré et institué dans le discours littéraire lui-même. on parlera ainsi d’une ‘scénographie postcoloniale’ pour caractériser, dans un corpus d’œuvres produites dans d’anciennes colonies, une ‘définition forte de l’espace d’énonciation’, à visée performative (moura 1999). cette définition de la francophonie pose plusieurs problèmes sur le plan de la théorie littéraire proprement dite, dont les situations francophones constituent une sorte de laboratoire conceptuel. c’est évidemment toute la question de l’articulation du texte à son contexte de production que les études francophones placent au centre de leurs démarches (avec les dangers d’essentialiser un concept pour en faire une caractéristique transcendante, ou encore de rabattre le texte à ses conditions d’émergence); mais ce n’est pas ici le lieu de traiter de ces questions. il nous importe par contre de revenir un instant sur les oppositions binaires sur lesquelles se fondent ces définitions sociolittéraires de la francophonie: dominants vs dominés, centre vs périphérie, métropole vs colonies. en réalité, c’est essentiellement le second terme de ces couples qui fait l’objet de l’investigation; la réalité francophone étant constituée de la multiplicité des points de vue de dominés, et la france elle-même étant le plus souvent évacuée du modèle explicatif (ou prise en compte à titre de représentation fantasmée). il semble donc ainsi que nous ayons affaire à une inversion portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 15 provenzano francophonie complète de la perspective impérialiste que nous avions exposée au début et qui, elle, épousait exclusivement le ‘nous’ franco-centré. sans doute faudrait-il s’appuyer sur de plus longs développements, mais ne peut-on faire l’hypothèse que prendre le point de vue des dominés revient, finalement, à dissoudre l’idée même de francophonie? un article de denis saint-jacques expose le problème en partant du cas du québec et démontrant l’absence de toute réalité ‘francophone’ à tous les niveaux influents sur la production littéraire québécoise, celle-ci étant davantage définie par la qualité de sa position périphérique par rapport à la france (saint-jacques 1991). mais le fait le plus parlant de cette dissolution est sans doute le récent succès de la théorie postcoloniale, à peine évoquée, comme fondatrice d’une épistémologie des études francophones. en choisissant le fait de l’expansion coloniale comme critère déterminant l’appréhension du corpus littéraire francophone, jean-marc moura intègre celui-ci au large corpus des littératures dites ‘europhones postcoloniales’, mais il en exclut du même coup les littératures belges, suisses et, dans une certaine mesure également (du fait de son décalage chronologique et structural), québécoise. autrement dit, pour le dire en forçant un peu les choses, la définition sociolittéraire de la francophonie aboutit à l’effacement même du fait francophone devant, pour la francophonie nord, le fait ‘périphérique’; pour la francophonie sud, le fait ‘colonial’. en guise de conclusion: vers une définition sociodiscursive il convient certainement de prendre acte de cette nouvelle donne conceptuelle. le champ de la recherche francophone n’en disparaît pas pour autant. il nous semble cependant utile de suggérer un autre type de définition de son objet, qu’on qualifiera de socio-discursif : la francophonie serait précisément l’ensemble des rhétoriques, des idéologies, des concepts, des représentations mis en place pour rendre compte de la communauté des usagers et des usages de la langue française; cette définition recouvre également les usages sociaux de ces rhétoriques, idéologies, concepts ou représentations. du paradigme de l’impérialisme aux paradigmes sociologique— davantage appliqué à la francophonie nord—et postcolonial—davantage appliqué à la francophonie sud, se dessinent ainsi une suite d’effets de discours, une gamme d’énonciateurs de la francophonie, une série de lieux d’où se pense, s’énonce, se labellise, s’instrumentalise, ou se dissout, la francophonie. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 16 provenzano francophonie bibliographie baggioni, d. 1996, ‘éléments pour une histoire de la francophonie (idéologie, mouvements, institutions)’ in le français dans l’espace francophone: description linguistique et sociolinguistique de la francophonie, tome 2, éds robillard, d. & beniamino, m. honoré champion, paris, 789-806. baggioni, d. & kasbarian, j.-m. 1996, ‘production de l’identité dans les situations de francophonie en contact’, in le français dans l’espace francophone: description linguistique et sociolinguistique de la francophonie, tome 2, éds robillard, d. & beniamino, m. honoré champion, paris, 855-867. beniamino, m. 1999, la francophonie littéraire. essai pour une théorie, l’harmattan, paris. beniamino, m. & gauvin, l. (éds) 2005, vocabulaire des études francophones. les concepts de base, pulim, limoges. bourdieu, p. 1985, ‘existe-t-il une littérature belge? limites d’un champ et frontières politiques’, études de lettres, vol. iii, 3-6. bourdieu, p. 1994, raisons pratiques. sur la théorie de l’action, seuil, paris. bourdieu, p. 1998, les règles de l’art. genèse et structure du champ littéraire, 2e éd., seuil, paris. bretegnier, a. 1996, ‘l’insécurité linguistique: objet insécurisé? essai de synthèse et perspectives’ in le français dans l’espace francophone: description linguistique et sociolinguistique de la francophonie, tome 2, éds robillard, d. & beniamino, m. honoré champion, paris, 903-919. breton, r. 1996, ‘la démographie des francophones est-elle insaisissable?’ in le français dans l’espace francophone: description linguistique et sociolinguistique de la francophonie, tome 2, éds robillard, d. & beniamino, m. honoré champion, paris, 849-853. charlier, g. 1938, les lettres françaises de belgique. esquisse historique, la renaissance du livre, bruxelles. deniau, x. 2001, la francophonie, 5e éd., puf, paris. denis, b. & klinkenberg, j.-m. 2005, la littérature belge. précis d’histoire sociale, labor, bruxelles. dubois, j. 1986, l’institution de la littérature. introduction à une sociologie, 2e éd., nathan-labor, paris-bruxelles. francard, m. (éd.) 1993, l’insécurité linguistique en communauté française de belgique, service de la langue française, bruxelles. gauvin, l. 2003, ‘la notion de surconscience linguistique et ses prolongements’ in les études littéraires francophones: état des lieux, éds moura, j.-m. & d’hulst, l., éditions du conseil scientifique de l’université charles-de-gaulle lille 3, lille, 99-112. klinkenberg, j.-m. 1993, ‘préface’ in francard 1993, 5-7. moura, j.-m. 1999, littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale, puf, paris. maurer, b.1996, 'continuité et convivialité: utiliser le concept de continuum pour situer les français d'afrique' in le français dans l'espace francophone: description linguistique et sociolinguistique de la francophonie, tome 2, robillard, d. & beniamino (éds), m. honoré champion, paris, 873-885. piron, m. 1968, ‘littératures françaises hors de france’ (ou: ‘le problème des littératures françaises marginales’), bulletin de l’académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises, vol. xlvi, no 1, 246-262. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 17 provenzano francophonie reclus, o. 1886, france, colonies et algérie, hachette, paris. ———1904, lâchons l’asie, prenons l’afrique, où renaître, comment durer?, librairie universelle, paris. ———1917, un grand destin commence, la renaissance du livre, paris. rivarol, a. 1936, discours sur l’universalité de la langue française (1784), larousse, paris. rossel, v. 1895, histoire de la littérature française hors de france, payot, lausanne. saint-jacques, d. 1991, ‘vers une unification du champ littéraire de la francophonie?’ in situations de l’écrivain francophone, éd. aron, p., revue de l’institut de sociologie, 1990-1991, 19-25. senghor, l. s. 1962, ‘le français, langue de culture’, in le français, langue vivante, esprit, no 311, 837-844. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 18 bibliographie portalshepherdcopyedit&galley2011final portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. terpsichorean architecture special issue, guest edited by tony mitchell. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. rock critics as ‘mouldy modernists’ becky shepherd, macquarie university three particularly prevalent questions determine the focus of this study. first, why does rock criticism continue to tie itself to the past? second, why does contemporary popular culture, of which the specialist music press is a principal cultural intermediary, propagate a fixation with canonical rock music and the narrative tropes of nostalgia and authenticity that surround the canon and its popular cultural significance? third, how does the specialist music press generate retrospectivity in contemporary popular culture? there are several conceptual platforms from which to view and critique the continued maintenance of the rock canon and the general preoccupation with the past held by the specialist music press. i engage in this essay with these conceptual considerations, while also providing an historical and theoretical overview of the canon, and critiquing, in particular, rock criticism’s role in the creation of the canon as the centre of a ‘rock world’ (frith 1988: 2). retrospectivity and the lineage of new journalism the new journalism of the late 1960s almost single-handedly crafted the notion of a rock canon. this same hierarchical understanding of ‘rock versus pop’ music continues to characterise the vast majority of contemporary journalistic writing on popular music. while there has been much scholarly discussion surrounding a recent decline in the shepherd rock critics as ‘mouldy’ modernists portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 2 consumption of music press publications (laing 2006), of the existing modes of discourse on popular music—including the internet, radio, film and television—the contemporary specialist music press still operates as a ‘cultural intermediary’ (bourdieu 1984) or ‘gatekeeper’ (toynbee 1993: 290; shuker 1998: 199) between the music industry, its consumers and fans of popular music. in contemporary popular culture, the specialist music press appear to maintain significance by propagating retrospectivity, and maintaining the ‘myth of rock’s own ideological effects’ (frith 2004: 35), which positions pop and rock music as binary opposites. the press maintains avid interest in canonical artists, thereby sustaining the valorisation of the rock canon. furthermore, the press champions new ‘retro’ sounding rock music, comparing the sound of this ‘new’ music with those older works consecrated within the canon. the discursive tropes of authenticity and nostalgia frame the function and value of this retrospectivity, illustrated not only in the specialist music press, but throughout contemporary popular culture. more recently, emi’s vinyl reissues of canonical albums (2008), martin scorsese’s live concert footage of the rolling stones in shine a light (2008), the beatles remasters (2009), the who’s quadrophenia tour (2012), and the popularity of reissue guitars, amplifiers, keyboards and analogue audio technologies, for example, further proliferate the popularity of all things ‘retro’ in contemporary popular culture. this preoccupation with the past maintains rock music’s belief in its own supremacy over all other constituent genres of popular music. as a means of fuelling this rhetoric of nostalgia, and maintaining the supremacy of ‘classic’ or canonical rock music, the press uses two particularly ubiquitous approaches. first, the press use a series of nostalgic markers to develop catchy terminology and genre titles to describe and categorise the sound of emerging contemporary ‘retro’ rock music. critics writing for the contemporary music press make frequent reference to canonical music in their descriptive commentary of album reviews, interviews and critiques of new ‘retro’ music, and its contemporary referents. the music press creates direct parallels between the sound of new emerging ‘retro’ music, including artists such as the white stripes, midlake and wolfmother, with the sounds of canonical rock music, furthermore attributing a type of cultural capital, directly characterised by artistic credibility and notions of authenticity, to these new rock releases. these markers include references to retrospective forms such as garage rock, psychedelia, progressive shepherd rock critics as ‘mouldy’ modernists portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 3 rock and punk. accompanying these titles are terms such as ‘nu’ (wooldridge 2005: 14) ‘throwback’ (hampton 2007: 56) and ‘vintage’ (male 2002: 82). this combination of terms, like for example ‘nu-metal,’ characterise specific types of new rock music with a type of nostalgic loading. this loading works concurrently with the culturally laden tropes of authenticity and artistic credibility already characterising terms such as progressive rock, metal and psychedelia for example. so paradoxically, that which appears to be new also carries the label vintage’ or ‘retro.’ secondly, the contemporary specialist music press generate countless ‘best-of’ critics and readers’ polls, all of which overwhelmingly valorise pre-1980s rock music. a recent study of ‘best-of’ polls selected from five of the most popularly circulated music publications of the last decade—spin, rolling stone, mojo, q and classic rock— demonstrates the maintenance of this dominate nostalgia for canonical rock music. artists including led zeppelin, the beatles, the who, the rolling stones, pink floyd and david bowie, for example, appear on all five of the ‘best-of’ lists from these magazines, and are credited for more than one recording or performance. 88 percent of the artists featured collectively across all five lists represent music recorded and released prior to 1980. this process of ‘recanonisaton’ is a continuation of the pivotal role that the press, and critics of the music press, have always played in the crafting of the hierarchical ideology that characterises the ‘pop versus rock music’ schism. during the late 1960s the rise of publications such as crawdaddy, rolling stone, and creem magazine, and some key contributors, such as lester bangs, robert christgau and nat hentoff, began to construct the foundations of a type of ‘rock world’ (frith 1988: 2), out of which emerged a ‘myth of rock’s own ideological effects’ (frith 2004: 35), or an ascribed authenticity that came to typify certain types of music consecrated within the canon of popular music. refecting an increasingly self-reflexive popular music market, a new, more critical discourse on popular music would emerge in the form of ‘new journalism,’ inherent to the aforementioned publications. buoyed by the emergence of a new counter-cultural sensibility, these publications would go on to play an integral role in the formation of a particular ‘art world’ or ‘rock world.’ the valorisation of this world through various fanzines, specialist and trade publications and the general press played a primary role in the dissemination of a cultural discourse around rock music. during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the music press and shepherd rock critics as ‘mouldy’ modernists portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 4 its contributing critics and editors began to coin new terms and expressions that became associated with the categorisation of musical styles, including the titles of music genres, and the definition of particular music and socio-cultural movements. collectively these writers performed ‘an external evaluation of the music industry’s products, based upon certain core assumptions about what makes good, important music, and what makes disposable crap’ (fenster 2002: 86). such musical and sociocultural commentaries proliferated a discourse that came to characterise the rock world and to orchestrate ‘a popular music criticism [that could] be understood as meaning making, a way of continuing the discourse of popular music on a non-musical plane’ (jones & featherly 2002: 32). critics of the new journalism created a discourse of authenticity used to elevate popular musical forms of the late 1960s and 1970s, endowing selected artists and their repertoire—such as elvis presley, bob dylan, jimi hendrix, the who, the beatles, led zeppelin, the clash—with both artistic and cultural function and value. frith explains that this new style of journalism ‘[was] not so much about representing music to a public as cultivating a “knowing community” that links a select set of musicians to an equally select set of listeners—people who define themselves as superior to the mainstream undiscriminating popular culture’ (firth 1996: 66–67). with such ideologically generated discourses in place, the specialist music press has a template from which to continually assign set hierarchies in popular music. however, this process of delineation is particularly contentious and, in actuality, bears no absolutes. therefore, at this point, the most pressing point of inquiry asks why the contemporary music press insists upon maintaining essentially modernist discourses surrounding rock music? why does the press cling to traditional models of interpretation and presentation as part of a contemporary discourse on popular music? modernist narratives and cultural reification retrospectivity is mobilised by a series of nostalgic trends. firstly, these trends can be observed as a harking back to ‘an authentic origin or centre from which to disparage the degenerate present’ (greene 1991: 305), with nostalgia fuelled by hostile reactions to the assumed inadequacies of the present.1 such references to ‘authenticity’ can be 1 for further studies on the rhetoric of nostalgia as a hostile reaction to the inadequacies of the present, see stewart (1984) and williams (1977). shepherd rock critics as ‘mouldy’ modernists portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 5 aligned with modernist conceptions of nostalgia as it preferences the maintenance of grand narratives, that is, the canon. alternatively, conceptions of nostalgia can be understood as a type of discursive reality, or as frederick jameson explains, ‘a stylistic museum from which artefacts of the past becomes part of contemporary pastiche’ (1985: 113). in a contemporary context, nostalgia is referred to as popular memory, an historical consciousness (tannock 1995), and a ‘structure of feeling’ (williams 1977: 128). here, nostalgia becomes a gateway to an imagined experience of the past. in this context, nostalgia as a reference to the past can also imply the effacement of grand historic structures such as canonicity. nostalgia represents a breakdown of such signifiers, a type of dissolution of affect, or a displacement of the aesthetic significance of the rock canon. put simply, contemporary popular culture poaches from the canon and disregards its cultural significance to denote a contemporary concept of style or history as a style, the elements of which can be rearranged and recontextualised as part of the continued reification of culture. nostalgia therefore uses the canon as a type of mass cultural reification, a discursive construction that is itself a commodity, the production and distribution of which standardises mass cultural products, used to homogenise mass culture. in this context, canonical rock music is maintained within the contemporary domain, and rendered significant on account of its commodity value. jameson furthers these conceptions of commodified canonical nostalgia, by explaining how contemporary popular culture poaches the most unique forms of artistry from the imaginary museum that is conceptualised as ‘the past.’ while jameson does not make direct reference to canonical discourses, i suggest that the popular music canon can be conceptualised as part of the ‘imaginary museum’ (1985: 115), to which he makes reference. jameson is not denying the existence of a canon, but rather problematising the significance of such a modernist discourse in the contemporary domain. he explains that [t]here is another sense in which writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds—they’ve already been invented; only a limited number of combinations are possible; the most unique ones have been already thought … hence, once again, pastiche: in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles of the imaginary museum. (1985: 115) clearly, jameson’s identification of pastiche as a feature of a suggested ‘post modernity’ is accurate and evidenced by contemporary popular culture. i do not, shepherd rock critics as ‘mouldy’ modernists portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 6 however, adhere to either his regarding the canon as a ‘dead style’ or his inference to pastiche as pure similitude. retrospectivity, while fuelled by the press, spills over into other facets of popular culture to create something ‘new,’ not as direct repetition, but as a type of difference by means of recontextualsation (new ‘retro’ rock music, remastered releases). perhaps therefore the simple concept of this type of recontexualisation negates pointless similitude when we are talking about retrospectivity. if, for example, retrospectivity were only evident in the nostalgic preoccupation of the contemporary music press, that is ‘best-of lists and revived feature articles on bob dylan, the beatles and keith richards, then we could in fact interpret nostalgia as a longing for the past, or an ‘authentic origin,’ as would be typically modernist, and acknowledge an obvious thread of similitude and repetition. we could therefore also assume that such a longing can be satisfied by the totality of the canon and jameson would win the argument. retrospectivity is, however, more than nostalgia, and nostalgia does not appear to function as a passive longing for the past, but rather as a structure of feeling that functions as a vital ingredient in the production of contemporary pastiche. suffice to say, while nostalgia can be considered an authentic and necessary reverence for the past, with acknowledgement of the canon as sacred and ‘classic,’ it can at the same time recharacterise the canon as a type of popular cultural bric-a-brac. major record labels for example, engage in this game of rhetoric by acknowledging that remastered versions of canonical albums hold a particular currency, with not only the older generation of original fans, but with the younger generation whose association with canonical rock music is directly framed by the romanticism of imagined nostalgia. the creation and promotion of new ‘retro’ rock also engages in this game of semantics, paying homage to the canon on the one hand, and poaching shamelessly from it on the other. the motive is therefore two-fold, but the result is the manufacture of something new, whether it be a recontexualisation of canon rock music in the form of new ‘retro’ music, or the recontextualisation of a recording in the form of a remaster. new ‘retro’ rock music and remastered releases of canonical albums both demonstrate examples of the duality of retrospectivity as it functions as part of contemporary popular culture. both represent a type of canonical reification, and yet simultaneously both represent the emergence of ‘new’ hybridised and recontextualised impressions of the canon and a movement away from pure similitude, demonstrating something borrowed, something recontextualised, and therefore something ‘new.’ shepherd rock critics as ‘mouldy’ modernists portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 7 when we return to jameson, then, we acknowledge as salient his observations about canonical nostalgia and cultural reification. however, jameson appears to be making some slightly redundant claims here, as any revisiting of the past essentially reifies an artefact. stylistic innovation is always pastiche, and is therefore necessarily part retrospective; new styles are hybrid expressions of what has come before. to make an obvious point, the popular music canon is predominately characterised by rock music, which is a hybridised pastiche of rhythm and blues and country music. therefore, if jameson considers imitation and pastiche as similitude then he is indirectly making a more contentious statement on popular music more generally. the point of conjecture, therefore, lies closer to the tried and tested notion of art versus commerce, and therein we can ask: is that the point at which this inevitable process of reification negates artistic progression? jameson indirectly and derogatorily suggests that any recontextualisation of the past, represented as the ‘imaginary museum,’ is necessarily a part of the mass reification of contemporary popular culture: the artistry is redundant; the commodity value is paramount. jameson, therefore, implies that the canon, as a grand narrative within the imaginary museum, is a discursive construction that maintains narrative claims to its own totality. moreover, jameson suggests that capitalist mass culture depends upon such discourses to form a stylistic museum from which contemporary culture can create pastiche (1985: 115). in this context the canon and its constituents become empty signifiers. to consider the canon as merely a collection of de-signified artefacts would be to witness its contemporary reiteration as pure similitude, yet this does not appear to be the case. rather than functioning as empty signifiers of pastiche within a contemporary context, the canon of rock music, rock music’s assertions of authenticity that typify the canon, and the role of the contemporary specialist music press as a champion of retrospectivity, remain a significant part of a popular cultural hierarchy that frames the aesthetics of popular music. so while we cling to modernist narratives, we create difference by poaching from, and recontextualising, the past in a contemporary context. conclusion where is contemporary rock criticism situated in all this theorising of the mechanics of nostalgia and retrospectivity? while i have argued here that the retrospective focus is shepherd rock critics as ‘mouldy’ modernists portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 8 not simply a passive romanticisation of the past, the contemporary specialist music press continues to valorise canonical rock music at the peril of other constituent genres of popular music (pop, rap, hip hop, and the many permutations of dance music for example). with the press continuing to operate as a significant cultural intermediary between the music industry, critics, fans and musicians, the dominant discourse on popular music is steeped in nostalgia, and in particular is characterised by a preoccupation with canonical rock music. this is problematic for a number of reasons. the world of sampling, remixes, and mash-ups, and the explosion of mp3 cultures and home production, for example, are undoubtedly signalling as stimulating and progressive a climate change as rock’n’roll once was, and yet those developing contemporary discursive frameworks for these musical expressions of artistry are looking backwards. when they pause for a moment to glimpse the present, they are predominately focussing on that which is characterised by the past. the contemporary music press has somewhat backed itself into a tight corner. the retrospective focus of the press is therefore not without fault or criticism. however, when we look outside what appears to be the banal reiteration of the specialist music press and its rehashed cover articles on canonical artists, we return to a discussion on the recontextualisation of the canon. ubiquitous throughout contemporary popular music is a reimagining of the popular music canon, contemporary additions to the canon; derivative … yes, but perhaps the overarching question remains—isn’t everything somehow derivative of that which has come before? when jameson talks about cultural reification and we apply this notion to our understanding of retrospectivity in the contemporary music press, we are left wondering if retrospectivity as reification necessarily negates artistic validity, and difference? perhaps a movement away from this type of stagnation and the preconceived inherent notions of retrospectivity, lies in realigning our presuppositions about contemporary uses of the canon and its surrounding discourses on nostalgia. there are those who feel that nostalgia for canonical rock and by default new ‘retro’ rock music is a pointless reiteration of modernist discourses. there are those who champion the maintenance of ‘authentic’ artistry and those who cling to rock’s own ideological conceptions of superiority, which are reiterated by the canon. this particular perspective is characterised by an adherence to the totality of the canon as a dominant nostalgic shepherd rock critics as ‘mouldy’ modernists portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 9 discourse in popular music. it is from this perspective that contemporary forms of popular music as seen as ‘lesser-than’ or inferior to that which has come before, in particular, that which characterises pre-1980s rock music. then there are those who applaud retrospectivity, but see no sense in simply reiterating the modernist narratives that surround the canon. rather, these critics, fans, and musicians embrace retrospectivity as one type of reiteration of the canon, in the form of contemporary recontextualisation. here, all things ‘retro’ oriented are, therefore, new, borrowed, rebuilt and reflavoured by contemporary popular music. within that context contemporary retrospectivity and the role of the contemporary music press can realign conceptions about canonical music and its function and ‘value’ within contemporary popular culture. however retrospectivity is understood, the specialist music press are firmly tied to the past when it comes to ascribing value judgements about popular music. so how do we move from here? how do we recraft conversations about value in popular music? do we need to recraft these presuppositions surrounding the canon? how will contemporary rock criticism provide a more progressive engagement with emerging popular music, while self-referentially acknowledging the canon as an ascribed type of nostalgia? as the press remain preoccupied by retrospectivity and the tropes of authenticity and nostalgia that surround the rock canon, are they in fact missing some of the main game as it is being played in contemporary popular culture? reference list bourdieu, p. 1984, distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. routledge, london & new york. fenster, m. 2002, ‘consumers’ guides: the political economy of the music press and the democracy of critical discourse,’ in the popular music studies reader, (eds) a. bennett, b. shank & j. toynbee. routledge, london & new york. frith, s. 1988, music for pleasure: essays in the study of popular music. polity press, cambridge. _____ 1996, performing rights. harvard university press, cambridge, ma. _____ 2004, ‘towards an aesthetic of popular music,’ in popular music. critical concepts in media and cultural studies. routledge, london & new york. laing, d. 2006, ‘anglo-american music journalism: texts and contexts,’ in the popular music studies reader (eds) a. bennett, b. shank & j. toynbee. routledge, london & new york. jones, s. & featherly, k. 2002, ‘re-viewing rock writing: narrative of popular music criticism,’ in pop music and the press, (ed.) s. jones. temple university press, philadelphia, 19-40. jameson, f. 1985, ‘postmodernism and consumer culture,’ in postmodernism culture, (ed.) h. foster. pluto press, london, 111. male, a. 2002, ‘basic instinct.’ mojo, september: 81–88. hampton, j. 2007, ‘the 40 best albums of 2006.’ spin, january: 56. scorsese, m. (dir.) 2008, shine a light, documentary, 20th century fox. shepherd rock critics as ‘mouldy’ modernists portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 10 stewart, s. 1984, on longing: narratives on the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. john hopkins university press, baltimore. williams, r. 1977, marxism and literature. oxford university press, oxford. toynbee, j. 1993, ‘policing bohemia, pinning up grunge: the music press and generic change in british pop and rock,’ popular music, vol. 12, no. 3: 289–300. mcnairgalley2013finalpa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. australians abroad special issue, guest edited by juliana de nooy. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. title mary poppins and the soviet pilgrimage: p. l. travers’s moscow excursion (1934) john mcnair, university of queensland in the narrative of australians abroad in the twentieth century, the journey to soviet russia occupies a particular place. although never on the standard itinerary of international tourism, the ‘socialist sixth of the world’ in the decades between the world wars became an increasingly common destination for western intellectuals drawn by the allure of a grandiose social experiment that seemed so much in contrast to the economic depression, social strife and political unrest overshadowing their lives at home. for most of those who travelled there—and certainly for australians no less than others—the trip itself was an ideological gesture; for many it held the promise of a visit to the future.1 for its part, the soviet regime was not slow to recognize the role such travellers and their testimony might play in its own strategies to influence ‘progressive’ opinion in the capitalist world. state and party policies regarding the invitation and reception of international visitors were implemented by a number of official agencies, but from 1925 most often by a specially-constituted all-union society for cultural relations with foreign countries (generally referred to by its russian acronym voks2). intourist, the state travel bureau, was established in 1929 to organize and market individual and group 1 a cliché generally attributed to the us journalist lincoln steffens (steffens 1931: 79). 2 the most recent and comprehensive account in english of voks and its activities, and indeed of this aspect of soviet cultural diplomacy in general (a subject far beyond the scope of this essay), is to be found in david-fox (2012). unlike earlier studies—for example, margulies (1968) and hollander (1981), this draws on previously inaccessible russian archive materials. mcnair mary poppins portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 2 tourist ‘packages.’ by the mid-1930s, the ‘ideological’ grand tour of russia— sometimes glibly (though not always inappropriately) designated the ‘soviet pilgrimage’—was well under way, its participants including as well as international luminaries of the left—such as theodor dreiser (1927), henri barbusse (1928), george bernard shaw (1931), sydney and beatrice webb (1932) and romain rolland (1935)— increasing numbers of less ‘committed’ intellectuals and professionals eager to see the new russia at first hand. between 1929 and 1939, according to recent calculations by sheila fitzpatrick (2008), some sixty-four individuals made the trip from australia: trade-unionists, academics, schoolteachers, journalists, engineers, doctors, agronomists and economists, as well as a stockbroker, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a clergyman, a lawyer and the writers jean devanny and katharine susannah prichard.3 when she set out on her soviet journey in 1932, pamela travers, née helen lyndon goff, was not yet a well-known writer and no longer a resident of australia. born in maryborough in 1899, brought up in ipswich, allora and bowral, and educated in sydney, she had left her native land in 1924 to create for herself a new career and a new identity in the great imperial metropolis that was london.4 she was to return only once, in 1963, for a visit of only three weeks. as an ‘australian abroad,’ therefore, she is to be reckoned less a traveller than an expatriate—one among many intellectuals, writers and artists who over several generations had constructed themselves, in ros pesman’s phrase, as ‘fugitives from the cultural desert’ (1996: 200) and made their home in the old country. thanks to the mary poppins stories, travers was more successful than most in her quest for self-reinvention; so much so that few if any of her readers and admirers knew of her australian origins at all. it is therefore all the more ironic that she should begin her account of the trip by obliquely invoking her homeland: ‘going to russia, it appears, is almost as hazardous and complicated a business as going to australia must have been in the days of captain cook’ (travers 1934a: 15). moscow excursion—published some months before mary poppins in 1934—is to all intents and purposes the work of a briton of anglo-irish background abroad, written for a british readership for most of whom australia remained a destination only slightly less alien and remote than the new russia. 3 fitzpatrick’s figures (2008: 27–30) do not include comintern delegates or protégés. on australian travellers to russia, see also pesman (1996, chapter 7), and individual chapters in fitzpatrick and rasmussen (2008); on the visits of prichard and devanny, see mcnair (2000) and (2002) respectively. 4 for travers’s biography see lawson (2010) and saunders (2011). mcnair mary poppins portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 3 her decision to embark on so daunting a journey took her friends by surprise,5 splitting them (as she gleefully observed) into opposing camps on broadly political lines: ‘my forthcoming trip seems to be either the chance of a lifetime or a piece of utter recklessness’ (18). confounding the pro-soviets and anti-soviets alike, she claimed no other purpose but ‘pure enjoyment’; and while ‘in a world rocking madly between fascism and communism’ she professed to prefer the latter form of tyranny (10), she would not nail her colours to either mast. at once disqualifying herself as an ‘ideological’ tourist, she admits: ‘it is difficult for me to think or feel politically’ (18). from the start, therefore, just as she distances herself from the general run of ‘pilgrims’ organized into groups and delegations, chaperoned by official guides and interpreters, conducted around showcase institutions, primed with the statistics of soviet progress and and manipulated by the ‘techniques of hospitality’ (hollander 1981: 120) deployed by voks and kindred agencies to impress and inspire them, so too her account sets itself apart from the standard pilgrimage narrative. as sheila fitzpatrick has argued in drawing attention to some of its more trenchant passages, it exemplifies the ‘cooler reactions’ of less committed travellers (2008: 19, 21) and in that sense is written against its genre. moscow excursion, however, is a less straightforward and more ambivalent record of the soviet journey than this might suggest: on the one hand parodying the ‘truth about russia’ book (katharine susannah prichard’s the real russia, also published in 1934, is a prime example, albeit one unlikely to have been known to travers); and on the other, in its blend of self-deprecation, humour, irony and whimsy illustrating the conflicting responses—hope, scepticism and disillusion—so often evoked by the encounter with soviet reality. originally (if the preface is to be credited) a sequence of letters ‘written... for a single recipient’ (travers 1934a: 10), moscow excursion comprises seven brief chapters (a total of 121 pages), extracts from which were first published in the new english weekly in 1933. it gets under way when the narrator, having purchased a place on a guided tour at the london office of intourist (unaccompanied individual travel was not an option), sets sail for leningrad, and it follows her on the beaten track of official tourism from leningrad to moscow and back to leningrad (a projected river trip to nizhnii novgorod being cancelled at the last minute when, improbably, all the available vessels boats were 5 although it seems likely that her decision was partly inspired by the example of her friend, the irish writer hubert butler, who visited russia in 1931. mcnair mary poppins portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 4 reported to have broken down), ending with the return voyage to london some weeks later. already the contrast with the real russia is striking: here the author (in reality for most of her stay travelling with a delegation of foreign literati under the aegis of the organizing committee of the union of soviet writers) disingenuously represents herself as ‘taking my own wilful way’ independent of any ‘conducted tour’ or organized itinerary (prichard 1934: 6–7). for travers, there is no escaping the trammels of collectivised travel: the tour, the guide and the group. among the latter, the majority is made up of what are facetiously termed the ‘woikers,’ apparently trade union delegates acting as mouthpieces for soviet propaganda. the rest—equally ‘serious and solemn’ (19) intellectuals—are identified only by generic names in the manner of some of the characters in mary poppins (the policeman, the bird woman, the butcher): the first, second and third professors, the schoolteachers, the business man, the poultry farmer. the narrator defines herself as the antithesis of her fellow-travellers: frivolous, flippant and ‘so definitely lacking in the right attitude’ (travers 1934a: 20). the first professor (‘fp’) in particular deprecates her refusal to take things seriously, and the schoolteachers clearly disapprove of her sybaritic lifestyle (‘yes, but what do you do?’) (20). only the business man from manchester, who looks forward to seeing ‘the kremlin’s tomb’ and frequently strays from the group in quest of functioning churches, seems a kindred soul. the rest are happy to follow the formidable guides who steer them round the usual tourist sites (st isaac’s cathedral, the hermitage, the smolny convent in leningrad, st basil’s, the tretyakov gallery, the kremlin ramparts in moscow6) and the standard venues of the soviet tour: the obligatory child-care centre, a technical school, an electrification plant, the house of culture, a boot factory, a palace of weddings, a courtroom, a sports stadium, an airport; at each port of call a director waits to receive them with a well-rehearsed recital of facts and figures. it was precisely such parties of docile and credulous foreigners that malcolm muggeridge, then resident in moscow, described as ‘one of the wonders of the age’ (1972: 244). from her perspective as a disaffected insider, travers is no less sardonic: factories, crèches, prisons – doesn’t it sound to you the most lunatic kind of nightmare? not one of us would put a foot inside such places in the west…and yet here we are, solemnly trooping about looking at boots, babies and criminals as though they were bits of the true cross. (1934a: 66) 6 to travers’s indignation, the kremlin itself was closed for a meeting of the congress of soviets. mcnair mary poppins portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 5 kicking over the traces whenever she can, she flouts the accepted conventions of the soviet guided tour: the crèche, for example, so often a highlight for western admirers of the soviet achievement, is for her a disappointment; ‘it was not a very clean crèche, and i couldn’t help wondering if the overalls were to protect the babies from us or us from the babies’ (59). her enthusiasm for a moscow prison (‘the happiest place i have yet seen in russia’) is prompted not by the usual sympathy with the regenerative aims of the socialist penal system but by an idiosyncratic delight in seeing the inmates ‘simply doing nothing’ (65). while the others shuffle reverently around lenin’s rooms at the smolny institute, she senses only emptiness and chilliness and gives herself up to ‘wild surmise’ about the young noblewomen in satins and high heels who wandered these same corridors in the reign of catherine the great: ‘i am glad to think the walls remember something a little irrational’ (34). on occasion, she withdraws from the tour altogether: we continue to move in a body like some faint cooling sun through strange zodiacal signs—the house of culture, the house of the workers, the house of sports, the house of prostitutes—to the last i resolutely refused to go. the guide did all she could to persuade me and couldn’t believe i wasn’t in the least interested. (79) the institution in question was in all likelihood the prophylactorium for reformed prostitutes, another showcase of soviet social engineering that failed to impress doris hayball, another australian abroad, a few years later (1939: 84–85).7 there were other reasons for travers’s increasingly frequent truancy, for unlike her travelling companions, she had russian contacts8: t in leningrad, who presses illegal roubles into her hand, z ‘the russian anti-communist from cambridge,’ a young poet, a blue-eyed member of the cheka9 with an interest in english literature, m the party member, a the secretary to a writers’ club, v a young girl ‘ecstatic’ to be involved in the soviet experiment and a (nameless) young film-maker from birmingham ‘who has gone so bolshie that even the bolshies think him rather too much on the red side’ (travers 1934a: 73). although she claims these are ‘fictitious initials’ assigned to 7 hayball’s impressions of her tour and their similarity to travers’s are discussed by fitzpatrick (2008: 19–21). 8 in some cases these may have been acquaintances of p. d. ouspensky (uspenskii), largely resident in london from the early 1920s, a friend of travers’s mentor alfred orage and like him a close associate of the russianized georgian mystic george gurdjieff (giurdzhiev). 9 the cheka (‘special committee’), redesignated the gpu (gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravlenie) in 1922 and ogpu (obyedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye) in 1923, was reconstituted as the nkvd (narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del) in july 1934. mcnair mary poppins portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 6 ‘synthesized personages, it seems clear that her exposure to russia went far beyond the mediated conversations,’ with the ‘ordinary russians’ produced by soviet officialdom to meet visiting foreigners. thanks to such friends she strays from the prescribed itinerary to visit a cemetery and a film studio, glimpses life as it is lived in a communal flat with no running water, and finds refuge from her ‘very modern, very ugly, very new’ leningrad hotel (25) in a real apartment with a real fireplace and comfortable armchairs, a smiling maid and (even more welcome) wine in a bottle and white bread (38). in such company she is introduced too to the sinister underside of soviet life in the mid-thirties: the poet who writes verse that cannot be published because it is not propaganda undergoes a transformation in the company of the man from the cheka: ‘i care only to write propaganda poems for the soviet world state’ (39). and for the tourist who really does take her ‘own wilful way’ there is always the possibility of contact with actual ‘ordinary russians,’ like the returned émigrée clinging to her ‘fanatical’ faith in the ultimate victory of socialism (42), or the driver on the intourist coach who ‘unexpectedly turned into a human being’ and shared with her his bottle of home-made vodka (103). assigned (or appropriating) as a tourist the role of ‘the outcast, the irreverent one’ (travers 1934a: 70), travers writes against the conventions and clichés of the genre her account seems to parody. neither the prison nor the crèche nor the boot factory strike her as the ‘model’ institutions celebrated in other narratives (66); the two-year-olds in the crèche are not the usual happy healthy toddlers, but ‘very small old men,’ ‘grave and sombre’ (59); the inevitable collective farm turns out to be ‘a small dilapidated village green’ (101), and even swan lake is a disappointment, a production so antiquated as ‘to make one think one is still living under the tsarist régime’ (106). she is unconstrained by the tactful reticence that so often glosses over the more negative aspects of russian reality: the food queues in which crowds stand ‘quietly and greyly,’ on their faces ‘a steady, sealed look, as though they were under an anaesthetic’ (42); the meat coupons, worthless since there is no meat to be had outside the torgsin (foreign currency) shops (84); ‘the drabness, the universal grey, the complete sameness of the people’ (30); the street urchins clamouring for sweets and chocolate, the absence of bathplugs and hot water in the hotel, the rotten eggs served at breakfast, the appalling food that is ‘a king’s feast compared with the fare of the average russian’ (51), the fact that her movements are watched, her mail intercepted and her attempts to telephone friends frustrated by the mcnair mary poppins portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 7 security police. most radically of all, she rejects the convention that books about russia should pretend to give ‘the whole truth’ (10), and indeed the entire notion that the ‘real russia’ is to be found in the factories, crèches, museums and power stations of the official tour at all: ‘properly to see russia one must not be a tourist. one must know the language, move about alone and dispense with the questionable blessing of state guides’; otherwise there is no need for the traveller to spend more money ‘than will buy a ticket to tunbridge wells or brighton’ (8–9). at the same time, however, although she does not know the language (and, unlike katharine susannah prichard, never claims to), and although it is almost impossible to go about alone, travers is engaged in her own search for the ‘real russia’ concealed by the appearance of mass uniformity and the ‘resolute materialism’ of the soviet state (72); occasionally, indeed, she seems to have found it. lenin’s mausoleum, for example, repels her with its ‘statue of poor flesh preserved against its own will and against all law,’ but she is moved by the reverent silence of the crowd waiting to do homage and the gentle solicitude of the guard who helps her down the dark stairs (72). a performance of hamlet, where ‘a magical current’ flows between actors and audience, so that ‘spectators become participants, and every person in the theatre is acting a specific part in the play’ helps explains the popular appeal of the great ‘bolshevik pageant’ (93). at the ballet too she shares in the audience’s delight and feels ‘entirely at one with the russians, probably because the theatre is the only place where they become a collection of liberated human beings instead of functioning as members of groups, cells and soviets’ (106). in the same way she feels affinity with the inmates of the gaol, each set free by an ‘individual ‘individual anti-social act’ and cleansed ‘from the mass in him’(65); and enjoys her moment of camaraderie with the suddenly humanised bus-driver. for travers, then, the whole truth about russia is more than the notion of a society transformed by collectivist mentality, socialist ideology and materialist philosophy which sustains the first professor, her particular sparring partner, and the other ‘serious’ members of the group. conceding the importance of the soviet experiment, she cannot look on it, as they do, ‘untrammelled by any sense of proportion’: it seems to me horribly imperfect, horribly old-fashioned, horribly bourgeois … and at the moment more like tom brown’s schooldays or a church lads’ brigade than an ideal state. if i regard this mcnair mary poppins portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 8 as ideal i must exclude everything else, and if i exclude how can i be a communist in any ultimate sense, a communist in the true meaning of the word? a part is not enough for me, i want all. (88) ‘apolitical’ in the sense that, in sheila fitzpatrick’s words, she is neither a fellow traveller ‘nor a dyed-in-the-wool opponent of soviet communism’ (fitzpatrick 2008: 21), the author of moscow excursion nevertheless writes from a position of ideological idealism which arguably reflects her interest in gurdjieff and his institute for the harmonious development of man.10 in soviet communism she sees not some transcendent ‘belief in the individual and the enlarging of human capacities’ but a doctrine of mechanization (11); and in the new russia she sees not a humanizing classless society but ‘pre-eminently the bourgeois, class-ridden state’ in which the workers are privileged to the exclusion of all others (41–42). her most mordant strictures are reserved for the ‘soviet principles’ that have transformed ‘russia reborn’ into merely ‘a new and more vigorous form of bourgeois bureaucracy’ (8–9): rationalism, materialism, conformity, collectivism, statism and the socialist work ethic. lenin’s rooms at smolny exude an ‘inhuman intensity’ and ‘raw rationalism’ suggestive of a man ‘consumed by mind’ (33–34); the empty husk of his body preserved in the mausoleum exemplifies the materialism of the state that has made it ‘a thing for tourists to gape at and peasants to pray to’ (72).the infants in the crèche sup their gruel under a portrait of the child lenin and a red banner that proclaims ‘play is not just fun. it is the preparation for toil’ (59)—an early object lesson in the fact that, whereas ‘to the western mind warmth and food is [sic] a compensation for work, … here work makes up for the lack of these’ (43). work is exalted into an ‘old-fashioned’ ’doctrine of denial’ by which the state ensures the self-sacrifice of its citizens in the name of ‘the time that is to come’; ‘they worship employment, and we, surely, are moving on to enjoyment. if not, what are we living for?’(42). only in the prison and in the cemetery is it possible to ‘do nothing’ (40; 65). even tourists succumb to stultifying effects of relentlessly mechanical routine: we are infected with the need, obvious in all the russians one sees, of living only with part of ourselves, of storing up precious energy and enduring, enduring, enduring. the machine is getting us, we are falling into place, cogs in the great wheel. we move from fortress to palace, from palace to factory with nightmare regularity. the great human clock goes ticking evenly, but nobody seems to know if it is telling the right time. (30) 10 introduced to the gurdjieff ‘system’ by orage, travers continued to study it after his death in 1934, and in 1936 (through orage’s widow) she met gurdjieff himself. mcnair mary poppins portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 9 from this workaday world of monotony and regimentation, however, travers can take refuge in the alternative russia revealed to her by imagination, fantasy and magic; rather as the banks children escape from the everyday and the commonplace into the realm of the absurd and the impossible made accessible with the advent of mary poppins. the ghostly young ladies gambolling through the corridors at smolny (travers 1934a:34) are one flight of fancy; the six little boys who might have been one little boy repeated several times (‘a recurring decimal on legs’) are another (104). the three dozen lemons she brings with her from london have miraculous properties, freeing the successful literary bureaucrat a from his ‘communist mould,’ ‘his face suddenly softened and mobile and joyous’ (117), and casting a spell over the obstructive hallporter as ‘warmth, friendliness, life’ flows over russians and tourists alike (119). her long-cherished romantic notion of riding in a droshky is realised one night when she (improbably) whisks the first professor off in search of genghiz khan (86); although their quarry eludes them and the professor takes the opportunity to continue her political instruction. did the young defendant in a court case really beat up his neighbour because he played the flute badly? (68). did the third professor really threaten to climb on to the roof of the bus and sing ‘land of hope and glory’? (70). did the collective farm really pride itself on an annual crop of thirty-three cabbages, two thousand lettuces and seven carrots? (102). as a reviewer in the christchurch sun had noted already in 1926, few writers can equal p. l. travers ‘in the realm of whimsical fantasy’ (quoted in lawson 2010: 90). it is not only in whimsy, however, that the author of moscow excursion looks for some key to the riddles and enigmas of the real russia. as though turning the underlying conceit of the soviet pilgrimage against itself, she repeatedly invokes the imagery and mythology of christianity as a commentary on the materialist mysteries of bolshevism. the travellers are devotés of ‘the russian cult’ (19; 66), worshippers before pieces of the true cross (66); lenin’s rooms at smolny are the soviet bethlehem (32), while crowds flock to ‘the kremlin’s tomb’ to worship a ‘dead but living god’ (72) and the image of him as a child, ‘a nimbus of curls’ shining round his head, smiles down like the christ-child on the inmates of the day-nursery (59). the ‘liquidating of churches’ is ‘obviously one of the first articles of the soviet faith’ (57), although aggressive atheism is merely a mask for the new secular religion: mcnair mary poppins portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 10 the soviet is not concerned with atheism, but with throwing over one god to deify another—man, perhaps, with the ultimate ideal paradise, here and now, heaven on earth, the symbol lenin, and the choir of angels the communist party. there is no race more natively religious than the russian—they have merely turned their faith in another direction. (37) an icon of st george and the dragon in st basil’s cathedral proves on closer inspection to depict the apotheosis of lenin and his followers ‘stalin, kalinin, molotov, etc.’ rescuing the proletariat from the monster of capitalism (60). like the early christians, the new russia preaches a doctrine of righteous self-denial (43), its avatar lenin, like jesus, proclaiming ‘the doctrine of work the only good’ and ‘declaring himself for a paradise here and now.’ but lenin did not live long enough; his teaching has been eclipsed by a ‘renegade doctrine,’ ‘the “new” religion’ that promises instead of a future heaven ‘a future superstate’ (116). the tone is ironic, but the philosophical challenge to the soviet state’s ‘rationalization’ of lenin’s idealism is none the less serious; for ‘rationalization, carried to its logical conclusion, can mean nothing but death’ (10–11). as the preface to moscow excursion warns us, anyone who looks here for ‘a serious exposition of the soviet state is doomed to disappointment’ (travers 1934a: 10). it describes food queues and shortages and offers a glimpse of stalin—or at least of ‘a dark asiatic face huddled in one corner’ of a rolls royce (81)—but says nothing of the forced collectivization of agriculture and its direr consequences (the famine, repression and civil unrest which most probably were the reason for the cancellation of the trip to nizhnii novgorod) nor of the ruthless politics of stalinism. its author denounces the activities of the secret police, yet seems unaware of the danger for her russian friends of her persistent attempts to telephone them. yet its self-conscious superficiality and studied naivety are perhaps deceptive, and distinguish it from the ingenuousness (or often disingenuousness) of more ‘serious’ soviet pilgrimage narratives. quirky, ‘admittedly entirely personal and prejudiced’ (10) as they might be, her despatches are not without their moments of prescience: on the eve of the great purge, for example, she reflects on the nature of the ‘bolshevik pageant’ and the ‘conditioning’ of its participants: oh, it’s clever, it’s diabolically clever. lenin discovered that bears dance naturally and stalin knew well how to put rings in their noses and lead them through the streets. but somewhere, behind all the cunning exploitation, is there not the bear’s own desire to be so led? haven’t the people themselves chosen the tyranny that flatters their deepest instincts and relieves them of the necessity of thinking for themselves? (93) mcnair mary poppins portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 11 such a question serves further to remind us how far the persona habitually affected by travers’s traveller—part innocent abroad, part enfant terrible, superficially flippant yet more serious than she cares to appear—differs from the earnest narrators of more routine testimonies to the soviet pilgrimage: conscientious delegates and fact-finders, expert witnesses, self-righteous ‘progressives.’ it is in fact an essential element of the self-deprecating irony that is the dominant narrative mode of moscow excursion, setting it apart and hinting at the richer textures and ambiguities that distinguish the best travel writing. its heroine, by her own admission ‘lamentably idealistic and humanitarian’ (travers 1934a: 10), remains in two minds about the new russia; unlike the first professor, she cannot embrace the accomplished fact of soviet power as the communist ideal; but only because it is a partial solution, a fragment of some ‘eternal pattern’ (12) that is yet to emerge: ‘a part is not enough for me, i want all’ (88). central to this subtext of ambiguity, and indeed to the humour that is its expression, is the second person in the narrative, the ‘single recipient’ of the original letters, never identified but adumbrated in the text as a keenly-missed, understanding and supportive male presence growing a beard as he awaits the traveller’s return (87), presumably to ‘the bright fields of ireland’ (109). the reader might naturally assume that this is the ‘h. l. g.’ to whom the volume is dedicated, even if (given the absence of any apparent prototype in the author’s life at this time) it is another case of ‘fictitious initials’ designating a ‘synthesised personage.’ in fact, however, these are the actual initials of the author herself. here indeed is a whimsical touch worthy of an author so adept at reinventing herself in her life and work. is moscow excursion at one level a narrative of selfdiscovery, the record of a quest for something more than the ‘real’ russia? is the author dedicating the book, as valerie lawson puts it, to ‘her real self’ (lawson 2010: 117)? is ‘p. l. t’ in fact ‘h. l. g.,’ or pamela travers still lyndon goff—an australian abroad in search of a world beyond? reference list david-fox, m. 2012, showcasing the great experiment. cultural diplomacy and western visitors to the soviet union, 1921–1941. oxford university press, oxford. fitzpatrick, s. 2008, ‘australian visitors to the soviet union: the view from the soviet side,’ in political tourists: travellers from australia to the soviet union in the 1920s–1940s, (eds) s. fitzpatrick & c. rasmussen. melbourne university press, melbourne: 1–39. fitzpatrick, s. & rasmussen, c. (eds) 2008, political tourists: travellers from australia to the soviet union in the 1920s-1940s. melbourne university press, melbourne. hayball, d. 1939, sidelights on the soviets: a plain, unvarnished tale of a trip to russia and its great theatre festival. george batchelor, melbourne. mcnair mary poppins portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 12 hollander, p. 1981, political pilgrims: travels of western intellectuals to the soviet union, china and cuba 1928–1978. oxford university press, new york & oxford. lawson, v. 2010, mary poppins she wrote: the true story of australian writer p. l. travers, creator of the quintessentially english nanny. revised edition, hachette, sydney (originally published 1999 as out of the sky she came: the life of p. l. travers, creator of mary poppins. hodder headline australia, rydalmere, nsw). margulies, s. r. 1968, the pilgrimage to russia: the soviet union and the treatment of foreigners, 1924–1937. university of wisconsin press, madison. mcnair, j. 2000, ‘visiting the future: australian [fellow-]travellers in the soviet union,’ australian journal of politics and history, vol. 46, no. 4: 463–79. _____ 2002, ‘“comrades, i know, for i have seen”: jean devanny in the soviet union,’ australian slavonic and east european studies, vol. 16, no. 1–2: 155–72. muggeridge, m. 1972, chronicles of wasted time. collins, london. pesman, r. 1996, duty free: australian women abroad. oxford university press, melbourne. prichard, k. s. n.d. [1934], the real russia. modern publishers, sydney. saunders, k. 2011, notorious australian women. harper collins, pymble, nsw. steffens, l. 1931, the autobiography of lincoln steffens. harcourt, brace and world, new york. travers, p. l. 1934a, moscow excursion. us edition, reynal and hitchcock, new york. (original uk edition, 1934, gerald howe, london.) _____ 1934b, mary poppins. gerald howe, london. microsoft word portalv10no2thomasarticlespecialissue[1].doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. edible alterities: perspectives from la francophonie special issue, guest edited by angela giovanangeli and julie robert. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. the cook and the writer: maryse condé’s journey of selfdiscovery bonnie thomas, university of western australia in an interview with paola ghinelli, celebrated guadeloupean writer maryse condé draws on an evocative metaphor to affirm her identity: ‘j’ai avalé toute une série de réalités et je suis le résultat de ces mélanges’ (ghinelli 2005: 43).1 condé’s recent writings reveal a preoccupation with self-understanding, culminating in her 2012 autobiographical narrative la vie sans fards (life without embellishment), in which she attempts to recount her life without resorting to self-aggrandizement. condé affirms in a 2010 interview that knowing herself is crucially linked to knowing her place within her female genealogy: ‘chez nous aux antilles toutes les généalogies doivent passer par les femmes’ (carruggi 2010: 210).2 this article aims to reveal how condé’s 2006 memoir, victoire, les saveurs et les mots3—a work of autofiction in which she imagines her maternal grandmother’s life—allows her to place herself within such a female continuum. drawing on one of the few facts she knows about victoire—that she was a cook—condé reinforces the intimate connection between history, memory and food in her memoir, bringing forth a profound link between the generations of women that precede her. in this way she ensures her family histories form part of a greater narrative of the caribbean. condé’s nomadic background makes her particularly attuned to the 1 ‘i swallowed a whole series of realities and i am the result of these mixes.’ all translations in this paper are my own with the exception of published translations of condé’s work. 2 ‘for us in the french caribbean, all genealogies must pass through women.’ 3 translated into english in 2010 with the title victoire: my mother’s mother. hereafter, reference to the novel will be abbreviated to victoire. thomas the cook and the writer portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 2 transnational and polyphonic nature of her caribbean identity and she reveals that food provides both a literal and figurative vehicle for the reappraisal of her history. the theoretical background to this discussion draws on two principal sources—first, edouard glissant’s concept of relation; and second, antonio benítez-rojo’s notion of the polyphonic fugue. martinican writer glissant remains one of the foremost theoreticians of the caribbean and his characterization of martinique and guadeloupe as sites of history dominated by ruptures and a brutal dislocation caused by the slave trade is crucial to understanding the french caribbean context (glissant 1989: 61). however, glissant considerably extended his interpretation of these ideas, which he first explored in his 1981 le discours antillais,4 in works such as poétique de la relation (glissant 1990),5 une nouvelle région du monde (glissant 2006), quand les murs tombent: l’identité nationale hors-la-loi? (glissant & chamoiseau 2007) and mémoires des esclavages: la fondation d’un centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leur abolitions (glissant 2007). glissant’s concept of relation challenges the idea of a fixed identity and instead encourages a theoretical approach that views elements in relation to one another rather than in oppositional pairings. he employs the image of the rhizome to encapsulate this position with its connotation of a chaotic network of interconnecting roots: ‘rhizomic thought is the principle behind what i call the poetics of relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the other’ (glissant 1997: 11). relation in this paper displaces the idea of a continuous unfolding of history in which past, present and future relate to each other in an oppositional way. instead, relation privileges a network of interrelationships where there is sufficient flexibility to reinterpret seemingly fixed meanings. on a more personal level, in the case of condé and her female relatives, a relational approach means delving into family mythologies in which individuals have been relegated to reductive stereotypes. for example, condé has always viewed her mother as emotionally absent and difficult in a similar manner to the way in which jeanne, condé’s mother, views victoire. while condé distances herself from glissant’s cerebral approach to the past—she notes that ‘glissant is abstract i live, and i draw lessons from what i live, but i don’t have theoretical constructs’ (alexander et al. 2006: 21)—his 4 translated into english in 1989 with the title caribbean discourse. 5 translated into english in 1997 with the title poetics of relation. thomas the cook and the writer portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 3 model of relation nonetheless proves useful when viewing condé’s reflections on her ancestors. indeed, one could argue that condé shows that the discovery and integration of her female genealogy into her personal history constitutes an innovative incarnation of relation. critic nick nesbitt argues that condé’s approach to writing history and memory is unique, as she ‘opens a space so that the human subject and historical fact can meet … condé articulates an individual experience of french caribbean history, saturated with affectivity’ (2002: 115). condé’s work consistently demonstrates how the personal becomes a powerful expression of the political. nesbitt’s assertion highlights the way in which condé engages with and reinforces the link between history and individual histories, a feat that is achieved in victoire, through the symbolism of food. in his now famous 1992 publication the repeating island: the caribbean and the postmodern perspective, antonio benítez-rojo draws attention to the plural, rhizomatic nature of the caribbean. he characterizes the caribbean as a ‘meta-archipelago,’ a geographical feature without boundary or centre that conjures up images of ‘unstable condensations, turbulences, whirlpools, clumps of bubbles … in short, a field of observation quite in tune with the objectives of chaos’ (1992: 2–3). like glissant, however, benítez-rojo stresses that such chaos is not necessarily a negative phenomenon; rather it charaterises a space for new and fruitful connections. benítezrojo likens the caribbean to a fugue where all elements are necessary, even those that conflict, in order to create an intricate polyphonic composition (1992: 173). in a place like the caribbean where there are so many potentially clashing influences—different languages, cultures and power relations—the image of the fugue allows for the possibility of positive intersection. benítez-rojo’s framework emphasizing plurality and interconnection adds another layer to analysis of condé’s reminiscences against the backdrop of french caribbean history. her attempt to make sense of her female line forms part of a larger search for polyphonic ‘order’ within a ‘chaotic’ network of relationships: ‘victoire is an element that allows me to access the truth about my mother and hence about myself. since i never knew victoire and have no memory of her, she is only theoretical and abstract, but without her i would never have been able to reach the intimacy that i want with my mother’ (boisseron 2010: 144). in victoire condé interrogates her past for answers to the psychologically disjointed upbringing she experienced as a child and its decisive influence in shaping her global thomas the cook and the writer portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 4 outlook later in life. as she states in her essay pour une littérature-monde, ‘je tentai d’expliciter les complexes rapports de ma mère et de ma grand-mère, toute cette avantvie qui influa sur mon comportement’ (2007: 213).6 and in a 2010 interview she asserts that she had to ‘voir, recréer toute cette généalogie féminine que je connaissais pas’ (carruggi 2010: 211).7 throughout the narrative condé uncovers and, in the absence of hard facts, imagines and reconstructs her maternal grandmother victoire’s life. she discovers that, contrary to her mother jeanne’s bourgeois existence as an adult, jeanne’s childhood was spent in poverty as victoire hired herself out as a cook. the symbolism of food works in a number of different ways in victoire. first, condé establishes food as a symbol of alienation and acculturation to the french way of life. second, she demonstrates that food constitutes an emotional battleground between the three generations of women where food comes to constitute a language. third, she uses food as a means to inscribe her grandmother’s story in a historical narrative where records of victoire’s culinary successes act as examples of pierre nora’s ‘lieux de mémoire, sites of memory’ (1989: 7). finally, the results of victoire’s labour in the kitchen help to open the doors to greater autonomy for her daughter and, consequently, her granddaughter. the constant comparisons condé makes between her grandmother’s occupation as a cook and her own as a writer—‘i want to establish the link between her creativity and mine, to switch from the savors, the colors, and the smells of meat and vegetables to those of words’ (2010: 59)—constitute a final drawing together of her female relatives in a gesture of relation. before proceeding to an analysis of condé’s text, it is important first to establish the central role that food and cooking play in the history and culture of the caribbean. according to brinda mehta, here speaking of french guadaloupean author gisèle pineau, ‘it is impossible to separate the island’s [guadeloupe’s] culinary history from its disempowering colonial history of amerindian genocide, african slavery, indian and chinese indenture, and its subsequent consequences of cultural métissage or creolization, migration, survival, and adaptation’ (2005: 25). there are a number of pertinent points to consider in relation to this culinary history of conquest and adaptation. first, food became one of many ways in which the colonizing power, france, imposed its will on the dominated cultures of martinique, guadeloupe and marie 6 ‘i tried to make explicit the complex relationships with my mother and grandmother, all this life before mine that influenced my behaviour.’ 7 ‘see, recreate this whole female genealogy that i didn’t know.’ thomas the cook and the writer portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 5 galante. domestic servants like victoire were forced to recreate as much as possible the culinary traditions of france in the kitchens of their employers. french food was associated with superiority so that imported products such as apples were more sought after than tropical produce such as mangoes or avocadoes. moreover, apart from crops such as sugar cane, which remained a symbol of exploitation and oppression after the abolition of slavery in martinique and guadeloupe in 1848, local food was overlooked in favour of foreign imports. consequently, these french caribbean islands became increasingly dependant upon french aid as they lost the ability to be self-sufficient. as richard burton put it, the island departments of martinique and guadeloupe became ‘all superstructure and no base’ (1995: 4). just like the french language, imported french food attained a certain prestige in comparison to its local counterparts. on the other hand, food became a means for illiterate domestic workers to achieve a sense of autonomy within their situation to the point where it constituted a kind of language. as mehta has affirmed in relation to the guadeloupean writer gisèle pineau’s grandmother, ‘[c]ultural production in the form of cooking, cultivation, storytelling, and other forms of cultural discursiveness become [an] alphabet, [a] symbolic system of self-inscription in family and communal history’ (2005: 30). in the case of victoire, her ability in the kitchen achieves her an enviable reputation in her milieu despite her inability to speak french. this sense of autonomy forms a contrast to jeanne who strives to emulate the french model by expressing herself resolutely in the french language and by being as ‘french’ as possible. one could draw a parallel here between victoire and pineau’s grandmother, man ya, who also rejects assimilation and remains resolutely herself—a simple peasant woman who is deeply attached to the natural landscape of guadeloupe and who expresses herself in creole. like condé’s parents, pineau’s mother and father subscribe to an assimilationist model of self-advancement, but in both cases the writers underline the painful self-censorship and limitations such an approach entails. condé introduces the idea of food as a symbol of alienation and acculturation to the french way of life in her first autobiographical reflection le coeur à rire et à pleurer: contes vrais de mon enfance (1999).8 this book centres on condé’s childhood in 8 tales from the heart: true stories from my childhood. hereafter, reference to this work will be abbreviated to tales from the heart. thomas the cook and the writer portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 6 guadeloupe and offers insights into her growing awareness of the way in which historical forces imprint themselves upon individual lives. in particular she draws attention to the ongoing influence of france on her daily life and her parents’ commitment to assimilating to the french way of life as much as possible. condé enlists a culinary scene in tales from the heart to dramatize the conflict of affirming one’s identity in a situation of cultural dominance. the family are on one of their regular trips to france, enjoying a meal at a parisian café when waiters would arrive at their table: ‘their trays balanced on their hips, the garçons de café would hover around us admiringly like honey bees. setting down the diabolos menthes, they never failed to come out with: “you speak excellent french, you know!”’ (2001: 4). condé’s parents are outraged, her father declaring that they are as french as the waiters while her mother asserts that they are even more so because they are better educated, have better manners and have travelled more. from their elegant clothes to their very french choice of drink, monsieur and madame boucolon see themselves as indistinguishable from their metropolitan counterparts. for the young condé, however, this experience provokes a serious questioning of her identity, only deepened when her older brother sandrino declares that their parents are ‘a pair of alienated individuals’ (2001: 6). in this café scene condé’s parents demonstrate a bicultural approach to identity that situates guadeloupe constantly in relation to france rather than viewing the different aspects of their identity in a relational context. the split that condé senses between her parents’ perception of themselves as exceptional individuals, coupled with the attitude of superiority adopted by the parisian waiters, marks the beginning of her refusal to be defined by others. while still not fully understanding the concept of alienation, the young condé eventually comes to the conclusion that an alienated person must be someone who ‘is trying to be what he can’t because he does not like what he is’ (2001: 7). condé’s description of her overnight transformation from a model of obedience into an obstinate child encapsulates the critical, questioning attitude that is characteristic of her later thought and drives her to interrogate her family through history through relation. her parents, in contrast to their daughter, appear stunted in their intellectual growth as they remain fixated on a model of social advancement that is continually oriented towards france. the development of these attitudes proves fundamental in victoire as they decisively influence the relationships that grow between mother, daughter and granddaughter and are orchestrated through the medium of food. thomas the cook and the writer portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 7 in contrast to her depiction of her parents’ assimilationist attitude, condé empowers victoire by emphasizing her capacity to create a bridge between two cultures through food. victoire demonstrates a remarkable ability to create culinary delights that blend and adapt both the foreign and local cultures. for a family christening for her employers, for example, victoire creates a menu that is an exotic blend of european delights and caribbean delicacies, including ‘[c]onch and freshwater fingerling pie. sea urchin chaud-froid. fatted chicken caramelized in juniper’ (2010: 190). food and cooking, then, constitute powerful vehicles for the expression of social relations between different classes and cultures. what the menu above underlines is the way in which the values attributed to different classes may vary according to how you interpret them—on the one hand, victoire may appear to be exploited and limited by her domestic duties; on the other hand, she forges a path of autonomy using food that not only allows her to express herself, but also opens a road towards liberation for her descendants. as a result of victoire’s abilities as a cook she is able to support jeanne to pursue a career as one of the first black school teachers in guadeloupe and consequently for condé to become a leading writer and academic. the progressive upward mobility of this female line is facilitated by the medium of food. condé also dramatizes the conflicted relationships in her female genealogy in the way she and her ancestors relate to food. victoire illustrates that food metamorphoses into a powerful battlefield for the exchange of emotions, resulting in the permanent transformation of the female line. condé’s narrative reveals that jeanne expresses her feelings towards life in her approach to food. unlike for victoire, food for jeanne is not a source of pleasure or nourishment, but a way of rebelling against her mother and expressing her anger at her situation. when she is angry at victoire for deserting her in order to follow a man to martinique, jeanne loses a significant amount of weight ‘as a way of punishing her mother who placed so much importance in [food]’ (2010: 96). as victoire feels increasingly rejected by her daughter, she expresses her emotions by burying herself in the kitchen and ‘cooking to excess’ (2010: 112). victoire and jeanne consistently play out their emotional battles through the indulgence in or rejection of food to the point where victoire feels so withdrawn from her daughter that she ultimately loses her literal taste for life. the symbolic intermingling of food and emotion carries over into condé’s own life and she recalls the way her mother became furious when she showed an interest in cooking. she discovers that the acceptance or thomas the cook and the writer portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 8 rejection of a culinary role symbolized a far more complex distinction for her mother in which a love of food is likened to oppression and a rejection of it to intellectual superiority: ‘je me suis rendu compte plus tard que c’est parce qu’en fait il y avait un choix: ou bien être intellectuelle comme elle l’était, ou bien être comme ma grand-mère, une femme d’instinct, une femme sans éducation’ (carruggi 2010: 210–11).9 however, by asserting in the preface to a book on french caribbean cuisine that she is an excellent cook as well as a writer (ovide 2002: 9), condé shows that identity is no longer a case of either/or, but, rather, a place where previously conflicting elements can coexist. victoire reveals condé’s overarching desire to find patterns of relation in her family—or polyphonic beauty in benítez-rojo’s terms—and therefore to reconcile with her personal and cultural past. in a different manner, condé uses her grandmother’s culinary talents as a way to inscribe her tale in a larger historical narrative by recording the concrete remains she leaves behind her. interestingly, despite the difficult relationship between mother and daughter, it is jeanne who conserves many of these ‘traces of the past’ as if she is trying to transpose victoire’s worth onto a level that is acceptable among the black bourgeois society to which she joins as a result of her education. condé recalls hearing her mother constantly asserting that: ‘[m]y mother could neither read nor write, but without her i wouldn’t be where i am today’ (2010: 114) and that among ‘the papers my mother kept was issue 51 of l’echo pointois, where right in the middle of a laudatory article appears the menu for this christening banquet, lyrically composed like a poem’ (2010: 70). it is as if jeanne is desperate to remember her mother in a meaningful way, but struggles to do so in a society that rejects the importance of an illiterate domestic who cannot speak french. jeanne finds herself in a complex web of conflicting demands where victoire is the one who enables her promotion to bourgeois society, but at the same time, jeanne must relinquish attachment to her mother in order to accept this position. jeanne’s ambiguous, emotionally detached approach to life reflects her internal struggle as she fights to find a way to reconcile these two very different worlds. in fact it falls to her daughter to forge this reconciliatory network of relation as if the distance afforded by one generation’s remove is the only way to heal from the past. 9 ‘i only realized much later that it was because there was in fact a choice: to be an intellectual as she was, or to be like my grandmother, a woman of instinct, a woman without education.’ thomas the cook and the writer portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 9 condé strengthens her grandmother’s influence by likening victoire’s creations to a religious experience, in this way reappraising her exclusion from history with a capital ‘h’. for example, reverend father moulinet declares that her ‘cooking amounted to honoring god’ (2010: 123), ‘the priest in le moule extolled victoire’s merits in his sermon at high mass and called her a true christian’ (2010: 123) and wrote in his diary that it ‘is the almighty who has manifested himself in her hands’ (2010: 125). endowed with divine qualities, victoire is no longer bound to her state of illiteracy, colour, gender and poverty. on the contrary, condé’s grandmother takes on a role of definitive influence. the extraordinary achievement of liberating her descendants from the shackles of subservience provides an overarching and uniting framework for her daughter and grandchildren to follow. condé’s re-evaluation of victoire’s role provides a bonding link between generations of highly conflicted female relationships. condé reinforces the intimate connection between history, memory and food in her recreation of a culinary scene she labels ‘the last supper’. victoire is close to death and again it is food to which she turns as a way to leave a final imprint on her descendants’ narrative. as condé imagines this event in her book, she recalls it is an occasion that blends the personal and political: it unites all the people for whom victoire cares whilst simultaneously allowing her to imagine a better future for her country: ‘one day, guadeloupe would no longer be tortured by questions of class. the white creoles would learn to be humble and tolerant. there would no longer be the need to set a club of grands nègres against them. both would get along, freely intermingle, and who knows, love each other’ (2010: 189). this lunch represents victoire’s ‘way of writing her last will and testament’ (2010: 189) and in a rare moment of intimacy between mother and daughter, jeanne records the menu of this significant day ‘on one of her exercise books that she carefully kept, scribbled with bits of her diary, memos, class timetables, and her children’s height and weight’ (2010: 189). food thus becomes a way for victoire to reach out to her daughter and for her daughter to reciprocate in a way that is meaningful for her. it is interesting that jeanne chooses to record this culinary experience in written form, in some way forging a bond between all three generations where the cook (victoire) gradually becomes the writer (condé). in an attempt to forge a network of relation with her female ancestors—indeed, to reconnect the broken links between herself and her mother, and her mother and her thomas the cook and the writer portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 10 grandmother—condé makes repeated comparisons of the cook and the writer in victoire. cooking is a way for victoire to express her creativity in the same way condé expresses hers through writing. condé traces the ways in which one’s attitude to one’s craft reflects the ebbs and flows of one’s life. for example, when victoire is no longer able to set foot in the kitchen, condé laments the feeling of uselessness that must assail her, just as she would if she was banned from her computer (2010: 116). when victoire loses her purpose in life it is because she cannot cook, in the same way that the gift of writing may desert one if one loses the will to live (2010: 171). victoire’s attitude to life is closely mirrored in her attitude to food while for condé this creative expression is found in writing. condé’s appreciation of the complexities of french caribbean identity—both in a global and local context—is a topic that she has discussed in a number of contexts over the years. in a 1991 interview with françoise pfaff, for example, condé discusses the multiplicity of caribbean identity, arguing that it cannot be reproduced like a recipe for cooking, but, rather, that there are several ways to be caribbean (2010: 113). furthermore, in her 1995 contribution to the edited collection penser la créolité, ‘chercher nos vérités,’ she poses the question ‘what is the caribbean today?’ she answers that it is ‘a place without definite contours, porous to all distant noises, traversed by all influences, even the most contradictory’ (1995: 309). this emphasis on multiplicity, mutual influence and connection in french caribbean identity is reflected in glissant’s model of relation. condé’s autobiographical narratives demonstrate the way in which people need to situate themselves in a relational network in order to understand both themselves and their country. for condé this relational feat is achieved through her creative linking of victoire’s culinary art and condé’s own literary craft. the quest to bond the cook with the writer also allows condé to better understand her own mother and therefore to create links where before there was disconnection and rupture. finally she is able to view her mother in her own light, reflecting that both jeanne and herself have harnessed their memories of victoire to construct their identities: in her grief and remorse, jeanne constructed a myth that barely corresponded to reality and left in the dark uncertain aspects of victoire’s personality. in short, she endeavored at all costs to have her conform to the clichéd norm of the guadeloupean matador, the fighting woman who courageously resists life’s trials. as for me, i prefer my grandmother to remain secretive, enigmatic, the improper architect of a liberation that we, her descendants, have known how to enjoy to the full. (2010: 195) thomas the cook and the writer portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 11 victoire ends with the birth of a baby, condé’s older sister, which underlines the redemptive possibilities of relation and the importance of family and social connection. through her reconstruction of her grandmother through literature, condé succeeds in creating a profound link between the generations of women that precede and descend from her. victoire reinforces the idea that the writing process and culinary creation are closely related and constitute a means to transform one’s future and the legacy that an individual will leave to his or her descendants. food becomes a metaphor for creativity, acceptance and recovery in a female space; but it is also a symbol of alienation and acculturation to french way of life. ultimately, the book reveals that it is possible to mend family ties through the sharing of food as well as acting as a metaphor for the reconciliation between the past, present and future. reference list alexander, a-m., broichhagen, v., koffi-tessia, m.-h., lachman, k., and simek, n. 2006, ‘a conversation at princeton with maryse condé,’ in feasting on words: maryse condé, cannibalism, and the caribbean text, (eds) v. broichhagen, k. lachman, & n. simek. programme in latin american studies, princeton university, princeton: 1–28. benítez-rojo, a. 1992, the repeating island: the caribbean and the postmodern perspective. duke university press, durham, nc, & london. boisseron, b. 2010, ‘intimité: entretien avec maryse condé’, international journal of francophone studies, vol. 13, no. 1: 131–53. burton, r. d.e. & reno, f. (eds) 1995, french and west indian: martinique, guadeloupe and french guiana today. macmillan, london & basingstoke. carruggi, n. 2010, ‘ecrire en maryse condé. entretien avec maryse condé,’ in maryse condé: rébellion et transgressions, (ed.) n. carruggi, karthala, paris: 203–18. condé, m. 1995, ‘chercher nos vérités’ in penser la créolité, (eds) m. condé & m. cottenet-hage, karthala, paris, 305–10. _____ 1999, le coeur à rire et à pleurer: contes vrais de mon enfance. robert laffont, paris. _____ 2001, tales from the heart: true stories from my childhood, (trans.) r. philcox. soho press, new york. _____ 2006, victoire, les saveurs et les mots. mercure de france, paris. _____ 2007, ‘liaison dangereuse’ in pour une littérature-monde, (eds) m. le bris & j. rouaud, gallimard, paris : 205–16. _____ 2010, victoire: my mother’s mother, (trans.) r. philcox. atria international, new york. _____ 2012, la vie sans fards. j.-c. lattès, paris. ghinelli, p. 2005, archipels littéraires. mémoire d’encrier, montreal. glissant, e. 1989, caribbean discourse: selected essays, (trans.) m. dash. university press of virginia, charlottesville. _____ 1981. le discours antillais. gallimard, paris. _____ 1990. poétique de la relation. gallimard, paris. _____ 1997, poetics of relation, (trans.) b. wing. university of michigan press, ann arbor. _____ 2006, une nouvelle région du monde. gallimard, paris. _____ 2007, mémoires des esclavages: la fondation d’un centre national pour la mémoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions. gallimard, paris. glissant, e. & chamoiseau, p. 2007, quand les murs tombent: l’identité nationale hors-la-loi? galaade, paris. mehta, b. j. 2005, ‘culinary diasporas: identity and the language of food in gisèle pineau’s un papillon dans la cité and l’exil selon julia,’ international journal of francophone studies, vol. 8, no. 1: 23–51. thomas the cook and the writer portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 12 nesbitt, n. f. 2002, ‘le sujet de l’histoire: mémoires troublées dans traversée de la mangrove et le coeur à rire et à pleurer’ in maryse condé: une nomade inconvenante, (eds) m. cottenet-hage & l. moudileno: ibis rouge, guadeloupe: 113–20. nora, p. 1989, ‘between memory and history: les lieux de mémoire,’ representations, no. 26: 7–24. ovide, s. 2002, french caribbean cuisine. hippocrene books, new york. pfaff, f. 1993, entretiens avec maryse condé. karthala, paris. in a city like delhi – in a city like delhi: urban spirituality, sustainability and women yamini narayanan, dora marinova, jeffrey kenworthy, murdoch university the link between spirituality and sustainability has long been recognised as essential to the way humans perceive and relate to one another, and to nature. in more recent debates, concerns about the limited supply of natural resources and preserving the physical environment for future generations have been juxtaposed to ever-increasing consumption and dependence on economic growth. this has generated calls for spiritual solutions that can help curb consumerism and resurrect compassion for nature, humans and other living beings. this paper examines the link between spirituality and sustainability in a case study of urban communities within a megacity of a developing country. it argues that well articulated spiritual approaches to community development in such a city would make for more sustainable urban communities. the paper uses women’s roles and positions within this framework, as key indicators of community success. the case study used is that of communities in delhi, from the perspective of women. it is based on recent interviews with 20 women in the capital city of india—an ancient country that is heading towards becoming the most populous nation and experiencing fast rates of economic development within a competitive globalised world resulting in an urban environment that is contributing to huge environmental and social challenges. the paper asks what could a spiritual focus contribute to a more sustainable future for delhi. the paper answers this question by exploring the links between spirituality and sustainability and argues for incorporating spiritual approaches to sustainable portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi development programmes. it then examines the context for spiritual approaches to community development, particularly in urban societies in india. it embraces the commonly held perspective that women are the keepers of community, and emphasises the importance of women’s perspectives. it explores how women’s lives shape, and in turn, are shaped by their spiritual experiences in the city of delhi. the vivid and recurring themes from the interviews set the tone, direction and background of the argument, and contribute to our understanding of the role of spirituality as a binding force in the pursuit of a more sustainable way of living. spirituality and sustainability it takes time, quite a long time, to make a healthy, strong, public opinion which will solve its own problems... the whole problem of social reform, therefore, resolves itself into this: where are those we want to reform? make them first. where are the people? (vivekananda, 1918) the brundtland commission (brundtland 1987) defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present generation, without compromising the ability of future generations, to meet their own needs. this definition calls for simultaneously contending with the dynamics of economic growth, the limited capacity of the ecological systems to absorb the impact of human activities, and the need for social equity in the context of need for a stable human relationship, under which both growth and sustainability in growth will be possible (environment canada, n.d.). the immediate spiritual question that arises when vivekananda and brundtland are considered together is: where lies the motivation to be sustainable? what twinge of conscience pushes us to think of the needs of future generations? is it really purely an intellectual rationalisation of justice, or is it a deeper, moral urge to do the right thing? how powerful is the conscience? do humanitarian values and spiritual ethics bring on the sense of empowerment necessary to create a more sustainable world? any society and its people, unless they are, in some way, spiritually well disposed to humankind and the environment, run the risk of becoming overwhelmed by a call for such a complex response. portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 2 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi chile and simpson quote ife (1995): ‘modern society is essentially secular, and has left little room for notions of the sacred or for spiritual values. there is a strong need for community development to incorporate notions of spiritual development’ (2004: 319). they agree that there may be some sections of the world community that reject notions of spirituality, but believe that such a ‘secular’ society represents a relatively small global population. research reveals evidence of an overwhelming worldwide return to the spiritual realm (underwood, andler et al. 2005, tacey 2003). this is not marked just by a resurgence of interest in the churches or temples or traditional religions—the fervent awareness of a diverse range of spirituality and philosophy is spread across the board. from india to america, russia to japan to australia, the spiritual seeds seem to be flowering faster than jack’s beanstalk. and the ways of seeking spiritual enlightenment are as culturally varied as the world. tacey describes the present renewal of interest in spirituality as a spiritual revolution. he says: it is a spontaneous movement in society, a new interest in the reality of the spirit and its healing effects on life, health, community and well-being. it is our secular society realising that it has been running on empty, and has to restore itself at a deep, primal source, a source which is beyond humanity and yet paradoxically at the very source of our experience. it is our recognition that we have outgrown the ideals and values of the early scientific era…science itself has experienced its own revolution of the spirit, and is no longer arraigned against spirituality in the old way. (tacey 2003, 1) spirituality, in this context, becomes a foundation upon which sustainable development must build. according to the brundtland definition, sustainability refers to a conscious decision on our part to use the planet’s resources to meet our needs and not our greed, as mahatma gandhi would have it. any such choice may require a grounding of universal and human values. spiritual behaviour stresses human values such as humility, respect, compassion and responsibility. for sustainability to be based on the widely accepted brundtland definition, it would seem necessary to build upon spiritual behaviour and humanitarian values in the community. maurice f. strong, the secretary general of the rio summit in 1992 said, ‘actions that do not flow from our deepest spiritual, ethical, portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 3 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi and moral values cannot succeed in building the kind of secure, sustainable, and hopeful future to which rio pointed and to which we all aspire.’ to this effect, chile and simpson write, ‘(t)he six dimensions of community development, namely, social, economical, political, cultural, spiritual, and environmental aspects are strongly informed by spiritual values of holism, sustainability, diversity, equilibrium and social justice’ (2004, 318). it is very important to note that sustainability has been defined as a spiritual value here. spirituality in sustainable development provides the framework for critical analysis for understanding the causes. it provides a context for addressing issues of social injustice and reform, safeguarding personal rights and freedoms, recognising and respecting personal values and ambitions, and providing a powerful catalyst for bringing about decisive and positive transformations in attitudes and values. the very realisation that there is a need for sustainability leads to a spiritualistic contemplation. can an ideal sustainable world exist, without a high level of spirituality amongst its citizens? there is significant evidence that it cannot. it has been variously suggested that with an ingrained sense of spirituality towards development, we will move even beyond the concept of sustainable development, towards ‘reciprocal responsibility’ (mcniff 2002; tano, reuben and powaukee n.d.). abram (1996, ix) considers this ethic of reciprocal responsibility within the framework of human beings’ relation with the natural ecology. he believes that there should be ‘an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth’ (1996, 7). our current artificial relationship with nature, where we place ourselves outside the boundaries of a freeflowing, respectful and intimate closeness, is the cause of a systematic imbalance that upsets the emotional and physical health of the human community, within itself and with the ecological context which encompasses it. he writes: portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 4 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi human beings are tuned for relationship…(the) landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams—these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate…today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. it is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape. (1996, 7) chile and simpson remark, ‘spirituality is a relationship between the individual, collective and the universe.’ (2004, 319) however, what are more important are the individual’s behaviour, beliefs and attitudes. the dalai lama agrees that religious and spiritual beliefs could be used to exploit others if ‘someone possesses certain intellectual knowledge of religious traditions and teachings, yet his or her consciousness and mental continuum remains totally uninfluenced by it’ (2001, 170). according to him, the first responsibility is to ‘watch ourselves’. whether it is perceived as letting go of destructive behaviours or embracing better behaviours, the point remains the same. spiritual understanding alone is not enough. it must then become the reason and the foundation for actions that seek to better align society and individual, actions with an agreed spiritual sustainability purpose. a focus on spirituality as the linking and leading element in sustainability would refine human consciousness and conscience. peck’s treatise (1978) on love, traditional values and spiritual growth can be applied to this context—that in order for members of any community to truly care for each other, they must conduct themselves in a manner that will contribute to individual and communal spiritual growth. he says, ‘discipline is the means of human spiritual evolution’, and believes that the motivation and the energy for this discipline can only be love, which he defines as ‘(t)he will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth’ (1978, 69). by extension, such a spiritual growth will help restore respect and care for other human beings as well as for the natural environment on the planet earth. otherwise the link between the degradation of society and the ecology will never move from broad understanding to a collaborative purpose based on individual beliefs. portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 5 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi the rapidly growing gap between the rich and poor in developing countries, and worldwide, between the first and third world nations, exacerbated by ecological deterioration is a forceful testimony to the failure of traditional practices of development. this failure has now given birth to a worldwide vision to create an alternative means of human progress as represented in the united nations’ millennium goals (un 2000). such development would be grounded in a commitment to harmonious, equitable and sustainable human societies. negotiations have encountered numerous obstacles in its implementation because of a lack of a holistic theory and practice that considers the fourth and possibly the most important dimension of development, namely spirituality. such a theory and practice needs to be grounded in the premise that the sustainability crisis is a direct consequence of development’s contribution to modernisation: as a result of the mechanisation of daily life, human beings have become increasingly alienated from their spiritual connection to nature and community (cohen 2005). a truly sustainable society must have means by which economic power and assets can be decentralised and distributed in ways that restore inter-human and the human-environment connections. thus it is a claim of this paper that sustainable development as action, and spirituality as belief are intertwined, and must be addressed together to achieve sustainability for individuals, and hence for society. spirituality and community development the core philosophy of a community seems to be a motivation amongst its members to connect and interact with each other. a species capable of experiencing loneliness, human beings have established themselves within communities to ensure their physical and emotional welfare. furthermore, the qualities and needs of communities are dynamic and constantly changing—this requires an approach that understands, respects, and values diversity. the paper asserts therefore, that the correct framework for achieving sustainability will embrace and articulate this diversity on an ongoing basis. in this way, spiritual sustainability becomes the foundation for individual and community sustainability and by extension, for sustainable development in general. portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 6 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi spiritual sustainability focussed approaches to community development attempt to bring about a respectful harmony of cultures and races, which ‘looks upon the world as an organic whole, of which all peoples are parts’ (ghanananda 1937, 160). such attempts have been made, ghanananda explains, first with the formation of the league of nations, and subsequently with the establishment of the united nations and the institutions under its charter such as the international court of justice, unesco, who, and fao. however, according to ghanananda (1937, 161), ‘(s)uch lofty aims cannot be achieved without the necessary preparations and disciplines leading to the establishment of a moral and ethical basis. the instinct of individualism cannot be suppressed by the mere foundation of theoretical conceptions of justice and self-determination.’ this lack of spiritual identity resulted in a united nations without a mandate to intervene in developments such as the war in iraq. it would appear that spirit of individualism in a person, and of cooperation within an organisation is not mutually exclusive. the ‘instinct of individualism’ can be eminently nourished in situations where the impulse or inner desire is satisfied through communal means. academic research on sustainable communities has created a neat phrase— ‘intentional communities’. such communities are essentially organised around a central value system and beliefs which all members of the community respect and continually inform. vibrant intentional communities include farming, self-reliant communities, organic vegetable farms, christian communities trying to live according to god’s vision, communities supporting innovative economic systems based on human values and community co-housing networks (communities and community-building links n.d.). communities are created to provide the senses of connectedness, fostering, nurturing and a sharing of joy and happiness that individuals of a society crave, and can achieve only through a harmonious communal system of living. a community is a deliberately created environment that affords the freedom and time, to live fully according to one’s deepest, strongest and most personal values, which will ultimately lead to liberating feelings of gratification, goodness and humility. this paper asserts that in effect, all communities, whether they consciously choose to label themselves as such or not, are ‘intentional’ in portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 7 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi nature. for example, when individuals select a place of residence, so to speak, their ‘intention’ reflects their judgements about the physical and spiritual characteristics of the community of which they have chosen to be a part. they also intentionally or unintentionally contribute to this community’s vision of the future (see box 1). it follows therefore, that identifying and intentionalising universal community beliefs is a necessary step in achieving spiritual sustainability for individuals therein. this holds for both ‘intentional’ and ‘less intentional’ communities. box 1. excerpts from interview with dr. meenakshi gopinath, principal, lady shri ram college, university of delhi, 2 february 2005 my vision for community life in delhi ten years from now is linked to what’s already happening now—little communities have begun to structure themselves around religious beliefs, because there is a reclaiming of roots and identities. you know, the bengalis will have a small cultural get-together during their festivals and community celebrations.1 during dusshera, the pujas have become really huge, stupendous community affairs.2 i don’t think they should be on the scale that they are now, they are huge and there is a lot of commercial activity going on, but it’s great for community connectivity. then you have the chanting groups, the civic society groups, the community groups in delhi, and they help life develop. the neighbourhood should provide community, create facilities for the children, some kind of spiritual training for children, either by way of yoga classes or music classes, something that’s organised by each neighbourhood. but the community centres should really be revitalised, for the original purpose for which they were created, where the entire neighbourhood comes together, where there is bonding, there is a sense of sharing, people feel they have an extended family—we have to build around the issues of family, relationships—in india that’s what’s important. so we have to make up a less individualistic community feeling, something that’s inclusive, family-oriented, so that children, the grandparents, the parents, they can all come together outside of the family and into the community as well. i also think that delhi needs to protect and promote libraries. suddenly there have been a lot of very interesting bookshops that have opened up. but the culture of reading—i think 1 bengalis form one of the largest migrant groups in delhi. originally from the eastern state of west bengal, the community is one of the major contributors to the intellectual and cultural vibrancy of the city. 2 the hindu festival of dusshera celebrates the victory of good over evil. during the 10-day celebrations, the story of ramleela is enacted, which narrates how lord rama rescued his wife sita from the demon king ravana of lanka, who abducted her from the forests. traditionally in bengal, the festival is also celebrated as durga puja, which glorifies the nine manifestations of the angry goddess durga (who also stands for the triumph of right over wrong) for nine days. on the tenth day, she is immersed into hooghly river, which runs through the bengal capital of calcutta. in delhi, the image is floated into the yamuna. the image of the goddess is erected in huge tents all across the city. brahmins are fed, new clothes are bought and it is a time of family bonding, joy and devotion. portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 8 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi delhi could do with a lot more book clubs, because that is the fount of spirituality. it could do with a lot more music clubs; it needs to borrow the idea of the katcheri, the music season from chennai, during the ganesh festival.3 it has started in delhi, with a very interesting interpretation of sufi music near the nizamuddin area. then we have the very interesting festival of plays here. so there are these ideas—they must be worked upon. above all, i think there must be a message to the new generation of people: do not just blindly adopt the corporate culture. basically you should really provide for the creation, and reflection. the other thing we need is quiet places for meditation in delhi. solitude and silence—it is a very noisy city. the rig vedas emphasise placing society over the self. intentional communities work because the individual does not resent submitting his/her needs to societal obligations— rather the society reflects his or her particular characteristics and in fact, further nurtures and encourages these distinguishing traits. thus, the process of articulating community spirit is ongoing and individuality as a source of vitality is preserved. it might be argued that such communities are unnatural, built on artificial foundations, and therefore unsustainable. critics might retort that the lifespan of such a community might only be as long as that of the generation that created and formed it; and that its unique character might not endure to meet the changing lifestyles and values of the next generation. however, intentional communities typically overcome this objection because they have at their heart an ideology that draws people towards each other while allowing variety of expressions, beliefs, interests, approaches and practices. the argument for a spiritual approach is that this immensely values diversity. chile and simpson (2004) write that power and resources in such communities are typically distributed equitably, while honouring plurality in spirituality. thus the second conclusion of the paper is that for any sort of community development programme, such an intentional spiritual approach is fundamental for the generation of immediate and long-term positive spiritual sustainability. 3 the katcheri or the music season in chennai runs from december through january each year. national artistes in carnatic classical music, both vocalists and instrumentalists perform to crowds of hundreds. portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 9 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi is urban spiritual sustainability unnatural? what constitutes appropriate spirituality within a contemporary urban culture? there is need for an articulated urban spirituality and its focus must be communal. the questions that this paper is looking to develop are: what kind of spirituality works in a public space within an urban context? what would be the benefits of such spirituality in relation to sustainable development, and how best might this be achieved? a city’s legacy is also enhanced by the way that the values, beliefs, obligations, rights and responsibilities of its citizens enrich the values of cities. growth of developing megacities in particular is often unplanned and ad hoc—the legacy of such cities lies in their historical traditions, spiritual beliefs, and the diversity of their value systems (storelli 2003, 8). such a perspective is particularly valuable for assessing the position of women in cities. given that women form a vast heterogeneous group in themselves, and that in any megapolis, women also arrive as migrants for various reasons from different parts of the country, it can also be safely assumed that different parts of the city represent distinct values. so, while builders of cities might aim for an overarching value to represent a city, the reality might often be that the city represents a grand historical reality (or many such realities), while also speaking for a mosaic of values taken from a spectrum of cultures and communities that inhabit the city. it is significant for community and city related studies, that a ‘man’s city’ might be considerably different from a ‘woman’s city’, as might be ‘feminine aspects’ of cities from ‘masculine aspects’ of the same city. one might even question whether or not the diversity within genders might be greater than between them. what can be made of this cacophony of voices? ‘the city may be regarded as a series of overlays of simultaneous visions that co-exist. in order to know where the city might be going, we must know from where it is coming. to know who the ‘we’ are, we must disaggregate the city into many ‘sub-cities and we’s’. people must deal with the many overlays simultaneously’, writes khan (2003, para 26). storelli writes, ‘cities are an argument for shared and harmonious living of cultural portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 10 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi diversity and anonymity, and are an area or a district where human beings are happier and produce wealth, well-being and culture’ (2003, 8). she continues, ‘this analysis of society and this understanding of an area leads to a social perception of the kind of place we wish to live in’ (2003, 8). the perception of the city as a habitat (see box 2) helps bring issues of sustainability strongly to the forefront. articulating urban spirituality can inform a way of life for the community. it can integrate the diverse urban populace (secular and nonsecular, multi-ethnic groups etc) through involvement in social and shared activities. box 2. excerpts from interview with dr. meenakshi gopinath, 2 february 2005 i think we should stop looking at a city as a city, and rather as a habitat. it changes the realisation from separateness to inter-connectedness. it makes us realise that for anything to be sustainable, the link of interconnectedness has to be respected. you cannot have power and dominance in your relationships. you have to bring in spiritual power to bear out interaction. see, whether you are in an office, or a bureaucratic set-up, you have to ensure that the power of the bureaucracy does not undermine or get suffocating, rather it is there as an enabling environment. if a city really has to reach its potential, it has to be an enabling environment for its citizens. it has to provide sustenance, it has to provide community. now what is happening by and large in urban environments is the breakdown of the sense of community, bringing with it alienation, isolation. stability at the level of a caring environment, an ethical environment for the elderly, providing spaces and a supportive environment for the differently abled, and a sense of concern of my stretching my arm, my limits—it means a concern for all other human beings, above all a respect for the environment. i think a city has several advantages, has energy of creativity, the energy of a lot of different people living together, energy of professional accomplishment. these energies can somehow be harnessed into expression, and be supportive, to create community, and then i think the city need not be so threatening, alienating. the other thing is also the architecture of urban cities. by and large, it seems like we equate concrete jungles with metropolises. we have to think about how to harmonise structure and space. alternative ways of viewing a city, and new ideas of negotiating with a city constantly emerge, and the renewed search for meaning in urban spaces has created a new word— metrospirituality. a comment on a theology website reads thus: people use the term ‘metrosexuality’ to define the distinctive blend of sexual choices that are being made as part of an urban lifestyle. analogous to that we see a distinctive blend of spiritual options emerging—if you like, a ‘metro-spirituality’. metrospirituality is not an exclusively christian portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 11 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi spirituality: it is simply the way of being ‘spiritual’ that becomes possible within a complex, creative, pluralistic (postmodern) urban environment. (metro-spirituality 2003) johnstone (2003) suggests that metrospirituality should be responsive to the variations of place—even within the same city—that is foreign to ‘standardised generic evangelical spirituality’. metrospirituality should be developed and applied locally, he says, taking into account the immediate social and spiritual environment. the principle of articulating and intentionalising spiritual plurality and commonality, is essential to creating sustainable cities. is it difficult or even possible to incorporate spirituality in an urban culture? most eastern spiritual traditions have advocated detachment, renouncement of worldly comforts and immersing oneself in labour and service. the city on the other hand, stands for material benefits and ease of technology. technology has been seen as a hindrance to spiritual paths, which is one reason western societies are seen by the east as spiritually and morally less refined. however, indian spiritual leaders like sri ramakrishna have believed that technology could give without taking away, that when viewed from the right perspective, technology could do nothing to dilute spiritual strength and on the contrary, could complement the values beautifully to promote an efficient, yet moral sustainability. megacities increasingly assume the shared nature and characteristics of world cities, with similar aspirations to development and wealth. for the transition to a sustainable melting pot of different communities at local and global levels, it is necessary that urban spaces that imitate global values at a micro-level share a vision of spiritual sustainability to provide an ethical foundation for the emerging world community. the preamble to the earth charter community says, ‘the spirit of human solidarity and kinship with all life is strengthened when we live with reverence for the mystery of being, gratitude for the gift of life, and humility regarding the human place in nature’ (the earth charter 2000, 2). thus, while urban spiritual sustainability does require constant engagement to keep it dynamic, from human perspective, nothing could be more natural. portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 12 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi in a city like delhi – spiritual approaches and the urban community india is the land of supernatural beauty, superstitions, stately riches and unparalleled poverty, and the capital of this land of mysteries is delhi. delhi is a palimpsest, living the diversities, the contradictions and the magnificence of a city where at least three centuries exist together, sometimes peacefully, often in turbulence. delhi has been reincarnated nine times, and the city’s aura of grandeur, collapse, old wealth and vitality has charmed emperors, conquerors and refugees alike. modern delhi stands at the western end of the gangetic plains, with the once majestic but now impoverished state of uttar pradesh and the infant state of uttrakhand on the eastern side. the state of haryana envelops delhi on the other three sides. the himalayan river, yamuna, the second holiest hindu river, flows through the state, to converge with the ganges a couple of hundred kilometres south of the city. delhi is also the seat of the central government, and has an economy supported by agriculture, tourism, commerce and a growing multinational corporate outsourcing industry. urban community in delhi is a potpourri of vibrant cultural colour and festivities, green movements, true historical splendour, growing young professional talents, migrant rural poverty, traffic and fumes, the seat of the government and bureaucracy, entertainment glamour, and high crime. all of this coexists with the simple village and green farms that large tracts of delhi once were, not too long ago, just after the country’s independence. today, delhi’s community spirit is under threat with high crime rates in the city, especially against women. community practices and a lack of neighbourhood watch programmes (organised by the community, and administered by the delhi police, to reduce crime rates in the locality) fail to capture women's experiences of the city that are negotiated through acts of violence. while it is imperative to address the inadequacies of physical infrastructure in the city, and pay close attention to improving law and order and planning agencies for the city, it is also true that the high and shockingly gruesome crime and violence against all sections of women in the city—housewives, professionals, old women, young girls, foreign tourists—are a result of almost no form of a cohesive, portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 13 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi dynamic, harmonious and supportive community in the city. any urban spiritual sustainability programme must address the reasons for this if delhi is ever to become a sustainable city. uma ranganathan’s description of mumbai’s urban environment might as well have been written for delhi: not for the first time, i began to feel the walls closing in around me. walls of noise, walls of disrespect, walls of thoughtlessness. cities, in fact, are nothing but huge fortresses, aren’t they, with millions of padlocked doors. some with double and triple locks too. all in the name of safety and protection. and you hardly notice the way the locks and walls shrink your world, eat into your free space and limit the scope of your movements, eventually giving birth to a mad monster within you. (ranganathan 2004, 14) it is a vicious circle: high crime in the city can kill the spirit, and a dead spirit, devoid of empathy, love, care and respect can foster a high crime rate. a delhi citizen has at least a couple of chances of confronting death everyday, either directly or indirectly. newspaper reports detailing the reported crimes of the previous day, continued investigations into missing persons, terrorism, and once out in the city itself, automobile crashes, stabbings in wealthy neighbourhoods and rape incidents. in addition, a citizen’s spirit is weakened everyday. for instance, a leper tapping the windows of my car has never shocked me, and only occasionally repulsed me. the spirit lies protected, if dormant, in the safe confines of a car, but for about 60 per cent of the city’s 14 million inhabitants, life is a daily battle with the city, in all its ugliness, potency and poignancy. what chance does community spirit have of surviving then? what is the impact of such a city on the future generations (see box 3), a question which provides the main impetus for the sustainability concept? in delhi, there is an infusion of wealth in the city and an excess of consumption as never seen before. at the same time, the grinding stresses of poverty, violence, environmental pollution, repressed sexuality and unemployment continue, the contradictions making life both a struggle and a relief. this is when people want and need meaning in their lives. portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 14 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi box 3. ‘where are the children in delhi?’, excerpts from interview with dr. indu seth, 21 january 2005. i think community life will diminish further in ten years. children are the glue of a strong community but you don’t see them around any more! when we were kids, we used to have so much time on our hands. children these days don’t have that much time, their syllabus is so heavy. the competition is so fierce; it’s getting more and more hard to keep up. and if kids play these days, it’s only cricket, i have never seen them play anything else. or video games. that’s it. we used to play a variety of games. playing the same thing, for the same reasons, is not good if you want your imagination to grow, if you want yourself to develop further. the more variety you see, the more games you play, and the more values you develop. the kids play on the roads, blocking traffic, and they develop a sense of a) breaking rules, and b) the sense of being constantly on guard. neither is good for children who need to grow into responsible adults. the other thing that is happening to children because of this is that they are growing irresponsible, devil-may-care and selfish. we used to take more care; we were more considerate. according to an org-marg poll in 2001, 94 per cent of young adults below the age of 30 in delhi believe in god, 62 per cent pray regularly and 35 per cent make a weekly temple pilgrimage (holistic living n.d.). the art of living (2004) organisers in delhi say that over 16,000 people have taken their course in the past year alone, as compared to about 2000 people a year in preceding years. women spiritual leaders like mata nirmala devi and mata amritanandamayi, the ‘mother who heals with a hug’ routinely draw crowds of thousands each year. the sri sathya sai baba trust organises development and charity works in the city, like blood donation camps, adult literacy classes, and midday meals for poor and homeless children. if these statistics are representative, people are desperately seeking a way through the chaos. how can this desire be harnessed to solve the problems that cause it? the search for meaning automatically draws one to seek and understand other communities, and try to recreate what makes them vibrant and sustainable. sensing that the time was ripe for a new series of experiments on community development in the city, the delhi state government is now more involved in many innovative forms of community initiatives. the chief minister shiela dikshit’s favourite community development project is the bhagidari, inaugurated in january 2000, which is a broad partnership between the residents’ welfare associations of all neighbourhoods with the portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 15 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi state government. this citizen-government alliance is meant to further empower citizens groups, where they can directly appeal to the state for assistance in community development. as chile and simpson point out, a diverse range of associations covers a spectrum of spiritual beliefs and understandings. ‘finding the commonalities and the links within these beliefs may be the key to discovering the role of spirituality in community development’, they write (2004, 321). they explain that these liaisons call for a comprehensive method of considering diverse and yet related issues such as justice, economic fairness, equality, rights, health and nutrition, governance and environmental protection, all of which are aspects of sustainability. indeed, partnerships are proving globally to be integral to capturing the many voices that make sustainable development possible. the central government’s ministry of urban affairs and employment started the ubsp (urban basic services for the poor) as a way of improving lifestyles for the city’s poor in their communities, their neighbourhoods, with an aim of ultimately developing a spirit of community and interconnectedness within the city itself. an important aspect of ubsp is its participatory process of planning and implementation, working with poor women from impoverished neighbourhoods to improve health and education facilities, the local environment, access to credit and fairer incomes, and other basic rights. over 130,000 poor women serve voluntarily and willingly, working together with the governments and the ngos (unesco best practices for human settlements n.d.). it is said that delhi is for the “dilwallas” or for “people of the heart”. how? in addition to horror and suffering, there is exuberance and joy in equal abundance. it is a city of passion, both good and bad, and passion is the stuff of the heart. for delhi, any attempt at invigorating spiritual sustainability will have to take this as a starting point. portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 16 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi spirituality, communities and women how do women experience this city? what shapes women’s lives in an urban environment? what are the specific contemporary status and the traditional role of women in urban societies? contemporary urban communities in any city can be variously described in terms of lifestyle choices, cultural diversity, social, political and religious values, wealth and poverty, and community spirit. which of these aspects in particular shapes women’s lives in urban communities? what personal and gender-specific values of women in turn, shape community, and thereby, the city? what does urban spiritual sustainability for women look like? social sustainability, through addressing the elements of spirituality in communities taps into valuable but neglected human resources like cooperation, respect, compassion and responsibility. chile and simpson write, ‘the underpinning philosophy of community development and spirituality is the connection of the individual to the collective, acknowledging that the well-being of the individual influences and is influenced by the well-being of the community’ (2004, 325). the sense of connectivity is the source of greater respect, compassion and responsibility for other living and non-living things, which is the essence of a sustainable lifestyle. urban communities are culturally, socially and economically so diverse and rich, and there are sections within sections that form exclusive social networks. these invisible boundaries are generally not divisive and add to the vibrancy, colour and energy of the cities. young and miranne explain (2004, 1), ‘boundaries establish differences and commonalities between individuals and groups…they may be maintained, crossed, resisted, reconfigured…(and they) may be permeable and inclusive.’ the imagery of the urban environment gets further enriched through the actions that women take within these geographical spaces and the lives they live there. they write, ‘(s)ocially constructed gender relations and the visible and invisible boundaries affect how women use urban space’ (2004, 1). young and miranne particularly consider the important point that women are active mostly at the periphery of urban communities and that this has thus far portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 17 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi been the primary way in which they have been able to access urban spaces for themselves. race, class and ethnicity determine the social and cultural characteristics of urban communities. women significantly enhance, alter or determine in some way, this nature of city societies. women thus shape urban identities and, in turn, are affected by them. women thus negotiate with the urban environment through their multiple identities. communities in the cities, particularly in the developing world, need to create spaces that are physically safe, provide an environment that addresses the needs of women and children, allow for an ‘expansive and inclusive’ definition of the family and create policies that consider women’s lives ‘holistically’. according to the dalai lama (2001, 15), women have the potential not only to create happy lives for themselves, but also help other human beings, and have a natural, creative quality. importantly, women play a fundamental role in passing on communal traditions to generations. the experiences of women volunteers and ngo workers in new delhi confirm this (see box 4). women are more likely to attach social and emotional importance to rituals, symbols and traditions representing community customs. an active and involved role of women in urban community development and neighbourhood programmes will result in strong communal and social values that will be inherent in every succeeding generation, as they perpetuate the traditions that sustain community spirit through time. box 4. excerpts from interview with latika dikshit, congress party and social worker, daughter and personal secretary to chief minister shiela dikshit, 4 february 2005 i think women have a different understanding of spirituality to men. i have been a grassroots worker now for over 15 years, and i find women are far more liberal, far more inclusive, far more broadminded, they discriminate much less, because they themselves have been victims of discrimination so they understand discrimination very well. i think indian women are extremely liberal. for example, you go to a small village meeting where only the women come, and the purdah is off. and you see how animated the discussions are, how lively and they come from different backgrounds. and the boundaries just vanish, though they may not be allowed to speak to each other normally. portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 18 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi if spirituality means growing into an evolved human being, i think women are far more evolved, and they evolve after their experiences and what they have gone through. and rural women especially are very evolved, even if she comes to the city. whatever hardship a community might have, it is harder for the woman—she has to keep the family together. whether it’s poverty—it’s the woman who nurtures the family; her husband, children, parents, in-laws, grandchildren—and i’ve never come across a woman who is wanting in the nurturing factor. however difficult a situation maybe, by and large, women never shirk their responsibilities towards their families. they really are great heroines. according to peck, the single most important aspect of any social culture is the family. he writes, ‘the most basic culture in which we develop is the culture of our family, and our parents are its “cultural leaders.”’ (peck 1978, 177) in this context, the role of the mother is crucial as a cultural, moral, intellectual and emotional family leader, whose leadership, so to speak, would have a crucial impact on the nature of communities. women’s spirituality can play a leading role (see box 5) in transforming the urban environment of cities like delhi. without their leadership, sustainable cities are not possible. without empowering women, cities will suffer from a void where their leadership should be. spiritual sustainability must take this into account if it is in turn to empower sustainable development. conclusion the sustainability concept is very complex and integral to a world where knowledge and practices have been dominated by reductionist and fragmented western paradigms that leave out where the motivation and care for future generations come from. the power of spirituality as an overarching element in building sustainable communities and a sustainable lifestyle in a sustainable city is widely (intuitively and rationally, through education and experience) recognised by women in delhi. it is in accordance with the spurt of interest and literature on contemporary spirituality as it relates to love, psychotherapy, consumerism, sex and religion, often with overlapping or similar explanations. a spiritual approach to community building leads to empowered women, who have a sophisticated understanding of being responsible for their individual and communal lives. portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 19 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi suzuki and dressel (2004, 350) observe that human beings are principally built and programmed to be of service. box 5. excerpts from interview with dr. meenakshi gopinath, 2 february 2005 i think women are always exploring non-oppressive alternatives, because we have to deal with patriarchy in so many ways. we have to deal with coercion, abuse of power; we are constantly negotiating and renegotiating our space within the built environment. we care for those who defend our land, their home and the spaces that they occupy. i think women have a very special role. and i think they need to recognise that they have a contribution to make. i think women’s groups can take on this leadership, of humanising a city. it should be one of the agendas of the women’s movement—but right now humanising a city has not been part of that. and you would think it would be given the high crime rate against women. but there is a face of delhi that is not as aggressive as it may seem to be. so how do we retrieve that face of delhi and how do we protect and preserve that part of delhi, without harking back to the past or romanticising the city in any way? but the little practices of community sharing and caring—especially caring for the elderly, philanthropy, the idea of altruism—how can we bring this back? most people still react aggressively. and you have a large migrant population that comes and goes. the service sector is completely filled by migrant labour. so there is a sense of familiarity and bonding. but delhi is a capital city and we have to invest more in it. we have to make it more people friendly. we have to have a greater sense of ownership about it. right now we always blame someone else—we pass the buck on to the politicians or the bureaucrats, because we are still at one level a very bureaucratic city. but we can’t expect the bureaucracy to do everything for us. community, expression of citizenship—all of that will work. and spirituality is the key because it provides the framework for our relationships with the others, and with the community at large. however, jones warns that ‘contemporary spirituality plays into an increasingly prevalent consumer mentality’ (1997, 17). he writes, ‘rather than understanding desire as an indication of a human lack only satisfied by knowledge and love…through transformed living, desires signify the need for new levels of consumption by the self.’ (1997, 17) according to him, this is because citizens of capitalist societies are tutored to see things as commodities, subject to the individual. the change in such attitudes and behaviours is at the core of the sustainability agenda and women’s rich spirituality is an integral part of a foundation of a world built around harmony, care and respect, where women’s voices, portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 20 narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi including the ones from the women of delhi, are powerfully heard. conversely, without such an agenda, sustainability cannot be achieved, for delhi or the world. reference list abram, d. 1996, the spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-thanhuman world, vintage books, new york. art of living 2004, [online]. available at: http://www.artofliving.org/contactsdetail.asp? centerid=297 [accessed 22 jul. 2004]. brundtland, h. 1988, our common future, (the brundtland report), world commission on environment and development, oxford university press, oxford. chile, l.m. & simpson, g. 2004, ‘spirituality and community development: exploring the link between the individual and the collective’, community development journal, 39.4, 318-331. cohen, a, 2005, [online]. available at: www.andrewcohen.com [accessed 2 mar. 2005]. communities and community-building links n.d. [online]. available at: http://cdj. oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/39/4/318 [accessed 18 apr. 2005]. dalai lama (his holiness, the) 2001, the art of living – a guide to contentment, joy and fulfillment, thorsons, london. davids, t.w.r. and oldenberg, h. 1994, ‘vinyaya texts’, in mueller, f. (ed.) 1879-1910, the sacred books of the east, 50 vols., vol. 13, 94-97, 100-102, clarendon, oxford,; repr. in andre, a. & overfield, j. 1994, the human record: sources of global history, vol. 1, 2nd ed., houghton mifflin, boston,. 72-74 [online]. available at: http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/bud-ser1.html [accessed 8 nov. 2004] environment canada n.d. [online]. available at: http://www.on.ec.gc.ca/water/raps/intro_e.html [accessed 25 oct. 2004]. ghanananda, s. 1937, sri ramakrishna and his unique message, the ramakrishna vedanta centre, london. holistic living n.d. [online]. available at: www.holistic-living.com [accessed 22 jul. 2004]. ife, j. 1995, community development: creating community alternatives – vision, analysis and practice, longman, south melbourne, australia. johnstone, s. 2003, metro-spirituality and the emergent church [online]. available at: http://www.sijohnston.info/ [accessed 14 sep. 2004]. jones, l.g. 1997, ‘a thirst for god or consumer spirituality’, in spirituality and social embodiment, eds. l.g. jones and j.l. buckley, blackwell publishers, oxford and ma. khan, h.-u. 2003, ‘reflections in a cracked mirror: the global architecture of cities in asia, proceedings of the conference ‘new global history and the city’, st. petersburg, russia [online]. available at: http://www.eu.spb.ru/newglobalhistory/en/hkhan.html [accessed 18 apr. 2005]. mcniff, j. 2002, refusals, resistances and the transformative power of educational enquiry [online]. available at: http://www.jeanmcniff.com/refusal.html [accessed 18 apr. 2005]. portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 21 http://www.artofliving.org/contactsdetail.asp?centerid=297 http://www.artofliving.org/contactsdetail.asp?centerid=297 http://www.andrewcohen.com/ http://cdj.%0boupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/39/4/318 http://cdj.%0boupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/39/4/318 http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/bud-ser1.html http://www.on.ec.gc.ca/water/raps/intro_e.html http://www.holistic-living.com http://www.sijohnston.info/ http://www.eu.spb.ru/newglobalhistory/en/hkhan.html http://www.jeanmcniff.com/refusal.html narayanan, marinova, kenworthy in a city like delhi metro-spirituality 2003 [online]. available at: http://www.opensourcetheology.net/node/ 208 [accessed 19 apr. 2005]. peck, s.m. 1978, the road less travelled – a new psychology of love, traditional values and spiritual growth, rider publications, london. ranganathan, u. 2004, bombay to eternity – memoirs of a laidback rebel, penguin books india. storelli, c., 2003 [online]. ‘cities as heritage’, in naturopa, 100, 2003 [online]. available at: http://www.coe.int/t/e/cultural_cooperation/environment/resources/naturopa_m agazine/naturopa100_e.pdf?l=e [accessed 19 aug. 2004]. strong, m.f., 1992. quoted at ‘the spiritual work of the united nations and the liberation of humanity’, leo meeting, 22 aug. 2002 [online]. available at: http://www.aquaac.org/untalk/free/unleo02-2.html [accessed 3 oct. 2004]. suzuki, d. and dressel, h., 2004, from the naked ape to superspecies: humanity and the global eco-crisis, greystone books, british columbia. tacey, d. 2003, the spirituality revolution: the emergence of contemporary spirituality, harpercollins publishers, australia. tano m.l., reuben, j.h. & powaukee, d. n.d. an indian tribal view of the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle: legal, historical and cultural lessons [online]. available at: http://www.iiirm.org/publications/articles%20reports%20papers/radioactive%20 waste/fuel%20cycle.pdf [accessed 18 apr. 2005]. the earth charter 2000 [online]. available at: http://www.earthcharter.org/ [accessed 27 apr. 2005]. underwood, a., adler, j., whitford, b., chung, j., juarez, v., berrett, d and ali, l. 2005, ‘in search of the spiritual’, newsweek, 00289604, 9 may 2005, vol. 146, issue 9/10. united nations 2000, millennium declaration [online]. available at: http://www.un.org/ millennium/ [accessed 18 apr. 2005]. uniting church assembly 1991, the rights of nature and future generations [online]. available at: www.sustainability.dpc.wa.gov.au/docs/bgpapers/ethics%20papers/ unitingchurch1.pdf [accessed 29 mar. 2005]. unesco best practices for human settlements n.d. [online]. poverty alleviation through community participation – ubsp india, available at: http://www.unesco.org/most/asia12.htm [accessed 27 apr. 2005]. vivekananda, s. 1918, lectures from colombo to almora, prabuddha bharata office, almora, himalayas. young, a. h. and k. b. miranne (eds) 2000, gendering the city: women, boundaries and visions of urban life, lanham, md and rowman and littlefield, by (book review by burnier, d. 2004) portal vol. 3, no.1 january 2006 22 http://www.opensourcetheology.net/node/208 http://www.opensourcetheology.net/node/208 http://www.coe.int/t/e/cultural_cooperation/environment/resources/naturopa_magazine/naturopa100_e.pdf?l=e http://www.coe.int/t/e/cultural_cooperation/environment/resources/naturopa_magazine/naturopa100_e.pdf?l=e http://www.aquaac.org/untalk/free/unleo02-2.html http://www.iiirm.org/publications/articles%20reports%20papers/radioactive%20waste/fuel%20cycle.pdf http://www.iiirm.org/publications/articles%20reports%20papers/radioactive%20waste/fuel%20cycle.pdf http://www.unesco.org/%0bmost/asia12.htm chile and simpson quote ife (1995): ‘modern society is essen spirituality, communities and women reference list 当代中国的自由主义者与民族主义 民族主义与当代中国的自由主义者 冯崇义 the upsurge of nationalism in china since the 1990s has attracted considerable interest in academic circles. it has come about against the background of the frustration of political modernization (democratization) in china as a result of the june fourth incident. these historical circumstances have prompted further debate over the relationship between democratization and nationalism. an interesting question for chinese liberals committed to constitutional democracy is how to respond to nationalism. generally speaking, contemporary chinese liberals believe that nationalism is detrimental to democratization, jeopardizes national interest, and allows national sovereignty to override human rights. 民族主义 1 在二十世纪九十年代在中国飙升，曾引起学界广泛的关注。 2 中国 民族主义思潮高涨的背景，是以“六四”事件为标志的中国政治现代化（民主 化）事业的严重挫折。这样一种历史因缘，促使人们更深入地思考中国政治民 主化与民族主义的关系。矢志追求中国宪政民主的当代中国自由主义者如何因 应民族主义，确是饶有兴味的课题。大致说来，当代中国自由主义者表达了三 个主要观点：民族主义妨害民主化、民族主义危害国家利益、人权高于主权。 1 民族主义一词有很多用法。在本文中，民族指的是现实中或想象中的文化和政治社群；民族 主义则同时指以本民族为中心的思想信条和以本民族为忠诚对象的情感。这种思想信条和情感 可以表现为旨在构建一个民族、追求民族独立、维护民族统一、捍卫民族主权和扩张本民族的 经济利益甚至于领土的各种活动和运动。参阅安德森（b．anderson）：《被想象出来的社群》 （imagined communities），伦敦，1983 年版；格尔纳（e．gellner）：《民族和民族主义》 （nations and nationalism），牛津，1983 年版；史密斯（a．d．smith）：《关于民族主义的 理论》（theories of nationalism），伦敦，1983 年版。实际上，在现代的各种民族主义运 动中，“民族”在更确切的意义上是“民族国家”，因为其重心是“国”而不是“族”、“民族构 建”实为“国家构建”、“民族利益”也往往由国家来决定。不过，严格意义上的“民族国家” 并不存在，并没有一个“国家”和一个单一“民族” 完全重合。地球上第一个“民族国家”英 国便是由英格兰、苏格兰、威尔士、爱尔兰等多个民族构成的。 2 参阅jonathan unger, chinese nationalism, m. e. sharpe, 1996; yongnian zheng, discovering chinese nationalism in china, cambridge university press, 1999; 李世涛 主编：《民族主义与转型期中国的命运》，时代文艺出版社，2000 年版。标志着当时中国民族 主义飙升的三部曲是宋强、张藏藏、乔边：《中国可以说不》，中华工商联合出版社，1996 年 版；李希光、刘康等：《妖魔化中国的背后》，中国社会科学出版社，1996 年版；房宁、王小 东、宋强等：全球化阴影下的中国之路》，中国社会科学出版社，1999 年版。 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal feng, chongyi liberalism and nationalism in contemporary china 一、民族主义妨害中国民主化 早在春秋时期，中国人的自我认同和文化认同便已形成。在《尚书》中便有多 处使用“中国”和“华夏”这两个词，将居住在“中国”的“华夏”民族和居 住在其他地方的“夷狄”明确区别开来。《春秋》三传则不约而同地花不小篇幅 来严“夷夏之防”，以“非我族类其心必异”为依据，要求“内诸夏而外夷 狄”。 3 相比之下，起源于西方的、现代意义上的民族主义，对中国人来说有两 层新意。一是关于主权在民和公民权利的观念；一是关于在世界体系中民族地 位平等的观念。我们正是在这种意义上来讨论中国知识分子对民族主义的最初 拥抱。中国现代民族主义的兴起，是对鸦片战争以及西方侵略和冲击的回应。 1895 年由康有为起草、1300 多名举人签字的“公车上书”，可说是中国现代民 族主义的出生证。正是在这篇给皇帝的集体奏议中，头次提出要一改旧例，“当 以列国并立之势治天下，不当以一统垂裳之势治天下”；也头次提出天下应“与 民共之”，以便“合四万万人心以为心，天下莫强焉”。 4 从那时起，先进的中国 人便不遗余力地呼唤中华民族的民族意识，领导具有浓烈民族主义色彩的改革 与革命。 近代以来的中国，民族主义与自由主义的关系一直相当复杂微妙。民族主义与 自由主义曾经结伴而行，作为相辅相成的两种力量促进中华民族的独立和现代 化。近现代中国的自由主义者，同时都也是民族主义者。 5 以“君主立宪”为 核心内容的戊戌变法同时也是为了实现“国家富强”的民族主义目标；创建 “中华民国”的孙中山，其“三民主义”将民族主义置于民权主义之前；抗日 战争时期的中国自由主义者，抗日与民主并重，将民主宪政作为救亡图存的不 二法门。 然而，在近代以来的中国历史行程中，民族主义功业卓著、自由主义的事业则 步履维艰。作为三民主义思想体系组成部分的孙中山民族主义思想，目标是要 将中国建设成为一个民主的、具有社会主义色彩的现代民族国家。 6 而孙中山 之后的国民党领袖，特别是后来居于领导地位的蒋介石一系，有意无意地将孙 中山的民族主义思想和他的自由主义思想以及社会主义思想割裂开来，国民党 在蒋介石的领导下基本上完成了建立民族国家的大业，但这个国家却是一个同 时敌视社会主义和自由主义的党国。中国共产党正是宣称它要比其它任何党派 都要更加爱国、并将民族主义作为动员群众的有效工具，才在濒临灭亡的绝境 中借中国抗日战争全面爆发的机会东山再起，并在随后的内战中打败了“反 帝”立场似乎稍逊一畴的国民党。 7 中国共产党胜利之后，所建立起来的是比 3 关于“中国”一词的起源及其早期用法，参阅王尔敏：《中国名称溯源及其近代诠释》，载王尔 敏编：《中国近代思想史论》，台北，1982 年版，第 461-480 页。 4 康有为：《公车上书》，载谭合成、江山编：《世纪档案》，中国档案出版社 1995 年版，第 2-22 页。 5 冯崇义：《在民族主义、社会主义和自由主义之间：中国近现代知识分子》，《从中国化到 全球化》，中国社会科学出版社，2003 年版，第 83-110 页。 6 孙中山：《三民主义》，《孙中山选集》，人民出版社 1981 年版，第 615-879 页。 7 参阅约翰逊（c．johnson）：《农民民族主义和共产主义政权》 （peasant nationalism and portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 2 feng, chongyi liberalism and nationalism in contemporary china 国民党离自由主义更远的党国。中共党国将自由主义打入了十八层地狱，将党 的利益、集体利益和国家利益置于神圣的祭坛，个人自由和个人利益都只具有 随时可以被牺牲的工具性价值。 当代中国自由主义者认为，健康的民族主义必须以自由主义为基础。一旦跨越 人权、自由、平等、民主、和平、理性等超越民族界限的普适性自由主义价 值，民族主义不仅在内政中成为专制主义的帮凶，而且会轻而易举地滑向排外 主义、沙文主义、种族主义和法西斯主义。现代中国的主要政治势力（国、共 两党）高扬民族主义而疏离自由主义、甚至利用民族主义来打压自由主义，这 无疑是中国现代化事业的重大挫折。 8 在国共两党政治势力的支配之下，民族 主义的浪潮淹没了中国人对自由民主的追求，改变了中国人原来以英美为师融 入近代民主潮流的大方向，转而走上了“以俄为师”的歧途邪道。从那以后， 国共两党所学习的不再是主流正脉的西方，而是非主流的、反西方的“西方” （马列主义及苏俄）。现代化模式在中国的这种急剧转换，在很大程度上是受到 西方列强对中国的侵略行径和苏俄宣布放弃俄国在华所有特权的诺言这正反两 面的刺激。受民族主义激情支配的中国人，已无法将西方列强的侵略行径和西 方捷足先登的自由民主制度及相应价值区分开来，因为反对西方列强的侵略、 满足民族主义的诉求，而将从西方历史中发源的自由民主制度和价值也疯狂抵 制。正是在这一意义上，朱学勤将“病态民族主义”（或“狂热的民族主义”） 同“民粹主义”一起称为中国五四运动以来两个精神“病灶”。 9 更有甚者，中国经过抗日战争而获得民族解放和民族独立之后，以抵抗外来侵 略为特征的中国民族主义便完成了它的历史使命。此后中国政府和民众在全面 封杀自由主义的背景下继续沉迷于民族主义，对中国民主化事业危害甚大。中 共在夺取全国政权前夕起将美国确定为头号民族敌人，一个重要原因就是要消 灭中国亲美知识界的“自由主义和个人主义”。 10 长期以来，中共党国高举着民 族主义或爱国主义的旗帜、不断地煽动反西方的“民族感情”来弱化和消除自 由主义对中国民众的影响。在二十世纪八十年代以前的党国意识形态之中，追 求起源于西方的自由民主与当西方的“洋奴”几乎是同义词。党国也很成功地 利用中国人的“民族感情”，在反对“全盘西化”的旗号下将自由民主拒于国门 之外。 11 communist power），斯坦福，1962 年版。 8 参阅冯崇义：《国魂，在国难中挣扎：抗战时期的中国文化》，广西师范大学出版社，1995 年版。 9 朱学勤：《五四以来两个精神“病灶”》，李世涛主编：《知识分子立场：民族主义与转型 期中国的命运》，时代文艺出版社，2000 年版，第 500-513 页。 10 参阅毛泽东：《别了，斯徒雷登》，《毛泽东选集》合订本，人民出版社，1969 年版，第 1384-1386 页。如果不是受国家操控，按照“朴素的民族感情”，中国民族主义的主要矛头没 有理由指向代表着“自由民主”或“资产阶级自由化”但没有侵占中国一寸领土而且在世界大 战中有恩于中华民族的美国，而是应该指向曾在近代以来侵占大片中国领土并在 1945 年苏联红 军出兵东北时强奸那么多中国妇女的俄国。当然，利用历史恩怨来煽动民族仇恨，是很恶劣的 政治权术。 11 冯崇义：《“全盘西化”辩》，《当代中国研究》，2005 年夏季号，第 81-93 页。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 3 feng, chongyi liberalism and nationalism in contemporary china 直到“改革开放”时代，自由主义才又在中国死灰复燃。在“思想解放”的 “八十年代”，中国人向往“蔚蓝色文明”，闭关锁国是受到普遍诟病的对象， 亲近西方和学习西方则是进步的时尚。以民主化为目标的政治体制改革被胡耀 邦和赵紫阳两任中共总书记摆上了议事日程。然而，以西方的民主政治为榜样 的改革进程，只艰难地经历了短暂的几年时间，又为 1989 年“六四”镇压所打 断。这一事件给中共党国造成了深刻的统治危机，再加上苏东剧变和苏联解体 的强烈刺激，党国主导的民族主义应运而生，并成功地得到了民间的热烈响 应。在党国民族主义的意识形态框架以及中国现实的政治空间里，反对西方的 “和平演变”被重新确定为一项基本国策，对民主政治的追求又重新被扣上 “全盘西化”的帽子大张挞伐。 12 实际上，中国改革的“总设计师”一贯主张 “不能搞三权鼎立那一套”，认定“所谓资产阶级自由化，就是要中国全盘西 化”。 13 在当代中国自由主义者看来，当代中国的民族主义具有强烈的国家意识形态色 彩，是党国用来增强政权合法性的工具。用孙立平的话说，上个世纪九十年代 中国出现民族主义思潮，“在很大程度上意味着将民族主义作为转型期意识形态 的一个重要的思想资源。从这个意义上来说，这种民族主义带有很强的实用主 义性质。” 14 徐友渔很敏锐地指出，二十世纪九十年代以来兴起的民族主义与近 现代中国历史上的民族主义在起源上有天壤之别。以往强劲的民族主义是由于 外部侵略所产生的危亡感，当代的民族主义飙升则肇因于党国为填补马列主义 式微所留下的意识形态真空而进行的“舆论导向”。 15 显然，不是中国公民或中 国的“国家利益”需要与在政治、经济、文化等方面都遥遥领先值得学习而且 在各种交往中获益匪浅的西方作对，而是党国需要与自由民主的西方作对，民 族主义已成为维持党国专制统治的主要思想支柱。樊百华甚至指出，中共党国 的民族主义有机会主义之嫌，因为中共一方面利用民族主义话语来“攒民意”， 另一方面又协助外资企业严酷压榨中国本土劳工的超额利润来向“列强”及外 国商人“轮番献礼”。 16 应该说，中共利用民族主义来弥补意识形态真空和合法 性危机、维护党国体制和一个强大的中央集权，至少获得了部分的成功。但 是，中共这种成功的另一面，就是延缓了中国的民主化进程。 二、民族主义危害国家利益 “国家利益”（在“民族国家”的框架中，“国家利益”与 “民族利益” 概念 互通，故英文中用的是同一个词 national interest）归根结底是一个国家全 体公民在安全、经济福利、政治权利和文化生活等方面的利益。但是，统治集 团为了维护其本身的利益，往往故意将国家利益、政府利益和执政党利益混为 一谈、从中渔利。在实行多党制的民主制度下，因为政党轮流坐桩和政府定期 12 叶扬：《“全盘西化”论剖析》，《科学社会主义》，1987 年第 2 期，第 6-11 页。 13 邓小平：《邓小平文选》，人民出版社，1993 年版，第 195、207 页。 14 孙立平：《汇入世界主流文明——民族主义三题》，李世涛主编：《知识分子立场：民族主 义与转型期中国的命运》，时代文艺出版社，2000 年版，第 375 页。 15 徐友渔：《民族主义、全球化和国家利益》，http://space.cenet.org.cn/2005/11/13. 16 樊百华：《共产党利用民族主义的手法小结》，http://peacehall.com/news/2005/04/19 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 4 http://space.cenet.org.cn/2005/11/13 feng, chongyi liberalism and nationalism in contemporary china 更迭等缘故，政党利益与政府利益泾渭分明，政府利益和国家利益同样泾渭分 明，浑水摸鱼难度较大。而在中国这种一党专政的浑沌国度，专政党可以轻而 易举地将执政党利益等同于政府利益、并进而将政府利益等同于国家利益，尽 管政府和国家都具有讽刺性地加上“人民”这一前缀。 “第三世界”在经济、政治、科技、教育各方面现代国家建设的所有具体成 就，基本上都是“西化”的成果。第二次世界大战结束以来“第三世界”各国 的民族主义，却恰恰是以反西方和反“西化”为基本特征。这种民族主义在对 外关系中严重危害本国的国家和民族利益，至少有三种表现形式。其一，因为 盲目排外而长期中断与世界主流文明国家在政治、经济、文化诸方面的正常交 往，既丧失了巨大的经济和贸易利益，也封杀了“第三世界”各国学习先进的 制度和文化而获得进步的机会。其二，在狂热的民族主义支配下不惜以武力争 夺区域优势地位或区域霸主地位，使这些国家陷入无穷的灾难，例如伊朗和伊 拉克之间的战争、伊拉克与科威特之间的战争、叙利亚与黎巴嫩之间的战争。 其三，为西方国家右翼势力提供口实和把柄，使这些右翼势力的强硬态度和政 策得以在一些西方国家的国内政治中占上风。这一项也是以当今的穆斯林世界 最为明显。当今穆斯林世界的狂热民族主义者和恐怖主义者都自以为他们的所 作所为是捍卫民族利益。然而，恰恰是他们的极端民族主义言行严重地损害这 些穆斯林国家的民族利益，既使西方世界的“鸽派”无法与这些穆斯林国家保 持有益友好的交往，也使西方世界的“鹰派”得以占据上风并有充分的借口对 这些穆斯林国家进行制裁、甚至于沉重的军事打击。恐怖主义者及支持他们的 极端民族主义者博得了不向西方低头的“民族英雄”称号、或者成全了他们 “烈士”的功名，但这些国家的广大民众则由于他们的“英雄”言行而蒙受无 穷的灾难。正如一位中国自由主义学者所指出的那样，“在有的国家，民族主义 成为激励人们奋发努力的精神力量，但在另外一些国家，民族主义情绪却成为 自我封闭的理由，成为社会与经济发展的障碍。只要看一下当今的世界，我们 就不难看出，一些最旗帜鲜明地坚持民族主义的国家，往往也就是最抗拒现代 化的主流文明的国家，有的甚至也就是当今世界上最落后的国家。” 17 真正认清并增进民族国家的利益，绝非易事。当代中国的自由主义者认为，中 共党国极权统治是共产主义和民族主义的混合物，党国特权和党国意识形态严 重地扭曲了当代中国政府和民众对“民族利益”或“国家利益”的认识，往往 无知而满怀激情地破坏民族国家的利益，在实践中带来严重的后果。在毛泽东 时代，中国的“强国梦”被党国意识形态和毛泽东的个人野心扭曲为打肿脸庞 充胖子式的虚荣，曾经作为国际共产主义运动的中坚或旗手来开罪所有本来可 以友好往来的先进国家，也曾经为充当第三世界的“老大哥”和代言人而浪费 无数资源支持很多无赖的独裁政权，教训至为深刻。在改革开放时代，党国淡 化意识形态而突出“国家利益”，本来是一种进步。但是，那种以酷烈排外（实 为“排西方”）主义为特征的民族主义并未完全消失，经济及综合国力的倍增又 迅速助长了朝野上下的一股民族主义的“虚骄之气”。 18 两者交相为患，危害着 17 孙立平：《汇入世界主流文明——民族主义三题》；李世涛主编：《知识分子立场：民族主 义与转型期中国的命运》，时代文艺出版社，2000 年版，第 378-379 页。 18 李慎之：《关于文化问题的一些思考》，李慎之、何家栋：《中国的道路》，南方日报出版 社，2000 年版，第 85 页。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 5 feng, chongyi liberalism and nationalism in contemporary china 中国的民族利益。徐友渔对此有很简洁的总结：“在上世纪 50 至 70 年代，狭隘 民族主义与左倾意识形态相结合，搞闭关锁国，拒绝对外开放、学习、引进， 使我国一再丧失经济发展的机会。在当代，民族主义与西方泊来的新左派理论、 ‘世界体系’理论、反全球化理论相结合，力图阻止中国参与全球化的进程”。 19 当代中国的自由主义者认定，民族主义的作用随着历史的变迁而截然相反。在 争取民族独立和民族解放时期，民族主义成为社会动员、国家整合和民族凝聚 的巨大动力；而在民族独立之后的现代化时期，强烈的民族主义则成为社会、 经济和政治发展的严重障碍。刘晓波通过观察近年来反美民族主义、反日民族 主义、反台独爱国主义、香港爱国主义的种种表现，系统论述了中国社会极端 民族主义与独裁主义相结合而形成了“独裁爱国主义”，不断地危害中国的国家 利益，如果继续发展将给中国带来毁灭性的灾难。 20 按照当代中国自由主义者的价值判断，不存在公民利益之上或公民利益之外的 “国家利益”或“民族利益”。保护和增进国家民族的利益，也就是保护和增进 公民们在经济、政治和文化等方面的具体权益，而不是打着国家或民族的旗号 去伤害公民的权益。刘军宁的结论是：“民族主义虽然把民族利益看得至高无 上，但除在文化领域小有作为外，根本无法为实现民族利益提供真正有效的手 段。在当今，越来越无可争辩的是，在实现民族利益方面，最有效的政治手段 是民主政治，经济手段是市场经济，文化手段是尊重多元与宽容异端，这些手 段值得每一个胸怀民族利益的人去认真对待。” 21 三、人权高于主权 民族国家的主权和公民的人权本非对立之物。当国家主权在十七世纪的欧洲最 初形成之时，它所针对的是罗马教会的外来干涉和封建割据势力的内部挑战。 伴随着“人民主权”、“专制之下无祖国”等观念在十八世纪欧洲启蒙运动中的 成熟，国家对公民权利的保护成为公民忠诚于国家主权的内在要求。如徐迅所 说，自由主义的民族主义“在国家问题上主张国家的政治生活、经济生活和社 会生活都应以维护个人自由为目的，反对任何形式的专制”。 22 主权和人权的分离和冲突，主要发生于经由民族主义运动立国的专制国家。在 民族独立运动中，国民便普遍地被要求牺牲个人权利以服务于反抗外来侵略的 事业。当民族解放运动的胜利所得到的不是一个民主政府而是专制政府，这些 国家的政府往往以国家的名义变本加厉地要求国民作出更大的牺牲，以巩固和 加强中央集权。将“人权”和“主权”作为对立的概念来讨论，也是最近才发 生的新鲜事。在冷战时期，民主国家为了与苏联在“发展中国家”中争夺盟 19 徐友渔：《民族主义、全球化和国家利益》，http://space.cenet.org.cn/2005/11/13. 20 刘晓波：《单刃毒剑——中国民族主义批判》，博大出版社，2006 年版。 21 刘军宁：《民族主义四面观》，李世涛主编：《知识分子立场：民族主义与转型期中国的命 运》，时代文艺出版社，2000 年版，第 17 页。 22 徐迅：《民族主义》，中国社会科学出版社，1998 年版，第 55 页。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 6 feng, chongyi liberalism and nationalism in contemporary china 友，从实用主义角度出发支持很多独裁政权，而根本不顾这些国家的人权状 况。直到二十世纪八十年代，人权问题才逐步被西方国家摆上国际政治的议事 日程，并在冷战结束之后正式形成了“人权外交”。由于内政不受外来干涉是国 家主权这一概念的题中应有之义，因而人权状况欠佳的发展中国家便很自然地 祭起国家主权这面旗帜来对抗西方国家的人权外交。中国政府及民族主义者指 责西方人权外交的基本理由有二。其一，西方国家的“人权外交”只不过是别 有用心地利用人权干预“社会主义国家”和发展中国家内政的一种战略手段； 其二，“人权高于主权”是“西方价值观”，违背“主权神圣不可侵犯”和“不 干涉内政”的国际关系准则。 23 其实，中共政权从 1949 年执政以来就一直将国家主权和安全置于首要地位。信 奉这种“主权优先”原则，也使中国自由知识分子付出沉重的代价。1949 年中 共政权从中华民国接收过来的那批自由知识分子，居于爱国心和国家主权优先 原则，自愿放弃了思想自由、言论自由、学术独立等自由主义立场，对新政权 全面投诚、降心相从。但是，中国自由知识分子并没有得到党国的信任，在五 十年代末的“反右运动”中全军覆没。没有对个人自由权利的法律保护，党国 当局随时都可以按照党国所定义的“国家利益”来剥夺公民们的基本政治权 利。当代中国的自由主义者吸取了这一沉痛的教训，对那种排斥人权的“国家 主权”以及排斥个人权利的民族主义深感忧虑与不安。正如刘军宁所说，“自由 主义只认同能够维护和扩大个人生存的自由空间的政治体制。……自由主义坚 决反对以抽象的‘公意’或‘国家集体利益’的借口来剥夺公民个人的自由 权”。 24 当代中国的自由主义者认为，在国际政治中以“人权优先”取代“主权优先”、 以“有限主权”取代“绝对主权”，是人类以巨大代价、特别是两次世界大战及 无数次民族战争的生命代价换取的自由主义新成果。是否接受“人权优先”的 原则实际上是当代世界区分文明和野蛮的主要标志之一。“人权高于主权”对于 当今世界主流文明来说，已是不证自明的原则。而在那些还维持着野蛮的专制 制度的国家，当权者以为坐上了统治者的位置就获得了奴役本国人民的特权， 将“国家主权”作为挡箭牌来反对国际社会在人权问题上“干涉内政”。在 1999 年的“科索沃事件”中，中国政府和民族主义者站在米洛特维奇一边，中 国自由主义者则公开支持北约对南联盟的“人道主义干涉”。因为在他们看来， 是否尊重包括自由民主和“人权原则”在内的人类普遍价值，是判别民族主义 的道德分界线，因为这些人类共同追求的价值是属于全人类的共同财富和准 则，无国界民族之分。坚守人道主义的道德底线，就不允许专制政权不顾人类 文明的基本准则、使用国家暴力肆意践踏人权。 25 朱学勤也强调：“‘万国之 上还有人类在’，这是胡适留下的名言，六十年过去了，只要政治文明在人们的 头脑中尚未普遍确立，这句话在中国就不会过时。生命价值既是最高，也是最 低，是任何政治诉求都不能突破的人伦底线。” 26 23 杨洁勉：《后冷战时期的中美关系》，上海人民出版社，2000 年版，第 148-151 页。 24 刘军宁：《自由主义如是说》，http://www.china-week.com/16/3/2005 25 徐迅：《民族主义》，中国社会科学出版社，1998 年版，第 60 页。 26 朱学勤：《万国之上有人类在》，《东方早报》，2005 年 7 月 19 日。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 7 http://www.china-week.com/16/3/2005 feng, chongyi liberalism and nationalism in contemporary china 刘晓波著有专文对“人权高于主权”的观点进行了系统论述。刘晓波明确表 示，人权是超越宗教信仰、意识形态、种族、民族、和国家的普适性权利。二 十一世纪新秩序的普适性正义规则，应该以自由主义的价值观为核心。所谓 “人权高于主权”的原则，就是人的自由权利优先于国家和民族的整体利益， 任何国家、任何群体、任何组织不得以“主权”、“内政”之名，任意行使侵犯 个人的自由和权利的强制性权力。人权原则，乃是任何民族或主权国家都不得 以任何借口破坏这条底线。如果任何民族或主权国家突破这条底线，国际社会 就有权力和道义责任进行包括经济制裁和军事打击在内的人道主义干预。 27 王怡 更直截了当地谴责当代中国人权与主权严重冲突的生存状况。他指出，在当代 世界，保障人权是公民对民族国家的身份认同的前提条件。在民主国家，民族 国家的身份认同和捍卫人权的民主政体密不可分。而他在中国这个专制的党治 政府之下，所感到的只是“一个在政治上不被尊重、不被承认而在精神上常常 受其折辱的被统治者”。 28 因为中国政府及部分民族主义者不承认“人权高于主权“的原则，“爱国主义” 在中国往往受到严重的扭曲。其中一个突出的表现是，处处为政府的特权和面 子着想，而将中国人的生命和权利视同草芥。例如，在收回香港主权的前几 年，坚决反对港英当局关于香港政治民主化的政改方案，以“爱国”的名义阻 止港英当局给香港的六百万中国人出让任何民主权利；为了实现主权和领土完 整的爱国主义目标,扬言不惜兵戎相向，将居住在台湾的两千多万中国人化为灰 烬，甚至于不惜牺牲西安以东的中国人以与美国决一死战；坚决反对西方国家 “将西方的人权标准强加于中国”，以“爱国”的名义阻止中国人得到言论、结 社、出版等方面的自由权利。如此等等，不一而足。秦晖怒斥这些“爱国”者 根本不把中国同胞当人看、特别是不把中国人当与西方人等值的人看，而是将 中国人视为比洋人“低人三等”、不配享受所谓“西方的人权标准”的“贱 人”。 29 结论 在“民族国家”形成之后一个多世纪的西方历史中，民族主义一直是冲突、战 争和灾难的根源，在小战不断的同时是“文明世界”的两次世界大战。现在西 方终于彻底觉醒了，确定了和解与合作的主旋律，通过谈判和协商来解决利益 纷争和意见分歧，而不是诉诸民族主义来扩大分歧和冲突。 由于中国在近代以来遭受西方列强一个多世纪的侵略欺凌，备受创伤的民族心 灵对外来势力的恃强凌弱有着沉痛而敏感的集体记忆，而且民族主义在中国的 民族解放和建国事业中居功甚伟，民族主义很容易成为一种强势（权）话语。 而且，西方在近现代中国同时扮演两种角色，既是现代化的典范，又是凶恶的 侵略者。西方的这种双重角色，给很多中国人带来困惑。尽管先进的中国人在 十九世纪四十年代就已提出“师夷之长技以制夷”的战略（也就是通过迅速实 27 刘晓波：《人权高于主权》，http://www.bjzc.org/bjs/bc/2002/4/11 28 王怡：《我成为民族主义者的那天》，http://xinsheng.net/articles/2004/8/7. 29 秦晖：《不爱国人却“爱国”、只“爱民族”不爱民》，http://www.jzt.net.cn/article. portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 8 http://www.bjzc.org/bjs/bc/2002/4/11 http://xinsheng.net/articles/2004/8/7 feng, chongyi liberalism and nationalism in contemporary china 现现代化的途径来抵制侵略），但热烈追求西方典范的中国人往往又会被扣上洋 奴、买办、汉奸的帽子。很多中国人长期将西方文明和西方霸权混为一谈，并 因为反对西方霸权而导向对西方文明的抵制。 当代中国的自由主义者总结了历史的经验教训，认为中国在二十世纪九十年代 以来高扬民族主义，不仅对内危害中国民主化的事业，而且在对外关系中危害 中国的国家利益。他们主张理性地区分西方文明和西方霸权，在反对西方霸权 的时候绝不反对西方文明，在学习西方文明的时候也忘不了反对西方霸权以维 护国家利益。而且他们认为国家利益是国民个体利益的集合，不存在国民利益 之外的“国家利益”，不能将国家利益与政府的利益或执政党的利益等同起来， 更不能以“国家利益”的借口侵害公民权利。在二十一世纪的全球化浪潮中， 中国在国际政治中应该与西方先进国家那样遵从“人权高于主权”的原则，积 极主动地接受人类普世价值、遵守人类文明的基本准则、融入世界主流文明， 在切实改善国内人权状况的同时，支持全球的人道主义事业。毕竟，“自由主义 和民族主义是性质不同的意识形态，它们有不同的出发点，遵从不同的逻辑， 走向不同的归宿。自由主义以人类个体为出发点，遵从‘普世主义’的逻辑， 目标是人类所有个体的自由幸福；民族主义则以民族群体为出发点，遵从与 ‘他者’不同或敌对的‘特殊主义’的逻辑，对同类的关爱有着鲜明的边界， 目标是本族本群的优势。” 30 自由主义者认为，当民族主义与自由主义目标一 致的时候，两者可以相得益彰；当民族主义与自由主义发生冲突的时候，取舍 的标准当然应该向自由主义倾斜。 参考书目 unger, jonathan. 1996, chinese nationalism, m. e. sharpe. zheng, yongnian. 1999, discovering chinese nationalism in china, cambridge university press. 安德森（b．anderson）：《被想象出来的社群》（imagined communities）， 伦敦，1983 年版。 毛泽东：《别了，斯徒雷登》，《毛泽东选集》合订本，人民出版社，1969 年 版。 邓小平：《邓小平文选》，人民出版社，1993 年版。 房宁、王小东、宋强等：全球化阴影下的中国之路》，中国社会科学出版社， 1999 年版。 冯崇义：《“全盘西化”辩》，《当代中国研究》，2005 年夏季号。 冯崇义：《国魂，在国难中挣扎：抗战时期的中国文化》，广西师范大学出版 社，1995 年版。 冯崇义：《在民族主义、社会主义和自由主义之间：中国近现代知识分子》， 《从中国化到全球化》，中国社会科学出版社，2003 年版。 30 冯崇义：《在民族主义、社会主义和自由主义之间：中国近现代知识分子》，《从中国化到 全球化》，中国社会科学出版社，2003 年版，第 105 页。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 9 feng, chongyi liberalism and nationalism in contemporary china 格尔纳（e．gellner）：《民族和民族主义》（nations and nationalism），牛 津，1983 年版。 康有为：《公车上书》，载谭合成、江山编：《世纪档案》，中国档案出版社 1995 年版。 李慎之：《关于文化问题的一些思考》，李慎之、何家栋：《中国的道路》， 南方日报出版社，2000 年版。 李世涛主编：《民族主义与转型期中国的命运》，时代文艺出版社，2000 年 版。 李希光、刘康等：《妖魔化中国的背后》，中国社会科学出版社，1996 年版。 刘军宁：《民族主义四面观》，李世涛主编：《知识分子立场：民族主义与转 型期中国的命运》，时代文艺出版社，2000 年版。 刘晓波：《单刃毒剑——中国民族主义批判》，博大出版社，2006 年版。 史密斯（a．d．smith）：《关于民族主义的理论》（theories of nationalism），伦敦，1983 年版。 宋强、张藏藏、乔边：《中国可以说不》，中华工商联合出版社，1996 年版。 孙立平：《汇入世界主流文明——民族主义三题》，李世涛主编：《知识分子 立场：民族主义与转型期中国的命运》，时代文艺出版社，2000 年版。 孙中山：《三民主义》，《孙中山选集》，人民出版社 1981 年版。 王尔敏：《中国名称溯源及其近代诠释》，载王尔敏编：《中国近代思想史 论》，台北，1982 年版。 徐迅：《民族主义》，中国社会科学出版社，1998 年版。 杨洁勉：《后冷战时期的中美关系》，上海人民出版社，2000 年版。 叶扬：《“全盘西化”论剖析》，《科学社会主义》，1987 年第 2 期。 约翰逊（c．johnson）：《农民民族主义和共产主义政权》 （peasant nationalism and communist power），斯坦福，1962 年版。 朱学勤：《万国之上有人类在》，《东方早报》，2005 年 7 月 19 日。 朱学勤：《五四以来两个精神“病灶”》，李世涛主编：《知识分子立场：民 族主义与转型期中国的命运》，时代文艺出版社，2000 年版。 本文作者冯崇义现为悉尼科技大学国际研究学院副教授，主要研究领域是中国 现代和当代思想史及政治民主化。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 10 2136-12700-6-le portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. envisioning the shôjo aesthetic in miyazawa kenji’s ‘the twin stars’ and ‘night of the milky way railway’ helen kilpatrick, university of wollongong even though miyazawa kenji’s (1896–1933) children’s tales (dôwa) initially operated (and were marginalised) within the confines of patriarchal japan’s taishô era (1912– 1926), some of his narratives incorporate gently transgressive shôjo (girl) themes. two such works provide the focus for this paper, ‘the twin stars’ (futago no hoshi) and ‘night of the milky way railway’ (ginga tetsudô no yoru), henceforth futago and ginga. futago is often seen as the prototype for the now classic ginga (akieda 1989: 76). whereas futago was the author’s first piece of prose fiction, initially narrated to his family in 1918, ginga was his last, and remained unfinished at his death in 1933. both works exhibit several signifiers of the early twentieth century ‘girl,’ and indeed the ‘beautiful boy’ (bishônen), such as androgyny, adoring friendships and melancholic yearning. these kinds of tropes in shôjo literature and visual culture epitomise a subversive desire for release, through the imagination, from the restrictions imposed by an enduringly patriarchal japan. although these now familiar motifs are present in kenji’s narratives, they are still rather implicit. recently, however, among the many illustrators of futago and ginga, two award-winning artists, makino suzuko (b.1951) and azuma itsuko (b.1953), have embraced and foregrounded these aspects of the kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 2 stories.1 their respective visual interpretations of the narratives draw on earlier shôjo art, manga and literature conventions to bring kenji’s work into the broader community of the ‘girl.’ by using takahara eiri’s (1999) concept of ‘girl consciousness’ (shôjo ishiki) and honda masuko’s (1988; 1992) ‘fluttering’ (hirahira) aesthetic, this paper shows how makino’s and azuma’s artistic interpretations of futago and ginga resonate with recurring motifs of the shôjo. takahara’s the territory of the girl (shôjo ryôiki) demonstrates his interest in destabilising centrist, patriarchal modes of literary criticism. he proposes the notion of ‘girl consciousness’ (1999: 9) as being able to think like a girl in order to help decentre the dominant patriarchal way of viewing the world. takahara maintains that having a ‘consciousness of the girl’ when reading shôjo fiction inspires a ‘freedom’ (jiyû) and ‘arrogance’ (kôman) that release a critical and creative power as an act of resistance. he cautions, however, that such ‘freedom’ is imagined rather than actual or political liberation, and that this ‘arrogance’ functions as a ‘non-concrete faculty’ whereby unattainable desires and wishes in the actual world can be satisfied through the subject’s imaginative process (1999: 17). his ‘girl conscious’ reader actively seeks an imagined escape from socially imposed chains such as daughter-, wife-, mother-hood, and even boyand man-hood. importantly, takahara reiterates that one does not need to be a biological female in order to have ‘girl consciousness.’2 rather, any such ‘girlishness’ is a way of being, open to both males and females who wish to reject societal norms and restrictions (1999: 10). this point is relevant to the present discussion of both futago and ginga in that, although neither futago nor ginga is written by, nor necessarily even for or about girls, both stories and their protagonists have traits that will be recognisable and appealing to ‘girl conscious’ readers. through this way of reading, they can be gently subversive of their societal confines. as aoyama and hartley (2009: 2) suggest, the fictional construction of ‘a parallel imagined fantasy world that acknowledges [the girl’s] aspirations and fulfils her desires’ helps deflect the negative social and cultural assessments that have been directed against the shôjo. 1 these two picture books form part of kumon publishing’s illustrated series of kenji’s works edited by amazawa taijirô and hagiwara masayoshi. both were first published in 1993 and are still in print. futago was in its 11th print run in 2010, ginga in its 18th run in 2008. kumon will continue to reprint the series due to its enduring reception (email communication, 7 january 2012). 2 another present-day male novelist, takemoto nobara (b. 1968), for example, demonstrates such ‘girl consciousness’ in his affinities with the shôjo in his novels and his life. his novel shimotsuma monogatari (2002) has become known internationally through its translation (in 2006) as kamikaze girls and especially through its adaption into film (in 2004). kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 3 takahara’s ‘freedom and arrogance’ connects with honda’s earlier (1992) notion of fluttering and lightness. honda indicates how the aesthetic of ‘fluttering’ in shôjo literature and art offers a sense of lightness that invokes an interstitial space of imagined liberty. decorative ‘girlish’ ornaments such as ribbons, frills and lace, and alliterative and assonant words and sounds that appear to waft and shimmer in the breeze symbolise an unfettered shôjo imagination. they provide a ‘fantastic’ (takahara 1999: 19) space of floating yet resilient ‘girls’ hours’ in which real time is suspended (honda, 1992: 177–78). when the ‘girl’ is caught between the desire for and constraints of womanhood, her imaginative aspirations render the space between girlhood and adulthood as a place of liminality in which to dream freely and resist her societal confines. honda is nevertheless aware of the paradox that while these evanescent tropes signal a kind of eternal and ageless desire, such sparkle also holds the imminent risk of fading. while dreams and fantasies offered the taishô ‘girl’ a freedom that was not present in the real world, they also signalled the desire for a resistance that could not last. such an experience of shôjo literature is therefore bitter-sweet in offering only a brief liberation from the more rigid concerns and constraints of everyday life. as honda points out, however, this very impulse signifies an act of transgression that blurs boundaries, freeing the ‘girl’ to yearn for the faraway sky and connect to new and free things, without any urge for ‘worldly benefit or sexual desire’ (honda 1992: 182).3 the gentle transgressions that play out in kenji’s futago and ginga narratives form part of a tradition of imagined resistance to everyday confines that had its beginnings in early twentieth century japan. although kenji is not generally considered a shôjo writer, scholars have noted that many of his stories have an aesthetic that is reminiscent of japanese girls’ narratives, such as the 1920s flower tales (hanamonogatari) of yoshiya nobuko (1896–1973).4 yoshiya’s stories presented their readers with a european exoticism and romanticism with erotic undertones as they fashioned melancholic dreams and ideals of girls who yearned for love, often with older women (aoyama 2009: 60).5 like other art and intellectual writing of the time, including the popular takarazuka theatre troupe of girls and women who played men’s and boys’ roles, these 3 as translated by aoyama and hartley (2009: 35). 4 on various shôjo traits in kenji’s work see, for instance: amazawa (1988; 1998), akieda (2005; 2006), hirazawa (2000), dollase (2003), yamane (1999). 5 for more on a similar yearning, european flavour in shôjo manga, see aoyama & hartley (2009: 11) and welker (2009: 162). kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 4 stories reached kenji’s rural region of iwate (amazawa 1988: 53). amazawa suggests that ginga, with its mastery of ‘girl conversation,’ is infused with the ‘breath’ of yoshiya’s flower tales that were introduced to kenji by his younger sister (1998: 22).6 indeed, amazawa observes that in the first draft of ginga, it was actually three sisters rather than two boys who were originally riding in the eponymous train (22), and its sensitive dialogue and gentle assonances recall all the delicacy and lightness of honda’s hirahira aesthetic. kenji’s work was no doubt influenced by the yearning images and emotional dreamscapes of the shônen and shôjo that were beginning to reverberate through 1920s japanese culture and literature. this was also a time when the ‘modern girl’ (moga) was contesting patriarchal gender and power relations (seaman 2006:157). the moga, with her bobbed, masculine hair, modern clothing and ability to attain paid work outside the home, became associated with androgyny and resistance to gendered power relations. neither was gender-bending unusual in japan. takahara (1999: 16–17) sees both the modern taishô girl and today’s androgynous or asexual shôjo as a continuation and blending of the medieval chigo boys who were sought by priests and samurai for their sexual favours. elsewhere (2003: 9) he reiterates that androgynous images in the arts (including kabuki) have a long history in japan, and that representations of bishônen in early 1900s’ works like kawabata yasunari’s shônen (the youth) and orikuchi shinobu’s kuchibue (whistle) were precursors of the shôjo. according to takahara, these bishônen images encompassed the desire to contest gendered power relations in a similar way to today’s shôjo (1999: 15; also see, 2006: 191). kenji’s emotional fantasies certainly display an attraction to and awareness of gender issues, and were no doubt guided by his interest in and awareness of egalitarian issues on many levels (see hamashita 2002: 232).7 in turn, as akieda miho asserts (2006: 22), there is a new reception to kenji’s poetry and literature which has inspired and fortified the genealogy of ‘girl’ literature and 6 amazawa taijirô is an eminent kenji scholar and poet. he worked on the compilation of the complete works of miyazawa kenji (miyazawa kenji zenshû) in the 1970s. he is also co-editor of the series of picture books (miyazawa kenji e-dôwashû) which holds makino’s and azuma’s artistic interpretations of futago and ginga. 7 as hara (2000: 360–61) indicates, kenji showed an interest in women’s concerns through his active support of the local journal josei iwate (women of iwate). his ‘marivuron and the girl’ (marivuron to shôjo) was first published in the journal in 1933. it depicts the aestheticised aspirations of a young girl who, in symbolic rejection of her role as a dutiful daughter, adores an older woman and yearns for an artistic life like hers. see kilpatrick (2009), which also discusses kenji’s readings of the egalitarian ideologies of the pre-raphaelites. kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 5 manga. for example, matsumoto reiji’s award-winning 1978 ginga tetsudô 999 developed a shôjo audience through its reference to kenji’s ginga and through its themes. akieda (2005; 2006) also points out the intertextual borrowings and quotations from kenji’s work in the shôjo literature of yû miri (b. 1968) and nagano mayumi (b. 1959). further, hirazawa shin’ichi (2000: 6–11) draws comparisons between yoshimoto banana’s narratives and kenji’s ginga in their pursuit of other-worldly themes of death, dreams and yearning.8 he suggests that yoshimoto’s depictions of night and death hark back to and surpass kenji’s fourth dimensional ‘theory of empty space’ (2000: 9). traits in kenji’s work that overlap with the characteristics of the girl pointed out by honda and others include for instance: the in-between stage peculiar to adolescence; a fusion of masculine and feminine characteristics; an affinity for the space of ‘death’ and the border of the real world and death; a refusal to mature; and an affinity for water and water imagery (akieda 2005: 17). certainly, such intertextuality has brought some attention to the largely overlooked shôjo aesthetic in kenji’s work. both the futago and ginga narratives immediately signify the hirahira sparkle and lightness of unfettered dreams, the liminal realm of the ‘girl,’ through their luminescent skies against the dark night. each is set in the fantastic celestial sphere, the mystical transitional space that is well recognised in shôjo literature, and that kenji admired for its spirit of freedom, creativity and spirituality. both futago and ginga also show a deep reverence for nature that harks back to the romantic penchant for flora and fauna. the blend of science and religion in the narratives further reflects their ‘exotic’ european imagery and adds a flavour of mystical spiritualism.9 the works’ fantastic themes, their use of katakana names and words, and their emotional language and scenes all exhibit a tone and sensibility that symbolise the refusal to transition smoothly from childhood to adulthood or girlhood to womanhood. the two-part futago narrative is a somewhat fatalistic story of virtue and justice, constructed around ambiguously gendered twin stars (dôji). (according to nakachi bun (1996: 135), the term dôji can be translated as both ‘child’ and ‘bodhisattva’ and was 8 hirazawa focuses particularly on yoshimoto’s moonlight shadow (mûnraito shadô; 1986), goodbye tsugumi (tsugumi; 1989) and kitchen (kicchin; 1988). 9 despite his devout buddhism, kenji often blended his eclectic interest in religion with western science, for instance, einstein’s fourth dimension. he expounded on his theories about life and art in his 1926 treatise, outline of agrarian art, which was inspired by the artistic endeavours and reformist social ideals of pre-raphaelites john ruskin and william morris (onda 1991[3]: 264). kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 6 used by kenji to differentiate the ‘eternal child’ from the actual child who grows up or matures. it is evidence of the centrist patriarchal viewpoint that the twins are usually taken as boys even though their non-japanese names, chunse dôji and pôse dôji, give no hint as to their gender.) the stars are peripheral to the earthly world, bound by their celestial orchestral ‘duties’ to the king of the heavens. every evening, they are required to sit on their crystalline pedestals and play their silver flutes to the ‘song of the circling stars.’ in the first part, when their nightly work is done, they race off to frolic together in the misty dawn skies. as they are enjoying themselves at a heavenly fountain spring, they witness a fight between the scorpion and crow constellations. when it ends, they help the wounded scorpion back home, and arrive just in time to take up their flutes for the evening star song. in the second part, the twins again show their gently rebellious streak by taking off with a trickster comet who, when he becomes disenchanted with them, thrusts them into the depths of the sea. the two different worlds (heaven and sea) are representative of the hierarchical social relations to be transcended through their adventures. in the sea, they find themselves amongst other ‘fallen’ stars who, due to their ‘misdeeds’ as stars, have now become starfish dwelling in the mud of the ocean floor (39).10 eventually, they are reinstated to their rightful place in heaven through the good graces of the sea king who has heard of their altruistic deeds above. despite the story’s obvious buddhist references, the narrative has many ‘exotic’ elements (including graeco-roman astronomical references), but it is the eponymous twins’ desire for adventure and their tender bonds of affection for each other that call up the transgressive desires of the shôjo. their devotion and special bonds are similar to those of the orphaned heroines in many shôjo novels and bring to mind the union of honda’s collective ‘girlhood.’11 the twins also gently challenge their restrictive situation by showing their desire to break free from their prescribed roles. while the twins trust in their king, they seek something more than their daily routine, signalling a subtle resistance to their imposed responsibilities (in the hierarchic patriarchy). moreover, their togetherness, friendship and affection for each other see them through adversity in both parts of the story. 10 page numbers for all quotations from the two narratives are from the kumon picture books. translations are my own. 11 honda (1992) draws on benedict anderson’s ‘imagined community’ (1983) when discussing the wider girl collective. kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 7 in comparison, the more comprehensive ginga narrative takes up and complicates the tender friendship that is introduced in futago, and indeed makes intertextual references to futago’s twins and the star song. in a way that recalls the melancholic aesthetic of shôjo literature, ginga concerns itself with the profound pain of giovanni’s schoolboy yearning, sorrow and desire for a deeper bond with his classmate, campanella.12 their italian names in katakana script (for foreign loanwords) also enhance the ‘exotic,’ unrealistic or fictitious flavour reminiscent of many shôjo works (dollase 2003: 732– 33). further, the friendship between the ginga boys’ fathers reiterates mutual affection as an important theme. as if questioning society’s patriarchal roles, the narrative shows the sensitive giovanni providing the main support for his sick mother in his father’s absence. giovanni is kept busy running from school to work to home, taking responsibility for many domestic tasks with no time for friends or play. he and his mother’s plight in the absence of the family’s ‘male breadwinner’ suggests some disenchantment with the patriarchal system and the rigid or emotionally distant masculinity it prescribes for authority figures. the boys’ tender friendship also contrasts with the callousness of their classmates who seem destined with time to become more like the cold and distant patriarchal role models more often found in their contemporaneous society. giovanni is ostracised by his classmates who shun and tease him about his absent father as he goes about his daily chores. sad and isolated, he escapes into an emotion-charged dream world, riding in a train across the night skies of the milky way with campanella, his only sympathetic friend. he is aching for love and affection, for a close sentimental relationship. these feelings are reminiscent of the ‘pure emotionalism’ of the melancholic shôjo found in yoshiya nobuko’s flower tales, where ‘sadness is almost a performative act’ (dollase 2003: 729–30). ginga resounds with the pathos of giovanni’s yearning for eternal friendship with campanella, and the intensity of his affection also recalls the erotic undertones and the tragedies of unrequited love between same sex or androgynous figures found in shôjo novels like the shônen-ai (boys’ love, or bl) in, for example, nagano mayumi’s the boy alice (shônen arisu). 12 according to mori masaki, kenji’s ginga was probably heavily influenced by tommaso campanella’s 1623 novel, the city of the sun, which kenji read in translation. besides taking campanella as the name for one of the protagonists, ginga is similar to campanella’s novel in its themes of friendship, loneliness and self-sacrifice. the italian novel also deals with communitarian agrarian practices, labour and equal opportunities of education found in other works by kenji (mori 1997: 207). kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 8 together, the two boys experience an imaginative celestial trip towards death, which is itself another well-known ‘girl’ trope.13 the end of the narrative makes it clear that campanella has drowned in the river, and the boys probe the depths of life and death in discussion with each of the other-worldy characters they meet along the way. this fantastic death-ride signals the ephemeral liminality of childhood (and its earthly cessation for campanella). the whole narrative aestheticises campanella’s death through giovanni’s yearning for (yet despair of) eternal union and happiness, reiterating the story as a part of the emotional arena of the shônen and shôjo. the themes of adoration, yearning and preoccupation with death echo the intense passion that signals the ‘girl conscious’ desire to break free from the difficulties imposed by the restrictive systems operating in the physical world. giovanni’s melancholy is played out in his constant search for ‘real happiness’ (66, passim) and in his bitter-sweet sighs of longing for eternal friendship with campanella, an affection which he feels is not fully reciprocated. for example, giovanni is so pained at campanella’s interest in the girl kaoru, who has joined the train with her brother after they have drowned with the titanic, that he asks himself: ‘why am i this unhappy? … isn’t there anyone who will go anywhere with me, right to the end?’ (54). in contrast to the italian names of the two boys, kaoru is a japanese name. besides this, it can also be used for both males and females. for instance, kaoru is both the name of prince genji’s son in the famous eleventh century tale of genji (genji monogatari) and that of the eponymous dancer in kawabata’s izu dancer (izu no odoriko, 1926). the ambiguously gendered name thus adds another level of androgynous or shônen-ai (bl) intertextuality. giovanni’s jealousy and pathetic adoration for campanella also exemplify the sentiment of unrequited love similar to that found in shôjo manga from the 1970s; for example, in andre’s love for lady oscar in ikeda riyoko’s rose of versailles (berusaiyu no bara, 1972–1973).14 giovanni’s disappointments and feelings of abandonment, particularly after campanella’s departure, manifest in several displays of aestheticised pain and tears. 13 for detail on death as a common theme in shôjo works see, for instance, akieda (2005) and hirazawa (2000). 14 other examples of this kind of unrequited love in shôjo manga are: the prince’s love for a young man in yamagishi ryôko’s emperor of the land of the rising sun (hi izuru tokoro no tenshi, 1980–1984); or the love triangles in ueda miwa’s peach girl (pīchi gāru, 1998–2003) and in honey and clover (hachimitsu to kurôbâ, 2000–2006). the first ‘boys’ love’ or bishônen manga was probably takemiya keiko’s ‘in the sunroom’ (sanrûmu nite), first published in a shôjo monthly in 1970 (aoyama 1988: 188). kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 9 like many fictional shôjo figures who have to overcome different obstacles in their pursuit of affection and happiness, ginga’s protagonists use impassioned language and gestures to express their yearning and/or admiration. after kaoru and her brother have left the train, giovanni says with a deep sigh: ‘it’s just the two of us again’ (66). as if prescient of campanella’s inevitable death and the elusiveness of eternal happiness, giovanni suggests: ‘let’s go on together, on and on forever’ (66–67). campanella agrees, but his eyes well with ‘beautiful tears’ (66), for he is apparently already aware of his own death and his impending departure in a way that giovanni is not. giovanni’s efforts to hold on to an unattainable love that silently slips away from his grasp leave an aestheticised sense of deep pathos and yearning. giovanni’s sense of dejection and sorrow is intensified at the boys’ final parting, as campanella vanishes into the ‘dim white haze’ (66) into an aestheticised death. giovanni’s ‘unbearable loneliness’ (67) is almost palpable when he cannot see the same heavenly vision of campanella’s mother that his friend can. in an outpouring of unrestrained emotion, giovanni bursts into tears, ‘sobs filling his throat’ (67) as he realises that he is alone and that campanella has reached his mother in death. this intense sentiment draws attention to the elusiveness of eternal connectedness, and is inscribed with a touching aesthetic that helps transcend the gender parameters inferred by other parts of the text (the boys’ names or schoolboy antics, for instance). such devotion and tenderness poignantly reverberate with all the ‘colours, fragrances and sounds ... that resonate uniquely with the aesthetics of the girl’ (honda 1992: 165).15 as akieda (2006: 32) suggests giovanni’s lonely inner search for happiness is like a shôjo rite of passage. the boys’ reverence for their mothers adds to the intensity of melancholic emotion. like other bishônen characters such as yoshimoto banana’s vulnerable yûichi in kitchen (kicchin) who has lost his biological mother and his biological father (who becomes his transsexual mother), the two ginga boys love their mothers deeply. one poignant chapter begins with campanella’s agitated concern about receiving his mother’s forgiveness. this leads both boys to profound consideration of their mothers’ love, and of their concern for their mothers’ happiness. holding back his tears, campanella says: ‘i would do anything to make my mother truly happy. but i wonder 15 as translated by aoyama and hartley (2009: 27). kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 10 what would make her happiest?’ (25). giovanni similarly expresses a care and concern for his sick mother that, in turn, subtly hints at the plight of women and their inherent responsibilities within a restrictive (and poverty-stricken) community. whereas giovanni’s devotion and practical assistance to his mother while other boys are at play draws attention to prescribed gender roles, it also emphasises his isolation and sadness. the boys’ expression of adoration for their mothers further signals the regret often felt on the verge of adulthood, at leaving the comfort and familiarity of childhood. the ginga narrative’s celebration of light and transparency—the sense of misty, feathery, fluttering space, the flora and fauna imagery—is reminiscent of the liminal space occupied by the ‘girl’ on the verge of fantastical ‘flight’ from the repressive reality of the actual patriarchal world. for instance, the textual imagery surrounding the train-ride is replete with pulsating, phosphorescent light like dazzling ‘scattered diamonds’ (19) and ‘rippling,’ ‘swaying’ silver pampas grass (21), as opposed to the physical rigour and torment of the world of school, work and home that giovanni has to try to balance in his daily care for his mother. the luminescence also recalls the ‘rainbows and moonlight’ and ‘transparent food’ from the preface to kenji’s 1924 book, the restaurant of many orders (chûmon no ôi ryôriten) where ‘anything is possible,’16 the narrative similarly resonates with images reminiscent of the flickering light of the alternating current lamp from his famous poem ‘the phenomenon called i’ (watakushi to iu genshô). this poem expresses the transience of life that giovanni’s pensiveness in turn opens up as part of the liminal space of the child on the verge of adulthood. ultimately, both the futago and ginga narratives provide examples of potentially transgressive figures who imagine and desire something other. the protagonists have gentle and sensitive temperaments and seek to break free from the chains of duties and responsibility imposed by their respective confines: the twins from their nightly duties, and giovanni from his daily chores and ostracism. while the twins long for adventure, for escape from their nightly flute-playing duties in the heavens, giovanni fulfils his dreams of flight from more earthly environs through a supernatural train ride. the twins’ and giovanni’s positions as peripheral and transient are comparable to the presexual or adolescent ‘girl’ who desires ‘freedom from the constraints of sexuality and 16 the beginning of this preface is included on the jacket cover of all the picture books in the kumon series that contains the futago and ginga books. this thus forms part of the ideologically influential peritext that helps locate the genre and signals the authors’ (and editors’ and artists’) expectations for it. kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 11 oppressive gender roles in a patriarchal system’ (sherif 1999: 128). both narratives thus suggest a gently ‘arrogant’ resistance to dominant discourses of patriarchal authority. makino and azuma’s artistic lineage artists makino suzuko and azuma itsuko overlay kenji’s futago and ginga narratives with lyrical, romantic visual images that draw on well-known conventions in preceding art. such conventions are found, for instance, in the 1920s’ melancholic shôjo and bishônen images of takabatake kashô, and in the iconoclastic 1970–1980s’ love stories of manga artists like ôshima yumiko, hagio moto and takemiya keiko. kashô is known for his expression of human emotion against idealised bucolic settings and he famously depicted melancholic bishônen looking longingly into the distance.17 these kinds of intensely emotion-charged images of beautiful androgynous characters and scenes were often created with the intention of interrogating the fixed categories of gender and womanhood. kami (2006: 108–9), for instance, sees the representation and experience of melancholic reverie (lyricism) in 1920s’ japanese art as one of the rarely available forms of resistance to the confines of the day. he attributes this lyrical melancholy to the ‘darkness’ (kurasa) underlying female and children’s daily lives. later shôjo manga artists built on this emotion and androgyny, continuing and elaborating them as forms of subversion. much shôjo manga art incorporated a highly decorative art nouveau version of medievalism, with fair-skinned, often androgynous maidens with blonde flowing hair, in swirling gowns, surrounded by european castles, ruins, forests, flowers and birds. as aoyama (1988: 188) indicates, they brought a new type of romanticism, beauty and fantasy, incorporating gender ambiguity and homosexuality as a form of resistance to patriarchal norms. she attributes manga artists’ new interest in boys ‘to the desire to explore masculinity or androgyny as opposed to the worn-out image of femininity’ (1988: 194) found in earlier manga. makino and azuma access similar visual conventions to lift kenji’s narratives out of the context of taishô and bring the stories firmly into the sphere of the present-day shôjo. known for her depictions of ethereal angels and medieval fantasy, makino’s art expresses religious and medieval symbolist imagery, while azuma’s is replete with a 17 see hartley (2008) for some beautiful images of takabatake’s bishônen, and kami for an explanation of the beginnings of japanese lyricism and melancholy in shôjo pictures produced for children (2006). kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 12 mysticism and beauty that connects with the gothic romantic shôjo aesthetic.18 as aoyama suggests: ‘parody, allusion, quotation, adaptation, and travesty play significant roles in shôjo shôsetsu .. shôjo manga, and … yaoi’ (2005: 57).19 marni stanley (2008: 100) further indicates the sexually empowering—as opposed to compensatory— potential of the yaoi genre, especially in relation to its playful mockery of mainstream truths. in contrast to other illustrated versions of futago and ginga,20 makino’s and azuma’s interpretations of the protagonists can be likened to the recent convention whereby fans appropriate characters from fictional narratives and transform them in their own art into romantic love between ‘beautiful boys.’21 the two artists help transfigure futago and ginga by bringing a sense of shôjo/shônen resistance into play through their depictions of the characters as androgynous beauties and through the fundamental aesthetics of their illustrations. makino’s futago makino’s cover for the futago no hoshi volume of four kenji stories features two enchanting young bishônen figures who immediately signal the book as a ‘girl’ collection (see figure 1).22 makino’s beautiful, anthropomorphised stars are garbed in 18 examples of other artwork by makino and azuma can be found at: http://www.artmarmelo.com/shop/415494/list.html (makino); and http://iamachild.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/itsukoazuma-japanese/ (azuma). both artists have won numerous prizes. besides being evident in makino’s artwork, her preference for a cosmos where the medieval meets the near future is evident at: http://www.art-marmelo.com/shop/415494/list.html (in japanese). (all sites accessed 28 november 2012.) see takahara eiri’s gosshiku hâto (2004: 1), for discussion of the ‘gothic’ as an imagined space that never existed. 19 yaoi is writing and/or artwork, usually created by and for women, that focuses on the relationship between males. it is an acronym for ‘yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi,’ often translated into english as ‘no climax, no resolution, no meaning’ (ishikawa 2008: 11). the term yaoi is almost interchangeable with boys’ love. also see, mizoguchi (2003: 49–50) and aoyama (2005: 62, footnote 12). 20 no other picture books of futago or ginga make any apparent visual reference to the genealogy of the girl. see, for instance, miyazawa kenji’s futago no hoshi (illus. toyama shigetoshi. 1987); futago no hoshi (illus. akiyama tadashi. 2005); futago no hoshi (1) (illus. shimizu chikako. 2010); ginga tetsudô no yoru (illus. kobayashi toshiya. 1984); ginga tetsudô no yoru (illus. satô kunio. 1996). 21 fan art of arakawa hiromu’s manga, fullmetal alchemist (hagane no renkinjutsushi), for instance, takes the two boys from the manga and blends in some episodes from kenji’s ginga original to create a different kind of relationship from that in either of the originals (ishikawa 2008: 13). ishikawa also points out that other ‘fans,’ such as kôga yun (b. 1965) who initially parodied takahashi yôichi’s captain tsubasa, have themselves gone on to become well-known manga artists (2008: 13). 22 this volume includes, in sequence: ‘yamanashi’ (wild pear) illustrated by yuno seiichi; ‘futago no hoshi’ and ‘okinagusa’ (the spring anemone), both illustrated by makino; and yuno’s ‘matsuri no ban’ (the night of the festival). kenji classified ‘yamanashi’ and ‘okinagusa’ as (girl-signifying) ‘flower and bird tales’ (kachô dôwa), while ‘matsuri no ban’ was designated as a local folk tale (iihatôbu minwa). kenji designated ‘futago’ as a buddhist tale, but categorised the much longer ‘ginga’ as a tale for adolescents. for more information on these classifications see ‘nôto・memo (honbunhen)’ (in miyazawa kenji 1997: 13 [2]: 333–34). a list of tales by their categorisation is available at: http://why.kenji.ne.jp/douwa/sinla2.html (accessed 27 november 2012). kenji’s other kachô dôwa include: ‘mekura budô’ (wild grape); ‘marivuron to shôjo’ (marivuron and the girl); ‘manazuru to kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 13 flowing, diaphanous graeco-roman robes and set against a mystical celestial background. these heavenly, misty surroundings also convey all the exotic beauty and escapism found in the shôjo manga of makino’s predecessors. complementing the elements of graeco-roman mythology in the original narrative, her signature medieval symbology suggests both the mystery and drama of ancient astronomical lore and an escape from the confines of the mundanities of daily life. makino’s lunar references also draw on european conventions, and call attention to the mythological origins of the narrative’s zodiac creatures such as the scorpion and the serpent (or sea king), depicted here against the lustrous central pedestal. the play of light and transparency against the mystical surroundings is reminiscent of the luminescent beauty and liminality expressed in the shôjo genre. figure 1: illus. makino suzuko; jacket cover, futago no hoshi; kumon, 1993. dariya’ (the dahlias and the crane), and ‘yodaka no hoshi’ (nighthawk star). see tanaka eiichi (1981) on the development and structure of the kacho dôwa. kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 14 further, the pale skin, blonde wavy hair, wide-eyed and fey demeanour of makino’s twins reference a beauty, exoticism and androgyny reminiscent of earlier japanese art. in the style of shôjo manga, readers can choose to read them as either attractive boys or girls (welker 2006: 852). whereas other artists have illustrated the twins as naïve, nonanthropomorphic or masculine stars,23 makino’s signification of chunse and pôse as graceful ethereal beauties edging towards adolescence gestures towards what aoyama (2005: 54) sees as the evanescent, transitional phase of neutral sexuality before adolescence. the hirahira lightness and transparency of makino’s flowing robes simultaneously draw attention to yet also conceal the twins’ bodies in a way that emphasises femininity whilst also denying womanhood (welker 2009: 168; aoyama 2005). the hazy empyrean heaven appears to flow through and around their robes and figures, obscuring their feet and lower bodies in a ghostly atmosphere like that which honda (1992: 209) finds in yoshiya’s flower tales. the delicate transparency foregrounds their waiflike figures as mystical and eternal, yet is also symbolic of the fleeting and transitional aspects of ‘girlhood’ desires. the twins’ itch for risk and excitement is represented by their outstretched arms, which gesture toward the moon from either side of the central ‘crystalline pedestal’ (figure 1). from the outset this expression of their desire for something else inscribes them with some agency, as gently resistant to societal expectations rather than presenting them as merely ‘cute’ objects for a male gaze. at the same time, the anthropomorphised crescent moon within the outline of the full moon that they are reaching for is gently blowing out a plume of smoke, its promise of the unknown future again representative of the twins’ desire for adventure. this smoke nevertheless remains confined within the circle of the full moon. whereas the act of stretching towards the unattainable represents a gently resistant defiance against their containment, the suggestion of confined space simultaneously symbolises the invisible barriers that surround everyday roles. the circle imagery, too, reflects the confines and restrictions of their eternal routine, but the full moon’s suggestion of complete perfection and harmony in life (hall 1995:104) also symbolises their fulfillable desires. the twins’ wilfulness within the confines of their roles in this ethereal star world ultimately signals their wistful hopes and dreams. 23 see, for instance, toyama shigetoshi’s (1987) abstractions, or akiyama tadashi’s (2005) and shimizu chikako’s (2010) more masculine twins. (see some of their images at: http://www.amazon.co.jp. search for:「双子の星」.) kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 15 figure 2: illus. makino suzuko; pp. 16–17, futago no hoshi; kumon, 1993. the circle and light imagery continues in makino’s title spread (figure 2), where her twins are poised under the suggestion of the thinly enclosed lunar haloes emanating from each of their radiant star-coronae. the twin on the right looks like s/he is about to break free of the pedestal frame. the flute is lowered, showing a readiness to explore the world, to move away from the confines of the palace. this ‘arrogant’ desire to break out and seek other experiences and places not only indicates dissatisfaction with ordinary routine, but also represents an imagined resistance to imposed restrictions, the opportunity for a more inspired ‘freedom’ from the nightly routine. whereas the narrative signifies the twins’ exploits in part 2 as a ‘fall from grace,’ makino’s pink-cheeked twins dive together head first in a blur of speed through the darkness (figure 3). their falling figures are not only luminescent against the black background, but their active plunging bodies are also propelled into a more liminal ‘fantastic’ towards a more empowered shôjo transcendence. their plunging presence against the depths illuminates their potential and agency against their fall into a fateful ‘death.’ the play of light against dark also intensifies the fall as a dramatic near-death experience that can be seen as a rejection of the mundanity of their nightly orchestral duties. their close proximity to death situates them at the periphery of a different world kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 16 figure 3: illus. makino suzuko; pp. 30–31, futago no hoshi; kumon, 1993. of other possibilities as in-between figures of becoming. whereas the original narrative signals the twins’ lost innocence, the blurred movement and the brilliance of makino’s dual adolescent figures, together against the darkness, signal their combined resistance against all other forces. indeed, along with their liminality and androgynous beauty, their togetherness throughout all the images invokes the defiant ‘girl’ collective. their sense of alliance and absorption into the shôjo imaginary is even more apparent in makino’s penultimate picture of the wraithlike twins entwined and merging with the misty waterspout at the end of part 1 (figure 4). even as they are being ferried back figure 4: illus. makino suzuko; pp. 36–37, futago no hoshi; kumon, 1993. kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 17 home to their pedestals and their nightly roles, their forward movement (from right to left), their ethereality, and the outline of the moon in the foreground all signify their continuing hopes and desires.24 makino’s final picture shows chunse and pôse at the helm of the waterspout-as-dragongod, its/their hirahira ribbon-whiskers trailing behind while the cloudy tail flows out from around and behind a foregrounded, out-of-frame gothic castle (figure 5). the dragon figure surges upwards in a wispy curlicue, as a swirling inverse ‘s’ or unclosed figure eight as it makes its way back to the heavens. this luminous wisp evokes the sisterhood of honda’s ‘wafting’ aesthetic. it further symbolises the imaginative transcendence into which the twins are heading (in the direction of reading) even as they return home, to the imaginative unknown: the ‘territory of the girl.’ the dragon and castle imagery evince the eternally resistant ‘girl’ who transcends the earthly confines of here-and-now to dream of other possibilities and roam among her undying desires. figure 5: illus. makino suzuko; p. 45, futago no hoshi; kumon, 1993. 24 following kress and van leeuwen’s (2006) theory of reading images, in pictures read from right to left, the right-hand-side presents the given or known situation, the left, the unknown future. kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 18 makino’s sense of the fantastic and her beautiful twins thus move the story beyond the original narrative’s simplistic (and fatalistic) moral. the imagery develops their mild transgressions as an imagined adventure of aestheticised resistance, re-visioning the original story as a subversive space of becoming and of fulfillable desires. azuma’s ginga azuma, too, accesses ginga’s fantastic setting to illuminate the topos as a space of transparency and light that contrasts with the everyday physical world of giovanni’s earthly life at school, work or home. from the outset, the artist infuses the narrative’s phosphorescent milky way with a liberal peppering of visual radiance. her transparent apple-universe on the cover not only evokes the sweet scent of the apples given to the children on the train (48) but, together with the verbal imagery of wild roses (42), it also brings to mind the fresh fragrance of ‘girldom’ (figure 6). the apple recalls the long figure 6: illus. azuma itsuko; jacket cover, ginga tetsudô no yoru; kumon, 1993. kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 19 lineage of fruity and flowery names in various genres (of fiction and fashion magazines, for instance) for young girls (mackie 2009: 193). further, the glowing, crystalline apple-globe is transparent against an empty darkness, the contrast once again intensifying the mystical atmosphere and suggesting the ephemeral space which can be filled with ‘girlish’ dreams. the spiralling trail of the tiny ginga (milky way) train weaves around and through the globe, with the misty depths of the nebula and stars shining within. this image of the train against the vastness also has multiple levels of intertextuality, fluidly reinscribing images from matsumoto reiji’s now classic ginga tetsudô 999 back onto kenji’s original ginga.25 azuma’s cover offers an immediate image of fantastical freedom, both within and outside of the confined space of the apple-universe. luminescent crosses at either side of azuma’s title double spread within the book (figure 7) also inscribe the narrative’s understated christian imagery with an occidental exoticism that dollase suggests ‘estranges girls from … reality and the masculine japanese world’ (2003: 730). such imagery further brings into play the shôjo artistic predilection for a romanticised psychic spirituality (ariga 2002: 195; 200). figure 7: illus. azuma itsuko; pp. 45, ginga tetsudô no yoru; kumon, 1993. 25 images of ginga tetsudô 999 can be found at http://www.mangahere.com/manga/ginga_tetsudou_999/v01/c001/2.html (last accessed 26 november 2012). kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 20 another incandescent cross above a feathery cloud mass of floating, winged trumpetplaying angel figures in the book’s penultimate spread heralds campanella’s death in a final scene of aestheticised melancholy (figure 8). azuma’s angels in this same image suggest giovanni’s inspired, romanticised flight from the chains that bind him in his everyday world. this includes the pain of ostracism, his daily chores, and even his anticipation of the further restrictions of adulthood roles to come. besides the ‘exotic’ religious symbolism, the lightness and transparency of the clouds and angels incorporate a delicacy that further recalls that of the angels and shôjo symbols in, for instance, hagio moto’s heart of thomas (tôma no shinzô).26 together with the portrayal of the departing campanella, kaoru and her brother, the heavenly imagery enhances the sorrow of the boys’ parting, the intensity of giovanni’s admiration, yearning and ultimate loss of campanella’s eternal friendship. figure 8: illus. azuma itsuko; pp. 64–65, ginga tetsudô no yoru; kumon, 1993. azuma uniquely intensifies the relationship between the two boys in ginga through her depiction of an apparently unrequited desire that is reminiscent of the elusive love and adoration between ‘beautiful boy’ (bishônen) figures from earlier shôjo narratives. she introduces the boys at the section when giovanni first realises campanella is with him 26 hagio has also mentioned her regard for kenji’s fantasies. see: http://www.tcj.com/history/the-motohagio-interview-conducted-by-matt-thorn-part-two-of-four/. images of hagio’s covers can be found at http://www.hagiomoto.net/ (accessed 27 november 2012). kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 21 on the train (figure 9). the focus on the sorrow of their gazing figures harks back to kashô’s bishônen figures and the bl themes of hagio. they sit facing one another with wide-eyed, dreamy looks that exude a wistful melancholy. while their gazes are directed towards each other in an indication of mutual admiration and desire for psychological engagement, their eyes do not meet. they are simultaneously downcast, the younger-looking giovanni’s (on the right) particularly poignant with apparent expectation. the sense of silent, tragic adoration and yearning arrests ideas of heteronormativity and suggests the shôjo/bl arena of resistant transgression. the sense of longing and hope in their wistful gazes signals their yearning for an alternative path beyond the real, mundane world, towards a truer ‘happiness.’ both their gazes are directed towards the obsidian star chart that campanella received at the milky way station where he boarded. it is this chart that initiates giovanni’s dreams as he tries unsuccessfully to recall stopping at this station (which signifies death). in contrast to the hardship of giovanni’s everyday life, this melancholic gazing underlines giovanni’s sorrow about the elusiveness of true friendship. it brings their potential bl relationship to the fore while also signalling their future separation. by hinting at a romantic relationship that focuses on unrequited desires, the artwork inscribes all the pathos of giovanni’s longing and signals the space of subversive passion. azuma’s images thus gently challenge the social restrictions imposed upon the boys and any such unconventional relationship. figure 9: illus. azuma itsuko; pp. 22–23, ginga tetsudô no yoru; kumon, 1993. kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 22 the framing in this picture contrasts notions of confinement with imagined freedom. whereas azuma’s boys are merging into the train that floats in space as it moves along, they are also bordered within more rigid, yet almost subliminal rectangular lines of light that echo the outline of the window. their confinement, however, is set against the galactic background of drifting planets in an endless space. the rainbow colours and light and transparency reinscribe the special brilliance of the celestial scenery along their dreamy travels. the scene is replete with all the mystery and wistfulness of the shôjo/bishônen aesthetic. yet the bishônen figures are framed both within and outside the ethereal translucence of the celestial backdrop. the linearity and angularity of the framing imply notions of imposed restrictions, but are simultaneously juxtaposed against the expansive flow outside that surrounds and seeps through their semitransparent bodies to offer the imaginative possibilities of internal transgressive desires. pathos and loneliness are again borne out in another framed image of a gazing giovanni, near the point in the narrative that expresses his continuing pain and jealousy at campanella’s attention to the girl kaoru (figure 10). here, where narrative describes the dejected, tearful giovanni staring out of the window, azuma frames his yearning face within an illuminated rectangle. at the same time, he is set against the hirahira imagery of freely flying birds which are in turn surrounded by phosphorescent light and glittering crystalline stars. giovanni gazes downwards, towards yet beyond the viewer, figure 10: illus. azuma itsuko; pp. 5253, ginga tetsudô no yoru; kumon, 1993. kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 23 past all the swaying, rustling and gleaming beauty of the swiftly passing countryside. the whole image illuminates the poignancy of his pain and solitude. his disconnected gaze reinforces the vision of abandonment and retreat from difficult worldly constraints (symbolised in the linear frame) as he yearns for the unfettered ‘freedom’ that he imagines eternal love will bring and that the heavenly backdrop represents. amidst all the sparkle and translucency used to describe the natural world in the verbal text, the luminescence surrounding the framed giovanni as he admires the beautiful flocks of birds aestheticises his yearning for eternal friendship as he asks himself (and the viewer): ‘why am i this unhappy?’ (54). his ‘eyes fill with tears again’ (54–55) at the thought that campanella is so absorbed by kaoru. this picture thus reinscribes his teary isolation as he tries to calm himself by looking off into the dim haze in the distance after having unfairly snubbed the girl. giovanni’s emotional solitude is reiterated in the final spread that highlights his separation from campanella (figure 11). campanella has ‘escaped’ the pain of this world into death. he is high above, looking along vectors of light that lead down towards giovanni and his teacher as they (and the viewer) reflect upon campanella’s death. this picture again directs the separated boys’ gazes towards each other, yet they are broken by the horizon (and vertically by the book’s gutter), underlining the fact that they have not been able to fully connect, and are now even further apart. this visual figure 11: illus. azuma itsuko; pp. 68–69, ginga tetsudô no yoru; kumon, 1993. kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 24 separation underlines giovanni’s isolation and melancholy. azuma illuminates and reinscribes the intensity of his desire for escape into love for campanella, signalling the space of profound longing. her poignant illustrations highlight the shôjo aspects of kenji’s narrative, re-visioning dominant patriarchal readings of ginga with a contemporary sense of resistance. ultimately, makino and azuma extend kenji’s concern for the oppressed and vulnerable into the sphere of the ‘girl’ by drawing upon the rich japanese genealogy of shôjo visual imagery. like much of the lyrical art since taishô, both makino and azuma establish their protagonists as androgynous, caucasian beauties against a fantastic sphere filled with iridescent flora and fauna. in doing so, the artists engender a radiant, liminal aesthetic that calls up the ‘girl’ collective. in taking up many of the earlier, iconoclastic conventions of many shôjo manga, they are not only reinscribing the original stories with bishônen imagery, but also continuing and expanding the sphere. their art offers readers a visual taste of honda’s hirahira aesthetic of fulfillable desires while instantiating takahara’s ‘girl conscious’ world as a space of imagined resistance to restrictive roles. by emphasising the in-between space as one of sorrowful yearning, the artists incorporate and expand the aesthetic of opposition to societal constraints imposed by ideologies operating both now and at the time when the narratives were originally produced. their art ultimately evokes the takahara/honda transitional realm of ‘freedom and arrogance’ by creating an exotic, marginal space in which their ‘girl’ figures can break free—at least through the imagination—from social restrictions. like honda’s internal resistance, this space inspires a subversive imaginative that may well live on eternally in the mind. these artistic representations provide layers of imaginative ‘girldom,’ bringing into play takahara’s ‘fantastic’ as an incorporeal, liminal space that constitutes an intuitive ‘girl conscious’ rejection of life’s externally prescribed limits. makino and azuma are thus incorporating these picture books, ostensibly produced for younger audiences, into the ever-growing shôjo sphere (of literature, film, anime and visual arts). that is, the illustrations for futago and ginga are galvanizing and reflecting a collective ‘girl consciousness’ that subtly confronts patriarchal hegemonies, past and current, and thus expands the abstract consciousness of the ‘girl’ to emerging audiences. kilpatrick envisioning the shôjo aesthetic portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 25 acknowledgements i am indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and perceptive recommendations on an earlier version of this paper. any errors are nonetheless my own. further thanks go to the two artists, makino suzuko and azuma itsuko, who have kindly given permission to reproduce their images here. i am also grateful to ms shizu takagi at kumon for her 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metropolis (1926). despite the formal and aesthetic incompatability of early twentieth century (predominantly western) works of this literary genre and more recent ones, east and west, the underlying dialectic tension between progressive optimism and disorientation, existential up-rootedness, alienation and angst (rilke's loss of soul) as archetypal manifestation of mega-city reality and its social structure and organisation, constitutes a generic hallmark, regardless of time and place. significantly, the relevance of this problem is reinforced, theoretically and practically, by the eminent scholar and architect rem koolhaas whose reflections have china as a principal reference point of the global "out-of-control process of modernisation". this paper focuses on the literary representation of the complexity and universality of the problem and the social implications of the blurred and ambiguous vision of urban reality with particular reference to contemporary chinese literature. 我们赖以生存的世界在最近五十年的发展速度比历史上任何其他阶段都要快。这一发展过程 富有象征性的标志是现代都市的出现。城市发展在世界各地的速度和强度都各有不同，可以 说，没有任何一个大陆和文化不受到它的影响和冲击。 作为一个新现实的象征，现代城市在二十世纪初就吸引了很多西方主流作家的兴趣和关注； 作为创作主题也在诸多文学作品中得到充分和多方面的探索。这集中反映在里尔克的《毛地 日记》、帕骚斯的《曼哈顿枢纽》、多伯林的《柏林亚力山大广场》、乔伊斯的《尤里西斯》 等作品中，以及艾略特长诗《荒原》中被诗化了的伦敦的凄凉和暗淡景象；也有拉什迪八十 年代发表的《午夜的孩子》等。 1 佛里兹·朗的经典无声幻想影片《大都会》， 2 以其对一个 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal 1 里尔克，《毛地日记》，1945 年版；帕骚斯，《曼哈顿枢纽》，1925；多伯林，《柏林亚力山大广场》，1929； 乔伊斯，《尤里西斯》，1922； 艾略特，《荒原》，1922；拉什迪，《午夜的孩子》，1980。本文所有详细索 引请见文末参考书目。 2 佛里兹·朗（fritz lang）：《大都会》（metropolis），纽约基诺国际电影制片厂，1989 年出品。 li, xia the destruction and reconstrution of the city in late 20th century chinese novels portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 2 高度机械化的未来都市具有恐怖色彩的描写和意象，为我们提供了二十世纪初人类对作为文 明标志的城市高度发展在生存上的焦虑和危机感的艺术表现，即都市书写（包括不同形式的 以都市为主题的小说和叙事）。可以说无论在本杰明的意义上还是在库哈斯的具有纲领性的 “典型城市”的蓝图里，都市书写都充满矛盾、困惑和主题轮廓的模糊， 3 这突出体现在人 类对现代文化的乌托邦式的幻想与其发展过程中呈现的世界末日般的现实的冲突和不相称 上。 以上每部作品都是经久不衰的代表作。他们的共同特点是就人类对现代城市及其内在固有的 破坏性的经历所进行的艺术探索，并将这种艺术探索放在创作主题和结构的突出位置，由此 形成新的艺术表现形式和探索。在里尔克作品中被诗化了的 1902 年的巴黎是一个异化的文明 和死亡的景象，尽管她表面上充满活力和对生活的渴望与追求。里尔克将其归结为人类自然 生存节奏的消失和与其相关的对生活的立刻的、伸手即来的满足的无节制的追求：“难道这 就是生命的动力吗－是生活本身吗？生活本来是安静的、有宽度的、朴实的。而这里生活的 动力是急促的、无限制的追求。这种对生活的张狂的欲望，对生活全部的立即的、一小时内 就得到满足的欲望：这样的生活巴黎比比皆是，所以她接近死亡。她是一个如此异化的城市。” 4 里尔克在一百年前对城市文明的异化的具有诊断性的洞察，在一百年后仍具代表性和说服力。 其实，在人类对自己赖以生存的自然环境破坏的日益加剧，及其导致的与自然和谐的逐渐丧 失的今天，更具有说服力。值得注意的是，被大多数人认为是理所当然的日新月异的、全球 性的现代化进程（日趋完善的建筑业，如摩天大楼和日趋复杂的地下工程、以现代交通为代 表的城市组织和发展、人口政策—城市空间的超负荷使用，以及日趋职业化、自动化的社会 和私人生活等）是以对人类赖以生存的家园的破坏和与自然亲合力的逐渐消失为代价的。多 种精心制作的电影、电视节目、电脑游戏及大众性体育活动人为地使居住在城市荒原中的人 们感到充实起来。 以上所列举的都市书写在风格流派上自成一体；从形式上看，它们可谓最富有创新和实验性 的西方小说，当然也包括电影。笔者认为，虽然中国大陆作家也从诸多的方面展示了城市生 活，特别是北京和上海的生活，但他们的作品在写作技巧和深度方面，还不能和以上所提及 的西方作品同日而语。但正如西方同类文学实践一样，以关注都市现实为创作主题的主要文 学形式在中国也是小说。正如评论家张英进所说：“就文学形式而言，小说比戏剧和诗歌更 3 库哈斯：《小、中、大、特大》，纽约毛纳齐利出版社，1995 年版，第 1995、1087 页。 4 里尔克（rainier maria rilke）：《毛地日记》（the notebooks of malte laurids brigge），m. d. h. norton 译, 纽 约：诺顿公司, 1945 年版。第 47 页。 li, xia the destruction and reconstrution of the city in late 20th century chinese novels portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 3 得到认可，因为现在中国的城市问题在绝大程度上，是在小说里被首先问题化的。” 5 在这 里，张英进也很恰当地谈到了中国诗歌对城市生活的探索。 6 中国的城市发展在世界历史上可能不处于领先地位， 7 但邓小平改革开放的远见卓识及其所 带来的市场经济使中国城市发生了翻天覆地的变化，特别是在上海、深圳、北京、广州、大 连、青岛等地。 8 值得注意的是，深圳和上海作为珠江和长江三角洲改革开放的龙头，以其 典型的后现代建筑和布局吸引了国际著名建筑家的注意。在谈到建筑风格时，库哈斯借用奥 地利作家穆齐尔的著名小说《没有个性的人》， 9 将深圳称为“典型城市”或“没有个性的 城市”，并将其选为他在哈佛大学建筑学院高年级班的一个特殊研究专题中的城市之一。 10 库哈斯认为，这种“典型城市”的最终原型是新加坡，因为它比任何其他亚洲城市都更具有 西方城市的特点，或者以他的原话，是“一个失控的现代化过程的受害者”，或者说是“殖 民主义的最后一次体面的痉挛。” 11 但更重要的是，新加坡的典型化在于它是自我宣称的中 国建筑模式的实验室：“事实如此，新加坡的模式，正象我们所见，是一系列系统性的变质 体的综合。这实际上使它成为城市化最具意识形态象征意义的城市之一，而且正在向亚洲各 地传播。其组织形式的魅力、其取代和根除异物的效率、其对人口改造的成功、其对自身过 去的梳理及对本土文化的控制，为那些比它多数千万人口的国家提供了一个想像、建筑、策 划新的城市环境的不可抗拒的模式。越来越重要的是，新加坡将自己称为中国大陆的实验室， 这一角色会使它从眼下的郁闷中解脱出来。” 12 毋宁置疑，新加坡式的城市化模式的产生从根本上是为了解决日益增长的、由工业化和农业 人口的流动所造成的人口问题，同时也是改善城市居民的居住条件所必需的。 13 这种大规模 的城市化进程及其所导致的人的离异和失落感，可以从第三届茅盾文学奖获奖小说、孙力和 5 张英进：《中国文学与电影中的城市：空间、时间和性别的结构》（英文版），美国斯坦弗大学出版社，1996 年版，第xvii页。本文章所有该书引语均为本文作者所译。 6 张英进：《中国文学与电影中的城市：空间、时间和性别的结构》（英文版），美国斯坦弗大学出版社，1996 年版，第 271 页。 7 若兹·摩非（rhoads murphey），《上海：现代中国的关键》（shanghai: key to modern china），剑桥大学 出版社，1953 年版。 8 戴锦华：《隐形书写：二十世纪九十年代的中国大众文化》，1999 年版，第 31-57 页。 9 罗伯特·穆齐尔：《没有个性的人》（der mann ohne eigenschaften），汉堡若沃特出版社，1952 年版。 10 库哈斯：《小、中、大、特大》，纽约毛纳齐利出版社，1995 年版，第 1995、1087 页。库哈斯在中国最著 名的设计是中央电视台新总部（2002 年）和广州歌剧院（2002 年）等。 11 库哈斯：《小、中、大、特大》，纽约毛纳齐利出版社，1995 年版，第 1013 页。 12 库哈斯：《小、中、大、特大》，纽约毛纳齐利出版社，1995 年版，第 1087 页。 13 在新加坡大规模的城市化进程中，历史已几乎完全被抹去。人们唯一能够看到的历史痕迹是刻意镶嵌在建 筑上的装饰物。这里唯一可以认出的“历史”是作为英国殖民象征的拉福兹饭店。这个豪华饭店最近在耗资数 亿元后，被“克隆”到了它殖民地时期的辉煌。现存的原唐人街的一小部分也是因为规划失误而免遭推土机的 清除。 li, xia the destruction and reconstrution of the city in late 20th century chinese novels portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 4 余小惠的《都市风流》所看到。 14 笔者认为，《都市风流》是中国城市现代化及其对整个社 会造成的深远影响的比较成功的文学表现。作者以敏锐的洞察力和独特的视角，对社会每个 利益集团和阶层的生活的方方面面都进行了深刻的探索，特别是旧势力的维护者和改革倡导 者之间的斗争，全景式地刻画了社会变革中人的命运和心态。书中用大量笔墨描写了普店街 拆迁工程实现过程中出现的问题。毫无疑问，普店街拆迁工程是中国现代城市化过程的一个 缩影。这个旨在改善城市居民居住条件的工程在开始的时候受到居民的普遍支持和拥护。“普 店街的拆迁，是道路改造工程拆迁任务中最大的一项。它意味着这片几乎与这座城市一起诞 生的、拥有三千多户的居民区从此在这座城市版图内的消失。取代它的将是一座现代化的大 型立体交叉桥和环桥耸立的新型商业区。规划者们充分表现了自己惊人的雄心和气魄。而这 里的居民呢？普店街的居民在希望中等待着搬迁动员令的下达。人们要求改变生活环境的愿 望远远大于对这个居住了几十年，甚至几辈子的地方的留恋。两个星期以来，各家报纸和电 台、电视台集中宣传改造市里交通的必要性。居民们意识到，市里交通改造和自己居住条件 的改善指日可待。” 15 但是，这种由外国投资和政治野心所驱动的搬迁不仅仅代表了改善居民生活条件的善意，更 重要的是它标志着对传统生活的破坏，最终不可避免地导致人与自身生存环境和文化的离异 和失落感。这种情感和精神家园的丧失，可以在书中从海外归来的柳若菲在普店街寻找她失 去的家园时的感觉所看到。“她在寻找那条窄小的胡同和那个拥挤却是温暖的家。然而，她 站在这儿，却惊呆了。普店街消失了。她的眼前奇迹般的出现了一条宽阔的马路，一座宏伟 壮观的立体交叉桥和大桥两旁高耸的建筑群，以及桥上衣着新潮、鲜艳的熙熙攘攘的人群。 迎接她的又是一个陌生的世界。” 16 与这种象烟云一样比比皆是的离异和失落感同时发生的，还有以改善居民生活条件为由的大 刀阔斧的拆迁和建筑。城市居民们被压抑的、对过去的乡村生活的留恋和他们对城市生活所 感到的禁忌和束缚象一条红线贯穿着整个小说，这明显体现在建华的母亲对城市生活的厌倦 和因她难以逃脱的这种困境所带来的烦恼：“妈并不喜欢城市生活，从小他就听母亲对农村 那些往事的回忆，那里人好，天也好，地也好，在农村养成的习惯改都改不掉。为什么不能 去内蒙呢，那儿有的是地，种菜、种豆、养猪、养鸡，可由着性子来。” 17 城市人的这种对过去田园式的生活的眷恋和向往当然并不新鲜，它深深植根于中国文学、文 化和思想体系中，而且在大批农村人口被那些决定命运的发家美梦吸引到大城市的今日中国， 14 孙力、余小惠：《都市风流》，人民文学出版社，2004 年版。 15 孙力、余小惠：《都市风流》，人民文学出版社，2004 年版，第 293 页。 16 孙力、余小惠：《都市风流》，人民文学出版社，2004 年版，第 500 页。 17 孙力、余小惠：《都市风流》，人民文学出版社，2004 年版，第 58 页。 li, xia the destruction and reconstrution of the city in late 20th century chinese novels portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 5 应该是一个比以往任何时候都更重要、与我们的生活更息息相关的话题。不可否认，农村生 活在中国文学中，从过去到现在都占据着极其重要的地位，而且要比对中国农村来说仍然十 分陌生的城市生活重要得多。众所周知，对于绝大多数新中国的领导人，特别是毛泽东来说， 农村自始至终构成了“中国社会的重心，”虽然这一点在历史上某些阶段造成了严重后果（比 如“文革”期间的知识青年上山下乡运动）。在近年来发表的论著中，有些评论家指出，中 国有影响的作家，如鲁迅、郭沫若、茅盾、老舍、巴金、曹禺、艾青、郁达夫、丁玲、戴望 舒、施蛰存、穆时英和沈从文，只有老舍、巴金、曹禺和施蛰存出生在城市，而且他们当中 只有几位写过“令人难忘的城市叙事”。 18 对沈从文来说，北京和上海的城市生活不过是一 种囚禁和流亡，导致了他在以城市为主题的小说中的“报复心理”。 19 沈从文在他对城市生 活方式和传统的反思中，将北京和上海进行了对比，并将北京和上海各自所代表的价值观和 心态进行了探索。他所表达的观点和叶文心的观察多有雷同：“北京代表了上层文化和绅士 官员的优雅，上海却是时尚、华丽、装饰、耀眼的商业中心，一个新兴的资产阶级城市。” 20 这一观察与徐吁把“自然、纯朴”的北京乡下生活和充满“机械化和理智”的大都市上海的 对比不无巧合。 21 毫无疑问，农村对城市生活和价值观的怀疑和不满及城市对乡村生活的暗中的向往，象一条 主线贯穿于大多数中国作家和思想家的作品当中，这特别包括那些长期参加城市建设和国家 领导工作的当权人物。这种怀疑和不满在王蒙八十年代所写的中篇小说《蝴蝶》、诗人顾城 的诗歌及小说和杨炼的作品中得到突出的表现，尽管后者出生、长大在北京，并在西方大城 市游历多年。 22 其实，这种怀疑和不满导致了很多评论家将这种“对农村问题的固执的关注” 看成是毛泽东以后中国文学的一个明显的特点：“毛泽东以后的中国文学和电影的一个鲜明 的特点是他们的“多样化”：“伤痕文学”、“朦胧诗”、“意识流小说”、“寻根文学”、 “先锋小说”和“第五代电影”只是 1976 年以来中国文艺现象的几种。尽管他们是多样的， 但是毛泽东以后的中国文学所表现的是对农村问题的固执的关注。” 23 但是现阶段城乡对立的主要问题是农村人口向城市的大规模的流动。这一主题即没有得到严 肃文学的重视，也没有在通俗文学中受到应有的处理。在谈到过去二十年的中国文学流时, 18 钱理群等：《中国现代文学三十年》, 1987 年版，第 87 页。 19 张英进：《中国文学与电影中的城市：空间、时间和性别的结构》（英文版），美国斯坦弗大学出版社，1996 年版，第 277 页。 20 叶文心：《疏离学院：民国时期的文化和政治，1919-1937》（英文版），1990 年版，第 56 页。 21 张英进：《中国文学与电影中的城市：空间、时间和性别的结构》（英文版），美国斯坦弗大学出版社，1996 年版，第 278 页。 22 参见顾城在海外所著小说《英儿》及杨炼的诗集《太阳与人》。 23 张英进：《中国文学与电影中的城市：空间、时间和性别的结构》（英文版），美国斯坦弗大学出版社，1996 年版，第 263 页。 li, xia the destruction and reconstrution of the city in late 20th century chinese novels portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 6 丁凡和何岩红认为,只有“新写实小说”的作家们把自己的创作焦点集中在城市现实、城市的 普通居民、以及他们的生活、情感和观点上。 24 通俗文学作品对城市现实的处理拘泥于形式 和写作技巧上的重复，并且注意力过于集中在城市中产阶级身上。王蒙在 1999 年的一次谈话 中强调过这一点：“我们在这里所看到的是主题焦点的变化——对城市生活的肤浅的描写无 疑占据了整个文坛。如果说在同一主题上表现方式是多样的，并且有精彩的想像的话，那当 然好。但就事论事，我们现在的大多数都市小说都是一个调子。更糟的是，他们写的都是千 篇一律，都是小资产阶级的男男女女（或者是假冒的资产阶级），从一个情感游戏跳到另一 个。它们的作者显然是想让读者在他们的小说里看出什么“特殊的意义”，虽然这些文本里 没有任何值得理解的东西。” 25 既然文学在现阶段的中国是由市场经济所驱动的（这在王蒙看来是一个可喜的发展势头）， 因为市场经济有助于保持在王蒙看来是“我们文化生态的平衡”，农村人口向城市的大规模 流动这个令人压抑的主题，及其为社会带来的后果和影响，对以中产阶级为主流的读者群来 说，不具吸引力（在西方农村人口大规模向城市流动的地区也是如此）。但是，在百分之七 十的人口仍然生活在农村的中国，大规模的人口流动所造成的数万万人生活家园的破坏和精 神上的失落，其中的问题不是几十年内能够解决的。根据预测，在今后的二十年里，将有四 分之一的农村人口流入城市，使现有的每一个城市至少要扩大一倍。这就为城市无节制的蔓 延和“典型城市”的存在提供了理想的条件，如果外国资本继续流入的话。 毫无疑问，新加坡就是这个经过周密部署、被严格修改和检验而完美化的“典型城市”的标 准，同时它也是一个受到全方位严格控制的、带有儒家理念的社会模式。库哈斯预测到：“在 这种情况下，解构主义模式或者其他任何体面的当代命题（他们会是什么呢？）看来都不会 有更大的吸引力。新加坡代表了使这种吸引力为人所需的权威、手段和远见的准确的含量。 在新加坡的众多的、我们根本没有听过名字的建筑设计所里，中国的未来正在被设计着。在 这里设计的无数个新城市里，摩天大楼是唯一的一个建筑类型。继共产主义的对传统观念的 进攻以后，这里将产生第二个、而且是更有效的反机器主义，帮助中国迈进‘理想之国’： 这就是市场经济，但是刨除了一般市场经济的颓废、民主、混乱和西方的残忍。从新加坡折 射出来的是一个不对称的中心。 中国大陆从东到西，将遍布着一座座新加坡城；它的模式将 是中国现代化的标志。二十亿人是不会错的。” 26 24 丁凡、何岩红：《过去二十年的中国文学》，载《中国文学》（英文版），1999 年冬，第 5-12 页。 25 王蒙：《向大千世界敞开我们的心怀》，载《中国文学》英文版，1999 年春，第 5-24 页。本文的该书引语 为本文作者所译。 26 库哈斯：《小、中、大、特大》，纽约毛纳齐利出版社，1995 年版，第 1087 页。 li, xia the destruction and reconstrution of the city in late 20th century chinese novels portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 7 新加坡是孔子“博施于民，而能济众”的实证，同时也是装备最完善的控制他们的手段。“这 种新建筑模式简直是超现代。那看似各为一体的每一个餐厅都与一个庞大的洗碗机相连接； 我们第一次参观那里时，被邀请到控制室去。整个一面墙安装的都是连接着暗设的摄像机的 监控器，这使监视者们能够将镜头推向任何一张饭桌，近距离监视每一个橱窗的任何一笔交 易。” 27 由于“典型城市”在最近几十年才发展、壮大起来，它对城市每个个人的影响在中国文学上 还没有充分反映出来（西方文学也如此），所以现阶段对这一文学表现形式做比较全面、具 体的评估还有困难。但是我们可能在刘大鸿的极富艺术性的、结合农民画和宗教题材的媚俗 绘画中找到一个反映二十世纪末中国社会的迷惑、失落、焦虑和破裂的更恰当的艺术表现形 式。“也正是这种陈词滥调，这种当代中国城市普遍感到的焦虑、不安、烦恼，这种捉弄人 的颓废和使人眼花缭乱的混乱，刘大鸿的艺术即反映，又以其为得意洋洋取笑嘲讽的对象。” 28 再者，二十世纪末的中国文学和文学批评似乎继续在农村生活和文化中寻找合适的坐标和社 会批评的标准，张艺谋在 1999 年接受多伦多《环球报》采访谈到他自己的创作灵感时肯定了 这一点。 29 总的来说，这也包括第五代电影导演；在某种程度上，也包括那些正在政治、艺 术地位和个人艺术表现形式方面确定自己位置的第六代电影导演。只要看一下八九十年代在 国际上有影响的电影、文学力作和各个流派的通俗小说，就可以知道，占据这些中国文化人 注意力的主题，以及他们赖以吸取灵感、进行社会历史反省和艺术感知建设的，仍然是农村 （而不是城市）的生活和文化。 虽然中国的城市（与俄罗斯和苏联相比）在十六世纪就已具规模，但是中国城市本身和中国 人对城市生活的体验，仍然是中国文学批评的“未知领地”，“中国学者刚刚开始关注文学 和文化中的城市范畴这一极其重要的主题。” 30 另一方面，长期固有的城乡对立和对这一主 题的多层次的艺术表现（在对城市的负面描写这一点上不异于西方文学）构成了张英进所说 的、现代中国文化想像中的反复出现的主题之一。 31 鉴于张英进的研究是现阶段关于这一主 题的少有的学术论著，并且以清末、民国时期的北京和上海为主，更多的和更全面的、包括 港澳台的研究是学界所期待的。 27 库哈斯：《小、中、大、特大》，纽约毛纳齐利出版社，1995 年版，第 1087 页。 28 白杰明：《赤字：论当代中国文化》，哥伦比亚大学出版社，1999 年版，第 208 页。 29 见多伦多《环球报》，2000 年 5 月 5 日。 30 张英进：《中国文学与电影中的城市：空间、时间和性别的结构》（英文版），美国斯坦弗大学出版社，1996 年版，第xix页。 31 张英进：《中国文学与电影中的城市：空间、时间和性别的结构》（英文版），美国斯坦弗大学出版社，1996 年版，第xvi-xvii页。 li, xia the destruction and reconstrution of the city in late 20th century chinese novels portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 8 二十世纪八十年代初开始的改革开放为中国带来了深刻的变革，城市生活的结构已经变成了 一个更复杂、更具挑战性的主题。在谈到九十年代中国文学发展情况时张英进强调指出在城 市发展前提下传统价值观念的解体和社会凝聚力（家庭）的削弱。 32 贾平凹的小说《废都》 以及该书在 1993 年出版时所带来的争议颇具代表性地表现了二十世纪九十年代充斥于中国 城市的困惑和混乱。 33 虽然有些评论家将这本小说及身为作家的主人公庄之蝶看作是对“二 十世纪末中国大气候的大师级描写”、是“现代石头记”和“旨在召唤全社会反省的、对中 国社会阴暗面的大胆揭露”，另一些评论家则将其扁为一个不择手段的雇佣文人的耸人听闻 的商业炒作和为追求利润所作的“黄色小说”。该书题目的覆盖面之广包含婚姻、文化、宗 教、政治、商业，即整个社会和社会每个人生活的方方面面（当然也指逝去的都城）和由其 导致的、对社会的威胁。 34 虽然在这次“堕落”之前贾平凹一直被认为是一个严肃、具有高度文化修养的作家，北京作 家王朔从来就没有把他自己对通俗文学和平民生活方式的挚爱当做秘密。如果王蒙对中国作 家的缺乏幽默感到失望的话，在王朔的反映城市下层社会的小说中，幽默，特别是黑色幽默 好像取之不尽，即手可得。这一点在中国评论家中引起很大的不安。评论家阎晶明索性将王 朔笔下的北京下层青年称为伤风败俗、破坏秩序和伦理道德的“社会渣滓”。 35 从八十年代末开始王朔的小说在北京青年中极为流行，作家本人也已成为中国城市小说中最 重要、最成功、被称为“痞子文学”的反文化的典型。 36 王朔得意洋洋地坚持他的艺术独立 性及其与严肃文学的距离。 37 王朔的成功，使他的很多部小说被般上银幕。他所描写的游手 好闲、玩世不恭及其有叛逆心理的年轻人以及他们对社会规范的无视，在很长时间里被看成 是对中国思想、社会、和政治生活的一种不稳定因素。既然痞子代表社会上传播极广的恶性 态度和习惯，在很多情况下接近或者构成犯罪，王朔的创作意图充其量也和二十世纪末中国 社会意识形态、思想和精神方面的困惑和混乱一样模糊、捉摸不定、模棱两可。这一点在由 王朔同名小说改编的电影《顽主》中超现实主义的最后一幕的荒诞、滑稽的描写中表现地淋 漓尽致。 38 在这里，西式时装模特、身着戏装的京剧演员、半裸体的女健身运动员、解放军 战士、清朝的遗老遗少、红卫兵、警察、工人和农民，在重金属摇滚的伴奏下，同台高歌起 32 张英进：《中国文学与电影中的城市：空间、时间和性别的结构》（英文版），美国斯坦弗大学出版社，1996 年版，第 264 页。 33 贾平凹：《废都》，北京出版社, 1993 年版。 34 肖夏林主编：《废都废谁》，学苑出版社，1993 年版，第 2 页。 35 阎晶明：《顽主与都市的冲突》，载《文学评论》1989 年第 6 期，第 87 页。 36 白杰明：《赤字：论当代中国文化》，哥伦比亚大学出版社，1999 年版，第 23-64 页。 37 左舒拉: 《王朔：一个敢于藐视常规的俗人》，《大众电影》1989 年第 5 期，第 14 页。 38 见米家山执导的影片《顽主》，峨嵋电影制片厂 1988 出品。 li, xia the destruction and reconstrution of the city in late 20th century chinese novels portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 9 舞。这里的背景是毫无疑问的都市背景。在王朔刻意设计的黑色幽默中，崔健歇斯底里地向 观众叫唱着流行歌“大千世界”: 我曾梦想着现代化的都市生活， 可现在我的感觉，我不知怎样做。 这里的高楼一天比一天增多， 这里的日子并不好过。 找个朋友在酒馆里随便坐坐， 录音机里唱着市面流行的歌。 你是这样想的，你是那样做的； 人人都戴着一个厚厚的面具， 你让我怎么做。 这简单的歌词是二十世纪末中国都市人们对生存的理想、矛盾、困惑和无奈的特写。显然在 王朔的作品中青年人对都市生活所抱的、做为进步象征的希望和梦想还无从实现；每个人物 的焦虑和不满都象一条红线贯穿于电影的始终，而且并没有因当中的事件、连续不断的滑稽 场面和最后一幕令人毛骨悚然的黑色幽默而减轻。 在都市寻找希望和梦想，对千百万人来说，有一种不可抵抗的诱惑力，但是这种希望和梦想 在王朔的另一部小说《千万别把我当人》中，用黑色幽默被一种对即将来临的灾难的预测所 笼罩（象很多西方都市小说一样）——当举国同庆唐元豹在札晃奥运会上夺冠时，整个城市 被笼罩在一片巨大的原子弹爆炸后产生的蘑菇云中，巨大的阴影覆盖着夏日中国城市的上空。 但是二十世纪八九十年代的很多其他都市叙述，带给读者的结局是比王朔的要乐观，却很有 片面性。总的来说，中国文学的都市写作作为文化兴衰的范例，对主题的表现形式是模糊的、 不确定的，正象普店街工程和小说中的人物对它的各种不同态度和反应一样。 参考书目 阿尔弗莱德·多伯林：《柏林亚力桑大广场》（berlin alexanderplatz），法兰克福乌尔斯坦 出版社，1955 年版。 艾略特：《荒原》，伦敦费伯出版社，1922 年版。 li, xia the destruction and reconstrution of the city in late 20th century chinese novels portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 10 白杰明：《赤字：论当代中国文化》（in the red: on contemporary chinese culture），哥伦 比亚大学出版社，1999 年版。 白杰明：《王朔与流氓文学》（wang shuo and liumang (‘hooligan’) culture）,载《澳大利亚 中国杂志》（australian journal of chinese affairs）， 1992 年第 28 期，第 23-64 页。 戴锦华：《隐形书写：二十世纪九十年代的中国大众文化》（invisible writing: the politics of chinese mass culture in the 1990s），载《现代中国文学和文化》（modern chinese literature and culture ）1999 年第 11 期，第 31-57 页。 丁凡、何岩红：《过去二十年的中国文学》，载《中国文学》（英文版）1999 年冬，第 5-12 页。 佛里兹·朗：《大都会》（metropolis），纽约基诺国际电影制片厂，1989 年出品。 顾城：《英儿》，华艺出版社，1993 年版。 贾平凹：《废都》，北京出版社, 1993 年版。 罗伯特·穆齐尔（robert musil）：《没有个性的人》（der mann ohne eigenschaften），汉 堡若沃特出版社，1952 年版。 钱理群、吴福辉、温儒敏等：《中国现代文学三十年》,上海文艺出版社，1987 年版。 仁牟·库哈斯、o.m.a.、毛尔：《小、中、大、特大》，纽约毛纳齐利出版社，1995 年版。 瑞尼尔·马瑞亚·里尔克（ rainier maria rilke）：《毛地日记》（the notebooks of malte laurids brigge），m. d. h. norton 译, 纽约：诺顿公司, 1945 年版。 若兹·摩非，《上海：现代中国的关键》（shanghai: key to modern china），剑桥大学出版 社，1953 年版。 萨曼·拉什迪（salman rushdie）：《午夜的孩子》（midnight’s children），伦敦海角出版 社，1981 年版。 孙力、余小惠：《都市风流》，人民文学出版社，2004 年版。 王蒙：《蝴蝶》，载《十月》1980 年第 4 期。 王蒙：《向大千世界敞开我们的心怀》，载《中国文学》1999 年春，第 5－24 页。 王朔：《千万别把我当人》，云南人民出版社, 2003 年版。 肖夏林主编：《废都废谁》，学苑出版社，1993 年版。 阎晶明：《顽主与都市的冲突》，载《文学评论》1989 年第 6 期，第 87 页。 杨炼：《太阳与人》，湖南文艺出版社，1991 年版。 叶文心:《疏离学院：民国时期的文化和政治，1919-1937》( the alienated academy: culture and politics in republican china, 1919-1937)，哈佛大学出版社，1990 年版。 约翰·稻斯·帕骚斯：《曼哈顿枢纽》，纽约哈伯出版社，1926 年版。 詹母斯·乔伊斯：《尤里西斯》，巴黎莎士比亚出版社，1926 年版。 li, xia the destruction and reconstrution of the city in late 20th century chinese novels portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 11 张英进：《中国文学与电影中的城市：空间、时间和性别的结构》，斯坦弗大学出版社，1996 年版。 左舒拉：《王朔：一个敢于藐视常规的俗人》，《大众电影》1989 年第 5 期，第 14-15 页。 本文作者李侠，哲学博士、文学翻译、澳大利亚纽卡斯尔大学中文专业创始人，二十年来一 直从事中国语言、文学、文化和翻译的教学和研究工作；曾在海内外有影响的学术刊物上发 表中国文学、电影、比较文学、翻译等方面的论著几十篇。 brides, maids, and prostitutes: portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal brides, maids, and prostitutes: reflections on the study of ‘trafficked’ women1 nicole constable, university of pittsburgh introduction over the past several years, some feminist scholars of migration have begun to argue that it makes sense to talk about the migration of ‘prostitutes,’ ‘maids,’ and ‘mail order brides’ as if they were all part of the same larger phenomenon (maher 2003; ehrenreich & hochschild 2004). i agree that it is sometimes useful to consider these three types of gendered migration together, but my own starting point and my argument in this essay takes a different focus and point of departure.2 instead of arguing that the three separate literatures on what i prefer to call domestic workers, sex workers, and correspondence brides are too separate and would benefit from being combined, i am concerned with the potential for unwarranted blurs—or fuzzy shadow lines—between the three categories. i am troubled by the ways in which different types of gendered migration are sometimes blurred together and treated too much as though they are one and the same, in academic, popular, and activist literatures. some academic literature and much activist literature that deals with multiple forms of women’s migration prematurely assumes that they are part 1 this essay was first prepared for the international migration of ‘traditional women’: migrant sex workers, domestic workers, and mail-order brides in the pacific rim, a conference at the center for comparative immigration studies, u.c. san diego, october 23-26, 2003. i am grateful to kristen hill maher and the participants. a revised version was presented at the eighth women in asia conference, at the university of technology, sydney, september 26-28, 2005. my sincere thanks to devleena ghosh and barbara leigh for inviting me, joseph alter and kevin ming for their comments, s. carole vance for inspiring me to think about trafficking, and to the migrant women whose experiences have deeply influenced my view of the world. 2 there are a growing number of recent studies that criticize popular notions of trafficking, that do not blur boundaries or that do so in productive ways (e.g., cheng 2002; and contributors to piper & roces 2003). constable brides, maids and prostitutes of a common phenomenon, one that can most simply be glossed as ‘trafficked women.’ my second and related concern has been—especially in the case of correspondence marriages—that some authors have focused on, or reproduced in their own work, simplistic stereotypes or an imagined fantasy of ‘mail order brides’ with relatively little attention paid to the variations in the circumstances, forms of introduction, and actual experiences of couples who have met through correspondence and eventually married. therefore, before considering productive comparisons, it is important to carefully consider the variations within each ‘category’ of migrant woman, and the limitations of defining them as a category in the first place. my aim here is to reconsider some of the scholarly and popular depictions of so-called ‘mail order brides’ as ‘trafficked’ women; to question what i consider the warranted and unwarranted blurs that subtly or explicitly enter some of the scholarly and activist literature on ‘mail order brides’; and to highlight heterogeneity in the experiences, circumstances, and expressions of agency of women who meet men through correspondence. the literature on sex workers has influenced my thinking about correspondence marriage, not because brides and sex workers are fundamentally alike, but because they are both subjects of the wider discourse on trafficking, women’s agency, and women’s victimization. i aim to highlight the weaknesses of a trafficking framework from an ethnographic perspective, and point to some of the ways that theoretical issues raised in the sex worker literature might apply to the study of correspondence marriages.3 despite important theoretical insights that can come from a combined discussion of sex workers, domestic workers, and foreign brides, and despite many similarly structured patterns of inequality, i urge caution. women’s emigration to rich countries because migrant sex workers, maids, and correspondence brides often (but not always) 3 this essay draws from research i began in 1998 among women and men who met through correspondence and from research conducted among filipina domestic workers in hong kong in the early 1990s. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 constable brides, maids and prostitutes follow the broader patterned movement of women from poorer, so-called third world countries of the less developed global south, to wealthier first world or more developed countries of the global north, they are often assumed or implied to share common structures of inequality that define, constrain, and propel their mobility. the mobility of women from poorer parts of asia (e.g., the philippines, indonesia, thailand, sri lanka, india) who perform the reproductive labor for people in wealthier regions (e.g., hong kong, taiwan, singapore, western europe and the middle east) is well documented (constable 1997, 2003a, 2003b, 2005a, 2005b; parrenas 2001; ehrenreich and hochschild 2002; gamburd 2000; kempadoo and doezema 1998). but despite some broader gendered migration patterns, the overall theme lends itself too easily to the wellaccepted logic of a more simplistic modernization narrative: of course poor women will want to move from a poor or ‘backwards’ country to work for or marry a richer person in a more ‘modern’ country. the structural inequality of such a situation provides a common and readily accepted logic for the growing pattern for female labor and marriage migration. this logic is not necessarily wrong, but it is not the only way to tell and understand the story. moreover, if it is read as the story, it obscures significant variations among and between women and through time. one problem with such a narrative is that factors that do not fit so clearly may be obscured or ignored. for example, a simple modernization narrative risks obscuring the fact that filipinas who work as maids in hong kong (and elsewhere), are not usually among the poorest or least-educated women from the philippines, and that many do not consider earning money their only or even their primary motivation. it can obscure the fact that many correspondence brides from china are not so young and not so poor, but are often urban professionals in their late thirties or forties, many of whom are divorced. such a narrative often obscures non-material motivating factors for emigration. a desire to be married, to escape familial problems, or for love, romance, or compatibility, may be among the non-material motivating factors for women who seek to meet foreign marriage partners through correspondence. like many filipina prospective brides, given a choice, chinese women often voice their preference for having their foreign husbands come and live in their country, rather than emigrate to the west. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 constable brides, maids and prostitutes the pattern of filipina maids being more educated than their employers, or of professional chinese or vietnamese women marrying working class western men (thai 2002; constable 2005a), reveal problems with maintaining the popular fiction of poor and desperate so called ‘traditional’ women emigrating to the west. such a narrative may lead us to take at face value images that women promote of themselves as ‘traditional’ women, actively and consciously downplaying their education and their worldly experiences in order to attract prospective employers or spouses. on the other hand, assuming that all prospective employers and spouses want ‘traditional’ asian wives or workers is also inaccurate. chinese employers in hong kong before 1997, for example, often expressed a strong preference for hiring filipinas over rural mainland chinese women as domestic workers precisely because filipinas were conceived of as more modern, more western, better educated, better versed in english (and could tutor children), and thus better at serving the needs of cosmopolitan employers (constable 1997). whereas many us men seeking marriage partners hope to meet women with ‘traditional family values’ and expect to find such values in women from more remote and less cosmopolitan regions of the philippines, others sought to correspond with and marry educated and professional chinese women or filipinas because they thought they would be a better match or better suited to a middle-class american lifestyle. some men expected such women to be less ‘desperate’ to emigrate, and to have more sincere marital objectives (constable 2003a). another reason why the south to north migration narrative is troubling is because it lends itself too easily to the logic of a trafficking discourse, to a view of women as victims, and to a fundamentally anti-immigration stance. such a narrative suggests overall that women are victims whether they know it or not, and it obscures some of the ways they express resistance, exert influence and create change. it thus makes it difficult to imagine any good migration. it also lays the foundation for an attempt to determine which women are innocent victims (deserving and worthy of protection by virtue of their ‘coercion’) and which are not. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 constable brides, maids and prostitutes jo doezema’s insightful argument that the twin concepts of forced versus voluntary prostitution have lost their utility because they constantly resuscitate the dichotomous notion of innocent and coerced women who deserve rescue, and immoral women who deserve what they get, can be applied to foreign brides as well (1998). in the case of foreign brides, such dichotomous logic relies on a presumed distinction between naive and innocent women who are lured or coerced into marriages on false pretenses but have pure marital motives, versus those who are active agents who voluntarily enter into marriage, knowing what they are getting into, and whose marital motives are deemed questionable or too opportunistic. in the united nations trafficking protocol (article 3), trafficking is defined as ‘the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other means of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability...’ this definition is sometimes interpreted so broadly as to include almost anyone who emigrates from global south to north. it can be used to support the notion that all women from poorer parts of the world have been, in a sense, ‘coerced’(or are ‘vulnerable’)—by virtue of fundamental global patterns of inequality—into migrating to wealthier parts of the world for work or marriage. this definition also begs the question of who exactly qualifies as ‘coerced’ or ‘vulnerable.’ such a question, however interesting, may be misdirected. a wealthier, better-educated, woman in her forties from manila or beijing may be assumed to be less vulnerable to exploitation than a very young, less educated woman from a poor rural village, but surely neither woman should be denied a visa or legal privileges and protections on the basis of age, education, or social background. several examples help to illustrate the way in which the concept of trafficking is uncritically applied to foreign brides. in mail-order brides: women for sale (1994) mila glodava and richard onizuka discuss what they consider an obvious connection between ‘mail order brides’ and trafficking. they applaud the 1990s spotlight on ‘mail order brides’ and explain, ‘this exploitation of women carries heavy societal consequences— the continued degradation of women and oppression of the weak, which can promote portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 constable brides, maids and prostitutes other forms of sexual exploitation such as pornography, pedophilia, white slavery and prostitution’ (1994, 6). their argument is built on the assumption that correspondence brides are literally ‘sold’ to western men who ‘buy’ brides. such a definition, which highlights the commodification of women and blurs them with sex workers and slaves, is not uncommon. the coalition against trafficking in women (cat-w) and the philippine women center of british columbia (pwc) also define ‘mail-order brides’ as ‘trafficked women,’ a category in which they include ‘domestic workers, mail-order brides, prostitutes and other filipino women who are forced to emigrate as part of globalization’ (pwc 2000, 1; barry 1992).4 according to the pwc, a ‘mail order bride’ is the result of a ‘formal transaction between a man and a woman from different countries, usually brokered by an agent, who is part of the mail-order bride industry, via catalogs or the internet. the term…[applies] to situations where men go to the philippines with the intention of finding a wife’ and includes ‘filipino women who have been introduced to canadian husbands through informal networks of family and friends’ (2000, 1). the pwc also counts as ‘mail order brides’ women who have met their husbands through computer dating in canada and women who have married their employers (49). their definition is so broad that it is difficult to imagine any form of filipina migration that would not be trafficking. like glodava and onizuka, the pwc makes no case for determining that some foreign brides are trafficked and others are not, nor do they attempt to distinguish between those who were coerced and others who were not. glodava and onizuka cite several ‘unsuccessful’ ‘case stories,’ all of which involve abuse and most of which end in divorce, to illustrate some of the difficulties faced by ‘mail order brides’ as trafficked women. these include the story of chita, a 45-year old school teacher in the philippines, who was ‘considered an old maid by her friends and colleagues and had become increasingly anxious to get married’ (1994, 69). chita envied 4 organizations such as cat-w reject the notion of ‘sex work’ and consider all prostitution a form of violence against women. it thus furthers their agenda to blur the boundaries and to swell the ranks of socalled ‘trafficked’ women. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 constable brides, maids and prostitutes her friends with us husbands, hoped to meet a man who could help support her family, and submitted her photograph to an introduction agency. after corresponding with dean for a year and a half, they met in person and eventually married. in the united states, chita was faced with caring for three abusive stepchildren. the children ‘treated her like a maid’ and dean allowed it (70). eventually she ‘ran away to a shelter,’ and as glodava and onizuka write, she is ‘now working and happy to be free of her abusive situation. she has divorced her husband and has acquired [us] permanent residence’ (70). catherine was ‘an unwed mother who had a very good job in advertising in malaysia’ (70) when she decided—partly as a joke—to submit her name and photograph to a friend’s introduction agency. after almost six months of correspondence with john, he came to malaysia and they were married. in the united states, john began treating her violently, and ‘brought his mistress home’ (71). after a lengthy trial, she divorced john and ‘is looking forward to becoming a citizen and bringing her son and his wife to the united states’ (72). amor ‘was 42 when she married a corporate lawyer named don.’ she had been ‘a chemist working for a prestigious pharmaceutical company in manila when don saw her photograph in one of the mail-order bride catalogs’ (72). like john, don ‘started bringing home his mistress.’ when the mistress moved in, amor decided to leave him, despite the stigma of a failed marriage, she moved to california and decided against reconciliation (73). these cases are used by glodava and onizuka to illustrate the abuses and difficulties that ‘mail order brides’ face as ‘trafficked’ women, but they also reveal other patterns that the authors do not discuss. like many of the prospective chinese and filipina brides i encountered during my research on correspondence introductions and marriage between 1998 and 2001, amor and chita were both considered ‘too old’ to marry well in the philippines, and like rosie, a filipina unwed mother i knew well, catherine’s status as an unwed mother reduced her prospects for a favorable marriage locally. although chita cited economic need as a factor in her desire to marry a wealthy american, catherine and amor had relatively good jobs. like many of the women i encountered, it is difficult to reduce these women’s motives to economic desperation. the women i met in the late 1990s had a number of reasons for seeking to marry foreigners. economics were rarely portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 constable brides, maids and prostitutes the primary or the sole motivating factor (see also nakamatsu 2003, 183). their interest was tied at least in part by a desire to be married, and to achieve marital subjectivity, since remaining single was looked down upon. their non-material reasons included a desire for love and compatibility, and a desire to meet a man who would treat them as equals. such reasons were not necessarily conceived of as separate from economic or material considerations. like the women i knew, amor, chita, and catherine all took the initiative to list their names and photographs with an introduction agency and they made decisions about who to write to. contrary to the common assumption that intra-ethnic marriages that are based on introductions by friends or family members provide a greater safety net than those based on impersonal introductions (maher 2003, 15), women i spoke to pointed out the ‘freedom’ afforded to them by internet or printed catalog introductions. as one explained, when a family member or friend serves as matchmaker, it is difficult to say no, but when you meet someone through e-mail or the internet, you are free to say no, withhold your address, tear up his letter, give a false name, or never correspond again. moreover women who marry within an ethnic community might find community support, but they can also be pressured not to air their dirty laundry at the risk of shaming not only themselves and their husbands, but also the wider ethnic community (narayan 1995). given the stigma associated with divorce in the philippines, and the sense that it is the woman’s responsibility to make a marriage succeed, had amor, catherine or chita married an overseas filipino, they could have faced greater community or familial pressure to remain in an unhappy marriage. moreover, an intra-ethnic marriage, for example between a mainland chinese woman emigrant and a chinese american man, given the cultural, regional, and possible class differences, would not necessarily result in greater compatibility than a marriage between a chinese woman and a white american (chin 1994). given the initiative that chita, catherine, and amor express in the process of seeking a husband, it is difficult to see them as passive. in the end, after facing difficulties in their marriages and receiving support from friends or women’s activist organizations, all three portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 constable brides, maids and prostitutes women remained in the united states, found jobs, and took the route of permanent residence and eventually, perhaps, citizenship. yet glodava and onizuka use these cases to illustrate the plight of ‘trafficked’ women who are ‘bought’ and ‘sold’, rather than their agency. in such cases, i would argue, the notion of ‘trafficking’ deters from a clear understanding of their situations. they experienced emotional and physical abuse, but they were not ‘bought or sold.’ a deeper understanding of their situations is gained from an awareness of structural factors (economic ones), gendered assumptions about work, and the vulnerability of immigrant brides. in such cases, a trafficking framework obscures their agency and the important factors underlying their decisions to emigrate, depicting them instead as willing victims. discursive blurs some authors who do not utilize the term ‘trafficking’ nonetheless highlight certain commonalities or connections between maids, sex workers, and brides without adequately considering differences and variations and the implications of such blurs. roland tolentino’s article, ‘bodies, letters, and catalogs: filipinas in transnational space’ (1996) serves as an example of the blurring of boundaries between several categories of women workers and migrants. tolentino’s article is a fascinating and insightful discursive analysis of what he calls the ‘geopolitics of filipinas in transnational space, specifically focusing on the problematics of the mail-order bride phenomenon as a social and political practice’ (1996, 49). he analyses ‘mail-order brides’ as ‘bodies in transnational space,’ alongside the bodies of filipina maids or helpers, sex workers, sweatshop factory workers, and nurses. as he explains, all are linked to philippine political economy, colonial and post-colonial history, race relations, and western sexual fantasies about asian women. tolentino aptly observes that filipino women’s racial, national and gender identities are connected to their opportunities for mobility as wives, sex workers, and maids. insightful and important in many ways—contributing to a large body of literature that examines ‘mail order bride catalogs’ (e.g., halualani 1995; wilson 1988; villapando portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 constable brides, maids and prostitutes 1989) or local host communities’ discourses about ‘mail order brides,’ maids and sex workers (e.g., holt 1996; robinson 1996; suzuki 1999, 2005), and linking it to a wider concern about gender and transnationalism—the article nonetheless illustrates the risk of unwarranted blurs between filipina workers of various sorts, and wives. he focuses on discursive dimensions of ‘mail order brides,’ and his stated goal is not ‘to construct a rescue narrative nor a victim paradigm for the mail-order bride; both inevitably position women as oppressed, taunting liberation as key to the questions “what is to be done?”...’ instead, his hope is for ‘other interventions to occur which, in turn, may lead toward some theoretical and practical empowerment tactics for the actual marginalized bodies/voices who experience the effects of colonial and neocolonial histories in their daily struggles’ (1996, 51-52). one of the key threads that ties tolentino’s essay together is that of the sexuality of filipina women. he suggests that filipina brides (or more specifically the discourse about filipina brides) is linked to their sexuality, sex workers and ‘hospitality girls’ in military brothels, maids, and sweatshop workers. however, his study stops short of actual ethnographic analysis or any attempt to integrate the voices and discourses of women who would question, debate, or dispute, many of these commonalities. the essay thus conveys a generalized message about the overall commodification and exploitation of filipina women. the ‘mail order brides’ in his article, may be discursive representations of bodies in transnational space, but they are nonetheless depicted as commodities that are victimized by western men, and that are primarily understood as little different from exploited domestic workers and abused entertainers and prostitutes. tolentino avoids the term ‘trafficking,’ but his work contains and reinforces a similar blur to that which is found in the work of activist scholars and activist organizations. the idea that ‘mail order brides,’ prostitutes, and maids are trafficked women or that they are somehow alike as ‘marginalized bodies’ in transnational space, reinforces the sense that their similarities are greater than their differences. such studies, to borrow from chandra mohanty, homogenize and discursively colonize third world women, rendering them all as victims (1991). both the discursive analysis of catalogs and the trafficking literature on portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 constable brides, maids and prostitutes ‘mail order brides’ ignore women’s own views of themselves as anything other than victims. defined solely or primarily on the basis of their presumed victim status, maids, sex workers and correspondence brides inevitably—but inaccurately—blur together. it is hard to imagine how the ‘marginalized bodies/voices’ of filipina brides might enter such a discussion given that they would disagree with many of the ways tolentino has described them. labels as an ethnographer, i am particularly interested in people’s own use of labels and their responses to the labels that others impose on them, and especially people’s rejection or critique of externally imposed labels. in the course of research among filipina domestic workers in hong kong and among women involved in correspondence relationships, i noticed disjunctures between women’s own labels, their understandings of themselves, and their roles as prospective brides and domestic workers on the one hand, and the labels that outsiders (including employers, government organizations, employment agencies, and researchers) imposed on them. politically active maids in hong kong preferred the term ‘domestic worker’ (dw) to ‘domestic helper’ (dh) or ‘maid.’5 given the variety of terms people use to refer to themselves, and the different opinions about such terms, it is difficult to find one term that satisfies everyone. nevertheless, it is important to consider how labels both reflect and can come to constitute a certain reality. the terms ‘trafficking’ and ‘mail order bride’ are linked to certain assumptions about women’s victim status and their commodification. they fit with and reinscribe preexisting demeaning images of asian women as submissive ‘lotus blossoms’ or sly ‘dragon ladies’ (tajima 1989; marchetti 1993). it is thus important to ask whether those we write about identify with the labels we use, and if not what are the implications of 5 ‘domestic worker’ reflects a political stance and is considered preferable to derogatory or diminutive terms such as ‘maid’ or ‘helper.’ although not embraced by all filipina maids, dw implies agency, activism and consciousness about workers’ rights. dw indicates resistance to the notion of a maid as a victim, and an awareness of the unequal conditions that make victimization and exploitation possible. as such, some women initially thought of themselves as ‘maids’ or ‘helpers’ but after experiencing difficulties or becoming familiar with problems faced by workers, embraced the label dw. as of the mid-1990s, even the most activist domestic workers did not consider migrant domestic workers ‘trafficked.’ portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 11 constable brides, maids and prostitutes using them anyway? i met women in hong kong who unselfconsciously referred to themselves as ‘maids’ or ‘helpers,’ although most activist women preferred the term domestic worker, but i never met women involved in correspondence relationships who referred to themselves as ‘mail order brides.’ the english term is well known and carries very negative connotations in the philippines; in china in the 1990s it was virtually unknown. when i explained the notion of ‘mail order’ to chinese women, they laughed or expressed offense at the idea that they were like commodities to be bought or sold. in the philippines ‘mail order bride’ is used by staff members of organizations such as the cfo (commission on filipinos overseas) to refer to women who meet spouses through correspondence. this carries strong implications about the commodification of women, the commodification of the process of introductions, and trafficking. women i met in the philippines who were participating in the mandatory cfo ‘pre departure seminar’ for wives or fiancées of foreign nationals were shown documentary videotapes about women who had been horribly abused by their foreign husbands. these women were identified as ‘mail order brides.’ one cfo staff member unofficially explained that the seminar was designed to establish which women really knew their husbands and which were ‘mail order brides’ thus establishing a connection between the term and the likelihood or possibility of experiencing domestic abuse. the term ‘mail order bride’ is commonly used in the united states and australia, but is rarely used by the men and women themselves. a us department of justice report, international matchmaking organizations: a report to congress (usdoj-ins 1999), unabashedly uses the term, as does the appendix to the report entitled ‘the mail order bride industry and its impact on immigration’ (scholes 1999). of the dozens of men i encountered who were involved in correspondence relationships, most rejected the term and were critical of its use. they associated it with sensationalist media representations of correspondence marriages and with activist and feminist critiques of cross-border portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 constable brides, maids and prostitutes marriages as a form of trafficking. many us-based introduction agencies have also widely rejected and criticized the term. the term ‘mail order bride’ is problematic for many reasons (julag-ay 1997). although it highlights the way in which images of women can be commodified by commercial introduction agencies, this can overshadow the fact that an increasing number of men are also listed on the websites and catalogs. as kathryn robinson reminds us (2001), brides are not simply ‘bought and sold’ although their images may be. tolentino writes that, ‘both bride and groom bind themselves into a contract of marriage without physically seeing each other’ (1996, 60) and that ‘the first world groom and third world bride will most likely meet for the first time a few days before their marriage’ (60). both such statements reflect and reinforce deeply ingrained stereotypical assumptions about ‘mail order brides,’ but neither statement is supported by empirical research. in order to qualify for a us ‘fiancée visa,’ a couple is required by law to have met in person. there are rare exceptions in the case of religious prohibitions or if one partner is too ill or incapacitated to travel. most couples i knew had met several times in person and corresponded for over a year before they married. the term ‘mail order bride’—with its implications of ‘buying’ a wife—also helps explain why textual analyses of so-called ‘mail order bride catalogs’ often impose a sexual reading onto images that appear in actuality to be very innocent, more reminiscent of images we might find in a school yearbook or in a passport (wilson 1988, 120-21). regardless of the innocent looking photographs reprinted in his article, tolentino writes that catalogs are ‘torn between’ representing women as ‘hookers and virgins’ although they ‘aim to make clear the distinction between the two’ (1996, 69). from the photographs he presents, however, there is little sign of ‘hookers.’ the catalogs may depict innocent-looking women, but they nonetheless recall—supposedly in men’s minds—images of sex tours and asian prostitutes. in contrast to tolentino’s assertion, most men i knew made a point of distancing themselves from women who might be remotely involved in the sex or hospitality industry, and most claimed to be looking for portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 13 constable brides, maids and prostitutes good wives with strong ‘family values.’6 like the term ‘trafficking,’ the term ‘mail order bride’ tends to define the bride and groom solely on the basis of larger structural inequalities. it denies the possibility of third world women (many of whom are educated adults) making logical, wise and active choices. while such terms may mobilize sympathy for foreign women as ‘victims’ they also reinforce certain preexisting stereotypes of asian women. this may be beneficial in bringing about support for us legislation to protect those who end up in highly abusive marriages (simons 1999), but it also makes it difficult for correspondence marriages to be understood in terms that are similar to other marriages.7 writing against labels so far, i have shown how images of maids, sex workers, and brides from asia have been blurred in cultural studies discursive analyses, as well as in more activist-oriented antitrafficking literature. next i turn to two short ethnographic sketches to further interrogate notions of ‘mail order brides’ and trafficked women. like several recent studies of migrant wives, these sketches complicate the idea of ‘mail order brides’ as trafficked victims and point instead to their experiences and expressions of agency (roces 2003; mckay 2003; nakamatsu 2003; tibe-bonifacio 2003). i met bob and faith,8 a filipino-us couple, in the philippines in the late 1990s. they had been married over 15 years and had two children together. they had met in the early-tomid 1980s when faith was in her early 20s and bob in his 50s. bob had been widowed from his wife of several decades, and was devastated by her death. around the same time, he underwent surgery. he was highly impressed by the care given to him by the filipino 6 this is not to suggest that men had no sexual fantasies related to images of innocent looking women. however, my point is that the discursive analyses of such images usually highlight and dwell on sexuality, whereas the men and women consciously and intentionally distanced themselves from what they considered a ‘demeaning’ interpretation. 7 foreign brides who are married for less than two years and whose marriages dissolve, for example, can easily lose their claim to permanent residence in the united states. this means that women may remain in unhappy marriages longer than they otherwise might out of the fear or stigma of being required to return home. 8 all names are pseudonyms. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 14 constable brides, maids and prostitutes doctor and nurses. a filipina nurse gave him the addresses of some friends in the philippines, and urged him to write to them. shortly afterwards he embarked on a long voyage, during which time he wrote letters to several women in the hope of eventually ‘remarrying and starting over.’ originally bob had not written to faith but to a friend of hers. the friend already had many pen pals so she passed his letter on to faith. bob and faith then corresponded for many months, during which time faith turned down an opportunity to emigrate to canada (sponsored by her aunt); then he came to visit her in the philippines. faith described her respect for americans, spoke of the many filipinos she knew who had emigrated to america, and of her attraction to a man who ‘offered the love of a father, grandfather and husband combined in one.’ within days, after several chaperoned dates, bob proposed (requesting her father’s permission, following filipino custom). faith’s parents supported the marriage but insisted that they have a church wedding in the philippines, rather than take the faster emigration route of getting a fiancée visa and marrying in the united states, for the sake of family honor and to protect faith’s reputation. bob’s adult children opposed their marriage. his son urged him to make faith sign a prenuptial agreement, and his daughter-in-law warned him that faith was a ‘prostitute’ or a ‘gold digger.’ faith felt hurt, but understood that they were concerned about their father; eventually she won them over. faith said that she never regretted her decision to marry bob. she became a us citizen and they had two children. for several years, while they lived in the united states, she was lonely and homesick. after his retirement, she convinced bob to move back to the philippines to be near her family, where they could also afford to hire a ‘helper’ and a cook. like most of the couples i met, bob and faith fit certain stereotypes and dispelled others. the age difference of over thirty years was one of the largest of any couples i knew, but their marriage seemed solid and they seemed compatible (to me and to some mutual acquaintances who knew them far better than i did). before marriage faith’s family’s portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 15 constable brides, maids and prostitutes economic situation was not good. nevertheless, had her main motive been to emigrate to the west, she had an opportunity to do so that she turned down before meeting bob in person. once a us citizen, she opted to return to the philippines. although faith would have liked to have a part time job, she agreed not to work because of bob. bob, on the other hand, compromised in moving back to the philippines. although he was happy living there and was well integrated into the upper-middle-class filipino community, he also missed the united states. bob’s adult children’s initial suspicions about faith’s motives and character are fairly common among the friends and relatives of men who are married to foreign women. this story illustrates both the popular blurs that may be prompted by third world women who perform various forms of reproductive labor, as well as the subtle differences and motivations that can never be fully represented in a simple modernization narrative. ping was a 50-year-old divorcee from beijing when i met her in the 1ate 1990s; elvin was a 65-year old artist and lawyer from california. they had met over the internet, on a web site where men and women enter their names, photographs, and introduce themselves, and where a fee is only paid at the point when someone (a man or woman) chooses to correspond with a particular person.9 in beijing ping lived in a nice apartment with her adult son and had a job as a librarian for a large private company. elvin was also divorced with adult children and was semi-retired. typical of many couples i met, they got to know one another over a yearlong period of correspondence via e-mail and internet chat. citing the fact that single men in beijing were only interested in very young women, and concerned that she could not meet a chinese man who was educated and shared her ‘cultural’ interests, ping was attracted to elvin for his artistic and intellectual pursuits. ping thought elvin was interested in meeting a chinese woman because he had a friend with a chinese wife, and he was attracted to what he thought was less materialism among chinese women. they met in person when he came to beijing for a two-week visit. at the end of the visit they continued to correspond and elvin proposed. 9 some web sites are free to submit information but charge a few dollars for access to someone’s contact information. in 1998 a six-month membership cost between us$40 and $150. in some clubs this entitled members to free access to all listings; in others e-mail addresses required no further payment but additional fees were charged for mailing addresses (see constable 2005b). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 16 constable brides, maids and prostitutes when i first met her, ping was carefully weighing elvin’s proposal. eventually, she agreed to go to the united states on a ‘fiancée visa’ for 90 days, after which time she was required by law to either marry him or return to china. although she was not certain about elvin (and she wished that the visa allowed them more time together before having to marry), her visit reassured her and she agreed to marry him. their marriage was rocky. elvin was not physically violent, although ping had once been so angry that she threw something at him, but he was uncommunicative and increasingly critical of her demands. as she explained, he was insensitive to her loneliness, expected her to be satisfied working and staying at home, and he provided her with little emotional or material support. she took a minimum wage job to contribute to their expenses. at various points she threatened to leave. she returned temporarily to china, but returned to the united states to try again. the relationship was turbulent. she mentioned looking forward to the ‘two year mark’ in their marriage. when they crossed that watershed she could apply for unconditional permanent resident status, even if she and elvin split up. ping explained that part of the problem was that elvin thought he ‘owned’ her. he at once resented her attempts to gain greater personal and economic independence, and also refused to offer her greater financial or emotional support. by 2005, she had obtained a divorce and was living in the united states as a permanent resident. such stories point to a problem with the assumption that ‘mail order brides’ are trafficked victims. ping made a reasonably well-informed decision on the basis of what she knew about elvin (from a year of correspondence, his two-week visit in china, and her twoand-a-half-month visit in the united states). this might suggest that she knew too much to be considered an innocent victim, but others might argue that she was trafficked by virtue of the wider structural inequalities between the united states and china, the false promises and assurances that elvin made before they were married, and her vulnerability as a foreign bride who would have to return to china permanently and lose her right to us residence if she did not remain married to elvin for two years. yet the notion of coercion and trafficking is confounded here by ping’s ‘white collar’ identity in china, and her low wage and emigrant status in the united states. had she been poorer, younger, portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 17 constable brides, maids and prostitutes and less willing to return to china, she might better fit the stereotypical image of a ‘mail order bride.’ productive blurs so far, i have argued against unproductive blurs, but must acknowledge an intellectual debt and a link to the work that has been done theorizing sex work and prostitution. because sex work, correspondence brides, and domestic workers are similarly positioned discursively and at times structurally, such links can be highly productive.10 kamala kempadoo’s work has been especially helpful in my analysis and critique of the literature on ‘mail order brides.’ she argues that third world prostitutes are often described by terms such as ‘slaves, trafficked, and victims’ evoking ‘images of helpless, ignorant, dependent women and girls’ despite the fact that many sex workers suggest that we understand prostitution very differently as ‘work within a clearly defined industry, as a survival strategy, or as a way of making do when other options are limited or closed’ (1999, 225). kempadoo asks whether we should thus read sex workers’ views as ‘false consciousness’ or as a simplistic adoption of western discourses on prostitutes’ rights? in keeping with studies and analyses that call for a shift away from ‘simple hierarchies and dichotomies to the problematization of multiple spaces, seemingly contradictory social locations and plural sites of power’ (234) she suggests that we pay greater attention to expressions of sex worker’s agency, to see how they have resisted and contested ‘oppressive and exploitative structures as well as the visions and ideologies inscribed in women’s practices.’ this move ‘is an attempt to position sex workers as actors in the global arena, as persons capable of making choices and decisions, that lead to transformations of consciousness and to decisions in everyday life’ (233). kempadoo identifies third world sex workers as ‘one of the last sites of gender relations to be interrogated through a critical feminist lens that assumes that women are both active subjects and subjects of domination’ (234). 10 this is not to deny possible real connections between various categories of migrant women. for connections between domestic workers and correspondence brides, and for an example of a domestic worker who is also a marriage migrant, see constable 2003b. see also piper & roces 2003 for several insightful examinations of connections between work and marriage migration. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 18 constable brides, maids and prostitutes so-called ‘mail order brides’ are similarly depicted as trafficked victims in need of rescue. and like those who ‘fight for changes in the sex industry—and not for its abolition,’ and who attempt to represent a different perspective, they are also subject to the charge of ‘false consciousness’ (kempadoo 1999, 234). in relation to the issue of ‘mail order brides,’ for example, the pwc criticizes any ‘narrow definition’ of trafficking that seeks to isolate issues of abuse and coercion, a position that they suggest is ‘being peddled by feminists, especially those from the north, who seek to legalize prostitution as a legitimate form of “work”’ as a ‘reprehensible position’ (pwc 2000, 1). in keeping with kempadoo’s arguments, and in contrast to the pwc perspective, i suggest that an awareness of women’s agency does not require that we ignore or accept structural inequalities and gendered abuses. if we pay closer attention to women’s own attempts—through their words and actions—to counter or resist, and in some cases strategically embrace, the very images of submissive wife or passive sex object that are uncritically reproduced in the anti-trafficking literature, then we may avoid reproducing the notion that women’s subservience and victimization is a natural and expected outcome. it seems ironic that some of the activist groups that most strongly oppose the demeaning treatment and condescending images of women, ultimately traffic in those very images themselves. unlike sex worker activists, however, there exists no loud or active debate among selfascribed ‘mail order brides’ who are fighting for rights and representation. as tolentino suggests, this may be because ‘the existence and operations of mail order brides’ is ‘poised to conceal aspects of women’s pasts, thus making ethnography much more difficult to undertake’ (1996, 51). when such ethnographic studies are conducted they generally draw on the experiences of women in shelters, or those whose relationships have, by definition, already failed (julag-ay 1997; abraham 2000).11 i have found that foreign brides usually have little reason to identify themselves as a group on the basis of how they met their spouses (larsen 1989 is an exception). if we listen carefully, we may portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 19 constable brides, maids and prostitutes hear the voices of immigrant wives, but most have little reason to identify themselves as or to reply to the name of ‘mail order brides’ or trafficked women. conclusion my primary concern has not been with the fact that there exist three separate bodies of literature on brides, maids, and sex workers, or with the potential benefits of looking at these sorts of gendered migration in combination, but with the problematic ways in which they are sometimes assumed to be one and the same. the broad underlying assumption that is more overt in some activist literature than in more narrowly academic sources is that they are all part and parcel of ‘the traffic in women.’ given a tendency among some academics and activists to all-too-readily blur the differences between various migrant women under the rubric of ‘trafficked women,’ my aim is to contribute to an ethnographically-based critique of the notion of migrant women as simply passive victims, and to illustrate some of the ways in which the victim-agent dichotomy falls short of providing us with a useful framework for understanding the lives, choices, experiences, and difficulties faced by migrant women. my argument has drawn inspiration from the literature on sex workers that criticizes the dichotomy between innocent victims in need of rescue and immoral women deserving of what they get (doezema 1998; kempadoo 1999). this critique applies to the treatment of foreign brides in the united states, where those who are deemed to have unknowingly entered bad marriages on good faith (as innocent victims) are entitled to make legal claims to remain in the country as permanent immigrants and eventually to become citizens, whereas those who are deemed to be immoral women who entered the marriage on false grounds are not entitled to legal protections and immigration rights (simons 1999; meng 1994). women’s ability to make a case to stay in the united states often depends on their ability to be seen as victims, rather than as women who entered marriages as equals or near equals and whose marriages failed. in other words, women whose marriages fail before 11 studies by ordonez 1997, roces 2003, and tibe-bonefacio 2003 are very noteworthy exceptions. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 20 constable brides, maids and prostitutes two years are up can only make a claim to remain in the country if they can prove that they entered the marriage in good faith and that they have suffered abuse.12 the examples presented above support the idea that coercion, force, and agency are extremely hard to gauge or measure, and that they also vary through time, making it impossible to label all migrant women (maids, sex workers, correspondence brides) as trafficked, or to suggest that they are ever outside of a system of power and inequality. the significant differences and variations in women’s migrant experiences, and the difficulty in labeling them all as ‘coerced,’ point to the need to rethink the value and utility of the notion of ‘trafficking.’ although migrant women’s experiences—be they brides or workers or both—may indeed be similarly structured by broad factors such as class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender, women’s experiences may also differ both among and between these categories and those of emigrant wife and emigrant worker. trafficking overlooks many important issues including the distinction between women workers who are cognizant of selling their sexual or other labor, and correspondence brides who (like other brides) contribute reproductive labor but do not consider their sexual acts or their household work a commodity. although there are analytical, theoretical, and ethnographic insights to be drawn across the literatures on women migrants of various types, there are also risks in attempting to construct links and labels that the women we write about would not recognize or welcome. the fact that most correspondence brides would not recognize themselves in discussions of ‘mail order brides’ and trafficked women, or in discussions that suggest that they are somehow like prostitutes or maids, should be a cause for concern. identifying whom we are talking to and about by the labels they would recognize and respect, would seem be a fundamental step in the right direction for scholars, activists, 12 this legal situation can have negative implications for both spouses. it can pressure women to put up with abusive marriages, it can provide men with greater opportunity to subject foreign wives to abuse, and it can cause women to make or exaggerate accusations of abuse in order to make claims to remain in the country. us legal restrictions make it difficult for women to leave unhappy marriages that do not involve abuse. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 21 constable brides, maids and prostitutes and policy makers. legislation and advocacy efforts that are directed toward ‘trafficked women’ or ‘mail order brides’ prematurely exclude foreign brides (and their husbands) who would not identify themselves or their marriages in such terms. attempts to communicate with, advocate for, and provide support for foreign brides, would benefit by dropping the ‘mail order bride’ label altogether, considering instead the shared and differing needs and interests of immigrant women. the trafficking label also requires critical rethinking. from a practical perspective its adoption is closely linked to sources of funding. but its whole-scale adoption has served to blur distinctions between different sorts of migrant women and their needs and interests. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 22 constable brides, maids and prostitutes reference list abraham, m. 2000, speaking the unspeakable: marital violence among south asian immigrants in the united states, rutgers university 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(eds.) 1998, global sex workers: rights, resistance, redefinition, routledge, new york. larsen, w. 1989, confessions of a mail order bride: american life through thai eyes, new horizon press, far hills, nj. marchetti, g. 1993, romance and the yellow peril: race, sex and discursive strategies in portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 23 http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/catw/barry.htm constable brides, maids and prostitutes hollywood fiction, university of california press, berkeley, california. maher, k. 2003, ‘gendered migrations of sex workers, domestic workers, and correspondence brides’, international migration of ‘traditional women’, center for comparative immigration studies, university of california at san diego. october 23-26. mckay, d. 2003, ‘filipinas in canada—de-skilling as a push toward marriage’ in wife or worker? asian women and migration, n. piper & m. roces (eds.), rowman and littlefield, new york, 23-51. meng, e.1994, ‘mail-order brides: gilded prostitution and the legal response’ in michigan journal of law reform 28, 197-248. mohanty, c. t. 1991, ‘under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’ in third world women and the politics of feminism, c. t. mohanty, a. russo & l. torres (eds.), university of indiana press, bloomington, 51-80. nakamatsu, t. 2003, ‘international marriage through introduction agencies: social and legal realities of ‘asian’’ wives of japanese men’, in wife or worker? asian women and migration, n. piper & m. roces (eds.) rowman and littlefield, new york, 181-201. narayan, u. 1995, ‘“male-order” brides: immigrant women, domestic violence and immigration law’, hypatia 10, 1, 104-119. ordonez, r. z. 1997, ‘mail-order brides: an emerging community’ in filipino americans, transformation and identity, m. p. root (ed.), sage publications, thousand oaks, california. parrenas, r. s. 2001, servants of globalization: women, migration, and domestic work, stanford university press, stanford, california. piper, n. & m. roces (eds.) 2003, wife or worker? asian women and migration, rowman and littlefield, new york. pwc (philippine women centre of british columbia). 2000, canada: the new frontier for filipino mail-order brides [online]. available: www site of status of women canada, http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/pube.html [accessed 5 october 2003]. robinson, k. 1996, ‘of mail-order brides and “boys’ own” tales: representations of asianaustralian marriages’, feminist review 52, 53-68. ———2001, ‘marriage migration, family values, and the “global ecumene”’, conference on migration and the ‘asian family’ in a globalizing world, national university of singapore, 16-18 april. roces, m. 2003, ‘sisterhood is local: filipina women in mount isa marriage’ in wife or worker? asian women and migration, n. piper & m. roces (eds), rowman and littlefield, new york, 73-100. scholes, r. 1999, ‘the mail order bride industry and its impact on immigration’ in international matchmaking organizations: a report to congress (appendix a), [online]. available: http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/aboutins/repsstudies.mobrept_full.pdf [accessed 5 october 2003]. simons, l. 1999, ‘mail order brides: the legal framework and possibilities for change’ in gender and immigration, g. a. kelson & d. delaet (eds), new york university press, washington square, n.y., 127-43. suzuki, n. 1999, ‘women imagined/women imaging: re/presentations of filipinas in japan since the 1980s’, u.s.-japan women’s journal 19, 142-75. ——— 2005, ‘tripartite desires: filipina-japanese marriages and fantasies of transnational portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 24 http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/pube.html constable brides, maids and prostitutes traversal’ in cross border marriages: gender and mobility in transnational asia, n. constable (ed.), university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia, 124-44. tajima, r. e. 1989, ‘lotus blossoms don’t bleed: images of asian women’ in making waves: an anthology of writings by and about asian american women, asian women united of california (ed.), beacon press, boston, massachusetts, 308-317. thai, h. c. 2002, ‘clashing dreams: highly educated overseas brides and their low-wage u.s. husbands’ in global woman, b. ehrenreich & a. hochschild (eds), metropolitan books, new york, 230-253. tibe-bonifacio, g. 2003, ‘filipino women and their citizenship in australia’ doctoral thesis, university of wollongong. tolentino, r. b. 1996, ‘bodies, letters, catalogs: filipinas in transnational space’, social text 14, 3, 49-76. united nations, ‘the protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, [online]. available: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/trafficking_protocol.html [accessed 9 february 2006. usdoj-ins (united states department of justice-immigration and naturalization service). 1999, international matchmaking organizations: a report to congress, [online]. available: http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/aboutins/repsstudies.mobrept.htm [accessed 5 october 2003]. villapando, v. 1989, ‘the business of selling mail-order brides’, in making waves: an anthology of writings by and about asian american women, asian women united of california (ed.), beacon press, boston, massachusetts, 318-327. wilson, a. 1988, ‘american catalogues of asian brides’, anthropology for the nineties, the free press, j.cole (ed.), new york, 114-125. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 25 http://www.unodc.org/unodc/trafficking_protocol.html http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/aboutins/repsstudies.mobrept.htm nicole constable, university of pittsburgh introduction reference list microsoft word mooreportalcopyeditaugust2011finalam portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. terpsichorean architecture special issue, guest edited by tony mitchell. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. is the unspeakable singable?: the ethics of ‘holocaust’ representation and the reception of górecki’s symphony no. 3 alison moore, university of technology sydney a large body of scholarly reflection and critical interrogation has considered questions of the politics and ethics of historical, literary, cinematic and graphic representation of the victimisation of civilians in world war two (friedländer 1984; lacapra 1994; bartov 1996; rothberg 2000; zelizer 2000; finkelstein 2001; lang 2003). this paper reconsiders the claim of holocaust unspeakability through an examination of the massively popular symphony no. 3 (symfonia pieśni żałosnych) of henryk mikołaj górecki, a work that has increasingly been construed as a holocaust symphony, in spite of the composer’s insistence that it is not (górecki 1992). it would appear on the surface that the question of the symphony no. 3 as a ‘holocaust’ piece is a non sequitur, since its construction as such occurred primarily through its reception and post factum global marketing rather than as product of its composition. that important distinction may appear to dispel any suggestion that górecki’s work might be subject to the same ethical concerns as other kinds of artistic referencing of world war two victimhood. in fact there are strong reasons to think that the symphony no. 3, in simultaneously dramatising, genderising and universalising ethnically and religiously specific forms of suffering, is even more problematic in its relationship to war victims and the ethics of an appropriate compassionate response to them. this article does not assume that the use of the term ‘holocaust’ to refer to all world war two victimisation is unproblematic. on moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 2 the contrary, it is clear that questions about how the suffering and persecution of particular groups have been generalised to all of humanity go to the heart of the ambiguities in górecki’s artistic intention, and even more so in the morally dubious market reception of his work. the symphony no. 3 was commissioned as a war symphony for polish victims of nazism, and it explicitly references the suffering of an innocent female polish catholic civilian in a nazi gestapo prison cell. in its reception it has been encoded as a symphony about the victimisation of genocidal target groups more generally, and oddly, about the persecution of the jews under nazism more particularly. that slippage, i will argue, is indeed part of a global marketing politics of the aestheticisation of the holocaust. however, the recognition that ‘holocaust’ suffering was not part of the intended references in górecki’s musical intention cannot be sustained as a defence of górecki against the demand that his creation should be subject to the similar ethical considerations that have been applied to jewish-specific world war two artistic representation. the aestheticisation and dramatisation of suffering in the symphony give it a politics all its own in relation to the polish post-communist context it prefigured. national-, religious-, and gender-specific themes in the symphony that reinscribe world war two victimisation within catholic traditions of piety make górecki’s claims to a universalist view of the suffering all the more reductive. the title of this article poses the question, ‘is the unspeakable singable?,’ because unspeakability has been invoked in ethical discussion of the holocaust representation, both to sacralise the suffering of jewish victims and to insist upon the danger of voyeuristic accounts of nazism. but if writing and visualising the suffering of world war two victims are problematic for the reasons that survivors and historians have argued, where does music stand in its capacity to create listener pleasure from the suffering of others, or to invoke a type of indulgent compassion with the potential for a collapsing of self and a universalist reductionism? suffering beyond words ... perhaps no other historical phenomenon is so ethically fraught to represent and, in particular, to aestheticise, as world war two. the german frankfurt school philosopher theodor adorno was perhaps the first observer to suggest that the horrors of the war could not, or should not, be the subject of aesthetic representation at all moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 3 (adorno 1983: 34). numerous variations of the claim have been repeated by scholars, novelists, critics and essayists. in each case, the ethics and the possibility of representation are conflated, blurred or deliberately intertwined. the us literary critic george steiner exemplified that position when he asserted that ‘the world of auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason’ (quoted in lang 1990: 151), and that, ‘it is by no means clear that there can be or that there ought to be, any form, style, or code of articulate, intelligible expression somehow adequate to the facts of the shoah’ (steiner 1967: 199). berel lang has asserted an ethical position around the failure of language in relation to the holocaust, since a respectful silence is the only humanitarian response to the facts of such brutality and suffering (lang 1990: 158–160). a broader claim appeared in the later work of susan sontag. discussing the ethics of photographic representation of war in the twentieth century she argued that even the first world war had produced conditions that ‘exceeded the capacity of words to describe’ (sontag 2003: 22). but if words have been imagined as problematic tools for representing holocaust suffering, images have no less conjured ethical reprobation. in reflections of nazism, saul friedländer pioneered discussion of filmic and fictional representations of the holocaust as overwhelmingly unethical because they aestheticized it for voyeuristic pleasure and numbed appropriate responses of horror under the exigency of entertainment (friedländer 1984). lanzmann, too, claimed that even posing the question of why jews were killed by the nazis ‘immediately reveals its obscenity. there is indeed an absolute obscenity in the project of understanding’ (lanzmann 1990: 271). that view has been called into question for its censoring implication. dominick lacapra, for example, argues that lanzmann’s affirmation of a bilderverbot (forbidding of images) extended to a kind of warumverbot (forbidding of ‘why?’) around holocaust representation, thus appearing both to ‘sacralize the holocaust and to surround it with taboos’ (lacapra 1997: 236). as hayden white has remarked, the calls for reverent silence around genocide have haunted fictional representation of such events, making the necessity of distinguishing history from fiction even more acute in holocaust debates than in other historiographic discussions about the disciplinary boundary separating historical from fictional truth (white 1992). in holocaust representation, the stakes are higher all round. statements about the unrepresentability of the holocaust are not only claims about the unthinkable magnitude of those horrors; they are also moral moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 4 claims about the obscenity of representing them. in her the fragility of empathy after the holocaust, carolyn dean demonstrates that the term pornographic has been used repeatedly by those criticising the moral ground of graphic depiction of suffering and victimisation in writing, art and cinema about the holocaust, alongside claims about it as unspeakable (dean 2004). there are ethical dimensions and disputes, then, both to the representation of holocaust violence and suffering, and to the statement about its impossibility. curiously, none of these concerns appear to have been raised in relation to musical representation. with so many critics asserting that the holocaust is obscene to depict graphically and is unspeakable in literary and other verbal forms of expression, why, it might be asked, does no one seem to think that the suffering of world war two victims is similarly un-singable? one way to address that question might be to argue that music has a unique capacity to represent that which is outside the limits of other forms of human expression. but that line of thought, however fruitful, would not help to explain why music has escaped from ethical considerations about the holocaust as a site of aesthetic pleasure. if the activities of writing and visually referencing the horrors and suffering of world war two are laden with the moral danger of turning those events into voyeuristic spectacle, then why is music not viewed as equally, if not more, problematic, given its exceptional capacity to transport, soothe, excite and pleasure us? indeed, although there have been some excellent studies of european composers in their relation to the holocaust (kontaski 2001; wlodarski 2010; kramer 2002), and studies of holocaust referencing in punk music (stratton 2007), there has been very little ethical consideration about the various musical references to wartime suffering and to other moments of historic mass violence and victimisation, even though such events have inspired musical composition. around the time that adorno was famously asserting the existence of a holocaust aporia (impossibility of poetry), the french composer olivier messiaen was writing from within a german prisoner of war camp a piece of chamber music entitled quatuor pour la fin du temps (quartet for the end of time) (pople 1988). messiaen’s work is not explicitly about the events of world war two but was created from within the composer’s own experience of them. evidencing an eerie bleakness of rupture, alienation and a world turned inside out, before hurtling toward apocalypse with exhilaration and horror, messaien’s piece was perhaps the very first to suggest that moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 5 if the events of world war two, in their ghastly plenitude, surpassed the capacity of words to express them, they did not exhaust the negative sublime expressive capacities of music. adorno was considerably more accommodating about representation of the events of the war in relation to musical composition, as he indicated in his praise of arnold schoenberg’s a survivor from warsaw from 1947 (adorno 1983; schoenberg 1951). a number of other musical compositions have referenced the events of world war two. in 1960 the polish composer krzysztof penderecki wrote a threnody to the victims of hiroshima. and in 1967 he composed a hastily written dies irae for the unveiling of the polish government war memorial at auschwitz. his compatriot and contemporary, henryk górecki, who had been first commissioned to write the memorial work, withdrew from the task months prior to the ceremony, saying that he had been unable to imagine music that might do justice to such suffering (thomas 2005: 183; thomas 1997). but górecki later did historically reference the war in his 1976 symphony no. 3, opus 63, known as the ‘symphony of sorrowful songs,’ a work that since the late 1980s has flooded popular classical music cultures globally and become one of the most commercially successful pieces of classical art music in its time, estimated to have sold over 1 million copies and ranking in the top ten discs of the decade 1992-2002 (‘top ten discs’ 2002).1 although górecki claimed that, like words, music is incapable of representing the monumental horrors of world war two (górecki 2004, cover notes), his third symphony has been overwhelmingly interpreted as a work about the nazi persecution of jewish and slavic populations, as evidenced in the examples discussed in the following sections of this article. denying such historically specific interpretations, górecki has instead promoted a universalist view of the work, dedicating it to all victims of war and repression, in spite of its explicitly catholic and polish national frames of reference (rusbridger 1993). the universalist account of górecki’s no. 3 appears to be supported by its international popularity, but if credence in that view is suspended momentarily, then we might consider the more unique historical contexts relevant to the production and reception of the work. the symphony no. 3 is about a particular someone’s suffering in war: that is, a polish national, feminine and catholic pious form. and it contains verbal and conceptual content that is specific to the experience of persecuted poles under nazism. 1 in august 2011 amazon.com ranked the london sinfonietta cd recording alone the 11th bestselling symphony, and the 11th bestselling classical modern, 20th or 21st century work (‘henryk gorecki’). (note, the link is to the page for this particular recording, and its sales rankings list is updated daily). moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 6 its reception, as distinct from its content, has overwhelmingly been about the generation of a particular kind of compassionate response to world war two, one that is heavily imbued with catholic pathos and redemption, and which arguably encourages a collapsing of the listener’s own emotional pain into an identification with the suffering of war victims. that argument would rely upon a view of music in the majority of its forms and genres as designed, above all (and more than any other kind of art), to make us feel something, as well as potentially making us think and move. but in that view, the use of music to reference historical events deemed too horrific to aestheticise in literary, filmic or graphic forms, would surely be even more problematic, given its potential to engender emotions without reflection, and identification without appropriate attribution of whose suffering is being represented. the sorrowful songs sensation as górecki’s symphony no. 3 climbed in popularity across the 1990s and in the first decades of the new millennium, so too has it become associated with the holocaust victims, and with the question of mass violence and suffering and the compassionate response deemed appropriate to it. in 1993 a documentary film about the ‘symphony of sorrowful songs’ was produced by the british film-maker tony palmer (palmer 2008). the documentary contains an interview with górecki as well as a full recording of the symphony played by the london sinfonietta and conducted by david zinman, with the soprano solo performed by dawn upshaw, identical to the 1992 recording that was the most widely sold and circulated version in the 1990s (górecki 1992). dawn upshaw is shown in a dramatic physical performance, even as her vocal style is restrained. she gazes upwards to represent piety, blinking and squinting with heaving of breast to show grief and sorrow. the documentary follows a pattern of other attempts to visualise the themes of the symphony no. 3, which tend to focus on the soprano soloist as a figure of tragic, pious and graciously suffering feminine beauty. the 2008 documentary also contains a collection of photographic and video images showing scenes of mass killing, emaciated survivors of the bergen-belsen concentration camp, brutal state violence against civilians in various cultural contexts, bodies of dead children in wartime bosnia, and journalist footage of the aftermath of bombings where women weep at the loss of those dear to them. by splicing these images alongside those of upshaw acting the role of someone in sublime ecstatic sorrow as she soars sweetly into the upper reaches of her vocal range, the documentary yokes górecki’s text into a roughly packaged statement moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 7 about the horror of violence, and the beauty both of suffering itself and of our compassionate responses to it. in 2005 a joint bbc and polish television dvd production by james kent filmed the performance of the second movement of górecki’s third symphony on the site of the auschwitz concentration camp to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the camp’s liberation (kent 2004). this documentary won a number of awards (bafta 2006 ‘huw wheldon award for best specialist factual’; international emmy 2005 ‘best arts programme’; rts award 2005 ‘best arts programme’) and was nominated for several others. in this visual account we see the dramatic soprano isabel bayrakdaraian standing in an open doorway in the snow, white flakes decorating her thick hair that flutters in the breeze; she, too, looks upwards to heaven as the tears roll down her cheeks. there are no dead babies or other inapt juxtapositions of violent imagery here, and yet suffering is made into an object for potential voyeuristic enjoyment through the image of feminine beauty and piety. this documentary is ethically problematic in relation to the question of the sensual aestheticisation of gestapo victims, as suggested by the cinematography of the scene, by the body and face of the soprano singing górecki’s score, and by the pathos-imbued vocal interpretation brought to the piece musicologically in this rendition. such an interpretation appears to encourage forms of gratuitous indulgence in the pleasures of sorrowful empathy, which might be viewed as a somewhat kitsch or crass response to an historical awareness of the realities of a terrible violence that remains in living memory for a considerable number of survivors. it might be protested that górecki cannot be held responsible for the various visual glosses on his music; he has stated that he was mortified by palmer’s documentary (‘sorry story’ 1993: 82). luke howard has argued that the view of górecki’s no. 3 as a symphony about war or the holocaust is largely generated by its reception and marketing and not by the intentions and ideas of the composer himself. if the no. 3 is about anything, howard argues, then it is about the sorrow of mothers (howard 1998: 151). similarly, the biographer adrian thomas claims that while the no. 3 is ‘concerned with inner sorrow and compassion,’ it is ‘no more connected with auschwitz than it is with more recent barbarities’ (thomas 1997: 94). but while the symphony no. 3 does not attempt to represent ‘the holocaust’ in the way its popular reception has suggested, it does nonetheless make explicit reference to the nazi persecution of civilians in moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 8 world-war-two poland, where the majority of nazi concentration camps were located, and where around 90 percent of the native jewish population (3 million people) were killed, in addition to the 2.5–3 million non-jewish poles, and several million other europeans identified by the nazis as jewish, romani, slavic, or in other respects enemies of nazi racial purification (gross 2006: 4.). such a context appears in tension with górecki’s own insistence on the universality of his work. clearly the symphony is indeed about the suffering of particular cultural subjects, located in a series of historical events, which are both uniquely famous and historiographically contested. the claim to universalism may, in part, help to explain why there has been a striking lack of ethical or historiographic examination of the górecki no. 3. but the fact that górecki’s work is sonic, rather than visual, theatrical or literary, is perhaps also responsible for it evading the charge of aesthecisation that has heavily tarred various artistic (especially cinematographic) attempts to evoke the suffering of world war two genocide victims.(see dean 2004: 36-37). while górecki may indeed have experienced his inspiration in terms that were not limited to forms of national, religious, ethnic or temporal identity, the content of his expression is acutely historically and culturally located. it is about a very specific kind of suffering—that of a silesian mother grieving the loss of her son in a war against the germans (relevant to górecki’s own upbringing in the multicultural environment of lower silesia), that of the virgin mary in polish catholic liturgical tradition, and, most saliently for the politics of its reception, that of a civilian victim of the gestapo in poland during world war two. in many respects it is unsurprising that the symphony no. 3 has enjoyed a popular reception as a ‘holocaust symphony.’ partly it may have been encoded in this way due to popular forms of historical ignorance, and to the magnetic vortex of ‘the holocaust’ as a trope of narrative force. górecki himself did little to resist its association with that branding, ambiguously alluding to the universality of the suffering it references in a move that both allowed for the symphony’s participation in an ongoing project of polish national memorialisation, and for a global capitalisation of the work in relation to jewish and multiple other identities of suffering. however, music historians’ assertions that the symphony no. 3 is not a holocaust symphony have not helped to tease out the work’s ambivalent relationship to the larger politics of world war two global memory. if ‘holocaust victims’ are defined expansively to include all civilians who were racially moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 9 targeted by the nazis, then górecki’s piece has an obvious relevance in discussions of the ethics of holocaust representation. the question of such definitions cuts across some of the most contested issues in holocaust studies, and in this article, i make no moral claims either way as to whether polish non-jewish suffering should be considered part of ‘the holocaust,’ or about how such a construct as ‘the holocaust’ is most properly defined. the symphony no. 3’s most troubling aestheticisation of the suffering of victims of the nazis lies in its use in the second movement of words taken from the inscription carved into the wall by a young woman held in a gestapo prison cell in zakopane in 1944. the inscription is a plea to the girl’s mother and/or the virgin mary not to weep for her, and concludes with a catholic ave maria. the first movement is set to the words of a fifteenth-century polish easter hymn in the model of the pietà lament of mary as she contemplates the death of her son jesus; while the third movement is based on a silesian folk song in which a mother laments the loss of her son in the silesian uprisings against german rule from 1919–1921, a conflict that is often commemorated as a source of polish national pride in resisting foreign domination. but while the first and third movements heavily encode the symphony in catholic and nationalist terms, the text of the second movement, which references the gestapo persecution of a polish catholic girl, has received the most overwhelming praise and fascination. górecki’s choice of and remarks on this text suggest that the no. 3, in fact, is about something more than just the sorrow of mothers. górecki has often explained why he chose the words of the second movement from among many other inscriptions carved on those cell walls by the prisoners held within them and that typically railed bitterly against the injustice of their treatment: the young woman’s words revealed a selflessness; in spite of her own victimisation, the prisoner’s thought is not for her own misery but for the pain that her death will cause her (biological or spiritual) mother (górecki 2003). in referencing nazism’s victims through this choice of text, the second movement invokes the power of compassion to transcend suffering—it is not merely about the love between mother and child, but about the freedom from despair afforded by an experience of kindness to others within the context of contemplating the victims of nazism. the aesthetic and ethical pleasure this contemplation invokes, the tears it prompts, the rapturous statement of superlatives it inspires, have occured in response to moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 10 a young catholic woman’s prayer, interpreted and presented by górecki as an example of the highest moral and most elegantly sublime redemption. the history of various musical interpretations of the symphony no. 3 also suggests something about both górecki’s intentions and the significance of the work’s reception. in spite of having a discernible anglophone accent in her articulation of górecki’s polish lyrics, the composer commended dawn upshaw for the demure and understated vocal style she has brought to recordings of the symphony, similar to that of the polish soprano and mozart specialist teresa zylis-gara, for whom the part was originally written, and unlike stefania woytowicz, whose more dramatic style dominated the earliest recordings of the work (howard 1998: 142). upshaw’s less powerful voice, her sweeter tonality and restrained vibrato, suggest something about the feminine persona górecki imagined this vocal part to embody: the imprisoned girl of the second movement, like the virgin mary of the first movement, and the lamenting mother of the third movement, weeps peacefully, not angrily, graciously, not bitterly; she is noble, morally commendable and beautiful in her suffering. in a transcript from a rehearsal of the work in 1997 górecki is noted responding to comments from listeners in the audience who remarked that the soprano was swamped by the orchestra in the opening of the first movement; she is supposed to be swamped, he replies, and only later in the movement should her voice rise above the pitch of the orchestra as she climbs upward into the more resonant zone of her range (górecki 2003). this corresponds to the division of the score between the opening vocal entry, with its simple two note descending motif in which the girl calls out to her mother despairingly, as any young person facing death might be expected to do, and the brighter rising sequence of notes, which corresponds to the lyrical revelation that the mother is invoked, not so that the girl might take solace from her, but so that she might give it instead. the simple semiotic message of these contrasted passages is transparent. in her suffering, the victim is overwhelmed, but in her piety and selflessness she transcends her suffering and attains resonance and perfection. the ability of her voice to rise above the orchestra in the climax (both in pitch and in volume) designates religious self-sacrifice, selflessness and compassion for others as the keys to transcending suffering. the ave maria prayer component of the lyrics coincides with a monotone resolution settling into the major key—her voice is steady, while the orchestral parts dwindle out in an eerie minor key. in completing her invocation the victim, then, is at peace, at one with god in the moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 11 feminine aspect of mary, and she maintains her spirit even as the dark events of her imprisonment loom threateningly around her. the catholic aestheticisation of polish suffering in górecki’s work is also one of the points through which the symphony should be interrogated in relation to ethical discussions of holocaust representation. one possible auditory interpretation of the second movement of the symphony no. 3 might note its hasty leap to redemption, which follows rapidly after the evocation of despair. in a study of documentary and other filmic representation, the intellectual historian dominick la capra has criticised accounts of the holocaust that imbue it with a mystical sublimity, beyond cognition, or that attempt to make it into a sad story in which everything is rectified in the end. redemption, la capra insists, is the one thing that any work of art that references to world war two should avoid giving us, since it serves to occlude the traumatic abyss that those events represent to those who survived them (lacapra 2000: 179). by that measure, then, the górecki’s no. 3 is a dubious exemplar of how we might respond to world war two suffering. its catholic dimension enables the automatic redemption following each articulation of despair. its epic quality connotes the sublime—that which is beyond the capacities of thought or speech to contain; and, its relentless lentissimo suggests a patience (or an indulgence) to remain within the vulnerable sadness it evokes. the hopeful sweetness of its rising note progressions reassure us that if only we weep, then everything will be alright. that is not a universal response to victimisation, but rather a particularly religious one. contemplation of world war two horrors may only feel redemptive to those who believe that the innocent and the righteous will be saved, and that the evil ones will pay for their sins by the will of some divine moral arbiter. but why then has the górecki no. 3 had such a massive power to seduce even those who do not subscribe to his own catholicism, or to other compatible religious world-views? solace and redemption are clearly appealing tropes to a range of audiences, and the ‘abyss’ of world war two suffering may indeed not be any easier for atheists to contemplate. catholic suffering under nazism the catholicism of górecki’s evocation of nazi atrocity, then, may be one of the least appropriate spiritual frameworks through which to approach the human questions suggested by this historical phenomenon. of all the categories of people to which the moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 12 suffering of world war two is associated, catholics are not, in fact, one that might legitimately make a special claim to persecution, even if many polish victims of racial persecution under nazism were also catholic. in 1933 pope pious the twelfth signed the reichskoncordat with hitler to secure the privileges of the catholic church in german territories, and hitler was never excommunicated by the papacy. as the historian richard steigmann-gall remarks in the holy reich, ‘the insistence that nazism was an anti-christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the past fifty years,’ generated in order to sustain both ‘the myths of the cold war and the regeneration of the german nation’ (2003: 266). in poland catholics numbered among the victims of nazism and its sympathisers and collaborators. many catholics across europe were complicit in the persecution of the jews under nazism. there is a long tradition of catholic anti-semitism throughout europe, and collaborationist regimes, from vichy france to ustasha croatia, were heavily catholic in their right-wing ideological outlooks. many catholics, of course, did not support the nazis, and they even risked or lost their lives in their efforts to help those who were persecuted (opdyke 1999). in germany the position of christianity was ambivalent in relation to nazism. protestant relations to the regime became increasingly strained throughout the early years of hitler’s rule, as exemplified by 1936 objection of protestant leaders to nazi racial policies, the subsequent persecution of religious leaders, and the active resistance of anti-nazi clergymen such as dietrich bonhoeffer. catholic clergy, too, were sent to concentration camps if they opposed the nazi regime, though in germany only a small percentage actively did so (phayer 2000: 67–68). in poland catholics were heavily victimised, but that was in large part due to targeting of poles in general given the nazi view that slavic populations were sub-human. many polish civilians hid jews out of a catholic-based ethical conviction about the wrongness of murder (tec 1987). there are numerous jewish testimonials of poles who helped jews even in spite of holding anti-semitic beliefs themselves, because their ethics in principle opposed the persecution of innocents, both through catholic belief and what the historian michael gross refers to as a polish cultural ‘romantic tradition of nurturing the weak and defending the persecuted’ (gross 2006: 261). both hostile and complicit catholics feature in the account of the jewish-polish survivor and historian nechama tec, who remained in hiding in poland throughout the nazi occupation (tec 1984). if catholicism cut across moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 13 the line of complicity with nazism in the polish wartime context, while also acting subversively against it, its ambivalence surely cancels out any claim to a particular identity as a persecuted religion. in short, the relationship of catholicism, and indeed of many christians, to nazism was a mixture of defiance and obedience, of objection and support. but if catholicism has no particular victimhood claim in relation to world war two, polish identity generally can legitimately make such a claim, and historically has indeed done so. while polish jews were decimated by the nazi invasion with deaths estimated around three million, non-jewish poles were killed in roughly equal numbers. recent nationalist tropes claim survival through great suffering as a particularly strong polish trait, a result of the shattered history of the nation, denied its autonomy under russian and hapsburg rule, then again under nazism and its communist successor. communist historical accounts, too, emphasised the nation as a site of victimhood. as magdalena teter remarks, the view of ‘polish history as a history of suffering and martyrdom throughout the ages’ (1999: 1) resembled the popular perception of jewish history that salo baron has called ‘lachrymose’ history (cited in liberles & lyman 1995: 341). this helps to explain how, in the postwar politics of official national war memorialisation, ‘jews became “competitors” in suffering’ (teter 1999: 1). in 1964 the gomułka regime appointed the ultra-nationalist hard-liner general moczar as minister of the interior. moczar led the state towards greater police repression in response to the student uprisings of the late 1960s, blaming jewish students for the ferment, and pressuring the remaining postwar jews to emigrate en masse. by 1970 only a tiny smattering of the jewish population remained in a country that had held europe’s largest jewish population prior to world war two (steinlauf 1997: ix). catholicism had been increasingly tolerated from the late 1950s as well, and throughout the remaining communist period the polish catholic church enjoyed considerable freedom. moczar also had a significant influence on the state institutions responsible for memorialisation of the war. as the historian michael steinlauf shows in bondage to the dead: poland and the memory of the holocaust, the period from the late 1960s until 1989 saw a marked disavowal that jews were the largest group massacred by the nazis on polish soil, and a concomitant insistence on an official memory of the war as a story of polish, not jewish, victimisation. the official communist great universal moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 14 encyclopaedia entries on the war were ‘de-judaised’ and ‘polonised,’ and its historical writers were harassed to remove all mention of specific groups who had suffered at the hands of the nazis apart from poles (steinlauf 1997). the unveiling of the auschwitz memorial in 1967, for which górecki was supposed to compose a piece of music, was part of this revisionist moment in the cultivation of memory about the war. but if górecki’s withdrawal from that contract came from an unwillingness to be implicated in the new de-judaised version of the past, he has never said so. his symphony no. 3, written seven years later, referenced the war in terms consistent with the moczar movement toward commemoration of a national suffering and toleration of catholicism as a polish national treasure. in the global context, on the other hand, polish victimisation by the nazis, like victimisation of such groups as homosexuals and the roma, has been underplayed against the dominant perception of the holocaust as a jewish tragedy. one of the more influential documentary films about the holocaust, claude lanzman’s 1985 shoah, overwhelmingly represented poland as the site of jewish persecution, and includes interviews conducted by lanzman travelling through poland in the 1980s. non-jewish poles appear in lanzman’s account as bystanders to the holocaust, witnesses to its horrors, complicit collaborators with the nazis, and perpetrators themselves of genocidal violence; but they are not represented specifically as victims of the nazi persecution of civilian, as indeed they also were. in fact non-jewish poles were racially targeted on a massive scale because the nazi theory of race ranked all slavic peoples only slightly higher than jews in the hierarchy of unter to ubermenschen (sub-human to super-human). the plans for the lebensraum invasion of the east entailed the total displacement of existing polish, russian, and other populations in order to create settlement for ethnic germans (burleigh 2002). there is a place, then, for specific forms of polish memorialisation of nazi victims, such as górecki’s symphony exemplifies, just as there should be memorialisation of all the groups targeted for persecution by hostile, genocidal regimes. but against the backdrop of its polish context, górecki’s national emphasis stands complicit, willingly or unwillingly, with the anti-semitic move within polish communist memorialisation of the time. the fact that the symphony no. 3 does not refer to jewish persecution is less an indication of its universality, than a symptom of the postwar moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 15 polish political will to elide the suffering of particular groups into an inclusive historical myth of communal national struggle. if the fact of a broad polish victimisation by the nazis cannot be denied, nor should the particular victimisation of jews, or for that matter any other group, be subsumed within it. ecouterism musicological criticisms of górecki’s symphony no. 3 commonly focus on its accessibility and simplistic diatonic modality, and on its betrayal of the serial, atonal and avant-garde project of most twentieth-century art music, a project to which górecki himself was committed up until the 1970s (see jakelski 2009). but never do such critics consider the politics of the symphony’s pathos and redemption. modernist musical aesthetics possibly are more appropriate for representing the senseless death and unredeemable horrors of world war two precisely because they do no attempt to translate such events into a pretty tune for our listening pleasure or a trigger for the exquisite sweetness of sadness or the ecstatic release of cathartic sorrow. but ought we to be wary of judging górecki’s piece as problematic simply because of the pleasures it provokes or the mass popularity it has gleaned? as carolyn dean’s work shows moral objections to aesthetic or voyeuristic representation of the holocaust have rarely justified how pleasure of any kind actually disrupts an appropriate recognition of the suffering of others (dean 2004: 50-51). the question driving the present inquiry, however, is not whether the pleasure of górecki’s sad songs encourages an inappropriate memorialisation of the victims of world war two, but rather, by what mechanism or dynamic might it operate in this way—if indeed that is its effect? the work’s tendency to nationalise the suffering of the war and to redeem its horrors with the soothing balm of catholic redemption make its historical referencing suspect. the visual accompaniments that have followed in the reception and dissemination of the symphony no. 3 show that the work’s effect on some consumers is related to its aestheticised and highly gendered views of suffering and compassion. if the term voyeurism connotes too restrictedly a visual enjoyment, perhaps another french-derived neologism is needed to describe a similar pleasure taken in aural stimulation: as voyeur derives from the verb voir to see, then the verb écouter to listen would give us écouteur and hence ‘ecouteurism.’ debates about holocaust representation and the ethics of aestheticisation have tended to assume that the greatest moore is the unspeakable singable? portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 16 dangers may lie in the use of imagery that repeats a dynamic of genocide in the violation of victims or the sadism of perpetrators (steiner 1967). but górecki’s sad songs suggest concerns about another kind of representation of genocide, all the more insidious for its sweetness: musical evocation of compassion for the suffering of others in war has the potential to encourage a pleasurable sadness derived from the collapsing of our emotions into an imagination of historical subjects’ suffering. feeling good, feeling ourselves to be ‘good’ because we weep for the pain of others, we turn away from the horror of reality and make an object of solace and satiation from their suffering. in accepting universalist denials of the cultural specificity of expressions of pain, spirituality and transcendence, we risk ignoring the messier memory contexts in which all works of art about world war two emerge. reference list adorno, w. t. 1983, prisms, trans. s. weber nicholsen & s. weber. mit press, cambridge, ma. bartov, o. 1996, murder in our midst: the holocaust, industrial killing, and representation. oxford university press, new york. burleigh, m. 2002, germany turns eastwards: a study of ostforschung in the third reich. pan, london. dean, c.j. 2004, the fragility of empathy after the holocaust. cornell university press, ithaca. finkelstein, n. 2001, the holocaust industry: reflections on the exploitation of jewish suffering, 2nd edition. verso, new york. friedländer, s. 1984, reflections of nazism: an essay on kitsch and death. harper & row, new york. górecki, h. m. 1992, symphony no. 3, symfonia pieśni żałosnych (symphony of sorrowful songs): opus 36, for soprano solo and orchestra. boosey & hawkes, london. _____ 2003, ‘remarks on performing the third symphony,’ trans. m. trochimczyk, polish music journal, vol. 6, no. 2. online, available: http://www.usc.edu/dept/polish_music/pmj/issue/6.2.03/goreckithird.html [accessed 12 april 2010]. _____ 2004, symphony no. 3 (symphony of sorrowful songs); three olden style pieces, cd. zofia kilanowicz: soprano, polish national radio symphony orchestra; antoni wit: conductor. naxos recording. _____ 1992, symphony no. 3 (symfonia pieśni żałosnych) cd. dawn upshaw: soprano; london sinfonietta; david zinman: conductor. nonesuch records. gross, j. t. 2006, fear: antisemitism in poland after auschwitz, an essay in historical interpretation. random house, new york. ‘henryk gorecki: symphony 3 “sorrowful songs”’ 2011, amazon.com page. online, available: http://www.amazon.com/henryk-gorecki-symphony-sorrowful-songs/dp/b000005j1c [accessed august 20 2011]. howard, l. b. 1998, ‘motherhood, billboard, and the holocaust: perceptions and receptions of górecki’s symphony no. 3,’ musical quarterly, vol. 82, no. 1: 131–159. jakelski, l. 2009, ‘górecki’s scontri and avant-garde music in cold-war poland,’ the journal of musicology, vol. 26, no. 2: 205–259. kent, j. 2004, holocaust: a music memorial film from auschwitz. dvd. exec: peter maniura. bbc2. kontarsky, m. 2001, trauma auschwitz: zu verarbeitungen des nichtverarbeitbaren bei peter weiss, luigi nono und paul dessau. pfau, saarbrücken. kramer, j. d. 2002, ‘coming to terms with music as protest and remembrance: one composer’s story,’ current musicology, no. 67/68: 195–242. lacapra, d. 1994, representing the holocaust: history, theory and 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3 (symfonia pieśni żałosnych). dvd, ntsc, tony palmer films. phayer, m. 2000, the catholic church and nazi germany. da capo, cambridge, ma. pople, a. 1998, messaien: quatuor pour la fin du temps. oxford university press, oxford. rothberg, m. 2000, traumatic realism: the demands of holocaust representation. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. rusbridger, a. 1993, ‘the pole who remains apart,’ london guardian, 13 feb.: 5. schoenberg, a. 1951, a survivor from warsaw, op. 46. schirmer, london. sontag, s. 2003, regarding the pain of others. penguin, london. ‘sorry story’ 1993, london evening standard, 18 june: 82. steigmann-gall, r. 2003, holy reich: conceptions of christianity, 1919–1945. cambridge university press, new york. steiner, g. 1967, language and silence. prometheus, new york. steinlauf, m. 1997, bondage to the dead: poland and the memory of the holocaust. syracuse university press, new york. stratton, j. 2007, ‘punk, jews and the holocaust—the english story,’ shofar: an interdisciplinary journal of jewish studies, vol. 26, no. 4: 124–149. tec, n. 1984, dry tears: the story of a lost childhood. oxford university press, new york. tec, n. 1987, when light pierced the darkness: christian rescue of jews in nazi-occupied poland. oxford university press, new york. teter, m. 1999, ‘review of michael steinlauf, bondage to the dead’. h-judaic july. online, available: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3260 [accessed 10 february 2010]. thomas, a. 2005, polish music since symanowsky. cambridge university press, cambridge. thomas, a. 1997, gorecki, oxford studies of composers. clarendon press, oxford. ‘top 10 discs of the decade’ 2002, bbc music magazine, 1 nov.: 27–28. wlodarski, a. 2010, ‘the testimonial aesthetics of different trains,’ journal of the american musicological society, vol. 63, no. 1: 99–141. white, h. b. 1992, ‘historical emplotment and the problem of truth,’ in probing the limits of representation: nazism and the final solution, (ed.) s. friedlander. harvard university press, cambridge, ma, 37–53. zelizer, b. 2000, remembering to forget: holocaust memory through the camera’s eye. university of chicago press, chicago. template for 2003 conference papers the seduction of sarah: travel memoirs and intercultural learning barbara e. hanna, queensland university of technology juliana de nooy, university of queensland an autobiographical narrative by an expatriate australian journalist, sarah turnbull’s almost french: a new life in paris dominated australian bestseller lists for 2002, outselling all non-fiction bar the guinness book of records. heavily promoted in book outlets in australia, it also benefited from vigorous word of mouth publicity: almost french spontaneously circulated amongst australian students of french, and, even closer to home, was recommended by a wide cross section of the authors’ acquaintances: ‘you’ve been to france, you’ll love this.’ since its original publication, the book has also been released in us and uk editions. this then is an account of intercultural experience with enormous popular appeal. how does this book deal with issues of intercultural communication, and what are the lessons to be learned from it? our analysis proposes that the book participates in a complex game of generic assignation, whereby the lure of one genre, a certain kind of travel memoir, is used to manoeuvre readers into a position where they read the book as a treatise on intercultural difference. we suggest that the particular form of genre hybridity attempted is a delicate enterprise, in that the intercultural lessons on offer risk being overshadowed by the expectations readers bring to the genre of the contemporary travel memoir set in france. in making a play for audience attention while attempting to impart intercultural knowledge, the book’s narrator is positioned in a way parallel to that of the teacher of intercultural communication who seeks to use narratives as pedagogical resources. for portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah this reason, our paper draws pedagogical conclusions from its literary/textual analysis, bridging disciplines in a way that mirrors turnbull’s bridging of genres. intercultural narratives stories of encounters with the cultural other are gaining in importance as a means of increasing student understanding of cultural difference (cf. álvarez and beaven 2003, pavlenko 2001, ros i solé 2004, thurlow 2004). the intercultural narratives most often proposed for classroom use and attracting the most scholarly attention tend to be either literary (intercultural autobiographies, migrant life-writing) or conceived in and for a pedagogical context (student diaries, accounts of critical incidents). yet the genres most readily available for telling of intercultural experiences, and reaching the widest public, fall into neither of these categories, but are variations on the personal anecdote, whose written form is the travel memoir.1 amongst anglophone readers this genre— and in particular the year-in-france-cum-home-renovation memoir (of which peter mayle’s a year in provence is the iconic example)—boasts a wealth of publications and enviable sales figures and even—a sure indicator of its conventionalized status— several recent spoofs (bouchet 2004, clarke 2004, 2005). despite detailed descriptions of different ways of life, these entertaining narratives do not lend themselves in any obvious way to intercultural learning. narrator and reader are invariably positioned as mirrors of each other, and cultural complicity is fostered between them such that there is no need to reassess incidents in terms of values other than one’s own. the french-based sub-genre trades on the mythical charm of france, a country populated by a stock cast of colourful characters, whose antics in comic adventures and tales of calamity are bound to amuse the decidedly more normal anglophone reader. characters are caricatures: more memorable than any insights into different cultural values are the bureaucratic bunglers, eccentric workmen and flirtatious foreigners populating these stories. the conventions of the genre thus work to entrench stereotypes, such that the other remains firmly other. given the enormous reach of these texts, the idea of diverting these conventions to a different purpose is tantalizing. this paper explores the possibility—and the 1 in another study the authors have looked at oral accounts of study abroad experiences of australian students (de nooy and hanna 2003). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah difficulty—of harnessing the travel memoir set in france to the task of facilitating cultural understanding. the problem is one of shifting predictable patterns, and our case study, turnbull’s almost french, takes up the challenge with mixed results, raising questions about the preconditions for intercultural learning. although found on the same bookshop shelf as mayle’s volume, almost french differs from it and its kind in significant ways. whilst the australian edition’s jacket publicity evokes the charm of paris, promising a tale of love in ‘a magical city,’ turnbull attempts to draw the reader towards an understanding of many aspects of french culture that initially appeared unfathomable to her. from the account of her arrival at the airport, the positioning of narrator and reader challenges the conventions of the genre. at cocktail parties, on the phone, in shops and in the street, it is turnbull herself who is the colourful and bizarre character among the normal french. the narrator thus others herself and invites readers to do the same: to see the anglophone as the foreigner, to view australian norms from another perspective. turnbull repeatedly invokes la séduction (ix, 23, 55, 139, 170, 179) as a french quality to which she is susceptible, as she falls for the charms of paris and of frédéric.2 ross chambers’ discussions of narrative, however, allow us to see a further seduction at work in almost french. in story and situation and room for maneuver, chambers views narrative as a seductive enterprise by the narrator aimed at shifting the desire of the narratee. it can be argued that turnbull’s book sets up a narrative seduction that exploits the travel memoir genre to present opportunities for intercultural learning. success is not, however, guaranteed, for it depends on enticing readers away from the powerfully seductive myth of a stereotypical france that attracted many of them to the book in the first place. analysis of these competing seductions—the allure of the myth of france and the persuasive powers of turnbull’s narration—will reveal the role of genre in determining the intercultural outcome of readings, with implications for intercultural storytelling more generally. a tale of two genres: travel memoir? almost french: a new life in paris is marketed as a travel memoir in australia, and although the uk edition (turnbull 2003a) is published by specialists in cross-cultural 2 all quotations are from the australian edition (2002). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah training manuals, and is listed in their catalogue in the section ‘managing across cultures,’ high street bookshops display it in the travel memoir section. the us edition (2003b) places it even more firmly in this category. the revised title—almost french: love and a new life in paris—emphasizes romance and the book sits comfortably amongst other bestselling volumes such as: a farmhouse in provence: an american finds old stones, new wine and love among the french (henry 2000) french spirits: a house, a village, and a love affair in burgundy (greene 2002) the olive farm: a memoir of life, love and olive oil in southern france (drinkwater 2002) while these titles suggest the love story as an alternative model to the travel memoir genre, the mutual inclusiveness of france and romance in the popular imagination implies that any tale of travel in france is by definition already a love story. a journalist breathlessly reports: sarah moved around eastern europe before settling in paris—the city of love! and the reason she moved—what else, love! while travelling in bucharest she met a french lawyer, fell in love and followed him to france. it sounds like the start of a romance novel. sarah not only married her dream, she’s living her dream. (australian broadcasting corporation [abc] 19 jun. 2002) indeed, in another summary, romance overshadows the travel memoir to the point where the book becomes a novel: ‘almost french, the debut novel by journalist sarah turnbull, is a love story between man, woman and city: she’s australian, he’s french and the town is paris!’ (abc 24 apr. 2002) resisting the romantic reading, we point out that nightmare moments abound in this book where love is arguably a minor theme. as a more careful review remarks, ‘turnbull tells readers less about love than new life’ (publishers weekly 2003), and the author’s description of that new life in many respects defies the book’s positioning within the genre of travel memoir. while the early chapters are chronologically arranged, recounting turnbull’s arrival, decision to stay, struggle to find work, and move to the centre of paris, simultaneously each chapter seeks to analyse a perplexing aspect of french culture. topics include intellectualism, dinner parties, small talk, dress, family ties to place, relations between the sexes, and, throughout the book, portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah communication. far more important than the narrative of relationship milestones on the way from chance meeting with frédéric in chapter 1 to marriage in the epilogue is the story of the passage from incomprehension and ineptitude in a foreign culture to understanding and competence. although the postcard view of france promised by the genre is certainly present, turnbull most often recognizes and labels it as such—‘yes, i admit, i’m carried away on a kaleidoscope of clichés straight out of a trashy romance novel’ (22, cf. 128, 170)— in order to provide an alternative view. in fact the ‘clichéd visions’ (ix) are identified in the prologue as what turnbull brought to paris. they are a starting point, assumed to be shared by the reader, who is invited to move on, to accompany sarah on her journey of discovery of frenchness from a french perspective. this is not to say that turnbull’s account is always successful in disentangling itself from clichés, nor that her analysis is faultless: despite regular recognition of the diversity of french culture, the book also contains over-extrapolations from parisian bourgeois circles to paris in general to france as a whole. yet the very presence of analysis, even if flawed, encourages the reader to engage with instances of cultural difference as indicative of divergent patterns of cultural behaviour, rather than as a colourful but one-dimensional backdrop to her adventures. emphasizing the learning that has marked turnbull’s six years in france are statements that could have come from an intercultural communication textbook, heartfelt but nonetheless didactic remarks about how ‘you can’t measure your behaviour by familiar yardsticks’ (39): how do you explain the nuances of the way people interact when you’ve never questioned them yourself before? how can you construct neat answers for customs and codes of behaviour you have taken for granted since birth? (70) i was too consumed by the effort of trying to adapt to my new home to see the reaction of frédéric’s relatives within the context of a culture. instead, i did exactly what you shouldn’t do, what i’ve been doing all along in france. i took it personally. (88) my eyes don’t see what frédéric sees—or at least they see it differently.’ (151) i need to step out of my old rubric and embrace a new one. to forget how i did things in australia and learn a way of communicating that works in france. (187) portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah the film forced me to face facts—my style of communicating doesn’t work in france. it had to change. (273) intercultural guidebook it can be argued then that although the book is labelled a travel memoir, its purpose parallels that of a book turnbull cites on several occasions: polly platt’s french or foe (1998). openly didactic rather than seductive, french or foe (along with other volumes attempting to explain french culture) is sold, not as travel memoir but as intercultural guidebook or travel guide, a genre addressing a more limited readership already actively seeking answers to intercultural questions and including: savoir-flair: 211 tips for enjoying france and the french (platt 2000) au contraire! figuring out the french (asselin and mastron 2001) sixty million frenchmen can’t be wrong: why we love france but not the french (nadeau and barlow 2003) culture shock! france: a guide to customs and etiquette (taylor 2003) turnbull’s book thus plays between genres, one more clearly flagged than the other. this was apparently a deliberate choice: interviews indicate that turnbull felt she could ‘fill a niche between the “renovating a house in the countryside” genre and more serious cultural studies’ (wyndham 2003). thus, although the book is pitched as travel memoir, unlike mayle in a year in provence or greene in french spirits, turnbull is not satisfied to remain bemused by the curious french, but rather seeks to understand perplexing incidents as part of wider cultural patterns. however, in order to impart her new knowledge, she must persuade the reader to exchange readymade romance for lessons in cultural difference. her strategies include framing her narrative as an ‘adventure’ in both prologue and epilogue (ix, 309) such that the learning is a question of ‘solv[ing] mysteries’ (135) rather than taking instruction; holding out the promise of a rich reality (ix, 118) that eludes the romantic gaze; and, more subtly, manipulating the possibilities for reader identification with her life in paris, that locus of desire predetermined by the travel memoir genre, through constantly adjusting her speaking position. nevertheless, these seductive measures are not successful with all readers, as we shall see. the ambiguity of genre in almost french prevents the reader from simply settling into comfortable complicity with the narrator. the reading position provided by the genre of the travel memoir (identification with the narrator through shared values) is destabilized portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah as turnbull recalibrates her cultural norms. she becomes a moving target for readerly identification as she invites the reader to continue to shadow her. this is achieved through frequent variation in the distance between turnbull as narrator (the sujet de l’énonciation) and turnbull as protagonist (the sujet de l’énoncé, benveniste, cf. chambers 1984, 1991). while the protagonist steadily evolves from australian tourist to ‘almost french’ resident of paris, the narrator’s speaking position repeatedly oscillates between that of the newly arrived and uncomprehending sarah and her wiser, more reflective avatar. this produces double-edged accounts of incidents: turnbull explains her incomprehension in a way that arouses sympathy from the australian reader, but she simultaneously takes an ironic distance from her self-portrait that unsettles the affinity. thus the tale of a disastrous bourgeois cocktail party shows an almost caricatured australian girl in doc martens attempting to strike up chatty conversations by enthusiastically admiring the furniture and encouraging guests to get stuck into the champagne (63). similarly double is the mocking description of her own propensity to dress down when there is no reason to dress up (130, cf. x), accompanied by a bafflement easily understood by her intended readers: ‘underpinning frédéric’s reaction to tracksuit pants is a concept which to me is totally foreign: looking scruffy is selfish’ (131). this ironic distance sharpens into a clear split between australian and french ways of seeing and the narration glides from one towards the other. at the cocktail party, sarah articulates her confusion as an australian: ‘could the rules be so different in france? but then how else are you supposed to get the ball rolling if not with preliminary questions and conversation?’ (64). having marked this point of contact with her intended readers, she leads them elsewhere. she moves towards a speaking position from within french culture, at first giving voice to frédéric’s interpretation, and eventually accepting french rules of social engagement. thus it is in frédéric’s voice in the first instance that we hear that her behaviour might be interpreted as clumsy, intrusive and uncultured by french standards (65). eventually, however, it is sarah herself who ‘do[es]n’t feel compelled to fill silences’ (273), who is able to explain conversation as a game of skill and to recount her wins. the turning point for turnbull occurs she sees the film ridicule, in which a provincial baron must learn the art of verbal jousting in order to gain an audience with louis xvi (271-273). if frédéric’s role in sarah’s transformation resembles that of the kindly aristocrat who coaches the portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah baron, that role is adopted by turnbull in relation to the reader. the reader receives instruction in the goals of interaction and the criteria for success. similarly, while not renouncing her right to wear trousers that make her ‘look like a baby elephant’ (131), turnbull guides the reader towards frédéric’s (and by extension a french) perspective on casual anglo dressing, detouring from paris to london to a hypermarket in boulogne-sur-mer filled with british day-trippers. she recounts her own shift in attitude when, during a weekend trip across the channel, sarah reacts to londoners’ eclectic combinations of styles and colours through eyes now accustomed to parisian norms: ‘“look what they’re wearing!” i exclaimed to frédéric’ (133). but the narrator turnbull continues to hover between speaking positions, touching base with the reader’s world view—‘you might think this is ridiculous’ (138)—at points during her exposition of french aesthetic principles, and tempting them towards a new view. emblematic of turnbull’s approach to french culture is the episode of the new window. in a significant departure from stories of the loving restoration of traditional homes to their former glory, the home improvements in sarah’s apartment open up an entirely new (and illegal) window. and just as the book shies from perpetuating ‘clichéd visions’ of paris, the renovation literally provides a new way of seeing the city. ‘it’s like a painting’ (236 ) says frédéric of the view, but its composition differs from that of the monet painting of their street at the musée d’orsay (235). this is highlighted in the jacket cover of the australian edition (figure 1): ‘sarah’ surveys a view of paris comprising chimney pots and satellite dishes, zinc roofs and high rise. but this window does more than provide a room with a view: its installation requires that turnbull be actively involved in negotiating parisian rules of renovation, legal or otherwise. indeed the ‘eye-opener’ (239) in this architectural adventure has been the revelation that ‘in paris, there is a way around almost every rule’ (239). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah figure one: the australian cover. ‘tunnell[ing]’ (231) through a ‘blind wall’ (227), ‘hoping for a glimmer of light’ (232), the quest for her window onto paris reflects sarah’s determination to achieve an insider’s perspective on french culture. the blind wall is ‘a source of frustration, a portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah solid, sealed barrier’ (227) not unlike the cultural barriers she has confronted, and as the effort of tunnelling through suggests, this is not a view that can simply be acquired like a postcard. the reader, like sarah, is required to chip away at what seemed like rocksolid certainties. as turnbull explains when she struggles to see beauty in a blockhausstrewn beach under a leaden sky: ‘at heart, it isn’t about scenery: it is about who we are, individually, and what we are willing to become’ (154). and for those she tempts towards transformation, the reward turnbull promises is a perspective ‘far richer, a thousand times better’ than the stereotyped image of france (ix). l’invitation au voyage the extent to which readers will be persuaded to share the narrator’s vision—to exchange the romantic stereotype for the cultural insights turnbull proposes—is thus uncertain. for many, the easy pleasures of the genre of the contemporary travel memoir set in france tend to obscure the new view available. thus the window entirely disappears on the cover of the us edition in favour of the tourist’s paris (figure 2): a soft-focus image of le quartier st michel overlaid by a postcard of a kiss on the pont des arts. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah figure two: the us cover. in parallel fashion, the intercultural import of turnbull’s tale has a tendency to disappear in accounts of the book. much of the paratext of almost french (publicity, jacket blurb, interviews, reviews) constructs an itinerary through the book that, although a voyage of discovery, is very much the discovery of what cryle (1998) terms the ‘familiar foreign’: romance, restaurants, fashion shows, surly shopkeepers, and small spoilt dogs all make their appearance. turnbull’s story is therefore often read as simply another evocation of the quaint charm of paris and those romantic frenchmen. as almost french surged through bestseller lists, it was not the intercultural learning portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 11 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah narrative that was highlighted in reviews and other reader comment, and those voting turnbull’s life ‘the most envied’ (wyndham 2003) surely overlooked the miserable marginalization at dinner parties, the humiliating inability to accomplish simple tasks which marked her early days in paris. while accounts of culture shock may be characteristic of ‘settler writing’ (álvarez and beaven 2003), they are not the most salient part of turnbull’s story for the majority of readers. it was turnbull’s fortune (or misfortune) to find herself in a french subculture that corresponded so precisely to the stereotyped expectations of an anglophone audience. consequently, in accepting l’invitation au voyage offered by the book, readers have not necessarily taken up turnbull’s further invitation to revise these expectations, to arrive at a hitherto unknown destination. we might take, as one example, the myth of france as the land of endemic elegance. paris is indeed a capital of high fashion and readers are duly given accounts of interviews with couturiers and fashion parades that turnbull covers as journalist. the transformation of her own wardrobe is also recorded: her airport arrival in ‘clumpy sandals’ and safari shorts is repeated at various points as a kind of ‘before’ shot. commentators have highlighted this moment together with the ‘lesson in french dress standards’ (130) represented by frédéric’s distress at her attempt to wear tracksuit pants in the street. the temptation is to read her subsequent adaptation as, if not exactly a rags-to-riches story, at least one of sartorial salvation, of deliverance from australian dagginess to enlightened elegance. this interpretation resembles that of turnbull’s mother, who, in casual sweater and slacks, feels ‘hopelessly out of place’ on the stylish rue du faubourg st-honoré (140). for subsequent visits she packs smart suits and high heels. lesson learnt? maybe, but it is not necessarily the one her daughter wants readers to learn as she adds a generally overlooked qualification: the revised holiday wardrobe is ‘perfect for rue du faubourg st-honoré but conspicuously inappropriate for tripping through french country markets’ (140). this comment is a loose thread in the smooth stitches of the story of the uniformly elegant french, a loose thread we can use to unravel that story. here is a clue that different contexts within french culture require different clothes; that blanket generalizations about the french fail to take into account even the diversity of clothing requirements within the one subculture. that is, turnbull again provides the material needed to destabilize the stereotype. further hints are the various points at which frédéric is not aligned with elegance (for example 21 portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah 22). indeed, if sarah’s dress changes, so does frédéric’s: as was the case with the apartment, the renovation of his wardrobe distances it from a traditional style (his grandfather’s cravats), as he buys australian country road designs (296). yet how many reviewers and readers tell us that frédéric is the quintessentially, tautologically, elegant frenchman? his old school friend, portrayed with a revealing gap between torn tee shirt and ‘slipping shorts’ (28), is completely ignored in the reviews (and is perhaps seen only as an idiosyncratic exception). in these readings, only those elements of the story that concur with the pre-existing picture of frenchness are retained. this is not to suggest, however, that readers finding confirmation of clichés cannot learn any intercultural lessons from the book: the two queenslanders were all dressed up to explore the paris neighbourhood that’s the main setting for […] almost french. they were excited to spot the author in the street […] and stop for a chat. ‘after reading your book, we thought we’d better make an effort,’ said the woman in black high heels and stockings. (wyndham 2003). no doubt these well-dressed explorers did not need almost french to tell them about french elegance. however, even if, like turnbull’s mother, they over-extrapolate this dress code to country markets, even if their image of french culture has not changed, they have still learnt something from the book, namely that their own vestimentary presentation, rather than being neutral, is available for interpretation. so whilst they may not see france differently, they have learnt to see themselves through other eyes. that is, the mirror held up by almost french, rather than simply reflecting an australian view back to australian readers, allows us to see what those curious french might think of us. there is nonetheless a clear division between two quite different responses to turnbull’s book, readings we could characterize broadly as ‘starry-eyed’ and ‘intercultural.’ the division is illustrated by the two types of letters turnbull is said to receive: ‘some say her evocative book makes them want to rush to france; many thank her for expressing the loneliness and confusion of their own expat life there’ (wyndham 2003). how can the same book conjure up such opposing visions of france? more pertinently for teachers of intercultural communication, what mechanism enables some readers to make the interpretative leap towards revising stereotypes and, conversely, what hinders others? portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 13 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah competing seductions the discrepancy between readings can be partly explained by the competing seductions at work. as we have seen, almost french harnesses the seductive strength of the myth of france in order to lure readers towards a reassessment of that idealized image. this is a precarious strategy, not in sales terms, but in intercultural ones. the reader’s desire is engaged in order to divert it, but the danger is that the pursuit of french romance blinds readers to turnbull’s more subtle seduction. it is not only the power of myth, however, that predisposes readers to finding romantic clichés in a book where they are challenged. the ‘starry-eyed’ readings of almost french bear testimony also to the power of genre in determining the reader’s engagement with the text. pavlenko (2001, 213, 218) emphasizes the need to approach language-learning memoirs and other cross-cultural autobiographies as genres, to focus on their rhetorical shaping as much as their informational value. furthermore, just as turnbull’s writing is shaped by rhetorical conventions, so too is the way it is read. the book has been insistently marketed as a travel memoir, and thus it is with the expectations of this genre—glamour, excitement and the flavour of an exotic location— that most readers open almost french. as gerhart (1991, 156) remarks, ‘genres frame readers as well as texts’, and clearly not all readers are prepared to relinquish the genre hypotheses with which they come to the book. reinforcing freadman and macdonald’s thesis that genre is not simply constituted by textual features but is an act of interpretation that in turn largely determines further interpretations of a text (freadman and macdonald 1991, 24), we find reluctance on the part of some readers to revise their expectations, to register either sarah’s loneliness or her insights into australian, as much as french, behaviour. for chambers, storytelling can change people when the seductive powers of the narration are able to redirect the desire of the reader/listener. in the case at hand, the shift is from a desire for the set pieces of the life in france memoir towards a desire to see through different eyes, and the first condition necessary for it to take place is an acceptance of the detour in genre. it is when readers allow themselves to be enticed away from the predictable delights of the travel memoir towards the lessons of the travel guide that the ‘intercultural’ reading emerges. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 14 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah now, shifting genre is not unlike the process of elucidating an intercultural incident. in each case, a narrative is revisited through a different interpretative framework. reframing the genre entails rereading, relativizing and reconsidering, skills we associate with intercultural competence. as a book that is ‘betwixt and between’ genres (to echo turnbull’s characterization of her expatriate condition, 298), almost french invites readers to move between one set of reading practices and another. as such it provides opportunities—but only for those readers who can make that shift—to experience first hand, and even as armchair travellers, what it is to participate in an intercultural journey. if almost french has potential for intercultural learning it also has lessons for teachers of the intercultural, who use narrative to illustrate points of difference in cultural world views. thurlow (2004) has called for such teachers to be autobiographical storytellers, and for our stories to be gritty, uncomfortable, if necessary. rather than presenting the practice of intercultural communication as a straightforward path to harmony, happiness and, indeed, envied lives, we need, he says, to teach our students that it can involve confronting, even intractable challenges to our most deeply held beliefs and values. our analysis of the fate of almost french, however, suggests that merely disseminating stories, autobiographical or otherwise, in the hope of demonstrating this principle, is not enough: the impact of a text depends less on its content than on the way in which readers engage with it. while we can never ultimately control the ways in which our stories are taken up, we need to be aware of prevailing myths and of the side effects of our narrative seductions and framings. in offering our stories, we must be mindful of genre norms and the kinds of reading practices they invite: these have profound effects on the capacity to interpret incidents in terms of cultural values other than one’s own. a humorous anecdote of cultural misunderstanding placed to liven up the language class, a horror story that students accept at face value, an intercultural novel studied in literary terms: none of these necessarily provides any payoff in intercultural terms. all can be interpreted by students in ways other than we intend, be this to confirm the charm of a parisian life, or the ‘weirdness’ of other cultures, the other’s otherness. that is, following an interpretative path more travelled, students may retain from our stories only what they portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 15 hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah already knew, missing the message calculated to make them question those very expectations. the pedagogical use of narratives thus needs to involve not just the story but the framework available for its interpretation. working with students to make explicit the conventions of various kinds of travellers’ tales, focusing on the positioning of the narratee that is favoured in stories of crazy foreigners can develop reflexes for reframing everyday intercultural tales outside the classroom, not ignoring the entertainment value, the sunshine of romance and home renovation, but not being blinded by them to potentially disruptive intercultural lessons. reference list álvarez, i. & beaven, t. 2003, ‘a life in the sun: accounts of new lives abroad as intercultural narratives’, unpublished conference paper, international association for languages and intercultural communication conference: the intercultural narrative. lancaster. asselin, g. & mastron, r. 2001, au contraire! figuring out the french, intercultural press, yarmouth, me. australian broadcasting corporation 24 apr. 2002, radio broadcast summary [online]. available at: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/nclub/stories/s539504.htm [accessed 23 jan. 2006]. ———19 jun. 2002, radio broadcast summary [online]. available at: http://www.abc.net.au/sydney/stories/s585341.htm [accessed 23 jan. 2006]. benveniste, e. 1966, problèmes de linguistique générale, gallimard, paris. bouchet, b. 2004, french letters: under the provence sun: an incredible tale of fathers, scams and lavender moussaka, hodder headline, sydney. chambers, r.1984, story and situation, university of minnesota press, minneapolis. ———1991, room for maneuver: reading (the) oppositional (in) narrative, university of chicago press, chicago; london. clarke, s. 2004, a year in the merde, random house australia, sydney. ———2005, merde actually, random house australia, sydney. cryle, p. 1998, ‘detouring via the other: representations of frenchness in some australian advertisements’, unpublished conference paper, australian society of french studies conference, melbourne. de nooy, j., & hanna, b. e. 2003, ‘cultural information gathering by australian students in france’, language and intercultural communication, 3.1, 64-80. drinkwater, c. 2002, the olive farm: a memoir of life, love and olive oil in southern france, penguin, new york. freadman, a. & macdonald, a. 1992, what is this thing called ‘genre’?: four essays in the semiotics of genre, boombana publications, mt nebo, qld. gerhart, m. 1992, genre choices, gender questions, university of oklahoma press, norman, oklahoma; london. greene, j. 2002, french spirits: a house, a village, and a love affair in burgundy, william morrow, new york. henry, m. r. 2000, a farmhouse in provence: an american finds old stones, new wine and love among the french, iuniverse.com, lincoln, neb. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 16 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/nclub/stories/s539504.htm http://www.abc.net.au/sydney/stories/s585341.htm hanna & de nooy the seduction of sarah mayle, p. 1990, a year in provence, knopf, new york. nadeau, j.-b. & barlow, j. 2003, sixty million frenchmen can’t be wrong: why we love france but not the french, sourcebooks, naperville, ill. pavlenko, a. 2001, ‘language learning memoirs as a gendered genre’, applied linguistics, 22.2, 213-40. platt, p. 1998, french or foe?: getting the most out of visiting, living and working in france, distribooks international, evanston, ill. ———2000, savoir-flair: 211 tips for enjoying france and the french, distribooks international, evanston, ill. publishers weekly, 16 jun 2003, review of almost french [online]. available at: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail//1592400388//qid=065445965/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/002-26084073723230?v=glance&s=books&vi=reviews [accessed 23 jan. 2006]. ros i solé, c. 2004, ‘autobiographical accounts of l2 identity construction in chicano literature’, language and intercultural communication, 4.4, 229-241. taylor, s. a. 2003, culture shock! france: a guide to customs and etiquette, graphic arts center publishing co., portland, or. thurlow, c. 2004, ‘relating to our work, accounting for our selves: the autobiographical imperative in teaching about difference’, language and intercultural communication, 4.4, 209-228. turnbull, s. 2002, almost french: a new life in paris, bantam australia, sydney. ———2003a, almost french: a new life in paris, nicholas brealey, london. ———2003b, almost french: love and a new life in paris, gotham, new york. wyndham, s. 11 jan. 2003, ‘most envied life’, sydney morning herald [online]. available at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/10/1041990089948.html. [accessed 23 jan. 2006]. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 17 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1592400388//qid=065445965/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/002-2608407-3723230?v=glance&s=books&vi=reviews http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1592400388//qid=065445965/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/002-2608407-3723230?v=glance&s=books&vi=reviews http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1592400388//qid=065445965/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/002-2608407-3723230?v=glance&s=books&vi=reviews http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/10/1041990089948.html microsoft word portalformattingfinalmartinspecialissuesep2011[1] portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. health and borders across time and cultures: china, india and the indian ocean region special issue, guest edited by beatriz carrillo garcía and devleena ghosh. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. the long road from the kidney bazaar: a commentary on pakistan’s progress towards self-sufficiency in organ transplantation dominique martin, university of melbourne introduction ‘transplant tourism’ may be defined as international travel for commercial organ transplantation, in which patients travel abroad to undergo transplantation involving purchased organs. the practice of transplant tourism emerged in the late 1980s with the advent of cyclosporine, an immunosuppressant drug that facilitated organ transfer between genetically unrelated individuals. in conjunction with increased surgical experience with living kidney provision, the possibility of matching patients with strangers in distant countries and planning procurement and transplantation of a kidney from one to another became feasible. it is thus likely that the majority of transplant tourists obtain kidneys provided by living kidney vendors,1 although transplant tourists may also purchase partial livers from living vendors, or a variety of organs from deceased providers such as executed prisoners in china (budiani-saberi & delmonico 2008: 927). in the last three decades, increasing global needs for organ transplantation have outpaced the development of deceased and living donation programs in many countries (francis & francis 2010: 284). despite widespread prohibitions against trade 1 to avoid ambiguity, i use the term ‘provider’ to refer to all individuals from whom organs are removed for the purpose of transplantation, rather than ‘donor.’ as the latter term implies both voluntariness and altruistic motivation. ‘donor’ and ‘vendor’ will be used to distinguish between voluntary altruistic providers and voluntary remunerated providers. martin long road from the kidney bazaar portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 2 in human organs in keeping with the policy of the world health organization (who 2010b), globalized networks of organ trafficking and travel for commercial organ transplantation have emerged and markets have flourished in numerous developing countries (shimazono 2007). unmet needs for transplantation in wealthier nations encourage some patients to travel to countries with a plentiful supply of desperately poor vendors and absent or ineffective regulation of procurement and transplantation programs. in this paper, i draw on the history of transplantation in pakistan to highlight the factors that contribute to travel for commercial organ transplantation and those that are influential in eradication of the practice. following the introduction of the transplantation of human tissues and organ ordinance in 2007 (government of pakistan 2007), pakistan has evolved from a major ‘hotspot’ for kidney sales to a successful model for developing countries establishing transplantation programs (persy et al. 2010: c125). i will argue that the example of pakistan should inspire other countries in the region and throughout the world to renew their efforts to promote more effective and ethical access to organ transplantation through the pursuit of national self-sufficiency. a brief review of global trade in organs during the last decade pakistan became infamous throughout the world as one of the best known and largest markets for human kidneys. in the absence of legislation governing organ procurement activities, as many as 1500 kidneys were sold annually to foreign patients (rizvi et al. 2009). research into the pakistan market provides evidence of the impact of unregulated trade on kidney vendors and recipients, as well as highlighting the typical features of such markets. vendors are drawn from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities and are often subjected to coercion, deception or fraud and inadequate standards of care (naqvi et al. 2007 & 2008). as a result, they frequently suffer both physical and psychological complications, fail to obtain a benefit from their payment and may end up regretting their involvement in the practice (moazam et al. 2009). domestic patients who purchase kidneys as well as transplant tourists face higher risks of medical complications compared with those who receive organs from unpaid donors (see rizvi et al. 2010; alghamdi et al. 2010), and may also experience deception, fraud and exploitation (shimazono 2007: 958). martin long road from the kidney bazaar portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 3 most countries have been touched by transplant tourism as either destinations or sources of transplant tourists. for example, india, the philippines, china, egypt, iraq, parts of south america, and turkey have all gained notoriety as organ suppliers for wealthy domestic patients and foreigners from all over the world, including australia, the united states, japan, israel, taiwan and saudi arabia (see shimazono 2007; budiani-saberi & delmonico 2008). the work of anthropologists such as nancy scheper-hughes, a cofounder of organswatch, journalists and human rights organizations such as the coalition for organ failure solutions has put a human face and voice to the disembodied organs sold on the market, sharing the narratives of countless kidney vendors from across the world and advocating on their behalf (cohen 2003; scheperhughes 2004 & 2011; moazam et al. 2009; budiani-saberi & mostafa 2010; smith 2011). whether in moldova, south africa, nicaragua or pakistan, the tale of an organ seller is often remarkably similar. desperate poverty and naïve hope for a better future leads the young, healthy and ill-informed to sell kidneys to powerful brokers in circumstances that rapidly spiral out of the vendor’s control. hasty operations, inadequate payments and impaired health leave vendors deeper in debt, unable to return to work and socially isolated (scheper-hughes 2004: 49–52). frequently, organ selling becomes a staple feature of local economies, with devastating consequences for communities (moazam et al. 2009). the who estimates that 10 percent of organ transplants performed worldwide involve transplant tourists, representing as many as 9000 a year (who 2007). although recent data on current markets is lacking, there are ongoing reports of trade in some countries, including egypt (irin 2011), south america (smith 2011), china (echevarría 2010), india (carvalho 2011), the philippines (padilla 2009) and pakistan (‘another kidney’ 2011). the trade persists despite the work of the who, individual countries and professional organizations that have helped to promote awareness of the issue, for example through the creation of the declaration of istanbul on organ trafficking and transplant tourism (participants 2008), to encourage and assist in the development of legislation prohibiting organ trafficking, and to prosecute those involved in illegal organ trading activities (see smith 2010; siddique 2011). although at present only saudi arabia and iran offer legal payments to organ providers or their families, and iran formally prohibits transplant tourism (ghods & mahdavi 2007: 651), emerging support for the payment of organ providers by some medical professionals, policy makers and martin long road from the kidney bazaar portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 4 bioethicists makes legal organ markets in a number of additional countries a real possibility in the future (satel 2009; steinbuch 2010; l. smith 2011). the endorsement of legal organ markets may undermine efforts to discourage less regulated markets by promoting the commodification of transplantation and organ providers. it also risks simply relocating the hazards of transplant tourism within national transplantation programs. in iran, for example, studies suggest that organ vendors—like those in pakistan—are disproportionately drawn from disadvantaged communities and face significant risks of harm (zargooshi 2001; malakhoutian et al. 2007). the poor comprise 84 percent of all vendors, but only 50 percent of recipients (ghods et al. 2001). in saudi arabia, where expatriates comprise roughly 30 percent of the resident population, 54 percent of potential organ providers in 2009 were nonsaudis (scot 2009: 54), while only 16.5 percent of dialysis patients were non-saudis (scot 2009: 37).2 inequities between potential organ provider and recipient populations are characteristic of all organ markets, whether illegal or regulated, domestic or international. at the level of policy making, internationally and domestically, efforts to prevent transplant tourism have been marked by an emphasis on the prohibition of organ markets and the importance of establishing better access to transplantation services within countries, thereby minimizing demand for transplantation abroad. the who and numerous professional organizations have therefore highlighted the pursuit of national self-sufficiency in organ transplantation as a priority goal for policy makers. for example, as in the declaration of istanbul on organ trafficking and transplant tourism (participants 2008), and in the recent updated who guiding principles on organ, cell and tissue transplantation (who 2008). the importance of this goal was emphasised at the most recent who global consultation on organ transplantation (collaborators 2011). 2 although this discrepancy implies inequitable access to transplantation for expatriate workers in saudi arabia, it is difficult to interpret the figures in the absence of more explanatory data, for example regarding the prevalence of renal failure in the expatriate population. additionally, some non-saudis accessing dialysis may be from neighbouring countries such as yemen, rather than resident expatriates. unfortunately, no information is currently available regarding access to transplantation in saudi arabia for foreign residents, despite the fact they comprise a potentially significant proportion of the organ provider population. martin long road from the kidney bazaar portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 5 the self-sufficiency model the concept of national self-sufficiency dates from the mid 1970s when the world health organization first began to advocate the promotion of national blood supplies from voluntary unpaid donors, and to discourage commercial outsourcing that posed quality and safety risks for recipients and exploitation of the poor in foreign countries. although the development of international trade in blood and plasma products has to some extent undermined the ideology of self-sufficiency with respect to blood procurement and regional—rather than national self-sufficiency—is now promoted in places such as europe (farrugia 2009: 126), it remains an important aspiration for many countries (who 2010a). furthermore, despite the globalized nature of tissue banking for use in research and therapeutic products and the complex relationship between notfor-profit and for-profit entities engaged in the procurement, storage, modification and use of both human blood and tissue, societies maintain a strong interest in and responsibility for the treatment of their human biological materials (hbm). within the borders of national healthcare systems, however porous, many nations will strive to meet their own needs for such materials for a number of reasons: it is the most effective, inexpensive or reliable way to do so; they wish to avoid unethical outsourcing practices; or simply because of a sense of national ownership of their bodies and any detached materials. the same concerns and principles identified in the history of national selfsufficiency in blood transfusion may now be applied to organ provision and transplantation. self-sufficiency with respect to any human biological materials such as blood, organs, cells or tissue refers to ‘the achievement by a population of an adequate supply of hbm and healthcare services, such that the needs of the population for therapeutic procedures involving these materials may be met using their own resources’ (martin 2010: 386). while the achievement of true self-sufficiency in organ transplantation may remain a distant goal in many countries, adoption of this goal will guide more effective practical strategies and ethical policies concerning organ procurement and transplantation. the inherent reciprocity of the self-sufficiency approach—in which all members of a community are considered potential transplant recipients and potential organ donors— encourages public participation in efforts to minimize needs for transplantation and to optimize the availability of resources, thereby enhancing progress towards selfsufficiency. the prohibition of commercial organ provision in the self-sufficiency martin long road from the kidney bazaar portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 6 model promotes social equity by removing incentives that would likely result in a disproportionate number of poorer individuals contributing to the organ pool. it also minimizes the risk of conflicts of interest among those responsible for the oversight and operation of procurement and transplantation programs by reducing commercialism within the programs. the practical features of the self-sufficiency approach may be summarized as follows: (i) legislation; (ii) organization; (iii) healthcare infrastructure; (iv) registries and data collection; (v) public health and education; (vi) community consultation. a multifaceted approach to policy making that considers each of these elements enables the development of synergistic strategies that optimize the efficient use of resources. for example, public health campaigns can both minimize demand for transplantation by preventing diseases that contribute to organ failure, and encourage donation. the importance of each practical element, the role of government, professionals and community, and the ethos of equity, reciprocity and public ownership of transplantation, are manifest in the story of pakistan’s progress toward self-sufficiency. features of the self-sufficiency model in pakistan legislation in contrast to its former global notoriety as an international kidney bazaar, pakistan is slowly but surely making progress towards self-sufficiency. despite the enormous political, social and environmental challenges the country has faced in recent years, the combined efforts of pakistani transplant professionals, policy makers and community members in conjunction with international support, have produced dramatic changes in the transplantation landscape. in 2007, the transplantation of human tissues and organ ordinance was issued, formally prohibiting payment for organ provision, legalizing deceased organ donation and defining the role of national authorities in monitoring and regulating transplantation activities (government of pakistan 2007). despite legal challenges from some individuals and groups who have sought to restore trade in organs, the ordinance was upheld by the shariat court and the bill passing the legislation was ratified in march 2010 (bile et al. 2010). although its impact cannot be fully evaluated as yet, the criminalization of the organ trade has discouraged transplant tourism to pakistan (rizvi et al. 2009: 125). perhaps more importantly, it has laid the foundations for the pursuit of self-sufficiency. martin long road from the kidney bazaar portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 7 organization and infrastructure the ordinance resulted in the establishment of the human organ and tissue authority, which now accredits hospitals that may engage in organ procurement and transplantation (bile et al. 2010). the identification of infrastructure required for safe and effective transplant programs helps to protect donors and recipients from inadequate care, while monitoring systems strive to ensure voluntariness and non-commercialism in donation. more general improvements in public healthcare programs and infrastructure in pakistan will enhance existing transplant services and promote better access to transplantation. registries and data collection pakistani healthcare professionals have already highlighted the need to establish registries to evaluate programs and facilitate follow-up care of patients (bile et al. 2010). at the who third global consultation on organ transplantation held in march 2010, which focused on the development of strategies to promote progress towards selfsufficiency, the importance of registries and the value of comprehensive data collection were emphasized by a working group dedicated to this issue (collaborators 2011: s75– s80). such monitoring not only safeguards patients and facilitates identification and prevention of illegal practices, it provides policy makers and professionals with the information required to enable constant performance evaluation and improvement. public health programs and education recognizing the economic and social costs of organ procurement and transplantation, the self-sufficiency model strives not only to maximize the availability of organs and transplantation services, but also to minimize needs for transplantation through the prevention and treatment of diseases that may contribute to organ failure. in conjunction with education about organ donation, public health programs may be the most effective way to achieve progress towards self-sufficiency, particularly in the setting of scarce healthcare resources. additional benefits of such programs include the opportunity to address more widespread healthcare needs in addition to those of patients with organ failure. in countries such as pakistan, organ failure may not be foremost among healthcare priorities, and investment in public health represents an opportunity to address urgent healthcare needs while laying the groundwork for future transplantation and donation programs (see for example persy, et al., 2010). martin long road from the kidney bazaar portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 8 community consultation although deceased organ donation is now legal and supported by religious authorities, as the shariat court decision demonstrates, only two deceased donors have provided transplants in pakistan (rizvi et al. 2010). lack of the requisite healthcare infrastructure, as well as the need for public education and the evolution of social attitudes towards deceased donation mean that deceased procurement programs will take time. one study, for example, reveals that roughly one third of residents in karachi believed organ donation was endorsed by religious authorities, one third believed it opposed, and a third simply did not know (saleem et al. 2009) the study found that perceived religious support for organ donation, as well as socioeconomic status and education were the most important variables influencing willingness to donate (saleem et al. 2009). although there has been widespread support for deceased organ donation by islamic religious authorities throughout the world, the issues surrounding end of life care for organ donors and organ procurement remain philosophically complex, both in islam and other faiths, and may prove challenging in practice (rady et al. 2009). in the meantime, living kidney donation offers many pakistanis suffering end-stage renal failure the best, most cost-effective life saving treatment for their disease, and may be strongly motivated as a social responsibility or religious duty (saleem et al. 2009). in the following section, i shall examine the importance of community in the self-sufficiency model using the example of the sindh institute of urology and transplantation (siut) in karachi. the siut program of living kidney donation and transplantation reveals how community participation and engagement with transplantation contributes to selfsufficiency at both the local and national levels. the ethos of siut despite the tragedy of rampant commercialism prominent in my account thus far, the history of transplantation in pakistan is equally distinguished by an extraordinary example of excellence in healthcare. siut has not only lead the battle against organ markets and the evolution of transplantation policy in pakistan, it provides an invaluable illustration of the self-sufficiency ethos for other provinces and countries throughout the world. founded by dr adib rizvi in 1991, siut began as a small dialysis unit in the urology department of the civil hospital in karachi, which has become the largest public sector health care centre in the country, providing free medical care in urology and transplantation surgery, as well as dialysis to the poor (rizvi et al. 2003; siut martin long road from the kidney bazaar portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 9 2010). only related live donors are permitted and payment for donation is prohibited. in addition to developing the institute, dr rizvi and his colleagues have also fought hard to discourage transplant commercialism and tourism by reporting on its impact on kidney vendors and by lobbying for the 2007 ordinance. in its mission statement, siut identifies the following goals: to provide free, comprehensive and modern medical facilities in urology, nephrology, liver disease, related cancers and transplantation; to train manpower in these specialties at all levels (i.e. doctors, nurses, technologist, technicians and others); to conduct comprehensive research in relevant areas of our specialties to increase the body of knowledge worldwide; to increase public awareness of prevention of diseases in these areas. (siut 2010) siut now performs over 500 renal transplants and provides over 144 000 dialysis sessions each year (siut 2010). largely funded by government and charitable contributions, it demonstrates how a non-commercial approach to transplantation and organ procurement can successfully meet public needs (persy et al. 2009). it continues to grow with the creation of a new campus in northern sindh province and has also helped to provide emergency medical relief camps for flood victims throughout pakistan (siut 2010). among the factors contributing to the success of siut is its emphasis on non-commercialism and public healthcare. public funding and charitable support for the institute is undoubtedly motivated by the fact that it provides services to the poor. although at present kidney donors are essentially limited to those able and willing to donate to relatives in need, it is probable that societal recognition of the value of siut services will encourage support for participation in deceased donation. if cultural beliefs and misconceptions regarding deceased donation can be addressed, the public trust in and support for services at siut will encourage efforts to contribute towards this community resource through donation. significantly, siut demonstrates that even poor living kidney providers can be successfully motivated by altruism and solidarity rather than commercial considerations. donors within the siut program give kidneys to relatives or friends: members of their own communities rather than individuals rendered foreign by nationality or disproportionate wealth. this fact should prompt reflection by those who claim that, ‘altruism has failed’ and who argue that only the creation of markets can succeed in meeting needs for organs (see satel 2009). the rate limiting factors for self-sufficiency martin long road from the kidney bazaar portal, vol. 8, no. 2, july 2011. 10 in sindh province, as in many parts of the world, are primarily shortages of healthcare resources, lack of access to donation and transplantation services and the education and promotion of public participation in donation. learning from pakistan pakistan’s history of transplantation is one of extreme contrasts, from the miserable consequences of kidney selling noted earlier to the achievements of siut. it demonstrates the risks of those made vulnerable by extreme poverty and the progress that can be achieved in healthcare despite such poverty when professionals, governments and communities unite in pursuit of common goals. pakistan faces enormous challenges if it is eventually to meet all needs for transplantation and to completely eradicate organ trading and transplant tourism, but it has made significant progress in recent years. it should serve as a warning and an inspiration to other countries engaged in transplantation activities both domestically and abroad. transplant tourism trades on existing international socioeconomic inequities, just as domestic organ markets rely on and may exacerbate injustice within national borders. organ and transplantation commercialism fails to promote sustainable systems of organ provision and transplantation, in particular through the establishment of deceased donation programs, and contributes few, if any, lasting benefits to organ vendors and their societies. those who argue that individuals should be ‘free’ to sell their organs must remember that those most likely to sell are also least likely to have access to transplantation, and that transplant tourists are not obtaining ‘surplus’ organs from foreign communities, but further diminishing the scarce transplantation resources of these communities. the pursuit of national or regional self-sufficiency, in the context of communities working together to meet common needs for transplantation, offers a comprehensive and ethical solution to the problem of organ shortages and transplant tourism. although it requires effort, investment and commitment by governments, 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[accessed 7 june 2011]. steinbuch, r. 2010, ‘unos-coordinated organ sales: toward improving the health and welfare of the historically underprivileged.’ journal of the national medical association, vol. 102, no. 1, 41–43. who 2007, ‘who proposes global agenda on organ transplantation.’ online, available: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2007/pr12/en/index.html [accessed 5 november 2010.] who 2008, ‘who guiding principles on human cell, tissue and organ transplantation’ (updated edition). geneva: world health organization. online, available: www.who.int/entity/transplantation/guiding_principlestransplantation_wha63.22en.pdf [accessed 6 october 2010.] who 2010a, ‘availability, safety and quality of blood products,’ wha 63.12: 1–4. online, available: http://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/wha63/a63_r12-en.pdf [accessed december 28, 2010]. who 2010b, ‘resolution on human organ and tissue transplantation,’ wha 63.22. online, available: http://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/wha63/a63_r22-en.pdf [accessed 28 december 2010]. zargooshi, j. 2001, ‘quality of life of iranian kidney “donors,”’ the journal of urology, vol. 166, no. 5: 1790–1799. microsoft word portalencarnacaocopyeditgalley2011final+je portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. terpsichorean architecture special issue, guest edited by tony mitchell. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. musical structure as narrative in rock john encarnacao, university of western sydney introduction the word narrative is often applied to studies of pop and rock music as an organising principle. musical eras and stylistic movements are arranged to tell particular histories; the works of a particular artist are construed as tracing a stylistic journey; the life story of an artist is invoked to give greater understanding to this or that album, as in ‘that’s his divorce album’ or ‘all her records have been crap since she went to rehab.’ in each instance, musical works are woven into a constructed narrative in order to make sense of the history of popular music or of particular repertoires. the intention of this paper is to contribute to a discussion of narrative as it occurs in individual examples of rock music. at this level, the idea of narrative is most readily applied to a song’s lyrics—the extent to which linear sense can be made, or the extent to which a recognisable emotional state is evoked. rather than this, though, my intention is to consider the assumptions of narrative from which the structure of much rock music proceeds. in particular, this research stands at odds with approaches that concentrate on the lyrical content of rock music. though a study of song lyrics can provide much insight into the attitudes and philosophies of particular groups of people in particular places at particular times, and even help to shape discourses about culture at a broader level, to ignore the sound of pop and rock tracks is to do them a great disservice. the impact of these pieces fuses sound with ideas embodied in the words. a song lyric need not conform to a encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 2 narrative structure, or make literal sense. nirvana’s ‘smells like teen spirit’ (1991) makes for a telling example. a look at the lyric arguably reveals little literal sense (‘a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido’), but combined with the music, a sense of generational torpor, and (perhaps) a fight against this, seems to be transmitted with great force and atmosphere. more to the point, as is often the case with rock recordings, the sound is not designed so that the lyrics are readily decipherable. to concentrate on the lyrics here is to ignore the basic premise of the recording, and, one might say, rock music in general, which is to evoke a state of mind through sound rather than words alone or as the central element. the importance of lyrical content to the reception of a rock track may be lesser or greater depending on the example, but even the work of that most celebrated of lyricists, bob dylan, is conveyed at least as much by the overall sound of the recordings, and the timbre and phrasing of his voice, as through the words themselves, and whatever narrative sense they may or may not make.1 walser (1993: 39–41) cautions against the problems that may be encountered when ‘oral modes’ such as music, by definition episodic, ephemeral and dynamic, are analysed in terms of literate modes, which are narrative, sequential and static. i agree with him to the extent that analyses of rock music which centre on musical scores or song lyrics fall into this trap, but i also regard as valid gracyk’s assertion (1996: viii–x) that rock as a phenomenon is defined by the primacy of the recording as text. i intend to explore this friction between music as a dynamic entity and rock songs as recorded artefacts. although many writers are cautious about trying to define a nebulous term such as ‘rock music,’2 for the purposes of this paper, i suggest that instrumentation is key to what is broadly addressed by the term. we might refer to rock music as relying predominantly upon instrumental combinations of (usually electric) guitars, keyboards, drums and singing, is often (but not always) song-oriented, and stylistically descending from american traditions of blues, country and jazz.3 1 two examples of popular music studies (chosen relatively at random, as there are many) that concentrate almost exclusively on the lyrics of songs are smith (2007) and adelt (2005). while smith is engaged in an investigation of history and collective memory, and uses blues recordings from 1924–1941 as a primary source, adelt, to my mind, mistakes the reading of songs’ lyrics for a wholesale engagement with young’s output of the mid–1970s. 2 witness allan moore, in the opening paragraph of his rock: the primary text: ‘i shall begin by refusing to offer a definition, in the belief that all readers will bring with them common-sense, and highly diverse, understandings of what “rock” is to them’ (2001: 1). 3 one of the blind peer-reviewers of this work suggested that rock is ‘increasingly experienced as multimedia theatre.’ while this is true in many cases, such a consideration is beyond the scope of this paper. encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 3 to paraphrase stephenson (2002: 121–143) is also to recount the accepted wisdom of the basic elements of popular song form. a verse is a section that recurs musically with different lyrics each time, or in at least two instances. a chorus is a section that recurs musically with the same, or similar, lyrics each time. a bridge is a section of contrast— in verse-chorus form, it generally only occurs after we hear a verse and chorus, and often only after two verses and choruses; in verse-bridge form, it is the section that contrasts with the verse and for various reasons does not conform to our expectations of a chorus. in verse-bridge form, there is often a refrain, a line or pair of lines that breaks into the form at regular intervals, often as the last line of the verse.4 there are other identifiable differences between these types of sections—for example, choruses and refrains commonly contain the title of a song, and backing vocals often enter at a song’s chorus (hence the term). there are generally fewer words in a chorus than a verse as narrative detail gives way to summation or exhortation. pre-choruses are identifiable as common bridges, of sorts, between verses and choruses.5 there are also, of course, exceptions to these guidelines, such as songs with successive choruses that offer different sets of lyrics. by and large, these definitions are workable and provide a basis for what is to follow, but i think it important to consider recordings that pursue strategies for structure that do not fit into these archetypes, and to suggest how such approaches might be collected into new categories. for this, i will use susan mcclary’s idea of ‘quest narrative’ (2000).6 i am also interested in the idea that structure in music is not simply a linear phenomenon, but also articulated by the character of, and fluctuations in, what i will call ‘soundmass,’ which may be as readily perceived three-dimensionally, as linearly. moore’s sound-box (2001: 120–126) is a descriptive frame comprised of three axes—vertical, 4 a good example of a refrain is the couplet ‘something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is / do you, mr jones?,’ from bob dylan’s ‘ballad of a thin man.’ note that a refrain is easily distinguishable from a chorus in that it does not constitute a new section. 5 pre-choruses are not included in stephenson’s formulation. 6 amongst the literature surveyed for this study, the approaches to the idea of narrative found in essays on western art music differ greatly from that offered here. for example, maus (1997) engages with writings that seek to chart the emotional content of pieces of music through the attribution of dramatic characteristics to musical gestures, such as melodies. nicholls cautions against ‘musical narrativization: an interpretative act in which a listener invents an explanatory response to events in a composition’ (2007: 300). his own analyses are rather literal in the sense that popular songs that can be conceived of as containing dialogue or discourse between characters are examined for musical support or counterpoint to the storytelling. a similar approach is followed by neal (2007), with particular attention to narrative or episodic story arcs and their intersections with standard variations of verse-chorus-bridge forms. none of these approaches is adopted here. encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 4 horizontal and depth/distance, with which his analyses account for spatiality in the recorded text. i use the term sound-mass to indicate the overall sonic identity of a piece, made up primarily of timbre, dynamics, density and register, parameters which writers such as middleton (2000) and moore have identified as often downplayed in musicology’s historical bias towards harmony, rhythm and form. as constructs, both the sound-box and sound-mass attempt to deal with the sound of rock music as presented through recordings, rather than (or in moore’s case as well as) progressions of rhythms and harmonies—variations on formulae which tell us only so much. moore’s sound-box is based on ‘a model which suggests that the instruments and voices of rock are stratified into relatively discrete layers’ (2001: 33), which accord to the functions of rhythm, melody, bass line and harmonic accompaniment. this may be useful for many, even the majority of, rock recordings, but tends not to apply to what i term ‘immersive’ forms later in this paper. in addition, i argue that some of the recordings discussed here deal with music as a process rather than a mapping of received formal constructs. for this i draw upon judy lochhead’s concept of forming and formbuilding (1992). quest narrative and song form in conventional wisdom (2000), mcclary, in defining tonality, and nineteenth-century western art music practice as structurally distinct from the blues, writes: the background of a tonal composition … proceeds through a series of arrivals, beginning in the tonic key, moving through a few other keys, and returning finally home to the tonic. this background thereby traces a trajectory something like a quest narrative, with return to and affirmation of original identity guaranteed in advance. whereas in the blues, even narrative lyrics are rendered in strophes that minimize narrativity within the musical process, the linear unfolding of tonality almost always pursues a narrative-like series of dramatic events, regardless of the matter at hand. as anthropologists have pointed out, this kind of orientation with respect to time is so fundamental to those of us shaped by such forms that we tend to dismiss as primitive any cultural practices (whether blues or philip glass) based on other assumptions. (mcclary 2000: 66– 67) to take this further, the fundamental principle of quest narrative—that of the establishment of a stable home territory, the process of an adventure or series of episodes away from that territory, and a conclusion which returns ‘home’—is common in music, as it is in literature and film. in music, it is certainly not restricted to the classical and romantic periods of western art music that mcclary focuses on. just as sonata form is made up of exposition–development–recapitulation, the standard jazz form of head–solos–head is easily received as a quest narrative. i disagree with mcclary’s reading of blues structure; i would say that the standard 12-bar form is a encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 5 quest narrative in miniature, beginning and ending on the home chord (i) after venturing forth to chords iv and v.7 although it is, of course, missing the point to analyse blues songs solely in terms of their harmonic content, when the most important content is found (arguably) in the areas of timbre, gesture and groove, and these parameters’ interaction with the delivery of the lyric, i make this distinction because of the link between the blues form and the strophic nature of much rock music. another narrative may often be found in blues performances and recordings (though not always) in the building up of dynamics, gradation of timbre, variation in the density of arrangement, or a combination of any of these, through the duration of a performance or recording. a consideration of how musical structures are articulated, and the extent to which they accord to the default model of the quest narrative, has the potential to provide us with a useful range of analytical tools. there are various ways in which quest narrative may be articulated in rock music and those recordings that break from this convention of form seem to demand a rethinking of popular music analysis.8 two brief examples9 will outline structural norms of rock music that still account for a great deal of practice and that are easily reconciled with the idea of the quest narrative. elvis costello – ‘welcome to the working week’ (1977): verse/chorus/bridge form as quest narrative this recording has a structure typical to pop and rock: verse–chorus–verse–chorus– bridge–verse–chorus, though the initial verse is presented at a slower tempo than the rest of the song, and the final chorus is truncated. each verse-chorus unit ventures out from the home territory of the tonic key (e major) and a timbre and dynamic of relative repose at the start of the verse to a chorus which is denser, louder, features unison rhythms in the instrumentation, and does not start on the tonic chord as the verse does. the bridge extends this excursion away from home, not touching upon the tonic chord 7 if we read mcclary literally, she seems to infer that blues music is not tonal. this has to do with her conception of tonality as including all the mechanisms of nineteenth century western art music. i do not think for a moment she intends to indicate that the blues as a musical style is atonal. rather, mcclary is working from the idea that tonality in the blues is not functional in the sense of how it operates in western art music. 8 the use of the term ‘recording’ is deliberate. the term ‘song’ is inadequate here, as songs may be found in various arrangements, performances and recordings, and each version may differ in respect to structure and instrumentation. 9 i acknowledge that the selection of examples is idiosyncratic. there is no attempt made here to be representative of the broad sweep of styles that tend to be grouped under the term ‘rock.’ although further points may be made through the use of examples that are more broadly known, i am satisfied that my purpose is served by any examples that satisfactorily illustrate the argument. encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 6 at all and maintaining the thickened texture and heightened dynamic level of the chorus. note that diatonic harmony is pivotal in delineating the form here, as it often is in recordings that articulate traditional rock music structures. the experience of the sound-mass of this piece is of an ordered and hierarchical structure that supports the voice and lyric, which is itself very much front and centre. the creamy backing vocals and chiming electric guitars present a non-threatening, sixties-oriented backdrop against which costello’s snarling vocal throws easy rhymes and non-specific images coated with the envy and spite that helped to define his early image. driving it all is the quest narrative form, which ensures that the recording peaks at a ‘golden-mean’ three-quarters of the way through in the bridge section, the point harmonically and dynamically furthest away (though not far at all) from ‘home.’ the kinks – ‘everybody’s gonna be happy’ (1965): strophic form as quest narrative. a strophic form in pop/rock is one comprised of a limited number of sections—often two or three—that are repeated in the same sequence throughout the recording. we can call a single instance of this sequence of sections a strophe, and each instance of the strophe may outline a quest narrative.10 in this example, the strophe consists of versechorus, each section identifiable through its chord progression: verse: c7 / g7 (repeat) chorus: b♭ / b♭ / f / a / d / d / c / g (all chords are major triads unless indicated otherwise) the verse, though based on only two chords, sustains interest through a three part internal form, the first of which is the verse proper (with different lyrics each time), and the second (‘i know’) and third (‘come on baby ...’) of which are refrains. there is ambiguity over which of the two chords—both sevenths—is the tonic, or home, until the final three chords of the chorus point towards g. regardless, the repetition of these two chords constitutes a home territory from which the b♭ that starts the chorus ventures sharply away. although relatively concise, the harmonic disruption of the chord progression of the chorus in the context of the repetition of the verse is dramatic, and there is a sense of order being restored upon the resumption of the verse. 10 in the case of twelve-bar blues form, the words strophe, stanza and verse are often interchangeable due to the lack of a contrasting section. encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 7 the syncopation in the drums and guitars on this recording, along with its brisk tempo, make it a dance track. this is reinforced by the rhythmic contrast between verse and chorus, with the latin-clave-like syncopated snare of the verses giving way to urgent clapping on every beat in the chorus. the rhythm arrangement mirrors the underlying imperative of the quest narrative structure, which creates a peak of excitement through each chorus’s excursion away from the home territory. though the vocal sits atop the sound-mass—as is the case with virtually all pop and rock recordings up to 1966—it functions more as party-maker (‘i know,’ ‘c’mon baby,’ the goodwill of the song’s title) than costello’s combination of image and emotion. though the feeling is more participatory than in the costello track, the quest narrative form navigates us through the peaks and troughs of intensity. in their brevity, the sketches above ignore some important musical phenomena. instrumentation, arrangement and timbre are taken into account, but more concentration on these aspects might yield very differently nuanced results. also, instrumentation, harmony and musical gesture go a long way towards defining musical style. we might describe the costello track as country rock, and the kinks track as beat-group rock ‘n’ roll. entirely different analytical threads might be pursued along these lines that are beyond the scope of this paper. three categories of non-narrative rock song structure judy lochhead calls upon unpublished writings of leo trietler for a general definition of form: in a chapter titled “the shape of time”, he defines form as “the organization of periods of time with change and the effect of change,” (trietler 1976). form, then, concerns the organizational relations of parts to other parts and of parts to whole, such relationships obtaining among units of a relatively moderate to long duration. (lochhead 1992: 133) helpfully broad, applicable not only to music but to any form which is time-based, the emphasis on ‘change and the effect of change’ reminds us of the inescapability of the experience of time-based forms as linear. in response to this, and what she terms the ‘aristotelian principles of tragedy: specifically, a temporal form should have a beginning, middle, and end,’ lochhead suggests that ‘discussions of form in general and analyses of specific formal instances often do not account for the “building-up” of a whole by the accumulation of parts’ (lochhead 1992: 135). she calls this ‘forming,’ or encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 8 ‘formbuilding.’ this accumulation of parts may be considered in numerous ways; for lochhead, in her consideration of pieces by joan tower, it has to do with the way in which material returns and is transformed within a score. for our purposes, we might consider the layering of the recording process in which a form is built ‘vertically’ and in terms of depth-of-field through the construction of a distinctive sound-mass. this is the case particularly with the immersive form of animal collective’s ‘people,’ but also with the single-cell forms of pink floyd’s ‘obscured by clouds’ and smog’s ‘all your women things.’ we may also invoke the idea of formbuilding in the sense of the block-like addition of section after section in the labyrinth form of scout niblett’s ‘drummer boy.’ 1. labyrinth forms i coined this term when analysing some recent independent ‘new folk’ music, identifying structures which combine numerous sections in such a way that the terms verse, chorus, and bridge are inadequate as descriptors.11 as well as featuring a greater number of distinct sections than are commonly found in pop and rock songs, these forms often do not return to their starting points, and so are irreconcilable with the idea of quest narrative. while quest narrative forms in rock music are often episodic, they are homogenously so; labyrinth forms tend to juxtapose episodes in ways that create unfamiliar shapes. labyrinth forms share many characteristics with through-composed works. each meanders through sections without the sorts of repetition or formal plan found in more traditionally structured works. the idea of labyrinth forms is particular to pop/rock/song-based forms in that there often is repetition of sections, but this repetition is handled in such a way that the usual patterns concerning verses, choruses and bridges are not found. scout niblett – ‘drummer boy’ (2003)12 there are six distinct sections here: five sections proper, and a brief coda. as neither of the first two sections of the recording is returned to once left, there is no feeling of ‘home territory.’ each successive section strikes the listener as a new place, resulting in 11 see encarnacao (2009: 64, 89–92, 101), in which the term ‘labyrinth form’ is applied to recordings by kes and faun fables. 12 for an analysis of this song and niblett’s approach on i conjure series ep (2003) and i am (2003), see encarnacao (2007). encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 9 a structure that is truly episodic, yet, musically speaking, does not subscribe to a traditional sense of narrative. a comparison between the structure of this recording and the two already discussed is instructive: recording title sectional structure analysis ‘welcome to the working week’ a – b – a – b – c – a – b. verse (a) chorus (b) – bridge (c) form. each verse-chorus unit outlines a quest narrative, and the bridge comprises the furthest point away from the point of origin. ‘everybody’s gonna be happy’ (intro on a) a – b – a – b – a – b – b a (fade). strophic form. the strophe consists of verse (a) – chorus (b). each strophe outlines a quest narrative. ‘drummer boy’ a – b – c – d – c – d – c – e – f (coda) none of these sections is readily identifiable as verse or chorus. without a return to the point of origin or subscription to the types of sections we expect in rock recordings, there is no sense of quest narrative articulated by the structure. in the costello and kinks tracks, the alternation of sections a and b is integral to their definition as verses and choruses and helps to cement the idea of a place of origin, a move away from that place, and a return. in ‘drummer boy’ we hear four vastly contrasting sections before any of them is repeated, and neither the c nor d section functions as verse or chorus. additionally, the functional diatonic harmony of the first two examples is not evident in ‘drummer boy,’13 and this is underlined by the fact that each section is in a different tempo. these aspects upset any traditional notion of narrative as we have come to expect it to operate in song form.14 in terms of sound-mass, while each section works within a standard kit of rock instrumentation – vocals, guitars, drums – the lack of continuity between sections means that the listener is constantly readjusting to different sound-masses which individually carry connotations of the confessional singer-songwriter (a), indie/post-rock (b), hard rock (c), outsider music (d and e) and punk (e). these are not exercises in musical style, it would seem, but rather a through-composed approach to the momentary demands of mood and text. while we might be able to plot a trajectory of intensity 13 sections a, c, d and f all to some extent revolve around the pitch of e, but section b is chromatic and comes to rest on an e♭7 chord, and the riff of section e has a tonal centre of f, so the idea of a tonal centre of e for the track is much disrupted. 14 this is ironic, as part of the lyric concerns a quest: ‘no mortal man has yet succeeded in climbing the big glass mountain. / “i know” said the drummer boy “but my heart is stout and determined / and i long for adventure,”’ encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 10 through the progression of these sections that accords to a sense of narrative, with the template of traditional rock forms as the backdrop to the performance, we are struck mostly by the audacity of the dynamic and stylistic shifts. 2. single-cell forms. some rock recordings avoid the quest narrative through being completely comprised of repeated iterations of a single musical idea or tonal area. this may take the form of a riff, chord progression or drone. pink floyd – ‘obscured by clouds’ (1972) this track might be described as a restrained guitar solo over a pulsed drone. without any alternation of sections, or a strophe, and especially with the track beginning and ending with fades, we could be hearing an excerpt from a much larger, perhaps endless form. the music is presented as a process, rather than having a beginning-middle-end reinforced by formal divisions. the complete lack of harmonic movement helps to establish the sense of a prolongation of a single moment or situation, rather than a progression of episodes or a number of recurring scenes symptomatic of quest narrative structures. just as pivotal is the lack of variation in instrumentation, timbre and the articulation of rhythm. all of these musical phenomena result in our experience of the track as sound-mass. this is in distinction to the foregrounding of melodic and rhythmic characteristics that traditionally help to articulate quest narrative form in rock music. it might be possible to map some sort of narrative structure onto the use of register in the lead guitar part, but without the landmarks we usually find in the areas of harmony, instrumentation and timbre, this would be a relatively obscure approach. ‘obscured by clouds’ might also be considered an ‘immersive’ form (see below), although the mix level of the lead guitar situates it as the lead instrument, much like the vocal in the majority of pop and rock recordings. the presence of a clear lead instrument or vocal in a recording takes us away from immersion as we become spectators to the actions of the lead part as protagonist. smog – ‘all your women things’ (1996)15 in what is a common approach for this artist, this recording repeats a single three-chord progression for the entirety of its seven-minute duration. while this progression quickly 15 again, for a discussion of smog/bill callahan’s approach, see encarnacao (2007). encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 11 establishes a sense of ‘home,’ the lack of a contrasting section results in the feeling of the song ‘not going anywhere.’ that is, as with the pink floyd example, the expectation of ‘change or the effect of change’ is thwarted. there is no poetic form to the lyric to help further divide the piece into sections, even though there are some lines that recur. the slow tempo, smooth timbres of acoustic guitar and cello, the low register of the voice, and the constant gestural and harmonic repetition invite readings of depression, regret, comfort, even sedation, from the sound-mass. there is an intimacy to the dry sound, close miking, and delivery of bill callahan’s voice that draws our focus towards both the vocal and the lyrics. although swells and dips in the sound-mass are achieved through the addition and subtraction of instrumental layers, and at some level we may perceive these as contributing to a ‘journey,’ the resistance to sectional change is highly unusual in rock song form and focuses the listener on a static emotional state. in fact, although the static emotional state is a common gambit in pop and rock lyrics, this stasis is generally juxtaposed with the contrast between sections that results in a sense of musical narrative. in ‘all your women things,’ the sense of tableau or frozen moment of the lyric is mirrored by the structure of the recording. this underlines the extent to which (at least) two streams of narrative are often in operation, and in contradiction, in rock recordings – the quest narrative driven by the imperatives of sectional contrast and a piece’s climax, and the situation or emotional state offered by the lyric. 3. immersive forms in this type, sectional contrasts that are generally associated with narrative structure may be present but are overshadowed by the character of the sound-mass. a concentration on timbre and texture pushes harmonic elements, a definitive signifier of sectional change, into the background. the voice tends to be a strand in the texture not as differentiated from the rest of the mix, and not as high in the mix, as we are used to in the context of quest narrative forms. the stratification of texture identified by moore and heard clearly in the examples thus far is compromised, even obliterated in some cases. a feeling of immersion in the sound-mass can result in a more participatory response to the work and encourages more of a physical and sensual interaction than the emotional and intellectual responses prompted by quest narrative forms. this is not to say that physical, sensual, emotional and intellectual responses are separable, but that immersive forms have a particular appeal to the physical and sensual. encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 12 theredsunband – ‘pavement’ (2003) the sound-mass here is made up of a highly distorted guitar with very little treble, two languid voices (one female, one male), drum-kit and tambourine. though the form is punctuated by the refrain, which features the song’s title, the experience of the track is perhaps more of its sound-mass than the succession of sections or musical ideas. a verse/bridge form is buried in the sound, the bridge discernible through a subtle change in melody, but the sectional contrast is obscured by the accompaniment, which remains the same for the bridge as the verse. some sense of climax is discernible in the rise in vocal register and dynamics in the next to last verse/refrain, but this, again, is very subtle compared to the sense of ‘quest’ embodied in the structures already discussed where sectional contrast is much more clearly articulated. rather than negotiating a journey with a relatively predictable trajectory, the listener is immersed in the soundmass, coming up for air, as it were, in the textural pause of each refrain. animal collective – ‘people’ (2006) although layers of instrumentation build up gradually towards the entry of the vocal at two minutes into the recording, rather than forming a procession through contrasting sections, this piece, like ‘pavement’ is defined more by its ‘three-dimensional’ soundmass than by its linear form. either the receiver (listener seems too restricted a term) of this music surrenders to immersion in the sound-mass, or she is likely to find the repetition unengaging. if pressed, one might say there is a verse (‘yeah, yeah-eah/yeah, yeah-eah’) and refrain (the ‘people!!!!!!’ scream) structure discernible, but this is buried beneath shimmering guitar textures and blasting drum accents. to define this simple strophe as containing verse and bridge is to stretch the definitions of these terms to breaking point. one might also argue that the gradual build of layers at the start of the recording, and the quick depletion of them at the end, constitutes a quest narrative articulated by the density of the sound-mass rather than by sections defined by contrasting harmonic progressions. this is the most conspicuous example of those presented here of lochhead’s formbuilding, the layers accreting gradually in such a way that they are relatively indistinguishable to the ear.16 this can also be true of strophic forms, where 16 it is worth noting that for animal collective around this time (2006), this practice of gradual accretion/depletion of layers, with melodic elements buried, and occasionally rising up through the sonic encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 13 the miniature quest narrative of each iteration of the strophe contributes to a larger quest narrative, with density, register, dynamics and timbre articulating a sense of goal and return. while it is important to acknowledge that quest narrative can emerge through the timbral and textural trajectory of the sound-mass (and, in fact, this often happens in tandem with the structural process of quest narrative form), the omission or obfuscation of verse-chorus-bridge or strophic structures in immersive forms leads us to experience rock recordings in an entirely different way. conclusion all of the examples here that avoid or obscure the conventional structural markers that result in the quest narrative shape downplay harmonic contrast in favour of timbral contrast or an aesthetic that embraces minimal musical means or material. these structures are articulated either through repetition or a drone aesthetic (single-cell and immersive forms) or a multiplicity of sections that explodes conventional rock song form (labyrinth forms). at the risk of drawing the sorts of parallels to classical music that walser and others have cautioned against, it is as if rock music might be said to be going through a process of exploration not dissimilar to that embarked upon by western art music composers of the period 1920–1970. as lochhead asserts, ‘the twentieth century … has witnessed the erosion of the belief that the aristotelian principles of aesthetics are absolute. composers have compositionally explored alternate means of temporal organization’ (1992: 134). these include, but are not limited to: edgard varèse, who initiated a move towards timbre and texture as the chief articulators of structure; the pioneers of musique concrète and electronic composition such as pierre henry, pierre shaeffer, john cage and karlheinz stockhausen, where harmony and rhythm are often subordinated to the phenomena of sound-as-itself; and minimalists la monte young, steve reich, terry riley and philip glass. i am not suggesting that rock music is ‘behind,’ and ‘catching up to’ art music, or that art music is the sole bastion of innovation. pop and rock have always had their own possibilities and effects. it is also apparent that in rock music, structures have always been articulated through sound itself as much as by harmonic or rhythmic organisation. murk, was as much part of an improvisatory performance practice as studio technique, as witnessed by the author at a concert at newtown rsl, (‘@newtown’) sydney, australia on 4 november 2006. encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 14 it is hoped that this paper might serve as a starting point for the consideration of the different structural paradigms that can be discerned in popular music. the most obvious antecedents to the examples presented here might be the velvet underground and german (‘krautrock’) groups such as can, faust and tangerine dream, all active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and all of whom experimented with structure. since that time, the number of rock artists who have made recordings where structures might be best described as labyrinth, immersive, or single-cell, is immense. in particular, there has been a great rise in single-cell and immersive forms in the first decade of the twenty-first century, with new stylistic fusions such as avant-folk (e.g. six organs of admittance, charalambides), avantand psychedelic rock (e.g. akron/family, animal collective, gang gang dance), and punk-art collisions (e.g. castings, black dice).17 however, we need not confine ourselves to the fringes of rock music to find use for the formal categories introduced here. the funk of james brown from the mid-sixties through to the early 1970s (for example) offers another opportunity to consider immersive forms. though articulated by polyrhythms, we may experience many of these recordings as pulsating sound-masses rather than analyse the rhythmic components. of course, this is true also of a great number of rock recordings, but most of these are overlaid by the quest narrative structure articulated by verse-chorus-bridge or strophic forms. by contrast, many classic funk sides by brown—for example, ‘mother popcorn’ (1969) and ‘sex machine’ (1970)—are virtually single-cell forms only broken up by a single detour to a bridge. a study of the structural paradigms presented by electronic dance music, or hip hop, using the categories suggested in this paper, might also be instructive, as it would help to explain the extent to which various examples are related to, rely on, or reject, structural conventions of pop and rock. one of the most immediate uses of this approach to musical structure might be to rethink the ways in which recordings as texts are related, irrespective of style or genre. that is, the recognition of labyrinth, immersive and single-cell forms might be used to group pieces apart from stylistic types predicated largely by rhythm and gesture. this approach also invites the comparison of examples of rock music with narrative and nonnarrative approaches to other disciplines, particularly film and literature. straying from 17 the extent to which some of these artists, and/or individual recordings by them, might be described as rock is open to debate. encarnacao musical structure as narrative in rock portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 15 structural norms might be seen as representative of an approach to the history of a culture, a reluctance on the part of an artist to be aligned too closely to one movement or another. acknowledgments this essay was completed as part of the professional development program at the university of western sydney. reference list adelt, u. 2005, ‘“hard to say the meaning”: neil young’s enigmatic songs of the 1970s,’ journal of popular music studies, vol. 17, no. 2: 162–174. encarnacao, j. 2007, ‘cult musicians versus technology: transcending 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university press, oxford, 104–121. moore, a. f. 2001, rock: the primary text. ashgate, aldershot & burlington. neal, j. r. 2007, ‘narrative paradigms, musical signifiers, and form as function in country music,’ music theory spectrum, no. 29: 41–72. nicholls, d. 2007, ‘narrative theory as an analytical tool in the study of popular music texts,’ music & letters, vol. 88, no. 2: 297–315. smith, c. 2007, ‘going to the nation: the idea of oklahoma in early blues recordings,’ popular music, vol. 26, no. 1: 83–96. stephenson, ken 2002, what to listen for in rock. yale university press, new haven & london. walser, r. 1993, running with the devil: power, gender and madness in heavy metal music, wesleyan university press, hanover, nh. discography animal collective 2006, ‘people,’ people ep, spunk. james brown 1969, ‘mother popcorn (you got to have a mother for me),’ king 45 rpm single, collected on the cd of jb (sex machine and other soul classics), polydor, 1985. james brown 1970, ‘get up (i 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http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal 重建帝國﹕ 歷史正劇與中國當代民族主義在大眾文化中的新的表現形式 孔书玉 this paper explores the discourse of cultural nationalism and its recent articulation in historical tv dramas (lishi ju): tv serials set in the chinese imperial past and depicting court politics and the private lives of imperial families. first, i briefly survey the recent resurgence of historical drama on the tv screen, especially comparing two different ways of representing history: “history light” (xishuo) and “history orthodox” (zhengju). while history light, a new genre strongly influenced by the costume dramas imported from hong kong and taiwan, emphasizes the entertainment values of popular culture and adopts a postmodern attitude towards history, history orthodox renews the pedagogical tradition and the moralistic narrative of historical drama in modern china since the may fourth enlightenment movement. i then focus on tv dramas in the history orthodox mode and their ideological messages, examining two representative works by hu mei: yongzheng dynasty (yongzheng wangchao, 1999) and the great emperor wu of han (hanwu dadi, 2005). while drawing attention to the various narrative strategies, intertextualities and audio-visual styles employed in these dramas to represent the glorious national history and portray a strong leader (the emperor) as national hero, i also provide a contextual analysis of the production and circulation of these two dramas as well as the critical and media response to them, to reveal the social agencies and social formation of these dramas behind the screen. i suggest that the revisionist reframing of the past in historical tv drama reflects a new nationalist historical consciousness and cultural identity borne out of china’s rapid rise and aspirations to become an economic and political superpower. 引 語 近二十年來﹐電視劇隨著大眾傳媒和流行文化的飛速發展﹐已經成為一個龐大的文 化產業。同時它也正取代了文學和電影﹐作為後文字時代最大眾化的敘事形式，其 kong, shuyu rebuilding the empire portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 2 在建立公眾共識、溝通社會等方面起著很大的作用。正因為電視劇在商業和文化上 的重要意義﹐各種社會力量﹐從國家宣傳機構到作為傳媒人的知識分子﹐從私人投 資公司到國家電視臺﹐都積極涉足干預電視劇的生產﹐並為各自的政治、經濟和文 化利益服务。也正因為如此﹐電視劇這一種特殊的流行文化應該成為研究當代中國 文化的不可或缺的一個方面。 本文以近年來出現的一個特殊的電視劇文類歷史正劇為案例﹐通過對兩部歷史電視 劇《雍正王朝》和《漢武大帝》具體的生產和消費的背景﹐敘事策略和主題內容的 意識形態話語的分析﹐初步探討大眾文化在後社會主義的中國的意識形態作用。 具體地說﹐我將從歷史正劇重新生產和想象民族的歷史、文化和英雄等方面﹐討論 各種社會力量怎樣借助大眾文化參預重構新的民族主義的話語。 1、歷史正劇﹕“正統”文類的意識形態話語 對了解大陸電視劇的人﹐這些年來電視劇發展一個重要的現象就是古裝戲的氾濫流 行﹐而且愈演愈烈。據統計﹐古裝戲在 1999 年還只佔全年度電視劇生產的 10.7%﹐2000 年則升至 21.6%﹐2001 年更達 24.8%。tpf 1 fpt 儘管國家廣播電視總局一再 強調弘揚主旋律﹐強調電視劇要關注現實題材﹐並從很多方面控制一般歷史題材電 視劇生產數量﹐ 特別對宮廷武打類劇目的申報立項採取壓縮比例從嚴控制, tp f 2 fpt 但古 裝戲仍大行其道﹐愈演愈烈。根據央視-索福瑞媒介研究 (csm)的統計數據﹐2002 和 2003 年歷史題材的電視劇均為三分之一左右。 tpf 3 fpt 古裝戲中很大一部份是所謂歷史劇﹐即以歷史上的人物﹐事件為依托或素材的電視 劇。歷史劇作為以歷史的表現評價現實的戲劇形式與歷史小說一樣因其特殊的“以 古喻今”的敘述策略很受歡迎。在現代文藝史上﹐歷史劇在上世紀二。三十年代和 五六十年代曾一度繁榮﹐影響很大﹐如《清宮秘史》(電影与舞台劇)、《屈原》 (舞台劇)、《鴉片戰爭》(三個版本的電影)、《海瑞罷官》(舞台劇)等。每一個時 期的歷史劇都與當時社會政局密切相關﹐提出當代迫切的政治社會問題﹐並帶有其 特殊的政治意識形態的信息。 世紀末﹐隨著電視傳媒的飛速擴展﹐歷史劇也找到新的表現形式——電視歷史劇。 電視歷史劇對以往的舞台電影中的歷史劇形式有繼承也有發展。其特色主要表現為 兩個方面﹐一是帝王戲或宮廷戲的流行﹐所謂“演了皇帝演皇后﹐演了皇后演皇 妃﹐演了皇妃演皇妓﹐演了皇妓演格格”(影視評論家張鳳鑄語)﹐甚至出現一年內 五個康熙鬧熒屏的盛況。另一個特點就是所謂“戲說類”歷史劇的出現。“戲說歷 史劇”指那些以歷史上的朝代或人物為托﹐但未必有歷史事件可循的“歷史故事 劇”。歷史演義﹐歷史故事在中國敘事文學中本來就源遠流長﹐有很深厚的民間傳 統和基礎﹐如《包青天》、《乾隆微服出巡》等。而九十年代受港臺古裝戲娛樂消 遣態度的影響﹐ 例如大陸和香港合拍的《戲說乾隆》﹐大陸電視劇甩掉了以往歷 tp 1 pt 王麗娟：《關於電視歷史劇走紅的思考》﹐载《影視藝術》2003 年第 1 期﹐第 53 页。 tp 2 pt 胡占凡：《繁榮發展，淨化熒屏，為 16 大營造良好氛圍》﹐载《中國電視》2002 年第 4 期。 tp 3 pt 见《中國電視劇市場報告》﹐北京華夏出版社﹐2004 年版，第 82 页。古裝戲的流行有多方面的 原因﹐因本文篇幅無法在此探讨。 kong, shuyu rebuilding the empire portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 3 史敘事的沉重包袱﹐不僅津津樂道宮闈秘聞、兒女私情一類題材﹐而且形式上也不 求史證﹐甚至以“戲仿”、“戲說”歷史為特點。這些“戲說劇”有些還有一定的 社會關懷﹐如《宰相劉羅鍋》、《鐵齒銅牙紀曉蘭》；而另一些則干脆以消遣娛樂 為目的﹐如《還珠格格》、《孝莊密史》等。“戲說”類歷史劇對大眾文化中的娛 樂性消費性的張揚﹐ 對歷史的虛無主義態度﹐以及後現代主義的“戲仿”美學﹐ 在一定程度上衝擊了大陸歷史劇的政治教化性﹐歷史嚴肅性以及藝術上的現實主 義。很多戲說劇創造了機高的收視率﹐並因其商業效應招來大量模仿者。 正是在這一背景下﹐我們才能理解“歷史正劇”這一概念的提出及其在電視劇實踐 中的意識形態意義。“正劇”並非新創﹐但以往多在討論戲劇的表現形式上﹐與 “喜劇”﹐悲劇相區別的意義上使用。而把歷史和正劇聯係起來﹐並在電視劇這一 大眾文化形式的語境中討論﹐卻有根深的政治寓意。 歷史正劇的提出並以作品來支持其主張應該始自《雍正王朝》。這是一部當時歷史 劇中罕見的“大投資﹐高檔次﹐權威參預”的“大片”。由北京同道文化發展有限 公司和湖南廣電集團投資, 於 1999 年元旦至春節在中央電視臺一套節目的黃金時 段播出。該劇播出前後﹐大量輿論宣傳媒體炒作就都集中在“歷史正劇”這一概念 上。主創人員一再強調該劇的“正統”特點。 編劇劉和平稱該劇主題是“國家至 上”﹐導演胡玫則說她要表現帝王治國“當家難”﹐表現“一個民族的生生死 死”﹐總制片人更是說《雍正王朝》“是一部濃縮了的《資治通鑒》﹐一部快節 奏、別具一格的帶悲劇意味的歷史正劇”。tpf 4 fpt 《雍正王朝》的這種“正劇”觀得到 相當電視劇編導和電視評論的響應支持﹐傳媒也爆炒這一概念。需要指出的一個 事實是﹐就在《雍正王朝》播出前兩個月﹐湖南衛視與台灣瓊瑤合作的戲說喜劇 《還珠格格》創下古裝電視劇的 40%的最高收視率。因此也招來很多維護大陸正統 歷史劇觀念的傳媒人和評論家的討伐。隨後幾年﹐很多電視巨制如《康熙帝國》、 《走向共和》及最近的《漢武大帝》都承襲 “正統”﹐為自己披上“正劇”這一 神聖的外衣。主創人員和評論家們對其內容的“信史”方面的強調 (即使有爭議﹐ 但也爭在“信”與否上)以及國家電視臺(以上電視劇都是在中央電視臺黃金時段首 播)的權威相助﹐使得拍“正劇”本身就成了“義正詞嚴”道義在身的體現。《康 熙帝國》導演陳家林的那句“我就拍正劇﹐決不投降”道出這種“自我加冕”道德 论调和話語霸權主義。 tpf 5 fpt 如果我們把“正劇”話語中的道德倫理化和霸權主義放到前面所述的戲說類歷史劇 的娛樂主義傾向和後現代主義“戲仿”、“消費歷史”的意識形態的語境中﹐我們 不難看到“正劇”的特殊政治和文化意義﹕首先﹐正劇對歷史的意識形態定位是對 戲說類歷史劇的反擊。如果說戲說類歷史劇的產生﹐與電視作為大眾傳媒﹐電視劇 作為大眾文化以及電視劇生產中的市場化的必然結果﹐那麼流行了中國文學和文化 產品中的“文以載道”、“社會教化”傳統 以及當今中國主導及精英意識形態以 正劇來“撥亂反正”則是十分自然的結果。正劇再一次在電視屏幕上繼承宣揚了以 往歷史劇的“政治相關性”、“歷史嚴肅性”和“寫實主義手法”﹔其次﹐ 在歷 史劇表現的內容上﹐“正劇”強調表現“國家大事”﹐雖然主要集中在宮廷政治權 tp 4 pt 胡玫：《一個民族的生生死死﹕我拍電視連續劇<雍正王朝>》﹐载《中國電視》1999 年第 3 期﹐ 第 35-39 页。 tp 5 pt 陳家林：《我就拍正劇決不投降》，载《北京晨報》2001 年 12 月 26 日。 kong, shuyu rebuilding the empire portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 4 謀和君臣關係上﹐而不是“戲說”類那些百官野史”﹐後宮闈秘聞或民間傳說。雍 正的反腐倡廉﹐清宮的興洋務搞維新﹐漢武的平諸侯攘匈奴﹐無不是國家社稽道德 民生的大事、正事。而“正劇”中的“帝王將相”也個個養光疇韜、正氣浩然﹐鞠 躬盡瘁﹐一反“戲說”中的風流成性﹐昏庸無能。在藝術風格和表現形式上﹐正劇 的“新古典主義”、“歷史現實主義”則試圖以史詩的客觀敘事﹐製造一種歷史真 實的幻覺。 可以看出﹐“歷史正劇”旨在繼承發揚中國現代歷史劇的“正統”傳統。眾所周 知﹐現代歷史劇除了在政治權力鬥爭中發揮“古為今用”的作用﹐而且常常與“愛 國主義”、“民族主義”捆綁在一起。在後一方面﹐也就是重寫民族歷史﹐再造民 族英雄上﹐電視熒屏上的歷史正劇的確有了進一步的發展。 2、《雍正王朝》﹕帝王將相作為民族英雄 六十年代﹐毛澤東在批判文藝界時說，有一段時期，我們的舞台上全都成了帝王將 相，才子佳人，全是死人。文化大革命由此發動。江青親自領導的“革命現代樣板 戲”成功地把“帝王將相，才子佳人”趕出了革命舞台。取而代之以“兩結合”﹐ “三突出”高大全的“工農兵”形象。 大概是文化革命還是不夠徹底。九十年代﹐帝王將相又捲土重來﹐這在前面簡述的 大陸電視劇的生產中尤為突出。如果說帝王將相在戲說劇中的氾濫成災還可以忽略 不計﹐畢竟“編著玩”、“看著玩”本身消解了其嚴肅意義﹐那麼“歷史正劇”也 對帝王將相趨之若騖﹐而且賦予其前所未有的政治意義和高大形象﹐則顯露了當今 中國文化意識形態的種種端倪。 歷史正劇對歷史的重寫中最引人注目的就是對歷代帝王的“修正主義”的改寫。歷 史學家對歷史人物事件的分歧本屬自然﹐但重估歷史也常常是因為當時政治所需而 具有特定的政治意識形態意義。這在以往歷史小說歷史劇的創作中屡見不鮮。如郭 沫若寫《蔡文姬》、吳唅寫《海瑞罷官》等。八十年代以來﹐歷史敘事的一個重要 的現像就是這種歷史“修正主義”不僅借助大眾文化而得以走出精英和主流階層被 廣泛傳播﹐而且還與文化民族主義在大陸的復興有密切關係。tpf 6 fpt“曾國藩現像”借 “曾國藩”小說、電視劇及各類“歷史普及讀物”影響了大眾對儒家傳統的再認認 識﹐而李鴻章更是借《走向共和》得以“平反昭雪”。在這方面﹐“歷史正劇“中 的帝王形象把歷史“修正主義”推向機至。它雖然秉承以往歷史劇的“正統”傳 統﹐但又與以往歷史劇﹐尤其是“五四”以來的“革命”、“啟蒙”以及歷史唯物 主義為主導的歷史劇觀念發生很大的斷裂。下面﹐我將以胡玫導演的《雍正王朝》 和《漢武大帝》為案例﹐ 來分析歷史正劇中的新帝王觀﹐並由此來討論民族主義 在世紀之交的中國文化中的新的想象和表現。 首先﹐皇帝在這些歷史正劇被有意識地正面描寫﹐而且作為集道德﹐才智和權謀于 一身的民族英雄被拔高美化。 tp 6 pt yingjie guo, cultural nationalism in contemporary china: the search for national identity under reform, london and new york: routledge curzon, 2004. kong, shuyu rebuilding the empire portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 5 《雍正王朝》改編自小說家二月河的長篇歷史小說《雍正皇帝》。二月河的原作致 力描寫清初政治社會生活的各方面﹐對雍正的刻畫雖然對比以前的“定論”有所 “反案”﹐但仍然有保留地把他寫成一個在中國特定的宮廷爭斗政治中的“典 型”﹐有褒有貶。而電視劇《雍正王朝》則對史實和原小說都進行了修正。一開頭 就把歷史公認的雍正篡位寫成是康熙“最後的深謀遠慮”﹐雍正是受命於政事廢 馳、百弊從生的危難之時﹔接著通過雍正治國“當家”一系列政治事件﹐把雍正塑 造成一個力排眾議的“改革者”﹐一個不被理解的孤獨的悲劇英雄。他整治貪官污 吏、清查虧空、施行新政﹐因而“得民心者得天下”。他粗茶淡飯、大義滅親、鞠 躬盡瘁﹐是道德上的完人﹐儒家傳統意義上的“明君”。胡玫對雍正的表現﹐不僅 得到很多史學家、文化評論家的置疑﹐甚至二月河本人也認為電視劇與其書在雍正 理解上出入很大﹐有些“高大全”。胡玫本人卻對自己的改編深信不疑﹐她在創作 談中明確表示﹐“中國銀屏需要塑造英雄形象”﹐這部劇就是表現“一個民族的生 生死死”。tpf 7 fpt 胡玫在最新的作品《漢武大帝》進一步把帝王塑造為民族英雄的觀念付諸實踐。電 視居制《漢武大帝》詳細陳列了漢王朝的強盛、漢文化的輝煌﹐並把這一切歸于漢 武帝劉徹的文治武功、自強不息和人性張揚。片頭主題歌中“你燃燒自己溫暖大 地﹐讓自己成為余燼”，毫不掩飾地對漢武帝進行歌頌和膜拜﹐幾乎媲美文革中的 毛澤東崇拜。在回答中青報記者提問﹐胡玫理直氣壯地說﹐“漢武帝在我們這個劇 中就是個高大全……我特別反對數典忘祖……為什么說我們祖先偉大就是歌頌封建 專制卻可以說愷撒是大帝﹖五千年的歷史為什么不能歌頌﹖我所以把片名叫漢武大 帝就是說他是一個偉大的皇帝。”tpf 8 fpt 對熟悉共產黨歷史的人都知道﹐以往的民族英 雄多是擁有武功評定外侵的將領﹐如岳飛、文天祥、鄧世昌等，而很少以儒教為根 本的文相，更不用說君主帝王。胡玫的帝王英雄无疑是對幾十年唯物史觀所強調的 人民的力量和作用的挑战﹐而且直指五四以來的民主啟蒙精神的反封建传统。 其次﹐歷史正劇對歷史及帝王在歷史中的地位作用的重寫基本上是站在帝王的立場 上。 《雍正王朝》對雍正皇帝的塑造最為突出的一個例子就是對其“得國不正”歷史的 改寫。眾所周知﹐雍正雖是有為之君﹐但其“得國不正”也是歷史公認﹐雍正自己 當時已經面臨譴責﹐於是寫了《大義覺迷錄》以自辯。該書的拙劣編造和欲蓋彌彰 在當時已經被指責﹐以致乾隆繼位後列其為禁書﹐這段歷史也是史學家公論。但是 如秦暉和其他對《雍正王朝》提出批評的人指出的﹐電視劇卻毫無保留地採用《大 義覺迷錄》的解釋對雍正種種行為進行辯解﹐並稱其為“得民心者得天下”tpf 9 fpt。不 僅如此﹐全劇還對雍正的暴戾刻薄的性格、對政敵尤其讀書人大興文字獄等行為﹐ 都一一為其辯護開脫﹐把它們變成雍正嫉惡如仇、果敢剛毅的表現。 tp 7 pt 胡玫：《一個民族的生生死死﹕我拍電視連續劇<雍正王朝>》﹐载《中國電視》1999 年第 3 期。 tp 8 pt 刘江华：《<漢武大帝>反响大，观众专家导演三堂会审》，载《北京青年报》2005 年 1 月 29 日。 tp 9 pt 秦暉：《<雍正王朝>是歷史正劇嗎﹖》，载中國青年報 1999 年 3 月 15 日第 5 版。 kong, shuyu rebuilding the empire portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 6 這種站在帝王立場為帝王說話的歷史觀也直接表現在電視劇的敘事角度上。胡玫在 《雍正王朝》創作談中解釋該劇的定位和敘事角度時說：“我認定﹐未來的電視劇 將是一部帝王治國片。我們將隨著攝像機鏡頭﹐隨著國家之主雍正的眼睛﹐俯瞰他 的家國大地和萬千子民的生息﹐看他如何救民富國。因而我強調全片所講述的故事 將緊緊圍繞著‘當家難’三個字而展開。”tpf 10 fpt 古代封建君主的“家天下”被理解成 為國為民當家；與此同時，共產黨幾十年唯物史所強調的人民了無蹤影。 再次﹐在重塑帝王時﹐歷史正劇借用很多現代觀念﹐把帝王“人性化”﹐使之成為 可以被大眾接受的“民族英雄”。 與古代和民間的帝王“天子”遠而敬之的崇拜有所區別的是﹐歷史正劇的帝王將相 雖然是常人非比的英雄﹐但都很有“人味兒”。胡玫曾特意以雍正殺子一場戲為 例﹐ 講他們怎樣“塑造一個富有丰滿人性意味的皇帝”。tpf 11 fpt 在《漢武大帝》中﹐ 她又把漢武帝塑造成既是暴君也是情人﹐既是政治家軍事家也是詩人學者。把帝王 人性化的一個重要手段就是表現帝王個人生活和家庭關係﹐如有的學者指出﹐《雍 正王朝》中父子關係、兄弟關係、親友之間的家庭關係、家庭衝突、家與國的關係 構成了電視劇的主體內容。 tpf 12 fpt 一時間﹐發掘帝王們的人性﹐表現他們複雜的內心世 界幾乎成了歷史正劇新的流行模式。在某些電視劇中﹐如《走向共和》對歷史人物 如慈禧、袁世凱的人情味複雜性的強調甚至導致了部份主題和人物的曖昧與矛盾。 歷史劇中寫歷史、寫政治也寫人性的傾向無疑是與八十年代以來中國文學影視回歸 “人”的現代化進程有關。許多電視劇又是改編自小說或由作家執筆編劇﹐同時也 體現了當前電視劇生產強調的現代娛樂觀念“好看”、“動人”﹐並以此取得觀眾 的認同﹐獲得商業成功。應該指出“人性化”並沒有損害帝王作為民族英雄﹐恰恰 相反﹐歷史正劇的創作者正是借用這種現代化的藝術觀念使他們的帝王英雄更容易 被大眾所信服、接受。可以說﹐挖掘帝王的人性正是歷史正劇與以往歷史劇不同的 新的敘事策略。 3、重建帝國﹕《漢武大帝》與盛世神話 與歷史正劇中把帝王作為民族英雄民族靈魂的敘事策略相關聯的是歷史正劇對民族 過去的盛世想象。胡玫的另一部歷史電視劇《漢武大帝》代表了這種在熒屏上“重 建帝國”的雄心和實踐。 先談一下《漢武大帝》的製作背景。這部歷時近三年、斥資 5000 萬人民幣打造的 大型歷史劇是由中國電影集團公司、中央電視臺影視部、世紀英雄影視投資公司、 上海金德影業有限公司、北京華錄百納影視有限公司聯合出品；由中國電影集團公 司總經理韓三平親自擔任總制片人﹐胡玫和《雍正王朝》的班子繼續擔任主創人 員。編劇江奇濤是個軍隊作家﹐以寫主旋律的影視作品出名。可以看到這部戲可謂 集中國家資本和民間資本﹐不僅經濟意義上的資本雄厚﹐而且政治、社會和文化資 tp 10 pt 胡玫：《一個民族的生生死死﹕我拍電視連續劇<雍正王朝>》﹐载《中國電視》1999 年第 3 期。 tp 11 pt 同上﹐第 35-39 页。 tp 12 pt 尹鴻：《中國電視劇整體特征研究——中美電視劇比較研究》﹐上海三聯書店﹐ 2005 年版第 323 页。 kong, shuyu rebuilding the empire portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 7 本也非一般的通俗娛樂電視劇所能望其項背。該劇製作一開始就受到官方的密切關 注和支持，它不僅順利通過國家重大革命和歷史題材影視創作小組審批﹐而且得到 廣電局負責人、官方的歷史學家和影視評論家的讚許。tpf 13 fpt 2005 年元旦期間國家電 視臺中央電視臺在一套節目黃金時間首播出﹐定其為央視開年大戲。播至一半﹐ 立刻又在中央電視臺一套晚間劇場重播﹐隨後在春節期間﹐又在央視的電視劇頻道 再度回放。雖然其首播單集收視率在 5%上下﹐比不上當年《雍正王朝》19.8%的古 裝戲記錄﹐但如此禮遇造成的強大的聲勢必然在媒體、評論界和大眾間引起廣泛關 注。當然中央電視臺對《漢武大帝》的造勢絕不單純是一種政治文化行為﹐事實 上﹐中央電視臺單從該劇的貼片廣告就賺了 1.2 億﹐在播放期間把原有五十八集的 電視劇“注水”加上兩集拍攝花絮﹐坐收六十集的廣告﹐而創下央視單劇廣告收入 的記錄。在某種意義上﹐《漢武大帝》代表了當代文化生產中國家強勢媒體力量和 巨額民間投資共同打造“政治/文化精品” 和“商業/市場名牌”的生產模式。在 後社會主義的當代中國﹐這種“精品”、“名牌”除了應該具有巨大的“經濟效 益”外 ——《漢武大帝》光電視劇音像版權就買了 1015 萬﹐ 成為除了張藝謀電 影《英雄》外唯一音像版權過千萬的影視作品﹐——還必須其有與主流/國家意識 形態相輔相承的“社會效益”。而《漢武大帝》的社會效益的重要方面就是為世紀 之交中國經濟起飛所帶動的新的民族主義尋求表現形式和溝通渠道。 如果說《雍正王朝》著力于一個“改革者”或所謂“民族性格”、“民族英雄”的 塑造﹐那麼﹐《漢武大帝》在繼續塑造強者帝王英雄之余﹐更著力重構民族歷 史和民族文化﹐並把它們定義為“盛世強音”。《漢武大帝》尋根直至漢文化的源 頭﹐即中國的第一個統一多民族的盛世漢朝。從景帝時期、劉徹童年開篇﹐通過劉 徹風險繼位、掌握大權、尊王攘夷、獨尊儒術、內削諸侯、外敗匈奴﹐展現漢武大 帝治國之能、御人之術和權謀爭斗的政績与大漢帝國雄兵百萬征戰天下的輝煌。 在描寫漢朝統一盛世方面﹐《漢武大帝》的確創造了一個歷史新高。它對漢朝全景 式再現遠遠超出以往歷史敘事的範圍和價值評判。首先﹐它對中國歷史上第一次文 化大一統“獨尊儒術”以儒家思想為中心的文化整合進行了正面的刻畫﹐並彰显其 禮儀、文學、音樂、藝術、哲學、史學等成就﹔其次﹐它詳盡地表現漢朝政治制度 的形成和鞏固過程﹐尤其突出這一政治體系的形成對國家興盛的意義。眾所週知﹐ 漢朝所完善的郡縣制、文官制度以及中央地方兩級制度乃近兩千年封建中央集權的 開山模式﹐中國現代歷史一般都採取“客觀”中立的描述﹐因此《漢武大帝》對其 在歷史上積極作用的刻畫，可以說是現代文藝尤其是共產黨時期的文藝中的創舉。 最後﹐它對漢武帝時的軍事擴張和尚武精神加以重彩描畫﹐從武帝到諸大將衛青、 霍去病﹐從出使西域到征戰匈奴﹐漢朝的擴張好戰被寫成樹立和維護國威﹐漢武帝 窮兵黷武更成了“進取精神”、“不斷開拓”的代表。 與再造盛世的主題相應﹐電視劇採用了所謂“史詩”、“宏大敘事”的手法﹐不僅 表現如漢武大帝的政治軍事事件﹐還試圖再現漢王朝的經濟、政治、文化、風俗各 個方面。從國家的儀式到女性的衣著﹐從眾多歷史人物(據說有 1700 人之多)到宮 廷生活的細節﹐都得到無微不至的“還原”刻畫﹐並且一再用“宏大建築、宏大藝 術、宏大場景”來製造一種泱泱大國湟湟天朝的氣象。胡玫稱其歷史表現形式和表 tp 13 pt 《<漢武大帝>通過國家重大革命和歷史題材影視創作領導小組的審查》﹐载《香港商報》2004 年 8 月 28 日。 kong, shuyu rebuilding the empire portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 8 現風格為“新古典主義”、“歷史現實主義”，並認為這是“創作一部能弘揚中華 民族精神﹐高揚愛國主義英雄主義的史詩性作品”以及“普及民族古典的歷史文化 知識”的關鍵。tpf 14 fpt 無論從中國現代歷史戲還是其它各類歷史敘事看﹐《漢武大帝》這種聖世想象都可 以說是前所未有的。眾所週知﹐自五四以來包括過去半個多世紀共產黨的文學藝術 和歷史敘事中﹐中國古代封建歷史一直是一個有些尷尬和棘手的題目。一方面﹐秉 乘反傳統反封建的革命傳統﹐尤其為了樹立共產黨統治的合法性﹐中國的愛國主義 民族主義教育一直強調的是封建歷史的腐敗性反動性和中國人民受欺壓、受屈辱的 歷史。尤其是對鴉片戰爭以來的近代史的書寫﹐一直是“受害者”的想象模式﹐是 百年恥辱的歷史。即使在對古代歷史﹐由于歷史唯物主義的要求﹐也對封建專制的 文功武治的成績語焉不詳、態度含混。另一方面﹐在各類愛國主義和民族主義的教 育中﹐又用歷史悠久、文化輝煌來製造民族集體身份﹐樹立民族自豪感。可是﹐挖 空了儒家傳統以及帝王為中堅的歷史就常常顯得空泛無物。總覽社會主義時期的歷 史書﹐除了文化技術上的一些成就被肯定﹐古代的政治制度、思想文化的大部份都 被批判揚棄，歷史成了壓迫-造反的簡單循環。正因此﹐可以說﹐五四的全盤反傳 統其實為文化更新自掘根基﹐而毛澤東時代成長的中國人對中國歷史的無知、漠視 和虛無﹐業使得愛國主義民族主義教育失之表面﹐很少奏效。 正是在這一背景上﹐《漢武大帝》和近年來的以帝王為中心的“歷史正劇”可以說 彌補了民族想象的一個重要斷裂。它一掃以往中共民族想象話語中對民族歷史光榮 輝煌的壓抑和消極表現﹐而肆意書寫其政治制度的先進、文化藝術的輝煌﹐尤其是 皇帝和文臣武將的道德人性和豐功偉業；或者拿胡玫的話說“一個輝煌壯麗英雄輩 出﹐偉大和悲壯的時代”。這種書寫雖然與以往對民族歷史的書寫不同﹐但必須指 出的是﹐它其實是當代中國主流意識形態在大眾文化中的表現。世紀之交﹐以加入 wto、申奧成功為代表﹐中國政治經濟力量日益強大﹐在國際舞台扮演更多的角 色﹐民族主義情緒也與以往的“受害者”心態發生了變化。以“民族復興”、“強 國夢想”為中心的民族主義話語再度興起﹐它不僅在官方的宣傳﹐而且在民間的表 中都得到呼應。《雍正王朝》、《漢武大帝》正是反映和迎合了這種新的民族主義 心態和想象﹐而這些歷史正劇也得到了從精英評論家(其中不乏官方御用文人稱 《漢武大帝》表現了“強者精神與盛世情懷”)tpf 15 fpt 到网上大學生論壇 (稱全國觀看 此劇為視覺祭祖與國民集體心跳)tpf 16 fpt 再到ceo階層(向漢武大帝學習“威權型”領導 力) tpf 17 fpt 的積極回應。 結 論 tp 14 pt 胡玫：《“新古典主義”藝術的宣言﹕<漢武大帝>電視劇導演闡述》﹐载《香港商報》2004 年 12 月 16 日。 tp 15 pt 例如北大教授張頤武的文章《強者精神與盛世情懷》﹐载《新京報》2006 年 3 月 10 日。 tp 16 pt 《<漢武大帝>：視覺祭祖與國民集體心跳》，http://ent.sina.com.cn ，2005 年 3 月 13 日查阅。 tp 17 pt 《向漢武大帝學習領導力》，见中廣網http://www.cnradio.com.cn/caijing/cfgc/200503/t2005030250405，2006年月12日查阅。 kong, shuyu rebuilding the empire portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 9 任何一部歷史都是當代史。研究各類歷史敘事包括歷史正劇對過去對歷史的重新想 象﹐再虛構中關鍵的不是這些修正是否符合“歷史”﹐而是這些修正所披露的當代 訴求。 綜前所述﹐《雍正王朝》和《漢武大帝》為代表的歷史正劇是在中國當代社會發生 急劇變化、民族主義話語急需新的表述的歷史背景下產生的。它既有多種社會、經 濟、文化力量的參入尤其民間資本發展文化產品的因素﹐更代表文化精英和主流意 識形態在現代化全球化之際對民族想象新的建構和整合。在經濟改革引發的新的社 會經濟政治力量形成的新的社會關係中﹐面對改革和全球化帶來的各種文化挑戰和 社會問題﹐陳舊的社會主義主流意識形態和既成的歷史民族想象已經受到大眾的漠 視和挑戰﹐普遍的文化失范和信仰危機使部份精英知識分子和官方試圖從其它的思 想文化來源中如傳統文化、民間思想或威權政治尋找重新整合民族凝聚力和文化秩 序的力量。所以歷史正劇對“強者”的呼喚和“盛世”的想象雖然對共產黨的歷史 唯物論有所挑戰﹐也在很大程度上放棄了五四新文化運動的反封建反傳統的啟蒙精 神﹐但仍然屬于新的官方文化和主流意識形態的一部分。事實上﹐在歷史正劇重新 民族神話的過程中﹐文化精英們與國家、与資本、與強勢媒體、與主流話語又一次 同謀合作﹐而人民、民主、社會公正则又一次被堂而皇之地忽略和忘記了。 参考书目 guo, yingjie, 2004, cultural nationalism in contemporary china: the search for national identity under reform, london and new york: routledge curzon. 胡玫：《一個民族的生生死死﹕我拍電視連續劇<雍正王朝>》﹐载《中國電視》 1999 年第 3 期。 胡占凡：《繁榮發展，淨化熒屏，為 16 大營造良好氛圍》﹐载《中國電視》2002 年第 4 期。 王麗娟：《關於電視歷史劇走紅的思考》﹐载《影視藝術》2003 年第 1 期。 尹鴻：《中國電視劇整體特征研究——中美電視劇比較研究》﹐上海三聯書店﹐ 2005 年版。 秦暉：《<雍正王朝>是歷史正劇嗎﹖》，载中國青年報 1999 年 3 月 15 日第 5 版。 陳家林：《我就拍正劇決不投降》，载《北京晨報》2001 年 12 月 26 日。 胡玫：《“新古典主義”藝術的宣言﹕<漢武大帝>電視劇導演闡述》﹐载《香港商 報》2004 年 12 月 16 日。 刘江华：《<漢武大帝>反响大，观众专家导演三堂会审》，载《北京青年报》2005 年 1 月 29 日。 張頤武：《強者精神與盛世情懷》﹐载《新京報》2006 年 3 月 10 日。 本文作者孔书玉现执教于悉尼大学。其近著《消费文学：当代中国文学作品中的畅 销者及其商业化》于 2005 年由美国斯坦福大学出版社出版发行。 portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. indian ocean traffic special issue, guest edited by lola sharon davidson and stephen muecke. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries: the movement of sikhs in the indian ocean anjali gera roy, indian institute of technology, kharagpur introduction the geography of punjab, a land-locked region divided between india and pakistan, makes it an unlikely player in oceanic sojourns. but imperial interventions in punjab in the middle of the 19th century triggered movements from punjab that inserted this region in the littoral narrative of the indian ocean. unlike the movements of lascars and traders from coastal regions, which have been central to the revisionist histories of the indian ocean, sikh migrations from punjab have not featured in oceanic dialogues. the absence of sikhs in indian ocean studies is largely due to the silence of sikh soldiers, skilled craftsmen and cultivators with largely rural roots who were uprooted to strange lands. the confusion of sikhs with hindus, muslims, and even afghans, in the colonial era, as well as the classification of punjabi muslims as pakistani in the post-colonial, further complicates the sikh migration narrative.1 falling between economic, military, cultural and labour histories, these movements have remained largely undocumented. in the absence of written documentation, the buried narrative of sikh journeys, therefore, must be reconstructed through statistical data in colonial records, anecdotal references in imperial texts, memoirs of colonial administrators, oral histories, photographs, interviews and punjabi folk genres. drawing on a wide range of official and unofficial 1 thomas metcalf (2007) points out that the term sikh was used in south east asia as a floating signifier to refer to anyone who was seen as possessing certain attributes and that anyone with a certain physique and wearing a turban could pass as sikh. he mentions jones-vaughan’s comment about half of the selangor police force not being sikh but pathan, hailing mainly from peshawar. roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 2 historical sources, this essay argues that twin developments in punjab, namely the construction of sikhs as ‘a martial race’ and their integration in the imperial capitalist economy, connects the movements of soldiers and policemen to shanghai, hong kong, the straits settlements and kenya with those of skilled artisans to mombasa and uganda. memoirs of colonial administrators, such as john w. cell (2002), james douie (1916), herbert edwardes (1851), s. s. thorburn (1876), malcolm darling (1928) and others, can serve as valuable documents on ‘the punjab school’ by providing the rationale for imperial policies in the region, the problems the officials encountered in implementing them, and an assessment of their success or failure. animated by the reformist rhetoric characterizing the civilizing mission, these documents constitute justifications by young officers for colonialist strategies of survey, measurement, revenue collection and improved irrigation and cultivation undertaken with the objective of propelling punjab into modernity. along with british administrators’ reports and memoirs, colonial documents such as the enlisted record below constitute valuable sources of information. enlistment record of dilawar khan dated march 29 1897. dilawar enlisted with the hong kong and singapore royal garrison artillery (hksrga) at the age of nineteen. (source: moving here catalogue.) punjabi folksongs also constitute an unexpected archive of movements from punjab. if the opening boli or call of bhangra,2 the punjabi harvest dance, naturalizes the sikh narrative of mobility and their mobile subjectivities, punjabi folksongs provide an important lead into the place, duration and nature of their sojourns abroad. 3 amarjit 2 bareen barseen khatan giya si/ ki khat ke lihanda (you were away a dozen long years in search of a living/ what did you earn and bring back home?) 3 in the following folksong, immortalized by punjab’s singing legends surinder and parkash kaur in the http://www.movinghere.org.uk/search/catalogue.asp?sequence=&resourcetypeid=&recordid= http://www.movinghere.org.uk/search/catalogue.asp?sequence=&resourcetypeid=&recordid= roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 3 chandan mentions that the imperial state co-opted punjabi folksingers to encourage overseas recruitment on the eve of the first world war. but the popular folksong he cites equally fits earlier imperial exhortations to punjabi young men to join the army: bharti ho ja wey aithey khaweynga wey sukki roti othey khaweynga biscoot pattooa biscoooot bharti ho ja wey ... aithey paweynga khaddar dey leerey othey paweynga soot, pattooa soooot the recruits are at your door step here you eat dried roti there you’ll eat biscuits ... here you are in tatters there you’ll wear a suit ... drivers of punjabi migration notwithstanding the bhangra boli’s confirmation of its economic imperative, punjabi migration does not strictly fall into the narrative of indenturement. 4 distinguishing punjabi migration from those from other parts of india, shinder thandi opines that ‘punjabi migration really commenced during the final quarter of the 19th century’ and 1940s, a young soldier returning home after a long sojourn continues to tease a village belle until she realizes that he is none other than her absent husband: soldier: sadke sadke jandiye mutiare ni kanda chuba tere pair bankiye naare ni oh young lass trundling down the road! a thorn has pricked your foot young woman: sadke sadke jandiye siphaiya we kanda chuba mere pair bankiye rahiya we oh young soldier marching down the road! a thorn has indeed pricked my foot, oh young wayfarer the motif of young sikhs leaving their newly married wives in the care of parents and returning home, sometimes after a gap of a decade or more, runs through the life stories of most pioneer sikhs in africa, australia, north america, canada and malaya uploaded on sikh websites, as well as in the memoirs and ethnographic studies published by their descendants. most pioneers were married either in childhood or before their sojourns abroad and could afford to return home only after a gap of several years to visit wives and children left in the care of the family. the tradition of sons returning to the places of migration with their fathers was followed for at least a generation, if not more. the wives of munshi ram aggarwal and kala singh, the east african sikh pioneers, did not accompany them to nairobi, but two of ram’s sons, lekh raj and puranchand, joined their father in africa. the family business in india was left in the hands of the eldest son, wa’liati ram, corroborating tatla’s thesis about younger sons being encouraged to travel abroad to prevent subdivision of land holdings and property following the land settlement act (2004). kala singh, who is alleged to have had a masai wife, eventually returned to the wife he left behind, in maur mandi, at the end of his life. 4 hans raj aggarwal, the grandson of the hindu east african pioneer munshi ram aggarwal, recollects a visit by the then governor of nairobi offering his grandfather acres of land at a dirt cheap price and munshi ram declining it politely by replying: ‘we are only here for a few years, for business purposes. we don’t intend to settle. we’re well off at home’ (aggarwal east african sikh heritage, n.p.) . roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 4 regards it as ‘very much a product of the strategic and influential position which punjab acquired within the british empire’ (2006: npg). punjab historians, such as ian talbot (2004, 2007), david gilmartin (2004), darshan singh tatla (1995), thomas metcalf (2003) and tan tai yong (2005), are divided between situating sikh movements either in labour histories, by privileging the construction of punjab as the granary of the empire, or in military histories by highlighting the colonial production of punjabis as ‘a martial race’ (metcalf 2007). if the reconstruction of punjab’s agrarian history by talbot, gilmartin and tatla has thrown new light on socioeconomic transformations triggering labour migrations, the tracing of its military history by metcalf and yong has illuminated the relationship between the construction of sikhs as a martial race during the british empire and sikh mobility. tatla concludes that the socioeconomic transformations in punjab produced a ‘culture of mobility’ that ‘predisposed the inhabitants to the unsettling process of overseas migration’ (2004: 46-47). punjab historians have also exposed the janus face of british policies in punjab and highlighted the imperialist self-interest couched in a language of paternalist concern. they have demonstrated that a number of factors, such as the construction of the sikhs as ‘a martial race’ after 1857 and their preferential recruitment in the british army; the establishment of canal colonies in the 1870s and the resettlement of peasants and retired army men from densely populated regions in punjab in the new colonies; the subsequent integration of punjab in the colonial capitalist economy through an elaborate system of telegraphs and railways; and the paradoxical increase of rural indebtedness and prosperity in punjabi villages completely transformed punjab’s geography and economy. the production of sikhs as ‘a martial race’ after the anglo-sikh wars was followed by their resignification as peasants or skilled artisans in the decades that followed. in both cases this was impelled by a complex colonial logic designed to serve larger imperial interests.5 the deep conviction of the british about ‘the martial prowess of the sikhs’ flowing out of ‘their religious observances or beliefs,’ as harjot oberoi has pointed out (1994: 361), illustrates how pseudo-scientific theories of race could be superscribed on traditional caste hierarchies and ritual formations, such as the khalsa sikh, to serve colonial economic imperatives. the convergence of physiognomy and the colonial 5 darshan singh tatla (1995) has pointed out that the perception of sikhs as aggressive led to their classification as ‘undesirable’ and unfit for manual labour on the plantations in fiji, trinidad and guyana. roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 5 construction of the martial race resulted in the preferential recruitment of punjabis or sikhs in the police force.6 gilmartin has argued that even the punjabi ‘village’ and the punjabi ‘villager’ are imperial constructions (1995: 70). imperial stereotypes of the sikh soldier and punjabi villager may be viewed as a classic illustration of wallerstein’s (1994) world system theory about the emergence of global capitalism in the 14th century in which the labour of the periphery was put in the service of the creation of core capital with semi-peripheries serving as conduits.7 rajit mazumder (2003) challenges the official justification of the establishment of canal colonies as easing demographic pressure on the densely populated districts of central punjab by arguing that their primary objective was to obtain financial returns from investments.8 similarly, talbot (2007) focuses on the janus face of british imperialism by showing that the transformative potential of the social engineering in the canal colonies was set back by the subsequent restitution of customary law in punjab. however, it is veena oldenburg who unmasks the strategic misalliance of land reforms with customary law through which the system of private property and ownership transformed the concept of the punjabi village while increasing rural indebtedness (2002). oldenburg is unambiguous in her attribution of the impoverishment of the punjabi peasantry to the displacement of the system of community ownership by capitalist ownership and of the sikh revenue system by the imperial. while mazumder, connecting military considerations with agrarian developments, argues that receipt of land grants made the recruited soldiers perceive the state as beneficent, oldenburg calls attention to the irony of the filial connection between the peasant and the soldier, pointing out that one son in punjabi families was made to bear the burden of the privileges earned by the other, who in turn served as fodder for the army (oldenburg 2002; mazumder 2003: 64). metcalf contends that the imperial connections between the dispersed sites of sikh migration were forged by colonial officials’ indian connections and interactions with 6 the stipulation of a height of 5.10 and 34¾ chest measurement as the eligibility condition for military recruitment displayed a distinct bias for punjabis, who are taller and better built than other indian ethnic groups. 7tatla’s thesis about the integration of rural punjabis in a global economy is corroborated by an aborted plan for the construction of a transnational trade network through the resignification of aroras and khatris as petty shopkeepers (2004). 8 he quotes imran ali to contend that the state’s real motivation for canal construction was to entrench itself in rural society by buying the loyalty of those given grants (mazumder 2003: 66–67). roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 6 sikh soldiers producing a ‘distinctive policing strategy connecting india with the colonies from the 1870s to the first world war’ (metcalf 2007: 103). the periodic returns of punjab officials to punjabi villages to recruit soldiers or policemen demonstrate that ‘india was not simply a colonial territory but itself a centre of britain’s imperial authority’ (metcalf 2007: 103). their requests for sikh soldiers were motivated as much by their perception of sikhs as ‘brave, strong, vigorous, and well suited to the rough life and exhausting climate (metcalf 2007: 117) as by negative stereotypes of other natives. thus, it was india’s strategic position within the empire and the prestige of the punjab school in colonial administration that connected punjab to the rest of the empire. while privileging labour or military histories, most scholars make a perfunctory reference to the fact that the earliest movement from punjab was that of exiles. after the end of the anglo-sikh war in 1848–49, the young prince duleep singh was banished to england and nihal singh (bhai maharaj singh) was deported to singapore.9 this history of the forced migration of exiles and convicts that is older than that of the military disrupts the homogenous discourse of sikh migration as a reward to sikhs for their loyalty to the british. karnail singh sandhu, in sikhs in malaysia (2008), and rajindar singh bedi, in the earliest arrival of sikhs in malaya (2001), demystify the sikh recruitment theory by arguing that the first sikhs to arrive in the straits settlements were political prisoners from punjab rather than soldiers. they assert that both officers and soldiers of the annexed punjab’s army deemed dangerous for the east india company were deported to the penal colonies. hong tou a-san in cheen echoing metcalf’s argument, arunajeet kaur’s comprehensive master’s thesis on ‘the role of sikhs in the policing of british malaya and the straits settlements (1874-1957)’ relates the sikh migration to british malaya and the straits settlements as sepoys to their construction as ‘the martial races’ after the ‘mutiny’ of 1857.10 kaur points out that proximity, tropical climate, and the positive tales told by returning sikhs made 9 an anonymous source alleges that documents about sikh soldiers in the british army who played a dubious role in the anglo-sikh wars and were deployed in the opium wars in shanghai since 1829 have been suppressed in both imperial and sikh histories. however, jackson (2012), while acknowledging the presence of indian soldiers in the first opium war, believes that sikhs were not involved until the second opium war. mukherjee and qin, on the other hand, trace their movement to the late 1880s (2009). 10 kaur’s revised thesis has subsequently been published as a book sikhs in the policing of british malaya and straits settlements (1874-1957) (2009). roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 7 cheen (including malaya, singapore and hong kong) favoured destinations as compared to vilayat or britain.11 kaur’s exclusion of shanghai in ‘cheen’ is surprising considering that colonial military records and photographic evidence from around 1860 of sikhs resting against bombed out buildings confirm the sikh presence in the ludhiana regiment sent to shanghai to quell the taiping rebellion in 1851.12 bickers et al. ascribe the twenty-fold rise of the indian population in shanghai between 1885 to 1915 to the recruitment of sikhs in the shanghai municipal force (2000: 59). the shanghai international police force (established in 1864) is reported to have expanded over the years (jackson 2012) to include a sikh branch (established in 1884) consisting of officers who retired or were left from sikh military detachments in china.13 on the outbreak of the boxer rising in 1900, troops of the 14th sikh regiment are believed to have sailed from bombay to shanghai via singapore and hong kong and returned via taku in 1902.14 the transnational nature of shanghai connections is reinforced by the fact that many retired sikh soldiers from shanghai or hong kong stopped over here on their way to vancouver or fiji. it is from here that they boarded the komagata maru in 1907 for the west coast of the usa and vancouver or travelled elsewhere.15 the role played by shanghai and hong kong sikhs in producing the myth of economic prosperity among their fellow villagers that catalyzed their desire for exploration has been underestimated. it was from the hong kong sikhs, who visited canada in 1897, that the lore of the dream of foreign lands was disseminated in punjab. 11this is corroborated by bhatti and dusenbury’s suggestion that the sikhs arriving in australia in 1890 via new zealand may have travelled from malaya, which supports lopo-dhalliwal’s claim about the planter john mackay travelling with sikhs to australia (bhatti & dusenbury 2001; lopo-dhalliwal 1971: 6). 12with the passing of the company’s armies to the crown, the senior sikh regiments became the 14th (king george’s own ferozepore sikhs), the 15thludhiana sikhs and the 45th of the bengal foot, later indian infantry, but were still popularly known as rattray’s sikhs. the 15th sikhs saw service in shanghai during the second chinese war in 1860–61, defending that city against the taiping rebels, while all three senior battalions served in the second afghan war, 1878–80 (jullunder brigade association, n.d, n.p.). jackson confirms the presence of sikh soldiers in the second opium war (2012: 8). 13the chinese referred to sikhs as hong tou a-san—a reference to their red turbans (hong means red in mandarin while tou refers to the head). according to jackson, ‘asan is thought to derive from the sikhs’ third class social position in shanghai, or from a transliteration of either the british exclamation “i say” or “ah, sir,” as shanghai’s chinese addressed the sikhs’ (jackson 2012: 4). 14 the regiment embarked on s.s. formosa at bombay on august 12 1900 and sailed to shanghai via singapore and hong kong, disembarking on september 6 1900. 15for instance, harnam singh, who had been a ‘naik’ (corporal) in the 14th sikhs during the boxer rebellion, is eventually traced to kisumu in africa. suneel kumar reports: ‘the canadian sikh delegation, which was joined by several sikhs from shanghai, hong kong, singapore and penang, took part in the jaito da morcha of 1923–25. the jatha started from vancouver on july 13 1924, and reached at jaito in punjab, in february 1925’ (kumar 2008: npg). roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 8 hong kong receives a mention in several studies for its historic significance, first as the earliest site of military migration, and second as an important node in transoceanic journeys to shanghai, australia, new zealand, canada and north america (jackson 2012). it played a key role, for example, in the famous incident of the komagata maru since the port from which sikhs set off for vancouver to circumvent the restriction related to continuous journey. the khalsa diwan sikh gurdwara in wan chai appears to have served as a transit lounge for sikhs sailing from kolkata to different parts of the world. it was from here that gurdit singh planned his operations and where many passengers lived, sometimes for years, before leaving for canada.16 but narratives of the sikh policemen who remained, returned, or moved on must be put together by piecing together different ends of the jigsaw puzzle. while the sikh migration to hong kong is commonly traced back to creagh’s recruitment of 100 sikhs in 1867, some sources, such as james joseph keezhangatte, claim that 2700 soldiers, including sikhs, were seen at the flag raising ceremony during captain elliot’s declaration of hong kong as a british occupation in 1841 (2008: 209). however, the expulsion of the sikhs from the police force following the hong kongization of the force explains their relatively smaller number in the present (7,500 in 2006). orang bengali in the straits settlements the different waves of sikh movement to southeast asia problematize their inclusion in rajesh rai (2006) and vijay devadas’s (2006) indentured diasporas, claire anderson’s convict diasporas (2006), or tan tai yong’s military diasporas (2006). in order to construct the narrative of the migration and settlement of sikh detainees in malaya and the straits settlements, one is compelled to turn to informal sikh chronicles such as malkiat singh lopo-dhalliwal’s some historical notes (1971), sewa singh gandharb’s early sikh pioneers of singapore (1986), and formal sources such as karnail singh sandhu’s sikhs in malaysia (2008) (lopo-dhalliwal 1971; gandharb 1986; sandhu 2008). orang bengali as political prisoners some historical notes (1971), a slim volume gifted by lopo-dhalliwal to the sikh community to celebrate a century of sikh presence in malaya and singapore, fills the 16 all passengers are reported to have prayed here before the komagata maru departed in 1914. roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 9 silence in official histories on the sikh migration prior to 1857.17 beginning by invoking janam sakhi references to guru nanak’s udasis or travels to ‘suvarna pur’ (suwarna bhumi) and to sumatra, lopo-dhalliwal speculates that the first sikh guru might have visited malacca in the 16th century. he draws on reports of colonial officers, diaries of women travellers and newspaper reports to reproduce anecdotal evidence that testifies to the presence of political prisoners.18 the most celebrated of these was nihal singh or bhai maharaj singh, exiled to solitary punishment in singapore following his capture in 1849, and his disciple kharag singh. karnail singh sandhu’s account confirms the first wave of sikh settlement in the straits following the deportation of sikhs opposed to british rule, first to malacca and then to sarawak. but he doubts if there would have been more than a few arrivals every year and suggests that the ones who followed might have been of a different category (sandhu & mani 2008: 560). this contradicts lopodhalliwal’s citation of a singapore free press (september 1863) report about the outbreak of one hundred ‘generally powerful, daring’ sikhs brought from the alipore jail in india. it is also silent on the anecdote about an aborted plot by prisoners to shoot the superintendent of the singapore jail following a dispute between ‘rawdasee’ [ravidasi] and ‘majabee’ [mazhabi] sikhs reported by lopo-dhalliwal (1971). while conceding that some discharged sikh convicts might have decided to settle in the straits settlement, sandhu categorically states that no family in singapore or malaysia can trace its origins to any of them (sandhu & mani 2008: 560).19 lopo-dhalliwal’s commemorative volume (1971), based on oral and undocumented sikh sources, expresses a disagreement on accepted historical details. for example, he corrects the commonly held view of speedy’s arrival in 1874 (winstedt 1945; gullick 1953) by predating it by a year on the authority of a sikh chronicler.20 similarly, his advancing the sikh arrival in southeast asia by nearly half a century to 1819 complicates the narrative of the migration of sikh policemen through allusions to 17 nihal singh went blind and died in 1856; kharag singh was detained as part of the preventative measures taken by the british after the ‘mutiny’ of 1857. the marginalization of sikhs in the sections on southeast asia by rai & devadas in the encyclopedia on the indian diaspora (ed. b. lal et al. 2006) dealing with indenturement must be attributed to their failure to account for the sikh migration, which was one of free workers. 18 lopo-dhalliwal draws on the accounts of the traveller isabella bird, the official charles burton buckley and on reports in the singapore free press (1971). 19however, lopo-dhalliwal contends that these narratives are lost partially due to the sikhs marrying local malay and chinese women. he names their children, who include pioneers such as sardar mohan singh, sardar jaswant singh and sardar samund singh of malacca but argues that their grandchildren acquired non-sikh names such as babu despite being raised in indian traditions (1971). 20 tatla dates speedy’s arrival to 1873 (2004). roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 10 movements of a different nature. while his suggestion about the first sikh settlers in malaya being those aboard mackay’s ship to australia in 1837 is uncorroborated by concrete evidence,21 bhai maharaj singh’s solitary confinement, sikh insurrections at the singapore jail in 1868 and the settlement of sikhs released before 1873 in perak and other states is substantiated by oral testimonies, which allude to the intermarriage of these sikhs with local women and records of names of specific individuals born of these unions (lopo-dhalliwal 1971). due to the confusion of sikhs with bengalis in malaysia through the use of the term bengalis to refer to all non-tamil hindu and muslim migrants to malacca at the end of the 19th century and the adoption of the ascription by sikhs in their self-description in the 1911 census, it is difficult to estimate the exact number of sikh migrants to malaysia. but the 1921 census mentions 11,113 punjabis and 1,845 bengalis who might have included sikhs.22 malay language dictionaries continue to refer to sikhs as ‘orang bengali’. orang bengali as soldiers and policemen kaur’s dissertation about the sikh presence in these states and their construction as a martial race after 1857, however, must skip several pages of the sikh travelogue that does not conform to her thesis (2003; 2009). in buttressing her argument about the british admiration of sikh military prowess following the anglo-sikh wars (1836– 1849), she fails to explore the link between sikh insurrections, the loyalty of 13,420 men of the punjab irregulars from the punjab frontier force during the 1857 revolt and the subsequent formation of the military force of sikh and punjabi muslims between may and december 1857. relying on abdul karim bagoo’s 1954 study, academic exercise. the origin and growth of the malayan states, kaur corroborates the presence of sikhs in peninsular malaya in perak under captain speedy in the employ of ngah ibrahim, the mantri of larut, in september 1873. while the symmetry of kaur’s narrative is disrupted by the ‘unruly’ presence of exiles and political prisoners, she bypasses the earlier wave to substantiate her ‘martial race’ argument. she classifies the sikh migration into three phases: the first phase (1874–1896), in which the british were 21 margaret allen traces this movement back to otim singh who left moga for sumatra in 1881 and arrived in australia five years later (2008). 22 ‘the generic name given by malays to indians other than tamils is “bengali” and under this head come the dogra, sikh, pathan, panjabi mussulman, kashmiri, waziri, rajput, afghan, behari, and all other breeds of men from india who are either “kling hindu” or “kling islam”’ (lopo-dhalliwal 1971: 1–2). roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 11 trying to assert imperial authority; the second phase (1896–second world war), which entailed the british government reorganizing colonial policing to focus on civilian needs and crime control and that coincided with the formation of the malay states; and the third phase (1948–1960) characterized by increasing breakdown. however, focusing on migrations after 1873, she is forced to exclude the prehistory of sikh migration to the straits settlements, for information on which one must turn to the less academic some historical notes (lopo-dhalliwal 1971). the exile of political prisoners to singapore jails after the anglo-sikh wars and ‘the mutiny’ of 1857, and the recruitment of sikhs after 1857, are not really contradictory because they are both based on the representation of sikhs as warriors in pre-colonial and colonial narratives (yong 2005). kaur’s attribution of the militarization of sikhs to imperial economic imperatives in the malayan peninsula corroborates tatla’s thesis about the integration of both punjabi soldiers and cultivators in the international economy (1995). her point about the recruitment of loyal strangers to contain indigenous factions in malaya who conflicted with british economic interests illustrates the british management of the colonial economy through an effective integration of different kinds of colonials into the world system. the movement of sikhs in the indian ocean is activated by the colonial construction of different ‘native’ populations as industrious, lazy or martial (metcalf 2007).23 as kaur points out, the construction of sikhs as ‘the martial races’ and of malays and chinese as unfit for the policing of malaya led to the large scale recruitment of sikhs into the police force from 1873 to 1947. the return of speedy and walker, who had the experience of leading sikhs during the 1857 mutiny, to punjab in search of ‘pure’ sikhs, accounts for the large sikh presence in malaya until they faced competition from the indian army in 1895. kala singha in africa in contrast to that to southeast asia, the sikh movement to east africa, straddles both the military migration of southeast asia and labour migration elsewhere. in contrast to the jat sikhs recruited into the army and resettled in the canal colonies or who migrated to vancouver or california, a different sikh subject, belonging to the lower castes of ramgariha (carpenter), lohana (blacksmith) and mistry (mason) and also chamar 23 mcleod’s idea of the sikh’s evolution into a martial consciousness by the sixth guru to accommodate the jats, who were of a militant tradition, has a bearing here (2003). roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 12 (leatherworkers), came to be integrated into the imperial world system through these castes’ production as skilled artisans largely due to the arbitrary strategies deployed by colonial officers such as maquire and lugard.24 metcalf views the ‘almost reflexive turning to india and to indians by such men as lugard and wilcocks’ as testifying to ‘the power of the idea of india as a centre of crafts, skills and peoples who could be drawn upon to make empire more efficient and economical’ (2007: 124). h. h. johnston requested ‘for sikhs, and sikhs alone’ [50 raised to 70 later], preferably from his own ‘raw sikhs,’ in 1891, and himself returned to recruit in punjab in 1895. like walker, who took a recruiting trip to the punjab countryside, captain c. m. maguire preferred ‘trained and disciplined’ sikh troopers directly from the indian army (metcalf 2007: 115). however, maquire’s selection of 49 mazbi, ‘or lower-class sikhs, true mazhabis, not lohanas or ramdasis,’ from two premier battalions on being informed that they ‘were less particular as to the food given them than jat sikhs’ (metcalf 2007: 116) accounts for the practical considerations that altered the caste composition of the army as well as the preponderance of lower class sikhs in africa. c. a. edwards got twenty sikhs from five regiments to sign for service in 1894 by making sure that they were ‘good’ sikhs with no criminal records, even though they might have belonged to lower ranks in the army. similarly, it was on lugard’s strategic request in 1900 for ‘the so-called skilled labour viz., clerks, artisans, engineers, and pilots, etc.’ on grounds of british indians ‘being of a more efficient type than those available in africa’ that ten clerks and twenty eight transport attendants were transported under carrigan in 1905 (metcalf 2007: 23).25 blacksmiths were also included as they ‘had already proved invaluable in teaching the natives how to use and repair carts, break in oxen to draught work, and tend animals’ (metcalf 2007: 124). sikh policemen and artisans transported to africa frequently emerge in the memoirs of colonial officers as footnotes to the heroic saga of imperial adventures, either as helpers in the accomplishment of the colonial mission or as splendid or amusing stereotypes. these memoirs are invariably cast in the kiplingesque mould of good and bad natives produced by the colonial gaze. adela quested’s gaze on the punkahwallah’s hourglass 24 the reference to jats, the favoured caste in the rehabilitation of canal colonies, occurs in inder singh gill’s account of his migration in 1922, following that of his uncle nahar singh pangli, from jundiali ludhiana district in 1915 (he was probably one of the clerks brought by carrigan). 25 this followed the turning down of his earlier request for jemadars to lead hausa and yoruba troops. roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 13 figure in e. m. forster’s a passage to india (1998) returns in karen blixen’s portrayal of pooran singh ‘by the forge, bared to the waist,’ in out of africa as ‘incredibly slight and nimble, with the indian hourglass torso’ (1993: 333). pooran singh, the ‘fundee of the farm, which means an artisan of all work, carpenter, saddler and cabinet-maker as well as blacksmith,’ in blixen’s novel, epitomizes the imperial stereotype of the sikh. her description of pooran singh, who ‘behaved altogether like a man who is himself being burnt at the stake, or like some chafed over-devil at work,’ belongs to the best tradition of imperialist prose. later, she admits that pooran singh ‘was no devil but a person of the meekest disposition’ and that it ‘was a very fine, proud sight, to watch him tiring a wheel’ (1993: 333–35). if blixen borrows kiplingesque imagery to describe the fundee on her farm, john bate, in wheels over black cotton (1978), steals his character’s name to describe ‘the mechanically minded gunga din’ lal singh, who resembled ‘a wild afghan tribesman during working and only needed a long rifle to complete the illusion’ (1978: 31). like blixen, his gaze lingers on ‘him squatting on his haunches, gazing with asiatic reverence, or bloody-minded at the entrails of a motorcycle bleeding to death on the floor depending on the end whether he had traced the trouble’ to mythicize the sikh (bate 1978: 31–32). beryl markham, in west with the night, describes bishan singh as ‘one of kipling’s elephant boys,’ who remained to her ‘a man of mystery, without age or youth, but burdened with experience, like the wandering jew’ (1984: 61). despite their being exoticized, blixen’s mythologized pooran singh, who works like a maniac at his forge, patterson’s five sikh carpenters, led by natha singh, who have a narrow escape through suspending a ladder that proves to be providential, or bate’s motorcycle expert lal singh, who miraculously produces spare parts out of nowhere, come across as exotic or comic figures. without kipling’s deft manipulation of point of view, through which umr singh, the trooper in a sahib’s war, articulates the sikh voice, foran’s colonial gaze in a cuckoo in kenya (1936: 102–6) can only romanticize sergeant harnam singh as ‘a fine figure of a man’ who ‘upheld the best traditions of the indian army throughout his career in africa’ (1936: 102–6). a comparison of colonial accounts and imperial texts with the self-narratives of sikh pioneers in east africa provides a glimpse into alternative migrant perspectives of the migration process. in order to reconstruct this alternative account of the movement of roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 14 sikhs in the late 1880s, a sikh website called sikhs of east africa that has put together colonial records, memoirs of colonial officers, photographs, interviews and oral histories of pioneers and their descendants, proves to be an invaluable archive by confirming, correcting and disrupting imperial narratives of the same event. the mythical sikh characters produced in imperial texts return in the stories and interviews of colonial officials and pioneer sikhs uploaded on sikh websites. blixen’s description of pooran singh as ‘an ascetic of the first water’ who ‘did not eat meat,’ ‘did not drink, or smoke, or gamble’ makes one suspect if her investment of ‘mythic qualities’ in the fundee of her farm produced the saintly baba pooran singh of kericho venerated by sikhs (1993: 333–35). perhaps pooran singh, who had set sail for india in blixen’s memoirs, returned to kenya in the avatar of baba pooran singh after visiting the family in punjab he had not seen for years. the wounded ‘splendid great sikh’ in f. jackson’s early days in africa (1930), who keeps lunging at the rebellious swahili boy despite his arm being blown off during the suppression of the revolt in 1897, is probably jemadar bhagwar [bhagwan] singh from the ludhiana (later the 15th) sikhs. records confirm that bhagwar [bhagwan] singh ‘joined the suakin expedition in 1885, sailing for the sudan and fighting the dervishes at totrek where defensive stockades were built’ and whose ‘gallantry and discipline saved the column from complete destruction.’26 other sikh policemen, such as the four jemadars mentioned by metcalf who signed up for east africa, reappear in colonial memoirs (metcalf 2007: 119). sikhs like inspector besant singh become the object of respect as accomplices of young colonial officers. foran describes besant singh as ‘a tower of strength, often saving me [foran] from making an abject idiot of myself [himself] through over-hasty action or sheer ignorance’ (1905: 102–6). he adds that besant singh ‘was a great ‘shikari,’ a brave man and worthy of the highest traditions of the gallant sikh units in the indian 26 the 14th ferozepore sikhs after this served in east africa and china. the 15th ludhiana sikhs were sent to egypt and then to sudan, where they won battle honours at totrek (d.s. sandhu, n.d., n.p.). ‘the 15th sikhs joined the suakin expedition in 1885, sailing for the sudan and fighting the dervishes at totrek where defensive stockades were built. their gallantry and discipline saved the column from complete destruction’ (‘the 47th [now the 5th] regiment,’ jullundur brigade association, n.d., n.p.). ‘in june, 1897, a party consisting of lieutenant macdonald, jemadar bhagwan singh and fourteen men proceeded to british east africa and joined an expedition formed to fight mutineers and other hostile elements in the sudan. of this small detachment lieutenant macdonald and one sepoy were killed and jemadar bhagwan singh and three sepoys wounded. jemadar bhagwan singh and three sepoys were awarded the indian order of merit for continuous conspicuous gallantry in action, and the officer in charge of the expedition, colonel macdonald, writing about the party, stated: “this detachment fully maintained the great reputation of the 14th sikhs and fought with such gallantry that they secured the admiration of all”’ (jullundur brigade association, n.d., n.p.). the party returned to the regiment in nowshera on may 7 1899. roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 15 army in which he served with honour before transferring to the indian police and then coming to british east africa’ (1905: 102–6). in kill or be killed, foran also names ‘a stalwart sikh policeman,’ harnam singh, whose lusty shouts scared a leopard perched on his shoulders during a hunting expedition, confirming the presence of sikh policemen in east africa in the 1890s (1905: 53–55). although they are seen playing second fiddle to the man eaters in j. h. patterson’s the man eaters of tsavo, the ‘fine powerful sikh named ungan singh,’ who was ‘seized in his tent, dragged and eaten’ finds a mention (1907: 21–24). the model police sergeant, ‘who had been a “naik” (corporal) in the 14th sikhs,’ had probably served with them through the boxer rebellion in china. sikh officers like satbachan singh, the first police officer in kenya, were remembered by their associates for years after leaving service.27 even though some journeys, like that of jagat ‘macho dogo,’ predate the construction of the uganda railways, the sikh military and police narrative in east africa is imbricated with that of the railways. the sikh pioneers, munshi ram aggarwal, kala singha, jagat ‘macho dogo’ and lal singh, came to explore the business opportunities opened by the setting up of the railways. the first police inspector in africa, kapur singh, was brought over to oversee the construction of the ugandan railways for which a large number of sikhs from the artisan castes of ramgarihas, lohanas and mistries were recruited. kapur singh’s secondment to work with the kenya police force in 1895 following his posting in baluchistan confirms the nexus between land settlement acts, military recruitment and migration from thickly populated areas like gagobuha near amritsar, from which kapur singh hailed, as well as the punjab experience of colonial officers who served in other colonies such as malaya and east africa. the policy followed in the canal colonies of rewarding sikhs through land allotments for services rendered in the army or elsewhere appears to have been replicated in east africa when indian migrants working on the railways were offered land grants after the completion of the railways. among these was the pioneer jagat ‘macho dogo,’ hailing from a farming family. impressed by his farm, measuring about 105 acres by the kibo river, the british encouraged him to bring more farmers like himself to set off a chain 27 it is interesting that the colonial ascriptions of sikhs such as those surrounding satbachan singh, killer of lions, lover of nature, model farmer, cattle breeder and spiritual healer, should have been internalized and absorbed in family lore. mohinder singh chadha highlights the role of sikhs in maintaining law and order by recalling his uncle labha singh chadha’s reputation as a lion killer when he arrived from jhelum, after serving in the police force, at the turn of the century. labha’s other brothers, lakha singh and bishen singh, who followed him, also appear in the records of colonial officers. roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 16 migration with brothers, cousins and entire villages joining sikh migrants to africa. these communities mirrored the kin-based village communities that the colonial government had consciously reproduced in sikh settlements in the canal colonies. except for those of the young and poor jagat ‘macho dogo’ and his friend lal singh, from jullunder district, who worked their way to africa by firing the boiler on a steamer in 1892/93, the experiences of the sikh pioneers are underwritten by both ‘the culture of mobility,’ which tatla sees as characterizing the sikhs following their resettlement in the canal colonies, and the colonial policies that forced movement.28 gurdit singh nayer, a grown man of 32, set off from lahore to east africa in 1889 to improve his economic prospects by working as a cashier in the newly opened bank of india and traveling to remote regions in dangerous conditions. soon enough, he was to discover better opportunities in serving as a commission agent for artisans from his home town. nayer diversified into the furniture business, constructed many landmark buildings in nairobi and became a prominent figure before being forced to return to lahore in 1932 after a huge business loss. it was his wife damayanti who brought the children back to settle in nairobi after spending five years in lahore during which nayer died. the emphasis laid by his son trilok singh nayer on his parents’ upper class credentials (of his father being a highly cultured man, well versed in persian, music and theatre, and his mother being from a prominent lahori family) disrupts the topos of poverty that undergirds migration literature. similarly, the imperial construction of the exploitative relationship between the hindu bania or moneylender and the sikh and muslim peasants, the official reason for the introduction of the land alienation act of 1900, is refuted by oldenburg who argues for a cooperative rather than extortionist relation in the pre-colonial system between the literate hindu record keeper and the non-literate peasants (2002). the evidence of this co-operation emerges in the strong bond between two young men from maur mandi in the patiala state, munshi ram aggarwal, from a prosperous hindu bania family, and kala singh, from the jat sikh caste, who were the first to arrive in east africa from punjab in the 1880s. 28 neither the sikh pioneers who travelled to east africa, nor all those who set sail on the komagata maru to vancouver, were impelled by poverty to seek a fortune overseas because, as some historians have pointed out, few landless families could have afforded to raise the passage. roy soldiers, artisans, cultivators and revolutionaries portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 17 neither the imperial motif of poverty nor caste enmity but a narrative of adventure emerges as the key motivator for the journeys of these two punjabi pioneers to africa. despite hindu munshi ram’s greater business acumen, the sixteen year old sikh, kala singh, made a larger impact on the masai reserve and with other indigenous people and became the ethnocultural signifier of punjabi identity. even after they had parted ways professionally, the friendship between the families survived time and space. munshi ram’s descendant, hans raj aggarwal, refused to dishonour his father’s associate’s memory by refuting all allegations of his secret liaisons with african women. aggarwal’s reminiscences also suggest a chain migration from maur mandi through the subsequent settlement of sikhs from the village and an intersection of not only caste but also sectarian boundaries that explains the confusion of sikhs with hindus, and even pathans, in the minds of their australian or californian hosts. conclusion this essay shows that embedding divergent narratives in the frame tale of the initiating impulse for migration, namely the socioeconomic transformations in 19th century punjab, can link apparently disconnected sikh migration stories to different parts of the world. instead of beginning with the places of settlement, a return to colonial policies and developments in the sending villages of central doaba districts of punjab can explain how punjabi hinterlands were connected to port cities. following sikhs from their dispersed sites of resettlement to their home villages in the districts of amritsar, ludhiana, jullundur, hoshiarpur and ferozepore in central punjab provides insight into the political, social, economic and cultural 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(ed.) 1995, officers of the punjab commission. neda publishers, lahore. bagoo, a.k. 1954, academic exercise. the origin and growth of the malayan states. university of malaya, singapore. blixen, k. 1993, out of africa and shadows on the grass. penguin, delhi. chandan, a. 1998, ‘how they suffered: world war i and its impact on punjabis,’ paper presented at ‘across the black waters,’ a one-day symposium at the imperial war museum, london, november 7. online, available: http://apnaorg.com/articles/amarjit/wwi... portalvol10no2introfinal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. edible alterities: perspectives from la francophonie special issue, guest edited by angela giovanangeli and julie robert. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. introduction: edible alterities, perspectives from la francophonie angela giovanangeli and julie robert, university of technology, sydney this project began, as many do, in the company of a good friend over a meal. this particular meal, however, was being eaten at a newly opened vegan establishment in sydney. after the plates had been cleared, the chef emerged into the near empty dining room and apologised for having no desserts to offer because he had not yet mastered the art of vegan baking. as he waxed on describing his unsuccessful attempts to craft something tasty and sweet that reflected his philosophy of nourishment, my dinner companion and i began exchanging the glances of people who were being treated to more information than they needed or desired. for this chef, however, food and identity were a matter of principle. not only did food provide his livelihood, but it defined his struggles as a chef, a businessman and an ambassador of a philosophy about how we should eat. at least in this instance, it also defined his relationship to those around him. food was intrinsic to his conception of how one should live one’s life. he was his food in a way that was even more all encompassing than what brillat-savarin (1982) could have imagined when he argued that we are what we eat. this special issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies focuses on food and francophone cultures. the cultures of the french speaking world have inherited many of the french traditions about the importance of food and dining, as well as questions about what to eat and drink, how to consume it, and what such practices might reveal about those who make choices about food. when approached to giovanangeli and robert introduction portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 2 contribute to this special issue, the authors found that issues of food were already underlying their research into the literatures and cultures of the francophone world. this collection of papers thus brings the questions of cultural identity, memory and transculturation that are the mainstays of francophone studies into conversation with the matters of edibility and food-related practices. while the papers share a reference to the french language, they concern themselves with a variety of discursive spaces, of categories of social actors and of material and symbolic resources in very different parts of the world. food is explored both in terms of ‘real world’ issues and as representation, often simultaneously, which attests to the tremendous value of food for understanding culture and identity. bonnie thomas and tess do use food to make sense of histories, both familial and national. thomas’s article, explores the connection between history, memory and food in maryse condé’s memoir victoire, les saveurs et les mots and underscores the connection between three generations of women. this analysis reveals how family histories form part of a greater narrative of the caribbean and that food provides both a literal and figurative vehicle for the reappraisal of history. for do, food provides a sense of comfort and acts as a means of asserting the existence of a national culture distinct from foreign influences in her reading of the historical franco-vietnamese detective novel les travers du docteur porc. do challenges the role given to food in crime fiction in order to read food as a way to assert a distinct national identity and a sense of comfort at a time when foreign powers were encroaching on dai-viet. more ambiguous or troubled relationships with food emerge in the essays by karin speedy, amy hubbell and angela giovanangeli. speedy’s analysis of forced and unwitting cannibalism in the oeuvre of new caledonian writer georges beaudoux takes up the european notion of the cannibal as the ultimate other and uses its particular evocations in jean m’barai le pêcheur de tripangs. following beaudoux’s lead, she queries how cannibalism might be better understood as a trope for the figure of the métis. the role of food in the nostalgic processes of those living in exile is complicated in amy hubbell’s discussion of the popular culture and literary production of the piednoir community in france. forced to flee their algerian homeland with the war and the independence movement in the 1960s, food becomes both a way of connecting with a lost past and a focus for painful remembrances. giovanangeli and robert introduction portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 3 angela giovanangeli’s paper draws on notions of resistance and social change and investigates some of the recent transformations of food distribution in france. her case study of a french farm market explores how the local farm market initiative can be viewed as a creative and innovative performance that questions mainstream food practices. the role of food in the positing of cultural identity is examined in the special issue’s last two essays by jean anderson and julie robert, who find themselves on opposite sides of this debate. anderson’s article examines the way food and eating within the colonial and postcolonial francophone context form a conflicted interface between indigene and coloniser. anderson draws on a range of fictional texts by oceanian writers, mainly from the french-speaking pacific, to reflect on the meaning and function of food in relation to indigenous identity in the face of colonisation and the belief that modernisation will lead to the adoption of metropolitan food practices. for robert, by contrast, food—as taken up by shanghai-born quebecoise author ying chen in le mangeur—fails to be emblematic of larger cultural or moralistic constructs. rather, she argues that notions of edibility stem from the food-related choices that flow from our embodiment, thus helping us understand who we are. central to this special issue and the question put to all the authors is the matter of how food constructs and reconstructs identity at different periods of time, in different french speaking countries and in different ways. as the papers in this issue attest, it is a question that lends itself to many answers, for as much as food is a common global concern, it is still intensely anchored in localised activity and interactions. food therefore serves as an ideal way to explore the diversity of experiences and circumstances represented by the common frame of la francophonie. reference list brillat-savarin, j. a. 1982, la physiologie du goût, champs classiques, paris. portalapplebyvol7no22010galley-v2-31-8-10 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. ‘a bit of a grope’: gender, sex and racial boundaries in transitional east timor roslyn appleby, university of technology, sydney introduction the promotion of gender equality has, in recent decades, been a central concern in international development projects, and is enshrined in international agreements and commitments including the millennium development goals. yet the enactment of these goals in the intercultural contact zone of development has been problematic, as development workers struggle to balance sometimes-contradictory discourses of gender equality and tolerance for cultural difference. for white women working in development, this struggle can be particularly difficult. on the one hand, women may be marginalised within the patriarchal culture of international development and, at the same time, find themselves the target of local men’s hostility and aggression. while research and plans to promote gender equality in a global arena have, appropriately, primarily focused on the opportunities and barriers faced by women in ‘recipient’ communities, few empirical accounts have tackled the ambiguities inherent in the positioning of white women as international aid workers. this article takes up these concerns by focusing on the gender positioning of white australian women who were employed as foreign aid workers in east timor during the military and aid intervention of 2000-2002, following the country’s historic vote for independence from indonesia. drawing on the narrative accounts of seven of the women i interviewed as part of a larger study,1 the article explores the challenges the women faced in negotiating gender relations with men in the international aid 1 the interviews represent part of a larger study published in appleby (2010). appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 2 community and in the timorese community. my interpretation of their accounts, shaped in part by my own experiences of teaching english in east timor during the same period of international occupation, demonstrates the women’s complex and contradictory positioning as both international aid workers and cultural aliens. the following two sections are intended to situate the women’s experiences as actors within a broader geopolitical domain of international intervention and occupation. the first locates the women’s aid work within the historical context of intervention in east timor; the second provides a critical account of the intervention’s intended aims of gender reform. i then turn to my discussion of the women’s accounts. in that discussion, i focus in particular on the women’s narration of encounters in public space as a contested domain in regard to the spatial regulation of gender and race (rose 1993), and in a contact zone ‘where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’ (pratt 1992: 4). intervention, occupation, and the transition to independence in east timor the 2000-2002 international aid effort in east timor can be understood as one phase in a long history of intervention and occupation, marked by over four centuries of portuguese colonialism and 24 years of indonesian occupation and incorporation into the indonesian state. indonesian occupation came to an end in 1999 when the people of east timor voted overwhelmingly for independence. violence escalated following the announcement of the results, with massacres and large-scale destruction of properties and infrastructure as indonesian troops and supporters withdrew. by september, civil society was in a state of collapse with the cessation and withdrawal of all civil, government, legal and administrative functions, and the destruction of seventy percent of the physical infrastructure and 90 percent of housing (chopra 2002). in order to quell the violence, indonesia approved the intervention of an australian-led multinational peacekeeping force whose strength ultimately reached 11,500 troops (chopra 2000: 28). the international force east timor (interfet) was charged with restoring security, and in 2000 formally handed over military command to a un peacekeeping operation and the united nations transitional administration for east timor (untaet). this set the tone for a co-location of the aid effort with a masculinised military presence. supported by a military strength of 8,950 troops, 200 military observers, and a civilian police force of 1,640, untaet assumed its mandate appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 3 to maintain law and order, rebuild the structure of government and public administration, develop civil and social services and coordinate humanitarian assistance during east timor’s transition to full independence in 2002. alongside the un mission, a vast array of government and non-government organisations arrived and took a major role in the reconstruction of east timor through the mobilisation of emergency relief efforts and the channelling of aid funds and expertise into a huge range of assistance programs in housing, health, education, welfare, public administration, business and industry. english language education programs were a key element in the educational assistance provided by australia. all the women in this study were professional english language teachers, much in demand in the early emergency phase of national reconstruction due to the sudden withdrawal of indonesian teachers from east timor, and because of the use of english as the lingua franca of the foreign intervention. gender reform and international intervention the women aid workers’ negotiation of everyday gender interactions can be considered in light of the stated goals for gender reform that were a feature of the transitional period. untaet’s peacekeeping and development operations were to include a focus on ‘gender mainstreaming,’ in keeping with contemporary development thinking that gender perspectives should be considered in the design and delivery of every aid project. the inclusion of a gender perspective in aid projects is primarily understood in terms of gender inequality as a problem located within the recipient community, a problem manifest, for example, in poor participation rates for girls in formal education. in this way, developed and developing communities are conceived in a dichotomous relationship: the developed world is constituted as a place of modern attitudes and approaches towards gender equality, in contrast with the developing world which is constructed as a place of traditional, patriarchal notions of gender oppression. in this regard, it is useful to recall spivak’s argument that one ‘justification of imperialism as a civilising mission,’ as opposed to a mission for the expansion of western capitalism, was to be found in the actions of ‘white men, seeking to save brown women from brown men’ (1994: 10). while the opportunities and freedoms available to women and girls in developing countries may indeed be limited, focusing solely on problems in the recipient community serves to mask persistent inequalities in the developed world, assumes that western women are liberated and in control of their own lives, and fails to appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 4 adequately address the conflicts that arise when, and because, development enterprises occupy sites in the developing world. development projects may require that aid workers strive to combat the social and moral injustices of sexism, racism, class exclusion and so on, but the various interests of social justice are sometimes in conflict, as can be seen in the debates between first world and third world feminism on the issue of feminist cultural imperialism. within feminist circles, there has been much debate over the way gender interests are conceived, represented and investigated. critiques of a ‘superior “we know best” attitude of western feminisms’ have complicated approaches to gender (pearson & jackson 1998: 7) and implicated white women in the paternalistic, neocolonial discourses of development (wells & mcewan 2004). on the other hand, the retreat to ‘culture and tradition’ as a means of resisting neocolonial interference has, in some circumstances, prevented women from ‘overcoming discrimination and enjoying basic human rights’ (hunt 2004: 258). while attempts to relocate gender politics often focus on a global ‘human rights’ framework, feminist poststructuralists have also emphasised the importance of engagement with women’s local, everyday struggles, and ‘rhizomatic practices’ of resistance, to develop an ‘emancipatory politics’ (yeoh, teo & huang 2002: 3). the latter attempt to avoid essentialist notions of, and transhistorical claims about, gender in favour of situated, contextualised analyses that consider the intersection of gender/power relations with other axes of difference in the politics of change (hawthorne 2004). nevertheless, as i attempt to demonstrate in this study, these ideals leave the position of white women aid workers in a dilemma about how to negotiate competing desires for gender equality and cultural sensitivity in their own everyday interactions and encounters. in transitional east timor, these debates and dilemmas were particularly acute. claims that east timor is a patriarchal society, one in which women have suffered disproportionately under waves of occupation, are found amongst both timorese and western scholars, with some alleging that customary tribal practices, portuguese colonialism and catholicism have contributed to women’s oppression (see, for example, charlesworth & wood 2002; de araujo 2007; joshi 2007). however, in the transitional period between 1999 and 2002, despite the establishment of a gender affairs unit in untaet, observers have claimed that achievements in improving gender equality were appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 5 limited not only by patriarchal traditions, but also by poor planning, limited funding, hostility from male officials within the un mission, and the masculine nature of the un enterprise itself (charlesworth 2008). indeed, 97.6 percent of the peacekeeping forces and 96 percent of the international civilian police were male; and although 33 percent of the civilians in untaet were women, almost all the key positions were held by men (charlesworth 2008). amongst aid agencies, women were represented in the traditional areas of health and education, yet leaders and administrators in those programs also tended to be male. in these circumstances, joshi (2007) has argued that a militarised and masculinised untaet, under the control of a male dominated department of peace keeping operations, exacerbated gender problems in east timor and failed to protect civilian women from sexual violence perpetrated by international military and police personnel. from the perspective of critical development studies, the problematic gender relations within the aid program were symptomatic of a pattern in which aid is closely associated with a masculinist culture of military intervention. in such interventions, a democratic project for introducing gender equality in parts of the world where women are oppressed may be used to legitimate a conservative militarist agendas (eisenstein 2007); yet the masculinised nature of military operations may serve to aggravate iniquitous gender effects in conflict and post-conflict zones (mazurana, raven-roberts, parpart & lautze 2005). this raises significant dilemmas for the pursuit of gender equality through aid programs, and may ultimately exacerbate conditions of inequality for women on both sides of the development divide. in the following sections, i discuss the complex and contradictory positioning of white women working on development projects in east timor, and contrast their experiential accounts in relation to men in the international community and the timorese community. on the one hand, the women’s responses to men in the international community display an explicit rejection of the subservient subject positions offered by a masculinist development culture. by contrast, in their encounters with timorese men, the women’s self-positioning was more ambivalent, as they attempted to juggle competing discourses of gender equality and cultural sensitivity, and to accommodate an awareness of their own intrusion and occupation of timor as a place that was not their own. the women’s contrasting responses point to the ambiguous position of white women as alien appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 6 occupiers, and highlight the dilemmas they face in finding an appropriately gendered role in the development enterprise as an intercultural domain. gender relations within the international community working in dili, the location of the greatest number of foreign workers, the women in this study experienced the public social space of the intervention and development enterprise to be intensely patriarchal, and assessed much of the behaviour of foreign men as ‘incredibly sexist.’ accounts of the perceived sexism that prevailed within the privileged foreign development community, suggest that while the women teachers in this study enjoyed mixed social interaction on their own terms, they vigorously opposed the scrutiny of an objectifying male gaze (appleby 2009, 2010). they bristled at perceived gender hierarchies in an overarching patriarchal development regime, and resisted involvement in social practices that they experienced as hostile to women. for these women, the social spaces produced by the development community appeared to enable an exaggerated, muscular masculinity: from their perspective, this was a ‘blokes’ world.’ in the opinion of one teacher, elly,2 the emergency scenario and war games, the expectation and evidence of violence and conflict, appeared to attract men who ‘would just never get jobs with that sort of authority or money or sense of importance at home, and they can do it all in these situations.’ this vision of a conflict zone in which men dressed in ‘little military outfits’ were barking orders and exercising control over people and situations, echoed with the legacies of an earlier colonial era where the empire was envisaged as ‘a place of masculine endeavour, where heroic individual males behave in adventurous ways, exploring undiscovered lands and subduing the inhabitants’ (mills 1994: 36–37). the privileging of hegemonic masculinity tended to marginalise female teachers who felt excluded by the muscular pursuits of a militarised development mission. in elly’s view, the gendered construction of public space in east timor meant that women aid workers were ‘a bit of an anomaly.’ she added: ‘the whole set-up was still kind of quite patriarchal because it was still so war-oriented … there was something very “wargames-y” about the whole scene, and male about it.’ this male scene appeared to contain an implicit message to women: ‘watch out, it’s males that operate here!’ 2 all participants are referred to by pseudonym. appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 7 i didn’t feel like “watch out because women are being attacked on the streets” … it was more kind of “this is very much a war zone and you don’t know very much about that whole kind of thing so just be careful.” that’s what i felt. like we were not really meant to be there, as a gender. like as aid workers, yes, but as women aid workers, there was something a bit funny. while the women saw themselves as having a legitimate professional role as educators, they believed they were seen by men as lightweight, uncommitted and middle class. another teacher, helen, suspected ‘professional jealousy’ was at the heart of the criticisms and exclusions directed at teachers, who were ‘easy targets, because people seem to imagine that we have a light job.’ such ‘light jobs’ could be contrasted to the masculinised, physical work undertaken in development sites, such as timor, characterised by danger and designated for emergency relief. in related recollections, fay suggested that in the eyes of male aid workers, ‘we were this sort of bunch of middle-class teachers from australia with no commitment,’ cast as outsiders in a masculinist hierarchy. without legitimacy in a masculine domain, elly felt the teachers were viewed as ‘sex objects,’ and as ‘meat market’ prey in a social scene comprising ‘the whole nightclub scene’ and hotels where ‘predatory australian men’ would congregate to ‘scoff at the trough, drink beer, and watch violent, noisy videos.’ these were viewed as hostile places where women were subject to close inspection, groping and harassment. elly reasoned that by travelling overseas, normal social expectations had been removed, allowing some men to enter a time warp and ‘revert to that type of behaviour’ whereby women’s bodies are constituted and controlled through the scrutiny of the male gaze. in sum, these women’s accounts constituted the development community as a patriarchal domain in which foreign men occupied a position of dominance, and in which women were out of place. moreover, men’s behaviour in the ngo and un circle was perceived as doubly inappropriate: the gendered performances were not only anachronistic and historically dislocated, reflecting outdated norms that would be unacceptable at home, but also geographically inappropriate in being transposed into another cultural space where different norms and sensitivities may need to be considered. the dominant position of a militarised, masculinised foreign community was consolidated by notions of timor as a dangerous place. during the transitional period, appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 8 rumours of political instability and impending militia attacks justified the continuing foreign occupation as a means of controlling the threat of timorese violence. foreign workers were warned to exercise caution, not to venture out alone or at night, not to go to the beach, and to stay away from any meetings or gatherings of people. the effect of these warnings was to secure a patronising, protective role for men who, in helen’s experience, were ‘hectoring us about how to keep safe. they all do it.’ from the teachers’ perspective, the potential dangers were construed as a threat to expatriate women’s safety, and added to their sense of being monitored and controlled. with white women implicitly ‘mythologized as the desired objects of colonized men’ (stoler 1995: 183), a discourse of fear was mobilised by masculinist claims to know what the dangers were and how to avoid them (rose 1993). those claims for territorial control necessitated the redrawing of racial boundaries, and reaffirmed the need to monitor and confine women within secure physical spaces. in the complex patterns of gendered behaviour in this space, we can see stoler’s point that ‘sexual desire in colonial and postcolonial contexts has been a crucial transfer point of power, tangled with racial exclusions in complicated ways’ (stoler 1995: 190). gender relations between white women and timorese men while most of the women in this study did recount incidents of unwanted attention or harassment by timorese men, their responses to these threats were complex and varied. despite hostile incidents of being watched, followed or confronted by timorese men, often in isolated public spaces, they positioned their own responses within discourses of cultural sensitivity, rather than asserting their rights to gender equality. as outsiders, the women could only make assumptions about timorese sexual mores and how western women were identified by timorese men. acting on their assumptions, the women tended to adopt strategies that, first, served to diminish or excuse threatening behaviour from timorese men, and second, aimed to defuse the effects of this behaviour by modifying their own bodily performance in an effort to avoid antagonising perceived timorese gender norms. in adopting these strategies, the women’s contrasting reaction to western men and timorese men is of interest: whereas the attempted regulation by western men was repudiated by the women as doubly inappropriate, the women’s reflexive, ambivalent response to timorese men suggested a greater inclination to see western women, including themselves, as being inappropriate in that space. appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 9 dismissing: just a bit of a grope an apt example of the difference between women’s responses to western and timorese men is demonstrated in the contrasting accounts of physical touching recalled by helen and fay. helen complained bitterly of the unwanted attention she had received from western men, and in particular she criticised the way in which one western man had pursued, harassed and touched her inappropriately. she found this particularly irksome when this happened in the presence of timorese company. helen’s concerns point to underlying assumptions about conservatism on matters of gender and sexuality in timorese society: i just had real hassles with this [australian] contract engineer who really harassed me, who really gave me the shits actually. you know, touching me in the wrong way, and bothering me, winding me up in front of timorese or, you know, grabbing me in the wrongyou know, if anything like that happens in front of the timorese it’s ten times worse, he did it to me at a party and i just nearly died. awful. by contrast, fay’s experience of a series of unwanted sexual approaches by timorese men was dismissed as a minor irritation because ‘i didn’t feel there was a threat of violence, no i didn’t feel that it was going to go over into anything more than perhaps a bit of a grope.’ diminishing: just a little bit frightened a similar strategy adopted by the women was to diminish the threat of harassment by understatement. in the following account, i turn to the beach as a site that was particularly challenging in terms of gendered and sexualised intercultural encounters. the beach had become something of haven for teachers who wanted to escape stifling classrooms or cramped houses shared with other development workers. escaping for a walk along the beach at the end of a long teaching day carried out in extreme heat, the women were routinely followed by timorese men calling out verbal greetings, ranging from the benign ‘hello missus,’ to stronger suggestions such as ‘you fuck i!’ although elly described the experience of walking in this contested public space as ‘horrific,’ others, like dana, tended to understate the effect of being targeted as ‘the centre of attention’ by the male gaze. people looking at you because you’re a woman, on the beach, you know what it’s like, appearing in your bathers not with—you know with the east timorese (laughs) um, yeah just getting hassled. i remember there were incidents where people followed me and elly, where i got—where i had somebody waiting on the beach for me if i went in for a swim. that kind of thing, it was a bit appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 10 intimidating. on the street, you know i’d be riding my bike around but um, you know i felt okay because i was on my bike, but um, but yeah i didn’t feel as safe as i would have riding around the streets of sydney. (…) i was just a little bit frightened sometimes, not all the times, but, just a little bit frightened. i don’t think it ever—maybe that i would get attacked or that my bike would get stopped or maybe i’d get robbed. not that much, you know i’ve been more intimidated in other countries, as a woman. dana’s account demonstrates a cautious, or tentative response to timorese harassment, as the otherwise intimidating effects are diminished by constant moderation (‘a little bit frightened’), and by positive comparison with other locations (sydney and ‘other countries’). rationalising: it can happen anywhere even in instances of physical assault, the threat posed by timorese men was diminished through related strategies of rationalisation, as can be seen in anne’s account of harassment by a timorese man. when walking around the streets of dili, anne had initially ‘never felt any threat to my security,’ and felt protected by an identity she projected as a valued professional aid worker and english teacher, and also as someone who fitted in with the local community: i didn’t mind walking anywhere, and i didn’t mind walking in the pitch dark where there were no lights, and [i thought] ‘all the people round here know me’ and i felt there was safety in that. walking through the markets every day, even though people would say, ‘oh the market place is dangerous,’ but all the shopkeepers knew me and called out to me and i always thought, ‘if there’s ever any trouble, i think they’d help me, i really do.’ however, this sense of regard and protection was disrupted when, walking home alone one night, she was followed and grabbed by a man: ‘i guess i was shocked, and my reaction was to yell at him, and i yelled at him in indonesian, and i said: “i live here, i have lots of friends here, if i yell right now you are in big danger. get out of here! go!”’ the man fled, but the incident changed her sense of herself in public: what i found after that, i was so furious because i thought: ‘you’ve just spoilt it for me, up till now i didn’t mind walking anywhere’ (...) but after that, i thought: ‘i can’t go out on my own any more. suddenly i was really conscious of that, especially at night time, but i was more wary all the time. i was so angry that i should have to be. and i did think later: ‘come on, you know, that can happen anywhere in the world, not just in timor.’ this incident made ann reconsider her position in the social order. whereas she had assumed a position of power, in part secured through her identity as a white professional, she had now been reminded of her vulnerable status as an isolated female out alone at night. however, anger over the individual attack, and its implications for her sense of appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 11 worth and freedom, her sense of belonging, was eventually rationalised, naturalised, and transformed into a recognition of what she saw as women’s universal experience: a restriction on mobility enforced by the threat of violence. excusing: emasculation by foreign intervention timorese men’s behaviour was also excused by considering their position in relation to the western invasion of development aid workers. from the women’s viewpoint, the intervention of busy foreign aid workers had exacerbated racial and economic inequalities that disadvantaged timorese men. while the large and highly paid international workforce was fully employed reconstructing the country, local unemployment remained high. the few jobs that were available to timorese, working as ‘drivers, security guards and interpreters in an administration dominated by foreign experts’ (sword-gusmao 2003: 302), were paid at a daily rate of $5, while the united nations paid ‘new york salaries for its own staff’ (o’kane 2001: 21). as one of the women teachers observed, while the streets had become the public domain of a privileged, masculine, ‘un junket,’ groups of ‘bored and frustrated young men feeling like second class citizens,’ were robbed of their agency in the face of an intervention by wealthy outsiders. there were a lot of foreigners going running and stuff like that, with their wallets and what have you, early in the morning or at dusk, and making themselves vulnerable really, just not understanding that there would be that rather odd reaction to them. but there was also a lot of hostility on the street, the brutalised atmosphere and a lot of frustrated young people around. there’s no money and that massive un gravy train where peoplethe place was really, really full of foreigners living very affluent lifestyles, driving around and throwing money about, so i think at that point, those contradictions were really intense. several of the women, including dana, recognised that the teachers were complicit in this contradictory activity, ‘being over there and having money and having jobs and (…) another occupier coming in, an unofficial one,’ and that female teachers were therefore a target of resentment by disenfranchised masculine timorese hostility. dana wondered whether the anger provoked by western affluence and agency was perhaps more easily expressed as an exercise of power over western women rather than western men: ‘if you’re not feeling very powerful, then sexually harassing someone can make you feel pretty powerful, if that person is seen as pretty frightened and pretty vulnerable.’ blaming: western women’s sexuality the teachers also suspected that certain beliefs about western women’s sexuality may appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 12 have affected their interactions with timorese men. in fay’s opinion, there was ‘obviously that fascination with western sexual mores and there was quite a lot of fascination there with that, with western women who have sex and um, disapproval of it at the same time, a sort of antagonism.’ it was, perhaps, this fascination or intrigue that was evident in one perplexing incident recounted by fay. when travelling with a white male companion, they had been approached by ‘a timorese man who came up to [my male companion] and took him away and started talking about ‘fucky fucky’ or something like that, it was in those sort of terms and um, i don’t know what he actually wanted, um, it was about me [but] i don’t know what was happening there.’ incidents that occurred when walking on the beach with female companions were represented as similarly confusing: ‘those episodes on the beach and the whole thing about western women and sex andoh dear! i didn’t know where all that came from there, whether it was having some westerners behave like westerners, be publicly affectionate, have sex and that, in a traditional context being misinterpreted.’ the sense of alienation this provoked in fay led her to feel ‘foreign the whole time, and very, very cut off from the [timorese] culture.’ confronting responses to western women were also held to be influenced by notorious patterns of predatory western sex tourism in developing countries. thus, elly believed the approaches by timorese men were shaped by expectations that ‘wealthy, single women go to indonesia [to] pick up a toy-boy,’ or by hopes that a wealthy western woman might be able to give ‘a golden handshake out of some situation.’ as dana explained: ‘well if you’re a westerner you’ve got wealth, and if you’re a woman then and if you’re a western woman then that means you’re promiscuous or, you know, possibly promiscuous. so, you’re a bit of a target and a bit of an intrigue i guess, that’s how it felt to me.’ in these complex, unresolved patterns of engagement, bringing together threat and desire, the women sensed that they were not only the target of resentment and ‘hatred,’ but also of what fay had described as ‘an underlying antagonism about western sexuality’ for which women were to blame. monitoring the self the awareness of being watched and confronted was discomforting, and brought about appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 13 changes in the women’s spatial mobility and feelings about themselves. on the streets and on the beaches, an increased sensitivity to being identified as western, and potentially associated with a code of behaviour that could be perceived by nonwesterners as immoral, began to shift teachers’ images of what was appropriate in this context. as fay observed: ‘you end up feeling that you’re blaming yourself for not being a good catholic girl and all that, there’s all sorts of things about behaving appropriately in someone else’s culture, but how much you actually can change yourselfwe’re probably all inappropriate in the culture to come extent.’ in response to their sense of cultural inappropriateness, the women adopted strategies of rigorous self-monitoring and regulation in order to negotiate an acceptable appearance in public space. these strategies involved practices of taming the unacceptable female body by restricting mobility and exposure. spatial confinement for some, the simplest way to avoid harassment was to remain cocooned in the private domain, the space traditionally allocated to women. while the public sphere, and by extension imperial space, has been the domain of white western masculinity, the private domain has been associated with feminine, domestic pursuits. in this division, the exclusion of women from the public, political domain has been justified by the representation of females as natural, maternal creatures ‘beyond culture and society, compelled to remain in the private domestic sphere’ (rose 1993: 32). respecting, and in effect reproducing this traditional division, some women aid workers chose to limit their own mobility, and suffered a sense of isolation as a consequence. thus, elly recalled that the advice and warnings about the threat of danger in public spaces hindered her physical freedom: ‘yeah it did restrict my movement, but i was pretty careful anyway, at night time, well we all were i guess. just because of the general climate of people saying be careful, and you’d feel a bit nervous.’ for helen, the result was a sense of spatial confinement, and she lamented: ‘i feel a bit marooned in the expatriate enclave and i miss [my] freedom of movement.’ when they did venture out, the women tended to heed official warnings. they rarely went walking alone and, even when in pairs, restricted the places in which they were seen. certain routes were preferable in order to avoid harassment, and in elly’s account the public space of the streets was distinguished from the public space of the beach, appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 14 indicating the geographic contingency of the regulatory regime: there seemed to be a bit of a difference between which way you went, if you went right or left, from our houses. we went left [to the beach] once, and we got harassed, and then we went right after that [along the streets], and we hardly ever went left even though it’s much nicer down the other way cause that’s where the water was and everything, nice places for swimming and stuff, but so, we kind of just went the other way which is a lot more public. bodily confinement as well as curtailing their own mobility, the teachers also regulated their own bodily performance and appearance in an effort to become appropriate, and to bridge the gap between different cultural discourses around embodiment. for many, this entailed an attempt to be spatially inconspicuous, and therefore acceptable, by adopting modest attire, or choosing to swim in full clothing. claiming a particular expertise in cultural sensitivity by virtue of having ‘been in asia for a bit,’ kate adopted a modest form of beach attire: ‘these long legged things’ and ‘a sun-block top to put on top of the bathing suit.’ her own strategies of cultural adaptation, involving a veiling of the body, were contrasted with the behaviour of younger western women, who she condemned as culturally insensitive and therefore to be blamed for provoking a negative reaction amongst the timorese: i think some of the young americans and australians are begging for trouble with what they wear to swimming and stuff like that, and you know, they just think what’s appropriate for us here [in australia] is appropriate for us there [in timor], whereas (…) but yeah, just things like that, it’s an insensitivity (…) and even some of the un workers who were highly respected and appreciated for what they do, they’re just breaking cultural things left, right and centre. in a move of reflexivity, kate nevertheless acknowledged that her own performances might yet be unwittingly inappropriate, thus reinforcing her commitment to cultural sensitivity: ‘and then i shouldn’t say anything because, unknowingly i could have been doing some things as well.’ on dry land, a similar form of bodily veiling as a mode of cultural accommodation was adopted by fay, on the advice of her students acting as cultural mediators: ‘the veneer is there, you know the students would actually say, “you must wear sleeves,” they knew what was socially acceptable and what wasn’t. i did wear the blue sack [a large, shapeless blue dress]. that was my concession to timor.’ fay’s concession implied an acknowledgement that her dress served as a veneer, a mask, a means of passing unnoticed in a public domain regulated by a different set of gendered cultural norms. appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 15 presenting a-sexual readings of the body in addition to deploying these adaptive strategies, in some cases women were able to refuse sexualised readings of their body by calling on various alternative positionings that relied on elder status or professional status. some of the older women, for example, expressed a greater sense of freedom or confidence in their use of public space. for example, kate claimed that she ‘never felt threatened at all’ because she suspected that ‘the grey hair earns a lot of respect.’ similarly unfazed by the hassling that upset other women teachers, carol explained that when followed and approached by timorese men during her walks on the beach, she had simply to announce, in a prim and proper fashion, that she was an ‘english teacher,’ and ‘to say in indonesian, quite firmly, to go away.’ her professional identity was called upon as a discursive form of protective veil against unwanted sexual attention. this reading of the professional body of the teacher seemed to prevail as the women entered the institutional space of the campus. regardless of the harassment in the streets and on the beaches, it never occurred in the grounds of the university, where the women appeared to be read not as sexed bodies, but in terms of a professional identity produced in a specific place. elly demonstrated this spatial contrast succinctly: ‘you couldn’t lie on the beach, you did get completely harassed there. and certainly i got followed around in town a fair bit too. but not on campus: i was “the teacher” on campus.’ the particular space in which she appeared interacted with how she felt she was perceived and produced as a subject: the teaching space of the campus created a different meaning for her body. conclusion in the accounts of white women development workers in transitional east timor, a stark difference is apparent in their responses to approaches made by men from the foreign community and men from the timorese community. whereas the women took up oppositional positions in relation to perceptions of hegemonic masculinity in the international community, their positioning in relation to timorese men was more complex and ambiguous, as discourses of gender equality and sexual freedom came into conflict with discourses of tolerance towards perceived cultural difference. this contrasting positioning echoed the ambiguous position of white women in the colonial projects of an earlier era. appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 16 from the women’s perspective, a sense of unresolved disquiet remained in relation to the gendered spatiality of the contact zone. just as public space has historically been constructed in the west as a masculine sphere so, too, can contemporary development contexts be read as intercultural public spaces that reproduce normative gender hierarchies. from the perspective of women teachers, transitional east timor was experienced as a domain for masculine intervention and agency, where foreign men were positioned at the head of public institutions charged with the regulation and control of the development context as a public space. development projects, international organisations, diplomatic missions and the military served to sustain patriarchal regimes akin to those of the imperial explorers, mapping and surveying the landscape, producing plans and defending the territory against external threats. in this space, sexual and racial desire became sites for the transfer of power: women experienced the marginalising effects of being cast as an anomaly, found their mobility curtailed, and felt themselves subject, through the male gaze, to surveillance, monitoring and control. returning the gaze, women saw the patriarchal and sexist regimes of western men as doubly inappropriate, on the one hand exemplifying the archaic double standards of a different era, and on the other hand, transgressing perceived gender boundaries of the local context. in the intercultural contact zone of development, gender as a dimension of teachers’ subjectivity was entwined with various axes of embodied difference, particularly those implicated in the colonial legacies attached to whiteness and economic advantage. in this location, the intersection of whiteness and the female body in the public domain appeared to be read in a negative way by timorese men, giving rise to suspicion and harassment. and yet the teachers in this study responded to such harassment by asserting discourses of cultural sensitivity, even at the expense of a commitment to personal freedom and gender equality. in public spaces, women regulated their own mobility, disguised their bodies by veiling them in modest, missionary clothes to obscure femaleness, and at times invoked protection through more powerful social and professional identities. these disguises suggest an attempt to androgynise or discipline the space of the unacceptable female body in order to enable women to appear, under the gaze of both local and foreign eyes, as appropriate and legitimate participants in the public domain. women’s awareness of complicity in the foreign occupation of east timor was thus translated into a self-positioning as intruder into another sovereign appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 17 cultural domain, and claims of gender equality receded in the face of discourses of tolerance for cultural difference. the accounts of white women in the development milieu of transitional east timor demonstrate that gendered participation, under circumstances of occupation and intervention, remains a troublesome experience. these gendered, geopolitical relations in the teachers’ narratives demonstrate the weight of meaning attached to personal and interpersonal space, and highlight the complexity of development that defies reduction to a singular narrative of social and economic progress. overall, despite a development rhetoric of progress towards supposedly universal goals of social justice and gender equality, in conditions of intervention and occupation gender remains a problematic dimension of subjectivity where complex geometries of power intersect with patriarchal and sexist regimes, and women’s roles continue to be defined in relation to masculine desire. acknowledgements the research was supported by funding from the elssa centre, university of technology, sydney. reference list appleby, r. 2010, elt, gender and international development: myths of progress in a neocolonial world, multilingual matters, bristol. appleby, r. 2009, ‘unruly others: language teachers and the policing of gender in international development,’ journal and proceedings of gender awareness in language education, [online], vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 4-14. available: http://www.gale-sig.org/website/the_gale_journal.html [accessed 7 february 2010] charlesworth, h. 2008, ‘are women peaceful? reflections on the role of women in peace-building,’ feminist legal studies, vol. 16, 347–361. charlesworth, h. & wood, m. 2002, ‘women and human rights in the rebuilding of east timor,’ nordic journal of international law, vol. 71, 325–348. chopra, j. 2000, ‘the un’s kingdom of east timor,’ survival, vol. 42, no. 3, 27–39. chopra, j. 2002, ‘building state failure in east timor,’ development and change, vol. 33, no. 5, 979– 1000. de araujo, m. 2007, ‘oxfam and partners in east timor: creating a voice for women and carving a space of that voice,’ in challenges and possibilities: international organisations and women in timor-leste, (eds) d. grenfell & a. trembath, globalism institute, rmit university, melbourne, australia, 19–25. duffield, m. 2002, ‘social reconstruction and the radicalization of development: aid as a relation of global liberal governance,’ development and change, vol. 33, no. 5, 1049–1071. eisenstein, a. 2007, sexual decoys: gender, race and war in imperial democracy. zed books, london. hawthorne, s. 2004, ‘the political uses of obscurantism: gender mainstreaming and intersectionality,’ development bulletin, the australian development studies network, anu, vol. 64, 87–91. appleby ‘a bit of a grope’ portal, vol. 7, no. 2, july 2010. 18 hunt, j. 2004, ‘gender and development,’ in key issues in development, (eds) d. kingsbury, j. remenyi j. mckay & j. hunt, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke & new york, 243–265. joshi, v., 2007, ‘creating and limiting opportunities: women’s organizing and the un in east timor,’ in challenges and possibilities: international organisations and women in timor-leste, (eds) d. grenfell & a. trembath, globalism institute, rmit university, melbourne, australia, 13–16. mazurana, d., raven-roberts, a., parpart, j. & lautze, j. 2005, gender, conflict, and peacekeeping. rowman & littlefield, lanham. mills, s. 1994, ‘knowledge, gender, and empire,’ in writing women and space: colonial and postcolonial geographies, (eds) a. blunt & g. rose, guilford press, new york, 20–50. o’kane, m. 2001, ‘revolution turns against its own,’ the guardian weekly, 1–7 february, 21. pearson, r., & jackson, c. 1998, ‘interrogating development: feminism, gender and policy,’ in feminist visions of development, (eds) c. jackson & r. pearson, routledge, london and new york, 1–16. pratt, m. l. 1992, imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation. routledge, london. rose, g. 1993, feminism and geography: the limits of geographical knowledge. polity press, cambridge. spivak, g. 1994, ‘can the subaltern speak? speculations on widow sacrifice,’ in colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: a reader, (eds) p. williams & l. chrisman, harvester wheatsheaf, new york and london, 66–111. stoler, a. l. 1995, race and the education of desire: foucault’s history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. duke university press, durham. sword gusmao, k. 2003, a woman of independence. pan macmillan, sydney. wells, j., & mcewan, t. (2004). ‘gender mainstreaming: moving from principles to implementation,’ development bulletin, the australian development studies network, anu, no. 64, 31–33. yeoh, b. s. a., teo, p., & huang, s. 2002, ‘women’s agencies and activisms in the asia-pacific region,’ in gender politics in the asia-pacific region, (eds) b. s. a. yeoh, p. teo & s. huang, routledge, london & new york, 1–16. portal v11 no 1 jan 2014 fotouhi copyeditgalley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. stigma and exclusion in cross-cultural contexts special issue, guest edited by annie pohlman, sol rojas-lizana and maryam jamarani. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. an analysis of literary representations of iranian men in diasporic iranian literature sanaz fotouhi, university of new south wales in 1987 betty mahmoody published her memoir, not without my daughter. it recounts her life as an american woman married to an iranian doctor in the usa. in 1985, in the wake of the 1979 iranian revolution and at the height of the iran-iraq war, dr mahmoody, who had encountered racial discrimination at work, decided to travel to iran for two weeks with betty and their daughter, mahtob. after much convincing, betty was persuaded to undertake the trip. iran, however, was not what she had imagined. she depicts the country as a dirty desert with basic facilities and ‘primitive’ customs that she does not understand. expecting to return to the usa after two weeks, betty learned on the day of their planned return that her husband had been fired from his job in the usa and had decided to stay in iran indefinitely. it appears this had been his plan all along. as betty protests, mahmoody becomes violent and abusive. when she attempts to run away, he separates her from mahtob and imprisons her. but she manages to sneak out and meet people who help her. after eighteen months of abuse and mistreatment, betty and mahtob escape through the mountains into turkey, where they seek refuge at the us consulate. mahmoody’s memoir has been one of the most successful bestsellers of its genre since its publication. as of 2010, not without my daughter had sold 11 million copies, and had been translated into numerous languages. to date, it is still listed as one of the top 100 books in chain bookstores alongside classics such as catcher in the rye and sense and sensibility. i begin this paper with mahmoody’s book, and its success, because it fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 2 has had consequences for the way modern iranian culture, particularly iranian masculinity, has been perceived in the west. as shahram khosravi argues, ‘the construction of iranian men’s “primitive masculinity” started in the late 1980s. the most conspicuous and influential mediawork operation has undoubtedly been not without my daughter … [which] has created a widespread stereotype of the iranian man’ (2009: 599). while mahmoody’s representation may have exerted considerable influence on contemporary representations of iranian men, this kind of portrayal of iranian and middle eastern masculinity dates further back to early encounters of the west with the middle east. in the west, both historically as subjects of western imagination and more recently as members of the western polity, iranian and other middle eastern men have long been subjected to ambivalent representations. in western travelogues, for example, as faegheh shirazai has argued, the middle eastern man is portrayed ‘as something lesser, not quite as a real man,’ as either a despot or a victim, as ‘either domineering patriarchal or oppressed by colonial power’ (2010: 6). more recently, these dichotomies have been reflected in western films that portray middle eastern and iranian men as the ‘bad guys,’ the terrorists at fault. the middle eastern man, then, has been portrayed as either the main antagonist or as a simplified, one-dimensional character constructed to fulfil an expected role. interestingly, the ambivalence of iranian masculinity has not been constructed by western representations alone. rather, in recent times numerous books by iranian women writers in english have been replicating the stereotypical orientalist depiction of iranian men found in mahmoody’s not without my daughter. in many of these accounts, iranian men are depicted hypervisibly and negatively as violent fanatics and sexual deviants; at the same time, ambivalently, they may be rendered almost invisible. given this ambivalence in iranian women’s writing it is notable that there is a dearth of iranian men’s voices within the larger framework of diasporic iranian writing in english and in the recent scholarship that surrounds it. while iranian women’s fiction and memoirs have received significant attention from publishers, readers, reviewers, and scholars, iranian men’s narratives have been largely ignored. but such narratives do exist. in my research into the representation of and works by iranian men in english since the 1979 revolution, i discovered that iranian male authors have published over fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 3 sixty-five memoirs and books of fiction in english. yet, unlike books by iranian women, many of which have become part of popular english-language literary discourse in the west, very few of the men’s accounts have replicated that success. furthermore, while iranian women’s narratives have attracted much scholarly attention, there is again a dearth of reviews of, let alone academic engagement with, works written by iranian men. cognisant of this background, my aim here is to address the scant scholarly and public attention paid either to diasporic iranian men’s narratives or to the representation of iranian masculinity. given that western perceptions of iranian men and masculinity have primarily been constructed through narratives by diasporic iranian women writers, i first consider how iranian masculinity has been represented in relation to feminist discourses. i argue that iranian women’s narratives, usually filtered through a critique of patriarchy and/or orientalist feminist discourses, coupled with iranian women’s tendency towards self-orientalization in their own writing, have contributed to iranian men’s simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility in diasporic iranian literature written in english. second, i examine the increasing popularity of diasporic iranian men’s narratives and argue that their writing stems from a desire to critique conventional understandings of iranian masculinity. drawing on kelly oliver’s theories of subjectivity in witnessing (2001), and situating male diasporic iranian male writing in specific sociopolitical settings, i examine the various strategies that male writers have employed to represent and reconstruct iranian masculinity and their own individual sense of identity. male hypervisibility/invisibility and female self-orientalisation the current hypervisibility and invisibility of iranian men can be traced back to the legacy of orientalist discourses that historically described middle eastern muslim men as autocrats who lock up women. ‘oversexed degenerates,’ as said sardonically puts it in orientalism, these men are ‘capable of cleverly devious intrigues, but [are] essentially sadistic, treacherous [and] low’ (1978: 287). in the contemporary epoch, moreover, representations of middle eastern masculinity have become synonymous with fundamentalism, and associated with terror, rage and savagery. yet it should not be forgotten that in iran the onset of modernization in the early decades of the twentieth century produced western educated men who encouraged the public presence of women in society, thereby enabling stereotypical images of iranian masculinity to shift slightly. fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 4 however, following the 1979 islamic revolution and the us embassy hostage crisis (1979–1981), more negative connotations were renewed and reconfirmed for the western gaze. as the western world watched in horror ‘wild-eyed’ iranians shook their fists in the air and sent death messages to the usa (scott 2000: 178). by taking us diplomatic representatives hostage, iranian men regained their position as ‘devilish savages of islam’ (scott 2000: 178). as khosravi argues (2009: 599) this primitive image of iranian masculinity was based on notions of fundamentalist islam and promoted through various media outlets.1 that image, heightened later by 9/11 and the ensuing ‘war on terror,’ has perpetuated the hypervisibility of iranian masculinity in the west. the position of iranian men, however, is even more complicated given that until recently most understandings of iranian masculinity in the west were mediated and constructed through a feminist perspective. lahoucine ouzgane observes that ‘in the last three or four decades, scholarly attention to gender issues in the middle east and north africa has been focused almost exclusively on a quest to understand femininity: what is it and how it is made and regulated?’ (2006: 1). steeped in an orientalist vision of the middle east that rendered muslim women as at once ‘victims of religious dogma’ (bahramitash 2006: 223) and oppressed by dominant patriarchal discourses, middle eastern women have become subjects of recognition and study in the west. middle eastern women’s narratives, particularly after 9/11 and in the wake of new conflicts between middle eastern regimes and the west, were embraced by western readers. consequently the western publishing industry realised the marketability of these books, and since 2001 hundreds of titles by and about middle eastern women have been published in the west, with a significant proportion by and about iranian women. this timely sociopolitical interest at a time of political tensions between iran and the west has also encouraged specific modes of reading. in rethinking global sisterhood (2007), nima naghibi outlines her interest in analysing ‘how particular kinds of (often contradictory) representations of the persian woman as abject, as repressed, and, paradoxically, as licentious [has] become consolidated as unquestioned “truths” in 1 in islamophobia peter gottschalk and gabriel greenberg demonstrate how the image of the iranian man evolved during and after the iranian revolution and the hostage crisis through cartoons in popular us newspapers that depicted imam khomeini ‘and the islamic revolutionaries of iran as crazy, backward, and violent’ (2008: 124). fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 5 dominant western and iranian feminist discourses’ (2007: x). a seminal text that critiques and outlines the relationship between western white feminism and that of the ‘third world,’ in this case iranian women, naghibi explains how the idea of ‘global sisterhood’ has functioned in the past and present to benefit western women at the expense of the other. naghibi explores this relationship through analysis of texts by western women about iranian women, and suggests that such representations have also influenced iranian feminism and iranian women’s representation of themselves. she positions her argument around the current situation of political instability and military conflict across the middle east, and concludes that such texts have influenced recent western declarations of war across the middle east in the name of liberating its women. although these types of representation have been common in the west for many decades, particularly in the works of diasporic iranian women writers, the origins of these representations date back to the introduction of concepts of western modernity, including feminism, to iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. in his insightful refashioning iran: orientalism, occidentalism and historiography, mohammad tavakoli-targhi (2001) proposes that much of what informs the modern narrative of iranian history is influenced by western and eurocentric notions of modernity and ‘occidental rationality.’ he argues that ‘whereas europeans reconstituted the modern self in relation to their non-western others, asians and africans [and middle easterners] began to redefine their self in relation to europe, their new significant other’ (2001: 4). at the heart of this definition was a ‘binary opposition’ influenced heavily by colonial and orientalist language that defined what was constituted modern—that is western—and what was not—that is middle eastern. in the early 1900s a prominent signs of difference between what was modern and what was not was defined by the condition of iranian women, particularly their position, status and visibility in iranian society and public life. these differences were marked by how iranian women dressed, which thus came to signify iran’s backwardness not only in the eyes of the west but also from the perspective of certain groups of western educated iranian modernists in the early decades of the twentieth century. as tavakolitarghi states, ‘for iranian modernists, viewing european women as educated and cultured, the veil became a symbol of backwardness. its removal, in their view, was essential to the advancement of iran and its dissociation from arab-islamic culture’ fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 6 (2001: 54). although these ideas were not entirely welcomed by traditionalist iranians, they were influential enough to construct a specific class within iranian society in which women were given new forms of freedom. with new models of modernisation, iranian women had the opportunity to be educated and, despite being in small numbers, for the first time, in the early decades of the 1900s they became part of the public sphere. this not only exposed women to alternative concepts of gender relations, particularly those driven by newly imported concepts of western feminism; it also gave iranian women the ability to comment actively and challenge masculine and patriarchal social norms. as early as the 1920s, then, iranian women were publishing their opinions and views on different aspects of iranian society, including on concepts of veiling and unveiling.2 for nasrin rahimieh ‘this conceptualisation … has informed [much of] iran’s understanding of its own history’ (2003: 148). one can argue that it also informs much of diasporic iranian women’s contemporary writing, especially when representing iranian gender relations and iranian masculinity. a survey of diasporic women authors published since the 1980s reveals a list dominated by elite iranian families. azar nafisi, for example, the author of reading lolita in tehran (2004), is the daughter of one of tehran’s mayors during the shah’s regime; her mother was one of the first women representatives of the parliament during the shah’s regime. sattareh farman-farmaian, the narrator of daughter of persia (1996), is a qajar princess with a father who insisted on his daughter’s education, even permitting her to go to the usa as one of the first iranian women to travel alone outside iran in the early 1900s, at a time when her friends were being taken out of middle school by their parents to be married. lily monadjemi, author of blood and carnations (1993) and a matter of survival (2010), is the descendent of naser al-din shah, one of the shahs of persia (1848 to 1896) who is widely regarded as responsible for the country’s nineteenth century encounter with modernity. marjan-satrapi, creator of the persepolis comic series, is a descendent of a qajar monarch. davar ardalan, the author of my name is iran (2008), is the daughter of laleh bakhtiar, one of the most prominent iranian-american women scholars, and a translator into english of the koran from a feminist perspective. similarly, shusha guppy, the author of many books including the blindfold horse (1988), was also a songwriter, singer and filmmaker, and the daughter of a famous iranian theologian who 2 in women with moustaches and men without beards (2005), afsaneh najmabadi identifies the earliest and most significant contributions that iranian women have made to feminist discourse in iran. fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 7 sent her to paris in 1952 to study oriental languages and philosophy when she was only seventeen. the list is not exclusive; but it does indicate how much of what is being written about iran outside iran is being informed by people from a historically privileged class of iranian society. this is not to deny that women of non-aristocratic backgrounds, such as marina nemat, firoozeh dumas, gina nahai and susan pari, also contribute to the discourse. however, by virtue of living outside iran and writing in english, they too could be deemed to belong to this privileged class of educated iranians. i highlight this class factor because the social situation, personal experiences, and education of many of the women who are now cultural leaders and representatives of iranian experiences in diaspora are very much westernised or influenced by western concepts of modernity. this influence, as rahimieh (2003) and tavakoli-targhi (2001) both argue, is steeped in orientalist notions and dichotomies that were carried across with western notions of modernity in the early part of the twentieth century. for rahimieh ‘orientalist discourses … underwrite the history of modern iran’ (2003: 148). however, the islamic revolution in the late 1970s that re-emphasised the east/west and gender dichotomies, also created unresolved contradictions not only between iran and the west but also between iranians themselves. as said tells us, ‘if all told there is an intellectual acquiescence in the images and doctrines of orientalism, there is also a very powerful reinforcement of this in economic, political, and social exchange: the modern orient, in short, participates in its own orientalising’ (1978: 325). this means that iranians themselves, whether as pro-government proponents from iran who emphasise the differences between iran and the west, or as educated diasporic writers writing about the perils of life for iranians under the islamic regime, or as even defenders of women’s rights, may be implicated inevitably in the politics of what rahimieh calls ‘self-orientalisation’ (2003). on this basis, therefore, if some diasporic writers, particularly women writers, are involved in this process of self-orientalisation, what impacts does this process have on the representation of iranian men and forms of masculinity produced by their work? as naghibi puts it, ‘in representing persian women, [many] draw on what foucault has called the “already-said,” or rather the repressed “never-said” of manifest discourse. the truth of iranian women’s representation as abject, veiled subjects is thus further entrenched by the self-referentiality of the already-said of colonial discourse’ (2007: fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 8 xvii). many iranian women writers, coming from a privileged, educated echelons of iranian society, to some degree identify with this discourse. as naghibi reminds us: the western woman, modeled on an enlightenment figure of autonomous subjecthood, contrasts herself in each instance to the persian woman, represented as the devalued other against which western woman consolidates herself. privileged iranian women in the nineteenth centuries also participated in the discursive subjugation of their working-class persian counterparts. by positioning the persian woman as the embodiment of oppressed womanhood, western and elite iranian women represented themselves as epitomical of modernity and progress. (2007: xvii) i believe that this approach operates even now, particularly amongst diasporic western educated women and that this self-orientalising tendency among diasporic iranian women has a direct influence on how iranian masculinity is perceived and represented in the west. a glimpse at the range of memoirs and fictional works by diasporic iranian women writers reveals that, in most cases, women are depicted as oppressed and lacking freedom, mostly at the hands of various male members of their family or by patriarchal society at large. women’s dystopia, it seems, has been created by the men in their lives. rarely do we come across likeable and rounded male characters or even a loving male/female relationship. more often than not when men are present they are representative of specific types of masculinity: patriarchs, abusers, sexual deviants, and religious fundamentalists. most notable of all such types in numerous texts is the controlling patriarchal father who can become abusive and against whose authority no other member of the family dares speak. in nahid rachlin’s memoir, persian girls (2006), for instance, her father is represented as the all-controlling patriarch who always has the last word. although rachlin, with her brothers’ support and influence, manages to leave for the usa to study, her father’s decisions lead to her sister pari’s unsuccessful marriage to an abusive man and their subsequent divorce. the father’s insistence on a second marriage for pari confines her under the power of a mentally unstable man who eventually commits her to a mental institution. the marriage is responsible for her depression and death in mysterious circumstances. similarly, in zoe ghahramani’s sky of red poppies (2010), roya’s father, a powerful landowner, is a fearsome figure who makes sure his children, especially his girls, do as they are told. when roya’s sister disobeys and becomes involved in politics he ships her off to the usa. similarly, in mani shirazi’s javady ally (1984), we are taken into the lives of homa and her mother, who live under the constant fear of a verbally and physically abusive father. fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 9 azar nafisi’s reading lolita in tehran (2004) features male figures who appear in different oppressive forms in the lives of the girls in the book club. the seven girls seem to be living in fear of their domineering brothers, fathers, or other male family members. nafisi, in fact, introduces each girl in relation to the difficulties she has had with her male family members in getting to the first session of the book club. sanaz is seen running into nafisi’s house ‘harassed, as if she had been running from a stalker or a thief,’ after her younger brother, ‘the darling of their parents,’ who had ‘taken to proving his masculinity by spying on her, listening to her phone conversations, driving her car around and monitoring her actions,’ had dropped her off with disapproval (2004: 14). another girl, nassrin, reveals in a conversation with nafisi how she finally made it to the book club: ‘i mentioned the idea [of attending this book club] very casually to my father, just to test his reaction, and he vehemently disapproved. how did you convince him to let you come? i asked. i lied, she said. you lied? what else can one do with a person who’s so dictatorial who won’t let his daughter at this age, go to an all-female literature class?’ (2004: 17) other typical male ‘types’ who appear across various books are religious fanatics and sexual deviants, or a combination of both. nassrin in nafisi’s reading lolita in tehran (2004), for instance, reveals how ‘her youngest uncle, a devout and pious man,’ had sexually abused her while tutoring her. she recounts how ‘during those sessions as they sat side by side at her desk, his hands had wandered over her legs, her whole body, as she repeated the arabic tenses’ (2004: 49). similarly, in javady ally (shirazi 1984), young homa is abused on the shoulders of a trusted clergyman who volunteers to carry her through crowded demonstrations. as they walk through the crowd, he fondles her through her skirt, pretending to keep her steady on his shoulders. although there is no denying that such descriptions may be representative of iranian women and their lived experiences, the representations of the oppressed iranian woman as narrated from a position of privilege by western-educated women also inevitably engender hypervisible stereotypes of iranian men and masculinity. as kelly oliver (2001) argues in witnessing, her study of the psychology of oppression and subjectivity, both hypervisiblity and invisibility are ‘bad visibility’ in that neither allow for those represented to be seen or recognized as individuals, let alone speak for themselves. this is an oppressive force, according to oliver since ‘the seeing/being-seen dichotomy fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 10 mirrors the subject/object dualism that is symptomatic of oppression. the seer is the active subject while the seen is the passive object’ (2001: 149). as she puts it, ‘oppression makes people into faceless objects or lesser subjects. the lack of visage in objects renders them invisible in any ethical or political sense. in turn, subjectivity becomes the domain of domination. subjectivity is conferred by those in power and empowered on those they deem powerless and disempowered’ (2001: 149). by representing iranian men in general terms, and without giving them the opportunity to express themselves, iranian women writers are potentially replicating the kind of oppressive force identified by oliver while also rendering iranian men, and alternative aspects of iranian masculinity, invisible. furthermore, the majority of such texts are circulated within a western context where they interrelate and reinforce with the ‘antiiranian attitudes … and anti-iranian propaganda that began during the hostage crisis’ (mobasher 2006: 101). moreover, given their ‘ignorance [of] and refusal to distinguish proand anti-khomeini iranians living [outside iran]’ (mobasher 2006: 101) these books can be seen to further emphasise the hypervisiblity of a highly limited version of iranian masculinity. such representations operate in the same way that derek stanovsky believes representations of postcolonial masculinity often operate, whereby the ‘essentialising and homogenising of masculinity serves to obscure the actual diversity and plurality of lived masculinities’ (2007: 495). such representations of iranian men and masculinity could also be regarded as feeding into the post 9/11 discourse of the war on terror. as bhattacharyya gargi reminds us, one of the motives leading to the us declaration of the war on terror was to liberate women from the oppressive forces of their patriarchal societies: ‘the abuse of women and the denial of their public rights has [sic] been used as a marker of barbarism and as indication of societal sickness, a sickness requiring intervention’ (2008: 19). when the writer nafisi, for instance, emphasises how the lives of iranian women are ‘doomed,’ and claims that ‘[western] novels were an escape from the reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection, and leave aside our stories about the deans and the morality squads on the streets’ (2004: 38), her words could be read as fuelling the discourse that appeals to what spivak famously describes as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ (1994: 93). these assumptions can be interpreted as advocating the war on terror and us attacks across the middle east on the basis of fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 11 liberating muslim women from religiously fanatic men, iranian or otherwise. arguably in reaction against this hypervisible oversimplification of iranian men and masculinity, diasporic iranian male writers have begun to write back. iranian men writing iranian men in ‘displaced masculinities’ khosravi argues that ‘iranian men’s masculine identity has been challenged and renegotiated on the one hand by the iranian women’s struggle for emancipation and on the other hand by the [western] mediaworks’ (2009: 591). in response to this, since the early 2000s iranian men have begun making themselves publically visible in various ways, including through literature. aware of their ambivalent hypervisible and yet invisible situation, diasporic iranian men have also begun to narrate their lived experiences of negotiating bifurcated identities. siamack baniameri, for example, begins his humorous anecdotal book iranican dream (2005), about an average iranian-american man trying to raise two teenagers by himself, with a chapter entitled ‘it sucks being me’ with these words: ‘being a middle easternamerican man nowadays is as hard as a stash of beef jerky sitting on top of a pick up truck’s dashboard in the arizona summer heat. you sure grow thick skin’ (2005: 3). in what follows, i highlight, address and analyse some of the books’ recurring themes and issues raised by iranian men in diaspora, situating them against the backdrop of their sociopolitical and historical contexts. in particular, i argue how these books could be read as responses to the hypervisibility of iranian men and masculinity as constructed by historical orientalist narratives and iranian women’s self-orientalisation in their own texts. i argue that these books, many of which counter the negative stereotypes that have made iranian men invisible, could be read as postcolonial responses to the marginalising and oppressive forces that have limited the representation of iranian masculinity. here, i consider their responses to two specific elements that have greatly contributed to the hypervisibility of iranian masculinity: the stereotypical representation of iranian men as religiously violent fanatics and terrorists; and, their representation as sexual deviants. finally, i argue that this recognition can potentially assist in the reconstruction of iranian masculinity from the space of hypervisibility and invisibility to that of individual visibility as would be recognisable in a western context. terrorism and the hostage crisis for many diasporic iranian men, the iranian hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981—a fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 12 ‘miniwar,’ as mobasher calls it (2006: 107) between iran and the usa—and, more recently, the events of 9/11, 2001, are key historical events that continue to affect their social position and sense of gendered identity. both events created tension between how iranian masculinity is perceived in the west and how iranian men see themselves in the west, with the hostage crisis arguably having the greatest impact. as mobasher argues, the hostage crisis operated on the legacy of orientalist discourses and constructed a new kind of binary opposition between iran and the usa: ‘[it] created the first xenophobic anti-iranian and anti-islamic reaction with new images of iran, islam, and iranian and other muslim immigrants as barbaric, uncivilised terrorists—a reaction that continues today’ (2006: 112). consequently many diasporic iranians, particularly men, were exposed to open discrimination of various kinds, lived with the stigma and shame of being iranian (mobasher 2006: 111), which thus ‘motivated [them] to cover up their iranian national origin’ (mobasher 2006: 101). othered and pushed to the margins, like colonised subjects, it has only been recently that iranian men have decided to openly deal with the trauma of the hostage crisis and the label of terrorist associated with middle eastern men more broadly. among the many strategies that iranian men have employed to recontextualise this image, one of the most popular has been through creating a sense of sympathy and human connection with readers. this is why some writers, such as said sayrafiezadeh in his memoir when skateboards will be free (2009), appeal to a sense of empathy and emotional sympathy to make iranian men recognisable as individuals. sayrafiezadeh’s memoir recounts his life as the child of socialist parents, an iranian father—who left to go to iran to run for president on behalf of the socialist party—and a jewish-american mother. it recalls not only the difficulties of growing up with a mother who chose to live in self-inflicted poverty and who moved often from place to place, but also the pain of carrying an iranian name as a middle school student in the usa during the hostage crisis. one of the most emotionally touching memories recalled by sayrafiezadeh concerns the time his mother finally decides to settle in one place, after which sayrafiezadeh enters a predominantly black school with clear racial segregation, where white students, after a simple examination, were filtered into more advanced classes as ‘scholars’ while everyone else stayed with the school’s normal curriculum. soon sayrafiezadeh finds himself in the scholar classes, where for the first time he befriends a few of his classmates, daniel and tab. daniel is a confident, ‘handsome’ white boy, who soon takes idealised shape in fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 13 sayrafiezadeh’s mind given that his own physical appearance, with dark bushy eyebrows, clearly marks him as different from other students in the class. sayrafiezadeh, in recognising his own difference, dreams of looking like daniel: ‘i fantasised about being daniel, literally, his body taking the place of mine. i was sure the girls liked him, or loved him’ (2009: 183). but daniel ‘had one flaw, only one, and that was his blatant and unconcealed racism’ (2009: 183). as their friendship grows, and the two boys become closer, the hostage crisis occurs. with iran mentioned for the first time in school, and as the crisis escalates, sayrafiezadeh finds himself caught between his unease with his friends’ blatant comments about iranians in iran and his desire to hide his iranian identity. however, having been brought up with an opinionated socialist mother, he makes an unruly comment that brings him into the spotlight. when one afternoon daniel asks him, ‘what do you think about the hostage crisis, said?,’ he blurts out: ‘i believe the hostages are spies and should be tried for their crimes against the iranian people … they deserve what they get’ (2009: 193). this comment attracts the attention of his classmates. it marks the end of his friendship with daniel, and the beginning of a difficult school life where he is beaten up, bullied, and eventually transferred from the scholar class to the class with the black students. consequently, sayrafiezadeh becomes hypervisible as a person associated with the hostage crisis. this hypervisibility leads to his invisibility as an individual in school. his old friends now run away from him. gradually his internal struggle over self-identification renders him invisible even to himself. as he writes: daniel continued to remain handsome in my eyes. in fact, he became more handsome, while i, in turn became more ugly. this was the unhappy side effect of having first perceived him as my flawless opposite. i grew skinnier, frailer, as he grew more strapping. my features became loud and prominent while his became refined and elegant. i was sure that he would be a movie star when he grew up. it was as if my face was cannibalising the flesh from my body, absorbing it into itself, so that my nose and eyes and eyebrows intensified with each day, growing darker, larger, hairier. it was a hideous face, i was sure, loudly calling attention to itself. now i avoided mirrors at all costs. (2009: 200) this statement is telling of the psychological operations of hypervisibility / invisibility that affected the iranian sense of masculinity as a result of the hostage crisis. this is in keeping with oliver’s understandings of subjectivity and identity: subjectivities are constructed intersubjectively, particularly by the way others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves. as she puts it, ‘a positive sense of self is dependent on positive recognition from others, while a negative sense of self is the result of negative fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 14 recognition or lack of recognition from others’ (2001: 4). she further argues that ‘when others respect us as capable of judgment and action, only then can we respect ourselves as autonomous agents’ (2001: 5). according to oliver, in the processes of subjectification ‘recognition from the dominant culture is necessary to develop a strong sense of one’s own personal and group identity’ (2001: 23). stereotypes and misrecognition based on differences construct an antagonistic relationship and create a kind of ‘inferiority complex,’ which is the result of the ‘internalisation of stereotypes of inferiority’ (2001: 24). this inferiority complex, however, operates not only on a psychological level; it can also affect the way we are perceived and perceive ourselves physically. as oliver argues, ‘values of dominant culture are not so much internalised psychologically but forced onto the bodies of the oppressed. the oppressed are chained to the body, represented as unable to think, to reason, to act properly. they are reduced to an egoless, passive body that is at the same time in need of control and discipline’ (2001: 24). in short, those who are oppressed also begin to see themselves as physically inferior to the one who is domineering. sayrafiezadeh’s statements about his own body in when skateboards will be free would appear to confirm the salience of oliver’s understanding of subjectivity formation. when sayrafiezadeh is bullied and his friends stop associating with him, he is objectified and oppressed. this lack of intersubjective relationship and recognition affects his sense of subjectivity and he begins to internalise this inferiority. this in turn influences how he sees himself physically, particularly in comparison with daniel, regarded by sayrafiezadeh as a representative of the superiority and the power of the dominant culture around him. that in his eyes daniel grows into a stunning man while he appears thinner and more frail points to the physical internalisation of this kind of inferiority on the physical level. when he stops looking in the mirror he becomes invisible even to himself in what amounts to a loss of identity. this consequently affects his entire life in the usa. growing up, he turns into a solitary and shy adult with little self-confidence about his appearance. he has occasional self-confessed kleptomaniac tendencies, and gets by working in a low level job for martha stewart’s company, hoping every day to be recognised for his genius. this touching and emotionally wrenching account of how sayrafiezadeh’s childhood lead to difficult adult life as a man with iranian heritage in the usa, reveals how the fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 15 oppression of iranian men in diaspora has evolved from an overexposed hypervisibile iranian ‘type’ to a subjective invisibility as an iranian diasporic individual. in line with oliver’s arguments, that evolution has made sayrafiezadeh and other iranian diasporic men into ‘faceless objects, or lesser subjects’ (2001: 149). that said, when skateboards will be free also operates on a level that suggests a break with the oppressive cycle; it offers the author a venue in which to reconstruct and regain a sense of subjectivity by determining his own represented reality. as oliver reminds us, ‘it is not merely being seen, or being recognised between spectacle and oblivion, that makes for an ethical or just relation. rather … the oscillation between invisibility and hypervisiblity [is] a matter not so much of being seen but of making one’s world’ (2001: 150). at the end of his memoir, then, sayrafiezadeh points to this possibility when he writes, ‘it was up to each of us to bear our private miseries alone, until that glorious day in the future when it would all be resolved once and for all, and a perfect world would emerge’ (2009: 286). this forward-looking, optimistic statement, coupled with an earlier sentence, ‘the truth must not only be truth, it must also be told’ (2009: 286), points to the possibility and need for other iranian men to similarly construct themselves into representational visibility. sexuality and romance one of the recurring elements in diasporic iranian men’s literature is the theme of sexuality. as noted above, iranian masculinity in the west has often been framed as a kind of uncontrollable, deviant and violent sexuality. this type of stereotypical representation, which stems historically from orientalist harem narratives and which is often confirmed and replicated by modern iranian and middle eastern women’s narratives, continues to shadow if not overdetermine perceptions of iranian men in the west today. one of the ways by which writers have attempted to dismantle the stereotype has been to introduce elements of romance and spiritual love into the representation of iranian male-female relationships. of the many novels to date that have embraced the romance genre, the most successful so far has been mahbod seraji’s rooftops of tehran (2009), an emotional bildungsroman that follows pasha, a seventeen year old boy who practically lives on the rooftop of their middle-class family home in tehran during the summer of 1973, as he falls in love with zari, the girl next door. zari is engaged to another young man known as ‘doctor.’ constrained by his sense of loyalty to doctor, who is a man of values and a good friend, pasha tries to hide his love fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 16 for zari. doctor, who is involved in anti-governmental activities, is taken by the shah’s secret police and eventually killed and pasha is left behind to console zari, who also has feelings for him. however, in an act of protest against the doctor’s fate, zari sets herself on fire in front of the shah’s entourage and is badly burned. to protect zari and those associated with her act from the government’s wrath, her family acts as if she were dead; unbeknownst to pasha and the outside world, she continues to live at home—in full chador, her face covered—posing as a distant cousin who has moved in with the family to console them after her death. despite living next to each other for months, the lovers never reunite. at the novel’s end, pasha migrates to the usa to study while zari’s family moves to a distant city. everything about this book—the red rose on the cover of the us version; the jokes and games played by pasha and his friend; the lovers’ near kiss on the rooftop; pasha’s temporary insanity at the thought of losing his love—counters the image of iranian man as sexually deviant and violent. bringing into fictional space an iranian man who shares his emotions and feelings challenges the stereotypes that have not permitted iranian men to be recognised in the west as individual human beings. as oliver notes, such recognition can break the cycle of oppression and marginality, because ‘recognition requires the assimilation of difference into something familiar’ (2001: 9). this means that ‘the subject recognises the other only when he [sic] can see something familiar in that other, for example, when he can see that the other is a person too’ (2001: 9). since its publication in 2009, rooftops of tehran has had a positive reception among critics, elicited numerous reader reviews and testimonies on popular sites such as amazon.com, and won numerous awards. reviewers have praised the novel for its capacity to cross historical and cultural divides, and to present non-stereotypical insights into iran and its peoples largely absent from the contemporary iranian novel. the author’s website (seraji 2008) provides a useful archive of many reviews, including the following, which note the novel’s challenges to representational orthodoxy vis-à-vis iranian masculinity: ‘refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression’ (kirkus); ‘seraji’s wonderfully appealing characters, living universal teenage emotional lives of dreams and minor worries, lose their innocence in the brutalities that foreshadow the iranian revolution’ (the milwaukee sentinel); and, ‘“rooftops of tehran,” calls on america to open its fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 17 eyes and ears to iran: its people, its pain, its beauty, its love. hopefully america will listen’ (truthout). similarly, reese erlich, the author of the iran agenda (2007), writes on the author’s site: ‘you learn a lot about iranian culture while coming to understand characters with universal appeal.’ william kent kruegar also writes, ‘thank god for authors like seraji who show us that no matter how distant apart our worlds may be, in the humanness of our hearts we are all united’ (seraji 2008). individual readers, too, have lauded seraji’s novel book. rooftop’s page on amazon.com is filled with reviews and comments that emphasise how the novel enabled readers to recognise the similarities between themselves and iranians. one effusive reviewer in particular demonstrates this point when she writes: “rooftops of tehran” is much more than a love story. it is an affirmation of shared human experiences. we all dream, love, laugh and cry. we have fears and want good things for our children. mr. seraji has given us a glimpse into the unknown and it is up to us to recognise that regardless of religion or culture we are more alike than some would like us to believe. (rooftops of tehran n.d.) such positive responses not only point to the book’s success in challenging stereotypes of iranian men and masculinity, but also begin to break down the national, political and cultural barriers that emphasise an us/them dichotomy. in a diasporic setting this recognition of similarity of human experiences can assist faster integration and acceptance of diasporic iranians. on a global level, at a time of tension and the ever present threat of war with iran, such narratives can operate to diffuse tensions by emphasising shared human experiences. seraji is not alone in challenging these barriers. another novel that also presents a romantic understanding of iranian masculinity is manoucher parvin’s avicenna and i: the journey of spirits (1996). it tells the story of professor pirooz, an iranian academic who is caught between his home and host cultures and is disenchanted by the social ills of consumerism, random violence and conflict that surround him in new york. when he meets a neighbour, sitareh poonia, an indian woman educated in spiritual philosophy, their love blossoms due to a spiritual connection and their mutual love for the 9th century iranian mathematician and physician, avicenna. but sitareh is murdered. distraught by her death but guided in his dreams by avicenna’s spirit, pirooz sets out on a soul-searching journey to iran, to the city of hamedan where avicenna is buried. at avicenna’s mausoleum, however, he meets sitareh bastan who bears more than a fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 18 passing resemblance to sitareh. the two come together through their love for avicenna and begin a life together. avicenna and i operates on several levels to challenge the kind of normalised gender relations associated between iranian men and women in the west. in her review of the book, marta simidchieva argues that avicenna and i is reminiscent of a persian ‘court romance’ (1997: 408). in particular the novel ‘evokes a faint echo’ of nezami’s haft peykar (seven beauties), a classic narrative poem from the twelfth century. in haft peykar, the persian king bahram gur gains knowledge and spiritual awareness from his seven brides, who come from the far corners of the world. as she compares the two texts, simidchieva writes that ‘in nezami’s romance, as in parvin’s novel, the protagonist’s journey of spiritual enlightenment starts in the abode of an indian beauty and is brought to a close in his union with an iranian one’ (1997: 408). the book’s close intertextual resemblance to a persian court romance suggests the author’s explicit attempt to provide a reconstructed representation of iranian gender relations. in traditional persian court poetry, the kind of romantic gender relationship found in parvin’s novel is common and reflective of the romantic tradition in iranian cultural history. however, in the western representation of iranian gender relations, this history has been rendered invisible. by tapping into that tradition and foregrounding the romantic gender relationships so prevalent in persian court poetry, the novel also functions as a challenge to naturalised western perceptions of iranian masculinity. pirooz’s spiritual romanticism, and his soft-spoken nature, are not simply signs of an alternative vision of iranian masculinity; they also signify a writing back against orientalist perceptions of iranian men as violent and sexually aggressive. furthermore, pirooz’s close spiritual relationship with both sitarehs, who act as guides in his spiritual journey, reframes our understanding of gender hierarchy and agency, both in traditional iranian literature, and in the way the west normally perceives iranian gender relations. as simidchieva argues, the novel brings into vision the notion of ‘romantic love as a means of spiritual maturation of the male protagonist and the role of the woman as a guide on his journey’ (1997: 408). here however, it must be noted that the although women played a significant role in guiding male protagonists in traditional persian poetry, and court poetry, as well as in the romance genre more broadly, they were often passive in their roles. making that point, simidchieva observes that in fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 19 parvin’s narrative, ‘the female characters ... are more assertive than their medieval counterparts’ (1997: 408). in parvin’s account, women are not only powerful, active spiritual leaders who guide the male character, they are also sexually more assertive than their male partner: in new york sitareh poonia invites professor pirooz to her house; in iran, it is sitareh bastan who, after housing professor pirooz for a few days, appears in his bedroom in the middle of the night ‘like a gentle flame … in a golden negligee’ (1996: 113), catching him by surprise, to initiate passionate, spiritual and sensual lovemaking. pirooz’s reservation, politeness and his initial reluctance to countenance a possible sexual relationship with sitareh poonia, combined to challenge reader’s expectations of iranian male sexual dominance and gendered hierarchies. conclusion in this article i have examined selected representations of iranian masculinity in diasporic iranian literature, arguing that iranian masculinity in diaspora is predominantly constructed in and through orientalist discourses, and that such constructions continue in iranian women’s self-orientalising narratives. the representations have generated stereotypes of iranian masculinity, which have led to the hypervisibility of iranian men whether in diaspora or in iran, as well as their simultaneous invisibility in terms of individuated subjectivity. i argue that such narratives deploy a range of strategies to reconstruct and regain a sense of subjectivity and to reframe western understandings of iranian gender relationships and hierarchies. this discussion is an inaugural step in the recategorization and reconceptualization of diasporic iranian men’s narratives as active responses to a history of gendered hypervisibility and invisibility. further work in this area will need to address the profound narrative shifts about the so-called iranian experience that occurred in the wake of the controversial iranian presidential elections in 2009, a period not covered in this article. the post-2009 narratives offer fresh and challenging perspectives for understandings of iranian identity and masculinity, particularly in light of renewed western interest in iranian politics and the iranian government’s relationship with the iranian people in a region that continues to endure political instability and violence. fotouhi iranian men portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 20 reference list ardalan, d. 2008, my name is iran. holt paperbacks, new york. bahramitash, r. 2005, ‘the war on terror, feminist orientalism and orientalist feminism: case studies of two north american bestsellers,’ middle east critique, vol. 14, no. 2: 221–235. baniameri, s. 2005, iranican deam. online, available: virtualbookworm.com. 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[accessed i july 2014]. said, e. 1978, orientalism. penguin, new york. sayrafiezadeh, s. 2009, when skateboards will be free. dial press, new york. satrapi, m. 2003, persepolis. jonathan cape, london. ______ 2004, persepolis 2. jonathan cape, london. scott, c. v. 2000, ‘bound for glory: the hostage crisis as captivity narrative in iran,’ international studies quarterly, vol. 44, no. 1: 77–88. seraji, m. 2008, rooftops of tehran: a novel, author website. online, available: rooftopsoftehran.com [accessed 1 december 2013]. ______ 2009, rooftops of tehran: a novel. new american library, london. shirazi, f. 2010, muslim women in war and crisis: representation and reality. university of texas press, austin. shirazi, m. 1984, javady alley. women’s press, london. simidchieva, m. 1997, ‘review of avecina and i: journey of the spirits,’ iranian studies, vol. 30, no. 3: 406–408. spivak, g. c. 1994, ‘can the subaltern speak?’ in colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: a reader, (eds) p. williams & l. chrisman. harvester wheatsheaf, hempstead: 90–105 stanovsky, d. 2007, ‘postcolonial masculinities,’ in international encyclopedia of men and masculinities, (eds) m. flood, j. kegan & b. pease. routledge, london: 493–496. tavakoli-targhi, m. 2001, refashioning iran: orientalism, occidentalism and histography. palgrave, new york. 前言 前言: 中国文化民族主义的复兴 郭英杰 五四以来曾有过数次文化民族主义的回潮，但六四以来的文化民族主义复兴，即使 算不上二十世纪的高潮，也是中华人民共和国史无先例的现象。这种现象无疑不是 孤立的，而是中国社会政治变革的一部分，没有全面深入的分析便难以看清其真 相。然而，民族主义是个十分容易情绪化的话题，即使力求中立的学者也难做到客 观冷静。因此，国内对于文化民族主义兴衰的评说，与其他各种民族主义相似，大 多两极分化，同情者欲其兴，反对者欲其亡。欲其兴者或夸大其词，以壮声威，或 矢口否认文化民族主义的兴起，旨在告诫同道人：“革命尚未成功，吾辈尚需努 力。” 欲其亡者也采用类似的策略，目的则是为了提醒人们对这股“逆流”提高警 惕；要么就把它说得微不足道，以免助长了敌人的威风。 对于文化民族主义的兴衰尚且莫衷一是，对其性质和特点就更难形成一致意见。翻 开有关中国民族主义的文章，具体的分析固然有之，更多的则是闭门造车，是抽象 的是与非，合理不合理，明智不明智，应该如何如何，不一而足，到头来却说不清 民族主义为何物，道不明它欲何为。本来公说公有理，婆说婆有理，这倒无可厚 非，只要自圆其说、持之有据也就是了。怕只怕价值评判一马当先，而事实反倒不 被当成一回事了。这并不是说学者可以完全不受价值观念的影响，可以绝对客观公 正，但学术毕竟不同于政治鼓噪或道德说教。 缘此种种，本专辑主要讨论文化民族主义现象，而不关心它应该如何之类的问题。 毋庸置疑，它是一种十分复杂的东西，绝不是几篇文章就可以概括的，它的来龙去 脉更难以一言以蔽之。我们的目的无非是抛砖引玉，试图超越价值观念的论辩，冲 破门户之见的阻隔，把对中国民族主义的思考进一步引向深入。 为了避免不必要的争论，首先需要对民族主义的概念作几点说明。第一，民族主义 既有消极的一面，也有积极的一面，二者混在一起，你中有我，我中有你，难以分 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal guo, yingjie revival of chinese cultural nationalism 开。取其精华去其糟粕之类的说法听起来不无道理，却不知如何实施。况且，如果 连精华和糟粕都搞不清楚或达不成统一的意见，取什么去什么无从谈起了。这样说 不是为了一笔勾销“智叟”们为百姓指点迷津的贡献，只是强调这个问题的复杂及现 象本身的重要。 第二，我们大致同意anthony smith1给民族主义所下的定义，既：民族主义是一种 意识形态思潮，它的目标是维持民族自主(national autonomy)、民族认同(national identity)与民族统一(national unity)。其中自主不仅指不受外国或者外族势力的奴 役和统治，还包括“主权在民”（popular sovereignty）的诉求。自英国资产阶级革 命和法国大革命以来，这种诉求与民主运动携手并肩，融为一体，冲击了神权和王 权的霸主地位。正是从这种意义上说民族主义才是现代的产物。这样的民族主义不 光前现代中国没有，今天也难说。反美反日情绪之类当然也不能不让叫民族主义， 但称之为“主义”未免抬举它了。这样的“主义”海内外已有大量的评论，因此不作为 我们讨论的中心。再说，类似的东西中国古代早已有之，无现代性可言，而“主权 在民”这一民族主义和民主主义的核心原则却至今难以落实，甚至中国的民主志士 都耻于打出这样的旗号。 第三，民族主义可以分为政治民族主义和文化民族主义两大类。前者以“主权在民” 为出发点，力图实现民族自主自治，建立自己的、与世界其他民族国家平等的主权 民族国家，并维护民族的统一。后者关注的焦点在于民族认同，尤其是文化认同。 虽然它也关心民族统一和自主，但并不认为国家必不可少；而且统一和自主也不单 指领土完整和政治自治，还包括民族凝聚力，坚持自身价值和信仰的权利，以及国 家行为与民族意志、传统价值及民间习俗之间的一致性。2 总而言之，在文化民族主义的视野中，民族是一个经长期演变而形成的有机的整 体，它的精华是它独特和“优越”的文明。这种文明包括语言文字、文学艺术、价值 观、民族精神、共同记忆、神话传说等等，有时它主要表现为一种思维和行为方 式、审美观和文化情趣。这一切构成了个人和群体的认知参照系和认同的基础，需 要代代相传。文化民族主义并不认为文明不可变更，但主张局部或逐渐的调整，它 1 anthony smith, national identity, reno, las vegas and london: university of nevada press, 1993. 2 john hutchinson, the dynamics of cultural nationalism, london: allen & unwin, 1987. portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 2 guo, yingjie revival of chinese cultural nationalism 认为如果一个民族原有的文化道德秩序和价值信仰体系出现紊乱，随之而来的是道 德沦丧，社会失序和民族的衰落。 一般说来，任何民族主义的意识形态都具有政治和文化的内容，二者相辅相成。但 中国五四以来的民族主义却是一个例外，因为它几乎从头开始就患有严重的精神分 裂症。其症状表现在政治民族主义和文化民族主义两股力量分道扬镳，甚至势不两 立。具体地说，政治民族主义者（包括五四知识分子、革命党人和共产党人）欲图 重建国家权威、重塑国民、富国强兵。尽管他们的思路大相径庭，但一致认为中国 的传统“封建”文化是造成中国落后和软弱的根本原因，理当属于革命的对象，不打 倒“孔家店”，不扫除传统“封建”文化，中国便不得启蒙，不得富强，不能进入现代 和世界现代民族国家之列。这场运动如排山倒海，势不可挡。相比之下，中国的文 化民族主义者逆潮流而动，且势单力薄，自然不是对手。于是，政治民族主义及其 奉行的“反传统主义”长时期占据主导地位。 共产党人忠实地继承了五四“反传统主义”的传统，并在文革时期把它推向了极致。 虽然中共也曾降低过反传统的调子，但其霸权地位从未受到强劲的挑战，这种情况 一直延续到六四前后。六四以后中共在“爱国主义教育”中重提弘扬优秀传统文化与 它对六四的分析有关，在中共看来，六四的起因不仅包括“资产阶级自由化”和 “西 化”思潮，还包括由此引发的“民族虚无主义”。因此，新版的“爱国主义”显著增加了 对优秀传统民族文化的弘扬。 中共对传统文化态度的转变使“反传统主义”和“西化派”遭受了沉重的打击，并改变 了政治民族主义和文化民族主义对峙的格局。尽管官方的“弘扬优秀传统文化”有其 自身的实用目的，但却为文化民族主义粉墨登场创造了百年不遇的良机，也为传统 文化的回归大开方便之门。在这样的背景下国内市场上“古典”和历史剧数量剧增， 曲阜和黄帝陵热闹起来了，据说最近还出现了“读经热”。热度如何暂且不论，对文 化民族主义的理解也可以不尽相同，对于“复兴”的提法更可以质疑，但无论如何传 统文化和文化民族主义的境遇已是今非昔比，不说五四时期，与《河殇》为主旋律 的八十年代相比，已是天壤之别了。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 3 guo, yingjie revival of chinese cultural nationalism 当然，官方弘扬传统文化只是文化华民族主义复兴的一个前提条件。另外两个原因 可能具有更加深刻的意义。一是过去二十多年中人们时常听到的“信仰危机”和“道德 危机”；二是所谓“二十一世纪是中国世纪”的预言。从实质上来看，上述“危机”又是 认同的危机。按 smith 的解释，这种危机是由传统的合法性危机引发的，这是因为 民族的自我意识在很大程度上依赖于它自身的传统和价值体系，如果后者的合法性 出现严重问题，那么以此为基础的民族认同就失去了支撑，就不再被自然而然地接 受了。 就中国的具体情况来说，中华大传统的合法性危机早在五四时期就已经出现，只不 过连绵不断的革命和战争使这种危机显得无足轻重。随着“新中国”的建立，一套社 会主义信仰价值体系取代了传统的信仰价值体系，往日的臣民、新民、国人又要被 改造成“社会主义新人”，这项工作成功与否认另当别论，但集体认同的危机大致得 到解决。但是，改革开放时期社会主义信仰的瓦解又导致了中国社会主义小传统的 合法性危机，同时全球化的潮流使之明显加剧，难以在短期内消失。 八十年代的“西化论” 、“国学热”，九十年代有关“人文精神”的讨论、“文化重建”和重 构中华性的呼吁、后殖民批评的流行、“孔子热” 、“炎黄热” ，以及最近的“读经 热”，似乎都流露出修补或重建群体信仰价值体系的欲望。就连胡锦涛主席构思的 “和谐社会”也要求重建“社会主义核心价值体系”。谁也无法料定中国最终会出现一 个什么样的民族价值体系，但至少可以看出传统文化没有被排除在外，而是被当作 可资利用的资源。 这一历史性的转折无疑还受益于有关“中国世纪”的预言以及对于中国未来在全球范 围内进行政治、经济和文化竞争的考虑。文化的竞争不仅包括文化产业的角逐，更 重要的是“软实力”的较量。而“软实力”的竞争远不是一时一地谁胜谁负的问题，它 关系到谁占据全面的话语权，谁的价值观念正确合理，谁的思维、表达和行为方式 可取，等等。赢家不废举手之劳便可以得到大量的优势，而输家则要做出巨大的努 力去调整和改变自己的行为举止，否则就难以被对方所接受，难以与之对话和交 往。更不用说这样的文化大势对人们的自尊心、自信心和自身价值的影响了。 那么中国用什么样的文化传统、思想、观念和价值来提升自己的“软实力”呢？也许 在传统文化当中比在“社会主义先进文化”当中更容易找到让世人接受的价值观念。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 4 guo, yingjie revival of chinese cultural nationalism 与其让历史唯物主义、“四项基本原则”和“雷锋精神”走向世界，还不如谈谈“天人合 一” 、“和谐社会” 或“和谐世界”。况且，中国的“综合国力”也是今非昔比，国人不必 象鸦片战争和甲午海战以后那样锤胸顿足地自我反省，寻找受辱于人的缘由。相 反，在不少人看来，中国近二十多年里经济的高速增长再次证明了中国人的聪明才 智和中国文化的优越性。 虽然这样的优越感绝非无懈可击，但它很可能改变了百年来有关传统文化的争论。 随着民族自信的明显增长，知识精英对传统文化的估价出现了巨大的变化，于是 “反传统主义”退潮，而弘扬传统文化、挖掘文化资源和寻文化之根的呼吁则日渐响 亮。难怪以往反传统的政治民族族主义者纷纷停止了对传统的批判，甚至开始反思 启蒙和“五四精神”，并谈论“继承优秀传统文化”。其中不仅包括共产党人，还包括 民主志士和持不同政见者。当然，不能因此断定这就是政治民族主义与文化民族主 义的合流，但可以肯定往日以清算传统为手段来实现富国强兵的目的的政治民族主 义已见式微，而既“富国强兵”又继承和发扬传统已成为多数人能够接受的提法。依 此而论，如果说中华民族的集体认同在近现代史上经历了由正及反的过程，而今它 的重新整合看来已经开始了。 本专辑共收集八篇文章，作者都是在澳大利亚执教的学者。在专辑筹备期间曾数次 邀请中国大陆的学者投稿，有的没有回音，有的答应赐稿，可惜最终却未能如愿以 偿。此外还向一些海外学者发出邀请，均未收到回音。这样一来本专辑的讨论难免 有不少局限，希望专辑面世以后能够引起更多同行的关注，共同切磋，扩大交流， 以便使这项研究更加全面深入。如前所言，我们的目的只在于抛砖引玉，在于共同 探讨。 在编辑过程中，除了对个别文字和书写格式作了有限的变动和统一处理，所有的文 章都保存了原貌，文章的观点和看法事先没有统一的要求，事后也不强求统一。这 样做的好处是可以使作者真正畅所欲言，各叙己见；缺点是专辑的整体一致性因而 打了折扣。好在专辑毕竟不同于专著，但愿读者不会求全责备。 可喜的是，作者大都对文化民族主义保持客观冷静的态度，并注重实事求是。陈兆 华从康晓光的《文化民族主义论纲》和杨振宁、王蒙、许嘉璐等人的《甲申文化宣 言》入手，对文化民族主义作了总体的概括，并对其指导思想进行了缜密的分析。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 5 guo, yingjie revival of chinese cultural nationalism 孔书玉的文章针对电视剧《雍正王朝》和《汉武大帝》的主题内容及其意识形态指 向，深入讨论了历史正剧如何重写民族历史、如何再造民族英雄，以及各种社会力 量如何借助大众文化参与民族重构的话语。王一燕则把视线投向当代中国小说中的 故乡的文学构建，她指出：“无论‘中国’被如何设定，无论国族身份设立在乡村还是 市井，叙述中国必然是讲述中国文化传统，而传统又需要建筑在本土场域，即故乡 之中。” 传统和故乡也是李侠一文关注的中心问题，只不过二者在人们的脑海里变得更加模 糊，而且人们的感情也不无矛盾。通过对《都市风流》和其他都市小说的分析，作 者揭示了中国大规模的城市化所导致的人的离异和失落感；同时，在都市寻找希望 和梦想，对千百万人来说，又有一种不可抵抗的诱惑力。这种失落感也许算不上文 化民族主义，却能够激发人们对日益丧失的“精神家园”的向往。 郑怡的话题同样是围饶文学展开的，但重心不在小说，而是“由余秋雨为始作佣者 的文化散文”。她所关注的首要问题是文化散文写作行为中对当代差异性文化品位 的塑造，其次，她仔细地勾勒出通过对过去国族精神家园的改写来重塑当今文化民 族情感的尝试，并且厘清了文化散文这种新公共话语先锋、国族精神家园及文化民 族情绪在华夏民族重塑过程中所起的作用及其相互关系。 高默波的文章以电视剧《施琅大将军》为重点，但论及许多民族主义的敏感话题， 如汉奸和民族英雄、夏夷之辩、王朝正塑、立德立功、文攻武卫等等。这不仅使文 章内容丰富多彩，同时还展示了文化民族主义的复杂性，以及文化民族主义复兴所 面对的难题。在作者看来，除非西方的发展和现代化模式彻底破产，除非中国能为 人类现代化发展提供新的模式，否则中国文化民族主义的复兴就不能摆脱困境。 相比之下，古德曼对文化民族主义的复兴持更加谨慎的态度。他虽然没有对此直接 发表意见，但明确质疑“文化”和“中国文化”等概念的实用性以及文化决定论的社会 发展观，并强调“中国文化”的区域性与共社会经济变革的区域性动因。从这种角度 来看，难以把中国经济的高速发展归结为文化因素，因此文化民族主义复兴的口号 便失去了一条重要依据；另外，究竟什么是“中国文化”，究竟弘扬什么，这些问题 远比喊口号的人所想象的更加复杂。正如高默波所说，“中国文化”是仁、义、礼、 智、信、忠、孝、节？还是道教、佛教、穆斯林或其他文化？ portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 6 guo, yingjie revival of chinese cultural nationalism 冯崇义对民族主义的批判最为直接了当，他站在自由主义的立场上，指出民族主义 妨碍民主化，危害国家利益，危害人权。毫无疑问，本文所说的民族主义大体属于 政治民族主义，甚至包括不少国家主义的成份，当然也包括部分文化民族主义的因 素。作者之所以没有把这三股思潮区别对待无疑是因为它们之间的差别不大，依此 而论，对民族主义的批判自然包括对文化民族主义的批判。这种自由主义的批判免 不了有商榷的余地，但它却说明自由主义的确是文化民族主义复兴的一大障碍。正 如五四时期一样，在目前新一轮的民族认同论战当中，二者还有一搏，但自由主义 者已经不站上风了。 出版华语专辑是 portal 在线期刊的总编 paul allatson 博士首先提出来的，筹备工作 自始至终得到他的大力支持。wayne peake 博士负责日常联络工作并提供具体技术 支援。参与审稿的海内外同行百忙中抽出不少时间仔细阅读稿件并提出详细的修改 意见。悉尼科技大学博士候选人奚平更是不厌其烦，作了大量细致的编辑工作。在 此一并致谢。尤其感谢各位作者，他们的真识卓见使我受益不浅，相信读者也会有 同感，他们的友好合作更加感人至深。 郭英杰 郭英杰博士在澳大利亚悉尼科技大学国际研究学院任教，其主要研究项目包括当代 中国的民族主义和中国入世以来的对内开放政策。近著有 cultural nationalism in contemporary china: the search for national identity under reform。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 7 portaljamesgoodmanspecialissuefinal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. special issue details: global climate change policy: post-copenhagen discord special issue, guest edited by chris riedy and ian mcgregor. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. disorderly deliberation? generative dynamics of global climate justice james goodman, university of technology sydney since its inception, official climate governance has hinged on perceptions of climate justice. under the rubric of ‘common but differentiated responsibility,’ the 1992 framework convention on climate change and the ensuing kyoto protocol have had their main impact on signatories that are high-emitting industrialized countries. the thirty-seven ‘developed countries’ listed in ‘annex 1’ of the convention had a special obligation to take the lead in reducing greenhouse gas emissions (patterson and grubb 1992).1 under the 1997 kyoto protocol these countries agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels, and to do this by 2012.with the upcoming expiry of kyoto commitments, there is an urgent requirement for a new climate governance package deal (depledge 2006). as a result, climate justice is firmly back on the agenda, and in new ways, as manifested from the highest elite levels of global climate negotiation to the most grassroots challenges to climate policy. the configuration of climate governance post-2012, and indeed its effectiveness, centres on these contestations over the meaning of climate justice, and its official re-articulations. current climate governance, and its future configuration, thus has to be understood as a reflexive and dynamic process. as with any form of interstate governance, global climate policy seeks stabilized principles to drive its inter-governmental ‘rules of the game.’ yet, forced to address the exponential challenges of climate change, and its 1 there are now 40 countries in the annex 1 group, which includes the european union; this article refers to the group as ‘annex 1 countries.’ goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 2 associated implications for justice, these principles must be subject to disordering challenges, and to reordering. there is an imperative to move beyond immediate accommodations, with new rules of the game to more effectively apprehend the challenges posed. here, the mechanisms of disorderly deliberation become critical. the approach taken in this paper positions such disorder, centring on a contest over the meaning of climate justice, at the core of global climate governance. climate governance, it may be argued, is not qualitatively dissimilar from other forms of global governance. all forms of official governance respond to some felt need, and as perceptions of that need changes, so the governance framework changes. but climate change poses special challenges, similar in scale perhaps to cold war governance. there, the confrontation between communism and capitalism was a systemic confrontation, reflecting global-scale social contradictions, which posed the possibility of planetary annihilation, in this case through a ‘nuclear winter.’ climate change likewise expresses a global systemic contradiction, in this case an ecological contradiction between climate stability and accumulation. like the nuclear stand-off, climate change is also totalizing, and poses the possibility of making the planet uninhabitable. the key difference is that under the cold war the two key players could negotiate with one another, to ward off annihilation: the usa and the soviet union could construct governance structures, as expressed in the notion of détente, to manage the confrontation. in contrast, there is no negotiating with climate change: there is no ‘hot line’ to manage eco-social relations. where the cold war could be managed through the threat of ‘mutually assured destruction,’ every effort at managing climate change, rather than addressing its causes, brings us closer to the possibility of catastrophic change. in this respect, governance structures that secure managerial ‘sub-paradigmatic’ adaptations to existing arrangements are counterproductive, and serve only to prefigure the required paradigmatic transformations (sousa santos 1995). here, questions of reflexive governance are both urgent and fundamental. as the existing carbon-intensive social paradigm reaches its limits we are witnessing various efforts at managing the transition through global carbon markets and the application of technology (stern 2007; parry et al. 2007; lohmann 2006). while efforts to address the problem prove inadequate, climate change has intensified, forcing new targets and approaches onto the goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 3 table (christoff 2006; dorsey 2007). the resulting disorderly transition marks an interregnum in sociological terms, a period of social and political flux, and potential (sousa santos 1995). indeed with the advent of climate crisis we see the emergence of a deep-seated challenge to society’s underlying historicity: the crisis literally imperils survival for human society, and insofar as carbon-intensive development underpins social structures, the prospect of de-carbonization challenges the very foundation of prevailing norms and hierarchies. the systemic ecological challenge posed by climate change, and its intensification, forces the agenda for climate governance. models for addressing the crisis from within market capitalism have proved to be woefully inadequate; yet they have persisted. weak forms of ‘ecological modernization,’ centred on carbon trading and end-of-pipe technologies, for instance, continue to dominate. stronger forms of intervention, through fiscal policy and direct regulation for renewables, posit a ‘second modernity,’ with growth de-carbonized by ‘precautionary’ technologies and institutional practices (beck 1995; blowers 1997; moll 2000). yet the decoupling of economic growth from ecological degradation as promoted by ecological modernizers has become more of a fond hope than a present possibility. on a world scale, emissions continue to rise exponentially, testament to the paradox that every reduction in emissions intensity is more than overwhelmed by the increased scale of activity that it enables, as expressed in global economic growth. as ecological modernity falters in the face of persistently rising emissions, confronted with questions of growth and accumulation, it has quickly been overtaken by a revived denialism and a reactive securitization of the issue. there is, as a result, a deepened polarization of the policy field. those defending the growth model, whether or not offering the means of emissions reduction, confront those rejecting it. the latter perspective encompasses a range of positions, from ecological sufficiency to ecological socialism and ecological feminism, and may be linked to ‘post-developmentalist’ and ‘subsistence’ perspectives (salleh 1997; bennholdt-thomsen & mies 1999; hornborg 2001; foster-carter 2002; ziai 2007; kovel 2007). these psotions share the recognition that climate change requires a post-growth society, and that this necessarily entails the large-scale restructuring of social relations. as ecological modernization fails to remaster ecology for society, we are left with a clear choice: continued burden-shifting goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 4 and technological optimism, versus an entirely new ecology-society nexus (harvey 1996). these policy confrontations play a central role in the intensifying political dynamics of climate justice. the failure of the current model of climate governance is a key factor legitimizing challenges to its ‘rules of the game.’ indeed, we may say that we sit on the cusp of a paradigm-shift, one that forces awareness of humanity’s planetary agency, and thus awareness of its role in the face of eco-systemic impacts. the ‘anthropocene’ era, in which humankind has had the capacity to reshape the bio-physical character of the planet, is said to have been in place since the invention of the steam engine (crutzen 2002). with the documented impacts of human-generated climate change, as expressed in climate science, that capacity translates into an imperative for global reflexivity. the result is a profound clash between what chakrabarty characterizes as the history of humanity, the recorded histories of human justice, and the history of the species as expressed in climate science (2008). as historical time confronts geological time, global climate governance is invoked as the required mediating instrument, bridging human justice and climate impacts. as a site of global governance, then, climate governance embodies the possibility, and indeed necessity of defining and pursuing global climate reflexivity. conceptualizing global climate governance in general terms, climate governance is the structure of authority that encompasses global climate policy: as a mode of governance, rather than simply government, it involves a range of state and non-state players, and is a field of practice rather than simply a set of institutions. as with any mode of authority, as opposed to coercion, climate governance is grounded in principles of justice. climate governance develops through contestations over these principles, between ‘official’ and ‘non-official’ versions: principles emerge and change, from the process of interstate negotiation to civil society mobilization. approaches to global governance invariably conceive of it as bringing order to disorder, whether by increasing the ‘density’ of interstate society, or by expressing the leverage of global civil society (held & mcgrew 2002). by focusing on reflexivity this paper seeks to invert the frame, and foreground the challenges to governance. clearly there are multiple structural challenges to climate policy, as much from intended as unintended effects: the focus here is on the process of goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 5 reconceptualizing justice claims, in part to address these effects. the aim is to address climate governance as both a disordering and ordering process, analyzing the role of contestation in producing justice principles and practices. climate change imposes its own pace of policy reform, forcing new imperatives; it also imposes its own remarkable scope, in terms of global reach and all-encompassing depth. the resulting justice challenges are manifold, and resonate across a range of disciplines. the focus on reflexive governance most directly engages with critical international relations and globalization studies. the two dominant traditions in international relations theory—‘realism’ and ‘idealism’—are preoccupied principally with the question of whether state or non-state actors are dominant (walker 1993). critical international relations, instead, addresses the process of exercising power and counterpower at all levels (halliday 2001). related approaches to interpreting global governance have also emerged from other social science disciplines that investigate globalization across national-international divides (mcgrew 1997). within these fields there is a clear distinction between ‘globalization theory,’ which positions globalization as a cause of the changes it brings, and the ‘theory of globalization’ that seeks to explain globalization itself (rosenberg 2000). these latter, more critical approaches to globalization studies, dovetail with approaches in critical international relations, and offer a rich inter-disciplinary frame. the relationship between global governance discourses and contending social forces is a focus, especially, of the neo-gramscian international relations tradition, which positions the governance-contestation nexus as the key explanatory site of global politics (cox 1987; cox 2001; gill 2002; bakker & gill 2003; rupert 2003; carroll 2007). the aim is for constructive critique, and the generation of alternate principles and guides to action, in order to address climate change and realizing climate justice. debates about the extent to which climate change forces a refiguring of hegemonic formations, and the possibilities this offers for counter-hegemonic challengers, are intensifying, especially with the advent of north-south instruments of climate governance (levy & egan 2003; newell 2008; paterson & newell 2010). the attempted monetization of greenhouse gas emissions, and the construction of the carbon commodity, allow new forms of marketization to offset mitigation. this neoliberalization of climate policy offers new sites for displacement from high emitters goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 6 in the north, and from their southern counterparts, and thus for new forms of contestation (okereke 2008).2 in this way, north-south climate policy frameworks create transnational political spaces, which can be used to politicize ecological unevenness. as such, north-south relations in climate justice are simultaneously positioned alongside fields of postcolonial and critical development studies. confronted by global environmental change the development problematic is redefined as a concern for over-consuming industrialized societies as well as for newly industrializing and under-developed societies (robinson 2002; biel 2000; mcmichael 2003). this shared development crisis sets the mould for climate justice debates. out of the confrontation between developmentalist and post-developmentalist models, where southern and northern exemplars are set against each other, has emerged a more explicitly ‘reflexive’ developmental frame, which rests on mutual recognition of shared problems and the pursuit of common targets (pieterse 1998; 2004). rather than looking to the north as a guide for development, or to the south for post-developmentalist scenarios, the ‘reflexive development’ approach finds new pathways at the nexus between north and south for confronting and addressing globalizing pressures. the reflexive logic was exemplified by the ‘global justice movement’ that emerged in the mid-1990s, in which neoliberal globalism was identified as the shared problem of both north and south (della porta 2007). this allowed the identification of common targets, including interstate agencies charged with implementing those precepts (starr 2000; reitan 2007). neo-liberal global governance, and its failures, generated a protest cycle expressed in the global justice movement (cohen & rai 2000; smith 2002; tarrow 2005; eschle 2005; juris 2008). with climate change, as noted, the antagonism is driven by a deeper eco-systemic crisis, signaling the ‘revenge of nature’ on a planetary scale (anderson 2006). consequently, with the associated ‘climate justice movement’ there is a deeper and more existential community of fate. again, challenges are articulated in the form of shared problems, aspirations, and targets (roberts & parks 2 ‘north’ or ‘global north,’ and ‘south’ or ‘global south,’ are used here to simultaneously recognise social and spatial inequalities: most low-income societies are in the southern hemisphere, but the ‘south’ is also global, with extreme poverty also in the northern hemisphere; likewise for the high-income ‘north’, which is both spatially concentrated and globalized. as discussed in this article, the ambiguity of these categories is increasingly played-out in the dynamics of inter-state climate policy. goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 7 2006). in this context climate justice emerges as a particularly powerful expression of ‘reflexive development’ on a world scale. reflexivity rests in movements, and when it comes to questions of political agency, accounts of global social action replicate long-running debates about the relative importance of instrumental as against expressive action (buechler 2000; della porta and tarrow 2005; macdonald 2006). with climate action movements, research reveals a strong instrumental theme, centring on the rhetoric-reality gap in climate policy (hall & taplin 2007). this affirms a ‘political opportunities’ model of social movement mobilization where movements are interpreted as rational actors responding to institutional failure (van der heijden 2006). at the same time, there can be strong expressive dimensions to climate action as a form of ethical action: here climate action can be an end in itself, an intrinsic defence of ethical values in the face of climate injustice (connor et al 2009). as with other movements, the two dimensions are interwoven and play-out in ways that reflect the history and context of local mobilization (calhoun 1993). there is, indeed, a key place-based dimension to the mobilization of climate justice claims, and thus to global climate governance. in climate governance the contradictions between policy and practice are most evident in particular sites of carbon policy: a geography of carbon policy can be traced from expanding carbon-intensive infrastructure in the north, to carbon trading finance houses, and then to ‘clean development’ offset sites located in the south (roberts & tofflon-weiss 2001; chatterton 2005; plows 2008). climate action, then, is enacted in specific places, where the concrete instances of climate policy failure are manifested. such sites acquire a meaning that is simultaneously local and global, reflecting the spatial politics of climate change (seel 1997; griggs & howarth 2004; pickerill & chatterton 2006; bosso & guber 2006;). as generative sites, these can be conceptualized as places where new insights emerge, and new justice claims are produced (johnston & goodman 2006; massey 2007). here, the territoriality of climate policy becomes a key dimension of politicization and mobilization (brenner 2004; drainville 2004; harvey 2010). official and non-official climate justice the impact of climate change has been likened to that of a third world war, one at least as devastating as its predecessors. in this war the global south is in the immediate goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 8 firing line: the impacts of climate change for low-income peoples are now predicted to be disproportionate and catastrophic. in april 2007 a report issued by the intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc) on impacts and vulnerability stated that in the south, where urbanization and industrialization are already putting pressure on resources and where adaptation capacity is relatively weak, climate change will have its most immediate negative impact (parry et al. 2007). the report predicted major water shortages due to climate change, with a potential halving in agricultural production in some regions of africa by 2020, and a one-third reduction in yields in central and south asia by 2050, as well as inundation of the densely populated megadeltas of south and south-east asia due to rising sea levels. in this context, those amongst northern and southern elites who continue to benefit from continued accumulation do so at an immediate and measurable cost to southern peoples. but there is a sting in the tail: as nature wreaks its revenge a climate breakdown from which even the richest cannot insulate themselves, is now only a generation away. the un human development report for 2007, ‘fighting climate change,’ underlines the point: climate change is the defining human development challenge of the 21st century. failure to respond to that challenge will stall and then reverse international efforts to reduce poverty. the poorest countries and most vulnerable citizens will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks, even though they have contributed least to the problem. looking to the future, no country— however wealthy or powerful—will be immune to the impact of global warming. (undp 2008: 1) the asymmetries of cause and effect in climate change directly reflect global development divides, making the question of how to address climate change unalterably a question of justice. as noted, the inter-governmental climate change convention and kyoto process was primarily directed at northern climate change culprits with the aim of reducing their emissions. the impact of that effort has been minimal—securing at best a one per cent reduction in overall anticipated global ghg emissions from 1992 levels (christoff 2006). the key impact of kyoto, however, was to create frameworks that enable the displacement of restructuring costs from north to south, through carbon trading. the un’s ‘clean development mechanism,’ for instance, certifies development projects that offset for rising greenhouse gas emissions in annex 1 countries. all such projects operate to displace northern costs, re-gearing southern developmentalism to northern needs. driven by external financial imperatives rather than local ecological or developmental needs, their principal effect is goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 9 to disrupt and distort southern societies, to support ghg polluters in the north, and to create windfall profits for carbon traders (lohmann 2006). in many respects, however, this model is unraveling. there are two elements: first, the emergence of southern emitters; and second, the increasing incidence of impacts, especially in southern settings. the 1992 convention rested on a model of climate justice that located the victims in the south and the culprits in the north, with northern countries bearing historic responsibility and producing about three-quarters of 1992 emissions (jordan 1994). that model is now heavily qualified by the fact that since 2007 non-annex 1 countries responsible for the majority of the world’s current emissions, and thus must be part of any agreement to reduce overall emissions (barker et al 2007). at one level the growing importance of non-annex 1 countries is reflected in a rapid process of bidding-up funding commitments: since the mid-2000s northern agencies and states have made increasingly generous offers of ‘adaptation’ funding, linked to southern compliance with northern mitigation models and priorities. in 2006, for instance, the world bank linked the privatization of southern energy and resources sectors with financial support to enable what it called ‘climate-resilient development,’ estimating southern annual climate adaptation needs at up to $40 billion (world bank 2006). four years later a major world bank investigation into adaptation costs recalulated the estimate at between $70 and $100 billion per year (world bank 2010). the world bank estimates compare unfavourably with the $10 billion a year offer under the ‘copenhagen accord.’ the accord was assembled by the usa in the closing days of the 2008 unfccc conference of the parties held in copenhagen, and marked a significant attempt to break away from the consensual united nations negotiating process. the accord echoes responses to the new international economic order in the early 1970s, which was effectively countered by northern offers of development aid, and by a breakaway northern configuration, the ‘group of six’ major economies, which began meeting formally in 1975 (biel 2000). unlike the 1970s, however, the breakdown at copenhagen in 2009 should not be interpreted as the endgame, but rather as the initial skirmish in a major power shift, driven by the geopolitics of emissions. that geopolitics is now forcing a move beyond the ‘thirdwordism’ expressed in the division between goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 10 northern and southern responsibilities, and towards a new mutual responsibility. the advent of a reciprocal ecological interdependency between northern and southern societies contrasts dramatically with the logic of developmental dependency. rather than the south depending on the north, north and south now depend on each other. the confrontation between capitalist development and ecological survival expressed in advancing climate change is thus creating a new meta-imperative to live differently: the imperative creates a new inter-dependency, where, put simply, all societies depend on each other’s willingness and capacity to shift from carbon-intensive accumulation. this reflexive dynamic of climate justice has major implications for the governance model. as long as climate justice was framed mainly in terms of interstate responsibilities and obligations, its political logic could be confined and delimited. with the north defined as the principal culprit, the bulk of non-official influence on the governance process was north-centred and was deployed under the generic rubric of ‘climate action’, for instance through the ‘climate action network’ which was established in 1988 (pearce 2010).. with the unraveling of the model established under the framework convention, new forms of political engagement and approaches to climate justice have emerged. faced by growing disorder in the interstate governance process, climate politics has been forced out of the interstate container and has become subject to wider influences. several factors are at play. most important is the failure of policy and the first signs of large scale impacts on southern peoples. additionally, with the emergence of southern elites as key players in the interstate political process, new unofficial counterpoints have emerged, through transnational climate justice politics. the result, at muller observes, is that climate justice has increasingly revitalized and subsumed the pre-existing global justice movement (muller 2008). unofficial climate justice climate justice was first enunciated as a global set of principles at the united nations world summit on sustainable development, held in johannesburg in august 2002 (india resources centre 2002). the twenty-seven principles of climate justice were written by a group of fourteen northern and southern ngos, including corpwatch, friends of the earth international, greenpeace international, the indigenous environmental network, and the third world network. the principles of climate justice foregrounded ecological debt, stating that northern states and corporations ‘owe goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 11 the rest of the world as a result of their appropriation of the planet’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases’ (india resources centre 2002:1). stronger involvement from affected peoples in the south was a priority, to allow local control and conservation with ‘clean, renewable, locally controlled and low-impact energy’; commodification and corporate influence were rejected, but market solutions were acceptable provided they conformed to ‘principles of democratic accountability, ecological sustainability and social justice’ (india resources centre 2002: 1). the critique of ‘false solutions,’ in particular emissions trading, was developed more strongly with the durban climate justice summit held in 2004. linked to the durban group ‘carbon trade watch,’ the summit gathered twenty organizations from europe, the usa, latin america, india and africa. the resulting ‘durban declaration on carbon trading’ outlined the various ways in which emissions trading both undermines existing sustainable practices and contributes to climate change, thus highlighting the irony that ‘the earth’s ability and capacity to support a climate conducive to life and human societies is [sic] now passing into the same corporate hands that are destroying the climate’ (carbon trade watch 2004). subsequently the declaration attracted support from a further 163 organizations, and given the growing importance of emissions trading, its message had a strong influence. drawing these players together, a ‘climate justice now!’ coalition was established in december 2007 at the bali ‘conference of parties to the un framework convention on climate change (unfccc).’ the coalition included a range of southern and northernbased ngos and social movements that had played a central role in global justice, such as focus on the global south, the international forum on globalization, la via campesina, the world development movement and third world network, as well as signatories of previous climate justice statements. at the bali unfccc the group issued a simple statement critical of ‘false solutions … such as trade liberalisation, privatisation, forest carbon markets, agrofuels and carbon offsetting,’ stressing instead the need to leave carbon in the ground, reduce elite consumption, entrench resource rights, pursue food sovereignty, and repay climate debts through north-south wealth transfers (climate justice coalition 2007). the following year, at the unfccc in poznam, the coalition produced a more critical position, asserting ‘we will not be able to stop climate change if we don’t change the neo-liberal and corporate-based economy goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 12 which stops us from achieving sustainable societies’ (climate justice now! 2008). the unfccc process needed to make a break with ‘market ideology’ and instead looked to sustainable practices in the south, as ‘effective and enduring solutions will come from those who have protected the environment’ such as peasants, women and indigenous peoples. also at bali in 2007, a campaign network established a process for the ‘peoples’ protocol on climate change’ (asia-pacific research network 2007). the protocol defined climate change as ‘a question of social justice … rooted in the current capitalist-dominated global economy which is principally driven by the relentless drive for private profits and accumulation’ (asia-pacific research network 2007:2). accordingly it rejected ‘market mechanisms that impose the cash nexus on ecological priorities,’ and was critical of technological fixes. the protocol asserted peoples’ resource sovereignty, and the need for affected peoples to be involved in climate policy, and stated that the ‘climate change crisis is not simply about adaptation and mitigation, but changing the whole economic framework into one of eco-sufficiency and sustainability’ (asia-pacific research network 2007:3). the protocol process and the climate justice now! coalition opened several lines of debate in the broader climate justice movement, centring on issues of growth, sufficiency, technology, markets, sovereignty and climate debt. the debates were defined in relation to emerging climate policy, but in the run-up to copenhagen in 2009 they began to establish a distinct ideological field. mobilizations at copenhagen through clima forum, for instance, saw this emergent movement announce itself as an alternative source of legitimacy on climate governance—a claim that gained traction in the context of a failing interstate process. in a development not unlike the linkage between global justice protesters and southern states at the seattle wto in 1999, southern states blocked northern efforts to dissolve the unfccc model of climate justice and staged a walk-out, with many official representations joining unofficial protesters on the ‘outside.’ but perhaps more important for the long-term development of climate justice principles, inside the negotiating hall some 100 states joined with the alliance of small island states in calling for emissions reductions that would prevent average temperatures rising more than 1.5 degrees celsius, thus breaking with the prevailing consensus that a rise of 2 degrees was acceptable, despite its impacts. goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 13 with these developments we have seen the centre of gravity for unofficial climate governance passing from a transnational climate advocacy network focused on the interstate process (expressed in the international climate action network), to a heterogeneous climate justice movement that challenges climate governance through a transnational collective consciousness and capacity to mobilize (see keck & sikkink 1998). in what follows this capacity is explored through an exploration of sites of climate justice, north and south. generative sites, north and south generative sites for climate justice, both north and south, are in the first instance sites of climate policy failure. as sites of failure, they are nonetheless also sites of possibility. in this respect the disorders of climate governance are themselves generative. in both north and south the physical manifestations of climate policy failure most dramatically undermine the legitimacy of the official model, and prefigure new approaches. northern sites one of the most powerful northern examples, originating in the uk in 2006, is the phenomenon of the ‘camp for climate action.’ as a form of strategic direct action the ‘climate camp’ model was taken up in a number of northern countries, in the usa for instance as ‘climate convergence,’ and became something of a climate justice template (plows 2008; saunders & price 2008). climate camps are a form of mass occupation, in the first instance spatial interventions, mounted as close as possible to the physical site of large-scale carbon emissions. the camp is often directed at contesting the expansion of carbon-emitting infrastructures, whether by (temporarily) closing them down or by simply posing an alternative. in this way, the camp exploits contradictions between the policy and practice of climate governance, and becomes in itself an embodied symbol of climate justice (roberts & tofflon-weiss 2001; chatterton 2005; plows 2008). the uk’s climate camps in the years 2006-2009 centred on preventing the expansion of coal fired power stations at drax (2006), kingsnorth (2008) and ratcliffe on soar (2009), and on halting the third runway at heathrow airport (2007). in two cases— kingsnorth and heathrow—planned expansions were shelved, suggesting the mobilizations had their effect on policy, as well as contributing to the process of movement building. the kingsnorth mobilization, for instance, was linked to a goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 14 campaign by the world development movement, which characterized the power station not simply as a negation of the uk’s kyoto commitments, but as a violation of global climate justice principles. on a world scale, the world development movement calculated that the additional emissions resulting from the expansion of the power plant would have the following direct impacts: • 100,000 more people losing their dry season water supply • up to 300 more people dying every year due to malnutrition • up to 60,000 more people suffering from drought in africa • 50,000 more people going hungry due to drought and lower crop yields • up to 40,000 more people exposed to malaria • 20,000 people being forced our of their homes and becoming climate refugees • around 30,000 more people losing their homes every year due to coastal flooding. (wdm 2009) more broadly, the camps were surprisingly successful in constructing counter-sites, designed to unmask and contest plans to expand carbon-intensive infrastructures and industries (newell 2008). as such, carbon hotspots become physical manifestations of climate policy failure, their meaning thus transformed: from functional mechanisms they become reconfigured as threats to planetary survival (a similar approach was observed for anti-road protests: seel 1997). the low walls and fences that skirt the facilities, protecting people from the heavy machinery, become highly politicized boundaries protecting the facilities from climate justice claims. as their existence is challenged, the sites acquire intense symbolic meaning, their boundaries acquiring a simultaneously local and global resonance (bosso & guber 2006). these otherwise ordinary places become political places that symbolically ‘lift the veil’ on climate policy. participation in such events is in this sense apocalyptic, designed to reveal what is real, through participation in collective action that models eco-centric living, through the creation of public and open spaces for reflection and debate on climate issues and how to address them, and through planning and mounting a series of direct actions against climate change perpetrators. conceptualized as a generative site, or as a social laboratory, the camp is defined as a place where people experience their own power, and where new visions and possibilities are produced (johnston & goodman 2006). what emerges is an embodied and emplaced spatial politics of climate change, a climate micro-politics perhaps, embedded in the macro-politics of globalized climate change. goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 15 southern sites southern climate justice movements are likewise focused on the injustices of climate policy, and are similarly centred on specific sites. where northern unofficial climate justice focuses on the failure to take responsibility for northern emissions, southern counterparts focus on the corollary, that is, the effort to displace responsibility for northern emissions reductions onto southern societies. again, north-south connectivity is central: it is no accident that unofficial climate justice has emerged at the same time as international carbon markets have begun to create offset projects in southern contexts (bond 2006). a direct north-south linkage is created, through climate governance under kyoto, between expanded emissions in northern contexts and ‘low cost’ carbon offset projects in the south. that connection is reflected in the durban ‘carbon trade watch’ group, which, as already noted, has played a central role in the emergent climate justice movement (bond & dada 2007). offset projects established under the kyoto-endorsed ‘clean development mechanism’ (cdm) have played a key role, as has the proposed un ‘programme for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries’ (redd). with the internationalization of emissions trading, offsetting has enabled a process of bidding-down the cost of emissions reduction in the search for cheapest perton emissions reductions (exactly what carbon markets are designed to achieve). as demonstrated by the up-take in southern offsets by eu countries in particular, the cost of emissions reduction under the cdm is considerably lower than the cost of emissions reductions ‘at home.’ cheaper still are offsets for reduced deforestation, under the proposed redd regime, which simply seeks to maintain or ‘sustainably manage’ existing forests. the stern report, for instance, pointed to redd credits as a ‘highly cost-effective way to reduce emissions,’ and, not surprisingly, a number of high emitting countries have since sought to extend recognition to forests under the proposed post-kyoto framework (stern 2007: 537). indeed, redd initiatives have spawned more than twenty programs under a variety of funding mechanisms. measures to reduce deforestation and degradation are clearly an important aspect of any global response to climate change. deforestation and degradation of forests increase global emissions not just by the burning of wood, but also by allowing the decomposition of soil carbon, and reducing the planet’s capacity to absorb co2 as well. goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 16 the intergovernmental panel on climate change estimates the net effect of these forest emissions to be about 17 percent of global emissions, with half of this coming from low-income developing countries in the tropics, such as indonesia, that retain substantial tracts of forest. the key issue rests, however, not on whether to prevent the loss of these forests, but on whether programs to achieve this can be used to generate offset credits for continued or expanded emissions in the north (reality of aid 2009; goodman & roberts 2009, 2011). north-south offset mechanisms like cdm and redd have, indeed, been targeted as creating new structures of global dependency, what carbon trade watch calls ‘carbon colonialism’ that reorientates development pathways to cater for the northern carbon appetite. further, both cdm and redd are criticized for assuming commensurability between present emissions and future increases in sink capacity, or reductions in projected emissions. there are also concerns about the vulnerability of offset schemes to the carbon market and to carbon speculators. offsets are seen as linking emissions reductions to highly volatile carbon prices, empowering a new class of carbon financiers (friends of the earth international 2008). redd, in particular has enormous scope, as it is potentially applicable to any significant southern forest. not surprisingly, the immediate impact on the peoples who live in forests, exercise ancestral domain over them, and rely on them, has become a major issue. in empowering carbon traders, redd is seen to jeopardize the sovereign rights of people who have historically conserved forests, and to serve as a charter for their dispossession (international forum of indigenous peoples on climate change 2008). there is a growing political revolt against carbon offsets from within countries, such as indonesia, that are emerging as key sites for such projects (see indonesian forum on the environment, walhi, 2009). contestation of redd projects, and also of cdms, centres on local contexts—articulated through transnational networks—with southern sites politicized in confrontation with official frameworks. one example is the challenge to redd projects in kalimantan, indonesia, that have been funded by the australian government to lay the groundwork for the recognition of carbon credits (see goodman & roberts 2010). the schemes are defined as violating justice principles, form the ‘polluter pays’ principle to issues of historical obligation and resulting ‘carbon debt.’ the world’s current reliance on the sink and carbon storage capacity of the goodman disorderly deliberation? portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 17 world’s remaining forests reflects the logic of global ecological injustice, with those who have benefited from the worldwide release of greenhouse gases arraigned against those who now are required to suffer the consequences. offsets, therefore, are seen as compounding these climate injustices. conclusions despite the broad structural context of a newly reciprocal imperative for global development, as imposed by climate change, it must be acknowledged that many of the possibilities for disordering prevailing climate governance remain unrealized. the barriers to unofficial climate justice, and thus to reflexive global climate governance, should not be underestimated. the sheer scale of, and system-wide challenge posed by, climate change are themselves demobilizing. in northern contexts there is an additional sense of complicity: here, rather than producing a climate movement, the intensifying crisis can produce a form of ‘apocalypse blindness’ (beck 1995; depledge 2006). in many contexts climate consciousness can exist as a latent subjectivity, where publics share an awareness of contradictions but fail to engage in social action (doherty 2002; norgaard 2006; boycoff 2008). a tension can build up, but remain internalized, with the resulting crisis of belief embedded in everyday subjectivity, but repressed from public policy (agyeman & evans 2004; dorsey 2007). we witness the deferral of social power to the public authorities, by which climate change is framed as a problem for policy elites and only incidentally for their increasingly anxious constituencies. in this scenario the constitutive power of social agency, an historical actor capable of remaking society, remains unrealized. something of the scale of the problem in the north is reflected, for instance, in concern at the lack of mass mobilization expressed by the uk energy and climate change minister (and later shadow prime minister), ed miliband, in december 2008: when you think about all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960s, all the big political movements had popular mobilization. maybe it’s an odd thing for someone in government to say, but i just think there’s a real opportunity and a need here. 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(ed.) 2007, exploring post-development: theory and practice, problems and perspectives. routledge, london. taskergalley2013portalpa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. australians abroad special issue, guest edited by juliana de nooy. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. ‘the sweet uses of london’: the careers ‘abroad’ of louise mack (1870–1935) and arthur maquarie (1874–1955) meg tasker, university of ballarat in 1901, louise mack abandoned her life in sydney as an unhappily married but successful journalist, novelist and poet, and headed off to ‘try her fortune’ in london. as angela woollacott’s (2001) and ros pesman’s (1996) studies of australian women travellers, and carl bridge’s (2009) demographic survey of australians in the england and wales census of 1901, have shown, she was one of hundreds of australian women in england at the turn of the century. she also belonged to a category of traveller studied by stephen alomes (1999), bridget griffin-foley (2002), john arnold (2009), and most recently, peter morton (2011): migratory writers of all kinds, from ‘literary’ novelists to journalists, who regarded london as the best place to advance their writing careers. mack’s time away from australia lasted seventeen years, during which she wrote many novels and a good deal of journalism, drawing on her london experiences and travels in europe. she managed to support herself financially through writing, both in london and after her return to australia, where she died in 1935. another writer from sydney already established in london when mack arrived, albeit precariously, was the poet and journalist arthur maquarie. best known in australia for helping henry lawson during the latter’s two-year english sojourn, maquarie left australia soon after graduating from the university of sydney. he followed a very different path from mack and as we shall see, conformed more closely to the ‘type’ of self-exiled australian who chose high tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 2 culture in england and europe over the newly developing literary scene in his home country. the careers of louise mack and arthur maquarie, among many others, offer insights into the conditions of literary life for australian writers in london circa 1900, and an opportunity to reconsider how such writers might figure in the literary and social history of their period. the larger study in which this paper originates focuses on ‘australians abroad’ (specifically, in london), not for the purpose of marking differences between ‘expatriate’ and ‘local’ writers, or tracing themes of alienation or exile, but to explore the intersections of british and australian identities and voices in their work, and issues of cultural identity evident in their careers—in short, the conditions of ‘being in london,’ as distinct from ‘leaving australia.’ the term ‘expatriate’ is not quite adequate for this purpose. without abandoning it entirely, i want to invoke a concept of transnational colonial identity as a palimpsestic set of coexisting identities, influences, or affiliations that could shift or be accentuated differently according to circumstances. also, the term ‘transnational’ is not used here, as so often in contemporary postcolonial studies, to invoke forces of globalisation in the theoretically post-empire, post-nationalist western world of the twenty-first century. rather, as applied to late nineteenth-century writers, it conveys the simultaneity of national, colonial and imperial affiliations.1 both mack and maquarie left the australian colonies seeking a broader field of experience, with ambitions focused at first, at least, on london—on making their way from the fringes of civilization to its centre. however, despite some initial similarities in their aspirations and the circumstances of their departures from sydney, they produced and inhabited very different types of careers and identities, demonstrating disparate (though not necessarily opposed) possibilities open to those who were simultaneously citizens of australia, britain, and the world. while it is fairly clear that they knew of 1 morton spends several pages discussing the problems of using the term ‘expatriate’ (2011: 44–49); alomes notes that for most (white) australians, expatriation meant a return to the british isles (1999: 2). such problems arise from the historical moment, not just from new ‘takes’ on national identity. angela woollacott’s to try her fortune in london, uses the term transnational in a similar way to hassam’s model of multiple cultural identities, asserting and exploring the multiple affiliations and professional mobility of australian women (2001: 8–9). in ‘negotiating the colonial australian popular archive,’ ken gelder comes closest to the kind of meaning i am looking for to capture the complexity of the issue, with ‘transnational colonial’ as an attribute of fiction that explicitly registers its location in an international framework (2010: 7). tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 3 each other and probably met—maquarie in a letter to bulletin editor j. f. archibald refers to mack’s arrival and to hearing from her about gossip in sydney (maquarie 1901)—there is little evidence of further contact between them, or commentary by either about the other’s work or circumstances. in 1901, the year mack left sydney for london, australia was declared a commonwealth, with the former colonies becoming states in a federation. although the colonies had long had democratic parliaments and varying degrees of self-government, they were subject to the constitutional monarchy of britain both before and after federation—and since the onset of the boer war in 1899, pro-imperial sentiment had been running high. as craig wilcox puts it in his romp through the ‘edwardian excursion’ of australians flocking to london, this was not as ironic as it may seem: ‘australian federation isn’t a declaration of independence but an expression of a colonial nationalism within a british empire that many hope—and a few fear—is growing closer together’ (2004: 25). the paradox of colonial nationalism being commensurate with imperialism was less striking to those who were born colonial australian britons than it would be to later generations; while the bulletin’s nationalism was radical and anti-english, the mainstream white settler culture was able to accommodate a sense of pride in the new societies being formed as offshoots of empire. the multi-layeredness and diversity of colonial, imperial, and british forms of cultural identity and affiliation has been more readily acknowledged by cultural historians than in most twentieth-century australian literary criticism, with the binary between radical nationalist and international cosmopolitanism dominating critical debates and surviving the challenges posed by poststructuralist and postcolonial critics (bird, dixon & lee 1996: xxii–xxxvi), to remain implicit at least in much mainstream discussion of ‘expatriates’ versus local writers.2 in postcolonial theory, more broadly, the focus ‘has moved increasingly away from binary models of resistance and identity in order to embrace more ambivalent, multilateral resistances and more transnational, syncretistic conceptions of postcolonial identity’ (ball 2004: 130). recent studies of australian travellers abroad, and particularly in london, have stressed the plurality of cultural identity for colonial and 2 an example of educated but non-academic contemporary discussion on the subject is the semianonymous blog posting ‘monday musings on australian literature: some australian expat novelists’ (2010). tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 4 british subjects, and the effect of displacement on the construction of cultural identity (hassam 2000: 4; woollacott 2001: 16; pesman 1996: 4–5). examining individual careers with an eye to these questions of cultural identity, it becomes apparent that there was a self-conscious multivalence in the work of some colonial writers, as they addressed a readership spread across several places that could be called ‘home.’ louise mack does this quite explicitly; arthur maquarie, less so. international publishing and distribution systems for english-language literature (see lyons & arnold 2001), paralleling the movements of theatrical and other cultural products around the world, could also create a sense of mobility and being active in multiple locations (rather than a static sense of rootedness in one place, succeeded by another). these complexities might render a writer and her work at once ‘colonial’ and ‘transnational.’ however, place does matter, and london was the centre of many of these networks. while new york and paris had their rival claims as metropolitan centres of western culture in the early twentieth century, it was to paternoster row and fleet street that most australian writers looked, when they thought of literary success beyond the scope of their colonial markets and readership. before her departure, louise mack had been recognized as a rising talent in sydney literary circles, particularly by a. g. stephens, literary editor of the bulletin, who published her poems dreams in flower as a bulletin booklet in 1901. she was permitted to join the group dubbed the ‘boy authors,’ where she met george lambert and john le gay brereton (brereton 1930: 25). she contributed many poems and stories to sydney journals, and was for three years ‘women’s columnist’ for the bulletin. her later fortunes in london would be reported in the bulletin by herself and others. while well treated in morris miller’s bibliography of australian literature (1940), with both her australian and overseas writing included and described, she was largely overlooked until patricia clarke’s sketch in pen portraits (1988), and a 1991 biography by her niece nancy phelan. accounts of her in feminist historical studies (pesman 1996; woollacott 2001) and in bridget griffen-foley’s work on australian journalists on fleet street (2002: 28–30) have helped to stimulate interest in her as a female professional and traveller, but the only close critical attention to her work since phelan’s biography is an essay by ken gelder and rachael weaver on her place in ‘colonial pseudoliterature.’ the reasons they give for her having been relegated to this despised position tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 5 (by alfred buchanan in 1907) are her ‘flippancy,’ interpreted as a failure to engage with the ‘serious investment in nationhood’ required by writers and scholars of a radical national cast, and her descent from high literary ambitions to writing serial romances. their analysis of her romance novels emphasizes the way she plays with various expressions of feeling about australia while failing to construct any sustained or consistent understanding of anglo-australian cultural identity. her novels ‘are much more concerned with literary articulations of national identity than with the realities of ‘colonial ideology,’ however this might be understood’ (gelder & weaver 2010: 86). mack’s passionate responses to each of the places she moved to seem to be both sincere and contingent, and each became integrated with her attachment to other places and cultures. she ‘loved the whole world,’ not just england or australia, and shrugged off questions of loyalty or nationalism by invoking aesthetic values that transcended such categories. in doing so, she shows just that fluidity and mobility across the systems of literary production and cultural affiliation alluded to earlier, marking her not as an expatriate shaking the dust of australia from her sandals, but as a colonial transnational writer (gelder 2011: 7). mack was a writer whose cosmopolitan cultural aspirations and identity were based on taste and sentiment, rather than more formal literary practice or education. she had planned (with her mother’s encouragement) to study at sydney university, but failed to matriculate, and after a short and miserable stint as a governess concentrated on writing (phelan 1991: 30). in 1896, an english publisher published her first novel, the world is round; she followed this promising start with another book for young readers, teens, published in sydney in 1897. from an early age, mack had wanted to travel. leaving behind her husband, john creed, and no children, she took ship for london in 1901— distributing her possessions among friends and family, clearly not intending a quick return (phelan 1991: 109). her money didn’t last long, and after a few months living in straitened circumstances, writing an australian girl in london (1902), she moved on to more profitable work writing serial romances for the publishing company of harmsworth, which published newspapers, serial fiction and books. in 1904, mack moved to florence, where she contributed to, and for a time acted as editor of, the english-language weekly paper, the italian gazette. in 1910 she returned to london and resumed writing serial romances for a rumoured £1000 a year (phelan 1991: 148). she tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 6 also wrote regularly for periodicals, notably w.t. stead’s review of reviews, and later won both respect and fame for her reports from behind the lines during wwi in belgium, which she wrote up as a woman’s experiences in the great war (1915) and around which she built a busy schedule of travelling and lecturing (phelan 1991: 176). mack’s longing for a london she knew only from books, and her ecstatic responses when she actually arrived, were expressed in poems and reports back to australia, as well as her fiction. in one of mack’s last novels, teens triumphant (1933), she draws on and gives a version of her own first few months in london, recast as the story of lennie, an australian girl who records her responses to london in intensely poetic and aesthetically charged novel. quotations from this book-within-a-book show it to be mack’s own an australian girl in london (1902). there are some telling points made in the retrospective novelistic account. lennie the serial writer, churning out 3,000 words a day and earning the princely sum of forty guineas a week, is jealous of her younger self, the lennie who wrote her book starving in a garrett (1902: 213). mack concludes teens triumphant by having lennie and her australian lover, dennis, return to sydney to marry, with a quotation from whistler: ‘no man should remain away too long from his own country’ (1933: 287). mack herself left england in 1918 after publishing her book a woman’s experiences in the great war (and dashing off a couple more novels) to do a lecture tour on the same subject for the red cross. she never returned to london, which seemed to have become associated for her with the business of writing serials rather than the art of writing novels. when she went to italy in 1904, it had been at least in part to make a break with serial writing and concentrate on writing a new novel, children of the sun (phelan 1991: 146). she spent ten years travelling in the pacific islands before settling in sydney in 1928, where she continued her career as a public speaker, and returned to writing, producing novels and a column for p. r. stephensen’s new magazine, the australian women’s weekly (phelan 1991: 176ff). having left australia with very little, and leaving behind a supportive literary network, mack did manage to make a living as a writer. she worked hard, established new networks and contacts, and carved out a diverse, if somewhat ad hoc, career as a journalist, novelist, poet, columnist, war correspondent and lecturer. she travelled extensively and wrote her travels into both fiction and journalism, often juxtaposing tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 7 australian and european points of view in ways that are interesting to contemporary literary historians working on transnational forms of literary and cultural work (e.g. gelder & weaver 2010). to what extent did mack relinquish or modify her colonial identity in order to establish this career as a woman of letters in a more cosmopolitan field? in her first years, like so many others reporting back from london, she expresses her consciousness of being a ‘colonial.’ in 1901, for instance, in ‘a little letter from london,’ she declared to the readers of the sydney bulletin: what a different london from a londoner’s london is the london of the colonial! london, as it seems to me, is the most beautiful city in the world. but i rarely find a londoner who agrees with me … to find london beautiful was an intense surprise to me. i had expected to find it crowded, and interesting, and enormous, and loud, and great, but never beautiful … all through the autumn and the winter there are atmospheric effects hovering about us here that turn london into a poem waiting to be written. up in skies, which writers hurriedly and cruelly describe as ‘grey,’ you will find, if you look, an indescribable tenderness of tone, subtle colourings, pale memories of dawns and sunsets, even in mid-morning ... (1901b) it is important to note, however, that the response to london in mack’s ‘little letter’ is not only colonial, or even distinctively colonial, but personal, and aesthetic, and literary. while the imagery of blood is shorthand for the whole freight of anglo-australian connectedness (as in henry parkes’s ‘crimson thread of kinship’), to this self-declared ‘colonial’ australian writer london is a personal encounter, a site of sensory experiences, a poem waiting to be written. contrast this with the vision of mack’s contemporary victor daley in ‘when london calls,’ published in the bulletin in 1900 (shortly after lawson’s departure for london), and frequently evoked in discussions of australians in england: crowned ogress—old, and sad, and wise— she sits with painted face and hard, imperious, cruel eyes in her high place. …. and when the poet’s lays grow bland, and urbanised, and prim— she stretches forth a jewelled hand and strangles him. here, the irish-born daley reflects both the anti-english attitudes of the bulletin, and his own decision not to attempt to achieve success in london, a move he had been considering until his first volume of poems was poorly reviewed there (tasker 2011: 114–16; molloy 2004: 116). his nightmare figure of a cruel and ‘haggard-eyed tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 8 imperatrix’ speaks specifically of colonial resentment and resistance, grounded in london’s metonymic significance as the centre of empire. as ball notes, ‘at the height of imperial power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, london … projected itself to the inhabitants of its pink-stained territories as the centre of the world, the fountainhead of culture, the zero-point of global time and space’ (ball 2004: 4). ‘when london calls’ is a clear example of the colonies ‘writing back’—identifying forces of power and exploitation underlying apparently cultural and aesthetic values and ambitions. mack’s version of london is also a re-writing of the imperial metropolis, through individual experience and perception. as ball goes on to argue, there are less oppositional ways of writing back from the colonies to the metropolitan centre: as ex-colonials come to dwell in london and walk its streets, they appropriate it and reterritorialize it. as writers render those experiences into autobiographical or fictional narratives, they reinscribe the metropolis against their backgrounds and identities as formerly colonized subjects. the london that once imposed its power and self-construction on them can now be reinvented by them. (ball 2004: 9) mack’s poetic response to london may not be the active resistance of radical nationalism, but it does appropriate the metropolis to her own aesthetic and literary purposes. in doing this, it is not far off being one of the ‘sweet uses of london’ that henry lawson recommended in a letter to the bulletin after his own two year sojourn there (lawson 1903). his advice to live cheaply, get an agent, and buckle down to work is more pragmatic, perhaps. but beneath the romantic breathiness, louise mack’s writing to the australian market in a fresh and poetic way about a familiar topic is equally strategic. mack’s longing to experience european history and culture was shared by arthur maquarie, who, like mack, used london as a base for further travels. both spent time living in florence, a cheap and cheerful alternative to london in winter, which had a community of english, american and other visitors. like mack, but a couple of years earlier, maquarie published some of his poems in the italian gazette. while maquarie came and went from florence on a seasonal basis, mack lived there for several years. she frequently used italy as a setting in her novels, together with london, paris, rome and sydney (for example in the romance of a woman of thirty). tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 9 the two had similar starts to their overseas careers, as they sought to establish themselves as writers, and were virtually unsupported by family or outside help, at first at least. their careers took very different turns, however, with mack having to rely on commercial work to support herself, and maquarie being in a position after his marriage to concentrate on purely literary work. the differences which developed between their cultural and political allegiances (or refusal of allegiance) and literary personae and performance are attributable to circumstances of life and travel, as well as to ideological differences such as class, gender or nationalistic fervour. the gender difference is apparent, yet it was mack who had to work for a living and maquarie who was able to support himself by marrying well. mack was less hostile to the nationalism of the bulletin than maquarie, yet she, like him, renounced the poetics of the bush bards as clumsy and uncouth. and class seems to have been a measure of value which the bohemian mack eschewed (while still valuing intellectual or aesthetic distinction), while the more traditionally oriented maquarie strove for gentility and inclusion in elite bodies such as the royal society of literature. both, however, began life as the bookish children of clergymen, middle class and well educated, but bursting to leave sydney as soon as possible. born arthur macquarie mullens in dubbo, maquarie attended the university of sydney, graduating in 1895 as a bachelor of arts. by 1898 he was in london, where he changed his name by deed poll, dropping the surname mullens and changing the spelling of his former middle name to maquarie. he comes across in his letters and writings as a self-consciously cultured young man with a decided preference for sonnets, lyrical verses (some of which were later set to elgar’s music) or quasi-elizabethan dramas. his dance of olives was reviewed by the bulletin, with several poems printed on the red page (‘verses’ 1905), and several of his poems were anthologised in louis lavater’s the sonnet in australasia (1956) and walter murdoch’s the oxford book of australasian verse (1918). as a poet in australia, he never achieved the level of recognition accorded mack by the editors of the bulletin. maquarie’s sonnets and lyric verses were often playful and facetious, self-consciously literary and stylised. the boer war drew a different type of verse from him, with a jingoistic recruitment song ‘a family matter. for the patriotic fund’: so it’s tumble to your saddles, and it’s off to kruger’s land tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 10 just to join the other lads and make a scatter. all the family’s turning out to lend a ready helping hand, for there’s some one got to talking rough, and mother calls and that’s enough; it’s now a family matter it’s now a family matter. …. buckle on your cartridge belts, waste no time about it, force is massing on the veldts; we must off and rout it. what if fate should work its worst, men can grin in falling. come on, chaps and be the first; here’s yer mother calling. here’s yer mother calling. (maquarie 1900c) what jars in this poem is not so much the imperial sentiment—there was a lot of it about, after all—but the faux working-class language, the shallow sentimentalism of its invocation of family ties, and its kipling-esque call to the lower orders to come to the aid of mother england. it reads now as a clumsy piece of propaganda, with no political analysis or room for doubt. a more lyrical treatment of the same theme is found in another poem written a couple of years later: i with the wide young empire in my veins, with parents breathing the strong austral sun, with kin inured to hardship on the plains where after all defeats the prize is won— i, though a wanderer with a loitering lyre, feel for the moment one hot touch of fire. if my own blood be needed, i will go and add it to my kinsman’s blood that fell where in the thickest of a treacherous foe he plied swift steel and scorned the rage of hell. if i am wanted, here at once am i, yielding myself as one content to die. but if you, england, should relax your hold in this ill wrestle; if through failing skill, or faint resolve, or putrid lust of gold, you leave what once you swore was god’s clear will; then i shall cast you off and curse your name and sing a free australia—free from shame. (maquarie 1905: 23) the voice here is formal and literary, the imagery conventional and still invoking the ties of blood, but with a difference—it is now ‘the wide young empire’ flowing in his veins. while the poet’s commitment to war as a noble and idealistic enterprise is no less vehement than in the proletarian ballad, the speaker here addresses ‘england’ rather than alluding sentimentally to the maternal emblem of queen and empress. in this tougher mode, he threatens that a failure of military nerve might not only lead him to tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 11 cast off and curse england in song but also (partly in consequence of his singing) to australia cutting loose from a shamed empire. significantly for a reading of maquarie’s performance of cultural identity through literature, this threatened loosening of the filial tie contradicts the anglo-australian poet’s otherwise confidently integrated representation of himself as a briton loyal to australia and england, with both nations having common goals and interests in sustaining the glory of empire. this later, more disillusioned, poem was written long after ‘a family matter,’ which was published as a song in 1899, reflecting the initial rush of enthusiasm for the boer war in the australian as well as british press. the ballad was published in britain as well as australia, as a letter to the editor of the london times indicates. explaining that australian troops in the boer war were motivated by ‘the idea of imperial unity and the love they bear the mother land,’ maquarie suggests that a statue should be erected by the british in sydney to commemorate australian soldiers: ‘such a monument—it need be of no great pretensions—would be the greatest possible pledge of the everlasting endurance of the filial tie’ (1899). the letter concludes with a mock-modest allusion to his own work: living as i do by my pen, i am not wealthy enough to offer any considerable subscription towards the carrying out of this project; but i will devote to it the payments due to me for my poems published in literature and the daily mail. i am especially glad that ‘a fam’ly [sic] matter,’ which was quoted in the times, has been brought to the notice of several million englishmen by being taken up by so many papers both in london and the provinces: i now hope for some result. i have, etc. arthur maquarie. (1899) maquarie writes as ‘a colonial’ but also as a writer and a loyal citizen of empire, claiming a place, however humble, in the british literary establishment. to some extent, australian visitors to england frequently felt that they were more cosmopolitan, less parochial, than the home-grown britons who had never left their county, let alone the british isles. this sense of dual citizenship could breed confidence, as we see in maquarie’s letter to the times; it could also give an australian writer the ability to communicate with more than one readership; not to erase the differences between colonials and londoners, but to explain and mediate them. this is a strategy adopted by mack, at various times, in a disarmingly ingenuous gesture that appears more in the novels written for the international audience of popular fiction than in the letters she wrote back to the (nationalist and anti-english) sydney bulletin. tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 12 in an australian girl in london, for example, the autobiographical protagonist exclaims: ‘i love every place i come to. the whole world fills me with rapture. i never realised its existence till i came to london. it was just the world on the map. nothing was real but australia’ (259). a little later, she identifies london as the location for a broadly cosmopolitan existence that had been out of reach: when we [australians] think of these places we see the globe lying between them and us. that great distance is always in our travels. when the nearness of ‘the continent’ becomes clear to us we feel that to live in london is just the same as to live in france, italy, germany. any place that can be reached in thirty-six hours appears to be almost on our property. when i wake in the morning and think ‘i am in london,’ i think also, ‘and in paris and holland, and germany and switzerland.’ and so, london means everywhere to us. to leave london and go back means to leave all europe also. even if we never get there, we always can—as long as we are in england. but go back to australia and the whole world vanishes, like a dream, and becomes, after a time, only a dream again. (278) mack’s ‘we’ includes the reader, so long as the reader is also from the antipodes; to an english reader, it is used confidingly, as an explanation of how ‘we australians, your cousins on the other side of the world’ feel. this passage both constructs and explains an imaginative and emotional response that reaches out to include british as well as australian readers. both maquarie and mack, then, positioned themselves in england as australian writers with something to say about matters of interest to readers in both london and australia. in mack’s case, she explored the experience of a colonial in london, self-consciously responding to the familiar and yet strange milieu and relating that experience in a way that invited the comprehension of british as well as australian readers. maquarie likewise, addressing the times, takes the tone of an ambassador who is at home in both camps, and assumes common interests as well as separate identities, while asserting the validity of a colonial position. how these writers fared in their new environments is another matter—what avenues were open to them as australian writers in london, and to what extent did they continue to carry their multiple cultural identities in their professional lives? at this stage, maquarie regarded himself as a poet who wrote for periodicals to support himself. as noted earlier, he was closely associated with henry lawson during the latter’s difficult but productive two years in england. maquarie was alerted to lawson’s arrival in london in 1900 by their mutual friend, john le gay brereton, and quickly tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 13 secured a commission to write a pair of articles about lawson’s poetry and short stories for the popular magazine argosy (maquarie 1900a, 1900b; barnes 2007). in the early 1980s, brian kiernan found a previously unpublished essay by lawson about this episode, which both drew attention to maquarie’s role and gave a highly coloured interpretation of him as a writer. in ‘“succeeding”: a sequel to “pursuing literature,”’ lawson stresses maquarie’s poverty, and the nervousness and energy with which he pursued his literary ambitions, concluding: arthur is teaching english in florence now, and writing yards of blank verse, and finishing a spanish novel and an epic or something on the life of corrigio or someone. he writes to say that he has struck a new line in the higher flights of poetry—something that hasn’t been written since the year one—and he’ll get a publisher in london next spring and a couple of hundred pounds down. he tackles london every spring but he doesn’t stay over winter because he can’t afford a fire and his frock coat is getting very threadbare. he flies south with the swallows. (kiernan 1983: 368) this is a fitting coda to the contrast lawson has presented between maquarie’s struggles and his own achievements. however, lawson’s initial success in london fell apart in the face of personal tragedy and lack of discipline (tasker & sussex 2007), while maquarie found his feet as a ‘man of letters’ in london and italy, but slipped virtually unnoticed from the annals of australian literature. although included (as an expatriate writer) by miller in his descriptive bibliography of australian literature to 1935, he no longer appears in the australian dictionary of biography, and his entry in the oxford companion to australian literature suggests that he ‘is most significant for the assistance he provided to henry lawson in london in 1900–1901’ (wilde et al. 1985: 460). maquarie continued to write and scrape by, alternating between london and florence. his fortunes appear to have changed in 1903 with his marriage to an american artist who also spent her winters in florence. mary lintner, a sculptor and printmaker, was the daughter of an eminent scientist and professor who held the post of new york state entomologist, and who had died in rome in 1898. she seems to have had at least some money from her father’s estate, as maquarie showed no signs of employment in later life, and the couple travelled extensively and lived well, settling at a permanent country residence, hurst house in surrey. maquarie’s relative affluence after his marriage not only allowed him a life of personal and creative freedom, but also provided an opportunity for him to act as a patron of the tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 14 arts after his death in 1955, in a way that showed he had not completely forgotten his australian origins. there being no children, maquarie left the bulk of his £21,000 estate to the university of sydney, to be used ‘in the promotion of australian culture in poetry and sculpture by the provision of traveling scholarships and by the publication of works of qualifying authors’ (university of sydney 1958; 1974). forty years earlier, maquarie had written to john le gay brereton, a former friend and fellow student who had become a librarian at the university of sydney: my wish is to do what little may ever be in my power to connect up the syd. varsity with things on this side. if you have any young graduates of the right sort coming this way, do not hesitate to give him a letter to me. i will do what i can and if he writes seriously i will propose him for the author’s club. (brereton papers, july 1913) the correspondence with brereton shows that while maquarie regarded australia generally as a cultural desert, he did value the connection with sydney university. brereton had been only one year ahead in the bachelor of arts, but was well known, and editor of the student magazine hermes when maquarie was a student. they corresponded over many years, exchanging copies of books, compliments, and gossip. maquarie wrote: i shall always remember the value of your influence for right ideals in literature long enough before you had any official position from which to exercise it. it is really very wonderful what you accomplished as an undergraduate among a weedy lot of hobbledehoys obsessed with the grandeur of the bulletin. (2 july 1913). in 1905 the bulletin had described as maquarie as ‘a wandering australian of whom there is vague information only. rumour declares that he knew (and loathed) sydney university until his departure for london … impelled by a fierce desire to see and feel the wider world’ (‘verses’ 1905). writing to brereton, maquarie recalled and denied this, saying his feelings were far more tepid: ‘i may have regretted to someone the limited stimulus to be found there’ (brereton papers, july 1913). clearly, the bequest was intended to redress this limitation by enabling students like himself to leave australia and acquire cultural experience and training without having to suffer the indignities of literary hackwork. maquarie continued to identify as a man of letters, but what sort of a writer was he? he appears in the 1911 census for surrey as ‘an author,’ and in that year he published the days of the magnificent: a drama of old florence in blank verse and prose. while tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 15 written in a pseudo-elizabethan style, the language and tone also carry echoes of another, more modern, italy-loving poet, robert browning. another drama published two years later, the happy kingdom (set in sardinia), was damned with faint praise by walter de la mare as readable and amusing but essentially imitative, ‘hold[ing] a mirror up to shakespeare rather than to nature’ (de la mare 1913: 422). to brereton, who had just published a book on elizabethan poets, maquarie wrote: ‘the elizabethans are being much studied now and shakspere [sic] well translated, the centre of the movement being in florence’ (brereton papers, sept 1913). while this may sound quaintly old-fashioned, it shows that maquarie saw himself as having his finger on the pulse in at least some literary circles, and that he was anxious to establish common literary ground between sydney, london and florence by invoking the realm of letters, as distinct from actual locations. ‘a fam’ly matter’ was an early and rare instance of overt australianness in maquarie’s literary career. for the most part, he apparently had no ambitions to perform or exploit his colonial subject matter, like lawson, or write about australians compared to the english, as mack did, but modelled himself on english writers. he continued to produce sonnets, lyrics, and verse dramas, published in elegant little volumes (some produced on his own printing press, the olive press, in florence), while maintaining a gentlemanly enough position to be elected in 1913 to the council of the royal society of literature in london. maquarie worked assiduously as foreign secretary and, from 1918, on the royal society’s ‘committee for promoting an intellectual entente among the allied and friendly countries,’ a committee which included among its number a large number of academics and a handful of writers, including thomas hardy and edmund gosse (royal society 1918). looking to recruit colonial fellows to the royal society in 1913, he wrote to brereton: one must have absolutely straight and solid men, wholehearted and sane, and in new countries literature breaks out in such queer places. the henry lawsons and the roderick quinns are a special local product, gifted doubtless in a way, but in far too narrow a way for public service outside their books. (brereton papers, july 1913) maquarie’s phrase ‘special local product’ conveys such a condescending view towards australian writers that it is little wonder he feared the bulletin getting hold of his comments: ‘i live with a dread of the sydney bulletin always in my mind. their lash is so unfair and so merciless, and so ready to attack what they may choose to fancy tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 16 snobbism’ (july 1913). such self-consciousness is telling, as is the anxiety to distance himself (and brereton) from the ‘special local’ (that is, colonial) product. maquarie was clearly an expatriate in the sense of having left australia without any intention of returning there to live—but after fourteen or more years away from australia, at the time of this correspondence, was he to all intents and purposes english? not quite—he was, after all, foreign secretary of the royal society, and something of an outsider, however well regarded. it was a position that allowed him to preside at lectures by visiting foreign writers or lecturers, and that he was suited for because of his experiences in both australia and italy. but it was also a position of difference, marking him as someone from outside the usual circles. in london, australian writers tended to be seen as australians—at times encouraged to take colonial life as their subject matter, in order to exploit a niche market, and at others, warned that their australian experience would be regarded as valueless by british newspapers, or of no interest to novel readers. it is worth noting, however, that both maquarie and mack spent a considerable amount of time in italy, where their place was more loosely defined as part of the english-speaking community, along with americans and others, with less emphasis on their particularly australian identity. in other circumstances, such as war, they were more likely to be regarded as british, or even english. this is certainly how mack represented herself when she was behind enemy lines in belgium in 1914—her account for the daily mail was headed ‘an englishwoman in antwerp’ (3 sep. 1914, cited in phelan 1991: 156), and she wrote later in her book a woman’s experiences in the great war: ‘whether i lived or died mattered not beside the satisfaction of sitting there, an english subject, looking down on the german army with contempt and hatred’ (mack 1915). during the boer war, however, the separate identity of the australian troops had been noted by many, maquarie’s plea for a war memorial being an example. two years later, mack reported (with some exasperation) that the war effort served as a marker of difference, under the guise of ‘loyalty’: ‘everybody says it as soon as it’s known you are australian. dozens, scores, hundreds of times i have had it cast at me—in london, in the country, everywhere—from anybody and everybody: “you australians were so good to us in the war.” that is all england thinks of us, i verily believe!’ (mack 1901b). the point is that an individual person could experience and express different positions, illustrating hassam’s argument for colonial identity as multi-layered and fitting with a transnational tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 17 (shifting, mobile) rather than a strictly hierarchical postcolonial system of cultural identity and affiliation. even a relatively conservative anglophile like maquarie retained australia as part of his sense of self, and as part of how others perceived and located him, in literary as well as social terms. there is nothing startling about this; the whole problem of expatriation is the juggling of different places and their associated values, roles and affiliations, which go to make up a sense of cultural identity. in 1913 maquarie wrote to brereton, asking for an assessment of australian literature from an australian point of view, saying: ‘it is so far to australia in so many more ways than that of geographical mileage, that it is not at all possible to me to keep in touch with the spirit of things … i feel that i could never have become a true son of what was by some chance my native land. there was perhaps a taint of latin in me that has made southern europe more readily understandable’ (brereton papers, sep. 1913). he did not return to australia except for one or two short visits, although he did acknowledge that it was still part of his ‘personal’ identity, ‘the compost of his heart.’ writing from on board a cruise yacht in 1926, he analyses his attachment to australia and his inability to be at home there: i want to strike out towards sydney harbour one day; knocking off the gilt of one thing after another leaves one longing for the old things which are the compost of our heart. the material things out there never entered into my make up. the crudeness, the childishness of the best there was to show, only made me sick with a great longing. but the tendrils of little human things did not let go; they only broke off and came with me; and now i want a good long look at the physical presence of one or two who are still left and can find memories to fill the long silence. i shouldn’t stay, because i couldn’t. the world has too many things in it, and there are too many left still to do. but i could get a certain amount of rest and deep-breathing and come back to the stress of life here. (brereton papers, jan. 1926) the bohemian, down-and-out writer portrayed by henry lawson has given way to an urbane, if wistful, man of letters, fully committed to his life ‘abroad.’ at the same time, however, his love of italy reminds us that he was a citizen of the world, not just a colonial claiming his british birthright. but even maquarie, with his apparent desire to adopt an ‘english’ standard and attempt to carve out a career and life far from australia, was constrained to some extent to work around or with his australian origins. by acting as foreign secretary for the royal society, he continued to carry and to manifest diverse cultural identities, in his own writing and in how he was seen by others. at a time when there was no clear or inevitable choice between being british or australian it is apparent that neither of these writers fully renounced (indeed, they could tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 18 not completely shed) either their british heritage or their colonial identity, whether working in commercial or literary milieux. both mack and maquarie write confidently as citizens of the world, rather than children of empire, and to differing degrees they drew in their work upon their experiences as australians, or rather, as australians abroad. living and working in london and italy, they were not simply expatriates or exiles; their complex and often shifting roles and identities insisted on hybridity. despite this theoretical hybridity being inevitable to some extent, it is still possible to distinguish between the positions of the two writers. the colonial transnational writer’s is differently inflected from the self-conscious expatriate’s, as it allows for several layers of identity to coexist without an ideologically driven impulse to assert, renounce or choose between them. maquarie’s letters and indeed his poems often reflect a tension between his desire to integrate with european and british culture, and the persistence of ties back to australia; this is articulated as a problem. mack, on the other hand, approaches questions of cultural identity more obliquely, as experiences to be written about and shared, rather than as declarations of loyalty or even ‘belonging.’ by comparison with maquarie, louise mack’s greater mobility between genres, and her lack of any fixed status or position in social or institutional settings of the kind that maquarie adhered to, correspond to a greater flexibility in her cultural affiliations, and a more fluid, simultaneously transnational and colonial writing identity. reference list alomes, s. 1999, when london calls: the expatriation of australian creative artists to britain. cambridge university press, cambridge. arnold, j. 2009, ‘australian books, publishers and writers in england, 1900–1940,’ in australians in britain: the twentieth-century experience, (eds) c. bridge, r. crawford, & d. dunstan. monash university epress, melbourne: 10.1–10.19. online, available: http://books.publishing.monash.edu/apps/bookworm/view/australians+in+britain%3a+the+twen tieth-century+experience/137/xhtml/chapter10.html [accessed 24 november 2011]. ball, j. 2004, imagining london: postcolonial fiction and the transnational metropolis. university of toronto press, toronto, buffalo & london. barnes, j. 2007, ‘henry lawson and the “pinker of literary agents,”’ new reckonings: australian literary studies, vol. 23, no. 2: 89–105. bird, d., dixon, r. & lee, c. 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(eds). 2001, a history of the book in australia 1891–1945. a national culture in a colonised market. university of queensland press, st lucia. mack, l. 1896, the world is round. fisher unwin, london. _____ 1897, teens: a story of australian schoolgirls. angus & robertson, sydney. _____ 1901a, dreams in flower. bulletin, sydney. _____ 1901b, ‘a little letter from london,’ bulletin, 7 august: red page. _____ 1902, an australian girl in london. t. fisher unwin, london. _____ 1911, the romance of a woman of thirty. alston rivers, london. online, available: http://www.apfa.esrc.unimelb.edu.au/objects/d00000843.htm. [accessed 25 november 2011] _____ 1915, a woman’s experiences in the great war. fisher unwin, london. online, available: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35392/35392-h/35392-h.htm. 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[maquarie’s letter dates his song as 1899.] _____ 1901, letter to j. f. archibald, in henry lawson miscellaneous papers, mitchell library, a l 29/ 1–26 cy 2213. _____ 1905, the dance of olives. j. m. dent & co., london. _____ 1911, the days of the magnificent: a drama of old florence in blank verse and prose. bickers & son, london. _____ 1913, the happy kingdom. bickers & son, london. miller, e. m. 1973 [1940], australian literature from its beginnings to 1935. 2 volumes. sydney university press, sydney. molloy, f. 2004, victor j. daley, a life. crossing press, sydney. ‘monday musings on australian literature: some australian expat novelists.’ 2010, whispering gums, 30 august. online, available: http://whisperinggums.com/2010/08/30/monday-musings-onaustralian-literature-some-australian-expat-novelists/ [accessed 11 october 2012]. morton, p. 2009, ‘australia’s england, 1880–1950,’ in the cambridge history of australian literature. (ed.) p. pierce. cambridge university press, cambridge: 255–81. _____ 2011, lusting for london: australian expatriate writers at the hub of empire, 1870–1950. palgrave macmillan, new york. tasker the sweet uses of london portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 20 murdoch, w. 1918, the oxford book of australasian verse. oxford university press, oxford. pesman, r. 1996, duty free: australian women abroad. oxford university press, melbourne. phelan, n. 1991, the romantic lives of louse mack. university of queensland press, st. lucia. royal society of literature. 1918, ‘the political aims of the british empire in the war: a statement addressed to correspondents in the united states of america, drawn up by the sub-committee on relations with america, and adopted and issued by the committee for promoting an intellectual entente. humphrey milford, london.’ online, available: http://libcudl.colorado.edu/wwi/pdf/i73498464.pdf [accessed 21 june 2012]. tasker, m. 2011, ‘“when london calls” and fleet street beckons: daley’s poem, reg’s diary—what happens when it all goes “bung”?,’ southerly, vol. 71, no. 1: 107–26. tasker, m. & sussex, l. 2007, ‘“that wild run to london”: henry and bertha lawson in england,’ new reckonings: australian literary studies, vol. 23, no. 2: 168–86. university of sydney. 1958, calendar, ‘benefactions’: 639. _____ 1974, calendar, ‘maquarie travelling scholarship’: 436. ‘verses by arthur maquarie.’ 1905, bulletin, 9 november: 2, red page. wilcox, c. 2004, ‘edwardian excursion,’ meanjin, vol. 63, no. 3: 23–32. wilde, w. h., hooton, j. & andrews, b. (eds) 1985, the oxford companion to australian literature. oxford university press, melbourne. woollacott, a. 2001, to try her fortune in london: australian women, colonialism, and modernity. oxford university press, new york. microsoft word marinelliintrogalleypolitics&aestheticschinanov2012issuefinal.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. politics and aesthetics in china special issue, guest edited by maurizio marinelli. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. word-images: politics and visual cultures in china maurizio marinelli, university of technology sydney in china, word-images have always played a crucial role in the construction of a claimed reality in the socio-political arena. according to the confucian doctrine, a precise relationship exists between the idea of ‘correctness’ (zheng 正), as expressed in the paradigm of ‘rectification of names’ (zhengming 正名), and the art of governing the state (zheng 政) (confucius 1960: 13.3). confucian philosophers argued that names and language embodied norms and had a performative function. by simply speaking or writing the words, an action, a title, a ritual, or an object was meant to become a reality. thus language set the standards for how ruler and subject should act. in confucius’s words: ‘to govern means to rectify names. if you lead the people by being rectified yourself, who will not be rectified?’ (confucius 1960: 12.17). a ruler able to ‘rectify names’ could set a clear example for his subjects to follow. when the ruler’s behaviour was in line with the standards defined by his words, the ruler was thought to literally embody codes of proper social and political behavior. conversely, when the behaviour of either ruler or ruled was out of line with the idealized standards ascribed to their social position, the prerogatives that normally attended that position no longer held. a king whose rule strayed from the idealized standards was no longer a proper ‘king,’ and could be legitimately overthrown and replaced. confucian epistemology propounded a vertically structured social and ethical hierarchy, and the ‘rectification of names’ played a crucial role in mediating the correlation between written ideal and orthodox social practice. marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 2 john makeham argues that confucius considered names as ‘social and political catalysts’ (1994: 39–47). names could be used to describe the reality, but they also had, and more significantly so, a prescriptive function. by using the correct names, the ruler had the opportunity to prescribe sociopolitical distinctions, and therefore to promote correct thought and behaviour both as orthodoxy and orthopraxy. these fundamental tenets on the proper use of language determined the connection between language, knowledge and power, and informed the practices of governance throughout chinese history even beyond the apparent divide represented by the creation of the ‘new china’ in october 1949. during mao zedong’s era (1949–1976), the confucian paradigm connecting ‘correct names’ with governmentality was systematically implemented through vertical and horizontal propaganda, and it was strategically combined with the use of socialist realism-style images as instruments of political action (barmé 1999; evans & donald 1999). chinese political discourse was characterized by what michael schoenhals (1992) defines as ‘formalized language.’ the ‘newspeak’ developed and used by party officials was a restricted code. it consisted of ‘correct’ formulations (tifa 提法), accompanied by ‘correct’ images, and aimed to teach the ‘enlarged masses’ (dazhong 大众) how to speak and, ultimately, how to think. thus, a set of rules and conventions shared by the official speaker and the listeners defined a logocentric model that represented a claimed reality. these rules were so pervasive that they became encoded in patterns, style, syntagmatic bonds and lexical items typical of formalized word-images. speech and artworks then followed the expressive devices of regulated discursive formations. a whole generation of ‘characters workers’ (wenyi gongzuozhe 文艺工作者) employed both characters and visual texts to contribute to the engineering of a totality, which became the only possible claimed reality. word-images were inculcated from the top-down, and then absorbed, and interiorized since they carried an intrinsic performative power, leading to the creation of the ‘one voice chamber’ [or, more literally, ‘one language temple’] (yiyantang 一言堂). as ludwig wittgenstein poignantly argued, words and sentences have the power to limit ‘expression of thoughts,’ because the boundaries of language indicate the boundaries of one’s world. ‘it will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense’ (wittgenstein 1961: 5–6). marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 3 however, in the chinese epistemological tradition, while confucian philosophers believed in the human (and ultimately political) possibility to engineer reality, understand it, name it, and therefore control it, daoists thought that such endeavours were the major source of human frustration, since they created an increasing gap between humans and nature. according to daoism, man’s only concern should be to fit into the great pattern of nature, not man-made society. the dao de jing 道德经 (the classic of the way and its power), attributed to laozi, and composed between the late sixth and the late fourth centuries bce, set forth a series of maxims that outline a perspective on reality very different from that of the confucian canon. confucius used the word dao 道 usually translated in english as ‘road’ or ‘way,’ to describe his ideal social system, but the daoists gave it a metaphysical interpretation and defined dao as the great pattern of nature. the ‘way’ became a discourse, and not a constant ‘name’; the process of ‘naming’ would confine people’s imagination and their ability to understand the universe. naming is like giving a label: after naming one tends to think of something’s nature under that label, and this is contrary to the dao. this is the rationale behind laozi’s affirmation: ‘the one who knows (or is centred) does not speak, the one who speaks does not know.’ therefore, for laozi (老子), dao was founded on a nameless, formless ‘non-being’: ‘it cannot be heard,’ ‘cannot be seen,’ and ‘cannot be spoken.’ the person who can transcend mundane human distinctions and become one with the dao is ‘beyond all harm’ and achieves ‘tranquility in the midst of strife.’ merging with the dao, he derives from it his individual de 德 or mystical ‘power.’ de later came to have the moralistic meaning of ‘virtue.’ another important concept that helps to understand the daoist concept of the relation between naming and politics is wu wei 无 为—usually translated as ‘inaction’ or ‘non-action,’ meaning, more accurately, something like ‘act naturally’ or ‘effortless action.’ this is the key to merging with the way of nature: ‘doing nothing,’ which does not mean complete inaction, but rather doing what is natural. ‘do nothing and everything will be done’ (wu wei er wu bu wei 无 为而无不为)—that is everything will be achieved of its own accord. the favorite metaphor of daoists is water, which though softest of all things, wears away hardest. if left to itself, the universe proceeds smoothly according to its own intrinsic harmonies. man’s efforts to change or improve nature—also by naming and classifying reality— marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 4 only destroy these harmonies and produce chaos. the dao de jing is ultimately a work of universal scope that comments on politics, statecraft, cosmology, aesthetics, and ethics. in the daoist worldview, each particular element has to be defined both in relation to our personal experience and to the cosmos. thus names are relative. the opening of the dao de jing emphasizes the relativism in the relation between name and things: the way (dao) that can be spoken of is not the constant way; the name that can be named is not the constant name. the nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth; the named is the mother of all things.’ (lao zi 1999: 79) visual imagery, in the most comprehensive sense of signs, allegories, metaphors, and the whole symbolic universe of references, plays a dominant role, both in the confucian and daoist corpuses. imagery informs the texts, and texts inspire iconographic representations. both the essential nature of the chinese character (zi 字) and the power of the classical texts make it difficult to sustain any possibility, in the experience of a constituted reality, based on a clear analytical distinction between images and words. dao de jing’s highly influential commentator wang bi (王弼 226–249 ce) explored the nexus between language and images, and poignantly argued for an inborn nature of the image in the language: the image is what brings out concept; language is what clarifies the image. nothing can equal image in giving the fullness of concept; nothing can equal language in giving the fullness of image. language was born of the image, thus we seek in language in order to observe the image. image was born of concept, thus we seek in image in order to observe the concept. concept is fully given in image; image is overt in language. (wang bi 1996: 63–64) reflecting on wang bi’s insights into the chinese apparatus of representation, one cannot refrain from comparing his recognition of the interconnected nature of language and images, with the intuition roman poet horatius (65–68 bce) displayed, when, in the extraordinary 416 lines of his work known as ars poetica,1 he condensed aristotle’s lesson of poetry as a living organism. but horatius also went one step further: he advocated ‘equal right to dare to do’ both to painters and poets (ut pictura poesis). drawing on the etymological meaning of poíesis, from the greek verb poiéin, which means to ‘create,’ ‘to build,’ horatius insisted both on the importance of the process of building with words, accurately selecting and polishing them, and also on the inventio: 1 horatius’s ars poetica was properly an epistle addressed to the pisoni family. marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 5 the choice of an original subject, or material for the creation. therefore, his understanding of ars poetica referred specifically to the imaginative texts. horatius argued that these texts deserved the same attention and the same careful interpretation that is traditionally offered to paintings. horatius referred to the complete genre (which included not only poetry, but all forms of tragedy, dramatic action, satire, etc). however, horatius’s similitude between the two forms does not necessarily imply their equivalence. in his own words: poetry resembles painting. some works will captivate you when you stand very close to them and others if you are at a greater distance. this one prefers a darker vantage point, that one wants to be seen in the light since it feels no terror before the penetrating judgment of the critic. this pleases only once, that will give pleasure even if we go back to it ten times over. (horatius 2010: 400–6) horatius argued that the authors of imaginative texts had to responsibly know themselves, which implies knowing their limits, without falling into the trap of persecutory complexes, exhibitionisms, or poetic frenzies. horatius saw imaginative texts as the outcome of a painstaking work, patience, study, and continuous correction, in one word: wisdom and not madness. however, literary works and imaginative texts can also derive from madness (both in the creative and pathological sense), or describe individual or collective ‘madness.’ a case in hand is lu xun’s word-image of ‘man–eating–man,’ that dominates his 1918 short story ‘diary of a madman’ (kuangren riji 狂人日记) (lu 1918: i, 422–33). here lu xun used the allegory of cannibalism to critique traditional society: before ‘being cured’ the main character of the story wrote various entries in his diary (using vernacular instead of classical chinese—which could be read in itself, at the time, as a sign of ‘madness’), where he claimed to have seen the words ‘eat people!’ between the lines of the classical confucian texts. the delusional state of the alleged ‘madman’ led him to see all the people in his village as potential man-eaters. lu xun’s symbolic call to ‘save our children,’ from what he saw as china’s ‘four-thousand years of cannibalism,’ was to be contradicted, in reality, a few decades later. in the mid-1980s, well-known chinese novelist zheng yi went to the guangxi zhuang autonomous region to conduct a thorough investigative report about the approximately 100,000 people who were massacred there during the cultural revolution. in his work, zheng yi documented the shocking facts about officially sanctioned cases of cannibalism, including interviews not only with family members of the victims, but also with some of marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 6 the cannibals who described how the victims’ bodies were carved up, shared among the killers, and eaten. in his work, accompanied by powerful photographs, zheng yi described the collective madness that dominated some of the most extraordinary ‘feasts of human flesh,’ like the one that occurred in wuxuan county (武宣县) in june 1968. while wuxuan locals tended to associate the outbreak of cannibalism at wuxuan with the political meeting ‘to blow a twelve-degree typhoon of class struggle,’ zheng yi concludes instead that these ‘feasts’ were due to the scarcity of food, even though he also highlights both the incredible cruelty (many victims were cannibalized while still alive), and the fact that the madness was not limited to guanxi alone, since violence and ruthlessness occurred all over china at the time (zheng 2002). imaginative texts can even become agents for violence. this was often the case during the cultural revolution.2 for example, the ‘ugly photograph’ of liu shaoqi’s wife, wang guangmei, wearing a body-clinging qipao dress (旗袍) during a banquet hosted by indonesian president sukarno in november 1963 during their state visit (figures 1 and 2),3 sparked the violence against her in april 1967, when the red guards, perpetrating a grotesque historical nemesis, openly criticized her on public stage after figure 1: the official banquet hosted by president sukarno during liu shaoqi’s and wang guangmei’s state visit to indonesia in november 1963. 2 for images of depictions of violence in cultural revolution posters, see: http://news.qq.com/a/20120422/000881.htm#p=1 3 see: http://www.gdcct.gov.cn/politics/party/201201/t20120110_645050.html#text marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 7 figure 2: liu shaoqi’s state visit to indonesia with wang guangmei. figure 3: wang guangmei criticized by the red guards in april 1967. marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 8 forcing her to put on the same dress, high heels and a flashy necklace made, this time, not with pearls but with ping pong balls (figure 3).4 language, images, word-images, or adopting horatius’s suggestion, imaginative texts, as the result of painstaking work, wisdom or madness (or a combination of the three elements), are the main focus of this special issue. the connecting thread between the five articles presented here is the authors’ interest in the history, politics and aesthetics of word-images as a medium for the transmission of what could be defined as ‘reality/realization,’ following the intuition of esteemed chinese artist qiu zhijie (邱志 杰).5 in his lecture entitled ‘total art,’ qiu zhijie pondered upon the chinese compound word xianshi (现实). qiu suggested translating xianshi into english as ‘reality/realization,’ respecting, in this fashion, the dual and interconnected semantic nature of the original chinese compound word. he observed that xian was originally a verb, carrying the meaning of uncovering and, ultimately, demystifying what is behind. qiu’s following explanation immediately shifts from the universe of words per se to convey a sophisticated visual imagery: 现 xian meant ‘to allow something that was not visible to become visible. originally it lay dormant, now it is apparent. from dormancy to appearance: we might call “realization” the process wherein those things which might appear are turned into things which have appeared. in this way they are established. as this corresponds to art, it constitutes one type of art as a verb. one form is selected from amidst countless latent possibilities to effect this becoming real, this obtaining of appearance’ (qiu zhijie 2010). this analytical framework could be applied to china, whose staged appearance of ‘reality’ to the world in the last three decades seemed to have been perceived as a sudden ‘realization,’ also due to the progressive prominence of chinese imaginative texts and the work of avant-garde artists in particular. paradoxically, the coming-out of china on the global stage, has followed a pattern that seemed to echo timothy mitchell’s argument of the superiority complex of the western paradigm of modernity, 4 see: http://www.northnews.cn/2011/0601/361968.shtml. i would like to thank my colleague fang xiaoping both for discussing this theme with me and finding the relevant image. 5 artist, curator and writer qiu zhijie is director of ‘total art’ studio at the chinese academy of art, hangzhou. as a conceptual artist, qiu’s practice includes painting, video, photography, installation, and theatre. marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 9 that led the west to stage the ‘world as exhibition,’ generating multiple distorting perceptions of the other and projective assumptions of the west itself (mitchell 1989: 217–36). with regard to china today, paraphrasing qiu zhijie, one could say that something that was not visible (but that indeed existed) has become visible, but there is something in the interstices of power between the visible and the invisible that is worth studying and reflecting upon. in this sense, qiu’s thought-provoking reflections on ‘reality/ realization’ constitute a powerful incitement to discourse. it is an invitation to engage with the complex interplay between words and images, and explore their multiple possibilities of being and becoming situated in time and space, and ultimately to play a crucial role in the dialectics between power and knowledge. qiu zhijie, today a famous artist and chief curator of the 2012 shanghai biennale, was one of the many chinese artists who, in the mid-1980s, became fascinated with investigating and experimenting with the possibilities offered by the visual power embodied in chinese characters. other famous artists are wu shanzhuan (see geremie barmé’s article in this special issue), xu bing 徐冰, and gu wenda 古文达 (jiang 2008). the maoist era and, according to these artists, the cultural revolution in particular, had privileged the function of the chinese characters as bearers of a precise political message, since, as xu bing poignantly said, ‘the chinese language directly influences the methods of thinking and understanding of all chinese people. to strike at the written word is to strike at the very essence of our culture. any doctoring of the written word becomes in itself a transformation of the most inherent portion of a person’s thinking’ (xu bing 2001: 14). the cultural revolution tactics of striking at words was strictly connected with the strategy of striking hard using words as instigators of extremely violent acts, and combining word-images to produce a sense of absolute totality. in the post-cultural revolution era, the awareness of the power of images and the treachery of characters, profoundly influenced another generation of ‘characters workers’ (wenyi gongzuozhe 文 艺工作者), who engaged with ‘an aesthetic embrace of the principles of traditional writing’ (xu bing 2001: 14) in unorthodox and witted ways, experimenting with character-play, and ultimately deconstructing the formerly unassailable absolute totality. qiu zhijie was one of those ‘characters workers.’ his most important early work was marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 10 elaborated over three years (1992–1995), and is entitled ‘copying “orchid pavillon preface” a thousand times’ (shuxie yiqianbian lantingxu 书写一千遍兰亭序) (figure 4). it was inspired by the masterpiece lantingjixu 兰亭集序, by wang xizhi 王羲之 (303–61 ce), which is considered a classic of chinese calligraphy. one would imagine that qiu’s title alluded to the calligrapher’s practice of faithfully copying over and over the famous preface, using, therefore, several sheets of paper. copying calligraphic master works is part of a longstanding tradition for artists in china. however, what qiu decided to do instead was to copy the characters a thousand times over the same sheet of rice paper. the final outcome was a sheet of paper saturated with black ink. the traditional act of ‘copying’ had led to the opposite of the expected climax of permanence and beauty: the erasure of the text. art historian wu hung interpreted this asserting: ‘“copying orchid pavilion preface a thousand times” can be seen as a postmodern deconstruction of traditional chinese calligraphy, an art form linked to china’s unique cultural heritage.’ (wu & wang 2010: 185). figure 4: qui zhijie: ‘copying “orchid pavillon preface” a thousand times’ (qiu zhijie 2009–2010). marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 11 this special issue derives from a multidisciplinary project, which draws on the individual expertise of the contributors, who are all china scholars respectively engaged in research across the disciplines of history, art history, human geography, and cultural studies. the content of these articles originated from an invitation to ponder upon the interrelation between ‘words’ and ‘images’ in imperial, modern and contemporary china. the essays presented in this special issue offer in-depth ‘realizations’ on the interplay of word-images, and shed light on the processes of power that underlie their interaction and metamorphosis. the essays presented here are the outcome of a careful re-elaboration of papers, which had originally been prepared for public presentation at the international conference on ‘word and image—east and west,’ held in sydney on 28–29 october 2011.6 in 1991 mieke bal defended the verbal and textual aspects of visual artifacts, arguing that a new cultural paradigm exists based on the assumption that ‘the culture in which works of art and literature emerge and function does not impose a strict distinction between the verbal and the visual domain. in cultural life the two domains are constantly intertwined’ (1991: 5). as the articles of this special issue will demonstrate, a strong case could be made to support the interconnectedness between verbal and visual domains also in the political sphere, both in the past and the present. these papers reveal a few significant common threads. first, there is an interest of the contributors in posing critical questions about the relation between history and culture, language and politics, and the relevant ability to proffer their argument using both textual and iconographic sources adequately interpreted within an international cultural reference framework. second, the authors undertake careful investigations of the historical memory and historical layers of writing and re-writing by means of a detailed perception of the interrelation between visual and textual evidence, offering also original critical interpretations. broadly speaking, this special issue contains papers that aim to critically engage with various aspects of chinese culture, history, politics and aesthetics, going beyond the staged appearance of china’s ‘reality’ to the world. the fundamental aim of the 6 the conference was organized by the university of sydney and also supported by the china research centre, university of technology sydney. i would like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers, francesco borghesi and giorgia alù. marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 12 contributors is their intention to offer well-informed, scholarly, and critical perspectives on the ways in which the ‘imagined’ and the ‘real’ become visible in the political and cultural realms. the special issue opens with duncan campbell’s article, ‘mortal ancestors, immortal images: zhang dai’s biographical portraits.’ campbell delves into the last completed work of the important late-ming historian and essayist zhang dai 張岱 (1597–?1684): ming yuyue sanbuxiu mingxian tuzan 明於越三不朽名賢圖贊 (portraits of the eminent worthies of zhejiang during the ming dynasty whose lives embodied the three eternals). zhang dai’s book included the biographies and portraits of 109 residents of his hometown shaoxing (including zhang’s friends and family members), and it was organized according to the ‘three eternals’ of a life well and usefully lived: virtue, deed, and word. shaoxing was one of the epicentres of seventeenth-century china’s élite cultural life. campbell explores the text-image dialectic through an in-depth analysis of zhang dai’s ‘biographical portraits.’ therefore, the special issue opens with an essay that contributes to the scholarship which reflects the recent ‘visual turn’ in chinese studies and the humanities more generally. duncan campbell’s work is followed by claire roberts’s article on the artwork of scholar-artist huang binhong (黄宾虹 1865–1955). today, huang binhong’s art collection, including hundreds of historic seals and ancient paintings, together with a large archive of his own paintings, calligraphy and personal papers, are core collections of the zhejiang provincial museum in hangzhou. huang’s classical education, with deep foundations in text-based historical learning, resulted in creative expression in the form of painting, calligraphy and seal carving. while based on cultural traditions of the past, these scholarly arts were directed at experiencing the present and imagining the future. calligraphy and painting may be understood as the living embodiment of the artist who is vitally connected to the historical past, whereas the printed impression of words or images carved into stone conveys ideas associated with authenticity, longevity and artistic completion. when combined in a brush-and-ink painting there is an interesting tension between the spiritual and temporal; the ancient inscriptions and contemporary creativity, that roberts explores in her essay thanks to her particular attention to the interconnection between the importance of place and learning in huang’s work. through this case study, roberts invites us also to reflect on ways that marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 13 contemporary chinese artists have drawn on the mutual interdependence of word and image to create compelling works of experimental art. this is the link between the first two essays and the following three of this special issue. geremie barmé’s contribution, entitled ‘history writ large: big-character posters, red logorrhoea and the art of words,’ is part of a series of essays related to ‘red revivalism’ in contemporary china. barmé’s starting point is the 1986 artwork of the then xiamenbased artist wu shanzhuan, called ‘red humor,’ which reworked references to bigcharacter posters (dazi bao 大字报) and other mao-era forms of political discourse, recalling the cultural revolution. barmé explains how wu’s installation offered a provocative microcosm of the overwhelming mood engendered by a logocentric movement to ‘paint the nation red’ with word-images during the years 1966–1967. this discussion of the hyper-real use of the dazi bao during china’s cultural revolution era (c. 1964–1978) allows barmé to probe into ‘the legacies of the word made image’ in modern china. the author analyzes the construction and deconstruction of the chinese character (zi 字), by detecting a lineage for wu’s artwork in the bapo (八破 eight-fragments bricolage work of the late-qing era). he then moves forward into the present-day to discuss the elaboration in the recent era of chinese hypermodernity of ‘demolition and forced relocation’ (chaiqian 拆迁), an urban developmental model which shares similar characteristics of excess and abuse to the use of words and images. as barmé argues, since the 1980s, wu shanzhuan has had many emulators and ‘avant-garde successors,’ since we have seen multiple examples of parodic deconstructions of the cultural authority of the chinese character (zi 字) in recent decades. the fourth article of the collection offers a significant example of the extremism in the use of characters and the related text-images. in his article, entitled ‘civilising the citizens: political slogans and the right to the city,’ maurizio marinelli, who is also the editor of this special issue, concentrates on the artwork of beijing-based artist zhang dali 张大力 called ‘slogan series.’ this article begins with an analysis of the logocentric mode which dominated the streets of beijing in the lead up to the olympic games. the euphoria over the olympics allowed the propaganda machinery to integrate all the key elements of the slogans used in the previous period, with the aim of promoting a ‘civilized’ behaviour in the citizens of the capital. zhang dali’s artwork, ‘the slogan series,’ can be interpreted as an aesthetic response to that civic political campaign. the marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 14 artist’s critical assessment of the violence of the olympics’ hegemonic language, led him to appropriate the language of state propaganda to create uncanny text-images, with the aim of preventing collective amnesia, and advocating the right to speak a different language to inhabit the city. the incessant reproduction of slogans seems to have generated a collective anaesthesia, since ‘the citizens watch them but don’t really see them’ (zhang 2009). this is the reason why zhang dali has decided to juxtapose people with slogans. the article investigates the social and emotional implications of a double juxtaposition: the slogans juxtaposed with the cityscape in the government’s ‘new citizenship’ campaign, and the slogans imposed and exposed on the people’s faces in zhang dali’s work. the fifth article, by carolyn cartier is entitled ‘image, precariousness and the logic of cultural production in hong kong.’ the focus is on different modes of time-space in a selected place, hong kong, which is increasingly marginalized under the dominant master narrative of ‘china’s rise.’ taking issue with abbas’s famous definition of hong kong, on the eve of the 1997 handover, as a ‘culture of disappearance’—which conveys the idea of any cultural expression made in hong kong as instantaneous and doomed to be short-lived—cartier instead proposes using jacques rancière’s concept of the ‘redistribution of the sensible.’ by so doing, she demonstrates how multiple forms of artistic and cultural production can render visible different spatialities and temporalities. the article investigates the aesthetics of politics, examining the production of art in hong kong through community art exchanges, political graffiti, installation and alternative performance art, including the juxtaposition of two simultaneous events: the exhibit ‘memories of 的 king kowloon’ on the historic graffiti of tsang tsou-choi 曾灶财, with the projection of images of ai weiwei 艾未未 on to streets and walls across the city. cartier shows how the ephemeral artworks also claim hong kong’s historic times, past times of identity formation, pre-prc chinas and possible alternative futures, in juxtaposition with political tensions in the special administrative region. reference list bal, m. 1991, reading rembrandt: beyond the word-image opposition. amsterdam university press, amsterdam. barmé, g. 1999, in the red: on contemporary chinese culture. columbia university press, new york. marinelli word-images portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 15 cheng, m., 2009, ‘de/visualizing calligraphic archeology: qiu zhijie’s total art,’ the drama review, vol. 53, no. 2: 17–34. confucius 1960, the analects, in the chinese classics, trans. j. legge. hong kong university press, hong kong. reprinted [1893–1895]), vol. 1, 1861. confucius’s analects are also available online: http://nothingistic.org/library/confucius/analects [accessed 7 july 2011]. davis, g. (ed.) 2010, a companion to horace. wiley-blackwell, chichester, & malden, ma. evans, h. & donald, s. h. 1999. picturing power in the people’s republic of china: posters of the cultural revolution. rowman & littlefield, lanham. jiang, j. (ed.) 2008, the revolution continues. random house, london. lao zi. 1999. trans. ‘from the daodejing,’ by i. bloom. in sources of chinese tradition, (eds) w. t. de bary, et al. vol. 1. columbia university press, new york: 79–80. lu xun. 1918, ‘kuangren riji’ (diary of a madman), in lu xun quanji, i, 422–33; selected works, i: 8– 21. makeham, j. 1994, name and actuality in early chinese thought. state university of new york, albany. mitchell, t. 1989, ‘the world as exhibition,’ comparative studies in society and history, vol. 31, no. 2: 217–36. qiu zhijie. 2009–2010, ‘copying a thousand times the orchid pavilion preface (1990–1995).’ online, available: http://www.huancuitang.org/en/style_and_attitude/grace_and_resilience/calligraphy_of_consolatio n_and_endurance/page2.shtml [accessed 14 january 2013]. _____ 2010, ‘total art,’ trans. j. d. lee & r. karl. online, available: http://www.qiuzhijie.com/ecritiquelunwen/016.htm [accessed 15 september 2012]. schoenhals, m. 1992, doing things with words in chinese politics: five studies. university of california at berkeley, berkeley. xu bing. 2001, ‘the living word,’ in the art of xu bing words without meaning, meaning without words, ed. b. erickson. university of washington press, seattle and london. wang bi, 1996, ‘elucidation of the images,’ classic of changes. in owen, s. (ed. & trans.), an anthology of chinese literature: beginnings to 1911, w.w. norton & co., new york: 63–64. wittgenstein, l. 1961, tractatus logico–philosophicus, (trans.) d. pears & b. mcguinness. routledge, london: 5–6. wu, h. & wang, p. 2010, contemporary chinese art: primary documents. museum of modern art, new york. zheng yi. 2002, scarlet memorial: tales of cannibalism in modern china, ed. and trans. t. p. sym. westview press, boulder. (for the extended original version see: zheng yi, hongse jinianbei [the red memorial plinth]. huashi wenhua gongsi, taipei). chinese online sources 文革期间的“暴力”宣传画 (propaganda posters on ‘violence’ from the cultural revolution era). online, available http://news.qq.com/a/20120422/000881.htm#p=1 [accessed 14 january 2013]. 王光美享誉海外被江青记恨 文革中惨遭批斗 (wang guangmei was envied by jiang qing for her international fame, and she was harshly criticized during the cultural revolution), 2012 (10 january). online, available: http://www.gdcct.gov.cn/politics/party/201201/t20120110_645050.html#text [accessed 14 january 2013]. original article appears in: 叶永烈 (ye yonglie)：《出没风波里》 (chumo fengboli) [inside and outside turmoil], 北京：十月文艺出版社。 october literature and art publishing house, beijing: 2007 年。 什么原因使江青欲在文革中整死王光美 (the reason why jiang qing criticized and persecuted wang guangmei to death during the cultural revolution), 2011 (1 june). online, available: http://www.northnews.cn/2011/0601/361968.shtml [accessed 14 january 2013]. original article appears in: 叶永烈 (ye yonglie)：《出没风波里》 (chumo fengboli) [inside and outside turmoil], 北京：十月文艺出版社。 october literature and art publishing house, beijing: 2007 年。 microsoft word 4326-18056-2-le.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. the unacceptable special issue, guest edited by john scannell. © 2014 [john scannell]. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v11i2.4326 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. introduction to ‘the unacceptable’ special issue john scannell, macquarie university this special issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies contends with the ‘unacceptable’ as the intervention upon bodies, images or practices deemed excessive to the limits of functional community. under the rubric of propriety, discussion of the ‘unacceptable’ can all too easily become marginalised through silence, erasure and/or condemnation. yet challenging the boundaries of the ‘unacceptable’ is vital to the continuity of a civil society, and the articles contained in this issue attempt to probe the limits of acceptability, as they seek to comprehend, and perhaps, intervene upon some divisive contemporary issues. torture, disability, sexuality, e-waste, bureaucracy, comedy, and the constitution of the strange are among the broad range of topics in which the definition, regulation and assessment of unacceptability are pursued. through documentation of such suitably ‘unacceptable’ issues, the articles contained in this volume not only compel the reader to question convention, but furthermore, interrogate the point where social intervention upon desire might be necessary too. dancing in the 'contact zone' portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal ibu sawitri and the a/occidental oriental monica wulff, university of technology, sydney this paper represents a companion piece or supplement to dancing in the contact zone. in that paper i introduced ibu sawitri, her dance, and my experience of our embodied cultural encounter.1 the first part of this paper is also devoted to ibu sawitri, but is specifically linked to the ideas raised in the ibu box camera from the installation. here i tell ‘my’ insights and interpretations of ibu sawitri’s life, which traverses a multitude of colonial and local patriarchies. the story is interwoven with transcripts of ibu’s voice as presented in the installation and a range of other historical indonesian women’s voices drawn from books and archives. in the second part of this paper i look at what it means to leave what pratt terms the ‘contact zone’ (1992) with a body that is informed and shaped by this experience. here i will discuss some of the main issues addressed in my camera box and the wall projection. i look at western audience reactions to the contemporary work i do in australia with the dance and performance techniques learned in indonesia. based on these reactions i speculate about western perceptions of traditional and modern asian art forms and what that says about our current western perceptions of asia. 1 for more background information about the installation, which represents a cross-cultural collaboration between sydney based director deborah pollard, video artist sam james, sound artists gail priest and myself as concept devisor and performer, as well as indonesian based sculptor hedi heriyanto, and explanation of the term ‘contact zone’, please refer to my other paper in this special issue of portal. wulff ibu sawitri bapak sumitra, ibu sawitri's father (family photograph, date unknown) ibu sawitri’s dance with history the thing that impressed me most about ibu’s life was that it spanned a period of incredible political upheaval and social change. my name is sawitri. i am 75 years old. i live in astanalanggar, losari, in indonesia. she was born some time around the mid1920s in losari, cirebon under dutch colonial rule. when i asked her what she remembered about that period she told me that she did not remember having had contact with dutch people in the village or the local surrounds, but occasionally she saw them at a distance closer to town. it was still the era of queen wilhelmina, i was a little girl then. the dutch ruled through a regional bureaucracy, which reached the villages via the tentacles of government in the form of gubenur, bupati, lurah, rw (rukun warga) and rt (rukun tetangga). 2 this local government/villager relationship was based on fragile trust and exploitation, the parameters within which ibu learned, in the course of her life, to negotiate with considerable skill. the dutch featured in ibu’s 2 governor, regent, village chief, administrative unit at the next-to-lowest level in a city consisting of several rts, and the neighborhood association, the lowest administrative unit (echols & shadily 1992). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 wulff ibu sawitri life through their absence, but affected her life directly through the system of top-down rule, which at times involved forced labour in government-owned rice fields and local industries. as pak wastar, one of the oldest gamelan topeng losari musicians remembers, as verified by sulastiyano: ‘“tahun 1930-an merupakan masa sulit pangan, karena sawah-sawah tidak ditanami padi melainkan tebu.” kenyataan ini disebabkan karena pemerintah hindia belanda menjadikan cirebon sebagai pengekspor gula terbesar’ (cited in masunah 2000, 47) [‘“the 1930s were a time of scarcity because the rice fields were not planted with rice but with sugarcane.” this situation was the result of the dutch east indies government making cirebon its largest sugar exporter’]. this historical condition is confirmed by soekesi: ‘daerah pesisir utara banyak terjadi penyewaan desa-desa atau daerah kepada orang partikulir yang kebanyakan orang tionghoa (cina). mereka berkuasa atas tanah beserta penduduknya terutama dalam menentukan pajak dan wajib kerja bagi penduduk guna keperluan pabrik atau perusahaan gula mereka’ (cited in masunah 2000, 48). [‘in the north coast region there was much renting out of villages and regions to individuals, many of whom were chinese. they were in charge of the land and its occupants in particular in the role of demanding land tax and forced labour from the residents to satisfy the demands of their factories and sugar companies’]. ibu sawitri sitting amongst the gamelan, losari/cirebon 1999 close government control through the local bureaucracy was a constant throughout portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 wulff ibu sawitri ibu’s life, given that the dutch system of law and government was maintained in independent indonesia. ms kurnianingrat, known to her friends as jo, an educated, indonesian woman from a noble background who did have direct contact with the dutch, tells how she experienced dutch rule: so far my life had been so protected that i did not notice the injustices around me. i did not know there were certain swimming pools with the notice: dogs and natives not allowed entrance. i had no idea that it was difficult for indonesians to be accepted at the european primary school, which paved the way for future good schooling. i did not realise that for most indonesian children it was made difficult to get a good education and i was oblivious of the fact that the masses were kept ignorant and poor (thompson zainu’ddin 1997, 169). the japanese occupation (1942-1945) and the hardships experienced during this time were vividly and frequently recalled during our conversations. from ibu’s stories it emerged that the japanese were present in the village and deeply resented. when the japanese landed here, i could already dance. all the bridges were bombed, so if you wanted to cross the river you had to go by raft. ibu told of how she and other women would rub their faces, arms and necks with mud before venturing out into the village. if they saw japanese in the distance they would turn around and insert their round enamel bowls called baskom used to carry rice and other goods from the markets under their sarongs to give the appearance of pregnancy. the dirty appearance and pregnant bodies were supposed to repel the japanese soldiers and guard the women against rape. that was my experience when i was young. i wasn’t afraid of anything. when the japanese were walking in the streets, they never let you pass, wherever they were, they would hit people with wooden sticks. so, that’s my experience, i don’t understand anything about politics, i just know what i saw. one day when we were coming back from the market ibu greeted a neighbour and then proceeded to tell me that particular woman’s mother had gone insane during the japanese occupation because of having been taken away by japanese soldiers, presumably to serve them sexually as a comfort woman. since that day she had been unable to participate in society and would cower, shake and scream if planes flew overhead or during a thunderstorm. she was terrified that the japanese were coming back to bomb the village. her story might have been the same as momoye’s, the name another javanese comfort woman was given by the japanese. she remembers her ordeal in an interview with jawa pos on april 29, 1993. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 wulff ibu sawitri at the start i didn’t know i would become an ianfu. i was still living in a kampung in yogya with my parents and three brothers and sisters, who’ve all died. in order to lighten my parents’ burden, i decided to look for work. i heard from friends that there was a japanese dr. sunginga offering jobs to people. i went and registered hoping i would get work in a restaurant or as an actor on the stage in kalimantan. after getting agreement from my parents, finally i left by train for surabaya. at the station i found lots of others who had the same destination as i did. from yogya 40 women left for kalimantan, but most were older women (sudah dewasa). there were only four of us 13 years or under, including me. in surabaya we were given two sets of clothes and rp. 8 pocket money and went by boat to banjarmasin. now, it wasn’t until we got to banjarmasin that we found out what our real work was, when we got put in a hostel with a three meter high fence around it in the telewan district near rambai market. i was allotted room number 11. a japanese gave me a health check up. and that was when, for the first time, i was forced to serve the lust (melayani nafsu) of the health worker. after that i just suffered more. especially as i had to serve up to twenty japanese per day. just imagine, i had to work from 12.00 pm until the next morning. from 12.00pm until 5.00pm we were raped (dipaksa melayani) by japanese soldiers, then from 5.00pm until morning by japanese civilians. so you could say that we were raped once an hour by the japanese who lusted like devils (nafsu setan). so we could only rest in the morning. not to mention the punishment we got for mistakes, such as keeping a customer waiting. after i was five months pregnant, i was forced to have an abortion. i was in a state of real shock over this, especially as they made me see my unborn child after the curette. i fainted, and i will never ever forget their treatment of me (cited in lucas 1997, 75). according to hicks, the method of recruiting comfort women for the japanese military brothels ran parallel to the recruitment of the forced labour system, namely via the local and village officials (cited in lucas 1997, 74). ibu escaped momoye’s fate as an ianfu but was subjected to forced labour like everybody else in the village. people were forced to work and were paid with beatings rather than food, that was the japanese era. the japanese era was very hard. lots of people went missing, they were taken to jatiwangi and never came home. i don’t know what became of them. because of a longlasting drought at the time and farmers being forced to grow cash crops for the japanese, they were unable to grow rice. widespread famine was the result. high inflation during the occupation, the inability to import yarn and hoarding of cloth by the japanese in aid of the war effort, meant that clothing and cloth were almost impossible to obtain. even the black market in cloth was forced into non-existence due to the scarcity of cloth. ibu would scrunch up her face in disgust when talking about being forced to eat low quality rice mixed with corn and gravel that tasted bad and was also very scarce. she remembered being constantly itchy from lice infestations caused by rat plagues, lack of soap, and wearing hessian sacks. she even succumbed to buying a rubber sarong (sold as a cloth substitute at the time) and told me with great amusement that it completely portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 wulff ibu sawitri warped out of shape after she washed it and hung it in the sun. in the following quote, a nameless voice on the hardships experienced by women during the occupation echoes from deep within the indonesian national archives: as a woman i was very moved (sangat trenyuh) to see the situation of women (in the tanjung priok area of jakarta) who were forced to wear rubber sarongs to cover their bodies. if they were menstruating and had to walk somewhere, the blood trickled down their ankles, because they had no (menstrual) cloths. this was terribly sad (benarbenar sangat menyedihkan) (cited in lucas 1997, 71). ibu sawitri in her late thirties with pak pade, husband number six (family photograph, date unknown) jo kurnianingrat, who became a senior member of the ministry for education under president soekarno, made this observation about the japanese occupation in her memoirs: three and a half years is a relatively short time but it was a devastating period. i am not thinking of the cruelty of the cash troops because cash troops, no matter what nationality, seem to be cruel everywhere, but their kempeitai, a kind of japanese politbureau, was notorious for its cruelty. the wealth of indonesia was scooped up and used for japanese war purposes, leaving the people poor and hungry. the dutch and indo-european men and women were put in separate camps and often portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 wulff ibu sawitri the men were transported to other countries to do forced labour. this happened to a lot of indonesians too. when they did come home they were emaciated and not capable of much (cited in thompson zainu’ddin 1997, 71). ibu was married for the first time at the age of ten in a misan match arranged by her father with the aim of fortifying a particular family tie.3 when i was 10 years old, i was married off by my father. i had no idea. i ended up asking to divorce my first child husband. since this marriage was not consummated ibu was left a janda kembang (a virgin widow) after her divorce. one year later somebody proposed to me. his name was sahari and my father accepted. i was 14 at the time. now a teenager she entered her second arranged marriage, this time to sahari, the son of her pencak silat (indonesian marshal arts) teacher. i became pregnant and had a child. he was a local village clerk. by the age of fifteen ibu was pregnant. in her seventh month of pregnancy she became very ill with a tumour on her neck and gave birth at nine months to a baby girl named mulyani while she was still sick. my child was getting bigger, but then at the age of two, she died of smallpox. after the death of her child when sawitri was seventeen, she and sahari divorced, after which she met and married sugimin, a policeman from purworejo. these were the years of the indonesian fight for independence, which ibu remembers with a sense of pride combined with sadness at the human toll and the loss of her own daughter. during that time our independence fighters were able to defeat the enemy. in those days we weren’t called a republic yet. jakarta wasn’t called jakarta, it was still called batavia. she often talked fondly of soekarno and his charismatic leadership qualities. since the age of nine ibu had been actively dancing and was also well on the way to becoming an accomplished dalang wayang kulit (wayang shadow-puppet narrator and puppeteer). i married a policeman after that, but we were only married for six months because he wouldn’t let me dance. she was in popular demand at the time she married sugimin and had a busy schedule of performances during the festive months. before ibu married sugimin she explained to him that she was a descendant of a long line of 3 by misan is meant a match that involves the marriage between the children of siblings. the symbolic aim of these marriages is to strengthen family ties and they are not expected to be consummated (sawitri 1996). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 wulff ibu sawitri mask dancers and dalang wayang kulit, that it was her calling and that she would not give it up for marriage. she asked him if he still wanted to marry her. he said he did and she made him sign a letter agreeing to this, which she had drafted through the village officials. after they were married for a while and sugimin being of a jealous nature, he started to follow her to performances that lasted from sunset to sunrise in order to keep an eye on her. sawitri took great offence at this and on one occasion when he followed her to gebang, a neighbouring village, she angrily sent him back home. the next morning when she had finished the wayang play, she went home via the kantor urusan agama (kua; the office of religious affairs) and divorced him there and then. she felt angry and offended that he had not kept his promise to respect her vocation. i would rather not have a husband than not dance, full stop! ibu, i am told by other older villagers, was a beautiful young woman with an independent career that was paying her way.4 she didn’t need to put up with sugimin’s jealous and often abusive behaviour. sugimin was apparently horrified at her decision and tried to talk her out of it, but she would not hear of it. village women with independent means of income can operate with a certain amount of freedom within their private realms compared to middle-class women who are tied to stifling middle-class codes of morality and the expected status of loyal and obedient housewife.5 these women tend to avoid divorce because many are economically dependent on their husbands and fear the shame brought about by divorce.6 kartini writes about her period of forced seclusion before marriage, which despite being written over 100 years ago, still aptly describes the frustration and pain of this kind of dependency: 4 divorce and remarriage were and still are relatively common in javanese villages and are not as socially frowned upon as in the middle class. ibu wiri, ibu sawitri’s cousin, also a dalang wayang was married and divorced nine times. 5 under the indonesian new order government of president soeharto ‘woman’ was equated with the status of mother and housewife destined by nature. soeharto talks about his views on indonesian women in reference to their role in national development in his autobiography: my thoughts, words and deeds: autobiography as told to g. dwipayana and kamadhan k.h, in the chapter titled concerning our women: ‘to bring indonesian women to their correct position and role, that is as the mother in a household [ibu rumah tangga] and simultaneously as a motor of development…we must not forget their essential nature [kodrat] as beings who must provide for the continuation of a life that is healthy, good and pleasurable’(soeharto cited in tiwon 1996, 59, her addition of indonesian words in brackets). 6 this trend is changing among educated upperand middle-class women in large cosmopolitan cities like jakarta and bandung, where divorce is on the increase. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 wulff ibu sawitri my prison is a large house, encircled by spacious grounds. but it is encircled by a high stone wall and this kept me imprisoned. no matter how large the house and garden, if you are forced to live there you feel stifled. i remember how, in silent desperation i flung myself at the eternally closed door against the cold stone walls or a locked door (kartini cited in and translated from dutch by tiwon 1996, 51). ibu was eighteen when she divorced sugimin. she was still suffering from the loss of her child and there were rivalries among other dalang wayang family members who were jealous of ibu’s success. the spread of a more conservative islam that was increasingly critical of elements of animism within older traditional forms of islam was dramatically shrinking the demand for topeng. these factors prompted ibu to join her aunt who was working in palembang in south sumatra. after my child’s death i was very unhappy and so my aunt took me to palembang with her. she did however regularly return to dance during the festive months, which still provided some work.7 in palembang she met and married her fourth husband, darmansyah, a muslim religious teacher from banjarmasin. she lived with him in banjarmasin on the island of kalimantan for three years. during the fourth year of marriage she divorced him and returned to the village to become part of the dance troupe again. some time after this, while she was back working with her aunt selling fruit and vegetables at the market in palembang to help support her family back home, she met and married her fifth husband. it’s there that i met the pilot. i married him, but it turned out he was already married but had told me he wasn’t. i found out from a friend of his. i don’t like being lied to, so i left him and came back to java. she never mentioned his name and mostly just referred to him as si pilot kapal terbang (the pilot). ibu was angry at being taken for a fool and went back to java without a word. si pilot followed a while later and she told him she refused to be a second wife to a liar. he pleaded and wouldn’t leave without her. in the end she told him to go home first and that she would follow in a few weeks when her dancing schedule was over. he did and she proceeded to send him the divorce papers. ibu met and married her sixth husband, pade from 7 poorer fishing villages less influenced by the more conservative city islam still regularly hire topeng losari performances for ritual occasions during the festive months. up until the 1965 communist coup many chinese families regularly hired topeng losari in various capacities for chinese new year celebrations and weddings. this practice stopped altogether after the coup (masunah 2000). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 wulff ibu sawitri makasar, in palembang. he was ten years her junior and somewhat of a geek. ibu used to talk about being embarrassed to walk with him because he always had his shirt half hanging out of his trousers or a shoelace undone. eventually i went back to palembang. there i met my last husband. he was the least handsome, most stupid and obliging of all my husbands. we were married for sixteen years. she said however that he was a good and patient man who adored her and had a steady income as a rice distribution clerk. they managed to buy three houses from their joint efforts. during her marriage to pade, and not long after her father’s death, ibu witnessed the 1965 communist coup in palembang. she talked about seeing rivers turned red from blood. i was in palembang. every day at least ten corpses were thrown into the river. she saw frightened people being rounded up and led into prison compounds with high fences close to the market she worked at. she returned to java shortly after the event to check that her family were safe. here in losari it rarely happened. it’s just that people went missing. i don’t know where they went. whether they were killed or not, i don’t know, but until now they haven’t come home. artists and dancers had reputations of belonging to the socialist artist organisation lekra, so during this time and for years after, ibu’s family did not perform for fear of being labelled communists. village officials would pick on you if you weren’t carrying the right kind of papers. they would say: ‘you are a communist and if you don’t want to be detained you have to pay me’. that’s how cruel the village officials were, they blackmailed their own people. we didn’t perform for a long time after that. artists were accused of being communists. her relative prosperity in palembang was now more needed than ever. prior to the communist coup, ibu was recalled to java to tend her dying father who on his deathbed entrusted the dance and its future survival to her. she returned to palembang after he passed away, but in the years that followed became increasingly concerned about keeping her promise to her father. ibu took this calling very seriously and eventually decided to leave her husband and return to java to teach the next generation how to dance. given the fact that ibu had never been able to conceive again after the birth of her first child, she was able to wean herself from her relationship to portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 wulff ibu sawitri pade by convincing him to marry her household helper to ensure that he could have children. he was unwilling at first but finally consented under the condition that ibu would not remarry. she kept her promise and from that day forward said she was married to her dance and would do all in her power to pass it on to the next generation. in the mid 1970s the government and jakartan patrons of the arts were showing a resurgent interest in traditional arts regarded as on the verge of ‘extinction,’ due to the traumatic effects of the communist coup and growing islamic conservatism. traditional arts were no longer seen as potentially subversive, and were absorbed into the new order propaganda machine to passively reflect the happy image of a unified, harmonious indonesia. this is when ibu and the new generation of dancers and musicians began to be invited to perform outside the village at government-sponsored events. it would appear that soeharto’s new order was employing the same strategies of divide and rule, or better still diffuse and rule, that its dutch predecessors had perfected during the era of the dutch east indies. it is a history that also fits into ghassan hage’s idea of ‘political necrophilia’. once the threat of those perceived as subversive had been eliminated, the soeharto government could show concern and assign money and resources to keep the appearance of those art forms alive. under the soeharto government, and with a growing interest from artistic circles in the bigger cities, ibu managed to make a living from her dance. during hard times she supplemented her income doing odd jobs. ibu’s long experience of surviving hard times, and the additional income from the new performance context created by the soeharto government, allowed ibu to maintain her dance, if in a new and changed form. she was forever haggling with government officials who were helping themselves to hefty commissions whenever she performed for the government or received government grants to build or repair her studio. by the time she received payment it was often only half of what she had signed for. privately she would get very cross about this, but when confronting officials she knew there was only so far she could go without losing their support altogether. soeharto kept on developing and building buildings, but how come he got to be so rich? he sucked his own people dry, so that in the end the ones with portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 11 wulff ibu sawitri nothing expected nothing and the ones living it up lived it up even more. i will never forget the banter and self-assured, patronising laughter of the government officials dressed in tight khaki pants, heavy black boots and greasy slicked back hair, at ibu’s deferential, playful but heartfelt attempts to get the officials to pay her fairly. in the last years of her life ibu witnessed the downfall of the oppressive soeharto regime. stories of the new order’s rampant corruption and nepotism were for the first time being openly verified and discussed on television. now the people understand what happened, we can’t be lied to anymore. ibu reached the limit of her patience at the growing conservatism and narrowmindedness of islam in the village when she overheard a sixteen-year-old religious preacher declare, over the local mosque loudspeaker, that public dancing and singing was haram. i used to listen to religious sermons from the loud speaker of the local mosque everyday. one day, a sixteen-year-old kiyai, told in his sermon that to go on the haj to mecca with money earned from dancing or singing was haram and unclean. i was very offended by this. this statement was clearly unacceptable and insulting to ibu and becomes even more so in light of the fact that islamic influences are an integral component of topeng losari. the traditional performing arts played an important role in the spread of islam in java. as a result many of these traditional art forms are intrinsically connected to islamic religious belief. the wali sanga, the nine disciples, who are believed to have first introduced islam to java, are prayed to at the beginning of every performance. their spirits are believed to reside in the various gamelan instruments and their function during performance is to guard the four-corners of the performance space and to bestow blessings and safety on those participating in the ritual occasion. that afternoon i marched off and confronted the preacher. i asked him whether he burned incense before he went off to preach anywhere. he agreed. i told him that i did the same. i pray and offer incense before i dance, just as he does, how could that be haram? if he can accept money from his efforts and go on a haj, why can’t i? he was a hypocrite. i don’t believe him. i am sure that god accepts me and my dance. that kyai was corrupt, he’s dead now. leaders of mask troupes, like ibu’s father sumitra, were considered to be charismatic leaders and holders of important portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 wulff ibu sawitri ritual and spiritual knowledge. they were consulted much like the village dukun (spiritual healer and seer) for guidance in emotional and spiritual matters. the knowledge these leaders drew on was documented in large religious books called primbon, which contain traditional pre-islamic and islamic-influenced spiritual teachings and knowledge. in her lifetime ibu would have liked to go to mecca, but was never in a position to afford the journey. in my life i have never had to be dependant on anybody else. any money she made from dancing went towards repairing the studio and maintaining the dance troupe. weekly rehearsals on sunday involved providing lunch, snacks and cigarettes for all gamelan players and dancers. costumes were in constant need of maintenance and new masks were ordered to supplement the old ones as well as the repair and repainting of the very old masks. ibu was good at saving and making grow whatever money she did earn. nobody has ever had to take pity on me by giving me food to eat. by allah, never! even if my life is full of bitterness and shortcomings, no matter what, i can take it, i can survive! sadly, even with the support of students and patrons, much of the money she earned in the last few years of her life, by which time she was becoming famous as an old master and frequently asked to perform, was used for medical purposes, which ibu resisted whenever possible. whatever my fate, i will never give up trying. god is the one who planted my seed, he is also the one who will come and take me away. in death all people are the same. ibu’s sawitri’s dance gave her a sense of self and purpose in life. these two factors provided ibu with an agency that allowed her to dance across the boundaries of the numerous patriarchal power constructs that at times threatened to topple her. perhaps ibu’s voice doesn’t carry far enough to make it heard in a context that ‘counts’. it was nevertheless a voice that spoke loud and clear to me. her commitment to and belief in her dance and its future, together with her determination and strength of character, drew me to her, hence my hope that it reaches a wider audience in this re-citation. ibu sawitri in life and beyond continues to inspire my own determination to survive as an artist in a world dominated by a conservative corporate patriarchal power construct, within which portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 13 wulff ibu sawitri the arts and humanity alike are battling against an ever-shrinking global platform to practice on and be heard. i would like to finish this section with this last memory of ibu. one of the last and saddest conversations we had was during the end of my 1999 stay in the village, ibu insisted on coming back home to the village from the hospital she had been admitted to the week before. it was late at night, she had been coughing incessantly and was visibly in pain. after the painkillers had started to take effect and i was massaging her back, she quietly started talking about the time she gave birth to her baby daughter at the age of sixteen when she herself was delirious with fever from a tumour on the side of her face and neck. she spoke in a quiet voice about the son of an important revolutionary fighter who was known to have healing powers who had been called on to help cure ibu’s tumour. through various methods, the details of which i no longer recall, she was eventually healed. she can’t remember her own child’s birth, only that she and the baby were well when she heard the news months later that the young man who had healed her had not returned from the independence fight against the dutch. the only thing that was returned to his family was a neatly folded pile of his clothes. her own husband returned from the guerrilla fight alive. she stopped talking then. i left ibu’s room feeling helpless and sad in the face of her illness that was mercilessly draining away a formidable life force. with the imprint of her bony, frail body still alive in my hands and deeply affected by her quiet reminiscences, i walked outside for a breath of cool night air. mang tara, ibu’s nephew, a father of three, was sitting outside ibu’s window. he looked sad and concerned and told me that he had never heard ibu telling that story before. the very last thing ibu ever told me when i called her from australia shortly before her death was: ‘dunia ini tidak selebar daun kelor,’ the world is bigger than a kelor leaf. taking the dance home: theft, appropriation hybridity or fusion what happens when you embody a form of dance learned in its home context and then walk away with it? what happens furthermore when you use this dance as a language in a new and different context? you are not new to the context, but the dance you are portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 14 wulff ibu sawitri carrying with you is. early in my dance career, a contemporary performer referred to my work as being ‘colonial’. the comment was made in response to the question about what the difference was with somebody like myself who was creating work derived from traditional indonesian dance forms and somebody working with other asian forms like butoh or the tadashi suzuki actor training method. this comment triggered the investigation that informs troppo obscura and this paper. by way of introducing the cacophony of angst-ridden questions which this comment provoked and which i now intend to address more directly, i will quote them here. is the performance work i am doing good or bad appropriation? is the way i use indonesian dance and training technique in a contemporary context in australia ethical or even legitimate? am i perpetuating the role of the colonizer by ‘taking’ the dance for my own expression without giving anything in return, reminiscent of the historical colonial plunder and disregard for traditional context and meaning? am i adorning myself with ‘other’ exotica to make up for the fact that i have ‘no’ culture? am i using asian dance as a ‘spicy sauce to make some old familiar gruel palpable again’ (weber 1991, 30)? do i wear an asian mask to hide my ‘whiteness,’ which implicates me with historical guilt? in the next section, i discuss the camera box inside which i perform and the wall projection in reference to my artistic and personal relationship with ibu sawitri and the theories and ideas raised throughout this chapter. stomping and butoh versus topeng losari from the early 1990s onwards there was a growing trend among australian performers to travel to japan and undertake beginners’ workshops in the suzuki method at the scot (suzuki company of toga) home in a remote mountain village in northern japan.8 many returned to take master workshops that qualified them to teach the form once back in australia. in the relatively close-knit performance scene it was almost imperative to undertake training in the form if you were to be taken seriously as a performer. in 1996, not wanting to be left out, i was a student of the suzuki method, taught by meme thorn during a six-month intensive actor training project with sidetrack performance group. 8 in the sydney performance scene the suzuki method was usually referred to as stomping because many of the movements involve stomping the feet on the ground with full force with a counter-restraining move just before impacting the floor. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 15 wulff ibu sawitri based on my experience of learning suzuki and from papers written about the method, i started to make mental comparisons between the suzuki method and those i had developed based on training in indonesian dance. the motivation behind this was to try to understand why the two japanese forms were viewed so differently from my indonesian-based style by the australian performance audience. it was my suspicion that the difference in perception between these two forms had more to do with the way that asia is constructed in the mind of the westerner, rather than any real reflection on the differences of these forms. both the butoh and the suzuki method draw on influences from much older forms such as noh and kabuki. in both these modern adaptations there is an emphasis on the body being grounded with a strong central focus, unlike traditional and modern western forms, which are more concerned with a movement upwards and across large areas of space. as was written in a scot festival publication: at the core of the suzuki method training is an emphasis on the movement of the lower body and feet, with special attention paid to the pelvic region (the actor’s centre of gravity), which are also the areas of emphasis for the actors training in the traditional theatre. in contrast to the heavenward orientation inherent in the erect posture encouraged by western theatrical training, this technique directs the energy of the body downward, earthward; the natural movement that results is derived from body movements employed in traditional farming in japan (senda in cohen 1996, 53). suzuki talks about modernization having ‘dismembered our physical faculties from our essential selves’ and that is what he is striving for with his movement training: to ‘restore the wholeness of the human body in the theatrical context.’ he aims through his form to make available to his students the ‘discovery of an inner physical sensibility’ and an ‘inner and profound memory innate to the human body’ (suzuki 1991, 243). these principles also apply to most forms of indonesian traditional dance. the forms i studied certainly conform to this principle. the abdomen and pelvic region are where the energy of the dance is harnessed. this is necessary because the legs are often bent low and the body weight is shifted across the central axis to accommodate movements portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 16 wulff ibu sawitri that often go against the natural centre of gravity. another function of the still, grounded centre is to operate as a contrast to the dynamism of the extremities such as hand, feet and head movements. a mental image and body sensation developed from my experience of learning dance in indonesia is of the centre as source of energy, which is channelled along threads connecting all parts of the body. the sensation is of a tangible feeling of energy emanating from the centre to the more peripheral parts of body that are employed for expression. body memory is another example of a deep, inner-body awareness that is developed by hours of watching, practicing and internalising dance movements. what i have tried to demonstrate here is that topeng losari mask dance and the other forms of indonesian dance i have learned over the years have become my movement vocabulary and performance training technique. it is my first language, if one is to speak of dance as a language. prior to learning indonesian dance i had no formal dance training. this dance training, which i began in 1983, is an ongoing, ever-evolving process. the performance skills i have learned over the years inform my work in a multitude of ways. at times this influence is very direct, for instance when i draw on movement vocabularies, at others indirect, as when i am using embodied performance techniques or images of dance to support whatever it is i am trying to express on stage or within an artwork. stylistically my dance training is different and yet it draws on similar fundamental performance techniques contained within both butoh and suzuki. although topeng losari is a traditional form that has not been theorized and processed into a modern movement philosophy in the same way as the suzuki method, i would argue that topeng losari as a movement and performance discipline is equally effective. boxing the colonial the question, then, of why my work was perceived as ‘colonial’ still remains to be addressed. i believe it has something to do with the fact that indonesian traditional dance is seen as a ‘classical,’ fixed asian form that comes from an ancient tradition which should not be interfered with or appropriated in the way that it is seen to be in portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 17 wulff ibu sawitri my performances. there seems no equivalent concern with the use of butoh and suzuki. is it because butoh and suzuki have originated in a modern context within an economically affluent ‘first world’ asian country such as japan? in contrast, is topeng losari not acceptable as a performance discipline because it is an unprocessed, traditional form, from an economically disadvantaged, politically challenged ‘third world’ country? as i have already argued, suzuki and butoh both draw on older, traditional sources and when these forms are analysed in juxtaposition with the indonesian dance training in terms of their usefulness as a performance discipline, they exhibit comparable benefits. how is a form like butoh that was developed in reaction to the very specific experience of the post world war two nuclear holocaust in japan, more relevant to an australian performer than a traditional indonesian dance form? the notion that traditional asian art forms are somehow pure, sacred, untouchable and eternally unchanging, says less about the actual evolution of these art forms and more about a romanticized notion of them. these notions are created in the west and then imposed onto eastern forms. this inability to accept the possibility of change and transformation of a people and their cultural expressions is a way of silencing and boxing the other. the perception in the west seems to be that ‘ancient,’ ‘exotic’ and ‘oriental’ objects and cultural expressions must be kept untouched and unchanged so that they can shimmer and radiate the mysterious promise of another world, so unavailable in the west and so closely connected to notions of beauty, desire and a lost past. it would appear that there is no other space for these cultural forms than the museum, and the glass display cabinets for these traditional art forms, where they are categorised, fixed, known and as a result killed off. the form and practitioners of the topeng losari mask dance had to change and reinvent themselves continually in order for the dance to continue existing as it has done for centuries. said refers to the paralysing effects of what i call the ‘western glass cabinet gaze’: ‘moreover the male conception of the world, in its effect upon the practicing orientalist, tends to be static, frozen, fixed eternally. the very possibility of development, transformation, human movement – in the deepest sense of the word – is denied the orient and the oriental’ (1996, 35). this notion of the orient as a ‘known,’ mystical, spiritual and exotic entity portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 18 wulff ibu sawitri is at the core of the continual emergence of asian-based new-age religions and shops selling all things asian. this perception of the exotic asian other appears to have more to do with what westerners experience as missing in society rather than any real understanding of that which is asian. in an attempt to find meaning, it is the repressed desires and yearnings of the person searching that dictates what is being perceived as the ‘answer’ to the quest for meaning. torgovnick cites lukacs to describe this western condition: in his history of the novel, lukacs sees the condition of the modern western mind, the mind that produced the novel, as ‘transcendentally homeless’: secular but yearning for the sacred, ironic but yearning for the absolute, individualistic but yearning for the wholeness of community, asking questions but receiving no answers, fragmented but yearning for immanent totality (1991, 188). perhaps the reason my reinterpretation or use of traditional indonesian dance within a contemporary performance context in australia is not always readily accepted is because it somehow touches on this deep-seated orientalist perception and is thus seen as ‘bastardising’ or even ‘destroying’ a traditional asian form. a form that by way of being traditional and asian falls into the category of other, evocative of the mystical eastern wisdoms contained within its very form, which if not preserved in its original state could be lost forever. schechner warns about the dangers inherent in the drive to save ‘threatened cultures,’ with an argument that recalls hage’s notion of ‘political necrophilia’: these attitudes barely conceal a kind of primitivism whereby threatened cultures (the tagalogs of the philippines, for example) are perceived as ‘living museums’ of the way humans ‘used to be’. also interventions based on ‘saving’ or ‘protecting’ cultures, although high sounding, often are late twentieth-century versions of the racist patronization or imperialist ambitions that glossed and glosses the work of missionaries whose avowed purpose was, and is, to ‘save’ and ‘civilize’ people who were and are thought to be savages/heathens (ripe for exploitation) (1991, 309). so far this discussion has centred on audience perceptions of my work in the west. what is more important, in my opinion, is what my teacher ibu sawitri thought about the contemporary work i do, informed in part by her dance tradition. i had been creating performances using elements of topeng losari for years before i summoned the courage to show ibu photos of the work i did and to ask her how she felt about it. during a long visit in 1999, when ibu had been in and out of hospital and i knew it was possibly going to be the last time i had to spend with her, i asked her. ibu referred to portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 19 wulff ibu sawitri the work i was doing as kreasi baru (new creations), the term used at indonesian dance schools for contemporary dance work based on traditional dance.9 she had no objections to me using her dance in this way, as long as i made it clear that it was ‘inspired’ by topeng losari, but was ‘not’ topeng losari itself. if i was to perform the dances true to how i had learned them, wearing traditional costume and mask, accompanied by the appropriate gamelan music, then i was to call it topeng losari and nothing else (sawitri 1999). i was relieved at her response and glad that the work i had created in the past had never violated these conditions. regarding the debate outlined in the title of this section; theft, appropriation, hybridity or fusion, daryl chin asks an important question about this issue: ‘the idea of interculturalism as simply a way of joining disparate cultural artefacts together has a hidden agenda of imperialism. when is interculturalism a valid expression of the postmodern crisis in information overload, and when is it merely a fashion statement of the ability to buy and sell anything from any culture?’ (1991, 87). artists, like other professionals, need to make a living in capitalist, commodity-based societies. one way of doing this is to follow the current ‘themes’ being promoted by the various funding bodies. if multiculturalism, in particular asian/australian collaborations, are being promoted by these bodies, the result is a proliferation of work based on these issues, created by artists in order to make a living. some of the projects funded will be genuine, in-depth explorations on the subject and others will be the ‘chop suey’ variety (weber 1991, 30). the market place for these intercultural works is domestic and international cultural festivals. weber draws a distinction between two types of intercultural work found at the festival market place. one, he refers to as ‘transculturation,’10 and the other, ‘acculturation’. he defines these terms as follows: ‘transculturation could indeed be defined as the deconstruction of a text/code and its wrenching displacement to a “historically and socially different situation”. 9 ibu knew this term because her niece nani, one of the troupe’s most talented dancers, had been sponsored by jakartan and bandung arts patrons to study at asti, the main academy for performing arts in bandung. part of her dance curriculum included contemporary indonesian dance that draws on traditional dance forms for its inspiration. this modern dance is called tari kreasi baru. i often witnessed nani performing her new choreographies when she was at home in the village during university vacations. these performances were greatly enjoyed by the family, including ibu. 10 for a detailed genealogy of transculturation see pratt (2000) and allatson (2002). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 20 wulff ibu sawitri acculturation, then, would be the inscription of a preserved foreign code in a native structure, which implies that an ideology is inscribed with it’ (1991, 35). transculturation, as weber defines it, is a transformation and re-codification process to make the borrowed text or technique gain its own identity of form and of content, within a new socio – historical context. acculturation, on the other hand, is a form that is borrowed with relatively minor changes, if any, within a new context. acculturation in avant-garde theatre was often the precursor to a form that would later develop into a transcultural model. applying weber’s terms to my own work i am suggesting that mine is a form of transculturation, as i hope has become clear from the process of discussion of troppo obscura in this paper. audiences, on the other hand, are interpreting some of my works as a form of acculturation, notably those performances that incorporate traditional indonesian dance, because they don’t seem to be able to move beyond the perceived asian (orientalist) text/code of the dance. in reference to weber’s model, what ibu sawitri says about the contemporary work i do becomes quite significant. she acknowledged that by using her dance in a different context i was creating something new in form and meaning from traditional topeng losari. therefore, in honour of that new form and the original topeng losari, it should be called something new (for it was a kreasi baru, ‘new creation’). reinterpreting topeng losari in a contemporary performance context in sydney was a necessary step in order to make it meaningful to myself and hopefully to my audience. even though i can, and have permission to perform traditional topeng losari dances in australia, and have done so on request, for me, there is more creative potential in working with the dance as a performance language, with which i can express a multitude of meanings in my own cultural context. the issue of claiming an asian tradition from a once colonised society is nevertheless problematic. there is no getting away from the history of colonial exploitation. as a middle-class citizen from a ‘first world’ nation i have access to information and have the means to travel. there is an inherent danger of being seduced into the role of the portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 21 wulff ibu sawitri neo-colonizer in the search of ‘hidden eastern treasures’ to make one’s own. pavis (1992) voices his suspicions of the latent colonial urge of the westerner engaged in intercultural projects, who ‘makes an effort to revitalise western forms and traditions by adding or substituting extra-european forms. faced with its own loss of flavour, sensuality, any link to reality at home, western culture reacts with the secular reflex of importing rejuvenating raw materials’ (cited in m. cohen 1996, 55). this leftover colonial sentiment is well captured by kroll (1980) in an interview with peter brook: i don’t think of myself as a theatre artist. i’m not particularly interested in theatre or art as such. i’m a traveler, an explorer whom life has thrust into this field. i’m like a vulcanologist who goes from volcano to volcano, looking for the biggest eruption. i’ve got themes i want to explore and experiments i want to make and places i want to see. it’s all part of the process i hope is getting richer and richer in human material and human discovery (cited in dunn 1996, 32). the sexualised language and greedy imagery here is typical of nineteenth-century colonial travel journals, photography and films produced by men. i was attempting to present visually a sense of these issues in the colonial camera box in the installation. brook falls neatly into the category of colonial adventurer with the typical sexual fascination for volcanoes and an appetite for an abundance of sensual delights, experiences and knowledge waiting for discovery and consumption. brook’s eclectic compilation of other cultures, perhaps those that he has gathered on his travels, and his reinterpretation of the mahabharata, within an imperialistic framework, have been a common source of criticism of his work. dunn elaborates: brook is more anthropologist than theatre director, and this is what the orient possesses for one like him, a means for human discovery. yet talk of the ‘orient’ implies that there is an ‘other’ and this highlights the bias that some feel brook has fallen victim to: in presenting the orient brook has placed himself back within the prevailing hierarchy, that of the occident. for as edward said points out in his study, ‘the orient was not allowed to represent itself, but had to be represented by the occident.’ in other words, brook had to re-align the stories of the mahabharata to fit within the framework of imperialist thought. (1996, 32) this brings me to the crucial question about my own work. am i being the coloniser by making a traditional indonesian dance form my language of performance expression? as i have attempted to make apparent throughout this paper, the dance skills and portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 22 wulff ibu sawitri performance training i draw on in my work are the result of many years invested in learning topeng losari. this dance is not just a commodity that has a beginning and an end only to be transported home and put away in my big wooden chest like a treasure with all my other glitter and dancing paraphernalia. it is much more than that. it is a language through which i have gleaned an insight into another way of being in the world and that has allowed me to embody this experience and become mentally, physically and spiritually ‘expanded’ for it. this process has been encouraged and supported by indonesian friends in indonesia and australia, starting all the way back in 1983 when my javanese host father mr. soeharso, whose family i lived with for one year, invited me to dance.11 it would of course be a lie to say that i have never been dazzled and seduced by a desire to claim the beauty and sensuality of indonesian dance forms for myself and that this desire is intrinsically linked to my own german/australian ‘transcendentally homeless’ identity in transition. i would never have started if there had not been an initial attraction and fascination with the other. however, in the course of learning this conversation shifted and is still shifting in an ongoing dialogue, which incorporates complexities from both sides of the dance floor as ‘contact zone’. in response to the ‘spicy sauce’ and ‘loss of flavour’ comments by weber and pavis, it needs to be established that i had no previous dance discipline to which i could add ‘sauce’ or ‘flavour’. indonesian dance is my ‘first’ movement language; i am illiterate in classical ballet and perform only ‘broken’ modern dance. i was in part addressing this issue in the installation within my camera box, by being clad from foot to waist in modern ballet clothes reminiscent of the stereotypical ‘fame! i’m gonna live forever’ look, and from waist to head inside the camera box with an eclectic mix of exotic javanese dance costumes evocative of the exotic mata hari. with this occidental /oriental hybrid i was trying to cut across the unspoken rule that white bodies, if they are to be seen as ‘politically correct,’ should only perform western dance or ‘modern’ adaptations of asian dance. as an occidental performing oriental dance i am trapped in 11 i have tried not to claim the traditional dances as my own, nor my contemporary performances to be traditional indonesian dance. any influences or representations of indonesian dance in my performances have always been acknowledged in my program notes. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 23 wulff ibu sawitri the box of colonial thief and appropriator. there is very little room to move, as i demonstrated by literally trying to dance from my waist up in the confines of a 52cm by 56cm by 70cm rectangular box within the installation. the interspersed silent film captions in the wall projection of the installation provide a list of some of the most inane and commonly repeated questions i am asked after performances. i thought you were german. do the hand movements mean anything? is it hard to keep the mask on? where did you learn to dance like that? they are the constant reminder that because my performances employ asian dance vocabularies they cannot easily be recognised as contemporary, no matter how cutting-edge and deconstructed. ibu sawitri and me in the dance studio, losari/cirebon 1999 this leads to the next question, do i wear an asian mask to hide my ‘whiteness,’ which implicates me with historical guilt? there is no escaping historical guilt, especially considering that i come from an australian/german background, which invariably provides me with solid doses from both sides. perhaps on a deeper psychological level the mask did initially represent a fetish object that helped me resolve, for the duration of the dance, the two incongruous parts of west and east that make up my identity. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 24 wulff ibu sawitri mcclintock provides an illuminating description of how she interprets the function of the fetish. the fetish thus stands at the crossroads of psychoanalysis and social history, inhabiting the threshold of both personal and historical memory. the fetish marks a crisis in a social meaning as the embodiment of an impossible irresolution. the contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur with compulsive repetition. hence the apparent power of the fetish to enchant the fetishist…as composite symbolic objects, fetishes thus embody the traumatic coincidence not only of individual but also historical memories held in contradiction. (1995, 184) the crisis in social meaning and historical memory for me is at the heart of what i have attempted to address in troppo obscura, namely that i am a white body with an asian dance vocabulary. furthermore i am a white body inscribed with a history of violence towards the very people whose dance i am learning and creating art with. the deeper psychological meanings underpinning this seemingly impossible irresolution are about not having a firm sense of belonging to either german or australian parent culture due to having grown up across both. this condition is coupled with having found a sense of connection and belonging to an adopted culture, indonesia, which is communally oriented and inclusive. on a subconscious level the mask became for me the symbolic object that embodied the contradiction of the non-belonging of my skin and inscribed history, together with the sense of belonging of my body movement and heart. this contradiction and the audience response to it is visualized in troppo obscura’s wall projection. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 25 wulff ibu sawitri wall-projection, troppo obscura, october 2002 directly inspired by the white-clad colonial woman from the archives who is my symbolic ancestor, i wanted to depict the image of a white body stripped naked like all the indonesian women from the archives presented in the installation. then, through the gradual layering of victorian clothing that functions as a metaphor of colonial history and colonial thinking, i wanted to depict the historical build-up of a particular way of being which is western, both as perceived from within and as seen from without. fully clad in layers of colonial history and ways of thinking, i engage in a mask dance that ends in a trick sequence of changing masks that represent the continual shift and metamorphosis of identity arising from the intersection of cultures. this is in a sense the depiction of the dance of the ‘contact zone’ that incorporates all the historical and individual complexities of a cross-cultural engagement. ultimately the sequence is reversed and the clothing comes off layer by layer until i am naked again. i like to think of this as what spivak calls the ‘unlearning’ or in this case the ‘undressing’ of western colonial ‘female privilege’ (1988, 295). there have been times when i have felt almost paralysed by the political and historical implications of what i was doing. to stop, however, is not the answer. chambers reminds us of the need to keep dancing the portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 26 wulff ibu sawitri ‘contact zone’ together. as a third way, neither ‘progressive’ nor ‘traditional,’ the effects of this configuration are neither restricted to the ‘centre’ nor the ‘periphery,’ or ‘third world’. to hold on to the uncertainties of this mutual interrogation is imperative. otherwise my desire continues to produce the cycles of hegemony that subject the other to my categories, to my need for alterity. then my recognition of difference merely becomes the prison for the object of my desire. requested to carry the burden of ‘authenticity,’ of ‘difference,’ or of ‘post coloniality,’ the other continues to be exploited. to be colonised, in another name (1996, 54). the conversation needs to be kept alive in order to negotiate spaces in the ‘contact zone,’ that don’t fall into the old top-down colonial binarism of the colonizer and colonised. spaces need to be negotiated where all voices can be heard. part of keeping the conversation alive involves being able to speak one another’s languages. it shouldn’t always be the ex-colonised speaking the ex-coloniser’s language. in the process of learning the other’s language, care must be taken to not fall into the trap of speaking on behalf of the other. within post-colonial debate language is given special attention: as well as encouraging translation between all languages used in the various post-colonial societies (including translations of indigenous into english and into other indigenous languages), it is equally important to insist on the metropolitan institutions and cultural practices to open themselves up to indigenous texts by encouraging the learning and use of these languages by metropolitan scholars (ashcroft, griffiths & tiffin 1998, 20). movement and dance is another form of language, another cultural text. by learning these other texts seriously and with respect, a new kind of conversation can be held outside the imperial framework. this is how i see the function of my work, that is, as a gesture against neo-colonialism. as intercultural performer, director and academic richard schechner says: the more we, and everyone else too, can perform our own and other people’s cultures the better. to perform someone else’s cultures takes knowledge, a ‘translation’ that is different, more viscerally experiential, than translating a book. intercultural exchange takes a teacher: someone who knows the body of performance of the culture being translated. the translator of culture is not a mere agent, as a translator of words might be, but an actual culture-bearer. this is why performing other cultures becomes so important. not just reading them, not just visiting them – but actually doing them. so that ‘them’ and ‘us’ is elided, or laid experientially side-by-side (1991, 314). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 27 wulff ibu sawitri installation space, troppo obscura, october 2002 in this paper and through my performance i have attempted to make visible the notion that contemporary individuals are increasingly making the shift from claiming unified, relatively homogenous identities, to acknowledging processes of identification. this can be seen as a direct result of globalisation and the information explosion. ibu’s life and dance in as small a place as losari in indonesia is reflective of the rapid changes taking place both domestically and globally. throughout her life she was forced to make many adjustments on a personal level and in relation to her dance tradition. her dance is still thriving today because she was willing to make the necessary changes and move with the times. contrary to how many in the west would perceive it, topeng losari is alive and well, exercising its own fluid indonesian form of modernity and it is not a necrotized form collecting dust behind a glass museum cabinet. like ibu sawitri i have adjusted and changed as a result of the knowledge and experience gained by learning dance and living with her, as well as through the process of making troppo obscura informed in part by that knowledge. for many of us, inhabiting a shifting, fluid identity is a means of being able to continue existing and reinventing ourselves in a rapidly changing world. colonial cultural ‘boxing’ was never appropriate and is even less relevant in today’s multifaceted world. within the current climate of global neoimperialism the unequal power distributions based on the colonial model of ‘us’ and portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 28 wulff ibu sawitri ‘them’ is being perpetuated. care must be taken in the west not to perpetuate these colonial hierarchies and power imbalances within the very celebration of multicultural, post-modern notions of ‘happy hybridity’(perera 1994, 17). through whatever means possible, whether it be discourse, ideology, or the language of dance, the time has come to (re)imagine the human subject and create new spaces where all can exist equally and find a space of representation. reference list allatson, p. 2002, latino dreams: transcultural traffic and the u.s. national imaginary, rodopi press, amsterdam and new york. ashcroft, b., griffiths, g. & tiffin, h. 1998, key concepts in post-colonial studies, routledge, london; new york. chambers, i. 1996, ‘signs of silence, lines of listening,’ in i. chambers & l. curti (eds), the post-colonial question: common skies, divided horizons, routledge, london, new york, 47-65. chin, d. 1991, ‘interculturalism, postmodernism, pluralism,’ in b. marranca & g. dasgupta (eds), interculturalism and performance, paj publications, new york. cohen, m. 1996, ‘seventeen stories about interculturalism and tadashi suzuki,’ about performance, centre for performance studies university of sydney, vol. 2, 5159. dunn, s. 1996, ‘cross cultural productions: peter brook and the mahabaratha,’ about performance, centre for performance studies university of sydney, vol. 2, 2741. echols, j. & shadily, h. 1992, an indonesian-english dictionary, pt gramedia, jakarta. hage, g. 2003, ‘the anatomy of anti-arab racism,’ the australian financial review, 15 august, p. 9. lucas, a. 1997, ‘images of javanese women during the japanese occupation 194245,’ in j. gelman taylor (ed.), women creating indonesia: the first fifty years, monash asia institute, melbourne, pp. 52-91. masunah, j. 2000, sawitri penari topeng losari, tarawang, yogyakarta. mcclintock, a.j. 1995, imperial leather, routledge, new york, london. pratt, m.l. 1992, imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation, routledge, london and new york. said, e. 1996, ‘from orientalism,’ in p. mongia (ed.), contemporary post colonial theory, arnold, new york. sawitri 1996, interview with the author, losari/cirebon (indonesia). sawitri 1999, interview with the author, losari/cirebon (indonesia). schechner, r. 1991, ‘intercultural themes,’ in b. marranca & g. dasgupta (eds), interculturalism and performance, paj publications, new york. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 29 wulff ibu sawitri spivak, g. 1988, ‘can the subaltern speak?’ in g. nelson & l. grossberg (eds), marxism and the interpretation of culture, macmillan, london, 271-313. suzuki, t. 1991, ‘culture is the body,’ in b. marranca & g. dasgupta (eds), interculturalism and performance, paj publications, new york. thompson zainu’ddin, a. 1997, ‘building the future: the life and work of kurnianingrat ali sastroamijoyo,’ in j. gelman taylor (ed.), women creating indonesia: the first fifty years, monash asia institute, melbourne, 156-203. tiwon, s. 1996, ‘models and maniacs,’ in l.j. sears (ed.), fantasizing the feminine in indonesia, duke university press, durham & london, pp. 47-71. torgovnick, m. 1991, gone primitive: savage intellects, modern lives, university of chicago press, chicago. weber, c. 1991, ‘ac/tc: currents of theoretical exchange,’ in b. marranca & g. dasgupta (eds), interculturalism and performance, paj publications, new york. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 30 ibu sawitri and the a/occidental oriental monica wulff, university of technology, sydney taking the dance home: theft, appropriation hybridity or fus boxing the colonial reference list microsoft word portalmitchellcopyeditgalley2011 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. terpsichorean architecture special issue, guest edited by tony mitchell. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. terpsichorean architecture: editor’s introduction tony mitchell, university of technology sydney in peter hoeg’s celebrated novel miss smilla’s feeling for snow (1992), greenlandborn smilla says of her extraordinary ability to decipher patterns and read tracks in snow: ‘reading snow is like listening to music. to describe what you’ve read is to try and describe music in writing’ (2005:37). later in the book, andreas fine licht, a blind professsor of eskimo languages and cultures at the danish institute of eskimology, deciphers a tape recording of a native greenlander speaking in dialect about hunting. he is also able to hear and identify in the background on the tape the jazz music of trumpeter roy louber, formerly of the john coltrane quartet, in a rare live concert performance in thule in the late 1960s (2005:134). the experience of listening to, or hearing and identifying music may, in both cases, be a complex one, but writing about it comprehensively and memorably can be even more complex and fraught with difficulties. this selection of papers comes from a symposium held at the university of technology sydeny (uts) in september 2009. the title derives from a notorious quote—now a cliché—from elvis costello in an interview in the british musician magazine in 1983: ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture—it’s a really stupid thing to want to do’ (white 1983). it has been attributed by various people at various times to frank zappa, thelonious monk, laurie anderson, david byrne and numerous others, mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 2 while costello and others have attributed it to martin mull, possibly in 1979, although an exact source has never been found.1 apart from tipping my hat to martin mull, a long neglected satirical singer-songwriter in the vein of randy newman, who once opened for zappa in austin, texas, in 1973, and whose music i particularly enjoyed in the 1970s, before he turned to film, television and painting, it would appear that costello, whether he likes it or not, has to live with the attribution. zappa actually said of the rock music press, arguably with some degree of accuracy, at least for anyone who reads the weekly music street press: ‘most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read’ (cited in botts 1981: 74 ). in his monograph on costello, dai griffiths takes the quotation seriously, beginning a chapter entitled ‘criticism’ with the claim that it ‘is a fine analogy for the purposelessness of writing about music.’ griffiths even invokes the abbé du bos’s 1719 réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture from wimsatt and brooks’s history of criticism, and examines various poetry anthologies, before getting down to the more mundane business of assessing reviews of costello’s albums and performances from the british weekly music press (2008: 115). david brackett likewise takes the statement seriously. concluding his book interpreting popular music with a 40-page chapter analysing costello’s song ‘pills and soap,’ from his 1983 album punch the clock, he deems it necessary to ‘consider the implications of this statement—which could be interpreted as a dismissal of the entire project of this book’ (2000: 157). brackett interprets the statement as pointing to the ‘untranslatability of one art form to another,’ and notes that costello is contradicting himself in agreeing to the interview in which he makes the statement in the first place, and is speaking in the context of responding to a question about harassment by the music press. brackett suggests that costello may be claiming that ‘analysing an art form is antithetical to producing art,’ an anti-intellectual position that regards art as spontaneous and that ‘thinking about it too much will interrupt the flow of inspiration’ (158). he then quotes a 1994 interview where costello contradicts this apparent separation between technique and inspiration. brackett goes on to suggest that this ‘tension between calculation and spontaneity’ (or musicology and inspiration) is typical not only of ‘somewhat marginal’ musicians like costello but also 1 as i discovered from quoteinvestigator.com: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-aboutmusic/. mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 3 of the popular music industry in general. he then proceeds to situate costello, via bourdieu, in a context of ‘intellectual pop music’ (160). this is a feasible claim, especially given costello’s 2008–2010 television program spectacle: elvis costello with … where, clipboard in hand, as songwriter-critic, he interrogates us songwriters such as allen toussaint, john prine and bruce springsteen about their song writing, and asks them to sing a particular song that illustrates their techniques. new yorker music critic alex ross begins his 2010 collection of essays listen to this by blithely and cavalierly brushing aside costello’s alleged statement: writing about music isn’t especially difficult. whoever coined the epigram … was muddying the waters. certainly, music criticism is a curious and dubious science, its jargon ranging from the wooden … to the purple. but it is no more dubious than any other kind of criticism. every art form fights the noose of verbal description. writing about dance is like singing about architecture; writing about writing is like making buildings about ballet. there is a fog-enshrouded border past which language cannot go. … in my writing on music, i try to demystify the art to some extent, dispel the hocus-pocus, while still respecting the boundless human complexity that gives it life. (ross 2010: xi-xii) this sounds suspiciously like bombast. ross goes on to claim that ‘[t]he difficult thing about music writing, in the end, is not to describe a sound but to describe a human being’ (xiii). this suggests that he may be confusing writing about music with music biography, where a musician or composer’s career provides the context in which a critique of their music is made. in his essays on bob dylan, radiohead, björk, and kurt cobain, all of which verge on hagiography, ross appears to fall into this trap, even if his musical knowledge is sounder than that of most music writers. reviewing listen to this in the sydney morning herald, classical music writer john carmody describes ross’s forays into pop music as ‘little more than uncritical fan-club gush,’ and concludes: ‘ross plainly wants to think that, as a new yorker chap, he’s a man about town, au fait with the latest and most chic trends yet, apart from a pr-style chapter on john luther adams, he writes dismayingly little about contemporary concert music’ (carmody 2011: 30). it was as an expert on ‘contemporary concert music’ in the 20th century, on the strength of his previous book the rest is noise (2007), an award-winning best seller, that ross was invited to ‘curate and present’ a concert program and do a speaking tour with the australian chamber orchestra in 2011. the aco likes to refer to itself as a ‘renegade’ in the classical music world, and its publicity includes a quote from time out new york mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 4 describing them as a ‘badass classical band’ (shades of nigel kennedy). nonetheless, although often contemporary, their programs tend to be rather conservative, and the works that ross chose by and large fitted that bill: takemitsu’s nostalghia, britten’s variations on a theme of frank bridge, stravinsky’s apollo: apotheosis, webern’s five movements, op.5, xenakis’ voile, and richard strauss’s metamorphosen. nothing here that theodor adorno would have disapproved of, or that regular sydney concertgoers wouldn’t have experienced before. my purpose in using the title ‘terpsichorean architecture’ was, in fact, to turn the supposedly oppositional binarism of costello’s statement on its head, and suggest that, far from being ‘a really stupid thing to want to do,’ writing about music is a vitally important activity. it can not only communicate the seemingly incommunicable, but can convey what are always subjective impressions to a readership seeking ways of understanding and relating to different forms and genres of music. the symposium concluded with a round table discussion between musicians and music critics: lloyd swanton of internationally successful sydney jazz-improvisation group the necks, hollis taylor, composer, violinist, and ornithologist, and also the music critics, bernard zuel, rock and pop music reviewer for the sydney morning herald, and john shand, jazz reviewer for the same newspaper. as an admirer of the necks, and an avid reader of both zuel’s and shand’s articles and reviews, which i find consistently reliable, wellinformed, considered and colourfully written, this seemed an ideal way to match up both practitioners and critics of music. ‘dancing about architecture’ is not, of course, as impossible or unlikely as it may sound: in fact many dance works have been conceived of as relating directly to the built environment. the english jazz writer paul savage, describing the music of john coltrane, refers to ‘a musical monument like that feat of terpsichorean architecture giant steps’ (2000). in a 2004 issue of the architectural review entitled ‘terpsichore and the architects,’ simon goldhill quotes choreographer trisha brown: ‘i have a deep sense of my body’s architecture … the skeleton.’ he notes that in ancient greek theatre, ‘the chorus danced the architecture of the theatrical space into being’ and ‘the dancer was a storyteller whose body told a story, like a sculpture coming alive or a mobile embodiment of tradition’ (2004). choreographer siobhan davies speaks of the dancer building mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 5 an inner architecture with volume, texture and rhythm, which allows you to slice up space … classical ballet and classical architecture share proportion, grandeur, and the idea of being at the centre of the universe … light and acoustics are very important in dance and architecture: we have to consider how we introduce light to form and how we hear ourselves live in that form. (cited in goldhill 2004) not only are there strong affinities between dance and architecture, in some contexts dance is architecture. there are also strong affinities between music and architecture. in her essay ‘postmodern architecture/postmodern music,’ jane piper clendinning argues that ‘the most useful appropriations of terminology reveal tangible links in practice, technique, method, or aesthetic between the two art forms’ (2002: 119). due to its non-verbal nature and construction of identifiable elements, ‘music may be more like a building than a poem, novel, short story, or a play’ (2002: 120). postmodern architecture and music often both involve ‘quotation and obvious allusion’ to older styles. obvious examples in architecture are frank gehry’s walt disney concert hall in downtown la, or michael graves’s portland building in oregon. in music one could cite luciano berio’s sinfonia (1968)—which pastiches mahler’s 2nd symphony, bach, samuel beckett’s novel l’innomable (1953, the unnameable), among other things—and karlheinz stockhausen’s hymnen (1967)—which samples a series of electronically transformed national anthems from around the world in a kaleidoscopic, swirling global voyage. clendinning presents two postmodern musical case studies: john corigliano’s opera the ghosts of versailles (1991), with its pastiches of numerous other operas and 18th century plays; and ligeti’s piano concerto (1988), which draws on previous works by ligeti as well as ‘a wide range of western and non-western music’ (clendinning 2002: 134). these postmodern affinities do not take us very far in a search for direct connections between music and architecture, however. in his 2006 book noise orders: jazz improvisation and architecture, david p. brown, a professor of architecture at the university of illinois in chicago, suggests that ‘the architect may take on the role of improvisor as well as other roles involved in the making of improvised music, including those of composer, soloist, provider of rhythmic support and listener’ (2006: xvi). he finds affinities between mondrian’s ‘neo-plasticism’ and the open form of boogiewoogie, john cage and rahsaan roland kirk and physicality, temporalities in mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 6 louis armstrong and le corbusier, and the work of the association for the advancement of creative musicians (aacm) and that of mies van der rohe. his argument is that improvised music can influence architecture in terms of suggesting more open forms of practice in which architects can contribute to emerging environments rather than predetermined ones. apart from influencing alternative forms of architecture, improvised music could influence architectural practices in creating more dynamic urban environments. heavily conceptual in its focus, the book nonetheless explores the creative potential of ‘improvised architecture.’ the brief for the symposium was to address issues of writing about music in different contexts: this produced writing on a wide array of different subjects, from travelogue to film music, european art music, african-american music, and rock music. keynote speaker hollis taylor’s multimedia performance ‘post impressions: music writing as bent travelogue’ is difficult to reproduce as a simple piece of ‘writing,’ although it combines experimental music writing by a music practitioner documenting a musical event with diary entries and photographs. it operates more as a piece of creative nonfiction in which the music performed on the project in question, great fences of australia, released as a cd and dvd in 2007, plays an important part. on the page, it is more a kind of ‘nomadic writing’ in the tradition of works such as stephen muecke’s no road (1997) or reading the country (1984), which engage with aboriginal forms of mapping australia. taylor’s concluding thoughts about the outback australia whose fence-lines she and her partner jon rose bowed into being like aeolian harps, invoke the aboriginal songlines that form networks across the country: ‘it sets me reflecting on how it might have been here when every feature of the landscape was woven into song. this land was a giant travel book ... a historybook ... a natural science book. the great australian songbook stretched back and forward in time.’ references to berlin in post-impressions are writ large in andrew hurley’s ‘collapsing (new) buildings: town planning, history and music in hubertus siegert’s berlin babylon (2001).’ some of the music in question is provided by german experimental noise merchants einsturzende neubaten, sometime associates of nick cave. siegert’s documentary is an account of the hasty, manic reconstruction of berlin in the 1990s, but is also about history, invoking walter benjamin’s famous 1940 ‘angel of history’ (2009). musical history plays a part in the film, with snippets of beethoven, wagner, mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 7 brahms and bertolt brecht’s collaborator hanns eisler, but hurley gives particular emphasis to a 78 rpm recording of beethoven’s 9th symphony conducted by hans knappertsbusch in 1934, the year after hitler’s rise to power. einsturzende neubaten’s engagement with architecture, which involves the use of miscellaneous junk collected from local tips wherever they perform, is especially grounded in the berlin squatters’ movement of the 1980s, and the band’s own habit of playing in historically significant deserted spaces in the city. there is also direct reference to architecture in the lyrics of their two tracks incorporated into the film, which mourn the city’s ‘superficial face-lift’ and the subsequent loss of whole areas of the city that were full of memory and history. einsturzende neubaten’s ‘dance about architecture’ is a particularly regretful one. my own historic experience of einsturzende neubaten in performance took place in 1991 at the cavernous, three-tiered phoenician club on broadway, formerly a cinema and television studio, and later a discotheque that featured australian groups such as sherbert and ac/dc in the 1970s. situated just up the road from uts, the venue was blitzed by einsturzende neubaten with supermarket trolleys, poles and other noisemaking devices. local ‘underground’ audiences—one of whom was dressed as a nick cave clone—celebrated both their european avant-garde status and their berlin connections with nick cave and the bad seeds. later in the 1990s the phoenician club became a venue for dance parties, and in 1995 the notorious anna wood episode took place, in which the teenager died from ecstasy-related cerebral oedema, which eventually led to the club’s closure in 1998 (see homan 1998). so probably without knowing it, einsturzende neubaten also performed in an historically significant and now defunct building in sydney. in ‘is the unspeakable singable? the ethics of holocaust representation and the reception of górecki’s symphony no.3,’ alison moore confronts the dilemma of writing about music that becomes related to the holocaust. the extremely popular, mournful music of the 1976 ‘symphony of sorrowful songs,’ by polish composer henryk górecki, who died in november 2010, has become what moore describes as ‘one of the most commercially successful pieces of classical art music in its time.’ it subsequently became the subject of a 2008 film by british documentary maker tony palmer, more noted for his work about the beatles, and other films that have attempted to connect it visually with the holocaust. górecki was a relatively obscure figure until mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 8 1992, and only became well known internationally when an elektra-nonesuch recording of the symphony with soprano dawn upshaw, released in commemoration of the holocaust, sold more than a million copies. this recording went to no. 3 on the british pop charts in february 1993, outranking madonna, and remained on billboard’s classical charts for 134 weeks (howard 2002: 195). sydney conservatorium graduate luke howard wrote his phd dissertation on the history and reception of górecki’s 3rd symphony at the university of michigan in 1997, and published ‘production vs. reception in postmodernism, the górecki case’ in 2002. there he recounts that rumours circulated after the success of the work that it had been suppressed by the communist authorities until after the fall of the berlin wall, and that this was its first recording. in fact it was first performed in royan in france in 1977, and on several other occasions in the 1970s, and first recorded in poland in 1980, and on a number of subsequent releases. at the royan performance, it was panned by western critics, and one composer (possibly pierre boulez), is reported to have cried ‘merde!’ as it ended. british industrial group test department included excerpts from it on a tour in 1985-86, and it was used in the soundtrack to maurice pialat’s 1985 film police, starring gérard depardieu. the first british performances took place in 1987 and 1988. this was long before the symphony was incorporated into the soundtracks of hollywood films like peter weir’s fearless (1993) and julian schnabel’s basquiat (1996) (howard 2002: 196). although górecki explicitly denied that the work references the holocaust, the association has remained, partly because a section of it relates to world war ii. as a result, the work joins by association a small group of compositions that do reference the holocaust—namely schoenberg’s a survivor from warsaw (1947) and steve reich’s 1988 grammy award-winning experimental work for string quartet and tape, different trains. górecki’s compatriot krzysztof penderecki composed dies irae in 1967 for the unveiling of the polish government war memorial at auschwitz, after górecki had withdrawn from the commission only months earlier, considering himself incapable of the task. górecki’s ‘spiritual minimalist’ musical style has something in common with reich, but it is in other respects a conventional work, and its association with the holocaust remains dubious. according to alex ross, górecki, along with john taverner and arvo pärt, belongs to a trio of twentieth century composers ‘who achieved mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 9 a degree of mass appeal during the global economic booms of the eighties and nineties; they provided oases of repose in a technologically-oversaturated culture’ (ross 2009: 578–579 ). rather maudlin and lugubrious repose in górecki’s case. excerpts from górecki’s third symphony were ‘cannibalised’ in a series of different contexts in the 1990s by british elecronica artists. lamb used excerpts in a track entitled ‘górecki’ (1997), and goldie incorporated it into his 60 minute track ‘mother’ (1998), after björk had famously introduced him to the work. both pieces remove the symphony from any holocaust associations and take it into strongly personalised territory. it was also sampled by norwegian goth-metal band ildfrost in 1993, in what howard calls ‘blank eclecticism,’ and by experimental krautrock band faust in 1994 in ‘a tightly constructed anti-fascist statement’ (howard 2002: 197). us rock group smashing pumpkins used it as pre-concert music on their 1996 world tour, and when things got out of hand in the mosh-pit in auckland, it was used to try and calm people down—one of many instances of the use of classical music to defuse disruptive youth. the symphony was sampled almost imperceptibly in british rock group the pale saints’ 1994 track ‘henry,’ and in bristol trip hop musician tricky’s remix of smashing pumpkins’ 1996 track ‘milk.’ and so on. in retrospect, howard’s argument that these accumulated appropriations amount to a definably postmodern ‘breach between “high art” and mass culture,’ which involved ‘the collective consumer, not the composer, who crossed traditional boundaries in listening and responding to the recording of the symphony’ (howard 2002: 203), seems rather thin. obviously the lugubrious mood of the symphony attracted these british musicians who were working in a genre noted for its melancholia. moore suggests the work is ‘heavily imbued with catholic pathos and redemption, and … arguably encourages a collapsing of the listener’s own emotional pain into an identification with the suffering of war victims.’ this corresponds to what she calls ‘écouteurism,’ a sonic version of ‘voyeurism.’ ‘from gospel to gates: modal blending in african-american musical discourse before the signifyin(g) monkey,’ by chris coady, demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary, collaborative work on gospel music done prior to the 1988 publication of henry louis gates’s key work the signifyin(g) monkey: a theory of africanamerican literary criticism. gates, who recently appeared on australian television screens on the sbs channel as an interviewee in the five-part program america: the mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 10 story of the us (2010), has long been acknowledged as a pioneer in the representation of african-american cultural forms as signifying practices. again postmodernism has tended to obscure gates’s work: as russell a. potter noted in his 1995 book about us hip hop, spectacular vernaculars, gates’s theorisation of a single african-american vernacular risks essentialising a diversity of overlapping and sometimes contradictory vernaculars (1995: 17). nonetheless, the practice of signifyin(g), which gates demonstrates compellingly lies at the heart of much vernacular american language and art, is a theoretical practice which is fundamentally ironic, fundamentally postmodern. signifyin(g), briefly put, is both the trope of pastiche and a pastiche of tropes, and its most central trope is that of the sly exchange of the literal for the figurative, and hip hop is its most profound and lively incarnation (potter 1995: 18). again, hindsight breeds scepticism, and the influence of the signifying monkey on hip hop now seems tenuous, despite early examples such as schooly d’s 1988 track ‘signifyin’ rapper.’ coady argues that the ‘modal blending’ of linguistic and musical analysis that gates uses had its antecedents in documentations of african-american gospel music in the decades before the signifyin(g) monkey. john encarnacao’s ‘musical structure as narrative in rock’ presents musicological analyses of several examples of rock music, drawing on susan mcclary’s notion of a ‘quest narrative,’ and the assumption that rock music is itself a form of writing. using the term ‘sound mass’ to denote the overall identity of a song in terms of timbre, dynamics, density and register, encarnacao analyses a series of musical examples— including elvis costello’s ‘welcome to the working week’ (1977)—which convey a quest narrative. he also presents examples of non-narrative rock song structures, from pink floyd to animal collective, suggesting that more recent exponents of unconventional song structure such as the us avant-folk and new psychedelic movements are embracing ‘labyrinth, immersive and single-cell’ structures that are analagous to those of western art music composers of the period 1920-1970. sarah attfield’s ‘punk rock and the value of auto-ethnographic writing about music’ examines the importance of writing on music from the perspective of performers and fans, rather than critics. drawing on the work of prominent australian historian greg dening, attfield charts the recent increase in auto-ethnography in music studies, as well as signalling some of its perils and pitfalls. she also refers to writers who combine an academic perspective with a fan’s involvement in the music—in this case british mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 11 punk—and use personal narrative, such as simon reynolds, helen reddington, nils stevenson and roger sabin, but values above all writers who are able to describe subcultural music scenes at first hand. dean biron examines liner notes, a form of music writing often overlooked, arguing that music, dance, architecture and other art forms all feed off and provide nourishment for one another. after presenting a brief history of the record sleeve, drawing on elborough’s exhaustive the long-player goodbye: the album from vinyl to ipod and back again (2008), and of music writing as literature, using peter dayan’s music writing literature: from sand via debussy to derrida (2006), biron goes on to analyse examples of a genre of writing that arguably has no rules. from bob dylan’s inchoate poetry to the beach boys’ fan letters, from didactic salvoes to downright commercial propaganda (buy this record!), liner notes are a form of publicity that can occasionally be helpful (or too helpful, as in the often detailed analyses on the ‘container inserts’ of classical cds, which often need a magnifying glass to read), are sometimes woefully self-indulgent (‘i first heard this band on my car radio with my girlfriend in 1967’), or often wilfully irrelevant (as when stockhausen provides a detailed description of everything he ate on the day of recording and says nothing about the music). biron divides liner notes into five different categories – literary, as in dylan’s poetry; tangential—as in us folk guitarist john fahey’s bizarre shaggy dog stories that filled entire lp covers on his own label takoma in the 1970s; expository—usually written by the composer recounting the evolution of the work; propagandist—political as well as commercial, as in john zorn’s pro-jewish sentiments; and retrospective— usually pertaining to compilations of music from the distant past, as in neil young’s endless personal archive recordings, which really challenge the fan’s endurance. ultimately, liner notes demonstrate that music and writing belong together, like dance and architecture, and writing about music ‘is a valuable part of the overall experience of interacting with recorded music.’ the insidious rise of mp3s has all but obliterated liner notes, which have nonetheless come into their own with the increasing quantity of cd reissues. becky shepherd uses the term ‘mouldy modernists,’ which derives from the modernist jazz term ‘moldy fig’—an ardent admirer of old fashioned styles of early jazz—to describe the apparent attachment of specialist rock critics to canonical music of the mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 12 1960s and 1970s. cd reissues arguably play a large part in this, with most popular music magazines devoting a lot of space to re-evaluations of canonical items. the longawaited release of ‘re-mastered and enhanced’ editions of the entire back catalogue of the beatles, which caused a media feeding frenzy in 2009, is the most prominent example of this. the growing popularity of pastiched retro forms of music such as psychedelia, folk, disco and ‘classic rock’ by contemporary bands is another. in a study of ‘best of’ polls in the most prominent rock music magazines in the us and uk (spin, rolling stone, mojo, q and classic rock), shepherd finds that 88 percent of recordings listed were released prior to 1980. she attributes this to a form of imaginary nostalgia, or nostalgia without memory—frederik jameson’s ‘imaginary museum’ (1991). as a result, ‘[t]he world of sampling, remixes, mash-ups and the explosion of mp3 cultures and home production’ is being overlooked in print outlets, or relegated to more specialist on-line publications, blogs and forums. in australia, for example, online magazines such as mess + noise and cyclic defrost are providing far more contemporary accounts of musical developments both here and elsewhere, while rolling stone struggles to keep up in print form. in one sense, the excessive nostalgia that shepherd diagnoses is due to the ageing of prominent us rock critics such as robert christgau (born in 1942), self-styled ‘dean of american rock critics,’ who used to give ‘marks’ to recordings in his reviews, and greil marcus (born in 1945) with his ongoing obsession with bob dylan, and a ‘new’ book on van morrison (2010). both continue to hold patriarchal court at the annual experience music project (emp) conferences, and maintain a long-standing association with the new york village voice and the us rolling stone. they also continue to refer to ‘rock & roll,’ as if nothing had changed in rock music since the 1950s. their readership has aged with them. finally, john scannell deals with similar territory in a different way in ‘working to design: the self-perpetuating ideology of rock.’ he takes his impetus from a 2009 article on rock criticism by uk guardian writer john harris, entitled, appropriately enough, ‘don’t look back,’ after the documentary about bob dylan’s 1965 british tour. harris laments the decline of the ‘lofty’ standards of rock journalism set by 1970s figures such as lester bangs, nick kent and greil marcus. new musical express (nme) journalist kent was noted for his heroin addiction and keeping company with rock stars with similar afflictions. his nme colleague julie burchill has said of him: ‘rumour has it that keith richards was once copiously sick on his jacket after a mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 13 prolonged smack binge and kent never washed it again’ (2010). in his ‘1970s memoir’ apathy for the devil, in which he recounts, among other things, his religious conversion, kent describes himself as ‘the zeitgeist-surfing dark prince of seventies rock journalism.’ burchill is suitably scathing: ‘cliché is piled upon cliché with all the heavy-handed ill-judgment of a manic monkey constructing a monstrous pousse-café’ (burchill 2010). kent was once similarly scathing about academic music writer simon frith, suggesting he never ‘got his hands dirty’ and stayed at home listening to cds rather than leaping into the sordid fray of rock star lifestyles. part of the problem here, scannell suggests, is that ‘most music writers simply “write” as they understand it, rather than, as deleuze and guattari might say, pursue a becoming-music through the writing process.’ this would involve ‘the production of sensation equivalent to the affective power of the music that inspired it in the first place.’ i’m sure we’ve all had musical epiphanies generated by sensations produced by reading reviews or accounts of concerts, albums and the like, but now, more often than not, this fails to happen. as a dylanologist, like marcus, and also a deleuzian, scannell focuses on todd haynes’s dylan film ‘biography’ i’m not there (2007), a distinctly non-representational account of episodes from dylan’s life that he sets alongside dylan’s own account of ‘faulty memory,’ chronicles: volume one (2004). in both cases, writing is seen as the ‘pursuit of difference,’ which has broader concerns than simply reaching an existing audience. this links up with sarah attfield’s valuing of writing about music by practitioners and scenesters rather than critics. on the other hand, much rock journalism tends to trade in clichés, assess a musician solely in terms of his or her career, and simply contextualise any new album or concert appearance in terms of career development. this is one reason why there are so many ‘quickie’ biographies of the more prominent pop and rock musicians, usually constructed from a detritus of press clippings. scannell refers to this as ‘writing to design,’ and although recent (auto)biographies like life (2010) by keith richard (born 1943), surely the ultimate example of the ‘rock and roll outlaw’ cliché, may stimulate the gossip-hungry, and more media feeding frenzies, does it really offer anything more than what is by now third-hand gossip? another example of journalistic clichés that scannell provides is the appellation ‘the new bob dylan,’ which has been applied by various journalists to an alarmingly wide range of musicians, and apart from betraying a mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 14 lack of imagination, amounts simply to a ‘pursuit of homogeneity.’ examples of ‘writing as becoming’ are seen by scannell (and harris) in marcus’s 1989 lipstick traces, which idolises the obnoxious john lydon, surely one of the most boorishly reactionary of punk figures, in terms of a ‘secret history’ involving the dadaists, the situationists, paris 1968, and a 16th century anabaptist revolt led by john of leydon. fanciful, yes. convincing, no. there will always be debates about music writing and its value. recently i reviewed robert milliken’s biography mother of rock: the lillian roxon story, the reissue of which coincided with a documentary about roxon, an almost forgotten australian rock journalist who compiled the first encyclopedia of rock in new york in 1969 and died in 1973. a legendary figure in her lifetime, she held court at the round table in max’s kansas city in new york with the likes of iggy pop, alice cooper, and andy warhol’s coterie, where she once publicly vilified germaine greer. greer nonetheless dedicated the female eunuch (1970) to her, and at the launch of paul clarke’s documentary on roxon, also called mother of rock—for reasons which seem obscure—at the melbourne film festival in 2010, indicated that all she ever wanted was for roxon to like her. obviously a tall poppy who never received the acclaim (or opprobrium) of greer, robert hughes, clive james and their ilk, roxon is now being rehabilitated. but her music writing does not stand the test of time – clichéd, breathless, and us-centric, her main achievement seems to have been as a gossip merchant who, after stints in the brisbane literary scene of the 1950s and the sydney push, successfully penetrated the notoriously snobbish hegemony of the new york music scene in the 1960s, and led something of a charmed life style until asthma destroyed her. her weekly missives from new york to the sydney morning herald were lapped up by a readership obviously prepared to kow-tow to whatever was happening in the big apple. her famous front page report about the protest march of ‘the women’s liberation ladies’ in 1970—‘this isn’t a fad like the hula hoop’—is more about herself than any of the issues that were at stake. ultimately, all that lies beneath costello’s—or mull’s—apothegm is surely resentment of the over-inflatedly powerful and unjustified influence of inflated exponents of music journalism on an often gullible readership. but at its best, as in the case of most of simon frith’s work, along with that of numerous others, writing about music makes us mitchell terpsichorean architecture portal, vol. 8, no. 1, january 2011. 15 think about why it matters, why it is worth taking seriously, and why committing to it as a life-long project is important and worthwhile. and why, as in miss smilla’s case, it can even become a matter of life and death. reference list america, the story of the us. 2010, television series, nutopia productions, history channel. beckett, s. 1953, l’innomable. les éditions de minuit, paris. benjamin, w. 2009 (1940), on the concept of history. createspace, no place. burchill, j. 2010, ‘apathy for the devil: a 1970s memoir by nick kent,’ book review, the observer, 7 march. online, available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/07/apathy-for-devil-bookreview [accessed 23 feb. 2011]. botts, l. 1981, loose talk: the book of quotes from the pages of rolling stone magazine. penguin, new york. brackett, d. 2000, interpreting popular music. university of california press, berkeley. brown, d. p. 2006, noise orders: jazz improvisation and architecture. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. burchill, j. 2010, review of apathy for the devil: a 1970s memoir by nick kent, the observer, 7 march. 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(dir.) 1993, fearless, motion picture, spring creek productions/warner brothers. white, t. 1983, ‘a man out of time beats the clock: an interview with elvis costello.’ musician, no. 60: 44–53. microsoft word portalmcgeespecialissuefinal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. special issue details: global climate change policy: post-copenhagen discord special issue, guest edited by chris riedy and ian mcgregor. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. exclusive minilateralism: an emerging discourse within international climate change governance? jeffrey scott mcgee, university of newcastle introduction this paper explores an important recent development in the process of international climate change governance. that development is the formation of a number of selective state-based forums for dialogue and/or decision-making on climate change outside the established institutional structure of the united nations framework convention on climate change (unfccc). a number of these selective state-based climate forums were instigated by the usa and australia, the two developed countries under annex 1 of the unfccc that, for the most part of the last decade, remained opposed to the binding emission reduction targets and differentiated emission reduction obligations of the kyoto protocol.1 the asia pacific partnership on clean development and climate (app), the apec sydney leaders declaration of 2007 (apec sydney declaration) and the us major economies process (mep) of 2007–2008 were all instigated and/or heavily supported by the us and australia. a common thread to these three selective state-based climate change forums is a willingness to allow important decision making on climate change to be devolved to a small group of key state actors, with little or no formal input from environmental or research non-governmental organisations. this paper seeks to analyse this recent development in international climate governance in 1 australia ratified the kyoto protocol upon the rudd labor government coming to power in november 2007. mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 2 terms of its compatibility with the democratic governance principles of cosmopolitan and deliberative democratic theory. the first section outlines the interdisciplinary research design of the paper that draws on the disciplines of international law (il) and critical constructivist international relations (ir) theory. this section also outlines the concept of ‘discourse’ that is later relied on to analyse the emergence of these selective state-based forums and the contestation they offer to existing intersubjective meaning on the process for international governance of climate change. the second section outlines the two key theoretical traditions of democratic theory, cosmopolitan and deliberative, that are later used in analysis of these selective state-based climate forums. the third section of the paper builds on this by introducing the concept of ‘minilateralism’ that has been developed by a number of academics and policy commentators to support a shift towards more exclusive modes of governance of international problems. the fourth section briefly outlines the process of the un climate regime and the three selective state-based climate change governance forums that have arisen and been promoted by the usa and australia in the second half of the last decade. the final section of the paper argues these selective state-based climate change forums embody a discourse of ‘exclusive minilateralism’ that is contesting the inclusive multilateral discourse on the process of international climate governance. the paper concludes with observations on the challenges that the exclusive minilateralism discourse poses for cosmopolitan and discursive democracy in international climate governance, and suggestions on how these challenges might be managed. research design critical constructivist international relations theory constructivism is an interpretive ir theory that focuses upon the ‘role of ideas, norms, knowledge, culture, and arguments in politics, stressing in particular the role of collectively held intersubjective ideas and understanding on social life’ (finnemore & sikkink 2001: 392). unlike the three more established ir theories of realism, institutionalism and liberalism, constructivists: reject the notion that states or other actors have objectively determined interests that they can pursue by selecting strategies and designing effective institutions. rather, international actors operate within a social context of shared subjective understandings and norms, which constitute their identities and roles and define appropriate forms of conduct … most specific norms and mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 3 understandings are generated, disseminated, and internalised through the efforts and discourse of diverse actors … in the constructivist view, even as states and other actors create norms and institutions to further their interests and values, those norms and institutions are redefining those interests and values, perhaps even the identities of the actors themselves. (abbott 2004: 367). the constructivist emphasis on ideas, which are often referred to as ‘norms’ in this literature, is an obvious common starting point for interdisciplinary research designs incorporating il and constructivist ir theory (armstrong, farrell & lambert 2007: 97). the constructivist ir tradition is divided into two broad strands. firstly, conventional constructivism, seeks to trace the causal impact of identities and norms on state behaviour (100).2 the conventional constructivist approach is concerned with identifying the causative effect of particular ideas or norms on state behaviour during a specific event or series of events in the international system (100). conventional constructivist work adopts a research design more closely aligned with the positivist social science paradigm in formulating hypotheses regarding the causal influence of norms on past state behaviour and subjecting them to empirical testing and investigation (pettenger 2007: 9–10). however, the second strand of constructivist work, critical constructivism, is less wedded to the positivist paradigm. critical constructivism is more concerned with ‘uncovering the power relations that underpin and are reproduced by social relations, including knowledge-creating and knowledge-laden relations’ that privilege some actors over others (armstrong, farrell & lambert 2007: 97). finnemore and sikkink describe critical constructivism as having: intellectual roots in critical social theory, including such figures as anthony giddens, jurgen habermas, and michel foucault. although it shares the core features of constructivism identified above, critical constructivism adds a belief that constructions of reality reflect, enact, and reify relations of power. critical constructivists believe that certain powerful groups play a privileged role in the process of social construction. the task of the critical scholar is both to unmask these ideational structures of domination and to facilitate the imagining of alternative worlds. critical constructivists thus see a weaker autonomous role for ideas than do other constructivists because ideas are viewed as more tightly linked to relations of material power. (2001: 398) critical constructivist ir theory is thus concerned with how ideas are used as an expression of power to shape the intersubjective meaning of international phenomena and the interests of the actors concerned. critical constructivist ir theory usefully complements il research in providing a theoretical framework for analysis of the political context in which international law and international legal institutions are formed. unlike conventional constructivism, the critical ir approach does not seek to test the effect of international law as a causal mechanism on particular instances of state 2 for a prominent example of conventional constructivist work, see wendt (1999). mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 4 behaviour.3 rather, critical constructivism provides understanding of the power-laden web of intersubjective meaning embodied in international law and legal institutions. critical constructivist ir theory also offers a theoretical framework for analysing how such intersubjective meaning is contested and altered over time. the ‘critical’ (i.e. emancipatory) potential of constructivism is in providing understanding of the powerladen web of intersubjective meaning that constitutes, and is constituted by, international law and legal institutions. this understanding opens up the possibility of international collective self-reflection for change. as neufeld explains: it is clear how interpretative approaches offer support for notions of progressive and emancipatory change in the global order. the intersubjective meanings which constitute the global order are themselves the product of an ongoing process of self-definition and self reflection, they are, then like all practices which instantiate them, open to change. (1993: 58) current international law, institutions and practices might therefore be viewed not as a natural ‘given’ reality, impervious to substantial change, but rather one of many possible socially constructed orders of intersubjective meaning available to the international community (neufeld 1993: 59). a critical constructivist understanding of international affairs thus opens the possibility for understanding discursive contestation over current international law, legal institutions and practices (dryzek 2006). interdisciplinarity: critical constructivist ir theory and international law despite the areas of common ground between the theoretical frameworks of critical constructivist ir theory and international legal analysis there have been only limited attempts to specifically link the two in research design. one of the more substantial explorations of the use of critical constructivist ir theory in analysis of international institutions is contained in the work of john dryzek (2005; 2007: 44–62).4 dryzek invites international lawyers to look beneath the text of an international agreement to the underlying ideas and intersubjective meanings upon which the agreement is structured.5 dryzek refers to this set of underlying ideas and intersubjective beliefs as a ‘discourse,’ which he defines as ‘a shared set of concepts, categories, and ideas that provides its adherents with a framework for making sense of situations, embodying judgements, assumptions, capabilities, dispositions and intentions’ (2006: 1). 3 even more adventurous sociological analysis within international legal scholarship has not been able to prove international law as a decisive causal mechanism in the behaviour of states, see chayes (1974). 4 see dryzek (2006: 23) for discussion of the critical constructivist research design of his work. 5 dryzek (2007: 60) uses the it metaphor that discourses ‘can provide the “software” that makes international regimes work, while more formal organizations and rules provide the “hardware.’” mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 5 dryzek provides a typology of the more prominent discourses operating in environmental governance and international politics more generally over recent decades (2005; 2006; 2007; 2009).6 he suggests that discourses are social structures that both enable and constrain actions (dryzek 2006: 24–25).7 discourse is constraining in the sense that it is constitutive of the subject dispositions and capacities of actors and is produced and reproduced by subsequent actions and interactions (dryzek 2007: 62). discourse is also enabling in the sense that actors draw on existing discourses to ‘subtly affect the content and weight of discourses’ within a given social structure (dryzek 2006: 24–25). dryzek thus comments: discourses can embody power in that they condition norms and perceptions of actors, suppressing some interests whilst advancing others. discourses pervade, constitute, and help explain the structure of international affairs. the power of discourses arises in their ability to structure and coordinate the actions of individuals’ subject wholly or partly to them. (2006: 3) dryzek argues that some discourses are ‘hegemonic’ in the sense that they are so ingrained in social structures that they are ‘not even recognised by those subject to them, but are instead treated as the natural order of things’ (2006: 8). however, discourses are not static. over time, coalitions of actors (that is, discourse coalitions) emerge with alternate discourses that seek to contest even hegemonic discourses (dryzek 2006). this contestation leads to change through either a dialectical accommodation/merging of competing discourses or the defeat of a competing discourse. although dryzek argues that discourses are important in understanding international affairs, he importantly points out that they cannot alone explain international social life and collective outcomes. dryzek concedes that other factors such as material factors and non-linguistic practices are also important (2007: 62). this article adopts dryzek’s concept of discourse in analysing contestation over the process of international climate governance that flows from the emergence of the selective state-based climate governance forums introduced above. leading models of democracy democracy is itself a highly contested concept (dryzek 2010: 21). however, as dryzek (2000: 7–12) explains, there are two leading theoretical models of democracy at a 6 dryzek (2009: 187) identifies a number of discourses operating in the field including; ecological limits, climate science scepticism, energy security and ecological modernisation. this article argues that a further discourse of ‘exclusive minilateralism’ must also be recognised. 7 dryzek’s approach builds on anthony giddens’s structuration theory, most fully described in his 1984 work, the constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration. mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 6 domestic level. liberal democracy ‘deals only in the reconciliation and aggregation of preferences defined prior to political interaction’ (dryzek 2000: 10). liberal democratic theory views democracy as a social choice mechanism which reconciles conflict by aggregating individual actor preferences that are pre-formed and unaffected by political interaction. liberal democratic activity is pursued by actors who strategically further their pre-formed interests by voting in elections to determine the make-up of constitutionally entrenched institutions of the domestic state. liberal democratic theory is thus directed towards the effectiveness of the aggregative and reconciliatory functions of the constitutionally entrenched institutions of the domestic liberal state. the second leading model of democracy at a domestic level is deliberative democracy. in deliberative democracy, institutions ought to be designed primarily to facilitate deliberation by political actors (dryzek 2000: 1). as dryzek explains, deliberation is ‘a social process distinguished from other kinds of communication in that deliberators are amenable to changing their judgements, preferences, and views during the course of their interactions, which involve persuasion, manipulation and deception’ (2000: 1). deliberative democracy is thus concerned with the ‘authenticity of democracy: the degree to which democratic control is substantive rather than symbolic, and engaged in by competent citizens’ (2000: 1). domestic institutions designed to promote deliberative democracy are concerned with improving the circumstances of communication and hence the capacity of actors to reflect upon and change their preferences (and ultimately voting patterns and other forms of political participation) in response to the better argument. at an international level, there is no institutional equivalent to the sovereign of the domestic liberal democratic state that has the power to make, enforce and administer laws that may override the consent of an individual citizen. the various institutions of the united nations system (that is, the security council, general assembly, and international court of justice) come the closest to replication of the functions of the domestic sovereign, however, ultimately derive their authority from the ongoing consent of the states involved. despite the lack of an equivalent to the domestic sovereign, liberal and deliberative theories of democracy have been used to analyse the democratic credentials of international institutions. the liberal democratic model of democracy has been adapted to the international sphere through the concept of cosmopolitan mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 7 democracy as developed by authors such as held (1995; 2002; 2006; 2009) and archibugi (1995; 2004). cosmopolitan democracy posits not only the furthering of government by democratic popular election at a domestic level but also the extension of democratic process to governance between states at a regional and global level (archibugi 2004; 442–452). held (2009: 538) points to the post-1945 proliferation of international governmental organisations in the areas of the ‘rules governing war, weapons systems, war crimes, human rights and the environment’ as evidence of a reconception of the traditional strict sovereignty of the state and indicative of an emergent cosmopolitanism in international society. dryzek describes the cosmopolitan desire to extend formal, democratically constituted, rule-based governance structures to the international sphere with: cosmopolitan democracy favours an international system more densely populated by institutions that both secure order and are democratically accountable in direct fashion that is, not just at one remove, through any accountability of states that take part in such arrangement… the project looks forward ultimately to an international legal system enforcing democratically determined laws, a global parliament to hold all other global institutions to account and international control of a military that would in the long run yield demilitarisation. (2006: 151– 152). however, cosmopolitan democracy also focuses on protection of the rights of the individual within the domestic state, with each individual to be accorded equal worth and dignity, active agency and personal responsibility (held 2002: 24). as held explains: in the first instance, cosmopolitanism can be taken as those basic values that set down standards or boundaries that no agent, whether a representative of government, state, or civil association should be able to cross. focussed on the claims of each person as an individual or as a member of humanity as a whole, these values espouse the idea that human beings are in a fundamental sense equal and deserve equal political treatment (2002: 23) at its more ambitious edge, the cosmopolitan democratic project proposes direct citizen election of representatives to supranational institutions that would have the authority to override state sovereignty (monbiot 2003). the primary focus of all variants of cosmopolitan democracy is to extend the aggregative, reconciliatory and accountability features of the domestic liberal democratic model into international governance structures. the underlying premise of the cosmopolitan project is that individual citizens will come to see themselves as world citizens and hence subordinate their more local identities and interests to a common global project (dryzek 2006: 153). mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 8 however, dryzek’s discursive democracy is a model for the pursuit of democratic ideals in international society that draws more particularly on the deliberative tradition of domestic democratic theory. dryzek argues that in the international sphere, which lacks centralised authority and has more dispersed power structures, the deliberative democratic project is best pursued through a democratic design that is: transnational and discursive, highlighting dispersed and competent control over the engagement of discourses in transnational public spheres, which in turn constructs or influences international outcomes in a variety of ways. transnational democracy of this sort is not electoral democracy, and it is not institutionalised in formal organizations. instead it is to be sought in communicatively competent decentralised control over the content and weight of globally consequential discourses, which in turn resonates with theories of deliberative democracy stressing communicative action in the public sphere … the public sphere encompasses social movements and media communications, and can reach into corporations, states, and intergovernmental organisations. it is an informal, communicative realm that can be contrasted with the constitutional exercise of authority. (dryzek 2006: 154) the weakness of centralised authority in the international system and recourse to principles of state sovereignty (that is, sovereign independence) to avoid international obligations are no impediments to discursive democracy. the ‘transnational public sphere’ of civil society movements and media operations does not require a centralised source of authority or state consent in order to engage citizens and other actors in reflective, deliberative and communicative processes. as dryzek explains, activity in the international public sphere has a capacity to shape actor perceptions, interests and identities and hence the outcome of more formal international institutions (2000: 121– 122). the formal institutions of international society thus embody and reproduce discourses. the discourses operating in the transnational public sphere and formal international institutions therefore operate in a mutually constitutive manner (121). multilateralism and minilateralism in international climate governance multilateralism in international affairs involves ‘creating international bodies, agreements, and rules through negotiation on the part of the states that will be subject to the arrangements in question, who agree to be bound by the arrangements’ (dryzek 2006: 129). the creation of formal rule-based institutions at an international level to foster a cooperative approach to international issues lies at the heart of the multilateral project. however, this does not mean that multilateral institutions will all have a high level of democratic process. the united nations security council is one of the key multilateral institutions of the post-war period, yet its five permanent members (that is, mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 9 the victorious allied powers of ww2) have an individual veto power over any substantive decisions of that forum.8 the democratisation of multilateral institutions is one of the key elements of the cosmopolitan democratic project an international level, as discussed above (dryzek 2006: 129). the united nations framework convention on climate change (unfccc) and kyoto protocol are the agreements that form the central basis of the multilateral institutions of international climate governance. at a formal level, the unfccc and kyoto meetings, have a solid claim to cosmopolitan democratic principles in that they are inclusive (all states party to those treaties may attend relevant meetings and have a single vote in decision making) and have near universal participation (most states are party to those treaties). cosmopolitan theory favours at least a majority decision-making rule in intergovernmental institutions (archibugi 2004: 449).9 unfccc draft rule 42 provides that the voting requirements for a ‘matter of substance’ are to be decided by the cop.10 however, in the absence of agreement by the cop on majority voting (which to date has not occurred) ‘there is a broad understanding in the climate change regime that substantive decisions should be adopted by consensus’ (farhana & depledge 2004).11 this consensus decision-making rule of the unfccc provides formal equality of state participation in the unfccc cop meetings so that even the smallest states have a potential veto power over substantial decisions.12at least formally, the unfccc and kyoto protocol decisionmaking rules are highly democratic when viewed through a cosmopolitan lens. however, the formal equality of states in participation and voting at unfccc cop meetings still operates in a world of states with significantly differing levels of resources. practically speaking, smaller developing states often have only very limited financial and human resources to participate in unfccc and kyoto protocol meetings whilst larger developed and developing states often having several hundred representatives present. 8 charter of the united nations, 1945, art 27(3). 9 although, as archibugi (2004: 448–449) points out, there is some tension within cosmopolitan thought as to whether majority decision making should be based on a majority of states or majority of global population. 10 for draft rule 42, see unfccc (1996). draft rule 42 contains two draft voting rules for the cop to make decisions on ‘matters of substance.’ the first rule allows for a retreat from a consensus voting rule to a two-thirds or three-quarters majority voting rule once attempts to reach consensus are exhausted. the second requires a consensus vote except on financial matters. 11 consensus is generally taken to be present if no party raises a formal objection to a particular decision; see farhana & depledge (2004: 443–444). 12 the consensus decision-making rule within the unfccc appeared to be strained at the 2010 cop 16 meeting in cancun, mexico. towards the end of the cop meeting, the cop president chairing the meeting, the mexican foreign minister, ms espinosa, overruled the express formal objection of bolivia, in order for the cop to formally adopt a package of decisions on mitigation, climate finance, adaptation and technology (vihma 2011). mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 10 as timmons-roberts and parks explain: vast differences in absolute and relative income have a tremendous impact upon the ability of countries to attend international conferences, participate in international organizations and hire skilled negotiators. this is what we call the direct route through which inequality reduces the likelihood of cooperation on climate change. it determines whether nations can pay for the salaries and accommodations, draft proposals with proper legal argumentation and nomenclature, attend the many formal and informal meetings at conferences and respond to the demands of powerful nations with well-thought-out counterproposals. (2006: 15–16) this lack of resources limits small state participation in cop decision making processes and effectively forces small states to participate in larger negotiating blocks that may act to practically constrain individual state choice and the exercise of their veto power on cop decisions. in sum, the formal multilateral decision-making structures of the unfccc cop and kyoto protocol meetings are largely consistent with cosmopolitan democratic principles despite acknowledged practical difficulties with small states having sufficient resources to fully participate in such meetings. cosmopolitan democracy is generally supportive of improving the voice of non-state actors to assist in improving the transparency, accountability and effectiveness of states and intergovernmental organisations (held 2006: 172). consistent with this, the unfccc formally encourages civil society participation in lobbying and educational roles with the cop meeting process. the role of non-governmental organisations (ngos), including environmental groups, is formally recognised in the unfccc with ngo’s able to attend cop meetings.13 for the purposes of cop meetings, nongovernmental organisations are divided into various categories including business nongovernmental organisations (bingos), research non-governmental organisations (ringos) and environmental non-governmental organisations (engos). as fisher (2010: 11) explains, the unfccc cop meetings have traditionally provided ngos with significantly greater access to and influence with state negotiators than in other international institutions. mcgregor (2011: 1) also describes the practice of ngos using their access at unfccc cop meetings to pursue ‘insider strategies’ to influence government delegates through lobbying. 13 for example, the united nations framework convention on climate change, opened for signature on 4 june 1992, 1771 u.n.t.s 107, art 7(2)(l), states the cop shall: ‘seek and utilize, where appropriate, the services and cooperation of, and information provided by, competent international organizations and intergovernmental and non-governmental bodies’; art 7(6) also states ‘any body or agency, whether national or international, governmental or non-governmental, which is qualified in matters covered by the convention, and which has informed the secretariat of its wish to be represented at a session of the conference of the parties as an observer, may be so admitted unless at least one third of the parties present object.’ mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 11 despite the difficulties that arose at the copenhagen cop 15 meeting,14 the un climate meeting process is at least formally designed for a reasonably high level of inclusiveness, openness and transparency for all involved states and interested ngo groups. at this formal level, the un climate regime has generally promoted an intersubjective understanding regarding the process of the international climate change governance that is consistent with cosmopolitan democratic principles. this understanding might be described as a discourse of inclusive multilateralism. however, there is a growing body of academic literature and policy commentary on international climate governance that is significantly contesting the formal inclusive multilateralism discourse of the un climate regime. this work argues that greater effectiveness in responding to climate change might be found in institutions involving a smaller number of key states, particularly the large emitting countries.15 for example, us author david victor is a keen advocate of these select decision making forums on climate change: in the area of international cooperation the solutions lie in efforts to create a club of a small number of important countries and craft the elements of serious cooperation. the efforts probably can’t emerge within the unfccc process because it is too large and inclusive. nor can it easily arise from other available forums such as the g8, because their membership is too skewed to include the dozen or so countries that must be part of an effective solution. the most interesting idea for a new institution is outgoing canadian prime minister paul martin’s concept for a forum of leaders from the twenty key countries. (victor 2006: 101) this call for key decisions on international climate change governance to be reduced to a select forum of key states has been echoed by us foreign policy commentator wright (2009: 167), australian climate policy commentator kellow (2006: 287–303) and australian opposition climate change spokesman greg hunt m.p (2009). prominent uk sociologist anthony giddens has similarly advocated for smaller forums of key nations: the large bulk of greenhouse gas emissions is produced by only a limited number of countries as far as mitigation is concerned, what the majority of states do pales in significance compared to the activities of the large polluters. only a limited number of states have the capability seriously 14 as fisher (2010: 11) describes it, following cop 15 at copenhagen there were criticisms particularly from engo groups claiming they were disenfranchised during the meeting. this is discussed further in this article. 15 it is beyond the scope of this paper to analyse the claims to greater effectiveness in reducing emissions made by supporters of minilateralism. for the purposes of the following discussion, it shall be assumed that there is significant merit in the minilateralist claims in this regard. certainly the minilateral argument that decision making amongst a small group of key states is easier to affect than consensus decision making across nearly 200 states carries some persuasive weight. mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 12 to pioneer technological innovation relevant to climate change … to be able to exploit this situation, we need quite a different perspective from those that emerged from kyoto and bali. an approach based on agreements or partnerships between individual nations, groups of countries and regions makes more senseand could eventually strengthen more universal measures....a body representing the major polluters should be established post-haste. if we include the eu as a single entity, then 70 percent of cumulative world emissions of greenhouse gases have been produced by just six countries. they should be meeting regularly with one another. (2009: 220–221). this view is supported by leading oxford climate change policy commentators, steven rayner and gwyn pryns: relying on an international agreement that requires the consent of all national governments inevitably results in the very lowest of common denominators. since fewer than twenty countries account for 80% of the world’s emissions and therefore have the potential to make any serious contribution to their mitigation, it would be better for diplomacy to focus upon them. in these early stages, the other 150 countries only get in the way. (2007: 27) us foreign policy commentator moisés naím has coined the expression ‘minilateralism’ to explain this approach of seeking a ‘magic number’ of key states with influence upon an issue to craft smaller more responsive international institutions (2009: 135–136). naím argues that for climate change the ‘magic number’ of states to meet to thrash out a global deal is about twenty (2009: 135–136). the minilateral model for international climate governance proposed by victor, wright, kellow, rayner and pryns, naím, giddens and hunt essentially excludes the 175 or so states with the least greenhouse gas emissions and all ngo involvement. this discourse on international climate change policy might therefore be described as exclusive minilateralism. the exclusive minilateralism discourse has been significantly criticised by eckersley (2010) on three grounds. first, many of the key disagreements in the unfccc and kyoto protocol negotiating process are due to a stand off between countries that are amongst the top emitters.16 an exclusive minilateral approach to climate governance may therefore still carry the same key negotiating obstacles of the larger forums. second, those states most exposed to the risk of climate impacts, such as the low lying island states, would most likely be excluded from participation and advocacy in the proposed minilateral forums. this breaches ethical principles of due process and will likely result in climate agreements that are self-serving to the large emitting states and sacrifice the interests of smaller, more vulnerable states (eckersley 2010). third, due to exclusion of those most affected a climate agreement struck in an exclusive minilateral forum would 16 for one influential eye-witness account of the stand off between china and the usa over emission reduction obligations see lynas (2009). mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 13 likely lack legitimacy within international society (eckersley 2010). the following section provides a brief outline and history of the united nations climate regime and three leading small group, non-un forums for international climate change governance and that were formed over the past five years. the united nations climate regime and its others unfccc and kyoto protocol the unfccc was formed in 1992 as a global agreement to provide broad principles to guide the human response to climate change. the unfccc was formed in response to the scientific advice provided by the un intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc).17 the unfccc established an agreed global goal of stabilising greenhouse gas emissions at a level that will prevent dangerous climate change (art 2), a general obligation on all countries to collect data on and report their greenhouse gas emissions (art 4(1)(a)) and the important burden-sharing principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ (cbdr) to guide the future level of obligations from developed and developing countries (art 3(1)). initially the developed states, listed in annex 1 of the unfccc, set an aspirational, non-binding target to reduce their national greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000 (art 4(2)(a)). however, it was soon recognised that stronger action was required from the annex 1 developed states than merely aspirational emission reduction targets. in 1995 the berlin mandate (unfccc 1995: 4-6) of the unfccc, initiated a two-year period of global negotiations with a view to setting binding emission reduction targets for the unfccc annex 1 countries. negotiations for these binding emission reductions targets were completed at the unfccc third conference of the parties (cop3) meeting in kyoto, japan in 1997. the kyoto protocol to the framework convention on climate change contains obligation for developed countries (listed in annex b) to lead on reducing greenhouse gas emissions by taking binding targets to reduce or limit their greenhouse gas emissions, against a 1990 baseline, by the target period of 2008–2012. the developing countries were exempted from this initial period of emission reduction targets due to the burden sharing principle of common but differentiated responsibilities agreed to in the unfccc. the cbdr principle required that developed countries 17 see houghton, jenkins & ephraums (1990). mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 14 initially lead the way in emission reduction activities. the us clinton administration argued strongly at the kyoto unfccc cop 3 meeting for including market-based flexibility mechanisms in the treaty, namely, emissions trading, joint implementation and a clean development mechanism, to assist the developed countries in meeting their emission targets at a least financial cost (depledge 1995: 16–19). however, in early in 1997, the us senate indicated that it would oppose us ratification of any climate change treaty that placed binding emission reductions on developed countries only, or which would harm the us economy. this presented a potentially fatal obstacle to us participation in the kyoto protocol. despite the position of the us senate, the clinton administration signed kyoto in 1998 and continued attending meetings to negotiate the finer details of its implementation, including rules for the flexibility mechanisms. doubts over us participation in the kyoto protocol further escalated towards the end of the clinton administration. in late 2000, at the unfccc cop 6 meeting at the hague, the clinton administration abandoned negotiations on rules for implementing the flexibility mechanisms of kyoto. in early 2002, the incoming g.w. bush administration formally announced the usa would not ratify kyoto and would withdraw from all further discussions under the protocol. australia made a similar announcement shortly thereafter. the usa and australia, two annex 1 countries that had agreed to emission limitation targets at kyoto, thus indicated they would not ratify the treaty and were openly opposed to developing nations being granted a period of grace without binding emission reduction obligations. despite the us and australian stand against kyoto, international negotiations on the rules to implement the treaty continued during 2001 with agreement on fine details to implement kyoto finally reached at the unfccc cop 7 meeting in marrakech in late 2001 (unfccc 2002). the russian federation ratified the kyoto protocol in november 2004 (unfccc 2009a), thereby bringing the treaty into force. the developed countries in annex b of the kyoto protocol were then bound to meet their emission targets for the first commitment period of 2008–2012. the unfccc cop 13 meeting in bali, indonesia, in december 2007, agreed on a twoyear period of negotiations to agree on the shape of the international climate change regime after the first commitment period of the kyoto protocol expires in late 2012 (unfccc 2007). this negotiation was carried out under ‘two tracks,’ track one mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 15 involving the kyoto protocol states that looked to strengthen the annex b emission reduction commitments of developed countries (ad hoc working group on further commitments for annex i parties under the kyoto protocol), the second (ad hoc working group on long-term cooperative action under the convention) that included all states party to the unfccc, including the usa. the copenhagen cop15 meeting in late 2009 was supposed to be a point of agreement on a new global architecture for the post–2012 period. however, after a near collapse of negotiations (meilstrup 2010: 131), the cop15 meeting only produced the copenhagen accord (unfccc 2009b), an agreement of two pages in length negotiated by a sub-group of approximately six countries, agreed to by approximately twenty countries at the meeting and ultimately only ‘noted’ by the wider cop meeting, rather than formally endorsed as a cop decision. however, all major elements of the copenhagen accord have now been formally adopted by the unfccc cop process through the agreement reached at the cop16 meeting in cancun, mexico in december 2010 (oberthür 2010: 6). the asia pacific partnership 2005 the launch of the asia-pacific partnership on clean development and climate (app) in mid–2005 came us a surprise to the international community and media.18 the app states had provided no prior indication that they were negotiating an international climate change agreement. the partnership was officially announced at a press conference at the 2005 association of south east asian nations (asean) ministerial meeting in vientiane, laos (downer 2005). government ministers from the six original app countries (china, india, japan, australia, south korea and the usa) were at the launch (downer 2005). the ministers explained the partnership was an ‘innovative and a fresh new development for the environment, for energy, security and for economic development in the region’ (downer 2005). an app ‘vision statement’ was released at the launch however it contained little information on how the partnership would operate.19 the australian foreign minister, mr downer, was the first to indicate the official app position that the partnership was intended to complement the kyoto protocol rather than provide an alternative (downer 2005). 18 for example, see brown and wilson (2005). 19 see, asia pacific partnership (2009a, 2009b). mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 16 the first ministerial meeting of the app was held in sydney, australia, in january 2006. a ‘charter’ document was released at the sydney meeting that describes the organisational structure of the partnership.20 the app charter establishes a governing body known as the ‘policy and implementation committee’ (pic) comprised of representatives from the seven partner governments (asia-pacific partnership 2009b). the charter also establishes eight sectoral (that is, industry based) task forces comprised of representatives from the partner governments, public research bodies and the private sector. it is the role of the app task forces to formulate project plans for approval and funding allocation by the pic (asia-pacific partnership 2009b). at the 2006 sydney ministerial meeting the pic approved over 100 projects for the eight task forces (asia-pacific partnership 2009b). by 2009, the total number of task force projects approved by the pic was over 170 (asia-pacific partnership 2010). the app task forces meet several times each year although the exact number and timing of these meetings is not known. as at 2008, the app had received only a total of us$200 million in public funding pledged by the seven partner governments (us state department 2008). the app expected the private sector to provide a significant amount of the funding for the implementation of app task force projects (us state department 2008). a number of countries expressed interest in joining the app. in october 2006, new zealand released cabinet minutes indicating a desire to participate in the app, initially by seeking involvement in app task force activities (new zealand government 2006). the russian federation and mexico also expressed interest in joining the app (van asselt 2007: 17–28). in late-2007, canada was admitted as the seventh partnership country. to date, canada is the only country that has been granted membership to expand the app. the app thus comprises a select grouping of seven countries. pic meetings of the app have only involved elite state actors. engo’s have been excluded from app meetings although business and research organisations are key participants in the app sectoral task forces (black 2006; mcgee & taplin 2008: 209). apec sydney leaders declaration 2007 the asia pacific economic cooperation (apec) meetings were initiated by australia in the late–1980s as an informal forum for dialogue amongst countries of the asia pacific 20 see asia-pacific partnership (2009b). mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 17 region on trade liberalization issues. apec has twenty-one member economies, including all app nations except india. an apec member state acts as coordinator and host an annual round of meetings for national leaders and senior business and government officials. apec does not have a founding charter or formal constitution but instead relies upon an agreed set of procedures for hosting of its meetings. in september 2007, australia hosted the annual apec ministerial meeting and leaders meeting in sydney. at the meeting, australia attempted to negotiate an apec position on a longterm, aspirational (that is, non-binding) global emissions reduction goal (wilkinson 2007). the meeting produced the ‘sydney apec leaders declaration on climate change, energy security and clean development’ (sydney apec declaration). given china’s reluctance to discuss global emissions goals, the sydney apec declaration contains only a commitment by apec countries to ‘work to achieve a common understanding on a long-term aspirational global emission reduction goal to pave the way for an effective post–2012 international arrangement’ (apec 2007). the sydney apec declaration adopts an approach similar to the app of shifting the focus of international cooperation on climate change toward voluntary commitments for research, information sharing and development of cleaner technologies. the sydney declaration also parallels the app by focussing climate change policy on non-binding targets for reduction in carbon intensity. the declaration contains an aspirational target for a 25 percent reduction in energy intensity in the apec economies by 2030, using 2005 as a base year (apec 2007). this energy intensity target is ‘apec-wide’ so does not apply individually to any one country. the apec sydney declaration again represented a shift towards international climate change policy being determined by a sub-group of states, with engos excluded from the apec forums (feinberg 2008). us major economies process 2007–2008 in early 2007, president g. w. bush announced a new us initiative climate change initiative that was initially called the ‘major emitters and energy consumers’ process (mep) (white house 2007a). the us mep proposed a series of us-sponsored meetings of fifteen of the world’s ‘top greenhouse economies and polluters’ to ‘develop a long-term global goal to reduce greenhouse gasses’ with each country working to ‘achieve this emissions goal by establishing ambitious mid-term national targets and programs, based on national circumstances’ (white house 2007a). the initiative envisioned that national targets and programs would be determined by each state mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 18 individually (white house 2007a). the initiative also proposed that major emitting nations ‘develop parallel national commitments to promote key clean energy technologies,’ with the us facilitating international development banks to provide lowcost financing options for clean energy technology transfer (white house 2007a). the mep was specifically intended to ‘build on and advance us relations with the asiapacific partnership on clean development and climate and other technology and bilateral partnerships’ (white house 2007a). the mep process would adopt the app approach of drawing together representatives from various sectors such as power generation and energy production to devise a ‘common work program on best practices’ (white house 2007b). despite launching the mep, the bush administration claimed to be committed to the unfccc process and that the mep meetings would ‘complement’ ongoing un activity. the final mep meeting was held at the conclusion of the g8 summit in hokkaido, japan, in july 2008. this meeting produced the first publicly released document of the mep, the ‘declaration of leaders meeting on energy security and climate change’ (mep leaders declaration) (white house 2008). the mep leaders declaration contains a ‘shared vision’ for a long-term cooperative global goal for emission reduction, but does not contain any attempt to quantify such reduction (white house 2008). the mep leaders declaration notes that developed states will implement economy wide mid-term goals and actions to achieve absolute reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (white house 2008). however, this statement on developed state mid-term goals is heavily qualified in that ‘where applicable’ developed states may simply focus on ‘stopping the growth’ of emissions (white house 2008). this wording accommodated the bush administration’s approach of the usa concentrating on ‘stopping the growth’ of national emissions at least until 2025, rather than engaging in any absolute cut in emission levels. the mep leaders declaration also strongly emphasised the app approach of sectoral-based technology cooperation and information exchange (white house 2008). the mep leaders declaration quite clearly draws inspiration from the app task force approach to technology development. in march 2009, the us major economies process was re-badged by the obama administration as the ‘major economies forum on energy and climate’ (us state department 2010). the seventeen countries of this new obama-backed forum met on five occasions in the lead up to the copenhagen cop 15 meeting with a view to reaching agreement on key climate related mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 19 issues (us state department 2009). both the bush major economies process and obama major economies forum meetings were state-to-state forums that excluded access for engos, ringos and bingos (greenpeace 2008).21 exclusive minilateralism: a strengthening discourse in international climate change governance? the exclusive minilateralism discourse has been steadily building strength in academic and policy commentating circles particularly amongst authors opposed to the binding targets and timetables approach of the kyoto protocol (kellow 2010). however, the strength of the exclusive minilateralism discourse is even more evident in the intersubjective understanding underlying the app, apec sydney declaration and us major economies process. these non-un climate change forums have sought to facilitate dialogue outside the unfccc process with a view to reaching important understandings on the level of ambition for medium and long-term emission reduction at a regional and/or global level. for example, the app encourages each participating state to set its own non-binding greenhouse target to reduce greenhouse gas intensity, the level of ambition to be based on its own national circumstances (asia-pacific partnership 2009b). the apec sydney declaration contains a non-binding, apec-wide, energy intensity reduction target of very modest substance (apec 2007). the obama us major economies forum meetings failed to agree on a figure for a medium term collective emission reduction target. however, the bush us mep endorsed a mediumterm approach of all countries (including developed countries) setting and implementing their own economy wide mid-term goals and actions on emission reduction that may be based on ‘stopping the growth’ of their emissions (reduction of greenhouse gas intensity only) rather than reducing emissions in absolute terms (below a 1990 or similar baseline) (white house 2008). important understandings were built in these select nonun forums as to the level ambition of future medium and long-term emission reduction targets (mcgee and taplin 2009). discussions have occurred and understandings have been built in these select, non-un minilateral forums that have excluded over 170 countries, many of which will be impacted hardest by the early climate change impacts. as discussed above, environmental ngos in particular have also been largely excluded from attending and lobbying at these non-un, minilateral forums. 21 for a more detailed comparison of the app, apec sydney declaration and the us major economies process, see mcgee and taplin (2009). mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 20 further, the understandings built in these minilateral forums appear to have influenced the process of the copenhagen cop 15 meeting. the cop15 meeting was dogged by criticism from smaller developing countries that key negotiating texts were developed in an opaque manner by a small group of developed countries22 rather than in the open, transparent and participatory process of earlier unfccc meetings. meilstrup (2010) provides a detailed history of the diplomatic negotiations that lead to the outcome at cop 15. he explains that in 2009 denmark sought to take advantage of its’ presidency of the cop 15 meeting to reconceptualise that role from one of simply facilitating dialogue between meeting participants to one of agenda setting and leadership (2010:116–117). denmark broke from usual unfccc process by entering into discussions outside the unfccc preparatory meetings for cop 15 to broker a ‘danish proposal’ for the cop 15 meeting (meilstrup 2010: 124). during 2009, denmark organised bilateral meetings with the eu, usa, australia, canada, the maldives, africa, mexico, brazil, china and india (meilstrup 2010: 125) to advocate for the danish proposal. denmark also arranged a multilateral meeting between 20-30 countries in early december 2009 to discuss the danish proposal (meilstrup 2010: 127). this again occurred outside the formal unfccc preparatory meetings for cop15 that involved all state parties to the convention. however, the ‘danish proposal’ was leaked to the united kingdom newspaper the guardian on the second day of the cop 15 meeting (vidal 2009) thereby alienating the vast bulk of states that were unaware of its existence (phelan 2010: 15, rajamani 2010: 826). the g-77 plus china then denounced the danish text as “undemocratic, unfair and draft with a lack of transparency” (meilstrup 2010: 128). as the negotiations at cop 15 moved towards their final days there was still no agreement on the extensive text being negotiated in the formal unfccc meeting process (meilstrup 2010:128). a group of 26 state leaders worked over the thursday night/friday morning before the closure of the cop to generate a text however failed to reach agreement (meilstrup 2010: 128; dimitrov 2010). finally, on the friday before closure of the cop the leaders of five states—china, india, south africa and brazil and the usa—met in private and agreed on the modest three page document that became the copenhagen accord (meilstrup 2010: 128; grubb 2010). the text of this document was then hastily presented to the group of twenty six other countries that had been seeking to draft an 22 see, for example, vidal (2009). mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 21 agreement (meilstrup 2010: 128). in the dying hours of cop 15 the copenhagen accord (unfccc 2009b) was presented to the meeting for adoption. in a heated and at times acrimonious debate the copenhagen accord was rejected by bolivia, nicaragua, venezuela, sudan and tuvalu (rajamani 2010: 826). due to lack of consensus on the text of the copenhagen accord the cop only ‘noted’ rather than ‘adopted’ the document as a decision (rajamani 2010: 826). importantly, this history shows the influence of minilateralism on the events at copenhagen. the failed danish proposal arose from a minilateral forum of confidential discussions between only 20-30 states. the copenhagen accord was also essentially produced in the minilateral setting of a confidential meeting between the usa and four large developing countries. the copenhagen accord was then presented to a slightly larger group of 26 countries that had been earlier negotiating a text before finally being unsuccessfully presented to the full cop meeting (a further 160 states) for approval. the copenhagen cop 15 meeting therefore shows strong evidence of a willingness of key states to marginalise the open development of text through the unfccc meetings and instead have recourse to minilateral climate discussion forums as pioneered in the app, apec sydney declaration and us major economies process. as discussed above, engo delegations at cop15 were also highly critical of the unusual opaqueness of negotiations and generation of negotiating texts at the meeting (fisher 2010; mcgregor 2011; phelan 2010; rajamani 2010: 3). the difficulty of ngo involvement at cop15 has been linked to the large number of ngo delegates, poor planning at the conference venue by the host danish government and a broadening of the agenda of climate justice groups present at the meeting (fisher 2010). however, mcgregor (2011: 4) argues that cop 15 demonstrated a more general disenfranchisement of smaller countries and engos within the cop process. the logistical problems at cop 15 no doubt played some part in ngo marginalisation at copenhagen. however, it is important that this should not mask a more general disenfranchisement of engos in international climate governance that had been building in the years leading to cop15 through the exclusive minilateralist institutions of the app and us major economies process. in summary, from 2005 onwards a number of significant non-un forums for climate change dialogue show clear affinity with the exclusive minilateralism discourse. the mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 22 approach of the denmark as cop president in the lead up to the cop 15 meeting and actions of key states at that meeting also show a propensity of exclusive small group negotiations and/or marginalisation of the of role engos. when combined with significant academic advocacy for small group negotiations in international climate governance these developments indicate a growing strength of the exclusive minilateralist discourse. what challenges does the exclusive minilateralism discourse provide for the furtherance of democracy in international climate change governance? the exclusive minilateralism discourse is in direct contestation with cosmopolitan democratic version of liberal multilateralism. first, the very significant reduction in franchise advocated by the exclusive minilateral discourse (from all countries concerned with climate change to only the key emitters and/or economically power states) is obviously at odds with the expansion of democratic representation23 in international institutions that lies at the heart of cosmopolitan democratic project (held 2006: 170– 172). the exclusive minilateralism discourse is therefore vulnerable to attack on the basis of its lack of legitimacy and failure to adhere to cosmopolitan democratic ideal of ‘all inclusiveness’ (held 2006: 171). second, the exclusive minilateralism discourse openly excludes civil society, particularly engos, from participation in meetings of the ‘inner sanctum’ of decision-making on international climate change policy. this conflicts with cosmopolitan democratic theory that promotes the voice of non-state actors as means of representing the aggregated interests of individuals and as an agent to monitor the accountability of states (held 2006: 171). third, the exclusive minilateralism discourse is also difficult to reconcile with cosmopolitan democratic ideal of enhancing the transparency and accountability of intergovernmental organisations (held 2006: 172). in sum, the cosmopolitan democrat should be significantly concerned at the strengthening of the exclusive minilateralism discourse. the exclusive minilateralism discourse also has potential negative effects upon the level of discursive democracy in international climate governance. dryzek indicates that in assessing a deliberative system it is important to consider the connections between the 23 held (2006: 171) explains this expansion of democratic representation in international decision making forums on the basis of a principle of ‘all-inclusiveness,’ that is ‘those whose life expectancy and life chances are significantly affected by social forces and processes ought to have a stake in the determination of the conditions and regulation of these forces and processes, either directly or indirectly through political representatives.’ mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 23 ‘public spaces’ of social movements, media outlets, internet, public hearings and other popular sites of communication and the ‘empowered spaces’ of formal collective decision making bodies such as the unfccc cop meetings (dryzek 2010: 10). he suggests that effective deliberative systems have mechanisms by which public spaces can adequately transmit information and influence to the empowered space and thereby hold the decision makers in the empowered space to account (dryzek 2010: 10). the copenhagen cop 15 meeting demonstrated a flowering of the public spaces of international climate governance with intense media coverage of the meeting and a record number of ngo representatives registered to attend (fisher 2010: 13). there were several large protest marches by engos and climate justice movements during the two weeks of cop 15 demanding a fair, binding and ambitious treaty from the state representatives in the empowered space of the meeting halls and back rooms of the bella centre (mcgregor 2011: 2; fisher 2010: 14–15). however, despite the vibrancy of the public space surrounding the cop15 meeting, within the empowered space of the bella centre, there was a strong feeling from engos of marginalisation and reduced ability to participate and effectively lobby state representatives (mcgregor 2011: 3–4, fisher 2010: 1). the minilateral approach of reducing negotiations to small groups of key states appears to have a significant negative impact upon the flows of influence and accountability between the public space and the empowered space of the formal negotiations. discursive democracy is thus weakened if a flourishing public space is unable to transmit its discursive influence into the empowered space of international climate governance and hold actors in that space accountable for their decisions. further, a continued strengthening of the exclusive minilateralism discourse and prevalence of exclusive minilateral institutions in international climate change governance carries significant risk that economically powerful states will seek a subtle redefinition of the ‘problem’ of human induced climate change and limit the range of acceptable policy options to those serving their immediate economic interests. the nonun minilateral climate forums discussed above have either explicitly or implicitly supported a rise in greenhouse emissions to 2050 that on the science of the ipcc will deliver in excess of a three degree average surface temperature increase above preindustrial levels (mcgee & taplin 2006: 183; mcgee & taplin 2009: 222–227). the country pledges made to the copenhagen accord and modelling done in support of the mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 24 app both tacitly accept a rise in surface temperature of this magnitude.24 the key nations involved in these agreements have thus already affected a subtle shift in intersubjective understanding on what level of ambition might realistically be expected in global emission reduction and hence what global ambition should be on the level of acceptable climate change. if the level of ambition of greenhouse gas mitigation arising from minilateral forums remains low there is a significant risk that the subsequent world of three degree plus warming will not be one that is friendly to either cosmopolitan or discursive conceptions of democracy in international climate governance.25 arguments against that the consensus decision making rule of the unfccc cop process will likely continue to gather strength. as the necessity to act more ambitiously to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions dawns it may well become more difficult to obtain the consent of every state at cop meetings. it is therefore important that the cop reforms its decision making rule to allow for some form of majority decision making that will avoid grid lock in decision making on key issues. such a proposal is currently being discussed within the unfccc26 and offers a useful starting point for reforming the cosmopolitan design of the cop process. however, there is also the possibility of attempting to formally incorporate some elements of the minilateralism discourse within the unfccc cop process. eckersley (2010: 2011) has recently argued that the difficulties of the consensus decision making rule in the unfccc might be eased by the formation of a minilateral ‘climate council’ within the cop comprising 15 states that represent 70 percent of world population. the climate council would be comprised of the states that are most responsible for climate change, most vulnerable to climate change and with the greatest capacity to respond by providing resources for mitigation and/or adaptation (eckersley 2010: 2011). the climate council would comprise a mixture of developed and developing state voices27. the climate council would have a role of providing a forum for discussion of difficult to resolve issues on mitigation and adaptation and make persuasive recommendations back to the full cop meeting 24 see, for example climate action tracker (2010) and ford et al. (2006). 25 for instance, flannery (2005; 291–295) warns of the danger that a failure of current generations to stem greenhouse gas emissions through democratic may lead to more authoritarian responses when more severe climate change impacts start to appear. 26 in may 2011 mexico and papua new guinea formally proposed that substantive decisions of the cop might be based, in the absence of consensus, on a three quarter majority vote (unfccc 2011). 27 eckersley (2010) suggests that one configuration for membership on the climate council would be: the usa ue, japan, russia, germany, great britain, france , poland, china, india, brazil, south africa and three representatives from the association of small island states, the african group and the least developed countries. mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 25 (eckersley 2010: 2011). in order to improve the discursive democratic design of the climate council it might also be possible to include representatives from peak ngos such as climate action network, world business council on sustainable development and the chairman of the ipcc. the inclusion of these voices from civil society might improve the transmission of influence and accountability between the public spaces of ngo activity and the empowered space of the unfccc cop meeting. conclusion the exclusive minilateralism discourse in international climate change governance has strengthened significantly over the past five years through both academic and policy commentary and non-un climate forums arising chiefly from the asia-pacific region. this experimentation with minilateral forums for climate change negotiations appears also to have also been present in the lead up to and during the copenhagen cop15 meeting. there is a significant prospect that the exclusive minilateralism discourse will continue to strengthen and further shape global climate change governance. the discourse represents a challenge to the pattern of inclusive multilateral climate governance that has been established in the un climate regime over the past two decades. a possible response to the exclusive minilateralism discourse is to consider reforming the consensus decision making rule of the unfccc to make it easier for the cop to obtain binding agreement on difficult issues relating to mitigation and adaptation. drawing on eckersley (2010: 2011), it might also be possible to formally include the exclusive minilateralism discourse within the unfccc cop process by the formation of a peak advisory body comprising representatives from the most responsible, vulnerable and capable states and peak environmental, business and scientific ngos. this body might have a strong advisory role on issues that become bogged down in the wider cop process. both strategies need to be considered carefully in deciding how the institution of the unfccc should respond to the exclusive minilateralism discourse. mcgee exclusive minilateralism portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 26 reference list abbott, k. 2004, ‘international relations theory, international law, and the regime governing atrocities in internal conflicts,’ american journal of international law, vol. 93, no. 2, 361–378. apec 2007, sydney apec leaders' declaration on climate change, energy security and clean development. online, available: http://www.apec.org/en/meeting-papers/leadersdeclarations/2007/2007_aelm/aelm_climatechange.aspx [accessed 3 december 2010]. archibugi, d. & held, d. 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http://newsstore.smh.com.au/apps/viewdocument.ac?multiview=true&sy=smh&page=1&kw=a pec+soft+on+emissions&pb=smh&dt=selectrange&dr=5years&so=relevance&sf=headline&r c=10&rm=200&sp=nrm&clspage=1&hids=&sids=smh070818ff5qp7lpq8g [accessed 3 december 2010]. wright, t. 2009, ‘toward effective multilateralism: why bigger may not be better,’ the washington quarterly, july, 163–180. portalintro260709 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. ‘the space between: languages, translations and cultures’: special issue edited by vera mackie, ikuko nakane, and emi otsuji. issn: 1449-2490: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. working in the space between stephanie hemelryk donald, university of sydney vera mackie, university of melbourne questions arising from the negotiation of difference are increasingly relevant in all spheres of contemporary life.1 the processes of globalisation are implicated in the circulation of finance, capital, commodities, knowledge, information, and cultural representations, and there are complex circuits for the movement of people associated with these phenomena. as mobility increases, so encounters with differences of language, culture, deportment and habitus become more common (mackie & stevens, in press). there are various modes of mobility: permanent migration; temporary sojourns; tourism; documented and undocumented labour migration; marriage migration; asylum seeking; and overseas study. in australia, issues of the negotiation of difference have often focused on relationships between the descendants of anglophone settlers/invaders and newer immigrant communities, or on relationships with indigenous australians. less attention has been paid to the university as a prime site for the negotiation of difference. a striking feature of contemporary australian society, culture and political economy is the provision of international education, a major driver of the economy and a major source of foreign exchange. there has been a shift from the scholarship regime of the colombo plan (oakman 2004) to the neo-liberal ‘user-pays’ regime of international 1 we gratefully acknowledge the support of the australian research council cultural research network (crn), the institute for international studies at the university of technology, sydney (uts), and the school of historical studies at the university of melbourne, and the encouragement of the crn cultural literacies node convener, mark gibson. particular thanks to paul allatson, editor of portal, for his engagement with this project throughout, and for his encouragement of this special issue. thanks also to the anonymous referees for their constructive comments on the articles in this special issue. hemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 2 education in the twenty-first century. currently well over 100,000 international students are studying in australian universities, from undergraduate to postgraduate levels.2 in 2007 james jupp commented that around 110,000 student visas are issued annually in australia, more than the total number for permanent settlement (2007: 204). thus, for the current cohort of young australians and their international student peers (not to mention academics), universities have the potential to become significant sites for learning the practices of dealing with difference.3 several contributors to this special issue focus on the language-learning classroom as the site for the negotiation of difference in australia.4 it must be admitted that the english language still has hegemonic status in language education in australia, for the medium of instruction is english (at least at elementary level) and most language textbooks provide glosses and explanations in english. nevertheless, the language classroom potentially enables the relative advantages and disadvantages of students from english-speaking backgrounds and non-english-speaking backgrounds to be flattened, or at least their contours may be changed.5 thus, if the language classroom does provide a setting for the reflection on, and negotiation of, difference, this is not simply a matter of learning how to express gratitude in japanese, or how to refer to a female professor in french. rather, and more importantly, the language classroom provides a space in which the learners’ own assumptions about linguistic and cultural practices may be de-naturalised. for many learners, the language class is a site for learning about the multiple dimensions of difference: gender, class and ethnicity, as well as different varieties of language and its multivalent quotidian uses. 2 in 2003, the australianvice-chancellors’ committee (now called universities australia) reported that there were 120,522 international students in undergraduate courses, and the total number of international students in australian university bachelor, postgraduate coursework, higher degree by research and nonaward courses was 210,307 students. see universities australia (2009). 3 the 2009 demonstrations by groups of indian students about threats to their safety and security in australian suburbs have highlighted the responsibilities of host societies that invite large numbers of international visitors into their midst. see universities australia (2009) for responses to this situation. 4 in current terminology, language educators prefer to refer to ‘additional’ languages rather than ‘second languages’ or ‘foreign languages.’ in australia, the term ‘languages other than english’ (lote) is also encountered, but this assumes that most learners have english as a first language. it is even more difficult to find appropriate terminology in university language classrooms where classes include international students who may come from diverse linguistic backgrounds, may be proficient in more than one language, and may have english as an additional language. 5 in the school of languages and intercultural education at curtin university of technology, there was an attempt to capitalise on this diversity by bringing together students in english as a second language programs and students in asian language programs for peer mentoring. each group of students acted as a resource for their ‘buddies’ in the other program. see dunworth (2002: 222–28). hemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 3 in many parts of the world, encounters across linguistic and cultural barriers occur every day and are taken for granted. in some places there are attempts to codify the terms of such interaction through explicit policies on language usage. multiethnic societies such as malaysia, singapore and india have detailed policies to deal with ethnic difference and diversity. the european union (eu) has developed as a supra-national organisation that must operate in many languages; as of 2009, this ‘translates’ into the bureaucratic convention that the most significant eu documents are made available in each of the eu’s 23 official languages (europa 2008). the united nations also has well-developed facilities for simultaneous interpreting across the languages of member states. in the anglophone settler societies, however, an assumption of english-language hegemony has papered over the very real linguistic and cultural diversity within the boundaries of nation-states such as australia or the usa.6 australia presents a conundrum in this respect. australia is home to a diverse population and has made pioneering efforts with multilingual broadcasting and such services as the telephone interpreter service. however, australian students have been relatively reluctant to pursue foreign language study.7 there are linguistic and cultural resources in the community that have not been fully utilised. as besemeres and wierzbicka have commented: australia is a country rich in languages and rich in bilingual experience. to date, however, this experience has not been widely shared and a monolingual perspective on the world dominates the country’s public discourse as well as the private thinking of most anglo australians. bilingual experience is a resource that until now has hardly been tapped in australia. (2007: xiv) the 2006 census data (australian bureau of statistics 2009) reported that 44 percent of australians were either born overseas or had at least one parent born overseas. of those born overseas, around a third came from predominantly english-language zones (23. 5 percent came from the uk, 8.8 percent from new zealand and 2.4 percent from south 6 at one of our workshops, paul allatson discussed the 2006 controversy in the usa over a recording of the us national anthem, the star spangled banner, being translated and sung in spanish with the title ‘nuestro himno,’ or our hymn/anthem (various artists 2006). the cd release of the song ignited calls for english to be formally declared the usa’s national language. however, as allatson noted, while many us states can, and have, enshrined english as the official idiom, calls to make english the national language face numerous legislative obstacles, including the need for a constitutional amendment. 7 several recent reports have focused on this issue. for example, a 2008 report to the australian academy of the humanities confirmed that fewer than 10 percent of australian university students undertake any study of languages other than english, and that numbers enrolled in language are stagnant despite an overall increase in numbers of tertiary students (beginners’ lote, 2008: 2). see also the report on asian languages and studies produced by the asian studies association of australia (2002). hemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 4 africa), suggesting that the majority of the overseas-born come with skills in other languages. however, 83 percent of australians say that they speak english at home. nevertheless, in australia there are constant concerns about a language skills shortfall, and soul-searching about the reluctance of young australians to study additional languages.8 the australian national television channel, the special broadcasting service (sbs), has served non-english interest groups with news, dramas and feature films for almost three decades (ang et al 2008). and, as andrew jakubowicz’s web resource ‘making multicultural australia for the 21st century’ carefully records, australia continues to be a country of change, movement, arrival and return from all over the world (making multicultural australia 2009). this makes it both surprising and inevitable that the use of language is hard-won and easily lost in a dominantly english environment. all of the contributors to this special issue have reflected on the stakes involved in negotiating differences in language and culture. in their research and professional practice they inhabit the ‘space between’: the space between languages, the space between cultures, and the space between academic disciplines. while many of our contributors are located in the australian university system, we also have contributors from outside that system, as well as contributors who are theorising disparate sites for the negotiation of difference. the most exciting aspect of the papers presented here is the ability to move between the spheres of cultural theory and the everyday. analytical techniques originally developed for literary and cultural analysis are brought to bear on the texts and practices of everyday life. the loci for these investigations include the classroom, the police station, the streets, local government and the university itself. the practices examined include translating and interpreting, language teaching, academic writing, literary production and critique, language planning and small business and shadow economies. the academic disciplines drawn on include theoretical and applied linguistics, discourse analysis, language teaching pedagogy, policy studies, cultural studies, literary studies, political science, gender studies and postcolonial theory. 8 at the time of writing, the most recent contribution to an ongoing media debate about language teaching and learning in australia was sussex (2009). hemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 5 a major theoretical reference point in this special issue is homi bhabha’s notion of the third space, where a dynamic process of identity formation is possible (1994: 37). as bhabha puts it, the third space is an in-between place, an ‘interstitial passage between fixed identifications [which] opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy’ (1994: 4). under bhabha’s theorisation, the third space ‘displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom’ (1990: 211). bhabha’s theories were originally developed for the analysis of colonial situations, but are increasingly being applied to contemporary situations of cultural contact under conditions of inequality. as we shall see below, linguists and language teachers have also found the notion of a third space to be a productive one. other contributors draw on mary louise pratt’s use of the concept of ‘transculturation.’ pratt adapted the concept from the writings of the cuban cultural ethnographer fernando ortiz (1940), who developed the neologism transculturation to describe the complex cultural interactions between the spanishand african-origin communities in cuba (pratt 1991: 523). pratt also uses the idea of the ‘contact zone—which the contribution in this issue by jun ohashi finds particularly useful—‘to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect’ (pratt 1992: 7). julia kristeva’s notion of intertextuality is important to several authors here. kristeva characterises textuality as ‘a mosaic of quotations’ (1986: 37), and argues that ‘the final meaning of (textual) content will be neither original source nor any one of the possible meanings taken on in the text, but will be, rather, a continuous movement back and forth in the space between the origin and all the possible connotative meanings’ (1996: 19091). this also resonates with bakhtin’s (1981) theory of dialogism, whereby speakers, listeners and writers and readers are engaged in a process of negotiation over the making of meaning. as celia thompson explains—in her contribution to this issue—in reference to bakhtin’s seminal essay, ‘the problem of the text in linguistics, philology and the human sciences’ (1986), bakhtin’s theories are ‘sociohistorically grounded in the spaces where the boundaries delineating individual ownership of words and ideas are blurred.’ hemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 6 some authors use the methodologies of discourse analysis. while foucault’s (1972) view of discourse analysis has also been influential in cultural analysis, it is not always immediately compatible with the kind of analysis undertaken by linguists. as poynton and lee explain, ‘[a] discourse in foucault’s sense is a body of knowledge, not so much a matter of language as a discipline … [f]or much of linguistics, on the other hand, discourse is roughly synonymous with text’ (2000: 6). fairclough’s view of critical discourse analysis can provide a bridge between textual analysis, the placing of texts in their sociocultural context, and foucauldian discourse analysis. for fairclough, ‘linguistic phenomena are social phenomena, in that language use is determined by sociocultural conventions that are underpinned by the power relations underlying the same conventions. at the same time, language plays a role in constructing, maintaining and changing sociocultural conventions’ (2001: 19). naoki sakai’s theories of translation provide another important reference point for our authors. sakai has referred to the ‘necessity’ and ‘impossibility’ of translation, and cautions against a naïve view of the possibility of adequate and transparent translation between languages, preferring to describe the relationship of translations between two languages as ‘co-figuration’ (2001: x). as he argues: while social encounter and commodity exchange respectively give rise to demands for transparency in communication and equivalence in value, they inevitably evoke the incommensurable in our sociality, and the excessive in equation. yet the incommensurable and the excessive cannot be comprehended outside the contexts of contact. (sakai 2001: ix) sakai is alive to the power relationships between languages and even suggests that the process of translation is one of the very conditions for modernity itself: modernity is inconceivable unless there are occasions where many regions, people, industries, and polities are in contact with one another despite [emphasis in original] geographic, cultural, and social distances. modernity, therefore, cannot be considered unless in reference to translation [emphasis added]. (2001: ix) with these power relationships in mind, sakai and colleagues embarked on the ambitious project of issuing a journal, traces, that would appear simultaneously in english, japanese, chinese, korean and german editions, the journal’s remit thus having the following consequences for potential authors: to write for traces is always to address oneself to readers in different languages. when one writes in one of the languages of the journal, one is simultaneously read in korean, english, german, japanese, one of the languages of china, and still others. every contributor to this journal is expected to be fully aware that she or he is writing for and addressing a multilingual audience: just hemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 7 like a local intellectual under a colonial regime, every contributor is, in a manner of speaking, expected to speak in a forked tongue. (2001: ix–x) sakai’s theories of literary translation and co-figuration shed light on the struggles over signage in ashfield, a western suburb of sydney with a significant chinese population. brett neilson takes two case studies, from liverpool road in ashfield and via sarpi in milan, where bilingual signage has been a source of friction. behind these controversies is the political economy of mobility in the contemporary world. it is necessary to understand global processes in order to follow the trajectories of chinese migration to australia and italy. as brett neilson reminds us in his essay in this special issue, although his investigation is very localised and specific, ‘the issues regarding dual language signage must thus be analysed with a global regard.’ while apparently encouraging a recognition of diversity and difference, in these sites the practices of translation also, however, reinforce the hegemony of two world languages: mandarin chinese and english. the shops and market stalls where encounters between different peoples take place are, according to neilson, ‘apart from being a place of commodity exchange and profit generation, [also] a site of linguistic transactions and affective relations.’ neilson links these debates about language to debates about citizenship, pointing out the paradox of contemporary citizenship: that as citizens we claim rights which are ‘conceived as universal but also as imposed in a particular, territorially homogeneous and neutrally bordered, political space.’ furthermore, ‘debates about citizenship … are focused on universalistic issues such as democracy, political rights and responsibilities, but now shift to include concerns about culture, which were formerly confined to the particular.’ kristeva’s theories of intertextuality and bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic imagination help to make sense of neophyte students’ negotiations with academic language and citation practices. celia thompson’s thoughtful essay helps to defuse some of the anxiety found in prevailing discussions of student plagiarism. the students in thompson’s study are working between disciplines, between languages and between genres. students taking an arts degree at an australian university exist in a ‘transdisciplinary contact zone’ where they must simultaneously learn the practices and conventions of several different academic disciplines. following holton (2000), hemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 8 thompson advocates a ‘hybridising rather than homogenising approach to pedagogy.’ she argues that, it is precisely by learning how to speak through the voices of others that we can begin to articulate an authoritative position of our own. by engaging with, rather than fearing, intertextual connections, we can create a dialogic pedagogy for academic writing that enables staff and students to transcend the notion of plagiarism as simply a lack of ‘academic honesty,’ and advance our understanding of the politics of text, knowledge and identity formation that characterises the complexities of the learning and teaching unfolding in today’s university classrooms. following bhabha’s work on the third space and pratt’s work on transculturation, jun ohashi sees the language classroom as a meeting place. ohashi traces a shift in the emphasis of language teaching, whereby the goals ‘have shifted from “communicative competence,” which aimed at native-level competence, to “intercultural competence,” which develops a cultural position in order to mediate the learners’ cultures and the cultures of the target languages.’ ohashi finds the concept of the ‘contact zone’ to be ‘particularly relevant in australia, a multicultural society where migration and diaspora are significant features of the national cultural landscape.’ it is, he argues, ‘a useful concept for understanding any society where people with different ancestral roots are living together, and thus negotiating and co-constructing their multicultural identities.’ the contact zone is the place, where, for example, ‘conversationalists negotiate and develop hybrid cultural forms and identities.’ ohashi traces the adaptation of bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’ by language educators, such as pegrum (2008: 137–38), kramsch (1993) and crozet, liddicoat and bianco (1993: 13). these authors see the language classroom as a symbolic meeting place for the exploration of interculturality. drawing on liddicoat et al (1999: 181), ohashi explains that the ‘notion of the third place where transculturation takes place helps us move away from the assumption that one language has one culture, and, by extension, homogeneous and static patterns of behaviour and values. it also challenges the assumption that where two cultures meet, often in the context of native and non native speakers’ conversations, the inevitable result will be dissonance, misfit, miscommunication and conflict.’ those who have been exposed to contextual understanding of other cultural ways of communication and world-views, he argues, have the potential to evolve into interculturally competent communicators who can embrace differences in cultural orientations and manage interactions with people outside hemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 9 their cultural boundaries. ohashi provides pedagogical strategies for achieving these aims in the classroom as ‘meeting place.’ emi otsuji and chihiro kinoshita thomson also see the language classroom as the site for the negotiation of identities. they ask what it means to promote student identity construction in another language, and aim for the nurturing of ‘active transcultural learners.’ their study necessarily focuses on three aspects of language learning: the textbook, the teacher and the learner. they are particularly interested in the construction of gendered identities, and argue that it is not enough simply to analyse textbooks. rather, it is necessary to consider how textbooks are used by specific teachers in specific classroom situations, and how they are received and used by specific students. they demonstrate that, for students from diverse backgrounds in the australian university classroom, learning a language also involves the negotiation of cross-cutting identities and subject positions with reference to gender, class, ethnicity and language variety. judy wakabayashi, however, suggests that there are limits to the applicability of the notion of the ‘third space.’ in her discussion of hon’yaku-chô (a variety of the japanese language used for translations) she refers to this variety as ‘the transformative strangeness within.’ commenting on the receptivity of the japanese language, she posits that ‘this openness toward foreign writing belies the oft-heard criticisms of japanese insularity and suggests that at least in linguistic matters the japanese are receptive to heterogeneity, even if these imported elements are eventually assimilated and transformed.’ wakabayashi argues that hon’yakuchô ‘constitutes a (sub)norm whose transgressive thrust is not so much to violate japanese norms as to transform them.’ translational japanese, then, ‘is not a space between, but a space within.’ it is a ‘porous entity whose seepage affects the larger system within which it is located.’ ikuko nakane’s research demonstrates the stakes involved in working between languages. she discusses the role of the interpreter in police interrogations. while interpreters may in theory be seen as invisible, neutral mediators, in practice this stance may be difficult to maintain, as is revealed in those cases where communication does not run smoothly. this has real material effects for suspects in criminal cases. in the sohemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 10 called ‘melbourne case’ for example,9 questions were raised about the role of interpreting and translating practices in the interrogation and trial of these suspects. in a profession like translating and interpreting, clear ethical protocols have been developed. in most spheres of everyday life, however, we are adrift without clear ethical guidelines for dealing with difference. the question of ethics also leads us back to questions of citizenship and co-existence and debates on universalism and particularity. angela giovanangeli considers the question of universalism versus particularity in the french language classroom, pointing out the gap between official language policy and the classroom, and reminding us that the french language has disparate varieties from the metropole to quebec and new caledonia. like several other authors, giovanangeli wishes to see the language classroom as a place in which differences can be negotiated: ‘teachers may either contribute to the preservation of normative positions in regard to dominating social practices, or they may challenge them. in the case of the latter, teachers need to promote a class environment that encourages a critical and self-reflective discourse for both students and teachers.’ cultural production is another important space for the negotiation of difference, and for finding ways of theorising the space between. hélène jaccomard considers a novel by didier coste, called days in sydney (2005). this novel is a diglossic text, switching between two languages, french and english, and without parallel translation. the potential readers of this novel are a relatively privileged group—those with linguistic and cultural competence in both english and french. jaccomard is interested in the aesthetics of this novel, and its reception in this surprising transcultural contact zone— bilingual and bicultural individuals in contemporary sydney. for jaccomard, this text ‘is a way of exploring the space between aesthetic creation and language, literary production and reception.’ such code-switching within one text is relatively unusual in the australian context, at least as far as novels are concerned, although there are some examples with parallel 9 the melbourne case involved some japanese tourists who were accused and convicted of smuggling drugs into australia. supporters of those convicted allege that there were problems in the interpreting provided in the case. see nakamura (2007). hemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 11 texts in two languages.10 code-switching between english and spanish is, however, a prominent feature of latina/o cultural production in the usa.11 in this edition of portal, we are pleased to include cultural texts, solicited by portal’s editor-in-chief paul allatson, which feature a complex relationship to linguistic diversity and which exemplify the theme of ‘working in the space between.’ ‘diary inside/color local crónica’ is an excerpt from susana chávez-silverman’s second book of code-switching chronicles, scenes from la cuenca del la y otros natural disasters, to be published in 2010 by the university of wisconsin press. alejandra morena and roberto milanes’ ‘knowing the place for the first time: a cuban exile’s story,’ is an experimental, personal ethnography that recounts the visits back to cuba made by a ‘new zealand’resident cuban, a member of the exiled generation that left the island after the 1959 revolution. we also have gabriela coronado’s ‘entre ausencias,’ a letter in spanish to the author’s mother about what it has meant to be a mexican in australia, relating her memories, nostalgia and experiences in a new, alien and often incomprehensible linguistic and cultural environment, one that requires constant translation and generates constant mistranslations on her part, and on the part of her interlocutors. the editors and authors of this special issue are also interested in what it means to inhabit the space between disciplines. the theme of the ‘space between’ developed from a series of roundtable discussions held under the auspices of the cultural literacies node of the australian research council cultural research network. the concerns of the cultural literacies node have been described as follows: this involves understanding the processes through which people make sense of culture through the specific means and media available to them. it is now a commonplace to argue that we need more than the traditional forms of literacy: reading and writing. we now need visual literacy and computer literacy, and the competence to deal with the increasing number of systems which deliver cultural content to us everyday: the internet, computer games, mobile telephones and so on. the understanding of these processes is a multidisciplinary project that will involve all the disciplines involved in the network. mark gibson, convener of the cultural literacies node of the network, proposed an initial discussion on multilingual literacies and cultural studies. a total of three events were held, two at the university of technology, sydney (uts) and one at the university of melbourne, convened by stephanie hemelryk donald and vera mackie, 10 see, however, the inclusion of words from other languages in ania walwicz’s poetry (1989: 83), and sneja gunew’s discussion of walwicz’s poetry (1994: 90–92). 11 on the political economy of literary translation in the usa, see lennon (2008). on code-switching in latina/o cultural production, see allatson (2007: 73). hemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 12 all supported by the cultural literacies node of the cultural research network. the initial discussion focused on the following themes: this forum brings together cultural researchers and those involved in teaching culture through language, to debate the role of language in literacy as an attribute of international competency. presenters will address the role of language in their research, their teaching and more generally in their engagement with everyday life as australian academics who support an ethos of internationalization. the seminar seeks to identify research directions in literacy and cultural research that speak to the need to identify language-learning and cultural research as complementary projects. we were also concerned to examine the anglocentrism of much research conducted under the banner of ‘cultural studies’ (see, for example, sakai 2001: i–x; chen and chua 2000: 9). we wished to take up and develop the initiatives of the cultural research network, building on the work of a growing number of individual researchers and students whose careers have been centred on the ‘region.’ in december 2007, a roundtable on ‘the cultural politics of translation’ was held at uts. in february 2008 a workshop on ‘the space between: languages, cultures, translation’ took place at the university of melbourne. after the final workshop, an open call for papers was issued, and we were able to add several more papers to the original group for this special issue. we are particularly pleased to have these papers published in portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies. portal has a policy of publishing articles from diverse disciplines alongside creative writings and artistic works. portal is also one of the few international journals that provide a space in which articles and creative products in english and other languages can, and do, sit side by side.12 this is, therefore, a very suitable site for reflecting on the spaces between languages, between cultures and between disciplines. 12 this contrasts, for example, with traces, for while it publishes editions in several languages, each translated edition is generally monoglossic. hemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 13 reference list allatson, p. 2007, key terms in latino/a cultural and literary studies, blackwell, malden, ma and oxford. ang, i., hawkins, g., & dabboussy, l. 2008, the sbs story: the challenge of cultural diversity, university of new south wales press, sydney. asian studies association of australia. 2002, maximising australia’s asia knowledge: repositioning and renewal of a national asset, asian studies association of australia, bundoora. australian bureau of statistics. 2009, a picture of the nation: the statistician’s report on the 2006 census. online, available: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/2070.0 (accessed 11 july 2009). bakhtin, m. m. 1981, the dialogic imagination: four essays, (ed.) m. holquist, trans. c. emerson & m. holquist, university of texas press, austin. bahktin, m. m. 1986, ‘the problem of the text in linguistics, philology and the human sciences: an experiment in philosophical analysis,’ in m. m. bakhtin, speech genres and other late essays, (eds.) c. emerson & m. holquist, trans. v. w. mcgee, university of texas press, austin, 104–31. beginners’ lote (languages other than english) in australian universities: an audit survey and analysis, report to the council of the australian academy of the humanities. 2008, council of the australian academy of the humanities. online, available: http://www.humanities.org.au/policy/languages/ (accessed 22 july 2009). besemeres, m. & wierzbicka, a. 2007, ‘introduction,’ in translating lives: living with two languages and cultures, (eds) m. besemeres & a. wierzbicka, university of queensland press, st lucia, xiii–xxiv. bhabha, h. k. 1990, ‘the third space: interview with homi bhabha,’ in identity, community, difference, (ed.) j. rutherford, lawrence and wishart, london, 207–21. bhabha, h. k. 1994, the location of culture, routledge, london; new york. chávez-silverman, s. in press (2010), scenes from la cuenca del la y otros natural disasters, university of wisconsin press, madison. coste, d. 2005, days in sydney. noesis, paris. crozet, c., liddicoat, a., & lo bianco, j. 1999, ‘intercultural competence: from language policy to language education,’ in striving for the third place: intercultural competence through language education, (eds) j. lo bianco, a. liddicoat & c. crozet, language australia, melbourne, 1-20. dunworth, k. 2002, ‘creating an environment for collaborative language learning,’ in the proceedings of quality conversations: annual international herdsa conference, perth, western australia, 10 july, 222–28. chen, k-h. & chua, b-h. 2000, ‘an introduction,’ inter-asia cultural studies, vol. 1, no. 1: 9–12. europa languages and europe. 2008, european commission official europa languages portal website. online, available: http://europa.eu/languages/en/home (accessed 11 july 2009). fairclough, n. 2001, language and power, 2nd edition, longman, harlow. foucault, m. 1972, the archaeology of knowledge, trans. a. m. sheridan smith, pantheon, new york. gunew, s. 1994, framing marginality: multicultural literary studies, melbourne university press, melbourne. jupp, j. 2007, from white australia to woomera: the story of australian immigration, 2nd edition, cambridge university press, cambridge. kramsch, c. 1993, context and culture in language teaching, oxford university press, oxford. kristeva, j. 1986, the kristeva reader, (ed.) toril moi, basil blackwell, oxford. lennon, b. 2008, ‘the antinomy of multilingual us literature,’ comparative american studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 203–24. liddicoat, a., crozet, c. & lo bianco, j. 1999, ‘striving for the third place: consequences and implications,’ in striving for the third place: intercultural competence through language education, (eds) j. lo bianco, a. liddicoat & c. crozet, language australia, melbourne, 181-87. mackie, v. & stevens, c. s. in press (2009), ‘globalisation and body politics,’ asian studies review, september. making multicultural australia for the 21st century. 2009, site developed by a. jakubowicz. online, available: http://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/ (accessed 11 july 2009). nakamura, h. 2007, ‘ten years in a victorian jail: the convict as the “other,”’ in unexpected encounters: neglected histories behind the australia-japan relationship, (eds) m. ackland & p. oliver, monash asia institute, clayton, victoria. oakman, d. 2004, facing asia: a history of the colombo plan, pandanus books, canberra. hemelryk donald and mackie working in the space between portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 14 ortiz, f. 1995 [1940], cuban counterpoint: tobacco and sugar, trans. harriet de onis, duke university press, durham, nc. pegrum, m. 2008, ‘film, culture and identity: critical intercultural literacies for the language classroom,’ language and intercultural communication, vol. 8, no. 2, 136-54. poynton, c. and lee, a. 2000, ‘culture & text: an introduction,’ in culture and text: discourse and methodology in social research and cultural studies, (eds) a. lee & c. poynton, allen & unwin, sydney, 1–18. pratt, m. l. 1991, ‘arts of the contact zone,’ profession, vol. 91, 33–40. pratt, m. l. 1992, imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation, routledge, london. sakai, n. 2001, ‘introduction,’ traces, no. 1, i–x. sussex, r. 2009, ‘don’t say no to a new idiom,’ the australian, 22 july, higher education supplement. online, available: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,25816240-12332,00.html (accessed 11 july 2009). universities australia. 2009, enhancing the student experience & student safety: a position paper, universities australia, canberra, june. online, available: http://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/content.asp?page=/publications/discussion/index.htm (accessed 11 july 2009). various artists. 2006, ‘nuestro himno,’ on somos americans cd, urban box office. walwicz, a. 1989, boat, angus and robertson, sydney. portal, edited by paul allatson portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 4, no. 1 january 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal merlinda bobis’s poem-plays: reading ethics and identity across cultures dolores herrero, universidad de zaragoza, españa. the work of filipino australian merlinda bobis deserves critical and academic assessment as an example of contemporary creative writing by women that defies longestablished notions and classifications and recasts traditional myths and genres from a feminist and multi/ transcultural perspective. this paper therefore aims to study bobis’s efforts to do away with rigid and monolithic notions of culture and identity by putting forward new and challenging hybrid forms and, in particular, to analyse the ways in which bobis’s poem-plays question patriarchal binary divisions and definitions of morality by offering an alternative feminist ethics of care. feminism and the return of ethical criticism classical definitions of morality, daphne grace haney has argued (2002, 143), with their emphasis upon supposedly detached and aseptic analyses of right-wrong and their endorsement of rights and rules, have been questioned and rejected by feminists of all kinds in the past three decades as predominantly masculine theories. as has been well documented, since plato, women in the western world, and more especially those living in colonized territories, have been systematically associated with the illogical and the emotional, and have been placed outside moral and political spheres. the romans defined morality as being exclusively masculine: the word ‘virtue’ comes from the root ‘vir,’ meaning man. the enlightenment only corroborated this view, the german herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays thinker kant going as far as to assert in his moral philosophy: ‘of course, i exclude women, children, and idiots’ (in hekman 1995, 36). to counter the lethal effects of patriarchal morality, many women writers, aware as they were of the dangers of relying on generalizing notions and labels, have nonetheless developed an alternative ethics of care based on principles of sympathy, nurturing and compassion. carol gilligan’s works, in particular her book in a different voice (1982), can be said to have pioneered the development of this movement. gilligan states that ‘the moral imperative’ that emerges from a woman’s perspective is ‘an injunction to care, a responsibility to discern and alleviate the real and recognizable trouble of this world’ (1982, 19). while men’s main concern is not to interfere with the rights of others, gilligan goes on to argue, women are chiefly concerned with responsibility and relationships rather than rights and rules. in other words, women’s moral judgements are, on the whole, not normative, but contextual and narrative. in her more recent work (1995, 121-26), gilligan establishes a clear distinction between a feminine ethic and a feminist ethic of care. a feminine ethic is one that entails social obligations and self-sacrifice, and which is therefore concomitant with patriarchy. a feminist ethic of care begins with connection, that is, a thorough appreciation of how human lives and emotions are interconnected, to the point of becoming the voice of resistance. however true these views may be, they should never be considered in a vacuum, that is, as general assumptions that apply to all women in exactly the same way. many other social, economic, cultural and generational distinguishing factors should also be taken into consideration when analyzing particular authors, works and situations. as is well known, recent feminist scholarship has brought to the fore the heterogeneity of postcolonial experiences and the diversity of women’s lives within them.1 chandra talpade mohanty, to give one example, warns against the temptation to use the general or universal term ‘women’ in order to refer to the specific historical and material reality of particular groups of women. the work of postcolonial feminist critics has also been fundamental in bringing this clarification to the surface. spivak’s writings on the impossibility of subaltern (third world) women being heard, to mention but one of the 1 see, for instance, talpade mohanty et al. (1991), bulbeck (1998), and ghandi (1998). portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 2 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays most widely known critical works in this field, is an outstanding example. as she put it in her seminal work ‘can the subaltern speak?’ (1988), postcolonial subjects, and particularly women, are trapped within a space that enforces their silence. yet, the degree of alienation and repression they suffer will vary depending on their specific circumstances. the term ‘third world woman’ should not therefore be taken as universal and monolithic. nevertheless, the world-wide silencing of women, she goes on to argue, could be extrapolated to the whole colonial process and be thus indicative of patriarchal and colonial morality. winnie tomm (in haney 2002, 144) reaches a similar conclusion when she claims: ‘patriarchal morality is based on the desire for power over the other, beginning with sexual power over women and extending to political power over nations. the politics of sex has the same source as the politics of wars: ignorance, fear, and hostility toward the other.’ to put it differently, ethics in the developing world has to do, not only with the simple survival of human beings, but also with the survival of sheer humanness. ethics should not therefore be regarded as a secondary academic matter, but as utterly fundamental for human survival. moreover, to claim the well-known feminist tenet that ‘the personal is always political’ inevitably implies a discussion of an ethics that calls for responsibility in our actions and solidarity and reciprocity in our interactions. the women’s contributions so far mentioned were not an isolated phenomenon, however. although clearly feminist, they should also be regarded as part of a much wider critical trend, namely, ethical criticism. the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the emergence of what critics have labeled as an ethical turn, partly produced as a reaction against the cultural radicalism and relativism propounded by certain ideological conceptions of the postmodern era. the return of ethical criticism has not been, however, a homogeneous phenomenon. critics like wayne booth (1988) and martha nussbaum (2001), to mention but two well-known examples, have led an attempt to reintroduce the values of liberal humanism associated with matthew arnold (1882) and f. r. leavis (1933, 1948, 1982) in the academia, while j. hillis miller (1987), andrew gibson (1999) and christopher falzon (1998), among others, have made the case for a criticism informed by the deconstructive ethics mainly put forward by jacques derrida portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 3 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays (1989, 1991, 2001) and emmanuel levinas in his seminal works totality and infinity (1961) and otherwise than being or beyond essence (1974). the feminist works previously mentioned might be seen as anticipating and/or corroborating some of the conclusions reached by the latter cluster of critics, mainly concerned with defining and advocating a postmodern post-foundational ethics. this ethics clearly asserts that it is possible to make ethical claims without relying on normative codes, categorical imperatives, or universal moral principles because ‘there are no categories or concepts knowable prior to what becomes the decisive ethical moment in levinas’ philosophy: the encounter with the singular, irreducible other’ (kotte 2001, 71). according to levinas, ethical responsibility is prompted by the encounter with the other, or ‘the face,’ as he also refers to it. for him, the other is always radically different and resists being transformed or appropriated. our encounters with the other are often ruled by our attempts to assimilate it and transform it in terms of our categories of understanding. to put it differently, we strive to reduce the other to the same, which turns this ethical moment par excellence into a rather unethical imposition. this has been, according to andrew gibson, the characteristic mode and ultimate sin of western philosophy, which has systematically tried to ‘speak of and therefore master the other as whole, to reduce the other to the terms of the same’ (1999, 65). is there a way to escape this ‘unethical’ impulse towards the other? the only answer for levinas is to confidently open ourselves up to the experience of reciprocity and alterity. in other words, meeting the other on ethical grounds implies assuming that there are no monolithic truths, that we cannot possibly be in absolute control, nor be in possession of the absolute truth, and that the subject is in constant dialogue and transformation, since our encounter with the world involves a reciprocity, a two-way movement or interplay between ourselves and the world that inexorably turns our self into an ever-changing entity. as can be deduced after reading merlinda bobis’s poem-plays promenade (1998b) and cantata of the warrior woman (1998a), the main object of analysis of my paper, this author is mainly concerned with writing as an ‘ethical’ means, not only of doing away with fixed and rigid categories and classifications, but also of liberation and celebration of a shared experience among women, especially women who have been suppressed by portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 4 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays the combined oppression of religion, patriarchy and colonialism. these works clearly echo and enforce the ethical postulates so far discussed. merlinda bobis and the filipino traditions of writing to understand merlinda bobis’s position, one must take a number of factors into consideration. first, she was born in the philippines but now lives in australia. in other words, she has been carried across different cultures and cannot therefore be defined by making exclusive reference to any of them. second, unlike other filipino women authors, who have decided to write in only one language (either english or their mother tongue), bobis has deliberately chosen to write in both filipino and english, thus showing her defiant willingness to make use of what she regards as her rich bicultural heritage.2 writing in filipino, bobis, like many other filipino artists, contributes to preserving the culture and values of the indigenous peoples of her home country. it is undeniable, as marra pl. lanot affirms, that these cultural minorities, as elsewhere in the world, are relegated to the margins; their artistic manifestations are neither studied nor disseminated because these groups are far from the centres of media and education and consequently do not form part of mainstream culture (1997, para. 5). however, it is also true that ‘unlike some nations subjugated by foreign power, the philippines cradles indigenous people .... they still preserve and practise their ancient beliefs, customs, and traditions’ (1997, para. 4), despite the long periods of spanish and american colonization they suffered in the past. on the other hand, bobis’s poetical work in english, some of which i will focus on in this paper, can be seen as part, and inheritor, 2 as has been thoroughly documented, the question of whether to use english or tagalog/filipino as writing languages has been quite a complex and thorny issue for most filipino authors, since the privileging and enforcement of one or the other has mainly depended on the shifting phases of filipino history in the twentieth century. far from resenting english as the oppressor’s tongue (in 1898 the treaty of paris ended the spanish-american war and transferred sovereignty over the philippines from spain to the united states), most early-twentieth-century writers, especially women, welcomed it as an instrument of cultural advancement (because women and men began writing in english at the same time, the first generation of women writing in english did not suffer the sorts of anxieties that afflicted women in the west). yet, the inauguration in 1935 of the philippine commonwealth, which allowed for local autonomy while retaining u.s. tutelage, quickly led the new linguistic authorities to recommend writers the use of tagalog as the basis for the national language. the two languages have thus been competing with each other for decades. it was mainly thanks to the 1974 bilingual policy in education, which provided for the use of both filipino and english in the classrooms, that this dispute was almost definitely settled, notwithstanding the fact that linguistic choices are never—and will never be—neutral. for more information on the subject, see manlapaz (2000, 187-202). portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 5 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays of a rich tradition of filipino poetry in english. this tradition could be dated back to the early days of the twentieth century, and it taught her how to decolonize the english language, that is, to use it in a specifically filipino way. after all, english ceased to be the sole possession of the english a long time ago, which means that the use of english by any writer from a formerly colonized state should now be seen as an assertion of identity rather than as an indication of its loss. bobis’s poetical work could therefore be said to contribute to the consolidation of a new and rather more eclectic and liberating phase in the history of filipino poetry: ‘the open clearing’ that, according to gemino h. abad (2000, para. 16-20), began in the 1970s and has allowed filipino poetry to keep on flourishing since then.3 to take abad’s words again (2000, para.18), it could be asserted that bobis’s poetical works ‘[are] marked by a more heightened consciousness of language in the way it creates its own reality, together with a deep sense of the poem as artifice or a kind of double forgery: a forgery from language which itself is already a fiction of reality, and a forgery in one’s own consciousness from the reality outside language.’ last but not least, merlinda bobis also partakes in yet another interesting tradition, that of the filipino radical theatre that, since its origins in the late 1970s, has dealt with areas of conflict and social tension, particularly in relation to issues of class, gender, and ethnicity. among other things, this cultural movement took a prominent part in the fight against the dictatorship of ferdinand marcos. theatre is, without any doubt, one of the artistic manifestations that holds greater critical potential because, as gilbert and tompkins put it, its ‘capacity to intervene publicly in social organization and to critique political structures can be more extensive than the relatively isolated circumstances of written narrative and poetry; theatre practitioners, however, also run a greater risk of political intervention in their activities’ (1996, 3). the real power of theatre ‘lies in its ability to teach people how to think widely (steadman 1991, 78), against and/or beyond established ideologies, political oppression, even political correctness. if, as contemporary poststructuralist criticism has demonstrated, (official) history 3 a good and clear overview of filipino poetry in english over the last one hundred years is given by abad (2000, 327-31). portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 6 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays systematically offers a strategic presentation of certain views and a suppression of others, (postcolonial/ feminist) plays use similar strategies of (re)presentation in order to disclose other—and othered—historical perspectives and thus question the authority of official discourses. moreover, these plays also contribute to preserving pre-contact languages that are essential to oral traditions and their transmission of history and culture, thus establishing a linguistic gap (very often by using unglossed indigenous terms) that disproves notions of the infinite transmissibility of language (ashcroft 1989, 72). finally, they undermine the foundations of the cultural establishment by representing english since, as stated before, the fact that they use english does not necessarily mean that they endorse british values. to quote gilbert and tompkins again: a dramatic focus on oral traditions opens up the possibility of challenging the tyranny of the written word through which many imperial languages claim their authenticity. by restoring to oral discourses their topology as performance pieces, theatre allows the orality of post-colonial languages to be fully realised, especially since each performance defers and deflects the authority of any written script. this descripted (performative) model of orality refers not to a language that has never been written, but to one which is unwritable at its moment of enunciation. (1996, 167) yet, this critical potential often cuts both ways. not only do these plays criticize the values upon which mainstream white culture relies, but they bring to the fore as well the battles and disagreements that characterized the time before western colonization. in other words, many of these playwrights, among whom bobis could be included, do not offer a static or rarefied image of their peoples. they no longer perpetuate wrong conceptions of the past by confronting a harmonious (and consequently utopian) precontact period with the dismal post-contact past and present. on the other hand, this representation of multifarious disputes on both sides of the divide may also have some healing power because, however inflammable these conflicts may be, they also ‘present an opportunity for dialogue, joint struggle, and provisional resolutions capable of releasing previously untapped social power’ (bodden 1996, 1). indeed, joining in the struggle of other filipino women activist writers and playwrights, such as the founders of women’s activist movements like makibara, women or gabriella,4 in her 4 for more information on the origins, aims and strategies of filipino radical theatre and activists see bodden (1996, 24-6). portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 7 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays poem-plays bobis has insisted on denouncing past mistakes while also expressing her determined belief in reconciliation. promenade and cantata of the warrior woman among other things, merlinda bobis’s plays bring to the fore the fact that family and gender are fundamental components in the configuration of nationalism and a sense of national identity, thus corroborating anne mcclintock’s well-known assumption that nationalist discourses often rely on the trope of family in order to naturalize their particular constructions of community and belonging. as mcclintock sees it (1993, 625), the image of family ascribed to national narratives presumes the subordination of women to men, and consequently strives to legitimate notions of the nation as something that should naturally imply hierarchy as well. moreover, the very notion of family is related to notions of genesis and chronological development, which means that the ruling figures of the family are also entitled to formulate, direct, and control that development. in other words, nationalism has always been a gendered discourse, and cannot be understood, let alone questioned and undermined, without a theory of gender power. bobis’s poem-plays promenade (1998b) and cantata of the warrior woman (1998a) are excellent examples of such vindication, since these plays clearly show that class society, nationalism, and by extension all kinds of colonial processes, have been constituted and based upon the subordination of women to men. therefore, the questioning and abolition of gender inequalities is absolutely central to the creation of a free and egalitarian society, one that transcends, and radically transforms, the patriarchal definitions of morality upon which the so-far official notions of individual and national identity have been erected. by putting forward a quest for national, collective and individual identity through reconstructing the lost voices of women in history, these poem-plays emphasize the importance of communication between self and other as the only way to give tolerance and peace a chance. significantly, it is bobis’s occasional—and obsessive—reliance on rigid binarisms that paradoxically leads the reader to question their pertinence and validity. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 8 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays promenade is a wonderful example of this. this performance poem was originally written as a poetry-dance drama for four actors: woman dark, woman light, man light, and man dark. to make confrontation and dualism even more obvious, they come from two different, or rather antagonistic, places: the other side of the mountain and the other side of the river. the emphasis on their shared otherness speaks for itself: no matter how strongly we try to detach self from other, the other is a quintessential part of our selves. as the woman dark concludes (1998b, 52): but you are me under my dark palm heart of a white cheek white lip white neck white breast white hip is dark the lack of mutual knowledge and understanding can only lead to confrontation. since each group assumes that the others have ‘two left feet,’ they cannot dance together. in other words, the members of both groups refuse to communicate with one another, to the point that they all become left-footed dancers who dance out ‘a troy a babylon/… korea and vietnam/ … the nicaraguan cry/ … a filipino coup/ … tibet rwanda/ …’ (59-60), in a word, war. it is only when a new dance music is played and heard that ‘the seams of history [can be] stitch[ed]’ (64), that they can finally dance, and this conciliatory dance, full of sexual overtones, is regarded as something absolutely necessary, something they all wished and longed for but never dared to confess. woman dark: lover lover what is that new dance music all about? man light: it is about the road to ithaca as far and empty as the eye can reach as the song can reach woman dark: and who is playing that song? man light: only no one my dear only no one woman dark: but someone must play portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 9 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays because someone must dance man light: perhaps it is the wind or our wish for a wind playing it (62) appearances can be terribly deceptive, and apparent opposites can end up being one and the same thing. parallelisms and contrasts between syntactical structures (for example: woman dark: ‘we did out-come the end/ did we not? [51], versus man light: ‘we could not out-come/ out-dance the end/ could we? [66]), make it clear that nothing is what it seems to be. the only certain things are uncertainty and the need to keep on searching for answers, for bridges, for strings that unite rather than barriers that divide. moreover, it would be no exaggeration to affirm that this outstanding reliance on visual binaries (male/female; and dark/light) also contributes to questioning discourses that naturalize gender hierarchies, while recuperating female subjectivities by showing that ‘gender is an ideology mapped across the body in and through representation’ (gilbert and tompkins 1996, 212). bobis’s plays particularly question rigid and binary categorizations that have systematically relegated women to silence and invisibility, in the preand post-contact periods alike. they verify and authorize woman’s presence, vision and experience, mainly by focusing on the experience of compassion and care between women, and on the need for women to overcome the sense of rivalry that has been instilled by the patriarchy. furthermore, bobis’s works often propose an escape from the established (male) space and the rigid taxonomies that conform it into a mythical—and therefore utopian—space (a place out of time and space) in which women can be free from male control and can survive and communicate without boundaries. cantata of the warrior woman daragang magayon (1998a) could be offered as a good illustration of this. as bobis has explained (1994, 117-29), this poem-play was an attempt to adapt the tradition of epic chanting (strongly identified with women in the philippines) and to question and rewrite its mythical content, which in the past basically dealt with the deeds of male warriors. she recognized the subversive potential of this genre when she spoke of transplanting contemporary politics into the myth-now-rewritten and using portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 10 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays this oral tradition as a more inclusive mode of resistance to oppressive regimes of all kinds. the cantata retells a traditional myth about mount mayon in bikol, bobis’s home region in southern luzon island of the philippines. this well-known myth tells the story of princess daragang magayon (‘beautiful maiden’), who rebelled against the determination of her fate by the male elders, who simply regarded her as an item of war booty traded by powerful men. she refuses to become the commodified object that male authority trades at will, or the symbolic exchange that cements relationships between men, and decides instead to fight for her freedom and that of her tribe. so strong and subversive is her potential that her grave will eventually grow into an active volcano. however filipino the topic may be, it is clear that the poem’s feminist agenda might just as well be extrapolated to many other places, and most particularly to australia, bobis’s host country. as has been well established, australian culture has been constructed as an essentially masculine one. within this domain, woman has been relegated to a marginal position where she has been given neither place nor voice. she has often been excluded as the subject of representation, and has been instead spoken for, to the point of becoming, to quote shaffer’s expression, ‘the colonised sex’ (1990, 8) in a predominantly phallocentric culture.5 significantly enough, throughout the poem-play, the protagonist refuses to be objectified (‘i am more than body./ i am heart. i am mind./ i am mine. i am mine’ [86]), to remain fixed within a single role, and by extension to be contained and imprisoned by rigidified naming. she soon realizes that she cannot possibly identify with the several names she has been given: ‘beautiful maiden,’ ‘the betrothed of pagtuga’ (the 5 one of the reasons for the dominant role ascribed to man in australia lies in the special relationship that he maintains with yet another important leitmotif of the australian tradition: the land. much of the socalled australian myth of nation responds to the male desire to control and possess an alien land in order to reaffirm his position as master and conqueror. meanwhile, the western conception of the land as something female (the so-called ‘mother earth’) places woman both outside and within the australian bush tradition. as shaffer remarks, woman functions as a metaphoric sign for the australian landscape: functioning as the fetishist other, the land-as-woman is represented as the negative component that man must appropriate in order to reassert his identity. she is, in shaffer’s words, the ‘harsh, cruel, threatening, fickle, castrating mother. she is dangerous, non-nurturing and not to be trusted’ (1990, 62). portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 11 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays enemy chief), and ‘the young of makusog’ (her father). these are not ‘her’ names. male authorities have imposed them on her, with the sole purpose of subjecting and reducing her to a fixed image they can easily manipulate and control. once they called me daragang magayon, a name that means beautiful maiden. a curse lurked in that name. i was hair, eyes, lips, breasts and feet of fire. i was holy. i was religion. maiden-bound, i was desired; bold hunter’s bounty, game and fruit trembling close to seeking lips and teeth that sink to tame. i was. i was a name. (77) daragang magayon knows that it is the sense of reality and value of her name-givers, and not her own, that strives to take hold of her. she must resist the temptation to acquiesce and get therefore entangled in their inflexible definitions, which prevent her from inventing herself. how easy then to succumb to the cosy little room that makes a given name; the space is cleared and cut for you. you can grow without wondering how far. ay, only to that other end, that final letter crouched against the wall. (97-8) to escape this lethal confinement, she ‘unnames’ herself, thus doing away with her former condition of embodiment of existing signs in order to become ‘the nameless one who is all names’ (78), that is, the creator of fluid and ever-changing meanings. ay, once, i might have been a fish. or a coral. or an anemone. or a stone. and we can be fish, coral, anemone, stone, even water. and we can rush to shore. and be the brine. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 12 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays and leap to air. and be the wind. how we speak many names beyond old names. we touch skin and shed skin. we remember self and find another. (144) this passage could also be said to illustrate bobis’s difficult creative journey. as she herself has affirmed when discussing this controversial poem-play, ‘i also attempted to unname/rename my self and my chosen literary form by breaking restrictive traditions. i refused to be ‘fixed’ under absolute definitions of gender and ethnic background’ (1994, 118). artists endowed with what might be called ‘a hyphenated identity’ are often misunderstood and attacked by people who insist on clinging to a rigid and monolithic concept of culture and selfhood. for many asian-australian women artists, and merlinda bobis is no exception, looking/sounding too australian, that is, too assimilated, often leads to accusations of having betrayed her people and abandoned her roots.6 on the other hand, attempting to keep the links with the original community, cultural history, and ethnic customs, may lead others to deny the asian-australian woman the right to claim an ‘australian’ identity.7 the cantata of the warrior woman recreates, in this context, a traditional epic by subverting its conventions. in other words, this poem-play is a hybrid text that openly defies long-established cultural and generic divisions and classifications. on the one 6 after watching bobis’s major performance in australia, a well-known manila critic accused her of having hybridized, and thus betrayed, tradition and co-opted with the west. he argued that the west should not have been able to make sense of the performance, because their words are too limited to understand the other, and went as far as to assert that, if westerners could understand the work, then it was no longer valid for filipinos (bobis 1994, 127). 7 as tseen-ling khoo claims, asian-australian women’s writings have often been underestimated by critics because, on many occasions, ‘reviews and readings are carried out against a backdrop of the australian popular cultural perception of asia as economic frontier, and asian peoples as tourists or potential business partners, if not refugees’ (2005, para.1). it is also undeniable that australia’s former ‘white’/ xenophobic attitudes can still sometimes stand in the way of the production of sound and nonbiased analyses of works by non-anglo-celtic authors. in particular, asian-australian women writers find it especially difficult to see and express themselves as ‘australian’ due to australia’s long history of rejection of and discrimination towards asians. moreover, the use of the term ‘ethnic writing,’ although more and more in disuse, can at times be taken as a synonym of ‘marginal’ or ‘second-class writing’ or, to take linda carroli’s words, “as an agglomeration of minority and esoteric experience that has no real value to the professionalized arts of the dominant culture” (1994, 333). portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 13 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays hand, it contains elements that clearly connect it with filipino indigenous and other traditional epics: it is a long narrative poem; war and the healing process that follows are its main subjects; it is written in elevated/ archaic style; the warrior woman is depicted against both natural and supernatural worlds that connect her with both history and myth; the fate of the tribe depends on the hero’s—in this case heroine’s—actions. nevertheless, this is not a traditional epic. tradition should also be revised and questioned: ‘what wisdom in tradition/ that can kill’ (99). to begin with, and in clear contrast with most traditional epics, which put the emphasis on courage and heroism in combat, the cantata deplores war and the use of violence, of which helpless women and children are usually the victims. in this poem-play, the protagonist feels compelled to rebel against such treatment, which deprives women of their freedom and their right to play an active role in history, while denying them the possibility of receiving any kind of social recognition. how wide our battlefield, but how narrow our palms, always unfurled, always vulnerable. the master decides there are no fists for us. no wonder, even in our dance, we turn only with open hands. no clutching of the wind for us; leave all the clutching to the sons. (128) the warrior woman fights against those who glorify war and conquest (‘there is always another war/ after every war’ [135]), and brings to the fore the suffering and resilience of women: but all of us suffer both bed and blade. all of us daughters waiting to be dragged by strange hands. all of us unarmed and crouching from the dark. all of us who are baptised by our wombs. and cut in its name. all of us who are not sons. (130) women’s persistent endurance is, more often than not, much more heroic than men’s portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 14 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays momentary courage at war. the warriors who have fought in battle are praised and immortalized in great epics, whereas the women who kept things going while the men were away, and who must cope with their irreparable losses after the war (‘they say we have won./ but i am looking for my son’ [135]), are relegated to oblivion. women’s fundamental contribution to the survival and healing of the nation can no longer be ignored. the very notion of the ‘heroic’ is therefore put to the test. when the blades are buried, there are more heroes. and theirs is not courage of a sudden flash surging when the foe is close, not the tightening of flesh for that lethal blow. it is a courage long and drawn-out like a breath, air endlessly pursuing air. (135) the warrior woman is finally caught in a dilemma: to fight or not to fight. however much she dislikes war, it seems there is no other way out, since she wholly refuses to ‘buy’ peace by becoming the enemy’s wife. the elders talked about my womb again and sons, the likes of pagtuga. meanwhile, the pirates hunted our tribe every season, but father was too old to battle them. too much blood pounded on our doors. (124) i would not be fodder for old men who live to hunt. (107) i can be warrior at fourteen like all the other boys. did you not call me the young of the strong one? did you not know my cunning in the hunt? give me a fair battle now. if i should die, let it not be by my other name, daragang magayon, that only waits to be uttered by the pulse of his loin. (129) portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 15 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays the fact that the main character is not a hero but the warrior woman also contributes to the controversial nature of this work. most heroines in traditional narratives, filipino folk epics being no exception, are commonly depicted as secondary characters. in these tales, the hero always plays the active and courageous part, whereas women remain powerless and passive. merlinda bobis has managed to counter this gender distinction by offering a female hero who resembles heroic characters in filipino history. as bobis says: from the babaylan (shaman) of precolonial philippines to the amazona (filipina guerilla of the left) of contemporary times, we have a tradition of warrior women who led their own epic lives. the female guerillas, peasant revolutionaries and union organisers –who have defied the colonising spaniards, americans, japanese and, more recently, the filipino politicos and military– can easily replace the masculine model of the epic hero. indeed, one of my country’s most celebrated heroes gabriela silang, who fought against the spaniards in the mid-eighteenth century, became one of my major inspirations. (1994. 121-22) the cantata, therefore, defies well-known epic conventions while apparently relying on them. again, appearances can be rather deceptive. this poem-play makes it clear from the very beginning that the warrior woman is the bard who will tell the story, and its opening is no different from that of most traditional epics that begin in medias res, during the preparation for battle. yet, in this case it is not a god, but the heroine’s own distaste for war that paralyzes her. moreover, if the prologue in most traditional epics is an invocation to the muse, gods or spirits, here the prologue is nothing but a statement of the play’s main argument, namely, the rejection of logocentrism or, to put it in simpler terms, the questioning of either/or distinctions and fixed meanings. ambiguity of form is yet another significant issue. the cantata is generically ambiguous, since it cannot be categorized as being simply epic, dramatic, or lyric. it is all three in one. as roger sworder puts it (in bobis 1994, 124): what you were doing was realising something more than epic –more like drama. but it is not truly dramatic, because you have only one actor. and because the dimensions of personality that you are exploring are not personal at all, it is not lyric either, although it is revelatory of the innermost feelings of the character. there is nothing particular about your warrior woman. she is the personification of ‘the female,’ the fact that your work is about ‘the female/ feminine’ rather than ‘this female’ is probable what gives it its epic spirit. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 16 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays in keeping with this statement, the cantata could be offered as an example of hybridized theatrical discourse. on the one hand, it incorporates traditional/ indigenous elements, which involve a departure from the techniques and assumptions of realism, for so long the ruling mode of conventional western plays. on the other hand, it vindicates the validity—and pertinence—of other modes of representation. this consequently affects the play’s content, structure and style, and its overall meaning and effect. traditional/indigenous enactments are not only mnemonic devices that help preserve history, but are also effective strategies for maintaining cultural difference through specific systems of communication (aural, visual, and kinetic) and through specific values inherent to local and pre-contact customs (gilbert and tompkins 1996, 54). one of those empowering traditional/indigenous elements is ritual. ritual plays have the power to situate their subjects and actions outside western epistemologies, thus escaping the teleological assumptions of linear time. furthermore, this non-naturalistic theatre denounces how space is constructed by culture and power, and strives to make the processes of participation conscious and powerful, as they become part of a larger communal—and political—project of liberation from different kinds of cultural oppression. as gilbert and tompkins put it (1996, 76-8): a theatre practice informed by ritual aims to do more than merely keep the spectator aesthetically engaged. like other forms of political theatre, it foregrounds belief systems and demands some kind of active response. and while ritual is a central way of transforming and simultaneously maintaining the spiritual and social health of a society, it has also shaken the geographic boundaries that colonisation erected, as illustrated throughout the [different forms of] diaspora by the increasing emphasis on ritual-based traditional enactments in theatre practice and in more general forms of cultural expression. music and dance also play a fundamental role in this critical project, and are often a quintessential part of ritual. transformations of the postcolonial female body are often theatricalized through rhythmic movement such as dance, which highlights the performing body, both as ‘the site of knowledge-power’ and as ‘a site of resistance’ (grosz 1990, 64). portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 17 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays splitting the focus from other sorts of kinetic and linguistic codes, dance renegotiates dramatic action, gilbert and tompkins have claimed (1996, 239-40), thus reinforcing the actor’s corporeality, especially when it is culturally laden. dance is a form of spatial inscription and thus a way of embodying and defying the domineering aspects of western culture and thought. moreover, dance recuperates postcolonial subjectivity by centralizing traditional and non-verbal forms of self-representation. located within a dramatic text, dance often denaturalizes theatre’s signifying practices by disrupting narrative sequence and/or genre. in other words, dance draws attention to the constructedness of all dramatic and, by extension, artistic representation, thus pointing to its potential as an alienating device in the brechtian sense. yet, it is also worth mentioning that in many plays, like the ones discussed here, traditional dances and styles of movement are hybridized with western form and fashion, so that the dance presented to the audience is no longer a reified traditional art but a staged artistic process. this does not deprive such dances of their power to function as acts of cultural retrieval, and nor does it turn them into a sign of acculturation, as some primitivist critics have claimed. on the contrary, these hybrid dance forms express a polyvalent and versatile identity that takes tradition into account while refusing to be confined under the sign of ‘authenticity.’ rituals and ritual dances are a quintessential part of the cantata. not only do they help the action unravel, but they also add further layers of symbolism and meaning that the reader/spectator must try and decipher so as to be able to integrate them into an everchanging but ultimately coherent whole. the repetitive and circular nature of rituals is clearly brought to the fore. yet, repetition also implies variation. ‘this has been done before./ it must be done again today/ and tomorrow. rituals repeat/ themselves as in chanting./ never a break between’ (99). different circumstances but the same injustice, this poem-play invites us to conclude. it is also made clear from the very beginning that women and men have separate ritual ceremonies, and that they are of a very different nature. men’s ceremonies are often celebratory. they celebrate the power and control they exert over all the other members of the community, especially women, as when makusog and pagtuga celebrate the sandugo, whereby they draw and drink each portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 18 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays other’s blood in ritual to their new deal and to seal daragang magayon’s fate as the betrothed of his father’s former enemy. women’s rituals, on the contrary, represent the female condition as one of imprisonment, while simultaneously or, by turns, enacting fantasies of women’s power and capacity to disrupt and defy the very confinement that has been imposed upon them. the beauty rite that the midwife must enact when the princess is born speaks for itself: women, no matter how high their social position may be, are denied the right to think and are reduced to the condition of bodies, whose only function is to please the ruling males and bear them new (male) warriors and (female) bodies. ‘a heavy piece of wood on the brow/ and another pressed/ against the back of the head/ to flatten the skull –there./ pity the newborn. the pressing/ wood/ will break her skull.’ (99). on the other hand, although the kibang (183-93) makes it clear that it is women that have to take the mortal risk to ask the oracle (it is the warriors that ultimately ask/tell daragang magayon to undertake the pilgrimage to the shore for the divination), it also assigns them powers and wisdom of which men seem to be deprived, as when magindara, the oracle, says to the princess: ‘you are nameless./ yet you own all names.’ (189). ‘a dead fish’ is the right answer to the oracle’s riddle ‘what fish does not swim against the current?’ as soon as daragang magayon is able to utter it, she undergoes a fantastic metamorphosis. all of a sudden, she turns into an older, and therefore wiser, woman, till she is again allowed, mainly thanks to the other women’s prayers in the ritual of the sakom, to come round, recover her previous appearance and, most important of all, persevere in her fight against the wishes of the male elders, who only want her to marry the enemy who is to subdue and annihilate her and her people. death awaits all of them, but after the massacre the mountain becomes and enacts ‘the ascent of rage/ and grief of a whole tribe.’ and is ‘deeply furrowed/ by the universal scar.’ (197), thus becoming the ultimate embodiment of the power and need of subversive resilience and resistance. reconciliation is to be desired and sought but so far it still is a remote possibility: ‘flight is song/ on four wings./ the fifth wind/ does not sing.’ (200). by introducing and interweaving such traditional elements as epic chanting, unglossed indigenous words, ritual and dance the cantata has managed to become a successful portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 19 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays attempt to re-invent both western and indigenous theatrical discourses, and thus to question all kinds of clear-cut divisions and binarisms. merlinda bobis has hybridized tradition, has transcended the rigid framework of any particular culture to create her own form, that is, to create herself. creative blood runs into multiple arteries and veins, while sifting then picking up new and even alien treasures along the way. then, when it has made its full trip to return to the heart, it cannot pretend that it is still of a preciously pure consistency—or of a definite identity or name. in its multiplicity of urges—steeped in tradition, contemporaneity and various cultures and tongues—creative blood might as well be a nameless hybrid. (bobis 1994, 128) significantly, when daragang magayon learns how to dance with the rest of the women in the tribe she also learns the most important lesson. she is no longer superior to them. as soon as the princess remembers with them, dances with them, she gets rid of all the restrictions imposed on her by male authority and is able to transcend all differences to become one with them. dance, in this case, is not only a mode of empowerment for oppressed characters, but also an equalizer, a physical and social force that does away with hierarchies even as it highlights the specific idiosyncrasy of the various participants. despite their differences of class, occupation and age, the women dancers enact a vision of unity, however utopian. this explains why these ritualistic dances are regarded as a threat by the ruling male authorities, whose ability to keep social order mainly depends on the preservation of social divisions. the women on stage celebrate this harmonious unity exclaiming: she is no princess. she is no beautiful maiden. she is not the young of her father. she is not the betrothed of the murderer. she is water. she is stone. she is bird. (153) life, like truth, the cantata seems to assert, is never monolithic. it is tremendously complex, ever-changing and fluid. if we insist on applying our own cultural parameters, portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 20 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays rules and taxonomies to the study of other cultures, we will never manage to communicate with them and, by so doing, get to know ourselves, because the ‘other’ is also part of ourselves, however hard we may try to repress and deny it: ‘blindness and fear;/ fear and blindness,/ what closest kin’ (91). in the context of this complex world society, the role of the writer/performer is that of a bridge, a translator who can go beyond apparent differences to search for unity. in the poem-play analyzed here, women seem to be better equipped to make this discovery. to quote the words uttered by sirangan, the princess’s maid: with this ripening of womb, could we not ripen in the mind to clear the eye and see a single world between earth and sky? the right to be human is born with everyone as bones lending shape to flesh. this is no boon bestowed by the branding eye. red is the only colour of all wombs. red is the only colour of all blood under different skins. (91-2) yet, sisterhood is not the end of the story. the main issue that the cantata brings to the fore is that fear does not men and women alike from their obligation to be ethical, that is, to engage in a communal dance, in an open-ended dialogue with the world and the others, to open themselves to the experience of alterity that, alone, will let us grow and make a better world possible. daragang magayon verbalizes what some human beings have known for centuries: i toast to all humanity. small and big, the same worth. big and small, the same use. this was their tigsik before. this is still our toast today. (...) in the years after that dance in the ritual of the halya, i saw how all hands of different colours portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 21 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays push the earth to turn. one hand could bind all hands, but the world spins on – the pulse unknots the fear. this drum beats, breaks, burns the cord. (93-94) not only does merlinda bobis embody the push and pull between different cultures and languages but also, and more importantly, she ultimately transcends these barriers. for her, it is in this liminal space, to take homi bhabha’s well-known words, that ‘we can speak of others and ourselves. and by exploring this hybridity, this third space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves’ (1988, 8). since there are no monolithic truths, we cannot possibly be in absolute control, and the subject is in constant dialogue and transformation. similarly, the multiple histories that circulate in postcolonial societies (the philippines, australia, and so on) overlap, intersect and compete with one another. they can be neither fused into a singular national (or any other kind of) narrative nor completely separated from one another or from their own particular contexts. history remains a site of struggle and contention, a hybridized discourse laden with contradictions and conflicts. consequently, solutions are to be made, not learned, hence the need to create ‘ethical’ discourses that incorporate the stories, desires and frustrations of the multitude of people who make up a nation or community. in short, political and cultural pluralism should be enforced, since this is the only way in which univocal and oppressive ideologies (patriarchal, colonial, and so on) can be dismantled so as to give a chorus of never-ending voices the chance to make a claim for shared authenticity and authority, for mutual tolerance, understanding, and care. the ethics of care is, therefore, the ethics of the future. it has often been taken up as the ethics of feminism. yet, to claim this ethics for one gender will be absurd, since we will be doing precisely what we are trying to discard and condemn. the ethics of care are, and should be, not only genderless, but also trans-gender, trans-national, trans-cultural. as citizens of this difficult, complex and globalized era, we should try and cling to a code of ethics that makes comprehension and communication possible along such ‘trans’ lines. the question is: will the pulse unknot the fear? will this drum beat, break and burn the cord? portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 22 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays acknowledgements the research carried out for the writing of this paper was financed by the m.c.y.t. (ministerio de ciencia y tecnología). d.g.i./feder, proyecto hum2004-00344/filo. a previous and rather shorter draft of this paper was presented at the 8th biennial easa conference: re-visions of australia: histories, images, identities, which was held in september 2005 in debrecen, hungary, and will soon be published in hungarian journal of english and american studies with the title ‘merlinda bobis’s re-evaluation of personal and (multi)national ethics and identity: cantata of the warrior woman.’ reference list abad, g.h. 2000, ‘one hundred years of filipino poetry: an overview,’ world literature today, vol. 74, no. 2, 327-331. arnold, m. (1882) 1992, culture and anarchy and other writings, cambridge university press, cambridge. ashcroft, b. 1989, ‘constitutive graphonomy: a post-colonial theory of literary writing,’ kunapipi, vol. 11, no. 1, 58-73. bhabha, h. 1988, ‘the commitment to theory,’ new formations, vol. 5, 5-23. bobis, m. 1994, ‘re-inventing the epic: notes on adapting a traditional genre,’ australian drama studies, vol. 25, (october), 117-29. ______ 1998a, ‘cantata of the warrior woman daragang magayon,’ in summer was a fast train without terminals, spinifex press, melbourne, 67-200. ______ 1998b, ‘promenade,’ in summer was a fast train without terminals, spinifex press, melbourne, 45-66. bodden, m.h. 1996, frontiers. boulder, vol. 16, no. 2-3, 24-26. booth, w.c. 1988, the company we keep: an ethics of fiction, university of california press, berkeley. bulbeck, c. 1998, re-orienting western feminisms: women’s diversity in a postcolonial world, cambridge university press, cambridge. carroli, l. 1994, ‘out of the melting pot into the fire,’ meanjin vol. 53, no. 2, 327-36. derrida, j. 1989, memoires for paul de man, trans. j. culler, c. lindsay, and e. cadava, columbia university press, new york. ______ (1991) 1995, the gift of death, trans. d. wills, university of chicago press, chicago. ______ 2001, on cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, routledge, london. falzon, c. 1998, foucault and the social dialogue: beyond fragmentation, routledge, london and new york. ghandi, l. 1998, postcolonial theory: a critical introduction, columbia university press, new york. gibson, a. 1999, postmodernity, ethics and the novel: from leavis to levinas, routledge, london and new york. gilbert, h., and tompkins, j. 1996, postcolonial drama: theory, practice, politics, routledge, london and new york. gilligan, c. 1982, in a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development, harvard university press, cambridge, mass. ______ 1995, ‘hearing the difference: theorizing connection,’ hypatia 10.2 (1995), 121-26. grosz, e. 1990, ‘inscriptions and body-maps: representations of the corporeal,’ in feminine/ masculine and representation, eds t. threadgold and a. cranny-francis, allen & unwin, sydney, 62-74. haney, d.g. 2002, ‘ethics and identity: postcolonial feminist perspectives,’ in ethics and subjectivity in literary and cultural studies, eds william s. haney and nicholas o. pagan, peter lang, bern, 143-158. hekman, j. s. 1995, moral voices, moral selves: carol gilligan and feminist moral theory, polity press, cambridge. khoo, t. n.d., ‘someone’s private zoo: asian australian women’s writing’ [online]. available: http://www.calgary.ca/uofc/eduweb/engl392/492a/articles/zoo.html [accessed 18 march 2005] kotte, c. 2001, ethical dimensions in british historiographic metafiction: julian barnes, graham swift, penelope lively, wissenschaflicher verlag trier, trier. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 23 herrero merlinda bobis’s poem-plays lanot, m.pl. 1997, ‘poetry as a people’s right is also a woman’s right,’ heritage [online], vol. 11, no. 1 (spring), 35-6. leavis, f.r. 1933, culture and environment: the training of critical awareness (with denys thompson), chatto & windus, london; oxford university press, toronto. ______ 1948, the great tradition: george eliot, henry james, joseph conrad, chatto & windus, london; clarke irwin, toronto. ______ 1982, the critic as anti-philosopher, ed g. singh, chatto & windus, london. levinas, e. (1961) 1969, totality and infinity, trans. a. lingis, duquesne university press, pittsburgh, pa. ______ (1974) 1981, otherwise than being or beyond essence, trans. a. lingis, martinus nijhoff, the hague. manlapaz, e.z. 2000, ‘literature in english by filipino women,’ feminist studies, vol. 26, no. 1, (spring), 187-201. mcclintock, a. 1993, ‘family feuds: gender, nationalism and the family,’ feminist review, vol. 44, (summer), 62-5. miller, j.h. 1987, the ethics of reading: kant, de man, eliot, trollope, james, and benjamin, columbia university press, new york. nussbaum, martha c. 2001, upheavals of thought. the intelligence of emotions, cambridge university press, london and new york. schaffer, k. 1990, women and the bush. forces of desire in the australian cultural tradition. cambridge university press, cambridge. spivak, g.c. 1988, ‘can the subaltern speak?,’ in marxism and the interpretation of culture, eds c. nelson and l. grossberg, university of illinois press, chicago, 271-313. steadman, i. 1991, ‘theatre beyond apartheid,’ research in african literatures, vol. 22, no. 3, 77-90. talpade mohanty c., russo, a., and torres, l. (ed.) 1991, third world women and the politics of feminism, indiana university press, bloomington. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 24 portal v11 no 1 jan 2014 pohlman copyedit&galley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. stigma and exclusion in cross-cultural contexts special issue, guest edited by annie pohlman, sol rojas-lizana and maryam jamarani. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. incitement to genocide against a political group: the anticommunist killings in indonesia annie pohlman, university of queensland the path to genocide and the eradication of a political group cast out this spawn of hell root and branch, tear down the walls of their ideological edifices, plough salt into the sterile sands of their alien mental beachhead, let communism nevermore sojourn in this nation. (djakarta daily mail, editorial, 11 december 1965) in 1965 indonesia’s government was overthrown by its military. in the months that followed the military, together with numerous civilian militia groups, eradicated the left from indonesia. through massacres, mass executions, mass arrests and many other forms of grievous human rights abuses, the military and their civilian counterparts effectively wiped out both leftist ideology and those who supported it. the main victims of these killings and mass arrests were members, or alleged sympathisers, of the mass-supported partai komunis indonesia (pki, indonesian communist party) and its associated organisations. an estimated 500,000 people were killed during the anticommunist purges between 1965 and 1968, and more than one million others were rounded up and held in political detention, where many were subjected to torture, starvation and forced labour over many years.1 in this article i argue that the indonesian killings of 1965–1968 constitute political genocide; perhaps the clearest example of genocide against a political group in the twentieth century. by terming the indonesian killings a case of political genocide, i 1 please note that small sections of this paper appeared in earlier versions (pohlman 2010, 2012). for a recent collection of analyses on these events, see kammen & mcgregor (2012). pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 2 argue two points. the first relates to the exclusion of political groups from the 1948 united nations convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (hereafter, the genocide convention), hence my examination here and critique of the grounds upon which the exclusion was made. i also outline the political situation in indonesia prior to the coup and explain how the country went through a process of increasingly violent political pillarisation, effectively creating the conditions for the eradication of the left. while i argue for the inclusion of political groups within the genocide convention, i also question what use such an inclusion would be to the victims of these atrocities. the second part of my argument pertains to the incitement for the indonesian killings, which is also an international crime under the genocide convention. i contend that the indonesian military incited the killings through a hate propaganda campaign. as a result of this propaganda, leftists in indonesia experienced extreme forms of dehumanisation and social death that, in turn, facilitated their eradication. i examine the propaganda in terms of incitement and culpability on the part of the indonesian military, and highlight some recent developments in international criminal law on incitement to genocide that may prove instructive in the indonesian case. just as the indonesian killings are a clear case of political genocide, the indonesian military’s anti-communist propaganda is a clear case of incitement. this incitement was a causal factor in the mobilisation of parts of the indonesian population to participate in the eradication of the left as it facilitated the dehumanisation and social death of communist party members and their associates. philosopher claudia card argues that social death is central to genocide because it involves not only atrocities against members of a persecuted group in order to bring about their destruction but also the eradication of that group’s ‘social vitality’; their social bonds, their intergenerational and community ties and culture. as card states, ‘the very idea of selecting victims by social group identity suggests that it is not just the physical life of victims that is targeted but the social vitality behind that identity’ (2003: 76). these extreme forms of persecution are a product of progressively more violent acts, whereby a group of people are gradually isolated and then made targets for increasingly frequent attacks on their livelihoods, rights and then their lives. essential to this progression towards genocide is the identification and then persecution of a group as well as the incitement to violence pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 3 against its members. in the field of comparative genocide studies, there are a number of studies which examine the progressive ‘stages’ of the escalation into genocide, such as the models provided by stanton (1998) and mayersen (2010: 20–21), each classifying the identification of the persecuted group and measures taken with the intent to incite violence as key steps in the aetiology of genocidal violence. in the indonesian case, this progression to genocidal violence took a direct route. the premise for the eradication of the left in indonesia was an attempted coup d’état on the night of 30 september 1965. the coup itself, in which six top-ranking generals were kidnapped and killed in the capital, jakarta, marked the beginning of the campaign against leftists in indonesia. the indonesian military seized the opportunity to destroy its main political rival, the communist party, in the resulting upheaval. within days, parts of the remaining military leadership began a propaganda campaign that incited various religious and nationalist civilian militia groups to join the army in eradicating communist supporters. to appreciate the pervasive nature of this propaganda campaign, it is crucial to note that almost all media outlets in indonesia were either closed or came under the control of the military within only a few weeks following the coup. this effectively meant that the indonesian military was able to control the public’s access to information at the national level.2 the propaganda campaign was an elaborate and calculated mixture of stories, warnings and instructions that were spread by radio and in newsprint media. these included intricate tales claiming that the pki had secretly been planning to take over the country and wipe out non-communist supporters. evidence for these plans was provided in entirely false reports of pki weapons caches, death lists and mass graves allegedly having been dug for the bodies of their enemies. the stories made up about the coup itself, however, featured most prominently within the propaganda. there were allegations that the generals had been mutilated and tortured by having their eyes plucked out and their genitals sliced off. there were also accusations that members of communist organisations, particularly those from gerwani (the women’s movement) and pemuda rakyat (the youth wing of the pki), had carried out these sadistic acts of 2 some of the most prominent newspapers at the time included those under direct military control, such as angkatan bersenjata (ab, the armed forces), berita yudha (by, army news), and duta masyarakat (dm, envoy of society). other papers central to the propaganda campaign included sinar harapan (sh, ray of hope), djakarta daily mail (ddt) and mingguan berita (mb, weekly news). pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 4 violence, all of which provided further proof of the pki’s immorality and savagery. the significance of these themes was that they created the appearance of the pki as a dangerous enemy. this, in turn, encouraged those who participated in the elimination of the party’s supporters to see themselves as defenders of the nation, purging the communists from indonesia in order to save it (drakeley 2007; wieringa 1998). this highly instrumentalised propaganda by the indonesian military must be seen as a critical impetus to the incitement and perpetuation of the violence against communists and ‘communist sympathisers’ following the 1965 coup. in order to make this argument, however, i must discuss the persecuted group, the pki and its supporters. the persecution of a sociopolitical group as genocide is a controversial issue within comparative genocide studies. thus i begin by how and why the attacks against communists and their sympathisers during the indonesian killings must be seen as genocide, before examining the case for incitement by the indonesian military. the indonesian killings and genocide the pki have no right to live! … hang the pki! hang the pki! hang the pki! (harian suara islam, 9 october 1965) genocide holds a unique position in both history and international criminal law. it may occur with other crimes, particularly crimes against humanity, but it retains its special position as the crime of crimes in law and as an event of singular importance and resonance in history (greenawalt 1999: 2293–94). by positioning this discussion squarely within the discourse of comparative genocide studies, a number of immediate ramifications must be addressed when naming the mass killings that took place in indonesia in 1965–1968 as genocide. the most obvious proceeds directly from longstanding debates over the definition of genocide as set down in article ii of the 1948 united nations convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide: ‘genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group.’ in relation to the indonesian case, these debates revolve around the exclusion of ‘political’ groups from those outlined in the genocide convention. i argue that this exclusion is a false one and will demonstrate this using the case of the persecution against leftist forces in indonesia since the mid-1960s. to do this, i first take up a point argued by other genocide researchers which is that while genocide is a crime that must remain codified pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 5 and prosecuted as such under international instruments, including the genocide convention and the rome statute of the international criminal court, the concept of genocide often encompasses more than its legal meaning found in court verdicts and juridical settings (barta 2008: 111). when exploring the meaning of genocide and, in this case, historiographical understandings of the indonesian killings, i argue that genocide and its meanings circulate through many discourses and so to barricade them within articles of law, rules of evidence, verdicts and judicial outcomes is, as tony barta has put it, ‘not very bright … to restrict historical enquiry to legal rules of evidence makes for the reverse of historical justice. the effect (and sometimes the intention) is injustice; the evidence admitted is partial and inadequate; the complexities of the case are covered rather than elucidated; the history is primitive’ (2008: 111). to say that legal discourse and juridical understandings of truth (or evidence or proof) are never impartial but are continuously caught up in their own self-authorising acts of legitimation is nothing new (derrida 1990; shildrick 2005). what barta’s comments underline, however, is how the political usages of the strict legal definition of ‘genocide’ (as a codified crime of the un convention, ratified by member states and in the criminal codes of many of these states), have devastating consequences not only for the prevention of genocide but also for its redress. genocide is, and should remain, a crime that is condemned and punished under international criminal law. but all too often, the legal definition of genocide is, on the one hand, reified so as only to describe those cases of mass human destruction that could be successfully prosecuted as genocide within the jurisprudence of an international criminal tribunal and, on the other hand, used to minimise, trivialise or deny mass atrocities that could not. put bluntly, genocide denial often masquerades as juridical certitude. this argument should not be mistaken as a denigration of the legal meaning of the crime of genocide. as with any other crime, the crime of genocide in international or national law is and must be prosecuted within a particular jurisdiction according to the statutes, codes and charters under which it has been defined. i do not argue that the crime in its legal meaning per se be ‘lessened’; nor do i support any sensationalist or hyperbolic use of the word ‘genocide’ (luban 2006; saul 2001). the crime of genocide is, at its core, mass atrocities against a group of people who are persecuted on the basis of their pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 6 membership within that group. such was the case in indonesia. hundreds of thousands of people were made targets of mass killing and other forms of mass atrocities because of their membership in, or association with, a particular group. that the victims belonged to an identifiable political group, rather than to ‘a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group,’ means that these acts did not amount to the crime of genocide as per the genocide convention. as with many other scholars within the field of comparative genocide studies, i contend that this exclusion of political groups is a false one, premised on a fallacious understanding of how human groups are identified and persecuted during genocides and on the compromises of post-world war ii realpolitik (van schaack 1997). in the indonesian case, an additional element to the discussion of political groups and the crime of genocide must be considered. on the one hand, i hold that political groups should be included within the genocide convention because their exclusion is based on sophistry and a flawed definition. on the other hand, however, i question the immediate usefulness of this inclusion within the legal definition of genocide, given the extremely small probability that the victims of these crimes will ever obtain any kind of justice in indonesia. there are currently no judicial avenues being pursued for any criminal or transitional justice mechanisms for the grievous human rights abuses that followed the 1965 coup, therefore, other approaches must be sought, not by default but by necessity. in indonesia, the likelihood of there being a juridical setting to account for the abuses of 1965–1968 (at least within the lifetimes of those directly involved in those events) appears slim (see ictj and kontras 2011). to restrict genocide’s meaning to the crime’s legal meaning, therefore, occludes other meanings that may be far more productive in the context of ‘coming to terms’ with the past. groups, victims and the genocide convention those who were involved should today be purged, we cannot wait until tomorrow. (mimber revolusi, 14 october 1965) the meaning of genocide in relation to the un convention, its definition, prosecution and prevention, has occupied genocide scholars for the last seventy years. not only have many such scholars created their own definitions of genocide out of dissatisfaction with the convention, but also amongst these definitions and debates, the inclusion or exclusion of particular groups has remained a centrally contested element of what is pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 7 meant by the term, ‘genocide’ (powell 2007; moses 2002). as christopher powell has asked, ‘what do genocides kill?’ (2007: 527). i do not contribute my own definition of genocide to the plenitude that already exists, rather, by reflecting on how the term and then the convention came about, i argue that the exclusion of ‘political’ groups from the convention’s definition of the crime does not exclude the events in indonesia in 1965–1968 from being genocide. the work of the jurist who both coined the term and was instrumental in bringing about the genocide convention, raphael lemkin, has been adopted and interpreted by many on all sides of these definitional debates (weiss-wendt 2005). lemkin’s writings (1944) about what he understood to be genocide reveal a much more inclusive understanding of the term when compared to how it was defined in the convention. in his recent book, what is genocide?, martin shaw revisits lemkin’s concept of genocide, and warns that we should gain a better understanding of the man’s ideas not because they are the ‘last word’ on the matter, but because they enable us to see how lemkin understood (and how we should understand) genocide fundamentally as a process (2007: 17–36). as a much broader concept, for lemkin, genocide ‘signif[ied] a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves’ (lemkin 1944: 79). as shaw shows, this destruction included a much wider range of acts so as to cover not only the attack on the physical and biological ‘aspects of life,’ but also on the political, social, cultural, religious and moral ‘fields’ of the ‘captive peoples’ (lemkin 1944: xi–xii, cited in shaw 2007: 19–20). in essence, many different acts taken separately can be part of genocide, but they are all part of the process of the destruction of human collectivities. this destruction of not only lives but also the social and community foundations gives genocide its unique position as the crime of crimes, and which, according to card, constitutes the social death of the group (2003: 76). lemkin’s concept of genocide as a wider process of destruction and how it came to be defined in the un convention were separated by time and the political manoeuvring that took place at the end of the second world war, the beginning of the cold war, and the establishment of the united nations. while others have convincingly shown that the eventual wording of the un genocide convention was as much a matter of political compromise as points of law (for example, see lippmann 1998), i take time here to pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 8 briefly trace some of steps that brought about the exclusion of ‘political groups’ from the convention. i echo beth van schaack who demonstrates clearly that the ‘exclusion of political groups from the genocide convention represents [a] compromise. no legal principle can justify this blind spot’ (1997: 2261). in the wake of trial of the major war criminals at nuremberg, at its 55th session on 11 december 1946, the united nations general assembly adopted unanimously the following resolution: genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups … many instances of such crimes of genocide have occurred when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part. the punishment of the crime of genocide is a matter of international concern. the general assembly, therefore, affirms that genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns … whether the crime is committed on religious, racial, political or any other grounds …3 from this original resolution, the matter then passed through a number of committees, procedural steps and drafts before finally being adopted by the general assembly on 9 december 1948. the two main drafts were developed in turn by the un secretariat (submitted in june 1947) and subsequently by an ad hoc committee on genocide of the un’s economic and social council (ecosoc) in mid–1948. in both of these drafts, political groups remained in the definition (greenawalt 1999: 2273–74). by the end of 1948, however, political groups had been removed from the final convention. there were purportedly two key reasons for their exclusion: first, political groups were somehow ‘unstable’ or ‘mutable’; and second, including them would be an impediment to many states’ willingness to ratify the convention (leblanc 1988: 274–75). as one researcher put it, the first reason that political (as well as linguistic) groups were excluded from the un convention was that they were a ‘matter of individual choice’ or ‘ephemeral,’ unlike ‘racial, religious, ethnic, and national groups [which …] were characterised by cohesiveness, homogeneity, inevitability of membership, stability, and tradition’ (lippmann 1998: 455). seventy years after these debates, which were arguably informed by contemporaneous understandings of individual and group identity, such an argument seems farcical (cribb 2001, 2003). ben saul, who also questions the 3 g.a. res. 96 (i), 1 gaor, 1st sess., 55th mtg. at 188-89, u.n. doc. a/64/add. 1 (1947). first and third emphases added (cited in van schaack, ‘the crime of political genocide,’ 2263). pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 9 exclusion of political groups from the convention in his study of violence in occupied east timor, calls the choice of groups currently protected ‘illogical.’ he rightly adds, ‘by protecting only national, racial, ethnical and religious groups from genocide, the genocide convention privileges these group identities over others, deeming them somehow more worthy or more fundamental … this assumption may have held sway in a pre–1950 era … in the 21st century, however, identity is more fragmented’ (2001: 508–9). this paralogism of protecting only ‘stable’ groups also plagues current interpretations of the crime. for example, during a number of the trials before the international criminal tribunal for rwanda (ictr), the question of how to define the tutsi as a group came under scrutiny. as such, at the first genocide trial of the ictr, prosecutor v. akayesu, the chamber deemed that as the working definition for ‘ethnic group’ was ‘a group whose members share a common language or culture’ and, as tutsi and hutu share these, the tutsi could not be characterised as a distinct ethnic group for the purposes of the trial.4 however, this was circumvented when the chamber decided to return to the travaux préparatoires of the genocide convention and therefore to the idea of protecting ‘“stable” groups, constituted in a permanent fashion and membership of which is determined by birth’ (cited in ‘developments in the law’ 2001: 2014–15). as paul magnarella has argued, this effectively meant that ‘by adding “stable and permanent group[s]” to the four existing categories, … the chamber has significantly expanded the kinds of populations that will be protected by that convention’ (1997: 531). this decision also highlights clearly a number of problems with the current convention’s definition. most importantly for this discussion, it shows that the definition of group is ambiguous; stability is the condition that qualifies a group for protection yet there are only four specific groups that are themselves unstable. does this mean that the definition protects any group that can be shown to be ‘stable’? and, given that the definition is ambiguous, does this mean that, such as in the akayesu trial, the definition is open for quite flexible interpretation? while this may mean a more inclusive approach to groups under the convention, it may also mean inconsistent and ultimately arbitrary judgements (‘developments in the law’ 2001: 2020–24). 4 case no. ictr-96-4-t (int’l crim. trib. for rwanda trial chamber i, 2 september 1998), at <http://www.ictr.org/english/cases/akayesu/judgement/akay001.htm> [accessed 12 september 2009], cited in ‘developments in the law: international criminal law’ (2001: 2014). pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 10 the second main argument made against the inclusion of political groups was that the convention was unlikely to be ratified if they were. when viewed within the context of early cold war politics, this reason seems the far more likely explanation for the final wording of the convention. put simply, in order for the genocide convention to become a binding treaty, there had to be at least twenty signatories. despite the fact that the original resolution 96(i) condemning genocide was adopted unanimously in 1946, it turned out to be quite difficult to convince twenty states to ratify the convention. lemkin himself spent a great deal of time lobbying on behalf of the convention, so much so that one journalist at the time named him ‘the un’s most persistent salesman’ (weiss-wendt 2005: 554). as samantha power has shown, lemkin worked tirelessly, writing to important organisations in each of the member states and, primarily, being sure to appeal to the political interests of the un delegates (2002: 55). appealing to so many delegates with particular interests to protect, however, meant compromise; the exclusion of political groups being the most obvious example of this. particularly at the sixth committee meetings prior to the final convention, several of the delegates made various objections to political groups, for example, on the grounds of not wanting to implicate their own governments in possible genocide allegations or fear that other, politically opposed states, might use the convention to intervene in internal matters, which would mean ‘limitations to their right to suppress internal disturbances.’5 given that millions have died under governments during ‘states of emergency’ or times when ‘special powers’ have been used to ‘suppress internal disturbances,’ surely the genocide of people on ‘political’ or any other grounds is as urgent a call to redress as on the grounds of race, ethnicity, nation or religion? two final points make the exclusion of political groups from the legal definition spurious. the first is that many other international conventions (both contemporaneous and subsequent to the genocide convention) include them and many other ‘groups’ that may be persecuted.6 the second is that the convention of 1948 was never meant to be 5 u.n. gaor 6th comm., 3d session, 65th mtg. at 21 (1948) (cited in van schaak 1997: 2267). see also weiss-wendt (2005: 551–59), on debates over the inclusion of political groups. 6 the most obvious of these from around 1948 being article ii of the international declaration of human rights, adopted just one day after the genocide convention on 10 december 1948, which states that all people are ‘entitled to all the rights and freedoms … without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.’ see also saul (2001: 505), where he draws attention to the fact that international human rights law has ‘recognised the protection needs of a range of increasingly visible group entities,’ and notes the pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 11 timeless or unchangeable. the beginning of article ii of the convention actually states: ‘in the present convention, genocide means…’ articles xxiv and xxv of the convention make clear that it would ‘remain in effect for a period of ten years’ and ‘thereafter remain in force for successive periods of five years’ unless a ‘request for the revision of the present convention [is] made at any time by any contracting party.’ as norbert finzsch has argued, the ‘framers of the convention obviously expected political or historical developments that would require altering, in wording or substance, the convention as it was ratified by the member states of the united nations. this expectation was not met, because of the effects of the cold war that lasted for the next 40 years’ (2008: 123). although the attempt was unsuccessful, this possibility of changing the legal definition of genocide to include additional groups was discussed at the preparatory committee on the establishment of an international criminal court (icc) in the mid–1990s (saul 2001: 505). in all, the current convention is ambiguous, flawed, and occasionally a vehicle for genocide denial. this is anathema to the spirit in which it was brought about by raphael lemkin, the man who worked so hard and long for its creation. as the akayesu decision at the ictr shows, changes will need to be made, so perhaps it is only a matter of time and political will. groups, victims and the indonesian killings [the pki are] poisonous stabbers in the back [who] must be eliminated! (djakarta daily mail, 16 november 1965, cited in drakeley 2007: 21) this part of the discussion questions who were the victims, the persecuted ‘group,’ of the indonesian genocide. the ‘political group’ of ‘suspected communists and their sympathisers’ was a political, cultural, social and economic construct that developed during a period of political ‘pillarisation’ during the 1950s and 1960s in indonesia and which, after the coup, became the primary (though not sole) ‘category’ for persecution (cribb 2001). furthermore, the ‘suspected communist or sympathiser’ category was defined differently by varying perpetrators. persecution was the result of many factors, membership within the pki or its associated organisations being only one of them. in this section i take up the question of ‘group’ in broad terms because the concept of a convention of the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (1981), the declaration on the rights of disabled persons (1975) and the convention on the rights of the child (1990). pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 12 stable group casts it in a monolithic light when it is precisely the opposite; as with any constructed identity, it was constantly changing, dependent on many variables and, in particular, took on new and lethal meanings when ‘suspected communists’ were demonised in the military’s propaganda following the coup. second, by saying that a construct developed during a certain timeframe ‘in indonesia’ is misleading; nothing is uniform across indonesia and what may be said of the southern parts of central java would probably not apply to aceh, eastern kalimantan or even at times to the northern parts of central java. one of the features of the killings was their non-uniformity; just as the killings were different from region to region, so too were the particularities of the victim ‘group/s.’ here, i discuss the victim group in more general terms in order to argue that there was a discernable group that, broadly speaking, was persecuted during the massacres—that is, ‘suspected communists and their sympathisers.’ i want now to address the evolution of the ‘victim group’ in indonesia prior to the massacres in order to elucidate how fluid the ‘group’ was and how arbitrary becoming a victim could be. robert cribb, the leading scholar on the killings, gives the most useful explanation of how to conceptualise the victim ‘group’ in his article, ‘genocide in indonesia, 1965–1966’ (2001). essentially, he underlines the same fallacy of ‘stable’ and ‘unstable’ groups (drawing attention to, in particular, the ‘rather shallow historical roots’ of ethnic identity) and, by sketching a history of colonial and postcolonial indonesia, clarifies how the idea of an indonesian ‘political’ victim group is infinitely complicated by historically competing ideas of the indonesian ‘nation.’ the aim of this section is neither to revisit all the debates about the indonesian nation nor to examine in depth early postcolonial politics (see anderson 1991; elson 2008). rather, given that cribb’s explanation offers a clear and germane understanding of the relevant issues, i take the time to briefly outline his points here. for cribb, by the middle of the twentieth century there were three possible ‘nations’ for the post-independent indonesia: ‘within the nationalist movement were three streams of thought, each of them envisaging an independent, modern and prosperous indonesia, but giving very different content to that nation. these three streams can be labelled islamic, communist and developmentalist’ (2001: 226). while none of these was a united, singular vision for the indonesian nation, put simply, the country could be based either on islamic teachings, socialist ideals or, for the developmentalists, it would be ‘simply pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 13 turning the formidable apparatus of the state which the dutch had created in indonesia to the benefit of indonesians, rather than foreigners’ (2001: 226). by the late 1940s, relations between the three had worsened and, during the 1950s, cribb contends that ‘indonesia underwent a process of political “pillarisation.” in other words, the relatively strong correlation between political and cultural identity was institutionalised, so that each of the identifiable cultural divisions within society was represented not only by its own political parties but by a whole range of separate social institutions’ (2001: 228). the communists, for example, under the leadership of d. n. aidit, actively pursued building a party that was ‘nationwide in scale and [had] a broad mass character, [to be] fully consolidated in the ideological, political and organisational spheres’ (cited in edman 1987: 42). in practical terms, this meant that by the mid–1960s, a broad range of organisations across the political, social, cultural and economic spectrum was associated with the pki with a claimed following of more than twenty-seven million, although this estimate is considered too high (mortimer 1974: 366–67). indonesia’s political pillarisation became more pronounced during the period between 1957 and 1965 when the country’s first president, sukarno, declared martial law and moved indonesia away from the multiparty parliamentary system of 1950–1957 to ‘guided democracy.’ on the whole, this period is marked by sukarno’s tendencies towards authoritarianism, economic mismanagement and hyperinflation, the curtailment of political parties, and the increase and institutionalisation of the military’s influence (riklefs 1981: 245–71). it was also a period marked by extreme populist rhetoric, led by sukarno’s own cult of personality. his penchant for grand speeches about the continuing, never-ending revolution, national monuments, and anti-imperialistic symbols set the tone both for national politics as well as daily life. as adrian vickers has shown: by the late 1950s most indonesians … had been drawn into the political maelstrom. they were exposed to constant political slogans, demonstrations and campaigns, and to sharp divisions in society … which side you chose in these divisions determined whether you lived or died, went to prison or gained access to the largesse of the winners in the political leadership struggle … indonesian life became dominated by acronyms and abbreviations: [such as] nasakom7 [and] manipol-usdek8. often people did not know what the slogans and acronyms meant, but 7 nasakom was an acronym for nasionalisme, agama, komunisme (nationalism, religion and communism). 8 manipol-usdek was the acronym derived from manifesto politik, undang-undang dasar 1945, sosialisme indonesia, demokrasi terpimpin, ekonomi terpimpin, and kepribadian indonesia (political manifesto, the 1945 constitution, indonesian socialism, guided democracy, guided economy and indonesian identity). pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 14 repeated them as mantras of their political groups … for ordinary indonesians sukarno’s message had a strong effect. (2005: 145–51) when cribb talks about a ‘political pillarisation’ in indonesia, a comparison might be made with a similar (though equally problematic) phenomenon, clifford geertz’s model of aliran, roughly translated as ‘streams’ of political, social and religious strata (1960; wertheim 1969). in 1963 geertz described this political pillarisation of indonesian life by outlining how the different aliran were organisationally focused around different parties, the nationalist party (for cribb, the ‘developmentalists’), the islamic parties masyumi and nahdlatul ulama (nu) and the pki: as well as its political organisation proper, each party has connected with it, formally or informally, women’s clubs, youth and student groups, labour unions, peasant organisations, charitable associations, private schools, religious or philosophical societies, veterans’ associations, savings clubs, and so forth, which serve to bind it to the local social system. for that reason, each party with its aggregation of specialised associations provides a general framework within which a wide range of social activities can be organised, as well as an over-all ideological rationale to give those activities point and direction. (geertz 1963: 14) as andreas ufen has argued, the 1955 elections made identification with the various aliran stronger and, in turn, increased the rivalries between the parties (2006: 8). while it could not be said that cribb’s communist, developmentalist and religious streams were stable or discrete groups or even that similar groups existed across the diverse contexts of the various regions of indonesia, it is fair to say that they were identifiable insomuch that indonesians both identified themselves with these streams and there was clear organisational and institutional membership with them. furthermore, this identification with the different groups could stretch beyond individuals with particular allegiances to include family members or even entire communities. the importance of establishing that these groups were identifiable lies in highlighting that membership within these groups was not reducible to a matter of political persuasion. in the newly post-independent indonesia with a national polity fragmented along ethnic, cultural, religious, economic, linguistic and political lines, membership of these streams or groups was just as (un)stable, malleable and constructed as any of the many ethnic, religious, linguistic or other groups across indonesia (young 1990). put simply, the developmentalist, islamic and communist streams were groups at that time and, for those who could be/were identified with the ‘communist’ group following the coup in 1965, this meant potentially lethal consequences. the legal definition of genocide as set down in the un genocide convention aside, it is fair to claim that the pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 15 sociopolitical group that was made the target of the killings and political detentions in 1965–1968 experienced widespread, systematic persecution in such a way as to constitute genocide. incitement and culpability they must be immediately smashed. since they have committed treason, they must be destroyed and quarantined from all activities in our fatherland. (army commander, general nasution, to a gathering of anti-communist student groups, november 1965. cited in hughes 1967: 192–93.) the second crucial factor in the progression towards genocide is the incitement and mobilisation of perpetrators. widespread forms of hate propaganda against the targeted group are often necessary to bring about the level of isolation and dehumanisation required to achieve the social death of the group. the highly instrumentalised nature of the indonesian military’s propaganda to incite public participation in the violence is key to understanding the military’s overall role in the killings. while a discussion of intent to commit crimes against humanity or genocide on the part of the indonesian military following the 1965 coup is beyond the purview of this article, it is useful to reflect briefly here on some recent international legal proceedings which speak directly to intent, the use of propaganda and incitement to commit grave human rights abuses. specifically, the rulings made on the ‘media’ trial by the international criminal tribunal for rwanda (ictr) that found three defendants guilty of incitement to commit genocide (one the editor of a newspaper, the other two broadcasting executives of a radio station) may prove instructive for assigning culpability in the case of the indonesian military’s propaganda in 1965.9 as susan benesch has argued in reference to incitement of genocide, for incitement to occur, there must be both the intent to cause genocide in addition to the fact that the incitement must be direct and public. furthermore, she adds that in order for incitement to be proven, the accused ‘must have authority or influence over the audience, and the audience must already be primed, or conditioned, to respond to the [accused’s] words’ 9 the ‘media’ trial was, officially, the prosecutor v. ferdinand nahimana, jean-bosco barayagwiza, hassan ngeze, case no. ictr-99-52-t, judgement and sentence, december 3, 2003. the judgements and associated legal documentation may be found on the ictr website, <http://www.ictr.org>. hereafter referred to as ‘judgement and sentence.’ it should be noted here that ‘incitement’ and ‘hate speech’ should not be conflated. see matas (2000) and benesch (2008). incitement is punishable under indonesian law. for examples, see articles 160, 161(1 and 2), which refer to the incitement of ‘unlawful acts,’ in the criminal code of indonesia (kitab undang-undang hukum pidana, kuhp). pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 16 (2008: 493-94). in other words, it is not merely the content of the message given but also the context in which that message is made and who creates that message that determines its potential harm (schabas 2000: 226–29). as many researchers have shown, the role of hate propaganda is often seen as a sine qua non in the build-up and prolonging of genocide and other mass human rights abuses (kuper 1991; staub 1992). genocides, crimes against humanity and, in this case, mass murder and political incarceration on the scale witnessed in indonesia after 1965, all require certain levels of planning, coordination, weapons and perpetrators; people do not spontaneously begin killing en masse. identified as a key element in gregory stanton’s ‘eight stages of genocide,’ hate propaganda, in conjunction with social, political and other factors, functions to classify and dehumanise potential victims, polarise communities, and thus aid in the organisation and extermination of those victims (1998). the role played by the indonesian military’s hate-propaganda in 1965 must therefore be examined as a pivotal element for the massacres and mass political detentions that followed. as in other developing countries at the time, radio and newsprint media were the most accessible and influential sources of information in indonesia during those months following the coup. as was shown to be the case in the media trial before the ictr, the indonesian military controlled that media and thus used it, as ‘the medium of communication with the widest public reach—to disseminate hatred and violence ... [the military] poisoned the minds of [the public], and by words and deeds caused the death of thousands of innocent civilians’ (‘judgement and sentence’ 2003: paras. 1099 and 1101). this incitement by the indonesian military does not, of course, in any way mitigate the criminal liability of those who took part in, planned or collaborated with these crimes (benesch 2004: 63). what the military’s propaganda campaign did do, however, was instrumentally play upon the already charged situation of political and social polarisation of the mid–1960s in indonesia, and create a fiction of an evil, alien and depraved pki that had to be destroyed in order to save the nation (cribb 1990: 28– 29). throughout the propaganda campaign following the coup, the messages to ‘cleanse’ the nation of evil communist forces remained a prominent feature. despite the evidence of incitement by the indonesian military, certain limitations need to be acknowledged. the strength of the case against the indonesian military is weaker when compared to the rwandan media case for numerous reasons. first, the indictment pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 17 of individuals responsible for the creation and dissemination of the propaganda in 1965 is highly problematic. aside from those high military officials such as suharto, ali murtopo (then chief of army special operations command, ospus) and possibly brigadier general sucipto (all now deceased) whose input into the propaganda is most likely, the authorship of the propaganda is unknown. there is an absence of convenient by-lines on news articles to trace individual involvement; most articles only contain the title, text and occasional picture. as wieringa has argued, the content for these articles, their sources and so on, were all provided by the indonesian military to the media outlets that remained publishing after the military either closed down or took over in the early days of october 1965 (2002: 296–317). further obscuring the issue of authorship is the possible role played by us and british intelligence agencies in the creation of the propaganda. as bradley simpson has claimed, although access to much information about these governments’ involvement remains classified, it is likely that they aided indonesian military officials in constructing the propaganda (2008: 181). given that international and indonesian law requires that individuals and not institutions be held indictable for crimes against humanity and other international crimes such as genocide, and that the individuals concerned in this case are, at present, either deceased or unidentifiable (unless someone were to come forward), this presents the first major impediment to proving incitement on the part of indonesian military officials. in terms of the structural preparation of any case against the indonesian military, there is another obstacle. the prosecution for the media case at the ictr was able to prove incitement on the part of the defendants in two key ways. the first, by creating a ‘general atmosphere’ or ‘climate of harm’ of anti-tutsi sentiment, the defendants’ media outlets had promoted a ‘message of prejudice and fear [that] paved the way for massacres of the tutsi population’ (‘judgement and sentence’ 2003: paras. 1073 and 243). in the indonesian case, this media was crucial in creating the ‘climate of harm’ that incited the massacres. the second way in which the prosecution in the rwandan trial was able to prove incitement; however, was also by showing that specific articles/broadcasts resulted in immediate violent actions. as an example of this, it was shown that people identified in the newspaper kangura would be killed soon after, so that the published names were effectively death lists (benesch 2004: 66). in the indonesian military’s case, those identified for ‘cleansing’ are mostly indiscriminately labelled as ‘pki,’ ‘g30s/pki elements,’ ‘communist sympathisers’ or the like. aside pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 18 from leaders of the pki or those aligned with the pki in the parliament, such as d. n. aidit, lukman or subandrio, individuals are rarely named. therefore proving the causal link between incitement and direct harm to individuals is untenable in the indonesian case. the greatest obstacle to preparing a case against the indonesian military for its propaganda, however, is the persistent recalcitrance on the part of the indonesian military and government to address past and present state atrocities. in the early years following the downfall of the suharto regime in 1998, efforts were made to set up a truth and reconciliation commission that would, it was hoped, investigate state crimes committed during that regime, including the mass killings and arrests of 1965–1968. despite repeated efforts, the commission was never launched. more recent judicial cases and decisions also do not bode well for the likelihood of indonesia’s military ever being held accountable for their past atrocities. for example, a report into twelve of the trials held before the ad hoc human rights court in jakarta since 2002 for crimes against humanity committed in east timor by the international center for transitional justice found that the ‘inescapable conclusion [was] that the trials on a whole must be regarded as a failure at every level, from technical competence to institutional integrity and political will’ (cohen 2004: ii).’ only six of the eighteen men tried were convicted (receiving sentences of between three and ten years) and all but two of these convictions were overturned or acquitted by the indonesian appeals court in 2004 (human rights watch 2004). in 2012, a three-year investigation into the violence following the 1965 coup was undertaken by the indonesian national human rights commission (aritonang 2012). based on interviews with survivors across the country, the commission’s report stated that there was sufficient evidence to warrant an official investigation by the attorney general’s office (ago). the ago, however, rejected the 850-page report on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to proceed with an investigation (prakoso, sihite, marhaenjati & novialita 2012). the failure of the truth and reconciliation legislation added to the apparent unwillingness of the indonesian government to prosecute grave human rights’ violations brings into serious question whether any official investigation into and/or prosecution of crimes committed in the aftermath of the 1965 coup will occur in indonesia. 10 10 other recent cases include the 2005 appeals court’s acquittal of twelve soldiers convicted in 2004 of the 1984 ‘tanjung priok’ massacre of demonstrators in jakarta (human rights watch 2005), as well as pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 19 conclusion it is true that [the pki] have performed an unpardonable violation; they not only have carried out a diabolical plan but have committed political crimes … the fate of the state and the nation depend upon the right action being taken. now is the time for the dissolution of the pki. the time for taking action has come. (mimbar revolusi, 11 october 1965) the social death of the left in indonesia following the 1965 coup was achieved through the military’s propaganda that, in turn, facilitated their eradication. in this paper i have argued that those eradicated, the pki and ‘communist sympathizers,’ were a defined group identity at the time. membership of this group was the strongest determinant for persecution during the massacres and mass arrests. given the underlying flaws of the definition of ‘genocide’ that excludes the persecution of political groups under the current un convention on genocide, i argue that the indonesian killings of 1965–1968 should be considered genocide. furthermore, despite all of the obstacles to achieving some form of justice for the many who were killed or persecuted, what is clear is that the indonesian military intentionally sought to incite anti-communist sentiment and violence following the 1965 coup. through a deliberate campaign, made of constructed, falsified, intentionally misleading and inflammatory propaganda, the military-controlled media in indonesia, as in the case of the media producers tried before the ictr, provided the ‘bullets in the gun.’ against a backdrop of heightened social, political and economic tensions, the propaganda was incitement and ‘[this] trigger had such a deadly impact because the gun was loaded’ (‘judgement and sentence’ 2003: para. 953). in other words, just as the ictr verdict found the defendants guilty of incitement to genocide because of the ‘fear-mongering and hate propaganda’ contained in their articles and radio broadcasts, so too is the indonesian military guilty of incitement for deliberately creating and spreading their own hate-filled, demonising propaganda against communists following the 1965 coup. the fact that it remains highly unlikely that any individuals responsible for that propaganda will ever be brought to trial in indonesia does not lessen their criminal liability. the media case before the ictr was a landmark trial in international jurisprudence on incitement and paves the way for further cases to be mounted against those who use words to instill hate and fear in order to incite violence. there is no the highly controversial handling of the case of the murder of human rights’ advocate and activist munir said thalib on a flight from jakarta to amsterdam in september 2004 (see nababan 2008: 140–45). pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 20 statute of limitations on crimes against humanity and, until the last perpetrator dies, whoever he may be, there is still the possibility that there will be a trial for the incitement of the political genocide in indonesia. acknowledgements i wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this article whose comments and feedback not only helped to clarify my arguments but also challenged me to think more carefully on the position of the indonesian killings within the broader field of comparative genocide 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papers, no. 37. vickers, a. 2005, a history of modern indonesia. cambridge university press, cambridge. wertheim, w. 1969, ‘from aliran towards class struggle in the javanese countryside,’ pacific viewpoint, vol. 10, no. 2: 1017. pohlman incitement to genocide portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 22 wieringa, s. 1998, ‘sexual metaphors in the change from sukarno’s old order to suharto’s new order in indonesia,’ review of indonesian and malaysian affairs, vol. 30, no. 2: 143–78. ______ 2002, sexual politics in indonesia. palgrave macmillan, new york. weiss-wendt, a. 2005, ‘hostage to politics: raphael lemkin on “soviet genocide,”’ journal of genocide research, vol. 7, no. 4: 551–59. young, k. 1990, ‘local and national influences in the violence of 1965,’ in the indonesian killings of 1965–1966, studies from java and bali, (ed.) r. cribb. centre of southeast asian studies, monash university clayton, vic: 101–20. women in asia: shadow lines portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal ‘women’ in ‘asia’: an interrogation devleena ghosh, university of technology, sydney the articles in this special issue section of portal had their first iteration as presentations in the eighth women in asia conference in 2005,1 the theme of which was ‘shadow lines’. the concept ‘women in asia’ is problematic since some of the major debates in gender or women’s studies have focused on the diversity of women’s life worlds and beings and the contested nature of the term ‘asia’. as a theme it has the potential to become a holdall phrase for scholarship, research and activist work ‘from suez to suva’. however, reflecting on these difficult terms can be a creative and rewarding process. the attempt to locate australia within the region, rather than within a putative ‘west’, and to deal with her geography rather than just her white history, can be an effective way of challenging many current ‘white blindfold’ discourses. at the same time, gendered analyses of society, politics and culture that attempt a re-insertion of ‘herstories’ into academic discourses have to be sophisticated enough to demonstrate the intrinsic gendering of all-embracing, supposedly ‘neutral’, ideas such as race, nationalism, ethics, and the state, rather than simply ‘adding in’ women. the marginalised spaces of women’s activities have to be legitimated as crucial elements of all social relations, highlighting the intimate relationships and connections between men and women. 1 the eighth women in asia conference, organised by the women’s caucus of the asian studies association of australia and the university of technology sydney, was held at the university of technology sydney from 26 to the 28 september 2005. the conveners of the conference were devleena ghosh and barbara leigh. ghosh women in asia the sub-theme of the conference, ‘shadow lines’, was an attempt to unsettle discourses about limits. that lines, borders and boundaries exist, whether of prejudice, politics, economics, or culture, is undeniable. but how do we analyse these issues without ossifying them, creating implacable alterities that refuse the liminal spaces that people occupy? what about the hidden and shadowed spaces of the interior, both of the home and the domestic sphere, as well as the inner courtyard, of the psyche? these shadowed spaces in asia are normally desired ones—they imply coolness, rest, and tranquility. such spaces can be restrictive but they can also contain powerful emotions, subversions, and ironies. the presenters at the conference dealt with many of these contradictions in different regional and disciplinary contexts. the shadow of colonialism provides the background to most of the contributions in this special issue. gender was a crucial lens through which colonial societies viewed their populations. patriarchy worked in these societies in pragmatic and discursive forms, normalising certain cultural practices, social customs and ways of being as ‘true’ or ‘natural’. women were twice colonised in their simultaneous experience of patriarchy and colonialism (peterson & rutherford 1986), doubly relegated to the obscure margins by patriarchal and imperial discourses and narratives that celebrated maleoriented values, such as bonding between men and reticent heroism, outdoor activities like battles, exploration and missionary activities, and the strong silent men who went to ‘take up the white man’s burden’ in barbaric, uncomfortable, steaming colonies. anne mcclintock elaborates on these points by emphasising that a main thrust of the imperial project was the attempt to ‘fashion the identity of a large class of people (hitherto disunited) with clear affiliations, distinct boundaries and separate values … around the presiding domestic values of monogamy, thrift, order, accumulation’ (mcclintock 1995, 167–8). she claims that women and colonised peoples were both infantilised and characterised as irrational and primordial; this meant that they occupied an ahistorical ‘anachronistic space’ (16). the confluence of the contradictions and paradoxes of class, gender and race affiliations, according to mcclintock, created the ‘racialization of domestic space’ as well as ‘the domestication of colonial space’. tropes such as gender, race, patriarchy, maternity, femininity, and domesticity, as well as the privileging of a clean, efficient and well-run home, good public hygiene, motherhood, scientific childbearing methods, and the instillation of proper morals, portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 ghosh women in asia were re-inscribed and reconstructed in the service of colonialism and modernity, and nations were frequently figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space. within this space, women were represented as the atavistic and authentic body of national tradition; men, by contrast, represented the progressive agent of national modernity, embodying nationalism’s progressive or revolutionary principle of discontinuity (mcclintock 1997). thus ‘undiscovered’ land was frequently seen as virgin, untouched, a woman waiting to be deflowered by white conquerors. but where do women stand in the imaginary of the postcolonial nation? when anticolonial movements in many parts of asia began to challenge imperial rule, women were inscribed with other values. they were categorised as ‘mothers of the nation’, biological reproducers of members of ethnic collectivities, and central participants in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and transmitters of its culture, for example as mothers or teachers (yuval-davis & anthias 1989, 7). the dilemma of women and nationalism can be presented as: ‘how could women be nationalists when they did not have equal rights? how could women not be nationalists when they loved their country, people and home?’ (west 1997, xii). national liberation movements are also inadvertently the record of a triumphant nationalism that makes its gains at the expense of women. they make common cause with women’s issues because nationalism requires a certain self-representational vocabulary—a definitional apparatus to imagine and describe itself (heng 1997, 31). the identification of women as bearers of cultural identity and boundary markers inevitably has a negative effect on their emergence as fully-fledged citizens (kandiyoti 1991, 429-43). rowena ward’s paper, ‘japanese government policy and the reality of the lives of the zanryu-fujin’, illustrates this conundrum by examining the japanese government’s changing response to the return of the zanryu-fujin, (women aged 13 years and over at the time of the russian invasion of manchuria on 9 august 1945 who did not undergo repatriation to japan at the end of the war). the japanese government assumed that the zanryu-fujin had chosen to remain in china and imposed differential policies on them regarding citizenship and rights. however, the narratives of the zanryu-fujin complicate the notions of national citizenship by highlighting the complex reality of their lives since many of them did not initially have a choice about whether to return to japan. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 ghosh women in asia in the metropoles, nationalism manifested itself differently. white women also bore the burden of empire, since their bodies and characters were inscribed with the superiority of european moral and civic virtues that distinguished them from women of other societies. they were neither patriarchal victims nor brave heroines; rather, their racial privileges in colonial society ran the gamut of complicity and resistance (midgley 1998, 7). in e. m. forster’s a passage to india, the ambiguous attitude of the british expatriate community to adela quested after she makes her accusation of rape against dr aziz subtly reflects this paradox (2000). european women, as family members of imperial functionaries, were both complicit in the colonising mission as well as affected by the patriarchy of their own cultures. at the same time, oriental men bore the double burden of being constructed as both incurably lascivious and rampantly sexual, as well as effeminate, effete, and languid. such sentiments meant that when colonial powers wished to consolidate their hegemony over their subjects, the terrain occupied by women was one that was most disputed. many imperial powers concluded that the major priority of reform or renaissance of native societies was the reform of the status of women. women represented the backward and barbaric traditions of native society, and the necessity for the renovation of tradition thus became increasingly based on debates about the rights and status of women, and the colonisation of minds as well as bodies (nandy 1983). such reforms were not imposed by law but by such means as education whereby european values could be subtly disseminated through colonised societies. in this context, partha chatterjee has argued that in anti-colonial nationalist struggles women were confined to the context of the family, even where the latter was being reconstructed. in india, for example, the discourse over nationalism situated ‘the women’s question’ in an ‘inner domain of sovereignty, far removed from the arena of political contest and the colonial state’ (chatterjee 1993, 117). the condition of indian women, defined by such cultural practices as widow burning, was extrapolated to mark the ‘unworthiness’ of all indian tradition and culture, and to provide the justifications needed to exhort indian civilisation to embrace the modernising aspects of colonialism. thus, the women’s question in the agenda of indian social reform in the early 19th century was not so much about the specific condition of women within a specific set of social relations, as it was about the political encounter between a colonial state and the supposed ‘tradition’ of a conquered people (chatterjee 1993, 119). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 ghosh women in asia in the postcolonial era, nationalism is still constructed as a gendered dynamic in the arena of the family. an article published in a popular annual three years after india’s independence in 1950, which concluded with the english proverb, ‘the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world’, claimed: women are the creators of the nation. the community is created by human beings but each of these humans was once nurtured in the lap of a mother, hence who else can be the maker of the nation than women? this is certain that human resources are more valuable than wealth and the creator has left the development of this human wealth in the hands of women (n. devi 1950, 157). in her essay ‘can the subaltern speak?’, gayatri spivak (1987) posed a challenging question for scholars of gender and colonialism. she asked if the double eliding of native women by colonisation and patriarchy precludes their voices from ever being heard. if human subjectivity is inscribed like a palimpsest; written and re-written by ‘violently shuttling’ discourses of power and knowledge and from shifting positions and locations, then it is impossible to retrieve subaltern agency from the colonial archives since one cannot assume that the colonised person has autonomy and that the archive presents a transparent record of her/his agency. the issue of gender further complicates this task, as the colonial archive usually contains the stories of men: ‘as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. if, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow’ (1987, 287). however, spivak does not imply that the engaged intellectual who wishes to highlight the oppression should therefore do nothing (loomba 1998, 234). rather, she advocates the adoption of the gramscian maxim, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’, or the combination of a philosophical scepticism about recovering any subaltern agency with a political commitment to making visible the position of the marginalised: ‘the subaltern cannot speak. there is no virtue in global laundry lists with ‘woman’ as pious item. representation has not withered away. the female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish’ (spivak 1987, 308). several of the papers in this special issue attempt to engage in the ‘circumscribed task’ cited by spivak. in ‘the way to entrepreneurship: education and work experience for female entrepreneurs, jiaocheng county, shanxi province’, minglu chen examines portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 ghosh women in asia the education background and work history of a newly emerged group of women entrepreneurs in the people’s republic of china (prc). she compares and analyses the situation of women enterprise owners, wives of male enterprise owners and those who take leadership positions in the enterprises as workshop leaders, share holders, managers and de facto managers and suggests that qualities other than higher education may be crucial in the trajectory of their careers. elaine jeffreys, on the other hand, examines some of the tensions surrounding the prc’s official policy of banning prostitution by focusing on two highly publicized cases of deceptive recruiting for sexual services in her essay, ‘over my dead body! media constructions of forced prostitution in the people’s republic of china’. the two cases involved young rural women who had migrated from their native homes to other more economically developed parts of china to look for work. both were forced to sell sex and both resisted, one jumping from a building and the other stabbing her employer. in both these articles, if one listens closely, faint but insistent subaltern voices emerge from the silence. histories of european and colonial discourses have often elided key sites in the production of those discourses. for example, ann laura stoler argues that michel foucault’s analysis of key processes in modernity in europe (as in his unfinished history of sexuality), by short-circuiting empire, ignored the ways in which colonial experiences were imbricated in these processes. instead, ‘bourgeois identities in both metropole and colony emerge tacitly and emphatically coded by race’ (stoler 1995, 7) and ‘a racialized regime of truth operated in cultural-anthropological, environmentalgeographical, and sociological-political registers’ (howell 2004). stoler describes how an implicit ‘racial grammar … circulated through empire and back through europe’ (1995, 14 & 30). colonial societies became obsessed with finding and controlling internal enemies who destabilised the colonial power structure, transgressing bourgeois norms such as sexual control, domesticity and racial purity. thus europeanness in the colonies was constructed as a delicate and beleaguered identity, needing self-discipline to resist degeneration or ‘going native’, in the face of the tide of ‘native’ biological and cultural contamination. mcclintock notes, like stoler, that the categories of class, gender and race overlapped and criss-crossed in imperial politics and that the family offered national narratives an indispensable metaphoric figure for sanctioning national hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests (mcclintock 1997, 91). stoler portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 ghosh women in asia recasts the connections between race, imperialism and sexuality by showing how bourgeois sexuality in europe was discursively and practically implicated in the colonial sexual order (howell 2004) and ‘control over sexuality and reproduction was at the core of defining colonial privilege and its boundaries’ (stoler 1995, 39). according to stoler, colonies functioned as ‘laboratories of modernity’ (1995, 15), whose experiments on discourses and policies of race, class, and sexual relations, were exported to the metropoles. for example, dutch colonialism in south-east asia produced significant and complex hybrid cultures through the influence of native and mixed-race mothers on their children and the intimate relationships between white dutch children and their local, ‘native’ nursemaids and nannies. not only did people shuttle between metropole and colony but so did ideas, practices, and policies, especially those that were mundane, domestic, and intimate. ‘modern’ ideas about gender roles, domestic management, or middle and working-class ‘respectability,’ were tried out in the colonies before being exported to imperial centres. modern discourses of sexuality and gender were created by interconnected engagements and dialogues between colonies and metropoles; thus, race/biology, as well as sex/biology/gender, were central elements in the fears and the desires of the colonial and metropolitan populations. these themes are addressed in ‘dancing in the “contact zone”‘ and ‘ibu sawitri and the a/occidental oriental’ where monica wulff, a sydney-based contemporary dancer and performance artist, reflects on a multimedia installation, troppo obscura, in which she addressed her personal relationship with a traditional mask dancer, ibu sawitri from cirebon on the west coast of java, indonesia. she explores some aspects of the complex relationships developed in the liminal spaces of contact zones, interrogating the colonial gaze and meditating on the human ties forged through artistic endeavour. wulff examines the ways in which the dance context and the dance have been transformed over time in the ‘contact zone’ (pratt 1992) as a result of rapidly changing socio-historical conditions, and discusses the nuances of cross-cultural encounters in the embodied practice and function of dance. postcolonial attempts at subaltern retrieval have been criticised by cultural critics other than spivak. the influential critic chandra talpade mohanty (1984) accuses european feminist discourses of constructing a monolithic, ‘third world’ female victim as its portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 ghosh women in asia object of research. she argues that these discourses assume that ‘third world’ women have the same interests and priorities as european women and that the struggle against patriarchal oppression is homogenous and global. thus the vast material and historical variances and contingencies within ‘third world’ women are elided. mohanty rejects such essentialist ideas of potential solidarities by advocating ‘imagined communities of women with divergent histories and social locations, woven together by the political threads of opposition to forms of domination that are not only pervasive but systemic’ (1991, 4). it is thus possible for such communities and solidarities to ‘retain the idea of multiple fluid structures of domination which intersect to locate women differently at particular historical conjunctures, while at the same time insisting on the dynamic oppositional agency of individuals and their engagement in “daily life”’ (1991, 13). similarly, trinh t. minh-ha considers that the popularity of the ‘third world woman’ is due to the exoticising of the native woman into a fixed ineluctable alterity: ‘it is as if everywhere we go, we become someone’s private zoo’ (1989, 82). trinh concludes that the creation of the ‘third world’ woman emphasises the european feminists’ solidarity, support and mediation of these oppressed women in the global struggle against patriarchy, solidifies the difference between first and third world women, and subverts the egalitarian discourses of western feminism. both mohanty and trinh powerfully repudiate marx’s dictum: ‘they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented’ (marx 1954, 106). heike hermanns takes up this question of representation by examining the reasons for the increase in female representation in south korean politics in the early 21st century. in ‘women in south korean politics: a long road to equality’, she discusses the democratic procedures that influence female representation, to show that female representation in parliaments is not the only way to influence politics and policies on women’s issues. in the twenty-first century, globalisation and the flows of information, capital, and people, have produced a multi-faceted and complex set of studies on women and migration. many contributions to this issue reflect on the multiple ways that women participate in different forms of negotiation between the blurred shadow lines of identity, notions of tradition and cultural change, love, sex and romance, the associations and intermeshings of family, community and the collective with the individual, and the ongoing mediations and meditation on silence and speaking. what are the historical dimensions to these kinds of negotiations and conversations? how portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 ghosh women in asia might we understand the transforming desires and wants of women in asia, their preoccupations and lived realities? nicole constable, in her subtle and rich essay, ‘brides, maids, and prostitutes: reflections on “trafficked” women’, critically examines the blurred boundaries—or the analytical shadow lines—in scholarly and popular conceptualizations of asian women migrants. she interrogates the commonalities and distinctions between women who migrate from the global south to the north as maids, brides, or sex workers and reflects on the importance of these factors. what are the implications of such blurs for women’s self-perceptions and life experiences, for feminist scholarship, and for immigration policies? drawing from ethnographic field research among chinese and filipina correspondence brides, filipina domestic workers, and from the wider literature on sex workers, constable considers some of the problems with a ‘trafficking’ framework, and discusses the analytical and ethnographic possibilities that emerge from a closer examination of the real and imagined shadow lines between sex workers, domestic workers, and migrant brides. the sites of being for migrant women are the spaces, both public and private, of their new landscapes where they perform and practice forms of social, economic and political action. nikos papastergiadis has suggested that the place of belonging can no longer by purely geographic (a notion of place) or historical (a sense of connection) because it is ‘cross-cut by a variety of global forces’ (1998, 1). if identities are fluid, unfixed and changing, it is perhaps appropriate that women can function across various arenas, appropriating the accoutrements of difference as they need them. christina ho delineates the imaginative projections of home and its traces in the present in ‘women crossing borders: the changing identities of professional chinese migrant women in australia’. ho analyses migration programs in the western world that increasingly target skilled professionals, as governments view migration through the lens of economic efficiency. however, once skilled migrants arrive in their new homes, they confront many barriers to re-establishing their careers in a new labour market. ho’s paper uses qualitative and quantitative data to explore the consequences of this career disruption for professional women from hong kong, now settled in australia, who often find themselves reorienting their identities and values away from the world of work towards non-market-based spheres of life, such as family, leisure and self portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 ghosh women in asia development, thus challenging the australian government’s economistic definitions of social citizenship. this mediating between the past and present, the domestic and the wider social world, mirrors the preoccupations of contemporary society and the way in which people’s material lives enter the imaginary and symbolic. this corporeality is at the generative core of meaning making, extending the materialist trajectory of what people do in domestic space into the more intimate waters of subjectivity, embodiment, and culture. the wider productive and social processes of labour and class intersect with the experiential modalities of sexuality and consumption within domestic spaces and women’s desires. these intimate experiences of broad social and economic practices contain much of the most compelling and memorable moments of social life. their affect generates much of the immediate meaning and connection with broader socialities, since women do not construct themselves in either/or categories, either in relation to a nativist longing for a homeland past, or in a global representational economy of the new capitalist culture of modernity. in this context, schaffer and song’s paper, ‘writing beyond the wall: translation, cross-cultural exchange, and chen ran’s “a private life”’, examines the translation of chinese women’s autobiographical writing into english. by locating chen ran’s work in the global flow of ideas between china and modern western democracies, the authors explore issues of translingual practice, reflecting on what escapes or is lost in translation, as well as the additive potential of the host text. can translation deliberately make certain ambiguities visible by negotiating meaning so that the text remains open-ended, with multiple possibilities for interpretation? schaffer and song claim that the translation process creates new spaces for dialogue among readers, writers and theorists, despite inhibiting factors like the imposition of local restraints, the universalising pressures of western modernity, and asymmetrical relations of power between guest and host language contexts. the contributors to the women in asia conference were exemplary in not romanticizing women, diasporic, and/or local cultures. rather, most attempted a kind of radical re-enchantment in celebrating the contingent character of the present, always seeking what is still undiscovered. to borrow from amitabh kumar, the possibilities of the papers at the conference had to do with their potential to resist national wills and portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 ghosh women in asia narrowly nationalist identities (2000, 229). mohanty has cautioned that the very process of constructing a narrative for oneself imposes a coherence that is never entirely there. but, she adds, this perhaps is the lesson to be learnt. home, community and identity all fall somewhere between the histories and experiences we inherit and the political choices we make through alliances, solidarities, and friendships (kumar 2000, v). the spectre that consistently haunts these papers is the construction of woman as anomaly, as object of uneasy reflections about the nature of cultural boundaries. new cultural spaces are being created that are framed by counter-politics and interventions. the loss of boundaries in the processes of living also influences the reinterpretation of the past and the translation of the present, so that the nature of subjectivity is contingent and contested. it does not float aimlessly in a postmodern moment; rather it is grounded in a thousand plateaus, felt and experienced through the body, historical landscapes, domestic spaces, through performance as well as through the realm of the imaginary, in the impact of ideals and the weight of history. reference list chatterjee, p. 1993, the nation and its fragments: colonial and postcolonial histories, princeton university press, princeton. devi, n. 1950, desh saradiya sankhya, anandabazar patrika, calcutta. forster, e.m. 2000 (1908), a passage to india, penguin, harmondsworth. heng, g. 1997, ‘“a great way to fly”: nationalism, the state and the varieties of third-world feminism’, in feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures, eds m. j. alexander & c. t. mohanty, routledge, new york, 30-46. howell, p. 2004, 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mohanty, c.t. 1984, ‘under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’ in boundary vol. 213, no. 1: 333-57. ——— 1991, ‘introduction: cartographies of struggle: third world women and the politics of feminism’, in third world women and the politics of feminism, eds c. mohanty, a. russo & l. torres, indiana university press, bloomington, indiana. 1-47. nandy, a. 1983, the intimate enemy: loss and recovery of self under colonialism, oxford university press, delhi. midgley, a. 1998, gender and imperialism, manchester university press, manchester. minh-ha, t.t. 1989, women, native, other, indiana university press, bloomington. papastergiadis, n. 1998, dialogues in the diasporas: essays and conversations on cultural identity, rivers oram press, london and new york, 1998. peterson, k.h. & a. rutherford (eds) 1986, a double colonization: colonial and post-colonial women, dangaroo press, denmark and england. pratt, m.l. 1992, imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation, routledge, london and new york. said, e. 1979, orientalism, vintage, new york. sangari, k.k & s. vaid (eds) 1989, recasting women: essays on colonial history, kali for women, new delhi. spivak, g. 1987, ‘can the subaltern speak?’, in marxism and the interpretation of culture, eds c. nelson & l. grossberg, university of illinois press, 271-315 stoler, a.l. 1995, race and the education of desire: foucault’s history of sexuality and the colonial order of things, duke university press, durham, nc, and london. subrahmanyam, s. 1997, the career and legend of vasco da gama, cambridge university press, cambridge. west, l.a. (ed.) 1997, feminist nationalism, routledge, london and new york. yuval-davis, n. & f. anthias 1989, women–nation–state, macmillan, london. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 ‘women’ in ‘asia’: an interrogation reference list portal v11 no 1 jan 2014 teh et al copyedit&galley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. stigma and exclusion in cross-cultural contexts special issue, guest edited by annie pohlman, sol rojas-lizana and maryam jamarani. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. self-stigma, anticipated stigma, and help-seeking communication in people with mental illness jen lee teh, david king, bernadette watson and shuang liu, university of queensland according to the world health organization (who 2010), mental disorders are among the leading causes of ill-health and disability worldwide, affecting over 450 million people. although treatments are available, large numbers of people with mental illness (pwmi) remain undiagnosed and are without adequate support (andrews, issakidis & carter 2001). undiagnosed or undertreated mental illness can have dire consequences, including suicide (who 2012). one key reason for pwmi avoiding diagnosis or treatment is the stigma associated with mental illness. the us surgeon general’s report on mental health has noted how stigma hinders pwmi from acknowledging their illness, seeking help, and disclosing to others (satcher 2000). there are various theories about the origins of mental illness stigma (corrigan, watson & ottati 2003). on the one hand, critical psychology questions whether mental illness conceptualisation, labelling and treatment causes stigma in the first place; that is, any system of psychology itself could be a source of oppression (parker 1999). on the other hand, it is also true that individuals often feel better when they have an explanation for their distress, and a biomedical diagnostic label may decrease the stigma by miminising blaming the individual as weak or sinful (schreiber & hartrick 2002). regardless of the complexities surrounding how labelling could give rise to stigma, the fact remains that mental illness stigma exists in many societies across the globe. that stigma causes pwmi to be discriminated against when renting homes, applying for jobs, using health services or encountering police officers (overton & medina 2008; corrigan et al. 2003). teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 2 stigma also inhibits pwmis from seeking help because people want to avoid being labelled as mental patients (cooper et al. 2003). as proposed in the modified labeling theory (link et al. 1989), this avoidance stems from fear of rejection that arises through psychosocial processes. modified labelling theory states that socialisation leads individuals to develop beliefs about how most people treat mental illness. if a person believes that others will reject a pwmi and think of them as less competent or trustworthy, there will be fear of rejection should that person experience symptoms of mental illness (link & phelan 2001). thus the pwmi might choose to keep their condition a secret or to withdraw from social contacts. given this potential pathway for stigma to inhibit pwmis seeking help, it is worthwhile to interrogate what constitutes mental illness stigma. one in five australian adults experience a mental illness in any given year, yet only 35 percent of people with symptoms of mental health problems seek help (australian bureau of statistics 2007). this scenario is complicated by cultural and linguistic backgrounds that generate diverse conceptualisations of mental illness (jacobsson 2002), and thus diverse approaches by pwmis in seeking treatment. for example, if an individual with mental distress has experienced discrimination due to their cultural background, such individuals may experience profound mental illness stigma. previous work has been done to determine the effect that different types of stigma have on help-seeking decisions (barney et al. 2006; vogel et al. 2006), but the focus of this paper will be on anticipated stigma versus self-stigma. in contrast to public stigma, which refers to discriminatory beliefs held by general society towards pwmi (corrigan & watson 2002), anticipated stigma and self-stigma are facets of personal stigma experienced by pwmi. anticipated or expected stigma is the belief of pwmi that others would think of them as having negative attributes (cechnicki et al. 2011; chaudoir et al. 2013). the prevalence of such stigma can be linked to judgment errors about the representativeness of media portrayals (kahneman & tversky 1972) where people tend to mistakenly believe that pwmi with negative attributes are more common than in reality due to what they are told by media sources. these mistaken attributes, which are often persistent, include being dangerous (corrigan et al. 2002) and incompetent (dickerson et al. 2002). self-stigma arises when pwmi internalise the negative stereotypes and prejudices associated with having mental health conditions, labelling themselves as socially unacceptable (ben-zeev et al. 2010; rose & thornicroft 2010). teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 3 indeed, one study in europe involving 1,229 participants with psychotic disorders from fourteen countries found that almost half of the participants reported moderate or high levels of self-stigma (brohan et al. 2010). both forms of personal stigma have been shown to reduce willingness of pwmi to seek help and it is conceivable that they mutually reinforce each other. bos et al. (2013), for example, combine both concepts together and refers to it as self-stigma. however, some researchers have attempted to isolate these two inter-related concepts because the subtle differences between them could be important for unlocking how stigma impacts help seeking by pwmi. for example, when schomerus, matschinger and angermeyer (2009) used different instruments to measure anticipated stigma and self-stigma, they found that self-stigma was more of an obstacle to help seeking. other research showed that it is anticipated stigma that fuels self-stigma, which then influences willingness to seek counselling (vogel et al. 2007). this study frames the question of how different stigma types affect willingness to communicate for help. we propose the term helpseeking communication to refer to self-disclosure by individuals about their psychological distress to another party who can respond personally. understanding how personal stigma inhibits communication for help is necessary to help pwmi fight the effects of stigma and communicate for help despite the inhibition they feel. this communication focus arises from the apparent paucity of research focusing on the link between help-seeking communication and personal stigma in pwmi (hinshaw 2004). in goffman’s (1963) seminal work on stigma, he argued that stigmatised persons would respond by limiting contact or passing off as an unstigmatised individual. such responses necessarily involve communication choices by pwmi—that is, they limit communication with others or choose not to disclose about their psychological struggles—so it is important to explore the link between stigma and helpseeking communication. this study fills a gap in existing literature that primarily focuses on communication to pwmi, for example, communication of stigma (meisenbach 2010) or communication to improve clinical outcomes (patel & sinclair 2008), instead of communication by pwmi. this study attempts to shed light on the link between the two kinds of personal stigma and help-seeking communication. to counter stigma’s influence on help-seeking communication effectively it is vital to know which type of stigma is at a higher level in teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 4 pwmi, how each type of stigma correlates to willingness to communicate for help and also which stigma type is more correlated with reduced help-seeking communication. we aimed, first, to measure the difference in levels of self-stigma (what i think of me) versus anticipated stigma (what i think others think of me) in pwmi. we hypothesised that pwmi would report different levels of these two aspects of personal stigma. second, we wanted to determine the nature and strength of the correlation between willingness to communicate and anticipated and self-stigma. establishing which type of stigma has stronger correlation to help-seeking communication could inform more effective anti-stigma interventions. we used the grounded theory approach in this study, defined as follows: a grounded theory is one that is inductively derived from the study of the phenomenon it represents … therefore, data collection, analysis and theory stand in reciprocal relationship with each other. one does not begin with a theory then prove it. rather, one begins with an area of study and what is relevant to that area is allowed to emerge. (strauss & corbin 1990: 23) the methods section will elaborate on how this approach, usually used in qualitative studies, guided the development of this study’s quantitative survey instrument. a new survey was needed because previous scales such as the anticipated discrimination when seeing a psychiatrist (adsp; schomerus et al. 2009) or the self-stigma of seeking help (ssosh; vogel et al. 2006) were too focused on seeking psychological help. this study aims to look at help-seeking communication in a broader sense, including disclosure to laypersons because such communication can improve societal attitudes (price 2009), which can benefit pwmi. methods setting and sample the study was conducted in brisbane, australia, between march and may 2011. at the time of the study, all participants had lived in australia for at least one year over the previous five years. recruitment occurred through email referrals and social networking platforms to disseminate the online survey link. several mental health organisations helped to distribute the survey and posters were put up in community spaces such as libraries, shopping centres, pharmacies and primary care clinics. ethical clearance was obtained from the first author’s university. the survey was anonymous to maintain confidentiality of participants. more than half of the stigma items were phrased in the form of affirming statements. teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 5 design potential participants were given a url link to the survey. the first question enquired about the respondent’s mental condition, ensuring that only those who had experienced mental illness were surveyed (if currently undiagnosed, they were asked to selfdiagnose based on their symptoms). hard copies of the survey (along with pre-paid envelopes) were distributed to those without internet access. participants who volunteered for the follow-up interviews provided their contact details. interviews took place at a venue and time of the participant’s choice. measuring stigma perception respondents were asked to what extent they agreed with two lists of twelve five-point likert scale statements (1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree). the first list contained statements reflecting self-stigma and the second list the corresponding statements for anticipated stigma. using the grounded theory approach, statements were generated from literature that reflected stigmatising beliefs about pwmi. obviously the list cannot be exhaustive, but a selection of the more common beliefs was made; for example, as mentioned earlier, the view that pwmi are dangerous (corrigan et al. 2002). a sample of a statement on the self-stigma list was ‘i believe that having a mental health condition means that i may be a danger to myself/others.’ the corresponding statement on the anticipated stigma list was ‘i think if others knew about my mental health condition, they would think that i might be a danger to myself/others.’ measuring willingness to communicate for help participants were asked to what extent they agreed with statements regarding willingness to talk about their psychological issues to counsellors, medical professionals, family members, non-kin close friends, and strangers in a self-help group (1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree). they were also asked if they had already spoken to these various help sources. statistical analysis the ratings on the twelve items for self-stigma were combined into one scale by aggregating the scores (negatively worded items were reverse coded) and calculating a mean score. the same procedure was followed for computing the twelve-item scale for anticipated stigma and the five-item scale for willingness to communicate for help. using spss 19, cronbach’s alphas were calculated for all three scales (0.74 self-stigma; teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 6 0.76 anticipated stigma; 0.80 willingness to communicate). a paired-samples t-test was used to determine if the means for the self-stigma ratings differed from the means of the anticipated-stigma ratings. this was done with the combined selfand anticipated stigma scales, as well as the individual stigma items. for correlation between willingness to communicate and stigma, pearson’s r was calculated for the participants when combined in a group and when they were split into two groups, caucasian (generally those from more western cultures) and non-caucasian. supplementary interviews participants who were willing to participate in follow-up interviews gave their contact details in the survey. face-to-face interviews, either in person or over internet video chat, of participants were conducted a few weeks after the survey to obtain a deeper understanding of how stigma affects help-seeking communication. interviewees were asked to elaborate on their stigma perception responses, for example, if they had answered strongly agree on the statement ‘i believe that having a mental health condition means that i may be a danger to myself/others,’ they would be asked why. they were also asked to describe their experiences with mental illness stigma and how it hindered help-seeking communication. the interviews were recorded with interviewee permission. mean duration of interviews was approximately 30 minutes (the shortest went for 21.5 minutes while the longest was 43.5 minutes). results seventy-two participants (72 percent female) completed the survey. participants had experienced a range of mental illness including depression, bipolar, anxiety and schizophrenia. respondents between the ages of 25 and 34 comprised 38 percent of the sample, followed by those aged 35 and above (35 percent). the majority of the sample was caucasians (61 percent), followed by asians (32 percent). there were 26 participants who agreed to be interviewed but not all were available within the time frame of the study. seventeen interviewees were chosen to represent as much diversity as possible in terms of the gender, age, culture and mental health characteristics of the respondents. this helped give the broadest picture possible about how personal stigma affects help-seeking communication. the rest of this section will present the findings in relation to the research questions. we will present the quantitative results from the survey, and to assist with explanations of these results we will supplement each finding teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 7 with quotes from the qualitative interviews. the quotes are not meant for deeper analysis, but are clear stand-alone exemplars of what participants said. attribute   selfstigma m (sd) rank by selfstigma mean rating anticipated stigma m (sd) rank by anticipated stigma mean rating t p-value different due to illness 3.21 (1.29) 1 3.25 (1.22) 4 -.24 .81 unpredictable 3.19 (1.26) 2 3.19 (1.22) 5 0.00 1.00 untreatable 2.90 (1.19) 3 2.68 (1.12) 10 1.27 .21 incompetent 2.81 (1.29) 4 3.35 (1.14) 1 -3.30** .00 dangerous 2.67 (1.31) 5 3.10 (1.25) 6 -3.02** .00 needy 2.67 (1.21) 6 3.00 (0.95) 8 -2.49* .02 unreliable 2.49 (1.23) 7 3.29 (1.16) 2 -4.99** .00 cannot live normally 2.32 (1.23) 8 2.69 (1.10) 9 -2.60* .01 lacks willpower 2.25 (1.25) 9 3.26 (1.18) 3 -5.94** .00 uses illness as excuse for failure 2.22 (1.11) 10 3.08 (1.14) 7 -4.83** .00 less able to contribute to society 1.64 (0.81) 11 2.64 (1.18) 11 -6.76** .00 needs to be treated as a child 1.56 (0.89) 12 2.07 (0.97) 12 -3.83** .00 combined scale 2.49 (0.61) 2.97 (0.60) -6.24** .00 table 1. mean ratings of stigma items (n = 72). *p < .05. **p < .01 teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 8 difference in levels of self-stigma versus anticipated stigma table 1 (above) shows mean ratings of individual attributes in the two stigma scales as well as their ranks according to the mean ratings. all mean ratings above 3 indicate agreement with the stigma statement (with the highest possible score being 5). table 1 also shows results of paired samples t-tests comparing ratings for individual stigma attributes and the two stigma scales. significant differences between self-stigma and anticipated stigma ratings were found for 9 out of 12 attributes, five had anticipated stigma ratings above 3. the mean score for the anticipated stigma scale was significantly higher than that for the self-stigma scale, which means respondents believed that others viewed them more negatively than they viewed themselves. an exemplar anecdote of anticipated stigma from participant #52 showed how a general practitioner (gp) clearly viewed her negatively for having depression: the gp told me, “you’re a public servant, you’ve got nothing to complain about, you’ve got it easy. i work 50 hours a week, get over it.” i walked out of his office bawling my eyes out. most people believe it’s in my head and the attitude is: “snap out of it.” it’s the people who don’t suffer depression who have that reaction. you tell them you’re having a down day, they automatically think, “what’s wrong?” they are looking for something specific but depression is not always triggered by an event. (#52, female, early 40s) nature and strength of correlation between stigma and willingness to communicate for help overall, self-stigma had a stronger negative correlation with willingness to seek help (r = -.15, p = .22) compared to anticipated stigma (r = -.01, p = .90) but both correlations were not significant at alpha level of .05. a typical example of how self-stigma plays a part in hindering help-seeking communication can be seen in the experience of participant #14. she first went through mental health services when she was caught selfharming at age 14 but suppressed the fact that she was hearing voices for over a year due to self-stigma. she said: “i felt like i was a freak and i was really scared how that would play out. it took me a long time to talk about it because to me that [hearing voices] was the stuff that made me really crazy” (#14, female, mid-20s). a significant correlation was found between self-stigma and help-seeking communication among the caucasian participants (see table 2). one caucasian respondent said that western culture can give rise to high levels of stigma: teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 9 a lot of it [stigma] was coming from outside, because [mental illness] it’s not spoken about and it’s not something that’s generally easily accessible – info about “oh actually this many people hear voices”. particularly in western culture it’s always voices that are portrayed [when] you’re crazy or whatever. i think a lot of it came from outside. specific things as well, my brother used to call me a freak, no real reason just a sibling thing but i think i internalised that and applied it to my own experience even though he didn’t know what was going on. it kinda amplified everything in my head. (#14, female, mid-20s) stigma type correlation with willingness to communicate p-value caucasians (n = 44) self -.36* .02 anticipated -.16 .31 non-caucasians (n = 28) self .00 .99 anticipated -.04 .83 table 2. correlations between stigma and help-seeking communication for caucasians and non-caucasians * p < .05 there were no significant correlations for the non-caucasian group. however, the following exemplar quote from an asian participant highlights the effect of stigma on help-seeking communication. initially i was quite willing to talk to my parents but at first they didn’t want to accept it – that their girl is having depression. [due to their] asian upbringing – they felt there is no such thing as depression you are just being dramatic, over the top…. they said negative things like, ‘your life is good enough already, there are people who are worse off than you. why do you feel like this?’ it’s mostly because of lack of knowledge about what depression is, lack of exposure to the sickness in the people from asian culture. (#34, female, late 20s) as the non-caucasian group was made up of several cultural groups, it reflected a variety of mental illness conceptualisations, stigma responses and communication. for example, participant #35, a male of middle eastern descent who had been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, was convinced that australian indigenous cultures allow for the possibility that those with mental illness are people with more evolved sensitivities. owing to his belief that mental illness is ‘not an illness,’ he was open to communicating about his experiences. he had encountered mental illness stigma but was not affected by it. he said: perhaps one day we will realise that [mental illness] it’s an increased awareness, perhaps an additional sense. perhaps it’s part of the human evolution…i see these phenomena as enhanced abilities…enhanced access to a consciousness or whatever. the fact that i can’t see something that somebody else sees, does that mean that person is crazy or that i’m blind? because my experiences particularly with indigenous cultures have brought about awareness that there are entities amongst us that we can’t witness but some can. (#35, male, late-20s) teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 10 we also found two individual stigma attitudes that had significant negative correlations with communication willingness, both in the combined group as well as amongst the caucasian participants (see table 3). correlations approaching marginal significance of p < .05 are listed in table 3 as well. attribute (selfor anticipated stigma)   correlation with willingness to communicate   p-value   lacks willpower (self-stigma)     combined   -.35**   .00     caucasian   -.47**   .00   lacks willpower (anticipated stigma)     caucasian   -.29   .06   less able to contribute to society (self-stigma)     caucasian   -.33*   .03   unpredictable (self-stigma)         combined   -.23   .05     non-caucasian   -.36   .06   needs to be treated as a child (anticipated stigma)   caucasian   -.28   .07   incompetent (self-stigma)    caucasian   -.28   .06   incompetent (anticipated stigma)     caucasian   -.27   .08   excuse for failure (anticipated stigma)     combined   .24   .05   table 3. correlations between stigma attributes and help-seeking communication in caucasians and non-caucasians. *p < .05. **p < .01 the stigma perceptions that pwmi are weak-willed and less able to contribute to society come through experiences such as the following: particularly within small organisations, people with mental illness are sometimes seen as weaker than others. possibly moving the person back to a lesser role or not giving them an opportunity to step up would be more of an example rather than anything that is specifically said. (#47, caucasian male, mid-20s) preferred help source the vast majority of respondents had spoken to at least one of the 5 help sources (only 5 teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 11 out of the 72 respondents said they had not spoken to any). based on the help sources that participants said they had spoken to, it appears that the most preferred choice for self-disclosure (81 percent) is someone close but not related, as table 4 shows. help source   percent of respondents who have spoken to help source   1. close friend (unrelated)   81   2. family member   72   3. counsellor   69   4. medical professional   68   5. self-help group member   26   table 4. preference of help source among pwmi. (n = 72) participants said they prefer to share their mental health struggles with friends because they want to spare family members, who may blame themselves for the problem. another scenario is where family members are also struggling, as was the experience of participant #58, who suffered depression when her maternal grandmother died, followed by her father, in the same year. she felt she could not speak about her emotions with her mother, as her mother already had to cope with the two profound losses. she said: i always found it very hard to share my emotions but i used to be able to do it until just after my grandma died, i was taking my grandma’s death very hard, and my dad said that i had to calm down and get over it because my mum was very upset as it was her mother … so i chose not to say what i was feeling anymore from that point on and then he died at the end of that year and that sort of made it worse. (#58, female, early 20s) discussion this paper examined the interplay between the two kinds of personal stigma in pwmi and their willingness to communicate for help. our first aim was to examine the difference between levels of anticipated and self-stigma. the fact that there was a significant difference in the stigma levels supports the previous research that have indicated that anticipated and self-stigma can be defined as separate constructs. our finding that respondents felt higher levels of anticipated stigma than self-stigma is consistent with previous research. vogel and colleagues (2007) noted that to alter anticipated stigma requires society-wide change. overall, the results can be considered encouraging as a mean of 2.97 out of 5 for anticipated stigma indicates that participants were neutral about the stigma that they expected from others. the findings from this teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 12 study suggest that we are moving towards reducing stigma. however, continued work is still needed to reduce anticipated stigma or build resilience against it because sirey et al. (2001) has shown that such stigma increases medical non-adherence. our findings on which attributes generated the highest stigma ratings (table 1) can be useful to develop more targeted anti-stigma initiatives and increase help-seeking in specific contexts. for example, the attribute of incompetence that had the highest anticipated stigma rating could be a factor when employed pwmi consider whether to use company resources such as mental illness screening. they could be reluctant because they anticipate that their employers will get to know about their issues and see them as less capable in handling their work. workplace campaigns to increase use of employee assistance program resources for mental health (ceniceros 2011) could benefit from addressing this particular facet of anticipated stigma pertaining to competence. incompetence was one of the five attributes where anticipated stigma was significantly higher than self-stigma (the others were dangerous, unreliable, lacks willpower and uses mental illness as excuse for failure). taken together, this set of attributes would make pwmi highly undesirable as an employee—which could explain why many do not disclose about their mental health problems to their employers (henderson et al. 2012). by highlighting possible attributes salient to workplace stigma, our findings also add to previous research showing how such stigma is an important predictor of job acquisition for pwmi (corbière et al. 2011). with respect to self-stigma, two attributes had mean ratings above 3: respondents felt they were different and unpredictable due to their illness. although the mean ratings were only 3.19 and 3.21, indicating a low level of agreement with the stigma statement, it is important to keep these aspects of self-stigma in mind. many researchers have shown the numerous negative effects of self-stigma on psychological well-being (corrigan et al. 2009; ritsher & phelan 2004). in addition, negative effects such as diminished self-esteem and self-efficacy have been known to persist even after someone recovers from psychiatric symptoms (link et al., 1997). self-stigma also has a particularly strong inhibitory effect on help seeking (barney et al. 2006; schomerus et al. 2009). in line with schomerus et al. (2009), we found that self-stigma was more closely correlated with decreased willingness for disclosure. this finding supports previous teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 13 studies like that conducted by rüsch et al. (2009: 552) which concluded that greater self-stigma could be related to reduced willingness to communicate for help, ‘possibly leading to decreased coping resources and thus to psychiatric hospitalisation as a last resort.’ this calls for initiatives aimed at challenging self-stigma, such as the training and empowerment of mental health consumers by health educators (speer et al. 2001). furthermore, clinicians could be trained to recognise signs of self-stigma in their patients so that they can take steps to address the stigma and prevent it from being a barrier to help-seeking communication. as the experience of participant #14 showed, self-stigma can prevent full disclosure of a patient’s mental health problems, which could result in less effective treatment. the effect of cultural differences can be seen in the differing correlations between stigma and help-seeking communication in the two groups (table 2 and table 3). previous researchers have also found cultural differences in mental illness stigma (rao et al. 2007). the literature seems divided on the issue regarding whether some cultures are more stigmatising towards mental illness. some researchers have found that less westernised societies are less stigmatising towards pwmi, whereas other studies have shown that there is greater stigma in such societies (jacobsson 2002). jacobsson further observed that differences in mental illness stigma (that is, stereotypes, prejudices and resulting discrimination) could be linked to cultural perceptions of mental disorders. kleinman and benson (2006) highlight the importance of health professionals being aware of their own culture and using culturally appropriate terms when relating to patients. the authors wrote about a chinese exchange student in the united states who declined treatment because her american health-care providers used the terms anxiety disorder and depressive disorder. she only resumed treatment when clinicians used the terms neurasthenia or a stress-related condition as this was what she was familiar with in china. in this study, most of the significant or near-significant correlations in this study involved caucasians. as this is an exploratory study, more data collection is needed before we can tease out why certain stigma attributes had significant correlations with willingness to communicate. the size of the non-caucasian group was not large enough to make any conclusive findings. the fact that diverse cultural groups (such as asian, islander, middle eastern) were combined could have also masked how this group was teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 14 different from the caucasians. perhaps the conceptualisation of mental illness, which has long been established to be culture-dependent (kleinman & good 1985), plays a part in moderating the effect of stigma on help-seeking communication. this possibility can be seen in the earlier quote from participant #35, who felt that his condition was not an illness and therefore was open to share his experiences despite having encountered mental illness stigma. this study also highlighted the importance of extending support for non-kin contacts that are the preferred help source. it lends weight to campaigns to enhance society’s overall capability to support those facing mental health issues, e.g. the mental health first aid programme. these are as important as initiatives that focus on equipping family members of pwmi, for example family survival psycho-education workshops (pollio et al. 2006). on the other hand, our participants were reluctant to disclose to members of self-help groups. this may mean that such groups will have to make a greater effort to reach out. more research should also be done to see what role stigma plays in attitudes toward group counselling (vogel et al. 2010). limitations one limitation of the study is its reliance on self-reporting instead of objective measures to determine participants’ actual mental health conditions. however, it is a valid method of uncovering perceptions, which have more to do with inner realities than external evaluations. the second limitation is the use of non-probability snowball sampling. although this method is suited for dealing with stigmatised individuals (kaplan et al. 1987), the pool of respondents may not be representative of the larger population of pwmi. therefore generalisation of findings from this study needs to be drawn with caution. third, there is difficulty in separating self-stigma from anticipated stigma as they are closely interrelated. future research can propose and test models of causation, moderation or mediation between the two concepts of personal stigma. fourth, the selection of stigma perceptions in this study is arbitrary, without considering whether the order of questions could potentially have carry-over effects or any other effects. finally, the timeframe for this study did not allow for the survey instrument to go through a full validation process. a validated instrument called the internalized stigma of mental illness questionnaire was recently rated positively for its psychometric properties (stevelink et al. 2012) so such instruments could be used in future research. teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 15 conclusions this study aimed to determine the strength of correlation between the two types of personal stigma in pwmi and their willingness to communicate for help. anticipated stigma was more prevalent among respondents than self-stigma, but the latter is more closely linked with decreased willingness for communication about mental health issues. while there are campaigns aimed at changing negative public perceptions about mental illness, more effort should be directed towards helping individuals cope with self-stigma, thereby enhancing help-seeking communication. examples of internal interventions have included advocacy: a study of mental health consumers by wahl (1999) found that the most common strategy for dealing with stigma was to speak out against the discrimination that they experienced. narrative therapy has also been used to change negative personal narratives to reduce self-stigma via empowerment of the individual (kondrat & teater 2009). the underlying conceptualisations of identity and narrative are relevant to mental illness stigma, especially self-stigma, for the following reason: ‘self-stigma is not merely a matter of inaccurate beliefs but also infects the stories one tells about oneself. to accept, for instance, that one is dangerous would seem necessarily to have an enormous range of consequences for how one might tell or not tell one’s life narrative’ (yanos et al. 2011: 578). a direction for future research that this study suggests is in examining how disease conceptualisations of pwmi affect their therapeutic relationships with their doctors, as these can be either empowering or disempowering. in addition, watson and larson (2006) proposed to empower mentally ill individuals by encouraging engagement in various social identities related to their abilities. social group memberships and other ‘domains of self-worth’ could provide both protection from the negative consequences of stigma and yield opportunities to build social support (watson & larson 2006: 242). authors of the first self-stigma study in iran, upon finding high levels of stigma (despite islamic teachings and a well-developed mental health service), said that improving how mentally ill people cope with stigma is an ‘interesting and promising route’ (ghanean et al. 2011: 16). future research into the effect of gender, age, culture, type of diagnosis/mental illness and time from disease onset on self-stigma can yield further insights on how to decrease self-stigma and increase help-seeking communication. more studies with statistically teh, king, watson and liu self-stigma, anticipated-stigma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 16 representative samples can also yield strategies to encourage help-seeking communication. this correlation study is only a first step towards improving communication among pwmi. increased communication can bring about a more varied discourse on psychological distress, which is preferable to unproductive suppression, as a problem shared is a problem halved. reference list andrews, g., issakidis, c. & carter, g. 2001, ‘shortfall in mental health service utilisation,’ the british journal of psychiatry, vol. 179, no. 5: 417–425. australian bureau of statistics. 2007, national survey of mental health and wellbeing: summary of results. abs, canberra. barney, l., griffiths, k., jorm, a. & christensen, h. 2006, ‘stigma about depression and its impact on help-seeking intentions,’ australian and new zealand journal of psychiatry, vol. 40, no. 1: 51–54. ben-zeev, d., young, m. & corrigan, p. 2010, ‘dsm-v and the stigma of mental 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empowerment,’ rehabilitation education, vol. 20, no. 4: 235–246. world health organization. 2012, public health action for the prevention of suicide: a framework. who, geneva. _____. 2010, mental health: strengthening our response. online, available: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs220/en/ [accessed 31 may 2013]. yanos, p., roe, d. & lysaker, p. 2011, ‘narrative enhancement and cognitive therapy: a new groupbased treatment for internalized stigma among persons with severe mental illness,’ international journal of group psychotherapy, vol. 61, no. 4: 577–595. portal v11 no 1 jan 2014 chavezsilverman copyedit&galley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. rock water ladder dream crónica susana chávez-silverman, pomona college 2 septiembre, 2012 (back in) claramonte, califas para montenegro, mi amor y para zachary mirman & marian williams as i’m sure you know, ons stad is sommer gefok now. new orleans is suffering, some massive, scary flooding is happening all over louisiana. in some places even worse, surprisingly, than 7 years ago with katrina. mi corazón sangra: i travel there often, have close friends there and natuurlik, that is the city of our corazón com/partido. suffused with the feeling in/of your voice all day, ayer. your familiar emo-laconic voz shot through me, flecha al corazón. i’d dreamt about you, and awakened with the certainty that i needed to phone you. went to bed last night reinhabiting a dream i had 3 months ago, unos días después del venus transit. i dreamt about the sea, a ladder, and a rock-face. i was standing on a cliff, looking down into clear-blue, moving water. podía ver un cliff-face en la otra orilla. there was a ladder standing in the water, y una mujer. i couldn’t see her face clearly, pero i knew the woman was me. last night, i knew (lo había intuido en junio)—o confirmé, digamos—the idea of you as that rock-face. i again remembered/felt myself como la mujer en el agua. the ladder chávez-silverman three crónicas portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 2 presented a way up the rock-face—an escape ladder—pero no me interesaba usarla. felt no pressing need to get out of there. the rushing water was pushing me toward, up against the rock-face. era una fuerza insistente, natural. yet not … aggro, ni peligroso. i felt no fear. ese rock-face se sentía … hard, yet paradoxically yielding, también. and strangely, uncannily … warm. now (digo, after south africa), me siento confirmada en los foretelling powers de ese dream: sé que ese rock-face is you. you are as ostensibly hard, unyielding as a rock-face. y sin embargo, this is only a surface (reading). i probe harder, deeper, y (te me) cedes. you accommodate. almost with a sense of alivio, it seems to me. shockingly warm. de hecho: ese too-hot, molten lava core is precisely what the stone-face seeks to safeguard. el correlato objetivo de ese tu impossibly tense dyad: between shield-yield. en el sueño, i turned my face toward that rock-face. laid my cheek against that outcropping of earth, a la vez forbidding and warm, as if lit from a fire within. even as i slept on your firm yet yielding shoulder in vasbyt, 30 years ago. as our dodge van chariot-turned-calabaza hurtled us toward chicago, hacia nuestra separación. as the blood from our lost ‘little zygote’—and your cum—still seeped out of me. as our tears flowed. my head on your shoulder, acurrucados en nuestro green sleeping bag, dormimos. in a startlingly similar scenario, así dormimos ahora, last month, in pretoria. reclaiming our passionate, my-country manera de dormir, soldered together, in the city where we’d come apart, en tu país. in south africa now, my face pressed against your firm shoulder, my legs curled against your nalga, nuestros pies entrelazados. or—most of the night— you turned toward me, detrás de mí, your body tracing the outline of my back, my butt. tu brazo, encircling my breasts, pressing me toward you, possesive, tightly, mi mano sobre la tuya. so we slept, juntos. chávez-silverman three crónicas portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 3 teensy ‘out of africa’ crónica 5 enero, 2013 claramonte, califas for isak dinesen (otra aries), in memoriam and for wim lindeque that h and i may find a way, de alguna manera, to come and go from one another, in love. así de sencillo (ja ja). oh, quiero ser como denys finch-hatton y que tú seas como la karen blixen. even if this analogy is topsy turvy, en términos del género. i mean: you are the great white (non) hunter, and i your foreign, writer amante. pero i embrace el finch-hatton’s fierce love for la blixen, outside the bond/age of marriage, dispensing with the normal convivialities (and trivialities) of the always dayto-dailiness, disappearing, laaargos trechos, into the bush. to do his thing. no con otras amantes, necesariamente (as la blixen jealously accused him of, de vez en cuando). o no principalmente. era … otra cosa. more than anything, su radical necesidad de soledad. he needed to miss her, me parece. craved the yearning. y ample airspace alrededor suyo. y ella, wildly, strangely independent in her own right, nevertheless still kind of struggled to accept it, accept him, tal cual era. she yearned for something more, algo más…qué sé sho: reconocible, perhaps. pero they loved each other. sin lugar a dudas. siempre. hasta el final. his untimely, tragic, blaze-of-glory, downed-byplane muerte. to me, their love, su modo de amarse, was perfect. there, lo he dicho. este es mi ideal. my latest greatest hope. chávez-silverman three crónicas portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 4 astral logic crónica 28 january, 2013 thompson creek trailhead claramonte, califas para montenegro, altyd, y hoy, en nuestro día and for joanna martine woolfolk, in memoriam siguiendo la star-cycle lógica de nuestro lifelong love (como dice joanna, my longtime astróloga), no es coincidencia que last year, 2012—30 years exactly after we’d met (on this very day: 28 january, 1982, en el balboa café, san francisco)—te (me) apareciste, te (me) abriste, again. instant combustion. right from the get-go, desde el mero instante que nos vimos, again, after so long. ironic (¿o el destino, the hand of fate?) that your heart should bleed love— rojo amor arrojado—for me. que te (me) desnudaras tan completely, tan startlingly, en el mismo lugar que nos había tronchado en 1982. pretoria. blame apartheid. culpa a tu mamá (prim, xenophobic, class-bound provincial scottish arribista). blame your fear (el miedo del miedo del amor, like the poet alejandra pizarnik says)—el miedo de tu propio corazón excesivo. blame my mid-20’s hyperpoliticized guilt and anti-apartheid outrage, culpa mi terca impaciencia. i have. i do. pero fíjate que como te estoy diciendo, la foto como que…just snapped into focus, al pensar las cosas—us—en términos de los astros. as is my wont, desde la infancia. y desde esta óptica galáctica, let’s say (o … extra-galáctica), it all makes perfect sense. so, i should’ve seen it coming, supongo (ah, pero mi propio persimmon-squishy, aztecripe corazón es tan y tan hope-springs-eternal). your heart had begun to immure itself (that awful, precise, medieval-sounding, architectural term you often use, al describirte) by december 1982. un año después de chávez-silverman three crónicas portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 5 conocernos en mi país, en san francisco, nuestra ciudad. sólo 5 meses después de mi arrival in johannesburg. as shocking to me, esa tu repentina emo-parálisis, as when your heart had poured itself suddenly, abundantly forth to me in my land (a pesar de ser un self-described ‘rough, rugged and independent’ oke), al comienzo de ese año. de la misma manera, by december 2012, siguiendo una terrible simetría astral—y en fatídica compensación por esa (for you, terrifyingly excessive) apertura pretoriana en agosto—te me habías comenzado a clausurar. again. go ahead, te escribí. preténdete judas. it ain’t gonna work for you, y tú lo sabes. you can try all you want, pero you can’t hide from la emo-verdad. tamp it down, push it down, deep, adentro tuyo. intenta enterrar esta verdad. pero como dice faulkner (más o menos): what’s buried alive is just that. sólo y precisamente eso. enterrado. pero alive. la verdad de nuestro amor, star-scripted, will only burrow deeper. dolor agudo, punzante. like your angina diagnosis el 21 de diciembre (el día del dizque mayan end of the world): a medical objective correlative of your tortured, wannabe resolutely safetysoeking corazón. más o menos invisible, on the surface (except for those blasts of unresolved rabia—your ‘buffalo temper,’ como dices—and that resigned wince cuando te retratan unguarded para una carabobo fotie), esa verdad will worm its way ever-deeper into your fortressed, exquisitely vulnerable heart. cual la proverbial thorn en pata de león. pero little eye, ¿eh? he aquí que la star-cycle logic todavía tiene algo que decirnos. si el 2012 siguió—in sequentially analogous if compressed fashion—los acontecimientos de nuestro 1982 beginning, then it follows that in 2013, the year of the serpent, you should acknowledge the error of your ways. incluso deberías (una brazen hope, lo reconozco) pedirme perdón. confesarme again (confesarte a ti mismo primero, ob-vio)—like you did in the news café, in pretoria, last august—que me amas. that you can’t—que no quieres—vivir sin mí. chávez-silverman three crónicas portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 6 you did this once. in 1983. pero back then, my young, tender, trampled, proud heart se había vuelto páramo. scorched earth. ahora no. ya no. sigo siendo yo. the one you know, the one you love. pero soy otra, too. you remarked it yourself, in pretoria. en la cama. my pilgrim’s progress. mi largo peregrinaje hacia la paciencia. ‘you’ve been an excellent student of patience lately, i’d say, shug,’ me dijiste. come, montenegro. my bok boytjie. my lion-lover. deja que te quite esa espina. let me. robertsgalleypolitics&aestheticschinanov2012issuefinal(2) portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. politics and aesthetics in china special issue, guest edited by maurizio marinelli. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. metal and stone, brush and ink: word as source in the art of huang binhong claire roberts, university of adelaide figure 1: photo of huang binhong reading at home in hangzhou. [reproduced in huang binhong quanji (2006: vol. 10, 289)] roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 2 in 1948, on the eve of the fall of beiping to communist forces, scholar-artist huang binhong (黃賓虹 1865–1955), then aged 85 and widely regarded as one of the greatest chinese landscape painters of the twentieth century, travelled by aeroplane to shanghai, and then overland to hangzhou. the journey marked the end of a decade of living in the former imperial capital, much of it under japanese occupation.1 huang’s son-in-law carried the artist’s most precious belongings as hand luggage: a sack of 900 ancient seals and a roll of historic paintings cut from their wooden rods to lighten the load, treasures from his personal art collection. today, huang binhong’s historic seals and paintings, as well as a large archive of his own paintings, calligraphy and personal papers, are core collections of the zhejiang provincial museum, hangzhou. huang’s multiple identities, as artist, scholar, collector and connoisseur were integral to his creative practice (roberts 2010: 52–53). like many of his contemporaries born in the late nineteenth century (at the end of the qing dynasty) he received a classical figure 2: huang binhong, hanging scroll, landscape, ink and colour on paper, 1948. [reproduced in huang binhong quanji (2006: vol. 10, 257)] 1 for background on huang binhong’s period of residence in beiping, see roberts (2007). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 3 education with deep foundations in historical, text-based learning. in the case of huang binhong, that learning engendered creative expression in the form of painting, calligraphy and seal carving, and scholarly expression in the form of art historical research and collecting. while based on cultural traditions of the past, calligraphy and painting were a means to mediate the present and imagine the future. they were the expressive embodiment of the artist who was vitally connected to the historical past. the written word is central to chinese brush-and-ink painting in a way that it is not in most western art. the same brush is used for calligraphy and painting; artists ‘write’ rather than paint a painting; and text is an integral part of any work: a poetic inscription is usually added to a painting, sometimes with a dedication to the person it is being created for, together with the artist’s signature, a date and the artist’s seal. in a painting dedicated to low chuck-tiew (劉作籌 1911–1993) that dates from 1948, three of the four seals were carved by huang binhong.2 the uppermost seal ‘huang binhong’s seal’ (huang binhong yin 黃賓虹印)was engraved directly into the stone, whereas the other two seals, ‘hermit of mount huang’ (huangshan shan zhong ren 黄山山中人) and ‘studio of the wild swan flying over ice’ (bing shang hong fei guan 冰上鴻飛館) were created through a reverse process of cutting away stone to reveal the characters, so that the seal impression appears as red characters against a white ground. seals are works of art in miniature and require considerable epigraphic and compositional skill. their role within a painting is to enhance compositional balance, confer authenticity and signal completion of the artistic process. when a seal is impressed onto a painting it contrasts with the fluid expression of the calligraphic brushwork creating a tension between the temporal and the spiritual, the past and the present, word and image. together, the different elements of a painting create a whole, its layers and references intended to be read and deciphered like a text, and its visuality understood within a lineage of scholarly art practice. through his activity as a collector and his prodigious output as a scholar and connoisseur, the art of huang binhong highlights the deep literary and historical resonances that continued to operate within the scholarly arts of painting and 2 see huang binhong quanji 1 (2006: 298). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 4 calligraphy into the twentieth century.3 in the pages that follow i will consider the centrality of place and learning in huang binhong’s art and how the past and the present co-exist in ways that open up artistic practice and make it possible to conceive of his paintings as being at once rooted in the past and actively engaged in a spirit of enquiry to create a new and expressive artistic language that was distinctively his own. place as source: jiangnan, shexian and huangshan huang binhong identified with the landscape and artistic traditions of jiangnan 江南 the lower yangtze river valley. in particular it was his ancestral home of shexian in anhui, and the region that encompassed jinhua, hangzhou, huangshan (yellow mountain) and the yangtze and xin’an rivers. it was here that huang binhong spent formative years of his life. historically, it was the cultural heartland of china with a concentration of well-educated scholar-gentry families, who had amassed important collections of books and artworks.4 throughout his life huang binhong drew intellectual and artistic inspiration from the landscape of southeastern anhui and huangshan and the many artists, poets and scholars in whose footsteps he followed. shexian is renowned for its great concentration of mountains and waterways. it is defined by mountains: huangshan to the northwest, tianmushan to the northeast and baijishan to the southwest. during the ming and qing dynasties it became a great mercantile centre, owing to its strategic location at the confluence of numerous waterways that linked anhui with zhejiang and jiangsu. shexian was famous for local products including the ‘four treasures of a scholar’s studio’ (wenfang sibao 文房四寶): ink, paper, brushes and ink stones. huang binhong’s ancestor huang cisun, a scholar of the imperial academy, was one of a number of natives from shexian who achieved success in the imperial examinations. the shexian gazette credits the beauty of the natural environment, together with the tenacity and ingenuity of the local people, for the creation of merchant wealth and the nurturing of many fine scholars and artists (shexian zhi 1995: 503–5, 577–79). shexian was a place of austere beauty where business, education and art were inextricably linked. 3 see the six volumes of huang binhong’s writings, huang binhong wenji (1999), which include his scholarship on ancient seals, art history, and connoisseurship. 4 in a short essay written in a supplement to shenzhou ribao and published sometime between 1913 and 1914, huang binhong provided information about some of the major collectors in shexian from the ming dynasty through to the early twentieth century. see huang binhong wenji (zazhu bian) (1999: 67). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 5 the manufacture of the tools and materials used by scholars to write and paint, quality goods that also appealed to court officials and local scribes, drew on the local resources of the area—pine trees, bamboo, clean water and high quality stone. historical records indicate that high quality ink made from pine soot, inkstones and paper, had been produced in shexian since the tang dynasty (berliner 2003: 11–12). in 1890, huang binhong himself gained first-hand experience in making ink, when he helped his father manufacture ink as part of a business venture that the family developed in response to poor quality imports and out of a desire to revive the local industry (wang zhongxiu 2005: 24). the business was abandoned following his father’s death in 1894, but huang retained a highly developed appreciation of fine ink.5 the presence of abundant supplies of timber attracted skilled carvers and contributed to the growth of high-quality wood carving workshops in shexian. local timber was used to make wood blocks for printing books and carved wooden moulds for ink sticks that were both practical and prized by collectors. creative collaborations between scholars, artists, artisans and entrepreneurs produced high quality illustrated books.6 figure 3: photos of tandu village and site of the binhong pavilion. [photographs © claire roberts] 5 huang binhong published a detailed essay on the history of ink making ‘xu zao mo’ in the shanghai journal guocui xuebao (volumes 42 and 44, 1908), which drew on this experience and subsequent research. see huang binhong wenji (zazhu bian) (1999: 13-20). 6 for an overview of woodblock printing in shexian, see kobayashi and sabin (1981: 25–32). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 6 one of huang binhong’s early, published writings is an essay entitled ‘village living’.7 in it he speaks of the close relationship between the huang family and tandu village (潭 渡村) in shexian. tandu takes its name from the place where a deep pond (tan 潭) must be crossed (du tan 渡潭): in the tang dynasty the huang family moved to huang tun, which was nine li west of shexian, just north of the point where where the pond is crossed.8 in the essay huang lists the mountains that surround the ancestral village and the rivers, streams, lakes and deep ponds. 9 he describes the ‘pavilion of the rainbow at the water’s edge’ or binhong pavilion (binhong ting 濱虹亭) on the northern bank of the stream, as one of the most beautiful spots in tandu, from where he would derive his artist name, binhong 濱虹.10 the landscape he evokes, part real, part imagined, draws on an idea of the past, inspired by literary remnants, family lore and natural and architectural features that survived the vicissitudes of time. the essay is an intimate portrait of the ancestral home that he was in the process of leaving. after moving to shanghai in 1909 he would never return to live in shexian. yet the mountains and waterways of area were to remain an important inspiration for his art, poetry and writing for years to come. huang binhong’s essay takes on a more polemical significance if it is considered as part of a genre of writing about historic places and homelands that developed in response to anti manchu-qing nationalism, modernisation and westernisation. it was published in the journal of the national essence in 1908 three years before the 1911 revolution that would bring the ‘foreign’ manchu-qing dynasty to and end. huang’s research into family history and the intimate portrait of tandu village is similar to undertakings conducted in other parts of the world at this time. one example is dinesh chandra sen (1866–1939), a bengali scholar, historian and devotee of bengali literature, who was a contemporary of huang binhong. sen scoured the east bengal countryside for old manuscripts. dipesh chakrabarty describes sen’s work as ‘romantic 7 the essay was originally published in 1908, guocui xuebao, volumes 42 and 43. see huang binhong wenji, zazhu bian (1999: 7–12). 8 huang binhong wenji (za zhu bian) (1999: 422). 9 the mountains surrounding tanducun are cited as taishoushan and xieshan to the northwest, fengshan, jingtangshan to the south, lingshan, jinlanshan, huangluoshan and tianmashan to the west and the famous huangshan or yellow mountain to the north. huang binhong wenji (zazhu bian) (1999: 7). 10 huang binhong wenji (za zhu bian) (1999: 8). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 7 anti-colonial nationalism’: for those who, like sen and others of his generation, had seen literature as quintessentially political, the past was constituted, ultimately, not merely by historical evidence but also by emotional and experiential recollections of the past. the past in that sense could fuse with the present. it was inhabitable in spirit. sentiments and emotions were thus a part of the method of both constituting and accessing a collective past. (chakrabarty 2004: 167) for huang binhong, like sen, the evocation of place was an expression of both a personal identity and a nascent national spirit, with a political dimension at a time of tension and change. figure 4: huang lü, album leaf, eight views of tandu, ink and colour on paper, early 1700s. [collection: zhejiang provincial museum, hangzhou] an album titled ‘eight views of tandu’ (tandu ba jing 潭渡八景) painted by huang binhong’s ancestor huang lü (黄吕) in the early 1700s and acquired by huang in 1928 is a fine example of his use of historical collections to access a personal and a collective past. huang lü was the son of huang sheng (黄生 hao baishan 白山, 1622–1696), a literatus and ming loyalist. huang lü studied with his father and was skilled in the ‘four roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 8 arts’ of poetry, painting, seal carving and calligraphy, as well as martial arts. he continued his father’s interest in family history and published miscellaneous annals from tanbin, a book which greatly influenced huang binhong’s own interest in family and local history.11 the ‘eight views’ depict life in the ancestral village and its situation on wide river flats at the confluence of numerous waterways. each leaf is accompanied by a twenty-eight character poem. the album opens with a painting entitled ‘waiting for the moon by the bank of the river.’ figure 5: huang lü, album leaf, eight views of tandu, ink and colour on paper, early 1700s. [collection: zhejiang provincial museum, hangzhou] the second leaf depicts an agricultural scene and the incongruous figure of a scholar on horseback, drawing attention to the large number of educated men who came from the area. the album held a particular significance for huang binhong who, during an 11 tanbin was an early name for tandu. roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 9 extended period of cultural and political turmoil, was exploring and locating his identity in his homeland and the cultural world of his forebears. huangshan: paintings and name seals figure 6: hongren, hanging scroll, ancient tree, ink on paper, 1669. [collection: zhejiang provincial museum, hangzhou] huang binhong’s fascination with shexian and huangshan was complex and multifaceted, at once literary, visual and experiential. his identification with huangshan is highlighted in signatures on paintings and references to his collection: ‘hongruo from below tiandu peak of huangshan’ (huangshan tiandu xia hongruo 黃山天都下虹若) and ‘from the collection of huang binhong’s studio at tiandu’ (tiandu huang binhong 天都黃賓虹).12 tiandu refers to the heavenly citadel peak (tiandufeng 天都峰) of huangshan and alludes to the tiandu school which was synonymous with the huangshan or xin’an school of artists. 12 paintings from huang binhong’s collection were reproduced in the art supplement jinshi shuhua in 1936 and 1937 (yu shasong 1988). for example jinshi shuhua, 65 (1936), p.2, and a painting dated 1936 now in the collection of the arthur m. sackler gallery in washington, dc (s1987.252). hongren also expressed his identification with shexian and huangshan by sometimes signing his paintings with a reference to the names of temples or mountain peaks of huangshan and environs. see cahill (1981: 80). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 10 figure 7: li yinsang seal – ‘binhong.’ [collection: zhejiang provincial museum, hangzhou] figure 8: huangshan name seals carved by huang binhong. [collection: zhejiang provincial museum, hangzhou] huang binhong developed his own considerable collection of paintings by shexian and huangshan artists. he had visited his relative, huang cisun (黃次孫) in 1882 the year before his death, and was given a number of paintings including a small painting by hongren (弘仁). huang binhong admired hongren as a fellow county man who identified strongly with huangshan, as a ming loyalist and as an artist who succeeded in creating an independent style. one of huang binhong’s early seals, carved by li roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 11 yinsang (李尹桑 1880–1945) features two characters that sound like the artists name bin hong 賓弘. hong means great or magnanimous and is the first character of hongren’s name. by using it, instead of the character for rainbow (hong 虹) found in huang’s own name, li yinsang suggests that for huang binhong, hongren was the single most important artist of the huangshan or xin’an school. huangshan was originally called ebony mountain (yishan 黟山). it is said that the yellow emperor travelled there to collect herbs for an elixir. in 747 emperor minghuang of the tang dynasty, who was a practicing daoist, changed the name of the mountain to huangshan, thus linking it with the yellow emperor and daoism. it is the name by which the mountain is known today. allusions to huangshan and daoism are frequent in many of huang binhong’s artist names. examples include a seal carved by huang binhong ‘hermit of huangshan’ (huangshan shan zhong ren 黄山山中人), and a seal used by him in his middle years, huang binhong, that has been cleverly composed so that the character for mountain reads as the two lower strokes of the huang character, which allows for the readings ‘huang binhong’ and ‘binhong of huangshan’ (huangshan binhong 黃山賓虹). the names of the adjacent mountains, huangshan and baiyue, were combined in an early seal carved by the artist. the jiajing emperor of the ming dynasty built the palace of ultimate simplicity (taisu gong 太素宫) on mount bai, which during its heyday supported more than one hundred daoist temples (wu lixia 2003: 6–7). over the course of his life huang binhong made nine trips to huangshan. the earliest was in 1883, at the age of twenty, and the last in 1935 when he was seventy-two. visible from his ancestral home, huangshan was a place of great natural beauty. aware of its daoist and buddhist associations, huang would comment on the power of the mountain to sustain the soul and extend human life.13 the relative inaccessibility of the mountain, as well as the benefits that humans could derive from entering its reaches, had attracted scholars, artists, poets and recluses for centuries. by incorporating references to his native region, its history and its people into his painting, writing and seals, huang binhong created a rich and layered iconography of place. 13 huang binhong wenji (tiba bian) (1999: 82). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 12 collecting: research and the preservation of national culture throughout his life huang binhong spent what money he could afford on collecting seals, rubbings, books, painting and calligraphy. in his view connoisseurship, research, writing and painting were integral aspects of scholarly and artistic endeavour. seals made from stone or bronze were official accoutrements used to identify a person or an institution. they could be inscribed with a person’s title, office or name, pen name or studio name (or poem or symbolic image) and were understood to embody the authority of the person or institution. figure 9: ancient seals from huang binhong’s collection now in the collection of the zheijiang provincial museum, hangzhou. [reproduced in zhongguo lidai xiyin yishu (2000: 71)] huang binhong’s interest in collecting and researching ancient seals was connected to the broader cultural and political debate about the future of the chinese language in the face of increased westernisation and modernisation. those promoting full retention of the language argued that chinese is one of the world’s oldest written languages in continuous use and is fundamental to understanding the development of chinese roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 13 culture. the elevation of the written word to an art form and its integral relationship with painting meant that the appreciation of brush and ink painting could not be divorced from its relationship to the written word. many scholars shared the belief that there was still much to be learned from an analysis of historical objects in circulation, such as ancient seals, as well as objects that were being recovered by archaeologists (shan guolin 1998: 31).14 the discovery of ancient inscribed fragments of tortoise shells and bones at the shang-yin (eleventh–twelfth century bce) site near anyang in henan province in the late 1800s, for example, and the reproduction of many of those objects in magazines in the early 1900s, renewed intellectual interest in the debate over the antiquity and origin of the chinese language (yetts 1933: 657–85).15 ancient words, inscribed on bone, cast in metal and incised in stone not only stimulated scholarly research but also exerted a profound aesthetic influence on seal carvers, calligraphers and painters. figure 10: pages from a book of huang binhong’s collection of ancient seals: binhong caotang cang guxiyin. in 1883, at the age of 20, huang binhong was given a han dynasty [206 bce–220 ce] general’s seal that originally formed part of a collection assembled by the bibliophile wang qishu (汪啓淑 1728–c.1799). wang was from shexian and a good friend of huang binhong’s ancestor huang lü (who painted the eight views of tandu). he had amassed a large collection of ancient seals and compiled many books on the subject, 14 in the late eighteenth century calligraphers had begun to take an active interest in carved stone stele dating from the six dynasties period (317–589) that were excavated in large numbers. similarly seal carvers began to take notice of ancient seals dating from the qin and han dynasties. 15 see also yetts (1933). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 14 reproducing the impressions of seals in his collection (hummel 1943: vol. 2, 810–12).16 huang saw many of wang’s writings on visits to shexian and over time acquired a number of other seals that were originally part of the wang qishu collection.17 huang binhong’s regard for learning from ancient objects that incorporated the written word was motivated by an intense curiosity to discover ‘things never seen before’: whilst engravings on stone and bronze, calligraphy and painting are known as art they are in fact the mother of all skilled arts. they are second in importance after literature. military force [wu 武] is used to suppress rebellions, words [wen 文] are used to govern. in former times  [denotes missing characters] until the warring states period, civility had collapsed and music was destroyed, every day people were in search of weapons and warfare, people suffered and it was an extreme situation. but scholarship and culture remained as bright and luminous as ever and in the many thousands of years since then there is nothing to compare with it, the strangeness and extraordinary ability to engender a sense of wonder. i have searched for and collected ancient seals, numismatics, words impressed into pottery shards, things never seen before. the examination and recording of these objects has been gradually increasing … it is important to study and appreciate [ancient] scripts and calligraphy as well as painting. if you learn from the best, then you will still only achieve something lesser.18 the objects that huang acquired were appreciated for their philological and aesthetic dimensions, and as historic artefacts that were profoundly affected by the time in which they were created. after the widespread devastation of the taiping wars, and subsequent political and social upheaval, scholars such as huang binhong believed that it was through the rediscovery of remnants of literary, visual and material culture that the new could be created. hangzhou: the late years in 1948, soon after huang’s arrival in hangzhou, an exhibition of paintings from his personal collection was displayed at the hangzhou art academy. the inclusion of his own paintings with historic works of art underlines the close connection that he believed existed in his mind between the two. one of huang binhong’s most beautiful works from this period is an album of paintings of huangshan, dated 1949, painted for a friend from shexian.19 the album may be thought of as marking his homecoming. while 16 wang’s publications included collection of ancient bronze seals from the han dynasty (han tong yin cong) printed in 12 volumes in 1755, and qishu’s collection of ancient seals (qishu ji gu yin cun) in 16 volumes. 17 see wang zhongxiu (2005: 16, 20, 31) and ‘jiushi zashu, zhi yi’, section one, in huang binhong wenji (zazhu bian) (1999: 570–71). impressions of the six seals were included in wang’s book qishu ji gu yin qun. huang binhong wrote about wang qishu’s collection of han dynasty bronze seals in an article ‘on a collection of ancient seals’ (xu gu yin tan), published in xueshu shijie 1, no. 9 (march) 1936: 35. 18 huang binhong, ‘zishu gao’ in huang binhong wenji (za zhu bian) (1999: 600). no date. 19 huang binhong, huangshan xiesheng ce (1997). see also huang binhong quanji 5 (2006: 170–88). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 15 figure 11: huang binhong, album leaf, huangshan wo you album, ink and colour on paper, 1949. [reproduced in huangshan woyou: huang binhong quanji (2006, vol. 5: 176–77)] huang did not travel to huangshan again, through painting he was able to return there in spirit. the title page is inscribed in seal script ‘travelling in huangshan while remaining at rest’ (huangshan woyou 黃山臥游) and is followed by an introductory text written in a blunt cursive calligraphy: ‘every pine tree and rock in cloud valley has found its way into these paintings. the sound of a lute being strummed and the movement of someone exercising echo the sound of the mountains.’ the album is intended to be read like a book. paintings and poems written by huang binhong during his travels to huangshan face one another on the page highlighting the interdependence of calligraphy, poetry and painting. in the middle of the album is a painting that continues across the two leaves, a misty, low-lying landscape executed with a dry brush and subtle colour washes. in the lower left corner there is a pavilion on the bank of a river, close to a large bridge that spans the waterway. another bridge can be discerned to the right of the composition suggesting a complex river system. it is inscribed: roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 16 the fengle river travels some one hundred li from its source in huangshan to my village where it gathers to form a deep pool. in the tang dynasty, my ancestor huang chungong [huang rui] moved from huangtun [黃屯]north to a point where you cross the deep pools, hence the name tandu village. in days gone by there was a binhong pavilion, which was one of the most beautiful sites in the area. looking west you can see the mountain range [of huangshan], the two peaks of cloud gate [yunmen 雲門] and tiandu [tiandufeng] and lotus flower peaks [lianhuafeng 蓮花 峰], the tallest of them all. the autobiographical nature of the image and text provide an important context for understanding the album, which is suffused with memories of travel and personal experience. according to an inscription, the images were gathered more than ten years earlier, probably during the last trip that huang made to huangshan in september 1935, with his wife song ruoying (宋若婴) and student huang bingqing (黄冰清) (wang zhongxiu 2005: 365–66).20 the paintings evoke a vivid mental landscape, and the delight of returning to southern china. they resonate with the feelings of elation and freedom on leaving the city and public office so famously expressed in tao yuanming’s poem: return home! my fields and garden will be covered with weeds, why not return? when oneself has made the mind the body’s slave, why sorrow and solitary grieve? i realise that “the past may not be censured,” yet i know “the future may be striven after.” truly i am not far astray from the road, i feel today is right, if yesterday was wrong. my boat rocks, lightly tossing, the wind, whirling, blows my coat. i ask a traveller of the way ahead. i resent the faintness of the dawn light. i espy my humble dwelling, so i am glad, so i run. the servants welcome me, the children wait at the door. the paths are overgrown, but the pine and the chrysanthemum remain.21 communist china: challenges to culture in late 1951 huang binhong travelled to beijing to attend the third meeting of the first national committee of the chinese people’s political consultative conference. ironically his presence at this meeting marks a turning point in the period of political and artistic limbo that he experienced from 1949 to 1951, and the beginning of his 20 the party set out from shanghai on 19 september 1935 and returned on 1 october. they also travelled to tandu and huangdun, and in tangmo to view the calligraphy and painting collection of huang’s friend xu chengyao. 21 quoted in barmé (2002: 220–21). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 17 figure 12: photo of huang binhong taken in beijing in 1951. [reproduced in huang binhong quanji (2006: vol. 10, 268)] recognition by communist authorities at the national level. huang was a specially invited public figure and participated in most of sessions of the week-long conference.22 he met and spoke with mao zedong (毛澤東 1893–1976), chairman of the people’s republic of china, and had a long conversation with the premier zhou enlai (周恩來 1898–1976). mao zedong apparently proposed a toast to huang binhong as the oldest of all the conference delegates and asked what he was working on. huang replied that he was studying ancient inscriptions of the warring states, to which mao responded that he was currently reading non-canonical texts of the zhou and qin dynasties.23 mao 22 see huang binhong’s identification card and book of tickets to be signed, dated and handed in when attending conference sessions. eight tickets were used, and four remain unused. collection of the zhejiang provincial museum (zpm 05644). 23 see xia chengtao’s dairy entry for early 1952, following a visit to see huang binhong, quoted in wang zhongxiu (1999: 526–27). xia chengtao was an academic and researched ci poetry of the tang and song dynasties. in 1952 xia became head of the chinese department at the zhejiang teacher’s college (zhejiang shifanxueyuan) in hangzhou. roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 18 zedong, the iconoclast who brought radical political and cultural change to china was also a keen reader of ancient chinese history and had an interest in chinese poetry and literature. transcriptions of historical poems in his distinctive calligraphic script came to be renowned, and he composed poems that had a strong classical flavour.24 the personal insight that huang gained into mao’s interest in ancient chinese literature and history, through their brief exchange, would have heartened huang binhong at a time when much traditional chinese culture was under threat. two years later huang binhong dedicated a painting to mao zedong: ‘the chairman, mr runzhi, with wishes for a long life’ (runzhi xiansheng zhuxi shouqing 潤之先生主席 壽慶).25 in a customary way of expressing respect to a superior, huang has placed mao’s name higher than the rest of the inscription. the painting marks mao zedong’s sixtieth birthday. in 1953 in the huang binhong turned ninety. a painting by someone of such advanced years was in itself symbolic of longevity. the painting is inscribed with a poem replete with historical allusions, and which praises mao zedong’s leadership by linking mao with yu, the legendary founder of the xia dynasty, and china’s classical past. the legacy of the great yu is carved on mount heng brilliant stars salute the northern heavenly body [beidou, referring to mao]. with a spirit descended from heaven, heaven responds by granting authority to rule, according to the [sixty-year] cycle of life there are reforms. drawing and painting pave the way for a flourishing cultural civilisation, boats and vehicles travel to virtuous neighbours. looking back on engravings in bronze and stone, we join to wish you eight thousand springs. the painting, signed huang binhong of huangshan at the age of ninety, has a traditional tripartite composition. mao zedong would have delighted in the auspicious sentiments conveyed by the pairing of sail boats and pine trees which indicate smooth sailing and a long life. huang’s painting embodies the hope that many people held out for the new regime in the early years of the people’s republic of china. the elderly artist saluted mao as a ruler with a mandate from heaven, highlighting at the same time the importance for chinese civilisation of history, embodied by the inscriptions on bronze and stone, which he was researching. 24 mao zedong’s brush and ink calligraphy became ubiquitous in china. it could be found on newspaper mastheads, the name plaques of institutions and in the many books that were published to promote his ideology. 25 runzhi was mao zedong’s pen name. see zhongnanhai canghua ji (1993: vol. 1, plate 5). see also huang binhong quanji 4 (2006: 225) roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 19 late style: the inspiration of dao-xian (1821–1861) from 1952 to the end of 1954, huang binhong pursued an independent artistic style that had little to do with the subject matter and ideology promoted by the new communist regime. the large volume of works he produced suggests a renewed interest in painting. he continued to take his inspiration from the art of the past, his travels in sichuan and guangxi, his ancestral home in anhui and his new home by the west lake in hangzhou. his late paintings are shaped by his familiarity with brush and ink technique, the deterioration of his eyesight prior to a cataract operation in 1953 at the age of ninety, and a renewed vision. inscriptions on paintings from this period often refer to the art and calligraphy of the daoguang (1821–1850) and xianfeng (1851–1861) periods of the late qing dynasty— figure 13: huang binhong, hanging scroll, landscape, ink on paper, 1952 [reproduced in huang binhong quanji (2006, vol. 2: 232)] roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 20 the mid 1800s. huang was attracted to the scholarly interest in epigraphy and the study of inscriptions on bronze and stone at that time, which led to the re-invigoration of calligraphy and painting. he identified with and championed the work of artists who lived one hundred years earlier on the basis of their ability to mediate and transform the art of the past. his concern to document artists who had slipped from public consciousness into obscurity perhaps also reflected his own extreme old age and a hope that a similar fate would not befall his own posthumous reputation. in the inscription on a bold calligraphic painting huang binhong refers to the work of the late qing calligrapher he shaoji (何紹基 1799–1873) who created an individual style based the systematic study of ancient stone inscriptions (chang et al. 2000: 66– 69).26 figure 14: huang binhong, hanging scroll, landscape, ink on paper, 1952. [reproduced in huang binhong quanji (2006, vol. 3: 104)] 26 see huang binhong quanji 2 (2006: vol. 2, 232). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 21 in a striking painting which exhibits an even freer and more abbreviated brush technique huang refers to the brushwork of hu’er [his ancestor huang sheng b. 1622], which he describes as being as ‘powerful as a bronze [ceremonial vessel or] ding.’ the inscription continues: ‘i believe that bao [shichen], zhao [zhiqian] and other virtuous men of the daoguang and xianfeng periods did in fact surpass men of earlier times.’27 bao shichen (包世臣 1775–1855) and zhao zhiqian (趙之謙 1829–1884), both active in the late 1800s, were important scholar-artists who developed individual calligraphic figure 15: huang binhong, hanging scroll, landscape, ink on paper, 1953 [reproduced in huang binhong jingpin ji (2004: 64). collection of the national art museum of china] 27 see huang binhong quanji 3 (2006: vol. 3, 104). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 22 styles based on the study of early chinese writing. huang binhong appreciated the practiced brushwork of calligraphers who turned their hand to landscape painting.28 in this work the calligraphic lines used for the painted elements and the inscription are similar, their volumetric form conveying an inner tensile strength. huang’s sure blunt brushstrokes painted with a splayed brush convey a feeling of ‘metal and stone’ derived from the study of ancient seals and inscriptions on stone stele and the careful balancing of elements within the painting suggest the resolution of areas of solid and void that occur in the creation of a seal. through his powerful calligraphic abstraction of form and expressionistic use of ink and colour huang binhong demonstrates his own distinctive, transcendent style. in an inscription on a quite different work, painted after his cataract operation, huang gives us a summary of his philosophy of painting, based on a synthesis of ideas and techniques from the past. the mountains and rivers are solid and substantial and the grasses and trees lush and resplendent. the techniques of dong [yuan 董源], ju [ran 巨然] and the two mi’s [mi fu 米黻 and mi youren 米友仁] may be regarded as coming from the same school. [in the paintings of] famous artists of the song and yuan dynasties there is void within the solid and solid within the void. the force of the brush conveys life-breath and the colour of ink conveys resonance. during the dao [daoguang] and xian [xianfeng] periods of the qing dynasty epigraphy flourished. large seal script, small seal script and clerical script are distinct and were all used for text carved onto stone tablets. truly great calligraphy and painting should combine the strengths of them all. these are the wise words of the ancients. they represent true inner beauty.29 huang binhong refers to the concept of inner beauty (nei mei 內美), which he says may be found in the ancient scripts engraved in bronze and carved on stone. according to huang inner beauty is a spirit or an aura the source of which lies within, ‘in the bones’. it is a force that is concealed rather than overt, exerting a deep and lasting influence.30 the latent strength inherent in the brush strokes that derived from inscriptions carved into stone or cast in bronze, was for huang binhong the key to artistic renewal and the ultimate aesthetic. 28 during the daoguang period, bao anwu painted many landscape paintings for which he developed a following. see zhongguo meishujia renming cidian (2004: 151–52). for other paintings by huang binhong with references to bao anwu’s calligraphy and landscape painting, see huang binhong huaji (1985, plate 32); huang binhong huaji (1992, plate 25). for information on zhao zhiqian, see chang et al. (2000: 94–97). for related works by huang binhong, see huang binhong juewei huaji (1993, plate 12), and huang binhong huaji (1992, plate 21). 29 see huang binhong jingpin ji (zhongguo meishuguan, renmin meishu chubanshe 2004: 64). collection of the national art museum of china. 30 see huang binhong, ‘guohua zhi min xue,’ in huang binhong wenji (shuhua bian, xia) (1999: 451), and wang zhongxiu, ‘xunjue ‘neimei’ de yishu dashi huang binhong,’ in mohai botao (1998: 216–17). roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 23 word and image: the final resting place figure 16: huang binhong’s grave: grave sculpture and new headstone. [grave sculpture reproduced in wang zhongxiu (ed.), huang binhong nianpu (2005: 560–61); new headstone photographs © claire roberts] huang binhong is buried in the nanshan cemetery in hangzhou. the original tombstone that marked his grave incorporated a carved torso of the artist wearing a traditional gown, his head bowed and hands clasped to his chest, holding a book. the grave was desecrated during the cultural revolution and the sculpture smashed. today a sombre black granite headstone has replaced the original. it is engraved with the words ‘artist huang binhong’s grave 1864–1955’ (huajia huang binhong xiansheng zhi mu 畫家黃賓虹先生之墓). the seal script inscription was copied from the original grave marker, written by pan tianshou (潘天寿 1897–1971) a fellow artist and academy professor who died in 1971 as a result of his suffering during the cultural revolution. today, a bronze statue of huang binhong has been erected on the bank of west lake in hangzhou, not far from huang binhong’s former house, now a house museum administered by the zhejiang provincial museum. the statue by liu jieyong (劉傑勇) dates from 2000 and is based on a photograph of huang binhong sketching near west roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 24 lake en-plein-air. the use of an image that depicts the artist sketching from life, or to use the parlance of the day ‘seeking truth from facts’, reflects a desire, perhaps, to better align huang binhong with the title bestowed on him in 1953, ‘outstanding artist of the chinese people,’ in the hope of redefining him as a people’s artist, rather than the scholar-artist that he was. figure 17: photograph of huang binhong sketching and contemporary bronze sculpture. [photograph of huang binhong sketching reproduced in huang binhong quanji (2006: vol. 10, 289; photograph of bronze sculpture © claire roberts] reference list barmé, g. r. 2002, an artistic exile: a life of feng zikai (1898–1975). university of california press, berkeley. berliner, n. 2003, yin yu tang: the architecture and daily life of a chinese house. tuttle publishing, boston. cahill, j. (ed.) 1981, shadows of mount huang: chinese painting and printing of the anhui school. university art museum, berkeley. chakrabarty, d. 2004, ‘romantic archives: literature and the politics of identity in bengal’, critical inquiry, vol. 30, no. 3 (spring): 654-682. chang, j., lawton t., & allee, s. t. 2000, brushing the past: later chinese calligraphy from the gift of robert hatfield ellsworth. freer gallery of art, smithsonian institution, washington d.c. huang binhong. 1997, huangshan xiesheng ce. shanghai huabao chubanshe, shanghai. huang binhong quanji bianji weiyuanhui (ed.) 2006, huang binhong quanji. 10 volumes. shandong meishu chubanshe, jinan and zhejiang renmin meishu chubanshe, hangzhou. huang binhong yanjiu hui (ed.) 1998, mohai botao: huang binhong yanjiu lunwenji. xiaoshan wenlian, xiaoshan. roberts metal and stone portal, vol. 9, no. 3, november 2012. 25 hummel, a.w. 1943, eminent chinese of the ch’ing period (1644–1912). library of congress, washington, dc. kobayashi, h. & sabin, s. 1981, ‘the great age of anhui printing,’ in shadows of mount huang: chinese painting and printing of the anhui school, ed. j. cahill. university art museum, berkeley: 25–32. liu guoxin, liu shao, & he ruimin (eds) 1994, zhonghua renmin gongheguo lishi changbian, vol. 1. guangxi renmin chubanshe, nanning. mao zedong. 1978, mao zedong shici moyi. wenwu chubanshe, beijing. qiu zhuchang. 1985, huang binhong zhuanji nianpu hebian. renmin meishu chubanshe, beijing. roberts, c. ‘questions of authenticity: huang binhong and the palace museum,’ china heritage quarterly no. 10 (june). online, available: http://chinaheritagenewsletter.anu.edu.au/scholarship.php?searchterm=010_hbhpalace.inc&issue=010 [accessed 1 november 2012]. _____ 2010, friendship in art: fou lei and huang binhong. hong kong university press, hong kong. shan guolin. 1998, ‘painting of china’s new metropolis: the shanghai school, 1850–1900,’ in a century in crisis: modernity and tradition in the art of twentieth century china, (eds) j. f. andrews & s. kuiyi. guggenheim museum publications, new york: 20–34. shanghai shuhua chubanshe, zhejiangsheng bowuguan (eds) 1999, huang binhong wenji, 6 volumes. shanghai shuhua chubanshe, shanghai. wang zhongxiu. 1998, ‘xunjue ‘neimei’ de yishu dashi huang binhong,’ in mohai botao: huang binhong yanjiu lunwenji, (ed.) huang binhong yanjiu hui. xiaoshan wenlian, xiaoshan: 216–17. wang zhongxiu (ed.) 2005, huang binhong nianpu. shanghai shuhua chubanshe, shanghai. wong yan ching & yau hok wa (eds.) 2000, zhongguo lidai xiyin yishu (the art of chinese seals through the ages). zhejiangsheng bowuguan, hangzhou and xianggang zhongwen daxue wenwuguan, hong kong. wu lixia. 2003, zoujin huizhou. huaxia chubanshe, beijing. yetts, p. w. 1933, ‘the shang-yin dynasty and the an-yang finds,’ journal of the royal asiatic society, july: 657–85. yu jianhua (ed.) 1989, zhongguo meishu jia renming cidian. shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, shanghai. yu shasong (ed.) 1988, jinshi shuhua hedingben (yi, er, san, si ce). hangzhou guji shudian, hangzhou. zhejiang renmin meishu chubanshe, shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe (ed.) 1985, huang binhong hua ji. zhejiang renmin meishu chubanshe, shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, hangzhou & shanghai. zhejiangsheng bowuguan (ed.) 1992, huang binhong huaji. shanghai shuhua chubanshe, shanghai. _____ (ed). 1993, huang binhong juewei huaji. shanghai shuhua chubanshe, shanghai. zhongguo meishuguan, renmin meishu chubanshe (eds) 2004, huang binhong jingpin ji. renmin meishu chubanshe, beijing. zhongnanhai huace bianji weiyuanhui (ed.) 1993, zhongnanhai canghua ji. xiyuan chubanshe, beijing. zhongyang dang’an guan (ed.) 1984, mao zedong shou shu gu shici xuan. wenwu chubanshe, dang’an chubanshe, beijing. portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal doris salcedo’s melancholy objects vera mackie, university of melbourne doris salcedo’s work ‘atrabiliarios’ (defiant) (1992-2004) refers to the women who have been disappeared in her homeland of colombia.1 over forty boxes are recessed in the walls of the gallery. each box contains one or two shoes, sometimes a single shoe, sometimes a pair, sometimes a mismatched pair. each recessed box is covered with a membrane, described as a layer of cow bladder, bordered with black stitches of surgical thread. the backlit cow bladder evokes human skin. the black, white, brown and ivory shoes are visible through the skin-like surface. on the floor of the gallery are stacked a series of empty boxes, made of the same cow bladder which covers the gallery niches. a version of this work, which salcedo has developed over several years, is now held in the san francisco museum of modern art (sfmoma).2 this is where i encountered the work, and where i started to try to make sense of the power of these particular objects. after my visit to sfmoma, shoes came to be a recurrent theme in my encounters in museums and art 1 this article developed from a paper presented at the conference ‘pain and death: politics, aesthetics and legalities,’ centre for cross-cultural research, australian national university, december 2005. i am indebted to carolyn strange for comments on successive drafts and to the anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier version. 2 see <http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/exhib_detail.asp?id=11> accessed 8 september 2005. see also the interactive feature at <http://www.sfmoma.org/msoma/artworks/8398.html> accessed 10 october 2006. there are precursors to ‘atrabiliarios’ in several of salcedo’s untitled works from the late 1980s. an earlier version of ‘atrabiliarios’ was displayed at the institute of contemporary art in boston in the exhibition ‘currents 92: the absent body’ (princenthal et al 2000: 15-16; 48-57). ‘atrabilarios’ was also installed at the art gallery of new south wales in 1997 as part of the exhibition ‘body.’ see <http://collection.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/results.do?view=detail&db=object&searchmode=adva nced&id=29134>, accessed 12 september 2007. mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 2 galleries, suggesting to me that there was an archetypal element to this display which was worthy of further exploration. the shoes on display in ‘atrabiliarios’ are all feminine in style—with heels, bows, anklestraps. there are no androgynous sneakers or boots. the most poignant are the single shoes, suggesting someone so intent on escape that a shoe has been lost. these ladylike shoes evoke the vulnerability of women in public spaces. shoes like these are not designed for physical exertion, except maybe for dancing. someone wearing shoes like these would have a hard time running away from a dangerous situation.3 a well-worn shoe also invokes the individuality of the former wearer, as the shoe has been moulded to the shape of the foot. the shoes must bear traces of the body of the person who has disappeared, although we strain to see the details through the membrane which covers the shoes. we can imagine that the wearers’ feet, too, would bear the traces of all the shoes worn in a lifetime. there would be calluses, corns, scars left after blistering, the odd shapes of toes which have been repeatedly pushed into pointed shoes. the shoe is the classic fetishistic object (steele 2005: passim; steele 2006: 250-271). but this usually involves the shoe as a displacement, a disavowal of castration: with the shoe as a sheath for something else. here, however, the shoe reminds us rather of the missing body of the woman who has been subjected to politicised violence. in such a situation, ‘the absence of the body creates a profound crisis for mourners,’ who are denied the opportunity to carry out the necessary rituals of mourning and commemoration (tumarkin 2005: 71). there is a chain of signification which links the leather of the shoes displayed in lighted boxes, the puce cow bladder which covers the boxes, and the melancholy remembrance of the bodies of the disappeared. there is an excess in the repetition of different kinds of skin: the leather of the shoes, the cow bladder which covers the niches which hold the shoes, and an inevitable association with the skin of the feet of the person who wore the shoes. the stitching around the display boxes is described as surgical thread. the jagged stitches evoke the suturing of wounds, possibly suggesting a process of healing. for this viewer, however, 3 see photographer david bailey’s comments on high-heeled shoes: ‘i like high heels … i know it’s chauvinistic. the girls can’t run away from me.’ bailey’s comments are quoted in bayley (1991: 45) and cited in steele (2005: 27). mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 3 the stiches were more reminiscent of the barbed wire of incarceration, provoking memories of other memorial sites. salcedo herself has commented on some aspects of this work, created after she had researched the stories of the women who had disappeared. early versions of ‘atrabiliarios’ included shoes donated by the families of the disappeared women: while researching specific cases of disappearance i discovered that the only feature common to all cases, which enabled the identity of the missing people discovered in a common grave to be determined, was each person’s shoes. the shoes also represent traces of the trajectory that led the victim to such a tragic death. (salcedo, in princenthal, basualdo and huyssen 2000: 17) the shoes have been said to ‘occupy a point somewhere between a relic and a fetish… as a relic they stand in for the remains of the deceased; as a fetish they become a substitute object of both identification and disavowal’ (merewether 1993: 42). in stimulating such potent psychological mechanisms, these objects are in some ways more powerful than a literal documentation would be, although documentation and testimony, of course, have a vital role in political campaigns. most renderings of the title ‘atrabiliarios’ do not do justice to this dimension of the work. in english, the work is often known as ‘defiant.’ this evokes the attitude of women who refuse to be intimidated, and the attitude of their relatives who refuse to forget. the adjective ‘atrabiliarios’ is derived from a word for ‘black bile,’ or in other words ‘melancholy,’ cognate with the rather archaic english adjective ‘atrabilious.’ grammatically, this is the form used to modify a plural noun, indicating a collective rather than an individual state of melancholy. under the medieval system of humours, an excess of black bile was associated with fear, misanthropy, depression and madness, in a system where physical and mental states were not easily distinguished.4 the colour black also has broader connotations of mourning in many cultures, in such practices as the wearing of black clothes. 4 oed; for a discussion of the place of melancholy in the system of humoural psychology in early modern europe, see breitenberg (1996: 37-38); eng and kazanjian (2003: 7-8). see also günter grass’s reflections on albrecht dürer’s engraving, melencolia i, which he links with the events of twentieth century german history (grass 2002: 61-76). i am indebted to paul allatson for a detailed e-mail discussion on the connotations of ‘atrabiliarios’ in the spanish language. mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 4 by invoking the ‘relic’ and the ‘fetish,’ salcedo is drawing on a complex cultural history. the history of the concept of fetishism includes the worship of magical objects attributed to ‘uncivilised’ societies under discourses of colonialism, the ‘commodity fetishism’ described in marxist economic thought, and the psychoanalytic mechanism whereby an object, such as an item of clothing, a glove, or a shoe provides sexual satisfaction in place of genital sexual activity. in some cases of sexual fetishism, the body is invoked through the shape of the fetish or through the texture of skin, leather or fur (marx 1930 [1867]: 43-58; freud 1961 [1927]; erwin 2002: 414-416; wright 1992: 41-45, 113-120, 327-331). in order to understand the relationship between fetishism, mourning and melancholia, i have found e.l. mccallum’s re-reading of freud to be most useful. she explains that ‘[l]ike fetishism, melancholia breaks down proper boundaries between subject and object; also like fetishism, melancholia emerges as a subject deals with loss...’ (mccallum 1999: xxi). she elaborates further: ‘both fetishism and melancholia involve a loss of a loved object (possibly at the level of the unconscious), a memorialisation of the loss, an ambivalence about knowing that loss, and a lack of shame in one’s conduct in resolving that loss’ (mccallum 1999: 116). in her use of objects—shoes—to evoke the powerful psychological mechanisms of fetishism, mourning and melancholia, salcedo’s work is thus also congruent with some recent preoccupations in cultural research, whereby melancholia has been taken out of the realm of individual psychology, and into more politicised realms of collective memory and mourning. mccallum argues that we can see fetishism as a productive rather than a necessarily pathological state of mind. some other recent writers have also explored melancholy as a productive state. descriptions of the ‘normal’ processes of grieving and mourning set out a series of stages whereby an individual gradually comes to terms with loss (freud 1957 [1917]: 243). in the case of politicised violence, however, there can be no simple process of coming to terms with loss. the state of melancholia, the refusal to come to terms with loss, may in fact be the most appropriate and productive response. the only way in which an individual can understand such loss is by placing it in its social, political and historical context, and by working with others to change that political reality. mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 5 the practice of collecting by artists and connoisseurs has repeatedly been linked with melancholy. salcedo’s collection of shoes provokes a collective melancholy which may be linked to political consciousness. this is congruent with anne anling cheng’s discussion of a process whereby the mourner may ‘go from being a subject of grief to being a subject of grievance’ (cheng 2000: 3). similarly, eng and kazanjian argue for a ‘politics of mourning that might be active rather than reactive, prescient rather than nostalgic, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary’ (2003: 2; see also gilroy [2005]). there is a further set of cultural resonances which contribute to the power of these representations and evoke the magical connotations of the shoe as fetish: fairy tales such as ‘cinderella’ and ‘the red shoes’ which have a wide currency in european cultures and beyond. the shoes which helped to identify the victims of violent purges seem like a perversion of the fairy stories of cinderella, where the fitting of the slipper to the dainty foot of the orphan girl proves her identity, and assures her reunion with prince charming in a romantic happy ending. this is not to suggest that salcedo herself intended such a connection, but rather that a viewer who has grown up in a culture which references european traditions is likely to make intertextual links between the shoes in ‘atrabiliarios’ and a long series of cultural representations of shoes in myth and fairytale. although the popular image of the cinderella stories is one of romance, the various versions of the story are shot through with mourning, melancholia, violence and mutilation. cinderella is an orphan, mourning the loss of her mother. in different versions of the tale, the slipper may be made of glass, gold or fur. cinderella’s habitus is by the hearth, where she is forced to sort through the ashes—the source of her name (brothers grimm 1992 [1906]: 214-222; warner 1994: 202-217; bettelheim 1976: 236277).5 the combination of rags, cinders, ashes and ashen colours invokes associations of mourning. we do not know whether the original owners of the shoes in salcedo’s artwork are mothers, whose children will become orphans like cinderella, or daughters, whose parents have experienced the tragedy of outliving their own children. in the 5 the french version of her name refers to ashes rather than cinders, despite the apparent similarity between perrault’s ‘cendrillon’ and ‘cinderella’/’cinders.’ the german version is ‘ashputtel’ or ‘aschenputtel.’ mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 6 cinderella stories, the shoe becomes proof of identity, as it does for the remains of the disappeared women. for the disappeared women, however, there is no happy ending; no prince to rescue them at the end of the story. salcedo’s work also resonates with hans christian andersen’s story of ‘the red shoes.’ at the centre of this story is another orphaned girl, who becomes infatuated with a pair of red dancing shoes. the shoes take on a life of their own, taking over the body of the young woman and dancing her until she is close to death. in this story there is an opposition between the sensuality represented by the dancing red shoes and the restraint enjoined by the church. the original story is one of redemption, with the girl returning to the fold of the church, after her dangerous flirtation with sensual pleasures. this redemption, however, is at the price of a horrific mutilation, the removal of her feet with the red shoes and their replacement with wooden prostheses (andersen 2002 [1865]: 207-213). in powell and pressburger’s sublime film of the red shoes (1948), the variations on the story are played out in the ballet-within-the-film, and the filmic narrative of a doomed romance. in the ballet, the dancer is danced to death and her red shoes are left behind. in the framing narrative, the ballerina plunges to her death and her erstwhile lover removes the red shoes from her bloodied legs. the filmic narrative then replays the ballet-withinthe-film, this time restaged as a mourning ritual. the other dancers dance around the red shoes, in memory of the missing dancer. as in salcedo’s work, the shoes invoke the body and the memory of the missing loved one, in the film made all the more poignant by the contrast with the animation of the dancers.6 marina warner has traced the complexity of references and resonances in the cinderella stories, reminding us that ‘the earliest surviving tale of a wronged daughter dropping her shoe was set down in china in the ninth century when footbinding was practised’ (warner 1994: 128). as it happens, on the same day that i encountered doris salcedo’s work in sfmoma, i wandered into an antique shop called the enchanted house on the edges of san francisco’s chinatown. it was a wet day, where the colour of the sky, the sea, the clouds and the rain matched the metallic steel grey of the bay bridge. the shop 6 on shoes in cinema, see turim (2001: 58-90) and e. mackie (2001: 233-247). in the wizard of oz (1939), shoes are the emblems of good and evil, of the good witch and the wicked witch. mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 7 was full of shades of brown and red, gleaming strings of pearls, necklaces of jade and ivory, the dull sheen of silken kimonos, the metallic gleam of maoist kitsch. in one corner of a display cabinet were some embroidered silk shoes, single and in pairs: shoes for women with bound feet. the owner of the shop explained about the shoes, the significance of their size, and the attraction of these objects for some first world collectors who apparently compare their own freedom with their perceptions of the wretchedness of the women with bound feet. the antique shop, far from providing an exotic and colourful space to escape from the grey wetness outside, became inextricably linked with my attempts to come to terms with the emotions stirred up by doris salcedo’s work on display in another part of town. as i gazed at the silken embroidered shoes through the fog of jetlag, i was reminded of dorothy ko’s research on shoes like these. the shoes she researched were artefacts which provided evidence of the practices of footbinding, a matter of social custom rather different from the politicised violence invoked by salcedo. these silk shoes were stitched by the women themselves and thus bear traces of their handiwork. because footbinding is no longer practiced, the only evidence we now have of the practice is the shoes. as ko comments, ‘most of the bodies are gone. only the shoes remain.’ (ko 2001: 7; see also ko [2005] and zamperini [2006]). when we encounter shoes like these in museums, galleries and antique shops, we are forced to consider the politics of looking, and the politics of display, a question which returns me to the experience of salcedo’s work in sfmoma. if salcedo’s installation is primarily seen as an artwork for passive contemplation, then it can be placed in a genealogy which would include van gogh’s 1886 oil painting ‘a pair of boots,’ andy warhol’s 1980 series, ‘diamond dust shoes,’7 magritte’s 1935 surrealist painting ‘le modèle rouge’ where the feet and shoes are fused, and meret oppenheim’s 1936 assemblage ‘my nurse,’ which places a pair of high-heeled shoes on a silver plate, trussed like roasted meat. fredric jameson has considered the different representational practices, and indeed critical reading practices, associated with the 7 it hardly bears repeating that shoes are a constantly recurring motif in warhol’s work, dating from his work as a commercial artist. see warhol’s whimsical portfolio, a la recherche du shoe perdu (1955), its title invoking the melancholy of proust’s novel. refer also to the cabinet of shoes displayed in ‘raid the icebox i with andy warhol, 1969–1970,’ a travelling exhibition of objects from the rhode island school of design museum (allara 2002: 40–48). on shoes in art, see also west (2001: 41–57). mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 8 work of van gogh, magritte and warhol, as part of a search for a critical artistic practice adequate to the conditions of late capitalism. in an almost throwaway comment, he alludes to the ‘blood, torture, death and terror’ which are the underside of culture in late capitalism (jameson 1991: 5).8 with respect to warhol’s ‘diamond dust shoes,’ jameson refers to the ‘deathly quality’ and the ‘glacéd x-ray elegance’ of the photographic negative which has been screeenprinted and painted over. warhol’s shoes are the ghostly traces of commodity culture and advertising, several steps removed from contact with any actual wearers (1991: 9). jameson refers to the viewer who confronts the work ‘at the turning of a museum corridor or gallery with all the contingency of some inexplicable natural object’ (1991: 8). he does not, however, pursue this tantalising hint of the embodied experience of museum-going, but returns to the notion of the fetish: on the level of the content, we have to do with what are now far more clearly fetishes, in both the freudian and marxian senses … here, however, we have a random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life world as the pile of shoes left over from auschwitz or the remainders and tokens of some incomprehensible and tragic fire in a packed dance hall. (jameson 1991: 8) i would also, however, like to consider salcedo’s installation as a site, where the embodied experience of the observer is part of the power of the work. the artist has commented on the importance of spatiality in the work: it was vital to construct the work in spatial terms, to act as a meeting point for those of us who had lived through such ordeals. the experience had to be taken to a collective space, away from the anonymity of private experience. (salcedo, in princenthal et al 2000: 16) the installation at sfmoma can then ultimately be connected with other sites of display. this process leads me through a series of idiosyncratic memories of other museums, galleries and sites. this is not simply to indulge in personal nostalgia about travel, tourism and artistic spectatorship, but to suggest that any individual’s engagement with such a work or site will be mediated through a similar series of embodied memories and traces, as well as an academic journey through the relevant critical literature: 8 jameson’s essay was originally published in new left review (1984), but was later incorporated into a book of the same title (1991). references hereafter are to the book version. mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 9 deriving from internal codes particular to the individual, spectatorial interpretation and even possible productive mis-interpretation continually imbues salcedo’s sculptures with an inexhaustible fund of new meanings. (wong 2001: 78) the shoes displayed in ‘atrabiliarios’ lead the spectator to try to imagine the scene of trauma and attempted escape, but there is no direct access to that experience, only its melancholy traces. it is hard to imagine what it would be like to be ‘in her shoes.’ in trying to move from the melancholy associations of the shoes on display, to imagine the individual woman and her trauma, a photograph from a different time and place comes to my mind. the photograph shows a woman. she has blonde hair and is dressed in a tailored suit, in stockinged feet with only one high-heeled shoe. two burly male guards grip her elbows. the whole scene takes place on an airport tarmac at night, illuminated by the airport floodlights. the woman is evdokia petrova, one of two diplomats from the soviet embassy in canberra who defected to australia in 1954.9 in a struggle over whether she would return to the soviet union or remain in australia she lost one of her shoes, a russian cinderella stranded in australia.10 in this case, too, the shoe has proven to be a powerful signifier of trauma, and has taken its place in the australian cultural imaginary. evdokia petrova’s missing shoe provided the motif for a recent museum exhibition on the petrovs.11 the shoe as logo, as motif and as 9 on the ‘petrov affair,’ see the exhibition catalogue, the archival website produced by old parliament house and the national archives of australia, various books, and the oral history interview with evdokia petrova held in the national library of australia. old parliament house (2004) <http://www.oldparliamenthouse.gov.au/petrovwebquest/>, accessed 30 september 2005; petrova (1996); petrov and petrov (1956); manne (2004). 10 petrova eventually decided to defect when the aeroplane stopped to refuel in darwin. mascot airport is now known as kingsford smith international airport. photograph by william m. carty, reproduced in old parliament house (2004: 3). see also lim (2005). the old parliament house museum in canberra now sells a bookmark which bears the photograph of evdokia petrova at mascot. the photograph is the one which shows her anguished expression in the melée at the airport. it is full-length, showing her one shod foot and one stockinged foot. the figures of the soviet security guards have been cropped from either side. photographs of the scene at mascot are regularly reproduced, and the scene is used to open the television miniseries, the petrov affair (directed by michael carson, pbl productions, 1986). since i first presented the paper on which this article is based, there has been a novel for young people, the red shoe, which makes constant references to evdokia petrova’s missing shoe, and a play with the title of mrs petrov’s shoe. both are set in the 1950s, and use the story of the petrovs to invoke the paranoia of the era. i would argue, however, that the focus on the shoe in both works suggests that there is a deep psychological resonance in the figure of the missing shoe. see dubosarsky (2006) and janaczewska (2006). 11 the original shoe has been lost, but its image was reproduced on the exhibition website and catalogue, and on t-shirts commemorating the exhibition. in the catalogue, a logo appears at the beginning of each paragraph: the black silhouette of a high-heeled shoe on a white page. on the cover of the catalogue, the shoe appears in shades of grey against a black, white and red background. brooches in the shape of the shoe are still being sold in the museum shop as souvenirs. see the discussion of the connotations of this object in mackie (2005: 22-26). mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 10 souvenir mediates between the object’s particular significance in the life of an individual, and its connotations in the culture at large, as a signifier of femininity.12 it is tempting to speculate that only a woman’s shoe could have the dense range of associations explored in these museum and gallery displays. mccallum’s comments on the cultural significance of the high-heeled shoe are suggestive: although all objects are imbued with meaning, some may be more public, such as those objects that designate cultural categories of identity (the way a high-heeled shoe embodies femininity). (mccallum 1999: 74) a shoe with a lost pair is a recurrent aftermath of a traumatic experience, a sign of an attempt to escape. the sight of evdokia petrova limping across the tarmac, having lost one shoe, now takes on an archetypal quality, reminding us of the single shoes in doris salcedo’s work, remnants of other women’s futile attempts to escape. one could easily protest that this is a long way from the kinds of violence evoked by salcedo. petrova, after all, survived to old age in an australian suburb. the photograph, however, captures the moment when an individual feels terror at the power of the state. no reassurance of her eventual safety can cancel out the power of that photograph. petrova’s story brings an individual dimension to the use of the shoe as the trace of a traumatic experience. anyone who encounters shoes in a museum or other display can not help but be reminded of the glass cases in the museum of auschwitz-birkenau, which hold piles of the former possessions of those who died there. one might also be reminded of all of the artistic responses to that pile of shoes (jones 2001: 197-232). my mind goes back to one huge glass case which held so many shoes that the scale was numbing. it was difficult to focus on individual shoes; difficult to gain any sense of the age, class or gender of the individuals who had worn them.13 my memories of the museum of auschwitz are now mediated through my experience of looking at salcedo’s work, the spiky black stitches of ‘atrabiliarios’ and the barbed wire of the concentration camp becoming sutured in my mind. the distinctive shoes in salcedo’s display uncannily invoke the individual characters of their wearers. somehow it seems imperative to perform a similar act of imagination when faced with the anonymous shoes in the auschwitz museum display, to try to move from the 12 or, as davidson has commented: ‘shoes retain the imprint of the wearer’s foot, and their hollow shape can indicate a vessel for identity, a substitute for the self’ (2006: 273). 13 the meaning of these shoes is described by photographer alan jacobs: ‘taken inside a huge glass case in the auschwitz museum. this represents one day’s collection at the peak of the gassings, about twenty five thousand pairs.’ <http://www.remember.org/jacobs/shoeheap.html>, accessed 14 august 2005. mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 11 long-shot of the uncountable pile of shoes to a close-up of individual shoes, each one a relic of the life of an individual, ‘shorn of their earlier life world’ (jameson 1991: 8). griselda pollock has discussed the politics of looking in places like auschwitz, and has described her own refusal to visit that place. in remembering all of the people who could not choose to leave auschwitz, she considers it inappropriate to visit there with the knowledge that one can leave at will, unlike those memorialised there, referring to ‘the utter perversity of arriving at auschwitz by cab, as if the place belonged in the realm of ordinary travel, of arrival and departure’ (2003). unlike pollock, maria tumarkin is willing to allow that even those who travel as ‘tourists’ may be transformed by their encounter with sites which evoke a traumatic history, places which she calls ‘traumascapes’ (tumarkin 2005: 52). this prompts us to think through the possible positions from which we might look at the art works of doris salcedo or the museum exhibits in a place like auschwitz. in both cases, a simple process of grieving and mourning is denied to the viewer. accounting for the deaths alluded to is still unfinished business. the appropriate response is melancholic, but a melancholia which is placed in a social, political and historical context, where we consider our own imbrication in the world which has been produced through these past events. as charles merewether has explained: the relations between violence and the law of the state drives collective memory from the public into the private sphere of the individual or the family, and yet, for this reason, the relation to the dead, our dead, becomes a critical factor in popular culture because it is the contested site of identity which threatens military and state power. (merewether 1993: 35) by viewing doris salcedo’s work in a public art gallery, or viewing the relics of auschwitz in a public museum, these traces and memories are necessarily brought out of the realm of private contemplation and into a space of public spectatorship.14 this may also potentially become a site of public discussion. a site such as auschwitz does more, however, than simply affect visitors through their experience of gazing at objects and reflecting on their meaning. the scale of the actual site can only be appreciated through the embodied experience of being there. no text, film or photograph can prepare us for the experience of trudging through that vast space, past those rows and rows of barracks, blinking at the 14 see the discussion of shared emotional experiences of spectatorship as an aspect of publicness in donald and donald (2000) and wong (2001: 55-85). mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 12 contrast between the dim barracks and the sunlight outside, straining to focus on individual shoes in that glass case.15 doris salcedo’s work ‘atrabiliarios’ triggers an imaginative process whereby we try to imagine ourselves ‘in the shoes’ of the victim of trauma and the mourners left behind. salcedo has commented on the significance of the ‘skinlike membrane,’ which ‘evokes the body and slightly obscures the objects within’ so that ‘we see them as if through the remove of memory.’16 this, too, is an embodied process. we walk round the gallery; we strain to discern the details of the shoes through the semi-transparent membrane; the after-image of the display stays with us in other journeys and encounters; and becomes part of our own memories, reflections and political commitments. paradoxically, the embodied experience of walking through the museum or art gallery invokes an imaginative process of searching for the traces of those missing bodies. salcedo’s work is akin to the power of fairy tales as described by marina warner, ‘on the one hand charting perennial drives and terrors, both conscious and unconscious, and on the other mapping actual volatile experience’ (warner 1994: xxi). there is no such thing as an innocent or blameless viewing position for tourists, travellers, scholars, or spectators in museums. we are all implicated in multiple matrices of power, and need to choose an ethical position from which to approach such sites. for some, the ethical decision may be to refuse to be a spectator. for others, the ethical decision may well be to look, and to engage with the complexities of the viewing position one is placed in, possibly by linking this site with other sites which evoke memories of trauma. the museum now functions as a space for memorialisation, where the evocation of the powerful psychological mechanisms of fetishism, mourning and melancholia leads to reflections on the politics of memory. 15 this experience is akin to what chakrabarty (2002: 8) has referred to in his discussion of the museum as an institution which ‘increasingly opens itself up to the embodied and the lived’ chakrabarty links this discussion with a distinction between ‘performative’ and ‘pedagogical’ models of citizenship, adapted from homi bhabha (1994: 139-170). the connection between museums and citizenship is certainly useful for theorising the national dimensions of the museum as an institution. further consideration, however, is necessary to place the museum in the contact of transnational tourism, where there is no simple relationship between the national history invoked in the display and the personal history of a viewer whose citizenship and nationality might be elsewhere. 16 doris salcedo, caption to ‘atrabiliarios,’ san francisco museum of modern art. mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 13 reference list allara, p. 2002, ‘please touch, warhol’s collection as alternative museum,’ in j. w. smith (ed.) possession obsession: andy warhol and collecting, andy warhol museum, pittsburgh, 40-48. andersen, h.c. 2002 [1865], ‘the red shoes,’ in stories and tales, trans. by h. w. dulcken, routledge, london, 207-213. bayley, s. 1991, taste: the secret meaning of things, faber and faber, london. bettelheim, b. 1976, the uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales, alfred a. knopf, new york, 236-277. bhabha, h. 1994, ‘dissemination: time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation,’ in the location of culture, routledge, london, 139-170. carson, m. (dir.) 1986, the petrov affair, pbl productions. chakrabarty, d. 2002, ‘museums in late democracy,’ humanities research, vol. 11, no. 1, 1-12. cheng, a. a. 2000, the melancholy of race, oxford university press, oxford. davidson, h. 2006, ‘sex and sin: the magic of red shoes,’ in g. riello, and p. mcneil (eds) shoes: a history from sandals to sneakers, oxford and new york, berg, 272-289. donald. j. and donald, s. 2000, ‘the publicness of cinema,’ in c. gledhill and l. williams (eds) reinventing film studies, edward arnold, london. dubosarsky, u. 2006, the red shoe, allen and unwin, sydney. eng, d. l. and kazanjian, d. (eds) 2003. ‘introduction: mourning remains,’ in d. a. eng and d. kazanjian (eds) loss: the politics of mourning, university of california press, berkeley, 1-25. erwin, e. (ed.) the freud encyclopedia: theory, therapy and culture, routledge, new york. fleming, v. (dir.) 1939, the wizard of oz, metro-goldwyn-mayer. freud, s. 1957 [1917] ‘mourning and melancholia,’ in j. strachey (ed./trans.) the standard edition of the complete works of sigmund freud, the hogarth press, london, vol. 14, 237-258. freud, s. 1961 [1927], ‘fetishism,’ in j. strachey (ed./trans.), the standard edition of the complete works of sigmund freud, the hogarth press, london, vol. 21, 152-159. gilroy, p. 2005, postcolonial melancholia, columbia university press, new york. grass, g. 2002, ‘on stasis in progress: variations on albrecht dürer’s engraving melencolia i,’ in albrecht dürer and his legacy: the legacy of a graphic artist, by g. bartram with contributions by g. grass, j. l. koerner and u. kuhlemann, princeton university press, princeton, nj, 61-76. jameson, f. 1984, ‘postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism,’ new left review, no. 146 (july-august), 59-92. jameson, f. 1991, postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, duke university press, durham. janaczewska, n. 2006, mrs petrov’s shoe, performed at fortyfivedownstairs, melbourne, may 2006. jones, e. c. 2001, ‘empty shoes,’ in s. benstock and s. ferriss (eds) footnotes: on shoes, rutgers university press, new brunswick, 2001, 197-232. ko, d. 2001, every step a lotus, university of california press, berkeley. ko, d. 2005. cinderella's sisters: a revisionist history of footbinding, university of california press, berkeley. lim, a. 2005, ‘time capsule: vladimir petrov defects,’ weekend australian, april 2-3, 2005. mackie, e. 2001, ‘red shoes and bloody stumps,’ s. benstock and s. ferriss (eds) footnotes: on shoes, rutgers university press, new brunswick, 2001, 233-251. mackie, v. 2005, ‘evdokia petrova’s shoe,’ lilith, no. 14, 22-26. manne, r. 2004, the petrov affair, text publishing, melbourne, revised edition. mccallum, e. l. 1999, object lessons: how to do things with fetishism, state university of new york press, albany. marx, k. 1930 [1867]. capital: a critique of political economy, dent, london, everyman’s library no 848, trans. by e. & c. paul, vol. 1. merewether, c. 1993, ‘naming violence in the work of doris salcedo,’ third text, no. 24, 35-44. old parliament house, 2004, the petrov affair, department of communications, information, technology and the arts, canberra. petrov, v. and petrov e. 1956, empire of fear, frederick a. praeger, new york. petrova, e. a. 1996, interview conducted by robert manne, oral history section, national library of australia. pollock, g. 2003, ‘holocaust tourism: being there, looking back and the ethics of spatial memory,’ in d. crouch and n. lübbren (eds) visual culture and tourism, berg, oxford, 175-189. powell, m. and pressburger, e. (dir.), 1948, the red shoes, eagle lion films. steele, v. 2005 [1998], shoes: a lexicon of style, london: scriptum editions, miniature edition. mackie doris salcedo’s melancholy objects portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 14 steele, v. 2006, ‘shoes and the erotic imagination,’ in g. riello and p. mcneil (eds) shoes: a history from sandals to sneakers, oxford and new york: berg, 250-271. turim, m. 2001. ‘high angles on shoes: cinema, gender and footwear,’ in s. benstock and s. ferriss (eds) footnotes: on shoes, rutgers university press, new brunswick, 2001, 41-57. the brothers grimm, 1992 [1906] ‘ashputtel,’ in the brothers grimm fairy tales, alfred a. knopf, new york, everyman’s library children’s classics, 214-222. warner, m. 1994, from the beast to the blonde: on fairy tales and their tellers, farrar, strauss and giroux, new york. warhol, a. 1955, a la recherche du shoe perdu, collection of the andy warhol museum. west, j. ‘the shoe in art, the shoe as art,’ in s. benstock and s. ferriss (eds) footnotes: on shoes, rutgers university press, new brunswick, 2001, 41-57. wright, e. 1992, feminism and psychoanalysis: a critical dictionary, basil blackwell, oxford. wong, e. 2001. ‘the afterlife of loss: situating memory in the sculptural art of doris salcedo,’ critical sense, winter, 55-85. zamperini, p. 2006. ‘a dream of butterflies? shoes in chinese culture,’ in g. riello and p. mcneil (eds) shoes: a history from sandals to sneakers, oxford and new york: berg, 196-205. (sh believed that this should be spread out throughout the thesis) portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal the commons: opening and enclosing non-commodified space james arvanitakis, faculty of humanities and social sciences, university of technology sydney introduction this paper begins with a simple question—‘how can you steal something that no one owns’? though a simple question, the answer is complicated, for the stealing of ‘things’ owned by no one explains an important aspect of capitalism’s insatiable appetite. historically the conditions for industrialisation and market economies were created by capital through the colonisation of common lands and common modes of production— things that are shared but not owned. and this is an appetite that shows no sign of abating. this paper looks at the concept of the commons as aspects of our lives that no one owns but that everyone enjoys. today the commons are constantly under siege. however, this claim does not only refer to ‘physical’ commons; here, i extend the concept of non-commodified ‘spaces’ into the cultural sphere. by outlining how capital continually works to enclose the commons—both physical and cultural—this paper aims to present a key contest occurring between neoliberalism and today’s social justice movements. this conflict is based on the manufacturing of scarcity through enclosure versus the concept of abundance through sharing and cooperation. in this paper i define abundance as a sense that there is ‘enough to share,’ and separate it from material wealth. this may explain why certain societies have large amounts of material wealth but lack abundance, and thus experience a sense of scarcity. in this paper i argue that the ‘scarcity’ that exists in many parts of our world today is manufactured, and results not from the ‘tragedy of the commons,’ but rather from the ‘tragedy of arvanitakis the commons enclosure.’ the purpose then, is to identify the source of this enclosure, and why it continues, as well as describe potential paths to challenge it. before doing so, however, i would like to better examine the concept of the commons. understanding the commons while references to the commons can be traced back to ancient rome, clearly physical commons such as air and water existed long before the concept was ever ‘defined.’ this category also encompasses the ‘biodiversity’ or ‘genetic’ commons, which include classifications such as the human genome that makes us a unique species, as well as the world’s biological diversity (shiva 2000). these are aspects of the physical environment that, historically, no one owns but we all enjoy. while we usually think of ‘physical or environmental commons,’ bollier (2002) argues that there are also institution-based commons. i identify these as ‘institutional commons’ that can include ‘public goods’ such as public education, health, the infrastructure that allows our society to function (that is, water delivery and sewerage systems), and even public space. bollier (2002) and lessig (2004) extend the concept of the institutional commons to include literature, music, the performing and visual arts, radio, community arts, and sites of heritage. this conceptualisation of the commons may also be expanded to the ‘cultural’ sphere. therefore the commons can include human relationships such as the need for safety, trust, shared intellect, as well as simply cooperation. briefly focussing on ‘safety,’ for example, i would argue that safety as a commons can be understood as both a sense of peace and an absence of fear. it can be thought of as mediated by a sense of belonging that allows members of communities to interact with each other (rustomjee 2001). cultural commons such as safety represent a form of biopolitics that promotes the potential for greater cooperation. that is, if i feel safe within my community, even when surrounded by strangers, then i am likely to cooperate with them. safety can produce relationships that are non-hierarchical and inclusive, allowing communities to work together to overcome scarcity, crisis and fear (hardt and negri 2004, xvi). portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 2 arvanitakis the commons according to the ecologist (1996, 6-9), commons have a number of definitive characteristics that appear to cut across all categories. these include the position that commons cannot be commodified, and, if they are, they cease to be commons and become commodities. further, though neither public nor private, commons tend to be facilitated by local communities. while this may be true to a degree, commons cannot be exclusionary.1 that is, if commons have fences or borders erected around them they become private property. in many societies a central government ‘manages’ the commons; however, realistically they have been inherited from past generations and any governing body only holds them in trust for the broader public, as well as for future generations.2 commons are not scarce but rather abundant, and, in fact, if facilitated and managed properly they can overcome scarcity. finally, commons can be understood to be ubiquitous, functioning all the time and every day. the ecologist claims that ‘the commons is the social and political space where things get done and where people have a sense of belonging and an element of control over their lives,’ providing ‘sustenance, security and independence’ (1996, 6-7). thus, what a community shares can include the need for trust, cooperation and human relationships. that is, these are the very foundations of what makes ‘a community’ rather than a group of individuals living in close proximity to each other. rather than being driven by self interest and competition, the notion of the commons is based on communal and altruistic cooperation. for communities to use and maintain the commons, cooperation, collaboration and communication is required (hardt and negri 2004, xv). this understanding of the commons involves people operating on a collective rather than merely individualistic level. the tragedy of the commons in garret hardin’s (1968) original work in the area, the concept of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is focused on the physical (environmental) commons. based on a belief in 1 later in this paper i argue that certain commons such as ‘financial cooperatives’ can operate under market conditions. consequently, while some commons such as air cannot be exclusionary, the use of others needs to be negotiated with their ‘managers.’ 2 here the term ‘manage’ is used in its most generic sense—that is, to direct or control the use of something. unless otherwise specified, there are no financial implications intended. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 3 arvanitakis the commons ‘methodological individualism’ (jacobs 1997) and the dominance of the self-interested individual, hardin argues that humanity inevitably exploits resources that are not assigned clear property rights, including the commons. hardin proposes that ‘the survival of the commons depends on “mutual coercion mutually agreed on.”’ hardin also argues that some kind of ‘administrative elite’ should undertake this ‘coercion,’ although today this appears to have been replaced by the disciplines offered by ‘the market’ and its proponents. one example can be found in sklair’s (1996; 2000) ‘transnational capital class’ (tcc), those elite managers, policy advisers and politicians that actively promote the agenda of neoliberalism and free market solutions to all areas of life. the tcc offer ‘the market’ as the means to better manage the commons. although the managerial justification for the enclosure of the commons can be found in hardin’s 1968 essay, hardt and negri (2004) believe that the commons were essentially destroyed with the advent of private property. such a position echoes well-established arguments by thomson (1963) who described the commodifying tendencies of capital, including the enclosure of the commons. goldman (1997, 1) notes that while hardin’s position was never based on empirical evidence and has been continuously ‘debunked,’ the assumptions underpinning it persist and continue a long neoliberal tradition that suggests we must commercialise to get the best out of people. as a result, much of what has traditionally been thought of as the commons has disappeared. today there is very little left in our physical world that is shared, and there is little understanding of forms of ownership that do not rely on defined private property rights (jacobs 1997). in fact, the majority of economics textbooks state that if private property rights are not or cannot be appropriately defined, then market failure will result.3 this was highlighted in a recent debate in australia over indigenous communal-owned lands. senior members of the federal government, including the minister for health, tony abbott, and the prime minister, john howard, argued that communal land ownership continues to hold indigenous communities back from economic development (wood 2003, 13; metherell 2004a, 6). in fact, tony abbott branded native title as 3 for example, see mctaggart et al (1999) for a one-dimensional perspective on this topic. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 4 arvanitakis the commons ‘economically useless’ and called for it to be replaced (wood 2003, 13). according to the prime minister, this would breed ‘a more entrepreneurial’ culture (metherell 2004b, 7). these discussions have been welcomed by senior labor party officials, including president warren mundine, himself an indigenous australian (karvelas 2004, 4), although these positions have been disputed by many other indigenous leaders, such as yunupingu (2005).4 cultural implications a number of important cultural implications follow hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ (1968). to begin with, there is the connotation that the community cannot manage communally based resources. this type of argument contains a clear cultural statement that ‘human nature’ means we are ‘greedy’ and dominated by self-interest. as the ecologist notes, the original belief presented by hardin is that profit is the only ‘operating social value’ (1996, 13). the general argument, then, is that environmental destruction should be blamed on the selfishness of people (goldman 1997). the second implication follows the first: the commons are always areas of potential conflict. that is, under the market logic, a lack of private property rights means that ‘resources’ are subject to constant dispute. we must be protected from ourselves and our self-interest or all resources, both physical and institutional, will increasingly become scarce and conflict will follow. in fact, in a society whose consciousness is dominated by commodity fetishism and materialistic goals, we are discouraged from the belief that we have things in common beyond self interest (bollier 2002). this is elucidated by ostrom and thrainn in terms of the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’—‘if i don’t others will, so i’d better get in first’ (1990, 3).5 the perspective inherent in the 4 similar proposals have been presented regarding pacific island countries as a path out of their ‘economic woes.’ conservative commentator, helen hughes (2004, 15), argues for the abandoning of communal land ownership for individual property rights. much like the australian indigenous system, communal land ownership throughout the pacific is seen to be the source of economic backwardness and corruption that can only be overcome by appropriate private property rights and free market measures (hughes 2004). recently, the australia institute has sponsored a response to such proposals (fingleton 2005). 5 the concept of the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ presents a situation where two suspects arrested by police are held but with insufficient evidence for a conviction. the prisoners have been separated and the police visit portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 5 arvanitakis the commons prisoner’s dilemma has important cultural consequences for the institutional commons. here citizens discard public institutions in favour of private ones because there is a general feeling that others are doing so and neglect is likely to follow. the abandonment of public institutions is facilitated by the government’s purposeful disregard of them, creating ‘spirals of neglect.’ after ignoring the need to increase resources to public institutions, the government justifies further neglect by the fact that citizens are abandoning these organisations—a process driven by neglect in the first place. for example, we have seen increased funding of private schools over public institutions. the result is that the public education system is being abandoned as parents are left with the (inevitable) decision to support the public education (a commons), at the risk that their children will not receive an education equivalent to that offered by private institutions. this creates a culture of competition that inspires agents (in this case parents) to abandon and attack the commons (of public education) because of the fear that others are about to do the same.6 this culture of competition, greed and conflict leads to an institutional reliance on the markets. the natural extension, then, is to commercialise the commons—run them like a business—to prevent their over-exploitation from greed or neglect by disinterested bureaucrats. to achieve stability, communal institutions should be replaced with private ownership which will assist in reversing the ‘actions of the world’s majority who blindly think they have the freedom to overgraze, over-consume and over-breed’ (goldman 1997, 4).7 each independently and offer them the same deal: if one testifies for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence and the betrayer goes free. the prisoners are best served by both keeping silent but a lack of trust is likely to result in each prisoner attempting to betray the other first. 6 the issue of funding of the australian schooling system is hotly debated with pro-public and pro-private school lobby groups presenting different ‘statistics’ to reveal the ‘true’ figures. see, for example, centre of independent studies (http://www.cis.org.au/) compared to the australian council of state schools (http://www.acsso.org.au/). here i am responding to the trend of increasing funding of private schools identified by burke (2004a; 2004b). 7 hartmann (2004) has extended this position by arguing that we have seen the emergence of ‘the greening of hate’; that is, environmental problems have been blamed on the over-breeding of the poor rather than on any over-use of the resources within high-income nations. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 6 arvanitakis the commons the notion that the privatisation of the global commons is the key to their protection is a recurring theme in much of the neoliberal literature. for example, a 2002 report from britain’s royal society criticises government-run conservation programs, development aid, protected areas and even plant gene banks, and claims that it is time ‘for capitalism to take charge’ (cited in pearce 2002, 10). according to the report, the environment should be ‘parcelled out to the private sector, with market forces influencing everything from cleaning up our rivers and the atmosphere to protecting forests and soils’ (pearce 2002, 10). tragedy of enclosure in response, the ecologist (1996, 15) argues that we are not seeing the tragedy of the commons, but rather a ‘tragedy of enclosure,’ as it is the commodification, privatisation and enclosure of the commons that causes a crisis of scarcity. this position can be confirmed by following the basic laws of ‘supply and demand’ economics that characterises the trade of commodities. the scarcer commodities are, the higher their value will be. accordingly, to maximise profits by demanding higher prices, it suits the owners of resources to ‘manufacture scarcity’ (farhat 2001, iii). this does not occur when the commons operate; rather it occurs when the commons are enclosed. for example, farhat (2001) argues that one of the most pressing environmental crises today results from the ongoing erosion of the earth’s genetic resources. this is causing myriad environmental and social problems, including declining diversity in food crops that offer less protection from disease, and pest infestation. the cause of this decline is related to the commodification of plants and seed varieties that were once openly shared as commons, but are now traded as commodities, dramatically reducing their availability. however, this is not just a scarcity of natural resources and other physical commons, but scarcity in the broader sense. this is a theme identified by bauman, who argues that we are witnessing the disappearance or a scarcity of the ‘public sphere’ (1999, 69). bauman describes the public sphere as the area of legitimate public discourse. bauman’s position is that we are seeing the colonisation of the public sphere and a re-definition of the portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 7 arvanitakis the commons ‘notoriously mobile boundary’ between the public and the private (1999, 70). this has obvious links to habermas’s focus on the structural change of the public sphere under the contemporary era of state capitalism and the increasingly powerful positions of economic corporations in public life (1962). in the structural transformation of the public sphere (1962), habermas argued that economic and governmental interests have taken over the public sphere, while citizens have become content to be (primarily) consumers of goods, services, political administration and spectacle. this enclosure of the public sphere is continuous, recurring, and takes many forms. for example, in response to former u.s. anti-terrorist official richard clarke’s criticisms of white house reaction to the 2001 terrorist attacks and general lack of policy in this area, the white house organised a multi-level assault on his personality rather than on ‘the substance of his contentions’ (allen 2004, 39). this is evidence of the crisis in the public sphere identified by bauman (1999, 69), where the focus on policy (or politics) has become subsumed by the issue of personality (or politics). that is, enclosure of the public sphere has seen politics replaced by politics. consequently, for the commons, life today is precarious and subject to the constant threat of enclosure and commodification. while there has always been a tension between the commons and the market, the privileging of free market fundamentalism has seen both the expansion of marketisation and the ‘commodification of everything’ (barber 1998). the commons/commodity typology before proceeding to discuss the defence of the commons by today’s resistance movements, i would like to introduce a typology that outlines the arguments presented. it is important to acknowledge that any typology is both a simplification and a generalisation of the arguments that are presented. likewise, it is highly unlikely that any typology has the ability to cover all cases; therefore, exceptions are expected to arise. furthermore, it is also important to note that i am not attempting to draw simple binaries between the different categories. rather, the purpose is to highlight the relationships between the groupings i have identified. as davis (2001) notes, binaries often act to simplify complex phenomena. for example, any transaction that takes place should be portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 8 arvanitakis the commons considered along a continuum divided between commodities and the exchange of commons via non-commercial transactions (davis 2001). we can thus see the commons operating within the market system as well as outside it. rather than drawing binaries, my purpose is to describe such a continuum. the commons/commodity typology draws two broad distinctions, and is thus divided along a classic x-y axis format (see figure 1). the x axis is the division between commodities and commons. on the extremes there exist ‘pure’ commons and commodities. on the commons side, this may include either physical (such as air), institutional (a community library) or cultural commons (such as trust or hope). at the other extreme, there are pure commodities such as foreign-exchange transactions. the y axis represents the separation of the ‘market’ from not only the economy but also wider society. this is a feature of the free market fundamentalism that is common in today’s neoliberalism and has seen the market become the metaphor for the economy (milberg 2001, 407). there are ‘purely’ societal-based organisations (publicly owned health centres, for example) at one end and solely market-based organisations (such as the stock market) on the other. the four zones of the typology are summarised in table 1. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 9 arvanitakis the commons figure 1: commons/commodity typology market society commodities commons cooperatives / mutually owned organisations zone 3 community based/ non-economic open-space (cgm) zone 4 regulated markets zone 2 neoliberal capitalism zone 1 figure 2: examples of commons/commodities society commodities commons cooperatives / mutually owned organisations community based/ non-economic open-space (cgm) regulated markets neoliberal capitalism credit unions nrma national mutual shares foreign ex derivatives education health utilities banks cultural industry public space diary cooperative market portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 10 arvanitakis the commons table 1: commons/commodity typology zones description of zones examples of zones zone 1: marketcommodity neoliberalism this is the zone in which neoliberal capitalism operates. this is the space of the free market that operates with little or no involvement from outside influences. here markets and commodities are seen to have little (if any) connection to wider society. the central goal is profit or return on investment. the image of the individual is one of atomised self interest. only by pursuing self interest does society operate appropriately with a functioning community. capital markets financial derivatives and foreign exchange zone 2: commodity -society regulated markets this area sees markets placed within the broader context of society and community. here it is acknowledged that markets need to be regulated to meet both economic and social goals. financial institutions such as banks privatised utilities such as electricity and the infrastructure that allows delivery of water. zone 3: marketcommons cooperatives/mutually owned organisations this area places community-based resources within the market context. here, resources may be used for the sake of financial gain or profit, but this is placed within the context of broader communal aims. financial cooperatives such as credit unions and other mutually owned organisations including agricultural cooperatives zone 4: societycommons counterglobal. movement (cgm) the commons community-based and non-commodified space. this is the zone in which the cgm operates. this is a space that is considered outside the market and is not driven by economic or financial motivations. the aims are communal or societal. the individual is seen to be both part of the broader community while maintaining their singularity. an open and authentic community is established by achieving this balance. utilities managed for public interest such as hospitals and water public space, national parks portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 11 arvanitakis the commons in addition to the examples noted in table 1, others have been added to the typology to present a broader overview in figure 2. these examples are specifically drawn as ovals to signify my position that no group or ‘cluster’ fits comfortably or easily within any single zone. even if it is possible to place a cluster wholly in a single zone, the point at which an individual example fits within the cluster varies significantly. this point can be explained with an example. to begin with, ‘health’ is a broad cluster that includes both private and public health care providers. many hospitals are managed by government-owned organisations with the prime motivation to serve the ‘common good’ (mcauley 1998). as such, ‘health’ available to all primarily aims to serve broader society—and thus fits within zone 4.8 here the common good is seen to consist of establishing functioning social systems, institutions and environments of benefit to all (mcauley 1998). however, each individual health centre and hospital within the public realm will have different philosophies, and some may have greater community links than others. this can be contrasted with privately run health care organisations. such organisations have multiple motivations, which include both the provision of health care and obtaining a profitable return for investors. this is highlighted by one of australia’s leading private health care providers, mayne group. mayne’s mission statement outlines the company’s goals that include ‘building on the success of our health care products and services to meet the needs of all our stakeholders’ whose number consists of both the consumers of its health products and services and its investors (mayne group 2005). for this reason, mayne’s website provides information about the health services it provides alongside ‘investor’ information including current share price and investment strategies. operating within this regulated market place,9 such privately run organisations place priority not only on profits but also on the health of their customers—two goals that are intimately related. consequently, the cluster of health spreads across zone 2 and 4. 8 for example, the state government of victoria’s ‘metropolitan health strategy’ (2003, 14) places the needs for the community at the centre of the public health sector. 9 a list of the large number of legislation administered by the australian federal minister for health and ageing including that which directly impacts private health providers is listed on the following site: http://www.health.gov.au/internet/wcms/publishing.nsf/content/health-eta2.htm february 2005. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 12 arvanitakis the commons this close interrelationship between profits and caring for the health of consumers highlights the continuum identified above. as such, both binaries and simplified positions—for instance, ‘public is good’ and ‘private is bad’—can be avoided. it can be argued, then, that private health providers provide an important service to the broader well being of society as they may fill gaps left by the public system.10 figure 2 also portrays the close link between society and the economy. here the economy is observed and managed within the context of broader societal goals. the economy, society, nature and politics are not seen as being separate spheres. it is important to note that while i concentrate on the physical sphere, the typology can also be extended to the cultural sphere. for example, it would be possible to draw a continuum between open sharing of knowledge and the strict application of intellectual property where all knowledge is commodified. however, such a discussion is beyond the scope of this paper. enclosing the commons as noted, under neoliberal capitalism the commons are constantly under threat as two simultaneous processes emerge. the first is the separation of the economy from society. this reaches a point at which ‘the market’ becomes a metaphor for the economy as realms considered outside its domain are slowly subsumed (milberg 2001, 407). the second is neoliberalism’s frontier disposition as it moves towards an ongoing commodification and enclosure of the commons. both are portrayed in figure 3. the central theme that emerges in figure 3 is the hollowing out of zone 4 and the subsequent expansion of zone 1. that is, because of neoliberal capitalism’s frontier disposition, increasingly fewer resources are considered outside the market’s domain and zone 4 shrinks while zone 1 inflates. the result is that many commons that were once 10 this example (hopefully) highlights the flexibility of using such a typology. the mayne group is traded on the australian stock exchange. consequently, while the products and services it provides operate within zone 2, the organisation itself, which involves the commercial trading of its shares, would be classified under commodities and sit within zone 1. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 13 arvanitakis the commons seen as being beyond the realm of the market have now been commodified and an imbalance has emerged between the market and other forms of ownership (lessig 2004; barber 1998). this prompts bollier (2002, 6) to argue that today there is a tendency not to even recognise the existence of commons. figure 3: enclosing the commons market society commodities commons cooperatives / mutually owned organisations community based/ non-economic open-space (cgm) regulated markets neoliberal capitalism credit unions nrmanational mutual shares foreign ex derivatives education health utilities banks culture public space the result of the enclosure, then, is that we are seeing many of the clusters moving from zone 4 towards zone 1 either directly (through aggressive privatisation programs) or through stages (such as partial privatisation and public-private partnerships [ppps]).11 it is important to note that i am making no attempt to assign a ‘time scale’ to the typology. the changes that are taking place are current and both the mode and speed of change within each of the presented clusters varies extensively across time and through space. the experience of each sector within different nations would also be significantly different. for example, the banking sector in australia moved relatively quickly from zone 2 to zone 1, while once exclusively public goods, such as education, have experienced a slower transition. water privatisation has not yet occurred in australia, but has occurred elsewhere in the world. 11 ppps can be defined as any collaboration undertaken between public bodies (including local councils or state and national governments) and private companies (osborne 2000, 11) portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 14 arvanitakis the commons to highlight the hollowing-out of zone 4, again i will briefly return to the example of health care system in australia. the issue of privatising the australian health care system and its consequences is discussed by brooks (1999, 321). noting that this issue reflects a global trend over the past few decades, brooks describes how private hospitals have stepped into areas that were once dominated by public providers, including research foundations. this has been driven, in part, by the decision of governments to reduce funding in areas that once were priorities, due to the dominance of budgetary fiscal responsibility that has come to dominate economic orthodoxy since the late 1970s (brooks 1999, 321). such trends continue and are being pursued through a wide variety of mechanisms including ppps. this allows the further hollowing out of zone 4 as many relationships established through ppps give priority to the private sector in accessing research gains. this is particularly evident in the private-public partnerships that have become the widely accepted in university research departments (bollier 2002). this removes knowledge from the commons (zone 4) and commodifies it as intellectual property (represented in zone 1). reclaiming the commons the concept of the commons is an intellectual thread that links global justice advocates around the world—both on a global and local level. i use the term ‘counter-globalisation movement’ (cgm) to describe the many different advocates and activists that make up this heterogenous group. this group includes, but is not limited to, those that have been described as ‘anti-globalisation’ activists, individuals who have empathy with such activists but do not take part in protests, and more formal non-government organizations, such as the ones discussed below. the question is ‘counter to what’? my answer is counter to the enclosure of neoliberal capitalism and its processes of enclosure and exclusion. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 15 arvanitakis the commons simultaneously, the project of neoliberal capitalism seems focussed in enclosing these commons. in fact, as local communities continually move to open new commons, this actually allows the frontier disposition of neoliberal capitalism to expand. in contrast to this commodification, enclosure, and the exclusion that follows, the counter movement defends and establishes new commons that are open to all. this is a non-commodified space. i argue that this contestation over the commons is a pivotal conflict between the cgm and neoliberalism. the cgm works to defend and open new commons— something that happens in many different ways and takes many different forms. organisations as varied as aid/watch, aftinet, focus on the global south, and the council of canadians, pursue anti-privatisation campaigns in protection of the commons.12 for example, aid/watch’s ‘right to water’ campaign raises concerns about the ongoing privatisation of water, including rainwater (aid/watch 2005). in 2001, aid/watch commenced a review of the policies and programs of international financial institutions, investigating their relationship to private water corporations. aid/watch identified a consistent policy recommendation to solve people’s lack of access to safe drinking water by privatising community assets and instituting user-pay systems.13 this situation arises because official development assistance (oda) funds and loans to low-income countries focus on privatisation of water delivery and thus privilege multinational water corporations. the prioritisation of user-pays and profits results in the exclusion of a wide section of the population from a resource once available to all. in response, aid/watch argues that water is a commons, not a commodity to be sold and, as a result, available only to the highest bidder. 12 aid/watch is a non-government organisation based in sydney that aims to monitor the development dollar and raise concerns about the commodification of the development assistance program (see www.aidwatch.org.au). aftinet is the australian fair trade and investment network also based in sydney (www.aftinet.org.au). focus on the global south is based in bangkok, manila and in india, and looks at a cross section of issues including trade, globalisation and development specifically from the perspective of low-income nations (www.focusweb.org). the council of canadians is a canadian-based organisation also concerned with trade and globalisation (www.canadians.org). 13 these conclusions were supported by recent work undertaken by naomi klein (2005) who concludes that privatisation is the only solution offered to the poor by the world’s international financial institutions. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 16 arvanitakis the commons rather than being limited to a small group of actors, however, this process of reclaiming, protecting or establishing commons is central to the cgm. szerszynski (1999), for example, analyses contemporary ‘environmental’ protests with a specific focus on ‘reclaim the streets’ (rts).14 szerszynski argues that such protests operate at the level of what might be called the ‘semiotics of the everyday’ by moving to reclaim public spaces.15 szerszynski (1999) also feels that these protests spill into the cultural sphere by arguing that they are not only about reclaiming public space, but also the ‘life-world.’ this is an opening of non-commercial space or commons both in the physical and cultural (life) spheres. furthermore, this opening emerges not as a well-defined political project but as autonomous and sometimes spontaneous collective behaviours that stress the commons while, at the same time, defending multiple singularities (hardt and negri 2004). this is a different logic to that of neoliberalism as it promotes abundance rather than scarcity. the new form of biopolitics promotes multiple singularities to ‘work in common’ to establish new commons (hardt and negri 2004). it is here, i argue, that the real project of the cgm emerges. the cgm moves to reestablish non-commodified spaces in areas that the market has enclosed. figure 4 presents a visual summary of this aspect of the cgm. it also highlights some of the mechanisms used by the cgm including advocating for the tobin tax16 and antiprivatisation campaigns at the united nations, through national forums as well at the local community level (kingsnorth 2002). consequently, the abundance created by the cgm takes many different forms. for example, abundance can be created in the material sphere by ensuring access to social services that are well resourced. likewise, abundance 14 the reclaim the streets collective is made up of various groups that come together to ‘reclaim public space.’ there are many such collectives around the world and they come together in a sporadic fashion. see http://www.reclaimthestreets.net/. 15 it should be noted that while szerszynski (1999) uses the label ‘environment’ to describe the protest, he also notes that such protest groups are not single-issue organizations; rather, they present multi-dimensional symbols. 16 tobin taxes are taxes placed on cross-border currency transactions with the aim of limiting speculation and currency volatility, and promoting longer-term investment and national economic sovereignty (patomaki 2001). the vision that exists for such a tax is that the revenue raised would be managed by the un and directed towards global priorities including environmental and human needs. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 17 arvanitakis the commons can also be created in the cultural sphere through the open and cooperative sharing of hope, trust and knowledge. it should also be noted that within this context the market is brought back under the umbrella of the economy and broader society. the market is not seen to exist in its own right, but rather is merely one mechanism to promote the allocation of selected resources. figure 4: commons/commodity typology market society commodities commons cooperatives / mutually owned organisations community based/ non-economic open-space (cgm) regulated markets neoliberal capitalism credit unions shares foreign ex derivatives education health utilities banks culture public space tobin tax new regulations reclaim the streets anti-privatisation campaigns drawing conclusions a number of important conclusions derive from reading the commons/commodities typology. first, this typology highlights the ongoing enclosure and commodification of various commons, such as public health and education systems, has been a slow yet prevalent trend. furthermore, this trend also reflects a cultural shift. here, the clear cultural message delivered by hardin’s (1968) tragedy of the commons is that the broader public cannot be trusted to manage resources. markets become accepted as the only mechanism for distributing resources, and there emerges wide level approval that this can only be achieved through commodification. evidence from this can be derived from the overwhelming support given to the privatisation of once mutually owned resources, such portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 18 arvanitakis the commons as the nrma and amp in australia.17 this point reflects the broader position that the privatisation of public goods is accompanied by the commodification of culture as the market becomes the dominant organisational form. a third conclusion that can be made is that the typology portrays the ongoing dominance of the cartesian logic and neoliberalism’s frontier disposition. simultaneously, this also demonstrates the disappearance of the commons as described by bollier (2002) and lessig (2004). there is a hollowing out of zone 4 that occurs as the commons are enclosed despite the efforts of the cgm to stop or alter this process. finally, the typology also demonstrates a fundamental real project of the cgm and how it works to establish new commons. as discussed earlier, i argue that this is the central intellectual thread that links the heterogenous groups of actors that i have presented as the cgm. reference list aid/watch 2005, aid/watch campaigns [online] available at: http://www.aidwatch.org.au/index.php?current=2 [accessed march 2005]. australian stock exchange and australian shareholders’ association, ‘demutalisations since 1985. avaliable at http://www.delisted.com.au/demutualised.aspx. accessed 28 january 2006. allen m. 2004, ‘the war on a terrorism advisor,’ sydney morning herald, 27 march, 39. barber, b. 1998, ‘democracy at risk: american culture in a global culture,’ world policy journal, 15.2: summer 1998, 29-41. bauman, z. 1999, liquid modernity, polity, london and new york. bollier, d. 2002, silent theft: the private plunder of our common wealth, routledge, new york. brooks, p.m. 1999, ‘the privatisation of teaching hospitals,’ medical journal of australia, 170: 321-322. burke, k. 2004a, ‘how private schools get paid,’ sydney morning herald, 16 march. ______ 2004b, ‘pressure on nsw to slash funding for private schools,’ sydney morning herald, 16 march. davis, j. 2001, ‘gifts and trade,’ in cullenberg, s., amariglio, j., and ruccio, d.f. (eds), postmodernism, economics and knowledge, routledge, london and new york, 475-482. 17 nrma and amp were both successful mutually owned organisations that were privatised in the 1990s. both de-mutualisations received overwhelming support from former members who were offered ‘free shares’ in the process. such de-mutualisation follows on from others and joins the privatisation of publicly owned australian organisations (qantas, commonwealth bank, nsw gio and telstra). see http://www.delisted.com.au/demutualised.aspx for details accessed march 2005. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 19 http://www.delisted.com.au/demutualised.aspx arvanitakis the commons ecologist, the 1996, whose common future? reclaiming the commons, earthscan publications, london. farhat, r. not dated, biopiracy: genetic engineering, life patents and the manufacturing of scarcity, aid/watch, sydney. fingleton, j. ed. 2005, privatising land in the pacific: a defence of customary tenures, discussion paper number 80, june 2005, the australia institute, canberra. goldman, m. 1997, ‘“customs in common”: the epistemic world of the commons scholars,’ theory and science, 26.1: 1-37. habermas, j. 1991 [1962], the structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society studies in contemporary german social thought, the mit press, cambridge, ma hardin, g. 1968, ‘the tragedy of the commons,’ in dryzek, j.s., and schlosberg, d. (eds), 1999, debating the earth: the environmental politics reader, oxford university press, new york, 23-34. hardt, m. and negri, a. 2000, empire, harvard university press, cambridge. ———. 2004, multitude, penguin, new york. hartmann, b. 2004, ‘conserving racism: the greening of hate at home and abroad,’ different takes, 27, winter 2004 [online] available at: http://popdev.hampshire.edu/projects/dt/pdfs/differentakes_27.pdf [accessed november 2004]. hughes, h. 2004, ‘radical reforms needed to make pacific viable,’ the courier-mail, 7 december 2004, 15. jacobs, m. 1997, ‘sustainability and markets: on the neoclassical model of environmental economics,’ new political economy, november: 365-385. karvelas, p. 2004, ‘land rights may be privatized,’ the australian, 10 december 2004, 4. kingsnorth, p. 2004, one no, many yeses: a journey to the heart of the global resistance movement, simon & schuster, london. klein, n. 2005, ‘the rise of disaster capitalism,’ the nation, 2 may 2005, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050502/klein [accessed may 2005]. lessig, l. 2004, free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, penguin, east rutherford, nj. mayne group 2004, mayne group [online]. available at: http://www.maynegroup.com/97.asp [accessed february 2005]. mcauley, i. 1998, ‘health a common good,’ new doctor, 68, summer 1998, [online]. available at: http://www.drs.org.au/journal/68/68health.htm [accessed january 2005]. mctaggart d., findley c., and parkin m. 1999, economics, 3rd edition, addison wesley longman, melbourne. metherell, m. 2004a, ‘land system holds us back, says mundine,’ the sydney morning herald, 10 december 2004, 6. ______ 2004b, ‘howard backs private gain from black land,’ the sydney morning herald, 10 december 2004, 7. milberg, w. 2001, ‘de-centering the market metaphor in international economics,’ in cullenberg, s., amariglio, j. and ruccio, d.f. (eds), postmodernism, economics and knowledge, routledge, london and new york, 407-430. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 20 arvanitakis the commons osborne, s. p. 2000, public-private partnerships: theory and practice in international perspective, routledge, oxford. ostrom, r.c., and thrainn, e. eds. 1990, governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action political economy of institutions and decisions, cambridge university press, cambridge. pearce, f. 2002, ‘market forces “are the way to save the planet”,’ new scientist, 175.2350: 10. patomaki, h. 2001, democratising globalisation: the leverage of the tobin tax, zed books, london and new york. rustomjee, s. 2001, ‘exploring social disintegration,’ group analysis, sage publications, london. shiva, v. 2000, protect or plunder? understanding intellectual property rights, zed books, london. sklair, l. 1996, ‘conceptualising and researching the transnational capitalist class in australia,’ australian and new zealand journal of sociology, 32.2: 1-19. ______ 2000, the transnational capitalist class, blackwell publishers, sydney, london. szerszynski, b. 1999, ‘performance politics: the dramatics of environmental protest,’ in ray, l. and sayer, a. (eds), culture and the economy: after the cultural turn, sage, london, 211-228. thompson, e. p. 1963, the making of the english working class, penguin books, london. wallach, l., and woodall, p. 2004, whose trade organisation?, the new press, new york and london. wood, a. 2002, ‘individual enterprise the key to progress for aborigines,’ the australian, 29 april 2003, 13. yunupingu, g. 2005, ‘turning back the clock for aborigines,’ sydney morning herald, 11 april 2005, 11. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 21 james arvanitakis, faculty of humanities and social sciences introduction understanding the commons the tragedy of the commons cultural implications tragedy of enclosure the commons/commodity typology table 1: commons/commodity typology neoliberalism regulated markets cooperatives/mutually owned organisations the commons enclosing the commons reclaiming the commons drawing conclusions search | portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies quick jump to page content main navigation main content sidebar toggle navigation home about about the press team our principles and partners our partners and providers books all publications csr book series genocide perspectives series media object book series uts shopfront series conferences journals publish with us publish a book or book series publish a journal article suggest a new journal role of editorial board or managing committee research integrity principles for scholarly publishing ethics and transparency advertising and sponsorship contact search register login toggle navigation journal home current previous issues announcements about about the journal submissions editorial team privacy statement contact home search portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies search search articles for advanced filters published after 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 january february march april may june july august september october november december 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 published before 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 january february march april may june july august september october november december 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 by author search results no results make a submission information for authors about the journal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies is a fully peer reviewed journal dedicated to the publishing of scholarly articles from practitioners of—and dissenters from—international, regional, area, migration and ethnic studies, and it is also dedicated to providing a space for the work of cultural producers interested in the internationalization of cultures. partners and major indexers issn: 1449-2490 privacy policy portal v11 no 1 jan 2014 rojaslizana copyedit&galley irl portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. stigma and exclusion in cross-cultural contexts special issue, guest edited by annie pohlman, sol rojas-lizana and maryam jamarani. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. perceived discrimination in lgbtiq discourse from australia: a typology of verbal discrimination isolda rojas-lizana, university of queensland new within the field of discourse analysis, perceived discrimination (pd) is the study of discourse that focuses on the perspectives of the victims of discrimination. this article explores the experiences of verbal discrimination as reported by eighteen lgbtiq (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer/questioning) participants during semi-structured, co-constructed interviews. data was classified in order to develop a taxonomy of discrimination based on mellor (2003; 2004) who foregrounds two types of discrimination: verbal and behavioural. in this paper, i identify the forms of verbal discrimination encountered by the participants and offer an analysis of the discourse used in the construction of the experiences and effects reported. the results show that verbal discrimination is mainly triggered by a perceived transgression of the normalised standards of people’s behaviour, movements and appearance in a heterosexist society. i identify and describe three subtypes of discrimination through the analysis of keywords, effects and expressions. participants resorted to several discursive strategies when conveying their intentions: mitigation strategies when wanting to minimize the experience; and hedging and repetition for emphasis and to convey urgency and pervasiveness. metaphorical expressions related to internal or external injuries were also used to express the powerful effect of verbal discrimination on people. lgbtiq discrimination in australia discrimination in general is classically defined as a phenomenon that involves ‘deny[ing] to individuals or groups of people equality of treatment which they may rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 2 wish’ (allport 1979: 51). recognized as a worldwide experience, discrimination in terms of gender and sexuality is no exception (koken, bimbi & parson 2009; chin 2004; dougherty, baiocchi-wagner & mcguire 2011; griffith & hebl 2002; hebl et al. 2002). australia is not known for being a lgbtiq-friendly place at a macro level, that is, in the legal and social arenas. there is little protection under federal law from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity (ahrc 2011). while religious and other institutions are exempted from anti-discriminatory laws, in most states same sex couples do not have the possibility of marrying and adopting children. federal law still considers ‘(homo)sexual advances’ a mitigating factor in cases of violent assault, while the law in the state of queensland discriminates against lgbtiq people in terms of the age of consent (see waites 2003 for the case of the uk). research also confirms negative attitudes among the australian population toward lgbtiq people and rights (johnson, madisson & patridge 2011), although more recent polls on same-sex marriage (2009–2012) have shown that 64 percent of australians approve changes in the existing law (galaxy research 2012). in the australian media lgbtiq people are almost invisible and hence are not considered a ‘normal’ part of society; thus their appearance in the public sphere often elicits immediate controversy. two examples can be noted here. one was a public attack on the children’s program play school (abc) in 2004 for showing a segment in which a girl had two mothers (allan & burridge 2006). the other was in 2011 when billboards displaying an ad for condoms featuring two men were taken down after public outcry in brisbane. in 2011 the australian human rights commission published a report showing the results of public consultation on the experiences and views of people who may have been discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation or sex and/or gender identity. the majority of the participants identified a need for greater legal protection given the high levels of discrimination, violence, harassment and bullying faced by lgbtiq people in australia (ahrc 2011). perceived discrimination and discourse analysis discourse analysis is a method of carrying out linguistic and social research that has its basis in the ancient study of rhetoric (van dijk 1996). generally speaking, it studies language in use in the form of text, written or spoken, and within a context, to help understand human systems. discourse analysis assumes two elementary assertions: first, rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 3 that language is ‘constitutive,’ meaning that language is not considered static and referential only but as ‘the site where meanings are created and changed’ (taylor 2001: 6). second, discourse needs to be understood in its situated context as linguistic activity brings forth cognitive and cultural resources (fauconnier 2004). critical discourse analysis (cda) has traditionally studied elite discourse in order to expose unequal power relations and manipulation (fairclough 1995, 2002; van dijk 1997; wodak & meyer 2009). it centres on those who have the power to impose their views and how their discourse is used to perpetuate and ‘normalize’ dominant ideologies. my research, however, belongs to a small number of studies that have focused on the perspectives of the victims of discrimination to develop a greater understanding of their discourses by classifying their accounts and examining how people who have experienced discrimination convey these stories (mellor 2003, 2004; merino 2006, merino et al. 2009). this article is guided by the following research questions: how can the participants’ experiences of discrimination be classified? what examples of verbal discrimination can be found? how are these experiences manifested in discourse? participants in attempting to uncover answers to the above questions, my research involved interviews with eighteen people who self-identified as lgbtiq members of the community. the sample included an age range of 18 to 62 years old; however, fifteen of the participants were young adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty. sixteen of the participants had tertiary qualifications and two had completed secondary education. the interviewees were all interviewed in the brisbane metropolitan area. fifteen of the interviewees were australians, one was a us citizen, one a uk citizen and one a singaporean. nine people identified as gay or lesbian, three as bisexual, six as transgender, seven as queer, and five used other terms not included in the acronym. some participants used more than one term to refer to their self-identification. they were recruited using a snowball sampling technique (lindlof & taylor 2011), the starting point being the queer collective organization at the university of queensland. procedure ethical clearance from the university of queensland was obtained before initiating the research. open-ended interviews were conducted in different locations, according to rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 4 which venue was more comfortable for the participants (their home, the researcher’s office, university spaces). being aware that an interviewer has an impact on the way that the participants respond, a trained research assistant who was a member of the lgbtiq community conducted the interviews. hence, the ‘active interview’ (holstein & gubrium 1995) and ‘co-constructed interview’ (miller 2011; talmy 2011) approach was used, as these accept that both participants are involved in the process of constructing meaning. in these cases the interviewer intentionally activates narrative production (holstein & gubrium 1995), engaging with the participant by offering their own experiences as an example, asking definitions for clarification, using colloquial and in-group language, and providing narrative linkage and narrative shift, among other strategies. the participants in my study received an information sheet and a consent form that explained the aims and nature of my research, and that they would expect to be asked about experiences of discrimination. they were told that their participation would be anonymous and confidential. analysis methods: taxonomy the data were transcribed and then classified manually into themes in terms of frequency and salience. i used the software leximancer to create semantic fields and validate the classification. mellor’s taxonomy of discrimination (2003; 2004) was then used as a guide to classify discrimination. mellor used his taxonomy for the first time in the case of aboriginal australians (2003) and replicated it for vietnamese immigrants (2004). the taxonomy was again used and adapted by merino et al. (2009) for the case of chile’s mapuche people, evidence of the taxonomy’s applicability across social and cultural groups. the taxonomy identifies four categories of perceived discrimination: verbal racism; behavioural racism; discrimination (for example, denying opportunities available to others in the community and excessive targeting); and macro racism. the last two categories include discrimination at a level that involves institutional participation, and that may also involve legal issues, cultural dominance, and biased historical accounts. given those features, i adapted the taxonomy according to the specificity of the data collected and the interests of the researcher. that is, given that i concentrate on everyday speech and interactions, the last two forms of discrimination were not included in this analysis. rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 5 results after coding the data on themes that emerged in the semi-structured questions answered by the participants, a taxonomy of discrimination was created based on the taxonomy of racism and discrimination proposed by mellor (2003, 2004), and merino et al. (2009). i identified in the data two major categories of discrimination: verbal and behavioural. in this section i identify the forms of verbal discrimination encountered and offer an analysis of the discourse used in the construction of the experiences and of the effects reported, as is evident in figure 1 below. figure 1. taxonomy of discrimination according to the experiences reported by lgbtiq participants. verbal discrimination: name-calling, abuse, remarks research has proven that language plays an important role in the reproduction of social inequality, with both quantitative and qualitative studies reporting that verbal harassment is the most common form of victimization among minorities (pilkington & d’augelli 1995; thurlow 2001; merino et al., 2009). however, it is common to encounter attempts in the mass media and popular culture that are intended to discredit some language uses such as ‘inclusive language’ and attention to ‘political correctness’ rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 6 (lakoff 2000; allan & burridge 2006). political correctness (an unfortunate term that emphasizes mandating) has at times inspired resistance given it can be considered to be a form of manipulation in which speakers are told to change their linguistic habits (allan & burridge 2006). interestingly, opposition to political correctness is more often found in people with conservative political views who do not themselves hold stigmatized identities (santos 2007). nonetheless, anti-discriminatory language policies have been effective in changing habits and foregrounding issues around discrimination that were socially invisible until recently. indeed, homophobic and/or heterosexist language is a psychological stressor that begins early at home, is perpetuated in the school system, and is disturbingly common in everyday life. in spite of this, it does not receive the same attention and sanctions as those found in the case of insults related to ethnic or religious backgrounds (thurlow 2001). triggering in general, verbal discrimination seems to be triggered by a perceived transgression of the normalized standards of people’s behaviour, movements and appearance (look). people who perform verbal discrimination seem to do so in order to chastise their victims as they feel ‘discomfort,’ which is part of a cultural aversion to nonheterosexual people who do not conform to the gender/sexuality roles assigned in a heterosexist society (judith butler cited in taylor 2010). people, especially people in groups, may feel the need to police what is considered normal and to regard participants as perpetrators, active offenders ‘doing’ something in a violating way (fernández díaz 2003; see mellor 2004 for a similar explanation in the case of vietnamese immigrants). figure 2 summarises the types of actions that triggered the act of discrimination in my data. the cases of verbal discrimination presented are classified as circumstances of heterosexism. for heterosexism, i use herek’s (1991: 90) definition as it applies at both the individual and the cultural levels (religion, law, media and popular culture), that is, as an ‘ideological system that denies, denigrates and stigmatizes any non-heterosexual form of behaviour, identity, relationship, or community.’ verbal discrimination presented three forms: name-calling, abuse and remarks. these subcategories are presented and illustrated below. rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 7 figure 2: types of gender performance that triggered discrimination in the experiences reported by lgbtiq participants. 1. name-calling to be called a name is among the first forms of linguistic injuries that one learns (butler 1997). in name-calling a person is abused directly ‘by assailing them with contemptuous, perhaps insolent, language that may include an element of bragging.’ (allan & burridge 2006: 79). the intention is normally to hurt the ‘other’ as well as to find acceptance in or sense of belonging to a specific group. the motive for namecalling may initiate as fear of what one does not understand or know, or fear of becoming the very other that is being rejected. in the cases at hand, verbal insults were triggered by gender performance, that is, physical appearance and behaviour that did not comply with heteronormative conventions (tikkun 2010). participants were aware that their defying of gender norms had produced the reactions. name-calling was reported to be the most common form of discrimination among the participants (16/18). in fact, name-calling was so common that its mention was made almost in passim by several of the interviewees, as if its commonness made them not worth mentioning it as a case of discrimination. name-calling came from strangers in groups or individuals (in all cases identified as young males); they were not reported as coming from family members whose discrimination more often took the form of rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 8 remarks and insults in relation to both gender and sexuality. consider the samples below: sample 1 p31: i’ve never gotten anything like overtly negative. none of my lecturers have ever had a go at me about it. you get the usual stupid people walking through the great court like calling you a faggot or something, but as far people i’ve actually met face-to-face, i don’t think there’s been anything. (my emphasis) sample 2 p4: there was a lot of shit from when i lived in mackay, but brisbane is a very different place. the worst i’ve gotten is numerous people yelling at me from cars as they’re going past, calling me a poofter, a faggot, a dyke. (my emphasis) samples 1 and 2 provide an example of the discursive strategy called ‘mitigation’ (flores-ferrán 2010; martinovski 2006), where the experience of discrimination is blocked with a preceding generalization: ‘never gotten anything like overtly negative’; ‘there was a lot of shit from when i lived in mackay.’ we know that for cognitive reasons english would normally topicalize at the beginning of a sentence; thus the information that comes second would be secondary in importance. moreover, the use of ambiguous intensifiers of frequency and quantity (‘usual,’ ‘numerous’) in a general and open-ended way foregrounds the idea of these events being common and expected, and therefore unimportant in comparison with other unstated experiences. this is because important events are supposed to be remembered and described in detail. these participants seem to suggest that because these experiences are pervasive, anticipated and perpetrated by strangers (not ‘face-to-face’ as expressed in sample 1, by unknown ‘numerous people’ as in sample 2), they are not ‘serious’ cases of discrimination. mitigating name-calling in this way could be a coping strategy in which downgrading its importance in discourse would downgrade it in the mind of the experiencer (martinovski 2006). it may also respond to the wish of not wanting to position oneself as a helpless victim but as a resilient experiencer (quinton 2003; branscombe & schmitt 1999; taylor, wood & lichtman 1983). this is supported by the demographics of this group, which present the cultural capital of education and the social capital of network connections. sample 1 refers to name-calling within a university campus. this participant does not show surprise at this behaviour although other participants did expect less discrimination in campus (see sample 3 below). research has identified a 1 the use of the letter ‘p’ stands for ‘participant,’ followed by a number associated with the chronological order of the interviews. rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 9 ‘narcissism epidemic’ within the millennial generation (henderson & murdock 2012; twenge & foster 2008, 2010), that is, in comparison with other generations ‘millennials may have trouble empathizing with other groups due to an elevated sense of entitlement and the tendency to view higher education from a consumer’s perspective’ (henderson & murdock 2012: 186). unlike samples 1 and 2, sample 3 does not mitigate the experience and reflects on the negative effect of name-calling (‘dykes’ in this case) that emerges, especially when participants are caught by surprise. sample 3 p10: but then the mood of enjoying whatever night it was is effectively ruined for some time, yeah. i think, also, that is how we reacted because we were in an environment where we felt supported in general. like i said, where i expected people to know better and i expect people in general to look down on any behaviour that’s discriminating against you because of your sexuality. whereas, i think, if i was in a scenario where i felt unsafe or worried and that happened to me in my country town, where i don’t really know how safe it is in general, i would be more likely to then try and act straight. as possible as that is. as explained in sample 3, the shock of name-calling is strong when discrimination takes place in spaces that are supposed to be exempt from these situations. verbal assault here is magnified by being unanticipated. the unforseen nature of the situation unsettles the private frame the recipient was in before the act, and creates a violent, instantaneous, ‘loss of context’ (butler 1997), that is, a context in which the participant was performing their gender naturally (not ‘acting straight’ as mentioned later). overt discrimination was not part of the ‘university’ frame (lakoff 2010), as it would be of the frame ‘country town’ for participant 10 (and 8 below, see sample 4): this created a situation of uncertainty. most people with a stigmatized identity tend to be constantly on their guard. this is pervasively present throughout my data in the use of key words such as ‘lucky’ which foregrounds the idea of unpredictability and lack of control, and hedges such as ‘most of the time,’ ‘not yet,’ ‘so far,’ and the downtoner ‘just’ (blumkulka, house & kasper 1989) marking (minimal) presence. sample 4 shows a reflection on this point, emphasized by the repetition of ‘just’: sample 4 p8: but the fear of it happening is just—it’s just significant … you know, it’s not like we’re in some country town in the middle of nowhere—it’s brisbane. it’s like the most progressive part of queensland; i should be like okay here, and it just—i don’t know; it just doesn’t feel like you can be a hundred per cent safe, you know? faggot and dyke the most common words used in name-calling were ‘faggot’ (‘poofter’ was mentioned rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 10 only by older informants which may mean that the term is in disuse), ‘gay,’ and ‘dyke,’ accompanied by the emphatic general pejorative ‘fucken’ (croom 2014). depending on the situation, the degree of aggressiveness and intentionality varied; however, they were always uttered with a pejorative connotation. the triggering factor was visual in terms of physical appearance (‘looking the stereotype’ according to the perpetrator) and of behaviour (mainly holding hands or ‘snuggling’). studies have shown that the use of the word ‘faggot’ when indirectly expressed in a group of young males refers to anything that is viewed as uncool, cowardly, and unmanly (aerts et al., 2012; thurlow 2001; plumer 2001), which seems to be the case in sample 5 below. ‘faggot’ and ‘poofter’ are especially marked as having a developmental history that is important in adolescent male peer-group dynamics. their meaning and frequency of use vary from childhood to adolescence, foregrounding the homophobic meaning as age increases. all these meanings emphasize otherness— ‘specifically of being different from the collectively authorized expectations of male peers, in lacking stereotypical masculinity and/or in betraying peer group solidarity.’ (plummer 2001: 21). sample 5 p8: but the other half were like i guess bogans—yeah, really intolerant and—i’m glad not to see them because i went to a party just like i think it was a couple of years ago. yeah, they got really drunk and just started calling everyone faggots. it was really like soul-crushing, i guess; heartbreaking, that they’re all so backwards. participant 8 in sample 5 is a university student and is here referring to their old high school classmates. what seems to be disappointing to the participant, manifested in the use of metaphors for internal injuries (‘soul-crushing,’ ‘heartbreaking’), is that these exclassmates had not changed from their adolescent years. notice that internal injuries, like hidden identities, are more concealable than external ones. the perpetrators’ behaviour is explained in their categorization: they are ‘bogans,’ a group characterized as ‘intolerant’ and ‘backwards’ (and ‘drunk’). all other reports of name-calling were registered in circumstances of direct address. gay this word was reported as being used on its own or in the phrase ‘that’s so gay.’ both uses had a negative connotation, and the impact of the word was especially important in terms of the ‘way’ (tone, disposition) the term was used. studies have reported the rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 11 negative use of ‘gay’ as widespread for describing ‘anything undesirable such as a lack of interest in sport, academic success or lack of aggression’ (thurlow 2001: 33). lalor & rendle-short studied the contemporary use of the word gay in australian english and concluded that younger people (18-30 year olds) would more likely understand gay in the negative sense as ‘indicating that something (or someone) is “stupid,” “bad,” “lame” or “pathetic,”’ especially in conjunction with the intensifier “so”’ (2007: 148). sample 6 shows a metalinguistic comment on the associations that it foregrounds by proximity: sample 6 p1: if you think about the saying, “that’s so gay,” it’s a pretty discriminatory thing to say. the whole idea about that sense is “that’s so crap,” which is just associating being queer or homosexual with being crap. using the term carelessly and without consciously knowing that it may be offensive seems to make it even more so. consider, sample 7 p16: one of the ladies had to do a story on a dolphin who is hanging around in the bay and one of her co-workers said something like “oh, you have to do a story on that gay dolphin” and you could kind of tell she meant it in a negative way (…) that ‘gay’ is a word used so frequently among teenagers in australia (lalor & rendleshort 2007) shows that there is a tacit licence to use it, which is not the case for abusive terms related to ethnicity or religion (unks 1995; thurlow 2001), as the following interchange illustrates: sample 8 p3: then one day we were sitting in front of the x-box, just mucking around and he was like, “oh that’s so gay.” i’m like, “why do you keep saying that?” he was like, “i don’t know, it’s just a thing.” i explained about—i actually had an etymology discussion with my brother and i told him all about how it was really offensive to certain people and stuff. queer the use of ‘queer’ by non-lgbtiq people in certain situations was condemned for its intentional association with weirdness and aberrancy. participant 1 in sample 9 tells the story of being in a class where the lecturer used ‘queer’ to characterize a writer well known for his strange behaviour and paedophilic inclinations. typifying lists establish a relationship between the elements of the list and suggest identification; therefore, by mere association these terms transfer their features to neighbouring terms (rojas-lizana 2011). rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 12 sample 9 p1: it was a gothic literature class and she was talking about this one author who was quite eccentric and weird. she was referring to him as if he was like a michael jackson figure; he was really reclusive and he had all these eccentricities and things that he would do that were quite weird to everybody. she said: “you know he’s eccentric, he’s flamboyant, he’s queer, really queer.” at the time, the way she was talking about it was like whoa, what are you talking about? so i felt quite upset and taken aback by this person associating somebody who’s been considered a paedophile with somebody who’s been queer … it was just such a horrific thing to say and the way she said it was really careless and dismissive. she was really, really confident and arrogant almost in the way she was speaking. (my emphasis) the ‘speech situation’ (austin 2000) is very important in the assessment of what is considered discriminatory and the extent of the discrimination. the participant not only emphasizes the fact that the lecturer was associating the term with a negative behaviour, they considered it important to establish the ‘way’ in which it was said, that is, the attitude of the person. this is marked by the use of intensifiers (‘whoa,’ ‘really’) and repetition (‘really, really’). another important element that made this ‘just such a horrific thing to say’ was that the setting placed the lecturer in a position of power and influence over people in a context where discrimination is supposed to be opposed (as in sample 3). the participant commented that when this type of incidents happens in this particular context, students feel disempowered to speak up and oppose what has been stated for reasons of embarrassment, and in this case, of disclosure. finally, the importance of the ‘total speech situation’ is confirmed when these words are not used as forms of verbal injury but as part of in-group speech. hence they would signify something else depending on who says it, with which disposition, and under what circumstances (croom 2014). consider their use in an in-group situation: sample 10 p9: … and i thought she was the cutest dyke i’d ever met in my life. p10: i think of myself as queer, to be very specific. i like that because it’s a political term which just, to me, means not straight, which is my little political stance on not having to box yourself into a certain category and not having to say i’m a lesbian and that means i’m only going to like girls for my entire life, because i feel like you can’t be sure. 2. abuse and remarks abusive language and negative remarks were reported to come mostly from people known to the participant, that is, acquaintances at work, fellow students, and family members (parents, brothers, sisters, and grandparents). the examples of verbal discrimination previously presented were triggered by what the perpetrator of discrimination would consider a transgression of gender rules. there is another rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 13 triggering situation, however, that has to do with gender indeterminacy in the eyes of the perpetrators and that affects mainly transgender or transsexual people who are transitioning. not being able to place a person within the normative binary for gender and sexuality seems to unsettle heterosexist people. participants reported that trans people appear to be subjected to a higher level of violent discrimination than other members of the community, which confirms studies stating that trans people are attacked more frequently because of their non-normative expression of gender (valentine 2003). abuse expressed in indexical expressions the use of indexical expressions in everyday life situates and contextualizes speech and communication moments precisely because these expressions have indeterminate referents until placed in a concrete situation (bamberg 2000). in a collaborative interaction their use would create bonds, solidarity and reflect a common disposition, which was the case in the interviews where participants used the singular ‘they’ with different degrees of fluency. pronouns are especially important in the context of gender and sexuality as their use discloses identities and how these identities are perceived or want to be perceived (rojas-lizana and hannah 2013). their conscious use was referred to by participants as the ‘pronoun game.’ sample 11 p16: i used to really play a pronoun game, which if you don’t know, that saying ‘they,’ or ‘their’ or ‘my partner’ instead of saying ‘she’ or ‘he,’ or you know, just to absolutely disguise what pronoun they have and thus what gender they are. a well-known indexical expression mentioned was the pronoun ‘it’ used as a form of abuse to refer to and address trans people. this is considered a strong insult not because people do not distinguish between male and female, which may be welcomed in cases, but because the addressee is dehumanized. from what has been reported, verbal abusers know the gravity and violence of this offense. an extreme example of behavioural discrimination (physical assault) related to ‘it’ is illustrated by tikkun in a footnote: ‘as this thesis was being completed, a trans student … was beaten, his clothes ripped off, and the word ‘it’ carved deeply into his chest as he was leaving a class’ (2010: 16). however, sample 12 below proposes that the use of it is unintentional (‘a slip of the tongue’) and could be considered a coping strategy for this participant. however, this is clearly not the case in sample 13 below. rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 14 sample 12 p2: but every now and then someone will drop the word ‘it.’ i just have this reaction of like, you did not just ‘it’ someone, you did not just ‘it’ me did you? often i think that the words that i’ve— the ways that i’ve had it used when someone’s been talking to me is—it was like more of a slip of the tongue … but i’m sure people use it in a mean way but i haven’t had that ... sample 13 p3: [h]e refuses to learn pronouns, he keeps referring to me as—he referred to me as an ‘it’ once in an argument, like repeated attempts … he’s just like, well, you’re this invisible minority, i don’t even have to pay attention to you, because you don’t even have a pronoun, you stupid creature. the force of the insult in sample 13 lies in the use of repetition, listing and the hedged comment: ‘you don’t even have a pronoun.’ the connotations of the ‘it’ pronoun are listed clearly: an ‘it’ is invisible (a minority within a minority), stupid, and a creature. the use of ‘creature’ brings out the non-human implication of the term. participant 3 reported that this insult came from a gay man who seemed to share with heteronormative thinking the binary notion of sexuality (either homosexual or heterosexual) as the only valid one. this discrepancy found within a marginalized group points to an epistemological difference in the in-group members’ thinking. as booth says, ‘[t]ransexuals occupy a liminal position fundamentally at odds with hegemonic paradigms of sex, gender, and sexuality, and reactions ranging from fearfulness to rage have often led to discrimination and violence. the ultimate solution suggested by queer theory would be a paradigm shift away from these rigid, hegemonic structures’ (2011: 202). another example of abusive language indicating a similar meaning occurs in sample 14: sample 14 p2: the manager—who’d been there before and after the new owners—received an email from the managers who’d been into the pub and they said, ‘what is that thing that works behind the bar? you need to fire them.’ that was it. (my emphasis) from the categorization of gender that rules the heteronormative paradigm, the abusive language in sample 14 reveals the following beliefs: there are two genders, and only two genders; gender is invariant; there are no transfers from one gender to another; and everyone must be classified as either one gender or another (tikkun 2010 from garfinkel 1967). that abusive language and the assumptions underpinning it also confirm that the importance given to gender identity is such that gender indeterminacy removes humanity from someone’s identity (‘that thing’). rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 15 stigmatized identities have points in common, and differences in the way they experience discrimination and how they cope with it (quinn & chaudoir 2009). this group was poles apart from other stigmatized identities in that they would have had to cope with discrimination very early in life which may come from their own family groups (not so much the case of ethnic or class stigmatized identities, for instance). most cases of people making discriminatory remarks were reported from family members in connection with religion and stereotyping. religion played an important role both in discrimination and in disclosure. participants stated that it is one of the reasons for not disclosing or befriending people. they also mentioned it to explain why their families discriminated against them. sample 15 p15: i did [experience discrimination] with my parents—quite a bit from my parents. i’m from quite a religious family. sample 16 p7: but i sometimes still think about that kind of stuff. it’s like a mantra; it gets into your brain and becomes part of your reality. so it was just all that reinforcement hearing from her, ‘you’re going to go to hell, i don’t want you to go to hell, i love you. can’t you just come to church and we’ll sort it all out.’ studies show that discrimination coming from family has deep consequences in the lives of those affected (koken, bimbi & parsons 2009). ryan et al. (2009) found in their us-based study that higher rates of family rejection during adolescence were significantly associated with poor mental health outcomes in an lgbtiq group. as parents (the term includes anyone with primary caregiving responsibilities) are the most important people in a person’s life at a vulnerable age (emotionally, materially, physically), their rejection creates a strong impact: ‘parents tend to be uniquely important to children because children’s sense of security and other emotional and psychological states are dependent on the quality of relationship with their parent(s).’ (rohner 2004: 833). the participant in sample 16 mentions rejection (in the word ‘hell’) and ‘love’ in the same line, which makes these types of remarks powerfully charged with emotionally contradictory messages. the participant can still bring the experience to their mind, years after, because these remarks were not expressed once but many times. this is articulated in the repetitions, and in words with reiterative meanings and associations such as ‘mantra,’ ‘reinforcement,’ ‘get,’ ‘become’ and ‘still.’ rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 16 religion was mentioned in other instances of discrimination that did not relate to family. consider sample 17: sample 17 p17: during prayer they actually pray that the government will make the right decision to abolish gay marriage. p5: what i didn’t realise was it was a bible group and he sent me facebook mes s with bible verses about gay people going to hell. basically trying to convince me otherwise which went on until i cut contact and made it so he couldn’t contact me anymore. sample 17 refers to the christian church the participant attended at the time of the interview (which may be felt as a rejection coming from the extended family). the remark had a deep effect on the participant (see sample 18) who indicates the wounding power of words in their choice of vocabulary. this is clear in the use of two types of metaphor for physical injury to refer to emotional injury emphasized below: sample 18 p17: … and i’m like, i mean it’s like an outright slap in your face. it was like that’s clearly wrong, it’s an abomination and you should not do it kind of thing. so i was like, yeah, it kind of hit me. i felt really judged by that one statement and i felt really weird the whole week. finally, parental rejection took other forms of discrimination such as stereotyping, forbidding the participant to disclose to others (sample 19), stop talking to them (sample 20), or excluding participants’ partners (sample 21) from their presence. it also took the form of behavioural types of discrimination that are not discussed here. sample 19 p14: he’s so adamant that i don’t tell anybody, i think, especially my grandmother. i asked if he, they had told her and he’s like, no. it’s like, well are you going to? he said, no. you realise i’m going to tell her at chris’—, no. p15: over the years since then, she told me i’m still not allowed to tell my siblings because they are younger and she doesn’t want them exposed to it if i am not sure and things like that. she told me not to tell my dad because he had issues with his dad being bisexual as well and she said that he’d find it too hard to cope with. sample 20 p14: when i came out my parents wouldn’t talk to me. my mother didn’t talk to me for two weeks and it was around her birthday and mother’s day as well. so it was really hard and then my father wouldn’t. sample 21 p3: they’re just like, we want to meet you and you can’t bring your partner. conclusion language plays an important role in the promotion of social inequality. quantitative and rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 17 qualitative studies have reported that verbal harassment is the most common form of victimization among minorities and that it can have serious effects on mental health. the purpose of this article was to present and analyse qualitative data on perceived discrimination from people identifying as lgbtiq in brisbane, australia. after building a taxonomy of discrimination based on mellor’s work (2003; 2004), i concentrated on describing, exemplifying, and analysing verbal forms of discrimination. three types of verbal injury were identified in my research: name-calling, abuse, and remarks. name-calling was the most pervasively experienced and concentrated on the words ‘faggot,’ ‘dyke,’ ‘gay,’ and ‘queer.’ some participants mentioned it as a minor form of discrimination, while others elaborated on its strong effects. there is a relation between the type of verbal injury and the perpetrators performing them. in general, name-calling came from people who did not know the experiencers whereas abuse and remarks were uttered by acquaintances and family. a particular connection was established between discriminatory remarks and (christian) religion. the data show that discrimination experienced by this stigmatized identity is overt and that participants are stressed by the ever-present possibility of facing it. verbal discrimination is triggered by a performance of gender that disturbs the perpetrator’s heterosexist beliefs. participants resorted to several discursive strategies to convey their intentions. they used mitigation strategies when wanting to minimize the experience resorting to contrasts and ambiguous expressions. this could be a form of coping, or of not wanting to appear as a victim, as victimhood connotes passivity and lack of agency. hedging and repetition were used for emphasis, and to convey urgency and pervasiveness. metaphorical expressions related to internal or external injuries were used to express the powerful effect of words on people. this work is part of a larger project on perceived discrimination that aims to contribute to the investigation of the phenomenon of discrimination, stigma, and exclusion by documenting and analysing the discourse of pd reported by people with stigmatized identities during semi-structured, open-ended interviews. lgbtiq discourse on pd identified a discriminatory ideology (heterosexism) that is present and active in contemporary australia. verbal forms of discrimination have been identified as pervasive, overt and expected. rojas-lizana perceived discrimination portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 18 studying the discourse of pd offers ways to explore discrimination and social identities from multiple and complex angles and allows the experiencer to represent themselves to readers in their reflective and active dimensions. these findings will help to establish the state of discrimination in specific settings in terms of awareness, disposition, and priorities, as well as show how widespread, settled or rejected certain views about the ‘other’ are. this information can then be used in applied disciplines such as social psychology, human resources management and mental health. in terms of field 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(eds) 2009, methods of critical discourse analysis. sage, london. wintergalleyportaljuly2012final portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. imagined transcultural histories and geographies special issue, guest edited by bronwyn winter. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. imagined transcultural histories and geographies bronwyn winter, university of sydney in a globalised world, an assumption prevails that the nation has somehow lost its power to regulate our lives, being undermined by other forces, either top-down through the impact of global capitalism or bottom-up through migrations, transnational religious, ethnic or social movement communities or other transversal politics. a related idea is that ‘culture’ is now irrevocably hybridised and border-zoned, that we no longer live in a world of discrete, located, identifiable and historically grounded cultures but, rather, in some unstable and for-the-moment insterstitiality, a sort of cultural interlanguage that sits outside well-mapped structures of power. yet, just as the nation and the boundaries it sets around culture are being conceptually chased from our maps of the world, they come galloping back to reassert themselves. they do so politically, economically, legally, symbolically. amidst all the noise of our transnationalisms, hybridities and interstitialities, the idea of what it is to be ‘australian’ or ‘french’ or ‘filipino’ or ‘asian’ reaffirms itself, in mental geographies and constructed histories, as our ‘imagined community’—to use benedict anderson’s famous term (1983)—or indeed, ‘imagined other,’ even if it is an imagined ‘other’ that we would somehow wish to incorporate into our newly hybridised self. using the notion of transcultural mappings, the articles in this special issue investigate this apparent paradox. they look at how the self and other have been mapped through imagined links between geography, history and cultural location. they interrogate the tension between persistent mappings of the world based on discrete national or cultural winter imagined transcultural histories and geographies portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 2 identities on one hand, and, on the other hand, the push to move beyond these carefully guarded borders and problematise precise notions of identity and belonging. the idea of transculturation was coined by the cuban anthropologist fernando ortiz in 1940, to describe a process of transition from one culture to another in a context of (often forced) migration, out of which new cultural formations emerged (ortiz 1995). it has come to the fore once again, along with the idea of the transnational, within a conceptual framework that enables us to develop new interdisciplinary epistemologies of the global, the local, and the ‘glocal’ (for example, wilson & dissanayake 1996; grewal & kaplan 2000). the concomitant development of postcolonial and crosscultural studies concepts such as the interstitial (bhabha 1994), the hybrid (bhabha 1994, 1998; young 1995; hall 2003a, 2003b), the borderlands (anzaldúa 1987) and ‘border thinking’ (mignolo 2000), have begged the question of how these notions are determined, for example: interstitial between what and what? technically all cultures have always been hybrid, as human culture is not a reified ‘thing’ but a process, not static but in movement. so when we discuss border crossings and hybridities within international, postcolonial or area studies, or within comparative cultural studies, on what premises are we basing such discussions? are we positing some mythical idea of an original cultural homogeneity, and an associated national cohesion, as a mooring from which we embark? or are we, on the contrary, suggesting that cultural and indeed national mappings, or the discussion of an identifiable culture associated with a language, nation or region, have become superfluous and even obsolete? in which case, how can we continue to have intelligible conversations about distinctive locations of groups and individuals, constructed historically, geopolitically, culturally, socioeconomically and indeed ideologically? with all its capitalist delocalisations, globalised hybridities, and migrations of people and ideas, our world continues to be structured around the idea of the nation (or supranational region: ‘europe,’ ‘asia,’ and so on). assumptions about such constructions and their impacts, even as we challenge them, thus continue to inform our analyses and debates. in short, we continue to map the world, sociopolitically and culturally as much as physically, even as we challenge the logic of such mappings. we imagine these mappings as grounded in a historical inevitability: an always-thereness of sorts, that we winter imagined transcultural histories and geographies portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 3 nonetheless seek to reassert, to control anew, through our very act of mapping. hence the paradox: mapping is an exercise in plotting, delimiting, demarcating, whether historical, geographical or symbolic: australia (for example) is here and it came to be in this way; this is what it is and this is what it is not. the transcultural, however, like its cousin the transnational, destabilises the certainties of maps, much as peters (or more accurately, lambert-gails-peters) destabilised mercator—or as the ‘southern’ map that places the global south at the top of the globe destabilised both. the transcultural fuzzes the edges, shifts the foci, changes the shapes. a word of explanation: the mercator and lambert-gails-peters projections are both named for their originators. mercator was a flemish geographer and cartographer who developed his cylindrical projection in 1569. it became a cartographical standard and was particularly useful to navigators in charting lines of constant course. its great and much criticised disadvantage is that the scale increases from the equator to the poles, thus enlarging land masses farther from the equator and compressing those closer to the equator. this means that africa, south america, and australia appear much smaller than they are, and rather squat, while europe and north america loom much bigger in comparison. the peters projection uses an equal-area cylinder, reputed to have been developed by an alsatian mathematician by the name of lambert in the 1770s. james gails proposed a lambert-based projection in 1855, and arno peters presented his map in 1973 as a new invention. it quickly took on as an emblem of anti-hegemony under peters’s name, although all cylindrical-projection maps skew distances and dimensions as geographers and cartographers will readily point out. indeed, as juliana de nooy points out in her article in this issue (discussed below), ‘maps are relational, a projection of “there” from “here.”’ (de nooy, this issue). the articles in this issue, then, look at what factors determine how different transcultural mappings occur through space and time, and on what assumptions and consenses (or questionings and discords) they are based. they investigate the operation of localised power in transnationalised constructions of place and identity, whether in asserting power over, or in aspiring to gain access to a perceived locus of power, or even in assuming an already-thereness that sits (aspirationally?) outside power relations. tim laurie, in his article ‘epistemology as politics and the double-bind of border thinking: lévi-strauss, mignolo, deleuze and guattari,’ begins with the question: ‘how winter imagined transcultural histories and geographies portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 4 can one criticise the projects of governance through knowing (episteme) linked to state projects of imperial expansion and colonialism without also according to these states the capacity to think in an orderly and consistent manner distinct from its pleasures and inclinations (epistemology)?’ he explores this question through an examination of three bodies of work and approaches to discussing (post-/de-)colonial relations: claude lévistrauss’s structuralist anthropology; gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s althusserian and psychoanalytic poststructuralism; and walter mignolo’s ‘decolonial’ and ‘border’ thinking. his article highlights the difficulties in providing real analytical alternatives to colonialist or otherwise dominant-class epistemologies and circuits of power. lévistrauss, in questioning western value systems and othering of ‘primitive peoples,’ nonetheless retains the authoritative voice of the western knower. deleuze and guattari, in seeking to analyse the role of affect and multiplicities of often contradictory power relations, including within the left, and in seeking to engage with gendered analysis, nonetheless remain within a masculinist framework predicated on the authoritative voice of the western intellectual. mignolo, in seeking simultaneously to reject naïve cultural relativist valorisations of the non-western and to decolonise knowledge by valorising non-western epistemologies, nonetheless glosses over differences of location and power (class and gender among others) within the ‘non-west.’ moreover, in his over-reliance on a ‘philology’ of historical texts, mignolo evacuates the lived experience of the historical subjects he discusses. in the end, we are left with a ‘discourse on the discourse on colonialism’ that ultimately fails to move us beyond an obsession with identities and locations of speakers into an analysis of the geo-historical constitution of sociopolitical relations. such an analysis is at the centre of liz rechniewski and matthew graves’s project in ‘mapping utopia: cartography and social reform in 19th century australia.’ their discussion of imagined cartographies of australia during the first half of the nineteenth century demonstrates the clear link between these cartographies and the political idea of australia as an ‘unblemished’ new land that britain could fashion to its own blueprint as an experimental site. the cartographers discussed in the article all worked from secondhand accounts as none of them had actually visited the continent, and their ‘speculative’ geographies imagined australia as a land of fertility and promise, one that would enable british dreams of social reform and egalitarianism to be realised. the very naming of different places on the maps—or proposals for names—reflects a construction of an winter imagined transcultural histories and geographies portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 5 exported (and utopianised) britain, with major place names being british (named after british places or notable people), and various coats of arms and other iconographies accompanying the maps. proposals for the containment of indigenous peoples, even as they were granted some paternalistic respect through the preservation of some indigenous place names, also accompanied the cartographers’ projects. clearly, mapping, and its history, are a political exercise, and nowhere more so than in these imagined british mappings of australia that continue to inform our understanding of how our national space is constructed. juliana de nooy, taking us into the twenty-first century and ‘back’ from australia to europe, discusses the mapping of the individual or collective self through projection onto or against the other, in her article ‘the transcultural self: mapping french identity in contemporary australian women’s travel memoirs.’ in this case, however, the relationship is neither colonial nor postcolonial, although the legacy of colonialism and australia’s enduring national self-conception as an outpost of europe are clearly present in the material that de nooy discusses. through her discussion of memoirs by australian women having spent some time (sometimes a mere few months) in france, de nooy explores the idea of frenchness not only as fetish for the protagonists of the narratives, but as a vehicle for exploring the self. for each of the women, becoming ‘almost french’ or having a ‘french life’ (to cite two titles) is far less about acquiring knowledge or understanding of french history, politics, society, people or even language, than about a projection of female australian selves onto a french background. strangely, this enterprise seems not entirely dissimilar to the british projection of a social-reformist utopia onto an imagined australia, discussed by rechniewski and graves. in both cases, the other place is an imagined entity onto which one maps one’s own desires: collective (or posited as such) sociopolitical desires in the britishaustralian case, and individual feminised desires in the australian-french case. both are to do with the other imagined as a backdrop onto which one projects oneself. the significant differences stem, of course, from the vastly divergent histories of britishaustralian and australian-french relations, and from the role of france in the feminised anglo-world imaginary as a fantasy place, from the city of lights to charming rural retreats, from haute couture style and cosmopolitanism to refined manners and exquisite food. france is there, in these books, for australian consumption and female selfdiscovery. winter imagined transcultural histories and geographies portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 6 consumption is also the topic of rick flowers and elaine swan’s article ‘eating the asian other? pedagogies of food multiculturalism in australia.’ drawing on research by scholars such as uma narayan, ghassan hage and jean duruz, flowers and swan explore the issue of food consumption by white australian elites as a superficial expression of ‘multiculturalism.’ like the white australian women living a ‘french’ life discussed by de nooy, australian elites consume a visible aspect of the other—in this case, through eating their food—without necessarily knowing anything else about the other either as part of the australian demographic or as a specific cultural heritage. going against the grain of the research, however, flowers and swan choose to discuss the personal story of ‘frank,’ a white australian man who married a chinese student in the 1950s, then later, a filipino migrant in the 1970s. he had two children with each partner. frank also travelled a great deal in his job, to parts of south east asia and subsaharan africa. he lived ‘multicultural food’ at a time when other white australians were barely beginning to discover that there might be such a ‘thing.’ what is particularly compelling about flowers and swan’s account is the ordinariness of frank’s discussion of food: the crossover from potatoes to rice as staple carbohydrate, even the ‘exotic’ food cooked by his first and second wives, as part of the taken-forgranted, the everyday. it is only when he discusses his experience of eating ‘african’ food that his narrative begins to contain more ‘exoticising’ tropes. at the same time, the cultural specificities or culinary skills of his wives, or his emotional relationship to food, barely register a mention. through their discussion of frank’s narrative, flowers and swan highlight a number of issues in need of further exploration: the relevance of gender and its interactions with culture and ethnicity; the different operation of the private and public spheres as ‘places for food inter-cultural encounters and claims about identity’; and the uneven valuing of food as ‘cosmopolitan capital’: again, ‘french’ food is used as an example of high cosmopolitan capital. the last article in this special collection, shirlita espinosa’s ‘reading the gendered body in filipino-australian diaspora philanthropy,’ shifts the focus from white australian mappings onto the other, to the other’s mappings onto australia. it focuses on the gendering of diasporic philanthropy, through a discussion of the beauty contests at the blacktown fiesta cultura (now a multicultural festival, also referred to by flowers and swan). the fiesta was begun by the filipino community in blacktown in winter imagined transcultural histories and geographies portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 7 the 1970s and has since expanded, taking on a more generic ‘multicultural’ flavour (although the ‘wow! blacktown’ nomenclature is a typically filipino marketing expression). through her exploration of how filipino diasporic philanthropy overlaps with the feminised construction of the ‘filipino migrant’ as primarily ‘filpina,’ notably through the imagery of the ‘mail-order bride,’ espinosa reminds us that the transcultural is also gendered, and as such, mapped onto sexualised bodies. the mapping exercise discussed by espinosa, moreover, is that of a multiple-levelled projection. it is not only a projection of ‘there’ from ‘here,’ but also, and even more so, a projection of ‘there’ into ‘here.’ it is not only a (self-)construction of ‘asian-ness’ for an australian market—a performance of the othered ‘us’ for the australian ‘them’—but also a selfreferential performance of us for us, to remind us of our ethno-national duty towards ‘home.’ even as who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ becomes blurred, inevitably, through the collective history and personal experience of migration, marriage and various levels of assimilation, an ‘us-ness’ struggles to reinvent and reassert itself, paradoxically taking on, in this case, the very feminised construction that has been imposed from outside. the articles in this issue show that the transcultural ‘playing field’ is certainly very far from being level, in the best of all cosmopolitan worlds. transculturation is constituted first historically, including, albeit not solely, through the legacy of colonialism, and imagined geographically as a projection of ‘us’ onto them or an incorporation of some aspect of ‘them-ness’ within ‘us.’ the articles also show that ‘them’ and ‘us,’ even in their imagined unities and separateness, are traversed by the dialectics of, among other things, class and gender. finally, they show us that national and cultural boundaries— and the power relations they symbolise—far from being broken down, are continually reconstituting and reasserting themselves, even as they ostensibly embrace hybridisation. reference list anderson, b. 1983, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. verso, london. anzaldúa, g. 1987, borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza. aunt lute books, san francisco. bhabha, h. 1994, the location of culture. routledge, london & new york. _____ 1998, ‘culture’s in between,’ in multicultural states: rethinking difference and identity, (ed.) d. bennett. routledge, london, 29–36. grewal, i. & kaplan, c. 2000, ‘postcolonial studies and transnational feminist practices,’ jouvert: a journal of postcolonial studies, vol. 5, no. 1. online, available: http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v5i1/grewal.htm [accessed july 1, 2012]. winter imagined transcultural histories and geographies portal, vol. 9, no. 2, july 2012. 8 hall, s. 2003a, ‘the work of representation,’ in representation: cultural representations and signifying practices, (ed.) s. hall. sage, london, 13–64. _____ 2003b, ‘the spectacle of the “other,”’ in representation: cultural representations and signifying practices, (ed.) s. hall. sage, london, 223–90. mignolo, w. 2000, local histories, global designs: coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. princeton university press, new jersey. ortiz, f. [1940] 1995, cuban counterpoint: tobacco and sugar. trans. h. de onís. duke university press, durham. wilson, r. & dissanayake, w. (eds) 1996, global/local: cultural production and the transnational imaginary, duke university press, durham. young, r.j.c. 1995, colonial desire: hybridity in theory, culture and race. routledge, london. microsoft word goi ousset-krief compressed galley.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. geographies of identity special issue, guest edited by matthew graves and elizabeth rechniewski. © 2015 [annie ousset-krief]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i1.3436 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. le yiddishland newyorkais: la mémoire enracinée annie ousset-krief, université sorbonne nouvelle quiconque se promène dans new york ne peut qu’être frappé par la multiplicité des visages que la ville affiche. façonnée au cours du temps par les populations diverses qui s’y installèrent, new york est comme un livre ouvert sur le monde. simple touriste ou résident, chacun peut y trouver sa part d’humanité. car les identités qui s’y expriment sont nombreuses et se donnent en miroir dans le paysage urbain. le lower east side, en particulier, tel un livre d’histoire, dévoile les trajectoires individuelles des communautés qui s’y sont, un jour, arrêtées. hester street, delancey street, orchard street: ces rues autrefois hébergeaient les exilés venus de petits villages lointains de pologne ou russie. ce quartier, d’à peine 4 miles carrés, compris entre la 14ème rue au nord, le bowery à l’ouest, catherine street au sud et l’east river, fut autrefois une enclave juive. entre 1880 et 1920, des centaines de milliers de juifs venus par vagues successives d’europe de l’est, s’y établirent. le lower east side est un lieu où s’est imprimée la marque pérenne d’une communauté, il est devenu la mémoire vive des juifs américains. lorsque les immigrants juifs de russie s’installèrent aux etats-unis, il y avait déjà une communauté juive établie, structurée. environ 250 000 personnes, dont plus d’un quart à new york. elles étaient majoritairement d’origine allemande. mais malgré l’existence de cette communauté, les nouveaux arrivants éprouvèrent le besoin impérieux de recréer ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 2 figure 1: carte du lower east side, manhattan, 14 april 2012 © perryplanet, wikimedia commons [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:0089_klzwick_dscn0779.jpg]. quelque chose à part, quelque chose qui leur était propre. ils firent du lower east side leur terre, dans un pays qui symbolisait pour eux une goldene medine (terre d’or). pourquoi s’installer downtown manhattan? certes, ils n’avaient pas les moyens de vivre uptown, où résidaient les juifs américains qui avaient prospéré. le quartier du lower east side était traditionnellement la zone de première installation des immigrants. mais par-delà la nécessité économique, il y avait probablement aussi une dimension quasifamiliale: on restait groupé par village d’origine. une fois downtown, ils ne se sont pas contentés de créer des structures d’habitat et de survie minimales. le lower east side n’était pas qu’un territoire transitionnel, entre l’ancien monde et le nouveau. ‘the neighborhood did not just come to stand for what urban historians call the area of first settlement’ [la zone d’habitation en vint à représenter autre chose que ce que les historiens de la ville appellent zone de première installation], écrit l’historienne hasia diner. ‘rather, it was jewish cultural authenticity—pure, untarnished jewish cultural honesty’ [c’était plutôt l’incarnation de l’authenticité culturelle juive—une authenticité juive pure, intacte] (diner 2000 : 27). ces immigrants y ont établi un véritable monde, leur monde de la yiddishkeit, et le quartier en porte les traces. ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 3 la yiddishkeit, c’est à la fois une culture, une langue, un mode de vie, une vision juive du monde, c’est ‘être juif au monde.’ on a là un phénomène très particulier, où des juifs se définissant comme juifs, ne peuvent s’identifier à un groupe juif déjà présent, et produisent un monde différent, singulier. c’était deux communautés diasporiques qui avaient deux histoires différentes, malgré le lien originel reconnu—ostjuden (juifs de l’est), imprégnés d’orthodoxie religieuse, versus juifs occidentaux, héritiers des lumières. donc le lower east side n’est pas seulement un pont entre le nouveau monde et l’ancien, il est aussi, de par la transplantation de traditions culturelles, un pont entre la judéité américaine et la judéité d’europe orientale. l’analyse de ce quartier où subsistent maintes traces mémorielles peut, par conséquent, à la fois nous éclairer sur cette identité complexe, polymorphe, qu’est l’identité juive, mais aussi, plus spécifiquement, sur l’identité juive américaine. car, ce que ces immigrants ont créé au cœur du lower east side, est devenu le référent pour tous les juifs américains, y compris ceux qui ont une origine autre. autrefois les journalistes ou historiens appelaient le lower east side le ghetto, le hebrew quarter ou bien jewtown (jacob riis). le terme ‘ghetto’ me semble inapproprié, car on est bien loin du ghetto imposé par les sociétés extérieures, comme ce fut le cas avec le premier ghetto à venise. même utilisé dans un sens plus large, comme le fait par exemple louis wirth dans son étude du quartier juif de chicago, le mot ‘ghetto’ semble impliquer un repli sur soi, un ‘gigantesque mécanisme de défense,’ dit wirth (1980: 24). or il ne s’agit pas tant de défense que de cohérence avec l’être juif et différenciation culturelle. la terminologie contemporaine parle des ‘quartiers ethniques,’ insistant sur l’aspect identitaire que présente tel ou tel paysage. mon étude sera axée sur le yiddishland newyorkais, la ‘terre juive.’ plus qu’un simple quartier, le lower east side était une aire culturelle et religieuse, un monde véritable, avec sa langue—le yiddish— sa culture, sa foi, sa vie intense. le lower east side était la réplique du yiddishland européen, un yiddishland en miniature, la reconstruction partielle du shtetl, cette bourgade d’europe de l’est, si profondément et spécifiquement juive. comment ces immigrants ont-ils remodelé leur environnement, de quelle manière s’effectua la spatialisation de l’identité, l’appropriation des lieux, nécessaire à un ancrage, nécessaire à la vie, tout simplement ? pourquoi le lower east side est-il ce pivot mémoriel ? comment en est-il venu à incarner pour toute une communauté un ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 4 monde perdu ? quelles en sont les traces dans la cité? telles sont quelques-unes des questions que l’on peut se poser et auxquelles je vais tenter de répondre. du shtetl d’europe orientale au lower east side ‘etre humain, c’est vivre dans un monde rempli de lieux significatifs; être humain, c’est avoir et connaître sa place,’ écrit edward relph (1976 : 17). trouver sa place, donner un sens à son environnement, c’est sans doute cela qui fut la force créatrice sous-tendant l’installation des juifs de russie à la fin du xixe siècle. de 1880 à 1920, près de deux millions d’entre eux émigrèrent aux etats-unis. 75% restèrent à new york. a l’origine, l’appellation ‘yiddishland’ a été donnée à cette partie de l’europe orientale où les juifs vivaient. bref rappel historique : les communautés juives de pologne avaient été très florissantes pendant des siècles, jusqu’à ce que la pologne soit démantelée à la fin du 18ème siècle, et ses territoires répartis entre les différentes puissances. et c’est l’empire russe qui ‘hérita’ des terres où vivait un très grand nombre de juifs. or la russie avait exclu de son empire tout juif. obligés de ‘prendre’ les juifs de pologne, ils les reléguèrent à l’ouest, dans ce que l’on appela la ‘zone de résidence.’ vivant pour une grande majorité dans des shtetls (villages), ils y développèrent une société autonome, distinctement juive, et c’est ce modèle qu’ils recréèrent partiellement à new york. le shtetl était déjà l’expression d’une ‘culture diasporique’ (j’emprunte cette notion à dominique schnapper), d’une identité liée à l’exil. les déracinements successifs s’étaient accompagnés d’un renforcement de l’identité, laquelle s’était modelée de manière différente selon les pays où la diaspora juive s’était installée. la population établie en pologne avait développé des spécificités qu’elle reproduisit peu ou prou en amérique. le shtetl était organisé autour de la synagogue et des rabbins. la religion était le pivot sur lequel reposait la vie de chacun. le kahal (c’est-à-dire le conseil nommé par la communauté des individus) mettait en place des institutions de base : une synagogue, un mikveh (bain rituel), un cheder, (école), un hospice et un cimetière. religion, éducation, charité, les trois piliers sur lesquels repose le monde, dit le traité des pères (pirke avot, recueil de maximes du 3ème siècle), accompagnement d’un bout à l’autre de la vie. la tâche de ces instances était de maintenir la continuité des croyances et lois, ce qui faisait l’identité des juifs, leur spécificité. continuité, tradition, étaient les garantes de la survie des judaïcités. la mémoire était ici la clé de voûte, élément essentiel de la ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 5 culture : ‘forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption,’ ‘l’oubli conduit à l’exil, alors que le souvenir est le secret de la rédemption,’ écrivait le baal shem tov, le ‘maître du bon nom,’ fondateur du mouvement hassidique au dixseptième siècle en pologne. lutter contre l’oubli : telle était la tâche que s’étaient assignés les juifs depuis l’exil. l’historien américain, yerushalmi souligne dans son ouvrage zakhor (souviens-toi !) cet impératif du souvenir qui est la trame de toute l’histoire juive à travers le temps et l’espace. point focal du judaïsme, il s’incarne, non pas dans de simples actes commémoratifs, mais bien dans des constructions et reconstructions communautaires qui se retrouvent partout dans le monde, et à toutes les époques : ‘les souvenirs collectifs du peuple juif étaient fonction de la foi partagée, de la cohésion et de la volonté du groupe même, transmettant et recréant son passé grâce à tout un entrelacs complexe d’institutions sociales et religieuses qui fonctionnèrent organiquement à cette fin’ (yerushalmi 1984 : 110). déracinés du shtetl, les juifs de russie vont reproduire les mêmes cadres de vie à new york. le nouveau paysage portera l’empreinte de leur identité, ils créeront des lieux qui seront des marqueurs puissants de leur être juif, fortement ancré dans la tradition. car que leur offraient les juifs américains? une judéité édulcorée, un judaïsme hérité des lumières. le principe de base était, pour reprendre la formule du poète de la haskala (les lumières juives) yehuda leib gordon, ‘sois un juif chez toi et un homme à l’extérieur.’ la rupture entre l’être juif et le fait religieux s’était accompli, on était devenu américain de confession israélite, et tout ce qui faisait l’essence juive traditionnelle avait été gommé. impossible par conséquent pour les juifs de russie de se plier à cette forme de vie sans éprouver un trop grand décalage ou même un sentiment de trahison, car ils n’avaient pas opéré cette rupture entre sentiment d’appartenance à un peuple et sentiment religieux, et ne pouvaient d’emblée réformer leurs institutions et les américaniser. le lower east side va donc devenir une réplique à petite échelle du yiddishland. comment ont-ils occupé l’espace ? pourquoi peut-on parler ici de géographie identitaire ? avant de devenir un territoire juif, le lower east side avait accueilli les immigrants irlandais dans les années 1830. ils occupèrent les rues proches du fleuve, car ils ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 6 travaillaient dans les docks. ce quartier ouvrier, pauvre, reçut le surnom de five points, à cause des cinq rues qui y convergeaient. une autre partie du lower east side fut occupée par les immigrants allemands qui arrivèrent après l’échec de la révolution de 1848. ils s’installèrent au nord de grand street. généralement issus de la classe bourgeoise, ils développèrent un quartier plus résidentiel, plus tourné vers la culture et la politique: théâtre, presse en langue allemande, qui furent une sorte de modèle pour les immigrants juifs socialistes du début du xxe siècle, qui eux, étaient yiddishophones (je rappellerai que le yiddish a un substrat allemand sur lequel se sont greffés hébreu et langues slaves). il n’y avait pas, à new york, de quartier juif avant l’arrivée des juifs de russie en 1881, après l’assassinat du tsar alexandre ii et les pogroms qui suivirent. ce qui ne veut pas dire qu’il n’y avait aucun juif dans ce quartier du lower east side. un réseau d’institutions communautaires avait certes été mis en place, des synagogues—mais en très petit nombre (il n’y en avait que deux)—avaient été bâties, mais l’habitat était éclaté, il n’y avait pas d’aire culturelle proprement définie. les juifs américains, portés par la modernité, avaient dissocié religion et identité. le judaïsme était maintenant relégué au domaine privé. créant le mouvement religieux reform, version d’un judaïsme adapté au monde moderne et à ses nouvelles contraintes, ils étaient beaucoup plus laxistes dans l’observation des règles religieuses : la fréquentation de la synagogue n’était plus aussi régulière et rythmée par les deux prières quotidiennes, donc nulle nécessité pour eux de vivre à côté d’un oratoire, et nul besoin d’avoir de multiples lieux de prières ; de même, ils n’observaient plus de manière stricte les règles alimentaires de la cashrout, par conséquent, il y avait un petit nombre de boutiques d’alimentation casher. en résumé, l’espace urbain ne portait pas l’empreinte manifeste de leur présence. quand les juifs venus de russie, beaucoup plus traditionalistes, décidèrent de vivre à new york, ils le firent conformément aux exigences religieuses, et leur environnement fut modifié en conséquence. prenant possession de ces quelques rues du lower east side, les immigrants installèrent rapidement leurs communautés. ils façonnèrent un paysage qui leur était propre, jalonné de signes, de marqueurs, autrement dit, pour reprendre ce concept élaboré par joël bonnemaison, de géosymboles1 porteurs de leur 1 géosymbole : ‘marqueur spatial, signe dans l’espace, qui reflète et forge une identité’ (bonnemaison 2005 : 55). ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 7 identité. ils développèrent des institutions à caractère religieux et séculier, et extrêmement visibles, ancrages spatiaux de leur être, modifiant profondément le paysage urbain. ces constructions étaient le pendant de ce qu’ils avaient bâti en europe de l’est et recouvraient toutes les sphères de la vie quotidienne, car la judéité était ancrée dans la religion et le culturel. la question de l’être juif ne se posait pas pour eux, comme l’analyse yerushalmi: ‘les juifs ont opéré tout au long de leur histoire une fusion sans équivalent de la religion et du sentiment d’appartenance à un peuple’ (yerushalmi 1984 : 14). les exigences d’une vie juive traditionnelle sont telles que très rapidement s’est reconstituée, à l’échelle d’un quartier, la topographie du shtetl. quelles formes prit l’expression de cette identité ? la vie religieuse il n’est pas nécessaire, dans la religion juive, d’élever des édifices spécifiquement religieux. la synagogue est détachée de toute implantation géographique, elle peut être établie partout où les juifs résident. une simple pièce suffit, un minimum de dix fidèles (des hommes) formant le mynian, peuvent se réunir et prier, pourvu qu’ils aient les rouleaux de la torah. donc des ‘mini-synagogues’ (ou oratoires) furent créées, occupant les frontstore rooms dans des bâtiments qui n’étaient pas a priori destinés à abriter des institutions religieuses. on les surnommait des shtiebl (petite pièce). il y en avait des centaines, car les immigrants se regroupaient par congrégation ‘locale,’ par village. chacune avait ses rituels, petites différences cultuelles, façons de cantiler, etc. d’autre part, les juifs pratiquant ne doivent pas habiter à plus de mille pieds des lieux de prière, d’où la multiplication de ces lieux. les juifs très traditionalistes rejettent volontairement les édifices trop recherchés sur le plan architectural, et préfèrent une neutralité de construction, plus propice, selon eux à l’expression de la foi. donc rien ne distinguait extérieurement ces shtiebl des autres lieux, si ce n’est des inscriptions gravées au-dessus des portes, mais l’on peut penser que la présence de ces juifs orthodoxes, vêtus de manière traditionnelle (longs caftans noirs, shtreimels, i-e chapeaux bordés de fourrure), tranchait singulièrement sur le paysage américain et conférait aux lieux une identité fortement juive. une rue entière était une succession de ces shtiebl: elle fut surnommée shtiebl row—le long d’east broadway, entre clinton et montgomery street. aujourd’hui restent encore quelques shtiebl qui fonctionnent quotidiennement. il y a aussi une yeshiva (école talmudique), meshiva tifereth ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 8 jerusalem, sur east broadway, toujours en activité, et ce, depuis sa création en 1907. quelque 25 000 juifs habitent encore le lower east side. lorsqu’une communauté était plus nombreuse, plus riche, elle cherchait parfois à construire une synagogue. géosymboles importants de ce paysage, les synagogues étaient parfois d’anciens temples protestants réaffectés au culte israélite. une identité se superposait à une autre. d’ailleurs aujourd’hui le processus de strates culturelles n’est pas achevé: de nombreuses synagogues ont été reprises et transformées par les groupes suivants d’immigrants, par exemple anshei ileya (forsyth street), qui aujourd’hui est une congrégation adventiste hispano-américaine (on peut remarquer que l’étoile de david a été conservée) ou barbara church, autrefois synagogue établie par une congrégation de suwalki en pologne. on peut encore voir les tables du décalogue; par contre une croix a été dressée au sommet de la coupole. figure 2. ‘eldridge street synagogue’ [la synagogue d’eldridge street] 14 november 2006 © viktor korchenov, wikimedia commons [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:eldridgestreetsynagogue.jpg].  voici la première synagogue construite par les juifs de russie en 1892, la synagogue d’eldridge street (figure 2), ‘the grandest landmark of the jewish days on the lower east side,’ ‘la synagogue historique la plus imposante de la période ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 9 juive du lower east side,’ a écrit l’historien marvin gelfand (1992). cette synagogue fonctionne toujours, mais elle est aujourd’hui en plein quartier chinois, enchâssée entre deux temples bouddhistes. comme la synagogue d’eldridge street, d’autres synagogues accueillent toujours les fidèles (quotidiennement et les jours de fête). figure 3. ‘synagogue bialystoker’ [la synagogue bialystoker] 1998, wikimedia commons [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:bialystoker_outside.jpg]. figure 4. ‘purim celebration in bialystoker 2007’ [célébration de purim à bialystoker 2007], 3 march 2007 © juda s. engelmayer, wikimedia commons [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:bialystokerpurim07.jpg]. ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 10  la synagogue bialystoker (figure 3 et 4), sur grand street, un ancien temple méthodiste bâti en 1826 et acheté en 1905 par une congrégation de bialystok. l’extérieur austère n’a pas été modifié. mais l’intérieur est remarquablement décoré et coloré, de la même manière que les synagogues en bois de pologne l’étaient. aujourd’hui 450 familles y sont affiliées. figure 5. ‘entrance to chasam sopher’ [entrée de chasam sopher] © team_klzwick as part of the commons:wikis take manhattan project [contribution au projet de commons: les wikis se saisissent de manhattan], 4 october 2008, wikimedia commons [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:0089_klzwick_dscn0779.jpg].  chasam sopher (figure 5), 8 clinton street. le bâtiment date de 1853. c’était une des synagogues construite par les juifs allemands (qui partirent s’installer uptown) et reprise en 1891 par deux congrégations orthodoxes. cette synagogue n’a jamais cessé de fonctionner, même lorsque le quartier a été partiellement déserté. le bâtiment a été entièrement restauré et ré-inauguré en 2006. de nombreuses familles y sont aujourd’hui affiliées. ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 11 figure 6. ‘beth hamedrash hagadol of manhattan—early 1900s’ [beth hamedrash hagadol de manhattan—au début du 20 siècle] © the jewish encyclopedia, wikimedia commons [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:beth_hamedrash_hagadol_-_early_1900s.jpg].  beth hamidrash hagadol (figure 6), 60 norfolk street. c’est une ancienne église baptiste, construite en 1850, qui fut achetée en 1885 par des juifs de russie. figure 7. ‘first warsaw congregation (former congregation adath jeshurun) [première congrégation de warsaw (anciennement congrégation adath jeshurun)], 58 rivington street, lower east side, nyc,’ 6 july 2013 © oncenawhile, wikimedia commons [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:first_warsaw_congregation_(former_congregation_adath_je shurun).jpeg]. ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 12  adath jeshurun (figure 7), rivington street, fut fondée par une congrégation de la ville de jassy (roumanie) en 1903. ce magnifique édifice, œuvre de l’architecte emery roth, est le symbole d’une vie juive exceptionnelle dans le lower east side. aujourd’hui la synagogue a été transformée en résidences pour artistes. figure 8. ‘looking southeast across pike at pike street synagogue, also called congregation sons of israel kalwarie [synagogue], now serving residential and commercial tenants and a buddhist temple, on a sunny afternoon’ [la synagogue de pike street vue du sud-est et de l'autre côté de la rue. appelée aussi congrégation des fils d'israel kalwarie [synagogue]. y sont installés maintenant des locataires résidentiels et commerciaux et un temple bouddhique. par un après-midi ensoleillé] 30 may 2010 © jim henderson, wikimedia commons [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:13_pike_street_synagogue_1904_jeh.jpg] ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 13  the sons of israel kalwarie synagogue (figure 8), construite en 1903, l’une des plus grandes à l’époque, avec une capacité de 1 500 sièges. kalwarie est une ville à la frontière entre la lituanie et la pologne. a la fin des années 1970, la synagogue ferma ses portes, faute de fidèles. le bâtiment abrite maintenant un temple bouddhiste, un centre commercial et des logements. les autres édifices caractéristiques du shtetl, outre les synagogues, étaient les écoles (cheder) et les bains rituels (mikve). il y en avait probablement des centaines, la plupart dans des salles en sous-sol, pour capter les sources. certains ont été établis dans des édifices séparés, comme celui-ci, dans east broadway, qui date de 1904 (figure 9), et qui a été construit dans une ancienne église. il ne reste plus que trois mikve aujourd’hui dans downtown newyork. figure 9. ‘ritualarium, formerly arnold toynbee hall, 313 east broadway’ [ritualarium, anciennement alfred toynbee hall], new york architecture, [http://www.nyc-architecture.com/les/les013.htm]. il y avait aussi un grand nombre de boutiques qui vendaient des articles religieux. aujourd’hui encore, ces petites boutiques sont indispensables, même si nombre de leurs ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 14 transactions s’effectuent par internet. elles perdurent dans un univers plus asiatique que juif (figure 10). figure 10. boutique d’articles religieux © l’auteur. figure 11. kletzker brotherly aid association, 5 ludlow street, now a chinese funeral parlour [l’association kletzker d’aide fraternelle ... maintenant dépôt mortuaire chinois] © 2015 tangential travel [http://elirab.me/jewish/heritage-walk-on-the-lower-east-side-continued/]. dernier aspect communautaire, cette fois lié à la charité, les sociétés d’entraide. entre 1880 et 1910, quelque 300 landsmanschaftn (sociétés d’entraide) opéraient dans le quartier. on peut toujours voir l’inscription sur le fronton de la kletzker brotherly aid association sur la rue ludlow, à l’angle de canal street (figure 11). indissociables de la religion, les commerces alimentaires et les restaurants. les règles alimentaires qui conditionnent la pratique religieuse juive sont nombreuses et ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 15 très strictes. ces commerces étaient donc une nécessité et une nouveauté dans le paysage américain : par exemple, les boucheries casher, qui pouvaient satisfaire aux normes d’abattage de la viande, et les boulangeries qui faisaient les matsot (pain azyme pour la fête de pâque, pessah). il y avait également un grand nombre d’épiceries particulières, qui ne vendaient que des produits laitiers, de façon à respecter les lois de la cashrout (lait et viande ne doivent pas être mélangés), des boutiques de vins casher, bref un panel complet d’activités économiques spécifiques, liées au particularisme identitaire de cette communauté. en 1899, dans les quelques rues qui formaient le 10ème district (tenth ward), il y avait 631 commerces d’alimentation. parmi eux : 140 épiceries, 131 boucheries, 36 boulangeries, 14 crèmeries, 64 boutiques de bonbons, 10 delicatessen, etc. aujourd’hui encore, certains commerces sont extrêmement florissants et attirent autant les amateurs de nourriture ‘exotique’ que les juifs orthodoxes. deux boulangeries ont survécu : yonah shimmel et streit’s. des boutiques de delicatessen ont aujourd’hui acquis une notoriété surprenante: il est très à la mode d’acheter son saumon chez russ and daughters, ou de faire ses courses chez katz. de même, un restaurant comme ratner’s (1904–2004) a connu pendant 100 ans une notoriété jamais démentie: ‘ratner’s was such a fixture of the lower east side’ [chez ratner était l’un des lieux incontournables du lower east side], dit laurie tobias cohen, directrice du lower east side conservancy. ‘on a sunday, we would come here from the suburbs and bargain for clothes in the area, then go to ratner’s. this was a pilgrimage, something critical you did to reaffirm your roots’ [le dimanche, nous avions l’habitude de venir ici depuis nos banlieues, marchander l’achat de vêtements, puis nous allions chez ratner. c’était un pèlerinage, quelque chose d’une importance cruciale, que vous faisiez pour réaffirmer vos racines] (lower east side conservancy n. d.). l’autre versant de la vie intense qui se déroulait dans le lower east side, c’est le théâtre l’historien ronald sanders (1994: 10) qualifie ainsi les institutions culturelles de la presse et du théâtre: ‘if the press was the world’s talmud, the theater was its synagogue’2 [si l’on peut dire que la presse était le talmud de ce monde, alors le théâtre était sa synagogue].’ les théâtres étaient sur la 2ème avenue, ce qui valut à cette rue le surnom de jewish broadway. le yiddish art theater était le plus célèbre. en fait, le théâtre n’était pas une construction du nouveau monde, mais bien une tradition 2 talmud : ensemble des commentaires sur la torah, c’est-à-dire, les cinq premiers livres de la bible. ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 16 culturelle qui remontait aux années 1870-1880 en russie. mais le tsar avait interdit le théâtre dans son empire dès 1883. cet art profondément populaire trouva tout naturellement une renaissance à new york avec les immigrants. c’était une composante importante de l’expression de la yiddishkeit en tant que vision du monde, de par la langue, bien sûr, puisque les pièces étaient jouées en yiddish, mais aussi par le choix des créations artistiques. le plus célèbre des auteurs dramatiques en langue yiddish était jacob gordin. il fit notamment des adaptations de king lear, qui attirèrent des foules de spectateurs compatissants au sort du vieil homme abandonné et trahi par ses filles. on raconte que l’acteur jacob adler, qui interprétait le roi lear, était si convaincant que des spectateurs venaient sur scène pour le consoler et lui proposer de l’accueillir chez eux. le théâtre en tant que théâtre a aujourd’hui disparu, la modernisation a eu raison de ce pan de la culture yiddish, mais jusque dans les années 1960, se jouaient des pièces en yiddish, notamment au public theater, sur la 2e avenue et east 4th street. figure 12. ‘forward building in lower east side, new york city’ [bâtiment forward au lower east side], 16 august 2012 © alexisrael. wikimedia commons [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:forward_building_full_view.jpg]. ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 17 la presse fut un autre élément essentiel de ces années voici l’immeuble qui hébergea le forverts (forward building, figure 12) pionnier de la presse yiddish, à sa création en 1897. l’inscription en caractères hébraïques figure toujours au fronton. les journaux en yiddish subsistent aujourd’hui, modérément, (et sans doute plus par souci culturel que besoin populaire, sauf dans le milieu ultraorthodoxe). le forverts a déménagé de ce bâtiment, aujourd’hui occupé par une association chinoise, mais est toujours publié, dans trois langues maintenant: yiddish, anglais et russe. l’expansion culturelle était telle à l’époque que l’on rapporte que les habitants non juifs du lower east side—et il y en avait des milliers—apprirent le yiddish et communiquaient en yiddish avec leurs voisins. on raconte aussi que les agents de police irlandais qui travaillaient sur east broadway accrochaient des amulettes juives à leurs sifflets. figure 13. © mande weisser, ‘the new world chanukkiah’ [la chanoukkia du nouveau monde], jewishsource.com [http://www.jewishsource.com/itemdy00.asp?t1=14605]. voici une chanoukkia (chandelier). l’artiste, maude weisser, l’a intitulée ‘la chanoukkia du nouveau monde’ (figure 13). la chanoukkia est allumée tous les ans pour la fête de hanoukka, fête des lumières. hanoukka, c’est à la fois le symbole du lien sacré entre dieu et les juifs, et le symbole de la force de l’identité. en l’an 160 avant l’ère chrétienne, mattathias macchabée conduisit ses troupes contre antiochus epiphane, refusant l’hellénisation forcée et le renoncement au judaïsme. célébrant la victoire, ils rouvrirent le temple de jérusalem et allumèrent une lampe, qui brûla miraculeusement pendant huit jours. on allume pour cette raison huit bougies, un jour après l’autre. la neuvième ‘protège’ les huit autres. ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 18 ici, les bougeoirs sont une rue du lower east side, et parmi les bâtiments on trouve une synagogue, etz chaim ansche volozin, et l’immeuble du yiddish art theatre. quant au chamash, le ‘veilleur’ qui sert à allumer les autres bougies, c’est ellis island. sont réunis ici cultuel et culturel. avec la dimension supplémentaire de symbiose historique entre deux événements-clé, ou tout au moins interprétés comme tout aussi signifiants : la victoire des macchabés et l’arrivée dans le nouveau monde. on voit dans cette création artistico-religieuse comment l’histoire en est venue à remodeler le présent, comment toute séparation temporelle est effacée, dans un objet rituel qui sert de symbole à toute une communauté. le lower east side a été classé par la ville de new york comme ‘historical landmark’ en l’an 2000. le quartier considéré comme ‘historic district’ a été dessiné de la façon suivante : il est approximativement délimité par allen street, east houston, essex street, canal street, eldridge street, east broadway, et grand street. soit 620 acres, et 442 bâtiments. en 2004, on a élargi cette surface à madison, rutger, et henry street, soit 320 acres et 108 bâtiments supplémentaires. dans la fiche technique de cet enregistrement, les responsables ont défini l’importance du quartier en termes d’histoire, de religion, d’architecture, d’héritage ethnique et de commerce. c’est par conséquent une reconnaissance de la signification de ce quartier pour une très grande partie de la population américaine et plus particulièrement les juifs américains, puisque près d’un million d’entre eux y ont résidé à un moment ou un autre, et une reconnaissance de son importance dans l’histoire de la ville, une reconnaissance ‘transculturelle.’ au niveau de la communauté juive américaine, le lower east side en est venu à représenter—sur les plans spatial et temporel—le cœur de leur histoire. ils regardent le lower east side comme leur lieu, le centre de leur expérience. cette peinture murale sur le mur d’un foyer juif pour personnes âgées dans east broadway, résume en une courte formule le processus ici à l’œuvre (figure 14); l’inscription en bas à droite ne figure pas sur cette photo. elle est la suivante: ‘our strength is our heritage, our heritage is our life.’ ‘notre force réside dans notre héritage, notre héritage est notre vie.’ reprenant ce qui symbolise l’épopée des juifs de russie à new york, elle nous permet d’apprécier la valeur des événements-clé de cette histoire : l’arrivée à ellis island, la force de la religion, avec le chandelier, les bougies du shabbat, les rabbins, mais aussi la culture ouvrière et socialiste: dans la partie gauche on peut ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 19 figure 14. ‘mural, ilgwu—international ladies garment workers union—our strength is our heritage—our heritage is our life—east broadway, lower east side’ [peinture murale, ilgwu— syndicat international des femmes fabricants de vêtements—notre force est notre héritage—notre héritage est notre vie—east broadway, lower east side] © frank h. jump, fading ad blog [http://www.fadingad.com/fadingadblog/category/judaica/]. voir le titre du grand journal créé par abraham cahan, mentionné auparavant, le forverts; on voit aussi les syndicalistes manifestant et le logo de l’international ladies garment workers union. en somme, un condensé des quatre décennies de vie dans le lower east side, mais emblématiques de toute la vie juive américaine. conclusion avec le temps, le lower east side se vida progressivement de ses occupants juifs— laissant l’espace ouvert aux nouveaux immigrants venus d’asie ou d’amérique latine. mais l’appartenance demeure. tous les magasins n’ont pas disparu, bien au contraire certains connaissent une affluence digne des jours anciens, même si le phénomène de mode joue ici un rôle non négligeable. de nombreuses synagogues sont encore en activité, et perpétuent la mémoire des lieux. les jours de fête, des centaines de fidèles se pressent dans ces différents lieux de prière, et c’est la preuve que l’appartenance n’est pas fossilisée, et que le déplacement géographique n’efface pas les traces. ce qui est extrêmement particulier dans le cas de l’immigration juive, c’est que, du fait de l’exil, l’affirmation de l’identité était dissociée du territoire. c’est une manière d’être au monde, qui se transplante, dans le temps et l’espace. ce qui forge l’identité—puis la ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 20 reflète—est une combinaison de pratiques, linguistiques ou alimentaires, religieuses, vestimentaires, etc. mais cet ensemble prit corps dans le lieu, et le territoire devint le reflet de l’identité, tout en la renforçant. la culture—au sens large—détermine un mode de comportement au quotidien. et cela donna naissance à un univers singulier, qui s’enracina durablement. a travers l’histoire de ce quartier, nous pouvons ouvrir une réflexion sur la pérennité d’une communauté—laquelle affirme et célèbre son identité dans une sorte de ‘géographie du sacré.’ acte volontaire identitaire, c’est aussi le signe d’un sentiment profond d’appartenance à une chaîne. ‘nous sommes tous dans le même paysage,’ écrivait franz rosenzweig (2003 [1921]). la mémoire joue pleinement son rôle de transmetteur de conscience collective à travers l’histoire et répond à l’injonction biblique zakhor, ‘souviens-toi !.’ c’est après la deuxième guerre mondiale que le lower east side en est venu à incarner pour les américains la ‘véritable’ judéité. en effet, pendant des décennies, les différentes communautés avaient maintenu des liens avec leurs villages d’origine, il y avait une interdépendance assumée entre le ‘vieux pays’ (alte heyme) et les branches américaines. mais les shtetls ont disparu en fumée, six millions de juifs ont péri dans les camps d’extermination. a part quelques synagogues dans les grandes villes de l’est, comme prague ou budapest, la vie juive s’est arrêtée, même si aujourd’hui des juifs ultra-orthodoxes venus souvent des etats-unis, tentent de donner une nouvelle impulsion. c’est donc le lower east side qui remplit cette fonction de ‘vieille maison,’ récipiendaire de la tradition et de l’histoire des communautés décimées pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale. alors, est-ce une construction de la mémoire collective ou une réalité? certains historiens débattent de la validité du lower east side comme lieu authentique d’une vie juive. ainsi, beth s. wenger écrit que le lower east side became ‘a physical space for the invention of jewish identity in america [un espace physique pour l’invention de l’identité juive en amérique]’ (wenger 1997). selon elle, le quartier a revêtu une dimension quasi-mythique, oblitérant une réalité plus négative, gommant les aspects sociaux pour ne retenir que le côté solidaire et vivant. de même, irving howe souligne que l’on ne se souvient pas de tout, ‘much of it is beyond recall,’ écrit-il, ‘and must remain so. there is nothing glamorous about poverty, nothing admirable about deprivation, nothing enviable about suffering [une grande part du passé échappe au ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 21 souvenir, et c’est bien ainsi. il n’y a rien de fascinant dans la pauvreté, rien d’admirable dans les privations, rien d’enviable dans la souffrance] (howe 1996: 24). cette mémoire sélective serait-elle alors une tentative pour réaffirmer une identité qui se fragilise? il y a indubitablement aux etats-unis un renouveau ethnique, et peut-être ce réinvestissement historique est-il une forme spécifique dans un mouvement plus général. anthony smith (1981) interprète ce renouveau ethnique comme un besoin d’humanité face à un monde moderne trop rationnel et scientifique. dans le même esprit, daniel bell (1975) note un besoin d’ancrage dans un groupe ‘primordial’ afin de compenser les manques liés à la nation moderne. je soulignerai simplement qu’il ne faut pas réduire le sens que peut prendre le lower east side dans l’histoire juive américaine et minimiser l’authenticité de cette judéité, qui s’est incarnée dans maintes institutions et s’est affirmée en parallèle de la culture dominante. le lower east side a fourni un espace géographique dans lequel l’identité juive s’est inscrite et affirmée. ‘in retrospect we see these places, and think of others already vanished from the scene, as landmarks of jewish life in new york’ [rétrospectivement nous voyons ces lieux, et nous nous remémorons d’autres lieux disparus, comme des points de référence de la vie juive à new york]. telle était la conclusion dressée par h. k. blatt dans son rapport sur les juifs de new york effectué pour le gouvernement dans les années 30. marvin gelfland abonde dans son sens: ‘irish, german, italian, polish, ukrainian immigrants have shared this four-mile-square enclave, but it is not ethnic effrontery to call the old city quarter the jewish lower east side’ [les immigrants irlandais, allemands, italiens, polonais, ukrainiens, ont partagé cette enclave de quatre miles carrés, mais ce n’est pas faire preuve d’arrogance ethnique que d’appeler ce quartier de la vieille ville le lower east side juif]’ (1992 : 56). paul ricœur (2000) disait que parler d’identité, c’est parler du maintien de soi à travers le temps. maintien de soi comme rouage d’une chaîne millénaire, affirmation de l’essence des êtres, de leur appartenance à un peuple privé de terre. a travers les trajectoires individuelles s’est constituée une mémoire collective, oublieuse des conflits, des dissensions, pour ne reconnaître que l’unicité, la cohésion d’une histoire riche et longue. ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 22 mémoire, histoire. lieu, identité. mémoire et lieu ne peuvent être dissociés, le territoire s’inscrit dans l’univers de la mémoire. et l’identité, par le biais de formes spatiales, s’incarne dans le lieu. on voit donc comment le sentiment d’appartenance et l’appropriation des lieux sont en interaction permanente, se renforçant mutuellement. on peut considérer que le lower east side est une sorte de synthèse des différentes facettes de l’identité juive, à la fois sur le plan religieux et sur le plan séculier. congruence des différentes valeurs, telles la charité, la foi, l’éducation au sens large, et importance numérique des groupes qui se sont installés, ont eu pour résultat une sorte de sacralisation du lieu. ‘la mémoire installe le souvenir dans le sacré,’ écrit pierre nora. mais ici, on peut entendre le mot ‘sacré’ dans son sens hébreu kadosh, c’est-à-dire ‘à part,’ ‘singulier,’ ‘spécial.’ spécial, il l’est en effet, dans le vécu et l’imaginaire des juifs américains. il est devenu, dans les mots de hasia diner, leur ‘plymouth rock’ (2000 : 8). lieu de mémoire, il est le paradigme d’une histoire qui s’inscrit en parallèle de l’histoire américaine. mais même si aujourd’hui beaucoup se rendent dans ce quartier comme s’ils effectuaient un pèlerinage, sur les traces de leurs grands-parents ou arrière-grandsparents, le lower east side n’est pas devenu un musée figé dans le passé; la vie juive n’a pas cessé de vibrer. certes, l’ère du yiddishland est révolue, mais les jours de shabbat et les jours de fête, orchard street, eldridge street, reprennent leur visage traditionnel, et le paysage urbain new-yorkais révèle avec plus d’acuité encore sa diversité, ses multiples facettes identitaires ouvrages cités bell, d. 1975, ‘ethnicity and social change’ [le changement social et l’ethnicité], in ethnicity, theory and experience, (eds) n. glazer & d. moynihan. harvard university press, cambridge, ma : 141–176. blatt, h. k. c.1935+, ‘jews of new york: population’ [juifs de new york: population], works progress administration (wpa) federal writers’ project study of the jews of new york. bonnemaison, j. 2005, la géographie culturelle, (eds) m. lasseur & c. thibault. cths, paris. diner, h. 2000, the lower east side memories [souvenirs du lower east side]. princeton university press, princeton. gelfand, m. 1992, ‘welcome to america: manhatten’s jewish lower east side’ [bienvenue aux etatsunis: le lower east side juif de manhattan], american heritage, vol. 43, no. 2 : 56–75. online, available: http://www.americanheritage.com/content/welcome-america [accessed 31 december 2014]. howe, i. 1976, world of our fathers [le monde de nos pères]. harcourt brace jovanovic, new york. lower east side conservancy n. d. online, available: www.lesjc.org [accessed 3 june 2014]. relph, e. 1976, place and placelessness [lieu et non-lieu]. pion, london. ricœur, p. 2000, la mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. seuil, paris. rosenzweig, f. 2003 [1921], l'etoile de la rédemption. éditions du seuil, paris. ousset-krief le yiddishland newyorkais portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 23 sanders, r. 1994, the lower east side. dover publications, new york. smith, a. 1981, the ethnic revival [la renaissance ethnique]. cambridge university press, cambridge. wenger, b. s. 1997, ‘memory as identity: the invention of the lower east side’ [la mémoire comme identité: l’invention du lower east side], american jewish history, vol. 85, no 1 : 3–27. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ajh.1997.0008. wirth, l. 1980 (1ère edition 1928), le ghetto. presses universitaires de grenoble, collection ‘champs urbains,’ grenoble. yerushalmi, y. h. 1984, zakhor. gallimard, paris. microsoft word 3878-16884-1-le.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. © 2014 [susana chávez-silverman]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v11i2.3878 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. heart hold on crónica susana chávez-silverman, pomona college claramonte, califas 4 october 2013 para esmeralda, mi avatar, in memoriam i am inconsolable. lost in my own cat-less casa. even ill, in terrible pain (la vet, muy sympathetic, me dijo que cats & rabbits chatter their teeth—as my esmeralda had been doing for months!—when in excruciating pain), she’d totter upstairs, manuvering como small, determined bumper car, tanteando el terreno con paws y whiskers, desde que perdió la vista, with no warning and no explanation (no physical explanation, anygüey), en el 2005. cada mañana venía, clambering gingerly up her little muñeca staircase to my high bed, pa’ asegurar que yo estuviera despierta. a las 7 de la mañana llegaba, on the dot. en sus salad days, if i didn’t comply immediately, la esme hacía incredibly badgering travesuras, perfectly designed pa’ obligarme a investigar. trepaba, oh mini-tejón, al vintage 60’s bureau, caminando fastidiosamente entre el enjambre de perfumes, swiping deliberately at one or two. or, she’d become a cuerda floja daredevil. esto hace ya años, en el 2001, when we came back from living in buenos aires and i turned the loft into the master bedroom. effectively anunciando al mundo—en la semiótica del espacio doméstico—que el dorian and i were a loveless (y sobre todo basically sexless) pareja. chávez-silverman heart hold on portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 2 esto, ob-vio, was totally unconscious, en el momento. pero mi therapist observó, hace un par de años, que irónicamente el loft es el espacio más open, más public de la casa. esa anagnórisis would only come years later. a couple of years ago, after i’d kicked him out and reclaimed my rightful recámara. the large, private, serene oasis at the back of the house, arriba, rodeada de eucaliptos, pinos, y con vista de esas swaying, frondosos jacarandaes. en el 2001, i’d transformed that private recinto into my study, alegando demasiado noise del teenaged juvenil, y bla bla. pero lo abandoné como study en el 2008, al volver del retrete. de mis dos meses en el montalvo arts center, de writer-in-residence. after those transformative two months away—lejos de mi casa (y de dorian) por primera vez en 15 años—de repente something about being on the same floor as dorian gave me los creeps, although the conscious knowledge of that (de ese horror vacui) would only begin to dawn on me later. desde el 2008, ese master bedroom-cum-study languidecía, sleeping beauty bajo brambles, mientras yo escribía downstairs, en el dining table. dizque por el mucho calor upstairs. pero aunque ob-vio, eso es sólo en verano, i never moved back upstairs to write. como en ‘casa tomada’ de julio, ahora me doy cuenta, ¡le cedí todo el floor de arriba! even as dorian also colonised my new downstairs writing spot, con su repentino y ávido interés en tocar el piano (siempre bastante mal, pero yo después de sus embistes dizque musicales, casi nunca lo tocaba …). o su obsesión con el gourmet cooking. pero anygüey, a lo que iba. entre el 2001 y el 2005, cuando la esme lost her sight, solía trepar de un single muscular leap a la cama y luego, fearlessly, directamente al ledge behind the bed, una half-wall that overlooks el living, down below en la primera planta. there she’d prance, right on that edge, meowing bien ‘look-at-me,’ green eyes flashing imperiously, plumed tail aloft, hasta que aterrada, exasperada, me levantaba para rescatarla. una de sus peores hazañas en años más recientes, post-ceguera, era su manía de volcar los trash cans. to foil her, i’d buy ever-more-impervious tachos de basura. con lids, or real heavy ones. pero nothing stopped her. si sus bed-leaping antics no surtían efecto, bajaba las doll steps y caminaba hacia el baño. volcaba el trashcan, pawing off the lid skillfully y allí mero se metía, searching out los little pieces of plastic or cellophane que chávez-silverman heart hold on portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 3 eran su greatest delicacy. ese jodido rustling siempre acababa por hundirme. irrevocablemente despierta, i’d race to snatch up her formerly plump y lately cada vez más endeble black-furred body, terrified de que se hubiera tragado algún cosmeticallyinduced veneno. y ella me sonreía, te lo juro, triunfante. i know esmeralda was ready to go, even as joanna, mi adorada astróloga y amiga, was released from pain this year. el 1 de mayo. nine months to the day after montenegro and i were together, en pretoria. as joanna had foreseen. so, i summoned the strength to let esme go el 3 de octubre, on joanna’s libra birthday. el juvenil llamó and semi-berated me while i was at the vet, in the little private death chamber. wih the beloved pet i’d gotten for him, cuando tenía 10 años, in my lap, her life ebbing away. me increpaba, as if her death were my fault. pero fortificada con el knowledge que me trajo este verano horrible, el miedo masquerades as anger, i coached myself, anger masks fear, me dije, though my heart was breaking. it’s his illness talking, i reminded myself. be a mirror, not a sponge. las nami mantras—i’m sorry u feel that way, honey, le dije. and then i just waited. miraculously, he changed his tune—take pictures of her, mom, he commanded (only) semi-gruffly. and so i did. y hablando del corazón: like my own (i am, after all, her human avatar en esta tierra), esme’s heart refused to give out! refused to give up, to let go. después de una lethal injection, dojo la vet, it normally takes 5 minutes. 15 at the outside. tres veces entró la vet pa’ checar—i can still feel her purring, insistí. impossible, dijo la vet, pero escuchó con el stethoscope—her heart’s still beating, admitió, puzzled—strong heart! three times she did this, repitió este procedure, before gently murmuring—she’s on the other side now. almost 40 minutes i held you, esmeralda. whispering to you, acurrucándote, brushing you con un small slicker brush que me prestaron. no habrías querido entrar al heaven sin que tu fur se viera just-so, ¿que no? and so adios, my little lioness-hearted black beauty. for now. sólo por ahora. ahí te wacho, on the other side. isa research committee on social movements, collective action and social change portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal collective action of ‘others’ in sydney walter lalich, university of technology sydney collective actions are often undertaken by segments of ‘other’ ethnic communities to satisfy collectively perceived needs in a place of settlement. through collective action groups of people of particular ethnic background mobilize resources to develop necessary collective goods. to facilitate their settlement in the new social environment many groups of non-english speaking people background develop their own spiritual and secular places, a communal home in sydney. they appropriate facilities that meet a certain communal need, like places of worship, social and sporting clubs, schools, childcare and diverse welfare facilities. ethnic collectives establish communal roots and create a new social and physical landscape with impact beyond local territorial boundaries. this development is dependent upon the collective will of concerned individuals confronted with external pressures, exclusion, and internal constraints. it is indicated by said (1983,15) that the individual mind registers and is very much aware of the collective whole, context, or situation in which it finds itself, and reacts as a social actor. collective acts as modes of confronting the new environment are materialised through the voluntary development of social infrastructure by migrant actors. the decision to appropriate a necessary place to satisfy an urgently perceived need is made by a particular group following the initiative concerning the particular issue of significance for their immediate group. this initiative and action is often generated from lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney several people, or even a single person, at a grass-roots level. on rare occasions only is such a development a product of a hierarchically structured body, either a religious or secular umbrella organisation. it mostly reflects awareness by a group of individuals that they have to and can solve some collectively perceived problem with the intention of enhancing the quality of their lives. among the major issues of concern are spiritual, recreational, maintenance of language, as well as the childcare or aged care needs of that group of people. from networks and informal meetings, formal organisations develop, following local practice, to pursue the action aiming to establish needed facilities. this article begins with a brief discourse on key theoretical concepts of collective action and communal places, considered as collective goods, being the outcome of fragmented collective acts. the creation of urban landscape by ‘others’ is best identified through the visible communal places established by diverse ethnic collectives. data on demographic and cultural changes in the post-1945 period identify the intensity of settlement constraints and migration-derived demand for collective goods and migrant response. the arrival of large numbers of settlers from diverse parts of the world into the transferred british socio-cultural outpost of sydney was a cultural shock for both the settlers and descendants of earlier settlers. the development of ethnic1 social infrastructure was an act of resistance (pile 1997, 3; melucci 1996, 183) to the sociocultural uniformity and assimilation pressures that many settlers encountered even after the 1970s (batrouney 2002, 57; jupp 2002, 22-24; murphy 2000, 161; lopez 2000, 46; hage 1998, 82, 235; lewins 1978: 38). many immigrants wanted to continue religious service in their own language, to communicate and socialise in their own language, to play sports they knew, to maintain and transfer culture to the next generation, and to enjoy traditional food and drinks (powell 1993, 83). for these purposes, ethnic groups had to develop their own communal places. the second half of this article presents information on the outcome of ethnic collective action in sydney over the second half of the last century: the development of communal places. the article concludes with an 1 ethnic in the australian context indicates first or second generation immigrants of non-english speaking background or origin, nesb (martin 1981). in this essay the term is interchanged with migrant. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 2 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney observation on the diverse social implications of this endeavour, fragmented by cultural, religious, linguistic, ideological and environmental influences. collective action collective motivation and the commitment of migrants to improve their quality of life enables the development of various places that satisfy a certain collectively perceived need in a new social environment: communal places. the purpose of collective action is to advance common or collective interests and solve perceived problems through provision of collective goods that cannot be provided otherwise or efficiently through the channels of the host environment (hechter, et al 1982, 415; hannerz 1974, 60; olson 1965,5). a reference to durkheim’s (1964, 283) notions of ‘collective conscience’, as a system of functions determining an equilibrium helps in the comprehension of a collective action. the concept suggests possible collective ends or values that emerge in human interaction during settlement, and that could shape the course of social relations, but also become the core of collective motivations and define the outcome of interaction among members of a collective. ethnic collective action is a local response to diverse social and cultural constraints, deprivation, and the inadequacy of mainstream social infrastructure. observed settlement experiences confirm an observation by polanyi (1957, 46): that individual economic interests are not always the most important, as many migrants pursue non-economic aims as well, including the maintenance of social ties and the enhancement of collective wellbeing. immigrants pool resources in prescriptive collective action to achieve outcomes that could not be acquired individually. collective acts often precede solutions to household problems, as migrants resort to mutual help to solve collectively perceived problems. a group of people enters into collective arrangements to make decisions about joint investment, resources, location, construction, management, control, maintenance and service delivery. the collective defines goals to be achieved with the intent of ‘achieving position in relation to the environment’ (luhmann 1995, 198). similarly, coleman (1990, portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 3 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney 300) argues that social relationships develop among individual actors who attempt to make the best use of available resources over which they have control. it is ascertained that marginalisation and alienation stimulate attachment among co-ethnic migrants, which helps in defining courses of collective action and the mobilization of resources (hechter et al 1982, 421). a migrant collective act is made feasible by enhanced social capital during settlement in the new social environment. social capital, understood as a joint interaction of norms, networks and trust (putnam 1993, 17; coleman 1990, 302; bourdieu 1993, 32) could be considered to be at its highest level at a time of settlement. social capital as the bonding thread (portes 1995, 12) facilitates the development of communal infrastructure during settlement in a new social environment. moreover, social capital is itself enhanced as a result of successful communal endeavour within a developed communal place. through the defined node in social space, a communal place that bridges social capital (putnam 2000, 23) is engendered towards the rest of community, expanding beyond physical boundaries. solidarity among co-ethnic migrants intensifies due to common settlement experiences, although many may have arrived with no previous mutual contacts. solidarity facilitates networks among the people on the basis of the shared language and culture of those who also share the same settlement experience. immigrant solidarity, networks and enhanced trust are key factors impacting on self-reliance, mutuality and collaboration on tasks deemed to be for a common good. a high level of mutual trust and a common settlement experience encourages individuals to join forces to solve perceived problems. the development of communal organisations is the outcome of fragmented ethnic collective acts in the new environment. in their study, gamm and putnam (2001, 207 210) emphasise that the growth of associations in the usa from 1870 to 1920 was due to the effects of industrialisation, urbanization, a structured division between work and leisure time, and network-based immigration. this is reflected in the post-1945 australian social experience in the development of ethnic organisations and their portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 4 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney appropriation of communal places. these developments signify the intensity of the migrants’ preoccupation with communal well-being and the resultant collective actions.2 collective goods a collective good is a product of the action by individuals who choose to accomplish aims collectively rather than individually (buchanan and tullock 1965, 13). communal places developed by ethnic communities are considered to be collective goods because of the nature of supply and consumption patterns. these places, characterised by their intrinsic social significance for a group of people, have a property of quasi public goods (buchanan 1987, 18-21; stiglitz 2000, 14). without their joint efforts, members of many ethnic collectives would have no adequate place to enjoy spiritual life, socialize, transfer culture to the young or care for the elderly. these privately produced and maintained collective goods have different forms of exclusion of non-members, at least in the first instance. hechter (1987, 10, 36) claims that actors form groups ‘in order to consume various excludable jointly produced goods – goods whose attainment involves the co-operation of at least two individual producers’, and that levels of exclusion could vary. the existence of selective incentives (olson 1965, 51) limits the consumption of collective goods only to those who contribute because they, as members of a particular group, jointly develop it reflecting their perceived collective needs. similar to public goods, collective goods are characterised by the property of nondepletability in consumption. ethnic communal places are liminal (zukin 1992, 222) in the sense that they are both communal and private at the same time, but also in that many would evolve from communal to public spaces during their life-span. these communal places are produced independently by various groups of people, collectives consisting of individuals who join their resources for a common good, and the outcome is a product of the individual’s private commitment towards a joint purpose. still, collective goods are to 2 data was collected among ethnic organisations in sydney in the period 1999-2001 for the doctoral thesis on ethnic community capital: the development of ethnic social infrastructure in sydney, submitted by the author at the university of technology, sydney in 2003. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 5 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney some extent competitive, as migrants may choose, for example, among regional or nonregional co-ethnic clubs, or to join the religious organization closer to the home address. ethnic collective goods are qualified by communal homogeneity, and a high degree of emotional commitment and compliance as members of a particular collective engage in solving their own needs. there is a range of social and economic influences on the provision of these collective goods. economic influences relate primarily to demand intensity, economies of scale and cost minimisation. social influences on decisions to develop some collective goods vary and could be social rewards or penalties, moral and political considerations, ignorance about available alternatives and desire for selfdevelopment through participation (frank 1997, 624; hardin 1982, 22, 102-120). members of a collective make a decision to commit their time, energy and money to a particular development, instead of meeting in their own homes, inadequate public and commercial premises, or the continued renting, leasing or sharing of available facilities on an irregular basis. to many individuals, participation in a collective act is a cost-minimising act because the gained benefits are expected to be greater than the cost of joining or sharing the cost of producing a collective good (buchanan and tullock 1965, 44). the benefits are primarily social, for example, the establishment of a place where people can have continuous social intercourse, worship collectively, maintain culture, play familiar games, take care of elderly, to be at home. the individual contribution of money and time to develop a particular collective good is outweighed by beneficial social outcomes. collective goods arise out of the joint action to spread the high costs of production of, for example, a place of worship or school (hechter 1987, 37). for many immigrants, the rationale of collective action is located in minimising the encountered social cost. the welfare impact of such decisions is of major significance to a collective, and it could be stated that the pareto criterion (stiglitz 2000, 57) applies in this case, because a group of individuals is better off without being likely to make anyone else worse off. ethnic communal places have tangible material and economic values as a capitalised portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 6 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney asset, but they also embody important intangible symbolic and social values. the visible communal places developed by ‘others’ through voluntary grass-roots collective acts differ from the other public places, not only in symbols, but also in the mode of production and the established sense of attachment (relph 1976, 37). post-war social dynamics the arrival of over three million settlers of non-english speaking background since 1948 impacted on cultural and social life in australia.3 this immigration is characterised by the heterogeneity of its structure and the predominantly urban settlement induced by the needs of housing, construction, industrialisation, that demanded both labour and markets (collins 1984, 4; logan, et al 1981, 41-2). the first post-war settlers encountered an australia with only 1.8 per cent of the population of non-english speaking background (nesb) settlers in 1947, but by 2001 this share increased to 13.5 per cent (price, ed.1979, a 92-5; abs 2001). migrants gravitate to major coastal cities and in particular to sydney. the first major change in demographic structure occurred during the 1950-1960 period when 50,000 european refugees settled in sydney (burnley 2001, 129; kunz 1988, 43-5). the share of non-english speakers in sydney increased from 2.2 per cent out of a million and a half inhabitants in 1947 to 23.4 per cent out of four million in 2001 (abs 2001). it is estimated that people of non-english speaking background, first and second generation, together comprise over 54 per cent of the sydney population (burnley et al 1997, 33). the post-war intensification of cultural diversity is best identified with data on language use and religious diversity. in sydney, 734,198 speakers of over 5 years of age daily used one of twenty major (non-english) languages in 1996, while the other languages were spoken by an additional 175,182 inhabitants, or around 27.0 per cent of all inhabitants in 2001 (abs 2001; eac 1998). 3 among many other sources analysing major features of the post-war australian immigration experience are: martin 1978; viviani 1984; coughlan and mcnamara (ed.) 1997; burnley 2000; 2001; jupp (ed.) 2001, 2002. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 7 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney australia is now home to all major world religions. although there was immigration by orthodox, muslim and buddhist believers as early as the 19th century, they were barely recorded statistically in 1947, due to the entry restrictions. followers of these and other newly arrived religious denominations now make up around 14 per cent of the total sydney population. the large-scale arrival of continental europeans and later of asian and latin american settlers greatly increased the number of roman catholic believers, increasing pressures on already existing religious and educational systems developed earlier by predominantly irish catholic settlers. nevertheless, some roman catholic communities developed their churches, schools and community centres. the large numbers of migrants of diverse background meant that the additional and differentiated demand for goods and services could not be satisfied by the limitations of the entrenched local culture and a non-responsive welfare state (jakubowicz 1989, 275; cox 1975, 182). moreover, assimilation was the official policy until the late 1960s. policy makers for years ignored many issues generated by the arrival of large numbers of people and showed no interest in solving diverse settlement problems (cie 1992, xv; jupp 1991,106; cox 1987, 90). despite policy changes since the 1970s and an emphasis on multiculturalism, many non-english speaking migrants still do not feel welcome (hage 1998, 16; betts 1999, 316). new settlers brought new forms of culture, social life and recreation, and new social needs, but australia was not prepared for the effects of its own ambitious immigration program. at the same time, sydney was not well endowed with public places and welfare services, like childcare, to which access was further limited due to cultural and linguistic differences (brennan 1998, 144; thompson 1994, 205; spearritt 1978, 36, 241). ethnic collective action in sydney very soon after arrival migrants became conscious not only of marginalisation and a disadvantageous social position, but also of their own potential. this facilitated collaboration of particular groups of people in over sixty ethnic groups on tasks of mutual interest, which differed between the groups, even among people of the same ethnic portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 8 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney background. many migrants became aware that their particular collective need could be satisfied only through the appropriation of physical objects. it is estimated that at least 450 ethnic organisations established their own communal places in sydney between 1950 and 2000. some organisations purchased and adapted abandoned halls, churches (sometimes with the help of the parent organisation) and even squash courts in older suburbs, and consequently around 80 churches, some dating from the 19th century, acquired a new lease of life. however, the majority of organisations appropriated available vacant land in semi-rural suburbs and constructed the necessary premises. these fragmented acts enabled many settlers to acquire a place of action and commitment where their communal needs are met, a place of belonging, with a feeling of ‘home’ established. indeed for many it was at one stage also a place of resistance to social and assimilation pressures. today, these symbolic places embedded in the social and urban landscape of sydney create the mainframe of everyday cultural diversity. migrant collective action materialised in social space adds a new dimension to the understanding of the settlement process and identifies the complexities of collective actions in sydney. data on appropriated places, constructed space and human engagement identify the dynamics of collective action, tangible outcomes and social significance. also, data on human engagement provide insights into financial involvement and participation in activities that enabled this important development. it is difficult to define created social value, as many social costs and benefits are not readily assessed in monetary terms and it is therefore difficult to estimate (baumol and blinder 1985, 543), it is thus difficult to fully recognize, comprehend and measure the extent of the impact of ethnic collective action on social texture. the dynamics of this development reflect changes in immigration patterns and in processes within the ethnic communities that define goals and identify investment capabilities (access to human, material, financial and organizational resources). the arrival of large numbers of migrants of the same origin and cultural background created necessary thresholds. however, as immigration is structured not only by ethnicity, age and gender, but also by regional, cultural, class and ideological differences, it impacts on portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 9 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney the perception of priorities, patterns and dynamics of development. the outcome of these fragmented collective actions is materialised in a new, culturally diverse communal space that enables spiritual life, leisure, recreation, education, childcare and aged-care. ethnic communal space is established through the activities of many culturally diverse groups in response to local problems within the existing social context and settlement constraints. the consequent collective actions proceed, and often overlap, through the appropriation and production of space (harvey 1989, 220-221). the dynamics of the appropriation of places over five consecutive ten-year periods by 393 respondent organisations is presented in table 1. they established over four hundred and seventy thousand square metres of functional communal space where 180,000 persons could find a place of their own at any given moment (lalich 2004). table 1. developed ethnic communal space, by type and periods of development: sydney, 1950-2000 (estimated persons; developed units) type/ period 19501960 % 19611970 % 19711980 % 19811990 % 19912000 % capacitypersons6 all units by type(n) religious1 11.9 21.1 18.7 24.3 24.0 120,029 208 clubs2 17.9 26.7 15.8 30.0 9.6 49,151 94 education3 0.4 0.6 22.3 48.5 28.2 10,792 44 aged care4 17.5 23.4 10.0 27.6 21.5 2,270 47 units/period5 12.2 14.5 17.0 29.8 26.5 393 notes: 1. includes places in halls, sunday school classrooms. 2. includes sports clubs, but not spectators at sporting events. 3. includes places in childcare and in tertiary institutions (hostel). 4. beds in aged care; does not includes places in general welfare organizations. 5. including eleven general welfare places. 6. indicates capacity places, not the actual users, attendants, volunteers. source: lalich, w.f. 2004, ethnic community capital, unpublished phd thesis, uts, sydney. this development also depended on exogenous factors, the socio-economic environment, settlement constraints and public (un)awareness about immigrants’ welfare. post-war development can be divided into two periods. during the initial period until the 1970s, which corresponds broadly to the period of pressure to assimilate, there was rarely public portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 10 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney support for migrant initiatives. after 1980 the development of ethnic schools, childcare, welfare and aged care received more public support, as public awareness of unsatisfactory conditions facing immigrants surfaced. the henderson report of 1970 emphasised migrant deprivation. the federal whitlam labor government (1972-1975) introduced various policy measures, and from 1974-75 migrant welfare and educational organisations received material help (jakubowicz, et al 1984, 38-9). the galbally commission in 1978 qualified existing social constraints encountered by new settlers as unsatisfactory, recommending major policy changes. it confirmed the role of ethnic organisations as major service providers to migrants. these changes in development patterns are reflected in table 1, although a diversification of the sources of migration has also impacted on development patterns since 1980. collected data show that over 56 per cent of the 393 units were developed since 1980, indicating a persistence of felt needs, accumulation of capital, and the arrival of migrants from new sources. the development of schools, childcare centres and aged-care was facilitated in this twenty-year period by public support. in this period around 77 per cent of all school and childcare capacities, together with 49 per cent of all aged care, were developed. meanwhile, the need for aged-care was large at the beginning of the post-war settlement. the continuous intensive development of places of worship significantly increased during the last two decades, due to the expanding sources of immigration. over 48 per cent of all religious capacities were developed since 1980, responding to demand for places of worship by newly arrived buddhist, muslim, hindu and oriental christian believers. many less recently arrived european christians built new and larger churches, reflecting increased prosperity, and replacing the older unsatisfactory places of worship and community halls. the data in table 1 indicate the importance of the development of social and sports clubs during the first four decades and a rapid decrease in the last decade. this reflects aging of the post-war migrants who developed clubs to meet their own social and recreational needs, generational changes, and changes in the structure of immigrants and in society, in particular in the hospitality industry. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 11 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney the intensity of the development of this segment of communal space over the analysed time period indicates changes in development priorities. differences in the orientation of ethnic communal action due to the settlement encounters, maintenance of transferred cultures and the ageing process are reflected in the outcomes of collective actions. the development reflects transfer and maintenance of culture, language and heritage, considerations of communal wellbeing, but also of the impact of public support on the development of educational and aged care capacities.4 the development emphasis changed from the satisfaction of the immediate social and cultural needs of the first generation of migrants, in places of worship and clubs, to the long-term maintenance of transferred cultures, religions and languages, and to the organised care for weaker members of community across generational changes. data on development patterns show that: european immigrants have built over 90 percent of all leisure capacities reflecting cultural differences, social deprivation and the evolution of sydney; european orthodox, non-european christians, buddhists, hindus and muslims had a major role in the development of places of worship; non-european settlers developed most facilities after 1980; despite a long tradition of an irish-dominant local roman catholic church, language and culture specific catholic churches were developed; asian and pacific islands christian communities primarily developed churches, and; european (mediterranean) and muslim immigrants have developed all respondent day schools and the majority of childcare centres. social value ethnic communal places signify collective consciousness, collective action, participation, and the embeddedness of transplanted cultures in a transforming local and transnational social space. joint group voluntary investment in ethnic communal places is a result of a 4 as the majority of immigrants were initially single males used to different types of entertainment, many new ethnic social and sporting clubs were initiated. football, in australian terminology soccer, was revived by post-war migrants. itwas much more than a recreational and socialisation pastime for young male immigrants, as it provided opportunities for communication with other sectors of the community, the application of organisational and leadership skills, and a path for inclusion in a new society (mosely, cashman, o’hara and weatherburn, eds 1997; caldwell 1987). migrant-organised football clubs were predominant in sydney championships in the 1950s and 1960s; rare were the clubs that had local origins. the first division in 1967 consisted of pan hellenic, hakoah, prague, apia, polonia, yugal, croatia, st george-budapest, melita eagles, and manly, named after a local beach suburb (korban 1994). portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 12 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney social choice expressing a relevant social preference (luhmann 1995, 317). values formulate action commitments, morally justify preferences and reflect on the outcome. a settler’s situation is defined by olson’s (1965, 24) proposition that what matters most is not how many collective goods will be produced, but rather whether ‘any of the collective goods will be provided’. communal places as the outcome of ethnic collective action generate intrinsic meaning or values unlike any other form of expenditure. they are imbued with the meaning of home to people who left their place of origin and settled in a new environment. the settlement experience and constraints define the pattern and the outcome of collective action. cultural systems provide a key input to any action through the interrelation of the different parts that form value and belief systems, and systems of expressive symbols which define a frame of reference for collective action (parsons and shils 1962, 24, 53). the outcome reflects the time and place of settlement that could differ even within the same ethnic group. the full value and effects of ethnic collective action could be assessed only through the comprehension of incorporated intangible social values and externality effects. the appropriated ethnic communal places meet communal needs as perceived by a particular group of people, but also form bridges between cultures in a culturally diverse social environment. the expanded field of social interaction underlines the significance of the outcome of ethnic collective actions. the development of ethnic communal places correlates to social changes that generate organisational changes, new functions and activities, as well as sources of finance. the sustainability of these places is dependent upon generational changes, and a capacity for continuing to satisfy community needs and to generate communal participation. these places developed in a particular locality have a dual spatial logic; they are a communal home for the members of a group who often live in more distant suburbs, but are also at the same time an important node for its immediate neighbourhood, defining it symbolically as well as appropriating the role of a local heritage. these visible places in the landscape depend on the persistence of collectively perceived portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 13 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney needs and a capacity for satisfying the needs of a younger generation and even of new consumers coming sometimes from outside their own ethnic group. some clubs broaden membership basis; places of worship are shared with believers of some other denomination; children in childcare are often of different ethnic background due to spatial mobility; students in ethnic schools are of different ethnic origin, as are the residents in aged care as a consequence of public financing of aged-care institutions. this indicates the transforming nature of ethnic communal space. some communal places would inevitably change their role as did many former churches and other public places after having been appropriated by their present users. the changing nature of a communal place is illustrated by a brief insight into the changes in the marconi club, a key sporting and social institution in western sydney, developed by italian migrants since 1958. it was a corollary of the need for a public place for the numerous italian gardeners to gather, socialise, play bocce or football, eat their own food and enjoy wine. club marconi italian settlers arrived in western sydney in large numbers after 1950. powell (1993) describes how italian immigrants had no place of their own in which they could socialise, have a glass of wine, play bocce or football. two italian brothers offered eight acres of land to the community at price of £3,500, but on delayed repayment terms. the first 100 members, including some anglo neighbours, raised £5,000 to start the club, constructing the first building in 1958. a further addition, the christina lounge, was built in 1962. following the purchase of additional blocks of land, diverse social and recreation premises were also developed to meet the growing needs of its continuously growing membership. among its 23,000 members less than half were born in italy; some were descendants of italian migrants, but many were born elsewhere, in europe and latin america. the later developments included a football stadium for 12,000 spectators, tennis grounds, a multifunctional indoor boccedromo, childcare, and parking for 1,800 cars. while the club mainly supports traditional italian recreational activities, it also supports netball and was one of the first clubs to establish female membership. having grown from a small italian communal association to a professionally managed institution, marconi is now a meeting place for many local associations and multiple links with the rest of community and overseas. it is a very visible major node on the urban landscape and a unique cultural space collectively developed to meet the recreational needs of the italian migrants in the area. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 14 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney participation to develop their own communal places migrants rely primarily on their own resources. their actions enhance collective empowerment and community satisfaction, best emphasised by a motto in the local assyrian periodical ‘let us build it together’ (i.e, the nineveh club) (kinarah 1980, 4). this grass-roots development is characterized by significant voluntary involvement of people at diverse stages of the organisational life and at diverse hierarchical levels, often at the expense of family time, earning potential, household consumption and savings. people respond voluntarily with an intensity corresponding to the perceived urgency of settlement situation and felt needs. it is a joint group effort where there are few if any ‘free riders’ (coleman 1990, 273). diverse modes of participation in ethnic communal organisations are shown in table 2. table 2. ethnic communal places, community participation in respondent organisations: sydney, 2000 (estimate persons) volunteers participating6 (%) institutions units (n) consumers5 at committees other activities total employ -ees7 religious1 208 191,983 20.0 80.0 11,202 595 leisure2 94 117,412 33.5 66.5 3,436 1,196 education3 44 9,820 35.2 64.8 540 1,208 welfare4 47 2,197 22.6 77.4 1,973 1,832 total 393 321,412 23.4 76.6 17,151 4,831 notes: 1. includes halls, sunday school classrooms. 2. does not include sports grounds. 3. includes childcare and tertiary institutions. 4. includes eleven general welfare organizations. 5. reported regular users, irrespective of the form. 6. trust, board, committee members; regular volunteers in other activities. considered as a lower estimate of potential volunteers that increases substantially in the case of need. 7. all employees (managers; full and part time workers). source: lalich, w.f. 2004, ethnic community capital, unpublished ph d thesis, uts, sydney. people contribute their physical and creative labour, and material resources to the development of communal places. for many this is an opportunity to volunteer time and finances, to express their organisational and business acumen, as well as leadership portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 15 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney skills.5 participation by volunteers is of paramount importance at all stages of the organisational life cycle and is expressed through work and consumption, financial and other material contributions. data in table 2 show that among over 17,000 regular volunteers, nearly a quarter are active in committees creating a new hierarchical system with a leadership structure. some remain in these key functions for years, often due to their skills, ability, time, charisma and resources donated towards development and organisational maintenance. for many small organisations direct member participation is their mode of existence, of their sustainability. communal centres also create many new employment opportunities as well; over 4,800 persons are employed, including people from outside the serviced ethnic community. among the employed are priests, teachers school principals, managers of aged-care facilities and some social clubs, creating a new social hierarchy. volunteers and employees help to organise life and activities in 393 communal places where over 320,000 persons satisfy their spiritual, social, cultural and welfare needs. many communal places are erected by voluntary labour, minimising material cost, but the extent of participation is difficult to assess because of insufficient records and difficulties in estimating the value of volunteer input in society. however, estimates of voluntary participation in australia provide an insight into the significance of voluntary participation in ethnic communal organisations. the reported lower estimate of national weekly participation of approximately 2.3 hours per volunteer (ironmonger 2000, 61; lyons 1994, 37), if applied to an estimated 17,150 current volunteers in ethnic communal places, indicates that they alone contributed at least 2.1 million hours in 2000. however, any attempt to estimate the social value of migrant voluntary participation, applied skills and emotional engagement would have to take into account that most of this work was done after work, during weekends and holidays. the respondent ethnic collectives generated investment in communal space and created property with an estimated value of around two billion australian dollars. this estimate 5 some examples of the registered voluntary work: during construction of: the russian orthodox archangel michael church 2,670 hours were donated between 1959 and 1965 (1984); the macedonian orthodox church, st petka, benefited from at least 597 voluntary work days, in addition to contracted work, during four months of construction in 1977 (cirevski 1999). portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 16 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney only partly reflects the full extent of material involvement by many thousands of migrants. public authorities (state and federal) supported the development of schools and childcare with 17 per cent, and aged care places with 31 per cent of investment (lalich 2004) through direct and indirect assistance, including capital investment and the financing of part of the current expenditure. the estimated public financial involvement, together with a reportedly very limited overseas public and private funding amounted to around 13 per cent of the total recorded investment. at the same time, many organisations had difficulties in securing bank loans, encountered unfriendly neighbours and inflexible local councils, dissipating energy and resources on court litigations (dunn 2001). new social interactions established functions and generated activities at or from communal places identify diversity and the intensity of the impact of ethnic collective action on development as a new field of social interaction. many organisations have developed far beyond their initial function as they respond to changes in society and to perceptions of communal needs, enabling diverse bonding and bridging effects with the rest of the community and world. the diversity of established functions facilitates the realisation of more than 5,500 diverse activities that enable satisfaction of the social needs of over 180,000 persons in sydney (lalich 2004). these beneficial effects provide the best description of the achieved social values and social capital. the established functions and generated activities satisfy the immediate social needs for spiritual life, recreation, maintenance of culture and care, but also enable various forms of cultural exchange, including school visits, participation in local festivities and sporting competitions, and collecting aid. the best-known instances of the impact on social life in sydney are in the emancipation of non-traditional religious denominations, spreading private education among new culturally defined consumers, the introduction of new sports, creating a jovial atmosphere at festivities, public celebration of various asian new years and other festive events. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 17 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney ethnic collective action does not occur in isolation as it is created in a socio-spatial environment defined by different levels of conduciveness. any activity, production or consumption of goods and services or subsequent linkages, could generate unpriced byproducts or externalities that could affect other actors (harvey 1973, 57). it is argued by chinitz and tiebout (1965, 255-9) that there are problems in determining the share of costs between communities. there apparently is no ideal situation and any decision to develop a collective good could have an impact on different social structures. beneficial externalities evolve through compensation for public inefficiencies (baumol and blinder 1985, 542) in the provision of necessary services to immigrants because otherwise there would be additional pressure on limited mainstream services and facilities (cutts 1992, 37; murphy, et al 1990, iii, xii). ethnic communal places are key elements of ethnic institutional completeness (breton 1964, 194) and of the urban built environment. they are permanent nodes on the landscape with a significance that often extends beyond ethnic boundaries through impact on the local social environment. in many instances non-co-ethnic members participate in activities and many services are provided to the benefit of the broader community, indicating the gradual conversion of some communal places into public places. furthermore, zukin (1995, 115) indicates that cultural spaces in their many guises also enhance the economic value of commercial and residential property. despite the contrary arguments, the positive ‘spatial field of effects’ (harvey 1973, 60) of newly developed ethnic communal places is here emphasised. unlike most commercial places, ethnic communal places are dispersed throughout the metropolitan area. although they have cultural boundaries, these places have no fixed space limits, as to many consumers dispersed throughout the metropolitan area the large distances are not an obstacle for participation in communal life. their location mostly depends on the available accessible space, and many are located close to railways stations, and some form clusters. in most cases ethnic communal clusters are multifunctional and culturally diverse, precluding the intensity of the impact of the much denser commercial development. such concentrations are key places of urban attraction, portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 18 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney as well as places of tourist consumption. the revival of football (or soccer), introduction of bocce (mediterranean hard court bowling), dragon boat races and the popularisation of lion dancing are among other major influences generated from these places. football and other sports helped many migrants to survive. participation in sports was a mode of identity creation, group empowerment, social exchange, inter-cultural contacts and the establishment of links with the mainstream society (margo 2000, 108; mosely 1997, 42; cashman 1995, 163). similarly, new religious and school buildings increased awareness of the local community about religious, cultural and linguistic differences, opened new options for spiritual practices and increased a degree of tolerance unknown in the time of white australia and assimilation policies. these places are the key nodes of the australian multicultural experience. although the development of these places reflects local settlement needs, their externality effects extend beyond the local social and physical boundaries, as ethnic communal places create and share the transnational social space (smith, guarnizo 1998). hence, it is possible to paraphrase a comment by dilnot (1997, 7) that the clearest externality is that we all benefit from a more satisfied community in terms of ‘greater productivity and from the more civilized and humane society that we expect to flow’ from a more satisfied community. conclusion ethnic collective actions enable the transfer of cultures, customs, and lifestyle, thereby contributing to social changes and the new urban landscape. the collective actions undertaken were the only way to satisfy perceived community needs and to create a ‘normal’ life (jamrozik 1983, 142). this creative collective endeavour—based on selfreliance, personal sacrifices and the voluntary contribution of time and resources—is compensated for by the achieved utility and social values, empowerment and inclusion in the new environment. this migration-generated communal investment differs from other forms of either public or private investment in social infrastructure. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 19 lalich collective action of ‘others’ in sydney many elements of sydney’s urban resources are the outcome of materialised collective actions undertaken autonomously by diverse migrants. these reflect differences in the development patterns and life cycles of organisations. migrants have established essential organisational support networks, key elements of (ethnic) institutional completeness in a continuously changing society, complementing other social institutions. although various impediments were encountered during development, the provision of public support facilitated the development of educational and aged-care facilities and secured the continuity of these services. ethnic collective action enriched the social, cultural, religious and sporting life of many old and new suburbs, creating signifiers of cultural diversity in sydney. this development is much more important than simply an immigrant intervention in space. the significance of ethnic communal places transcends their immediate communal intent and suburban limits, opening up possibilities for broadly based inter-cultural practices. in the process, collective action of this kind enables many migrants to discard modes of resistance and instead seek inclusion in transformative local and transnational social spaces. reference list australian bureau of statistics 2001, 2001 census statistics, canberra. baumol, w. j. & blinder, a. s. 1985, economics: principles and policy, 3rd ed., harcourt brace jovanovich, new york. betts, k. 1999, the great divide, duffy & snellgrove, sydney. bourdieu, p. 1993, sociology in question, trans. r. nice, sage publications, london. brennan, d. 1998, the politics of australian child care: philanthropy to feminism and beyond, rev. 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(ed.) 1979, australian immigration: a bibliography and digest, no.4, the anu, department of demography, canberra. putnam, r. d. 1993, making democracy work: civic traditions in modern italy, princeton university press, princeton, n.j. ——— 2000, bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community, simon & schuster, new york. relph, e. 1976, place and placelessness, pion ltd, london. russian orthodox church archangel michael 1984, 25th anniversary, blacktown. said, e. w. 1983, the world, the text, and the critic, faber and faber, london. smith, m.p. & guarnizo, l. e. (eds) 1998, transnationalism from below, transaction publications, new brunswick, n.j. spearritt, p. 1978, sydney since the twenties. hale and iremonger, sydney. stiglitz, j. e. 2000, economics of the public sector, w. w. norton & company, new york. thompson, e. 1994, fair enough: egalitarianism in australia, unsw press, sydney. viviani, n. 1984, the long journey: vietnamese migration and settlement in australia, melbourne university press, melbourne. zukin, s.1992, ‘postmodern urban landscape: mapping culture and power’ in modernity and identity, eds s. lash and j. friedman, blackwell, oxford. ——— 1995, the cultures of cities, blackwell, oxford. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 23 post-war social dynamics table 1. developed ethnic communal space, by type and period participation conclusion microsoft word goi stottgalley cs er 31 mar .doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. geographies of identity special issue, guest edited by matthew graves and elizabeth rechniewski. © 2015 [carolyn stott]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i1.4100 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose: the complex identity of a parisian quartier carolyn stott, university of sydney ‘belleville est la géographie résignée à l’histoire: la manufacture des nostalgies’ (pennac 1989: 401)1 introduction perched on a hill overlooking the french capital to its north east, belleville straddles four parisian arrondissements: the tenth, eleventh, nineteenth and twentieth (see figures 1 and 2).2 while historians and locals often differ on its geographical boundaries, they do agree that the quartier has long been considered a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities. the international street signage and outward appearance of the bellevillois inhabitants are testimony to the multitude of languages they speak (more than 80, by some accounts). the curious juxtaposition of old, new and partially renovated buildings evokes a long and tumultuous history. the sheer diversity of the population and its numerous artistic workshops uphold belleville’s reputation as a rich cultural centre. if its culture is widely accepted as rich, the same cannot be said of its economic status; although the suburb has been undergoing a kind of gentrification since the end of the twentieth century, the classification of belleville as one of the cheapest quartiers on the french monopoly board still holds true for many 1 ‘in belleville, geography has surrendered to history: the construction of nostalgic memories.’ my translation; all translations in this essay are mine. 2 paris is divided into twenty administrative districts called arrondissements, each of which is subdivided into four quartiers (see figures 1 and 2). stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 2 figure 1: map of the twenty arrondissements that comprise inner paris (belleville is located in the northwestern corner of the twentieth arrondissement, but also spills into the nineteenth, eleventh and tenth arrondissements. courtesy of aude baron [http://www.resto-de-paris.com/wpcontent/uploads/2011/11/paris-arrondissement.png]. figure 2: map of inner paris showing division of arrondissements into quartiers (belleville is quartier no. 77). courtesy of daniel freeman [http://www.paris-walking-tours.com/images/quartier.jpg]. parisians.3 despite this lowly ranking, the quartier attained new prominence as a utopian space during the 1990s, principally due to the phenomenal success of daniel pennac’s series of malaussène novels (1985–1995). belleville is not merely a physical space. as pennac has observed, the mere mention of its name inspires strong feelings, notably a kind of nostalgia for a communal existence perceived as much warmer than that experienced by some contemporary inhabitants of the quartier.4 geography and history join forces; reality and representation become 3 la goutte d’or (eighteenth arrondissement), to cite another example, is now one of the cheapest residential quartiers in inner paris (kupferman 2013). 4 see, for example, former bellevillois resident and author thierry jonquet’s jours tranquilles à belleville (2003). stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 3 entangled to the extent that, for literary commentators like pennac, the presence of a mythological belleville is evident in the streets and buildings of the actual suburb. belleville is a place but at the same time an idea of a place that has been created over a number of centuries. little surprise, then, that this inner parisian quartier is so difficult to situate geographically or to confine to its current administrative limits. placing with some degree of accuracy any community of historical significance in a clearly delineated modern topographical setting is a complex task, made even more difficult by the gradual transformation of both the physical space and the population. the variety of representations offered by writers and others claiming some degree of expertise with regard to the quartier of belleville has created over time a rich and multi-layered palimpsest of identities. the french term quartier has been retained in this article as it is difficult to translate comprehensively into english. the term’s interpretation by sociologists such as patrick simon incorporates a quartier’s uniqueness as a living space never quite corresponding to official administrative limits; this is particularly true of belleville, according to simon (1992: 48). historians like gérard jacquemet agree that ‘the symbolic force of the quartier [of belleville] is so great that it surpasses its [geographical] limits’ (1984: 19). in the parisian landscape, belleville embodies this definition of a unique space with a personality and history with which its inhabitants identify strongly. the quartier of concern in this article thus fits marc augé’s notion of an anthropological place, which he describes as ‘relational, historical and concerned with identity’ (1995: 77). background and context an understanding of the geographical transformations before and after belleville’s annexation to paris in 1860, as well as the cultural and physical metamorphosis of the quartier, which occurred predominantly throughout the twentieth century, will give the context necessary for discussing the complex identities that are associated with contemporary belleville. throughout its transformation from merovingian royal estate to carolingian hamlet, late medieval village and then sixteenth century parish, pre-revolutionary belleville remained sparsely populated and rural. in 1789, belleville became a sizeable commune, capital of the canton pantin in the department of seine, in line with the divisions introduced by the new republic. the next major administrative redefinition of paris stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 4 nearly a century later was to have a dramatic effect on belleville. with the annexation of a number of communes surrounding the french capital in 1860, including belleville, eight new arrondissements were created, incorporating thirty-two new quartiers. belleville’s change in status from a large independent provincial city to one of eighty parisian quartiers was to have immediate and far-reaching effects on its population, not the least of which included its relegation from second largest city in the department of seine and thirteenth largest in france, to a minor subdivision of the french capital. the former commune of belleville was divided into two, in a deliberate but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to curb the increasingly dissident bellevillois inhabitants, as demonstrated by their active participation in the paris commune ten years later. in line with the new rules requiring four quartiers per arrondissement, belleville became the seventy-seventh quartier of ménilmontant (see figure 2). the four main routes of boulevard de belleville and rues de belleville, de ménilmontant and pixérécourt were established as, and remain to this day, the official boundaries. as the current administrative boundaries do not correspond to the more extended preannexation belleville, historians, writers and other interested parties have been trying to realign them ever since. this accounts for the often-cited symbolic overflow of belleville from the twentieth into the tenth, eleventh and nineteenth arrondissements, incorporating the geographical boundaries of the old commune. the situation was complicated further by the creation in 2002 of 122 conseils de quartier in paris. the eastern border of belleville’s conseil de quartier, rue des pyrénées, reduces slightly the size of the quartier’s official administrative limits which date back to belleville’s annexation to paris. however, to compensate for the reduction in size of the quartier, the appearance in the list of conseils de quartier of belleville/saint-maur in the eleventh arrondissement and bas-belleville in the nineteenth, gives increased recognition to the name of belleville and a boost in numbers to its population. if belleville, according to the 1891 census figures, had the reputation of being the most parisian of quartiers (jacquemet 1984: 393), this was no longer the case a century later. provincial migration occurred first towards the end of the nineteenth century, primarily from the central region of auvergne. foreign immigration took place throughout the twentieth century, beginning with the ashkenazi jews from eastern europe escaping pogroms in their homelands. their arrival and subsequent transition from persecuted stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 5 victims to respected artisans in the clothing and shoe industries can be linked to the construction of a new identity: for themselves, with the quartier into which they were welcomed, and for belleville itself, which assumed an ashkenazi jewish identity that was to remain valid until the 1950s. armenians, greeks and polish jews continued to migrate throughout the interwar years. following the deportation and decimation of the jewish population of belleville during world war ii, the french government’s proimmigration policy led to the arrival of large numbers of sephardic jews and muslims from the former colonies of the maghreb. immigration to the quartier continued in waves throughout the 1960s, with the first sub-saharan africans contributing to the increasingly cosmopolitan population. refugees from asia were the next to arrive. the first wave came from china throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and those arrivals were joined in the 1980s by south-east asians. with the asian influx towards the end of the twentieth century, the bellevillois population took a geographic and cultural turn far removed from its european, and then african, heritage. a century of immigration has transformed the face of belleville from the most parisian of quartiers to a multicultural district with a significantly higher percentage of residents of immigrant origin, and a proportion of non-european residents, which at eighteen percent is twice the parisian average (clerval, fleury & humain-lamoure 2011: 53). it is, however, not only the cultural face of the quartier that has been transformed over the last century. belleville’s physical metamorphosis is also evidenced by the mosaic of building styles, the legacy of 150 years of urban planning and renovation. each of the stages of urban renovation that occurred spasmodically and belatedly in belleville brought about significant demographic change. firstly, amongst the flow-on effects of baron haussmann’s extensive reforms to the french capital in the 1860s was an exodus of the poorer residents of inner paris to the outskirts of the capital, including the newly annexed belleville. the quartier thus assumed an enduring working-class populaire identity. substandard housing erected throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century to cater for the growing population was poorly maintained, with construction and renovation at a standstill at the end of the century. despite a recognized urgent need at the beginning of the twentieth century to prioritize belleville’s insalubrious and unstable structures, no renovations of note took place until the 1960s; this heralded the second stage of the quartier’s urban transformation. three stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 6 sectors previously designated as insalubrious were completely razed, signalling the end of the populaire atmosphere that had existed in belleville for a century. under jacques chirac’s mayorship of paris (1977–1995), the third stage comprising an extensive makeover of the east of the french capital was initiated in the 1980s, and the overhaul of belleville continued. if chirac’s renovations were generally less radical than those of the 1960s and 1970s, some buildings were considered beyond salvation, and replaced with apartment blocks considered by many to be unsightly. in the mid1990s belleville’s residents demonstrated their recalcitrant streak by persuading the government to take a less dramatic approach to the quartier’s renovation. the final stage in belleville’s transformation thus began with the soft urbanism promoted by antoine grumbach that had been successfully implemented in other parisian quartiers (yaari 2008: 276). this stage is still underway, and coincides with a progressive gentrification of parts of belleville that is already affecting the social composition of the quartier’s population. simon names the group of mainly middle-class residents whose move into the quartier is linked to the gentrification process multiculturels; the motives behind their choice of belleville as residence are both financial and ideological (1994: 446). a slightly smaller group of new residents whom simon calls transplantés are similarly middle-class, but driven more by the cheaper accommodation available than by the desire to live in a cosmopolitan quartier (1995: 185). in a century and a half, belleville has thus been transformed from an impoverished quartier populaire on the outskirts of paris to a partially gentrified inner-parisian quartier. this transformation has necessarily impacted the quartier’s image viewed both from inside, by its population in constant metamorphosis, and from outside, by literary and social commentators with an interest in belleville. the geographical, historical, cultural and social features of belleville are variously represented in non-fiction, literature and popular culture. by classifying these representations as rouge, noir or rose, we can establish several identities that pertain to the quartier and its inhabitants.5 some works fall easily into one or other category, whilst others, such as the malaussène series by daniel pennac—au bonheur des ogres 5 i explored extensively this categorisation in my doctoral thesis, belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose: représentations d’un quartier parisien depuis le moyen âge jusqu’à l’an 2000 (stott 2009). stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 7 (1985); la fée carabine (1987); la petite marchande de prose (1989); and monsieur malaussène (1995)—are more difficult to classify. belleville rouge history and politics merge in the association of the colour red with belleville. the blood shed in defence of the quartier from the beginning of the second empire (1852) is testimony to the revolutionary tendencies of the inhabitants. with a high proportion of manual labourers and craftsmen possessing a strong sense of social justice, sometimes to the point of anarchy (braquet: 23), the bellevillois population played an active role in the commune of 1871. the capitulation of belleville in the final battle of the semaine sanglante (bloody week) signalled the end of the commune. journalist, author and politician jules vallès recounts in detail the quartier’s role in the insurrection in l’insurgé (1886), as does émile zola in la débâcle (1892). in the wake of the commune, the first cooperative in france was established in belleville in 1877 with the aim of giving the quartier’s working-class inhabitants access to political education and culture. on the eve of world war i, with a membership of 9,000 and an additional focus on equitable commerce, la bellevilloise had become a model for subsequent cooperatives in paris and throughout france, and played a major role in the economic and cultural life of eastern paris until the 1950s (lafon 2011). its impact on the population of belleville was such that the cooperative’s name was deliberately associated with a major struggle to preserve the history and character of the quartier towards the end of the twentieth century. the enduring streak of rebellion and social justice that characterised the bellevillois inhabitants in the nineteenth century was evident one hundred years later in the creation of the association la bellevilleuse. inhabitants of bas-belleville (lower belleville) mobilised in the 1980s to fight a plan to completely demolish the sector. the association was created to provide support for inhabitants whose residences were under threat and who were mostly of working-class and/or immigrant origin, and lacking the necessary expertise to fight the powerful government-led redevelopment project. support was offered in the form of legal counsel, business, financial and construction advice. a protracted david and goliath-inspired battle ended in victory for the inhabitants, with 22 percent of buildings demolished instead of the 95 percent initially targeted by the government. the association la bellevilleuse’s struggle and subsequent stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 8 triumph is mirrored throughout the last tome of pennac’s malaussène series (monsieur malaussène 1995), in which the fictional residents of belleville demonstrate their recalcitrance by banding together to save the zèbre cinema from demolition.6 literary commentator david platten refers to pennac’s deliberate attempts to portray his belleville-based characters as belonging to ‘a mildly anarchic, alternative society … which ferociously resists institutional meddling in its affairs’ (platten 2011: 183) and the imposition of ‘bourgeois codes of morality’ (188). possessed of a strong moral code, pennac’s bellevillois characters are liberally tinged with red: they stand up for immigration and peaceful cohabitation and against racism, political and police corruption, exploitation of the disadvantaged; they defend the physical environment in which they live, along with its history. belleville’s association with the colour red is evident in its inhabitants’ past and present struggles, in their politics, passion and courage to stand up for what is right and in the blood shed in this process. noir author patrick pécherot recalls this tradition through the setting of belleville-barcelone (1938 paris, the dying days of the front populaire in the face of a rising fascist movement) and in the words of his detective protagonist: ‘the quartier’s colour tended towards red’ (pécherot 2003: 127). if the bloodshed during the violent insurrections of the past is more figurative in relation to contemporary struggles in belleville, the quartier’s association with corruption and crime is, however, still a reality, revealing the dark side of belleville’s identity. belleville noir belleville’s association with violence and crime can be traced back to the middle of the fifteenth century, when the gallows of paris were transferred to a part of what is now belleville called montfaucon, where they remained until the eighteenth century. poet françois villon’s testament (1461) and ballade des pendus (1462) evoke the curious crowds drawn to montfaucon to witness murderers and criminals meet their end. belleville is evoked in literature as a quartier of ill repute from the eighteenth century, with contraband transactions around the mur des fermiers généraux, sleazy activity in the vicinity of the gypsum quarries of the buttes chaumont in the nineteenth century 6 in reality, the last remaining cinema in belleville called the berry-zèbre found itself in a similar situation at the end of the 1980, and was saved by proaction on the part of the bellevillois population. i have argued elsewhere that the publication of monsieur malaussène helped resurrect the cinema as the zèbre cabaret-cirque performance space in 2003 (stott 2009: 266). stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 9 and the presence of the hoodlum apaches during the belle époque. historian john merriman claims that nineteenth century belleville housed ‘the very worst people of the capital and the most turbulent of workers from the faubourgs [outskirts]’ (1991: 203). contemporary belleville reflects this heritage, with its reputation as a centre of illegal activities depicted frequently in roman and film noir in the second half of the twentieth century, this despite the reality that the quartier’s crime figures are amongst the lowest in the french capital (inhesj/ondrp 2013). racial tension is evident from time to time, most recently in the victimization of the asian community,7 who are often perceived as insular by parts of the bellevillois population. the quartier’s standing as a dangerous space and hive of criminal activity is, however, heightened by its frequent negative depiction in contemporary literature and popular culture. literary commentator moez lahmédi describes the quartier as ‘morbid … an archetypal crime fiction topos’ (2011: 5). many of these contemporary noir representations can be grouped in the may 1968inspired genre of the néo-polar, whose themes denounce destructive aspects of contemporary french society such as racism, corruption, unemployment and its consequences. from flic story by jacques deray (1975) to l.627 by bertrand tavernier (1992), belleville was portrayed nine times in film and many more in literature as a centre of vice (stott 2009). néo-polar authors and residents joseph bialot, thierry jonquet and serge quadruppani repeatedly paint their quartier as demoralizing, decrepit and sinister; their representations are validated by allusions in their texts to historical facts associating contemporary belleville with its past, and verified by the reality of some pockets of the quartier, where the all-too-evident repercussions of unemployment, such as poverty and delinquency, abound. for bialot, geographical landmarks such as the père lachaise cemetery are the root of belleville’s evil, and to be avoided at all costs; a wrong turn into the cemetery leads to murder in babel-ville (1979). throughout his belleville series (1993, 1994, 1998), jonquet focusses on the prevalence in the quartier of racial tension, delinquency and marginalization, gloomily foreseeing belleville’s ultimate demise. negative undertones relating to belleville’s shady past and present are present in quadruppani’s belleville series and short stories (1991, 1992, 1994, 1996). la forcenée, for example, alludes to the recent architectural history of the 7 a peaceful protest by the chinese community of belleville in june 2010 degenerated into violence with the involvement of non-chinese youth, allegedly from both inside and outside the quartier. stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 10 quartier through his squatter protagonists’ protest against the property development in eastern paris (1994: 36). pécherot returns to the paris populaire of the 1930s, implicating the quartier in multiple murders, russian arms deals, the demise of the front populaire and the rise of the extreme-right movement la cagoule (2003). resident, author and film director arnaud malherbe nominates belleville as both title and décor for his tele-film (2010) and two-volume graphic novel (malherbe & perriot 2010) in a deliberately archetypal noir depiction of the quartier, with twenty-first century themes of illegal immigration and the chinese mafia. pennac, too, takes up classic noir themes such as racism (1987), corruption (1987, 1989), occultism (1985), murder and violence. nor can he ignore belleville’s state of significant disrepair. throughout his malaussène series he refers to the progressive disappearance of ‘his’ belleville of yesteryear, facilitated by corrupt property developers; as a former longterm resident in the latter part of the twentieth century, he is well placed to give evidence. crime thus remains commonplace in the belleville of the néo-polar genre, far more so than occurs in reality in the quartier, and often more grisly in nature. the colour black is thus closely associated with belleville’s dark past and present. however, if the quartier appears in print and in celluloid as architecturally and morally doomed, more than a hint of rose appears in fiction and in reality, as writers and residents focus on the pleasures and amusements to be found in its domains. belleville rose if the colour pink is synonymous with amorous endeavours and the pursuit of pleasure, belleville’s history and representations in literature and popular culture are laden with examples. jean-jacques rousseau admired the solitary delights of the ‘joyful countryside’ in the late eighteenth century (1782: 14–15). his more sociable countrymen of all classes preferred the crowds of the cabarets of la courtille. the famous descente de la courtille parade which took place every year until 1838 as part of the mardi gras festival is evoked by edmond and jules goncourt (1856), and the appropriately named place des fêtes, created in 1836, was the site of many open-air balls. the pleasures of the quartier populaire as it existed in the first half of the twentieth century were variously vaunted in song by edith piaf (rivgauche & léveillée 1960) and maurice chevalier (1942); on paper by jacques prévert (as scriptwriter for marcel carné’s enfants du paradis in 1945) and eugène dabit (1933: 90); and in film, most notably by albert lamorisse (1956). stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 11 with the focus during the second half of the twentieth century on the physical transformation of the quartier and the progressively changing face of its population, writers and social commentators observed a gradual move away from the traditional image of the parisian quartier populaire. the association of the colour pink with optimism and a sense of nostalgia for the past is variously made by literary and social commentators of contemporary belleville, who see the quartier as one of the last remaining vestiges of paris populaire. in the works of writers and former belleville residents romain gary and daniel pennac, a positive representation overrides less salubrious themes. gary’s depiction of the quartier as a warm cosmopolitan community is amusing, sincere and undoubtedly coloured by his own memories of a newly arrived, impoverished young immigrant in 1928 (1975). in the malaussène series, pennac’s protagonists are nourished, sheltered and protected by a close-knit circle of friends who replace absent family members and whose diverse nationalities accurately reflect the multicultural population of belleville: the ben tayed family who appear throughout the series hail from algeria; loussa de casamance, the mandarin-speaking colleague of benjamin is from sénégal (1989); stojilkovitch is from serbia (1985); and van thian is from vietnam (1987). it is little wonder that pennac, in an interview with the author in 1998, described the quartier in which he lived for many years as a ‘miniature planet … a multinational community.’ given their often precarious existence prior to moving to belleville, and the relatively warm welcome that they receive in the quartier from neighbours with whom they might share a religion, culture, nationality, history or values, residents of immigrant origins often develop a deep attachment to belleville.8 platten suggests that pennac invents for his characters complex past histories relevant to belleville’s history, and integrates them into the plot in an attempt to establish a ‘communal identity’ (2011: 183); his characters’ identification with the quartier is strong, and the support shown for their neighbours unyielding, especially in the face of adversity. the bellevillois inhabitants demonstrate a similar communal identity in real life, according to simon, who cites in support of this argument the relative stability of the immigrant population (1992: 54). local residents confirm the on-going existence of a strong collective bellevillois identity, despite signs of deterioration (rigoulet: 2010). members of 8 pécherot confirms the deep-seated loyalty felt towards belleville by one of his immigrant characters who resides in the quartier in belleville-barcelone (2003: 71). stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 12 different nationalities accept the different cultural and religious practices of their neighbours and manage to share the restricted physical space in relative harmony. festivals and exhibitions are commonplace, and the number of associations created to support the residents of belleville is three times that of the average across paris (apur 2007: 130).9 rather than a ghetto, belleville is a cultural melting pot whose members might shop in different sectors yet live in the same apartment building. they plant together and share the products of community gardens; they exchange culinary skills for computing expertise in community centres (de villanova 2011: 193). the community spirit that is a sign of a strong communal identity with the quartier is continuously evoked by pennac; the local youths with an intimidating air follow an elderly vietnamese resident from the atm where she has withdrawn a large sum of money not with the intention of robbing her, but of assuring her safety (1987: 29-31). cissou, the council locksmith with an acute sense of social justice, coordinates by day the forced eviction of local inhabitants behind in their rent, and by night returns the belongings he has just confiscated to their owners (1995). pennac’s belleville, despite its crumbling physical appearance, has a lively sense of community reminiscent of the paris populaire of a long-gone era. if his representation of belleville as a uniquely enduring haven of social harmony is perceived by some commentators as utopian, simon and tapia underline the sense of tolerance that prevails in reality, and explain the relative harmony in the quartier by the observation on the part of bellevillois inhabitants of the golden rule of peaceful coexistence: keeping a respectful distance (1998: 101). the quartier as it is represented in the malaussène series is certainly idealistic, but it is a resident author’s personal perspective, tinged heavily with the pink of nostalgia, as is the belleville of gary, lamorisse, dabit, piaf and others. readers are offered a set of rose-coloured glasses and a glimpse of what the quartier might once have been and what it could be again. the prevalence in literature, sociology and popular culture of this idealistic vision is sufficient to engender widespread belief and perpetuate the image in reality, as evidenced by the overriding sense of community and tolerance for other cultural practices that is highly unusual in a multiethnic quartier such as belleville. 9 roselyne de villanova notes that the aim of many of these associations is to provide assistance to those in need (often of immigrant origin), whilst at the same time encouraging independence and ultimately a smoother integration into the quartier (2011: 193). stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 13 pennac’s malaussène series defies classification as mere rose-coloured nostalgia: like belleville itself, it blends all three elements, rose, rouge, noir, into the creation of a collective bellevillois identity, according the quartier the status of central character. indeed, classifying the series as part of a single literary genre is similarly problematic; it contains elements of detective fiction, fairy tale, myth and reality. this diversity has no doubt contributed to its broad appeal and consequent remarkable success. these elements continue to mark the most recent representations of belleville. author and film director xabi molia, like pennac, incorporates elements of noir, rouge and rose in his futuristic depiction of a dilapidated twenty-first century belleville caught in the grip of an epidemic, against which the uninfected fight desperately for survival (2011); the doctor protagonist responsible for tracking the spread of the epidemic discovers a longlost love for his missing wife along the way. conclusion these three strands—rouge, noir and rose—that run through the literary, historical, sociological and cultural representations of belleville, have been woven together over time to create a rich, complex, multi-layered ‘imagined community’ (anderson 1991). there is a certain continuity in the themes that persist over the centuries, and yet each era brings reinterpretation and modification of this legacy. myth and reality have become inextricably interwoven as the very reputation of the quartier inspires new generations to assume the mantle of its past. thus the memory of working-class activism and cooperation characteristic of the late nineteenth century is incorporated into the battle to save bas-belleville from property developers by the determined group of inhabitants who founded the association la bellevilleuse in the 1990s. we may speculate that the vibrancy of the community of belleville today results in part from its reputation, taken up and defended by contemporary residents: the multiculturels, the writers and artists, the immigrants anxious to leave the conflicts of their past lives behind them and contribute to a tolerant, diverse community. we may speculate, too, that pennac’s exploitation of the political and cultural history of belleville and the idealisation of the sense of community associated with the quartier have resonated with an audience concerned about the future of the cities in which they live. readers of the malaussène series are reminded of the importance of identifying with and preserving the history and values of public spaces. stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 14 pennac’s representation of belleville evokes the much broader concept of french cultural memory defined by pierre nora, for whom a place’s changing physical appearance matters less than the memory that survives it. according to nora, this memory relies heavily upon those who retain it, and as such is in a state of perpetual evolution (1997: 24). in applying nora’s concept of cultural memory to belleville, the physical boundaries of the quartier become less important than the resonance of the events that take place there in the memory of the residents. pennac can thus be seen as guardian of belleville’s cultural memory; his notion of geography surrendering to history in belleville (1989: 401) holds true. and yet perhaps the key to belleville’s unique status and complex identity is, in fact, its geographical location. originally situated beyond the physical boundaries of paris, it was not obliged to answer to the city’s authorities and thus acquired its reputation for rebellious behaviour, contraband activities and illicit pleasures. even since its annexation to paris, belleville has continued to function as an extraordinary space where it is customary to expect the unexpected. this, too, is reflected in pennac’s malassène series, in the characters who reside in the quartier and in the quartier itself: ‘what i love about belleville is the element of surprise’ (pennac 1987: 262). reference list anderson, b. 1991, imagined communities: 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belleville-barcelone, gallimard, paris. pennac, d. 1985, au bonheur des ogres [the scapegoat]. gallimard, paris. pennac, d. 1987, la fée carabine [the fairy gunmother]. gallimard, paris. pennac, d. 1989, la petite marchande de prose [write to kill]. gallimard, paris. pennac, d. 1995, monsieur malaussène [mr malaussène]. gallimard, paris. platten, d. 2011, the pleasures of crime: reading modern french crime fiction. rodopi, amsterdam & new york. quadruppani, s. 1991, y (there). métailié, paris. quadruppani, s. 1992, rue de la cloche [bell street]. métailié, paris. quadruppani, s. 1994, la forcenée [the madwoman]. métailié, paris. quadruppani, s. 1996, ‘la montée de la courtille [the ascent of la courtille]’, in paris, rive noire, (the dark side of paris), (ed.) h. dougier. autrement collection romans d’une ville, paris: 5–34. rigoulet, l. 2010, ‘casse-tête à belleville [belleville conundrum],’ télérama.fr, no. 3179–3180. online, available: http://www.telerama.fr/monde/casse-tete-a-belleville,63726.php [accessed 9 august 2013]. rivgauche, michel & léveillée, claude. 1960, boulevard du crime [crime boulevard]. song. rousseau, j.-j. 1960 (1782), rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire [daydreams of a solitary rambler]. garnier-frères, paris. simon, p. 1992, ‘belleville, un quartier d’intégration,’ migrations société, vol. 4, no. 19 (janvier–février): 45–68. simon, p. 1994 ‘l’esprit des lieux’ [sense of place], in in belleville, belleville, visages d’une planète [belleville, belleville, faces of a planet], (ed.) f. morier. créaphis, paris: 428–457. simon, p. 1995 ‘la société partagée. relations interethniques et interclasses dans un quartier en rénovation. belleville, paris xxe [shared society. interracial and interclass relationships in a changing quartier], cahiers internationaux de sociologie, vol. 98: 161–190. simon, p. & tapia, c. 1998, le belleville des juifs tunisiens [the tunisian jews of belleville]. éditions autrement, paris. stott, c. 2009, belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose: représentations d’un quartier parisien depuis le moyen âge jusqu’à l’an 2000 [red belleville, black belleville, pink belleville: representations of a parisian neighbourhood from the middle ages to 2000]. doctoral thesis, completed under the supervision of professor jean fornasiero, university of adelaide. online, available http://hdl.handle.net/2440/50422 [accessed 9 august 2013]. stott belleville rouge, belleville noir, belleville rose portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 16 stott, c. 2011, ‘belleville au pluriel: representations of a parisian suburb in the néo-polar,’ in hexagonal variations. diversity, plurality and reinvention in contemporary france, (eds) j. mccormack, m. pratt, a. rolls. rodopi, amsterdam & new york: 355–370. vallès, j. 1975 (1886), l’insurgé [the insurgent]. gallimard collection folio classique, paris. villon, f. 1991 (1461–1462), poésies complètes [complete poetry], (ed.) m. zink. le livre de poche collection lettres gothiques, paris. yaari, m. 2008, rethinking the french city: architecture, dwelling and display after 1968. rodopi, amsterdam & new york. zola, é. 1892, la débâcle [the debacle]. g. charpentier, paris. portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal different trajectories: europe and scotland in recent scottish cinema ian goode, university of glasgow since approval was given via a referendum in 1997 for the advent of the scottish parliament, the benefits and constraints of scotland’s devolved role within and against the uk has, understandably, formed the primary axis of political debate, despite increasing evidence that scotland, like other nations, is part of a globalised world. it has long been argued that nationalist scotland exercises a preference for closer ties with a less imperialist europe rather than with the colonially tainted state of the united kingdom (hechter 1975, 310). however, the precise meaning of scotland’s role within a changing europe receives little attention in mainstream debate (imrie 2006). meanwhile, the european union (eu) is engaged in the ongoing process of enlarging and renegotiating its boundaries. despite the paucity of cinematic texts that address ostensibly scottish-european concerns, i want to consider the meaning of europe through a focus on how a number of films have been written into critical accounts of scottish, british and european cinema while also examining how this relationship is given meaning in recent films produced in scotland, in order to map the different manifestations of the relationship between europe and scotland. the idea of europe europe initially referred to a terrain that stretched westwards from the aegean and was associated with christendom, civilisation and the values of human rights and freedom (ichijo 2004, 71-72). the political institutionalisation of europe as the formation called the european economic community (eec) in 1957 meant that europe increasingly became identified with western europe, as did an adherence to democracy and human goode europe and scotland in recent scottish cinema rights. this was confirmed in 1986 when the single european act reinforced the image of europe as a market and a world economic power (ichijo 2004, 70). the relationship between this idea of europe and cinema is maintained through the heading of ‘european cinema,’ and, despite the shift eastwards towards the study of asian and world cinemas, ‘european cinema’ continues to function as a category of cultural distinction. thomas elsaesser’s effort to pinpoint the current meaning of european cinema suggests that the label ‘european’ seems, in the era of world cinema, to make more sense when applied from without than when given substance from within (2005, 486). similarly, rosalind galt argues that european space is invisible, existing as a political idea but not as a coherent location (2006, 179). despite these discursive impediments, the relationship between europe and cinema endures and one of the critical functions of european cinema within a british context has been to highlight a perceived cinematic deficit in british national cinema. in 1969 alan lovell argued that it is often assumed that britain had made no significant contribution to european cinema, hence such questions as ‘why is there no british nouvelle vague? why do we have no godard, no truffaut, no pasolini, no bergman?’ (1972, 2). however, the success of directors such as derek jarman, peter greenaway and sally potter in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in british art cinema assuming a critical presence in european cinema (orr 2000). duncan petrie has also charted the emergence of a scottish art cinema within british cinema during the 1980s and 1990s (2000, 148-171). the legitimation of popular european cinemas, and the consequent expansion of the parameters of europe that is referenced by european cinema, have served to deflect lovell’s argument, but it often remains the case that to summon european cinema within critical accounts of national cinema, particularly where that cinema is viewed as peripheral and emergent, is a means of conferring cultural capital onto that cinema (dyer and vincendeau 1992; petrie 2000; eleftheriotis 2001; iordanova 2003). the ongoing legitimation of national and peripheral cinemas is questioned by tim bergfelder, who argues that ‘most studies of national cinema in europe remain couched in a rhetoric of cultural protectionism and fear of globalisation, and they still perpetuate in many cases, whether unwittingly or not, the illusion of ‘pure’ and stable national cultures’ (2005, 321). portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 2 goode europe and scotland in recent scottish cinema in a similar vein, eleanor bell urges scottish literary studies to move from its often insular focus on tradition-inspired approaches in order to ‘take account of some of the wider influences now affecting the nature of belonging at wider european and macro levels’ (bell and miller 2004, 84; bell 2004; murray 2005). following the direction of the arguments put forward by bergfelder and bell i want to consider those areas where the relationship between europe and scotland is manifest in a selection of recent films produced with some degree of scottish involvement. scotland and european cinema the first of these areas is the most conventional and is demonstrated in connection with scottish auteur directors such as bill douglas and more recently lynne ramsay. the deeply personal and autobiographical films of douglas and his poetic style offer the opportunity of aligning scottish cinema with what john caughie refers to as the ‘sustained, hard edged and diverse european tradition of art cinema’ (1993, 200). underlying this tendency is a desire to buttress an emerging, though uncertain, national cinema with the cultural distinction of european art cinema. it confirms the idea of europe as inherently civilizing and suggests a centripetal trajectory that looks southwards to the european continent, and to the canonical centres of european cinema formed by the auteurs of france, germany and italy. the relationship between scotland and european cinema is represented more directly in recent films such as prague (1992) and morvern callar (2003) where protagonists leave scotland on a journey that takes them southwards to significant encounters in continental europe.1 prague features the quest of the young scot alexander novak to discover the past of his czech/jewish mother during the nazi occupation of the country. the film is less concerned with the nature of the connection between the country that alexander has travelled from and the post-communist czech nation, than it is with the search for a fragment of the past preserved on film, somewhere in the prague film archive. the significance of this film lies in the relocation of the protagonist to one of the former centres of europe, though this is ultimately a lesser concern than the 1 tickets (2005) is a more recent collaboration between abbas kiarostami, ken loach and ermanno olmi on the shared theme of a railway journey through europe. this portmanteau film extends european cinema into world cinema, and the loach film features a trio of celtic football club supporters who have one of their tickets stolen by a young boy from a poor albanian family. the charity and compassion extended to the boy and his family by the glaswegians highlights the different status of figures who share a journey to the same destination. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 3 goode europe and scotland in recent scottish cinema triangular romance involving bruno ganz as josef and sandrine bonnaire as elena, both actors synonymous with european art cinema. the attempt to engage at different levels of signification with the legacy of the past in the formally oblique manner associated with european art cinema also effectively signifies the cinematic journey of the director ian sellar away from the scotland of his previous film, venus peter (1989), towards the former centre of european cinema, via the production support of canal+ and the bbc. alan warner’s novel morvern callar was adapted into a film by lynne ramsay. the standing of warner as an established novelist and the visual style of ramsay function as a combination that invites a particular type of critical discourse. j. hoberman likens the female morvern to mersault, the male existential figure of albert camus’s novel the outsider (1946 [1942]) and the character of david locke in michelangelo antonioni’s the passenger (1975) (hoberman 2002). the currency accrued by asserting the philosophical credentials of the film, again affirms a connection with both the european novel and european cinema.2 however, the journey that morvern makes with her companion lanna to a spanish resort, with the money acquired from her dead partner, reveals a less singular expression of alienation. morvern’s relationship with lanna is compromised by the estrangement that she increasingly feels from an environment offering the conforming pleasures of mass tourism to the brit abroad. she tastes some of the transitory pleasures offered by the anonymous resort in the shape of discos, drugs and casual sex before deciding to leave with the reluctant lanna. the girls’ walk away from the resort into arable spain provides an encounter with a more authentic, lush and colourful part of spain and an exotic location of temporary fascination that breaks up stylistic continuity since the west of scotland landscape was shot with much less colour and bright light. the journey away from the resort and other people offers respite for morvern’s restless and disconnected subjectivity, but no meaningful cultural interaction. morvern appears to be more drawn to nature than she is to other people and is frequently shown literally and self-consciously touching the surface textures of nature from soil, and tree bark to the worms and insects that permeate the soil. diegetic music from the tape left for her by her deceased partner plays in morvern’s walkman and isolates her from contact with other people while restricting the amount of dialogue in 2 the resurrection and film adaptation of scottish writer alexander trocchi’s existential novel of 1961 young adam (2003) performed a similar function. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 4 goode europe and scotland in recent scottish cinema the film. the texture of sounds from the computer monitor and keyboard, water running on to enamel, in addition to the foregrounding of diegetic music, signal the formal preoccupations of a director who confirms her art cinema credentials by significantly attenuating narrative impetus. the withholding of identification and narrative impetus that results from morvern’s emotional detachment, partly explains the alignment of her subjectivity by critics with the existential subjects of french literature (jones 2004). however, what differentiates morvern’s subjectivity from her illustrious counterparts is her gender but also her friendship with lanna, who is altogether more willing to submit to the hedonistic pleasures offered by the resort, and to retain a connection with her life back in scotland rather than take flight from it. for lanna ‘here is the same crap that’s everywhere, so stop dreaming.’ morvern values lanna’s companionship but does not depend on it as lanna, like the spectator of the film, receives few indicators to what morvern is feeling and thinking. these versions of the travelling scot show protagonists who leave scotland but do not have to converse in the language of the countries to which they travel. the significance of these encounters between europe and scottish protagonists lies in the critical opportunity of aligning scottish cultural production with the european novel and european art cinema. the limited degree of cross-cultural exchange in this manifestation of the relationship between scotland and europe renders this mode aesthetically expressive and its content culturally conservative as these examples of journeying protagonists are drawn to the continent of europe yet also separated from it, seemingly unable on this evidence to be represented as parts of a shared cultural formation. pan-european film there is evidence of pan-european relationships involving scotland, developing in film, more so than in television production (eleftheriotis 2001). there is some overlap between this mode and scotland and european cinema not least since films such as prague and filmmakers such as lynne ramsay have benefited from the european cofunding facilitated by the eurimages programme set up by the european commission in portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 5 goode europe and scotland in recent scottish cinema 1988, and by that programme’s successors.3 these modes are separated with the intention of identifying, however slight, evidence of an increased level of cross-cultural co-operation and exchange, and a consequential loosening of exclusively national orientation (wayne 2002). scottish films of the 1980s such as another time, another place (1983) and especially play me something (1989) specifically address cross-cultural encounters with continental europe from within the various and not exclusively urban settings of northern scotland (schlesinger 1990; petrie 2000, 162-68). however, the most prominent contemporary manifestation of pan-european cinema involving scotland lies in the northerly relationship with denmark and the larger formation of scandinavia (murray 2005). this trend began with breaking the waves (1996), continued with the scottish-norwegian co-production aberdeen (2000), and more recently has been sustained by the production plan formed by the sigma and antonine film companies in scotland, and the zentropa and calyx companies based in denmark. this agreement has produced films such as wilbur wants to kill himself (2002) and red road (2006) (laing 2000). breaking the waves was an english language production directed by lars von trier, and whilst not an official dogma 95 film it bears the influences of the dogma technique (hjort and mackenzie 2003). the film was shot mainly in rural scotland and its paneuropean aspects are to be found in the cast, crew and sources of finance.4 it relates to a north european and scottish context through the representation of the experience of a female protagonist in a remote religious community. the treatment of emily watson’s character bess has generated discussion amongst feminist critics, but little attention has been devoted to the pan-european aspects of breaking the waves. the raw depiction of calvinist excess in breaking the waves signifies an important aspect of a religious and 3 the eurimages programme has since been supplemented by the media plus programme, which in 2007 became media 2007. the former provides financial support for the development of production projects in fiction, documentaries, animation and multimedia, while eurimages is the council of europe fund for the co-production, distribution and exhibition of european cinematographic works. there are currently 28 member states of eurimages but the uk has not signed up. although uk film producers cannot apply directly for funds, a european co-production partner, if a member state, would be eligible. see: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/media/index_en.htm [accessed 13 august 2007]. 4 breaking the waves was co-produced primarily within denmark, the netherlands, sweden and france. the cast and crew included robby mueller and jean paul meurice (cinematography), emily watson, stellan skarsgaard (cast), and lars von trier (director). locations included the isle of skye, mallaig and settings on the west coast of scotland. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 6 goode europe and scotland in recent scottish cinema cultural inheritance that is distributed across north european countries, rather than represented as an experience that is exclusive to rural scotland (eklund 1982; petrie 2000, 207; gordon, 2004). the non-naturalistic style of the film does not establish or frame the characters in a landscape that exploits or rests upon the visual opportunities of rural scotland. the manipulated level of contrast, dilution of colour, and the insertion of musical chapter headings create an unfamiliar and stylised look that is underlined by the dramatic extremes of the narrative that are concentrated by the intensity of emily watson’s performance of bess. the coastal locations of the northwest highlands of scotland function as markers of remoteness and isolation where the religious strictures of the local community circumscribe the life of bess and her relationship with her paralysed husband jan. this combination of unfamiliar elements and tone creates a film that could be located within the tradition of european art cinema, and the director lars von trier could also be aligned with fellow scandinavian auteurs, but the spectator of breaking of waves is not orientated towards viewing the film in either an exclusively national or a classically european art cinema framework. wilbur wants to kill himself concerns the implications of the attempts of a young man initially determined to kill himself in response to the relationships that form around him. the generation of humour, romance, melodrama and most importantly, an unfamiliar dramatic tone for the setting of glasgow, marks the distinctiveness of the film. wilbur also benefits from a co-production arrangement between scotland and denmark and the backing of scottish screen, enabling lone scherfig, the director of the 2000 language comedy italiensk for begyndere (called italian for beginners in its british release), to direct her first english language feature combining the locations of the city of glasgow and the ‘filmbyen’ studio in denmark. like breaking the waves, wilbur mixes cast and crew productively without departing from the global norm and export potential of the english language (ives 2006). the cultural exchange of wilbur is most evident in the desire to extract impassive and dark humour from the further reaches of male melancholy through the protagonist of wilbur and the defamiliarized setting of glasgow (marks 2000). this is most apparent in the restrained pacing of the script in scenes where humour emerges cumulatively rather than immediately in the manner made familiar by the succinct verbal economy of the joke or gag. it is apparent during the scenes in the film portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 7 goode europe and scotland in recent scottish cinema where the forum of the suicide group provides the setting for suicidally motivated individuals to interact with hospital psychologists. here individuals such as wayne give accounts of their actions and motivations and rather than receiving the support and understanding of the rest of the group they are met with indifference and in wilbur’s case outright hostility from ruby. moira asks wilbur ‘what do you think would happen in a broad sociological sense if we all went around killing ourselves?’ shortly before moira has completed her question to wilbur a cut away from moira’s direct look at wilbur to ruby and claire registers the impassive and disinterested response of these other members of the group. a cut back to a close shot of wilbur shows him pausing before answering ‘there’d be no more group.’ a cut then follows showing the psychologist horst smoking a cigarette and nodding gently in apparent agreement. the slow pacing of the scene and the cutting away from the leader of the discussion, moira, to other members of the circle of group members breaks up the momentum of the scene and allows the black humour of the situation to register cumulatively rather than immediately. the refusal to treat wilbur and the other members of the suicide group’s plights tragically connects the film with the black humour of theatre of the absurd (o’neill 1983). this disposition toward death is combined and eventually displaced over the course of the film by the romantic triangle that is formed between wilbur’s brother harbour and the struggling single mother, alice. once harbour is diagnosed with terminal cancer the brothers begin to exchange motivations for life and for the end of life respectively through their respective feelings for alice. harbour accepts that he has lost his wife to his brother, wilbur, who also gains the will to live as harbour’s is taken away by cancer and curtailed by an overdose of tablets. this representation of masculinity and humour occurs through the north european combination of writing, setting and casting that releases the film from a rootedness in either denmark or scotland as well as the more sedimented representation of the hard man traditionally associated with glasgow and clydeside (spring 1990). in both of these films the setting of scotland does not form a primary source of meaning but rather forms the setting for tonally and generically unfamiliar dramas that emanate from denmark but are also a consequence of the relationships formed beyond the borders of denmark through co-production with eurimages and sigma films in glasgow. the filmic results of these trajectories of production problematize the critical framework of national cinema. this is demonstrated in geoffrey macnab’s (2003) portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 8 goode europe and scotland in recent scottish cinema review of wilbur, which draws upon the familiar critical discourse of classical european cinema and the french new wave in order to compare the decidedly unfamiliar and cross-cultural wilbur with the indubitably french jules et jim (1962). the humour and dramatic tone of wilbur and breaking the waves exposes the lack of critical vocabulary for situating films within a cross-cultural critical framework that extends beyond the level of production. the articulation of the relationship between europe and scotland reveals how europe can still be understood as a civilizing idea that lends a peripheral national cinema like scottish cinema the cultural capital that is bound to the idea of european cinema. the protagonists of scottish art cinema who journey to europe, affirm a trajectory where europe is discursively located and reached through association and movement south of scotland, towards the mediterranean and the old countries of the european continent that give substance to european art cinema. however, underneath this trajectory of north to south, where europe is essentially elsewhere, lies a countering, bi-directional and residually pan-european film and television that suggests different co-ordinates for understanding the relationship. the co-productions between scotland and denmark reveal how cultural co-operation and cultural exchange take the relationship northwards, towards scotland’s norse affiliations, within what is not an exclusively urban articulation of the relationship. this drift north echoes peter davidson’s suggestion that one of the meanings of the north is that it represents ‘a place of purification, an escape from the limitations of civilization’ (2005, 21). these altering trajectories underline heidi armbruster’s proposition of a shifting and tidal idea of europe and indicate how the shifting contours of europe and its meanings, extend to and emanate from scotland through recent film, and how the changing articulation of this relationship should be acknowledged and understood (armbruster et al 2003, 887; jäckel 2003). reference list armbruster, h., rollo, c. and meinhof, u. 2003, ‘imagining europe: everyday narratives in european border communities,’ journal of ethnic and migration studies, vol. 29, no. 5, september, 885-99. arnold, a. (dir.) 2006, red road, advanced party scheme. bauman, z. 1998, globalization: the human consequences, polity press, cambridge. bell, e. 2004, questioning scotland: literature, nationalism, postmodernism, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. bell, e. and millar, g. (eds), 2004, scotland in theory: reflections on culture and literature, rodopi, amsterdam. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 9 goode europe and scotland in recent scottish cinema bergfelder, t. 2005, ‘rethinking european film studies,’ media, culture and society, vol. 27, no. 3, 315331. betz, m. 2001, ‘the name above the (sub)title: internationalism, coproduction, and polyglot european art cinema,’ camera obscura, vol. 46, no. 1, 1-44. camus, a. 1946 [1942], the outsider, tr. s. gilbert, hamilton, london. caughie, j. 1993, ‘don’t mourn–analyse: reviewing the trilogy,’ in dick e. (ed.), bill douglas: a lanternist’s account, british film institute, london, 197-204. davidson, p. 2005, the idea of north, reaktion books, london. dyer, r. & vincendeau, g. (eds.), 1992, popular european cinema, routledge, london. eklund, e. 1982, ‘the scottish free church and its relation to nineteenth-century swedish and swedish-american lutheranism,’ church history, vol. 51, no.4, december, 405-18. eleftheriotis, d. 2001, popular cinemas of europe: studies of texts, contexts, and frameworks, continuum, london. elsaesser, t. 2005, european cinema. face to face with hollywood, amsterdam university press, amsterdam. galt, r. 2006, the new european cinema: redrawing the map, columbia university press, new york. gordon s. 2004, ‘breaking the waves and the negativity of melanie klein: re-thinking the female spectator,’ screen, vol. 45, no. 3, autumn, 206-25. hechter, m. 1975, internal colonialism: the celtic fringe in british national development, 1536-1966, routledge & kegan paul, london. hoberman, j. 2002, village voice, december 11-17. hjort, m. and mackenzie s. (eds.), 2003, purity and provocation: dogma 95, british film institute, london. ichijo, i. 2004, scottish nationalism and the idea of europe. concepts of europe and the nation, frank cass, london. imrie, c. 2006, ‘internationalising scotland: making scotland global and international in its outlook,’ scottish affairs, no. 54, winter, 68-90. iordanova, d. 2003, cinema of the other europe: the industry and artistry of east central european film, wallflower, london. jäckel, a. 2003, european film industries, british film institute, london. jones, c. 2004, ‘“the becoming woman”: femininity and the rave generation in alan warner’s morvern callar,’ scottish studies review, vol. 5, no. 2, autumn, 56-68. kiarostamo, a., loach, k., and olmi, e. (dir.) 2005, tickets, fandango/medusa produzione, and sixteen films ltd. laing, a. 2000, ‘scots and danes in digital film venture,’ sunday herald [online], available: http://infoweb.newsbank.com [accessed 10 august 2006]. lovell, a. 1972, ‘the unknown cinema of britain,’ cinema journal, vol. 11, no. 2, spring, 1-8. antonioni. m. (dir.) 1975, the passenger, compagnia cinematografíca champion. mackenzie, d. (dir.) 2003, young adam, film council. macnab, g. 2003, ‘killing me softly,’ sight and sound, vol. 13, no. 12, december, 24-25. marks, l. 2000, the skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses, duke university press, durham, nc. media 2007 official website. 2007. available: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/media/index_en.htm [accessed 13 august 2007]. moland, h.p. (dir.) 2000, aberdeen, filmfrabiken baltic sea ab. murray, j. 2005, ‘dogmac? scottish-scandinavian cinema of the 00s,’ paper given at screen conference, university of glasgow. murray, j. 2005, ‘kids in america? narratives of transatlantic influence in 1990s scottish cinema,’ screen, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 217-25. neat, t. (dir.) 1989, play me something (1989) o’neill, p. 1983, ‘the comedy of entropy: the contexts of black humour,’ canadian review of comparative literature, vol. 10, no. 2, 1983, pp.145-166. orr, j. 2000, ‘the art of national identity. peter greenaway and derek jarman’ in higson, a. & ashby, j., eds, british cinema: past and present, routledge, london, 327-38. petrie, d. 2000, screening scotland, british film institute, london. radford, m. (dir.) 1983, another time, another place, associated-rediffusion television. ramsay, l. (dir.) 2003, morvern callar, company pictures. scherfig, l. (dir.) 2000, italiensk for begyndere [italian for beginners], danmarks radio. scherfig, l. (dir.) 2002, wilbur wants to kill himself, zentropa entertainments. schlesinger, p. 1990, ‘scotland, europe and identity,’ in dick, e. (ed.), from limelight to satellite: a portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 10 goode europe and scotland in recent scottish cinema scottish film book, british film institute, london, 207-220. sellar, i. (dir.) 1989, venus peter, british film institute. sellar, i. (dir.) 1992, prague, bbc. spring, i. 1990, phantom village: the myth of the new glasgow, polygon, edinburgh. trocchi, a. 1961, young adam, heinemann, london. truffaut, f. (dir.) 1962, jules et jim, les films du carrosse. von trier, l. (dir.), 1996, breaking the waves, argus film produktie. warner, a. 1995, morvern callar, jonathan cape, london. wayne, m. 2002, the politics of contemporary european cinema, intellect, bristol. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 11 different trajectories: europe and scotland in recent scotti ian goode, university of glasgow welcome to the july 2005 issue of portal, a special issue with the title "strange localities: utopias, intellectuals and ident portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ editor’s welcome, portal vol. 2, no. 2, july 2005. welcome to the july 2005 issue of portal, a special issue with the title ‘strange localities: utopias, intellectuals and identities in the 21st century,’ guest edited by alistair fox and hilary radner (both from the university of otago, new zealand), who convened an international colloquium on this theme in january 2004, and murray pratt (university of technology sydney, australia). as alistair fox says in his introduction to the special issue, the twelve papers gathered under the ‘strange localities’ rubric provide rich insights into the ways by which ‘the contemporary utopian impulse is expressing itself, both in the search for utopia, and through the exposure of false utopias.’ with a broad geographical reach, and an equally broad critical gaze, the essays collected here shed new light on the critical, yet often ambivalent, role that identity politics play in myriad utopian projects, and also in such critical enterprises and epoch-defining processes as postcolonialism, postfeminism, postmodernism, transnationalism, multiculturalism, and economic and cultural globalization. in addition to the papers collected in the special issue section, this issue of portal includes a number of essays that, while not addressing the special issue theme, also have much to say about the nexus between contemporary identity debates, intellectual practice, and utopian imaginaries. we are also pleased to introduce in the portal cultural works' section two short chronicle-like pieces by moses iten, a young australian writer. paul allatson chair, portal editorial committee portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 4, no. 1 january 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal editor’s welcome, portal vol. 4, no. 1, january 2007. paul allatson, chair, portal editorial committee portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies enters its fourth year with the journal’s first special chinese-language issue. organised under the rubric of ‘the revival of chinese cultural nationalism,’ the issue has been guest edited by dr yingjie guo of the institute for international studies, university of technology sydney, and features the work of scholars based in china and australia. as guo says in his introductory essay to the special issue, debates over cultural nationalism in china have been on the rise since the events in tiananmen square on june 4, 1989; indeed, the post-tiananmen era in china may be witnessing what guo calls an unparalleled cultural-political movement in the country’s history. the various contributors to this special issue explore the ramifications and manifestations of that broad culturalpolitical movement in film production, television drama, literary texts, cultural essays, regional entrepreneurship, and contemporary debates on nationalism and liberalism. this issue of portal also features four non-special issue essays: a study of feminist ethics in the work of filipino-australian writer and dramatist merlinda bobis, by dolores herrero (universidad de zaragoza, spain); a taut critique of the discourse that regards the twentieth century as the bloodiest and most atrocious in human history, by david b. macdonald (otago university, new zealand); a trenchant analysis, by ramzi nasser and kamal abouchedid (notre dame university, lebanon), of what the authors call the rise of “academic apartheid” in the university sector throughout the arab world; and a fascinating exploration of the feminism and environmentalism pioneered by the australian author, mountaineer, solicitor and buddhist marie byles (1900-1979), by allison cadzow (university of technology sydney). finally, it is a huge pleasure to also include in portal’s cultural works section a selection of poems by the chinese poet yang lian, translated by mabel lee (responsible for translating nobel laureate gao xingjian’s novels soul mountain [2000] and one man’s bible [2002] into english). untitled portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. the transcultural edge, curated by ilaria vanni accarigi. © 2016 [stephanie springgay]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i1.4790. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. learning to be affected in contemporary art stephanie springgay, university of toronto the canadian artist diane borsato has explored a number of different projects with bees and beekeepers, mushrooms and mychologists, and with plants. much of borsato’s practice is concerned with ‘learning’ through affective, bodily, and intimate gestures. she often works with specific groups of people—mycologists, astronomers, physicists, tea sommeliers, ikebana practitioners and beekeepers—in order to think about the mobility of thought, about ethical-political encounters, and the affective dimensions to embodied knowing. one of her earlier projects with bees, italian lessons (2007–2011), involved an apprenticeship of sorts in beekeeping in zafferana etnea, italy a town populated by more than 700 beekeepers. borsato, unfamiliar with the local italian dialect, worked intimately and patiently with a beekeeper learning italian and beekeeping simultaneously. in your temper my weather borsato worked with 100 beekeepers from the ontario region. in a five-hour performance in the walker court at the art gallery of ontario, canada, borsato and the beekeepers meditated. beekeepers often describe the effects of beekeeping as similar to meditation, noting states of calm, focus, mindfulness, attunement, and rhythm. similarly, many beekeepers meditate, read books, write, or do other quiet and intimate activities alongside or in very close proximity to their hives, communing with the bees as they fly in and out of the hive. for borsato and other beekeepers this meditation entangles the rhythm of bees with human mindfulness, suggesting a connectivity between human and non-human elements. these issues were springgay learning to be affected portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 2 expanded on in her apiary videos, which depict beekeepers meditating in eight different regional apiaries from backyards, rooftops, botanic gardens and industrial wastelands in an attempt to alter environmental conditions that affect bees, humans, and the earth. another project of borsato’s that i think extends the questions and problems regarding ecologies are the works that she has done with mychologists. her work with mushrooms and mycelium, and her collaborations with amateur mychologists, speak to movements’ virtuality. in the 2008 china town foray, which has had a number of iterations, borsato leads a mushroom foray through urban streets, with a particular focus on a city’s chinatown, where variations of mushroom species can be found in shops (springgay 2012). in another fungi project terrestrial/celestial from 2010, amateur mychologists and astronomers were brought together for a day-long event in which they shared their field knowledge. while bees elicit fear from stings and swarms, and feature spectacularly in public imaginations about environmental degradation and collapse, mushrooms are often vilified for being passive, inactive, and immobile. fungi are found on forest floors, decaying logs, and while they signify the earth’s heterogeneous renewal they are often marked as dirty and worthless. yet fungi––of which mushrooms are only the fruiting part––coexist in complex ecosystems with other plants. moreover, within this vitality is a rhythm of movement too subtle for human perception, a virtual movement. my research into borsato’s various projects is to think about an affective pedagogy, which proposes to intervene in ecologies of human and nonhuman relations. rather than understanding her work simply as enacting embodied and experiential learning, thereby reducing it to both a human construct and a human experience, i am interested in the ways her interventionist gestures transform pedagogy from learning ‘about’ to the mobility of thinking-doing, which demands that the boundaries between human and non-human become viscous. for example, her projects do not set out to measure how much italian is learned or the nature of that learning, or what species of mushrooms are identified; rather the incipiency of learning, of becoming more-than with the earth, are the gestures she invites. my contention is that borsato’s work can push us beyond the experience of art, where experience is understood as resemblance, towards an affective pedagogy of movement, where movement between bees, bee keepers, hives, galleries, and so on springgay learning to be affected portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 3 constitutes a multiplicity, where all the elements are connected to and implicated in what comes to be constituted through the composition. in her most recent work borsato has been studying ikebana flower arrangements, which she composes using found fruits and vegetables in her fridge, or more recently from objects and leftover materials from museum installations and receptions in the museum of contemporary canadian art in toronto. the sogetsu-style arrangements, composed from disparate natural and artificial materials playfully collides matter emphasizing the autonomy of objects and their more-than relation to human knowing. here matter is distributed across a swarm of various vibrant multiplicities opening creative possibilities and providing a powerful alternative to thinking an affective pedagogy as movement. reference list springgay, s. (2012) ‘“the chinatown foray” as sensational pedagogies,’ curriculum inquiry, vol. 41, no. 5: 636–656. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-873x.2011.00565.x. images: the chinatown foray figure 1: the chinatown foray, intervention and project documentation digital photograph, toronto and new york city, 2008–2010, diane borsato: http://dianeborsato.net/projects/the-chinatown-foray/. springgay learning to be affected portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 4 figure 2: the chinatown foray, intervention and project documentation digital photographs, toronto and new york city, 2008–2010, diane borsato: http://dianeborsato.net/projects/the-chinatown-foray/. figure 3: the chinatown foray, intervention and project documentation digital photograph, toronto and new york city, 2008–2010, diane borsato: http://dianeborsato.net/projects/the-chinatown-foray/. springgay learning to be affected portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 5 images: terrestrial/celestial figure 4: terrestrial/ celestial, relational performance and project documentation digital photograph, toronto and vancouver region, 2009–2010, diane borsato: http://dianeborsato.net/projects/terrestrial-celestial/. figure 5: terrestrial/ celestial, relational performance and project documentation digital photographs, toronto and vancouver region, 2009–2010, diane borsato: http://dianeborsato.net/projects/terrestrial-celestial/. springgay learning to be affected portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 6 figure 6: terrestrial/ celestial, relational performance and project documentation digital photographs, toronto and vancouver region, 2009–2010, diane borsato: http://dianeborsato.net/projects/terrestrial-celestial/. dancing in the 'contact zone' portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal dancing in the ‘contact zone’ monica wulff, university of technology sydney in october 2002 i performed and exhibited troppo obscura: a peepshow of historical perversity at the performance space as part of the multicultural arts festival, carnivale, in sydney, australia. troppo obscura was a multimedia installation that explored some aspects of the complex relationships between the west and asia. the work looked at a large range of possibilities, from the colonial gaze through to personal relationships forged through artistic endeavour. this paper focuses on one such personal relationship addressed in the installation, namely that between traditional master mask dancer ibu sawitri from cirebon on the west coast of java, indonesia, and myself, a sydney based contemporary dancer and performance artist. between 1992 and 1999, the year ibu sawitri passed away, i spent many long-term visits learning dance and living in ibu sawitri’s house in losari. troppo obscura was an artistic collaboration between sydney-based director and performer deborah pollard, video artist sam james, sound artist gail priest, indonesian-based sculptor hedi heriyanto, and myself as concept devisor and performer. the installation was exhibited in one of the ground floor performance space galleries and consisted of five larger-than-life bellows camera sculptures made by hedi heriyanto. two of the cameras housed live performers; another two contained video players projecting film loops of old archival material. this film material, which i researched and copied from the dutch national film archives naa, was shot by the dutch during the indonesian colonial period from as early as 1912. live video footage wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ of ibu sawitri presented in one of the camera boxes was shot by cinematographer peter panoa during visits to ibu sawitri in cirebon between 1996-1999. the far end wall of the gallery hosted a large video-loop projection of myself dressed in colonial garb performing a series of mask dances. this footage was made to look like old black and white archival film footage and looped throughout the duration of the installation. reminiscent of the victorian peepshow the camera boxes were provided with small peeping holes through which audience members could view the contents of each camera box. headsets were provided which contained accompanying soundtracks by gail priest. each camera box addressed a particular aspect of the east-west relationship ranging from colonial times to the present. troppo obscura, october 2002, dancing in the box i envisage this essay as a two part series, the composite paper of which is titled ibu sawitri and the a/occidental oriental.1 this paper is about ibu sawitri’s family and dance background and how she, the younger generation of dancers, the dance context, and the dance itself, have been transformed over time as a result of rapidly changing socio-historical conditions. in the second half of this essay i move the discussion to the 1 also published in portal in this special issue on women in asia. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ broader issues of cross-cultural encounters in what pratt terms the ‘contact zone’ (1992). this involves looking at dance as an embodied practice and its function in the ‘contact zone’, as well as dealing with spivak’s debates about the subaltern voice in reference to my telling of ibu sawitri’s story, both in the installation and in text. a closer analysis of the dynamics of my dance with ibu sawitri in ‘contact zone’ is addressed here. commencing the dance after staring at the computer screen long enough i feel myself being hypnotically drawn into its white surface. i am surrounded by thick fog, floating in a white cloud, hanging suspended in a moment of beginning. looking at all this empty white that is ever so slowly filling up with little black letters intercepted by short spaces in neat rows, like ants on a mission, i am reminded of the time i danced in the snow. i performed a series of dance movements from panji sutrawinangun, the first mask dance that ibu sawitri, my cirebonese mask dancing teacher and dear friend taught me.2 i danced silently in an open, snow-covered field in groningen, the north of holland, to an audience composed of my partner rogier (who had agreed to film the event) and the occasional bemused passer-by. the panji mask is small and white with a sharp nose and thin upturned red lips. i was wearing a long red overcoat that together with the mask made a striking contrast with the white snow-covered landscape so reminiscent of this luminous white screen. the snow and haze produced an eerie silence that was interrupted only by the sound of snow crunching under my winter boots and the sound of my foggy breath filtering through the small nostril holes in the mask. at the time i was interested to see how the white of the mask, the red of the coat, and the movements of a dance so specific to indonesia and a tropical atmosphere, would appear on a western-clad body in a quintessentially european winter setting. i was interested in the paradox and incongruity of this scene that cuts across colonial history and serves to deconstruct the box into which traditional indonesian dance, indonesian woman, and western woman performing asian dance are neatly locked. that was the 2 ibu literally means mother but when placed in front of a person’s name indicates the polite form of address to an older woman. to refer to an older woman by her first name without using the honorific title ibu would be regarded as demeaning. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ concept. perceptually, however, my body experienced a very different story. as i was dancing i thought of ibu and the time i spent with her before her death a year prior to the dance in the snow. i was filled with a great sadness and sense of loss—not only for ibu sawitri as it transpired, but for my own grandmother, nan, who had died in australia while i was in europe ten years earlier and whose death i had never really given myself the time or permission to mourn. during the last few months i spent with ibu sawitri she told me that there were still many places in the world that she would like to see. for years she had asked me to bring her a long warm overcoat from australia. initially i found her request unusual, not least because indonesia is a tropical country and the countryside on the north coast of cirebon is particularly hot. i assumed she wanted the coat in case she and her mask dancing troupe were ever asked to perform overseas again, like they had in november 1993 when they had been sponsored by unicef to perform in new york, or maybe to wear on visits to bandung or bogor, which are located in the hills and therefore have cooler climates. we had often talked about ibu visiting australia, the funding for which i was at that time still trying to secure. it was only on my last visit to cirebon that i finally managed to fulfil ibu sawitri’s request by bringing her a three-quarter-length eucalyptus-green trench coat. looking back i am not surprised that it was almost identical to a coat nan used to have. ibu wore the coat over her kebaya and batik sarong on what she considered cold nights during the rainy season but, sadly, never had the opportunity to wear it overseas. she died two months after my last visit to the village in 1999. i remember thinking as i was wearing my red vinyl trench coat, dancing panji in the snow, that perhaps somehow through my body and the mask ibu was visiting another place in the world after all. nan had been in germany with us for the first year in 1973. never having been to europe before she had a hard time with the glatteis (frozen slippery ground) during that first winter. she slipped once and broke her false teeth, her ‘clackers’ as she called them. lying on the slippery ground unable to get up she had fumbled in her bag for her dictionary to look up the word for help. hilfe! her name being gertrude, she was portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ referred to as glatteis gerty from that day forward. if nothing else, by dancing in the snow i was paying tribute to the memory of two important, influential and loved women in my life. meanwhile all this talk about snow is no doubt influenced by the fact that it is winter in sydney and a particularly cold day today. as i sit and type i can feel my cheeks, nose and fingers tingling from the adjustment to the evenly air-conditioned, windowless basement that houses my ‘workstation’. around me the neon lights hum and illuminate the space in white light, which bounces crisply off the maze of white desks and blue partitions. my partition in defiance of office anonymity is covered with an eclectic collection of postcards, photos and posters of indonesian dancers, past performances, and a close-up picture of ibu sawitri taken during my last visit. i look closely at the photograph of her wrinkled light brown face, her small rounded nose, her mouth in that familiar half smile and the wisps of grey and black hair that hang loosely around her face. even in this close-up, traces of her old beauty are still visible. those traces surprised me the first time i met ibu sawitri at her home in losari. thin, leathery skinned, toothless, wearing her usual attire of kain batik, loose kebaya and worn plastic slippers, she nevertheless emanated magnetic presence, charm and beauty. she often had a cheeky twinkle in her eyes and was as genit and funny as the best of them, ibu sawitri, losari/cirebon, 1999 portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 5 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ especially when in the company of men of rank and importance. the other noticeable aspect of her physicality was her straight back and her quick energetic movements, which made her appear tall, proud and younger than her wrinkled, thin exterior would otherwise suggest. we spent that first afternoon chatting in the front guest room, me drinking kopi tubruk with copious amounts of sugar and ibu smoking fat unfiltered gudang garam cigarettes. the guest room of the family house was an odd mix of old and new. the back and side walls separating the guest room from the interior of the house consisted of deep-brown teak planks from the bottom to the middle of the wall, but the middle to the top consisted of typical javanese village-style, whitewashed, thatched bamboo. these walls were sparsely hung with a handful of old plastic framed photographs of family, performances and awards. the front of the house was a modern brick wall ibu sawitri dancing klana bando patih, losari/cirebon, 1997 portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 6 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ painted white, with two large 1970s-style windows on either side of an old, dilapidated traditional teak door that looked out onto a large dirt-yard pendopo. the decision to seek out ibu sawitri to see if she would agree to teach me her dance had been a leap of faith. the journey there, and the resulting complex, fluid and always changing relationship of teacher, student, mother, daughter, insider, outsider, agent, object and friend, changed my life forever. ibu sawitri with family in losari/cirebon, 1999 finding ibu sawitri the first time i saw ibu sawitri, or mak etik as i was later to call her, was in 1992 on a faded, old colour photograph with rounded corners typical of the mid to late 1970s. mas untung, a senior member of rendra’s benkel theatre, showed me the photograph over tea in his home in yogyakarta.3 the image on the photograph was of a masked dancer striking an energetic pose with legs wide, torso bent back, and arms defiantly 3 rendra is a famous indonesian poet and playwright based in depok/jakarta where he lives and works with his theatre company benkel teater. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 7 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ outstretched at the sides. the dancer was wearing a white mask with a black beard, large eyes and nose, a black headscarf and a brightly patterned megamendung batik cloth tied around her waist. the mask she was wearing was temunggung, the semirefined prime minister character. the performance was taking place outdoors on a stage under a blue tarpaulin surrounded by local village people. i didn’t understand the details of what i was looking at, but i did notice a mask and body that regardless of the tattered, faded nature of the photograph, showed an incredible energy and expressiveness. the dancer’s arms, although thin as sticks, together with the rest of her body, radiated a strength and arrogance befitting the masculine mask. this photo, over and above the handful of recommendations i had received from friends in the yogyakarta dance and theatre community with whom i was living and learning dance at the time, made me decide to look up ibu sawitri and ask her if she would become my dance teacher. didik ninik thowok, a famous transvestite dancer and comedian in whose studio i was living and learning dance at the time, was particularly enthusiastic about the insights and benefits that could be gleaned from the process of learning dance in a traditional context during extended visits. during the early stages of his own dancing career he had learned a different style of cirebonese mask dance from an old master who had since died. didik had been hoping to learn with ibu himself but due to his busy schedule and ibu’s failing health never had the chance. he did, however, become a patron and was very supportive and generous of ibu, particularly during the final stages of her illness. equipped with a photograph and a vague set of directions about how to find ibu sawitri’s house, i set off just like all those other ‘transcendentally homeless’ adventurers of the past. the first part of the journey was routine, since i had travelled between yogyakarta and jakarta many times before. this journey was no different. i had the usual conversation with fellow passengers who wanted to know everything about me, especially why i wasn’t married and why i was travelling alone. i gave my standard responses in between sips of iced tea and added the newly acquired name cards to my ever-growing stash of people i would probably never meet again. as a portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 8 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ westerner who speaks fluent indonesian with a javanese accent i was a novelty and a curiosity. my white skin, light brown hair, blue eyes and 1.65cm height, which is average in australia, even short in holland or germany, put me almost one head above most people i met and thus made me very conspicuous. hey bule, mau ke mana? hallo londo! i luf you! hey mister, or the other variation, hey muster!4 i used to hate the last one because it sounds too much like monster, which on a bad day desperate at the lack of privacy and millions of eyes watching, i would sometimes feel like. but then there are days in australia when i feel like a monster so i suppose it’s all relative. although welcome and flattering when i first arrived in 1983 as a self-conscious teenager desperate for attention, this superstar status had become increasingly hard to bear the longer i spent in indonesia. i could not go anywhere unnoticed. i couldn’t sit on a train reading a book or simply staring out the window. i was eternally engaged in the same conversation except that the faces changed. i did meet many amazing people that way and i am conscious of how ungrateful and superior it may appear to complain about this popularity, which has such a long and contested history. i am aware that my position as other in this context, although not always easy, is infinitely more empowering than being an other in a western context. yet, as occidental i was placed in a box, from which i could not escape regardless of how long i spent in indonesia. i was and would always be, to anybody who didn’t know me, the newly arrived bule or londo, a status which comes with a whole range of assumptions that i couldn’t evade, no matter how hard i tried. the journey from cirebon train station to losari, approximately an hour’s drive towards the border separating west java from central java, brought me headlong into the reality of what i was about to undertake. after much hustle and bustle, questionasking and being led off in fifty different directions, i eventually worked out how to get to the bus terminal that would then connect me by bemo (a diesel hiace van) to losari. 4 bule literally means albino buffalo but is the commonly used term for western foreigner. in central and east java foreigners are referred to as londo, from the word belanda, which means dutch. the way to distinguish between nationalities is to add the name of the country, i.e. londo jepang, londo inggris, londo jerman etc. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 9 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ hot, sticky and tired i was finally sitting in the middle row next to a window. in typical indonesian public transport style the van waited in the sweltering heat for the maximum passengers and then proceeded to travel along at breakneck speed, overtaking other bemos in order to compete for passengers who, in complete defiance of the laws of physics, always found room. the passengers i encountered that day and on many occasions since were mostly made up of young men in torn, dusty old sneakers, faded jeans and t-shirts often adorned with some kind of heavy metal insignia, school children of all ages in national uniform, old weather-beaten women in tired traditional dress, young women dressed in last year’s lebaran fashions, now faded and torn.5 the women had by far the biggest cargo made up of krupuk (prawn crackers), dried fish, chickens, vegetables, plastic ware, bundles wrapped in batik slendang (shawls), and all manner of packages, the contents of which i could only guess at. i sat with my bag propped on my knees, wedged tightly between the window and a young schoolgirl who kept stealing sidelong glances at me. the smell that pervaded the van was a combination of pungent dried fish, shrimp paste, dried and raw onions, salty sea air, diesel fumes, sweat, and the ever-present kretek (clove) cigarette smoke. these smells emanated potently and immediately from the goods stashed in the minibus, and also wafted in through the open door and windows from local industries scattered along the roadside, as we flew along.6 in this context the passengers didn’t speak to me, they just stared. my presence in their midst was decidedly out of the ordinary, given that this bemo route was not heading towards any obvious tourist destinations. in my usual attempt to make myself invisible i in turn stared out the window. the landscape to the right of the main road was flat and vast, interspersed with rice-fields, local industries and, in the small towns, flanked by open shop fronts and markets. to the left of the road was the ever-present north coast dotted with local fishing ports full of multicoloured fishing trawlers. 5 lebaran or hari raya idul fitri is the muslim celebration at the end of the one-month fast of ramadan. muslims all over indonesia buy a new set of clothes to celebrate this event. for some people of lower economic status this occasion often represents the one time of the year they will buy new clothes. 6 fishing, prawn farming, onion growing and drying, and sea-salt production, are the prime industries of the cirebon-javanese north coast. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 10 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ a few young schoolgirls, including my immediate neighbour started to giggle, and i heard them speaking in a hard, explosive-sounding, unfamiliar javanese dialect. kepriben, idung londo iki kok gede banget! soon the entire van was laughing. an old woman pointed at her own nose and then at me. i started to rub my nose, thinking i had some dirt smeared on it, but this action just made everybody laugh more. then i understood, they thought my nose was odd. i didn’t think i had a particularly long nose, but compared to the broader, flatter indonesian noses and to those unfamiliar with regularly seeing westerners close up, my nose must have appeared like some strange discoloured mutation. iya ya, londo idunge gede ya?! this comment by me was followed by peels of laughter and a barrage of questions, now that the passengers knew i could speak indonesian, even a bit of low javanese. this ice breaker, or nose breaker as i should say, ice being furthest from reality, was welcome, because in no time at all i was able to establish where to get off the bemo and how to find ibu’s house. one of the passengers got off with me and was telling the becak drivers to take me to the mask dancer’s house. o bu witri, iya ya penari kedog, ya ya tahu, tahu, sini, sini ikut saya, saya antarin. they all knew ibu sawitri, her family being the only active mask dancers left in losari, a small town on the outskirts of the cirebon district. the sensation of wind blowing through my hair, the gentle squeaking sound of the becak wheels turning, and the pleasant chatter of the becak driver behind me, had a calming effect, helped no doubt by the knowledge that i had, with the help of the local people, managed to find a way to ibu’s house without any major drama. the languid sleepy inactivity of a hot, post-lunch javanese village afternoon floated past like a dream interrupted only by the sudden jerking of heads and the usual calls at the sight of a bule in a becak. the initial calm i felt was slowly evaporating and soon replaced by a lowlevel nervousness at the shock i would cause when i arrived in the village. i was comforted by the knowledge that there had been numerous other western and big-city visitors, so my appearance would not be a complete novelty. yet my arrival did cause something of a commotion. ibu sawitri’s niece, mak mutri, went into a right tizz at the sight of me. she sent heri, nur and sri, three of her five portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 11 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ children, on a mission to find ibu, who was not at home. i was seated in the guest room and kept reassuring mak mutri that there was no hurry. she was visibly flustered and was dashing in and out of the front room of ibu’s house with tea and all manner of jars filled with biscuits, peanuts and krupuk. ibu arrived soon after also looking alarmed. she had been helping a neighbour with a collective cooking session for an impending wedding. later that day she told me how relieved she was that i could speak indonesian and that she had been worried she would have to turn me away as she had done on one other occasion when a foreigner who could not speak indonesian had come to study with her. and that’s where it all started. she agreed to become my dance teacher after she had found out more about me and all about the other dances i had learned and told me all about her other students and her own dancing history. from there we agreed on tuition fees, accommodation, food costs, and a date when i would return for my first two weeks of instruction. ibu sawitri teaching family and students, losari/cirebon, 1997 topeng losari: dancing in context: changing social conditions when i first met ibu sawitri she was in her late sixties. she was a descendant from a long line of mask-dancing families and was the only surviving member of her generation. she had been married six times and had left her last husband in palembang on the island of sumatra at the age of 50 in order to devote herself fully to her maskdancing vocation. it had been her father’s dying wish that if she failed to pass on the dance, she was to bury the masks according to local custom (sawitri 1996, 1998) . portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 12 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ when i first met her she was busily teaching the younger generation how to dance and play gamelan. topeng losari had almost died out in the 1960s but was brought back into existence with the help of a handful of jakartan patrons of the arts and artists who were concerned at the rapid rate at which traditional arts in indonesia were disappearing. one of the main reasons so many art forms had disappeared was the trend towards a more conservative islam. this growing conservatism was brought about by closer ties between villages to the middle-class urban islamic party muhamadiyah, with links to islam imported directly from the middle east via radio, television, books, and more frequent travel to mecca. this trend had a profoundly negative impact on traditional art forms. traditional artists were accused of being tahyul (inspired by animism) rather than the new rational form of ‘pure’ islam aspired to by muhamadiyah. traditional ceremonies like bersih desa7 associated with the rice harvest and ancestor worship were increasingly discouraged from as early as the 1930s, and the discouragement gained strength in the 1950s and 1960s (masunah 2000). topeng performances were an integral part of these rituals, and, with their demise, topeng became increasingly marginalised. the second most dramatic attack on traditional art forms was the 1965 communist coup and subsequent massacres of suspected communists. prior to the coup indonesia had the largest communist party in the world outside china. artists and their suspected connections to the socialist artist movement lekra were thus under suspicion.8 out of fear of being accused communist, the topeng losari mask dancing troupe stopped performing altogether after the 1965 military crackdown. it wasn’t until the late 1970s that the troupe was rediscovered by jakartan patrons of the arts. another reason the traditional arts were starting to wane was the advent of television in the early 1960s and an increasing number of households obtaining radios and cassette recorders that 7 bersih desa is a village cleansing ritual whereby dangerous spirits are warded away from the village by offering food to the danjang desa (guardian spirit of the village). food offerings are made at the gravesite of the danjang desa (geertz 1976). 8 for more information on lekra see foulcher (1986). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 13 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ introduced different forms of popular entertainment, such as dangdut,9 and local and international pop and rock music, to rural areas. in the past, daytime mask dance-drama performance and all-night wayang kulit (shadow puppet) performances were the highlight of ritual occasions, such as marriage, circumcision, and harvest ceremonies. in the 1960s these traditional performances were rapidly being replaced with popular modern entertainment forms such as bands, popular music played through large sound systems, and outdoor film screenings. the hire of these modern forms of entertainment was considerably cheaper than paying and providing food for an entire dance troupe (sen 1994; sen and hill 2000). in1992, ibu sawitri and her mask dancing troupe purwakencana rarely performed in a local context, except for annual local government-sponsored occasions, or for each other, that is other gamelan players or family members. most performances were sponsored and organised by patrons of the arts in larger cities or government bodies wanting to showcase traditional regional arts as a manifestation of indonesian cultural unity. the troupe was even invited as far afield as new york, sponsored by unicef to highlight traditional arts from the region of cirebon, west java. the fifteen-year break, and the change in performance context and audience, had a major impact on the topeng losari form. in the past, performances were all-day events that would begin with the main mask characters of the panji repertoire being danced solo. panji, the main protagonist and archetype of the ideal refined male, would always start the proceedings, to be followed by increasingly less refined characters, concluding with the final return to a refined character.10 this part of the proceeding served as the performance introduction and is a danced form. following this introduction of characters was a complete mask drama detailing the adventures of prince panji. 9 dangdut is a form of contemporary popular music inspired by indian bollywood musical scores. the tabla beat with its onomatopoeic dang-dut-dut-dang sound is where the music acquired its name. dangdut began as a youth subculture in the late 1960s and is still very popular among the indonesian working class and in rural areas. rhoma irama, who was one of dangdut’s first stars, is still massively popular today. the dangdut song lyrics range from romance, heartbreak and social critique to muslim morality (pioquinto 1995). 10 panji is a refined prince character and represents the same archetype as arjuna of the mahabharata and rama of the ramayana repertoires (holt 1967). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 14 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ traditionally the mask performances were held during the day and followed by an allnight wayang kulit shadow-puppet performance by the same dalang.11 nowadays, given the changed performance context and audience, the troupe mainly performs the dances together with a very short segment of the panji drama inserted in the middle. the dances have also been radically shortened. in the past the choreography for the main characters was up to an hour and a half in length. the dances performed nowadays are an average of fifteen minutes in length when performed in isolation and up to a maximum of thirty minutes when performed as a dance/drama ‘package’. topeng losari has undergone a radical transition in the performance context. originally it was performed in the surrounding villages, as a ritual occasion to bestow blessings and ward off evil spirits on a given ceremonial occasion. now it is predominantly a performance commodity of traditional cirebonese mask dance that is marketed at local (mostly big city) or international arts festivals. were it not for this transition in context and audience, topeng losari would have disappeared, as have many other traditional art forms in indonesia. ibu sawitri and the troupe’s ability to survive was due to their willingness to adapt and grow with changing conditions. when i spoke to ibu about the meaning of various movements, she confessed to not knowing them, but that her father had known. she herself was worried that the full meaning, in other words her meaning of the dance, was not going to be passed on to the next generation.12 now the next generation is busily making the dance their own and has no doubt a clear sense of what the dance means to them, based on their experience of it. many members of the younger generation would have mainly observed and participated in performances at festivals, outside the traditional village context, and thus have a very different sense of the form and its meaning than ibu sawitri did. from early childhood, she would have sat among the gamelan players 11 in other mask dancing areas of cirebon it is said to represent a life cycle starting with infancy through to old age, the fragility of these states being expressed through refined character representations. as with characters of the wayang repertoire, the danced masks represent archetypes ranging from the most desired to most undesired character types. their function was to confirm acceptable social behaviour in the community (suanda 1983; 1988). 12 much of ibu’s traditional dance knowledge has not been passed on to the next generation because it was no longer practical or relevant in the new performance context (sawitri 1999). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 15 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ watching the proceedings at ceremonial occasions, as well as during the ngamen (busking) tours during paceklik (literally, empty stomach), the time of scarcity before the rice harvest (suanda 1983; 1988). ibu sawitri participating in gamelan rehearsals losari/cirebon, 1997 each generation of dancers had, and has, different interpretations and different experiences of the dance based on the context and time in which they were and are performing. in other words culture, even traditional culture, is dynamic and ever changing. the minute a culture or tradition becomes static and unchanged it dies and becomes a museum piece. as schechner puts it: the slipperiness of ‘culture’ as a definite term is due to extreme dynamism, lability, and volatility of any given culture. every culture is always changing, even japan during its period of so-called isolation that ended with the meiji restoration of 1868. what is meant by ‘culture’ is actually a snapshot, a stop-frame of an ongoing historical action…attempting to fix cultures or stop them from changing is like trying to annihilate history (1991, 306). ibu sawitri’s decision to accept me as a student was first and foremost an economic one. given that the troupe was reliant on invitations from the outside to perform and thus earn money, there was no certainty as to when such occasions would come about. the troupe could no longer rely on set ritual months with guaranteed work as they had portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 16 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ in the past. in between gigs, ibu sawitri and the other troupe members earned money through an endless variety of odd jobs such as rolling cigarettes, peeling onions for local industries, cooking and selling food, selling clothing door to door, and working as seasonal labourers in local rice fields, to mention a few of their varied sources of income. teaching dance to outside students was thus a means of making a living from her dance. when i first started studying dance in the village, a price was negotiated for the dance tuition that included food and accommodation. not surprisingly it was more than the cost for local students. i was a westerner and there was no escaping the fact that i was in a privileged position economically when living in a small village in java, even though i was an artist on a low income in my own country. i was accepted as a student, and later on as a daughter.13 the fact that i was a westerner who had the financial freedom to come and go put me in a position of power i had to be careful not to abuse. as said reminds us: for a european or american studying in the orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality: that he comes up against the orient as a european or american first, as an individual second. and to be a european or an american in such a situation is by no means an inert fact. it meant and means being aware, however dimly, that one belongs to a power with definite interests in the orient, and more important that one belongs to a part of the earth with a definite history of involvement in the orient almost since the time of homer (1996, 28). passing on the dance from 1992 until my last visit in early 2002, i regularly spent extended periods of time learning the dance and living with ibu sawitri’s family. during these visits i learned four of the five dances that were being taught by ibu sawitri. in the beginning i learned one dance per long-term visit, and later would revise and improve those i had learned. the younger generation of her family and myself were taught dance in an outdoor covered studio space (sponsored by a patron) at the back of the house, accompanied by poor recordings of live gamelan music from past performances and live gamelan 13 teacher-student relationships have an ancient history in java. committed students are often included into family structures and, like real family, are expected to help the teacher/parent whenever possible. so even though my friendship with ibu sawitri was a genuine one, there were certain political motivations in cultivating strong bonds of loyalty (geertz 1976). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 17 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ practices on sundays. learning the dance involved ibu sawitri and/or several of the more accomplished dancers dancing at the front, while those learning stood behind and copied the movements. sometimes ibu would watch and give feedback. this often involved her jumping up and slapping the body part of the learner that wasn’t cooperating. the usual comment was the movement was either mati (dead) or salah (wrong). she would then demonstrate how it was supposed to look and make the learner copy it until she was satisfied. she might even manipulate the body to give the feeling of the movement in a direct way. the main mode of learning was by endless repetition and observing the teacher’s movements. ibu sawitri’s experience of learning dance was very different. when she was growing up, her father’s mask dancing troupe was always busy. during the festival months they performed almost daily and in the low season went on busking tours. at the age of nine ibu was invited to perform, and from years of watching knew how to do it. experience and skill are gained by performing. it was exceptionally important to be known as an excellent dancer, particularly if you were the dalang of the group, as was ibu’s father. competition between groups was fierce and in order to survive one had to be the best. a number of ascetic practices were employed to ensure this kind of success. the dalang, dancers and musicians alike practised ritual fasting,14 and other ascetic feats of endurance, such as living in a tree or down a well for long periods at a time, or eating a cup of chillies a day for a given period, to mention a few (sawitri and gamelan players 1996). the feats were believed to endow the person carrying them out with special magical powers, one of which was the ability to attract audience attention, which would in turn guarantee continued work. none of the younger generation of dancers had participated in ritual fasting, although they were aware of its function. ibu called the younger dancers the generasi supermie (instant noodle generation) and said it was pointless to teach them the more ascetic practices related to the dance because, one, they weren’t strong enough, and two, they 14 puasa wali is a ritual fast that begins with a three-day fasting period and then builds up gradually over time to the maximum of 40 days. the only food consumed during this fast is a small cup of water and half a banana per day (masunah 2000; sawitri 1999). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 18 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ kartini dancing temunggung magang diraja at a gamelan member’s son’s circumcision celebration, losari/cirebon, 1997 didn’t need them any more (sawitri 1996). there are other ritual practices involved in staging the dance that the younger generation have learned and still practice, such as burning incense and praying to the wali sanga,15 whose spirits are believed to reside in the gamelan instruments and to guard the four corners of the performance space. masks are also traditionally believed to contain the spirits of the characters they represent and are given incense at regular intervals according to the javanese lunar calendar. when ibu dances, she believes that she is entered by the spirit of the mask. she describes it as being ‘danced’ by the mask (sawitri 1993, 1998).16 15 wali sanga are the nine holy men believed to have introduced islam to indonesia. islam was spread through the traditional arts and there clearly exists a strong connection, certainly in the minds of the traditional performers. sunan kalidjaga is generally considered the most important and powerful of the walis and is usually credited with founding the wayang shadow play and therefore has a special protective function in relation to the traditional performing arts (geertz 1976; ricklefs 2001). 16 kathy foley (1985) has observed this phenomenon in her research with traditional dancers from west java. she refers to it as the ‘empty vessel theory’. according to this theory, when commencing to dance, the traditional dancer lets go of the ego to make space for the spirit of the dance to enter and lead the body of the dancer. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 19 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ embodiment or cannibalism: encounters in the contact zone when i went to study dance with ibu sawitri i had no plans other than that. building on the dance styles i had already studied, i wanted to learn the technique of dancing with masks. soon after starting to learn dance in the village, i realised that ibu was struggling to keep an art form alive that to me looked well on its way out. old gamelan musicians were dying without being replaced by younger ones. ibu was the only person who held the information that needed to be passed on in order for the dance to survive into the future, or so i thought. she had knowledge about the dances’ history and meaning, which she said had not been passed on to the next generation yet. partly in response to my own need to ‘master’ and ‘understand’ the dance, which was new and strange to me, i did what all colonials, anthropologists, ethnographers, and explorers of the past did: i recorded the dance and attempted through interviews to document as much knowledge and history about the dance as i could. during the first few long-term visits i made amateur attempts at recording the full mask repertoire on video and dat cassette. later on i decided it would be a good idea to make a documentary about ibu’s life and the dance. in attempting this i spent many months between 1996-1999 filming the dance and interviewing ibu and her family with my ex-partner, a cinematographer. he shot many hours of exquisite footage but to date there is still no documentary film. the footage remains archived on my mini esky, which i guard with my life. the fact is i’m not a filmmaker. i’m a dancer, contemporary performer, visual artist, and academic, and these are the venues through which i have processed the knowledge of my experience of living and learning dance with ibu sawitri.17 a change in perspective through the process of making troppo obscura, i no longer see my engagement with ibu and her dance as driven by the need to ‘save’ a ‘dying’ art form from ‘extinction’ (in keeping with a colonialist concept of benevolence); rather i see it as a cross-cultural dance of shared space in which our subject positions and identities are in an ever 17 the footage remains and with help from professional filmmakers i am hoping one day to make a documentary, at the very least to record the footage onto dvd and return it to ibu’s family. during my last stay in 1999 i employed a professional sound recording team to record the full dance repertoire. i handed ibu the original master copy and a large number of cd and cassette copies for use in teaching. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 20 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ evolving choreography of rearticulation. i am attempting to make this process visible in my performance work and particularly so in the troppo obscura project. in the following quote, referencing spivak and heidegger, chambers dances this fluid complex choreography in words that echo my intention here. in my response to an impossibility, the impossibility of speaking for the other, i mark the particular, the particularity of my voice, body of thought and way of being, and from within the global web or ‘westernisation’ of the world speak from somewhere, not everywhere. this is to seek to inscribe that impossibility into my language, understanding it not as a critical failure or closure but rather as something that exposes me to the interrogation of the presence of the other, and thus to the historical bounds, cultural specificity and political limits of my self. it perhaps means to live in another country where ‘to confront the subaltern is not to represent them, but to learn to represent ourselves’. to live in another place, is to begin to inhabit the ambiguous territories that draw us out of our actual being towards a way of becoming in which no one history or identity is immune from a new and diverse ‘worldling of the world’ (1996, 59). in keeping with chambers’ position, it appears that the more important question to ask ourselves in the face of the other is: ‘can i speak myself?’ speaking our ‘self’ in the process of engagement with the other is in the end all any of us can hope to achieve. what i have tried to do in my performance work and writing is to locate my body as the filter that receives information, internalises, interprets and ‘re-cites’ it, based on a very personalized set of building blocks that constitute ‘me’ (chambers 1996). to complicate matters these building blocks of identity formation and subject positionality are in a constant state of becoming, so that everything is always in a state of flux and change, making it impossible to speak in absolutes. given that it is only just possible to speak ourselves in the here and now, and knowing that this position is fragile and changeable, how can we contemplate being able to speak for an other? i cannot speak for ibu sawitri. what i can do, however, is speak about how i remember my own personal experience of engagement with her, and how that challenges and changes the foundations on which i now stand. i have attempted to place the ‘somewhere’ of my body and way of being in the world by telling that story, literally and metaphorically, within the installation and this text. i hope that this kind of engagement is a ‘speaking to, not a listening to or speaking for, the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman.’ i also hope that with this process i am ‘systematically unlearning my postcolonial, intellectual, female privilege’ (spivak 1988, 295, her emphasis). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 21 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ collisions in the contact zone at this point i remember a segment of archival film footage film i came across while doing research in the dutch archives and which was to become the inspiration for the wall projection of the installation, in which i perform indonesian mask dances in colonial dress. the scene was of a colonial woman dressed in white, turn of the nineteenth-century colonial dress, with a larger white feathery hat, stepping out of a car with other dutch colonial residents, and narrowly escaping the path of a thin, darkly clad javanese woman walking along the footbath carrying a load on her head. in the film, the paths of the voluminous white colonial woman and the thin javanese woman cross without engagement. in this encounter these women’s spaces did not converge; there was no meeting place, no awareness or acknowledgement of each another’s existence or inhabited worlds. this footage is testimony to the reality of colonial denial. the very foundation of colonialism is the inhabiting of the other’s world as if it is ‘unreal’, ‘uncivilised’ and thus needing to be inhabited with the ‘real’, the ‘civilized westerner’ who has ‘truth’ and enlightenment on his/her side. the psychological underpinnings of this logic appear to run along the lines of: ‘i am real, i am the centre of my universe, your other existence threatens to topple my existence in the centre, and therefore i must annihilate, or at the very least subordinate, you’. i remember choreographing a dance in my head in reaction to what i was watching in the archives. i imagined a javanese family sitting down to eat in their home, when through the door a group of white clad colonial agents waft into the space full of confidence and an air of propriety. they move around the table looking at the family with gesticulating moves and raised eyebrows. the javanese family looks at each other in concern and stand up and begin to speak to the intruders. they respond with peels of surprised laughter at the quaint language issuing from the family members’ mouths. the white clad people start to touch the hair and bodies of the family, who duck and shy away. in response they are gripped with more force and a dance begins with the javanese being manipulated into ther forms and shapes of tables, lampshade holders, stools to be sat on, drapes around the shoulders, shapes on which to rest one’s feet. and so the dance struggles on. each time the javanese escape a pose and start to attack, portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 22 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ more of the intruders group together and manipulate them into another shape. eventually the family members resist less and less until they are malleably shaped into whatever form the intruders wish. at that point i stopped in disgust, and returned my gaze despondently back to the video screen. ghassan hage divides this spectrum of the fear of european otherness into two types, ‘the other of the will’ and ‘the other of the body’. the other of the will is the cunning other, the competitive other, the manipulative other, the conspiratorial other, the other that can thwart my plans and undermine me, the other who, deep down, i fear might be superior to me at least with regard to intelligence. the epitome of this other is, of course, the anti-semitic figure of the jew. it is also the product of a racism very specific to it, the racism of extermination. the other of the body, on the other hand, is an unambiguously inferior other (except, perhaps, when it comes to sexual prowess), inferior in terms of intelligence, inferior in terms of technical know-how, inferior in terms of capacity to be productive (eg the category of ‘the lazy other’). the epitome of this was the colonial portrayal of the black african. likewise it is also the product of a very specific type of racism, the racism of exploitation (2003, 9). hage goes on to argue that because the other of the body was ‘all body’, she/he was exploitable as such and didn’t pose a threat of the mind, which would have called for extermination. that is not to say, however, that colonial exploitation didn’t in many cases also cause extermination; it clearly did. as hage notes, once the other is contained, controlled, eliminated or radically reduced in numbers, politically squashed and powerless, a substantial number of colonisers start ‘to love those “socio-politically dead other[s]” and “yearn” to “preserve” their culture’. he refers to this as a “political necrophilia” specific to the evolution of colonial culture’ (2003, 9). this yearning to be the ‘benevolent’ guardian and saviour of the down-trodden and helpless, he argues, relied on the knowledge that they were and would remain disempowered and moving towards extinction, justifying the superior position of ‘saviour’ with ‘might’ and ‘right’ on their side. the way of dealing with the fear unleashed from a collision of cultures in the past, and to an extent in the present, was/is to counteract it with the violence of colonial invasion and imperialism. ironically the site of this collision and the resulting space of intersection, of other and self, self and other, can a open up a new space for portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 23 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ wall projection, troppo obscura, october 2002 interpretation and ways of being in the world. the shaded-in convex shape of two overlapping circles—the stageof coloniser/colonised, ex-coloniser/ex-colonised—is what i like to think of as pratt’s ‘contact zone’. pratt defines her use of the term ‘contact zone’ as: an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect. by using the term ‘contact,’ i aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. a ‘contact’ perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. it treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power (1992, 7). i like to think of the ‘contact zone’ as a dance floor made up of the overlapping sections of two diverse circles that represent a particular history, culture, and identity. i imagine a dance taking place on this convex parqueted dance floor between the egos of those two overlapping circles now forced to share the same space. the dance begins, bodies approach and recede, circle one another curiously and cautiously, touch and bump, stumble and get up again, push and pick up, caress and shield, dance and copy, on and on and on in an ever-changing and emerging portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 24 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ ex-colonised dance floor of the ‘contact zone ex-coloniser coloniser / colonised / dance floor of the ‘contact zone’ dynamic of interacting bodies. this dance might create any number of endings. it could end with one of the dancers bound, gagged and forced to watch the other dance in glittering costume to spectacular music. or it might end with one of the dancers forcing the other dancer to follow his/her specific movement style. another outcome might involve one of the dancers copying the other’s movements and using them in whatever way they like, while the other dancer would resist, sticking rigidly to their original movement form without deviation. a novel outcome would be for the dancers to relax into a dance of constant motion and transformation in which both dancers are free to express their movement style and to be influenced and moved by the other. it may be a dance where the dancers try on each other’s dances for size and see how they feel in their bodies, thus finding places to put this new information in their bodies and in their minds. in this process they may find a language with which to speak and dance with one another without becoming one, maintaining difference with a new embodied awareness of the other, who is still other but no longer feared. by embodying as distinct from cannibalising the other, whether it be through language, dance, music, or art, we are opening up new spaces for multiplicity and diverse ways of portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 25 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ being in the world. making a space in our bodies to let the other in is an act of expansion, rather than denial and annihilation. this space allows for an open-ended ‘cross-cultural conversation that attempts to distinguish and articulate the contradictions of postcolonial mentalities and material worlds’ (sears 1996, 42). cannibalism, on the other hand, being the european trope most closely tied to the deep-seated psychological fear of the other, is in fact what the colonisers metaphorically do to the feared other (fusco 2001, 111). the coloniser greedily finds out everything there is to know about the other, which is a kind of invasive consuming, with the stated aim of labelling exactly ‘who they are’ and thus diffusing their threat. this labelling pronounced after a swallow, burp and a wiping of the mouth, is an annihilation and a boxing-in of the other’s right to exist in a state of transition and change in the same way that the coloniser allows him/herself to exist. it is a denial of space. dancing the contact zone with ibu so what does the dance between ibu sawitri and i look like? our dance traverses the boundaries of age, race, history and privilege. the relationship we established was primarily one of teacher and student. within this dynamic we developed a close friendship and i was eventually accepted as an adopted daughter into her family. the feeling was mutual. the embodied experience of learning dance with ibu, and living in her house with her family, instilled in me a sense of belonging, solidarity and connection with ibu and her family. this experience was heightened by the growing awareness of how these relationships were becoming manifest within my own body. half a year after ibu’s death, at home in my studio rehearsing for an impending performance, i had an experience that dramatically changed the way i understand dance, embodiment and human connection. on this particular occasion, in keeping with my rehearsal routine, i was practising one of the mask dances by way of warm-up. as i was moving through the dance, i became aware of an image of ibu’s dancing body. at the same time, as i was engaging in the dance movements i could literally feel ibu in those parts of my body. it was a strange combination of holding an image of the movement in my mind and at the same time feeling ibu in that actual part of my body. as if her arm portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 26 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ was my arm. as if my body was remembering ibu. by dancing the moves i was evoking ibu in my body. i was deeply affected by this experience and it is the closest i have come to a moment of what i understand to be spirituality. i was mourning ibu’s death at the time and the fact that i could feel this kind of deep body connection with her through the dance, was a great comfort and relief. i realised that this process had been going on for a long time and was part of the process of learning the dance, but that i hadn’t been consciously aware of it until then. i knew that it wasn’t only ibu, but all my previous dance teachers and people of importance in my life, whom i remembered in this embodied way. they literally became a part of my body and thus part of my identity, which is continually transforming to accommodate new encounters with people. this experience made me reflect on how disconnected we generally are in the west from our bodies. all those years of descartes, rational enlightenment, and the cartesian split have left most of us walking, disconnected, rational brains. this modern metropolitan condition goes some way towards explaining the overriding sense of alienation and disconnection many feel and points in the direction of our desires for and fantasies about the exotic, natural, wild, savage other. the idea of a deep mind/body connection, of course, is not a new one, and is the expressed goal of many other performance, movement, meditation, and theatre training techniques. in retelling this experience i am hoping to get to the heart of what i mean by dancing the ‘contact zone’. in our engagement i have physically and mentally tried on ibu’s dance and world for size and she has tried on mine. this dance does not eradicate the discrepancies of our histories, access to power, privilege, and knowledge. on the contrary, it incorporates them. by sharing one space, engaging in a dance or a conversation or whatever the form of interaction may be, we become ‘real’ to one another without having to become the same. of course ibu was not learning contemporary performance from me; why would she at the age of 75? she did, however, listen to me telling her what i do with influences from her dance in australia, and she saw the pictures, listened to my feelings, fears and hopes about my work, family, portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 27 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ friends and life. she watched me dance her dances, observed my strengths and weaknesses, saw me living with her family, came to live with me in my house in yogyakarta, met my friends, and tried my food (she didn’t like it much). in other words, she also embodied me, the ‘western other’ so that i, too, became ‘real’, a part of who she was. this becoming ‘real’ is available if we allow the other in and give our-otherselves in return. perhaps the embodiment i am speaking of here is a form of cannibalism, a more positive kind that serves to discursively negate the colonial trope of savage uncivilised cannibal imposed by the west on the other. 18 me dancing in on-lined, a contemporary performance, drawing on traditional indonesian dance and mask, performance space, september 1995 18 this kind of semiotic reversal of the cannibal trope was a strategy employed by the brazilian cultural discourse of cannibalism (anthropophagy) which emerged in the 1920s to show that ‘primitivism should no longer be understood as a stage to be overcome, but instead as a valuable instrument for redeeming modern society from the excesses of capitalism’ (bellei 1998, 102). the ideas surrounding this discourse as summarised by bellei from writings published in the journal revista de antropofogia published between may 1928 to august 1929 was the notion of ‘the stomach without ideas, ready to devour everything’ which was ‘a metaphor for the cosmopolitan enterprise of absorbing both foreign and native cultures as the means to construe a hybrid and unique brazilian identity’ (bellei 1998, 91). portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 28 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ one of the important dynamics of my relationship with ibu sawitri, and one i feel i must emphasise here, is that our teacher/student relationship was based on a shared commitment and respect for the discipline of dance, in particular ibu’s style of topeng purwakencana. even though i was paying for tuition, and the money was sorely needed, it is important to remember that there were definite rules associated with this student/teacher contract. loyalty to ibu and her dance was of utmost importance. i knew of one paying student ibu had refused to continue teaching because the person in question had gone to ask some research questions to other mask dancers in the region about ibu’s past, without consulting her first. considering the history of rivalry among different mask dancing troupes, this was a clear breach of trust. even though this student was paying to learn dance and conduct research, ibu refused to continue teaching her and was visibly hurt by the student’s actions. i have no doubt that had i in some way undermined ibu’s authority as teacher or disrespected her reputation and dance, my fate would have been no different, regardless of my tuition fees. ibu was a force to be reckoned with. re-citing ibu the pink ‘pièce de resistance’, 1980s-style, frilly vinyl sofa in the front room, which had not long before replaced the old javanese teak bench, sold to an antique dealer for peanuts and no doubt resold to the west for a small fortune as an ‘ancient javanese love bench’ or some such exotic title; the outside tiled and roofed dance floor; the small laminated chip wood table and rickety chairs in the middle of the house; or the front steps to the side of the main entrance to the house facing the pendopo: these were the usual places ibu, her family and i would nongkrong and chat. in between dance lessons, which would usually be conducted for three hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, there was not an awful lot to do other than chat and ngemil. the local woman selling all manner of multicoloured sweet and savoury snacks, which she carried on her back from door to door, would miraculously appear with her delicacies just when we had settled down to talk. our conversations included first and foremost copious amounts of village gossip, family dramas, personal worries and concerns. husbands, boyfriends and the perfect match were an all-time favourite topic of conversation. ibu, portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 29 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ having been married six times, was of course an expert and an astute judge of character. on a more serious note discussions revolved around political developments like the then recent downfall of president soeharto and the subsequent economic crisis, village wars and looting of local chinese shops. but most of all when talking with ibu we swapped memories of funny stories, and did lots and lots of talking up the past. sometimes i wanted to capture some of the stories she told me on film to include in the documentary i was then still trying to make. periodically i would ask her if she would mind if we did an interview. she never objected and often told me that she was hoping that with the stories i was recording i would one day write a book about her life. ibu was herself illiterate, and her older brother punjul was the only one of the nine siblings who received a primary school education at the village volksschool (colonial-era elementary school). i always found doing the interviews very stressful. peter had certain cinematographic considerations of light and aesthetics that he insisted on, so by the time we had asked ibu to sit in the designated spot, fumbled with all the cables and got the microphones set up, i felt thoroughly uncomfortable. ibu was amazingly good at dealing with all the fiddling about. she would have a cigarette while she waited for us and would just get on with yelling out instructions to her family about things needing to be done. i would start with a list of questions that i had formulated during the week based on things we had chatted about. in answer to my first question, ibu would launch into an answer that very quickly veered off the topic because we had already spoken at length about it during the week. she would refer to shared knowledge, which of course when you are documenting something, doesn’t work. i would try various different methods to elicit the information i was looking for, but never successfully. in the end i gave up trying, and i had to accept that i was not in control and would only ask questions relating to whatever she was talking about at the time. peter found this process excruciating because the interview would last for hours and fill up tape after tape with seemingly directionless information. in retrospect however, i’m pleased that i stopped trying to steer the interviews because i am left with a record that is more openended. i have learned many new things about ibu and myself from what she talked about, the questions for which i would at that time not have had the insight and portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 30 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ understanding to ask. during my five-month research period in the dutch film archives, seeing shot after shot of beautiful dancing girls, in the palaces, in the villages, and on the streets, i often remembered with some embarrassment my own motivations in documenting ibu’s dance and life. my complicity with these colonial cameramen was uncomfortably present as i watched the archival footage. i would wonder if ibu had ever been filmed when she was dancing as a young woman. it struck me then that ibu as an old woman was the voice of these nameless, silent dancers of the archives. this thought grew into the realisation of the ibu camera box in troppo obscura. i wanted ibu, who could have been any one of those village dancers i saw in the archives, some of whom i recast in the installation, to have a presence. i had listened to her voice over the eight years of studying and living with her. i knew that there was a very different story attached to this archival image of traditionele javaanse danseressen and the way it was read and retold in the west. i wanted that story to be heard in the west as i had been told and therein, as spivak reminds me, lies my dilemma. reference list bellei, s.l.p. 1998, cannibalism and the new world, cambridge university press, cambridge. chambers, i. 1996, ‘signs of silence, lines of listening’, in i. chambers and l. curti (eds), the post-colonial question: common skies, divided horizons, routledge, london, new york, 47-65. foley, k. 1985, ‘the dancer and the danced: trance dance and traditional performance in west java’, asian theatre journal, vol. 2, 128-149. fusco, c. 2001, the bodies that were not ours and other writings, routledge, london and new york. foulcher, k. 1986, social commitment in literature and the arts: the indonesian ‘institute of people’s culture’, 1950-1965, centre of southeast asian studies monash university, clayton, vic. geertz, c. 1976, the religion of java, university of chicago press, chicago. hage, g. 2003, ‘the anatomy of anti-arab racism,’ the australian financial review, 15 august, 9. holt, c. 1967, art in indonesia: continuities and change, cornell university press, ithaca, ny. masunah, j. 2000, sawitri penari topeng losari, tarawang, yogyakarta. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 31 wulff dancing in the ‘contact zone’ pioquinto, c.e. 1995, dangdut: indonesian popular music: gender and performance, unpublished phd thesis, university of sydney. pratt, m.l. 1992, imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation, routledge, london and new york. ricklefs, m.c. 2001, a history of modern indonesia since c.1200, 3rd edn, palgrave, basingstoke. said, e. 1996, ‘from orientalism’, in p. mongia (ed.), contemporary post colonial theory, arnold, new york. sawitri 1993, interview with the author, losari/cirebon (indonesia). sawitri 1996, interview with the author, losari/cirebon (indonesia). sawitri 1998, interview with the author, losari/cirebon (indonesia). sawitri 1999, interview with the author, losari/cirebon (indonesia). sawitri and gamelan players 1996, interview with the author, losari/cirebon (indonesia). schechner, r. 1991, ‘intercultural themes’, in b. marranca and g. dasgupta (eds), interculturalism and performance, paj publications, new york. sears, l.j. 1996, fantasizing the feminine in indonesia, duke university press, durham and london. sen, k. 1994, indonesian cinema: framing the new order, zed books, london. sen, k. and hill, d.t. 2000, media, culture and politics in indonesia, oxford university press, melbourne. spivak, g. 1988, ‘can the subaltern speak?’ in g. nelson and l. grossberg (eds), marxism and the interpretation of culture, macmillan, london, 271-313. suanda, e. 1983, topeng cirebon: in its social context, wesleyan university press, middletown, ct. suanda, e. 1988, ‘dancing the cirebonese topeng’, journal of the american gamelan institute, vol. 3, no. 3, 7-15. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 32 microsoft word 3775-16713-2-le.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. stigma and exclusion in cross-cultural contexts special issue, guest edited by annie pohlman, sol rojas-lizana and maryam jamarani. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. stigma, trauma and the social forces shaping memory transmission in argentina jill stockwell, swinburne university since the return to democratic rule in argentina in 1983, competing claims about how the period of political and state violence of the 1970s and 1980s might be collectively remembered by the nation have caused deep political and societal divisions. this paper explores the personal memories of argentine women1 from two ideologically-opposed groups—those on the political left affected by military repression during the 1976– 1983 military dictatorship and those on the political right affected by the armed guerrilla violence predominantly in the years leading up to the 1976 military coup.2 in contemporary argentina, the memories of enduring personal trauma carried by both groups of women are commonly perceived as unable to co-exist in a shared mnemonic 1 women have played and continue to play a highly visible and active role in argentine memorial cultures, and are particularly influential in the intergenerational transmission of memories. despite women playing a central role in the transmission of memory to the next generation, in many transitional contexts the role women play is marginalised. in argentina, however, there is a direct connection between women remembering experiences of violence at a grassroots level and their attempt to gain a place in the public sphere. i suggest that we can learn a great deal from looking at how argentine women have mediated and assimilated their traumatic pasts, both publicly and privately, as well as the ways in which their practices of remembrance impact and shape social relations, and apply these to better understanding women’s experiences of violence in other transitional contexts. 2 in the years leading up to the military coup, political violence was widespread (calvero 2005). there were armed groups on various sides of the ideological divide, including an armed guerrilla movement (extreme left) and paramilitary death-squads (extreme right). the guerrilla groups were engaged in urban bombings that claimed scores of victims and mounted attempts on military installations and their personnel (brysk 1994). the peronist montoneros and the marxist ejército revolucionario del pueblo (erp) were considered to be the two main armed guerrilla groups. stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 2 space—as if remembering one history of violence is seen as an attempt to forget or violate the other history of violence and trauma. vittoria villaruel, who works on behalf of the victims of the armed guerrilla movement, told me of the public hostility and harassment faced by the families she supports on a daily basis. in our interview, she told me that she herself has publicly been labelled a fascist for demanding human rights on behalf of the organisation’s victims. ‘we’re being called nazis for defending innocent people,’ vittoria told me.3 her observation made me realise that despite pioneering many of the justice-seeking and truth-telling mechanisms designed to ‘deal with’ the past in transitioning democracies, argentine memorial cultures remain in the entrenched political and ideological divisions of old. i contend that we need to look beyond political and ideological contestations and engage in a deeper analysis of how memorial cultures are created and sustained. i argue that we cannot account for the antagonism and stigma pervading argentine memorial cultures, without acknowledging the role played by individual emotions and affect in generating and shaping collective emotions and affects (hutchison & bleiker 2008).4 i am not attempting to depoliticise the conversation about memory and trauma in contemporary argentina; nor am i seeking to deny that the two groups exist in a heavily politicised arena. however, i am proposing that we shift our attention away from the exclusive focus on the political and ideological nature of their stories of violence and incorporate an affective reading of the two groups of women’s traumatic memories. in this paper, i explore the role of the transmission of emotions and affects with regard to how and why they can stir individuals and collectives to such an extent that the past continues to operate as a source of social and political division. drawing on 3 interview with vittoria villaruel, director, el centro de estudios legales sobre el terrorismo y sus victimas (celtyv), buenos aires, 29 april 2009. the research for this paper is based on oral testimonies i collected in 2009 in argentina as part of my phd research with two groups of women: those whose family members were kidnapped and murdered by the armed political groups from 1973 to 1976; and those whose family members were kidnapped, disappeared or murdered by the military government from 1976 to 1983. the interviewees emphasised their preference for disclosing both their names and the identities of their missing/killed family members. all translations of the women’s quotes are my own. 4 affect can be used as a broad term to refer to emotions, feelings, and affects (shouse 2005: para 2). the three terms are often used interchangeably. feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social and affects are pre-personal (para 2). displays of emotion can be genuine or feigned; when we relay our emotions publicly, they may be an expression of our internal state or they may be contrived in order to fulfil social expectations (para 4). affects are more abstract than emotions because they cannot always be fully realised in language (para 5). they are non-conscious and unformed, and refer to the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance with an added dimension of intensity (para 5). stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 3 contemporary theories of the emotional and affective transmission of memories, i consider the verbal and non-verbal ways in which traumatic memories are communicated between individuals.5 in analysing the affective transmission of memory, i seek to develop ways of thinking about how emotions and affects can shape encounters between people and permeate public spheres of remembrance. rather than simply rendering a factual narrative of the past, this paper engages emotions and affects as a way of exploring how these may become the source of a different kind of understanding of the stigma that fuels existing societal antagonisms in argentine society. the politics of remembering in argentina argentine scholar elizabeth jelin (2003) suggests that every time argentina experiences a change of government debates surface over what and how to remember the period of repression and political violence in the 1970s and 1980s. various actors who have taken part in these debates have linked their political programs for the future with the memories of a violent past (jelin 2003). as a result, the two different groups of victims—those of the left versus those of the right—have come to view the public sphere in which they articulate their memories of trauma as a ‘scarce resource’ (rothberg 2009: 3). it is as if different memories vie for pre-eminence in a constant struggle for political, social and legal recognition in which (again) there are only winners and losers (rothberg 2009). as political opponents have pushed to remember certain groups of victims while sidelining others within the formation of argentina’s collective memorial culture, contentious debates about past violence within society have intensified. these debates have resulted in the polarisation of groups that struggle to overcome the injustices of political recognition over whose history should ultimately be recognised. these competitive ideological battles have had major consequences for the make-up of the public sphere in which individual memories enter and circulate in the present day; they have also had crucial implications for the shaping of argentine collective memorial culture and identity. with an increasing need for collective identity amidst social and political conflicts over how to account for violations experienced during this traumatic 5 maurice halbwachs (1992) originally asserted that rather than residing within the individual memories are formed and organised within a collective context; as a result various groups of people have different collective memories, which in turn give rise to different modes of behaviour. in other words, halbwachs believes that the memory of individuals is influenced by the social context in which they function and that virtually all experiences and perceptions are shaped by one individual’s interaction with another. stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 4 past, argentina has developed into a society of memory groups, with each claiming recognition and the legitimacy of its voices and demands. as those who personally experienced suffering have given oral testimony in the public sphere and talked of their experiences with others, memory has become a common language through which individuals have been able to articulate and share their traumatic experiences. as a result, memory has become a dominant form of belonging in argentina. members of particular political and ideological groups have created a shared fabric of a life-world in which remembering their loved ones who were affected by political and state violence is central. the spread of these community-based groups, whereby being a group member means assuming a shared identity and subscribing to a shared group past, has resulted in the ‘problematisation of memory’ (misztal 2004: 68). as the boundaries of memory parallel the boundaries of group identity, there is a sense of competitive victimhood as groups compete for the recognition and legitimisation of their memories of victimhood at the exclusion of others within the public sphere (rothberg 2009). there has been a long history to reclamation rights in argentina since the end of military rule. however, official recognition of the desaparecidos6 only came about after 2003. néstor kirchner—the first peronist president since the successive administrations of juan and isabel péron prior to the military coup of 1976—came to power in that year and endorsed new cultural models of collective remembrance. for the first time since the early days of the return to democratic rule, the governments of néstor kirchner (2003–2007) and cristina fernández kirchner (since 2007) embraced the traditional discourse of human rights by consecrating the idea of memory as a ‘national duty’ (sosa 2009: 251). following years of being publicly stigmatised and questioned about their individual involvement in armed guerrilla activities, and dealing with consistent institutional denial—particularly under the menem government7—survivors and 6 coined by the military as a way of denying the kidnap, torture and murder of its citizens, the word desaparecer, ‘to disappear,’ began to be used as a transitive verb in the argentine language from the time of the military coup, 24 march 1976 (feitlowitz 1998). those who were disappeared by the argentine military are referred to as los desaparecidos; the majority were abducted by the security forces and taken to clandestine detention centres, where they were tortured and later murdered (conadep 1986). the total number of disappeared is contested. argentina’s under secretariat for human rights estimates the official number of disappeared to be up to 12,000 (barahona de brito et al. 2001). thirty thousand is considered an emblematic figure used by many argentine human rights organisations. 7 when carlos menem assumed office in july 1989, he extended pardons to all military officials with human rights prosecutions pending and to former military junta leaders already convicted of human rights violations (brysk 1994). stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 5 families of the desaparecidos finally felt they were being acknowledged under the kirchner administrations. in recent times, however, the families of victims of the armed guerrilla movement have rallied together to fight against perceived moves by the current government to remember one side of history while forgetting the other. these families told me that their feelings of victimisation had been reignited since the kirchner administrations took office. in their view, the kirchners began to make the memories of loss and violence of the families of the desaparecidos more politically relevant than those of the families of the victims of the armed guerrilla movement. for example, lorenza told me of her struggle to find a reason to keep on living because the sadness and the sense of loss she experienced on a daily basis were overwhelming. she told me that the memory of seeing her only daughter, nineteen-year-old laura, critically wounded by a car bomb that exploded outside the gates of her university in 1975, never leaves her. lorenza described feeling as though she is forced to exist on the edge of society, in a no-man’s land, because her daughter laura, who was apolitical, was in the wrong place at the wrong time when a car bomb that was planted by the armed guerrilla movement exploded. she told me: ‘these were political ideas that weren’t mine, that weren’t of my family, that weren’t of laura. and we were victims of these political ideas.’ for lorenza the struggle she has faced to live with such traumatic memories has been compounded by a sense of ‘imposed oblivion’ (passerini 2003: 247) and a never-ending struggle for the moral and legal recognition of her memories in the public sphere. lorenza told me that she sent three letters to the president of argentina, asking for those responsible in the armed guerrilla movement to be held legally accountable. she received no reply but, many months later, was deeply confused when she was sent a card from the president wishing her a ‘happy new year.’ lorenza reveals the extent to which she is locked psychically into the dependence on the state for recognition of her traumatic memories. she continues: i have never received an explanation [of who killed laura]. i can never receive an explanation when there’s so much silence and so much forgetfulness. the pain i feel is already bad enough but this is what makes my pain so much worse. completely … terror touched me. and this, i don’t know, is abandoning someone, really abandoning someone.8 8 interview with lorenza ferrari, buenos aires, 29 july 2009. stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 6 vittoria villaruel from el centro de estudios legales sobre el terrorismo y sus víctimas (celtyv)9 stressed that the organisation had initiated thousands of lawsuits over recent years. many of the families feel they have been denied justice because the state, while having an obligation to investigate the claims, has refused to do so. lorenza concurs: in recent years [i feel the injustice] a lot more. before there was always a little hope, that there would be more justice. but now, i despair that there could ever be justice. today, and today more than yesterday, and for certain tomorrow more than today, i ask for justice. i want to know why … for me, every day, when i hear the difference that is being made between the dead, it’s like being stabbed [in my heart]. it’s like being stabbed because it’s another foot that is pushing laura into the ground … justice is blindfolded. justice is blind [in argentina] because it doesn’t see that which it should. rather than playing a role in expanding social patterns of recognition, lorenza perceives the current government’s political approach to collective remembrance of the period of political violence during the 1970s has magnified the social and cultural conditions that foster feelings of marginalisation, ostracism, resistance and anger among the families of victims of the armed guerrilla resistance. lorenza told me she has sought support from the organisation celtyv, not because she has ever been affiliated in any way with the political right, but because her daughter was killed in an attack by the armed guerrilla movement. with the current government uninterested in her claim for recognition, she feels she has nowhere else to turn for support. though not affiliated with the political left or right, lorenza still finds herself caught up in the middle of competitive remembering. her story shows how someone who is apolitical can be coopted into a political discourse because they have nowhere else to turn. lorenza was angry because she was ostracised by argentine society simply because her daughter was killed by ‘the wrong crowd.’ she told me: today i know there are montoneros still alive, some of whom, i want to tell you clearly because i have nothing to hide … if i have something to say i will say it … some of them are in today’s government. as a political idea, i’m not saying they were laura’s killers, but as a political idea, they are in government and they are the same ones who won’t acknowledge what happened to me and to others. that’s to say, the military have someone to defend them, the montoneros have someone to defend them. but who’s going to defend me? me, my son, my husband, nobody has come near us; no government has ever looked after our mental health because i’ll tell you, insanity is waiting at the door. it only has to open it. 9 the organisation offers psychological support to the victims of the armed guerrilla movement, and runs publicity campaigns to heighten awareness, both locally and internationally. it also prepares cases and campaigns the government to reopen legal proceedings against those suspected of the murder of the family members that the organisation represents. the organisation, though concerned with issues of historical justice, is perceived by the argentine human rights movement as having an active political agenda. stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 7 women such as lorenza regularly give oral testimony in the public sphere as a way of countering the ‘amnesia’ imposed by various societal and institutional groups around past injustices. only by testifying to their traumatic experiences do the women with whom i spoke feel they can ‘reinscribe their subjectivity into situations that mutilated it to the point of annihilation’ (oliver 2001: 99). however, in doing this they face the prospect that their testimonies could be forever ‘on trial,’ their credibility constantly questioned (99). this is true for any testimony that ascribes to forms of oppression, argues oliver (2001), so long as the culture within which an individual speaks continues with policies of amnesia. despite this, the two groups of women continue to give oral testimony as a way of justifying their status as fully fledged citizens of argentine society, flying in the face of any attempts to silence the memories of their loved ones. the transmission of emotions powerful collective memories about the period of state terror and political violence of the 1970s and 1980s have heightened political and social tensions in contemporary argentina. in turn, strong bonds have been formed between individuals from within adversarial memorial cultures, resulting in highly specific collective memories. much of the power of these collective memories, i argue, has in part been derived from the strong emotions that they provoke. for memory belongs in the ‘intermediary realm’ between individuals; it develops and grows out of the interplay of interpersonal relations and, as such, the emotions play an important role in this process (assmann 2006: 3). oral testimony has played a crucial role in how events have collectively been assimilated and remembered in argentina. in continuously speaking publicly about their traumatic memories and relating their emotional experiences in the form of oral testimony, the women i interviewed have thus played a significant role in an important social psychological process called the ‘social sharing of emotions’ (rimé & christophe 1997: 133). there is much empirical evidence suggesting that emotions tend to be socially shared (rimé & christophe 1997). while researchers previously considered emotions as merely a short-lived and intrapersonal phenomenon, more recent theories on emotions reveal strong evidence that emotions are essentially interpersonal communicative acts, which instead involve long-term social processes: the more individuals are upset, the more likely they are to share their story with others and to elicit vivid and long-lasting memories of the event (rimé & christophe 1997). this process can influence the way stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 8 an historical experience is organised in memory and perhaps recalled in the future (pennebaker & banasik 1997). i suggest that the social sharing of emotion has contributed significantly to the ongoing polarisation between the right and left within argentine collective memorial culture as individuals’ perceptions and understanding of violent events have been shaped by those giving oral testimony. the fear and terror associated with past violence are strongly communicated by both groups of women in their narratives, and this in turn can engender strong feelings in those listening. for example, gladys, whose military husband was killed by the armed guerrilla movement in 1976, reiterated negationist information that she had received through others about the ‘real’ fate of the desaparecidos: the children that they [human rights organisations/families of the disappeared] say are disappeared … you can’t believe that it’s true. some friends of mine went to see the names listed on the posters [of las madres] in the plaza de mayo and they know for a fact that they are alive. so it’s not certain … it’s not certain.10 gladys is visibly angry as she reconstructs and shares with me negationist claims that she has received from others within her memorial group. it is information that serves to create a doubt about the fate of those who were disappeared by the military. as gladys circulates the information, her emotional experience also circulates and spreads throughout her social group. therefore, as individuals repetitively relate their emotional experiences to others, the social group gradually assimilates those experiences and, as a result, is furnished with new emotional knowledge (rimé & christophe 1997). as we can see from gladys’s narrative, as the two groups of women share memories about their traumatic life events in the public sphere, the attitudes of those listening can also become more extreme toward past collective issues and the current society (paez, basabe & gonsalez 1997). in going beyond the women’s standard narratives of trauma and violence, and in exploring the transmission of their emotions, we can see how the women have ‘an ability to affect and be affected’ when they talk about their shared pasts (massumi 1987: xvi). i argue that the women’s emotions are a social force that remains and is at work in the public sphere long after they have shared their experiences with others. i suggest that the women’s emotions leave an affective residue, which has what anna gibbs 10 interview with gladys echegoyen, buenos aires, 22 july 2009. stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 9 (2010: 187) describes as an ‘energetic capacity.’ this capacity contributes toward a sense of the continuance of stigma and animosity over time. the affective residue helps to sustain and preserve the connections between those ideas, thoughts, values and habits that act as an affective charge within a politics of remembering in contemporary argentine society. the transmission of affects though not always visible or noticed, i argue that powerful affects are also released in the process of individuals remembering and sharing their traumatic pasts. like the emotions, affect is another social force that structures group identities, and the traffic between the individual and collective forms of remembrance. affect also plays a role in what stern calls ‘the interpersonal traffic of feeling’ (cited in watkins 2010: 278). affect is the name we give to those forces that can serve as a kind of ‘raw psychic material’ to drive us towards movement and thought, and influence our conscious and unconscious behaviours and attitudes (tumarkin 2009: 8). affect cannot be fully realised in language, as it is always prior to or in excess of conscious states of perception (massumi 2002). it has a grammar of its own, and is the body’s way of preparing it for action and reaction in a given environment at a certain level of intensity (massumi 2002). massumi (2002) defines affect in terms of its autonomy from conscious perception and language; it is about the body opening up to the indeterminacy of its automatic responses. gilles deleuze’s work on corporeality suggests the ways in which affect is mediated through the dynamic interaction between different bodies: ‘a body affects other bodies, or is affected by other bodies; it is this capacity for affecting and being affected that also defines a body in its individuality’ (1988: 123). deleuze’s theory challenges assumptions about the boundaries and the boundedness of bodies, or ‘what we take to be our own and how one body relates to others’ in its vicinity (probyn 2010: 76). we can apply deleuze’s model of bodily affect to contemporary argentina as a way of understanding how the fear lodged deep inside the mental space of argentine civilians by the military government persists and circulates in non-verbal and nonrepresentational ways among individuals and throughout the society today. in our interview, abuela buscarita and abuela raquel told me that a well-known clandestine detention centre used by the military to torture the desaparecidos was located around stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 10 the corner from las abuelas’s head office. they avoid passing by the centre because it induces so much fear and anxiety within them—so much so that it can raise the hair on their skin. the women know that, historically, the building holds within it a level of danger; they already have an impression of the risks associated with the building and this impression is felt on the surface of their skin (ahmed 2004a). the fear and anxiety is exacerbated as the abuelas pass by the building because they are physically reminded of their deep losses, and this anxiety is displaced on to the object of their fear (ahmed 2004a): the detention centre. as a result, fear shapes the borders between the abuelas and the building, as they affectively grasp that it is a danger that should be avoided. deleuze’s understanding of the ability of bodies to affect and to be affected provides a powerful way of understanding how the women’s feelings of loss, melancholy and anger when remembering their traumatic pasts can accumulate, seep into and reside within other bodies in the public sphere, altering individuals’ understanding of their selves as well as their relation with the past (probyn 2010). going public with their narratives ensures that testimony occupies a public sphere, which can include both identifiable witnesses as well as potential addressees (rothberg 2008). in this way, the circulation of the women’s narratives and the accompanying affects result in the shaping of the contours of the public space they inhabit (rothberg 2008). their public testimonies fill this space with ‘the psychic and physical losses that cannot be transcended’ (rothberg 2008: 219). if we think about deleuze’s explanation of how affect works, then we are able to consider what this process of remembering may produce in the context of postdictatorship argentina. exploring how affect is retained and accumulated, and the way in which it can circulate between bodies and shape subjectivities, is crucial to our understanding of how it can form and mobilise individuals or groups in different ways over a period of time.11 transmission of affect and perception laura speaks about how the attitudes and experiences of her parents have been crucial in shaping the fear of violence of the next generation of argentines. she says: 11 for further discussion on the emotional and affective transmission of trauma, see stockwell (2014). stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 11 [some kids] were breastfed with fear. if a kid lives in a home where her parents are terrified and don’t go out at night, she feels those things. there were parents who were always afraid during the military regime. they couldn’t live a quiet life, scared that ‘[the military] would come and take us away.’ when you live in fear, you transmit this to your children. (cited in kaiser 2005b: 56) a number of scholars (brennan 2004; probyn 2005) suggest that affects can be contagious. teresa brennan’s the transmission of affect (2004) develops this idea in her model of connectedness and transmission of affects. she asks: ‘is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and “felt the atmosphere?”’ (2004: 1). brennan’s idea also forms part of the intellectual history of crowd psychology and the sociology of emotion, and explains that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies; there is no clear boundary separating individuals and their environment. brennan suggests that it is primarily a modern and western approach to assume that the individual is energetically self-contained, and that affects and feelings are an individual’s alone. for brennan the origin of transmitted affects is social, since affects can arise from within an individual but can also occur as a result of an interaction between an individual and his/her environment: ‘by the transmission of affect, i mean simply that the emotions or affects of one person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into another’ (2004: 3). this, she contends, does not mean that an individual’s particular emotional experience is irrelevant. instead, brennan points out that if one picks up on another’s feelings or emotions, the thoughts one attaches to that affect remain one’s own: ‘they remain the product of the particular historical conjunction of worlds and experiences i represent. the thoughts are not necessarily tied to the affects they appear to evoke. one may as well say that the affects evoke the thoughts’ (2004: 7). we can see in gladys’s example how the doubt spread among other members of her memorial group leads her to openly and publicly doubt the claims of las madres de la plaza de mayo and the human rights movement in her narrative. i suggest that we look to theories of affect contagion as a way of understanding the role affects may play in the constitution of a relationship between individuals, groups and communities. in her model of the sociality of emotions, sara ahmed (2004a) argues that emotions create ‘surfaces and boundaries’ that assist individuals to discern between what is inside and outside in the first place. she believes that surfaces and boundaries are made precisely through the emotions, or through how individuals respond to objects, situations stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 12 or others (ahmed 2004a).12 in exploring the sociality of affects, we can begin to understand how affects work to align some individuals with some and against others. ahmed’s theory of affective attachment in particular gives us a way of understanding how emotions play a crucial role in the ‘surfacing of individual and collective bodies’ (2004a: 25). how we feel about others is what aligns us with a collective (ahmed 2004a). ahmed’s theory offers a way to talk about both emotions and affect, and the ways in which both can shape individual and group perception. emotions and affects align individuals with communities through an intensity of attachment; in other words, those ideas that connect us to one thing or another, that which makes us feel or that which holds us in place (ahmed 2000). in this way, the forming of the individual and the nation arises partly by viewing the ‘other’ as the cause of one’s emotional duress (ahmed 2004a). through being moved by the proximity of another affective attachments take place, affecting some differently from others (ahmed 2004a). for example, when the group las abuelas de la plaza de mayo (the grandmothers) was nominated to receive the nobel peace prize, an email petition was circulated by celtyv asking for signatures in protest at the nomination of las abuelas. the petition declared that las abuelas had never spoken out in support of the victims of the armed guerrilla movement, and was in fact associated with those guerrillas who had killed their family members. the petition, to date with nearly 22,000 signatures, was sent to the nobel prize committee citing opposition based on the following rationale: the families of the victims of terror have never heard, in 26 years of democratic rule, one word of consolation or empathy from members of an organisation [las abuelas] which supports the impunity of terrorists, a unilateral version of history, and the actions and disappearance of the collective memory of thousands of innocent victims of bomb attacks, kidnappings, torture, assassinations, and robberies, all left unpunished. (www.petitiononline.com/celtyv1a/petition) such a narrative produces a polarisation between the two groups of victims, and sets up an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy that blames las abuelas for destroying any future possibility for peace and reconciliation in argentina. the online petition reveals the existence of a perceived injury: the refusal of las abuelas to negate the violence committed by the armed guerrilla movement is constituted as the cause of celtyv’s members’ ongoing feelings of pain. celtyv feels it is the injured party—the one that 12 ahmed (2004b) uses the term ‘object’ to refer to objects, situations or individuals. stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 13 is hurt by the silence of las abuelas. it perceives this silence as a direct provocation, and holds las abuelas accountable for putting the well-being of the nation at risk. one’s perception of another involves a form of ‘contact’ between the individual and the ‘other’ that is shaped by longer histories of contact (ahmed 2004b: 194). it is the ‘moment of contact,’ shaped and informed by past histories, which allows the proximity of the ‘other’ to thus be perceived as threatening. in this way, we can see how affects work to secure collectives through the way they align some individuals together, but against others (ahmed 2004a). in the example of the online petition, hatred plays a role in shaping collectives by way of sustaining injured parties that adopt defensive approaches against those whose proximity is perceived as threatening. celtyv feels victimised by las abuelas in the present because the organisation is seen as fighting for the memory of those who killed their family members. the intensity of attachment the women feel for the ‘other’ has been shaped by the changing political approaches to collective remembering in argentina since the return to democratic rule. as a result, the affective responses the women have towards their traumatic memories are partly triggered by the collective political approach to memorialisation in argentina (traverso 2010: 182). this point was articulated by gladys, who expressed her growing despair with what she perceived as the current government’s ‘protection’ of human rights groups within argentina. these groups, gladys believes, shelter those who committed crimes within the armed guerrilla movement, including those who killed her husband. she told me: ‘i’ve never met them [las madres de la plaza de mayo], but it makes me mad because they appear with their posters, they are totally protected by this government.’ paloma aguilar fernández suggests that: ‘one tends to see one’s contemporary adversaries through the prism of the adversary that one had in the past’ (cited in jelin 2003: 147). gladys was confused by the different messages she had received, and mistrustful of some of the claims made by the families of the desaparecidos because of her association with them as mothers of ‘terrorists’ in the past. gladys’s example illustrates the vexed relationship in argentina between the changing politics of remembrance, stigma and affect. stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 14 as individuals, we become aware of ourselves through our contact with others (merleau-ponty 1962). this contact can generate both positive and negative affects. power relations have a particular impact on the alignment between individuals when soliciting the recognition of others becomes a measure for the acknowledgement and confirmation of an individual’s self-worth. when recognition functions in a negative way and carries with it the resultant force of negative affects, it can have a detrimental effect on an individual’s self-worth. the ability of affect to accumulate and its relationship to recognition—and the ways in which this interconnected process may obliterate the possibility for empathic alignment with others—can be seen in the following example of the adversarial nature of interactions between different memorial cultures in argentina. in our interview, barbara told me that to talk about her father is to recuperate his memory. as she was only very young when her father was killed, barbara has relied on newspaper cuttings and anecdotes from her father’s colleagues to understand who her father really was. the role her journalist father played in the violence of the 1970s before his death—unsolved in her mind—can be a source of intense frustration. ‘he never killed anyone, i’m sure of it,’ barbara told me. she continued: where is the proof? ... the situation was very violent. he [her father] had a weekly television program where … tarquini [her father’s name] was an easy target. everyone in the world knew it because he was a very straightforward type, very energetic, and he talked very … he said some very heavy things and in a strong way. my mother said that she knew that he was going to be killed … because he was very honest, spontaneous … there were times … he was an exhibitionist.13 barbara describes her internal anguish at the lack of evidence provided by those attempting to vilify her father as a member of a right-wing paramilitary group, and the frustration she has suffered when her efforts to clear her father’s name have been thwarted. barbara struggles with feelings of stigmatisation and public shame because of the presumed role her father played in the terror inflicted by the military. her story illustrates the way in which our perception of something as beneficial or harmful depends on how it affects us (ahmed 2004b). because of her interface with political and social judgements about the actions of her father in the past, barbara feels ashamed that she herself has done something wrong; she feels that she is to blame in some way for her father’s actions. current political and social conditions produce within barbara an 13 interview with barbara tarquini, buenos aires, 17 july 2009. stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 15 ambiguous coexistence between feelings of shame and pride. she carries these contradictory emotions within herself, experiencing great anxiety at being unable to restore her father’s memory in the public sphere and attain a sense of pride about who she is. in barbara’s case, she has failed to elicit for herself a sense of social recognition. as honneth explains: ‘recognition itself must possess the character of affective approval or encouragement’ (1995: 95). these affects, states watkins, ‘are the corporeal instantiation of recognition, the sensations one may feel in being recognized, which accumulate over time, fostering a sense of self-worth’ (2010: 273). moments of recognition therefore function as an affective force (watkins 2010). barbara’s perception that political, social and cultural recognition is withheld from her when she remembers her father creates feelings of having failed in the eyes of the ‘ideal other’ (ahmed 2004b). for barbara, recognition functions in a negative way, and carries with it the resultant force of negative affects. barbara’s sense of shame and her shattered sense of self-worth bind her negatively to others in her failure to ‘live up to’ others (ahmed 2004b: 107). barbara has the impression that the government and human rights organisations are marginalising her personal memories of her father; moreover, those groups also leave her with the impression that she has something to feel shameful about. she feels that she cannot be a legitimate player in argentina’s collective memorial culture. severed social bonds when considering the physical, emotional and psychological damage that the women i interviewed have endured, it is not just the effects of trauma on an individual’s bodily or ‘skin’ surface that we need to think about, but also the ways in which the ‘skin’ of the community has been affected (ahmed 2004a). for example, the violence experienced during the 1970s and 1980s was not just inflicted on the bodies of those individuals who personally lived through the terror, but was also inflicted on the body of argentine society; society itself was torn apart by the disappearance and murder of thousands of its citizens. the argentine community was damaged insofar as attachments with loved ones were severed. this has resulted in a collective trauma that has involved ‘a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality’ (erikson 1995: 187). stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 16 kai erikson (1995) suggests that trauma has a social dimension, and can create community. for many survivors of argentina’s clandestine detention centres, and the families of desaparecidos and murdered individuals, feeling different from others after experiencing a trauma has become a kind of calling and has drawn individuals together who are similarly affected (erikson 1995). while the numbness and dislocation shared by traumatised individuals mean that relating to each other can be painful and difficult, they can still be shared as a source of communality and shared identity (erikson 1995). however, while trauma can engender a sense of community between individuals and groups, it can also damage the texture of a community (erikson 1995). dori laub and nanette auerhahn (1989) write that the link between individuals is predicated on the possibility and expectation of empathy. however, when individuals’ vital needs either go unheeded or are ignored by others, those individuals lose the expectation that their needs will in some way be met (laub & auerhahn 1989). as the individual no longer feels they have anyone on whom they can count, the link between the self and the ‘other’ is obliterated by a failure of empathy (laub & auerhahn 1989). a failure of empathy indicates a failure in an individual’s interpersonal environment: the message one sends out is not responded to by another (laub & auerhahn 1989). for example, barbara was told by government agencies that she did not have the right to claim assistance as a victim of the military dictatorship because her father was declared a fascist. barbara told me: i went to speak with forensic psychologists who were reconstructing cases. i wanted to know how they operated, how they worked out to which group the murdered belonged. and they told me, no, your father was a fascist. a lot of doors closed for me because of the ideology of my father. the lack of receptivity for her trauma has made barbara feel as if she is not regarded as a citizen with equal rights within argentine society. barbara feels there is no understanding for her experience of loss, and feels desperately alone as a result. barbara does not feel she is able to engage within her environment interpersonally, and as such is unable to elicit a sense of mutuality. she is left feeling that she has nobody within the government or human rights organisations on whom she can count. in argentina, considerable social damage has been produced by the significant absence of empathy for the grief of others. this has denied both groups of women what they desire: the acknowledgement and empathic engagement with their suffering by those stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 17 individuals instrumental and directly responsible in causing their emotional pain (ross 2003). when the women believe their memories have not been given the political, moral, social and legal recognition they feel they deserve within the public sphere of collective remembrance, affective alignment fails; this failure of affective alignment perpetuates the stalemate between members of antagonistic memorial cultures (ahmed 2004a). what this means for the women i interviewed is that the failure of empathy for the other group’s grief destroys the possibility for communication between adversarial memorial cultures. the women’s ideologically charged projections result in certain fixations ‘that project onto others or deposit into others negative affects’; in turn, these can create the illusion of affects being ‘located’ in other individuals of ideologically opposed groups (schwab 2010: 112). the circulation of negative affects can radically disturb people’s understanding of themselves, as well as their relations with others and the past (probyn 2010). what is then produced is a lack of what ahmed (2004a: 36) calls ‘fellow feeling’: the women’s pain cannot be shared through empathy with others in different memory groups. conclusion it becomes clear that we cannot possibly understand argentine social or public life without understanding the transmission of affective memory. we cannot hope to understand the forces that are at play to keep such stigma and deep animosity in place decades after the end of the dictatorship. affect is created as the women repetitively share their narratives of violence and loss in the public sphere. affect is that which is said and that remains unsaid in the oral testimony encounter. it is that which can communicate and motivate overtly and publicly; but it is also an excess that remains unprocessed and misrecognised, evading consciousness yet provoking behaviour all the same. in post-authoritarian contexts emerging from periods of mass violence, the notion of affect is particularly relevant to raising our consciousness of how individuals carry the legacy of surviving violence and how they continue living with their heart-breaking loss. most crucially, i believe, the notion of affect makes us conscious of the vulnerability of others. judith butler (2003) critically asks, ‘what makes for a grievable life?’ she asserts that a process of differential grieving can lead to the marginalisation of groups that do not conform to the prevailing norm of the human (butler 2009). these ungrievable groups are stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 18 framed as never having been lives at all, and so are already lost from the living (butler 2009). perceived as threats to human life rather than as living people, such groups become targeted for marginalisation in order to ‘protect the lives of the living’ (butler 2009: 31). butler presents a connection between vulnerability, political recognition and the performative element of community by arguing that violence and the experience of loss are a part of us all: we all have some notion of what it is to lose somebody. she argues that grief can lay bare the ‘thrall’ in which our relations with others hold us; ‘in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control’ (butler 2004: 23). butler tells us that we need to critically evaluate and oppose such conditions that make some lives more vulnerable and more grievable than others: ‘from where might a principle emerge by which we vow to protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered, if not from an apprehension of a common human vulnerability?’ (butler 2003: 30). we must acknowledge, however, what a mammoth task it is to recognise this ‘common human vulnerability’ to which butler refers – to ask individuals who have been pushed to the limits of humanity themselves to see the vulnerability of those who have pushed them. when i think about how some of the women i interviewed struggle to find a way to keep living with their memories, i question whether we can ask any more of them. however, there were moments when some of the women described moving into a different relationship to the pain they were suffering. victoria paz told me: i quietly approached some families [of the disappeared] that i could trust so that they could explain to me and teach me about the violence they suffered... for my pain and the injustice that happened to my father to take its rightful place [in argentina’s collective memorial record], i had to find out the other side of the story. if not, then my story is partial and subjective.14 victoria’s comment reminds us that while affect can result in a negative attachment to others, it is in following the trails of affect, with the ‘restlessness of its promise’ and ‘the relief of its continued mobilization’ (stewart 2010: 353), that we may find new relational possibilities and new, non-reductive ways of thinking about memory in a society recovering from violence and trauma. 14 interview with victoria paz, buenos aires, 12 july 2009. stockwell stigma, trauma portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 19 reference list ahmed, s. 2000, transformations: thinking through feminism. routledge, new york. ahmed, s. 2004a, ‘collective feelings: or, the impressions left by others,’ theory culture society, vol. 21, no. 2: 25–42. ______ 2004b, the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh university press, edinburgh. assmann, j. 2006, religion and cultural memory: ten studies, trans. r. livingstone. stanford university 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continuum: journal of media & cultural studies, vol. 24, no. 1: 179–191. tumarkin, m. 2009, ‘disturbing the sound of silence: towards the thick vision of the long soviet silence.’ performance paradigm, vol. 5, no. 2. online, available: http://www.performanceparadigm.net/journal/issue-52/articles/disturbing-the-sound-of-silencetowards-the-thick-vision-of-the-long-soviet-silence/ [accessed march october 2013]. watkins, m. 2010, ‘desiring recognition, accumulating affect,’ in the affect theory reader, (eds) m. gregg and g. j. seigworth. duke university press, durham, nc: 269–288. aaig introduction galley final portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. afro-americanophilia in germany special issue, guest edited by moritz ege and andrew wright hurley. © 2015 [moritz ege and andrew hurley]. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i2.4358 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal introduction: special issue on afro-americanophilia in germany moritz ege, ludwig maximilian university munich andrew wright hurley, university of technology sydney from a ‘provincial’ and (hopefully) self-aware european perspective, it is clear that cultural forms or practices that originated among african americans have, beyond their value to african americans themselves and people elsewhere, contributed tremendously to life on the european continent. those contributions include everything from the political imaginaries of the civil rights and black power movements, through philosophical thought, to literature, film, television, theatre, dance, sports, visual culture and everyday aesthetics. most prominent, perhaps, have been forms of music—blues and jazz to r’n’b, rap, and hybrid electronic music forms—all of which have ‘furnished’ european listeners’ lives, whatever their so-called race. while deeply embedded racism can run through these processes of cultural flow, transfer, and appropriation, and numerous forms of exploitation are at work, in many cases there is also an ambiguous love for black diasporic culture, at least according to the appropriating subjects’ view of themselves, which manifests itself in admiration, desire, a sense of affinity or connection, and sometimes in fantasies of ‘becoming black.’1 this issue’s papers, which 1 by using terms like ‘black’ and ‘white’ we refer to socially dominant categorizations that do not mirror any biologically ‘real’ essence, but are made meaningful by history and by present forms of ascription, discrimination, and political empowerment movements. categorizations like ‘white’ and ‘black’ are not entirely isomorphic across situations and societal-cultural contexts. we tend to spell the word with a capital letter (‘black’) in the context of terminological expressions, of emphatic, affirmative usages and ege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 2 present case studies of what we will call afro-americanophilia, address the forms, ambiguities and politics involved in these cultural processes in 20th-century germany. this interest builds on the existing literature about black diasporic formations, including those in europe, and on writings on cultural traffic and flow that take place under conditions of inequality. if we take a global view, it is clear that the people, cultures and politics of the black atlantic more generally have shaped the experience of modernity and post-modernity in many parts of the world. paul gilroy’s suggestion that black atlantic cultures form a ‘counterculture of modernity’ (gilroy 1993: 29) has dominated the research literature on these questions for quite some time. clearly, people of the black atlantic have shaped the world through their labour (for a long time forced/enslaved), ethico-politically (through the influence of social movements and thought that were directed against slavery, colonialism, racism, and sexism), and aesthetically (through arts and cultural production). furthermore, they have created diasporic modes of belonging and collectivity, that traverse borders and imaginaries, be they national or continental, and simultaneously render the contingent but nonetheless violent nature of such borders more visible. here, however, following an important yet neglected line of inquiry in works such as gilroy’s, we are interested not so much in the ‘negative continent’ of the black atlantic itself, but in its effect on europe, and the resulting difficulties of delimiting self and other. contrary to what old and new forms of racism and nationalism would have us believe, both historically and with regard to ‘the contemporary multiculture,’ and the results of decades of ‘multicultural drift,’ europe is not ‘white’ (gilroy 2004: xii; hall 2013). or, as gilroy apodictically put it some years ago, ‘the peculiar synonymity of the terms european and white cannot continue’ (gilroy 2004: xii). of course, the main reason why it cannot continue lies in the political demands for justice and recognition of europe’s diverse populations. processes of cultural flow and appropriation, however, are another important reason why purity (be it cultural or ‘racial’) can be no more than a fantasy. while, on a more descriptive, historiographical level, the fundamental importance of afro-diasporic presences and influences is relatively well-documented in countries with large black populations, it is less well known in other countries—like germany––where of intentionally political identities, but not as a general rule. quotation marks are used occasionally to serve as reminders of the terms’ problematic nature. ege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 3 the actual presence of people of african origin has been relatively small. yet, here, too, afro-diasporic influences, or what harry j. elam, jr, and kennell m. jackson call global ‘black cultural traffic,’ have played out in important yet complicated ways (elam & jackson 2005). a body of research literature on this question has started to consolidate, and the goal of this special edition of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies is to take a step back, review the literature and its implications and contribute to the historiographic discussion and the attendant wider debate.2 a fundamental result of german research to date has been to show that the german interest in afro-diasporic culture has been far from homogeneous in its forms, functions, politics and positionalities, while, at the same time, some significant patterns of dominance have persisted over long periods of time. ‘white’ majoritarian germans, with a variety of attendant convictions and social positions, have brought their desires, preconceptions and the weight of colonial discourses into the equation. germans of colour, including black germans or afro-germans, have also engaged in complex ways with things african american. at a basic level, our two joint essays and the individual papers in this special edition seek to plumb that heterogeneity. while we grant most attention to the second half of the twentieth century, our first survey essay sketches the important prehistory. but first some words about terminology. in order to search for patterns in the heterogeneous german engagement with the black diaspora, we have oriented ourselves by using the term afro-americanophilia that moritz ege advanced in his 2007 study of west german culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. in ege’s coinage, the term afro-americanophilia denotes a ‘cultural theme’ of wide-spread enthusiasm for african american culture and politics, which manifested in a surge in ‘positive’ (often highly sexualized) images of black people in visual culture, high demand for soul music, solidarity activities for the black panther party among student activists, and a wide range of other more or less ephemeral attempts to show closeness to african americans (see ege, in this volume). these practices of fashioning white selves by connecting them to signs and experiences coded 2 while this is not the place to comprehensively document how gilroy’s notion of the black atlantic (more famous than robert farris thompson’s earlier usage) has been received in germany, it is worthwhile pointing out that the primary vector of reception initially comprised advanced music journalists and cultural critics. a later, more academically oriented milestone was a conference and subsequent publication organized by paul gilroy, fatima el-tayeb and tina campt, and specifically titled ‘der black atlantic’ (berlin 2004). other relevant works include the volume blackening europe, edited by heike raphael-hernandez (2004). ege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 4 as black were especially inflected by the contours of the post-nazi era, when explicitly racist vocabularies were (largely) taboo in public discourse, and when many—but by no means all––younger germans searched for identities untainted by the legacy of german fascism. this was also an optimistic time when new african states and the black power movement in the usa challenged and redefined the global ‘colour line.’ from a more critical perspective, however, we can view young afro-americanophile germans of the day as searching for an identification in order to ‘align themselves with the victims and avengers of genocide, rather than its perpetrators and accomplices,’ and doing so without questioning the implications of their own whiteness, as the drama scholar katrin sieg puts it (2002: 13).3 in our two joint essays we attend to the ambiguities in post-war afro-americanophilia, but we are also interested in the prehistory and afterlife of the high afro-americanophilia of the post-war era. afro-americanophilia is a cultural theme that presents itself at different levels and in different intensities. it can denote simple mimesis of ‘black’ cultural practices— moments of dancing to ‘black’ music, singing along, or a passing imaginary identification, as in reading and other forms of cultural reception or consumption. such moments, ephemeral as they tend to be, do not necessarily have great relevance to the individual, and they certainly do not amount to strong empathy, recognition, or commitment within a collective, but they can contribute to significant overarching cultural themes. for some individuals (and, in some cases, for groups such as youth subcultures), afro-americanophilia can also exceed transient moments of mimesis and take the form of a more stable yet somehow ineffable, embodied identification with ‘being black’ and with ‘blackness,’ that is, with the imaginary essence of the african american experience, whatever that may be understood to mean (johnson 2003: 4). at different times, various non-black dissidents became disenchanted with their conventional ‘white’ identities and felt an elective affinity with african diasporic experience. for some protagonists of afro-americanophilia, this even became a lifelong process. we can call their type of identification ‘enhanced’ afro-americanophilia. at times afro-americanophilia like this can articulate with fantasies and desires of ‘becoming black.’ ‘becoming black’ was famously advanced by the french philosophers gilles deleuze and félix guattari (1987), who used the term to translate 3 from the beginning, we must stress that german society was not afro-americanophile in its entirety; rather, only significant groups within it were. ege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 5 ambiguous practices of imitation, appropriation, and desire into a fantasy of imaginary or symbolic ‘race-change.’4 the trope of ‘becoming black’ tended to be employed in verbal discourse with some awareness of its own counterfactual, imaginary character, and the practices that we term afro-americanophile could sometimes also be ironic and self-aware. this irony is retained within the term, in the combination of a politically charged 1960s self-designation—‘afro-american’—with a rather formal, antiquated greek suffix, ‘-philia.’ the neologism is, of course, reminiscent of the term negrophilia (négrophilie in french), which, as we show in our first joint essay, has been advanced in discussions of ‘primitivist’ culture of the 1920s, first by its (white) protagonists, then by cultural historians. it is still used by some commentators in order to refer to cases of strong ‘white’ love for ‘black’ culture in the present time. we will discuss negrophilia in the sense of its 1920s manifestation in our first joint essay, but we will not use the term trans-historically, as the wording seems not suited for that purpose. instead, in a hopefully more palatable dehistoricization, we apply the neologism afroamericanophilia to phenomena in different historical moments, whether or not the term ‘afro-american’ was in use at the time. when we use the term afro-americanophilia in this special issue we mainly have in mind black cultures in the usa. if, however, the black atlantic forms an interconnected entity, this is an arbitrary delimitation.5 nonetheless, german afroamericanophilia related largely—but not exclusively—to black usa, and not, say, to cuba, haiti, or brazil.6 while comparisons are difficult to make, it seems safe to say that many ‘afro-americanophiles’ also were much less interested in the cultures, politics, and people from the african continent. the usa was the dominant world power in the 20th century, and we believe there often was a specificity to this ‘love’ for that reason. this is not to deny that other elements of the black atlantic or a less nationally defined sense of ‘blackness’ and also ‘africanness’ had a part to play in german afro-americanophilia, and co-constituted us african american culture, but 4 echoing the 1970s (predominantly ‘white’) countercultures’ predilection for drama and ecstatic communion, deleuze and guattari envisioned new ‘blocs of becoming’ in which members of minorities and of the majority would communally ‘become minor,’ that is, leave behind their pre-given, rigid, rationalist, hierarchically positioned subjectivities in a mutual process of transformation and disidentification (deleuze & guattari 1987). see also wright (2004). 5 the interconnectedness of the ‘creole’ zone is a matter that the critic ernest borneman was early to contemplate (see detlef siegfried’s discussion of borneman in this special edition). 6 for work on cuba in the german imaginary, see for example, hosek (2012); on german engagements with brazilian and teuto-brazilian interculturalities, see finger, kathöfer and larkosh (2015). ege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 6 we cannot do them justice here. indeed, we believe that a more precise analysis of those relationships represents a crucial field of on-going and future research.7 for the purpose of understanding afro-americanophilia, we need to think carefully about temporality. what, exactly, was the relationship between the german love for african american culture in the 1920s and its variant in the 1960s? were they two instantiations of an ‘exoticism’ that remained, in its internal structure, more or less identical? amiri baraka suggests that african american culture can be seen and heard as a ‘changing same’ over time, due to a basic ‘double consciousness’ (w. e. b. du bois) within the modern world. does something similar hold true for the ambivalent german love of african american culture? (we will discuss that ambivalence in a moment.) it is for the individual papers in this special edition and other studies to illuminate that question. our basic methodological sensibility, however, follows stuart hall’s insights about racism in societies ‘structured in dominance,’ which stress the specificity of spatiotemporal constellations, even whilst admitting of commonalities between social systems that are structured in a racist way (hall 1980). following such an approach, then, we might think of german afro-americanophilia as an object that is internally heterogeneous and changes its forms and its meanings, implications and political effects over time. accordingly, we have sought to analyse specific sociocultural constellations (of desires, of forms of appropriation and solidarity, of subject positions, of agency), without denying that overarching tendencies—especially in power relations—are likely to be relevant. one obvious way to think about german afro-americanophilia is to ponder how to periodize it. we can think of such an endeavour as arriving at a timeline of german ‘desire/demand for black cultural material,’ to borrow kennell jackson’s phrase (2005). such a timeline must be attuned to three partly countervailing things. it needs to take into account the chronological ruptures of german history; it must take into account the histories of the usa, particularly african american history; but also, conceptually, it needs to be alive to a transnational frame, not just a national or euro-american one.8 7 for example, one phenomenon that we have not been able to analyse in our joint essays, and where the literature is in its infancy, is the german reception of reggae, an afro-caribbean form originating in jamaica, and an afro-diasporic phenomenon par excellence. it is for future research to determine how its reception and re-contextualization in germany mirrors or diverges from those of us african american art forms like blues, soul and disco. 8 immanuel wallerstein’s writings on ‘world systems’ are pertinent here (wallerstein 2011). on the ege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 7 in our two jointly authored survey essays, we identify the detail and draw out some of the implications of the increasingly diverse research on german afro-americanophilia. our overall approach in these essays is to give an outline of historical phases of afroamericanophilia. the underlying aim is to advance a differentiated view of german afro-americanophilia that is able to account for the continuities, ruptures and general complexities of global cultural flows and reception. pulling into focus the black diaspora’s interactions and convergences with german history is important for another reason: it highlights transnational sources of sociocultural change and creativity that are often overlooked in the writing of cultural history. such a task can destabilize eurocentric narratives and help question the supposed mutual exclusivity of spatiopolitical entities like a nation-state—or a diaspora, for that matter—by showing how such entities overlap and sometimes dissolve. there is something else that needs to be borne in mind. cultural life in germany has been enriched in many ways by afro-americanophilia. these contributions can be studied descriptively and analytically, for instance as forms of cultural transfer.9 but, as should be clear by now, afro-americanophilia is not just a story of contribution, solidarity, and transcultural flow. there has also been contention, misrecognition, struggle, and violence. first of all, unambiguous racism still shapes the reality lived by black people in germany and provides a sombre backdrop to stories of afroamericanophilia (see e.g. sow 2008; el-tayeb 2011). moreover there can also be a violence intrinsic to ‘-philia’ itself, or to the notion of would-be ‘colourblindness.’10 those germans who have loved african american cultures were sometimes merely problems of periodization, see paul gilroy’s criticism of habermas, lyotard, jameson and others who regard world war ii as the significant orientating rupture, globally (1993: 42). for a contrary approach to europe, using african america as the starting place, see the edited volume, blackening europe (raphaelhernandez 2004). 9 in such approaches, the analyst often takes a seemingly neutral, unpolitical bird’s eye’s view, which has been popular in german cultural history. for an overview of models of cultural transfer that has been influential in germany see e.g. burke 2000 (originally in english). 10 as critics like fatima el-tayeb note (2011), today many if not most white germans—including many who have engaged with african american cultures and people—often see themselves as fundamentally non-racial and non-racist: aggressive whiteness is other people’s business, as it were. yet this is despite their (which is to say: our) reliance on an implicitly racialized self-image and a complex regime of border policing that, despite historical and current diversity, maintains the country’s dominant white-germanness, materially and metaphorically, through a repertoire that defines the national body as ‘white’ and germans of colour as marginal or not-really-there. el-tayeb argues that in europe in general, ‘race’ figures as an ‘unspeakable presence,’ which ‘makes itself felt from day-to-day interactions to transcontinental political structures, while simultaneously being deemed non-existent within european thought’ (el-tayeb 2011: xviii). the basic situation is one of a ‘ peculiar coexistence of, on the one hand, a regime of continentwide recognized visual markers that construct non-whiteness as non-europeanness with on the other a discourse of colorblindness that claims not to see racialized difference’ (el-tayeb 2011: xxiv). ege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 8 ‘flipping’ and positively weighting the negative stereotypes that anti-black german racists applied. given unequal resources, white germans’ desire for black cultural material has often impelled people of colour to perform to those expectations, accommodate themselves or otherwise negotiate with them. this was certainly the case in the first half of the twentieth century, when many black people found employment as performers under particularly hostile circumstances. yet many people of colour in germany today still feel such dynamics when, for instance, stereotypes have an impact upon their employment opportunities (or lack thereof) or on interpersonal encounters.11 given these realities, we need to ensure that accounts of afro-americanophilia illuminate not only the functions that these practices fulfilled for (primarily white) actors and their constructions and experiences of their enhanced ‘selves,’ but also the ways in which individual black actors accommodate and/or disrupt white desires, or capitalize upon felt empathy and solidarity. there is an extensive critical literature about the ‘white’ consumption of racial otherness (primarily in english, some also in german). the entertainments of blackface minstrelsy and their racial politics and legacies have been debated particularly extensively and controversially. according to eric lott’s work on north american minstrelsy, love and theft (1996), this popular theatrical form was shot through with both revulsion and attraction, and many other things besides. similar issues arise in the context of ‘enhanced’ afro-americanophilia as well. critics have hence offered scathing critiques of the racializing exoticism that drove and continues to drive what norman mailer (1957) famously called ‘the white negro.’12 in this context, bell hooks (1992) advanced the influential notion of cultural ‘anthropophagy,’ stressing the aggressive side of such practices; of incorporation; of the symbolic destruction of a difference that the consumer simultaneously upholds—often in the form of very stereotypical distortions—for the purposes of power and pleasure. from a vantage point of psychoanalysis and cultural theory, kobena mercer (2013) and others also enquired 11 for instance, many contributors to the volume farbe bekennen (oguntoye, opitz & schultz 1986)––a landmark volume of black german women’s activist writing; see our second joint essay in this special issue––stress that receiving race-based ‘compliments’ make actual personal encounters very difficult. david theo goldberg argues that ‘the sometime exoticizing of black bodies and sexuality’ in germany forms the exception to the overall european rule of ‘casualness about interracial social intercourse’ (2009: 185). for an ethnographic account of this exoticization, seen from different perspectives, see partridge (2012). 12 on german iterations of the ‘white negro’ in west germany in the 1960s, see siegfried (2010); james baldwin’s contemporaneous critique is discussed in the essays by ege and hurley below. ege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 9 into the ways in which racial fetishization can be at play. such approaches add depth to more materialist arguments like those of amiri baraka (1995) and perry a. hall (1997) that highlight the appropriation (or rather expropriation) of black cultural production for white profit. in combination, these debates have fundamentally changed the ways that processes of projection and appropriation are discussed in the usa and elsewhere. however, despite such critical interventions overseas and although such an analysis has been advocated outside the mainstream german media by antiracist activists and scholars for some time (see references below), such ideas are not yet widespread in germany. indeed, to people from countries with a longer tradition of black activism, it often comes as a shock to see how white germans have felt at liberty to put on blackface, literally and figuratively. the shock is compounded by how socially accepted such practices are, and by how aggressively many germans reject any criticism of those practices.13 critical voices, particularly those of black german intellectuals, have for a long time remained on the margins. having said that, we do need to recognise that the status quo is also being challenged. questions of ‘race’ and its relevance in europe and in germany, in particular, are being posed more explicitly, in a more sustained way, and by a more diverse group of people, though the strength of the concomitant backlash is hard to measure. in academia, numerous texts on afro-germans, on african americans and germany, and on blacks in germany have been published recently, as we will discuss their implications for a history of afro-americanophilia further in our two joint essays. the shifting academic focus is entangled with broader transformations in the social world too. it reflects, variously, the rising relevance of concepts of race, racism and ethnicity in a more diverse germany,14 the transnational trend in historiography, and, especially, the growth and increasing political consciousness of black germans. these are crossed with changes in the media that can allow critical voices to cut through (sieg 2015). european 13 this is a point made by katrin sieg, in the introduction to her seminal study of ‘ethnic drag’ practices in germany. she notes, for example, that whereas french audiences found a 1988 blackface performance ‘utterly offensive,’ germans regarded such practices as ‘utterly unremarkable’; indeed they have acquired ‘normative status on the west german stage’ (sieg 2002: 2). on recent responses to contemporary blackfacing in germany, compare thurn (2014) and sieg (2015). 14 in germany, the demographic descriptor ‘background of migration’ is commonly used. it is unclear and problematic—for example, it includes germans born in germany whose parents came from elsewhere. in some ways, however, it seems an indispensable category, especially given that ‘race’ was a taboo subject for surveys. the overall percentage of people with such a background is about 20 percent. in many urban schools, students whose parents speak a language other than german are in a numeric majority. for statistics, see ‘migration, integration’ (2015). ege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 10 union policies relating to diversity and anti-discrimination are requiring changes in local administration and everyday life. critical studies by susan arndt (2001), maureen maisha eggers et al. (2005), kien nghi ha et al. (2007), grada kilomba (2008), noah sow (2008), susan arndt and nadja ofuatey-alazar (2011) and others foreground the knowledge of people of colour about racism and question the privileges of being ‘white’ and discursively ‘unmarked.’ works such as fatima el-tayeb’s europe’s others: queering ethnicity in postnational europe (2011) also question how black european cultural politics relate to broader european minority discourses. given these different intellectual traditions and political standpoints, our focus on afroamericanophilia is intended to contribute to an analysis of sociocultural life that critically reflects cultural and social structurings through race and highlights relations rather than substances or essences. we intentionally do not pose a transhistorical question about afro-americanophilia’s effects. instead, in different case studies and situations, the authors decipher a contentious network of distributed agency that sometimes remains a ‘white’ monologue, and sometimes creates ‘lines of flight’ for different subjects and actors, to use deleuze and guattari’s vocabulary (1987). examining these networks and lines of flight adds to our understanding of the continuing relevance of ‘race’ in germany, and provides insights into the workings of racialized sociocultural formations that might otherwise go unnoticed. after all, if racism is a problem that white people cause, then understanding it––in order to overcome it––requires us to examine the affective undercurrents of whiteness. the case studies in this special issue provide particularly relevant material on which to do so. the individual papers in this issue in the two jointly authored survey essays included in this special issue, we advance a two-part periodization of twentieth century german afro-americanophilia. the first essay examines the ‘pre-history’ of afro-americanophilia, beginning with the reception in german-speaking lands of african people, ideas and cultures prior to the 19th century. we then look at the german reception of such things as the antebellum us novel by harriet beecher stowe, uncle tom’s cabin, before moving through the german colonial, the weimar, the national socialist and the postwar eras, when cultural forms such as minstrelsy, ragtime, cakewalk, jazz and other afro-diasporic musical forms were received in germany. the essay also examines the ways in which the lives of ege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 11 afro-germans during these eras are being painstakingly reconstructed by historians. the second essay tracks the contours and manifestations of afro-americanophilia in the counter-culture era and beyond that era. the authors attend to afro-americanophile aspects of the new social movements in germany, including second-wave feminism and afro-german activism, and contemplate further ‘hotspots’ in the reception of afrodiasporic cultural forms, including disco, hiphop and techno. the authors finally return to the question of what continuities an attempt to periodize afro-americanophilia might obscure. the historian detlef siegfried turns his attention to the crucial figure of ernest (ernst) borneman(n), who emigrated from germany in the 1930s and, in his own way, re-traced some of the legs of the black atlantic, spending time in the uk and in north america prior to returning to german-speaking lands in the 1960s. in a remarkably broad career that spanned literary writing, film-making, ethnomusicology and sexology, borneman also pioneered jazz scholarship, applying what he referred to as an anthropological perspective to the art form. he benefited from personal contact with afro-caribbean expatriates resident in london, and later engaged in an important public dispute with amiri baraka over black cultural nationalism and jazz. cultural historian andrew hurley examines the afro-americanophile changes evident in the career of the west german jazz writer, producer and broadcaster, joachim ernst berendt. he contemplates how berendt earnestly deployed afro-americanophilia in the postwar era in a moralistic attempt to render german culture less chauvinist. he then examines how berendt’s afro-americanophilia broke down after being confronted by militant black nationalism in the late 1960s, and how berendt’s -philic energies mutated into what might be called polyphilia. in his contribution, moritz ege turns special attention to both the wide-spread commoditization of afro-americanophilia in the late 1960s and early 1970s in west germany, and the counter-cultural manifestations of the afro-americanophile cultural theme during the same era, which included the activities of a small movement that named itself the ‘berlin blues.’ as the article shows, the ‘racial’ undertones of ideas of sexual liberation and cultural revolution were important in connecting both realms and, more generally, in forming subjectivities of the 1968 generation. finally, hip-hop scholar leo schmieding analyses the different ways in which eastege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 12 germans engaged with hip-hop culture during the final decade of the german democratic republic. he considers interpretations of us hip-hop as the ‘second culture’ of an oppressed working class, and he also examines how grass-roots east german rappers began to make the idiom their own. in this context, schmieding contemplates the double role of the dt64 broadcaster lutz schramm, who kept the functionaries happy with his verbal mediation of the hip-hop genre, but also provided the scene with the music and arcane knowledge they hungered for, as well as a platform where their own efforts could be publicized. these case studies give new insights into important aspects of afro-americanophilia in 20th century germany and into some of its protagonists. we acknowledge that the case studies’ primary preoccupation is with (white) men, who with their constructions and deconstructions of whiteness and masculinity undoubtedly form a core german afroamericanophile group, and we also recognise that the articles were written from similar positionalities. we planned a larger special edition that would have included a wider and more diverse array of topics and writers, but unfortunately that did not come to pass. we proceeded with the scaled back edition in the belief that it adds to the already wideranging and multifaceted literature, but fully aware that there is much more to tell. readers wishing to investigate those other areas are directed to the literature that we discuss in this introduction, and especially in ege’s and hurley’s two jointly authored survey essays. acknowledgements as guest editors of this special edition, we would like to thank all the contributors, as well as the peer reviewers, and the journal’s editor, paul allatson. reference list arndt, s. 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[leroi jones] 1995 [1963], blues people: negro music in white america. payback, edinburgh. burke, p. 2000, kultureller austausch [cultural exchange]. suhrkamp, frankfurt am main. deleuze, g. & guattari, f. 1987, a thousand plateaux: capitalism and schizophrenia, (trans.) b. massumi. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. ege, m. 2007, schwarz werden: ‘afroamerikanophilie’ in den 1960er und 1970er jahren [becoming black: ‘afroamericanophilia’ in the 1960s and 1970s]. transcript verlag, bielefeld. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14361/9783839405970 eggers, m. m. et al., (eds) 2005, mythen, masken und subjekte: kritische weissseinsforschung in ege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 13 deutschland [myths, masks and subjects: critical whiteness studies in germany]. unrast verlag, münster. elam, h. j., jr., & jackson, k. (eds) 2005, black cultural traffic: crossroads in global performance and popular culture. university of michigan press, ann arbor. el-tayeb, f. 2011, european others: queering ethnicity in postnational europe. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. finger, a., kathöfer, g. & larkosh, c. (eds) 2015, kulturconfusao: on german –brazilian interculturalities. walter de gruyter, berlin & boston. gilroy, p. 1993, the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. harvard university press, cambridge, ma. gilroy, p. 2004, ‘foreword: migrancy, culture, and a new map of europe,’ in blackening europe: the african american presence, (ed.) h. raphael-hernandez. routledge, london & new york: xi– xxii. goldberg, d. t. 2009, the threat of race: reflections of racial neoliberalism. wiley-blackwell, malden, ma. ha, k. n. et al., (eds) 2007, postkoloniale perspektiven von people of color auf rassismus, kulturpolitik und widerstand in deutschland [postcolonial perspectives of people of colour on racism, cultural politics and resistance in germany]. unrast verlag, münster. hall, p. a. 1997, ‘african-american music: dynamics of appropriation and innovation,’ in borrowed power: essays on cultural appropriation, (eds) b. h. ziff & p. v. rao. new brunswick: rutgers university press, brunswick: 31–51. hall, s. 1980, ‘race, articulation and societies structured in dominance,’ in sociological theories: race and colonialism. unesco publishing, paris: 305–345. hall, s. 1980, ‘the spectacle of the “other,”’ in representation: cultural representations and signifying practices, (eds) s. hall et al. 4th edition. sage & open university press, london & milford keynes: 215–287. hooks, b. 1992, ‘eating the other: desire and resistance,’ in black looks: race and representation. south end press, boston: 21–39. hosek, j.r. 2012, sun, sex and socialism: cuba in the german imaginary. university of toronto press, toronto. kilomba, g. 2008, plantation memories: episodes of everyday racism. unrast verlag, münster. lauré al-samarai, n. 2004, ‘unwegsame erinnerungen: auto/biographische zeugnisse von schwarzen deutschen aus der brd und der ddr’ [impassable memories: auto/biographical testimonies of black germans from the frg and the gdr], in afrikanerinnen in deutschland und schwarze deutsche. geschichte und gegenwart [africans in germany and black germans: past and present], (eds) m. bechhaus-gerst & r. klein-arendt. lit verlag, münster: 197–210. mailer, n. 1957, the white negro. city lights books, san francisco. mazón, p. & steingröver, r. (eds) 2005, not so plain as black or white: afro-german culture and history, 1890–2000. rochester university press, rochester. mercer, k. 2013, ‘reading racial fetishism,’ in representation: cultural representations and signifying practices, (eds) s. hall et al. 4th edition. sage & open university press, london & milford keynes: 280–287. oguntoye, k., opitz [ayim], m., & schultz, d. (eds) 1986, farbe bekennen: afro-deutsche frauen auf den spuren ihrer geschichte [showing [their] colours: afro-german women in search of their history]. orlanda, berlin. oguntoye, k., opitz [ayim], m., & schultz, d. (eds) 1991, showing our colors: afrogerman women speak out. university of massachussetts press, amherst. partridge, d. 2012, hypersexuality and headscarves: race, sex, and citizenship in the new germany. indiana university press, bloomington. raphael-hernandez, h. (ed.) 2004, blackening europe: the african american presence. routledge, london & new york. sieg, k. 2002, drag: performing race, nation, sexuality in west germany. university of michigan press, ann arbor. sieg, k. 2015, ‘race, guilt and innocence: facing blackfacing in contemporary german theater.’ german studies review, vol. 38, no. 1: 117–134. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2015.0007 siegfried, d. 2010, ‘white negroes: the fascination of the authentic in the west german counterculture of the 1960s,’ in changing the world, changing oneself: political protest and collective identities in west germany and the u.s. in the 1960s and 1970s, (ed.) b. davis. berghahn, new york & oxford: 191–215. ege and hurley introduction: afro-americanophilia portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 14 sow, n. 2008, deutschland schwarz weiss: der alltaegliche rassismus [germany black and white: everyday racism]. bertelsmann, munich. thompson, r. f. 1983. flash of the spirit: african and afro-american art and philosophy. vintage, new york. thurn, n. 2014, ‘dieses stück genets wird jede deutsche bühne überfordern. zur rezeption von jean genets “les nègres” in deutschland.’ [this piece by genet would overtax every german theatre: on the reception of jean genet’s les negres in germany], jean genet und deutschland [jean genet and germany], (eds) m. n. lorenz & o. lubrich . merlin, gifkendorf: 277–300. ‘migration, integration’ 2015, statistisches bundesamt. online, available: https://www.destatis.de/de/zahlenfakten/gesellschaftstaat/bevoelkerung/migrationintegration/ migrationintegration.html [accessed 20 april 2015]. wallerstein, i. 2011, modern world-system ii: mercantilism and the consolidation of the european world-economy, 1600–1750. 2nd edition. university of california press, berkeley. wright, m. 2004, becoming black: creating identity in the african diaspora. duke university press, durham, nc. portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 4, no. 1 january 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal the academic ‘patras’ of the arab world: creating a climate of academic apartheid ramzi n. nasser and kamal abouchedid, notre dame university, lebanon in this paper we adopt the term “apartheid,” expanding its traditional semantic range beyond the field of race to the field of epistemology. in so doing, we wish to address three dimensions of segregation in the system of higher education in arab countries: (1) alienation of higher education institutions from the indigenous epistemology; (2) their failure to emancipate the education they provide from the colonial past; (3) their inability to move into the modern information age. epistemological segregation denies academics the opportunity to transform their indigenous world (freire 1988). by identifying it and naming it, we seek to raise the alarm concerning the development of an ethos of academic apartheid in arab institutions of higher education. we discuss the three dimensions identified above, “from a critical pedagogical perspective which illuminates the relationship among knowledge, authority, and power” (giroux 1994: 30). in so doing, we hope to shift the analytic focus from the traditional methodological individualism of social theory—which examines power as exercised by individual decision makers (bauman 1987)—to methodological structuralism that views power as the by-product of complex collectivist social behavior engendered by colonial forces. further, we shift the focus from the subjective, understood as partly historically produced and regulated (baxter 2002) and engage in a praxis that negates poststructuralist idealistic methodology, in which self-generating discourse overrides an engagement with, and understanding of, the complexities of interactions of historical nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ and social systems with their institutions. in our praxis, the scholar is perceived through the roles he/she plays within a range of different, and often conflicting, discourses, and in varying historical, cultural, and social contexts. the value of methodological structuralism in analyzing the status of higher education in the context of epistemological alienation is that it can bring to light the interactive processes among the historical and sociopolitical factors that hamstring arab academics in their efforts to become transformers of their indigenous world. this paper can be considered a self-critical reflection on the current state of arab academia. the fact that it criticizes the academic situation in the arab world should in no sense be taken as implying an endorsement of the discourse of the colonizer. in this paper, we engage with a new cultural phase in the arab world that we term “indigenous colonialism,” a condition of post-colonial trauma found mainly in arab states. the embrace of colonial instruments by the formerly colonized results in the creation of a higher education regime controlled by an elite (patras). in this paper, the word patras refers to patriarchal elites who exercise power in absolutist, often discriminatory terms. our aim is to combat indigenous colonialism by exposing its underlying paradigm. scholars adopting a realist position may object that this work is not objective or “value neutral.” our project is to deconstruct the construct of an “arab university” in an arab world by systematically examining its underlying paradigm. to be neutral would be to accept the frame of reference of the system of education in the arab world, a system built on colonial principles and western epistemologies that curtail creative emancipation. we hope that this paper will initiate a process of development of a genuinely decolonizing context, within which change can begin to be effected and resistant voices heard. epistemological alienation alienation in general may be defined as a process which treats individuals as products and objects, rather than creative actors engaged in meaningful activity (barakat 1993). a readily discernible characteristic of arab academics is their reliance on western sources of epistemology, which relegates the academics themselves to the role of portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 2 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ epistemological followers (or translators), rather than that of epistemological actors and creators of knowledge. a noteworthy feature of their work is the distance of academic discourse from the local context of the indigenous. in most fields where knowledge transfer occurs, the knowledge is imported, repackaged, and delivered in a secular form—a jebel-ali culture of academia.1 the knowledge is thus made alien to the cultural, social, and political reality of the native arab learner. those who arrive at some understanding of the situation, whether students or faculty, come to see that academics are marginal figures whose role in the educational process and even in their own intellectual development, is insignificant. currently, many european and american universities work eagerly to provide practical and authentic student-centered instruction. in contrast, the teaching in arab universities is mostly teacher-centered and theoretical and often relies on european and american textbooks detached from the cultural contexts of the indigenous learners (rugh 2002; abouchedid 1994). the authors’ personal experience of discussions and research conducted with students in arab universities is that the applicability of western epistemology to arab ontology is rarely debated. attempts to shift teaching away from teacher-centered practices may lead the students to question the teacher’s credentials. for example, in a sociology class, one of the authors of this paper expressed the desire to learn from his undergraduate students’ personal experiences. in response, one student said: “we are not in a position to teach you …; we are paying tuition fees to learn, not to teach.” this attitude is characteristic of a context in which the prevailing discourse of teaching and learning is embedded in outmoded authoritarian models. however, it is not unusual to find that predominant teaching method which faculty experience in their graduate education (even 1993) once as students who have gone through a number of graduate courses at universities, they are used to clear objectives, lectures, and assignments provided by the instructor (tanner, galls, & pajak 1997). what is a serious condition among arab students is a fundamentalist attitude about teaching and learning that teacher speaks-student listens. 1 jebel-ali is a zoned area of dubai, united arab emirates, to which manufacturers send their products to be redistributed bearing uae trademarks. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 3 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ the very physical structure of the classroom provides a further illustration of this fact. the classroom is designed in a rigidly theatrical fashion: the teacher stands on a pedestal; the desks are arranged linearly; most classrooms have green boards and are directionally centered on the teacher. the concept of the teacher’s authority so deeply engrained in students’ minds coalesces with teacher-centered strategies and a teachercentered physical space in students’ epistemological perspective on teaching and learning. arab students, having been trained for obedience and respect for authority, which are characteristics of tribal behavior (barakat 1988), are likely to detach themselves from classroom discussion for fear of challenging the “infallible” teacher. the grade book, the frigid academic discourse, and the power relations between student and teacher, combine to create an oppressive educational process. in reaction, teachers complain about their students’ lethargy and lack of motivation and students complain about the authoritarian approach taken to the teaching process. both teachers and students are caught up in a demeaning cycle of fear and distrust. indigenous educators who have assimilated western discourse and non-indigenous values find it difficult to become educators who teach subject matters from an indigenous perspective that reflects the social and cultural realities of the indigenous. these educators see in indigenous epistemology a collective consciousness that deters individual effort and scholastic motivation, and these circumstances give rise to a sense of paradox and unsettledness in arab scholars (habashi 2005). in fact, academia in the arab world2 emulates the tradition of higher education in the west by espousing the values of competition, individualism, and individual ownership. but in no way do these institutions establish themselves as unique indigenous cultural units espousing the collective identity of the “arab student.” for arab universities, the emulation of western organization, western culture, and the western value of individual 2 usually the definition of the arab world is somewhat over generalized. there are different behavioral structures in different arab societies. for instance, tunis, which is a predominantly a muslim country, has instituted state rules that have enticed a behavioral structure similar to that of any western society. however, arab world is united by one influential cultural component, being islam that manifests itself in every aspect of arab social life and in specifically countries as algeria, bahrain, egypt, iraq, palestine, jordan, kuwait, lebanon, libya, morocco, oman, qatar, saudi arabia, syria, tunisia, united arab emirates, and yemen. it could also include iran but the term arab world refers specifically to arab countries. this paper refers specifically to arab countries. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 4 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ performance is a result of a process of modernization that has often negated indigenous know-how. the inherent contradiction in this situation is heightened by the fact that the academic patras blurs the distinction between the institution as a locus for the cultivation and dissemination of indigenous knowledge and students’ epistemology. it is often the case that students have to acculturate themselves to the university, which ends by being a way of colonizing the indigenous through the indigenous, i.e., through the patras. little is heard about indigenous scholarship by the indigenous themselves. whereas indigenous scholars should play a major role in disseminating research on this subject and organizing fora for the discussion and exploration of ideas, most universities remain “teaching places.” private universities remain unwaveringly committed to being teaching institutions exclusively. the american university of beirut (aub) is a typical case. the aub is partly bureaucratic and market oriented (dedoussis 2004). arab universities do little research compared, for example, to universities in brazil. for example, in brazil, 80% of the research budget is allocated to universities, while the rest goes to non-governmental organizations and municipal agencies (akkari and perez 1998). with little or no grants allocated for research, teaching loads increase to the detriment of research activity and scholarly initiative. as discussed in nour (2006), many arab universities in the gulf region and along the mediterranean coast value teaching more than research and development. the authors of this paper have taught in universities in the gulf region as well as in lebanon. their experience is that chairpersons and deans who constitute the academic patras expect their faculty to teach more than five courses per semester and up to ten courses per academic year. faculty; thus, look to course overloads as a supplementary source of income, instead of research and academic development. the academic leadership is aware of this and allocates overload based on a system of favoritism rather than merit or need. one must ask why the academic patras deter academics from undertaking scholarly activities such as research. the patras perpetuate their prestige and political authority by impeding potentially boat-rocking research, forestalling critiques within academia that might raise professional issues that would undermine the patras’ position of power and control. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 5 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ anti-research attitudes and behaviors in arab universities are clearly reflected in the number of publications produced in arab countries. the statistics on publishing in the arab world are shocking. academic journals published by arab scholarly circles do not even number 50; in contrast, thousands of academic and scholarly journals are published in the usa alone (nasser and abouchedid 2001). publishing, of course, benefits from a snowball effect. book publishing in arab states does not constitute a massive financial undertaking, and yet the scholarly publishing efforts of arab states is limited, suggesting that little is done to interpret subject matter from the perspective of indigenous arab learning needs. generally, epistemological alienation in the arab world persists in the absence of educational movements to overcome it. such movements are blocked by two main sources of alienation and post-colonial social behavior. the shadow cast over the present by the colonial past both private and public arab educational institutions were established over a century ago during the colonial period. in the nineteenth century, what might be called an educational invasion by missionaries took place in the arab levantine in the name of humanitarian concern and the advance of science. this movement led to the establishment of a significant number of jesuit and protestant missionary educational institutions in former palestine and in the part of syria that constitutes present-day lebanon (szyliowicz 1973). not only has colonial education made the course of individual development difficult for indigenous arabs, it has also patched onto arab schools and universities modern educational principles that are alien to most arabs. for example, during the nineteenth century, two kinds of schools and universities were established in what is now lebanon. schools of first kind were patterned after french or british educational models as a sign of solidarity and shared interests between the colonial bourgeoisie and the arab native intellectual elite. representatives of the jesuit order and protestant denominations, local arab churches, and private shareholders have dominated the private higher education sector and sought to enable arab students to appreciate the “christian life” (penrose 1970). over the last century and since the portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 6 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ beginning of this one, foreign universities in lebanon have shed their christian affiliations and secularized their governance. they continued to maintain western cultural influence in this part of the middle east. through the “copycat” reproduction of western modes of cognition and behavior via foreign language teaching, many french and american universities in lebanon and the arab world in general inculcate students with a sense of the overarching superiority of european languages, such as english and french, and implicitly promote the perception that only these languages can provide definitions of concepts and generate new theories. schools of the second were established by proponents of arab nationalism (khashan 2000) and have aspired to forge a counter-colonial model of education capable of enabling the masses to throw off post-colonial subjugation. as a result, two diametrically opposed types of educational institutions have emerged: one that maintains a self-imposed pseudoisolation from western epistemology and insulates itself from foreign ideas, and another that endorses western education. western-style liberal-arts colleges for men and women have mushroomed in the gulf region, and prestige attaches to american and british higher education degrees (zoepf 2006b). these colleges feverishly recruit new faculty coached in the western epistemological framework; they use english as the medium of instruction; they follow the american semester-based system; and they emulate the culture of american campuses in order to keep in line with the “international curriculum” and degree programs (bollag 2005; zoepf 2006b). in contrast, another group of educational institutions, established mainly in syria, pursue a reactive counter-discourse to western epistemology and accuse western forms of educational systems of “being imperialist and neo-colonial and seeking to supplant arab cultural values and destroy arab national identities.” syrian universities use arabic as the medium of instruction (del castillo 2004), even in the teaching of the sciences, health sciences, and medicine, in order to maintain a perceived indigenous purity. ironically, they use translations into arabic of a western academic knowledge base; particularly, excluding thousands of years of arab medicine from the curriculum. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 7 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ iraqi universities have been highly polarized under occupation by us forces. some american universities have begun to develop programs in collaboration with iraqi universities (usaid, report #26) in the areas of agriculture, library science, research, and archeology, with a view to improving techniques of higher education. however, little effort has been made in fields in the humanities and comparative cultural studies. it should be noted that iraqi universities have constituted a site of quiet resistance to oppression, allowing for speaking out about the occupation as well as the previous regime’s brutal policies. in syria, the anti-colonial and ultra-national institutions have not yet succeeded in establishing a tenable alternative indigenous discourse that espouses national education with western epistemology. moreover, an indigenous arab pedagogy has yet to be developed for use by the various arab systems of education. such a pedagogy would have to resonate with the cultural, social, and political realities of indigenous arabs. attempts to indigenize education have strengthened the opposition by radical groups to western colonial models of education by motivating efforts to establish their own educational institutions and supporting resistance to the intentions and effects of a colonial epistemology. the recent setting up of islamic universities in egypt, jordan, gaza, and the west bank (palestine), even indonesia and malaysia give some semblance of constituting an islamic revitalization movement to radicalize and indigenize education within the framework of islamicization. islamic educational programs go against the western epistemological grain, implanting islamic values of persuasion rather than exploration and putting islamic values on a collision course with the western cultural values. however, a number of these universities use a system’s approach coated in rationality and positivist attitudes which counters the fundamental premises of islamic education. consequently, arab academics who yield to fundamentalist thinking are perhaps acting in reaction to epistemologies that make little sense to indigenous researchers (clignet 1971): they regress to fundamentalist ideas as a way of reinvigorating the silenced past. it is thus that in many parts of the arab world colonialism has created safe havens for the breeding of anti-western epistemologies and the blaming of the west for meddling in arab thinking by transplanting into it contradictory epistemologies and thoughts (boullata 1990). portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 8 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ certainly, western countries have interfered with the cultural, political, and economic evolution of arab peoples, but wholesale criticism of the west misses the point. issawi (1981), for instance, sees that intellectual and cultural stagnation accompanied by economic decline are the result of arab evolutionary processes, mostly unrelated to western colonialism. the lebanese sociologist barakat (1993) ascribes the cause of many arab grievances to collectivist behavior, which is at the heart of the predominant value system of arab society. khashan (1992) considers that a highly distinctive feature of arab collectivist behavior, characterized by patron-client interests, ultra-tribalist attitudes, continuing cultural stagnation, political oppression, over-dependence on the west, and the blatant censorship of intellectual life, is the continuing dominance of primary-group relations. arab institutions of higher education appear almost uniformly to suffer from the same epistemological torpidity as existed under colonialism. in particular, this problem has been perpetuated by a class of neo-colonialists, the patras of arab universities, who deny academics the freedoms of self-expression, pursuit of innovation, and critical and creative thinking. to quote hafiz (1996, 7-8), the academic patras makes it easy for “the beasts of darkness, the enemies of the intellect and freedom” to thrive and destroy independent thinking and creativity. the absence of an indigenous course of action, arab admiration for the western experience of modernization, and the lack of a grassroots movement have together conduced to prevent arab academics from taking an active role in the forging of the modern information age. failure to move towards the modern the issue of modernity has been at the centre of arab intellectual reform since the beginning of the nineteenth century. with the advent of the information age, most arab institutions of higher education have highlighted the need to meet the functional requirements of this development. although arab universities are becoming organized to adapt to information technologies, their human resources do not yet have the necessary skills related to information organization and electronic education, media, and publishing to complete along these lines (nasser & abouchedid 2001). thus, information technology has been adopted as an extension of the western information portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 9 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ system, but with greater reliance on knowing how to operate than on knowing how to engage in a constructivist approach. despite enthusiastic acceptance of, and indeed enamorment with, information technologies, very little has been done in arab universities to transpose the indigenous printed word into an indigenous electronic medium as a platform for wider scholarly communication among arab and western scholars. hence, information technology in most arab universities functions essentially to market the institution and recruit students. arab universities use information technology tools for learning the technique related to their particular teaching needs, while in the west, the availability of a global information network is being used to transform both the public and the private spheres and to create new social, political, economic, and cultural realities (undsf 2005). within the institutions, bureaucracy operates as a source of destabilization of intellectual and academic life and development. an intensive micro-managing approach, manifested in management’s involvement in trivial operational issues, inevitably discourages research and critical approaches to academia. a recent report by human rights watch (2005) indicates that the academic leadership often drains academics’ energy with inconsistencies, capricious decisions,3 and whimsical regime changes. whereas, academic freedom broadly thrives in american universities, in beirut and cairo the idea that academic freedom is inherent to academic life is unheard of: academic freedom is treated as a perk rather than a given in academic life (human rights watch report 2005). the patras deploys an internal network of spies and informants to serve them and undermine academics who wish to pursue their scholarship, responsible and free speech, and innovative teaching methods. arab scholars are induced to turn their backs on their role as social transformers, critical thinkers, and agents of social change. they cannot marshal adequate support for their initiatives to liberate academia from institutional coercion and nepotism, and they play 3 this is typified by the recent firing on february 2006 at zayed university, in the united arab emirates, of an american professor, claudia kiburz, who taught english, and of her supervisor, andrew hirst, who heads the university’s english language center (zoepf, 2006a). ms kiburz shared the now infamous danish newspaper cartoons with her students for purposes of class discussion. the firing exemplifies how insubstantial is the respect for academic freedom in one of the most socially liberal gulf nations. ironically, after this incident, the cartoons were widely circulated and discussed on campus (zoepf 2006b). portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 10 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ little part in policy-making or decision-making. despite all these obstacles, independent, critical, research-oriented arab scholar-researchers do exist: they relentlessly challenge the politics of the system, but they are overloaded with administrative and teaching tasks, rebuffed, or recruited into small paternalistic and patriarchal circles, such that their radical motivation and their desire for change dissipate. a strong board of directors that exerts control by providing large amounts of money to a university in the form of philanthropic donations can fetter even an administration that would otherwise be supportive of the university’s scholars. the absence of controls on the requirements made of faculty and the vagueness of performance expectations make for little sense of commitment within the organization as a whole. thus, academics place little value on their own academic output, whether in the form of instruction, research, or administrative tasks. the debilitating impact on arab characterize higher education creates an epistemological vacuum, such that academics cannot help placing even the most burning scholarly issues at the bottom of their list of intellectual life made by the “clanocracy,” patriarchal practices, and nepotism that priorities, however painful this may be for them.4 the university patras can be characterized as revivers of western artifacts and reproducers of colonial knowledge. intimidated by western knowledge and technology, they reject arab indigenous know-how and helplessly rely on western expertise in implementing educational and technol3ogical programs. consequently, arab universities hinder the promotion of indigenous arab knowledge by sidelining academics and engaging them in administrative and teaching tasks. universities in other transition countries, whose constitutional elements edge toward market-style fundamentals, for instance india, have adopted a contrary course of action. there, academics take their work in their respective fields of specialization seriously. they nationalize local problems while rejecting foreign interference and research on local and indigenous issues by foreign entities (barnes 1982). similarly, in latin america, in 4 the word clanocracy uses clan instead of “bureau” as conceptualized in max weber’s notion of bureaucracy. clanocracy refers to clan social practices in organizing social affairs in their tribal context (el-amine 1998). portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 11 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ rural areas, a grassroots movement has replaced the development programs established by the united nations in conjunction with local institutions and universities. these programs had long sidelined more indigenous local programs that met the immediate needs of society (schaw and grieve 1979). social degradation and structural deficiencies in higher education academia has grown significantly in the arab world with the sprouting of colleges and universities in the gulf region. this has not, however, improved the quality of arab undergraduates and graduates. in fact, what we have seen is a major turnaround in the quality of graduates. the fact that most of these institutions behave more like businesses than institutions of higher education produces a transactional approach to education geared more to student stupor than to instilling ideals of excellence. this state of affairs can be ascribed not just to economic causes, but also to social ones: the development of a large middle class, and, along with it, the establishment of institutions of higher education and of a modern service structure. the economic calculation of the return on education on the micro level ignores the macro economic return: since, with the rising cost of education, the benefit-cost ratio is less than one (the internal rate of return is considerably less than what students’ parents invest), the recouping of the educational investment takes longer in arab countries than it does for students in the usa, england, or canada (fergany 2001). so rather than viewing higher education as a benchmark in upward mobility, many perceive it as a stepping-stone to prestige or high status. thus, in the arab world, education constitutes a means of filling a social need more than an economic one. possibly because of this epistemology, education is seen as a commodity rather than as a personal lifelong experience. to many, this commodity seems lucrative and productive of revenues, as it can be sold or bought for a price. in the arab context, the licensing of programs is a means of obtaining university accreditation. once a university has been licensed to operate programs by the various governmental ministries, it may wish to do as it likes in changing the substance of the curriculum and in so doing faces little interference by officials in the ministry of higher education. however, substantial numbers of universities now seek accreditation from portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 12 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ foreign associations in order to market themselves as the sole credible academic institutions in the arab world. they may turn a blind eye to the mishandling of finances and they invest heavily in faculty who have doctorates, facilities, programs, and technology, all in order to receive the foreign rubber stamp while the whole time, organizationally, corruption drives even the simplest student transactions. a number of universities in the arab world vie with each other to establish affiliations with sister universities in the west. this is the situation that has obtained in the establishment of the knowledge city in dubai and the education city in qatar (zoepf 2005). in these two gulf region locations, tier i universities have formed ties with arab institutions, whose doors are then opened to local arab students. this relationship has had some very disturbing results. the universities in question use their affiliations to market themselves as american or british institutions, and they coordinate their programs with their partner universities abroad. but the arab universities in question are far from implementing the kinds of organization, the culture, or the values that most american universities enjoy (dedoussis 2004). many of these universities carry the american label in order to project an appearance of value-added to prospective students. in reality, and disturbingly, they are very parochial entities, undermined by confusion of identity and operating in a constant state of epistemological quandary. in many cases, colleges and universities in lebanon and the united arab emirates and other gulf states operate with non-existent infrastructure for higher education. recently, western academics who have taught in the gulf region have alleged these institutions are more like warehouses (see “dave’s esl forum: an internet discussion forum”) or fronts for dubious business establishments. many of these universities receive their licenses through corrupt arrangements between the university administration and the top echelons of their countries’ ministries. they graduate students with mediocre or substandard qualifications and continue to operate under the protective wing of ministries of higher education. the alliance of private institutions and local governance conveys the impression that no external national body can protect faculties’ inherent rights. it also plants the seeds of fear in arab academics and portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 13 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ continues to be a factor militating against success in the effort to free arab academic life from the dark forces of stagnation. the structure of arab society is deeply influenced by the patriarchal power and patronclient dynamics that trickle down from the top echelons to junior-level faculty and staff. academics who refrain from engaging in dubious interactions run the risk of being derailed from their promotional track, and even being dismissed altogether. serious academics see all this with mounting dismay. their efforts at exploring truth and studying the nature of society are neutralized by a system pervaded with inadequacies, a dysfunctional atmosphere, and unethical practices. what is to be done? conclusion and recommendations academia in the arab world must have recourse to the globalutionaries5 of the arab world, peaceful and pragmatic professionals who do not seek revolutionary change but make use of non-profit global institutions to make their case heard. globalutionaries often bring change by turning to international accrediting agencies, since many arab universities measure quality through the types of external accreditation they qualify for. academics can receive support from these accrediting bodies because such bodies oblige the academic and administrative leadership to operate with greater accountability, transparency, and respect for faculty rights, regulations, and rules. universities in their current state cannot make the necessary corrections on their own. much more is needed for external independent bodies to become involved with local academics and civil society in the fight for an ethical, professional, and correct practice. academic leadership, faculty, and staff must all understand the judicial process and the role of civil society in the development and significance of a university. disciplinary processes must take their course, and legal procedures must be set in motion to hold academic entities responsible and accountable for their actions. the leadership should 5 globalutionaries a word coined-up by thomas friedman of the new york times (1997), and refers to individuals who attempt to do everything they can to integrate into the global economy, on the conviction that the more their nations are tied into the global system, the more their governments and institutions will be exposed to the rules, standards, laws, pressure, security and regulations of global institutions, and, at the same time, the less arbitrary, corrupt and autocratic national systems will be. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 14 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ provide mentoring, guidance, and conflict resolution strategies (bass and steidlmeier 1999). leaders must be of a caliber to be able to forge a platform for intellectual discovery and epistemological emancipation from over-politicized students and university-wide bad practices. once a committed body is established, it will initiate the drive for positive development, trust, and respect (gardner and cleavenge 1998). faculty should be able to see that their leadership is capable of dealing with seemingly mundane tasks imbued with a higher purpose. they should feel that leadership devotes effort to preserving what is morally correct. both faculty and the academic leadership can create the building blocks with which to effect the correction of the institution and prepare the basis for the fermentation of a powerful collective identity, through which value is given to individual output for the sake of the collective good. the depoliticization of the university is one of the most difficult tasks that academic leadership will have to carry out by winning respect, inspiring others, and promoting empowerment. only then can faculty in turn sow the seeds of change among their students, within the culture, and in the society and the university at large (conger 1999). the judicial process must be taken seriously, such that the rule of law is strengthened and patron-client relations, favoritism, and kickback systems are combated by strong regulations. the leadership and academics alike must understand the seriousness of their actions. decisions, understood by all, must be made by a body that is accountable and can hold academic personnel to a legal framework that ensures there are serious ramifications for wrong-doing. once the sense of professional/academic correct practice is institutionalized, a careful look at scholarly and indigenous values could bring higher education closer to emancipation from the western impress on indigenous frameworks of academic expression. relying on critical theory in education, which is concerned with the workings of power in and through pedagogical discourses, the analyses presented in this paper relate social and epistemological conditions, including post-colonialism, to academic decline in the arab world. we have explored the resistance to epistemological renovation, and to the portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 15 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ incorporation of new indigenous principles in the structures of institutions of higher educational. institutional, clanocratic, and nepotistic behavior stifle efforts by academics to alter the status quo with respect to indigenous epistemology. the ruling academic elite (the patras), with their nepotistic and clientelistic behavior, violate the fundamental tenets of academic freedom and creativity (sabour 2001). institutions of higher education must be emancipated from western epistemological thinking. our intention has not been to place the responsibility for academic failure on indigenous arab academics. the cultural capital of the colonizers has derailed the indigenous from their own educational course, and the transfer of western epistemology to the indigenous has had an impact on what is learned or not learned in the arab world. what is now happening is that schooling is creating a generation of internalizers but not producers, a trend that warns of the negative effects of schooling on students’ identity formation. the process of emancipation from the colonial past and from the overwhelming influence of western epistemology must start with a cultural movement capable of reinvigorating the indigenous arab epistemology. colonialism has a palpable influence on social relations both within a nation and between nations. it tends to concentrate power in the hands of a few. the educational institutions of the arab world were conceived to serve that few, leaving the great majority behind. scholars within universities must reflect on the purpose of education and the role it plays for the wider community. although the market-oriented approach of universities in the arab world fosters the desire of the majority of arab students to receive a western form of education, students remain passive in the face not only of the reality of the demographics of arab states, but also of epistemological educational issues. as well, recent times have been revolutionary in terms of knowledge transfer, given rapid technological developments coupled with economic and social globalization. yet arab scholars remain excluded, or exclude themselves, from access to the global knowledge structure. further, these scholars have done little to transform the power dynamic within the pedagogical relationship between student and teacher and indeed between student and material. unless the idea of reforming the arab university by an accountable and democratic process takes hold—moving the arab university portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 16 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ from the status of object (passive actor) to a perceived status as actor/subject (critical actor) (illich 1973) and restructuring the arab university classroom (i.e., such that power relations are altered)—the arab university, far from playing the role of paradigmatic agent of social change, will remain subject to the forces of stagnation and underdevelopment. reference list abouchedid, k. 1994, ‘the text and the significance of the context,’sci-quest, vol. 4, no. 1, 35-38. akkari, a. and perez, s. 1998, ‘educational research in latin america: review and perspectives,’ education policy analysis archives, vol. 6. available: http://olam.ed.asu.edu/epaa/ barakat, h. 1993, the 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1971, ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t the dilemmas of colonizer-colonized relations,’ comparative education review, vol. 15, 296-312. conger, j. a. 1999, ‘charismatic and transformational leadership: an insider’s perspective on these developing streams of research,’ leadership quarterly, vol. 10, 145-179. dedoussis, e. 2004, ‘a cross-cultural comparison of organizational culture: evidence from universities in the arab world and japan,’ cross cultural management, vol. 11, 1533. del castillo, d. 2004, ‘the arab world’s scientific desert,’ the chronicle of higher education, vol. 50, no. 28, a38. el-amine, a. 1998, higher education in lebanon, lebanese association of educational studies, beirut lebanon. even, r. 1993, ‘subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge: prospective secondary teachers and the function concept’, journal for research in mathematics education, vol. 24, no. 2, 94-116. fergany, n. 2001, higher education in arab countries; human development and labour market requirements, almishkat centre for research, egypt foucault, m. 1980, power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977, pantheon, new york. friedman, t. 1997, ‘the globalutionaries,’ the new york times, 24 july gardner, w. l. and d. cleavenger 1998, ‘the impression management strategies associated with transformational leadership at the world-class level,’ management communication quarterly, vol. 12, 3-41. giroux, h. a. 1994, disturbing pleasures: learning popular culture, routledge, new york. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 17 nasser and abouchedid academic ‘patras’ hafiz, s. 1996, arabs without anger, dar al nafa’is, beirut. habashi, j. 2005, ‘creating indigenous discourse, history, power and imperialism in academia, palestinian case,’ qualitative inquiry, vol. 11, no. 5, 771-788. human rights watch 2005, reading between the ‘red lines’: the repression of academic freedom in egyptian universities. human rights watch report, 17 (6). available: http://hrw.org/reports/2005/egypt0605/ illich, i. 1973, deschooling society, penguin, harmondsworth. issawi, c. 1981, the arab’s world legacy, princeton: nj: darwin press. khashan, h. 1992, inside the lebanese confessional mind, university press of america, boston. ______ 2000, arabs at the crossroads: political identity and nationalism, university press of florida, gainesville. nasser, r. and abouchedid, k. 2000, ‘educational research in the levantine: revisited,’ palma research journal, vol. 7, 43-60. ______ 2001, ‘problems and epistemology of publishing in the arab world: the case of lebanon,’ journal of electronic publishing, vol. 6, 1-12. nour, s. 2005, ‘science and technology development indicators in the arab region: a comparative study of arab gulf and mediterranean countries,’ science, technology, and society, vol. 10, no. 2, 249-274. penrose, s. 1970, that they may have life: the story of the american university of beirut, the american university of beirut press, beirut. sabour, m. 2001, the ontology and status of intellectuals in arab academia and society, aldershot hants, ashgate.. schaw, t. and grieve, m. 1979, ‘dependence as an approach to understanding continuing inequalities in africa,’ the journal of developing areas, vol. 13, 229-246. szyliowicz, j. 1973, education and modernization in the middle east, carnel university press london. tanner, c., galls, s., and pajak, e. 1997, ‘problem-based learning in advanced preparation of educational leaders,’ educational planning, vol. 10, no. 3, 3-12. united nations, digital solidarity fund 2005, from the digital divide to the need for a world wide solidarity movement, united nations, new york. weidemann, w., and humphrey, m. b. 2002, ‘building a network to empower teachers for school reform,’ school science & mathematics, vol. 102, no. 2, 88-93. zoepf, k. 2005, ‘in qatar’s education city, u.s. colleges build atop a gusher,’ the chronicle of higher education, vol.51, no. 33, a42 ______ 2006a, ‘u.s. professor is fired over cartoons by university in united arab emirates’, the chronicle of higher education, vol. 52, no. 25, a41. ______ 2006b, ‘universities for women push borders in persian gulf,’ the chronicle of higher education, vol. 52, no. 32, a46 portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 18 untitled portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. cultural works: practices of inscription and remembrance. © 2016 [roderick marsh]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i1.4784. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. gardening roderick marsh, melbourne-based writer marsh gardening portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 2 gardening frank’d kill for his own garden—green seasons, pistil, black loam crumbling in his fingers like an ice sheet in a warm world. below him, fifteen storeys of concrete, hard-edged shadows that hide the sun and climate control that withers anything he plants. his favourite place is the herbarium of the city’s botanic gardens—one day he picks a rare orchid and smuggles it home under his shirt. the stain it leaves stamps a craving in his skin, a want that won’t fade. he searches the city for another—but it’s february and the florists only have roses. one night, he finds his flower pinned to the wall of a tattoo parlour and it inspires a garden grown in his skin. prue from full fathom plants that first flower on his chest with a whirring harrow and ink fertilised with blood. the garden grows. pay cheques and pain order each season’s planting. protea among heather, a cosmos once extinct now preserved in shallow skin. an avenue of oaks climbs his thighs to a vanishing point marsh gardening portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 3 in his crotch. he plants until his skin overflows—colour curling behind his ears and over the hills of his buttocks, ghost orchids in the secret spaces between his toes. time stretches the garden, flowers sag and droop—patches become overgrown. resisting this last season, he makes plans to replant his garden—at the green hills memorial park, where new flowers will bloom. figure 1: untitled. from the manual of the mustard seed garden for painters, c. 1801/1825. woodblock print on paper. anonymous, japan. wikimedia commons, source: 4whx9cplyoisja at google cultural institute. marsh gardening portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 4 gardening some days, frank feels he would kill for his own garden—kill for black loam crumbling in his fingers, his own green seasons, pistil and stamen. but including today’s casualties, 43 indoor pot plants have died in frank’s care. his small apartment, where everything has its place, kills plants. perhaps it is the 24 stories of concrete below him, perhaps the hard-edged shadows that hide the sun or it could be the climate control with its 32 settings. whatever it is, the trend line of plant deaths on frank’s chart is straight and rises without relief. frank enjoys reviewing his spreadsheets before bed. it calms him. he checks tasks completed, tracks long-term trends and tweaks the next day’s activities. his plant death data spoil his pleasure. he tries everything: deep watering, shallow watering, special soil additives, humidifiers, dehumidifiers, lamps that mimic direct sunlight, lamps that mimic dappled sunlight and once, a regime of no light at all. nothing changes the pot plant mortality rate. frank finishes tomorrow’s agenda. his stride is definitely getting longer. he will get off the tram the stop before the national gallery to make sure he completes 10,550 steps, even though it will add an extra three minutes to his travel time. he adds today’s two dead plants. frank is not familiar with loss. he is an archivist at the national gallery. if he classifies something, it says classified. nothing vanishes without permission. nothing dies. at work, he aims at permanence. at home, he just wants a garden. as the dead increase, his once happy lunchtime visits to the herbarium of the city’s botanic gardens, taunt him with tangles of successful growth. today at the herbarium, frank follows the crowd to see a rare arethusa orchid that has flowered for the first time. it is beautiful. leafless, large purple flowers stand with white crests. already late for a meeting, frank waits until the lunchtime crowd disperses and comes close enough to touch the orchid. he wants it. he wants it in his apartment where he can enjoy it alone. he leans forward to sniff a flower and quickly picks it. he hides it under his shirt, against his skin. gently holding his side, he walks towards the exit and marsh gardening portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 5 back to work. he feels the flower against his skin for the rest of the day and it consoles him. frank fills a vase with water as soon as he gets home. he lifts his shirt to recover the arethusa. the flower is crushed and dead. frank slowly lifts the lid of the rubbish bin and lays it to rest. he wonders if this death should be added to his spreadsheet. but while undressing for his shower, he notices a dark red stain on his belly where the flower had been. it does not wash off and after his shower, frank carefully towels the area dry. he feels that the flower still lives in his skin. the stain is there the next morning. he imagines he can feel a cool flower against his skin all day. over the next three days frank avoids rubbing or washing his belly. on the third day, the stain has almost vanished. it is just a slight discolouration. that night frank caresses the space where the stain had been. by morning, it is gone. the next day, frank returns to the herbarium before work, when he knows it will be almost empty. he wants another orchid. he waits, but there is always someone near. he feels watched. he scans the room for cameras, but can see nothing. he is running very late. he approaches the orchids, reaches out for another, and hears a gentle cough. he turns to see one of the garden’s staff looking at him. she smiles and says, “please don’t pick the flowers”. frank’s hand drops. he slumps and walks slowly to the gallery. that night on the way home he stops at every florist he passes. it is mid-february and they only have roses. frank has never given someone a rose. he does not want to buy one now. the last florist is in a side street near his building. by the time frank gets there, it is closed. next to the florist is a tattoo parlour, full fathom five burnt in pokerwork above the door. frank does not want to go home without a flower. he lingers to look at the designs in the window— samplers of skulls in black and coloured inks, half-naked women, celtic and tribal designs. he watches the woman behind the counter and marvels at her coloured arms, complex designs disappearing into her sleeves. he looks at her piercings—ears, nose, lip, eyebrow— wondering what makes someone adorn themselves this way. as he turns to go, he sees a sampler of flowers and in the centre his arethusa. he stops and stares. marsh gardening portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 6 that night he stays up searching online for images of tattooed flowers. he sees collections of flowers on skin. gardens seeded in limb and torso beds snake under clothing and body hair. he lies awake for hours stroking his own skin, touching the spot on his belly the orchid had stained. the next morning, a saturday, he returns to full fathom five and points to the orchid on the wall and his belly. prue, the tattoo artist, warns him of the pain of tattooing along the waistline, but frank is certain where he wants his first planting. the pain of the tattoo shocks him. he feels his skin is earth under a harrow as the needles plant the orchid. prue works silently. concentrating. he imagines her working in a light, sandy soil fertilised with blood. slowly, dreamily, frank’s gritted teeth relax, though gardening the pain does not stop. it stays with him as prue finishes her work, covers the tattoo with plastic wrap and tapes it down. he only half listens to her instructions on caring for the tattoo as he pulls up his pants and tightens his belt. it aches all the way home. for the next few days, he has to abandon belts for suspenders. from that one orchid, frank’s garden grows. pay cheques and pain order each season’s planting. he and prue plant protea among heather, a cosmos once extinct is preserved in shallow skin. frank plants for years. he forgets about his apartment and its light and heating. he plants and throws out his pots and potting mix. he plants until his beds overflow. colour curls behind his ears and over the hills of his buttocks—ghost orchids grow in the secret spaces between his toes. he tracks his plantings in a new spreadsheet. species name, common name, origin, location in his garden. he names the scents of flowers, the pain in planting, the cost, healing time and infections. at night, while completing his spreadsheet, he caresses his garden. he runs his fingers over the flowers and through the branches of trees. one day frank panics. he wants an avenue of trees in his garden, but his beds are almost full. prue calms him with a lecture on perspective. soon vast oaks track the inside of his thighs, receding to a vanishing point in his crotch. later that year, the garden is complete. his job is to tend it. he sees prue less often, but still visits when she wants to display her work. he likes to show off his garden—the archivist as exhibit. every day he works special creams and unguents into his skin. but marsh gardening portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 7 no matter how he cares for it, time stretches the garden, flowers sag and droop—patches became overgrown with grey hair. he weeds assiduously with wax. a year later, he discovers a cancer has poisoned the soil beneath his careful planting. metastasising cells make the flowers look sickly as their ground takes on a sallow glow. resisting this last season, frank makes plans to preserve his garden. he creates a final spreadsheet, a simple list. instructions for his doctor and the specialists: the taxidermist, the frame maker, the lawyer who will handle his bequest. he plans to return his garden to the national gallery— stretched, framed and ready for hanging. prue will be pleased. corporate capitalism: overcoming a barrier to ecologically and socially sustainable development portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal corporate capitalism: a barrier to be overcome in enabling ecologically and socially sustainable development ian mcgregor, university of technology sydney this article seeks to identify ways of ensuring that the business sector can more effectively contribute to the required transition towards ecologically sustainable development (esd). it begins by seeking to identify the major reasons for the lack of progress towards esd in australia, new zealand and most other developed countries. it then identifies the financial and business systems within which the major corporations operate as one of the major reasons for this lack of progress. the article briefly reviews possible approaches to sustainable societies and it then proposes using the natural step system conditions for ecological and social sustainability to develop objectives for an ecologically sustainable business sector. it then describes some of the major ways of changing how governance, society, governments and businesses might operate, in order to re-orient society towards being ecologically and socially sustainable. progress towards esd models of sustainable development this section reviews briefly the two predominant models of sustainable development from the sustainable development literature. this will help define how this article conceptualises esd and how this relates to sustainable societies. these two models were illustrated in the following diagrams based on those included in 1996 australia: state of environment report. mcgregor corporate capitalism figure 1: two models of sustainable development overlapping system model of sd nested system model of esd (three pillars model) (russian doll model) source: (state of the environment advisory council 1996: ch 10, 12) the overlapping system model of sustainable development the major problem with the overlapping system model (also referred to as the three pillars model) is that it does not recognize that our economic and social systems must operate within the constraints of the eco-system (state of the environment advisory council 1996). these models generally promote a balance of ecological/environmental, social and economic/business interests (world business council for sustainable development). development approaches based on this type of model are less likely to meet one of the three core objectives of esd in australia, which is ‘to protect biological diversity and maintain essential ecological processes and life-support systems’ (ecologically sustainable development steering committee 1992, 8). the problem is that the earth’s ecosystems and the environment are too crucially important to this and future generations to be balanced particularly with economic growth, which is usually the focus of the economic circle or pillar at the world or portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 2 mcgregor corporate capitalism national level. ecosystems need to given higher priority in order to ensure that human activity systems (social and economic) do not continue to do significant damage to them (czech 2000). an example of this is the australian government’s refusal to ratify the kyoto protocol in relation to greenhouse gas emissions, due mainly to the possible negative impact on economic growth over next decade (hamilton 2003). this indicates a higher priority being given to economic growth by the australian government than to the prevention of further damage to the atmospheric ecosystem. the version of sustainable development or sustainability that is reflected in the overlapping system model tends towards ‘weak sustainability’ as defined by bell and morse (1999). weak sustainability equates to a sort of economic sustainability where the emphasis is upon allocation of resources and levels of consumption, and financial value as a key element of system quality. the bell and morse (1999) definitions of weak and strong sustainability represent points towards either end of a continuum. at the weak sustainability end, economic factors tend to predominate and at the strong sustainability end, ecological factors predominate. ecological factors are often not measurable in financial terms and include physical measures of soil erosion, biodiversity, dryland salinity etc. the nested system model, discussed below, reflects more of a strong sustainability approach. the nested system model of esd the nested system model recognises the constraints imposed by the earth’s eco-system on human activity systems, including the social and economic systems. the 1996 australia: state of environment report describes the nested system model as: ...the decision-making model needed for an ecologically sustainable future for australia. it recognises that the economy is a sub-set of society, since many important aspects of society do not involve economic activity. similarly, it acknowledges that human society is totally constrained by the natural ecology of our planet. it requires integration of ecological thinking into all social and economic planning (ecologically sustainable development steering committee 1992; state of the environment advisory council 1996, ch10, 12). this holistic perspective, which recognizes the limits imposed by the earth’s ecosystems on social and economic systems, indicates that we need to move beyond the triple bottom line for business, which is based on the overlapping system or three pillars model. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 3 mcgregor corporate capitalism the terminology ‘ecologically sustainable development’ (esd) is used in this article in preference to either sustainable development or sustainability. this is because some of the forms of sustainable development and sustainability referred to in the literature fail to fully recognise the ecological limits that need to be placed on human activity and reflect weak sustainability (bell & morse 1999) as defined and discussed in the previous section. many of these sustainable development approaches use the overlapping system or three pillars model referred to above in regard to balancing economic, social and ecological or environmental issues (world business council for sustainable development, n.d.). as also noted above, the ecology of the earth and its ecosystems has to be paramount and be recognised as a higher priority than economic or profit growth in order to progress towards esd. it is a lack of recognition of this that contributes to the lack of progress towards esd. lack of progress towards esd for millions of years, humans had little impact on the earth’s ecosystems. however, in the late twentieth century, human population and technology reached a level where human activities began to have major and significant adverse impacts on the earth’s ecosystems. the need to redirect our development towards a more ecologically sustainable form of development was increasingly recognised in the 1980s and 1990s following the publication of books such as our common future (world commission on environment and development, 1987) and beyond the limits (meadows, meadows & randers 1992). the world summit on sustainable development (wssd) in rio de janeiro in 1992 and 2 subsequent wssd meetings have been held to address this crucial global issue. in 1992, leading scientists also published warning to humanity (union of concerned scientists), discussing the environmental and resource damage caused by overconsumption in developed countries. during the ensuing decade, however, little progress has been made in addressing the five major challenges that this report identified as needing urgent attention. these were: we must bring environmentally damaging activities under control to restore and protect the integrity of the earth's systems we depend on; we must manage resources crucial to human welfare more effectively; we must stabilize population; we must reduce and eventually eliminate poverty; portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 4 mcgregor corporate capitalism we must ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions. (union of concerned scientists, 1992, website). also in 1992, all australian governments endorsed the national strategy for ecologically sustainable development. its core objectives were: to enhance individual and community well-being and welfare by following a path of economic development that safeguards the welfare of future generations; to provide for equity within and between generations; to protect biological diversity and maintain essential ecological processes and life-support systems (ecologically sustainable development steering committee 1992, 8). this national strategy also included, as one of its guiding principles, the following version of the precautionary principle—‘where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation’(ecologically sustainable development steering committee 1992, 8). despite the laudable aims of the national strategy, australia and many other developed countries have, over the last decade, continued to increase emissions of greenhouse gases, increase use of non-renewable resources and increase waste production. despite being unsustainable, economic growth continues to be given much higher priority than esd in australia (christoff 2002) and rest of the world (czech, 2000). in in reverse, christoff (2002, 6) describes australia’s progress towards esd since 1992 as a ‘decade in reverse’. professor daniel esty of yale, a leading us environmentalist, stated in 2002 ‘there was no country that had swung more sharply against environmental improvements in the decade since the rio earth summit than australia’ (asia pulse 2002). a review of australia’s national headline sustainability indicators (environment australia 2002) found that for most (over 70 percent) of the indicators that related to ecological factors, trend data was not available. this is unlike the economic indicators, three of which related to economic growth and for all of which trend data was available. this may in itself be an indication of the relative priority given to ecological sustainability versus growth in economic activity by the australian government and society. for three of the four ecological indicators for which trend data was available, the trend was adverse or negative (mcgregor 2003, 38). portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 5 mcgregor corporate capitalism most countries, including australia and new zealand, are still focused on economic growth as an overriding priority and as more important than measures to move towards esd. a recent example of this is australia’s refusal to sign the kyoto protocol to reduce greenhouse gases, as the federal government claims that doing so might marginally reduce economic growth (hamilton 2003). the corporate sector is one of the key proponents of giving priority to economic growth. the system within which major corporations operate requires them to ensure their survival by continually growing their revenues and profits over time. this continual growth of corporations’ revenues and profits is made much easier by the continuing economic growth of the countries in which they operate. this article postulates that this system results in a corporate sector that is much more focused on revenue, profits and economic growth rather than esd. in addition, due to the large and growing power and influence of the corporate sector on society (ritz 2001), this results in the corporate sector acting as a major and powerful barrier to esd, which is difficult to overcome. major barriers to progress towards esd lester milbrath (1994) identified one of the major stumbling blocks to a sustainable society as those key premises supported by leadership groups in most societies, which he called the dominant social paradigm (dsp). one of the key problems that he identifies with the dsp is that it includes continued economic growth. he also identifies the need to move towards what he calls the new environmental paradigm (nep) to make substantial progress towards esd. this nep deeply challenges the dsp and the premises underlying modern industrial societies. the nep, in my view, represents part of the massive societal change required to make significant progress towards esd. the business sector in australia, new zealand and most other developed countries strongly reinforces the dsp and its focus on economic growth. economic growth is an increase in the real value of production and consumption of goods and services produced and sold in a country or region. economic growth occurs when there is an increase in the multiplied product of population and per capita consumption. the australian and new zealand economies grow as an integrated whole consisting of agricultural, extractive, manufacturing, and services sectors that require physical inputs and produce wastes. economic growth is usually indicated by increases portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 6 mcgregor corporate capitalism in the real (prices adjusted for inflation) gross domestic product (gdp) or real gross national product (gnp). economic growth has been a primary—and remains a perennial—goal of australian and new zealand and most other societies and governments. established principles of physics and ecology demonstrate there is a limit to economic growth, because there are limited sources of energy and materials and limits to the absorption capacity of the atmosphere (greenhouse gases) and other sinks which the economy uses to absorb waste (based on the nested system model referred to earlier). in simple terms, our current level of economic activities is already above the level of ecological resource constraints; we use too much of the sources that provide the inputs (particularly non-renewable and many renewable resources) and the sinks (rivers, lakes, oceans, atmospheres) that absorb the outputs. despite this, we seek to increase the level of our economic activities, without seeking to impose conditions on this economic growth that would ensure that the economy is ecologically sustainable. for example, there is strong and increasing evidence that australasian and global economic growth (with increased greenhouse gas emissions) is causing substantial and in the short to medium-term irreparable ecological damage to the atmospheric ecosystem and the welfare of future generations in australia, new zealand, our pacific island neighbours and the world. there has been an increase of global temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions to levels above those prevalent on earth for 120,000 years (intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc), 2003). the australian government, however, still refuses to ratify the kyoto protocol despite having one of the highest levels of per capita greenhouse emission of any country in the world (christoff 2002, 2). technological progress has had many positive and negative ecological, economic and social effects and it may be dangerous to depend on it to reconcile the conflict between economic growth and the long-term ecological and societal welfare of australasia and the world. there is a vigorous debate between the technological optimists and the technological sceptics. the situation is well summarised in costanza’s (1999, 25) article that compares the technological optimists’ position—that ‘technical progress can deal with any challenge’—with the technological pessimists’ position, that ‘progress portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 7 mcgregor corporate capitalism should depend less on technology and more on social and community development’. this article argues that the precautionary principle strongly militates against the technological optimist’s position as the relatively minor potential negative impacts of taking a more cautious approach are strongly outweighed by the huge ecological problems encountered if the technological optimists are wrong. the business sector tends to support the view of the technological optimists, as it supports ‘business as usual’ and the dsp referred to earlier. economic growth, as gauged by increasing gdp, is an increasingly dangerous and anachronistic goal for any developed country, including australian and new zealand (czech 2000; douthwaite 1999; hamilton 2003). richard layard (2003) of the london school of economics portrays it as the paradox at the heart of our civilization, arguing that despite greater income and wealth, people have not become happier. there is also strong and increasing evidence that in most developed countries, such as australia, continuing economic growth does not increase societal welfare (daly & farley 2004; the australia institute 2002). this is particularly the case since about 1980 for many developed countries (daly & farley 2004). a steady state economy (that is, an economy with a relatively stable, mildly fluctuating level of gdp) is a viable alternative to a growing economy and has become a more appropriate and necessary goal in making progress towards esd for australia, new zealand, usa, canada, japan and almost all of europe. economic growth may still be possible but only within system conditions which ensure that it occurs as part of an ecologically sustainable economy. appropriate system conditions are proposed in a later section of this article. the long-term sustainability of a steady state economy requires its establishment at a size small enough to avoid the breaching of reduced ecological and economic capacity during expected or unexpected supply shocks such as droughts and energy shortages. a steady state economy does not preclude social and economic development, a qualitative process in which different technologies may be employed and the relative prominence of economic sectors may evolve. it would involve increasing the quality of life of the majority of people worldwide, rather than the quantity of material consumed and accumulated (particularly in developed countries). portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 8 mcgregor corporate capitalism in her 1992 book, beyond the limits, meadows (1992) quotes from a world bank environment working paper which clearly recognises the problems with treating economic growth as part of, or analogous to, development. it states that ‘our planet develops over time without growing. our economy, a sub-system of the finite and nongrowing earth, must eventually adapt to a similar pattern of development.’ the severe and ever-increasing threat to our planet’s eco-systems means that we urgently need to change our societal and business focus from pursuing unsustainable economic growth as a societal priority. as developed countries move towards a steady state economy, it would also be advisable for them to assist other nations in moving from the goal of economic growth to the goal of a steady state economy, beginning with those nations currently enjoying adequate per capita consumption. for many nations with widespread poverty, increasing per capita consumption (via economic growth) and relieving poverty by more equitable distributions of income and wealth remains an appropriate goal—but again it should only occur within appropriate system conditions to ensure it is ecologically sustainable. given the dsp that holds that economic growth is good for society, the environment and ecosystems, the move towards a steady state economy will not be easy. the problem is well exemplified by a statement in 2002 made by us president george w bush in relation to climate change: ‘addressing global climate change will require a sustained effort, over many generations. my approach recognizes that sustained economic growth is the solution, not the problem’ (us white house 2002, website). why the corporate sector is a major barrier to esd this section highlights the major role of the corporate sector in encouraging and reinforcing economic growth as a key part of the ecologically unsustainable dsp. economic growth is strongly supported by the business sector, particularly larger corporations whose shares are traded on the australasian and overseas share markets. this is because the economic and financial systems within which these corporations operate require not only that there is a focus on current profits for shareholders, but also on continual growth of profits in the future in order to increase the price of shares in the portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 9 mcgregor corporate capitalism corporation (weston & brigham 1975). the directors and management of these businesses are also focused on growing profits because poor profit growth often leads to a company being taken over by a competitor, or chief executives and executive management being dismissed by directors (hanson et al. 2001, 401-402). growth of profits is usually achieved through increasing revenues, an outcome that is much easier to achieve in an economy that is growing strongly. this circumstance explains why directors and management of corporations strongly support continued high economic growth. the expectation is that on average, corporate revenues should at least grow at the rate of economic growth—higher for ‘growth’ industries (often those in the high technology sector etc) and slower for mature industries (such as coal, steel, food etc) (weston & brigham 1975). there is also pressure on the management of corporations to continually reduce costs to increase profitability. where this increase in profitability is achieved by dematerialisation or reduced energy usage, it may have some positive impact on ecological sustainability. where it is achieved by reduced employment, it is likely to have an adverse impact on social sustainability, particularly if the retrenched employees find it difficult to find appropriate new employment. this leads to the other rationale used by business to support economic growth, the claim that economic growth is necessary to maintain unemployment at acceptable levels (hayden 1999). according to this rationale, changes such as work-time reduction and other full-employment measures can enable the economy to generate a better quality of life; full, meaningful employment; and a move towards an ecologically and socially sustainable society (hayden 1999). george’s (2002) proposal for universal guaranteed income would also help overcome this problem. most businesses do recognise that they have responsibilities to stakeholders in addition to shareholders, including employees, customers, suppliers, government, society etc (hanson et al 2001). some major businesses now report using a ‘triple bottom line’ that includes economic (profit/financial), social and environmental aspects (global reporting initiative 2003). considerations of these other stakeholders and other broader issues, such as ecologically and socially sustainable development, will however always tend to be a secondary issue for corporate businesses due to the way the financial system operates, requiring these corporations to grow profits in order to survive. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 10 mcgregor corporate capitalism the corporate sector is a major barrier to facilitating any transition to esd, not only because of its extensive advertising which is a major influence in supporting more sales of more goods and services which contribute in turn to economic growth and competitive consumerism (hamilton 2003). it is also due to the corporations’ directors’ and executives’ powerful political position supporting the strong societal priority given to economic growth. this powerful political position is gained through extensive political party campaign donations and lobbying (ritz 2001). it will therefore require major transformation of the social, political and business environment and the governance mechanisms within which it operates to change the current corporate business objectives of seeking continual profit growth and the ongoing reduction of labour costs, which then reinforces unsustainable economic growth and contributes to unemployment. this change is, however, necessary if we are to adhere to the ecological limits of our planet and start the transformation towards a new ecologically and socially sustainable society with a steady state economy and an ecologically and socially sustainable business system (czech 2000; daly 1996). an ecologically sustainable society conditions for an ecologically sustainable society there has been much discussion about achieving sustainable societies and how they would operate. works that have a perspective similar to that taken in this article include beyond growth (daly 1996), the principles for a sustainable society (iucn 1991), shoveling fuel for a runaway train (czech, 2000), envisioning a sustainable society (milbrath, 1989), stumbling blocks to a sustainable society (milbrath, 1994) and a just and sustainable australia (yencken & porter 2001). milbrath (1994) argues that a nep is required and that it will need to successfully challenge and overcome the current dsp to make significant progress towards an ecologically and socially sustainable society. some of the key social norms that the nep should provide are: adopt a global bioethic protect and nurture natural systems forbid behaviour that may irreversibly injure natural systems; avoid/minimize risky actions. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 11 mcgregor corporate capitalism protect and enhance public health. feel compassion/obligation to other species, future generations, and people in other lands de-emphasize violence and domination, reject war, enhance conciliation programs provide peace and order enrich work patterns to make work fulfilling emphasize cooperation foster democratic decision-making; enhance participation. enhance freedom so long as it does not injure life systems provide justice/equity encourage holistic thinking and broad-spectrum competence control science and technology. these are broad social norms and it is hard to translate them to a specific model for a sustainable society or path towards esd. in order to develop a more specific framework for esd towards an ecologically sustainable society and an ecologically sustainable business sector, the natural step (ns) model will be used. this model postulates the following system conditions required for a sustainable society. within it, nature is not subject to systematically increased 1. concentrations of substances extracted from the earth’s crust. 2. concentrations of substances produced by society 3. degradation by physical means. 4. and, in that society human needs are met worldwide. (robert et al., 2002) diesendorf has criticised the ns model in regard to its different levels of generality and the limited treatment of the social and economic aspects of sustainable development (1998). in the same paper, diesendorf, however, accepts that the model provides a strong focus for business and government in controlling flows into the environment and developing measurable indicators of ecological sustainability. the 4th system condition relating to social sustainability is also broad and general. i would, however, argue that as human beings are adaptable creatures there is a wide range of system conditions within which a socially sustainable human society can operate. the focus of this article is therefore mainly on ecologically sustainability. there is strong evidence that we are breaching the first three system conditions in a way that is detrimental to the earth’s portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 12 mcgregor corporate capitalism ecosystems and the welfare of future generations. for this reason, the ns model will be used as a basis in this article for assessing the changes in governance, society, the business sector and possible government policies that could assist in the move towards esd and an ecologically sustainable society. objectives for an ecologically sustainable business sector within an ecologically sustainable society based on this ns model, it is possible to formulate objectives for an ecologically sustainable business sector. those shown below are based on the objectives developed by robert et al (2002) but have been simplified for the purpose of this article. these objectives are: 1. eliminate the use of non-renewable resources by businesses and society 2. eliminate any contribution by businesses or society to increasing the concentration of substances produced by society which have a detrimental effect on eco-systems ensure that businesses are not over-harvesting or degrading ecosystems 3. ensure that all businesses provide working conditions that provide employees with reasonable quality of life and contribute to meeting human needs worldwide and the needs of future generations. as with the societal ns system conditions (referred to above), the first three objectives relate to ecological sustainability. the 4th objective builds upon the social sustainability system condition of the ns model, which is broad and has therefore been made more specific in order to be useful in relation to the business sector. these objectives have been chosen to be challenging and to represent a future vision or ideal for an ecologically and socially sustainable business sector and to guide the necessary societal and business sector change. they can also provide a framework for strategic policy and other decision-making required to move society towards an ecologically sustainable future. as society starts the important, urgent and necessary move towards esd, governments will develop laws, regulations, taxes and other policy measures to encourage or enforce ecologically sustainability on businesses and the rest of society (holmberg & robèrt 2000). these are discussed further in the following section. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 13 mcgregor corporate capitalism societal and governance changes that would facilitate transition to an ecologically sustainable business sector and society governance for esd the world humanity action trust defines governance as ‘the framework of social and economic systems and legal and political structures through which humanity manages itself’ (2000, 7). governance comprises the institutions, processes and traditions, which determine how power is exercised, how decisions are taken and how citizens have their say. the oecd public management program focuses in particular on the principal elements of good governance, namely: accountability: government is able and willing to show the extent to which its actions and decisions are consistent with clearly defined and agreed-upon objectives. transparency: government actions, decisions and decision-making processes are open to an appropriate level of scrutiny by others parts of government, civil society and, in some instances, outside institutions and governments. efficiency and effectiveness: government strives to produce quality public outputs, including services delivered to citizens, at the best cost, and ensures that outputs meet the original intentions of policymakers. responsiveness: government has the capacity and flexibility to respond rapidly to societal changes, takes into account the expectations of civil society in identifying the general public interest, and is willing to critically re-examine the role of government. forward vision: government is able to anticipate future problems and issues based on current data and trends and develop policies that take into account future costs and anticipated changes (e.g. demographic, economic, environmental, etc.). rule of law: government enforces equally transparent laws, regulations and codes. (oecd puma 2004) good governance may assist the societal and business transition to esd, but there needs to be a re-direction of the focus that international, national and regional governance is trying to achieve at a societal level, in order that significant progress can be made. once the pressure to make more and more of the same is dispelled, human ingenuity can be turned to making life better and better with much less resource use and no pollution or emissions. such a society is likely to be even more innovative and creative than our current one (coulter 2003). this next section identifies some of the governance and societal changes that re-directing governance towards esd could make or seek to achieve. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 14 mcgregor corporate capitalism governance principles for ‘sufficiency’ and ‘sustainability’ princen (2003) proposes some sufficiency principles as underlying social organizing principles for a sustainable society. these principles are summarised below: restraint, the behavioral tendency of using less than what is physically or technically or legally or financially possible. restraint is invoked when everincreasing use has immediate and tangible benefits yet causes long-term, often intangible and invisible, negative impacts; the precautionary principle states that corrective action is warranted in the face of critical environmental threats even if the science is not conclusive. all australian governments endorsed a version of the precautionary principle in the national strategy for ecologically sustainable development in 1992; polluter pays principle states that those actors primarily responsible for degradation pay for clean-up and amelioration; the zero principle extends the precautionary principle by stating that compromise solutions—a ‘balance’ between jobs and the environment, for instance—are unacceptable when such compromises serve only to postpone a real solution. put differently, with critical threats, in the long-term the only solution is to halt the environmental insult. the principle of reverse onus states that the burden of proof is on those who would intervene into critical life support systems. at present one can harvest a forest or invent a chemical and it is the responsibility of others—downstream residents, regulators, atmospheric or oceanic scientists, environmentalists, waste managers and organised labour union representatives—to demonstrate harm. good governance based on these sufficiency and sustainability principles and the natural step system conditions also outlined previously would represent a sound basis for making progress towards ecologically and socially sustainable society. the next section focuses on some of the problems in moving towards the first ‘sufficiency principle’ of restraint. from competitive consumerism to ‘enoughness’ major changes at the societal level will be required to move from the current dsp to a nep (milbrath 1994). the dominant culture in australasian, north american and most european societies has come to associate happiness with growing disposable income portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 15 mcgregor corporate capitalism and spending more (both of which are dependent on economic growth). there is strong and increasing evidence that beyond a certain level (which most developed countries reached in the 1960s or 70s) increased spending, resulting in increased gdp, does not make us happier or increase societal welfare (brink & zeesman 1997; the australia institute 2002). there is no doubt that developed countries have sufficient productive capacity to provide adequate food, shelter, clothing for their citizens (that is, comply with the 4th system condition in the natural step model in relation to meeting basic human needs—at least in their own country—if not worldwide). the consumer culture that is strongly encouraged by the corporate sector is another major barrier to esd. as vicki robin states ‘it is not too hard to imagine a simple life, richly lived’(2002). she then goes on to encourage ‘enoughness’ as a way of changing the economy to a more ecologically and socially sustainable model. it will not be easy to move from the current rampant competitive consumer society, where people strive for bigger houses, faster cars, larger freezers, etc to a steady state economy wherein the quality of life is more important than the size, speed and quantity of consumer goods possessed. such a shift will also require significant societal change. this societal change would be made easier if the corporate sector was not driven and constrained by the system within which it currently operates that makes corporations strive for continual revenue and profit growth fuelled by increased consumption. until substantial societal change occurs, government is not going to start to move from the current dominant social paradigm to the new environmental paradigm required for esd. in a survey of the australian public environmental protection was chosen over economic growth by a ratio of 6-to-1, and in the us 61 percent chose environmental protection over economic growth, with 28 percent choosing economic growth over environmental protection (milbrath 1989). more recent data published in 2004 indicated that: nine out of ten people in nsw rate the environment as an important personal priority in their lives, after family and friends. fifty four percent of people say the environment is very important in their lives and a further 38 percent say it is rather important. the environment is ranked above leisure and work as a valued personal priority. (nsw department of environment, december 2004, 28) despite this strong popular support, there seems to be little progress towards esd. i would argue that one of the major reasons for this has been the substantially increased power of the corporate elite in australia and in most other developed countries portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 16 mcgregor corporate capitalism (monbiot 2000) and their reinforcement of the dsp. some of the largest multinational corporations have revenues larger than the total gdp (money spent on goods and services etc) of australia (anderson & cavanagh 2000). in many cases, the power of corporations is such that they can negotiate special deals with national governments for ‘tax holidays’ and other concessions, particularly if they are proposing a major investment and it can be feasibly be located in more than one country. ericsson, the swedish electronics company, is reported to have threatened to relocate its world headquarters from sweden because of the high tax rates imposed in that country; more recently it has warned sweden not to reject the invitation to join the euro currency system (afp 2003). james hardie relocated the legal domicile of its parent company and world headquarters away from australia for tax and other reasons (hardie 2001). it has recently become clear that trying to avoid potential liability payments to australian victims of its asbestos activities was one of the major reasons for the relocation (sydney morning herald 2004). despite the increasing power of corporations (monbiot 2000; ritz 2001), governments (encouraged by popular support) are likely to be the most effective mechanism to move society towards esd and to control corporations. in plenary session at the 1992 rio earth summit, stefan schmidheiny, chairman of the business council for sustainable development called for a bold new governance partnership between business and governments. ‘business must move beyond the traditional approach of backdoor lobbying: governments must move beyond traditional over-reliance on command-andcontrol regulations’ (ward, borregaard & kapelus 2002). governance, society, governments and businesses all have to change substantially in order to enable significant progress to be made towards esd. government and governance policies to ensure an ecologically sustainable business sector as outlined previously, the financial system within which corporate businesses currently operate makes it unlikely that business will become ecologically and socially sustainable, without significant social pressure and government intervention. however, in conjunction with substantial societal change and social pressure, governments are in a powerful position to compel businesses to change in the direction of esd. this section provides an overview of some the governance initiatives and policies that could be adopted to ensure businesses become more ecologically sustainable. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 17 mcgregor corporate capitalism a government could implement all of the policies or measures, outlined below, concurrently. some consideration would need to be given to how these policies and measures would interact. their interaction should mainly be mutually reinforcing in progressing the required societal and business sector transition towards esd, as they are all based on moving society and the business sector towards the four system conditions for an ecologically and socially sustainable society and the four objectives for an ecologically sustainable business sector. licence to operate a business governments could require businesses to operate in an ecologically sustainable manner or withdraw their licence to operate. the idea of licensing businesses and making them prove that they are operating in the public interest is far from new; in fact it was applied in the late 18th and early 19th century in the united states, where charter corporations had to apply at the end of their charter (usually 20 years) to have it renewed by the relevant state legislature. this arrangement allowed the state legislatures to only renew charter for corporations where the directors and management could show they were operating in the public interest as well as management and shareholders’/investors’ interests (ritz 2001). given the resources of many corporations (e.g. microsoft, general electric etc) and the wide diversity of shareholders, particularly institutional investors for pension funds etc, there would be a lot of pressure on legislatures in today’s context to renew the charter. this process of renewing licences to operate businesses could be based on the business being required to justify that it was complying with the four objectives for an ecologically sustainable business. if the business was not achieving these objectives, its licence may only be renewed for five years, rather than a standard ten years—with the possibility of the license not being renewed after five years, unless by that time the business was meeting the required standards. such a government requirement to operate according to the four objectives is less radical than the proposal made in a recent article in ecological economics that suggested all corporations should be forced by government to become non-profit (lux 2003). lux’s suggested approach, which is somewhat similar to the state ownership of enterprises used in the ussr and eastern europe in most of the late 20th century, portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 18 mcgregor corporate capitalism would eliminate the incentive to continually improve businesses products, services and efficiency, in order to enhance profitability. the elimination of this continual improvement element had clear disadvantages when tested in the ussr’s and eastern european model of state ownership of production. license to manufacture products or provide commercial services eco-efficient products that meet the same needs and provide similar functionality to current products are desirable alternatives from the point of view of esd. examples of such products include household electronics (vcrs, tvs etc), for which research has shown that the stand-by power consumption of certain household electronics is 50 times lower than others (australian greenhouse office 2003). a ‘license to manufacture’ system is one way to allow only those products close to best practice in eco-efficiency to be produced. similar licenses to enforce standards for eco-efficiency could be imposed on service businesses and non-profit organisations. over time, eco-efficiency standards can also be increased so that all products and services provided by the business sector are produced within the standards required by the three objectives for an ecologically sustainable business sector. government to auction licenses to use resources a policy related to the auctioning of licenses to use non-renewable resources would have significant impact on progress towards esd, in particular with regard to fulfilling the esd objective of ensuring equity for future generations. for non-renewable resources, these licenses should allow ever-decreasing usage each year, to encourage a movement away from further depletion. ideally, this should be done in such a way that the usage of non-renewable resources would be eliminated before reasonably accessible supplies were fully depleted or exhausted. by issuing licenses for continually decreasing amounts of non-renewable resources to be used, governments would force businesses to continually reduce the amount of non-renewable resources used and help move the business sector towards being ecologically sustainable. for renewable resources—fish, water etc—independent experts would be required to establish a rate at which the renewable resource could be used or harvested without depletion or damage to the resource or the ecological systems which use the resource. it is recognised that establishing such rates and adhering to them may present an even greater challenge in relation to renewable resources in the global commons. already portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 19 mcgregor corporate capitalism major difficulties have been encountered dealing with localised situations, as witnessed for example, by the difficulties australian authorities have had trying to stop unsustainable fishing of patagonian tooth fish. experts in this case have determined sustainable fishing levels but illegal over-fishing is threatening to destroy breeding stocks of this extremely rare and prized fish (abc 2003). government to ensure work time reduction governments, particularly in developed countries, need to encourage their constituents to produce less, consume less and work shorter hours to facilitate the move towards an ecologically and socially sustainable steady state economy. hayden puts it succinctly: ‘we need a vision of spending time with the joneses – rather than keeping up with them’ (1999). unlike rewarding more work with more money that flows into the economy and creates more economic growth, by rewarding workers with more leisure time, we can have less consumption and less production. many of the workers in developed countries today are often poorer in real terms, and spend more time at work than 30 years ago and less time with family and on leisure activities. real gains in productivity have actually translated into making shareholder elites and upper management obscenely rich (hayden 1999). work time reduction can contribute both to ecological (earning less, consuming less, travelling less) and social sustainability—more time for relationships, families, volunteer work and leisure—major contributors to societal happiness (hamilton 2003). it can therefore contribute to all four societal system conditions and the four objectives for an ecologically sustainable business sector specified previously. universal guaranteed income and maximum allowable wealth in his book, theory of justice rawls proposes that the level of inequality needed in a just society is that level of inequality that results in the poorest in society faring the best economically (1999). that is, the level of incentive is enough to encourage people, but that incentives are not so huge that the poor are made poorer. in today’s societies, the remuneration packages received by corporate chief executives and other senior corporate executives are well beyond the level required to provide enough incentive to do the job well. in the interesting book, socioeconomic democracy, george proposes a ‘universal guaranteed income’ and a ‘maximum allowable wealth’ as a way of reducing the gap between rich and poor and developing a more socially sustainable society portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 20 mcgregor corporate capitalism (2002). this approach could make a major contribution to the fourth societal system condition of the ns model relating to meeting human needs worldwide, as many individuals have much more wealth than they could ever need and a universal guaranteed income would assist in moving those in severe poverty from the necessity to clear rainforest and destroy eco-systems in order to eke out a basic subsistence existence. an ecologically and socially sustainable tax system governments should heavily tax unsustainable activities and the use of non-renewable resources and use selective subsidies to encourage more sustainable alternatives, including use of renewable alternatives (e.g., energy). higher rates of goods and services taxes should also be levied on goods and services that use non-renewable resources. moving the tax burden from earned income from employment earnings to taxing unearned/investment income of people able to support themselves would assist in social sustainability. savings should still be encouraged but for the purpose of self-funded retirement income provision that will be increasingly required given the aging population in australasia and most other developed countries. progressive taxation of higher income earners should also assist in social sustainability, or governments could move closer to the ‘universal guaranteed income’ and ‘maximum allowable wealth’ concepts discussed in above (george 2002). ecologically and socially progressive taxation systems are an efficient way of reorienting the market mechanisms towards more ecologically and socially desirable outcomes. markets can be efficient in allocating renewable resources—but tend to under-value non-renewable resources—which are clearly of value for future generations as well as the current users and consumers. government or social non-profit ownership of infrastructure it is inefficient in australia (both in ecological and economic terms), to have two fibre optic cable networks (andrews 2002), and three or more sets of mobile telephone towers and relay stations etc. there are certain types of infrastructure, usually basic utilities that are natural monopolies (e.g., water supply distribution, electricity and gas distribution, telephone—mobile and landline, including fibre cable infrastructure). portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 21 mcgregor corporate capitalism government or non-profit social organisations (owned by users) would be a better way to increase the ecologically sustainability of these enterprises rather than ideologically driven competition and privatisation policies. it is an enormous waste of resources— mostly non-renewable—to have duplicate networks for natural monopolies such as electricity, water, gas distribution, local telephone services etc. it is also difficult to successfully regulate the providers—but if the providers are non-profit mutual organisations (owned by users) or government owned, the incentive for over-charging (by negotiating higher prices than required with the regulator) is largely eliminated. mutual ownership by users may be more efficient than the government ownership approach, as the users are likely to be focussed on the utility providing reliable service at minimal cost. in the us, where many of the natural monopolies in infrastructure and utilities are privately owned but regulated, there is evidence that government regulators have lost the battle to defend the public interest as a consequence of being out-negotiated by better-resourced private utilities. the major blackout of 2003 in the northeastern usa also provides some evidence that the us ‘private’ infrastructure model may not be the best, as it appears to be less reliable than many european or australasian electricity grid systems. 4. international governance many of the environmental and social issues we face are global rather than national. for example, the consensus view of the international panel on climate change is that a global reduction of between 60-80 percent is required (well beyond the 5 percent proposed in the kyoto protocol) to stabilise atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at current levels (yencken, 2002). current levels may already be higher than ideal. other environmental and social problems (poverty, hunger, terrorism) will also need improved international governance. redirecting money from military spending to ecological and social spending in ‘stumbling blocks for a sustainable society’ milbrath urged the world to ‘reject war’ and ‘provide peace and order’ (1994). the redirection of military spending in australia, which the government has recently planned to increase from around $10 billion per year to $15.3 billion per year (over $40 million per day) (doherty 2003) to health, portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 22 mcgregor corporate capitalism education and social welfare would make a substantial contribution to increased social sustainability in australia. redirecting the huge us military budget, which represents over 50 percent of the world’s military expenditure, could make a huge contribution towards global esd. the fourth system condition of the ns model states ‘in that society human needs are met worldwide’ (robert et al 2002). international governance that focused on esd would seek the re-direction of a significant proportion of the huge military expenditures of north america, europe and australia towards providing food, shelter and basic healthcare for the poor of the world would make a major contribution towards meeting this condition. many of those living in severe poverty worldwide contribute significantly to environmental and ecological degradation through their efforts to subsist and survive. 5. conclusions at every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different. roberto unger (smolin 1997) economic growth, driven largely by the corporate sector, continues to stop australia, new zealand and most other countries making significant progress towards esd. the system within which the corporate sector operates requires that directors and management of large share market-listed corporations focus on continually growing profits to increase the value of the shares, in order for the corporations to survive and not be taken over. we therefore urgently need an end to unsustainable ‘business as usual’ from almost every business because our planet’s eco-systems are under severe and increasing unsustainable pressure from our human activity systems—in particular our economic and business systems. ensuring that society moves towards esd and businesses move towards an ecologically and socially sustainable business model will not be easy but it is important, urgent and necessary. the natural step’s four system conditions for ecological and social sustainability provide a framework for developing objectives for the business sector within a sustainable society. major societal change is required before significant progress towards esd can commence. this societal change will result in a range of major government measures to ensure ecological and social sustainability of the business sector. some examples of these include business and product licensing, portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 23 mcgregor corporate capitalism steadily increasing restrictions on use of non-renewable resources, policies to ensure that renewable resources are only harvested at or below their replenishment rate, ecological tax systems, work-time reduction and income guarantees to encourage ecologically sustainable behaviour by both business and consumers. acknowledgements i wish to acknowledge dr cynthia mitchell, dr juliet willets and suzanne grob of the institute for sustainable futures, uts and dr suzanne benn and dr martin kornberger of the school of management at the university of technology, sydney (uts), australia and nigel jollands of agresearch limited in new zealand for their extremely useful comments and input to the preparation of this article. i would also like to acknowledge the valuable suggestions of the two anonymous portal reviewers. reference list australian 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sustainable development, available at <http://www.wbcsd.ch/templates/templatewbcsd1/layout.asp?type=p&menuid =nja&doopen=1&clickmenu=leftmenu>, accessed june 2003 world commission on environment and development 1987, our common future, oxford university press. world humanity action trust 2000, governance for a sustainable future, world humanity action trust, london. yencken, d 2002, 'governance for sustainability', australian journal of public administration, vol. 51, no. 2, pp 78-89. yencken, d & porter, l 2001, a just and sustainable australia, the australian council of social service, melbourne. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 26 http://www.oecd.org/document/32/0,2340,en_2649_37425_1814560_1_1_1_37425,00.html> http://www.oecd.org/document/32/0,2340,en_2649_37425_1814560_1_1_1_37425,00.html> http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/09/21/1095651330854.html> http://www.gpionline.net>/ http://www.ucsusa.org/ucs/about/1992-world-scientists-warning-to-humanity.html> http://www.ucsusa.org/ucs/about/1992-world-scientists-warning-to-humanity.html> http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/02/climatechange.html> http://www.wbcsd.ch/templates/templatewbcsd1/layout.asp?type=p&menuid=nja&doopen=1&clickmenu=leftmenu> http://www.wbcsd.ch/templates/templatewbcsd1/layout.asp?type=p&menuid=nja&doopen=1&clickmenu=leftmenu> corporate capitalism: a barrier to be overcome in enabling e progress towards esd models of sustainable development the overlapping system model of sustainable development the nested system model of esd lack of progress towards esd major barriers to progress towards esd why the corporate sector is a major barrier to esd an ecologically sustainable society conditions for an ecologically sustainable society objectives for an ecologically sustainable business sector w societal and governance changes that would facilitate transi governance for esd governance principles for ‘sufficiency’ and ‘sustainability’ from competitive consumerism to ‘enoughness’ government and governance policies to ensure an ecologically licence to operate a business license to manufacture products or provide commercial servic government to auction licenses to use resources government to ensure work time reduction universal guaranteed income and maximum allowable wealth an ecologically and socially sustainable tax system government or social non-profit ownership of infrastructure 4. international governance redirecting money from military spending to ecological and s 5. conclusions microsoft word 3527-14488-2-le[1].docx portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. 2 poems: an accidental ape, first watch roderick marsh roderick marsh lives in melbourne and occasionally moonlights as an ecological economist and management consultant. he also writes poetry—often in an apron. marsh 2 poems portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 2 an accidental ape armed with finches and iguanas, darwin and wallace revealed a simple truth: kalimantan’s old man of the forest is family. his auburn beard and piercing eyes remind me of my caledonian forebears—a solitary pict, whose powerful arms spin the world on its axis so we can witness the vast tree bud again, in rwanda, where silverbacked cloud-forest dwellers, abide in a deep meditation on digestion. powerful chests spread over broad bellies, they gesture to lower lands, where the great river congo splits love’s dominions from those of war—vicious gangs roam the north, young warriors prove themselves by murdering unwary travellers in lopsided battles, ten against one; south of the river, young satyrs fence with penis swords and caress buttocks as balm for wounded pride, while crotch-locked nymphs rise to orgasmic crescendos. we are north and south, made with rips and tears, ecstatic rage, blood and death, tender pleasure too, face-to-face, eyes joining with lips and tongue. wilberforce thought our simian ties an insult; they terrified him by day, at night he dreamt a college of grinning primates in purple socks leading him to overlook the wild abyss where twin loops of stardust spun down a kalpa, a dance for five elements; he woke, drenched, divine order swamped by contingency. there was the vast topography—a bestiary of earth, of air, and sea. greater in number were dead ends. a dread came upon him, man was absent almost everywhere; no crown of creation, not inevitable—an accidental ape. marsh 2 poems portal, vol. 10, no. 2, july 2013. 3 first watch begin when you can no longer see the lines on your palm held at arm’s length. in summer, it is time when the black ants at your feet have melted into the dirt’s twilight. forget your watch. its sterile march cannot keep time held in sun, eye, body. its stone heart and constant hands dissect the world, winding withered facets of cut certainty, flickering shadows behind glass. trust your eye, your calluses, the dirt under each fingernail, the beetle’s stifled tick— carnal echoes to till the soil’s hours as the earth spins seasons and settling blood washes wrongs away. begin when the black ants march across your swollen palms. each carrying a small piece of the carrion beetle stuck in your throat. line 11 of the poem intentionally misquotes keats’s endymion, book iv, lines 529–31. microsoft word goi cleall wednesday galley.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. geographies of identity special issue, guest edited by matthew graves and elizabeth rechniewski. © 2015 [esme cleall]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i1.4379 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. silencing deafness: displacing disability in the nineteenth century esme cleall, university of sheffield  ‘we should try ourselves to forget that they are deaf. we should try to teach them to forget that they are deaf.’ so spoke alexander graham bell, the british inventor of the telephone and deaf educationalist, in a controversial speech of 1884 (cited in ladd 2003: 129). the speech, reproduced as a pamphlet, memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race (1883), was contentious at the time and has since been widely criticised by disability activists as eugenic. in it bell advocated the intermarriage of deaf and hearing in order to breed-out deafness, to eradicate what he labelled a ‘variety’ of humanity that he saw as defective. before that goal could be achieved, bell hoped that deaf people could be taught to articulate spoken language to the extent that their deafness could be forgotten (bell 1883). bell was not arguing for an end to the discrimination that surrounded deafness, as may be implied through an ‘equal opportunities’ reading of his words. rather, he actively sought the forgetting of deafness in the deaf and the ultimate rendering of disability itself a thing of the forgotten past. this desire, common in a latenineteenth century british culture of fostering ‘normalcy,’ identified difference (be it the difference of ethnicity, sexuality, or disability) as something undesirable, and the forgetting of that difference an aspiration. in his 2010 memoir, deafness of the mind, the deaf author kevin fitzgerald also used the idea of ‘forgetting’ to evoke deaf education. his memoir’s subtitle, the forgotten cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 2 children of boston spa, points to the deaf ‘inmates’ of the st john’s institution for the deaf and dumb, in yorkshire england, where fitzgerald was himself a pupil in the 1950s. this is an account of his ‘incarceration’ at the hands of the catholic church and of how ‘generations of deaf children were treated as second class citizens’ (fitzgerald 2010). fitzgerald’s understanding of forgetting is linked to the discrimination deaf people have long faced and the way in which they have been marginalised from society and from history. here, fitzgerald evokes two issues typical of many examples of the ‘history of forgetting’: the repression of painful memories of abuse and the marginalisation of minority histories. the very different meanings bell and fitzgerald intend by ‘forgetting’ point to the contours of a complicated process: the relationship between ‘forgotten’ histories and the active process of ‘forgetting.’ there is no doubt that experiences of disability, including deafness, have been historiographically marginal, even within social and cultural history.1 the excellent work of many historians of disability, including that produced by community activists, has, for the most part, been self-contained, and is often treated as a different kind of history from that of other social groups and processes. whilst some historians of disability have drawn attention to the potential utility of examining disability alongside other socially constructed categories of difference, such as ethnicity, for the most part disability has been forgotten as a way of being, a source of identity, and a target of prejudice and discrimination (ladd 2003: 1–26). historians of memory have even used ideas of disability as metaphors for forgetting—stories and experiences which have fallen on ‘deaf ears.’ ann laura stoler, to take just one example, has recently discussed the ‘aphasia’ surrounding issues of colonialism and immigration in french history, a cognitive disability she explains psychologists see as a ‘comprehension deficit,’ a partial ‘knowledge loss’ or a ‘difficulty comprehending “structural relationships”’ (stoler 2001: 145). the metaphor is perhaps useful in capturing the fragmented representation of colonialism with which stoler is concerned, but it is interesting to reflect on her use of the phrase ‘disabled histories’ to encapsulate the process of forgetting itself. one also wonders about the effect of the metaphors so often used by social historians about 1 the relationship between ‘disability’ and ‘deafness’ is a complicated one. many politically deaf groups in the late-twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries have powerfully argued that deafness is not a disability but a ‘way of being’ and a suppressed cultural group. in this article, however, i am discussing deafness and disability together because this is how it was understood by those writing about deafness in the work i’m reviewing here, and the labelling of deafness as disability (or rather ‘infirmity’) was, i argue an important element of its historically ‘forgetting.’ cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 3 giving ‘voice to the voiceless,’ and listening to ‘the silences’ in the archives (and the common, if inaccurate, perception that deaf people are voiceless and silent) on conceiving deaf experience, in particular, as an area for historical research. but does the academically and culturally marginal place occupied by deaf history mean that the experience of deafness has been forgotten? and what indeed constitutes a ‘history of forgetting’? how does it differ from the ‘hidden histories’ (morgan 1999) of marginalised groups (including sign-language users) and the problems of scant sources and incompatible language fluencies in accessing them? as many commentators from freud on have demonstrated, forgetting is not simply experience overlooked or misplaced, but is an active process through which certain feelings and memories are excluded, repressed or silenced from an individual or collective consciousness (radstone & schwarz 2010). much of the existing work on historical memory and forgetting concentrates on the repression of violence, such as the forgetting and remembering of conflict and conquest; the refusal of guilt, as in the forgetting of colonialism and collaboration; or the wary treatment of histories of sectarianism and suppression, wrought with contemporary resonances. although less notorious, many deaf activists have constructed the treatment of the deaf as just such an issue, a process of medical and epistemological violence, cultural colonialism and linguistic suppression. haran lane (1992), for example, has described members of deaf communities as linguistic minorities, with distinct cultures, who have suffered and continue to suffer the ‘physical subjugation of a disempowered people, the imposition of alien language and mores, and the regulation of education on behalf of the [hearing] colonizer’s goals.’ some of these processes, particularly those of cruelty and maltreatment, lie behind fitzgerald’s implication that the abuse suffered by the children of boston spa has been forgotten. but it is not these elements upon which i focus here. instead i examine how the very discussion of the deaf, particularly in the nineteenth century, was haunted by evocations and conceptions of ‘silence’ and ‘forgetting.’ this brings me back to bell’s construction of the deaf. when bell, a hearing man concerned with educating the deaf into ‘normality,’ implied that deafness, and ultimately the deaf, were best erased, he was speaking as one of many in the late nineteenth-century anglophone world who actively sought to forget deafness. it is striking how common this metaphor was. the word ‘forgetting’ creeps into cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 4 numerous discussions of deafness in the writing of bell’s contemporaries, both deaf and hearing. some, including bell, were overt in their desire to forget deafness. others used the term ambivalently and sometimes metaphorically. some even pleaded that people who were deaf were not forgotten. but, though varied, the use of the imagery of forgetting and silence to evoke deafness is recurrent, and may, therefore, be seen to reveal something about how deaf experience can be approached as a ‘history of forgetting.’ it is particularly suggestive given that the use of such language occurred at the same time as deafness began to be popularly acknowledged as a social category in europe and north america. locating deafness and finding ‘the deaf’ like race, gender and other categories of difference, disability is a relational discourse. whilst what it means to be disabled is read off a variety of visible and medical markers, ‘disability’ has no inherent meaning, simply being the way in which those with a perceived impairment come to be socially disadvantaged. yet, although a social process, disability is often naturalised as a state of being that is different from and inferior to an imagined ‘norm.’ deafness too is subject to social definition (in contemporary british society being profoundly deaf is considered disabling, being tone deaf is not). deaf activists have used ‘deaf’ to indicate a deaf identity and ‘deaf’ as an adjective, a distinction which illuminates the fluid meanings of what it means to be deaf.2 becoming hard-of-hearing in older age, being pre-lingually deaf, being profoundly deaf, and being ‘mute,’ are significantly different ways of being (though in nineteenth-century discussions of ‘the deaf and dumb’ many of these distinctions are conflated). because disability is socially constructed, what it means to be deaf depends enormously on the attitudes of a given society to impairment as well as the resources and education available to deaf people. deafness constitutes different things at different moments in the past as it has in different places and societies. deafness has very long associations and symbolic investments in western culture. from leviticus and its prohibitive stance towards disability and impairment in the hebrew bible, to jesus’ miraculous opening of deaf ears in the new testament, biblical teachings have ensured that deafness has been be highly, if contradictorily, symbolically 2 this is a distinction i generally find very useful, but one that i have not used in this article as the difference between the terms did not exist in the nineteenth century and applying them retrospectively requires a problematic assumption of identity. cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 5 invested (cleall 2013). but, despite this, deaf people in british society were not identified as a social category ‘the deaf’ or ‘the deaf and dumb’ until the late eighteenth century. during the nineteenth century, this category consolidated and there was a considerable change and reconceptualisation of what it meant to be deaf in the european and anglophone world, as it was a time when other categories of difference were also being demarcated and codified. throughout the century, a coincidence of factors and developments subjected people who were deaf to an unprecedented degree of scrutiny. nineteenth-century medical advancements gave doctors increased confidence in their ability to identify and cure various disabilities and diseases. the fact that little could be done by way of medical intervention in the vast majority of cases of profound deafness did little to hinder the enthusiasm for trying: holes were drilled through deaf children’s jaws, caustic substances were poured into their ears, ear-drums were pierced, white-hot metal was applied, and in some cases their skulls were fractured behind the ear. numerous surgical attempts at ‘cure’ resulted in failure (and were sometimes fatal) (carpenter 2009: 115). at the same time, a rapidly growing group of teachers of the deaf declared they could ‘help’ deaf people and advocated new techniques and instruments which they claimed could enable deaf-mute people to acquire speech. others were intent, not on forcing deaf-mute people to articulate spoken language, but on teaching them to read and write it as a replacement for oral communication. such measures were seized upon by philanthropists and missionaries, who argued that the deaf were literally prevented from hearing the word of god and claimed the ‘deaf, who on that account do not attend church’ as a problematic social group, and set up deaf churches and prayer groups (society for the propagation of christian knowledge 1864). within the newly founded schools, churches, and institutions for the deaf that emerged from these activities, deaf people, able to come together within organised structures, developed distinctive social identities themselves. the use of manual sign-languages spread rapidly. all these developments served to make the deaf an identifiable community subject to an unprecedented amount of attention from both educational and medical ‘experts’ and from the lay public. the 1861 census (1863, vol. iii: 55–166), for example, went into considerable depth about deafness, including sections on ‘distribution of the deaf-andcleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 6 dumb in england,’ the ‘causes of congenital deafness, ‘causes of acquired mutism,’ ‘ages of male and female mutes’ and the ‘necessity of special instruction.’ societies were established to ‘educate,’ ‘rescue,’ ‘civilise’ and christianise deaf children, particularly those from the working classes. the discourses on deafness produced by these varied groups and by deaf people themselves were extremely diverse, characterised by discussion, debate and disagreement about the intentions and execution of their interventions. nevertheless, several tropes carried across these divergences. one was that this was a moment that many contemporaries often framed in terms of a sudden finding or remembering of the deaf. philanthropists and educationalists spoke as though they were discovering deaf children who they constructed as ‘forgotten’ by society and even by their own families. evangelical philanthropists urged the hearing not to forget the ‘class of your fellow-creatures’ who ‘because one gift was wanting’ were ‘excluded from their natural share in human rights, and degraded ... from their rank as human beings.’ they begged the hearing to ‘rescue’ the deaf from this ‘forlorn condition’ and introduce them to ‘unfolding the truths and the hopes of religion’ (account of the general institution … 1814: 3). spurred on by accounts of deaf schools in london and edinburgh, enthusiasts for deaf education in the provinces began a search for the deaf in their own localities. mr gordon (1831: 22), an advocate of deaf education, wrote ‘liverpool is known to contain 100 deaf mutes, but judging from its great population, and the difficulty which is experienced in discovering those objects, it is to be feared, that not more than one half of their number has yet been discovered in that town.’ discovering the unseen, unheard places of the deaf, is reminiscent of other ‘discoveries’ of the nineteenth century, from ‘darkest africa’ to ‘outcast london,’ as is the passive construction of the deaf as ‘objects.’ the predominant strain of language here is ‘remembering’ rather than ‘forgetting,’ but this is grounded in the assumption that, ordinarily, deaf people were easy to forget. a second trope common across these divergent discourses was that the deaf could be defined through their otherness, and could be categorised and codified as a distinct social group. this too could motivate and facilitate their forgetting. as henri-jacques striker (1999) has demonstrated, fear of disability has recurred in many guises in different ages, and is in part about the fear of the ‘unlike.’ from this perspective, bell’s cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 7 work can be read as an assimilationist desire to forget difference, as can other projects of deaf education that had at their heart the desire to create ‘normality.’ it is not surprising that the very moment that deafness became solidified as a marked category, a social group, and a subject of pedagogical and medical ‘expertise,’ it was accompanied by a discourse of forgetting, removal and displacement. this is a pattern that can, i believe, be identified far wider than in writings about disability, still less deafness. rather, it reflects the discomfort in nineteenth-century society with facing difference, the desire to construct normality, the tendency to exclude those who are different from the imagined nation, and the desire that difference be forgotten, that the deaf, as bell put it, ‘try and forget that they are deaf.’ the desire to forget this newly identified form of ‘deviance’ was sometimes expressed overtly (as in the case of bell). however, it was also expressed through the frequency with which tropes of forgetting and remembering appear in writings about deafness, where the values invested in ‘forgetting’ (and also ‘remembering’) are more ambiguous. it is these tendencies that the remainder of the article seeks to explore. out of sight out of mind: the deaf institution as a space of forgetting the nineteenth century saw the increased institutionalisation of people with disabilities, including deaf people, within asylums and residential schools. in a move not dissimilar to what foucault named the ‘great confinement’ of the ‘insane,’ the deaf were increasingly segregated from ‘normal’ society (striker 1999: 66). under the enlightenment drive towards ‘civilisation,’ the education of the deaf became a subject of increased medical and pedagogic expertise and a matter of public concern. in britain, the first school for deaf children, the braidwood institution, opened in edinburgh in 1760. in 1792 the first public institution opened in london. similar institutions soon sprang up all over the country. by the time of the 1881 census there were currently 317 pupils at the london asylum (and at its branch in margate), 138 pupils in the manchester institution for the deaf-and-dumb, 109 pupils at the edgbaston school, 100 at the liverpool school, and 65 pupils at the institution in exeter, 105 at the school in brighton, 77 in newcastle-upon-tyne and 97 at the brighton institution (census 1871). these schools signified various kinds of segregation. boarding schools offered families of deaf children the opportunity to send away, and possibly forget, the ‘problem’ of cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 8 disability, at least on an everyday basis. day schools for deaf children ensured that the deaf were educated separately and differently from hearing children. part of the methodology of these asylums was based on the pedagogy of forgetting. in the early and mid-nineteenth century, the methods used to instruct deaf children varied and some teachers of the deaf used manual sign-systems (often artificially devised rather than being an organic sign language) to teach written english. but over the course of the century, hearing instructors at the asylums became engaged in a struggle to make deaf children forget visual-spatial forms of communication, both in the form of complex sign-languages, and, what the teachers scathingly discussed as ‘gesture.’ from the early nineteenth century, many educators of the deaf educationalists claimed ‘our object is ... to substitute our language for his’ and bemoaned that ‘it is very well known that while together, the deaf and dumb use nothing but the very language which we want them to forsake—gestures’ (gordon 1831: 14). in 1880 the second international conference on the deaf and dumb in milan decreed the abolition of sign-languages across europe, and by 1900 every one of the 87 schools for the deaf in britain had banned sign-languages both as a formal means of instruction and as a way of students communicating with each other outside class (carpenter 2009: 139). the message was invariably reinforced by harsh physical punishments and the binding and beating of silent hands. again we can see the interplay between remembering or creating and forgetting or destroying. ironically, these were places that, by allowing many deaf children to come together for the first time, actually facilitated the rapid spread of manual sign languages. there are other ways in which the tropes of forgetting that recurred in nineteenthcentury discussions of deafness seem to be tied to the development of these asylums, they can be read as ‘spaces of forgetting.’ space has often been linked to ideas around memory. historians of memory have powerfully demonstrated the ways in which space can be used ‘to remember’ and how, in jay winter’s phraseology, we construct ‘sites of memory’ and ‘sites of mourning’ (1995). but space is also important for forgetting, as is demonstrated by the spatial imagery that saturates the language we use to discuss those who are ‘marginal’ to society, social ‘outcasts,’ or experiences that are ‘peripheral’ to what is held ‘centrally.’ forgotten memories are sometimes discussed as ‘spotless minds’ or vacuous ‘blank spaces’ that need to be filled in. cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 9 space can facilitate forgetting through visually and conceptually obscuring the object, person or experience in question. the solid structures and closed walls of the deaf asylums hid deaf people from the outside world. the stern victorian institutional architecture of the asylums with their high sturdy walls produced the illusion that disability itself could be identified and contained—the deaf could be set apart from the ‘normal’ people outside and then, hidden, and forgotten. contemporary illustrations of such asylums seemed to magnify this effect, depicting them as isolated buildings with the impermeable walls (see figure 1). the spatial separation signified by these structures reassuringly evoked the idea of an ‘actual’ distinction between ‘the disabled’ and those disability activists have sometimes referred to as ‘the temporarily able-bodied’; the walls of the asylums helped disability to be constructed as discrete and different. behind the walls, hearing observers imagined spaces that could easily be forgotten. whilst the geographer of deafness, mike gulliver (2008) has argued that, at least in the french context, these asylums created what he calls ‘deaf space,’ differentiated from the hearing world and filled with visual voices, these voices are not present in hearing representations, instead the asylums were constructed as places of silence. figure 1: ‘the deaf & dumb asylum,’ margate, uk, in charles, reynolds and co., the album of margate views, pre–1889. online, available: http://www.margatelocalhistory.co.uk/pictures/printsleporello%202.html [accessed 31 january 2015]. cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 10 some hearing observers even went so far as to link the asylums with a place forgotten not only behind walls, but as far away, socially and emotionally, as an overseas territory. joseph hatton (1896: 6), for example, wrote on his ‘exploration’ of the margate deaf and dumb asylum (pictured above, figure 1) as the ‘reminiscences of a sojourner in deaf-and-dumb land,’ a place he described as ‘a strange, sad, interesting country, a little world of little people.’ the deaf were safely contained ‘in there’ and the allusion of physical distance seemed to relieve hatton, and other interlopers into ‘deaf-and-dumb lands,’ of the suggestions of guilt implied passingly, of being born outside of this land. the language that hatton (1896: 41) used to evoke the ‘deaf-and-dumb lands’ is strikingly reminiscent of the language of contemporary imperial travel writing, ‘deafand-dumb land is a new country to me,’ he wrote: for a time it affected me as might have done the discovery of a new country: “we were the first, that ever burst, into that silent sea” exclaimed the ancient mariner. many a visitor had sojourned in deaf-and-dumb-land before me; but i experienced some of the sensations of a discoverer. this imagery is not only about geographical distance but also about otherness, a linking that was increasingly mapped onto imperial frameworks in this period. in medical and colonial discourses the empire was also being increasingly linked to disease in this period: the ‘hot’ spaces of the colonies were being linked with sickness and a climate that europeans could not survive; africa was a ‘sick continent’ both epidemiologically and morally, and the peoples of empire were imagined as crying out for the rapidly advancing western biomedicine. in doing so, the empire offered a means through which to imaginarily transport the ills from the metropole out to the colonies. it was as though sickness and disability were themselves being conceptually exported to the colonies, as climatic understandings of disease increasingly identified africa and india as ‘places of sickness’ and britain as a place of relative ‘health.’ such moves encouraged the forgetting of disability back home. it also meant that deaf people, and people with disabilities more widely, became associated with difference and with otherness. this difference ‘at home,’ as discussed in the first part of this article, was something that many were anxious to forget. to some extent, the isolated buildings of the institutions for the deaf, ‘cut off’ from ‘normal’ humanity, mirrored or imitated the imagined remoteness of the deaf child as cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 11 ‘insulated and lonely’ (account of the general institution … 1814: 25). writers about the deaf had long deplored how, in the words of an irish advocate of deaf education, the (uneducated) deaf-mute was ‘excluded in this life from the circle of social enjoyment, doomed to pine away his years in solitary misery’ (gordon 1831: iv). hatton (1896: 9) reflected on the ‘faces of deaf-mutes’ he encountered in the margate deaf asylum; he could ‘imagine nothing more pathetic than the anxious look of a deaf-and-dumb child, the utter lost expression of it, the sense of being cut off from you, of being outside your world, a creature of an inferior order.’ w. roe, headmaster at the midland deaf and dumb institution, similarly deplored that ‘from the cradle they [deaf people] are cut off from their fellow creatures ... god only can know the bitterness of heart, the isolation of the deaf and dumb child of the poor, as it grows up in a world without speech or sound—a lifelong silence!’ (roe 1886: 3). one implication of this is the refusal of responsibility for the social process through which a deaf child could became ostracised and excluded; if the deaf child was ‘isolated’ from society, it was not the fault of society at large but the fault of the disability itself. this logic suggests that even outside of the asylum, the deaf were imagined to be distant and with this distance came the construction of difference and forgetting. beyond the asylum: silence, invisibility and crises of representation the literary critic and disability theorist, ato quayson, has described what he terms the ‘crisis of representation’ that surrounds the literary portrayal of people with disabilities. reflecting on a scope advertisement depicting a man with cerebral palsy literally being looked straight through, quayson discusses the apparent ‘invisibility’ of disabled people and argues that ‘the problem is not one of not being seen … but of being framed within a discourse of stereotypes and expectations that serve to efface a person’s identity’ (quayson 2007: 2). that is to say, people with disabilities are seen only as their disability; their gender, ethnic, or class identities, for example, are forgotten because they are only seen as ‘disabled.’ quayson draws on the work of rosemarie garlandthompson (1997) who analysed a process through which she claims the ability of a non-disabled person to engage with a disabled person is disrupted because in registering the disability, they effectively ‘short-circuit’ the absorption of all other forms of social information. these analyses have strong resonances with many of the ways in which people who are deaf are represented in nineteenth-century writings, the individuality of deaf people is easily forgotten as they are primarily represented as ‘deaf and dumb.’ cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 12 only the shedding of difference, represented in particular by the acquisition of written english, could bring an individual identity to light. one account told of a young deaf man once known only as ‘troublesome dummy,’ but, of whom, having spent some time in a deaf institution, it was reported that ‘[a]ll is changed; he is a nice clean, well behaved boy, and people are beginning to call him by his right name, william’ (roe 1886: 9). taking quayson’s theory very broadly, there are several ways in which deafness could trigger a ‘crisis of representation.’ in quite the opposite way to how, before his ‘education,’ william was subsumed within the label of his disability, others found it was their disability itself that was surrounded by silence. this was particularly true beyond representations of working-class deaf people towards whom most of the philanthropic activity around deafness was aimed. like all discourses of difference, disability is intersectional and is experienced differently as it interacts with race, gender and class. writing of her experiences as a middle-class intellectual woman who became increasingly deaf from the age of 18, harriet martineau (1834: 252) complained that ‘everybody helps, by false tenderness, to make the subject too sacred a one to be touched upon.’ silence here is not the muteness of a deaf person, still less martineau who was renowned for her loquacity, but the 'dumbness' of her companions, unable to speak of the issue they feared. the misplaced tact or embarrassment here is not an inclusive overlooking but a refusal to acknowledge individual needs and identity. this ‘silence’ or ‘crisis’ around martineau’s deafness recalls the shame, discomfort and anxiety that often characterise other histories that have been forgotten. deafness does not fit quayson’s model of a ‘crisis of representation’ in the same way that physical deformity does, nor does the visual appearance of someone who was deaf trigger the kinds of shocked short-circuits that garland-thomson has explored. indeed, the invisibility of deafness was sometimes seen as disconcertingly allowing deaf people to ‘pass’ as hearing. for philanthropists, the un-pitying image of ‘normality’ was also frustrating as it failed to entice the ‘able-bodied’ to donate to the cause of deafness. but for others, the ‘sameness’ of the face offered the potential to mitigate some of the otherness of deafness and symbolised a poignant silence. as a reverend kennedy put it in the early nineteenth century: cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 13 [s]urely to a thinking mind their dumb mouths will plead more powerfully than the most eloquent efforts of speech; for as they wear like ourselves the human face divine, their wearing of it will be only a silent reproach to us, if we omit, when we have an opportunity, to confer on them some of those intellectual prerogatives of which that face is the proper index. (cited in account of the general institution 1814: 27) but, whilst sparing the deaf some of the stigma of deformity, this invisibility too could be problematic. in her ‘letter to the deaf’ (1834), harriet martineau outlined her fears and frustration not of being excluded because her acquaintances saw her as different but because they forgot that she was so. recalling the times she had been surrounded by chattering friends whose conversation she could not hear and whose laughter she imagined directed at her unhearing self, martineau evoked the pain of being among friends and yet feeling isolated. whilst her inability to join in and to follow the chatter seemed easily forgotten, ‘we,’ martineau wrote embracing her deaf ‘family,’ ‘cannot forget ... for five minutes together, that we spend in society’; the deaf, she suggested, were constantly reminded of what was easily forgotten (1834: 251). silence forms an equivalent crisis of representation for deafness and is also conceptually linked to forgetting. as gulliver (2008: 90) notes, although misguided, the trope of silence is almost ‘iconic’ in hearing representations of deafness, used ‘extensively’ by hearing people to evoke the lives of deaf people and included in the title of many books, films and performances made by or about them. this was also the case in the nineteenth century, where deaf people were often called ‘children of silence.’3 but naming deaf people as ‘silent’ is poetic at best and actively silencing at worst. deaf people are not silent, though during the nineteenth century, many deaf people were made to believe their voices were ugly and chose not to use them. the construction of deaf people as ‘silent’ beings brings to mind other people who have been silenced in british history not least the indigenous peoples of empire, whose voices, like those of the deaf, were often labelled ‘unintelligible.’ the lives of many of those defined through their difference were described, not as actively excluded, but as unable to ‘speak up,’ ‘naturally’ silent, and easily forgotten. but of course, silence does not necessarily indicate forgetting. some of the most intense silences are generated around what cannot be forgotten and yet, to use the hearing metaphor, cannot be spoken. 3 see for example george tait’s autobiography, which is dedicated to the ‘children of silence’ (1878). cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 14 conclusion: the tensions of finding and forgetting the writing of histories of forgetting and remembering is, like other history writing, intimately linked to the present, to the moment of recall. the early twentieth-first century is a complex and contradictory moment for the making and unmaking of deaf identity and the writing of d/deaf histories (pray & jordan 2010). on the one hand, deaf archives are growing rapidly, suggesting a renewed acknowledgement of and interest in the lives of deaf people. but in part, the archives are growing because many special deaf schools are being closed, deemed unnecessary by renewed insistence on ‘mainstream’ education and the demise of many deaf clubs due to ageing populations and declining funding. politically, socially and economically, deaf people are still being marginalised and, in the united kingdom at least, this promises to increase as disability benefits are cut. cochlear implants have been felt by many deaf community groups to be a new way of mutilating deaf people, imposing a kind of hearing literally on those embodied deaf, and, in the words of some deaf activists, contributing to the ‘ethnocide’ of a reproducing deaf culture (sparrow 2010). the rise of pre-gestation and antenatal genetic testing and the non-implantation of embryos and abortion of foetuses containing ‘disabled’ genes have led to further anxiety. a clause of the human fertilization and embryology bill, an act of the parliament of the united kingdom in 2008, which sought to make it compulsory for ivf doctors to select a genetically ‘healthy’ foetus in ivf over an ‘abnormal’ or ‘disabled’ foetus, such as one that was deaf, was read by many deaf activists as an attempt to eradicate the congenitally deaf from coming into being (emery, middleton & turner 2010). the campaign against it, called ‘stop eugenics,’ brings to mind bell’s desire that deaf people should not be born. this campaign spread rapidly via the internet, a medium that offers exciting new opportunities for remote visual communication and the formation of new deaf communities. amidst these developments are many complex tensions between forgetting and remembering. the nineteenth century was also a moment of complex interchange between inclusion and marginalisation. it was a period in western europe and north america when ‘the deaf and dumb’ consolidated as a social category and significant social efforts were put into discovering, finding and remembering deafness. yet it was also a period that saw new attempts to obscure and contain ‘the deaf and dumb.’ in the article i have discussed an illusion of containment of the anxieties through which those living with deafness and cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 15 disability could be imagined to be a discrete and identifiable group, best kept out of sight. i have explored the ‘crisis of representation’ that surrounded discussions of deafness in other spheres. like other peoples constructed as different, deaf people were represented as disruptive, potentially frightening, and often best forgotten. in posing deafness as something that should be forgotten, it was actively excluded and that through suggesting that the ‘silent’ deaf were ‘easy to forget,’ their displacement was in effect facilitated. reference list account of the general institution established in birmingham, for the instruction of deaf and dumb children, including rules of the society and a list of the patrons, officers, and subscribers 1814, j. ferrall, birmingham. bell, a. 1883, memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race, presented to the national academy of sciences at new haven. national academy of sciences, washington, dc. carpenter, m. 2009, health, medicine and society in victorian england. praeger, california. census of england and wales for the year 1861 census of england and wales for the year 1871 census of england and wales for the year 1881 cleall, e. 2013, ‘“deaf to the word”: deafness, gender and protestantism in nineteenth-century britain and ireland,’ gender and history, vol. 25, no. 3 (november): 590–603. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12027. emery, s., middleton, a. & turner, g. 2010, ‘whose deaf genes are they anyway? the deaf community’s challenge to legislation on embryo selection,’ sign language studies, vol. 10, no. 2 (winter): 155–169. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sls.0.0037. fitzgerald, k. 2010, deafness of the mind: the forgotten children of boston spa. kevin fitzgerald, manchester. garland-thomson, r. 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687591003755849. cleall silencing deafness portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 16 stoler, a. 2011, ‘colonial aphasia: race and disabled histories in france,’ public culture, vol. 23, no. 1: 121–156. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2010-018. striker, h.-j. 1999, a history of disability, (trans.) w. sayers. university of michigan, michigan. tait, g. 1878, autobiography of george tait, a deaf mute. james bowes & sons, halifax. winter, j. 1995, sites of memory, sites of mourning: the great war in european cultural history. cambridge university press, cambridge. untitled portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. the transcultural edge, curated by ilaria vanni accarigi. © 2016 [susana chávez-silverman]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i1.4794 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal solstice hart-seer: recordando ‘la chascona’ y ‘la sebastiana’ crónica susana chávez-silverman, pomona college 21 diciembre (winter solstice) y 31 diciembre, 2015 thompson creek trailhead, claramonte, califas para lucía ‘lucy war’ guerra and for elizabeth ‘la elizzz’ horan, david ‘divinito’ divita and amanda mccullough cuando vi el headline ayer, de una nota de la escritora joyce maynard en la travel section del new york times (diario que—a contracorriente—i’ve recently started taking los domingos), ‘where pablo neruda lived and loved,’ and especially when my eye scrolled down to the words donde la autora explica que está en tsile con su marido jim, queriendo dedicar ‘some time to our spanish. that, and romance,’ confieso que mi primera reacción fue un giant eye-roll, followed closely by the exclamation—¡gringa huevona! al leer la frase siguiente: ‘who better to fan the flames than neruda?’ uf, me dije (vahtante uncharitably, ya lo sé), qué flames ni que eight rooms, cuando hay 4000 otros poetas way more flame-fanning que ese outdated machista. just a couple of paragraphs in, sentí un visceral rechazo, un no querer leer a la maynard mainly por haberme desentendido—decades ago, i realize with a start—de la estética de neruda. and even, me doy cuenta, de la ética de neruda, que en estos tiempos tan globalized y (post?) pomo también parece maomeno (eye: pronunciación tsilensis, ob-vio) de museo, con su cold war marxismo, su earnest maniqueísmo. y ni hablar neruda’s chávez-silverman solstice hart-seer portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 2 sexual politics, ¡uf! si bien hay que conceder que lo peor está en veinte poemas de amor (his barely post-adolescent love poems, del ’24, creo recordar), the only work of neruda’s que la maynard conoce, según confiesa. pero anygüey lo mío, chez neruda, was always residencia en la tierra: esa relentlessly dark, private hasta el casi solipsismo, surrealist-inflected imagery i flattered myself, en la universidad, spoke directly to me. a mí, cuando vivía en el too-bright, b(l)eachand cocaine-white orange county de los late 1970s y la indulgent (or prescient) pedagogy de la lucy war me permitió escabullirme del standard-issue essay assignment (on the kenecott copper corporation, si mal no recuerdo) en su curso, ‘civilización y cultura de chile,’ para escribir, instead, de la desolate, furibunda misantropía en ‘walking around,’ con la que yo, dark-haired (if green-eyed) bohemian mestiza from norcal, totalmente fish out of agua (en las boogie nights y newport beach days de semidilettante college girl, hangueando con bikers and surfers y punk rockers tras la orange curtain), me identificaba ferozmente. ese ensayo (uf, i shudder to think how impressionistic and naïve it must’ve been) marked the birth of a serious student, y—seducida por la brillantez y el encanto pedagógico de la lucy war—spanish major (formerly psychology) y future literature scholar y—25 years en el futuro, en el mere mere país de neruda y de la lucy war— escritora. curiosamente, i felt myself being drawn in—a pesar de mi activated smarm-o-meter—a la prosa de la maynard, even as she was drawn in by ‘la chascona,’ la casa que neruda había comprado a su then-secret amante, matilde urrutia, en santiago. las expectativas de la maynard eran mínimas—she only wanted to pick up a bit of nerudiana en el gift shop. pero inesperadamente se sintió hechizada ni bien puso pie en el garden, antes de cruzar, siquiera, el threshhold. she felt herself drawn, dice, to a kindred spirit. y de forma análoga yo me sentí—against my initial rechazo—drawn into la maynard’s story. la cual se trataba, mainly, de la estética doméstica de neruda, which la maynard, quien se describe como ‘incurable’ collector, identifies with. me too, me doy cuenta. no tanto porque yo sea coleccionista, or not exactly. i don’t seriously collect anything, con la excepcion de los tecolotes. pero esos vatos los heredé chávez-silverman solstice hart-seer portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 3 figure 1: ‘vista de la casa de pablo neruda, “la chascona,”’ 2 february 2009, wikimedia commons © marcelo ois lagarde. chávez-silverman solstice hart-seer portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 4 figure 2 (left) and figure 3 (right), ‘la chascona,’ 20 july 2011, wikimedia commons © arturo rinaldi villegas. de mamá, and the only time new ones are added es cuando alguien que ha visto mi modest, one-shelf culling (de la truly prodigious collection que tenía mamá) y cree que colecciono los owls me regala uno. oh, and perfumes. esa es, creo, mi única collection—obsessive, i freely admit—de adeveras. no, i don’t scour yard sales or flea markets, ni hago haunt el ebay, como la maynard (or, for that matter, como el austra y tantos otros de mis amigos). tampoco es que me llamen mucho la atención las fotos de los interiors ni los objects de neruda en sí—máh vien al revés. esa onda nautical que tanto le fascinaba a neruda, por ejiemplo, directamente me carga (como diria la lucy), aunque como él, i do have a thing for old maps and photos. pero that’s not what attracts a la maynard either. ella responde, she says, a interiores que muestren un sentido de humor, de drama, de pasión. aun cuando los objects, by themselves, parezcan ‘ugly—even tacky,’ la maynard recurre a las palabras del artista joseph cornell para recordarnos que el arte ‘happens in the assemblage.’ chávez-silverman solstice hart-seer portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 5 bingo, c’est moi. recuerdo el momento, a few days ago, cuando mi advisee amanda primero vino a mi casa. ni bien did she put foot en el living-dining, escaneó mi nelson saucer pendant, mis midcentury teak muebles, el black lacquer knabe baby grand que heredé cuando falleció mamá, con las family fotos encima y mi doll, lee (en pelotas, de indeterminate gender, con un platinum mohawk y slightly asian eyes), sitting triunfante atop an antique zulu basket. la amandita se puso a reír y exclamó, bien saucer-eyed— omg, this house is you, profa! algo semejante había ocurrido cuando mi colega/amigo el divinito (aka el david divita) came over hace un par de años. como amanda, el div también se había puesto a ehcanear el room, his eyes alighting on different bits: my noguchi coffee table (comprada de design without reach—ja, ja—company que empezó mi long-ago ex, el rob forbes … pero esa es otra), my carefully edited grouping of dvd’s en el black lacquer-painted brick fireplace mantel: dog day afternoon, dangerous liaisons, the chant of jimmy blacksmith, the wicker man, y mis all-time faves, the last wave y the marriage of maria braun.—is this … a tableau? ventured el div. me acuerdo que me sentí levemente irritated. me había parecido algo … catty, quizás. ob-vio, reconozco que mi estética doméstica is not everybody’s taza de té—i live here, había respondido medio defensively—so, tableau vivant! pero anygüey, mientras más me adentraba en la narrative de la maynard, and pored over las accompanying fotos de ‘la chascona’ y ‘la sebastiana,’ la house que neruda y su (by-then) wife la matilde had bought en valparaíso, más me sentía overcome por una creeping sensación de … ¿de qué? de aguda incomodidad, de uncanny deja-vu. de repente, en uno de mis invisible links flashes—i’ve been there, me dije, con un sentido de surprise y a la vez, utter certainty—conozco estas dos casas. y ese flash—suddenly unburied memory—me llevó a otro. menos ambiguo. cero placentero. porque en ese instante, i knew i'd been there con el darth vader (como la joanna woolfolk le solía llamar al dorian, aka el p., as from late 2007). we’d travelled to chile en enero del 2001, con el 13-year-old juvenil. yo iba a presentar en un poetry congreso en valdivia; i was finally going to see santiago (sueño que había acariciado desde que conocí a la lucy war y al villegas en uci, y el subercaseaux y el cosme noriega y el walter fountains y otros exiled tsilenos … pero esa es otra) y hasta el chiloé de mi amiga la elbita andrade, y conocer a un veritable who’s who de los (y las, chávez-silverman solstice hart-seer portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 6 figure 4, ‘la sebastiana,’ 30 april 2014, wikimedia commons © rodrigo fernández. figure 5 (left): ‘la sebastiana pablo neruda's house in valparaíso, chile,’ 6 january 2004, wikimedia commons © pekka parhi. figure 6 (right): ‘la sebastiana,’ 30 april 2014, wikimedia commons © rodrigo fernández. chávez-silverman solstice hart-seer portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 7 more to the point) poetas tsilenos, courtesy of my longtime pana ‘el chileno,’ aka luis cárcamo. por eso esa sensacion tan unheimlich. i hadn’t wanted to remember that, being there, en las casas de neruda, por el temita (bitter little jaja) del dorian. ob-vio, por eso i’d buried the memory for so long. casi 15 años. i didn’t want to see that. yo allí, flaneuring por esos recovecos, esos dim, memoryand memorabilia-filled ambientes closely trailed por ese forbidding, shut-down phantom. presencia ausente. pero … was i even there? i needed proof. me puse a rastrear los photo albums de nuestro año en el southern cone. 2000–2001. el año de mi neh fellowship. feels like … another life. era otra vida, musito. tú eras otra. hago un special trip to my office, on campus. it’s where i’d moved most of my precious photo albums, en los últimos años de mi calvario con dorian. you never knew what he’d get up to, en sus fits de celos y envidia y sus (out of) control-freak ways. ya había fisgado, bien descaradamente, en mis diaries (i’d taken to hiding them—to no avail— and resorted to an elaborate system of codes, initials, pseudónimos); me había abierto la correspondencia. pero ¡coño! they weren’t there. finally, desesperada, los encontré sin querer, at home, entre el arcane cambalache de los dining room shelves, al lado de los astrology books, cat behavior books y libros de cocina. quería mirar las fotos. i needed to know if my mind was playing tricks on me. intenté abrir a january 2001, pero … me daba cosa. me eché patrás y llamé al juvenil—just do it, mama, me instó. go for it. you can do it. if it gets too weird, sólo teneh que cerrar el álbum. he was right. los años (y mis 5 años de therapy con una post-trauma expert) have worked their magic. oh, los balsamic efectos del olvido. don't get me wrong, el dorian se ve just as creepily affectless and dead-eyed as i remembered him. pero estos 5 años in recovery, como quien dice, le han drenado el poder. ahora veo que es sólo un fantoche. un darth vader wannabe. y ahora, también, entiendo que este invisible links enfrentamiento con las neruda houses ha sido tan disturbing porque hay algo más. algo que no entendía. not back then. now though, reading este love-paean de la maynard a las weird, swooningly chávez-silverman solstice hart-seer portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 8 romantic neruda houses, it hits me: mi desasosiego es porque allí, suddenly—lejos de nuestro hogar en socal pero far away, too, de nuestro sabbatical home in cerebral, angst-inducing, un-erotic buenos aires—my lovelessness was thrown into stark relief. pero también me di cuenta de que it cut both ways: unloved por el dorian, yo tampoco sentía nada por él. no. the reasons for remaining with him were … elsewhere. nai’ que ver, poh, con el amor (pero esa es otra). por eso—oh, ahora caigo—nunca había podido escribir de chile. por eso, esos photo albums se me habían ‘desaparecido.’ pero alongside el (sólo momentáneo, i abashedly admit) reconocimiento del desamor, also thrown into shattering relief en esas loveand memory-saturated homes, había algo … otro. algo más. curled inside me, cual tierno tendril de helecho, fossilized, hasta entonces inaccesible: mi gran love story. esas casas—sin yo entenderlo—provocaron un minúsculo unfurling. un levísimo cosquilleo inside me. five months later, i would reference it, pero sólo de un modo elíptico, off-hand, como si fuera tangencial, rather than the main thing (tan acostumbrada estaba al panoptical gaze del dorian que me auto-censuraba, sin siquiera darme cuenta) en mi ‘anniversary crónica.’ i wrote it on a freezing 16 de junio del 2001, en buenos aires, para conmemorar dos aniversarios: uno sombrío, el de la soweto massacre en 1976, el otro happy, el wedding anniversary de mis padres. pero en ese january 2001 en chile, yo era como la snow white. muerta en vida, or asleep, en un coffin de cristal. o como la sleeping beauty, rodeada de brambles. tendría que esperar 7 años para el (cyber) beso de mi prince charming. el de siempre. digo, from before, del 1982. el de mi gran love story, el amor de mi vida. simón, hasta el 2008 cuando, viviendo dos meses lejos de dorian for the first time, el repentino, long-buried recuerdo de nuestro miscarriage—y de nuestro love story—burst to the surface. y de allí hasta contactar a montenegro … the blink of an eye. and his response? un e-mail casi instantáneo, corroborando nuestro pregnancy, nuestro blood-loss, nuestro amor. weirdly, todo lo nuestro habia persistido en él, alive. digo, accesible a la consciencia. irónicamente, it had been i, little miss emo, yo había desterrado ese memory al ether del olvido. for more than 25 years. chávez-silverman solstice hart-seer portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 9 now, recalling my visits to ‘la chascona’ y ‘la sebastiana,’ transportada por la starryeyed narrative de la maynard, me había devuelto el recuerdo de esa double anagnorisis: desamor (dorian) y amor (esa slightly unfurling fronda de helecho had borne, in its tender green embrace, la imagen de mi montenegro). en cambio, leer, a few days ago, los reviews del film 45 years—y los unusually deep comments de los stars, tom courtenay y la incomparable charlotte rampling—ha sido más bien un glacier thaw. porque mi prince charming did show up (in die vleis, digo). and he woke me up with his kiss—all night, esa helada noche encantada, esa full moon winter pretoria night en agosto del 2012. but then, se volvió a dormir. ahora, i’m not dead, como katya, la ice-embalmed (suddenly revealed by global warming melting glacier) love of his life from 50 years before del husband en 45 years. ni siquiera soy una wa(l)king dead anymore, like i was los 17 años que pasé con mi tormentor (as you called dorian, en pretoria). but you, montenegro (or should i say hh, for highveld howie?), tú has vuelto a encarnar al rip van winkle. what you called yourself en el 2008, remember? cuando me decías que yo era la que te estaba despertando, waking you up to yourself, después de tantos años out of practice—be patient, shug, me pediste. you woke me up, montenegro, but then te volviste a dormir. asleep ain’t dead, aunque hay que reconocer que se parecen. ‘as you get older,’ dice andrew haigh, el 42-yearold director de 45 years, ‘you don’t want to deal with the fact that maybe you’ve made the wrong decisions … so it makes sense that people stick by their decisions, even if they’re the wrong decisions.’ pos órale, tendrá sentido, mr. haigh. pero fuck that. triple chale to what ‘makes sense.’ 45 years tiene lugar en tranquil norfolk, britain y—en otro invisible linksy twist— desde hace unos años, i call your northern suburbs of joburg compound southfork. norfolk, southfork. allí es donde vives—where you sleepwalk, rather, through your rutina doméstica—con tu second wife (si bien sólo hace 13 años, not 45 …). pero like i said: asleep ain’t dead. chávez-silverman solstice hart-seer portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 10 y hoy por hoy, se trata de desenterrar y nombrar a los monstruos. unmasking them, para poder recordar, soñar, vivir y escribir. y amar. y lucy, porque crees tanto en el destino, en el destino de nuestro amor, this one’s for you. © 2017 by ian campbell. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: campbell, i. 2017. lembah elqui / valle de elqui / elqui valley. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:1, 13-16. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal. v14i1.5357 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 1 april 2017 abstract the three versions of ian campbell’s poem about valle de elqui (in chile) presented here comprise a poem he first wrote in spanish, then in english and finally in a more powerful version in indonesian, which was first published in 2012 in the literary pages of the jakarta mass media daily kompas. campbell regards this whole process as emblematic of his explorations in trilingual poetics, namely what does a ‘concept’/poem idea look like if done in the three languages with which he has some degree of written knowledge or fluency: english, spanish, indonesian. this mirrors the ‘three-pronged’ title ‘selatan-sursouth’ that he adopted for the collection of his poetry in portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2008. the indonesian version, ‘lembah elqui,’ was also included in campbell’s poetry and prose collection tak ada peringatan (vivid publishing, 2013). in each version now the reference is to gabriela mistral (1889-1957), nobel prize laureate for literature (1945), whose burial place lies in monte grande in the valle de elqui in northern chile. keywords ian campbell; gabriela mistral; lembah alqui, chili; valle de elqui, chile; elqui valley, chile; trilingual aesthetics cultural work lembah elqui / valle de elqui / elqui valley ian campbell macquarie university corresponding author: mr ian campbell, honorary research associate, department of international studies, macquarie university, nsw, australia. ialuca@iinet.net.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5357 article history: received 18/01/2017; revised 14/03/2017; accepted 15/03/2017; published 04/05/2017 transitions and dislocations, curated cultural works issue, curated by paul allatson. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 13 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5357 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5357 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5357 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:ialuca@iinet.net.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5357 lembah elqui, chili lereng-lereng lembah melandai, ke buminya; garis-garis vertikal bergabung, ke buminya. suatu kuburan dikelilingi batu-batu, sungai berbuih, alirannya. gabriela mistral pernah mengajar di rumah sekolah bekasnya; bangku-bangku berdebu tetap; sekolah sepi, ketenangannya. lewat jendela saya melihat daun-daun anggur, tersinar cerah, meluap-luap gula putihnya. di tengah batu-batu, tersebar, di bawah logam berat matahari merahnya. lembah-lembah terjauh, kepuisiannya; kesunyian biru, kepuisiannya, batu menjelma ke dalam kata; sorga dihancurkan, kekosongan, di bawahnya. dikuburkan kepuisiannya; batu-batu mendalam menguning di bawah pencelupan sekarat matahari, merahnya. campbell portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201714 valle de elqui, chile cuesta empinada, tumba rodeada por rocas. rápido y blanco el río, escritorio y pupitres antiguos escuela mistral. uvas destinadas para pisco, brillantes de azúcar a través de las montañas, metales pesados del sol, patrimonio de todos, sin excepción. poesía de los valles lejanos silencio azul, piedras de palabras, polvo de cielo, poesía enterrada, en rocas duras, amarillentas por el fuego rojo del sol. elqui valley, chile valley slopes angle down, all verticals converge, tomb surrounded by stone, white river runs. here gabriela taught, her old school house and pupils’ dusty desks, now for ever stilled. through the windows outside pisco grapes dazzle, brim full of sugar amid scattered rocks, beneath the heavy metal of the sun. lembah elqui portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201715 poetry of the far valleys, of the blue silence, stone becomes word, heavens pulverized by the void below. poetry is interred, deep stone yellows under the dying red of the sun. campbell portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201716 flora y fauna crónica flora y fauna crónica los angeles, ca 12 junio, 2003 susana chávez-silverman pomona college, california, u.s.a. para pierre cuando me fui para south africa, and i lived my first spring in pretoria, allí por octubre, noviembre, viví como insólito regalo el florecimiento de los jacarandaes. como northern califas girl, of course, había visto mucho nature espectacular: the pacific ocean como yarda de enfrente, for starters, y los sequoia giant redwoods. yes, especially los redwoods. pero también esa enredadera, don’t know its name, the one with the huge, velvety deep purple blossoms y las fragile, hairy leaves and stems como patas de tarántula. the yellow, puffy, dust-scented mimosa on early spring mornings, camino a la secundaria. and eucalyptus: medicinal and faintly erotic a la vez. porque el olor a eucalipto me vuelve, inevitablemente, a los wild summer rides en la moto del motero del barrio, bob salter, the summer after we returned from our calvario—18 months viviendo en españa—and i began to get a little bit popular con eso de haber estado living in europe y todo. anyway, i would cling cual ventosa, aterrada, to bob’s sweat-dampened, skintight tshirted, bronze surfer-boy espalda (maravillada de que un chico tan laid back, tan marijuanero y cool, would even invite me to ride with him) as he took those eastside santa cruz curves fast, waaay too fast, crunching and scattering los eucalyptus buttons mientras nos adentrábamos a ese wild forest, de la veaga (te juro, that’s how it’s spelled!) park, just three long, uphill blocks de mi casa. anyway, no me acuerdo haber visto, antes de sudáfrica, un jacarandá. sultry yet somehow insouciant too, durante el resto del año, con esas dark green, frilly leaves—casi como una de esas sensitive plants, you know, the ones that curl up y se ponen all shy portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 1 cuando les tocas las hojas con la yema del dedo o con un lápiz, well, like that, pero en gigante—y sus weird, flat, walnut-colored pods. not exactly nondescript, pero definitely nothing to write home about. pero luego, for the too-short, two months + of their bloom, shocking surtidores de unscented pétalos—wouldn’t it be demasiado over the top si encima de todo tuvieran perfume too?—cascading, drifting, amontonándose, machacados bajo pies y ruedas. pretoria se jacta de ser “la ciudad de los jacarandaes”, and i certainly believed it and was properly awed and grateful, each spring, por esa breve explosión de dusty periwinkle. sí, ese es el color, exactamente. como el “periwinkle” crayon en la caja gigante de crayolas. llegué a creer que la vida era eso, precisely: the otherwordly, ephemeral beauty de los jacarandaes and, in equal measure, the clawing loneliness of having just three people en todo el continente africano. en realidad el primero i’d just broken an engagement of sorts with. otro me recogió, literalmente, de la calle y me instaló en su tiny, 7th floor flat, only to leave casi de inmediato para un obligatory, months-long military camp en ciudad del cabo. y el tercero, a spanish-british immigrant to “the colonies,” por ser el segundón de un wealthy family, después de un kerouac-worthy roadtrip en su minúsculo vw bug across the southern tip of africa—de pretoria a cape town and back, por pietermaritzburg and port elizabeth and paarl, stellenbosch, and the transkei and then some—se había tomado un one-year leave de su teaching job en la universidad de sudáfrica (that was why i got to stay on at unisa) para asistir al masters and johnson sex clinic en st. louis—te lo juro! so i was living alone, realmente sola, por primera vez en mi vida. no tv, not even a radio. como que no quería interact with people, con los afrikaners i was surrounded with in the governmental capital, por temor a que su racismo se me contagiara. sería hasta que mi amigo africano del xeroxing room en unisa, neppe, me comentó, “suzi, you have to learn their language, to understand them. to understand us” que something in me would shift, crack open. i needed to let it happen. right about then, besides, volvió etienne from kapstaad, from the army camp, and i got an instant afrikaner roomate. raised by a dominee daddy, no less, and gay. he’d walked out on his latest job, además, waiter at an portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 2 upscale restaurant, cuando despidieron a 6 kitchen workers africanas, and within 24 hours had himself-and them-new jobs. so put that en tu pipa and smoke it, mija, i told myself. what do i know, really know, about afrikaners? about this country? pero en los primeros meses en africa estuve hermetically sealed, alone. i wrote it like a mantra (maudlin, ya lo sé) almost every day, en mi diario: “how can i go on like this? ¿me estaré volviendo loca? i’m so alone, alone, alone…” sola con mis precious felttipped pens y y mis chinese cuadernos from little ricky’s en new york y mis libros de segunda mano, me aferraba a la incongruente idea de que mi vida and my writing—the two were inseparable—were made possible, somehow, por esa breve nube de jacarandá, which seemed to shimmer and float, sólo para mí, just below my 7th floor balcony window. sólo luego vendría a reconocer, a entender the special, secret bond between the jacarandas and me. una necesidad. un destino cartográfico. de geografía, latitudes. renuncié la boludez de mi northern california snobbery cuando me mudé al evil (ok, it’s the inland) empire, the easternmost edge de los angeles county. ugh, había pensado years before, una vez cuando me desviaron al ontario airport, right smack en medio del evil, en vez del john wayne airport de orange county. i’d never even heard of “ontario, california”. i couldn’t believe such a bleached-out, tunbleweeded, rascuache sprawl was even part of california! pero sabes que?, what did i know? lo único del southland que conocía eran los lush orange groves and suburban lawns del san fernando valley de mi infancia, before we moved north por el glaucoma de daddy, y para que yo y mis hermanas wouldn’t turn into valley girls. y san diego, donde mis abuelos. pero eso era otra cosa. tropical. anyway, ¿qué remedio? here i was, pero it’s not like you can look a gift horse en la boca, right? en cuanto a academic jobs, digo. especially una ternura-track job en tu field—poetry—en un nationally-ranked (como recalcaría mom) liberal arts college. y especially considerando que yo era una single mother, a.b.d. simón, “all-butportal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 3 dissertation.” so close, pero sooooo far del finish line. conque i knew this job was a once-in-a-lifetime chollo and chingao, girl, you better take it and be grateful. smog or no smog. so, cual no era my surprise, when i went down para buscar housing en late spring y al llegar, en el rental car, to the eerily bucolic, suburban (pero como que no: con sus craftsman cottages and ancient trees and too much quiet it resembled, oddly, more like a town out of a tennessee williams play que un lugar en califas) pueblo de claremont, vi, in the central island that divided a huge, four-lane suburban avenue a stand of mature, baroquely blooming jacarandas, as far as my eye could see. y te juro que right then and there, como que decidí que it was gonna be ok. living there. digo, here. bueno, y just guess qué es lo que abunda, qué representa la idiosincracia misma de buenos aires, according to the porteños? you got it: los jacarandaes. esta vez, i wasn’t alone. happily “en pareja,” como dicen en la argentina y con el juvenile in tow, i was actually bien apprehensive i wouldn’t be able to muster enough of my signature angst, harness esa imprescindible sensación de dis/locación, de otredad which has dogged/blessed me toda la vida. pero not to worry: lamento (o celebro) confirmar que buenos aires, de por sí, is one of the most anxious, neurotic latitudes en el mundo. and, hablando de latitudes: como thunderbolt it hit me, cuando pierre—on our first day out—encontró el departamento idóneo…right en la very same street del jardín botánico. gente, it’s true. mi sueño hecho reality: i was going to live in the mero corazón de cortázar and borgeslandia. just blocks from, de hecho, the four corners borges enshrines in his famous poem: “guatemala, serrano, paraguay, gurruchaga.” writing now (aunque es casi imposible dar crédito, volver a ese estado previo: my unknowing buenos aires), i am pierced by the memory of my ignorance—qué pendeja, no? pero how the hell was i to know?—when i taught that poem, creo que por primera vez, en el ’98, i think it was. how could i not have known and ever called myself—or, anyguey, allowed myself to be called, a specialist in argentine literature? i cringe! no portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 4 tener idea de algo tan fundamental—especially for borges—tan sencillo, of course, once you’re there: what i had thought were random country names, basque surnames son ni más ni menos que street names en borges’s old stomping grounds, lo que ahora se llama el trendísimo palermo viejo. i had even asked my student, alelí, an authentic porteña, pero having grown up en los northern suburbs, en victoria, ella no tenía clue tampoco. so maybe i shouldn’t feel so bad… tan sencillo, once you’re there. and perhaps only if you’re there … so, qué es lo que esto nos dice about borders, identidades, transnational studies, about the end of nationalisms, sobre el supposedly-shrinking global mundo? shrinking para quién? my ascendent in sagitarius me confirma y reitera un destino peregrino. ay, utópica. yes, outopos. not out of this mundo, sino no-place. bueno, no one place, quizás. it’s all about place. (sé que me contradigo; no me retes.) y mi lugar—my secret garden, si querés—was, for thirteen angst and revelation-filled months, ese fading beauty, onetime departamento de lujo, donde los padres de la dra. lustig de ferrer la habían criado, after fleeing austria in the holocaust, al sur. escribí a todo dar, mano. even with the juvenile coming home from school for lunch every day, even having to wash clothes en esa tiny, casi breaking down lavadora and dry them en ese bizarre gas closet en la cocina, que yo pensé all argentines must have, hasta que gustavo vino de la plata y me dijo no way! definitely not! que eso era una especie de artefacto, antique, primitive. escribí a pesar de no tener mucama, a fact that astounded a casi todas mi amigas who—no obstante “la crisis”—steadfastly continued to employ a domestic servant. al menos unas horitas por semana, ¿eh susi? escribí no obtante o— digámoslo claro de una puta vez—precisely because of esa constante, opresiva humedad porteña. i mean, not only after los “estragos acuáticos” (as i hyper-dramatically termed the bursting de las ancient cañerías en el departamento de arriba—while we were out of the country—y sus consecuencias: moho and water damage, un olor a mississippi that would dog that apartment for the next seven months, a veces más, a veces menos, like our portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 5 own private weather system) sino every day. una especie de damp my califas-, spain and africa-habituated cuerpo was simply not built for. una humedad that all (five months of) summer turns the soft, dense pile of the unusual— for argentina—wall-to-wall moqueta into a spongey pantano underfoot, that wilts even freshly-laundered and dried for hours toallas into an hongo-laden miasma, that frizzes and puffs hair heavenward y causa que cualquier mosquito bite, thumbnail size at worst in a normal climate, se convierta en throbbing huevo de avestruz, y para peor, te pone unos gross michelines tipo watermelon rodante. luckily, this indignity i was able to suffer con el stalwart del pablo zambrano quien, pobrecito, had chosen to visit from spain en febrero which is, a diferencia de lo que pregona eliot, the true cruelest month. all during february pablo and i pinched our sides and complained, horrorizados, de cómo no nos entraba nuestra ropa normal. en vez, even the most unfashionably generoussized attire poked and jabbed, clung and chafed, haciendo que una de nuestras actividades predilectas fuera tomar vaso tras vaso de vino tinto sentados en el skinny bed de su cuarto—el cuarto “de la mucama,” just off the kitchen—hojeando nostálgicamente (y cotilleando, if truth be told, sobre los ever more collagen-puffed labios de nuestra adorada melanie, o el definitely receding hairline del flags) slightly outdated copies of el hola, purchased for outlandishly jacked-up prices en nuestro kiosko on las heras. en fin escribí, exquisitely conscious de que esto no era la vida. i mean, no era mi vida. como dijo anoche la poeta carol muske-dukes en un reading de su nuevo libro sparrow, about living con su marido (he was an actor): life with him wasn’t normal, and i knew it. en buenos aires, yo poseía una heightened sense of awareness, the poignancy of imminent loss. casi todos los días en república arabe siria 2847, 3ºb se constituían como un festín. nothing felt routine. ni siquiera una visita a la dentista. especially una visita a la dentista, who confidently informed me que no podía usar ese supersonic cleaning gadget on me más de dos veces por año, o si no los laser rays or whatever would damage my teeth (luego, mi dentista libanés en california would tell me that was crazy, pero that’s another story…). en buenos aires, habitaba un espacio in-between. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 6 elsewhere. pero quizás por esto mismo i claimed it so fiercely as mine. or maybe it claimed me. so different from when i lived in spain, en la secundaria. de teenager, me regocijaba when my foreignness was apparent. angry at my parents for uprooting me en la cúspide of what would be, alas, una short-lived y sólo semi-popularidad, i turned upon the foreign country toda la rabia y el veneno de mi terca diferencia. pero en buenos aires (y ojito: eso que before i moved there, casi los únicos argentinos who’d impressed me favorably were either in books or dead or both…) i realized que nunca me había sentido más…qué sé sho—and i know que es medio cursi y trillado, pero—más yo misma. y…[pausa porteña] ob-vio que había—hay—enormes, pero gaping differences between me and the average porteña. pero an odd, opiate centeredness, hasta orgullo washed over me, more and more as the months passed y me daba cuenta de que la gente me pasaba in the streets not exactly like i was invisible sino como si fuera… one of them. eso nunca, pero nunca me había pasado in any city, in any country before. not even at “home.” y esa extraña comodidad o aceptación de mí misma, in my skin, was uncanny. sí, eso. el ansia que me impulsó a escribir en buenos aires no era la misma mierda metafísica de siempre, que i’m so lonely, i feel so lost; i don’t fit in, what am i doing here. todo ese rollo. it was something elemental, and somehow much more unsettling: wonderment crossed with an oddly seamless, destined belonging, y el miedo and preregret of its loss. una enfermedad. melancholia before the fact. antes de la pérdida. escribir es la necesidad de captar, de contar eso. heme aquí. i mean, allí: facing out these humedad-warped, wavy-glass paned double doors which open onto el minúsculo balcón, just three floors up this time, en vez de siete, como en pretoria, pero con una vista shockingly similar. y…[pausa porteña] es el sur, me di cuenta. this southernness is what i need. mis sentidos engullen, aquí, not only a jacaranda-petal strewn street sino más localmente- por ejemplo, after a sudestada-also the twisted, rust-colored limbs of a storm-downed portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 7 portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 8 tilo, los almost too-fragrant linden blossoms floating out, a bridal veil over the dented roof of a taxi some fool dejó aparcado ilegalmente durante la noche y que ahora sólo se asoma un cachito, all smashed, wicked witch of the west flat, under the still-damp flowers and branches. a little farther, to the right, al otro lado de la avenida las heras (the hairs, we call it), the neon sign for the farmacia del botánico has just come on. it glows comfortingly green en la fuzzy penumbra del crepúsculo, al lado del chillón bluewhite sign for the supermercado disco. closer, just across república arabe siria (ex malabia, insiste la landlady, la dra. susana lustig—fue menem quien le cambió el nombre) some of the feral cats are beginning their nightly yowl-session (ni que fueran tan feral: they’re fed delish argentine groundround, todos los días, by some viejitas del barrio!) y veo uno chiquitito, a blue-grey, shorthaired kitten, algo cojo and with one milky eye. ayer el juvenil lo recogió, scooped his skinny, quivering body up and held him close to his chest, on our way back home from lunch at hermann’s. he begged and begged for us to take him home. por poco…pero no. we can’t honey, le dije. no ves como cojea? plus he’s got a sick eye and you know he’s covered in pulgas. con eso, el intermitentemente fastidious and gross-outable juvenile set him, gently pero quickly, back down en la vereda de enfrente. pero as we crossed the street to our apartment building, he kept turning around pa’ ver si le seguía ese little grey kitten. y me miró bien grouchy for a while after that. the lavender-dusk sky is stained a darker, menacing near-black above the stand of enormous palmeras, just inside la reja del jardín botánico. promete llover. del otro lado del jardín—just one city block away, sobre república de las indias, donde vive la escritora viv gorbato (amiga del david foster, but that’s another story)—i think i can hear the tiger beginning to wake up. simón, el mero mero tigre de borges. the very same one he used to gaze at, for hours, en el zoológico de buenos aires. a una manzana de esta ventana, where i’m sitting. it must be feeding time. flora y fauna crónica ngo cultural work final portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. cultural works section. © 2015 [boi huyen ngo]. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i2.4404 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal. intersecting homeliness: vietnamese australian reflections on a suburban home, strathfield, nsw boi huyen ngo, university of technology sydney memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost. (bachelard 1969: 6) in 2013 i lived in vietnam. once a year, the vietnamese people have a particular tradition called khom đất, where the people set out a guest table filled with a delicious feast of food and paper clothing, shoes, accessories and money for the spirits of the house. khom in khom đất means a set of rituals or a prayer to bow down and pay respect. đất means land. this is a ritual that acknowledges the spirits within the home and the agency that those spirits have with respect to the home. there would be separate rituals for different types of spirits and incense would burn as an offering in various household places. for example, an incense and food offering would be on an altar directly above the fire stove in the kitchen, a sign for residents to be grateful to the fire spirit of the home. there is a belief that if the fire spirit gets angry, then the spirit may be a danger to the family. the spirit has the agency and a power over the home. this then is a ritual for recognising that a home has its ghosts, its history and its spirits that reside long before the current people residents and that those spirits have the power to protect or destroy. mostly, the ritual tells us to recognise that land and place are not to be owned, ngo intersecting homeliness portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 2 and matters such as fire or water or wood are not mere commodities. rather, these materialities are living and only would be at our disposal to help us when they are given respect and the recognition that they are living and are powerful agents. within the vietnamese language, there is no specific word for differentiating between ‘home’ and ‘house’; rather, vietnamese people use the word ‘house’ to mean both the building and the home—nhà—(rather than state, ‘i go home,’ one states literally, ‘i return to the house’—tôi về nhà). to say house rather than home could mean that home is not to be possessed, but has its own agency, vitality and spirit. with this in mind, i want to tell you about a particular uncanny phenomenon that happened in my family home in strathfield, sydney—a loved family home where my family still resides—that occurred ten years ago and that, to this day, has not escaped any of our memories. by recounting this phenomenon, i hope to capture, in a selfreflexive way, the merging of the past and the present within the vietnamese migrant experience living in the australian landscape, with its dark history of the forced displacement of indigenous peoples. i wish to mourn and acknowledge that the land that has given my refugee family the opportunity to begin life safely and freely, and that is my birthplace, is a stolen land. and, therefore, we are always both grateful for, and in mourning with, our homeland. the land of my family home in strathfield has varying textures, varying levels. on the outer layer of the land, the soil is powdered, providing a beautiful façade of smoothness. it smells sweet and musky, like dried fruit. my father is the gardener. he made the garden in a formal european style, almost as a way for the family to integrate or to have the feeling of belonging in the europeanised surroundings of australia. just half a metre below this powdered and smooth soil, you meet rough, older soil, clumpy and annoying. through the moisture of the land and its own decay, the many fragmented roots of trees, plants, and weeds that had formerly stood on this land are pulped within this soil. this soil’s varying textures are hard to grasp; the small fragments of stone and roots and unknown bits stab the hands like fragments of the finest glass. other parts of this soil have an unexpected touch of oiliness, an unknown thickness that is sticky. the smell of the soil is unpleasant, with a certain strange sourness lingering in the air. ngo intersecting homeliness portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 3 the traditional owners and custodians of the land of my house are the wangal people of the darug tribe (darug can also be spelt as dharug). this land, the land of strathfield, was an important place for the culture and livelihood of these people. the european settlement of strathfield began in 1793. the wangal people were driven away from the land after this settlement, a land that was their home, their source of food, a part of themselves. armed soldiers were sent out by lieutenant-governor grose to drive the wangal people out of the land of my house (strathfield heritage 2015). i cannot find information about what happened to them afterwards. even now, the strathfield heritage website actually says that these people most likely never lived in strathfield but just used the land for hunting and gathering food.1 it was almost as if to 1 the strathfield heritage website states: ‘it is unlikely that the strathfield district was a place of permanent camping for the wangal people, as strathfield does not contain rock shelters or overhangs suitable for camping. rather the plentiful eucalypt trees, native grasses and access to the cooks and parramatta rivers made strathfield a likely place for gathering or hunting food by the wangal people, a costal clan of the darug tribe. as an important source of food, strathfield may have been an integral part of the wangal clan’s territory’ (strathfield heritage 2015). ngo intersecting homeliness portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 4 wipe yourself clean and innocent off the horror of stealing a homeland by not recognising the area as their homeland in the first place. between 1789 and 1790 the introduction of smallpox to the darug tribe by the european settlers killed thousands (kohen 1985). although there were no records, it is likely that within the first three years of the european settlement, over half the darug tribe died of smallpox. a report from governor arthur phillip (1789) stated the following: numbers of the natives were found dead with the smallpox … it is not possible to determine the number of natives who were carried off by this fatal disease. it must be great… and as natives always retired from where the disorder appeared, and which some must have carried with them, it must have been spread to a considerable distance, as well inland as along the coast. we have seen traces of it wherever we have been. (campbell 2002: 88) my family began to notice a curious, pimply group of orange mushrooms growing around the garden. they started to grow at the side of the house and within a week they had spread to all the garden beds. we all found them perplexing and extraordinarily disgusting to look at. my father in particular found them puzzling; he is a professional gardener and had never seen them before. one night, as we sat in the garden, we smelt an awful stench. my parents recognised the smell as similar to rotting dead corpse. such a thick and abject smell; it was musty, acidic, decayed. it confronted us like a veil. it came over the house. the smell came from the mushrooms. we began to kill off the mushrooms. with long sticks, we slashed them down whilst keeping our distance from them. but they continued to grow. they spread. it would be weeks later that they disappeared as quickly as they had come. a few years later, from a rather incidental search on the internet, we realised that these things were not mushrooms. they were flowers with no stem or roots, from the rafflesia genus. they are even known locally as ‘corpse flowers’ due to their stench. they grow in water-based landscapes such as marshes or in the tropical forests of south east asia. for them to flourish and grow in abundance in strathfield, australia, a considerably drier environment, seemed ghostly—that abstract body of the past. for my family (who happen to come from south east asia) and for my home, they were an ngo intersecting homeliness portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 5 uncanny phenomenon, these mushrooms that grow upon invisible south east asian waters. the aboriginal conception of body is that body is part of land, land is part of body; ‘speech and sweat are seen to penetrate people and places: speech goes in the human ear and travels through the air, sweat comes out of the body and sinks into waterhole (the earth pores or ear channels)’ (rose 2002: 320). aboriginal bodies of the darug were killed by massacres and sickness: ‘by 1840 there were fewer than 300 dharug aborigines left alive, only about 10% of the original population in 1788’ (kohen 1985: 22). the land, being part of the killed bodies, expresses this silenced history, quietly and disquietly. within this expression of the land—the uncanny flowers smelling of corpses, the cries of a moving land. the land will always be drenched with the ghosts of the pasts, the quiet of its hidden tragedy, the heaviness of its disquiet. the (dis) quiet of home. when my family first moved into this home, we thought there were ghosts. now we know there are ghosts. and the ghosts are crystallised in the land. a land loved, nurtured, tragic, homely and unhomely. reference list bachelard, g. 1969, the poetics of space, (trans.) m. jolas. beacon press, boston. campbell, j. 2002, invisible invaders: smallpox and other diseases in aboriginal australia 1780–1880. melbourne university press, carlton south. kohen, j.l. 1985, aborigines in the west: prehistory to present. western sydney project, seven hills, nsw. rose, d. b. 2002, ‘dialogue with place: toward an ecological body,’ journal of narrative theory, vol. 32, no. 3, fall: 311–325. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2011.0054 strathfield heritage 2015, aboriginal history of strathfield district. online, available: http://strathfieldheritage.org/placenames/aboriginal-history-of-strathfield-district/ [accessed 11 april 2015]. women in asia: shadow lines portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal editor’s welcome to portal vol. 3, no. 2 2006 the second issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies for 2006 features a special selection of essays grouped under the title ‘women in asia’ and guest-edited by devleena ghosh and barbara leigh, both from the university of technology, sydney. the essays in this special issue had their first incarnations at the eighth women in asia conference, ‘shadow lines’, organised by the women’s caucus of the asian studies association of australia and the university of technology sydney (convened by ghosh and leigh), and held at the university of technology sydney from 26 to the 28 september 2005. aiming self-consciously and tacitly to toy with, and dispute, the historical and discursive valencies accruing to the key, twined terms ‘women’ and ‘asia’, the ten essays grouped here combine to form a rich repository of contemporary research about the status of women in many parts of that vast, arguably incoherent, geocultural space called asia. all of the contributing authors thus ‘attempt to unsettle discourses about limits,’ to cite from co-editor devleena ghosh’s opening paper. that attempt is far from straightforward, as ghosh elaborates: ‘that lines, borders and boundaries exist, whether of prejudice, politics, economics, or culture, is undeniable. but how do we analyse these issues without ossifying them, creating implacable alterities that refuse the liminal spaces that people occupy?’ multivalent solutions are called for, ghosh suggests, and these are to be found not simply in ‘counter-politics and interventions’, but also through the excavation and recognition of multiple subjectivities from/in ‘a thousand plateaus, felt and experienced through the body, historical landscapes, domestic spaces, through performance as well as through the realm of the imaginary, in the impact of ideals and the weight of history’. allatson editor’s welcome portal 3.2 (2006) in addition to the special section on ‘women in asia’, this edition of portal contains two essays in its general academic section. françois provenzano’s ‘francophonie et études francophones: considérations historiques et métacritiques sur quelques concepts majeurs’ offers a sustained meditation and critique of the discourse of francophonic unity, and suggests a range of possible critical directions for future research into the study of french-speaking zones, peoples and cultures. barbara elizabeth hanna and juliana de nooy’s ‘the seduction of sarah: travel memoirs and intercultural learning’, focuses on a big-selling memoir that was also something of a mediasensation on its publication in australia in 2002, expatriate australian journalist sarah turnbull’s account of her ambivalent ‘new life’ in paris, france, after her marriage to a local: almost french: a new life in paris. interested in turnbull’s autobiography as a potentially useful and productive classroom text for demonstrating, and enabling discussion of, intercultural difference, the authors’ rich analysis demonstrates that such texts present a host of problems to the teacher keen to work with students’ self-critical capacities to locate themselves in international and transcultural frameworks. we are delighted, as well, to present three cultural works in this issue: extracts from katherine elizabeth clay’s evocative ‘comic’ narrative of study abroad, ‘from penrith to paris,’ itself a lively visual-textual antidote to turnbull’s ambivalently romanticized view of (not-quite)-belonging in paris (as discussed by hanna and de nooy in this issue); a typically idiosyncratic satire about the current german chancellor, angela merkel, from anthony stephens, expertly deploying an ancient celtic narrative verse form; and california-based chicana writer susana chávez-silverman’s code-switching chronicle/crónica, ‘oda a la ambigüedad crónica,’ a beautifully concise exploration of loss and the sensory regime of memorialisation. paul allatson, chair, portal editorial committee portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/editor/submission/342 editor’s welcome to portal vol. 3, no. 2 2006 microsoft word portacoronadogeneralarticlesspecialissuesep2011final portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. general article section. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. the smell of films and memories: a mexican migrant’s search for emotional sustainability. gabriela coronado, university of western sydney introduction i am sitting in the darkness, surrounded by australians waiting for the film to begin. i am anxious wondering how this film will represent my country. i feel scrutinised as if they knew i am mexican and they will judge me through the gaze of the film. at the same time i am excited. i want to see my city again and walk in it through its images and sounds, and remember my past in it. i know this will make me feel close to the ones who stayed there. when people migrate to a culturally different country the act of remembering acquires a vital and distinctive meaning. having migrated to australia my memories of places and my past life there have slowly become vague, and i find it difficult to know for sure if my recollections are real, imagined or just products of my desire. in many cases i find it impossible to communicate my memories to people i interact with in the new environment who do not share my cultural referents. it is not so simple for migrants to recount our memories. it is not the same as remembering in other circumstances. in this case the recollection cannot be situated in familiar contexts and common referents or be part of a shared story. telling our stories of past experiences in another cultural context involves refractions that give stories new meanings. in this dialogue the act of narration transforms what we remember and how it can be interpreted in the different cultural context. coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 2 far from our country of origin, our history, personal life experience and customs provide specific ways of narrating our identity. we construct ourselves for the native others, contrasting more than finding commonalities among our experiences. to share a memory is to communicate our difference. in the new context our identity seems to be disconnected from our past. our history, or at least part of it, is for our audience somehow strange, not to say folkloric, and in many cases it is even incomprehensible. implicitly or explicitly we continuously have to translate, not just between languages but between cultural meanings. this act of translation demands more than a standard bilingual competence (bryan et al. 2001). lacking knowledge of the new cultural environment makes me feel frustrated, inadequately equipped to fully communicate. memory is without question an important part of being human and in the context of migration it acquires a central value. memories sustain people emotionally, reinforcing or not the links with social and affective experiences associated with multiple locations in the two countries (see fortier [2000] on the role of memory in identity formation of migrants). memories are an anchor to our past and connect us with those who stayed in the home country and are still part of our emotional life, even if now mediated by phone calls, skype exchanges, emails or letters, or the trips in which as migrants we feel not locals anymore. we become visitors, known and unknown at the same time. having lived most of my life in mexico city, in my new life in australia i have found it almost impossible to relate with others without using my mexican referents. i use my recollections to communicate but because my interlocutors are unfamiliar with the cultural context where my experience happened, difficulties of communication frequently appear. i want to find common referents, but the ones they recognise frequently rely on stereotypes and make me feel depersonalised. in the attempt to belong i retell my memories constructing myself as if i were a cultural actor performing with an ethnic identity (bell 1999). i am who i am, but adorned by my mexicanness. i become more mexican than myself (coronado 2003). those memories told as representative of my ethnicity do not necessarily express how i feel i am, and thus they make me feel emotionally dissatisfied. my identity performance is aimed at the others but excludes myself. however, in the story-telling i become in some way who i claim i am. coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 3 immersed into a systematic process of self observation and self reflection on my life in australia, for almost fifteen years living between two countries (mexico and australia), two cities (mexico city and sydney), and two social worlds (mexican and multicultural australian ‘families-friends’), i have explored my emotional experiences and their relationship with my memories of place. for me ‘place’ is more than the physical location. de certeau (1984: 118) defines place in the context of his reading of everyday practice as the organised ‘objects of something reducible to the being-there as something dead,’ static. for him place contrasts with space, as ‘a place constituted by a system of signs, a ‘practised place’ (de certeau 1984: 17). but from the perspective of memory and emotions, places are never emptied of social, cultural and affective meanings, even when they look deserted, still. that is why in this paper i will use the concept ‘place’ to refer to the semiotic complexity of the city (or other locations) in which narratives construct memories. place is therefore the objective/subjective site where i have reflected on my personal life, my recollections and my way of recounting them, in my country of origin and my country of destination. in this paper i capture the inherent complexity of the migrant experience by selecting one element i discovered especially significant in my emotional strategies: the memory associations triggered by representations of mexico in films i have seen in cinemas in australia. in this case i include films that were produced by mexicans—amores perros (2000) and babel (2006) by alejandro gonzález iñárritu, and y tu mamá también alfonso cuarón (2001)—and on mexico, these three and frida (2002) by julie taymor. all included themes and places that i found meaningful for my emotional wellbeing which includes social and affective connections with others in australia, and also their distant intermittent continuity in mexico. i identify this process with the concept of emotional sustainability, defined as the ‘the ability to sustain friendly and nurturing relationships to experience a sense of body-mind and person-planet unity and to maintain physical and emotional health’ (sattmann-frese 2005: 218). i situated my autoethnography in reflecting on my experience as migrant member of an australian cinema audience. the four films i will refer to include representations of mexican life from different gazes, which have triggered important recollections about mexico city, my city of origin, and the country side. in these films i explore how the interaction between different discrete elements shown in the visual and audio coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 4 representations, streets, houses, sounds, behaviours, attires, verbal styles and events, set off deeply embodied memories stimulating strong emotional associations. this is one of the intentions of film makers, to emotionally affect audiences through exposure to the screen experience (keene 2010). those elements brought me back to personal incidents, some similar and others completely different from those that motivated my recollections and the infinite intimate associations triggered by the films. by reflecting on these incidents i will explore the role different senses play in the process of recollection and its emotional effects, and subsequently the embodiment of such experience: smelling, feeling and reliving through films. a mexican goes to the movies in australia. an autoethnography. in the search for understanding the link between place, memory and migration i used an autoethnographic approach (coronado 2009). my aim was to incorporate my own experience as migrant as a core source of data. the autoethnographic reflection and writing, understood as at once introspection and a consideration of the ethnographer’s immersion in the processes involved in the study (adler and adler 1999), allowed me to identify emotional affects and strategic responses in my everyday practices in the country of destination, linked to my status as a mexican in australia. according to kuhn (2002: 33) ‘emotion and memory bring into play a category with which film theory—and cultural theory more generally—are ill equipped to deal: experience ... a key category of everyday knowledge, structuring people’s lives in important ways.’ such reflections on one’s own experience are a significant form of knowledge. in this case i reflect on processes that in many cases are unconscious and difficult to explore, and therefore hard to understand without including researcher reflexivity. thus i decided to research the impact on migrants of representations of their country of origin in films using an exploration of my own subjectivity as a way to arrive at a deeper comprehension based on my own experience. in this case my autoethnography refers to my condition as a subject under study (ellis & boucher 2000). i reflected on myself as migrant, focusing on the strategies i have used to sustain myself emotionally regarding the here (place of destination) and the there (place of origin). i used autoethnography as a systematic and reflective practice for reconstructing my experiences (acts of memory), the feelings triggered (emotional responses), my coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 5 sensations (sensorial memory) and the ways i have incorporated those recollections in my social interactions in both countries. my personal reflections focused on ‘observation’ of my responses to films that included representations of mexico and i saw in australia. i also included reflections on what i remembered when viewing the films again for accurate descriptions of the films. at all stages of my reflections the focus was on myself as audience. these reflections have highlighted the emotional potential that stories and images of the country of origin, shown in films, can have not only for migrants, but also for other viewers who have not directly experienced the represented events.1 my experience of cinematographic representations in the films, associated with places that connect with nostalgic events is inherently complex, and went beyond what i expected as the obvious response to images and sounds. they triggered emotions and generated unexpected bodily responses, among them the memory of familiar smells. by smelling the film i was simultaneously transported to important moments of my life or to forgotten events, not necessarily connected with the film image-signs (pasolini 1976). the embodied emotions experienced sitting in front of the big screen made me feel closer to the place imprinted in my memory, the mexico that lives through my different senses. place and memory: becoming myself in my two cities mexico city, my place of origin, carries a strong emotional baggage in my recollections. they trigger conflicting feelings: pain, joy, nostalgia, rage, home sickness, oblivion, desire, and relief. it is the city of my childhood, my teenage years and so far most of my adult life. in it my primal affects were born and my roots are buried. that is why i regard this city as the place of my most constitutive memories. i was made and made myself in it as an urban, white, professional middle class woman. as an anthropologist i had important life experiences in the countryside but those experiences can also be associated with the social relations which are part of the life of 1 this kind of emotional response was analysed by keene (2010) regarding the impact of war films on veterans and their society. through the use of the concept ‘prosthetic memory’—coined by alison landsberg (2004)—he emphasises the role of prosthetic memory as a form of memory in which ‘the new technologies of mass consumption have enabled the creation of affective experiences that can create a “bodily memory,’ even though its possessor has not lived through the original event’ (keene 2010: 10). coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 6 the city, the rural-urban dynamic. in mexico city i encountered many rural migrants. i became their friend and was invited to their home towns. thus, rural life is also meaningful as part of my mexican identity. my destination city, sydney, is simultaneously my own and alien, familiar and strange, similar and startling. it constitutes me in ways which although profoundly affective i find more difficult to locate in the material space of the city. my recollections in it are intimate and less spatial. i feel i am still a tourist. nevertheless, the new place also produces sensory perceptions, and day by day they become part of the constitution of my new identity and my memory. being myself in both cities i discovered they are alike. both have similar corners and urban ambiences and in both i found kindness and hostility, traffic, dust and smog, people in a hurry and wandering families or young and old couples, dark streets and luminous spaces. but they feel, look, sound, smell, and are lived differently. at least that is how i sense them. the australian countryside seems very different to me, especially where there are no people, but even more so when it is inhabited and appropriated in culturally different ways. how is it possible that towns do not have centre? i still look for it when travelling along country roads, not knowing where to stop. after some years living far from my country, my memories of ‘my’ city have become fuzzy. i have doubts about them being what i have remembered, thinking i have constructed them in my imagination so that i will not lose them. i imagine my city with sounds, colours and textures, temperatures, odours and flavours that feel so real that i cannot be certain if my imagination is playing games or if my memories represent the experiences as they actually were2. against my intellectual position, that acknowledges that memory is always created in acts of communication, as susan engel (1999) argues, i insist on remembering my experiences of places as they were, searching in my recollections for an unreachable truth. i need to remember because my memories represent my belonging, the social construction of my beliefs and perceptions. my memories give me my sense of place (mcdowell 2008). my lived places, now memories, feel accurate in the sense that ‘memory is true if it resonates with oneself, illuminates one’s life and affords a sense of continuity and 2 the quality of memory narratives seems to be similar to what freud (1965) describes as dreamnarratives, in which unconscious meanings emerge and become part of how the memory is communicated. coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 7 identity to the remembered’ (engel 1999: 13). my places are there and i know they are shared by the ones who stayed. the places i remember, full of social and emotional meanings, are still inhabited by the people who stayed there, but they know how they have been transformed. when i am back (or share past recollections in phone conversations) i find it easy to communicate my memories. i do not have to struggle to make sense, nor to explain the cultural context in which things happened. we share histories and we interpret using cultural codes that provide common meanings and worldviews. these emerge out of the cultural matrix, which in a continuous flux simultaneously articulates common meanings and generates new cultural processes and practices (bonfil 1987a).3 through common cultural referents we recognise each other and contextualise our stories. we trust we can decode meanings. in this way i have evidence of our commonality and this certainty reinforces our links. i continue to be for them as i was, although now differently. to share my memories in such conditions provides me emotional strength (engel 1999: 33) that sustains me in my new country. it feeds my sense of still belonging, even if dislocated. in australia, to narrate those memories implies in the first instance to translate them into another cultural context and into a language that is not mine, english. telling my memories demands of me a premeditated construction of meaning in which i continuously need to decide what i want to communicate and why, and then plan how to do it successfully. not always does the outcome satisfy me. intentional construction of memory is not unique to my experience or to the migrant condition. it has been recognised as an inherent characteristic in the act of recalling. furthermore, independently of being deliberate or not, the acts of recollection are ‘inevitably selective in that they serve particular interests and political ideologies in the present’ (mcdowell 2008: 42). it is possible to go further, and recognise that the act of communicating our memories changes the way in which we remember them. in other words, ‘in each case the person you are telling it to, and the reasons you are telling it, will have a formative effect on the memory itself’ (mcdowell 2008: 12). by selecting 3 this kind of application of bonfil’s ideas reinforces my interest in his conceptualisation of deep culture (1987b). against the superficial reading of his work as essentialist, his theorisation, especially in his article ‘la teoría del control cultural’ (1987a), offers insights into cultural processes that simultaneously have continuity and change. coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 8 and replaying the acts that have historically constituted us that we decide are meaningful for our new identities, we perform who we are.4 for a migrant like me telling my memories in australia means to be alert most of the time during the communication process. it seems to me to demand greater awareness than i would have if i was in mexico, and it makes me feel the communication loses spontaneity. it feels artificial and tiring. even so, i trust that the metropolitan context as ‘a universal and abstract subject which the city is itself’ (de certeau 1984: 94) generates convergence, and hopefully while talking about my city and my life in it i will find shared referents, or at least close associations. in the end communication happens, even if occasionally i am frustrated feeling i was not fully understood. when conversations trigger memories and associations with my city i often feel that common urban referents would have allowed me to establish connections and meanings, and enabled me to relate better with my interlocutors in social and emotional ways. in those cases i have usually chosen selected memories to communicate who i am, in the hope that my audience would be able to find in my represented identity not only who i am as a migrant, a mexican, but who i am as myself. but through my difficulties to communicate my memories i have discovered that in fact the places are hugely different. the perception of senses: how memories come to life the memories of my city emerge also without looking for them. it is not just an intellectual and rational process, a coldly planned act of will, but a response to my personal or social emotional needs. frequently they surprise me and in my reactions i have perceived at different moments that some senses are strongly associated, and they set in motion intense embodied sensations, which are difficult to discern and which i find impossible to express with certainty and precision. one of them is the smell of memories. odours have an inherent condition of being imprecise and difficult to verbalise (classen 1993), but this fact does not stop them from being as powerful as other forms of perception that are easier to capture in words. there are many works on the relationship between memory and smell from different perspectives, more or less experimental, which try to evaluate and measure the 4 see, for example butler (1988) on performativity in the constitution of identity, gender in her case. coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 9 psychological, biological and social mechanisms of the relationship between them (herz and trygg 1996). they include not only the elements associated, but the interaction between different senses and ‘odour memory’ (larsson 1997, wilson & stevenson 2003; gibson 1966). more common, however, is the tendency to focus on the study of responses, in verbal or visual media, produced by smell and in particular the faculty of smell (dade et al. 2001). in my search for connections between smells and memory i followed a different route. i looked at this link through the whole sensorium, i.e. a system in which the faculties of perception interact in the interpretation of the surrounding world. according to senses theorists—for example, howes (1991)—the sensorium is mediated by social and cultural processes that define unique ways in which we explain and experience reality, according to hierarchies attributed to the different senses, the ‘ratios of sense’ (ong 1991). in this case i posit that the sensorium and its link with memory form an indivisible set, in which any of the perceived elements detonates other sensory perceptions, among them smells. as classen (1993: 103) says: olfactory codes function in association with other sensory codes. in certain cases there is a consonance between the message conveyed through the medium of smell and that communicated through other sensory media. in other cases however, the olfactory message differs from that produced by the other sensory characteristics. i highlight here the importance of the other senses as mediators between smell → memory, or memory → smell. when incorporating other senses in the process of recalling, it is relevant to take into account the nexus smell-memory not as a direct and unidirectional association but as a system which involves at least three elements. to model this process i use as metaphor the ideas of henri poincaré (1943) on the three body system. he studied the interdependence of the sun, the earth and the moon, demonstrating the emergence of complexity when a third body is taken into account, even if, like the moon compared to the sun and the earth it is much smaller and less visible. most accounts of the senses emphasise sight and hearing. the inclusion of smell as a minor sense disrupts the simplicity of the dominant binary relation. in practice separating out any one of the senses would be artificial and less productive for the aims of this self reflection. the interdependence between the different senses is crucial, coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 10 bearing in mind that beside the impacts of the context of production and communication in which the recollections are told, the already mentioned process of remembering includes a mix of fragments which are perceived by different senses and with multiple connotations: ‘each time we say or imagine something from our past we are putting it together from bits and pieces that may have until now been stored separately’ (engel 1999: 6). out of my reflections on how cinema might contribute to emotional sustainability i propose a systemic view in the form of another 3-body model, in which the relationship between smell and memory is mediated by the other senses, sight, hearing, and imaginary touch and taste, as in figure 1. instead of situations in which smell triggers memories, as in the famous novel in search of lost time (proust 1994) where from the perception of the smell of madeleines proust related the memories of his aunt and other associations from his childhood (see also sutton 2001), the odour can be also evoked by perception through other senses that are linked themselves with recalled stories in which additional emotions are generated. it is not that i remember because i smell, but that i smell because i remember, because i see and hear. life events memories perception through other senses odour recollection figure 1: three-body system in the interaction between smell and memory. the three body relationship is multidirectional. each site can activate memories displayed in others of the associated senses. in the same way images we observe in films might bring memories from the past into our present, they can also become coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 11 embodied, triggering physical reactions associated with the emotions produced. such recollections turn into imaginaries, that is, constructed representations of lived experiences, including memories of smell, touch and other sensations such as cold, heat, moisture and anguish. for me, when memories produce corporal associations they generate more intensity and consequently more emotional responses are produced. this tridimensional conceptualisation of the interaction between smell and memory helped me to explore the value of films as an emotional support for migrants. from images and sounds i had olfactory associations, followed by emotions and sensations which themselves produced relations with other memories, not necessarily linked directly with the event that activated the olfactory episode. as kuhn (2002: 164) states in relation to films, the sense of recognition comes not because the places or events in the film necessarily resemble those of the viewer, but because the film expresses feelings that prompt the audience’s memories. in my analyses of films i focused on the elements which triggered olfactory memories followed by emotional sensations. i recreated these experiences using my sociological imagination, (mills 2000) and my ethnographic imagination (willis 2000): i linked my reflections on my ‘problem’ with broader social patterns that affected that experience. the selection criteria for my corpus (the films i analysed) came from my sensorial and emotional responses to the wider context of translocation between origin and destination. in my reflections as cinema goer the selection of films was not arbitrary. i used my surprise as an indicator of which films and situations would generate the strongest olfactory memories that create the emotional effect. i will explore the four selected films considering their role on my emotional sustainability as a migrant. then i explore how the experience connected with my emotional sustainability. in search of emotional sustainability: a mexican migrant goes to the movies in some way the process of writing, trying to describe my reactions in front of the screen and watching the films again and again to corroborate my recollections, reinforced my emotional sustainability. it made me feel close, discovering continuities and ways i can communicate who i am here and there. in figure 2, included below, i capture the process in which i found myself using my sensorium as an audience, first to coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 12 see and to hear, then imagining other senses to perceive textures and tastes, and finally embodying the emotions set off by the imaginary or real perceptions of smells. the most surprising experience for me was the difference between emotions coming from the perceived explicit content of the film (memory in the diagram) and the imaginary triggered in the sensorium as a whole. from the images and sounds represented, which i identified by the senses of sight and hearing, my recollections generated associations sometimes similar but equally often unexpectedly contrary. emotions that emerge from the films and those created by related memories are not only different, but can be unobvious and opposite. memory odour other memories emotions emotional sustainability mexico in the movies touch taste smell hearing sight i recollections mirant emotional network in both places figure 2: films, senses and emotional sustainability. the generation of memory-associations is also infinite. the cycle can continue, finding in each movement the potential of reinforcing my sense of belonging. the connections with my people appear to be stronger even if i am not in face to face communication with them. at the same time the sense of continuity between my past and my present, here and there, reinforces my certainty of relating with the new place, creating my emotional sustainability. not being divided by an ocean my identity became one, embracing all its diversity, from the now and then, from my countries, my cities, my cultures and my affects. coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 13 films about mexico, produced by mexicans or filmmakers from other nationalities, have represented an essential resource for my emotional sustainability in my life as migrant. to achieve emotional sustainability (supra sattmann-frese 2005) and its associated feelings of belonging can act as an antidote against depressive effects arising from the dislocation involved in the migration process. the feeling of wholeness and wellbeing that emotional sustainability entails is important in situations in which it is common to fall into ‘anomie.’ according to durkheim (1970), in anomic moments, people may experience disassociation or confusion when confronted by the loss of their social and cultural frame of reference. in those situations it is common to find fragmented identities, alienation and marginality in relation to both groups. such is the risk that we all migrants confront, suddenly de-contextualised, separated from our emotional ties and having to relate to people with other cultures, value systems and social histories. at the beginning of the relocation process, depending on the reasons for migration and the forms of immersion in the new context, many experience estrangement, isolation and cultural shock. such feelings make initial interactions with others harder. we may equally experience abandonment and the fantasy of a new and superficial social environment, simultaneously full of anguish and euphoric liberation from past experiences. some thoughts crossed my mind when i migrated: ‘i do not have a home anymore,’ ‘i will never find true friends again,’ ‘i lost my friends’ or ‘i won’t be part of the life of my loved ones,’ ‘the life of my children escapes as water in my hands.’ i have also encountered similar feelings in conversations with other migrants (see also read & wyndham 2003). after some years those fears have lost their intensity and slowly i have discovered strategies for sustaining me emotionally in my two places, with my two peoples. one of those strategies is the emotional associations produced by cinematographic representations of mexico and the memories they have triggered. the use of films for my emotional sustainability worked in both directions. they provided cultural referents that allowed me to talk to my new friends in australia about my past experiences and simultaneously they evoked affective links with my past. for instance, babel offered my australian friends the possibility of seeing a wedding in a popular/rural mexican style, which included the decapitation of a hen. responding to this scene i was able to share over lunch the same shock, and could talk about my coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 14 country in a way that was complex, without having to identify personally with such event, even if it is part of the mexican culture, my culture. using those images as contrast, i was able to refer to my past and construct for them what i would like my new identity to be, ‘telling stories about the past, our past is a key moment in the making of ourselves ... such narratives of identity are shaped as much by what is left out of the account—whether forgotten or repressed—as by what is actually told’ (kuhn 2002: 2). the represented culture was familiar but not part of my way of life, although it was closer than i would like to recognise in my new identity. even though the smell of hen’s blood is familiar to me, in the same way as it is for many others who are not mexican, the event, the images, the noises seemed partially alien to me. in fact i felt relief at being away. later i will explore this and other relevant scenes in babel. films on mexico provided visual and sound meanings (some as part of dialogues and others as background) for me to find points of commonality to familiarise my australian friends with situations connected with my memories. they helped me to communicate a deeper comprehension of meanings that are important to me. they provided me with opportunities for self representation that though necessarily mexican, resonate in such a way that i can talk about my history, a history with continuities and discontinuities with my australian identity.5 especially important for my memories and associations are the representations of mexican places in which my personal history was located. through them i try to capture recollections that are slowly vanishing, leaving only a sense of loss. to see the streets of my childhood and their familiar activities comforts me and helps me to comment on my stories or nostalgias through my associations. watching the films i remember, but i also discover other ways of perceiving ourselves. the most important experience for me has been the olfactory associations that these images triggered. they generated deep emotions strongly embodied: shivering, sweating, heart beating, itching, flushing. i have never experienced such intense memories through any other means. 5 i will not explore here the theme of australian movies, but it is relevant to mention that i have also used them as a resource to recount my life experiences in australia when i get back to mexico. for example the film australia (luhrmann 2008) provided me with referents that helped me to explain how i see my new country, and its social and political history, and how i interpret my relationship with australia and australianness. my use of this film, however, feels more didactic and less emotional to me. i have not found in australian films the kind of imagined embodiment i feel when i see representations of my place of origin. coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 15 my first surprise came while seeing the film amores perros. this film is very sensual in itself. it is also very violent.6 but in spite of this overt message it triggered a pleasant memory: the soundtrack incorporates sounds from the streets of mexico, among them the voice of a tamal-seller with its familiar cry: ‘tamales!’7 the sound triggered a smell of tamales, followed by many recollections from my life in mexico. i will discuss this image at greater length later. for the moment i will just make a connection with a book i had read by pilcher (2001), who gives tamales a central role in the cultural construction of mexican identity. when i read his book his idea sounded far-fetched, but now, after this intense response to tamales i have reconsidered. i asked myself if my personal symbolism attached to tamales might be unconsciously linked to some collective meanings linked to the shared culture of deep mexico, the core culture which articulates and gives continuity to mexico’s diverse cultural practices (bonfil 1987b). i do not have an answer, but the experience made me recognise the importance of shared cultural experiences that might carry meanings from the cultural substrata, which can be related with bonfil’s (1987a) cultural matrix (see supra). after my surprise from watching that film i continued smelling films, sometimes inadvertently, at other times on purpose. i paid attention to my reactions each time i watched a mexican film in australia, searching, and finding, forms of emotional proximity to my people, my place and my story. this discovery motivated my exploration of smells in movies with a mexican theme, even when not by mexican filmmakers. it has also encouraged me to share my strategies. the narrative i include below tries to communicate my memories of how each of the four films triggered olfactory recollections and associated emotions. this practice is now a significant component of my strategy for emotional sustainability, far from my city, my past and my primary affective relationships. in this context my narrative emerged in the language that i regard closer to my affect, which i translated later as an important way to communicate in my new place. seeing, hearing and smelling my memories on the big screen i have chosen to order my account following the chronological order of my life, rather than in the order i experienced the films themselves, as i discovered myself smelling 6 for an analysis of this film as related with the dark side of mexico, see coronado and hodge (2004). 7 tamal is a popular food made of maize dough stuffed with chilli sauce and meat. it is wrapped with corn or banana leaves and steamed. coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 16 and remembering in response to films. i will reflect first on my most distant memories, from my childhood. that does not mean that the process of remembering in the movies was linear. as will be appreciated in the account of my reactions, memories from the four films travelled through different stages of my life and the associations assembled memories that converge and overlap, independently of when they happened in life. i begin with the film frida. frida by julie taymor (2002) frida is set in two central locations in mexico city, the suburb of coyoacán and downtown mexico city, which coincidentally connect closely with my own history. even though the film sets those spaces in an earlier time than when i lived there, beginning in 1922 and finishing before i was born, the places as filmed are contemporary, even more so than my remembered place when i lived in mexico. the fact that it was filmed in 2002 obviously helps it evoke my memories from a later time than the film’s chronology. images of streets, colours and textures are recent, so i find it impossible to know how plausible the film would be for those who were alive in that period. in my memories the images and sounds make sense even if they overlap with more recent memories. for example frida’s house in the film is as it is now, as a museum i have visited recently. the sound of the bells from saint augustine’s church is in my memories, always the same, from when i was a child till today. i analyse the film focussing on my reactions as an audience, a mexican watching a film in australia. my objective is to narrate the memories triggered by the films as a whole and by specific scenes that evoked olfactory memories that connected with my past, my places and my people. i begin with scenes set in the zócalo, the main square of mexico city, and move onto other scenes that connected with different places and events in my life. caminando la película visité el centro de la ciudad como cuando de niña íbamos a comprar con el aguinaldo ropa interior por docena o yendo hacia el zócalo a ver la iluminación navideña. caminé nuevamente las calles que de niña me llevaban al mercado de coyoacán agarrada de la mano de mi mamá. recuerdo los olores del mercado, la mezcla de olor a cilantro, incienso y carne cruda, y yo saltando y tratando de evitar los charcos con su desagradable olor agrio y con miedo a que se me salpicaran mis calcetines blancos. coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 17 walking the film i visited downtown mexico city in the same way i did when as a child we went to buy wholesale hosiery or in the direction of the zócalo, the central plaza of mexico city, to see the christmas decoration lights. i walked again the streets that as a girl led me to coyoacán market, holding my mother’s hand. i remembered the market smells, a mix of coriander, incense and raw meat. i see myself jumping the puddles, holding my breath to avoid their disgusting, acid smell, afraid that my white socks might be stained. con las imágenes del panteón huelo a iglesia, particularmente esa mezcla de viejo con olor a cera quemada que seguramente fue lo que en más de una ocasión me hizo que me desmayara. la casa de la familia de frida me huele a abuela, con el olor de los pajaritos en sus jaulas y el jabón barato en el lavamanos, olor que en mi recuerdo casi no se distingue del jabón para lavar ropa. the images of the graveyard remind me of the smell of churches, particularly the stink of oldness mixed with the scent of burned wax, which surely was what made me faint more than once. frida’s family house smells of my granny, with the odour of the birds in their cages and the cheap soap in the hand basin, a smell that in my memory cannot be easily distinguished from laundry soap. las escenas donde hay comida también me desatan olores, pero no me sorprenden. recordar el olor a mole poblano (el símbolo de la cocina mexicana) que prepara la ex esposa de diego rivera al día siguiente de su boda con frida u oler a chile en nogada me parece obvio y no recuerdo ningún evento en el que de niña me ofrecieran dichos platillos. mi papá contaba que los chiles en nogada eran especiales para el día de san agustín en la comida para festejar a mi abuelo, pero yo nunca fui invitada. the scenes with food images also triggered aromas but they do not surprise me. obviously i remembered the smell of mole poblano (the icon of mexican cuisine) which diego rivera’s ex-wife prepared for the day after his wedding with frida, or the smell of chillies stuffed with nuts, but i do not recall any event as a child in which someone offered me those dishes. my father liked to say that those chillies were the speciality for saint augustine’s day, in the banquet offered to my granddad. i was never invited to such an event. lo que sí me sorprende es la mezcla de olor a dulce, canela y grasa ante la imagen de un foco en el puesto de buñuelos en donde diego y frida están sentados. en mi recuerdo el foco está mosqueado y me remonta a las innumerables ferias apestosas que visité de niña y de mamá llevando de la mano a mis chiquitas. ¿no sería mejor simplemente oler a buñuelo? what surprised me most was the mixing of smells of sweet, cinnamon and fat while watching the image of a light globe on a stand which sells buñuelos (pastry bread) where diego and frida are seating. in my memory the light globe has fly shit, and this brings me back to the countless stinking fairs i visited as a child, and later as mother, holding the hands of my own little ones. would it not be better to smell just the buñuelo (a special sweet fried bread)? coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 18 éstos y otros olores me parecen atemporales y me cuesta trabajo ubicarlos en un momento en particular, pero de todos modos me atrapan y me trasladan a lugares en la ciudad de méxico y a ciertos eventos: coyoacán el día del grito, san ángel en la feria del carmen (que también huele a cloroformo de las botellas en donde muestran animales monstruosos), la alameda en la temporada de reyes, e incluso el arco a la revolución donde recientemente fui con mi nieto pues ahí llegan ahora los reyes magos. these and other smells seem to me timeless and i find it hard to associate them with a particular moment. still they trapped me, and made me travel to places in mexico city and some specific events: coyoacán on independence day; san ángel in the festival for the virgin of carmen (which also smells of chloroform, exuding from deformed animals displayed in glass bottles); la alameda for the festivities of the three wise kings, and the arch of the revolution, where i recently took my grandson because the three wise kings made an appearance there. viendo las escenas donde se representa el accidente de frida también huelo a sangre. el olor me recuerda el accidente que vi de adolescente, en donde la arena ocultaba el color de la sangre pero no su olor. a diferencia del accidente de frida en mi recuerdo la mujer ahí quedó muerta. preferiría no acordarme. watching the scenes that represent frida’s accident, i also smell blood. the smell of blood reminds me of an accident i witnessed as a teenager. in my memory the sand concealed the colour of the blood but not its smell. contrasting the accident in frida with my recollection, the woman i saw was actually dead. i would prefer to forget it. en las escenas de fiesta y cantina el humo de puro me remite a la casa de mis papás los sábados, día que su amigo español nos visitaba. como me desagradaba tener que olerlo cada semana. siempre pensé ¿por qué no se lo fuma en su casa? el olor a alcohol y cigarro extrañamente me trasladó a la época de la prepa, en la hiedra. ahí tomábamos café y cantábamos con una guitarra, pero no recuerdo que oliera a alcohol. olía a la hiedra que recubría las paredes y a quesadillas. in the scenes of parties and bars the smoke of cigars brought me back to my parent’s house on saturdays, the day of my father’s spanish friend’s visit. how much i hated its smell. i always thought: why does he not smoke it at his home? the smell of alcohol and cigarettes strangely transported me to my time in high school. in the cafeteria la hiedra (the ivy) we drank coffee and sang songs accompanied by a guitar, but i do not remember it smelling of alcohol. it smelled of ivy, which gave the place its name and covered the walls. it also smelled of quesadillas. this memory-association might have come from the setting represented in the film, a tavern with musicians playing in it. also, i suppose, because both places were associated with the place i lived most of my life, coyoacán. in this case the connections, as in my three body system, led me first to other senses, but still connected with smell. coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 19 otros momentos aparecen como asociaciones pero se saltan el orden y me remontan a un recuerdo familiar en mi casa de adulta en el tiempo en que mi hija adolescente pinta. el estudio de diego y frida y las múltiples escenas en las que uno o el otro aparecen pintando huelen a las noches en que duermo sabiendo que al despertar el mismo olor aunque más tenue, me anuncia la sorpresa de un nuevo cuadro de mi pequeña artista. other moments appeared as associations but leapt over the chronological order. they brought me back to memories of my own home as adult, when my teenage daughter was painting. diego’s and frida’s studios, and other scenes in which one or the other was painting, smelled of the evenings in which i went to sleep knowing that when i awoke the same smell, although less intense, would announce to me the surprise of a new, striking painting from my little artist. la riqueza de las texturas de los muros, los colores y las escenas de las calles llenas de transeúntes pasando entre puestos no me parecen olorosas. podrían haber olido a melón, pero no. sin embargo en ellas encuentro dos escenas especialmente evocativas. el puesto de pan me huele a chocolate en el que mi abuelita sopeaba pan de pueblo cuando lo comprábamos en las ferias. la otra escena es la imagen del periódico colgando de un mecate detenido con una pinza para colgar la ropa. dicho olor me perturba; lo tengo impregnado y lo recuerdo con sólo acercar mis dedos a la nariz. me parece que el periódico huele a periódico en cualquier lugar del mundo. quizá por eso prefiero el periódico en internet. the richness of textures on the walls, the colours and the images of streets, full of people passing through the stands, did not prompt specific smells, even though they included images of fruits. i might have smelled the rockmelons but i didn’t. however among these images i found two were particularly evocative. the bread stand smelled of the hot chocolate in which my granny soaked the pan de pueblo, a kind of bread commonly sold only at festivals and fairs. the other image, of newspapers hanging from ropes with pegs holding them, unsettled me. its smell is so impregnated in my memory. i recall it just by bringing my fingers towards my nose. it seems newspapers smell the same everywhere. maybe that is why i prefer news online. es esa clase de olor atemporal y que traspasa espacios. me recuerda abuelos, padres, hermanos, esposos y amigos, casi siempre hombres, deteniendo con sus manos las páginas abiertas del periódico y pasando las páginas con la fricción de sus dedos manchados. el recuerdo me da escalofríos. me evoca sensaciones en las me siento excluida, pero al mismo tiempo puedo establecer conexiones entre mis dos lugares. es esa clase de recuerdo que me da tranquilidad y certeza. me permite sentir que mi nueva identidad contiene continuidades y no sólo rupturas. it is that kind of timeless odour that invades spaces. it reminds me of grandfathers, fathers, husbands and friends, almost always men, holding the open pages of the newspaper with their arms apart, turning the pages with the friction of their stained fingers. the memory made me shiver. it evoked powerful feelings of being excluded. but at the same time i could find connections between my two coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 20 places. it is that kind of memory that creates a sense of calm and certainty. it reminds me that my new identity has continuities and not just ruptures. babel by alejandro gonzález (2006) and y tu mamá también by alfonso cuarón (2001) i have decided to explore these two films at the same time, since i found some similarities in the recollections they triggered. in babel i focus only on the part of the story set in mexico, when a mexican nanny travelled from the usa to her home town for her son’s wedding, taking her boss’s children with her. in the case of y tu mamá también, although there were scenes that smelled of my urban life, as i will mention later, i found the rural images more significant, along roads or by almost deserted beaches. some of these images converged with those from the wedding in babel, but produced different emotional sensations in me, probably because the locations included different social contexts and emotional ambiences. en las imágenes de la ciudad clase mediera de y tu mamá también las escenas en donde los protagonistas nadan, huelen a alberca y me remonta a la etapa en que cada fin de semana íbamos con mi mamá a nadar al club, jugábamos en los jardines, comíamos tortas y nos asoleábamos. este recuerdo me huele sobre todo a pasto. las imágenes que desata no me es claro si las recuerdo o sólo recuerdo las fotos, especialmente aquella en donde estoy en traje de baño jugando futbol, pero sea cual sea el detonador la sensación de ocio representada en la película me resulta muy placentera, y me conecta con mi vida en australia donde es más común que las casas tengan albercas, aunque el olor que recuerdo es de arena mojada. in the images of the aspirational middle class city of y tu mamá también the scenes where the protagonists swim smell of swimming pool and transported me back to the time when we used to go every saturday to the club with my mother. we swam, played in the gardens, took some sun and ate tortas (a mexican type of baguette). this memory smelled mostly of lawn. the visual images it triggers are not so clear. i am not sure if i remember them or i only recalled photographs, especially one in which i was in a bathing suit playing soccer.8 whatever is the case, the leisurely feeling the film prompted in me seems very pleasant, and connects me with my life in australia, where it is more common for houses to have pools, although the smell i recall is of wet sand . el viaje que los protagonistas emprenden hacia la playa se ve, oye y huele muy parecido a mis viajes a trabajo de campo como antropóloga. es esa mezcla de polvo con hierba y olor a gasolina quemada lo que desata inolvidables recuerdos: huele a cacahuate, pero no tostado, cuando viajo en un camión que me dio 8 this kind of experience regarding the construction of memories from images in pictures has also been reported by warnock (1994). coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 21 aventón y tuve que ir sentada en una montaña de cacahuates semi verdes, y a sudor y polvo cuando viajé en el techo de un jeep sorteando mezquites y protegiéndome con mi morral. the protagonists’ trip to the beach looked, sounded and smelled very similar to my fieldwork trips in mexico as an anthropologist. the mixed smell of dust, grass and burned petrol set off unforgettable memories. i could smell raw peanuts, as on an occasion when a truck gave me a lift and i had to sit on top of a pile of peanuts; or sweat and dust from another occasion when i travelled on the roof of a jeep, needing to ward off the spikes of mezquites (a kind of tree common in desert areas) protecting myself with my morral (carrying bag). pero las imágenes que más huelen son las de la cantina en el pueblo donde los dos muchachos y la joven se emborrachan y juegan sensualmente en frente de otros parroquianos. ellas me recuerdan el miedo con olor a adrenalina, ese sudor penetrante que huele hasta cuando te acabas de bañar. es olor a angustia. no sé si el olor lo imaginé asociado con mis recuerdos o lo olí de verdad sentada en el cine, recordando historias que había escuchado en mi vida, y que me hicieron sentir miedo cuando un transeúnte se acercaba mientras yo caminaba entre pueblos. mientras veía la película sentía que en cada escena, lo peor iba a pasar, que los jóvenes iban a ser golpeados y la mujer violada. para mi alivio nada paso ni en las escenas ni en mi vida, aunque aparentemente el recuerdo persiste y desata intensas sensaciones inquietantes que me hacen sentir alivio de estar tan lejos. but the images that smelled most powerfully were those from a pub in a rural town where the two young men and the woman got drunk and played sensual games in front of other patrons. i remembered the fear accompanied by the smell of adrenaline, that penetrating smell that is still intense even after having a shower. it is the smell of anguish. i am not sure if the smell was an imaginary association with my memories or i actually smelled it sitting in the cinema, recalling stories that i have heard which made me feel afraid each time someone approached me while i was walking between towns. while watching these scenes i expected that the worst would happen, that the woman was going to be raped and the young men beaten. to my relief nothing happened in the film, nor in my life. but this memory is persistent, and it creates intense, unsettling sensations that make me feel relieved i am so far away. en babel la escena en la que decapitan una gallina que sigue corriendo sin cabeza me produjo desconcierto. no tanto por que no supiera que sucede, sino por mi inusual identificación con los gringuitos. sus gestos me hicieron sentir chiquita recordando cuando mi tío veterinario mató mi gallina. yo desde la ventana me asomo queriendo y no queriendo ver. creo recordar que le torció el cuello y el olor que recuerdo es el del pollo en adobo que no quise comer ese día. in babel i was disconcerted by a scene in which a hen was decapitated and continued running around. not so much because i did not know this kind of thing happened but because of my unusual identification with the reactions of the gringitos (diminutive of gringo, used in mexico to refer to americans). their gestures made me feel a child again, as on the occasion when my uncle, a vet, coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 22 killed my hen. i peeked from the window, wanting and not wanting to see. i seem to remember that he twisted her neck. the associated smell comes from the chicken cooked in adobo (chilli sauce), which i did not want to eat that day. las escenas de la boda de pueblo evocan recuerdos más placenteros. no es que haya yo asistido a muchas bodas de ese tipo. es una en particular la que evoco bailando en la tierra y oliendo a pulque. mi recuerdo también huele al mole del banquete, pero su olor me transporta al regreso en donde mis dos hijas se hacían las dormidas mientras silenciosamente se comían el pollo del itacate que generosamente nos dieron, como es costumbre en las comidas festivas. the images of the simple, rural wedding bring back more pleasant memories. it is not that i went to many weddings of that kind. but there is one in particular that i recall, dancing on the bare earth and smelling pulque (a mild alcoholic drink from cactus). my recollection also smelled mole from the banquet, but this smell took me back to our car trip home afterwards. during the drive my little daughters pretended to be asleep in the back while quietly eating the chicken from the itacate (food gift), which was given to us as is the generous custom in such festivities. en la fiesta imágenes y sonidos en particular también me conectaron con mi vida familiar. huelen a pólvora cuando mi hermano disparaba tiros al aire para que se abriera el cielo y las nubes dejara entrar al año nuevo, y a refresco de naranja cuando celebrábamos algún evento en casa de mis compadres. este recuerdo también huele a ron con coca cola. particular images and sounds from the fiesta also connected me with different times of my family life. there was a smell of gun powder, as when my brother shot his gun in the air ‘to open the sky’ to let the new year come in. i could also smell orange soda, as when we celebrated on many occasion at the house of my compadres (ritual siblings). this memory also brings back the smell of rum and coke. esos recuerdos me parecen particularmente importantes como emigrante, renuevan la sensación de amistad y colaboración. en australia también lo he sentido pero huele diferente. huele a pan, galletas, chocolates y té. aunque también a curry, arroz frito, sopa ramen y tinga cuando en comidas organizadas en la oficina yo y otros emigrantes compartimos con otros australianos nuestros recuerdos en nuestro país de origen por medio de sus olores, sabores, texturas y colores. todo ello también huele a vino, la bebida de rigor en nuestra identidad australiana. those memories are particularly important to me as a migrant. they renew the sense of friendship and collaboration. i have sensed it also in australia but the aromas are different. they are smells of bread, biscuits, chocolates and tea. there are also smells of curry, fried rice, noodles y and tinga (a mexican dish) when i and other migrants organise lunch at the office, sharing with other australians our nostalgia for our mother lands through odours, tastes, textures and colours. all these memories also smell of wine, the obligatory drink for our australian identity. coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 23 amores perros by alejandro gonzález iñárritu (2000) i decided to comment on the film amores perros last, because it gave me my biggest surprise in the sensorial link i was tracing between films, memory and emotional sustainability. i have already described my initial shock, smelling my city when i heard the sound track from the city streets, and in particular some scenes in which the distant sound from a loudspeaker can be heard offering tamales for sale: ♫ tamales calientitos, tamales, tamales calientitos, tamales ♫ the strength of the olfactory memory produced by this street cry might have been reinforced by the symbolic meaning of tamales in mexican culture, parallel to the sound, the images moved between scenes in different neighbourhoods. the repeated cry connected two worlds that are separated by class in many other social contexts. the working class neighbourhood (vecindario) where a hit-man and his street dogs live and the wealthy neighbourhood (colonia) where he walks along searching for his former life communicate with each other through the sound. in some way the images and sound scapes of the city represented in the film reinforce such memories and prompt the smell and taste of tamales even more. el sonido de la venta de tamales en las calles me hace recorrer las calles sin banquetas de mi colonia en méxico y en donde sigue viviendo una de mis hijas y su familia. ahí este recuerdo de tamales además de a tamal también huele a salsa, elote asado, esquites, tacos al pastor, todo mezclado con refresco y perro callejero. y a polvo y sudor de los transeúntes que acaban de jugar basquetbol en ‘los juegos.’ the sound of the tamales-seller made me walk the streets without sidewalks around my former mexican home, where one of my daughters and her family still lives. once there, my memories also smelled chilli sauces, toasted corn cobs, esquites (corn kernels cooked with herbs) and tacos, all mixed with soft drinks and dirty street dogs. it also smelled of dust and sweat from young men who had just finished playing basketball in the play ground. del mismo modo que en la película, el recuerdo se continúa hacia una zona más acomodada de la ciudad, polanco, donde me quedo algunos días cuando visito a mi otra hija, aunque ahí el recuerdo de su olor se desvanece, sólo queda en mi memoria el sonido y mi sensación sentada en el cine y descubriendo mi placer olfativo. aunque no extraño los tamales su olor me trae muchos recuerdos: la boda civil de mi hija, la tamalada los días de la candelaria, las primeras comuniones y mi mamá batiendo la masa en una cazuela que huele a maíz agrio y coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 24 a barro. también recuerdo al libro de pilcher (2001) quien me obliga a reconocer que estoy profundamente conectada con la identidad nacional. in the same way as in the film my recollections continued their journey to a wealthier district, polanco, where nowadays i spend half of my time in mexico, visiting my other daughter. in my memory the smell became less strong there. all that remained was the sound memory and my sensations of sitting in the cinema rediscovering my olfactory pleasure. although i do not miss the tamales as such, their smell brings back many memories. it reminds me of my daughter’s civil wedding, the tamalada on the day of candelaria, of first communions, and my mother kneading the dough in a big cazuela (traditional pan) that smells of sour corn and clay. i also remember the book by pilcher (2001) who made me recognise i am deeply connected with the national identity. pero sobre todo la película huele a miedo. al igual que mis recuerdos con olor a angustia, las imágenes de los charcos, los perros y la sangre huelen y me remontan a muchos momentos en que de niña, joven y adulta caminé por las largas calles con bardas interminables sintiendo que a cada momento alguien me iba a atacar. las bardas que pretejen a los que están adentro para que no sientan miedo a mi me huelen a sudor frío, se oyen como taquicardia y encapsulan mi alivio de vivir fuera de mi ciudad y mi preocupación por los que se quedaron en ella. but mostly the film smells of fear. in the same way as other memories, the images of puddles, dogs and blood smell, and they brought me back to many moments full of anguish in which as a child, teenager and adult i walked isolated streets with unending walls feeling that at any moment someone would appear and attack me. to me, the walls that protect those inside so that they do not feel fear, smell of cold sweat. they sound like tachycardia and they capture my sense of relief at living away from my city and at the same time my worries for the ones who stayed there. conclusion as a migrant, movies have offered me the experience of reencountering my life, and the ability to communicate emotionally in my new place and identity. they have provided me common referents that are crucial to express myself beyond the stereotypes of mexicanness, and as time passes, also of my australianness. the embodied memories prompted by the mix of sensations from the multiple and complex interactions of the sensorium, in this case imagined from seen images and heard sounds, allowed me to feel that my life and identity, although different in each place, are a continuity. in the process of adapting to a new place and community the experience encoded in my olfactory memory, even if is one of the senses that is most difficult to measure and communicate, has been the most potent trigger of memories and coronado the smell of films and memories portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 25 emotions, which i feel, smell, taste, hear, see and touch, even if only in my imagination. image, speech and sound tracks smell and produce sensations. they bring back recollections that revive past emotions and help me to recuperate my living fragments, and with them to recreate my new identity, without a feeling of being fractured. my experience as audience in frida, babel, y tu mamá también, and especially in amores perros reinforced my conviction that to be able to understand the relevance of memory in the migrant context it is important to expand the range of sensorial experiences that might help to promote emotional sustainability, so fundamental for coping with the migrant’s new life experiences in the city of destination. paradoxically, such sustainability is not achieved only by seeking pleasant memories. to do so might be too artificial. in the relationship with others, the deep links with those who stay in the home country, and with those in the country of destination, and the sense of belonging to one place, or two, or to the planet, necessarily includes memories, sensations and experiences that, like life, produce conflicting memories. being painful does not make them less important to sustain identity and belonging. reference list: adler, p. a. & adler, p. 1999, ‘the ethnographers’ ball—revisited,’ journal of contemporary ethnography, vol. 28, no. 5: 442–450. bonfil, g. 1987a, ‘la teoría del control cultural en el estudio de procesos étnicos,’ papeles de la casa chata, ciesas, méxico df, vol. 2, no. 2: 23–43. ______ 1987b, méxico profundo. una civilización negada. sep/ciesas, méxico df. butler, j. 1988, ‘performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory,’ theatre journal, vol. 40, no. 4: 519–531. classen, c. 1993, worlds of sense. 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(eds) 2003, migrants, strangers and purple bananas. latin american migrants in spain, australia and the united states, special issue. humanities research, vol. 10, no. 1. australian national university, canberra. sattmann-frese, w. 2005, sustainable living for a sustainable earth: from an education for sustainable development towards an education for sustainable living. phd thesis, university of western sydney, australia. sutton, d. e. 2001, remembrance of repasts. an anthropology of food and memory. berg, oxford. taymor, j. (dir.) 2002, frida. handprint entertainment/lions gate films/miramax films/ventanarosa productions, usa. warnock, m. 1994, ‘memory: the triumph over time,’ comparative literature, vol. 109, no. 5: 938– 950. willis, p. 2000, the ethnographic imagination. polity press/blackwell, cambridge. wilson, d. a. & stevenson, r.j. 2003, ‘the fundamental role of memory in olfactory perception,’ trends in neurosciences, vol. 26, no. 5: 243–247. 中国现当代小说中的故乡构建初探 中国现当代小说中的故乡构建初探 王一燕 although the importance of the native place in chinese life is beyond dispute and it has been a significant preoccupation of chinese authors throughout history, literary representations of the native place still remain to be studied systematically. this paper attempts to examine the construction of the native place in modern chinese fiction and its role in literary representations of china. until the beginning of the twentieth century, the native place in chinese literature remained an abstract notion without specific geographical locations and the narrative focus was on the ‘native-place sentiment’ (bryna goodman 1995). it is a modern phenomenon that the native place appears as a local cultural space with ethnographic details and is closely related to the need for narrating china, although it can still be abstract and symbolic. the construction of the native place is crucial in the project of national narration for modern chinese fiction, as it is often created as the nation’s cultural origin and authentication. however, the relationship between the native place and national representation in chinese fiction is paradoxical, because, on the one hand the native place necessarily differs in origin, and on the other hand, many chinese authors are devoted to china as a cultural totality. this paper will focus on the paradoxical relationship between the authors’ nativist aspirations to create distinctive local cultural identities and their commitment to the abstract idea of a single chinese nation. furthermore, both the native place and national narration are intricately associated with the tendency of literary nativism, i.e. the belief and the practice that literary writing should focus on constructing the native place and that the narrative style should continue and develop the indigenous narrative traditions. in other words, portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 2 poetics is part of the politics in the configuration of the native place. the initial questions i shall try to answer include: how is the native place viewed and configured in modern chinese fiction? what kinds of local stories are generated as national tales and what is the role of the native place in such narratives? why do writers ‘write local but think national’? why do national myths in chinese regional literatures compete to identify with the central nation-state? 摘 要 “故乡”在国人的日常生活与社会交际中的重要性是不容置疑的，在文学中的 表述也是司空见惯的。然而，故乡的文学表述却有待于更为系统的研究。首 先，现当代小说中的故乡与古典诗词里的故乡是截然不同的，虽然两者均可为 虚构，但前者更为实在，后者更为抽象。现当代小说着重于对家乡地域文化的 再现，古典诗词则更强调情感的意像与表达。再则，故乡的构建与中国现当代 文学的本土追求紧密相关，从前的乡愁与乡情虽在，但已与当今本土文学中通 过故乡再现民族精神及国民风貌大相径庭。本文着重探讨现当代小说中故乡的 文学构建，并力求回答当代文学与本土追求的相关问题，例如：现当代中国小 说中如何关注并建构故乡？现当代中国小说中产生了哪些以国族叙事出现的地 方故事？故乡在这些叙事中的作用与效果如何？作家为何往往“书写故乡而思 考国族”？为何中国地域文学中竞相创建国族神话并与国族中心认同？ 一、故乡构建及本土文学 故 乡 故乡的社会历史文化意义究竟何在？首先，故乡是中国社会个体及群体身份构 建的中心环节。美国学者顾德曼 (bryna goodman)在其研究民国时期上海地方 会馆社团的专著中着重探讨故乡在上海移民群体的生活中扮演的角色，充分证 实了故乡在中国人身份构建中的重要性。顾德曼的研究表明从同一地方移民到 上海的“同乡”彼此之间在很多层次上有关系，虽然他们在来上海以前也许尚 未蒙面。同乡们在城市里，尤其在就业上互相帮助，形成关系网你来我往。共 同的乡音熟悉的语汇不仅使交流方便，更重要的是他们也因此有了有共同的身 份定义，因为共同的区域文化和语言决定了他们共同的“根本”。故乡作为本 土场域对于中国各地的移民来说是切实的身份认同的依据，是你来我往的重要 根基，同乡们在新的环境生活中的异同也是相互交流的重要话题。 1 1 （美）顾德曼 (bryna goodman) 著，宋钻友译：《家乡、城市和国家：上海的地缘网络与认 同，1853-1937》，上海古籍出版社，2004 年版，第 3-5 页。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 3 大约从二十世纪初开始，故乡与现当代小说同步进入中国文学的语境，并逐步 成为了中国小说中经久不衰的主题及母题。故乡的建构可以说是中国小说的现 代性历史转折的标志。二十世纪初期故乡作为本土场域出现在现代小说里，随 后便一直在文学想象中占据着中心地位。鲁迅、沈从文、巴金、老舍、茅盾、 张爱玲等的长短篇小说中，富有地域特色的地方表述使得故乡不仅仅是叙事的 背景，更为重要的是“故乡成为了叙事的主角”。 2 建构故乡在早期的现代小 说中至为重要，因为很多作家借助故乡的风土人情表达各自的政治立场或文化 观点。鲁迅对国民劣根性的声陈与批判，沈从文对文化怀旧的表达，到后来老 舍小说中着意于对民间爱国主义热情的激发，都是通过叙述故乡的民情风俗而 实现的。三、四十年代在革命根据地里，共产党尤其鼓励在文学创作中运用地 方特色，创建大众文学的本土故乡。一九四九年建立中华人民共和国以后，又 将这一理念用于促生“新”中国的国族叙述。二十世纪八十年代以后故乡更是 一步步成为文学中的本土场域，使得贾平凹等得以讴歌乡土中国，并令莫言之 辈追述国族阳刚。 故乡在现当代小说中的意义是多方面的，但 为突出的一点是故乡以各种姿态 出场，既有超越现实和经验的内涵，也是实地的社区生活考察。故乡既可以是 乡间故里，也可以是中心都市；既可以是作者的原籍或其后来认作的他/故乡； 既可在地图上真实可觅，也可只是想象中的文化空间。小说中的故乡往往是文 化身份的起源、是作者文化现象的寻根的场所，因此它可以是作者称之为故乡 或者家乡的地方，可以是但也不必是作者的出生地，作者也许会称其度过童年 时光之地为故乡。它甚至可以指作者的籍贯或者老家，根本就不是作者的出生 地，但它往往是作者身份认同的在地，是作者选定其文化从属关系的场域。简 言之，故乡叙事建构是二十世纪以后出现的文学现象，现当代中国作家往往通 过小说中虚构的故乡建构国族文化根源，并表达对故乡的渴念之情。二十一世 纪以来故乡的文学形象更是层出不穷，文学中的故乡依然蒸蒸日上。 文学中故乡的理念早已有之。可是，尽管思乡及乡愁的母题一开始就见之于中 国文学，尤其在古典诗歌当中，但是本土场域在诗歌的想象中只是抽象的概 念，而不是具体的地方。李白的名句“举头望明月，低头思故乡”，就是通过 对故乡的高度抽象而有力地捕捉到本土场域的实质，以至于时至今日仍然人人 咏诵。正因为思“故乡”的故乡指的是“家乡”， 而不是“家”，所以获得世 世代代国人的认同。根据唐小兵之考，历史上 早使用“故乡”或者“故土” 这一概念的文本可追溯到汉代始皇帝刘邦的《大风歌》。据司马迁《史记》里 的《刘邦本纪》所录，刘邦既有衣锦还乡的骄傲：“大风起兮云飞扬，威振海 内兮我归故乡”，也有离乡背井的感叹：“游子悲故乡！”。唐小兵认为刘邦 的诗句奠定了汉文化的情感方式，促成了汉民族常常共有的远离故乡时的悲哀 惆怅，另外，汉唐以来，“故乡的形象及观念恰好无疑地表达出原始的情感结 构，通过唤起忧郁的乡愁，以至于将情感上升到具有寓意的形而上学的高 度”。 3 简言之，唐小兵确认乡愁实际上是中国诗歌建立在抽象的故乡理念上 2 jeffrey kinkley, ed. imperfect paradise. honululu: university of harwai'i press, 1995, p. 4. 3 tang xiaobing, chinese modern: the heroic and the quotidian, durham: duke university press, portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 4 的一种情感表达的原型。 民国以前的小说中，虽然故乡有时也在不经意的场合下偶尔出场，但是几乎没 有对故乡文化地理特意的描述与向往。故乡作为本土场域编织在文学的想象中 只是当现代小说在中国产生以后的产物。由于故乡在中国文化传统中的特殊 性，唐小兵在寻找“故乡”这一理念相应的英文表述时，斟酌了许多说法，比 如“home”(家园)，“hometown”(家乡)，“my native place”(我的出生 地)，等等。 后唐小兵认为“the native land”(本土界地) 更为确切，因为 它抓住了故乡理念的文化根源和乡愁的双重意义。 4 可是我认为“the native place”(本土场域)更为恰当，“本土”一词当然直接与“文学的本土性”相 连，而“场域”一词则含义宽泛，涵盖了故乡文化起源的多样性，适用于各类 本土界地，无论所涉及的“地方”是村落乡间，抑或是乡镇城市。本文将在下 文进一步指出故乡虽然常常以乡村的风貌出现，但城市作为故乡却也是不应忽 略的,“城市”与“乡村”同样是“故乡”。 海内外的中国文学评论迄今为止却完全忽略了小说中城市作为故乡的文化身 份，一提故乡，学者们想到的便是乡村，尤其是乡土文学里的山村水乡， 多 可以是“边城”、“鲁镇”之类的乡镇。其实，从现实到意象，城市，即便是 中心都市，对个人的文化身份而言同样是故乡，因此具有同等重要的文化意 义。中国城市历史悠久，有独特的地方语言及文化传统，很多小说作品正是借 助于城市文化的种种背景来探究个人的文化身份的。比如，贾平凹笔下的商州 和西安就是比重相当的故乡，老舍的北京城与李锐的吕梁山村都是其人物土生 土长的家园。同样，正如乡村之间有别，城市与城市也不宜按在研究本土场域 的文学建构及其与地方和国族身份的联系时也应该考虑城市作为故乡的本土 性。比如上海和北京，尽管都富有国际性，但又各具自身的地方和本土色彩， 文学构建中的北京与上海自然是大相径庭的。王朔的北京与王安忆的上海从语 言到食物到人物心态至文化氛围完全不一样，北京的胡同及单位里的大院与上 海的弄堂俨然不是一回事。再有一点，上海的地方特色恰恰来自于其都市化及 国际化的程度，尤其对“土生土长”的上海人来说是这样，上海也因此成为上 海作家所倾心描写的故乡家园。卫慧的《上海宝贝》便以类似的方式表现了上 海地方性的内在的矛盾统一：上海既是国际都市，同时又是上海人的本土家 园，是充满了文化记忆的故乡。 众所周知，鲁迅在二十年代编辑首部现代中国文学选集的时候为“乡土文学” 定名。但半个世纪以后中国现当代文学批评中对乡土文学和寻根文学的分类导 致了对此类文学作品政治性的特别关注。因此，尽管很多学者研讨乡土文学和 寻根文学作品时也常常从各方面触及文化空间的意义，但是现当代中国小说中 的故乡乃本土场域的作用却远远未成为中国文学研究所关注的重点。比如说， 李欧梵强调八十年代的寻根文学是对中国共产党多年来的文化意识形态的背 2000, pp.74-5. 4 tang xiaobing, chinese modern: the heroic and the quotidian, durham: duke university press, 2000, pp.74-5. portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 5 叛，寻找文化本源的需要反映了对另类意识形态的需求。从四十年代开始，共 产党长期便自称是深知中国大众心态及中华民族起源的权威，寻根文学对官方 意识形态的有力挑战是通过对乡村家族族谱的地域性文化传统的求证来实现 的。 5 罗马丽·哈登 (rosemary haddon) 认为“我们应当承认乡土文学及其主 题是与乡村的文化寓意紧密相连的。这些概念可以是正面的，也可以是反面 的，但均与农村及农业社会的价值观念有关。 6 金介甫 (jeffrey c. kinkley) 在研究沈从文的作品时指出沈氏一往情深地反复申述湘西是真正美好的中国所 在，《爱丽丝在中国》中的表述尤甚，以至于有“区域主义”(regionalism)之 嫌。 7 这些学者们的意见当然各有千秋，但至少在对小说里的故乡的认识是貌 离神合的，他们不约而同地认定中国文学中的故乡是乡下农村，城市可以忽略 不计，城市与文化寻根的关系似乎是不存在的或不重要的。 文学批评中的城市盲点显然也在于城市在中国现代化进程中的主导作用。中国 的现代化始于城市，城市是西方思想文化进入中国的端口，是城市的现代化引 发了中国社会及文化的全方位嬗变。因此，城市往往不是 为明显的中国知识 分子个体文化寻根的场域。同时，一些富有影响力的有本土倾向的作家生长在 农村，例如贾平凹与莫言在感情精神上并非能够或愿意真正与城市文化水乳交 融，尤其是与市民文化有一定的距离，因此他们的怀旧与寻根往往是在记忆里 找寻少年时代的村落。当然，忽略本土场域的城市构建，也与许多作品关注 “乡土文化”，认为乡土文化乃中国文化传统正宗有关, 结果是乡下、村镇垄 断了中国传统文化在地的表述。再则，中国社会的传统使人们相信“以农为 本”是中华民族的根基，那么，中国的国族身份自然也应当是以农业为代表 的。因而迄今为止年年的国庆装饰都少不了“大丰收”的主题，新年的庆典， 贺岁的彩灯都往往是农民丰衣足食的欢乐景象。问题是，中国的许多城市历史 悠久，现当代中国文学中许多文本也将都市作为本土场域，因此，文学批评应 当重新审视城市文学，不应当对城市-故乡的表述视而不见了。 文学的本土性 为了便于更为系统全面地探讨故乡的理念及本土场域的建构，本人在此提出 “文学本土性”的理念与同行商酌。首先，“本土文学”能够超越“乡土文 学”与“寻根文学”的局限，让城市文学进入并丰富扩大文化寻根的文学批评 话语。同时，“文学的本土性”包含致力于建构本土场域的信仰和实践两个方 面。很多作者不仅在主题上寻求地方文化空间的再现，往往也将叙述风格和手 段尽量“本地化”采用“本地”叙述策略，包括形式，风格，描述，叙事背 5 leo ou-fan lee，1993, ‘afterword: reflections on change and continuity in modern chinese fiction’ in ellen widmer and david der-wei wang eds. from may fourth to june fourth: fiction and film in twentieth-century china, cambridge: harvard university press, 1993, pp. 361-83. 6 haddon, rosemary, 1994, ‘chinese nativist literature of the 1920s: the sojourner-narrator’ modern chinese literature 8 (1 & 2), p. 99. 7 jeffrey kinkley, ‘shen congwen and the use of regionalism in modern chinese literature’, modern chinese literature 1 (2) 1985, pp. 157-83. portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 6 景，语言以及其它特色以追求富于地域风格的叙事传统。文学的本土性可以概 括为如下表现：文本主题旨在构建本土场域；叙述风格尽可能(重新)开创“本 土”叙事形式；在追求“本土”传统时表现出对异国文学传统的意识。 带有本土倾向的叙述策略可以属于，或者衍生于“在地的”叙事传统。许多作 家，如汪曾祺、贾平凹等，避免叙述语言的欧化，也尽量排除“毛语”的痕 迹。本人提出文学的本土性不是就一部小说或一篇散文的风格而言，也无意于 将作者归类为称作某种“流派”，而是着意于提供一个新的有创见性的分析框 架，以便系统地研究在现当代中国文学作品真真切切的故乡热土，可触可摸的 本土意识。文学的本土性因此也可以被视为一种可以谋求的写作立场，用来辨 别、比较、讨论作品在本土意识方面的共同属性与差别。笔者希望以此将文学 作品的本土性与本土场域的构建结合起来，并以此探讨中国现当代文学特殊的 文化政治过程，即现当代中国小说如何在构建在地的文化身份时借机参与国族 叙述，同时也尽量表述文本自身的本土性。 具体说来，如果文学的本土性包括主题和叙述风格两个方面，笔者认为沈从 文、老舍、汪曾祺、贾平凹等人的作品堪称典范。鲁迅、阿城、李锐等人的作 品本土性也很强，但其作品的本土性严格说来只是部分的而不是全方位的，因 为，虽然其作品的主题包含了极大的“本土关怀”，非常专注地以“中国特 色”建构故乡的本土场域，但是从风格上讲，他们的写作从其它传统中借鉴了 很多叙述策略，因此他们的叙述风格基本上是外来的，非本土的。金庸的武侠 小说，二月河的通俗历史想象，及其类似的章回历史小说等等，属于“部分” 本土文学的另外一类，即叙述风格的本土回归。他们的小说使传统白话文小说 得以重生，尤其是再现了中国小说与历史叙述之间的高度互文性。遗憾的是他 们的通俗历史想象无意于创造本土场域，故乡也好，国族也好，并非关注的焦 点所在。因此，笔者将其归属于“部分本土性文本”。笔者在此也顺便说明， 由于本人目前关注的是现当代中国小说中的本土场域构建，因此武打小说，历 史小说，戏剧，电影，诗歌和其它类型中的文学本土主义和本土地域的创作均 未在此讨论。 本土主义运动，无论目标是政治独立还是领土主权，自我意识的觉醒是前提， 而自我意识的觉醒又取决于对外族强势的认知。文学上的本土意识也是如此， 不可能与生俱来，而只能在接触谙熟异国文学传统以后，在文化之间的相互作 用下产生发展。当然，跨文化交流往往也是帝国强权，殖民统治，或全球化影 响带来的结果。缘此种种，文学本土主义是殖民主义和后殖民主义的一个间接 产品，文学本土主义是对文学创作、生产、消费、阅读国际化的一种反应，也 是文化国族主义的必然成分。如同国族主义在中国政治历史上发挥了主要作用 那样，文学本土意识在当代中国文学作品中，尤其是在近十年，也是一个重要 现象。相对于中国作家日益书写“地方”而思考国族身份与国际政治来说，文 学本土主义也日益成为一个对全球化过程的具自我意识的回应。无论是作为对 主导的意识形态的“反动”行为，还是回应他者或异族带来的威胁，在大量当 代中国作家的作品中都可以清楚地看到地方文化空间的建构，如阿城、韩少 功、贾平凹、莫言、苏童、陈忠实、阿来、王安忆等诸多人。与此同时，他们 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 7 的作品探究国族问题时也表达普遍的人类关怀，这样的探索是通过对故乡的追 忆叙述实现的。笔者希望在此通过分析现当代中国文学有代表性的文本，深入 观察本土写作使用“故乡”表述地方文化空间的现象，从而设立文学本土主义 的框架，以检验中国文学中的本土性。 在文学本土主义的模式内可以同时检验许多同源术语：“乡土文学”，“寻根 文学”，“新写实小说”，“市井文学”，“地域文学”，“城市文学”甚至 一些“实验小说”。在这里“城市文学”的作品需要进一步解析，尽管有些城 市文学的叙事背景是市井中心，但城市文学，尤其是近期的一些作品，主要关 注当代城市生活的“现代性”，而不是将城市作为故乡家园的所在地，例如邱 华栋近年来的一些作品。 8 如同李洁非所言，城市文学决定性的特征在于其对 商业活动和白领工人的生活方式的张扬，其作品描写出使城市居民彼此间变得 日益陌生的当代城市氛围。 9 但城市文学的文化空间是多元的，有跨国性的， 甚至有时也不排除地域性、乡土性，比如前文提到的描写当代上海的小说。罕 瑞·弗豪（heinrich fuehaul）认证城市文学中往往张扬“市井异国情调” (urban exoticism)，同时将异国情调赋予当代跨国跨文化的城市经验。 10 文学 本土主义在“市井文学”中表现相当强烈，本地文化空间成为叙述的要点。老 舍的北京题材可以视为一个很好的市井本土主义的例子，邓友梅笔下的北京和 冯骥才笔下的天津也是如此。市井文学的共同之处是致力于地方文化的重现， 甚至到了迷恋地方文化实践的地步。 现当代中国的历史取向决定了政治对文学形成了全面的宏观控制，无论作家们 是顺应时势还是抵抗主流意识形态，文学批评往往根据历史的进程来观察分析 文学作品。跟随政治和历史的时段划分的结果是，作品之间、不同写作风格之 间的有机联系被疏漏忽略了。文学本土主义的框架不受历史进程的囿限，能够 跨时空地同时检验不同时期，不同地区的，但均以故乡为本土场域的不同文 本。 中国当前越来越多的学者通过宏观认识现当代文学的大潮，非常关注地域身份 和文学生产之间的关系，地域文化的研究今年著述甚丰，“本土写作”的术语 也应运而生，成为文学批评中使用频率颇高的语汇。一九九五年陈晓明编辑出 版了《中国新本土小说精选》，在前言中陈氏强调指出作者自身主体定位的重 要性造就了在后殖民背景下本土写作的必然性，后殖民写作时本土文学和乡土 文学的差异有两个重要因素，即作者想象中的观众和作者对观众的态度。陈晓 明认为，本土写作侧重国际观众，而乡土文学则为国民观众书写他们喜爱的田 园主题，因此 能代表乡土文学的作家是刘绍棠和孙犁。陈氏将文学本土主义 视为一个不断演变的过程，指出在 1980 年与 1990 年间的中国本土写作在自我 8 邱华栋：《都市风情小说》，北京师范大学出版社， 1999 年版。 9 李洁非：《城市像框》，山西教育出版社，1999 版，第 56、76 页。 10 heinrich fruehauf, ‘urban exoticism in modern and contemporary chinese literature’ in ellen widmer and david der-wei wang eds. from may fourth to june fourth: fiction and film in twentieth-century china, cambridge: harvard university press, 1993, pp. 133-64) portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 8 导向和异国情调之间摇摆不定。在编辑《中国新本土小说精选》时，陈晓明努 力让这两种倾向互补，中国农村生活因此能够“通过细读表述中国与西方发达 国家的绝然不同”。 11 仔细观察他遴选的十篇文本可以得出这样的判断，即陈 氏欣赏本土场域的封闭式的社群建构，“本土”由此变为“原始”或“乡村” 的同义词，与西化、启蒙及现代化的所有影响形成强烈的比照。同时，在叙述 语言和叙述风格方面，这些选篇也极少表现出对地方色彩的关注。不过陈晓明 倒是付诸很多篇幅来讨论本土作家采用的语言策略，（跟很多学者类似，比如 说李欧梵）发现了背离毛意识形态的倾向，但他并未强调叙述学意义上的“本 土”特征。 12 丁帆作序并编辑的十六册《新时代地域文化小说》系列时留意到中国当代文学 地域文化身份日益密切的关注，并将此归于中国社会近期文化嬗变和经济全球 化的结果。他认为中国过去的乡村文化话语和现今中国都市生活之间有一种文 化滞差，并造成了当今中国社会的文化意识混乱，因此很多作者关注书写传统 乡村和现代市井之间的裂隙。对丁帆来说，这些作者对构成地方文化身份的内 容非常清楚。笔者认为这些作者同时也在表现出对本土场域的关心，而这无疑 是对跨国国际都市化的回应, 因为日益增显的全球化因素业已唤起了对家乡和 文化根源的渴望之情。丁帆的立场认可了选集作品中的地域性，但他没有明确 指出，更未强调中国文化意象中的关键是在国际背景下的本土、地域和国族之 间的种种联系与断裂。 13 从地方小说到国族身份 表面看来本土写作倾向于关注乡村社会或者市井民间文化，似乎并非与建构现 代国家的进程直接相关, 然而，传统与现代，大众与精英，中心与地方，乡村 与城市的明确二元分立正是现代性话语的一部分。意识到这样的二元性是现代 国族叙述中至关重要的。只有当城市，精英，现代及中心变得势不可挡，才能 产生与之对立的因素，即对乡村、大众、传统和边缘的需求。中国本土写作中 的思乡、乡愁，乡村和市井的民间传说，对“劣根性”的揭斥和隐匿等等，都 11 陈晓明编：《新本土小说精选》，西宁：青海人民出版社， 1995 年版，第 2 页。 12 尽管笔者不同意陈晓明的某些观点，其文《本土主义的神化：一个不断被发现的叙述》 （《中国新本土小说精选》序言）对文学本土主义的评判见解深邃，于笔者启迪甚大。陈氏所 选的十篇本土小说是：李锐《北京有个金太阳》，阎连科《天宫图》，万方《杀人》，陈源斌 《万家诉讼》，刘醒龙《凤凰琴》，葛安荣《花木季节》，熊正良《红锈》，王彪《欲望》， 吉慧《黑色季节》，张继《流水情结》。这十个短篇小说都写的是乡村里农民生活的悲惨与不 幸，距当代城市所代表的现代性极其邈远。即使偶尔有一点现代性的痕迹，也常常是用来突出 乡村在时空上与世界的遥远。 13 丁帆的十六卷《新时代地域文化小说丛书》(北京：北京出版社, 1998 版) 收入下列小说：周大 新《紫雾》，张国擎《古景一柳》，尤凤伟《金龟》，杨争光《赌徒》，阎连科《欢乐家 园》，彭见明《野渡》，刘醒龙《黄昏放牛》，林希《天津闲人》，赵本夫《孔穴》，叶广苓 《风也潇潇雨也潇潇》，王祥夫《永不回归的姑母》，邵振国 《日落复日出》，李宽定《良家 妇女》，李贯通《鱼渡》，金学种《寻找鸟声》，阿成《胡天胡地胡骚》。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 9 是在文学的臆想中建构中国，对过去和本土地域选择性的记忆与诉求常常被用 作策略来缔造身份和再现想象中的社群。 14 与此同时，各种政治力量为自身的 利益也多方利用国族故事，通过本土文本来障显与“历史真实性”的本源衔 接。多年来，中国共产党的宣传机构一直下大功夫操作群体国族记忆, 精心制 造并维护了以延安为中心的黄土高原的中华文明本源神话。以陕北作为“本土 场域”的在地“证明” 党乃国族，并由此增强中国共产党作为国家民族代表的 合法性。 15 一方面，故乡的再现及创造本土场域与叙述中国的联系非常紧密，中国文学中 的地域性似乎只是用来表达更为“真实”的，“中国”的国族身份。另一方 面，叙述中国也意味着将“中国”置于“真实”的本土场域，即作家本人非常 熟悉的故乡热土，这也是故乡的再现对中国作者和读者都不胜引人之处。显 然，“中国”的在地，个人的故乡，在文学想象中会因人而异，取决于作者本 人的文化身份及区域认同。在当下紧锣密鼓的全球化进程中，本土文学当然会 迫不及待地讲述地方故事并以此建构国族身份。笔者认为，与本土文学 为相 关的问题是文化中国到底如何定义？许多学者认为，文化中国的终极表现是 “文化中心主义”，也就是说中国国民的国族忠实其实是对中华文明精英文化 的忠实，而不是对国家的忠实。 16 同样，中国本土文学也不以设立地方特色为 目的，地方文化身份的构建只是手段而已，并且该手段也不用来达到与国家或 中华文明的分离。恰恰相反，创造地方是为了为了加强与国族的认同，为了通 过张扬“本地”与国家权力中心的文化历史相关性从而申诉当下的政治经济相 关性。早期的现代中国文学中，本土地域的构建常常用来给国民性定义，尤其 是展示负面的国族特征以唤醒国民富国强兵。 17 故乡作为地方身份的文学再现 在很大程度上来说是这种原初动机的附产品。近几十年来，本土场域的创作似 乎已“习惯”性地与国族身份相连，以至于中国范围内少数民族作家的本土写 作也是如此，诸如张承志描写中国穆斯林在国家强力压迫下受苦受难的小说， 18 以及阿来的描写藏族部落争战的史诗， 19 均与 “中国”的概念紧密相连，而且 至少是在表面上忠实于主流的国家学说的。当然，此类现象也有可能是囿于时 14 例如，拉美国家的文学曾使用叙述策略将现代国族国家在大众记忆中勃兴起来然后奠定了国 族身份，见william rowe and vivian schelling, memory and modernity: popular culture and latin america, london: verso, 1991)。 15 edward friedman, ‘reconstructing china’s national identity: a southern alternative to mao-era anti-imperialist nationalism’ in the journal of asian studies, 1994, vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 67-91. 16 james townsend, ‘chinese nationalism’ in jonathan unger ed. chinese nationalism, new york: m. e. sharp, 1996, pp. 1-30; joseph r. levenson, 1971 ‘the province, the nation, and the world: the problem of chinese identity’, in joseph r. levenson, ed. modern china: an interpretive anthology, london: macmillan, 1971, pp. 53-68. 17 john fitzgerald, awakening china: politics, culture, and class in the nationalist revolution, stanford: stanford university press, 1996. 18 张承志：《清洁的精神》，安徽文艺出版社, 2000 年版；《心灵史》，湖南文艺出版社, 1999。 19 阿来：《尘埃落定》，北京人民文学出版社，1998 年版。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 10 局自我审查的结果。 “叙述中国”很久以来都是本土写作切实的、重要的动机，虽然不是唯一的动 机。但是作者们的本土经历显然各不相同，这必然意味着中国国族的情感核心 在不同的时间以不同的传统被设定在不同的区域。在叙述中国的长期过程中， 各类国族故事的创生、再生和置换也是时势所需，小说中虚构的国族身份必须 随时尚繁衍变化才可能为读者接受。尽管如此，无论“中国”被如何设定，无 论国族身份设立在乡村还是在市井，叙述中国必然是讲述中国文化传统，而传 统又需要建筑在本土场域，即故乡之中。 虽然中国大陆、台湾及中国海外侨民在本土写作上存在种种差异，本土小说依 其创造本土场域的形式、意图大致可分为四类：第一类，故乡设在江南小镇， 意在如鲁迅、苏童和韩少功等人那样掘显国族劣根性的小说；第二类，象沈从 文、张承志那样表述中国边疆国族异趣的小说；第三类，类同老舍、邓友梅、 冯骥才那样专注市井大众，再现文化精粹的小说；第四类，承接或对抗中国共 产党官方的本土场域神话，而将故乡设在西北山乡，张扬国族刚毅特质的小 说。 二、现当代中国小说中的本土场域 鲁迅——江南小镇与中华民族劣根性 鲁迅短篇小说中的两个小镇，鲁镇和未庄，在中国文学史上一出现就赫赫有 名。鲁镇是鲁迅许多知名小说中的叙事场景，如《祝福》、《孔乙己》、《故 乡》等，《阿 q 正传》正是在未庄发生的故事。鲁镇和未庄的雏形取材于鲁迅 的家乡绍兴，可是，尽管这两个小镇无论从当地景观、食品、语言到风俗、民 间信仰及其意象手法，江浙特色随处可见，但它们代表的并非“当地”的景 观，鲁迅也完全无意于再现江南水乡的罗曼蒂克。相反，鲁迅急于捕捉的是中 国国族特质，国民的孽根性，因此鲁镇和未庄便成为“中国”社会愚昧黑暗停 滞不前的整体表述。 鲁镇未庄是普普通通的江南村镇，镇上居住着无知、无助但又顽固保守的人 们，鲁迅对他们的态度是：哀其不幸，恨其不争。正是如此，鲁镇未庄及其居 民成为了鲁迅民族特性小说天然的组成部分。鲁镇未庄的本地特征是通过本地 居民的日常生活以及其日常生活与国家政治民族的文化传统之间的关系来表现 的。所以，虽然是同样的女人们在河边闲聊，男人们在酒店里喝酒，国家的政 治事件对他们的生活影响极大，而他们对全国性政治事件的曲解或误解往往突 出了自身的愚昧与无助。由于传统价值在村民们的日常生活中占主导地位，因 此鲁镇未庄在中国文学史上就永远成为具有负面色彩的“本土”。 六十年后，南京作家苏童的中短篇小说在江南塑造了另一个故乡：枫杨树村。 与鲁镇和未庄一样，枫杨树村并不完全是农村，因为据官方的居民登记，其人 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 11 口主要是“市镇居民”。枫杨树村的居民冷漠自私惰性十足，现当代中国社会 的政治变动的喧嚣对村民的心态和生活毫无影响，小说尽其可能地削弱被害者 与迫害者之间的差别，使其人物性格比鲁镇未庄的居民更为可憎可恨可怜。枫 杨树村居民互以为敌，整个社区敌意弥漫，以致于冷漠乃为美德。他们也毫无 罪恶感，道德良心更是天方夜谭，自然也不会产生绝望之感或怜悯之心，生存 便是存在。苏童尤其擅长模糊历史背景，用朦胧的叙事时间来使叙述者安全潜 匿, 大程度地做“疏离化”描述，枫杨树村因此成为苏童精炼地表陈和揭露 中国劣根性的本土，是当代文学中 为可恨可憎的故乡。 韩少功是又一位对中国国民劣根性进行深入批判的作家。跟鲁迅和苏童相似， 韩少功也造就了一个南方的乡村——马桥，只是马桥村在湖南，居湘江之侧。 马桥村也是在韩氏的作品中多次出场，逐渐成为韩少功文本中的故乡、本土的 原型。韩氏的名篇《马桥词典》以字典的形式通过逐条纪录解释马桥当地的关 键词汇实录乡村生活的方方面面，马桥村民的自私、封闭、保守、愚昧表现得 为突出。作者明说他是在给马桥村作传，也确实成功地建立了“客观的”人 类学意义上的马桥地方志。 20 韩少功的湖南马桥显然不只是马桥村而已，也是 再现民族特质的原乡。更值得一提的是《马桥词典》大张旗鼓地与官方多年倡 导的国族神话背道而驰，面向南方，在背弃黄土高原的同时也揭露吃苦耐劳的 中国国民的封闭自守。 当然，国民劣质的所在地并非局限在中国南方。这种以批判精神为主导，以各 处乡村为在地而进行国民特质探索的作家、作品数不胜数，笔者较为熟悉的就 包括刘恒的《狗日的粮食》、徐坤的《女娲》、莫言的《丰乳肥臀》、阎连科 的《流水行云》等。 沈从文——国族边疆与异域情趣 沈从文是另一位在建构文学本土场域方面有深远意义的现代作家，其作品“将 中国描绘为年轻而生机盎然的土地”， 21 在现当代文学中是屈指可数的。沈氏 的村民活泼生动，诚实真挚，可爱纯朴，他的叙述语言也别具一格，混合了当 地民歌民谣与多种方言。湘西是多民族杂居之地，在此土生土长的沈从文认定 远离汉文化主流及远离城市中心的边疆文化才是中华民族的生命力所在。鲁迅 小说中的叙事人要么是哑然不语要么是心情沉重，不开化的村民要么是愚昧混 沌要么是走投无路。相比之下，沈从文的叙述人与村民之间情感接近，而这种 亲近又使沈氏的湘西本地小说展现了一种对土地的热情，以及对生活在这片土 地上的人群与其文化的热爱。沈从文可以说是探索国族“边缘”与国族“内 涵”关系的先驱，其后继者众多，如阿来，贾平凹，汪增祺，张承志等等。莫 言若以其红高粱系列及其他构建山东高密村的文本为代表也可以归类其中。这 批作者的作品，无论是叙述者、人物、叙事语言和叙述策略，无不与本土场域 有着紧密的联系，故乡的土地、民俗、人生、鸟语都在其文本视野之内。 20 韩少功：《马桥词典》，北京作家出版社，1996 年版，第 68 页。 21 jeffrey kinkley, ed. imperfect paradise. honululu: university of harwai'i press, 1995, p. 1. portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 12 老舍——市井大众与民族精神 老舍是北京本地人，其作品关注的是北京穷苦市民的生活及市民的大众文化。 老舍的北京是普通市民的“老北京”，与北京作为首都乃精英汇聚之地并为国 家政治经济文化中心有明显的距离。老舍作品的描写重点是中下层市民的生活 方式，使用的语言是远离书卷的胡同口语。北京对老舍说来是市民的故乡，北 京市民才是北京的代表，胡同是他们生活的环境，而并非文学故事中可以随意 替换的背景。老舍的文本的本土性与国族主义话语的联系是不经意的，但又是 紧密相关的，因为北京对北京人而言既是家乡，又是首都，家与国方位上的重 叠使北京的地域身份双重，也使位居国族中心这一图景变得错综复杂，但老舍 的北京以“土”为本，方寸夺定。 一九八十年代，北京和天津的市井传统成为“市井生活文学”的主题，形成本 土文学的另一趋势。邓友梅的北京、冯骥才的天津将中国北方的市井文化用浓 郁的有地方色彩的描述再现，回应了老舍早年的北京市民小说。 22 这些作家的 人物是不讲普通话的，他们说的甚至不是北方话，而是地地道道的北京话或天 津话。邓友梅冯骥才表述传统的中国市井文化应当被看成中国当代文化寻根的 一个有机部分，因为他们探求了中国城市文化的市井传统，是与乡村寻根小说 并驾齐驱的。与集中表述乡村的作者们一样，关注市井生活的作者们也有意识 地揭开市井传统和国民心态之间的联系。邓友梅和冯骥才的作品与老舍一样都 饱浸地方语言风俗特色，然而不同于老舍的是，邓、冯的小说玩味已然消失的 世界，幻想地方文化传统的回归。 官方意识形态与本土场域 中国共产党很早就开始将自身与民族国家联系在一起，并且意识到设定本土场 域为其提供合法的文化身份的特殊重要性。虽然在建党初期曾大张旗鼓反传统 反封建，但其目标是建立新中国，因此也名正言顺地用乡村意象代表民族国 家。抗战八年，共产党的基地在陕北延安，但从那时候起其宣传机构就开始注 意如何将地方特色融入国家话语。不过，关键的是中国共产党一直将自己作为 国民利益及民族精神的代表，为中华民族的国家本源而建构一个符合中国共产 党的目标的场域因而成为理论家，文艺工作者包括作家的重要任务。 由于现今的陕西省是古代秦国在地，秦始皇有统一天下的丰功伟绩，因此多年 来官方话语中的中华文明的原乡一直只有陕西，如同中国共产党元老夏衍一九 八六年在评论电影《黄土地》和电视系列剧《河殇》时强调“陕北黄土高原是 中华民族的摇篮”。 23 显然，陕西文明起源说有助于共产党与秦始皇统一中国 的目标认同，以便中共称颂秦始皇用武力消除异己统一中国的历史，为自己的 22 金汉、冯青云、李新宇编：《新编中国当代文学发展史》，杭州大学出版社， 第 526-529 页。 23 geremie barmé and john minford, eds. seeds of fire: chinese voices of conscience, new york: blloaxe books, 1986, p. 260. portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 13 政治目的服务。爱德华·弗里曼 (edward friedman) 研究中国国族身份认同时 指出：“中华人民共和国在毛泽东时代一再申明自己是华夏子孙，其祖先两千 年前于黄河流域建立了华夏文明，通过长期对外族的抵抗与兼并，使中国得以 发扬光大”。 24 陕北地区在三、四十年代成为共产党的根据地，因此中国共产 党本身的历史也巩固了陕北作为中华民族诞生地的神话。爱德华·弗里曼还进 一步证实中共官方 为偏爱的民族性格特质为“自我牺牲，勤劳勇敢”，具体 表现在陕北农民在穷山恶水的恶劣环境中的生存争斗精神。 25 中国共产党本土 场域的意识形态延续多年，对中国好几代作家产生了巨大影响，长期以来，作 家很难超越共产党的本土观念，通常只是在二元的悖论之间选择，不是认同就 是对抗中国共产党对国族本原神话的诠释。八十年代的寻根文学尤见作家们对 共产党提倡的本土场域的颠覆。直到如今，虽然考古发现已经多方证实现今中 国土地上曾经有着多元文化的各种渊源，但官方国族话语中的中华民族起源仍 然限定在陕西。 四十年代赵树理和丁玲可以说是遵循党的指示， 早将中共领导的革命与农村 和农民与文学结合的作家。 26 两人均在作品中将北方农村描写成共产主义革命 的在地，让普通农民在村子里诞生成长为革命英雄。尽管出身富裕之家，念过 高中，赵树理却遵从党的指示制造了自身从农民到作家的神话。中华人民共和 国成立后赵树理更是顺时应世，继续创作农民革命故事并逐渐转向书写农业集 体化的过程。当然，响应中国共产党号召的作家比比皆是，他们积极创作反映 新中国的文学作品，书写农村新生活，创造出许许多多的“社会主义新农 村”。 五十年代的政治场景要求小说必须描写土地改革展显乡村的阶级斗争，这也是 共产党统治下创造新中国本土场域有效的政治方针，其效应在几乎当时所有的 小说中都可见一斑，如丁玲的《太阳照在桑干河上》(1949)，周立波的《暴风 骤雨》(1949) 和《山乡巨变》(1958)，柳青的《创业史》(1960)。直到文革结 束，很多作品仍然致力于描写农村社会的阶级斗争，相信表现农村 能够忠实 表述社会主义中国的本土构建。浩然的作品首屈一指地继承了中国共产党倡导 的本土写作传统，把当时意识形态下的农村阶级斗争叙述推向了极致。浩然 为知名的两部小说《艳阳天》(1964-1966) 和《金光大道》(1972) 均致力于描 写社会主义革命下的农村景色，是文革时期主流意识形态下本土写作的典型文 本，其间日常农村生活大都是集体活动，个人的主体性几乎泯灭，北方农村的 民风民俗成为负面传统被统统根除。 一九九三年陕西作家陈忠实的《白鹿原》将中国共产党的国族起源神话发扬光 24 edward friedman, national identity and democratic prospects in socialist china, new york: m.e. sharp, 1995, p. 90. 25 edward friedman, national identity and democratic prospects in socialist china, new york: m.e. sharp, 1995, p. 330. 26 yi-tsi mei feuerwerker, ideology, power, text: self-representation and the peasnt “other” in modern chinese literature, stanford: stanford university press, 1998. portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 14 大，中国现代革命史再一次在陕北的黄土高原展开。故事发生在陕北农村白鹿 原，书中很多人物基本是中国现代社会转型时期的文化原型，是代表某种政治 观点、派别或文化价值的符号。两个 为典型的人物是白家家长农民白嘉轩和 乡间儒士朱先生。为家族延续香火，白嘉轩连续结婚七次，因为白嘉轩阳刚过 旺，六位前妻无力承受他巨大的阳具，均在婚后一年之内死去，并无子嗣。第 七夫人命大，因为是朱先生的女儿，为白家生下三儿一女。大陆评论界普遍视 《白鹿原》为国族史诗，代表了社会主义现实主义与浪漫主义的传统的回归， 赞扬之声不断。的确，《白鹿原》从白鹿两家同根同源的家族史再现了中共产 党与国民党的半个多世纪的政治争斗，并以共产党能够接受的方式理想化地延 伸了中国现当代历史。白、鹿两家上下几代亲亲戚戚、男男女女之间的恩恩怨 怨展现出中国近现代史上政治、历史、意识、文化之间的错综复杂。白嘉轩的 阳刚之巨既是族长力量的神秘，也是中国种族强盛的象征。《白鹿原》表现了 土地和国族精神之间的密切联系，不仅增强了中国共产党在九十年代 为需要 的合法性，也重复强调了中国共产党几十年来编织的神话：陕西是现当代中国 国族的本土场域，也是中华民族正宗祖壤。《白鹿原》可谓是共产党所规定的 本土场域中的国族寓言范本。 就来自新疆，甘肃，青海，宁夏，陕西和西藏的作者书写“西部中国”的现 象，朱红在评论中指出：“中国西部作家在目前 为引人注目，他们代表了真 正的地域描述，在表现西部贫瘠荒蛮的同时，也歌颂西部地区的自然力量及和 美纯真。西部小说反映了当下社会变化引发的各种冲突，迥然不同地描写中国 人自己。小说在表现历史的忧郁及沉重的同时，更为成功地描绘了富有生机顽 强为生的男男女女”。 27 如果将朱红的评论与故乡描述联系起来，可以清楚看 到《白鹿原》为现代中国创造原属本土场域的目标及过程，便也可以理解这部 书获得一九九五年茅盾文学奖、作者陈忠实被任命为陕西作家协会主席的因 由。 三、结语 现当代中国小说中的故乡与中国古典诗词中的故乡的截然不同之处在于从前的 乡愁与乡情已被当今本土文学中再现的民族精神及国民风貌所取代，游子思乡 的当代表述是把故乡构建成有血有肉的文化在地，成为民族国家的本土根源。 尽管故乡的概念仍然可能是抽象的并具有象征性的，故乡成为富有人类学意义 的地域文化空间只是现当代的现象，而这种现象与叙述中国的需要密切相关。 故乡作为本土场域对现当代中国小说的国族叙述至关重要，因为故乡往往被理 解为鉴定国族文化的本源。与此同时，本土场域与中国小说中的国族表述之间 的关系又是自相矛盾的，一方面本土与本源必然不同，另一方面很多中国作家 27 zhu hong, ed. and trans. the chinese western: short fiction from today’s china, new york: ballantine books, 1988, p. ix. portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 15 把中国归为同一文化整体。本文通过对“故乡”的文本表述分析探讨了现当代 中国小说中的本土倾向以及国族叙述与地域文化之间的关系。当代中国小说中 的本土意识表现在内容与主体上对故乡及本土的关注与建构，在形式上延续并 发展本土的叙事传统。也就是说，叙述方式也是建构本土场域政治的一部分。 故乡与国族叙述是文学本土意识两个不同的侧面，文学的本土意识表述则是本 土与国族的必然联系。 参考书目 barmé, geremie and minford, john, eds. 1986,seeds of fire: chinese voices of conscience, new york: blloaxe books. feuerwerker, yi-tsi mei, 1998, ideology, power, text: self-representation and the peasnt “other” in modern chinese literature, stanford: stanford university press. fitzgerald, john, 1996, awakening china: politics, culture, and class in the nationalist revolution, stanford: stanford university press. friedman, edward, 1994, ‘reconstructing china’s national identity: a southern alternative to mao-era anti-imperialist nationalism’ in the journal of asian studies, vol. 53, no. 1. friedman, edward, 1995, national identity and democratic prospects in socialist china, new york: m.e. sharp. fruehauf, heinrich, 1993, ‘urban exoticism in modern and contemporary chinese literature’ in ellen widmer and david der-wei wang eds. from may fourth to june fourth: fiction and film in twentieth-century china, cambridge: harvard university press. haddon, rosemary, 1994, ‘chinese nativist literature of the 1920s: the sojournernarrator’, modern chinese literature 8 (1 & 2). hong, zhu, ed. and trans. 1988, the chinese western: short fiction from today’s china, new york: ballantine books. kinkley, jeffrey, 1985, “shen congwen and the use of regionalism in modern chinese literature”, modern chinese literature 1 (2). kinkley, jeffrey, ed. 1995, imperfect paradise. honululu: university of harwai'i press. lee, leo ou-fan, 1993, “afterword: reflections on change and continuity in modern chinese fiction” in widmer, ellen and wang, david der-wei eds. 1993, from may fourth to june fourth: fiction and film in twentieth-century china, cambridge: harvard university press. rowe, william and schelling, 1991, vivian, memory and modernity: popular culture and latin america, london: verso. tang, xiaobing, 2000, chinese modern: the heroic and the quotidian, durham: duke university press. portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 wang, yiyan literary nativism, the native place and modern chinese fiction 16 townsend, james, 1996, ‘chinese nationalism’ in jonathan unger ed. chinese nationalism, new york: m. e. sharp; levenson, joseph r., 1971, “the province, the nation, and the world: the problem of chinese identity”, in joseph r. levenson, ed. 1971, modern china: an interpretive anthology, london: macmillan. 阿来：《尘埃落定》，北京人民文学出版社，1998 年版。 陈晓明编：《新本土小说精选》，西宁：青海人民出版社，1995 年版。 丁帆：《新时代地域文化小说丛书》，北京：北京出版社，1998 年版。 顾德曼 (bryna goodman) 著，宋钻友译：《家乡、城市和国家：上海的地缘网 络与认同，1853-1937》，上海古籍出版社，2004 年版。 韩少功：《马桥词典》，北京作家出版社，1996 年版。 金汉、冯青云、李新宇编：《新编中国当代文学发展史》，杭州大学出版社。 邱华栋：《都市风情小说》，北京师范大学出版社， 1999 年版。 张承志：《清洁的精神》，安徽文艺出版社, 2000 年版； 张承志：《心灵史》，湖南文艺出版社，1999 年版。 王一燕博士现于悉尼大学执教现当代中国文学和电影，其研究领域为现当代中 国小说、当代中国社会文化嬗变以及华人海外族群文化身份等。其研究贾平凹 的专著 narrating china: jia pingwa and his fictional world 已由英国 routledge 公司出版（2006）。高杰翻译的中文版《叙述中国：贾平凹及其虚构的小说境 界》预计将在 2007 年由安徽教育出版社出版。 portal vol. 4, no.1, january 2007 abstract design is a wide reaching and unruly idea, often associated with seamless global mobility, ubiquitous consumerism, elite urban tastes, and fast paced economic growth. but design is also increasingly understood to be operating at edges, as a necessary response to the ethical and political challenges of advanced global capitalism. design is both the problem and the solution, and effects everything. as tony fry writes ‘design–the designer and designed objects, images, systems and things–shapes the form, operation, appearance and perceptions of the material world we occupy.’ this curated issue takes as its departure point fry’s notion that design broadly shapes the world we occupy. to ask what happens when the world we occupy is not conceived simply in terms of local issues and solutions, but rather as a set of shared concerns that are localised and play out through global flows. to do so this issue presents ten contributions from indonesia. keywords indonesia; design; desain; local-glocal; design edges; global flows; design thinking curated work designing futures in indonesia alexandra crosby corresponding author: alexandra crosby, school of design, faculty of design, architecture and building, university of technology sydney, po box 123, broadway nsw 2007, australia alexandra.crosby@uts.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.5065 article history: received 20/06/2016; revised 27/06/2016; accepted 11/07/2016; published 09/08/2016 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 13, no. 2 july 2016 © 2016 by alexandra crosby. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: crosby, a. 2016. designing futures in indonesia. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 13:2, 1-6. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.5065 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au designing futures in indonesia, curated works special issue, curated by alexandra crosby. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received financial support from the australian department of foreign affairs and trade (dfat) australia-indonesia institute. 1 mailto:alexandra.crosby@uts.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.5065 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.5065 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.5065 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au design is a wide reaching and unruly idea, often associated with seamless global mobility, ubiquitous consumerism, elite urban tastes, and fast paced economic growth. but design is also increasingly understood to be operating at edges, as a necessary response to the ethical and political challenges of advanced global capitalism. design is both the problem and the solution, and it effects everything. as tony fry writes ‘design—the designer and designed objects, images, systems and things—shapes the form, operation, appearance and perceptions of the material world we occupy’ (2009: 3). this curated special issue of portal takes as its departure point fry’s notion that design broadly shapes the world we occupy. the special issue asks what happens when the world we occupy is not conceived simply in terms of local issues and solutions, but rather as a set of shared concerns that are localised and play out through global flows. attending to that question, this curated issue presents ten contributions from indonesia. in indonesia, where the arrival of design is inseparable from colonisation, there are tensions between the complexity of design as a ‘world shaping force’ (fry 2009: 3) and the way it manifests in local contexts, creating a sense of place, ‘which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local’ (massey 1991: 7). while some design circulates globally—for example we use the same software in jakarta and sydney—there is also design that is produced by and reproduces place (for example where the climate is just right to grow a particular type of teak wood necessary for a particular kind of house), or at just one time, (when designers’ paths cross through one project and lead to collaboration on another). moreover not all design produces ease and convenience, and not all design solves problems. some designers make the seams or joins of their work visible, or they leave something unfinished for the next person to take up. some design processes go so slowly that they seem to reverse the logic of production. they operate only at small scales. they emerge only in close communities, neither in the creative clusters of institutions, nor in the think tanks of multinational companies. these are the edges of design, operating at human scale in local contexts. at these edges we find designers in gardens and kitchens. we see a privileging of craftsmanship over financial flows and sometimes we are even able to let go of the fast, new and convenient connotations of design. while these tensions—between design as a problem and a solution; between local and global contexts—are certainly not unique to indonesia, they play out in highly visible and often beautiful ways because of the way the local and the global are imagined across the archipelago, in particular at the scale of the kampung (neighbourhood), and because of the rich design practices that have been invented, altered and remixed over hundreds of years of trade and colonisation. in this second curated issue of portal, i explore design ideas in indonesia by asking designers to articulate their practice through visual essays of photographs and drawings. these essays pay attention to small pragmatic design acts that change how we think about indonesia, its place in the world and its assumed trajectories of progress as a ‘developing’ nation. as markussen points out, ‘the design act is not a boycott, strike, protest, demonstration, or some other political act, but lends its power of resistance from being precisely a designerly way of intervening into people’s lives’ (2013: 38) in this issue i draw from the recent curated issue of portal (volume 13, number 1, january 2016) in which ilaria vanni uses edges as a starting point to think about ecologies of transcultural processes. in indonesia design also produces edges at which the flows of people, knowledge and materials create unexpected and unique results, approaches to urgent global crosby portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20162 challenges, for instance, that are grown in gardens rather than manufactured in factories. this issue opens up a space for designers to talk about design in indonesia as a site of transition, exchange and reflection, and this reflection speaks to the significance of design at this historical moment, a moment of intensifying urbanisation and increasing exploitation of natural resources. one of the transcultural edges explored in this issue relates to a wider research project— the indonesia australia design futures exchange—to map emergent design practices in indonesia and to bring together indonesian and australian designers, design researchers, and design educators to work on sustainable futures by rethinking the way we design food production, housing, transport and cities, all of which reveal urgent problems that affect the entire region of southeast asia. indonesia, with rich and diverse cultures of local making, from batik to instrument building, is a unique laboratory where well-established creative practices meet new technologies and alternative economies in tangible everyday ways. as kathleen azali and andriew budiman explain in their essay, ‘design’ and its indonesian translation desain, are relatively new, imported words, generally understood in indonesia through the categories of graphic, interior, and product design, that tend to divide university and college faculties. in this curated issue i present ten works by designers living or working in indonesia. they engage with a variety of transcultural and creative edges, as they reflect on their own design practices, or those of others, as hybrid trajectories. we join ratna cahaya rina as she explores graphic design at the edge of the city (kota) and village (desa) when the internet, pirated software and what she calls ‘visual literacy’ make possible a creative industry that can transform the economies of small villages. with little opportunity for up-skilling and few education prospects, typical employment for many of java’s villagers includes driving trucks and and ocek (motorbike taxi). but here, in remote java, ratna finds self-taught designers in high demand, juggling clients all over the world and pooling resources in their makeshift studios. in this context, while still offering only precarious employment, design in a global workplace offers an alternative future for some of indonesia’s poorest communities. in their piece, andriew budiman and kathleen azali present another side of this story by showing that, while the development of the creative industries in indonesia has been exciting and can lift some communities out of poverty, it has not always been accompanied by critical conversations about design. they deal with the complexity of the design scene in surabaya by tracing the emergence of the design it yourself surabaya (diysub) event in their essay ‘designing a design conference-festival: reflective notes from surabaya.’ tarlen handayani builds on these ideas, explaining her own design practice as a mix of imported and local aesthetics in her essay ‘book binding in bandung.’ tarlen looks at the productive edge between craft and design and points to how the indonesian setting produces challenging ambiguity around craft because of the pace at which ideas spread. she sensitively navigates between her own reliance on social media for her business and the hand rendering of her craft as a fiercely independent design practice. also inspired by the lack of distinction between craft and design in indonesia, jessica dunn, an australian product designer, is welcomed at the edges of indonesia’s internationally acclaimed textile industry, in her story ‘batik of batang—a design story.’ in her analysis of the motifs of these culturally significant fabrics, she brings attention to the human, and particularly female, stories of these design practices. this allows her to challenge the devaluing of a cottage industry with its limited scale when compared to factory production. with her beautiful portraits, jessica reminds us that batik is a craft inseparable from being human for designing futures in indonesia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20163 https://indoaustdesignfutures.org/ javanese people. exemplifying what matthew kiem calls ‘care in use’ (2011: 8), the designers of batik, made on cotton or silk cloth in organic dyes, pay careful attention to the handling of the cloth, the way it is washed, how it touches skin young and old, and the ways it is passed between humans who care for one another. batik is also an example of what cameron tonkinwise (2004) calls ‘beauty-in-use,’ where objects mediate our experience of the world, rather than standing simply before us. although usually batik belongs to a household in java, it is not understood as an object for display, as a painting might be. rather, batik mediates the way javanese mothers hold their babies and the way javanese elders live with their families to the end of their lives. away from java, at one of the geographical edges of indonesia—the island of rote ndao, in the eastern province of nusa tenggara timur (west timor)—campbell drake and william kelly consider the agency and responsibility of spatial design in tourism development. william’s still photographs force us to contemplate the kind of slowing down that will be necessary to make ethical design decisions in this region. as designers who understand that every decision made in designing a building has a legacy, they argue that it is only by the inclusion of community consultation and careful analysis into the design process can the ecological disasters produced by tourism in bali be avoided in rote ndao. will scott-kemmis, clare cooper and kirsten bradley are the australian designers selected to participate in the indonesia australia design futures exchange. they travelled in central java and bali to exchange knowledge, share ideas and work at the edges of design’s global definitions. their approach to design evokes the words of lenskjold, olander, and halse, who argue that ‘some types of contemporary co-design practices embody a different form of activist agency—one that is experimentally and immanently generated only as the design project unfolds’ (2015: 67). in a personal and sophisticated form of design thinking, scott-kemmis uses space and marks on the pages of his notebook to make connections between ideas and people in indonesia and australia. in his visual essay, he shows us this way of thinking, tracing how it pushes and pulls at his design training, and the edges it produces. in her essay ‘collective improvisation’ clare cooper makes another critique of design discourse by considering design collaboration through the lens of improvised music, reflecting on her own career with the splitter orchestra and splinter orchestra, and the now now festival. watching design play out in transdisciplinary ways on her exchange in java, cooper points to the design possibilities created when trust is prioritised over competition. in the large-scale political murals of taring padi, she sees an edge between silence and participation where art and design is political in its collectivity. in her piece ‘tempe as language—a village revitalisation mini-project,’ kirsten bradley interviews creative women who are resurrecting food design practices. like scott-kemmis, kirsten is wary of the title of designer. a founder of milkwood permaculture, she navigates the tricky territory of first, being an expert sharing her expertise, and second, opening design to mass participation. guy julier cites permaculture, along with the appropriate technology movement and community architecture, as one of many examples of radical thinking in design that emerged in the 1970s (2013: 225). making sure this radical thinking can make change in a contemporary context is central to kirsten’s work. considering permaculture as a design practice that originated in australia (mollison 1978) and now circulates widely through global flows of information, local translations of permacultural ethics and principles in a javanese village align with bradley’s ongoing work. crosby portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20164 http://thenownow.net/ http://thenownow.net/ another translation of permaculture is found in bali, with designer, artist and organic farmer ili farhana. in response to indonesia’s food security challenge, with more people and less arable land available, ili teaches people to grow their own food, wherever they are, in whatever way they can. kirsten and ili, both social media sensations—see the instagram accounts @milkwood_permaculture and @kspejeng respectively—find inspiration in a kind of remix, between the awakening of food practices that have almost been lost to industrial agriculture and the ways participatory modes of global environmentalism are shared online. in their remix, these practices—jam making, tempe making, seed sharing and gardening— become political, world-making acts of design futuring. writing about australian-based artist tessa zettel’s work ‘making time,’ abbey mellik lopez draws on jean beaudrillard’s idea of object-time and tony fry’s thoughts of time as a medium to describe design as ‘a material practice that prefigures the future’ (2013). she describes the act of preserving food as a mode of futuring, an act of making time. ‘in counterpoint to the ob-ject and its refutation of duration, is the design pro-ject—a prefigurative act that initiates specific change in a situation’ (2013 n. p.). when ili makes jam from rosella calyx, grown in her garden on land reclaimed from monocropping, and also translates and shares her recipe, she is also futuring and making time, offering her time to others, rather than dividing and fracturing our worlds. time (waktu) has many modes in indonesia: it describes seasons, light, love, growth and decay as much as it refers to hours, minutes and seconds. as the indonesian word for hour is ‘jam,’ in making jam, ili makes more hours and in doing so, offers different understandings of design as time is improbably translated and shared. cindy lin and andrew mooon also consider the ways our categories of time define design in their two-part essay ‘negotiating time—design as historical practice’ where they present stories of repair and revaluing. in the eviction zone of kampung pasar ikan (fish market kampung), north jakarta, a casualty of a contentious 40 billion usd plan to design and construct a sea wall to prevent the city from sinking, residents work together to maintain, repair and redesign their electricity supplies, and as they do so, they continue to produce stories about the place and its infrastructure. through repair, they refuse a future of erasure and demand an acknowledgement of the complexity of place. lin and moon write: ‘repair encourages us to take seriously the material interstices between past and future, showing how infrastructure demonstrates a historical legacy maintained to endure and retain the old but not quite.’ in kalimantan, another outer edge of indonesia, they interview the school of drones (sod), a diy drone collective, to find out how mapping can be a collaborative act of resistance in a landscape ravaged by development. serendipity is a buzzword in the design industry. it happens at the edges, where different forms of creativity, or different kinds of projects meet and interact. there are many translations of this word in indonesia, none of them quite exact: spontan, improve, beruntung. yet this idea exists in all the design presented here—in the collaborations, observations, and small, slow interventions into living. this special curated issue seeks to map and document different forms of serendipity that are happening at the edges of design practices in indonesia today. a focus on edges facilitates an analysis of small scale emergent issues, such as those exemplified in the ten contributions presented here. however, these emergent and localised issues—the industrialisation of farming, eviction of residents in city developments, rapid tourism development—need to be seen as intersecting with contemporary global design concerns around sustainability, resilience and place-making. food design, batik, mural painting, diy festivals, remix and repair practices, building and book binding, embody in designing futures in indonesia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20165 https://www.instagram.com/milkwood_permaculture/ https://www.instagram.com/kspejeng many respects concerns about how we interact with our environment and how we use the resources available to us. the perspective adopted in this curated issue is based on the understanding of deeply localised practices that grip with contemporary global design questions. in particular, as designers working with other designers (rather than on other designers’ work) the contributors to this curated issue are able to translate across multiple scales and cultural formations to a degree that is not available to other researchers. for those of us committed to ideas of design practice that shape the world, there is a need not only for a deep understanding of our own specific contexts, but also for the critical ability to see and learn from how similar matters of concern are played out across different cultural and social formations. acknowledgements the research for this special curated issue has been made possible by the australian department of foreign affairs and trade (dfat) australia-indonesia institute. references fry, t. 2009, design futuring. oxford, berg jackson, s. j 2014, ‘rethinking repair,’ in media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society, eds t. gillespie, p. j. boczkowski & k. a. foot. mit press, massachusetts: 221–237 julier, g. 2013, ‘from design culture to design activism,’ design and culture, vol. 5, no. 2: 215–236 kiem, m. 2011, ‘theorising a transformative agenda for craft,’ craft + design enquiry, issue 3, ‘sustainability in craft and design.’ online, available: http://craftdesignenquiry.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/ theorising-transformative-agenda-for.html [accessed 30 may 2016] lenskjold, t.u. olander, s. & halse, j. 2015, ‘minor design activism: prompting change from within,’ design issues, vol. 31, no. 4: 67–78 markussen, t. 2013, ‘the disruptive aesthetics of design activism: enacting design between art and politics,’ design issues, vol. 29, no.1: 38–50 mellick lopes, a. 2013, ‘seeing things in/as time’ [presented at making time in sydney, 23 february. online, available: http://making-time.net/?p=411 [accessed 30 may 2016] mollison, b. 1978, permaculture 1: a perennial agricultural system for human settlements. transworld publishers, melbourne tonkinwise, c. 2003, ‘beauty-in-use,’ design philosophy papers, vol. 1, no. 2: 73–82 vanni, i., 2016, ‘the transcultural edge.’ portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 1. online, available: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/issue/view/372 [accessed 30 may 2016] crosby portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20166 http://craftdesignenquiry.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/theorising-transformative-agenda-for.html http://craftdesignenquiry.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/theorising-transformative-agenda-for.html http://making-time.net/?p=411 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/issue/view/372 microsoft word goi moseley tuesday galley.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. geographies of identity special issue, guest edited by matthew graves and elizabeth rechniewski. © 2015 [charles moseley]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i1.4381 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. the travels of sir john mandeville and the moral geography of the medieval world charles moseley, university of cambridge mandeville’s travels1 began to circulate soon after 1356. though nobody is sure who wrote it, few would now give any credit to the uncompromising declaration by one of the book’s first editors, paul hamelius, that it was a liège notary, jean d’outremeuse,2 any more than to the suggestion it was a certain doctor, known to have practised in liège, jean de bourgogne.3 the book’s narrator affirms that he is an english knight. that is not impossible, as there was a growing class of milites literati, and there are several details that suggest an intimate acquaintance with england. but it is certain that the author, whoever he was, and it does not really matter, had the use of the resources of a good library and was moreover very much au fait with contemporary religious issues and controversies. some mandeville scholars believe he was connected with a benedictine called jean le lonc, of ypres, who wrote a collection of material on the near and far east (including travel narratives). to that collection it is certain mandeville had access. seymour has suggested, indeed—most recently in his 2010 edition of the egerton version—that jean and ‘mandeville’ were one and the same person. the question of who wrote it, however, does not affect an appreciation of this 1 a list of the most important editions and the fullest discussions of the book is given at the end of this essay. 2 this idea, utterly simplistic, was first suggested by hamelius (1919) on the title page in his edition and he adduced the slimmest of evidence to support it. 3 de bourgogne is known to be the author of a treatise de pestilentia, and is named in certain mss of the travels. but there are several early mss of great authority—mainly those circulating in england—which make no mention of him. his authorship can be discounted. moseley the travels of sir john mandeville portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 2 complex book, the importance of which is beyond question. it was, after all, by far the most widely disseminated account of the orient in the later middle ages and early modern period, and was frequently adapted for various different uses. it was one of the first secular books to be printed, and printers do not print for fun: they knew there was a demand. the book was almost certainly written originally in anglo-norman. versions in other languages appeared very shortly afterwards: in paris french (1371), latin (the ‘vulgate’ text), german (1393), and english. there are three english translations that can be dated just before or just after 1400: the cotton and egerton versions; and the so-called defective version, which has a large lacuna in the description of egypt. the account, in whole or in part, was regularly included in summae that had as their theme the countries of the east, like the livre des merveilles (1403) in the bibliothèque nationale. but it was also recast, for example as a picture book, at the beginning of the fifteenth century (british library addit m.s. 24189), or even as a verse narrative, like the english metrical version (ed. m. c. seymour 1973). well before the end of the fifteenth century one could have got hold of the book in every major language of europe, including czech and irish. at least 300 mss actually survive. (just for comparison, of marco polo there are only some 70.) after printing, the book was regularly reissued: in england, and from 1568 (at least) down to about 1710, there was an edition roughly every 13 years.4 very few other books in english from the middle ages made it into the shops of early printers—chaucer, langland, lydgate are almost the only others—and no other medieval book was reissued so often for so long. all these versions show to some degree—sometimes to a large degree!—adaptation and what one used to refer to as ‘contamination.’ some of them address the special interests of a precise audience, and we should remember that our concepts of the integrity of a text, of an ideal version as it left the hand of the author, was not an idea of which anyone in the middle ages would have had much grasp. paul zumthor’s concept of mouvance (1972) is really helpful: a book is continually recreated in transmission, and each recreation in its turn engenders more, which reflect the needs of that writer and his projected public. later versions of mandeville lose more and more the subtle nuances 4 in moseley (2011: 5–20) i argue that though there are no surviving copies between 1496 and 1568, the existence of several can be deduced. moseley the travels of sir john mandeville portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 3 and the values of the earliest texts. so when one tries to examine the effect of this book, known by so many over such a long period, on the mentalité of europe, one must take into account what iain higgins (1997) calls its ‘isotopes.’ for the most part, it is impossible to say which reader read which version. the arrival of printed versions, however, seems to have normalized, in each country, the versions available on the one first printed. for example, in england after the edition of the defective version by pynson (1496), all editions known in english in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries descend from pynson’s text. one sees the same normalization after the editions of 1478 and 1481 in augsburg of anton sorg, or after comeno’s 1480 milan edition. furthermore, it is to be noted how early these printings are: before 1500 we know of eight editions in germany, seven in france, four in the international latin, two in dutch and two in english; before 1520 there are czech and spanish editions. this huge popularity demands attention. the book offered something—perhaps several things—that readers were looking for. first of all, it offers itself as an account of the journey to the holy land and egypt—to ‘teach the way there,’ as the author says. it does indeed describe several recognised pilgrim itineraries followed by pilgrims from western europe, and adds to them a good number of detailed anecdotes and stories about constantinople, several islands in the aegean, cyprus and egypt. it describes the monastery of st catherine on mount sinai, and then, with great detail concerning the benefits in indulgence therefrom, the visits to the holy places of the holy land. pilgrim narratives are not that rare and found a public among those who were preparing to make a pilgrimage—and of course many people did make the pilgrimages. but there were others who did not have the opportunity, and would use these books as a sort of mental pilgrimage with perfectly genuine devotion. mandeville was certainly aware of this as a possible use of his book. he is careful to link places with their biblical history and specifies in each place how many days’ indulgence a devout visit and contemplation would bring. similarly, the very circumstantial description of jerusalem is tied closely to the biblical accounts of the passion and crucifixion. moreover, the book’s prologue sounds a note which might sound very topical to late fourteenth century ears: the duty of good christians to stop internecine conflict and unite to recover the holy land from the moslems. it was, after all, only in 1291 that the last frankish stronghold, acre, had fallen. this was an appeal taken seriously. it bore tragic fruit in the disastrous crusade of nicopolis in 1396, when the army of jean sans peur (for whom the livre des moseley the travels of sir john mandeville portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 4 merveilles was made) was annihilated. it is important to recognise that the mental maps and attitudes of the author and of his audience were coloured not only by past crusades but also by current ones in africa, spain, the eastern march and asia minor. their mental maps are not spatial, as ours might be, but narrative, mnemonic and ideological. although this part of the book was doubtless for some readers the most important,5 it does not stop there. the narrator is made to continue his world tour across arabia, india, and as far as cathay, and finally to the fabulous realm of prester john. some places that he claims to have visited are in indo-china or in what is now indonesia. it is perfectly possible that the writer could have travelled that far—after all, several westerners did so—but this second half of the book builds almost entirely on other accounts of the far east, earlier or contemporary, from which it has been worked up. the author knew the letter of prester john; he knew the alexander romances. he had access to the encyclopaedic speculum maius of vincent of beauvais (d. 1264)—perhaps in a big library in flanders—which among other things dealt with accounts of travel to the east and with the natural ‘marvels of the world’ descending from pliny, solinus and aethicus. the first-hand account of friar odoric of pordenone (1274?–1331) was especially important for mandeville. odoric had travelled over practically all asia and had lived in china between 1316 and 1327. mandeville chose from his best stories those he could elaborate to give them a new force and vividness, far greater than the original.6 for example, one need only compare odoric’s rather dull account of crossing the desert of lop nor with mandeville’s far more gripping and imaginatively detailed one. (incidentally, it is interesting to note that mandeville seems not to have used marco polo.) this systematic use of the work of other writers has led a few critics to say bluntly that mandeville’s longest journey was to the nearest library, and that is indeed possible. but many real travellers—like schiltberger, or indeed polo—did flesh out their accounts in exactly this way, sometimes word for word. so it is entirely possible that some information about the eastern mediterranean or the holy land, at least, might be based on what the author himself had seen. after all, in the fourteenth century anyone with an interest in those areas would have had no difficulty in getting as far as 5 one owner of the only ms (b. l. cotton titus cxvi) of the cotton english translation tore out the four leaves on pilgrimage, and the picture-book version (british library add. m.s. 24 189), made in prague in about l400, only deals with this first part of the book. 6 this cherry picking is exactly what happened to the travels too, of course. johann schiltberger, taken prisoner at nicopolis, used mandeville to elaborate on his account of his own adventures. moseley the travels of sir john mandeville portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 5 palestine. many people of very humble station did exactly that. far more important, however, is the fact that for centuries no reader would have had the means to examine mandeville’s sources or incentive to question his having travelled. what people believed of the book is an important fact about it. the second half of the book demonstrates that mandeville passes way beyond the usual format of the pilgrim narrative. his work is a ‘geographical’ encyclopaedia—the term in our sense is anachronistic, of course—cast in the unusual form of a personal narrative. it is careful to offer the best information available, as trustworthy and up to date as possible, so it gives details not only of countries and cultures, but also a clear and intelligent account of the roundness of the earth,7 of the pole star, of the antipodes. he asserts that the torrid zone of ptolemy can in fact safely be crossed, and that moreover it is perfectly possible to sail right round the world. indeed, he says he would himself have done it if he could have found ‘company and shipping’ and he claims to have met a man who had done just that. it is in this description of the earth that mandeville’s most interesting ideas emerge, ideas that i have not been able to find in any of the sources. this constitutes one of our principal problems in understanding the book’s genesis and career. for in the early texts, nothing supports the reputation that later attached to mandeville as a mere teller of tall tales, a liar, his book full of monsters and strange beings, the ‘monsters of men’ like the sciapods, the astomi, ‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders’: in the early texts they are dismissed in a dozen lines. what instead comes over very clearly, very often, is the idea that the nature that rules in western europe also rules in the rest of the world. what is impossible here is impossible there, save for the simply miraculous. as far as i can see, this is an idea unique in its time, which opens the way to serious, systematic exploration of a world which, though strange, is nevertheless comprehensible, not likely to upset the rules of nature for the traveller who goes into the unknown. by insisting on the fact that the globe is habitable everywhere, that it is everywhere traversable, the travels encouraged people to find ‘company and shipping’ and set off on discovery. which they did: it is easy to show that many who encouraged, patronised or executed the voyages of exploration of the fifteenth century, like dom enrique (prince henry the navigator) of portugal, or columbus, relied on mandeville heavily. 7 following tractatus de sphaera, by johannes sacrobosco (c. 1230). moseley the travels of sir john mandeville portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 6 those who went to the book for information, moreover, could not help encountering its picture of the world and its underlying ideas. one problem can be simply stated. without a recognised method for describing space, it becomes impossible to link countries to their neighbours. mandeville was thus forced to adopt the convention where each country is an ‘isle,’ to use his word, a separate entity, and only the sensibility of the traveller as he moves from one to the other links them. this is exactly how distance and space could be envisaged in medieval accounts. medieval representations of space, or indeed place, can seem very strange to us. moderns too easily assume they are simply primitive, waiting for enlightenment to happen, but the ideas our medieval and antique predecessors held worked as well on their terms as ours do on ours, and genuinely reflect the grammar of the way they saw. perspective, for example, was something the romans could manage perfectly well, as the wall paintings of pompeii show us, but they and their successors did not always choose to use it. just so with visualizing a space that we cannot at that moment actually see: for us moderns to do so relies on our knowledge of the convention of maps and the diagrammatic relationship into which they draw places. as edson and savage-smith remark, however: ‘maps in early christendom, particularly world maps, were attempts to explore theological and historical aspects of space, rather than make scale models of the physical world’ (2004:.93). that methodology of making models of the physical was not invented in europe until the late fifteenth century at the earliest. areas close to home might indeed be precisely known, and the relationship between places exactly understood. while this sort of knowledge might extend along main lines of communication, like the pilgrim routes to the holy land, clearly, without an overall agreed convention for a descriptive system, you will have an infinitude of more or less overlapping but in the last analysis distinct spatial models. to use dick harrison’s term, this detailed, experienced, knowledge of distance and relationship may be termed ‘micro-space’ (1996). but the further from ‘home,’ the less detailed the microspatial picture will be, and the more what we may call the macrospatial, working on quite different principles, will come into operation. the familiar convention of the ‘t-in-o’ mappae mundi, with east at the top, and the don, nile and mediterranean forming the t is well represented by the hereford mappa mundi (c. 1285) in hereford cathedral, which is typical of those dating from the ninth to the sixteenth century. such maps are moseley the travels of sir john mandeville portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 7 no help to finding one’s way, but perfectly coherent if we want to treat places and the world itself, and the events that occurred there, as moral symbols placed on a land space represented as a disc symmetrically and symbolically disposed around jerusalem. on the map, full of stories and text, one finds many ideas and details of traditional moralised geography, where fundamentally the world is interpreted symbolically. as the twelfth century poet alain de lille put it in his poem on the name of the rose (migne patrologia latina 1849–1855: 210 , 579a): omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura, nobis est in speculum. nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis, nostri status, nostri sortis fidele signaculum8 signaculum, indeed. for on the macrospace these ‘tino’ maps depict are inscribed the legends and marvels, the myths and monsters beyond the mental margins of microspace. the hereford map must indeed be read as much as moral symbol as work of information—it is both, of course. the earth is bathed in ocean, and at the four corners are the letters m.o.r.s.—death. the importance of these features is far less descriptive or orientational than mnemonic and moral, and historical, even ideological—this is a christian map—within the linear model, itself moral, of time from creation to the last judgement; and that model was usual till long after the middle ages. the distinction is illustrated by contrasting the sea charts of the middle ages, the portolani, which are perfectly satisfactory tools to find your way from one haven to another—across microspace—with mappae mundi like the hereford map: a map of moral history, where space becomes symbol. literature reflects this dichotomy. the road that chaucer’s pilgrims ride is microspace, with named and remembered places in a sequence—even so, they are on a moral and symbolic journey just as much as langland’s pilgrims. but the landscape of romance, for example king alisaunder, or the roman de toute chevalerie of thomas of kent—or the arthurian romances—is not interested in physical sequence and circumstantial detail: the focus is on the moral tests and prowess of the hero as he leaves microspace, perhaps named with real names, for the macrospace, and it is a waste of time to try to 8 ‘the whole world’s creation is for us a mirror, like a book or picture. it is a faithful symbol of our life, our death, our state and our fate.’ moseley the travels of sir john mandeville portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 8 make any physical map of the journeys. in exactly the same way it is a waste of time to try to put mandeville’s supposed journey on a modern map: what matters is the moral and indeed epistemological challenge the narrative gives us. mandeville of course has to use the usual symbolic convention—as on the hereford mappa mundi—where jerusalem is at the same time the centre of the world and its summit, so to speak, everything falling away from it. yet at the same time everything has symbolically, morally fallen away from the earthly paradise in the remotest east. (belief in its actual existence would persist for a good few centuries yet: bishop p. d. huet of soissons, wrote on the topic in 1694, and a certain erik klimt defended a doctoral dissertation arguing for its physical existence in the university of uppsala in 1714). mandeville says he saw the earthly paradise in the distance, its walls covered with moss. he has to reconcile this spatial symbolism with his idea of the sphericity of the earth, and of course it is not possible. he is clearly uneasy about the problems these difficulties present, and that uneasiness, which i have found in no other account, is the first step, i think, on the way to a methodology which could resolve them. indeed, looking at the hereford map helps us to get an idea of the default mental map of mandeville and his first readers, for mandeville’s methodological problem is grasped the more readily if one thinks about the problem of representing a sphere, the globe of the earth, on a plane surface. modern map projections, invented long after mandeville, partly solve the problem, but introduce difficulties of their own, not least the similar one of political, even cultural prioritisation. (i sometimes make my students look at a map centred on tokyo, or one with antarctica at the top.) mandeville, aware as he seems to be of the methodological problem, uses his narrative with an identical moral intention, and the structure of the book that results is important. it is in the handling of the narrator however that one must see the book’s greatest originality. the first person narrative does not just give a great deal of diverse information from many different sources. it allows it to be filtered through the judgement and personality of a subtly characterised narrator, whose very intimacy with his readers is both authorising and qualifying. he paints a very fair picture of the eastern orthodox church,9 as he does for the nestorian, insisting on the coherence of their teaching, and, as they were both regarded as schismatic or heretical by the papacy, 9 such accounts are far from common in the period. moseley the travels of sir john mandeville portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 9 tacitly implying that rome’s position is not necessarily the only plausible one. similarly he claims to have served in the army of the sultan of egypt and recounts a conversation this simple soldier had with this potentate (!) in which he describes the religion and practice of the west.10 the sultan is then made to point out how the behaviour of christians falls far short of the ideals they profess. later, he gives the fullest description, remarkably balanced, of islam to be found in the vernaculars of the time, and underlines the moral superiority of moslems over christians, especially in works of charity and almsgiving. he describes the cannibalism of lamory, in the east, the gymnosophists, polyandry, the cult of the juggernaut—all opportunities to show the failings of christians and the rational basis and viability of other beliefs and cultures. it is in fact a very critical, almost revolutionary, point of view that the author takes of the practice and overconfident pride of the latin church each time he compares pagan and western behaviour, always to the disadvantage of easy and unconsidered certainties in europe. in fact, the theme of the first sentences of the book is here worked out: christians of the west are simply not fit to possess the holy land, and are unworthy of their religion. mandeville’s criticism is profound but indirect. though he praises the greeks or the moslems, he presents himself as a good catholic. it must be stressed that at no time does mandeville question the central doctrines of christianity but it is hard to see how his first readers would not have recalled that the bull of boniface viii unam sanctam (1302), relying on the doctrine of innocent iii (1215), and recently restated by clement vi, said that nulla salus extra ecclesiam—’there is no salvation outside the church.’ that bull ‘declared, said, defined and pronounced that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of each human being that they be subject to the roman pontiff.’ this is just unfortunate, in theory, for the moslems and the gymnosophists, for the greeks as for virtuous pagans like job—who is mentioned twice at crucial points in the book. but, as mandeville says there, ‘we know not whom god loveth nor whom he hateth.’ mandeville’s book became a ‘geographical’ authority. it was indeed as up to date an account of the world as he knew how to make it, but one cannot ignore the fact that it has a great satiric force too. the assumed moral superiority of europe is questioned and the customs and beliefs of the east, garbled as they may be in many cases, are used to 10 there is a very similar satiric dialogue in the thirteenth century dialogus miraculorum of caesarius of heisterbach, which mandeville may have used directly or indirectly as a model. moseley the travels of sir john mandeville portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 10 criticise social and political behaviour in the christian world. the concept of a nature fundamentally reasonable and explicable is equally underlined by the narrator. he rejects the tradition of the irrationally marvellous that so dominates writing about the east before him. the narrator remains circumspect, ironic, about the truth of marvels. indeed, he is at pains to stress that what is normal and accepted in europe might look very weird to eyes in another country who see the world from a different perspective. for example, in one of his first person stories, he describes how he was shown the vegetable lamb of tartary, a great marvel, and drew an immediate parallel with the fabled genesis of barnacle geese from barnacles—a story nobody in the west questioned for another three hundred years. what is marvellous to one set of eyes is utterly usual to another. he asserts that there must be a rational explanation for the phenomenon of the fish swarming to land in java and allowing themselves to be caught. his story of a trip past the magnetic rocks on a ‘stitched ship,’ made of planks sewn together,11 is framed by ‘someone told me …’—no first hand assertion there. there is a better example of this careful distancing. mandeville says he had drunk of the legendary fountain of youth ‘three of four times.’ yet he limits himself, archly, to saying, ‘it seems to me i am a little better.’ and at the end of the book, there he is, old, hampered by arthritis. the personality built up through the book, sceptical, ironic, courageous and intelligent, goes a long way to explaining why this book kept its diverse readership for so very long. it is no wonder that ‘mandeville,’ fictitious as he might have been, became a figure in whom pretty universally for two centuries more and more people believed. his was an authority, factual and interpretative, unquestioned until the very late sixteenth century, when the new discoveries were forcing some people—far from all—to recognise that mandeville’s conceptual model was no longer viable. columbus not only used the book in his preparation for the first and later voyages, but seems to have couched the very first description of the new world in terms derived from mandeville’s. if, as i contend, that letter to luis santangel—printed and circulating within days of his return—was a sort of investors’ prospectus for a second voyage, columbus had little choice but to present his account, in which he describes things he could not have seen or known, in terms that his audiences would expect from their reading of mandeville, the chief and 11 though they were passing into memory, in europe, such a method of construction was not uncommon when iron was very scarce: the vikings used it. where mandeville sets this story, moreover, in the arabian peninsula, such a construction method lasted into modern times. but the magnetic rocks, which would supposedly draw all the iron out of the ship, are a very old fable indeed (see moseley 1968: 323). moseley the travels of sir john mandeville portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 11 most readily available account of the east. over a century later walter raleigh refers to mandeville as an authority in the account of the guiana voyage, and we know frobisher had a copy with him in 1576 when he searched for a north west passage. moreover, such was his renown that he had a fairly successful play written about him in the 1590s, and he takes his place with other worthies of travel like king solomon, and columbus, drake, jenkinson and chancellor on the engraved title page of samuel purchas’s purchas his pilgrimes (1613). detailed, factual, use of the book, however, though common for so long, is not to my mind of most interest to us. mere enumeration of borrowed details leads nowhere. what is really important is the insight the book gives us into the sensibility and conceptual originality of a man of unusual learning living at a time of great intellectual, environmental and political upheaval. that also allows us to begin to understand how vastly different mental models of the world we live in might develop—will develop!— from what seems, for the moment, to be a stable and comprehensive picture. editions of mandeville’s travels deluz, c. (ed.) 2000, jean de mandeville, le livre des merveilles du monde, (coll. sources d’histoire médiévale, 31). éditions du cnrs, paris. hamelius, p. (ed.) 1919 & 1923, the cotton text (2 vols). early english text society, london. letts, m. (ed.) 1953, the egerton text (2 vols.). hakluyt society, london. moseley, c. w. r. d. (ed.) 2005, mandeville’s travels (translation and introduction). 2nd ed. penguin books, london. seymour, m. c. (ed.) 1967, the cotton text. oxford university press, oxford. _____ 2002, the defective version of mandeville’s travels. early english text society, oxford university press, oxford. _____ 2010, the egerton version of mandeville’s travels. early english text society, oxford university press, oxford. warner, g. (ed.) 1889, the egerton text. roxburghe club, london. reference list bennett, j. w. 1954, the rediscovery of sir john mandeville. the modern language association of america, new york. bremer, e. & röhl, s. (eds) 2007, jean de mandeville in europa. neue perspektiven in der reiseliteraturforschung, (mittelalter studien 12). fink verlag, münchen. caesarius of heisterbach c. early 13th century, dialogus miraculorum. campbell, m. b. 1988, the witness and the other world: exotic european travel writing 400–l600. cornell university press, ithaca and london. deluz, c. 1988, le livre de jehan de mandeville: une "géographie" au xive siècle. publications de l’institut d’etudes médiévales de l’université catholique de louvain, louvain-la-neuve. edson, e. & savage-smith, e. 2004, medieval views of the cosmos. university of chicago press, chicago. elner, j. & rubiés, j-p. (eds) 1999, voyages and visions: towards a cultural history of travel, reaktion books, london. moseley the travels of sir john mandeville portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 12 greenblatt, s. j. 1991, marvellous possessions. university of chicago press, chicago. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226306575.001.0001. harrison, d. 1996, medieval space: the extent of microspatial knowledge in western europe during the middle ages. lund university press, lund. higgins, i. m. 1997, writing east: the ‘travels’ of sir john mandeville. university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.9783/9780812202267. howard, d. r. 1971, ‘the world of mandeville’s travels,’ yearbook of english studies, vol. 1: 1–17. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3507049. lawton, d. 2001, ‘the surveying subject and the “whole world” of belief: three case studies’ in new medieval literatures iv, (eds) r. copeland & d. lawton. clarendon press, oxford: 9–37. letts, m. 1949, sir john mandeville, the man and his book. batchworth press, london. migne, j. p. 1849–1855, patrologia latina, vol. 210. moseley, c. w. r. d. 1968, ‘stitched ships and loadstone rocks,’ notes and queries, vol. 15, no. 9 (september): 323. moseley, c. w. r. d. 1974, ‘the metamorphoses of sir john mandeville,’ yearbook of english studies, vol. 4: 5–25. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3506677. moseley, c. w. r. d. 2011, ‘“new things to speak of”: money, memory and mandeville’s travels in early modern england,’ yearbook of english studies, vol. 41, no. 1: 5–20. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5699/yearenglstud.41.1.0005. niayesh, l. (ed.) 2011, mandeville and mandevillian lore in early modern england. manchester university press, manchester. poerck, g. de 1955, ‘la tradition manuscrite des voyages de jean de mandeville,’ romanica gandensia, vol. 4: 125–158. sacrobosco, j. c. 1230. tractatus de sphaera (on the sphere of the world). seymour, m. c. 1961, ‘the origin of the egerton version of mandeville’s travels,’ medium aevum, vol. 30: 159–169. seymour, m. c. 1993, sir john mandeville. (authors of the middle ages, 1; english writers of the late middle ages). variorum, aldershot, hampshire. zacher, c. k. 1976, curiosity and pilgrimage: the literature of discovery in fourteenth-century england. johns hopkins university press, baltimore. zumthor, p. 1972, essai de poétique médiévale. seuil, paris. portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 4, no. 1 january 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal poems by yang lian translated from the chinese by mabel lee “winter garden,” “grafton bridge,” “the game of lies,” “dead poet’s city,” “cruel children,” “the garden this afternoon,” “incidents,” “hospital,” “dead land” and “valley,” from yang lian’s works, 1982–1997: where the sea stands still (shanghai literature and art publishing house, 1998). “at a right angle to paper,” “harmonica,” “ten years,” “record of twin cities,” “clouds,” and “taking a stroll,” from yang lian’s new works, 1998-2002: notes of a happy ghost (shanghai literature and art publishing house, 2003). yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems winter garden 1 trees frozen red in snow as if wearing tattered wind jackets snow crunches underfoot as night rushes by with newly soled shoes goats fear the loneliness and for their own ears transform their bleating into wailing on the road a cow has just given birth is covered in whip marks and lies panting in mud and blood streetlights are on early and lovers dark like rocks stand there with hazy faces against a metallic spiritual bed the field mouse is a weary nurse and furtively sneaks through a wound in the garden to dream flowers pale red flesh preserved underground like when a child dies there is always a young ghost stars not fully formed lock us behind an iron fence 2 those who distrust language the most are poets in white snow roses wilt at birth and flames are far away from a pair of chilly hands winter is busy like a hardworking editor i am snipped by the sunlight and bend to smell the worsening stench of my corpse in the north wind of one person the garden died long ago existing for ghosts and finally returning to ghosts blue music of tree and tree arises from the sheer loneliness so the same big snowfall twice falls from my shoulders covering the garden i am forgotten trudging up to the road i become a mistake and like a hoarse throat in the light of the deserted street chant withered words bearing witness to many years portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 2 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems 3 those with a fetish for corpses love to stroll in the winter garden those with a fetish for ruins enjoy plotting to drown a kitten in a ditch crushing its head like smashing a walnut they must have been children who had come into the garden children excel in trampling flowers even the last day is false a scorched wooden post pokes slanting out of the ground like a crocodile’s snout sky dark as if asleep during the day fish skeletons spewed up by the sea stab at us in dream the fish being scaled alive are stabbed are alive under a moving blade each body of flesh sinks until too weak to look back touch everything tangible does not exist yet a malignant cancer deep within grows imperceptibly a pregnant black woman envelops a raped springtime a sea of eyes split tree trunks asunder swans’ necks arch into stark white underwater traps fragmenting the world through the cracked compound eye method we all become blind ghostly silhouettes in white snow and exposed to icy winds suffer the pain of bones sprouting until the garden is shamed into bright colours it will be thrashed all life by an undiscriminating season portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 3 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems grafton bridge as you cross the bridge the graveyard below draws close pine trees raise their suspicious faces a sea of the dead with the stench of iron sheeting rust coloured sunlight circles about like an old dog sniffing at you a dog’s eye staring scenery on the bridge is unusually clear sky a withered dead volcano a crimson fist on a cheap headstone a drop of stale blood clouds bring together all of yesterday’s storms but are sullied by bird claws the handrail brings you home transparent windows are open you are crossing the bridge at home a whole city is located in a sickroom green weeds link so many footsteps rock owners under rock roofs close in iron owners in iron corridors close in hallucinations are seen death has no need for speed where you are headed is still the point at which you turn old the dead on the grass look down to you it is the same distance but as if manacled with glass handcuffs you must return to inspect and repair each bridge pylon of today’s crimes a child running wildly amongst a flock of snow-white seagulls suddenly stands still to shout out because of the stars to weep loudly because of the sharp lingering pain of black night portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 4 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems the game of lies when we tell lies tiger stripes disturb the black night road cruelly betrayed by streetlights lies replacing pedestrians we stroll but an ant charges into forbidden zones of sleep talk must understand fingers moon’s dead weight at each setting and foolish cries for help from some small throat no a person never lies to himself it is only words playing with him playing at being asleep we dream of the sea playing with the sea we drift to another island going ashore when hungry we raise or butcher parrots or monkeys and again turn into fierce rocks but we say nothing and in saying nothing arms become crocodiles snapping at each other’s tail in dead water we believe those self-deceiving words to be real the last day contained in each line of poetry preserves a face in a mirror smashed many years ago long earlobes hang on an iron hoop rolled by a boy a lifetime of suns rolling to the abrupt slope of a black night when words gush out a mute is born demented silence in the mute’s heart a tiger’s inner silence as it pounces on a gazelle flesh is torn without even the rustle of paper we have always been mute and so are manipulated by lies portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 5 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems dead poet’s city not only those who have lived can die those names buried in silence all through life subscribe to silence in this city you have dismantled an empty street pretends to be a funeral procession moonlight hard like iron bones clanking in iron hands what is outside the window is long forgotten little drums beat each word deleted by you in life returns to delete you unsparingly deletes savagely deletes world deleted specimens of faces are closer and clearer eyes deleted eyesight polishes glass edges carves a paper bird with delicate lines like the one you saw smashed crumpled discarded on a rotting manuscript in the corner your final death is already familiar an old house waiting to shift out dead skeletons portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 6 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems cruel children children dance in a circle around a drop of the mother’s blood their snowy white arms are born to hit weary eyes all around first tooth planted in a pink field as a low-hanging walnut is cracked they watch the mother’s twitching face smile smiling splashing water in the sky bending on black nights inlaid with no sleep when children do not sleep the world must also be awake wild skiing on long scratches listening intently for the newest command river more transparent weeping more visible hostility flows increasingly like unformed flesh a bloodstained lipstick cannot be washed clean children dancing with mothers worn on their feet like favourite toys to be wilfully destroyed like tasty hands untiringly dragged into the future when they use deathly cruel silence to frighten the sun angels and green flies join hands to clap a bean is familiar with bolting the last door portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 7 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems the garden this afternoon this afternoon has always been that afternoon flowers with the faces of bats laugh even more happily hospital windows like the whites of the eyes of staring corpses afternoon seemingly fragmented scent of flowers invited into the homes around ash swirling from chimneys turns more colourful the false teeth of angels are exposed holding down age like holding down a skirt lifted by a wild wind with a laugh a cruel spring another laugh and the sound lifts the garden to heaven things not imagined will never be born people living close to wounds detect smells wounds drenched by rain split exude fragrance a garden crams in all afternoons bodies are decked with paper flowers paper the only decoration bones shine black branches sprout bone-like nodes in the depths of corpses the petals of flowers gestate worms crawl about under skin this loneliness is sweet and rancid there is always this loneliness when the soil of the heart is crumbled by roots when each hospital has been gift-wrapped wounds are bright and lush in the sunlight looking so real cicadas keep drinking blood keep creating heartless laughter from an empty shell and even happier gardens proliferate everywhere gradually disintegrating with the shrill cries of bats subtle fragrances of an afternoon roll up the world leaving not even wounds leaving only the swollen moon still the colour of flesh still watching over an unblemished black night portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 8 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems incidents you continue to emerge calmly from an incident one amongst many one day amongst many wasted months and years when rotting wilderness again removes your shoes snow props you up on frozen red toes on this day the sky is a sombre grey but with no sign of snow only your chilliness from life to death the past is soundless leaves no footprints in the snow old clothing is always modest like the wooden bed of a corpse sliding to the sea under another copulating couple a past incident can no longer generate other incidents a lifetime’s mistakes are towering trees on a mountain white more distant than snow bones emerge from you days emerge from bones you are all thrown behind yourselves look upon many deserted moons portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 9 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems hospital the lid closes is your face also covered in nails like constantly being spat upon in a lifetime of humiliation has bleached this easy death a hand cannot stroke its own pain the darkness of this night is external to you you have rented four thin walls inside a cardboard carton listening to a river inside a hollowed out skeleton listening to a storm you wait for the next patient like another teardrop flying into your eye a piercing scream strikes the streaky glass becomes a happy shout you savagely hammer at nails portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 10 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems dead land you need walls with nothing but the dawn the garden is a reflection of the inner mind forever departing you need those staring eyes you pick out the most easily forgotten pair and begin to forget fear you fear each day’s freckle-faced loneliness violence lasting from four to six o’clock music leaves bones scraped clean clanking in fields nobody knows whether your ears are ringing right now nor do you know you only need the room to be empty with the masochism acquired in a lifetime you use the sunlight to glimpse the unattained real last day but for the sunlight there are no tears the garden’s name yet unspoken is forgotten portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 11 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems valley arriving at darkness we see light at the foot of the valley rocks stretching into the distance like the sky suddenly snap like a shaky ladder timid fingers bending to violent stars weep turning us into cripples deceiving our eyes when light turns into living things we are dead microscopic wriggling bodies of flesh bore holes into us glow moon like a person falling spread-eagled city lying on a bed lush with wrong perceptions reading a morbid book front cover the sea back cover the sound of hoofs treading in muddy water traps always sensed when right underfoot only when distance vanishes do we touch the red flowing stream and use the wrinkles on rocks to display all the fears of the past portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 12 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems at a right angle to paper at a right angle to paper you grasp a wisp of morning mist a tranquil tree on a grave sky awakening in the bedroom young women at odds naked frenzied stalk a daytime walnut destroys the evidence of the brain’s crime alcohol all year round sustains a headache holding tight forks at a table sparkling with the sea the world puts eyes into mouths a poem that has never been finished at a right angle to paper just written on an epitaph is washed over by the river on floorboards blood nailed up as a ladder with two frozen legs is taken along to the crowds panic buying trash another morning preserving the cruelty of clocks at a right angle to a derelict street it says this is not the last time for you to come down on paper portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 13 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems harmonica the flowers under the chilly sky are grotesque except for the lips river water makes sculptures of tiny ears with a song tongues of past events lick fastidiously into an empty space half a note at a time rocks approach the shore but remain far away spring inhales or exhales fish-bone pipes shine who is it shaking someone’s old map in the wind to make words vanish so that they are not lies like clouds the world resounds when blown as young green fingers learn the language of the ear pain finds you lasts longer than the future life so simple as if it is only this life river water flowing away a pale white fingernail at this instant thrusts deeper and deeper playing restoring fingerprints to ancient silver with no skin and loving again the source of darkness in the sound box portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 14 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems ten years time like a fish swims to its own taste cliff not under your feet years emptier than a word sea wall sharp nipples suckle the storm rocks are not there turned like a brass bolt you rust in the armpit of shining waves epitaph of a sunken ship name swathed in fish scales charges down a slope of flesh the art of stinging a jellyfish this void called water turns sweet is called old sunlight possesses the pull of a magnet ten summers in your lungs trim back the black water level of a haemorrhaging garden reflections in the harbour dance upside down striving to remember who had left you with a nature such as yours in the kitchen sculling a glass of sour self-brewed beer is the same as pouring it out skeleton completes yet another zero portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 15 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems record of twin cities infinitely harder than granite pear blossoms protracted busy tone on the telephone white like a ringing in the ears hangs up another spring bedroom footsteps taken apart decorate a beautiful address dry skating rink stores dead fragrances person with the same name as you a naked body flying far away is discharged on an alumina street ladder reaching the clouds lust awakens another bout of all night rain spring strips away fertile underpants pear tree unmoving climbs into a telephone book’s abstraction veranda in complete darkness time difference unreels the silk cocoon of an inch thick past sky separating into two small red moist parts sucks the complex numbers of your skull an existence twice fabricated defiles your non-existence pear blossoms coldly construct glass masks and swamps portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 16 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems clouds their time is it also like a big blob of sticky blood their music stands hide the sky blue performers lento and allegretto scour a veranda bearing down upon the valley the sound of wind fills the theatre and the stage crowds with people rushing home homeless their loneliness fingers a glass eyeball their heads have all flown from desolate white spines imaginary boatman dreams of cliffs alarmingly close it is a room flowers on the rented wardrobe chaotically fade at lunch wearing the island’s velocity they see animals on plates jumping from one side to another to be cut up seems to be misunderstood for having been present they use different plays to change dialect and blood and flesh butterfly wings on the menu are eaten windows darken another border is stealthily crossed so borrow an address to heighten the anxiety in a letter the person who forgets to post it keeps altering the water’s surface theatricality reduces the world to images barely daring to inhale and can be erased at will they transcend their own distance roll up the curtains draw close to the secret part of life portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 17 yang lian/mabel lee (translator) poems taking a stroll can goldfish in water sing of a city’s rise and decline? a row of swans poke into their feathers by the river are they making portraits of girls holding mirrors to themselves? the sound of the wind fills his strolling self led in the dark by a road arriving at the marsh his feet sink down an inch green spills over the embankment aware of the inevitability of winter a bout of rain makes the smashed knees of grasses kneel everywhere a cloud creates an eclipse he sees in the distant horizon the flickering of light and dark multiplying that night a wild goose called all night arriving at this forgotten memory gives the feeling of being gently swallowed gives the feeling of becoming the valley a withered willow exploding gold colours eject a womb that keeps giving birth to the sky listen to the wooden fence roaring in the wind the days can only be fenced in by being nailed to death reaching the sogginess of water and blood drowning awaits future of café chatter locking the door a city full of him holding cups that have gone cold like a breath that has been planted walking on buried in the skeleton of the old iron bridge unable to go further a big clump of dark red rusted bushes forces itself into a window sunlight malevolently bursts forth revealing the dank water level that has taken residence on his head strangled scenery appears dismantled in the darkness solitarily hanging stairs appear portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 18 untitled portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. the transcultural edge, curated by ilaria vanni accarigi. © 2016 [rox de luca]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i1.4793. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. abundance, excess, waste rox de luca, sydney-based artist figure 1: miscellaneous found plastics, 2015 © rox de luca. de luca abundance, excess, waste portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 2 my work since the early 2010s has focused on the concepts of abundance, excess and waste. these concerns have translated directly into vibrant and colourful garlands i have constructed from discarded plastics collected on bondi beach, sydney, where i live. the process of collecting is fastidious, as is the process of sorting and grading the plastics by colour and size. this initial gathering and sorting process is followed by threading the components onto strings of wire. when completed, these assemblages stand in stark contrast to the ease of disposability associated with the materials that arrive on the shoreline, evidence of our collective human neglect and destruction of the environment around us. the contrast is heightened by the fact that the constructed garlands embody the paradoxical beauty of our plastic waste byproducts, while also evoking the ways by which those byproducts similarly accumulate in randomly assorted patterns across the oceans and beaches of the planet. * * * in response to works from the exhibition ‘saved—project wall’ at the james dohary project space, sydney, in october 2012, the critic jacqueline milner located this ambulatory approach to collecting and reassembling the plastic detritus of contemporary life in a long tradition of artist engagements with and fascination for found objects and their malleable capacities to signify anew: walking, collecting and aesthetics intersect in the practice of many artists, offering a way to engage with place and landscape that materially connects the personal with the public. such an approach also allows an artist to tread lightly, as the artwork generally reconfigures what is already there rather than adding yet another commodity to a congested world. there is a kind of humility to this way of working, a recognition both of the creativity inherent in the everyday, and of the value of the small gesture that can subtly, but sometimes powerfully, change one’s take on things.1 more specifically, for milner, ‘[de luca’s] scour[ing of] her local beach—sydney’s iconic bondi—for plastic traces which she then assembles in long ropes using the tools of a jeweller,’ is guided by formal and social parameters. that is, colour choices guide the compositional process, the brightly hued results then appearing to ‘sprout’ from 1 jacqueline milner, notes to accompany the exhibition ‘saved—project wall,’ james dohary project space, sydney, october 2012. de luca abundance, excess, waste portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 3 figure 2: installation view, saved – project wall, james dorahy project space, october 2012 © rox de luca. de luca abundance, excess, waste portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 4 walls or to coil up from the floor, in installations that heighten the works’ ‘potential for transformation and endless accretion. celebratory garlands (a mermaid’s necklace?), or chains ready to strangle unsuspecting marine life? the works read like rosaries that count out either the pleasures of summer days or the sins of environmental neglect.’ i want my compositions to shift between the entrancingly beautiful and the grotesque; and that sensation of uneasiness is amplified when the works are placed back into the environment from which their bases in excess and waste originated. figure 3: saved (rusty pipe), exhibited: sculpture by the sea, 2013, site-specific sculpture found plastics, wire, 15 metres in length © rox de luca. de luca abundance, excess, waste portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 5 figure 4: ‘cassata,’ 2012, found plastics, 10 x 22 x 20cm. from the exhibition saved project wall, james dorahy project space, october 2012 © rox de luca. figure 5: ‘cassata, detail.’ from the exhibition saved project wall, james dorahy project space, october 2012 © rox de luca. de luca abundance, excess, waste portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 6 figure 6: ‘saved (pink#1), detail,’ october 2012 © rox de luca. de luca abundance, excess, waste portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 7 figure 7: ‘saved (blue) bundle,’ 20 x 30 x 26cm, found plastics, wire october 2012 © rox de luca. figure 8: saved (blue aviation seals), detail, found plastics, 2015 © rox de luca. de luca abundance, excess, waste portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 8 figure 9: cassata (for marco), 12 x 14 x 10 cm, 2015 © rox de luca. figure 10: saved (torrone), 2015, work in progress, found plastic and wire, 10 x 15 x 12 cm, 2015 © rox de luca. microsoft word 3749-16712-2-le.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. stigma and exclusion in cross-cultural contexts special issue, guest edited by annie pohlman, sol rojas-lizana and maryam jamarani. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. stigma and exclusion in cross-cultural contexts annie pohlman, sol rojas-lizana and maryam jamarani, university of queensland, guest editors discriminatory and marginalising discourses affect the cultural and social realities of people in all human societies. across time and place, these discourses manifest in numerous tangible and intangible ways, creating stigma and forms of exclusion by means particular to their cultural, historical, political and social contexts. these discourses also manifest in varying degrees of harm; from verbal abuse and behavioural forms of exclusion, to physical abuse and neglect, and exclusionary practices at institutional, legal and regulatory levels. such forms of stigma cause direct physical and mental harm and other forms of persecution. the papers in this special issue arise from a one-day symposium held at the university of queensland in february 2013. the symposium, ‘stigma and exclusion in crosscultural contexts,’ brought together researchers and community-based practitioners from across australia and overseas to explore marginalisation, discriminatory discourses and stigma in a wide range of historical and cross-cultural settings. by critically engaging with experiences of social, political and cultural exclusion and marginalisation in different contexts, we aimed to elucidate how discourses of stigma are created, contested and negotiated in cross-cultural settings. we also aimed to explore stigmatisation in its lived realities: as discourses of exclusion; as the fleshy pohlman, rojas-lizana and jamarani stigma and exclusion portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 2 reality of discrimination in social worlds; as part of the life narratives of individuals and groups; and as discourses of agency and counter-discourses in responding to stigma. following the symposium, we invited speakers to submit articles that reflected on the special issue’s theme of stigma in cross-cultural contexts. the papers assembled here are the result of that process and reflect a wide range of disciplinary stances, areas of geographical focus, historical contexts and thematic approaches to the study of stigma and exclusionary practices around the world. amongst the contributions, authors examine stigma and experiences of exclusion in australia, indonesia, france, iran, romania, czech republic, slovakia, rwanda and argentina. while all the papers examine stigma, exclusion and discrimination, individual contributions approach this topic from particular areas of concern. the contributions range from analyses of discrimination based on race, sexual identity, gender and religion, to the stigma faced by people with mental illness, to more extreme processes of marginalisation which result in dehumanisation and incitement to mass violence. the disciplinary approaches to this area of research on stigma are also widespread: amongst the contributors there are historians, psychologists, political scientists, asian studies specialists, linguists, critical discourse analysis researchers and cultural theorists. taken together, these contributions address some of the many complex realities of stigma and exclusion, elucidating the contextual aspects and discursive functions of discriminatory discourses around the world. the contributions have been organised by topic. first, stigma and exclusion in the area of gender and sexuality are explored in two papers, bronwyn winter’s contribution on gay marriage and sol rojas-lizana’s examination of lgbtiq discrimination. winter looks at the challenges and forms of exclusion that could result from the legalisation of gay marriage, calling our attention to the consequences of normalising ideas of ‘the family’ in western neo-liberal societies. since families are at the base of social fabric, to be married—for both heterosexuals and homosexuals—means to conform better with what it is considered to be fully human, as set down in the 1948 universal declaration of human rights. gay marriage has become a major transnational gay rights issue and a key marker of gay citizenship, to the extent that it is considered self-evident that its legalisation represents progress. yet it is becoming apparent that this ‘progress’ is concurrent with other forms of exclusion, of which the differences in status between the pohlman, rojas-lizana and jamarani stigma and exclusion portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 3 married and the unmarried have attracted the most attention to date. the article reflects on how three states (argentina, france and australia) have used gay marriage to improve their image in terms of their social-justice credentials while ignoring other social justice issues, including some lgbtiq rights. the author argues that gay marriage is a convenient liberal smokescreen that, in reassuring progressive elites, deflects the focus from neoliberal, so-called security and other discriminatory measures taken by states that may be far more worrying for homosexuals (and many others) in the longer term. in her contribution rojas-lizana builds a taxonomy of discrimination for a brisbanebased lgbtiq self-identifying group based on their own accounts of discrimination. the author identifies verbal and behavioural forms of discrimination, elucidates the forms of verbal discrimination and offers an analysis of the discourse used in the construction of the experiences and of the effects reported. the results show that verbal discrimination is an overt phenomenon and that participants are stressed by the everpresent possibility of facing it. verbal discrimination is mainly triggered by a perceived transgression against the normalised standards of people’s behaviour, movements and appearance in a heterosexist society. rojas-lizana presents three subtypes: name-calling, abuse and remarks, which are described through the analysis of keywords, effects and expressions (such as ‘faggot,’ ‘gay,’ ‘dyke,’ ‘queer,’ the pronoun ‘it,’ religious comments and other remarks). the contribution reveals the powerful effects of verbal discrimination against people who identify as lgbtiq. fearing rejection by family and/or society and receiving the stigmatised ‘mental illness’ label can result in inhibiting individuals suffering from various degrees of mental illness from seeking help. jen lee teh and her colleagues present the results of their study on the interplay and correlation between two types of personal stigma in people with mental illness and their willingness to communicate for help. making a distinction between self-stigma (internalised negative beliefs) and perceived stigma (anticipated or expected external sources of stigma), their study focuses on anticipated stigma and its connection with help seeking behaviours. the authors examined the online survey results of 72 participants who had experienced mental illness at some stage in their life, with follow up interviews with 17 of them. all the participants resided in australia but came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. the authors’ results highlight the pohlman, rojas-lizana and jamarani stigma and exclusion portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 4 importance of building resilience as well as cultural-specific strategies for overcoming persistent mental illness stigma. in her study of the literary representation of iranian men in diasporic iranian literature, sanaz fotouhi analyses the causes and consequences of the stigmatised image of the middle eastern (particularly iranian) man in the west. middle eastern muslim men have been historically subjected to stereotypical representations in the west and, following the 1979 islamic revolution and the american hostage crisis in iran, iranian men and masculinity have become hypervisible as aggressive and religiously fanatic. moreover, in the past decade memoirs and fictional accounts written in english by iranian women have reinforced this hypervisible and violent image of iranian men. the author first examines the self-orientalising discourses presented by iranian women authors in their autobiographical novels, whereby they rely on stories of repressed women whose basic freedoms are impinged upon by men in the patriarchal society. fotouhi then moves to examine narratives written by iranian men in the west and shows how the stigmatised image of iranian men in the west has impeded the integration of diasporic iranian men in their host societies. zane goebal’s contribution to this special issue offers an examination of neighbourhood talk with a particular focus on negative stereotypes of ‘chineseness’ in indonesia and the stigmatising of an individual within a small community. by providing an in-depth analysis of conversations during two meetings of men in a local community in central java, goebel delves into the complex processes by which individuals and groups create stigmatising discourses through positioning certain individuals as deviant. drawing on constructs of and enduring stereotypes about indonesians of chinese ancestry in indonesia, the men in these meetings used these stereotypes in their own formulations to stigmatise an individual within their community based on his associated negative ‘chinese’ traits and behaviours. by revealing these micro-level processes of stigmatisation, goebel’s analysis exposes the progression by which the discourse of individuals and communities can function to exclude, sanction and marginalise others. the final four contributions of this special issue deal with the relationship between exclusionary discourses, stigma and mass atrocities. the essays by narelle fletcher, annie pohlman and emma townsend examine the relationship between discriminatory discourse and incitement to genocide and mass atrocity crimes, while jill stockwell’s pohlman, rojas-lizana and jamarani stigma and exclusion portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 5 paper reflects on stigma and memorial cultures in the transitional justice context of postdictatorship argentina. the first two contributions on this theme examine incitement to genocidal violence in specific historical contexts: fletcher in regard to the genocide in rwanda in 1994; and pohlman in the context of the genocidal massacres against those associated with the indonesian communist party (pki) following an abortive coup on 1 october 1965. in both cases, the authors demonstrate how incitement played a crucial function in mobilising parts of the population in these countries to take part in mass atrocities. in fletcher’s article, she offers a close reading of a particularly infamous speech made by léon mugesera some eighteen months prior to the outbreak of the genocide in rwanda on 6 april 1994. this speech was made in a small town and delivered to only approximately 1,000 attendees but it was also recorded and rebroadcast in the lead-up to the killings. known for its virulent genocidal discourse, this speech became infamous for offering what fletcher describes as a plan for implementing the massacres. after the genocide, mugesera fled to canada as a refugee. after a decade of judicial proceedings in canada, mugesera was deported to rwanda in 2012 to face prosecution for incitement to genocide. what fletcher offers is more than a description of this speech and its contents. rather, she reflects carefully on how this speech was interpreted and contested during the canadian judicial proceedings, highlighting how mugesera refuted the claim of genocidal incitement by obscuring the meaning of his words. in her analysis, fletcher examines the french translations of the original speech made in kinyarwanda and reveals the often insidious forms of genocidal discourse that were, in some cases, purposefully obfuscated in the translations for the canadian court. by doing so, she brings focus to how discourse that is used to incite mass violence must be carefully interpreted, taking into account crucial linguistic and sociocultural factors. in her article, pohlman analyses genocidal incitement in the historical context of mid1960s indonesia. she begins by examining the indonesian massacres of 1965–1966 as genocidal violence and reflecting on the definitional debates over what constitutes genocide as per the un convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. pohlman then focuses on the indonesian military’s mass propaganda campaign following the coup in october 1965 that incited the massacres of an estimated 500,000 ‘suspected communists.’ she also highlights some recent developments in pohlman, rojas-lizana and jamarani stigma and exclusion portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 6 international criminal law on incitement to genocide and compares these with the possible culpability of those who created the indonesian military’s campaign. pohlman thus underlines the importance of examining extreme forms of dehumanisation and stigmatisation that lead to mass atrocities. emma townsend also examines extreme forms of dehumanising discourse, taking as her focus hate speech against roma in contemporary europe. by analysing recent examples of hate speech and other severe discourses of stigmatisation against roma across a number of european contexts, townsend questions whether this discourse should be considered genocidal. in the first part of her essay, she tracks historical trends in anti-roma discourse in europe, providing the important context for contemporary formations of this hate speech. she then argues that serious persecution of roma has continued in the post-war period, pointing to several examples of severe forms of state repression against roma communities in the latter half of the twentieth century. in the main part of her article, townsend turns her attention to twenty-first century examples of anti-roma discourse and persecution, particularly in the czech republic, slovakia and france. townsend provides a continuum of this discourse, which begins in hate speech, progresses to genocidal discourse and culminates in incitement. the final article in this special issue is jill stockwell’s exploration of women’s memories and competing political perspectives in contemporary argentina. between 1976 and 1983, argentina’s right-wing military dictatorship persecuted those on the political left, the most well-known form of this persecution being the kidnap, torture and execution of activists, or the desaparecidos (the disappeared). prior to the take-over of the government in 1976, however, leftist and rightist forces had been involved in violent struggles for power, including armed guerrilla violence by leftists. now, nearing four decades since the end of the dictatorship, argentina remains deeply divided, with competing claims about how the regime and its victims should be remembered continuing to dominate contemporary political debates. stockwell interviewed women who lost loved ones from both the left (during the dictatorship) and from the right (during the guerrilla armed actions prior to the 1976 coup). by exploring these women’s testimonies, and by drawing on understandings of how deep memory and affect are crucial to the formation and continuation of memorial cultures on both sides, stockwell pohlman, rojas-lizana and jamarani stigma and exclusion portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 7 tries to find ways to move beyond the stigma and political and ideological contestations which divide the two groups of women. the articles in this special issue represent the work of a diverse group of practitioners and researchers from an array of disciplinary backgrounds. yet each focuses on the discourses of stigma, which range from the everyday speech of exclusion, through marginalising discourse in communities and states, to discourse inciting harm against persecuted groups. the different forms of stigma examined in this special issue span different historical, political and geographical contexts, the resultant analyses revealing complex stories about how individuals and groups are excluded from their families, communities and even nations. some of the contributors issue a call for intervention, to create better and more suitable strategies to repair the harm of stigma or to prevent stigma. other contributors ask us to consider the complex realities of those who live with stigma. and others demand that justice be sought for those who have been stigmatised and oppressed. by considering stigma in some of its many manifestations and as a fundamental form of harm that people can do to others, the contributions to this special issue require us to explore more widely and more deeply the multifaceted realities of marginalisation and exclusion. portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal there’s no place like home/camino a casa crónica susana chávez-silverman, pomona college claremont, califas 16 julio, 2007 para deborah barker-benfield, mi touchstone del lado de acá …dream of a city que se mueve al pulso de la poesía night after night after night (my diary, 7-ix-01) ana maría shua ani, you were my first. suena a lover, pero me refiero a real, live argentine amiga. judía, and famous. entre otras cosas, por ser judía. o digamos, not for being, ob-vio, sino por escribir, textualizar—dar textura a—’lo’ judío. a veces de modo directo, like in el libro de los recuerdos pero otras veces, your jewishness was something more … qué sé sho, organic, un tipo de background, bien matter of fact, to the larger (or smaller) story. which was, en mi lectura al menos, always about el género. gender and genre. dizque tengo la memoria de un elefante, pero te juro i don’t remember si te conocí primero en la página, o en la pantalla. ¿no fue el ‘noviete’ foster quien nos hizo hookear arriba? (don’t worry, i’ll return to him—y explico ese atrevido apodo—later) no, sha sé, creo que fue la beth pollack, amiga de la flo mo-ro. la beth y yo nos conocimos en uno de tantos congresos vaginales, oops, digamos ‘de mujeres’ que abundaban in those days. bueno, que abundan, a secas, ¿no? i needed sangre fresca para uno de mis seminarios, y la beth me recomendó el libro de los recuerdos. yo, siempre chávez-silverman there’s no place like home subversiva y rebelde, elegí títulos más idiosincráticos—sexy and dangerous—que no anunciaban su jewishness de un modo tan abierto: los amores de laurita and casa de geishas. a principios de la muy identitarian década de los 90, i had started to lean— insistently, politically, defiantly (en un departamento de español)—hacia la literatura chicana; it had been years since anything al sur de la frontera—or anything new, anyway—me había llamado mucho la atención. you changed all that, ani. y no sólo con tus relatos—luxuriantly erotic y humorísticos a la vez, no mean feat, esta combinación—like laurita’s loves, que culmina con esa slightly shocking scene de una expectant mother en plena jouissance en su bidet (con todo y su thumb-chuping beba, in utero!). o con los weird, tiny microrrelatos de geishas’ house, con el que me deleitaba, abriéndolo al azar, letting my eye fall dondequiera que se abriera el libro and roam, sin rumbo, over images of disembodied nalgas, ojos, rabinos and golems. en tus páginas, en esa posmoderna ‘casa,’ me sentí tan a la vez uncannily at home y descolocada que ansiaba conocerte. in person. or the closest thing to it: en el internido. en los early ‘90s, argentina todavía era lejana y exótica para mí, like the moon, a pesar de mis décadas de lectura y estudio obsesivo, pasional. so, i lanced myself: te mandé un e-mail—tipo fan letter (con algunas preguntas literarias serias, so you wouldn’t think i was mensa)—a principios del ’94, i think. and the rest is history. or her/story, como quien dice. porque ¡me escribiste patrás! a pesar de ser una escritora de adeveras y tener un super busy schedule, y un writing studio y muchos international trips etc., eres una espectacular corresponsal, as god commands. siempre polemizamos un chingo (pero, ¿no es el push-pull de la polémica, esa esgrima verbal, the hallmark, sine qua non, de la amistad con un argentino?). simón, ciber-debatimos sobre el valor—o no—de los congresos vaginales (en uno de los cuales, little eye, había escuchado tu nombre primero) y las antologías de women’s lit. sobre la influencia literaria, el canon, el humor, ‘lo’ judío, la identidad, la lengua. over the years, los temas se volverían más personales, todavía candentes, but also tajantemente íntimos: la enfermedad, el cuerpo, los hijos, feeling burnt out, feeling lucky, feeling inspired, feeling. portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 2 chávez-silverman there’s no place like home al principio de nuestra correspondencia, you performed a miracle: ante mi discurso bajoneado y abúlico de post-disertación doctoral, hasta la little crown de pizarnik y habiendo comenzado a desplazarme hacia el campo de u.s. latino studies, me aseguraste de que la poesía argentina was still alive and kicking; me incitaste a conocerla. up close. en vez de mandarme to fly, diciéndome que you didn’t have time, o que la poesía no era tu specialty, you sent me a list of names, anotada y con tus recomendaciones. de esa lista elegí a las poetas (yes, sorry baby, all women!) que sigo estudiando, enseñando, leyendo hasta hoy. esos names que vos me mandaste fueron la razón de mi primer viaje a buenos aires, en 1999—cuando puse un título tan brazen a mi ponencia que creo que por poco te di un heart attack: ‘bajo la sombra de pizarnik: poetas argentinas y yo.’ remember? pero anyway, esa es otra historia. por tu generosidad—invitation and insistence—gracias. paulina vinderman paulina, vuelvo a mi diario —un cuaderno carmesí, bien goth-looking, con el mandato ‘confess’ impreso en la tapa; me lo regaló la poeta chicana alicia gaspar de alba- para confirmar que te conocí el 26 de agosto del 2000, hacia el final de un unusually icy invierno en el sur. llevaba apenas 2 meses living in buenos aires; no me acuerdo cómo supe de la poetry reading en el centro cultural san martín. sería que durante esos 13 meses, and right from the start, la poesía was my life en buenos aires: ciudad que yo había soñado la más poetic del mundo. y en este punto (como en tantos otros) la realidad se solapó precisely con mis sueños. esa noche, after i met you, después de escucharte leer, escribí lo siguiente: ‘¿cómo explicar how much it means to me, haber conocido a paulina vinderman y que ella sea, in reality, precisely the way i expected?’ es verdad que con mercurio en piscis en la casa 3, siempre, from childhood, he tenido el don de pronosticar. de haber escrito un guión, it couldn’t have been more perfect. standing around en el lobby del san martín on corrientes, waiting for the show to begin, me sentía incómoda, dis/locada, muy foreign de repente en un mundo particular y que me tincaba misterioso, forebidding. i knew no one; me parecía que me faltaba—o no había perseguido—palanca, enchufe en el mundo literario argentino. nunca he sabido “insertarme”, como se dice down here. y … [pausa porteña] será saturno en la casa 12. sí, le echo la culpa al big daddy saturn. anyway, a lovely woman passed by, me sonrió, y me convencí en el acto de que eras vos: paulina vinderman. recuerdo que pregunté, portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 3 chávez-silverman there’s no place like home medio alelada, cual si fueras joni mitchell, o mick jagger, ‘¿es ud. la poeta paulina vinderman?’ asentiste, i remember; creo que nos ruborizamos un poco, both of us, y me pediste que no te dijera de ud. (yo no agarraba la onda, not yet, de los social codes porteños). habré balbuceado que había venido de california para trabajar un libro sobre poetas, y que vos eras una de ellas. you were gracious, hasta un pelín tímida, i thought (like me, pensé). tu voz era elegante, meliflua. warm. leíste de mis libros predilectos tuyos. de escalera de incendio (título que en mi estado semi-exaltado en california—habiendo encontrado, después de haber besado a muuuuchos frogs, a una poeta argentina como dios manda—me dio una imagen cual si fuera de un painting de georgia o’keeffe, o frida kahlo, o remedios varo: a burning ladder, una escalera literalmente en llamas. fue hasta más tarde, en nuestra entrevista, que me corregiste, muy politely; me informaste que ‘escalera de incendio’ sencishamente significa ‘fire escape’). leíste de bulgaria. sé que parece una pendejada (eye: sentido mexicano), pero cuando leíste ‘mi hija escribe desde londres,’ hasta temblé. tuve la sensación (again, aunque parezca o cursi o imposible), a sharp certainty al conocerte in the flesh, de que la mujer de carne y hueso—exquisitamente sentient yet also clear-eyed, composed—tenía sentido, correspondía, with unusual accuracy, a la mujer que vos habías textualizado en las páginas de tus libros. y en estos 7 años, acá y allá, tomando gin tonics ‘con ingredientes’ (¡sin fish!), riéndonos o llorando, buscando amatistas, cúpulas, ardillas o libros de michael ondaatje, e-mails van e-mails vienen, hermana porteña, nunca me has defraudado. andrea ‘silvana’ ostrov sil, where do i begin? (oh my god, parezco la banda sonora de ‘love story.’ qué sentimentaloide, como dijera mi papá.) la cantidad de puns y chihtes—baroque, polyglot retruécanos—me desgarra. mr. albar, por ejemplo. o mr. excite! casi siempre, the origins almost forgotten (de dámaso a damahco a albaricoque a albar, a secas), pero la risa, ay la risa. el rescoldo de nuestro humor—inocente, travieso, despiadado— still lights up my life, como quien dice. to conjure you, miro la foto que tengo de vos en la pared de mi estudio, aquí en este globally over-calentado verano en el imperio del interior de california. estás sonriente, misteriosa, abrazada al fourteen-year-old juvenil, quien lleva su school uniform del instituto lange ley. el mismo día que conocí a paulina, fijate, escribí en mi journal: ‘tengo que llamar a andrea ostrov.’ pero como portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 4 chávez-silverman there’s no place like home que me daba cosa—entre miedo y hesitation—tal era el buildup que mr. excite, aka lagmanovich, mi director de tesis, me había dado de vos. que eras brishante, una intelectual de primera, que teníamos mucho en común, etc. no te llamé ese día, pero recuerdo la primera vez que te vi. era el 3 de agosto del 2000, en un congreso de gender en la uba. para variar, nada más al llegar a la uba, me sentía recontra fuera de lugar y convencida de que mi out of place-ness se delataba en mi cara, el body language, en todo. en eso vi a la francine, rodeada de una horda de fans argentinas. me dio una hearty welcome, pero she boomed out, ‘suzi, bienvenida a mi ciudad’. lo cual, ob-vio, me hizo sentirme más desubicada que antes, si cabe. ok, directamente lost. reconocí tu nombre en el programa y entré a tu panel con la intención de darte mi tarjeta, presentarme. i slipped in and sat down. te quitaste el abrigo color chocolate, muy escueto y apropiado, y de repente te me apareciste cual fairy princess, en un floaty traje, como de gasa, o seda. hermosa, incongruente para mi esquema más sobrio de la cacademia gringa. too gorgeous, also, para el tétrico ambiente de puan. había poca gente en el tiny room y—i could be wrong, pero— recuerdo que vos leíste todas las ponencias. or at least, yours y la de una o dos personas que se habían fumado el show. tu oscura mirada intensa, your outfit, tu speech me hicieron tal impacto que no me atreví a abordarte. i chickened out. yes, i confess: me fugué sin presentarme. viniste a casa el 15 de septiembre. el frío ha de haber continuado, almost until spring ese año; llevabas ese famoso tapado dark brown, trajiste facturas. you stayed more than two hours! hablamos de todo: de las estructuras académicas de nuestros países, de los hijos, de un jodido (y compartido) perfectionism que nos traba, que nos produce lo que bauticé citational anxiety: esa apparently inescapable, angustiosa necesidad de compilar más y más nombres en una epic, never-complete bibliography, seguir autorizándonos— avalándonos en las palabras de predecesores. más tarde, thinking about our first encuentro, temí haber cometido una barbaridad. había estado releyendo la temprana poesía de pizarnik. lo vi y me cayó como lightning flash: that surname, tu apellido. leon ostrov, a quien pizarnik había dedicado el libro, la última inocencia. her first psychoanalyst, ¿tu padre? tenía que ser … entonces, te hice lo que tanta gente me había hecho a mí, so many times, my whole life: te pregunté portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 5 chávez-silverman there’s no place like home si vos eras hija de … ay, cuánto me sacaba de onda esa pregunta, especially years ago, cuando apenitas comenzaba a publicar. no sé cómo se me escapó; no sé cómo no me odiaste, sil. pero no, you didn’t. asentiste, así nomás; te platiqué de mi padre famoso. well, digamos, famous es un modo de decir. renombrados, los dos, en el mundo de la cultura, de las letras. o sea, no en el dizque real world, ¿no? pero igual, vos y yo, las dos, elegimos seguir, más o menos, daddy’s footsteps. me, even more than you. más tarde me contarías de haber visto a pizarnik, de dinner guest en tu casa, con ese rarísimo atuendo—skin-tight, butch, red pants—del que yo, of course, sólo había leído. y muchas otras cosas me contaste. pero lo más precious—por inesperada, porque el día que te conocí te sentí contenida, inward, hasta formal—fue la amistad. forjada principalmente en tu little white car. una vez flotante, patas (llantas) arriba en las inundaciones de white encalada en el 200l, luego rescatado, milagrosamente secado, puesto en marcha y con sólo un deje a moho, faint reminder de la humedad, ese swampy damp que para mí will forever and ever signify buenos aires. ay, pobre del little white, perdido—robado—en abril del 2002, a plena crisis económica. confieso: i had my doubts. a ver si sobrevivía la intensidad de nuestro bond, después de mi vuelta a california. vos con el ajetreo de la universidad, el colegio de gaby, tu disertación, todo el revolú de la vida in a big city. y yo con el libro, la universidad, el juvenil. pero por internido, vos te hiciste una auténtica corresponsal argentina (oxymoron casi siempre, pero en tu caso, no); la distancia nunca fue el olvido para nosotras, al contrario. henos aquí de nuevo en la national library, en el mismo salón donde hace 3 años vos y ani me presentaron el libro. chance? ¿el azar objetivo? sólo me queda preguntarte, ¿crees que haya sido coincidencia que salieron nuestros primeros libros—killer crónicas and el género al bies—el mío en octubre y el tuyo en noviembre del 2004? pensalo bien, sil. without you, del lado de acá o ashá: nothing. saúl sosnowski well ¿digo la verdad? should i? the truth is, al principio, allí por diciembre del 2000, pasaste de mí un huevo—olímpicamentre, como se dice en más elegante. sho mandaba e-mail tras e-mail y caían—clunk—like into a black hole. what’s it take?, pensé, con creciente desperation. finally, saqué los big guns. saqué todos mis credenciales patronímicos, fálicos: mi director de tesis que me había recomendado te ehcribiera; my portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 6 chávez-silverman there’s no place like home daddy your mentor en una temprana chamba. en hippielandia, uc santa cruz, ¿te acordás? todo. mi pedigree, mi jewishness, mi linaje. nada. niente. nothing. quería que me publicaras una entrevista con paulina. i flooded your inbox. te mandé impassioned entreaties, incluyendo detalladas descripciones del current state of argentine poetry en el milenio. finally (¿mohqueado, curioso?) me atendiste. pero me hiciste jump through some major hoops. me publicaste, pero your way. que primero una reseña de bulgaria, paulina’s most recent book para entonces. y luego veríamos … well, we saw, allright. a partir de entonces, the flood gates cracked open. me osé a pedirte más, mandarte más, cada vez más. i have my ways, que no? ¿por qué no me publicás una croniquita en hispa?, say you will, anda. dale. after all, te me habías jactado—and rightly so—de haber publicado a unos poetas chicanos en hispamérica, creo que hasta en el inaugural issue, o casi. en 1972. en un apartado titulado ‘serie los marginados.’ well, the time is right now, ahoritita, te insistí, para que publiques a una chicana judía que escribe en bilingüe. (and little eye: lose the etiqueta ‘marginada,’ ok?) you agreed. fuihte un mensch. ¡hasta inauguraste el rubro ‘crónica’ para mí! y no he dejado de inundarte ever since. or … [pausa porteña] i wouldn’t, si no estuvieras en tanto globe-trotteo all the time. saúl: for your wit and your wisdom—frustrante, incitante, insistente—tu savage gemini push me-pull you, for rising to the desafío y más allá, thank you. laura klein nos conocimos in the flesh el 26 de junio de 2001, en vísperas de mi partida. justo cuando todo me iba bien, tan bien, las pataletas about my not-fitting-in subsiding, me sentía at last completely in-corporada a esta ciudad; todo un hermoso lava-flow de cotidiana pero igualmente exaltada inspiration. hilda rais y yo—dos tímidas, sipping whisky en las rocas en la now-defunct big mamma, on hair st, en palermo. ella me dijo que me presentaba a dos poetas notoriamente hurañas, o al menos esquivas: andrea gutiérrez y laura klein. ¿así de easy?, me pregunté. tenía mis dudas. buenos aires is a good city to get lost in, si uno quiere. aun si no… portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 7 chávez-silverman there’s no place like home lau, con vos siempre fue, nuestro enganche, por la palabra. aparte esa winter comida en lo de hilda, 6 years ago (que lo recuerdo plática y plática, represa des-bordada de words, más que comida, cuando te tenía por fin, face to face), sólo nos vimos in the flesh una vez, aquí, en la biblioteca, hace 3 años. pero so much has happened, inter nos, ¿no? y pienso en lévi-strauss, whose words i read en una novela de nadine gordimer en el ’82, a plena dictadura de acá y pocos meses antes de ir a vivir a la sudáfrica del apartheid: ‘i am the place in which something has occurred.’ vos y sho conformamos un lugar—an/other place—we make things happen, in and with our words. la gente alega, se queja de que no se puede ‘hacer nada’ por e-mail, but we know another truth. lo que me sorprendió más—por la imagen que me había hecho de vos, desde descubrir tu a mano alzada hasta conocerte en ese living de palermo en el 2001—a verrrrrr … si tomara un rorschach test about you, diría: intensa, cerebral, complicated, implacable. so, what surprised me was your humor. tu risa. no, something else: tu aceptación del juego. sos—fuiste desde siempre—una asidua adherida a mi code-switching. a los juegos inter-lingüísticos, interculturales, inter-todo que tanto irritaban o confundían a otros, north and south. entonces, por tu forked tongue, entre el cahteshano porteño, el hebreo and english de tu childhood, los recordados acordes del maternal yiddish, por esa polivalente lengua tuya, que metonimiza tu untamed cerebro y te abre a posibilidades no sólo semióticas e intelectuales o ideológicas sino también (and sometimes, above all) lúdicas, lau, te saludo. david william foster mi vida, supongo que debería conmemorar tu legendario … [pausa porteña] conocimiento de buenos aires, which i myself have witnessed, en tantos taxi rides, en tantos invernales flaneos a pie. pero ¿sabes qué? pos como que no me late; i’m not going to, precisamente porque ‘legendario’ es. instead, prefiero hablar de otro conocimiento, another taxi ride, en el que me hiciste enamorarme, again, del país de mi childhood: méxico. ibamos en taxi por zapopan, ¿te acordás? yo al principio lloraba los changes, las pérdidas. probably, era mi primera vez patrás en guadalajara en 20 años. pero al mirarlo por la ventanilla de aquel taxi, mientras te escuchaba—an erudite, funny, poignant, rabelaisian outpouring de tu sui generis cartografía, desde buenos aires en portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 8 chávez-silverman there’s no place like home los años 70 hasta una guadalajara pomo and mos def feliz—me di cuenta de que la repetición, la recuperación, incluso la vuelta no tiene que ser literal para significar. to take on meaning, depth. así, más tarde ese mismo año—el de mi ternura (en gran medida gracias a vos, pero that’s another story—la de como me rescataste de los peores elementos machistas, antiintelectuales y sexofóbicos de la cacademia gringa, which is how you earned your apodo, que se ha diseminado norte y sur: el noviete foster)—en el ’97 encontré en oaxaca the guadalajara of my childhood. todo estaba todavía allí, as it was not, any longer, in the ‘real’ guadalajara: chapopote-scented roads, topes como lomos de burro que te hacen polvo el underbelly del auto, buzzing, iridescent green-winged mayates, slow, diesel-spewing camiones locales, dim, cavernous mercados de abasto que despiden el olor a lima, chile, humo, masa, nardos. and everywhere, the green. verde, tanto verde. por haber resuscitado mi méxico, y por tantos otros regalos, mi vida, oh divino marqués, thank you. all of you—en buenos aires, califas o en el in-between del internido—me fomentan un feeling, a la vez uncanny y en casa, welcome and on edge, que constituye curiosamente my life blood, my manna, mi sustento. es esta sensación, ob-vio, que nutre mi escritura. es verdad: there’s no place like home. pero chez nous, no debería ser de otra manera, ¿no? caveat emptor: si alguna de las cualidades de estos seres ejemplares que ud. ha leído le parece quinta/esencialmente jewish, i assure you que es pura coincidencia. portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 9 there’s no place like home/camino a casa crónica search | portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies quick jump to page content main navigation main content sidebar toggle navigation home about about the press team our principles and partners our partners and providers books all publications csr book series genocide perspectives series media object book series uts shopfront series conferences journals publish with us publish a book or book series publish a journal article suggest a new journal role of editorial board or managing committee research integrity principles for scholarly publishing ethics and transparency advertising and sponsorship contact search register login toggle navigation journal home current previous issues announcements about about the journal submissions editorial team privacy statement contact home search portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies search search articles for advanced filters published after 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 january february march april may june july august september october november december 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 published before 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 january february march april may june july august september october november december 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 by author search results no results make a submission information for authors about the journal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies is a fully peer reviewed journal dedicated to the publishing of scholarly articles from practitioners of—and dissenters from—international, regional, area, migration and ethnic studies, and it is also dedicated to providing a space for the work of cultural producers interested in the internationalization of cultures. partners and major indexers issn: 1449-2490 privacy policy portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal learning from the germans? history and memory in german and european projects of integration1 andrew h. beattie, university of technology, sydney in recent years, discussion of european cultural values has increasingly included the proposition that ‘europe’ needs to face up to its difficult past(s). for european projects of cooperation and integration considerable significance is now attributed to history and memory. this is a historical novelty. the determination to avoid another war among european nations has long been central to the master narrative of european integration. yet at least until the 1980s, ‘europe’ in the sense of the european economic community and the european community (ec) was a purely economic, legal-political entity. it had few shared values and symbols, and certainly was not a community of memory. as tony judt (2000, 293) argues, both western integration and that pursued under soviet hegemony in eastern europe were characterised by ‘the erection of an unnatural and unsustainable frontier between past and present in european public memory’ (or better, in european public memories). shared memories in the west were limited to the integration process itself and did not reach back beyond 1945, apart from the resolve of ‘never again.’ a focus on the future rather than the past had also characterised older concepts of european integration (speth 1999, 169). 1 this article began as a paper presented at a september 2005 workshop of the ‘competing euro visions’ project at the institute for international studies, university of technology, sydney, and benefited subsequently from the author’s participation in bo stråth’s seminar ‘historical writing and politics of remembrance’ at the european university institute, florence, in 2006-7. it is a slightly revised english language version of a chapter, ‘geschichte und erinnerung in deutschen und europäischen einigungsdiskursen,’ in ‘schmerzliche erfahrungen’ der vergangenheit und der prozess der konstitutionalisierung europas, edited by c. joerges, m. mahlmann and u. k. preuß (forthcoming 2007). the author gratefully acknowledges the publisher, verlag für sozialwissenschaften, for permission to publish this english-language version. beattie learning from the germans? direct concern with the past increased only in the last two decades. the promotion of a shared historical consciousness became part of a larger attempt to imbue the dry bureaucratic and economic process of european integration with a common identity. since the 1980s, discussions of ‘european values’ have frequently, but by no means exclusively, addressed the legacy of twentieth-century warfare and genocide in europe (speth 1999; rousso 2004). this trend accelerated with the prospect and, since 2004, the advent, of the accession to the european union (eu) of former members of the soviet bloc in eastern europe (thum 2004, 7; gellner and glatzmeier 2005, 11). of course, one should not fall into the trap of equating europe with the eu. the larger and looser council of europe also promotes joint projects for the teaching of history at schools and commemoration of the holocaust.2 such enterprises are inseparable from the spread of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ of the holocaust throughout the americanised world (levy and sznaider 2002). the eu ‘treaty establishing a constitution for europe’ takes the effort to anchor the integration process in a common understanding of history to a new level. references in the constitution’s preamble to europe being ‘reunited after bitter experiences’ and to the european peoples’ determination ‘to transcend their former divisions’ indicate this new, official prominence (european union 2004). awareness of, and (more or less selfconscious) confrontation with the painful past are apparently to function as a driving force of the integration project in the present and future. as christian joerges (2005, 248) has pointed out with understatement, it is possible to imagine a more substantial formulation than the preamble provides. it remains unclear which bitter experiences are meant, how europe’s citizens intend to transcend their previous divisions, and how and when europe managed to reunite itself. lack of specificity is hardly unusual in such a context. however, as murray pratt (2005, 7) argues, it remains characteristic of the circular, unreflective moment of eu perpetual self-constitution. there is much to be said for pratt’s suggestion that the past division in mind is not an internal one, but the foundational severing of the chosen ‘europa’ from her southern and eastern neighbours and subsequent others (2005, 15). 2 see the projects of the general directorate iv for education, culture and heritage, youth and sport (council of europe 2007a and 2007b; domnitz 2007). portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 2 beattie learning from the germans? the premise of this article, however, is that historical divisions and experiences within europe lie at the heart of attempts to forge a common european memory in support of integration. the history of the cold war and the continent’s division into east and west are of particular importance, as is suggested not least by the fact that the preamble’s reference to the bitter past was a polish initiative (joerges 2005, 248). as important as the holocaust and (post-)colonialism and their consequences are (müller 2007), the continent’s real and imagined east-west division should not be neglected. memory of the latter, as well as being intimately connected to that of the holocaust, is important in its own right, but often receives less scholarly attention, particularly in the anglophone world. this article considers whether and how german efforts to create a shared, national history and public memory after unification in 1990 can inform the european discussion. the union of the western federal republic of germany (frg) and the eastern german democratic republic (gdr) has often been cast as a small-scale experiment of the integration of western and eastern europe, or more specifically of the eu’s eastward expansion. in economics and migration studies, for example, ‘lessons’ for europe have been sought from german experiences, often with a view to avoiding the problems of the german case (sinn 2000; hochberg 1998). in contrast, german experiences with confronting difficult twentieth-century pasts are on the whole viewed positively. indeed, recent commentators have suggested that german handling of the ‘double’ totalitarian past could be instructive and even exemplary for europe (troebst 2006, 26; faulenbach 2006, 248-49). in this article, i explore, critically, what lessons, if any, german experiences might in fact hold for ‘europe.’ in the german context, discussions of public memory focussed on two related goals: on the one hand, the achievement of a unified public memory of national socialism and communism, and, on the other, the development of a common history of the divided postwar era. both tasks were pursued most energetically, prominently and directly, by two commissions of inquiry of the german federal parliament between 1992 and 1998 (deutscher bundestag 1995 and 1999), which were the subject of the author’s doctoral thesis (beattie 2005a). this provides the major empirical source for the present article’s discussion of german experiences, although i also draw more generally on german commemorative politics in the first decade after portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 3 beattie learning from the germans? unification, and contrast this with often more sophisticated historiography. the primary purpose of this paper is not to analyse the german case per se, but to question assumptions about its exemplary status for european projects and to consider its relevance to those projects.3 the second section addresses the treatment of the eastwest division during the cold war, while debates about totalitarianism and the relationship between national socialism and communism in public memory are the subject of the third and final part. in both sections, european parallels with, and possible ‘lessons’ from the german experiences are discussed, using examples from recent ‘european’ public memory debates and initiatives and historiography on the one hand, and the author’s own research and the growing secondary literature on germany on the other. first, however, it is necessary to consider the comparability of the two contexts, and thus the limiting preconditions for any german lessons for europe. differing starting points and similar goals parallels between german unification and european integration and expansion are problematic, as there are considerable differences in the character of the processes, with implications for history and public memory. the opening of the german-german border in november 1989 caught the political establishments and publics on both sides by surprise. the remarkable speed of the subsequent ‘rush to german unity’ (jarausch 1994), formalised in october 1990, resulted not least from the assumption of continuing german ethno-national identity and indeed homogeneity, despite forty years of division. the process was frequently (and not least by the western politicians who drove the constitutional process) conceived as reunification, as the restoration of ‘normal’ nationstatehood (zens 2000). the insight that forty years of divergent socialisation had had enduring effects on east and west germans, and the desire to purge them (mainly on the eastern side) in the name of ‘inner unity’ were later developments. indeed, the project of a common history arose only in the years following formal unification. in the course of difficult ongoing integration, it was nevertheless viewed as an unproblematic and readily attainable goal (wüstenberg 2004; beattie 2005a). as much as the enlarged federal republic after 1990 differed from previous incarnations of german nation-, 3 a detailed treatment of the positions of various political camps is impossible within the scope of this article, which concentrates on the dominant views of christian democrats and free democrats who were in government from 1990 until 1998. their positions on various issues were shared or rejected by social democrats and greens, and rejected in total by the post-communist party of democratic socialism (pds). see beattie (2005b) for a brief analysis and beattie (2005a) for a more comprehensive one. portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 4 beattie learning from the germans? state-, or nation-state-hood, the parameters of german history appeared to be clearly defined, and recourse could be taken to extant understandings of national history and practices of public memory.4 despite the loose talk in the constitutional treaty preamble of europe being ‘reunited,’ european integration is conceived rather differently, not least where history and memory are concerned. as judt (2005, 303, 308-9) argues, the beginnings of western european integration lay in quite traditional inter-state instruments and appeared only in retrospect as a revolutionary attempt at supranational integration. yet long before the collapse of the soviet bloc it had become clear that with the ec a qualitative novelty had come into existence and continued to constitute itself. with eastern expansion since 2004, any remaining doubts about the constructed-ness of the union have disappeared, and post-entry integration is expected to remain a long-term project. this applies all the more to the project of a common history and memory, which, in contrast with the german case, is being pursued contemporaneously with economic, legal, social and political integration and expansion. every plan for a shared european understanding of the past assumes the difficulty of overcoming inherited, primarily national, approaches to history (pavković 2000). both the ‘europe’ of the council of europe and that of the european union lack the definitional clarity and ready-made public memories of the german case. where do (or should) the temporal and geographical borders of european history lie? what is to be understood as ‘european,’ and what as regional, national, global or (post-)colonial (monteath 1999; jarausch and lindenberger 2007)? such european problems of definition played little roles in the german case, although many of them arguably also applied, mutatis mutandis. both the constructed and the processual nature of the european case appear to offer hope for more multiple perspectives and critical reflection than characterised the german example. during german unification, at most superficial differences between east and west were anticipated and a homogenous, indeed almost uniform, understanding of history was, and for years continued to be, desired. in contrast, european discourses assume considerable heterogeneity. for all the appeals to unity, the attractiveness and necessity of diversity are upheld. the expectations and hopes in both 4 the preamble to the unification treaty between east and west germany spoke of ‘consciousness of the continuity of german history’ (bewußtsein der kontinuität deutscher geschichte) (vertrag 1990). portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 5 beattie learning from the germans? cases thus indicate the enduring significance of national identifications, albeit with contrasting consequences on the two levels. further differences concern the pasts in question. there was no debate about colonialism in the german case, whereas it is, and must be, of greater significance for europe as a whole.5 on the other hand, the german relationship with national socialism, the second world war and the holocaust is necessarily different from any general european relationship, even if no european country can (or does) removes itself completely from discussions about complicity in the holocaust and co-responsibility for, and accommodation with, dictatorships and occupation regimes. the german experience of the cold war east-west division also differs from that of europe in significant ways. despite such differences, shared understandings of the past feature in both cases simultaneously as the prerequisite for, and the outcome of, further integration of the expanded community.6 although varying degrees of anticipated and desired conformity and plurality are in evidence, and although the debate about memory commences at different phases of the integration processes, the dominant discourse in both cases holds that transcending ‘divided memory’ is necessary to overcome past and present cleavages and tensions, and to realise common visions of the future. moreover, there are similarities in the imbalances of symbolic and intellectual capital. german unification was constitutionally, administratively and, to a considerable extent, intellectually accomplished as the accession of the eastern ‘new federal states’ to the federal republic. the balance of power was unmistakable, and not unlike that which characterises the accession to the eu club of the ‘new member states.’ the following sections demonstrate that, in accordance with this deeply asymmetrical unification 5 in recent years the colonial past has received more attention in germany, but it was almost completely absent before the late 1990s. 6 it is worth casting a second glance at the implications of the different phases of the integration processes during which the goal of a shared understanding of the past gained prominence. above i suggested that the pursuit of a common memory as a component of the ongoing broader integration process in the european case represents a possible gain in terms of critical reflection and multiple perspectives. yet if consenting to a particular ‘memory regime’ (langenbacher 2003) constitutes an ‘entry ticket’ to the union (judt 2005, 803), or, conversely, if divergence from the dominant partner’s memory regime represents a co-hindrance to entry, as in the case of turkey and the eu, then the sequence of the german case—with the memory debate beginning only after formal political accession—appears more conducive to plurality and to agency on the part of the ‘minor’ party. in short, apologists for communist rule in east germany were not excluded from unification, but attacked and marginalised afterwards. portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 6 beattie learning from the germans? process, the course and outcome of public memory debates were characterised by varying degrees of inconsistency and hypocrisy, success and failure. overcoming cold war divisions in germany after 1990, the development of a common memory of the divided past was granted considerable significance for the ‘inner unity’ of the recently unified country. politicians from various parties were disturbed by the apparently increasing alienation of easterners and westerners. in order to overcome the ‘wall-in-the-head’ syndrome and the ‘crisis of unification’ (kocka 1995), they argued, the germans needed to listen to each others’ stories and to embrace the divided past. politicians and allied historians— primarily but by no means only from the political right—demanded a historically-rooted national identity, and sought to have the postwar era understood as a history of national suffering caused by communist crimes, but also of eventual redemption through unification (beattie 2005b; zens 2000). history’s ‘re-nationalisation’ was thus to legitimise reunification and support integration (jarausch 1995). both historical scholarship and public memory were to praise those germans who had held firm to their desire for national unity and to scorn those who had made themselves comfortable in national division or, worse still, embraced post-national values. in and beyond the commissions of inquiry, such criticism was directed at eastern dissidents who had still hoped for an independent east german state in 1989-1990. above all, however, it targeted westerners, many of whom had become increasingly indifferent to, and ignorant of, the gdr. some had come to equate the federal republic with ‘germany,’ a tendency that culminated in gdr citizens who crossed the border following the breaching of the berlin wall being met with such greetings as ‘welcome to germany’ (bender 2000; beattie 2005a). in reunified germany easterners and westerners were now supposed to regard the history of the other german state as an integral component of their own history. only then, it was suggested, would inner unity be achieved. this ambitious goal met with only moderate success, despite repeated exhortations to come together by listening to one another’s histories. even the commissions of inquiry made little effort to convince westerners to accept the gdr past as a component of their own history. they held numerous public hearings and commemoration ceremonies in eastern cities, but in the west only in the parliamentary building in bonn (beattie 2005a). westerners were portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 7 beattie learning from the germans? hardly addressed, with the exception of parts of the western political class on particular topics, on which more below. the west was also neglected in terms of content, and an opportunity thus went begging for easterners to learn more about the history of the federal republic or for the development of a shared history of division. revealingly, it was often precisely those opinion makers who pointed most vociferously to the need for a unified understanding of the divided past who simultaneously extracted the federal republic from the analysis, or who rejected out of hand even the mildest criticism of its history (and castigated its critics for obscuring the fundamental distinction between democracy and dictatorship). exempting the western past from examination did not prevent conservatives from implicitly or explicitly assessing the east german past against western norms or from making occasional politically expedient comparisons. when the west was examined, then generally it was in direct connection with the gdr, whether in the form of western parties’ policies towards east germany and the national question, the east german regime’s efforts at infiltration and propaganda in the west, or the population’s attitudes to the german question and to the gdr. such issues offered western conservatives and eastern dissidents the opportunity to castigate the western left not just for its national indifference, but for having played down the gdr’s democratic illegitimacy and human rights abuses (beattie 2007). otherwise, the federal republic featured as a self-evident, natural success story, without conflicts, contradictions or ruptures (beattie 2005a). in stark contrast, almost every aspect of the history of the east german regime was critically examined. the commissions of inquiry sought and found not only their main audience but also their historical subject matter in the east. the development of a common german history of division was thus predicated on a critical reappraisal, indeed the delegitimisation, of the east german past. the prevalent narrative of gdr history was dominated by the rise and fall of totalitarian, communist tyranny, and thus by repression and resistance. society and everyday life came into view only as far as they provided examples of repression or resistance. the east german state was denied any legitimacy, and even its anti-fascist doctrine was depicted as a deceptive, hypocritical instrument for justifying communist dictatorship (beattie 2005a). easterners thus were not only supposed to internalise uncritically the history of the portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 8 beattie learning from the germans? federal republic (apparently through osmosis), but were also to accept this polarised, bleak image of their former state. whoever pointed to any positive aspects to life in the gdr ran the risk of being branded an undemocratic apologist for stalinism or a nostalgic irredentist. even the heritage of the east german opposition and the ‘peaceful revolution’ of 1989—which eastern and western anti-communists often invoked as the only positive eastern contribution to the unified country—remained marginal in national commemorative activity, as suggested by the absence until the eleventh hour of an eastern representative in plans to celebrate the tenth anniversary of unification.7 the crude division of the eastern and western pasts into black and white respectively reflected the wider balance of power of reunification, and could do little to contribute to integration. on the contrary, it contributed to widespread impressions of western ‘colonisation’ und ‘victor’s justice,’ however one-sided and misleading such notions were (beattie 2005a). this rough, but by no means inaccurate, sketch of the dominant post-unification treatment of germany’s postwar history applies to public memory until at least the late 1990s. clearly, similar treatment would hardly be advisable for europe. scholarly research, however, assumed more moderate and subtle approaches from the mid-1990s, even if it shared (and in part continues to share) some of the same tendencies. during the era of division, communism had been largely written out of german history in the west, all the better to condemn the gdr as an illegitimate soviet import without german roots. the presence of german communists in the western occupation zones after the war and in western state parliaments into the 1950s was largely forgotten. since unification, much has been written about the gdr’s fixation on its larger, more prosperous western rival, but the formative role played by the eastern ‘ever present other’ (weitz 2001) in west germany’s political, economic, social and cultural development is only slowly being addressed (kleßmann 2001; faulenbach 1999). all too often, the gdr has been cast merely as an unfortunate failure that was doomed from the start, the shadow to the sunny side of the federal republic’s success story, while the latter can, it seems, still be told with few if any references to the former (schildt 1999; jarausch 2004a). historians who seek to do justice to the double past by noting conceptual complexities, such as the ‘asymmetrically interconnected parallel history,’ 7 on this point compare mcadams (1997, 307) with meckel (2001). portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 9 beattie learning from the germans? have remained a minority.8 even if their scholarly influence is considerable, the impact they have on public memory is surely limited. without expecting the same degree of sophistication from public memory as from scholarship, such perspectives would most likely have been more conducive to integration than the dominant black-and-white images that reflected and legitimised the fundamental asymmetries of unification. european public memory of the east-west division could profit from considering not just the best scholarship on that history, but also the german precedent. the asymmetrical relationships and conceptual difficulties of german debates about postwar division have numerous european parallels. as in the german case, the east needs to be incorporated into a self-satisfied western narrative that takes the western part for the whole and treats its history as an unproblematic success story of ever increasing prosperity and integration. in both cases the contingency and historicity of the eastwest border is often forgotten. gregor thum (2004, 4-5) has pointed convincingly to the need to address ‘blank spots in the history of european integration’ in relation to eastern europe. prominent among these are the frequent equation of western europe, or indeed the eu, with europe per se, and the erroneous notion of central and eastern european countries’ ‘return to europe’ since 1989, as though they had somehow left the continent (gerner 1999). crucial to a more inclusive history and conceptualisation of european integration, according to thum (2004), is the recognition, first, that eastern europe and europeans were central to pre-cold war notions of europe and european integration and, secondly, that post-1945 western integration was possible and necessary precisely because of the continent’s division. westerners’ failure to recognise that their freedom, prosperity and integration came at the expense of eastern europe’s forced integration under soviet rule (judt 2005, 242, 303-4) is a continuing source of bitterness for many easterners. this was demonstrated by the president of the republic of latvia, dr vaira vike-freiberga (2005), in advance of the celebrations to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of world war two in europe. the ubiquitous notion of ‘liberation’ in 1945 was, and remains, problematic and controversial in eastern europe (including east germany), a fact that must be considered in narratives of european 8 asymmetrisch verflochtene parallelgeschichte (kleßmann 1993; bauerkämper et al., 1998; niethammer 1999; faulenbach 1999; kleßmann 2005). portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 10 beattie learning from the germans? history.9 the self-satisfied and myopic slogan of the european union (2007a) for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the treaty of rome—‘together since 1957’— suggests that more critical reflection is required in this regard.10 both contexts display insufficient readiness to differentiate within the relevant ‘east.’ popular generalisations about easterners (and westerners) were counterproductive in germany, and the east-west dichotomy served to obscure vital distinctions among representatives, supporters, critics, victims and opponents of the east german regime. evaluations of the gdr were determined more by ideological and political beliefs than by geography, and there were both ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ with the end of the cold war and unification.11 this also applies to eastern europe. it is important, as judt (2000, 307; 2005, 202) stresses, to consider divergent experiences, attitudes and memories within eastern european countries, as well as those between them (troebst 2006). the historical activities of the council of europe suggest such awareness and a degree of openness to multiple perspectives, although pluralism is frequently conceived in ethnonational rather than ideological terms (stradling 2003). the ideological blinkeredness of much public memory and some scholarship in germany also has european equivalents. in scholarly and public depictions of eastern european history or histories, one often finds the familiar reduction of the past to that of the rule and crimes of the totalitarian party-state. complex histories are reduced to a ‘black book’ (courtois et al., 1999). simple dichotomies between democracy and dictatorship abound. where, for example, western european school history textbooks move beyond the absolute dichotomies of the cold war conflict between the superpowers, they perhaps mention perestroika, while many texts in post-communist states simply externalise and demonise communism, which appears exclusively as a soviet imposition without any indigenous roots. the ‘end of history’ seems to have 9 german proponents of the totalitarian paradigm also stress that only the western part of the country was liberated in 1945 (möller 1995; knabe 2005). the notion of liberation has more complex implications in germany than in countries occupied by the nazis, being potentially either self-exculpatory or, when contrasted with the notion of defeat, more critical (frei 2005). 10 the german language version of the website of the european union (2007b) provides an excellent example of the equation of the eu with europe, stating—where other languages merely call for ‘europe’ to be celebrated—that ‘europa is having its birthday’ (europa hat geburtstag). 11 the superimposition of the east-west issue was not least the result of pds efforts to redefine itself as a, indeed the only, eastern party, and to depict critical views of the east german past as emanating from the west (oswald 2004; beattie 2005a). portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 11 beattie learning from the germans? made substantial discussion of socialism, marxism, leninism, communism or capitalism virtually redundant for european history textbooks, and society and the social question are largely ignored (pingel 2000).12 how people lived under communist regimes is not explored, and neither is how they received and responded to official ideological dictates, for example in the realm of public memory (karge n.d). differentiated and nuanced depictions are rare, and the historicisation of communism appears to be more advanced in germany than further east (kolář 2006; pingel 2000, 45). it remains difficult to assess whether rather diffuse european public memory regarding the history of the cold war resembles or avoids the extremes of the rigorous anticommunism found in germany and numerous eastern european countries. a resolution of the parliamentary assembly of the council of europe (2006) on the ‘need for international condemnation of crimes of totalitarian communist regimes,’ employs a familiar uncompromising vocabulary. the resolution provides an unspecific catalogue of communist crimes, and yet it also acknowledges that communist parties have made (similarly unspecified) contributions to democracy. the resolution could hardly be said to contribute to a complex understanding of the past, even if it has symbolic value in indicating that communist crimes have not been forgotten. there is perhaps even less awareness at european level than there was in germany that cold war ideological conflicts also ran through western societies and that at the end of the conflict there were, therefore, also ‘losers’ in the west. although the black book of communism (courtois et al. 1999) is rightly interpreted not least as a criticism of the western european left, communism in the west is barely mentioned in discussions about developing a common european memory (rousso 2004, 1; morgan n.d.). as in germany, the issue is often treated as one that only concerns the east. a european discussion of communism in the west would most likely be more productive and less ideologically confrontational than the german debates, which in large part remained at the level of a highly moralised (neo-)conservative reckoning with the western left. after all, the histories of communist parties in france and italy are significantly 12 here the intensity of german attention to the east german past in school and university curricula and texts is rather atypical, although the gdr boom of the early and mid 1990s died down by the end of the decade (pasternack 2001; hüttmann 2004; arnswald 2004). portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 12 beattie learning from the germans? different from the smaller and more marginal communist party of germany (kpd) of the first postwar decade, or from the german communist party (dkp) of the 1970s, and are hardly reducible to their manipulation by moscow (or east berlin). genuinely transnational perspectives on interactions and permeations across the iron curtain (or within the soviet bloc) appear to be similarly necessary and difficult to achieve as their german equivalents, even if the roll of eastern europe or russia as the ‘other’ in the construction of (western) europe is already better understood than its german-german counterpart (karge n.d). a shared memory of europe’s divided cold war past that does justice not only to manifold historical complexities and interactions but also to divergent contemporary perspectives is hardly in sight. if indeed the pursuit of that goal is deemed necessary, it could benefit both from considerable achievements in the fields of german and european historical scholarship, as well as from the significant failures of german public memory after unification. a european ‘historians’ dispute’? the notion of the usefulness for ‘europe’ of german experiences in dealing with complicated pasts refers generally to the handling of the ‘double’ totalitarian past of nazism and communism, rather than that of the double postwar past of democracy and dictatorship. the foregoing discussion of the modalities of the latter is nevertheless necessary not only because of the obvious, if often overlooked, parallels between the german and european division into east and west, but also because the treatment of nazism and communism cannot be understood without it. the debate about the two totalitarianisms required the demonisation of the gdr, as discussed above, while the black-and-white approach to the two postwar states played a significant role in attitudes to the public memory of national socialism in postwar and post-unification germany. there is much to be said for a generally positive assessment of the german handling of the double past of nazism and communism, especially in comparison with contrasting examples from some eastern european countries (judt 2005, 824-29). yet a degree of caution is necessary. jan-werner müller (2007) rightly questions the suitability of the german model of ‘coming to terms with the past’ (vergangenheitsbewältigung) for european export. indeed, whether it can be characterised as a model is also open to question. portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 13 beattie learning from the germans? the postulated exemplary character of german public debates about the double past for europe rests, in part, on their misrepresentation or misunderstanding. it is often assumed that the 1990s saw the relatively straightforward and final establishment of a consensus in germany that regards the holocaust as at once historically unique and of singular paramount importance for german public memory. the construction of the memorial for the murdered jews of europe in the heart of berlin appears to support this assumption (müller 2001, 268-69; niven 2002). a common implication is that a similar development must now take place at european level. a variant on this view is the suggestion by judt that eastern european countries require their own ‘historians’ dispute,’ along the lines of that experienced by west germany in the mid 1980s (2000, 315). this argument implies incorrectly that the famous debate finally settled the thorny questions of the historical comparability, and of the relative significance for contemporary public memory, of nazism and communism. it overlooks the renewal of the dispute after 1989, when the earlier apparent victory of the left was vigorously recontested by the right. rather revealingly, too, judt’s suggestion ignores the perspectives of those who lived under communism, because the historians’ dispute was a west german affair. accounts that suggest that the same outcome—the holocaust’s historical singularity and its primacy in public memory—was achieved in the course of the 1990s are similarly problematic. they underestimate the diversity of opinion, the extent of conflict, and the fragility of the consensus that ostensibly emerged. in fact, german debates and their outcomes were highly ambivalent. on the one hand, both in and beyond the commissions of inquiry, eastern dissidents and victims of communism and western conservatives promoted the totalitarian paradigm (once again) as a quasi-official doctrine. they also sought to minimise differences between the mass crimes and the manifold forms of military and political violence in the twentieth century, and to commemorate all of their victims together. such tendencies represented a revision of the apparent outcome of the west german historians’ dispute, and were only in part successful (beattie 2006). on the other hand, the recognition of the singularity of the holocaust of european jews, and of the need to compensate and commemorate its victims, was raised to unparalleled normative status in the course of the delegitimisation of official east german anti-fascism (and not only in that context). these apparently contradictory positions—challenging the holocaust’s singularity and portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 14 beattie learning from the germans? primacy, and castigating the gdr for not acknowledging them—were sometimes advocated by the same people. in the hearing protocols and the reports of the commissions of inquiry one finds support both for the equation of ‘red’ and ‘brown’ regimes and the equal standing of their victims, and for the insistence on the inadmissibility of such equations (beattie 2005a). thus the course and result of the renewed historians’ dispute was not as unambiguous as is often assumed. commentators who suggest that europe could learn from the germans in these matters often have in mind the apparently satisfactory result of german debates. they thus ignore the fact that such debates are (and must be) contested again and again. indeed, they seem to construe, or perhaps want to draw, a ‘final line’ (schlussstrich) under the old debates about whether a final line should be drawn under the past. however, the place of nazi crimes in german public memory is subject to continual renegotiation. its alleged primacy was challenged by adherents of totalitarianism in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, and has been repeatedly disputed by those who want more recognition of german victims of the second world war and its immediate aftermath (beattie 2006). the vergegenwärtigung (recollection and making-present) of various pasts must always occur anew. moreover, the ensuing debates are to be welcomed, rather than abhorred, if public memory is not to become irrelevant or ossify through ritualisation. the german experiences outlined here can and should be regarded as a model for ‘europe’ only to a limited extent. yet the form of german debates—carried out as an open dispute about the interpretation and meaning of multiple pasts, at least in part in tandem and in communication with scholarly research—is worthy of imitation. most useful in terms of content is the guiding principle that gradually established itself in german commemorative politics in the course of the 1990s, and that enjoys support across the political mainstream: ‘nazi crimes must not be relativised by the confrontation with the crimes of stalinism. stalinist crimes must not be trivialised through reference to the nazi crimes’ (deutscher bundestag 1999, i: 614).13 disputes continue about the relative weighting of, and the degree of similarity between, the two totalitarian regimes and their macro crimes, but largely on the basis of this consensus 13 die ns-verbrechen dürfen durch die auseinandersetzung mit den verbrechen des stalinismus nicht relativiert werden. die stalinistischen verbrechen dürfen durch den hinweis auf die ns-verbrechen nicht bagatellisiert werden. portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 15 beattie learning from the germans? (beattie 2006). intellectual or political complacency should not lead us either to forget that this minimal consensus was not predetermined, or to ignore that it may be challenged in the future. the post-unification treatment of the approaches to the nazi past of the two postwar german states is instructive here. a broad coalition strongly criticized east german anti-fascism not just for its top-down character, but also for its insufficient attention to the holocaust. both criticisms were justified. and yet the common conclusion that inadequate and phoney east german public memory had now to be brought into line with the laudable and authentic approach of the west was highly problematic. some western conservative politicians and historians used the critique of the east to glorify western compensation policies, and to iron out the conflict-ridden history of the western confrontation with german guilt and responsibility. in the process, the acceptance of the holocaust as the central event of german history was projected back into the 1950s. conveniently forgotten in these critiques was that the key aspects of federal republican public memory, which now enjoyed normative status, had developed as recently as the 1980s or indeed the 1990s. in fact, a lack of attention to the holocaust, and a preference for concentrating on one’s own suffering or anti-nazi resistance, had characterised not just the gdr, but also the west at least until the 1960s (beattie 2005a). indeed, these characteristics were found in almost every european society for much of the postwar era, and not simply in eastern europe into the 1990s (lagrou 2000; judt 2005, 804-20; lebow et al., 2006). recent attempts to transform the holocaust into the eu’s foundational myth thus rewrite and distort the historical record in similar (if perhaps less partisan) fashion to the efforts of german conservatives after unification. in contrast with the desire to prevent a further war among european countries, the genocide was of no significance for early western integration. that this is often overlooked from a presentist perspective contributes to a widespread sense of western superiority (joerges 2005, 247-50; berger n.d.). it renders ‘backward’ eastern europeans who (still) utilise the totalitarian paradigm or challenge the holocaust’s uniqueness. this was evident in the interpretation of the 2004 conflict between salomon korn of the central council of jews in germany and the latvian eu commissioner sandra kalniete—over her insistence on the equal criminality of communism and nazism—as a conflict between west and east respectively (jarausch 2004b, 4-5). in fact, portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 16 beattie learning from the germans? the difference of opinion that arose exists not (only) between east and west but within each ‘camp.’ like its german counterpart, the inaccurate east-west dichotomy legitimises pressure on the eastern side to conform to a seemingly unquestionable but, in fact, contested western norm (joerges 2005, 247). in the process, it is often forgotten that the historical and symbolic foundations of the european community were, are and will continue to be, subject to change. however problematic its backward projection may be, holocaust memory has assumed considerable significance for the identity of many europeans and for attempts to cultivate a european identity. for example, in 2002 the council of europe (2007b) decided to introduce a continent-wide day of remembrance, albeit with the flexibility for individual countries to select the most appropriate date. it is noteworthy that most of western and northern europe, including germany, commemorates the liberation of auschwitz, other nazi concentration camps, or the relevant country itself. only (but not universally) in central-eastern and eastern europe do the chosen dates bear direct relation to repression or crimes, and thus a connection to the perpetrators and not (just) the victims is created. indeed, ‘cosmopolitan memory’ of the holocaust generally focuses on the victims, and de-contextualisation, de-territorialisation and universalisation are its preconditions and consequences (levy & sznaider 2002, 100-3). instead of engaging (self-)critically with the particularities of the history of bystanders, accomplices and perpetrators in many european countries, the much sought-after common memory glides over past divisions and does not go beyond the affect of betroffenheit (consternation). it thus militates against understanding the holocaust’s specific historical causes, course and consequences, despite the appeal of the stockholm international forum on the holocaust (2001) to address precisely these dimensions. the example of the council of europe’s day of remembrance should not taken to be representative of the various national public memories, but it nevertheless casts into doubt the frequently assumed german or western european entitlement and suitability to assume the role of instructor for eastern europe or ‘europe’ collectively on matters of holocaust memory. conclusion in contrast with the frequently assumed exemplary status of recent german experiences, i have argued for a more critical and nuanced understanding of unified germany’s portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 17 beattie learning from the germans? handling of its complicated history. one should not be content with focusing merely on the (occasionally misrepresented) result of debates, but must also consider their inherent ambivalences and contingency. a fuller understanding, including of possible european parallels, demands consideration not only of the repeatedly renewed dispute over the appropriate place of communism and nazism in public memory, but also of the handling of the german division in the cold war. indeed, both the complex course of discussion about the precedence either of totalitarianism or of holocaust singularity, and the highly asymmetrical handling of the postwar past, cast doubt on suggestions of a german recipe for successful integrative public memory. if any lessons can be drawn for europe, they are not necessarily positive. the german experience after 1990 demonstrates above all the necessity, but also the difficulty, of multiple perspectives, self-criticism and self-reflection. only conscious efforts to minimise the political and symbolic disparities of the integration process offer the prospect of avoiding the neglect of diverse eastern (and western) experiences, memories and priorities and their assimilation with a falsely glorified western norm. oversimplified western success stories and eastern horror stories alike are to be avoided. the european doctrine of ‘unity in diversity’ guarantees a degree of plurality that was lacking in the nation-state context of germany. nevertheless, it is essential to address differences and conflicts not only between nations, but also within them. complexity is necessary if divergent experiences and processes in different contexts— let alone their mutual interactions and interdependencies—are to be addressed. sensitivity to historicity and contingency can also help reduce entrenched assumptions of western superiority and eastern backwardness. the projection of contemporary values and understandings of the past back into one’s own history does little for one’s credibility or readiness for a genuine dialogue, and reduces the past to myth. it also fails to recognise that processing, interpreting and appropriating the past never ceases, but is constantly renewed. in germany in the course of the 1990s it gradually became evident that east-west differences would not quickly disappear and that integration—above all of differing understandings of history—would not be ‘achieved’ in the immediate future (hilsberg 1996). it was also recognised, more slowly and less universally, that this did not threaten the nation’s ‘inner unity’ or democracy (beattie 2007). such lessons hardly portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 18 beattie learning from the germans? need to be learnt on the european stage. expansion and integration proceed in full consciousness of divergent, conflicting memories. yet the asymmetries of memories and of intellectual capital remain similar. openness to differences of opinion and possibilities for communication can always be expanded. in light of the heated debates in germany in the early 1990s, the creation of a minimal consensus against the trivialisation of communist crimes and the relativisation of nazi crimes is remarkable. it was only possible in dialogue. it did not resolve every question or settle every argument. yet it constitutes an advance precisely for that reason. opposing perspectives may be painful or obnoxious but, in trying to learn from the ‘bitter experiences’ of history and overcome ‘past divisions,’ they are far better included and addressed than ignored or excluded. the phrases of the preamble to the eu constitution are vague and unspecific. but in so far as they recall the difficult past at all and stand in contrast to the myth of ‘reunited’ europe, they are to be welcomed, particularly if they provoke debate. reference list arnswald, u. 2004, zum stellenwert des themas ddr-geschichte in den lehrplänen der deutschen bundesländer, stiftung zur aufarbeitung der sed-diktatur, berlin [online]. available: http://www.stiftung-aufarbeitung.de/dokumentation/onlinearchiv.php [accessed 28 mar. 2007]. bauerkämper, a., sabrow, m., & stöver, b. 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germany, 1949-1968, ed. h. schissler, princeton university press, princeton, 219-32. wüstenberg, r. k. 2004, die politische dimension der versöhnung: eine theologische studie zum umgang mit schuld nach den systemumbrüchen in südafrika und deutschland, gütersloher verlagshaus, gütersloh. zens, m. 2000, ‘truism and taboo: the rhetoric of the berlin republic,’ in political thought and german reunification: the new german ideology, eds. h. williams, c. wight and n. kapferer, macmillan, basingstoke, 64-95. portal vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 22 http://www.holocaustforum.gov.se/pdfandforms/deklarat..pdf andrew h. beattie, university of technology, sydney reference list capitalizing asian studies: capitalizing asian studies: critical scholarship and the production of knowledge in a globalizing world tim oakes university of colorado at boulder producing knowledge in an era of globalization: two examples i want to begin with two examples from the united states of ‘capitalizing’ asian studies. the first example is a project called ‘asia in the schools.’ funded by the freeman foundation and coordinated by the new york-based asia society, asia in the schools is a laudable push toward better k-12 education about asia in the us. a tour of the project’s web site in 2001 suggested that the issue driving its mission of ‘preparing young americans for the demands of a complex global order in which asia looms large’ seems to be this: is america ready for the challenge of the asia market?1 or, we may have won the cold war, but are we prepared to win the ‘pacific century?’ or, is american capitalism prepared to meet the demands of a robust, wto sanctioned china market? thus, the project’s initial web site tracked asia-related curricula in each us state, correlated with state-level data on trade with asia—presumably as a way of evaluating whether states were matching their asian market capacity with adequate education about asia. now, i don’t want to pick on this project: i think it’s an excellent project, and i think we’re lucky to have the freeman foundation around to fund it. i do want to recognize, however, that the production of knowledge is never neutral, and that asia in the schools seeks to produce knowledge within a broader context in which us economic interests in asia make certain kinds of knowledge about asia valuable. the second example of ‘capitalizing’ asian studies is rather more literal than the first: in the 1990s, the us association for asian studies (aas) had accumulated a significant portfolio in stock holdings, much of which was international. in 1999 alone the aas 1 in 2001, asia in the schools could be found at http://www.asiaintheschools.org/. the current site is http://www.internationaled.org/. a complete report on the initiative can be found at http://www.internationaled.org/report.htm. see also http://www.askasia.org/. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 1 http://www.asiaintheschools.org/ http://www.internationaled.org/ http://www.internationaled.org/report.htm http://www.askasia.org/ investment portfolio grew by some $857,000 (duus 2000, pp. 6-7). this raises some particularly bothersome questions for some of the aas membership. during the asian financial crisis, when indonesia’s economy (and a good many of its poorer citizens) lay dying from the ‘drive-by shooting’ of derivatives speculators, causing overnight an 86% drop in the value of its stock market, us stock values increased by 31% (kristof & wyatt 1999).2 so us asianists might feel rather uncomfortable about the possibility that some of the remarkable success that their organization’s holdings have enjoyed have not been so innocently realized. according to a recent letter by aas president peter duus, the association maintains a ‘socially conscious’ approach to its investments on a case-by-case basis, but socially conscious investing is clearly secondary to assuring the ‘maximum long term performance of the aas investment portfolio’ (duus 2000). it is probably worth mentioning, too, that in this same letter, duus quotes deng xiaoping’s rhetorical remonstration to his fellow countrymen to throw off their shackles of egalitarianism. ‘to get rich is glorious,’ deng and duus tell us. now, if the association’s pursuit of wealth must be legitimized by a man who oversaw china’s transformation over the past 20 years into one of the world’s most unequal societies—not to mention his army’s massacre of anti-corruption protesters in 1989—this is indeed troubling. but i don’t mean to pick on the aas either. the concept of ‘socially conscious’ investing is, after all, highly suspect, and may be nothing more than a panacea for our collective liberal guilt. but the issue points to a larger concern that i want to explore in this paper: not only is knowledge production never neutral, but it is intimately tied up with broader political economic processes in often very mundane ways. in some respects, these are two examples of what appadurai has called ‘anxieties of the global’: the first case suggests an anxiety over meeting the challenge of globalization, while the other is a moral anxiety over the ethics of globalization. ‘everyone in the academy,’ appadurai observes, ‘is anxious to avoid seeming to be a mere publicist of the gigantic machineries that celebrate globalization’ (2000, p.1). and yet, we strive to make our knowledgeable voices heard among the hum of global media churning out ticker-tape 2 this is not to insist on a direct correlation between us stock portfolio increases and asia’s market demise, but rather to illustrate how the booms and busts of world markets are regional rather than global. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 2 parades of information; we strive to meet the challenge of globalization just as we distance ourselves from it. these anxieties arise as the result of a broader set of changes both in the global political economy, and in the nature of area studies scholarship. my goal here is to discuss these changes in parallel in order to clarify the relationship between the two. i’ll start with the shift in the nature of area studies, as demonstrated by shifting funding priorities. this shift, i will argue below, mirrors a larger shift in global political economy, in which the scales at which geographical knowledge is produced are increasingly in flux. scholarship is subsequently left scrambling to both understand this shift and make its knowledge production somehow relevant and valuable in an arena in which knowledge about asia is being produced and diffused from an increasingly diverse array of sources, in which area studies scholars are perhaps increasingly marginalized. the shift in area studies by now most area studies scholars have come to realize that the terrain of our field has been shifting away from producing knowledge about areas as coherent and bounded units, to a focus on processes that increasingly link areas together. notwithstanding the bush administration’s efforts to re-imagine the world as fundamentally divided along the age-old fault-lines of religion and morality, funding imperatives for area studies have shifted from cold war geopolitics to concerns over trade relations, globalization, developing markets and market institutions in post-socialist states.3 within the american aas, this shift has been recognized for some time, as evidenced, for example, by a presidential panel in 1997 on the ‘futures of asian studies.’ (http://www.aasianst.org/viewpoints/futures.htm). other institutions have recognized it as well. for example, the ‘regional worlds’ project at the university of chicago seeks to replace what appadurai refers to as ‘trait’ geographies with ‘process’ geographies, thereby infusing area studies with the global processes that link world regions together, generating imaginative new ‘pictures of the world’ 3 while the september 11, 2001 attacks on the us resulted in a brief revival of official calls to continue developing “area specialists” in the middle east, the so-called “war on terrorism” has yet to mark a reversal of the shift in area studies towards globalization and integration. for a related discussion, see wang (2002). portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 3 (http://www.regionalworlds.uchicago.edu). similarly, the ford foundation has made a now well-known shift away from areas per se and toward innovative boundary-crossing work, sponsoring, for example, special ‘boundary-crossing’ panels at annual aas meetings. and the focus of the social science research council (ssrc) is now ‘to understand how the culture, history, and language of a local context shape its interaction with, for example, the evolution of market institutions and engagement with international market forces’ (heginbotham 1994, p. 37). as the ssrc sees it, scholarship should be ‘context-sensitive,’ and thus not committed to traditionally received ‘areas’ or countries. thus, sub-national regions, and supranational regions are now important too, as are perspectives in which ‘global-local processes’ come into focus (abraham and kassimir 1997). ‘the geographic scope of area studies programs will need to be broader and more highly diversified than in the past. contexts will be defined less exclusively by political/military/security criteria and more by a mix that includes economic, trade, cultural, legal, educational, and communications criteria’ (heginbotham 1994, pp. 37-38). it is increasingly recognized that ‘areas’ are highly differentiated, requiring greater sensitivity to local context. this shift has not occurred without a great deal of reflexive concern among area studies scholars. there was some concern expressed at a joint meeting between the ssrc and the american council of learned societies (acls) in april 1997 over whether the international program in area studies funding was reinforcing an ‘ideology of globalization,’ in which history was being marginalized (abraham and kassimir 1997, p. 28). this concern can also be read as one over the increasing interest in and concern over the production of geographical knowledge. thus, an unstated theme underlying the shift in area studies has been the uncritical enshrining of a new set of geographical categories for knowledge production: spatial interaction, diffusion, transnationalism, global-local, region, locality, and the like. cumings (1997) has argued that the new geography of area studies is marked by a striking (and surprising) lack of political economy in general, and attention to ‘the global corporation’ in particular. such a lack represents an unwillingness or an inability to portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 4 reflect on what he finds most troubling in the relationship between area studies scholarship and national political and economic interests: ‘to put a subtle relationship all too crudely, power and money have found their subject first, and shaped fields of inquiry accordingly’ (1997, p. 9). it is now clear that cold war security concerns not only provided the major policy and funding push for the development of area studies following world war ii, but also seriously compromised the scholarly integrity of many area studies programs in the us through their direct links to national security institutions such as the oss, cia and the fbi. what is generally less clear, however, is that the current shift in area studies scholarship mirrors a related shift in the broader political economy of the world system and the changing situation of the united states within that system. today we may look back on cold war area studies scholarship and lament from a safe historical distance the blatant compromises of academic freedom that often occurred. we perhaps lack a similar reflexivity, however, regarding the broader political economic conditions for the contemporary construction of area studies knowledge, a point noted by cumings: ‘perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the new ssrc/acls restructuring and the apparent new direction of the major foundations is the absence of any reference to the basic motivation for so many of the new tendencies in the 1990s world that they hope to adapt themselves to, namely, the global corporation’ (1997, p. 26). area studies, according to cumings, should remain focused on political economy to redress this disappointment. the commodification of knowledge thorough and bracing as cumings’s critique is, it falls short of interrogating the political economic processes that shape geographical knowledge at the beginning of the 21st century. these processes are part of what rafael calls a distinctly ‘north american style of knowing,’ one that is ‘fundamentally dependent on, precisely to the extent that it is critical of, the conjunction of corporate funding, state support, and the flexible managerial systems of university governance characteristic of liberal pluralism’ (rafael 1994, p. 41). what is happening in area studies is reflected at the larger scale of the north american university itself. that is, a general trend toward the corporatization of the university and portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 5 the commodification of higher education (mitchell 1999; robins 2000). readings describes the trend thus: ‘the university is becoming a transnational bureaucratic corporation, either tied to transnational instances of government such as the european union or functioning independently, by analogy, with a transnational corporation’ (1996, p. 3). this trend has been succinctly captured in such brave-new-world terminology as ‘digital diploma mills,’ the ‘knowledge universe’ (convicted junk-bond trader michael milken’s new business venture), the ‘virtual university,’ and some of the more tongue-incheek versions: ‘mccollege’ and the ‘apm’ or ‘automatic professor machine’ (noble 1997). facing state-mandated budget cuts, universities increasingly turn to corporate partnerships, many of which are not fully disclosed and thus raise serious questions about academic freedom and the ownership of intellectual property (mitchell 2001). not surprisingly, the transformation of education in the digital age has become the policy objective of state governments throughout the us. in washington state, governor gary locke formed a panel in 1998, called the 2020 commission, to consider the future of education in the state (mitchell 1999). the panel included ‘21 of the state’s best and brightest community leaders,’ not one of which was a university teacher. rather the panel included ceos of weyerhaueser company, costco, and many other corporate interests. the panel advocated a shift in thinking about higher education, in which digital distance learning would streamline bloated university budgets and staff, where universities would be held accountable for their ‘output’ and where students would become ‘customers’ in a competitive education marketplace. this system of ‘flexible education’ mirrors a broader political economy of ‘flexible specialization’ in late capitalism. indeed, robins (2000) has argued that the virtual university represents less a technological change in education than a changing political economy of education associated with the forces of globalization. robins sees universities increasingly serving the function of providing skilled workers for the needs of transnational capital. this perspective has been echoed by readings (1996), who has argued that the university as we know it is a defunct institution that was created to serve the national interests of the 19th century state. this ‘cultural university’ of the 19th and 20th centuries is being replaced by the ‘technological university,’ the ‘corporate portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 6 university,’ and the ‘university of excellence’ of the 21st century, in which national knowledge is replaced with ‘dereferentialized knowledge.’ readings calls it nothing short of ‘rethinking the categories that have governed intellectual life for over two hundred years’ (p. 169). nor is this a call for a more multicultural or cultural studies-oriented curriculum, for these too often serve to merely legitimize the corporate commodification of knowledge, emphasizing hybridity and transnationalism in ways that strikingly parallel the vision statements of companies like microsoft, nike, and coca-cola (dirlik 1994; mitchell 1997). for readings, cultural studies ‘presents a vision of culture that is appropriate for the age of excellence (readings 1996, p. 11; see a similar critique in wang 2002). it should not be surprising, then, that even area studies institutions like the aas maintain a substantial stock portfolio. scholarly institutions need to be players if they are to survive. but the question is not whether the aas, or universities, should or should not be in the business of international investing. rather, the question is how do we situate our scholarship in a world where the political economy of knowledge production is undergoing immense transformation. it is this question of political economy, raised earlier by cumings, that lies at the core of my argument here. for all the anxiety over the shifts in area studies funding priorities, the futures of the aas and so on, there remains very little sustained analytical interrogation of the role of capital in shaping the knowledge universes that we inhabit. scaling geographical knowledge in addressing this question, i want to focus on the production of geographical knowledge, for if the shift in area studies mirrors a transformation in the global political economy where the scales at which geographical knowledge is produced have themselves shifted, then even non-area related disciplinary approaches in humanities and even social sciences are themselves being spatialized. ever since foucault (1996, p. 22) proposed that we now live ‘in the epoch of space,’ ‘mapping’ has become the metaphor of the times in ‘cuttingedge’ scholarship. the increasing interest in global-local relationships, in traditional areas differentiated into more context-specific regions and localities, in a borderless world, in portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 7 globalization, in the progressive potential of the internet, world wide web, and multiculturalism—all of these derive in part from capital’s own need to produced new spatial scales of accumulation and, thus, associated scales for the production of geographical knowledge (brenner 1997; cartier 2001; harvey 1995). shifting scales of knowledge represent capital’s incessant efforts to abstract from the actual social conditions of production, such that they become mystified into absolute categories of culture, ethnicity, locality, nation, or region (comaroff & comaroff 2000). geographers in particular have been engaged in a sustained critique of what has been called capital’s ‘production of scale,’ and this work offers a basis from which to critically interrogate the production of knowledge in today’s area studies fields (smith 1986, pp. 57-78). of course, a critique of capital’s production of scale is simply part of the more general theoretical argument, ‘that scale is neither an ontological given and a priori definable geographical territory nor a political neutral discursive strategy in the construction of narratives’ (swyngedouw 1997, p. 140). this is because different processes produce different scales of activity and meaning. scales of processes that we find important (the local, the global, the regional, whatever) ‘are the result, the product of processes, of sociospatial change’ that is ‘always heterogeneous, conflictual, and contested. scale becomes the arena and moment, both discursively and materially, where sociospatial power relations are contested and compromises are negotiated and regulated. scale, therefore, is both the result and the outcome of social struggle for power and control’ (p. 140). events such as the 1997 collapse of the baht in thailand are the result of innumerable scaled processes coming together at a particular location and time. we should be thinking of these scaled processes and how they come together in space and time to affect disruptive change. rather than merely injecting the political economy of the global corporation into our scholarship of spatial processes, then, a critical area studies needs to be focusing on how, and in whose interests, scales of knowledge are being produced and contested. to put it another way, the production of scale raises two important issues of concern to area studies fields. most obvious is that appadurai’s ‘process’ geographies make a lot of portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 8 sense, affording a new look at the ‘regional worlds’ in which different geographical understandings are formulated as people encounter the increased flows and disjunctures of the global economy. rather than reifying areas and regions, we should be focusing on ‘the struggles between individuals and social groups through whose actions scales and their nested articulations become produced as temporary standoffs in a perpetual transformation of sociospatial power struggle’ (swyngedouw 1997, p. 141). the other issue raised by the production of scale is that despite the sense that ‘process’ geographies make, it is perhaps more important to realize that scaled processes occur at all scales, that they are unruly, but that they are more often than not dominated by power whereby particular scales emerge to displace others. the regional, it turns out, tends to be one of those scales dominated by power. thus, the ‘process’ of capital, wilson and dirlik (1995, p. 6) observe, has been actively producing the scale of the ‘pacific rim’ as a ‘coherent region of economic exchange,’ and thereby actively repressing those scales of knowledge produced by less hegemonic interests: those of inter-island cultural and social interaction and differentiation. (see also cumings 1993). this is something about which appadurai seems to have much less to say, and which brings us to harvey’s recent observations regarding the production of geographical knowledge and our role as critical academics. geographical knowledge, harvey observes, is very difficult to pin down in theoretical terms. perhaps this explains some of the defensiveness of the area studies tradition with regard to theory: ‘geography is an empirical form of knowledge that is marked as much by contingency and particularity as by the universality that can be derived from first principles’ (harvey 2000, pp. 534-35; see also ong 1999, pp.10-11). this contingent and particularistic quality of geographical knowledge can be disturbing to other forms of rational understanding, such that ‘the insertion of space (let alone of tangible geographies) into any social theory … is always deeply disruptive of its central propositions and derivations … this disruptive effect makes space the favored metaphor in the postmodernist attack…upon all forms of universality’ (harvey 2000 p. 539). from the view of philosophy, this is profoundly ironic, because it was space, after all, that was enshrined by kant as the ultimate category of universalist thinking in the first place (casey 1997). but in fact geography is fragmented, synthetic, unruly and subject to portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 9 appropriation by any and all; it is a form of knowledge difficult to contain. this is why the line is often blurred between geography as a source of resistance to power—for example in the turn to local knowledge and diversity in the face of the homogenizing forces of globalized mass production—and geography as a source of legitimacy for all forms of bigotry and the exclusionary politics. this latter use of geography can be seen in the turn to locality as an exclusive enclave where outsiders aren’t welcome, as in the rise of local nationalisms, anti-immigrant politics, and conservative legislation that attempts to banish the ‘outsiders’ among us: gays, lesbians, the homeless. the unruly production and appropriation of scaled geographical knowledge is perhaps most clearly illustrated these days on the world wide web, where all kinds of geographical knowledge are being produced and disseminated instantaneously. the web illustrates well the blurry lines between geographies of power, appropriation, and resistance. but despite the free-wheeling and chaotic nature of the internet, where a seemingly infinite number of spaces for the production of knowledge pop up—to use a chinese metaphor—like mushrooms after a spring rain, the production and dissemination of geographical knowledge on the web remains dominated by powerful commercial and communications interests who write a regional world in very selective ways. how, for example, is the geography of china being written on the english-language web these days? since the mid-1990s, dozens of major english language web sites devoted to disseminating information about china as a new region on the frontiers of global capitalism have sprung up. one is inside china today (ict), run by the european internet network (ein) which was founded in 1995 to update global professionals on current events and business opportunities in post-socialist central europe (http://www.einnews.com/china/). now covering some 240 countries (at last count) ein aims its sites at the world’s business elite, those seeking opportunities in the emerging markets of post-socialist states and other world regions. in the month of october, 2000, ein sites received some 6 million page views from 350,000 ‘unique users,’ 68% of whom lived in north america, 75% of whom were male, nearly half of them earning over $50,000. ict—‘a service for global professionals’—features news, with an emphasis on business news, but also offers ‘country info,’ ‘discussion chat,’ ‘dating,’ and an extensive portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 10 http://www.einnews.com/china/ online shopping department. like other sites constructing a comprehensive regional geography aimed at the global investor, ict represents itself not simply as a provider of information, but as an online ‘china community’ that inhabits the virtual space of the region it seeks to construct. ict gets plenty of competition from china online, based in chicago (http://www.chinaonline.com/default.asp). china online offers much the same businessoriented approach to china as ict, but also claims to offer its information faster than other providers. china online also used to feature an ‘entertainment and lifestyle’ site called china pop, ‘providing fresh, unique, wholesome programming to the chinesespeaking world and sponsorship opportunities to companies seeking to increase their brand building and business prospects in china.’ while this cultural side of the business has apparently been dropped, china online still ‘offers media companies high-quality content, which in turn helps them to expand viewership and increase advertising revenues.’ like ict, china online is a subscription-based service and, also like ict, counts among its subscribers many universities and educational institutions around the world. the point here is not that business-oriented web sites should not be in the business of producing geographical knowledge. rather, it is that ‘china’ has become an overdetermined geographical category, a ‘scale’ representing the convergence of capital interests. as a region, china is being produced for global consumption in many different ways, but particularly in ways that are dominated by the interests of capital. scholarship that examines china in terms of ‘process’ geographies must first and foremost acknowledge how dominant interest are at work in producing the scale at which china becomes recognizable in the first place. producing regionalism these ideas offer a critical interrogation of the shift in area studies broached at the beginning of this paper. they suggest that the shift itself is part of broader shift in the political economy of capitalism. they also suggest that the issue is not whether this shift portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 11 http://www.chinaonline.com/default.asp is a good or bad thing. rather, the issue is our recognition that we are engaged in a field of geographical knowledge production in which there are many powerful agents contributing to the restructuring of the scales in which that knowledge is expressed. as area scholars we are not ourselves particularly powerful actors in this restructuring; but that doesn’t mean we simply accept spatial restructuring as a given. nor does it mean that we must become willing contributors to dominant agents of the restructuring of geographical knowledge. in this final section i want to explore further the ways regional scales of knowledge—particularly those constructing regional cultural categories—are being restructured as part of the dynamic political economic processes transforming asia and its relation to the global economy. i focus on the region because a restructured regionalism seems to be the most obvious outcome of the shifts in area studies scholarship described above. despite the fact that the rhetoric of globalization often assumes that the global and local scales are the only ones that matter anymore, empirical analysis reveals that state territorial regulation and planning still influences the geography of global capital a great deal.4 indeed, ‘competitive advantage’ in the global economy often depends on regionally-specific factors that are created or encouraged by state practice (dicken 1998). for states, benefiting from globalization may thus entail a careful balancing between cultivating place-specific development advantages while at the same time conforming to global standards of deregulation in local labor and financial markets. one region-specific factor that states often seek to cultivate as a development advantage which does not threaten the uniform standards sought by investors is distinctive regional culture (kearns & philo 1993; lash & urry 1994; zukin 1995; dirlik 1996; peet 1997). one of the ways that territoriality remains important in a globalizing world, then, is in its demarcation of a culture region that is somehow attractive to deterritorialized capital. such attractiveness may be expressed in many ways: a culture of skilled and hardworking laborers, a culture of entrepreneurialism, or a culture of ‘traditional’ values and beliefs conducive to modernization. it is often the state’s role to actively represent regional culture in these 4 for celebrations of the demise of regional boundaries, see castells (1989) and ohmae (1990). for the counterargument, see cox (1997) and storper (1997). portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 12 terms, while seeking to erase any negative cultural images that may commonly be held about the region (morley & robins 1995). the increasing interest among business elites in the importance of regional culture reflects common assumptions held in explaining the successful ‘tigers’ and ‘dragons’ of the ‘asian economic miracle’ (gertler 1997). here, cultural factors are said to facilitate the needs of advanced, ‘flexible’ capitalism: inter-firm cooperation and collaboration, vertical disintegration in large firms, and diverse forms of outsourcing (harrison 1992; leung 1993). production, in other words, is seen as more dependent on social relations than in the past, suggesting an advantage for regions with the appropriate ‘traits,’ such as strong cultural bonds of kinship, ethnicity, language, and/or religion (kotkin 1993). a well-established literature on ‘chinese capitalism’ tends to situate the success of overseas chinese business within a discourse of time-honored ‘confucian values’ and ‘chineseness.’ (chan & chiang 1994; weidenbaum & hughes 1996). thus, explanations of chinese business networks have emphasized the kinship and native-place based practice of guanxi, or ‘connections’ (redding 1990; yang 1994). as ong (1999, p. 68) notes of these kinds of ‘trait’ geographies, ‘chinese race, culture, and economic activities have become naturalized as inseparable or even the same phenomena.’ (see also berger 1996). it is the production of the regional scale that enables such cultural coherencies to emerge. olds and yeung (1999, p. 541) have also criticized much of this work for explaining regional chinese business networks according to ‘internalized factors associated with culture and identity’ expressed at regional scales. in fact, the scale of ‘chinese capitalism’ as a regional phenomenon is highly contested and shifting. olds and yeung argue that ethnic chinese business networks are increasingly disrupted by external forces of global capital, compelling them to adopt more ‘credible’ and ‘transparent’ management practices as defined by global financial gatekeepers— those who perhaps also bookmark inside china today or china online on their web browsers. what these critiques point to is the role of ideology among state and business elites. although asian states must, in essence, ‘play by the rules or be left behind,’ they actively promote a rhetoric of cultural difference vis-à-vis the west, that adds a dynamic portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 13 dimension to their competitiveness. maintaining an ideology of regional culture serves to distinguish a territorial region, increasing its visibility in the pathways of capital, while allowing conformity with the norms of the deregulated global economy. ching also sees such regionalist projects as ideological formations. he adds that, conceiving regionalism as a discursive construct instead of an empirical reality serves better to explain the differing constructions of regionalist projects within late capitalism. political and economic rationalism alone cannot explain why asian regionalism has been, more often than not, articulated on cultural grounds rather than on grounds that are economic (as in north america) or political (as in western europe) (2000, p. 239). the answer is not simply that the regionalist discourse of ‘asian values’ or ‘chinese capitalism’ depends on an ideology of culturalism, but that such ideologies are mobilized as politics of scale, in which state interests converge with and negotiate those of international capital. this leaves us with a need to recognize that the shifting categories by which our knowledge is produced, disseminated, and received, are not innocent. certainly they cannot be celebrated as ‘innovative’ or ‘cutting-edge,’ as if capital had never heard of transnationalism or hybridity until scholars started tossing these ideas around. we need to be aware of the broader context for the shift in area studies and that ‘crossing borders’ (disciplinary, international, social, or mental) does not necessarily mean much more than just keeping up with the times. if, however, we wish to do more than ‘keep up with the times,’ then a critical focus on the production of scale seems a good place to start. reference list abraham, i. & kassimir, r. 1997, ‘internationalization of the social sciences and humanities’, items vol. 51 no. 2-3, pp. 23-30. appadurai, a. 2000, ‘grassroots globalization and the research imagination’, public culture, vol. 12 no. 1, pp. 1-19. berger, m. 1996, ‘yellow mythologies: the east asian miracle and post-cold war capitalism’, positions: east asia cultures critique, vol. 4 no. 1, pp. 90-126. brenner, n. 1997, ‘global, fragmented, hierarchical: henri lefebvre’s geographies of globalization’, public culture, vol. 10 no. 1, pp. 135-167. cartier, c. 2001, globalizing south china, oxford, blackwell. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 14 casey, e. 1997, the fate of place: a philosophical history, berkeley ca, university of california press. castells, m. 1989, the informational city: information technology, economic restructuring, and the urban-regional process, oxford, blackwell. chan, k.b. & c. chiang. 1994, stepping out: the making of chinese entrepreneurs, new york, simon and schuster. ching, l. 2000, ‘globalizing the regional, regionalizing the global: mass culture and asianism in the age of late capital’, public culture vol. 12 no. 1, pp. 233-257. comaroff, j. & comaroff j.l., 2000, ‘millenial capitalism: first thoughts on a second coming’, public culture vol. 12 no. 2, pp. 291-343. cox, k. (ed.) 1997, spaces of globalization: reasserting the power of the local, new york and london, guilford. cumings, b. 1993, ‘rimspeak’, in what is in a rim? critical perspectives on the pacific region idea, eds. a. dirlik & r. wilson, boulder, co, westview, pp. 29-47. ______ 1997, ‘boundary displacement: area studies and international studies during and after the cold war’, bulletin of concerned asian scholars vol. 29 no. 1, pp. 6-26. dicken, p. 1998, global shift: transforming the world economy, 3rd edn, new york and london, guilford. dirlik, a. 1994, after the revolution: waking to global capitalism, hanover, wesleyan university press. ______ 1996, ‘the global in the local’, in global / local: cultural production and the transnational imaginary, eds r. wilson & w. dissanayake, durham, nc, duke university press, pp. 21-45. dirlik, a. & wilson, r. (eds) 1995, asia/pacific as space of cultural production, durham, nc, duke university press. duus, p. 2000, ‘on riches, virtue and the great bull market’, asian studies newsletter, vol. 45 no. 2, pp. 6-7. foucault, m. 1986, ‘of other spaces’, trans. j. miskowiec, diacritics, vol. 16 no. 1 (spring). gertler, m. 1997, ‘the invention of regional culture’, in geographies of economies, eds r. lee & j. wills, london, arnold pp. 47-58. hamilton, g.g. 1991, business networks and economic development in east and south east asia, hong kong, university of hong kong center for asian studies. harrison, b. 1992, ‘industrial districts: old wine in new bottles?’ regional studies 26, pp. 469-893. harvey, d. 1995, ‘militant particularism and global ambition: the conceptual politics of place, space, and environment in the work of raymond williams’, social text 42, 69-98. _____ 2000, ‘cosmopolitanism and the banality of geographical evils’, public culture, vol 12 no. 2, pp. 529-564. heginbotham, s. 1994, ‘rethinking international scholarship’, items vol. 48 no 2-3, pp. 33-40. kearns, g. & c. philo, c. (eds) 1993, selling places: the city as cultural capital, oxford, pergamon. kotkin, j. 1993, tribes: how race, religion, and identity determine success in the new global economy, new york, random house. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 15 kristof, n. & wyatt, e. 1999, ‘who went under in the world's sea of cash?’, new york times, 15 february, a1. lash, s. & urry, j., 1994, economies of signs and spaces, london, sage. leatherman, c. 2001, ‘tourism scholar says u. of montana violated her academic freedom’, the chronicle of higher education, 19 february. available: http://chronicle.com/daily/2001/02/2001021904n.htm leung, c.k. 1993, ‘personal contacts, subcontracting linkages, and development in the hong kong zhujiang delta region’, annals of the association of american geographers vol. 83 no. 2, pp. 272-302. mitchell, k. 1997, ‘different diasporas and the hype of hybridity’, environment and planning d: society and space, vol. 15 no. 5, pp. 533-553. _____ 1999, ‘commentary’, environment and planning, vol. 31 no. 3, pp. 381-388. morley, d. & robins k., 1995, spaces of identity: global media, electronic landscapes, and cultural boundaries, london and new york, routledge. noble, d. 1997, ‘digital diploma mills, part i: the automation of higher education’, first monday [online]. available: http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/noble ohmae, k. 1990, the borderless world: power and strategy in the interlinked world economy, new york, harper business. olds, k. & yeung, h.w.c. 1999, ‘(re)shaping “chinese” business networks in a globalising era’, environment and planning d: society and space vol. 17 no. 5, pp. 535-555. ong, a. 1999, flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality, durham, nc, duke university press. peet, r. 1997, ‘the cultural production of economic forms’, in geographies of economies, eds r. lee and j. wills, london, arnold, pp. 37-46. rafael, v. 1994, ‘the cultures of area studies in the united states’, social text 41, pp. 91-111. readings, b. 1996, the university in ruins, cambridge, ma, harvard university press. redding, s.g. 1990, the spirit of chinese capitalism, berlin, w. de gruyter. robins, k. 2000, the virtual university. talk given at the university of colorado spring colloquium series, boulder, co, april. smith, n. 1986, ‘geography, difference, and the politics of scale’, in postmodernism and the social sciences, eds j. doherty, e. graham, and m. malek, new york, st. martin’s press, pp. 57-78. storper, m. 1997, the regional world: territorial development in a global economy, new york and london, guilford. swyngedouw, e. 1997, ‘neither global nor local: “glocalization” and the politics of scale’, in spaces of globalization: reasserting the power of the local, ed. k.r. cox, new york and london: guilford, pp. 137-166. viewpoints (july, 1997): the futures of asian studies [online], 1997. available: http://www.aasianst.org/viewpoints/futures.htm wang, b. 2002, ‘the cold war, imperial aesthetics, and area studies’, social text 20 (3): pp. 45-65. weidenbaum, m. & s. hughes, 1996, the bamboo network: how expatriate chinese entrepreneurs are creating a new economic superpower in asia, new york, free press. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 16 portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 17 yang, m. 1994, gifts, favors, and banquets: the art of social relationships in china, ithaca, ny, cornell university press. zukin, s. 1995, the cultures of cities, oxford, blackwell. producing knowledge in an era of globalization: two examples the shift in area studies the commodification of knowledge scaling geographical knowledge producing regionalism reference list microsoft word portalfisherspecialissuefinal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. special issue details: global climate change policy: post-copenhagen discord special issue, guest edited by chris riedy and ian mcgregor. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. shifting global climate governance: creating long-term goals through unfccc article 2 p. brian fisher, college of charleston since our exit from bonn (june 2011), the climate regime has taken significant steps toward developing short-range standards for global emission reductions based on a temperature threshold of 2° c above pre-industrial levels (unfccc 2010c). however, as the climate regime pursues a post-kyoto agenda to establish specific greenhouse gas (ghg) targets, the question that now stands is how these short-term standards, fixed to a temperature threshold, fit into more holistic climate policy objectives. this article seeks to situate these short-term objectives within longer-term climate policy goals by examining five different approaches to developing climate architecture and policy. the conclusion is that the current approach based on national targets and timetables is insufficient to generate long-term equitable and efficacious climate policy. since the bali road map1 was constructed, focus has been on what the ipcc (2007) established as a dangerous threshold temperature of +2° c (ipcc 2007b; unfccc 2009; unfccc 2010b; unfccc 2010c). from copenhagen in 2009 through bonn 2011, the mitigation discourse has centered this threshold as the target for cultivating specific emission reductions.2 while the threshold has been agreed upon generally3 and 1 a two-year plan to generate a legally binding agreement in copenhagen in 2009 based on fixed national emissions targets. 2 in addition, significant progress has also been made in concatenating the diversity of country reduction commitments and in developing more transparency in the monitoring, reporting and verification (mrv) processes. fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 2 some headway made, three critical issues have emerged that threaten the future of effective climate governance. first, mitigation in a post-kyoto scheme is based on a ‘pledge and review’ system, where individual countries promise to cut emissions and agree to a monitoring of their progress. this pledge relies exclusively on the good intentions of individual countries to meet global emission goals, one that can be easily subverted or deprioritized, and subjected to traditional collective action dilemmas. second, there is no consensus and ambition to develop a ‘shared vision’ for longer-term commitments. the awg-lca (ad hoc working group on long-range cooperative action under the unfccc) explicitly directs, ‘parties share a vision for long-term cooperative action in order to achieve the objective of the convention under its article 2’ (unfccc 2010b). little has been accomplished since kyoto in formulating this vision. in fact, long-term cuts in emissions and concentrations were excluded from consideration as part of the shared vision, and put on the agenda for cop 18 in durban, south africa in 2011 (wri 2010). there also remains little in common between the developed and developing countries in mitigating emissions. finally, there are no common targets to fulfill long-range objectives as outlined in article 2 of the unfccc. third, there are significant issues in the implementation of emission controls to meet the 2° c temperature target. as it stands, current pledges are inadequate to reach this target. specifically, the united nations environmental programme (unep) concluded in cancun (2010) that existing pledges only amounted to 60 percent of the greenhouse gas (ghg) emission reduction necessary to meet the 2° c target (unep 2010; see also, levin and bradley 2010). this leaves a critical gap in meeting the target itself. so, while the ‘pledge system’ may stimulate interest initially from china and the usa (whose emissions represent more than 40 percent of the global total), it also means that these two countries can hold the rest of the regime attendant to its national self-interests. specifically, the universal nature of the current approach allows for certain countries to continue holding the regime hostage to its interests (prins & rayner 2007). overall, while the focus has been on minimizing emissions to avoid this threshold temperature, scant attention has been paid to longer-term goals and approaches to reach 3 some within the regime, particularly those already vulnerable to climate changes like small island states, have advocated a 1.5° c threshold; however, many in the regime have countered that this is not pragmatically feasible. fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 3 those goals. despite the optimism surrounding the recent developments in climate governance, these issues raise important questions about the viability of the current global governance to meet the +2° c target to prevent long-term climate disruption. the thesis of this article is that existing deficiencies emphasize the need for long-term goals within the regime to guide short-term policy objectives. in many ways, the longterm trajectory is more salient to building and establishing effective climate policy than short-term objectives of national emission targets (rayner 2010). as it stands now, the hope is that by meeting short-term goals, long-term consequences will be mitigated. i argue that this may lead to ineffective results. without a clear set of long-term objectives to drive climate negotiations, ‘ad hoc approaches and incremental decisions may prematurely foreclose options for protecting the climate’ (corfee-morlot & hohne 2003) now and for future generations. in addition, this approach neglects to address the underlying drivers of climate change, that is, the systems, institutions, and discourses in which the problem itself is created. if these drivers are not addressed, the efficaciousness of climate governance will be limited. this possibly will exacerbate present global inequities, and create a subclass of displaced and vulnerable populations. in short, the current short-term approach does little to change the global structure in which the problem is embedded. there are larger implications from this approach that are not extensively considered in literature or policies. article 2 lays out the purpose of the climate regime, stating that the ‘objective’ is to avoid ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’ (italics mine). article 2 hinges on how ‘dangerous’ is defined and what exactly constitutes the ‘climate system’—that is, is it merely the biophysical changes in the atmosphere or does it include impacts that affect people? the current approach to climate governance renders the definition of ‘dangerous’ to be a simple function of limiting global ghg emissions to avoid exceeding the 2° c threshold. this short-term prescriptive approach sees the issue as purely an environmental problem that can be managed through technical solutions to limit national ghgs based on discretionary country pledges. this unnecessarily mischaracterizes the problems posed by climate change. in addition, despite recent progress in bringing climate adaptation into the discussions through the cancun adaptation framework and securing pledges for funding ($100b) over the next ten years (unfccc 2010c), there has been little fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 4 practical global governance and implementation on large-scale adaptation. by treating climate problems exclusively as an environmental issue, the current adaptation structure treats the symptoms rather than the cause, ignoring other significant implications for policy. efficient and equitable climate policy cannot be achieved without first a definitional dialogue funneled toward developing long-term policy goals that should precede any short-range solutions. hard targets may not be set, but particularly the usa and china must establish long-term goals; otherwise, short-term successes can be quickly undermined. establishing long-term goals can offer multifarious approaches to meet those goals, rather than a direct, linear based on a ‘one size fits all’ approach that has led to the present inadequacies in climate governance.4 it also allows shifts in political and economic global structure to accommodate more equitable and effective institutional arrangements to meet the long-term goals. while the objective of the regime should remain climate stabilization to avoid dangerous interference, it should not be done based on ghg targets. in this light, establishing long-term goals for climate policy is imperative and it must: (i) include differing paths for the differing circumstances of states, (ii) address the fundamental drivers of climate change, and (iii) address the ‘effects’ side of the equation based on the three pillars of sustainable development, i.e. social & economic development, environment and climate protection and equity. based on these critical elements, what follows will analyze various approaches to addressing the climate change problem to determine what may help establish long-term goals for the regime. based on this, i argue for discarding national emission targets in favor of long-term goals based on renewable energy and enhanced security for those most vulnerable to climate impacts. article 2 of the unfccc the history of article 2 the core of the unfccc centers on article 2, which outlines the objective of the agreement, and article 3, which provides guiding principles to implement the convention. these two articles set up the remainder of the agreement, including the 4 domestically it requires constituents to buy into short-term political sacrifice for longer-term goals— goals that they may or may not recognize as in their interest. this is particularly true for the usa. for key states like the usa, if domestic constituencies cannot support global policy on climate change, there is a serious risk of undermining the entire regime. fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 5 commitments required by signatories, and a practical agenda on observations, education and training, future conferences of the parties (cops), scientific bodies, and a financial mechanism. since the early 1970s, the climate policy debate focused on how to stabilize ghg concentrations, and this aspect was enshrined in article 2 as the core objective of the convention. article 2 (un 1992) states, in full: the ultimate objective of this convention and any related legal instruments that the conference of the parties may adopt is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system [emphasis added]. such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner. since the adoption of the unfccc, however, attention in policy circles gradually shifted to the near term, particularly to the development, ratification, and implementation of the kyoto protocol. specifically, most developed countries have focused on mitigation targets in the kyoto protocol while developing countries have focused more on burden sharing than on article 2 (see unfccc/sbsta/2002/inf.14 2002; blanchard et al. 2002; oppenheimer & petsonk 2005).5 recently, this focus continued in copenhagen and cancun with an attempt to generate post-kyoto agreement for reducing ghg emissions through binding national targets. to date, a post-kyoto agreement has not been reached, and binding national targets have been reduced to a ‘pledge and review’ system. these developments have led increasingly to a narrowing of focus by the regime to ensure: a) the viability of the regime itself; b) tangible short-term imperatives are agreed to; and c) attempt to build consensus on these objectives. however, this narrowing of concentration has also led to discounting longterm goals. questions arising from article 2 article 2 is indeterminate, as it ‘conveys some degree of the substance of the long-term goal while carefully avoiding any quantitative expression of it’ (gupta & van asselt 2006: 83; bodansky 1993). as a result, it raises critical definitional questions that inhibit determining long-term goals for addressing global climate change. article 2 centers on the ‘stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations … at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’ [emphasis 5 in addition, the g77, including china, has objected to discussions of article 2 for fear that it might lead to emissions caps for them (corfee-morlot & hohne 2003). fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 6 added]. three critical points can be made about this first half of article 2. first, and most importantly, it is not at all clear what ‘dangerous’ means. is there a specific level of danger associated with climate change that represents a trigger point for the biophysical climate system? second, ghg concentrations become the de facto measuring stick for anthropogenic interference, and not for example, mean global temperature.6 third, who is in danger?—that is, is it a measure of targets and timetables, or danger to regions, or specific locales and peoples? how these fundamental questions are approached, and ultimately answered, brings a host of critical, secondary issues to the fore. these point to the role of ‘climate impacts’ in the climate governance equation, prompting three questions. first, where along the causal path is ‘danger’ or risk to be measured? second, how do we regulate and manage ‘anthropic interference with the climate system’? third, how is ‘climate system’ defined (that is, what constitutes the ‘climate system’ that is in danger)? these questions prompt a second set of questions. how is ‘danger’ or risk to be measured; in other words, at what point in the climate cycle do we measure what is dangerous to the climate system? how do we govern the danger or risk? that is, do we address gcc by adjustments in emissions reductions through mitigation and trading, the process itself (by empower decision making), the structures that create the material and ideational underpinnings of ghg emissions (e.g. an energy revolution), or the impacts? is it a combination? to date, there has been but one approach—mitigation through national targets (or now ‘pledge and review’) with an increasing discourse around adaptation. finally, what is included in the climate system? is it simply a measure of environmental or more specifically atmospheric danger, or regional or local climate systems that then impact people? does the definition include how people are affected by changes in the climate system? who is prioritized, if at all, within the ‘climate system’? these questions are imperative for developing future climate policy. where we are today on article 2 since the inception of the unfccc, most of the activity on article 2 has focused on the scientific and economic aspects of ghg concentration stabilization. early on, the ipcc 6 there is criticism about the use of ghg concentrations as the measuring stick for slow climate change, primarily because there is no fixed quantifiable measure for anticipating future or anticipated ghg emissions. see, for example victor (2001). in addition, as the language has shifted to the 2 c threshold, it seems to run counter to the article 2 standard. fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 7 interpreted article 2 by seeing ghg ‘concentrations stabilization’ as a function of national emissions that aggregate in generating future temperature and sea level changes (wigley 1995; wigley et al. 1996; oppenheimer & petsonk 2005; schellnhuber et al. 2006). therefore, from this early stage, much of the discussion focused on emission stabilization pathways on the mitigation side of the climate equation, and has ‘largely bypassed the explicit consideration of climate change impacts’ (corfee-morlot & hohne 2003). moreover, these ‘stabilization pathways’ were primarily considered from the perspective of aggregate national emissions. in fact, since 1997, international climate negotiations were dominated by short-term issues such as the design of rules of the kyoto protocol (corfee-morlot & hohne 2003). even today (through cancun and bonn 2011), the discourse continues to center around emission targets and timetables. similarly, the focus on what constitutes ‘danger’ has focused primarily on scientific and economic considerations, while social, cultural and ethical dimensions have received scant attention (rayner & malone 1998; adger 2001; elzen & berk 2003; gupta 2003; oppenheimer & petsonk 2005; gupta & van asselt 2006; fisher 2011). in addition, the psychological aspects of ‘danger’ remain dormant within a climate change context (kasperson et al. 1988; mcdaniels et al. 1996; henry 2000). that is, to the degree impacts were discussed, much of it focused on those direct biophysical impacts with global consequences, such as ice sheets (that would contribute to sea level rise), global coral bleaching, and the economic costs of these types of impacts and of mitigation. in 2001, the third assessment report by the ipcc restructured their thinking on article 2 by referring to ‘five areas of concern,’ including: (i) risk of large scale singularities; (ii) aggregate impacts; (iii) distribution of impacts; (iv) risks of extreme weather events; and (v) risks to unique and threatened systems. nevertheless, the ‘climate change policy debate in the last few years has focused more on the costs of mitigation than on the avoided impacts or potential benefits of mitigation’ (corfee-morlot & hohne 2003: 277–278). although recently there has been increasing attention to adaptation, particularly in light of economic development, the negotiation calculus for large emitters continues to focus on the costs of mitigation, rather than avoided impacts and/or the impacts to those most vulnerable. simply, negotiations are driven by costs and economics. this is even more so after the ‘pledge and review’ system adoption, since key countries can use their discretion on ghg reductions and to what degree they will comply. fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 8 in this regard, in the most recent ipcc ar4 report (2007), contributors drew upon article 2 directly in a call to determine ‘key vulnerabilities’ (ipcc 2007d: 784). for the first time, there was a specific call for scientific assessment of what impacts might be associated with different levels of ghg concentrations, and ‘normative evaluation by policy-makers of which potential impacts and associated likelihoods are significant enough to constitute, individually or in combination, dai [dangerous anthropic interference]’ (ipcc 2007d: 784). as a result, today article 2 and ‘key vulnerabilities’ are one of the seven crosscutting themes for all working groups (patwardhan et al. 2003; oppenheimer & petsonk 2005). as the ipcc ar4 and the cancun agreements (unfccc 2010c) demonstrate, there is increasing dialogue on vulnerability and adaptation. however, the discussions remain at the periphery of climate policy, which remains driven by mitigation through national emission targets to reduce global ghgs. the goal of this policy approach is to prevent global mean surface temperature from exceeding another 2 c, after which many scientists agree certain key tipping points in the climate system may be triggered. however, despite this near consensus on beyond 2 c temperature target, there remains uncertainty on what amount would prevent triggering dangerous tipping points. thus the policy plan is based on reaching short-term targets and hoping that it is enough to achieve this 2 c goal. operationalizing unfccc article 2 the climate process: how it works at the global level, dynamics of ipat, population growth, affluence and technology contribute to degradation of the biosphere. these drivers have tentacles reaching into the national and local levels influenced by more complex drivers of poverty, urbanization, land use, income distribution, values and governance ideology. these global drivers contribute to the structure that facilitates activities that generate ghgs. these drivers merge and combine with anthropogenic drivers at the local level and individual level (see figure 1). there, anthropogenic drivers of ghg emissions take place within national and global contexts. these ‘agency’ drivers include fossil fuel burning (transportation, refrigeration, and so on), increasing waste in landfills, land use (for example, deforestation, rice paddies), and industrial processes (such as cement fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 9 production).7 in addition, individual environmental values play an important role in supporting and justifying these material practices that lead to ghg emissions. these individual anthropogenic drivers lead to an accumulation of ghg emissions that enter the biophysical climate cycle, which then ‘force’ or produce local biophysical climate impacts such as changes in temperature, precipitation, and sea level rise (slr). these climate changes impact human populations, which can be positive or negative, depending on sociopolitical and economic structure as well as geography. for many, particularly in vulnerable regions, this impact will be negative and will result in some form of human and societal impact (see figure 1 below).8 global anthropogenic structural drivers population dynamics affluence/ energy use technology (+/-) local anthropogenic drivers fossil fuel burning industrial processes waste disposal land use values atmospheric concentrations “climate drivers” radiative forcing (+/-) biophysical climate response carbon cycle feedback biophysical climate cycle natural drivers national ghg emissions ( co2; ch4; n2o; hcs) local climate changes ( temp, precip, slr, coastal erosion) human impact (damage, displacement, degradation) humans directly causing harm to other humans outcome approach structural approach source approach t&t approach process approach access, voice, standing (legal & political) figure 1. a linear depiction of the ‘climate process.’ this figure illustrates the full range of the climate process and how humans cause direct harm to other humans through the medium of earth’s climate system. it also represents the five (5) policy approaches to address fuller range of the climate problem. 7 structural drivers at the local level are different from ipat at the global level and include policy, institutions, organizations/ngos, culture/traditions, social factors (such as family), and so on. 8 i do not necessarily see the ‘climate process’ as a linear cause-effect, as depicted in this figure, but it helps to demonstrate where in the process may be most effective in addressing climate change. fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 10 approaches to climate governance: framing the ‘big picture’ a fundamental question for climate governance is where along the cause-effect chain provides the most effective and equitable position to address climate change (see figure 1). the unfccc and recent climate agreements assert climate change must be addressed in part through sustainable development. sustainable development, it is argued by the un, is a three-sided equation of equity, environment, and economic development—the 3 e’s. i will examine five possible approaches to address climate change (as depicted in figure 1) in light of unfccc article 2 and the three pillars of sustainable development. the targets and timetables approach the first approach is best characterized by the targets and timetables (t&t) approach (see table 1). currently, the unfccc, kyoto protocol (kp), and the cancun agreements (ca) all seek to regulate ghg emissions as the primary source of climate change at the national level. based on this approach, the kyoto protocol commits developed countries to reduce ghg emissions to target limits. the single largest advantage of this approach is that it is already in use by the unfccc and ipcc (torvanger et al. 2004: 9). a second significant advantage is that it works within the current constructs of the state-based international system. so the incentive system runs parallel with the state-based system, providing rules and norms that help guide, implement, and to some extent, enforce ghg emissions’ mitigation through binding global agreements supported by domestic mechanisms. thus, this approach holds the state responsible for determining and implementing its own mitigation mechanisms to reach target emissions. a third advantage is that it is empirically calculable. a fourth advantage is that it is only one step removed from individual behavior (person, firm, plant, or corporation) that generates emissions. this reduces the level of uncertainty and enhances the validity of empirical measurements. finally, as technology changes, new technical options are easily implemented to mitigate emissions, creating an attractive synergy between national governments and corporations that incentivizes new technology. there are significant drawbacks to this approach, however. first, and most importantly, it relies heavily on the current international system, which is subject to severe disparities in power and leverage. the structure inherently serves the interests of the dominant fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 11 table 1. differing approaches to the architecture and development of climate policy. powers. this has led to fractious negotiations that have ended in entrenched, seemingly intractable, positions by various states and their collaborative partners. second, this represents only a short-term perspective for addressing climate change, with consequent solutions designed to slow the global ghg emissions that may trigger irreparable harm (which as discussed is the current medium-run goal of the regime). source targets & timetables (t&t) structural process outcome description regulate individual activities that produce ghgs regulate at the national source of ghgs regulate global political & economic systems how int’l decisions are made in regulating commitments regulate based on effects of cc examples individual allotments national ghg emissions address dynamics of pat (pop, tech, & affluence) international negotiation; participation; markets impacts of climate change on local populations (e.g. adaptation) level of focus local/individual/ corps: individual emissions national national & global global local/community: impacts on community advantages * addressing fundamental indiv drivers of gcc; * attacks ‘values’ underpinning behavior * provides common ground * allows for clean technology to address the core of emissions * ghg emissions are source of gcc * calculable * in use (ipcc) * step close to emissions * bring in corps/tech * addresses structural driver of gcc * inherently builds on equity considerations * problems in both poor & affluent * considers the global feedback impact of gcc * focus is on means of producing equity * fairer participation = fairer outcome * those most effected have voice & standing (access) * rawls: welfare of the worst-off nations maximized * fairer burdensharing * prevents longer term problems * ensures most vulnerable covered *helps to redress structural inequities *polluter pays disadvantages * equity = egalitarian? * unrealistic for historic ghg emitters * emasculates sovereignty * need structural equality at same time * subject to power in int’l sys * distant from ‘real’ impacts * no consideration of global impacts * becomes a function of gdp *same int’l deadlock issues * execution welfare system? * negotiation about leverage & thus subject to power * state’s interest paramount * increases costs * inhibits climate action * builds a case for compensation/ damages fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 12 a third disadvantage is that it remains far removed from the effects and consequences of climate change. in fact, this approach offers no calculus of climate impacts, making it a highly inequitable policy approach for those who will suffer from significant climate effects. because ghg emissions cannot be simply turned off, and even in the best mitigation scenario will continue through inertia, this approach has significant inequity built into it for those vulnerable to climate change impacts. in addition, this approach does little to address either the drivers of climate change and the political and economic structure in which climate change takes place. thus, it entails deep structural inequity. a fourth disadvantage is that it counts emissions based on the source of production and not consumption. this creates inequitable results because it provides a secondary incentive to locate the highest ghg producing activities in the poorest states. already for economic competitive advantage, the ‘dirtiest’ production plants and firms are located in these areas, which overall tend to be the most vulnerable to environmental change. in essence, this provides cheap goods to the affluent with little or no environmental cost. in fact, people largely assume the environmental cost where the plant or industry is located through degradation and increased emissions, which could offset positive economic development in developing countries. therefore, this approach creates a double incentive to locate these activities in poor states because powerful national governments would want the ghg emissions to be counted against least powerful states (with the power to do it).9 incentives converge for both national governments and corporations to locate high ghg emission-producing plants in developing countries generating severe inequity. only by counting the ghgs where the good is consumed can climate policy generate equitable and economic benefits in line with sustainable development. however, this is not the case with the t&t approach. the source approach a second approach characterized by the source approach focuses on individual or local level emissions as the foundational drivers of ghg emissions. that is, people— individually, in communities or as part of corporations, produce and use fossil fuels that augment global ghg levels contributing directly to gcc. this approach would regulate those activities at the local level. this approach can take many forms, from emission 9 this is only offset under the targets and timetables approach to the degree that cdm in the kp works to share of technology through clean energy programs in these countries. fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 13 taxes, fuel standards, promoting clean energy use, or ‘contraction and convergence,’10 in which global emissions are reduced by reducing per capita (or individual) ghg emissions.11 both the precautionary principle and principles of equity underscore some form of per capita approach to stabilizing and ultimately limiting ghg emissions. the advantages of a source approach are that it is inherently based on principles of equity and thus has a strong justice component that will appeal to a variety of states for many reasons. specifically, a ‘contraction and convergence’ (c&c) policy is based on egalitarian criteria; that is, theoretically every person has the right to pollute to the same extent (and implicitly to be equally protected from pollution) (meyer 2000; den elzen et al. 2006). even global fuel or energy standards are undergirded by egalitarian principles, preserving justice as a primary force in climate policy. yet, it should be noted that historical responsibility, a highly debatable aspect of climate ethics, remains outside the scope of c&c (oberheitmann 2010).12 second, at this individual/local level, the drivers of climate change are addressed at its most fundamental level—the industry or energy producer and the individual as the consumer of fossil fuels. this is the only approach that directly addresses the values that support environmentally degrading behavior. most importantly, clean energy technology can be applied at this level both to reduce emissions at the extraction/production site as well as at the consumer level. this provides a direct link to generating ghg reductions at the base level and does so as part of a long-term goal. in the current t&t approach, this is a tertiary goal—driven by the primary goal of reducing emissions at the national level. here, the primary goal and focus of the regime is upon developing core technologies that can be used to produce cleaner energy, and use this cleaner energy in homes and buildings thereby enhancing efficiency, effectiveness, equity and security. finally, it does offer some common ground for getting recalcitrant (yet differently positioned) countries like the usa and china to join in the global effort to combat global climate change, both through an incentivized approach based on technology and clean economies, as well as long-term 10 ‘contraction’ is the reducing of global ghg emissions, and ‘convergence’ is the closing of the gap between per capita emissions between the affluent and the developing countries to a level (in the future) where ultimately emission outputs are equal for every person. the total budget of carbon is to be equally shared through ‘entitlements’ based on a negotiable rate of linear convergence by an agreed upon timeline. 11 c&c was first formally proposed to the unfccc at cop-2 in 1996 by the global commons institute, and at copenhagen (2009) became a controversial subject. as expected, it lacked support among developed countries. 12 the ‘brazilian proposal’ allocated national emission limits based on historic responsibility, which is based on the polluter pays principle (see, meira filho & gonzalez miguez 2000). fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 14 goal of recognizing per capita emissions. for example, china already supports c&c, while the usa may be enticed by incentives that reduce their obligations (initially) toward contraction with higher investment in clean energy. if this technology and clean energy were shared with the developing world, this would further soften the ground for agreement. this could actually build common ground, rather than feebly attempting to ‘find’ common ground, around long-run per capita emissions for states with divergent interests. the primary disadvantage of the source approach is that it may be unrealistic for historic ghg emitters, who would have to consent (through international negotiation) to it—something that to date is rare in international politics. at this point, without technology to guarantee low per capita emissions, historical emitters may resist even soft long-term targets for several reasons. first, there may be a greater chance to bridge the china-usa gap through this approach than the t&t approach, particularly if tethered to clean energy incentives. second, it emasculates sovereignty and a nation’s control over its territory and citizens, which is historically a particularly hard sell for countries like the usa and china. in this regard, it is extremely doubtful that any progress could be expected on c&c or ghg emissions per capita except as a nonbinding long-term goal without other incentives. third, enforcement would be a challenge, because it requires the state to hold individuals accountable for greenhouse contributions—a highly unlikely scenario. fourth, it is difficult to implement if the structural conditions that lead to global economic inequality are not addressed concomitantly. finally, it is also difficult to standardize between countries and is dependent then on the incentives to develop technology outside of the formal climate architecture. the structural approach a third approach is a structural approach, where the focus of addressing climate change is on the structures that create and perpetuate ghg emissions. this approach addresses the underlying structural drivers of emissions leading to climate change. it would regulate climate change through changes to the political and economic systems at both the global and national scale. the primary advantage of this approach is that it attempts to get at the structural and institutional impediments to addressing climate change. for example, this approach would examine traditional structural dynamics leading to fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 15 environmental degradation, such as population increases, technology, and affluence. this leads to a second advantage in that it seeks to recognize the extent to which each state is contributing to the problem regardless of socio-economic starting point (based on gdp). theoretically, this is formed upon equity grounds; however, it would ultimately turn on whether historical antecedents for socio-economic conditions and population growth were concomitantly taken into consideration. another significant advantage is that it recognizes global climate change as a process that continually influences and changes the political and economic structure. so part of this calculus considers the feedback of biophysical processes from climate changes upon the macro human subsystem. there are serious drawbacks to the structural approach. first, in many ways it relies heavily on gdp for determining responsibility toward climate change. as a result, it would not differ much in international negotiations from the current t&t approach and thus have the same limitations. second, if climate change is seen as a problem of structural drivers, then attending to those institutional drivers becomes a complex problem—one that may be as complex as the climate problem itself. for example, addressing trade disparities, conditional loans and investment streams that favor developed countries, is a complex and highly politicized debate. increasing consumption in both developed and rapidly developing countries is another example—a significant issue that has been left off the discussion table altogether. yet the climate problem is embedded within these structural disparities. finally, addressing climate change through structural adjustments runs the risk of appearing as a welfare system designed to funnel financial and technological resources from the developed to the underdeveloped in a way that seems separate from the impacts of and responsibility for climate change. most likely, these are fatal flaws that would lead to intractable collective action problems. however, the structural approach does demonstrate that addressing emission reductions and adaptation without attending to the structural drivers merely treats the symptoms of the climate problem. the process approach a fourth approach centers on the process and/or procedure through which international decisions are made in regulating commitments. the focus is on the international negotiation process, participation in the global environmental decision-making, access fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 16 to information and data, and the market as a medium for addressing gcc. the biggest advantage of this approach is that those who are (or will be) adversely affected by climate change have both a voice and presumably some form of standing (that is, access) to the international system to redress their vulnerabilities, impacts, and damages from climate change. a second distinct advantage is that it can produce procedural justice by focusing on the means of generating policy. a third, related advantage is, in principle, that there is a correlation between fair participation and de minimus fairer outcomes. finally, rawls’s maxim (1971) is implicit in this approach in that the welfare of the worst-off nations should be maximized, and thus operate as a net benefit to the poorest nations.13 although rawls did not endorse use of his theory directly as an argument for economic redistribution in the international arena, and instead confined it to a single society, it represents a specific justice approach to climate change that is not only relevant to generating equitable policy but one that cannot be ignored (rawls, 1999:106). henry shue argues that through this process, the well off should not be enriched at the expense of the not so well-off, thereby expanding inequality (shue 1999). finally, it offers a platform for discussing burden sharing, and how to spread the costs of mitigation and adaptation (see, shue 1999; meyer & roser 2006; page 2008). a distinct advantage of this approach is therefore that it highlights inequality in deriving decisions as well as in the outcomes of decisions. the disadvantage of the process approach is that ultimately negotiation (at any level) is about leverage, and thus is about power. power in the international system is inherently unequal, giving little leverage for those disenfranchised. similarly, the international system continues to be dominated by sovereignty and state self-interest, which again diminishes procedural aspects of standing and access for those disaffected by climate changes. moreover, the powerful can use bargaining tactics to undermine collective action. as henry shue points out, many countries such as the united states (and now china) are employing a strategy of waiting for others to do their ‘fair share’ before they will agree do the same, resulting in paralysis (shue 2011). so, the powerful can manipulate the procedural process through which climate outcomes are negotiated, 13 this theory is here applied generally to the international arena in the climate context. the argument here is that fundamentally distributive justice (in theory) lacks the capacity of imposing differing obligations between the domestic and international arenas, as ‘nationality’ would be an arbitrary characteristic similar to innate talent, race or social status. in addition, this process approach would not necessitate direct wealth redistribution, but a duty to assist those who are directly affected by human induced climate change, and to do so to the extent of full reparations. fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 17 leading once again to unjust outcomes. this suggests that representation and standing do not necessarily guarantee an efficient or equitable outcome for parties, and may be ineffectual as a global instrument. in addition, a voice without standing (political or legal) has little meaning, and further without a legal structure or venue to protect access, the procedural approach may make little difference in outcome. finally, this approach cannot represent a stand-alone approach to climate policy; in fact, it must operate as a complement to another approach. the outcomes approach finally, the fifth approach is one based on outcomes of climate change. that is, climate policy is developed by examining the effects of gcc, particularly in local communities and specific contexts. the most compelling rationale supporting the outcome approach is that, because there are multiple ways to achieve just and efficacious climate policy, it offers a more diverse platform for equitable burden sharing (rayner 2010). second, there are underlying legal and political justifications for this approach, as ghg emission inputs (by human beings) are a direct causal force in harming both the environment and other human beings.14 this causational link moves the gcc issue into a sphere of justice that demands (in some form) the outcome approach (that is, adaptation). this argument is strengthened by two other variables—disproportionality and predisposed vulnerability. climate change has locally disproportionate effects on those already marginalized and vulnerable (pielke et al. 2007; fisher 2011), and this approach acknowledges and addresses this important aspect of the climate problem. third, this approach emphasizes dealing with the consequences of climate change, which will help mitigate additional unintentional effects, like the loss of culture and sovereignty, and climate-related diasporas that post a threat to the global community and economy, and to individual states. fourth, this approach includes forms of bottomup, context-driven adaptation, but also compensatory justice, providing for broader prescriptions and forms of reparations from the damages caused by gcc. fifth, contrary to the other approaches, this approach does not necessarily require international consensus to work or to build new institutions out of whole cloth. sixth, the outcome approach breaks down the state-based formula necessary within the t&t approach and allows for vulnerable populations in developed countries, like impoverished sectors in 14 admittedly, proving specific causation, legally or even politically, is a significant issue, but one that does not subvert the argument here. fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 18 the usa or the inuit (in the usa, canada, and russia), to be recognized based on how they are affected by climate change. finally, making the outcome approach, more than any other, has the potential to galvanize (rayner 2010) because all parties need to adapt and build more resilient societal spaces. all in all, by including a fuller range of costs, an outcome approach changes the gcc calculus in ways that provide a more accurate reflection of the gcc problem and its consequences. the major disadvantage of this approach is that it raises the perceived ‘costs’15 of gcc, which create clear disincentives to broadening the approach to gcc. although perceived costs do not include costs to the environment, vulnerable communities, security, or the costs of ‘doing nothing’. second, a pure ‘justice’ angle rarely generates political action that counters national self-interest. a third drawback would be getting the global community to recognize climate impacts for those most vulnerable and to adequately fund adaptation. the proposed us$100 billion for adaptation in the cancun agreements does not come close to the amount deemed necessary for large-scale adaptation globally (stern 2009). in addition, global financial constraints and political perceptions of the climate issue suggest that as more resources are devoted to mitigation to prevent 2 c, less will be devoted toward adaptation. this ‘pendulum of costs’ is beyond the scope of this article, but it does provide a potentially significant limitation to the outcome approach. this stresses the importance of incentivized connection with another approach that properly incentivizes the development of clean energy with climate adaptation. finally, ‘cost’ calculi represents a pandora’s box, as who determines what is a climate-related impact, to what degree is it climate-related, who gets the money (what hierarchy), and who collects and distributes it with the capability of monitoring to ensure its proper use? these questions are not fatal flaws, but they point to significant impediments to international agreement and future climate policy. reframing the approach to climate governance changing the climate change frame: justifying outcome and source approaches in evaluating the five approaches, the key question is not so much about mitigation or adaptation as it is how much of climate change can (and should) be accepted. in the 15 i say perceived costs here, because multifarious and significant costs are associated with gcc, far beyond mitigation costs and/or even adaptation costs, such as the damage to culture, indirect costs to local or national economies, or even administrative costs (at all levels). however, to date, the singular focus of climate negotiation has been on national level mitigation costs. fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 19 language of article 2, the question is how much climate change can be endured yet avoid dai (‘dangerous anthropic interference’). today, mitigation and adaptation are considered in separate spheres or more recently as ‘two sides to the same coin.’ that said, much of the discussion and policy remains based on the t&t approach toward mitigation (that is, regulating ghg emissions at the national scale). this becomes an economic question—how much climate mitigation can be afforded? in this short-term view, economic self-interest will prevail over the environmental considerations, at least until such environmental costs become more apparent and significant or economic interests align with environmental ones. this directly suggests that, even at the national level, it is economically rational to delay action until those costs become increasingly clear or until new technology develops. the success of the regime, even if fully implemented, is then completely dependent on the degree to which technology provides answers. even with motivation toward developing clean development technologies, finding cooperative arrangements when varying states have different historical responsibilities, capacities, political ideologies, and goals is difficult. in other words, the t&t approach in many ways inhibits economic motivation from being fully pursued and realized. it politicizes the climate regime and inhibits both market incentives and fails to address the human security of vulnerable peoples. as a result, at the global level the targets and timetables strategy inspires various forms of free riding, as larger national economies can continue business-as-usual without any additional economic costs,16 while others suffer the consequences. without long-term goals and assessments, this free riding remains and national economic self-interest and externalizing economic and environmental costs become the driving forces of the climate regime. however, when the question is changed to ask how much of climate change can (and should) be accepted by the global community, the calculus changes. i am not suggesting that nations will not continue to view climate policy through a lens of self-interest. rather, climate change is a global problem that creates changes in global climate, and thus to solve it requires a global perspective—not a conglomeration of national perspectives. this global perspective is further justified by two elements, one that humans are directly and disproportionately affected by the actions of other humans, and second, that the earth’s biosphere is a global commons that all human beings are entitled 16 some scholars may suggest that economic opportunity costs arelost by delay, particularly in developing renewable energy technologies, and has been suggested, there are many who suggest that the long-term consideration of climate change has present economic costs of delaying action now (stern 2007). fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 20 to enjoy free of harm. on the former, the disproportionate effects create not only severe inequity but also serious security risks at the national and global levels. in shifting the question to a global perspective and away from national self-interest, the foci of the problem itself are transformed in two ways. first, it includes those adversely affected by climate change and therefore brings the outcome approach to the fore, and second, the question emphasizes some form of an approach that is best for the global community, and not exclusively based on state self-interest. the emphasis then is on a source approach, one that may focus on creating clean energy and new technology— which can be employed to the benefit of the global community. simply put, this is a global problem affecting all nations (and people) and solutions should benefit all nations and the global community. this approach transforms the climate debate into a positive sum game. when outcomes and sources are included in climate policy discussion, the calculus for mitigation is also changed. that is, adaptation becomes a cost of mitigation, and more emphasis is put on preventing the damage caused by human augmented ghg emissions (to reduce the costs of adaptation). so, if mitigation is solely part of the economic calculus, then for self-interested individuals, the equation is simple: is the harm from global climate change (to themselves or community) greater than economic costs of mitigation? most in the usa see little harm from gcc to themselves personally, and therefore any economic cost is likely too high. however, if adaptation is part of the cost equation—that is, harm to others caused by ghg emissions, then the costs of doing nothing increase and becomes part of tradeoff analysis for climate policy. action to prevent future harm (and costs) becomes imperative. in this form, justice emerges naturally from the cost equation, not as a function of strict national mitigation and/or historic responsibility. in addition, it provides political justification for domestic policies on climate change, particularly for the usa. as such, this is the core strength of the outcome approach to global climate change. even further, this can be incentivized through the source approach based on developing clean technologies. assessing ‘danger’ in article 2 the threshold question from article 2 for long-term climate policy centers on assessing (i) dai—dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system, and (ii) what are the subject(s) of the prevention. in preventing dai with the climate system, the fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 21 question becomes: what is the mandate designed to prevent or protect? most scholars and policy makers have interpreted this aspect of dai to mean the establishment of formal mechanisms designed around stabilizing national emissions by the largest polluters to ultimately ‘stabilize’ global ghgs to prevent a 2 c increase. thus the regime has advocated and promoted for the last 20 years the t&t approach to climate policy. the argument here is not to dismiss informal mechanisms and/or formal monitoring of national ghgs, but rather, that this approach as the core of the regime misses the mark. rather, the source approach, particularly when long-term goals are considered, offers a more substantive and effective path forward for the regime. it places energy at the center rather than aggregated emissions and targets and timetables. this offers more pragmatic pathways to generating effective ghg mitigation and international agreement. on the second question—what is climate policy designed to protect from dai, closer examination of the secondary aspects of article 2 provides some insight. specifically, article 2 states (in the second part) that the ceiling for global ghg emissions should be kept at a level ‘to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner’ (un 1992). the focus here is on maintaining global ghg concentrations at a given level to allow natural ecosystem adaptation, not threaten agricultural production, and promote sustainable development. the question is whether article 2, in establishing the purpose and goal of the regime, included consideration of the impacts from climate change, and if so, to what degree and in what form should we consider the effects from climate change as part of the core mandate of the climate regime? considering the whole of article 2, should concentrations (through radiative climate forcing) reach a level where changes to the ecosystem outpace adaptation and/or threaten food production, it would indeed constitute ‘dangerous’ interference with the climate system. this provides an initial clue that the framers were thinking to include ‘impacts’ to human support systems when drafting the article. in fact, in some parts of the world—for example, atolls, the arctic, lowlands of africa—we are already seeing the pace of changes outstrip natural adaptation, food production, and adaptive capacity. in addition, much of international environmental law (iel) has evolved primarily based fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 22 on the norms that states are responsible for ‘transboundary harm’ from activities within their dominion and control.17 this principle of iel that states are responsible for transboundary harm reinforces that states should be theoretically responsible for climate impacts. this, in conjunction with anthropogenic interference with the climate system that threatens food production implies that climate impacts must be part of the initial design of article 2. article 1 of the unfccc (un 1992) also provides guidance on ‘adverse effects of climate change’ as it states: ‘adverse effects of climate change’ means changes in the physical environment or biota resulting from climate change which have significant deleterious effects on the composition, resilience or productivity of natural and managed ecosystems or on the operation of socioeconomic systems or on human health and welfare. as part of the convention, article 1 suggests concern for socio-economic and health aspects of climate impacts, not just biophysical impacts (see jamieson 1992, 1996; rayner & malone 1998; adger 2001; gupta et al. 2003; gardiner 2006). in addition, article 4.1(f) asks all parties to minimize adverse climate effects on: ‘[t]he economy, on public health and on the quality of the environment, of projects or measures undertaken by them to mitigate or adapt to climate change’ (un 1992, unfccc article 4(1)(f)). however, despite this reading of article 1, there has been less attention to the socioeconomic aspects as a source of ‘danger’ in discussions on article 2. rather, the ‘political and diplomatic process through which it evolved paid much more attention to physical and biological vulnerabilities as sources of danger, and rather less attention to economic issues …[while] ethical and cultural considerations have been nearly absent’ (oppenheimer & petsonk 2005: 213). clearly if there are socio-economic considerations as part of ‘danger,’ the broader aspects of human systems, i.e. cultural, ethical and psychological, must also be part of the calculus. 17 see the stockholm declaration, principle 21, which is echoed in the rio declaration, principle 2: ‘states have in accordance with the charter of the united nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental policies, and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other states or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction.’ principle 21 has now become customary law, which means that it applies to all states and not only states to a particular agreement. in iel, see: trail smelter arbitration (united states v. canada), 3, united nations reports of international arbitral awards 1911 (1938), reprinted in 33 a.j.i.l. 182 (1939), 3, united nations reports of international arbitral awards 1938 (1941), reprinted in 35 a.j.i.l. 684 (1941). fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 23 in further support of this interpretation, the final sentence of article 2 gives significant primacy to ‘sustainable development.’ although this could be an attempt to privilege economic development relative to climate change and environmental harm, it nevertheless demonstrates a linkage between climate ‘danger,’ its outcomes (effects), and sustainable development (brundtland 1987). given the history of sustainable development and climate change, the nexus between sustainable development—defined by the wced as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’—and climate change fit naturally with the ideas of stabilizing future concentrations and preventing dangerous outcomes—particularly for future generations (oppenheimer & petsonk 2005). this emphasizes the three es of environment (protection), economic (development) and equity (fairness in process and substance) as part of climate governance. reading both the precepts of sustainable development in line with article 1 of the unfccc strongly suggests that not only would dai include climate impacts, but it would also include socio-economic, cultural, and health (mental, emotional and psychological) impacts in addition to the biophysical ones (ipcc 2007d; schneider et al. 2001). to include these necessary elements therefore endorses the outcome approach to climate policy. article 2: a ‘danger’ to whom? what remains unanswered, however, is what a ‘danger’ is to whom and how should those ‘in danger’ be assessed? here, there is no easy answer. a single, absolute metric of ‘dangerous anthropic interference’ cannot be attained due to differential impacts and vulnerabilities (dessai et al. 2003, 2004; schneider 2001, 2004; jacoby 2004). moreover, ‘dangerous’ is a socially constructed term that requires knowledge of local context to understand how these impacts and vulnerabilities contextually play out. in determining dai, value judgments are necessary to determine who is affected. such value judgments are context specific (dessai et al. 2004) and imply judgments about selection, comparability and significance, which in turn suggest that peoples’ perceptions play a large role in defining ‘dangerous’ (see, generally, azar & sterner 1996). in other words, ‘various societies and peoples may value the significance of impacts and vulnerabilities on human and natural systems differently’ (ipcc 2007d: 784). for example, a resource-dependent society will value protecting its resource base more than most developed countries, and will thus prioritize the risk or ‘danger’ to those fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 24 resources. as a result, biophysical indicators cannot sufficiently capture that communities—particularly those with different socio-economic positions, will be affected differently by the same level of climate change, and therefore they will not share the same meaning of ‘dangerous.’ finally, the choice of scale is ‘also crucial, as considerations of fairness, justice and equity require examination of the distribution of impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation potential, not only among, but also within groupings’ (ipcc 2007d: 784; jamieson 1992; gardiner 2004). thus in operationalizing article 2, examining how climate impacts affect people in a local context, and how people perceive those risks associated with climate change are critical features in determining dai. these aspects of climate policy and policy discussions are understated in negotiations and understudied in climate scholarship. this suggests that dai is both how people are contributing to ghgs that change the biophysical climate system, but also how people are affected by these changes in climate and how they perceive that their exposure to the danger (posed by climate changes) has been augmented. as a result, before there can be a logical first step toward defining dai at the global level, it must be understood from a climate impact perspective at the local level, including people’s perception of risk. therefore, longterm goals for equitable global climate policy (in meeting the objective of the unfccc as outlined by article 2) can only be attained by understanding locally derived conditions that assess and establish ‘risk’ and dai. a second insight from these approaches to dai is that it provides a cogent argument for establishing long-term goals and targets around dai, which help guide near-term decisions on mitigation commitments under the convention (corfee-morlot & hohne 2003) as well as protect the most vulnerable by understanding their exposure to climate changes in their local context (fisher 2011). conclusion: implications and consequences for climate governance i have argued that by establishing long-term goals for climate policy we can deduce more effective short-term climate policy (instead of the current approach of starting with short-term goals and moving forward). this requires understanding the tangible threats from climate change and recognizing synergistic linkages for incentivizing climate action. it necessitates reframing the political problem of global climate change fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 25 to define ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference’ with the climate system in identifying those threats. developing long-term goals to address these threats from global climate change depends in large part on defining and operationalizing elements of unfccc article 2. in attempting to operationalize article 2, i showed that there are several stages in the causal process where climate changes could be measured, monitored and addressed by the regime. currently, the regime has adopted the t&t approach to address climate changes, which has been shown to be politically difficult in international negotiations, particularly considering china and the usa are reluctant to engage in national emissions caps. without addressing the unsustainable drivers of gcc, this approach may not address effectively the climate problem even if fully implemented. it also runs the risk that it may exacerbate current global inequalities, which places additional emphasis on developing a climate architecture that includes fair distribution of the responsibility and burdens from climate change. however, despite the proliferation of literature on burden allocation, from a policy perspective, it is very difficult to negotiate and get self-interested actors to comply with agreed-on parameters. one of the primary risks from climate change to global (and national) economic and political systems is the increasing cost from growing insecurity and inequity. both elements provide a challenge to the global system, a risk that is underrepresented in current international negotiations and climate policy calculi. instead of climate security, responsibility and equity framing the climate debate, it has been mischaracterized as a singular environmental issue using the t&t approach. climate change however is not a function of environmental degradation per se, but rather a function of unsustainable drivers of human development that represents significant threats to human systems, particularly those most vulnerable. this explains why traditional environmental methods and solutions have been ineffective in addressing the climate problem. therefore, the climate regime must replace the t&t approach with a combination of outcome and source approaches. by adopting these approaches, it essentially splits mitigation and adaptation into two separate strategies. the first is based on energy transformation and sources of emissions, where major polluters, the usa and china, can build common ground. by focusing on energy transformation will deviate each country from the business as usual path, while bypassing what may be an intractable fisher shifting global climate governance portal, vol. 8, no. 3, september 2011. 26 problem of fair allocation and responsibility. the second is an explicit focus on adaptation because as currently constituted in the regime, adaptation is a secondary priority to mitigation. the source approach shifts the focus away from national ghg emissions’ limits to the development of clean energy toward long-term goals of carbon neutrality and (relatively) equal per capita emissions. in operationalizing this aspect of article 2, it establishes targets based on the development of clean energy and renewable energy implementation (and targets), which can be more effectively integrated into an incentivized climate regime as well as address directly the drivers of ghg emissions. this approach also offers synergies and incentives for the usa and china to cooperate. both countries recognize that ‘green growth’ is a key to the future of economic development, and both recognize not only the harmful effects to ecosystems and humans from industrial processes, but also that energy systems must be transformed. in addition, energy targets could be integrated into a system of contraction and convergence that allows for higher emissions, at least temporarily, the more funding and research put into energy development. this would create more equitable framework, based on contracting emissions per capita, while emphasizing energy transformation. the source approach therefore is a bridge between the seemingly growing gap between china and the usa, as well as bridges the divide between developed and developing countries. it provides a path forward where none exists currently based on the t&t approach. this shift would also recognize, through the outcome approach, the need to protect those most immediately threatened by the effects of climate change. it was established that this includes climate impacts more generally, and includes not only biophysical effects but also socio-economic, cultural and psychological effects. next, this process should be examined at the local level and by 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[accessed 22 june 2011]. the shi'ites, the west and the future of democracy: reframing political change in a religio-secular world portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal the shi'ites, the west and the future of democracy: reframing political change in a religio-secular world john a. rees, university of new south wales what we ultimately owe iraq is to let the iraqis grasp nationhood and sovereignty for themselves—and keep it, if they can. noah feldman in the vacuum left by the toppling of saddam, the mosque was one of the few remaining threads of the social fabric that survived. paul mcgeough introduction in the aftermath of the attacks upon washington and new york in september 2001 (9/11), one of the central challenges posed to policy development is how secular and religious actors might together conceive a cohesive polity, or more poignantly, how the secular assumption of analysts and commentators might be challenged and corrected by the inclusion of religious actors and perspectives (philpott 2002, thomas 2005). in a context like occupied iraq, itself a direct consequence of 9/11, where religious traditions constitute a primary structure of cultural and political power, the need to find some sort of secular-religious balance becomes acute. it is within the context of this debate that the award-winning australian journalist paul mcgeough published an important analysis titled mission impossible: the sheikhs, the us and the future of iraq (2004a). the present article critically reviews mcgeough’s essay within the broader discussion of secular-religious relations in international affairs. rees the shi'ites, the west the thesis of mission impossible can be summarised around two ideas: that the us strategy in iraq was flawed because it wilfully bypassed the traditional power structures of iraqi society; and that these structures, formed around the tribe and the mosque, are anti-democratic, thus rendering attempts at democratisation in iraq impossible. this article affirms mcgeough’s argument concerning the gross inadequacy of the us strategy, but critically examines the author’s fatalism toward the democratic capacity of iraqi structures, notably the structure of the mosque. focusing on the shi’ite community as central actors in an emerging iraqi democracy, the article attempts to deconstruct the author’s secularist view that the world of the mosque exists in a ‘parallel universe’ to the liberal democratic west. by reframing the shi’ites as essential actors in the democratic project, it situates political discourse in a ‘religio-secular world’ (marty, 2003) thus bringing the ‘other’ worlds of religion and secularism together in a sphere of interdependence. such an approach takes us beyond mcgeough’s orientalist posture toward the most prominent religious actors of iraq, and emphasizes the importance of post-secular structures in the discourses on democratic change. 1. mission impossible by paul mcgeough from the opening sentence, mission impossible reflects the kind of as-it-happened intensity expected from one of the most highly regarded journalists in iraq. reporting from deep context and reliant on ‘iraqi voices’ (2004a, iv), mcgeough attempts to go beyond ‘narrow and partisan examinations’ (2004a, 8) of the occupation to analyse the conflict within the cultural traditions of the middle east. in so doing, he sets out to describe a world that is radically unfamiliar to the western cosmopolitan reader— welcome to an ‘ethno-religious cauldron’ (2004a, 34), to the domain of the sheikhs. the world of the sheikhs mission impossible bores into the ‘bedrock’ (2004a, 8) of iraqi culture, a conglomerate of tribal and islamic traditions compacted together by ancient interests. the central actors between the tribe and the mosque are the sheikhs—‘men of power’ (2004a, iii), the true rulers of iraq and of the region. for mcgeough the sheikhs have effectively suffocated us neo-conservative hopes for a democratic iraq in much the same way they unravelled portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 2 rees the shi'ites, the west british plans for the region in the 1920s (2004a, 12). significant for the present study, the domain of the sheikhs is described as ‘another world, a parallel universe’ (2004a, 4) to that of the west, held together by ‘tradition, religion and rites’ (2004a, 21) but not of democracy. on this latter point, mcgeough is emphatic: the more i saw of the sheikhs, and the more i talked with them, the more clearly i realised that the most fundamental power structures in iraqi society run counter to those which underpin democracy (2004a, iii). understanding the world of the sheikhs thus requires ‘using your mind’s eye to erase the existing national boundaries’ and a return to when ‘what we now call the middle east was carved up into warring tribal fiefdoms’ (2004a, 10). tossing the american occupation into this ‘swirling mix of tribal and mosque power’ was unlikely to produce ‘anything that washington had in mind when it embarked on its project of regime change’ (2004a, 42). the title, mission impossible, is therefore chiselled as an epitaph on the tomb of the us-led campaign that has become bogged in babylon. ‘a pincers of its own making’ from a strategic perspective, mcgeough portrays the us mission in iraq as a ‘story of hubris’ (2004a, iv) gone wrong. this is in large part because ‘the neoconservative ideology of dick cheney, donald rumsfeld and paul wolfowitz took no account of the people and the culture of iraq’ (2004a, 7) who instead ‘believed they could build their democracy mall without planning approval’ (2004a, 7). more significantly, as with other moments of imperial over-stretch throughout history, in iraq the coercive powers of the would-be conquerors seem no match for the cultural and historic arsenal of their wouldbe subjects. it is not the barbarian hordes, nor the russian winter, nor the hindu kush that proves insurmountable this time, but forces that mcgeough attributes with a quasimetaphysical quality: ‘as the us focuses on its self-appointed task, around it, unseen, are the pillars of an ancient tribal society that, along with religious crossbeams of equal strength and proportions, are likely to doom the american quest.’ (mcgeough, 2004a, 4) indeed, the depth of mystery that animates the politics of tribe and mosque as reported by mcgeough will challenge the most ardent positivist with the grim truth that ‘kids from portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 3 rees the shi'ites, the west texas and idaho’ (2004a) beamed into ancient cities like fallujah and holy cities like najaf have next to no chance of winning the iraqis to their imperial cause. as one ‘youthful lieutenant’ exasperated, ‘what does a sheikh look like? i go to meetings with people who dress and look like sheikhs, but they don't carry a sheikh id card.’ (2004a, 65) as if to then divulge the futility of his mission, lieutenant colonel chris hickey reasoned that until he can ‘figure [the sheikhs] out’ he will have to ‘stand above tribal politics and deal with the higher goals of safety, peace and prosperity’ (2004a, 65). by stark contrast, mcgeough believes there is no higher goal than figuring the sheikhs out. the failure to do so, in both the planning and the execution of the occupation, explains why ‘the us is caught in a pincers of its own making, between the tribes and the mosque’ (2004a, 7) and reveals ‘why today's iraq is not the nursery for democracy that washington wants it to be’ (2004, iv). 2. toward a critical appraisal of mission impossible there is no doubt mission impossible is replete with incisive commentary, whether by mcgeough as narrator or by iraqi and other voices that speak into the narrative. as a grass-roots record of perspectives emanating from the many publics of occupied iraq, it is an invaluable resource. however, fundamental questions also exist concerning the central logic of the essay. for instance, if the traditional structures of tribe and mosque cannot be utilised in building a democratic iraq, what are the alternatives? what assumptions undergird mcgeough’s view that these structures have an anti-democratic ontology? the problematic logic of fatalism one of the defining textures of mission impossible, explicit in the title, is a fatalism about the future of iraq. yet what holds this fatalism together are what seem to be irreconcilable tensions: on the one hand, it was ‘a very bad idea’ (mcgeough 2004a, 8) for the us to exclude the sheikhs in building a new democratic iraq; on the other hand, the political structures of the sheikhs run ‘counter to those which underpin democracy’ (mcgeough 2004, iii); on the one hand, mcgeough trusts the judgement of arab friends to lead him to study the sheikhs (2004a, iii); on the other hand, he does not trust the judgement of the portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 4 rees the shi'ites, the west tribes and the mosque with iraq’s future democratic affairs. perhaps caught in a pincers of his own making, mcgeough can only conclude that iraq has become a ‘feuding, vengeful mess’ (2004a, 79) in a context where ‘there is no room for tolerance or trust’; and that the most powerful discourse in the country exists not between the iraqis and the americans, but between the iraqis themselves ‘as they set the scene for a post-30 june carve-up of the country…and probably of each other’ (2004a, 80). these foreboding words mark the penultimate sentence of the essay, a statement of finality against which very few contrasting thoughts exist on tribe and mosque as political resources for a positive future. the fatalism embedded in mcgeough’s argument is illogical, principally because it works against the central thesis of the essay, which is to criticise the neoconservative policy of bypassing the sheikhs. billingsley summarises the us foreign policy goal in the middle east as ‘wholesale political reform in the region based on the imposition of a liberal democracy—the one true source of progress’ (2004a, 23). mcgeough powerfully testifies just how ill-conceived such an aspiration has proved to be. yet at this point confusion arises: however foolish the original us plans for a liberal democratic iraq might have been, mission impossible can be read as the defeat of liberal progress in iraq because of the antidemocratic ontology of the tribe and mosque. in other words, mcgeough knows whom ultimately to blame for the post-saddam mess, and it’s not the americans. given the incompatibility of worlds involved—the liberal democratic west and the primordial domain of the sheikhs—one could argue that the invaders and occupiers had little choice but to foist their ‘liberal’ will upon the iraqi people. following the fatalistic logic of mcgeough’s argument, the neoconservative strategy of violent occupation thus becomes strangely vindicated. framing the analysis there is, of course, nothing wrong per se with bleak or despairing analysis. some of the defining narratives of our time depend upon it. it would be ludicrous, for instance, to condemn albert camus’ the plague for its bleak texture—how else does one allegorise the german occupation of france but through a story of unforgiving pestilence? yet camus, whose subject is more sinister than mcgeough’s, wants also to tell us of human portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 5 rees the shi'ites, the west capability in the face of life disasters [‘ah, i understand sir. you're like me, you're a fatalist.’ tarrou: ‘i had said nothing of the kind, and what's more, am not a fatalist. i told him so….’ (camus 1948, 26)] mcgeough, by contrast, seems fatalistically compelled toward a tragic ending. the phrase ‘the future of iraq’ in the subtitle of mission impossible is thus rhetorical—there is none, or at least none worth feeling hopeful about. is mcgeough correct in his fatalistic analysis that the bedrock structures of iraqi society are anti-democratic? i shall limit the consideration of this question to the relation between democracy and the deep cultural resource of religion. this is, of course, a large task that demands stringent control within the limited space of the present article. the two dominant islamic traditions in iraq, making up eighty per cent of the population, are the shi’ite and sunni. according to mcgeough, while ‘the tribal structure appears to be stronger than religion in the lives of iraqi sunnis, the reverse is the case for the shi’ites – for them the mosque is the dominant influence’ (2004a, 34). whilst not disregarding the importance of the tribes, in keeping with mcgeough’s framework i shall focus on the importance of mosque over tribe and offer an introductory analysis about the majority shi’ite tradition in the region (iran and iraq) against the claim that it cannot be utilised as a resource for democracy. before analysing the shi’ites in relation to democracy, however, it is worth exploring the question of democracy in relation to religion more broadly. the rationale for this approach, as shall be argued below, is that mcgeough’s fatalistic posture toward the shi’ites in mission impossible stems from an a priori assumption about religion within the author’s own secular framework. as such, it is with a critique of this assumption in mcgeough’s work and beyond that the present article is primarily concerned. 3. worlds apart? reframing democracies in a religio-secular world in a recent article titled worlds apart, mcgeough analysed the november riots in france by members of muslim middle eastern and north african french communities thus: ‘it is too simplistic to say it’s all about religion and it’s too dangerous to lump it in with the global jihad.’ (2005) the essential problem behind the rioting is instead identified as a portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 6 rees the shi'ites, the west ‘freedom or democracy deficit’. describing the arab world as ‘a corner of hell where the privation of mind, body and soul leaves many youngsters in the homelands ripe of the jihadist picking’, for mcgeough it is also an ‘irony’ that resistance to inequality and injustice in such a world comes from islamic activists for whom ‘religion is a protective bubble from which to challenge the status quo’. it is noteworthy that in neither the analysis of the french context nor in the totalised sum of the arab world is religion as religion given any political agency: explanations for muslim discontent in france are purely materialist and structural; the prominence of muslim activism on the moonscape of the arab world is because there is no alternative. these perspectives are instructive in our attempt to identify mcgeough’s assumptions toward religious actors in relation to democracy in iraq. whilst not discounting the truths contained in worlds apart, there is no ‘middle’ place for islamic actors between the poles of anonymity and extremism. yet so often it is in the middle political space, described by martin krygier as neither hot nor cold but ‘lukewarm’ (1997, 57), where the notions of pluralism, civility, freedom and democracy are conceived. for mcgeough, and indeed many others before him, the middle space is by necessity a secular space. religion does have its place within a secular framework, but according to prominent secular theorist steve bruce, only when religious interest groups ‘accept the privatization of their distinctive religious beliefs and move on to secular ground’ (2002, 21) allowing democracy to be facilitated by a ‘neutral state’ (bruce, 2002 16). accordingly, secularization can be understood as the decline or containment of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals, such that religious ideas and traditions no longer fundamentally shape the governance of a people (bruce 2002, 1-45). but is democracy solely a derivative of the secular? for mcgeough the answer is ‘yes’ and this influences his negative reading of the shi’ites as anti-democratic actors in a desperate iraq. one of the foundational assumptions behind mission impossible, what might be called a secularist assumption, is that democratic norms cannot, in any credible sense, function within ethno-religiously defined structures of power (e.g. 2004a, 79). for portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 7 rees the shi'ites, the west instance, mcgeough agrees with conservative analyst patrick basham’s lament that the current iraqi middle class is unable to deliver ‘democratisation’, by which he means ‘political debate in a secular, liberal fashion’ (2004a, 79). iraq is instead a domain where religious actors thrive in an ‘ethno-religious cauldron’ (2004a, 34) of ‘prayers and death’ (2004a, 31), and where those exercising power from the mosque have no intention to do business in the meeting tents of democracy. what results from this approach is a denial of democratic alternatives to the one conceived by the secular liberal western tradition. for the author it seems near-impossible that such alternatives could ever evolve out of the primordial swamp of the mosque or the tribes: ‘any attempt to foist bottom-up principles of rights and democracy onto societies that are so top-down driven will require a decades-long commitment…. or more likely, it will simply fail.’ (2004a, 77) in what is from many angles a highly contestable assertion, mcgeough writes ‘in truth, except israel, democracy does not exist in the middle east, and this despite the sorrow of so much western intervention in the region over the years.’ (2004a, 77) as if to warn against manipulating the cultural dna of the middle east for the designer interests of the west, mission impossible thus reads as an extended ‘i told you so’, a secularist condemnation of primordial power and those who try to coopt it for modern causes. exploring democracy in a religio-secular space a contrasting response to questions about whether democracy is secular is to hold that whilst democracy can be secular in form, it need not always be so. numerous scholars in the sociology of religion and international relations argue that there exists an observable desecularization of world politics (e.g. berger 2004; thomas 2005; westerlund 1996). if this is true, non-secular structures of power demand consideration as constituent elements in the architecture of democracy. the nobel laureate amartya sen has recently argued that democracy isn’t a ‘western invention’ but is better understood as having ‘global roots’ (sen 2003). sen argues (after rawls) for ‘a broader view of democracy in terms of public reasoning’ (2003, 29). the portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 8 rees the shi'ites, the west inference drawn is that democracy ‘has demands that transcend the ballot box’ (2003, 29) and is better predicated upon the notions of ‘tolerance and openness of public discussion’ (2003, 31). as such, and in contrast to rawls’ ‘thin’ notion of justice, this ‘thicker’ notion of democracy can be sourced in the history of cultures the world over. the championing of pluralism, diversity, and basic liberties can be found in the history of many societies. the long tradition of encouraging and protecting public debates on political, social, and cultural matters in, say, india, china, japan, korea, iran, turkey, the arab world, and many parts of africa, demand much fuller recognition in the history of democratic ideas. (sen 2003, 29-30) it follows that a practical implementation of sen’s conception of democracy would require the (re)inclusion of religious traditions in the building of democratic institutions, and a belief that these traditions can make a fundamental contribution to pluralism (thomas 2000). part of this process involves reframing the political space into what marty usefully calls the ‘religio-secular world’ (2003) of international affairs. marty’s attempt to find ‘a new model for describing the world that we actually inhabit’ (2003, 42), like sen’s call to reconceive democracy, acts as a salient criticism: the old debates revolve around binary categories: societies were either secular or religious; worldly or other-worldly; materialist or spiritual; favoring immanence or transcendence, etc...[but] most people blur, mesh, meld, and muddle together elements of both the secular and the religious, the worldly and the other-worldly. (marty 2003, 42) we can employ this argument to credibly suggest that mission impossible is written within a binary framework where the reader is confronted with a war of the worlds—the domain of the sheikhs described as ‘another world, a parallel universe’ (2004a, 4) against that of the liberal democratic west. but is the west as ‘secular’ as bruce and others suggest? might, in accordance with marty’s more integrated framework, some ‘western’ as well as ‘eastern’ actors be better understood as religio-secular in outlook? one need not be a secularist in order to be secular or liberal. in why i am not a secularist connolly argues that ‘secularism and liberalism are connected, though neither is entirely reducible to the other’ (1999, 10). connolly then suggests that ‘secularism needs refashioning, not elimination’ (1999, 19), and—in what could function as a salient definition of a post-secular politics—argues that this refashioning requires a ‘reflective engagement…among a variety of religions and irreligions to support a more vibrant portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 9 rees the shi'ites, the west public pluralism’ (1999, 6). for connolly, the secular can be more ‘engaged’ with a ‘deep pluralism’ (see 1999, 137-187) than the secularist might suggest. if one need not be a secularist in order to be secular, neither does one need to be secular in order to be western. the political theorist elshtain argues against what she perceives to be the ‘liberal monism’ of american politics thus: one enters political life as a citizen. but if one also has religious convictions, these convictions naturally will inform my judgements as a citizen. my religious views help to determine who i am, how i think, and what i care about. this is as it should be. in america it makes no sense to ask people to bracket what they care about most deeply when they debate issues that are properly political. (elshtain 2003, 79) if this beyond-secular perspective can be argued in an american context, how much more so from cultural contexts fundamentally shaped by religious traditions as iraq? such a thought invites us to reframe what democracy is—what the constituent elements of it are, and from where these elements might be drawn. religion america i have thus argued (after sen) that democracy is not exceptional to the ‘west’, and suggested (after connolly and elshtain) that religion is not exceptional to the politics of the ‘east’. relevant to the present discussion, one of the best examples of the complicated interaction between culture and religion in the ‘west’ is found in the united states itself. mcgeough pits the secular west in a zero-sum fashion against the mosque. as a us-initiated and us-led occupation, it follows that the us is acting with secular intent. in some ways this is true. whilst george w. bush might at times present as a soldier for christ, pivotal neocon strategists like wolfowitz and pearl, or administration heavyweights like cheney and rumsfeld, have no overt religious profile. yet does this mean there is no religious agenda in a broader political sense? the effect of religion upon us policy cannot be measured by religious affiliation alone, but extends to understanding the scope and purpose of political power by those who seek to wield it. in what some understand to be a unipolar world of american hegemony, the us has become, as mandelbaum puts it, the ‘hyperpower’ of world politics (2002, 61). in portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 10 rees the shi'ites, the west celebrating this hyperpower america has experienced a religious conversion—to itself. ‘the us is no longer just a nation’, writes george monbiot, ‘it is now a religion…. the united states no longer needs to call upon god; it is god, and those who go abroad to spread the light do so in the name of a celestial domain. the presidency is turning into a priesthood.’ (2003) monbiot’s thesis is not original, but it does contextualize a widelyheld view that at the foundations of us identity lie fundamentally religious concepts. this is, in many ways, not exceptional to the us, but conforms to what anthony d. smith calls ‘the sacred dimension of nationalism’ (smith, 2000). what does seem unprecedented is the depth of missionary zeal produced when us nationalism is imbibed with hegemonic confidence. mcgeough deftly conveys the religious nature of the us mission in iraq when he describes it as ‘dreamy’ (2004a, 7). this incisive term offers insight into american motivations in iraq. in a speech to the american enterprise institute on the day before the shock and awe of us military omnipotence was unleashed, president bush ‘dreamily’ acknowledged the immanence of the campaign as if it were a sovereign dispensation. critically observed, this was a performance of soft revivalism, the preacher telling it like it is, not so much defending the faith as submitting to its presence—the manifest destiny of religion america. once hostilities had commenced, bush lavished the us campaign with the ancient words of isaiah 61: ‘to the captives come out, and to those in darkness be free’ (monbiot 2003). in other words, the us is the harbinger of peace with justice, led by a president who presides over a binary world of good and evil (singer 2004). the example of religion america above is usefully negative. this is not because the religious energies within a nation have no positive potential, but because it neutralises any exceptionalist charge that shi’ite error or excess in the middle east is solely due to its religious moorings. can the religious energies of a nation also be utilized in a constructive process of participatory democratisation? the religio-secular frame offers a useful heuristic tool for challenging notions of the mosque as always undemocratic and exploring post-secular democratic possibilities. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 11 rees the shi'ites, the west 4. toward a post-secular conception of iraqi democracy in a strong critique of mission impossible, anthony bubalo argues ‘it is time we changed the paradigm for talking about democracy in the middle east’ (2004a, 134) and, echoing sen, states that ‘today democracy is not for the west to export or impose’ (bubalo 2004a, 134). similarly, stewart has appealed to the need for a new lexicon on iraq: ‘the gap between the way foreigners talk about iraq and the reality is monstrous. our political vocabulary—“rogue states”, ”nation-building intervention”, ”wmd”, “neo-imperialism”, “terrorism”—is useless.’ (stewart 2005, 9) stewart’s main argument, contrasting the fatalistic logic of mission impossible, is that most if not all actors in iraq ‘have almost no idea what iraq is like or is going to be like’ (2005, 9). stewart’s view serves to highlight how radically premature mcgeough’s thesis of impossibility is, and it also encourages the exploration of alternatives to such a view. tribe and mosque as sources of pluralism bubalo sums mcgeough’s argument as ‘culturalist’ (2004, 136) and rightly indicts mission impossible for depending on ‘caricature’. caricature is marked by fixing and exaggerating certain qualities of a subject, and in so doing, ignoring the more complex and dynamic nature of real-life entities. by using immovable metaphors such as ‘bedrock’, mcgeough seems neglectful of the dynamic quality of the tribe and the mosque to adapt and contribute to an indigenous democratic polity. yet on numerous occasions mcgeough details aspects of these ‘bedrock’ structures that, if reframed, could be seen as possible sources for pluralism and diversity. for instance, with appeal to the tribal leadership of the sheikhs in iraq, bubalo argues that traditional structures of power are malleable and open to democratic process: isn’t it possible to want strong leaders and at the same time to appreciate the ability to choose the strong leader you want?... the fact that sons and brothers are often passed over when it comes time to choose a new tribal leader underlines the extent to which fitness to rule and consensus are also important parts of [tribal] ethos. (bubalo, 2004 136) moreover, many of the tribes are religiously mixed, having members of the majority shi’ite and minority sunni communities within them. this diverse membership could form the foundation for inter-islamic discourse on issues of security—the only possible portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 12 rees the shi'ites, the west role mcgeough can see for the tribes (2004a, 61-70)—conflict mediation and governance. piggott has recently suggested that throughout the middle east and north africa the politics of the tribe will always prevail over religious affiliation (2005, 19). but this need not always be so, and the prospect of transforming contexts of internecine violence might depend on the agency of pluralism within the religious traditions and by a more explicit utilisation of religious resources such as sacred texts to deeply indigenise a post-secular democratic culture (rees, 2004). reframing shi’ite politics a consideration of secularism above leads us to one of the defining tensions within mission impossible. whilst the author forcefully describes what is so wrong with the us strategy of ‘crafting a secular administration that would be dominated by the hand-picked exiles washington had airlifted into the country’ (mcgeough 2004a, 7), working against his own thesis, mcgeough’s secularism reinforces us concerns upon which this very strategy was based: ‘they feared that if liberated iraqis were left to their own devices, the mullahs would demand an iranian-style theocracy....’ (2004a, 7) a necessary focus of mcgeough’s thinking about iraq is the pivotal place of the majority shi’ite community. the sheikh of sheikhs in iraq is the iranian-born grand ayatollah ali al-sistani. it is no exaggeration to suggest that the spectre of al-sistani haunts mission impossible and its author. indeed, such is mcgeough’s fascination with the grand ayatollah, one could be forgiven for thinking the term ‘enigmatic’ was part of sistani's official title. mcgeough interprets al-sistani with a nervous awe: awe at the pre-secular origins to his authority, and nerves at the autonomy that this provides. he writes, in the year since bush landed his invasion force in iraq, najaf has reasserted itself as the spiritual heart of the country. the back-alley office of the grand ayatollah al-sistani has become a serious rival to baghdad as a seat of political power. to this day the grand ayatollah remains an enigma. he has no political party and no army. he rarely speaks his mind and he hardly ever ventures from the ascetic home where he receives few guests—and certainly not bush’s man in iraq, paul bremmer. (2004a, 37) when does al-sistani’s autonomy become subversion? what is the risk of including alsistani in the circle of power, as his call for popular elections and criticisms of the interim constitution seem to indicate he expects? one word sums up mcgeough’s concern: iran. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 13 rees the shi'ites, the west even if al-sistani compromises and accepts a us-sponsored framework for the future political development of iraq…there are grave fears among secular shiites and non-shiite iraqis that an alsistani dominated regime might quickly evolve into something very different, perhaps something very theocratic, maybe something very iranian. (2004a, 35) mcgeough’s perspective is problematic. the sheer otherness of al-sistani—described by mcgeough as ‘a robed and bearded near-saint, a formidable opponent who says very little but means what he says’ (2004a, 34)—and of the shi’ite tradition that he represents, produces in mission impossible a sloppy and prejudicial reading of shi’ite politics that effectively shuts-out any place for the shia in a democratic iraq. whilst acknowledging the political and theological diversity that exists in any religious community, given the shi’ites comprise sixty per cent of the iraqi population one can immediately see the impracticality of mcgeough view. of course, mcgeough’s caricature of al-sistani confronts the reader with another ‘enigmatic’ ayatollah, the leader of the iranian revolution in 1978-79, ruhollah khomeini. iran is often held up as proof that islamic religious politics are retrograde, a point re-emphasised by the recent elections which were far more fixed than free. ‘theocracy’ has thus become an epithet for all that is wrong with political religion, particularly of an islamic kind. when the iranian revolution occurred its leaders were portrayed as ghosts from a past age, backwards in time and outlook, fundamentalists with little to offer the modern world. this was, and remains, the view of many opponents of iran, none more so than the us. iran has been the object of an unrelenting campaign by the us to paint it as an evil other, an aberration in world politics, whilst trumpeting the trustworthiness of ‘moderate arab states like saudi arabia’ (rice 2000, 60). this last statement was made in 2000 by condeleeza rice, now us secretary of state. rice holds the concept of a ‘moderate’ saudi arabia against a fixed and negative portrayal of iran, describing the latter as trading in ‘fundamentalist islam’ (rice 2000, 60). one can quickly see the illogic of such a view. saudi arabia is at best autocratic and, it should not go unnoticed, most of the 9/11 hijackers were middle-class saudi nationals. more poignantly, one need only examine the wahhabist tradition of the saudis to place shi’ite nationalism in comparative perspective. as the anthropologist geertz puts it, portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 14 rees the shi'ites, the west wahhabism…is the name generally given to the radically puritanical version of islam dominant to the point of absolutism in present-day saudi arabia—the sort that stones adulterers, decapitates apostates, forbids female-car driving, and, apparently, breeds such people as osama bin laden.’ (geertz 2003, 37) by contrast, the closer one examines the politics of iran the more one sees not the fixed fundamentalism of religious political control, but rather, a very dynamic process of political evolution within the interpretive tradition of shi’ite islam (armstrong 2000). the fixed nature of the term ‘theocracy’ implies rigidity and a disengagement from contemporary culture. and, if the erroneous judgements and oppressive eccentricity of the iranian regime were our only focus, there is plenty of rigidity to be found. however the iranian revolution can also be reframed as ‘a multi-faceted revolutionary movement led by a religious opposition that appealed to widespread anti-western and anti-tyrannical feelings’ (keddie 2003, 24). moreover, it was fundamentally shaped by the international climate of the cold war period and was ‘neither east nor west’ in essence (keddie and gasiorowski, 1990). as with all post-secular political processes, which in this case is directly linked to the many post-colonial changes occurring in world politics in second half of the twentieth century, shi’ite religion in iran is highly complex. complex, but not enigmatic. diversity and evolution in shi’ite politics i draw on two aspects of the shi’ite revolution in iran that challenge mcgeough’s caricature of shi’ite politics in iraq. the first is a de-linkage: shi’ite politics is diverse and cannot be neatly exported from tehran to baghdad. in his seminal history of the arab peoples, hourani argues that ‘the revolution could be explained in terms of factors specific to iran’ (1991, 457). hourani continues, ‘[in iran] certain powerful classes were particularly responsive to appeals expressed in religious language, and there was a religious leadership which was able to act as a rallying point for all movements of opposition’, whereas in iraq ‘where shi’is formed a majority, their men of learning did not have the same intimate connection with the urban masses or the same influence on the government as in iran.’ (hourani 1991, 457-458) in other words, theories of a pan-shi’ite ‘theocratic’ polity must first deal with the iranian-iraqi diversities and not simply conflate portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 15 rees the shi'ites, the west leaders and traditions across cultural, linguistic and historic divides simply because they share the same religious tradition. notably, this generic regard for the shi’ites parallels the neoconservative assumption that context and culture matter little in relation to democracy. it is therefore erroneous to invest the shi’ites with a ‘civilisational’ unity that ignores the many clashes and/or differences that exist within the tradition. at times mcgeough acknowledges this diversity, but only to develop the argument about violence and vested interest in iraqi society. headlining the fear that ‘the shi’ites are coming!’ might make good copy for secularists in iraq and elsewhere, but it is in defiance of the cultural complexity that is the very stuff of politics, whether ‘eastern or ‘western’. the second aspect is a linkage between iranian and iraqi shi’ites. against the thesis that the iranian shi’ites were ghosts from a past age, it is important to understand that khomeini was not a traditionalist in shi’ite religion but an innovator. his interpretive theory of velayat-i-faqih (mandate of the islamic jurist) controversially called for shi’ite involvement in government and was opposed by conservative shi’ites. this was also different from the pan-islamic polity implicit in the concept of umma where the faith community is not organised within the fences of any state. ‘in an islamic context,’ writes religious scholar armstrong, ‘khomeini’s message was modern’ (2000, 2). thus, as an innovative interpretive project, iranian politics reflects an evolving process of post-secular political formation, first from secular to religio-secular autocracy, and now from religiosecular autocracy to religio-secular democracy. this evolutionary process is reflected in the wider islamic world (hofmann 2004; tamimi 2001; abootalebi 1999). scholars such as frederic volpi are also beginning to reframe islamism as a potential form of pseudo-democracy alongside republican and liberal models (2004). whatever obstacles one might acknowledge in islamism’s march toward democracy, it is imperative that such an option be given central consideration. volpi invokes olivier roy’s view that ‘the issue of the state in the middle east cannot be properly addressed without reference to the loci of personal allegiances created by solidarity groups (asabiyya), networks and communities (particularly religious ones)’ (volpi 2004, 1065). such logic seems strengthened by mcgeough’s own observation that portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 16 rees the shi'ites, the west ‘[i]n the vacuum left by the toppling of saddam, the mosque was one of the few remaining threads of the social fabric that survived’ (mcgeough 2004a). volpi’s term ‘pseudo-democracy’ is somewhat confusing given that he favorably compares islamic with liberal and republican democratic models. it is perhaps more useful to try and distinguish, as feldman attempts to do (2003), between islamist and islamic democracy. this distinction is useful when analyzing shi’ite politics in iran. iran and the possibility of post-secular democracy in iraq that the iranian evolution has stalled, and may possibly grind to a halt under new president ahmedinejad, says very little about shi’ite politics per se and more about the ability of autocrats to hang on to power. such intransigence is not unique to islamism, but can also be seen in the behaviour of republican and liberal democratic elites (volpi 2004, 1070-1074). it also suggests that the movement toward liberalisation by progressive shi’ites under former president khatami was not supported by a commensurate level of presidential power over the military and security forces (abdo and lyons 2003, 121122). in a simple, if not simplistic, alternative analysis mcgeough holds that in iraq the ‘iranian’ alternative – meaning the shi’ite alternative—is little more than the imposition of ‘theocracy’. by this epithet, mcgeough conflates theocracy with autocracy, and turns al-sistani and khomeini into a single composite medieval figure not to be trusted with the future of iraq. in a telling conversation with mcgeough, sheikh mohammed hussien alkinana dismisses mcgeough’s suggestion that many in the west saw khomeini as an extremist. ‘that is only because people in the west don’t understand khomeini.’ (2004, 45) one need not be an apologist for khomeini to see the truth of this statement. understanding the possibility of a shi’ite-led post-secular democracy in iraq may require a reframing that goes back to tehran. it is readily acknowledged that al-sistani is no fan of aspects of the iranian experiment. there are two ways one could interpret what ensues from this view. either al-sistani no portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 17 rees the shi'ites, the west longer believes in shi’ite governance, a view that cannot be reconciled with his public statements since the occupation and his patronage of the shi’ite majority in the new elected parliament. alternatively, al-sistani is also an innovator and is consciously trying to develop the shi’ite political alternative further. if shi’ite politics can be reframed as evolving from autocracy to democracy, and if al-sistani can influence iraqi democracy and government in the same way he brokered a civil resolution to the siege of najaf in august 2004, then history might well record how iraq built the post-secular democracy that the iranians never got. numbers will of course help this process. the shia comprise only 60 per cent of iraqis, unlike 90 per cent in iran, and will thus be forced into a national unity strategy with both kurds and sunnis. beyond the process of coalition building, the acid tests of gender and minority rights must also be used to scrutinize the bona fides of any new government. these are the substantive issues of implementation, and it is readily acknowledged that there is long way to go in the process of democratic formation. there is nothing exceptionally ‘post-secular’ about any of this, yet these are the very possibilities that mcgeough and others have suggested are impossible in iraq because of the iran-shi’ite connection. before any policy development can begin in earnest in iraq, what is ultimately required is a change in the assumptions about islam as a resource for democratisation. beyond iran and iraq, scholars such as keane argue that islamism plays a vital role in bringing new visions of civil society into being. for instance, as a counter to the ‘compulsory secularism’ of the military autocracy in turkey, keane highlights the role of ‘muslim actors intent on developing and redefining civil society—pushing toward a post-secular civil society, structured by new codes of ethics and aesthetics and held together and institutionally protected by new post-secularist government policies in such fields as law, education, municipal administration, banking and foreign affairs’ (keane 1998, 28). for keane, the concept of ‘global civil society’ marks an evolution toward a ‘new cosmology’ (2003, 1-39) that employs ‘religious civilisations’ as a catalyst because they have ‘developed world-views and world-girdling institutions that feed the streams of portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 18 rees the shi'ites, the west social life that are today global’ (keane 2003, 40). in a powerful recasting of ‘civilisational’ rhetoric in the security discourses of scholars such as huntington (1996), islamic civilisation plays a central role in the search for post-secular civility and democratic participation (keane 2003, 40-43). specific to iraq, noah feldman, a principal consultant in the design of the interim constitution of iraq, argues for the prominence and necessity of islamic traditions in a post-saddam democratic era. he writes, post-saddam iraq would pose an ideal opportunity for the world to show its openness to the possibility of islamic democracy, by embracing any political parties or organisations that promise to work within the structures of democratic constitutional government. that would mean that ideas associated with islam would figure in an iraqi constitutional convention, and that islamic democrats would be able to participate in a subsequent government…. a new government would have little chance of being legitimate if the iraqi people were denied the opportunity to rely on the ideals and values of islam to create it. (feldman 2003, 180) not only are we presented with islam as a primary political resource, we are confronted with the creative imperative to include islamic concepts (hanafi 2002) in a democratic context that will not have it otherwise, such is the nature of democracy. 5. beyond orientalism bubalo describes the argument presented in mission impossible as one of ‘loving and loathing’ the arabs (2004, 132). this is an understandable but overstated critique, and mcgeough is justifiably defensive to the charge (mcgeough 2004b, 140-141). i believe the entanglement of incisive commentary, astute description, yet also fatalism and blinkered secularist assumption that exists in mission impossible indicates a more complicated dynamic that is better described as orientalist. edward said, perhaps the most authoritative voice on the subject, described orientalism as ‘the corporate institution for dealing with the orient—dealing with it by making sense about it, authorising views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, orientalism is a western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the orient’ (said 1978, 1995, 3). in this essay i have criticized mcgeough’s view that traditional iraqi structures of tribe and mosque exist in a parallel universe to the so-called liberal democratic west. whatever the author’s explicit intention, such an approach effectively portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 19 rees the shi'ites, the west contains and controls iraqi structures of power, negating their utility as political resources in the contemporary world. this is not done as an overt act of hostility, but rather, it is achieved through a critique of imperial power via ‘iraqi voices’. thus mission impossible at once limits traditional iraqi power, advocates for iraqi freedom, and dismisses iraqi capacity to build a positive future. said also asserted what many now take for granted, that ‘ideas, cultures and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their... configurations of power also being studied’ (1978, 1995, 5). this mcgeough does by a commendably intimate investigation into the milieu of the sheikhs. however, said also argues that ‘because of orientalism the orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action’ (1978, 1995, 3). applied to the current discussion, keane observes that many islamists ‘insist that secularism …effectively functions as an orientalist ideology that protects despotic states bent on stifling the growth of civil societies within the muslim world’ (1998, 2728). such an unfreedom is assured in mission impossible due, as the title forecasts, to the underlying fatalism toward the indigenous structures of iraqi culture, and thus to mcgeough’s orientalist posture. that the views of an experienced western foreign correspondent can (still) be thoroughly deconstructed in the first five pages of a now classic text of cultural theory is more than a little discouraging. reporting political change in the religio-secular space demands a new way of seeing and being in the emerging political forms of a religio-secular world. whatever problems the authority structure of the mosque may have in its transition toward democracy, it seems absurd to suggest that it offers less preferable resources for iraqi democracy than the just-as-traditional authoritarian violence that the ‘west’ has so often sponsored in the middle east. engagement with significant non-secular actors such as the shi’ites to help concieve an iraqi democracy is, by any measure, a necessary and worthwhile enterprise. sen argues that ‘the value of public reasoning applies to reasoning about democracy itself.’ (2003, 34). as i have reasoned above, reframing the assumptions that underlie the descriptions in paul mcgeough’s mission impossible might help conceive a better democratic framework that includes the sheikhs, the ‘west’, and post portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 20 rees the shi'ites, the west secular democratic possibility. reference list abdo, g. and lyons, j. 2003, answering to god: faith and freedom in twenty-first century iran, henry holt co, new york. abootalebi, a.r. 1999, islam, islamists and democracy’, middle east review of international affairs 3.1, 14-24. armstrong, k. 2000, ‘in defense of khomeini’, afr review, 20 october, 1-11. berger, p.l. 1999, ‘the desecularization of the world: a global overview’ in: the desecularization of the world, berger, p.l. (ed), 1999, eerdmans, michigan,, 1-18. billingsley, a. 2004, ‘the native scene’ the diplomat, aug-sept, 23-25. bruce, s. 2002, god is dead. secularization in the west, blackwell, oxford. bubalo, a. 2004, 'mission impossible: correspondence', quarterly essay, 15, 132-136. connolly, w.e. 1999, why i am not a secularist, university of minnesota press, minneapolis. elshtain, j.b. 2003, ‘against liberal monism’, daedalus, summer, 78-79. feldman, n. 2003, after jihad. america and the struggle for islamic democracy, farrar, strauss & giroux, new york. gertz, c. 2003, ‘which way to mecca? part ii’, the new york review of books, july 3, 36-39. hanafi, h. 2002, ‘alternative conceptions of civil society: a reflective islamic approach’. in: alternative conceptions to civil society, chambers, s. and kymlicka, w. (eds.), princeton university press, princeton, 171-189. hofmann, s.r. 2004, ‘islam and democracy. micro-level indications of compatibility’, comparative political studies 37.6, 652-676. hourani, a. 1991, a history of the arab peoples, harvard university press, cambridge, mass. huntington, s.p. 1996, the clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order, simon & schuster, new york. keane, j. 1998, civil society: old images, new visions blackwell, oxford. ———2003, global civil society? cambridge university press, cambridge. keddie, n. and gasiorowski, m.j. 1990, neither east nor west. iran, the soviet union and the united states, yale university press, new haven and london. keddie, n.r. 1995, iran and the muslim world: resistance and revolution, macmillan, london. ———2003, ‘secularism and its discontents’, daedalus, summer, 14-30. krygier, m. 1997, between fear and hope. hybrid thoughts on public values, abc books, sydney. mandelbaum, m. 2002, ‘the inadequacy of american power’, foreign affairs, september/october, 61-73. marty, m.e. 2003, ‘our religio-secular world’, daedalus, summer, 42-48. mcgeough, p. 2004a, ‘mission impossible: the sheikhs, the us and the future of iraq’, quarterly essay, 14. ———2004b, ‘mission impossible: correspondence’, quarterly essay,15, 137-148. ———2005, ‘worlds apart’, sydney morning herald, 12 november. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 21 rees the shi'ites, the west monbiot, g. 2003, ‘america is a religion’, the guardian, 29 july. philpott, d. 2002, ‘the challenge of september 11 to secularism in international relations’, world politics, 55, october, 66-95. piggott, l. 2005, ‘tribalism in the arab mena region’, policy, 21.1, 15-20. rees, j.a. 2004, ‘“really existing scriptures”: on the use of sacred text in international affairs’, the brandywine review of faith and international affairs, 1.2, 17-26. rice, c. 2000, ‘promoting the national interest’, foreign affairs, january/february, 4562. robbins, j.w. 2004, ‘a post-national theology of empire’, journal of cultural and religious theory, 5.3, 1-6. roy, o. 1997, ‘islamists in power’, in: the islamism debate, kramer, m. (ed), the moshe dayan center for middle eastern and african studies: tel aviv university, 69-85. said, e. 1995 (1978), orientalism, penguin, london. sen, a. 2003, ‘democracy and its global roots’, the new republic, 6 october, 28-35. singer, p. 2004, the president of good and evil, plume books, new jersey. smith, a.d. 2000, ‘the “sacred” dimension of nationalism’, millennium: journal of international studies, 29.3, 791-814. stewart, r. 2005, ‘degrees of not knowing’, london review of books, 31 march, 9-11. tamimi, a.s. 2001, rachid ghannouchi: a democrat within islamism, oxford university press, oxford. thomas, s. 2000, ‘taking religious and cultural pluralism seriously: the global resurgence of religion and the transformation of international society’, millennium: journal of international studies, 29.3, 815-841. thomas, s. 2005, the global resurgence of religion and the transformation of international relations. the struggle for the soul of the twenty-first century, palgrave macmillan, new york. volpi, f. 2004, ‘pseudo-democracy in the muslim world’, third world quarterly, 25.6, 1061-1078. westerlund, d. 1996, questioning the secular state: the world-wide resurgence of religion in politics, hurst & company, london. portal vol. 3, no. 1 january 2006 22 untitled portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. the transcultural edge, curated by ilaria vanni accarigi. © 2016 [leyla stevens]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i1.4799. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. lomba merpati: place-making and communal signalling within javanese pigeon racing leyla stevens, university of technology sydney whenever i am in an unfamiliar city i become a walker. it is through aimless meandering that i can start to make sense of a new place, to physically understand its topography. in a place like yogyakarta, where sidewalks are rarities and walking a fraught activity, public communal spaces—the south square, the local market, the closest soccer field—become my way of mapping and inhabiting the city. this time in yogyakarta i encounter the communal pull of pigeon training grounds. once you learn to recognise the goalposts you can spot pigeon training grounds everywhere throughout the city. four poles mark the corners of a square, rising around eight meters up into the air with a rope tied around the poles to form another square in the sky. usually they are located on the periphery of rice fields, or within common grounds between several kampung (village/neighbourhood). within the villages that line the main river artery of yogyakarta, pigeon goalposts are set up on the narrow bridges that span the two sides of the river. these training grounds act as social gathering points for young men in the kampung. peak training times occur in the coolness of late afternoon, before the last call to prayer. the grounds become a crowd of trainers, bystanders, pigeon cages stacked up on the ground and always at least one enterprising snack stand. stevens lomba merpati portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 2 figure 1: pigeon racing training, yogyakarta, digital photograph, 2015 © leyla stevens figure 2: pigeon racing training, yogyakarta, digital photograph, 2015 © leyla stevens pigeons mate for life and pigeon racing in java operates through separating the male bird from his hen, so he will instinctively fly back to her. the practice is known in european traditions as widowing. it is a sport that is enacted through a series of performative signalling between two locations. the men who release the male birds drive out to the starting point by motorbike with the pigeons in cages strapped to their stevens lomba merpati portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 3 backs. they release the male birds in pairs and then signal back to the men waiting at the goalposts by walkie talkies. the pigeon as it races from a to b is a homing device, the female essentially signalling to its mate. back at the square men wait and watch for the pigeons to appear in the sky, much like how i know surfers to stand on the shore and watch for a set of waves to come in—a line of men linked through idle commentary, all watching the same point on the distant horizon. once the male bird is in sight the pigeon handler will step into the square as if it was a stage. holding the female bird in his hands, he will shake her up and down, at the same time calling loudly out to the male. upon reaching the goalposts the male bird dives down through the top square and lands on the back of his mate. this type of racing is called merpati balap: short distance sprint racing. figure 3: pigeon racing training, yogyakarta, digital photograph, 2015 © leyla stevens for the men who partake in this sport, pigeon racing is a passion, a daily social practice, a currency and a source of pride. one handler, mas sigit, tells me it is all up to the personality of the pigeon that determines how fast they are. some pigeons simply do not have what it takes. i ask him how many pigeons he owns. he tells me he owns three male birds, all newly trained. how much does a pigeon cost? it turns out it is not a small stevens lomba merpati portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 4 sum even for a young, unpaired male bird. he hopes to enter the next local competition in bantul, where the winning prize is a motorbike. as we talk he releases one of his pigeons and it disappears into a rice field. the field is yet to be harvested and the stalks make it difficult to locate one small pigeon. everyone forms a line that scours the field for the missing bird. mas sigit calls out with the female bird in one hand. half an hour later it emerges, hopping, as one trainer laughs, like a frog between the stalks. figure 4: pigeon racing training, yogyakarta, digital photograph, 2015 © leyla stevens © 2017 by gerardo papalia. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: papalia, g. 2017. trump: just a berlusclone? portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:1, 30-32. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal. v14i1.5366 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 1 april 2017 abstract berlusconi and trump share many analogies, but perhaps the most cogent of them is their ability to master new media. they are both ubiquitous on television while trump also rides the social media wave. their success reflects and reinforces a new mediatic paradigm: the digisphere. they are not notable as individuals in themselves but as simulacra of what may become a long procession of future political leaders. keywords donald trump; silvio berlusconi; media; regis debray; digisphere new perspectives report trump: just a berlusclone? gerardo papalia la trobe university corresponding author: dr gerardo papalia, senior lecturer learning futures, la trobe learning and teaching, la trobe university, melbourne victoria 3086, australia. g.papalia@ latrobe.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5366 article history: received 23/01/2017; revised 22/02/2017; accepted 25/02/2017; published 04/05/2017 transitions and dislocations, curated cultural works issue, curated by paul allatson. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 30 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5366 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5366 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5366 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:g.papalia@latrobe.edu.au mailto:g.papalia@latrobe.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5366 is donald trump just a clone of silvio berlusconi? the initial evidence is compelling, but not in the way many may have imagined. it is true that both manage businesses that are concerned with images and their manipulation for public effect: berlusconi runs a media empire spanning television as well as newspapers and holds a near monopoly of television advertising in his country. likewise trump’s empire is fundamentally a giant branding exercise. to many it might appear coincidental that both men’s rise has been propelled by their investment in media using profits derived from real-estate speculation. i do not think that it is a coincidence as i will explain. the popularity of both men is also similar: their larger than life public personae are centred on the ‘powerful white male in a tailored suit’ cliché garnished with alpha chauvinism and marinated in porcine sexual proclivities. this image, rather than damage their respective lunges at political power, has actually helped their respective political careers. in both italy and the usa, their success has occasioned extensive head-scratching, hand wringing and vociferous indignation, particularly among those aligned to the left of the political spectrum. however, we can look at this contradiction from a different angle by asking these two questions: what do their success, celebrity or indeed notoriety, say about the mediatic soup these oversized fish are swimming in? what is their aquatic imaginary? the answer: a media culture where powerful white males in tailored suits are current and largely acceptable to varying degrees and shades. not surprisingly, it is among an audience of heterosexual men and others who identify with the values expressed by this male image that their support is largely centred. these two epigones of male aspiration are surfing on a wave that is much larger than they could ever be. in this sense they are simulacra of each other: two more exemplars from a seemingly endless procession of reproducible signifiers, so much so that they appear identical even to the detail of their respective casting seams: their hairstyles. their strength lies not in their uniqueness, but in the fact that they can be reproduced ad nauseam. indeed, in some obscure atavistic way both trump and berlusconi have understood that this very quality is the path to fame and power, well worth sinking their massive real-estate profits to attain. after all, real-estate speculation is an excellent primer for a media career, as both sectors derive their appeal from appearance and aspiration rather than rational consideration. so, where does all this leave us? a partial primer for a response is the model conceptualised and published in 1993 under the title l’état séducteur: les révolutions médiologiques du pouvoir by régis debray, french media analyst and erstwhile journalist. this model anticipated the arrival of politicians of the calibre of berlusconi and trump by dividing human history into three eras each dominated by a communication paradigm: the logosphere, pertaining to the spoken word, which dominated feudal europe; the graphosphere connoting the printed word spanning the passage from absolute monarchies to the popular democracies, and the videosphere, which characterises the current era. each of these paradigms determines the direction of social, political, economic and cultural forces akin to a hub moving an array of spokes ultimately powering the turning rim of change. most of the handwringing traditional left is motivated by nostalgia for the graphosphere, an epoch dominated by the logical sequence of reasoned, sustained and exalted thought. it was in this period that politicians sought out the company of grey bearded luminaries and (mainly) male intellectuals to sustain their reputations and their political legitimacy. these halcyon days are now over, replaced by the videosphere where what counts above all is entertainment. the politicians of our time seek out the company of the fashionable, the beautiful visual image or trump: just a berlusclone? portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201731 even the grotesque, in a word, the celebrated. it is with the mediatic currency of celebrity that our latter day leaders pay for the public’s disattention and hold onto it. were we to go beyond debray and theorise the next era beyond the videosphere, calling it the ‘digisphere,’ we would characterise it as a period of increasingly fast circulation of imagery in all its forms, across multiple digital devices. in a manner akin to electronic commerce, the greater the speed of circulation, the faster the accumulation of social and political currency. it has long since ceased to matter what triggers this obsessive and constantly increasing circulation of images, because the vast audience (now no longer a public), has long ceased to reflect or to think, preferring surrender to the eye glazing procession of visual stimuli. it matters little whether trump, berlusconi or their epigones win, for the digital media that supports them has already taken over our thoughts, our emotions and ultimately our lives. as the multiple social media platforms that sustain our contemporary personalities indicate, whether they be facebook, linkedin, instagram, tinder or grinder, we have become clones of these politicians we are so driven to decry. reference debray, r. 1993, l’état séducteur: les révolutions médiologiques du pouvoir. gallimard, paris. papalia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201732 © 2017 by susana chávezsilverman. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: chávez-silverman, s. 2017. black holes—deshielo crónica. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:1, 20-23. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal. v14i1.5355 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 1 april 2017 abstract susana chávez-silverman is a califas-born u.s. latina writer and flaneuse who (against all odds) is also an educator, although she mostly laments what’s happened to la cacademia over the last decade or so. she still finds joy and hope in being la high priestess of slow to her students and former students, some of which are among her closest compinches. of the two crónicas included in this special curated issue of cultural works in portal under the theme transitions and dislocations, she says: ‘my writing/life took a major detour in 2016. for most of the year, i wrote nothing at all. or rather, nothing except e-mail after email: to administrators, colleagues all over the world, attorneys, friends and relatives. i had scheduled my sabbatical in order to finish a book project, but had been derailed by a title ix investigation and plagiarism case at my home institution, and the accompanying anxiety and anger. i returned to my book over the summer, culling and editing hundreds of pages of primary texts (letters and emails). but this book is much longer—and truer—than anything i’ve written before and takes a different kind of writing energy, uninterrupted time, and commitment. writing from a place of anger and anxiety doesn’t serve this book. the two crónicas included in this special curated issue are not part of my book in progress, our ubuntu, montenegro: del balboa café al apartheid and back. rather, they were my way of easing back into my (he)art space. ‘casi víspera’ proves i did write something in 2016 after all (other than email, i mean)—i had no memory of it until early this year! ‘black holes’ talks about precisely this (remembering and not). i was determined not to let 2016’s plagiarism/title ix toxic double helix continue to poison me. i wanted to begin 2017 with a bang, and wrote this for my son, for his 30th birthday.’ keywords susana chávez-silverman; crónica; chronicle cultural work black holes—deshielo crónica susana chávez-silverman pomona college corresponding author: professor susana chávez-silverman, romance languages and literatures, pomona college, 333 n. college way, claremont ca 91711, usa. suzanne.chavezsilverman@pomona.edu doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5355 article history: received 18/01/2017; revised 14/03/2017; accepted 15/03/2017; published 04/05/2017 transitions and dislocations, curated cultural works issue, curated by paul allatson. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 20 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5355 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5355 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5355 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:suzanne.chavezsilverman@pomona.edu http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5355 1 enero, 2017 claramonte, califas para mi hijo, etienne joseph con razón que i have lacunae. big ol’ black holes de la memoria. subí just now para guardar las pages de la agenda del annus horribilis (2016) en el drawer del enorme escritorio que tengo arriba en el study. little eye: nunca lo uso como tal—digo, as a desk, cual study. i just can’t, ya que érase una vez it was my old bedroom, during my 100year sleep, o sea los 17 que pasé con el dorian. never mind que lo haya refaccionado after my great escape, painting the room a gorgeous emerald city verde, installing fauxweathered, funky estantes and a jewel-red ultrasuede sofa, plus ese enorme desk, antaño de daddy, y antaño before him belonging to josé f. montesinos (el cuñado del mere mere lorca, pero esa es otra …). en el drawer, vi algunas otras agenda pages que tenía allí, guardadas. creo que nunca he mirado allí, i mean really looked; normally sólo guardo la agenda caduca y saco las new pages y así. a kind of new year ritual. pero a saber por qué, ahora me dio por mirar. there was 2004, and 2003. no sé cómo, pero en ese invisible linksy, azar objetivo, totalmente cortázar kind of way, en una my gaze alighted on … el 8 de febrero de 2003 until right now, esa fecha sólo me había significado algo beautiful y bittersweet: la famosa last night con mi montenegro. completely forgotten by me for many years, pero en 2008, en el montalvo memory vortex, it had come back to me. i’d begun to remember. todos pero todititos los minuciosos details de esa noche (que resultó no ser la last night after all y quizás— she says now, no sin una buena dosis de ironía—it should have been). tan technicolor que al recordarlos—al recontártelos, montenegro—i conjured you. i conjured us, de nuevo, a más de 25 años de distancia. tu cuerpo, nuestro sudor, a pesar de esa (so much colder back then, remember, na’ que ver, poh, con este globally-overheated now) long, icy san francisco night. los restos de coca en mi hand mirror, las colillas en mi cinzano ashtray, el que daddy me había robado de ese outdoor café en canarias, to mom’s horror (aunque daddy le aseguró mil veces, june, they’re meant to be taken). tu cuerpo, fornido y winter-pale (ningún rastro de sexy southern hemisphere bronze: tú y tus homies, el du toit y el ken steenkamp, ya llevaban semanas aquí en el norte by the time we met—you’d been white-washed, jaja), lanky and muscular. our cold feet entwined, toda la noche. tu boca. tu boca en la mía, en mi sexo. your body above me, ah, tus hombros. your wide, full-lipped mouth, soot-dark capricorn eyes. querías follarme como nadie, nunca, antes, you said. oh the hubris, erotic and heartbreaking, de los 25 años. y acurrucados allí, horas y horas después (buzzed on coke y remy martin, on the lust and passion of our san francisco idyll y la preemptive desesperación de tu next-day departure) we dozed off, finally, as the pearl-pale, opaque marina dawn filtered through los matchstick slats de esos student-cheap bamboo blinds de cost plus. anygüey, como te estaba diciendo … al subir al dizque study ahora, abrí el desk drawer donde guardo las pages de mis ex-agendas, para archivar las de 2016. actually, no tengo guardadas tantos ex-años allí, i realized. en 2010, cuando mi fuga de planet dorian, i must’ve black holes portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201721 purged quite a few years’ worth. now, ni siquiera me acuerdo, ¿cuándo habré comenzado a llevar una agenda, anyway? ni puta idea. otro black hole… pero bueno: la cosa es que de repente (ni idea cómo, like i said: estas cosas me pasan), me eye fell upon some pages from 2004 (año que recordé, al tiro, como terribilis), then 2006, todo el año, which i decided to toss por aburrido (except la primera visita de wim a califas, that was epic, al pensarlo, y mi primer viaje a puerto rico para lasa, y luego a oz … si bien mal acompañada por el sarcófago del dorian, ob-vio … uf ). a continuación, medio sticking together por los weird sticky restos de un ex-rubber band, vi algunas pages de 2003. año hasta más terribilis, si cabe, que 2004. pero i couldn’t help myself. ya había probado de ese magic mushroom, down ese rabbithole. i fanned those ancient agenda pages all around me, arrodillada allí en la beige sisal-look moqueta, y la primera que vi, distintiva e individual era—i promise you—el 8 de febrero, 2003. no appointments, no horóscopos, no lunches, dinners, nada. only one sentence written there:—you need to die, mom. pero oh … ‘twas enough (pace mercutio): i was felled. instantly. ojalá y pudiera decir que ‘it all came back to me,’ right then and there. al leer esa odiosa, ominosa frase. pero—a diferencia de los movies—así no trabaja la memoria. al menos: not mine. porque la verdad es que si bien he podido hacer memoria (oh, i still love this oh so ‘tine way of saying it—to remember—aun a 15 años de escucharlo en su habitat) del contexto histórico de la frase, i have no memory of what, specifically, provoked esa death wish ese día. porque ya había padecido más de un año de la outsized rabia del juvenil, que comenzó en 2001, like clockwork, ni bien volvimos del año en buenos aires. ese nuestro año porteño, i’ve seen it so clearly, poignantly since then—yo desarraigada allí pero re(dis)covering myself, becoming myself, my writerly self—también me compró un año extra de tu childhood, joey. vos, dislocado como yo, you’d sulked for the first few weeks, pero then you’d bloomed. para cuando volvimos a la suburban college town reality de tu first year of high school, te habías adueñado de esa faraway city en el sur. te habías hecho amigos, hablabas un español aporteñado. you didn’t want to come back, ni yo tampoco. patrás en califas, se te explotó una barroca american adolescencia con una double-dose de phallic, bad-ass, wannabe ghetto hostilidad. which you aimed directo al solar plexus de lo que me era más caro, más yo: mi writing. ojito: me tuve que interrumpir, just now, pa’ llamar al austra. ostensibly pa’ alertarle, cual google alerta, jaja, de los five (in)visible links i’d just sent him, him y unos cuantos otros tripulantes, on e-macho. i knew he’d be taken by la nota en el clove tree (pero ‘really’ on la globalización, las spice islas, la dutch east india co., la accidental colonización de la américas y … global warming) by amitav ghosh. sabía que we’d bond, bigtime, over el ghosh’s rapsodias planteriles que al rato end up y te transportan a un lugar (o muchos) muy otro, completely unexpected. ¡coño, que vato brillante! pero i said ‘tuve que’ porque me di cuenta, al estar platicando con el austra, de que my heart was racing and i was breathing really fast. so, dije que no recuerdo (los detalles) and it’s true, i don’t. pero the body remembers. y hasta el austra (not prone to emo-gushing) me dijo, cuando le leí la odiosa frase del juvenil—god darls, that brings it all right back, doesn’t it? i remember how intense and awful those days were for you. entonces, fortificada por la breve plática planteril transpacífica con el austra (who remembers), pude—puedo—volver a la brega. get patrás en la montura and ride this love-bronco un little hair longer. anygüey joey, te juro que even here, now, 14 years en el futuro de esa rage-fuelled missile, no me viene a la memoria su por qué. y ¿sabes qué? maybe it’s better this way. porque vos te chávez-silverman portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201722 acordás. de eso, estoy segura. in the trc of our shared heart—lo más hermoso de este wack, espantoso año pasado, añito del fucking chinese chango, for which i’d had such high hopes— te me has disculpado. estoy casi segura de que you even specifically recalled that very deathwish. y me dijiste que it wasn’t about me. que nada que ver conmigo. que it was all about you. que eran cosas que hubieses querido decir a tu dad, pero … no te atrevías and he was nowhere to be found en esos días (well ni entonces ni now, pero … esa es otra). pero el punto de todo esto es que creo que los black holes no son, necesariamente—o no siempre—a bad thing. el máximo recuerdo del 8 de febrero—el original, de 1982—had been glacier-buried más de 25 años cuando comenzó el thaw—el memory-melt–en 2008, en el montalvo arts center. y ese deshielo, esa recovery, por destabilizing que fuera (y me terremoteó, but good, el concepto de mi pasado, de mí, de quién yo era), it was a gift. porque me devolvió a montenegro. y eso (aunque eventualmente te volvieras a tu southforky, sleepwalking life, oh rip van winkle)— ese return—me despertó de mi propia bella durmiente 100-year sleep. y de esa stark, lúcida vigilia—awake, finally, al horror de mi daily (muerte en) vida y a la urgencia de cambiarla— nunca más me volví a dormir. aunque me tomara un par de añitos más, esa nueva vigilia (que me había devuelto intactos y nítidos los recuerdos—oh so lushly embodied—de ese original 8 de febrero, y de tantas otras san francisco and new orleans nights, de soñolientas y eróticas houston mornings y de nuestra helada mardi gras despedida en chicago) me fortaleció para emprender mi great escape en septiembre de 2010. así que ¿the moral of the story, m’ijito? let’s lance ourselves forward onto the spear, como dice el sokoloff. live with the question. abracemos, in other words, las operaciones selectivas de la memoria. porque he aquí su razón de ser: a veces el olvido es balsámico, como cuando miré esa agenda page—el 8 de febrero, 2003—and had not a fucking clue why you’d said what you’d said. seguro que hay algo allí dark and ugly, deep down below. pero ¿sabes qué? en este caso, mejor que sigan roncando esos sleeping canes. you and i are in a good place now y como dije antes, i think your own remembering is enough for the both of us, ¿que no? por otra parte, cuando hay algo glacier-buried que te podría cambiar la vida para bien—like it saved my life—pos órale. esa es otra cosa. lance yourself. go for it. al comienzo de un nuevo año, el año del fire phoenix (mejor que el roostie, ¿no te parece?)—your 30th year, coño—celebremos este thaw. black holes portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201723 © 2016 by natalie edwards and christopher hogarth. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: edwards, n. and hogarth c. 2016. fishermen and little fish: migration and hospitality in maxine beneba clarke’s ‘the stilt fishermen of kathaluwa’. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 13:2, 1-10. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal. v13i2.4891 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 13, no. 2 july 2016 abstract in this article, we argue that maxine beneba clarke’s tale ‘the stilt fishermen of kathaluwa,’ in foreign soil (2014), is a provocative representation of migration in contemporary australia. at a time in which the world is facing its largest migration since the second world war and in which australian border policy is making headlines around the world, clarke’s tale is a powerful intervention in discourses of contemporary australian identity and nationhood. we demonstrate that the tale is a subtle manipulation of what mccullough terms the ‘refugee narrative structure’ since it carefully undercuts the myth of a nation as a coherent narrative across time and space. by juxtaposing the tales of an illegal migrant and a volunteer case worker, and by setting the tale largely in a functioning detention centre, clarke gives voice to the voiceless and draws parallels between individuals on different sides of the insider/outsider binary. the encounter that finally takes place between them implicates the reader very directly in discourses of contemporary migration and border policy. keywords australia; migration; refugees; borders; hospitality; detention centres; narratives of nationhood; maxine benebe clarke; the stilt fisherman of kathaluwa; foreign soil research article fishermen and little fish: migration and hospitality in maxine beneba clarke’s ‘the stilt fishermen of kathaluwa’ natalie edwards1, christopher hogarth2 1 department of french studies, school of humanities, faculty of arts, university of adelaide 2 school of communications, international studies and languages, division of education, arts and social sciences, university of south australia corresponding author: natalie edwards, department of french studies, university of adelaide, sa 5005. natalie.edwards@adelaide.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.4891 article history: received 11/03/2016; revised 02/05/2016; accepted 07/05/2016; published 09/08/2016 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.4891 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.4891 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.4891 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:natalie.edwards@adelaide.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.4891 in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the world is facing its largest refugee crisis since the second world war.1 high numbers of refugees are fleeing not only war-torn syria and iraq, but also troubled countries such as afghanistan, kosovo, albania, pakistan, eritrea, nigeria and serbia.2 australia is the destination for refugees from many of these countries, in addition to people departing from states in the asia pacific region such as myanmar, fiji and sri lanka. in australia, the arrival of migrants seeking asylum in such large numbers has generated often vitriolic debate over national security and border arrangements. recent changes in australian immigration policy—operation sovereign borders, a policy of blocking boats carrying so-called illegal immigrants—made headlines around the world. gillian whitlock observes that ‘operation sovereign borders, a militarized program designed to prevent the boats entering australian waters, uses eleven unmarked orange lifeboats that act as ‘vital weapons in a new “tow back” policy implemented in secrecy and in the interests of national security and border control’ (whitlock 2015: 245). revelations of such policies have provoked outrage among many australians, as evidenced by the protests and rallies held in major cities in april and october 2015. one of the most controversial elements of the policy is the use of offshore detention centres on christmas island (an australian territory in the north-eastern indian ocean) and, in the pacific, manus island (papua new guinea) and nauru. reports of abuse, rape, riots and human rights infringements have raised questions over the practices followed in these centres and engendered strong reactions in australian society. in this article, we examine one such reaction: a fictionalized account from maxine beneba clarke of an encounter between a refugee and a volunteer caseworker in an australian detention centre. clarke is a relatively new name in australian literature but her debut collection of short stories, foreign soil (2014), is widely celebrated in australia. the manuscript won the 2013 victorian premier’s literary award for an unpublished work and the published volume was shortlisted for several awards, including the coveted stella prize. clarke holds a specific migration story herself, having been born in australia to a family that has four continents of migration in its history; her parents were born in london to caribbean migrants who descended from african slaves (shaw 2014: n. p.). foreign soil takes migration as its subject, weaving the trope through a series of short stories that each centre upon one protagonist in a variety of anglophone settings. throughout the volume, clarke highlights the specific voices and accents of her characters in their myriad settings; nathanial robertson of kingston speaks in a jamaican accent in ‘big islan,’ a family from louisiana speak in new orleans drawl in ‘gaps in the hickory,’ and sudanese refugee asha makes statements in imperfect english, such as ‘i have second husband. i lucky’ in ‘david.’ here, we examine the two protagonists of the story ‘the stilt fishermen of kathaluwa’: asanka, a young man who has fled sri lanka illegally; and loretta, the volunteer who meets him in the villawood detention centre, which in the world outside the text is a functioning centre located in suburban sydney. clarke interweaves the stories of these two characters, recounting asanka’s background as a child soldier for the tamil tigers and his escape on an overcrowded, unsafe boat while at the same time situating loretta as a graduate in law who lives in a sydney suburb and is wracked by guilt over her lifestyle choices. the short story comprises an intricate layering of spaces and temporalities as it weaves between the 1 this claim is made by amnesty international (amnesty international australia 2015). 2 information on current migration trends mentioned in this article is drawn from the bbc report ‘migrant crisis: migration to europe explained in seven charts’ (2016) and the australian government’s australia’s migration trends 2013–2014’ (2014). edwards and hogarth portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20162 two characters’ stories. one of the most striking elements of the text is its dual narrative structure, in which the author presents the background to the two protagonists and only brings them together in the final section. the reader is thus well acquainted with the story, perspective and motivations of both characters before the encounter takes place. this narrative strategy, we argue, enables clarke to create a new paradigm for the encounter between individuals of different languages, ethnicities, colours and nationalities. overall, we argue that this text should not simply be read as part of a wave of immigrant stories but rather as a challenge to many of the paradigms that overdetermine immigrant and refugee narratives. in its juxtaposition of the two characters, the insider and the outsider, and the way in which it gradually undercuts the differences between them, ‘the stilt fishermen of kathaluwa’ is an important intervention in the representation of illegal migrants and in discourses of contemporary australian identity. parallel narratives in her work on narratives about population movements kate mccullough theorizes what she terms as the ‘refugee narrative structure,’ contrasting it with immigrant narrative (2011: 825). in the latter narrative form, texts stage an initial foreignness and recount a series of obstacles to the migrant protagonist before culminating in acculturation. such texts foreground national difference and an insider/outsider binary and typically follow a teleological pattern. a ‘refugee narrative structure,’ by contrast, intervenes critically in the narratives through which nations emerge. mccullough bases her theory on edward said’s stance that nationalism depends partially on the creation of a narrative that involves both time and space. that is, it is a narrative of the historical development of the nation through time as well as the physical space that it encompasses (said 2000: 176). for mccullough a refugee narrative points to the disruption of such narratives of nationhood. such texts employ ‘a complex layering of spaces and temporalities, bringing together discourses of the local (ethnic) and the global and disrupting the time/space of the nation’ (said 2000: 804). by adopting a non-linear structure and by rejecting the tropes of immigrant narrative, refugee narratives not only disrupt the teleological time of the nation but also expose the historical homogeneity of the myth of nation creation. it is our contention that clarke’s story employs a series of narrative strategies that together perform exactly this movement. ‘the stilt fishermen of kathaluwa’ employs a dual narrative structure that is marked by the disruption of chronological time. the tale opens with a description of asanka entering the fishing boat and hiding with the other clandestine migrants, yet the text proceeds to move back and forward through time to fill in the gaps in his history. simultaneously, the reader is first introduced to loretta as she wakes up in her comfortable, new house in an unnamed australian suburb with her lawyer husband next to her. slowly, the tale recounts snapshots of her past as clarke weaves several layers of experience into loretta’s identity. the text is thus structured around a series of temporal shifts that identify the characters’ present situations— the cell in the detention centre for asanka, the middle-class suburb for loretta—as the product of unexpected events. asanka is first presented as an isolated, innocent child who is entirely out of place among the adult migrants and human traffickers on board the rickety fishing boat. he fears the confined space of the fish hold beneath the deck in which the men are obliged to hide and is only spared being hidden in it by the pity of the older migrant chaminda. he weeps but ‘doesn’t feel fear in the way that he used to’ (clarke 2014: 195) because, in the first temporal shift that the text stages, the reader learns that he was abducted as a young boy by the tamil fishermen and little fish portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20163 tigers and was obliged to kill in order to survive. the text recounts abuse he suffered, such as being confined in a potato chest as punishment, and murders he committed, then returns to the present time and space of the detention centre. the reader follows asanka’s daily routine at villawood, before further temporal shifts recount his memories of his mother and father, the life-threatening illness he contracted on the fishing boat, and the moment at which the australian authorities captured the migrants. after each of these incidents, the narrative returns to asanka’s life in the detention centre, thereby drawing explicit connections between his traumatic background and its unfair consequences. asanka’s mental deterioration is recounted in detail as he becomes steadily more paranoid, imagines blood gushing over him and his surroundings and becomes obsessed with time, tracking the seconds that pass in the seemingly endless days in detention. time therefore becomes a central theme of the tale but is presented not as a marker of progress or development but as a metaphor of disintegration. these multiple temporal shifts thus gradually construct a complex portrayal of this character and invite the reader to sympathise with the child who is far from innocent but who is more sinned against than sinning. the theme of time and the non-chronological narrative structure immediately distance the text from the standard immigrant narrative theorized by mccullough; moreover, the multiple layering of time and space mirror the pattern of refugee narrative by working to undercut a coherent, progressive narrative of complete nationhood. the non-chronological narrative structure with which clarke portrays asanka is mirrored in the description of loretta. the reader is first introduced to this character as she awakes one saturday morning to volunteer at villawood. her pristine, newly built house fashioned by an interior stylist with a perfect lawn outstretched in front of it belies a more complex domestic and personal situation. a succession of temporal shifts again moves the narrative into different timeframes, providing glimpses into loretta’s history. she is considering motherhood, for example, and the text recounts incidents in which she speaks to her mother-in-law about starting a family. snapshots of her at school and university show her studying law and dreaming of a career in refugee and asylum seeker law. the reader also learns in another temporal shift that loretta resigned a position at the asylum seekers support centre since her husband, now working in a prominent legal firm, found it embarrassing. the tension between the two is tangible, as their interpretations of the law and their relationship to it are vastly different. in one flashback, loretta weeps on the floor upon hearing of chaminda’s suicide in the detention centre and sam violently rebukes her for her emotional response (231). between these incursions into the past, the text returns to the present of loretta’s life, in which she drives to and volunteers at villawood, leading up to her encounter with asanka. this middle-class lawyer is thus far from a faceless, unfeeling professional and her personal story likewise garners sympathy from the reader. moreover, small clues in the memories of her life lead to another layer of this narrative: sam has a nonna, the name loretta is of italian origin, she buys turkish bread and prepares mediterranean food with her family (179). were the non-chronological narrative to reach further back in history, perhaps to loretta’s childhood or to the tale of her parents, one may imagine that it would be a classic australian tale of successful migration and multiculturalism. the frequent temporal shifts that present each character’s history are a subtle indication that everyone is directly impacted by their personal, familial and collective histories and that these may be closer to the characters’ present than one may imagine from superficial appearances. furthermore, by moving time backward and forward in her narrative of these characters, clarke undoes the teleological time of the nation as understood by mccullough. if the myth of the nation depends upon a narrative of edwards and hogarth portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20164 progress through chronological time and through space, the complex layering of spaces and temporalities in clarke’s story subtly yet convincingly undercuts it. parallel voices the short story’s ‘refugee narrative structure’ therefore disrupts time and space in both strands of narrative, thereby creating a parallel between the two characters. while their situations are vastly different, the way in which their present experiences are framed through layers of temporalities draws them together as products of the migrant experience. clarke draws further parallels between the two strands of narrative that tell each character’s story through a manipulation of focalization. the tale is narrated by an unnamed, third person narrator who is situated externally to the tale. clarke also uses focalized narration in order to draw parallels between the two main characters. the french literary theorist gérard genette draws a distinction between voice and focalization by asking ‘who speaks?’ of the former and ‘who sees?’ of the latter (genette 1980: 186). mieke bal pushes this further by distinguishing two different categories within focalization: the ‘focalizer,’ who focalizes somebody/something else and the ‘focalized’ who is the object of the focalizer (bal 1983: 234). in ‘the stilt fishermen of kathaluwa,’ the third-person narration incorporates such focalization to convey loretta’s and asanka’s voices; in terms of genette’s distinction, the third-person narrator speaks but the two characters see, and in terms of bal’s, both serve as ‘focalizers’ of a focalized australia. there is very little dialogue in this tale, yet clarke enables the reader to hear her characters’ voices through this technique. in asanka’s case, the narrative focalization serves first to emphasize his youth and vulnerability. the reader hears his childlike vocabulary and ideas through phrases or terms, such as in his nicknames for his captors: ponytail and moustache. asanka imagines the captors in relation to a personification of an element of nature, the sea, that we readily associate with children: ‘if they shout at him, they will wake the ocean for sure, wake the snoring beast’ (clarke 2014: 195). importantly, this technique allows the reader into the intimate thoughts of the characters and it is clear from the outset that asanka’s thoughts are extremely troubled. while still on the boat, he hallucinates, imagining a group of fishermen who provide the title of the tale: ‘the fishermen nod their heads, as if to wish safe passage … he thought they were extinct, the stilt fishermen of kathaluwa. he learned about them back at school. there were photographs of them in his geography book’ (198). the focalization thus places the reader in the position of the child refugee, viewing the scene from his perspective yet knowing through the third-person narration that his thoughts are irrational. moreover, clarke’s use of focalization enables the reader to view the full extent of his mental spiral in the detention centre. using his wristwatch, asanka counts constantly in his mind, second by second. clarke renders the reader witness to his habit thus: 08.09.23. he undresses, moves into the tiny shower cubicle, turns on the hot water tap, steps under the cold spray. the water warms, scalds, starts burning his skin. 08.10.52. blood is washing off him, running down his thin brown body and into the silver drain hole. there is red, everywhere. he has not killed anybody today, not killed since he got away from the liberation tigers. but there is blood all over this shower cubicle, all over him. (209) crucially, nobody around him—loretta, his fellow captives or the guards whose habits he describes methodically—notices the depth of his psychological suffering. even the man whom asanka describes as the ‘head doctor’ tells him that there is no blood but had then ‘walked fishermen and little fish portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20165 out of here, left him behind, in the chest’ (209). by contrast, the reader is fully aware of the character’s silent, inner turmoil through the narrative focalization. similarly, loretta’s voice is rarely heard, besides snippets of conversations or short exclamations. instead, the focalization switches to her in the strand of narrative that recounts her story. her seemingly perfect suburban lifestyle is quickly undone by the intimate thoughts to which this narrative technique gives access. the reader learns of her dissatisfaction with her husband, whom she resents on the basis of his general dismissive behaviour. the morning after he misses dinner with her and her mother due to excessive drinking with a client, the reader follows her vision of his face twenty centimetres from her and reads her thought: ‘saturday morning’s the only time sam ever sleeps in. fuck him though’ (199). likewise, the reader understands her glee when she knocks the contents of a rubbish bin over the lawn and later thinks ‘when it rains, the toilet rolls, newspapers and cereal boxes strewn across the grass will sog to grey pulp. they’ll look like old vomit on the manicured jade nature strip’ (217). more than feeling ill at ease with her middle-class environment, though, loretta is also emotionally involved with the individuals with whom she volunteers in the centre and the focalized narration gives the reader access to this aspect of her life. when she learns of chaminda’s suicide and sam shouts at her, she reacts viscerally—‘it’d felt like ice-cold fingers were closing around her lungs’—and admits internally to feeling responsible for the death. she had taped a note to her boss’s desk, but on learning that the note had been lost, the reader hears her exclaim: ‘she should have fucking known though—better than that’ (231). the wry comment on her marriage—that she is silent in the face of her husband’s outburst—cannot be lost on the reader. the final section of the story, after her encounter with asanka, recounts her silently sitting in her car: ‘hopelessness burrows into her chest again, its fingernails digging into her lungs, slowly squeezing out the air. fuck sam, fuck having a baby, fuck her new job, and fuck this stupid fucking car’ (243). overall, the focalized narrative demonstrates the mechanisms through which the voiceless are silenced. by placing the reader within asanka’s and loretta’s minds, showing personal perspectives that nobody around them notices, the narrative technique cautions against the facile reading of the characters according to stereotypes. that technique also underscores how the voiceless may constitute the site of imagined alternatives to an accepted historical record but that these alternatives are rarely accepted as legitimized narratives. taken together, the dual narrative structure and the focalized narrative voice create considerable readerly sympathy for the two characters who are closer to each other than they or anybody else realize, and who are apparently understood by nobody around them. parallel metaphors in addition to the dual narrative structure and focalization that draw parallels between the two characters, a set of metaphors that are common to both strands of narrative creates further proximity between them. the opening lines that describe asanka’s boarding of the fishing boat mention the ‘olive-green’ ocean, the migrants’ ‘brown legs,’ and their ‘black or blue shorts,’ and recount how the migrants were instructed ‘do not wear white’ (192). metaphors of colour abound in the story and are a striking element of clarke’s style; amid the simple, unpoetic prose that narrates the characters’ thoughts with little description, the images provided by the adjectives of colour stand out. the ocean is described in hues of dark blue, green, grey and black and the migrants’ skin is evoked by similarly sombre colours; by contrast, the australian police uniforms are white, as are the walls and ceilings of the detention centre. these images of dark and light, of shades of black and white, are contrasted to the violent red hues of asanka’s hallucinations. edwards and hogarth portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20166 in the shower, for example, his focalized narrative reads ‘blood is washing off him, running down his thin brown body and into the silver drain hole. there is red, everywhere … the waxy white soap bar turns pink with blood’ (209–10). given there is little other description, therefore, the imagery of blood redness stands in contrast to the repeated imagery of black and white hues in the confined spaces of the detention centre in which asanka finds himself. the strand of narrative that recounts loretta’s story performs a seemingly identical movement. the white colour of her skin is repeatedly referenced, in a clear contrast to asanka’s colouring, and her environment is also monochrome. sam has bought her an ostentatious black sports car that she detests. in the most salient example, her bathroom consists of black surfaces that contrast with plain white tiles. loretta remembers the words of the interior stylist, who described the palate thus: ‘“black and white” … “never goes out of fashion. you just dress it up with whatever colour you want to suit the season. yellow cushions and wall art in summer, purple throw rugs and candles in winter”’ (202). yet, as loretta regrets, there is never any colour change, neither in summer nor in winter, and the colourful images of the children she imagines—brown, vegemite fingerprints, green playdough, flame-haired daughters—never materialize physically. while asanka is confined in black and white and haunted by colours, red-haired loretta—‘not red like blood, though, orange-red like sunset’ (228), as asanka describes her—is similarly confined, despite her dreams of a multicoloured life. for loretta, even the view of the lawn strewn with rubbish is a source of pleasure, as she gazes upon the ‘dark green bin,’ the ‘yellow lid,’ the ‘lite white milk cartons’ and ‘an orange juice bottle’ (214). the racial distinction between dark and light skinned individuals is clear throughout these repeated metaphors, and so is the will for a multicoloured society that sees beyond monochromaticity. these striking metaphors, the only descriptive adjectives in the tale, further highlight the similarities between the two narratives and the lived experience of two characters, despite their apparently opposed personal situations. together, the two characters represent a view of australia that does not conform to a multicoloured, multicultural palette; rather australia emerges as a stark juxtaposition between dark and light colours that do not come together. given australia’s historical exclusion of certain “races” from immigrating, some policies of which persisted until 1973, and its inescapable legacy, clarke’s representation could be interpreted as a wry comment on australia’s past, present and future. the second metaphor that stands out in clarke’s undescriptive prose is that of animality. there are several images in which humans are compared to non-human creatures, most commonly to fish, in an apparent will to emphasize the fragility of human experience. asanka narrowly escapes being transported in the claustrophobic fish hold in which other immigrants are packed tightly together. the ‘people traffickers’ who command the fishing boat poke at asanka with fish knives, treating the human being no differently to how they would inspect their catch on a fishing trip. the migrants drink fish blood when their water supply is exhausted; their skin is compared to fish scales due to dehydration; and, when sick with dysentery, asanka’s fellow migrants hold him over the side of the boat, suspended in the ocean like a floating fish so as not to spread the disease. the text thus presents the experience of these refugees as gradually dehumanizing, and likening them to the migrating fish who cross the seas to survive elsewhere. yet these migrants are clearly not those who reach their destination and prolong their species, as asanka notices: ‘the boat post-catch, the entire deck writhing silver and shimmery as a hundred netted herring thrash and wriggle, gasping for air’ (196). the detention centre, following these piscatorial images, is presented as akin to a fish tank, full of barely-human specimens who thrash about in cramped quarters and who are gazed upon from the outside by the journalists who flock to its gates. ironically, the australians who surround asanka in the fish bowl of a detention centre fishermen and little fish portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20167 confine him for far longer than the illegal migrants confined their cargo to the fish hold and the tamil tigers confined asanka to the potato chest. this metaphor is reiterated in one specific moment in the narrative devoted to loretta’s story, but with a notable difference given that it involves a sex scene that alludes to the fickle distinction between the human and the non-human. loretta’s focalized narration describes her husband during the sex act, while she is thinking of the detention centre and noticing the precise time on the alarm clock, just as asanka does as he walks around his very different environment: ‘sam’s mouth is opening and closing, right next to her ear. he thrashes and gulps and writhes, like a landed fish’ (201). the scene portrays sex as base and animalistic—but only briefly. sam’s transformation into a non-human is a temporary movement that culminates in him returning to his usual state, comfortable in his safe, suburban environment. by contrast, the refugees undergo a gradual change into a state that, culminating in their entrapment in a fishbowl, is irreversible. the culmination of this metaphor is the first encounter between asanka and representatives of australia: the border police who intercept the boat in australian waters. the reader again hears asanka’s voice as he narrates their appearance: ‘the tall australian man is a stilt fisherman crouched two metres about the water. he is staring down at chaminda, at asanka, at the whole boatload of them. they are tiny fishes, flitting above his stilts, unaware what crouches above them, and he is quietly suspended, waiting’ (242). the border police thus appear to asanka like the stilt fisherman whom he imagined during his hallucinations. he views both groups as phantom beings who embody a protective force, but his childlike comparison emphasizes their dissimilarity; while both are figures of authority, the fishermen inspire wonderment in school children, whereas the border police are figures of distant, foreign laws. what unites the two groups is not their respective roles but asanka’s position in relation to them. both look down on him from above as they would look down on a fish: a powerless, motionless creature, a fish out of water destined to exist in a state of unbelonging before its eventual demise. in this metaphor, therefore, the short story extends its representation of the dehumanizing aspects of migration by implying that no positive resolution is possible. the fate of asanka and his fellow migrants is exactly that of a captured shoal of fish on the floor of a boat. rethinking the encounter the encounter between the two characters occurs at the very end of the short story and the reader is thus acquainted with the multiple parallels between them before they come together. the narrative is carefully crafted to place the reader in the position of the knowing outsider who understands the similarities between the two characters, whereas the characters themselves face each other in awkward silence. the few words that they exchange cause discomfort. asanka refers to his treatment by the tamil tigers and says, ‘chaminda said you would help me’ (235). loretta replies little except for ‘sorry’ before he abruptly tells her: ‘i have to go now’ (237). the focalized narration presents her voice in the car park as she thinks: ‘she’s left him there. wasn’t even in a position to help anymore’ (243). meanwhile asanka has returned to his room with the hairpins, tissues and dental floss he has stolen from her bag. a graphic passage recounts how he removes the plastic coating from a hairpin, threads the dental floss around it and uses it to sew his mouth shut. the metaphor of silencing (the migrant) is clear, yet the image also iterates the gradual dehumanization of the refugee in the story. the description of asanka pushing the pin through the flesh of his lips reduces him again to the status of a fish, but with a hook in its mouth: caught, trapped, helpless and awaiting its inevitable fate. edwards and hogarth portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20168 the presentation of this encounter, we argue, is the main reason why clarke’s tale subverts the script of immigrant narrative as theorized by mccullough. this event, which provides the conclusion of the tale, may at first appear as a missed encounter between the two characters. they are largely silent and uncommunicative, unaware of the parallels between them. nevertheless, occurring after the story has drawn attention to the personal parallels between them, the story’s final encounter becomes an important site of potentiality. literary critic mireille rosello (2005) theorizes the ‘performative encounter’ as the rare exception in which international and/or intercultural encounters do not adhere to the overdetermined scripts set down by history, encounters that forge identity formations that break open new possibilities of subjectivity in a post-colonial era. she defines the performative encounter as ‘a type of encounter that coincides with the creation of new subject positions rather than treating pre-existing (pre-imagined) identities as the reason for, and justification of, the protocol of encounter’ (rosello 2005: 1). in the case of asanka and loretta, the encounter that transpires between them does not immediately create new subject positions; but both are significantly changed as a result of it. asanka is on the brink of becoming a militant activist and loretta is on the brink of taking action in both her professional and personal realms. the central enigma of the story lies in the potential of their encounter. ‘the stilt fishermen of kathaluwa’ ends on this meeting, one that provides little conclusion. instead, the tale invites the reader into the text to imagine the closure to each character’s tale. the media personnel are gathering around asanka and loretta is voicing her desire for change in her car; the potential for a performative encounter between thes two characters is now evident. rather than providing a neat, teleological ending to this migrant narrative, clarke’s potentially performative encounter implicates the reader directly in her tale, forcing that reader to imagine what might happen to asanka, how his story will be covered and how his request for asylum may unfold, and to speculate, as well, about how loretta may choose to live her life. overall, this tale of two characters in very different positions insists upon the unknown parallels that may exist, but that lie unknown, in the stories of strangers. these are not just any strangers, however, but fictionalized representations of individuals caught in the specific trauma of contemporary migration. the third-person narrative voice in the short story is carefully crafted to render the perspectives of such individuals, thereby giving voice to those who find themselves in a situation that is often described yet rarely heard. mccullough’s notion of a ‘refugee narrative structure’ finds an echo in clarke’s story, which undercuts the legitimized, chronological and teleological narrative of the nation through its emphasis on the complex layering of time and space that becomes the fabric of alternative narratives. asanka and loretta both form part of the tapestry that constitutes the contemporary australian nation and demonstrate the myth of any coherent, complete narrative of its formation. instead, given the importance accorded to time within the story, time appears to be out of joint for these two characters, who meet at the wrong time and in the wrong place. in a different time and a different place, their encounter could have been performative, leading to changed subject positions and a subversion of historical narratives that would ordinarily dictate the protocol of their meeting. in this story, however, the reader is forced to acknowledge that such an encounter does not occur ,and that it would be extremely unlikely to occur in the reality outside the text of contemporary immigration practices and policies. moreover, the reader’s ethical position as a reader who passively observes the stories of others is similarly called into question. at a time in which reports of psychological suffering, incarceration of minors and self-harm in detention centres is being widely publicized, to what extent is the reader willing to stage a performative encounter with the fictional characters who represent the reality of the migration crisis? fishermen and little fish portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20169 references amnesty international australia 2015, ‘australia takes first step to address world refugee crisis’. online, available: http://www.amnesty.org.au/features/comments/38023 [accessed 6 march 2016] ‘australia’s migration trends 2013–2014’ 2014, australian government, department of immigration and border protection.’ online, available: https://www.border.gov.au/reportsandpublications/ documents/statistics/migration-trends13-14.pdf [accessed 6 march 2016] bal, m. 1983, ‘the narrating and the focalizing: a theory of the agents in narrative,’ style, vol. 17: 234–69 clarke, m. b. 2014, foreign soil. hachette, sydney genette, g. 1980, narrative discourse. blackwell, oxford mccullough, k. 2011, ‘displacement as narrative structure: refugee time/space in diana abu-jaber’s arabian jazz,’ american literature, vol. 84, no. 1: 803–29. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/000298311437225 ‘migrant crisis: migration to europe explained in seven charts’ 2016, bbc news, 4 march. online, available: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131911 [accessed 6 march 2016] rosello, m. 2005, france and the maghreb: performative encounters. university of florida press, gainesville said, e. 2000, reflections on exile and other essays. harvard university press, cambridge shaw, m. 2014, global local: maxine beneba clarke on ‘foreign soil,’ 7 february. online, available: http:// www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2014/02/07/29437/global-local-maxine-beneba-clarke-onforeign-soil/ [accessed 6 march 2016] whitlock, g. 2015, ‘the hospitality of cyberspace: mobilizing asylum seeker testimony online’, biography, vol. 38, no. 2: 245–66. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/bio.2015.0025 edwards and hogarth portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 201610 http://www.amnesty.org.au/features/comments/38023 https://www.border.gov.au/reportsandpublications/documents/statistics/migration-trends13-14.pdf https://www.border.gov.au/reportsandpublications/documents/statistics/migration-trends13-14.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1437225 http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1437225 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131911 http://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2014/02/07/29437/global-local-maxine-beneba-clarke-on-foreign-soil/ http://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2014/02/07/29437/global-local-maxine-beneba-clarke-on-foreign-soil/ http://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2014/02/07/29437/global-local-maxine-beneba-clarke-on-foreign-soil/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/bio.2015.0025 mckaygalley2013finalpa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. australians abroad special issue, guest edited by juliana de nooy. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. a critique of the militarisation of australian history and culture thesis: the case of anzac battlefield tourism jim mckay, centre for critical and cultural studies, university of queensland this special issue on travel from australia through a multidisciplinary lens is particularly apposite to the increasing popularity of anzac battlefield tourism. consider, for instance, the dawn service at gallipoli in 2015, which will be the highlight of the commemoration of the anzac centenary between 2014 and 2018 (anzac centenary 2012). australian battlefield tourism companies are already fully booked for this event, which is forecast to be ‘the largest peacetime gathering of australians outside of australia’ (kelly 2011). some academics have argued that rising participation in anzac battlefield tours is symptomatic of a systemic and unrelenting militarisation of australian history and culture. historians marilyn lake, mark mckenna and henry reynolds are arguably the most prominent proponents of this line of reasoning. according to mckenna: it seems impossible to deny the broader militarisation of our history and culture: the surfeit of jingoistic military histories, the increasing tendency for military displays before football grand finals, the extension of the term anzac to encompass firefighters and sporting champions, the professionally stage-managed event of the dawn service at anzac cove, the burgeoning popularity of battlefield tourism (particularly gallipoli and the kokoda track), the ubiquitous newspaper supplements extolling the virtues of soldiers past and present, and the tendency of the media and both main political parties to view the death of the last world war i veterans as significant national moments. (2007) in the opening passage of their book, what’s wrong with anzac? the militarisation of australian history (henceforth, wwwa), to which mckenna contributed a chapter, lake and reynolds also avowed that militarisation was a pervasive and inexorable mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 2 force: ‘for several years now australia has seen the relentless militarisation of our history; the commemoration of war and understanding of our national history have been conflated. the anzac spirit is now said to animate all our past achievements, even as the gallipoli landing recedes into the distant past’ (lake & reynolds 2010a: vii). lake (2010b: 12, 22) continued this theme in her introductory chapter by first stating that, ‘australian history has been thoroughly militarised,’ and then foreshadowing that the book will examine the ‘militarisation of australian history, public memory and national values.’ some examples of militarisation presented in wwwa are: • the promotion of anzac day as the national day • a resurgence of interest in remembrance day, vp day, and vietnam veterans day • a profusion of newspaper articles, books and documentaries on military history • obtuse and jingoistic behaviour by young australian tourists at gallipoli • commemorations of ww1, ww2 and the korean and vietnam wars • the advancement of anzac by political leaders, the department of veterans’ affairs (dva), the australian war memorial, the mass media and schools • the attendance of former prime ministers bob hawke and john howard at dawn services in gallipoli. reactions to this militarisation thesis have ranged from effusive praise to anger in numerous academic and popular forums.1 it is unfeasible to untangle such a heated and multifarious controversy here, so i will focus on two aspects of militarisation that are relevant to this special issue. first, i argue that the version of militarisation proposed by lake, mckenna and reynolds contains ontological and epistemological flaws that render it incapable for understanding the multifaceted motivations for, and experiences of, anzac battlefield tours. i then maintain that in order to study how australians respond to anzac battlefield tours researchers need to deploy an empirically grounded and multidisciplinary framework. as an alternative to the militarisation thesis, i draw on postmodern concepts of tourism to analyse instances of travel by high school students that problematise anzac myths.2 1 for strongly contrasting appraisals of both wwwa and the larger so-called ‘history wars’ related to anzac, see bendle (2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c), blainey (2010), bryant (2010), mckernan (2010), o’ lincoln (2010), prior (2010), romei (2010) shannon (2010) and the age (2009). 2 i use ‘myths’ as formulated by barthes in his classic text mythologies (1973). for applications of barthes’s principles to anzac, see buchanan and james (1999), mckay (2010), slade (2003) and white (2010). hirst (1999), macleod (2004a, 2004b, 2007) and nile (1991b) adopted similar approaches in demythologising various aspects of gallipoli. mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 3 some ontological and epistemological flaws of the militarisation thesis in his seminal essay ‘notes on deconstructing “the popular,”’ hall recommended that analyses of ‘the popular’ should always begin with ‘the double stake in popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it’ (1981: 228). he issued this advice because ‘the people’ invariably respond refractorily to attempts to govern them (current examples range from profuse ‘leaderless’ movements around the world modelled on ‘occupy wall street’ to the series of insurrections in the middle east). consequently, hall counselled scholars to examine the specific and multiple ways people ignore, recuperate, subvert and resist hegemonic discourses and practices. these vicissitudinous features are absent from the views of lake, mckenna and reynolds because of their restricted ontological and epistemological premises. following the publication of shaw’s (1991) watershed analysis of postmilitarisation, scholars have investigated how military institutions both affect, and are affected by, other spheres—education, politics, sport, the economy, media, gender relations, family and civic life—by using carefully theorised empirical studies of the attitudinal, behavioural and discursive aspects of militarisation, remilitarisation and demilitarisation (satana 2008; sheffer & barak 2010). by contrast, lake, mckenna and reynolds neither define militarisation nor provide a theoretical framework for their arguments. this conceptual lacuna is their first step on a steep, slippery slope, whereby militarisation is assumed to be a fait accompli with the next move being to demonstrate its effects. moreover, this presupposition is embedded in a top-down, monolithic, functionalist, and teleological polemic that rests mainly on anecdotal evidence. lake, mckenna and reynolds focus predominantly on the public sphere: official ceremonies, media coverage, federal government expenditures and educational resources with allegedly militarising aims. although this viewpoint identifies efforts by elites to legitimise their specific version of anzac, it tells us little about informal reactions to official rhetoric and rituals. historian graeme davison astutely highlights an important limitation of this top-down approach: we historians, practitioners of ‘history from below,’ think ‘downwards’ from the nation to the intimate world of family and suburb, while the rest of the world thinks ‘upwards,’ only intermittently and sometimes unwillingly, from the private domain of home and family to the wider world. historians seeking entry to the national soul have often dissected the public rituals of australia day and anzac day. they assume that public celebrations are a clue to private sentiments. (davison 2003: 75) mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 4 the closest we get to a bottom-up perspective is an aside by mckenna: ‘the story of anzac day’s resurgence should not only be understood from the top down. there appears to be a deep need on the part of many younger australians for a shared sacred experience. a “moving” experience of what it means to be australian. anzac day fills that need’ (2007: 71). however, this both assumes that young australians are ‘cultural dopes’ (hall 1981: 230) and contains a functionalist premise about an experiential vacuum having to be satisfied. davison identifies some obvious problems with this line of reasoning: the trouble with the ‘vacuum hypothesis’ is that there are as many moral vacuums waiting to be filled as there are nostalgic historians ready to suggest them … it doesn’t explain why anzac … should be preferred to any other national or religious myth. (it’s a theory that regards young people literally as suckers, ready to fill their inner emptiness with whatever mythology is on hand). nor does it plausibly explain why, if we go by the attendance statistics, this mysterious vacuum has opened up so suddenly since the mid-1990s. (davison 2003: 80) bottom-up perspectives that lake, mckenna and reynolds never consult reveal the recusant sort of scenario suggested by hall regarding australians’ stances toward anzac myths. in scrutinising the australians and the past survey (hamilton & ashton 2003), davison and fellow historian richard white (2003) found that national anniversaries, holidays and commemorations are mediated in the main by familial and local networks with citizens manifesting sceptical, apathetic and even hostile attitudes toward official ceremonies (also see clark 2012). in their studies of national identity, sociologists timothy phillips and phillip smith (phillips & smith 2000; smith & phillips 2001) ascertained that although australians consistently endorsed anzac motifs this was done relatively autonomously from discourses proffered by elites. these tenacious quotidian practices are evident with respect to anzac day, which, as historian helen robinson (2010: 77) put it, is ‘not just a matter of attendance’ but ‘a question of attitude.’ for instance, anthropologist bruce kapferer (1988) argued that anzac day has been characterised by a ‘people-state opposition’ with a cacophony of drinking, gambling, mateship, militarism, masculinity, disorder, liminality, communitas and tensions between authorities and citizens.3 author and speechwriter freudenberg has noted that such discordance over anzac day is even evident in wwwa: 3 historian ken inglis, one of the most insightful analysts of anzac, noted that kapferer’s ethnographic research needed to be qualified by a more subtle historical analysis of anzac day practices (inglis 1990; also see inglis 2008). mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 5 in their chapter on the anti-war movement, carina donaldson and marilyn lake write, ‘the content over anzac day and then vietnam (in the 1960s and 1970s) was part of a larger cultural struggle over the sort of society australian should become.’ that is, the anzac debate can be productive and positive, by the authors’ own standards. (freudenberg 2010) ironically, lake (2010b) noted such conflicting viewpoints among bloggers who responded to her criticisms of anzac on the age (‘creation’ 2009) website: ‘[they] contained a mixture of hostility and support, personal attacks and thoughtful reflection … there were as many contributors who expressed relief’ (lake 2010b: 4); ‘rhapsodies [about anzac] received short shrift from more cynical contributors to the debate who pointed to different history lessons’ (5); ‘the online forum attracted a lively, heated exchange that revealed … deep divisions over the meaning of anzac’ (7). lake also mentioned that some bloggers were inclined to invoke their family’s military service as an entitlement to speak authoritatively and silence critics, but aside from wondering if the ‘cult of anzac’ was producing ‘two classes of citizens,’ she again ignored what these responses might tell us about how intimate ties shape mundane interpretations of anzac (lake 2010b: 23).4 similar problems arise with lake’s claims about the military history books: ‘there are now more books published on australians at war than ever before, hundreds during the last two decades alone. the shelves of bookshops groan under their weight and military history is usually given its own section of the shop’ (2010b: 14). this personifies the loose and simplistic evidence used throughout wwwa. shops do contain hagiographic australian military history books, but also sell critical volumes like zombie myths of australian military history (stockings 2010), the broken years (gammage 2010), gallipoli: the end of the myth (prior 2009), zero hour (davidson 2010), all day long the noise of battle (windsor 2011) and, of course, wwwa. two critical military history books were also acclaimed in the 2012 prime minister’s prize for australian history. paul daley’s (2009) beersheba: a journey through australia’s forgotten war was shortlisted, and bad characters: sex, crime, mutiny and murder in the great war by peter stanley (2010) was the joint winner. moreover, we are not told how sales of books on australian military history compare, for instance, with international bestselling ones by historians of world war two, like antony beevor and ian kershaw. there is also no analysis of the motivations of, or the militaristic effects on, readers of military history texts. 4 a similar pattern was also evident on two related blogs (bryant 2010; romei 2010). mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 6 the declaration that ‘we have seen the relentless militarisation of our history’ would ostensibly warrant a thorough analysis of the organic intellectuals who currently research and teach military history in universities, but this is never done in wwwa, possibly because, contrary to the militarisation thesis, this field occupies a peripheral status in australian education (dean 2010). lake also failed to note that highly critical material also appears in the popular media. some examples are the three blogs mentioned above, newspaper articles by her and reynolds (lake 2009; lake and reynolds 2010b) and extended critiques by mckenna (2006a, 2007) and author and speechwriter dennis glover (2005) in two conservative national dailies. critical appraisals of anzac by journalists and academics also appear regularly in the flagship dailies of fairfax media in melbourne and sydney (bantick 2010; mcdonald 2011; porter 2009; prior & wilson 2002). the above ontological and epistemological flaws also shape how lake, mckenna and reynolds view anzac battlefield tourism. constructing moral panics and folk devils at gallipoli in 2005 some young australian tourists at gallipoli on anzac day were described in the media as ‘scumbags,’ a ‘blight on society’ and ‘the slobbering, filthy, unkempt yobbo/bogan aussie backpacker’ (ziino 2006b).5 such descriptions exemplify the observation by cultural geographer rachel hughes (2008: 319) that popular narratives of global travel are infused by a ‘moral geography’ with mobile postmodern tourists often portrayed as amoral citizens, especially at sites of remembrance. like mckenna, lake is similarly reproachful about young australian tourists: ‘anzac day [has] ceased to be a day of solemn remembrance and become a festive event, celebrated by backpackers wrapped in flags, playing rock music, drinking beer and proclaiming their national identity on the distant shores of turkey’ (lake 2010b: 3). in disagreeing with anthropologist and historian clendinnen’s (2006a) interpretation of anzac day,6 mckenna expressed despondence about ‘feelgood flag-waving’ at the 2005 gallipoli dawn service: i despair at the crass commercialisation of 25 april. take the recent anzac day dawn services at gallipoli, the voice of john laws booming out over anzac cove as the ode is read, rock videos playing, young australians standing wrapped in the flag, stubbies in hand, beer bottles and waste strewn on the ground afterwards (is this the mcg or anzac cove?). to me, this cheap 5 these are some descriptors documented by ziino (2006b), who also notes there were defenders of young australians. 6 for a response to mckenna, see clendinnen (2006b). mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 7 choreography, much of it encouraged by the state, is not ‘sober mourning’ but an example of the new australian patriotism—largely unreflective and blind to its political exploitation. (2006b: 70) in his chapter in wwwa mckenna (2010: 127) also disparaged young australians at anzac cove for: indulging in what [then-prime minister john] howard called a ‘rite of passage’ … providing the media with vox pops which suggested that the last thing on their minds was the history of ww1: ‘it wasn’t about the empire it was about us’; ‘i am here because it’s just great to be so proud of our history’; ‘the diggers would be happy if they knew we were here’; ‘they fought for us so that we could have a free life’; ‘they’re the reason we live the way we do.’ analogous moralising also underpinned his co-authored article ‘‘it’s really moving mate’: the gallipoli pilgrimage and sentimental nationalism in australia’ (mckenna & ward 2007). the first part of the title came from a conversation mckenna and ward initiated with a young australian who was watching a world cup football match involving australia with a group of friends at a street-bar in istanbul. his phrase about being stirred by a recent trip to gallipoli was intended to convey their belief that it typified the emotional shallowness of such tourists. they also quoted an australian newspaper article that condemned the behaviour of young australians at the 2005 gallipoli dawn service. the second section of their title was intended to communicate their critique of research at gallipoli by historian bruce scates (2006). mckenna and ward questioned aspects of scates’ methodology, including the purported ‘danger’ of using oral history:7 ‘unlike a primary source that is at arm’s length, the personal and intimate nature of oral history makes it at once appear more convincing, more ‘real,’ harder to distance and harder to critique’ (mckenna & ward 2007: 143). they then divined that: ‘much of scates’ language tells us that the book was written while he was under the emotional spell of his material … scates was entranced by the “landmarks of memory” … and like many of the pilgrims he interviews … caught up in the lure of gallipoli as a sacred parable’ (2007: 143–44). next, they asserted that experiences of pilgrimage documented by scates needed ‘to be understood primarily in the australian context, not the local scenery at gallipoli,’ and offered the bemused reactions to gallipoli by a group of danish postgraduate students as attestation that scates misconstrued the emotional responses of australians (mckenna & ward 2007: 145). to bolster their case, they recommended the work of 7 for a response to mckenna and ward, see scates (2007). for an apposite example of the rich insights obtained using the method of ‘oral historiography,’ see clark (2012). mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 8 two scholars as alternative readings of australians’ emotional responses at gallipoli: sociologist brad west (2005) and historian john mcquilton (2004). however, these suggestions confound their critique. they omitted that like any experienced ethnographer, west did not stay at ‘arm’s length’ from the backpackers he studied; his research corroborated some of scates’ findings; and his dialogical and cosmopolitan framework is diametrically opposed to their teleological view. mcquilton incisively identifies some australians’ sense of entitlement about gallipoli, but again mckenna and ward leave out important insights by mcquilton that undermine their stance, such as ‘gallipoli has never had a single meaning,’ ‘gallipoli has always been a contested space’ and ‘gallipoli [is] contested space in terms of what people bring to it in the form of battlefield tours’ (mcquilton 2004: 151). furthermore, using anecdotal evidence to make broad and simple generalisations is evident once again: ‘grabs’ at one dawn service; quotes from a single newspaper article; the non-reactions of a few danes; and a happenstance conversation with one person in a bar as verification that young australian tourists manifest superficial emotions. it is hardly surprising that a few boors are among the thousands of tourists whom the dva controversially crams into a confined space with no reserved seating long before the dawn service at gallipoli. moreover, given both the liminality that kapferer describes surrounding anzac day and that some young australians are likely to have been on the global ‘party tourism’ circuit, the solemn behaviour of the vast majority of attendees is remarkable. thus it is empirically unwarranted to use a few examples from a single dawn service and a one-off conversation at a bar to pillory young australians when the overwhelming majority behaves civilly and respectfully on scores of battlefield tours every year. in 1972 sociologist stanley cohen published folk devils and moral panics (2001), an analysis of skirmishes between ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ at england seaside resorts. cohen showed how mainly small frays and acts of vandalism were amplified by the media. these sensational representations, in turn, intensified public anxieties about allegedly declining morals and elicited demands for official intervention. consequently, the police acted more vigorously in subsequent incidents, which led to additional arrests and a self-fulfilling prophecy about the dangers to society supposedly posed by these young people. to explain his findings cohen devised a general model of ‘moral panics’ that is mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 9 still used widely today.8 historian bart ziino offered an explanation for media constructions of young australians at gallipoli in 2005 that is consistent with cohen’s concept of moral panics. like mcquilton, he sees these portrayals as the most recent manifestation of australians’ recurring anxieties about ‘ownership’ of gallipoli, in this case, ‘fears about commercialisation of the sacred and its incursions on a particular memory of war’ (ziino 2006b: 8). in contrast to the teleological perspective of mckenna and ward, ziino explained pilgrimages and tourism at gallipoli in a nuanced way: australians’ relationships with gallipoli are no longer mediated directly by the experience of the great war, or the generation that experienced that trauma, but by a memory of war that is being recomposed constantly as australians come into contact with the legend, the site from which it takes its origin, and a people who attach their own histories to this place. (ziino 2006b: 8) lake opined that, ‘as historians we think it is important to distinguish between history and mythology,’ but she and mckenna turn myth-makers by constructing young australians as ‘folk devils’ (2010a: 138). this aligns them with some awkward bedfellows: conservative politicians, journalists and returned service league (rsl) officials who are invariably deployed by media workers to vilify young australians.9 there is also a related paradox of mckenna criticising the media for its ‘cheap choreography,’ only to ventriloquise its reports in denouncing young australians.10 i next demonstrate the weaknesses of the militarisation thesis with respect to the teaching and learning of anzac history in schools. some classroom examples of deconstructing anzac myths according to lake the dva has militarised history in schools during the past decade with students: ‘conceptualised as the inheritors of the anzac spirit and its custodians … [and] … bombarded in recent years and throughout the year with every aspect of our engagement in overseas wars’ (2010b: 137). lake also claimed that educational resources supplied by the dva constitute ‘a veritable tidal wave of military history … [that] … has engulfed our nation’ (2010b: 135). she made this case on her reading of dva materials, drawing selectively on another researcher’s survey of schoolchildren and alluding to concerns of anonymous parents and teachers. the flaws in her 8 for recent appraisals of cohen’s work, see critcher (2009) and jenkins (2009). 9 mckernan (1998) and mcqueen (2003) observe that radical australian intellectuals have had a long-standing ambivalence toward anzac myths. 10 for examples of moral panics and australian youth, see poynting and morgan (2007). mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 10 methodology are readily apparent.11 first, like mckenna, she adopts a patronising ‘cultural dope’ view of teachers and students. second, she neglects once again what can be learned from the australians and the past survey: ‘we cannot assume that [information] is simply absorbed sponge-like by audiences. schools, media, personalities, and politicians are the least trusted about the past … far more faith is placed in sources that are less likely to promote a singularly national past: in family anecdotes, or books’ (white 2003: 56). third, teachers and students do not have messages about anzac injected hypodermically into their brains so we need to know the various ways in which they engage with dva resources. as we shall see, like all pedagogical materials, dva items can be taught and learned in an array of ways: apathetically, cynically, enthusiastically, uncritically, reflectively and subversively. yet lake does not use conventional educational research methods (for example, in-depth interviews, ethnographies or analyses of ‘formal,’ ‘hidden’ and ‘null’ curricula) in a single classroom to investigate how teachers and learners handle dva material. without such research we cannot assume the pedagogical effects of any educational resources. as communication studies scholars robert hodge and gunther kress emphasised generically, ‘meaning is always negotiated in the semiotic process, never simply imposed inexorably from above by an omnipotent author through an absolute code’ (1988: 12). let us now consider some projects in which student have used military history and/or battlefield tours to construct alternative national practices based on healing, reconciliation and empathy. when the howard government was at its zenith, adelaide schoolgirl donna handke was inspired by a fieldtrip to the village of raukkan, formerly point mcleay aboriginal mission, in the coorong. the excursion was part of the connecting spirits project led by her national award-winning history teacher julie reece. the ngarrindjeri regained control of point mcleay in 1974 and in 1982 renamed it raukkan (‘a place of peace’). the majority of the village’s approximately 125 residents are indigenous and its most renowned son is writer, inventor, preacher and political activist david unaipon (1872– 1967), who is commemorated by an image on the australian $50 note along with a picture of the raukkan church. the church has a strong anzac connection for the ngarrindjeri: in 1925 a stained-glass window was installed in memory of five 11 for a counter-critique of lake by a contributor to the dva resources, see lewis (2010). mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 11 ngarrindjeri who died on the western front and in 1996 a memorial to them was also erected there. the soldiers needed permission from the protector of aborigines before they could leave point mcleay and those who survived the war were subjected to his authority when they came back. the soldiers also fought and died for a country in which most indigenous people were not even entitled to vote for another five decades. a key promoter of the church memorial was the late doreen kartinyeri, niece of private rufus rigney, one of 18 aboriginal soldiers from point mcleay whom she researched for her book ngarrindjeri anzacs (kartinyeri 1996). prior to her visit handke never even knew that indigenous australians had fought in wwi, but did a case-study of rigney for a final year history project. she discovered that rigney lied about his age so he could enlist with his older brother and uncle and was the only ngarrindjeri with a marked grave on the western front. handke and reece then devised a plan to visit the cemetery in belgium where rigney was buried. after working part-time to raise funds for the trip, handley and 12 other students commemorated rigney’s life and scattered sand from ngarrindjeri country on his grave. the students returned with two items for the ngarrindjeri: a video of the ceremony and soil from the gravesite that was used in a traditional ceremony for rigney. kartinyeri, who assisted handke with her project, but had never met her uncles or seen rigney’s grave until she watched the video, said that: ‘here’s a lovely young girl who has done something really worth while, not just for herself, but for us—blackfellas, ngarrindjeri people. i can really say thank you, baby’ (australian broadcasting corporation 2005). in continuing the connecting spirits project, reece returned to the cemetery with another group of her pupils and some ngarrindjeri students from meningie area school, including relatives of rigney. on remembrance day 2007, reece and one of her pupils, chloe oborn, launched connecting spirits 2006 to document the excursion of the 22 students (oborn & reece 2007). scottish-australian singer-songwriter eric bogle, whose and the band played waltzing matilda has often been used as an anti-war ballad, also performed for the first time lost soul, a song that was inspired by the ngarrindjeri soldiers. victor koolmatrie, rigney’s great-nephew who performed a traditional tribute at his uncle’s grave in belgium, reflected that: ‘it’s about lost souls and we’re trying to find them and commemorate them and tell the story about how the soldier is here and how he died. and so we’re trying to connect our souls and their souls together’ (australian broadcasting corporation 2007). mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 12 among the worst atrocities perpetrated by the japanese during ww2 were the sandakan-ranau pow death marches, which resulted in over 3,600 indigenous slavelabourers and 2,400 allied soldiers dying and only six pows—all australians— surviving. in 2010 soil that students from murwillumbah high school brought from ranau and sandakan pow camps was used at the opening ceremony of the sandakan memorial walk adjacent to the local cenotaph. the events at sandakan, including research on the walk, are also embedded in the school’s year 9 program (goodman 2010). in 2011 year 9 and 10 drama students at toodyay district high school in rural western australia researched the sandakan-ranau pow death marches as part of their re-recording of the play, six from borneo (simpson n. d.). this culminated in the launching of a cd that was attended by descendants of soldiers who died on the march and the malaysian consul general (australian broadcasting corporation 2011b; the australian teacher 2011). melbourne students with diverse backgrounds from işik (turkish for ‘illumination’ or ‘light’) college and penleigh and essendon grammar visited gallipoli in 2010 in the spirit of friendship and intercultural understanding. the sentiments of fatih gezer from işik pose an interesting challenge for the hypothesis that reactions to gallipoli are predetermined by the australian context: ‘i’m on both sides because, you know, my homeland is turkey and australia. i spent most of my life in australia so i’ll be paying respect to both sides equally’ (australian broadcasting corporation 2010). in 2011 students from the hutchins school and st. michael’s collegiate in hobart, rangitoto college in auckland and istanbul lisesi began tears of gallipoli (2011) an exchange program designed to engender tolerance, understanding and reconciliation. as part of the program students from the four schools used the social media site facebook to get acquainted. in march, sixteen australian and new zealand students stayed with families of the istanbul students and travelled to gallipoli with their turkish counterparts where they attended the annual martyrs’ day ceremony and visited battlefields. a month later the hobart schools jointly hosted 10 turkish students, who at the invitation of the tasmanian rsl, marched in the anzac day parade and laid a wreath in turkish colours at the main service (australian broadcasting corporation 2011a, 2011c; hoggett 2011; the hutchins school 2011). according to john devine, head of international exchanges at hutchins, his students benefited from: mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 13 an opportunity to see so many historical areas and places whilst they were over there—that was one thing they certainly commented about when they came back. they all were very moved when they went to gallipoli and the way that it was phrased was almost in quiet awe. .... and they were surprised but extremely pleased with the great respect that any turkish people they met showed them, whether it was gallipoli or istanbul or wherever they went. (personal interview, 4 july 2011) when i asked vicki paterson, a history teacher at st michaels, who accompanied her students to turkey and co-hosted the turkish students with hutchins, what her students learned from the exchange, she said that: our girls said they got a greater understanding and appreciation of the gallipoli story. they then mentioned the whole experience of being part of a family with a different cultural background and an entirely different way of living. they loved the experience of having a friend, having somebody they were living with who was in many ways very like them, they appreciated that camaraderie, that opportunity to be part of the family in an entirely different part of the world ... the turkish students also said that they really enjoyed our anzac day service because it was a commemoration and they felt it was dignified and appropriate. theirs is very military, planes flying over and rousing speeches, nationalistic speeches, whereas ours is … a bit low key i suppose. (personal interview, 6 july 2011) in relating how st. michael’s teachers used dva material, paterson indicated that they had a ‘very crowded curriculum’ so used dva resources ‘sometimes but very, very sparingly … mainly for its images.’ when i asked if involving students in battlefield tours could glorify war, paterson stated that: we have had quite a deliberate attempt not to glorify war for some time. in fact, we have always questioned here the whole idea of the anzac myth. we refer to it as myth and we look at that idea of mateship that’s been heavily promoted by the government lately and we trace it back … by looking at the growth of nationalism. we look at the whole outback, the drovers, where mateship really started and the art at the time that promoted nationalism and so on before we start to look at gallipoli. and they look at the real causes for ww1 before they ... look at not just why the gallipoli campaign took place from the point of view of australia and britain ... but from the point of view of turkey and what was germany’s role and so on. (personal interview, 6 july 2011) lake claims that ‘australian history has been thoroughly militarised.’ however, all of the above projects engendered reconciliation, healing, tolerance and intercultural friendships, because students either studied military history, visited battlefields, attended commemorative military ceremonies, or in the case of the connecting spirits group, worked respectfully on military history projects with aboriginal people. lake and mckenna fail to grasp the polymorphous features of anzac myths because their self-fulfilling assumptions rest on a top-down view of history, an overdetermined concept of militarisation and an oversocialised understanding of human behaviour (gronow 2008; wearing et al. 2009). from their omniscient viewpoint, it is always others who are deluded: young backpackers at gallipoli who mindlessly channel john howard; scates and his respondents who mysteriously fall under the sacred spell of mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 14 gallipoli; and teachers and schoolchildren who passively absorb dva material. yet they do not present one in-depth account of what australians have learned from visiting battlefields. their assumptions that militarisation ‘seems impossible to deny’ and is ‘relentless’ means that—astonishingly for professors of history—they even ignore how history students and teachers have both deconstructed anzac myths and constructed alternative national practices. perhaps the most ironic example of this blind spot is a winning essay in the 2010 year 11/12 national history challenge by nicholas peterson (2010) of clarence valley anglican school in grafton, nsw. the idea for his erudite and critical paper (‘john howard, conservatism and the celebration of anzac day’ [italics in original]) came from reading an article in dissent by lake (2007). these entwined ontological and epistemological defects also have important political consequences. reynolds and lake conclude wwwa by rhetorically asking: ‘the key premise of the anzac legend is that nations and men are made in war. is it not now time for australia to cast it aside?’ (2010: 167). however noble this goal might be, they offer no practical strategies regarding how to mobilise australian citizens for this formidable utopian project12 and it is difficult to see how their plea will appeal to the enlightened students, teachers and tourists whom they variously silenced, patronised and demonised in wwwa. i now turn to an alternative framework for studying anzac battlefield tourism by referring to empirical research on anzac and some concepts that have been deployed in studies of postmodern tourism. my suggestions are not intended to be a ‘blueprint’ but a ‘toolbox’ of concepts that can be applied empirically to specific aspects of anzac battlefield tourism. an alternative perspective on anzac battlefield tourism historian humphrey mcqueen observed that ‘anzac day has never been what it used to be … what continues to change are the cultural and political responses to the legacy of the gallipoli campaign’ (2003). we can see such dynamism in historical studies of pilgrimage, tourism and war. peter hoffenberg (2001) demonstrated how early pilgrimages to gallipoli were shaped by a combination of events: travelling great distances; early reports on the condition of cemeteries by officials and former combatants; promotions by the returned sailors’, soldiers’ and airmen’s imperial league of australia; and particular ways in which visitors imagined the landscapes of 12 for some inherent contradictions of utopian intellectual projects see the work of contrarian philosopher john gray (2008, 2009). mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 15 both australia and gallipoli. in re-examining the research on tourism as a motivation for enlisting in ww1, ziino (2006a: 52) revealed the intricacies of the nexus between war, tourism and home. he emphasised the ‘duality’ of the soldier-tourist identity and the ‘multiple guises in which men and women understood their wartime experiences,’ and contended that a ‘tourist analogy’ can help us to ‘understand the cultural baggage that accompanied australians to the war’ (52). davison’s comment on the contingency of anzac myths is also valuable here: in 1989 it had seemed axiomatic that anzac sentiment would be stronger while anzacs were themselves there to represent and reinforce it and weaker once they died. now we know what we should perhaps have realised from the beginning—that the myth might flourish even more luxuriantly when it was freed from the limitations of historical fact and the human frailties of its surviving representatives. feeling connected to the past, after all, is not at all the same as being connected with history. (davison 2003: 81) in addition to the dynamic historical perspectives of davison, hoffenberg, mcqueen and ziino, we can also find contemporary evidence on tourism that directly contradicts the militarisation thesis. based on responses to a questionnaire by hundreds of australians who visited ww1 battlefields and cemeteries, scates argued that even visitors with no direct connections to these sites could be classified as ‘secular pilgrims.’ contrary to mckenna and ward, davison sees scates’s work as being useful in explaining the growing interest in anzac among young australians: the key to understanding the power of myths, national or otherwise, lies in the intelligible connection they establish between personal experience and public events. when australians were asked [in the australians and the past survey] about the most significant experiences in their own lives, the most frequently mentioned after the main life events—birth, childhood, marriage—were ‘hardship’ and ‘holidays and travel.’ gallipoli connects powerfully to both, bruce scates has shown how strongly the pilgrimage to gallipoli accommodates both the patriotism and the wanderlust of young australians. (davison 2003: 80–81) scates’s findings have also been substantiated by other empirical studies. clarke and eastgate (2011) described the experiences of australian tourists on the western front as a case of ‘religion meets commemoration.’ one study of australians at gallipoli by hannaford and newton (2008) and another of australians and new zealanders by hyde and harman (2011) also reported that participants manifested a combination of sacred and secular behaviours. using ethnographic and semiotic methods west (2010) concluded that the genesis and development of memorialisation at gallipoli was best explained by dialogical relationships among australians, new zealanders and turks. west (2008b) also deployed aspects of globalisation, bakhtin’s notion of dialogical discourses and collective memory studies to analyse the experiences of australian mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 16 backpackers at gallipoli. drawing on his participant-observation and interviews, he reported that the ritual of ‘international civil religious pilgrimage’ engendered cosmopolitan interactions among australians and turks. lake posits that due to militarisation ‘the rightful honouring of the dead and the writing of national history have been conflated’ and that ‘because war commemoration centres on timeless military virtues— “the anzac spirit” … all wars become one’ (2010a: 12). meanwhile ‘[h]istorical specificity, difference and changing contexts are lost sight of’ (12). these sweeping assertions are rebutted by empirical research. historian richard braithwaite questioned the assumption that commercial tourism is inherently inappropriate at sandakan by showing how it has assisted both residents and visitors to heal and reconcile with ‘the past and former enemies’ (braithwaite & lee 2006). braithwaite and leiper found that a different situation existed at sites associated with the thai–burma railway— ‘recreation with a dash of lite infotainment’ (2010: 327)— and historian kevin blackburn (2000) reached similar conclusions about both the railway sites and changi prison museum. on the other hand, blackburn (2001) found that regardless of whether visitors were veterans, relatives of the dead or tourists, they experienced the changi murals in terms of the sacred. in summary, tourists respond differently to different sites, because anzac cove is not the same as chunuk bair, lone pine and the nek, and gallipoli is different from kokoda, tobruk, long tan, fromelles, the australian war memorial, the shrine of remembrance and the 16 sandakan memorials around australia. like anzac day services, battlefield tourism needs to be viewed as a ‘complex and ongoing negotiation of national and local histories in terms of local, regional and national identity politics’ (mayes 2009: 51). i now discuss some concepts that have been used productively in empirical studies of postmodern tourism, including battlefield sites. tourists do not travel just as they please. the pleasurable, nostalgic, romantic, hedonistic and fantastical experiences of tourists are enabled by a multibillion dollar global industry that is implicated in the commoditisation of mass murder, environmental degradation, sexual exploitation and social inequalities (mosedale 2011; seabrook 2001; sturken 2007; weaver 2011). tourism is also mobilised for projects of social and civic governance (bennett 2005; pretes 2003). yet these economic and political constraints do not operate in uncomplicated and unchallenged ways, because tourism mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 17 both constitutes, and is constituted by, the broader context of postmodernity. i cannot investigate in detail numerous debates surrounding terms like postmodernism and postmodernity.13 however, bauman’s (1992, 1996a, 1996b, 2011) sociological perspective on ‘liquid modernity’—whereby social identities and relations tend to be fluid, accelerated, contingent, disposable, and fragmented—is helpful for understanding the global dynamics of tourism, as is the ‘coexistence thesis of detraditionalisation’ proposed by luke (1996) and thompson (1996), who argued that ontological oppositions—old/new, past/present, traditional/modern and authentic/artificial—have become increasingly obsolete in mass-mediated societies where citizens constantly challenge and modify conventional beliefs and practices. this coexistence standpoint has obvious implications for understanding how tourists experience authenticity. for instance, thompson asserts that ‘traditions which rely heavily on mediated symbolic forms are not ipso facto less authentic than those which are transmitted through face-toface interaction … the uprooting and re-mooring of traditions does not necessarily render them inauthentic’ (thompson 1996: 103). scholars have used these concepts to show how postmodern tourists bring repertoires of contradictory expectations and motivations to sites that can then be reinforced, challenged or transformed, depending on latent and manifest outcomes of tours. (jansson 2007; germann molz 2010; munt 1994). whereas lake and mckenna view tourists as shallow and sentimental dopes, empirical research shows that travellers have the capacity to engage reflexively with sites. for instance, postmodern tourists do more than passively gaze at other people, objects and locales; they also have embodied and mediated experiences that enable them to inhabit multiple, hybrid and fluid subjectivities (edensor 2000; månsson 2011; urry & larsen 2011). crouch and desforges encapsulated this fluid and reflexive postmodern scenario in stating that, ‘the tourist is not only “a tourist” and draws upon complex significations in her/his practice of space through events and encounters’ (2003: 10). this postmodern take on tourism means that authenticity needs to be analysed as a contingent combination of staged, existential, constructive and emergent experiences rather than dismissed as inherently amoral (cohen & cohen 2012). 13 for an overview see featherstone (2007). mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 18 this is evident in ‘dark’ tourism or ‘thanotourism’: you do not need not be cambodian to be deeply affected by a visit to the tuol sleng genocide museum (hughes 2008) or be jewish to react sadly and respectfully to holocaust museums (cohen 2011; saindon 2012). sociologist jennifer iles observed that battlefield tours have both ‘constraints and opportunities that influence tourists’ performances’ (2006: 164). thus tourists’ reactions are affected by how their motivations and expectations interact with those of their fellow travellers, instructions of guides, behaviour of natives and a site’s ‘staged authenticity.’ consequently, battlefield tours can precipitate a range of often conflicting responses: guilt, revulsion, shame, anger, empathy, sorrow, comfort, pride, reverence, re-enchantment, empathy and communitas. battlefield tourists can also challenge information provided by organisers and guides and transform their viewpoints (muzaini et al. 2007). in their anthropological analysis of emotions at gettysburg national military park, gatewood and cameron found that ‘visitors sometimes began as tourists, but were transformed into pilgrims’ (2004: 193). similarly, one of hannaford and newton’s visitors to gallipoli stated that, ‘i was a tourist in istanbul but the moment we got anywhere near the site we were pilgrims’ (2008). likewise, young australian backpackers can visit gallipoli and reflect on the horror of war (nile 1991a: 42). mckenna and ward’s teleological thesis that emotional experiences of young australians need to be understood primarily in the australian milieu, manifests a myopic understanding of the intricate interactions among tourists’ reflexive abilities, global mobility, media technologies, cosmopolitan identities, nationalism, gender and generations (allon et al. 2008; hudson 2009; west 2006; 2008a). regardless of the sentiments that australian tourists bring to gallipoli, they are both affected by, and influence, local events. just one example is the admiration they develop for turks after reading the empathetic message on the atatürk memorial bordering the entrance to anzac cove that atatürk (‘father of the turks’) wrote in 1934: those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives ... you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. therefore rest in peace. there is no difference between the johnnies and the mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours ... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace ... after having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well. lake and mckenna also ignore three consistent findings of empirical research on emotions and battlefield tourism: the co-existence of feelings of nationalism with sadness for the combatants and civilians who suffered on all sides; anger over the mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 19 senselessness of warfare; and a desire for peace (osbaldiston & petray, 2011). mckenna (2007) expressed such contradictory emotions in stating that he was haunted by the courage of an iraqi police officer who sacrificed his life to save people from dying in a suicide bomb attack. one could easily turn the emotional tables here—‘it’s really haunting mate’—but his heartfelt response is similar to millions of people who see such events. and his afterthought—‘the anzac spirit is not uniquely australian. it is universal’—is also shared by thousands of australians and new zealanders whose visits to gallipoli have enabled them to see gallipoli through the eyes of both anzacs and turks. implications i have argued that lake, mckenna and reynolds have a procrustean view that is incapable of engaging with well-known articulations among tourism, commercialisation, embodiment and myriad technologies of memory, remembrance, and commemoration (edwards 2009; hirsch 2012; keren 2009; landsberg 2004; sturken 1997; todman 2009). as an alternative to their totalising view, i propose a multidisciplinary perspective that is capable of empirically investigating the particularities of postmodern tourism. both my critique and alternative are directly pertinent to the lead-up, implementation and consequences of the anzac centenary, which will be one of the biggest commemorative events in australian history. understanding the complex and contested ways in which australians both at home and abroad will respond to this five-year commemoration is a daunting academic task, one unlikely to be achieved by a hotchpotch of anecdotes, moral condemnations, utopian rhetoric and preconceived ideas about the inescapable militarisation of australian history and culture. while lake and reynolds (2010a: vii) opened wwwa by claiming that the gallipoli landing was fading ‘into the distant past,’ both the composition and goals of the national commission on the commemoration of the anzac centenary were being criticised and controversies have surrounded the committee’s subsequent activities (dean 2010, 2011; jones & tatnell 2012; kelly 2011; kelly & walters 2012; shanahan 2012). analysing such ongoing contestations at the both the micro and macro levels will require a rigorously empirical and multidisciplinary approach that is sensitive to the ways in which australians constantly reconfigure anzac myths. for as mckenna reminds us, albeit for mckay anzac battlefield tourism portal, vol. 10, no. 1, january 2013. 20 reasons that he did not intend, ‘there is always another gallipoli waiting around the corner’ (2006b: 70). coda gallipoli was a bastard of a place. i never understood what we were fighting for. all i could think of was that i never wanted to go back to the bloody place. 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heidelberg press, heidelberg, vic.: 31–46. white, r. 2003, ‘national days and the national past in australia,’ australian cultural history, no. 23: 55–72. windsor, g. 2011, all day long the noise of battle. pier 9, millers point, nsw. ziino, b. 2006a, ‘a kind of round trip: australian soldiers and the tourist analogy, 1914–18,’ war & society, vol. 25, no. 2: 39–52. ____ 2006b, ‘who owns gallipoli? australia’s gallipoli anxieties, 1915–2005,’ journal of australian studies, no. 88: 1–12. portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal memory and a hard place: revisiting central havana marivic wyndham, university of technology sydney, and peter read, university of sydney this is the story of how two men remember the ruined precinct of central havana. one left in 1959 and did not return for 32 years. the other has never left the island of cuba. their names are manolo and raúl. how do these two men of similar age, he the dispossessed, he the possessor, remember their city of memory? whom and what do they exclude from the myth-making of memory and by what processes? this paper follows the return of the two men to the area of the city which meant most to them as young men: central havana, then and now the hub of the capital’s social and commercial life. raúl has remained in the city for half a century, but until the invitation of the authors to show him the sites of his earlier life, had not entered central havana for some years. the second, manolo, returned from exile in miami to central havana in 1991 to make a clandestine film, la habana de hoy y de siempre, about the city that he once loved, and lost.1 raúl is a strong and fit sixty-five year old retired dock worker. he lives with his wife 1 rather than in the context of cuban film production, the film is best assessed within the international theme of exiles or others returning to a significant site after traumatic experience and departure. parallel documentaries are, in australia, hellfire pass (chase 1987), in which former soldiers return to the burma railway after many years, and in chile, carmen castillo’s calle santa fe (2007), in which castillo returns to the santiago street where she was wounded, and her husband killed, by pinochet’s forces. like most other films in the genre, these documentaries focus on the emotions of those who return, including nostalgia, alienation, unfamiliarity with present time, and an attempted spiritual repossession of the site. the field has even wider literary roots, including, in australia, andrew riemer’s inside outside (1992), in which riemer returns to his war-time home in budapest, and in cuba, the essay by manuel bretos with which this article concludes. wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 2 maría in a modest flat in the tourist suburb of la rampa. most evenings raúl and maría will be found at the home of their daughter, her husband and their grandson. maría will be there by three to begin to prepare the evening meal by picking the stones out of the rice, raúl will come by at about five. they’ll cook dinner together chatting with the family over a rum or two, and after dinner, dominoes. in a noisy, loving household, raúl seems to be the only one sometimes prepared to say no to his adored grandson. at the age of seventeen, in about 1953, raúl left the hard but rewarding life of vegetables, pigs and donkeys of his family farm for the excitement of the city. in the smart shopping centre of central havana he watched the chauffeurs drop off the rich families outside the modern department stores like el encanto and fin de siglo, and return for them, and their parcels, in a couple of hours. but he did not feel alienated. he had no doubt that, as a young man, the city was his also. while the rich were inside fin de siglo, he and his friends were in woolworths (better known as ten cent) nearby. in central havana was street life, the brand new rex cinema, the french and spanish speciality shops, the corner cafes, bustling crowds, the dressing up, the self-confidence of the young cuban male. then came the revolution. manolo was born at about the same time as raúl. he lived and grew up in the city in much more wealthy circumstances. a well known florida television identity in the 1990s, he is part of the large cuban american exile community that since that 1960s has made miami its home-away-from-home. life in havana of the mid 1950s offered much to young men like him: education at one of the best schools, law, medicine or engineering in the university. his life as a young man was saturday tennis and dinner at the family’s exclusive club, church on sunday, an honoured place in the family firm, a modern car, a house in the country, a limitless future. after an absence of three decades, he reminisced ‘how much we enjoyed sitting on the sea wall, looking at the unique sunset of cuba, or getting wet as winter approached and the waves broke.’ then came the revolution. so in the 1960s his city slipped from reality to memory. in the 1970s his havana was no longer a yearning but a phantom. by the 1980s his fantasy city, like the castle of the sleeping beauty, was interwoven in his mind with metaphorical briars. the best people had left her, the remainder were unable to waken. the thorny spikes imprisoned its wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 3 dream people, who awaited the touch and the kiss of the handsome prince who would one day return to reclaim the beautiful woman-city who had promised, then denied, so much. emotionally manolo’s central havana remained entrapped in the memory of his group of exiles, young, male and rich, who had become her self-appointed custodians. almost always they mourned her in the trope of a lost love. raúl’s city was not frozen but airy. he lived in her and took part in her activities. not likely to inherit anything in the city before the revolution, he did not do so afterwards. by 1963 he was drafted into a brigade of the unskilled labour force. for some years he was optimistic; he enjoyed the sense of purpose while his work brigade constructed its own apartment block. daily he walked or cycled the five kilometres to the docks to the two-storey wooden buildings lining the waterfront. by 1980 he realised that the docklands of the port of havana would be his employment for life. his city continued to change, but for the worse. nurturing a sense of the solid elegance of spanish colonial architecture, raúl was distressed when by the end of the sixties, the dock buildings were looking dingy, their paint flaking and the cement crumbling. by 1970 buildings throughout his city began to close or were abandoned. some even collapsed. it was not the fault of the revolution, he reflected; preservation was hardly possible under the strictures of the american embargo. yet his aesthetic sense was offended. while manolo’s woman-city was enchanted and immobilised, raúl’s was real, but ageing. in 2000 he was a pensioner, but out of necessity still working. intrigued by history, he held a large collection of ‘forties and ‘fifties newspapers which he was delighted to show and discuss with the visitor. listening to short-wave radio at night, he picked up spanish language programs from latin america and europe and was well informed on world events. short, solid, with thinning hair and commonly in sandals, shorts and a tshirt, he seemed happiest when visiting his brother’s small farm an hour from havana. unquestionably his revolution had soured. he began to denounce the pervasive network of neighbourhood spies. he condemned indignities at the hands of the police: more than once he was forced to empty his lunch box on the streets to demonstrate to the militia, and to any passer-by, that he was no black marketeer or saboteur. he conceded, in private conversation, a deep but helpless anger held in check only with difficulty, that wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 4 the young people, especially the men, were in 2000 no more able to control their destinies than the young men drafted into work brigades just after the revolution. for in 1959 raúl was a young man such as they. so was manolo. when the authors asked raúl to show us his personal, pre-revolutionary havana, he began mentally sketching the route through the city of his youth. he wanted to demonstrate his own places of memory, where he had hung out, bought ice cream, ridden his bike, met his friends, talked to girls and bought the suit he was married in. what is known to tourists as old havana hardly touched him, nor the tourists’ restaurants, nor their modern ‘photo opportunity’ sites, nor the spanish fortress el morro, nor the old churches, nor his own suburb. central havana was his immediate choice, the city of excitement of his youth. central havana is in reality two distinct areas. choose a thoroughfare one or two streets away from the famous beachfront avenue el malecón, walk downhill and west from the hotel habana libre and the city becomes suddenly poorer: fewer tourists, more abandoned or destroyed buildings, fewer cubans selling cigars and taxi rides, fewer hustlers, more pedestrians. tourist guide books recommend very few places to visit. the streets are too narrow for their buses. neptuno, san rafael, canongo, escobar, lealtad, perseverancia: these streets are close to el malecón, yet they could almost be in another city. for this once modernist precinct has aged badly. eighteenth-century spanish colonial architecture can still look stately after decades of neglect, but the architects of the post world war ii downtown of central havana used the latest postwar materials of plastic, plate glass, paint and tile. such materials un-maintained for forty or fifty years look ugly and deteriorated. move further west through lealtad and perseverancia towards el prado: quite suddenly, the streetscape improves. after not much more than a kilometre, the pedestrian arrives in the avenida del prado itself, its diplomatic-plated mercedes, fine hotels, scammers, hustlers, uniforms, museums, restaurants, imposing churches, buildings in process of elegant and rapid restoration by the city historian, the powerful official charged with the ultimate restoration of the entire city. glance east again: the streets of central havana are there, just out of sight, still thronged with the city’s poor. manolo understood the difference too, because in 1991, he returned to havana wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 5 clandestinely. he was to make a film about the city which would never again be the playground of the rich young men of 1959, but which to that generation remained emotionally theirs, and only theirs, forever. at the moment when the consequences of the russian withdrawal, after the collapse of the soviet camp in the late 1980s, touched their most painful low point of poverty and despair, he secreted a video camera aboard a plane from miami to havana, then into a hire car, to investigate what had become of the city of ideal memory. the result was a 60 minute video shown on miami television, la habana de hoy y de siempre, (havana now as always). it marked an emotional reunion with the city from which he had been absent for thirty years, and the city which his former countryman raúl had never left. a personal visual testimony, rather than a commercial production, it speaks to and for the many manolos who have never returned to their island. manolo’s film journey begins as, about to leave miami for havana, he approaches the camera and stands before a spanish colonial, havana-style building. he wears not the orange t-shirt and brown shorts of raúl, but a guayabera, the starched cuban linen shirt, and smart slacks. invitingly he engages his audience: havana. our dear havana. how often have you and i asked ourselves—would we recognise havana if we started off in any corner block, would we be able to go through her, street by street, without getting lost? we’re going to find that out straight away. sit back, enjoy a cafecito as we proceed through her. havana now, havana always. nine years later, at eleven a.m., the 28th of november 2000, raúl, and the authors are setting out on our own tour. we leave the house in la rampa, walk downhill past the european-style bakery, the cafe, the well stocked peso-economy bookshop to turn right at the café-bar on el malecón. its location is superb, its paintwork faded, its structure grey concrete, its presentation uninviting. the salt spray, raúl tells us, is responsible for the deterioration of all these buildings of the seafront. it is clear that he will hold neither individual nor government responsible for what we are about to inspect. the building adjacent to the café-bar he identifies as a former convent though no evidence now remains of its former status. may we take a photo raúl? por supuesto, of course. we take the first right again up calle hospital (hospital street), and approach that huge, light brown, aggressively modernist skyscraper intended by its 1950s architects to wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 6 attract its own up-market neighbourhood. the thirty stories of the hospital incongruously dominate its drab surroundings. it was to be the central bank, raúl tells us, of which only eight stories were complete at the time of castro’s revolution. within a month arsonist ‘counter-revolutionaries’ destroyed all but the shell and the secure basement which still, incongruously, holds the national treasury beside the bodies awaiting carriage to el cementerio colón. past the hospital we turn up escobar, on the threshold of what was once, fifty years ago, havana’s smartest shopping precinct. we pass the once famous factory of the romeo y julieta cigars. our photo reveals the right side of the building as no more than a dirty grey front facade, three stories of gaping door frames. trucks park on what was once the ground floor. we sense a little tension in our guide. although we keep the camera out of sight when not in use, raúl seems uncomfortable more at what we are photographing than at the presence of the camera itself. to us the remains of romeo y julieta are imposing in spite, or because, of its decay. raúl says he will show us in the afternoon, in old havana, the factory of partagás cigars which has been splendidly restored. later we will understand why it is important to him that we see romeo y julieta as once it might have been. partagás’s real fábrica de tabaco, though a little larger, is similar in style and age. its beauty after restoration, its symmetry, its breath-taking cream cement walls, its brown painted terrazas, are as astounding as romeo y julieta’s ugliness before restoration. it is clear that raúl wants his visitors not to judge his city as it is, but as it was, and could be again. he maintains a commentary of what the buildings used to look like. people push past in the crowded street. manolo villaverde’s videoed tour begin in bright sunshine, not in central havana but miramar, once one of havana’s most exclusive residential suburbs. his camera operator is evidently crouched just above the windscreen while manolo drives. ‘these beautiful mansions ...’ his mood is conspiratorial as well as nostalgic. beneath his commentary a guitar works through a melancholy progression. ‘here we are at 26th street ...’ now a lugubrious silence settles upon the soundtrack. few people are seen on the streets, no one is interviewed, no comment is made on the few who are seen. no-one resents the camera because nobody seems to be aware of it. avenue after avenue unrolls past the generation of exiles metaphorically crowding the vehicle, repossessing, by their presence, the city that once was theirs. the silent road sequences acquire a dreamlike quality in which the camera, never venturing outside the car, always absorbs, never wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 7 stops, never questions, never participates in the moment. manolo’s constant theme remains, ‘do you remember ...?’ raúl is remembering many times and many places. he turns into neptuno, where the workaday commercial business of havana still is transacted. the left hand side, where destroyed or empty buildings alternate with large but dimly lit peso-economy stores, seems to belong still to the 1950s. the right side contains most of what is left of the smarter 1950s stores, their names still picked out in ceramic floor tiles. some, modernised, offer the latest latin american fashions. a column of foul black smoke billows from an eye-level bakery window, so thick it seems that the place must be on fire. raúl does not appear to notice. like everyone else, he merely walks on the road to avoid it. raúl approaches the junction with escobar, where the gold on white mosaic entrance tiles read zapatería (shoe shop). the once high-fashion shoe store now sells massproduced items, including cheap shoes, but displays none. windowless save for the plate glass frontage, this zapatería was designed for creative interior flood and spot lighting, which it now lacks totally. inside the bustling store we can dimly see twenty or thirty people moving about or queuing. adjacent to the store crumbles to decay an abandoned three storey building. weeds grow picturesquely from its several terrazas. directly opposite it is the bright tiendas pan-americanas furniture store, as fashionable, and as almost as expensive, as anywhere in latin america. raúl’s eyes glisten at the rich leather sofas and glass coffee tables. it is clear that he also expects us to take a photo here. this is what his havana ought to be. so far we have encountered no-one except down-at-heel havanans in the whole of the crowded precinct. thus we are immediately noticeable and somewhat embarrassing to our guide, who clearly did not expect us to be so fascinated by ruins and decay. he is conscious of the way that havanans are looking at him, then at us pointing the camera or staring, then back to him. his use of ‘hola hermano’ (hello brother) and ‘lo siento, hermana’ (i’m sorry, sister), rather than compañero (comrade), signifies a muted personal (rather than general) apology to his countrymen and women, perhaps more for what we are photographing, rather than for our presence itself. a starving dachshund staggers past. snap. raúl asks us awkwardly. ‘would anyone want to take a picture of a wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 8 healthy dog?’ we try to explain, truthfully, that we take pictures of dachshunds the world over, in any condition. raúl looks unimpressed. he suspects that we have come to gloat over the sad condition of this most elegant, most north american, havana of the1950s. his city of memory remains one of young people and fun. we approach perseverancia. of this once fashionable apartment building only the facade remains, and not much of that. it is not clear whether it has collapsed of its own weight or has been gutted. the top floor alone retains its wooden doors leading on to now vanished terrazas. a farmacia (chemist), still retains its first elegance of dark shelves and glowing bottles. one or two people stand inside buying remedies—but not aspirin, nor antibiotics nor diarrhoea mixture, which are available for dollars, not pesos, and certainly not at this store. the huge corner block opposite is also now a shell. the ground level, oddly dark in the bright sunshine, may once have been converted to shops; now it seems to be inhabited by squatters. an evidently unemployed young man in brown trousers and a pink t-shirt rolled to his shoulders watches us unmoving. above him are two once elegant stories, now slowly crumbling. the cast iron balcony has been cut away and the corner verandah demolished, for no obvious reason. traces of colour remain among the green-stained paint, red brick below grey cement, the blue diamondshaped ornamentation on each side of the graceful terraza. the third building is so stained with dirty green as to suggest this was its original colour. weeds as big as small trees grow from what is left of the terrazas. through the street-level gaping doorframes can be seen the cement ceilings stripped of timber, removed, perhaps, like the cast-iron grilles, for scrap, or to restore old havana. at the street level, below the green stain and the weeds, a huge hopper overflows with rubbish. a man is peering into it. beside the hopper stands a beautifully restored chrysler. havanan cars seem to be in better shape than they were a decade earlier, and certainly better than the buildings. raúl observes and look at all these private cars in the city, you can tell which they are by their number plates. despite our material scarcity, their owners believe in the bustling city, they drive round in it. we ask, doesn’t it hurt to see these ugly ruins? no, not really. but when pressed, raúl concedes, wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 9 yes, the wounds have healed but they still hurt. it’s what we start with; we have no time for judgments. there’s no beauty in ruins, only ugliness, but in each ruin lies the potential for restoration. he uses the verb ‘castigar’ (to punish) to imply it is time which has punished the buildings, not people. manolo, leaving miramar and heading down el malecón, seems to sense danger. he tells his viewers, ‘our deepest gratitude to those people who risking more than liberty, and feigning ingenuousness under present conditions, achieved the filming of this video.’ his spy-car approaches central havana. it begins to rain. no police, who normally stand at every corner and even now, in 2000, are watching us languidly, appear in his film. no havanan is seen to leave any of the buildings that we are walking past, hardly anyone is seen at all. why? perhaps contemporary cubans like raúl are irrelevant to this reclamation of a single moment by a single privileged group of the city’s long history. those who remained have by implication obliterated themselves from the collective memory of the exiles whose havana stopped in 1959 and has not yet re-started. manolo’s central havana, like his memory, froze at the last moment of the old order. it is the falsity of that position that we are learning from raúl. it is only memories which freeze, not cities. at amistad, raúl guides us to the right to enter the central square of high 1950s fashion. sydneysiders would be at the junction of market and george st, new yorkers, in madison avenue. imagine, though, if no repairs had been made in those sydney precincts for fifty years. even in the bright sunshine the decrepit, boarded up department stores are depressing and a little sinister. what now can they contain? in the gloom of the upper stories, is the dirty or blackening linoleum piled with rubbish? are the cracked and dusty counters still arranged for customers, or stacked up in corners, or have they been removed? are the ceiling tiles falling in, the doors fallen off the changing rooms, the escalators rusted over, the lifts crashed to the bottom of shafts? what remains of the merchandise in those dusty heaps lying in every corner? does anyone even have a key any more? the nationalized larger stores seem parodies of what they once were. some are trading, wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 10 apparently only at the ground floor level. fin de siglo, the great and famous department store. the pale blue and white architecture of the upper stories has worn well, but water has entered the paintwork at the mezzanine level. on the street, the ubiquitous garbage hoppers, the plate glass windows timbered or papered over. temporarily at least, fin de siglo, so important in the memories of raúl and manolo, has ceased to trade. nearby stands the second store, la época attacked by arsonists in april 1961 as a preliminary to the invasion at the bay of pigs, later rebuilt. it is again in business. guards control the entry of the long queue outside according to the number coming out of another door. but el encanto, the best and biggest of the three department stores, was firebombed with phosphorous and razed to the ground by the same counter-revolutionaries who destroyed the bank building, and who, raúl tells us, were never caught. he explains that in the terrible conflagration, a female worker fé de valle, was killed. she’s given her name to the park where once stood the store. a sign erected to her memory reads: fé de valle 1.8.1917 18.4.1961 cada día trabajamos más every day we work more, construímos más ... y todo we build more … and all ello en homenaje a los that in homage to those que no cobraron sueldo who earned no wages por morir. in death. fidel2 fidel the el encanto park is a pleasant, well used rest area in a precinct where few others exist in this area. even now, it retains some of the glamour of the 1950s. a large tree stands in the park, planted, presumably, as the park was constructed. indo-china, the brightly lit oriental clothing store, still trades on the left of industria. its terraza pavement, marble portico, tiled entrance and tiled store name are still intact. snap. an elderly, modestly dressed woman stares thoughtfully into its enticing interior. she does not enter. the opposite side of the park seems not to have had a day’s repairs since 1959. it looks dreadful. raúl explains that the city historian has not yet had time to reach the area. it is much more likely that the area will be razed rather than reconstructed as the 1950s smart havana downtown. by the time manolo’s camera arrives in central havana, at the very street where now 2 her tomb, in cementerio colón, is recorded in com-relieve s.a. (1999: 153). wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 11 we are now standing, his 1991 journey has grown darker, his filmed streets strangely melancholy. he remarks, ‘that was fin de siglo, the shopping area of the rich.’ the few people who appear on his pavements seem to walk at half the normal speed, as if in a dream. a man on a bicycle looks at and through the camera. manolo asks his viewers nostalgically, ‘do you remember the frozen ice-cream and little sandwiches they sold at the department store ten cent?’ no doubt the exiles do remember, and so indeed does raúl, and so do the older people who are buying the cuban sandwiches and sugar cane juice here, in 2000, at this very minute. manolo continues, ‘here’s el arte, where many of us had our photos taken.’ it’s just a few metres from the fashionable men’s clothing store of the 1950s, j de valles, where raúl bought a suit for his wedding, and outside which he is now at this moment posing. the building, still strikingly named in a running french cursive style of relief white letters on white paint, now sells cheap cotton clothes, utensils and knick-knacks. its plate glass windows are boarded up. the glass counters have been dragged into the street from which are sold more cheap clothes. just near here, manolo tells his miami viewers, was the funeral parlour, the jewellery shop, ‘the store where we bought our florsheim shoes,’ the astor movie house, the cafes, ‘very memorable in our youth ... you remember, don’t you?’ here was ‘that very popular chinese restaurant,’ ‘on the left, the old sears.’ the few filmed havanans of manolo’s sunless streets never are seen to talk, work, shop, eat, touch, drink coffee, cry or laugh. they process in the streets but leave no mark upon them. they do not engage the city, nor does it engage them. yet about us, in 2000, at this moment hundreds of people are pushing, walking about, queuing, sitting, talking, like those who throng the urban streets of the wide world. manolo’s and raúl’s neptuno and san rafael hardly seem to be the same streets, nor even part of the same suburb or the same city. manolo’s description is as evasive as raúl’s is factual. the revolution which precipitated both his own departure (and the decline of raúl’s downtown) remains absent from his commentary. central havana must be allowed to stay frozen; only its original beauty remains. ‘observe the natural curves of this beautiful avenue.’ throughout his film no one of the political hoardings and posters which in reality punctuate every city block are to be seen. they must have been deliberately edited out of the shot-list. only once, in the far distance, does an image of che guevara appear. wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 12 nor does manolo explain why the el encanto site is now a park. though his constituency always remains ‘we,’ he names no individual, identifies no one’s house, visits no one’s tomb in the cementerio colón. memories of families disunited, changing sides, of revolution and counter-revolution are after thirty years, still much too raw. don’t mention the bay of pigs. people can be edited from streets and shops. only the 1950s endure. raúl’s memories have by contrast moved steadily away from the 1950s. we sense some puzzlement, if not irritation, at our constant questions. ‘was that store abandoned at the time of the revolution?’ he answers, or implies, ‘i don’t know, i can’t remember. why is it so important?’ life goes on, time passes, the revolution is only one reason why the city changed, and it’s still changing. we leave the park to walk the last two hundred metres down san rafael which leads to el prado and the hotel inglaterra. the joyería francesa, the elegant french jewellery, looks as though it has been closed for decades, but outside, under its once grand, redpainted portico sits a woman under a beach umbrella selling watch straps and batteries. she has placed chairs on each side, one of which supports an electric fan. she seems at this moment to be doing no business. was this the jewellery shop of manolo’s memory? a bearded man holding two plastic bags strolls past the two hoppers parked seemingly at random on the road. bath-houses flourish in empty, or half empty, buildings. men awaiting their turn sit on masonry blocks which seem to have tumbled from the retaining wall only yesterday. the clock outside what was once the cine rex, the rex twin cinemas, the pride of havana, now has no hands, nor motor. almost certainly they have been removed to another location. icons the shape of bells once marked the hours of 12, 3, 6 and 9, and what seem to be now giant buttons marked the other hours. the number five has vanished. the top row of light green tiles has fallen off the rex or been removed for rebuilding elsewhere? the cinema looks dark, closed off and menacing. a foul pool of sewage seeps across the road. raúl makes no comment beyond, ‘come this way, i don’t want you to get your feet wet.’ a former electrical store, the european brand names still surprisingly clear, advertises above the heads of the shoppers: hotpoint. philips. giralt. almost all electrical goods imported to cuba are now made in asia. the store, like, seemingly almost every store in central havana, now sells cheap clothes and bamboo furniture. wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 13 we cross into avenida bélgica which leads us to the birthplace of josé martí, a museum, though closed for the day. raúl clearly expects us to linger at the site. we stop for granizado (flavoured shaved ice), for which he insists on paying, and reflect on what we have seen. in raúl’s city there are no ghosts, nor many precise memories, because for those who have remained the city is process, nothing remains the same, everything changes, everything will improve. those frozen, locked-off memories of trysting places and smart shops belong to the exiles. yet after several hours of wandering raúl has grown a little more sad and reflective, more for the decline of his city than for lost times. for those who have never left there is no beauty in ruins, no fascination. ‘yes, it’s sad to see a lovely object wounded. but just give us time to bring in the resources, and the time to fix these things up, and we’ll make the city sparkle once again. these ruins shame us more than you know.’ the smashed and empty structures remind us of london during the blitz, the cheap goods and long queues of berlin in 1946. raúl reminds us sharply, but obliquely, that this is a false analogy. his city was not blitzed; no one was to blame. the city has continued to change; 1959 was but a way station. would you visit my home, his unease implies, to notice the mark on the wall, the springs protruding from the chairs? would you move the armchair to photograph the stain on the carpet? his eyes alight in admiration of the restoration of the museo de bellas artes, raúl is the custodian of change and process, the guardian of city pride in a working city which lives and changes. manolo is the custodian of a moment in time, of a city in snapshot. driving through the area nine years earlier, manolo confines himself to the remark: ‘with a little bit of imagination i’m sure that each of you can recapture the smells of petrol and the sea ... who can forget the weatherman at the national observatory giving the tvc weather report, “blue skies and scattered showers across the country?”’ only those who had a tv in the 1950s. by three in the afternoon we manage to persuade raúl to stop for lunch at havana’s best known tourist restaurant, la bodeguita del medio. the meal, which would cost the average cuban four months’ salary, means little to him. he remarks that he could cook a cuban meal better himself, and no doubt he is right. this past and present tourist area wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 14 seems never to have been within his compass. his continuities, though not far away, are elsewhere: he used to buy clothes at gomez de mena, now a huge, rather ugly, dim, dusty and echoing arcade occupied only on the ground floor. the upper floors, he comments, used to be occupied by banks and businesses; it was a blaze of lights. loppy yu, ‘the best sandwich shop in havana,’ kept going until the 1970s. la floridita, a famous hemingway restaurant, closed in the 1960s while the exiles established its counterpart in miami. now it is re-established in its first position in zulueta street. ‘but it’s not on our map.’ raúl explains that the boulevard was re-named agramonte after a famous patriot of the wars of independence against spain, but it’s still called zulueta by almost everyone, including by those born long after the revolution itself. most of the city streets have an official and an older, unofficial name. raúl has his own memory map of the 1950s, but one overlain and intertwined by many times, many sites, many street names, many engagements. it is one of the few attributes he shares with manolo. raúl wants us to admire the restored architecture and politely scolds us for our perceived obsession with decay. we pass the cuartel de bomberos, the old and dilapidated fire station, now being restored as a museum. ‘why didn’t you take a picture of the new and very modern fire station as well? this morning you walked straight past it. now please admire the centro asturiano. two years ago the entrance was used as a public toilet. did you ever see a sight more magnificent than as it is now?’ indeed it is breathtakingly beautiful. nothing froze; all is fluid. ‘things got worse, yes, which was nobody’s fault, and now they’re improving.’ ‘el tiempo pasa,’ he remarks, time passes. some shops closed immediately because their owners departed, some were confiscated, some were destroyed by malcontents, but most continued trading – something for decades. many still do. buildings collapsed, we are assured by several people, not because we didn’t look after them, but because they were not built to last and since the special period we have not had time to demolish them. yet the continuous transformation of the havanan urban space is obvious neither to the returning exiles nor to the tourists wedded to the romantic notion of the beautiful enchanted woman asleep in her neglected castle. especially it is not obvious to that first generation of cuban americans who continue to imagine their city, long immobilised in briars, still awaiting the kiss of the handsome—and returning—prince. manolo now realises that the prince will never arrive. their city is ugly and ruined. manolo’s purpose is to bid it farewell. wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 15 he’s not coming back. shadows lengthen, and the dirty windscreen behind which his camera crouches heightens its alienation from the present. his last message is that havana is still, beneath the rubble, beautiful; but she will never be beautiful again until the exiles return. safe in miami again, he addresses the camera: you enjoyed that, didn’t you? i’m sure that you have remembered forgotten places. i would bet that some of you recaptured your years as a young man there, in that very place ... because we have all loved her. as before and as always. the revolution froze his central havana. its current population he has not mentioned once, and barely revealed it on his camera. in truth, raúl and his countrymen and women spend their lives repairing, lamenting, queuing, admiring, engaging, waiting, and loving too; but if they are revealed without identity or solidity, or not revealed at all, they have no right to existence save as flotsam. havana is not, to manolo, occupied by an enemy, it is no-man’s land. it is terra nullius. in his mind he will not need morally to contest the city on his triumphant return; his is the right of former possession made real by the memory of exclusive occupation. neither a new havana nor new havanans have replaced the purged and exiled family, church or club. memory triumphs over reality; memory alone is solid. it does not seem apparent to him that raúl may have a claim upon the city at all, still less a better claim than his own. by five thirty raúl also has finished his tour and done with us. towards the end, and now arrived at the area of greatest restoration, he has grown more cheerful, more accepting of the idiosyncrasies of his unusual tourists. if manolo had come to the city in 2000 instead of 1991, his monocular camera might have caught raúl, and us, walking the downtown streets. assuredly we would have been edited from the sequence, for no tourists are allowed to interrupt his flow of repossession. perhaps raúl alone might have been allowed to remain in shot, a humbly dressed older man, plastic bags in hand, just another cuban who had not seen fit to leave the island at the time when the best people did so, and so paid the price. the camera could not discern that this older, stocky havanan, was wiser now, his five decade presence redeemed by experience, by recollections both loving and bitter. and wyndham and read memory and a hard place portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 16 manolo would not know that this man of hard and complex memory remains willing to share his city with old and new havanans, rejoicing that the long neglect has been slowed and will soon be reversed. in truth, when raúl thinks of exiles at all, he sees them as no more than the people who decided to leave. pobrecitos (poor things), he calls them without irony. he does not despise manolo or his class of exiles. probably the two men never met each other before 1959, and are not likely ever to do so. yet, as havanan males of the same age, they should have more in common than a shared affection for the old city. manolo and raúl occupy two different universes. neither, though for different reasons, wants to discuss the revolution. each year takes them further apart. el tiempo pasa. yet the universes can unite, with good will and understanding. like manolo, miguel bretos, a child émigré of 1961, in his case via operation pedro pan, also returned many years later to central havana. he, too, arrived in el encanto park and reflected, [the other moment of enlightenment during my return trip] was at the corner of galiano and san rafael. to a provincial kid, this is the havana that mattered. el encanto, fin de siglo, flogar, christmas shopping, matinees at the america, a bite at the pullman before heading back across the tunnel and the via blanca to good old matanzas, which had none of that. it struck me that in the still unsightly, gaping void where el encanto once stood, there rises a huge tree—forty years’ worth of growth. it was a bittersweet experience: to realize how much “i” belonged there, and how much “there” belonged to me. on the other hand, in the shadow of that very tree, two generations of fellow cubans had grown whose life experiences, thoughts, concerns and values were radically different from my own. to understand each other, we must talk to one another. and, if talk we must, that conversation must take place within a space that is physically and spiritually cuban. (bretos 2002) reference list castillo, carmen (dir. and prod.) 2007, calle santa fe, agnès b. and love streams productions, paris. chase, graham (dir.), and tim read (prod.) 1987, hellfire pass, film australia, sydney. com-relieve s.a. 1999, a guide to the cristobal colón necropolis in havana, escudo de oro, eec. bretos, miguel a. 2002, ‘historical cross-pollination through 1960: straddling a cultural frontier.’ arch: the university of miami school of architecture newsletter, summer. on line. available: http://www.arc.miami.edu/publications/soanews_sprgsmmr02.pdf (accessed 28 january 2008). riemer, andrew 1992, inside outside, angus and robertson, pymble, nsw. villaverde, manolo (dir.) 1991, la habana de hoy y de siempre, ferro video productions, miami. portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal discourses of anti-corruption in mexico: culture of corruption or corruption of culture? gabriela coronado, university of western sydney1 introduction excessive and costly bureaucratic procedures and shrinking economic and social policies have restricted options for mexican society to function effectively. in order to achieve outcomes demanded by organisations or to fulfil their duties as citizens, mexicans must operate in the informal polity, outside or against frameworks of regulations. in the context of growing transnational activities the increasing role of unregulated activities is perceived as a large problem, producing loss of control and even criminality that must be eradicated. mexican people are caught between a battle for economic survival and the burden of a dysfunctional government bureaucracy, the legacy of modernisation and economic rationalism. in that context the use of informal practices is perceived as an easier, or often the only way, to make things happen. citizens have to fulfil their rights and responsibilities in the interface between government and the public, in a system characterised by undemocratic practices and abuses of power at all levels. these circumstances have led to an increase of unregulated activities, and boosted the informal sector and the informal polity associated with it. in order to function and fulfil their obligations in such a constrained environment, mexican citizens and organisations must find alternative strategies. 1 an earlier and preliminary version of this paper was presented in the ailasa conference in sydney, australia, 27-29 september 2006. coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 2 the informal polity contains a range of informal practices used to deal with limitations of the formal system and its excessive regulations, what i call ‘doing it a la mexicana.’ informal practices include favores (favours), palancas (levers, a little help from insiders or powerful supporters), deploying social reciprocity and family networks, using coyotes (persons paid to do administrative procedures on others’ behalf, mostly through personal contacts inside the organisation), giving regalos (gifts) and paying mordidas (bribes). in a developing nation in a neoliberal world these informal practices become survival strategies, alternative ways for people to deal with administrative procedures that are rigid, inefficient and expensive. the informal polity is often labelled corruption, but this is problematic. practices vary and can be considered legitimate or illegitimate from different perspectives. some can be interpreted as sources of unfair competition, as discriminatory practices or plain corruption, while others demonstrate creativity, innovation or merely a struggle to survive. individuals dealing with civic duties or working on behalf of organizations interacting with officials claim the processes are dysfunctional, forcing them to use any strategy to get by. some such strategies can be considered corruption, but others not. judgements of these practices are influenced by ideological and political discourses from other cultures, organised around a distinction between developed and developing countries. such a division and the ideologies that legitimise it dominate the political and economic international contexts in which businesses operate. countries are evaluated through global instruments defined by views and values from powerful economic players, developed countries and their corporations. developing countries, such as mexico, are under their scrutiny, and must regulate their internal affairs following guidelines defined by lender or aid institutions (like the world bank or international monetary fund) that serve the interests of countries and corporations who benefit from the economic performance of aid recipients. a condition for support is that countries should undertake neoliberal reforms: lower tariffs, privatise public companies, reduce taxes to attract investment, spend public funds for modernisation not social welfare (woodward 2005). for countries to be competitive in the global market they need to be (or at least look) attractive (porter 2001), with low risk, and low levels of corruption. coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 3 these pressures create contradictory demands for developing countries such as mexico. corruption in contemporary mexico exists and can be found at all levels of social, political and economic life. corrupt governments have accumulated huge fortunes from public resources, and individuals engage in more or less serious acts of corruption in their everyday life (morris 1991). but governments have to control the growing informal or underground economy and its associated informal practices, in conditions of underdevelopment and reductions in the already inadequate welfare support, where there is no alternative to offer (theobald 1990). for people to cope under these conditions means to find their own ways, through common informal practices. informal practices in earlier times were socially acceptable (e.g. local officials in colonial times personally charged for services to complement their low salary (lomnitz 2000) but these are now perceived as corruption, and government and society are urged to eradicate them. it is important to recognise, also, that eradicating corruption in developing nations does not necessary serve the interests of all players. as has been noted in the literature on corruption and development (e.g. robinson 1998) some practices identified as corruption may be advantageous for global business operations, providing economic activities otherwise not available or serving as the ‘grease’ that dysfunctional bureaucratic organisations need to deliver. even if such views are contentious they highlight ambiguities and contradictions underlying anti-corruption initiatives. my purpose here is modest. i focus on issues associated with informal practices that can be seen as survival strategies but are judged as the culture of corruption. i will draw attention to implications of discursive practices that represent and define corruption, pointing to the ideological constructions that help to mask the problem, blaming practices as causes instead of recognising them as effects of larger historically rooted political and economic interests. i also explore some implications of metaphoric language used in the mexican public discourse about corruption that connect corruption to cultural values. in this framework i consider the implicit postcolonial ideology through which countries and their cultures are understood in global exchanges, influencing the way corruption and country attractiveness are measured. to highlight the impact of postcolonial coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 4 ideologies i briefly refer to two instruments used by global business to measure country risk: transparency international (ti) index (www.transparency.org) and hofstede’s dimensions of national cultures (2001). then i analyse some examples of anticorruption initiatives in mexico. in my interpretation i draw on my own experience as a mexican, and on a research project in mexico from 2005-2007 on the use of informal practices.2 although in this paper i do not analyse stories collected in the research project, they are implicit in my interpretations of the perspective of ordinary mexicans. ‘culture of corruption’ and postcolonial ideology i lived in mexico most of my life, experiencing the difficulties created by dysfunctional bureaucratic systems. i dealt with public offices, always fearing i would be unable to fulfil my needs or duties as a citizen. every time i asked myself: do i have enough money to pay the expensive imposts, and more if they ask me for a mordida? are they going to ask me for another document not mentioned before, making me waste another day? are they going to send me to another desk after one hour in a queue? or ask me to come back tomorrow? many other mexicans like me have to deal with these concerns every time we pay for services, get driving permits or just drive in the city, or complete the procedures to marry, to register a birth or death. mexicans confront these difficulties everyday throughout their life. they also embody what is commonly called the problem of corruption, captured in the phrase cultura de la corrupción (culture of corruption). the association of corruption with culture in this phrase implies that mexican culture (like that of any comparable nation) is characterized by corruption that seems to derive from tradition through our socialization, inherited from our ancestors. it implies we have been ‘imprinted’ by corruption in the way we behave. it highlights also a core problem for global business. culture and corruption seem to come together as a problem for global agents, unsure of how to treat potential business partners, and reduce the risk they will spoil ‘good’ business. even though there is often a reluctance on the part of theorists to link corruption with culture, some writers from a business perspective make this link overt, as for example, davis and ruhe (2003) who correlate the ti corruption index and hofstede’s cultural dimensions in country assessments. 2 this project is part of a comparative project on informal practices, cross-cultural ‘larrikins’ in a neoliberal world: ideology and myth in postmodern australia, mexico and brazil, with the participation of prof bob hodge, dr. gabriela coronado, dr. fernanda duarte and dr. greg teal. coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 5 the phrase ‘culture of corruption,’ according to morris (2000: 227, note 16), was first used in the corruption literature by le vine in 1975. in mexico it now has wide currency, in ordinary conversations, in newspapers (e.g. la jornada 10/02/2002) and official documents (e.g. escobar 2004), to refer to a complex problem that mexico must solve before she can participate fully in the global economy. the connotations of corruption as culture, along with other metaphors, such as the ‘cancer of corruption,’3 exert a powerful influence on the way corruption is understood, and anti-corruption efforts are designed (for the impact of metaphoric language see morgan 1998). a common definition of corruption applied by monitoring organisations to measure ‘the extent of corruption’ is ‘the misuse of public power for private benefit’ (lambsdorff 2004: 3). such a broad definition is, however, too reductive and misses important distinctions needed to understand the problem and do something about it. when measuring and trying to reduce the ‘extent of corruption’ it is misleading to ignore distinctions between practices treated as equal under such a general understanding of corruption.4 is it the same to fight against ‘petty corruption’ as ‘grand corruption’? is the same strategy needed to combat bribes in the conduct of public services as to obtain multimillion-dollar contracts? is it the same to ask for a favour to get a job when you are unemployed as to ignore drug trafficking or white collar fraud? obviously not. rule-breaking happens in every society but there are many ways of judging the actions and their impacts. different forms of breaching the social order are given different legal or moral weight depending on the outcomes, the power and status of rule-breakers and beneficiaries, and the cultural values of the country or organization in which they happen. depending on cultural, social, economic, ideological and political factors, similar practices in different situations (e.g. public or private, formal or informal), or in different countries, (e.g. developed vs. developing), might be labelled acceptable or unacceptable, as demonstrating creativity and flexibility or as corruption. to judge such practices sometimes as corruption and sometimes not involves intercultural ideological forms, historically constructed in the complex global dynamics of international relations as postcolonial ideologies (see during 2000). said (1978) has shown that representing 3 this metaphor is used among others by james wolfensohn, president of the world bank in 1996 (in seligson 2002: 410, note 6) 4 for broader perspectives on corruption in different contexts and countries see: heidenheimer, johnston and levine 1989; rose-akerena 1999; morris 1991; valverde n.d. coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 6 the world in these terms is a strategy, ‘orientalism,’ by which colonial powers (mis)represent the ‘other’ from the perspective of the dominant westerner as a means of domination. based on economic and political dominance some nations consider their cultures as inherently superior, and those who are different as inferior. postcolonial ideologies have influenced global representations of countries and cultures in the context of global markets, and are implicit in discourses of managerialism (see chiapelo & fairclaugh 2002), which have become hegemonic among business organisations and beyond, shaping the way governments construct political discourses (hodge & coronado 2006). the managerial discourse impacts on the way countries interact with each other in the context of globalization, culturally, politically and for trade (spich 1995). as such it can be considered a discursive regime (foucault 1971), in which privileged speakers reinforce through their language the interests of the dominant. framed by this hegemonic discourse, international bodies, mostly led by developed nations, represent and measure corruption globally, considering it a risk, another cultural obstacle, for developing countries wishing to integrate into the global economy, inhibiting multinationals from doing business with them. corruption is perceived as a ‘country risk,’ affecting their level of ‘attractiveness.’ according to the findings of the world business environment survey, country scores in corruption indexes are important considerations for investment decisions (bartra et al. 2003), a key factor in the international business environment to differentiate nations in terms of competitive advantage (porter 2001). to be competitive in gaining access to foreign investment, a country needs to look attractive in the eyes of potential investors, as attractive as any other ‘commodity’ offered in the marketplace (kotler et al. 1993). consequently, countries need to eradicate corruption or at least show they are trying. in this context, the assumption that corruption is part of the culture conveys the sense that countries rated with high risk have a behaviour deeply rooted in their collective consciousness, that everyone shares the values associated with such cultural behaviour, and acts on them in their everyday practices. in this view it is not an anomaly produced by individuals acting against the social order but the effect of the common values of the whole society, passed on across many generations, naturalised as acceptable to all members and highly resistant to change. from the perspective of the people whose coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 7 ‘culture’ is under judgement, this reinforces the sense of collective undervaluation in postcolonialism. it is also useful for some who benefit from denouncing or not rejecting practices that are actually not aspects of the national culture but rather institutionalised conditions under which they seek profits in the neoliberal political economy. the metaphor ‘culture of corruption’ displaces the problem and obscures ways of dealing with it, thus ignoring other areas that in fact lead to corruption in its worst forms, benefiting corrupt, self-serving governments and elites, and not the people. representing corruption as part of the culture works well to benefit transnational sectors wanting to do business in ‘developing’ countries. if corruption is seen as part of the ‘host’ culture, and ‘experts’ on intercultural business relations advise them to be culturally sensitive and respect the culture of the ‘other’ and act accordingly, even though they claim to know are wrong (see westwood 2006), then business should follow those practices. in this way postcolonial assumptions about culture serve to justify many acts of corruption carried out in the name of cultural sensitivity. the management of intercultural issues in the expansion into other markets has been influenced by the ideas of hofstede (2001 [1980]), whose understanding of national cultures was based on a survey applied in one organisation, ibm. his study focused on what can be considered in a broad sense ‘organisational culture,’ the way of doing things in an organisation (for an overview of different understandings of organisational culture see alvesson 1993). the data he collected indicated how employees in different countries report behaviours, attitudes and preferences in the workplace in different nations. that data was interpreted, classified and ranked, producing characterisations that were generalised as if representative of the whole national culture. an analysis of his interpretations of cultures reveals an implicit dichotomy, in which the anglo/protestant/western behaviour, ‘our way,’ is naturalised as the ‘right’ behaviour, while alternative practices from other nations, the ‘other’s way,’ are implicitly assumed to be wrong: inefficient and immoral (see fougere and moulettes forthcoming). generic attitudes, which hofstede calls ‘dimensions of culture’—‘high/low powerdistance,’ ‘individualism-collectivism,’ ‘high/low uncertainty avoidance’ ‘masculinityfemininity’—were applied to classify cultures in asymmetrical binaries. one kind of coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 8 behaviour is associated with negative outcomes for business and its opposite with positive ones. from an anglo business perspective the characteristics of the ‘other,’ usually the developing countries, become by definition negative behaviours, deterministically reproduced by their culture and judged indiscriminately as a problem for business operations. such ideological interpretation of behaviours related with the cultural dimensions are defined as natural to the ‘culture’ of these nations and the source of their problems (for example, in a collectivist society the use of friends and family networks), or highly regarded for those ranking high in power distance structures. following this influential perspective the culture of the ‘other’ is assumed to be an obstacle that corporations need to ‘tolerate’ and deal with to be effective (for business discourses of tolerance as a postcolonial strategy, see coronado, forthcoming). to consider corruption as inherent to culture assumes a link between corruption levels in a country and its cultural characteristics. it is important to take culture into account but to do so in such a simplistic way is problematic. corruption as a complex phenomenon includes some links with cultural practices, in which agents of corruption take advantage of the ‘contradictions and ambiguities of the normative system for personal lucre’ (lomnitz 2000, 15 my translation; see also harrison and huntington 2001). but that normative system and its cultural practices are not fixed nor limited to a specific nation, but linked to the broader conditions in which economies and political bodies operate inside each nation and interact in the global context (bull & nevel 2003; elliot 1997). in this light i will evaluate the link between practices associated with corruption and hofstede’s cultural dimensions. the ideological measurement of corruption. the association between cultural dimensions and corruption was not an aim in hofstede’s work, although the link is made in the business literature, and he explicitly introduced it in recent revisions of his work (hofstede & hofstede 2005). it is easy to correlate cultural dimensions in his terms with practices that are perceived and measured as corruption in the indexes: ‘collectivist’ cultures can be associated with nepotism and ‘individualist’ with individual merit; high ‘power distance’ with abuse of authoritarian power and discretionary power, while low power-distance is claimed to generate fairness. masculine cultures are associated with machismo, which produces favouritism, discrimination and sexual harassment, whereas feminine cultures promote coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 9 equal opportunity and care for the needy. the link between corruption and uncertainty avoidance, i.e. ‘the extent in which members of a culture feel threatened by unknown or ambiguous situations’ (hofstede & hofstede 2005: 167) is more ambiguous, since it can be seen as a positive quality in the context of business competitiveness, with flexibility or capacity for innovation; but it also relates to rule orientation, daring to break rules or not, which in itself creates unknown situations. paradoxically, for hofstede strong uncertainty avoidance (as in mexico, 82 in the index) is associated with more perceived corruption (2005: 168 & 352). corruption and innovation both involve ‘breaking rules,’ but in one case it is assumed to have damaging effects while in the other it is seen as positive for the competitive global market, now recognised as uncertain. to judge the act of breaking rules positively or negatively is problematic, and similar practices are judged differently, depending on the contexts, perceptions of the development-status of the countries, how the behaviours are associated with those national cultures, and views of cultures reflecting postcolonial ideologies. corruption and inefficiency are commonly seen as inherent characteristics of the culture of ‘developing’ nations. as such, the place they occupy in the corruption index is unequivocal. they have ‘wrong’ behaviours according to the cultural dimensions, and therefore are economically underdeveloped and rank high in corruption. all these qualities come neatly together, and naturalize the link in the eyes of international business managers who rely on these ratings as an easy way to make decisions. corruption indexes assigned by bodies such as transparency international (ti), and cultural values connected with ‘good management,’ become important tools to evaluate a nation’s attractiveness (high or low risk). under this ideology a country judged as corrupt wanting to reform must try to change that perception, reduce its scores and put anti corruption schemes in place, learning from more developed nations how to manage properly. in order to show similarities between measurement of corruption and countries’ cultures i will compare them. both instruments legitimise their authority with a scientific discursive regime, which promises that their ‘truth’ has been rigorously obtained. the statistical apparatus allows extrapolation of findings from subjective judgements, coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 10 perceptions, and attitudes, elicited from samples as if they referred to the whole nation. the behaviour of some persons from this sample, which is not even statistically representative in their own terms, becomes ‘the culture/behaviour’ of a nation. perceptions of organisational culture or ‘extent of corruption’ provided by participants in the sample are ascribed to the society as a whole. both instruments take the scientific discursive regime seriously, and include explicit statements about the limitations of the instruments, but these are buried in the more technical texts, and then ignored in the use of the measurements by the wider public, non-government organisations, governments, academics and businesses. both instruments use the same ideological strategy, which draws on the views and values of business people as if they were the sole legitimate possessors of knowledge about that society. in hofstede’s study, the ‘experts’ on national culture are ibm managers (although it is not clear in all cases whether the managers were nationals or expatriates). in ti, the index ‘reflects the views of business people and analysts around the world, including experts who are residents in the countries evaluated’ (transparency international 2004, 6). as experts they know the ‘other’ since they live there and do business with them. for a brief illustration table 1 compares the two instruments, to show elements in common in their postcolonial strategies. country classifications based on measurements of cultural dimensions and corruption indexes become guidelines for businesses operating globally, trying to reduce risks. intentionally or not, the measurements misrepresent whole societies. their cultures, including their propensity for corruption, are perceived as inadequate, difficult or impossible to change. imprecise and wildly generalised judgements on countries as more or less corrupt without distinguishing what kind of practices are measured allow whole societies and cultures to be ‘blamed,’ for practices of specific sectors or individuals that are not always targeted by anti-corruption campaigns. fighting corruption the mexican way to make mexico ‘attractive’ the government is meant to control the levels of corruption that have been measured and publicised through corruption index, but neoliberal pressures confront mexican governments with a paradox: they need to regulate the informal polity and the corruption associated with its practices, and simultaneously coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 11 ignore the fact that it is happening. to penalise the practices of the informal economy without offering an alternative to increasing unemployment and poverty will not stop the problem and might create another country risk, political unrest. elements. hofstede’s national culture dimensions. transparency international lambsdorff’s background paper to the 2004 corruption perception index. definitions of concepts in essential terms that encompass multiple practices. broad definition of culture: based on few dimensions of organisational culture, as representing the whole culture of a society. ‘the software of the mind.’ broad definition of corruption: ‘corruption can range from petty bureaucratic corruption (such as the paying of bribes to low level officials) right through to grand political corruption (such as the paying of large kick-backs in return for the awarding of contracts).’ individual perceptions treated as objective truths. attitudes in the workplace toward bosses and colleagues are the nation’s behaviour. perceptions of ‘propensity’ to act corruptly as actual corruption. culture as homogenous at national level. sample behaviour is considered homogenous for whole country and region. construction of country perception index from the results of a few surveys not systematically applied. imprecise terms in the instruments of measurement. individual ‘preference’ in the form of operating inside an organization. extent of corruption measured by imprecise terms: ‘prevalence,’ ‘commonness’ ‘frequency,’ ‘likelihood,’ ‘problematic,’ ‘severity.’ naturalisation of association between characteristics and judgements. cultural dimensions of the other negatively valued, the developed positively e.g. collectivism = corruption vs. individualism = democracy. business sectors as moral authority to judge nation’s behaviour: perception from ‘senior business people,’ ‘panel of experts,’ ‘elite business people,’ ‘staff to a foreign country,’ ‘expatriate business men.’ table 1: measurement of culture and corruption in comparison to deal with this paradox, governmental agencies act inconsistently, sometimes banning some practices, at other times ignoring them. they have also introduced minor changes that reduce the perceived potential of the informal polity to become actual corruption, by regulating a posteriori what is already out of control. one such move was to create designated spaces for illegal street sellers. another attempt to regulate the unregulated was to reduce the bureaucratic structure involved in delivering services by government agencies, a program called simplificación administrative (administrative simplification). this program attempted to reduce corruption in the interface between the public and the service desk by making some public services free or redirecting payments to the budget office cashier (tesorería) or into banks. in that way the circulation of money associated with fees (and exposed to bribes) was transferred to public or commercial institutions that have no involvement in the administrative process. coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 12 the impacts of this kind of initiative are difficult to evaluate, but according to peoples’ perceptions (from interviews) to submit and pay for an application does not avoid being asked for a ‘tip,’ which is generally given with the unspoken fear that otherwise the process will be delayed, or the documents ‘lost’: in the entrance there is a giant sign that says: no payment for procedures in this office. everything to be paid in the tesorería. but when we married, when we have already signed, he told us “well … mmh ... whatever you would like to give for the judge’s cooperation …”5 although just anecdotal, this example points to the need to distinguish between culture of corruption for survival and institutionalised corruption, another phrase used to refer to the problem of corruption in countries with high corruption indexes. institutionalised corruption is an outcome of complex historical, political and economic conditions that shaped how governments and economic elites have functioned in the country, from early colonial times till the globalised present (see semo 2000). it refers to the conditions under which citizens and organisations interact with public bureaucracies, within a legal framework that in mexico is seen as undemocratic, inefficient, discretional and insecure (del castillo & guerrero 2003). the distinction is useful given the impacts that simplistic views of the phenomena have on the success or failure of anti-corruption initiatives. the two phrases point to different understandings of the phenomena and how to fight against it. to illustrate the postcolonial ideology in the discourses that have emerged out of global pressures (from finance institutions, corporations and global organisations) to control corruption levels in mexico i will analyse two examples i found during my research in mexico city, in april-may 2006. the examples come from different initiatives that self represent as against the ‘culture of corruption,’ promoting the ‘culture of legality.’ one is a may 2006 press release from transparencia mexicana (tm), the mexican chapter of transparency international. the second is a billboard from the consejo de la comunicación ac (council of communication, civil association), a business organisation that calls itself la voz de las empresas (the voice of business). 5 all translations of spanish are mine: ‘en la entrada dice un letrero gigante: en esta oficina, ningún trámite tiene costo. todo lo tienes que pagar en latesorería pero cuando nos casamos, ya que firmamos no sé qué, nos dijo “bueno ... pues .... este ... lo que gusten cooperar para la juez”‘ (interviewee 06/05/2006) coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 13 transparency mexican’s public voice transparency mexican is the ‘author’ of the document i analyse. its self-description appears at the bottom of the page by way of a signature: non-government organisation which combats corruption in mexico from an integrated perspective, through public policies and private attitudes which go beyond policy pronouncements to generate concrete changes in the institutional framework and the culture of legality.6 in order to communicate to the public through the media this organisation released a synthesis of the last results of the application of the índice nacional de corrupción y buen gobierno (national index of corruption and good governance in mexico). table 2 includes some elements from the document that highlight the ideological construction of corruption in this text. my translation quotes in spanish title: mexico, stuck in its corruption levels: transparency mexican. ‘méxico, estancado en sus niveles de corrupción: transparencia mexicana.’ name of instrument: national index of corruption and good government. ‘índice nacional de corrupción y buen gobierno.’ scope: in 3 levels of government and private business. ‘en 3 niveles de gobierno y empresas particulares.’ what was measured: payment of bribe or ‘mordida,’ which was declared by mexican households. ‘pago de soborno o ‘mordida’ declarado por los hogares mexicanos.’ agents mexico. federal entities/states. households. households …headed by youngsters, as well as those with higher educational levels. ‘méxico.’ ‘entidades federativas/estados.’ ‘hogares.’ ‘hogares…encabezados por jóvenes, así como aquellos que tienen mayores niveles educativos.’ results: households inclined to pay bribes. from country households, the ones headed by young people, as well as those who have the highest education levels, continue to be more inclined to participate in acts of corruption. ‘propensión de lo hogares a pagar sobornos’ ‘de los hogares del país, los encabezados por jóvenes, así como aquellos que tienen mayores niveles educativos siguen siendo los más propensos a participar en actos de corrupción.’ table 2: elements of the press release from transparency mexican. one press release from transparencia mexicana is too little to prove much. however, when analysed closely it throws up relevant meanings for my argument. first, the title produces a shock in the audience (myself, in the first instance). through its links with transparency international the speaker, tm, establishes its expert status to evaluate corruption in mexico. from that position it declares that mexico is ‘stuck in’ levels of corruption, which suggests that everything done so far has failed. the reader learns later 6 for original in spanish see full document in appendix at the end. coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 14 in the text that in fact this is not so, that there have been improvements in some sectors and that actually ‘half the number of the country’s federal entities reduced the occurrence of corruption’ in some services. the text mentions fluctuations in different years, a reduction from 2001 to 2003, increasing in 2005 but still lower than in 2001. even though the information provided in the document paints a more complex picture, the simplistic title conveys a sense of failure that implies the difficulties of changing a culture of corruption into a culture of legality, the aim of this organisation as presented at the end of the press release. in this reading, the text creates a sense that small outcomes are insufficient to fulfil the grand aim of this organisation: to transform mexico’s culture of corruption into a ‘culture of legality.’ from other sources we find that the comparison is inexact, since the data does not come from a longitudinal study but from different samples. it is unclear if the differences cited showed that the various groups are more honest in reporting bribes, or if the actual corruption in the delivery of services has changed. detailed information about the instrument is available in the organisation web page (http://www.tm.org.mx) but to the public, the press release and article arouse the maximum concern. the grammatical subjects of the different sentences in the text produce confusion. it is difficult to know who the agent of corruption is, and who is trying to improve. mexico is a problematic subject of the sentence in the title. if it is subject, mexico is the agent of corruption, illustrating the postcolonial strategy in which an evaluation based on a sample of individual perceptions is generalised to construct an image of the whole nation as responsible for the success or failure of the action. if mexico is the agent, then what is the role of the entidades federativas (states of the federation) that the same document says are reducing the incidence of corruption? in those cases they are not agents of corruption, but agents who reduce corruption. how is it possible that the whole is the agent of corruption, and the parts are those who try to reduce it? there is another ambiguity in the name of the instrument. what exactly is the index measuring? corruption? or good government? does it imply that those are opposites, so that reducing corruption means good government? in spanish the use of the word gobierno creates the sense that the problem is mostly associated with government offices, so that private businesses (even if mentioned as providers of some of the coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 15 services evaluated) are made invisible. the document does not mention which services are public and which are private. this imprecision shifts the focus onto the practices of common people, those who reported bribes, not those who demand them and are the real targets of the index: those in charge of trámites (administrative procedures) or who provide servicios públicos (public services). the document is also imprecise about its scope, implying that the index registers the payments of all bribes declared, as if its scope were universal when actually the index is based on a sample and not all those surveyed may have reported honestly. there is another agent of corruption included in the text. according to the document the index registers the payment of bribes, mordidas, declared by hogares. the word can be translated as household but its literal translation is ‘homes.’ hogares has emotional connotations that connect with family life, the intimate space in which individuals are socialised. this tacitly reinforces the idea that corruption comes from the culture: by stating that ‘homes’ ‘declared’ they paid bribes, it implies that ‘homes’ are the agents in these acts of corruption, ergo, it is a cultural practice. if ‘mexican homes’ are ‘inclined to’ pay bribes, as stated in the text, does it mean that members of a family home are all inclined to be corrupted, thus condemning the culture to continue without change? the presentation of the outcomes continues this ambiguity. one phrase emphasises the home’s inclination to be involved in acts of corruption: ‘the results raise an alert about homes’ inclination to pay bribes.’ from this and other similar phrases used in the document we are led to suppose that all members of the family are corrupt, thus increasing the number of people supposedly included in the sample, justifying the generalisation to the whole of mexico. in another document from the same organisation the mathematical basis is explained: a sample of ‘14,019 homes with between 383 and 514 households surveyed in each federal region’ is then ‘extrapolated to the whole population’ where ‘the results imply almost 101 million acts of corruption in the 38 services during the year’ (transparencia mexicana 2005). in a country of 103.3 million (according to the 2005 census, inegi 2005) if this is treated as an average this ‘extrapolation’ makes it seem that each citizen (except for 2.2% honest mexicans) committed a corrupt act that year. in another part of the press release tm focused on one kind of ‘home’ especially coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 16 ‘inclined’ to be corrupt: young and educated. interestingly, in this case the term used is soborno instead of mordida. both terms in this context would be translated by the same english word, bribery, but the text distinguishes between the two, ‘soborno o mordida.’ the difference is the gravity of the ‘crime.’ the term mordida is part of the mexican ‘folklore of corruption’ (covarrubias 2003) linked in the text with ‘petty corruption,’ which ‘affects the income of mexican homes’: mostly those with less than the minimum income (in 24% of cases, the text informs us). by comparison the young and educated ‘homes,’ not in the lowest income sector, are constructed as involved in more serious corruption, paying sobornos. the text does not offer readers an explanation of this behaviour, letting them form their own conclusions. one reason for the figures is that these youngsters may be more ready to report bribes. in one of my interviews with a family of 3 women of different generations the youngest criticised her mother for denying that she has used informal practices (favores) to help her to solve problems. other possibilities are that this sector is frustrated to be unemployed or poorly paid after long years of study and investment in education, or that they refuse to waste their time in tedious bureaucracy when they are paid more than the cost of bribes paid to low-wage employees. the young people’s ‘inclination’ to pay bribes, whether it reflects frustration, cynicism or lower moral values, challenges the postcolonialist assumption that corruption is higher in less developed countries because of their cultural backwardness. if we suppose that the young and educated are more influenced by other cultures, in mexico this means adopting ‘the american way,’ omnipresent in mexican media and life (coronado & hodge 2004), how does their propensity come from supposedly corrupt and backward mexican culture? it is also plausible, although difficult to demonstrate without more extensive research, that their attitudes can be linked to changes of social expectations and values influenced by their exposure to neoliberal and postcolonial ideologies, which have failed to deliver. under a global economy the promise that individual success and higher consumer capacity will bring economic development, higher employment and social prosperity is only fulfilled for the few who, according to the dominant discourse, are developed, have the right cultural qualities and therefore inhabit a culture of legality. for the rest, neoliberalism and postcolonialism not only fail to transform the economic, social and coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 17 political conditions in which corruption is played out, but through this failure help reproduce the institutionalised corruption that produces winners and losers in both developed and developing worlds. image 1: billboard in the streets of polanco, mexico city (© author) the voice of mexican business when i was driving in mexico city in may 2006 in a wealthy neighbourhood, polanco, a street billboard caught my attention. at first i did not realised that it was an anticorruption campaign by business organisations. i passed it many times, and only when i was able to read all parts of the text and image did i appreciate its relevance for my research. then i stopped to take a picture (see image 1). my initial puzzlement came from the fact that the image and the related text that dominates it, pa’l chesco, refers to a popular phrase that means ‘for a fizzy drink.’ this meaning is reinforced by the image of a bottle with a straw. even though in some cases coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 18 asking for a soft drink might be a euphemism for demanding a bribe,7 the language used in the poster is mostly associated with low income workers providing a service. the expression usually comes as a polite request: señito, ahi pa’l chesco,¿ no? (dear madam, something for a fizzy drink, no?). literally it is a request for something to buy a cool drink after hard work under the sun. i have heard it all my life, when someone has provided me with a service; from people who serve petrol in a garage station who do not receive a salary, from macheteros (men that carry building products) delivering bags of cement or bricks to your house, known to earn low wages, and also from employees of big companies who deliver products, and are probably earning the minimum salary. i did not see a similar campaign in other less affluent neighbourhoods. why was it run there? was it directed to wealthy people, recommending them not to give tips? or was it trying to compensate for the bad image of business from international scandals such as enron? at first glance we might suppose that the people running this campaign are familiar with the language and culture of ordinary people who use this phrase, and sympathetic to their needs. but by linking the phrase in the top with the next line ‘we are thirsty for honesty’ (and other phrases below) the text constructs an opposition. it implies that one action, workers asking for a soft drink, is the problem that needs to be solved, to fulfil the wish of business for honesty. at the foot of the image the speaker is identified as the council of communication a.c. (civil association), who declare that they are the voice of business. above this ‘signature’ is an image of a falling drop of water, creating ripples. this image implies that this small contribution from business, the billboard, will expand and produce the change needed to satisfy their desire. the question is how this phrase used by common workers plays a part in the campaign, as against the business leaders’ ‘thirst for honesty’? the two phrases polarise two sectors. business are thirsty for honesty and do not use that language (implying they are not corrupt) while common people are literally thirsty and cannot buy a soft drink but are to blame for corruption, like the ‘homes’ the tm press release identified as having inclinations to be corrupt. below the image the statement ‘no a la corrupción’ (say no to corruption) indicates that the main voice in the text is that of people united in honesty to reject 7 as in an example reported by del castillo and guerrero: ‘si quieres con el refresco nos arreglamos’ (if you want with a soft drink we can fix it) (2003: 21). coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 19 corruption. but if corruption in this view is interpreted as demanding a tip, what actions would oppose it? to impose a new rule that low-paid employees are not allowed to ask for a tip? or maybe, if we believe in the good will of businesses (at least those united against corruption) they will increase wages so that workers do not need to ask pa’l chesco? a sceptic will suspect that they will just continue with their campaign as ‘ethically responsible businesses,’ saving some taxes for this contribution to society, building a positive image, and maybe, still profiting from institutionalised corruption. concluding remarks through analysing these two examples i draw attention to the weight given in anticorruption initiatives to practices from the informal polity, mostly associated with poorer sectors of society. these practices are not so much a culture of corruption as basic to survival. from this we can see that to represent corruption as inherent in a culture targets informal practices used by common people to survive, instead of focusing on the contexts of institutionalised corruption, which involve national and global agents pressuring developing countries to become cheap open markets, with the reduced welfare required by neoliberal models as conditions for aid or loans. the so-called culture of corruption has attributed the ‘problem’ to culturally learned behaviours of common people, who supposedly act in that way in any context, whether as citizens or on behalf of private or public organisations. corruption in this view is linked to the country’s ‘cultural dimensions,’ which according to the postcolonial managerial discourse prevent the country from perform efficiently in the global economy. according to this ideology, stopping corruption means changing the behaviour of common people, ‘the family homes that are inclined to corruption.’ the analysis of anti-corruption initiatives shows their focus on behaviour at lower levels of bureaucracy and in the ‘homes’ that interact with them, not exposing systemic practices that owe much to global pressures in the contemporary neoliberal dispensation. ordinary mexicans have internalised discourses that characterise their practices as a ‘culture of corruption.’ but these practices, irrespective of whether they are called culture, folklore, cancer, creativity, flexibility or corruption, seem their only way to deal with a state bureaucracy economically and politically complicit with the interests of the neoliberal global economy. coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 20 the examples analysed from transparencia mexicana and la voz de las empresas show that these bodies, intentionally or unintentionally, respond to those interests and perspectives, promoting an image in which common people acting a la mexicana are to blame for the poor image that makes mexico unattractive and uncompetitive. in that context, discourses of transparencia (transparency), moralización (moralisation) honestidad (honesty) or buen gobierno (good governance), adopted by governments, politicians and business groups to fight this soft target, appear as just rhetoric, and probably do not really aim to change mexico for the benefit of its peoples. coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 21 appendix one coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 22 reference list alvesson, m. 1993, cultural perspectives on organizations. cambridge university press, new york. bartra, g., kaufmann, d., and stone a.h.w. 2003, world business environment survey findings. world bank publications, washington, d.c. bull, m.j. and nevel, j.l. (eds.), 2003, corruption in contemporary politics, palgrave macmillan, new york. chiapelo, e. and fairclough , n. 2002, ‘understanding the new management ideology: a transdisciplinary contribution from critical discourse analysis and new sociology of capitalism,’ discourse & society, vol. 13, no. 2, 185-208. coronado, g. (forthcoming), ‘constructing the “postcolonial” manager. orientalising latin america in the textbooks’ in prasad, a (ed.), against the grain: advances in postcolonial organization studies. organization studies series, liber & copenhagen business school press, copenhagen. covarrubias gonzález, i. 2003, ‘el impacto de la corrupción en el proceso de democratización de méxico. una propuesta de análisis,’ revista probidad, vol. 24, 1-14. davis, j.h. and ruhe, j.a. 2003, ‘perceptions of country corruption. antecedents and outcomes,’ journal of business ethics, vol. 43, no. 4, 275-88 del castillo, a. and guerrero, m.a. 2003, percepciones de la corrupción en la ciudad de méxico. online, available: http://presupuestoygastopublico.org/documentos/transparencia/dt_134.pdf. (accessed 23 jan. 2007). during, s. 2000, ‘postcolonialism and globalization: towards a historicization of their inter-relation,’ cultural studies, vol. 14, no. 3/4, 385–404. elliot, k.a. 1997, corruption and the global economy. institute for international economics, washington, d.c. escobar, r.e. 2004, ‘corrupción en méxico: mal o vicio de muchos,’ foro: presidencia de la república, 10 abril. online, available: http://foros.fox.presidencia.gob.mx/read.php?13,163892 (accessed 13 feb. 2007). foucault, m. 1971, ‘orders of discourse’ social science information, vol.10, no. 2, 7-30. fougere, m. and moulettes, a. forthcoming, ‘cross-cultural management discourse – ideas of democracy, development, modernity and progress in hofstede’s culture’s consequences,’ prasad, a (ed.), against the grain: advances in postcolonial organization studies. organization studies series, liber & copenhagen business school press. harrison l.e and huntington, s.p. (eds.) 2000, culture matters: how values shape human progress. basic books, new york. heidenheimer, a., johnston, m., and levine, v.t. (eds.) 1989 political corruption: a handbook. transaction books, new jersey. hodge, b., and coronado, g. 2006, ‘mexico inc? discourse analysis and the triumph of managerialism,’ organization, vol. 16, no.4, 529-47. hofstede, g. 2001[1980], culture’s consequences: international differences in work related values. 2nd ed. sage, beverly hills, ca. hofstede, g. and hofstede, g.j. 2005, cultures and organizations. software of the mind. mcgraw hill, new york. inegi 2005, resultados definitivos del ii conteo de población y vivienda para el estado de chiapas. méxico: instituto nacional de estadística geografía e informática. online, available: http://www.inegi.gov.mx (accessed 5 feb 2007). kotler, p., haider, d., and rein, i. 1993, marketing places. the free press, new york. la jornada 2002, ‘podrían seguir en la inercia de la cultura de la corrupción, señala bravo mena,’ 10 feb. online, available: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2002/02/10/008n1pol.php (accessed 13/02/2007). lambsdorff, j.g. 2004, framework document: background paper to the 2004 corruption perception index. 2004. transparency international and university of passau, online, available: http://www.icgg.org?downoloads/2004_cpi_fd.pdf. (accessed 14 august 2005). lomnitz, c. (coord.) 2000, vicios públicos, virtudes privadas. la corrupción en méxico. ciesas/porrúa, méxico d.f. morgan, g. 1998, images of organization. sage, thousand oaks, ca. morris, s. 1991, corruption and politics in contemporary mexico. university of alabama press, tuscalosa. morris, s. 2000, ‘¿”la política acostumbrada” o “política insólita”? el problema de la corrupción en el méxico contemporáneo,’ in vicios públicos, virtudes privadas. la corrupción en méxico. lomnitz, c. (coord.), ciesas/porrúa, mexico city, 221-237. porter, m. 2001 [1990], the competitive advantage of nations. free press, new york. coronado discourses of anti-corruption in mexico portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 23 robinson, m. (ed) 1998, corruption and development. routledge, new york rose-akerena, s. 1999, corruption and government. causes, consequences, and reform. cambridge university press, cambridge. said, e. 1978, orientalism. penguin, harmondsworth. seligson, m. 2002, ‘the impact of corruption on regime legitimacy: a comparative study of four latin american countries,’ the journal of politics, vol. 64, no. 2, 408-433. semo, e. 2000, ‘de la colonia a la independencia: la línea imaginaria entre lo público y lo privado contemporáneo,’ in vicios públicos, virtudes privadas. la corrupción en méxico. lomnitz c. (coord.), ciesas/porrúa, mexico city, 65-85. spich, r. 1995, ‘globalization folklore: problems of myth and ideology in the discourse on globalization,’ journal of organizational change management, vol. 8, no. 4, 6-29 theobald, r. 1990, corruption, development and underdevelopment. duke university press, durham. transparencia mexicana 2005, ‘measuring corruption in public service delivery: the experience of mexico.’ online, available: http://www.globalcorruptionreport.org.gcr2005/download/english/corruption_in_ practice.pdf (accessed 14 aug 2005). transparency international 2004, transparency international corruption perception index 2004, pp. 1-8, online, available: http//www.transparency.org (accessed: 14 august 2005). valverde loya, m.a. n/d, ‘la corrupción en méxico y el entorno internacional.’ juripolis online. online, available: http://www.ccm.itesm.mx/dhes/juripolis/archivos/avalverde (accessed 25 jan. 2007). westwood, r. 2006, ‘international business and management studies as an orientalist discourse: a postcolonial critique,’ critical perspectives on international business, vol. 2, no. 2, 91-113. woodward, d. 2005, australia unsettled. the legacy of ‘neo-liberalism.’ pearson, frenchs forest, sydney. women in revolt naked in the gymnasium: women as agents of social change maja mikula institute for international studies, university of technology sydney … [t]he most ridiculous thing of all will be the sight of women naked in the palaestra, exercising with the men, especially when they are no longer young […] yes, indeed, he said: according to present notions, the proposal would be thought ridiculous. (plato in agonito 1977, p. 26, italics added) women have throughout history participated in and sometimes initiated rebellions to defend the welfare of their family, community, class and race or ethnic group. these rebellions – with all their political, social and cultural complexity – are sometimes (rather patronisingly) called ‘popular feminism’ or ‘unconscious feminism.’1 we realise how problematic this appellation could be, since women – in britain in particular, but elsewhere as well – have in the not-so-distant past organised precisely against radical feminism, to defend family values and other more conservative standards of social conduct. the perceived paradox reveals how differences and their related ‘interests’ are shaped in a contest over the symbols of public culture, often intersecting the divide based on gender, class, political and denominational persuasion, ethnicity or race. it appears that generations of women in a wide range of political and social movements, individual women resisting social injustice and at least three waves of conscious feminism(s) have not yet succeeded in defeating the popular stigma surrounding female activism. women moving in the public arena still evoke the same negative images they have conjured for centuries, reflected in such derogatory appellations as ‘viragos,’ ‘witches,’ ‘femmes-hommes,’ or ‘hyenas in petty-coats’. 1 both terms are indeed quite unacceptable, but they clearly demonstrate the inertia of language in staying abreast of social change. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 1 it could be said that the best way to undermine women’s ‘revolutionary’ potential is to ask ‘what do you mean by women?’ or, ‘what do you mean by revolution?’ that is not my intention. however, qualifying my principal terms of reference seems imperative from the outset, since both notions have been at the centre of particularly animated polemics at least since the early years of ‘women’s revolution’ in the early 1960s and the collapse of the iron curtain in the late 1980s respectively. ‘as if women existed’: different approaches to subjectivity […] the case against saying ‘we’ seems overwhelming: politically as a piece of imperialist presumption, and epistemologically as a fiction that equates autonomy with universality. (scheman 1993, p. 190) invoking ‘women’ in the title of this paper is a hazardous enterprise, which may attract accusations of essentialism, normativity and exclusivity. ever since the publication of de bouvoir’s the second sex (1949), gender has been regarded as a social, rather than biological category. subsequent debates problematised its ‘universal’ and ‘essential’ nature. positing gender as a ‘multiple interpretation of sex’ inevitably challenged the existence of unified categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’. on the one hand, essentialist discourse has been widely criticised by non-white and nonwestern feminists on the account of its blindness to the multiplicity of racial, ethnic, cultural, social and political intersections in which concrete groups of women are constructed (see for example spelman 1988; elshtain 1995). on the other, it has been challenged by poststructuralist, deconstructionist and postmodernist theorists, who generally reject the existence of pregiven, stable and unified subjects. most notably, antiessentialist approach has been advocated consistently by the american cultural theorist judith butler (1990, 1992). assumptions of the existence of a coherent identity of ‘women’ based on either biology or ‘universal’ social conditioning have been characteristic of feminist discourse since the 1960s. motivated by a desire to constitute ‘woman’ as a subject on an equal footing with the aristotelian rational ‘man’, feminists of the 1960s and 1970s were engaging in a kind portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 2 of ‘transpraxis’, using the models and strategies at their disposal, which had been at the core of the ‘oppressive’ relationship they were rebelling against. even nowadays, many theorists adhere to a view that a certain degree of essentialism is a necessary precondition for feminist political action. the question is, do we need an unproblematic unity of ‘women’ in order to be politically engaged, that is, is political action really dependent on solidarity of identity? a characteristic lament from the advocates of conventional pragmatics is: ‘why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic? just when we are forming our own theories about the world, uncertainty emerges about whether the world can be theorized’ (hartsock 1990, p. 164). others believe that this kind of ‘strategic essentialism’ simply won’t do, since ‘strategies always have meanings that exceed the purposes for which they are intended’ (butler 1990, p. 5). despite her opposition – in principle – to ‘strategic essentialism’, butler concedes that temporary unities ‘might emerge in the context of concrete actions that have purposes other than the articulation of identity,’ permitting of ‘multiple convergences and divergences, without obedience to a normative telos of definitional closure’ (1990, p. 16). according to this view, ‘certain forms of acknowledged fragmentation might [actually] facilitate coalitional action, precisely because the ‘unity’ of the category of women is neither presupposed nor desired’ (1990). anti-essentialist argument has spilled over from theory to feminist practice. it has been recognised that the rejection of universality entails an acknowledgment of the contingent and specific nature of political claims for women and men alike. anti-essentialist political strategies are seen as resting on ‘analyses of the utility of certain arguments in certain discursive contexts, without, however, invoking absolute qualities for women or men’ (scott 1988). on a practical level, new strategies for women’s activism have been developed. by far the most popular is ‘transversalist politics’, which draws on strategies employed by italian feminists from women’s resource centre in bologna. ‘transversalist politics’ (yuval-davis 1997) involves a process of ‘rooting’ and portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 3 ‘shifting,’ in which activists remain rooted in their own identities and values, while at the same time being ready to shift views in dialogue with those of other identities and values. political dialogue fashioned in this manner is expected to avoid uncritical solidarity and the homogenisation of the ‘other’. the knowledge acquired through this practice is always ‘unfinished’, but its fluidity is seen as beneficial, because of its capability to take into account differences and ruptures, which would otherwise remain hidden under the surface. recent feminist studies tend to resist the temptation of producing a ‘grand narrative’ of the ‘universal woman’. individual ‘fragments’ speak for themselves. this refusal to treat women as a ‘universal subject’ is not considered a defection from politics, but on the contrary, a political act in itself (butler 1992, p. 4), aimed at opening up spaces for political interests that have hitherto been marginalised. ‘as if revolution was possible’: women and the end of history just when we are talking about the changes we want, ideas of progress and the possibility of systematically and rationally organizing human society become dubious and suspect. (hartsock 1990, p. 164) if the previous section reads as an apology to feminist essentialists, we also owe one to the advocates of posthistoire, whose influence in the last fifty years cannot be overlooked. posthistorians leave little room for revolt and we are more or less expected to resign to a status quo. this version of the ‘end of history’ looks both more plausible and more desirable from a position of power. from women’s vantage point, it is hard to accept that history might be coming to an end. history had been man’s domain for centuries and women began gaining access to it only in the last three or four decades. not surprisingly, modern-day ‘eschatologists’ are mostly men. the few women who have tackled speculations on the end of history, have done so only to dismiss them as either irrelevant or missing the point. jean bethke elshtain, for example, has seen them as short-lived delusions proving that ‘history does not bend to our wishes or to our theories, at least not in the ways we fondly hope or optimistically project’ (1995, p. 196). julia kristeva has reasserted the necessity of nurturing a ‘culture of revolt’, by invoking the portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 4 correlation – central to psychoanalysis – between pleasure and revolt: ‘… happiness exists only at the price of a revolt. none of us has pleasure without confronting an obstacle, prohibition, authority, or law that allows us to realize ourselves as autonomous and free. the revolt revealed to accompany the private experience of happiness is an integral part of the pleasure principle’ (2000, p. 7). one’s acceptance or rejection of the possibility of history coming to an end depends mainly on the interpretation of ‘progress’ one subscribes to. the enlightenment promise of an orderly advance from poverty and ignorance to prosperity and modernity has been exposed as part and parcel of colonialist discourse. contrary to the common perception, postmodernist interpretations at the other end of the spectrum do not categorically deny the possibility of progress as such, but they refuse to see it in the context of a prophetic, supposedly universal ‘grand narrative’. if it is true that the time of great rebellious projects, bold prophecies and dichotomies charged with value judgment is behind us, what implications does that have on women and their social agency? three ‘grand narratives’ of the twentieth century – socialism, fascism and communism – have all failed and the perceived anomie makes contemporary posthistorians feel uneasy. the fourth competing narrative, that of liberalism, is rather uncritically glorified by posthistorians. macro-narratives in the epic tradition as well as in history have notoriously been at the core of the patriarchal rhetoric: the symbolic ‘slaying of the virago’ in classical literature has been brought to our attention by a number of scholars (see, for example, tomalin 1982); religious fundamentalisms have endeavoured to make woman practically invisible; fascism has cast her as procreator and ‘guardian of the hearth’; while communism has bequeathed her with the legacy of the ‘double burden’. narrative tends to order reality. narrative form has been described as consisting of repeated binary oppositions, through which meaning is universally produced. consequently, disintegration of a narrative always entails a collapse of the underlying grid of dichotomies. francis fukuyama published his much-debated essay ‘the end of portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 5 history?’ in the national interest in 1989, the year of the collapse of the berlin wall.2 although it is impossible to refer the end of the cold war to any single event, 1989 symbolically marks the ‘implosion’, or ‘self-deconstruction’ of the greatest twentiethcentury political dichotomy of communist totalitarianism vs. western liberal democracy. deconstruction of binary oppositions has been one of the vital strategies of feminist theory. in particular, feminists have consciously engaged in undermining what was seen as the two staple elements of patriarchal discourse, namely the male/female and the public/private dichotomies. it has been argued that the male/female opposition reflects an essentially masculine conception of the ‘autonomous self’, while the female element of the opposition merely functions as a ‘prop’ for its construction (di stefano 1996, p. 96). arguments in favour of autonomy have mainly been motivated by pragmatic reasons, in campaigns for women’s legal and political rights. others have maintained that autonomous self-determination is not gender-biased and as such does not necessarily require that women fit into male-defined norms (see grosz 1987, p. 193). the dichotomy of ‘public’ versus ‘private’ domains has arguably been the most instrumental in the exclusion of women from political rights and other rights commonly associated with citizenship. in liberalism, a clear division of these two realms – interpreted respectively as ‘the state’ vs. ‘civil society’; ‘the social’ vs. ‘the personal’; and the ‘public’ vs. the ‘domestic’ – has been considered a much needed guarantor of individual freedom.3 according to carole pateman, the strong separation between public and private spheres in liberalism meant that domestic power relations were seen as a matter of personal ‘choice’, not to be incorporated in the scope of democracy. the issue for women then was to apply democratic ideals ‘in the kitchen, the nursery and the bedroom’ (1988, p. 216). pateman’s arguments focus on the origins of liberal democracy in a social contract, which, according to pateman, went hand in hand with a sexual contract of women’s subjugation through marital rights. 2 the thesis offered in the essay was later dealt with in book format in the end of history and the last man (1992). 3 for a discussion of the dichotomy within liberalism, see will kymlicka (1990). portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 6 pateman’s influential book on the sexual contract has been challenged by later feminists, who questioned the relevance of the origins in social (and by extension, sexual) contract for present-day liberalism (see brown 1995, p. 137). more generally, feminists have emphasised the ways in which women’s chances of becoming political equals are in fact influenced and often determined by power relations within the household and work force. it has been recognised that the ‘boundary between the public and the private is a political act in itself’ and that ‘political power relations with their own dynamics exist in each social sphere’ (yuval-davis 1997, p. 80). the nature and makeup of what is considered ‘public’ and ‘private’ varies from one study to another, from one set of power relations under scrutiny to another. feminist theorists such as butler and scott (butler 1990; butler 1992; scott 1992, p. 2240) have preferred to disassociate themselves from the grand narratives of social progress and refused to substitute them with alternative, supposedly more ‘women-friendly’ narratives. rejecting the today widely discredited rhetoric, they have asserted that our world is really full of micro-narrative possibilities opening up in countless directions. history continues, because numerous potential as well as actual conflicts around the globe warn us against both complacency and defeatism. but history itself has to shake off its prophetic aspirations and loaded rhetoric. in the case of marxism, richard rorty has suggested to abandon the idea of progress through ‘the anticapitalist struggle’ in favour of ‘the struggle against avoidable human misery;’ to start talking about ‘greed and selfishness’ rather than about ‘bourgeois ideology,’ about ‘starvation wages’ and ‘layoffs’ rather than about the ‘commodification of labor,’ and about ‘differential perpupil expenditure on schools’ and ‘differential access to health care’ rather than about the ‘division of society into classes’ (rorty 1995, p. 212). in a similar vein, feminist studies of women as agents of social change can be interpreted as unique anecdotes, which may help us observe how different women in different contexts have struggled against what they viewed as avoidable human affliction. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 7 women and revolution … [t]he woman holds the promise of liberation. it is the woman who, in delacroix’ painting, holding the flag of the revolution, leads the people on the barricades. she wears no uniform; her breasts are bare, and her beautiful face shows no trace of violence. but she has a rifle in her hand – for the end of violence is still to be fought for. (marcuse 1972) women are often seen as the guardians of tradition, rather than as the symbols of social change. this is especially true in revolutions inspired by a drive for national liberation and independence (see yuval-davis 1997, pp. 60-61). however, it has also been noticed that women’s political participation peaks in periods of turbulent social change (see kaufman 1997, p. 165). this statement – which is, incidentally, also true for the majority of men – may sound like a truism within societies based on patriarchal power and dominated by masculine culture. in that context, revolution always seems to bring promise of inclusion for the excluded and the oppressed. significantly, women have also been prominent in symbolic representations of the ‘world-turned-upside-down’ during carnivals of sixteenth-century europe (see davis 1975, pp. 124-151), and young women appeared as ‘living icons’ in official representations of revolutionary france (see hunt 1992, p. 82). and indeed, delacroix’ liberty guiding the people – a young woman holding the revolutionary flag – has become an almost universal image of revolution. women’s revolutionary potential has been asserted in most major world revolutions and subversive movements, from france to russia, from china to latin america, from iran to india. this potential has been recognised by theorists like marcuse (1972) and habermas (1989). insights into women’s revolutionary potential have been offered by disciplines such as anthropology and psychoanalysis. anthropology’s concept of liminality, devised and elaborated by arnold van gennep, in his the rites of passage (1960) and victor turner in the ritual process: structure and anti-structure (1969), seems to be particularly useful. both studies deal with transitional stages and the accompanying rituals in primitive societies. according to turner, ‘limen’4 is a ‘no-man’s land betwixt-andbetween […] a fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities […] a 4 lat. limen signifies ‘threshold’ or ‘margin’. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 8 striving after new forms and structures. political liminal groups ‘frighten’ a stable commune but are invaluable in crisis.5 liminality is open, fluid and diverse. also, there is a certain correspondence between the ‘weakness’ of liminality in transitional periods and the structural inferiority of certain groups or categories in established social systems. turner has outlined the difference between the attributes of liminality and those of the status system in terms of a series of binary oppositions, such as ‘transition/state’, ‘communitas/structure’, ‘equality/inequality’, ‘absence of status/status’, ‘nakedness or uniform clothing/ distinctions of clothing’, ‘minimisation of sex distinctions/maximisation of sex distinctions, ‘suspension of kinship rights and obligations/kinship rights and obligations’ etc. within this framework, woman becomes a liminal entity by definition. however, rites of passage – like world-turned-upside-down carnivals – upset the system only to define and confirm it. indeed, women in revolutionary movements have often felt ‘betrayed’ once the revolutionary disorder has petrified into a new system (see diamond 1998; galili 1998). in lacanian psychoanalysis, the creative impetus for change lies in the unconscious, the magma, the outside – and by implication, precisely in the female. luce irigaray has maintained that rationality in the western tradition has always been conceptualised as male (see irigaray1985). it is based on the principles of identity, non-contradiction and binarism. these principles arise from a belief in the possibility of individuating stable forms. for the female imaginary – according to irigaray – there is no such possibility. irigaray describes women as a ‘sort of magma […] from which men, humanity, draw nourishment, shelter, the resources to live or survive for free’ (1993, p. 102). consequently, women are said to resemble the unconscious (irigaray 1985, p. 73), a sphere in which the laws of identity and non-contradiction do not apply. ‘naked in the gymnasium’ i would like to conclude this essay with a reflection on the opening quotation from plato’s republic. in this controversial treatise, socrates maintains that women should be educated equally with men and included among the guardians, the ruling class of his 5 for a perceptive treatment of women as a liminal group see trexler (1980, p. 16). portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 9 ideal city. susan moller okin has convincingly argued that this revolutionary vision goes hand in hand with plato’s erasure of the private sphere and individual property from the lives of the guardians (1991, p. 21). elsewhere, the preservation of property necessitates monogamy and private households, and thus brings women back to their role of ‘private wives’ with all that this involves. in the light of this interpretation, women are drawn into a prophetic (and utopian) ‘grand narrative’, but they can also easily be betrayed by it. the ‘grand narrative’ out of the way, we can play with its fragments. i propose that we consider the image of naked women and men in the gymnasium. we can then establish that gymnasium symbolically represents society and that nakedness (or ‘absence of clothes’) stands for difference freed of social constraints. along with plato’s glaucon, we can conclude: according to present notions, the proposal – in addition to being thought ‘ridiculous’ – is not necessarily a desirable objective for either women or men. clothes may be a conditio sine qua non, but through numerous revolts, women and men may achieve more freedom in choosing their attire for different occasions. reference list agonito, rosemary (ed) 1997, history of ideas on woman: a source book, paragon, new york. brown, wendy 1995, states of injury: power and freedom in late modernity, princeton university press, princeton, n.j. butler, judith 1990, gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity, routledge, new york. ______ 1992, ‘contingent foundations: feminism and the question of postmodernism,’ in feminists theorize the political, eds. judith butler and joan scott, routledge new york and london, pp. 3-21 davis, natalie zemon 1975, society and culture in early modern france, stanford university press, stanford and duckworth, london. de bouvoir, simone 1972, the second sex, trans. and ed. h.m. parshley, penguin, harmondsworth. originally published in 1949 as le deuxième sexe, librairie gallimard, paris. diamond, marie josephine 1998, ‘olympe de gouges and the french revolution: the construction of gender as critique,’ in women and revolution: global expressions, ed. m.j. diamond, kluwer academic publishers, dordrecht, pp. 117. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 10 di stefano, christine 1996, ‘autonomy in the light of difference,’ in revisioning the political: feminist reconstructions of traditional concepts in western political theory, eds. nancy hirschmann and christine di stefano, westview press, oxford, pp. 95-116. elshtain, jean bethke 1995, ‘exporting feminism,’ journal of international affairs, vol. 48, no. 2, winter, pp. 541-559. ______, ‘feminism and the crisis of contemporary culture’ 1995, in history and the idea of progress, ed. arthur m. melzer, jerry weinberger and m. richard zinman, cornell university press, ithaca and london, pp. 196-210 fukuyama, francis 1992, the end of history and the last man, pree press, new york. galili, ziva 1998, ‘women and the russian revolution,’ in women and revolution: global expressions, ed. m.j. diamond, kluwer academic publishers, dordrecht, pp. 63-77 grosz, elizabeth 1987, ‘conclusion: what is feminist theory,’ in feminist challenges: social and political theory, eds c. pateman and e. grosz, northeastern university press, boston. habermas, jürgen 1989, the structural transformation of the public sphere, trans. thomas burger, mit press, cambridge. hartsock, nancy 1990, ‘foucault on power: a theory for women?’ in feminism/postmodernism, ed. linda j. nicholson, routledge, new york. hunt, lynn 1992, the family romance of the french revolution, university of california press, berkeley. irigaray, luce 1993, an ethics of sexual difference, trans. c. burke and g. gill, cornell university press, ithaca, new york. ______ 1985, the sex which is not one, trans. c. porter and c. burke, cornell university press, ithaca, new york. kaufman, michael 1997, ‘differential participation: men, women and popular power,’ in community power, grassroots democracy and the transformation of social life, eds michael kaufman and haroldo dilla alfonso, zed books, london, pp. 151-69. kristeva, julia 2000, the sense and non-sense of revolt: the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, trans. jeanine herman, columbia university press, new york. kymlicka, will 1990, contemporary political philosophy: an introduction, oxford university press oxford. marcuse, herbert 1972, counterrevolution and revolt, allen lane, london. okin, susan moller 1991, ‘philosopher queens and private wives: plato on women and the family,’ in feminist interpretations and political theory, eds mary lyndon shanley and carole pateman, polity press, cambridge, pp. 11-31 pateman, carole 1988, the sexual contract, polity press, cambridge. plato 1968, the republic, trans. allan bloom, basic books, new york. rorty, richard 1995, ‘the end of leninism and history as comic frame,’ in history and the idea of progress, eds arthur m. melzer, jerry weinberger and m.richard zinman, cornell university press, ithaca ny and london, pp. 211-226. scheman, naomi 1993, engenderings: constructions of knowledge, authority and privilege, routledge, new york and london. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 11 portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 12 scott, joan w. 1998, ‘deconstructing equality-versus-difference,’ feminist studies vol. 14, no. 1, spring, pp. 35-50 ______ 1992, ‘experience,’ in feminists theorize the political, eds. judith butler and joan scott, routledge, new york and london. spelman, elizabeth 1988, inessential woman: problems of exclusion in feminist thought, beacon books, boston. tomalin, margaret 1982, the fortunes of the warrior heroine in italian literature: an index of emancipation, longo ravenna. trexler, richard 1980, public life in renaissance florence, academic press, new york. turner, victor 1969, the ritual process: structure and anti-structure, routledge & kegan paul, london. van gennep, arnold 1960, the rites of passage, trans. monika b. vizedom and gabrielle l. caffee, university of chicago press, chicago. yuval-davis, nira 1997, gender and nation sage, london. naked in the gymnasium: women as agents of social change maja mikula institute for international studies, university of technology sydney women and revolution untitled portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. the transcultural edge, curated by ilaria vanni accarigi. © 2016 [frans ari prasetyo]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i1.4789. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. city performance: chinese new year in west kalimantan frans ari prasetyo, bandung institute of technology the tight state control over indonesia’s ethnic chinese communities under president suharto’s new order (1966–1998) resulted in the political, social and cultural exclusion of those communities for many decades. in practice the new order era saw the indonesian government discriminate overtly against many of the country’s nonindigenous populations, but it targeted the chinese in particular. certain businesses were closed to chinese indonesians, there was a quota for chinese indonesians in entering state universities, and there were restrictions on chinese indonesians joining the civil service. with the collapse of the new order in 1998 and the subsequent lessening of state control over all indonesian social and ethnic groups, attempts have been made to re-establish long-suppressed chinese cultural formations and practices in indonesia. a case in point is the celebration of chinese new year, which had been banned since the passing of order no 14/1967 by president suharto, the ban also coinciding with the breaking off of diplomatic relations with china. following the rapprochement between indonesia and china at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentyfirst, the indonesian government has taken extraordinary steps to bring about better conditions for the country’s ethnic chinese populations. prasetyo city performance portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 2 given this context, it is important to establish a historical sense of the changing receptions and status of ethnic chinese in indonesia since the collapse of the suharto regime in 1998. the subsequent reformation of the indonesian political system after the suharto era saw an immediate lessening of state control over ethnic chinese communities, and other groups. the first post-suharto era president, bacharuddin jusuf habibie (1998–1999), issued a presidential decision that the division between pribumi (so-called indigenous indonesians) and non-pribumi (non-indigenous indonesians, including the country’s communities of chinese descent) be abolished. attempts have been made since then to re-establish or resuscitate long-suppressed ethnic and cultural chinese practices in indonesia. consequently, alternative discourses on identity have emerged, ranging from political and religious identifications to those of a more sociocultural nature. the status of chinese indonesians began to change dramatically when the discriminatory distinction between pribumi and non-pribumi indonesians was nullified formally by president abdurrahman wahid (popularly known as ‘gus dur,’ 1999– 2001) in 2000 via government decree number 6/2000. this process was further solidified with the issuing of the anti-racial discrimination law number 12/2006 on citizenship. in 2002, president megawati sukarnoputri (2001–2004) designated chinese new year—cap go meh or imlek in local idiom—as a national public holiday. her declaration of imlek as a public holiday followed her predecessor gus dur’s decision to make chinese new year an ‘optional holiday’ in 2001. since the end of the prohibition of chinese new year celebrations, the night sky of towns and cities across indonesia has been illuminated with fireworks on the eve of chinese new year. most notably, the traditional street parades and accompanying festival on the fifteenth day of the new year have been growing in size in a number of west kalimantan towns, in particular in singkawang, a city on the northwestern coast of the province of west kalimantan (borneo), with a population just under 200,000, the majority of chinese descent. singkawang is the only indonesian city to have a chinese majority. the chinese communities in singkawang, as with chinese communities the world over, celebrate the advent of the lunar new year during which family reunions, and visits among family and friends, renew communal bonds. the night was traditionally marked by the firing of crackers and ritual processions intended to scare prasetyo city performance portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 3 map 1: wiki commons, indonesia regions map for use on wikivoyage, indonesian version, march 2014, author peter fitzgerald, indonesian translation by bennylin. map 2: west kalimantan province. source: http://www.divrekalbar.com/2015/05/ prasetyo city performance portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 4 the demons of bad luck away from the coming year; those rituals have been revived with a great deal of local popularity since 2002. that popularity reflects the long history of the new year festival, and of local chinese communities, in singkawang. as noted earlier singkawang is unique in indonesia given it is the only city in the country with a majority chinese indonesian population. hakka, a chinese dialect, is the city’s main language. the relationship between the city and the cultural history of china in singkawang is intimate, and extends to the mutual transculturation of chinese, dayak (indigenous peoples of kalimantan) and malay peoples in kalimantan. this relationship, i argue, is responsible for the intensity of the local assimilation and adoption of the chinese new year festival. historically, chinese and dayaks have been viewed in indonesia as ethnic collaborators. although dayaks have clashed with chinese in the past, such conflicts were often instigated by external parties trying to use the dayaks to control the chinese. today, the street parade-cumperformance of cap go meh in singkawang provides a cultural stage on which to display dayak and chinese unity. indeed, the singkawang parade has gained such national attention that it is often featured in the official ‘visit indonesia’ tourist calendar. the chinese new year festival has become a key element of the city’s cultural landscape and a popular tourist destination. the renewed celebration of chinese new year may therefore be regarded as one of the cultural milestones signalling a new era ‘position’ for chinese communities in indonesia. these events raise important questions. what causes some chinese new year festivals in indonesia to be remembered and resuscitated, while others become moments of forgotten, indeed repressed, culture? what do these processes of remembering and forgetting reveal about chinese indonesian desires and hopes in indonesian national time, space and place? what are the relationships between the city and the city-street performance that epitomize the celebration of chinese new year? such questions underpin my thinking about the chinese new year celebrations in singkawang. * * * the following short narrative is intended to introduce and explain the accompanying visual narrative or visual ethnography, curated by ilaria vanni, of chinese new year performances in singkawang, where the street parade traverses the city’s main streets, prasetyo city performance portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 5 and the parade’s participants engage in a variety of rituals and performances. the visual observations that i include here help to demonstrate the role played by the streetperformance imagination in accumulating religious, cultural and social symbolism in the context of the cosmopolitan city that hosts the new year festival. indeed, in singkawang, the festival seems to portray the city’s ideal cosmopolitan resident as a figure who is flexible, adaptable, open to a plurality of cultures and willing to engage in, and with, multiple new cultural forms. in practice, what occurs in the festival is a reimagining of the town, a reorientation towards its complex sociocultural history and its contemporary ethnocultural realities. the parade’s performance of cultural imaginations, notably chinese cultural expressions, enacts a sense of cross-community and transhistorical connection, to the extent that participants and audience appear to embrace a national cultural imaginary that fuels the continued construction and reconstruction of chinese indonesian culture as at once a specific local identity place and a specific local sociocultural space. some of the street parade performers, acting as spirit mediums, sit on chairs embedded with knives or studded with nails, but more often they stand on the chairs with their bare feet on the sharpened edge of the knife blades. some parade participants carry portable altars and palanquins on which are mounted images of deities. the procession includes dragon and lion dancers and a group of young men carrying staffs topped with papiermâché sculptures of the twelve chinese zodiac animals. carried on the shoulders of chair-bearers, the singkawang performers ride high above the crowds, as if on parade floats. the crowd that packs the streets has a good view of these performers as they undertake acrobatic stunts, balancing on their stomachs or rocking upon the knives set into the chairs. among the performers, there are essentially three distinct groups—chinese, dayak and malay—each distinguished by their dress. the chinese wear the military uniforms of ming generals and foot soldiers as depicted in chinese opera. the dayak costume comprises embroidered vests that resembled the traditional baju burung (bird garment) or jacket over trousers, covered by embroidered aprons that pass for the traditional sirat or cawat (loincloths). dayak performers wear headbands or helmets decorated with hornbill and pheasant feathers. participants who might be termed malay also wear a distinctive costume, which comprises t-shirt (singlets) or vests over trousers with cloth prasetyo city performance portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 6 sashes tied criss-cross over their chests and arms, and on their heads bandanas. such material and sartorial symbolism—which also imply that audiences will be reading proceedings and bodies for signs of participants’ wealth and status—in the context of the visual performances comprising the chinese new year celebrations in singkawang are alluring and powerful precisely because of the complex sociocultural and ethnic identifications that feed into such religious rituals. a focus on the performativities encapsulating cap go meh in singkawang usefully begins to recognize how the parade is not only typical of the resuscitated, historically anchored work of chinese cultural practices and identities, but also indicative of how those practices and identities have been institutionalized into the rituals of the city, and the indonesian nation state itself. as the following visual ethnography aims to reveal, the cap go meh street parades are legible as drama, ritual theatre, a mode of visual identity-making, and political circus and thus, ultimately, as central to the iconography of the city and its ethnicized communities. visual ethnography: chinese new year, singkawang figure 1: chinese new year, singkawang, digital photograph, 2015 © frans ari prasetyo prasetyo city performance portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 7 figure 2: chinese new year, singkawang, digital photograph, 2015 © frans ari prasetyo figure 3: chinese new year, singkawang, digital photograph, 2015 © frans ari prasetyo prasetyo city performance portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 8 figure 4: chinese new year, singkawang, digital photograph, 2015 © frans ari prasetyo figure 5: chinese new year, singkawang, digital photograph, 2015 © frans ari prasetyo prasetyo city performance portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 9 figure 6: chinese new year, singkawang, digital photograph, 2015 © frans ari prasetyo figure 7: chinese new year, singkawang, digital photograph, 2015 © frans ari prasetyo prasetyo city performance portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 10 figure 8: chinese new year, singkawang, digital photograph, 2015 © frans ari prasetyo prasetyo city performance portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 11 figure 9: chinese new year, singkawang, digital photograph, 2015 © frans ari prasetyo prasetyo city performance portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 12 figure 10: chinese new year, singkawang, digital photograph, 2015 © frans ari prasetyo 3293-16733-1-le portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. stigma and exclusion in cross-cultural contexts special issue, guest edited by annie pohlman, sol rojas-lizana and maryam jamarani. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. words that can kill: the mugesera speech and the 1994 tutsi genocide in rwanda narelle fletcher, university of technology sydney one of the most frequently asked questions in the wake of the genocide which took place in rwanda in 1994 has been ‘how could it happen?,’ or more specifically, how could it be that so many thousands of individual citizens throughout the country could be motivated to turn on their neighbours in a concerted groundswell of violence, killing them without mercy. many of the scholars and journalists who sought to elucidate the origins of the genocide in the country’s colonial and post-colonial history have highlighted the significance of the stigmatisation of the tutsi population during this period (prunier 1995; braeckman 1995; hintjens 1999; mugesera 2004). in this connection, the introduction of identity cards by belgian authorities in 1933, which categorically established each individual’s ‘ubwoko’ [ethnicity], intrinsically promoted the notion that ethnic difference was an important consideration for rwandan society. more tangibly, these cards subsequently facilitated the widespread exclusion of the tutsi population from schools and workplaces. they were also used by genocide perpetrators in 1994 to identify their victims, to the extent that they have been regarded as tantamount to ‘death warrants’ (des forges 1999: 19). stigmatisation was also an essential feature of the anti-tutsi propaganda that was disseminated from the 1950s onwards in meetings, newspaper articles and political tracts (mugesera 1994). among the key characteristics of this propaganda discourse was the representation of tutsi as ‘inyenzi’ [cockroaches] or ‘inkota’ [snakes]; in other words, as vermin to be exterminated. this deliberate and systematic dehumanisation of fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 2 the target race constitutes a characteristic phase in the implementation of a policy of genocide (stanton 1996). the establishment in july 1993 of radio télévision libre des mille collines (rtlm), the so-called ‘hate radio,’ saw an intensification of the rhetoric of discrimination against the tutsi throughout the country (chrétien 1995). given the importance of the discourse of genocide ideologists for the implementation of mass killings on the ground, elucidating the rhetorical strategies and the specific terminology used is therefore an essential task for arriving at a more incisive understanding of how the genocide in rwanda occurred. among the corpus of extant documents attesting to the elaboration of genocide ideology in rwanda, the speech made by the well-known political figure, léon mugesera, on 22 november 1992 is particularly significant. mugesera was vice-president of the incumbent hutu party mouvement républicain national pour la démocratie et le développement (mrnd) [national republican movement for democracy and development] in the northern prefecture of gisenyi, which was a regime stronghold of then president juvénal habyarimana. in this district, in the small town of kabaya, mugesera delivered his speech at a party meeting attended by approximately one thousand rwandans. however, the speech was also recorded and it reached a far more extensive audience when it was broadcast in full by the rtlm radio station in november 1993 on the first anniversary of the kabaya meeting, only a few months before the outbreak of the genocide on 6 april 1994. mugesera’s speech is an important document because it constitutes the earliest evidence of genocidal discourse expressed by a member of the incumbent political party in rwanda in a public forum and, as such, it has often been regarded as offering a ‘blueprint’ for the practical implementation of the genocide (hintjens 1999: 255). for the respected genocide scholar alison des forges, the speech was noteworthy and was preserved in its entirety because ‘its ideas and style of expression were so extreme and called forth a vigorous response from the opposition’ (1999: 68). in subsequent years, the contents of the speech were the subject of intense scrutiny and heated debate within the framework of judicial proceedings spanning more than a decade that were conducted in canada to determine whether mugesera—who had fled to that country as a refugee— should be deported to rwanda to face prosecution for incitement to genocide. in that context, lexical questions regarding the precise meaning of specific terms in the original fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 3 speech delivered in kinyarwanda, as well as important concerns raised by its french translations were crucial elements in the decision-making process, which finally resulted in mugesera being deported to rwanda on 23 january 2012 to stand trial. in this article i address three key issues raised by mugesera’s speech that provide valuable insight into the strategies involved in the elaboration and implementation of genocidal discourse. the discussion first examines significant lexical and syntactical features of the original speech in kinyarwanda. this close textual commentary is important because since delivering the speech, mugesera has relentlessly sought to attenuate his own personal responsibility in relation to the accusation of incitement to genocide by systematically obfuscating the meaning of his words. the second associated issue relates to the reception of the speech by its target audience. in this regard, i would argue that although the manipulative purpose of genocidal discourse may well be expressed in many instances by very direct and brutal language, it can also be formulated in more subtle and insidious ways through the implicit connotations of the terminology used. in fact, the use of polyvalent or euphemistic language can be a very effective strategy for minimising spontaneous resistance to concepts that are naturally abhorrent, thereby facilitating the assimilation of the genocidal message— perhaps even unconsciously—by the target audience for which it is intended. at the same time, the fact that this message may primarily lie in the connotations, rather than in the actual standard definition of the term(s) in question, also means that it is very easy for perpetrators and negationists to then vehemently deny that such connotations were intended, or that they even exist, as ruth wodak (2007) has noted in her analysis of the coded anti-semitic discourse of an austrian rightwing politician. it is therefore of vital importance to take into consideration the message that the target audience has retained from the discourse in question, where that information is available. the third focus of attention in this discussion relates to cross-cultural issues of translation and interpretation raised by the legal proceedings conducted against mugesera in canada. the main piece of evidence in the proceedings was the text of the speech itself; the fact that it had been delivered in a language not spoken by the vast majority of those involved in the hearings was acknowledged as a serious hurdle. the impassioned debates concerning the accuracy of the different french translations of the speech in this foreign context highlighted the enormous difficulties associated with fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 4 arriving at a clear understanding of the meaning of a text that has been lifted out of its original linguistic and sociocultural environment. it also illustrated the potential for deliberate misrepresentations of meaning by translators who may themselves be pursuing a specific agenda. such considerations have grave repercussions not only within the very specific realm of judicial rulings on cases relating to genocide, but for genocide scholarship as a whole, in every instance where the necessity for translation creates incontrovertible linguistic ‘filters’ that can impact on the accuracy of the information communicated from the genocide survivor or witness to the genocide scholar, and indeed to the broader international community. lexical and syntactical features of the original speech in kinyarwanda léon mugesera was a skilled orator who was cognisant of the spoken word’s potential power. the speech he made in kabaya in 1992 is lengthy: its delivery took roughly thirty minutes and the transcription of the original kinyarwanda text amounts to some three thousand words. there is a discernible structure and each section is explicitly signposted for the listeners. brief introductory remarks (110 words) identify four main points which the speaker will develop: the importance of being wary of alleged protutsi political parties within rwanda such as the mouvement démocratique républicain (mdr) [republican democratic movement]; the importance of not allowing the country to be ‘invaded’ by the tutsi; the necessity for his listeners to protect themselves against the tutsi; and finally, the behaviour they should adopt. the main body of the speech contains detailed argumentation addressing each of these main points in order (2700 words). this section is also characterised by frequent recourse to many rhetorical strategies to sustain the audience’s attention and to facilitate their understanding. these include lexical and syntactical repetitions, inclusive terminology (‘we,’ ‘us’), instructional language (‘we must not let ourselves be invaded!’/‘unite!’), humour in the form of mockery of political opponents, rhetorical questions, and the use of logical connectors (‘first,’ ‘second,’ ‘next’), which create the impression of a well-organised and well-argued presentation. the speech ends with a clearly labelled conclusion (150 words) comprising a brief recapitulation of its key points. the target audience of the speech is identified in mugesera’s opening lines as the faithful followers of the party—‘abarwanashyaka ba muvoma yacu’ [lit. militants of our movement]—and mugesera repeatedly exploits the rhetorical devices of empathy fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 5 and identification to reinforce the notion of unity amongst the assembled group. the mrnd is symbolically represented as an extension of the family unit: mugesera addresses his listeners throughout as ‘babyeyi, bavandimwe’ [parents, brothers]. he also employs the term ‘urugo’—the traditional enclosure surrounding the family home—to promote the notion of homogeneity between family, political party and country. the first mention of this word appears in a deliberately shocking metaphor for the conflict between the mrnd-led hutu majority and their political opponents who supported the rwandan patriotic front (rpf), the tutsi political party in exile: mbe wa mugabo we, nawe wa mubyeyi we muri hano, harya umuntu azaza yicare mu rugo rwawe, ahannye, wongere wemere ko ahagaruka koko?!? uwo ni umurizo rwose! (le discours de kabaya 1992: 5)1 hey, you, man and you, woman who are here, if someone comes and sits in your enclosure and defecates, will you really allow him to return? that is totally taboo.2 in these lines, the hutu are portrayed as being ‘at home.’ their country rwanda is both a physical space and a patriotic concept that it is their right and duty to defend. the tutsi on the other hand are represented as outsiders who abuse the hospitality of the rightful owners and transgress all social mores by defecating. tolerating such blatantly hostile behaviour is untenable: indeed, mugesera categorically states that it is ‘umuziro’ [taboo]. by choosing this term, the orator introduces the connotation that such tolerance is not only unacceptable, but prohibited by the moral code underpinning the society. from this perspective, repelling the tutsi is no longer simply a political or even an ethnic question. instead, it is framed as a moral imperative to preserve the home[land]. this message is reiterated a few paragraphs later using a combination of the two powerful terms of ‘urugo’ and ‘umuziro’: ‘urugo rwacu ntiruvogerwa. kuvogerwa rero mumenye ko ari umuziro!’ (6) [our enclosure is not allowing itself to be invaded. know that to allow oneself to be invaded is taboo!]. many scholars have commented on the hierarchical nature of rwandan society, identifying it as one of the key factors that contributed to the successful implementation of the genocidal agenda advocated by the hutu extremists (kellow & steeves 1998: 116). however, a frequently made assumption is that the participation of thousands of rwandans in the mass killings of the tutsi stemmed from a basic ingrained response 1 all number references to mugesera’s speech relate to the section divisions used in the online text that is accompanied by the french translation by thomas kaminzi. all highlighting in bold is mine. 2 all translations from kinyarwanda and french are mine unless otherwise specified. fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 6 tantamount to blind obedience. in this regard, mugesera’s speech is a particularly valuable document in illustrating the level of sophistication of the orator’s message. in order for the speech to be effective, it was not sufficient for mugusera to recite slogans or to give his audience blunt directives to eliminate the tutsi. instead, he presents a cleverly constructed argumentation that has the appearance of being firmly grounded in rwandan law and rwandan social traditions. he cites authoritative texts such as the ‘ivanjili’ [the gospel] in order to bolster the credibility of his arguments. however, these references are then subjected to manipulation and distortion to align them more convincingly with mugesera’s own agenda with regard to the tutsi. for example: mw’ivanjili biranditse ngo’ko: ‘nibagukubita urushyi kw’itama limwe uzatege ilindi bakubite ho.’ njye mbabwiye ko iyo vanjili yahindutse muri muvoma yacu: nibagukubita urushyi kw’itama limwe, uzabatere ebyili ku rindi hanyuma biture hasi ubutazazanzamuka! (le discours de kabaya 1992: 5) in the gospel it is written: ‘if someone slaps you on the cheek, give the other one so he can hit it as well.’ i am telling you that this gospel has changed in our movement. if someone slaps you on the cheek, hit him twice on the other so he will fall to the ground and will not able to regain consciousness. on one level, this revised ending can be read simply as an illustration of the idea that the hutu must take action to defend themselves against tutsi aggression. however, mugesera’s lexical choice of the term ‘ubutazazanzamuka’ [literally, so that he will not be able to come out of his unconscious state] could also be interpreted as a euphemism to convey the idea that these opponents should indeed remain permanently inanimate on the ground—in other words, that they should be killed. this is an example of the point raised earlier with regard to the importance of elucidating the connotations of a given term, and there are a number of other instances of potentially polyvalent language throughout the speech. whether or not this was the actual meaning mugesera wished to convey is a pivotal question, as the onus of establishing intent is one of the core requirements in any judicial prosecution for genocide. a significant stylistic feature of the kabaya speech is mugesera’s use of rhetorical questions. this is a powerful syntactical device used to engage the audience’s attention, but it can also fulfil a persuasive function by orientating the audience’s opinion in a specific direction. the most remarkable use of this linguistic strategy in mugesera’s speech can be found in an accumulation of questions regarding families within rwanda who actively support the tutsi cause. it is also here that the core genocidal verb ‘gutsemba’ [to exterminate] is used for the first time: fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 7 kuki abo babyeyi bohereje abana batabafata ngo babatsembe? kuki badafata abo babajyana na bo bose ngo babatsembe? ubu mutegereje ko bazaza kudutsemba koko?!? (le discours de kabaya 1992: 9) why don’t we seize those parents who sent their children and exterminate them? why don’t we seize all those who bring them and exterminate them all? are we really waiting now for them to come and exterminate us? the syntactical structure of these lines with their question format, further enhanced by repetition, carries the strong communicative force of a suggestion. it is therefore difficult not to see these words as an explicit call for the extermination of the tutsi and their supporters, especially against the backdrop of the widespread denigration of the tutsi as ‘inyenzi’ [cockroaches] that should be stamped out. this term is omnipresent in mugesera’s speech, appearing more than twenty times, whereas the standard designation of ‘abatutsi’ is used only once. mugesera’s preference for the derogatory term illustrates the extent to which the stigmatisation of the tutsi was already an ingrained component of the discourse of genocide ideologists in the early 1990s. reception of the speech by its target audience mugesera’s stated purpose in addressing the audience at kabaya was to instruct them as to how they should behave. this speech was therefore intended to have a lasting impact on the audience: to this end, it was important that crucial elements remain in the minds of the listeners long after the end of the meeting. among the most powerful and memorable features of the speech are the singular images that mugesera uses to provoke a hostile reaction to the tutsi and their supporters. the first of these images, that of the tutsi defecating in the hutu family enclosure discussed above, comes very early in the speech. it is a deliberately shocking picture that mugesera plants in the minds of his listeners in order to illicit an emotional as well as an intellectual response to his argumentation. however, another image has acquired such notoriety that it is often cited as an example of genocidal discourse in studies devoted to the genocide in rwanda (melvern 2006: 39). this section of the speech comes well after the explicit call to exterminate discussed above, but it can be seen as an equally overt incitement to action: mperutse kubwira umuntu wali unyiraseho ngo ni za pl. ndamubwira nti: ‘ikoza twakoze muli 59, nubwo nali umwana, nuko twabaretse mugasohoka.’ mubaza niba atarumvishe inkuru y’abafalasha, basubiye iwabo muli israyeli bavuye muli ethiopiya ambwira ko atayizi, nti: ‘ntabwo uzi kwumva no gusoma? jye ndakumenyesha ko iwanyu ali muli ethiopiya, ko tuzabanyuza muli nyabarongo mukagera yo bwangu’! (le discours de kabaya 1992: 17) i recently said to someone who was boasting about being in the pl [parti liberal (liberal party), pro-tutsi]: ‘the mistake we made in 1959, even though i was a child then, was that we let you fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 8 leave.’ i asked him if he hadn’t heard the story of the falashas who returned to their home in israel from ethiopia? he said he did not know this story. i said to him: ‘don’t you know how to listen or read? let me tell you that your home is in ethiopia, and that we will send you back along the nyabarongo river so you get there quickly.’ here mugesera exploits the stylistic device of reproducing an alleged exchange in direct speech to endow the thematic content with the natural dynamics inherent in the communicative speech act of a conversation. at the same time, it could also be argued that through the use of the dialogue format, mugesera is effectively modelling the type of behaviour he wishes his listeners to emulate: in other words, when they encounter tutsi or their supporters, they should tell them they will send them back to ethiopia. moreover, the fact that mugesera uses the simple future tense ‘tuzabanyuza’ [we will send you] without any modalisation such as ‘could’ or ‘would’ to attenuate the force of the verb endows this passage with the cognitive value of an incontrovertible action. mugesera precedes the evocation of the river by making reference to rwandan history and the specific date of 1959. it can be assumed that everyone present at the meeting in kabaya would have immediately grasped the full significance of mugesera’s mention of both 1959 and the nyabarongo river. at the 1998 immigration hearing in canada, however, it was necessary to call on expert witnesses to bridge the sociocultural gap in knowledge between the two audiences. in this specific instance, the belgian academic filip reyntens explained that 1959 marked the end of the tutsi monarchy and the beginning of the revolution leading to the formation of a government led by the hutu majority. during this period many thousands of tutsi fled the country. another expert witness, alison des forges, provided the information that during previous massacres, tutsis had been killed and their bodies thrown into the nyabarongo river (mugesera c. canada 1998: 75). a significant detail in this connection is that the nyabarongo river is not navigable because it is too shallow: for this reason, the suggestion that mugesera’s words may refer to sending the tutsi back to ethiopia by boat is not credible. such contextual information is essential in order to fully appreciate the significance of mugesera’s words. the orator was effectively anchoring his argumentation in behaviour that had been validated by its status as part of rwandan history. however, the lasting impact of the reference to nyabarongo can also be explained by the fact that it evokes a simple and powerful visual image—that of tutsis floating away along the river. fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 9 the extent to which léon mugesera was successful in communicating the essential ideas contained in his genocidal discourse is illustrated by the testimonies of a number of the audience members who were present at the kabaya meeting. the interviews were conducted by the rwandan media in early 2012 to record the reaction of rwandans to mugesera’s return to face trial in kigali. of course, reservations have to be expressed regarding the reliability of these statements, given that the interviews were conducted some twenty years after the speech was delivered, and that the content of the interview may have been distorted by the editing process. however, it appears useful to note that each of the audience members interviewed had retained a very similar message from mugesera’s speech. thus, for aisha mukantagara, who is identified as a tutsi: ubwo inkuru ya mbere yatangiye kuvuga ngo abatutsi ngo babajyane muri ethiopiya ngo babanyuze muri nyabarongo ngo bahinguke iwabo muri ethiopiya. ubwo noneho, ubwo interahamwe aho zari ziri zaje kubyina zaje kugira gute… noneho ziratangira zikajya zikurebano undi muntu mo abandi bantu ahari. zikavuga ngo aho ngo ntimubyumvise ngo murabatahana mubajyana hehe? (léon mugesera speech /eye witness testimony 2012) the first news he announced was that the tutsi should be sent to ethiopia by sending them along the nyabarongo so that they would come out in ethiopia. after that, the interahamwe [militia responsible for widespread killing during the genocide], who had come there to dance, started to look at us differently as if we were different people. they asked us: did you hear what was said and should you be allowed to go back anywhere? the testimony of fayza hakizimana that appears in the same broadcast contains more details regarding the emotional impact of mugesera’s words on his listeners. in introducing this new witness, the reporter comments in a voiceover that hakizimana was directly influenced by mugesera’s speech to take action, and that he had immediately started hunting and killing tutsi: yavuze amagambo akomeye cyane ndetse bamwe kuburyo imitima yahungabanye cyane abwira akangurira abahutu ko nibadaca abatutsi amajosi ngo babanze kuyabaca aribo bazayabaca. ijambo yavuze ryateye abantu benshi impungenge kuburyo yaneruye akavuga ati. abo batutsi ni ukubanyuza iyubusamo muri nyabarongo bagahinguka iwabo muri ethiopiya. (léon mugesera speech/eye witness testimony 2012) he said very harsh things so much so that the hearts of some people were hurt. he woke up the hutu, saying that if they do not cut the necks of the tutsi it will be the tutsi who will cut theirs. the speech he said made a lot of people worried because he clearly said to send the tutsis along the nyabarongo as a shortcut back to their home in ethiopia. as can be seen in both of these extracts, mugesera’s words concerning the nyabarongo river made a profound impression on his listeners, with the implicit message that the tutsi should be killed being clearly understood. the fact that over a thousand tutsi were indeed thrown into the nyabarongo river in 1994 attests at the very least to how fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 10 accurately mugesera’s words presaged these future events, if not to how effectively his words were translated into deeds (melvern 2000: 189; mutesi 2010). the problem of clearly discerning the explicit and implicit meanings of the language used by léon mugesera lies at the heart of the ongoing controversy that has surrounded the speech. in his opening lines mugesera acknowledges the fact that he feels he is among faithful supporters, and for this reason: ‘twese uko duteraniye hano, ngirango ijambo ndi buvuge muranyunva’ (le discours de kabaya 1992: 2) [as we are all together here, i believe that you will understand the speech that i am going to say]. mugesera’s language can be seen as deliberately opaque: his purpose was to use his rhetorical skill to entertain and instruct his listeners, who were accustomed to extracting the underlying essential message embedded in proverbs, sayings and ‘umugani,’ the tales from traditional folklore. whether or not an unequivocal causal link can be established between the contents of mugesera’s speech in 1992 and the killing of thousands of tutsis in 1994 is a question still debated today within the legal context of the trial for incitement to genocide currently being conducted against léon mugesera in rwanda. however, the supreme court of ottawa did note in its 2005 ruling on the mugesera case that the nature of the target audience was an ‘important contextual factor’ and that it was essential to consider how mugesera’s speech would have been understood by that audience in relation to the sociopolitical events of the time (mugesera c. canada 2005: 61). the speech in translation the ‘afterlife’ of mugesera’s speech within the framework of the judicial proceedings in canada provides an invaluable insight into how crucial the translation process can be for accurately conveying the ideas that were expressed in a language few people master outside of the rwandan community. indeed, the fact that much of the source material relating to the genocide—printed media, radio broadcasts, testimonies by perpetrators and survivors—has been formulated solely in kinyarwanda means that it remains inaccessible to foreign commentators until it is translated. in the international criminal tribunal for rwanda (ictr), challenges relating to the accuracy and ethical standards of the work of translators and interpreters are frequently made; however, few genocide scholars have explicitly questioned the potential impact of this inescapable linguistic filter on the information that is acquired. closer examination of the two translations of fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 11 mugesera’s speech that were proposed for the hearings in canada therefore provides a valuable illustration of the potential significant distortions of meaning that may occur in the translation process, and hence of the desirability of independent verification. the canadian hearings were conducted in french and two very different french translations of the speech were proposed for use as the basic reference text. mugesera’s defence team submitted a translation by rwandan linguist eugène shimamungu, while the legal team representing the canadian minister of citizenship and immigration preferred the translation by another rwandan linguist, thomas kaminzi. even a cursory comparative examination of both of the french translations immediately exposes significant differences in content that cannot simply be attributed to the personal preferences of the translator regarding terminology or syntax. at this point, it is important to recall that among the core ethical responsibilities of a professional translator, the principles of accuracy and impartiality are paramount in order to ensure that the translation reflects the sense of the original text as closely as possible. shimamungu’s translation is remarkable in that it contains so many examples of what can be classified as mistranslations. in other words, the french version he proposes so significantly differs from the original that it is clearly not an accurate representation of the original text and its meaning. given the linguist’s experience and reputation, it is evident that such remarkable divergence is not the result of human error or ignorance. rather, it suggests a deliberate intention to achieve two specific and related objectives: first, to attenuate the force of mugesera’s vilification of the tutsis in order to minimise the risk of it being interpreted as incitement to genocide; and second, to exaggerate the threat represented by the tutsi and their supporters in order to bolster mugesera’s claims that he was simply advocating legitimate defence. an illustrative example of the latter occurs in the early part of the speech. in the original kinyarwanda, the orator evokes the ‘death throes’ of the opposing mdr party and mocks their feeble ‘kicks’ against his own ruling mrnd party. however, in shimamungu’s version the mdr is portrayed very differently, both through the deliberate lexical choices made in translating mugesera’s words, and also by the addition of the text highlighted below, which does not appear at all in the original. the kaminzi translation is also included here for comparison: fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 12 mugesera: mdr n’amashyaka bifatanyije bilimo gusamba, umugeli wabyo, muwilinde [the mdr, together with the other parties, are on the point of death. be careful of their kicks.] (le discours de kabaya 1992: 4) kaminzi: le mdr et les partis qui partagent ses opinions sont en train d’agoniser. evitez leurs coups de pied. [the mdr and the parties that share their opinions are in the process of dying. avoid their kicks.] shimamungu: le m.d.r. et les partis acolytes sont tourmentés par un désir ardent de pouvoir. défendez-vous contre leur agression. [the mdr and the associated parties are tormented by an ardent desire for power. defend yourselves against their aggression.] (discours attribué au dr. mugesera: 2) compared with mugesera’s original intention, which was clearly to denigrate the political strength of the opposing parties by dismissively comparing their actions to the feeble kicks of a dying man, shimamungu’s version reads as being totally contradictory to the original text. this can only be attributed to the translator’s pursuit of a very different agenda as dictated by the new context of the canadian judicial hearing. however, by far the most blatant example of a mistranslation in shimamungu’s text occurs in relation to the key verb ‘gutsemba’ [to exterminate] in the passage discussed above. the impression that the translator’s overriding objective is to mitigate the violence of mugesera’s language directed against the tutsi, rather than to faithfully translate the original kinyarwanda text, is incontrovertible. thomas kaminzi’s french translation is also included here for the purposes of comparison: mugesera: kuki abo babyeyi bohereje abana batabafata ngo babatsembe? kuki badafata abo babajyana na bo bose ngo babatsembe? ubu mutegereje ko bazaza kudutsemba koko?!? (le discours de kabaya 1992: 9) [why don’t we seize those parents who sent their children and exterminate them? why don’t we arrest all those who bring them and exterminate them all? are we really waiting now for them to come and exterminate us?] kaminzi: pourquoi n’arrête-t-on pas ces parents qui ont envoyé leurs enfants et pourquoi ne les extermine-t-on pas? pourquoi n’arrête-t-on pas ceux qui les amènent et pourquoi ne les extermine-t-on pas tous? attendons-nous que ce soit réellement eux qui viennent nous exterminer? [why don’t we arrest those parents who sent their children and why don’t we exterminate them? why don’t we arrest those who bring them and why don’t we exterminate them all? are we waiting until it is really them who come to exterminate us?] shimamungu: pourquoi ces parents qui ont envoyé les enfants au front ennemi ne les arrête-t-on pas pour les soumettre à ce jugement? pourquoi n’arrête-t-on pas ceux qui les convoient et tous les membres de ce réseau pour les soumettre à ce jugement? [why don’t we arrest these parents who sent their children to the enemy front and why don’t we subject them to this judgment? why don’t we arrest those who send them and all the members of that network in order to subject them to this judgment?] (5) the challenge of reformulating the last of mugesera’s rhetorical questions in a way that would appear coherent with this singular interpretation of the verb ‘gutsemba’ was clearly deemed to be insurmountable, with the result that shimamungu has simply fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 13 omitted the entire last sentence from his translation. as noted earlier, after very careful scrutiny, kaminzi’s translation, not shimamungu’s, was retained as the official version used in all the subsequent hearings in canada, although mugesera’s defence lawyer continued to question the accuracy of this translation, claiming that it deliberately and erroneously favoured ‘the most violent words’ (un procès saisissant 1996). mugesera’s own behaviour in the face of the ongoing condemnation of the speech is also worthy of comment, given that the orator has repeatedly sought to attenuate his own personal responsibility in relation to the accusation of incitement to genocide. for example, despite the existence of the audio recording of the speech where his voice is clearly identifiable, mugesera initially denied uttering the words that were played back to him (léon mugesera au banc des accuses 1994). on another occasion, he claimed that although he was present at kabaya, he had not been scheduled to speak, and was only called upon at the last minute as a replacement. his speech was therefore not a carefully prepared argument designed to promote genocidal attacks against the tutsi, but rather an impromptu and impassioned personal reaction to recent events relating to the war against the rpf (mugesera c. canada 1998: 51). mugesera adopted yet another tactic to absolve himself of responsibility after the broadcasting of his recorded speech in full by radio rtlm in november 1993. mugesera protested that the radio journalists had edited his speech without his permission or knowledge and had transformed it into something unrecognisable in order to use it for their own purposes of genocide propaganda (mugesera c. canada 1998: 53–54). in each of these instances, mugesera’s core argument in his own defence is grounded in the fundamental idea that the meaning of language is heavily influenced by context. this is of course a widely accepted sociocultural concept, and is one of the basic tenets of critical discourse analysis underpinning this article (van dijk 1993; 2001). mugesera sought to manipulate this notion to his own advantage by focussing on the various micro-contexts in which his speech was heard to minimise his own responsibility for his specific linguistic choices, as well as to draw attention away from the far more significant macro-context of the political situation of rwanda in 1992. he claimed, for example, that the actual syntactical structure of his text had been edited in such a way as to grossly distort the intended meaning (mugesera c. canada 1998: 51), and that the original sense of the word or expression in kinyarwanda had been lost or was being fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 14 misinterpreted as a result of being translated into another language, such as french (léon mugesera au banc des accusés 1994). such comments restrict the scope of the discussion to surface issues of omission, or equivalence of specific terminology, and neglect the underlying sociolinguistic context within which those terms acquire their full potential meaning. as has been illustrated above in the example of the information provided by expert witnesses at the canadian hearings, the sociopolitical context in which mugesera’s speech was conceived is crucial for elucidating meaning; however, this degree of illumination was clearly not beneficial to mugesera’s cause. conclusion jean-pierre chrétien notes in his book on the rwandan media of this period that many genocide ideologists and perpetrators believed that they could deliver their genocidal message with impunity because the fact they were speaking in kinyarwanda meant that they were not open to international scrutiny (1995:16). it is therefore significant that the first detailed examination of mugesera’s speech occurred in a legal framework in a foreign country rather than within its country of origin. this created an opportunity not only for calling the individual, léon mugesera, to account, but also for allowing the international community to acquire a greater understanding of the very specific linguistic techniques used to win the support of the rwandan audience. the specific language used by perpetrators, victims and witnesses in relation to the 1994 genocide in rwanda constitutes a crucial field of research for arriving at a clearer understanding not only of what actually occurred, but how. the stigmatisation of the tutsi population by means of their classification, exclusion and dehumanisation paved the way for their extermination, and references to all of these are present in the speech delivered by léon mugesera. the illustrative features of the speech that have been discussed in this article provide important insight into how genocidal ideology was transmitted to the general rwandan population, and stand as tangible evidence of a consciously constructed campaign to convert all listeners to the genocidal cause. in the face of the growing trend towards revisionism and negationism with regard to the genocide in rwanda, it is imperative that the veritable intended meaning of speeches such as the one delivered by mugesera at kabaya not be ‘lost in translation.’ this is essential not only in the interests of establishing criminal responsibility and subsequently imposing the most appropriate sanctions on individuals such as léon fletcher words that can kill portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 15 mugesera, but also in the interests of enabling the international community to arrive at a far more accurate understanding of the unwavering and intransigent resolve underpinning the implementation of the 1994 genocide conducted against the tutsi. reference list braeckman, c. 1995, rwanda, histoire d’un génocide. fayard, paris. chrétien, j. p. (ed.) 1995, rwanda: les médias du génocide. karthala, paris. _____ 2010, ‘le génocide du rwanda: un négationnisme structurel,’ hommes et libertés, no. 151, july– september. online, available: http://www.ldhfrance.org/img/pdf/h_l151_international_2._le_genocide_du_rwanda_un_negationnisme_struc turel_.pdf [accessed 28 october 2012]. des forges, a. 1999, leave none to tell the story: genocide in rwanda. human rights watch and the international federation of human rights leagues, new york. discours attribué au dr mugesera léon mrnd s/préfectur (sic) kabaya gisenyi le 22/09/1992, trans. e. shimamungu. online, available: http://www.urubuga.net/mugesera-fr2.pdf [accessed 04 may 2012]. hintjens, h. 1999, ‘explaining the 1994 genocide in rwanda,’ the journal of modern african studies, vol. 37, no. 2: 241–286. kellow, c. & steeves, h. 1998, ‘the role of the radio in the rwandan genocide,’ journal of communication, vol. 48, no. 3: 107–28. le discours de kabaya. 1992, trans. t. kaminzi. online, available: http://rwanda94.pagespersoorange.fr/sitepers/dosrwand/kabaya.html [accessed 04 may 2012]. léon mugesera au banc des accusés, 1994. online, available: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x39fu2_leon-mugesera-au-banc-des-accuses-3_news [accessed 15 october 2012]. léon mugesera speech /eye witness testimony, 2012. online, available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luhbklblr0a&list=flufkryc6y7wzmsucjg0azq&feature=mh_ lolz [accessed 29 september 2012]. melvern, l. 2000, a people betrayed: the role of the west in rwanda’s genocide. zed, london. _____ 2006, conspiracy to murder: the rwandan genocide. verso, london & new york. mugesera, a. 2004, ‘evolution du racisme anti-tutsi et sa mise en pratique au jour le jour,’ dialogue, vol. 178, april–june: 35–47. mugesera c. canada (ministre de la citoyenneté et de l’immigration) 1998. online, available: http://www.scribd.com/doc/79499069/affaire-mugesera-commission-de-l-immigration-et-dustatut-de-refugie-6-novembre-1998 [accessed 29 september 2012]. ______ 2005. online, available: http://www.refworld.org/docid/470a4a6bd.html [accessed 23 october 2012]. mutesi, t. 2010, ‘genocide victims who floated on l. victoria to be reburied,’ orinfor, 26 april 2010. online, available: http://www.orinfor.gov.rw/printmedia/topstory.php?id=789 [accessed 27 october 2012]. prunier, g. 1995, the rwanda crisis, 1959–1994: history of a genocide. c. hurst, london. stanton, g. 1996, ‘the 8 stages of genocide.’ online, available: http://www.genocidewatch.org/images/8stagesbriefingpaper.pdf [accessed 28 october 2012]. un procès saisissant, celui de léon mugesera, 1996. online, available: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3c616_un-proces-saisissant-celui-de-leon_news [accessed 15 october 2012]. van dijk, t. 1993, ‘principles of critical discourse analysis,’ discourse & society, vol. 4, no. 2: 249– 283. _____. 2001, ‘discourse, ideology and context,’ folia linguistica, vol. 30, no. 1–2: 11–40. wodak, r. 2007, ‘pragmatics and critical discourse analysis,’ pragmatics and cognition, vol. 15, no. 1: 203–225. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 2 september 2017 communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue, guest edited by anu bissoonauth and rowena ward. © 2017 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: dwyer, k. a. 2017. my brother the mexican. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:2, 123-126. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5615 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au cultural work my brother the mexican k. angelique dwyer gustavus adolphus college corresponding author: associate professor k. angelique dwyer, department of modern languages, literatures and cultures, gustavus adoplhus college, 800 west college avenue, saint peter mn 56082, usa. adwyer@gustavus.edu doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5615 article history: received 14/07/2017; revised 21/07/2017; accepted 22/07/2017; published 05/10/2017 abstract k. angelique dwyer is an american who grew up in mexico by chance, frequently crossing (geographic, cultural and linguistic) borders. she writes short stories that explore bicultural and bilingual experiences, as exemplified by ‘my brother the mexican’ published in this issue. she is an associate professor of spanish in the department of modern languages, literatures and cultures, as well as chair of the latina/o, latin american and caribbean studies (lalacs) program, at gustavus adolphus college. she has a ba in communication studies from iteso (guadalajara, mexico) and an ma and phd in latin american literature from the university of iowa. she specializes in mexico/us intercultural studies, chicana/latina cultural production, performance art and film. her research, teaching and civic engagement highlight identity politics in marginalized populations within a local and global terrain. keywords k. angelique dwyer; spanglish; identity negotiation; mexican american; amexican; bicultural identity; siblings; gender relations declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 123 mailto:adwyer%40gustavus.edu?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5615 el ‘piti’ le decían, i never knew why. we lived just outside ‘el barrio,’ at least that’s what they called it, ‘cause it took too long to say ‘tlachichilco del carmen.’ nobody called it that, but my mom. she would make us go to el barrio a vender ‘panquecitos.’ two little gringüitos selling cupcakes en la plaza. — ‘how do you say cupcakes mom?’ — ‘get out the dictionary’ was her favorite answer. panquecitos. though i later found out from a spaniard that cupcakes were madalenas. i just figured he was talking about two girls called magdalena. íbamos a la plaza los domingos en la noche and by the end of the night those baskets would be empty. apparently los del barrio hadn’t tasted seven-minute marshmallow icing before. cuando eran las fiestas del santo patrón we would go into town for the races. people would ride their horses a pelo. i don’t know how my brother could ride bareback. i rode a mare once por allá por el lago but she threw me ‘cause she was worried about her colt running off. never again. en las carreras my brother rode pinto, and his friend sebas rode señor, un palomino bien grandote. the winner would get a pollito, a little yellow chicken, like the kind on easter cards. we had so many pollitos at our house ‘cause el piti would win every other race. either the pirate’s cap he wore gave him good luck or it was all pinto’s doing. after the races, a pinto lo bañábamos en el lago, with a big bar of zote (that pink soap women in town use to hand wash their husband’s work clothes). we washed his face with té de manzanilla ‘cause pinto’s left eye was always irritated, se le infectaba con el polvo y con el agua de la laguna. una vez, cuando el pinto andaba suelto, i went out to give him a carrot and some cool chamomile tea to put on his face. he came over as soon as he saw me and sin querer queriendo stepped on my bare foot. it hurt so bad no podía ni gritar. i just stood there, under his hoof. i tried to push him, but realized that the force of a ten-year-old would never manage. my solution: aventé la zanahoria and he went after it. it was a close one. todavía me acuerdo del peso like it was yesterday. my mom, la señora linda, was always yelling after el piti to feed the pollitos but his attention was only focused on his gallos who had now grown enough to become fighters. when we lived in guanatos he had palomas. he would catch them on the roof of the house we rented. they were a dirty gray, like most city pigeons are, with purple metallic streaks on their wings. he set the pigeons loose when we moved to el barrio and started a rooster pin instead. my job was to check on the hens, pick up the eggs and take them up to mom, feed the pollitos, and the roosters, and be el piti’s assistant when one of the roosters got stung by an alacrán. the procedure when this happened was simple: i had to put a piece of garlic in the rooster’s beak, while he held it down. then, we’d wash it down with milk. this was the antidote … later used on one of our cats, which didn’t survive the scorpion’s stinger. my mom eventually found out that the scorpion provides its own antidote. nomás le cortas la cola and then put it in a bottle of rubbing alcohol. in junior high i started going to tardeadas in town and hung out with the fresas. we’d listen to eighties music or rock en español: soda stereo, alaska, maná. el piti was in high school by then, hiding behind his tejana. as soon as the last period of the day ended he’d drive off in his faded gray grand marqui ’82 blasting la recodo’s ‘acábame de matar, pa’ qué me dejas heridoooo’ and heading straight for el barrio. the only time i hung out in el barrio was at the fiestas ‘cause there was a cute guy that would come every year to work at the puestos. ‘el panadero’ le decíamos… he asked me to dance a quebradita once … ay, viejos tiempos … but then he had to go back to the puestos luego-luego a vender pan dulce. dwyer portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 124 un día (it was a sunday night i think) mi papá se había llevado el carro y mi mamá y yo veíamos re-runs of ‘the golden girls’ cuando suddenly we heard a knock on the door y nos enteramos que al piti lo habían llevado a la cruz roja ‘cause he got thrown by the bull he was ridding at the toros. they’re supposed to cover the bulls’ horns in town but they never do. me la han contado tantas veces: he got thrown off the bull and landed on his feet. there was an expression of awe in the crowd. as he started to walk away the bull came behind him y lo corneó puncturing his left lung and causing him to collapse. mi mamá lo buscó por todo el hospital civil de guanatos. — ‘has any one seen my son? my son!!!! …’ gritaba, y aijo de la chingada, just remembering it makes my eyes water. i thought she was gonna faint, or maybe i was gonna faint ‘cause she was so freaked out. turned out el piti forgot his tarjeta de seguro social and couldn’t be treated at the hospital without one so he was sitting in the corner huddled over until my mom and i finally made it there. — ‘never again mijo … never again’ la señora linda said. ‘promise me you’ll never ride a bull again.’ two days later, with a big scar on his back and practically no left lung, my brother, el piti, admitted to my mom that bull riding was his life and he was gonna do it no matter what. by the time i was in high school he went away for college. he didn’t want to leave but he didn’t want to go to college in guanatos either: — ‘puros pinches fresas’ he’d say ‘¿qué chingados voy a hacer yo ahí, compa …?’ so, they sent him to los estates, but the farthest he made it was laredo. every year for christmas regresaba al barrio para las fiestas con botas nuevas y camisas de seda. he had so much gold jewelry hanging off him i had to make fun … it was too easy. less than two years later he came back for good. pos la neta es que no aguantó. he came back to stay, and for once, there was a period of two to six months when we were on the same page. the reason? around my junior year i dated a vaquerillo. he wore a cowboy hat, botas de avestruz, wranglers, and was always covered in mud ‘cause he worked on his family’s farm. the funny thing was, he had grown up in east l.a. and spoke barrio spanglish. i still remember what his truck smelled like. it was an odd combination of old leather, expensive cologne and manure. le decían el pelón … pos por pelón, but my mom always called him josé. el piti y el pelón eran compas, they hung out a lot. we’d go out together al palenque o a los toros and they’d bring the mariachi over o la banda norteña, o lo que fuera hombre. i knew all the songs even though i listened to madonna and la unión at home. there was something about those pinches corridos though, they always managed to get under my skin. aunque no me gustaran, siempre me llegaban. we’d go to the fiestas y al carnaval, we’d drink tequila in the terrazas and dance to la sonora dinamita. i even enrolled in the escaramuza, the mexican charra equestrian club. el piti would let me ride espíritu. he’d actually drive the stallion out to town para que yo lo montara en la escaramuza. espíritu was a racehorse. espíritu de chávez le puso mi mamá, ‘cause he was a fighter. we’d do our runs and el piti would be in the stands watching so he could give me tips later. this was definitely my vaquera stage. years later, i moved to los estates and he stayed in el barrio. yo siempre me juraba que even though i was living in the states, el barrio was home. this here, my native land, was only a part-time arrangement. little did i know the path i took ten years ago would be long, y que me alejaría cada vez más de esa vida que llevo siempre tan close to me. one summer me vino a visitar, con sus tres hijos y con mis papás. my parents made a long summer road trip through los estates with their grandkids and stopped in town to hang out. my brother the mexican portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 125 the plan was: el piti would fly in, stay for a week and then take the three kids back with him para que mis papás descansaran y se quedaran acá conmigo otro rato. at the airport waiting for his return flight he begged my mom to leave with him porque un hombre solo no puede con tres niños. — ‘they’re your own kids’ le dije ‘¿cómo no vas a poder?’ — ‘what if they have to go to the bathroom?’ he’d say ‘i can’t be in three places at once …’ — ‘they’ve got family restrooms here … hello … just look for one’ le contesté. pero él insistía en que mi mamá lo tenía que acompañar hasta allá y después regresarse sola. ni más. not happening. so, that was the day, my brother, el piti, the left lung-less, banda listener and wendy’s frosty-lover said to me before he stomped off: ‘you’re too american,’ and aijo de la chingada how that hurt. a shot through the heart that still stings today. dwyer portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 126 portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 4, no. 1 january 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal imagining the twentieth century: retrospective, myth, and the colonial question david bruce macdonald, otago university as the twentieth century drew to a close, retrospectives entered into fashion, be they boxed-set or abridged, chronological descriptions, or fin de siecle memoirs. written by some of today’s leading historians and political scientists, these have attempted, by and large, to portray the twentieth century as the most atrocious in human history, in terms of totalising ideologies, bloodshed, terror, and mass death. while providing useful coverage of twentieth century events, retrospectives have a tendency to downplay or ignore conflict and conquest in earlier centuries. the nineteenth century emerges as an age of moral values, hope, progress and enlightenment – an era squandered only from world war i onwards, leading inexorably to auschwitz, vietnam, cambodia, and yugoslavia. this article seeks to explore how and why the twentieth century has been cast as the most atrocious. i also problematise the creation of a nineteenth century foil, a moral opposite and other, which has often been used to create a false before-and-after portrayal of historical events. historian will durant calculated recently that there has only been a 29-year period in all of human history during which there was no warfare in progress somewhere in the world (hynes 1998, xi). yet, a form of historical amnesia macdonald imagining the twentieth century seems to pervade western scholarship, whereby the twentieth century emerges as decisive break from the past, an anomaly – or ‘very unpleasant surprise’ (glover 1999, 3). in 1822, ernest renan famously observed that ‘the essential element of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common but it must also have forgotten many things.’ arguably, in an effort to retain positive views about the past, societies deliberately forget uncomfortable knowledge, which then becomes a series of ‘open secrets’ known by everyone but not discussed. cohen has described a form of ‘social amnesia’: ‘a mode of forgetting by which a whole society separates itself from its discreditable past record’ (buckley-zistel 2006, 132-3). previous centuries, however, were hardly ideal, neither for europeans nor their colonial subjects. colonialism in earlier centuries saw large percentages of indigenous peoples killed; there were more examples of successfully implemented genocide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than afterwards. without downplaying the reality of twentieth century horrors (or their death totals), there needs to be space for resurrecting the past. this article will critically examine twentieth century retrospectives, contrasting them with recent critiques of colonialism in the nineteenth century and before. i critique recent eurocentric scholarship for deliberately ignoring many of the negative aspects of western history, even reconstructing time in such as way as to privilege european history and events over those of other continents and peoples. this underlines the trend, as chakrabarty has noted, of putting ‘europe first, the rest of the world later’ (2000). approaching history: conflicting perspectives how history is approached is often as important as the events themselves. hayden white has attacked the idea that histories or retrospectives are authentic representations of actual events, with only ‘certain rhetorical flourishes or poetic effects’ to distract readers from the truth of what they are reading (1987, x; 24). rather, white argues that all forms of historical narrative, be they ‘annals,’ ‘chronicles,’ or ‘history proper’ portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 2 macdonald imagining the twentieth century (according to his taxonomy), are subject to a process of ‘narrativising.’ here, historians try to create a story from the ‘real events’ of history, complete with a beginning and an end, and some type of moral lesson. as white, argues, the biases, desires and fantasies of the historian cannot be considered separate from the events they are describing. which events are chosen and how they are presented will depend on a number of very personal factors, expressed through a process of ‘narrativising’ (white 1987, 4). this argument about ‘narrativising’ was later raised by campbell, in his alternative reading of the first gulf war. he describes how policy makers, historians and others interpret events and craft a ‘story,’ with an ‘ordered plot,’ ‘cast of characters,’ ‘attributable motivations,’ and ‘lessons for the future’ (1993, 7; 26-7). historical accounts are often little more than one interpretation and organisation of a myriad of events, arranged according to the bias and ideals of the ‘narrator.’ white and campbell both laudably attempt to examine the method by which a series of chronological events eventually emerge as a closed historical juncture, with a beginning and an end, and a series of moral lessons of good and evil. through such a reading, retrospectives on the twentieth century involve a set of judgements, normative redefinitions of the past, and prescriptions for the future. we learn lessons from them: ‘don’t follow charismatic leaders’; ‘beware of totalising ideologies’; ‘democracy is the best defence against violence and bloodshed’; and so on. retrospectives tell us where we went wrong, and why. finding an ‘other’ or a foil in the nineteenth century provides a useful contrast if we are to moralise about twentieth century depravity. a contrary argument is given by hobsbawm, who is quick to dismiss postmodernism’s relativism and its discursive view of history. his primary attack concerns those who generate postmodern scholarship. these, he argues, ‘see themselves as representing collectivities or milieux marginalized by the hegemonic culture of some group … whose claim to superiority they contest. but it is wrong.’ postmodernism’s relativism, according to hobsbawm, allows for, ‘no clear distinction between what is true and what i feel to be true’ (hobsbawm 1997, 271; jacoby 1999, 118-120). in contradistinction to white, hobsbawm promotes history as a telling of the facts – an account of what really portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 3 macdonald imagining the twentieth century happened. ‘without the distinction between what is real and what is not,’ he advances, ‘there is no history’ (hobsbawm 1997, viii). facts cannot be invented, ‘either elvis presley is dead or he isn’t. the question can be unambiguously answered on the basis of evidence, insofar as reliable evidence is available’ (hobsbawm 1997, 6). certainly there are indisputable facts, but there are also biases in factual accounts, making some accounts more plausible than others. and sometimes, ‘facts’ are disputed – sometimes rumours of elvis presley’s death are greatly exaggerated. take for example hobsbawm’s straightforward and unambiguous analysis of kosovo. here, ‘few of the ideologies of intolerance are based on simple lies or fictions for which no evidence exists. after all, there was a battle of kosovo in 1389, the serb warriors and their allies were defeated by the turks, and this did leave scars on the popular memory of the serbs …’ (1997, 6). on the surface, this statement is relatively unproblematic. however—serbian defeat at kosovo in 1398 is not an indisputable fact—historical records allow for a wide variety of interpretations. marriott insists that the serbs lost decisively, judah advances that the serbs may have actually won the battle, while malcolm’s definitive account advances that the battle was a draw, neither side having clinched decisive victory (marriott 1930, 65; judah 1997, 31; malcolm 1998, 75-9). i use this rather mundane example to demonstrate that ‘facts’ as we know them are not always givens, nor are an historian’s motivations always obvious. while motives may be relatively benign, historians can exclude much, in their need for concision, or due to their ignorance of some aspects of history. perhaps more likely – historians desire to have their histories ‘fit’ into a neat framework, conferring their own view of the world. roberts’s the twentieth century, offers a good example of such a process in action. in his introduction, roberts adopts a mixture of apology and defiance, when he argues ‘the history of the twentieth century has therefore to be approached with (what is sometimes deplored) a “eurocentric” stance. in many ways, the world actually was centred on europe when the twentieth century began. much of that century’s story is of how and why that ceased to be true before it ended’ (roberts 1999, 38). here, european history takes precedence because the world was ‘centred on it’ – non-european history portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 4 macdonald imagining the twentieth century is devalued and marginalised before the book even begins. creating a new twentieth century in coming to terms with twentieth century ‘narratives,’ it is useful to look at how time can be reinterpreted in light of an author’s personal viewpoint. for some, writing history is little more than, ‘measuring an endless piece of string with a ruler.’ centuries are arbitrary inventions, ‘just a distance between two chosen points’ (roberts 1999, 3). for others, centuries are defined by wars, revolutions, and other major transformations, which encapsulate the mood or overall ‘feel’ of a century, and come to symbolise it. thus emerges the concept of ‘long’ and ‘short’ centuries. lukacs’s ‘short century’ is but 75 years in length—running from 1914 to 1989 (lukacs 1993, 1)—as are those of grenville (1994, 1) and hobsbawm. for lukacs as for others, time and its division into centuries is purely a european affair, established primarily by military victories and defeats. the ‘real’ nineteenth century only begins after napoleon’s defeat at waterloo in 1815, and ends with world war i, a century of 99 years. the eighteenth century is 126 years long, beginning with ‘the world wars between england and france,’ and ending with waterloo. the 101-year seventeenth century begins with the defeat of the spanish armada in 1588, and closes with the rise of france as england’s chief enemy in 1689 (lukacs 1993, 1-2). but such demarcations depend on individual choice. grenville offers alternatives: a nineteenth century starting with the french revolution of 1789, with the beginnings of the twentieth century in 1871 (with german unification) or 1890 (with the beginnings of german weltpolitik) (1994, 1). such divisions are as inherently eurocentric as their authors. after all, world war i had little direct impact in asia, africa, or latin america. similarly, the collapse of communism in 1989 had significantly greater repercussions within europe than outside it. we can also criticise the short century’s reductionism – it becomes little more than the clash between communism and liberal democracy (ponting 1998, 4). hobsbawm’s short century epitomises such criticisms. his is effectively encapsulated portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 5 macdonald imagining the twentieth century by the rise and fall of soviet communism, which, he asserts, ‘forms a coherent historical period’ (hobsbawm 1994, 5). however, like lukacs and grenville, personal motivations, such as his long-term affiliations with communism, have much to do with his choice of dates (conquest 2000, 10-11). conquest has noted hobsbawm’s ‘addiction to marxism,’ as well as his, ‘if not unqualified approval of, then undisguised preference for, communist regimes’ (conquest 2000, 50). in these cases, white’s narrativity is obvious – even the division of centuries owes much to the motivations and desires of the individual historian. the twentieth century as squandered utopia the most prevalent portrayal of the twentieth century is one of squandered legacy – the belief that the wonders of the nineteenth century were forever tarnished by the horrors of technology, war, and totalising ideologies. in the age of extremes, the twentieth century emerges as the worst in human history, ‘not only because it was without doubt the most murderous century of which we have record, both by the scale, frequency and length of warfare which filled it … but also by the unparalleled scale of the human catastrophes it produced, from the greatest famines in history to systemic genocide’ (hobsbawm 1994, 13). glover’s humanity: a moral history of the 20th century, advances essentially the same view. he too sees the century as one of dashed expectations, at the start of the century there was optimism, coming from the enlightenment that the spread of a humane and scientific outlook would lead to the fading away, not only of war, but also of other forms of cruelty and barbarism. they would fill the chamber of horrors in the museum of our primitive past. in light of these expectation, the century of hitler, stalin, pol pot and saddam hussein was likely to be a surprise. volcanoes thought extinct turned out not to be (glover 1999, 6). similar portrayals can be found throughout this body of contemporary literature. gilbert’s a history of the twentieth century opens with the following statement, ‘the twentieth century has witnessed some of humanity’s greatest achievements and some of its worst excesses’ (gilbert 1997, 1). howard and louis’s oxford history portrays the century’s beginning as a ‘paradoxical combination of hope and fear.’ there was hope for a ‘new golden age,’ of ‘scientific discoveries and technological developments.’ portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 6 macdonald imagining the twentieth century nevertheless, ‘fear arose from the apparent disintegration of traditional values and social structures, both secular and religious … and from the prospect that the world was therefore confronting a future in which only the strongest and the most ruthless would survive’ (howard and louis 1998, xix). violence is often premised on the irrationality of ideology in the twentieth century, and the abandonment of christianity and its moral precepts. furet commented that, ‘in the nineteenth century, history replaces god as the all powerful force in the destiny of men, but only in the twentieth century do we see the political madness caused by this substitution’ (finkielkraut 1998, 63). for brzezinski, nazism and communism tried to, ‘usurp the role of the world’s great religions’ – but produced fanaticism and ‘megadeaths’ instead (1995, 34). for coker, nazism was based on ‘an irrational ideology,’ one which was ‘deeply antagonistic to the values of the enlightenment’ (1998, 169). for many retrospectives, a focus on world wars i and ii is an obvious starting point. popular consensus in the literature suggests that world war i inaugurates the ‘short’ century, through its surprising mix of death and destruction, setting the stage for further conflict as the century progresses. amid hobsbawm’s four reasons for the violence of the twentieth century is, ‘the limitless sacrifices which governments imposed on their own men as they drove them into the holocaust of verdun and ypres set a sinister precedent, if only for imposing even more unlimited massacres on the enemy’ (1997, 256-7). technology also plays a crucial role. it allows war to escalate beyond belief, and in finkielkraut’s words, sets off an ‘endless chain,’ which leads to the russian revolution, the rise of stalin and hitler, the cold war, and so on (finkielkraut 2000, 6970). the twentieth century is thus an ‘endless conflict,’ requiring ‘total mobilisation,’ ‘total war’ and ‘total victory,’ a new and startling break with the past (finkielkraut 2000, 72). for others, world war ii is the nodal point and the defining event of the twentieth century. lukacs is a particularly strong adherent of this idea. for him, ‘much of the portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 7 macdonald imagining the twentieth century twentieth century before 1940-41 led up to hitler.’ as well, ‘so much of the rest of the century, from 1941 on, was the consequence of the second world war that he alone had begun and that was dominated by his presence until the end’ (lukacs 1993, 9). howard and louis similarly advance world war ii as, ‘the pivotal event of the century.’ the emergence of an ‘american century’; the decline of europe and its old imperial system, and the rise of ideological conflict during the cold war figure as little more than a denouement (howard and louis 1998, xxi). three decades before, george steiner, in his critique of t.s. eliot, termed the post-war era a ‘post culture,’ with world war ii leaving a, ‘formidable gap in the co-ordinates of location, of psychological recognition in the western mind’ (1972, 55-6). little seems to have changed since then, despite the collapse of communism in europe. while wars figure as high-water marks in the grim history of the twentieth century, they do not encapsulate the totality of the century’s horrors – one must also rely on utilitarian appraisals – statistics and quantitative analysis. in 1993, brzezinski dissected the century in terms of ‘megadeaths,’ that is, death tolls of over 10 to the power of six. this includes the two world wars and roughly thirty civil wars with at least ten thousand casualties each. in these cases, civilians suffered the majority of deaths and injuries. totalitarian ideologies, bent on creating ‘coercive utopias,’ are for brzezinski a unique feature of the twentieth century, as is the invention of genocide, specifically the idea of mass killing unrelated to traditional war aims (1995, 8-9). brzezinski calculates that some 60 million alone died in failed attempts to create communist utopias, in the soviet union, china, and cambodia. the total number of casualties for the twentieth century is between 167 and 175 million dead, a result, brzezinski posits, of ‘politically motivated carnage’ (1995, 11-18). a more recent update by the carnegie commission adds another four million casualties since 1989, and includes conflicts in the gulf, the horn of africa, and the balkans (jacoby 1999, 168). what brzezinski, hobsbawm, and glover share is the belief that raw data or quantitative analysis provides the best gauge of a given century’s horror. for utilitarian philosophers, the higher the death totals, the worse the century. judgements of good portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 8 macdonald imagining the twentieth century and evil are reducible to a comparison between the numbers of people killed in any given situation. such a belief allowed glover to posit earlier in causing death and saving lives, ‘[w]hen we think soberly about the worst hypothetical choice in the world, it is hard not to conclude that a nazi society, including the extermination camps, would be less terrible than a major nuclear war’ (1990, 262). glover offered another scenario, where nuclear war would in fact be the lesser of two evils, ‘if you construct an imaginary case in which the only way to stop the leaders of a country releasing a virus that will kill everybody on earth is to wage nuclear war, i will agree that in those circumstances nuclear war would be justifiable’ (1990, 262). the key issue here is high numbers. the relative horror of an event or potential event is measured largely by the numbers of people killed (and perhaps tortured); morality lies in the minimisation of death and suffering. high casualty rates, when added to the rise of dictatorships, irrational ideologies, technological warfare and the collapse of enlightenment narratives and christian morality, produce a century that is seemingly unique in its atrociousness. or does it? colonialism and imperialism the mere exercise of promoting the twentieth century as the worst in history necessarily involves some level of wilful blindness. in order to create a form of dramatic contrast between then and now, the past is presented in glowing colours, involving what edward said has called a ‘blotting out of knowledge’ (stannard 1992, 14). western and other crimes go back centuries. stannard’s american holocaust was one of the first books to promote earlier eras as qualitatively and quantitatively worse than the more recent past. writing in 1992, stannard advanced that the average rate of depopulation in the americas since 1492 has been between 90-98 percent, due to a combination of ‘firestorms of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide’ (1992, xii). through a mixture of disease, slave labour, massacre and forced resettlement, the death toll from continual orgies of violence was fixed at roughly 100 million people, making portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 9 macdonald imagining the twentieth century the destruction of the american indians, ‘far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world’ (stannard 1992, x). as well, we need to consider that spanish crimes in the americas also reflect events taking place in spain, from the final defeat of the moors to the expulsion of the jews, as enrique dussel (1995) and walter mignolo (1995; 2005) both discuss. colonial terror continued in various forms, under various empires, for almost five centuries. the spanish were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of indigenous peoples, followed by the british during the sixteenth century and after, who continued the wholesale slaughter of indigenous peoples. the torch was then passed to the united states in the eighteenth century. shelley wright invites us to see that twentieth century horrors like the holocaust hardly constitute argues, ‘a great chasm dividing us irrevocably from our brutal past. it is a very thin line. we have crossed it many times.’ the difference between the pre and post-holocaust world is not that the world has necessarily become any more violent, or evil. rather, the holocaust has forced us to ‘understand that the violence of ethnic tribalism is not confined to africa, or asia, or the middle east, or the cities of eastern europe – it is here, at home – we are the savage’ (wright 2001, 18-9). the nineteenth century as pristine the nineteenth century is portrayed as the era when the ideals of the enlightenment were put into practice, namely: ‘a universal system of … rules and standards of moral behaviour, embodied in the institutions of states dedicated to rational progress of humanity’ (hobsbawm 1997, 254). it is also described as a peaceful century, because there were no major wars in europe until 1914 (hobsbawm 1994, 22). hobsbawm’s ‘long nineteenth century’ is relatively mild, since it, ‘seemed, and actually was, a period of almost unbroken material, intellectual and moral progress’ (1994, 13). violence was uncommon, and events such as the irish republican bombing of westminster hall, and the pogroms of russian jews were, ‘small, almost negligible by the standards of modern massacre.’ as well, ‘the dead were counted in dozens, not hundreds, let alone portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 10 macdonald imagining the twentieth century millions’ (hobsbawm 1994, 13). for brzezinski, there is no doubt that ‘the twentieth century was born in hope. it dawned in a relatively benign setting, [with] … a relatively prolonged spell of peace’ (1995, 3). while we are presented with the crimean war, the franco-prussian war, and the russo-japanese war of 1905, each is dismissed with a banal revisionism. crimea had, ‘no major geopolitical repercussions,’ while the other two are cast in an almost positive light, since they ‘signalled the emergence on the world scene of germany and japan respectively, as new potential major actors’ (brzezinksi 1995, 3). one detects a similar outlook with glover’s first chapter in humanity, entitled ‘never such innocence again.’ he too describes ‘one hundred years of largely unbroken european peace,’ making it, ‘plausible to think that the human race was growing out of its warlike past’ (1990, 3). the early twentieth century marked, he argues, a belief in moral progress, with, ‘human viciousness and barbarism in retreat’ (1990, 1). lukacs’s nineteenth century is distinguished by, ‘the absence of world war,’ thus accounting for its prosperity and progressiveness (1993, 2). for howard and louis, the nineteenth century emerges as a golden age, with the end of the century marking ‘the dawn of a new and happier age in the history of mankind,’ an age dominated by science and technology, trade, finance, and growing military power (1998, 3). arguably, this golden age portrayal of the nineteenth century allows for the creation of a straw man, a sitting target that is soon shot down by historians when gavrilo princip fires his fatal browning pistol. in the search for a contrast and foil, much of this literature elides the negative realities of colonialism, at best dealing with them in a cursory and superficial fashion. peace in europe implies ipso facto that europeans are peaceful and rational by nature. the application of this idea with regards to colonialism renders a skewed portrait of events. for howard and louis, colonialism in africa and asia lead to an ‘almost unquestioned belief in the cultural and indeed racial superiority of the ‘white’ races over the rest of mankind’ (1998, 3-5). this state of affairs was not necessarily negative, however, since, ‘this belief was usually combined with a sense of obligation to bring the blessings of portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 11 macdonald imagining the twentieth century ‘civilization’ to ‘backward’ peoples; an obligation combined with one very much older, to spread the christian gospel among the heathen’ (1998, 5).. a healthy dose of paternalism, it seems, gives colonialism carte blanche. colonialism is also excused on the grounds that it had few negative longterm effects. howard and louis argue that ‘even where western imperialism seemed most triumphant, indigenous cultures remained largely intact, making no concession to the conqueror than was strictly necessary.’ it is only in the twentieth century that ‘western communications, trade, and technology’ undermined ‘traditional life-styles,’ a trend that also affected europe (howard and louis 1998, 6). here, colonialism emerges as relatively benign, a shallow and easily rectified form of exploitation. things only change in the twentieth century, a time when everybody, irrespective of race, shares the same sense of dislocation. for brzezinski, previous centuries saw ‘explosions of violence,’ which might have been intense, violent and bloody outbursts – but were nevertheless ‘rarely sustained.’ as for slaughter, particularly that of non-combatants, this was, ‘directly associated with physical contest and conquest; rarely was it a matter of sustained policy, based on systematized premeditation.’ premeditated killing was rather, ‘the twentieth century’s gruesome contribution to political history’ (brzezinksi 1995, 5). roberts argues that despite famines, and attacks by raiders or conquerors, ‘old ways’ could be resumed. we are to believe that, ‘the warp and weft of daily life and the way people lived through it hardly changes much in predominantly agricultural and pastoral societies and the acceptance of occasional disaster was part of that’ (1999, 29). for groups that didn’t survive – too bad. roberts describes them as being ‘at a stage of achievement low enough to be called neolithic if not paleolithic, and … very vulnerable’ (1999, 90-102). there is a strong and distasteful sense of historical inevitability here, with certain groups being fated to die out once they were confronted with western civilisations. on balance, colonialism, and its close cousin imperialism emerge as both positive and negative forces. imperialism introduces education, technology, western medicine, and portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 12 macdonald imagining the twentieth century christianity. it also introduces organisation and new concepts of identity (roberts 1999, 98-9). genocide, terror, economic exploitation, and other features do not seem to be important enough to merit condemnation; they are par for the course, by-products of the colonial experience. criticism of imperialism, argues roberts, often centres on the ‘diatribe’ (1999, 83). by establishing a hegemonic discourse about the twentieth century as the worst, roberts, gilbert, howard, hobsbawm and others have to distort earlier periods of history, excising the ‘dark side’ of the nineteenth century. however, it is only by coming to terms with the nineteenth century and its associated colonial horrors that we can better understand the violence of the twentieth century, a century when the outrages perpetrated in africa, asia and elsewhere came back to haunt the countries of europe. darkness from the past colonialism should and must be counted as an aspect of european degeneracy, and as a potential precedent for later dehumanisation, racism, and warfare. in death and deliverance (1994), burleigh described the long and arduous process of training of ss killers during germany’s euthanasia programs in the 1930s. browning’s ordinary men (1993) similarly describes how killers were created rather than born. the ability to dehumanise an enemy, to destroy life with unmitigated cruelty, had to be learned. and not everyone could assimilate these lessons. so it was with european states coming into the twentieth century. those who cut their teeth on the boxer rebellion, or raped the congo of its human and natural resources, those who had exterminated the tasmanian aboriginals or mowed down the western canadian métis with gattling fire, were not the peace-loving, morally progressive peoples we would like the believe. an alternative view of the twentieth century, and a plausible one, is to see it as a continuation of the past. ‘communism and nazism,’ after all, ‘had their origins deep in 19th century history’ (ponting 1998, 9; 18-19). racism, ethno-nationalism, eugenics, phrenology, and social darwinism, all are rooted in nineteenth century racial science and social theory. little about these ideologies was new or particularly innovative. the innovation lay in the transplantation of colonial violence to the european context. as portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 13 macdonald imagining the twentieth century grenville describes, ‘since the mid-nineteenth century the europeans had avoided fighting each other for empire, since the cost of war between them would have been of quite a different order’ (1994, 5). grenville’s analysis touches perhaps on the real reason for stability in europe, the projection of western aggression onto outside countries, aggression that was ‘crudely proven by his [the coloniser’s] capacity to conquer other peoples more numerous than the invading european armies’ (1994, 5). such retrospectives provide a more balanced coverage of the twentieth century than others, since they actually look for the roots of aggression in earlier times, rather than seeing 1914 as a complete break from the past. for those truly looking at nineteenth century precedents, there is little in the twentieth century that is a surprise. in earlier centuries, a greater percentage of people died in european colonies than at any time in the twentieth century, even if the absolute numbers were lower. arguably, more groups were the victims of successful genocide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than afterwards, despite superior technology and communication. writing during the 1980s and 1990s, historians and journalists like tatz, stannard, and hochschild have been pushing for recognition of indigenous genocides in australia, the americas, africa, and the asian subcontinent. i have briefly touched on stannard’s work, which blames spanish, british and settler authorities from bringing about what he feels is the largest genocide in world history (stannard 1992, x; 128-9; 222-3). this follows and precedes a growing literature on colonial crimes in the americas, including the works of todorov, thornton, sale, and churchill. much of this builds on the pioneering work of richard drinnon, who thoughtfully laid out the case for genocide in his facing west: the metaphysics of indian-hating and empire-building (1980). hochschild’s king leopold’s ghost explores the horrific legacies of belgian colonialism in the congo, from the foundation of the colony in the 1880s, to the death of the belgian king in 1910. hochschild delivers a damning critique of colonialism, positing that belgium’s rule in the congo brought about the deaths of some 10 million portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 14 macdonald imagining the twentieth century congolese africans (50 percent of the population), through massacre, disease, forced relocation, and slave labour. while the apogee of the killing occurred from 1890 to 1910, straddling the twentieth century, the congo genocide was nevertheless a pure product of nineteenth-century colonialism (hochschild 1999, 225-233). implicit here was the belief that european countries had the right to exploit africa to the fullest, particularly if great profits could be gained, in this case from the forced cultivation of rubber. much of this work is a gripping tale of intrigue and duplicity, with king leopold taking centre stage, emerging as an ungainly, strutting, conniving paedophile, who succeeds in carving out his kingdom, then maintains and enhances it with deliberate care. hochschild’s narrative style is full of battles between good and evil: bloodthirsty belgian soldiers and company officials versus human rights workers and foreign observers. however, leopold is not alone in his ruthless methods. hochschild notes that other colonial empires followed relatively the same course of action. rubber production in french west africa, portuguese angola, and the german camaroons followed a similar trajectory, with the percentages of dead in these regions also approaching fifty percent (1999, 280). more recent work by le cour grandmaison traces links between the mentality and techniques that inspired nineteenth century french colonialism in africa and the holocaust (2005). while involving much lower casualty figures, the genocide of the australian aborigines during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has provoked much research in recent years. as tatz has argued, british colonialism was responsible for the deaths of some 95 percent of the aboriginal population in australia, and for the complete extermination of the tasmanian aborigines. here the original population were much lower than in the americas or in the congo, totalling somewhere between 250,000 and 750,000 at the time of captain james cook’s arrival in 1788. whatever the earlier figures, by the 1911, there were less than 31,000 aborigines alive (tatz 1999, 6-8). using the 1948 un genocide convention, specifically article ii as a reference, tatz cites australia with at least three acts of genocide (1999, 6). portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 15 macdonald imagining the twentieth century the work of tatz (1999), henry reynolds (1999), paul bartrop (2001), a. dirk moses (2001), robert manne (2001) and others have provoked a series of “history wars” in australia over whether australia committed genocide against its aboriginal peoples. a special issue of aboriginal history (vol. 1 2001) was also devoted to the topic. much of the controversy stemmed from a 1997 report produced by the human rights and equal opportunity commission, entitled ‘bringing them home: report of the national inquiry into the separation of aboriginal and torres strait islander children from their families.’ the report, the outcome of a national inquiry commissioned by the labor government in may 1995, acknowledged that the australian government had ‘knowingly committed genocide through the forcible transfer of children, as a matter of official policy, not just yesteryear but as recently as the 1970s’ (tatz 1999, 33). however the lack of recognition of the report’s conclusions by the australian government has further fuelled the “history wars” over whether the government should apologise for the crimes of the past (macintyre 2003). while studies of indigenous genocides and colonial oppression are arguably becoming a growth industry, the tragic impact of two centuries of british rule in india has been underexplored in recent times. chomsky (1993) is one of the few western academics to have made reference to indian famines, particularly the bengal famine of 1769-70, which killed an estimated 10 million people. davis’s late victorian holocausts provides another recent account although he raises the total numbers of dead to 30 million overall, based on statistics from the lancet (2001, 7-8). while brzezinski is content to blame ideology and dictators for megadeaths, he has yet to apply his model to earlier colonial periods. forays into the past present us with new challenges. we are forced to consider the twentieth century not just as one of change and transformation, but also as a time of evolution and inherited moral corruption from the past. should we acknowledge the reality of past atrocities, history becomes neither a ‘surprise,’ nor a break from the past. a forum is opened where debate and discussion over the past can come forth. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 16 macdonald imagining the twentieth century dissecting the twentieth century if there have been horrors in previous centuries every bit as bad as those in the twentieth, why then do current retrospectives elide the realities of the past? i would offer six key reasons, of potentially many more, why previous centuries have not been deemed worthy of comparison but should be: 1) twentieth century violence is condemned as irrational, versus the rationality and profit-oriented motives of colonialism. retrospectives of the twentieth century often focus on the irrationality of violence, and the rapid, unexpected but inevitable escalation of warfare. it is almost tautological to say that the madness, or bestiality, of the twentieth century consisted in an abandonment of earlier values and norms. the old order was seemingly rational, moral, and christian; the new order, with its ‘arrogantly irrational goals,’ its moral nihilism, and its totalitarian ideologies, was not. however, in condemning the new order as an abandonment of the old, the nineteenth century emerges as a time of rationality, morality and idealism, as does colonialism. in the nineteenth century, j.a. hobson and karl marx would condemn colonialism as oppressive, but would similarly see the rationality behind it: establishing and expanding markets, while bringing about trade monopolies in lesser developed regions. greed and the quest for profit were and still are seen as inherently rational, as was the quest for exclusive control over regional trade. as nicholson describes the logic behind this process, ‘an obvious way of trying to reduce the risks on investment was to take political control of the area it was in … imperialism developed to defend and promote economic activity’ (1998, 71-2). nostalgia for nineteenth century liberal democracy and free trade often ignores the highly exploitative nature of these systems. for example, the bleeding of india in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave britain the raw materials and later the markets to fuel its industrial revolution, something for which, nehru ironically remarked, ‘bengal can take pride.’ describing british rule as little more than a ‘gold lust,’ nehru portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 17 macdonald imagining the twentieth century saw the ‘liquidation of the artisan class’ as directly attributable to the suppression of indian domestic manufacturing in favour of british imports. this led to the deaths of ‘tens of millions’ of people (nehru 1990, 209-11). an 1835 british commission of inquiry supposed this claim, noting that, ‘the misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce. the bones of cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of india’ (chomsky 1993, 13). killing in order to clear land for settlement, or killing and enslavement as a by-product of industrialisation, urbanisation, cultivation, or other aspects of modernity, all emerge as essentially rational but regrettable aspects of the forward march of ‘the history of commerce.’ coker has cleverly compared ‘westernisation’ in the colonies with nihilism in the west. both for him perform the same function – they break down traditional cultures, and destroy self-respect (1998, 158). as more studies expose the irrationality and brutality of colonialism, our previous conceptions of it will necessarily change. 2) the development of the mass media and the globalisation of information allow us to know about twentieth century atrocities. however, such access to information was not available in earlier centuries, leading to a false impression that ‘no news is good news.’ northrop frye argued several decades ago that, ‘man has doubtless always experienced time in the same way, dragged backwards from the receding past into an unknown future. but the quickening of the pace of news, with telegraph and submarine cable, helped to dramatize a sense of the world in visible motion, with every day bringing new scenes and episodes of a passing show’ (1967, 31). the evolution of mass media allows us to know much more about the world than ever before. but with this knowledge comes obligations, as ignatieff has argued (1998). we have become more attuned to what he calls the ‘the needs of strangers,’ and these needs can include protection from cruelty and harm. graphic images from around the world allow people to empathise with one another, reinforcing a sense of global responsibility. the increased demand for humanitarian intervention in such trouble spots as rwanda, bosnia, and kosovo is portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 18 macdonald imagining the twentieth century proof positive of this phenomenon (ignatieff 1998; mullerson 1997, 28-31). today, as it was for much of the previous century, we take it for granted that if something horrible happens, we will find out about it. should we doubt the objectivity of the mass media, websites and ngos can keep us informed about human rights violations around the world. until the twentieth century, the paucity of impartial journalism and mass electronic communication made atrocities difficult to catalogue, if anyone actually cared to learn about them. many of the details of the past have only come to light in recent years, as demonstrated by the range of contemporary studies. as the weight of historical knowledge about colonial atrocities increases, we will begin to see more patterns going from one century to the next. 3) we expect people to live today, and we have a belief in human equality. it is difficult to understand how attitudes could have been otherwise in previous centuries. with international conventions on human rights and genocide, there is at least a hope that nations will conform to some moral standard of behaviour, and treat their citizens with equal fairness. however, conceptions of universal rights and equality are new – largely a reaction to world wars i and ii. before the last century, when colonialism ran riot throughout much of the world, most indigenous inhabitants were not considered full persons. the 1788 doctrine of terra nullius, for example, declared australia to be ‘a land empty but for fauna and flora.’ aborigines were denied the status of being considered humans until the mid twentieth century (tatz 1999, 7). theories of superior and inferior religions, civilisations, and races were crucial in the development of colonialism, and such a sense of superiority legitimated a litany of colonial atrocities: land theft, enslavement, deliberate spreading of disease, and massacre. as nicholson argues, ‘one hundred years ago, the idea that people of all races and both sexes had equal rights was accepted only by a minority’ (1998, 194). singer adds that, ‘racist assumptions shared by most europeans at the turn of century are now totally unacceptable, at least in public life’ (1979, 14). with an evolving sense of morality and equality comes a lack of understanding of past conceptions of inequality. while we portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 19 macdonald imagining the twentieth century might expect the interahamwe or arkan’s tigers to slaughter their enemies with impunity, we don’t expect western leaders to be overtly racist or bloodthirsty. the projection of twentieth century norms on an understanding of past leaders and their motivations obscures the reality of the racial attitudes of earlier époques. 4) personifying evil is something more common to the twentieth century than in earlier periods of history. we need to be aware that the lack of an evil dictator or totalising ideology does not detract from the horrors of an event. discussions of twentieth century evil often involve the personification of it, for example, in the policies, ideology or personal traits of adolf hitler, joseph stalin, or mao zedong. while such personification is possible for twentieth century atrocity, earlier instances of genocide and suffering are much harder to personify in one man or one ideology. historical characters such as genghis khan or napoleon bonaparte were the exceptions rather than the rule. earlier periods of history were not so simple to understand. genocide and terror could take place over generations, and often did. with few interested lobby groups or photojournalists to hide from, no international conventions to uphold, no television cameras to avoid, pre-twentieth century killers could afford to take their time. they could be systematic or not, they could choose a variety of methods: disease, army massacres, settler militia patrols, bounties, slave labour, or whatever means seem appropriate. in some countries like australia and the united states, large numbers of settlers were seemingly eager to do their part in the killing of indigenous peoples, who, at any rate, were denied the status of being fully human. governments sometimes, but not always, condoned atrocities. the victims of genocide were an inconvenience, a troublesome eyesore, often dying because they seemingly stood in the path of progress and civilisation. discussions of past genocides must reject the twentieth century need for figureheads and stereotypes. as tatz argues, people today have a particular image in mind when they think of genocide, conditioned by the standards of hitler or stalin. for many, the portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 20 macdonald imagining the twentieth century success of a genocide accusation of genocide depends on the structure and ‘look’ of the state involved, australians understand only the stereotypical or traditional scenes of historical or present-day slaughter. for them, genocide connotes either the bulldozed corpses at belsen or the serried rows of cambodian skulls, the panga-wielding hutu in pursuit of tutsi victims or the ethnic cleansing in the former yugoslavia. as australians see it, patently we cannot be connected to, or with, the stereotypes of swastika-wearing ss psychopaths, or crazed black tribal africans (tatz 1999, 2). in tatz’s definition of genocide, intent is not even necessary, as long as there are sufficient casualties and a high enough percentage of the target population killed (1999, 36). helen fein similarly advances that genocide can be the result of, ‘sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly’ (chalk 1994, 49). in the australian case, there does not have to be a hitlerlike figure for genocide to have occurred. a common element of these critiques is their structuralist outlook. tony barta has argued for, ‘a conception of genocide which embraces relations of destruction and removes from the word the emphasis on policy and intention which brought it into being’ (nicholson 1998, 137). here it is the system, but not any specific policies or actors, which brings about genocide. one could also adopt nicholson’s distinction between ‘somatic violence’ and ‘structural violence,’ somatic being the intentional killing of individuals through war or mass murder. structural violence on the other hand, ‘happens when people die because of the activities of other human beings even though they did not intend to kill them as such’ (nicholson 1998, 137). ‘unnecessary poverty’ figures as an example of this phenomenon. a similar attitude is evident in stannard’s critique (1992). a reading of his work suggests that there are simply too many leaders promoting atrocities, in too many places, and over too long a period for any one man (or woman) to be singled out as an ‘anti-christ.’ even hochschild’s denunciation of belgian colonialism does not target leopold directly for mass murder. his is also a structuralist critique; leopold maliciously put in place the conditions for a genocide, and it comes to pass. and once the structure was in portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 21 macdonald imagining the twentieth century place, other countries such as france, portugal and germany followed belgium’s lead and committed similar atrocities, spurred by the competition for low cost rubber. nehru’s analysis is equally structuralist. rather than singling out robert clive or queen victoria, he attacks structures and institutions, namely: british colonialism, the zamindari system, and the industrial revolution. even in his denunciation of the viceroy, nehru is attacking his position in indian society, and the logic of the colonial system that introduced the office. this emphasis on structure versus individual invariably makes critiques of the past less precise; it reduces the number of exploitable symbols and metaphors, and as tatz maintains, makes genocide less salient and less understandable. 5) the inability or lack of interest in statistically quantifying the suffering or deaths of non-european groups. no quantum of suffering has been done for the nineteenth or earlier centuries in terms of ‘megadeaths.’ in the twentieth century, ‘before’ and ‘after’ population statistics (however imprecise) make it relatively easy to estimate the numbers of dead in conflict. population losses during the holocaust, ditto those in cambodia and rwanda, can be quantified reasonably accurately, even if there is disagreement about specifics. while there is often some covering up of death totals, as in stalinist russia or maoist china, we still have a good idea of how many people died, and when. for political scientists obsessed with quantifying precise totals or calculating precise numbers of ‘megadeaths,’ the imprecision of previous centuries can be frustrating, leading to a rejection of the reality of past horrors. while the number of wars in the nineteenth can often be ascertained (henderson and tucker 2001, 317-338), casualty rates are not always obvious, especially for noneuropean combatants. colonialism often produces slow and steady casualty rates comparable to losses in low to medium intensity conflict. researchers looking into past genocides must often content themselves with ranges of numbers, rather than precise totals. tatz, for example, has no accurate figures for the aboriginal population before cook’s voyages. the range of pre-conquest figures varies from 250,000 to 750,000, portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 22 macdonald imagining the twentieth century even though we know that by 1924, only 31,000 remained. researchers into the belgal famine must content themselves with a rough estimate of 10 million. even the total deaths for the 1943 famine are expressed as a range. as keay puts it, ‘famine fatalities are notoriously unreliable’ (2001, 504). hochschild is in the same boat. to reach his figure of ten million, he has relied on a 1919 official belgian government commission, who concluded that the population had been ‘reduced by half.’ however, it was only in 1924 that the first proper census was taken, which gave a figure of ten million survivors (1999, 233). stannard’s research has also involved a rejection of older, less accurate population totals. these estimates, based on the work of kroeber and the ‘berkeley school’ put the total population of the americas at less than 15 million (with only 1 million in north america). stannard therefore privileges borah and dobyns, both of whom put the preconquest population of the americas at well over 100 million. however, even these are dismissed as an underestimation; for him, ‘all estimates to date have been too low.’ in general, stannard argues that as archaeological investigation becomes more sophisticated, it will be easier for, ‘previous ‘invisible’ population loss,’ to be discovered (1992, 267-8). clearly, we will never know precisely how many people perished as a result of colonialism, nor will we ever have completely accurate totals for evaluating population size before european conquest. nevertheless, there may be anywhere from 20-70 million indigenous casualties in the nineteenth century as a direct result of colonialism in africa, the americas, asia, and the antipodes. so far, however, no one has attempted a brzezinski-esque form of quantitative analysis for earlier centuries. as new information about the past is being unearthed, our view of previous centuries will necessarily change. hoschchild was the first to systematically prepare a coherent and readable analysis of belgian genocide in the congo, yet the information existed for decades. what was lacking was the interest and the will of a competent researcher to put all of the pieces together. while not as accurate as documentation about contemporary atrocities, we should not discount the reality of previous ‘megadeaths.’ portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 23 macdonald imagining the twentieth century rather, we should understand that that colonial governments who were directly or indirectly responsible for these crimes did not keep accurate statistics for the same reason they killed these people off in the first place; these people did not matter. 6) wilful blindness, and a lack of desire to tarnish the past can prevent rigorous examination of the negative aspects of colonialism. anthony smith has written much on myths of the golden age, something that pervades western, and indeed, all cultures to one extent or another. positive myths about a nation’s past help to ‘define the historic culture community,’ while endowing it with a ‘particular energy and power’ (1983, 152). history, argues smith, forms a ‘repository or quarry from which materials may be selected in the construction and invention of nations’ (1997, 37). further, a nation’s ‘immortality’ is based on its ability to ‘unfold a glorious past, a golden age of saints and heroes, to give meaning to its promise of restoration and dignity’ (smith 1983, 153-4). the desire to preserve a pure and unadulterated sense of national history might be responsible for much of the wilful blindness we see in twentieth century retrospectives. all nations wish to preserve a positive sense of their own history. while blake’s ‘jerusalem’ might be embarrassingly dated for some, a sense of empire as a positive endeavour remains in many historical accounts. as paxman has argued in the english (1998), there is a certain nostalgia for the forgotten ‘breed,’ those who created and maintained the british empire. such men were presented as ‘fearless and philistine, safe in taxis and invaluable in shipwrecks, … the embodiment of the ruling class, men you could send to the ends of the earth and know that they would dominate the natives firmly but fairly, their needs no more than the occasional months-old copy of the times and a tin of their favourite pipe tobacco’ (1998, 177). most nations have a tendency to gloss over their past, to diminish the negative aspects of their history in the service of national mythology. the twentieth century retrospective is but one example of this process in motion. we are thus left with howard and louis’s promise that, ‘indigenous cultures remained largely intact,’ even portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 24 macdonald imagining the twentieth century after centuries of colonial exploitation (gilbert 1997, 14-5). we also have brzezinski’s hopeful analysis that atrocities in the past were rarely, ‘a matter of sustained policy’ (1995, 5). perhaps the indigenous peoples of australia and the americas would disagree. protecting his conception of a european golden age, roberts had this to say: ‘the dark side of the balance sheet of empire has so often been set out that there is mercifully no need for further elaboration on the many wickednesses it contains’ (1999, 90). the key word here is ‘mercifully,’ suggesting that in commemorating the negative legacies of colonialism we deride the self-esteem of the colonisers, destroying the portrait historians are trying to paint. conclusions in the final analysis, the nineteenth century, and those preceding it allow us to see the twentieth century as an evolution and an application of earlier forms of behaviour. our century was not in every sense a break with earlier periods, but was in many respects a continuation of it. while it is much harder to quantify, personify, and document the evils of the past, this does not meant that atrocity, violence, and abject terror did not exist. what we remember and commemorate about the twentieth century, the events we enshrine and pass down to our children will be based on the previous century as the worst ever, the best of times and the worst of times. fortunately perhaps, retrospectives carry their own in-built obsolescence. in his analysis of russian history after 1989, hobsbawm argued that cold war-era analyses written in the west, compiled by the piecing together snippets of information from the soviet union, were now of little use. with the opening up of the russian archives we now have almost full access to the ‘truth’ of what happened during communism’s history. because of increased information, he argues, ‘an enormous mass of literature that appeared during this time will now have to be junked, whatever its ingenuity in using fragmentary sources and the plausibility of its guesswork. we just won’t need it anymore.’ these books will now provide insight into the historiography of the soviet era, not its history per se (hobsbawm 1997, 243). the same can and may well be said about twentieth century chronologies in the not so distant future. what emerges from portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 25 macdonald imagining the twentieth century these retrospectives, and a new era of genocide studies, is that there are two very different ideas about previous centuries, and their significance in world history, one that privileges the twentieth century, and another that resurrects the past as an important focus of study. reference list p. bartrop, p. 2001, ‘the holocaust, the aborigines, and the bureaucracy of destruction: an australian dimension of genocide,’ journal of genocide research, vol. 3, no. 1, 75-87. browning, c. 1993, ordinary men: reserve police battalion 101 and the final solution in poland, harper collins, new york. brzezinksi, z. 1995, out of control: global turmoil on the eve of the 21st century, touchstone, new york. buckley-zistel, s. 2006, ‘remembering to forget: chosen amnesia as a strategy for local coexistence in post-genocide rwanda,’ africa: the journal of the international african institute, vol. 76, no. 2, 131-50. burleigh, m. 1994, death and deliverance: ‘euthanasia’ in germany 1900-1945, cambridge university press, cambridge. campbell, d. 1993, politics without principle: sovereignty, ethics and the narratives of the gulf war, lynne rienner, boulder, co. chakrabarty, d. 2000, provincializing europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference, princeton university press, princeton. chalk, f. 1994, ‘redefining genocide,’ in genocide: conceptual and historical dimensions, ed. g. andropoulos, university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia, 47-63. chomsky, n. 1993, year 501: the conquest continues, south end press, boston. coker, c. 1998, twilight of the west, westview, london. conquest, r. 2000, reflections on a ravaged century, w w norton & company, new york. davis, m. 2001, late victorian holocausts, verso, london. drinnon, r. 1980, facing west: the metaphysics of indian-hating and empire-building, university of minnesota press, minneapolis. dussel, e. 1995, the invention of the americas: eclipse of “the other” and the myth of modernity, translated by michael d. barber, continuum, new york. finkielkraut, a. 2000, in the name of humanity: reflections on the twentieth century, columbia university press, new york. _______ 1998, the future of a negation: reflections on the question of genocide translated by mary byrd kelly, university of nebraska press, london. frye, n. 1967, the modern century: the whidden lectures 1967, oxford university press, toronto. gilbert, m. 1997, a history of the twentieth century: volume one: 1900-1933, harpercollins, london. glover, j. 1999, humanity: a moral history of the twentieth century, jonathan cape, london. _______ 1990, causing death and saving lives, penguin, london. grenville, j.a.s. 1994, a history of the world in the twentieth century, harvard university press, cambridge. henderson, e. and r. tucker, 2001, ‘clear and present strangers: the clash of civilizations and international conflict,’ international studies quarterly, vol. 45, no. 2, june, 317-38. hobsbawm, e. 1997, on history, weidenfeld & nicolson, london. _______ 1994, age of extremes: the short twentieth century 1914-1991, penguin, london. hochschild, a. 1999, king leopold’s ghost: a story of greed, terror and heroism in colonial africa, macmillan, london. howard, m., and w.r. louis, eds, 1998, the oxford history of the twentieth century, oxford university press, oxford. hynes, s. 1998, the soldier’s tale: bearing witness to modern war, pimlico, london. ignatieff, m. 2001, virtual war: kosovo and beyond, vintage, london. _______ 1998, the warrior’s honour, chatto and windus, london. jacoby, r. 1999, the end of utopia: politics and culture in an age of apathy, basic books, new york. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 26 macdonald imagining the twentieth century judah, t. 1997, the serbs: history, myth and the destruction of yugoslavia, yale university press, new haven, ct. keay, j. 2001, india: a history, grove, london. le cour grandmainson, o. 2005, coloniser, exterminer: sur la guerre et l’etat colonial, fayard, paris. lukacs, j. 1993, the end of the twentieth century and the end of the modern age, ticknor & fields, new york. macintyre, s. 2003, the history wars, melbourne university press, melbourne. malcolm, n. 1998, kosovo: a short history, macmillan, london. manne, r. 2001, ‘in denial: the stolen generations and the right,’ australian quarterly essay, vol.1, 1113. margaret, s. 2005, reckoning with the past: teaching history in northern ireland lexington books, lanham, md. marriott, j.a.r. 1930, the eastern question: an historical study in european diplomacy, clarendon press, oxford. mignolo, w. 2005. the idea of latin america, blackwell, malden, ma. _______ 1995. the darker side of the renaissance: literacy, territoriality, and colonization, university of michigan press, ann arbor. moses, a.d. 2000, ‘an antipodean genocide? the origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of australia’, journal of genocide research, vol. 2, no. 1, 89-106. mullerson, r. 1997, human rights diplomacy, routledge, london. nehru, j. 1990, the discovery of india, oxford university press, new york. nicholson, m. 1998, international relations: a concise introduction, macmillan, london. paxman, j. 1998, the english: the portrait of a people, michael joseph, london. polya, g.m. 1995, ‘the famine of history: bengal 1943,’ international network on holocaust and genocide, vol. 10, 10-15. ponting, c. 1998, the 20th century: a world history, henry holt and company, new york. reynolds, h. 1999, why weren’t we told? a personal search for the truth about our history, viking, london. roberts, j.m. 1999, the twentieth century: the history of the world, 1901 to 2000, penguin viking, new york. singer, p. 1979, practical ethics, cambridge university press, cambridge. smith, a. 1997, ‘the “golden age” and national revival,’ in myths and nationhood, eds. g. hosking and g. schöpflin, c. hurst and company, london, 36-59. _______ 1983, theories of nationalism, holmes & meier, new york. stannard, d. 1992, american holocaust: the conquest of the new world, oxford university press, london. steiner, g. 1972, in blue beard’s castle: some notes on the redefinition of culture, yale university press, new haven, ct. tatz, c. 1999, ‘genocide in australia,’ aiatsis research discussion papers no. 8. todorov, t. 1984, the conquest of america: the quest for the other, harper & row, new york. white, h. 1987, the content of the form: narrative discourse and historical representation, johns hopkins university press, baltimore, md. wiesel, e. 1960, night, avon books, new york. wright, s. 2001, international human rights, decolonisation and globalisation: becoming human, routledge, new york. portal vol. 4 no. 1 january 2007 27 david bruce macdonald, otago university as the twentieth century drew to a close, retrospectives entered into fashion, be they boxed-set or abridged, chronological descriptions, or fin de siecle memoirs. written by some of today’s leading historians and political scientists, these have attempted, by and large, to portray the twentieth century as the most atrocious in human history, in terms of totalising ideologies, bloodshed, terror, and mass death. while providing useful coverage of twentieth century events, retrospectives have a tendency to downplay or ignore conflict and conquest in earlier centuries. the nineteenth century emerges as an age of moral values, hope, progress and enlightenment – an era squandered only from world war i onwards, leading inexorably to auschwitz, vietnam, cambodia, and yugoslavia. in 1822, ernest renan famously observed that ‘the essential element of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common but it must also have forgotten many things.’ arguably, in an effort to retain positive views about the past, societies deliberately forget uncomfortable knowledge, which then becomes a series of ‘open secrets’ known by everyone but not discussed. cohen has described a form of ‘social amnesia’: ‘a mode of forgetting by which a whole society separates itself from its discreditable past record’ (buckley-zistel 2006, 132-3). creating a new twentieth century the twentieth century as squandered utopia the nineteenth century as pristine dissecting the twentieth century conclusions reference list portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal beyond eurocentrism: manuel poirier’s breton road film western hélène sicard-cowan, mcgill university peruvian-born french director manuel poirier, who received the prize from the jury at the 1997 cannes film festival for his film western, decided to set his film about friendship, love and miscegenation between europeans and non-european immigrants, not in the ‘center’ of france, but rather on the ‘margins,’ in the region of brittany. with the growing inability of european nation-states to act as poles of identification for their populations, brittany has recently become a destination of fantasized, or actual relocation, not only for the french, but also for other nationalities, among which the british figure prominently. the popularity of the summer saga suggestively called dolmen, which the french television channel tf1 broadcast in 2005, points to the cultural significance that brittany has acquired in recent years. up to 2005, the region that had traditionally been selected as backdrop for the saga was the sunny côte d’azur in the south of france, whereas brittany was out of question for fear that its allegedly inhospitable climate would jeopardize the shooting of the film. poirier’s attraction to brittany shines through in an interview, in which the director says that the region is not a passageway to a more desirable destination, but a place where one actually goes to [settle down]: ‘elle n’est pas une région où l’on passe, mais où l’on va’ (poirier 1997a). the fantasy of coming ‘home’ in brittany lies at the heart of poirier’s film, in which two male ‘nomads,’ the catalonian-born paco and the russianborn nino, both struggle to find domestic happiness in what the film’s title implicitly presents as a european ‘far west.’ one of the most striking aspects of poirier’s film can be considered its depiction of non-european immigrants as guides and hosts for the homeless european male protagonist. in this article, i wish to explore the ways in which sicard-cowan manuel poirier’s breton road film western poirier appropriates and re-signifies the american genre of the western in western to present brittany as a micro-version of an idealized european union. in poirier’s utopian europe, brotherhood, friendship and love characterize the relationships between europeans and their intimate others, that is to say non-european immigrants. according to manuel poirier, the making of western fulfilled his own desire to leave paris and go to brittany to shoot a road movie that, like the west in american westerns, would reflect the notion of freedom (1997a). in choosing to go to the farthest end of the european continent to make his film,1 poirier takes up a french tradition dating back to the 19th century. already during the age of industrialization, french writers and artists such as gustave flaubert and paul gauguin left the french capital to undertake their own journeys in the ‘savage’ region in search of primitivism, male empowerment, authenticity, stability, intellectual freedom, and rejuvenation (sicard-cowan 2007). more recently, the image of brittany as a ‘wild’ alternative to parisian civility has become part and parcel of the region’s own self-image. for example, the producers of breizh cola, a local variant on coca cola, played on the homophonic resemblance of ‘far’ and the french term phare [lighthouse] to advertise their product as ‘l’autre cola du phare ouest’ [the other cola of the lighthouse (phare) in the west]. given this insistence on characterizing brittany as a french equivalent of the american frontier, it might be worthwhile exploring the associations conjured up by this comparison. in her book west of everything: the inner life of westerns, jane tompkins contends that ‘the [american] west seems to offer escape from the conditions of life in modern industrial society: from a mechanized existence, economic dead ends, social entanglements, unhappy personal relations, political injustice’ (1992, 4). as is the case with the heroes of conventional american westerns, the impulse to ‘go west’ for artists such as flaubert and gauguin can be said to have originated, to a large extent, in a sense of profound dissatisfaction with personal and/or socio-political circumstances. much the same could be said for manuel poirier, whose film bears the mark of the repressive political climate in which it was conceived, shot and released, and thus reveals something of the director’s reaction to such a context. 1 not only did he choose brittany, but he chose the western most département (an administrative district in france) of brittany suggestively named finistère (finis terrae). portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 2 sicard-cowan manuel poirier’s breton road film western that reaction is visible, for example, in a manifesto against the anti-immigrant policies of the french government that poirier co-signed in 1996 while working on western. specifically, the manifesto targeted the enactment of the so-called ‘debré laws’— named after the minister of the interior, michel debré—which, as mireille rosello has shown, redefined hospitality by requiring ‘any host to act as an immigration officer’ (2001, 38) vis-à-vis his/her guests. these new laws stipulated in particular that it was illegal to open the door of one’s home to a foreigner who had not been issued an official certificat d’hébergement [lodging certificate] by the french authorities prior to his/her arrival in france. in addition, anyone putting up foreigners was also required to inform french authorities of the departure of his/her guest(s). in 1997, when a french woman was accused of, and subsequently charged with, having committed a délit d’hébergement [crime of hospitality] for taking in a female friend along with the woman’s undocumented zairean partner, sixty-six film directors, including poirier, urged the french population to practice civil disobedience against the institutionalized xenophobia of the debré laws. in a text entitled ‘il faut désobéir à des lois inhumaines’ [one must disobey inhumane laws] (‘il faut’ 1997) the directors claimed to be guilty of having put up undocumented immigrants, and demanded to be judged accordingly.2 against this backdrop, western appears as a filmic meditation on hospitality. more precisely, the film can be interpreted as the translation, in the filmic medium, of what michael roth calls a ‘political nostalgia,’ which he defines as ‘an expression of the refusal to feel at home in an unjust political regime’ (1993, 34). in western, such nostalgia reveals itself most notably in poirier’s contrasting representations of paris and brittany. while the former is associated with the predominance of economic interest over human concerns and the active discouragement of contacts with foreigners, brittany is imagined as a place of daily interactions between foreigners and ‘natives.’ this sense of relationality in brittany is evidenced already in the rather unconventional opening shot3 with which the film begins: the film opens onto an image of a busy street set against the backdrop of a town situated below, with the traffic coming towards the camera. partially visible on the right side of the frame, we see a sign with the name of a 2 for more details on this matter see rosello (2001, chapter one). 3 jane tompkins indicates that ‘the land revealed … in the opening shot of a western is a land defined by absence: of trees, of greenery, of houses, of the signs of civilization, above all, absence of water and shade’ (1992, 71). portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 3 sicard-cowan manuel poirier’s breton road film western city exhibiting the letters ‘qui,’4 opposed on the left side by the hand of a hitchhiker. after a few seconds, a car driven by paco (sergi lópez), a spanish salesman who works for a parisian shoe company, pulls over, and the identity of the hitchhiker is revealed as that of an attractive breton woman. however, she declines paco’s invitation to ride with him, telling him instead to take another hitchhiker who had been waiting longer than she had. in this way, paco is brought together with the other protagonist, nino (sacha bourdo), a penniless russian who has been on the road ever since his french bride left him before their marriage two years before. for paco, this chance encounter triggers a series of unpredictable events through which poirier redefines european masculine identity from being self-contained to being-inrelation and open to alterity. such a transformation is of the most crucial importance. as will become clear below, poirier posits it as a condition for the creolization of europe.5 the first step in paco’s mutation comes when nino subsequently steals the former’s car along with all of his commercial merchandise. the incident costs paco his job because, although the car does not belong to the company, his employer has strictly forbidden him to share this private space with strangers for fear that his goods might be stolen. at a superficial level, nino might thus appear responsible for paco’s critical situation, a reading that would seem to give weight to the vilifying argument that male immigrant foreigners rob european men of their jobs. however, it would be difficult not to interpret paco’s predicament at once as poirier’s way of highlighting the negative impact of the debré laws on french society at large since, in the end, the european subject is found guilty of and punished for having shared his personal space with a foreigner—not unlike the french woman mentioned above who, as punishment for her ‘crime of hospitality,’ lost her job and was subsequently sent to jail. while not ignoring the dominant discourse that turns hospitality into a ‘crime,’ the project of western will also suggest another possible model. in an unexpected plot twist, paco eventually comes to see himself as partly responsible for the theft of his car. as he explains to marinette (elisabeth vitali), a breton woman who offers him a lift and a bed for the night, he made a mistake that no hero in a conventional western would ever 4 those familiar with the region will have recognized quimper. 5 i borrow the expression ‘creolization of europe’ from rosello and pratt (2007), editors of a themed issue of culture theory and critique titled ‘creolisation: towards a non-eurocentric europe.’ portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 4 sicard-cowan manuel poirier’s breton road film western make: after erecting a wall of silence between himself and the foreigner, paco ends up listening and speaking to nino, thereby adopting an attitude that stands in sharp contrast to the ethos of the typical film western hero. as janet tompkins indeed remarks, in a conventional western the hero would never render himself vulnerable by opening himself up to ‘penetration’ by the outside world: control is the key word [in westerns]. not speaking demonstrates control not only over feelings but over one’s physical boundaries as well. the male, by remaining “hermetic,” “closed up,” maintains the integrity of the boundary that divides him from the world. (it is fitting that in the western the ultimate loss of that control takes place when one man puts holes in another man’s body.) to speak is literally to open the body to penetration by opening an orifice; it is also to mingle the body’s substance with the substance that is outside of it. finally, it suggests a certain incompleteness, a need to be in relation. speech relates the person who is speaking to other people (as opposed to things); it requires acknowledging their existence and, by extension, their parity. if “to become a man,” as schwenger says, “must be finally to attain the solidity and selfcontainment of an object,” “an object that is self-contained does not have to open itself up in words. (56) in poirier’s film, paco pays a dear price precisely for failing to keep himself hermetically sealed to nino’s speech: the later makes the false claim that he hears an unusual noise coming from the rear of the car, paco stops the vehicle to inspect it, and finds himself stranded on the side of the road. ‘il m’a eu à l’oreille’ [he tricked my ears] paco tells marinette in the aftermath of nino’s tour de force. in the dominant french political discourse on immigration, it is common practice to invoke france’s alleged vulnerability in order to justify the need for even harsher immigration laws. but the equation between france’s supposed fragility and tougher immigration laws is precisely what poirier seeks to undo. when asked in one interview to comment on the ‘message’ of his film, poirier underlined what distinguishes his argument from those put forth by the french extreme-right and embraced by mainstream politicians: plein de gens vivent dans des situations très difficiles, ils sont au chômage, n’ont que le rmi ou même le smic. pour autant, ils ne votent pas front national. on pourrait leur rendre hommage. et moi, j’ai envie de raconter ces gens-là, tels qu’ils sont, pas en les démunissant davantage.6 (poirier 1997a) as it turns out, in the alternative space of western, which poirier qualifies as ‘utopian,’ paco’s dispossession and vulnerability does not lead to the commiseration of this 6 lots of people live in very difficult situations, they are unemployed, have only a minimum wage, or not even that. but still, they do not vote for the national front. and i want to show these people the way they are, without making them more dispossessed than they already are. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 5 sicard-cowan manuel poirier’s breton road film western character’s fate by the director, but rather to the representation of meaningful, nurturing relations between a european and a non-european, which ultimately prove beneficial not only to them, but to french society at large. in west of everything (1992, 9), jane tompkins points out a contradiction, which she perceives to be inherent in the genre of the western: ‘logic would suggest that in his flight from women and children, family life, triviality, and tameness, the western hero would run straight into the arms of the indian, wild blood brother of his soul, but it doesn’t happen.’ in his own western, poirier follows the logic suggested by tompkins by allowing a ‘buddy film’-style friendship to develop between a european man and a ‘nomadic’ foreigner. although poirier’s protagonists are marked as different in terms of geographical origins, social status and ways of life at the beginning of western, as the film progresses, the contours of their respective identities become blurred, and they eventually trade places, as evidenced by a formal parallelism of poirier’s narrative: in the opening shot, paco can be seen giving a ride to nino, whereas toward the end of film, their respective roles have been reversed. the first moment of bonding between the two men occurs when paco visits nino in the hospital after having given the russian a serious beating in retaliation for the theft of his car. at the hospital, nino tells paco that he stole his vehicle to seduce a woman. however, in spite of the car and the pair of shoes he offers to the woman in question, all nino manages to gain from his theft is a bed for the night, not the relationship he had longed for. in the meantime, paco has also met a woman named marinette, and he expresses his gratitude to nino since the latter facilitated their encounter precisely through his theft (marinette gave a lift to paco after he had been stranded on the road by nino). in the scene at the hospital, then, paco begins to subordinate economic interest to love interest, which again marks a deviation from the conventions of the genre of the western. as virginia wexman indicates in creating the couple: love, marriage, and hollywood performance, in traditional westerns, ‘romantic love is marginal’ (1993, 83) since it is subordinated to what she calls a ‘dynastic model of marriage which understands the marriage relationship not in terms of emotional fulfillment but as an economic partnership, the object of which is to make use of land to build a patrimony for future generations’ (81). in poirier’s own western, love is associated neither with marriage, nor with capital gain; in fact, paco tells marinette that marriage does not mean portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 6 sicard-cowan manuel poirier’s breton road film western anything to him, and the unexpected cancellation of nino’s marriage by his wife-to-be has left him with a less than positive attitude for the institution. as for the material benefits which the two protagonists could derive from their relationships with breton women, the living conditions of the latter do not appear to be conducive to the men’s potential accumulation of wealth: marinette sells trinkets and souvenirs in the fishing village of le guilvinec, and nino’s girlfriend nathalie is a single mother who works hard to put food in the plates of her five children. it is, above all, paco’s distancing from ownership that brings him closer to nino’s way of life. when paco asks nino if he locked the car after using it, nino answers in the negative; as a poor homeless person, he does not have the reflexes that come with ownership. soon enough, paco will relinquish his own economic interests in his quest for emotional fulfillment, as illustrated for example by his absolute disinterest in recovering his car after he sees the vehicle race by marinette’s house. poirier’s next move in deterritorializing paco’s personal identity then consists in making him homeless just like nino: marinette puts paco’s love to the test by asking him to return after spending three weeks of ‘absolute freedom,’ after which the two of them will decide if they still want to be together. marinette’s action derives from her fear that paco might end up cheating on her, like her previous lover did. as a consequence, paco and nino embark on a rather peculiar three-week journey through brittany on foot. however, despite poirier’s suggestion of great distances in his use of cinemascope,7 an aesthetics traditionally used to represent landscapes in westerns according to wexman (1993, 109), the protagonists’ journey differs sharply from the frontier conquest of traditional western heroes—consisting rather of circular motions performed in a perimeter of only eight miles. for instance, at the beginning of their journey, nino tells paco that they are heading eastward, toward the city of nantes. but after a short while, they decide to go back to the town of pont l’abbé because the waitress at the hotel 7 ‘un road-movie en cinémascope sur quinze kilomètres’ (poirier cited in burdeau 1992). james monaco (1997, 87) defines the filmic aesthetics of cinemascope.wide screen as follows: ‘the … method of achieving a widescreen ratio, the anamorphic process, became popular in the mid-fifties as “cinemascope,”’ a process via which ‘an anamorphic lens squeezes a wide image into the normal frame dimensions of the film and then unsqueezes the image during projection to provide a picture with the proper proportions. the standard squeeze ratio for the most common anamorphic systems (first cinemascope, now panavision) is 2:1; that is, a subject will appear in the squeezed frame to be half as wide as in reality.’ portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 7 sicard-cowan manuel poirier’s breton road film western where they stayed the night before has invited them to spend the evening with her and a girlfriend. similarly, at the close of the film, the protagonists return to le guilvinec, where marinette lives. the absence of a linear, teleological trajectory suggests that the protagonists’ journey cannot be equated to a conquest in the traditional sense of the word. in fact, whereas the hero in a conventional western appears to be ‘a kind of “natural” proprietor of the land’ (tompkins 1992, 81), it is far from being the case in poirier’s film. one scene in particular illustrates this point: having spent their last bit of money, nino and paco seek work in a farm. when nino accidentally wounds paco with the chain saw the farmer had let them borrow to cut tree branches, the farmer refuses to call the doctor, chases them away from his property, and even burns their personal belongings. nino interprets the farmer’s actions as being driven by a need to erase the slightest trace of their existence. such a scene underlines both the landowner’s exclusionary attitude, and the protagonists’ sense of homelessness—a far cry from the promotion of land ownership to be found in traditional westerns. furthermore, by narrating failed relationships between his male protagonists and breton women whose names refer to breton landscape and flora (marinette is evocative of the sea, and fougère means ‘fern’), poirier ironizes the western hero’s fantasy of being united with nature, for which female characters usually serve as metaphors in the genre (tompkins 1992, 109). in contrast with the scene at the breton farm, scenes shot in cinemascope that feature breton landscape as such—as opposed to the people who own it—convey images of brittany as a shelter for the two dispossessed protagonists: in such scenes, where the two men can be seen walking in the breton countryside, the camera invariably pulls back, causing them to ultimately blend in with their surroundings. this merging, however, does not cancel difference in the manner of the traditional western, where ‘the sense of otherness is suppressed [and] bodies, beasts, and landscape merge into a harmonious whole’ through the use of color, wide screen, and music (tompkins 1992, 109). poirier, on the contrary, takes great pain to represent brittany as a space open to alterity. for instance, the scenes depicting the breton landscape are accompanied by non-diegetic flamenco music; and toward the end of the film, nino is shown singing a russian song in the breton home where he has finally found domestic happiness. thus, brittany is characterized as a multilingual space since paco, nino, baptiste, as well as some of the breton characters that appear in the movie speak french along with other portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 8 sicard-cowan manuel poirier’s breton road film western european and non-european languages. therefore, western does not reduce brittany to its celtic heritage. rather, the film represents the celtic heritage as only one of several cultural influences. poirier’s emphasis on the foreigners’ various cultural backgrounds in his film undoubtedly serves to illustrate his conviction that identities need to connect with other identities in order to live, contrary to the belief held by proponents of cultural assimilation in france.8 in western, brittany’s relation to otherness, where otherness is neither degraded, nor annihilated, but welcomed in its difference, mirrors the male european subject (paco)’s gradual acceptance of the male foreigner (nino) as an equal. if, at the beginning of their journey together, paco looks down on nino for the latter’s identity as a powerless man (paco tells nino that he feels ‘shitty’ and hopeless for being jobless, homeless, and loveless like nino), he ends up trusting nino to act as mediator between himself and marinette, the woman he thinks he loves. previously, it was paco who, because of his luck in love, played the role of mediator between nino and breton women in the film. paco’s position vis-à-vis the ‘foreigner’ is further transformed when he seems to find a ‘double’ of sorts in another character baptiste (basile siekoua): a black male from the ivory coast whose legs have been paralyzed. paco can be regarded as a potential double for baptiste in that both his legs are wounded in the course of the film: the first time through the chain saw held by nino; the second time through a car door inadvertently slung open by nathalie (marie matheron), a breton woman suffering from an acute sense of isolation, whom paco immediately falls in love with. since baptiste is the only male character involved in a successful relationship with a breton woman, he appears as an ideal romantic partner and a model of masculinity to be emulated.9 in identifying paco with baptiste, it would seem that poirier raises the 8 poirier (1997a) says the following: ‘pour vivre, une identité a besoin d’aller vers les autres …. quand on a trouvé la sienne, on se sent bien, on peut s’ouvrir aux autres et les accueillir. c’est l’inverse du raisonnement d’extrême-droite qui, au nom de la sauvegarde de son identité, en appelle à se cadenasser à double tour’ [an identity needs to connect with other identities in order to live …. when one has found one’s identity, one feels good, one can open up to others and welcome them. it is the opposite of rightwing thinking, which calls for double locking one’s door for the sake of protecting one’s identity]. 9 in portraying a disabled man, and particularly a black disabled man, as embodiment of a masculinity to be emulated, poirier subverts the conventions pertaining to the representation of the western hero, whose hypermasculinity, argues wexman (1993, 92), is usually linked to his unusual size, as indicated in the portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 9 sicard-cowan manuel poirier’s breton road film western viewers’ expectations that his european protagonists will come together as a couple (paco with marinette, or with nathalie), whereas the non-european nino will continue his erratic, loveless life. on the other hand, however, in depicting an interracial couple formed by a non-european man and a european woman (baptiste and his breton girlfriend) as an ideal couple, the director also seems to suggest that a happy ending is possible for nino. as it turns out, it is paco who loses in the aleatory game of love. one scene in particular foreshadows the spaniard’s bad luck. in this scene, paco and nino spend the evening—and the night—at their waitress’s place. the women gathered there exoticize paco in spite of the latter’s attempts to undermine their efforts by remarking that both brittany and spain share a celtic cultural heritage. such an attitude on the women’s part reveals that paco is the object of fantasized erotic union, not a candidate for durable companionship. nino, on the other hand, finds both love and a home at the end of his breton journey. in order for nino’s emotional fulfillment to finally occur, the male european subject has to relinquish his sense of entitlement as the foreigner’s host. in the final scenes of the film, paco blames nino for taking advantage of his invitation to spend the evening with nathalie: according to paco, nino flirts with the woman, even though paco has told him that he is in love with her. paco’s anger mounts in spite of the fact that it is not nino who is flirting with nathalie, but nathalie herself who is attracted to nino. in light of his friend’s frustration, nino decides not to go back to nathalie’s, but ultimately, paco accepts that nathalie has chosen nino, not him. at the end of poirier’s film, paco comes to recognize nathalie’s role as decision-maker in her own private space, as well as his guest-turned-host’s own entitlement to happiness. at the end of the film, paco is even shown sharing in nino and nathalie’s happiness since the three of them can be seen laughing and sharing a meal with nathalie’s numerous children. in his review of western called ‘… à la maison’ [at home], emmanuel burdeau (1997) perceives the absence of the epic quality characteristic of traditional westerns as some kind of failed mastery of the generic conventions on poirier’s part. i would suggest instead that burdeau has missed the political significance of poirier’s intentional deviations from the genre of the western, some of which i have highlighted in this titles of such westerns as tall in the saddle (1944), the tall texan (1953), tall man riding (1955), the tall stranger (1957), and the tall t (1957). portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 10 sicard-cowan manuel poirier’s breton road film western article. in my view, western should be read as poirier’s attempt to represent immigration not as reverse colonization through the usurpation of european jobs and women by male foreigners, but rather as a source of personal and social betterment. the male foreigner, in poirier’s film, is not portrayed as a parasite threatening to undo france’s ‘fragile’ social fabric, but rather as a facilitator, and even ‘fixer’ of social relations: between men, between men and women, as well as between parents and children as evidenced in a scene in which nino attempts to reconnect an estranged son to his father. interactions between the male foreigner embodied by nino and the male european subject embodied by paco serve not only to redefine conventional european masculinity, but also to promote an alternative to the dominant eurocentric definition of europe: in poirier’s european ‘family,’ a european man has accepted his role as guest of a male foreigner; the latter, for his part, has turned into a stay-at-home father, and he forms a happy couple with a working mother providing for him and for her five children whose facial features and names reflect various ethnicities. in addition, poirier’s choice of locating his alternative european family in brittany serves to fragment france’s national identity into regional identities and bring out the country’s longstanding ethnic and cultural pluralism—a reality which continues to be denied in today’s france as evidenced by the country’s refusal to ratify the european charter for regional or minority languages. poirier’s belief that personal identity is not reducible to national affiliation gains further visibility in the final credits: there, the names of all the individuals involved in the making of the film are paired with flags representing one or more countries which are, in turn, coupled with one or more specific regions; one name is paired neither with a national affiliation, nor with a regional one. in western, it would seem that poirier defines personal identity as subjective performance, as is illustrated in the ivorian national baptiste’s mention of his breton origins. reference list boetticher, b. (dir.) 1957, the tall t, columbia pictures. burdeau, e. 1997, ‘… à la maison,’ cahiers du cinéma, no. 516, 72-73. carr, t. (dir.) 1957, the tall stranger, allied artists. ‘il faut désobéir à des lois inhumaines.’ 1997, l’humanité 12 feb. [online]. available: http://www.humanite.presse.fr/popup_print.php3?id_article=772239 [accessed 2 jan. 2007]. marin, e.l. (dir.) 1944, tall in the saddle, rko radio pictures. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 11 sicard-cowan manuel poirier’s breton road film western monaco, j. 1977, how to read a film, oxford university press, new york. poirier, m. 1997a, ‘j’ai envie de parler des gens qui veulent vivre,’ l’humanité, 27 aug. [online]. available: http://www.humanite.presse.fr/journal/1997-08-27-785971 [accessed 2 jan. 2007]. poirer, m. (dir.) 1997b, western, cns. pratt, m. & rosello, m. (eds.) 2007, special issue: creolisation: towards a non-eurocentric europe, culture theory and critique, vol. 48, no.1. rosello, m. 2001, postcolonial hospitality. the immigrant as guest, stanford university press, stanford. roth, m. 1993, ‘returning to nostalgia,’ in home and its dislocations in nineteenth-century france, ed. suzanne nash, state university of new york press, albany, 25-44. selandar, l. (dir.) 1955, tall man riding, warner brothers. sicard-cowan, h. 2007, ‘la fantaisie bretonne de gustave flaubert dans par les champs et par les grèves’ [online]. available : http://www.univ-rouen.fr/flaubert [accessed 22 june 2007]. tompkins, j. 1992, west of everything: the inner life of westerns, oxford university press, oxford, new york. wexman, v.w. 1993, creating the couple. love, marriage, and hollywood performance, princeton university press, princeton. williams, e. (dir.) 1953, the tall texan, lippert pictures. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 12 hélène sicard-cowan, mcgill university 3287-16759-2-le portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. stigma and exclusion in cross-cultural contexts special issue, guest edited by annie pohlman, sol rojas-lizana and maryam jamarani. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. hate speech or genocidal discourse? an examination of anti-roma sentiment in contemporary europe emma townsend, university of queensland the final solution to the gypsy question proposed by the national party is a blueprint for all european states … stop! their demanding and thieving mentality … we don’t want parasites among us … we protect you and your family. (national party quoted in albert 2012: 139–140) the above proposition for a ‘final solution to the gypsy question,’ strongly reminiscent of nazi genocidal propaganda, was made during the 2009 european parliament elections in the czech republic by the far-right national party (albert 2012: 139). this statement is symptomatic of the pervasive negative attitudes present in many european states towards members of the romani community. physical persecution of roma is also common, often manifested in racially motivated violence that is frequently ignored and occasionally encouraged by state authorities (amnesty international 2011: 4–5; council of europe 2012: 39–40,64; stewart 2012: xiii–xix). this context of persecution, exclusion, and stigmatisation is informed by a discourse that renders some extremely negative actions largely acceptable, such as the segregation of roma into villages (and often ghettos) enclosed by walls or monitored by guards and video cameras (amaré 2010; hollinger 2010; council of europe 2012: 93–99). the stigmatisation of roma (as well as their persecution and exclusion) in contemporary european states has been widely recognised and discussed.1 it is questionable, however, if previous approaches have been adequate to explain the nature of the discourse present in many european states towards romani people. 1 see: amnesty international (2011); centre for reproductive rights and poradňa pre obcianske a l’udské práva (centre for civil and human rights) (2003); council of europe (2012); halász (2008); hancock (2002); nicolae (2002); scicluna (2007); sigona (2005, 2011); stewart (2012). townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 2 in this article, i utilise the concept of genocidal discourse to analyse instances of negative language used in relation to romani communities in contemporary europe. in this analysis, i question whether some of the persecutory actions taken towards roma by a number of contemporary european states are informed by a discourse that is not simply stigmatising, but can be understood as genocidal discourse. i preface this analysis with an examination of the origins and history of romani populations, along with an outline of their contemporary treatment. this historical and contextual discussion provides a brief overview of the situation within which potential instances of genocidal discourse must be located. i then discuss the concept of genocidal discourse in relation to its place within the continuum of group-targeted negative language. i analyse three examples of roma-targeted extreme negative speech in three different states. through these examples, i argue that there is a genocidal discourse in european states targeted at romani people and communities. further, these examples will reveal the influence that this discourse has in shaping actions towards roma, particularly with regard to exclusionist policies. both the presence of a genocidal discourse and the influence this discourse has on informing actions towards roma are significant findings with considerable implications for contemporary european states. i examine genocidal discourse as a pan-european phenomenon. as such, this article is intended to provide a broad overview of the negative language used towards roma as a phenomenon not confined by state borders. it is thereby intended to compliment analyses of similar language and/or exclusion that are state-specific, as exemplified in the work of scholars such as kelso (2007, 2013), magyari-vincze (2006a, 2006b), sigona (2005, 2011) and woodcock (2007a, 2007b). this approach consequently conceptualises the discourse present in different european states as individual manifestations of a wider trend.2 sigona’s work on the italian response to roma through placement in ‘nomad camps’ (2005, 2011), magyari-vincze’s studies on ethnicallymotivated discrimination affecting the reproductive health of romani women in romania (2006a, 2006b), and the work of both kelso (2007, 2013) and woodcock (2007a, 2007b) on the conflicts in romania over both identities and genocide 2 a similar contention has been made by polak, who in an article examining the challenges of teaching about the romani genocide during world war ii in europe, argued ‘the history and contemporary situation in romania is very different from other countries in europe but the influence of negative attitudes to roma on the willingness to teach about their history … has been voiced by colleagues working in the field of holocaust education across europe’ (2013: 80). townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 3 recognition demonstrate the diversity of the treatment of roma in individual european states. approaching this issue as a pan-european phenomenon is not to deny that the context and history of each european state is unique; nor does it deny the specificity of many state responses towards roma. rather, my pan-european approach recognises that the treatment of and discourse towards roma—a transnational and pan-european minority group—in individual european states cannot be understood (or challenged) without understanding and acknowledging the wider context. this approach therefore offers the chance to identify, understand, and challenge wider european trends that may resist positive change when only discussed at the individual-state level. methodology and terminology genocide is both an emotive and contested concept. as argued by powell in his examination of how civilisations produce genocide, ‘almost every scholar who writes about genocide proposes his or her own definition’ (2011: 60). one definition of particular significance is found in the united nations convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (uncg). the convention criminalises genocide and allows for prosecution of its perpetrators (united nations 1948: 280). the value in the criminalisation of genocide is clear. however, there is also value in engaging with sociological perspectives on the concept of genocide. this approach emphasises the importance of understanding what happened—genocide—and how and why that genocide occurred (powell 2011: 59). in arguing for the value of a sociological understanding of genocide, powell contends that while the findings of such an examination may be complex, ‘we need to face these complexities and confusions if we hope to find ways to prevent genocide rather than to punish it after the fact’ (2011: 59). this article similarly engages with genocide—or, more specifically, genocidal discourse—as a sociological concept, and accordingly refrains from analysis of the concept’s legal uses or implications. this discussion must also be prefaced with a note on terminology, which plays a significant role in any discussion of roma. many of the names used to refer to roma are born of prejudice or misunderstanding (gheorghe and liégeois 1995: 7). the term ‘roma’ is deliberately used here and refers to all those who identify themselves as roma, ‘sinti,’ ‘travellers,’ ‘gypsies,’ ‘cale/kale,’ ‘romanichel’ or ‘manouches,’ among others (hübschmannova 2003: 2–3). ‘rom’ is the term most roma groups use townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 4 themselves, of which ‘roma’ is the plural form (amnesty international 2011: 3; gheorghe & liégeois 1995: 8). the use of the term ‘gypsy/gypsy’ is no longer appropriate, given that it was based on the mistaken belief that roma were egyptian in origin (hancock 2002: xxi). likewise, the various contemporary names used that originate from the ancient greek ‘atsinganos’ are inappropriate; this name meant ‘untouched/untouchable’ and is therefore highly (though often unknowingly) stigmatising (gheorghe & liégeois 1995: 7). i therefore deliberately use the term roma for these reasons. romani history in europe the roma are the largest minority group in contemporary europe (amnesty international 2011: 3; council of europe 2012: 11). despite a lack of accurate data, it is estimated that there are 10 to 12 million roma in europe, and this population is transnational, non-territorial, and extremely heterogeneous (amnesty international 2011: 3; european association for the defense of human rights 2012: 7; gil-robles 2006: 4; petrova 2003: 114). the exclusion, persecution and stigmatisation of roma commenced almost immediately upon their arrival in europe. the romani people originated in india and migrated west for unknown reasons, with records indicating that the first arrivals in europe occurred in the thirteenth century (mcgarry 2010: 10). by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries roma were present across europe (fraser 1995: 85–122; gheorghe & liégeois 1995: 7). claims of witchcraft, thievery and espionage were frequently levelled against roma (barany 2002: 89; fraser 1995: 75, 89; mcgarry 2010: 10–12). from the sixteenth century, countries such as denmark, england, france, germany, italy, the netherlands, norway, scotland, sweden, and switzerland passed various laws that made it illegal—often under threat of death—for roma to cross their borders (fraser 1995: 131; liégeois 1994: 125–130; petrova 2003: 123–124). additionally, roma were widely used as slaves in the territory that is present day romania for centuries, with this practice abolished only in 1864 (hancock 2002: 18–25). one of the most widely held and influential stereotypes of roma has been that of a ‘biological’ nomadism (hancock 2002: 101; mayall 2004: 130, 133; mcgarry 2010: 8; petrova 2003: 120). nomadism came to be almost synonymous with romani culture and was routinely outlawed (kenrick & puxon 1972: 50; mayall 2004: 130, 252). this myth has shaped many of the interactions by mainstream european society with roma. townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 5 this was particularly true as the socioeconomic landscape in europe designated nomadism as neither economically useful nor socially acceptable behaviour (petrova 2003: 124, 129). despite this enduring stereotype, it is clear that nomadism was (and still is) partially or even largely a reactionary behaviour developed by romani communities in response to economic considerations, enduring persecution, and the difficulties faced in accessing the same rights as other citizens (crowe 2003: 91; fraser 1995: 43; gheorghe & liégeois 1995: 7; hancock 2002: 101; liégeois 1994: 27). the endurance and influence of the nomadic myth makes clear the impact that language and perceptions of roma have had on their treatment and in determining what actions are ‘acceptable’ in contemporary europe. along with the nomadic myth, other negative perceptions of roma have been influential, notably the enduring, negative and powerful stereotypes of roma as ‘dirty,’ ‘thieves,’ ‘dangerous’ and ‘inferior’ (gheorghe & liégeois 1995: 8–9; hammarberg 2008). with the rise of ideas of race and race science in the nineteenth century, such perceptions assumed fixed biological overtones (fings, heuss & sparing 1997: 19; hancock 1999: 45, 47, 2002: 35; mayall 2004: 89). this racial discourse, seized upon by the nazis in the 1930s, justified the large scale genocide of roma alongside the many other victims of nazism during the holocaust (huttenbach 1991: 31–33). it is unclear precisely how many roma were murdered during this genocide; many deaths occurred outside the organised structure of concentration camps and thus went unrecorded, and pre-war population figures were incomplete (hancock 2002: 46–47; united states holocaust memorial museum 2001). the most widely accepted estimates place the number of deaths in the range of 250,000–500,000 (amnesty international 2011: 4; fraser 1995: 268; huttenbach 1991: 45; kelso 2007: 47, 2013: 63; liégeois 1994: 134; polak 2013: 82).3 this period in european history again demonstrates the importance of perceptions and language in informing what actions are seen as ‘acceptable’ and ‘legitimate’ for romani people. despite the substantial evidence indicating that this genocide was motivated by ideas of an inferior romani ‘race,’ the genocide of roma during wwii was denied by many states until recently, with germany only officially recognising the romani experience 3 a number of scholars estimate the number of deaths were far higher: hancock provides estimates of 500,000–1,500,000 (2002: 48); mcgarry similarly estimates 250,000–1,500,000 roma were killed (2010: 20) – and nicolae suggests that 250,000–1,000,000 roma were murdered during wwii (2002: 66). townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 6 during the holocaust as genocide in 1982 (sridhar 2006: 3571; united states holocaust memorial museum 2011; wippermann 2006: 175). an official memorial for the romani holocaust, referred to by some scholars as ‘porajmos’ (devouring) or ‘samudaripen’ (murder of all), was inaugurated in berlin only in 2012 (evans 2012; polak 2013: 79, 82). this belated historical recognition of genocide has contributed to the contemporary environment in which the persecution of roma continues.4 their past genocide has not been widely acknowledged, and consequently the links with their contemporary treatment are not made—whether these links are identified in the language used in reference to roma, or in the policies and actions that target romani populations. serious persecution of roma has continued throughout the post-wwii period, arguably at least partially as a result of the lack of recognition of the romani genocide. one of the most egregious examples of genocidal intent towards roma in post-war europe is identifiable in the numerous instances of coercive and forced sterilisations of romani women and girls (european association for the defense of human rights 2012: 15). state run programs of involuntary sterilisation existed in norway from 1934 to 1974, sweden from 1935 to 1975, and in switzerland from the 1920s through to the 1980s (scicluna 2007; staff of the u.s. commission on security and cooperation in europe 2006: 4). a frequently coercive sterilisation program was also run in czechoslovakia beginning in 1967 and enduring through the break-up of the state, with cases alleged as recently as 2009 (judr. otakar motejl: public defender of rights 2005: 26; open society foundations 2011: 3; thomas 2006). these sterilisation practices confirm that a stigmatising view of roma endured largely uninterrupted in the post-wwii period. the perceptions of romani people as ‘inferior,’ ‘unhealthy’ and as a ‘threat’ to states that justified their genocide in nazi germany continued to be perpetuated (albert 2011: 2; helsinki watch 1992: 21–21, 28–29). this language has very strong parallels with that 4 a growing body of scholarship challenges the exclusion of roma from holocaust studies and remembrance with scholars, romani activists, and genocide survivors and their families all contributing to the powerful movement for recognition and remembrance. for example, hancock (2002), kelso (2007, 2013), polak (2013), and woodcock (2007b), have and continue to produce work challenging the historical denial of recognition. however, this article is focused on the actions, constructs, and opinions of the non-romani majority towards the romani minority; therefore the historical denial and silencing of the romani genocide is significant as the majority european consciousness does not necessarily reflect the work of scholars and activists. for example, kelso reports that ‘history and civic teachers across [romania] told me that they knew almost nothing about the holocaust history of roma’ (2013: 66). townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 7 used to justify the genocide of roma in nazi germany, demonstrating a continuity of a potentially genocidal discourse within a wider context of ongoing persecution. the persecution, exclusion and stigmatisation of roma intensified across europe in the 1990s in the aftermath of the collapse of communism, the expansion of the european union, and the resulting economic, political and societal changes (amnesty international 2011: 4–5; brearley 2001: 591; fraser 1995: 289–290; liégeois 1994: 155; o’nions 2011: 373; stewart 2012: xvi). the particular persecution of roma during this period has been noted by the organization for security and co-operation in europe, which in a report published in 2000 argued that: even against the backcloth of a decade blighted by extreme forms of racist intolerance, the phenomenon of prejudice against roma is singular. romani communities are the subject of hostile perceptions across an extraordinary range of countries. in some, politicians and citizens feel few scruples about expressing derogatory stereotypes of roma. in this climate, roma have been prime targets of skinhead violence and, at times, what must properly be called pogroms. (van der stoel 2000: 3) the proposition that ‘the phenomenon of prejudice against the roma is singular’ is significant: it asserts that the persecution of roma was (and is) not simply symptomatic of a changing economic and political landscape. likewise, it cannot be equated with the reactions of many states towards migrants and outsiders in similar periods. the persecution of the roma in contemporary europe can and should be placed in a category of its own. exclusion and stigmatisation in the contemporary period the contemporary period (from 2000 to the present day), on which this article focuses, has seen no abatement in the persecution of roma or the negative language used in reference to them. roma are stigmatised and excluded on a regular basis and are also frequently made targets of racially motivated violence (council of europe 2012: 39– 40,63-64; stewart 2012: xiii–xix). in his book examining the increasing anti-roma sentiment in europe in recent years, stewart quotes the mayor of a hungarian village as saying: i just don’t understand this question about who is a gypsy. it is quite clear, isn’t it? everyone who is a gypsy is a gypsy. you can smell them from a kilometre. there is no definition for this—i can’t find one. you have to accept that a person who was born a gypsy has a different temperament; they live differently and behave differently. i grew up among gypsy children. everyone who is a gypsy has remained a gypsy. it makes no difference if they have a bath every night, the smell remains, just like with horses. there is a specific gypsy smell. (2012: xviii) townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 8 similar attitudes can be identified in romania; the mayor of the town of craiova was quoted in 2005 as saying that ‘if i put them [roma] in the zoo and showed them to kids saying look at the monkeys, they wouldn’t see any difference’ (scicluna 2007). the two statements indicate the acceptability of the stigmatisation of roma in contemporary europe. in an examination of negative language and hate speech, the political philosopher bhikhu parekh argued that ‘if anything can be said about a group of persons with impunity, anything can also be done to it’ (parekh 2006: 218). the relationship between speech and action is significant, as racially motivated violence targeting roma has occurred across europe with methods ranging from assaults to arson and fire bombings (council of europe 2012: 63–64; stewart 2012: xiv–xvi). such incidents are regularly denied sincere investigation by authorities (council of europe 2012: 64; stewart 2012: xiv–xvi). in a survey conducted in 2008, 18 percent of romani people questioned reported that they had been targeted by racially motivated violence in the preceding year (european union agency for fundamental rights 2009: 9). such incidents of racially motivated violence cannot be understood—and therefore prevented—without contextualising them as physical manifestations of stigmatising speech. the influence of negative speech can also be observed in the violent exclusion of roma from majority european societies through official policies and actions. for example, in 1999, a wall was constructed in the czech town of usti nad labem, with the mayor stating that ‘this wall is about one group that obeys the laws of the czech republic and behaves according to good morals, and about a group that breaks these rules—doesn’t pay rent, doesn’t use proper hygiene and doesn’t do anything right’ (quoted in perlez 1998). in ostrovany in slovakia in 2009, another wall was built ostensibly to protect the non-roma residents and to prevent roma ‘from entering private gardens and stealing’ (cyril revak quoted in bednarikova 2009). in 2011 in the town of baia mare, romania, a wall was built between the roma and non-roma to maintain ‘order and discipline’ (catalin chereches quoted in lacatus 2011). this exclusion only deepened when in june 2012, the romani community was moved from their walled ghetto in baia mare to accommodation in a decommissioned chemical factory (lacatus 2012). within days, signs of poisoning were shown by both children and adults (lacatus 2012). the justifications offered for such acts of extreme physical exclusion—as well as the townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 9 occurrence of such acts in and of themselves—typify the widespread negative discourse that targets roma. this discourse has the potential to legitimise extreme acts of violence and physical exclusion as the only viable course of action in the face of such a ‘threat.’ genocidal discourse and negative language the holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers; it began with words. these are the catastrophic effects of racism (cotler 2011: 132). genocidal discourse, as i call the form of discourse identified above, is a form of negative, group-targeted language. it can be situated within a set of concepts that refer to the virulent and often violent language used to stigmatise and denigrate a people belonging to a ‘group.’ the concept of genocidal discourse is rarely defined; however, its meaning can be inferred through the definition of the term ‘genocide.’ genocide refers to the intentional targeting of a group for destruction as defined in the united nations convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (uncg): any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (united nations 1948: 280) accordingly, a genocidal discourse refers to a widely used and accepted language of negation, destruction and erasure targeted at a particular group or groups. while other forms of negative language that target roma are heard in europe, roma are frequently the targets (and victims) of a discourse that legitimises a genocidal end-goal—the erasure, removal or destruction of the romani group—but that does not necessarily encourage or incite a genocidal process.5 the adequacy of genocidal discourse will become clear through my analysis of the concepts of hate speech, genocidal discourse, and incitement to genocide, with all three concepts being located along what could be termed a ‘negative language continuum.’ 5 for example, nicolae has repeatedly identified hate speech targeted at roma (2002, 2005, 2009). other scholars have examined how labels and stereotypes (often negative) ascribed to roma by non-roma in a number of european states are purposively utilised and engaged with by both non-roma and roma: see sigona (2005, 2011) and woodcock (2007a, 2007b). townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 10 a number of authors have examined the various categories of negative language, some of whom have also elaborated on some form of a continuum of language (benesch 2007–2008, 2011a, 2011b, 2012; cotler 2011; cryer 2005; parekh 2006; timmermann 2008; wallenstein 2001). within this scholarship, hate speech is a widely analysed and contested concept (benesch 2007–2008, 2011b, 2012; parekh 2006; timmermann 2008). benesch defines hate speech as ‘a very broad category including (1) speech that is intended to harm directly, by insulting or offending the person or people it purports to describe; and (2) speech intended to cause indirect harm, by inciting one person or group against another’ (2011b: 390). benesch also makes clear that hate speech ‘denigrates people on the basis of their membership in a group’ (2012: 1). timmermann likewise conceptualises hate speech as a form of language that stigmatises, demonises and humiliates a group, resulting in the targeted group experiencing ‘utter helplessness and lack of control’ (2008: 359). according to such conceptualisations, hate speech is the public expression of hate. this hate can and does harm; however, it is not necessarily intended to cause action and it does not promote group destruction. parekh argues for a more extreme conceptualisation of hate speech: hate speech expresses, advocates, encourages, promotes or incites hatred of a group of individuals distinguished by a particular feature or set of features. hatred is not the same as a lack of respect or even positive disrespect, dislike, disapproval, or a demeaning view of others. it implies hostility, rejection, a wish to harm or destroy, a desire to get the target group out of one’s way, a silent or vocal and a passive or active declaration of war against it. (2006: 214, emphasis mine) in parekh’s conceptualisation hate speech exceeds the boundaries of hate, for to hate a group and to desire its erasure or destruction are different sentiments. a desire for group destruction is essentially genocidal in nature and reflects a far greater hostility than ‘hate.’ the sentiments contained in parekh’s conceptualisation are therefore closer to genocidal discourse or incitement to genocide, as they either use the language of or suggest acts that pursue a goal of group destruction. hate speech is the verbal expression of hostility, vilification, denigration and stigmatisation. it is a necessary condition for further radicalisation of negative language; without the denigration and stigmatisation of a group, justifying their destruction could not occur: an exploration of the thought processes and emotions of those who have committed hate crimes and been actively involved in mass atrocities reveals how the stigmatization of the victims and their exclusion from the human community enabled the perpetrators to engage in these acts while simultaneously remaining convinced that these acts were necessary and, in fact, corresponded to what the prevailing morality required of them. (timmermann 2008: 359) townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 11 cotler concurs, arguing that: the enduring lesson of the holocaust and the genocides that followed, from srebrenica to rwanda, was that they occurred not only because of the machinery of death, but because of the statesanctioned incitement to hate. it was this teaching of contempt, this demonizing of the other; this is where it all began. (cotler 2011: 131) hate speech therefore plays a vital role in making possible a radicalisation of hate into justified destruction, and its importance in creating a context of violent hatred that can be used to legitimise physical actions cannot be understated. it does not, however, justify destruction or necessarily suggest any kind of physical action in and of itself. as such it is located at the least extreme end of the negative language continuum. at the opposite end of the negative language continuum is incitement to genocide. incitement refers to ‘an attempt to persuade another person, by whatever means, to commit an offense,’ in this case, genocide (cryer 2005: 493). therefore, incitement to genocide refers to speech that does not simply call for group destruction, but that is likely to or capable of provoking individuals or groups to commit violent acts intended to destroy the target (victim) group. further, incitement to genocide is included in the uncg as a crime alongside genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide (united nations 1948: 280). in order for a speech or any other form of expression to fall under the rubric of incitement to genocide, a number of preconditions must be met. benesch lists the indicators necessary for speech to be categorised as incitement to genocide, which focus on the context in which the incitement occurred (for example, previous violence and psychological conditioning) and the receptiveness of the audience to the incitement (2007–2008: 498). cryer similarly contends that for incitement to have occurred and to be prosecutable, it must have been public, direct (particularly as understood within its context), and the expression of the inciter’s own desire for the target group to be destroyed (2005: 500). wallenstein likewise engages with the concept of incitement to genocide, arguing for the centrality of intent: ‘incitement cannot be accidental; it must be coordinated and dispersed by those with a broader plan of destruction of a people’ (2001: 388). the above criteria make clear that incitement to genocide is the purposeful, direct, and public call for the destruction of a group, made to a receptive audience within a context already primed for the hatred, delegitimisation and rejection of the target group. this form of negative language is intended to provoke a physical manifestation of the violent townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 12 sentiment being expressed. incitement to genocide cannot be identified (or, more specifically, prosecuted) without the presence of an audience. it is therefore situated at the far end of the negative language continuum. that said, neither hate speech nor incitement to genocide encapsulate the contemporary situation in which roma are denigrated and vilified without being the target of widespread calls for physical genocide. rather, they are the targets (and victims) of a discourse that uses a language of negation, erasure and destruction. hate speech genocidal discourse incitement to genocide less extreme more extreme figure 1: the negative language continuum. as already noted, the most adequate and useful concept that encapsulates the true nature of this language is genocidal discourse. on the negative language continuum, genocidal discourse is a more extreme form of negative language than hate speech. genocidal discourse involves the escalation of a widely acceptable language of hatred into language that proposes, promotes or justifies the destruction of a group as acceptable and/or necessary. such calls for destruction do not necessarily have to be located within a plan for destruction or a call for people to cause this destruction. the identification of a genocidal discourse is not dependent on a receptive audience. for this reason genocidal discourse is a less extreme form of negative language than incitement to genocide on the negative language continuum. it must be noted, however, that while physical violence may not occur as a result of genocidal discourse, its use has consequences, and national policies toward and state treatment of roma can be informed by its presence. further, genocidal discourse has the potential to escalate into incitement to genocide, which is both a crime as defined in the uncg and a clear indicator that genocide could occur (benesch 2007–2008: 488, 493). despite the frequent confluence of the different forms of negative language, the concept of genocidal discourse helps to explain some of the language used in contemporary europe. genocidal discourse in contemporary europe czech republic and geographical erasure—national party and workers’ party one of the most overt and public manifestations of genocidal discourse directed at townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 13 roma in contemporary europe has been expressed by the czech national party (np). in 2009 in its campaign for election to the european parliament the national party produced a television advertisement that explicitly utilised a genocidal discourse against roma (albert 2012: 139). the advertisement opened with a depiction of a flock of white sheep literally kicking a black sheep off the czech flag (national party 2009). as the advertisement progresses it becomes clear that this scene is intended to depict ‘white sheep’ czech citizens ‘kicking out’ the romani ‘black sheep.’ the next screen states that ‘the final solution to the gypsy question proposed by the national party is a blueprint for all european states’ (albert 2012: 139). this ‘final solution blueprint’ involves the deportation of all roma ‘back’ to india—a country that the romani people migrated from centuries earlier (albert 2012: 140). the advertisement continues by making the following statements: ‘stop black racism,’ ‘national party against integration of inadaptables,’ ‘no! favouring of gypsies,’ ‘we defend czech national interests,’ ‘stop! their demanding and thieving mentality,’ ‘your taxes—their future!,’ and ‘we do not want black racists among us’ (albert 2012: 139–140). the advertisement concludes with the statement, ‘we don’t want parasites among us,’ and the np claim that ‘we protect you and your family’ (albert 2012: 139–140). the np election advertisement was aired briefly on the public station czech television, and was subsequently placed on youtube after being pulled from the station (albert 2012: 140). once on youtube, many supportive comments were made of the advertisement and the sentiments it espoused, including the claim that ‘the roma are the cancer of the czech republic’ (albert 2012: 140). during this period, the czech workers’ party (wp) organised ‘protection corps’ of uniformed party members to ‘monitor’ romani neighbourhoods (albert 2012: 141). this action was allegedly taken in response to complaints made against romani communities by ‘decent’ (read non-romani) citizens that had not been addressed by police (albert 2012: 141). the wp claimed, as did the np in its advertisement, that majority czech society is the victim of ‘black’ (roma) racism, but that the party itself is not racist (albert 2012: 142–143). albert argues that such claims are symptomatic of a wider trend in czech society by which ‘the non-roma “majority society,” which has the power to exclude the roma and has done so for generations, views itself as the victims of those it excludes, and attempts to usurp the rhetoric of rights to justify its behaviour’ (albert 2012: 143). townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 14 the two incidents in the czech republic from 2008–2009 indicate how genocidal discourse towards and about the romani people may be expressed by those with some degree of public influence. in this discourse, roma are thieves, drains on the state and hardworking tax payers, parasites, and ultimately present such a threat to the czech state that a ‘final solution’ must be found to the ‘problem’ they embody. clear parallels are evident between this language and the genocidal discourse used in nazi germany towards roma, along with jewish and other peoples. thomas hammarberg, the 2006– 2012 council of europe commissioner for human rights, noted this parallel: today’s rhetoric against the roma is very similar to the one used by nazis and fascists before the mass killings started in the thirties and forties. once more, it is argued that the roma is a threat to safety and public health. no distinction is made between a few criminals and the overwhelming majority of the roma population. this is shameful and dangerous. (hammarberg 2008) indeed, the np articulates a genocidal discourse of erasure of roma through the proposed deportation of roma from ‘all european states.’ in the np advertisement, roma are the victims of an unambiguous plan for group-targeted geographical erasure. both the wp and the np were far-right extremist parties (albert 2012: 138) that received a very small percentage of votes in european parliament elections—in 2009 the wp received 1.07 percent of the vote, the np a mere 0.26 percent (albert 2012: 153–154). despite these poor polling results, the influence of the rhetoric used by the parties should not be understated (albert 2012: 138). albert argues that the language used and actions taken by the two parties reflect the deep anti-romani sentiments in czech society, and are not isolated manifestations of extremism (albert 2012: 138). a 2012 poll showed that 71 percent, or almost three quarters of the czech population, held a negative view of romani people (bikár 2012).6 these opinions range from somewhat negative (34 percent), to unequivocally negative (26 percent), with 10 percent of respondents claiming they ‘loathe’ roma (bikár 2012). only 5 percent of respondents reported having a good or very good opinion of roma in the czech republic (bikár 2012). a 2013 poll conducted by the same agency found that negative attitudes towards roma have remained stable, despite an increase in the tolerance for the right of minority groups generally to live according to their cultural values (czech press agency 2013).7 6 this poll was conducted by the stem agency among a representative sample of 1062 czech residents from 27 october to 5 november 2012, with the respondents chosen by the quota selection method (bikár 2012). 7 1000 respondents were polled by stem between 2 and 9 april 2013 (czech press agency 2013). townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 15 even when informed by no personal experience, the perceptions of roma held by many czechs remain generally negative: ‘in the absence of direct personal experience, nonroma relate claims of romany transgressions to other non-roma for which they are usually unable to offer proof (even if the claims defy reason)’ (albert 2012: 144). in the anti-romani environment spurred on by the public expression of genocidal discourse, riots, public anti-roma demonstrations, and arson attacks targeting roma have occurred in recent years. in one instance, a romani family threatened with murder were denied assistance by the police: ‘when they called the authorities for help, they were told either to barricade themselves in their home and call the police if someone tried to break in, or to leave town’ (albert 2012: 161). the wide anti-romani sentiment in the czech republic provides the backdrop against which more extreme deployments of genocidal discourse, typified by the two rightwing political parties discussed above, can take place. thus, the securitising of roma as a physical threat to the state that demands monitoring clearly becomes legitimated and even expected in a state where romani people are the targets of an acceptable and often explicit genocidal discourse. france and geographical erasure a romani-targeted genocidal discourse is also identifiable in contemporary france, which is epitomised in a statement made by francois hollande in 2012 during his presidential campaign (glenny 2012: viii). while still a presidential candidate, hollande stated that ‘the origin of the problem, that is to say the movement of a population that is nowhere accepted and lives in abject conditions, is that we did not establish a european regulation (une règle européenne) to keep that population where it ought to live, in romania’ (quoted in glenny 2012: viii). the statement must be situated within a climate of high tensions between roma and non-roma in france, particularly due to the strong association in the country between roma and crime (about 2012: 95–96; council of europe 2012: 41). hollande made this call for a europe-wide regulation on the romani ‘problem’ when he was a presidential candidate in an election that he went on to win. as such, his comments appeared to be acceptable and legitimate to the general french public, and thus can be understood as representative of a wider antiroma discourse that promotes the geographic erasure and destruction of the romani group. hollande does not call for roma to ‘change,’ to be integrated, or to be accepted. rather, his statement makes clear that the best ‘solution’ to the romani ‘problem’ is to remove them entirely from france, and from most other european countries, in what townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 16 amounts to another example of how genocidal discourse in contemporary europe towards roma is played out. parallelling the genocidal discourse in the public domain against roma in france have been such state-sponsored actions as the expulsions of roma that began under the sarkozy government in the summer of 2010. roma were widely targeted for collective eviction and expulsion, with a cash payment of €300 offered to any roma who ‘volunteered’ to leave (council of europe 2012: 204; o’nions 2011: 380). while the french government denied that roma were the specific targets of this policy, an august 2010 presidential circular stated that roma camps should be prioritised for eviction (about 2012: 95–99; o’nions 2011: 380). the expulsions were not the first ethnically targeted policies of exclusion towards roma in france; the genocidal discourse that drove them also informed other exclusionary policies dating from 2007 (amaré 2010). this particular policy saw the creation of a village d’insertion (social insertion and/or integration village) in a parisian prefecture after a fire destroyed a shanty-town in aubervilliers (amaré 2010). there are now a number of these villages in france, all of which are officially intended to ensure their (almost exclusively) romani residents develop the skills necessary to integrate successfully into french society (hollinger 2010). the villages guarantee all residents access to education, employment, healthcare and housing (hollinger 2010). however, in these villages the residents are strictly monitored and controlled by the state. the villages are walled, monitored by guards and video cameras, access to the villages is stringently controlled (particularly for any ‘outsiders’) and curfews are regularly enforced for residents (amaré 2010; hollinger 2010). under an allegedly benevolent guise, such villages are a physical manifestation of the same sentiment of geographical erasure on a continental scale expressed by francois hollande in 2012. the genocidal discourse aimed at geographical erasure in france has been influential in underwriting exclusionary actions and policies that are supported both by french authorities and majority french society. slovakia and biological erasure the final example of the romani-targeted genocidal discourse in europe is drawn from slovakia, where in 1995 the then minister of health, lubomir javorsky, stated that ‘the government will do everything to ensure that more white children than romani children are born’ (quoted in zoon 2001: 66). the statement exemplifies a broader national townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 17 concern in slovakia about the higher birth rate of the slovakian romani population compared to the non-roma slovak population (european roma rights centre 2003: 10–11; holt 2005: 927; land 2008: 60). the key fears javorsky was alluding to are that the romani population will soon outnumber mainstream slovak society and dominate the country, and that the romani population is inherently unhealthy and inferior (centre for reproductive rights and poradňa 2003: 86; european roma rights centre 2003: 10–11; zoon 2001: 66–67). these sentiments and the policies and actions informed by them (such as involuntary sterilisations) were also widely expressed and practiced in communist czechoslovakia (centre for reproductive rights and poradňa 2003: 41; council of europe 2012: 93– 99). this suggests a historical continuity of anti-roma rhetoric and policies spanning the communist and post-communist epochs. the genocidal discourse advocating the biological erasure of roma has persisted throughout the post-communist period, as typified by a 1993 speech from then slovak prime minister, vladimir meciar: we ought to take into consideration … the extended reproduction of the socially inadaptable population. already children are giving birth to children—poorly adaptable mentally and socially, with serious health problems, who are simply a great burden on this society … if we don’t deal with them now, then they will deal with us in time. (quoted in zoon 2001: 66) a position paper generated by the ministry of health in october 2000 argued that ‘if we do not succeed in integrating the romani population and modify their reproduction[,] the percentage of nonqualified and handicapped persons in the population will increase’ (zoon 2001: 67). also in 2000, robert fico, the ‘leader of the smer party … call[ed] for an end to “the growth of the poor quality romani population”’ (european roma rights centre 2000). the examples of genocidal discourse from slovakia are not as recent as others discussed in this article; however, they reflect a concern about the roma that has resulted in calls for the biological erasure and destruction of at least part of the romani communities in slovakia. to designate a high romani birth rate or an increased but ‘inferior’ romani population a threat to the slovak state that must be ‘dealt with’ is to engage with a genocidal discourse of biological erasure. further, such statements could potentially justify specific and extreme actions that are intended to prevent future generations of romani people in the slovak republic. it is relevant to note here that while the communist era state-sponsored program of ethnically targeted sterilisation of roma was officially abandoned in post-communist townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 18 slovakia, allegations of continued involuntary sterilisation of romani women have been documented since then (centre for reproductive rights and poradňa 2003: 13–14).8 the number of romani women involuntarily sterilised in slovakia is unknown. a 2003 european roma rights centre submission to the united nations human rights committee detailed interviews with approximately 200 romani women who had been involuntarily sterilised (european roma rights centre 2003: 8). another 2003 report authored by the centre for reproductive rights and poradňa interviewed 110 romani slovak women who either knew or strongly suspected they had been sterilised since the collapse of communism (centre for reproductive rights and poradňa 2003: 14). these numbers refer only to the women interviewed by the authors of both reports; it is highly likely that other cases exist. while these sterilisations were not the result of official state policy, they were largely performed by doctors employed by state hospitals or state actors (council of europe, commissioner for human rights 2003). the slovak government has been reluctant to assume responsibility for this practice, or to express official regret (albert 2011: 2; centre for reproductive rights and poradňa 2003: 17; zoon 2001: 65). after a number of inquiries and investigations, the slovak government’s responses have included denial that sterilisations were performed without consent (regardless of the type of consent gained), and admission that involuntary sterilisations have technically occurred but were not in violation of any rights as the sterilisations were ‘medically indicated’ (centre for reproductive rights and poradňa 2002: 44–48, 2003: 1–6; council of europe, commissioner for human rights 2003; ministry of health of the slovak republic 2003). the united nations human rights committee determined in 2011 that an investigation by the slovak government into the practice was inadequate and expressed concern ‘at the narrow focus of the investigation and the lack of information on concrete measures to eliminate forced sterilisation, which, allegedly, continues to take place’ (united nations human rights committee 2011: 4). actions intended to prevent births in a particular group are potentially genocidal. for this reason, slovak government 8 involuntary sterilisations of romani women have also been documented in post-communist czech republic, where a 2004–2005 investigation carried out by the czech public defender of rights identified at least 40 romani women who had been involuntary sterilised in the modern czech state: see judr. otakar motejl: public defender of rights (2005) and staff of the u.s. commission on security and cooperation in europe (2006). townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 19 responses to the controversy over sterilisation represent a particularly serious manifestation of the genocidal discourse in contemporary europe towards roma. conclusion the three national examples identified in this article highlight the complex ways by which a genocidal discourse targets roma in contemporary europe. roma are frequently made targets by a language of negation, erasure and destruction, with the group likewise perceived by majority populations as posing a ‘threat’ to the state that demands a response. the suggested—and sometimes enacted—responses to this discourse translate as physical attempts at erasure. this may involve geographical erasure, whereby the removal of roma from the town/region/state in which they reside is advocated in an attempt to eliminate the roma presence in the area of concern, as has happened in the czech republic and france. an alternative is biological erasure, the promotion of methods of population control (for example, coercive or forced sterilisations) intended to prevent the birth of future generations of roma, as has been identified in slovakia. in addition, physical violence against roma is also commonplace in many european states. the circulations of a genocidal discourse directed at the roma in contemporary european states is significant. when the erasure of romani people is widely legitimised through language, actions intended to achieve that goal are not merely possible but become probable. consequently, many of the attacks on and policies toward the roma across european states that could be seen to be persecutory or discriminatory may actually be physical manifestations of group targeted erasure. the call of ‘never again’ was made across europe in the aftermath of the holocaust—a genocide that included the romani group amongst its victims. recognition of the genocidal discourse targeting roma and the potentially destructive acts that have resulted from it can potentially transform broader perceptions and treatment of romani people. continued misconceptualisation of the attitudes towards roma in contemporary europe (and the policies and behaviours informed by those attitudes) can only result in continued failure to create the conditions necessary for positive transformation. townsend hate speech or genocidal discourse? portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 20 reference list about, i. 2012, ‘underclass gypsies: an historical approach on categorisation and exclusion in france in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ in the gypsy ‘menace’: populism and the new antigypsy politics, (ed) m. stewart. london: hurst and company: 95–114. albert, g. 2011, ‘forced sterilization and romani women’s resistance in central europe,’ different takes online, available http://popdev.hampshire.edu/projects/dt/71 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_______ 2007b, ‘romanian romani resistance to genocide in the matrix of the ţigan other,’ the anthropology of east europe review, vol. 25, no. 2: 28–43. zoon, i. 2001, on the margins: slovakia: roma and public services in slovakia. open society institute, new york. online, available: http://www.eurac.edu/en/research/institutes/imr/documents/zoon_romaandpublicservicesinslova kia_2001.pdf [accessed 9 april 2013]. © 2016 by sumugan sivanesan. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: sivanesan, s. 2016. movements of minorities: auslankan struggles for transnational justice. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 13:2, 1-16. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v13i2.4477 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 13, no. 2 july 2016 abstract this paper reflects on arguments and positions put forth by tamils in sri lanka, those in the diaspora and commentators in the ‘international community,’ regarding the 2015 presidential elections in sri lanka. in particular it concerns the prospect of justice for those that suffered in the final stages of sri lanka’s civil war, which concluded in may 2009. it is a self-reflexive account of my activities as a writer in residence at the university of peradeniya, sri lanka, in the lead-up to the election and of the implications of those events upon my return to sydney. keywords sri lanka-australia relations; people-to-people; tamil diaspora studies; 2015 sri lankan presidential elections; media juxtaposition; self-reflexivity research article movements of minorities: auslankan struggles for transnational justice sumugan sivanesan, independent scholar corresponding author: sumugan sivanesan, unit 4/52-56 oxford st epping, nsw 2121, australia. sumugan.sivanesan@gmail.com doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.4477 article history: received 06/11/2015; revised 30/06/2016; accepted 11/07/2016; published 09/08/2016 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received financial support from university of peradeniya, faculty of arts; australia council for the arts, literature; arts nsw 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.4477 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.4477 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:sumugan.sivanesan@gmail.com http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i2.4477 this text arose from my experiences during a writers’ residency in sri lanka in the build-up to the january 2015 election, in which maithripala sririsena usurped the long-standing president mahinda rajapaksa. it tracks notions of democracy and justice as put forth by a range of public figures commenting in the international news media, as tamils and other activists campaigned for an independent probe into war crimes that occurred during the final stages of the civil conflict that ended in 2009. returning to sydney, i continued to monitor commentary regarding the tacit agreement between australian and sri lankan governments that produced the ‘auslankan’ asylum seeking subject and found myself amongst grass roots ‘people-to-people’ networks that were challenging these powers. figure 1 miauniverse, 2 january 2015 a vote for democracy in the days leading up to the 2015 presidential election in sri lanka i travelled between the southern capital city of colombo and jaffna, the ‘tamil capital’ in the island’s north. as one of the tamil diaspora, i was familiar with the widespread criticisms of president mahinda rajapaksa, a man who likened himself to a mythological king, and alongside his brothers and son, kept an authoritarian rule over a country rebuilding in the wake of a decades long civil war. the war is often understood as an ethnic conflict between a sinhala majority population and an armed tamil secessionist movement, the liberation tigers of tamil eelam (ltte), who effectively ran a de-facto state in the island’s north and east from the mid-1980s until their ultimate defeat by sri lankan forces in may 2009. on election day i rode my bicycle to the iconic jaffna library to read the newspapers, negotiating the roadblocks and the exceptional number of police, who were out in force anticipating trouble. here i learned that the ‘international tamil diaspora’ was urging tamils to abstain from voting. professor r. sri ranjan, a spokesperson for the international council of eelam tamils (icet), claimed that neither the ruling president mahinda rajapaksa, representing the united people’s freedom alliance, or his significant challenger, the common candidate maithripala sririsena for the united democratic front, would bring tamils positive change. from his base in canada, sri ranjan observed that neither presidential candidate had specifically addressed tamil concerns or had indicated they would withdraw the military presence from the former ltte-controlled areas. it was the professor’s belief that the election only concerned the ‘sinhala nation’ and was impervious to issues of tamil self-determination, arguing that: a country is beautiful when all people can live in harmony with equal rights where human rights are respected. these governments, whoever it is, whatever party it is, has destroyed the country. the fundamental rights of self-determination of all the people should be respected and the constitution of sri lanka gives no space for it. (sri ranjan 2015: para. 22) as a representative of both tamils in the diaspora and in sri lanka, sri ranjan called for a constitutional change to recognise both the tamil and sinhala nations as equal partners. sivanesan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20162 despite the decision of the tamil national alliance (tna) to support the common opposition, sri ranjan urged tamils not to be used as a ‘bargaining chip’ in majority politics and to instead boycott the vote. the filmmaker, academic and activist sivamohan sumathy strenuously disagreed with such calls to boycott, arguing that the election had opened up spaces for minority voices in the politics of the sinhala majority state. addressing the possibility of de-militarisation, she claimed that the presidential election gave tamil voters of the north ‘hope and a confidence in our own strength to bring about change’ (sumathy 2014: para. 2). speaking specifically about the people of the north and east—the lifeblood of the tamil nation—she cautioned that this change would not occur overnight, but that it was necessary for tamil and muslim communities to better conceive their own lives and agendas. rather than self-determination sumathy advocated for a politics of participation, insisting that it would be ‘suicidal for the tamil voter to not vote, to engage in a politics of isolationism’ (sumathy 2014: para. 2). to make her case she drew attention to the disjunction between the hardline separatist politics of tamil nationalists, such as sri ranjan, and the realities that these positions have failed to address: the daily lives of people are racked by unemployment, a dearth of skilled labour, caste discrimination persisting at many levels, in white collar as well as working class sectors. education, housing, farming, the persistence of problems facing the f ishing people, the right to the sea, access to government bodies, safeguards for farmers etc. the resettled do not have the capital to start up life anew and they go into debt in a major way. (sumathy 2014: para. 6) the election thus presented tamils with an opportunity to leverage their concerns beyond rival nationalist agendas and to participate in a broader critique of the rajapaksa regime—indeed several commentators regarded the tamil voter as being largely anti-mahinda rather than promaithripala (srinivasan 2015: para. 9). so, it stands to reason that by pursuing political alliances rather than separatist politics tamils would benefit from building affinities and strategies with other minorities whose communities are beset by similar problems. such a ‘movement of minorities’ could potentially campaign for coherent reforms to be delivered across the country. this would involve implementing the long-slated devolution of powers in sri lanka, granting provincial councils relative autonomy, which has long been a concern for those who feel as ‘second-class citizens’ on the island (iqbal 2009). sumathy (2014) argues that the curtailing of extra ordinary executive presidential powers and reforms, such as the right to associate, would open up spaces for democracy to develop. given such conditions, minorities would be able to build resistance to forces such as big development and militarisation. the sri lankan born popstar mia, the public persona of mathangi ‘maya’ arulpragasam, is a high profile commentator with a global diasporic following, who tweeted: figure 2 miauniverse, 2 january 2015 movements of minorities portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20163 the celebrity appeared to echo the urgings of sri ranjan when she announced earlier that if she were in sri lanka she ‘wouldn’t vote at all to endorse war crimes’ (miauniverse 2015). while some are dismissive of mia’s opinions, i raise her here as a self-styled voice of a generation, a commercially successful yet uncompromising poster girl for transnational justice, who has championed the plight of sri lankan tamils as a cause célèbre. her comments led me to dwell on the interplay of justice and democracy. professor sri ranjan argued that since neither of the major parties mentioned justice in their election manifestos there was effectively nothing for people of the tamil nation to vote for, especially as tamils in the north were being colonised and made dependent by the ‘sinhalisation’ of the island (sri ranjan 2015: para. 8). by comparison, sumathy’s campaign presses for community participation in a nation-wide democratic process. it is an option only made available for tamils of the north and east after the defeat of the ltte who forcibly discouraged or prevented people from voting in the past. mia, however, calls on those outside sri lanka to ensure justice prevails, addressing her followers, the international diaspora and civil society groups. she brings to mind what the cultural theorist suvendrini perera labels ‘the international community’ (tic), comprising ‘global institutions that are seen to administer and adjudicate matters of international justice,’ such as relevant divisions of the united nations and ngos (2016: 74). does participation equate to empowerment, and can empowerment deliver justice? in the aftermath of the civil war, the perpetrators of injustice are understood as being representatives of the sinhala state and the tamil militants. those subject to this violence are not only tamil civilians, but as now widely acknowledged, also muslims, up-country or malaiyaka tamils and others caught in the crossfire of the warring factions. what is most significant about sumathy’s emphasis on empowerment through participation is that minorities are not simply rendered pawns or victims of dominant political machinations; rather they are at the forefront, articulating their needs and lobbying the government to implement their recommendations, independent of the international diaspora’s will. ideally these movements would not be expressions of tamil or other nationalisms, especially those formulating outside the island, and would arise from intercultural community organisations and the desire to address common injustices as equals. justice on hold like many others i awoke on the morning after the election to learn that mahinda rajapaksa had vacated temple trees, the prime minister’s official residence in colombo, during the night. the news of his defeat was celebrated amongst my circle of friends, both tamil and sinhala. the incoming president maithripala sririsena won on a mandate that promised a program of political reforms within one hundred days of election, which would be followed by a general parliamentary election. many of the people i encountered seemed circumspect as to how, and even if, these reforms would affect those most in need. regardless, the historical change of government appeared to have been received across the island with optimism and relative calm. often i would hear people say things like: ‘it is what the people wanted’; and ‘this is good for democracy in this country.’ if democracy implies participation and equality, how then does one attain justice? the legal scholar ratna kapur has argued that justice implies haste, as the longer the delay in redressing injustice, the greater injustice becomes (kapur 2014). days after the election, stories surfaced claiming that the leadership change was not as smooth as it had appeared. allegations in the press accused the outgoing president of attempting to convince police and military leaders to mount a coup (bbc news 2015). sivanesan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20164 in light of these claims it is worth noting the commentary published in the guardian newspaper, which emphasises that the election results were ‘not a revolution,’ but rather ‘an uprising within the dominant party in government against the high-handed style of the rajapaksas’ (the guardian 2015: para. 2). echoing these sentiments was the australian sports journalist and human rights activist trevor grant, who wrote on the day the new president was sworn in: the central current issue of the un war crimes investigation into the slaughter of up to 70,000 innocent tamil civilians will receive the same blathering nationalistic rejection as rajapaksa applied to it, from the moment he declared in 2009 that, despite the 70,000 or so dead bodies lying in the sands of mullivaikal, his military had completed a humanitarian mission with zero casualty. (grant 2015: para. 12). the ltte are also culpable of war crimes. during the much discussed ‘white flag incident’ several prominent insurgent leaders with the assistance of journalists arranged to surrender to sri lankan forces in the last days of the war. perera calls out the ‘shocking indifference’ of these high ranking ltte towards tamil civilians, whom they had prevented from fleeing on the point of death and whom they now sought to abandon (perera 2016: 81). in a grim twist, it appears that soon after surrendering the leaders were executed (harrison 2013). while this is a clear violation of international law, it suggests that some of the ltte members responsible for war crimes may have already been dealt with. as grant pointedly remarks, those in the sri lankan government who are liable for such crimes are still, more or less, in power, including the newly elected prime minister who was the acting minister of defence around the time of the executions (grant 2015: para. 14). mahinda rajapaksa was widely criticised for his government’s failure to seriously investigate these and other allegations of war crimes, or to implement the recommendations made by its own lessons learnt and reconciliation commission (llrc). his government’s refusal to cooperate with consecutive united nations human rights council resolutions and the growing international disapproval of the president led to the council adopting a resolution in march 2014 to mount an independent international inquiry (resolution 25/1). yet the probe continues to meet with delays. following sririsena’s election victory the process was deferred for six months in response to a request by the new government to carry out their own independent domestic investigation. according to the un high commissioner for human rights, zeid ra’ad al hussein, this was a concession made ‘for one time only’ so as to gain the cooperation of sririsena’s government and to strengthen the unhrc’s findings and recommendations (ohchr 2015). following sri lanka’s parliamentary election in august 2015, a resolution was mutually adopted in late september that specifies the involvement of ‘commonwealth and other foreign judges, defence lawyers and authorised prosecutors and investigators’ to ensure a credible justice process (hrc 2015: 4). yet midway through 2016, the international inquiry still flounders, with sirisena stating in january that, contra to the agreement, he would refuse to allow foreign judges into the investigation (ameen 2016). given the ongoing resistance to establishing an independent probe, it appears injustice will be prolonged for the foreseeable future. people-to-people connections between australians and sri lankans exist for me as family networks that span widespread tamil diasporas. i am not certain if it is these networks that the foreign minister for australia in 2010, stephen smith, had in mind when he coined the phrase ‘people-to-people movements of minorities portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20165 links’ in a ministerial statement delivered to parliament soon after the end of the war in sri lanka. smith used the phrase to emphasise how ongoing cooperation between sri lanka and australia would be crucial to ‘combating people smuggling and human trafficking’ (smith 2010: para. 4). ‘people-to-people’ has since been adopted by australian officials to encompass a range of shared interests between the two countries that include membership of the commonwealth, initiatives such as the colombo plan, development aid, education and sporting ties. since asylum seekers fleeing sri lanka appeared on the national horizon late in 2009, successive australian governments have sought the cooperation of the sri lankan government to curb the flow of migrants ‘upstream’ (mulligan 2010: 19). it was therefore not unusual that the then newly-elected prime minister, tony abbott, emerged as an ally of the rajapaksa regime amidst the controversy of the commonwealth heads of government meeting (chogm) held in colombo in 2013. as a campaign to boycott the meeting spearheaded by charismatic qc geoffrey robertson gained momentum, the heads of state of canada, india and mauritius announced they would not attend. the uk prime minister at that time, david cameron, used the event as a platform to openly critique the rajapaksa government, making an unscheduled visit to jaffna and speaking to some of those who were internally displaced. it was a performance that was widely read as appealing to the significant population of tamil voters in the uk, which leads one to ask why the significant tamil community in australia did not warrant a similar display of support from their prime minister. as the outgoing chair of chogm the australian prime minister was obliged to attend; however in contrast to his british counterpart, abbott used the gathering to exhibit his friendship and support of the post-war government. abbott, who campaigned behind the slogan ‘stop the boats,’ acted against the tide of criticism of the rajapaksa government and even appeared to justify the allegations of torture leveled at his host when he told a press conference, ‘in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen’ (abbott 2013: para. 30). at the conclusion of the meeting abbott presented the sri lankan navy with a gift of two bay class patrol boats to assist in its policing of people-smugglers, only days after a senior sri lankan navy officer who had advised australia on human trafficking was arrested for his key role in a major smuggling operation (doherty 2013). in an interview published in 2015, the new sri lankan prime minister ranil wickremesinghe disclosed that the abbott government had chosen to ‘look the other way’ as reports of the rajapaksas’s human rights abuses emerged, thereby securing the former president’s cooperation and confirming suspicions of a tacit agreement between the two governments. wickremesinghe claimed that it was impossible for asylum seekers to leave sri lanka by boat without the consent of those close to the government, alluding to top level involvement in people-smuggling operations (cited in hodge 2015). perera also describes the un’s departure from sri lanka in the moments before the final stages of the war as an act of ‘turning away,’ setting the conditions of (in)visibility for the violence that was to follow, a technique of self-blinding that performance scholar diana taylor labels ‘percepticide’ (cited in perera 2016: 75). perera argues such acts serve to delimit authorities’ knowledge of suffering and ultimately shape the means of accountability for that suffering (perera 2016: 76). similarly in australia, ‘looking the other away’ to avoid allegations of human rights abuses is a familiar practice of cultivated ignorance. these acts to delimit knowledge and evidence are familiar to aboriginal activists who also accuse the australian state of ongoing colonial violence and genocide and whose struggles for self-determination are of little interest to sivanesan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20166 majority politics (howell 2013: 79). such methods of selective ignorance that underpin the close cooperation of the australian and sri lankan governments can be read as a means of co-legitimisation, in which both states accused of oppression and neocolonialism are able to construct themselves, from nationalist perspectives, as ‘homelands under siege’ (perera 2009: 656) by tamils, indigenous people or other non-nationals. on may day 2010 a group of aboriginal activists in melbourne undertook a symbolic counter-action to these top-level collaborations by presenting ‘aboriginal passports’ to 254 tamil refugees caught in a stand-off between indonesian and australian authorities in the javanese port of merak. these aboriginal passports are ‘living breathing documents’ issued by the grassroots indigenous social justice alliance (isja) that question the legitimacy and challenge the authority of the ‘post-colonising’ australian state. the shadow diplomacy that these aboriginal passports enact subverts the state’s co-option of people-to-people links to curb the flow of migration, and instead extends welcome, forges connections, solidarities and acknowledges the common experiences of those marginalised by their respective states. no paradigm shift in an email, sivamohan sumathy included a poem she composed after the election result was announced: my election days, 2015 campaigning, exciting, tense, nervous, delirium-invested, holding training sessions on the verandah for the immediate neighbourhood, as nobody but appa had voted in any previous presidential election, strangely agreeing with appa on politics for once, passing on all the wild gossip about the mr family, nightmare riddled pre election nights, sleeplessness, inducing drinking, exhilarating, liberating, cautionary, educating vasuki’s children about the elections (they are keenly interested), near addiction to fb and quarrelling with totally unknown friends on it, while another plethora of unknown persons writing in to befriend me, baila sessions, holding candle lit vigils for assassinated journalists, being connected to the universe on election night, through thiru, who was on every tweet, every note, every social bleep, planning, writing, tasking for the future, doubts, setting off crackers, taking to singing, questions, pondering profound political questions on the nature of the state, reforms or revolution, gramsci’s historic bloc, not stopping at paradigm shift as most liberal commentators have done with this over used and abused term, not bothering with muslim bashing in europe over charlie whatever, in fact, just a wee bit short of visionary. no paradigm shift, no revolution, it is toward … they cut the jak tree down in our backyard, the day after elections. the parrots displaced again. if, as sumathy apprehends it, the election was ‘no paradigm shift’ and ‘no revolution’ then what is to be gained, particularly for sri lanka’s minorities? better representation? the promise of a more democratic future? or simply a president who is more palatable to india and the west to do business with? the controversial norwegian peace broker erik solheim urges tamil diasporas to keep pressuring their governments to ensure that justice is eventually seen in sri lanka (solheim 2015); however the exiled journalist j. s. tissainayagam questions whether movements of minorities portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20167 the international community would respond if the new president was found to be culpable for war crimes. indeed, it is worth remembering that australia opposed the un resolution to mount an international investigation into allegations of these crimes. tissainayagam surmises: ‘the heart of the matter is whether national interests and international politics trump justice’ (tissainayagam 2015: para. 13). in recent years organisations such as amnesty international, freedom from torture, bar human rights committee and the international crisis group have published stinging reports about the abuse of rights in post-war sri lanka. the international crimes evidence project (icep) in its 2014 report island of impunity finds reasonable evidence to accuse both sri lankan forces and the ltte of violations of international humanitarian law that amount to war crimes. these include intentional attacks against the civilian population, humanitarian aid and hospitals, rape and sexual violence, the taking of hostages, use of human shields and the conscription of children. icep also claims to have acquired testimonies about forensic evidence, such as mass graves, being covertly destroyed in the post-war period. the report proposes that if the crimes it has gathered evidence on were to be proven at trial it could lead to the convictions of senior military commanders, sri lankan government officials and senior surviving members of the ltte (icep 2014). since the end of the war forms of ‘survival media’ (perera 2016) have emerged challenging steps taken by the sri lankan government to minimise witnesses to possible war crimes. these include photographs of atrocities taken on cell phones by victims of violence and trophy videos shot by members of the sri lankan army. one notorious video of a soldier executing a bound naked man in a field, was dismissed as separatist propaganda by the sri lankan government only to be later verified by independent experts (bbc 2010). such media was rendered as forensic evidence by the investigative journalist callum macrae and his crew for the channel 4 documentary no fire zone (2013), and has become central to an international campaign for justice. in february 2015, the independent non-government organisation human rights watch addressed a letter to president sririsena shortly after his election victory that raised a number of concerns including police torture, minority rights and conflict-related accountability. the letter concludes with a list of recommendations that advised, amongst other things, that the new head of state establish a ‘hybrid international-domestic court to prosecute those on both sides responsible for serious violations of international law’ (roth 2015: para. 25). yet despite these numerous campaigns to bring justice to sri lankans, in the lead up to the election sririsena affirmed that he would resist pressure to put the rajapaksas or anyone in the security forces before an international war crimes court (cited in tissainayagam 2015). without an unbiased procedure there can be no accountability for war crimes, no justice and no paradigm shift. auslanka suvendrini perera suggests that we should dispense with the prefix ‘sri’ in sri lanka. as a sinhala character that translates as blessed or holy, it sparked waves of protests in the 1950s when introduced on license plates of cars and buses while the country was still known by its name under the british protectorate, ceylon. perera likens the use of sri to the ‘great’ in great britain, that is, as a misleading qualifier (perera 2016). rebecca lim, a migrant agent and former australian department of immigration and citizenship employee, recently disclosed that the close cooperation between australia and sri lanka on border protection, in which asylum seekers fleeing sri lanka are treated ‘differently’ by australian authorities, is referred to by those in the know as ‘auslanka’ (lim 2015: para. 4). thus, auslanka names a sivanesan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20168 supranational condition that controls the movements and restricts the life options of those fleeing sri lanka for australia. in november 2014 near the cocos islands australian security forces intercepted 38 asylum seekers, including six children, who had fled sri lanka by boat. the migrants were evaluated using enhanced screening techniques over a video link-up. one asylum seeker who was judged to potentially trigger australia’s refugee obligations was transferred to either papua new guinea or nauru for further determination. the remainder were handed over, people-to-people, to the sri lankan navy—one can imagine to the very bay class boats gifted to them by the australian government. these ‘sri lankan returns’ were intended to face criminal prosecution in sri lanka for unlawfully leaving the country (farrell 2014). in this incident, those seeking to flee sri lanka and enter australia are ensnared in the net of auslanka, by which they are incarcerated and criminalised. cloaked in the secrecy of ‘operational matters’ under operation sovereign borders the details and frequency of such incidents are hidden from the public or press. in december 2014 human rights watch released a statement criticising this incident and the techniques targeted at sri lankan asylum seekers. the organisation accused australia of violating its obligations under international law, exposing a ‘yawning gap between its practices and international legal principles’ and warned authorities not to ignore the ‘well-documented and politically motivated torture, rape, and ill-treatment of many men and women detained by sri lankan security forces’ (human rights watch 2014: para. 4). while the australian government maintains measures such as fast-tracked onboard assessments and tow-backs are undertaken to ‘save lives at sea,’ they overlook the conditions by which people are often forced to leave. sri lankans are unable to claim for protection at the office of the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) within their country. therefore, for many fleeing persecution—for example those who are witness to war crimes—the only option is to leave without the requisite visas (human rights law centre 2014: 4). australia may well exercise zero-tolerance towards boat arrivals in the interests of its own security and sovereignty, but it as yet does not provide alternative pathways for those seeking to flee persecution. furthermore, as those returned are potentially criminalised under sri lankan law and at risk of persecution in detention, australian authorities become susceptible for refoulement. it seems that auslankans, as vulnerable, exploitable and easily manipulated subjects, are the human currency of our bilateral relations. caught between persecution, detention and imprisonment, who is accountable for auslankan lives? pop polemics figure 3 miauniverse, 2 january 2015 movements of minorities portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 20169 the anthropologist and musicologist john hutnyk describes mia as a storyteller of our times, who in her own way speaks truth to power. he likens her to scheherazade, the subject of 1001 nights who concocts gripping tales to postpone her death at the hands of the despotic king shahryar. following the work of walter benjamin and theodor adorno, hutnyk claims that we need figures such as mia to tell better stories so that despotism might be overcome. for hutnyk, such narratives work in the ‘interval before the formation of a genuine revolutionary people’s army that can win’ (hutnyk 2012: 2). they serve to foster the required subjectivities, or at least fend off forces that would subsume or annihilate such tendencies amongst the marginalised and disempowered. as a child fleeing sri lanka for the uk as a refugee of the war in the 1980s, mia, or alternatively arulpragasam, insists on the legitimacy of her voice as a witness to that violence. in a 2010 interview she asserted: people reckon that i need a political degree in order to go, “my school got bombed and i remember it cos i was ten-years-old.” i think if there is an issue of people who, having had first hand experiences, are not being able to recount that—because there is law or government restrictions or censorship or the removal of an individual story in a political situation— then that’s what i’ll keep saying and sticking up for, cos i think that’s the most dangerous thing. (cited in hutnyk 2012: 12) arulpragasam leveraged her family’s connection to the tamil separatist movement to establish her pop persona and career. so, in a sense mia, an acronym for ‘missing in action’ or ‘missing in acton’ the west london borough where her family relocated to a council estate, brings the war back home. while mia’s twitter commentary is unlikely to achieve a redistribution of power, as a contemporary entertainer and provocateur, she articulates and subverts forms of anti-migrant violence and structural racism in the circuits of power in which she is fetishised and from which she profits. through performances and the production of pop cultural artifacts mia, to use hutnyk’s term, ‘trinketizes’ the experiences of the war and its flow on effects in the diaspora. typically the ‘dessicatation’ of such experiences into pop commodities prompts much theory and critique; however hutnyk complains that it is rare for these analyses to go further than a mere fascination with said commodities (hutnyk 2008). hutnyk’s discussion centres around reactions to, and readings of, the promotional video for mia’s song born free (2010), directed by romain gravas. the narrative of the nine minute short film follows us badged paramilitary forces as they raid buildings to round up young red-haired men. the so-called ‘ginger jihadists’ are bused out to the desert and forced to run into a mine field, where they are shot at, bludgeoned, bombed and killed. the tongue-in-cheek ultra-violence of the promotional video can in part be read as an allegory for the bombing and extra-judicial killing of tamils in the sands of mullivaikal in the final days of the war and by which the video becomes an act of negation. the violence that the international community refused to witness returns to that community as a compelling, spot-the-reference, agit-pop spectacle. hutnyk appreciates mia’s staging of the cultural war that accompanies the war on terror as a provocative pop parody, ‘before which passivity is more violent yet’ (2012: 11). for a moment the born free video was able to punch through the postmodern west’s de-sensitisation to the pervasiveness of ‘total war,’ sparking a wave of controversy and commentary that challenged the percepticide that shrouded sri lanka and other forms of state-sanctioned violence meted out under the guise of the war on terror. it is important to note that the sri lanka’s final push into the north and east was backed by the international community’s stance on the war on terror (perera 2016: 80), and my use of mia’s tweets acknowledges her contribution to making this visible. by mia’s reckoning, for the international community to again be complicit with the sri lankan government, by sivanesan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 201610 deporting tamil witnesses to war atrocities back to the very forces who were responsible for them, effectively reinforces, extends and re-sanctions that violence. thus, while the international community acknowledges its oversight in refusing to witness war atrocities by pushing for processes of accountability, it defers to the stubborn assurances from the very same state accused of war crimes, delimiting the possibility of justice. transnational justice figure 4 miauniverse, 9 january 2015 what then, can be meant by justice seven years after the end of the war in sri lanka? from here, it would seem deeply flawed to recall, romanticise or attempt to revive the ltte as a productive counterforce to the sri lankan state, especially considering how the leadership gambled the lives of the very people it claimed to be fighting for. it is also impossible to call for justice for tamils without doing so for other victims of the decades-long conflict, such as muslim communities in the north and east. justice also implicates others complicit with the atrocities that occurred in the final stages of the war. arguably, the international community has pursued the establishment of an independent probe retrospectively, to correct its abandoning of the civilian population as the conflict came to a close. yet moves towards an international process draw accusations of neocolonialism in sri lanka, as fanned by sinhala bhuddist nationalists, and recalling the averse reactions to international interference that surfaced when norway became involved in the peace-brokering process (thiruvarangan 2016, para 4). if political stability and trade are determined to be what is at stake in re-unified sri lanka, and are reasons used to stall the pursuit of justice and the devolution of powers, then the sinhala nation will override minority concerns. injustices will become more pronounced if moves to install the former president’s brother, gotabaya rajapaksa, into the leadership of the sri lankan freedom party are successful (gunasekara 2016). the former sri lankan defence secretary oversaw the final stages of the war and is widely acknowledged to be responsible for numerous human rights abuses, such as white van disappearances and attacks on journalists. however, as journalist ryan goodman (2015) noted soon after the election, as a us citizen gotabaya is liable to be prosecuted under the us war crimes act 1996. these circumstances open a potential legal pathway to hedge minority concerns and pursue justice. beyond the island, auslankan asylum seekers, and not only tamils, are met with the violence of australian border politics. that violence describes the tacit agreement between both states whose exclusive sovereign legitimacies are being challenged by people-to-people links across migrant and aboriginal networks. refugee and aboriginal struggles working together might be movements of minorities portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 201611 considered as another movement of minorities, which seek to consolidate counterpower against interests that trump justice. it is worth noting that perera, who was born in sri lanka, is amongst the founding members of researchers against pacific black sites (n.d) who work to expose, discuss and critique the conditions, forms of violence and torture occurring in australian funded immigration detention centres in nauru and manus island, combating the enforced percepticide surrounding these ‘extra-legal’ spaces and the transnational relations that make them possible (perera and pugliese 2015). auslankans, then, can be read not only as asylum seekers caught in regional border policies and controls; the term may extend to cover those working to undo this space, and may arguably signify a decolonial objective. the question that hangs over much of my engagement with auslanka is ‘what is the diaspora to do?’ ongoing resistance, solidarity and (parodic) negation have appeared as strategies in the pursuit of transnational justice. as one who writes, i may well heed the demand extending through hutnyk (2012) for better stories to overcome despotism and to bring ‘hope and a confidence in our own strength to bring about change’ (sumathy 2014). thus, while it is necessary to agitate and critique the conditions of the present, it is also necessary to articulate a future. as an alternative to negation, marco cuevis-hewitt (2011) argues for writers working within movements to concern themselves with a ‘futurology of the present,’ that is to recognise the many and varied living futures already coming into being. following the war, i established a rapport with the tamil refugee and controversial media figure, sanjeev ‘alex’ kuhendrarajah, who was amongst those in merak who received an aboriginal passport (see sivanesan 2016 and 2014). although he has never set foot in australia, the gesture encouraged alex to learn more about indigenous struggles here and seek out commonalities. while i certainly do not agree with many of alex’s arguments, we both appreciate the continuing need to challenge neocolonial oppression and to align ourselves with histories of transnational anticolonialism. over the course of its development the backdrop of this writing task shifted from preelection jaffna to sydney, where i was amongst a groundswell of protests opposing the forced closures of aboriginal communities in western australia, 2015. at a rally in belmore park veteran activist jenny munro raised the idea of a ‘blak parliament’ made up of elected aboriginal representatives who would convene in the old parliament house situated opposite the federal parliament in canberra. according to munro’s vision, the governance of the country would be bi-partisan with decisions mediated by a senate that sits between both parliaments. unlike sri lanka, power sharing in australia might seem like an improbable idea, but the proposition is nevertheless straightforward in its attempts to bring aboriginal law, customs and history on a par with the dominant political system. later that evening thousands of people marched through the streets of sydney, behind aboriginal leaders. disrupting traffic, they pursued a new paradigm in australia in which the rights of aboriginal people, including their right to self-determination, would be upheld. protests such as this are a manifestation of people-to-people links and long evolving counterpowers. they prefigure alternative, decolonial futures to be built on respect, peaceful coexistence and equality in which the australian state and aboriginal nations would walk in step as mutual partners. they make visible and accessible an ongoing struggle to address injustice as equals. acknowledgements thank you to the following organisations for support and funding: university of peradeniya, faculty of arts; australia council for the arts, literature; arts nsw sivanesan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 2, july 201612 references abbott, t. 2013, press conference, friday 15 november, colombo, sri lanka. online, available: http:// 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rogers]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v11i2.3307 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. the jouissance of the torturer in zero dark thirty and the enjoyment of the unacceptable juliet rogers, university of melbourne1 torturers enjoy violence. this might be the very definition of a torturer. the enjoyment of the torturer in the scene of violence is emblematised in the ways in which the victim is produced in the scene. this might be as an object, as figuren as in the case of victims of the nazi holocaust; it might be as vehicles for the furthering of an ideal; or specifically, it might be as animated matter as in the scene of state sanctioned torture. in each of these scenes all or some of the modes of production of the victim may be at work, but in each of these scenes it is the use of the victim which defines the enjoyment of the perpetrator; use, as emblematized in the particular arrangement of that person as necessary to the perpetrator’s enjoyment. my interest is in the particular production of the victim in the practice of the torturer and in some instances for perpetrators of violence more broadly, and the impact of this arrangement on the victim, to understand this it is perhaps helpful to confront the dynamics engaged in particular scenes of violence, and examine the textures of these dynamics as they relate to the perpetrator’s enjoyment of the acts. that is, to understand the impacts on the victims it is helpful—although often uncomfortable—to consider the 1 dr juliet rogers teaches in the department of criminology, university of melbourne. much of this work is inspired by conversations with dori laub, my warmest thanks for his generosity and insight. this work departs from our conversations via its hefty lacanian emphasis, however, and the mistakes are, of course, my own. rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 2 particularities of how some perpetrators experience themselves in the scene of violence, because it is precisely this scene which the victims themselves often want to understand.2 these particularities, understood through lacanian psychoanalysis, can be understood as contingent on the texture of the perpetrator’s identification with either the regime, the law, their superiors or with the victim. violence, in this sense, can be seen as a particular and often aggressively invested, practice of the performance of identity, and as a desire to produce a particular and invested reality for the regime, for oneself and about oneself. in the terms of jacques lacan, the perpetrator always performs an address to the other,3 and this other exists, not as the person in front of them, in fact precisely not, but as the location from which the recognition of their deed comes. there are perpetrators who certainly exercise violence in an effort to achieve this recognition in an ordinary— although certainly violent sense from the perspective of the victim— but there are also those for whom the recognition is not required. these are the omnipotent, narcissistic perpetrators whose actions emanate from their own authority. these are the subjects who perceive themselves not as subject, but as the definitive authority from where both positive law—as an emblem of justice—and from where oedipal law—as an emblem of right—emanates. from these two poles we can understand a continuum of identification and dis-identification for the perpetrator with the law, god, the father, with their superiors, or even with the victim—what lacan would call the (big o) other, as the one who prohibits and proscribes the enjoyments of the subject. what is of interest in these modes of identification, particularly in the field of trauma, is to understand how the locations of identification (or dis-identification) can produce a particular enjoyment in some perpetrators and specifically those who torture, as what lacan has coined a jouissance—as a relation of excitement or enjoyment evoked through a proximity to prohibition and to the sanction of identity as right. an enjoyment that appears at the point when positive law sanctions and oedipal law prohibits; an enjoyment which the victim experiences and in which torturers may revel, repeatedly. 2 in both my work as a therapist with survivors of trauma and in my research i have heard, almost without exception, the question from survivors: ‘why me?’ 3 we can understand this extrapolated by lacan specifically in relation to criminality, and while my concern here is not with the legality or conviction of the perpetrator, lacan’s discussions on this are pertinent because the acts of perpetrators cannot be separated from the judgment of the law. see lacan’s ecrits (lacan 2006c [1966]). rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 3 the omnipotent torturer the omnipotent perpetrator is the psychotic for whom the violence is a creation of the reality they envision without the necessity of sanctioning that reality in the eyes of others. adolf hitler might be the most obvious of the examples from european history, but we can speculate about other examples in immediate history, such as: charles graner, the ‘ringleader’ in the abu ghraib scenes of torture; perhaps anders breivik in norway; even eugene de kock the head of the south african apartheid regime’s secret assassination and torture organization, vlakplaas. these are generally charismatic figures precisely because they exist without doubt; they like to take the law into their own hands, sometimes literally, because they believe, at the time, that it is their law. this form of omnipotence—and its infantile trajectory—is well illustrated in the script of ariel dorfman’s play death and the maiden (1994), in the ‘confession’ of dr miranda, a torturer who represented the interests of a repressive state. in dorfman’s play paulina—the woman who was raped and tortured by dr miranda some 20 years prior—has captured dr miranda, and wants to kill, maim, or torture him in retribution for his treatment of her, and also to facilitate the extraction of a confession. dr miranda does confess, in some version, and we see the dynamics at play in his indication of his rationales and his enjoyment of the acts of torture. these document both his floating of oedipal law and his obedience to the state, that latter of which is emblematised in a righteous belief. as he says: the real real truth, it was for humanitarian reasons. we’re at war, i thought, they want to kill me and my family, they want to install a totalitarian dictatorship, but even so, they still have the right to some form of medical attention. it was slowly, almost without realizing how, that i became involved in more delicate operations, they let me sit in on sessions where my role was to determine if the prisoners could take that much torture, that much electric current. at first i told myself that it was a way of saving people’s lives, and i did, because many times i told them—without it being true, simply to help the person who was being tortured—i ordered them to stop or the prisoner would die. but afterwards i began to—bit by bit, the virtue i was feeling turned into excitement— the mask of virtue fell off it and it, the excitement, it hid, it hid, it hid from me what i was doing, the swamp of what—by the time paulina salas was brought in it was already too late. too late. … too late. a kind of—brutalization took over my life, i began to really truly like what i was doing. it became a game. my curiosity was partly morbid, partly scientific. how much can this woman take? more than the other one? how’s her sex? does her sex dry up when you put the current through her? can she have an orgasm under those circumstances? she is entirely in your power, you can carry out all your fantasies, you can do what you want with her. everything they have forbidden you since ever, whatever your mother urgently whispered you were never to do. you began to dream with her, with all those women. (dorfman 1994: 41–42) rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 4 excitement, curiosity, benevolence,4 flouting a childish prohibition—these are miranda’s rationales. they announce neither regret nor remorse. he is not apologetic, nor does he speak of any recognition of paulina’s humanity, pain or suffering. his curiosity suggests (perhaps) a recognition that he knew there was another person there. she is not an object, she has different feelings or at least responses to his own but even these feelings become part of the enjoyment. she is not object in the usual sense that we ascribe to perpetrator’s relations with their victims; she is a person whose responses he enjoyed manipulating; she is his to subject. these are responses that prompt his attention and his desire. his ‘confession’ is more a reverie on what he could do to the victims, and how much he enjoyed doing it, rather than an indication that he did not, or should not have enjoyed it. to understand this performance of enjoyment in the scene of such violence we must understand the dynamics of prohibition and their interaction between positive law’s prohibitions. or, in the case of acts such as miranda’s, and indeed of most torturers, we must understand the relation between the performance of acts of what we call internationally “crimes against humanity”—and are readily understood as breeches of oedipal law—when they are sanctioned by the law of the state.5 that is, it is helpful to understand how the rendering of the unacceptable in oedipal law—described by miranda as ‘whatever your mother urgently whispered you were never to do’—is experienced by the perpetrator when it becomes acceptable in positive law. what i will discuss below is how the rendering of that which is prohibited through oedipal law into ‘what you could or even must do’ under the instructions and sanctions of the state, produces a particular form of enjoyment; one which we can understand as a jouissance. to understand jouissance we need to trace the subject’s trajectory in relation to oedipal and positive law. what psychoanalysis has traced is that the subject is born omnipotent, but comes to know itself as constantly in a state of fragmentation. for lacan, the infant that sees itself in the mirror wants to become that imago and constantly attempts to relive the ideali it ‘takes itself to be.’ it is not that the infant only wants to replicate 4 the benevolence is in part a specific device in the plot of the play, since allowing the victims to live also meant that the ‘commission’ set up in the fictional country that paulina lives will only investigate incidents where deaths occur. this suggests that miranda will never face the investigative or judicial powers of the state. retributive justice is not possible for paulina. 5 for a discussion of the almost comprehensive sanction of law in the perpetration of ‘crimes against humanity,’ see balint (2011), and for a specific discussion of the sanction of torture by law and lawyers in contemporary usa, see sands (2008). rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 5 what it has seen, however, but how it imagines itself seen by the other. as lacan says: ‘it suffices to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume] as image’ (lacan 2006c: 76). this is an identification with its image in the gaze of the one who sees. the one who the infant imagines sees all. this figure is firstly the mother, but then the father, who ‘may be regarded as the original representative of the law’s authority,’ and this location of law’s authority can then be replaced by god, by the fuhrer, or by law itself. this location is the site from which we understand the lacanian other is located, not as a specific person or rule, but as a site from which a person regarded as authoritative can inhabit and from which a particular doctrine, law or text can emanate. it is this figure or text that sanctions the image and, at least in the infant’s imagination—an imagination that persists as an adult—proscribes what is the desirable mode of being for the subject. at the point that language intersects with this image, however, then the infant knows—at some level—that it cannot hold the gestalt of this image together as a fixed form. the image fragments and the subject struggles to master the image it perceives as the ideal representation of itself. this struggle is performed over and over again for the subject in the gaze of the other as a performance as plea; an act in search of sanction. language—and we might say the language of the law6—is the tool employed to try and hold the fragments together—to engage others in the production of the ideal image of the self.7 language is the effort to employ others in the industry to (re)produce the image. language, however, is also the moment of entry into the world of others and of other objects, it is the moment of otherness. language thus indicates that we will never full capture the image or ourselves in our own terms. it is the realization that what we cannot capture everything in our mouths, that there will always be that which alludes us. for lacan language is castration as the name-of-the-father or the law-of-the-father; the moment of prohibition when particles are separated from us and we know we will never be all for the mother, or all in the mirror again. language is thus the product of oedipal law that prohibits the getting of all, as the getting of all the mother’s desire, that is, in the idiom of violence, it is the prohibition of the mastery over ourselves as well as 6 for lacan, ‘language begins along with the law’ and this is precisely because the instigation of prohibition emerges as the impossibility of capturing all in language (lacan 2006e: 225). 7 as lacan says, ‘the “ideal-i” … situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction, that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual’ (lacan 2006c: 76). rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 6 over the body of another; the cut inserted that makes fragments of our desired identity. the rest of our lives are fraught with trying to get those bits back. we can see this in freud’s grandson’s wrangling with the loss of his mother via the cotton reel, as lacan says: this reel is not the mother reduced to a little ball by some magical game … it is a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him while still remaining his, still retained’ (lacan 1977: 62). it is those pieces of himself—those the subject has lost but tries to recover in language—that are the pieces in the mirror that he is desperately holding onto. and here is where we can understand the enjoyment of the torturer and certainly some other forms of violent perpetrators (although not all) as an aggressive exercise of this desperation to hold the pieces. in the action of violence the torturer makes, what we might call, an incision into the flesh of the other before him. this is both real and metaphoric in the sense that flesh is ‘the small part of the subject’ that the torturer is trying to get back—and sometimes by extracting that flesh from another. flesh is not only skin however, it is, for lacan, the conjoining of language with the image, that is, once we have named that piece of ourselves we feel we have lost or are losing, then we understand or symbolise that piece in what has come to be called reality. and we become part of this reality, our flesh has become of the world through the use of symbols to name the piece lost. the taking of this flesh from another is what occurs in the scene of violence, and the object as flesh of another, for the torturer, becomes something which renders a salve to the loss of the parts of the torturer’s self. in lacanian terms the piece that one wants to extract from another is what he calls the objet petit a; the object which will fill the lack cut through castration. as lacan says of intimate relations with others: ‘i love you, but, because inexplicably i love in you something more than you—the objet petit a—i mutilate you’ (lacan 1977: 263). but there are dimensions to this intimacy. why might call them degrees of violence. in the scene of violence where the torturer, as well as some other forms of violent perpetrators, employ the body of the victim to extract this objet, the relation is not with the victim but with the other who can sanction the significance of the act, or the significance of the object extracted. this relation, as a kind of deference, produces an enjoyment in the sense of an excitement over performing the duties of the other, an enjoyment of being a good citizen and hence reproducing an image of oneself as desirable—in the gaze of the other (in the mirror), while at the same time being in proximity to the law which has prohibited precisely this form of getting the piece of rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 7 flesh—as objet petit a—back, getting back what was imagined cut from the body of the subject. the object of torture the object that is cut from the victim might be speech, as in the scene of torture where the words of the tortured are extracted, in elaine scarry’s terms, to bolster the power of the regime (scarry 1985). in such a scene the torturer performs, not only as a torturer, but simultaneously bolsters the regimes capacity to author his behaviour as that of a good torturer. further, in such a scene, the torturer enjoys the production of a reality that he has a priori identified as the reality. the example of torture, particularly in elaine scarry’s account, offers the specific illustrations of this condition, as a parallel experience of the scene of torture. the regime, in scarry’s terms is what we can think of as the parent, guardian or sovereign, and this figure is embodied in the torturer who is able to decide as to whether the subject lives, dies, or is subjected to mental or physical agony, at the same time as employing language to assert or author a particular reality— the regimes reality. the body of the tortured deteriorates or betrays the victim of torture—through becoming a weapon itself, as in the case of stress positions—at the same time that the torturer re-inscribes or speaks the scene through the language of the regime. the torturer becomes the judge of reality, what a chair, filing cabinet or other ordinary—but no less painful—tool of the torture signify.8 reality, we might say, is the jurisdiction of the regime in this scene, and, in a very literal sense, the torturer states that the pain can stop, the torture victim can live,9 if they obey the codes (as requests) of the torturer. in the film zero-dark-thirty —which is claimed by the filmmakers to be based on ‘first hand’ accounts of these scenes—the torturer, daniel stanton, explains the rules, very succinctly, as he says: ‘i own you ammar. you belong to me. look at me … if you don’t look at me when i talk to you, i hurt you. if you step off this mat, i hurt you. if you lie to me i’m gonna hurt you. now look at me’ (bigelow 2012). in this sense the torturer becomes the judge of not only the worth of the body of the subject— whether it should be hurt, injured or killed—but the judge of whether the tortured are good or bad, qua worthy of life. the torturer—as the screenwriters of zero-dark-thirty 8 i have discussed this dynamic further; see rogers (2010). 9 there is a necessary qualifier here, because of course complying to what the torturer requests rarely means the pain will stop. despite the justifications for torture it is rarely performed in the interests of gaining information. hence the victim can do very little to appease the torturer, nevertheless, this is the dynamic set up in this scene. scarry discusses this dynamic at length in body in pain (1985). rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 8 uncomfortably portray—own the body of the tortured, that is, they own his reality and (re)produce this reality on their own terms. in the scene of torture, where the actions of violence perform this as violence in their production of the speech of the tortured, as reflecting the reality of the regime, the torturer affirms his imago in this reality, by (re)producing it through the violence itself. this may resonate with other forms of violence also, as allen feldman says, writing on violence in northern ireland and in south africa: ‘in the ecozone of violence, such regulatory memory is both constitutive of the self and a mark of personal finitude. finitude affects not only personhood but collective memory—violence renders everything repeatable in its own mechanical reproduction and everything finite in its defacements’ (feldman 2003: 60). this conjoining of finitude and of repetition has a parallel articulation in lacanian psychoanalysis as the conjoining of the death drive and the reality principle. because the production of reality always requires a killing off of other possible interpretations of reality, that is, it is a killing off of other names for the flesh lost. the reel becomes the mother, and at the moment of that mastery—if only for a moment—the child experiences the loss of the mother as bearable, not pleasurable, but not unbearable, almost a relief.10 and it is this relief that is repeated in our lives, but to more or less degrees. for lacan repetition is an activity of the death drive insofar as it strives to kill off all that might function as an alterity to the reality imagined by the subject. this non-alterity to reality is what lacan calls the realization of the signifier, that is the production of a finitude to reality. for lacan: ‘the realization of the signifier will never be able to be careful enough in its memorization to succeed in designating the primacy of the significance as such’ (lacan 1977: 61). repetition occurs because of the impossibility of this designation of primacy—or what we might call the complete designation of reality as reality for all. repetition is here, what we might think of, as the throwing of the cotton reel out from the child’s cot, again and again and again. for most of us, the repetition of the throwing and the feeling of capturing the loss of the mother in language—the ‘i miss you’ form of language—is soothing enough. repetition is an ordinary activity that is, for lacan, why we continue to speak at all, to repeat the terms we understand, to test them in the world and have them sanctioned by others. but this 10 this is of course why lacan ties the reality principle to the beyond of the pleasure principle. rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 9 need for sanction is what also produces the proximity to prohibition, precisely because we may be wrong. for some repetition is intolerable, conversation, argument, dialogue or difference is intolerable. these things introduce intolerable fragments in the subject’s sense of self, as reflective of, or reflected as the nation, the community, the regime. it is then that a desire for finitude insists as a desire for the aggression of the death instinct to the point of infliction into the flesh of another. the violent desire for finitude in one repeated example of the desire for finitude we can see the efforts of the suicide bomber, the jihadist, the martyr. in, at least some, of the violences exercised by ‘suicide bombers’ is the effort to produce a definitive reality in the flesh of others. this is not necessarily as a desire to die, but as a desire to leave a mark in reality, a mark that endures either in the flesh, polis or political reality of another. the mark of oneself on or in another offers one form of having a desired image of reality reflected in the flesh of another. but this kind of mark also represents both the desperation and the aggressivity of the desire for a mark. the effort to produce reality is painfully represented in the acts and descriptions of mohamad siddique khan, one of the “london bombers” of 2005: i’m going to keep this short and to the point because it’s all been said before by far more eloquent people than me. but our words have no impact upon you therefore i’m going to talk to you in a language that you understand. our words are dead until we give them life with our blood … this is how our ethical stances are dictated. your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people and your support of them makes you directly responsible … until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight. we are at war and i am a soldier. (khan cited in govan, tweedle & stokes 2005: 7) what siddique khan’s statement points to is the use of flesh as an attempt to render his reality recognisable in the terms of the other. his words are ‘dead,’ but his blood animates them, ‘gives them life.’ the flesh of himself and that of those he kills forms the objet pettit a—that marks an effort for definitive reality. for lacan the objet petit a is a non-specular substance that falls from what he calls the cut in the other. its status as non-specular is crucial because it brokers no dissent. that is, it cannot be interpreted by others. hence the destruction of the flesh of others is crucial for siddique khan, and even for this destruction in the form a bombing—where flesh will not be recognizable as anything more than flesh. that is, in his understanding it exists with no specular image. this form of destruction enables him to believe that rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 10 his actions will not be interpreted, that is, for siddique khan his actions in the flesh are definitive and signify a definitive reality, they represent the possibility of noninterpretation insofar as they represent the wish for the interpretation that he (imagines) he gives them.11 in siddique khan’s rendition we could say that the flesh of the dead (including himself) as the remainder of the blast, are the words he is trying to make understood with his blood, and the blood of others. to be understood in his terms is of course to have produced his own reality. as feldman said of the effort to produce reality in the flesh in northern ireland ‘the historical event is not that which happens but that which is narrated’ (feldman 2003: 61). thus siddique khan’s action is not only an effort to make himself heard, but to first make himself understandable, to narrate the reality of his experience as one who can speak.12 to do this—in a lacanian sense—he must redefine the codes of the other, that is reposition the other as his other. and, of course, in this representation of the other we can hear the echo of his prayer ‘there is no god but (his) god,’ and we might say that for siddique khan that there is no reality but (his) reality, that is, there is no other but the other, as the other for him.13 the production of this kind of what we might think of as an ‘exclusive reality’ is a form of psychosis. in the suicide bomber it can be seen as a psychological as well as a political psychosis. it is a moment where nothing exists but the significance offered by the one signifying, that is, to siddique khan all others are dead when he dies—there is no living signifier beyond his act. in this way the psychotic can be understood as one who dwells in their own reality—the person in front of them is only a person insofar as they see them as such, if they see them as an object then the psychotic will treat them as such. because all others are (dead) objects, then the interpretation of reality does not exist precisely because there is no other person to interpret the act differently. reality simply is what they believe it to be, and then they die (and kill) with that belief. 11 of course for those injured, for those who lost people in the bombings and for all of us looking on however, there is a great deal of interpretation to be done beyond siddique khan’s own. 12 for an excellent discussion of how siddique khan’s actions can be understood in the register of the ethical, see pugliese (2010). 13 i want to ensure here that this point is not misunderstood. a lacanian discussion of the other as god is not incongruent with a notion of faith. it is not that siddique khan’s belief in allah is only his belief, but that in his inscription of his reality his defers the judgment of his act as the right reality onto allah who sits for him in the site of judgment. he may be right, but a debate on faith is beyond this discussion. rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 11 the psychosis of torture for lacan the psychotic structure is marked by the belief that there is ‘no paternity to the signifier,’ no law-of-the-father only a law of the self; in this sense it is autonomy in its most extreme form, auto-nomos, self law. in primo levi’s discussion of the soccer game of the sonderkommando—the work details comprising jewish prisoners—in auschwitz we can see the dynamics of this form of perpetration at work, if not the actual individual enjoyments of the most violent of perpetrators (levi 1989: 55). in the soccer game the brutality of the regime is highlighted through the performance of a regime which enables the utter destruction of people as objects, as ‘figuren’ in shoshana felman’s terms (2002), and then the re-animation of them as sporting combatants for the purposes of the game. it is the very structures of the camp which produce these possibilities, for levi (1989) and for giorgio agamben (1999)14—who sees that shift between object and subject and back again—as the most obscene of the performances of the relations between nazi germany and the jews. that the jews could be treated as supposedly sporting equals and then returned to the position of being able to be killed with impunity, illuminates, for agamben, the real structure of the camp in which the responsibility for human relation, in our terms, can be allocated into the laws or rules of the camp, and the matter before the sporting participants can be suspended in the interest of other—more playful—rules being applied. but of course all these rules are playful in the most sadistic sense. because this was, of course, not just a game of soccer but the game of animation of matter, an animation which was only on the terms of the perpetrator. the soccer game indicates the structure of such an animation, in which the playfulness of the perpetrators is enabled because of the suspension of judgment—and indeed of any sense of relation—and its replacement into the rule, the law, rather than the relation. this suspension indicates a powerfully disturbing and instructive depiction of what the camp can do to people, although offers little by way of thinking responsibility for the participants in the game. for the participants, we could imagine, that the game was enabled by the regime, but this very enabling removed their capacity to see it as more than a game enabled by another. it is when the game is produced in the more—and perhaps truly—intimate scenes of violence, where the perpetrator can both animate and 14 see also sanyal (2002). rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 12 suspend at his or her own whim, that we see the profound enjoyment of some perpetrators as a lacanian jouissance. for lacan jouissance took many forms, but the one that is useful to us here, is that of a bodily jouissance understood as an enjoyment in the flesh, a jouissance that, i will explain, as an encounter with and as law, a moment of proximity to prohibition in which that prohibition becomes unbearable. the frame for jouisance is that of the oedipal scene, previously mentioned. in this scene the limit of the subject is experienced as an encounter with castration evidenced in an imagination of the oedipal scene. for lacan there is no reality to the oedipal scene, only an experience of it.15 the imagination which haunts the child and then the adult becomes for lacan the defining element to all relations as a desire to thwart the cut of castration. jouissance can be understood as an effort to thwart castration while at the same time toying with it. if castration is embodied in, what lacan calls, the law-of-the-father then coming close to that law both produces an excitement—as a terror—and the possibility of knowing where the limits of law begin and end. that is, it produces the tension in knowing the precise coordinates of recognition from the other. and it is precisely this last production which the sadistic perpetrator enjoys, not only in his flirtation with the limit, but in his embodiment of the father-fuhrer as the dictator of the limit. the other, particularly in the time of war and in scenes of torture, is an other who can decide who lives and who decides, embodied in the words of the character daniel in zero-dark-thirty who dictates the limits of pain and of life—‘if you lie to me i hurt you … i own you’ (bigelow 2012). daniel, in these scenes is the figure of the father as the dictator of limits and of punishment. but daniel goes further in the scene of torture where he re-animates the relation between himself and his victims in a mode which makes him not only the figure who can decide on life and death (on pain, or not) but the figure who can produce the form of life the victim experiences. that is, he can animate the tortured within his own parameters. in the scene of daniel with the torture victim ammar ,this dictation of life comes in the form of daniel torturing in one moment then later coming back to offer ammar drink, 15 even the patient known as the wolf man in freud’s account does not necessarily see the scene of his parents coitus, but knows the experience and puts image to it. for lacan this image is what he calls the imaginary as an imagination of every encounter through the lens of the first trauma of the imagining of the oedipal scene. rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 13 food and even a gentle touch in the next moment. this animation of the relation, of course, is the torturer’s technique that we have come to know in popular culture (and sometimes in the flesh) as ‘good cop, bad cop.’ this is usually embodied in two people, but as a technique of torture it is perhaps more effective as an injury to the tortured when embodied in the confusions which haunt the relationship to one person—the torturerother.16 in zero-dark-thirty and perhaps in all scenes of torture, this technique may be both effective and enjoyable to the perpetrator, but the texture of the technique beyond the parameters of its effect in acquiring information is helpful to parse if we are to understand the excitements of the perpetrator in these scenes.17 in the scene of torture, such as that illuminated in zero-dark-thirty, daniel has the sanction of his superiors, and this is crucial to his performance of torture and, in the film, it suggests a more clinical—or perhaps legal—relation is at work; one which relieves daniel of not only responsibility but of being accused of exercising an enjoyment. we can see what is going on in the scene of torture as a reanimation of the oedipal scene where the child who imagines the scene imagines himself able to be the author of the scene. this is a getting close to the instance of castration but then far from being subject to it—and its attendant horrors and excitements—it is a recruiting of one’s own law to animate the flesh that is denied the child in that moment—the mother’s flesh. to understand this we must understand the legal sanction offered to perpetrators of violence in situations of war, that is, how positive law functions to sanction the breach of oedipal law, or how positive law allows—and even demands—the torturer breach the flesh of the another. the breach of flesh is, of course, law’s stock-in-trade—as a practice of torture, capital punishment and even detention, but it is also the very thing barred the subject in the oedipal scene. in this scene the figure of the father (this figure could be an actual father or it could be any desirable object or experience the mother has away from the child) prevents the child from consummating his desires for the mother, that is, returning to her flesh; a return to the womb as a form of re-entry into the flesh.18 16 the damage of this torture may well be the feelings embodied in trusting another and then the awareness that one’s own sense of trust is not to be trusted. this is of course elaine scarry’s point about the body of the tortured becoming a weapon to itself—more than in the experience of pain, the body as an affectionate/loving entity betrays itself in having any feelings of trust (scarry 1985). 17 perhaps this can also offer substance through which to ponder the torturer’s level of responsibility to the community and to the victim. 18 note: rape, then, far from being a ‘side effect’ of war is undoubtedly inherent to it because it performs the subject’s own guilt of perpetration—that is, it is an important excess beyond the laws of war, and important component to the guilty subject who knows that the breach of another’s flesh is a breach of rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 14 this desire for return can be thought of as what is symbolically sanctioned in the commands of war. the soldier is told that his insertion into the flesh of another— whether it causes pain death or another form of injury—is a necessary act of war. in war—or in any post war context—the sanction of the destruction of the flesh of another is confusing (or should be confusing), precisely because this is what is barred to the subject prior to war. at the time of war this confusion is likely to be managed by replacing the prohibitive function of the father with the commands of superiors. thus when a soldier is instructed to kill—to enter the flesh of another with bullet, knife or other mechanism of destruction—the body of the victim becomes not a body at all but an inanimate object, as figuren, or as an object.19 this construction enables a belief that oedipal law is enduring no breach, at least for that time. indeed, contrary to the assumptions of pleasure experienced by people who create the other as object, what i am suggesting here is that the enjoyment is not in the rendering of the other as object, but in the animation of the other at the hands of the perpetrator who imagines themselves able to animate the other as subject to their own law. conclusion for most soldiers the return to the ordinary law of relations after being subject to the laws/commands of war is traumatic, in varying degrees, precisely because the flesh rendered object begins to return in memory as human flesh; flesh with its own life and flesh subject to the ordinary injunctions of oedipal law. indeed the return to ordinary life after war should be traumatic if the soldier-subject is to re-orientate themselves to the ordinary law of relations. for some perpetrators in a war however, the confusion of the contradictions between oedipal law and the positive commands of war (what we can call positive law) promote neither post-trauma nor remorse. for some perpetrators the contradictions between oedipal and positive law are precisely what is enjoyable about war and its attendant violences. in the scene of torture in zero-dark-thirty mentioned above we can see the presumption that the sanction of positive law does not render the other object. for daniel stanton they are precisely human others who are able to be breached, that is, the oedipal law. rape, as a breach of positive law—despite its sanction by comrades or even superiors—is something for which the subject knows he could be (should be) punished. and punishment is a necessity for the subject who breaches oedipal law. 19 there is so much writing on the creation of the other as ‘object’; see, for example, gobodo-madikizela (2008). rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 15 sanction for the breach is enabled through the sanction of the law. but this breach is a breach of oedipal law. in the scene of torture we see the breach of oedipal law and the attempts to thwart it in the animation of the other’s flesh or the other’s life. the animation of the matter of the body of another is not only enabled but is psychically made seductive through the sanction of positive law’s performance of a breach of oedipal law. thus what is unacceptable—in oedipal law—but sanctioned—in positive law—precisely enables a enjoyment for the perpetrator in the act of violence. this tension of the command and the unacceptable, in fact, is the perfect formula for a jouissance of the torturer; a formula which demands the subject enjoy the flesh of another in its animation. the enjoyment is precisely in the being in proximity of the law because it also points to the location of where one knows what one is, that is, if the subject knows where the cut will arrive then it also knows what is desirable (in a negative sense) to the mother. the subject’s proximity to the cut announces that one is getting warmer in returning to the mother’s absolute desire, (or the womb).20 thus the (sovereign or military) law’s direction as to what is to be cut, tortured, or killed points to both the oedipal crime and a location in which permeation of the womb can occur. but the subject—on an unconscious level—knows this is both sanctioned and prohibited at the same time, and, it is this knowledge which produces the animation 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(dir.) 1994, death and the maiden. capitol films, los angeles. pugliese, j. 2010, ‘necroethics of terrorism,’ law &critique, vol. 32: 213–231, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10978-010-9074-x rogers, j. 2010, ‘torture: a modicum of recognition,’ law & critique, vol. 32: 233–245, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10978-010-9075-9 ______ 2013, law’s cut on the body of human rights: female circumcision, torture and sacred flesh. routledge, london. rogers jouissance of the torturer portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 17 sands, p. 2008, torture team: rumsfeld’s memo and the betrayal of american values. palgrave mcmillan, new york. sanyal, d. 2002, ‘a soccer match in auschwitz: passing culpability in holocaust criticism,’ representations, vol. 79: 1–27, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rep.2002.79.1.1 scarry, e. 1985, body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world. oxford, new york. winterson, j. 1992, written on the body. jonathan cape, london. zizek, s. 2013, ‘zero dark thirty: hollywood’s gift to american power,’ 26 january. online, available: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-tortureunjustifiable [accessed: 27 january 2013]. women in asia: shadow lines portal journal of multidisciplinary international studiesi, vol. 4, no. 2 july 2007. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal editor’s welcome to portal vol. 4, no. 2 2007 the second issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies for 2007 is a special issue with the title contesting euro visions, edited by dimitris eleftheriotis (university of glasgow), murray pratt (university of technology sydney) and ilaria vanni, (university of technology sydney). as the editors’ opening essay emphasises, this issue is not concerned to perpetuate myths of a europe united or federated, or even cohered by shared values. rather it aims to reclaim something of the conceptual, transcultural and locational uncertainties encoded in the foundation myth of europe’s origins: europa’s seduction and abduction by zeus, disguised as a white bull. as the editors argue, this myth is marked by the physical elusiveness of europe’s actual location (homer’s europa being, for example, phoenician, in what is now syria), and also complicated by centuries of amendments and revisions. thus, by approaching contemporary europe through the prism of a mutating and unanchored foundational fiction, the editors argue that that fiction ‘can be used to understand how in europe particular local histories and local knowledge intersect with global issues, and conversely how what appears to be “european” is, in fact, the result of global encounters. narratives of european values need to be located in this striated space, while friction as an organising metaphor also explains the slippage and relation between the lived, heterogeneous embodiments of contemporary europe and abstract notions of values.’ the other essays gathered in this special issue endorse this notion of a striated europe, a shifting space best regarded as a space of friction. i would like to thank all of the authors included in this special issue for their patience and support for the contesting euro visions ideal that frames the issue. i would also like to take the opportunity to announce a call for papers for the july 2008 issue of portal, entitled ‘italian cultures: writing italian cultural studies in the world.’ full details follow, in both english and italian, and can be found on the journal’s homepage. paul allatson, chair, portal editorial committee allatson editor’s welcome portal 4.2 (2007) call for papers ‘italian cultures: writing italian cultural studies in the world.’ portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies is seeking articles for a special issue on italian cultural studies. it aims at updating existing scholarship and scoping the proliferation of interests in this growing field. it recognizes that cultural studies practitioners write multiple italies within italy itself and from provincialized italies, with a perspective that is both global and informed by specific local knowledge. in particular we seek articles that map how processes of social change and identification are negotiated, imagined, explored and contested in relation to the following (but not exclusively) themes: • belonging • body • cinema • consumption • design • digital cultures • everyday • fashion • food • language • media (new and old) • new writing • place • sport • visual cultures portal has built into its editorial protocols a commitment to facilitating dialogue between international studies practitioners working anywhere in the world, and not simply or exclusively in the ‘north,’ ‘the west’ or the ‘first world.’ the journal’s commitment to fashioning a genuinely ‘international' studies rubric is also reflected in our willingness to publish critical and creative work in english as well as in a number of other languages: bahasa indonesia, chinese, croatian, french, german, italian, japanese, serbian, and spanish. portal provides open access to all of it content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. if are interested in submitting a paper please read the author’s guidelines and information about the submission process portal’s homepage, http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. deadline: 1 march 2008. for further information, please contact dr ilaria vanni: ilaria.vanni@uts.edu.au portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 2 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal allatson editor’s welcome portal 4.2 (2007) portal, journal of multidisciplinary international studies, numero speciale: ‘italian cultures: writing italian cultural studies in the world’. portal, journal of multidisciplinary international studies sta raccogliendo articoli per un numero speciale sugli studi culturali che trattino tematiche legate all’italia con lo scopo di aggiornare la ricerca esistente e produrre una mappatura della proliferazione di interesse in quest’area in espansione. portal riconosce che una molteplicità di italie viene generata dai ricercatori che lavorano nell’ambito di cultural studies all’incontro di prospettive globali e saperi locali, sia come panorama interno all’italia sia come provincializzazioni dell’italia. in particolare questo numero è interessato (ma non limitato) a testi sulle seguenti tematiche: • cibo • cinema • consumi • corpi • culture visive • design • culture digitali • lingua • luoghi • media (vecchi e nuovi) • moda • processi di appartenenza • quotidianità • scrittura creativa • sport portal include nei suoi protocolli editoriali l’impegno a facilitare il dialogo tra studiosi e studiose di studi internazionali che lavorano in qualsiasi parte del mondo, e non solo nel ‘nord’, nell’ ‘ovest’ o nel ‘primo mondo’. l’impegno della rivista a creare un clima genuinamente ‘internazionale’ si ritrova anche nella decisione di pubblicare testi critici e creativi non solo in inglese ma anche in bahasa indonesia, cinese, croato, francese, giapponese, italiano, serbo, spagnolo e tedesco. portal garantisce libero accesso a tutti i testi pubblicati sostenendo così la libera circolazione, creazione e lo scambio di saperi. le avvertenze per gli autori sono pubblicate nel sito della rivista http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. la scadenza per la presentazione dei testi è il 1 marzo 2008. per ulteriori informazioni si prega di contattare dr ilaria vanni: ilaria.vanni@uts.edu.au portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 3 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal editor’s welcome to portal vol. 4, no. 2 2007 the second issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary inte portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 2 september 2017 communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue, guest edited by anu bissoonauth and rowena ward. © 2017 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: bissoonauth, a. and parish, n. 2017. french, english or kanak languages? can traditional languages and cultures be sustained in new caledonia?. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:2, 39-53. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5378 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au research article french, english or kanak languages? can traditional languages and cultures be sustained in new caledonia? anu bissoonauth1*, nina parish2 1 school of humanities and social inquiry, faculty of law, humanities and the arts, university of wollongong, northfields avenue, wollongong nsw 2522, australia 2 department of politics, languages and international studies, faculty of humanities and social sciences, university of bath, 1 west, university of bath, claverton down, bath ba2 7ay united kingdom *corresponding author: dr anu bissoonauth, school of humanities and social inquiry, faculty of law, humanities and the arts, university of wollongong, northfields avenue, wollongong nsw 2522, australia. anu_bissoonauth_bedford@uow.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5378 article history: received 31/01/2017; revised 18/05/2017; accepted 16/06/2017; published 05/10/2017 abstract new caledonia has an unusual linguistic dynamic in comparison to other french overseas territories. while new caledonia was established as a penal colony in 1853, the other french islands were settled as plantation colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. in these areas, french creole is usually the lingua franca and has lower status than french. in new caledonia, although french has official status and dominates in state institutions, it is the native language of only half the population. there are 28 indigenous languages and a french creole, tayo, spoken mostly in the rural areas. the 2014 census population revealed a multicultural new caledonian population; it did not, however, record the rate of multilingualism in speakers. the present study, conducted in two stages, addresses a gap in the research by focussing on patterns of language use and social attitudes of new caledonians towards their own multilingualism. the same methodology consisting of a structured questionnaire and semi-structured interview was used to collect data in both stages of the research so that a comparative analysis could be carried out between urban and rural new caledonia. this paper focuses on social perceptions of ancestral languages and cultures as well as challenges to their preservation in multilingual spaces, as new caledonia transitions towards a new status to be defined in an independence declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 39 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5378 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5378 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:anu_bissoonauth_bedford@uow.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5378 referendum in 2018. preliminary results from the study show a difference in the language habits between older and younger generations of new caledonians of melanesian descent. although french is perceived as the lingua franca by all, english is more valued than ancestral melanesian languages by the younger generations. in terms of cultural representations and links with family history, there seems to be a discrepancy between the younger and the older generations. whilst the older generations perceive the tjibaou cultural centre as a traditional space for melanesian art and culture, their younger counterparts view it as a place associated with contemporary art and music performances. keywords new caledonia; french; english; kanak; multilingualism; sustainability introduction french is a pluricentric language; in other words, it has several interacting centres, each providing a national variety with at least some of its own (codified) forms (clyne 1992: 1). in his discussion of french as a pluricentric language lüdi (1992) classified the frenchspeaking world into three categories according to the status of french in these areas and the number of speakers who have french as their first language. new caledonia falls into the second category of francophone countries in which ‘french is the official language … without generally being among the languages of the first socialization of the population’ (lüdi 1992: 150). the diglossic situation, whereby french dominates in the education system, media and administration (fillol & vernaudon 2004; roche 2015), and the asymmetrical nature of pluricentricity, are highlighted by the fact that french is the native language of only half the population in new caledonia (ball 1997: 57; taglioni 2004: 250). lüdi (1992: 171) suggested a number of directions for future research, which include the links between language and identity in multilingual societies where french is not the first language of the majority of the population. sallabank (2015: 38) highlighted a lack of sociolinguistic research on language attitudes about language change and policy in new caledonia. the present study contributes to addressing this gap by investigating language practices and language attitudes of new caledonians towards the various languages present in their environment. the article focuses on patterns of language use, perceptions of multilingual spaces and attitudes about the preservation of ancestral languages and cultures as new caledonia transitions towards a new status to be defined in an independence referendum by 2018. one of our interview participants sums up the feelings of new caledonians in the following terms with regard to their relatively isolated position in the predominantly englishspeaking pacific: ‘on se sent un peu seuls quand même car dans tout le pacifique tout le monde parle anglais. on n’est pas nombreux à parler français, on a tahiti, wallis et nouvellecalédonie.’1 if this quotation is placed in a regional context, it can be stated that of the ten million inhabitants of the island members of the pacific islands forum, most speak more than one language, and this occurs often in countries where there are numerous local languages (for example, papua new guinea alone has over 850 languages). furthermore, the populations 1 ‘we feel a little isolated all the same because throughout the pacific everyone speaks english. there aren’t many of us who speak french: tahiti, wallis and new caledonia.’ all translations are our own unless otherwise indicated. bissoonauth and parish portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 40 of the french territories in the pacific total around 500,000, with the other islands widely speaking english (pacific community 2016). which languages, then, will be used in new caledonia after new caledonians decide on their future? indeed, what role does the question of languages play in the discussions, debates and decisions leading to the definition of the future status of the territory? will ancestral languages and customs be lost? will english become the lingua franca? historical overview of new caledonia situated about 1,500 kilometres east of australia, new caledonia was established as a french penal colony in 1853 by napoleon iii, who wanted to secure france’s presence in the pacific ocean where australia and new zealand were already british colonies. similarly to australia, new caledonia also had an indigenous population and was peopled by convicts as well as other european migrants and missionaries. as a consequence of this increase in european population, the indigenous melanesian or kanak population became more and more suppressed and acculturated. free settlers were encouraged to migrate, and approximately 60,000 indentured labourers from the pacific islands, vietnam, java, indonesia and japan were imported to work in mines, agriculture, fishing and domestic service between 1864 and 1939 (shineberg & foster 2017). it is of note here that new caledonia has twenty-five percent of the world’s nickel reserves (pitoiset 2016). a nickel boom in the 1960s and 1970s attracted additional migrants from france and the french pacific territories to the islands (aldrich & connell 1992: 139) in a deliberate program by the french state to outnumber new caledonia’s indigenous people (fisher 2013: 57). the 1980s were marked by the rise of the kanak independence movement in response to that french program, and by a strong resistance to independence among the non-indigenous population (‘spotlight on overseas france’ 2011). in 1988, tensions and violent unrest on the island of ouvea resulted in the negotiation of the matignon peace accord, which gave new caledonians a ten-year transition to vote on the future of the country. however, in 1998 the matignon accord was extended into the nouméa accord, which stipulated that the referendum on self-determination should be deferred and decided by a three-fifths majority in local congress between 2014 and 2018, failing which the french state must convene a referendum by the end of 2018. the nouméa accord established a customary senate in 1999 whose role is purely consultative and yet it must be consulted for projects or propositions related to kanak identity by the local government and courts (pitoiset 2014: 60). since 2004, new caledonia has the status of a pays d’outre mer (pom), which means that it has more autonomy to administer its domestic affairs than other french overseas territories (toms) and departments and regions (droms) (chappell 2012; ‘new caledonia profile’ 2016). the volatile political situation in new caledonia was highlighted by chappell (2012) in his analysis of social tensions and political divisions that have led to several government resignations over issues related to local identity. one example was the lack of consensus over which flag—the french tricolore or the kanak flag—would best represent new caledonian identity in the 2011 pacific games, an issue that ground government to a halt for several months in that year, and on which there are continuing differences. in the end, the local congress voted for the flying of both flags until an agreement could be reached on a single flag accepted by all (fisher 2013: 166). another example from 2015 concerns differences over the eligibility to vote arising from complex definitions in the nouméa accord that restrict the electorates for the local provincial assemblies and the final referendum. the french, english or kanak languages? can traditional languages and cultures be sustained in new caledonia? portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 41 finalisation of the electoral rolls by a french commission has been a controversial subject, with observers from the united nations called in to assist. as nic maclellan, a journalist and researcher in the pacific islands puts it, ‘the road to a referendum will not be smooth, and time is short’ (2015). language situation according to the 2014 census, the population of new caledonia including the north and south provinces and the loyalty islands was 269,000 (broustet & rivoilan 2015). the majority of the population lives in the south province with two out of three new caledonians based in the capital city nouméa and its suburbs. the census also asked new caledonians to indicate the community or communities with which they most identified. a breakdown of the population by community in table 1 reveals a multicultural population with the largest community being indigenous melanesians or kanaks (39.1 percent), followed by europeans (27.1 percent) and a minority of polynesians (10.3 percent), asians (2.7 percent), those who identified with several communities (8 percent), those who identified themselves as ‘caledonian’ or mixed race (7.4 percent), and those who did not identify with any community in particular (2.5 percent). it can be noted that the census did not ask which language(s) new caledonians most frequently used to record the rate of bi/multilingualism of the population. table 1 population by community. source: ‘structure de la population et évolutions’ (2015). as new caledonia is a french pom, the official language is the same as that of metropolitan france: standard french. french dominates in the administrative, legal and education systems as well as the media. french is also the vehicular language in new caledonia in its standard and regional varieties called new caledonian french (ncf) (roche 2015). new caledonian french or français calédonien (darot & pauleau 2010: 286), described by corne as ‘different from any regional variety spoken in metropolitan france or from any other overseas variety,’ is ‘mutually intelligible with other varieties of french, both metropolitan and overseas’ (corne 1999: 16). new caledonian french originates from the français populaire spoken by convicts sent out to the island in the nineteenth century and developed in situ when it came into contact with local languages. the most salient differences between new caledonian french bissoonauth and parish portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 42 and standard french are of a phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical nature (darot & pauleau 2010: 294–297). from a phonological perspective, new caledonian french bears similarities to varieties of regional french spoken in north africa and the south of france, resulting from language contact between french, melanesian languages and australian english, as indigenous populations, francophones and anglophones travelled to or worked in those areas (corne 1999; darot & pauleau 2010). the most significant difference between standard french and ncf pronunciation is in the area of nasal vowels, where ncf has lost the opposition between the /ô/ and the /â/ due to contact with melanesian languages (tryon 1991: 282–283). another distinctive feature of new caledonian french is loan words from local melanesian and polynesian languages, which have contributed to the development of its lexicon, particularly in the areas of fauna and flora. there are 28 indigenous melanesian languages, also called kanak languages (nocus et al. 2013: 85), in new caledonia, and they are currently spoken along with a handful of polynesian and asian languages. as highlighted by sallabank (2015: 33), the term kanak is not an indigenous melanesian name, but is derived from kanaka in hawaiian which means ‘man’ or human being. although all new caledonian melanesian languages belong to the southern oceanic group of the austronesian languages (corne 1999: 19), they are not mutually intelligible. this is one reason why french, the language of the colonial master, has evolved into not only the lingua franca, but also the vehicular language across new caledonia. indigenous melanesian languages are mostly used in informal situations, such as the home domain, and with members of the same community or tribe, and have a lower status than french. the diglossic situation between french and indigenous languages is further enhanced by a lack of intergenerational transmission of ancestral languages (roche 2015) and a belief that french is the superior language (salaün 2007) in a context of education funded and controlled by the french state, where french is the sole language of education and is associated with social mobility and academic success (fillol & vernaudon, 2004). as the linguist vernaudon puts it, ‘le message de l’école est pour l’instant assez clair: la langue, la seule langue de la réussite, c’est le français’ (2009: 23).2 tayo, also known as patois de saint-louis (siegel et al. 2000: 75) is a french-based creole that emerged in the nineteenth century from the contact between marist missionaries and local melanesian tribes. this vernacular, mainly spoken in the village of saint-louis, is unknown to many non-kanak new caledonians (corne 1999: 26). the relationship between tayo and french is also one of diglossia, in that tayo has a lower status than french. english, another pluricentric language, is also present in the new caledonian linguistic landscape. however, it is very much a foreign language since it has been taught, only relatively recently, as the first foreign language in schools and is not used by most new caledonians in everyday life. a deliberate education policy introducing english at primary and secondary school in an effort to enable closer associations with the region is leading to changes in the multilingual landscape of new caledonia. research methodology and data collection the present study was carried out in december 2015. it was stage two of a wider research project that investigates patterns of language use and attitudes in multilingual and 2 ‘the message from school is quite clear: the language, the only language, associated with success is french.’ french, english or kanak languages? can traditional languages and cultures be sustained in new caledonia? portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 43 multicultural new caledonia on the eve of the independence referendum vote, which may take place in 2018. while stage one of the research focused on urban nouméa (bissoonauth 2015), stage two of the research emphasised language practices and social perceptions of linguistic spaces and ancestral cultures by new caledonians from rural areas. the methodology used was a multi-response structured questionnaire complemented by a face-to-face interview carried out in the field. in the follow-up interview, participants were asked to expand on their language use and language choices in a variety of social contexts, their perceptions and attitudes towards multilingual spaces in new caledonia, with particular reference to the tjibaou cultural centre (cct), where the agence de développement de la culture kanak (adck, agency for the development of kanak culture) is based. the same questionnaire and semi-structured interview from stage one of the research, consisting of ten and five questions respectively, were used so that we could compare urban and rural areas. in the second phase of the investigation, however, there were some limitations that impacted on the scope of the study, as explained below. the present sample consists of 28 participants (14 male and 14 female), six of whom were from the two tribes that were visited as described in the next section. the remaining twentytwo had been invited to participate in the study by the cultural liaison facilitators because of their diversity and were from various parts of new caledonia. eleven participants were born outside nouméa (saint-louis, mont dore, conception and northern provinces), ten were from french polynesia (wallis and futuna, and tahiti) and one was from la réunion, and all were living outside nouméa. twelve respondents (5 male and 7 female) from the sample participated in the interviews that followed the completion of the questionnaire, thus allowing qualitative data to be compared with quantitative data. limitations of present research as the study dealt with the new caledonians living in rural areas, a customary path had to be followed in order to meet indigenous communities living in tribes in these areas. indeed, before visiting a tribe, the chief had to be contacted by the customary senator of the region under whose jurisdiction these tribes fall. the senator had to contact the chief in person and arrange for a convenient day and time to visit the tribe. the cultural liaison facilitator, a member of the kanak community, would then accompany the researcher on the visit, as the protocol required. we followed the same procedure for data collection with each participant to ensure that bias was kept to a minimum. on arrival to the tribe, there would be a customary welcome ceremony during which gifts would be exchanged and the cultural liaison facilitator would be the first to speak and to introduce the visitor/researcher. it was only then that the visitors could introduce themselves, explain the aims of the research and ask the chief ’s permission to conduct the investigation in their community. because of time constraints during this second stage of the research we only visited two tribes. the first tribe was located at boulouparis (some 70 kilometres north of nouméa) and the second at yaté (approximately 50 kilometres east of nouméa). this is why the number of participants from the tribes is small in the present sample (6 participants). it should be noted that both chiefs participated in the survey and it was through the interviews with them as cultural leaders that it became apparent how languages participate in this complex customary system. in the interview on language use and language choice with the tribe chief at boulouparis, who used to be the former president of the customary bissoonauth and parish portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 44 senate, he was quick to point out that before the french language was imposed by colonial rule, bior multilingual elders would participate in and negotiate the customary path when making contact with another tribe. nowadays these exchanges are carried out in french, which is obviously more efficient in many ways, but it erases the complexities and nuances of the customary system and does little to sustain the use and understanding of different ancestral languages and traditions. data analysis the quantitative analysis of the data was carried out by calculating the frequency and percentage in each response category for every response. answers to most questions were pre-coded and a statistical analysis allowed a rapid production of figures and cross-tabulations which illustrate the language trends of the sample. the qualitative analysis was carried out by transcribing verbatim individual responses to questions 1 and 2 in the questionnaire. the interview questions allowed participants to expand on their responses related to their language practices and perceptions of multilingual spaces with a focus on the tjibaou cultural centre involved in the preservation of melanesian oral languages and cultures. an analysis of twelve transcriptions using a thematic approach allowed topics to be identified (guest et al. 2012: 10–11). language(s) most frequently used on a daily basis in four social contexts (home, work, friends, strangers) and social perceptions of multilingualism were identified as topics, allowing qualitative data to be compared with quantitative data from the questionnaire in order to gain a better understanding of factors influencing language practices and attitudes towards sustainability of ancestral cultures among the participants. data analysis was carried out for the whole sample as the aim of this study was to show general trends rather than individual variations. the results are for the whole sample, unless stated otherwise. the percentages do not always add up to a hundred since the questionnaire was a multi-response one, whereby participants could indicate several languages used in a variety of contexts. language use on a daily basis in the present sample of 28 new caledonians, fifty percent of the participants claimed to be residing in a rural area outside nouméa. it should be noted that most jobs and schools are situated in the capital, so many new caledonians reside in nouméa and its surroundings for professional and educational reasons. the ethnolinguistic profile of the sample can be said to cover a number of ethnolinguistic backgrounds, since 10 percent claimed to be of european descent, 45 percent of melanesian ancestry and 37 percent of mainly polynesian and asian migrant descent question seven of the questionnaire asked participants which language(s) they used in the following contexts: at home, at work, with friends and with strangers. as can be noted from table 2 below, french is the language most commonly used in all four social contexts (88 percent on average) followed by ‘other’ ancestral languages originating from polynesia and asia (11 percent), then kanak languages (9 percent). tayo (7 percent) was mostly used in the home context and not at work. english, on the other hand, was used especially by those who worked in it and in the tourism industry in nouméa city centre (25 percent). in the interviews, the majority of participants (90 percent) said they had learnt english in school as a foreign language. french, english or kanak languages? can traditional languages and cultures be sustained in new caledonia? portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 45 2015 sample (n=28: 14 male & 14 female) home (%) work (%) friends (%) strangers (%) average (%) english 7 25 17 37 22 french 82 93 89 86 88 kanak 18 4 11 4 9 tayo 11 0 4 4 4 other (wallisian, futunian, tongan, bislamar, réunionnais creole, spanish) 25 4 4 11 11 table 2 language(s) most frequently used on a daily basis (%) in 2015 sample. a comparison with results from the first stage of the study in urban areas (table 3) shows that, as expected, french is the language most commonly used at work and with strangers. the slight difference with english in the home context is due to the fact that one female participant, who is a teacher, said in the interview that both her spouse and herself, whose first language is french, prefer speaking english with their young child to get him accustomed to the language. the change in learning and using english between the two samples is quite an impressive development in a very short time, and results from a deliberate educational policy to teach english. not long ago very few new caledonians studied english at school and this increase in usage points to efforts to better integrate with the english-dominant region. the most striking difference between the two samples is the presence of tayo, which was absent in the 2013 sample, except for one participant who spoke it when visiting family in saint-louis (bissoonauth 2015: 282). the presence of tayo in the 2015 sample is explained in the next section. 2013 sample (n=30: 15 male & 15 female) home (%) work (%) friends (%) strangers (%) average (%) english 0 13 17 37 17 french 80 100 97 100 94 kanak 43 10 27 7 22 tayo 0 0 0 0 0 other 17 7 17 13 14 table 3 language(s) most frequently used on a daily basis (%) in 2013 sample. who are the tayo speakers? in the sample, eight participants answered that they could understand tayo, but only three participants responded that they used tayo at home. all three respondents in the present sample resided in the outskirts of nouméa in the tribes located at conception, saint-louis and further east from nouméa in yaté. the first tayo speaker was a male senator over 60 years of age, the second a female student under 20 years of age and the third was a female museum community liaison officer in her forties. although there was no family connection between bissoonauth and parish portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 46 them, they all were from the main tayo-speaking areas in new caledonia (saint-louis and conception). this may be significant since saint-louis, in particular, has been the location of ongoing violence, in the last decade, by young kanaks against other rival groups of kanaks, wallisian families who have settled in the area and french authorities (abc radio australia 2012). in question six of the questionnaire participants were asked to rank their language ability according to a scale between 1 and 4 where 1 was weak and 4 very good. altogether the three tayo speakers of the sample claimed proficiency in french, english, tayo and drehu (a melanesian language from the loyalty islands). it is interesting to note that the older participant, the male senator, only indicated french, tayo and drehu, and did not include english in his language repertoire. the two women, on the other hand, who are younger, included english as part of their multilingual skills. these results confirm what other informants said in the interviews about english becoming more prominent in the education system in new caledonia with it being offered as an option in all secondary schools and increasingly in primary schools. in the third part of question six of the questionnaire, participants were invited to rate the importance of the languages they come into contact with on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 was not important to 4 being very important. the male senator who claimed to speak french, drehu and tayo, rated french as more important than tayo, whereas both women rated english, french and tayo, the non-dominant creole, as equally important. the trend would seem to indicate a difference in attitudes between generations and genders that merits further investigation. violence and the french language an aspect that should not be neglected in the participants’ responses is the regular association of violence with the french language. this analogy is unsurprising given the often aggressive nature of colonial rule, the imposition of the french language, and a school environment with its strong emphasis on discipline. one male participant, in response to question 2 about which public space one should visit to hear tayo, states very diplomatically: ‘il y a aussi on va dire qu’on nous a un peu imposé cette langue française.’3 he then goes on to talk of his father being hit if he used his indigenous language at school. another participant told of schoolgirls’ hair being cut off if they did not express themselves in standard french. confirming fillol and vernaudon’s (2004) observations, one participant emphasises the obligation of children to speak good french in order to do well at school, a pressure that he believes has become more significant since his own childhood: ‘car nous on a vécu dans les langues.’4 in her interview, the older tayo female speaker repeatedly states that, as schoolchildren, they were not allowed to speak tayo because it deformed french: ‘il fallait pas parler le tayo parce que ça déformait le français.’ she also expresses great resentment and anger at linguists coming to study the kanak languages whilst the authorities were actively and violently not allowing their use: ‘en même temps qu’on a vu les linguistes qui sont venus nous étudier et d’un autre côté le système nous interdisait de parler nos langues ou nous violenter pour justement ne pas pratiquer notre langue.’ this paradox is strangely mirrored in this participant’s admission to mainly using french in her everyday life with colleagues, friends, and even 3 ‘there is also, let us say that they imposed a little this french language on us’. 4 ‘because we were immersed in indigenous languages’. french, english or kanak languages? can traditional languages and cultures be sustained in new caledonia? portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 47 her children. she claims to use tayo when she does not want others to understand: ‘quand on parle la langue le tayo c’est pour ne pas être compris par les autres.’ in her case, tayo has become a type of secret language that is forged through cultural bonds. french, it seems, holds value in terms of linguistic identity, but is separate from cultural identity. emmanuel tjibaou, the director of the cultural centre tjibaou (cct) and the agence de développement de la culture kanak (adck), and son of the independence leader, jean-marie tjibaou, participated in the survey and agreed to be interviewed as the director of cctadck about the centre’s activities and role in preserving new caledonia’s oral languages and cultural heritage. emmanuel tjibaou defines himself as an ethnolinguist and a cultural activist. he leads the cct-adck’s research and heritage department and maintains that the relationship to french in new caledonia has changed. the younger population is used to speaking french (‘les gens ont l’habitude de s’exprimer en français et c’est plus la même chose que nos parents ou nos grands-parents, ils avaient du mal’) and for them it is no longer a question of domination, of violence, and of power relations, as it would have been in the recent past. french is the lingua franca and is readily accepted as such: ‘on passe par le français et c’est communément admis que c’est le français c’est la langue qui nous permet de se comprendre entre nous.’ this generational difference is reflected in the differing responses from young adults, parents and grandparents in the interviews for this project. emmanuel tjibaou emphasizes the significance of multilingual cultures and sustaining their usage in new caledonia by showing respect when addressing others in their language (‘c’est une question d’installer une familiarité, moins de distance avec les individus le fait de, d’être étranger et de parler la langue c’est du respect vis-à-vis de la personne qui s’exprime en langue’), the efforts made to not impose one’s own language on others (‘je fais des efforts pour éviter d’imposer mon … ma langue aux autres’), but above all the importance of a choice of languages (‘voilà, l’important c’est le choix’). how does the centre culturel tjibaou contribute to maintaining traditional languages and cultures? the cct was inaugurated in may 1998, the day before the signing of the nouméa accord, and is named after independence leader jean-marie tjibaou, who was assassinated in 1989 by one of his supporters after he signed the precursor to the nouméa accord, the matignonoudinot accords. as noted above, the cct houses the adck, whose breathtaking design was conceived by italian architect renzo piano, assisted by the ethnologist, alban bensa, a specialist in kanak culture. its structure is based on the villages in which the kanak tribes live: a series of huts that distinguish the different functions and hierarchies of the tribes and a central alley along which the huts are dispersed. jean-marie tjibaou had originally asked the french government to build a cultural centre in nouméa in june 1988. the centre’s official primary purpose, as expressed in its mission statement, was to ‘promote the kanak archaeological and linguistic heritage’ (tjibaou cultural centre and adck n.d.). interestingly, it was the first of mitterand’s grands projets to be invested in or built outside france. thus the political meets or appropriates the cultural in an attempt to bridge the gap between the aspirations of the french government and the desire by activists to achieve a new and independent state of kanaky (message 2006: 155), particularly following the troubles of the 1980s. the cct was transferred to the local new caledonian government in 2012, as part of scheduled handovers of various responsibilities under the nouméa accord. bissoonauth and parish portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 48 the cct-adck plays an interesting role with regard to the various languages spoken in new caledonia. other institutions, such as the académie des langues kanak (alk, academy of kanak languages), the centre national de la recherche scientifique (cnrs, french national research centre) and the université de la nouvelle-calédonie, are also working to preserve local kanak languages and cultures as intended in the nouméa accord, but in this article our focus is on the cct-adck because of the symbolic importance of its location. the cct-adck’s research and heritage department is engaged in collecting the oral traditions of the different tribes in new caledonia (adck n.d.) for digital presentation and display in the centre’s multimedia library. as emmanuel tjibaou states in his interview, this heritage project is collecting knowledge in the form of local and everyday know-how, and as a result it takes place in the language of the specific tribe for each oral tradition. the project does not aim to take knowledge away from the tribe or to steal it, but rather to ensure its transmission to the next generations. linguists are involved at every stage of this project as the ancestral language plays a key part in understanding a particular tribe’s heritage. interestingly and perhaps paradoxically, although the research and heritage department’s working languages are french and all the kanak languages, the languages that the cct uses to present its exhibitions—french, english and japanese—are not the same, thereby demonstrating that there is a gap between those who visit the cultural centre and those for whom it was initially intended. the choice of french, english and japanese at the tjibaou cultural centre reflects the three highest numbers of visitors by nationality and language to the centre, as shown in the ‘tourisme bilan 2014’ section of the institut de la statistique et des études économiques nouvellecalédonie (l’année finit mieux qu’elle n’avait commencé’ 2014). the cct-adck therefore collects, documents and provides digital access to the various traditional languages and cultures of new caledonia. but to what extent will this public space be able to sustain the linguistic heterogeneity that characterises the make-up of kanak societies and cultures? the responses to the interviews conducted for this project indicate differing understandings of the cct for different generations. the older participants are generally appreciative in their understanding of the centre and its aims. one interviewee comments: ‘le centre c’est la vitrine du peuple kanak.’5 another participant describes it as a place that preserves and shares knowledge: ‘un lieu qui sert à conserver et à partager les savoirs.’ another interviewee is learning xaracûu at the cct and talks about the opportunity to have a structure that favours safeguarding not only languages, but their practice, on cultural and artistic levels :‘la chance d’avoir cette structure qui favorise la sauvegarde de la langue et pas que la langue, c’est encore la pratique, mais aussi au niveau culturel, artistique.’ in the interviews the younger generation has much less to say about the ctt; they talk about it in terms of visits and concert-going but do not make reference to its value in sharing and preserving oral traditions and kanak cultures. this difference in perspective may well reflect a decrease in the usage of their own languages on the part of younger people; that attitude was also perceptible in our interviews. different visitor responses from local and global points of views serve to highlight the paradoxes represented within the centre itself. the global cannot be separated from the local here, nor the colonised from the coloniser, nor the troubled past from a future that will inevitably involve change. the centre attracts visitors from all over the world because of its spectacular architecture and location; it also attracts more kanak visitors than would have been possible in the 1980s. as pointed out by emmanuel kasarhérou, former cultural director 5 ‘the centre is a window onto the kanak people.’ french, english or kanak languages? can traditional languages and cultures be sustained in new caledonia? portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 49 of the cct and now head curator at the quai branly museum in paris, which displays indigenous art and culture from all over the world: in new caledonia many people think that a museum must keep the past but should not exhibit it. another explanation of our difficulties in attracting kanak visitors is their fear of entering a place where artefacts of the past are displayed. they feel as if they were entering a cemetery where devils live. the matter however must not be forced, attitudes will change gradually. the only thing to do is to explain why it is important for the future of our cultures to have a museum. we must explain why museums did not exist in the past and why they are important nowadays. (message 2006: 151) when kylie message published her book about new museums in 2006, the mission statement of the cct read as follows: ‘the cct may be seen to provide an official site for testing and holding dialogue and debate over what kinds of images and ideas may be appropriate signifiers of a renewed cultural identity for new caledonians as the country continues to negotiate its future direction’ (message 2006: 150). the cct-adck’s website no longer contains such an explicit aim but there is no doubt that this cultural institution continues to play an important role by being forward looking about preserving and developing kanak cultural traditions, and in negotiating new forms of cultural identity for a multiethnic and multilingual ‘state.’ as the 2018 referendum approaches, many changes, both symbolic and concrete, have taken place in new caledonia and france. education in the local languages was one of the main demands of the independence movement in the 1980s, but it was only in 2006 that the first school curricula adapted to new caledonia were introduced that included kanak languages. this situation was despite the fact that the 1998 nouméa accord provided for kanak languages, along with french, to be the languages of teaching and culture. also, in 2006, the maison de la nouvelle calédonie (n.d.), which was created in 1998 following the matignon peace accord with the two-pronged aim of promoting new caledonia to the french and offering help to kanaks living in france, moved to a more prominent position and a bigger space in paris. an important exhibition, ‘kanak: l’art est une parole’ (kanak: art is a word), curated by emmanuel kasarhérou and roger boulay, opened at the quai branly museum in october 2013, before moving to the cct in march 2014. kanak languages could be heard throughout this exhibition. the exhibition’s opening in paris with customary representatives from many tribes participating spontaneously in the opening events and kasahérou giving the opening speech in his ancestral language of ajië was made even more poignant by the fact that the site of the museum had been used for several colonial exhibitions, including the exhibition of 1931, when kanak people had been displayed as exhibits from the colonies (mwà véé 2014). conclusion the present study represents stage two of a wider investigation on how new caledonians are sustaining their languages and cultures as the country transitions towards an independence referendum expected to be held by the end of 2018. this study focussed on the following three areas: language practices, perceptions and attitudes towards ancestral languages and cultures, and challenges to their preservation in multilingual spaces such as the centre culturel tjibaou. results show a difference between the language practices of older and younger generations of new caledonians of melanesian descent. french is well-established and perceived as the lingua franca by all. and yet english is becoming more used and valued than ancestral melanesian languages by the younger generations who participated in the bissoonauth and parish portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 50 study because it is associated with international mobility and access to the english-speaking pacific. language perceptions and attitudes revealed that traditional melanesian and migrant polynesian and other languages in new caledonia’s ecosystem are identity markers, since they are associated with the ancestral languages and cultures of specific ethno-linguistic groups. the case of french creole tayo is an exception as it is considered by the tayo speakers as a language group and differentiating marker. the interview data on perceptions and attitudes towards the iconic tjibaou cultural centre, which as mentioned previously houses a research and heritage department, revealed a discrepancy between older and younger generations of melanesians. whilst the older generations perceive the centre as a symbolic space for melanesian traditional art and culture, the younger members of the community view it more as a modern place associated with contemporary music and outdoor performances. the small size of the sample from rural areas in the second stage of the study points to the need for a third stage to be carried out in a synchronic manner in urban nouméa, the rural north as well as the loyalty islands. this synchronic study fieldwork would allow the continuation of the study of language habits of new caledonians with an emphasis on how local languages and cultures are being maintained with the country’s yet to be determined future. references abc radio australia 2012, ‘renewed clashes in saint-louis,’ online, available: http://www. radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/onairhighlights/renewed-clashes-in-saint-louis [accessed 7 september 2017]. agence de développement de la culture kanak (adck) n.d, ‘patrimoine’ [patrimony], official website. online, 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[accessed 16 august 2014]. french, english or kanak languages? can traditional languages and cultures be sustained in new caledonia? portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 53 http://lengas.revues.org/829 http://jso.revues.org/1003 http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/spotlight-on-overseas-france,18493 http://www.isee.nc/population/recensement/structure-de-la-population-et-evolutions http://www.isee.nc/population/recensement/structure-de-la-population-et-evolutions http://www.adck.nc/presentation/english-presentation/the-tjibaou-cultural-centre-and-adck https://doi.org/10.1080/00223349108572668 http://www.nouvelle-caledonie.gouv.fr/.../colloque-illettrisme-nouvelle caledonie © 2017 by susana chávezsilverman. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: chávez-silverman, s. 2017. casi víspera / colibrí resucitado crónica. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:1, 17-19. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5354 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 1 april 2017 abstract susana chávez-silverman is a califas-born u.s. latina writer and flaneuse who (against all odds) is also an educator, although she mostly laments what’s happened to la cacademia over the last decade or so. she still finds joy and hope in being la high priestess of slow to her students and former students, some of which are among her closest compinches. of the two crónicas included in this special curated issue of cultural works in portal under the theme transitions and dislocations, she says: ‘my writing/life took a major detour in 2016. for most of the year, i wrote nothing at all. or rather, nothing except e-mail after email: to administrators, colleagues all over the world, attorneys, friends and relatives. i had scheduled my sabbatical in order to finish a book project, but had been derailed by a title ix investigation and plagiarism case at my home institution, and the accompanying anxiety and anger. i returned to my book over the summer, culling and editing hundreds of pages of primary texts (letters and emails). but this book is much longer—and truer—than anything i’ve written before and takes a different kind of writing energy, uninterrupted time, and commitment. writing from a place of anger and anxiety doesn’t serve this book. the two crónicas included in this special curated issue are not part of my book in progress, our ubuntu, montenegro: del balboa café al apartheid and back. rather, they were my way of easing back into my (he)art space. ‘casi víspera’ proves i did write something in 2016 after all (other than email, i mean)—i had no memory of it until early this year! ‘black holes’ talks about precisely this (remembering and not). i was determined not to let 2016’s plagiarism/title ix toxic double helix continue to poison me. i wanted to begin 2017 with a bang, and wrote this for my son, for his 30th birthday.’ keywords susana chávez-silverman; crónica; chronicle cultural work casi víspera / colibrí resucitado crónica susana chávez-silverman pomona college corresponding author: professor susana chávez-silverman, romance languages and literatures, pomona college, 333 n. college way, claremont ca 91711, usa. suzanne. chavezsilverman@pomona.edu doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5354 article history: received 18/01/2017; revised 14/03/2017; accepted 15/03/2017; published 04/05/2017 transitions and dislocations, curated cultural works issue, curated by paul allatson. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 17 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5354 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5354 mailto:suzanne.chavezsilverman@pomona.edu mailto:suzanne.chavezsilverman@pomona.edu http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5354 28 febrero, 2016 claramonte, califas for my sister, sarita, con amor anoche, recogí on campus a mi advisee amanda y otra de mis devotees, la madison orozco. we had a three-hour cena en trop mex (pero esa es otra) pero first las traje a casa, pa’ show them around y para dar la housekey a amanda for her house-sitting gig. lo primero que dijo la madison, ni bien entró, fue—this house is so you, profa. justo lo que había dicho amanda, last month. me sentí relieved—y levemente agasajada. ahora bien: here’s where things get really strange. salimos al patio, para explicarles los ins ‘n’ outs de las plantas. it was dusk. that sort of dimming, slightly hazy light. en una, exclamó la madison—profa, there’s a dead baby bird over here! miré—confieso que i didn’t really want to see—y sólo vi una espece de pequeño bulto gris. pero crouching down vi que en efecto, he was just … lying there boca arriba, plopped down next to the coiled manguera. he wasn’t actually dead, pero el poor little vato jadeaba de tal forma—his teensy chest heaved up and down tan violentamente—que it mos def looked like he didn’t have long pal mundo. irrumpí en llanto—sé que tiendo a un little hair drama queen, pero te juro que this was mos def a first! un colibrí posado is one thing. strange, insólito, i thought, cuando vi dos así, sitting stock still, posados en una rama, en el montalvo arts center. hace años. en la primavera del 2008. ese artist retrete en el bosque encantado, where i was beginning to wake up from my bella durmiente sleep, en mi otra vida (pero esa sí que es otra). eso era weird, como dije, pero oddly poignant: esas incongruously drab-colored, upright figures, como teensy totems que no revelaban nada de su singular magia. like rima in green mansions, escribí back then, en ese momento cuando abel la ve en su plain-jane calico, hanging back shyly en los shadows, meekly nursing him back to consciousness después de su snakebite, or waiting on her dizque abuelo, el nuflo, a la tenue luz del fuego. abel didn’t even recognize that beige domesticated creature; no la podía reconciliar con la iridescent, warbling, in constant motion bird-girl que le había hechizado. anygüey, tal era yo—como el mr abel—ante los colibríes posados en el montalvo arts center, aunque en estos últimos años, i’ve grown more accustomed to seeing them like that en el health trail. pero este pequeñajo de anoche te juro que he took it to a different level. ¿habrase visto jamás un hummingbird flat on his back? la cabecita estaba ladeada as i leaned in, como para…comprobar o confirmar que he really was, en efecto, un colibrí. se veía heart-wrenchingly vulnerable, según, in need of imminent last rites. he was gray, panza arriba, y como dije, jadeaba y temblaba. y vi su inconfundible pico, mini-aguja, almost … resting, on the ground. confirmé así que simón: juvenile colibrí. en eso me sobrecogieron unas ganas locas de tocarle, acurrucarle: ese adorable beak, the grayishwhite baby plumas bristling on his little heaving chest. pero me contuve. alguna vestigial science-y factoid de la infancia me reprimió. recordaba, dimly, algo de no querer contaminarle de mi scent, para que su mom o sus compinches no le rechazaran. al final, las girls and i decidimos que lo mejor sería just … leave him there. es febrero, casi casi marzo, pero after esas torrential lluvias la primera semana del año, que auguraban un el niño for the ages—and an end to our 5-year sequía—since then, na’ de na’. dispiritingly chávez-silverman portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201718 balmy socal summer weather, día tras día. pero la verdad, esto pintaba mejor para nuestro little friend. i had horrible visions of wild creatures coming en la noche, pa’ devorarle. así tumbado, boca arriba como el moteca de cortázar, y—just like him—desprovisto de su magic, powerless. intenté convencerme de que un morsel tan magro wouldn’t be enough temptation como para que un tecolote or hawk se molestara en navegar entre las ramas del pino o del eucalyptus que me bordean el patio. and even someone tan physics-deficient como yo entiende que las new, medio trailer trashy beige plasticky fences que instalaron hace un par de años son demasiado slippery para los gatos y too high para los coyotes. y los squirrels, musité paranoica, son legumbreros, ¿que no? anygüey, esta mañana, con heavy heart y una overwhelming sensation of dread and foreboding—ob-vio, la definición misma de la ansiedad (pretty much my homeostasis desde mid-november, desde que me he visto ensnared in the toxic double helix de un caso de academic dishonesty metastasized into a false title ix grievance de la condená plagiadora ¡contra mí!)—salí al patio convinced de que tendría que scoop up y enterrar al miniature avian finadito. debatí entre merciful myopia y cruel claridad, eventualmente i opted for the latter y me puse las gafas, no vaya a ser que pisara al tiny cadaver. to my shock, under an eerily overcast, si también overly sultry sky (where oh where’s the damn el niño?), miré donde había dejado la manguera last night, al ladito mero del casicorpse, y … ¡nada! te lo juro: niks, nada, nothing at all. no sign of him. i stared at the spot for a while, medio alelada. luego, i methodically searched the patio: the shoddily-painted (por ese dizque curandero handyman, el enrique), peeling jacuzzi cover y las plantas encima, todas las otras larger free-standing plants. medio pendejamente i scanned the fence-tops, the barbecue, hasta el norcal windchime que me regaló mi hermana sarita. pero nada… reluctantly, i headed back inside. antes de salir pa’ la yoga class (necesitaba unos downward caninos malamente), mandé un textual a sarita, about el mini-lazarus milagro colibrí. como ella sabe un huevo de arcane mystical symbols, native american totems y toda la onda shamánca (little eye: this is literal, ella hizo un cursillo y todo), pensé que for sure she’d be able to shed some luz on what was going on. digo, el cosmic meaning de que este vato estuviera al mere mere borde de la muerte pa’ luego resucitar. fíjate que en los últimos momentos de la yoga class—en savasana, esa deeply relaxing, occasionally acid-trippy guided meditation—me dio una especie de anagnorisis: ese injured, stunned colibrí…c’est moi! tal y como él había estado down for the count pero no knocked out del todo, i too must pick myself up, dust myself off, deliberately disentangle myself from “the snare of the fowler” (psalm 91:3, per mi bff wim, a catholic priest), unfurl my alas, and fly. back from yoga, vi que mi hermana sarita (con quien siempre he tenido un psychic bond, en todo caso) me había textualizado:—down, pero not out! colibrí can change the direction of its flight at will—up, down, back ‘n’ forth. it can find the sweetness amidst the thorns. that’s the picture i’m getting: winded, battered but bouncing back after a respite. just as you will after your trip. see? te dije que sarita can read the signs. so … he aquí: en esta casi-víspera de mi viaje patrás a la madre patria, colibrí magic me ha mostrado que i can—i must—write (myself free). casi víspera portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201719 microsoft word goi rechniewski galley.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. geographies of identity special issue, guest edited by matthew graves and elizabeth rechniewski. © 2015 [elizabeth rechniewski]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i1.4095 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. the perils of proximity: the geopolitical underpinnings of australian views of new caledonia in the nineteenth century elizabeth rechniewski, university of sydney the close relationship that once existed between these far-flung outposts of european empire has largely been forgotten, yet in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries new caledonia loomed large in australian preoccupations and imagination. the links between these two imperial colonies were much stronger than we might realise today: a web of interdependent commercial and personal relations underpinned a complex relationship that oscillated between rivalry, suspicion and the recognition of interests held in common by european settlers who were each other’s closest neighbours. these attitudes reflected in part the state of broader relations between france and britain, as well as changing geopolitical realities in the region. the profoundly ambiguous and tension-filled relationship between the two imperial powers, britain and france, must be stressed—the two countries had been at war for much of the past five hundred years; they vied for power and influence in europe, strategic control of international waters and colonial possessions; yet they recognised one another, in relation in particular to the indigenous other, as sharing european, christian, civilised values. the alliance between france and britain forged to fight the crimean war in 1853—the year of the french takeover of new caledonia—did not fundamentally alter the suspicion that many australians felt towards the french. indeed, they feared that the british would be all the rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 2 more likely to abandon the interests of their colonial dependents if those interests conflicted with the needs of the alliance. in addition to being buffeted by these centuries-old antagonisms between the imperial powers, relations between the australian colonies and new caledonia reflected the more particular situation of european settlers who were forging colonial societies in a region very remote from the tutelage of the metropole. the ‘tyranny of distance’ had a special impact on the mindset of australians, who feared that the relative proximity of new caledonia and their own isolation from possible british intervention made them vulnerable to any threats that might come from that quarter. jill donohoo has recently shown convincingly how attitudes towards the presence of a penal colony in new caledonia, and the ‘danger’ posed by escaped or pardoned prisoners arriving on australian shores, helped to shape australia’s fledgling foreign policy, its evolving relationship with britain, and even the push towards federation (donohoo 2013). this article focuses on other perceived dangers posed by the proximity of new caledonia through exploring attitudes and opinions expressed in the australian press at certain key points in new caledonia’s history: the annexation of the grande terre by the french in 1853, the kanak revolts of 1878–1879 and the pre-world war 1 nickel mining boom. the tangled attitudes expressed in the australian press towards new caledonia cannot be understood without recalling the early years of its settlement. from the founding of the colony of new south wales, new caledonia was under the titular control of the colonial administration, whose charter laid claim to seas within 30 degrees of the coast. although the islands were not officially settled by the british, australian merchants set up a triangular trade between new caledonia, australia and china, transporting iron and metal utensils and tools of many kinds and tobacco to new caledonia to trade for sandalwood, which they took to china and traded for tea that was then brought back to australia. australian sandalwood merchants, writes martyn lyons, were ‘by far the most frequent and representative visitor[s] from australian shores in this period’ (lyons 1986: 8). at first a trickle, the trade took off in the 1840s: between 1840 and 1850, traders operating out of australia stripped sandalwood first from the île des pins, then the loyalty islands and finally grande terre's east coast. they also collected bêches-demer (trepang or sea cucumbers). the loyalty islands and in particular the coast around ouvéa saw extensive trade exchanges between the islanders and english-speaking rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 3 merchants. english was the first european foreign language the natives heard, some english words entered their languages, and a pidgin ‘bichelamar’ (from the word for trepang), a mixture of english and local languages developed. in 1879, in his report on the kanak revolts, general de trentinian notes that ‘les canaques parlent l’anglais de préférence au français’1 (dousset-leenhardt 1978: 146). this language work was promoted by protestant missionaries who were the first missionaries to arrive on new caledonia in 1840, three years before the catholics, and they appear to have been considerably more successful than the catholics in those areas, the loyalty islands (maré and lifou), where they were allowed to continue their mission after the french annexation of the main island. only at the very end of the nineteenth century were they permitted by governor feillet to re-establish themselves on the mainland. however in the loyalty islands they wielded considerable influence through the education of new generations, forming a strong protestant presence on the islands that will be reflected in the story of watriama, later in the article. later in the century some of these missionary settlements would be accused by the french of running a kind of fiefdom, beyond the reach of civil law, and of fomenting opposition to french administration (lyons 1986: 34–35). one of the early names given to the group of islands off the east coast of new caledonia—including ouvéa, maré and lifou—was ‘the britannia group,’ named after a british trading vessel ‘britannia’ that called there in 1793 (the same year as the passage of d’entrecastaux). this appellation was still in use in newspapers published in new south wales and victoria in the 1840s, with the associations of assumed ownership that this implies (mm 09.12.1843: 3; aust 30.09.1843: 4). a few australians and britons settled in new caledonia and set up businesses: mr towns, a ‘respectable man in sydney’ on the isle of pines, for example (smh 25.01.1851: 6), and james paddon, a british adventurer turned trader, who bought the island of nou from the chiefs in 1851 and established trading posts along the east and west coasts of the grande terre. at the time of the french annexation he ran a highly flourishing business employing hundreds of native and european workers, with his own shipping fleet, shipyards, and a village at anse paddon with shops and services. 1 ‘the kanak prefer to speak english rather than french.’ rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 4 for many decades after the founding of new south wales, therefore, australian merchants and missionaries considered new caledonia as their own ‘hunting ground’ and the general public were accustomed to think of it as an offshore appendage. news from and about new caledonia, particularly the arrival and departure of trading vessels, weather and sea forecasts, were a regular presence in the early newspapers. this early history contributed to the sense of ownership that australians continued to express throughout the century, challenging the legitimacy of french control. for despite some impractical propositions and failed private initiatives to extend british colonial administration over new caledonia, such as that of major sullivan, a retired army office resident in new south wales who in 1842, ‘proposed to establish a settlement at new caledonia to be called victoria in honour of the queen’2, the british failed to secure the islands. french annexation, 24 september 1853 in september 1853, two ships of the french navy landed at balade and claimed possession in the name of emperor napoleon iii. the annexation provoked outrage in the australian colonies; this outrage however was directed as much against the british colonial office for its laxity and lack of foresight as criticism of the french for their boldness. note that it came 11 years after the french annexation of tahiti and the ‘pritchard affair’ of 1842—the expulsion of the british missionary and consul george pritchard—which provoked lingering poor relations and suspicion between france and britain during the reign of louis-philippe and also suggested to the australians that the british might be less than forceful in protecting british colonial possessions. in relation to that incident, the south australian register wrote that ‘french activity and aggrandisement have prevailed against the rights of a defenceless christian queen who from english fainéantise and over-cautious policy is left unprotected’ (sar 05.06.1844: 4). france had also extended her influence in the gambier islands, tuamotus and wallis and futuna, ‘becoming england’s principal colonial rival in the south pacific’ (merle 1995: 35). 2 mills relates that a company was to be formed under royal charter with a capital of 3,000,000 british pounds, to buy lands from the crown at 5 shillings per acre and to use the proceeds to promote asiatic or convict emigration until free europeans became acclimatised. the colonial office ‘rightly dismissed the plan as visionary and impracticable’ (mills 1915: 314). rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 5 news of the french takeover apparently reached australia only at the end of october, since 1 november is the first date on which a report appears in the australian press, in the sydney morning herald. over the following days the newspapers lament the fact and assess the consequences of this event of ‘very grave importance,’ this ‘coup d’état’ in the words of the maitland mercury (19.11.1853: 2), this ‘bold move’ that indicates ‘ambitious projects’ on the part of the emperor, which he has been at pains to conceal (ch 12.11.1853: 2). the australian press—which often summarises and relays each other’s articles—expresses in chorus ideas that are to have a long life. they insist that new caledonia rightfully belongs to britain—cook had hoisted the ensign in 1774 and had provided a detailed description of the place (cook’s account of his landing is republished in a number of newspapers to support this prior claim). with the benefit of hindsight, and a new appreciation of what has been lost, the papers lament the capture of this ‘valuable prize,’ making frequent references to its economic and strategic significance. france is said to have seized it in compensation for the ‘loss’ fifty years previously of st domingo, ‘the only really valuable colony they ever had’ according to one correspondent (ch 09.12.1853: 2). having recently forfeited new zealand to the british, according to a letter writer to the sydney morning herald, the french sought first a port on tahiti but finally settled on new caledonia: the port of st vincent is a ‘cherbourg in the southern hemisphere’ (smh 03.11.1853: 3). the laxity of the british government is responsible for allowing the french takeover. the australian press castigates the ‘cowardly spirit of the cabinet at home’ (smh 03.11.1853: 3), the ‘idly neglectful’ colonial authorities, the ‘doubters of downing street’ (mm 19.11.1853: 2). their negligence is contrasted to the purposefulness, planning and decisiveness of the french, who displayed ‘the practical genius of the tuileries’ (mbc 19.11.1853: 2). a sense of betrayal is pervasive: doubts are expressed as to whether the colonial office has the interests of the colonists at heart or the will to defend them for it is too preoccupied by grand designs and imperial alliances. a letter writer to the sydney morning herald assets that ‘if australia were a nation, there can be no doubt how she would act in the matter; the french occupation would be resisted as an aggression’; australia, however, is in a weak position to object since the french, dealing only with britain, can claim that they are as near to new caledonia as the british are (smh 09.11.1853: 3). the alliance between britain and france—which has rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 6 perhaps stayed a british response to this affront—is often represented as unnatural, an act of cowardice: ‘the unnatural and unholy alliance that now exists between england and france, between liberty and despotism, between light and darkness; between fraud, perjury, and murder on the one side, and truth, honour, and philanthropy on the other’ (isn 12.11.1853, reprinted in mbc 26.11.1853: 4). french motives are suspect, its plans for the future of the island viewed with grave concern. if the aim of the takeover is to set up a penal colony (this ‘moral pestilence’), the commentators are outraged: just when new south wales has rid itself of its ‘bad reputation consequent on being a penal colony,’ just when transportation has been stopped, a new colony may be set up in her near neighbourhood, and on the trade routes with the west coast of america, china etc. (isn 12.11.1853, reprinted in mbc 26.11.1853: 4). as donohoo has shown, there was both initial and ongoing concern that escaped convicts might make their way to australia. other, more sinister, motives are imputed to the french: it cannot be simply to set up a penal colony that france has gone to this much effort, the annexation must be part of her larger strategic designs for control of the pacific. louis napoléon’s ‘ambitious projects’ writes the courier hobart, which have been pursued quietly, even behind ‘a veil’ are now coming to fruition (ch 12.11.1853: 2). the moreton bay courier, displaying a decided taste for the colourful turn of phrase and the sensational claim, avers that louis napoléon’s plans put the whole of eastern australia and new zealand under threat from a ‘swarm of the mustachioed sons of gaul’: new caledonia occupies a most commanding position for a naval station, whence, in the event of occasion arising, all the ports of eastern australia and new zealand could be commanded within a week. balade harbour is situated in latitude 20° 17' 25" s., longitude 164° 27' e. a good steamer, or a north-easterly breeze, would easily bring swarms of the mustachioed sons of gaul, into moreton bay for instance, in four or five days. (mbc 19.11.1853: 2) the courier points to the additional cost of the defence measures made necessary by the french presence, to protect ‘england’s wealthiest and most defenceless possessions’ (mbc 19.11.1853). in the event of war between britain and france, the port (then port st vincent, 25 miles north-west of noumea) would allow the french to control access to port jackson: it is ‘admirably situated to enable them to capture every vessel entering or leaving the ports of new south wales’ (ch 9.12.1853: 2). occasional and unfounded rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 7 reports of the french building a ‘second sebastopol’ in new caledonia contribute to this fear (saa 20.08.1860: 2). these fears were not expressed only on the wilder fringes of the australian press: on 20 december 1859 sir henry parkes moved a resolution in the nsw legislative assembly, ‘the defence of the colonies,’ calling for the formation of a national militia to defend the colony from attack by aggressive european powers. it soon becomes clear in his speech that he has in mind the threat posed by france, a threat that was all the greater because they had ‘a port of refuge within a very few days’ sail of our own harbour, ‘as contiguous to our shores as an enemy could wish it to be’ (parkes 1876: 103). declaring that the danger of a rupture with france was imminent, he warned that protection could not be expected from britain since the ‘imperial government has directly intimated on more than one occasion that the colonies must provide for their own defence’ (parkes 1876: 98, 103). the ambiguity of the relationship to this foreign power—now after all an ally of britain in the crimean war—and the self-interest of the colonists who traded extensively with new caledonia, allow calmer voices to be heard. despite conjuring up hysterical visions of swarms of marauding gauls, the moreton bay courier sees reason to be optimistic about the economic and possibly even the military advantages of the takeover. the presence of the french will probably ‘induce our admiralty to post a strong naval squadron in the pacific,’ using one of the australian ports. scientific exploration may be pursued and goldfields discovered in new caledonia. adopting a decidedly parochial approach to international affairs, it opines that in the event of the continuance of peace, the french colonists will need livestock and coal, thus providing a ‘profitable outlet within four or five days sail of moreton bay’ (mbc 19.11.1853: 2). the maitland mercury, paraphrasing the sydney morning herald of 1 and 2 november, argues however that while, from a commercial point of view, the annexation—‘even by the french’—may seem advantageous, this is far outweighed by ‘the moral, social, and political consequences attaching to the occupation of one of the most splendid islands in the pacific by a rival nation, whose aims and objects are so dissimilar, not to say opposite, to those which have for many years been earnestly contemplated by the most intelligent colonists of australia and new zealand’ (mm 5.11.1853: 3). rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 8 the moreton bay courier sees other reasons to hope: many places that were formally under french or spanish control are now british. in the event of war between britain and france it is possible that new caledonia might change hands … although the paper sagely hopes that such conflict can be avoided: ‘the two most powerful and enlightened nations in the world, have been long enough at war with each other’ (mbc 19.11.1853: 2). the illustrated sydney news, although uncompromisingly anti-french, takes a similarly confident view of the power of the british—the strongest naval power on earth—to evict the french from the pacific in the event of war between the two nations. the french settlers should therefore perhaps be considered as ‘pioneers’ doing the rough work of clearing the land before it reverts to the british (isn 12.11.1853: 1, reprinted in mbc 26.12.1853: 4). % it is in this paper that the first hints of a particular critique of the french begin to be seen. the illustrated sydney news states that it is not optimistic about the fate of the natives of new caledonia under french rule, and doubts whether any improvement in their lot can be hoped for under their new gallic masters: profligate in life, corrupt in morals, servile in spirit, and degraded in politics, the french are about the last people on the face of the earth whose rule it would be desirable to substitute for any other government that could be mentioned. the fact is that the french and the savages, placed at opposite extremities of the same line, are both equally remote from the golden mean of true civilisation: and, indeed, if forced to choose between the two, we would prefer immaturity to rottenness. (isn 12.11.1853: 1, reprinted in mbc 26.12.1853: 4) the virulence of this denunciation (of an ally) might seem to be a marginal opinion and no doubt was the most extreme of its kind. however it is worthy of note that this article was reprinted in the moreton bay courier on 26 november. the arguments put forward in the newspapers in november and december 1853 constitute so many ‘frames’3 that will be used to interpret french motives and actions, to diagnose problems and even to pass moral judgement on the french as colonial neighbours, over the next sixty years. business being of greater long-term interest than politics, however, despite the fears expressed concerning the effects of french annexation, australian involvement in the colonial development of new caledonia continued apace: an australian, john higginson, became the largest owner of copper 3 for kuypers, ‘framing … is the process whereby communicators act—consciously or not—to construct a particular point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be viewed in a particular manner, with some facts made more or less noticeable (even ignored) than others’ (kuypers 2009: 182). rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 9 and nickel mines, exported gold from fernhill mine and founded what later became the société le nickel. cattle were brought to new caledonia from australia and put out to graze using australian methods of pasturing (large unfenced pastures) causing untold damage to the terrain and colliding with the agricultural interests of the kanak as the cattle trampled over their crops. australian words entered the french language on new caledonia: les stockmen; les paddocks; le bush, reflecting the extensive participation of australians in the cattle industry: ‘in 1866 there were 200 australians in new caledonia out of a population of 1100 free settlers. the franco-australian society was a substantial livestock company’ (lyons 1986: 49–50). it was however a very one-sided arrangement: in 1860, trade with new caledonia amounted to only 1 percent of sydney’s foreign trade, but exchanges with sydney amounted to no less than 84 percent of new caledonia’s trade (11). the kanak revolts of 1878–1879 the second significant period examined in this article concerns the revolts by certain kanak tribes against french rule in 1878–1879. by this time the penal colony had been functioning for some 12 years and two significant groups of political deportees had arrived there in the 1870s: 200 or more kabyl algerians deported in 1873 after the mokrani uprising and some 4,000 communards (estimates of numbers for both groups vary considerably). george parsons and jill donohoo have written of the hostile reactions expressed in the press and parliaments of nsw and queensland during this period to the possible arrival of pardoned communards and prisoners whose sentence had expired, as well as the ongoing threat of escapees from the penal colony; and of the attempts by the colonial governments to prevent their entry. from the mid-1870s, writes parsons, this issue provoked ‘a diplomatic quarrel between great britain and france, and ‘arous[ed] intense feeling in the australian colonies’ (parsons 1967: 58). it is important to recognise that this issue was an ongoing source of tension in the views held by australians towards the french colony, but our focus here is on the reaction to the indigenous revolts that were extensively covered in the australian press.4 this reaction must be understood in the context of the developing imperial rivalry, where the issue of who might make the ‘better’ colonisers became an argument in justification of the legitimacy of british rule. references abound in the papers of this period to the defects 4 200 french and 1200 kanaks, including atai and several other chiefs, were killed. as a result of the rebellion, 800 kanaks were exiled to either the îles belep or île des pins. others were sent to tahiti, never to return. rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 10 of french colonial rule, whether in the colony of bourbon (present-day réunion) where ‘chaos’ prevails (smh 20.08.1879), or in cochin-china (en 27.03.1878: 2). the ‘unfortunate state of affairs in new caledonia,’ brought about by mining failures and financial disasters, is ‘but a type of the wretched state of french colonies generally’ (en 27.03.1878: 2). this rivalry helps to explain the nature of the reporting of the kanak revolts. the descriptions of the rebel natives as ‘blood-sated murderers’ who leave ‘corpses lying in every direction, cut and hacked as savages delight to do’ (smh 12.07.78: 5) reflect the fellow colonists’ horror at the ‘barbarity’ of the natives. oblique references to the mutilation of bodies ‘too revolting and sickening to describe here’ (mm 13.07.78: 6) hint at acts of cannibalism that, as karin speedy has shown, operated as the demarcation between savage and civilised (speedy 2013). however it is noteworthy that considerable attempts are made nevertheless to explain the origin of the events in grievances held by the kanak against the settlers or the french authorities, grievances that, it is often suggested in the australian press, are well founded. whatever the excesses of the tribes’ actions, these are shown to be motivated by affronts to their customs, by land disputes, forced labour or the result of mistreatment and exploitation. the article in the maitland mercury (13.07.1878: 6) is clear in attributing blame to the colonial administrators, particularly a certain lecarte, and to the settlers who had encroached on native land, had ‘tampered with their women’ and dug up kanak graveyards. the brisbane courier, while attributing to the race of the papuan (sic) family of mankind ‘all its worst characteristics,’ nevertheless reflects in philosophical vein that we have no means of knowing the native version of the events: ‘the white man writes his own annals; the savage passes away and leaves no record’ (bc 15.10.1878: 2). the sydney morning herald sent its own correspondent, a certain ‘julian thomas’ (he had changed his birth name ‘john stanley james’ several times), known as the vagabond, a journalist who, after working in london, new york and melbourne, had moved to sydney in august 1877 and begun to write for the sydney morning herald with articles notably about sydney’s slums. in melbourne he had gained notoriety for investigative methods that saw him adopt the persona of a down and out in order to expose the wretched lives of the underclass. sydney readers were less interested in such rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 11 exposés; the editor therefore sent him to new caledonia in july 1878 as its ‘special correspondent’ to report on the native revolts there (cannon 1983: 9). he was perhaps australia’s first ‘war correspondent,’ indeed he referred to the indigenous revolts as a ‘war.’ thomas sent back reports that, he later discovered, were often withheld by the french authorities. only on his return was he able to rewrite and publish lengthy accounts of the war, reprinted in other australian papers, from the beginning of september until the end of october 1878. thomas gained a close understanding of the causes and consequences of the war for he was granted special permission by the french governor to travel to the districts in revolt; he accompanies the french troops on patrol, describes in vivid detail the exhaustion and privations of these marches, interviews officers, colonists, residents of noumea and even a few indigenous people. he tries to uncover and explain for his readers what has provoked the revolts, and lays out in great detail the depradations, exactions, and humiliations that colonisation and settlement have imposed on the native peoples (article dated 27.09.78; printed smh 15.10.78). he catalogues the massacres committed by the rebels, but also the sometimes indiscriminate retribution inflicted by the troops, and especially the gendarmes. he is also critical of the authorities’ lack of preparedness, their failure to warn or come to the assistance of isolated settlers who stand in peril. michael cannon describes his reports as constituting ‘one of the first and most damning indictments written against french colonial rule in the pacific’ (cannon 1983: 10). it is perhaps significant to note, however, that when thomas was asked by the argus in 1883 to report on the system of ‘blackbirding’—forced recruitment of indigenous workers from the new hebrides to work on queensland sugar plantations—he had little criticism to make of a system that was nevertheless akin to slavery (pons-ribot 1989: 15). this hint of a double standard echoes the readiness to condemn french colonialism and exonerate british practices that is widespread in the newspapers of the time. the brisbane courier correspondent, recognising the universal significance of the conflict over land between coloniser and colonised, offers a well-developed if tendentious comparison: in australia the very sparseness of the population, both black and white, operates to prevent collisions on so grimly murderous a scale as the one reported from new caledonia; while in new zealand the mixture of braggadocio and magnanimity that characterises the maori rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 12 warrior has been, even in the thick of bush warfare, a better protection to the settled districts than the bullets of her majesty’s red-coats. in new caledonia, on the other hand, both these conditions are reversed. there is a teeming native population, brooding over their territorial wrongs while closely mingled with and pressed on by a still greater force of whites. (bc 03.08.1878: 4) the journalist draws a contrast between the colonising practices of the british in australia and the french in new caledonia, to the disadvantage of the latter. whatever may be the faults of the british colonists, the french have dealt with their natives in a worse fashion. the kanak are actually more civilised than the completely savage aborigines: they live in settled villages, till the soil, venerate their chiefs, and have a system of landownership, and yet the french have treated these ‘semi-civilised tribes’ worse than we have the ‘wholly savage’ australian natives (bc 26.11.1878: 2). such criticisms of the failures of french administration and colonisation —the ‘admitted incapacity of our french neighbours for the work of colonisation’ as the brisbane courier puts it (26.11.1878: 2)—generally draw a distinction between the role of the authorities and that of the white settlers, the latter often portrayed as the victims of the incompetence of their officials. this distinction allows the newspapers to once again argue that new caledonia should be handed back to the british, thus ‘relinquishing to abler or more experienced hands the uphill task of colonising and civilising new caledonia’ (bc 07.09.78: 4) and also for a certain fellow feeling to be evinced in sympathy with the plight of the french settlers, linked after all to australians by personal and commercial ties, and sharing the ‘white man’s burden’ in these farflung imperial outposts. on a personal level, ‘generous sympathy’ and support for the french settlers is expressed through a subscription fund that raised a little over 620 pounds (smh 10.08.1878: 4). the claim that the majority of french settlers would be glad to have the british as colonial masters is once again advanced: ‘such a desire, it is credibly reported, has for some time past been very generally felt by those settlers who are competent to form an opinion concerning the future prospects of the island under french rule’ (bc 07.09.1878: 4).5 this long-standing (and largely unsubstantiated) claim in the 5 note that in the french report into the causes of the revolts, general arthur de trentinian cited as one of the causes: ‘le profond sentiment de jalousie avec lequel les anglais ont vu et voient encore notre occupation de la nouvelle-calédonie’(the profound feeling of jealousy with which the english have viewed and still view our occupation of new caledonia), a sentiment which has led them to ‘encourage’ the natives of new caledonia to profit from the military weakness of france in the wake of the 1870 rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 13 australian press is one that will continue to be aired into the twentieth century, when it will again become entangled in fears of invasion—no longer fear of invasion from the french but from the north, when new caledonia is seen to represent the ‘weak link’ in australian defence and the stepping stone for possible invasion by the japanese. pre-world war i the final period examined in this article are the two decades preceding world war i, a period of renewed australian interest in new caledonia in the context of the perceived threat from japan. many writers have drawn attention to the increasing anxiety about the growing economic and military power of japan in the pacific at this time (walker 1999; meaney 2007), anxiety fuelled by her victory over russia in the war of 1905, the first victory of an asian power over a european one in modern history. from this time on, although japan was allied to britain from 1902, australia viewed britain’s asian ally as a potential enemy and japan became an object of ‘obsessive interest’ for australians (stanley 2008: 27). the fear of invasion and a burgeoning race fear found expression in poetry and fiction and in the new and striking medium of film. this was not a marginal phenomenon: influential magazines such as the bulletin and many lesser pamphlets and journals such as the lone hand contributed to fostering this fear. in this context the proximity of new caledonia took on a new significance. large numbers of japanese workers, perhaps two thousand by some estimates, had been recruited from the late nineteenth century to work in the booming nickel mines there.6 but were they simply workers or was something more sinister going on? might this colony not constitute a jumping off point for the invasion of australia? typical of the wilder claims made about the danger posed by the presence of japanese workers on the grande terre was the article by a. k. shearston-may: ‘new caledonia: a menace to white australia: the remarkable colony of japanese who have become australia's nearest neighbor,’ published in the lone hand in june 1911.7 shearston-may, who had recently visited the island, claims the presence of some 2,500 japanese workers on new caledonia, many of them former soldiers who had fought in defeat by germany (appendix, dousset-leenhardt 1978: 146). de trentinian offers no evidence of such interference in the colony however. 6 this was a significant number compared to the population of the colony at the time, perhaps 60,000 in total, including 27,000 kanak, europeans (convicts and settlers) and workers from other islands. 7 the lone hand was a monthly magazine published from may 1907 to february 1921, strongly associated with the rise of australian nationalism. rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 14 the russo-japanese war. he cannot believe that their presence on the island is innocent and not part of some larger strategy by the japanese who are seeking a naval base and a coaling station in the area. the french have shown no sign of taking the menace seriously or dealing with the situation. the solution? australia should take over the island. in doing so it would moreover be fulfilling the wishes of some, perhaps many of its french inhabitants, for the settlers, shearston–may claims, would dearly love cession to england: they have a deep and abiding regard over there for the english and for the australian. if their land cannot prosper under french rule, they say, let england have it. let it come under the sway of australia. if that were to follow, they all believe in their hearts that new caledonia would once more return to old prosperity; that the japanese would be shipped back to their own country; and that life, and work and money-making for themselves would be easier and happier. (the lone hand june 1911: 121–122) shearston-may’s evidence for the views of the french settlers is left unclear—‘in their hearts’ leaves room for doubt whether he has any at all. he was not, however, the only one to make such claims; letter writers to the sydney morning herald made similar assertions, as the curious story of watriama reveals. william jacob watriama was probably born around 1875 at tuo village on maré, one of the loyalty islands. although he was almost certainly the son of a servant of the chiefly naisiline clan, he claimed in later life to be the ‘king of the loyalty isles’ (laracy 2011). he was brought up in the protestant faith and developed a marked anglophilia that was to characterise his interventions in colonial relations between france, britain and australia. he settled in sydney in 1891 where he first came to public notice in 1911 when he launched a campaign urging the end of french rule over new caledonia and its dependencies (and also an end to the french co-administration of the new hebrides).8 in march 1911 we find him quoted in the sydney morning herald, describing hmself as the ‘king of the loyalty islands’ and recounting suspicious activity on the part of japanese workers on new caledonia, who had set up a wireless station. this indicates, he is reported as saying that the japanese ‘intend eventually to form a naval base at new caledonia in order to attack australia’ (smh 13.03.1911: 10). the concerns of watriama and shearston-may meet up in a series of articles penned by the latter that were published in 8 hugh laracy (2011) writes that watriama is a figure of some historical interest, for he was one of the few black men to attain a degree of acceptance in white australian society. much of this support was due to his war record with the aif in france. wounded at pozières, he was discharged on 5 december 1917. when he died in 1925 considerable attention was paid in the newspapers and his funeral was organised and financed by the northbridge soldiers’ league (evening news 06.01.1925). rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 15 the daily herald (south australia) also in march 1911. six lengthy articles were published under the headline ‘only 900 miles away’ by the herald’s ‘special representative’ over the course of a week, totalling over 21,000 words. in the article for friday 10 march, shearston-may interviews watriama at length about the latter’s fears, before turning to other witnesses and evidence of japanese spying and infliltration ‘in australia’s backyard’ and indeed in australia itself. (dh 07.03.1911 to 14.03.1911) at the end of october watriama himself writes to the sydney morning herald, railing against the presence of ‘3000 veterans of the russo-japanese war’ on new caledonia. these ‘trained japanese’ constitute an ‘increasing menace’ and foretell of the invasion ‘that will surely come’ (smh, letter dated 22.10.1911, published 25.10.1911: 21). his letter prompts a number of others in response in the following days. the first does not challenge the accuracy of watriama’s assessment of japanese intentions but rather doubts whether representations to the french on this issue will have any effect: ‘whatever the protestations of the commonwealth may be, france will not give satisfaction’ since its republican principles compel it to be the ‘nation the most hospitable of the world.’ the tone of the letter suggests that the writer does not find this hospitality to be an admirable trait (smh 26.10.1911: 13). the discussion continued through november and december in both editorials and letters. on 4 december the sydney morning herald suggests that advantage be taken of negotiations between france and britain over the new hebrides to discuss ‘pacific matters’ including the situation in new caledonia. the paper claims, in an echo of the lone hand article, that a ‘movement’ in new caledonia has recently been formed to campaign for the transfer of power to the british (smh 04.12.1911: 8). conclusion during the three periods of tension in the relations between australia and new caledonia examined in this article, the anxiety and uncertainty provoked by the rapidly evolving geopolitical situation in the pacific were heightened by the very proximity of new caledonia. some never gave up the hope that the french colony would return to the british fold, the only way of ensuring that it would not constitute a ‘trojan horse,’ first for french, then for japanese incursion into the region. these fears provoked common themes and perennial complaints about the french: that they were poor colonial administrators; that new caledonia was a backward and festering sore in the rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 16 pacific, a source of criminality and disease through the persistence of the penal colony (deportation continued until 1897); that it was unsuccessful in agriculture and the development of cash crops; and that it remained under the total control of the french government (and a republican one at that, from 1875), failing to develop the institutions of local governance that the australian colonies achieved progressively from the early nineteenth century. as late as 1915, when france and britain were allies once again and australian troops were fighting alongside them at gallipoli, the respected economist r. c. mills, calling for recognition of the ‘achievements of wakefield in colonization and colonial policy’ and in the british annexation of new zealand, wrote: ‘new zealand, lost to the french, might have become a second noumea, and another plague spot in the pacific’ (mills 1915: 340). as australians compared and contrasted their own society, institutions of governance and practices of colonisation to those of new caledonia, ruled by ‘a rival nation, whose aims and objects are so dissimilar, not to say opposite, to those which have for many years been earnestly contemplated by the most intelligent colonists of australia and of new zealand’ (smh 02.11.1853: 4), these assumed differences became markers of distinction and identity. indeed a four-sided relationship was created by the presence of the french on new caledonia: australian settlers/britain/french settlers/france, forming a complex web of relations within which the australians had to conceive and negotiate the terms of their own presence in the pacific. historians have drawn attention to the significance of hostility to chinese workers and kanakas (a few of whom came from new caledonia) in developing an australian national consciousness (mcminn 1994: 123-4). but the constant comparisons that the newspapers engage in, to the detriment of their french neighbours, suggest that this consciousness was also forged in the uneasy cohabitation of australian and french colonists in this long isolated corner of the pacific. reference list cannon, m. (ed). 1983, ‘introduction,’ the vagabond papers. abridged, 2nd edition. hyland house, melbourne. donohoo, j. 2013, ‘australian reactions to the french penal colony in new caledonia,’ explorations, v. 54: 25–45. dousset-leenhardt, r. 1978, colonialisme et contradictions: nouvelle-calédonie 1878–1978. l’harmattan, paris. kuypers, j. 2009, ‘framing analysis,’ rhetorical criticism: perspectives in action. lexington books, plymouth: 181–204. rechniewski the perils of proximity portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 17 laracy, h. 2011, watriama and co: further pacific islands portraits. australian national university press, canberra. lyons, m. 1986, the totem and the tricolour: a short history of new caledonia since 1774. nsw university press, kensington, nsw. mcminn, w. g. 1994, nationalism and federalism in australia. oxford university press australia. meaney, m. 2007, towards a new vision: australia and japan across time. nsw university press, kensington,nsw. merle, i. 1995, expériences coloniales: la nouvelle-calédonie (1853–1920). edns belin, paris. mills, r. c. 1915, the colonization of australia. sidgwick & jackson, london. parkes, h. 1876, speeches on various occasions connected with the public affairs of nsw. longmans, green and co, london & lebourne. pons-ribot, g. (ed). 1989, la guerre en nouvelle-calédonie (1878). la petite maison, boulogne. parsons, g. 1967, ‘new caledonian convicts in new south wales 1876–1884,’ journal of the royal historical society, v. 52, no. 6: 51–67. shearston-may, a. k. 1911, ‘new caledonia: a menace to white australia: the remarkable colony of japanese who have become australia's nearest neighbor,’ the lone hand, june: 117–122. speedy, k. 2013, ‘“after me fellow caïcaï you”: eating the other/the other eating,’ portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, special issue: edible alterity, v. 10, n. 2. online, available: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/2971 [accessed 1 november 2014]. stanley, p. 2008, invading australia: japan and the battle for australia. viking, camberwell, vic. walker, d. 1999, anxious nation: australia and the rise of asia 1850–1939. university of queensland press, st lucia. list of newspapers cited (abbreviation) and date of first publication age (melbourne) (age) 1854 argus (melbourne) (ar) 1846 the australian (sydney) (aust) 1824 brisbane courier (bc) 1864 courier (hobart) (ch) 1840 daily herald (sth aust) (dh) 1910 evening news (sydney) (en) 1869 illustrated sydney news (isn) 1853 maitland mercury (mm) 1843 moreton bay courier (queensland) (mbc) 1846 south australian advertiser (adelaide) (saa) 1858 south australian register (adelaide) (sar) 1839 sydney morning herald (smh) 1831 using the search engine of the australian national library’s trove collection of digitised newspapers, all articles, editorials and letters devoted to ‘new caledonia’ were identified and read for the periods 01.09.1853 to 01.01.1854; 20.06.1878 to 31.12.1878; and the years 1911–1912. microsoft word 3296-16720-1-le.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. stigma and exclusion in cross-cultural contexts special issue, guest edited by annie pohlman, sol rojas-lizana and maryam jamarani. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. the ‘ties that bind us’: the hidden knots of gay marriage bronwyn winter, university of sydney conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other. so i don’t support gay marriage despite being a conservative. i support gay marriage because i’m a conservative. (david cameron, prime minister of the united kingdom, keynote speech at conservative party national conference, manchester, 5 october 2011). gay marriage has become a major transnational gay rights issue. it is considered a key marker of equal citizenship between gay and straight individuals: a step forward in the normalisation and thus de-stigmatisation of homosexuality. as lisa duggan has put it, ‘marriage equality has become the singularly representative issue for the mainstream lgbt rights movement, often standing in for all the political aspirations of queer people’ (duggan 2011: 1). the proposition that legalisation of gay marriage represents progress is assumed to be self-evident. scholarship over the last two decades, however (such as polikoff 1993; duggan 2003; ahmed 2006; puar 2006; browne 2011; halberstam 2012), has challenged that assumption, and puar in particular has noted that this ‘progress’ is concurrent with other forms of exclusion. in this article i will further explore these challenges in considering how states have used gay marriage to enhance their social-justice credentials and popularity while leaving other social justice issues, including some gay rights issues, unaddressed. i argue that gay marriage is a convenient liberal smokescreen that, in reassuring progressive elites (straight and gay), deflects the winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 2 focus from neoliberal, so-called security and other discriminatory measures taken by states that are far more worrying for homosexuals (and indeed, many others) in the longer term. further, i will examine the force of the religious right’s opposition to gay marriage, which is unsurprising yet often startling in its vehemence. the force of this opposition, however, simultaneously reinforces the progressive credentials of governments adopting gay marriage and makes it difficult for anyone else who wishes to be considered progressive to maintain a critique of the ‘marriage equality’ agenda. as michael warner put it as early as 1999, in relation to the debate in the usa, ‘there is something unfashionable, and perhaps untimely, about any questioning of gay marriage as a goal in politics … at this point the only people arguing against gay marriage, it seems, are those homophobic dinosaurs’ (warner 1999: 120). my main interest here is not with the individual motivations of lesbians and gay men who wish to marry nor even with the egalitarian rationale of the pro-gay-marriage social movement—although i will comment on the latter. it is the harnessing of the marriage rights agenda by states that is my concern. i will also move away from the copiously explored site of the usa to look at three other case study sites: argentina, france and australia. argentina is one of six countries outside europe to recognise same-sex marriage at the time of this writing. the others are: canada (2005); south africa (2006); brazil, uruguay and new zealand (2013). france is the second most recent of ten european countries to legalise same-sex marriage (may 2013, a few days after brazil), the most recent being the united kingdom (july 2013). other european bills are, at the time of this writing, under discussion in parliament in andorra, finland, germany (where the september, 2013 re-election of angela merkel is nonetheless likely to delay legalisation), ireland and luxembourg. outside europe, nepal and taiwan are considering legislation. as for australia, it was among the first countries in the world to formally recognise same-sex relationships for immigration purposes (since 1982, with successive changes in legislation since that time). although the current ‘interdependency’ framework for gay immigration purposes is distinct from that for married or de facto heterosexual couples, it does signal both a popular and institutional recognition of gay couple relationships. notwithstanding current federal opposition to gay marriage, opinion polls cited by australian marriage equality indicate that 75 percent of australians consider it winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 3 only a matter of time before same sex marriage is legalised (ame website), no doubt all the more because some australian states already recognise civil partnerships in one form or another. these three countries are chosen, first, because they are culturally and geographically quite distinct yet present significant similarities as concerns their political, socioeconomic and legislative structures. they are all liberal capitalist democracies with a white and western or western-focused ruling class. they all have or are developing some sort of human rights framework within national or supranational legislation or statutory bodies: the european union (eu) convention on human rights, 1950; the union of south american nations (unasur) commitment to the formation of a human rights body, 2013; and the australian human rights commission (ahrc), set up in 1986. second, gay marriage legislation is either quite recent or still under discussion (2010 in argentina, 2013 in france and not yet legalised in australia). third, opposition to gay marriage in all three countries has been ferocious. while the catholic church has been one of the main players in this opposition in all three cases, and while the basic argument among the opposition has been a defence of the heterosexual-based family unit, the types of alliances formed and the discursive construction of the opposition has presented national specificities. fourth, in all cases, advocacy of gay marriage, by gay rights movements and the political class alike, has tapped into a globalised lgbt rights discourse, mobilising the rhetoric of equality, inclusiveness and human rights. to date, the english-language scholarly literature has overwhelmingly focused on the usa, sometimes in a ‘post-9/11’ frame, with some examination as well of australia and eu countries. there is little scholarly literature as yet on gay marriage debates in argentina and france, in either english, spanish or french, but a great deal of discussion in online media of various sorts. most of the existing critiques revolve around some version of the ideas of ‘homonormativity’ (duggan 2003), that is, assimilation of the ‘right’ homosexuals into a heterosexist societal structure, with concurrent exclusion of less assimilable sexual others, and ‘homonationalism’ (puar 2006), the harnessing of a ‘gay rights’ agenda to western nationalist and imperialist ends (see also polikoff 1993). winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 4 before discussing my three country case studies in more detail, i will briefly, for the purpose of contextualisation, situate gay marriage campaigns within the context of a global lgbt rights agenda, and canvass some of the existing critiques of these campaigns. the focus of this discussion is less on the national and transnational social movements themselves than on the gradual institutionalisation of lgbt rights discourse within the un, as it is this un-isation of lgbt rights that has provided the political and discursive framework within which national governments have placed their ‘lgbt equality’ agendas. it is well beyond my brief here to retrace the entire history of the global lgbt rights agenda (or indeed, of the shifts in nomenclature from ‘gay,’ to ‘gay and lesbian,’ to ‘lesbian and gay,’ to the inclusion of ‘bisexual,’ ‘transgender’ and occasionally ‘intersex’ and even ‘queer’). its beginnings can, however, roughly be traced to the late 1970s, with the formation in 1978 of the international gay association (which subsequently became the international lesbian and gay association, and then, following the ‘alphabet soup’ imperative of including all sexual orientations and identities apart from heterosexual: the international lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex association). among other things, ilga was the first lesbian and gay ngo to obtain special consultative status with the un economic and social council (ecosoc), in 1993. subsequent initiatives were the founding in 1990 in the usa of the international lesbian and gay human rights commission and the idaho initiative: international day against homophobia, initiated in québec as a national event in 2003, and officially launched as idaho at the 2006 world conference on lgbt human rights, also in montreal, organised in july to precede the outgames. the 2006 montreal conference could be considered a culmination point in the global mainstreaming of the global lgbt rights agenda that had been building over the previous decade and, in particular as concerns us here, of the global gay marriage campaign. at the time of the conference, gay marriage was already legal in four countries, three of them in the eu: the netherlands (2001), belgium (2003), spain (2005) and canada (2005). the so-called montreal declaration on lgbt human rights, which had been written by the international organising group well prior to the conference, was presented at the final plenary of the conference. it was also read by martina navratilova and mark tewsbury at the ensuing opening ceremony of the montreal outgames. the declaration clearly articulated the gay marriage demand: winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 5 lgbt people are not isolated individuals. we fall in love, and establish relationships and families–however configured. for many of us, these relationships and families are the most important parts of our lives. unless they are legally recognized, our rights to equality and dignity cannot be fully secured … we therefore demand that all governments that have not yet done so reform family law in order to reflect the growing diversity of family life, by opening-up legal marriage to same-sex couples, introducing similar partnership rights for all unmarried couples, and ensuring equal access for all to every option for parenthood. (montreal declaration 2006). the montreal declaration informed the yogyakarta principles adopted that november in yogyakarta, indonesia by a committee of human rights experts, chaired by the then un human rights commissioner and keynote speaker at the montreal conference, montreal native louise arbour. principle 24 concerns ‘the right to found a family’: ‘everyone has the right to found a family, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. families exist in diverse forms. no family may be subjected to discrimination on the basis of the sexual orientation or gender identity of any of its members’ (yogyakarta principles 2006). this sentence is followed by a number of dot-points that articulate parenting and couple rights. the montreal declaration and the yogyakarta principles remain firmly within the framework of the family as codified within the 1948 universal declaration of human rights. not only do human rights include the right to marry and found a family, but the un declaration also tells us that the family is ‘the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state’ (article 16, para. 3). the yogyakarta principles may include a nod to ‘diverse forms’ of family but the idea of family itself, aligned to the heteropatriarchal nuclear-family model of modern capitalist nation-states, is not at any time questioned. the two documents were nonetheless considered a landmark in advancing the global lgbt rights agenda, an agenda about which the reformist-assimilationist bases, and the ‘alphabet-soup’ grouping of all ‘alternative’ sexual and gender identities, have not been seriously questioned either by the un and other interor supra-national rights bodies, democratic nation-states or gay rights organisations. this ‘homonormalisation’ did not, however, prevent the yogyakarta principles from meeting with strong opposition from a number of un members when they were presented at the un human rights council on 26 march 2007, with the support of 54 member states. on 18 december 2008, a winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 6 declaration on sexual orientation and gender identity (a french and dutch initiative), and signed by 66 member states (including all eu countries), was presented by argentina to the un general assembly. the declaration reaffirmed the principles of the 1948 un declaration, including ‘the principle of non-discrimination which requires that human rights apply equally to every human being regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity’ (un general assembly 2008, article 3). a counter-declaration at the initiative of the organisation of the islamic conference, and read by syria, was presented the following day. most recently, the un human rights council passed its first resolution on ‘human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity’ (resolution l.9 rev.1, 16 june 2011). the persistent opposition by most (albeit not all) muslim countries to decriminalisation of homosexuality has provided a new means for western and pro-western nations to distinguish themselves as progressive in relation to the essentialised islamic (terrorist) other. in her analysis of ‘homonationalism,’ jasbir puar argues that in tying ‘the recognition of homosexual subjects, both legally and representationally,’ to nationalist and imperialist agendas, thus constructing a specific ‘biopolitical’ profile of the gay citizen, western homonormativist assimilation helps to reinforce the othering of those beings deemed unacceptable within these biopolitics (puar 2006: 9 ff). the ‘muslim world’ becomes once again essentialised as a-historic, brutal and the anathema of progress and modernity. much as ‘women’s rights’ were used as a moral justification for the ‘war on terror’ in 2001 to 2003 (delphy 2002; winter 2002a; winter 2006; eisenstein 2007), ‘gay rights,’ defined homonormatively, have become the new indicator of western moral superiority. we have gay marriage, gay businesses, gay tv shows, while they have stonings, rapes and honour killings. for puar, writing within a us post-9/11 context, ‘they’ is the muslim other, although the othering does not stop there. yet, the fact remains that the countries most fervently opposed to any sort of rights for gay people are those where religion—islam but also christianity—and state are the most heavily imbricated. homosexuality is, for example, illegal in christian-dominated uganda and cameroon as well as in many caribbean and pacific-island states that are also christian dominated. it remains illegal in 77 countries and is punishable by death in five of these as well as in muslim-controlled regions of nigeria. on a national level, in winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 7 2013 nigeria became one of a number of countries to regress on gay and lesbian rights, adopting on 30 may a law condemning any gay or lesbian couples who marry to fourteen years in prison, with a ten-year sentence for gay and lesbian couples who merely show affection in public. with this sort of brutal opposition, largely fuelled by religious lobbies, it is not difficult to understand why gay marriage has become an international cause célèbre and it becomes difficult to argue against it if one wishes to be considered progressive. it is, however, arguable, even demonstrable, that notwithstanding the vicious opposition of governments such as that of nigeria, marriage is not at the top of the agenda in countries where even to exist as gay or lesbian is punishable by death, prison, corporal punishment, fines and/or various other forms of legally sanctioned economic discrimination and social ostracism. yet our understandings of human rights are heavily influenced by positivist thinking: according to such thinking, human rights are incrementally obtained in a linear pathway of progress that inevitably moves forward and upward. the legal recognition of gay marriage and family, as the montreal declaration argues, has come to be seen as an essential (final?) step in ‘fully securing’ gay and lesbian ‘dignity and equality,’ and thus a marker of the ‘advanced’ state of democracies. that gay marriage is not necessarily the most pressing matter in uganda or saudi arabia does not, for its advocates, mean that it does not represent the finality of gay rights for citizens of those countries. according to such arguments, uganda and saudi arabia have simply not ‘advanced’ that far yet. to set up gay marriage as the pinnacle of recognition of gay ‘dignity and equality,’ as per article 16 of the 1948 un declaration, is to frame ‘lgbt rights’ in a particular way. i am not here arguing for culturally-relativist definitions of human rights (such as the 1981 islamic declaration), as a counter to the presumed ‘western hegemony’ of human rights philosophy. i do believe it is possible to identify a common humanity and fundamental needs of every human being, whatever particular approach one takes: human rights, human capabilities (nussbaum 2000) or so on. i am, however, suggesting that what the authors of the 1948 declaration decided were human rights is open to both interpretation and contestation, as feminists have argued for many decades in relation to the family, which is the primary site of the gendering of social relations. as such, it is also the basis for explicit or tacit ideological, legal and cultural codification not only of winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 8 what women are and what women’s place is in society, but also of the forms of punishment women are to receive if they transgress. that most violence against women happens within or in relation to a family context is noteworthy. i note in passing that gay marriage has not and will not resolve the issue of domestic violence, and am concerned at the naivety of the idea often advanced by gay marriage advocates that the latter will somehow in itself subvert or transform the institution of marriage. i have to date observed nothing and seen no research that bears out such an assumption. these codes are so deeply ingrained in our cultures as to be considered natural (winter 2002b). gender, for example, is considered a ‘normal’ social division and basis for social organisation, and to be properly gendered one has to exhibit certain physical and psychological characteristics. the politics of transgender has largely been built on that premise: that gender is a normal part of social relations, and if one has the misfortune to be born into the ‘wrong’ gender, then this should be surgically changed. the idea that social relations might be much improved, and ‘dignity and equality’ more wholly realised, by doing away entirely with the concept of gender, has little currency in global lgbt rights conversations. indeed, it appears to be inconceivable, so overwhelming is the necessity to have a gender—on every identity document, every form one fills out, through every act of selfidentification—as is the necessity to be situated in relation to official coupledom. citizenship is in fact not only sexual but also marital—as david cameron, cited at the beginning of this article, clearly reminds us. to be married—for both heterosexuals and homosexuals—is to better conform to what it is to be fully human, as encoded in the 1948 universal declaration of human rights among other documents. families are at the base of social fabric; they are protected by states through legislation and cultural norms. to be part of a family is to more fully exist. to be part of a legally recognised couple is to more fully exist. to procreate or to adopt children is to more fully exist. in doing so, one conserves ‘the ties that bind us’ as a nation, as david cameron reminds us. the implicit flipside of this equation is that not to be married and procreate means that one less fully exists, is socially, culturally and emotionally deprived and indeed deficient. will the unmarried and childless gay man or lesbian become the new pariah of a homonormalised nation? winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 9 as pointed out by puar and by others such as alexandra chasin (2000), who analyses the impact of capitalist consumerism on gay politics, the national ‘us’ is defined by elites and their social, financial and cultural capital. as a core demand of the global lgbt rights movement, gay marriage remains the province of liberal and largely secularised capitalist democracies. as a sign of gay normalcy, it is also, in this global neoliberal context, necessarily synonymous with cosmopolitanism. assimilated gay culture is one of the attributes of prosperous global cities. it is a selling point of innercity tourist culture, flourishing in oxford street or the inner west in sydney, barrio norte or san telmo in buenos aires or the marais in paris. it is noteworthy that in both argentina and france, the national and international media focus following the passage of the gay marriage laws was on urban professional white men (for example: pink news 2010; le monde 25 may 2013; chrisafis 2013). to be gay and to be married is to have access both to full citizenship of one’s country and to be an ambassador for that country, or at least its cosmopolitan urban centres, as a desirable place to travel, live and do business—and indeed, migrate. in immigration legislation in most countries, immigrants married to a national have easier access to visas and shorter waiting periods for work and residency permits than civil-union partners or those in non-formalised couple relationships. absent from this glowing scenario of the modern, egalitarian and cosmopolitan nation is the fact that marriage operates to reinforce already-existing differentiation between classes of immigrants. while gay marriage legislation and the improved immigration opportunities it opens up are certainly not colour-coded in the letter of the law, screening processes are nonetheless usually different depending on the country of origin of the spouse. for example, those coming from the less wealthy countries of the socalled global south come under greater suspicion of having entered into marriages of convenience. also, in some cases, as has been noted in relation to france’s new law, existing bilateral agreements concerning which country’s law is to be observed concerning recognition of marriage can work against transnational couples (trouillard 2013). moreover, gay marriage does nothing to address the ongoing issue of asylum for lesbians and gay men for whom liberal democracies are more often than not closely guarded fortresses (jansen & spijkerboer 2011; winter 2012). even as these democracies open their doors (just a crack) to gay asylum seekers, they reinforce both the reification of the cultures and countries of origin as a-historic and backward, and the winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 10 construction of a performative ‘gay’ identity aligned to a western stereotypical model (luibhéid 2008; millbank 2009). in fact, argues sandip roy, ‘legalizing same-sex marriage may be less about gay rights and more about codifying an ideal of european values—another brick in the wall of fortress europe before it’s too late’ (roy 2005). how, asks ilgin yorukoglu, writing about turkish gay minorities in germany, ‘do we explain this double standard, one that encourages tolerance and invites gay tourists and the “creative class” to the table on the one hand, while calling for stricter border controls to curb immigration on the other?’ (yorukoglu 2010: 435). more broadly, as i suggested at the beginning of this article, actions by governments in favour of gay marriage cost nothing; this is particularly the case for left-leaning governments for which the religious right is not usually a key constituency. on the contrary, in fact, support for gay marriage improves governments’ popularity among a significant electoral demographic, and even right-wing governments who may be assumed to be more attentive to religious hardliners have learned to play to popular opinion, as we will see presently in the case of the new abbott government in australia. support for liberal-democratic social justice issues like gay marriage is also useful in deflecting attention from other measures that are far less likely to advance gay, or anyone’s, human rights, as we will see in looking at all three case studies. argentina in 2010, argentina became the first country in latin america, and the tenth in the world, to legalise same-sex marriage. this move has resulted in the qualification of argentina, on numerous online media and encyclopedia sites, as the most ‘advanced’ latin american country as concerns gay rights. the senate approved the law on 14 july, by 33 votes to 27, with three abstentions, after a fourteen-hour debate. the vote was televised live and peronist president cristina kirchner also signed off on the law on national television on 22 july. according to an article in the british press, five hundred marriages were celebrated between that date and 25 december (that number increased to 6,000 by june 2012), and some three hundred suppliers were explicitly targeting the gay marriage market. gay (male?) spouses-to-be were reported to be much bigger spenders than their heterosexual counterparts, by some 30 percent (kelly 2012). a ‘gay marriage’ tourism industry has even developed, oriented primarily around buenos aires, winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 11 the ‘gay capital’ of south america, although some tourism websites also provide advice on regional argentinian destinations such as rosario, mendoza, bariloche and ushuaia. yet some commentators have noted that gay marriage, often framed, as i have suggested above, as the culmination of progress on gay rights, has in argentina lain more at the beginning than at the end of the road. discrimination and violence against gay men and lesbians in regional argentina—anywhere, in fact, outside the cosmopolitan porteño culture of central buenos aires—continues virtually unimpeded, and gay marriage has done little if anything to alter this. the extent of the problem was brought home some months prior to the passage of the gay marriage law by a murder case that has become a cause célèbre among lgbt rights activists in argentina (dillon 2011; greenfield 2011). on 7 march 2010, 27-year old natalia ‘pepa’ gaitán, a highly visible and butch-looking lesbian living in the city of córdoba, was murdered by her girlfriend’s stepfather, daniel toledo, who objected to his stepdaughter leaving home to leave with gaitán (greenfield 2011). a wave of local protest ensued, with graffiti and posters denouncing this murder as a hate crime. as lawyer natalia milisenda put it: ‘this is a case of gender violence, which is not recognised in public policies, but which victimises many lesbian women, simply for the fact that they are women and that they are freely exercising their sexuality’ (cited in vinter 2010). yet the court refused to acknowledge that gaitán was targeted as a lesbian and as a woman refusing to conform to feminine stereotypes, and toledo was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment for ‘domestic violence’ (greenfield 2011). the following year, the 8 march international women’s day protest in córdoba commemorated gaitán’s murder, focusing on femicide and other forms of violence against women including lesbians (qualiafolk 2011). other forms of violence against women continue to be a grave problem in argentina. a few days after the gay marriage law was signed, there was a large demonstration in buenos aires in favour of fully legalising abortion, which is subject to strict restrictions under the 1921 penal code, still in force. the code qualifies abortion as a ‘crime against life,’ and allows it in only two exceptional cases: where there is immediate risk to the mother’s life and in the case of rape of a mentally incompetent woman (that is, developmentally disabled or mentally ill). in practice, however, even in these cases some doctors will raise conscientious objections and refuse to perform the abortions. one is led to ask why, in these two areas that are both related to the idea of sexual winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 12 citizenship and sexual rights, and that have historically met with resistance for the same reasons: ‘nature, morals and “common good”’ (rawson 2012: 177, my translation), there have been such diametrically opposing political outcomes. the outcomes are all the more surprising because in other countries, the recognition of women’s sexual and reproductive rights has preceded the recognition of gay relationships by many decades. milagros belgrano rawson suggests that this apparently paradoxical difference in outcome is related to the ongoing refusal by the state to consider women as full sexual citizens (rawson 2012: 177 ff). rawson also suggests that the greatest impact of illegal abortion is on poor women, as richer women have access to safe but costly abortions in argentina (illegal) or overseas (legal). while it would be counterproductive and indeed absurd to consider the continuing struggle of argentinian women for freedom from violence and for full reproductive and sexual rights as somehow in ‘competition’ with gay rights, it is nonetheless telling that a relatively cosmetic issue, that of gay marriage, has been addressed while more substantive and even legally-supported discriminations and violence against gay men and all women, straight or lesbian, persist. rawson has offered a second reason for this ‘rights’ discrepancy: a certain political opportunism by president kirchner and her party (rawson 2012: 177 ff). kirchner, like her late husband and former president nestor, was elected on, among other things, a human rights platform. moreover, in the wake of the global financial crisis argentina’s inflation was running at some 25 percent in 2010, its highest level since the devaluation of the peso in 2002, and the government and president, in the lead up to elections the following year, were dogged by allegations of corruption and defections from the right wing of their peronist ranks. kirchner badly needed to score some political points and show the world that argentina could hold its own among richer, more ‘advanced’ democracies of the west. argentina’s western aspirations are not only political and economic, they are also cultural, with strong affinities with europe (particularly france and italy, perhaps more so than spain in some respects). indeed, argentina is often considered the ‘whitest’ country in latin america, both statistically (an estimated 97 percent of the population is of european origin: cia statistics), and because of the (need to reaffirm) identity, image and aspirations of middle-class porteños (inhabitants of buenos aires) (joseph 2012). winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 13 argentina nonetheless remains a strongly catholic country, even if many argentinian catholics, like french catholics, are more lapsed than practising. if kirchner stopped short of opposing the church on abortion—on the contrary, she herself has clearly declared on more than one occasion that she is against abortion—she did find herself at loggerheads with the then cardinal jorge bergoglio, now pope francis, over gay marriage. the relationship between bergoglio and kirchner had been tense for some time, with bergoglio going so far as to accuse kirchner of ‘persecuting’ argentinian catholics. the tension reached a peak at the time of legalisation of gay marriage, with bergoglio prominently at the head of demonstrations against the law, claiming gay marriage was the work of the devil. apart from gay marriage (and abortion) bergoglio also took the argentine government to task over the issue of poverty in argentina. (such a stance is reminiscent of that taken by george pell in sydney. pell has always been a staunch defender of australia’s poor, but an equally staunch opponent of gay rights, so much so that he inspired the mocking lead float in sydney’s popular gay and lesbian mardi gras parade in 2004, ‘st fairy’s,’ a parody on st mary’s, sydney’s catholic cathedral.) the issue of poverty in argentina is all the more vexed because the methodology and measures used by the official government statistics office, indec, are wildly at variance with those used in a parallel study by the argentine catholic university’s observatory for social debt (odsa). indec puts the 2012 poverty rate at some 6 percent of argentina’s population of 40 million, while odsa puts it at around 26 percent (odsa 2013, mercopress 2013). the poverty rate in argentina can also be linked to race and origin: regional migration (that is, from other south american countries) is the main source of argentina’s low and unskilled labour force (often undocumented) and accounts for roughly three quarters of all immigration. the legalisation of gay marriage in argentina is thus, notwithstanding the global context, very much a local story. its passage with much fanfare at a time when argentina was facing multiple political and economic difficulties, enabled the argentine state simultaneously to position itself as the vanguard of modernity, human rights and ‘sexual citizenship’ in latin america and to gloss over some other, deeper problems, such as the refusal of complete sexual citizenship to women more generally, alleged winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 14 political corruption and ongoing poverty, in a country where some 40 percent of the population is under 25. france if in argentina the legalisation of gay marriage appears to be a form of opportunistic grandstanding by a centre-left regime confronted with political and economic woes in other areas, the politically and sometimes physically violent french gay marriage debate has emerged, as french political debates often do, as a battle for the meaning of the republic and the prerogative to define it. the ‘against’ campaign has been particularly strong, its main organisers being a coalition called la manif pour tous (demonstration for all), so named as a counterslogan to the mariage pour tous (marriage for all) slogan of the pro-gay marriage campaign, which was also the name commonly given to the bill to open marriage to same-sex couples, that became law on 17 may 2013. the manif pour tous, a coalition of a number of organisations, although many of them exist in name only, claimed its 13 january 2013 demonstration against gay marriage to be the most significant mobilisation of the right since 1984. in that year, parents, teachers and priests mobilised against a proposal to increase government control of (mostly catholic) private schools, bringing about the downfall of the mauroy government, the most progressive of the mitterrand years. although less than half the size of the 24 june 1984 demonstration, the 13 january one was certainly large, with 800,000 or 340,000 participants (depending on whether one believes the organisers’ figures or those of the police) (hopquin & laurent 2013). it was certainly much larger than either the 16 december 2012 or 27 january 2013 demonstrations in favour of gay marriage, which indicates that the use of numbers of people demonstrating as the primary measure of the success of a political movement is ill-advised, given that manif pour tous failed where mariage pour tous succeeded. the size of the manif pour tous mobilisation is nonetheless indicative of the deep-seated catholic-based conservatism that continues to exert influence in france, which is simultaneously the pioneer of republican secularism and the ‘eldest daughter of the catholic church’ (because of the 496 conversion of clovis, king of the franks and of gaul, who consequently became the church’s first son). in keeping with these cowinter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 15 existing and sometimes warring, sometimes cooperating values, the imagery and rhetoric used by the manif pour tous, like those used by the french extreme right party the national front, combined these ‘two frances’ into a message aimed at claiming the moral high ground in the latest battle for the republic. the manif pour tous expresses its opposition to gay marriage as follows: the ‘marriage for all’ bill radically overhauls the civil code by systematically removing the words ‘husband,’ ‘wife,’ ‘father’ and ‘mother’ in favour of asexual and undifferentiated terms (notably ‘parents’). this bill thus intends to legally remove sexual difference and calls into question the foundation of human identity: sexual difference and the filiation that results from it. (manif pour tous website 2013, my translation). one of the most powerful tactics used by the manif pour tous has been the mariannes pour tous. marianne is the feminised symbol of the republic, emerging from popular culture among the french revolutionaries to become celebrated in statues, busts, coins and stamps, and used discursively in a range of political debates (winter 2009). she has even become part of the official logo of the republic (since 1999): her profile is featured in reverse silhouette as the white stripe of the french blue-white-red flag. marianne’s metonymical force is difficult to underestimate. today, (s)he who says ‘marianne’ says ‘the republic’: its values, its institutions, its political culture. in the various demonstrations of the manif pour tous, groups of mariannes pour tous have featured prominently. all young and long-haired, and mostly albeit not all white, the mariannes pour tous appear clothed in flowing white dresses with the red phrygian bonnets (that came to symbolise liberty at the time of the revolution) decorated with tricolour rosettes. they typically wear sashes reminiscent of beauty contests showing the region they come from (limousin, brittany and so on), and hold aloft copies of the french civil code, which the may 17 law amended. following the adoption of the law, they have demonstrated wearing gags to symbolise the ‘silencing of democracy.’ the mariannes pour tous also have a facebook page. in sporting the regalia of the republic and carrying one of its key political and legal symbols, the civil code (dating from the napoleonic era of codification of french law), the mariannes pour tous embody the republic: both the importance of the centralised state and the equally important rights and duties of citizens. through their youthful (reproduction-ready) femininity, wearing sashes that denote not republican departments winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 16 but pre-republican regions, the mariannes pour tous recall not the revolution but the counterrevolution, the france profonde of local cultures and their identification with the land and the church, that stands in opposition to hegemonic paris. embodying this mixed imagery, and standing behind, under or alongside the manif pour tous banners and placards showing an image of a father, a mother, a son and a daughter, the mariannes pour tous reinforce the idea that the republic is synonymous with the heterosexual nuclear family, anchored in the deep traditions of french culture. the opposition to gay marriage in france has also involved some violent incidents, the most extreme of which being the 21 may 2013 suicide of extreme-right historian and essayist dominique venner, who shot himself in front of the altar of the notre dame cathedral in paris, an act witnessed by some 1,500 people. a few hours previously, he had published a text on his blog calling on the manif pour tous not to stop opposing gay marriage but to extend their campaign to opposing an islamic takeover of france through immigration. to make this opposition count, wrote venner, ‘new, spectacular and symbolic gestures’ would be needed to ‘rock people out of their drowsiness, shake up anesthetised consciences and awaken the memory of our origins’ (venner 2013). venner’s action was certainly spectacular, and as greens deputy noël mamère put it in his own blog a few days later, it ‘adds to the rising power of a grassroots fascism that is corrupting much of the french right’ (mamère 2013). the force of the opposition to gay marriage in france, and the sort of symbolism and rhetoric it has deployed, makes it very difficult to take a critical attitude towards the french gay marriage campaign. like other polarising debates such as that over the islamic headscarf since 1989, or the 2009 ‘national identity’ debate initiated by then president nicolas sarkozy, the gay marriage debate has become imbricated with a broader ideological battle for the republic. yet, in looking at the carefully orchestrated 29 may broadcast of france’s first gay marriage, it becomes clear whose republic has won for the moment. the marriage, between two youngish to middle aged white professional men (one a 40-year-old business owner, one a 30-year-old public servant), took place in montpellier, dubbed france’s most gay-friendly city by gay e-zine têtu, and was celebrated as are all marriages in france, in the city hall. according to gay rights campaigners this marriage had been in preparation for many months before the passage of the law, with both winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 17 socialist party mayor of montpellier, hélène mandroux, and the couple in question, lobbying to have the first official marriage celebrated there (thomas fouquet-lapar, personal communication, 4 october 2013). the ceremony had easy-listening marriage music to accompany it, being preceded by ‘l.o.v.e.,’ sung by nat king cole, and followed by frank sinatra singing ‘love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.’ before marrying the couple, mayor mandroux, standing between a portrait of president françois hollande and a bust of marianne, gave a speech in which the government’s version of the link between marriage and the republic was made clear. in advocating respect for others and respect for differences, mandroux reminded her large audience that this respect is core to french values. by adopting the ‘marriage for all’ law, said mandroux, france, the ‘country of human rights,’ advanced in its modernisation, moving ever closer to the values of liberty, equality and fraternity that are the ‘fundamental values’ of the republic. ‘it is through these values that guide us, inspire us and that are beyond us, that we honour the greatness of politics and the legitimacy of the mandate that is given us’ (‘us’ being the government) (mandroux 2013, my translation). mandroux added that in being able to ‘live their love in the light of day’ through the institution of marriage, gay men and lesbians had now ‘gained access to the same rights and the same duties’ as all other citizens (the idea of citizenship in france involving both in relatively equal measure). the message that mandroux, perhaps unintentionally, conveyed in this last statement, is that access to full citizenship necessarily goes together with (access to) marital status. whatever progressive aspirations mandroux, hollande, christiane taubira (justice minister and author of the law) and french gay rights movements may have, the rhetoric employed by mandroux (as well as by hollande, whom she cited) harnesses gay marriage to the service of the republican nation as firmly as the love horse is harnessed to the marital carriage. australia what, then, of australia, which as noted above was a world leader in recognising samesex relationships for the purpose of migration, and yet is the only of the three case study countries in this article to resist recognition of gay marriage? in the first gay immigration test case in 1982, lawyer betty hounslow based her arguments on an interpretation of the ‘compassionate and humanitarian’ provisions in the then immigration law. it was also around that test case that the gay and lesbian immigration winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 18 task force (glitf) was founded in sydney, and started both lobbying for changes in the law and providing legal advice and support for gay and lesbian binational couples. notwithstanding the efforts of the glitf and others to have laws introduced that reflected the reality and diversity of lesbian and gay couples, the procedures that the australian state incrementally developed from that time (first special category ‘interdependency’ visa 1991, equal status with de factos from 2009) were firmly aligned with ‘organis[ing] sexuality around the heteronormative institutions of intimacy and the family’ (yue 2008: 239-40). the ‘proof’ of cohabitation and relationship authenticity that was demanded consisted essentially of financial and legal documentation: joint bank accounts, rent receipts and so on, so that gay couples were forced into a marital merging that they otherwise may not have wished. moreover, successive iterations of the procedures have increasingly required justification of periods of cohabitation outside australia before applying for migration of the non-australian national. these immigration provisions, along with the strong gay cosmopolitanism of australia’s major cities (the sydney gay and lesbian mardi gras festival being one of the country’s major tourist income earners) nonetheless positioned australia as one of the world’s more gay-friendly countries. one might have expected, in a country where ‘homonormativity’ seemed to be everywhere—in gay urban culture, businesses, in television shows and film, among prominent gay citizens such as greens leader bob brown, high court judge michael kirby, the reverend dorothy mcrae mcmahon and a range of entertainers and writers, not to mention ‘allies’ such as politician clover moore (mayor of sydney at the time of this writing)—that gay marriage would naturally follow. then along came john howard. the howard government, in power in australia for a little under twelve years between 1996 and 2007, is often viewed as the most right wing in australia’s history, although there is disagreement over whether howard sat to the right of liberal party founder and howard role model robert menzies, or simply followed in the latter’s footsteps, adapting his politics to a different era. among the many acts for which the howard government is remembered is then attorney general philip ruddock’s marriage amendment act (2004). that law amended the 1961 marriage act, which had not actually defined marriage, as follows: winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 19 marriage means the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life (article 5 [1]). certain unions are not marriages. a union solemnised in a foreign country between: (a) a man and another man; or (b) a woman and another woman; must not be recognised as a marriage in australia (article 88ea). gay marriage had not been the major issue for lgbt rights campaigns in australia at that time, certainly not to the extent that it was in some other countries, but the marriage amendment act, that clearly reinscribed sexual citizenship as heterosexual citizenship, was the proverbial red rag to a bull. it prompted the formation of australian marriage equality (ame), founded the same year by activists from left wing political parties, the gay and lesbian rights lobby and other groups. ame launched a national campaign for gay marriage the following year and has not let up since. the campaign has been supported by the greens, trade unions, and various other groups and individuals not previously known for their attachment to marriage. it seems in retrospect that the surest way to get australian gay men and lesbians interested in gay marriage was to explicitly forbid it. the australian gay and lesbian, or lgbt movement, now appears to be firmly part of the global gay marriage campaign, and those of us who, like yue in relation to gay immigration, raise concerns about homonormativity, are relegated to the all-butsilent margins. even staunch lesbian feminists who have previously been marriage resisters rather than marriage advocates have difficulty in appearing as killjoys if other lesbians demonstrably want to get married, as evidenced by many conversations i have had with activists over the years. as women, after all, we have too frequently come up against prohibitions to wish to impose them on others. many australian feminists thus, bizarrely, find themselves demonstrating for gay marriage—or have difficulty in maintaining their broader critique of marriage as it is perceived to be ‘anti-’ gay rights. a second red rag was added by julia gillard, former australian prime minister. one might have thought that gillard, who comes from the left faction of the australian labor party (alp) would have been fully in support of a measure deemed progressive in the logic of ‘small-l’ liberalism that informs our western democracies. one might also have thought that the recent new zealand legalisation, and the fact that gillard’s friend and one of her main political lieutenants, finance minister penny wong, is not only an out lesbian living in a couple but also has a child with her partner, would sway gillard. not so: gillard resolutely continued to oppose gay marriage, and the position of an alp conscience vote and a liberal-national ‘no’ vote during her term ensured that winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 20 gay marriage could not possibly become legal in australia. a bill put by alp backbencher stephen jones in september 2012 was crushingly defeated in the house of representatives by 98 votes to 42. yet it may simply have been that gillard, who lives, unmarried, with her partner tim mathieson, was not in favour of marriage tout court. her position may thus be less conservative than may have been assumed. bizarrely, it is the new right-wing government in australia that may end up showing itself more amenable to considering gay marriage. prime minister tony abbott, sensitive to opinion polls, has declared himself open to a conscience vote in his party to replace the former blanket opposition. yet in december 2013, the federal government succeeded in its constitutional challenge to the australian capital territory’s gay marriage law, which was thus overturned by the high court, returning hundreds of canberran gay couples, who had married immediately the law was passed, to an unmarried state after only a few days of wedded bliss. at that time abbott remained cagey on whether he would follow through on a national conscience vote (murphy 2013), but has since turned his attention to matters more clearly in line with liberalnational heartland values: the introduction of a new raft of ‘security’ legislation and negotiations with cambodia, one of the world’s most corrupt countries, on outsourcing detention of asylum seekers. in australia, then, perhaps more than elsewhere, the campaign for gay marriage largely took the form from the outset of ‘how dare you say we can’t,’ perhaps rather more than ‘we really, really want this in order to be considered full citizens.’ nonetheless, australian marriage equality cites polls that place support for gay marriage in australia at 64 percent, with the proportion rising to 81 percent among 18-24 year olds (ame website), and ame national convenor rodney croome anticipates mass gay marriage travel to neighbouring new zealand (cited in packham 2013). this will surely be as good for the new zealand tourism industry as it has been for the porteño one in argentina. ame also frames marriage equality as being ‘about extending the privileges already enjoyed by the majority to an excluded minority’ (ame website). yet in australia, getting married can lead to new forms of underprivilege, such as loss of financial autonomy, contrary to what is the case in france for example. in 2008, the alp government under the then prime minister kevin rudd brought in reforms to grant same sex couples de facto partner status. this measure, trumpeted as winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 21 progressive, and despite some family-oriented benefits such as childcare rebates, in fact impacted negatively on many welfare entitlements such as pension payments and unemployment benefits, meaning that same-sex couples, who may have been living for years as legally and financially single, stood to lose out considerably under a new obligation to register their relationships with government welfare agency centrelink. under australian law, their relationship status, including means-testing of partner income, impacts on their entitlement to welfare payments such as age pension and unemployment benefits in exactly the same way as marriage would. older women, whose income over the course of their lifetime had typically been lower than that of men, were rendered particularly vulnerable. this measure also impacted culturally, as many older gay men and lesbians remained closeted and feared forced ‘outing’ by the new measures. in mid-2009, the welfare rights centre, which has engaged in advocacy for affected populations, reported receiving roughly ten calls a day from gay men and lesbians, many of them older, concerned about the impact of these changes (welfare rights ceo maree o’halloran, cited in peatling 2009). those callers have reason to be concerned, particularly if they are women. the 2012 poverty in australia report of the australian council of social service (acoss) shows that poverty in australia, as defined under very austere oecd terms, has not gone down in the period from 2003 to 2010, but risen slightly, and that roughly 12 percent of australians are living below the poverty line, with the proportion of women being higher at 13.5 percent. those on unemployment benefits and age pensions are particularly vulnerable, as are those living in expensive cities such as sydney (now rated the third most expensive in the world; it is also home to one fifth of australia’s population). ‘recognition’ of same sex partnerships as outlined above can only exacerbate the problem for those populations. it is one of the more unusual circumstances in the global debate about gay marriage, in which ‘homonormalisation’ can in fact increase other forms of stigmatisation, not for others, but for the very same people. the saying ‘be careful what you wish for’ comes to mind. recognition of gay marriage has also recently been put forward in australia as important for attracting skilled migration (even though de facto couples are now recognised as discussed above). brian grieg, former senator with the now defunct centrist party the australian democrats and west australian convenor of australian winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 22 marriage equality, commented in may 2013 that there was a pressing need for skilled migrants, but that married gay professionals from western countries (grieg referred only to english-speaking countries), whose marriages are not recognised here, are likely to go elsewhere instead. grieg argues that the long term impact on australia’s economy would be devastating, and even goes so far as to anticipate that among the growing chorus of voices worldwide calling for gay marriage ‘it will be employers and big business that will become among the loudest’ (grieg 2013). just as mayor mandroux firmly coopted gay marriage as an instrument of reassertion of french republican values, grieg has clearly framed gay marriage as being first and foremost about the big (or at least high-income professional) end of town. in a country that has since the beginning of the howard years, and well into the rudd then gillard years, grappled with the incessant and growing demonisation of asylum seekers in particular and muslims in general, or indeed anyone else who is other than white, professional and heterosexual (or modelled in that image), arguments such as grieg’s can appear at best clumsy and at worst, to be homonationalism (or homocapitalism) of the worst kind. this impression is only reinforced by consideration of the poverty statistics presented by acoss. it would seem that there are far more pressing issues of social and economic justice in australia, including for our gay and lesbian populations, than gay marriage. indeed, in a council community consultation forum in early may 2013, in my local sydney area of marrickville, a number of participants raised the problem of homelessness and poverty among many of sydney’s homosexuals, from young people having had to leave the family home to the elderly, unemployed and mentally ill. concern was also raised, in what is ostensibly one of the most multicultural areas of the city, about the framing of all gays as white anglo and all non-white-anglo as somehow separate from the gay community, as almost by definition locked into traditions that cannot accommodate homosexuality. as sandip roy, who is of indian origin, put it, many are consequently left ‘unsure where [they] belong, suspended between [their] skin and [their] sexuality’ (roy 2005). perhaps we are not as cosmopolitan as we think. conclusion the campaigns for gay marriage, and the rhetoric with which governments—and their oppositions—embrace or refuse it, highlight the importance of marriageability for winter the ties that bind us portal, vol. 11, no. 1, january 2014. 23 acceptance into the national community and for recognition as fully human. the nonmarriageable, according to australian marriage equality, are considered ‘second class citizens,’ deprived of the ‘protection by society and the state’ that the united nations advocates for formally recognised family units. gay marriage campaigns have thus been framed as in the interest of gay men and lesbians, in providing an ‘in’ to this marital citizenship. ultimately, however, marriage does not protect individuals or family members anywhere near as much as it protects the state. marriage and family are regulators of social relations, creating structures in which it is in fact impossible for individuals to become the free and equal citizens that the lofty rhetoric of democracies tells us we should be. more importantly, marriage and the family are the primary vehicles of socioeconomic and cultural reproduction in the nation’s image. the least threatening thing to our heteropatriarchal white-western capitalist states that gay rights activists can do, then, is to demand to marry and have families. as shannon gilreath has put it, if it values ‘only that which is paradigmatically straight,’ the gay movement will have ‘uncritically compromised its moral independence’ (gilreath 2011: 229 and 232). as a result, we will all have become bound anew by the ‘ties’ of a heterosexist nation, and stigmatised anew if we seek to undo them. reference list ahmed, s. 2006, queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. duke university press, durham, nc. australian council of social service 2012, ‘poverty in australia,’ acoss paper 194, sydney. online, available: http://www.acoss.org.au/uploads/html/acoss_povertyreport2012.html [accessed 2 june 2013]. australian marriage equality website. online, available: http://www.australianmarriageequality.com/wp/ [accessed 2 june 2013]. browne, k. 2011, ‘“by partner we mean ...”: alternative geographies of “gay marriage,”’ sexualities, vol. 14, no. 1: 100-122. cameron, d. 2011, keynote speech, conservative party conference. manchester, 5 october. online, available: 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280-294. yogyakarta principles, the. 2006. online, available: http://www.yogyakartaprinciples.org/principles_en.htm [accessed 1 june 2013]. yorukoglu, i. 2010, ‘marketing diversity: homonormativity and the queer turkish organizations in berlin,’ in islam and homosexuality, vol. 2, (ed.) s. habib, praeger, santa barbara, ca. yue, a. 2008, ‘same-sex migration in australia: from interdependency to intimacy,’ glq, vol. 14, no. 2-3: 239-262. grauby general article final2 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. general article section. © 2015 [françoise grauby]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i2.3813 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. ‘sand’s way’: the voices of george sand’s françois the waif in marcel proust’s remembrance of things past. françoise grauby, university of sydney proust’s critics have acknowledged that the volumes of a la recherche du temps perdu (remembrance of things past) are about the narrator finding his voice as a writer and taking the conscious decision to investigate his own past in order to draw general laws about life, love and art (descombes 1987; fraisse 1992; marchaisse 2009). his book is a construction oriented toward the demonstration of a truth—his calling as a writer— that can be uttered only at the end. we also know that the final episode that makes the truth burst forth, during the matinée at the house of the prince de guermantes, was one of the first written by proust. time regained comes to this renewed faith in literature and in his own talents only after a very long detour. my article wants to revisit two appearances of george sand’s françois le champi/françois the waif at both ends of a la recherche du temps perdu and look at the origins of proust’s calling. his early involvement with literature and the retelling at the end of the novel of the moment when the narrator, now an old man, discovers the book in the guermantes’s library will be the focus of this essay. more specifically, i would like to interrogate the place of sand’s novel within proust’s opus and the part it plays in the definition of literary vocation for proust. the two encounters with the novel stand at the two poles of the narrator’s life: the book first appears in the ‘combray’ grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 2 section in swann’s way and it reappears at the moment of apparent illumination regarding his future as a writer in time regained, when he finds renewed faith in literature and in his own literary talents. the narrator connects intimately with the voices at play in sand’s novel, which is delivered to him through the voice of his mother. the discovery, incarnation and integration of voices will ultimately constitute a fertile ground on which the narrator will build his own creation. they will also form part of a larger search for the personal within the collective. the narrator first hears the story of françois le champi during the famous ‘good-night kiss scene.’ the narrator, then about 10 years old, wants a good-night kiss from his mother and becomes so agitated that she decides to spend the night with him to calm him down, and reads him a story. the protagonist, despite having committed ‘une faute telle que je m’attendais à être obligé de quitter la maison’1 (proust 1954: i, 49), is paradoxically awarded with possession of his mother for one night. the book she reads tells a simple story, the awakening of love between the young miller’s wife madeleine blanchet and her adoptive son, françois, who was abandoned in the fields (hence his name champi, literally ‘field-boy’) and whom she has brought up as her son. one can see the parallel between the intense and passionate love felt by the narrator for his mother and the (incestuous) love between the characters in the story. several critics, from didier (1981) to kristeva (1994), have commented on the symbolic connexions between the two love stories, but few have discussed the oral tradition at play in similar ways in both novels. françois le champi is a story taken from the oral tradition of berry, sand’s native region. both stories involve a storyteller and an audience. in the context of literary vocation, this seems important. vocation (vocare: the act of calling) involves a voice (from above) that ultimately will give the order to write, when the narrator is ready to hear ‘the calling.’ george sand wrote several rural novels drawing from her childhood experiences of the berry. the story of françois le champi, written in 1850, is part of a series of three stories, compiled under the title of veillées du chanvreur.2 the story is told by two alternating voices. one is feminine, the old woman/grand-mother/parish priest’s servant 1 ‘a sin so deadly that i expected to be banished from the household’ (proust 2003: 40–41). 2 the hemp-twiner’s tales is one of sand’s three pastoral novels, the other two being la mare au diable (the devil’s pool) and la petite fadette (fadette), all published between 1847 and 1848. what unites these three texts is the semi-mythical character of the hemp twiner telling his stories at night. grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 3 whose function is to tell the story of the childhood and adolescence of françois. the other is masculine, the hemp-twiner who narrates the actual love story between the two protagonists. these two voices are depicted as inspired and gifted: they know how to convey a story and to bring it to life. one can also note that the masculine voice will be more daring in that it will tell the part of the story which is, after all, in the traditional 19th-century rural society of berry, an immoral and incestuous tale, that of a mother who ends up marrying her adoptive son. as is often the case, the story is told during a veillée, at night. the veillée is a genre in itself: it is a signal to sit comfortably and pay attention to a real-life narrator. the audience is composed of young people, young girls in particular, which means that some precautions in the telling of the story are necessary: ‘je sais que je parle devant des jeunesses, et je ne dirai parole de trop’3 (sand 1960: 279). as is often the case with the oral tradition, there are no definite or ‘true’ versions of the story: variations are included in the material and the listeners shape the emerging story for themselves. by nature, oral tales are ‘promiscuous and omnivorous … motifs and plotlines are nomadic’ says marina warner (1994: xvii); ‘l’écriture fait du conte un texte définitif alors que raconté oralement, il n’est jamais le même puisqu’il ne peut être mémorisé mot à mot,’4 comments belmont (belmont 2005: 24). thus george sand is only faithful to the story to the extent that she is faithful to its fundamental oral mode of expression, to the regional berrichon expressions and to the beliefs and representations of a traditional rural world. the characters, for example, are not talkative and are often ignorant of the origin of their feelings. love between the two characters, françois and madeleine, is not declared openly but evolves secretly and silently under the surface, goes through many twists and turns until an inner voice speaks the truth of the revelation. et madeleine … comprit mieux que par des paroles que ce n’était plus son enfant le champi, mais son amoureux françois qui se promenait à son côté. et quand ils eurent marché un peu de temps sans se parler, mais en se tenant par le bras, aussi serrés que la vigne à la vigne, françois lui dit : allons à la fontaine, peut-être y trouverai-je ma langue. (sand 1960: 402)5 3 ‘i know that i am speaking before young people, and i shall not say a word too much’ (sand 1930: 187). 4 ‘writing makes a story a definitive text though told orally, it is never the same because it cannot be memorised word for word.’ all translations are my own with the exception of published translations of proust’s and sand’s works. 5 ‘she understood, better than if he had spoken, that it was no longer her child, the waif, but her lover françois, that walked by her side. and after they had gone a little distance, silent, but linked arm in arm, as vine is interlaced with vine, françois said: “let’s go to the fountain, perhaps i may find my tongue there”’ (sand 1930: 280). grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 4 silence and pauses seem to be called upon so that feelings can blossom and grow. this evokes a rural world in which, as it is with the land, it is better to let things grow naturally, with as little human intervention as possible: ‘on dirait qu’à l’approche du lourd sommeil de l’hiver chaque être et chaque chose s’arrangent furtivement pour jouir d’un reste de vie et d’animation avant l’engourdissement fatal de la gelée …’6 (sand 1960: 204). this laconicism is included in the rhythm of the story itself as sand wants to emphasise the instinctive poetry of the rural region and its people: ‘les chansons, les récits, les contes rustiques, peignent en peu de mots ce que notre littérature ne sait qu’amplifier et déguiser’7 (sand 1960: 211). sand’s ultimate aim is to give a voice, through her stories, to this provincial world in which no one is tormented by the desire to give an account of their inner life to others, in which feelings do not emerge fully but remain on the verge of consciousness and are stronger for it. the narration itself is highly staged: it is a recounted story and the objections from the storytellers themselves and/or the author regularly intrude upon the narration, ‘providing a double thickness of heteroglossic context’ (gray-mcdonald 1992: 342). bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia challenges the idea of a fixed monolingual discourse in a text and encourages the recognition of ‘a diversity of social speech types … and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organised’ (bakhtin 1981: 262). in the novel’s preface (in the form of a dialogue between two artists), sand mentions that she is aiming at hybridity: a story told by and for simple people, using dialect and peasant idiom, but connecting with more educated/parisian readers: ‘raconte-moi l’histoire du champi … mais raconte-la moi comme si tu avais à ta droite un parisien parlant la langue moderne, et à ta gauche un paysan devant lequel tu ne voudrais pas dire une phrase, un mot où il ne pourrait pas pénétrer’ (sand 1960: 217).8 in a sense, the voices of the hemp-twiner and the priest’s servant, one ‘paysan inculte, mais heureusement doué et fort éloquent à sa manière,’ the other ‘paysanne un peu cultivée’9 (sand 1960: 217) provide a successful compromise between familiarity and intelligibility. 6 ‘at the approach of the long winter sleep, it seems as if every creature and thing stealthily agreed to enjoy what is left of life and animation before the deadly torpor of the frost’ (sand 1930: 131). 7 ‘songs, ballads and rustic tales say in a few words what our literature can only amplify and disguise’ (sand 1930: 135–136). 8 ‘come, begin, tell me the story of the ‘waif,’ but not in the way you and i heard it last night … tell it to me as if you had on your right hand a parisian speaking the modern tongue, and on your left a peasant before whom you were unwilling to utter a word or phrase which he could not understand’ (sand 1930: 139–140). 9 ‘he was uneducated, but happily gifted by nature and endowed with a certain rude eloquence,’ ‘she was a peasant-woman of some slight education’ (sand 1930: 139). grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 5 nous avons assisté hier à une veillée rustique à la ferme. le chanvreur a conté des histoires jusqu’à deux heures du matin. la servante du curé l’aidait ou le reprenait ; c’était une paysanne un peu cultivée ; lui, un paysan inculte, mais heureusement doué et fort éloquent à sa manière. a eux deux, ils nous ont raconté une histoire vraie, assez longue, et qui avait l’air d’un roman intime. l’as-tu retenue ? parfaitement, et je pourrais la redire mot à mot dans leur langage. (sand 1960: 216–217)10 this juxtaposition expresses a conception of art at the opposite pole from the perfection of the artwork: it is an attempt to render authenticity (with an accent on ‘attempt’). sand’s decision to find a new language and emphasise orality, spontaneity and the interaction that comes from communal storytelling is a risky one but she fully accepts and understands the possibility of trial and error. to write oral tales during the midnineteenth century was to challenge authority and the unquestionable cultural hegemony of parisian literary life with a populist form, to promote the values of the french regions, and to reject the conventional generic structure of the novel. the so-called ‘province’ was considered a foreign land by the parisians, and the different provinces were perceived as ‘petites républiques, dont chacune a ses lois, ses usages, ses jargons, ses héros, ses opinions politiques’ (janin 2003: 15). behind this challenge lies a struggle for cultural dominance, expressed by a debate about what authentic expression is; whether it is written or oral, whether it comes from the provinces or from paris. the story thus appears at the frontier of two worlds (regional/parisian), two representations (nature/culture), two languages (dialect/french), two voices (feminine/masculine), two generations (young/old), two ways of expressing emotions (by telling/by silence), two ways of telling a story (orally/in writing) and, finally, two approaches (instinctive, as produced by the land/nature itself, and intellectual, as retold by an artist). beyond this bipolar artistic model, one should not overlook the polyphonic nature of the story. the novel is staging a process of narration as collective, communal, heteroglossic, in an attempt to find one’s voice through the childhood land and the original patois. 10 ‘we were present last evening at a rustic gathering at the farm, and the hemp-dresser told a story until two o’clock in the morning. the priest’s servant helped him with his tale, and resumed it when he stopped; she was a peasant-woman of some slight education; he was uneducated, but happily gifted by nature and endowed with a certain rude eloquence. between them they related a true story, which was rather long, and like a simple kind of novel. can you remember it?—perfectly, and i could repeat it word for word in their language’ (sand 1930: 139). grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 6 the story is, above all, a reflection on voice as theme and enunciation, mixing old songs, different accents, inner voices (the voice of god, of the fairies11 and the supernatural are an integral part of the story, for instance françois’s inner voice tells him whom to court and love). there are also the voice of the manual labourer (the hemp-twiner is working on the hemp while he is telling the story) and the voice of the artist trying to recapture all these voices. we should add here the presence of another voice: that of sand the mother, who, before or during the writing of her stories, tested them on her own children and grandchildren, before bedtime.12 so the story retains something of its viva voce origins. anne berger rightly points out that the contes champêtres inscribe or represent orality in the written text (berger 1987). finding one’s voice, a voice that would render all voices in their authenticity, is thus at the centre of the story of françois le champi. a crucial element for sand is to find the right balance between emotions and the intellect, to make these voices agree and negotiate, to diffuse tensions and potential conflict in order to create harmony between the voices; each voice pulling gently in its direction so that none is neglected but none is dominant. it is a celebration of the oral in the literary, a celebration of freedom, authenticity and lack of constraint. it is, in the words of tim farrant: ‘word-spinning, freewheeling, vibrant’ (farrant 2010: 87). the result is a story that is pure telling without the showing, in which many voices can cohabit so harmoniously that no one, young or old, conservative or educated, can ultimately be shocked by what the story is telling. the artful way in which sand disguises the crux of the matter means that someone like marcel’s mother, to go back to remembrance, will read this story to her young son, at a time when he is claiming her as his possession. it is indeed ironic that sand’s style, which is most revered by marcel’s mother and grandmother, can allow this mythic story of forbidden love, under the guise of a bucolic and provincial world, to be read to a child who is obsessed by the love of his mother. but i deliberately want to avoid the œdipal implications of the 11 one can note that the etymology of ‘fée’ comes from ‘fatum’ (destiny) and the verb ‘fari’ (to speak). words and destiny are intertwined to describe what fairies represent in fairy-tales (a form of oracle). 12 implying a constant toing-and-froing between oral and written versions within a family circle. sand also assimilates, in her work and in her life, the act of caring for a child with writing (at night). the ‘veillée’ is also singular: it is when she chose to write, while looking after her sleeping children. just like the proustian narrator’s mother, she is actively creating (performing a story) while looking after a child. both missions appear equally important. grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 7 nocturnal bedroom scene between mother and son and go back to the voice, and, ultimately, vocation. marcel’s mother reads the story to him at night (the night session recalls the ‘veillée’/fireside story in the farm or a barn of the original story), providing another voice and another layer in the heteroglossia, cunningly coupling the masculine and the feminine (the young marcel believes that sand is a masculine author because of her masculine pen name), taking on multiple roles, playing each character. the book also comes to him with a certain prestige attached to it, having been carefully selected by his grandmother for his birthday, for its moral quality and impeccable style. like the oral stories told communally, it is also aimed at a young audience. orality is not reduced to vocal action. according to paul zumthor (1983), it integrates facial and body gestures. by staging a performance, the mother brings the voices to life and participates actively in the discovery of his literary vocation: the narrator mentions that the ‘phrases … semblaient écrites pour sa voix’ (proust 1954: i, 55).13 the voice of the mother unites with sand’s story and mission, just as if she had found instinctively, underneath the surface, what binds the text together: sand’s vision and feelings, her goodness,14 her doctrines of love, progress and reconciliation, and her connection to the rural world, trying to embrace a whole community: ‘c’est la continuité de cette voix des grands-mères que nous fait entendre george sand, cette permanence de la tradition orale grâce aux femmes. par cette continuité peuvent se faire entendre des voix beaucoup plus anciennes’ (didier 1990: 296).15 this is a scene of transmission of knowledge through the mother’s tongue. not only does marcel’s mother convey the multiplicity and hybridity that so characterise the book (writing, reading, translating at the same time), she also changes the original text. faithful, in that respect, to the idea of oral variations, she does not read love scenes, deemed too frank for a young reader, thus adding another layer of silence to the original text.16 by slightly altering the text, she reinforces the mysterious power of 13 ‘sentences … seemed written for her voice’ (proust 2003: 45). 14 the goodness and generosity of the mother and grandmother of marcel are often commented upon in proust’s novel. 15 ‘it is the continuity of the voices of the grandmothers that george sand lets us hear, the permanence of the oral tradition thanks to women. through this continuity, ancient voices can be heard.’ 16 in a similar way, madeleine will bond with françois when she reads him biblical stories (she will also rearrange some passages of the gospels and the lives of the saints). grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 8 the novel: the incomprehensibility of the patois words, the incoherences due to the omissions or the daydreamings of the boy cultivate the belief of the young narrator that the book is unique and that the story, despite or because of its strangeness, is written solely for him: ‘c’est cet enfant que le livre avait appelé tout de suite, ne voulant être regardé que par ses yeux, aimé que par son cœur, et ne parler qu’à lui’17 (proust 1954: viii, 243–244). it clearly exerts a strong magnetic or quasi-mystical pull on the boy. it is then no accident that all these elements (an intimate audience of one, a voice deployed in a circumscribed space, a unique story recounted in real time), converge toward the child, here and now, to create a circular and sacred space, a stage of a sort, cut from the continuum of social and family life, related to the sacral, so that a kind of prophecy can take place. reading out loud ‘définit ainsi un espace d’intimité non seulement physique, mais aussi spirituel, qui favorise le rapprochement’18 (ender 2002: 85) between mother and child, joining sacred space and earthly room. the fact that the story is told by someone invested with special powers/authority—one must note here the force of breath, prevalent in the doctrine of inspiration: ‘elle insufflait à cette prose si commune une sorte de vie sentimentale et continue’ (proust 1954: i, 56)19; similarly, sand’s prose that ‘respire toujours cette bonté, cette distinction morale’ (proust 1, 1954: i, 55)20—tends to heighten its power over the boy. what we are shown here is an annunciation—traditionally a woman’s scene—which acts as ‘miseen-abyme’ of another scene from françois le champi, where madeleine reads to françois and teaches him how to read: ‘la dimension de la parole s’y trouve maintenue et fonde dans l’union des bouches et des oreilles le plaisir de la consommation du livre’21 comments anne berger (berger 1987: 81). the annunciation intertext suggests a correlation between god’s intercessor and the verb, bringing together the power of words and notions of agency, intimating that something miraculous has happened: he has been chosen by god. as the archangel gabriel tells mary that she is to conceive a 17 ‘[the child] brought to me only by the book, this child has instantly summoned him to its presence, wanting to be seen only by his eyes, to be loved only by his heart, to speak only to him’ (proust 1992: 240). 18 ‘thus defines an intimate space, not only physical, but also spiritual, which encourages bonding’ 19 ‘she [the mother] breathed into this very common prose a sort of continuous emotional life’ (proust 2003: 45). 20 ‘always breathes that goodness, that moral distinction which mama had learned from my grandmother to consider superior to all else in life …’ (proust 2003: 45). 21 ‘the dimension of speech is maintained and founds the pleasure of consuming the book in the union of mouth and ears.’ grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 9 son, the mother, recognising the sensitive nature of her son, singularises the future writer and imbues him with a sense of mission: ‘l’annonciation s’avère être dans la recherche une structure riche en implications, structure souple (adaptable à la transgression des catégories sexuelles) en même temps persistante’22 writes brigitte mahuzier (1992: 91). the narrator will never describe at length what the book is about but will emphasise these three elements: the haunting motif of the mother’s voice; the enigma of the book (in particular the patois word champi); the singularity of that night and that book, which appear to the young boy to be made just for him. like the dreams that form part of the narrator’s inner world, the story is entirely formed of disconnected images that will stay imprinted at a profound level in his memory. these elements (the voice, the mystery and the singularity) capture the mythical elements necessary to set a scene of revelation. the emphasis is not on the love story between madeleine and françois (in which it is accepted that a young son can marry his mother) but on the setting of a calling. the voice of the mother summons a child in order for him to hear his destiny. and what is vocation after all if not the careful and long selection, between the myriad voices, of that unique voice that will take the writer to the discovery of what he is made for? this is exactly what happens in the final volume, when the narrator arrives at the realisation of what he is and what he wants to do. the calling is fully heard in the final volume, a delay that might be read, as in françois le champi, as an expression of nature taking its time. françois le champi does reappear in the final scenes of time regained, in the prince de guermantes’s bookcase, when the narrator finally grasps his calling and can free himself of years of procrastination (but, as we have seen, procrastination plays its part, it is the time one needs to bring the calling to maturity: ‘les vrais livres doivent être les enfants non du grand jour et de la causerie mais de l’obscurité et du silence’23 (proust 1954: viii, 260). 22 ‘the annunciation proves to be within la recherche a structure rich with implications, supple (adaptable to the transgression of sexual categories) and at the same time, persistent.’ 23 ‘real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence’ (proust 1992: 257). silence plays also an important part in the structure of the book, as proust is very deliberately hiding elements that could, first, make his discovery about time too literal and obvious, or second, appear too dogmatic or philosophical to the readers. keeping the reader a little behind, a little deaf and blind, is grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 10 his meditation on the place the book occupies occurs in a moment of apparent illumination, after a series of signs that all seem to point towards the rediscovery of literature. again, the narrator does not describe at length what the book is about but this time he emphasises different elements, moving away from the theatrical elements and the process of narration as collective and dialogised. as we have noted, the original story read to him gave a communal point of view and emphasised meaningful connections to the voices of others, through the unifying voice of the mother. in many ways, the book was a product of her voice and also of her taste in novels (and that of her own mother). the rediscovery of the book brings back to the forefront its title, françois le champi, that becomes an insistent leitmotif throughout the passage, with, at its centre, the name of the boy. now, the character, his name, and his forceful efforts to push the plot forward are given preeminence: it is the quest/the tribulations of the hero that are important, his vicissitudes, his resilience, his power of invention, his creative forces, his ultimate success. the story has moved from the communal to the agentic. françois comes from nothing and wins everything. once he knows what he wants and can identify his allies, he pursues his aim with determination.24 the fascination of the narrator does not thus reside in the book itself but in the title which carries his memories (it belongs undoubtedly to the family of poetic names such as guermantes, balbec, and parme. whose sounds and colours fill the narrator with awe) and provides the solidity of a foundation: françois le champi is, at the same time, a name, a situation (‘champi,’ a child without a father), a place (a regional dialect, the countryside of sand) and a journey. all these elements will lead the narrator to discover that his own book, the book he has been longing to write, will also be about a boy and a quest. he is, ultimately, as françois is, the subject of this book: ‘et je compris que tous ces matériaux de l’œuvre littéraire, c’était ma vie passée’25 (proust 1954: viii, 262). by quoting repeatedly the title of the original book, the narrator adopts an identity and a singularity in order to start writing. it is an impulse to write, a call to act. the name also a deliberate technique on proust’s part in order to control the distribution of information. the reader is just as the narrator was as a child, victim of the same ecstatic dazzlement. 24 in the classification of traditional oral stories, françois le champi belongs to the ‘conte-nouvelle,’ in which an autonomous young boy or girl journeys from the family home until he or she finds fortune or makes a good marriage, without any supernatural interventions. (belmont 2005: 19). 25 ‘and i understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life’ (proust 1992: 258). grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 11 françois also forms a strange echo with the name of his maid françoise, whom he likens to his writing double. both are domestics involved with manual labour, and the narrator will identify his writing techniques to the activities of françoise the ‘mender,’ establishing a link between her creativity and his. this is also evocative of the manual labour of the hemp-twiner, artist of a sort, talking and singing while he works. the older and more critical narrator comments on the style of sand to note that he has adopted a more critical stance. he refers here to sand’s idealism and ‘feminine’ generosity and goodness, for which she was praised by his mother and grandmother. however, he has managed to reverse his mother’s tastes and teach her literary appreciation: ‘certes, la ‘plume’ de george sand … ne me semblait pas du tout , comme elle avait paru si longtemps à ma mère avant qu’elle modelât ses goûts littéraires sur les miens, une plume magique’26 (proust 1954: viii, 244). in matters of literary taste, the son has become the master and declares that sand is not a supreme novelist. this distancing principle does not prevent some kind of magic from taking place however: it in no way precludes a profound empathy with the book. the enchantment is still present after all these years: ‘une chose que nous avons regardée autrefois, si nous la revoyons, nous rapporte avec le regard que nous y avons posé, toutes les images qui le remplissaient alors’27 (proust 1954: viii, 244) because he has, as a child, ‘magnetised’ the ‘quill’—‘plume que sans le vouloir j’avais électrisée’28 (proust 1954: viii, 244). he is able to conjure up recollections of his past, imagination taking over, fuelled by a firm consciousness of his own creative forces. if françois le champi is not such a remarkable book (‘n’était pas un livre bien extraordinaire’ (proust 1954: viii, 243), who has ordered the chain of memories and resurrected the past if not himself? only he can magnify the book and grant himself power of epiphany. the rediscovery of the book inaugurates the narrator’s real writing career: communal collaboration has become one singular voice assuming control with a greater emotional distance, away from sentimentality and idealism, recognising and embracing his own creative desire. by emphasising the name of the hero, discarding sand’s style and 26 ‘admittedly the ‘pen’ of george sand … no longer seemed to me, as for so long it had seemed to my mother before she had gradually come to model her literary tastes upon mine, in the least a magic pen’ (proust 1992: 240). 27 ‘a thing which we have looked at in the past brings back to us, if we see it again, not only the eyes with which we looked at it but all the images with which at the time those eyes were filled’ (proust 1992: 241). 28 ‘a pen which unintentionally … i had charged with electricity’ (proust 1992: 241). grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 12 asserting his taste, the narrator reappropriates the book as his own, analyses its magical properties and asserts his own creation by playing a more active role. where he had to listen to a voice, he knows now how to summon it and give it shape. it is, as doubrovsky puts it, ‘le seul moyen d’accoucher de soi’: ‘être soi-même, c’est trouver sa voix (voie)’29 (doubrovsky 1974: 60). in that respect, the only negotiation and reconciliation is with himself. the fusion is now with the name and not with the mother’s voice. one source of the image of the magnetised pen seems to be plato’s ion, in which socrates offers the metaphor of a magnet to explain how the rhapsode transmits the poet's original inspiration from the muse to the audience. socrates likens this magnetic attraction to the power of the muse, who inspires poets and, through them, a ‘chain’ of other men. the magnetic stone of herakles, like the magnetic pen of sand, is analogous to the possession and inspiration of a poet by the muse, creating a ‘chain of inspired beings’ travelling from place to place to tell their story/recite their poems and communicate the message from the gods. indeed, if the narrator places his efforts under the aegis of predecessors to bask in the reflected light of a cohort of models, instinctive artists and myths from the past (the nomadic background of the hemp-twiner is also acknowledged), there remains the possibility of a community necessary to establish the seriousness of his creative ambitions. in yet another sense, the mother’s voice and the storytellers of the past could be seen as two sides of the same coin, as the former proved an incentive to interrogate the latter. such an identification does not exclude affirmation of his own perspective and the construction of a personal locus30 but the all-important notion of filiation must not be overlooked. knowing oneself as a writer is crucially linked to knowing one’s place within a literary genealogy. what is important here is not that the narrator suddenly decides to write—some scholars have underlined the fact that nothing suggests that the narrator is not, after all, going to 29 ‘the only way to give birth to oneself’; ‘to be oneself is to find one’s voice (way)’ 30 ‘quant au livre intérieur de signes inconnus … cette lecture consistait en un acte de création où nul ne pourrait nous suppléer ni même collaborer avec nous’ (proust 1954: viii, 238) (‘as for the inner book of unknown symbols … to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us or even collaborate with us’ (proust 1992: 233). grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 13 continue his procrastination31—but that, upon seeing the book françois le champi he creates a mythology of his own by reappropriating a text populated with the intentions of his mother and grandmother, distancing himself from the lyrical and romantic style of sand (that his mother adopts and adapts so well) and forging a path of autonomy, acknowledging his own agency: it is he (his memories) weaving together layers of the past (like the hemp-twiner), drawing connections, extracting the essence of the book. his theories (however tentative) are thus in counterpoint to sand’s text and function as his own creative act. finally, the narrator quotes the text as an example of what such creation might be, to exemplify and prophesise what his future book should be. he has been touched by the magnetic force of literature that binds him to a chain. so the reading scene does not so much instigate writing as forge a connection with a chain of storytellers, poets and writers whose voices come together to form his own. this brings us back to the oral tradition in françois le champi. the story itself contributes to the general feeling of confusion and mystery necessary to imbue the moment with magical properties. the narrator is mesmerised by a voice telling a story about voices. and the mother’s voice is simply the best vessel to convey the calling because she ‘re-oralises’ and ‘re-originalises’ a story that has been written down—from oral story to book and back to oral story, in a reverse trajectory, forging a bond between time and place. by choosing to record this moment in written form, the narrator not only reconnects the links but also records his act as a writer. this transitory return to ‘vocality’ (zumthor 1983) is physically and psychically effective because the text is momentarily freed from written constraints and transmitted in the present moment, through the body of the mother, in the warmth of an interpersonal moment. this quintessential embodiment, and the attunement to the quality of voice, elemental rhythms and flows of the original text provide a privileged mode of access to creation. if, in a sense, the mother expresses her creativity through reading, the narrator mirrors her dedication and transfers one craft to another, in a quest to bond the writer with the storyteller. 31 see genette (1969: 234–235) and gray-mcdonald: ‘the embracing of literature may not, in fact, be the successful completion of marcel’s artistic quest and the “happy ending” with which many readers have concluded’ (gray-mcdonald 1989: 1021). grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 14 the vocality in the text is transmitted through a chain of artists from different backgrounds (old servant/hemp-twiner/sand (the mother who writes)/madame proust (the mother who reads)) but it also creates a setting, an annunciation of a sort (voice is authority from the past). it also combines the physical (the presence of the body, even manual labour: traditionally the hemp-twiner would work while telling his story) and the intellectual and the artistic (always reworked and transformed by variations, pauses, suspenses and omissions, placed at different moments). the voice, in short, penetrates deeper, ferments and grows. it carries a message that may take years to find its object: the love of the champi/the literary vocation of marcel; to be in the service of madeleine for françois/to be in the service of the madeleine for the other. the way the moment of revelation is expressed in françois le champi mirrors the quest of the narrator in la recherche: ‘il venait de se sentir brûlé pour la première fois par une grande bouffée de flamme, ayant toute sa vie chauffé doucement sous la cendre’ (sand 1960: 392).’32 after years of more or less comfortable procrastination, the narrator suddenly ties all the loose ends together and understands what is at work within him. not love, not art, but a process of composition, that is, creation. reference list belmont, n. 2005, ‘le conte de tradition orale’ [the oral tradition of storytelling], in conte en bibliothèque, (ed.) e. cevin. edition du cercle de la librairie, paris. online, available: http://bbf.enssib.fr/consulter/bbf-2005-05-0089-002 [accessed 31 january 2015]. bakhtin, m. 1981, the dialogic imagination, (trans.) m. holquist. university of texas press, austin. berger, a. 1987, ‘l’apprentissage selon george sand [learning according to george sand],’ littérature [litterature], no. 67: 73–83. descombes, v. 1987, proust, philosophie du roman [proust, philosophy of the novel]. minuit, paris. didier, b. 1981, l’ecriture-femme [women-writing]. presses universitaires de france, paris. ______ 1990, ‘la voix de mère-grand’ [grandmother’s voice], ethnologie française [french ethnology], vol. 20, no. 3: 293–300. doubrovsky, s. 1974, la place de la madeleine: ecriture et fantasme chez proust [the place of the madeleine: writing and fantasy in proust]. mercure de france, paris. ender, e. 2002, ‘le triomphe de l’éros dans françois le champi’ [the triumph of eros in françois le champi], george sand studies, vol. 21, no. 1: 84–101. farrant, t. 2010, ‘definition, repression, and the oral-literary interface,’ in the conte, oral and written dynamics, (eds) j. carruthers & m. mccusker. peter lang, berlin. fraisse, l. 1992, ‘méthode de composition marcel proust lecteur d’edgar poe [method of composition: marcel proust, reader of edgar poe],’ la revue des lettres modernes [journal of modern letters], no. 1067–1072: 35–82. genette, g. 1969, figures iii. seuil, paris. gray-mcdonald, m. 1989, ‘skipping love scenes: the repression of literature in proust,’ modern language notes, vol. 104, no. 5: 1020–1033. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2905363 32 ‘he shivered and gasped as if he had a fever; but it was only the fever of love, for he who had all his life warmed himself comfortably in front of the ashes, had suddenly been scorched by a great burst of flame’ (sand 1930: 272). grauby ‘sand’s way’ portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 15 ______ 1992, ‘silencing the mother tongue in françois le champi,’ romanic review, vol. 83, no. 3: 339–358. janin, j., 2003 [1840] ‘introduction,’ in les français peints par eux-mêmes [pictures of the french: a series of literary and graphic delineations of french character]. omnibus, paris. kristeva, j. 1994, le temps sensible: proust et l’expérience-littéraire [proust and the sense of time]. gallimard, paris. mahuzier, b. 1992, ‘l’annonce faite à marcel [the announcement made to marcel],’ littératures [literatures], no. 88: 84–94. marchaisse, t. 2009, comment marcel devient proust, enquête sur l’énigme de la créativité [how marcel became proust: inquiry into the creative process]. epel, paris. proust, m. 1954, a la recherche du temps perdu [in search of lost time], 8 volumes. gallimard/folio, paris. ______ 1992, time regained, (trans.) c. k. scott moncrieff & t. kilmartin. chatto and windus, london. ______ 2003, the way by swann’s, (trans.) l. davis, penguin, london. sand, g. 1930, the devils’ pool; françois the waif, (trans.) j. m. sedgwick. j. m. dent & sons, london. ______ 1960 [1846, 1847–1848], la mare au diable, françois le champi [the devils’ pool; françois the waif]. garnier frères, paris. warner, m. 1994, from the beast to the blonde. on fairy tales and their tellers. chatto and windus, london. zumthor, p. 1983, introduction à la poésie orale [introduction to oral poetry]. seuil, paris. © 2017 by ian campbell. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: campbell, i. 2017. charlie chaplin di ngamplang, 1927 / charlie chaplin at ngamplang, 1927. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:1, 9-12. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v14i1.5356 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 1 april 2017 abstract ‘charlie chaplin di ngamplang, 1927’ is an indonesian-language poem by australian poet ian campbell, and is a humorous meditation upon certain imaginary events that befell charlie chaplin at the dutch colonial-era hill station of ngamplang in west java in 1927. in historical terms chaplin did in fact visit the dutch east indies three times between 1927 and 1932, including the area around ngamplang. the poem was included in campbell’s poetry and prose collection tak ada peringatan (vivid publishing, fremantle, 2013). the indonesian language version of the poem first appeared in 2012 in the literary pages of the jakarta mass media daily kompas. an english-language back translation from the indonesian is also included here. keywords ian campbell; charlie chaplin; ngamplang, west java cultural work charlie chaplin di ngamplang, 1927 / charlie chaplin at ngamplang, 1927 ian campbell macquarie university corresponding author: mr ian campbell, honorary research associate, department of international studies, macquarie university, nsw, australia. ialuca@iinet.net.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5356 article history: received 18/01/2017; revised 14/03/2017; accepted 15/03/2017; published 04/05/2017 transitions and dislocations, curated cultural works issue, curated by paul allatson. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 9 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5356 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5356 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:ialuca@iinet.net.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5356 charlie chaplin di ngamplang, 1927 konon bisa dilihat dari kejauhan, bertongkat, berjalan kaki secara pincang; kepincangan asli atau kepincangan palsu, tergantung pendapat anda, saya kira, ‘kepincangan’ antara kebenaran dan kepalsuan, seperti sajak ini. tapi lebih dekat terlihat kedua kakinya terentang, seperti di garis lurus, lurusnya, tidak berbelit-belit apa pun, kaki-kaki aneh ini. seperti prajurit dalam barisan, sejajar di deretannya, ayo. pada umumnya pegawai-pegawai dan pelayan-pelayan di hotel ngamplang ini tidak melaporkan permintaan atau permohonan ‘khusus’ atau ‘luar biasa’ dari tamu ini, ahli dunia film silent di hollywood. ketika beliau bermain golf hanya mengarahkan bola golf dengan menggunakan kaki-kakinya berderet-deret, diliputi sepatu-sepatu hitam dan cemerlang, sebagai garis lurusnya. pegolf. seorang pendek, charlie sangat kuat; dalam aksi memukul bola golf, dengan tongkat jalannya, putter-nya. kadang-kadang beliau suka turun lewat tangga-tangga dari ruang umum ke arah kolam renang pribadi hotel yang letaknya memberi pemandangan indah ke lembah garoet jauh di bawahnya. aduh. suatu hari, sebab alasan yang tak bisa dipahami charlie turun ke bawah, secepat kilat, hilang: dalam kenyataan sudah terjatuh di kolam. topinya terapung-apung beberapa detik, seperti kapal, sampai tenggelam, basah dan berat, di bawah air. yang beruntung tongkat jalannya mengapung, pelayan-pelayan hotel mengangkatnya dari kolam, didampingi oleh charlie yang basah pakaiannya total. campbell portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201710 handuk-handuk disediakan oleh pelayan-pelayan supaya badan kurusnya bisa dikeringkan lagi. kasihan selama charlie dibawa kembali ke kamarnya di hotel ada ‘kesulitan’—tongkat jalannya patah ketika pelayan-pelayan coba membawa charlie lewat pintu-pintu berputar-putar di belakang hotel. konon manajemen hotel menawari charlie membayar ongkos tongkat dan topi baru. beliau hanya senyum tanpa berkata apa pun; tetap di hotel beberapa hari lagi, tanpa kecelakaan, atau kejadian. bersantai-santai di tempat tidur sebelum, dengan kesehatan refreshed, melanjutkan jadwal perjalanan —ke hollywood, lewat bandoeng. ( jakarta/sydney—may/august 2011) charlie chaplin at ngamplang, 1927 (english-language back translation from the indonesian) they say that he could be observed from afar, with that walking stick of his, walking as if with a kind of a limp, or at least unbalanced; whether it was a ‘true limp’ or just make-believe, even false, depends on your point of view, i guess; let’s say, like this poem actually, somewhere between truth and falsehood. but the closer you came the easier it was to see that both his feet were stretched out as if in a straight line, in fact there seemed to be no curve at all, such strange feet. like soldiers on parade, in line, ready-set-march, let’s go. rarely, almost never, the employees and waiters at the ngamplang hotel reported any ‘special’ or ‘extraordinary’ requests from our guest, that doyen of the world of silent film in hollywood. when he played golf he simply aimed the ball by using his spread-eagled feet as his line of play; those feet, covered in shoes so black and shiny. yes, he was a golfer. for a short man he was really quite powerful; as he put all his strength into his swing to hit the ball, charlie chaplin portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201711 his walking stick now doubling as his own ‘personal putter.’ sometimes charlie liked to go down the steps from the hotel’s recreational room at the rear to the private swimming pool whose splendid location gave commanding views over the garoet valley far below. but, my goodness. one day, for reasons that just cannot be explained, he went down, then in a flash, had disappeared. in truth, he had fallen into the pool. his bowler hat was afloat for a few minutes, like a ship, then it too disappeared, sunk below the water-line, drenched, a dead-weight. but fortunately his walking stick continued to float; servants leaped to fish it out of the pool, along with a right charlie hanging on for grim life, clothes wet right through. miraculously, servants appeared from out of nowhere, hand towels at the ready, in arms outstretched, to dry that wafer-thin body of his. but even then, while charlie was being brought back to his room in the hotel there was another ‘little difficulty’; his walking stick caught in the revolving doors at the rear of the hotel, snapping in two. they say that hotel management offered charlie to pay for the cost of a new hat and stick; at this point he just smiled and said nothing. remained at the hotel several more days, without further accident or mishap, recuperated, rested in his bed, before, somewhat ‘refreshed,’ continuing his journey, on schedule—to hollywood, via bandoeng! ( jakarta/sydney—may/august 2011) campbell portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201712 aaig ege galley final portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. afro-americanophilia in germany special issue, guest edited by moritz ege and andrew wright hurley. © 2015 [moritz ege]. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i2.4395 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. becoming-black: patterns and politics of west-german afroamericanophilia in the late 1960s moritz ege, ludwig maximilian university munich i. ‘yippie! i was in the right place at the right time!’—reflecting on her years in munich in the late 1960s and early 1970s, african american singer, actress and model donna summer exudes enthusiasm. why, and it what sense, was this the right time? in her 2003 autobiography, summer and her ghostwriter marc eliot make sense of her german experience by explaining to their international audience: ‘liberal postwar generation germans living in munich wanted to make some personal kind of statement about the civil rights movement in america. frequently that statement took the form of friendship, support, and work for anyone of color who happened to be from the states’ (summer 2003: 56). certainly, summer was right when she noticed a peculiar interest, a peculiar predilection, in munich and beyond. she located this within a specific milieu, and maybe, to use a much-maligned term, in the zeitgeist more generally. having arrived in 1968 as a singer for the musical hair, summer, the later ‘disco queen,’ stepped right into the contradictions of that famous ‘moment’ of cultural and political upheaval, that is, in its local, german version.1 questions of exoticism, guilt, otherness and 1 the literature on that cultural moment is large and continues to grow; for an overview with a focus on genealogy and the intersection of discourses of youth, politics, and consumption, see siegfried (2006). ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 2 ‘becoming-minor’ (deleuze & guattari 1986) contributed significantly to the contradictions that characterize this historical moment in germany. while straightforward anti-black racism remained a stark reality in large parts of society, gestures of appreciation as mentioned by summer did reach beyond a few urban, bohemian circles. in west-german culture in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s, as i argue in this paper, there was indeed a significant and specific pattern of what can be termed afroamericanophilia, involving affirmative or even worshipful approaches to, and appropriations of, african american culture and politics, which often, although not always, included a desire for african americans.2 such encounters were part of a flourishing ‘black cultural traffic’ (jackson 2005). analytically speaking, german afroamericanophilia partook of a moment both postcolonial—a few years after formal decolonization of many african nations—and hegemonically us-american, yet its patterns and politics had a peculiar local tone. when british cultural critic kobena mercer (1994) wrote that around 1968 in the usa and the uk many white rebels apparently wished to ‘become black,’ he could also have extended his analysis to the german context. following summer’s and mercer’s lead, this paper focuses on two manifestations of afro-americanophilia: first, a radical countercultural group from berlin, the so-called ‘blues’; and second, the reception of soul music in the counterculture and the pop-cultural mainstream. in a particularly condensed form, the two case studies enable us to trace the cultural dynamics of afroamericanophilia and discuss their larger cultural significance in germany around 1968. to many young (‘white’) germans, african american culture and politics provided ‘lines of flight’ from outdated modes of subjectivity; ‘lines of flight’ which were ethically embedded and physically tangible. in different ways, these tendencies resonated with: (a) radical, anti-imperialist politics; (b) countercultural sensibilities, where black american culture provided a radically contemporary critique of (white) european modernity; (c) the racialized, erotically charged logics of primitivism and romanticism in which ‘the repressed’ was to be brought back to the surface; and (d) a consumer-based economy and pop culture, which supported the incorporation, domestication and aestheticization of differences, desires and conflicts. 2 the term is coined in slightly satirical reference to the 1920s concept of ‘negrophilia.’ see the introduction to this journal issue for further reflections on the term, as well as ege (2007) and broeck (2010). ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 3 in germany, one generation after the holocaust and the collapse of national socialism, blurring the lines between what was one’s own and what was alien (fremd), reversing the aesthetic and moral hierarchy of anti-black racism, seemed like a particularly noble endeavour. however, this fed on a tradition of exoticism and as many—particularly black intellectuals such as james baldwin—already pointed out at the time, the politics of exoticism are ambivalent at best.3 afro-americanophilia could be highly paternalistic, fetishizing or controlling, good intentions notwithstanding. taking up donna summer’s brief observation cited at the beginning of this essay, the reader may have noticed that her wording also implied that people of colour from germany and from places other than north america appeared to be excluded from this unexpected and undifferentiated love, as were most of the south european labour migrants who were arriving in the country in those years. in some cases, nonetheless, this selective, erotically charged exoticism also led to tangible solidarity and strong connections between white germans and african americans. the point of this paper, then, is not to argue that afro-americanophilia offers the key to understanding the era, or that it was a good or a bad thing. i want to be careful to illuminate cultural texture, contexts, and normative ambiguities rather than deduce meanings from pre-given assumptions. putting the phenomenon in analytical focus, (re)constructing it intellectually from various sources, from the ground up, as a subcultural style and a larger current, may help us understand important transformations in postwar german history—generational, cultural, and political—in a more nuanced way, by linking (sub-)cultural practices and identities, as well as consumer culture, which figure prominently in ‘1968’ historiography, to questions of ‘race,’ whiteness and difference. overall, i argue that in those years, the mode in which many ‘white’ germans related to racial others and to otherness changed significantly: it foregrounded connectedness and symbolic incorporation, while maintaining (and libidinally charging) cultural distance and racialization. in doing so, it prefigured a more diverse, yet hardly post-racist or post-racial, present. another context needs to be borne in mind. at the time, west germany was home to tens of tens of thousands, rather than millions, of people of various origins who would, in the language of the era, be classified as schwarz (black), farbig (coloured), or as 3 see baldwin (1961: 217–221, 228–231). ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 4 neger (negro) [sic].4 black people in germany, black germans and temporary residents, were neither particularly numerous nor particularly vocal as political agents on a larger scale.5 furthermore, immigration was still widely considered under a gastarbeiter (guest worker) paradigm, which reinforced the idea of an essentially white german nation, during the very moment when a large amount of labour migration from southern europe was taking place. ii. finding examples for afro-americanophilia in the late 1960s and 1970s is not difficult. sociocultural analyses such as eldrige cleaver’s soul on ice (1968; german translation, 1969) were reviewed enthusiastically among german intellectuals.6 soul music, which is about african american experience and largely presented as an irreducibly black form of popular musical expression, succeeded commercially and found its way into the hearts, minds and movements of millions on a nearly world-wide scale, including in germany. the slogans and gestures of the black power movement found imitators in demonstrations—where thousands of germans were also heard chanting, ‘we are all black!’—and in night life. voluminous hairstyles were approvingly referred to as afrofrisuren (afro-haircuts). a radical left-wing author from berlin, taking up a popular trope, termed his home district, kreuzberg, ‘westberlins harlem,’ the harlem of west 4 the term ‘afro-german’ was popularized by a group of black german writers in the 1980s. references are given in the second jointly authored survey essay by andrew hurley and me in this special issue. 5by ‘black’/’black’ (schwarz/schwarz), i mean people who would be classified into a category such as ‘of african descent’ within the logics of racialized discourse. it would, for instance, include african american gis, afro-germans, and africans or african immigrants in germany, irrespective of their actual skin tone (though not other people of colour such as southern european immigrants). ‘white’ (weiß) designates germans who are, in that same discourse, considered members of the racially unmarked category. depending on context, in the usage of categories like ‘african american’ and ‘black,’ ‘black german,’ ‘white’ or ‘white german,’ national, political, cultural, physiological aspects may be foregrounded. the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ could be put in quotation marks throughout this essay, as they refer to socially and historically mutable classificatory categories, not to biological fact, and reiterating the terms without linguistic markers of their constructedness may contribute to reproducing racialized categorizations one seeks to question and deconstruct. at the same time, these terms are also highly politicized and political, both at the time and now. for that reason, for instance, ‘black’ is written with a capital ‘b’ when used in reference to political or cultural articulations that politicize an identity based on ‘race’ or racialization. i do not capitalize the first letter of ‘white’ because this aspect of identity politics does not apply in a symmetric way; but it should not be read as being a more self-evident category. sociocultural asymmetry can hardly be put into coherent, symmetric terminology. in some instances, describing subjects as ‘white german’ (rather than merely ‘german’) is helpful here because not using the racializing attribute could be read to imply—wrongly—that all germans are ‘white.’ for a critical account of the german-language terminology, see arndt (2004). 6 afro-german actor charles huber in his autobiography writes that cleaver’s book could be found in any upper-level high school student’s book bag at the time (2004: 184), and he stresses that this coolness gave him a new self-confidence and a desire to join their cause—‘mich solidarisieren,’ or to solidarize himself (2004: 201). ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 5 berlin, and he and his circle referred to themselves as, quote, weiße nigger [white n*s, sic]. magazines printed more or less explicit depictions of interracial sex and reflected on its significance. some radical-left student groups, in their attempts at ‘organizing’ among gis from the usa, exclusively approached african american soldiers. in urban gay subcultures, too, black people were particularly desired partners. on the other hand, theorists like jürgen habermas, in quite a different tone, warned students not to overly identify with oppressed groups abroad, such as ‘negroes in urban slums’ (1968: 11f). it was apparent that he considered this a wide-spread problem. ‘one thing i know for sure,’ says a white german grandmother in lothar lambert and wolfram zobus’s 1975 underground film classic 1 berlin harlem, ‘black is “in” today.’ these examples, some of which i will return to, cross a range of cultural fields/spheres: pop music, radical politics, sexuality, consumer culture, and, most of all, countercultural or underground scenes. across the spheres there are common patterns, despite apparent tensions and enmities, in particular between the commercial and the countercultural. for the purpose of this analysis, the years between 1967 and 1972, and arguably up until 1975, can be considered a relatively cohesive cultural moment, a temporal ‘conjuncture of structural, cultural and biographical forces,’ a ‘historic instant in which different impulses come together and form a specific unity or gestalt,’ as cultural analysis theorist rolf lindner writes, taking up the terminology of early cultural studies and cultural anthropology (2000: 11). methodologically speaking, if dynamics within one cultural field—such as, say, advertising—are compared to those within others—such as political movements, popular music, or sociocultural theory, then specific ‘cross-field effects’ may become apparent (lindner 2003: 182). noting such patterns, the methodological challenge for cultural analysis is not only how to write a history of practices of appropriation and transfer processes across cultural spheres, but, as we will see, how to balance coherence and heterogeneity in constituting an object of study. the afro-americanophile fascination itself certainly was not new. on the contrary, cultural historian kaspar maase, for instance, had the 1950s in mind when he wrote that for young germans at the time, ‘americanization’ really meant afro-americanization (1993; see also partridge 2008). and, as my and andrew hurley’s joint survey essays in this journal issue point out, a particular fascination with black popular culture in germany reaches back well into the 19th century. nonetheless, this historical moment ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 6 around 1968 is characterized by crucial transformations, both in black diasporic politics, particularly in the usa, and in forms of representation, appropriation and interaction, within a local context. german afro-americanophilia of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as this paper lays out in greater detail, is characterized by a peculiar constellation of black exclusivity and white desire. iii. in the late 1960s, many people and some organized groups in west germany wanted to support the contemporary african american freedom movement. on the german side, this included the black panther solidarity committees, groups within the so-called gi underground (which partly overlapped), and, later on, the angela davis solidarity network. as historians maria höhn and martin klimke (2010) have analyzed in great detail, most of these groups arose within the anti-imperialist radical left scene of the student movement (see also klimke (2006; 2008); siegfried (2006); ege (2007); and höhn (2008)).7 while these groups were not particularly large, they were highly visible, and some included leaders and protagonists of later developments, quite prominently k. d. wolff, head of the frankfurt chapter of sozialistischer deutscher studentenbund (socialist german student association). many more attended their demonstrations and conferences and read the literature they translated and published. for the west german left, their us and german opponents were closely intertwined, yet not identical. one’s own government was closely allied to the usa, and the country was a crucial staging ground for the us military and its war in southeast asia. exposing and incriminating the deep-seated racism of the usa and, to a lesser extent, germany, represented a main concern of these groups. for them, a humanist commitment to anti-racism was a crucial lesson taken from national socialism, however little experience they themselves might have had with that form of oppression. strategically, leading activists were motivated to establish an anti-imperialist coalition that would include oppressed and disaffected populations within the capitalist metropoles (a ‘second front’). in some cases, this solidarity work (solidaritätsarbeit) 7 a few years before, martin luther king, jr.’s visits to west and east germany (höhn & klimke 2010: chapter 5) already drew a large, more popular and politically centrist-liberal, much less subcultural crowd (20,000 people attended a sermon at west berlin’s waldbühne, for instance). the developments of the late 1960s in europe must also be seen in the context of a situation in which african american activists were broadening their movement’s scope towards global black populations (joseph 2007; finzsch, horton & horton 1999: 490–531; van deburg 1992: 112–191). ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 7 produced tangible results: cooperation between african american gis and predominantly white german supporters had a significant impact on the treatment of african americans in the us military and on german public discourse (höhn 2008: 142f). overall, however, such connections primarily had the function of connecting young germans to a wider world, cognitively, emotionally, and culturally. for them, conservative national culture, the west german state and conventional ways of life were tainted by their association with the hitler regime. others, however, wanted to translate the tactics and images of radical african american groups into their own context in more immediate ways. in particular, this was true for the so-called ‘blues’ in west-berlin, less a formally organized group than a countercultural urban underground scene.8 within the field of the german new left, the ‘blues’ stood out by virtue of the simultaneity and radicalism of their political and cultural opposition to mainstream society, by their efforts, in their own way, to collapse the political and the cultural sphere. in terms of self-fashioning, cultural practices, and political theory, this milieu bested all other activist groups (throughout german history) when it came to following african american idols. the berlin ‘blues’ must be understood in relation to developments within the usa, both politically and culturally. in the mid–1960s, large segments of the african american civil rights movement radicalized in terms of ideology and strategy. as is widely known, the slogan ‘black power’ encapsulated a shift toward more militant, confrontational tactics and strategies. it implied affirming an african american identity, from ‘coloured’ or ‘negro’ to ‘black’ (which was, after all, ‘beautiful’), and often also a move toward forms of black nationalism. in some prominent cases, this also meant that cooperation with ‘white’ supporters or members of interracial groups was rejected. most famously, the african american organization the student nonviolent coordinating committee (sncc) introduced such a policy in 1966. a similar stance was taken by the most spectacular and media-savvy group of the time, the black panther party (bpp) for self-defense, which was watched in awe and 8 counterculture refers to a group that was defined by the simultaneity and radicalism of their political and cultural opposition to mainstream society (and conventional models of the political and the cultural sphere). what defined the counterculture in the usa and in europe differed in some important ways. see hall and jefferson (1975) or schwendter (1971) for contemporaneous analyses, and siegfried (2006) for an historian’s perspective. ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 8 admiration by ‘progressive’ young people, of colour and white, the world over. while the dominant factions within the bpp advocated anti-imperialist internationalism, interracial cooperation within their own groups was deemed undesirable. spokespeople such as stokely carmichael insisted that white sympathizers should organize within their own communities and follow the bpp’s vanguard role. furthermore, this nationalism was highly gendered, often equating leadership with a re-articulation of oppressed black masculinity (finzsch 2003). other black nationalist factions that gained visibility during those years rejected coalition-building with white groups altogether. nonetheless, in the usa, some predominantly white groups within the so-called underground modelled themselves after the most radical parts of the black power movement and claimed various types of proximity, especially those which aimed at uniting political activism and a countercultural way of life, such as the yippies, the white panther party or, more (in)famously, the weather underground (jacobs 1992).9 such identifications could reach programmatic status; the weather underground, for instance, aimed at getting rid of reactionary whiteness: ‘our political objective is the destruction of honkiness. we are going to wipe out the imperialist state and every vestige of honky consciousness in white people’ (juchler 1996: 345). others, like yippie activist jerry rubin, felt they had already left their own whiteness behind altogether. the berlin ‘blues’ followed in the footsteps of these north american groups. a loose network of young people, students, artists, apprentices, young workers, and unemployed slackers, the ‘blues’ comprised, or spawned, groups such as the ‘black rats’ and the ‘tupamaros westberlin.’ designations such as haschrebellen (hash rebels) document the counter-cultural side of these groups. the self-styled urban guerrilla (stadtguerilla) ‘2 june movement’ grew out of the berlin ‘blues’ scene as well; it was responsible for several bombings and bank robberies, and also for the murder of the prominent judge günter von drenkmann, and the kidnapping of conservative mayoral candidate peter lorenz.10 the ‘blues’ was anarchist-leaning, often less intellectual and more hedonistic 9 for a treatment of the internationalist and transnational aspects of the us black panther party, see angelo (2009). 10 on their involvement in the bombing of the jewish community center in berlin, one of the most crude expressions of ‘anti-imperialism’ as anti-semitic anti-zionism, and the importance of former situationist ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 9 than university-based groups and student movement factions, and its members were more likely to have a working-class background. in that context, the name ‘blues’ thus connoted a hedonistic approach to radical politics. according to former ‘blues’ member ralf reinders, the term was coined by gudrun ensslin, the later red army faction member (and, previously, gi underground activist). according to this account, she used the term to suggest that, in her view, not enough political activism was being conducted in this crowd, because they spent too much time listening to music, consuming drugs and having sex (ege 2007: 116–137). a cultural and political history of the ‘blues’ scene, which is yet to be written, would have to include a long chapter on practices of appropriation from radical black politics and from african american culture. in that context, imitating african american language bridged everyday aesthetics and political intent. rather harmless political phrases and slogans were taken up, creating implicit parallels or analogies, such as when, in reference to imprisoned friends and associates, ‘free huey’ became ‘free bommi’ or ‘free verena.’ most infamously, the berlin ‘blues’ took up the iconography of the ‘pig,’ as epitomized by black panther party illustrator emory douglas’s fat, pinkcolored swine. here, ‘pigs’ (the english-language term was used consistently) referred not only to the police, but to the judicial system as a whole, to capitalists and managers, to the enemy as such; as the rastafarian reference goes, to all of ‘babylon.’ one ‘blues’ text, the ‘aufruf gegen den diebstahl en gros und en details der pigs an der menschheit’ [call to arms against the pigs’ smalland large-scale theft from humanity] (der blues, n. d.: 23–35), summarizes the manichaean worldview that was supported by the image of the ‘pig’: ‘besser jetzt ein paar millionen rollende schweinsköpfe, als in dieser faden lebenshaltung, die uns letztlich doch zwei milliarden gefallene kosten wird, weiter zu vegetieren. den unbewussten pigs solange vor die köpfe knallen, bis sie wach werden oder tot umfallen’ [better for a few million pigs heads to roll now than to keep vegetating within this tired attitude towards life which will cost us billions k.i.a. in the end. smash the heads of the unconscious pigs until they wake up or drop dead]. dieter kunzelmann, see kraushaar (2005). tupamaros refers to the uruguayan rebel group (named after the 18th century anticolonialist túpac amaru ii). the name ‘bewegung 2 juni’ [2 june movement] was chosen because on that day in 1967, unarmed student benno ohnesorg was shot in the head during a demonstration against the shah of persia by a west berlin policeman, and a cover-up ensued, which led to a radicalization of the student movement. a collection of ‘blues’ and ‘2 june movement’ documents, often accompanied by illustrations by the american cartoonist, robert crumb, is presented in the book der blues [the blues] (n. d.). ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 10 the verbal register was complemented by the physical. bearing, posture, styles of walking and salutations reflected the african american influences that the scene’s name so prominently displayed.11 one ‘blues’ activist, for example, remembers using the black panther salute, which had been popularized by athletes tommie smith and john carlos at the 1968 olympics in mexico city. for instance, upon meeting black people in berlin, he would raise his fist and arm, adding ‘attica!’ in reference to the prison revolt and the ensuing massacre in upstate new york in 1971. he would not have used the same gesture with ‘white’ comrades, he reminisced, because in those situations, it would have seemed too close to the party-communist salute. more generally, he and his friends adopted so much african american slang that, as he has it, ‘one wouldn’t be able to understand our sentences today.’ instead of money (geld), one spoke of ‘bread,’ instead of the government and the overall power structure, it was ‘the man.’ when he asked an african american friend about the fate of his girlfriend, the answer was, as he recollects, ‘what the fuck, i don’t know about my old lady,’ and after that, everybody (that is, all the men) within his circle referred to their girlfriends, in german, as ‘meine old lady’ [my old lady] (kröcher 2004). in that instance, by playfully stepping into a male african american speaker’s role, he adopted a dismissive attitude towards women, and articulated an understanding of masculinity as emotionally detached, cool, and in charge. such articulations of gender, and, implicitly, sexuality, resonated with popular images of african american men as unselfconscious, heroic, suave revolutionaries, as evidenced in various illustrations where guns and militancy lead to the proverbial upright walk. ‘blues’ activists, and many other germans, often had problematically clear notions of what ‘real’ and authentic black men, whom they so apparently admired, were like, and they did not hesitate to apply the notion of ‘uncle tom’ to those who did not meet their criteria. intellectually, connections between one’s own position and african american experiences were made by means of parallels and analogies. infamously, us yippie prankster jerry rubin had claimed that his long hair was like dark skin.12 people in the 11 for that reason, this scene’s afro-americanophilia should be understood in the context of countercultural or subcultural style—along the lines established in classic analyses by clarke (1975) and hebdige (1979). that is, style figures as a structure of signs which is actualized in a variety of different forms of expression, including language, music and clothing, and, here, political attitude, rhetoric and ideals. crucial semantic oppositions are derived from the relation to black american sources. 12 this quote circulated through various texts in the german counterculture, such as music writer helmut salzinger’s rock power (1972: 169). ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 11 west german scene, too, insisted that they experienced discrimination and were being ‘treated like negroes’ [sic] because of their long hair and hippie looks. as long-haired, working-class berlin rebel michael ‘bommi’ baumann, the most well-known member of the ‘blues,’ wrote in his early memoir, they got kicked out of bars or were spat upon in the streets, and employers discriminated against them. the distinction between chosen and racially ascribed markers of difference (long hair versus ‘black’ skin) seems obvious, as critics were quick to point out. nonetheless, conflating them provided a subjective basis for claiming an oppressed perspective that, in the view of people like baumann, necessarily led to a deeper understanding of african american culture and politics. however, the verbal articulation of one’s own supposed minority status was ultimately less important to one’s sense of empathy than the vague but nonetheless powerful notion of ‘feeling.’ ‘feeling,’ of course, was closely tied to music and the experience of listening to it, producing it, dancing to it and having sex while listening to it. music provided a form of experiential congruence between black culture, or what people saw as such, on the one hand, and their sense of self and world on the other. a striking example can be found in baumann’s memoir how it all began. baumann affectionately remembers his 1950s childhood: ich kann mich zum beispiel erinnern, da hab ich im bett gelegen und habe immer radio luxemburg gehört, abends, wenn du nicht mehr runtergegangen bist, hast du denn in der nacht immer noch musik gehört und wie ich das erste mal chubby checkers ‘let’s twist again’ gehört habe, bin ich aus dem bett aufgestanden und habe twist getanzt und habe es genauso getanzt, wie ich es später gesehen habe, also ich habe es intuitiv richtig verstanden wie der mann das gemeint hatte. zum beispiel in cleavers seele auf eis, rekonvaleszenz, dieses kapitel, da ist es ganz gut drin, da stimmts. ich hab’s damals intuitiv richtig erlebt, also feeling gehabt. (1975: 16) [for example, i remember i was lying in bed and i would always listen to radio luxemburg, at night, when you didn’t come out of your room again, then you would always listen to music at night, and when i heard chubby checker’s ‘let’s twist again’ for the first time, i got out of bed and danced the twist and i danced it in exactly the way in which i saw it later, that is, i intuitively understood it in the correct way, what the man meant. for instance, in cleaver’s soul on ice, the chapter ‘reconvalescence,’ that captures it, that fits. intuitively, i experienced it the way it was meant, that is, i got feeling.] however anecdotal it might be, this claim to immediate empathy through a cultural product, by way of physical intuition, touches on nothing less than the narrator’s sense of self, and his sense of difference from his own surroundings, to which it lends both cultural thickness (musically, physically) and a metaphoric frame.13 for people such as 13 in the relevant chapter, cleaver also speaks of white youth dancing to chubby checker, which makes it plausible to speculate that baumann’s memory was, as it were, creatively enhanced by the text. this, however, only confirms the relevance of soul on ice (cleaver 1968), which apparently strengthened his wish to take on the position of the ‘white negro.’ ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 12 baumann, african american politics could be such an important reference point partly because they rested on identifications that had already been formed in the process of socialization through popular culture and everyday life in allied-occupied west germany.14 from then on, those politics provided a metaphor for both difference and for belonging, a metaphor that intimately connected politics and subjectivity. ‘feeling,’ as baumann (1980) has it, refers to a mode of intuition and empathy that guides the self into cultural forms outside of its given horizon of autochthonous traditions. the term implies a mode of experience that cannot really be verbalized. furthermore, ‘feeling’ implicitly also serves as an argument against conspicuously cerebral factions of the left and, in baumann’s view, their overly intellectual modes of apprehending the world: as working-class people, baumann insists, he and his friends had never been as alienated from their bodies as their middle-class contemporaries, which made ‘earthy’ aspects of life such as sex and dancing, come to them much more naturally, just as they did to the african american world (1980: 16). within the ‘blues,’ the valorization of ‘feeling’ was embedded in culture-revolutionary ideals of leading one’s life, of lebensführung. overall, there is a holistic character to the countercultural protagonists’ afro-americanophilia, or at least to their own interpretation thereof. moreover, when it came to questioning the boundaries between the political, the aesthetic, and the mundane world of everyday existence, countercultural subjects tended to sense a cognate, lived utopia in the african american world in general and among the black panthers more specifically. crucially, for instance, popular arts and politics did not seem entirely differentiated sub-systems of society in black america, but rather, the sub-systems that differentiate in modern societies seemed to have merged again, or never to have been separated in the first place. in the african american world, political activism and organizing were an immediate expression of a popular, organic community in the state of collective revolt—or, anyway, that is how the situation could be read with at least some plausibility, especially when contrasted to the overall alienation between left-wing radicals and the majority of the west german population, including the working class. 14 there were, to be sure, other international and ethnically marked elements within the subcultural aesthetics of the blues: from south america, most prominently, from the adherents of us hippie culture who themselves exhibited a plethora of ethnic, partly primitivist predilections. the general hybridity of cultural expressions should also be kept in mind here: the black panther party’s iconic symbol, the beret, after all came from france. ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 13 many white german leftists, men and women alike, conceived of inter-racial sexual relations as a form of practical anti-racism.15 in terms of the binaries that structure cultural semantics, blackness had, at least since the romantic era, been associated with physicality and unrestrained sexuality. during german colonialism, after world war i, during the nazi regime and in its aftermath, black male sexuality was figured as a threat to national purity, and interracial sexuality as ‘racial disgrace.’ during the us occupation, the stance had softened, but the basic cultural logics and binaries had remained intact, even if they were re-evaluated. sometimes, in particular among those who wanted to rid themselves of traditional constraints, black people were taken to embody one’s personal sexual liberation. one of the crudest testaments of a wellintended, yet deeply racist, sexualization of blacks within the social world of the ‘blues’ could be found on a sticker distributed by an ad-hoc group named ‘frauenbefreiungsfront valerie solanas’ [valerie solanas women’s liberation front], which—now somewhat infamously—contained the following rhyming couplets: ‘der neger kann gut vögeln / und auch die pigs vermöbeln / und dann noch ist der neger / ein prima bombenleger / internationalismus hurra!’ [the negro is good at screwing / and at beating up the pigs / and furthermore the negro / is great at making bombs / hurray for internationalism!] here, countercultural and feminist sensibilities proved very much in tune with mainstream representations, even though, in the protagonists’ own view, they brought to the surface and transvalorised what was otherwise repressed. we might speculate that they considered this over-the-top stereotyping to be subversive of cultural norms.16 ‘black bars’ in germany, which had emerged during post-war occupation, were the primary spatial sites for sexual encounters, similar to the ‘interzones’ in kevin mumford’s history of sex districts in the early-20th century usa. occasionally, ‘blues’ activists would venture there, as is represented in die glücklichen (the happy ones, 1979), a picaresque novel cum memoir written by peter paul zahl. ‘viele panther hier?’ [many panthers here?], the protagonists, ‘blues’ activists, ask an african american 15 this is discussed in greater detail in ege (2007: ch. 3). eldridge cleaver’s theories of race and sex in soul on ice (1968) resonate with those of many countercultural whites. it must be stressed that because african american soldiers represented such an important and numerous group, there were many more black men than women in the country. hence, it was easier for white heterosexual women (and white gay men) to find black partners than it was for white heterosexual men (and white lesbian women). moral panics about this constellation occurred at various points after world wars i and ii. 16 on the importance of interracial sex in german 1970s feminist texts, see broeck (2007; 2010). ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 14 acquaintance, before entering a berlin night club called the international. ‘no, nur sympathisanten. viele hier. ich auch’ [no, not many, just sympathizers like myself], the man says in slightly broken german (zahl 1979: 146). night clubs such as the international, which were predominantly frequented by black men, most of them temporary residents in the country, and by white german women, existed in many german (and other european) cities, and also in smaller towns with us army bases.17 in the following excerpt from zahl’s book, the nightclub serves as a meeting point where gi underground activists are attempting to contact a potential african american deserter whom they plan to smuggle to scandinavia. but for the ‘blues’ protagonists, the club also provides exposure to a predominantly black environment. one of zahl’s narrators, ilona, describes the visit in an ecstatic tone: da drinnen afrikanische dunkelheit, tabakqualm, tänzer, über denen ein müder casablancaventilator. dagmar geht an der tanzfläche vorbei, wir folgen hintereinander. bunte lämpchen, soul. am besten, wir stellen uns hier hin, sage ich, und warten, bis ein tisch frei wird. wir haben mühe, unser staunen zu verbergen: schwarze männer, weiße frauen, der tanzstil schaukelnd, wiegend, mit drehenden schultern, angedeuteten schritten aus dem kniegelenk heraus, brusthoch gehaltenen, zu fäusten geballten händen. muhammad ali stil. guck dir die bewegungen an, sag das mal peter, von wegen positiver rassismus. die gis tragen alle zivil, sind bunt, teils verwegen gekleidet. wildlederstetsons, wildlederflickenanzüge, schals, baskenmützen, hosen zweifarbig und mit 80er schlag. schattenboxer. seine partnerin wippt, völlig ernst, mit dem kopf, wirft boxerhände vor die pralle brust. lederjacken, sonnenbrillen, barette. grelle sakkos, weite hosen, abgesteppte schuhe; brusttücher groß und duftig (schlagsahne) in vielen pastellfarben; kettchen um handgelenke. viele schließen die augen, viele frauen lassen die augen weit offen und ahmen jeden schritt, jedes wiegen ihrer tanzpartner nach. ein gutaussehender, gutgebauter schwarzer mann mit oberlippenbärtchen, in enger schwarzer samthose mit matrosenschlag, sackbetont, trägt ein mikrofon in der rechten, bewegt tänzerisch den oberkörper, der sich unter dem hautengen, taillierten, mit schillerkragen und weiten ärmeln versehenen hemd abzeichnet, singt refrains mit, ruft in gesang hinein, wechselt die platten, schreit in schwarzem dialekt einige sätze, wird unterbrochen, yeah mohn, yeah, kündigt die nächste gesanggruppe an, schnappt mit den fingern, wirft den oberkörper nach hinten, die oberschenkel hoch, hat glänzende haselnußbraune augen, strahlt gute laune ab, trinkt einen schluck aus der bierflasche, die ihm ein soulbrother hochreicht, auf das podest neben der box steigend, ein anderer stößt hinzu, der jockey verläßt die box, sie stehen nebeneinander, wippen im takt, deuten schritte an, yeah mohn, schließen die augen, werfen afrofrisuren nach hinten, abwechselnd die linke, die rechte schulter nach vorn, die hände, schlängelnd wie fische, schießen nach vorne und oben, arme winkeln sich in hüften. james brown! sage ich begeistert. tanzt du? ... 17 the segregation of us military social life and racism in german night clubs are discussed in some greater detail in the literature to which i referred earlier, and in other studies on the role of allied military bases in west german cultural history. these matters were also discussed passionately in gi underground magazines. ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 15 ilona hat recht, der typ ist ein as. so’n discjockey hab ich noch nie erlebt. verstehst du sein amerikanisch? nur zum teil. der spricht nen wüsten dialekt. soulbrother halt. der hat mehr pep in fingerspitzen und arsch als die ganze deutsche schlagermafia zusammen. (1979: 146)18 [in there, african darkness. tobacco smoke, dancers, above them: a tired casablanca-style ventilator fan. dagmar passes the dance floor, we follow one after another. colourful little lights, soul. we should stand here, i say, and wait until we can get a table. we find it difficult to hide our amazement: black men, white women, a see-sawing style of dance, rocking movements, moving the shoulders, suggestions of kick-steps from the knees, the hands, turned into fists, held chest-high. muhammad ali style. look at those movements, and tell it to peter: positive racism, as if. all the g.i.s are in civilian clothes and are dressed colourfully, some boldly. suede stetson hats, suede suits, shawls, berets, two-colour bellbottoms. shadow boxer. his female partner, very earnestly, is bouncing her head in tune, and takes her boxing-hands up, in front of her large chest. leather jackets, shades, berets. outrageous sports coats, bell-bottom pants, quilted shoes; large, airy, pastel-coloured kerchiefs (cream), little chains around the wrists. many are closing their eyes, many women have their eyes open and imitate every step, every rocking move of their dance partner. a good-looking, well-built black man with a moustache, sailor-style black velvet bellbottoms, accentuating his package, is carrying a microphone in his right hand, he is moving his upper body in soft dancing moves, the torso shows under his skin-tight, fitted shirt with its wide, open collar and arms, he is singing along in the refrain, shouting into the singing, he changes the tunes, he shouts some phrases in black dialect, becomes disrupted, yeah mohn, yeah, he is announcing the next act, snaps his fingers, throws back his upper body, lifts his thighs, he has shining, hazelnut eyes, he emits cheer and high spirits, takes a swig from a beer bottle which a soul brother has given to him, stepping onto the platform next to the dj box, another one comes, they stand next to each other, they rock their bodies in tune, they only hint at their moves, yeah mohn, they close their eyes, throw back their afros, move their shoulders, left and right, the hands, like fish, shoot to the fore and to the top, arms held at their hips. james brown!, i say, excitedly. you dance? ilona is right, the guy is amazing. i’ve never experienced a dj like that. can you follow his american english? only in parts. he’s got an awful dialect. soulbrother, after all. he’s got more zip [pep] in his fingertips and in his ass than the entire german schlager mafia.] this passage illustrates the baseline of subcultural afro-americanophilia’s political passions. zahl’s narrators are filled with fascination, an enjoyment of something ‘other’ and with sympathy far beyond the necessities of the political. at the same time, the protagonists aren’t primarily engaged in an exoticist excursion. rather, as this passage also illustrates, their experience is embedded in a tangible political project, namely aiding desertion. in this case, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but mutually constitutive. 18 schlager (literally ‘hit’) refers to a category of low-brow german popular music that the protagonists would most likely consider corny. ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 16 what is more, the author also makes sure to include dialogical reflections on ‘positive racism,’ ultimately dismissing the charge that racist projections form the basis of their fascination with black americans.19 such charges, the ensuing dialogue shows, crumble in the face of actual experience and activism. the scene at the ‘international’ seems to confirm that african american worlds are, indeed, different and have more ‘pep’ than the ones the activists have been exposed to, and ethical debates over exoticism, the narrative suggests, prove irrelevant in this practical situation. indeed, the protagonists and their african american acquaintances share a mutual ideological universe of left, anti-racist anti-capitalism, the contiguity of which is assured when they discuss james brown: his music is good, they agree, but the man is a ‘pig,’ and ‘pigs aren’t always pink.’ those who are pink, we may conclude, are not always ‘pigs,’ either.20 iv. there seemed to be a clear-cut alliance, then, between countercultural sensibilities and contemporary african american expressions. one might further argue that ‘feeling,’ meaning a type of relation toward music, dancing and sexuality, also points toward a mode of sociality, a projected ideal of intuitively harmonious relations between partners, between, more broadly speaking, the individual and the group. however, when it came to contemporary black popular music, things were more complicated, and these complications reveal further aspects of west germans’ relationship to the african american world at this historical moment. while they were enthralled by much black culture and black politics, many within the counterculture, for instance, felt ambivalent about soul music, as another interviewee, a former friend of 19 in the narrative, before the nightclub scene, the protagonists discuss the problematics of ‘positive racism,’ which some members of the group criticize strongly. nonetheless, after that visit, ‘positive racism’ appears to be a mostly academic problem. in talking to jeff, the issue comes up again. ‘ihr mogt sswarze leute?’ [you like black people?], jeff asks. ‘nicht mehr und nicht weniger als andere auch. verstehst du, darüber haben wir uns auf der fahrt hierher unterhalten, über rassismus. “rassism?”’ [no more or less than others. you know, this is what we talked about while driving here, about racism. racism?] ‘ja, auch über positiven rassismus. wenn ich sagen würde, ich liebe nur schwarze menschen, ist das das gleiche, wie wenn ein weißer rassist sagt, er haßt schwarze menschen.’ [yes, also about positive racism. if i were to say, i only love black people, that’s the same as when a white racist says he hates black people]. ‘right, sagt jeff. habt ihr papier bei?’ [right, says jeff. you have the papers?] ilona, the ‘positive racist,’ is proven right in the scene, so she can ask, later on: ‘na, habe ich recht gehabt, ich—positiver rassist? haste.’ [so, was i right, i, the—positive racist? yes, you were.] (zahl 1979: 145). 20 the narrator also terms james brown a ‘schwarze sau, wie sie im buche steht, kapitalist, schwanzideologe, onkel tom’ [a black pig, capitalist, cock ideologue, uncle tom]. the concern is not limited to this narrative, either. in berlin, a small demonstration against james brown was held outside a concert, mostly because of his appearance on tv on behalf of president nixon, calling for order at a time of urban riots. ‘pigs aren’t always pink,’ is what the flyer, distributed by white ‘countercultural’ sympathizers of the black panther party and some african american gis, said. ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 17 the aforementioned baumann, explains. the music was captivating enough, he recalls, but it obviously had a pop, rather than ‘earthy’ blues and hippie rock, sensibility about it: ‘also ich hab’ auf soul nicht so gestanden ..., weil die typen alle so sauber angezogen waren. die hatten alle so einen feinen bürgerlichen charakter gehabt ... von der musik waren die meisten begeistert, aber nicht so von dem äußeren der leute, ... die waren ja alle mit rüschenhemdchen und gleichschritt auf der bühne.’ [well, i didn’t really dig soul music … because these guys did so much dressing-up. they all had such a nice bourgeois character. i mean, most of us were into the music, but not so much into the appearance of these guys—after all, they all were up on stage in frilly shirts, dancing in lockstep!] (reinders 2004). as such statements indicate, in maledominated countercultural and ‘music expert’ circles, soul was dismissively referred to as ‘dancing music’ (tanzmusik) and, consequently, ‘girls’ music’ (mädchenmusik). (one may also wonder whether dancing to soul music required a physical ease that many either did not want or possess, or did not like to be seen not possessing.) this dislike also surfaced in many record reviews that emerged from the countercultural sensibility. in such reviews, the prevailing semantics are strongly linked to the aesthetic tradition of 1920s primitivism. in us discourse, terms from a different semantic frame of appreciation abound, with many adjectives such as ‘refined,’ ‘smooth’ or ‘easy,’ which connote a particular modernity, as opposed to ‘unpolished’ blues and rock music (see, for instance, keil 1966). such words, however, are hard to find in the german rock and pop music press. rather, in a left-leaning, generally countercultural magazine such as sounds, we find positively-weighted adjectives like ‘earthy’ [erdig], ‘vital’ [vital], ‘physical’ [physisch], as well as negative terms like ‘without juice and force’ [saftund kraftlos], ‘with-the-brakes-on’ [gebremst], ‘colourless’ [farblos], ‘shy and artifical’ [geziert], ‘watered-down’ [verwässert], ‘defused’ [entschärft], ‘smoothed-out’ [glatt], and, time and again, ‘sterile’ [steril]. these contrasting vocabularies of appreciation and condemnation document the reviewers’ cultural criticism: according to their logic, bad records were based on commercial calculations whereby artists anticipated a mass market’s prejudices, and hence let go of their uncensored, unfiltered, authentic expression—their unfiltered expression of blackness, we might add, which to these critics had a lot to do with ‘letting go.’ while the mass market may have wanted smoothed-out, watered-down, and ultimately ‘whitened’ black music, counter-cultural and anti-capitalist reviewers let us know they wanted the real thing in uncommodified ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 18 form. in this semiotic model, ‘authentic’ black figures as soulful, deep, emotional, communal, sensual, authentic; whereas the commercial world (including that which is ‘inauthentically’ black) figures as white, shallow, rational, individualistic, alienated and calculated.21 however, this was not only a rather naïve approach to how popular music is produced, and a rather limited definition of african american musical modernism, it also had the effect of producing a ‘pop’ audience as ‘other,’ and gendering it as female. at this point in the argument, it is important to locate the countercultural perspective within the cultural field. soul certainly was not an underground phenomenon. the famous atlantic records compilation that is soul (volume 1), sold about 120,000 copies in germany in 1968. according to one contemporary estimate, more than ten percent of all record purchases in germany at the time consisted of soul music. moreover, at the level of cultural significance and contemporaneity––pop culture’s famous sense of ‘now’––soul had become, as german lifestyle magazine twen put it in february 1968, ‘the music that everybody knows everything about,’ the music that was ‘rotating on all progressive turntables’ (bourbon 1968: 136). here, too, blackness was a relevant category, as, among other things, the rather fetishistic visual depictions of soul musicians in twen illustrate. in that sense, an overall afro-americanophile sentiment was prevalent within large segments of the younger generation. at the time, aside from ‘holistic’ practices of enhanced afro-americanophilia within highly politicized and countercultural circles, there was also a developing pop culture––transported mainly via music and visual culture––that prominently featured black glamour. here, too, people dreamt of sexual and physical liberation, engaged in exoticist projections and reproduced binaries that they claimed to transcend, and in some ways widened their horizons. here, too, some whites fantasized about being black. on the dancefloor and beyond, many transformed their styles of movement, and, in terms of their physicality, moved further away from the older german nationalist ideal of brisk, disciplined movement, zackigkeit [snappiness] (maase 1996). most often, however, they did so without coming to any cultural-revolutionary conclusions. 21 this is not to uncritically deny the effects of the profit-oriented recording industry and of racist practices within it. but the blinders of the countercultural view are apparent. such critics miss much of what is characteristic about the music, and universalize their own cultural codes (guillory & green 1998; ege 2007: 46ff). ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 19 this lower degree of cultural meaningfulness and coherence marks ‘mainstream’ afroamericanophilia as an aspect of (post-)modern consumer culture. the pleasure of seeing images and listening to sounds marked as ‘other’—racialized exoticism—was being democratized, in contrast to such earlier elite phenomena as 18th century aristocratic chinoiserie. these practices of appropriation also belonged to the realm of the everyday, as opposed to more traditional racialized carnival practices like ‘blacking up.’ the (white) self, rather than being conceived of as a rigidly bound entity concerned with purity and authenticity, functioned as a flexible consumer of difference.22 certainly, these popular forms of afro-americanophilia—and we must use the term in a much looser sense here—could also encompass anti-racist gestures and beliefs. the civil rights movement, and conservatives’ polemics against both black music and (formal) racial equality, infused musical enjoyment with an ethical tone, even though the mode of engagement here was characterized by less commitment to a political project or to a holistic way of subcultural life than elsewhere. however, countercultural and anti-racist critics were right to point out that the logic of consumption and commodification remained linked to processes of exploitation––in material and symbolic terms.23 at the micro-political level of movements, gestures and sensations, however, ‘mainstream’ afro-americanophilia did contribute to subtle forms of cultural change, and it did so outside of dissident urban scenes as well; changes to the way in which young germans of the post-fascist generation felt about, moved and inhabited their bodies; changes to where their cultural imaginaries ended; changes to how they conceived the boundaries between self and other. the political character of these processes became apparent in different ways, consciously or subconsciously. in a long feature article, teen magazine bravo spelled out the popular ‘white’ german passion for soul music, using a strangely inappropriate 22 it might be tempting to present a clear-cut dichotomy between a holistic model of solidarity, commitment and risk-taking on the one hand, and a more popular, less committed model that, through commodification and consumption, reproduces racism, on the other. however, solidarity workers weren’t disconnected from pop cultural imaginaries and, in their cultural criticism, sometimes held on to racialized imagery that would have been too explicit for much of the pop cultural world. 23 this argument is developed further in ege (2007), where i discuss charles wilp’s ‘afri cola’ advertising campaigns. classic arguments against the ‘consumption of difference’ (as forms of ‘incorporation,’ of ‘eating the other’) have been made by hooks (1992) and others. german-american new left theorist herbert marcuse (1969) termed phenomena like the so-called ‘sex wave’ in the mid1960s, which pre-dated ‘sexual liberation,’ a form of ‘repressive desublimation.’ in the german discussion, the racial aspect of these sexual imaginaries has been widely neglected, even though interracial sex plays a very significant role in crucial textual and visual representations of the time. ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 20 metaphor: ‘hätte ein disk-jockey in einem tanzschuppen die merkwürdige idee, keine soul-platten zu spielen, er würde glatt gelyncht werden. fazit: deutschlands teens sind soulverrückt. jedenfalls abends in den diskotheken. warum? soul fühlt man, soul tanzt man, soul lebt man’ [if a dj in a dance club had the strange idea of not playing soul records, he would most likely get himself lynched … germany’s teens are soul-crazed. at least at night in the night clubs. why? one feels soul, one dances soul, one lives soul.] (bravo 12 february 1968: 16).24 critics soon began to raise the question of who exactly this ‘one’ was, the ‘one’ who felt, danced, and lived soul: could it be a white person? and what would that imply? despite its pop aspect, and unlike many earlier black or black-inspired musical genres, especially rhythm-and-blues-derived ‘beat’ music, soul was difficult to read as anything but explicitly black music, based on specific experiences and entangled in complex ways with contemporaneous african american struggles in the context of civil rights, black power, and the postcolonial scene internationally. this is how it was decoded by german critics. for instance, another article in twen, from december 1968, which was accompanied by page after page of photographs of black people, stresses the notion of racial exclusivity: ‘die rückbesinnung auf die ursprünge, auf die schwarze seele des jazz, der rückzug auf gefühlsinhalte und auf ausdrucksformen, die für weiße nicht nachvollziehbar erscheinen, entspringen dem streben nach exklusivität, nach einer wenigstens begrenzten unnachahmlichkeit. sie bedeuten: off limits für weiße.’ [the return to the origins, to the black soul of jazz, the retreat into emotional content and toward forms of expression that seem inaccessible to whites are all derived from a pursuit of exclusivity, a non-imitability. they mean: off limits for whites] (twen, december 1968: 138). the ‘off limits’ issue may not have been recognized by every listener, but it did have practical aspects: in not being able to buy many of the records one had heard about, not really speaking the language, not quite getting the references, not knowing how to dance in just the right way. on a more discursive level, of course, the problem was categorical: if ‘soul’ referred to an essence of blackness, that essence might be completely inaccessible to whites. for that reason, contemporary critics often pointed out what they saw as an irony composed of the ethno-racial essentialism of soul music on the one hand, and its very popularity, its commercial, culture-industrial form 24 other references are provided in ege (2007: 46–78). ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 21 on the other hand.25 and while there was an abundance of rock ’n’ roll, ‘beat’ and neoblues bands throughout the 1960s in germany, there were initially very few bands that tried their luck as ‘soul’ bands. covers of u.s. soul hits recorded by mainstream schlager stars mostly failed, both commercially as well as critically.26 v. returning to the question of a broader pattern that runs through various forms of german afro-americanophilia in the late 1960s, these dynamics of exclusion, accessibility and inclusion are crucial. in this respect, the situation in the field of popular music was reminiscent of the situation in radical politics. in the latter, white german activists often went to considerable lengths to seek acceptance from black power activists, as the episode from the berlin nightclub shows. some sources drastically document such desires: ‘black gis!,’ read an english-language flyer distributed outside a mannheim army barracks by german sds students: we know there was a conclusion of black-power-leaders not to join any action organized by whities [sic]. but the part of german youth sympathizing with black power is much more radical as [sic] those at home in the states. we want to contact black men, friends or members of black power, that are ready to discuss and work with us. here, the intent to cooperate specifically and exclusively with african americans— african american men—coincided with a desire to be recognized and accepted despite one’s white skin. appropriating a pejorative term from african american usage (‘whities’), the authors of the flier apparently did not consider themselves white in the same sense as ‘whities’ in the united states, and in seeking zusammenarbeit (cooperation), they were asking for confirmation of that self-image.27 in widely disseminated cultural texts like those i discussed from bravo and twen, african americans stressed the irreducible difference inherent in their culture, experience, and political identity. in the field of music, the book blues people by amiri baraka (leroi jones)—translated into german in 1969—presents one such argument.28 25 intellectually, adorno’s critique of jazz as phony escapism from the cultural patterns of capitalist modernity seemed to provide the backdrop for such arguments. 26 see, for example. the cd compilation soul in germany (2007), which features german-language songs by the temptations, the supremes, marvin gaye, dionne warwick, and german-language soul covers by schlager singers, such as jacob sisters, manuela, gilla, and michael holm. 27 young germans’ contradictory relation to national guilt (in relation to world war ii, the holocaust and anti-semitism) and a more general western ‘white’ guilt (in relation to colonialism, slavery and imperialism) is discussed in ege (2007: 140ff). 28 this is discussed in andrew hurley’s and detlef siegfried’s essays in this journal issue. the book was ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 22 in the black power movement, a very similar pattern surfaced in the rejection of direct cooperation with white sympathizers (which, from a sympathetic viewpoint, could be termed as self-reliance and self-organization). in discourses on sexuality, prominent african americans stressed the attractiveness and beauty of other black people, in opposition to the traditional prestige attributed to white (especially female) partners. in popular music, a similar pattern could be seen in the exclusiveness of soul and the general consensus about the impossibility of a white person’s ‘black’ voice. however, in all these fields, symbolic exclusion only seemed to drive white attempts to gain membership and acceptance.29 there were different strategies for reacting to this sense of exclusion, and in contrast to the usa, fewer african americans were present to comment on them critically or intervene. disarming irony represented one such path, which was applied to band names and song titles (the average white band from scotland comes to mind), caricatures and wisecracks (such as the term schwarzsingen [‘blacksinging’]). and, of course, there were also serious intellectual arguments, especially within the context of radical politics, where black nationalism was dismissed as ‘petty-bourgeois’ and counter-revolutionary.30 crucially, however, in settings where the textual, discursive mode of engagement did not take centre stage, the primary strategy for coping with the tendency toward racial exclusiveness in african american culture and politics consisted in relying on the evidence of experience and performance: once one got the ‘feeling’ right, symbolic exclusion was replaced by imaginary belonging. for instance, in record reviews, articles, memoirs, and other narratives, there are vivid descriptions of immersion experiences, of temporary instances of communitas that take place in nightclubs, at concerts, or during travels. in such narratives, when one showed one’s enthusiasm in the right manner, as a review of an aretha franklin concert in frankfurt, attended mostly by african american gis, put it, when one was ready to show that one was part of the ‘magical circle of the enthusiasts’ and not some arrogant outsider, when one joined in the call translated into german in 1969 after having been translated by a ‘student collective,’ which included werner sollors, who came to chair harvard university’s department of african american studies at a later stage of his career. 29 to be sure, the awareness of this predicament was unevenly developed. those who merely felt enthused by afri-cola’s advertisements, danced to soul music or, maybe, fantasized about sex with a black partner most likely knew nothing about the arguments made by baraka and probably wouldn’t have cared either way. 30 this case was made, for instance, in the introduction to the german translation of baraka’s (then leroi jones) blues people (1969), written by the aforementioned ‘berlin student collective’. ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 23 and-response communication, ‘then one is accepted’ (twen october 1968: 140). whilst, then, there may have been rejection at the level of content, inclusion was simultaneously enacted at the level of performance, and this fulfilled a deep-seated white desire. sex, of course, was another form of togetherness that could be made to stand for a transgression of such boundaries. vi in this paper, i took a close look at forms, practices, patterns and—to some extent—the politics of afro-americanophilia in west germany between 1967 and 1975. in doing so, going into detail was important, not so as to deduce cultural meanings and dynamics from pre-given assumptions and normative viewpoints, but, in the space permitted, to reconstruct them from the ground up. what, then, did this wave of afroamericanophilia, at that cultural moment, mean for the history of racism in germany, and what other larger-scale cultural and social processes were connected with it? quite different things have been labelled here as instances of afro-americanophilia. given an object of study so heterogeneous, we must avoid fallacious reifications and generalizations. still, scientific surveys and personal accounts by black germans document that germany, on the whole, did not suddenly become a less racist place toward people of african descent. certainly, as illustrated in donna summer’s case, some blacks were able to manoeuvre through germany in ways that straightforward anti-black racism would have made less likely or even impossible.31 in some cases, more thoughtful forms of anti-racist practice took hold, and racial categories were rethought. solidarity work was real enough, and it inspired serious debates. however, overall, racism was not challenged, nor was the presumption of germany’s generic whiteness really questioned. rather, white rebels and consumers alike empowered themselves to live out their racialized fantasies, and constrained blacks to very specific roles—instrumentalizing them, defining their supposed essence, making them subservient, even while putting them on pedestals. the manichean worldview of 31 illuminating black people’s experiences with afro-americanophilia is an important task that could not be accomplished in this paper. notes on the post-ww ii era can be found in partridge 2008 (where, for example, hans-jürgen massaquoi’s memories of exoticist erotic interest in the 1950s are cited and interpreted); see also the articles by ege and hurley in this issue of portal and the comment by huber in footnote 6. baum et al. (1992 [1986]) give insights into their experiences with ‘white’ projections and desires toward afro-german women like themselves, highlighting occasional moments of empowerment, but mostly the alienating effects of ambiguous compliments and intrusive questions. however, this concerns a slightly later time, the early and mid–1980s, when the ‘alternative’ [alternative] and ‘öko’ [eco-activist] milieus had grown. ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 24 modern primitivism, in which blacks and whites were taken to embody essentially different, complementary principles (most basically, intellectuality versus emotionality and physicality), structured the stereotypes of black america that were widespread among white german afro-americanophiles, and motivated many of them. certainly, these logics did become modified and questioned, and new imaginations of culturalpolitical equivalence emerged.32 more often than not, however, the celebration of a cultural subconsciousness, of the formerly repressed (such as ideas about black sexuality), remained within the parameters of a racialized semantics. metaphor and equivalence are crucial concepts for understanding 1960s afroamericanophilia as symbolic practice. in popular culture, among whites, ‘feeling black’ and ‘becoming black’ were tropes and wide-spread fantasies. when countercultural activists claimed to have been treated ‘like blacks,’ and created chains of equivalence between their own life and that of african americans, they took such tropes the furthest. for countercultural subjects, blackness provided a metaphorical frame for imagining and, in a largely imaginary way, experiencing difference from the conservative cultural and political norms they rejected, which was not only a cognitive, but also an affective and corporeal matter. of course, in terms of actual social position and experience of oppression, these claims of equivalence were grossly inaccurate. additionally, the difference between dynamics of german guilt after the holocaust and white guilt in the united states led to curious displacements. in many ways, though, at the time, at least within cultural revolutionary thought and practice, realism was suspended anyway: exhuberance, fantasy, myth were seen to be more than merely misrecognitions of reality, as jerry rubin wrote, and german counterculturals soon translated: ‘marx ist ein mythos. mao ist ein mythos. die black panther sind ein mythos. / die menschen versuchen, dem mythos zu entsprechen, er holt das beste aus ihnen heraus’ [marx is a myth. mao is a myth. the black panthers are a myth. people try to live up to the myth, it helps them be the best they can] in fizz no. 3, 1971, unpaginated).33 32 within the context of afro-americanophilia, for instance, people began reading authors such as frantz fanon. furthermore, there are, of course, many more complex and more interesting models of african american popular aesthetics, some of which also circulated at the time within smaller circles of enthusiasts. historian george lipsitz’s (1994) suggestions focus on black popular aesthetics as articulating a contradictory, rather than primitivist, positionality half within, half external to western modernity and the displacements of modern capitalism. see also the discussion in ege (2007: 154–164). generally, at the time, practices (listening to music, dancing, connecting in various forms) may have been ahead—in the sense of more complex, less stereotypical—of the rhetoric that tried to explicate them. 33 my translation. ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 25 british cultural critic kobena mercer observed that around 1968, in the usa and in the uk, but also on a global scale, the predominantly white counter culture and black liberation movements were united by a common goal ‘to decolonize inherited models of subjectivity’ (1994: 304). of course, this meant quite different things under very different circumstances, but there also were significant alliances, crossovers and resonances. playful, empathetic and, one may argue, ethically and politically irresponsible approaches to personal and collective identity were hotly debated at the time, particularly in germany. in the realm of social theory, new processes of subject formation were discussed, for instance, in herbert marcuse’s optimistic diagnosis of a ‘new sensibility,’ which took experimental forms of life and subjectivity as a prefiguration of post-revolutionary times, or, in quite a different way, in jürgen habermas’s charge against ‘irrational’ and ‘romantic’ tendencies within the student movement and their ‘emotional identifications’ with subaltern groups, including the vietcong and the black panther party. significantly, german sds spokesman and psychoanalyst reimut reiche (1968), reflecting the mood of large parts of his constituency, defended such identifications, stressing the lack of credible objects of young people’s left-wing identification in post-fascist germany. furthermore, very much in line with marcuse, he designated such practices as a testing ground for ‘a new form of psychological relation to one’s surroundings’ in which emotions and the imagination were to play a bigger role. in a different theoretical language, french radical theorists gilles deleuze and félix guattari argued at the time that hegemonic forms of subjectivity needed to be and were being overcome. they viewed the ‘becoming-minor’ of dominant groups as an integral and necessary part thereof, that is the forming ‘blocs of becoming’ with subaltern movements, hoping that such processes would blur the line between what was considered one’s own and what was alien and ‘other’ (1987 [1980]: 291–298).34 in their view, affect, movement, gestures, quantums of energy, rhythm and pace are where ‘molecular’ processes of sociocultural change take place. in that sense, the enjoyment, appropriation and imitation of practices based in african american culture were indeed 34 on the concept of a ‘bloc of becoming’ (and its shortcomings) see ege (2007: 147–153). the authors explicitly took ‘becoming black,’ drawing partly on amiri baraka’s work, and quipped that, according to the black panthers, even blacks had to become black, or ‘minoritarian’ in an emphatic sense. ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 26 part of a process of change on this ‘molecular’ level, which deleuze and guattari opposed to the ‘molar’ level of institutional and movement politics, and was where they put their hopes for the emergence of new ‘blocs of becoming.’ this molecular level encompasses the history of lived corporeality and imagined selves which, in complex and non-linear ways, feed back into representations of the body politic. some of my findings correspond to such arguments: there is indeed no clear line between political solidarity and the realm of the imagination. political passions sometimes derive from popular cultural sensibilities and exoticist fantasies, or from a desire to leave behind one’s whiteness, one’s world-historical guilt, nazi associations, or one’s german provinciality. despite such entanglements, they can produce tangible results. connections are made, people find ‘lines of flight.’ what happens on a molecular level is irreducible to racial attributions or political discourse. of course, actual practices in many ways lagged behind utopian expectations, whether they were focussed on anti-imperialist solidarity or on a-subjective, molecular forms of becoming. the awareness of the problem of exoticism, for instance, remained limited, partly because of irrationalism. the politics of appropriation could not so easily be disentangled from structures of inequality, from the politics of race, gender, and sexuality. and, crucially, the de-contextualization and commodification of specific elements of african american cultural production, such as music, contributed to their integration into conventional, if updated, modes of (mainly white, german) subjectivity. here, deleuze and guattari’s disinterest in reflecting conventional power relations, and their enthusiasm for processes of becoming and movement below the level of discursive representations, are very much a reflection of their times; on the level of sophisticated theory, they speak to a desire for communitas that the counterculturals exhibited on the level of practice. in retrospect and leaving ethical questions to one side, something which seemed like liberation to many appears to many critics like a mere episode in processes of modernization and individualization. as historian detlef siegfried writes in his study on youth, protest and consumer culture in 1950s and 1960s west germany (2006), racial masquerades, and other experiments with identity, started as suband countercultural practice, and then became integrated into the cultural industries, where they contributed to an overall de-homogenization of life styles, to informalization (norbert elias, cas ege becoming black portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 27 wouters) and to a ‘pluralization of the spectrum of norms,’ which was, ironically, much more consonant with the emerging post-fordist social order. on that reading, and in stark contrast to the intentions of many protagonists, late 1960s afro-americanophilia, in concert with other forms of exoticism, contributed significantly to the modernization of consumer capitalism with its aestheticized modes of experience, less rigid national boundaries, and more fluid, performative identities and identifications. convincing as such sweeping historical narratives are, in trying to do justice to the complexity of cultural practice, i believe it is important to also remember the contradictory nature of 1960s and 1970s afro-americanophilia and allow for a more ambiguous conclusion. reference list angelo, a.-m. 2009, ‘the black panthers in london, 1967–1972: a diasporic struggle navigates the black atlantic,’ 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(with m. eliot) 2003, ordinary girl: the journey. villard, new york. that is soul, 1968. atlantic records. van deburg, w. 1992, new day in babylon: the black power movement and american culture, 1965– 1975. university of chicago press, chicago. zahl, p. p. 1979, die glücklichen. schelmenroman [the happy ones: a picaresque novel]. dt taschenbuch-verlag, berlin. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: chávez-silverman, s. 2018. after ‘the turn of the screw’ / life’s a peach crónica. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 117-120. https://doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v15i1-2.6047 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au cultural work after ‘the turn of the screw’ / life’s a peach crónica susana chávez-silverman pomona college corresponding author: professor susana chávez-silverman, romance languages and literatures, pomona college, 333 n. college way, claremont ca 91711, usa. suzanne. chavezsilverman@pomona.edu doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.6047 article history: received 12/04/2018; revised 30/05/2018; accepted 15/06/2018; published 23/08/2018 abstract hace unos días, i watched the turn of the screw. esa famosa versión i’d fetishized for years. décadas, actually. years ago mi estudiante sasha fariña (creo recordar que she was a cmc science student, enrolled in my latin american poetry seminar) fisgó en el internido y teorizó que it had actually been a tv special. me acuerdo que that didn’t sound right to me, and i let it drift back down hacia el ether del olvido. pero después de trabajar todo el santo día en operasie restorasie (as wim baptised my writing process para our ubuntu, montenegro) me sentí bien burnt out and in the invisible linksy way of things de repente on a whim hice google el film—for the millionth time. esta vez, instead of the myriad other versions que siempre he descartado al tiro al ver el cast o el año (the innocents con la deborah kerr es bien spooky, pero way too early; la 1999 version con la sublime jodhi may también es buena, pero too late), bingo, this could be it, me dije. keywords chronicle; crónica; susana chávez-silverman; after ‘the turn of the screw’ / life’s a peach crónica declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 117 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.6047 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:suzanne.chavezsilverman@pomona.edu mailto:suzanne.chavezsilverman@pomona.edu https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.6047 31 julio, 2017 y 5 abril, 2018 my own private gruta de las maravillas, aka claramonte, califas para david ‘divinito’ divita y chris van ginhoven rey 31–vii–17 hace unos días, i watched the turn of the screw. esa famosa versión i’d fetishized for years. décadas, actually. years ago mi estudiante sasha fariña (creo recordar que she was a cmc science student, enrolled in my latin american poetry seminar) fisgó en el internido y teorizó que it had actually been a tv special. me acuerdo que that didn’t sound right to me, and i let it drift back down hacia el ether del olvido. pero después de trabajar todo el santo día en operasie restorasie (as wim baptised my writing process para our ubuntu, montenegro) me sentí bien burnt out and in the invisible linksy way of things de repente on a whim hice google el film—for the millionth time. esta vez, instead of the myriad other versions que siempre he descartado al tiro al ver el cast o el año (the innocents con la deborah kerr es bien spooky, pero way too early; la 1999 version con la sublime jodhi may también es buena, pero too late), bingo, this could be it, me dije. the version that popped up en efecto había sido showtime tv special, like sasha had said. an hour-long show, parte de la serie nightmare classics, dirigida por shelley duvall. todo esto me pareció incongruente: i’d remembered being so petrified i’d had to turn it off! i never do that. surely a mere tv show couldn’t have been the culprit, ¿que no? siempre he estado convencida de que mi holy grail was an arcane british film que por algún misterioso motivo, didn’t show up en los archivos del internido. pero la fecha coincidía: el 12 de agosto, 1989. i remember watching it en el tv room de mamá, acurrucada sola en su too-soft blue print sofá, her white-noise sleep machine whirring gently en su recámara across the hall, el two-year-old juvenil asleep en el guest room. i’ve always remembered nostalgically esos last few norcal days, antes de mudarme a claramonte, una casi-ph.d. madre soltera con mi rambunctious toddler, pa’ comenzar la new job en pomona college. anygüey, con una creeping sensation entre incrédula y unheimlich, la curiosidad (as per usual) me ganó: i fired up boob tube. from the get-go, it was all wrong. first off, vaya mala onda, watching a film en la compu. chale to that. and then, desde los opening credits till the over-the-top final scene, nada coincidía con el uncanny terror que recordaba. me sentí lost in space, víctima de una burla cósmica. de cabo a rabo, a letdown. execrable acting, con la excepción de la amy irving, passable as the governess con todo y su faux-brit acento. hasta me reí con el cartoonish, completely unscary peter quint y los camp, zilch acting skills del teenaged balthazar getty as miles. pero el mayor chasco fue la miss jessel de cameron milzer. in my memory, miss jessel había sido el epicenter del terror: una eerily ethereal, white-clad figura, appearing and vanishing de forma inesperada, hovering cual si flotara across the pond, o del otro lado del cristal. la recordaba pálida, dark-haired y sensual con unos enormes, haunted dark eyes. ¡nai que ver! what state must i have been in, hace casi 30 años, to have been so unnerved by this ridiculous and banal performance? en fin. uf. a cautionary tale: this (real-life) horror story—darme cuenta de que my memory’s constructed something completely … other (léase false)—podría haberme pasado (habernos pasado, a mí y a h) en 2012. and yet, it didn’t. o en mi caso, at least, not till later. y al pensarlo: it wasn’t even exactly that, una falla de la memoria. porque la desilusión, el desengaño crept up on me solo en el aftermath. al encararme con su cowardice. chávez-silverman portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018118 su impotencia. darme cuenta de que rip van winkle had gone back to sleep. reconocer su fundamental inability: to live (up to) la alquímica magia de nuestro amor. because our 2012 reunion, ese dizque imposible stepping again—30 years later—into the same río, fue encantada. so, al menos tengo (tenemos) eso. no es nada (muy) visible a otros ojos (humanos), tan habituados a los search engines, los tweets y clicks y swipes, los emoji y los gustarrr. pero este subterranean, subtle saber es mi norte. lo que me propulsa (y me obliga) a quedarme en el espacio eléctrico (elegíaco) de our ubuntu, montenegro. 5–iv–18 uit die blou, mi colega el chris van g rey me mandó un e-macho. he’d seen the advert for call me by your name en mi office door y me mandó este link—https://lareviewofbooks.org/ article/elios-education/#!—una huge long review en los angeles review of books, por un tal d.a. miller. quien resulta ser (le hice google) un snarky, hyper-cerebral emeritus berkeley prof. i found myself embelesada, pero in a sort of helplessly trainwreckish way. no sé cómo terminé ese toxic screed (el divinito me confesó, last night at dinner, que he’d scarcely been able to), pero on the other hand, hay que admitir que algunas de las objeciones puntuales del vato kind of hit home. por ejemplo: guadagnino is a beauty junkie, sin duda. pero, since when is that a crime? and besides, en este caso, al miller se le olvida que hay un texto original: aciman’s novel! en nuestro sudden (clearly uranus-inspired) email hilito, le escribí al chris ayer que the novel’s setting is all dappled, slow, swooning, early–1980s italian beauty. y el film de guadagnino (por más que al miller esto le parezca bourgeois or whatever) capta este ambiente precisely. lo sé porque (perdona este mini-lapsus into the dated ‘authority of experience’ argument) i was there! hice tres life-saving escapadas a europa while i was living in south africa durante el apartheid. viví la movida en madrid, visité a mi prima lee en italy en ese impossibly hedonistic apex (just as the aids crisis was dawning). esa escena en la outdoor summer disco, con el gawky, big-footed oliver dancing in oblivious bliss a uno de mis temas-referencia— ‘love my way’ de los psychedelic furs—sent me into raptures. ¿quién coño es este miller, con su doggedly mean-spirited take-down, como pa’ privarme de este pleasure? el miller también hace un kvetching weirdly obsesivo about the (bloodand shit-less) sex scene entre elio y oliver. que if they’d really fucked, sus bodily fluids estarían splattered all over, y bla bla. pero ¿desde cuándo cualquier film visibiliza ese nivel de irl autenticidad—unless it’s hardcore? it’s true: el sexo en la novela es … messy, visceral, hasta painful. i loved it, y me pareció que el film soslaya el unflinching eroticism del libro. eso se lo concedo al miller. that was my main quibble con el film, junto con el personaje del padre, sammy, whom most critics/ viewers found appealing and enlightened. i found el stuhlbarg’s performance prissy, bordering on closety e irritante, especially su maudlin soliloquio que le ganó la oscar nomination.  lo peor del essay del miller: el vato completely misreads the film’s ending, one of guadagnino’s most inspired choices. cuando el oliver (who’s called elio’s house para anunciar su upcoming marriage) le dice, ‘i remember everything,’ según miller he’s relegating it (elio, todo) to the past. ¡nai que ver, poh hueón! al contrario: this one line, uttered by a nowengaged (rescatado for heteronormativity) oliver, indexes pal viewer que aunque el oliver has caved to familial and societal pressure, pa’ sus adentros el amor de su vida, lo que tuvo con elio, is still with him. and will haunt him forever—como lo muestra la coda de la novela which guadagnino (wisely) elects to forego. after ‘the turn of the screw’ / life’s a peach crónica portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018119 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/elios-education/#! https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/elios-education/#! it’s a love alive inside him, aunque invisible a otros ojos humanos (los de su diario a diario— pace cortázar). ob-vio, i need this love-affirming exegesis del final de call me by your name, ya que el amor de mi vida también se tronchó. porque h also caved to familial and societal pressures (principalmente su evil mother). ojo: en nuestro caso, yo soy la que rajé, broke his heart. pero the overarching narrative es semejante, uncomfortably, wrenchingly so. por eso me reconfortó, chris, que you share my reading of the film’s ending. lo que me escribiste—he went over to the dark side but he’s going to regret it and think about that peach for the rest of his life. touché, carnal! ¿habrá estado in love alguna vez el miller? quién sabe. pero anygúey … esa es otra. chávez-silverman portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018120 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: hoàng, n.t., quán, t., campbell, i. and chu, t. 2018. two poems by nguyễn tiên hoàng, writing in vietnamese as thường quán, with english translations by ian campbell and tony chu. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 121-124. https:// doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5845 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au cultural work two poems by nguyễn tiên hoàng, writing in vietnamese as thường quán, with english translations by ian campbell and tony chu nguyễn tiên hoàng, as thường quán1, ian campbell2, tony chu3 1 independent author. hoangtien.nguyen494@gmail.com 2 macquarie university. ialuca@iinet.net.au 3 independent author. baocanh99@gmail.com corresponding author: mr ian campbell, honorary research associate, department of international studies: languages and cultures, macquarie university, nsw 2109. australia. email: ialuca@iinet.net.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5845 article history: received 30/11/2017; revised 10/06/2018; accepted 15/06/2018; published 23/08/2018 abstract born in 1956 in danang, vietnam, nguyễn tiên hoàng arrived in australia in 1974 on a colombo plan scholarship. in writing poetry and literary essays in vietnamese over more than thirty years he has generally used the pen name, thường quán. however, as nguyễn tiên hoàng, his english language poems have been featured in the poetry international web series of australian poets—https://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/20689—as well as in a number of australian poetry book collections, the most recent being captive and temporal, published by vagabond press (sydney & tokyo, 2017) in its australia series— https://vagabondpress.net/collections/australia—which was short-listed for both the 2018 kenneth slessor prize for poetry and the mary gilmore award in 2018. the poems published in this issue of portal, ‘ngoài giấc ngủ’ and ‘hiện ra,’ were included in the book poetry collection—also titled ngoài giấc ngủ—published in california, usa, in 1990, which featured sixty-seven poems by melbourne-based nguyễn tiên hoàng, writing under the pen name thường quán. in 1994 the journal of vietnamese studies (melbourne) published the poem ‘ngoài giấc ngủ,’ together with a first english language version co-translation, titled ‘beyond,’ by ian campbell and tony chu. an adaptation of the poem was sung in vietnamese ngâm style by thu huong huynh, as part of ‘a spring evening of poetry, translated verse and music’ held in 1995 in sydney to mark 50 years of post-war declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.121 mailto:hoangtien.nguyen494@gmail.com mailto:ialuca@iinet.net.au mailto:baocanh99@gmail.com mailto:ialuca@iinet.net.au https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5845 https://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/20689 https://vagabondpress.net/collections/australia https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5845 migration to australia. the english language version later appeared in 1996, with the original poem in vietnamese, in a sydney-based vietnamese language newspaper, and in 2002 the english language translation appeared again in sunlines: an anthology of poetry to celebrate australia’s harmony in diversity, edited by anne fairbairn (canberra: dept. of immigration and multicultural and indigenous affairs, 2002). the english language co-translation of the poem appeared in nguyễn tiên hoàng’s collection, captive and temporal (sydney & tokyo: vagabond press, 2017). the poem, ‘ngoài giấc ngủ,’ now appears in its vietnamese language original form (1990), and in an english language co-translation by chu and campbell which varies slightly from all previous translations. an english language version of the poem, ‘hiện ra,’ has never been previously published and appears now in a co-translation as ‘becoming visible,’ together with the 1990 poem in its original vietnamese language version. keywords poetry; australia; vietnamese diaspora; nguyễn tiên hoàng; thường quán; ian campbell; tony chu; ngoài giấc ngủ; hiện ra ngoài giấc ngủ những người khuất mặt đến lặng lẽ chào tôi trong đêm khoảng cách là những cuộc đời nở hoa hiển tử tím xanh tròng mắt dòng sông đôi bờ quán lữ mưa giăng tay tìm nhau chẳng thể sờ chạm giọt mưa không giọt mưa không rơi ngoài giấc ngủ trôi vào hun hút mùa đông những ao làng xám rũ núi đồi bia mộ lách lau gió bần bật bần bật trắng thổi về đâu lạc mất câu chào trời mây thiên cổ chẳng tìm ra nhau chẳng tìm ra nhau nến thắp trong đêm những lời khan vọng. beyond shades uneen, hidden come silently to greet me in the night between those shades and i so many lives, passed by as flowers that bloom open hoàng, quán, campbell and chu portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018122 then wither—translucent as violets shades in the iris of a cold eye, a cool stream before my eyes meandering, pale blue; then the night in this dark inn. the gathering showers come, hands seek out one another unable to reach, to touch empty drops, empty drops falling into a world beyond sleep drifting endlessly, into winter, and the bleakness of village ponds and hamlets destitute. mountains and hills, where tombstones part the sea of reeds where the wind buffets and trembles o white wind, where are you blowing to? lost from the night are the moments of greeting, in this eternity of sky and cloud they and i remain unable to seek the other unable to find the other a candle burns in the night the beatings of the wind, hard to discern still echo and reverberate… translation by ian campbell and tony chu (1993, 2017) hiện ra hiện ra một giếng sầu ký thác một bờ sông chạy đầu lắc lư bờm ngựa đỏ trăng hai búi cỏ nến tàn phơ phất lửa phần thư. rồi hiện ra người đen nhánh tóc đi tìm nhặt nhạnh giữa đêm mù những trang cháy dở hồn than khóc về gọi thơ lên đàn giải oan. hiện ra đàn trẻ thơ hồng ửng lồng đèn ôm sừng trăng non về trả đường tre ấm lửa bầy đom đóm bay vào ở giữa hồ ao trắng ngát độ nở sen. mở cửa thôn làng mở cửa hiện ra kiềng bạc áo nâu non oan khi gột sạch lòng son hiện ra ô cửa mây lành hiện ra. becoming visible becoming visible, this well into which i trustingly cast my melancholy, along a river’s edge, a galloping horse, its fiery mane flaring up, the light of the moon is shining two poems by nguyễn tiên hoàng, writing in vietnamese as thường quán portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018123 upon tufts of grass, and ash of the candle turns white as the flame meanders across the pages. becoming visible again, a woman with jet black hair flowing looking for what is lost in the fog-mist of the night, her soul weeping over the half-burnt pages drawing forth the muse to the task of setting all aright. becoming visible, children silhouetted in red of lantern light, gathering up the rimméd horn of the young moon over the bamboo-shrouded road, warm night, fireflies dart here and there, between moths, aflutter upon the scented ponds as the lotus blooms. i prise open the gate of the village, i open it, i see the silver of the necklace worn over a brownish dress, my heart is made whole again, away the past, becoming visible, at the window, serene are the clouds. translation by ian campbell and tony chu (1994, 2017) hoàng, quán, campbell and chu portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018124 murphie final doi unacceptable galleymarch 15 2015final with no track changes (1) portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. the unacceptable special issue, guest edited by john scannell. © 2014 [andrew murphie]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v11i2.3407 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. auditland andrew murphie, university of new south wales through a silent transformation which … is ... barely possible to analyze, so-called intellectual life is increasingly administered and formatted by the editing and consumption of events … the event goes to market. (françois jullien 2011: 132) even though this may go against traditional thinking, one could thus speak of an a priori prosthetics. (bernard stiegler 2003a) is this still capitalism? what if it was something worse? (mckenzie wark 2013) audit—the ongoing evaluation of performance—began as a fairly narrow range of technical procedures in financial accounting. however, it has now expanded its range to ‘account’ for a wide range of behaviours, thoughts and even feelings, in the workplace and elsewhere. this article first suggests that audit cultures are a response to the ‘abyss of the differential.’ this is the abyss faced when too much generative difference threatens established interests, and thus everything these interests control. such interests often face a double bind, because they also rely on exploiting generative difference and are thus fully immersed in it. audit is seen as a useful response to this double bind—to the abyss of the differential. audit enables both control and ongoing exploitation of the differential. this article secondly aims to summarise some of the recent discussions of audit and then develop aspects of them. audit technics/cultures use a flexible series of control procedures that differentially declare what is (un)acceptable. they therefore both murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 2 energise and create shifting borders around what counts as performance, variably across multiple contexts. audit also links the local and global, the macro and micro, pragmatically, in what i suggest is a combination of instrumental and ‘operational reason’ (massumi 2002: 110). audit thus enables the creation and exchange of new forms of value. it enables new relations of production. here i suggest that audit also enables the insertion of the micro-events of work or living, little fragments of time or nervous energy, into a global mnemotechnics—the external memory work done in the networks of global media (stiegler 2003a). across these contexts, i argue that audit’s technics include a powerful use of the ‘pseudo a priori’ (stiegler 2003a). this allows audit to variably repurpose the significance of events—in terms of what is (un)acceptable—before, during and after their occurrence. at the same time, although i need to describe audit in some detail, this article is less concerned with audit per se than with the ethical/political questions involved. here i suggest that audit, politically, is an example of transitional technics/cultures. audit not only restructures value, relations of production, subjectivity and more in the present; it also provides passage to the social relations of the future. audit is not the only instance of transitional technics/cultures in the contemporary world, but it is an emblematic one. in this article, the transitional quality or power of audit is at stake—especially the impulses and tendencies it brings into play. thirdly, in order to suggest a way to grapple with the nature of some of these impulses and tendencies, in this essay i also want to inflect the usual understandings of audit toward a very specific concept of ‘neofeudalism.’ my approach to neofeudalism acknowledges fantasies of control over all existential territories of any kind, in short, fantasies of a supercharged neofeudal world. however, the fantasies do not actually inaugurate a new, functioning feudal society. rather, such fantasies are important in that they frame the real-world actions and impulses of those who fantasise. in short, the fantasies motivate those who are aligned with capital/other established or even newer interests. here, then, neofeudalism includes the real impulses and effects that result from such fantasies, realised in the often dysfunctional attempt to implement them (for example, neoliberalism1). to reiterate, by neofeudalism i do not mean a neofeudal 1 see lorenz (2012) for a particularly detailed critique of audit and neoliberalism with regard to the higher education system. see mirowski (2013) for a full critique of neoliberalism, in which audit plays a role (57). murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 3 society; rather i am referring to the rise of neofeudal impulses and tendencies in the workplace and everyday life. so neofeudalism also includes a specific if messy restructuring of social relations and concepts, such as property, the person and work, even life, infused by neofeudal tendencies. this might be best described as a microfeudalism in everyday life, energised by these tendencies. all of this is found in audit’s imposition of new social relations and, for that matter, concepts of relation in the workplace and elsewhere. finally, the article suggests that although they do not do this alone the impulses and tendencies carried by audit lead towards a more effective and more problematic society of direct control. this emerges from and overtakes the society in which audit has become so important (although the neofeudalism may remain). life becomes spectral, haunted by a range of ‘hungry ghosts,’ such as those of neofeudalism, neoliberalism and financialisation. too often the only way out seems to be to join these ghosts, in some kind of speculative microfeudalism. the abyss of the differential since at least the development of differential calculus by newton and leibniz, modern societies have thrived on the energies of difference—more precisely on the differential, or difference as a generative power. science and engineering work with differential tensions to build bridges, develop new technologies of communication, or manipulate genomes. the generative differences that move through weather events are captured in ongoing climate modelling. the brain’s functioning becomes a flexible mass of constantly differing connection weights between neurons. generative difference fuels financial markets and fashion. arguments about the nature of difference itself are staple fare in the academy and beyond. yet the summoning up of the powers of generative difference often takes cultures to places they do not want to go. as much as there might be a desire to explore and exploit the creative potential of generative difference, there is just as often a desire to impossibly limit exploration—to only that differential which can be exploited, in work cultures, institutional cultures, intellectual cultures, national cultures, established cultures of practice, even individual conversations. this has led to an ‘abyss of the differential.’ as remarked in the film diva (1981), ‘the abyss calls forth the abyss.’ generative difference calls forth more generative difference, and this in turn calls forth murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 4 the ongoing generation of flexible, modulating control that for deleuze is the mark of ‘control societies’ (1995: 169–182). these societies themselves multiply generative differentials, in the tensions between profit, social control and communication for example. audit inhabits such tensions, providing a way of communicating and controlling through them. as deleuze writes, the ‘quest for “universals of communication,”‘ of the kind that underpin the global reach of audit principles and measures ‘ought to make us shudder … maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. they’re thoroughly permeated by money’ (1995: 175).2 such exploration and exploitation of generative difference are, then, accompanied by aversion. indeed, exploitation, exploration and aversion all become the more intense as generative difference gets out of control. aversion grows especially when the differential produces things that are not wanted or cannot be exploited: unresolved disagreements, challenging new ideas that erode established disciplines, institutions and careers; global financial instability; climate change. audit can be seen as a series of cultural practices that attempt to deal with the ‘abyss of the differential.’ audit and its necessary twin ‘performance’—both broadly conceived— play an important role in regulating this abyss3 so that exploitation is maximised and aversion minimised. key to this is audit’s work with the flexible nature of the (un)acceptable. the shifting nature of the (un)acceptable, as constantly amended by audit, propels individual and cultural activity within a sea of ongoing differentiation. audit presents what is a very flexible and adaptable series of declarations about what is (un)acceptable in terms of activity or ‘performance’ within differentiation. it measures, evaluates and judges the generative nature of activity, reining it in, or pushing it in a different direction. it regulates events, behaviours, attention, desire and affect. audit as procedure and culture audit is thus both a technics4 and a broader culture of ongoing evaluation. the ambit of 2 deleuze continues: ‘we’ve got to hijack speech … creating has always been something different from communicating. the key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control’ (1995: 175). 3 i am not of course suggesting that audit is the only form of control within the complexities of contemporary capitalism or the likes of neofeudalism. however, audit is more important, more prevalent and less innocent than is often assumed. 4 technics can be defined here as an assemblage of techniques, technologies and related processes. pels suggests ‘a regulation of human practices that comes in a certain objectified form, as a set of objects (tools, machines, buildings), as a set of more or less explicit rules, as a ritual or an exemplar of conduct, murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 5 audit has developed along three, often intertwined, pathways. first, it is an independent (usually external) accounting of (internal) accounting. that is, it concerns the accuracy of the management of finances in an organisation. here, as elsewhere, it is an often externally imposed ‘control of control’ (power cited in shore & wright 2000: 73). second, this has been extended to a variety of other external checks on non-financial processes. this might include the like of water or energy management. all this is of course appropriate and useful. third, however, and this is where this article begins, audit evolves into a plethora of related technics that inhabit an increasing variety of locations and occasions within culture. to an extent it becomes work culture, even a prominent tendency within the culture of everyday life. in all this, audit itself is auto-generative. audit produces more audit. as it does so, power increasingly lies in audit, for both organisations and individuals. audit also spawns other, related forms of procedure, and activities, that are not, strictly speaking, audit, even if they inherit much of its character and purpose (performance ‘development,’ search engine rankings, likes on facebook). indeed, the aegis of audit extends to an ongoing measuring and accounting of much of life, usually according to predetermined criteria and increasingly often as channeled through external interests. at this point audit as practice incorporates its archaic meaning—’audit’ as hearing. it is an ongoing listening in, looking over the shoulder, as well as an ongoing kind of judicial hearing. kafka’s famous novel of bureaucratic judgment, the trial, only begins to describe the situation that results. for in audit cultures, the possibilities of kafka’s ‘indefinite postponement’ and ‘apparent acquittal’ at a macro level are now accompanied by an ongoing series of unpostponed and very real micro-judgments. a more extreme example is the use of facial recognition technology to make sure workers in the service industry are smiling enough (gawne 2012), but audit obviously has subtler processes and effects. audit, then, can be summed up as a process of measure and evaluation that manages / regulates / coerces other processes (including other processes of audit, as these proliferate). as it measures / evaluates, audit in-folds a series of judgements / doctrines / theories of behaviour and values of all kinds into events. this produces a certain or as a disciplinary apparatus (of course, technology usually combines two or more of these)’ (pels 2000: 137). murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 6 ordering of activities, a differential order that shifts depending on the shifting interests of the interests involved. this in turn controls as it modulates the little events of behavior, ‘like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next’ (deleuze 1995: 179). yet as audit gains importance it increasingly audits in the abstract—in terms of the fulfillment of ‘key performance indicators’ or other abstract objectives. it increasingly and scrupulously tries to avoid actual events outside of the circuits of audit even as it regulates these events—moment to moment work, signs of life or even actual material production. managerial attention and therefore its exercise of power are instead deferred to audit in the abstract. this disinterest in actual work events could be seen as a failure of audit and therefore of managerial power. as michael power notes, looking in from outside of audit, ‘failures can make visible the gap between the rhetorics of accountability and empowerment which set auditing in motion and the actual means for its achievement’ (power 1999: 68).5 to cover over this gap audit must constantly selfaffirm. ‘accordingly, auditing technology must constantly assert its claims to ‘make things auditable.’ it does this … by adapting the environment to its objectives through the creation of auditable performance measures.’ in fact, the very gap between accountability and actual achievement that power identifies can easily become a plus for audit. an appealing buffer zone open ups for management or other interests. they are only now responsible for implementing fairly abstract systems of audit. they are at least partly freed from responsibility for the messiness of actual processes. the desire to be on the right side of this buffer zone, because it is so appealing, moves through the system and from there to much of life as lived. via this, audit processes progressively interfere with actual activities at all levels. or rather, in ‘adapting the environment to its objectives,’ audit can even replace previous forms of activity. work, learning, living tend increasingly towards audit. more precisely, working/learning/living tend towards ‘performance,’ with ‘scripts,’ directed by auditors towards the fulfillment of audited objectives. more and more activity is directed towards a good, properly audited, performance score. of course, audit is often dysfunctional in terms of actual work/learning/living, never able to gain total control of 5 power (1999) and strathern (2000) provide two of the earliest and most complete accounts of the ‘audit society,’ or ‘audit cultures’ and their ‘rituals of verification.’ murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 7 real events, and is often resisted. yet again, however, audit can turn this into a plus. as audit makes ‘its own operational knowledge base institutionally credible’ (power 1999: 68), it no longer needs total control in order to have the desired effect. not only does audit demarcate acceptable and unacceptable. it also demarcates relevant and irrelevant—again, differentially, as requirements change in response to circumstances. resistance is not so much futile as increasingly irrelevant—as are dysfunction, failures of communication, or anything else that actually happens on the ground. precisely because of its abstract nature, audit has been an efficient and very adaptable method for regulating work and life in many different ‘ecologies.’ audit operates effectively across the complex dimensions of gregory bateson’s inter-ecological ‘ecology of mind.’ that is, it inhabits and transforms the patterns of communication that form across multiple individuals, groups and settings and from which any individual event of mind, of perception or of memory emerges, as part of a series of feedback loops (bateson 1972). audit can also work across political ecologies. it can work between the macro and micropolitical. it works effectively with the tensions that multiply at the points at which broader political and social formations meet the minutiae of everyday life.6 throughout, one of audit’s strengths is that it has one foot in a unifying homogenisation and another in its own generative and differential adaptation to a wide range of events and ‘habitats.’ audit also has another strength. if audit converts behaviour into performance it does so without always requiring an attendant belief. one does not have to believe in audit in order to live it. in the workplace one hears that one ‘doesn’t really believe in all this stuff,’ that ‘really it’s pointless, or worse, but that one should nevertheless, if cynically, at least minimally, comply.’ yet, even if it begins in cynicism, audit practice can lead to at least pseudo-belief, a belief that even perhaps becomes more genuine over time. as zizek notes: when althusser repeats, after pascal: “act as if you believe, pray, kneel down, and you shall believe, faith will arrive by itself,” he delineates an intricate reflective mechanism of retroactive, 6 beyond everyday audit in the workplace, larger examples of audit that link macro and micro are the audits used by usually conservative governments in order to implement a political agenda that impacts upon the everyday life of workers, often in terms of lost jobs, increases in precarious labour and privatisations. a recent example in australia is the queensland state government’s ‘commission of audit’ (‘queensland commission of audit’ 2013). on the politics of this see quiggin (2013) and hayward (2013). murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 8 “autopoetic”foundation … in short, the “external” ritual performatively generates its own ideological foundation. (zizek 1994: 12-13) also writing on pascal, deleuze and guattari put the issue slightly differently, writing that ‘pascal wagers on the transcendental existence of god, but the stake, that on which one bets, is the immanent existence of the one who believes god exists’ (1994: 73). our own everyday existence becomes the stake in the game, here a game premised on the transcendental existence of a society increasingly structured by audit and performance. of course, there has long been a desire for forms of micro-control that are transcendental yet can control micro-events, especially in response to the threat of the crowd or expanded democracy. audit’s precursor’s are therefore found in: edwards bernays’ ‘big think’ and walter lippmann’s ‘public opinion’ (murphie 2010); the 1947 birth of the social technics of neoliberalism in friedrich hayek’s mont pelerin society (plehwe 2009; mirowski 2013); or cybernetics and the development of control through cognitive models (murphie 2005). critiques of such developments include brian holmes’s discussion of the flexible personality (2006), building on herbert marcuse’s critique of the ‘one-dimensional man.’ holmes is interested in ‘the cultural, soft-power aspects of the new social paradigm.’ he also points to a ‘technological apparatus,’ an assemblages of techniques and technologies, that allows a ‘full implementation of the flexible employment system, that is, of a labor regime in which worker mobility and variable hours are accompanied by continuous electronic surveillance and the managerial analysis of performance.’ avital ronell (2005) has identified a drive within this: a ‘test drive.’ samuel weber writes of a ‘militarisation of thinking’ that suits this test drive, found in the language and practice of ‘targeting,’ especially after 9/11 (2005). from a different perspective, lauren berlant writes of subjects in contemporary culture pushed towards personal investment in a ‘cruel optimism.’ this relation ‘exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ (2011: 1). the peculiar desire-formations around audit or the like of performance development involve such a cruel optimism, and often a series of tests and targets that make of one a flexible if ‘onedimensional’ personality. audit cultures provide all this with sustenance as they emerge from, and evolve with it. they are full of test and trial, of aims and targets that are specific yet flexible (the goalposts not only keep moving; the whole field, including the goalposts, keeps murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 9 changing form). they encourage, indeed institutionalise, a cruel optimism across multiple ecologies. individual people and entire nations subject themselves to the cruel optimism that, for example, internationally-imposed austerity targets will provide economic and social salvation. and most audit targets are in some way as economic as they are social. indeed, audit cultures organise labour in a manner that is increasingly stable only in terms of its constant adjustment to an economic life (thus audit’s importance to precarity, as i shall detail a little later). in this, audit provides an adaptable bridge between the exploitation of physical processes (work, living) and the generation of abstract value in the economy. it also aligns concepts, indeed conceptualisation as a whole, with the economy. not only that, but it can effectively attune activity to the sub-conceptual abstract—an algorithm in the stock market, a rumour or proposition that ripples through the market or social field, a changing of an important institutional or nationwide measure (or google’s pagerank or facebook’s edgerank). in all cases, the realities of work/living on the ground must be brought, impossibly, into alignment with the producing/performing of value in the abstract circuits of audit culture. with all this activity, audit becomes both a business and a busyness. audit itself becomes surrogate work and even surrogate life. it devours money and time in both work and life. audit culture therefore regulates a double production, a double performance. it demands that actual work/living and the different work/living involved in audit itself are both ongoing. both must be regularly audited. audit regulates— differentially, in the sense of something like a thermostat returning a room to a desired temperature—the many cruel optimisms involved. in doing so, however, there are therefore many ways in which audit exacerbates the fact that ‘working … means bridging the gap between the prescriptive [audit] and concrete [actual messy work events] reality’ (dejours 2007: 72). under such conditions we perhaps risk living, not in the world, but in what i will call ‘auditland.’ auditland (the gentle informers) what i am calling ‘auditland’ can be described via anna funder’s book stasiland, a surprisingly compassionate portrait of east germany, before and after stasi control: murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 10 the stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. it knew who your visitors were, it knew who you telephoned, it knew if your wife slept around. it was a bureaucracy metastasised through east german society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub. obsessed with detail, the stasi entirely failed to predict the end of communism, and with it the end of the country. (funder 2002: 4) it would be unfair and inaccurate to say that many institutions, corporations or nations in 2013 mirror the german democratic republic (gdr), pre-1989. yet something about the structure of experience recounted in stasiland does resonate with contemporary experience,7 whether the experience of everyday audit or the more evolved version of audit found in what zygmunt bauman and david lyon have called ‘liquid surveillance’ (2012). the gdr was a country based upon a proliferation of informers. there was of course a massive technics in place designed to produce loyalty to the nation, before the entry into globalisation—and the fall of the wall. like stasiland, auditland describes a parasitic culture that threatens its host. there are other parallels. vered amit has asked, for example, ‘why … academicians and universities buy [the] bluff’ of audit culture (2000: 222). stasiland begins to answer this question. in the gdr people very often became informers not only out of fear, but out of a desire for simple survival or perhaps even promotion, although for those who refused (one notably by calling the bluff in public at her workplace by announcing the attempt to recruit her) the file was usually simply closed, with no consequences. in a sense, however, everyone had to go along with the stasi one way or another precisely because they lived in what funder calls stasiland— an existential territory as much as a country. the question of non-compliance is more complex in auditland than in stasiland, yet there seems increasingly little outside of the ambit of audited compliance. and, like stasiland, auditland generates its own fears, questions of survival, desires for promotion or even just a wish to remain part of the system in which one is necessarily invested. of course, the auditland i am posing is a much softer place than stasiland— with a much gentler process of information/informing, performed by good people, who often mean well (or perhaps just as often do not even care about the processes involved one way or the other). however, if national cultures of control such as stasiland thankfully mutate into the much softer, but now international cultures such as auditland 7 chris lorenz (2012) compares audit systems in universities to totalitarian communism. murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 11 within global technics, it is also true that by doing so they extend their reach. however soft a landing, auditland is a place where audit is increasingly gathered by all people, about all people, and placed into highly efficient circuits of local and global exchange. who runs auditland? who lives there? ceos, executives and consultants, governments and policy makers thrive in auditland. indeed, audit seems to propel management culture in general, with its proliferation of target-directed line managers. in education, audit is found in standardised testing, in the like of the excellence in research for australia audit, or the research assessment exercise in the uk. audit infests learning and teaching at all levels. it is found in national and international rankings and benchmarks that enable forms of international trade, in promotion and performance management situations, and in the ranking of departments or entire organisations or nations according to targets and evaluations. for example there was the recent australian labor government’s rather ineffective my school website (2013) or the bill & melinda gates foundation’s rather more significant ‘reform’ of us education through high stakes testing. in most of this, audit produces archives of the performance measures it collects that provide an ongoing basis for further comparison and therefore power. such archives are increasingly networked. they are also increasingly dynamic archives, alive to the global gathering, cross-referencing and ongoing communication of data, along with the like of data mining. this is all crucial to the extended powers of audit.8 the rhetoric is that this will make new things happen as it attempts to corral creativity and lived experience into predetermined channels (even as this predetermination shifts over time in accord with audit’s differential adaptation to circumstances). perhaps sometimes new things are encouraged by audit, especially if these seem useful to a certain agenda. however, in reality audit more often seems to stop new things happening. it attempts to reduce the degree of difference in favour of a repeatability, even if temporary, that will enable 8 bruce schneier writes in such contexts of a ‘feudal mode of computing’ in which: users pledge allegiance to more powerful companies who, in turn, promise to protect them from both sysadmin duties and security threats … feudal security consolidates power in the hands of the few. these companies act in their own self-interest. they use their relationship with us to increase their profits, sometimes at our expense. they act arbitrarily. they make mistakes. they’re deliberately changing social norms. medieval feudalism gave the lords vast powers over the landless peasants; we’re seeing the same thing on the internet. (2013: 16) it is perhaps no accident that microsoft’s bill gates is also driving much education ‘reform’ in the usa, using a powerful series of audits and networked archives to do so. murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 12 ongoing measure (for example, in academics publishing research in ‘highly ranked’ journals, most of which are aligned with commercial publishers). such systems can of course be ‘gamed,’ and often are (for example, by manipulation of the like of various rankings, or by determining the nature of what is measured by audit, of what is counted and therefore ‘counts’). two quick examples might prove instructive, although any reader will have their own. greg thompson and other researchers at murdoch university in perth have extensively researched and heavily criticised the effectiveness of testing via australia’s ‘national assessment program—literacy and numeracy’ or naplan (thompson & harbaugh 2012). more recently, an australian senate committee has been assessing the same—an audit of audit, if you like. what has become obvious, however, is that the ‘test’s custodian’s’ do not want the overarching process of audit itself to be evaluated negatively. in the senate committee, these custodians rejected the like of thompson’s research in favour, ironically, of far less empirically justifiable material (clark 2013). this echoes local audit culture practices. thompson and ian cook point out that one of the negative effects of naplan has been that ‘“good teaching” has changed and practices of data manipulation are becoming the new commonsense of “good teaching”’ (thompson & cook 2013: 256). there is little generation of the new, of that which cannot be immediately represented and brought into the circuits of evaluation, or of that which does not fit with ‘commonsense.’ a different example of dubious data collection is the bill and melinda gates’ foundation’s recent commitment to the development of a kind of biosensor bracelet. this would be used in the classroom to monitor students’ ‘excitement, stress, fear, engagement, boredom and relaxation through the skin’ (kwek 2013). it would form part of the gates’ foundation’s extensive intervention into us education (which now influences countries such as australia). the aim is ‘quantified teacher evaluation,’ even if on very dubious grounds (simon 2013). the varied forms of manipulation of empirical data in audit culture in the like of education are also found beyond it. as thompson and cook note, ‘the rise of the audit culture in education is an international experience’ (2013: 246), one ‘linked to wider social shifts towards processes and theories of governance that mobilize a marketized and managerialized administration of public institutions’ (2013: 244). even outside workplaces and institutions, audit has taken hold. there is now an unprecedented audit murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 13 of informal social and individual performance. social media sites such as facebook, google, and twitter gather audit data for corporate use. individuals use analytics or other aggregators of data for ongoing self-evaluation. these different locations and uses of audit are increasingly interlinked (work and home combining in gmail or facebook; companies and organisations exchanging data). many meta-surveillance initiatives also leverage this data in terms of possibilities of control. the us national security agency’s (nsa) prism project is a more obvious part of a highly complex international trade in data. this is often trade in the data of audit, broadly conceived. in obvious cases such as the nsa, it is a question of auditors versus the audited. yet it is seldom that simple. in fact, as on facebook, but also in the workplace, auditors and auditees are often both us, whether we are believers or cynics, exploiters or resisters. in east germany, stasi informants numbered as many as one in six members of the population. audit provides a much better system. nearly all of us are involved. we might not ‘believe,’ but we nevertheless go along with it. indeed, as noted previously, non-belief becomes an effective alibi for the channeling of power. audit produces a seemingly non-ideological means of modulating and adaptive social control. it produces new tendencies within subjectivity—towards a subjectivity of both performance and of the audit of this performance, separate from belief. these tendencies are also quite separate from other iterations of subjectivity that fall outside the ambit of audit, although the former go on to cannibalise the latter. in proposing this mutation of stasiland’s culture of informing into auditland’s information, evaluation and modulation, i am not aiming to accuse people of bad faith (or if i am i accuse myself as much as anyone else). marilyn strathern comments that we should have ‘no surprise that “auditors” can be shown to be “us”’ (strathern 2000a: 290). yet we perhaps think of ourselves in this way only reluctantly. or we believe we have no alternative but to participate in audit. the question becomes that of ‘how to deal with challenges that are at once obstructive, destructive even, and vitalizing’ (strathern 2000c: 14). these challenges can be slippery. audit cultures have a peculiar ‘cultural logic’ (shore & wright 2000: 83) that can be difficult to grasp. as we have seen, audit often involves the audit of other auditing processes: external audits of internal audits; higher order audits of lower order audits. murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 14 yet even if complex as a whole, at any individual point audit cultures promote simplistic modes of analysis. evaluative models in audit are often reductive and selffulfilling in terms of predicted outcomes. this in turn allows for the assumption, indeed production, of cognitive or affective ‘principles’ constructed by questionnaires, for example, regarding ‘objects’ (such as ‘skills’). students and teachers, researchers and others subject to audit seem to become evaluative, even sensitive agents within this process. the rhetoric is that of neoliberal ‘subjects’ capable, indeed desirous, of understanding and evaluating named (that is, reified) cognitive and affective processes. yet of course these ‘subjects’ of audit are all reified objects themselves. in sum, if audit cultures promise autonomy at all, this is ‘only allowed certain prescribed forms of expression’ (strathern 2000c: 8). reductive judgement rules. moreover, the audit and evaluation of net gain—the fulfillment of objectives—must be able to feed back into a network of symbolic processing and logics—even a peculiar global ‘feeling’—that in their entirety make up audit cultures. this in turn enables audit cultures to catalyse broader global networks. the well-intentioned, and certainly well-funded, move of the bill and melinda gates foundation into higher education is again instructive here. as reported by the chronicle, some see this as meant to install ‘a system of education designed for maximum measurability, delivered increasingly through technology, and— these critics say—narrowly focused on equipping students for short-term employability’ in which ‘there is too much emphasis on getting people through the system, processing them. … that needs to be seen in relation to what students are in fact learning. it’s a big problem, and it’s getting very little discussion’ (parry et al. 2013). in such circumstances, there is a tight regulation not only of what can be valued and exchanged, or even only of concepts of value and exchange, but also of concepts of the world, of ways of feeling the world. in this respect, audit is designed to avoid any kind of disruptive cognitive or affective event. audit cannot even afford to ‘recognize emergent forms of creative accountability’ (giri 2000: 174). yet audit itself involves a creative, complex and disruptive form of reason. instrumental and operational reason i have suggested that audit culture is an ongoing attempt to regulate—by modulating, in the middle of generative difference—what is acceptable or unacceptable. it forces an ongoing decision or feeling out, concerning what is of value in an action, a thought, a murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 15 feeling, with regards to other interests. as bernard stiegler puts it in another context, we have become ‘destined to decision, that is, to time understood in this sense, which is not that of life’ (2003b: 156). in a time ‘not that of life,’ the regulation of what is (un)acceptable provides a surrogate groundless ground for a society in which all has famously ‘melted into air,’ and instrumental reason interferes more intensely in everyday relations. yet more than this instrumental reason is involved. there are ongoing conversions and exchanges between instrumental reason and what brian massumi terms ‘operational reason’ (2002: 110); both are part of audit cultures. instrumental reason—and old style industrial work cultures—are based on a clear laying out of divisions between thinkers, actors and materials for exploitation (whether this is a forest, engineered materials or the labour, thinking or feeling of other human beings taken as material for exploitation). instrumental reason sequences and organises events of exploitation to control a future. it works from ‘above’ the elements it organises and sequences. it ‘transcends’ them in order to hold them in place. instrumental reason makes ‘thoughtfully explicit,’ ‘unfolds’ material relations into clear, conceptually organised perspectives and arrays ‘futurities … as mutually exclusive possibilities’ (massumi 2002: 110–111). operational reason is quite different. it is at work in the midst of events. it has a more flexible immanent perspective from within any set of events. operational reason is a: form of thought that is materially self-referential as opposed to reflective; that absorbs possibilities without extensively thinking it out … that infolds without extending ... that chooses according to principles unsubordinated to the established regularities of cause-effect; that poses an unpredictable futurity rather than anticipated outcomes. (massumi 2002: 110) operational reason is a ‘folding of thought into matter as such,’ a work with generative difference in situ. operational reason might be vague in terms of clear divisions and perspectives and in relation to other forms of organisation of the present, yet it is the more powerful for this. it has the potential to head in any direction, an ability to adapt to or even produce difference, a lack of commitment to defined futures or excluded possibilities.9 9 obviously operational reason has a positive side. yet it can also empower instrumental forms of reason, and supplement them where they are weak. one can also imagine much more politically positive configurations of instrumental and operational reason. murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 16 in audit cultures, instrumental and operational reason work together to provide a powerful way of bringing control into relation with generative difference, and structure and hierarchy into relation with flexibility. audit’s obvious instrumental reason regulates in accordance with external forces. it’s more subtle and often hidden operational reason adapts to situations from within. there is constant feedback between the two. the shifting nature of the (un)acceptable generates adaptive powers that combine instrumental and operational reason, macro and micro. this enables audit culture to install multi-scalar, portable and adaptable regimes—both from above and in the midst of events. this creates a cultural tendency towards passive affects with regard to the ‘system.’ it enables systems to thus rework the parameters of the production of subjectivity. as such, audit meshes micro-events with global networks. audit as global technics as i have begun to suggest, audit, like a thermostat, is a regulatory if differential technics, operating at different scales. on the one hand, audit is a technics designed to intervene in other, more local, technics. on the other, audit is increasingly a technics designed to work within what stiegler calls a ‘global mnemotechical system’ (2003a). the latter is a global intervention, via increasing media use, in the fundamental formation and operation of memories, and therefore perceptions and actions. it externalises the work of memory in media networks and technologies. it filters communications. it saturates everyday life. at least this is the aim. global technics enables a particular kind of intensity to what is both a ‘premediated’ (grusin 2010) and ‘immediated’ (in situ, on the fly) synthesis of memories and perceptions, actions and experiences. for richard grusin, ‘premediation’: characterizes the mediality of the first decade of the twenty-first century as focused on the cultural desire to make sure the future has already been pre-mediated before it turns into the present (or the past) … premediation is not to be confused with prediction. premediation is not about getting the future right, but about proliferating multiple remediations of the future both to maintain a low level of fear in the present and to prevent a recurrence of … tremendous media shock. (2010: 4) at the same time even global technics are a question of ‘immediation,’ in brian massumi’s terms (2011: 166). here, ‘in becoming-immanent to the event of expression [elements of cultural mediation] become immediate contributory forces. they are immediated’ (massumi 2011: 166). as both a local and global technics, and both powerfully premediating and immediating, audit comes together with many other forms of (pre/im)mediation: computers and networked archives and databases, screens and murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 17 cameras, networked communications; explicit rules as found, for example, in university regulations, or audit cultures themselves; rituals as found in the same, or in contemporary pedagogy; disciplines of all kinds. it is lived, just to take one small example, in what has recently been called the data-driven life—an ongoing documentation, evaluation and presentation of one’s life moment by moment, perhaps in online databases, in images captured by one’s mobile phone, in words, in documented moods, in records of credit card transactions and so on. this documenting and recording of life is now possible with all the extraordinary detail and portability made available by networked media technics—archives, data circulation and aggregation and the new forms of expression these make available with which to think and act. new wars over the mind audit therefore participates in what stiegler has called a ‘war of minds’ (2003a) that is also a new ‘war about typography.’ by this stiegler means that changes in media systems (for example, the move from the individual typewriter to the networked computer) allow for broader technical challenges to thought—taken as the basis for who ‘we’ think we are, individually, collectively and in the relation between the ‘i’ and the ‘we.’ for stiegler, the ‘challenging-forth’ (heidegger 1977) of education is functionally central to this war of minds. education is now subject, with its intensive audits communicated via digital and networked media, to a new international trade in educational ‘objects,’ measures and rankings, platforms such as moocs, and processes of instruction. these are thoroughly plugged into national and international agendas, precisely via audit’s control and energisation of certain kinds of performance. traditional institutions such as the modern university, never as in demand as before, are also, as bill readings noted long ago, ‘in ruins’ (1997). in the process learning, research and even just thinking suffer new constraints.10 for example, there is now ‘lifelong learning,’ but for many this is a burden, in terms of time and debt, as much as a joy. more dramatically perhaps, the new audit and related technics throw such strong light on the processes of education and 10 in 2013 peter higgs—after whom the higgs boson is named and who received the 2013 nobel prize for science—gave an interview in which he declared that ‘i wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system’ (aitkenhead 2013). higgs commented that in the past he had been an embarrassment when it came to research evaluation exercises at his university. he ‘doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers’ (aitkenhead 2013). murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 18 research that there is a kind of white out. it is sometimes quite difficult to recognise exactly what learning and research are when they are not just fulfilling predetermined objectives and agendas. the captures involved are further enhanced by audit’s manipulation of the framing of time. the pseudo a priori a return to an open world—to the unexpected, to creative potential—is obviously not favoured within audit culture—in education or elsewhere. yet, energised by the differential, the unexpected threatens to break out at any moment. audit has a specific strategy of capture for preventing anything unwanted that may arise. the a priori provides the solution, especially what stiegler calls the ‘pseudo a priori.’ as strathern puts it, in auditland ‘their’ ‘intervention has already taken place’ (2000c: 4). audit is an intervention ‘tied to the language and logic of a priori systems’ (giri 2000: 174). in this intervention, money and morals come together (strathern 2000c: 1) in a relation protected by ‘the prophylactic nature of ethics and methodologies’ (pels 2000: 156). there is a heightened possibility of ‘censorship and prescription’ (amit 2000: 227) and this censorship and prescription can work retroactively. here, however, there is a simultaneous erosion of the liberal fable of individual autonomy and of the neoliberal fable of the emergence of self-organization as found in market forces. both these fables are subsumed within the abstract counter-logic of the a priori. indeed, audit is the triumph of a priori systems. here it is first necessary to understand that the technics of audit create practices and systems based on cognitivist models of behaviour. the technics of audit extends the cognitivist logic of (symbolically processed) inputs and outputs into a programmed interference in events. for one thing, this means that events are reduced to symbols and statements with a certain syntax. a certain restricted sense-making is imposed on events. in the process, audit also imposes a kind of grammar of thought and action. events are thus ordered according to audit ideals. there must be an organised before, during and after. of course, events are messy. so the grammar is very much imposed by processes of regulation (a distribution curve, for example, aims and objectives, or ‘key performance indicators’). there is even more to it than this. for one thing, as i have suggested previously, audit’s required sense and murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 19 syntax change frequently. for another thing, the required sense and syntax can be imposed retrospectively—which is to say that events can be re-written retrospectively. at the same time, even if audit systems can work a posteriori, that is, after the fact, they usually do so wearing the mask of the a priori (in accordance with what ‘should have been from the beginning’). in audit, then, the power of an a priori ordering of the world is increased by adding a kind of pseudo a priori (stiegler 2003a). audit creates a technical system—both prosthetic and parasitic—that is slightly paradoxical. audit can just as easily come after in order to regulate what comes before. it can thus control the ‘unpredictable [in what] may be a matter of past … as [much as] forward referencing’ (strathern 2000a: 286). on the other hand, when genuinely a priori, audit poses another slight paradox. we are confronted with the fact that the technical prosthesis of audit—its supplementation of work and living—comes before the work and life it is supposed to supplement and evaluate. in either case, actual experience is subject to a regulative determination of events from outside that have wormed their way into the way that events are expressed. as audit fine-tunes itself it can increasingly regulate even the little fragments of time and nervous energy that form the basis of experience. a final paradox concerns the differential nature of audit itself. as i have suggested, what counts as (un)acceptable constantly shifts as audit works to modulate a changing world. this means that the assembling of befores, durings and afters constantly drifts. the archives that record audits are dynamic, and the history that seems to determine so much of performance is fundamentally unstable. of course, all these paradoxes create suffering. workers must constantly reconcile this a priori logic with the chaotic nature of work itself (dejours 2007). yet it is worth emphasizing that in amplifying an a priori logic, even and especially if this is constantly changing, audit systems channel one of the main strengths of global media’s technics of memory. this is the ability to intervene in events, even in events of individual and collective memory, before, during and after their occurrence. inevitably, in constantly re-writing experience the global technics of memory deconstructs any real a priori. all a priori is in this sense pseudo. this ‘deconstruction’ is profound. in general terms, stiegler describes the situation as follows. even though this may go against traditional thinking, one could thus speak of an a priori prosthetics. a priori synthetic judgement would be supported by an “a priori” prosthetic synthesis—an “a priori” which nevertheless has to remain in inverted commas because, upon murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 20 closer inspection, the a priori of synthetic judgement of consciousness takes place after the event [après-coup], after a prosthetic synthesis, and thus a posteriori (empirically, it pre-cedes this consciousness in time as the possibility of its already-there). but at the same time it also partakes in the a priori of the synthesis of judgement that it only makes possible—in a somewhat mythical, performative and foundational après-coup—and which, in being a precondition for any possible experience based on recognition, is “transcendental,” even though it only exists under the a posteriori conditions imposed by the history of technical inventions. i therefore call this situation “a-transcendental.” (2003a) arguably, the power of audit is situated within the ‘a-transcendental’ nature of global media, and the ‘pseudo’ in the pseudo a priori. of course, such power is not shared equally. if audit inhabits the a-transcendental it does so in order to bring the force of the pseudo to bear upon practices from work to education to relationships. practice is reduced, only ever meaningful if it is useful to interests elsewhere (audit’s own ‘alienation of labour’). in audit, only ‘certain social practices’ count—are literally counted (strathern 2000c: 1). these are precisely the practices that are deemed to create value elsewhere (a supervising manager’s career, the international trade in education products, a government’s need to prove reform). it should be clear now why, far from enhancing trust, audit often ‘creates the very mistrust it meant to address’ (shore and wright: 77). for one thing, audit is actually ‘intended to be stressful.’ this stress is not necessarily productive, even in the sense promised by the promoters of audit culture. for a start, when stressed, people tend to ‘feign … certain properties’ (maturana in giri 2000: 173) and game the system. both this stress and the strange environment created by the crossfire of feigned properties, pseudo powers, and so on, tend to wipe out ‘the commitment and loyalty of individuals to their organization’ (shore and wright 2000: 79). what is left is a series of new forms of subjectivity—a series of variations on ‘self-managing individuals’ (57) in competition with others. these individuals not only ‘render themselves auditable’ but marketable (of course the two go together). such individuals are of course not really self-managing. in fact, these marketable selves exist under conditions of ‘increased pressure to perform [and] reduced autonomy’ (shore & wright: 70). the strange time of the a-transcendental and the paradoxical nature of the pseudo a priori complicate this further. audit thus leads to a constant work of pressured self-creation as both auditable and marketable, and always unstable. in universities for example, ‘grant proposals’ become an endless and over-determined ‘technology of producing a marketable self’ (pels: 146). murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 21 this produces a particular kind of professionalisation. if audit cultures parasitically professionalise cultures in their own way, they do so precisely to introduce a viral expertise—audit expertise—and this to the detriment of other forms of professionalism or expertise. deviation, heterogenesis, stray thoughts (sometimes thought itself), unconstrained feelings or communications, and even many forms of technical innovation, expert or otherwise, all fall outside the ambit of audit. they are devalued and discouraged—unacceptable. what is instead valued and encouraged is what whitehead calls ‘minds in a groove’ (1997: 197), and not just any groove but the groove of evaluation. as such we could also see audit as an extension of the assessment systems of the past, a predictable if unfortunate one. as whitehead wrote: the dangers arising from this aspect of professionalism are great, particularly in our democratic societies. the directive force of reason is weakened. the leading intellects lack balance. they see this set of circumstances, or that set; but not both sets together. the task of coordination is left to those who lack either the force or the character to succeed in some definite career. (cited in stengers 1999)11 in some ways audit culture merely expands the sad undermining of education via assessment that permeated the entire education system long ago. again whitehead drew attention to this, writing that a ‘common external examination system is fatal to education’ (1967: 9). building on this observation, audit cultures could be seen to be parasites that might eventually be fatal to their hosts. a different example of this kind of fatality can be found in the free radio stations in france that came into existence in the 1970s. guattari writes about the way that these free radio stations were brought to heel by the french (then socialist) state. at the moment it brought the free stations under the rule of law to ‘help them,’ the state insisted on a ‘minimum audience, quality, and social value’ (guattari & rolnik 2008: 162). while ‘ninety percent’ of the stations ‘succumbed to the temptation, and plunged into a funnel,’ a small number refused. guattari’s account of this refusal is worth quoting at length: 11 it is ironic in this context that hayek loved to quote whitehead on habit, among other things, namely that ‘civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them’ (whitehead in hayek 1945: 527). hayek continues: ‘this is of profound significance in the social field. we make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess’ (hayek 1945: 527). he then goes on to discuss the price system, but one can see how this might work itself into audit. it seems clear to me that whitehead influenced hayek’s theory of experience and perception in relation to social and economic organization. murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 22 these stations said: “what we want is not to make big free radio stations but to make our own free radio stations. what we want is not to broadcast with sophisticated devices, or to extend our range, but simply to stop being interfered with on our frequency. we’re also not concerned about recognition or possible value judgments; we’re not going after audience ratings, because whoever wants to can listen, and whoever doesn’t can simply turn the dial. we want to be the only ones to guarantee what we like, what our production is, without referring to the new types of media evaluation … that doesn’t mean that we want to be amateurs, or produce mediocre things, but simply that we don’t want to become professionals in our practice—which doesn’t prevent us from devoting ourselves to it completely.” (guattari in guattari & rolnik 2008: 163) clearly for many professionalisation is a hindrance to devotion to work. guattari further comments that kafka ‘never became a professional of kafkaism.’ it is here that i turn to neofeudalism in order to fully tease out what it seems audit means in social and political terms. audit and fantasies of neofeudalism (neo)feudalism is essentially the event horizon of modern conservatism. where it comes full circle, and regresses into lunacy. (haque 2013) as i stated at the beginning of this article, i am not suggesting that audit is part of a full, global reversion to a feudal society.12 i am certainly not suggesting some kind of 12 many do, however, suggest a fundamental move globally towards neofeudalism (meyrowitz 1997). many write about ‘corporate feudalism’ or ‘neofeudal corporatism’ (graham & luke 2003). whitehead (2013) quotes chris hedges: ‘a slow-motion coup by a corporate state has cemented into place a neofeudalism in which there are only masters and serfs.’ there are now a suprising number of discussions about neofeudalism. the urban dictionary defines ‘neo-feudalism’ as the ‘phenomenon of corporations taking control of cultures and individuals through money, policies, practices, and gatekeeping in general to the point that they control many aspects of everyday private life’ (‘neo-feudalism’ 2012). johnson (2010) draws on galbraith’s discussion of neofeudalism in the affluent society (1998[1958]). critics of both the left and right find it emerging in a range of locations, including the usa and russia (inozemtsev 2011). indications of neofeudalism include the blurring of state and corporate powers, precarity in terms of work and everyday life, increasing disparities in the distribution of wealth, and the privatisation of security. it is often, though not always, associated with a ‘new form of regulatory state, premised upon a neo-liberal combination of market competition, privatized institutions, and decentred, at-a-distance forms of state regulation,’ founded on the principles of friedrich hayek (braithwaite 2000: 222). in contemporary discussions the rise of neofeudalism is often seen in tandem with the rise in debt, which sets up the kind of obligations resonant with feudalism. this is described specifically in michael hudson’s ‘the road to debt deflation, debt peonage, and neofeudalism’ (2012) and more generally in david graeber’s work. the situation in detroit, in which mandatory state oversight recently followed city bankruptcy, is often seen as current example of the emergence of neofeudalism via an audit/‘debt’ politics (johnson 2010). graeber links capitalism, feudalism and debt in the following comments: i think there’s a fundamental shift in the nature of capitalism, where some people are still using a very old-fashioned moral logic, but more and more people are recognizing what’s really going on. they just don’t know the extent of it. it’s not even clear that this is capitalism anymore. back when i went to college, they taught me that [sic.] the difference between capitalism and feudalism. in feudalism they take the money directly, through legal means, and they just shake you down, pull it out of your income, and in capitalism they take it through the wage, in these subtle ways. it seems like it’s shifting more toward the former thing. the government is letting these guys bribe murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 23 retrograde exit from capitalism. the case is the contrary. umair haque gets it right perhaps—neofeudalism is a kind of ‘event horizon’ from which contemporary reactionary politics, and contemporary corporate capitalism, find it hard to escape. indeed, as many writers make clear, if there is contemporary neofeudalism, it seems to emerge in parallel to, if not from within, a more general neoliberal intervention in politics and governance in favour of a vague concept of the ‘market.’13 here we can follow the lead of philip mirowski. although mirowski does not seem to call the result ‘neofeudalism’ (and may perhaps disagree with the term), his work is nevertheless suggestive in this respect. he argues that the ‘neoliberals reject ‘society’ as solution, and revive their version of authority in new guises’ (2013: 54). he states that, contrary to a common understanding of neoliberalism as undermining government and other the government to make laws where they can pick your pocket, and that’s pretty much it. (graeber in maisano 2012) graeber actually sees the situation as one of a reintroduction of ‘serfdom’ and discusses this not only in relation to debt but also to a loss of political rights. regarding late stage capitalism as re-feudalization, i would argue that serfdom is a more exact historical analogy … feudalism has an intrinsic web of personal oaths of allegiance and familial heritance which don’t apply well to the present. but the enserfment of the former middle class alongside the already largely enserfed working class is very much in process; it’s more than simple debt slavery. the middle class have lost all political rights at the national level, for example, since political power is presently reserved to the 1% (or less). if one takes the instance of russian serfs … the serfs continued to hold the land in a legal sense, but the labor and in many senses person of the serfs was entailed to the ownership class—who might change individually entirely [sic.] without in any way changing the enserfment—cuts close to the bone we have to pick in our own place and time, to me. (graeber 2011) graeber points out that even keynes saw ‘rentiers as a feudal holdover inconsistent with the spirit of capital accumulation’ (graeber 2012: 374). with a different emphasis, habermas wrote of the ‘refeudalization’ of the public sphere (1990: 292). tom cohen perhaps captures the mood of those warning of neofeudalism best. with mike hill, he points to a us department of defence report on climate change that ‘predicts water and resource wars … in tandem with a regression to more or less feudal techno-states’ (hill and cohen 2009: 2). cohen also writes of ‘hyper-financialization threatening ‘currency’ as such, ‘peak’ everything (oil, water, agriculture), neo-feudal telecracies, calculations of ‘population culling’ going forward decades’ (2012a: 33). in sum, there is: a post-global present consolidating what is routinely remarked as a neo-feudal order, the titanic shift of hyperwealth to the corporatist few (the so-called 1 %) sets the stage for a shift to control societies anticipating social disruption and the implications of ‘occupy’ style eruptions— concerning which the u.s. congress hastily passed new unconstitutional rules to apprehend citizens or take down websites. the ponzi scheme logics of twenty-first century earthscapes portray an array of time-bubbles, catastrophic deferrals, telecratic capture, and a voracious present that seems to practice a sort of tempophagy on itself corresponding with its structural premise of hyper-consumption and perpetual “growth.” the supposed urgencies of threatened economic and monetary “collapse” occlude and defer any attention to the imperatives of the biosphere, but this apparent pause or deferral of attention covers over an irreversible mutation … (cohen 2013b: 14) 13 see for example, pasquale (2013) or smith (2013). on the vagueness of neoliberal conceptions of the market see mirowski (2013: 55). murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 24 forms of control, ‘a primary aim of the neoliberal project is to redefine the shape and functions of the state, not to destroy it’ (56). as such, the: political project of neoliberalism is not laissez-faire; rather, it is to use state power to get the populace to prostrate themselves before the only dependable source of truth and wisdom in human civilization—viz., something they call “the market.” the more discombobulated the average citizen can be rendered, the quicker they will get with the program. (mirowski & tankus 2013) in the midst of this ‘discombobulation,’ neoliberalism ‘thoroughly revises what it means to be a human person’ (mirowski 2013: 58). along the way: not only does neoliberalism deconstruct any special status for human labor, but it lays waste to older distinctions between production and consumption rooted in any labor theory of value, and reduces the human being to an arbitrary bundle of “investments,” skill sets, temporary alliances (family, sex, race), and fungible body parts … the identity of the self evanesces under the pressure of continual prosthetic tinkering … the individual displays no necessary continuity from one “decision” to the next. the manager of you becomes the new ghost in the machine. (59) all this strongly suggests the specifics of neofeudal tendencies that rearrange the concepts of, and relations between persons, labour, property, capital accumulation and debt. as we know, older feudal societies involved territory-based lords, with a hierarchical structure of control, well defined forms of service and reciprocal obligation. there was a direct transfer of surplus from peasant to aristocracy (whether of grain or the body in the service of the feudal lord in wars). there was often minimal reward aside from the right to live. in contemporary neofeudal fantasies a new set of lords imagine themselves with these kind of rights over others (including the right to allow to live or die), and others with the kind of obligation to them found in feudalism. these fantasies lead to a very real set of impulses and programs. social relations are fundamentally transformed. neofeudal impulses and programs inhabit democratic processes and increasingly favour the rule of the many by the few. it is true that the territory that forms the basis for those who now imagine themselves a kind of variation of feudal lords is much more malleable and distributed. indeed, as mezzadra and neilson put it, flexible and multiplying borders become a ‘method’ for power (2013). just as importantly, feudal ‘territory’ comes to mean just as much personal or group existential-territory-becoming-property as it means common-landbecoming-property (guattari 1995: 55).14 in fact, this is a major function of audit: the conversion of existential territory into property, into ownable or rentable 14 one way to understand ‘existential territory’ is that it both allows, and results from, the available ‘diverse possibilities for recomposing [people’s] existential corporeality’ (guattari 1995: 7). murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 25 ‘“investments,” skills sets, temporary alliances,’ as mirowski puts it (2013: 59). in sum, the territory of neofeudal fantasy is multi-scalar, an interlinked and variable mix of the global and local that mixes geography with ‘existential territories.’ neofeudal fantasy’s territorial aims are thus grand: the control and financialisation of all populations, activities, thoughts, affects and energies, as well as of air, water, plants, the genome, even the climate.15 in short, the fantasy is of a revivification of persistent archaic structures in a mutated, technocratic and global feudalism (cohen 2012a). the reality behind the fantasy is a kind of collective defence of established practices and elite cultures, as these unevenly but vigorously attempt to adapt to the abyss of the differential. the fantasy is thus also a defence against: the failure of finance and management in social terms; the bumpy and often faltering nature of globalisation; the limits that climate change and other environment problems set on ‘unlimited growth’ and the challenges this provides to established industries and interests; the disruptive powers of digital and networked media; and the rise of newer, more flexible and cooperative forms of organisation that challenge the older, more fixed hierarchical forms. audit provides a useful set of services to this fantasy with real effects. it builds the basis of a fractal form of control (that is, one that self-replicates at different scales as it moves through complex networks). it also absolves powers and interests of detrimental social and environment impacts via the abstraction of activity and the deferral of responsibilities. as i have indicated previously, however, this involves not so much a full return to feudalism as a series of new variants of feudal fantasies and impulses. as organised as it might be by various interests, with their think tanks and other allied institutions, this neofeudalism remains a matter of complex distributed networks, of fragments. it appears incohesive when viewed from the ground up and even sometimes seems incohesive in total. it offers diminishing protection to those who give it their allegiance. it has no answer to major social or environmental problems. and even if the new ‘feudal lords’ might be more diffuse, more a ‘ghost in a machine,’ they are no less powerful for that. there is a real regression from a beneficial globalisation or cosmopolitanism or anything that does not serve a small population of interests. again, these interests seem to be both located ‘elsewhere’ and very much present. on 15 again see mirowski (2013) for a discussion of the reach of such aims in terms of neoliberalism. murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 26 the one hand, audit’s participation in neoliberal interventions in governance suggests that the powers of audit are those being relayed—from above, from an invisible management, from ‘the market’ and its ‘invisible hand,’ or perhaps from national programs. indeed, audit often feels exactly like this, a power, at best an irritant, at worst a tyranny, coming from elsewhere, interrupting ‘real work.’ on the other hand, i also want to once again draw attention to the immanent powers of audit, even if these are in relay with its external powers. indeed audit might best be seen as a kind of go-between. it is as go-between that audit plays a key role in the immanent transforming of subjects and relations in something like a neoliberal/neofeudal conversion of work, property (through new forms of enclosure), and concepts of the ‘person.’ this makes audit more than an irritant from elsewhere that workers go along with grudgingly. it suggests a need for more immediate resistance to many of the processes of audit, to the new social relations and subjects these processes help to form, and to the political transitions they help to make possible. what is to be resisted can be summed up in what i have suggested elsewhere is a ‘third enclosure’: ‘an enclosure building on but massively expanding the first [landed property] and second [intellectual property]’ (murphie 2011). this is an enclosure that suits fantasies of neofeudalism. it is energised by the like of audit. it involves a complexly nested and overlaid series of sometimes proprietary systems of gated demands for performance … it encloses the basics of human experience, the relations between action, perception, reflection and decision (or it attempts to enclose these) … the ‘third enclosure’ carefully constructs, through the practice of the test, a tragedy of the commons of affective intensity, of the free, open production of subjectivity. (murphie 2011) mckenzie wark puts something like the first two enclosures of landed and intellectual property (to which he adds ‘mass production’) in the following terms: we could imagine the commodity economy passing through three stages already: the enclosure of land, the mass production of the thing, and the commodification of information. each stage is a distinct private property form, producing a successive polarization of classes, of owners and nonowners. (2013b) however, things are even worse than this. wark notes that there is nothing that contemporary capital ‘won’t sacrifice to private property, including life itself,’ which becomes a commodity in general. moreover, the ‘ruling class wants to collect the rent but it doesn’t want to employ anyone’ (2013a). wark would perhaps not like the term neofeudalism, although he writes elsewhere of ‘quasi-feudalism’ (2013b: 27). after suggesting that capital should no longer be seen as one thing, he writes that there is a murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 27 need for ‘a new language to describe emergent forms of commodity economy. it’s not neo anything or post anything. it’s not late capitalism or cognitive capitalism’ (2013a ). however, this is in part because for wark newer political formations are not necessarily better. in a hacker manifesto, he writes that with the rise of private property and capital, ‘peasants, who once enjoyed reciprocal rights with their feudal lots, find themselves ‘free’—from any right at all. they are free to be exploited as farmers, but also find themselves in many parts of the world violently expropriated, enslaved, indentured—exploited’ (2004: section 184). on the one hand, this is why i am writing about neofeudal fantasies, impulses and tendencies here. the point of this is that there is no functional neofeudal society, with the like of fairly consistent ‘reciprocal rights’ that would guarantee some kind of existence for its contemporary ‘peasants.’ if there is anything like a contemporary neofeudalism, then, it is one in which the reciprocal rights keep changing, differentially, generatively, with new ways of producing a subjectivity of obligation along the lines of generative, modulating control. as in feudalism, such rights tend to the advantage of those on the right side of the ledger in terms of command and control. indeed, these fluctuating rights tend more and more to be very much onesided, in a totally new way that suggests a kind of ‘quasi-feudalism’ of a different kind to that discussed by wark. on the other hand, supposedly reciprocal rights and obligations, as one-sided and increasingly useless as they are to contemporary ‘peasants,’ do indeed proliferate, if changeably, in audit and performance. this is in part how audit works. thus it is one way of many in which audit culture takes up and reworks the vestiges and tendencies of feudalism from within contemporary capital. in sum, the tendency—expressed variably in different situations (or variably even in the same situation)—is away from ‘workers’ with full, even if exploited, lives. the tendency is towards the deplorable concept of ‘human capital’ (mirowski 2013: 58). i want to try and capture the extremity of this with the idea of the ‘third enclosure.’ this is an ongoing and active, differential enclosure of immanence itself on behalf of both the transcendental and the transcendent. by the ‘transcendental’ here i mean the complex, networked, never-fully-present-in-one-place forms of capture and social control that audit exemplifies so well. by ‘transcendent’ i mean the ongoing creation of the seeming ‘transcendence’ of obvious interests of corporations and individuals as well as of ‘transcendent’ concepts such as the ‘market’ or indeed something like ‘performance’ or ‘productivity.’ to put this all slightly differently, part of the work murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 28 done by the third enclosure is to manufacture transcendence from immanence. this ‘transcendence’ must indeed be manufactured, ongoingly from within immanence. this is necessary in a society so focused, at least with one eye, on immanent, variable events. deleuze and guattari are instructive here, especially with regard to the kind of communication involved in audit. they note that ‘immanence becomes immanent ‘to’ a transcendental subjectivity,’ or we might add, one that is transcendental in the sense that it’s subjectivity is formed within networks, as in the like of audit. ‘it is at the heart of its own field that the hallmark or figure of a transcendence must appear as action now referring to another self, to another consciousness (communication)’ (1994: 46). they go on to note that ‘in this modern moment we are no longer satisfied with thinking immanence as immanent to a transcendent; we want to think transcendence within the immanent, and it is from immanence that a breach is expected’ (deleuze & guattari 1994: 47). thus the new configuration of power from which audit emerges as a key technics and culture. how is power to intervene from within the immanent? ‘no longer content with handing over immanence to the transcendent, we want to discharge it, reproduce it, and fabricate it itself.’ all of these are the work of audit. ‘in fact this is not difficult—all that is necessary if for the movement to be stopped. it takes advantage of the interruption to reemerge, revive, and spring forth again’ (47). here again the work of audit is the stopping or constraint of movement, not only of the actions of work, but of active concepts of work, of relation and so forth. audit indeed ‘takes advantage of the interruption.’ i suggested previously that instrumental reason now performs a kind of reactionary détournement of operational reason. another way to put this is that in audit, instrumental reason exerts a particular form of capture of the immanent energies of operational reason. this is what allows the farming of the generative, an engagement with the differential that returns it to control. here i am suggesting a kind of reactionary détournement of immanence as a whole—of affect, of the production of subjectivity in situ, of cognitive events, of relations, of life itself. it is a détournement toward the transcendent. as i began to suggest previously, the production of subjectivity is crucial to the enclosure involved. although, as we shall see, what is produced is to some extent a series of fragments of subjectivity rather subjectivity per se. sandro mezzadra and brett neilson have noted that subjectivity has become ‘a battleground, where multiple devices murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 29 of subjection are confronted with practices of subjectivation’ (2013: 252).16 they point to the contemporary shift in the definition and thus the structural functioning of both the ‘person’ and property as legal entities. indeed there is now an ongoing generation of new relations between capital and labour, property and person. to begin to account for this differential generation of forms of labour and so forth, mezzadra and neilson extend peter linebaugh’s understanding of enclosure as the ‘moment of “conversion from common land to private property.”’ they suggest ‘a less literal use of the word enclosure that refers to any process in which private property is created through a violent gesture of appropriation’ (mezzadra & neilson 2013: 295). i am suggesting here that such an enclosure would include the enclosure and appropriation not only of labour, or the conversion of labourers into ‘human capital’ (mirowski 2013: 58), but of what was previously the free enjoyment and exchange of the personal, even an attempted closure of immanence itself. all of these become someone else’s property. this is key to understanding the extreme nature of the fantasies of neofeudalism than inhabit this restructuring, along with the roles that audit culture can play in this restructuring. for mezzadra and neilson (who do not discuss neofeudalism) the result of new forms of enclosure is the ‘multiplication of labour.’ this multiplication of labour has three tendencies, ‘intensification, diversification, and heterogenization … reshaping labor experiences and conditions’ (mezzadra & neilson 2013: 92). these tendencies mean that ‘labor threatens to colonize the whole of life and become the common substance of human activity’ (251). in these circumstances it seems reasonable to ask, ‘whatever happened to the concept of exploitation?’ (243). part of the answer mezzadra and neilson give is that subjects are now produced differently. here mezzadra and neilson follow lisa adkins, who suggests that ‘qualities previously associated with people are being disentangled’ and become ‘the object of processes of qualification and re-qualification’ (cited in mezzadra and neilson 2013: 262). i have suggested here that audit and performance cultures are central to such processes. disentangling specific qualities from ‘people’ enables new structures of work and life to ignore such people in favour of specific qualities. people are reduced to portions of nervous energy deployed in fragments of time, divorced from the fuller lived reality of 16 ‘subjectivation’ precedes and enables the production of subjectivity. audit and performance management are closely related series of ‘practices of subjectivation’ as much as they are ‘devices of subjection.’ murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 30 workers. as such, the neofeudal tendencies involved, assisted by the like of audit, produce a kind of ‘fractal.’ for franco berardi, fractals are the structuring material of the new world of work. they consist of small moments of time, or of nervous energy—a particular action, behavior, feeling, sensation or thought. via the like of audit and performance management, these fractals are increasingly all that count as work, to the exclusion of the rest of the lived body of the worker, even to the exclusion of other actual work that does not fit the immediate frame of audit. much work becomes ‘unaccounted for,’ and therefore unpaid.17 this unaccounted work is done in the hope that it might provide the basis for future paid instants of work. the aim is to maximise one’s production of the kind of fractals that might be rewarded by the like of audit, as the situation drifts, differentially. more of life is necessarily dedicated to work, and to preparing oneself for work (and the constant audit involved), even if much of this goes unrewarded. fractals allow for the ‘recombination of compatible (compatibilized) fragments (fractals) … compatible with the protocols of interfunctionality, and recombinable with other fragments of time’ (berardi 2012: 29, 118). these fractals become for sale in the now increasingly precarious labour market. thus, ‘social time is transformed into a sprawl of fractals, compatible fragments that can be combined by the networked machine’ (berardi 2012: 143). again, the ‘worker does not exist any more as a person. he [or she] is just the interchangeable producer of micro-fragments of recombinant semiosis which enter into the continuous flux of the network’ (berardi 2003). there is also a kind of fractal control (audit targets might be a simple example) that moves through these fractalised fragments of time and nervous energy. here there is a slightly different, if related, understanding of the fractal. the regular understanding of a fractal is as something that replicates across different scales, like the patterns one finds within a snowflake or leaf. as fractal therefore, fractal control can replicate at different scales. it can therefore produce ‘microfeudalisms’—miniature events in which social relations replicate or are infused by neofeudal tendencies. each of these fractal instances of control rearranges concepts and instances of property and person in situ, while communicating with the broader networks involved. the control is ‘“fractal” in that it aims for overarching hierarchy but is simultaneously and successfully diffuse and 17 this includes but is not limited to the like of unpaid internships and ‘work for the dole’ schemes. murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 31 scalable in its operations—a dense and complex network of flexible forces’ (murphie 2011). simply put: ‘the smallest part is a mirror image of the whole system’ (baldwin 2012). another force that seems to run throughout this is debt. in part because of the precarity of work, and in part because of the increased financialisation of everything, debt increases. this also suggests neofeudal tendencies, expressed in obligation via debt (see footnote 10). however, this is not just a matter of financial debt. there are also new forms of debt. for example there is affective debt, precisely as defined through processes of audit and performance management. there is even debt at the level of basic biological processes, for example a sleep debt that is owed as much to one’s performance at work as to one’s own body. it could be said that more and more of life is not only subject to fractalised labour but to a fractalised commodification of life itself. the latter—for example via the purchased regulation of affect, behaviours or physiological processes, or self-paid performance training—serves to extend debt as one pays to maximise the likelihood that one’s life (even one’s sleeping patterns perhaps), will serve the new order. as they say, ‘you owe it to yourself.’ unfortunately, in owing it to yourself, you also now owe it to everyone else. in such a situation, wark suggests that the ‘offerings of the times are so paltry that they can only be made to seem meaningful by making others suffer something much worse’ (2013a). thus, wark suggests, what i am calling neofeudal tendencies here lend themselves too easily to a new fascism, in which ‘consent is only secured by designating out-groups to hate.’18 audit is well suited to such designations—even variably in terms of ‘performance’ rankings for example—in its ongoing differentiation of the (un)acceptable. all in all, i will suggest that the regulating powers of audit are now part of an attempt to farm generative difference in everyday life. via an overarching ‘control of control,’ audit turns the little events—the fractals—of everyday living into a kind of accountable livestock. audit generates new events of control that bound other events in terms of performance. it provides an international language and set of processes that enables a global circulation, regulation and exchange of these events as services or ‘objects’ with a particular value. it enables ongoing differentiation as difference itself differs. and this 18 in fact, langthaler (2010) suggests that the concept of neofeudalism arose in 1960 when ‘political scientist robert koehl (1960) developed a more explicit concept of the “feudal aspects” of national socialism’ (langthaler 2010: 165). murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 32 in turn helps open all kinds of institutions and organisations—corporate, public, nonprofit and so on—to mutual exchange, with similarly organised regimes of work and eventually financialisation. yet this is not where audit ends. i suggested at the beginning of this article that audit and performance cultures are transitional. they prepare lives, multi-ecologically and micropolitically, if perversely, for that into which we are threatening to pass. i have suggested that this is a society built on a complex set of fantasies, impulses and tendencies of neofeudalism. as described above, however, even if these are fantasies they have very real effects. they do not add up to a full neofeudal social structure. they rather add up to social and subjective fragmentation and multi-ecological and political catastrophe.19 audit and performance both assist the social and subjective fragmentation and cover up the catastrophe. given all the above, it is no surprise that audit and performance measures increasingly replace more democratic discussion and action: in workplaces; in the way that universities organise learning, teaching and research; in politics where the ongoing measure of polling infects political judgment; in a media increasingly infected by audience monitoring, and by the lobbying of interest groups and think tanks (the latter of whom constantly promote audit and performance cultures). in all these locations, audit and performance also allow for a functioning fantasy of neofeudalism in that they encourage the acceptance of increasing levels and flexibility of surveillance (bauman & lyon 2012), the end of privacy, and the performance-based precarity i have briefly discussed above. the best one can hope for is that either one’s production of ‘fractals,’ or one’s adoption of microfeudalisms as a form of appropriate service managing the fractals of others, will be rewarded by the new aristocracy (a reward that itself often proves to be a fantasy). over forty years ago, foucault famously asked ‘how do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behaviour?’ (deleuze & guattari 1983: xiii). how can we deal with the microfascism in everyday life? we can now add another question that is not quite the same, even if they are related. ‘how do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and 19 it is perhaps no accident that the game of thrones television series is so popular today. it is a fantastical making sense of the vectors of power and existential threat—social and ecological—in the contemporary world. everyone wants to be a king, queen or knight. everyone wants their own dragons. murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 33 pleasures, of’ neofeudal fantasies, or of a microfeudalism in everyday life? a collective resistance to audit might provide part of the answer to this question. i can only briefly suggest some of the ways such resistance might form. before that, however, having suggested that audit cultures and technics are transitional, i will describe some of the social conditions towards which they might be transitioning. speculation and spectres why did hamlet trouble about ghosts after death, when life itself is haunted by ghosts so much more terrible? (chekhov 2004) i suggested earlier in this article that audit cultures, though powerful, are transitional. although effective in themselves, they also help power prepare lives for a transition into more direct ‘societies of control’ (deleuze 1995: 169–182). the latter are of course not new. they precede and have continued to develop in league with audit cultures and other forms of control. yet they seem to have recently crossed some kind of threshold. how can audit be placed in relation to the new climate of control? first, audit’s abstract ‘control of control’ is now combined with, or sometimes replaced by, a more direct control. audit’s periodic and rhythmic claiming of our attention has prepared us for its replacement—a more complete and ongoing attunement to control (an acceptance of ongoing surveillance for example). second, audit’s use of, if temporary, at least relatively stable signs, statements and measures is now complimented or replaced by a constantly modulating communication signal from which there is little escape. cybernetics finally triumphs over semiotics; signal processing triumphs over symbolic processing (thomsen 2012). third, audit reduces work and living to narrowband, single-channel speculations that tend to reduce to audit and performance per se. the new atmosphere of control is multi-channel, broadband. this allows it to permit, because it can control and/or financialise them, far more open and varied forms of speculation and behavioural modulation. speculation becomes highly inventive, especially in terms of the financialisation of everything (including of course speculation itself). speculation also attains a new creativity concerning the invention of control technics across an increasing variety of contexts. fourth, audit culture has made a significant contribution to a transformation of habit and this now intensifies, moving beyond audit. the habits of everyday speculation and everyday action are the more tied to global financial speculation, and this to ongoing murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 34 communication. the ‘general intellect’ is put to work in a collective and competitive speculation within the ongoing territorialisation of the ‘third enclosure.’ fifth and finally, audit’s erosion of time paves the way for our acceptance of a substantial reorganisation of time itself. to understand these transitions we can turn to jonathan crary’s 24/7 (2013). crary points to capital’s contemporary colonisation of time, so that people are now effectively working even as they consume, 24/7 (2013). as part of this phenomenon crary points to the attempted mastery of sleep. sleep is of little use to capital, so it is the final frontier of 24/7 society. sleep is therefore increasingly subject not only to audit but to more direct intervention and control, via sleep clinics and sleep apps monitoring sleep states, commercial pharmaceutical interventions, military experiment, and so on. and not only sleeping, but dreaming (crary 2013: 97) is to be recovered for work, for capital, from the financial barren time of ‘unadministered life’ (crary 2013: 68). this intervention in sleep and dreams indicates that capitalism becomes ‘inseparable from [an actual] reorganization of time’ (crary 2013: 62), the ultimate existential territory. this reorganisation of time is in some ways a profound extension of the pseudo a priori discussed above. time is to become a ‘time without time’ (crary 2013: 29), one meaningful only in terms of productive engagement with capitalised circuits of exchange. there is a ‘radical conceptualization of the relations between work and time … productive operations do not stop ... profit-generating work … can function 24/7’ (crary 2013: 62). ‘common life’—even sleeping or dreaming—is to be directly ‘made into the object of technics’ (crary 2013: 29). the fantasy of neofeudalism extends its very real microfeudalisms into something like crary’s 24/7. the whole enterprise now regulates habit differently, more directly. at times in addition to audit culture, at times without it, new technics arise that challenge given habits. these technics encourage an individual life that blurs work and leisure (even work and sleep and dreams). it also creates a series of habits, as for example in frequently monitoring one’s smartphone, that are constantly attuned to a signal that connects local and global (and the constant needs to adjust to the variations in communication between them). crary points to something of this in debord’s later comments on the ‘society of the spectacle’ that suggest a move from the ‘diffuse spectacle of the 1960s’ to ‘a global integrated spectacle’ (crary 2013: 73). he also takes up deleuze’s description of murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 35 ‘societies of control.’ here ‘institutional regulation of individual and social life’ proceeds in ‘ways that’ are ‘continuous and unbounded’ (crary 2013: 71) and even ‘what was once consumerism has expanded to 24/7 activity of techniques of personalization, of individuation, of machinic interface, and of mandatory communication’ (crary 2013: 72)—in short, of something beyond the usually indirect and periodic nature of audit-informed performance. google glass seems a relevant instance. glass is the recently arrived glasses-frame which effectively combines a camera, a smartphone, and a heads-up display to allow full-time communicative life, in which everything can be recorded by everyone and immediately uploaded for worldwide distribution. debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ becomes a ‘society of the spectacles.’ such technics encourage ‘the emergence of forms of habit that are inevitably 24/7 and reciprocally tied to mechanisms of power that are,’ as in deleuze’s societies of control, ‘equally “continuous and unbounded”’ (crary 2013: 77). it is the unboundedness that shows that we are perhaps passing out of audit cultures per se. continuous and unbounded control literally capitalises the world—directly. there is a higher level financial enclosure of any remaining commons (even sleep, dreams). even lower level markets are not safe as ‘international financial markets are now attempting to dominate many conventional markets as a long-term strategy to extract greater profits and accumulate capital’ (tricarico 2013). how can we respond to such a situation? i will suggest first that, however powerful, all this nevertheless remains haunted by the persistent failure of economic models and philosophies, even if the powers that were so heavily invested in them manage to survive. jacques derrida has written of the ‘spectres of marx’ that emerged following the collapse of the berlin wall. today i would suggest we have, following the recent series of financial crises, the emergence of a series of ‘spectres of hayek’: spectres of a failed ‘free market’; spectres of archaic structures and fantasies; spectres of the like of audit cultures and other controlling socio-technics developed by market-favouring institutions that hark back to hayek’s mont pelerin society. the life that emerges in this situation is at the same time spectral and speculative. it is haunted. an ever expanding financialisation is haunted by its own contradictions and failures, and seeks ever new forms of speculative intervention. as i suggested at the beginning of this article, everyday life is haunted by a range of ‘hungry ghosts,’ such as murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 36 those of neofeudal impulses and tendencies, and financialisation. too often the only way out seems to be to join in with some kind of speculative microfeudalism. by this i mean speculation that is intense but limited to developing new ways of thinking and acting in concert with what are increasingly intense social controls. dramatic catastrophes arise within the ‘ecology of mind’ and the broader environment. de-dramatising audit let me, however, conclude by returning to audit to suggest some ways out of this situation. is it possible to ‘de-dramatise’ audit—to diminish the constitution of its role in everyday life? to ‘unstage’ the concept of audit? to ‘de-professonalise’ one’s part of the world, at least with regard to audit, in order to rekindle a devotion to the world at large? to undo new forms of social control in favour of more genuinely democratic forms of social organisation—and not just nationally but locally, in workplace democracy, in forms of local community? this might require a counter-speculation, a counter-intervention within the very basis of individual and social habits. it would obviously require an unknotting of the ties between everyday speculation and financial speculation. it would require an exorcising of the spectres of ‘archaic attachments to cultural traditions’ such as feudalism, that one still finds in societies that nevertheless ‘aspire to technological and scientific modernity’ (guattari 1995: 4). this might allow a better analysis and questioning of more recent socio-economic models and technics such as audit, and beyond that, the societies of control. it would require a careful attention to how attention is directed and how this structures social relations. it would require us to ‘ferret out the’ microfeudalism ‘that is ingrained in our behaviour?’ (foucault in deleuze & guattari 1983: xiii). it would require a reworking of the nature of visibility, of the social circuits in which visibility plays role, and of the very question of whether so much should always be made visible. it might involve a ‘speculative pragmatism’ (massumi 2011: 29ff), something close to an operational reason rescued from instrumentality. activity would be divorced from the circuits of audience or performance. there would be fewer a priori’s, pseudo or not. speculation and pragmatism would be able to work together in the specific composition of events, in and of themselves, in their immediate contexts. here ‘what will come out of a process is to some degree an open question until its ‘final characterization’ of itself at its point of culmination’ (massumi 2011: 12). obviously, a key part of all this would murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 37 be the creation of work/modes of living that cannot be audited. less obviously, a key part of this might be activity that is not easily archived and therefore data mined by the wrong interests. as erin manning puts it in another context: there is a tendency today to activate the event only to the extent that it is documentable. the problem with this is that the documenting tends to pre-ordain the event and pre-contain it to a certain circumference. so many instances of everyday life tend in this direction—grant writing, job hunting, art exhibiting, all the cving we have to do. (manning cited in fritsch & stavning thomsen 2012) the question becomes one of rethinking ‘what an archive demands of us’ so that ‘process’ is able ‘to develop techniques that enable a singular emergence.’ crucially, time would be regained—taken back from the time of audit and 24/7 culture.20 impossibly for either audit cultures or 24/7 society as discussed here, manning speaks of ‘opening the event onto its own forces for giving time—giving time for exploration, time for failure ... excavating from the event its force toward the as-yet unthought or unformed … of restarting ... in a new kind of event-time.’ any reorganisation of work and everyday life outside of audit will require new cultures and an inventive technics—technics that enable singular individuations of work experiences and of occasions of living. finally, it will require a new kind of ‘transversality,’ an establishing of relations that are not restricted to those of auditor/auditee or the measured circuits of financial capital or social control. of course, it might also require allowing people to get some sleep—their own sleep. they might even begin to dream their own dreams. reference list aitkenhead, d. 2013, ‘peter higgs: i wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system,’ the guardian, 7 december. online, available: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system [accessed december 10 2013]. amit, v. 2000, ‘the university as panopticon: moral claims and attacks on academic freedom,’ in audit cultures: anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy, (ed.) m. strathern. routledge, london: 215–235. baldwin, j. 2012, ‘exacerbation, singularity, indifference: baudrillard and politics,’ baudrillard studies, vol. 9, no. 3. online, available: http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3baldwined.html [accessed 23 october 2013]. bateson, g. 1972, steps to an ecology of mind. chicago university press, chicago. 20 something that ironically, benjamin bloom, who invented the taxonomy of educational objectives, understood very well. it was key to his concept of mastery learning (1984) that, strangely enough, seems almost completely ignored in learning and teaching endeavours in universities, in favour of bloom et al.’s hierarchies of objectives (1956). murphie auditland portal, vol. 11, no. 2, july 2014. 38 bauman, z. & lyon, d. 2012, liquid surveillance: a conversation. polity, london. berardi, f. 2003, ‘what is the meaning of autonomy today?: subjectivation, social composition, refusal of work,’ republicart. online, available: http://republicart.net/disc/realpublicspaces/berardi01_en.htm [accessed 26 november 2013]. berardi, f. 2012, the uprising: on poetry and finance. semiotext(e), new york. berlant, l. 2011, cruel optimism. duke university press, durham, nc, & london. bloom, b. 1984, ‘the 2 sigma problem: the search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring,’ educational researcher, vol. 13, no. 6: 4–16. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0013189x013006004 bloom, b. s., engelhart, m. d., furst, e. j., hill, w. h., & krathwohl, d. r. 1956, taxonomy of educational objectives: the classification of educational goals; handbook i: cognitive domain. longmans green, new york. braithwaite, j. 2000, ‘the new regulatory state and the transformation of criminology,’ british journal of criminology, no. 40: 222–238. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bjc/40.2.222 chekhov, a. 2004, note-book of anton chekhov, (trans.) s. s. koteliansky & l.woolf. project gutenberg e-book. clark, m. 2013, ‘school testers deny naplan side effects,’ new matilda, 4 july. online, available: https://newmatilda.com/2013/07/04/school-testers-deny-naplan-side-effects [accessed 21 july 2013]. cohen, t. 2012a, ‘anecographics: climate change and “late” deconstruction,’ in impasses of the postglobal: theory in the era of climate change, vol. 2, (ed.) h. sussman. open humanities press/mpublishing, michigan: 32–57. cohen, t. 2012b, ‘introduction: murmurations—“climate change” and the defacement of theory,’ in telemorphosis: theory in the era of climate change, vol. 1, (ed.) t. cohen. open humanities press/mpublishing, michigan: 13–42. crary, j. 2013, 24/7: late capitalism and the end of sleep. verso, london. dejours, c. 2007, ‘subjectivity, work, and action,’ in recognition, work, politics: new directions in french critical theory, (eds) j-p. deranty, d. petherbridge, j. f. rundell, & r. sinnerbrink. brill, leiden: 71–88. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004157880.i-316.19 deleuze, g. 1995, negotiations, (trans.) m. joughin. columbia university press, new york. deleuze, g. & guattari, f. 1983, anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, (trans.) r. hurley, m. seem & h. r. lane. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. deleuze, g. 1994, what is philosophy? 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s. 1994, mapping ideology. verso, london. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: vanmai, j. 2018. rencontres exceptionnelles. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp.92-98 https://doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v15i1-2.5742 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au writerly reflection rencontres exceptionnelles jean vanmai independent author corresponding author: tess do, school of languages and linguistics, the university of melbourne, vic 3010. dot@unimelb.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5742 article history: received 12/02/2017; accepted 08/11/2017; published 23/08/2018 abstract jean vanmai is a new caledonian-born writer of vietnamese origin. his first two historical novels, chân đăng (société d’études historiques, 1980), winner of the asia book prize, and fils de chân đăng (éditions de l’océanie, 1983), recounted, for the first time, the experiences of the colonial indochinese workers indentured in new caledonia in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. author of several essays and novels including the acclaimed trilogy, pilou pilou (éditions de l’océanie, 1998, 1999, 2000), vanmai’s writing bears witness to the changing face of new caledonian society and the brave will of its multi-ethnic communities to build a common destiny together. his last publication to date is princess kanak (éditions de l’océanie, 2013). in ‘rencontres exceptionnelles’ jean vanmai offers a thoughtful personal account of his participation in the colloquium rencontres. taking the perspective of a caledo-viet author, whose writing has long been confined to his small home island in the pacific, he reflects on how his enchanting encounter with a larger community of readers, researchers, and in particular, french and australian fellow writers of vietnamese origin, reconnected him with his roots and with the voices of the vietnamese diaspora. using the trope of the unanswered letter from a vietnamese boatperson stranded in a malaysian refugee camp in the early 1980s, he addresses the painful questions of war, loss and exile. by taking upon himself to respond some forty years later to his compatriot’s distress call, he dwells on the vietnamese collective past and investigates his own sense of identity and belongingness. he concludes his narrative with the vision of a borderless vietnamese diaspora where generations of proud descendants of dragons and immortals bond and share the same love for the ancestral land. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 92 mailto:dot@unimelb.edu.au https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5742 https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5742 résumé jean vanmai est un écrivain néo-calédonien d’origine vietnamienne. ses deux premiers romans historiques, chân đăng (société d’études historiques, 1980), lauréat du prix de l’asie, et fils de chân đăng (éditions de l’océanie, 1983) documentaient pour la première fois le vécu des travailleurs coloniaux indochinois en nouvelle calédonie à la fin du xixème siècle et au xxème siècle. l’œuvre de jean vanmai inclut plusieurs essais et romans, dont la trilogie très acclamée pilou pilou (éditions de l’océanie, 1998, 1999, 2000) ; elle témoigne du visage changeant de la société néo-calédonienne et de la volonté courageuse de ses communautés multi-ethniques de construire ensemble un destin commun. à ce jour, son dernier roman est princess kanak (éditions de l’océanie, 2013). « rencontres exceptionnelles » est un compte-rendu personnel dans lequel jean vanmai réfléchit à sa participation au colloque rencontres. en prenant la perspective d’un auteur calédo-viet dont l’écriture a été longtemps confinée à sa petite île au cœur du pacifique, l’auteur se penche sur les rencontres établies avec les lecteurs, les chercheurs et surtout ses confrères francoet australo-vietnamiens qui l’ont reconnecté à ses racines et à la diaspora vietnamienne. il utilise le motif de la lettre morte qu’une migrante vietnamienne échouée dans un camp de réfugiés en malaisie lui a envoyée et qu’il a oubliée pendant une quarantaine d’années pour aborder les questions douloureuses de la guerre, la perte et l’exil. à travers sa réponse tardive à l’appel de détresse de sa compatriote, vanmai replonge dans le passé collectif vietnamien et examine ses propres sentiments d’identité et d’appartenance. pour conclure, il offre la vision d’une diaspora vietnamienne sans frontière où les fiers descendants de dragons et d’immortels se retrouvent unis dans un même amour de la terre ancestrale. keywords jean vanmai, vietnamese diaspora, new caledonia, nouvelle calédonie invité à participer à un colloque ayant pour thème « rencontres … un rassemblement de voix de la diaspora vietnamienne », à l’université de melbourne les 1er et 2 décembre 2016, ce fut pour moi une surprise et en même temps une joie. surpris tout d’abord de me voir invité à ce genre de rencontres de niveau élevé entre gens de plumes et d’une même identité culturelle. ma joie fut toutefois teintée de doutes, du fait que je me trouverais face à un auditoire anglophone, avec la langue de shakespeare que je ne maîtrise pas trop bien sur le plan littéraire. face à ces constats, ce ne fut pas l’angoisse devant la page blanche du début de mes travaux d’écriture, mais angoisse tout de même quant à la décision à prendre : faut-il y aller ? ou plutôt faut-il accepter le challenge ? bien entendu j’ai déjà fréquenté les salons du livre de paris, voire ceux de l’île d’ouessant en bretagne. tout comme le salon du livre, lire en polynésie, à tahiti, ainsi que le silo, salon international du livre océanien de poindimié en nouvelle-calédonie, entre autres. mais ceux-ci s’étaient déroulés dans un milieu francophone. que faire alors ? d’autant plus que ce salon-ci a un goût de nouveauté. non seulement en raison du pays d’accueil qu’est l’australie, mais aussi parce que ce sera en compagnie d’auteurs issus du việt nam. rencontres exceptionnelles portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201893 et je ne pourrais même pas dire que je serais en situation inconnue. puisqu’à melbourne, l’organisatrice principale, la cheville ouvrière de ce projet de colloque, me connait bien et je lui suis d’ailleurs très reconnaissant pour ce qu’elle a déjà fait pour moi. drôle de rencontre que fut d’ailleurs la nôtre. cela s’était passé un jour de l’an 2002 à nouméa. ce matin-là, je recevais un coup de fil de la part d’une personne venue sur le caillou pour un séminaire littéraire et qui souhaitait faire ma connaissance. c’était une belle jeune femme très posée et passionnée par la littérature. elle ne me connaissait pas du tout et souhaitait, en vérité, rencontrer si possible un auteur d’origine vietnamienne de nouvellecalédonie. mon agenda professionnel étant chargé ce jour-là, nous nous sommes donné rendez-vous chez moi pour une petite demi-heure d’entretien. or cette demie-heure-là ou presque nous a permis de nouer des liens très étroits et sincères par la suite. elle s’intéressait réellement à mes livres et était séduite par mon sujet sur les travailleurs tonkinois, surnommés les chân đăng, qui trimaient, hommes et femmes, dans les mines de chrome et de nickel à l’orée du vingtième siècle en nouvelle-calédonie. tess do a ensuite contribué à mieux faire connaître mes deux ouvrages chân đăng et fils de chân đăng, par une communication universitaire de grande qualité. elle avait de plus réussi à la faire publier en 2008 par l’éditeur ropodi dans une œuvre collective intitulée exile cultures, misplaced identities. pour ma part, ayant découvert au fil du temps qu’elle maîtrisait bien les us et coutumes de notre pays d’origine, tess était devenue à plusieurs reprises ma conseillère par internet sur les problèmes liés à la culture, aux traditions voire à certaines situations politiques délicates au việt nam. et, aujourd’hui, en 2016, c’est elle qui m’invite à son colloque organisé conjointement avec la charmante alexandra kurmann ! alors que faire ? quoi lui répondre ? ... et comment refuser une telle invitation amicale et officielle dans le cadre du colloque de l’université de melbourne ? — tess m’a invité à ce colloque, ai-je le droit de lui répondre par la négative ?, me demandais-je dès lors avec insistance. l’indécision prédominait cependant sur la raison, et ce, au plus profond de moi-même. je ne cessais de me dire : — né et isolé depuis toujours sur une petite île du pacifique, moi le scribouillard du bout du monde, éloigné de tout milieu culturel digne de ce nom, que vais-je pouvoir faire dans cette belle aventure littéraire ? puisqu’à ce jour je n’ai eu, me semble-t-il, que le langage de la sincérité dans l’évocation de mon témoignage historique, relatif à l’épopée des chân đăng. c’était, bien entendu, une belle façon pour moi de pouvoir également révéler aux lecteurs mon profond attachement envers le pays de mes ancêtres. et c’est sans doute aussi parce que je détiens, faut-il l’avouer, une sorte de raisonnement logique ou éclairé dans mon style d’écriture. or, en fait, c’est surtout par la grâce du très-haut qui, je le pense, a bien voulu m’accorder un tel don. cette réflexion intime et personnelle, je la prolongeais de cette façon : — par conséquent et si mérite il y a vraiment, elle ne viendrait donc pas uniquement de moimême ! ... je ne peux même pas prétendre, hélas, qu’elle provienne d’un enseignement judicieux transmis par mes aïeux. car en vérité je n’ai jamais eu le bonheur de connaître mes grandsparents … demeurés au pays. vanmai portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201894 en ces moments troublants je me consolais, comme je le pouvais, en murmurant : — on ne peut tout avoir lorsque l’on vit éloigné de tout et de tous à l’étranger, n’est-ce pas ? or contrairement aux conditions déplorables de vie de nos parents, les chân đăng, qui étaient si malmenés et exploités en leur temps de travailleurs de force sous contrat, j’ai grandi dans les conditions d’un enfant apatride (qui s’ignorait) sur un petit « caillou » paisible, baigné par l’océan pacifique. car par bonheur, nous leurs descendants, une fois la période coloniale abolie en 1945, n’avions jamais eu à subir ces maltraitances. c’est ainsi que désormais, nous nous ressentons une légitime fierté en songeant que nos anciens par leurs sueurs, leurs souffrances et souvent leurs larmes avaient contribué à transformer l’antique « île du bagne » en une « île de lumière ». de sorte qu’elle soit devenue de nos jours un véritable paradis des mers du sud. nonobstant ces dernières évocations si réconfortantes j’avoue qu’intérieurement, je ne me sentais toujours pas très à l’aise pour participer à une telle manifestation littéraire, chez les aussies. dans la mesure où d’autres flots de pensées négatives revenaient sans cesse submerger mon esprit : — tu es un descendant de nulle part, né sur une île lilliputienne, perdue au milieu de l’océan pacifique. tu parles si mal ta langue maternelle et tu vis de plus dans un milieu francophone. qu’auras-tu l’air face à ces cinq auteurs invités multilingues et qui, contrairement à toi, sont des « vietnamiens authentiques » ? ... excepté toutefois, marcelino truong illustrateur et peintre qui est un peu dans ton cas. puisqu’il est né lui aussi hors de son pays d’origine, à manille aux philippines. mes élucubrations se poursuivaient alors avec insistance sur ces auteurs participants : — toutefois la différence avec toi, c’est que truong est diplômé de sciences-po, paris ! ... tout comme la polyglotte et renommée anna moï qui, elle, considère « les mots comme un matériau artistique, au même titre que le marbre pour un sculpteur, ou la peinture à l’huile pour un peintre ». par contre thanh-van tran-nhut, cette auteure à succès me rassurait, comme j’avais eu la chance et le plaisir de la rencontrer quelque temps auparavant lors de son bref séjour à nouméa. tandis que chez les australiens d’origine vietnamienne : chi vu a remporté plusieurs prix, y compris le playbox asialink special initiative award. tandis que hoa pham romancière et auteur de théâtre, a remporté le viva la novella prize en 2014. donc tout compte fait, c’est réellement du lourd et du solide qui sera invité à melbourne !  lorsqu’à un moment donné, afin de mieux surmonter crainte et angoisse, je tentais de me raisonner en reconnaissant que nous sommes avant tout des vietnamiens. et que par conséquent nous appartenions au même peuple, quel que soit le lieu de notre naissance et des éloignements géographiques. je m’encourageais alors en songeant que lorsque nous serions tous ensemble, je pourrais certainement mieux m’intéresser à leur vie passée. puis réflexion faite, il s’avérait que ce serait trop leur demander. dans la mesure où pour chacun d’entre eux, le fait de vivre aujourd’hui agréablement dans un pays d’accueil si différent du leur, ne devait sans doute pas être facile au début. même s’ils sont parvenus à se faire une place en s’adaptant aux situations et conditions de vie nouvelles, dans leurs pays d’accueil respectifs. et qu’avec courage et persévérance quelques-uns d’entre eux, tels que ceux-ci, ont réussi à se faire connaître et apprécier aussi bien sur le plan professionnel que celui de l’écriture. rencontres exceptionnelles portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201895 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/illustrateur https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/artiste_peintre arrivé à ce stade de la réflexion, je réalisais assurément que je n’avais plus le droit d’interroger leur passé. car une telle démarche risquerait de remuer et de raviver douloureusement leurs mémoires encombrées par des douleurs et souffrances d’antan. c’est d’ailleurs pour cette raison qu’un certain nombre de compatriotes, désespérés, avaient décidé à une période de leur vie, de tout laisser derrière eux, de tout abandonner, dans la perspective de trouver quelque part ailleurs dans le monde une terre d’accueil. si jamais la chance était avec eux. or ce fut de cette façon aussi que beaucoup d’entre eux ont péri hélas en mer. d’autres, ayant eu plus de chance ont survécu. il m’est de ce fait impossible de les interroger sur des sujets aussi tragiques. c’est la raison pour laquelle j’ai noté que ces gens, qu’ils soient maintenant établis en australie, en france ou même en nouvelle-calédonie, sont de nature particulièrement discrète sur le passé sombre qu’ils ont eu à subir. je réalise en définitive que cette réflexion m’enjoint d’observer un silence respectueux vis-à-vis de tous. lorsque soudainement je me souviens d’un document que m’avait transmis un ami médecin sans frontière d’origine calédonienne, qui revenait en 1982 d’une mission humanitaire de plusieurs mois à poulo bidong. une l’île bondée de réfugiés vietnamiens à cette époque, située au large de la côte malaisienne. je m’empresse de le ressortir de mes archives. il s’agit d’une sorte de confidence anonyme oubliée ou abandonnée dans le petit bureau de cet ami médecin. ce document non signé, rédigé par une jeune femme, m’avait déjà interpellé à cette époque. il est vrai que j’étais bien trop jeune en ce temps-là pour vraiment saisir le degré de détresse de cette personne qui, sur un papier d’emballage chiffonné, relatait ses doutes, ses états d’âme, interrogations, voire ses accusations et autres réflexions existentielles. voici ce qu’avait écrit cette personne d’une main tremblante ; ce dont hélas je n’ai jamais pu connaître ni le nom et encore moins ce qui est advenue d’elle par la suite : « ayant vécu des années noires après la chute de saigon, j’ai subi les discours de haine, de rejet, de discrimination et de condamnation. en fait, âgée seulement de douze ans à ce moment-là, j’étais fragile, impuissante et ne pouvais ni me protéger ni dire quoi que ce soit alors qu’ils salissaient mes parents (mon père finit par être incarcéré dans les camps de rééducation). j’étais paralysée par la peur, la honte, jusqu’à l’impossibilité de me révolter. souvent on me piétinait en classe. comment pourrais-je me sentir fière quand on est traité de la sorte ? si bien qu’au fil du temps, par mes réactions voire mes indocilités j’ai été honnie, rejetée, emprisonnée, puis maudite par les đồng bào communistes. pour être finalement poussée hors du chez moi … de chez nous. bref, j’étais poussée à l’exil ! ainsi après avoir perdu le droit de vivre sur la terre ancestrale, je me retrouve aujourd’hui dans une promiscuité innommable au milieu de la multitude, sur cette île minuscule en mer de chine. alors que durant longtemps j’étais convaincue que je faisais partie des con rồng cháu tiên. c’est-à-dire aimée et indéracinable sur la terre natale des ancêtres. voilà pourquoi jusqu’à l’obsession, je me demande si je pourrais encore m’émouvoir et conserver la moindre fierté, lorsque j’entends prononcer les termes de con rồng cháu tiên ? car suis-je encore vraiment l’un de ces enfants du couple ancestral ? et là où je me trouve actuellement, que peuvent vraiment signifier pour moi les mots : quê hương, đất nước, tổ quốc, quê cha đất mẹ ? puisque submergée par l’horreur et le dégoût, je suis rejetée loin du pays qui m’a vu naître ! c’est la raison pour laquelle je brûle de tous les feux d’une souffrance toujours vive, mes blessures restent béantes. désormais pour survivre à toutes ces épreuves, j’ai décidé de ne plus en parler, ni à y penser. oui ! je demeurerai plongée dans un silence sidéral dès lors qu’il s’agit de ce passé, de mon passé, l’exil, la guerre, la rupture avec ma famille … » vanmai portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201896 en découvrant dès la toute première fois ce texte puissant, je ne pouvais que compatir sur son sort. et même si j’avais la possibilité de lui écrire en ce temps-là, je n’aurais pu lui exprimer grand-chose. aujourd’hui, en relisant ce document poignant, quelque trente-cinq ans après, la maturité aidant et avec un peu plus de discernement j’ai envie de lui dire : « chère inconnue, chère sœur : compte tenu de la qualité de ton écriture et de tes réflexions, je suis convaincu que comme beaucoup d’autres de nos compatriotes dans ton cas, tu t’en es très bien sortie. et que tu occupes depuis lors une fonction importante, quelque part dans le monde, digne de ta personnalité et de tes qualifications. si jamais un jour ou l’autre par le plus grand des hasards, tu découvrais ce texte, j’espère qu’il pourra répondre en partie à tes angoisses, remords et désespérances qui sans doute sont toujours enfouis au plus profond de toi-même. j’espère qu’il en sera de même pour ceux et celles qui ont eu à subir semblables tourments et douleurs. et que mes propos puissent apporter un peu de baume dans vos cœurs tourmentés. c’est en tout cas le vœu le plus sincère et le plus ardent que je me permets de formuler ici à votre intention. certes, de nos jours ces expressions đồng bào : compatriote ou camarade, quê hương : sol natal, đất nước : pays, tổ quốc : patrie, quê cha đất mẹ : mère-patrie, et même con rồng cháu tiên: peuple né d’un dragon et d’une fée, sont de nos jours galvaudées et fourvoyés sous le système politique et administratif actuel. mais dis-toi bien que lorsque, toi comme moi, nous évoquions ces termes, nous devrions penser uniquement au việt nam éternel, avec ses héritages culturels, ses légendes, ses coutumes et traditions immuables qui continuent à irriguer nos veines, à pénétrer notre esprit où que nous soyons, et qu’en fin de compte ils nous transforment, nous transcendent pour devenir ce que nous sommes aujourd’hui ! bien entendu cette époque douloureuse et les terribles épreuves que vous avez eu à traverser, il y en a eu d’autres aussi dramatiques lors des derniers conflits majeurs au việt nam à cause de l’occupation étrangère et, surtout, durant la lutte héroïque de nos ancêtres contre leurs puissants voisins qui par le passé ont occupé notre sol durant près d’un millénaire. c’est la raison pour laquelle, malgré les vicissitudes, les souffrances et les larmes parfois, je pense que nous ne devrions jamais oublier ni rejeter de notre mémoire ce sentiment de fierté qui nous lie viscéralement au pays de nos ancêtres : le việt nam éternel ! puisque les envahisseurs tout comme les dictateurs et tyrans passent, mais notre việt nam millénaire sera toujours là. un pays, c’est comme une très grande famille, il y a parmi ses enfants des bons, des moins bons et même des mauvais. mais par-dessus tout, aimons notre pays tel qu’il est. faisons tout notre possible pour conserver et maintenir nos racines dans son sol, dans sa terre nourricière au sens large du terme, malgré l’éloignement et les distances. de sorte à nous réconcilier pleinement avec le pays sacré de nos chers parents. bien entendu, cela ne m’empêche aucunement d’aimer aussi ma patrie d’adoption ! » c’est ainsi qu’abasourdi par tout ce qui vient d’être lu et écrit, il ne me restait finalement d’autre choix que d’accepter l’invitation du colloque de melbourne. afin de faire d’une part connaissance de ces écrivains reconnus et, d’autre part, rencontrer pour mieux apprécier d’autres compatriotes. car la plupart des vietnamiens accueillis aujourd’hui en australie ont été des réfugiés, ayant réussi à fuir leur pays d’origine dans les années quatre-vingt. par conséquent et dans le but d’associer à ma manière par l’action des mots à ces souffrances et malheurs, j’ai choisi de révéler par l’écriture ma propre vision, tout comme mes obsessions, voire mes ressentiments sur cette guerre du việt nam. c’est ainsi que j’ai décidé de présenter ma communication sur les souffrances morales et psychiques, par un descendant de chân đăng. bien que celui-ci vivait très loin de ces lieux de guerre et d’horreur. rencontres exceptionnelles portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201897 à dire vrai, même distancé par des milliers de kilomètres des champs de bataille, ce jeune personnage se sentait profondément concerné par ces conflits majeurs qui, durant trop longtemps, ravageaient et dévastaient le célèbre pays du con rồng cháu tiên. ainsi à l’heure et aux dates prévues, nous nous sommes rencontrés avec joie et émotion. puis tout devenait naturel et facile. très vite, nos « rencontres » littéraires, particulièrement enrichissantes et réconfortantes, se transformèrent en véritable bonheur de se retrouver, rassemblés-là par une même passion, celle de l’amour du pays ancestral en plus de celui du livre et de l’écrit. les barrières linguistiques que je craignais tant au départ n’existaient plus. j’exposais ma communication en français. les autres auteurs s’exprimaient pour leur part en anglais. les traducteurs et interprètes faisaient le reste. finalement ces lecture et écriture plurielles nous permettent de partager nos écrits, notre passion, nos réflexions ici et ailleurs, internationalement. j’ai trouvé un sentiment de fierté d’être l’unique auteur s’exprimant dans la langue de molière dans cette enceinte culturelle de l’université de melbourne. ultime confidence pour terminer. en plus de ce colloque rencontres—rencontres que je qualifierai sans hésitation d’enrichissantes et fécondes—j’ai été charmé par cette ville de quatre millions et demi d’habitants, riche de sa société multiculturelle, de son vaste réseau de tramway, en plus d’un savant mélange d’architectures contemporaines avec celles de l’époque victorienne. pour toutes ces raisons, je pense que melbourne mérite bien l’incomparable symbole de cité la plus agréable à vivre au monde. tous ces éléments réunis font que je garde un souvenir ému et impérissable de mon séjour dans cette belle grande ville culturelle d’australie. références do, t. 2008, ‘exile: rupture and continuity in jean vanmai’s chân đăng and fils de chân đăng,’ in exile cultures, misplaced identities, (eds) p. allatson & j. mccormack. rodopi, amsterdam & new york: 151–172. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401205924_010 vanmai, j. 1982, ‘chân đăng’: les tonkinois de calédonie au temps colonial. société d’études historiques de nouvelle-calédonie, nouméa, nouvelle-calédonie. ______ 1983, fils de chân đăng. éditions de l’océanie, nouméa, nouvelle-calédonie. vanmai portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201898 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401205924_010 © 2017 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: bissoonauth, a. and ward, r. 2017. introduction: communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:2, 1-5. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v14i2.5610 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 2 september 2017 communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue, guest edited by anu bissoonauth and rowena ward. introduction introduction: communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue anu bissoonauth1*, rowena ward1 1 school of humanities and social inquiry, faculty of law, humanities and the arts, university of wollongong, northfields avenue, wollongong nsw 2522 *corresponding author: dr anu bissoonauth, school of humanities and social inquiry, faculty of law, humanities and the arts, university of wollongong, northfields avenue, wollongong nsw 2522, australia. anu_bissoonauth_bedford@uow.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5610 article history: received 10/07/2017; revised 10/09/2017; accepted 13/09/2017; published 05/10/2017 abstract this special issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies emerged from discussions about the need to focus research on the diversity of the pacific and the sustainability of pacific peoples and communities for future generations. the issue brings together articles by researchers from australia and new caledonia with interests in sustainability from the disciplines of linguistics, cultural studies, social science and history in and across the pacific region. the papers are drawn primarily from presentations at a symposium on ‘pacific communities acting for sustainability,’ held at the university of wollongong in july 2016, which involved academics from australia and new caledonia. keywords sustainability; pacific; australia; new caledonia; solomon islands, papua new guinea 1 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5610 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5610 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:anu_bissoonauth_bedford@uow.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5610 this special issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies emerged from discussions about the need to focus research on the diversity of the pacific and the sustainability of pacific peoples and communities for future generations. the issue brings together articles by researchers from australia and new caledonia with interests in sustainability from the disciplines of linguistics, cultural studies, social science and history in and across the pacific region. the papers are drawn primarily from presentations at a symposium on ‘pacific communities acting for sustainability,’ held at the university of wollongong in july 2016, which involved academics from australia and new caledonia. the focus on sustainability in the pacific is important: the pacific is not only on australia’s eastern door step—even though as edward wolfers (in this issue) suggests, many australians do not recognise it as such—but also because many of the small island nations of the pacific are at risk of losing their traditional practices as economic development, globalisation, ethnic tensions and climate change take their toll. pacific communities engage in a variety of activities to sustain their social, political, linguistic and cultural heritages as well as their survival. these activities differ across time, space and geographical setting. that is they are, to use the words of nicola marks (in this issue), ‘dynamic and changing’ rather than static. the activities to do with sustainability can be compulsory or voluntary, but their overarching aim is to enhance survival and the relationships and networks within and between communities. indeed, there is a growing body of interdisciplinary research from the sciences, social sciences and the humanities—see reviews by mcgrail (2011); peterson (2016); bennett et al. (2016)—that identifies and endorses practices in communities that promote engagement, continuity and a healthy legacy for future generations. the concept of sustainability has been defined differently depending on the discipline. however, over the last two decades or so sustainability has increasingly become associated with the environment; but it does not have to be so. irrespective of the definition or discipline, the underlying theme is the maintenance of a resource of some type, for the future. the resource can be natural, for example water, actual communities, languages, and cultures and practices that assist in the ongoing maintenance of the resource. the united nations 1987 brundtland report, also known as ‘our common future,’ referred to sustainable development as meeting ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (united nations 1987: 16). while this definition remains workable, the premise of the report was that sustainable development required ‘not only a new era of economic growth for nations in which the majority are poor, but an assurance that those poor get their fair share of the resources required to sustain that growth. such equity would be aided by political systems that secure effective citizen participation in decision making’ (united nations 1987: 16). unfortunately, this situation has not eventuated. in this issue, nicola marks and edward wolfers both refer to the brundtland report in their discussions of ‘caring’ as a sustainable concept and concerns about attaining sustainability in the pacific respectively. other initiatives, such as unesco’s man and the biosphere programme, which was launched in 1971, clearly anticipated the need to address human development with the needs of future generations in mind, and advocated innovative and interdisciplinary means to do so (koshy et al. 2008: 5). the articles in this issue cross disciplinary and methodological boundaries to analyse the challenges and opportunities of sustainability for communities in the pacific region. the authors ask questions about how pacific communities cope with and comprehend the social, political, environmental and cultural changes that affect their values, lifestyle, identities, memories, and the legacies those communities will leave for future generations. the papers focus on communities in new caledonia, solomon islands, papua new guinea and australia bissoonauth and ward portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 2 to highlight the diverse means, approaches and forces by and/or against which communities are attempting to ‘maintain’ themselves as sustainable entities. in her contribution ‘population, reproduction and ivf in new caledonia: exploring sociocultural and caring dimensions of sustainable development,’ nicola marks critiques the united nations’ social development goals (sdgs). she advocates for the integration of the concept of ‘caring’ in sustainable development and a consideration of sociocultural practices as dynamic and evolving rather than static. moreover, while marks supports the publication of the new, broader sdgs, at the same time, she suggests that the united nations needs to more overtly recognise multiple normative visions for development and sustainability. marks proposes ‘caring sustainable development’ as one way forward. using new caledonia as a case study, she argues that ‘caring sustainable development’ could assist in overcoming the complex historical and colonial population divides and differences of approach between the indigenous kanak population and representatives of the french administration. in her research on the use of ivf, marks argues that while ivf may seem ‘untraditional’ if sociocultural practices are thought of as static, it is not however the case when sociocultural practices are recognised as dynamic and changing. pascual’s article, ‘le musée du bagne en nouvelle-calédonie et ses constructions identitaires’ [the penal colony museum in new caledonia and its identity constructions] compares representations of convict history in contemporary museum spaces in australia and new caledonia. her comparative and in-depth analysis draws on historical and museographic methodologies of data collection to examine the discourses promoted by the hyde park barracks museum in sydney and the nouville penal colony museum in nouméa. in particular, pascual asks how the migrant past is connected to convict memory in public exhibition spaces. she argues that museums have a political role to play in bringing communities together and encouraging an acceptance of the convict past as part of each country’s identity in order to build a sustainable legacy for future generations. anu bissoonauth and nina parish’s study, ‘french, english or kanak languages? can traditional languages and cultures be sustained in new caledonia?,’ analyses language use patterns in new caledonia and attitudes to multilingualism and the maintenance of ancestral cultures as the french territory prepares for the referendum on self-determination scheduled before the end of 2018. they compare the results of two fieldwork trips carried out in urban and rural regions respectively to show a generational shift in the language habits and attitudes of new caledonians of melanesian descent. importantly, they argue that while french is new caledonia’s dominant lingua franca, english is more valued than ancestral melanesian languages by the younger generations because it is associated with international mobility and access to the english-speaking pacific. moreover, the authors show that while the older generations perceive the tjibaou cultural centre, which houses a research and heritage department, as a symbolic traditional space for melanesian art and culture, the younger generations view it as a modern place associated with contemporary art and outdoor performances. importantly, these potentially contradictory views are not at odds with each other but operate to support the work of the cultural centre. rowena ward’s article ‘the internment and repatriation of the japanese-french nationals resident in new caledonia, 1941–1946,’ considers how changes to the french nationality law under vichy france had negative impacts on the japanese community in new caledonia. as ward shows, the changes to the nationality laws enabled members of the japanese ‘enemy’ to be arrested in new caledonia and then transferred to australia for internment. this in turn facilitated their repatriation to japan rather than new caledonia after the end of hostilities. introduction: communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 3 as a consequence, the japanese community in new caledonia, which had first emerged in the late 19th century, effectively disappeared. in short, ward shows how government policies and international conflicts can adversely affect the long-term sustainability of a community. in their paper, ‘challenges for sustainable communities in the solomon islanders: food security in honiara and livelihoods on savo island,’ nichole georgeou and charles hawksley examine the challenges faced by a community as it engages with the emerging market economy in solomon islands. based on focus group research, they highlight the diverse practices of and challenges facing different communities of savo islanders in accessing and engaging with the honiara central market (hcm), the largest fresh food and vegetable market in solomon islands. the authors emphasise the importance of gender roles among savo islanders in influencing their engagement with hcm and how decisions on the use of the cash are made. moreover, they highlight how different crops are produced for sale at the market in relation to specific practices of consumption and how these decisions interact to influence the long-term sustainability of the communities on savo island. finally, as a concluding statement to the special issue, in ‘sustainability: suspicions concerning attainability, with particular reference to the pacific,’ edward wolfers provides an overarching historical analysis of the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development in the pacific. he argues that before colonisation traditional pacific societies had their own sociocultural practices to ensure the sustainability of the natural environment and of trade. he asserts that sustainability for the colonial governments in these islands was linked to preparing pacific islanders for self-government and independence and not for the preservation of their local traditions. concerns for sustainability in the newly independent countries, therefore, were left to international organisations and to foreign aid donors. wolfers highlights a political shortfall in health, education, economy and government services that is undermining the sustainable development in tonga, samoa and papua new guinea. he recommends that future academic research on sustainability in the pacific should focus on what is happening on the ground and not be restricted to government discourses and policies. acknowledgements funding for the colloquia on which these papers are based was provided by the university of wollongong’s university international committee (uic) in conjunction with the faculty of law, humanities and the arts. references bennett, n. j. et al. 2016. ‘conservation social science: understanding and integrating human dimensions to improve conservation,’ biological conservation, vol. 205: 93–108. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.biocon.2016.10.006 koshy, k., mataki, & lal, m. 2008. sustainable development: a pacific islands perspective. a report man on follow-up to the mauritius 2005 review of the barbados programme of action. unesco cluster office for the pacific states, samoa. mcgrail, s. 2011. ‘editor’s introduction to this special issue on “sustainable futures,”’ journal of future studies, vol. 15, no. 3: 1–12. online, available: http://jfsdigital.org/wp-content/ uploads/2014/01/153-a01.pdf [accessed 13 september 2017]. bissoonauth and ward portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 4 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2016.10.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2016.10.006 http://jfsdigital.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/153-a01.pdf http://jfsdigital.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/153-a01.pdf peterson, n. 2016. ‘introduction to the special issue on social sustainability: integration, context, and governance,’ sustainability: science, practice & policy, vol. 12, no. 1: 3–7. online, available: https:// sspp.proquest.com/introduction-to-the-special-issue-on-social-sustainability-integration-context-andgovernance-dc31ee5cf89e [accessed 13 september 2017]. united nations 1987, world commission on environment and development [brundtlandt commission], report, annex: ‘our common future’ [brundtlandt report], unga a/42/427, 4 august. introduction: communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 5 https://sspp.proquest.com/introduction-to-the-special-issue-on-social-sustainability-integration-context-and-governance-dc31ee5cf89e https://sspp.proquest.com/introduction-to-the-special-issue-on-social-sustainability-integration-context-and-governance-dc31ee5cf89e https://sspp.proquest.com/introduction-to-the-special-issue-on-social-sustainability-integration-context-and-governance-dc31ee5cf89e chapter 2 the militant nun as political activist and feminist in martial law philippines mina roces, university of new south wales the 1984 feature film sister stella l. had its main character sister stella say the activist slogan: ‘kung hindi tayo kikilos, sino pa, kung hindi ngayon, kailan pa! [if we do not act, who will, if not now, when else!] ’(reyes 1989) this slogan was one of the catchphrases of the activists of the 1970s. the fact that screenplay writer jose lacaba purposely gave these lines to the character who was a militant nun (not a priest or other activist) was testimony to the visibility of the militant nun as representative of opposition to the marcos dictatorship. the plot of the movie involves a nun, sister stella legaspi, who is initially politically indifferent, but who eventually becomes sensitised to the plight of the strikers during a labour dispute in a depressed area. exposed to the miserable lives of the strikers, she joins them on the picket line, only to witness the military assault and murder of a labour leader. this experience strengthens her determination to fight against tyranny and oppression and she delivers that activist slogan at the climax of the film. the fictionalised story of sister stella l. (played by film star vilma santos) depicted the militant nun’s metamorphosis into political activist. nuns were in fact interviewed and consulted by director mike de leon in the making of the film, thus presenting a relatively accurate image of the militant nun in the martial law years (1972-1986).1 it was the nun’s exposure to the victims of martial law that inspired them to speak out for political detainees, support labour strikes, report on the abuses of the regime and later act as human barricades in the front lines that faced the military. but the nuns were not the only women political activists. there were many women who joined the communist party of the philippines and their military arm the new people’s army (npa). women also filled the ranks of the social democrats, the terrorist group the april 6th liberation movement, human rights reformist groups and the traditional political oppositionists, 1 interview with sister christine tan, leverisa, malate, metro-manila, february 15, 1993. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 1 including those who were in exile abroad. but these women remained marginalised in those groups, were denied leadership positions and in most cases given administrative or caretaking responsibilities, which reinforced traditional gender roles of women as secretaries, writers, nurses, cooks and ‘mothers’ or child minders (hilsdon 1995, p. 82). in contrast, the militant nuns, though still conforming to traditional gendered images of the woman as moral guardian, discovered that they had ‘moral power’. in this sense, they became much more effective than the women in other radical organisations. not seen as wanting official power, but revered as moral guardians, these militant nuns became a successful pressure group. first lady mrs imelda romualdez marcos, for instance, invited sister christine tan to malacañang four times for ‘discussions’ (perhaps to win the nuns over), the invitation itself evidence of the potential clout of moral power.2 sister christine was later invited by no less than president corazon aquino to be a member of the constitutional convention of 1986. nuns stood in front of military barricades to protect demonstrators from potential violence. in most cases, they did succeed in preventing military violence (as in the people power revolution of 1986), although there were some nuns who suffered beatings and torture by the military. this paper argues that it was the nuns’ unique positioning as ambivalent women that gave them power and legitimacy as political activists.4 in contrast to other women in radical politics, these women succeeded in becoming visible leaders and symbols of political activism while acting as a pressure group vis-à-vis the dictatorship. traditionally, women are defined in terms of their kinship relations with men: as sisters, wives, mothers, daughters for example. politics in the philippines is not male-dominated but gendered: men exercised official power while women exercised unofficial power through their ties with male politicians—as wives, mothers, sisters, daughters and even mistresses of male politicians. because filipino concepts see power as held by the kinship group, women—though marginalised in official political positions—can exercise power as members of the kinship group. women as the support system in kinship politics (the dominant dynamic in philippine politics where political power is 2 interview with sister christine tan, leverisa, malate, metro-manila, february 15, 1993. 3 that is, their role as nuns unsettled traditional definitions of women by highlighting contradictory discourses about how women exercised power and the categories of traditional/modern woman. 4 that is, their role as nuns unsettled traditional definitions of women by highlighting contradictory discourses about how women exercised power and the categories of traditional/modern woman. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 2 used to benefit the kinship group) are active political agents. women as wives and kin of male politicians who exercise power through their male relatives are the political norm. women radicals (apart from the nuns) shunned kinship politics, closing the door to power behind the scenes. compelled to compete in a male dominated environment where male rules prevailed, these women radicals failed to claim leadership roles and were pushed aside as auxiliaries in the struggle for national liberation. the militant nuns were theoretically unattached to men (though they still remained members of the kinship group, they lived in a world outside their families). and yet, by the end of the martial law period they had exercised power much like the traditional wives of politicians. not claiming official power (or even desiring it), they were different from the other women in radical politics whose aim was to gain political power in the end. the nuns were much more similar to the traditional women, who as wives or kin of politicians acted as a pressure group behind the scenes. in fact, like these wives of politicians, they metamorphosed into ‘politicians’ themselves after exercising power behind the scenes first. just as mrs marcos became governor of metro-manila, minister of human settlements and later congresswoman after she exercised an enormous amount of power as first lady, nuns like sister christine tan (who became a constitutional convention delegate) and sister mary john mananzan (who became chair of the citizen’s alliance for consumer protection and president of gabriela, the umbrella group representing a myriad of women’s organisations), claimed important political positions after they had exercised power behind the scenes during the martial law period. nuns were also ambivalent in the sphere of political power: they had ‘moral power’, but not political office. their source of moral power was the catholic church and traditional definitions of the feminine, which conflated ‘woman’ with ‘moral guardian’. in the provinces in particular, assumption nuns traced their ‘moral power’ to the respect they earned from the community through their activities such as providing education for the poor, negotiating with sugar planters for better conditions for sacadas (migratory seasonal workers who are employed to harvest sugar cane), and generally supporting the portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 3 campaigns of the oppressed (such as tribal women in baguio, the highlands).5 assumption nuns realised immediately that the catholic church in the philippines was ‘political’ and that their ‘moral power’ was thus inevitably political.6 this moral-cumpolitical power was acknowledged not just by the authoritarian rulers, but also by the other opposition groups, such as the npa (the new people’s army, the military arm of the communist party of the philippines). particularly in the provinces where the npa had a strong influence, it realised that nuns could be political rivals or allies. assumption nuns, for instance, noticed that the npa solicited their help. conversely, at least one assumption nun received death threats from the npa.7 by the close of martial law, the nuns invoked this moral power in critical situations. this newly found power then stood in stark contrast to their marginalisation within the male dominated church hierarchy. i argue that the experience of martial law when they discovered moral power also transformed them into feminists. they became the first women to challenge cultural constructions of the feminine.8 why? i suggest two possible explanations here. first of all, their ambivalent position as women unattached to men prevented them from practising kinship politics – in fact they represent the very antithesis of kinship politics (much more than the women in radical politics, who despite being theoretically opposed to kinship politics, discover that in practice this kind of politics is still alive and kicking within their organisations). secondly, the nuns were confronted with the contradiction between their politically effective ‘moral’ power and their marginalisation within the male dominated church hierarchy. the realisation of this contrast between their political voice in a dictatorship and their ineffective voice within the church hierarchy may have triggered the first feminist consciousness. martial 5 interview with sister gertrude borres, religious of the assumption, dean assumption college, san lorenzo makati metro-manila, january 21, 2002, and interview with sister josefina magat, religious of the assumption, president of the assumption convent, assumption convent, san lorenzo makati, metro-manila, february 1, 2002. 6 interview with sister gertrude borres; interview with sister josefina magat. 7 interview with sister gertrude borres. 8 in the late 1960s and 1970s, the first feminist organisation makibaka was formed, but when martial law was declared, it was forced to go underground and it later faded away. the women here were only beginning to challenge the cultural construction of the feminine, particularly the image of maria clara (submissive, vapid, demure, timid woman made ‘ideal’ through the character of jose rizal’s novel). the suffragists of the 1920s entered the new public spaces opened to them for the first time (went to university, founded women’s universities, joined the professions), but they did not confront definitions of the feminine; instead, they merely extended it to include other things. hence the suffragists were also beauty queens (carnival queens), heads of civic organisations as well as founders of universities. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 4 law became the catalyst that transformed nuns into radicals and feminists. by the later years of martial law, their anti-dictatorship stance was expanded to include specific women’s issues. the nuns became the first women’s group to challenge traditional cultural constructions of the feminine, form feminist organisations and then focus on trying to alter these traditional definitions of the feminine by teaching women’s studies courses and supporting research on women’s issues. a nun, sister mary john mananzan, became the head of gabriela (general assembly binding women for reforms, integrity, equality, leadership and action), an umbrella organisation for around 200 women’s groups in the early 1980s. the scholarly literature on women’s organisations in the philippines concentrates on the tension between feminism and nationalism, the discourse on the woman question, political activism, feminist perspectives, and descriptive accounts of the various women’s groups.9 the consensus among these scholars is that, in the tension between feminism and nationalism, the priority of national liberation downplayed women’s issues and prioritised other issues of social injustice, dictatorship, class struggle, democracy, violence and revolution. primarily interested in women’s activism in groups, scholars have chosen to focus only on groups that at one point or another may have grappled with the woman question (claussen 1998). hence, apart from women in the communist party of the philippines (cpp), other women radicals who were members of radical groups composed of both sexes have not been examined from a gendered perspective. exclusively women’s organisations were the ones prioritised in the scholarly research, regardless of whether these groups utilised feminist perspectives or not; what mattered was that they had been associated with political opposition or with radical politics. 9 on feminism and nationalism, see angeles (1989) and hilsdon (1995); on the feminist perspectives and/or feminist scholars see hyndman (1992); for accounts of women’s groups, see santos-maranan (1984); de dios (1996); gomez (1991); ronquillo (1984); tangcangco (1992); and for the feminist scholars’ perspective, see aguilar (1988 and 1994-1995). portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 5 thus the militant nuns, because they were not officially organised, were not given the prominence they deserved in the scholarly literature on women’s organisations or activist women. this could be explained partly by the fact that they do not have a unified organisation with a name, and partly because the common perception was that they were dismissed as mga madre lamang, just nuns. a recent phd dissertation, however, focused on the benedictine nuns and their evolution into feminist nuns, but the analysis was located in the context of a nun’s vocation. in ‘un(convent)ional sisterhood: feminist catholic nuns in the philippines’, heather lynn claussen argued that the nun’s feminism challenges the perspective that philippine feminism evolves out of nationalist/communist mass movements, coming instead from nun’s spirituality and being influenced by indigenous philippine priestesshood and international sources (claussen 1998: 201). using the case study of the benedictine nuns of st scholastica’s and relying quite heavily on the autobiography of one nun (who i suspect is sister mary john mananzan, under the pseudonym sister justine), claussen credits the nun’s exposure to women’s issues abroad, coupled with the observance of similar situations in the philippine context, as the catalyst that inspires feminist consciousness. furthermore, the very circumstances of nuns as unmarried (and thus celibate) women who as a sisterhood make decisions on their own, independently of men and outside the familial context, favourably position them as budding feminists (claussen 1998, pp. 374-5). this view of the origins of the nuns’ feminism is generally accurate and applies not only to the benedictine nuns (claussen’s research) but also to other religious orders, such as the religious of the assumption. many of the nuns were exposed to feminist ideas when they went overseas. but although their spirituality and their observance of women’s oppression in the local context were cited as influential in their feminist awakening, the links with indigenous philippine priestesshood were perhaps weaker in orders outside the benedictines (sister mary john has written about the role of filipino women in prehispanic times). while claussen acknowledged that the benedictine nuns were also affiliated with political and activist movements, including environmental activism,10 she did not single out political activism as an important step towards the evolution of the nuns’ feminism (in fact she argued that feminism did not evolve out of nationalist/communist mass movements). claussen argued that in the benedictine order, 10 interestingly, the same story which mary john revealed to me in an interview about her ‘baptism of portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 6 one nun could be singled out for building a group of feminist nuns in st scholastica’s. this nun, sister justine (perhaps sister mary john, who claussen described as being somewhat of a ‘legend’ and a ‘cultural heroine’ was a ‘key player in fanning the flames of missionary benedictine interest in, and commitment to a “feminism” fit for the philippines’ (claussen 1998, pp. 374-5). this paper modifies claussen’s arguments by suggesting that it was the disparity between their moral power vis-à-vis a dictatorship and their lack of power in the catholic church, that triggered their feminist consciousness. hence, political activism had some influence on the evolution of the nun’s feminism. but certainly, exposure to feminism abroad was also critical to their conscientisation (to use the nun’s term). on the whole, the militant nun—though acknowledged by everyone as the most visible symbol of martial law activism (epitomised by the film sister stella l.)—has been largely neglected by scholars of political activism and feminist scholars. this is regrettable, since the nuns (not the suffragists) were among the first to challenge traditional cultural constructions of the feminine in the philippines.11 martial law and the birth of the militant nun the nuns were transformed into political activists almost immediately after martial law was declared in 1972. the plight of a vast number of political prisoners or detainees (many of whom were tortured and killed or salvaged) first attracted the attention of these women, who—because of their christian vocation—staunchly believed in the causes of social justice. eventually, the problems of labourers who participated in illegal strikes against low salaries and inappropriate working conditions, and the evictions of tribal groups from their lands compelled the progressive nuns to come out of their convents, braving arrest and military force. at first, it was the plight of the political prisoners that awakened issues of social justice and transformed the nuns into political radicals. sister mariani dimaranan became the president of the task force detainees or tfd, an organisation founded to document the predicament of political prisoners, to give them support, to lobby for their release, speaking out against their unjust fire’ appears in this account under the pseudonym sister justine. 11 the filipino suffragists were also beauty queens, civic workers and founders of women’s universities. they did not challenge existing definitions of the feminine (especially as beauty queen) though they extended these definitions to include new roles in the new public spaces opened to women for the first time. see (roces 2001). portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 7 imprisonment and torture. nuns were active from the very beginning of martial law, when most filipinos, terrified of arrest, torture and death, kept quiet; when even the student radicals—so vehement in their demonstrations against president marcos in the early 1970s—either went underground or kept silent. the mob of angry student protesters who filled the streets in the late 1960s quickly vanished, but the militant nuns, with far less noise and more courage, consistently took to the streets to champion human rights. sister mariani’s motivation for becoming a political activist was not the theology of liberation but the practices of the oppressive regime, which forced the religious women to confront the reason behind their decision to become nuns: ay no i think the theology of liberation contributed, but i think, humanly speaking, they were touched by the situation of oppression; for me that is it. siempre, they saw the situation, they analyze also, and iyon nga, ang tanong mo sa sarili, bakit ako nagmadre? hindi ba? ano ang response ko sa situation na ganyan if i am a follower of christ talaga? de siempre may vow ka ng poverty; ano ang gagawin ko? [i think the theology of liberation contributed, but i think, humanly speaking, they were touched by the situation of oppression; for me that is it. of course, they saw the situation, they analyze also, and that’s it. one asks oneself, why did i become a nun? isn’t it? what is my response to a situation like that if i am a true follower of christ? of course i have a vow of poverty, so what am i going to do?]12 due to her political involvement, sister mariani was arrested and detained in camp crame for fifteen days and bicutan for thirty-two days. she was, however, not the only religious arrested in the simultaneous raids on convents, seminaries, catholic schools, and dormitories. these religious premises were ransacked by the military in an official search for ‘subversive materials’: st joseph’s college (where sister mariani was college registrar), our lady of angels seminary, the convent of the oblate sisters of nôtre dame, the redemptorist monasteries in davao and tacloban, and the good shepherd sisters in matina, davao, were also raided. on the orders of defense secretary juan ponce enrile, st joseph’s college, too, was raided, because the military suspected it was a centre for the distribution of underground newspapers (liberation 1973, pp. 1-2). witnessing the torture of political prisoners while she herself was under detention inspired sister mariani to join the task force detainees and to take over the presidency in april 1975. prior to that, an american franciscan priest had been president for a few months, but he relinquished the presidency to her. the task force detainees, or tfd, 12 interview with sister mariani dimaranan, new manila, quezon city, metro-manila, philippines. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 8 was dominated by women. it could loosely be classified as a women’s organisation, for—although it was not an exclusively women’s group—it happened to be dominated by women until the mid-1980s, when an equal number of men began to participate. the gendered nature of the tfd seemed to be a product of circumstances—the men were political detainees, and their wives formed an organisation to agitate for their release. militant nuns and wives of detainees cooperated in order to obtain documentation clandestinely on the plight of the political prisoners. the nuns in particular were deeply involved, as their activities included smuggling documents under their habits.15 a good number of nuns risked their lives in these activities. ang bayan (ideological paper of the communist party of the philippines, cpp) reported at least one case of a nun (pseudonym – sister jo) who escaped being burned to death by government militia sent to interrogate her.16 sister mary bernard, a carmelite nun, was conferred heroine status by the bantayog ng mga bayani for her work with the tfd for nine years (1975 1984) until she died of cancer. she too participated not because of the ideological principles of liberation theology, but because of her strong sense of justice and a desire to help those who were unfairly treated.17 sister christine tan, who became chairman of the executive board of the association of major religious superiors, boldly issued a memorandum to all major superiors of religious men and women that they will continue to publish signs of the times despite telegrams from chairman hans menzi of the philippine council for print-media asking them to ‘stop publishing various reports’.18 she said that publishing the newspaper was a defence of their human rights: ‘that is, the right to receive and disseminate information not carried by the controlled media, for our theological reflection, 15 interview with sister mariani dimaranan. 16 ‘madre, nakatakas sa mga pasista’, ang bayan, february 28, 1978, p. 11; ‘sister jo and her brush with urban white terror’, balita ng malayang pilipinas, february 25, 1978, p. 14. both underground papers are in the collection held at the cultural centre of the philippines. 17 sr. mary bernard, ‘remembering sr. mary bernard jimenez’, profile, philipppine human rights update, december 15-january 14, 1990, no page; mila astorga-garcia, ‘sr. mary bernard, religious activist’, october 4, 1984, no page. both articles are in the file of sr. mary bernard held at the bantayog ng mga bayani foundation library, pasig, metro-manila, philippines. 18 sister m. christine tan, rgs, letter addressed to major superiors of religious men and women on signs of the times, november 3, 1975, in philippine radical papers, the university of the philippines main library, microfilm, reel 09, box 17/24.01. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 9 conscientization and christian response’.19 the religious position was clear: ‘from the start we wanted our publication to be partisan: for the poor, the suffering and the oppressed; for truth, justice and freedom. but partisanship does not prevent our publication from extending every effort to be objective, that is, to present the facts.’20 sister christine’s memorandum was issued during the time when resistance to the regime was severely punished. once the martial law administration declared strikes illegal, any worker who agitated for an increase in wages or improved labour conditions risked military arrest and detention. sister mary john mananzan’s (a benedictine nun from st scholastica’s), ‘baptism of fire’ (her words) into the world of radical politics was a 1975 strike of workers at the la tondeña wine factory. workers approached st scholastica’s (obviously aware that nuns had ‘moral’ power before the nuns themselves discovered it), appealing for the support of the nuns. four nuns responded. once on site, the nuns linked arms (kapit-bisig) at the forefront of the picket lines to protect the striking workers.21 this became a pattern of all subsequent participation in illegal strikes. in all of these strikes, the nuns stood at the front lines. the nuns would automatically come to the front of the picket lines, using their bodies as buffer to shield and protect the workers from military violence. they believed that as dedicated members of the religious community they had the duty to protect the workers, male and female alike, if need be with their lives.22 nuns were not immune from harm. there was never a guarantee that they would be spared; indeed they were hosed, arrested, and harassed by the military. there were incidents where nuns were beaten up at rallies.23 despite the risks and harassment, nuns continued to join demonstrations by workers, usually for higher wages; farmers for land reform; indigenous tribes to defend their tribal lands from seizure; and human rights activists for the release of political prisoners and against human rights violations. 19 letter from sister m. christine tan. 20 letter from sister m. christine tan. 21 interview with sister mary john mananzan, manila, july 20, 1995. 22 interview with sister mariani dimaranan. 23 interview with sister mariani dimaranan; interview with sister mary john mananzan, july 20, 1995; interview with sister christine tan. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 10 the militant nuns elevated moral issues above political ideology by championing the causes of social justice, they also addressed the major problem faced by the philippines in the post-war era. here was one ideology supported by all activist groups, including the communists. the militant nuns were not just anti-marcos or anti-capitalist: they spoke out against various problems of poverty, including malnutrition and low wages; advocated land rights for the peasantry and disenfranchised tribal groups; and fought against maltreatment of political prisoners. stressing that they were not biased toward the left or any particular group, sister mariani remarked, ‘we are overground, level ground, underground, whatever ground’.24 the tfd’s original intent was ‘we help all victims of human rights violations irrespective of ideology’.25 according to sister gertrude borres, assumption passi (iloilo) was established because the planters wanted a school for their children. but because they were open to everyone and because they also sympathised with the sacadas and the npa, they were seen as ‘neutral ground’: ‘but we became a common ground, a leveling of all these things’.26 sister soledad perpiñan (sister sol), who was already a participant in the student activism of the 1960s, was drawn, like sister mary john, into the vortex of radical politics in the martial law period after she participated in the la tondeña strike. sister sol actually had a crucial role to play in the strike as a liaison person. immediately after the strike, she and fellow nuns formed the friends of the workers, which organised metro-manila into four districts to facilitate support activity for the strikers: calling convents for recruits to woman picket lines; making church personnel aware of issues of social justice as well as appealing to the international funding organisations; and getting media coverage with the international press (since local media were censored).27 her main contribution to political activism in the martial law years was as editor, writer, and founder of ibon facts and figures, a newsletter that produced documentation on philippine society, economy and politics (including the underground). first published in 1978, ibon facts and figures became the only available accurate published reportage 24 interview with sister mariani dimaranan. 25 interview with sister mariani dimaranan. 26 interview with sister gertrude borres. 27 interview with sister soledad perpiñan, quezon city, metro-manila, april 20, 1996. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 11 on current events and issues in the philippines. scholars, journalists and academics, particularly from overseas, relied on ibon for their data on philippine society and economy. sister sol and two others were responsible for writing and editing the publication. they chose the name ibon (bird) because the symbol of a bird recalled concepts of liberty and freedom.28 sister josefina magat, an assumption nun, volunteered to be part of an international fact-finding mission which investigated the torture and murder by the military of three university of the philippines students (around 1983). she was an officer of the association of major religious superiors in pampanga at that time. her involvement got her in conflict with a local bishop, who wanted to amend the final report by deleting the part which mentioned the presence of the mayor’s son (he was a friend of the mayor).29 nuns organised themselves into groups and divided tasks among themselves: some prepared the food for the rallies; some remained to pray for their comrades; and some joined the rallies in the picket lines. until the edsa revolution (the people-power revolution named after epifanio de los santos avenue, or edsa, where it happened), the nuns were involved in food preparation (usually sandwiches), in leading prayers, and in protecting lay men and women from the violence of the military.30 during the edsa revolution, they cooked food and distributed food to the soldiers. nuns armed with rosaries knelt down before armoured personnel carriers and pleaded with the military. the nuns also gave shelter and protection to other activist women escaping or hiding from military arrest. when social democrat karen tañada (kasapi member) had to go underground, she hid in convents;31 supreme court justice cecilia muñoz palma found shelter among the benedictine nuns of st scholastica’s when her dissenting opinion brought fear of reprisals;32 and charito planas (woman oppositionist 28 interview with sister soledad perpiñan. 29 interview with sister josefina magat. 30 interview with sister mary john mananzan, manila, july 20, 1995. 31 interview with karen tañada, quezon city, metro-manila, february 7, 1996. 32 interview with supreme court justice cecilia muñoz palma, quezon city, metro-manila, july 11, 1995. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 12 politician) escaped to southern philippines and on to the united states protected by nuns and disguised as one of them.33 during the snap elections of 1986, assumption nuns in the rural areas (pampanga and antique) walked miles to the provincial centre, where they literally hugged ballot boxes to protect them from being taken by the military.34 secretary-general of the citizen’s alliance for consumer protection from 1978, sister mary john mananzan, speaking for this group, delivered speeches criticising the regime on issues such as the rise in oil prices; appeared on television speaking out against a nuclear philippines; and argued with street police for permission to march in the streets to proclaim their stand.35 here was a nun officially taking up the cases of all consumers, defending their rights, protecting their interests, speaking on their behalf, and demanding fair prices for essential commodities. in the rural areas, nuns also got involved in local issues. in 1983-84, sister gertrude borres was threatened with a subpoena for being in the forefront, arms linked (kapitbisig) with other clergy, protesting the demolition of squatter communities. in 1986-88 (even after martial law), she worked with cordillera women who were against open-pit mining.36 discovering ‘moral’ power the question of whether or not the militant nuns should be considered as examples of gendered power was answered in an interview with sister mariani dimaranan, who corrected my statement that nuns did not have power with the assertion, ‘we got moral power’.37 what was this moral power and what are its dynamics? more importantly, how is it gendered and when did the nuns discover its potential? sister sol perpiñan saw 33 interview with vice mayor charito planas, quezon city, metro-manila, july 5, 1995, chic fortich, escape! charito planas: her story (quezon city: new day publishers, 1991). 34 interview with sister gertrude borres and sr. maria carmen r.a., sing for joy! in grateful remembrance, (manila: religious of the assumption philippine-thailand province centennial year, 1992), p. 282. 35 interviews with sister mary john mananzan, manila, february 4, 1994, and july 20, 1995. 36 interview with sister gertrude borres. 37 interview with sister mariani dimaranan. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 13 moral power as ‘real power’.38 and indeed, although more like a moral pressure or political pressure behind the scenes than overt official political power, moral power was very real in the sense that more often than not the nuns were able to influence decisions or at least escape punishment or merely ‘get away with’ an activity that would otherwise have been prohibited. as a priest once told sister mariani, who was then president of the tfd, the organisation that collected documentation on the plight of political prisoners and agitated for their release: ‘kung hindi ka madre na may belo, wala na ang tfd’ (if you were not a nun with a veil, the tfd would no longer be around’).39 the image of a nun (in contrast to a priest, who is male) gives the perception of someone who does not want official power, and who is therefore less threatening. the priest’s statement makes the assumption that, had the president of the tfd been male and not religious, the tfd would have been demolished by the military. when nuns joined picket lines in the illegal demonstrations of the martial law regime, they would not be immediately arrested by the police or the military and would be told by them ‘hindi kayo kasali’ (you are not included [in this fight/cause]).40 although it was true that the military would tend to leave the nuns unharmed, they sometimes arrested them or subjected them to physical violence or beatings. in the agitation for land reform rights and the fight for indigenous land in particular, some nuns suffered arrest and violence.41 the nuns became aware of the potential of moral power when they became political activists. in various written circulars and statements, nuns of various religious orders saw their role not just as helping the victims of martial law, but also as providing help in the evolution of martial law policies, directives and decrees, by making these more compliant with human rights and freedoms (e.g. through ceap, parents obtained favourable reaction from paf regarding the cat program to be carried out for girls’ high schools).42 in 1984, several religious orders released statements calling for a boycott or non-participation in the elections.43 38 interview with sister soledad perpiñan. 39 interview with sister mariani dimaranan. 40 interviews with sister mary john mananzan manila, february 4, 1994, and july 20, 1995. 41 interview with sister soledad perpiñan. 42 ‘religious of the assumption – summary of reflections on amrsp’s survey’, files, association of major religious superiors, new manila, quezon city. 43sisters’ association in mindanao (samin), ‘a statement of conscience on the immorality of the 1984 plebiscite and election’, january 15, 1984,’statement of the good shepherd sisters on the january portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 14 apart from making official statements of their political positions, the nuns also joined or formed organisations with overt oppositional political agendas. for example, sister sol and sister mary john were involved in ‘friends of the workers’—an organisation that helped workers who were striking for better conditions (strikes were illegal during martial law). sister sol knew that ibon’s database was used by the workers (including the benguet gold miners) during collective bargaining.44 here was a clear example where her research and writing gave workers the ammunition for their political and economic struggles. sister sol founded balai—a group interested in environmental issues, which produced its asian journal.45 by 1994, sister mary john was already leading a welga ng bayan (national strike). the nuns’ image as moral guardians or religious figures, coupled with their role as defenders of the oppressed victims of martial law, gave them both moral power and legitimacy. both sister gertrude borres and sister josefina magat affirm that their credibility as nuns working for social justice gave them legitimacy in the community.46 in some cases, they were able to protect the workers from being arrested,47 allow an overtly anti-regime organisation (tfd) to survive, smuggle documents inside their habits48 and negotiate with the military for more physical space at rallies.49 their potential moral power was recognised by then first lady imelda marcos, who invited sister christine tan four times to have an audience with her at malacañang palace. defense minister juan ponce enrile also called sister christine tan to discuss sister sol perpiñan’s activities (sister christine was her provincial superior).50 the classic example of the efficacy of moral power is the ‘people power revolution’ of 1986, when nuns armed with rosaries, along with unarmed civilians, faced the military in armoured plebiscite and may election’, kapisanan ng mga madre sa kamaynilan (kamay), ‘pahayag ng kamay sa darating na eleksyon’ and ‘kamay statement of the may ‘84 election’, all in papers, association of major religious superiors, quezon city, 44 interview with sister soledad perpiñan. 45 interview with sister soledad perpiñan. 46 interview with sister gertrude borres and interview with sister josefina magat. 47 interview with sister soledad perpiñan. 48 interview with sister marianin dimaranan 49 interview with sister mary john mananzan 50 interview with sister sol perpiñan. sister mary john was also told by a friend in the military that there was a file on her. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 15 personnel carriers. faced by these ultimate symbols of moral and religious power, and surrounded by praying civilians, the military hesitated to use violence. the image of nuns in white, kneeling down and saying the rosary in front of heavily armed soldiers, encapsulates the confrontation between two types of gendered power: the macho military man, representing the political power of the army with all its associations with male violence and the non-violent nun, who does not seek political power (represented by her kneeling down and praying), but who exudes moral power. in the snap elections of 1986, the rural areas were more vulnerable to violence and tampering of ballot boxes. sister josefina magat was assigned to one polling area in pampanga. during the elections, a group of armed men fired shots and entered the polling place. by coincidence, the leader recognised sister josefina as the nun who reported a robbery at the police precinct a week earlier and he immediately apologised (‘sorry, po, sorry po’). no one was harmed and the nuns were permitted to carry the ballot boxes to the municipal office. sister josefina believed that, had she not been a nun and someone who actually knew the person in charge, another nun and public school teachers watching the ballot boxes may have been harmed.51 the recognition of the force of nuns’ ‘moral power’ meant that they could be manipulated or used by political groups. sister gertrude identified her ‘baptism of fire’ (her words) as the day the npa used her moral authority among the peasant workers in passi, iloilo to encourage a violent confrontation with the military. in 1983, when she was superior of assumption passi iloilo, the peasants entered the city by force and confronted the military. she intervened and convinced the group of farmers to stay in the convent for two days. unlike sister mary john’s ‘baptism of fire’, sister gertrude’s was one of disillusionment. in the early morning, at around 4 am, the group went to the police station without letting her know that they were planning a violent confrontation with the military. she immediately closed the school and organised buses for people to leave just at the time the military began to surround the convent.52 51 interview with sister josefina magat. 52 interview with sister gertrude borres. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 16 but once the nuns tasted the fruits of moral power, some translated these to actual official political power quickly after 1986 (when martial law ended). sister christine tan was invited by the incoming president corazon aquino to be a member of the constitutional convention to give the urban poor a voice in the writing of the new constitution of the republic. in fact, sister christine has become somewhat of a celebrity appearing constantly on television and in the print media as a critic of presidential administrations, from aquino to estrada. sister sol perpiñan, through her involvement with ngos, often attends the united nations international conferences, where she is an official voice for advocate groups.53 the nuns’ habit also became a powerful symbol of moral power; and nuns as well as priests were extremely conscious of its ‘spiritual potency’. sister gertrude was quick to point out that martial law was post-vatican ii and nuns and priests received a directive from rome to dress like the laity and discard the nun’s wimple for example. the aim of this directive was to ensure that the religious blended with the community and therefore would not be subjected to special treatment, such as seats in a full bus, for example. but she was quick to observe that, during demonstrations, the nuns appeared in full habit (complete with veil) and the priests showed up attired in their sutanas.54 the nuns’ habit symbolised moral power and had to be worn as an expression of that power. it signified both moral power and protection from male military might (symbolised by military men in uniforms carrying guns). it produced a visual contrast between female moral power and macho military might. enter feminisms though militant nuns were very visible as political agents, there were only a handful of them at the start of martial law: only 200 radical nuns, out of a total of 9000 nuns in the country. while not all nuns were political radicals, the religious of st joseph’s and st scholastica’s, the franciscan nuns, the assumption nuns and the good shepherd nuns were among those particularly active. 53 interview with sister soledad perpiñan. 54 interview with sister gertrude borres. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 17 it was these same radical nuns, from that small group of 200, who metamorphosed into feminists. although the first feminist organisation in the philippines was formed in the late 1960s as part of the nationalist youth, the makibaka (malayang kilusan ng bagong kababaihan, or free movement of new women) was forced to go underground, aborting prematurely its mutation into a probable feminist movement with a nationalist orientation or, alternatively, a nationalist movement with a feminist orientation. it was only then beginning to criticise cultural constructions of the feminine, but still prioritised national liberation over women’s issues. the transformation from militant nun to feminist occurred in stages. even prior to martial law, some nuns were already questioning the disparity between the life of poverty lived by millions of filipinos outside the convent walls and the relatively secure and comfortable life in the cloisters. sister christine said she was feeling that somehow her vocation was ‘fake’, because of this disparity (and she herself came from a very wealthy family).55 these nuns asked permission to live among the urban poor. both sister christine and sister sol chose to live in the slum areas. sister gertrude borres wanted to work in the rural areas, so she was assigned to assumption passi, iloilo and sister josefina magat was assigned to san simon pampanga to teach in the vocational school for the poor there.56 thus, prior to 1972, these nuns were already involved in organising ‘conscientisation seminars’, where they spoke to their congregation and other religious orders about their new vocation of living with the poor. when martial law was declared, these same nuns organised ‘conscientisation seminars’, but this time the topic was martial law and the clergy’s new role in the politically oppressive regime. the nuns therefore already had experience in organising and giving seminars designed to rethink their roles as religious in response to the times. they also already had the infrastructure with which to discuss and disseminate these new ways of thinking about themselves. conscientisation seminars are defined by the nuns themselves as consciousness-raising of one’s basic political rights or human rights in the context of a social class. to them, feminism is the 55 interview with sister christine tan 56 interview with sister gertrude borres, interview with sister josefina magat. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 18 conscientisation of women in terms of their basic human rights, in the context of oppression by men.57 in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some nuns were exposed to western feminist ideas through overseas conferences. both sister mary john mananazan and sister soledad perpiñan cite these overseas contacts as influential in shaping their feminist consciousness.58 sister gertrude borres was in paris from 1994 to 1999 when she was elected to the general council of assumption sisters.59 but a crucial factor that triggered empathy for western feminist issues was the contrast between the ‘moral power’ they exercised politically and the fact that ‘in the church we have no voice’.60 in assemblies and political meetings, the nuns were assigned secretarial tasks, whereas the priests were often the speakers.61 on the exclusively male leadership of the church, sister christine said: ‘i have much against the male in the church, because they make all our laws, particularly about giving birth and abortions’.62 she also noted the contradiction between the women’s lack of power in the church and the nuns’ success in pressuring the bishops (who originally were silent) to declare martial law as illegal.63 such vocal criticisms of church patriarchy, as well as the political activism of these nuns, have provoked repercussions: sister christine, along with five sisters, was sent out of manila and threatened with excommunication.64 the nuns were therefore political activists before they became feminists,65 because it was the discovery of the disparity between the moral power they exercised as activists and their lack of power in the church that gave them first-hand experience of women’s inequality. how is it possible to exert influence on a military dictatorship, while being ignored in the church hierarchy? according to sister mary john (the ultimate example 57 interview with sister gertrude borres. 58 interviews with sister mary john mananzan, manila, february 4, 1994 and july 20, 1995, interview with sister soledad perpiñan. 59 interview with sister gertrude borres. 60 interview with sister christine tan. 61 interview with sister sol perpiñan. 62interview with sister soledad perpiñan 63 interview with sister christine tan. 64 interview with sister soledad perpiñan portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 19 of the feminist nun, whose feminists activities have been described by claussen as ‘legendary’) nuns were used to being underprivileged more than priests and they were in the best position to be feminists, because they could prove that they could live without a man.66 at the same time, their previous experience in conscientisation seminars67 meant that they had the organisational structure with which to disseminate their ideas to the rest of their congregation and then, through women’s organisations and women’s studies courses, to society at large. in 1980, sister mary john mananzan founded the feminist organisation pilipina, and in 1985, she founded the first institute of women’s studies in the philippines at st scholastica’s college. as dean of the college of arts and director of the women’s studies institute, sister mary john has been influential in spreading feminist ideas to the student body: women’s studies is a compulsory subject at st scholastica’s; that is, no woman can graduate without taking this subject. as head of the institute of women’s studies, sister mary john has introduced new courses that examine the patriarchal elements of filipino society, where males are privileged and spoiled and women seek to become self-sacrificing mothers, morally bound to the home. the introduction of courses focusing on the discourse on the woman question, with an emphasis on the specific philippine situation, exudes a feminist critique of the cultural construction of both the feminine and the masculine, an important landmark in the evolution of feminism in the philippines. in the process, she has refrained from merely grafting western feminist theories uncritically onto the philippine situation. on her own, she consciously chose to break away from the western feminist perspective: we [pilipina] make it a point to distinguish ourselves from some western feminists kasi [because] sometimes they trivialize the whole thing, they make it a man-against-woman thing which we don’t believe in. with us, it’s a matter of how you get a woman to really maximize her whole potential.68 65 interview with sister christine tan, interview with sister mary john mananzan, manila, february 4,1 994, interview with sister soledad perpinãn. 66 interview with sister soledad perpiñan; interview with sister mary john mananzan manila, february 4, 1994, and july 20, 1995. 67 interview with sister gertrude borres. 68jose f. lacaba, tape reporter, ‘sister mary john mananzan: christian and citizen,’ periodical and date not mentioned, filed in sister mary john mananzan’s personal scrapbook, nursia, the institute of women’s studies, st. scholastica’s college, manila. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 20 women’s studies workshops and seminars are also given to women in grassroots organisations at st scholastica’s. her influence as a charismatic nun has also been cited by fellow benedictine nuns as the reason why they also became feminists (claussen 1998, using the pseudonym sister justine). she was also cofounder of the center for women’s resources in 1979. she has written articles on the woman question in the philippines, researched the status of women in prehistory and historical times, and published on women’s issues.69 she is also an active member of the editorial board of lila asia pacific women’s studies, journal, an academic journal that publishes on women’s issues in the asia-pacific region. in 1986, gabriela began to involve itself primarily in women’s issues and perhaps it was no coincidence that sister mary john assumed presidency of that body in that year. the issues of mail-order brides, prostitution, trafficking in women, the comfort women and women migrants overseas, including domestic helpers, were given priority. by 2002, negotiations began which would bring together common women’s studies courses/agendas for five universities: st scholastica’s, assumption college, miriam college, holy spirit and st paul’s quezon city.70 while sister mary john concentrated on educating women or ‘conscientising’ women on feminist issues, sister sol focused on the issues of prostitution, sex tourism and the trafficking of women in particular. she founded third world movement against the exploitation of women (tw-mae-w) in 1982. the organisation was originally established in order to protest japanese sex tours and prostitution in manila and the military bases. it later expanded its concerns to include the mail-order bride phenomenon and filipino prostitution overseas, like the japayukis in japan. sister christine tan, who served as chair of the association of the major religious superiors of women in the philippines, criticised the church’s viewpoint on issues that affect women, like birth control and abortion. although she supported the anti-abortion stance of the church, she stressed that women have the right to determine what would be good for their own body. as a delegate in the 1986 constitutional convention, she was 69 see mananzan (n.d.; 1987; 1988) and mangahas and mananzan (1989). 70 interview with sister gertrude borres. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 21 against the pro-life provision (custodio 1986). contrary to the church’s official position, sister christine advocated family planning through artificial means.71 the nuns in their different orders also reflect the various feminisms. the assumption nuns do not identify closely with sister mary john’s or sister christine’s feminism, which they find combative. they don’t see their being feminist as necessarily challenging the male hierarchy of the church. they would like to see women develop their full potential (and in fact, interestingly, teach feminism in a theology class, which they call apostolic spirituality72) but do not overtly challenge the patriarchal nature of church hierarchy. sister gertrude says the assumption foundress’s view of women’s power is not combative: ‘it is discovering your own being and because you are able to discover your own being, it is that – that you bring to society and that is where you make a difference’73 perhaps this is because the assumption nuns i have spoken to have not had serious confrontations with male church hierarchy or have been able to resist (sister josefina, for example, resisted the bishops’ directive to remove the name of the mayor’s son in the fact-finding report). one clear strategy seems to be the attempt to redefine the vow of ‘obedience’ to mean that one must follow one’s conviction (whether the superior be a man or a woman).74 and by and large, these nuns were confident that they were able to follow their conscience. a group of male american friends told sister josefina: ‘i wish you were more aggressive,’ to which she calmly responded: ‘i say no, i am a filipina. they cannot understand the paradigm. we can get what we want.’75 the militant nun/feminist nun here to stay beyond martial law (post-1986) not all militant nuns would be comfortable with the ‘feminist’ label, no matter how broadly one defined feminism (since feminism is still an ‘f’ word in the philippines, with women exercising both official and unofficial power and even women in radical 71 neomi tanedo olivares, ‘‘erring’ catholic leaders’, letters, newspaper publication not identified, in the scrapbook on sister christine tan, compilation of newspaper clippings about her activities held by her godchild paulette, women’s desk, association of major religious superiors, quezon city, metromanila. 72 interview with sister gertrude borres. 73 interview with sister gertrude borres. 74 interview with sister josefina magat. 75 interview with sister gertrude borres. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 22 politics hesitant to call themselves feminist)76. after 1986 (when martial law ended), the nuns who had metamorphosed into political activists did not return to the cozy statusquo cocoon once the democratic institutions were restored. though some might have tasted a modicum of official power (like sister christine), they have chosen to continue to represent the voices of the oppressed, the poor, those suffering injustice. in the end, even someone like sister christine, sister mariani, and sister mary john chose to continue their political activism even after the fall of marcos. sister christine eventually felt morally obliged to announce her disillusionment with the regime of president corazon aquino: ‘the present leadership has failed us’.77 she attacked the aquino government as ‘elitist, corrupt and failing to meet the country’s basic needs’, faulting aquino herself for not being more decisive and reviewing her achievements as follows: ‘she restored for us a sense of pride but the people around her are not as sincere and honest.’78 the price of her continuing political activism was an estrangement with president aquino, costing her access to unofficial power. she persisted in participating in protests and rallies, including one that presented a play depicting the sufferings of the urban poor79 and one that submitted to president aquino proposals from a delegation of urban poor demanding a stop to the demolition of squatter communities and/or their relocation to sites a great distance away from their places of work.80 that her continued activism was still fueled by her moral concern was evidenced by her rhetorical question, ‘is a [sic] legal necessarily moral?’ sister christine was lamenting the fact that, despite promises by members of the constitutional convention that they would not run for office (for ethical reasons), some had gone back on their word and sought elective office.81 in the estrada administration (1998-2001), she has been a controversial figure 76 heather claussen’s study (1998) of the benedictine nuns confirms this. in my research on women and power in post-war philippines, all interviewees except the militant nuns were uncomfortable with the term (roces 1998). 77 ‘sister christine tan playing down the cory cult’, midweek, march 9, 1988, p. 1. 78 ‘prominent nun hits cory gov’t’, c.may 1987, in the scrapbook on sister christine tan (periodical not identified) kept by her godchild paulette at the women’s desk, association of major religious superiors, quezon city, metro-manila; ‘nun assails gov’t as elitist, corrupt’, star, may 16, 1987, n.p. in the same scrapbook. 79 ‘urban poor persecuted in ‘calvary’’, malaya, april 18, 1987, n.p. in the scrapbook on sister christine tan. 80 teodoro y. montelibano, ‘gov’t prepares expanded land reform program’, n.p., n.d., in the scrapbook on sister christine tan. 81 sister christine tan, ‘sister christine’s personal grief,’ letters to the editor, n.p., n.d., in the scrapbook on sister christine tan, periodical not identified. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 23 appearing often on television, particularly in the scandal involving the philippine charity sweepstakes. as chair of the citizen’s alliance for consumer protection, sister mary john criticised president fidel ramos’s increase in oil prices, the expanded value-added tax (e-vat), and the structural dynamics of a society where corruption was still rampant and only ten percent of the population benefited from economic reform.82 true to form, nuns in groups were at the forefront of demonstrations against the e-vat.83 sister mariani dimaranan clashed with cardinal jaime sin during the aquino demonstration (1986-1992), when he announced that there were no more political detainees under the aquino administration, despite the fact that tfd had clearly found evidence to the contrary.84 in more recent times, the militant nuns were again out in full force in ‘edsa dos’ or ‘people power ii’ in january 2001, when demonstrations and cabinet resignations caused the ouster of president joseph estrada. true, cardinal jaime sin was at the forefront of the campaign to pressure estrada to resign, but the nuns were there just as they were in the 1986 ‘people power i revolution’. assumption nuns brought students to the senate hearings and participated in anti-estrada rallies. even their mother superior was present in edsa dos.85 yet, while the militant nuns have succeeded in exercising political power behind the scenes as activists holding ‘moral’ power, they have been less effective in acquiring a voice within the patriarchal church hierarchy. the nuns’ predicament is also a classic example of how women’s power in the philippines has remained a contested site, where ambivalence and contradictions are the norm. the contesting discourses of kinship politics and modernity are played out and negotiated through women’s power. the nuns were not only political activists, but also feminists (modern). however, their moral power was exercised unofficially. refusing to claim official power, the nuns acted as a pressure group, lobbying politicians to initiate political and social change. perhaps that 82 personal communication with sister mary john mananzan, metro-manila, february 22, 1996. 83 ‘protests spread nationwide’, with picture caption ‘nuns are once more in the forefront of protest marches’, philippine daily inquirer, january 31, 1996, p. 1. 84 interview with sister mariani dimaranan. 85 interview with sister josefina magat. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 24 is the reason for their effectiveness: though they demanded modern ideas and full equality and empowerment for women, they did so in the traditional way women exercised power. at the same time, they exuded contrary images: traditional images of women as moral guardians and modern images of women as militant (mataray—tough and militant, not sweet and placid)87 and feminist. since the martial law era, philippine society has acknowledged the political influence of the militant nun – such moral power has been institutionalised with the presence of nuns in almost every demonstration involving social justice. but their feminist crusade within the church hierarchy has remained lacklustre. while moral power quickly became political power, enabling the nuns in political women’s organisations to influence pro-women legislation, nuns remained marginalised in the hierarchy of the catholic church. perhaps, moral power is effective in philippine local politics (since men dominate official power), but feminist power is not translatable to real power in the catholic church. the catholic church, after all, transcends local barriers and has remained far more male-dominated than philippine politics in the twentieth century. reference list aguilar, d.d. 1988, the feminist challenge: initial working principles toward reconceptualizing the feminist movement in the philippines, asian social institute, metro-manila. ——1994-95, ‘toward a reinscription of nationalist feminism’, review of women’s studies 4, 2. angeles, l. 1989, feminism and nationalism: the discourse on the woman question and the politics of the women’s movement in the philippines, 1900-1988, ma thesis, university of british columbia. claussen, h.l. 1998, un(convent)ional sisterhood: feminist catholic nuns in the philippines, phd dissertation, university of california, san diego. de dios, a.j.j. 1996, ‘participation of women’s groups in the anti-dictatorship struggle: genesis of a movement’, in women’s role in philippine history: selected essays, quezon city, university center for women’s studies, university of the philippines. gomez, m. 1991, ‘women’s organizations as offshoots of national political movements’ in sister m.j. mananzan (ed.) essays on women, manila, institute of women’s studies, st. scholastica’s college. 86 interview with sister mary john mananzan july 20, 1995. she lamented that the military and police often referred to her as mataray (unfeminine). 87 interview with sister mary john mananzan july 20, 1995. she lamented that the military and police often referred to her as mataray (unfeminine). portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 25 hilsdon, a. 1995, madonnas and martyrs: militarism and violence in the philippines, ateneo de manila university press, quezon city. hyndman, n.n. 1992, speaking for the ‘filipina’ feminist scholars and national liberation in the philippines, ba honours thesis, australian national university. liberation, november 12, 1973, pp. 1-2. copy available from the cultural centre of the philippines library. mananzan, sister m.j. (ed.) 1992, woman and religion. metro-manila: institute of women’s studies, st. scholastica’s college. ——(ed.) 1987, essays on women, metro-manila: institute of women’s studies, st. scholastica’s college. ——(ed.) (n.d.), the woman question in the philippines, pamphlet, metro-manila: institute of women’s studies, st. scholastica’s college. mangahas, f., and mananzan, sister m.j. (eds) 1989, sarilaya: women in the arts and media, metro-manila: the institute of women’s studies, st. scholastica’s college. roces, m. 2001, ‘women in philippine politics and society’ in h. mcpherson (ed.) mixed blessing: the impact of the american colonial experience on politics and society in the philippines, greenwood press, westport, connecticut, and london. ——1998, women, power, and kinship politics: female power in post-war philippines, praeger, westport. ronquillo, s. 1984, ‘makibaka remembered’, diliman review 42, 3-4. santos-maranan, a.f. 1984, ‘do women really hold university press half the sky?’ diliman review, may-august. tangcangco, l.c. 1992, ‘voters, candidates, and organizers: women and politics in contemporary philippines’ in p.d. tapales (ed.) filipino women and public policy, kalikasan press, manila. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 26 the militant nun as political activist and feminist in martial law philippines mina roces, university of new south wales martial law and the birth of the militant nun discovering ‘moral’ power enter feminisms the militant nun/feminist nun here to stay beyond martial law (post-1986) reference list microsoft word goi introduction galley.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. geographies of identity special issue, guest edited by matthew graves and elizabeth rechniewski. © 2015 [matthew graves and elizabeth rechniewski]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i1.4380 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. imagining geographies, mapping identities matthew graves, aix-marseille université elizabeth rechniewski, university of sydney the ambition of this issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies is to reach across the methodological boundaries of history, politics, literature and geography to apply their complementary perspectives to the study of identity and its relation to space and place, an aim that involves attempting to identify the many different ways the notoriously slippery concepts of identity and geography may intersect. in the course of the twentieth century the centrifugal forces of decolonization and globalization eroded frontiers and seemed to threaten the dissolution of national and cultural identity in supranational spaces of uncertain form (european enlargement), while the centrifugal forces of resurgent regionalism raised fears of the break-up of the sovereign body of the nation. the nation-states attempted to fill the identity void by devising new forms of territorial politics (devolution, shared sovereignty) based on a reconfiguration of the foundational spaces and places or the reinvention of collective myths; at the same time, movements of resistance formed around an essentialist rereading of national space (resurgent nationalisms), while others attempted to find an alternative sense of collective belonging outside of the national framework (region, community, network). in an age of hyper-communication, the postmodern diasporas have become a source of ‘long-distance nationalism’ (schiller & fouron 2001). graves & rechniewski imagining geographies portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 2 such geographical identities and ‘the struggle over geography’ (saïd 1993: 6)1 that they imply provide the setting for a new imaginative geography: for instance, the recurrent theme of englishness in post-devolution literature, or the revival of the travel writing genre which marked the end of decolonization. if we accept that the nation is an ‘imagined community’ (anderson 1991), then the new spaces of identity suggest new forms and formulations of the imaginary, a geo-narrative map yet to be drawn. in the last thirty years, the ‘spatial turn’ in social theory has reached beyond the boundaries of geography and its subdisciplines to encourage a focus on: the spatiality of social life, a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the life world of being creatively located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes: social being actively emplaced in space and time in an explicitly historical and geographical contextualization. (soja 1989: 10–11) moreover, the disciplinary partitions have been eroded from within as much as from without, since the ‘cultural turn’ in geography has encouraged the recognition that the description of space can rarely escape social, political and even ideological implications. just as space and place have become central to social theory, so has mapping emerged as a trope of spatial thinking and analysis. from stuart hall’s ‘maps of meaning’ (2003: 29) to salman rushdie’s ‘world mapped by stories,’2 the map-aslogo traces itineraries through a fragmentary world of uncertain meaning. for this issue we have selected articles that cast a fresh perspective on two areas where identity and geography intersect: the construction of identity through the imaginative recreation of place in literature: mapping literary spaces; and the study of the shifting relationships of centre and periphery, exclusion and inclusion in urban settings and geopolitical confrontations: social and political peripheries.3 mapping literary spaces the etymology of the term ‘plot’ goes back to old english when one of the meanings of ‘plot’ or ‘plat’ was a plan or map of land. that this term should have migrated to describe the narrative structure of fiction reveals the parallels that can be drawn between 1 the more fully elaborated text is: ‘just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. that struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings’ (saïd 1993: 6). 2 the expression refers to rushdie’s multimedia archive which was purchased by emory university and subsequently exhibited there in 2010. 3 we thank miriam thompson for her invaluable editorial work on this issue. graves & rechniewski imagining geographies portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 3 fictional creation and map-making; as peter turchi (2004: 13) writes: ‘in every piece we write, we contemplate a world; and as that world would not otherwise exist, we create it even as we discover it.’ turchi pursues these parallels along two lines of argument: not only does the writer create a fictional geography and setting for their story, but the very processes of writing resemble those of the cartographer since they involve choice of perspective, forms of symbolic representation, the selection of features to foreground, the depiction of relationships, and the drawing of boundaries. and through these processes, both writer and cartographer must conjure up the illusion of creating a simulacrum of reality, establishing a relationship with the real world that convinces the reader/user not of its absolute fidelity but of its validity, its usefulness and its relevance. the metaphor that depicts the novel as charting new territory and the writer as explorer is one of the tropes of literature. another is the metaphor that represents life as a ‘journey.’ indeed it constitutes one of the central tropes of western literature and myth: the journey of exploration, of initiation, of trial and redemption, where the main character embarks on a voyage of discovery that is also one of self-discovery and selftransformation. in his article in this issue charles moseley uncovers the moral and symbolic force of the geographical narrative in one of the earliest examples, that of mandeville’s travels, an account of the part-fabled journey of the western narrator to the east. his travels across ‘macrospace’ cannot be plotted onto any modern map but the trajectory of his journey reflects the theological and historical ordering of space of the medieval worldview, where geography is a physical representation of the sacred. even in the secular variants of this trope, that include the picaresque novel and the bildungsroman, geography is not simply the framework of travel, the background against which the action is played out, but an actor in the drama, confronting the hero with a series of physical trials and obstacles. as the journey unfolds, the hero moves not only through a physical landscape but also through the changing social landscapes that each stage brings. his mature self is built up through these successive encounters as the experiential and symbolic journey progresses. it is a voyage of self-discovery but also a voyage of discovery about the world for the hero and the reader, that is to say, a vehicle for critiquing existing ideas, for undoing the prejudices of the group to which one belongs. thus mandeville’s travels contains within it, moseley argues, a critical meditation and commentary on western ideas and graves & rechniewski imagining geographies portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 4 practices through the encounters with the many others that the journey affords. similarly, in her article for this issue, isabelle avila shows that marlow, the narrator of conrad’s heart of darkness, is forced by the end of his journey up river to reassess the true nature of savagery and civilization, and to question the self-assured depiction of european domination on the maps of colonized africa. as these examples suggest, while the self may be built up through journeying through space and time, it may also be disrupted, challenged indeed destroyed. in her paper to the ‘geographies of displacement’ conference in montpellier in june 2014, isabelle avila drew attention to the role of maps as lieux de mémoire that organize not only space but time as well. as the blank heart of african cartography was gradually filled over the nineteenth century, the successive versions of the map of the continent, preserved in memory, became testimony to the exploits of the british and the advance of ‘civilization.’ the maps, displayed in schoolrooms, furnished the ‘mobilier mental des britanniques’ over several generations, providing ‘un lieu de mémoire géographique du progrès de l’exploit humain.’4 her case study is a potent reminder that the development of western cartography is closely associated with the age of discovery and its expansion with the imperialist project. as toal (1996: 4) writes: ‘the function of cartography was to transform seized space into legible, ordered imperial territory.’ in the employ of the european colonial powers, the cartographers of empire carved up the ‘blanks’ and ‘empty quarters’ of the globe into easily assimilated geometrical figures, frequently along lines of longitude and latitude rather than the ethnic, religious, linguistic, or cultural contours of their indigenous populations, even in defiance of geographical realities. in this context, the map of empire became an instrument of ‘geography militant,’ serving a dominant epistemology in a polarized world of civilized western self and primitive indigenous other. in her article for this issue avila argues further, however, that the apparent simplicity of the story told by the maps, of the passage from the unknown to the known, from invisibility to transparency, was challenged by literary writers of the late nineteenth century, and notably by joseph conrad. through his portrayal of the shadows that close in on marlow’s voyage into the heart of darkness, the author refuses to reduce the 4 intervention by isabelle avila at the ‘geographies of displacement’ conference, held at montpellier, france, june 2014. the maps provided ‘the mental furniture of the british,’ ‘a geographical site of memory of the progress of human achievement.’ graves & rechniewski imagining geographies portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 5 continent to the limpid surface simplicity of the imperial maps and resists the master narrative of possession. challenging map narratives may involve resisting the incursion of the imperial mapmaker, as the assassination of the military cartographer richard bartlett at the hands of ulstermen who ‘would not have their country discovered’ demonstrates (quoted in covington 2013: 153). in the hands of marginalized communities, minorities, or regionalist movements, mapping may become an instrument with which to reconquer life spaces that have been denied or confiscated. cartographies of opposition and resistance to the abstract spaces imposed by the nation-state produce ‘counter space’ (lefebvre 1991: 383) where populations can reappropriate their cultural identities and social or political autonomy. in the struggle over geography, counter space is typically carved out on the periphery of political societies, or at the local and regional sub-scales. in her contribution to this issue, daniela rogobete looks at how postcolonial literature maps out such space, diachronically as much as synchronically, creating alternative narratives of identity. in particular, she examines the claims and counter-claims made for the indian english novel: in achieving global recognition for indian literature and culture while resisting the cultural compression of globalization, but also in projecting indian identities on western models to the detriment of regional literatures and languages. rogobete suggests that the tensions inherent in the paradigm of the ‘global novel’ may be resolved with the contemporary emergence of a ‘glocal’ indian literature which assimilates english and regional languages in a hybrid and eclectic genre that preserves the authenticity and diversity of cultural identities. social and political peripheries the relationship of core and periphery and its related pairs, inclusion and exclusion, centre and margin, can be conceptualized in many different ways and shown to operate in many settings, affecting individuals, communities, or whole populations, as the articles in this section illustrate. social and political exclusion are so often symbolized through, realized in and reinforced by, spatial segregation. this is poignantly illustrated in esme cleall’s article, silencing deafness, which describes the increased institutionalization of people with graves & rechniewski imagining geographies portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 6 disabilities, including deaf people, within asylums and residential schools in the nineteenth century. in a move not dissimilar to what foucault named the ‘great confinement’ of the ‘insane,’ the deaf were increasingly segregated from ‘normal’ society, hidden away behind the forbidding walls of victorian institutional architecture they were out of sight and out of mind. boarding schools offered families of deaf children the opportunity to send away, and possibly forget, the ‘problem’ of disability, at least on an everyday basis. day schools for deaf children ensured that the deaf were educated separately and differently from hearing children. physical segregation symbolized and reinforced the marginalization of the disabled. we could cite, too, the powerful forms of contemporary exclusion that result from urban segregation, with notable examples in current debate the social and physical isolation of the banlieues around french towns and cities. cut off from the urban centres by poor public transport and the physical obstacles of autoroutes and ring roads, they perpetuate a cycle of exclusion, poverty, prejudice and marginalization. but perhaps the most prominent discussions around this issue in recent years have addressed broader, even existential concerns: whether the individual has been ‘displaced’ from modern life, uprooted and exiled from space and meaningful place. for if individual identity is rooted in place, the twentieth century saw the undermining of the frameworks that provided a stable context for the self. the multiple dislocations of the modern world demand new ways of understanding our relationship to space, a new ‘poetics of geography: a site for investigating the metaphors and narrative strategies that we use to talk about space’ according to patricia yaeger (1996: 5). much has been written over recent decades about the potential effects of the hyper refashioning of our environment, the acceleration of change and the compression of space and time that result from new technologies of travel and communication. the concept of ‘non-places’ (augé 2009) problematizes the attachment to place of the contemporary citizen, condemned to inhabit the soulless environments of modern cities: has the modern world, with its standardized shopping malls and hotels, its global brands, its ceaseless redevelopments, undermined our sense of place, creating rootless populations with no attachment to their locality? the ‘post-modern thesis’ argues the depthlessness of attachment, the creation of a fragmented self without fixed points of reference suffering from ‘ontological insecurity.’ graves & rechniewski imagining geographies portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 7 others have argued that while it is true that identity in the modern world is increasingly loosened from all territorial ties, new landscapes of belonging are created: arjun appadurai, describing the creation through technological ties of networks uniting world-wide diaspora, writes of the ‘ethnospaces’ that unite people scattered across continents: as groups migrate, regroup in new locations, reconstruct their histories and reconfigure their ethnic projects, the ethnic in ethnography takes on a slippery, nonlocalized quality … the landscapes of group identity—the ethnoscapes—around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious or culturally homogeneous. (1996: 48) we need perhaps, moreover, to question the often implicit assumption of the ‘dislocation thesis,’ that there existed an unproblematic link between place and identity that characterized past generations, an idea that is sometimes reproduced even in academic theories that contrast the complex and shifting identities of the present with some golden past of identity rooted in place, and imply or extol the necessity for a return to ‘supposedly unalienated direct sensory interaction with nature’ (appadurai 1996: 48). david harvey (2009: 187) argues that such theories ‘cannot avoid descending into a pervasive elitism,’ as they contrast the empty and soulless lives of the majority with the ‘authenticity’ of those who live ‘simple lives close to the land.’ countering the perceived rootlessness of modern life, is the resistance of city dwellers to the juggernaut of change: for example, as carolyn stott’s article shows, the residents who took up the defence of ‘old’ belleville, continue to display a strong sense of community centred round preservation and celebration of the ‘uniqueness’ of this quartier of paris. their campaign illustrates how ideas about a locality can determine the destruction or preservation of its physical features: the historical representations of belleville that stott identifies draw to the area a certain type of resident, artists, writers and multiculturels, who value its unique heritage and are inspired to try to preserve and recreate (or create?) the qualities it possesses in reputation. stott reveals too the power of imaginary boundaries: the quartier known as ‘belleville’ overflows and transgresses its current administrative boundaries: it is a palimpsest of layer upon layer of historical associations and literary representations that overlap but never quite coincide. not only does the area defy any attempt to impose on it clear boundaries but internally it is criss-crossed by divisions and contrasts defined by the graves & rechniewski imagining geographies portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 8 needs, priorities and practices of the various communities who live there: high and low belleville; the old streets with their small workers’ cottages transformed into studios and the grand towers of the hlm; the sudden transformations from one street to another as the ethnic mix of each sector shifts. today’s inhabitants impose on it their own meanings through their social and work activities: the artists who see the area as redolent with an atmosphere propitious to their creativity and lifestyle; the transplantés who relate to it in utilitarian terms mainly as a cheaper place to live; immigrants who, benefitting from the quartier’s reputation for tolerance of diversity, seek to reproduce the familiarity of home in the streets and markets creating ‘microterritoires,’ ‘dans lequel les communautés diasporiques cherchent un ancrage territorial’ (bruneau 2006: 328). the tourists create yet another belleville organized around their visits to landmarks and historic sites: the père lachaise cemetery, the parc de belleville; or they follow the trail of daniel pennac’s famous fictional mallaussène family. each group, and indeed each inhabitant, creates their own places out of the space known as belleville (which no longer exists on any map), in a dialectical relationship where representation interacts with expectation and informs practice. in henri lefebvre’s terms, the quartier is ‘imagined, perceived and experienced as spaces of representation, representations of space and spaces of social practice at one and the same time’ (holloway & hubbard 2000: 236). annie ousset-krief brings to life another popular area of a great city: the lower east side of new york whose identity and architecture were transformed in the late nineteenth century by the influx of a vibrant community of jews. like stott’s study of belleville, ousset-krief’s portrait of the lower east side describes the transformations that the area has undergone over the centuries as first home to successive waves of poor migrants. hundreds of thousands of jews, often escaping from pogroms in russia and eastern europe, emigrated, along with italians and many other nationalities, to america at the end of the nineteenth century; many thousands of jews settled in the teeming east side tenements and tried to recreate a sense of home by re-establishing the structures that had governed their lives in the shtetl: worship, education. ousset-krief details the architectural legacy left by their investment in this new territory while demonstrating that the significance of these material traces of the past reaches beyond the architectural to represent a link with past lives, with the ‘origins’ of the jewish community in the usa; they offer a traceable lineage to the place where their grandparents and greatgraves & rechniewski imagining geographies portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 9 grandparents first settled. indeed walking tours are organized to allow descendants to follow literally in their footsteps. while more recent populations of immigrants have long replaced the majority of jews, the jewish community’s attachment to this, their first ‘home’ in the usa, remains strong and offers them a site of belonging that may displace the sense of loss stemming from their forced separation from their traditional homelands in eastern europe. colonial populations too, remote from the metropolitan centre, may be condemned by the tyranny of distance never to see the home country to which they nevertheless feel they belong. such was the fate of the australian colonists in the nineteenth century who found themselves at the edge of the known world, on the periphery of britain’s empire, just as new caledonia was a remote and insignificant possession of the french empire, au bout du monde. the case of the relationship between australia and new caledonia and their metropoles in the nineteenth century illustrates however the ambiguity and fluidity of definitions of centre and periphery. as elizabeth rechniewski shows in this issue, australia and new caledonia, far-flung outposts of the british and french empires on the geographical periphery and political margins of their metropolitan masters, were nevertheless fatally caught up in events that happened thousands of kilometres away, as the shifting alliances between the imperial powers were refracted in the relationships between their colonies. and australia and new caledonia formed in themselves a centre-periphery nucleus, bound together through their common european origins and settler colonialism but in an unequal relationship: australia the much larger, richer and longer established colony dominating trade and investment in new caledonia. yet for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, australia feared its much smaller and weaker neighbour as a threat to her very existence, as a steppingstone for french and later japanese aggression. gerard toal (1996: 1) has written that geography is not a noun but a verb: it does not describe what space is but studies what we do with space, imaginatively and politically. the articles in this issue illustrate the exercise of the literary and political imagination and the role of materiality and memory in the creation of geographic representation. they show too a new awareness of the centrality of space in the constitution of identities, and the need for a new geocritical reading of its discourse, as the graves & rechniewski imagining geographies portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 10 interrelations of place and community are played out on the many scales of social and political life, from the local to the global. reference list anderson, b. 1991, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, 2nd ed. verso, london. appadurai, a. 1996, modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. augé, m. 2009, non-places: an introduction to super modernity. 2nd ed., (trans.) j. howe. verso, london. bruneau, m. 2006, ‘les territoires de l'identité et la mémoire collective en diaspora,’ l'espace géographique, vol. 35, no. 4: 328–333. cosgrove, d. 2004, ‘landscape and landschaft: lecture delivered at the “spatial turn in history” symposium at the german historical institute, february 19, 2004,’ ghi bulletin, vol. 35, fall: 57– 71. covington, s. 2013, ‘“the odious demon from across the sea.” oliver cromwell, memory and the dislocations of ireland,’ in memory before modernity: practices of memory in early modern europe, (eds) e. kuijpers, j. pollmann, j. mueller & j. van der steen. koninklijke brill nv, leiden: 149–164. daniels, s. 1993, fields of vision: landscape imagery and national identity in england and the united states. polity press, cambridge. delaney, d. 2005, territory: a short introduction. blackwell, oxford. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9780470773925 hall, s. 2003, representation: cultural representation and signifying practices. sage publications/the open university, london. harvey, d. 2009, cosmopolitanism and the geographies of freedom. columbia university press, new york. holloway, l. & hubbard, p. 2000, people and place: the extraordinary geographies of everyday life. prentice hall, new york. lefebvre, h. 1991, the production of space. wiley-blackwell, london. saïd, e. 1993, culture and imperialism. vintage, london. schiller, n. g. & fouron, g. e. 2001, georges woke up laughing: long-distance nationalism and the search for home. duke university press, durham, nc, & london. soja, e. 1989, postmodern geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory. verso, london. toal, g. 1996, critical geopolitics: the politics of writing global space. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. turchi, p. 2004, maps of the imagination: the writer as cartographer. trinity university press, san antonio, texas. yaeger, p. 1996, the geography of identity. university of michigan press, ann arbor. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 2 september 2017 communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue, guest edited by anu bissoonauth and rowena ward. © 2017 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: ward, r.g. 2017. the internment and repatriation of the japanese-french nationals resident in new caledonia, 1941–1946. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:2, 55-67. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5478 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au research article the internment and repatriation of the japanese-french nationals resident in new caledonia, 1941–1946 rowena g. ward university of wollongong corresponding author: dr rowena g. ward, senior lecturer in japanese, school of humanities and social inquiry, university of wollongong, northfields avenue, wollongong nsw 2522, australia. roward@uow.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5478 article history: received 03/04/2017; revised 16/07/2017; accepted 18/06/2017; published 05/10/2017 abstract the pre-1941 japanese population of new caledonia was decimated by the french administration’s decision to transfer most of the japanese residents to australia for internment at the outbreak of the asia-pacific theatre of the second world war. among the men transferred to australia were ten men who had been formerly french nationals but had lost their french nationality by decree. the french administration’s ability to denationalise and intern, and then subsequently repatriate, the former-japanese french-nationals was possible due to changes to the french nationality laws and regulations introduced by the vichy regime. this paper considers the case of the japanese who had taken french nationality and were denationalised in the context of the changes to the french nationality laws that, in turn, negatively affected the post-1945 sustainability of the japanese community in new caledonia. keywords japanese; internment; world war two; new caledonia; french; denationalisation; repatriation. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 55 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5478 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5478 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:roward@uow.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5478 the long-term sustainability of an immigrant community depends on both internal mechanisms, such as the choice of where to live, and external factors, such as the attitudes of local communities to the community’s decision to live where it chooses. in periods of unrest or conflict, both factors can change quickly and have an impact on the sustainability of a community. the french administration’s decision to intern the male members of the japanese community in new caledonia and send most of them to australia for internment ultimately saw the virtual elimination of the japanese community in the french pacific colony. among those interned were a number of former japanese french nationals (hereafter former-jf nationals) or japanese who had taken french nationality (hereafter jf nationals) but had either decided to revoke it after the outbreak of war in the pacific or were forcibly denationalised.1 the denationalisation and internment of these men was made possible by changes to the french nationality act introduced by the vichy regime. whilst these changes have been analysed in the context of metropolitan france and the denationalisation of the local jewish community (marrus & paxton 1995), and to a lesser extent in algeria where both the muslim and jewish communities were targeted in different ways (weil 2008), the changes have not been the focus of research in new caledonia. in this paper, the jf nationals are used as a case study of a group that forms part of a larger group—both internally and externally recognised—to illustrate some of the external mechanisms that can have an impact on the sustainability of a community. importantly, these factors are complex and not always coherent or consistent, but that does not negate their effects. in the case of the jf nationals, a complex intertwined network of laws, regulations and policies introduced in the late 1930s and early 1940s by the french government combined with changing attitudes to the japanese community served to curtail the sustainability of new caledonia’s japanese community post–1945. research on japanese communities in the south pacific an increasing body of work has examined the japanese who lived across the south pacific during the first half of the 20th century. for instance, iwamoto (1999) examines the emigration of japanese to papua and new guinea whilst peattie (1988) discusses the emergence of a japanese community in micronesia. ganter (1994), oliver (2007), nagata (1996; 2001; 2004), bennett (2001) and sissons (1977; 1979; 2016) all address issues related to early japanese communities in australia, and bennett (2009) discusses the internment in new zealand of local japanese residents as well as those transferred from fiji and tonga. in the case of the japanese in new caledonia, kobayashi (1980) and palombo (2003) both consider the economic factors behind the japanese’ migration whilst tsuda (2006) addresses the historical and social context of their arrival. ishikawa (2007) focuses on the emigrants from okinawa prefecture who between 1892 and 1919 accounted for almost 15 percent of the japanese in new caledonia. from a different perspective, raulet-akaza (2012) examines the life of ono yaichi who was heavily involved in the negotiations facilitating the first group of workers from japan to work in new caledonia in the late 19th century. denton (2014) discusses the life of the japanese-french woman, rosalie kitazawa-fouque, who became a leading figure in the development of the nickel trade between new caledonia and japan. in contrast, cayrol (2015) notes the ‘wall of silence’ around the japanese community in new caledonia and the role that an exhibition in 2012 at the musée de nouvelle calédonie (museum of new caledonia) 1 ‘denationalisation’ and the ‘withdrawal of nationality’ are used interchangeably in this paper. ward portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 56 played in recognising the existence of the pre-war community. research on the changes to the legislation governing french nationality, especially during the vichy regime, is also ongoing. weil (2008) provides a comprehensive analysis of the changes to french nationality laws since the french revolution, and plender (1974) explains the changes to the laws in 1973 that removed the differences between the laws governing those eligible to take french nationality in metropolitan france vis-à-vis its overseas territories. marrus and paxton (1995) highlight the changes to french nationality directed at the exclusion of jews. to date, however, no detailed analysis of the effects that these changes had in new caledonia, especially as they pertain to the japanese who had taken french nationality, has been undertaken. this paper aims to remedy this situation. new caledonian history france annexed new caledonia in 1853 and shortly afterwards established a penal colony on the island of nouville, a short distance from nouméa. during world war two nouville became the site of an internment camp for the colony’s enemy aliens. until 1956, new caledonia was administered from metropolitan france through a high commissioner for the pacific who simultaneously acted as the governor of new caledonia (hereafter governor). while the 1998 nouméa accord has given new caledonia a ‘special collectivity’ status among france’s overseas territories, it remains french territory and as such, the laws of metropolitan france in most cases apply in new caledonia. in september 1940 new caledonians chose to align with the free french government in exile, an act that saw many new caledonia-based vichy supporters expelled and sent to saigon.2 at the time, the population of new caledonia consisted primarily of frencheuropeans (cardoche), tonkinese,3 javanese, local indigenous ‘kanak’ melanesians, and japanese. the japanese community, in fact, was the largest in the south pacific and only second in size to that of hawaii. most of the japanese had migrated to work in new caledonia’s nickel mines. as denton (2014) notes, members of the japanese community had a comparatively privileged position compared to other immigrant communities and were respected by the french administration. japanese population of new caledonia japanese emigration to new caledonia began in 1892 with the signing of an agreement to allow japanese to work in the nickel mines in the french colony (bencivengo 2012; rauletakaza 2012). in accordance with this agreement, 599 men from kumamoto prefecture moved to new caledonia in 1892 (kobayashi 190: 276–277). the harsh working conditions combined with the tropical climate meant only eight men stayed to the end of their five-year contracts. as a result of the problems, the agreement was terminated and no further japanese emigrated until after a revised agreement was signed in 1900 (kutsuki 2004: 190).4 under the revised new agreement, 1,208 japanese moved to new caledonia in 1900 and 1901 (kutsuki 2004: 191). thereafter, small groups of mostly miners emigrated on an irregular basis through to the outbreak of world war 1. at the end of their contracts, the majority of 2 for discussions on the shift to the free french cause, see chapter two of munholland (2005). 3 the tonkinese originated from an area now covered by the red river delta region of northern vietnam. 4 according to kutsuki (2004: 190) 23 members of the first group of men died in new caledonia. the internment and repatriation of the japanese-french nationals resident in new caledonia, 1941–1946 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 57 the japanese returned to japan, but a small number chose to remain in new caledonia. most of those who stayed continued to work as miners, but as kobayashi (1980: 211) shows, some became farmers, merchants or carpenters. owing to a combination of the depressed economic conditions in new caledonia after world war 1 and a shift to the hiring of tonkinese workers in the nickel mines, very few japanese moved there between 1919 and 1941 (ishikawa 2008: 84). in line with the japanese government’s view that new caledonia was within its ‘sphere of influence’ (archives de la nouvelle calédonie [hereafter anc] 107w 2852 cable from charles de gaulle to henri sautot, governor of new caledonia, 15 february 1941), a japanese consulate was established in nouméa in march 1940. on 24 november 1941, the japanese population of new caledonia comprised 1,047 men and 57 women (total 1,104) (anc 107w 2852).5 just less than one-third of the japanese population lived in and around nouméa (336), with the remainder spread in smaller populations across the colony, including koumac (90) and thio (71) (anc 107w 2852). the population had fallen since 1 january 1941 when it was 1,126, including 1,074 men (national archives of australia [hereafter naa] a2670 282/1940 australian military mission to new caledonia, appendix 12) yet it still constituted over 76 percent of the foreign population. some of the decrease was due to natural causes but with the outbreak of war becoming increasingly likely, some of the japanese returned to japan. a number of the japanese were married or in long-term relationships with javanese, caldoche, tonkinese or indigenous women, and many of these couples had children. the nationality of the children varied depending on whether their parents were married and, if not, on the nationality of their mother. some children were ostensibly japanese as their fathers were not french nationals; however, as the registration of births with the appropriate japanese authorities was difficult, many of those children were not recognised as japanese subjects by the japanese government.6 french nationality at the beginning of the twentieth century, french nationality was a mix of the jus soli (birthplace) and jus sanguinis (parentage) concepts of nationality. french nationality was given automatically to the children of a french father but could also be acquired by non-french citizens through naturalisation. there was a strong ideological correlation between being ‘socially’ french and french nationality. that is, french nationals were expected to adhere to certain french characteristics, which were absorbed through socialisation. these characteristics included fluency in the french language and a knowledge of french history and society. importantly, french women who married non-french nationals lost their french nationality upon marriage and became citizens of their husband’s country. moreover, children born of such couples were not french nationals irrespective of where they were born or chose to reside. 5 according to kobayashi (1980: 216) there were very few japanese women in new caledonia because the local authorities did not recognise proxy marriages and most of the men were single when they arrived. it was possible, if the men were married before arrival, to arrange for their wives to join them but few men took this path. 6 to be eligible for japanese citizenship people had to be listed on a japan-based family register. family registers were maintained at the local municipal level (for instance, town or village). the organisation of such a registration was difficult to organise without local consular representation. to register a child before the establishment of the japanese consulate in nouméa in 1940 required registering a child through the japanese consulate in sydney, by physically going to japan or by organising someone in japan to register the child. the registration proved too cumbersome in many cases and most children were not registered in japan. ward portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 58 rather, they were citizens of their father’s country or stateless if not eligible for citizenship of that country. the nationality laws were largely applied equally in france’s territories as in metropolitan france but as plender (1974: 717, note 43) shows, from the early 1880s the nationality laws were applied more liberally in france’s colonies, including new caledonia, in order to encourage immigration.7 in this case immigration referred to people of a european background and not the residents of france’s colonies, including any indigenous peoples. indigenous people, such as the new caledonian kanak, were ineligible for french nationality. after the first world war, france experienced depopulation due to a combination of war casualties and an increasing number of women marrying non-french citizens.8 in 1920 for instance, 14,178 french women married non-french citizens while only 8,736 non-french women acquired french nationality through marriage, therefore resulting in a loss of 5,442 people (weil 2008: 65). this situation raised some concerns about france’s long-term future and underpinned moves to change the nationality act in the 1920s (weil 2008: 65–67). after much deliberation, a new nationality act took effect on 10 august 1927. under the new law, french women who married non-french citizens on french territory were eligible to remain french nationals. previously, formerly french women could apply to regain their french nationality and should their application be successful, became french once again by decree. new caledonia-born julia quenneville for instance, regained her french nationality when her japanese husband (shiramitsu jukei)9 became french on 1 may 1936 (anc 127w 47).10 under the changes, children born to french mothers and non-french fathers could also be french nationals as long as they were born on french territory. at the same time, the eligibility period for naturalisation was reduced from ten years to three years and in the process socialisation became an encouragement to naturalisation rather than naturalisation as the culmination of socialisation (weil 2008: 68). despite the seemingly more liberal nationality law, new french nationals were ‘barred from exercising political rights’ (weil 2008: 194) and were excluded from certain professions in the short term. under the new law, the terms governing denaturalisation or the withdrawal of french nationality were also changed. according to weil (2008: 108), the new law allowed for the stripping of french nationality in three cases: ‘(1) carrying out acts against the internal or external security of the french state; (2) committing acts benefiting a foreign state that were incompatible with being a french citizen and were contrary to france’s interests; (3) failing to carry out the obligations resulting from laws on military recruitment.’ security concerns, including conscription (or military recruitment), were therefore central to the terms for the withdrawal of french nationality. from 1928 until 1935, male french nationals had to complete one year of compulsory military service. in march 1935, the period was extended to two years.11 applications for denationalisation from french males of military age were considered in the context of whether they had completed military service or not. new male 7 ‘the ‘record of naturalisations, 1926–1938’ (anc 127w 47) shows that colomina frederic, a spanish citizen born in new caledonia became french on 4 december 1926. 8 bertossi and hajjat (2013: 6–7) argue that france had similar concerns after the end of the second world war. 9 in line with japanese custom, japanese names are written surname first. 10 shiramitsu juhei and julia quenneville were married in bourail in 1925 (anc n19 acte de naissance quenneville julia). 11 in 1996 france suspended military conscription and formally ended the practice in 2001. the internment and repatriation of the japanese-french nationals resident in new caledonia, 1941–1946 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 59 french nationals of military age were also expected to complete military service. the concern was that denationalisation was aimed primarily at avoiding military service. to date the implications of the changes to the nationalisation laws as they applied in france’s overseas territories, including new caledonia, have been minimal. plender’s (1974: 718) account of the standardisation of the nationality laws across territorial france in 1973 does not explain how the previous laws were applied differently in the overseas territories visà-vis metropolitan france. between may 1927 and december 1941 35 japanese took french nationality. of these jf nationals, five men (shibata heizo, horio kanafou, mori zenkichi, sugiura masajiro, and goto sutekichi12) became french before the changes took effect on 10 august 1927. the date is important as it meant that the changes introduced by vichy regime did not apply to them, although they were used to denationalise goto sutekichi in february 1942 (see below). the french new caledonia-born wives of shibata and horio—considered the first and second japanese to take french citizenship—both lost their french nationality and became japanese subjects when they had married. shibata’s wife maria was reintegrated to french nationality on the same day her husband became a french national on 9 february 1927 (anc 157w 106). the new caledonian-born wives of japanese who took french nationality after 10 august 1927 did not lose their french nationality. in july 1940, the vichy regime implemented non-legislative changes to the rules governing french nationality. under these changes, anyone who had become a french national by decree since 10 august 1927 could have their nationality revoked ‘without cause’ (weil 2008: 88). an earlier decree issued on 12 november 1938 determined that french nationality could be stripped from naturalised french nationals should they be deemed to be ‘unworthy of the title of french citizen’ (marrus & paxton 1995: 56). under this earlier change, the council of state approval was required before the withdrawal of nationality could take effect but under the vichy changes, denaturalisation was an administrative decision without judicial oversight. the vichy change saw around 5,000 naturalised french nationals living in metropolitan france, including around 4,000 jews who were ‘returned’ to germany, lose their french nationality (marrus & paxton 1995). in early 1942 these changes were used to denationalise 13 jf nationals who had become french after 10 august 1927. importantly, the vichy changes were introduced prior to new caledonia deciding to align with the free french government in exile and therefore the laws remained applicable in new caledonia. the internment of the japanese residents of new caledonia the war in europe and the deteriorating political situation in the pacific saw the french administration become increasingly concerned about the presence of over 1,000 japanese residents in new caledonia. in june 1941 the french administration asked the australian government for permission to send 700 japanese to australia for internment in event of war (anc 107w 2852 letter from sautot to ballard, australia’s official representative in new caledonia, 26 june 1941). in reply, the australian government agreed to accept 300 japanese should war erupt (anc 107w 2852 letter from ballard to sautot, 4 august 1941). no reason was given for the lower number. immediately after the free french—with whom new caledonia was aligned—declared war against japan on 8 december 1941, the french administration began issuing notices for the arrest of the japanese residents. the original plan was to arrest only those japanese between 12 goto sutekichi is often referred to as suekichi in documents in the anc’s collection. ward portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 60 the ages of 18 and 50 years, but many of those arrested were over 50 years of age (naa a2670 282/1940 supplement 2 to war cabinet agendum no. 282/1940: 4). itami utanoshima, a cobbler in koumac, for example, was 70 years old when interned (anc 34w 17).13 the japanese were initially interned in a number of small local camps across new caledonia but were later concentrated to the former penal colony in nouville. on 19 december 1941, less than two weeks after the bombing of pearl harbour, the first ship carrying japanese internees departed nouméa bound for australia. between then and may 1942, 1,121 japanese were sent to australia for internment (naa mp508/1 255/702/2102 cable 357 to secretary, office of dominion affairs from department of army, 6 july 1942). among them were 10 former-jf nationals. all japanese sent to australia were repatriated to japan either as part of the september 1942 anglo-japanese civilian exchange or after the end of hostilities (ward 2016). the effect of this repatriation was the virtual elimination of the japanese population of new caledonia. japanese-french nationals as noted above, between 1927 and 1939 35 japanese became french nationals. whilst shibata and horio are recognised as the first jf nationals, they were not the first to apply. yamamoto kenzaburo applied in 1921 but his application was refused. yamamoto’s second application in 1929 was approved and he became french by decree in 1931 (anc 107w 2852 letter from gabriel georget, commissioner of police, nouméa, 20 december 1941).14 most jf nationals lived in nouméa but a number resided outside the capital. as was the case with the japanese population as a whole, many of the jf nationals were married or in relationships with women with whom they had children. in cases where the parents were married, the children were japanese by birth; but where their parents were unmarried the children could be french, japanese or citizens of their mother’s country. children born after 10 august 1927 to french mothers were eligible for french nationality at birth. by december 1941, a number of the jf nationals had died (e.g. mori zenkichi died in 1936).or in the case of ishikawa bumpei, had returned to japan (anc 34w 28 and anc 34w 17). an estimated 26 remained in new caledonia in december 1941. the reasons behind the decision of japanese people to take french nationality were a mix of economics and the personal. in 1920 the french administration imposed an annual poll tax of 25 francs on each non-french worker and to avoid paying the poll tax, ishikawa (2007: 78) claims, some japanese decided to apply for french nationality. this change would explain yamamoto kenzaburo’s application in 1921. for men with children, the decision was also practical as their children would probably live in new caledonia and therefore french nationality would be more appropriate. however, it must be acknowledged that 35 out of the over 5,000 japanese who had lived and worked in new caledonia between 1892 and 1941 is not a high proportion; it is therefore clear that the overwhelming majority did not see the value or necessity of becoming french nationals. conscription was not a concern as only one jf national was made to undertake conscription: okada jintaro (b. 1891 hiroshima prefecture 13 the 34w series comprises ‘arrival cards’ for non-french citizens who arrived in new caledonia. many were completed a long time after a foreigner’s arrival and hence the information is not always accurate. the series is not complete as a number of cards were lost before they were transferred to the anc’s collection. 14 the copy held in the anc’s collection is a carbon copy. it is presumably addressed to the governor but the addressee’s details are not shown. the internment and repatriation of the japanese-french nationals resident in new caledonia, 1941–1946 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 61 who arrived in new caledonia in 1914) (anc 34w 32). okada became a french national on 23 february 1933 and was conscripted in 1935 at the age of 44 (anc 350w 26). the reasons why only okada was conscripted are unclear but it may have been due to his relative young age (under 50 years) and that he lived in trianon, a suburb of nouméa (anc 350w 26). his duties during conscription were not particularly onerous (such as digging roads) and he only attended for a few days. while okada was the only japan-born jf national to be conscripted, as french nationals a number of sons of jf nationals were conscripted and/or enlisted in the french forces. for example, sakamoto kaneo claude, the son of sakamoto kan’ichi who took french nationality in 1930, was conscripted in may 1940 at the age of 20 and served until 1945 (anc 350w 39). outbreak of war and the internment of the jf nationals as mentioned earlier, at the outbreak of war in the pacific a number of the jf nationals were arrested and interned. good character references and the intervention of the governor saw many jf nationals released within weeks. anzai shoji, for instance, was interned on 31 december 1941 and then released on 17 january 1942 on the order of the governor (anc 34w 2). the arrest of the jf nationals was in accordance with the governor’s advice to the public prosecutor on 17 december 1941 that he intended to issue a decree that the jf nationals who had shown solidarity with the japanese cause be denaturalised (anc 107w 2852 letter from governor to the public prosecutor, 17 december 1941). jf nationals who had demonstrated that they were ‘worthy to be part of the french family’ were to remain free. this latter condition was largely ignored outside nouméa and many jf nationals resident in rural areas were interned. the internment of the non-suspect jf nationals necessitated the governor’s intervention to have them released. for example, sakamoto itsuki, a resident of voh, was interned in late december 1941 and released in january 1942 after the intervention of the governor on the undertaking that he would be placed under surveillance by the local police (anc 107w 2852 letter from governor to chief of police, voh, 28 january 1942). despite his initial release, sakamoto was re-interned in april 1942 and remained interned until july 1946, even though he remained french. after his release sakamoto returned to voh where he lived for a number of years.15 in line with the governor’s 17 december proposal, jf nationals who had become french after 10 august 1927 and were considered ‘suspect’ were approached about renouncing their french nationality. some agreed to renounce their french nationality but others did not. on the 10 and 21 february 1942, the governor signed decrees revoking the french nationality of eight men (inada sokieki,16 kosaki kinshichi,17 goto sutekichi, imamura keita, miyake hanzanburo, sakamoto kaniba, tsubashima yaichi,18 yamamoto kenzaburo19) who had agreed to relinquish their french nationality (anc 107w 2852 decrees signed by 15 sakamoto itsuki died in nouville on 12 june 1975, maire de nouméa: service à la population [births, deaths and marriages registry, nouméa town hall]. 16 inada sokieki is listed in the naa as sueki. he is sometimes listed as soneki or socieki in documents held by the anc. 17 kosaki is listed in the naa as kinhichi. 18 tsubashima is sometimes referred to as toubashima. he is listed in the naa as tsuboshima yaichi. 19 yamamoto kenzaburo is often referred to as yamamoto kenjaburo. ward portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 62 d’argenlieu, 10 and 21 february 1942). goto’s denationalisation had to be consensual as he had become french prior to the august 1927 changes. a third decree issued by d’argenlieu on 21 april 1942 forcibly revoked the french nationality of another five men (anzai shoji, katoushita hideo, yamamoto seiji, sukita suekichi,20 kiko masago) who had not agreed to relinquish their french nationality (anc 107w 2852). in effect, this third decree formally revoked the french nationality of jf nationals who were not considered to be worthy members of the french national family. the issue of the three decrees enabled the now former-jf nationals to be (re)interned or placed under house arrest. the issue of the decrees also facilitated the transfer of most of the former-jf nationals to australia for internment in late may 1942. anzai shoji, mentioned above, was re-interned on 11 may and sent to australia later that month, together with all but one of the former-jf nationals (sakamoto kaniba) (anc 34w 2). sakamoto kaniba was hospitalised on a number of occasions with an illness that prevented him from travelling. when not in hospital, sakamoto was interned with many of the other japanese men in nouville (anc 34w 38). the reasons behind the decision not to denationalise some jf nationals are more complex than whether the men’s actions were suspect or not. in at least one case, the decision was a pragmatic one. according to the u. s. naval liaison officer, okada jintaro, the operator of the salt works, was not interned by order of a local french army quartermaster as ‘there was no one else to make the salt’ (u.s. naval liaison officer 1942). presumably someone was found to take over okada’s work as the u.s. naval liaison officer also notes that okada was told by the ‘police commissioner that he is not to leave his house’ (u.s. naval liaison officer 1942). repatriation the decision on where the japanese from new caledonia would be repatriated—wherever they were interned—was under the control of the new caledonian authorities as the initial interning administration. former-jf nationals imamura keita and yamamoto kenzaburo were nominated by the japanese government to be repatriated as part of the proposed, albeit unsuccessful, second anglo-japanese civilian exchange (naa mt885/1 255/18/308 memo to australian department of external affairs from ballard, official representative new caledonia, 12 november 1943).21 interestingly, the french administration approved the inclusion of imamura but opposed the repatriation of yamamoto on the grounds that he was ‘dangerous’ (naa mt885/1 255/18/308 memo, 12 november 1943). approval for imamura to be included was given even though he was accused of suspicious acts as early as november 1941 (anc 107 w 2852 letter from lt-colonel jardin to governor, 29 november 1941). together with most of the japanese from new caledonia interned in australia, all formerjf nationals were repatriated to japan in february 1946. in october 1945, the australian government approached the french administration about the possibility of repatriating back to new caledonia the japanese from new caledonia who had been interned in australia (naa a1066 ic45/1/11/5 cablegram no 142 external affairs to ballard, australian government representative, nouméa, 17 october 1945). the governor’s response was that ‘all these internees to be repatriated to japan’ (naa a1066 ic45/1/11/5 cablegram no 154 20 sukita suekichi is listed in the naa as sugita suekichi. 21 for a discussion of the circumstances surrounding the failure of the 2nd anglo-japanese civilian exchange see fedorowich (1997) and ward (2015). the internment and repatriation of the japanese-french nationals resident in new caledonia, 1941–1946 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 63 the australian official representative, nouméa, 31 october 1945). kurtovitch (2013), in his play, ‘l’arrestation du japonais’ (the arrest of the japanese) suggests that this was part of the french administration’s strategy to eliminate the japanese community so as to claim and sell their assets. kurtovitch’s claim needs further examination but the governor’s argument that some jf nationals need to be denationalised so their ‘belongings can be confiscated’ (anc 107w 2852 letter from sautot to the high commissioner for france in the pacific, 5 february 1942) gives weight to his view. kurtovitch’s claim is further supported by the fact that the assets of the repatriated japanese were seized and sold off in the late 1950s with the french administration keeping the proceeds (palombo 2003). in january 1946, 29 japanese from new caledonia interned in australia signed a petition requesting that they be repatriated to new caledonia rather than japan (naa a1066 ic45/1/11/5 letter signed by anyei morio, compound leader 14c compound, loveday addressed to minister for external affairs, 31 january 1946). the petitioners included the former-jf nationals, goto sutekichi and inada sueki. there is no record of a reply but as the repatriation ship ss koei-maru that transferred many japanese internees back to japan left melbourne on 21 february, it is possible that the australian authorities did not bother to reply. yet, it shows that some of the former-jf nationals wished to return to new caledonia. all former-jf nationals interned in australia were on board the ss koei-maru when it departed melbourne. with their repatriation to japan the only chance of a continuation of a japanese community in new caledonia rested with the members of the japanese community—many of whom were jf nationals—who remained in new caledonia. these men were not given their freedom until july 1946, by which time they had been interned or held under house arrest for nearly four years, and most were aged in their late fifties if not older. yet, the french administration attempted to expel these men as well and it was partly due to the lateness of the french administration’s request that they were not repatriated to japan via australia. after their release most found it difficult to return to their previous life and none regained the social respect or economic position which they had had prior to the outbreak of war. the loss of prestige experienced by these men, compounded by the ‘wall of silence’ that emerged due to the repatriation to japan of the men sent to australia, effectively ended the community. that is, mechanisms external to the community led to the inability of the community to continue or sustain itself. conclusion this paper explains how the denationalisation and subsequent internment of 13 jf nationals resident in new caledonia were facilitated by changes to the french nationality laws introduced by the vichy regime. while these changes were driven by conditions in metropolitan france, they were used effectively against the japanese community in new caledonia to the long-term detriment of that community. the denationalisation of the jf nationals facilitated the transfer of 12 former-jf nationals to australia for internment, which, in turn, led to their repatriation to japan after the end of hostilities. their denationalisation and internment therefore prevented the sustainability of the community after 1945. the denationalisation and internment of the japanese community arose despite the fact that the japanese community had enjoyed a level of respect and was reasonably well integrated into the local community prior to the outbreak of war. this sudden change of attitude reflects how in times of conflict opinions towards an immigrant community can change quickly and in the process diminish the sustainability and viability of the immigrant community. this paper also shows that two of the former-jf nationals sent to australia petitioned to be allowed to return ward portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 64 to new caledonia but their request was not granted, thereby indicating that attitudes do not immediately revert back once conflict ends. finally, i have suggested here that there were probably some economic reasons behind the denationalisation and internment programs, but more work is needed to better understand these reasons, particularly in light of the governor’s refusal to allow the japanese to return to new caledonia and the deliberate confiscation and sell off of the japanese’ assets. references 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2, september 2017 67 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2016.1240020 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: tran-nhut, t.v. 2018. années du singe. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 77-82. https://doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v15i1-2.5732 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au cultural work années du singe thanh-van tran-nhut independent author corresponding author: tess do, school of languages and linguistics, the university of melbourne, vic 3010. eisenhut23@free.fr doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5732 article history: received 19/09/2017; accepted 08/11/2017; published 23/08/2018 abstract thanh-van tran-nhut was born in huế in 1962. she moved to the united states with her family in 1968, then to france in 1971. she holds a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from the california institute of technology. she is the author of a series of crime novels set in 17th-century vietnam, whose main character is mandarin tân, a young magistrate in an empire in turmoil. in 2009 she published a short story collection entitled le palais du mandarin that traces her successive migrations from vietnam to the usa and france through a sequence of fictionalized culinary memories. her most recent novel, kawekaweau (2017), drafted during her time as the writer in residence at randell cottage in wellington, new zealand, in 2014, is drawn from her historical research of french explorers’ findings in the antipodes in the 19th century. her work has been translated into six languages. in this story, the narrator, who left huế in 1968, returns thirty-six years later with questions about her past. she wanders through familiar yet oddly unrecognisable streets, in search of memories of tết mậu thân and the fateful offensive that would change the course of the war. résumé thanh-van tran-nhut est née à huế en 1962. elle s’installe aux états-unis avec sa famille en 1968, puis en france en 1971. elle est ingénieur en mécanique, diplômée du california institute of technology, et l’auteur d’une série policière située dans le vietnam du xviième siècle, dont le héros est le mandarin tân, un jeune magistrat dans un empire en pleine tourmente. son recueil de nouvelles le palais du mandarin (2009) retrace ses pérégrinations entre le vietnam, les usa et la france à travers des souvenirs culinaires. son dernier roman, kawekaweau (2017), élaboré lors de sa résidence d’écrivain au randell cottage à wellington (nouvelle-zélande) en 2014, s’appuie sur les voyages d’exploration scientifique français du xixe siècle aux antipodes. ses livres ont été traduits en six langues. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.77 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5732 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:eisenhut23@free.fr https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5732 ‘années du singe’ : la narratrice, qui a quitté huế en 1968, revient trente-six ans plus tard avec des questions sur son passé. elle erre dans des rues à la fois familières et étrangement méconnaissables, à la recherche de ses souvenirs du tết mậu thân et de cette offensive qui allait infléchir le cours de la guerre. keywords thanh-van tran-nhut, vietnamese diaspora, ‘années du singe’  la brume est partie en lambeaux. les silhouettes, d’abord duveteuses comme des cocons de bombyx, se sont précisées en quelques secondes : vieillards en chemises rayées, femmes traversant la rue, la palanche sur l’épaule. la grisaille initiale bascule brutalement dans la couleur. une ombrelle violette, ouverte contre le soleil, bleuit les joues d’une jeune fille ; des bougainvillées saignent contre un mur lézardé. je n’ai plus l’habitude de ces teintes saturées qui donnent une épaisseur spéciale au monde. huế, destination finale, après tout ce temps. je suis donc de retour. en trente-six ans, les douze animaux du zodiaque ont eu le loisir d’effectuer leur farandole trois fois. nous voilà donc revenus à l’année du singe. mes derniers souvenirs datent de début 1968, l’année de mes six ans. la ville est encore recroquevillée derrière une ligne imaginaire mais solide, corsetant un globe qui ne tourne pas rond, un trait tiré entre deux mondes qui devraient n’en faire qu’un – le fameux 17e parallèle. pourquoi revenir après tout ce temps ? parce qu’à force de traîner dans le brouillard, à regarder les tons de gris se superposer aux teintes de blanc, on finit par oublier. les autres avaient raison : il était temps de faire le chemin inverse. mais ce n’est pas un voyage d’agrément, une de ces balades pour le plaisir, dont on ramène du sable dans les poches et des photos pour plus tard. non, c’est une incursion dans le temps, destinée à rapporter non pas des souvenirs, mais le souvenir. une quête de la vérité, une enquête sur le passé, une reconquête de la mémoire. au moment de partir, j’ai demandé au borgne ce qu’il fallait chercher. une odeur ? un lieu ? un visage ? seulement un nuage d ’automne, m’a-t-il répondu avec l’incompréhensible concision de ceux qui ont tout vécu. à présent je contemple, hébétée, cette marée humaine se pressant sur le pont trường tiền qui enjambe de ses arches de métal la rivière des parfums. le bruit de la rue fait vibrer l’air. pétarades de motos chevauchées par des familles entières, klaxons impatients de taxis en maraude, cris de vendeuses de soupe. tant de frénésie m’oblige à me poser sur un banc, rue lê lợi. cette avenue porte le nom d’un des plus grands empereurs du pays, qui libéra la nation du joug des chinois en 1428. pratiquement chaque ville a une rue en son honneur, comme pour rappeler que les géants sont toujours parmi nous. son ancien compagnon d’armes, le lettré nguyễn trãi, n’a-t-il pas écrit « nous avons été parfois faibles et parfois puissants, mais nous n’avons jamais manqué de héros. » ? c’est un peu plus loin dans cette rue, à l’hôpital central, que mes frères et moi sommes nés. tu te souviens donc de ta naissance ? a ricané le veuf. et tu as oublié le reste ? j’ai fait une grimace. laisse-la, est intervenu le borgne. chacun son histoire. tran-nhut portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201878 l’odeur de viande grillée et de menthe fraîche me chatouille les narines. devant les gargotes, des brochettes de nem lụi grésillent sur des braseros, des bols de bún bò rougeoient au soleil. mais je ne suis pas venue ici pour déguster les spécialités locales. dans la main, je tiens un papier avec une seule adresse. étrange impression que ce mélange de souvenirs précis et d’oubli total, une amnésie sélective qui fait tanguer l’esprit et douter le cœur. je me rappelle des anecdotes mais pas mon nom, je reconnais les lieux publics mais suis incapable de retrouver le seul lieu qui compte. rue phan đình phùng. c’est là que je vais. je demande en vain le chemin aux passants. ils n’ont pas l’air de comprendre mon accent, ou font les sourds pour cacher leur ignorance. je me dirige au hasard vers le sud en me fiant aux grandes artères. les boutiques de tailleurs se succèdent, leurs devantures garnies de robes en taffetas et de chemises en soie. çà et là, des librairies et des quincailleries, puis des salons de coiffure. prête à retourner sur mes pas, j’aperçois du coin de l’œil une ruelle à ma gauche. c’est là. cung an định, le palais construit par khải định, père du dernier monarque bảo đại, peu après son accession au trône en 1916. empereur docile, allié des français, il régnera sans gloire pour ne laisser qu’un tombeau clinquant à flanc de colline et une bâtisse coloniale au fond d’une allée. je suis le sentier entre deux bassins d’eau morne, arrivant par l’arrière. les moussons ont dessiné sur la façade ocre des méandres fantasques qui ourlent l’escalier menant à la véranda. contournant l’édifice, j’aperçois le portail monumental coiffé de dragons et serti de mosaïques. dans la cour, un kiosque, aujourd’hui vide, surmonté d’un toit en tuile vernissée. la porte d’entrée est fermée. devant le palais coule un petit cours d’eau, le an cựu. là, sur le bord du trottoir, est assise une femme d’une cinquantaine d’années. elle regarde l’autre berge, où un temple bouddhiste se profile derrière des frangipaniers. — savez-vous qui habite ce palais ? ma voix résonne bizarrement, hésitante, comme désincarnée. les mots ont du mal à sortir. la femme se retourne. ses prunelles sont recouvertes d’un voile laiteux. ce regard nacré me prend au dépourvu. — personne. il appartient à la ville. — on n’y loge plus des familles d’enseignants ? elle se met à rire, des rides courant sous ses mèches prématurément blanchies. — depuis longtemps ce n’est plus le cas. dans ses yeux qui ne voient plus passe un étonnement poli qu’elle tente de masquer. — pardonnez mon indiscrétion, mais vous êtes việt kiều ? việt kiều  pour việt d’outre-mer, việt de l’étranger—principalement ceux qui ont fui le pays à la chute du régime de saigon, le dernier jour d’avril 1975. je n’y étais pas, mais j’ai suivi les événements de loin. des gens aiguillonnés par une frayeur viscérale, se sauvant de la terre de leurs ancêtres, prêts à abandonner tout ce qu’ils chérissaient. pour ceux-là, le mot communisme était synonyme d’un monde dont ils ne voulaient pas. à l’époque, je me suis demandé pourquoi tant de haine envers ceux qui avaient réussi ce coup de maître : réunifier un pays disloqué par trente ans de guerre. pour ressentir une telle panique, fallait-il avoir couché avec l’ennemi ou pactisé avec le diable ? — non. je ne suis pas việt kiều. années du singe portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201879 à l’étincelle jaillie de ses prunelles, je sens son scepticisme. elle fait semblant de ne pas comprendre : — vous êtes partie d’ici en quelle année ? — en 1968. — 1968, dit-elle, songeuse. l’année de l’offensive. année terrible... elle hésite avant de poursuivre d’une voix circonspecte : — vos parents avaient sûrement à faire ailleurs... je secoue la tête en silence. ces viêt et leurs questions détournées ! elle veut savoir pourquoi je suis partie d’ici. mais je ne peux lui donner une réponse que, moi aussi, je cherche. un garçon, débouchant d’une venelle, me tire de cette situation embarrassante. — grand-mère, il faut rentrer. c’est l’heure de manger. la femme bat des cils et se lève avec raideur. — eh bien, nous continuerons notre petite discussion une autre fois, me propose-t-elle. vaguement surpris, le gamin la prend par la main et la guide sur le chemin creusé d’ornières, que les ombres ont fini par envahir. seule, je contemple le cours d’eau qui prend peu à peu les couleurs de la nuit. la pleine lune, criblée comme un champ de bataille, donne aux choses un glacis grisâtre et adoucit les angles. à la faveur d’une porte latérale qu’on a oublié de refermer, je me glisse dans le palais an định. c’est ici que j’ai vécu. une princesse ? a minaudé le veuf, tout à coup révérencieux. absolument pas ! ai-je aussitôt répliqué. je n’ai rien à voir avec la famille royale. dès que l’université de huế a réservé cung an định pour ses enseignants en 1959, mon père, professeur d’économie, y disposait d’un appartement de fonction, tout comme certains de ses collègues. je monte à l’étage, là où nous habitions. carrelage géométrique importé de france, papier vert rizière, panneaux vitrés en demi-lune. tout y est. sauf ceux que j’ai connus. l’éclat des lanternes troue la nuit et fait scintiller les coupes de champagne dans les mains des convives. l’année 1968 vient de commencer. mes parents et leurs amis notables lèvent leur verre, puis redeviennent graves. aux dires du pharmacien qui a un frère général de brigade, les américains, persuadés que la victoire est imminente, n’ont aucune intention de cesser les bombardements entamés depuis trois ans au nord du pays. l’opération rolling thunder continuera à cibler les installations militaires, les zones de stockage de carburants, les alentours de hà nội et de hải phòng. on parle de plus de cinquante mille victimes civiles déjà, selon lui. dans la cour, les voitures astiquées renvoient les feux sourds de la fête et forment un rempart contre l ’obscurité qui a pris possession du monde. exceptionnellement, nous, les enfants, avons le droit de veiller un peu sous la surveillance de tuyết, la gamine de treize ans qui me garde. elle et moi, ce n’est pas toujours une histoire d ’amour. quand je lui désobéis, elle m’allonge des taloches et je lui mords l ’avant-bras. mais ce soir, elle feuillette le dernier paris match de ma mère en compagnie de la cuisinière, une femme coquette, tandis que quang, notre beau chauffeur, passe un chiffon sur les ailes de la renault familiale. mes frères aînés se livrent à leur jeu préféré—la guerre. l’un prend le rôle d ’un soldat du sud, l ’autre celui d ’un g.i. ils affectent une démarche de conquérant, casquette de guingois et cigarette au bec. les jumeaux galopent, imitent le son d ’une mitraillette, me pourchassent à travers le jardin. ils me dépassent d ’une tête, mais comme toujours, je leur échappe, rampe sous les buissons, détale entre deux citroën. je suis une việt cộng. espèrent-ils sérieusement l ’emporter sur mes terres ? pendant qu’ils fanfaronnent, une baudruche remplie d ’eau éclate à leurs pieds ; des poignées de gravier les atteignent par surprise. je m’esquive en criant on va gagner ! tran-nhut portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201880 tuyết interrompt sa lecture et sourit. on pourra bientôt la recruter, glisse-t-elle à quang, qui lui adresse un regard noir. au lever du soleil, la femme aux cheveux blancs est de nouveau assise devant la rivière. elle dit, sans se retourner : — vous revoilà ! faisons quelques pas ensemble. mes genoux ont tendance à rouiller au bord du an cựu. — parlez-moi de l’offensive du tết, de l’année du singe. elle se redresse à grand-peine et avance lentement, se guidant d’une canne. — ah, le tết mậu thân ... comment l’oublier ? dans la nuit du 30 au 31 janvier 1968, alors que le pays se prépare à fêter le nouvel an lunaire, les troupes việt cộng attaquent simultanément plusieurs villes du sud, dont huế. ici, les tirs de barrage commencent à 3 h 30, fracassant le ciel et secouant la terre. le bruit d’armes automatiques crève les tympans. sous une pluie de fusées éclairantes, des bataillons du nord prennent d’assaut les ponts au-dessus des douves et s’emparent de la citadelle. à l’aube, la bannière bleu et rouge, frappée de l’étoile d’or, flotte sur les remparts. beaucoup, terrorisés, fuient les quartiers sous le contrôle des communistes. mais d’autres, croyez-moi, ont attendu ce moment depuis qu’ils sont nés. débordées, les forces du sud appellent les u.s. marines à la rescousse. les combats font rage dans les rues avant que les américains ne reprennent la citadelle un mois plus tard, en y larguant des bombes et du napalm. elle tend l’oreille, comme pour guetter un vol d’hélicoptères ou le sifflement d’un obus. — au final, plus de cinq mille morts du côté des communistes, environ deux cents marines et quatre cents soldats du sud tués—et aussi de très nombreux blessés. la ville est détruite à 80 % par les frappes aériennes des américains. — et les civils ? nous traversons le pont sur le an cựu. des paysans matinaux se dirigent vers le marché, chargés de paniers de légumes. les marchands ambulants commencent leur tournée. quelque part, un coq s’égosille. ma compagne serre les dents. — près de trois mille victimes. des tombes partout—dans les jardins, les écoles ... beaucoup retrouvées dans des fosses communes, présentant des signes d’ exécutions... — tuées par les việt cộng ? — probablement. mais pas que par eux. des images semblent défiler dans sa mémoire. — les marines et les soldats du sud passaient de maison en maison, traquant les combattants communistes et leurs sympathisants. c’était l’époque des délations, des dénonciations des deux côtés. n’importe qui devenait indic. on abattait des gens pour un soupçon. comment croire un instant que les crimes n’ont été commis que par un seul camp ? elle se tait, le visage tourné vers l’eau, puis reprend : — février 1968... il n’arrêtait pas de pleuvoir sur huế. la pluie ruisselait sur le kiosque devant cung an định. tu t’en souviens ? le doigt pointé vers le palais, elle me fixe de ses prunelles mortes, comme si elle me voyait. son avant-bras, soudain dénudé, est poinçonné d’un impact de balle. sous la trace étoilée, la cicatrice en croissant de dents d’enfant. je me souviens. années du singe portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201881 il a plu toute la journée. ce soir, une petite bruine brouille la silhouette de khải định, immobile dans le kiosque. depuis plusieurs jours, nous sommes cloîtrés à l ’intérieur du palais. chaque heure apporte son lot de déflagrations, de coups de feu dont on essaie d ’évaluer la distance. des roquettes ont démoli une partie du toit, dans l ’autre aile. par la fenêtre à l ’étage, cet après-midi, j’ai vu passer des gars en pyjamas noirs, pieds nus dans la boue. parmi eux, des jeunes filles aux cheveux noués et à la mine sévère. ils viennent du maquis et n’ont peur de rien. les adultes parlent à voix basse au salon. mes frères, silencieux, serrent leurs soldats et leurs tanks miniatures. le nez collé à la vitre, je me morfonds. je n’en peux plus de cette atmosphère pesante. la jambe du monarque vient de bouger. la statue va sûrement descendre du kiosque ! je me glisse dehors pour voir où elle compte aller. sûrement du côté de la citadelle, où a lieu toute l ’action... l’air humide est saturé d ’odeurs de poudre et de fumée. un vent léger agite les rameaux. encore quelques pas jusqu’au pavillon... une main m’agrippe par le col. tuyết m’a vue sortir et s’apprête à me tirer les oreilles. — vite ! c’est lui là-bas ! crie une voix de femme. je me retourne. une forme noire vient de surgir des bosquets et nous dépasse en courant. quang, notre chauffeur, me jette un regard qui résume une vie—entre détermination et désespoir. derrière lui, la cuisinière fait signe à un việt en uniforme du sud, qui lève son arme. affolée, je m’élance. tuyết s’interpose. la balle traverse son avant-bras. le monde explose. je sais pourquoi je suis partie d’ici. tuyết a déjà disparu, aveugle solitaire happée par une ville qui lentement s’éveille. elle m’a laissée à l’entrée du temple bouddhiste. juste en face, de l’autre côté de la rivière, le palais an định émerge derrière les frondaisons. à mes pieds, sous un frangipanier qui embaume les rêves des morts et console les vivants, une petite tombe. đào thị thu vân, 1962 – 1968. thu, automne. vân , nuage. le nuage d’automne que j’étais venue chercher. les couleurs disparaissent très vite. les verts se diluent, les rouges ternissent, puis les bleus s’évaporent. la chaleur se retire par vagues et les contours se voilent. les autres avaient raison. c’est un besoin et un privilège que de se rappeler sa propre mort. pour moi, la quête s’arrête là, en ce matin radieux sur les rives du an cựu. trahisons, exécutions, exil. de cette guerre est né un pays enfin réunifié. mais la paix a toujours un prix. les viêt d’outre-mer ont pu refaire leur vie ailleurs. mais nous, qui avons tout perdu pour la promesse d’un jour nouveau, il nous arrive de vouloir replonger dans la fureur et le vacarme, une fois encore, pour ressentir le bouillonnement du sang et l’ivresse de l’espoir. nous, les viêt d’outre-tombe. tran-nhut portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201882 verges_portalspecialissueindianoceantrafficgalley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. indian ocean traffic special issue, guest edited by lola sharon davidson and stephen muecke. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. moorings: indian ocean creolisations françoise vergès & carpanin marimoutou translated by stephen muecke & françoise vergès ‘amarres’ [moorings] in réunion creole means many different things: link, attachment, bewitchment, spellbinding, to be in love, to be captivated, to be in a relationship, to care for [amar lë ker], to enliven the senses [i amar la boush]. and a few other things as well … the island oh no i am not writing goodbye again no i am not rewriting the ledger of returns to the homeland but playing knucklebones for childhood renewed patrice treuthardt, pointe et complainte des galets we are native to an island that is often left off maps of the world, and often confused with other french overseas territories. we want to bring to bear a problematic starting with this forgetfulness and confusion. since it is true that it is the lot of so many peoples and groups to be forgotten, or not to count, we have to ask: ‘forgotten by whom, and why? counting for whom, and why?’ so starting from this forgetfulness, this ‘nonexistence,’ and asking oneself the fundamentally political question of ‘who counts and for whom,’ is to go straight to the heart of what brings sociality into being, that is, being accepted by the community of citizens. but this community is not a purely national one, it relates also to what it means to live together, on the soil of réunion and in the indian vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 2 ocean region, a community that is both imagined and concrete, ancient and still being created. when europe used to think of itself as the centre of the world, and organised the world around this centre, we were somewhere over there at the end of the world. then, we were still moored to france, but it was an imposed mooring that strangled us on occasions. today, now that europe has become one of the provinces of the world, we are rethinking our moorings. our project is now one of decentering the gaze and redrawing the cartography of the world from the indian ocean viewpoint, here where france, africa, europe, asia and the muslim worlds cross paths. we want to inscribe our island into a network of meetings and exchanges, at the crossroads of african, european, asian, and islander worlds. sure, this is a somewhat peripheral world, but it is one we can think with, work over, and transform into an asset or an advantage. we are not in the centre of the world, we never will be. we will always be a little on the sidelines, in the margins, but so what? we suggest a mode of reinscription in diversity, and think of globalisation as a series of meetings and exchanges in a multipolar world. moorings—so that we can anchor ourselves in the ocean, and then—we slip the moorings, to enter into relationships. what is our motivation for writing this text? one might say that everything has already been said on questions of réunion, métissage, the intercultural, and other cultural crossovers, and that we could only go over the same ground, but less effectively. there would be nothing to add, or at least very little. do we have the capacity to renew all this, or should we wait for the ‘next generations’ who would naturally be identified with the ‘new’? the need to write this text emerged as a response to several things: the increasingly significant presence of artists and culture in the réunion landscape, and the questions arising from that presence; the new interest taken by paris in these réunionese artistic developments; the lack of thinking about them; the superficiality of public debate; the aggressively masculine ethic of the réunionese discourses on art, culture, politics, and the social; new questions and new practices arising from the profound changes of the last thirty years; and the need to take part in the postcolonial debate. on the one hand, we will base our work in part on the structuralism and poststructuralism of michel foucault, claude lévi-strauss, jacques derrida, tzvetan todorov, james clifford, régine robin, chantal mouffe, and the insights of vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 3 psychoanalysis, feminism, contemporary art and architecture; and on the other hand, the theoreticians of postcolonialism, among them aimé césaire, frantz fanon, c. l. r. james, stuart hall, edward saïd, paul gilroy, arjun appadurai, arundhati roy, sara suleri, salman rushdie, achille mbembe. it is on the basis of all this that we hope to develop a critical movement on réunion. the language of the other this text was written by two people from réunion, a woman and a man who grew up here, who feel native to the island, and who have taken part in, and continue to take part in, the cultural and political debate. to be native for us means not just to be born on the island but also to care for it as regards its place in the indian ocean; the reassessment of its local practices and modes of expression; and of the reclaiming of its territory. for us, being here means (without having any choice in the matter) being bilingual and pluricultural. europe has privileged monolingualism and monoculturalism for a long time. the european didn’t have need for others’ languages and cultures since in his eyes his own culture or language was considered universal. in the colonies plural languages and cultures were an inevitable fact of life, but made out by imperialism to be signs of backwardness. yet, they are now the necessary condition for intercultural practice. the language of the other has become ours—we are not proud or ashamed of it—and we have not lost our native tongue. it is also without fear or favour that we borrow the techniques and conceptual tools useful to us, and that we express our love for the arts and literatures of the west. we want to take on board the saying of the great africanamerican poet audre lorde: using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. despite that, we are not into binary oppositions: europe is one of our worlds. africa, asia, the moslem and island worlds are all part of our matrix. we are simply beginning a critical inventory. binary oppositions can be dispensed with, all cultures interpenetrate and nourish one another, and none is isolated and pure. for all that, we will not idealise mixing, nor indulge in wide-eyed celebration of creolité, but we will pay attention to the conflicts and tensions, and to the impulses that are always possible out of compensatory ethnic identification. frontiers of the ‘we’ the ideas we are presenting are open to debate; they are partisan without seeking either to be exhaustive or neutral. this is a text that highlights certain points. we have vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 4 knowingly and willingly left others to one side. as we wrote we were confronted by the multiple meanings of ‘we’: the ‘we’ that refers to the authors, the ‘we’ that stands in opposition or confrontation to a ‘they’ (be it on or beyond the island) and the ‘we’ that brings together the island’s inhabitants. we are conscious of the exclusion effects brought about by the ‘we,’ but we know that no group is brought into being without some strategy of exclusion. there can be no process of identification without the establishment of a frontier between a ‘we’ and a ‘they.’ but this in no way signifies that frontiers cannot be crossed, that the other does not constitute the self, and that such identifications are not constantly subject to negotiable transformations. this also means that one has to be wary of the transformation of the ‘they’ into a fantastical threat to our existence, bringing about the emergence of closed identities. the common ‘we’ of this essay is in the process of becoming. there are two reefs to avoid sailing into, on the port the nationalist and/or communalist we, and on the starboard the risk of being diluted in the abstract and ahistorical universal of the so-called ‘global village.’ if nationalism—as invention of european romanticism—was quite rightly used as a force in decolonisation struggles, if the nation-state remains the dominant model with all the problems that it brings with it (repression of languages and cultures), we know, then, from the examples of the rise and fall of nationalisms in the second half of the 20th century, that this model is not the only one we might use for our own emancipation and reappropriation. réunion, as a part of the french republic, therefore in europe, and a region anchored in its indian ocean environment, has to invent its own postcolonial model. the absence of an enlightened bourgeoisie in réunion—apart from some rare exceptions, few have anything to do with any movement to reinvest in the territory and its cultures—is associated with both communitarian1 tendencies and a fascination for the ‘global village,’ both of which are ahistorical attitudes. the rapid growth of communications and the accelerating access to consumer goods, along with the disappearance of scandalously visible poverty have inevitably produced the illusion that all this has come to pass without friction. the social and cultural struggles that brought about a better way of life have been quickly forgotten. we have slipped under the clouds of an amnesia that has obscured and personalised social difficulties and conflicts (the media have by and large reflected and reproduced this amnesia). in this way certain typical characterisations of the réunionese (the hopeless man, the possessive mother, dad the 1 communaliste, a term used in mauritius, as noted by the authors, is used in the original. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 5 rapist) are put forward by way of explanation for réunion’s ‘lack’ of progress, while the inheritances of colonialism with its brutality and violence, are moved to the background. for us, only an analysis that works the engagements between the political and the social, the economic and the cultural, the private and the public, can allow us to understand the complexity of life on réunion. the réunion bourgeoisie, for the most part, has remained withdrawn, while the lower middle class, the children of farm workers, shopkeepers, labourers, clerks, quickly wanted to forget, in the rush to the ‘metropolis,’ where they came from, as they grasp the secondary signs of frenchness—cars, holidays in mauritius, contempt for the poor—while at the same time being unaware of cultural and intellectual movements in the region or in europe. it is rare to find people who have passed on to their children the family genealogy, the struggles and battles, which have opened the door to the current phenomenon of compensatory identities. these social classes are quite like the postcolonial middle classes that have, consciously or not, taken part in what sarat maharaj calls ‘multicultural management’ (2001), which can accept a little cultural difference but not too much, and especially if it is well-framed by a strict separation between the social and the cultural, the cultural and the political. so we are looking to develop a ‘we’ that would avoid cultures of recrimination, the mythologisation of history, self-referenced identity or the fundamentally static notion of identity and choose responsibility, the present, the heterogeneous and creolisation. this is a ‘we’ that remembers the past but is not enclosed there; it is situated in a genealogy of struggles for justice, equity and democratisation. i invoke you, land of sapodillas in the reverberations of the riverbanks […] i invoke you, land of babel hidden like a shameful illness bazaar of erased alphabets beatitude of cargo god dried entrails monuments of corrugated iron i invoke you, scorched land crossroads of nowhere bringing in contraband portulans riel debars, l’oriflamme léthargique the island archipelago we propose to begin from what made us: the land where we grew up—the volcanic peak, the uninhabited land, isolated in the indian ocean, known to the arabs, avoided by the portuguese, colonised by the french—by retracing the trading routes criss-crossing the vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 6 worlds that made it. the first inhabitants were french colonisers with their malagasy and indian slaves. it was an island of slaves and masters, then an island of masters and indentured labourers. it is an island where history has thrown together malagasy, africans, comorans, indians, chinese, vietnamese, malays, europeans and french, atheists, catholics and moslems, buddhists and hindus, animists and polytheists. but this would be no simple business of juxtaposition. the island allows for people to be at the same time christian and hindu, christian and animist, or hindu and animist. it is an island of the creole world, on the route between africa and asia, a ‘french’ island, an island-archipelago. it is an island of the indian ocean world, an island of indianoceanic creolisations. exiles, reappropriations exile and deportation framed our birth. we have had to give things up, give up the right to return, give up the story of the european travellers of the 17th and 18th centuries. their myth was biblical—paradise or hell. we wanted to renounce the hegemonic story of pain and suffering because we didn’t want to inspire pity. we live on the island. there would be no reparation … we were born in violence, the violence of slavery, indentured labour and colonialism. nothing can repair this primordial violence. nothing. only by building the present will our land be ours. so it is from this angle that we have to consider questions of repair. that in itself is not enough to constitute the ground or the foundation for our identity. because there is no doubt about what is the issue: a reappropriation of the land and the creating of a ‘living together.’ let’s revise these facts and turn once again to the scenes of subjection to slavery or indentured labour. the island was a long way away and isolated; the french colonised it and it quickly became the ‘sister-island’ of the île de france (mauritius). the french were not particularly interested in the island: they had no great plans for it; it would simply be a stopover on the way to india. a few settlers were sent out from france, but they did not think they were actors in a great colonial scheme. they were forced to leave because of poverty in rural france. they were poor landless peasants, pirates, impoverished aristocrats, and a few tradesmen. they were not allowed to develop on their own account, they had to follow decisions taken for them in paris—monocultures of coffee or sugar cane—and were forgotten on this island; the empire forgot them. it was rather in san domingo, the pearl of the antilles, that imperial glory flourished. over there, courtly balls were put on that rivalled in luxury those of the metropolis. this was to be versailles in the vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 7 caribbean. in réunion the masters tried one way or another to imitate the life of those masters: furniture from india, large estates, silks, black domestics, black nannies, reserved pews in church … all the outward signs of the life of white masters, in the same mould, from one plantation to another across the world. the dwelling is an entrenched camp. riel debars, l’oriflamme léthargique scenes of subjection: a cartography of power the scene of subjection marked the territory. the apparatus of colonial slavery and post-slavery had to be inscribed again and again. it had to be repeated, to be made visible for public display. the territory was marked by this display; the territory of the masters’ houses or those of the lesser whites were distinguished from the territory of the subjected. the latter lived in a camp. as the years went by, he squeezed from the master the cultivation of a small plot of land, for his vegetables, his animals or his garden, but all that remained precarious. the island was divided into territories: plantations on the coast, with the territories of the master, the freed man and the slave, then in the centre, in the mountains, the territory of the runaway, the maroon. let’s not forget the territory that remains uninhabited, not yet entirely crafted by humans: that of the volcano, the forests, the ravines, a natural territory that has not yet come under human hands. the territory of the plantations marked out the social and cultural cartography of the island. there was a cartography of power that imitated the territory of colonial power: towns organised around the church and state institutions (first monarchical, then republican). a capital with the governor’s square and the institutions of power—government house, the cathedral, churches, customs houses, police, municipalities, schools—with the botanic gardens, the main street, the shops … the other towns followed the same pattern. the cartography of counter-power, that of the maroons, shaped an island interior where the toponymy retains the traces of the warrior chiefs. the war against the maroons destroyed the vestiges of their villages, so the spatial organisation of their power remains in the realm of speculation. the raids they carried out on plantations were evidence of their capacity to develop strategies of resistance. but there was another cartography of resistance: conspiracies among slaves to organise revolts, with designated targets. the time was at night, the site the plantation. what they wanted was freedom, to take back their lives even at the risk of death. the uprisings at saint-leu or vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 8 at sainte-suzanne at the beginning of the 19th century are outstanding proof of this. i was born over on zanzibar who am i now? i will go look from high on the cliffs i will climb to dimitile and be reborn danyèl waro, bwéo land of the banished and the deported this land of masters, slaves, maroons, freed slaves, indentured labourers, is first of all a land occupied by men dominating other men. there were few women, a third of the population for centuries. slavery, like indenture, was predominantly a masculine affair, because growing coffee and sugar cane demanded physical strength. you had to know how to wield the machete all day long, repeating the same movement: grabbing the cane with the left hand, cutting it with one blow, trimming the leaves and throwing it down. cane dust irritated the skin, the leaves were sharp, ants bit the feet and legs, the wall of cane hindered movement, and the cane-cutting season was during the summer … you had to go on. then the cane had to be baled and taken to the mill … the scenario of oppression was of one man submitted to another, possessed by the other, like his household goods, one of his heritage items. this was a masculine world where nature yielded to an economy of plunder. once the war against the maroons was won, once the uprisings were crushed, once the abolition of slavery had been achieved, colonial power was in a position to put its own stamp on the territory, on the periphery of the great french colonial empire. lives crouched in the grass at the water’s edge devour the horizon with wide open eyes claire karm, rue d’après peripheries réunion remained on the periphery of the empire, despite the efforts of certain grand blancs.2 for a long time the island did not appear on all the maps. no one was interested, no one cared. it is still somewhat neglected, of secondary interest compared to mauritius, madagascar, india, the antilles. it is on the last rung of the imperial ladder. it remains in the margin, still confused with (or at best placed in comparison or 2 the ‘big white [families]’ are big land-holders from the colonial and slave era, now mainly involved in the import-export business, marketing, banking, automobile franchises, etc. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 9 competition with) the antilles, already a minor player. throughout its history there were those looking to create a destiny as the ‘colonising colony.’ it would work for imperial triumph in the region, they said, it would proudly fly the flag of the colonial army, and subjugate other peoples for the greater glory of the colonial empire. men from réunion took part in imperial conquests and won fame as colonial mercenaries. others realised they were colonised when they encountered other colonised peoples and became anticolonial militants: george garros, raymond vergès, lucien barquissau, paul dussac. after the abolition of slavery the territory was reorganised for further colonisation. the freed slaves and poor whites [petits blancs] were moved off the more fertile and easier to cultivate lands to the high parts and isolated corners of the island. the island was divided between les hauts and les bas. sent to the margins of public colonial space were the labourers, the small plantation owners, the laundresses. our modernity was shaped by this territorialisation of wealth and power. shantytowns transformed the urban areas, marking the territory of the poor and the excluded around the centre of the city. in the course of the last fifty years the invention of new territories—the beach, the road, the shopping centre, the far south, the east and the west—compounds the phenomenon of territorialisation. spaces disappear or are marginalised: the large plantation, the factory, the railway, the boutik sinwa3 … the social, imaginary, cultural and economic space has been deeply changed by all this. signs of the cross at the great division of the world between fidelities and humilities a house only so the evenings might pray passage with passengers towards unknown lands alain lorraine, sur le black writing histories our past, even though it is the object of commemorations, studies and reappropriations, still remains a polemical field. colonialism remains a minor research topic, and if slavery is indeed studied, it still has not become part of the common story even though we might assume that the voices of victims, the place of genocide, of crimes against humanity in politics and the law, within the development of international criminal law, 3 [boutique chinois] local grocery shop which also doubled as a bar. for a long time this was an essential social and economic space, before the appearance and development of supermarkets. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 10 would be integrated without too much controversy. what is at stake with this resistance? while france, despite everything, was still able to finally confront vichy or the algerian war, in réunion it still seems too dangerous to confront the past because that would threaten either the ties that bind (‘dangers of communitarianism’) or the ties to france (asking the question about ‘being linked to those who subjected you’) and would bring about a rereading of notions such as citizenship, equality, and national identity starting from the position of who is in or out. along with this resistance is a tendency to mythologise. there is an absence of evidence, and there is difficulty in accessing the archives (neglected for a long time, totally abandoned, some even no doubt destroyed). the fact that the majority of the eyewitness accounts are those of the masters, of the magistrates or other administrators of the colonial and slave-owning society, has promoted a compensatory history that rejects complexity, grey areas and complicity in order to highlight only suffering and heroic deeds. the absence of concrete traces paradoxically brings about an inflation of memory, as if only this inflation could make sense of the suffering. as paul ricoeur has pointed out, the imperatives of memory run the risk of sitting in opposition to the imperatives of history and lead to what régine robin defined as ‘saturated memory’ that no longer knows how to sort out myth from history. from our point of view, it is the writing of history that is crucial. it is accompanied by memory, but it is not reduced to it, because memory is a social construction following its own logic. in any society we can observe memories superimposing themselves on each other or opposing each other. our proposal is to build a ‘common story’ that would make place for memories, pointing out at every turn that the story can be subject to critical revision. we want to do an inventory of the places of memory, of which too many have already been lost, defend them against destruction, preserve them, make them known. we want to inscribe the historical threads and genealogies so that transmission can occur. we want to confront gaps in memory and continue to develop scientific rigour in the research. we want to reconstitute this particular history of violence, of plunder and of dehumanisation in the general history of violence, plunder and dehumanisation. we want to live with absence, so that this history stops being the history of lost souls, but rather gives meaning to the lives of the women and men who have lived in this land, and to the present. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 11 figures of exclusion work must be done to locate the figures of exclusion in order to deconstruct them, to make an inventory of the stereotypes and insults: l’argent braguette [social security cheques], l’assisté [someone on the dole], le léspèrkui [parasite], parents in retirement, les cagnards,4 la tantine larou.5 the descendants of slaves and indentured labourers do not have the same fate as those descended from the masters. this is a fact, and we need to study the effects of that heritage today, showing the various discriminations, stigmatisations, and racial stereotypes. we have to think about the social politics of reparation, already begun thanks to political and social movements (unions, women’s movements and political parties) and put into practice through social welfare. to speak of welfare dependence or of parasitism, as certain kinds of well-known discourses like to, returns to a denial of the need for reparation; it stigmatises people already in a precarious state, and excludes a significant number of réunionese from citizenship. but we should also analyse the lethal consequences of aid that is not accompanied by responsibility, and that organises a life predicated on the wait for the next dole cheque or piece-meal job. the growing vulnerability of a sector of the population, hidden by welfare and a kind of getting by, can nevertheless be read in the daily violence that articulates the anxiety of a present going nowhere and a future that appears absent. the politics of reparation past events do not save us from critical interpretation. no one can occupy the moral high ground because of the suffering of their ancestors. when a crime has affected the whole society and can compromise its future, reparation needs to be collective. the truth and reconciliation commission in south africa showed how a society could collectively heal a crime by putting executioners and victims face to face while highlighting the question of responsibility towards the past and the future. we don’t want to make that the sole model, but we can see there a collective will to confront past evil, and move beyond revenge in order to live together. frantz fanon did not want to be a prisoner of the past: ‘i am not the slave of the slavery that dehumanised my fathers,’ he wrote (fanon 1986: 230). for him, the important thing was to be a man in the present, who would not have to carry the burden of the victimisation of his ancestors. 4 pejorative and discriminatory term used to designate rough young men, particularly those from the suburbs. 5 pejorative and discriminatory term used to designate young women who are supposed to like riding around in flashy sports cars. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 12 contemporary debates around the world suggest a whole series of responses on the question of reparation: tribunals, truth and reconciliation commissions, positive discrimination, financial compensation, restitution (of objects, bodies, documents, lands), the construction of memorials, and teaching. we have noticed that young people in réunion have no idea about the recent past, nor of the history of decolonisation that is so important for their understanding of the world and for their place in it and their ability to take part in its debates. for us, a first step in the process of reparation would be for the education system genuinely to take that history into account—there is no reason why it shouldn’t be included in the national curriculum. the production and distribution of visual documentation could be supported and encouraged by the government, there could be a department of african and indian ocean studies at the university of réunion, all sorts of archives could be made more easily available, a critical sociology of réunionese society could be developed and, as we have said, a survey of sites of memory should be done in order to protect them. we have a responsibility. the responsibility of writing history and of living together. the conditions under which slaves and indentured workers lived cannot explain the current situation. to do so would be to disrespect them. and yet, can one ignore the morbid social effects that such systems have produced? the cleaving of social links, the rupture of transmission between generations, the reduction of the human being to a thing, the inevitable violence of human relations, all that has had an impact, as has been proven elsewhere, on the fabric of society, on the relations between women and men, and parents and children. it is for this reason that history has to be explored and not repressed, why we must not be afraid of the excessiveness of certain discourses: these expressions must be understood as part of a desire for integration and recognition rather than a desire for exclusion. we consider it indispensable to maintain a tension between the sometimes turbulent emergence of these voices for so long kept out of the réunionese master narrative, and the need to integrate them into the new narrative we will construct together. this is what we call being moored in history and not to history. this is why we are answerable to the present. it is us who throw rubbish into the ravines, who destroy the lagoons, ruin the soil with pesticides, destroy flora and fauna, agree to the construction vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 13 of monstrous structures, let the landscapes be spoilt, buy thousands of cars every month. spoiling the island continues the predatory practices of colonial imperialism, since it is founded on the right to exploit while minimising the responsibility to pass things on, the consciousness that what one does today can have irreparable effects on resources and landscapes. since the landscape as a social construction is part of our imaginary, destroying it threatens our imaginary and culture. because the landscape is linked to and part of our social, psychological real-life experience. so when we speak of reparation, it is about all this: it is as much about the social spaces as it is about the historic, economic, linguistic, cultural and imaginary scapes. this politics of reparation is one of the moorings we are suggesting. it is explicitly located in relation to the countries that surround us, the continents we have come from: africa, asia, europe and the islands. indianoceanics we plough the waves of the indian ocean, searching for the most marvellous clouds, the most enchanting breezes the most iridescent flasks, songs, the subtlest colours, blue is our idol, and we know how to break waves on the sand and the reefs jean albany, fare fare seascapes our understanding of land includes the ocean. the notion of seascape, untranslatable into french, is useful here: the ocean is an immense, imaginary landscape, a space of slave trading, of forced migrations, of deportation and of ties. it is a place of crime, of separation, but also a place of primary transformation, of the first creolisation that unites diversities. exchanges, encounters, commerce, new languages and cultures; all took place in the indian ocean long before the arrival of the europeans. there were cosmopolitan cities, genuine global towns where jews, armenians, arabs, indians, chinese, malagasy rubbed shoulders… prefiguring (as evocative singular figures rather than models), contemporary global cities. if the arrival of the europeans profoundly changed the indian ocean world, it did not destroy it completely. the decolonisation period, followed by the construction of nation-states, consolidated the nationalisation of space. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 14 in recent years, transnational and transcontinental exchanges have undergone a renewal. they are uncovering new routes and itineraries. a new cartography is being drawn with the emergence of new global cities like johannesburg, dubai and singapore. the study of such spaces presupposes the study of the ‘production’ of the space, which is a social and cultural production. the indian ocean is a space without any precise supranationality or territorialisation. it is a cultural space overarched by several chronotopes, where temporalities and territorialities are constructed and deconstructed. an ocean linking continents and islands. a space that is afro-asiatic, moslem, christian, animist, buddhist, hindu, and creolised. an ocean of trade winds, monsoons, cyclones and winds. time/space—world the indian ocean contains several historic time zones. successive globalisations have produced regionalisations that go back to antiquity, to about the 4th to the 6th centuries. at that time this part of the indian ocean progressively entered a ‘time-world’ characterised by a variable multipolarity. what was often at stake was control of the routes of communication and exchange. its vastness, via numerous seas lapping numerous bordering lands, qualify it more than any other ocean for the name of crossroads of civilisation, with the existence also of various fringe civilisations flourishing in many archipelagos and islands. as a contact zone, the indian ocean still contains the most significant maritime sea-lanes linking the middle east, africa, asia, europe and america. a lot of the crude oil and related products from the persian gulf and indonesian oil wells goes through this ocean. it is not a homogenous space. its diversity and heterogeneity is highly visible. it looks like a transnational, transcontinental world in formation, with its inequalities, tensions, potential wars, its cosmopolitanism, its multipolarity, its dynamism and its creativity. it is piecemeal and fragmented, but also traversed by common itineraries; this ocean is marked by the different temporalities found there: malayo-indonesian, globalisation, the muslim economic world, european thalassocracy, pre-european global empires, trade and slavery, and european empires. as a commercial vector among cultures and peoples from the earliest times, it is today undergoing a new ‘globalisation.’ the geopolitical, cultural and economic stakes are doubled in this situation. tensions are exacerbated by the strong american military presence, civil wars and ethnic cleansing, environmental vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 15 degradation, demographic growth, pandemic diseases, the struggle to control natural resources (water, forests, oil, gemstones, minerals), and entrenched identities and religious positions. it is important to observe how changes register. those that make new exchange routes visible while submerging others follow a broad social logic. by looking at modes of affirmation, legitimation and strategic identification, we can analyse their interaction. the renewal of diasporic identities sometimes encouraged by their nation-states of origin, new circuits of exchange and traffic, including the mafia, should be analysed. réunion is not sheltered from reconfigurations of power or from ways of contesting it. indianoceanness: anchorage and moorings we want to suggest an indianoceanness that comprises both anchorages and moorings. we highlight the metaphor of anchorage because it helps us think about exile and displacement, movement and flux, without forgetting about the territory we have left. we want to work with an identity that is anchored yet travelling (concretely or through the imagination), marking or recognising routes and itineraries where exchanges and meetings happen. the reappropriation of territory liberates the imagination, allows us to take leave without fear or sorrow and to set sail. the island remembers its continents. we see a to-and-fro movement, a hither and thither, between continents and the island, between the island and the world of islands. the presence of the horizon means that one cannot forget what is over there beyond it. the horizon, that which is not yet known, that which arrives, the unpredictable, the unexpected, that is to say history. this geographical line is the metaphor for our political horizon, which is always subject to modification, to new contradictions, new conflicts, new challenges. this horizon that tricks the eye by appearing curved is a good metaphor for our position: the horizon recedes, the curve approaches. indianoceanness is not just cultural, or rather it recognises the cultural as an element of geopolitics and economics. our island, on the asia-africa axis, has been a crossing point of different economies and world-cultures. it is a space shaped by the successive territorialisation practices that cross each other, destroy each other, get mixed up and reordered. indian ocean creolisations are always being reworked, they are never finished. its dynamics are controlled by negotiation, as things necessarily get lost or relinquished. there is no creolisation without loss, just as it cannot happen without inequality because vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 16 creolisation demands or requires room to manoeuvre where tensions and conflicts are resolved without being dissolved. something has to be given up to find space for the other, for the stranger, to share the land, the island. we explore processes of indianoceanic creolisation on an island at the edge of the continents and situated in an oceanic space where civilisations have experienced multiple territorialisations. postcoloniality i salute you my queen […] from the holds a black wind opening up the asian dawn a nova on the portulan of my oceanic island boris gamaleya, vali pour une reine morte bricolage and borrowings postcoloniality does not just refer simply to an historical period, but to a way of rereading the world. the world is multivalent, and modernity is not the prerogative of the west alone, with the rest of the world trying to catch up. it asserts that other modernities exist, that mixing is inevitable, that the intercultural is a feature of any civilisation, and that there is both conflict and exchange in the relationship between coloniser and colonised. postcolonial theory is sensitive to regimes of representation and identification (masculine/feminine), the constructions of subjectivities of self and other (orientalism, the black body, insularity) and to strategies of creolisation and hybridisation. without assuming uninterrupted traditions, it speaks of borrowings, bricolage and reformulations. it is in itself a theory based on the idea of borrowing, drawing ideas both from local expressions and practices and western thought. it is wary of totalising discourses. it recognises that several different temporal regimes can coexist in a space layered with different territories. it does not oppose ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity,’ rather it asserts that a situated subject constantly negotiates the interaction between traditions and modernities. the gaze is necessarily decentered within and among transnational, transcontinental and diasporic movements, as these are translated in the imagination and the praxis of artists. post-colonial theory does not forget that the world is beset by conflicts, wars and inequalities. we date ‘post-coloniality’ in réunion from the beginning of the 1960s. the colonial order was breaking up. voices were raised to assert the solidarity of the réunionese people with other indian ocean peoples, with social movements in france, to affirm the vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 17 existence of a creole language, and a culture moored to africa, asia, europe and the other islands of the indian ocean. intellectual history merged with political demands that countered an hysterical campaign for ‘frenchness.’ the hegemonic discourse of frenchness took the line that réunion had no history, culture or language; that the inhabitants could not count as a people; only france could give it meaning, identity and existence. we could not exist without a france that was, as conservatives politicians proclaimed, ‘our sun.’ the women and men of réunion countered this cultural attack using the vocabulary of decolonisation, dignity and identity. they affirmed that our language exists, that we have a culture, a history that could not be subsumed to the french (‘hexagonal’) one, and even if we were connected to france, we were not reduced to it. indeed, events might have taken place that had a greater effect here than there. obviously the abolition of slavery and the mass importation of indentured workers had no impact in france: they are still not fully inscribed in french historiography. social and cultural movements emerged and began to spawn innovative and creative action. from the 1970s through the 1980s, journals (les cahiers de l’île de la réunion, bardzour), poets (boris gamaleya, alain lorraine, gilbert aubry, agnès guéneau, alain armand, patrice treuthardt), novelists (alain cheynet, axel gauvin, daniel honoré, jeanfrançois samlong), musicians (firmin viry, lo rwa kaf, granmoun lélé, danyèl waro, ziskakan), cultural and political activists (laurent vergès, firmin lacpatia, reynolds michel), researchers working on language, history and anthropology, created the broad outlines to think the foundations and the modes of expression of réunionese cultural, historical, and social identities. there were movements (the ufr,6 the southern cultural front, the réunion cultural movement, the ader,7 the udir,8 the ugtrf9) and places (farfar at la rivière-des-galets). all brought together eyewitness testimonies, offered meeting places and drafted demands. books such as réunion 69, 6 union of réunion women. founded in 1958 and closely linked to the réunion communist party, this organisation was the spearhead of a great number of social movements. 7 the association of réunion writers. with other organisations, like the réunion cultural movement, the mouvman pou nout droi kozé, les editions des chemins de la liberté, this group took up the cause of réunion literature and the creole language. 8 the union for réunion broadcasting. an association of writers with a long history in the créolie movement, which was initiated by gilbert aubry and jean-françois samlong, beginning with the neologism forged by jean albany. 9 the general union of réunion workers in france. this union had a long history of federating student and progressive worker unions of people from réunion in france, especially between the 1960s and the 1990s. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 18 une colonie française or la réunion, département français belied the toned-down image of ‘the little france of the indian ocean.’ none of this was easy. the repression was vicious: censorship, discrimination. conservative newspapers, radio and tv never reported what was going on, attacks never ceased. a little reminder: the bicentennial celebrations of colonisation in 1965 excluded the madagascan inhabitants; they refused to broadcast the maloya,10 celebration of a ‘white’ réunion, and frankly disdained the creole language. a mythic france the assertion of abstract and ahistorical frenchness sought to alienate (in the fanonian sense: to despise oneself) réunion society, relegating our dreams, our lives, to nonexistence. the ‘france’ that came our way was mediocre, stupid and sub-cultural. we saw nothing of the new wave cinema, nor the poetic, literary or dramatic avant-garde, nor the renewal of thought around structuralism and post-structuralism, nor the critical marxist debates, nor contemporary art, nor the debates in the human and social sciences, nor psychoanalysis, nor the sexual revolution, nor the women’s movement, nor the gay movement … these things were blocked. not to mention what was going on in africa and asia. it was forbidden to talk of torture in algeria, to do so led to prosecution. civil servants who led trade unions, who joined anti-hegemonic cultural and political movements were punished and children deported by the thousands. we only got a dumbed-down mass culture: guy lux,11 connaissance du monde tours, b-grade movies, photo-novels … it was a france of mythic, provincial, timid and inward-looking dimensions. even if its domination was not completely hegemonic, it was given nonetheless considerable powers of distribution and legitimation by the state. the world was read according to the binary logic of the cold war, of the battle between the ‘free world’ versus the ‘communist world.’ this was not without its effect in réunion, which also had its binary structures hard-wired into its society (master/slave, master/indentured, colonialist/anti-colonialist). this concatenation of binaries brought about a manichean discourse that masked social and cultural complexity. manichean discourses became the dominant explanation of life on réunion. a strong opposition 10 the maloya is song and dance coming from slave and indentured culture, practised either at mystical ceremonies celebrating the ancestors (servis kabaré, servis makwalé), or in more profane versions on musical evenings (kabar). while the maloya was marginalised for a long time, it was revived and celebrated by the réunion communist party militants and officials at the end of the 1960s. 11 a game-show host [trans.] vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 19 between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was even picked up by the anti-colonialist movement, opening the way for the emergence of an ‘us’ from réunion, which played two roles: one to try to get away from the two-bloc logic (campaign for the ‘indian ocean zone of peace’), and the other to try get recognition for the fact that on réunion there were networks and practices more complex than the simple creole-french opposition. the cultural movement of the last decades mobilised the society. vernacular music became a space of resistance. we rediscovered our voices in literature, art, theatre, music and poetry. it was a period of militancy and engagement. the cultural debate was turned around and forever changed. it was a remarkable time of creativity and dynamism. it was possible to celebrate exile and métissage, and the creole language was strengthened. the stakes in present debates cannot be understood unless one goes back to the economics of the dissent, discontent and disturbances of those years. now we have the task of a postcolonial/sociological rereading of the politics and culture of those years to reinsert the complexity of the real. for instance, we think that the opposition of french and creole languages ignores the presence of other languages like gujarati, chinese, malagasy, swahili, tamil, urdu or their mixtures on the island; in réunion there exist languages. i have no need to look, myself the pot of my identity overflows with my mixing i have no need to look, myself the container of my identity overflows danyèl waro, métissage rereadings and reinterpretations the 1960s and 1970s movements have been a source of references for our thinking ever since. batarsité,12 créolie, banyan people, coral people … ideas have emerged to define our presence. the official celebration (since 1981) of the 20th december—the date of the liberation of the slaves—has opened the way for a rereading of history. we have spoken once again of slavery, of our forebears who were enslaved or indentured. we have dared to denounce crimes and lies. no, slavery was not ‘softer’ on réunion than in the caribbean. yes, we are all inheritors of this history. no, the slaves were not just 12 métissage. batar in réunion creole does not have the same connotations as bâtard [bastard] in french. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 20 africans. yes, there was resistance—maroons, abortion, suicides, revolts, poisoning of masters, sabotage. no, it was not all resistance, slavery and indenture also succeeded in breaking peoples’ will and in their dehumanisation. yes, indenture work was brutal, perhaps as much as slavery. no, réunion was not a garden of eden. yes, there was racism. historians—michèle marimoutou, prosper eve, claude wanquet, sudel fuma—and economists—hai quang ho—are reconstructing this period. the airplane, the biggest boeing ever, lands at the huge aerodrome at grillot. when it arrives, this airplane makes a noise like hell, and when i speak softly, some say that i am noisy. christian jalma, le pouvoir éphémère des lapsus yet, we were still too much a people ‘spoken’ through others. our space has been filled with representations in which we didn’t recognise ourselves. the french are telling us: ‘we will explain to you who you are.’ a whole series of contradictory statements are blocking us in, spatially. we are at the same time always too much of this (violent, mute) and not enough of that (responsible, hard-working). we are ‘the france of the indian ocean’ yet ungrateful. this double-bind situation of contradictory injunctions (in the psychoanalytic sense, as an ‘effort to make the other mad’) is a feature of colonisation. as long as one is the stereotypical ‘creole’ it is acceptable: charming, singing, dancing, ‘nice,’ but not ‘angry’ and acting. this brings about a paradoxical situation where the subject is drawn into conforming to the stereotype the better to be indicted for following it. we affirm that it is preferable to assert our autonomy, to reject the slick touristy image of the ‘intense’ and ‘mixing pot’ island, in order to bring out the rough edges, the conflicts along with the wonders; life as a whole, basically. still, negative stereotypes are long-lived and even in 1985 one was able to read this interpretation: ‘the simplified gestures of miming, as symbols of expression appearing in the two dance types, maloya and sega, and intellectual introversion as refuge of the self, underpin the relations that réunion people have with the outside world’ (‘report de la commission traitant des violence intra-familiale’ 1985). our voices are regularly interrupted and our silences over-interpreted; we scarcely begin to say something and the gag is put in place. we have learnt to speak in an oblique or indirect fashion. we will have to invent a conceptual vocabulary to speak our world. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 21 the vocabulary of complaint and accusation is far too limiting, while assimilationist language has worked hard to deprive us of a sense of self. and if the anti-colonialist language opened us to the world and led us to tie together forms of solidarity once again, it also induced a habit of simplifying the facts. face to face with the violence and racism of a rigid society, with the denial of justice (electoral fraud, discrimination), we learned to be on the defensive. today we will have to forge new alliances, leave behind simplistic approaches, and recognise complexity. we are not pure deserts agnès guéneau, la réunion: une île, un silence today we acknowledge the need for a new movement, the need to think up new approaches and ways of seeing. we have to take into account the profound transformations that have taken place over the last twenty years. they demand new concepts and a new methodology. tens of thousands of unemployed, thousands of young people out of work, almost half the population on social benefits, the hegemony of oil and cars, bad city planning, spoilt environment, a daily life of domestic violence, rising delinquency, disappearing agriculture, 753,600 inhabitants of whom 40 percent are under 25, the region of france with the highest unemployment (31 percent), nearly 40 percent of the population below the poverty line, the continual rise of people with the right to access unemployment benefits (67,915 enrolled); rising numbers of women working outside the home, domestic violence, rape, incest, drugs, large numbers of suicides (especially young men, and especially in a region—the south of the island— famous for having ‘kept its traditions,’ for its ‘authenticity’), alcoholism, murderous road accidents. these are some indication that réunion society has problems. to this we can add the rapid changes taking place in the region and globally. yet these facts and data do not tell us everything. what we need is a sociology of these transformations, of the effects on society of the number of active women, of the constant rise in the proportion of zoreys,13 of the presence of mobile and other new forms of communication, of the car, of television, of the number of students, of the emergence of rap and hip-hop in réunion. 13 a term of uncertain etymology, designating people born outside of réunion (most often in continental france), residing in and/or working on the island. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 22 we have to know how to perceive the ‘small’ or the ‘minor,’ the scarcely visible manifestations of adaptation to change. the urban-rural dichotomy will henceforth have less meaning, since the urban fabric and its representations dominate, carving out territories that are interlaced but also confront each other. an urban sociology is called for. how did the inhabitants acquire public housing? what are the new urban cultures, or the modern semiotics of belonging to one group or another? what is the language of young people? what are the signs of belonging? what are the inhabitants’ uses of spatial strategies? what have the thousands of comorans, and their children, now réunionese, brought to réunion creolisation? what have the zoreys brought? what are the new social networks? who is doing what, and why? how is knowledge and social status being transmitted? how are masculinity and femininity structured? we need an anthropology of the political, of ‘how we live together.’ who is speaking for whom? who is being heard? how does one become ‘réunionese’? certainly the work of young researchers is beginning to build new knowledge, but we sense a lack of transfer, of fruitful exchanges, of a useful and vigorous public debate. obstacles exist. we witness a campaign whose goal is to put a stop to new developments and to impose a particular way of thinking. here and there histories are rewritten so that past tensions and conflicts are erased or relegated to ‘prehistory.’ medias (newspapers, radio, tv), the university, the schools are tools of pacification, which is threatened by any appearance of cultural diversity (understood as communitarian threats). the aim of this rewriting and revisionism is to make people forget their responsibilities towards each other. however, archives (both material and immaterial) inevitably reveal, and are revealing, multiple forms of complicity in brutal repressive strategies of silencing. preaching about novelty is also a way to mask the fact that novelty is a new disguise for past repressive measures. my country is a crazy ship where are they taking us? axel gauvin, chants pour ouvrir la langue et le coeur conservatisms, fears bitterness and resentment characterise too often the attitudes and discourses of intellectuals from réunion. in their opinion, communitarianism is a danger, the politicians are not up to it, people are alienated by supermarkets and consumerism and vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 23 suffer from becoming uprooted. they are disillusioned, and from this disillusion, they extract a knowledge of what should be ‘good’ for réunion. these are yaka fokon (must do) experts, setting up shop for their grievances in the media. often sexist, they speak freely of the offended or humiliated ‘réunionese man’; there are no women in their universe. no fathers in their world, not to mention mothers. they speak of a long-lost past so the present can be pasted over and the future made to look rosy. trading on others’ struggles in which they did not take part, they take few risks. they believe that ‘speaking is doing’; speaking, speaking, holding forth, these ‘kings of the word’ are free with words, but refuse to recognise that they are confounded by complex situations. they have solutions; they ‘know.’ they hide their power behind a low-risk populism, going about accusing others of being ‘intellectuals’ cut off from ‘the people.’ ‘intellectual’ is even an insult. over the last few years, a set of rhetorical strategies have been presented as ‘truths.’ it is important to deconstruct them in order to make visible the conditions under which these opinions are transformed into incontrovertible truths, into commonplaces. we have to understand how and why some of these expressions are picked up by the media, circulate, and become dominant, why a whole series of opinions are transformed into points of reference, the commonplaces of common sense, so that one no longer even asks where they have come from, and who created them. the function of these opinions is to construct a ‘truth effect.’ one of these classical strategies consists in stereotyping adversaries and denigrating them. in the public space that should be open to the agonistic encounter of diverse positions, insult and defamation move in. demonising the adversary seeks to take away his or her autonomy in action and thought. adversaries of hegemonic thought are presented as being controlled by forces greater than themselves (conspiracies abound), always suspected of having secret motivations. this antiintellectual populism is the inheritance of a world where might created right. one often hears, for the most part from the middle classes, ‘this is too intellectual, people don’t want to hear that,’ which tells us a lot about the kind of opinion they hold about those who are not allowed to think. this current ‘caste,’ the petit bourgeoisie, often civil servants, gained social and economic status thanks to the union struggles of the 1950s and 1960s (from which it is still reaping the benefits) and thanks to the french state handing over public responsibilities to them. this caste (rather than a ‘class’ since it does not even fight for its rights, it begs the state to protect them) gives itself all too vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 24 easily the legitimate right to be the spokesperson of the people, a people that is being constructed as generic, rather than diverse and complex. at the centre of this rhetorical machinery, ‘the truth’ is the obsessively marked term that is able to mask the conditions of its own production. for instance, a ‘truth’ was that blacks were lazy, malbars thieves,14 réunion women lascivious and men violent. the traces of racism and the denial of difference still impact upon the society. another common rhetorical strategy: ‘africa’ refers to a homogenised, stereotyped and racialised space. africa is a space of catastrophe, victimisation, misery, purged of any content; the artistic, intellectual, economic and philosophical production of a rich and diverse continent, along with the productive conflicts and the philosophical and legal contributions, are wiped out. in may 2004, an open letter was published in the réunion press that claimed that ‘the african civilisation has lost everything.’ now, for one, there are african civilisations, and two, extremely alive cultures. think, for instance, of the great writers: hampâté bâ, amadou kourouma, wole soyinka, nadine gordimer, naguib mahfouz; of the great filmmakers: med hondo, youssef chahine, cheick oumar sissoko; of the philosophers and social science researchers: jean godefroy bidima, achille mbembe, ato quayson, rehanna vally; of the artists: ousmane sow, sotigui kouyaté, fela, youssou n’dour; of nelson mandela. such a statement flies in the face of all the decolonisation struggles, as well as the contributions to international law, to theories and cultural emergences. at the beginning of 2004, south africa celebrated ten years of democracy. now without diminishing in any way the problems this country has been facing, like the rest of the nations of africa, and with respect for the peoples of africa and for what they have achieved, in admiration for their artistic and cultural expression, we reject totally the idea that ‘an african civilisation would have lost everything.’ africans have deemed this opinion racist, as they have denounced the ‘afro-pessimism’ that banished them to the void so that western superiority could settle in more comfortably. we are talking about african worlds whose creolised traces have contributed and are continuing to contribute to the richness of réunion society. 14 malbars are people in réunion who recognise themselves as having, or going back to, a south asian origin (bengal or southern india), or who follow the rituals linked to the forms of hinduism in réunion. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 25 the paternalist position towards the african continent (rich, complex, multiple) goes hand in hand with the opinions of those who refuse to see current mutations. too often, in the peoples of the region, in the civilisations that have given birth to the groups that constitute the peoples of réunion island, réunion paternalists see only minor civilisations, only minor peoples among the people. when they recognise their connections to the continent, they rarely acknowledge its contribution to réunion culture. the history of the island is recent, its culture is young, they say, and its survival will depend entirely on its being moored to france. they have a nostalgia for tan lontan [a long time ago], they are fearful of a new, more complex, more brutal world, of young people who ‘have no respect,’ and they hide under the wing of ‘mother france.’ they seek its parental protection, worried about having to take risks or assume responsibilities. they do not even notice that france has deeply changed, that she herself has been subject to profound transformations over the last fifty years, that she is facing up to new facts, and to unavoidable social and political changes. because of these changes, it is more important than ever that we make our voices heard. we are a society born in the first globalisation (slavery and colonisation), and from the beginning the society was multi-religious and multi-ethnic. (we will not digress on the demographic use that is made in réunion of the term ‘ethnic’; today anthropologists have agreed on the use of the term ‘ethno-cultural constitutions’). we can explain how we have managed, how we have made do to live together in this little land. we do not embrace any kind of idealism. we know that ethnic stereotypes, racist insults, and racialised fears exist, but we also know that réunion would not be réunion without the confrontation of differences. the idea of confrontation implies a cultural and political debate; a cultural debate that is not frightened of the political. let us underline this point for all those who would like to put aside politics so as to impose a demagogic populism (‘the elites are all corrupt’), where it is ‘every man for himself,’ where anonymous denunciations are encouraged, rumour is spread over the radio, in the papers, while mediocrity, sexism and racism is the order of the day. we know very well that no one can suffocate the well-springs of meaning and the fire of emergence gilbert aubry rivages d’alizé vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 26 breakaways from the institutionalisation of culture in the 1980s, the french state had put quite a bit of money into decentralised cultural structures. these policies had positive and unintended effects. as numerous artists and art critics have noted, massive institutionalisation and museumification have the tendency to empty the political content, in the broadest sense, out of culture, and lead artists for the most part to focus entirely on the market. this institutionalisation has muddied the waters on the question of moorings. if it is quite legitimate for an artist to want to sell her art, to be promoted and therefore enter the circuits of trade, or follow trends, the question of the relations of culture and politics, art and society, should be debated. the development of a critical space would be a good start. during a debate with artists on the 3rd may 2003, the problem of a ‘réunion art’ was raised. among the statements produced were: ‘wouldn’t the term ‘réunionese’ restrict the artist’s expressive scope? enclosing him or her in a space, whereas they may want to aspire to the universal? wouldn’t ‘réunionese art’ revert to a ‘regionalism’ in which people would necessarily look for ‘authenticity’?’ numerous philosophers, historians and anthropologist have reminded us that the notion of the universal was invented in europe (as the heritage of secularised christianity after the 18th century), which then led to the imposition of the equation europe = universal. europe’s singularity was hidden behind its universalist mask. if, after the second half of the 20th century, this analogy has been radically thrown into question, its continued use needs clarification. there is no doubt that the notion of the ‘universal’ is often used to go beyond things that appear too localised, to contain a space where the differentiations are fixed, leading to a ‘balkanisation,’ an ‘ethnicisation’ of identities. in the domain of art, it will be useful to be more precise about the réunionese contribution to modernity. in réunion, the republican secular education system imposed the european notion of universality and modernity. one might ask oneself how the term came about in an historical context that denied the universal to a large part of the world’s population. what is the réunionese contribution to the artistic and theoretical work towards new definitions of universality and modernity? what kinds of artistic works would answer to this context? over the last few years, artists have explored new arrangements. photographers—laurent zitte, rené-paul savignan, frédéric pothin, yoyo gonthier; plastic artists—esther hoareau, colette pounia, thierry fontaine, alain padeau, andré vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 27 robér, william zitte, gabrielle manglou; and in the area of new expressive forms like rap and hip hop, slam, cartoons, video. that said, there is no school of criticism, and it remains forbidden to suggest a debate on aesthetics. all expressions, all creations should be celebrated on their own terms. jealousy, envy and resentment have contributed to the creation of little feudalities. yet, new forms of artistic expression also bring into play what there is to be thought about, and to be translated into concepts and actions. young architects, social workers and psychologists have accumulated knowledge on new sites of negotiations. scattered knowledges are the foundations of a new methodology for coming to terms with réunionese society. anprèt amoin dé mo axel gauvin romans po détak la lang démay lo kèr15 the literature of absence the literature of réunion has always said one thing: there ‘is no history because there is no place.’ or more precisely: ‘there is no appropriation of history because the place is uninhabitable’; there is ‘no tongue nor language which can really convey this history or this place, because neither tongue nor language are inhabited by the place or this history, nor really do they live here in fact.’ this is where the challenge lies: to take charge of the place and the history, and the languages of the place and the history. where is the fiction in trying to come to terms with the history and the place, unless it is through traces, through ghosts? how can one live in a land of migrants? how can one live when one is a migrant? debré, with his willing and systematic denial of history and space, sought to erase réunion’s memories.16 the film sucre amer [dir. yann le masson, 1963] is worth looking at again and again: the dead are voting, and as for the living, they get nowhere near the ballot box. let’s have a look at the literary status of the slave: a non-person, a spectral figure; that of the maroon, condemned to wander, like a shadow; that of the indentured labourer, that of the petit blanc who successively confronts the maroon, then the uninhabited that remains uninhabitable, because in history they never met. the 15 ‘lend me two words,’ from axel gauvin, chants pour ouvrir la langue et le coeur. 16 michel debré, a parisian minister, arrived in réunion in april 1963, and succeeded in being elected député for saint-denis on may 6 despite local opposition to the ordonnance debré law he had introduced in 1960, that allowed civil servants in the overseas departments and territories of france to be put into forced exile on mainland france if suspected of disturbing public order. supported by those who rejected autonomy, he immediately became the leader of the local right wing. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 28 literature is haunted by the idea of trying to making the space habitable, taking account of history, speaking this place and this history, as it dreams of the missed meeting between the ‘white’ and the maroon. the real was there, and no one knew how to talk about it. literature goes back, in its encounter between history and place, to the inventory of its phantoms and fantasies. the always-fictionalised history of the origins of the encounter-as-living-together, of the very origins of the island, is always set up as a disaster about to happen, as an unaccomplished possibility, as original sin, of the primal scene as failure. the dream of paradise in the offing, prior to the occupation of the space, transforming it into a nonplace, is a recurrent effect in réunionese literature like a pre-origin myth that would come instead of, and in place of, the impossible (or the unthinkable) origin myth. this way of presenting the island as a paradise allows it to be situated outside of the history being made there, and to be thought beyond conflicts, in the classical framework of colonial paternalism. the island is thought of through the figure of the marvellous, but above all it is constructed as a foundation myth that puts ‘the creole’ (white settler) at the origins of the island and the world, lending that figure a legitimacy that history would not acknowledge. the fantasy of a pre-human paradise is immediately outweighed by the fantasy of a scorched earth, of a hellish space. if the island is both hell and heaven, even before man set foot there, the founding narrative of place will have to take account of this: there is really no purity to be rediscovered. if réunionese literature allows itself to be the space/place of a fictional memory that takes the place of an unthinkable mythic or historical memory, it is emerging also, at the same time, from another memory, which is that of the texts and of the languages that are considered forgotten, and which are only awaiting for a space in which to be heard again. the ethics of solidarity mon shemin lé pa galizé lï lé pa malizé mikaèl kourto, lao17 17 my road is not smoothed/it is not difficult mikaèl kourto, up there. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 29 monstrous and human the revolution in thought and culture that began around the world in the 1960s, with social, feminist and gay movements that questioned heterosexual and dominant masculinity, arrived in réunion twenty years later disconnected from these social movements. conformity to the colonial norms and taboos applied by religious orthodoxy or their insular versions (prohibition on masculine homosexuality, fear of feminine sexuality) impacted on the forms of emancipation. even today it is extremely difficult for a réunionese homosexual to be out in a society that caricatures, fears or excludes him or her. the reality of réunionese homosexuality may be seen in the personal columns or on the radio, but there is still no social space to express it. heterosexuality, on the other hand, stills run on masculinist desire and its representations, and the relations between men and women are structured by predatory violence. how else can we understand conjugal rape, the rape of infants, of young and old women? how else can we understand incest? when a father rapes his baby, or a young man rapes a women forty years older than him, the violence is amplified by intergenerational confusion. beyond the judicial and moralising discourses on crime, why is a woman’s (or sometimes a young boy’s) body nullified? we have to both judge and condemn the crime and make the victim aware of her rights, as well as carry out an analysis in which the réunionese men are not turned into monsters. making the crime monstrous puts it beyond the frame of the human condition by way of saying, ‘this is not a human thing.’ but these particular monsters are human beings, and their acts do cause us to ask about humanity and its capacity for cruelty and the horrific. yet we do know about horror, brutality and cruelty; our society was made of it. we can examine how the crime manifests itself, in its major expression—rape—by approaching it in a comparative context. contextualising rape (which is not to excuse it!) stops it being a ‘réunionese crime.’ the observation of post-totalitarian situations (like south africa after apartheid) shows how much the inheritance of a politics of violence, segregation and negation of the other has its effects on relations between men and women. it is as if man has to take revenge on woman for his past humiliation and make her body the territory of vengeance for his own body that was ‘feminised’ through humiliation, rape and torture. the observation of war and conflict situations today shows rape to be a massive phenomenon, whether in yugoslavia, rwanda, afghanistan, chechnya, tibet or india. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 30 but it is not only war situations that have rape at the borders of masculinity, it is also where speech no longer takes place, where sexuality (contradictory, under the spell of the unconscious, of desires) disappears in favour of predation or gang-bangs. it is the symptom of a crisis in masculinity where ‘being a man’ means dominating a woman, branding her body, annihilating her. brutality becomes the very expression of masculine identity. rape on réunion can be understood both as a sign of an inheritance and as a symptom of a global crisis in masculinity. in contemporary globalisation the body has become a commodity once again, with massive increases in prostitution, sale of organs, the trafficking of women and children, and according to this logic, the weaker body (child, women, senior) is seen as the first to be the object to be traded, mutilated or violated. masculine, feminine to this analysis of man/woman relations in réunion, we have to add that of the encounter of two forms of masculinity: the one which develops in a colonial world where physical strength gave the réunionese man his social status (working hard, working the land), and the other that arrives with the economic and social transformation brought about when office work and the mastery of french began to take over from the world of rural labour and its values. with unemployment, large numbers of men have lost their social position. how can we expect a man to occupy a parental place while at the same time the economy deprives him of all the symbols related to this function? working men’s experiences are not found in school or in the media; the physical strength that made his world is no longer valued. he reacts to this loss with a compensatory violence. mon vi i vol o van l’an par l’an somin domin in ot kalité domoun barbara robert, fannfoutan18 limits we hear people ask, ‘where is civil society?’ yet there have never been so many associations and activities. they say, ‘you have to bring people in from the outside to 18 ‘my life flies away with the wind year after year/the roads of the tomorrow/another kind/of people.’ barbara robert, joking. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 31 break down insularity,’ yet there have never been so many conference delegates, visits of artists and researchers. what’s missing? is there really a lack? we suggest this unease has several causes: physical, political and economic limitations. physical limitations: only on a small part of the land, can constructions be made. there is a lot of pressure on fundamental resources. we have to admit that resources are not unlimited, that nature cannot be extended, and that technology is not the solution to all these limitations. to local limitations must be added the extra burden brought about by exterior constraints: climate change, attacks on biodiversity, exhaustion of resources, and the pressure on resources. do we have the illusion of being protected from these pressures? and how are we going to work together to find solutions to these local limitations? political and social limitations: the local political elite faces the same challenges as everywhere else. populism and demagoguery are easy ways out. when problems demanding careful consideration present themselves, the political tendency is to wait on france. demography poses its own specific problems: from 1930 to 2003, the réunionese population quadrupled. every year 10,000 young people enter a workforce with annual places for only 3,000. in 2030 the number of retirees will by multiplied by three. economic limitations: as a product of the first globalisation (slavery and colonisation), the island’s economy was limited. slave owners lived on credit and went easily into debt to buy their bonded workforce. few had the willingness to take risks. well before the massive effects of free-market globalisation on economies (delocalisation, privatisation of public services, impoverishment of the middle classes, the rule of finance), the island’s economy went through a period where its industrial and craft structures were destroyed. the economy depends in large measure on government contracts, and couldn’t protect itself from liberalisation. the limitations of free-market globalisation are forcing us to be more inventive. at the heart of our unbridled ravines the surf has carved itself an islet where mother springs sing where the murmurs of a country’s roots entwine idriss issop banian, je suis d’ici et d’ailleurs inheritances while the battles of the 1960s for language, history and culture are still to be fought, we also have to respond to new challenges. we acknowledge our debt to the women and men who had the courage to assert réunionese singularity. standing on their shoulders, vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 32 reading over their writings, we inscribe ourselves in the present. we have no regrets, we have no vindictive or contemptuous feelings against political ‘elites,’ ‘bureaucrats’ or ‘welfare recipients,’ our starting point is who we are, not what we would have liked to have been. thus, with language. it is wearying to constantly have to prove that creole should be taken seriously at schools, to point out that it is a language, that it can be written and read, and that, like all languages, it borrows from others. it is wearying to see how those who negate creole are given space in public debates: teachers, psychologists, social workers, while at the same time the national education ministry has recognised the teaching of creole. and yet, the same old reactionaries, in the name of the fantasy of purity, showing their fear of diversity, are doing everything they can to take us back to a former world. yet, on this point there is no negotiation. we also have to take into account new facts that throw into doubt the binary structure of anticolonialist struggles: the emergence of new identities and cultural and confessional loyalties, massive exclusion through unemployment and a world of precarious lives, a more complex fragmentation of society, the relation of young people to new technologies and cartographies (new york, london, mumbai, maputo, antananarivo, chennai, johannesburg). people in réunion have learned to manipulate the tools and methods of globalisation and its communication technologies (internet, mobile phones—in 2007, 900,000 cell phones for 810,000 inhabitants). this flexibility in adapting new tools goes along with the difficulty of adapting to social and economic mutations and sets up a number of questions that force us to listen patiently. we have been enmeshed in a catch-up economy (catching up to the ‘metropolitan model’— statistics are always showing us the comparison between household disposable incomes in réunion versus data of ‘the metropole’). in order to justify itself (with the question: ‘are we supposed to leave people as they are?’), it dictates all our actions. we must put in place a new economy, an economy of time to listen, of time to negotiate. new cartographies are asking us to develop an ethics of responsibility. our colonial past should make us more sensitive in our behaviour towards the countries of the region. artists and researchers should ask themselves questions about the relations of knowledge and power. there is a need to build a real space for collaboration and exchange. any réunionese, being a european citizen, can move around the region at will. the reverse is not true: queues and humiliation are the lot for our neighbours vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 33 seeking visas for our country (not to mention the different currency exchange values). all réunionese tourists should be conscious of their positions and their prejudices. as for the sex tourists who head off from réunion to madagascar or other countries in the region, the idea of a colonising colony is alive and well in their heads. living together the ethic of responsibility that the metaphor of moorings suggests led us to the analysis of the laws that regulate the right to speak. we easily find scapegoats, most recently zoreys and people of the comoros. we have convinced ourselves that we are owed something, and we find comfort in the idea that others have nothing to teach us. to share is to speak and to listen to what others have to say as well as to the silences. to live somewhere is to build a common space where the very question of the political is posed: who wants the right to speak? solidarity is too often cliquey. we need to accept critique, understand that without a critical space the world shrinks and paternalism is waiting in the wings. debate is replaced by verbal abuse or what we call grocer (jealousy, resentment). the structure of silence is deadly when silence becomes law. we are struck by the way in which the story of the creuse children has the contours of a secret.19 first movement: a silent conspiracy. second movement: the scandal breaks in the media. third movement: justification and legitimation (talk of poverty of the families from whom the children were taken, of the neglect of the children, of the possibility of a better life for the children, minimising and banalising, ‘there are some unfortunate exceptions, but the majority was better off in the end’). fourth movement: the finger is pointed at the whistleblower. this reminds us of the plot of the film festen [vinterberg, 1998], it is not the person who commits the crime who upsets the apple cart, and who is rejected in the end, but the person who names him. he uncovers the family secret, brings the skeleton out of the cupboard and spoils everyone’s fun. too often we are our own worst enemies. too often, we don’t allow ourselves dignity and pride. the practice of moucatage20 is testimony to a perverted relation to otherness. moucatage can be funny, yet it can also be destructive, signifying the social prohibition 19 from 1964 to 1982, social services obeying debré’s orders, took away more than 1,600 réunionese children from their families and transported them to the department of creuse in france’s massif central, ostensibly because of overpopulation of réunion, under-employment and a large demographic of young people. these children were often abused. some families never saw them again. all the attempts to bring the affair to court were rejected. 20 teasing and bullying, often nasty, stigmatising physical characteristics or social behaviour. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 34 of crossing the bounds of the normal, and the will to bring the other back to conformity. we read practices like ladilafé,21 moucatage, clannish loyalty, as symptoms of envy and jealousy. how can we bring back practices of solidarity, that is to say of common consciousness? réunionese society is not lacking in compassion, it is a lack of solidarity that too often lets us down. we have yet to build a notion of territory as a common good and a space of shared practice. the outlines of the limits of private property (‘never go through the barreau [gate] without being invited!’) indicates the importance of security fences in réunionese daily life. quarrels among neighbours (with sudden explosions of violence) underline our susceptibility when it comes to these barriers. the separation between public and private, which is very important (someone might leave a pile of rubbish outside their gate, no problem, but one’s own kour [front yard] will be spotless, an aesthetic jewel) no doubt represents the difficulty in acknowledging the common good. but perhaps one has first to feel secure before opening one’s door. this process goes back to what we were suggesting: a reappropriation of the way the territory of ‘réunion’ is moored. indian ocean creolisations o ramaloya (raya m’aloya) dia ralaloya (raha m’aloya) alevena ao anatin’ny dihy (dia) re ny lasa fandrao managérat éric manana, maloya creolisation is not an accumulation or a sum of differences. it has the dynamism of an unfinished process that is subject to mutations and loss. it borrows mimetically and creatively. it has no problem with putting down roots, because a root is not necessarily stultifying, if it is a mooring that allows us to move on more easily. we do not idealise movement. mooring is a relation that accepts the link, that has no fear of submitting to meaning, to desire, and is happy to let things go. the other can no longer be evaluated according to the rulings of the one. all civilisations have been in contact with others, none has the monopoly on the universal or on modernity. each is traversed by conflicts among different traditions and modernities, each has movable frontiers, complex configurations. territories are overlapping, histories are interlaced. cultural diversity is a fact, and dialogue among 21 rumours, often uncomplimentary. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 35 civilisations a given for the future. homogenisation of the world is an offence against interculturality, multiplicity and diversity. we are speaking of areas of civilisation. we reject the particularisation of religions, civilisations, philosophies. we defend a philosophy of borrowing, forgery, imitation, and a dynamic of patching up, making do, of fixing up, of mending. a world quick to imitate, but which creolises the imitated thing to make something else of it, which invents the quotidian. this is a dynamic of alterity where we see no alienation or submission, rather a creativity of a world subject to continual conflicting inputs. a society has always recourse to imitation. all social groups and individuals are constituted by a network of borrowings, debts and recreations. creole we want to focus here on two versions of creolisation, bearing in mind, once again, that this text has no pretensions to completeness. we are interested here in language and maloya, but there are also rituals, housing, cuisine. creole was born of the need for communication among people coming from different places, myths, imaginaries and languages, of the need for spoken exchanges under work conditions of a settler and plantation society. words from masters to slaves, slaves to slaves, masters to indentured labourers, labourers to masters, labourers to labourers, freed slaves to freed slaves. discourses and knowledges of the world, delivered to language in the form of meanings to be made, were produced from perceptions and experiences of place and of relationships of production in the place. creole language necessarily carries, in the heterogeneity that presided over its development, the mark of languages, dreams, imaginaries, which were there at the very start, delivered unconsciously, subterranean, cryptic. but they burst forth again, in one way or another, in the everyday exchange of words, in poetic speech, in the lyrics of ségas and maloyas, in proverbs, word-play, riddles. crossings, meetings heterogeneity is a fact, transformed by the encounter of the imaginaries that produce the imaginary of the place; it bursts forth in crossings and appropriations. one legend, granmèr kal, is built from an amalgamation of myths from india, madagascar, and africa in the popular memory of réunionese oral traditions. this memory is linked to the apprehension that slaves hold for the master and his powers, and to a specific vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 36 perception of the supernatural. it bursts forth in a maloya by firmin viry where the heroine of an indian epic, sìtà in the ràmàyana, transformed into a female plantation worker, meets an ancient french romance. it bursts forth in street theatre that mixes sacred spaces with profane spaces, as in the jako,22 which brings into its dance style and repertoire of movements practices that are reinterpretations from dravidian india and mozambique. it bursts forth in the narlgon23—tamil or malabar theatre—where what was ritual in the original context becomes theatrical spectacle in the site of a terukkutu (traditional tamil theatre) gathered in the unconscious. it burst forth no doubt without the knowledge of the performers themselves, who have left the origins aside, but it is there, always present and immediately to hand. maloya is a stage for the space of processes and practices of indian oceanic creolisation, a common ground for a réunionese ethos. the lyrics of the maloya take on meaning and value in a festive or ceremonial context, where there is internal interaction (singer, chorus) and external interaction (players/participating audience). the lyrics of the maloya, often improvised from a base of uncertain origin, are infinitely variable, according to the conditions under which it is uttered, to the public’s role, how the singer is feeling, and how the chorus is made up; in short, maloya is a performance. it is both a social practice and a discursive practice, with its own internal logic. it can be read as a text, it has deconstructions/reconstructions of established collective speech, it has lexical shifts, and is the unique text of a unique artist. maloya is a community-in-living represented linguistically, socially and discursively. what was marginal becomes central. maloya mixes up and multiplies speaking positions and identities. the closing ceremony is challenged by its own formal devices. what disappears is the voice of the community and its connivance, which is the only thing that can assure the control and closure of meaning. yet the meaning is open to all voices and pathways. where the same would want to return to the same, the other is always present. so what does the text tell us, stripped of authorised language? it shows us precisely the impossible community; there is no protected historical space, no fixed time. a story of loss emerges that opens the way to melancholy, to an impossible task of 22 a street theatre character who usually appears on the first of january. jako is an acrobat in monkey/jaguar costume, most likely the product of the mixing of indian and mozambiquian practices. 23 song and dance theatre probably from the south of india and creolised by indian indentured labourers. it has been practised for a long time on religious occasions, marriages and other festive events. the repertoire is borrowed from major hindu myths. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 37 mourning. what is narrated, in face of the desired or dreamed of utopia of spatiotemporal closure and of respect for the communitarian norm, is rather, a contrario, a declension in major and minor keys, all sorts of violence, the dark side of desire, loneliness of the self, the permanent friction at the heart of everyday life. no one could deny the robust modernity of this poetic structure in which the poem is an object constantly under modification by its conditions of interpretation. the song, thus understood, carries within it hundred of texts, thousands of possibilities, a practice of reappropriation founded on the knowledge of loss. moorings mon papa moutardié mon monmon bingali a moin même batard moutardié mi boire de l’eau dane coeur fatak firmin viry, moutardié24 proposing the paradigm of indianoceanic creolisations, we suggest a problematic of loss and reappropriation. the picture we have painted may seem depressing, but we think there can be no programme of reconstruction without the work of turning the critical gaze on oneself. moving towards a pedagogy of life together, we have not been afraid to drag the skeletons from the closet, to put forward dissonant voices, emphasise contradictions and limitations and zoom in on conformities and taboos. dreaming of harmony is out of the question. democracy needs a space of negotiation where opposed and divergent interests can find a resolution around a common decision where everyone is prepared to give up a part of their egoistic goals and come to own a part of the others’ goals. we can find in creolisation a methodology for living together. we want to keep our eyes and ears open to see how creolised people are inventive and capable of appropriating the unexpected. in réunion we have moved, in less than fifty years, from a colonial society to a post-modern post-industrial one. few peoples in the world have had to face up to such mutations and such uncertainties without experiencing violence. we are proposing a contemporary inscription, as we live on this island, in the margins of the world and linked to all the continents. old links offer space 24 my father is a weaver bird/my mother a bengali bird/i am cast from a weaver bird/i drink water/stalks of the fataque plant. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 38 for new solidarities. we live in the indian ocean, one of the most dynamic places in the world today, a place of conflicts and encounters where new configurations are emerging. new cartographies remain to be drawn, reinterpreting the former cartographies from the present and inventing future ones. we suggest paying particular attention to vernacular practices and forms of expression. vernacular does not mean tan lontan, rather negotiation between different modernities and different traditions. it is for this reason that representations have to be deconstructed, the urban youth cultures of young boys and girls interrogated, along with the middle class cultures, and the new creolised forms of rites and customs. to achieve this we propose putting practices in relation to each other, in tension, practices that in a binary relation would cancel each other out. we wish to privilege a comparative approach of coming and going, using complexity, without trying to construct a totalising theory. for example, comparing hip hop cultures in maputo and saint-denis, diasporic manifestations in mauritius and réunion, the informal economy in antananarivo and in le port, the trappings of wealth in the middle classes of the indian ocean. this methodology teaches us to be ready for unexpected developments that might contradict what we are expecting. it warns us of the danger of transforming the past into a burden for the present and future generations, making them feel guilty (they have the right to want to forget in order to reappropriate the territory in their own way). the world is increasingly confronted with multilingualism, multi-religious practices, multicultural practices. colonial managing of differences made them minor and marginal and inscribed them in a relationship of inequality. today, no culture or area of civilisation would accept being placed on a hierarchical scale. the idea of monoculture no longer makes sense, if indeed it ever did. creolised people have a long experience of the intercultural, or of the negotiation between marked contrasts and a constant doubt about resolving them into one fixed set of practices. it is a fragile space, always on the edge. one can easily fall on the side of ethnicisation or assimilation. creolisation is not the only model of cultural contact, and is not looking to set itself up as such. we do not know what will emerge from current globalisation. creolisation is one of the products of different globalisations; as such it offers a contribution to the debate. for us it represents the moorings that, going out from the island, attach us to other islands and continents. december 2003 – june 2004, réunion – paris. vergès & marimoutou moorings portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 39 reference list albany, j. 1978, fare fare: ou, ‘le retour aux isles.’ j. albany, paris. aubry, g. 1971, rivages d’alizé. saint-denis de la réunion, saint-denis. ‘report de la commission traitant des violence intra-familiale’ 1985, n.p, saint-denis. fanon, f. 1986, black skin, white masks. pluto press, london. gamaleya, b. 1986, vali pour une reine morte. 2nd ed. bibliothèque départementale, saint-denis. gauvin, a. 1983, romans po détak la lang démay lo kèr. presses de développement, saint-leu. guéneau, a. 1979, la réunion: une île, un silence. arts graphiques modernes, saint-denis. jalma, c. 1997, le pouvoir éphémère des lapsus. grand océan, saint-denis. 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(dir.) 1963, sucré amer, documentary film, yann le masson production. lorraine, a. 1990, sur le black. 1, dieu des ravines. page libre, saint-denis. maharaj, sarat 2001, ‘perfidious fidelity: the untranslatability of the other,’ in s. hall and s. maharaj modernity and difference, (eds) s. campbell & g. tawadros. institute of international visual arts, london, 28–35. robert, b. 2000, fannfoutan. grand océan, saint-denis. treuthardt, p. 1988, pointe et complainte des galets. udir, le port, village titan. vinterberg, t. (dir.) 1998, festen, feature film, nimbus film productions. viry, f. 1998, ‘moutardié,’ ti mardé, cd, indigo records. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: barnes, l. 2018. linda lê, on writing and not writing. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 20-30. https://doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v15i1-2.5722 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au research article linda lê, on writing and not writing leslie barnes australian national university corresponding author: leslie barnes, department of french studies, faculty of arts; and school of literature, languages and linguistics, australian national university, act 2601. leslie. barnes@anu.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5722 article history: received 08/09/2017; revised 09/05/2018; accepted 01/07/2018; published 23/08/2018 abstract linda lê has noted that writing shapes her identity more than any origins or affiliations, a knowledge which she claims allows her to occupy with ease the illegitimate spaces between homeland and adopted country, between belonging and unbelonging. but lê’s work regularly stages the encounter between writing and not writing—juxtaposing the writer and the blank page, inspiration and silence—and figures the act of writing as a symbiotic relationship between a parasite and its host. this paper will examine these themes in two of lê’s novels: un si tendre vampire (1987) and conte de l ’amour bifrons (2005). focusing on the figure of l ’oiseau de mauvais augure and drawing on the dialogues between lê and the silenced writers to whom she looks for inspiration in her nonfiction essays, i will present the inability to write not as the opposite of literary inspiration, but as it’s double. the double is an equally recurrent image in lê’s writing, often represented by the figure of janus, or the god of beginnings and endings. i will suggest that the bird of ill omen is another janus figure, the (imagined) presence who embodies both inspiration and its loss, and who is the necessary double within each writer. résumé linda lê prétend qu’écrire lui est plus cher que les origines or l’appartenance à une telle communauté, une attitude qui, selon elle, lui permet d’occuper aisément les espaces illégitimes entre le pays natal et le pays adopté, entre appartenir et non-appartenir. mais dans ses écrits, elle met régulièrement en scène la rencontre entre écrire et ne pas écrire—juxtaposant l’écrivain et la page blanche, l’inspiration et le silence—et elle représente l’acte d’écrire comme un rapport symbiotique entre un parasite et son hôte. dans cet article nous examinons ces thèmes dans deux romans de lê : un si tendre vampire (table ronde, 1987) et conte de declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 20 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5722 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5722 l ’amour bifrons (christian bourgois, 2005). en nous penchant sur le personnage de l ’oiseau de mauvais augure et en faisant appel aux dialogues dans ses essais de non-fiction entre l’auteur et les écrivains réduits au silence qui l’inspirent, nous suggérons que ne pas écrire n’est pas l’opposé d’écrire, mais son double. le double est également omniprésent dans l’œuvre de lê, souvent représenté par janus bifrons, le dieu des commencements et des fins. dans son exploration métatextuelle du travail de l’écrivain, lê dramatise la possibilité de ne pas écrire, paradoxalement garantissant l’acte d’écrire. keywords lê, silence, inspiration, intertextuality, doubling, writing; l’inspiration, l’intertextualité, le double, l’écriture linda lê has often noted that writing shapes her identity more than any origins or affiliations, a knowledge which she claims allows her to occupy with ease the ambivalent and illegitimate spaces between homeland and adopted country, between belonging and unbelonging. but lê’s work regularly stages the fraught encounter between writing and not writing—juxtaposing the writer and the blank page, inspiration and silence—and figures the act of writing as a symbiotic relationship between a parasite and its host. writing is haunted by silence, threatened by the inability or refusal to put pen to paper. in her nonfiction essays, she studies the forced or deliberate silences of authors she admires—ingeborg bachmann, stig dagerman, marina tsvetaeva—with a mixture of fascination and horror. in her novels, which often see her characters struggling to write, failing to write, destroying their writing, appropriating the writing of others, or having their own writing stolen, lê explores the precariousness of representation and forces the writer figure to face repeatedly the possibility that ‘one day [she] will no longer be able to write … one day there will be no more words’ (barnes 2008: 11). silence looms just beyond each page written. her authors are harangued, exposed to violence, and prone to madness. they are alienated from the page before them and the world around them. indeed, lê’s novels regularly pursue examinations of authorship and of that which threatens it. what, they ask, is an author who cannot or does not write? drawing on discussions in her nonfiction and exploring their intertextual echoes in her fiction, this essay examines silence as a metafictional trope in two of lê’s novels: un si tendre vampire (such a tender vampire, 1987), her first novel, and conte de l ’amour bifrons (a tale of love, 2005), which was published almost twenty years later. both novels explore the author’s tenuous and angst-ridden relationship with writing through the figure of what lê names in the second, l ’oiseau de mauvais augure.1 in my analysis, i highlight the ways in which the writer’s confrontation with this bird of ill omen, and with the threat of silence hiding behind each word conjured, draws both the writer and the reader into a space of creative irresolution. throughout her œuvre, lê writes about not writing, using the work of literature, which is determined, to explore the indeterminacy of identity. and if it is writing that allows her to embrace the fluidity of her own identity, it is the possibility of not writing that motivates the written text. indeed, though seemingly contradictory phenomena, not writing is not the opposite of writing. instead, writing and not writing are intimately bound in lê’s universe. they are the two faces of janus bifrons, the roman god of transition ‘engagé avec son double dans un devenir éternel,’ who 1 ‘the bird of ill omen’ (lê 2017: 7). unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. linda lê, on writing and not writing portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201821 appears throughout lê’s œuvre, mediating beginnings and endings, the past and the future, french and francophone (grimal 1995: 12–13; barnes 2014: 203–204).2 it is somewhat surprising that the work of an author as prolific, original, and fêted as lê would reveal such an ‘anxiety of authorship’ (ni chealleaigh 2014: 439). despite the multiple moments of mourning and crisis that lê herself has traversed, and despite her obsessive fear with this possibility she describes as ‘more chilling than … death,’ lê herself has never endured a period in which she was unable to write (barnes 2008: 11). and it is not just her fiction that is recognized as among the most challenging and rewarding in france today. like many contemporary novelists, lê is both a writer and a critic. though she has claimed herself to be ‘ni exégète ni critique, simplement un goûteur,’ lê has established herself as a talented literary essayist, publishing to date four volumes of essays that combine literary analysis with biographical detail and in le complexe de caliban (the caliban complex) extended autobiographical reflections (1997: 2).3 these essays, she notes, offer ‘[une] interrogation sur la langue, sur l’identité et sur la place qu’occupe aujourd’hui la littérature’ and they serve as ‘exercices d’admiration’ for the figures she admired long before picking up the pen herself.4 it is clear that lê’s fiction has, from the beginning, demonstrated a readerly self-consciousness and self-referentiality that mark currie has identified as common in the work of writer-critics (1995: 3–4). her novels often assimilate the insights discussed in her literary criticism, and they regularly include comments on their own construction, dramatizing the borders between fiction and criticism, writing and reading, and writing and not writing. it is this latter tension i take up here in my discussion of silence, what lê calls elsewhere, ‘la tentation du silence.’5 ‘pourquoi,’ she asks, ‘à partir d’un certain moment, décide-t-on qu’on en a fini avec la littérature? on en a fini avec les mots, on tire le rideau’ (crépu 2010).6 lê’s engagement with silenced writers abounds in her non-fiction. first there is bartleby the scrivener and the orphan, in whom she found an immediate kinship as an adolescent, and whose condition embodies the demise of authorship in the age of mass and mechanical reproduction. bartleby’s ‘i would prefer not to,’ ‘ce refus tranquille, cette résistance passive, cette formule simple et pourtant séditieuse’ represents for lê a refusal to take part, a freedom from attachments, a liberating solitude (2005a: 45).7 but it also represents a refusal to write, a revolt perhaps best embodied in rimbaud’s infamous abandonment of poetry after only five years of writing, what one critic called ‘the great discovery of the creator after interminable agony’ (shapiro 1962: 146). then there is the austrian poet, ingeborg bachmann, whose malina is a source of inspiration for some of lê’s early fiction. bachmann thematized silence in her own work, locating its roots in the inability to represent the horror of the holocaust, and later went nine years without producing a literary text in an attempt to protect her own ethical purity in the post-war era (lê 1997: 29–30).8 2 ‘engaged with his double in an eternal becoming.’ 3 ‘neither exegete, nor critic, merely one who samples.’ 4 ‘[an] interrogation of language, identity, and the place occupied by literature today’; ‘expressions of admiration.’ see the back cover of le complexe de caliban (1997). 5 ‘the temptation of silence.’ 6 ‘why does one decide at a certain point to be done with literature? to do away with words, to lower the curtains.’ 7 ‘this quiet refusal, this passive resistance, this simple yet and seditious formula.’ 8 for a study of bachmann’s influence on lê’s œuvre, see kurmann (2016). barnes portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201822 there are the two russian poets: anna akhmatova, whose poetry reflects broch’s ‘tâche antigonienne … d’ôter à l’art son nimbe de pseudo-sainteté et de triompher de la mort’; and marina tsvetaeva, the exile, to whom lê pays homage not only in her edited volumes, but also in a stand-alone 2002 study entitled marina tsvetaeva, comment ça va la vie? (marina tsvetaeva, how’s life?; lê 1997: 161).9 akhmatova endured years of stateand self-imposed censorship and for some time managed only to write by scribbling a few lines of poetry, which her friends then committed to memory before she tossed them into the kitchen fire. tsvetaeva lived a life against and out of place with the demands of her time, protesting in vain the cruel twist of fate that had landed her in early twentieth-century russia. she wrote every day of her seventeen years of exile and misery but could not tolerate ‘le trop de réalité’ upon her return to her native country, where she saw her husband and daughter arrested and where she herself suffered greatly under stalin’s regime.10 tsvetaeva quit writing before taking her life, two gestures that, perhaps paradoxically, convey her commitment to poetry and to the autonomy of the poet.11 finally, there is stig dagerman, who struggled to write for five years, unable to finish a project, before also committing suicide. dagerman’s silence—his not writing and his death— was not only a means of self-protection, perhaps similar to that of bachmann, but also a refuge for the individual who had lost faith in the power of writing to change the world: ‘qu’est donc toute littérature en face d’un seul suicide intelligent?’ he asked (quoted in lê 2005a: 69).12 silence in these discussions is often as much a gesture of agency and political awareness, desperate though it may sometimes be, as it is the result of despair, fear, an inability to motivate, or an external restriction. and just as not writing is intimately bound with writing, the other face of silence is inspiration. indeed, though writing would appear to be inherently futile, it is also the only way to ‘transformer les défiances en possibilités, en ouvertures sur l’inconnu’ (lê 2005a: 146).13 in this section i turn to the encounters between silence and creative inspiration in two of lê’s works of fiction. the two novels that interest me here do not contain overt, intentional intertextual references to the experiences of silence and silencing lê discusses in her nonfiction, and my point is not to interrogate the textual sources of the manifestations of these themes in lê’s fiction. instead, these novels allow lê to carry on a dialogue with the authors who have inspired her, to continue a collective interrogation of a theme or reality that haunts each of them.14 lê’s use of the intertext in these instances is at the service of the metatext, which comments not simply on its own creation, but also on the precariousness of this labor. 9 ‘antigonean task … of removing art’s halo of pseudo-holiness and of triumphing over death.’ 10 ‘the excess of reality.’ 11 see stock for a study of tsvetaeva’s art and ethics. 12 ‘what is all of literature compared to one intelligent suicide?’ lê also quotes dagerman’s last text, notre besoin de consolation est impossible à rassasier (our need for consolation is insatiable): ‘ma puissance ne connaîtra plus de bornes le jour où je n’aurai plus que mon silence pour defender mon inviolabilité, car aucune hache ne peut avoir de prise sur le silence vivant’ (‘my strength will be limitless the day i have only my silence left to defend my inviolability, for no hatchet has any power over living silence’) (2009: 103). 13 in a discussion of blanchot in au fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau (to the depths of the unknown to find something new), lê reiterates this sentiment: ‘la puissance du verbe réside dans sa défaillance même’ (the power of the word lies in its very weakness) (132). 14 my use of the term intertextuality thus follows kristeva’s discussion and sees lê’s intertextual engagement with bachmann, dagerman, akhmatova, tsvetaeva, and melville on the question of silence as the extension and transformation of these authors’ writings and lived experiences, rather than as the direct impact of a source text on another. linda lê, on writing and not writing portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201823 un si tendre vampire is the first of three works lê published with la table ronde between 1987 and 1989 before moving to julliard with les evangiles du crime (gospels of the crime) in 1992 and then christian bourgois, where she has remained, with calomnies (slander) in 1993. though lê has stricken her first three novels from her bibliography, disparaging them as timid and immature and noting that ‘[elle] ne [s]’y reconnait plus, comme si un miroir [lui] renvoyait un visage totalement inconnu,’ un si tendre vampire anticipates the metafictional impulse found in much of lê’s work, and as such, perhaps deserves more critical attention than it has so far received (crépu 2010).15 the novel opens with a sleepless philippe—lying in the dark, listening to the nocturnal chorus of his building—in the moments before an enormous black bird charges into his room, surrounded by giant, drunken animals communicating to one another with shouts and raucous laughter. it is the nightmarish return of louis, dressed in a long, black coat and blue satin wings, a bird mask on his face. philippe, a writer, had awakened one morning three years earlier to find louis asleep at his worktable. he had then been manipulated into taking louis in and had come to depend on him as a source of encouragement. eventually, philippe signed the novel he was writing in louis’s name—at louis’s suggestion—in a vain bid to keep louis from leaving him, paradoxically silencing himself as the author while attempting to forestall the crisis of silence he knew would follow once the last word had been written. at louis’s return at the beginning of the novel, we learn that philippe has managed to write only the following lines in the three years since louis’s disappearance: ‘j’ai tué louis. il disparaît de ma vie aussi brusquement qu’il y est entré. j’aurais voulu le tuer pour de bon’ (17).16 louis is accompanied by a woman named xavière, who is as desperate as philippe to remain the object of louis’s attention. xavière and philippe spend the rest of the night, and the rest of the novel, together, first roaming the streets, then tucked away at a cheap motel, sharing stories of how they fell prey to louis’s charm. the novel ends with philippe suspicious that the last twelve hours of his life have been a trap laid by louis to lure him into writing another novel— this time with louis as the hero—which will return louis to his life, for better and for worse, and for which louis will invariably take credit. equally dubious and desirous of falling into this trap, philippe finds himself mulling over a sentence that could, he thinks, be the opening line of a new work: ‘il n’avait pas dormi de la nuit.’17 this is, of course, the first sentence of un si tendre vampire, the novel we have just finished reading. like un si tendre vampire, the structure of conte de l ’amour bifrons is circular, ending where the story begins, and the narrative is recounted by a third-person omniscient narrator, who is also the author. unlike vampire, however, in conte de l ’amour bifrons, the narrator/author reveals himself to the reader from the very first page, inserting himself into the narrative in chapters titled ‘l’oiseau de mauvais augure,’ a figure to whom i will return in a moment. the narrator interrupts his story to make observations about his characters, to second guess the direction his narrative is taking, and to lament the difficulty he faces making decisions where his novel is concerned: ‘me voici, moi, l’auteur de ce roman … ma plume court sur le papier … 15 ‘[she] does not recognize herself anymore in these works, as if in the mirror [she] were looking at the face of a stranger.’ jack yeager’s article on the question of plagiarism in lê’s œuvre includes a nuanced reading of theatricality and authorship in un si tendre vampire, underscoring the intersection between ‘pretending, role-playing, invention, illusion, artificiality, deception, and falseness at the heart of the text’ (2017: 9). ‘the text’ is, of course, the novel that philippe is writing; it is also the novel that lê has written— un si tendre vampire—and the novel more generally. yeager also notes the ‘metatextual thread’ that ties un si tendre vampire to conte de l’amour bifrons (2017: 8). 16 ‘i’ve killed louis. he disappeared from my life as abruptly as he entered. i would have liked to kill him for good.’ 17 ‘he had not slept all night.’ barnes portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201824 on pourrait croire qu’avec les années, avec tous les livres que j’ai écrits, j’avance avec l’assurance et la maîtrise de celui qui connaît son métier. il n’en est rien’ (48).18 these chapters alternate with those advancing the narrative, which tells the story of a pair of young lovers, ylane and ivan, following them through moments of psychological crisis and hospitalization, renewal with the discovery of their love, and an inevitable separation, which gives way to metamorphosis. in ylane and ivan we see lê expanding on the themes of the double and the orphan, or singleton, already germinating in un si tendre vampire and in fact developed throughout her œuvre. we also see her experimenting with the recurring themes of departures and ‘transformative ruptures’ (barnes 2014: 177).19 the opening chapter begins with a description, given directly by the narrator, of the novel’s central character, ylane, whom he claims he never would have discovered were it not for l ’oiseau de mauvais augure, who insisted that he find her and make her his heroine (7). when we meet ylane, she has abandoned her job, broken all her ties to the outside world, and is seated alone at her kitchen table, talking to herself like a madwoman. before her is an open book, on which she has scribbled the command that haunts her and that the narrator says was given to him by l ’oiseau de mauvais augure: ‘va tu ne sais où et rapporte tu ne sais quoi.’20 it appears as though this is precisely what she does since the next time we see her she is at the psychiatric clinic where she meets and falls for ivan, an encounter that saves her from the madness overtaking her. at the end of the novel, however, six months after ivan has left her to travel the world aboard an ocean liner—a departure he hopes will lead to the metamorphosis he desires—we find her again alone at this table, ‘comme au premier chapitre,’ the narrator tells us (147).21 and we learn that in this moment, though ylane ultimately decides against suicide, the words ‘va tu ne sais où et rapporte tu ne sais quoi’ signify the allure of death, the great journey into the unknown, the great journey into silence. like many of lê’s novels, the narrative action in un si tendre vampire and conte de l ’amour bifrons unfolds in a precarious universe. her characters wander, often fleeing some form of physical or psychological pursuit, and spend significant periods of time in transient spaces, for example, motels (vampire) and hospitals (conte): ‘deux mondes de transition, où se côtoient les moribonds et les vivants, les partants et les arrivants’ (1999: 26).22 as works of metafiction, 18 ‘so here i am, author of this novel … my pen runs over the paper … you might think after all these years, after all the books i’ve written, that i’d set out with all the confidence and command of someone who knows what they’re doing. not at all’ (lê 2017: 43). 19 see my discussion of catherine malabou’s plasticity in relation to lê’s trilogy of the late 1990s (barnes 2014). in her analysis of the ‘dusk of writing,’ malabou identifies a ‘“crepuscular movement of transformative rupture” which is the reconciliation of crisis, the past, and the forgotten through metamorphosis’ (barnes 2014: 177). a similar ‘transformative rupture’ is at work in lê’s fiction, i suggest, ‘one that attempts to explore the exhaustion of fiction at “the dusk” of the 20th century as a condition of its own regeneration in the 21st’ (barnes 2014: 177). see also my discussion of the relationship between intertextuality, metamorphosis, and lê’s aesthetics of exile (barnes 2014: 199–228). 20 ‘go into the unknown and bring back the unknown’ (lê 2017: 7). 21 ‘just as we found her in the first chapter’ (lê 2017: 137). 22 ‘two transitory worlds, where the dead mix with the living, the leaving with the arriving.’ we might consider this an example of the kind of indirect intertextuality i locate in lê’s work. in an essay on bachmann in tu écriras sur le bonheur (you will write about happiness), lê recounts two episodes—one taking place in an airport, the other in a hospital—that capture the ‘conflit et angoisse latents’ (‘conflict and latent anguish’) in bachmann’s life and work. in cultivating a similar ‘conflit et angoisse latents’ in these two novels, lê performs her intimate understanding of and complicity with bachmann, writing novels that converse with the austrian poet. there are also multiple instances of citations and textual borrowings, in other words, the more direct forms of intertextuality throughout her œuvre. conte de l’amour bifrons, for example, contains citations from lautréamont and tolstoï and references to other authors that appear in lê’s essays (e.g., félisberto hernandez and doestoïevski). linda lê, on writing and not writing portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201825 both novels also dramatize the variability of purpose and the unpredictability of inspiration to which the writer is prey. in un si tendre vampire, louis embodies this current of instability. every morning louis returns from his nocturnal adventures to sleep in philippe’s bed as the latter rises to work on his novel. like a mother bird with her young, he alights on philippe’s doorstep to offer morsels of creative sustenance, and more often, to distract and manipulate his host. philippe, fearing he is unequal to the task, quickly comes to depend on louis’s presence to write: ‘ces farces, ces faussetés lui étaient devenues si nécessaires qu’il les attendait avec une impatience mêlée d’allégresse’ (43).23 he rewrites the novel according to louis’s suggestions and experiences extended bouts of writer’s block during louis’s periodic shortterm disappearances. the two men develop a mutually parasitic relationship in which each feeds off the other. philippe’s productivity depends on the volatility louis has introduced into his life, and louis’s immortality—as a celebrated author—requires that he take from philippe only enough to leave his host functioning until the novel is finished, at which point he delivers the fatal blow. in conte de l ’amour bifrons, the figure of louis returns as a bird who circles the narrator’s head, periodically landing on his shoulder to encourage or torment him in his moments of creative uncertainty: ‘c’est le trou noir. je reste des heures à chercher un mot qui ne vient pas, un mot que l’oiseau de mauvais augure tient dans son bec et qu’il refuse de lâcher’ (49).24 like louis, l ’oiseau de mauvais augure is erratic and cruel, sowing as much doubt in his author as he does inspiration and abandoning the author arbitrarily: ‘cela fait deux jours que l’oiseau ne me rend plus visite … ses commentaires, ses sifflements, son croassement me manquent’ (82).25 as the narrator questions his capacity and negotiates with his muse to take control of his story, his character, ivan, also struggles to write. like ylane, ivan is an avid reader, but in his happiness with ylane, the young poète maudit is unable to write and only rediscovers his creative spark once he’s abandoned his lover. these fictional writers are not intertextual manifestations of the silenced authors lê writes about in her essays, though she does give a nod to these discussions in conte de l ’amour bifrons, when the narrator notes that he often wonders about the writers he admires and whether they too have encountered the bird of ill omen and known the same crises he has known. they are not muzzled by the state or unable to reconcile the futility of their writing with the political situations in which they find themselves.26 instead, they suffer from fear, despair, and a prevalence of romantic notions of the conditions under which writing can take place.27 23 ‘the tricks, the falsehoods had become so essential that he awaited them in a state of impatience mixed with joy.’ 24 ‘a black hole. i sit for hours searching for a word that won’t come, a word that the bird of ill omen holds in his beak and refuses to let go’ (lê 2017: 44). 25 ‘it’s two days since the bird stopped coming to visit me … i miss his running commentary, his whistling, his cawing’ (lê 2017: 77). 26 though it is a projection of the narrator’s psychosis, in voix: une crise lê explores the possibility of external persecution through the figure of ‘l’organisation,’ who the narrator believes is threatening her life and demanding that she destroy the novel she has written. see barnes (2007). 27 in many ways, ivan is lê’s johannes, the protagonist of knut hamsun’s victoria (2011 [1898]), in which ‘l’amour absolu est une faim qui demande à ne pas être rassasiée’ (‘absolute love is a hunger that demands to not be satisfied’) (lê 1997: 119). johannes, a celebrated poet, loves victoria and cannot have her, and in lê’s reading, he finds fame only because she is not his. indeed, for hamsun, men become ‘des génies, des héros, des poètes et des saints grâce à la jeune fille qu’ils n’ont pas possédée’ (‘geniuses, heroes, poets and saints thanks to the young woman they did not possess’) (lê 1997: 117–118). in hamsun’s novel, it is the tutor, whom lê calls l’oiseau de mauvais augure, who tells johannes he can never have the one he loves. barnes portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201826 at one point near the end of conte de l ’amour bifrons, the narrator questions whether he is actually the author of the novel: ‘il semblerait que j’en sois l’auteur mais par moments je ne sais plus si j’écris le livre dont rêve ivan ou si je rêve du livre qu’il a écrit’ (135).28 the authorial anxiety present in both novels—in other words, the anxiety surrounding silence, inspiration, and the coming into being of each novel—also manifests itself in the writer’s relationship with the characters he creates. un si tendre vampire does not merely recount how a man, louis, steals another man’s novel; it recounts how a character, louis, imposes himself on a writer, invading his home and his head, to become his protagonist. and when philippe notes at the end of un si tendre vampire that louis would reappear as soon as he began to write again, the reader understands that it would be simultaneously as character (who needs philippe to write in order to exist) and as usurper (who needs a new novel to steal in order to ensure his immortality). philippe is at times almost aware of louis’s game: ‘il se demandait si louis ne menait pas cette existence un peu mystérieuse pour l’intriguer et l’amener à l’observer’ (55).29 his intimate access to louis sometimes echoes that of the narrator of conte de l ’amour bifrons, who sees himself as his characters’ servant and friend, the secretary of their emotions, and who, like philippe, feels he is nothing without them: ‘depuis des mois je ne vis plus. j’ai donné mon sang, mes nerfs, ma chair, mes pensées à ylane et ivan. ce sont mes vampires’ (135).30 in lê’s novels, the characters are parasites, insatiable voids, gentle yet devastating in the violence they inflict on the writer, who wittingly cultivates the perverted symbiosis that will give as much as it takes. for the vampire creates in his thieving, and the novels crafted in un si tendre vampire and conte de l ’amour bifrons attest to the parasitic form of paternity he proffers. it is important to note that this opportunistic relationship is not a destructive one, but rather, depends on the sustained vitality of the other. in this, lê’s exploration of the vampire develops her broader thematic preoccupation with the double. philippe’s need for louis positions him as a romantic hero ‘perpétuellement à la poursuite d’un double introuvable, sur lequel il compte pour lui garantir son être propre;’ without this double, the hero himself is in peril (rosset 1976: 115).31 the same could be said for louis, the (anti)hero of his novel. ylane and ivan, on the other hand, languish in the nonexistence of the double—one already gone, the other only imagined; one whispering verses in the poet’s ear, the other animating the words and gestures of a shadow from the grave (2005b: 76–77; 90–91). in conte de l ’amour bifrons, perhaps even more so than in un si tendre vampire, lê figures the other as the original, of which ylane and ivan are mere duplications. and the foundational absence of this double sets the young lovers adrift; in losing the other they have lost themselves, ‘dans le sens qu’on [perd] celui qu’on voudrait être’ (rosset 1976: 92).32 this perverted and paradoxical doubling, in which the self is the duplicate of the other, who is the original, also captures the encounter between writing and not writing in lê’s work. in his meditation on le réel et son double (the real and its double) clément rosset offers a discussion of l´événement réel (the real event) and l ’autre événement (the other event) that 28 ‘it would seem that i’m the author, but there are moments when i no longer know whether i’m writing the book that ivan is dreaming about or if i’m dreaming about the book he has written’ (lê 2017: 125). 29 ‘he wondered if louis didn’t lead this slightly mysterious existence to intrigue him and lead him to watch.’ 30 ‘for months i’ve had no life. i’ve given my blood, my nerves, my flesh, my thoughts to ylane and ivan. they are my vampires’ (lê 2017: 126). 31 ‘always pursuing the missing double, on whom he relies to secure his own self.’ 32 ‘in the sense that we [lose] the one we would like to be.’ linda lê, on writing and not writing portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201827 illuminates the tensions inherent in lê’s reflections on the writer who does not write and in her own writerly tendency to write about not writing. if we substitute ‘writing’ for l ’événement réel and ‘not writing’ for l ’autre événement in the passage that follows, not writing becomes the original, ‘the absolute real’ that writing doubles, and without which, writing ceases to exist. rosset notes: on découvre … que l’‘autre événement’ n’est pas véritablement le double de l’événement réel. c’est bien plutôt l’inverse  : l’événement réel qui apparaît lui-même comme le double de l’‘autre événement’. en sorte que c’est l’événement réel qui est finalement l’‘autre’: l’autre c’est ce réel-ci, soit le double d’un autre réel qui serait lui le réel même, mais qui échappe toujours et dont on ne pourrait jamais rien dire ni rien savoir. l’unique, le réel, l’événement possèdent donc cette extraordinaire qualité d’être en quelque sorte l’autre de rien, d’apparaître comme le double d’une ‘autre’ réalité qui s’évanouit perpétuellement au seuil de toute réalisation, au moment de tout passage au réel. l’ensemble des événements qui s’accomplissent—c’est-à-dire, la réalité dans son ensemble—ne figure qu’une sorte de ‘mauvais’ réel, appartenant à l’ordre du double, de la copie, de l’image : c’est l’autre que ce réel a biffé qui est le réel absolu, l’original véritable dont l’événement réel n’est qu’une doublure trompeuse et perverse. le réel véritable est ailleurs. (44–45)33 if we follow rosset to understand this tension in lê’s work, ‘we discover that [not writing] is not really the double of [writing]. instead, the opposite is true.’ writing is a perverted caricature, ‘une singerie’ of the real, which is not writing (46).34 rosset’s interest in this passage is oracular literature, of which he gives three examples. one example is jacques deval’s ce soir à samarcande (tonight in samarcand, 1950), in which a terrified vizir escapes baghdad for samarcande, where he thinks he will escape death, but where death actually awaits him. his death in samarcande is a distortion of reality, which is the death he is trying to prevent, in other words, his death somewhere other than samarcande.35 in a similar vein, writing is a false real, the one that doubles not writing, which the writer knows to be real, and which remains present even as it is negated in the ‘passage au réel.’36 as with the oracular structure, where, for example, the vizir’s death is and is not the death fated, a bifurcation takes place that not only presents as two that which is actually one, but that also reveals what is seemingly one to be in fact two. in lê’s novels this plays out in the circularity of their narrative form. when we find philippe lying in the dark on the first page of un si tendre vampire, louis has not yet returned, 33 ‘we discover … that the “other event” is not actually the double of the real event. the opposite is in fact true: the “real event” which itself appears as the double of the “other event.” so that it is the real event that is the “other” in the end: the other is this real, that is, the double of an other real which would be the actual real, but which is always escaping and about which we can never say or know anything. the unique, the real, the event thus possess this extraordinary quality of being, in a sense, the other of nothing, of appearing as the double of an ‘other’ reality which is perpetually vanishing at the threshold of its realization, at the moment of its passage into the real. all the events that take place—in other words, the whole of reality— figure only as a sort of ‘bad’ real, belonging to the order of the double, of the copy, of the image: it is the other that this real has crossed out that is the absolute real, the true original, of which the real event is but a deceitful and perverse stand-in. the true real is elsewhere.’ 34 ‘an aping’; here, one cannot help but recall the plagiarism accusation marie ndiaye leveled at marie darrieussecq in 1998 after the publication of darrieussecq’s naissance des fantômes (my phantom husband, 1998). writing is stolen, illegitimate, its origins always dubious. see also yeager (2017). 35 the other example rosset gives is oedipus, for whom ‘le réel véritable,’ is the patricide and incest he thought he’d escaped—but in fact set into motion—by fleeing polybus and merope. 36 ‘passage into the real.’ barnes portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201828 and philippe has written nothing since his departure. when we circle back to this moment at the end of the novel in the reiteration of its first line, not only has louis already returned, but philippe has finished a second novel. at the beginning of conte de l ’amour bifrons, ylane sits at her kitchen table in a moment of sorrow simultaneously prior to and months after her discovery and loss of ivan. un si tendre vampire and conte de l ’amour bifrons dramatize the intimate encounter between writing and not writing, which, like the two-headed janus bifrons presiding over lê’s work, are two sides of the same coin, at once alternate and identical. in these novels, lê presents authors who are panicked before the blank page and who nevertheless continue to draw inspiration from the threat of silence. these novels offer a response to her nonfictional interrogations of silenced authors, one that reveals no anxiety of influence, but that instead explores the creative possibilities inherent in such a conversation with her predecessors. moreover, these novels, one of them in a sense silenced by the author herself, place the intertext at the service of her ongoing metatextual engagement with the writerly vocation. when the writer—when lê—sits down to write, she always faces the unnerving possibility that the words will not come. like ylane, the heroine of conte de l ’amour bifrons, she stands at the precipice, momentarily paralyzed in fear as she considers the injunction before her: ‘va tu ne sais où, rapporte tu ne sais quoi.’ but fortunately for her readers, lê has never not written. the words always come. because nothing guarantees the existence of writing like not writing. references barnes, l. 2007, ‘linda lê’s voix and the crisis of representation: alterity and the vietnamese immigrant writer in france’, french forum, vol. 32, no. 3: 123–138. https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.0.0012 ______ 2008, ‘literature and the outsider: an interview with linda lê,’ tr. l. barnes, world literature today, vol. 82, no. 3: 53–56. ______ 2014. vietnam and the colonial condition of french literature. university of nebraska press, lincoln. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1948 crépu, m. 2010, ‘ecrire, écrire, pourquoi?’ interview with linda lê. open edition books. online, available: http://books.openedition.org/bibpompidou/1189?lang=en [accessed 18 august 2017]. https:// doi.org/10.4000/books.bibpompidou.1182 currie, m. (ed.) 1995, metafiction. longman, london. https://doi.org/10.2307/40152546 grimal, p. 1999, le dieu janus et les origines de rome. berg, paris. hamsun, k. 2011 (1898), victoria. penguin, london. kristeva, j. 1969, ‘le mot, le dialogue, le roman,’ in sémiotikè: recherches pour une sémanalyse. seuil, paris: 143–173. kurmann, a. 2016, intertextual weaving in the work of linda lê: imagining the ideal reader. lexington books, lanham. https://doi.org/10.1353/wfs.2017.0017 lê, l. 1987, un si tendre vampire. table ronde, paris. ______ 1996, slander, tr. e. allen. university of nebraska press, lincoln. ______ 1997, tu écriras sur le bonheur. presses universitaires de france, paris. ______ 2002, marina tsvetaeva: comment ça va la vie? christian bourgois, paris. linda lê, on writing and not writing portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201829 https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.0.0012 https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1948 http://books.openedition.org/bibpompidou/1189?lang=en https://doi.org/10.4000/books.bibpompidou.1182 https://doi.org/10.4000/books.bibpompidou.1182 https://doi.org/10.2307/40152546 https://doi.org/10.1353/wfs.2017.0017 ______ 2005a, le complexe de caliban. christian bourgois, paris. ______ 2005b, conte de l ’amour bifrons. christian bourgois, paris. ______ 2009, au fond de l ’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau. christian bourgois, paris. ______ 2017, a tale of love, tr. s. robyns. mākaro press, wellington. ni chealaigh, g. 2014, ‘voyelles mutilées, consonnes aux jambages arrachés: linda lê’s compulsive tracing, erasing, and re-tracing fragments of the self in writing,’ contemporary french and francophone civilization, vol. 18, no. 4: 438–446. https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2014.938509 rosset, c. 1976, le réel et son double: essai sur l ’illusion. gallimard, paris. shapiro, k. 1962, ‘rimbaud’s silence,’ prairie schooner, vol. 36, no. 2: 145–148. stock, u. 2005, the ethics of the poet: marina tsvetaeva’s art in the light of conscience. maney publishing, leeds. https://doi.org/10.2307/20459266 yeager, j. 2017, ‘authorial identities in the work of linda lê,’ south east asia research, vol. 1, no. 18: 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967828x16688580 barnes portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201830 https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2014.938509 https://doi.org/10.2307/20459266 https://doi.org/10.1177/0967828x16688580 chapter 11 germany: myth and apologia in christa wolf’s novel medea. voices yixu lü, institute for international studies, university of technology sydney to understand the background to this recasting of the familiar greek myth as a novel narrated by several voices, a few bare details are necessary. in 1984, christa wolf produced her first re-casting of an ancient myth with the title kassandra. published at a time when west german interest in east german literature was at its height, kassandra became a cult book in the west without obliging its author to flee the east or having her silenced by the censor—no mean achievement. kassandra skilfully blended the type of feminism then popular in the west with a somewhat elegiac depiction of the betrayal of ideals in a society falling prey to totalitarianism. a contributing factor to the book’s success was the simultaneous appearance of a series of lectures the author gave at the university of frankfurt, in the federal republic, in which she set forth very eloquently the background reading and conceptualisation which led to the form kassandra finally assumed. there were critics who felt that the lectures, giving the novel’s ‘presuppositions’, were generally better written than the work itself, since they give the overall effect of an openness which is lacking in the highly stylised and gloomy prose of the novel itself. in 1989, christa wolf, as one of the mildly dissident public identities still tolerated by the east german regime, was ideally placed to speak for those who wanted the crumbling of the old east germany to make the way free for a genuine experiment with socialism, in whose values she still fervently believed. her voice, initially prominent in the internal political process leading up to the first free elections in the german democratic republic, ceased to be effective once it became clear that the overwhelming majority of her fellow citizens rejected the path she and other intellectuals advocated in favour of an immediate union with west germany. in 1990, christa wolf published a manuscript whose title translates as what remains. in it she recalls a period in which she became the object of surveillance by the secret police, thus allying herself implicitly with those dissidents who had been virtually forced into emigration through harassment by the stasi. this did not sit altogether portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 1 well with the reading public of a united germany, since she had, in fact, also achieved a modus vivendi with the communist regime over several decades while her works were enjoying great success in the west, and it seemed opportunistic for her now to claim something of the status of those whose existence the stasi had rendered impossible to the point where they were, in effect, pushed into unwilling exile. the major blow to christa wolf’s literary standing was the publication in 1993 of the dossier kept on her by the stasi. from this it became evident that, whilst she had never carried out spying activities for them, she had in the early ‘60s signed an agreement that she would, if required, become one of their ‘unofficial collaborators’. her own political situation had been very different then, and the media and public might have been prepared to forgive and forget, had she not already created a climate of irritation among her past and present readers by the claims to victim-status advanced in what remains. what followed was a process of ‘scape-goating’; the former eminent east german writer who could remain there and publish, whilst enjoying the status of a highly respected literary figure in the west, became for many an example of the re-writing of their own biographies by formerly prominent east germans in order to be respectable in the ‘new’, united germany. unfortunately for christa wolf, she had been caught out—or so it appeared. behind the ‘scape-goating’ there was the more general consideration of the treatment of east german literature by west german critics for as long as the berlin wall remained in place. in general, the west german reception of east german writing was more charitable and less stringently critical than the quality of the works themselves may have justified—for purely political reasons. christa wolf had been one of the major beneficiaries of this process in two senses: firstly, her works had generated a critical industry in the west that made of her a leading literary figure across the two germanies; secondly, her eminence in the west meant that the regime’s treatment of her works in the east, while at times the object of savage polemics on the part of ‘orthodox’ critics, was much more tolerant than if she had been a young writer starting out or a dissident who had entirely failed to interest the west german media. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 2 her fall from grace was therefore also pre-programmed in a sense. given the freedoms she had enjoyed in what she wrote while the berlin wall still stood, many former east german writers took against her. her western colleagues and critics were also prompt to come to the conclusion that there had been a general over-estimation of her quality as a writer. against this unfolding personal drama, her version of medea took shape between 1991 and 1996. looking back on the gestation of the work in 1997, christa wolf reviews the process of revaluation and remodeling to which she subjected the myth: like all those i asked, i was acquainted with medea as euripides represents her: the barbarian woman from the east who, inflamed with love for the argonaut jason, helps him to steal the golden fleece. for this reason he has come to her native colchis on the black sea, the easternmost fringe of the world then known to all mediterranean peoples. she flees with him and, after various wanderings, lands in corinth, the westernmost point of the mediterranean world. there jason turns away from her and wishes to marry the daughter of king creon. medea is exiled from the city. but in euripides’ version she is so demented by jealousy and outraged pride that she first kills creon’s daughter and then her own children. i could not believe this. a healer, a skilled practitioner of magic—for so she must have been in the most ancient strata of the myth which stem from times when children were the most valued property of a tribe and when mothers were highly esteemed precisely because they guaranteed the tribe’s continuance—such a one should murder her own children? (hochgeschurz 1998, p. 15) in the following paper, i shall try to demonstrate what steps christa wolf undertook in recasting a myth she clearly found repugnant in its best-known literary version. in doing so, i shall be constantly subjecting the ideology behind her adaptation to critical scrutiny. from the above, there is no doubt that she intends a rehabilitation of the mythical heroine. in testing its effectiveness, i shall be posing the question: does wolf’s ‘acquittal of medea’—as another modern german revamping of the myth by ursula haas (1987) is styled—go no further than a reversal of ‘patriarchal’ mythmaking, or does she have more sophisticated intensions? to make the subsequent analysis intelligible, it is necessary to list the basic changes in the plot from the version we know through an acquaintance with euripides. to begin with, christa wolf’s medea does not kill her own children. rather, once she is sentenced to leave corinth, she entrusts them to priestesses in the sanctuary of hera. no sooner has she quit the city than they are taken from the sanctuary by a mob and put to death (wolf 1999, p. 217). nor does medea murder her brother apsyrtos. in wolf’s version he is killed at the command of their own father, aietes, before the portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 3 argonauts flee colchis and as a result of a piece of despicable local politics. wolf then goes on to expunge many of the supernatural elements: medea has no divine ancestry and does not leave corinth after the murders in a chariot drawn by winged serpents. her turning against her own father is no longer motivated by her falling passionately in love with jason—a passion which some pre-euripidean versions have as the result of divine intervention—but jason becomes a pretext for her to flee colchis after an attempt to end the reign of aietes, in which she herself is involved, has ended in failure. medea is likewise quite innocent of the death of creon’s daughter glauké, a pitiable epileptic who drowns herself in a well in her father’s palace. finally, medea, rather than being fixated on jason to the end, frees herself of any attachment to him and finds satisfaction in a new love for the sculptor oistros, who is entirely christa wolf’s invention, as the name implies. thus we have, in summary, a tragic heroine who kills no one; a witch who only uses her powers for healing; a daughter who has connived at the theft of the her father’s golden fleece for the best of political motives. it is thus that the suspicion of a ‘medea for feminists’ may arise, for christa wolf’s version of the figure has not only forfeited all those actions and attributes that would define her out of the sphere of leftist-liberal respectability at the close of the 20th century—she has also acquired so many wholesome and well-meaning traits as to appear at times a deliberate incarnation of trendy, feminist virtues. since wolf has stripped away so many mythical traditions and turned others upside down, we must ask what are the wellsprings of action in her re-telling. medea remains the quintessential ‘stranger’—the outsider figure both in her native colchis and in corinth. this means the abolition of the distinction so natural to the greek tragedian euripides between culture and barbarism, for in wolf’s version both colchis and corinth are corrupt societies, equally dominated by dishonest patriarchal regimes and both based on the public denial of their own inhumanity, exemplified in each case by human sacrifice. in colchis, medea’s brother apsyrtos, is ritually slaughtered as a stratagem to allow his father aietes to have yet another reign as ‘sacred king’. in corinth, medea makes the discovery that the elder daughter of creon and merope, iphinoe, has been sacrificed in secret as part of a plot to assure creon’s dominance in portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 4 a power-struggle with his own queen. the greeks who wield power are, if anything, more barbaric than the barbarians. it is precisely in the monologue of akamas, the most unscrupulous power-broker among creon’s advisers, that the brutality of the killing of iphinoe is highlighted: where are we going, iphinoe is said to have asked at one point; her nurse patted her hand to calm her; what are they doing? iphinoe asked at the very end, when someone seized her by the nape of the neck and bent her head down upon the altar […]. the nurse kept holding her hand which twitched as the knife went into her throat. […] of course, the nurse went insane, […] running all day through the streets of corinth surrounded by guards to prevent anyone from talking to her. she avoided the queen; one day her shattered body was found at the foot of the sea-cliffs. (wolf 1999, p. 120) christa wolf has thus made the dominant contrast in her version of the ancient world, not the usual one between colchis and corinth, between culture and barbarism, but one between an inhumane patriarchy and a more compassionate matriarchy, an opposition she had already explored in her lectures on kassandra some years before. the cynical statesman akamas freely admits that, in the past, kings derived their right to rule from their queens, but then goes on to quote creon’s rationalisation of the suppression of women as a political force in the name of expediency and historical processes: not selfishness, but rather his concern for the future of corinth had set him on this course. for anyone who could read the signs of the times could see that, with all the wars and atrocities around us, states were being formed among which a corinth based on the old way of doing things, when power was in the hands of women, would simply not be able to sustain itself. and it was pointless to set oneself in opposition to the march of history. the best one could do was to try and recognize its direction before it was too late—otherwise one would simply be overrun. admittedly the price one might have to pay for acting opportunely could be very painful. (wolf 1999, p. 116) a constant undercurrent of resentment at the object-status women inevitably acquire in this scheme of things runs through the whole novel. it is epitomised in the traumatic moment in medea’s first monologue when she recounts the discovery of the remains of the sacrificed iphinoe, by following creon’s wife into the subterranean passages beneath the palace in which a feast is being celebrated. medea’s ‘otherness’ always contains within itself an ingredient of anxiety at herself being treated as a mere object. christa wolf’s introduction of a new figure into the complex, the woman from colchis, agameda, who begins as medea’s apprentice-healer but soon supplants her because she adapts better to the plots and expectations of the men of corinth, highlights this loss of autonomy. in the versions of euripides and seneca, medea’s portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 5 status as a tragic heroine is linked to her being genuinely dangerous, whereas in wolf’s rewriting she runs the risk of being merely an irritant, an annoyance. medea remains herself essentially by refusing to do what is expected of her. having left colchis with the ideal of finding a better society than that ruled by her own corrupt father, a society without gruesome ‘secrets’ (wolf 1999, p. 16), she is reduced by the sameness she finds in corinth to more or less trivial acts of ‘subversion’ or passive aggression. this effect is also reinforced by the structure of the novel. those ‘voices’ not actively hostile to medea, like agameda, or condescending, like akamas, are either confused victims themselves, like the unfortunate glauké, or resigned spectators, such as the astronomer leukon. thus it follows that medea’s own final monologue expresses total resignation. living in isolation in the mountains with lyssa, her own colchian nurse and the nurse of her children, she is shocked by the news that her sons by jason, whom she believed to be protected in hera’s sanctuary, are long dead, the victims of mob violence, and that the corinthians have fabricated the lie that she herself has killed them and then institutionalised this calumny in an annual ritual. her last utterance in the novel is a curse whose powerlessness is clear to herself: what is left to me. to curse them. a curse on you all. especially a curse on you: akamas. creon. agameda. presbon. may your lives turn to horror and your deaths be wretched. your howls shall go up to heaven and heaven shall not be moved. i, medea, curse you. where shall i go. is there a world, a time in which i would be at home. no one here to ask. that is the answer. (wolf 1999, p. 218) what we therefore have in christa wolf’s version is not merely a medea purified of all the malice, rage and power that have made her an archetypical ‘fury’, but one who seems to be the vehicle of various ideological intentions that bind her to a series of contemporary discourses. it is now time to enquire into these. it has been clear since the publication of her notes for kassandra, written down in the early ‘80s, that christa wolf sees her re-working of myths with full seriousness a process of restoring a distorted historical reality. myths are for her anything but flights of creative fancy or intense passions in narrative disguise. rather they are ‘a complex but still decipherable intellectual processing of enormous historical portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 6 processes in distant antiquity, a grandiose form of mirroring the transformation of hordes of hunter-gatherers via agrarian tribes into hierarchically structured city states with their own distinctive magical world-views’ (hochgeschurz 1998, p. 14). it is for her a fact that in ancient greece a matriarchal society preceded one ruled by men. such ‘facts’ have been distorted and obscured because men got to warp them with the help of the ‘patriarchal’ literary form of epic poetry: the epic, a form that owes its origins to the time when patriarchal rule struggled to establish itself, becomes by its very structure an instrument for making this dominance more elaborate and secure. […] as a heroine, woman can be but the object of masculine narrative: helen of troy, who survives in the myths as a petrified idol, being a case in point. (wolf 1983, p. 147) this does not necessarily descend to being a conspiracy-theory of myth-making as male propaganda, but christa wolf intends her readers to recognise, through the medium of her restorative reconstructions that ‘always the same motives are active in getting one group of people to devalue and demonise another: ignorance, fear, the desire to keep the other at a distance, feelings of guilt, the need to feel exculpated’ (hochgeschurz 1998, p. 23). a case in point in the text of her medea are the colchians who, having willingly come to corinth in search of a better society, now blame the woman they followed for their disappointment, and clothe this in nostalgic stories of the place they were so eager to leave: their legends [of colchis] will get more and more out of hand as our situation gets progressively worse, and there is no point in confronting them with the facts—even if there are such things as facts after so many years. (wolf 1999, p. 31) jason, too, shows an awareness of the manner in which his own narratives of gaining the golden fleece shift in the telling so that his first-person account becomes partly a function of the audience’s expectations: i have been obliged many times to tell how i climbed the tree, how i got hold of the fleece and managed to get down again with it safely, and each time the story changed a little in the telling, just as each audience wanted it to go, so that they could work themselves up into a real state of fright and feel really relieved at the end. it has got to the point that i no longer know myself exactly what i did go through in that grove with the oak-tree and that serpent, but no one is in the slightest interested in hearing that. […] in the end she [medea] said: they have made of each one of us what they need: out of you the hero, out of me the evil woman. they have driven us apart. (wolf 1999, p. 52) thus christa wolf’s recasting of the myth is, at the same time, an illustration of how myths come to assume the form in which we know them. the problem remains that portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 7 her demonstrations of the phenomenon are not ideologically neutral, but, as she freely admits, are governed by the tradition which begins with bachofen, then continues with the white goddess by robert graves and with the writings of the eccentric marxist, george thomson, whose books on ancient greece were published in german translation in east germany in 1980. for those writing in this tradition, there is no doubt whatsoever that matriarchy was the primal form of social organisation and was forcibly suppressed throughout the ancient world—for all that the majority of pre-historians now take a much more skeptical view of what graves and thomson portray as irrefutable truth. but such dogmatism suits christa wolf’s particular brand of feminism. from the composition of kassandra in the early ‘80s to the completion of medea in the late ‘90s, her insistence on the historical reality of a matriarchal age in a pre-literate ancient world has elements about it of a religious conviction, which may well relate to her loss of faith in socialism as practiced in the former german democratic republic. in the lectures on the composition of kassandra, she freely admits that her construction of a matriarchal troy is tantamount to a ‘model for a kind of utopia’ (wolf 1983, p. 83). in this context, too, she draws from the dominance of female figures in the minoan art of ancient crete the following conclusion: feminists, women committed to the women’s movement, saw in the kingdoms of the minoans communities to which they could attach their utopian longings at a time when their experience of the present and fear of the future had driven them into a corner. this all did once exist: the country in which women were free and placed on an equal footing with men. (wolf 1983, p. 61) if one considers christa wolf’s career as an east german writer, then it is improbable that she could have become the literary darling of the regime with her early works, in fact have briefly been even a candidate for the central committee of the sed, without convincing others of the sincerity of her belief that socialism was being realised, rather than betrayed, by the regime that built the berlin wall. it is equally improbable that her faith in the regime and the dogmas it endlessly propagated could have wholly withstood such events as the expulsion of the critical, but still committed communist wolf biermann and annulment of his citizenship in 1976 and the attacks on her own works in the regime’s literary periodicals, such as occurred in reviews of her novel about growing up in nazi germany in wartime. her turning to themes in antiquity which, on the one hand assert the utopian values of a matriarchal age, while portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 8 on the other showing its destruction and deformation by the rise of patriarchal rule and the discourses that accompany it, may thus be seen as filling a gap caused by disillusionment with a system which had rewarded her loyalty by insisting she should give up her intellectual independence and write closer to the party line. she begins to conceive her remodeling of medea two years after the end of the east german regime, and it comes as no surprise that her heroine is at home nowhere, neither in the discredited colchis she has left behind her, not in the corinth which is given to its own modes of celebrating its superiority as a culture and a state. thus her novel becomes one long meditation on the theme of estrangement. cast in the form of a plurality of voices, it clearly avoids the dramatic interaction of conflicting passions and ambitions that makes up the essence of euripides’ drama. wolf’s medea does not so much contribute actively to the unfolding of the plot, as merely speak and be spoken about. while a dramatic framework would force her into acts of self-assertion and aggression, the many voices that speak about her in the monologues of christa wolf’s text, without drawing any direct response from medea herself, have the cumulative effect of reducing her to being predominantly the object of the discourses of others. christa wolf is here grafting her novel onto that tradition of feminist argument which maintains that western thought has privileged subjectivity as a masculine attribute, whilst woman is accorded object-status. in this sense, luce irigaray had written: it is beyond doubt the subjectivity denied to woman which ensures her constitution as an object: as an object of representation, of discourse, of desire. […] the inarticulate devotion of the one party guarantees the self-satisfaction, the autonomy of the other for as long as there is no necessity to subject this dumbness to critical scrutiny a symptom – of historical repression. (irigaray 1980, p. 169) such considerations could well have influenced the poverty of independent action on the part of wolf’s medea. far from attempting to take active revenge for the humiliating treatment accorded to her in corinth, she limits herself to detecting and further inquiring into the dark secret of the sacrifice of iphinoe upon which the reign of creon is founded. it is not necessary for her to broadcast her discovery—it is sufficient that agameda sees her following queen merope into the underground vaults where the skeleton of iphinoe is preserved for the process to begin which will make her an outcast. as leukon observes: portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 9 and i understood that it was simply medea’s bad luck to have brought to light the buried truth which determines the life of our community and that we are unable to endure this. and that i can do nothing. (wolf 1999, p. 160) in the dystopian world of corinth, it is sufficient for medea to be the ‘outsider who knows’ to make her presence unendurable and to bring down on her both mobviolence and the sentence of banishment. it is surely no coincidence that two of the epigraphs to chapters in christa wolf’s novel are taken from the work by rené girard, first published in france in 1972 and translated into english in 1977 as violence and the sacred. to judge from her lectures on the composition of kassandra, wolf’s acquaintance with girard postdates the coming-down of the berlin wall, as the work from which she takes the epigraphs in her medea is not listed among the sources for her earlier recasting of a greek myth. moreover, the german translation of girard’s book did not appear until 1992. while euripides’ medea gets only a passing mention in girard’s lengthy discussions of ancient greek tragedy, much that he says of the sacrificial process as a ‘safety valve’ for the violence always likely to turn his version of ancient or ‘primitive’ societies into anarchy seems to have been woven into christa wolf’s recasting of the myth. girard insists that ‘the sacrificial process requires a certain degree of misunderstanding.’ the human victim is not really to blame for the ills that afflict a given community, but the channeling of those aggressions, that might otherwise rend the fabric of society, into a divine imperative to put to death or expel one of their number neutralises forces which might become uncontrollable. as girard puts it: in a universe where the slightest dispute can lead to disaster […] the rites of sacrifice serve to polarize the community’s aggressive impulses and redirect them toward victims that may be actual or figurative, animate or inanimate, but that are incapable of propagating further vengeance. […] the sacrificial process prevents the spread of violence by keeping vengeance in check. (girard 1977, p. 18) one variant on euripides’ plot introduced by christa wolf is the episode in which medea is hunted through the streets of corinth by a mob of citizens who have been influenced into blaming her for the plague which has broken out because corpses have been left to decay in buildings destroyed by an earthquake. girard’s theories seem especially relevant here, since wolf’s medea—unlike euripides’—cannot pose any real threat to her persecutors. not only has she nothing to do with the earthquake and portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 10 consequent plague, but wolf’s depriving her both of her passion for revenge and the supernatural powers that might enable her to carry it out, were she so inclined, make of her an ideal ‘pharmakos’ in girard’s sense: the city of athens prudently kept on hand a number of unfortunate souls, whom it maintained at public expense, for appointed times as well as in certain emergencies. whenever some calamity threatened—plague, famine, foreign invasion, or internal dissension – there was always a pharmakos at the disposal of the community. […] that is why the pharmakos was paraded about the city. he was used as a kind of sponge to sop up impurities, and afterward he was expelled from the community or killed in a ceremony that involved the entire populace. (wolf 1999, p. 94-95) creon’s corinth fulfils all the conditions that make expedient the transformation of medea into such a scapegoat. it is a corrupt regime, hence full of latent violence, and the rulers’ failure to take preventative action to avert an outbreak of plague after the earthquake creates a mood of panic among the citizens. medea has lost the status she originally held as jason’s wife by being expelled from the palace. she is a stranger with the aura of witchcraft about her. a campaign of defamation resurrects the calumny that she murdered apsyrtos, her own brother, many years before. she thus becomes a suitable object on which the community can vent its spleen by formally putting her on trial and subjecting her to a sentence of banishment—without fearing a wave of retaliatory violence such as bursts forth in the versions of euripides and seneca. her sons are later stoned to death as an extension of the same process. christa wolf’s obvious borrowings from girard have the effect of making the community rather than the individual the centre of violence. this focus on communities as having their own psychopathologies and thus a corresponding need of therapy and healing links wolf’s reading of girard with her personal experience of a united germany. for the lack of moral distinction between colchis and corinth in the novel surely reflects her own dual disillusionment with the east german regime that was and with the emotional climate of a reunited germany. in an interview which petra kammann recorded shortly after the novel appeared in 1996, christa wolf states: i was surprised myself that i was becoming once more obsessed with a mythological theme, but in fact it was not so incongruous. i began trying to come to terms with the figure of medea in the years 1990/91. at that time it had become apparent to me that our own culture, whenever it gets into a state of crisis, always relapses into the same patterns of behavior: to put people on the other side of imaginary borders, to make scapegoats of them, to cultivate images of ‘the enemy’ to the point of a pathological misapprehension of reality. […] in the gdr, i had witnessed, at first hand, into what a wretched situation a state gets when it publicly stigmatizes larger and larger groups of its own citizens, thus losing more and more of its capacity to integrate. today portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 11 we are experiencing in the expanded federal republic the parallel phenomenon that larger and larger groups of people are simply becoming superfluous—for social, ethnic and other reasons. (hochgeschurz 1998, p. 50) ironically, christa wolf’s novel itself was to fall victim to such hostile simplifications as she here attributes to both societies. it was seen as a polemical statement in the wars of resentment between ‘ossis’ and ‘wessis’ once the euphoria of reunification had evaporated, as a ‘textbook case of an east-west drama’ (hochgeschurz 1998, p. 118). the critic who produced this formulation in the influential newspaper die zeit, then went on to claim that colchis is—for christa wolf—the land of matriarchy, whereas corinth is the despised and patriarchal west. he then imputes to wolf the claim ‘that matriarchy (east germany) is morally superior to patriarchy (west germany)’. as the italian critic, anna chiarloni, rightly points out, this is simply not borne out by the text of the novel (hochgeschurz. 1998 p. 11) for wolf is at pains to demonstrate a moral sameness between colchis and corinth: both emerge in her recasting of the myth as tyrannies based on the sacrifice of the innocent. it is easy to see how wolf’s removal of euripides’ attributes of violence and power from the figure of medea could be interpreted—in the context of the east-west polemics of the ‘90s—as a general plea for the exculpation of east germans in general and the author herself in particular by making them appear as well-meaning victims in a heartless, capitalistic corinth as a model of united germany. for the novel does indeed maintain: ‘corinth is obsessed with the desire for gold […] and what shocked us [colchians] most: the worth of a citizen of corinth is measured by the amount of gold he possesses […]’ (wolf 1999, p. 35). there may indeed be in the novel a line of bleak and unforgiving criticism of the imperfections of the united gemany of the ‘90s—but the nostalgia of the colchian refugees for a colchis that never was is equally shown in terms that stop just short of contempt. the level on which the east-west question is alluded to is one of the more superficial strata of the text, but it was a convenient pretext for critics to dismiss christs wolf’s portrayal of medea as a naïve and cliché-ridden intervention in a debate neither side can meaningfully win. the centre of the novel’s intentions and achievement lies elsewhere. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 12 the fact that wolf freely admits that she began working on the figure of medea from a conviction that euripides’ notorious heroine could not have murdered her own children and the shrill objections of reviewers of the novel to precisely this change in the plot have both tended to obscure the complexity of the figure she creates and of the processes she depicts in the novel (hochgeschurz 1998, pp. 15, 41). while wolf may have not abandoned the view of the matriarchy as a historical reality which she held in the early ‘80s and owes to graves and thomson, her thinking has moved on from there, as her borrowings from irigaray and girard reveal. but there is a more important debt to consider in her novel of 1996, namely to the critique of western civilisation by horkheimer and adorno in their dialectic of the enlightenment. their main achievement lies in showing the irrational myths created by the self-assured discourse of reason to disguise its own shortcomings and its intimate connections with social and political power. by arrogating to itself a sovereign impartiality, the discourse of reason leaves itself vulnerable to such selfdeceptions as resulted in the rise of fascism in the 20th century and germany’s consequent negation of all the values enlightenment philosophy affirmed. in short, reason, as a public institution, mythicises itself in ways that blind it to the prejudices and destructive impulses that are still latent within it. thus the german critic, ricarda schmidt, writing in 1998, interprets the murder of medea’s children, in wolf’s version, by mob violence in terms borrowed from horkheimer and adorno: ‘these children are victims of power in the modern sense, not human sacrifices in the mythological or historical tradition’ (schmidt 1998, p. 312). it is fair to say that wolf makes this ‘modern sense’ credible by applying what she had gained from girard. however, her portrayals of two societies whose powerstructures are based on the irrationality of the sacrifices of apsyrtos and iphinoe for political motives, which must be disguised within the various modes of each state’s self-representation, is a direct application of ideas from the dialectic of the enlightenment. another critic, friederike mayer, basing her concluding argument on quotations from horkheimer and adorno, brings this aspect into sharper focus: portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 13 for reason is merely a domesticated, superficial layer beneath which the ‘bloodthirsty inner dimension’ lies, and here are ‘energies that are stronger than reason’. […] the ‘calculating reason’ which governs life in corinth, on the basis of which the corinthians are intent on avoiding confronting what they are afraid of, which looks for scapegoats so that they do not have to acknowledge the horrors in their own past, permits ‘the seeds of a new barbarism’ to germinate and thrive. (meyer 1997, p. 94) in these terms, the cultural criticism implicit in wolf’s medea is more fundamental and incisive than the trivial contrasting of an ‘east that was’ with a ‘west that is’ that was all some hostile german reviewers could see in her work. the point of the murders of the children in wolf’s version is not so much that medea does not commit them herself, but that, having occurred as an incidence of collective violence born of fear—corinth is still being laid waste by a plague—the guilt is attributed to her by a consensual lie. then the lie, in turn, is institutionalised into an annual ritual which serves as the basis of a myth. in the terms of horkheimer and adorno, a myth within the context of instrumentalised reason is, by definition, opaque—a construct beneath whose surface those who accept it do not probe, because to do so would be to reveal the cracks in the edifice of reason itself. by this process, it serves the purposes of the power-structure dominant in corinthian society much better to transform the banished and harmless medea into a mythical icon of the evil witch and unnatural, destructive mother than to inquire further into the real causes of the plague that unleashed—through fear—the collective violence that killed her children in the first place. to conduct such an enquiry would be to probe beneath the surface of corinthian self-representation and risk discovering—as has medea previously—the grisly secret at the base of creon’s continuing rule and the subterfuges which, as expounded by the cynical power-broker akamas, are essential to its stability. that medea’s own father, aietes, also shored up his power by resorting to similar means, and that it later becomes expedient in corinth as well to defame medea as the murderer in colchis of her own brother apsyrtos, demonstrates conclusively that wolf’s prime concern is not any kind of partisan statement from an east german viewpoint about the shortcomings of society in the united germany, but rather to revisit issues first raised by horkheimer and adorno in the wake of the defeat of nazism in terms that relate to contemporary european society as a whole. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 14 it is also a tribute to wolf’s artistry that she refrains from idealising the figure of medea herself. given the somewhat unsophisticated feminism that underlies her kassandra and her continued adherence to visions of a primal matriarchy in the ancient mediterranean world that remains more an article of faith than anything archaeology has confirmed, the way was surely open—given the revisions in euripides’ plot for which she had opted—to portray a medea who was at least at ease with herself and could look down on the machinations of patriarchal society with triumphal disdain. but christa wolf has stopped short of doing this, and presents instead—as shown by the passage quoted above with which the voice of medea ends the novel—a figure who is in virtually all phases of her life in a state of alienation. she does not disown her loyalties to her own home through an irresistible love for jason, as some versions of the myth would have it, but because she finds the rule of her father aietes unworthy of her loyalty and jason offers a possibility of escape. her loss of status in corinth, when creon has her expelled from the palace as a preparation to making jason the husband of his daughter glauké, does not outrage her, since her social position means nothing to her and jason has merely used her as a sexual object— something he continues to do even after she has become a public outcast. while christa wolf does not acknowledge any explicit debt to the writings of julia kristeva, there is much in her medea that is reminiscent of what kristeva writes of the—for her—primal social myth of the danaids in her book strangers to ourselves: a fact that one cannot ignore: the first strangers that appear at the beginning of our culture are women—the danaids. […] alienness —the political expression of force—seems to lie at the basis of the elementary forms of civilisation, to be its necessary obverse […] furthermore, the alienness of the danaids also raises the problem of the rivalry of the sexes in their extramarital connections, in love and sexual relationships. for what ‘relationship’ exists between the ‘people’ or ‘race’ of men and the ‘people’ or ‘race’ of women? (kristeva 1990, pp. 51-5) the danaids were the fifty daughters of the mythical greek ancestor-king danaus who fled from libya to greece so that they would not be forced to marry the fifty sons of danaus’ brother, aegyptus. these catch up with danaus and his daughters in argos and a mass-marriage is arranged. the danaids all murder their bridegrooms on their wedding-night, with one exception, so as to avoid being murdered themselves. danaus then sets about marrying off his daughters one by one to locals, no easy task portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 15 because of their reputation as murderesses. it is thus a myth about the problematic assimilation of (female) refugees by marriage (graves 1961, pp. 200-203). something of the radical estrangement between women in general and their—male dominated—social context, and also between women and their individual male partners, that pervades kristeva’s book seems to have been incorporated into christa wolf’s reinvention of the figure of medea. estranged from her native colchis, she finds no sense of belongingness in corinth—even before her discovery of the remains of the sacrificed daughter of creon, iphinoe, makes her a voluntary outcast long before she is banished. since the late 18th century, the figure of medea has presented a severe challenge to male writers, fascinated by the myth, but at a loss as to how to deal with a heroine who murders her own children. thus goethe’s contemporary, friedrich maximilian klinger, wrote two dramas around the figure, medea in corinth (1787) and medea in the caucasus (1791), the second with the intention of exorcising the destructive elements in her character by having her undergo a rehabilitation in the sense of enlightenment didacticism. repenting of her violent past life and eager to follow the dictates of reason, she devotes herself utterly to bringing civilised values to a ‘primitive’, savage community in the caucasus mountains. the major austrian dramatist of the early 19th century, franz grillparzer, made of euripides’ sparse tragedy a whole trilogy of plays, mainly in order to make medea’s murder of her children intelligible to contemporary audiences in terms of the stereotypes of female psychology then dominant. whereas in euripides’ version the children say nothing on stage, grillparzer makes them articulate so as to show them turning away from medea and towards jason’s new bride. the maternal bond is deliberately weakened in this way by the children’s rejection of their natural mother. thus their killing is more an act of despair by a woman abandoned by all than one of revenge by a figure of power. not surprisingly, it appeared to many german reviewers that wolf’s radical alterations to the traditional plot, which remove precisely those elements from it which post-enlightenment european society finds hardest to accept, were essentially portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 16 cosmetic and motivated by a desire to ‘save’ medea for modern feminism, whilst scarifying the prevailing attitudes of a united germany on the side. in this sense, her figure has been read as a kind of ‘medea for popular feminism.’ certainly, an element of exculpation is present. but the main appeal of the novel is to call for a fresh examination of the basis of the recently united germanies by illustrating how myths arise which divide societies into hostile factions by blurring the unpalatable truths of the past. it is thus a fresh call to go beyond the superficialities of the social antagonisms in the reunited germany in the late ‘90s, to continue the task envisaged by horkheimer and adorno in 1944: the point is rather that the enlightenment must examine itself, if men are not to be wholly betrayed. the task to be accomplished is not the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past. today, however, the past is preserved as the destruction of the past. (adorno & horkheimer 1989, p. xv) it is undeniable that, in present-day germany, the political decision of the u.s. to pour aid into west germany in the aftermath of 1945, so that it could become rapidly selfsufficient in economic terms and no longer be a burden, has become converted into an aura of moral superiority on the part of the ‘wessis’ towards their fellow germans in the east. ‘ossis’ have had the painful experience of the devaluation of their personal pasts by virtue of the fact that they did not grow up in the democracy that the marshall plan also made possible in the west, but under the political conditions imposed by the soviet union’s transformation of its zone of occupation into a satellite state in its own image. turning the consequences of international power-plays in the wake of the defeat of hitler into a myth of moral and cultural superiority a halfcentury later is the kind of process upon which wolf’s medea seeks to open a critical perspective. she does this, firstly, by subjecting the myth to an ‘alienation effect’ in brecht’s sense: her medea is emphatically not the medea her readers are expecting. this opens the way to a critical re-examination of the assumptions latent in euripides’ version. secondly, she refrains from a simple reversal of the myth in emotional terms and, instead, strands her heroine in a situation in which insight and exculpation do not produce a freeing of the figure from the alienation that besets her in all phases of her life. but, if the european enlightenment is not to betray itself once more, it is necessary to remain aware that society’s dealings with its own past are always prone portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 17 to lapse into processes of myth-making that are both convenient for the powerful majorities and distortions of the truths that underlie such power. this is what christa wolf signals to her readers in her preface and what her novel subsequently bears out: posing the wrong questions to her puts the figure that wishes to emerge from the darkness of misunderstanding at a loss to answer. we must warn her. our misunderstanding forms a closed system – nothing can refute it. or else we have to dare to penetrate into the inmost recesses of our misapprehension and self-misapprehension, simply tread this path, together, in single file, with the roar of collapsing walls in our ears. beside us – so may we hope – goes the figure with the magic name, the figure in which the ages encounter one another. in which our own age encounters itself – a painful process. the savage woman. (wolf 1999, p. 10) reference list adorno, theodor & horkheimer, max 1989, dialectic of enlightenment, trans. john cumming, new edn, verso 1989, london/new york. originally published in 1944 as dialektik der aufklärung, social studies association, new york. girard, rené 1977, violence and the sacred, trans. patrick gregory, the johns hopkins university press baltimore and london. originally published in 1972 as la violence et le sacré, paris. graves, robert 1958, greek myths, cassel & campany , london. graves, robert 1961, the white goddess, faber and faber, london: gutjahr, ortrud 1988, ‘mythos nach der wiedervereinigung. zu christa wolfs medea. stimmen und botho strauss’ ithaka’ in antikquitates renatae. deutsche und französische beiträge zur wirkung der antike in der europäischen literatur. festschrift fur renate böschenstein zum 65. geburtstag, eds verena ehrich-haefeli, hans-jürgen schrade & martin stern, königshausen & neumann, würzburg, pp. 345-360. hochgeschurz, marianne (ed.) 1998, christa wolfs medea. voraussetzungen zu einem text. mythos und bild, gerhard wolf janus press, berlin. irigaray, luce 1980, speculum. spiegel des anderen geschlechts, frankfurt a.m. kaminski, nicola 1997, ‘sommerstueck – was bleibt – medea. stimmen. wendeseismographen bei christa wolf’ in zwei wendezeiten. blicke auf die deutsche literatur 1945 und 1989, eds walter erhart & dirk niefanger, niemeyer , tübingen, p. 115-139. krätzer, jürgen 1997, ‘das kassandra-syndrom. medea stimmen und gegenstimmen: christa wolfs medea im spiegel der literaturkritik’ in die horen. zeitschriften fur literatur, kunst und kritik, no. 2, pp.48-60. kristeva, julia 1990, fremde sind wir uns selbst, trans. by xenia rajewsky, suhrkamp, frankfurt a. m. originally published in 1988 as estrangers à nousmêmes, paris. mayer, friederike 1997, ‘potenzierte fremdheit: medea – die wilde frau. betrachtungen zu christa wolfs roman medea. stimmen’ in literatur für leser, no. 1, pp. 85-94. paulys real-enzyclopädie der classischen alöteertumswissenschaft, neue bearbeitung 1934, metzler, stuttgart, bd. 15, 1. rupp, gerhard 1999, ‘weibliches schreiben als mythoskritik. christa wolfs roman medea. stimmen’ in klassiker der deutschen literatur. epochen-signaturen portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 18 portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 19 von der aufklarung bis zur gegenwart, ed. gerhard rupp, königshausen &neumann, wurzburg. schmidt, ricarda 1998, ‘das ausgeschlossene andere der abendländischen zivilisation. zu christa wolfs medea’, amsterdamer beiträge zur neueren germanistik, vol. 43, pp. 297-315. shafi, monika 1997, ‘“falsch leiden sollte es das auch geben”. konfliktstrukturen in christa wolfs roman medea’ in colloquia germanica. internationale zeitschrift für germanistik (30), pp. 375-385. wolf, christa 1999, medea. stimmen, dtv, münchen. first published 1996. wolf, christa 1983, voraussetzungen einer erzählung: kassandra. frankfurter poetik-vorlesungen, luchterhand, darmstadt und neuwied. germany: myth and apologia in christa wolf’s nove yixu lü, institute for international studies, un� reference list microsoft word goi avila sat galley.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. geographies of identity special issue, guest edited by matthew graves and elizabeth rechniewski. © 2015 [isabelle avila]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i1.4382. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. les cartes de l’afrique au xixe siècle et joseph conrad: perceptions d’une révolution cartographique isabelle avila, university of paris-est marne-la-vallée «notre siècle aura vu la fraction blanche de l’humanité prise d’une extraordinaire ardeur, d’un enfièvrement d’exploration, et comme dominée par la nécessité d’achever avec le siècle la conquête géographique du monde, prélude de la prise de possession effective », c’est ce que remarque en 1892 le secrétaire général de la société de géographie de paris, charles maunoir (1892: 495). en cette fin de xixe siècle, à l’heure des bilans, l’homme remplit les derniers blancs des cartes tout en s’appropriant ces territoires. les cartes sont ainsi à la fois des outils scientifiques et politiques. le visage cartographique de l’afrique surtout connaît une révolution alors que les blancs sont remplacés par les couleurs des rivalités des nations européennes. comment cette révolution sur la carte de l’afrique est-elle perçue par ses contemporains, lecteurs de cartes? comment joseph conrad arrive-t-il à la mettre en scène dans la littérature avec au cœur des ténèbres qu’il publie en 1899? pour comprendre ce que conrad écrit sur les cartes dans cette œuvre, n’est-il pas utile de se lancer dans l’exploration de l’esprit de cette époque autour de la cartographie et de comparer ce que conrad dit à d’autres témoignages de lecteurs de cartes? l’objet de cet article est de montrer comment la mise en scène des cartes de l’afrique par conrad dans au cœur des ténèbres s’inscrit dans l’esprit de son époque. il est tout d’abord intéressant de s’attarder sur la fascination des contemporains de conrad pour les blancs de la carte de l’afrique, blancs largement présents sur leurs cartes mentales, avant d’étudier leur perception du coloriage de cette carte par les puissances européennes qui colonisent ce continent. avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 2 les blancs de la carte de l’afrique quelques mois avant l’exposition universelle de paris en 1889, le président de la société de géographie de paris, ferdinand de lesseps, porte un regard rétrospectif sur le dixneuvième siècle, «un siècle qui restera lumineux entre tous à travers l’histoire» et qui aura notamment «fixé les dernières grandes lignes de la carte du monde» (1888: 493). cette grande œuvre encyclopédique qui consiste à remplir les blancs des cartes est encouragée par les sociétés de géographie qui sont créées au dix-neuvième siècle. dans les années 1850 et 1860, de nombreux blancs figurent encore sur la carte du monde. ces blancs signifiant l’inconnu entourent la carte d’un halo de mystère, fascinent les lecteurs de cartes et encouragent des vocations d’explorateurs. ce ne sont donc pas les informations scientifiques présentées par les cartes, véritables symboles du progrès, qui sont à l’origine d’une fascination pour la cartographie en générale, mais plutôt les blancs. ce n’est pas tant ce que les cartes disent que ce qu’elles n’arrivent pas à dire qui marque les lecteurs. le géographe écossais john scott keltie évoque en 1915, alors qu’il est rédacteur en chef de la revue de la société de géographie de londres, ses souvenirs d’enfance: one of my earliest geographical recollections is of a map of africa somewhere in the forties and early fifties on the wall of the school of my boyhood; begrimed and faded, with the word ‘unexplored’ in large capitals, from the sahara to the borders of the cape. i am afraid we boys were not sorry for the great blank without a single name to plague our memories. (keltie 1915: 59–60) l’un de mes souvenirs géographiques les plus anciens est celui d’une carte de l’afrique, dans les années 1840 ou au début des années 1850, sur le mur de l’école de mon enfance ; sale et défraîchie, avec le mot « inconnu » en grandes majuscules, du sahara au bord du cap. je dois dire que nous, garçons, n’étions pas mécontents de ce grand blanc sans un seul nom pour torturer nos memoires. (keltie 1915: 59–60)1 la confession de ce géographe, né en 1840 et éduqué en ecosse, montre comment un aspect marquant d’une carte murale de l’afrique s’est imprimé dans la mémoire du jeune enfant, pour y rester jusqu’à la fin de sa vie. abandonnant le souvenir de l’enfant pour adopter la voix du scientifique, keltie ajoute, cependant: «the work of the great army of explorers during the half-century has changed the face of the continent and filled up the enormous blanks that disfigured the maps of 1860» (keltie 1915: 59–60) [le travail de la grande armée d’explorateurs pendant ce demi-siècle a changé le visage du continent et a rempli les énormes blancs qui défiguraient les cartes de 1860 keltie 1 les traductions dans cet article sont celles de l’auteur. avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 3 1915: 59–60)]. quand il suggère que les blancs «défiguraient» les cartes, il reprend un discours souvent utilisé par les géographes de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle. pour tout esprit scientifique animé par la quête des progrès de la connaissance, les blancs constituaient des signes gênants qui affirmaient l’ignorance de l’homme. pourtant, ces blancs, perçus par les hommes de science de manière négative, ou du moins comme des problèmes à résoudre, pouvaient devenir de formidables espaces d’aventure pour les rêveurs, ou ceux qui faisaient travailler leur imagination. ceux-là avaient l’habitude de les contempler pendant des heures. le célèbre explorateur henry morton stanley (né en 1841, un an après keltie) suggère la fascination que les blancs des cartes ont opérée sur toute une génération lors de ses discours d’inauguration de la société de géographie de manchester et de celle d’edimbourg, le 21 octobre et le 3 décembre 1884: «long have you and i gazed upon the white blank in the old maps; long have we wondered what it contained» [pendant longtemps, vous et moi avons contemplé ce grand blanc des vieilles cartes; pendant longtemps nous sommes-nous demandé ce qu’il contenait] (1885: 23; 1885: 15). en incluant son public, il sous-entend qu’il n’a pas été le seul à ressentir la fascination du blanc des cartes, et les questionnements que ce blanc pouvait faire surgir. ces questionnements ont poussé stanley à l’action. il est allé voir ce que les blancs de la carte contenaient réellement. ces quelques citations permettent de retranscrire l’esprit d’une époque fascinée par les blancs de la carte africaine. cet état d’esprit a été remarquablement ressenti et mis en scène par l’écrivain d’origine polonaise, naturalisé britannique en 1886, joseph conrad. né peu de temps après ces explorateurs, en 1857, et inspiré par ses propres expériences de jeunesse à marseille, où il est engagé à partir de 1874 comme mousse sur un voilier, puis par ses seize années passées au service de la marine marchande britannique, devenant capitaine au long cours en 1886, puis par son travail pour le compte de l’etat indépendant du congo à partir de 1890, conrad se sert de la voix de son narrateur charles marlow, dans au cœur des ténèbres, en 1899, pour parler de cette fascination: now when i was a little chap i had a passion for maps. i would look for hours at south america, or africa, or australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. at that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when i saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) i would put my finger on it and say, when i grow up i will go there. (conrad 1990 [1899]: 142) quand j’étais petit, j’avais une passion pour les cartes. je passais des heures à regarder l’amérique du sud, ou l’afrique, ou l’australie, et je me perdais dans toute la gloire de l’exploration. en ce avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 4 temps-là, il restait beaucoup d’espaces blancs sur la terre, et quand j’en voyais un d’aspect particulièrement prometteur sur la carte (mais ils le sont tous), je mettais le doigt dessus et je disais, quand je serai grand, j’irai là. (conrad 1990 [1899]: 142) le narrateur marlow était, en réalité, bien l’interprète de conrad lui-même. en janvier 1924, dans geography and some explorers, conrad parle de sa fascination personnelle pour les cartes, et raconte comment il s’adonna, très tôt, à la «contemplation des cartes» qu’il compare à la fascination que certains ont pour l’observation des étoiles. il explique que l’honnêteté des cartes du dix-neuvième siècle qui affichaient leur ignorance lui donna un intérêt passionné pour la vérité et les connaissances précises, et s’attarde, en particulier, sur sa passion pour la carte de l’afrique et le travail des explorateurs: and it was africa, the continent of which romans used to say “some new thing was always coming,” that got cleared of the dull, imaginary wonders of the dark ages, which were replaced by exciting spaces of white paper. regions unknown! my imagination could depict to itself there worthy, adventurous, and devoted men, nibbling at the edges, attacking from north and south and east and west, conquering a bit of truth here and a bit of truth there, and sometimes swallowed up by the mystery their hearts were so persistently set on unveiling. (conrad 1924: 24–25). et c’était l’afrique, le continent dont les romains avaient coutume de dire qu’«elle réservait toujours du nouveau», qui fut débarrassée des merveilles imaginaires et ennuyeuses du moyen âge, lesquelles furent remplacées par des espaces excitants de papier blanc. des régions inconnues ! mon imagination pouvait s’y représenter des hommes méritants, aventureux, et dévoués, grignotant les bords, attaquant au nord et au sud, à l’est et à l’ouest, conquérant un peu de vérité ici et un peu de vérité là, avant d’être parfois avalés par le mystère que leurs cœurs avaient décidé de dévoiler avec tant d’obstination. (conrad 1924: 24–25) sur la carte de l’afrique, conrad observe, avec intérêt, les travaux des livingstone et des stanley, partis à la conquête de ces blancs. la présence des blancs et les efforts des explorateurs cherchant à compléter la carte du monde conduit conrad à se souvenir des cartes de jadis, remplies d’animaux et d’autres merveilles, et pourtant, paradoxalement ennuyeuses par rapport aux cartes qui faisaient figurer les blancs de l’aventure. l’évolution considérable de la carte de l’afrique en l’espace d’une génération conduit ceux qui ont l’habitude de manipuler des cartes à réfléchir à l’histoire de la cartographie. quarante ans avant conrad, stanley, lors de l’inauguration des sociétés de géographie de manchester et d’edimbourg, en 1884, avait lui-même invité son auditoire à faire un détour cartographique par les vieilles cartes, en comparant les cartes de l’afrique des quinzième et seizième siècles avec les cartes récentes pour mesurer les progrès accomplis par les explorations: take up any old map of africa, and glance at the antique and grotesque creations of the portuguese missionaries and travellers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and compare it with that of avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 5 today, illustrated by the travels of nearly 800 explorers. it is only now that we begin to have a rational idea as to what africa is, and whether commercial enterprise is in any way possible. before, it lay a huge unshapely mass, grimly outfigured on all maps, with an exasperating mystery and blankness about it, here and there relieved by illustrations which might be either lions or cats, elephants, or nameless antelops. prenez n’importe quelle vieille carte de l’afrique, et jetez un coup d’œil aux créations antiques et grotesques des missionnaires et des voyageurs portugais des quinzième et seizième siècles, et comparez-la avec celle d’aujourd’hui, illustrée par les voyages de près de 800 explorateurs. ce n’est que maintenant que nous commençons à avoir une idée rationnelle de ce qu’est l’afrique, et si l’entreprise commerciale y est, d’une quelconque manière, possible. auparavant, elle se présentait comme une masse énorme et sans forme, sévèrement défigurée sur toutes les cartes, avec une dimension exaspérante de mystère et de blancheur, ici et là soulagée par des illustrations qui pouvaient être soit des lions ou des chats, des éléphants, ou des antilopes sans nom. (1885: 10– 11; 1885: 4) isabelle surun fait remarquer, dans son article « le blanc de la carte, matrice de nouvelles représentations des espaces africains », que les blancs des cartes africaines avaient été, avec le même souci, recréés par les géographes du dix-huitième siècle inspirés par l’esprit des lumières, pour tous les lieux dont les latitudes et les longitudes étaient ignorées (2004: 134). c’est, donc, paradoxalement, pendant le siècle des lumières que la géographie de l’afrique s’est obscurcie. cette situation n’échappe pas aux cartographes de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle qui ont observé ce qu’isabelle surun a, plus récemment, remis en lumière : la dialectique de la carte africaine qui se remplit, puis se vide d’informations, avant de se remplir à nouveau. le célèbre cartographe écossais, john george bartholomew, décrit ainsi l’évolution de la carte de l’afrique, en 1890, au retour de la deuxième traversée de l’afrique par stanley qui vient de redécouvrir les monts de la lune dans la chaîne du ruwenzori, lors de l’expédition pour porter secours à emin pacha: nearly four hundred years ago the map of the period presented a very complete appearance indeed. it showed an interior covered with great lakes, rivers, and cities; but whether these were the results of actual exploration or merely of speculation remains a mystery. later on the accuracy of these wonderful maps of the ancients came to be doubted; and the conscientious cartographer, thinking it wiser to depict only the results of well-authenticated exploration, caused the great rivers and lakes of the interior to vanish from his map. until about forty years ago the best maps showed little else than the bare coast line, the great blanks in the interior suggesting a continuation of the vast deserts that were known to exist in the north. this state of affairs appeared to be a reproach to the enterprise of travellers. every map displayed our ignorance of africa, and summoned fearless spirits to go and explore the unknown. (bartholomew 1890: 575) il y a environ quatre cents ans, la carte de l’époque était en effet bien remplie. elle présentait un intérieur couvert de grands lacs, de fleuves, et de villes ; mais ces résultats étaient-ils issus de véritables explorations ou simplement de spéculations, cela demeure un mystère. plus tard, l’exactitude de ces merveilleuses cartes des anciens commença à être remise en question ; et le cartographe consciencieux, pensant qu’il était plus sage de dépeindre seulement les résultats d’une exploration validée scientifiquement, avait provoqué la disparition de la carte des grands fleuves et des lacs de l’intérieur. jusqu’à il y a environ quarante ans, les meilleures cartes de l’afrique ne montraient pas bien plus que la côte dénudée et les grands blancs de l’intérieur qui suggéraient une avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 6 continuité des grands déserts dont l’existence était connue dans le nord. cet état des choses semblait être un reproche à l’entreprise des voyageurs. chaque carte montrait notre ignorance de l’afrique, et appelait les esprits courageux à l’exploration de l’inconnu. (bartholomew 1890: 575) il est intéressant d’entrevoir, grâce à ce passage, le regard du cartographe de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle sur les changements de la carte de l’afrique, et sa réflexion autour de la dialectique des pleins et des vides. les explorateurs ne sont pas les seuls à remplir les blancs des cartes. en effet, certains lecteurs d’atlas, tels que joseph conrad, suivent leurs pas et accomplissent, eux aussi, ce consciencieux travail: it consisted in entering laboriously in pencil the outline of tanganyika on my beloved old atlas, which, having been published in 1852, knew nothing, of course, of the great lakes. the heart of its africa was white and big. surely it could have been nothing but a romantic impulse which prompted the idea of bringing it up to date with all the accuracy of which i was capable. thus i could imagine myself stepping in the very footprints of geographical discovery. (conrad 1924: 26) cela consistait à ajouter laborieusement au crayon le contour du tanganyika sur mon cher vieil atlas, qui, ayant été publié en 1852, ne connaissait pas du tout, bien entendu, les grands lacs. le cœur de son afrique était blanc et immense. ce n’était probablement rien d’autre qu’un élan romantique qui conduisit à l’idée de le mettre à jour avec toute la précision dont j’étais capable. ainsi, je pouvais m’imaginer suivre les pas mêmes de la découverte géographique. (conrad 1924: 26) il est d’ailleurs toujours possible de trouver des exemples de ces blancs qui étaient remplis au crayon à papier par leurs lecteurs. eli sowerbutts, futur secrétaire de la société de géographie de manchester, avait complété le célèbre royal atlas of modern geography de 1861 d’alexander keith johnston: sur les blancs de la carte d’afrique, dans la région du lac victoria, il avait inscrit «probable source of the nile» [source probable du nil] (johnston 1861: 37). si par endroits encore les cartes soulignent l’ignorance de l’homme, elles constituent avant tout, selon bartholomew, le «registre symbolique de (ses) connaissances sur la terre» (1903: x). la fin de la période héroïque des explorations semble cependant coïncider avec la fin du dix-neuvième siècle et, en 1891, charles maunoir commence à voir apparaître le «moment singulier» de la fin des grandes explorations: les explorateurs travaillent avec énergie, avec acharnement, à combler les dernières lacunes de la carte générale de notre planète. en nombre croissant chaque année, mieux secondés, placés pour la lutte dans des conditions moins pénibles que les ouvriers de la première heure, ils resserrent, par leurs itinéraires, les mailles du réseau des connaissances. dans un avenir plus ou moins éloigné, leur tâche sera terminée; les expressions terra incognita ou régions inexplorées disparaîtront à jamais des cartes et bientôt, tombées en désuétude, elles ne s’appliqueront plus que dans un sens figuré. la géographie alors se sera acquittée de son mandat primordial; les contours des rivages, avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 7 les traits intérieurs, le relief des terres émergées seront dessinés dans leur ensemble; l’œuvre entreprise dès les âges les plus lointains, lentement conduite à travers de longs siècles, sera réalisée; il y aura là un moment singulier dans l’histoire de la science. (maunior 1891: 444–445) dès 1896, de l’autre côté de la manche, le major darwin ne peut s’empêcher de regretter l’âge héroïque des explorations lors de son discours devant la section de géographie de la british association, à liverpool: «personally i cannot help feeling a completely unreasoning regret that we have almost passed out of the heroic period of geography. whatever the future may have in store for us, it can never give us another columbus, another magellan, or another livingstone» [personnellement, je ne peux pas m’empêcher d’éprouver un regret tout à fait irrationnel parce que nous sommes presque sortis de la période héroïque de la géographie. quoique l’avenir nous réserve, il ne nous donnera plus un autre colomb, un autre magellan, ou un autre livingstone] (darwin 1896: 498). l’expression de ce sentiment montre la confrontation entre l’intérêt rationnel pour les progrès des explorations, et l’attrait, presque passionnel, pour la romance de l’exploration et les exploits des aventuriers, qui ont malheureusement de moins en moins de blancs à conquérir. déjà en 1868, jules verne laissait son personnage paganel exprimer ses regrets devant la fin de l’épopée des grandes explorations: ah! mes amis, un découvreur de terres est un véritable inventeur! il en a les émotions et les surprises! mais maintenant cette mine est à peu près épuisée! on a tout vu, tout reconnu, tout inventé en fait de continents ou de nouveaux mondes, et nous autres, derniers venus dans la science géographique, nous n’avons plus rien à faire!» (verne 1868: 54) et c’est bien ces mêmes regrets que conrad partage en cette fin de dix-neuvième siècle alors qu’il assiste, comme ses contemporains à une révolution sur la carte de l’afrique: les blancs ont été, en l’espace de quelques années, remplis par les couleurs européennes. les couleurs de la carte de l’afrique pour assister à cette révolution cartographique, il suffit d’observer le contraste saisissant entre la première carte de l’afrique fournie en 1885, au moment du congrès de berlin, et celle présentée en 1890 dans la revue de la société de géographie de manchester. sur la première carte, qui ouvre littéralement la revue de la société et qui montre que l’afrique est au cœur des préoccupations ayant encouragé la création de cette société en 1884, l’afrique apparaît presque blanche, à l’exception des quelques couleurs européennes qui longent le littoral (fig. 1). en 1890, la carte qui illustre l’expédition de avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 8 figure 1: la carte de l’afrique en 1885 dans la revue de la société de géographie de manchester (source: philip, g.1885, ‘map of africa,’ journal of the manchester geographical society, vol. 1: 1). stanley s’est remplie de larges à-plats de couleurs délimitant les sphères d’influence des différentes nations européennes, désormais limitrophes non seulement sur le littoral, mais aussi au cœur de l’afrique (fig. 2). en l’espace de cinq ans, une révolution s’est produite dans la manière de représenter l’afrique sur les cartes politiques. la rapidité de cette révolution ne peut échapper aux lecteurs de cartes. en 1885, déjà, le président de la société de géographie de londres, lord aberdare, explique la portée du congrès de berlin qui se tient du 15 novembre 1884 au 26 février 1885 en peignant: the great change in the political geography of equatorial africa which has resulted from the labours of the berlin conference and the treaties between france, portugal, and the congo free state during the meetings of the conference. the map of africa, with this and previous avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 9 figure 2: la carte de l’afrique en 1890 dans la revue de la société de géographie de manchester (source: philip, g. 1890, ‘map to illustrate mr. h. m. stanley’s address to the manchester geographical society,’ journal of the manchester geographical society, vol. 6: 113). annexations of coast country … has during the year undergone a complete transformation. (aberdare 1885: 426) le grand changement dans la géographie politique de l’afrique équatoriale qui a émergé des travaux de la conférence de berlin et des traités entre la france, le portugal, et l’etat indépendant du congo pendant les réunions de la conférence. la carte de l’afrique, en conséquence de cela et d’annexions précédentes de régions littorales … a, au cours de cette année, connu une transformation complete. (aberdare 1885: 426) c’est la même révolution cartographique qui est dépeinte, cette année-là, dans la revue de la société de géographie ecossaise: the political map of africa: the late conference at berlin and the treaties which resulted from its deliberations have materially altered the map of all the region of equatorial africa situated between the two oceans. yesterday, all was a matter of political controversy; today, it is all definitely fixed, at least on paper. (scottish geographical society: 134) la carte politique de l’afrique centrale: la récente conférence à berlin et les traités qui ont résulté de ses délibérations ont altéré, matériellement, la carte de l’ensemble de la région de l’afrique équatoriale située entre les deux océans. hier, tout était sujet aux controverses politiques ; aujourd’hui, tout est fixé, de manière définitive, du moins sur le papier (scottish geographical society: 134) rétrospectivement, en 1911, le philips’ new historical atlas for students résume la portée du partage de l’afrique par les puissances européennes à la fin du dix-neuvième avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 10 siècle en intitulant sa carte de l’afrique: «modern europeaniation of africa» [européanisation de l’afrique à l’époque moderne] (muir 1911: 64). la carte de l’afrique constitue donc un véritable symbole, d’abord célèbre pour les blancs qui avaient produit de multiples vocations d’explorateurs, elle est, ensuite, célèbre pour le calque des couleurs européennes qui est posé sur ces blancs. l’ironie de cette coloration des blancs de l’afrique n’échappe pas aux cartographes et aux géographes contemporains de cette révolution. le cartographe john george bartholomew poursuit son observation de la dialectique des blancs de cette carte, dans la revue de la société de géographie écossaise dont il est le cartographe, en indiquant, en 1890, comment ceux-ci furent remplis par les couleurs européennes: the great era of discovery then set in. at first progress was slow, but within the last fifteen years it has been very rapid; and at the present day the dark cloud of mystery has been so far dispersed, that the map again shows an interior, with great lakes, rivers, and forests, filled in with detail not unlike its predecessor of ptolemaic origin. now, scientific men, missionaries, pioneers of commerce, germans, french, belgians, italians, portuguese, english, and scotch—all have their energies bent on africa, exploring and founding settlements. not a mail arrives but brings from them new data for the map of africa. in europe the knowledge of territories so valuable for commercial enterprise has led to a keen contest among the powers for their possession, thus necessitating frequent changes in the political colouring of the map. (bartholomew 1890: 575) la grande ère des découvertes alors apparut. au début, les progrès furent lents, mais durant ces quinze dernières années, ils ont été très rapides; et désormais le nuage sombre de mystères a été si bien écarté que la carte montre à nouveau un intérieur, avec de grands lacs, fleuves et forêts, rempli de détails semblables à son ancêtre d’origine ptolémaïque. maintenant, des scientifiques, des missionnaires, des pionniers du commerce, des allemands, des français, des belges, des italiens, des portugais, des anglais, des ecossais—tous ont leurs énergies tournées vers l’afrique, son exploration, et la création de colonies. pas une lettre n’arrive qui n’apporte de nouvelles informations pour la carte de l’afrique. en europe, la connaissance de territoires si utiles pour l’entreprise commerciale a conduit à une compétition vive entre les puissances pour leur possession, rendant ainsi nécessaire des changements fréquents dans la coloration politique de la carte. (bartholomew 1890: 575) la ruée des européens sur l’afrique constitue un vrai casse-tête pour les cartographes, sans cesse contraints d’actualiser leurs cartes. un collègue de bartholomew, le géographe arthur silva white, secrétaire de la société de géographie écossaise, souligne, quant à lui, le paradoxe d’un continent noir qui s’est soudain coloré: «the ‘dark continent,’ at least on the map, is now illuminated with a variety of colourings» [le ‘continent noir’ est, du moins sur la carte, maintenant illuminé d’une variété de couleurs] (white 1888: 152). l’image du «continent noir» s’était répandue au dix-neuvième siècle. elle avait de fortes connotations religieuses données par les missionnaires qui cherchaient à apporter avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 11 la lumière de l’évangile aux tribus africaines. pour ne citer qu’un exemple de cette utilisation de l’image du continent noir, en 1892, le révérend william hughes, dans dark africa and the way out, écrivait: « africa needs evangelizing and enlightening» [l’afrique a besoin d’être évangélisée et éclairée] (hughes 1892: 2). pour les explorateurs, l’image du « continent noir » suggérait, également, les mystères géographiques qui n’avaient pas encore été percés, ainsi que la végétation dense de l’afrique équatoriale. stanley rend l’expression très populaire, en 1878, dans through the dark continent. mais, pour stanley, alors même qu’il dévoile les mystères de l’afrique, le continent semble s’obscurcir pour garantir le succès de ses publications: en 1890, il publie in darkest africa. les images du «continent noir» et du «continent encore plus noir» de stanley font l’objet d’un tel engouement que william booth, le fondateur de l’armée du salut, les utilisent à des fins rhétoriques pour montrer que les forêts épaisses du continent africain sont comparables à l’infinie pauvreté de certains britanniques dans la métropole, dans son ouvrage in darkest england, and the way out, qu’il ouvre, d’ailleurs, par une carte symbolique (booth 1890). joseph conrad renverse, en 1899, cette image du «continent noir» dans au cœur des ténèbres, en remplaçant les ténèbres du continent noir par les ténèbres européennes. c’est ainsi que son narrateur charles marlow interprète le remplissage des blancs de la carte de l’afrique par les européens : true, by this time it was not a blank space any more. it had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. it had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. it had become a place of darkness. (conrad 1990 [1899]: 142) il était vrai que ce n’était plus un espace blanc à ce moment-là. il avait été rempli depuis mon enfance par des rivières, des lacs, et des noms. il avait cessé d’être un espace blanc de délicieux mystère—un endroit blanc sur lequel un garçon pouvait rêver de gloire. c’était devenu un lieu plein d’obscurité. (conrad 1990 [1899]: 142) l’augmentation des connaissances géographiques et les noms que les européens inscrivent sur le palimpseste cartographique du continent africain en se l’appropriant symboliquement n’auraient pas, selon le narrateur de conrad, éclairé le continent mais l’aurait obscurci. conrad présente alors une puissante synthèse littéraire permettant de rendre compte de la révolution cartographique de l’afrique: l’image paradoxale et oxymorique du continent africain arborant toutes les couleurs de l’arc-en-ciel, et, pourtant, entouré par avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 12 les ténèbres. alors qu’il s’apprête à s’enfoncer dans l’etat indépendant du congo, charles marlow se retrouve devant une carte de l’afrique: a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow. there was a vast amount of red— good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the east coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. however, i wasn’t going into any of these. i was going into the yellow. dead in the centre. and the river was there—fascinating—deadly—like a snake. (conrad 1990 [1899]: 145–146) une grande carte brillante, marquée par toutes les couleurs d’un arc-en-ciel. il y avait une large quantité de rouge, vision toujours rassurante, car chacun sait le réel travail qui y est fait, une sacrée dose de bleu, un peu de vert, des taches orangées, et, sur la côte est, un coin mauve, pour montrer où les joyeux pionniers du progrès buvaient leur joyeuse bière blonde. cependant, je n’allais dans aucun de ces derniers. j’allais dans le jaune. dans le cœur même. et le fleuve était là, fascinant, dangereux, comme un serpent. (conrad 1990 [1899]: 145–146) joseph conrad immortalise ainsi, dans la littérature, cette image symbolique de la carte de l’afrique et les réactions de ses contemporains. pour le narrateur britannique, la couleur rouge est rassurante et p. j. cain et a. g. hopkins ont expliqué ce sentiment: « in a world of shifting concepts the formal empire, the area painted red on the map, had a reassuringly solid physical presence» [dans un monde en perpétuel changement, l’empire formel, cette zone peinte en rouge sur la carte, constituait une présence physique solide et rassurante] (1993: 6). le portrait des allemands, en mauve, est, quant à lui, largement ironique. conrad contraste cependant l’apparition colorée de la carte avec des images qui évoquent les ténèbres, à commencer par le serpent, version symbolique des voies navigables empruntées par les explorateurs européens pour pénétrer le cœur du continent. de plus, avant de voir la carte, marlow mentionne deux femmes «knitting black wool» [filant de la laine noire], il les retrouve après avoir vu la carte, soulignant le fait qu’elles «knitted black wool feverishly» [filaient de la laine noire fébrilement], et les décrit comme ‘guarding the door of darkness’ [gardant la porte des ténèbres], comme elles gardent la carte colorée de l’afrique. cette carte brillante et colorée est entourée d’une «ominous … atmosphere» [atmosphère … sinistre], tout en constituant le cœur de cette atmosphère encadrée par la figure des deux fileuses, telles des parques filant le destin des hommes (conrad 1990 [1899]: 145–147). conrad invite ses lecteurs à saisir le sens profond de la carte de l’afrique dessinée par les européens en lui donnant une tonalité sinistre, mais aussi ironique, car il la compare au costume d’arlequin (gogwilt 1995: 123). en effet, alors que marlow rencontre un avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 13 jeune russe qui ressemble à un arlequin, c’est aussi à la carte de l’afrique qu’il pense: his aspect reminded me of something i had seen—something funny i had seen somewhere. as i maneuvered alongside, i was asking myself, “what does this fellow look like?” suddenly i got it. he looked like a harlequin. his clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown holland probably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow,— patches on the back, patches on the front, patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding around his jacket, scarlet edging at the bottom of his trousers; and the sunshine made him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, because you could see how beautifully all this patching had been done. (conrad 1990 [1899]: 212) son aspect me rappelait quelque chose que j’avais vu, quelque chose de drôle que j’avais vu quelque part. alors que je manœuvrais pour me rapprocher, je me demandais: «a quoi ressemble cet homme?». soudain, je compris. il ressemblait à un arlequin. ses habits avaient été faits de quelque étoffe qui était marron, de hollande probablement, mais elle était partout couverte de pièces, avec des pièces brillantes, bleu, rouge, et jaune ; des pièces dans le dos, des pièces devant, des pièces sur les coudes, sur les genoux; une couture colorée autour de sa veste, une bordure écarlate au bord de son pantalon; et le soleil lui donnait une apparence extrêmement gaie et, de plus, merveilleusement soignée, parce que vous pouviez voir comme tout ce rapiéçage avait été admirablement fait. (conrad 1990 [1899]: 212) conrad, en tant que grand amateur de cartes, ne pouvait avoir en tête que la carte de l’afrique en écrivant ce passage. a travers la figure de l’arlequin, personnage comique de la commedia dell’arte, il utilise la fonction théâtrale traditionnelle du bouffon qui révèle la vérité sous le déguisement de la comédie. comme marlow qui ne savait pas lire le russe et qui le prenait pour une écriture codée, celui qui ne savait pas lire les cartes aurait pensé que la carte de l’afrique ressemblait à un arlequin. dans au cœur des ténèbres, conrad propose à ses lecteurs de déchiffrer l’écriture codée de la carte de l’afrique, l’emmenant dans un voyage initiatique. le voyage remontant le fleuve est à comprendre comme la tentative de pénétrer le cœur non pas de l’afrique, mais de sa carte (puisque c’est dans les à-plats de couleur de cette dernière que marlow se rend), enlevant petit à petit les couches de couleurs pour accéder aux ténèbres qu’elles cachent. la mise en scène symbolique que conrad organise autour de la carte de l’afrique, cherchant à faire entrevoir les ténèbres européennes derrière son voile coloré, indique bien la forte impression laissée chez les contemporains par la révolution qui s’est produite en l’espace de quelques années sur cette carte. l’objet de cet article était de faire dialoguer à la fois le texte littéraire de joseph conrad, les représentations cartographiques de l’afrique et des lectures de cartes faites par des géographes contemporains de conrad. cela permet de voir à quel point les allusions aux cartes dans au cœur des ténèbres reflètent l’impact, sur les lecteurs de la fin du dixneuvième siècle, de la révolution sur les cartes de l’afrique. il est ainsi possible de avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 14 comprendre à quel point le texte de conrad s’inscrit dans l’esprit de cette époque. ce texte joue d’ailleurs sur le rôle des cartes et du texte littéraire. les cartes ont pour fonction de construire ou de reconstruire un monde simplifié, permettant à l’homme de le contrôler plus facilement, intellectuellement, voire matériellement. le texte littéraire de conrad cherche, lui, à déconstruire ce monde, à montrer les fissures dans l’édifice des connaissances, à signaler l’artifice. en effet, son narrateur marlow semble indiquer le passage de la lecture des cartes à celui du texte littéraire quand il déclare: «for a time i would feel i belonged still to a world of straight-forward facts; but the feeling would not last long» [l’espace d’un moment, je pensais faire partie d’un monde où les faits étaient tels qu’ils apparaissaient mais cette impression ne durait pas longtemps] (1899: 151). ces doutes peuvent s’appliquer à l’espace de la carte de l’afrique comme ils peuvent concerner une conscience du temps, au moment de la conclusion d’un siècle de progrès scientifiques. et l’image cartographique et littéraire créée par conrad d’une afrique peinte aux couleurs de l’arc-en-ciel tout en étant entourée de ténèbres est doublement puissante. elle semble refléter à la fois une perception de l’espace et une perception du temps. elle inverse les repères spatiaux en transportant les ténèbres du continent noir à l’extérieur de la carte du continent. elle symbolise aussi l’inscription de la gloire des couleurs européennes au dix-neuvième siècle tout en annonçant les ténèbres des conflits du vingtième siècle. a posteriori, cette image fin-de-siècle et oxymorique inscrit le temps dans l’espace en écrivant les impérialismes et nationalismes européens et fiers de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle et les ténèbres de la première guerre mondiale que ces derniers vont provoquer. sur sa carte littéraire, conrad cartographie ainsi les certitudes et les doutes d’une conscience de l’espace, du temps et de l’identité qui traduisent l’esprit de son époque. reference list aberdare, lord 1885, ‘annual address on the progress of geography,’ proceedings of the royal geographical society, vol. 7: 417–430. bartholomew, j. g. 1890, ‘the mapping of the world. part ii. africa,’ scottish geographical magazine, vol. 6: 575–597. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14702549008554699 and http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14702549008554556. bartholomew, j. g. 1903, the twentieth century citizen’s atlas of the world. george newnes, london. booth, gen. 1890, in darkest england, and the way out. laird and lee, chicago. cain, p. j. and hopkins, a. g. 1993, british imperialism: innovation and expansion 1688–1914. longman, london and new york. conrad, j. 1924, geography and some explorers. strangeways & sons, london. avila les cartes de l’afrique portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 15 conrad, j. 1990 (1899), heart of darkness. oxford university press, oxford. darwin, l. 1896, ‘address to the geographical section of the british association,’ scottish geographical magazine, vol. 12: 497–513. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00369229608732916. gogwilt, c. 1995, the invention of the west: joseph conrad and the double-mapping of europe and empire. stanford university press, stanford. hughes rev. w. 1892, dark africa and the way out; or a scheme for civilizing and evangelizing the dark continent. sampson low, marston & company, london. johnston, a. k. 1861, royal atlas of modern geography. william blackwood & sons, edinburgh & london. exemplaire de la john rylands university library de manchester. keltie, j. s. 1915, ‘a half century of geographical progress,’ journal of the manchester geographical society, vol. 31: 55–80. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14702541508554109. lesseps, f. de 1888, «seconde assemblée générale pour 1888» [second general assembly of 1888], compte rendu des séances de la société de géographie et de la commission centrale [minutes of the meetings of the geographical society and the central committee]: 493–497. maunoir, c. 1891, «rapport sur les travaux de la société de géographie et sur les progrès des sciences géographiques pendant l’année 1890» [report on the work of the geographical society and the progress of geographical sciences in the year 1890], bulletin de la société de géographie, septième série, tome, xii: 405–446. maunoir, c. 1892, «rapport sur les travaux de la société de géographie et sur les progrès des sciences géographiques pendant l’année 1891» [report on the work of the geographical society and the progress of geographical sciences in the year 1891], bulletin de la société de géographie, septième série, tome xiii: 393–395. muir, r. 1911, philips’ new historical atlas for students. george philip & son, london & liverpool. philip, g. 1885, ‘map of africa,’ journal of the manchester geographical society, vol. i: 1. philip, g. 1890, ‘map to illustrate mr. h. m. stanley’s address to the manchester geographical society,’ journal of the manchester geographical society, vol. 6: 113. scottish geographical society 1885, ‘the political map of africa,’ scottish geographical magazine, vol. 1: 134. stanley, h. m. 1878, through the dark continent: or, the sources of the nile around the great lakes of equatorial africa and down the livingstone river to the atlantic ocean. sampson low, marston, searle & rivington, london. stanley, h. m. 1885, ‘central africa and the congo basin, or, the importance of the scientific study of geography,’ journal of the manchester geographical society, vol. 1: 6–25. stanley, h. m. 1885, ‘inaugural address delivered before the scottish geographical society at edinburgh, 3rd december 1884,’ scottish geographical magazine, vol. 1: 1–17. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14702548508553941. stanley, h. m. 1890, in darkest africa, or, the quest, rescue and retreat of emin, governor of equatoria. sampson low, marston, searle & rivington, london. surun, i. 2004, «le blanc de la carte, matrice de nouvelles représentations des espaces africains», dans combler les blancs de la carte: modalités et enjeux de la construction des savoirs géographiques (xvii-xxe siècles), (dir.) i. laboulais-lesage. presses universitaires de strasbourg, strasbourg: 117–144. verne, j. 1977 (1868), les enfants du capitaine grant [the children of captain grant]. hachette, paris. white, a. s. 1888, ‘the partition of central africa,’ scottish geographical magazine, vol. 4: 152–158. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14702548808553970. portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal of lady-killers and ‘men dressed as women’: soap opera, scapegoats and the mexico city police department vek lewis, university of sydney examples of exaggeration are to be found in the way in which alterity, cultural, religious, or any other sort of difference become objects of fantasies and fears. the actors who are assumed to embody them are likely to become scapegoats, to the extent that they are frequently attributed a virtual violence that is almost natural or innate, whereas in reality they are very far from any such thing, if such a thing were to exist. (wieviorka 2003: 111) introduction a string of murders in real-life mexico city whose perpetrator cannot be found, a highrating family drama whose half-year long escalating whodunnit draws to a dramatic close, a police investigation whose top brass come up with an assortment of useless leads, a fictional transvestite who gains the trust of women only to kill them, a raid on travesti prostitutes in the hunt for the evasive killer, an ex-lucha libre wrestler known in the circuit as ‘the silent lady’ who is eventually fingered as the guilty party… the lines between reality and fantasy in contemporary mexican life are often not only unclear but can also lead to a fear-driven crosshatching of fiction and real life events in the scandalized public imagination. all the elements in this particular story are worthy of a serial melodrama. this article explores the intersections between the insertion of narrative elements of the highly successful mexican primetime serial la madrastra (the stepmother), from 2005, into popular consciousness and police mishandling of the case of a serial killer dubbed mataviejitas—the old lady-killer. telenovelas are watched by the great bulk of the population in mexico—not just lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 2 women—and especially the popular classes. in saying this, i understand the mexican police as viewers of the representations and participants in the talk that arose in the wake of the telenovela’s denouement, a critical tactic that places them firmly within the mainstream of the viewing public. this article raises an important question: do symbolic representations have material consequences for specific groups of people in society, in this case, travestis? and if so, how does this occur? the term travesti, as mauro cabral and paula viturro state, is used to refer to those persons who, having been assigned the masculine gender at birth, identify themselves in different versions of femininity, and who may or may not surgically or hormonally modify their bodies. [travesti] possesses a particular political specificity, in that it unites a generalized condition of social vulnerability, an association with sexual work, the exclusion of basic rights, and the recognition of the same as a political identity. (2006: 270) although these scholar-activists refer to argentina, travestis are found in many parts of latin america, including mexico. their lives and identities have been documented and studied at length in the last decade by both latin american and non-latin american ethnographers. the work of annick prieur (1998), for example, offers a detailed picture of the connection between mexican travestis’ gender and sexuality and their class origins, as well as their involvement in informal prostitution. likewise, mexican anthropologist césar gonzález pérez offers a view into the realities of travesti existence in colima, mexico, in his 2003 study on travestidos gays. his study commences with an examination of mexico’s judeo-christian heritage and the condemnation of sexual diversity. it also profiles the emergence of travestismo in relation to medico-legal discourses of deviance. he demonstrates that travestismo is more socially accepted when it is confined to the stage, in other words, for performance and entertainment purposes. outside this context it is subject to much opprobrium and social stigma. colima’s travestis experience ostracism in various domains and live on the edges of institutional life. this is also the case for travestis in other parts of mexico. gonzález pérez’s work, and that of other scholars, provides useful information about the cultural framing of travestis and their marginalisation, elements that will be touched on throughout this article. in recent years travestis have obtained considerable, although frequently fraught, social and political visibility. travestis in latin america comprise a segment of a set of sexually diverse populations, which includes gays and lesbians, whose place in culture is often imperilled socially, economically and politically. it is perhaps unsurprising that mexican popular media presently responds to this visibility in lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 3 ways that are themselves not unproblematic. representations of sexual minorities, while under-explored in the literature on representations by latin american and latin americanist scholars, provide a key link to the essential question of how the limits of knowledge around certain subjects are produced and reproduced in contemporary cultural contexts and the impacts such production has. in general, the issue of representation, these days, is infrequently addressed, as the connections between cultural productions and their reception have been so complicated by cultural critics as to appear to be impossible to predict. stuart hall has famously shown that the meanings encoded in productions as intended by their makers are not necessarily identical to the meanings decoded by viewers, and that production does not end when a piece of television has been edited and shown. meanings are continually produced and reproduced (1980: 128-29). representations, once released into the public realm, might be open to a multitude of interpretations, so what is the sense in addressing them here? while asymmetries of meaning may occur en route in the dispersal of a product and its reception, and oppositional or counter-hegemonic readings are always a possibility, this cannot discount instances in which the knowledge frameworks of dominant culture align with the viewing public’s own available frameworks, in which the visualising and interpreting of representational phenomena retain real symmetry. these knowledge frameworks, or conceptual models, are traceable in media texts and also the talk generated around them. knowledge relates not simply to encoded information, but also the beliefs that people hold about phenomena. these beliefs may be implicit, but they are shared by groups of viewers and readers who comprise what critical discourse theorist teun van dijk calls an ‘epistemic community’ (2003: 86). such communities share certain mental models and acquire strategies of interpretation from the discursive forms that structure their social and informational worlds. media texts may construct, authorise and activate established models of perception in their representational forms, as well as suggest certain ‘routes’ of interpretation. as van dijk further notes, in the realm of representations, the following pattern applies: x represents y for z. x is the representation, y is the thing represented by x (usually something concrete in the world) and z is the person or group that reads the representation (91). the power of the preferred or hegemonic reading, based as it is on shared knowledge constructs about the y term, here, travestis, is important in evaluating the political lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 4 consequences of representations. a consideration of the telenovela la madrastra, the parallel criminal case, public talk about both and police actions in engineering a swoop on sex working travestis, provide the occasion for a thoroughgoing reflection on the issue of representation, modes of knowledge and their effects. in the following section i outline major critical approaches to the telenovela genre. i then address the novela, la madrastra, sketch out its main features and demonstrate how it fits into the typical novela form. (footage from the final cliffhanger episode of la madrastra that crystallises the moment of the representation of cross-dressing is available to readers of this article as a supplementary file.) i address the role of televisa, the company that produced la madrastra, with respect to its depictions of sexual minorities, depictions that partake of a long history of mass cultural and juridical anxiety around cross-gendering, the kind of anxiety that underwrites la madrastra’s visions. next i speculate about viewer positions, referring to several on-line responses by the public vis-à-vis cross-dressing and travestis after the final episode of la madrastra was screened. finally, i examine the mataviejitas case, in order to ask some questions about how the codes of interpreting fiction and ‘real-life’ events in mexican media interact and merge and may impact not just on peoples’ perceptions but also lives. critical approaches to the telenovela form since the 1980s, scholars have studied the insertion of telenovelas into daily life, as ana lópez (1995) notes. this regards the function of the telenovela in terms of the ‘modernisation’ of latin american societies and the complicated relationship between production and reception. jesús martín-barbero has centred on these questions in several works, beginning with his landmark study de los medios a las mediaciones (1987), which posits that the telenovela, like other popular forms, is a site of mediations between the forces of production and reception. as lópez states, responding to martínbarbero’s insights, the telenovela ‘bears the marks of tv’s commercial imperatives and responds to the demands of cultural habits and specific ways of seeing which are in a constant state of transformation and adaptation’ (1995: 257). telenovelas are hugely popular throughout latin america; at times twelve different serials are screened each day, from dawn to dusk. this significantly impacts to frame the way publics in latin america see not only themselves but also the rest of the world. lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 5 lópez labels the novela a melodramatic form par excellence, whose organising mode is the principle of terminal moral forces that run through the social fabric (261). telenovelas are organised around figures of excess, often employing hyperbole, oxymoron and antithetical elements counterposed, as aprea and martínez mendoza note (1996: 21). these are the typical characteristics of melodrama. mexican novelas, as lópez and others indicate, are notorious for their manichean vision of the world— proposing a set of duelling dualisms, good and evil, saint and sinner and so on. although they are traditionally bereft of references to the real world in the sense of politics or economics, the picture of extended families and tightly knitted social groups evinces a degree of moral certainty that is only threatened by certain outside polarising forces that may intrude on family life. in the typical telenovela, aprea and martínez mendoza observe, everything revolves around a heterosexual couple at the centre of the story (1996: 24). often there is a wedding, or a planned wedding, which certain forces may interrupt or complicate. desires, and the persistence of desires, drive the plot. yet only desires properly contained within the monogamous heterosexual couple inevitably succeed and are trumpeted. the telenovela encourages a high degree of viewer identification and complicity, and often develops its themes in line with public interest, as well as, commonly, the presence of a major star. the good-natured protagonists are key; the heroine, moreover, obtains a more primordial place in the plot than the hero. the heroine is the chief point of public identification. as josé ignacio cabrujas affirms: la protagonista debe lucir desvalida y tener un rostro de candor. debe ser un ‘ser absoluto,’ construida sobre el amor a la abuela, a los niños, al perro, carece de odios. es honrada, aunque puede saltarse una ley injusta por una causa noble. es una persona normal que apunta en todo a lo sublime.1 (2002: 56-57) these characteristics place the female protagonist in the realm of the community; she is a figure of solidarity and strength and given over to public identification. she is ‘one of us,’ as cabrujas asserts, unlike the villain or villains, who are invariably not part of the community, or may be outsiders. further, as cabrujas argues, ‘toda heroína encarna la esencia del pueblo y la elabora una conducta superior al espectador’ (57) and, as such, 1 ‘the heroine should appear helpless and have a sincere face. she should be a complete being, constructed on the basis of her love towards her grandmother, children, dog, lacking in hatred. she is honourable, although she may break an unjust law for the sake of a noble cause. she is a normal person who fulfils the sublime in all she does.’ this translation, and all translations here, are mine. lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 6 she is viewed as a guide, and a presence in viewer’s lives.2 the important insertion of the telenovela into everyday life has a traceable genealogy. as martín-barbero illustrates in ‘memory and form in the latin american soap opera,’ its ancestors are the folletín—the newspaper serial, written day-to-day, subject to reader response, a ‘(con)fusion of fiction and life’ and the popular melodramatic cinema of the forties and fifties, which emotively depicted the kinship, relationships and rivalries of everyday existence (1995: 277). viewers classically derive a varied set of pleasures from the genre—events may be fantastical and over-the-top, but the suspension of disbelief involved in viewer participation, the watching and reading ‘as if it were real’ is significant. telenovelas, which often run to nine months, commonly have the attenuated pace of life, ‘the slow, cyclical rhythms of family life’ (allen 1995: 11). the stories that they tell become a matter of public interest and interrogation. there are only two days of the week in which telenovelas do not run—those annoying weekends—and people are left hanging to mull over what has happened, what will happen and what will be the consequences of possible future developments. allen talks of the teleological thrust of the telenovela. for allen, the drive towards closure privileges the final episodes institutionally, textually, and in terms of audience expectation and satisfaction. and telenovelas depend, for their impact, on an intense play of tensions and expectations, expectations that are linked to the conventions of the genre and the structures of everyday life, which together point to a horizon of expectations, based on viewer’s previous viewing experiences as well as their own life experiences. the ending of the telenovela is heavily promoted, and, in the case of particularly popular telenovelas, becomes the subject of anticipatory public and private discourse. (1995: 23) telenovelas have a closed format—they must come to an end. as allen further indicates: ‘closed serials offer viewers the opportunity to look back upon the completed text and impose on it some kind of moral or ideological order’ (23). this moral order is intimately connected to melodrama, which dramatises and makes significant every moment. questions raised are of the following type: what does this mean? why is this happening? what is the hidden, underlying cause or reason? christina slade observes that ‘when it comes to understanding the human, emotional and domestic life of … latin america, telenovelas are the privileged forms’ (2003: 8). telenovelas have 2 ‘all heroines incarnate the essence of the people, and this essence is detailed via behaviour superior to that of the viewer.’ lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 7 centrality in people’s lives in mexico and elsewhere and although, as martín barbero relates, they are often ‘laden with heavy narrative schema and complicitous, deceptive ideological inertia,’ meanings are not simply imposed on viewers (barbero 1995: 281). he further signals: ‘the full meaning and pleasure are found not just in the text, but more in the discussion of the family, neighborhood, workplace and friend networks’ (2000: 156-57). many studies thus move outside textual analysis and seek to locate telenovelas ethnographically. for telenovelas, in the words of christina slade, ‘are part of the texture’ of the everyday. fictional telenovela narrative for slade is used as a sounding board for ethical issues that are difficult to discuss in the first person (2003: 14). they thus form the basis for talk on wider events. televisa’s la madrastra all these features are relevant to the televisa novela la madrastra. this telenovela, twice remade and based on an original teleseries from 1980s chile, commenced in february 2005 and finished up in august of the same year. it centres on maría, who is sentenced to life in prison after being wrongfully accused of the murder of her friend, patricia. her husband is convinced she is the killer, and decides to have his children grow up thinking that she is dead. twenty years later maría is released for good behaviour. she returns to her husband, esteban, and asks him to re-marry her so that she can be close to her children. esteban initially resists—for he plans to marry the young and sultry ana rosa—but eventually assents to the remarriage, as the distance, resentment and distrust between him and maría dissipate. maría’s children, not knowing that she is the same woman whose adored image on the wall of the family mansion they worship, see her as an impostor who wants to take the place of their touted ‘late’ mother. gradually, however, they begin to like her and her husband falls in love with her again. maría must choose between telling her children the truth and having the family she always wanted or to find the real killer of her friend to exculpate herself. maría is clearly the incarnation par excellence of the good, holy mother; she is constantly linked in many tear-jerking scenes to la virgen de guadalupe. and yet she needs to prove her innocence, becoming the mexican archetypal madre sufrida in the process, which will inevitably lead to redemption.3 3 marit melhuus (1996) talks of the redemptive qualities of suffering and motherhood in mexican gender ideals. lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 8 the hunt for the real killer is an element seeded from the very beginning: who really murdered patricia? televisa kept the audience of la madrastra guessing by teasingly suggesting a range of possible killers among the avowed villains at the show’s debut: alba, the aunt of esteban; fabiola, who is besotted with esteban; and, bruno, the husband of fabiola; among others. all these characters are variations on the villain theme, and yet they are ambiguously so, as their avaricious desires drive them more than any essential evil attribute. the traditional villain—especially when male—is evil incarnate, perverted, symbolic of a corrupt order that threatens good, a contradictory will that murderously asserts itself. the villain discovered at the end embodies precisely these things. the inspector muñoz and maría’s attorney luciano (who is secretly in love with her) accompany us on the mission to discover the true killer’s identity. at the last minute, televisa decided to extend the telenovela by another ten episodes, thus keeping viewers transfixed on how things might end, which accords with robert c. allen’s comments on the teleological thrust of the novela form. public discussion only intensified. by now, the attorney luciano, esteban’s girlfriend ana rosa, and a bellboy had added to the body count of a killer still on the loose. finally, the cliffhanger scene in the last episode makes clear who the killer is, and what his motivations and manichean contradictory double psychology are, when maría herself becomes his next potential victim.4 televisa and its interests before considering the foregoing climactic scene with respect to its depiction of crossdressing—something to which we will return shortly—it is useful to locate this representation in the context of its producer’s influence and interests. as mexico’s largest stakeholder in media enterprises, televisa currently owns around 75 percent of the total market making it the largest media company in the spanish-speaking world. its programming airs in the u.s. via univisión, with whom televisa has a contractual agreement. televisa is a media empire with many transnational networks. headed by emilio azcárraga jean since 1991, the third in a dynastical succession in the same mexican family, televisa is responsible for a range of television production and distribution, as well as programming for pay tv, direct to home satellite services, cable, 4 see video 1 (file accessible via portal), and appendix 1 for a script summary of scene. lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 9 radio production and broadcasting, and feature film production and development across the americas. its relations with univisión go back to the 1960s; televisa has been a long time supplier of programming to the new york-based company, whose production is centred in miami. in spite of its diverse interests and influences, telenovelas continue to function as the backbone of the company’s business and creative activities. content-wise, televisa programming has a long history of portrayal of sexual minorities—gays, lesbians and travestis—in comedy and variety routines and other forms of entertainment which are sensationalistic in nature and draw on stereotypes, according to mónica taher, director of the media communications group of glaad, the gay and lesbian alliance against defamation (anodis 2006).5 in april 2006, glaad joined with the mexican-based group movemos, the movimiento en medios por la objetividad en temas de orientación e identidad sexual (movement for media objectivity in matters of sexual identity and orientation), to meet with representatives of televisa and the other major mexican networks in order to initiate open dialogue over the contents of representations of gays, lesbians and transgender people in their programming (anodis 2006). even though televisa states in its standards of programming that, ‘en televisa creemos en la dignidad humana y en el respeto a la persona.…en televisa siempre seremos respetuosos y promotores de los derechos humanos,’6 its advertising of the cliffhanger ending in which the killer would be revealed and its use of cross-dressing in psychopathological terms would seem to indicate otherwise (fundación televisa). such uses of travestis and transsexuals as morbid television spectacles are not restricted to la madrastra. notably, the now-defunct comedy skit show, no manches, also from televisa and led by omar chaparro, featured a segment that made fun of trans sex workers employing a freak show scenario of a travesti with three breasts. another segment of the reality show otro rollo, called buscando a memo, gained ratings via the 5 glaad, a u.s.-based group, was founded in new york city in the wake of the aids crisis, which also generated a ‘crisis in representation’ around alternative sexualities and sexual practices. according to its website, glaad is a non-profit lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) activist group ‘dedicated to promoting and ensuring fair, accurate, and inclusive representation of individuals and events in all media as a means of eliminating homophobia and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation’ (gay & lesbian alliance against defamation). 6 ‘at televisa we believe in human dignity and respecting people.…at televisa we always respect and promote human rights.’ lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 10 presentation of a set of beautiful female contestants among whom one is a transgender individual. the premise of the series is for the audience to guess which one is really a ‘man in disguise,’ even though the person in question lives and has lived full-time as female. given the success of la madrastra’s finale and the barrage of comments it produced, ratings would seem to be more at stake than any respectful treatment of the topic of travestis and travestismo. stuart hall, referred to at the beginning of this article, posits that the meanings intended by producers—in this case, televisa—do not come in the form of identifiably single beliefs, but rather as cultural codes that respond to public perceptions and the interests of power and dominance (1980: 129). sociologist steven seidman, refining hall’s work, explains that these codes in media are often inscribed binaristically, in terms of majority/minority, normal/abnormal, moral/decadent, healthy/sick, and so on. moreover, the media often classifies people in accordance with categories of race, gender, nationality or sexuality. it then frequently corresponds these categories to the above binaries. thus the category ‘homosexual’ or ‘travesti’ is attached to ‘abnormal,’ ‘decadent,’ ‘sick,’ and heterosexual and gender-normative takes the first set of positive qualifiers. importantly, notes seidman, ‘[t]he media does more than influence individual attitudes. it legitimates an unequal social order; it defines the moral boundaries of a society and thereby specifies what practices are acceptable, healthy, normal and good’ (2004: 137). in its dualistic world of the novela, la madrastra fulfils very well these potential effects, as well see by the final scene. the final episode in which demetrio is revealed both as killer and cross-dresser, activates notions of sexual perversion, criminal pathology and transvestism, notions whose terms of mystery, concealment and intrigue recur again and again. an explanation is given by demetrio himself as to his motives for cross-dressing and his traumatised psyche, that is, that any and every woman he has known has denigrated, insulted and humiliated him to such an extent that he has begun to despise himself and his masculine persona. maría accuses him of being sick, a point that demetrio does not negate. the psychological pretext for his taking on a feminine identity is thus communicated diegetically through dialogue as a response to his inner conflict with his male self. his cross-dressing as grotesque and mythic transformation in all its menacing power is semiotically encoded via the visual aspects of the scene: the lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 11 apparition of a cross-dressed stalker dressed in red, whose symbolically rich garb is matched by blood-red lacquered nails. red represents the colour of the femme fatale, possessive of a deviant rapacious sexuality; it suggests threat, alarm and strident scandal. the full impact of the mediatic construction of cross-dressing and the propping up of dominant knowledge frameworks, however, is to be found not just in the novela as text but also in the whole media environment itself, a large portion of which belongs, perhaps uncoincidentally, to televisa itself. it is also to be found in the social world, one mediated by a deeply ingrained fear of travestis, named by activists travestophobia, as well as the fascination with the putatively ‘abnormal’ and the morbid spectacle of its high-rating mediatic materialisation. such elements ensured the crossover potential into other genres of production and sense-making, even as the novela drew to its close. some examination of cross-dressing in the mexican cultural imaginary itself and travestophobia is necessary in order to unlock the interpretative power of la madrastra’s imagery in its socio-historical context. cross-dressing in the mexican cultural imaginary the ideas about cross-dressing that connect it to abnormal psychology, deception and even violence run deeper than contemporary soap opera, comedy or variety shows.7 the placement of crossgendered acts and identities into the realm of perversion, dissimulation and criminality displays a clear genealogy in mexican culture that can be traced in many arenas: in the depositions of medico-legal experts as far back as the 1880s, as well as in the early incarnations of today’s scandal sheets and the crónica policíaca. the dying years of the nineteenth century and the dawning of the twentieth foresaw the intense scrutiny and taxonomisation of subjects in the public gaze who differed from certain standard norms in argentina, mexico, nicaragua and other places, notes argentinian sociologist josefina fernández, author of cuerpos desobedientes: travestismo e identidad de género, a major study of travestis in argentina that provides a history of their discursive inscription in medico-legal discourse (2004: 25). emergent 7 los sánchez, a situation comedy that features a travesti character, libertad, who is treated sympathetically, appears to be a recent exception to the rule. in spite of this, she still occupies a rather slapstick and peripheral function to the main action at hand in the series. lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 12 homosexual and travesti subcultures were targeted by lawmakers, criminologists and medical professionals. same sex erotic practices, cross-dressing and cross-living behaviours became discursively inscribed as a sort of person whose nature was considered aberrant, deviant, and gender ambiguous. further, homosexual and travesti subcultures were associated ‘scientifically’ with crime, grouped alongside prostitutes, professional criminals, swindlers, and violent thieves (2004: 25). in mexico, the first year of the twentieth century ushered in the paradigm of the crossdressed body as a shameful and scandalous body. in the famous case of los 41, documented at length by robert mckee irwin (2003), police in mexico city performed a raid on a group of upper class males or lagartijos (fops) dancing with cross-dressed partners—and ignited the public imagination around questions of homosexuality, transvestism and decadence. this case inaugurated notions that persist in public discourse on travestis in many locales: cross-dressing and cross-gendering as a form of dangerous liminality, depravity and duplicity. recent work by julia serano (2007) and talia mae bettcher (2007) explores the framing of transgender bodies and identities by mainstream u.s. culture in terms of the appearance/reality dichotomy, in which cross dressing or cross-living subjects are understood as committing a deception or creating an illusion. when the appearance of one’s gender presentation is determined to be at odds with the ‘reality’ of one’s sexed body (genitalia), the charge of deception is levelled at transgender people. as bettcher illustrates: foundational to this appearance/reality contrast and the related deceiver/pretender bind is a representational relation that obtains between gender presentation and sexed body (that is, genitalia). gender presentation is generally taken as a sign of sexed body, taken to mean sexed body, taken to communicate sexed body. and it is precisely for this reason that transpeople who ‘misalign’ gender presentation and sexed body are construed as either deceivers or pretenders. (2007: 52-53) transphobic language and acts of violence often hinge on the rhetoric of appearance versus ‘hidden reality’, as bettcher describes in relation to the well-known case of the murdered young u.s. latina transsexual, gwen araujo, whose assailants invoked the trope of deception as a justification for murdering her. a similar rhetoric operates in the inscription of travestismo or cross-dressing as elaborate charade or ruse. while such rhetoric often operates in both u.s. and latin american contexts, the associations of lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 13 criminality, however, are particularly strong in latin america historically. the culturally specific nature of their deployment thus requires emphasis. in the contemporary scene, the work of leticia sabsay (2002) considers in some depth the mediatic depiction of travestis in the argentinian context, a context marked by juridical contestation in which the terms of morality, social danger and the social good were greatly implicated.8 sabsay found a visible dichotomy of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ ‘us’ were the moral majority groups concerned about the threat to their property values and livelihoods by the presence of travestis in their neighbourhoods and the reputed corrupt influence it would have on their middle class children. besides the media work done by sabsay, very little has been done specifically on the representations of travestis in any television or press genres besides that conducted by human rights and international lgbt advocacy groups with branches in latin america. the research of andrew reding (2003), for instance, shows that images of crossdressing and cross-gendering as a form of dangerous liminality (especially linked to hiv-aids transmission), depravity and perversion continue to dominate in the media, particularly in the popular or tabloid press, known as nota roja, a genre that will be examined shortly. addressing the persistence of such formulations fernández demonstrates that in latin america generally there prevails the myth of the violent, marginal and criminal travesti (2004: 118), which for her puts limits on seeing travesti identity in any other way in dominant culture: they are always located socially ‘del lado de lo abyecto’ (118).9 cross-dressing in public, moreover, has historically been actively criminalised in law, and inscribed juridically as constituting an offence to public morality and good custom. although there currently exist no broad, analytical scholarly works that examine the history of the promulgation and application of such laws in latin america, they have 8 like the sociologist fernández, sabsay (2002) analyses media depictions in the context of extensive knowledges of deviance, control, surveillance and juridical interpellation, specifically here in the context of the derogation of the police edicts in buenos aires, which had regulated travesti movements, identities and involvement in prostitution and the newly proposed (and harsher) código de convivencia. a major debate erupted over this in the early 1990s in which travestis achieved a hitherto unprecedented public visibility as political actors, calling on the authorities, feminists, jurists, neighbour decency groups, and so on. 9 that is, ‘on the abject side of things.’ lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 14 been studied and reported on at length in human rights circles. these laws have not only exacted an everyday toll on the movements of travestis in past and contemporary periods, they have also authorised and provided an apologia for commonly held beliefs about such subjects. such laws, while no longer in evidence at the federal level, can still be found at state and local levels in mexico. gonzález pérez’s previously cited study documents the existence and impact of such laws in colima.10 moreover, and perhaps most distressingly, in towns such as tecate, baja california, ordinances that specifically prohibit the presence of ‘men who dress as women’ in the public eye, coded as an office against morality, have found renewed support and been installed where they didn’t previously even exist—and as recently as 2002 (reding 2003: 61). even in areas whose legal jurisdictions do not specifically proscribe the public behaviours and identities of travestis, punitive avenues made available via the regulation of prostitution and disturbance of the public peace allow the continued criminalisation of such subjects, albeit in a de facto manner. the efforts of community activist groups against deeply entrenched criminalising and pathologising typologies of travestis emphasise the links between this cultural discourse—evidenced in legal statutes or mediatic productions—with the marginalisation and the perpetration of social and physical violence against travestis. newspaper headlines from the tabloid and conservative press in mexico frequently characterise travestis as aggressive, threatening and deceptive, posing an implicit link between being cross-dressing and criminal acts.11 travesti political groups have sought to contest the kinds of images of doubleness and charade that the la madrastra most pointedly encodes, and which circulate so saliently in the national consciousness. 10 in colima, laws exist that prohibit ‘spectacles’ that go against the ‘moral order’ (gonzález pérez 2003: 46). such ambiguity and vagueness provides a wide berth of interpretation for agents of the law. articles prohibiting the presence of men ‘disguised as women’ and ‘fooling’ or ‘taking advantage of others’ based on gender presentation in both bars and brothels are inscribed in the penal code established in 1985 (47). 11 some examples from the archivo (archives) of la reforma, a major mexican newspaper with a notably right-wing bent, illustrate this point: ‘detienen a travesti ebrio; traía droga’ (‘drunk travesti arrested; carrying drugs’ 2005); ‘hieren travestis a cliente en cuauhtémoc’ (‘travestis injure client in cuauhtémoc’ 2003); ‘decepciones y sorpresas’ (‘deceptions and surprises’ 2003); ‘un supuesto asaltante que se vestía de mujer’ (‘an alleged attacker who dressed as a woman’ 2003). while progressive newspapers such as la jornada offer a less mordant and less stigmatising view of non-normatively gendered subjects, newspapers like la reforma and el universal, more popular among the viewing and reading popular classes, offer visions that are arguably more formative of mainstream conceptions of travestis. lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 15 viewer interpretations of la madrastra such abject codings might not obtain their power to frame and restrict meanings were it not for the shared consensus on the aforementioned articulations on cross-gendering that is, the commonality of mental models and interpretative routines shared by producers and consumers around ‘transgender phenomena’ found in the context in which the novela was made. viewer comments at the show’s site on the finale are revealing:12 lupita: deberian pasar novelas como esas que nos de consejos como esa novela que todo lo vimos como si fuera realidad gracias por poner ese tipo de novelas de la realidad. tere: la verdad si me sorprendio que demetrio fuera travesti y que por eso matara a patricia para cubrir su secreto. rocoto: el personaje de demetrio no es homosexual ni bisexual, es un sindrome psicologico que lo ha hecho rebelarse ante su ‘yo’ masculino como resultado de todas las humillaciones que ha sufrido. vamos nuestra gente nesesita leer mas y usar el cerebro antes de escribir en un foro. jennifer: me solprendio mucho pq lo creia de todos menos de el y de carmela y al saberlo me sorprendi pq no lo esperaba y menos de esa forma que se vistiera de mujer y que fuera travestiiiiiiii. travestiiiiiiii.13 (foro la madrastra) as mexican journalist and transsexual activist hazel gloria davenporth observes, referring to these viewers’ reactions to the finale: según la perspectiva de quienes vieron el final de la telenovela, las personas que se travisten de hombres a mujeres ‘no sirven como hombres,’ son ‘asesinos porque son travestis’ o ‘rebeldes ante su yo masculino por humillaciones.’14 (davenporth 2005) although davenporth does not examine how the place and function of telenovelas in mexico predispose them to act as frameworks for understanding real-life events and for talking about difficult and fearful subjects, following thinkers such as marshall mcluhan, she does suggest that the images of cross-dressing as murderous disguise deployed by la madrastra—here read as outrageous but believable by viewers—have at least a suggestive potential to influence the way people think about travestismo and travestis (davenporth 2005). 12 spelling has been retained from the original source. 13 lupita: they should show telenovelas like this one that give us advice and which all of us watched as if it were reality thanks for putting that kind of reality show on. tere: actually it surprised me that demetrio was a travesti and for this reason he killed patricia to cover up his secret. rocoto: the character demetrio isn’t homosexual or bisexual, a psychological syndrome has made him rebel against his masculine ego as a result of all the humiliations he’s suffered. come on people you need to read more and use your brain before writing in this forum. jennifer: i was very surprised because i believed it was anyone but him and on finding out i was amazed because i didn’t expect it or at least not that way, him dressing up as a woman and that he was a travesti. a travestiiiiiiii! (this was written in red). 14 according to the perspective of those who watched the finale, men who dress as women ‘aren’t worth anything as men’; they are ‘murderers because they are travestis’ or ‘rebels against their masculine ego’ because of past humiliations. lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 16 the case of ‘mataviejitas’ and nota roja journalism around the same time that la madrastra was drawing to its hyped finale, a real-life drama was doing the rounds: the case of the mataviejitas. mataviejitas was the name given by the press in mexico to a serial killer operating within the metropolitan area of mexico city until january 25, 2006. the murders were carried out by bludgeoning or strangulation, and the killer invariably robbed the victims. the killer, initially assumed to be male, presented on some occasions as a social worker, complete with papers and uniform, and on other occasions as a health professional, donned with a stethoscope, in order to gain entry into elderly women’s homes. the women often accepted the presence of la mataviejitas at their homes, being in need of economic, emotional or medical help. the killer has been attributed with a total of 49 murders. as an article from la jornada succinctly puts it: ‘el más común es que asfixiaba a sus víctimas con objetos que se encontraban en el domicilio, como un lazo de cortina, medias o el cable de un aparato electrodoméstico o de teléfono’ (servín y salgado 2006).15 the same article notes that the killer was so careful in their technique that only on rare occasions were traces of fingerprints found at the crime scene, and these were insufficiently partial. the attacks were planned and astutely executed. the killer was assumed to be a man, since it was imagined that only a man would be capable of the physical strength required to overcome and kill the victims (servín y salgado, 26 jan 2006). bernardo bátiz, the chief prosecutor of mexico city, described mataviejitas as an individual characterised by ‘una mente brillante, muy hábil y precavido’ (becerril 2005).16 the search for mataviejitas was muddled by conflicting evidence. various individuals implicated in separate cases of the deaths of elderly women were advanced as the serial killer; none of them proved to be the real murderer. meanwhile the number of victims mounted: all women ranging in age from their late fifties to early nineties. on several occasions in 2005, the killer struck twice in the same month. accusations of official ineptitude increased incrementally with public fear about the safety of mujeres de la tercera edad, a polite mexican euphemism for older women. the crimes become more vicious: stabbing, plastic bags over the head, choking with household cable wire. the murderer even took care to burn down the house of one of the victims, their remains 15 ‘the killer most commonly asphyxiated his victims with objects found in the home, such as curtain ties, stockings, electrical appliance or telephone cords.’ 16 that is, possessing ‘a brilliant mind, [being] quite clever and careful.’ lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 17 only identifiable by dental records. at one point the police posited that two killers might be involved, and attention was also directed to the odd coincidence that at least three of the killer’s victims owned a print of an 18th century painting, boy in red waistcoat, by the french artist jean-baptiste greuze (‘mexico police hunt serial killer’ 2006). in desperation or perhaps to quell public fear, bátiz suggested publicly that the killer might have already died, that is, by their own hand. however, the killings continued. conflicting eyewitness accounts on seeing a stranger come and go from the victims’ homes reported either a man disguised as a nurse, or a social worker, wearing a wig; conversely, the killer was reported to be a woman. on august 25, 2005, bátiz presented two artist impressions of the killer: a figure with prominent jowls, heavyset eyes and wearing what looks like a wig, and earring studs. by october 2005, some two months after the end of la madrastra, the mexican authorities were reporting witness statements to the effect that the killer wore women’s clothing to gain access to the victims’ apartments. bátiz announced publicly that the killer could be a travesti. the coverage of the unfolding events is too vast to communicate in great detail in the present article; however, suffice to say that much of mexico city was captivated by the mystery of their latest serial killer, who inspired both awe and dread. the biggest and most densely populated city in the world, where one can be alone in a crowd, haunted by the solitude and anonymity of a sea of faces, as carlos monsiváis describes life in el df so poetically, became the stage for a new mass drama, unreeling itself in the ‘real,’ like so much fact turned fiction, or fiction turned fact (1997: 31-32). in an article published in the journal of criminology, revista cenipec, ‘homicidios seriales en la ciudad de méxico ¿un fenómeno viejo o nuevo?’ (2006), legal expert martín g. barrón cruz considers the history of serial killers whose murderous activities have ignited the popular and academic imagination in mexico. he profiles the lives and careers of the most famous, setting them against the violence of the urban environment of the great metropolis: its parameters of poverty, social inequality, and political exclusion whose toll is most often exacted against vulnerable minorities considered socially undesirable, but also older women in need. barrón underlines the persistent talk around such cases and the high dosage of ultra graphic data that flows through public channels. he notes that the reporting of the mataviejitas case warrants its inclusion in the legendary social register of crime-watching and observes the tendency to the lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 18 elevation of the killer to the status of celebrity. ‘convirtiéndose así en un tema moda, tanto del quehacer político-social como del académico…la proliferación de dicho fenómeno ha llegado a tal grado que, en algunos medios…se le conoce como ‘little old lady killer’17 (barrón cruz 2006: 159). in a similar, mordant vein, one public commentator in el universal records their disdain at what appears to be a morbid obsession around the case. in an interesting turn, the impassioned rise to discourse around the mataviejitas serial murders is explicitly linked by the writer in el universal to the intense and conflicted curiosity produced by telenovelas in the viewing public (velázquez 2006). certainly, if there exists a national obsession besides watching telenovelas, it involves the following of crime stories in print and visual media in mexico. nota roja journalism constructs a kind of dirty realism. as media scholar josé luis arriaga ornelas defines this genre of reportage in an issue of razón y palabra: en una acepción general, la nota roja es el género informativo por el cual se da cuenta de eventos (o sus consecuencias) en los que se encuentra implícito algún modo de violencia—humana o no— que rompe lo común de una sociedad determinada y, a veces también, su normatividad legal. ahí caben los relatos acerca de hechos criminales, catástrofes, accidentes o escándalos en general, pero expuestos según un código cuyos elementos más identificables son los encabezados impactantes, las narraciones con tintes de exageración y melodrama, entre otros.18 (2002) monsiváis, musing on the genre in ‘red news,’ similarly sees nota roja as framing the limits of the normal, but explains the participatory pleasures and agonies that crime narratives engender in the reading public, encouraging ‘a kind of retrospection that imagines the climactic moments’ intimately tied up with personal investments like jealousy, greed, the desire for loss of control and instinctual abandon that the trespass of the serial killing spree evokes (1997: 148). interestingly, such anticipatory and emotionally heightened elements compare well with the telenovela form, characteristics identified by the telenovela scholars profiled earlier. monsiváis pinpoints the historic function in mexico of the spectacularisation of crimes and criminals, whose reported actions and character function as ‘conversation pieces which become the joyous proof 17‘having become a hot topic, both in academic and socio-political affairs…the proliferation of the phenomenon has reached such a degree that, in some media…the killer is known as the “little old lady killer.”’ 18 in general terms, the nota roja style of journalism is that genre through which events and their consequences are recounted and in which one finds depicted forms of violence – human or otherwise – that break with the ‘the usual’ in a given society and violate its normative standards of legality. it contains criminal cases, catastrophes, accidents, and scandals in general, exposed according to media codes whose most identifiable elements are screaming headlines, narratives imbued with exaggeration and melodrama. lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 19 that the reader or commentator is still alive [unlike the killer’s victims], free, and more or less intact,’ that is, in spite of the violence that stalks the city as imagined by such media stories (148-49). arguably approaching the level of the popularity of telenovelas, here we see that crime stories—especially those whose discursive style relies on impact more than information—are tied up in the talk practices of everyday life. the curiosity to know the minute details of who-what-when-how-why drives the practices of consumption of these kinds of news stories. as sandro macassi lavander and francisco ampuero navarro (2001) demonstrate in their study of the peruvian incarnation of such stories, the individual social drama is the point of focus—the psychological bent and motivations of the killer. private is turned public, scandal becomes commonplace. a mixture of linguistic registers is apparent in this kind of media discourse, interpellating, as it often does, the popular sectors via colloquial and informal language use. in mexico, several of the magazines that specialise in sensationalistic crime reporting include alerta!, alarma!, presidio, de peso; the chief televisual sources for such reporting have included a sangre fría, ciudad desnuda, fuera de ley, and duro y directo. here, as always, personalities matter more than persons, and archetypes are heavily drawn upon to such an extent that the lines between novelistic fiction and documentary are blurred. the mataviejitas case, followed in both ‘serious’ journalistic fora and those considered popular (and, by elitist standards, less serious) took on all the mentioned shades of the historical tendencies in crime reporting, making use of intertextual resonances from popular culture and melodramatic narrative. the inference by chief public prosecutor bátiz that the killer could be a travesti—‘a man dressed as a woman’—ignited public attention and its cultivated love of melodrama and scandal. the notion that the killer was a ‘man dressed as a woman’ persisted even in news sources such as la palabra that openly discredited bátiz’s seeming ineptitude and inability to capture the killer (gonzález 2005). even after the raid against travesti prostitutes, the progressive newspaper la jornada still raised the issue of whether the killer was a woman or indeed a travesti (salgado 2005). as a communicative chain that projected the image of crossdressing criminality, the terms killer and travesti were subject to endless citation over several months. television shows such as mujer, casos de la vida real, employing a faux-documentary style, complete with fictional reconstructions, drew on pop psychology notions, mixed with the kinds of stereotypical ideas around cross-dressing familiar to us from the horror/psychological thriller genre, whose tradition in the lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 20 english-speaking world spans alfred hitchcock’s psycho, hammer studios’ dr jekyll and sister hyde and brian de palma’s classic flick, dressed to kill—all films which feature transgender people as killers.19 the reportage also compared the case to another which had shocked parisians decades before, the famous case of thierry paulin, dubbed the monster of monmartre, a killer of elderly women who was involved in a life of intensive drug use, parties, cruising on the gay scene and nightclub drag performance. that he killed his victims en homme was irrelevant; in the mexican context parallels between the french case and the current framing of mataviejitas as a cross-dresser made the association between travestismo and killing inevitable, together with the deeply embedded cultural associations around cross-dressing itself. as was the case in the cited viewer reactions after the finale of la madrastra, in public talk around the real-life serial killer much comment was delivered on mataviejitas’ proposed psychodrama and inner hatred of female figures, especially of the older generation. director of the instituto nacional de ciencias penales, the national institute of criminal sciences, miguel ontiveros alonso, argued that mataviejitas was ‘un hombre que ha decidido disfrazarse de mujer. el homicida podría disfrazarse de cura, de plomero, de enfermera, vendedor de biblias, etcétera, pero escogió hacerlo de mujer, lo que denota un importante conflicto con las figuras femeninas’ (cited in davenporth 2005).20 this comment appears to draw major inspiration from the character of demetrio as depicted in la madrastra. what wasn’t conceivable in the closed circuit of signifying practices around the case was that mataviejitas could simply be a woman: a hefty and strong one, a former lucha libre wrestler at that, but clearly not a crossdresser. i would suggest that the screening of la madrastra renewed and made fresh in the public mind the pre-established mental and social models of the pathology of cross 19 mujer, casos de la vida real is a talk show, produced by televisa and hosted by silvia pinal, which has been running since 1985, the year of mexico city’s great earthquake disaster. born in the context of a disaster of tremendous physical, emotional and discursive impact, it seeks to present matters of social relevance to the community: the pressing, the hard-hitting, and the ‘up close and personal.’ the program has an investigative yet informal current affairs style and often covers questions such as prostitution, sexual violence, drug addiction and trafficking, and other assorted controversies drawing national attention, as well as the fortunes and misfortunes of immigration and less-than-legal cases of border crossing to the u.s.a. 20 ‘a man who decided to disguise himself as a woman. the killer could have disguised himself as a priest, a plumber, a nurse, a bible salesman, etc, but no, he decided to do it as a woman, which denotes an important conflict with female figures in his life.’ lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 21 dressing and its murderous criminal intent: prototypes faithfully consonant with the novela’s world of black and white morality, its core of family values and normality, represented in la madrastra by maría and her family, which is threatened by the ‘deviant’ transvestite other. maría is a pure, faultless woman—the essence of heterosexual, maternal ambition. initially the one falsely assigned as impostor-killer, a transvestite is revealed to be the ‘real’ fearful embodiment of the duplicitous evildoer. in this way, representing the abject of which maría is cleansed, demetrio is quite otherwise—a shadowy manifestation which invades the family mansion and the heart of the family construct with its parent-child dyad. moreover, the comments by lupita, included earlier in the viewer interpretations section, make clear that the episode was seen by some as depicting a horizon of possibility—offering valid information, which we could relate to reality. the schema that the novela, the talk around it and that the mataviejitas case inscribe goes thus: one cross-dresses to disguise oneself and in order to commit a crime. it relates to dishonesty, deviousness and an inner conflict. rocoto’s analysis, another of the viewers mentioned previously, is not dissimilar to that of the penal expert, ontiveros alonso, which echoes the words used by demetrio to explain why he cross-dresses. captivated by this finale, then, and the case of the mataviejitas killer still on the loose, one could assert that the public read across genres and in interpreting real-life events, applied similar reading codes to both the motif of transvestism deployed by the novela, the codes of pop psychology and criminal intent found in nota roja journalism and the dark forces that threaten in the melodrama of everyday existence in mexico city, a city haunted by its self-conception of the violence of a crowded but anonymous polis. this viewing public consisted of the various lupitas across mexico, the witnesses who attested to having seen a cross-dressing killer, the chief public prosecutor bátiz himself, crime expert ontiveros alonso and, finally, the federal police who over two days in october 2005 conducted a series of raids on travesti prostitutes working in the streets, seeking to find mataviejitas among them. in these raids, scores of travesti and transsexual sex workers in calzada de tlalpan and avenida insurgentes were beaten and forced to board police vans. they were booked and taken to the benito juárez police station, where they were fined, photographed and finger printed, as arresting officers looked for evidence of the mataviejitas among them lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 22 (jiménez & sánchez 2005). although officially bátiz claims they were responding to neighbourhood complaints about prostitution in the area, those travesti and transsexual people so victimised report otherwise (jiménez & sánchez 2005). representatives of the travesti sex workers rights group ‘ángeles en busca de la libertad’ protested these raids with the motto ‘no somos machos, pero sí somos muchas’ (disforia de género 2005). the foregoing phrase—‘we’re not men, but many’—ironically encapsulates the key issue which places mainstream perceptions of travestis and travestis’ own self-concepts very much at odds. travestis rarely relate to the popular vision of themselves as mere ‘men dressed as women.’ although they do not always claim the subjectivity of women, unlike many male-to-female transsexuals, they nevertheless do not see themselves as conventional men. biologically male, perhaps, and homosexual because of their (selfidentified) erotic preference and activities with the same biological sex, but socially, and in terms of gender expression, many travestis frequently show a strong disidentification with the concept of ‘men’ and masculinity. studies like the brazilian-centred one of kulick (1998), as well as the previously mentioned work of prieur and gonzález pérez, both of which refer to mexican locales, show that travesti femininity is deeply attached to the cultural logics of so-called passive role homosexuality, in which those who penetrate are considered men, while those who are receptive are more like women. given this, and the travesti preference for the receptive role in sexual relations, their lovers are ‘men,’ but they themselves—according to self-concept—differ from this norm. prieur’s subjects relate to themselves as ‘like women’ and seek masculine partners whom they term mayates. prieur reveals via interviews what her subjects were like as children and when they first realised their femininity and attraction to males. their femininity was obvious to themselves and others due to their fondness for toys and play scenarios culturally particular to girls, as well as in their marked interest in girls’ clothes and their softness. most of her respondents claim they were born that way. in gonzález pérez’s study, although they are travestidos gays, many consider themselves muchachas, not ‘men,’ per se. and yet the public imagination at the conjunction of all the media forms studied in this article and the talk they provoked posits that cross-dressing as a phenomenon is about disguise, trickery as well as the intent to assault or kill. and this is the crux of the matter—the gap between dominant understandings of cross-dressing and cross-living people as seen in the novela, the mass media and police accounts, and the understandings these subjects have themselves, as lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 23 people who cross-identify and live in feminine mode on a daily basis.21 this disjuncture between how they are seen by others (thanks to the motif of the transvestite as criminally insane, as duplicitous invader) and how they see themselves compellingly illustrates bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence, which josefina fernández, cited previously, also advances in understanding the cultural stigmatisation of travestis in latin america. symbolic violence is a form of violence that permeates the social worlds in which travestis move. of course, this symbolic violence is not just enacted by la madrastra’s cross-dresser as murderous disguise imagery; it is also articulated in the talk around the episode and expert and popular nota roja versions of mataviejitas as a travesti, in other media texts historically, as well as in time honoured anti-travesti laws. yet as we see by the example of the telenovela representations and interpretations of the mataviejitas killer, symbolic violence can have very material consequences—the public abuse and police rounding up and fining of real-life trans people, to whom the soap opera’s imagery and the public talk inevitably remits. as bourdieu submits, symbolic violence works not just to relegate subjects to positions of inferiority, to place them at risk of other forms of violence, to deny them resources and participation in mainstream cultural life or limit their social mobility and aspirations, but rather it also inhabits the very individuals it acts against—thus reinforcing their marginalisation (bourdieu & wacquant 1992).22 in the same way that homophobia or the image of the drug addict may be internalised, travestis in the context of representations like these confront not simply public opprobrium, criminalisation and police persecution, but risk becoming imprisoned themselves in the cultural ideas of what a travesti is. as such, and for a multitude of good reasons, resisting symbolic 21 bettcher’s comments about how transpeople are perceived by mainstream culture, regardless of their own self-concepts, are useful here: ‘insofar as transpeople are open to constructions as ‘really an x,’ (appearances notwithstanding) we will immediately find ourselves represented in ways that are contrary to our own identifications. this construction literally reinscribes the position that genitalia are the essential determinants of sex by identifying that essential status as the ‘hidden reality or truth of sex,’ through such a construction, we will invariably be represented as deceivers or pretenders’ (2007: 51). 22 bourdieu first introduces the concept of symbolic violence briefly in the logic of practice (1990). he links it to misrecognition, that is, the tendency of subjects not to recognise that this form of violence is exercised against them, as it appears to be the natural order of things. symbolic violence, says bourdieu, constitutes a ‘gentle, invisible violence, unrecognised as such’ (1990: 127). bourdieu later gave the concept more development and application, showing how symbolic violence works in the interests of the dominant group to extend their world views and concepts of the ‘normal,’ the ‘natural’ to all subjects in such a way that it is rarely questioned. in being so commonly embodied and integrated in cultural forms and practices, it obtains the appearance of being real and yet it is a force, a set of contestable knowledge, whose ideological workings may be hidden but which can be exposed. although it is continually reproduced it may be interrogated, interrupted and denaturalised. lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 24 violence is a difficult yet urgent enterprise. concluding remarks i started this article raising the question: do representations have material consequences for specific groups of people in society? and if so, how does this occur? highlighting the structure and place of the telenovela in mexican society reveals how mexican novelas often work around a moral centre and deploy manichean visions of the world. their insertion into everyday life renders them into points of interrogation and mediation not simply of the content of the novela itself, but also the outside world. they constitute an important venue through which viewers make sense of modern life and current events. they become intertexts for reading both other media texts and the social text. they work ideologically and their melodramatic mode demands a willing suspense of disbelief, as well as viewer identification and complicity. their viewing public is vast and considerable hours of the day are devoted to screening the serials and re-hashing them afterwards. as semiotic and symbolic forms, they are involved in the organisation of emotional, domestic and social life. images of cross-dressing which connect it to deception, criminality and pathology— images disseminated by the final episode of la madrastra—were taken up and recirculated in talk around the program and in the context of the mataviejitas case. even the country’s highest legal experts and justice officials appear to have read across this discursive panorama so powerfully and viscerally invoked for mainstream mexico by the vision of the cross-dressed demetrio. in a country where little—if any—alternative knowledge about cross-dressing, cross-living and travesti subjects is available, this cross-over reading, if not the only possible one, was at least the most predictable, given the conjunction of generic elements, the tabloid reportage of the mataviejitas case, and the discourse evinced in her criminal profiling in the public domain. the evidence presented in this article suggests that this reading was the hegemonic one. police were highly criticised by human rights defenders for their raids on travesti prostitutes, and yet their actions could be seen as part of the implementation of the commonly agreed upon terms of symbolic violence which the novela and public talk negotiates—that is, that travestis are killers or mentally unstable, that their very embodied identity constitutes a ruse or deception, a manifestation of sickness, a gordian lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 25 knot of psychic doubleness and splitting. this is the reason why i have analysed the novela in terms of its social field of interaction, following critics like martín barbero. as in many other countries in which vast commercial media environments obtain, in mexico, where ‘real life’ is subject to mediatic (re)construction and the practices of framing that life are so suffused with the codes of melodrama and nota roja journalism, the public abuse of travestis as the targets of blame and police fury offers a vivid instance of the ways in which representations can insinuate themselves socially, organise the imaginary and produce real, lived effects. and if the experience of contemporary urban life in latin america is increasingly scripted by the media’s use of fear’s vocabulary, a phobic lexicography which separates the (sexually) normative from the ‘aberrant,’ wherein travestis become the usual suspects, it unsurprising that demetrio the killer crossdresser gains status as a master text for expressing fear of the other. that other here—the duplicitous and murderous travesti, ever unreal—emerges at the confluence of pre-established mental models and interpretative codes, in an informational landscape haunted by narratives where strangeness and difference become the embodiments of risk and violence, stalking the city dweller with half-imagined and syndicated nightmares in constant superimposition.23 23 citizens of fear: urban violence in latin america, the collection of essays edited by susana rotker (2002) on the subject of violence, crime and the latin american city, approaches the persistence and haunting presence of violence, both real and fearfully projected, within the spaces of the megalopolis and its mediascapes. rotker says in her introduction, ‘cities written by violence,’ that: ‘the city has been transformed into a space of vulnerability and danger.…what i am interested in narrating here is…the generalized sensation of insecurity that taints the latin american capitals, the sensation that has changed the ways people relate to urban space, to other human beings, to the state, and to the very concept of citizenship’ (2002: 8). in this sense, mexico city is just one among several latin american cities seized by its own sense of vulnerability and danger, whose impacts are increasingly seen in social relations, and whose register is the real turned hyperreal. the present article therefore elucidates just one paradigmatic example of what the findings of scholars like those included in rotker’s volume point to. lewis of lady killers portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 26 appendix: video 1 demetrio revealed—scene dialogue summary in english maria: demetrio…no, no… demetrio: no one is going to save you. ssh! quiet! maria: demetrio, hand yourself in, you’re not going to gain anything by killing me. demetrio: of course i will…i’ll gain my revenge…because of your stupid talent for finding me out. you’re the one who’s truly guilty for everything that’s happened. maria: me guilty? demetrio: yes, you. maria: but you’re the one who ruined my life, you destroyed everything i had…because of your crime i spent twenty years in prison! demetrio: the same twenty years that we lived peacefully and happily until you returned. why did you do it? why did you have to return? that’s why i have to kill you. maria: demetrio, demetrio, you’re sick, you need help. demetrio: sick? yes, i’m sick but it’s the fault of all the women i’ve known. they always denigrated me, insulted me, humiliated me until they managed to make me hate myself. that’s why i have to turn myself into someone else, so i can respect myself. maria: demetrio, demetrio…i’m not part of that group of women you’ve mentioned. not once did i insult you, not once did i hurt you or humiliate you! demetrio: and you’ve returned…i killed patricia…and i don’t want my son to feel the pain of finding out… that’s why i have to kill you too! 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and soap operas: negotiating reality from the periphery,’ media international australia (incorporating culture and policy), no. 106, february, 6-17. van dijk, t. a. 2003, ‘the discourse-knowledge interface,’ in g. weiss & r. wodak (eds), critical discourse analysis: theory and interdisciplinarity, palgrave-macmillan, houndsmills, uk, 85109. velázquez, g. 2006, ‘un thriller para el df,’ el universal, 30 enero. online. available: http://weblogs.eluniversal.com.mx/wweblogs_detalle.php?p_fecha=2006-0130&p_id_blog=2&p_id_tema=1739 (accessed 24 oct. 2007). wieviorka, m. 2003, ‘the new paradigm of violence,’ in j. friedman (ed.), globalization, the state, and violence, alta mira press, walnut creek, ca, 107-40. european slave trading, abolitionism, and ‘new systems of slavery’ in the indian ocean portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. indian ocean traffic special issue, guest edited by lola sharon davidson and stephen muecke. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. european slave trading, abolitionism, and ‘new systems of slavery’ in the indian ocean richard b. allen, framingham state university1 in april 1827, the captain of the dutch brig the swift retained mahomet, a native of surabaya on the north coast of java, to recruit workers from the countryside around the city. mahomet, who already knew the brig’s captain, soon secured the services of a number of men and women by giving them twenty rupees as two months’ advance wages and telling them that they would be going to work in singapore or batavia. after the ship left surabaya, however, these workers learned that they were actually bound for the french colony of ile de bourbon (réunion) in the southwestern indian ocean, a discovery that led them to demand they be returned to java. not unsurprisingly, their demands fell on deaf ears and the four men, four women, and one child who survived the swift’s subsequent wreck at rodrigues, the easternmost of the mascarene islands and a dependency of the british colony of mauritius 350 miles away, ended up in mauritius where their ultimate fate remains unknown.2 the story of the swift’s passengers highlights some of the problems inherent in assessing the status of migrant labourers in the indian ocean world during the early and mid-nineteenth century. prominent among these are the difficulties of distinguishing 1 this is an expanded and revised version of an article in slavery and the slave trades in the indian ocean world: global connections and disconnections, (eds) r. harms, b. k. freamon & d. blight, yale university press, new haven, in preparation. 2 co 415/9/a.221 – documents relating to the dutch brig swift which was wrecked at rodrigues in august 1827 with malays on board. twelve ‘malay’ men and two women on board the ship drowned when it was wrecked. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 2 ‘free’ from ‘unfree’ labour during an era that witnessed the demise of the legal british and french slave trades, the abolition of slavery in the british and french empires, and the emergence of a purported ‘new system of slavery’ that led to the migration of millions of indentured african, asian, and other non-european labourers throughout the colonial plantation world and beyond during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. the ambiguities surrounding the status of the javanese men and women on the swift are an early illustrative case in point. on the one hand, these individuals apparently knew what they were doing when they agreed to work as wage labourers in singapore or batavia and did so of their own accord. on the other hand, the fact that they were deliberately deceived about their real destination and their demands to be returned to java were ignored are consistent with the deceptive and coercive practices often used to secure the services of contract labourers in the early nineteenth-century colonial world. that the swift sailed at a time when french ships transported illegal cargoes of slaves from the indonesian archipelago to réunion,3 when british-flagged vessels reportedly could be found occasionally carrying slaves near the seychelles,4 and when dutch and british vessels frequented diego garcia with ‘malays’ of uncertain legal status on board5 underscores the difficulties of assessing the impact that european, and especially british, abolitionism had on forced migrant labour systems in the indian ocean basin. so does the fact that mahomet’s statement about his activities was among the documents submitted to the commission of eastern enquiry during its investigation into the illegal slave trade to mauritius which flourished from 1811 to circa 1827 (allen 2001a). the origins of the modern system of migrant contract labour date to the midand late 1820s when the first, ultimately unsuccessful attempts were made to employ free chinese and indian workers on mauritius and réunion (ly-tio-fane pineo 1984: 14– 17; carter & ng 1997: 4–5; weber 2002: 309–10). mauritius has long been acknowledged as the crucial test case for the use of free contractual or indentured labour in the colonial plantation world following british slave emancipation in 1834 3 co 415/1, pp. 15, 17, w.m.g. colebrooke and w. blair to earl bathurst, 25 oct. 1826; co 415/7/a.164, memorandum from captain ackland for mr. finniss [written after 13 sept. 1826]. on the illegal slave trade to réunion, see gerbeau (1979a, 2002), carter and gerbeau (1988), daget (1996) and finch (2005). 4 ior: f/4/1331/52588, p. 70, statement of the master of the brig hebe/as related to by the captain of the pecheur schooner at mahé, 20 oct. 1830. 5 co 415/1, p. 27, w.m.g. colebrooke and w. blair to earl bathurst, 21 nov. 1826. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 3 (cumpston 1953: 85), and the arrival of seventy-five privately recruited indian workers on the island on 2 november 1834 is widely regarded as marking the advent of this modern migrant labour system. the success of the mauritian experiment with indentured labour led to more than two million africans, chinese, indians, japanese, javanese, and melanesians leaving their homes to work on plantations and in other enterprises in the caribbean (british guiana, cuba, guadeloupe, jamaica, martinique, surinam, tobago, trinidad), eastern and southern africa (kenya, natal, transvaal, uganda), southern and southeast asia (burma, ceylon, malaya), the southwestern indian ocean (mayotte, nosy bé, réunion), australasia (new caledonia, queensland), the central and southern pacific (fiji, hawai’i, tahiti), and central and south america (mexico, peru) between the mid–1830s and the early 1920s (northrup 1995: 156–60). indentured labour also became an important component of regional political economies in india, especially in assam and adjacent areas (behal & mohapatra 1992; das gupta 1992, 2005). nineteenth-century british abolitionists first argued that the deception and coercion used to recruit indentured labourers and the exploitation and oppression to which they were subject during their indentures made these men and women little more than victims of a ‘new system of slavery.’ the experience of the first indentured indian immigrants to mauritius gave substance to these suspicions, and the public outcry in britain and india about their mistreatment led to the suspension of the so-called ‘coolie’ trade to the island in 1838.6 when indian emigration to mauritius resumed late in 1842, it did so under governmental supervision to limit further abuse of these workers. hugh tinker echoed these abolitionist sentiments in his classic study on the exportation of indian labour after british slave emancipation (tinker 1974), a work that continues to influence studies of the indentured experience. the tinkerian paradigm has not been without its critics, however; several scholars have argued that characterizing indentured labour systems in these terms is at least something of a misnomer (brereton 1994; carter 1995: 1–6; northrup 1995: 154). at the heart of this historiographical tradition is a preoccupation with assessing whether indentured labourers were really ‘free’ or ‘unfree’ and ascertaining the extent to which 6 see the reports of the commissions of inquiry based in mauritius (pp 1840 xxxvii [58], 18–35, 45– 68, and pp 1840 xxxvii [331], 12–94, 107–83), and in calcutta (pp 1841 xvi [45], 4–12) on early indentured immigrant living and working conditions. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 4 they exercised control over their own lives and destinies (baak 1999; allen 2002). the nature and dynamics of labour control figure prominently in these assessments that also tend to focus on the legal and quasi-legal dimensions of workers’ lives. while this approach has shed substantial light on various aspects of the indentured experience, it has also limited our understanding of these migrant labour systems and their role in shaping the modern capitalist global economy. one consequence is widespread acceptance of the notion that indentured workers were little more than the hapless and helpless victims of unscrupulous labour recruiters, plantation owners, and colonial officials. another consequence is a frequent failure to examine other important aspects of the indentured experience such as the place and activities of women in these systems, the role of gender in shaping local socio-economic relations, and the extent to which indentured workers exercised agency on their own behalf.7 a review of studies of these labourers in australasia (shlomowitz 1982; graves 1993; shineberg 1999), the caribbean (adamson 1972; mandle 1973; schuler 1980; look lai 1993; laurence 1994; hoefte 1998; kale 1998), south africa (tayal 1977; richardson 1984), the south pacific (gillion 1962; mayer 1963; lal 1983), and southeast asia (jain 1970, 1984; breman 1989; ramasamy 1992) highlights an attendant failure to view the indentured experience in individual colonies in larger global and comparative contexts (allen 2001b). lastly, few attempts have been made to explore possible structural connections between preand post-emancipation labour systems in the colonial world. studies of british slave plantation colonies usually come to an end with the abolition of slavery in 1834 (or occasionally with the collapse of the ‘apprenticeship’ system in 1838), while those that deal with post-emancipation labour systems in these colonies pay little or no attention to the slave regimes that preceded them. discussions of the conceptual and interpretative issues surrounding indentured labour (newbury 1975; marks & richardson 1984; van den boogaart & emmer 1986; munro 1993, 1995; shepherd 2002) also reflect this propensity to draw a sharp dividing line between the preand post-emancipation eras in the colonial plantation world. recent scholarship on migrant labour in the indian ocean underscores the need to explore the connections between preand post-emancipation labour systems more fully. mauritian archival sources, for example, confirm the existence of the kind of structural links between slave systems in india and the exportation of indian indentured labour 7 exceptions include jolly (1987), carter (1994), mohammed (1995), shepherd (1995) and allen (1999). allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 5 first proposed more than forty years ago by benedicte hjejle. in her seminal article on slavery and agricultural bondage in southern india, hjejle argued that the recruitment of some indentured indians cannot be understood without reference to indigenous systems of slavery, and that a significant number of the migrant workers who reached ceylon between 1843 and 1873 came from the ranks of south india’s praedial slave population (hjejle 1967: 106). the registers that recorded the arrival of indentured indians in mauritius confirm that the labourers who arrived on the island from southern india during the late 1830s included individuals of ‘slave’ caste status.8 unfortunately, it is unclear how many such individuals reached the island during or after the mid-1830s or may have been among the indentured immigrants who reached other plantation colonies during the nineteenth century. comparable structural links are a hallmark of the engagé system which entailed the recruitment of ostensibly liberated slaves and free contractual labourers along the east african coast and in madagascar to work on mayotte in the comoros, nosy-bé off madagascar’s northwest coast, and réunion following france’s abolition of slavery in 1848 (renault 1976; ly-tio-fane pineo 1979; gerbeau 1986; fuma 2000; monnier 2006). this system is widely regarded as little more than the old slave trade in new garb. we currently know little about the details of indentured labour recruitment in india before 1842 when governmental regulation of this system began. however, information about servile agricultural labour in early nineteenth-century southern india, the exportation of slaves from the subcontinent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the indigenous migrant labour systems that supplied indentured indian workers to mauritius before 1838 provide additional, if indirect, evidence of structural links between the slave and indentured labour trades in the indian ocean. an official inquiry during 1819 into slavery in the madras presidency reported that masters in some areas in southern india had a relatively free hand in disposing of their servile dependents if they chose to do so. such was the case in trichinopoly where the district’s collector, c. m. lushington, reported that while ‘pullers’ (pulayas) were usually sold with the land they worked, they were also frequently sold independently of the land in question,9 a development that raises questions about exactly how vyavry, 8 mgi: pe 1. the individuals in question were members of the palin and pulaya castes. 9 ior: f/4/919/25850, 134, c.m. lushington to a.d. campbell, 1 july 1819. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 6 aged twenty-eight and a ‘puller’ by caste, reached mauritius in 1838.10 lushington also noted the ‘indiscriminate’ sale of men, women, and children in malabar, an observation seconded by that district’s collector who reported that slaves were frequently transferred from one owner to another by sale, mortgage or hire.11 these regions were well known to european slavers who operated along the indian coast during the eighteenth century. the movement of slaves from malabar to the french comptoir at mahé and the dutch factory at cochin, for instance, became a subject of considerable concern to british authorities immediately following their acquisition of the province in 1792 (duncan et al. 179?, vol. 1: 164–65, & vol. 2: 35–36). official consternation about the malabar slave trade resurfaced no later than 1812 when british authorities considered how they might best bring an end to ‘the nefarious traffic in slaves which has prevailed on the malabar coast.’12 the large number of slaves exported by europeans from india during the eighteenth century likewise point to this trade laying the foundations, if not establishing some of the institutional structures, on which the indentured labour trades subsequently rested. perhaps as many as 24,000 indian slaves were exported to the mascarenes from 1670 to 1810, 75 percent of whom were dispatched to these islands between 1770 and 1793 when british seizure of france’s indian possessions following the outbreak of war in europe effectively ended the large-scale exportation of indian slaves to the southwestern indian ocean (allen 2004, 2005). areas in southern india such as malabar, tanjore, and tinnevelly, nevertheless continued to function as slave trading centres that attracted the attention of british officials during the 1810s, 1820s, and early 1830s.13 this continuing concern about slave exports from the coromandel and malabar coasts, and the funnelling of kidnapped and enslaved children from british territories to the french comptoir at mahé in particular, becomes more comprehensible in light of the fact that the midand late-1820s witnessed french attempts to recruit indentured indians to work on réunion, undertakings in which the former slave trading enclaves of 10 mgi: pe 1, no. 2415. 11 ior: f/4/919/25850, p. 174, j. vaughan to board of revenue, 20 july 1819. on slavery in southern india, see kumar (1965, esp. 34–48), kurup (1973), joseph (1987) and udaya (2003). 12 ior: p/322/68, p. 2850, wm thackeray to judge and magistrate zillah, north malabar, 29 may 1812. 13 ior: f/4/566/13970, reports of sir r. dick &a relative to the practice stated to have been prevalent of inveighling away and selling slaves within the division of dacca [1813-16]; f/4/1128/30151, contraband trade carried on through mahé [1819–20]; f/4/1034/28499, slavery, kidnapping and sale of children in tanjore and tinnevelly [1825]; f/4/1414/55774, relative to the kidnapping of children from the company’s territory for sale as slaves [1830–33]. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 7 pondichéry, karikal, and yanam figured prominently (northrup 1995: 60; weber 2002: 309–10). what little we currently know about indentured labour recruitment in india before 1838 likewise points to structural connections between the slave and indentured labour trades. marina carter notes that the labour exporters who supplied mauritius with indentured indians before 1838 tapped into indigenous migrant labour systems to do so, and that approximately one-third of the 7,000 indians who arrived in mauritius during 1837– 1838 were dhangars or tribal hill people from southern bihar (carter 1995: 204). hill tribesmen figured prominently among those who were enslaved in various parts of the subcontinent. an 1811 report about the trafficking of nepalese into british territories in northern india,14 and an 1816 report on the movement of enslaved children from assamese tribal areas to bengal,15 an important source of slaves and then indentured labourers for the mascarenes, suggests that the presence of individuals from the himalayan and/or assamese foothills among these early indentured recruits cannot be discounted pending further research. the need for such research is underscored by the request made in 1825 by the governor-general’s agent on the northeastern frontier that assamese who owed state service but could not fulfil their obligations because of the partial famine that had swept the region be allowed to sell themselves into slavery.16 although the government in calcutta promptly relinquished all of its claims to such service, british officials acknowledged that some assamese had nevertheless ‘contracted an obligation to serve private individuals for their lives during the pressure of the late famine.’17 the depth and extent of the ties between the slave and indentured labour trades is also suggested by the scale of european slave trading in the indian ocean basin, especially during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (allen 2008). europeans purchased and transported enslaved africans from mozambique and the swahili coast to india, the indonesian archipelago, and the mascarenes; indians to ceylon, indonesia, the mascarenes, and south africa; malagasies to india, java, the mascarenes, and 14 ior: f/4/369/9221, relative to the measures adopted for the prevention of the trade in children carried on between the upper provinces and the territories of napaul. 15 ior: f/4/566/13970, pp. 32–33, j.w. sage to shearman bird et al., 12 feb. 1816. 16 ior: f/4/1115/29887, pp. 3–4, d. scott to mr. chief secretary swinson, 4 mar. 1825. 17 ior: f/4/1115/29887, pp. 7–8, mr. acting secretary stirling to d. scott, 3 apr. 1825. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 8 sumatra; and men, women, and children from bali, java, makassar, nias, sumatra, and timor to ceylon, india, the mascarenes, and south africa. a review of published scholarship indicates that british, dutch, french, and portuguese traders purchased and transported at least 431,000 to 547,000 slaves to their indian ocean establishments between 1500 and 1850. the data at our disposal also point to a fouror possibly fivefold increase in the volume of this traffic between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with much of this growth occurring after 1770, and indicate that europeans continued to trade large numbers of slaves within the indian ocean basin well into the nineteenth century (allen 2010). the scope and scale of this activity becomes even more impressive when note is taken of european exports from the indian ocean to the americas. slaves from south asia occasionally reached the new world. in 1778, for example, la cibèle landed 258 men, forty-nine women, fifty-seven boys, and twenty-two girls from ‘the coasts of india’ at saint domingue (mettas 1978: 613–14). as the updated trans-atlantic slave voyage database attests, the number of slave exports from mozambique and madagascar to the americas increased steadily, rising from 11,825 during the seventeenth century to 58,180 during the eighteenth century and then soaring to 324,871 between 1801 and 1860 (trans-atlantic slave trade database 2009).18 these figures are indicative of the minimum number of such exports; in comments on this revised database, david eltis and david richardson (2008: 46–47) estimate that southeast africa exported 31,715 slaves to the americas during the seventeenth century, 70,931 during the eighteenth century, and 440,022 during the nineteenth century. what is clear from these data is that 76-85 per cent of all mozambican and malagasy slaves shipped across the atlantic were exported between 1781 and 1840. these figures, when added to those on slave trafficking within the indian ocean noted earlier, suggest that europeans were involved in the purchase and transportation of at least 826,000 and perhaps as many as 1,089,700 slaves within and beyond the confines of the mare indicum between 1500 and 1850. future research will undoubtedly lead to further refinement of these figures. when viewed in its totality, this activity points to the existence of increasingly integrated networks of free and unfree or forced migrant labour within and beyond the confines of the indian ocean world by the late eighteenth century. the 18 see trans-atlantic slave trade database (2009). allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 9 interconnectedness of these networks can be illustrated in other ways. recent scholarship reveals that significant numbers of indian and southeast asian convicts were transported across the mare indicum to satisfy the relentless demand for labour in european factories, administrative centres, and colonies. dutch authorities first shipped convicts from batavia and ceylon to the cape of good hope no later than 1688, and a small but steady flow of these convicts continued to reach the cape during the eighteenth century (armstrong 1999).19 british authorities, already versed in shipping approximately 50,000 convicts to their american colonies between 1718 and 1775 (grubb 2000; forster 2002), began transporting indian convicts to british possessions elsewhere in the indian ocean basin during the late 1780s. indian prisoners were first sent to the east india company’s factory at bencoolen (benkulen, bengkulu) in sumatra in 1787, the same year that witnessed the departure from britain of the first of the more than 160,000 convicts who reached australia between 1788 and 1868. while the exact number of indian prisoners subjected to transportation remains unknown, it is clear that tens of thousands suffered this fate. a minimum of 2,000 and perhaps as many as 4,000 to 6,000 were sent to bencoolen between 1787 and 1825 while at least 15,000 to 20,000 were dispatched to the straits settlements (malacca, penang, singapore) between 1790 and 1860. slightly more than 1,500 indian convicts arrived in mauritius between 1815 and 1837, while some 5,000–7,000 were shipped to burma from 1828 to 1862. the andaman islands, the site of an early, unsuccessful attempt (1793–96) to establish a penal colony in the bay of bengal, became a fully fledged penal colony following the indian mutiny of 1857–58 that ultimately housed some 50,000 prisoners before japanese occupation of the islands during world war ii ended the transportation of indian convicts.20 british authorities also shipped 1,000 to 1,500 or more convicts from ceylon (sri lanka) to mauritius and the straits settlements during the midnineteenth century. overall, british authorities dispatched at least 74,800 and perhaps as many as 90,000 south asian convicts overseas between 1787 and 1943 (yang 2003: 180; anderson 2007: 188; rediker, pybus & christopher 2007: 9). events at bencoolen also provide a vantage point from which to begin to consider the ways in which attempts to abolish slave trading, if not the institution of slavery itself, in 19 my thanks to james armstrong for permission to cite his paper. on forced migration in the dutch east india company’s empire, see ward (2009). 20 on the convict experience in mauritius and the andamans, see anderson (2000) and sen (2000), respectively. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 10 parts of the indian ocean may have influenced the development of abolitionism in britain and the ultimate recourse to indentured labour. the first shipment of indian convicts to bencoolen in 1787 coincided with the formulation of an ultimately abortive plan to emancipate the factory’s slaves and engage them as wage labourers.21 this proposal was not an isolated or unique event. thirteen years earlier, governor-general warren hastings and his council had issued regulations to control slave trading in bengal on the grounds that ‘the practice of stealing children from their parents and selling them for slaves has long prevailed in this country, and has greatly increased since the establishment of the english government in it.’ hastings continued that this ‘savage commerce’ was so extensive that there appeared to be no effective way of ‘remedying this calamitous evil’ but to abolish ‘the right of slavery altogether, excepting such cases to which the authority of government cannot reach.’22 aside from these public pronouncements, the archival record is frustratingly silent about the motive behind these regulations, which also seem to have fallen quickly into disuse (chattopadhyay 1977: 81). slavery and slave trading became a subject of official interest again no later than march 1785 when matthew day informed william cowper that ‘many hundreds’ of children had been sold into slavery because of the famine then ravaging the countryside surrounding dacca (dhaka) and were being shipped to ‘the foreign settlements [near calcutta] from whence … they are embarked in vessels to different parts.’23 day’s report prompted cowper to write to governor-general john macpherson requesting his ‘speedy interference to stop the pernicious trade … which is also as inhuman as it is illegal.’24 this consternation continued after lord cornwallis became governor-general in 1786, and culminated in his proclamation of 22 july 1789 banning slave exports from the bengal presidency.25 the madras presidency followed his lead on 8 march 1790.26 the early 1790s found british authorities taking various steps to prevent children in particular from being sold into slavery and to impede the exportation of slaves from their indian territories (allen 2006: 2009). 21 ior: f/4/279/6417, p. 5, extract of separate letter to bengal relative to bencoolen, dated 31 july 1787. 22 ior: p/49/46, pp. 1484–85, regulations issued 17 may 1774. 23 ior: p/50/60, m. day to william cowper, 2 mar. 1785, following l.r. no. 311, wm cowper to john macpherson, 14 mar. 1785, in fort william proceedings of 9 sept. 1785. 24 ior: p/50/60, wm cowper to john macpherson, 14 march 1785 – l.r. no. 311. 25 ior: p/3/46, pp. 488-93. see also calcutta gazette, extraordinary, 27 july 1789. 26 ior: p/241/17, pp. 644, 682. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 11 cornwallis’s proclamation, which long preceded the 1807 parliamentary abolition of the british slave trade, is significant in the annals of abolitionism because it appears to have been part of a more comprehensive attack on the institution of slavery itself in india. less than two weeks after issuing his proclamation, cornwallis informed the east india company’s court of directors in london that he was considering a plan to abolish slavery throughout the company’s indian territories in a way that would neither injure private interests nor antagonize the indigenous population. a simultaneous proposal to alleviate slaves’ misery before they were freed suggests that he envisioned a program of gradual emancipation.27 unfortunately, no copy of cornwallis’s plan survives in the archival record.28 the origins and depth of his abolitionist sentiments and the motive(s) behind the 1789 ban on slave exports from bengal and his plan to abolish slavery in india likewise remain hidden from our view. his personal papers (ross 1859) are silent about these matters, and contemporaries offer little insight into his possible motives other than to observe that he wanted to ensure the security, prosperity, and happiness of india’s inhabitants.29 what is clear, however, is that that cornwallis acted during a period of intense agitation in britain (1788–1792) to abolish the british slave trade which raises the question of whether his actions were a response to metropolitan pressure or an attempt to influence the outcome of the growing debate at home about abolishing the british slave trade, or a combination of the two. similar questions are raised by what we know about charles grant, a company employee who arrived in india in 1773 and worked closely with cornwallis before returning to england in 1790 (aspinall 1987: 11). back in england, grant, an evangelical christian, joined the london abolition committee (1791) and was deeply involved in the almost successful attempt in parliament early in 1793 to ban the british slave trade (jennings 1997: 67, 81–82). elected to the court of directors in 1794, he served as a director until 1813 and as the company’s chairman or deputy chairman six times between 1804 and 1815. grant has been described as a very influential director 27 pp 1828 xxiv [125], p. 13, extract of a letter from lord cornwallis, governor general of india, to the court of directors; dated 2 august 1789. 28 pp 1828 xxiv [125], p. 13, notation at the end of “extract of a letter from lord cornwallis, governor general of india, to the court of directors; dated 2 august 1789.” 29 pro 30/11/210, narrative of marquis cornwallis’s proceedings in india, and an explanation of his plans just prior to his death. sent to charles grant, chairman of the court of directors of the east india company [sept. 1805]. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 12 (bowen 2006: 130–32), a characterization which suggests that the court’s formal approval in 1796 of the measures taken to suppress slave trading in malabar30 may have reflected abolitionist sentiments at the highest levels of the company’s management. the argument by grant’s fellow director, david scott, that same year about the need to free bengali salt workers from compulsory labour because ‘slaves cannot work so cheap as free men, [and] besides we ought to give all our subjects liberty’ (cited in wright 1960: 184) does likewise. the extent to which abolitionist sentiments continued to shape company policies or influence its employees are raised by various developments during the early nineteenth century, including governor frederic north’s decision in 1800 to prohibit slave imports into and exports from ceylon;31 an 1805 proposal to abolish slavery at penang;32 the 1811 ban on the importation and sale of foreign slaves in the bengal presidency’s territories;33 and sir stamford raffles’s call in 1813 for the immediate emancipation of government slaves in java (captured recently from the dutch) on the grounds that their labour ‘may be superseded by granting a more liberal allowance to ordinary coolies.’34 events in the mascarenes further underscore the need to consider the extent to which developments in the indian ocean influenced abolitionist agenda and activities in britain, the formulation and implementation of imperial policies to suppress slave trading and abolish slavery, and the subsequent recourse to indentured labour. the islands became the centre of a notorious clandestine trade in slaves following their capture by a british expeditionary force in 1810 (daget 1979; wanquet 1988; barker 1996; allen 2001a). perhaps 123,400-145,000 men, women, and children were exported from madagascar, mozambique, the swahili coast, and the indonesian archipelago to mauritius and réunion between 1811 and 1848, mostly before circa 1831 (allen 2004: 41). the regional importance of the illegal trade to the mascarenes is suggested by the fact that it may have consumed from one-third to 42.6 percent of an estimated 340,100 to 371,800 trans-oceanic slave exports from eastern africa during the first half of the nineteenth century (allen 2010: 68). 30 ior: e/4/1011, pp. 411–12, answer to the letter in the political department dated 25 sept. 1794. 31 co 54/2, f. 95r, frederic north to court of directors, 30 aug. 1800. 32 ior: f/4/279/6417, p. 11, extract general letter to prince of wales island dated 18 feb. 1807. 33 ior: f/4/403/10115, pp. 1–2, a.d. 1811. regulation x. 34 ior: g/21/64, [section headed ‘slavery’], notes of the arrangements made by lord minto for the occupation and administration of the affairs of java; and of the principal subjects treated of in the despatches from the lieut governor of that island [written by b.j. jones, 7 oct. 1813]. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 13 this trade’s magnitude and the depth of the british commitment to suppressing it made the southwestern indian ocean a theatre of operations for anti-slave trade patrols by the royal navy well before the british government established an independent naval squadron in november 1819 to conduct such patrols off the west african coast (klein 2010: 193). the royal navy’s activities in the southwestern indian ocean during the 1810s and early 1820s were an important, and often overlooked, precursor to the much better known british attempts later in the nineteenth century to end slave exports from east africa (howell 1987). the extent of this activity is indicated by the number of captured slave ships and ‘prize negroes’ or ‘liberated africans’ condemned by viceadmiralty and colonial courts. the vice-admiralty court at the cape of good hope condemned twenty-seven slave ships captured by navy cruisers between december 1808 and december 1816 and funnelled more than 2,100 malagasy and mozambican prize negroes into the cape colony’s work force as ‘apprentices.’ additional seizures during the 1840s swelled the ranks of the cape’s prize negro population by more than 3,000 (saunders 1985, 1994). colonial and vice-admiralty courts in mauritius were even busier, condemning forty-eight captured slave ships between 1811 and 1825, thirty-nine of which were seized between 1815 and 1819.35 the number of adjudications handled by mauritian-based courts during this fourteen-year period exceeded those dealt with by the mixed or joint anti-slave trade commissions at rio de janeiro (forty-four) and surinam (one) between 1819 and 1845, and almost equalled the number of cases (fifty) handled at havana (bethell 1966: 84).36 as at the cape, the overwhelming majority of the 4,526 liberated africans landed on mauritius were ‘apprenticed’ to local estate owners for fourteen years.37 the commission of eastern enquiry subsequently estimated the value of the labour services provided by these apprentices who were still alive late in 1827 to be at least 100,000 piastres a year.38 this commitment to suppressing the illegal trade to mauritius and the seychelles also led to increasing british involvement with regional polities, the impact of which resonated for years. in april 1816, mauritian governor robert farquhar initiated 35 co 167/141, return no. 19 – return of the number of prize negroes apprenticed in the colony of mauritius from the year 1813 to 1827 inclusive. 36 the mixed commission based in sierra leone dealt with 528 such cases during the same period. 37 on liberated africans in mauritius, see carter, govinden & peerthum 2003. 38 co 167/143, p. 8, report of the commissioners of enquiry at mauritius upon the state of the prize negroes apprenticed in that colony [27 jan. 1829]. a sum equal to £20,000 at the official exchange rate of £1 = $5 in 1826. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 14 negotiations with the merina king, radama i, to end slave exports from those areas of madagascar under merina control. radama was induced to sign such a treaty in october 1817 and again in october 1820 after the first treaty had been abrogated unilaterally by the acting mauritian governor, major-general gage hall, in 1818. one immediate result of the 1820 accord was to deprive radama of substantial revenue he had previously enjoyed from taxing slave exports (scarr 1998: 132). loss of this revenue and the ultimate failure of his alliance with the british would lead radama to adopt autarkic policies which resulted in radical changes in the local system of corvée labour, changes that had dire consequences for the merina economy and imperial regime later in the century (campbell 2005a: esp. chap. 5). because it forced slave traders who had supplied the mascarenes to shift the centre of their operations from madagascar to the east african coast,39 the 1820 anglo-merina accord set the stage for greater british involvement along that coast. in april 1821, farquhar signalled his intention to secure a treaty with the sultan of oman, nominal ruler of zanzibar and other parts of the swahili coast, similar to that with radama.40 the following year, captain fairfax moresby, acting on the governor’s instructions, negotiated a treaty with sultan seyyid said in which the omani ruler banned the external traffic in slaves from his east african dominions and prohibited the sale of slaves to any christian (gray 1957: 24–29; beachey 1996: 17–22). like the 1820 treaty with radama, the moresby treaty had a significant impact on the sultan’s finances, depriving him of perhaps as much as $56,000 in revenue each year.41 these losses spurred seyyid’s interest in developing the clove industry on zanzibar and pemba (sheriff 1987: 50), an industry that soon consumed thousands of east african slaves each year. the traffic in chattel labour to these islands would become the focal point of an escalating conflict between britain and the sultan and his heirs that culminated in the establishment of a british protectorate over zanzibar in 1873. events in mauritius following the demise of the illegal slave trade circa 1827 likewise had a significant impact not only locally and regionally, but also far beyond the indian 39 co 167/57, despatch no. 46, r.t. farquhar to earl bathurst, 11 june 1821. 40 pp 1825 xxv [244], p. 37, r.t. farquhar to earl bathurst, 14 april 1821. 41 estimates of these losses vary. according to beachey (1996: 22), the sultan lost £11,250 ($56,250) a year. scarr (1998: 132) puts this figure at no more than $30,000 a year. abdul sheriff reports that the sultan claimed losing 40,000–50,000 maria theresa dollars (mt$) each year, or £8,421–£10,526 at the exchange rate of £1 = mt$4.75 that prevailed during the first half of the nineteenth century (1987: 50). allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 15 ocean. the increasing inability of mauritian planters during the 1820s to obtain the labour needed by the island’s rapidly expanding sugar industry, coupled with local resentment over slave amelioration policies that had been introduced during the late 1820s, erupted into armed insurrection in 1832 when john jeremie, a known abolitionist, was appointed as the colony’s attorney-general. although often dismissed as little more than a tempest in a small colonial tea cup, this rebellion exposed the false premises and defective administrative structures upon which the imperial policy of slave amelioration rested, thereby hastening the abolition of slavery throughout the british empire (burroughs 1976). * * * * * the developments outlined above highlight the need for studies of abolitionism and the overthrow of slavery to transcend the atlantic-centrism that is a hallmark of important works on these topics (davis 1966, 1975; eltis 1987; blackburn 1988; drescher 2009) and recent scholarship that situates the origins of abolitionism in a broader british imperial context (brown 2006). the need to do so is underscored by a small but growing corpus of work on abolition and its aftermath in the indian ocean world (campbell 2005b), and by a growing awareness among some historians of the conceptual and other problems that can result from a reliance on inflexible geographically-defined units of historical analysis.42 some historians of empire also demonstrate a growing appreciation that if there were significant differences between the british experience in the atlantic and indian ocean worlds, there were also important similarities between these two components of a single imperial entity (marshall 2003). work on the impact that public knowledge about and perceptions of empire had on british politics and identity (oldfield 1995; osborn 2002; nechtman 2010), the politics and ideology of the early british east india company state (stern 2007), and the geography of colour lines in colonial madras and new york (nightingale 2008) demonstrate the value of approaching european activities in these two ‘worlds’ from a pan-oceanic perspective. however, to argue the need to study the origins, dynamics, and impact of abolitionism within a truly comprehensive imperial context is one thing, to actually do so is 42 see the 2006 forum on conceptualizing the atlantic world in the william and mary quarterly, 3rd ser., vol. 63, no. 4, especially the contributions by alison games, philip j. stern & peter a. coclanis. for a review of how the atlantic world has been defined, see games 2006. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 16 something else. thirty years ago hubert gerbeau discussed the conceptual and other problems inherent in any attempt to reconstruct the history of slavery and slave trading in the indian ocean, not the least of which is the dearth of archival materials compared to those that exist for the atlantic (gerbeau 1979b). attempts to reconstruct abolitionist activity in the indian ocean and understand how and to what extent developments in the mare indicum actively shaped abolitionist discourse and policies face the same problem. the british east india company archives contain only scattered and often oblique references to the company’s involvement in slave trading during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (geber 1998: 101), a fact that helps to explain why histories of the company make little or no mention of its trafficking in and reliance on chattel labour in many of its indian ocean establishments (chaudhuri 1978; keay 1991; sen 1998; bowen 2006). studies of portuguese activity in india (subrahmanyam 1990), the dutch and french east india companies (boxer 1965; haudrère 1989; winius & vink 1994; subramanian 1999; wellington 2006), and indo-european trade and commerce (das gupta 1967; arasaratnam 1986; das gupta & pearson 1987; prakash 1998; sinha 2002) do likewise. under such circumstances, coming to grips more fully with the dialogue between the forces of abolitionism in the indian ocean and those in the atlantic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century will require adopting research strategies that allow us to explore the complex and often nuanced web of socio-political relationships that linked colonial officials with their counterparts not only in london, but also elsewhere in the imperial world. recent work on imperial careering during the nineteenth century provides a template for doing so (lambert & lester 2006). indeed, the applicability of such an approach to abolitionism and its impact in the indian ocean is suggested by the career of robert farquhar. in 1805, the future governor of mauritius, acting in his capacity as lieutenant governor of prince of wales island, would recommend the abolition of slavery at penang on the grounds that this institution was ‘the greatest of all evils, & the attempt to regulate such an evil is in itself almost absurd.’43 43 ior: g/34/9, f. 64v, appendix no. 13, report of the lieutenant governor of prince of wales island, enc. in r.t. farquhar, late lieut governor of prince of wales island, to john lumsden, chief secretary to government, fort william, 30 sept. 1805. allen european slave trading portal, vol. 9, no. 1, january 2012. 17 abbreviations co – colonial office records, national archives, kew, united kingdom; ior – india office records, british library, london; mgi – mahatma gandhi institute, moka, mauritius; pp – british parliament sessional papers; pro – domestic records of the public record office, gifts, deposits, notes and transcripts, national archives, kew, united kingdom. reference list adamson, a.h. 1972, sugar without slaves: the political 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(1829–1860),’ in esclavage et abolitions dans l’océan indien, 1723–1860, (ed.) edmond maestri, l’harmattan, paris, 309–28. wellington, d.c. 2006, french east india companies: a historical account and record of trade. university press of america, lanham, md. winius, g.d., & vink, m.p.m. 1994, the merchant-warrior pacified: the voc (the dutch east india company) and its changing political economy in india. oxford university press, delhi. wright, h.r.c. 1960, ‘raffles and the slave trade at batavia in 1812,’ the historical journal vol. 3, no. 2: 184–91. yang, a.a. 2003, ‘indian convict workers in southeast asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,’ journal of world history, vol. 14, no. 2: 179–208. http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces european slave trading, abolitionism, and ‘new systems of slavery’ in the indian ocean richard b. allen, framingham state university0f portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: dwyer, k.a. 2019. doce horas: a family border tale. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 16:1/2, 163-165. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal. v16i1/2.6474 portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 14492490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu. au/ojs/index.php/portal cultural works doce horas: a family border tale k. angelique dwyer corresponding author: associate professor k. angelique dwyer, chair of latinx, latin american, and caribbean studies, department of modern languages, literatures and cultures, gustavus adolphus college, 800 west college avenue, st. peter, mn. 56082 usa. email: adwyer@gustavus.edu doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6474 article history: received 09/02/2019; accepted 12/2/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract this creative non-fiction piece written in spanglish called ‘doce horas: a family border tale’ comically narrates my family’s adventure crossing the u.s.-mexico border by car a few days after new year’s. the story deals with identity negotiation, biculturalism and bilingualism in a non-conventional american family raised in mexico. the narrative voice in my piece provides a unique perspective broadening dialogue(s) on mexican american identity. keywords: k. angelique dwyer; short story; ‘doce horas.’ ‘llévele, llévele … la figurita del chavo … ¡hay elotes!’ óyeme, pero ¿qué es esto? i thought, mientras my family and i were stuck in traffic—en el tapón—for 12 hours. yes. twelve hours stuck. no motion. stopped, on our drive back from central mexico after ‘las vacas’ de navidad. ¡qué rollo! we’ve driven this at least 20 times in my lifetime. pero nada como esta vez. ¡qué circo! and it wasn’t because we were travelling with two kids, a dog, my senior parents and teenage nieces … nel. esos gritos infernales de ‘¡¡¡se le acabó la batería a mi i-pad!!!’ eran music to my ears comparado con lo que les voy a contar. y como si fuera corrido de antonio aguilar, ‘viene de ay, compadre’: ‘un día 28 de enero …’ well, it was actually january 4th to be precise, después de haber disfrutado las fiestas con mi familia extendida en jalisco, una selección de las familias dwyer, dwyer razo y salivia dwyer se lanzaron de regreso a hibernar a los lagos congelados de minnesota. we had planned to leave sooner but el piti, didn’t recommend it. ‘never leave the declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 163 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6474 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6474 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6474 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:adwyer@gustavus.edu http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6474 day after new year’s.’ imposible cruzar la frontera. so, we waited a couple days. we left the same way we arrived, en caravana, de ‘roadtrip’ desde minnesota hasta jalisco: dos carros, 4 días, buena conversación, esnakeando, y tomando fotos a lo loco, porque le prometí al maestro de mi hija, que le mandaría fotos, so he could share with the rest of the 2nd grade class. i was psyched about it because: what a better way than to introduce the ‘dangerous borderlands’ to the mainstream than through their white latina classmate’s family taking a roadtrip ¿no? obvi. we should have known the trip was cursed cuando tres días antes de irnos el patriarca de la familia, también conocido como don adán, got a horrible spasm in his back, which ended up leaving him in major pain over a month after our return. se puso tan fea la cosa que we had to stop in san toño for 2 days so he could rest. así que se armó el jangueo intra-generacional en el downtown con un muy merecido bbq and iced tea. the third day, we woke up at 4:30 a.m. (auxilio: try to get a 2-year-old, a 7-year-old and an overstuffed dog in a car at that hour—before coffee) y nos juimos pa’ la frontera y ‘por ay’ pá’ bajo,’ como dice mi familia puertorriqueña. even though we’re usually shot from all the driving, llegar a méxico after a 4-day—in this case 7-day trip—no tiene precio. there are just no words to describe the feeling of being back, being home, aunque no haya nacido ahí, it’s the home i’ve always known. ever since i was a kid i remember descending the barranca hills into the city and even if it was 2:00 a.m. the whole family would be singing loudly: ‘guadalajara, guadalajara … tienes el alma de provinciana … son mis palomas tu cacerío … hueles a pura tierra mojadaaaa’ as a welcome-back-home anthem. and even though we wouldn’t sing cuando bajábamos las curvas de la carretera a chapala—not because we didn’t know the chapala song, but because it’s a lullaby—y no vamos a abandonar al conductor así, oye…—but like sinking into a comfy chair, we would nestle into the realization of being home, al lado de esas aguas, rodeadas por montañas, moradas por el atardecer, y luces lejanas, cual pulsera de diamantes. truly the core of it all. home. i miss it. the fire place, the stars, the diamond bracelet across the water. the view, the tile floor under my bare feet, the wooden doors creek. my heart aches. bueno, pero ya me puse sappy. the whole point of this is to tell you what happened. porque un buen cuento nunca cansa y siempre divierte. así que, after spending a great christmas together, where my cuñada and i finally got the opportunity to cook a meal instead of don adán and la señora linda always working in the kitchen like trojans, pos ándale que nos tocó a nosotras … y que se arma la competencia de meatloafs. christmas day we went with el piti & familia a los toros y al bailongo. my kids were like “wow”: la banda, las papitas con chile, las botas de avestruz, the bathrooms … pretty cool cultural exposure. they also learned that while the enraged words: ‘¡háblame en español!’ work so well in the u.s. after they ask loudly: ‘mommy, why is that lady so mean?’ for everyone to hear; it doesn’t work well in mexico. así que en plena plaza de toros as people are coming in and finding places to sit, my daughter goes: ‘mami, ¿por qué esa señora tiene una verruga tan grande en la cara?’ the words ‘¡háblame dwyer portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019164 en inglés, carajo!’ could not have come out faster from my mouth. too late. just smile. the lady may not have noticed we were referring to her mole specifically. ‘buenas tardes.’ en fin, la pasamos chido. y como todo tiene final, pos nos lanzamos de regreso unos días después de new year’s. actually, it wasn’t all that bad of a return trip. we managed to leave early—cuando canta el gallo—we had lunch pre-made and only stopped a couple times. como suele pasar, both of our cars were nearly ravaged by the snake vendors in san luis potosí as we stopped for gas. i still remember the impression it had on me to see another kid of about my age run up to my window con culebra en mano. what a juxtaposition: my 12-year old self daydreaming the trip away as i listened to the tapes in my walkman and these kids selling snake skin in the middle of the desert just to make it. it was like being slapped in the face by the harsh reality de la vida que les tocó. para los que no sepan, ojo, porque lo que pasa es que: si le compras a uno, se te avientan todos, onda ‘the walking dead.’ you’re lucky if you’re able to exit the gas station without harming anyone. gruuueso. pero, aparte de eso, we made it to the border radius intact, until … well … we should have known. first: let’s look at the facts: 1) this was pre-trump; 2) we were 10 miles from the border; 3) had made record time; 4) had a hotel reserved al otro lado; 5) the gps indicated that the remaining route to the hotel would take us 15 minutes; 6) we had minimal provisions aboard. de repente, we slowed down. llegamos a una fila masiva de carros moviéndose a vuelta de rueda. the questions in the car start: ‘what happened?’ ‘why’d we stop?’ the oh-so-horrible for-any-driver-ever: ‘are we there yet?!’ and amidst the smog, the intermittent break lights and mini vans beside us—like a neon sign indicating we had arrived at the land of bizarre— emerges a vendor with a huge cristo en la cruz for sale. ‘llévele, llévele …’ y te hace precio, ¿eh? behind that vendor: el carrito de los elotes comes through the traffic lanes. luego, otro con la enorme imagen de la virgen de guadalupe, el de las paletas, brooms for sale, the ginormous ‘last supper’ painting with a gold frame, and oh, the many etceteras. things you would never dream would be for sale in the middle of the road just a few miles from one of the most talked-about borders of the modern world. we look at the vendors and start talking shit: ‘hay mira eso … nombre, ¿quién va a querer una pinche madre de esas? ¿ni que fuera qué?’ not knowing what bad karma might come of it. después de unos minutos, after sheer boredom— and when we were still optimistic about the traffic lessening—we bought 4 overstuffed figures of el chavo del 8 and friends. se nos hizo raro when we saw people getting out of their idling cars to access their ice chests, like tail gaiting. then, small groups of people would walk past us in the dark. ¿y esos? 6 hours later—after we had peed in a bottle inside the car and almost had our bladders burst—we found out people had opened their homes to rent the bathrooms out to desperate travelers. hicieron buena ganancia, eso sí. that night we experienced a varying range of human emotions: determination (we had to cross the border—no había de otra, i mean, you’re not gonna make a u-turn and drive 14 hours back when you’re only 15 miles away… right?). optimism (there’s traffic, pero sí se puede, hombre). joy (‘que pinches cuadros más feos’). anger (what is the hold up?). desperation (… que me estoy orinando …). exhaustion (12 hours stopped in traffic after a 14-hour drive, i don’t think i need to explain this one). curiosity (¿quién fregados se traga un elote en pleno desierto?). had the city of nuevo laredo not made enough that month or was the universe just messing with us? wtf? it all dawned on me: i knew why there was oversized religious imagery for sale: ‘pa’ que te arrepientas, cabrona.’ repent and pray to the higher power to get you out of this faster. a no, pero ¿tú? criticando y contenta. ándele. yep, you had to laugh about the last supper guy and the verruga lady. what goes around … jamás su tronco endereza. doce horas: a family border tale portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019165 portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal the possibility of a ‘dead europe’: tsiolkas, houellebecq and european mythologies nicholas manganas, university of technology sydney introduction this article posits that two constituent mythologies sustain and drive the european union (eu) integration process. the first is the tension between the twin narratives of ‘perpetual peace’ and ‘perpetual suffering.’ the narrative script of ‘perpetual peace’ promotes post-communist europe as a post-historical paradise. paradoxically, this narrative can only function in tandem with the inverse narrative of ‘perpetual suffering,’ a narrative script that argues that europe is the continent that carries the burden and pain of the twentieth century. the second fundamental mythology of the eu project is the tension between the narratives of europe as, on the one hand ‘authentic’ and as ‘cosmopolitan’ on the other. by authenticity i am referring to the rich and diverse cultural traditions of the european continent. this narrative script argues that the quaint, parochial and national traditions of the past are successfully functioning side by side with a modern cosmopolitan generation e sensibility (reid 2005, 3). both of these constituent mythologies are essential in forming what is emerging as a pan-european, europtimist raison d’etre. however, although this article considers these narratives to be powerful, it does not regard them as all-encompassing. in this article i argue that two recent novels, the australian christos tsiolkas’s dead europe (2005), and the french michel houellebecq’s the possibility of an island (2006), subvert these two mythologies, in the process undermining the legitimacy of recent works of europtomist scholarship. manganas possibility of a dead europe whose europe? in 2005 christos tsiolkas published dead europe, a novel that sought to subvert the european imaginary landscape from a greek-australian perspective—born in australia, his parents were greek immigrants—by issuing a challenge to europeans from the antipodes: europe, you are absent of life. former us secretary of defence donald rumsfeld was taken to task for dividing europe into ‘old’ and ‘new,’ but tsiolkas is after the knock-out punch: europe, you are not even alive. with what legitimacy can tsiolkas, an outsider, discuss the big themes of our time—history, migration, blood, belonging, poverty, refuge, anti-semitism—in such a european and realist fashion (syson 2005, 4)? in america jean baudrillard wrote, ‘europe can no longer be understood by starting out from europe itself’ (1988, 98), and tsiolkas starts his story on the other side of the world in suburban melbourne. dead europe tells the story of isaac, a greek-australian photographer invited to athens to help celebrate the culture of the greek diaspora. his exhibition makes a dismal understatement and he is overwhelmed by the changes that have taken place in greece and the rest of europe. the wave of hope that isaac experienced when he was last in europe in the aftermath of the fall of the berlin wall has evaporated. instead, he encounters empty villages drained of their former ‘life,’ and a new amoral generation of europeans living in what are now global, cosmopolitan and connected cities. isaac sets off on a journey across post-communist europe, and to cities such as prague, paris and oxford, taking photographs that seem to chronicle the decay of post-1989, postideological europe. his photographs chronicle his travels but something mysterious and surreal haunt his photographs. according to isaac: death in a photograph is not merely a matter of focus or of composition. it is not only the light. it is not the subject. there are photographs that are blurred or ugly or too dark or over-exposed, they can be banal or boring or incompetent. but that does not necessarily make them dead. death is, of course, simply the absence of life, of the heart and the blood and the soul. the absence of fluid and flesh. the eyes that stared back at me from my photos were dead. the trees, and asphalt streets, dead. all my subjects were muted and still. not calm, but inert. the absence of motion. i would emerge from the darkroom every time, and the smell of chemicals was death on my skin, on my hands. (46) the sustained metaphor of europe as ‘lifeless’ in tsiolkas’s novel is most likely a confronting one for europeans. after all, europeans still pride themselves as being in the centre of western civilisation. but what does it mean for europe to be dead? portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 2 manganas possibility of a dead europe according to tsiolkas the novel is seeking in one way or another to confront three deaths: the death of yugoslavia; the death of communism; and the death of europe’s peasant and agrarian class. moreover, there are numerous other deaths that can be added to the list: the death of ideology, jews, traditions, nation-states, languages, currencies, buildings, families, refugees, identities, religions, norms, sexualities, and so on. in this context death can also mean change. the question lies in whether the changes that have occurred in europe over the last two decades have been positive or negative. for readers of dead europe the outlook is bleak. at the same time, however, the novel celebrates the fact that europeans are conscious of the murky morality with which they live on a daily basis. as isaac’s cousin giulia thunders: ‘we finally have some money in our pockets and the bloody immigrant cousin from the new world comes back to tell us how he regrets the changes. what’s wrong with fine clothes, fine food, a decent living?’ (135). indeed, there can be no adequate answer to such a question. death, like a photograph, is fleeting. there is no stopping the forces of change. dead europe is not the first text to deal with alienation in the new europe. lukas moodysson’s lilya 4-ever (2002) and mathieu kassovitz’s la haine (1995) are two of many cinematic examples that highlight different communities living on the european margins. michael haneke’s recent film caché (2005) took this theme one step further by demonstrating that the french denial of responsibility for the treatment of algerians in its colonial past, and its current treatment of algerian immigrants, have severe consequences for both the french and the algerian people. is it perverse for the former colony to want its former master to share its pain? again, this is another question that may not be adequately answered. dead europe is not seeking to reconcile any of these larger questions. instead, it reads like an unromanticised travelogue as isaac photographs alienated peoples in the european continent of ‘peace,’ ‘prosperity,’ and ‘human rights.’ although dead europe has yet to be published in europe, michel houellebecq’s the possibility of an island, like all his recent novels, was a european publishing sensation. while dead europe chronicles the decay of europe through a greek-australian man’s increasingly debauched and transgressive sexual experiences, the possibility of an island goes a step further. houellebecq’s novel is a deeply negative vision of modern humanity and his targets include consumer society, sexual commodification, religion portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 3 manganas possibility of a dead europe (especially islam), democratic politics, and almost everything in between. in a world where people no longer have faith in the philosophical institutions that once served to ‘civilise’ society, the pursuit of sex is the world’s last ‘joy’ or, at the very least, the only possibility of a momentary feeling of ‘happiness.’ the possibility of an island tells the story of daniel, a misanthropic french comedian, who made a fortune ‘by acting a complete bastard with impunity’ with shows such as ‘munch on my gaza strip.’ in a post-ideological world, his liberal audiences do not know whether to be offended or to laud him. after earning millions of euros, daniel semi-retires in spain’s almería region because he is tired of the cruelty of laughter. living alone in a foreign land, daniel’s chief pursuit becomes sex. however, daniel’s sexual conquests only serve to act like a bandaid, covering the meaninglessness underneath. as a result, daniel joins the elohimites, a sect that promises immortality through cloning and promotes sexual hedonism and suicide. from the outset it may seem wanton to discuss two very different novels, one by a greek-australian and the other by a frenchman, in the context of european narratives of peace and suffering, authenticity and cosmopolitanism. however, it can be legitimately argued that both novels contain numerous thematic tropes that can be read, and compared, on a number of levels. moreover, it can be countered that both novels do not directly deal with european narratives per se. instead, europe is merely the geographic setting as the novels slowly follow the stories of their respective protagonists across the european space. whose europe do we encounter in these novels? is it a europe imagined by the respective authors? or is it a europe that we see through the eyes of the novels’ main characters? how can we equate isaac’s perceptions of europe, a gay greek australian embarking on a journey of self discovery in tsiolkas’s dead europe, with daniel in the possibility of an island, a heterosexual middle aged frenchman living in spain’s almería region? how does my own understanding of europe affect the reading of these novels? am i imagining a europe of my own, constructing a narrative with characters, plots, and action, to fit my own experience of what europe, is, was, and could be? i can only respond with the following: every narrative in the end is a form of explanation (dray 28, 2003). when we ask the questions—what is a story?; what does it portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 4 manganas possibility of a dead europe mean to follow a story?—it is perhaps useful to think of the extent that stories explain ourselves to ourselves. according to margaret somers, it matters not whether we are social scientists or subjects of historical research but ‘that we come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple and changing) by our location (usually unconsciously) in social narratives and networks of relations that are rarely of our own making’ (2003, 360). in other words, we are always embedded in social narratives. whether we recognise it or not, our social identities are constituted through narrativity. both dead europe and the possibility of an island create a textual social reality with varied historical scope. both novels, however, are complicated by the fact that they use the technique of twin narratives, merging two distinct historical periods into what forms in the end a whole. both dead europe and the possibility of an island set one of their narratives threads in twenty-first century post-communist europe (as described above). dead europe’s second narrative, however, looks back to the past spanning the second world war, the greek civil war, and the mass migration of europeans to australia in the 1950s. this narrative, a mythological vampiric tale of blood libel, explores the ghosts of the past lurking in the present through the stories of the journey made by isaac’s parents and grandparents from superstitious and peasant ridden greek villages, to their experiences as ‘wogs’ in ‘multicultural’ australia. but whereas tsiolkas’s second narrative works as a gothic counterpoint to contextualise isaac’s journey of selfdiscovery, the second narrative of the possibility of an island looks forward some two thousand years or so into the future. in houellebecq’s novel, the second narrative is told by the ‘neo-humans’ daniel 24 and daniel 25, the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth clones of daniel, who are attempting to reconstruct and understand the life of their predecessor, daniel 1. the historical span of both novels is therefore immense, circumventing any neat theoretical analysis. but what is apparent, however, is that europe emerges in both novels as a ‘sustained metaphor’ (white 2003, 243), at once a historical spectre and a futuristic dystopia. this article seeks to locate and explore this ‘sustained metaphor.’ rather than finding the differences between the novels problematic, i posit that these differences can offer a more enriching understanding of the process in which the constituent mythologies of authenticity and cosmopolitanism, peace and suffering, have emerged over the last few decades. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 5 manganas possibility of a dead europe contested narratives can you imagine today’s french youth rushing fervently to fight for their country? … in europe war has become unthinkable. not politically. anthropologically unthinkable. european people are no longer capable of waging war. paul in milan kundera’s immortality (1991, 135) despite michael hardt and antonio negri’s compelling argument in multitude that the september 11 attacks opened a new era of war and that ‘war is becoming a general phenomenon, global and interminable,’ europeans do not consider themselves to be operating in a state of ‘perpetual war’ (2000, 4). instead, one of the founding myths of the new europe is that of ‘perpetual peace,’ a narrative that continues to function despite the eruption of the us-led ‘war on terror.’ the narrative of perpetual peace is not an overriding narrative in the sense that it obliges all eu member states to always act peacefully and to seek out international justice. such a narrative could never be objectively demonstrated. rather, the narrative of ‘perpetual peace’ has taken on a mythological significance to the european supra-state, a symbolic value that celebrates the dawn of a new european era and that has served to erase the horrors of pre-1945 europe. in short, europe without the narrative of ‘perpetual peace’ is almost unthinkable, even if the narrative does not correspond to geopolitical reality. myths, according to florian bieber, are at once historical and anti-historical (2002, 97). by this bieber means that myths are historical in content, being based on real past events; yet the myth itself also has its own history. the narratives of perpetual peace and suffering likewise are myths with a history and anti-history. the idea of europe as a continent of ‘perpetual peace’ was first articulated by the us political commentator robert kagan in his popular book paradise and power (2003). according to kagan, ‘it is time to stop pretending that europeans and americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world’ (2003, 3). kagan argues that the european outlook is moving beyond power and into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiations and cooperation. unlike the usa, europe is entering into a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realisation of immanuel kant’s ‘perpetual peace.’ kagan is by no means celebrating this utopian vision of a unified europe. rather, he sees it as a corollary to europe’s decline in geopolitical power. put simply, when the european great powers were strong they believed in military power. now that the european powers are militarily weak they portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 6 manganas possibility of a dead europe champion international law and international institutions. the success of kagan’s treatise lies in his use of an ‘us and them’ approach: americans are from mars, europeans are from venus. this formula has been replicated by other writers who sometimes invert the argument. for example, in the united states of europe (2005) t. r. reid sees much to celebrate in the new european union and wants his fellow americans to sit up and take notice of the world’s new superpower. in reid’s manifesto the world is currently witnessing ‘a geopolitical revolution of historic dimensions’ (1). as reid reminds his us readers, ‘[europe] has more people, more wealth, and more trade than the united states of america’ (1). he points to the emergence of generation e, a new breed of european who considers the entire continent, and not just one country or city, to be ‘home’ (199). whether euro-optimist or eurosceptic, the argument always fits into the same narrative script: europe is unique, increasingly diverging from the hegemonic superpower priorities of the usa. the idea of europe and the usa being worlds apart is now part of accepted media discourse, reaffirmed on an almost daily basis in the mass media around such important issues as the invasion of iraq and discussion of the business regulations that govern global industry. according to reid, the growing sense that the usa is no longer the continent’s protector, but rather a potential threat—or even, perhaps, the greatest threat—has strengthened the movement toward ‘ever closer union’ among the members of the eu (24). neither the usa nor the eu are solid entities, and europe especially remains (geo)politically diverse and contradictory on a range of issues. it is, therefore, not difficult to understand the divergence of interests between europe and the usa, and by extension the rest of the world. although european states exported the idea of the border beyond europe’s boundaries as a means of creating a world order in their own image (nicolaidis and howse 2002, 770), europe maintained the aura of being the centre of western civilisation and the enlightenment values that it encompassed. this eurocentrism was not countered successfully until the advent of postcolonial theory in the 1960s and 1970s, when voices from european former colonies, such as frantz fanon’s the wretched of the earth (1961) and edward said’s orientalism (1978), began to make inroads in western scholarship. but despite the emergence of postcolonial scholarship, the burden of european history remained. in provincializing portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 7 manganas possibility of a dead europe europe dipesh chakrabarty argues that concepts such as ‘citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear the burden of european thought and history’ (2000, 4). chakrabarty is referring here to key concepts in the liberal tradition that postcolonial scholarship needs to engage with in order to ultimately subvert, or at the very least re-imagine, that thought and history. to what extent, then, does europe remain eurocentric? according to chakrabarty, ‘historians have long acknowledged that the so-called “european age” in modern history began to yield place to other regional and global configurations toward the middle of the twentieth century. european history is no longer seen as embodying anything like a ‘universal human history’ (2000, 3). there are numerous examples of the ‘other’ intruding in the european space over the last few decades. the biggest transformation has occurred with mass migration in recent years from europe’s former colonies and other developing countries. but there are also numerous examples to be found in cultural texts, such as salman rushdie’s novels, which bring the ‘third world’ into the ‘first world.’ this ‘yielding of place,’ as chakrabarty calls it (2000, 3), has certainly escalated in the postcolonial era. the idea of europe as no longer representing ‘universal human history’ is increasingly becoming more noticeable. in the twenty-first century a film can be global without including representations of the european continent. the award winning film directed by gonzález iñárritu, babel (2006), is at once celebrated for its ‘globality’ and marked by the absent presence of europe. the only european characters are the british and french tourists in morocco who are unappreciative of the crisis the american, played by brad pitt, is experiencing. europe, like those tourists, is a bystander, witnessing mass suffering and conflict in the world, but unwilling to sacrifice its comfort zone sufficiently to get itself involved. yet despite the emergence of other regions over the last century—in not only geo-political and economic measures but also cultural relevance—europe remains an entity of wonder, an enigma to ponder. with the eu integration process, the ‘idea’ of europe (at least in europe) still occupies centre stage, if not in geo-strategic importance (not many europeans would dispute the hegemonic superpower status of the usa), but at least in cultural relevance and the preservation of enlightenment values. the need to define europe, both in the popular press and in the area of european studies, has become more portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 8 manganas possibility of a dead europe complicated with the european union integration process and by the fact that now europe has also become an ‘importer’ of global realities, as exemplified by the infiltration of global diversity and inequalities into the ‘european space’ (nicolaidis and howse, 2002, 770). what does ‘perpetual peace’ mean, however, in a europe that has recently experienced bombings in madrid (2004) and london (2005), as well as increasing ‘ethnic’ conflict (for example, the french riots in late 2005 and the protests that swept some sections of the muslim world in early 2006 after the danish newspaper jyllands-posten published cartoons depicting the prophet mohammed)? on the one hand, these events demonstrate that the ‘outside’ world is already penetrating the european space. but on the other hand, despite the balkan wars, international and domestic terrorist attacks, race riots, and european participation in the us-led ‘war on terror,’ the narrative of ‘perpetual peace’ is still resonant. part of the reason for the potency of this narrative is that it operates with the twin narrative of ‘perpetual suffering.’ in ‘imagining the twentieth century,’ david bruce macdonald argues that ‘as the twentieth century drew to a close, retrospectives entered into fashion … written by some of today’s leading historians and political scientists, these have attempted, by and large, to portray the twentieth century as the most atrocious in human history, in terms of totalising ideologies, bloodshed, terror, and mass death’ (2007, 1). the problem, macdonald argues, is that retrospectives have a tendency to downplay or ignore conflict and conquest in earlier centuries. as a result, ‘the nineteenth century emerges as an age of moral values, hope, progress and enlightenment—an era squandered only from world war i onwards, leading inexorably to auschwitz, vietnam, cambodia, and yugoslavia’ (1). macdonald methodically deconstructs the idea of the twentieth century as being the most ‘atrocious’ in history, and mounts a convincing argument against that idea by highlighting the destructive legacy of colonialism in previous centuries, and by citing the genocide of the indigenous populations in the americas and australia. but the important point of macdonald’s argument, in my view, is not whether or not the twentieth century was the most destructive in history, but why it is imagined to be so. as shelley wright argues the difference between the pre and post-holocaust world is not that the world has necessarily become any more violent or evil. rather, the holocaust has forced us to ‘understand that the violence of ethnic tribalism is not portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 9 manganas possibility of a dead europe confined to africa, or asia, or the middle east, or the cities of eastern europe—it is here, at home—we are the savage’ (wright 2001, 18-9). europe has thus taken on board the ‘evil’ of the twentieth century and narrativised it through various modes of commemoration and fin de siecle memoirs. thus evil is somehow intrinsically linked to the european space, since some of the worst excesses of the twentieth century occurred on european soil, the geographic location of the first world war, most of the second world war, the holocaust, fascist dictatorial regimes, the oppressive soviet union and its satellite states, civil wars, ethnic tensions and economic devastations. when this historical context is taken into account, the eu project is nothing short of remarkable. the ex-uk prime minister tony blair acknowledged the historic dimensions of the eu integration process when complaining about the tediousness of eu summits: they do go on a bit. you know, these summits make sense if you try to have a sense of history. i mean, when the thing is getting tiresome, you have to remember what we are doing here. we are building a new world superpower. the european union is about the projection of collective power, wealth and influence. that collective strength makes individual nations more powerful— and it will make the eu as a whole a global power. (quoted in reid 2005, 2) in the narrativisation of the twentieth century as essentially a ‘european’ century of ‘total’ war, it is not surprising that the narrative script of post-1989 europe is that of ‘total’ or ‘perpetual’ peace. and this narrative script is sustained by its twin narrative of perpetual suffering: europe now has peace because it has suffered. this is a logical equation, but also one that may be subverted, as my discussion of the two novels will suggest. the narrative of ‘perpetual suffering’ might be news to aboriginal australians, to the peoples of east timor, rwanda, nicaragua, burma, and countless other localities of suffering and destruction where havoc has been wreaked on domestic populations. but according to macdonald, this underlines the trend, as chakrabarty has also noted, ‘of putting ‘europe first, the rest of the world later’ (2000, 2). the european union integration process continues the narratives of the enlightenment and the nineteenth century, skipping over the trauma of the twentieth century as more or less an historical glitch. the perpetuity of suffering is not erased, nor forgotten; rather it is commemorated, sustaining and validating the narrative of ‘perpetual peace.’ a post-historical eutopia il faut être absolument moderne we have to be utterly modern. arthur rimbaud, une saison en enfer arthur rimbaud, a season in hell portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 10 manganas possibility of a dead europe in europe almost every truism can be challenged and deconstructed: the nation-state, the border, the citizen, the immigrant, the intellectual, the peasant, the terrorist, the nationalist, the war criminal. everything in europe can be negated, turned in on itself, self-cannibalised. in the opinion pages of europe’s serious newspapers, intellectuals are given free reign to imagine europe as a negation. europe is not … one of the more recent and interesting critical approaches in imagining ‘europe’ has been by nicolaidis and howse who argue that the eu is a civilian power promoting an ‘eutopia’ through narratives of projection (nicolaidis and howse 2002). that is, the eu seeks to ‘reproduce’ itself ‘by encouraging regional integration around the world’ (2002, 768). nicolaidis and howse argue that ‘narratives of projection’ are extremely fruitful, but warn that ‘exercises in projection often lack the kind of self-awareness that would lead us to recognise how “what” is being projected is not the eu as is but an “eu-topia” (768). and that utopia itself is necessarily a contested one, and not everyone’s vision of the eu’s future. what eu is being projected becomes critical’ (769). in conclusion, the authors posit that the only way that the eu can become a meaningful utopia is by ‘bringing the outside world back in’ (769).a cursory glance at recent scholarship and popular culture, however, demonstrates that the outside world is already inside the european space on all fronts: academically, culturally, economically, and politically. it is not a matter of ‘bringing the outside world back in’ but of accommodating the ‘other’ already within, and which eu member states have been slow in recognising. another interesting approach was articulated by jacques derrida in ‘a europe of hope,’ published in le monde diplomatique in november 2004. derrida attempted to conceptualise a new ‘europe’ that could criticise every manifestation of eurocentrism without, however, rejecting or leaving europe altogether (2005, 15). in michael naas’s reading of ‘a europe of hope’: derrida would thus seem to be gesturing toward a europe with a particular tradition, a particular language—or particular languages, beginning with greek and latin—and a particular history, but a europe that then calls out for or calls us toward a europe that exceeds any particular european or eurocentric vision, a europe that might be rooted in certain european ideals, notably those of the enlightenment (democracy, freedom of thought and expression, freedom of the press, liberal education and so on), but that would call all those who hear the promise and hope of these values beyond their current understanding and deployment—whether in what is called europe today or anywhere else in the world. ‘a europe of hope’ would thus refer at once to this historical thing called europe, this continent identifiable on a map, and to a europe that portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 11 manganas possibility of a dead europe remains to come—not only in france or germany, italy or spain, but in the united states or australia, in algeria or china. (2005, 6) thus, naas argues, the ‘only real solution for the future, of actually thinking through and reflecting upon europe today not in order to say “yes” or “no” to it, but so as to criticise what has to be criticised within it and to realise the best of what it has promised’ (2005, 23). both derrida and nicolaidis and howse thus argue that although a european ideal might begin with europe, it must then seek to engage with ideas outside of europe, accommodating the best of european thought and tradition with the best that the rest of the world has to offer. a ‘europe of hope’ is, according to naas, a europe of endless, critical reflection, of analysis and discussion (naas 2005, 22). dead europe and the possibility of an island do not promote a ‘vision’ of europe, but rather, in derrida’s terms, a ‘discussion.’ both novels, however, highlight that europe does not have to ‘bring the outside world back in,’ but rather has to acknowledge that the outside world is already within the european space, blurring a multitude of borders, spaces and frontiers. in dead europe and the possibility of an island, the idea of europe as embodying ‘universal human history’ is ‘dead.’ yet whereas dead europe carries the burden of european thought and history to the extent that tsiolkas must engage with european histories and ideas in order to ultimately subvert them, the possibility of an island is marked by the absence of these historical burdens. the possibility of an island demonstrates that political ideology has been superseded by the culture of youth and image. daniel is a victim of the fallout from the 1960s’ sexual revolution: alienated by consumerism, incapable of belief, and prisoner to his restless desire (adams 2005, 15). the possibility of an island whilst evidently a scalding social critique of contemporary european society is, according to robert peluso, more than anything an attack on philosophical materialism, with ‘its favouring of rationality over sensualism, its glorification of the imperial individual over the collective human being and its predilection for seduction and domination rather than unselfish love and goodwill’ (2006, f-6). in dead europe, the outsiders are the underclass of refugees and migrants from europe’s former colonies. in the possibility of an island, however, any european who does not find glory in the ‘imperial individual’ is an outsider. in houellebecq’s narrative, therefore, almost everyone over the age of forty is superfluous. although daniel is disgusted by this ‘generational holocaust,’ he views such moral portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 12 manganas possibility of a dead europe abominations as a natural outgrowth—even an evolutionary step—of a modern consumer culture fixated on the young (schacht 2006). in dead europe, tsiolkas presents a post-communist europe free of political ideology, where the remnants of the political left and right are anachronisms in a world where ‘the sunday papers can have travel lift-outs extolling the virtues of cosmopolitan prague when a few miles down the road you can buy a young girl for sex for a few american dollars’ (2007). yet this collapse in ideological fervour in europe did not necessarily mean that ‘history’ had ended or that liberalism triumphed, as writers such as francis fukuyama (1992) argued in the early 1990s. according to humphrey mcqueen (2005), the triumphalism on the right, and the disarray on the left, blinded both sides to a third possibility: ‘the end of history as a clash of modernising ideas did not leave the field free for capitalism. rather, the end of history allowed for a resurgence of the peasant with her superstitions, her rituals of blood and soil. capitalism might have beaten off the future, but it has yet to vanquish the past. that much should have been clear in 1989’ (2005). tsiolkas exposes in dead europe the cult of superstition flourishing in a continent that is the supposed home of rationality and science. the unavoidable allegory to draw, according to syson, ‘is that something horrific is also stored in europe, with its long dark sleeping hatreds and terrible festivals of war, blood and slaughter’ (2005, 4). in dead europe, just like in michael haneke’s film caché (2005), those sleeping demons are awoken with terrifying consequences. dead europe is an obituary for the cheery optimism that swept europe in the aftermath of the fall of the berlin wall. isaac’s (and to a certain extent daniel’s) descent into ‘a season in hell’ is also a threnody for the loss of ‘authentic’ european culture. the mediterranean culture that was once concerned with the enjoyment of life and expansive notions of community has been replaced by a ‘western’ mass culture obsessed with consumption and excess. according to tsiolkas: as the nation becomes more westernised there are more and more people finding themselves alienated from the new europe … travel anywhere in the eu and you are confronted by the mass of refugees and migrants. so at the same time we are supposedly global and connected through the net and through commerce we are also building detention centres and creating laws that are about sealing ourselves off from those in exile. (2007) as a ‘sustained metaphor’ this threnody of loss extends to all local cultures of the portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 13 manganas possibility of a dead europe european union that are being disseminated in the name of creating a uniform and homogenous supra-state. deadly possibilities if the overarching theme of both novels is moral decadence, that decadence is pathologised by both tsiolkas and houellebecq as a modern syndrome, in that to be modern means ‘never being satisfied.’ according to tsiolkas, ‘i think australians and europeans and the americans are now truly decadent cultures. there is a danger in excess and the danger is a spiritual and moral emptiness’ (2007). this syndrome is an illness that subverts the rationality of cosmopolitan e-generation europeans. tsiolkas’s and houellebecq’s novels challenge the idea that cosmopolitan europe is functioning successfully alongside the ‘authentic’ traditions of european nations. instead, there are two europes – a connected europe and a disconnected europe – and both europes are increasingly in confrontation. ‘connected europe’ refers to a new generation of cosmopolitan europeans who are amoral, free, decadent, living in the present, and not tied to any traceable subjectivities from the past. these europeans are aware of the horrors and atrocities that occurred on european soil in the twentieth century but feel neither responsible for them, nor the burden of that history. instead, these europeans are ‘connected’ to each other, online and through social networks, and have more in common with each other than with the weight of their shared histories. ‘disconnected europe,’ on the other hand, refers to a europe that is removed from these social networks. these europeans are not necessarily ‘disconnected’ from the increasing ‘decadence’ and ‘excess’ that tsiolkas’s and houellebecq’s novels are criticising. rather these europeans feel the weight of their national history and the burden of the narratives of the twentieth century. both tsiolkas and houellebecq suggest that the difference between ‘connected’ and ‘disconnected’ europe lies between generations. tsiolkas laments the passing of ‘disconnected europe’ to ‘connected europe,’ and seems to suggest that an acknowledgement of this ‘loss’ is becoming ever more pressing and urgent. this is because the eu that is being unified is a western europe, leading to many other histories in europe being forgotten. thus, tsiolkas argues, ‘europe has to remember its history as being christian, jewish and muslim. it has to remember the byzantine portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 14 manganas possibility of a dead europe empire as much as it remembers the holy roman empire’ (2007). on the other hand, in the possibility of an island, houellebecq seems to suggest that because the idea that europe embodies ‘universal human history’ has become redundant, europe has entered into a new epoch of such historic dimensions that the morality and historical narratives of the past are no longer relevant. houellebecq’s novel, like arthur rimbaud before him, challenges us to be utterly modern. of course, what it means to be modern is constantly changing. daniel, the narrator in the possibility of an island, views history marching forward without him, leaving him feeling alienated. unlike tsiolkas, however, the possibility of an island suggests that there should be no lamentations for this state of affairs, that the only solution is a ‘final solution.’ the old citizens, ideas and myths (including daniel) must die and let europe connect to the global empire regardless of the consequences. there is no stopping modernity. according to john schacht, ‘if, as john donne wrote, ‘no man is an island,’ the possibility of one suggests that the sacrifices made to get there come with a hefty price tag: our common humanity’ (2006). the possibility of a dead europe is a europe where the cult of the individual has emerged as the new imperium. in america, jean baudrillard wrote: in the very heartland of wealth and liberation, you always hear the same question: ‘what are you doing after the orgy?’ what do you do when everything is available—sex, flowers, the stereotypes of life and death? this is america’s problem and, through america, it has become the whole world’s problem. (1988, 30) it has indeed become the world’s problem, especially europe’s. as baudrillard further reflects, ‘liberation has left everyone in an undefined state (it is always the same once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are)’ (1988, 46). isaac in dead europe leaves australia, a land of people still searching for a common identity, only to land in europe to discover a continent actually living kagan’s post-historical paradise, but unable to answer the age old questions: who am i?, and, where do i come from? as one australian reviewer of dead europe asked, what is the place of australia in a world where europe is dead? what happens to antipodeans when their other pole is no more (mcqueen 2005)? the other pole that is no more, is the ‘authentic,’ disconnected europe that remains in the imagination of europe’s former colonies and exiles. by the end of dead europe, isaac is so consumed by the past that it almost kills him. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 15 manganas possibility of a dead europe beneath europe’s post-historical paradise lie the phantoms that ‘connected’ europe is refusing to acknowledge and which have the potential to undermine powerful european mythologies that have so far served to create what tony blair calls a new global power. in the end, isaac is restored to life by being brought back to australia. his rescue depends on several kinds of love as much as on geography (mcqueen 2005). the story of daniel, on the other hand, does not have such a fitting ending. a post-historical paradise as conceived by houellebecq is, in the end, a dystopia. the neohuman narrations demonstrate that the frictionless existence of their perfectly modulated universe created by human reason is a living hell devoid of affection and meaning (peluso 2006, f-6). conclusion in europe today, to be utterly modern is to live in ‘perpetual peace,’ acknowledge the horrors of the ‘european century,’ and enjoy cosmopolitan lifestyles, yet at the same time to celebrate ‘national’ diversities. these mythologies cannot be objectively demonstrated; nonetheless they function discursively in order to erase the horrors of the twentieth century. it cannot be disputed that the european union project has been immensely successful in promoting these mythologies. any serious challenges to these mythologies, such as the recent invasion of iraq in 2003, lead to a mass mobilisation of european peoples on the streets in protest. the re-emergence of far-right political parties, which also have the potential to undermine these mythologies, has so far been relegated to the margins of european society. dead europe and the possibility of an island, however, highlight that beneath these mythologies lie two significant tensions. the first is that underneath europe’s post-historical paradise lurk the national stories and histories of the peoples being forgotten in the eu integration process. these stories must be acknowledged if the european union is to be true to the ideals of equality and justice. the second fundamental tension is that the eu is successfully accommodating both a cosmopolitan e-generation europe and the values and traditions of ‘authentic’ europe. tsiolkas and houellebecq demonstrate, albeit in different ways, that to be utterly modern means bringing these two different europes into confrontation. yet, in the end, although both novels do not offer us a satisfying resolution to the ‘big themes,’ they do promote a worthwhile discussion. although isaac’s photographs chronicle authentic europe’s slow death, his cousin giulia is there once again to remind us that it is impossible to know where modernity will take us: ‘this place has been here for portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 16 manganas possibility of a dead europe thousands of years and it will be here when your euro and your eu and your fucking nato will be just memories …’ (tsiolkas 2005, 106). it’s hard to argue against that. reference list adams, t. 2005, ‘the book of daniels,’ the observer, october 30, 15. baudrillard, j. 1988, america, verso, london. beck, u. 2003, ‘understanding the real europe,’ dissent, summer. [online]. available: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=483 [accessed 3 january, 2007]. bieber, f. 2002, ‘nationalist mobilization and stories of serb suffering: the kosovo myth from 600th anniversary to the present,’ rethinking history, vol. 6, no. 1 (spring), 95-110. chakrabarty, d. 2000, provincializing europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference princeton, nj, princeton university press. derrida, j. 2004, ‘une europe de l’espoir,’ le monde diplomatique, november, 3. dray, w. h. 2003, ‘on the nature and role of narrative in history,’ in g. roberts (ed.), the history and narrative reader, routledge, london, 25-39. fanon, f. 1967, the wretched of the earth, penguin, harmondsworth. fukuyama, f. 1992, the end of history and the last man, free press, new york. gonzález iñárritu, a. (dir.) 2006, babel, anonymous content. haneke, m. (dir.) 2005, caché, les films du losange. hardt, m. and negri, a. 2004, multitude, hamish hamilton, london. houellebecq, m. 2006, the possibility of an island, phoenix, london. kagan, r. 2003, paradise and power: america and europe in the new world order, atlantic books, london. kassovitz, m. (dir.) 1995, la haine, canal+. kundera, m. 1991, immortality, faber and faber, london. macdonald, d. b. 2007, ‘rethinking the twentieth century: retrospective, myth and the colonial question,’ portal: journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 4, no. 1. january. [online]. available: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/editor/issuetoc/28 [accessed 3 march, 2007]. mcqueen, h. 2005, ‘review of christos tsiolkas, dead europe,’ politics and culture, no. 4. [online]. available: http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/ [accessed 3 january, 2007]. moodysson, l. 2002, lilya 4-ever, zentropa entertainments. naas, m. 2005, ‘a last call for ‘europe,’ theory & event, vol. 8, no. 1 [online]. available: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/archive.html#8.1 [accessed 3 january, 2007]. nicolaidis, k. & howse, r. 2002, ‘‘this is my eutopia …’: narrative as power,’ journal of common market studies, vol. 40, no. 4, 767-92. peluso, r. 2006, ‘the book of daniels: houellebecq novel focuses on comedian and his two clones,’ pittsburgh post-gazette, october 8, f-6. reid, t. r. 2005, the united states of europe: the new superpower and the end of american supremacy, penguin press, new york. rimbaud, a. 2001, collected poems, oxford university press, oxford. said, e. 1978, orientalism, london, routledge & kegan paul. schacht, j. 2006, ‘the possibility of an island by michel houellebecq,’ pop matters, 22 may. [online]. available: http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/p/possibility-of-an-island.shtml, accessed 20 march, 2007. somers, m. 2003, ‘narrative, narrative identity, and social action: rethinking english working-class formation,’ in g. roberts (ed.), the history and narrative reader, routledge, london, 354-74. syson, i. 2005, ‘a taste of european decay,’ the age, may 28, 4. tsiolkas, c. 2005, dead europe, vintage, sydney. tsiolkas, c. 2007, ‘q&a with christos tsiolkas,’ random house (australia) press release, 3 january. white, h. 2003, ‘the historical text as literary artifact,’ in g. roberts (ed.), the history and narrative reader, routledge, london, 221-36. wright, s. 2001, international human rights, decolonization and globalization: becoming human, routledge, new york. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 17 http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=483 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/editor/issuetoc/28 http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsand the possibility of a ‘dead europe’: tsiolkas, houellebecq an nicholas manganas, university of technology sydney portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal the exorcist in istanbul: processes of transcultural appropriation within turkish popular cinema iain robert smith, university of nottingham rather than the manufactured clash of civilisations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. (said 2003: xxii) in the recent documentary crossing the bridge: the sound of istanbul (dir. fatik akin 2005), the record label bosses ahmet uluğ and cem yegül comment on the interstitial status of istanbul: cem yegül: istanbul is asia and europe. it’s east and it’s west. ahmet uluğ: but actually that’s an advantage. we try to be european, but at the same time we’re open to the east. that’s a part of us too. we’re open to both sides. the film goes on to illustrate this thesis with a focus on istanbul’s varied musical culture, which ranges from traditional arabesque singers such as orhan gencebay through to contemporary acts, such as the rapper ceza and the neo-psychedelic rock group baba zula. exploring the ways in which turkish musicians have borrowed and adapted elements of musical traditions as diverse as hip-hop, fusion and post-rock, crossing the bridge lays emphasis on the idea of istanbul as a ‘bridge’ between europe and asia both geographically and culturally. indeed, these processes of borrowing and adaptation are not simply a contemporary phenomenon. transcultural appropriation1 has a long history within turkish popular 1 i purposefully use the term ‘transcultural appropriation’ as this is a study of appropriation ‘across’ national and cultural boundaries. in previous decades, a study of this kind may well have used the term ‘intercultural’ to describe such relationships, yet i have purposefully chosen ‘trans’ (from the latin smith the exorcist in istanbul portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 2 culture, ranging from the literary borrowings of the edebiyyât-ı cedîde (new literature) movement in the early 20th century through to the more recent musical reworkings of the dolapdere big gang. this tendency is particularly evident within turkish cinema of the 1970s, in which elements of american popular culture were being appropriated and utilised in a diverse range of cinematic contexts including 3 dev adam (dir. t. fikret ucak 1973), which transposes the characters captain america, santo and spiderman to modern day istanbul, and turist ömer uzay yolunda (dir. hulki saner 1974), which inserts the indigenous character turist ömer into a remake of the star trek episode ‘the man trap.’ this article will focus on şeytan (dir. metin erksan 1974), an unofficial, unlicensed remake of the exorcist (dir. william friedkin 1973) with specific attention paid to the ways in which this remake replaces the prevailing catholic iconography with that of islam. there have been some important developments in remake theory in recent years (horton 1998; mazdon 2000; verevis 2006) that have attempted to move beyond reductive value judgements and stale conceptions of textual fidelity to analyse remakes through the ‘material, historical and political conditions which surround and penetrate the moment of production and subsequent moment(s) of reception’ (mazdon 2000: 26). building on this work, and utilising tom o’regan’s model of cultural exchange and transmission, this article seeks to build a model of transcultural appropriation attendant to the underlying tensions and negotiations within this hybrid cultural text. initially, this interrogation of material conditions necessitates a discussion of the status of turkey within contemporary political debates, critically examining the notion of turkey as a country ‘torn’ between east and west. second, the article outlines some of the key historical developments in turkish popular cinema, paying especial attention to the phenomenon of yeşilçam out of which şeytan developed. third, a close textual analysis of the film attends to the ways in which this remake transforms elements of the exorcist and the contextual factors that shaped these changes. finally, the article proposes a model of transcultural appropriation that locates these transformations within the wider socio-cultural climate in which they were enacted. preposition meaning ‘across, through’) rather than ‘inter’ (from the latin preposition meaning ‘between, among’) as i wish to indicate the fluidity and movement of ‘across’ in transcultural, as opposed to intercultural with its emphasis on ‘between’ cultures and the resultant sense of separateness. smith the exorcist in istanbul portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 3 bridge of civilisations few, if any issues in international relations have generated as much myth as that of an alleged ‘islamic threat.’ since the late 1970s, and more particularly since the iranian revolution of 197879, the issue of ‘islam’ and of its supposed challenge to the ‘west’ has become a matter of enduring international preoccupation, and one which politicians within western european states, as well as a number of islamic leaders, have chosen to highlight. (halliday 1996: 107) in 1993 samuel p. huntington famously predicted a ‘clash of civilisations’ between ‘islam’ and ‘the west’ following the collapse of marxist-leninism and the end of the cold war (1993: 22-28). according to this model of international affairs, the fall of the berlin wall signalled the end of the mutually supportive security ties between the usa and muslim states, and a subsequent shift in power within many muslim countries towards more anti-western political parties. without the common enemy of the communist ussr, previous alliances would gradually fall away and international conflict would become less about ideology or economics and more about opposing cultures and civilisations. as edward said later argued, such a model of transcultural relations is fundamentally reductive and incomplete. huntington’s thesis centres on the interactions of eight major civilisations, of which ‘the west’ and ‘islam’ take up the structuring opposition. such a model reduces the dynamics and plurality of these civilisations to essentialised blocs, which, as said argues, paints the world, ‘as if hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where popeye and bluto bash each other mercilessly’ (said 2001). significantly, when huntington deals with turkey’s position in this global model, he attempts to undermine the prevalent model of turkey as a cultural bridge, painting it instead as a ‘torn’ country: turkish leaders regularly described their country as a ‘bridge’ between cultures. turkey, prime minister tansu ciller argued in 1993, is both a ‘western democracy’ and ‘part of the middle east’ and ‘bridges two civilisations, physically and philosophically’…a bridge, however, is an artificial creation connecting two solid entities but is part of neither. when turkey’s leaders term their country a bridge, they euphemistically confirm that it is torn. (huntington 1998: 149) huntington’s model relies on a binary opposition being made between east and west, asia and europe, refusing to acknowledge the dynamic interdependency and heterogeneity of these cultural blocs. stretching his thesis to fit a country that pointedly refuses to fit such a binary, huntington falls back on empty rhetoric rather than addressing the fundamental difficulties such a model faces when discussing a nation smith the exorcist in istanbul portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 4 such as turkey. turkey is both muslim and secular; a country that is both european and asian. indeed, istanbul, the only metropolis in the world that straddles two continents, has at one time served as the capital city of the roman empire (330-395 ce), the byzantine empire (395-1204 and 1261-1453 ce), the latin empire (1204-1261 ce), and the ottoman empire (1453-1922 ce), its cityscape extending on both the european side (thrace) and the asian side (anatolia) of the bosphorus strait. designating turkey as a ‘torn country’ presents the world in terms of monolithic blocks far removed from the dynamic interactions of culture that such a history indicates.2 * * * when mustafa kemal atatürk came to power and founded the turkish republic in 1923, he instituted westernising reforms aiming to break away from the ottoman legacy and to orientate turkey decidedly towards europe (chaudhuri 2005: 67). inspired by the european republican model and the writings of muslim secularist ziya gökalp, atatürk brought in a number of key reforms designed to radically alter the shape and structure of the society. symbolised in the six arrows of his party’s emblem—populism, republicanism, nationalism, secularism, statism and reformism—these reforms included such symbolic changes as the banning of the fez in 1925, the introduction of a new code of law in 1926, and the replacement of the ottoman script (based on arabic with persian influences) with the latin alphabet in 1928. most controversial of all atatürk’s reforms were those related to secularism, including the abolishment of the caliphate—the supreme political office of islam worldwide—the disestablishment of the state religion and the removal of all islamic practices from public life. underlying this was a sense of turkish nationalism and a desire for turkey to reject its ottoman history and become a new ‘nation-state’. as nezih erdoğan and deniz göktürk note, 2 indeed, it is worth noting that the ottoman empire was itself very much part of europe and european history, as well as asian/middle eastern history, in both a geographical sense (at its zenith, the empire reached to the ‘doors’ of vienna), and a more metaphorical sense (the values of ‘christian’ western europe were partly constructed in opposition to their ottoman ‘other’ in the east). smith the exorcist in istanbul portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 5 after the founding of the republic in 1923, a nationalist discourse that had already been gaining power in the final years of the ottoman empire was disseminated directly by the state, aiming to legitimise a transition from ummet (from umma, meaning the islamic community or population) to millet (from mille, meaning nation). (erdoğan & göktürk 2001: 534) with the traditional association between state and religion having been dissolved, the nation-state became an instrument in what nizayi berkes calls ‘the real aim of the turkish transformation’ (1997: 510): modernisation and economic development. of course, we should not neglect that this embrace of secularism in the name of modernisation was itself heavily politically charged. as cultural anthropologist yael navaro-yashin argues in faces of the state: secularism and public life in turkey, “secularism is not a neutral paradigm, but a state ideology as well as a hegemonic public discourse in contemporary turkey” (2002: 6). this nation-building involved a narcissistic idealisation of collectivity, what robins and aksoy term the ‘deep nation,’ which, they argue, gradually unravelled throughout the secularist/islamist conflict in late twentieth century turkey. for these authors the story of turkish cinema, ‘can be told in terms of the progressive disordering of the ideal of the kemalist nation, which may be regarded as a productive disordering’ (2000: 215). indeed, the popular cinema of the period reflects this ‘disordering of the kemalist state,’ with the predominant yeşilçam mode of cinema often reflecting ‘traditional, usually folk-islamic, values’ (209) far away from the republican ideal of the nation. yeşilçam3 was the name given to the mode of popular film production that dominated the turkish cinema sector between the 1960s and 1980s. comparable to the term hollywood, yeşilçam (literally ‘green pine’) refers to both a physical locale where many of the film studios were located in istanbul, and the style of popular filmmaking that was produced by these studios. throughout this period, imported cultural forms and materials were often being reworked and adapted for the local audience, a practice that reflected an increasingly industrial mode of production within the turkish film industry. in the context of these cultural shifts, i will now turn to the film şeytan, a turkish remake of the us horror feature the exorcist, and a film produced at a time of rising islamic consciousness. 3 for a further discussion of yeşilçam, see my forthcoming article, ‘beam me up, omer: transnational media flow and the cultural politics of the turkish star trek remake’ (2008). smith the exorcist in istanbul portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 6 fantastik türk sineması şeytan marked a collaboration between two of the key figures in turkish cinema history: producer hulki saner and director metin erksan. saner, one of the most successful and prolific filmmakers in turkey, began the project after seeing that the exorcist was courting media attention and inciting controversy around the world. at a time when censorship of us films was still commonplace—the exorcist was not to be officially released in turkey until 1982—saner decided to capitalise on this public interest by producing a turkish version of the film for the domestic audience. indeed, saner, who had previously achieved success with both the turist ömer and aysecik series, resolved to make this a prestige project, hiring acclaimed director metin erksan to helm the film and giving him a relatively large budget for a yeşilçam production. erksan himself was already a celebrated filmmaker, one of the figureheads of the social realist movement in the 1960s, and winner of the golden bear at the 1964 berlin film festival for the film susuz yaz (dry summer, 1964). while he is generally seen to have gradually abandoned the social outlook of his earlier works, moving towards a more ‘popular’ mode of film production,4 erksan was a filmmaker of considerable weight and stature to bring to this yeşilçam project. while it would be easy to position this remake as an unoriginal copy of the prior film, this study will follow lucy mazdon’s innovative work on remakes, looking less at questions of ‘origins’ and ‘authenticity’ and more towards a study of remakes that shows the remake to be a site of ‘difference’ rather than a site of the ‘same’. as mazdon argues, rather than a search for origins (the linear causality of the relationship between the ‘original’ and the ‘copy’) a study of this kind involves a description of exchange and difference; the unbroken vertical axis which leads from the ‘original’ text to the remake as ‘copy’ is replaced by the circles of intertextuality and hybridity. (mazdon 2000: 27) furthermore, the prevailing critical mood to condemn remakes for their supposed lack of originality neglects the ways in which elements are appropriated and transformed within a particular socio-cultural context. as tom o’regan argues in his discussion of australian national cinema (1996), imitations and adaptations are commonly 4 erksan was later to helm an adaptation of hamlet, intikam melegi kadin hamlet (angel of vengeance, 1976), in which hamlet is a woman, ophelia is a man, and rosencrantz and guildenstern become two young women named rezzan and gul. smith the exorcist in istanbul portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 7 dismissed as pale imitations of the ‘original’ works. to correct this deficiency, o’regan proposes a model of appropriation that is focused less on the concept of imitation and more on the notion of transformation and negotiation. centrally, this leads o’regan to postulate that the distinctiveness of austrialian national cinema may not rest in some notion of separate australian-ness but, rather, ‘may be found in its negotiation of cultural transfers’ (219). within a turkish context, savas arslan has recently introduced the term ‘turkification,’ which relies on a similarly transformative notion of cultural exchange. reclaiming the term from its use as derogatory slang,5 arslan uses the term to describe the various practices of “translating, transforming or rendering western cinemas” (96). importantly, rather than seeing these transformations in terms of two discrete national cinemas coming into contact, arslan lays emphasis on the fluidity of these cultural formations and their overlapping, intersecting nature: turkification is a translation of the west. however, this translation does not simply take place between two languages, but also through other elements of cultural multiplicities. it is not reducible to a transfer of one set to another, each clearly coded and therefore decidable. here the west and the east are not totalities that are identifiable with a firm set of elements; instead they may be thought of as planes on which various particularities float. (arslan 2006: 98) this article, then, will analyse şeytan through an interrogation of the ways in which the home culture restructures the imported text and by locating these negotiations within the specific socio-cultural climate in which they were enacted. rather then searching for some essential ‘turkishness’ or indeed ‘westernness’ in the text, this will be an analysis of the ways in which these negotiations reflect the contextual conditions that shaped this particular transcultural appropriation. şeytan the film, as in the exorcist, opens on an archaeological expedition in the middle east where an elderly man discovers various historical artifacts signifying the devil. we then cut to a domestic scene featuring ayten (meral taygun) and her twelve year old daughter gul (canan perver). during the subsequent scenes, the theme from the exorcist (mike oldfield’s ‘tubular bells’) is repeatedly used to set tone and suspense.6 5 in germany, the term getürkt (‘turkified’) has come to be used as a derogatory term meaning ‘falsified’ or ‘corrupted,’ and is associated with the large turkish diaspora in the country. 6 such an act of unlicensed plagiarism of music from the source films was not uncommon. smith the exorcist in istanbul portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 8 up till this point, the film is a close recreation of the plot and characters of the exorcist. significantly, however, the introduction of tugrul bilge (cihan unal) represents an important moment of translation. replacing the role of father karros from the exorcist, tugrul bilge is a secular writer/journalist who is researching the ancient notion of demonic possession from the perspective of mental health. indeed, the film offers a prolonged close-up of the cover of his book, satan: the case of demon possession and the rite of exorcism in universal religions under the light of modern perspectives on mental diseases, serving both to introduce the audience to the notion of exorcism, while avoiding the problem of having a central character who is questioning his faith in allah. translative changes such as this have led some critics to condemn şeytan as internally disjointed.7 by transforming the exorcist into an islamic context, the film attempts to compensate for the lack of an earthly presence of satan in islam by replacing it with the notion of jinn and the spirit iblis. these changes are evident in the exorcism scene itself: imam: allah, i find shelter in your holy name. i praise your greatness. your boundless power will end this torture made by the creature you created from the fires to the one you created from the clay…banish this cruel iblis from the soul of this innocent servant. such expository dialogue points to the emphasis the film lays on explaining the nature of exorcism to the audience, a concept not ‘incompatible’ but certainly unfamiliar in contemporary turkish culture. significantly, at the start of the narrative, neither father karros in the exorcist nor tugrul bilge in şeytan believe in ‘exorcisms’ and they attempt to explain away their respective lead girl’s troubles in terms of modern, scientific understandings of mental illness rather than seeing it in terms of ‘possession’ per se. this scepticism about religious dogma forms the core theme of both the exorcist and şeytan, in that the various scientific methods for explaining the girl’s illness, which include psychotherapy, shock therapy, and a lumbar puncture, fail to clarify what happened to gul. the key revelation in each character’s narrative trajectory is that scientific rationale cannot explain all that happens in the world and that we need to return to religion, a notion that has especial resonance in secular kemalist turkey. 7 indeed, savas arslan goes as far as to call the film ‘incoherent’ for this very reason. smith the exorcist in istanbul portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 9 as we can see in figures 1 and 2, the adaptation from catholicism to islam further necessitated a number of iconographic alterations. the moment from the exorcist in which regan defiles herself using the cross is adapted with the use of a jinn shaped paper knife (figure 1). while in the exorcism ceremony itself, instead of using christian holy water, the imam uses zemzem water from the holy well of zemzem, and reads from the qu-ran rather than the bible (figure 2). significantly, however, these are not simply cosmetic changes but subtly impact the development of the narrative. most importantly, it is the ending of the film that exhibits the most significant alteration. rather than ending with the death of father karros, as in the exorcist, şeytan adds an extra scene in which gul and her mother visit a mosque. in these few moments, gul spends some reflective time with an imam while the camera pans the interiors of the mosque, reconfirming the renewal of islam in these characters lives. going beyond the bleak, harrowing ending suggested in the exorcist, şeytan offers a more redemptive conclusion laying emphasis on the religious overtones of the narrative. both the exorcist and şeytan deal with the perceived failings of scientific rationalism and propose the continued relevance of religion in the modern world. as william friedkin states in his introduction to the exorcist dvd, the exorcist is a film about the mystery of faith…it’s a story that can perhaps make you question your own value system. it strongly and realistically tries to make the case for spiritual forces in the universe, both good and evil. (warner bros 1999) figure 1: şeytan (metin erksan, 1974) smith the exorcist in istanbul portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 10 figure 2: şeytan (metin erksan, 1974) this theme had added significance in post-atatürk turkey, with şeytan produced at a time when the kemalist embrace of western conceptions of modernisation and rationalism was being questioned and islam was again coming to the fore in turkish political life. the reforms of atatürk centred on taking islam out of public life and moving turkey towards a more european model of a rationalist, secular culture. to produce a film, then, which highlights the failings of this rationalist, secular discourse, and explicitly celebrates islam for being able to defeat the ‘evil’ forces in the world, should be read as a partial repudiation of atatürk’s reforms and an attempt to reconfirm the importance and validity of islam in the modern world. as kaya özkaracalar notes, ‘this is by no means a cosmetic issue for turkey, but on the contrary, one of the major causes of social unrest in this country’ (2003: 214). conclusion national audiences, critics and filmmakers appropriate, negotiate, and transform the international cinema in various ways…any claims we may make about the space of – and distinctiveness of – [national cinemas] must turn on the participation, negotiation, adaptation and hybridisation following on from unequal cultural transfers. (o’regan 1996: 231) as should be clear, then, şeytan is not an incoherent attempt to simply plagiarise a western style horror film, but instead is an attempt to appropriate elements from a prior film in order to comment on, and reflect upon, issues that had significant resonance in the turkish culture of the time. it is a ‘turkification’ of the exorcist that restructures smith the exorcist in istanbul portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 11 the imported text in order to affirm the relevance of islam in contemporary secular turkey. at a time when a clash of civilisations is being widely predicted, whether between islam and christianity or more broadly the east and the west, it is time to pay attention to the overlapping, intersecting nature of cultures and the hybrid, symbiotic relationship between them. opposing the essentialist positions that envision cultures as ‘pure’ and under threat of being tainted by the ‘other,’ it is my intention that this model of transcultural exchange will draw attention to the intricate processes of borrowing and exchange through which cultures evolve, and go somewhat towards answering that call from edward said with which i opened. reference list akin, f. (dir.) 2005, crossing the bridge: the sound of istanbul, corazón international. arslan, s. 2006, hollywood alla turca: a history of cinema in turkey, unpublished phd thesis, ohio state university. berkes, n. 1997, the development of secularism in turkey. 2nd edition, hurst, london. chaudhuri, s. 2005, contemporary world cinema; europe, the middle east, east asia and south asia. edinburgh university press, edinburgh. erdoğan, n. and göktürk, d. 2001, ‘turkish cinema,’ companion encyclopaedia of middle eastern and north african film, ed. o. leaman, routledge, london, 533-73. erksan, m. (dir.) 1964, susuz yaz, hitit. _____ (dir.) 1974, şeytan, saner film. _____ (dir.) 1976, intikam melegi kadin hamlet, ugur film. fikret ucak, t, (dir.) 1973, 3 dev adam, renkli. friedkin, w. (dir.) 1973, the exorcist, warner brothers. gürata, a. 2006, ‘translating modernity: remakes in turkish cinema,’ asian cinemas: a reader and guide, eds. d. eleftheoritis and g. needham, edinburgh university press, edinburgh, 242-54. halliday, f. 1996, islam and the myth of confrontation. ib taurus, london. horton, a. and mcdougal s. 1998, play it again, sam: retakes on remakes. university of california press, berkeley. huntington, s. 1993, ‘clash of civilizations,’ foreign affairs, vol. 72, no. 3, (summer), 22-28. _______ 1998, the clash of civilisations and the remaking of world order. touchstone, london. kraidy, m. 2005, hybridity, or the cultural logic of globalization. temple university press, philadelphia. lake, m. (ed.) 2005, the eu & turkey: a glittering prize or a millstone? federal trust, london. lotman, y. 1990, the universe of the mind: a semiotic theory of culture. ib tauris, london. mazdon, l. 2000, encore hollywood: remaking french cinema. bfi, london. navaro-yashin, y. 2002, faces of the state: secularism and public life in turkey. princeton university press, princeton. o’regan, t. 1996, australian national cinema. routledge, london. özkaracalar, k. 2003, ‘between appropriation and innovation: turkish horror cinema,’ in fear without frontiers: horror cinema across the globe, ed. s. schneider, fab press, london, 204-17. pang, l. 2006, cultural control and globalization in asia: copyright, piracy and cinema. routledge, london. robins, k. and aksoy, a. 2000, ‘deep nation: the national question and turkish cinema culture’ in cinema and nation, eds. m. hjort and s. mackenzie, routledge, london, 203-21. said, e. 2003 (1978), orientalism: western conceptions of the orient. 25th anniversary edition, penguin, london. smith the exorcist in istanbul portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 12 _______ 2001, ‘the clash of ignorance,’ the nation, 22 oct. online. available: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011022/said (accessed 30 march 2007). saner, h. (dir.) 1974, turist ömer uzay yolunda, saner film. scognamillo g. and demirhan, m. 1999, fantastik turk sinemas, kabalc yaynevi, istanbul. smith, i. 2008 (forthcoming), ‘beam me up, omer: transnational media flow and the cultural politics of the turkish star trek remake,’ in velvet light trap, 61 (spring). simpson, c. 2006, ‘turkish cinema’s resurgence: the ‘deep nation’ unravels,’ senses of cinema, vol. 6, no. 39. online. available: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/39/turkish_cinema.html (accessed 30 march 2007). verevis, c. 2006, film remakes. edinburgh university press, edinburgh. warner brothers 1999. ‘the fear of god documentary’ on the exorcist: 25th anniversary edition, dir. w. friedkin [dvd], warner brothers. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: averis, k. 2018. transposing gender in the diaspora: linda lê’s les aubes (2000) and in memoriam (2007). portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 31-42. https://doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v15i1-2.5735 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au research article transposing gender in the diaspora: linda lê’s les aubes (2000) and in memoriam (2007) kate averis universidad de antioquia corresponding author: kate averis, universidad de antioquia, calle 67 número 53 108 p.o box 1226, medellin, colombia. katherine.averis@udea.edu.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5735 article history: received 08/09/2017; revised 03/08/2018; accepted 03/08/2018; published 23/08/2018 abstract linda lê’s is one of the most resonant voices of the vietnamese diaspora in francophone writing, and her works are frequently read through the lens of exile and encounter with the other. while not engaging with explicit representations of the diasporic experience, lê’s fictional and non-fictional texts are profoundly marked by the dislocation and alienation associated with the experience. this article considers the ways in which linda lê’s fictional writing surpasses the author’s own particular experience of the vietnamese diaspora to offer a literary universe in which the disruptions of diaspora are expressed through the depiction of resistant modes of being and belonging. focusing on two recent novels, les aubes (2000) and in memoriam (2007), this article analyses lê’s resistant construction of femininity, arguing that it is prompted and even enabled by the necessary transitions and transpositions of the diasporic experience. through an examination of the sisterly solidarity, gender alterity and (in)corporeality that are foregrounded in these novels, the analysis explores lê’s intratextual disruption of inherited models of femininity and modes of participation in domestic and sexual relationships, and draws a link with lê’s extratextual literary universe to reveal the feminist ethics that underpins her resistance to gendered hierarchies. résumé la voix de linda lê est l’une des plus significatives de la diaspora vietnamienne dans la littérature francophone et ses œuvres sont fréquemment lues dans l’optique de l’exil et de la rencontre avec l’autre. en contournant la représentation explicite de l’expérience diasporique, ses textes autant fictionnels que non-fictionnels sont néanmoins profondément marqués par declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 31 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5735 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:katherine.averis@udea.edu.com https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5735 les ruptures et l’aliénation de cette expérience. cet article examine la manière dont l’écriture fictionnelle de linda lê dépasse la propre expérience que l’auteure a fait de la diaspora vietnamienne, pour construire un univers littéraire dans lequel les heurts de l’expérience se traduisent par des modes d’être et d’appartenir contestataires. tout en se concentrant sur la construction de la féminité résistante dans deux romans récents, les aubes (2000) et in memoriam (2007), l’article avance l’idée que se sont les transitions et transpositions imposées par l’expérience diasporique qui l’ont rendue non seulement possible mais nécessaire. à travers l’étude de la solidarité sororale, l’altérité sexuelle et l’(in)corporéité au sein de ces deux romans, cet analyse explore d’une part la contestation des modèles hérités de la féminité, et de l’autre part, le refus de participer à des relations domestiques et sexuelles conventionnelles. en conclusion, il s’attache à démontrer comment ce lien entre les féminités contestataires de cette auteure singulière et son univers littéraire intertextuel participe d’une éthique féministe qui soustend la résistance aux hiérachies genrées. keywords linda lê, les aubes, in memoriam, diaspora, gender, feminist ethics; genre, l’éthique féministe linda lê’s corpus of fictional and non-fictional works spans the last three decades and underlines the singularity of individual experiences of displacement within the collective experience of the vietnamese diaspora, ‘one of the largest and most visible diasporas of the late twentieth century’ (nguyen 2015: 7). lê’s novels and short stories, in particular, offer a closerange, granular view of the personal impact of the disruption of familial and social networks caused by the dispersal of over two million vietnamese people to, principally, the usa and canada, france, and australia (nguyen 2015: 8). lê arrived in france in 1977 at the age of fourteen and published her first literary text in 1987; today, she is one of the most resonant voices of the vietnamese diaspora in francophone writing and her works are frequently read through the lens of exile and encounter with the other. yet unlike her francophone vietnamese literary contemporaries, such as kim lefèvre and anna moï, lê is less concerned with writing ‘narratives that … take place in vietnam and give voice to vietnamese characters’ (kurmann 2016: 35) or with explicit representations of her own departure from vietnam and settlement in france, privileging instead the associated themes of dislocation, guilt, trauma and alienation. in this sense, lê’s writing reflects the problematic intercultural subjectivity expressed in the works of an earlier generation of francophone vietnamese writers ‘taught to revere and even identify with a culture that nonetheless held them apart as inferior’ (britto 2004: 7–8). for these vietnamese writers of the colonial period, educated under the french colonial education system which actively affirmed the superiority of french culture and clearly marked vietnam as inferior, the french language offered an ambivalent means to reappropriate the french cultural tools that they had inherited in order to claim a space of self-representation and assert a sense of identity (britto 2004: 25–26). lê’s communication of the impact of forced displacement and diaspora, if not explicitly then tellingly, reveals some of the tensions of this intercultural position in a corpus that is ‘profoundly marked by the trauma of postcolonial exile, even as it seeks to surpass the specifics of the author’s own time and place, and to conceive of the work of literature as a universal space of aesthetic creation’ (barnes 2014: 25). this article considers the ways in which linda lê’s fictional writing surpasses the author’s own particular experience of the dislocation of diaspora to offer a literary universe in which alienation is expressed through the depiction of resistant modes of being and belonging. it focuses, in averis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201832 particular, on lê’s disruption of inherited models of femininity and modes of participation in familial and sexual relationships to reveal a strong feminist undercurrent in her fictional writing. lê’s works are not often read in terms of their feminist ethics, and certain features of her novels and short stories—such as the virtual absence of any affirmative female relationships—have been read as evidence of a suppression of the feminine, or an absence of female solidarity. yet, as gillian ni cheallaigh argues, ‘the isolation of lê’s heroines from other females is moderated and qualified by the motif of the sister and sororial solidarity’ (2015: 192). forged literary or symbolic sisterly relationships counter the apparent absence of female relationships in lê’s works, and form the basis of her feminist engagement with gendered identities and relationships. this analysis examines lê’s strategies of resistance to gendered hierarchies and normative identities through her presentation of sisterly solidarity, gender alterity and (in)corporeality to reveal the presence of a feminist ethics underpinning her works, despite the author’s declared aversion to aligning herself with feminist discourse (kurmann 2016: 15). drawing on leslie barnes’ observation that lê’s ‘literary innovation is intimately connected to [the] author’s position between, and experience of, france on the one hand and vietnam on the other’ (barnes 2014: 2), this article argues that these resistant feminist strategies are prompted and even enabled by the author’s diasporic experience, and the transposition of self and identity that such displacement demands. if, in order to reassert a sense of self, the diasporic subject must renegotiate the ties between self and other in the new setting, this process may also involve a revision of the nature of those ties in the new surroundings. the task of ‘translating’ oneself in the many (social, cultural and linguistic) contours of the new setting is at once necessary and impossible, such that this ineluctable process might be best understood as one of ‘transposition’ of the self into the new environment. the present analysis thus borrows from derrida’s notion of ‘the necessary and impossible task of translation’ to consider the subjective translation undergone in the disaporic setting (derrida 2007: 197). if transposition in music is to play or rewrite a composition in a key other than the one in which it was originally written, and to transpose a piece of writing means to relocate it in another time and space with the necessary shifts that this entails, the transposition of the self might be understood as a reaccommodation of self in the new cultural and often linguistic setting in the diaspora. if for derrida, ‘“peter” in this sense is not a translation of pierre, any more than “londres” is a translation of london,’ neither is linda lê merely a self-translation in the diaspora, but a cultural and linguistic transposition in france of the young girl who left vietnam in 1977 (derrida 2007: 198). well-known for her much-cited resistance to imposed categories of either literary or personal identities (yeager 1997: 256–257), lê applies equally resistant and disruptive strategies in the construction of her fictional characters. the present analysis focuses on two novels which portray female protagonists who are represented in highly ambiguous terms: les aubes [dawns] (2000), and the more recent in memoriam (2007), while drawing connections between these and other works by lê. both of these novels posit alternative models of femininity through the physical and psychological representation of their female protagonists, to offer alternative modes of participation in sexual and domestic relationships to those offered by hierarchised, patriarchal arrangements. les aubes: naming and narrating femininity les aubes is narrated in the first person by a young man who has lost his sight in a failed suicide attempt. he attributes his persistent suicidal drive to an unhappy childhood caught in the crossfire of his parents’ violent relationship, and declares his only solace in life to have been his dedication to three women: vega, forever, and sola. the narrator recounts his past, and transposing gender in the diaspora: linda lê’s les aubes (2000) and in memoriam (2007) portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201833 particularly his infatuation with forever, to vega, the young woman with whom he falls in love when he employs her to read to him upon losing his sight. the deceased forever is, herself, a victim of suicide, committed following the narrator’s stay with her during his childhood. prompted by two early suicide attempts in childhood, the narrator’s stay with forever only exacerbates his suicidal drive, which the father sought to eradicate by sending him to stay with his own ex-lover, and the sojourn eventually culminates in the third (failed) suicide attempt that results in the narrator’s loss of sight. the three female figures of les aubes are drawn together in a circle of suicide and literature that revolves around the narrator when vega reads to him the poetry of the tragic figure of sola (also a victim of suicide), to whose works forever had introduced him during his stay with her. for the narrator, vega, forever, and sola thus come to form a triad, and he refers to them collectively as ‘ses trois muses.’1 while vega and forever appear as characters in the novel, the figure of sola takes the form of a literary reference, as the author of the poetry adored by forever and read to the narrator by vega. as well as evoking the innate symbolism of vietnamese names, and revealing one of the ways in which lê tacitly weaves her vietnamese cultural knowledge into her french narrative (roberts 2003: 334), the english and latinate origins of their names reinforces the transcultural texture of lê’s writing. emily vaughan roberts observes the effect of the symbolic naming, typical of lê’s characters and also present in les aubes, in underlining the psychological dimension of their characterisation over any traits that might be grounded in any national or familial heritage (334). severed from any pre-existing heritage by such symbolic naming, their identities become defined in relation to the male narrator in an illustration of the defining and hierarchising power of patriarchal law. granted to them by the male narrator, who himself remains nameless and faceless, such symbolic names are employed by lê in a tactic observed by warren motte to be a ‘highly deliberate one: a name is after all the first guarantor of identity within a group, and to be nameless is to be very largely unidentified’ (55–56). the unidentifiable male narrator in les aubes thus fulfils the role of patriarchal law when he names and designates the identities of the women around him, drawing them together in a celestial constellation that orbits around him in a gesture that the triad will be seen to circumvent. their role as guiding lights of inspiration is further reinforced by their description as the narrator’s ‘muses’, recalling an earlier mythological female triad in lê’s fiction: the two sisters and cousin of les trois parques (1997a; the three fates 1997b).2 as this novel’s title indicates, these three female characters might be read as a transposition into a postcolonial francophone tradition of the moirai of greek mythology, ‘better known to modern readers under their latin name of the fates’ (rose 2005: 18). regularly represented as spinners who measure and cut the thread of human destiny, and most often depicted in literature as old women, who ‘were above all others the traditional spinners of the greek household’ (18), lê’s fates are young women locked in antagonistic relationships driven by self-interest and rivalry, in contrast with the severe, stern, yet co-operative elderly spinners of antiquity.the antagonistic (genealogical) sisterly bonds in les trois parques are rewritten in les aubes, where a forged literary sorority emerges between the three female figures, depicted as a community of writers 1 ‘his three muses’ (all translations are my own). 2 for an exposition of the mythological dimensions of this novel, see loucif (2009). averis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201834 and readers which exceeds the purview of the narrator, as illustrated by forever’s legacy of sola’s works to vega, via the medium of the male narrator.3 as first noted by michèle bacholle-bošković (2006) and developed by alexandra kurmann, such forged literary sororities are not limited to the characters within lê’s fictional universe, but extend to her intertextual ‘intellectual engagement with a predominantly european cohort of writers’, one of the most consistent interlocutors being the mid-twentieth-century austrian poet and writer, ingeborg bachmann (kurmann 2016: 2).4 kurmann meticulously traces the ‘sixteen-year intertextual commitment to the writer’ that threads through lê’s writing to reveal not only the transnational but also the complex intertextual dimensions of her œuvre (2). after being addressed since 1989 in lê’s non-fictional works and evoked in her fictional texts, bachmann finally appears in fictional form behind the pseudonym ‘sola’ in les aubes,5 such that the sisterly rapport that sola bears with forever and vega is reflected in lê’s extratextual interchange with her literary precursor. where, as kurmann notes, women in lê’s previous works of fiction suffer from increasingly unbearable degrees of isolation and mistreatment (14), this gives way in les aubes to a literary sorority, which displaces the centrality of the male narrator. just as the patriarchal inheritance of either the french or vietnamese literary tradition is superseded by lê’s forged literary relationship with a female austrian poet and writer, the sisterly bonds that emerge between the female characters of les aubes are privileged over the ties generated with their male narrator. this gesture of intraand intertextual female solidarity, which functions to circumvent the patriarchal naming and identification of the female figures of les aubes, does not, however, signal the demise of hierarchical patriarchal relationships, the inherent violence of which bachmann qualified in her novels as ‘the birth place of fascism’ (73). lê’s twenty-first-century texts continue to struggle with, and resist, the gendered power imbalances of inherited models of domestic and (hetero)sexual relationships. in memoriam: resistant femininity and gender alterity across lê’s corpus of fictional and non-fictional works, sexual relationships, and indeed most interpersonal relationships, are very rarely, if at all, portrayed as harmonious accords, but rather as violent affairs characterised by their mutually destructive nature. this is all the more so in lê’s portrayal of the domestic heterosexual partnerships that are the models inherited by her protagonists, where traditional power relationships between husbands and wives are often inverted, with wives and mothers carrying out the financially and socially dominant roles historically occupied by their male counterparts. les aubes is no exception, where the figure of the narrator’s mother is the wealthy head of an international business ‘consortium’ who sees herself as having rescued her husband from his inferior class status and failed career as a painter, and employs him in a purely decorative role within the business in order to keep him occupied and out of the way. models of husbands and fathers are thus frequently portrayed 3 the figure of the sororal triad might be considered a literary echo of that formed by lê’s own three sisters; the reference to the matriarch as ‘lady chacal’ (lady jackal) by the sisters of les trois parques resonates, in particular, with lê’s own disparaging remarks made in numerous interviews about her mother, and suggests a sisterly resistance that is present in both les trois parques and les aubes. 4 the russian poet, marina tsvetaeva, is also present in lê’s writing as a prominent interlocutor and ‘literary sister’, in non-fictional works such as tu écriras sur le bonheur (1999) and marina tsvétaïéva: comment ça va la vie? (2002), as well as more implicitly in the prominence of lê’s suicidal writerprotagonists, echoing tsvetaeva’s own end-of-life. 5 for an in-depth analysis of the personification of bachmann as sola in les aubes, see kurmann (2016: 143–149). transposing gender in the diaspora: linda lê’s les aubes (2000) and in memoriam (2007) portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201835 as emasculated, often becoming subsumed by the relationship if not eventually committing suicide, as is the case of sola’s father in in memoriam. the offspring of such conflictual domestic arrangements model their own sexual relationships in response to the paradigms of their progenitors with very different stakes for male and female characters, as seen in the two novels at hand. as ni cheallaigh observes, lê’s narratives are written almost exclusively from the perspective of the son or daughter (ni cheallaigh 2016: 63), an observation that is borne out by in memoriam, which presents the daughter’s response to the parental relationship, and les aubes, where it is the impact of the parents’ violence on the son that is at stake. like les aubes, in memoriam also employs an unnamed first-person male narrator, who retrospectively recounts a past love affair with a successful novelist who, like the poet referred to in les aubes, is also named sola. a despairing writer who finally meets the much-admired novelist in a chance encounter in a bookshop after fruitlessly endeavouring to contact her through her publisher, the narrator relates the course of their tormented relationship and his rivalry with his brother, thomas, who also becomes sola’s lover until her death by suicide. where the male narrator of les aubes seeks to break the mould set by his parents’ violent, destructive relationship by seeking to immerse himself in what he perceives as a fulfilling, affirmative relationship with his sexual partner, vega, the female protagonist of in memoriam, on the other hand, rejects the dysfunctional model of the parents’ relationship through precisely the opposite strategy: by keeping herself at a distance from the male partner and rejecting any symbiosis or interdependency, or even any kind of domestic set-up at all. indeed, it is lê’s female characters who predominantly resist subsumption into the domestic, heterosexual unit, in contrast with their male partners who frequently seek self-fulfilment and completion therein. lê’s female characters, then, might be said to defy gender norms by refusing to participate in the kind of hierarchical sexual relationships that are modelled to them by their parents and offered to them, albeit in altered form, by their (male) partners. instead, they seek alternative modes of participation in sexual relationships to those imagined as complementary by the male partner, and experienced as engulfing by the female. lê’s literary construction of femininity, which undermines the gender norms that require a complementarity between feminine and masculine ideals within a hierarchised heterosexual bond, reflects judith butler’s disruption of the correlation between sex and gender and her assertion of its cultural mutability. as butler states, ‘when the relevant “culture” that “constructs” gender is understood in terms of such a law or set of laws, then it seems that gender is as determined and fixed as it was under the biology is destiny formulation. in such a case, not biology, but culture, becomes destiny’ (butler 1999: 12). where the articulation of gendered identity within available cultural terms forecloses in advance, or at least hinders, the possibility of thinking of gender in new and productive ways, circumstances of displacement and diaspora offer a privileged space in which to untether understandings of gender from the historical and cultural intersections in which they are produced. it follows that if gender is not the manifestation of a sex, but a convergence of culturally and historically specific sets of relations, departure from a particular historical and cultural context permits the consideration of gender in radically altered ways. lê’s female characters’ resistance to the hierarchised patriarchal relationships that their partners envisage for them demonstrates the author’s renegotiation of gendered identities and relations that is facilitated by transposition from a given cultural environment to another. while lê does not entirely efface the binary gender regime to which butler attributes the correlation of sex and gender (1999: 10), she might be said to offer a queered form of androgyny through the downplaying of the corporeal in her defiant female characters, as i discuss in the third and final section of this essay. averis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201836 from (in)corporeality to incorporation as indicated by the physically vague and psychologically rich evocation of her narrators and protagonists, lê’s fictional works contain very few textual references to bodies (either female or male).6 the few descriptions of the physical traits of her female characters that do appear firmly emphasise their diaphanous presence and physical frailty, foregrounding their psychological over their physiological experiences. such a representation of incorporeal femininity reaches its most emphatic expression in les aubes in the character of forever, whom the narrator describes as a light-footed silhouette and ‘une fée tombée de je ne sais quel ciel’ (lê 2000: 18), and likens to an underdeveloped child, a helpless old woman, and even an anaemic plant (27).7 her vague physical presence and psychological isolation are reinforced by her habitation of the absolute margin—by the sea, in a cottage on a cliff which faces the horizon. like forever, in memoriam’s sola is described as eternally dressed in white (the colour of mourning in lê’s native vietnam) and deathly pale, effectively presaging her suicide. the dominant emphasis on sola’s wounded psychological state leaves the reader hard pressed to conjure up a mental image of the heroine in in memoriam. the narrator’s frequent comparison between sola and birds further emphasises her fragility, and above all, her other-worldliness: ‘je ne cessai pas de la comparer à un oiseau de paradis, planant très haut dans le ciel et qui mourrait s’il frôlait le sol’ (lê 2007: 71).8 in addition to emphasising her frailty and vulnerability, the likening of sola to ‘un oiseau perdu dans une bourrasque’ (89) illustrates the narrator’s difficulty in being able to tie her down, underlining his failure to hold her within the confines of the kind of interdependent relationship he envisages with her.9 frequently described by their (mostly male) narrators as slight, frail, weightless ‘feu follets,’10 lê’s young female characters respond by showing signs of suppressing their physical existence, notably, through eating disorders that seek to eliminate the body, and by avoiding the maternity that might ensure its descendance. forever’s anorexia, in which she seeks self-effacement after the narrator’s father, her former lover, forces her to seek an abortion before abandoning her, is a sign of her withdrawal her from the physical world of violent, destructive (hetero)sexual hierarchies. for the narrator, this denial of the physical self projects her into a spiritual realm as is made clear when he says: forever avait aussi ceci d’une fée: elle se nourrissait peu, d’une tranche de pain ou d’un biscuit sec. cette abstinence était pour moi une preuve de son immatérialité et non le symptôme de la maladie, l’anorexie, dont elle était affligée depuis ses quinze ans. pour 6 the exception to the absence of corporeal detail in lê’s works can be found in les trois parques, where each of the three female protagonists are referred to by a single physical attribute that is key to defining their character: the elder sister is referred to as ‘ventre rond’ (round belly) in reference to her advanced pregnancy, the younger sister as ‘belles gambettes’ (beautiful legs) in reference to her frivolous and self-involved nature, and the cousin as ‘la manchote’ (one-armed) in reference to the loss of her hand at puberty upon the discovery of her incestuous relationship with her twin brother (smith 2010). 7 ‘a fairy fallen from some unknown sky’; ‘une enfant arriérée,’ ‘une vieillarde impotente,’ ‘une plante anémique.’ 8 ‘i always compared her to a bird of paradise, gliding high in the sky and which would die if it touched the ground.’ 9 ‘a bird caught in a gust of wind.’ 10 ‘will-o’-the-wisps.’ transposing gender in the diaspora: linda lê’s les aubes (2000) and in memoriam (2007) portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201837 l’heure, la maigreur de forever était à mes yeux comme le signe de sa sainteté. (2000: 28–29)11 as tess do observes, ‘on peut diviser les personnages de lê en deux groupes selon leur préférence alimentaire: les mangeurs de viande à l’appétit féroce et les jeûneurs plus ou moins anorexiques’ (2004: 146).12 one of lê’s cast of fasters, forever is ultimately misguided in her attempt to recover autonomy and achieve self-determination through physical self-harming in the form of anorexia, a physical self-denial that is compensated for by an intellectual exuberance: ‘le refus de la nourriture s’accompagnait chez forever d’une boulimie d’études’ (2000: 29).13 like forever, the novelist in in memoriam, sola, replaces food with words, and physical sustenance with intellectual sustenance, such that ‘[s]a chair, son sang étaient faits de la matière même de ses livres’ (2007: 176).14 if the anorexia suffered by lê’s female characters seeks to suppress the existing physical self, the avoidance of maternity ensures against its future reproduction. where maternity is suppressed in les aubes at the behest of the male lover, in in memoriam it is sola who vigorously resists the desire of the male lover, thomas, to have a child with her. his attempts to impose onto her ‘cette féminité qu’elle refusait’ (176)15 initiate the final mental breakdown which culminates in her suicide. through her treatment of sola’s refusal of maternity, lê presents the possibility—as well as the cost—of resisting ‘cette féminité’ that sola rejects and which the male partner, by contrast, sees as necessary to her salvation: ‘il avait essayé de graver ceci dans son esprit: elle ne se reconcilierait pas avec elle même tant qu’elle ne serait pas mère’ (184).16 in consideration of lê’s own decision not to have children, expressed in the nonfictional á l ’enfant que je n’aurai pas (2011),17 parallels can be drawn between the protagonist and the author in their shared evocation of possible femininities beyond normative maternal femininity.18 in a vertiginous mise en abîme, both lê’s character sola, and the characters in sola’s books mirror lê’s stance on maternity: ‘les livres d’elle, que précisément éludaient toujours la question, mett[ait] en scène des personnages sans descendance, ... la procréation devenait alors un tabou inviolable’ (2007: 182).19 11 ‘forever shared another trait with fairies: she ate very little, a slice of bread or a dry biscuit. this abstinence was proof for me of her immateriality and not the symptom of her illness, anorexia, which had afflicted her since she was fifteen. at the time, forever’s thinness was, in my eyes, the sign of her saintliness.’ 12 ‘lê’s characters can be divided into two groups according to their dietary preferences: meat-eaters with a ferocious appetite, and fasters who are more or less anorexic.’ 13 ‘forever’s refusal of food went hand-in-hand with a bulimia of studies.’ 14 ‘her flesh and blood were made of the same matter as her books.’ 15 ‘this femininity that she refused.’ 16 ‘he had tried to engrave this in her mind: she would not be reconciled with herself unless she became a mother.’ 17 for a detailed analysis of lê’s use of the epistolary genre to give an account of her decision not to have children in á l’enfant que je n’aurai pas (2011), see edwards (2016: 75-102). 18 in cronos (2010), lê creates another remarkable figure of resistant femininity, una, who is involved in a gendered power struggle that is both domestic and political as she defies her husband, the authoritarian leader of a violent (and misogynistic) dictatorial regime. in the case of una, maternity, or rather pregnancy, becomes a mode of gendered resistance when she refuses to abort her child, conceived in an adulterous relationship. 19 ‘her books, which precisely always evaded the question, present[ed] characters without descendants ..., procreation thus became a sacrosanct taboo.’ averis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201838 in memoriam’s sola and les aubes’s forever thus present models of femininity that strive for auto-determination and resist any calls to materially defined experience or normative maternity. this is illustrated particularly clearly in in memoriam in the resonance of sola’s symbolic naming.20 suggesting solitary self-sufficience, sola’s name is, similarly to those of les aubes, granted to her by the male narrator and his brother, thomas: ‘nous l’appelions sola parce qu’elle était solitaire et seule, d’une solitude souveraine’ (2007: 9).21 despite being granted by the narrator and not of her own invention, the symbolism of sola’s name can equally be considered a strategy on the part of lê herself to define the female protagonist’s identity in and of herself; a measure of her sovereignty insofar as her identity is self-contained rather than measured against the male other, be it the father or a male sexual partner. this desire for auto-determination is reinforced in sola’s adoption of a publishing pseudonym, which frees sola from the imposed identity of the patronym and leaves the way open for the redefinition of identity in the present, as a writer. fellow diasporic writer, nancy huston, includes lê in a reflection on the nihilist tendency that she observes in a certain strand of contemporary french literature. in professeurs de désespoir (2004), huston denounces the solipsistic, masculinist drive that evangelises the autodetermination of self and denies the physical, corporeal and genealogical origins of human identity and experience. yet huston makes a special case for lê, stating ‘de tous les néantistes vivants, linda lê est celle que je préfère’ (2004: 324).22 for huston, despite lê’s embrace of nihilism’s self-sufficiency and auto-determination, lê fais aussi une découverte importante … : les hommes néantistes ne sont pas ses frères. toujours enchantés de rencontrer de belles et fragiles jeunes femmes qui fuient leur mère, ils sont friands de jeux cruels dont son corps et son âme font les frais. avec le passage du temps, elle comprend qu’à s’identifier à eux, elle risque sa peau. (2004: 328)23 echoing huston’s pronouncement, lê’s character sola does, indeed, come to realise that identifying with the male narrator and the symbiotic relationship he attempts to impose on her risks recasting her ‘solitude souveraine’ into damaging isolation, a detachment that is appealing to the narrator as he seeks to become indispensable to sola. misreading her ‘solitude’ as a sign of vulnerability and incompletion on her part, he projects onto her an ideal of the missing and desired other half, describing her repeatedly as ‘un miroir’ (2007: 13; 78) and ‘mon double’ (2007: 72; 94), and frequently referring to her as a long sought-after ‘twin.’24 for the narrator, the relationship is imagined as a constructive space for the affirmation of personal identity, yet sola is described as vigorously resisting this symbiotic desire, and refuting any kind of resemblance they may bear to one another, effectively destroying the narrator’s ‘rêve 20 for an articulate discussion of the mythological origins of the characters’ names in in memoriam, see loucif (2009). 21 ‘we called her sola because she was solitary and singular, of sovereign solitude.’ 22 ‘of all the living nihilists, linda lê is the one that i prefer.’ 23 ‘lê also makes an important discovery … : the male nihilists are not her brothers. always delighted to meet beautiful, fragile young women escaping from their mother, they are fond of cruel games for which her body and soul pay the price. with the passage of time, she understands that identifying with them places her at great risk.’ 24 ‘a mirror’; ‘my double.’ transposing gender in the diaspora: linda lê’s les aubes (2000) and in memoriam (2007) portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201839 de toujours, celui de [s]’allier à un alter ego’ (2007: 14).25 the narrator eventually realises that sola sees the kind of alliance that he envisages as an undesirable subsumption of the self into the other: ‘je mis du temps à admettre qu’elle se protégeât de toute relation fusionnelle. elle craignait d’y être engloutie, et cette crainte l’amenait à se partager entre thomas et moi, à délaisser l’un pour l’autre, puis à fermer la porte à tous deux afin de tenir conciliabule avec les personnages de son invention’ (2007: 15).26 sola thus rejects the narrator’s desired fusion and the fact that she seeks the imaginary company of the literary characters of her own invention is a telling revelation of lê’s transposition of gendered identities and relations. in this way, lê contests the capacity of inherited modes of hierarchical, patriarchal, heterosexual relationships to offer a fruitful space of self-realisation for women. these are depicted as not only hindering women’s autonomy and sense of self but as potentially life-threatening, as illustrated by her female characters’ physical self-effacement through self-harm and suicide. in contrast with the destructive, isolating relationships that are seen to be resisted by lê’s female protagonists, intraand intertextual relationships of female solidarity prove to offer women, including indeed lê herself, an alternative space of interpersonal connection and personal identification that is defined less by material reality than by literary affinity. the sisterly solidarity that is enacted between the female readers and writers of les aubes is echoed in lê’s ‘incorporation’ of the figure of ingeborg bachmann into her literary universe, as seen in the writerly figures that appear as sola in both les aubes and in memoriam in a literary gesture of female solidarity that kurmann observes to be replicated by huston when she writes lê into her own intertextual universe (kurmann 2016: 8; 58). lê’s female characters’ rejection of inherited modes of being and belonging and quest for definition in and of themselves thus reflect their author’s own staking out of a literary universe that exceeds the inherited traditions of french, vietnamese or even postcolonial francophone literatures. having disowned her first two literary publications (1987, 1988) due to the deference with which they approached the french literary tradition insofar as they sought ‘d’être à la hauteur des indigènes,’27 more recent works have intervened in that literary tradition, expanding and redefining its contours. lê loosens the hold of hierarchical, patriarchal constraints of the inherited traditions she works in and from, creating a literary space whose textures are decidedly intertextual, transnational and feminist. if the works produced in the first three decades of this singular author’s literary trajectory have engaged with the impossible translations and necessary transitions of diaspora, it remains to be seen how the resistant transpositions of female, intercultural identity will further develop in the mature works of a writer at the height of her career and craft. references argand, c. 1999, ‘linda lê,’ in lire, 1 april. online, available: https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/ linda-le_803102.html [accessed 2 may 2018]. 25 ‘lifelong dream, to ally [him]self to an alter ego.’ 26 ‘it took me a while to realise that she was protecting herself from any fusional relationship. she was afraid of becoming engulfed, and this fear led her to share herself between thomas and me, to abandon one for the other, and then to close the door on both of us to hold counsel with the characters of her own invention.’ 27 see lê’s comments in an interview with catherine argand (1999); ‘to measure up to the natives.’ averis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201840 https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/linda-le_803102.html https://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/linda-le_803102.html bacholle-bošković, m. 2006, linda lê: l ’écriture du manque. edwin mellen, lewiston, ny. barnes, l. 2014, vietnam and the colonial condition of french literature. university of nebraska press, lincoln, ne. britto, k. a. 2004, disorientation: france, vietnam, and the ambivalence of interculturality. hong kong university press, aberdeen, hk. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2007.2.2.306 butler, j. 1999 [1990], gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. routledge, new york & london. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-13213-2_87 derrida, j. 2007 [1987], ‘des tours de babel,’ in psyché: inventions of the other, vol. i, trans. j. f. graham. stanford university press, stanford: 191–225. do, t. 2004, ‘entre salut et damnation: métaphores chez linda lê,’ french cultural studies, vol. 15, no. 2: 142–157. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155804044094 edwards, n. 2016, voicing voluntary childlessness: narratives of non-mothering in french. peter lang, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knx254 huston, n. 2004, professeurs de désespoir. actes sud, arles; leméac, montréal. https://doi.org/10.1016/ s1636-6522(06)77374-3 kurmann, a. 2016, intertextual weaving in the work of linda lê: imagining the ideal reader. lexington, lanham, md. https://doi.org/10.1353/wfs.2017.0017 lê, l. 1987, un si tendre vampire. table ronde, paris. ______ 1988, fuir. table ronde, paris. ______ 1993, calomnies. christian bourgois, paris. ______ 1996, slander, trans. e. allen. university of nebraska press, lincoln. ______ 1997a, les trois parques. christian bourgois, paris. ______ 1997b, the three fates, trans. m. polizzotti. new directions publishing, new york. ______ 1999, tu écriras sur le bonheur. presses universitaires de france, paris. ______ 2000, les aubes. christian bourgois, paris. ______ 2002, marina tsvétaïéva: comment ça va la vie? jean-michel place, paris. ______ 2007, in memoriam. christian bourgois, paris. ______ 2010, cronos. christian bourgois, paris. ______ 2011, a l ’enfant que je n’aurai pas. nil, paris. loucif, s. 2009, ‘le fantastique dans les trois parques de linda lê,’ in redefining the real: the fantastic in contemporary french and francophone women’s writing, (ed.) m.-a. hutton. peter lang, bern: 115–127. ______ 2009, ‘linda lê, la passeuse,' contemporary french and francophone studies, vol. 13, no. 4: 495–501. https://doi.org/10.1080/17409290903096376 motte, w. 2003, fables of the novel: french fiction since 1990. dalkey archive press, normal, il. https:// doi.org/10.1353/sub.2005.0022 nguyen, n. h. c. (ed.) 2015, new perceptions of the vietnam war: essays on the war, the south vietnamese experience, the diaspora and the continuing impact. mcfarland and company, jefferson, nc. https://doi. org/10.1111/ajph.12230 transposing gender in the diaspora: linda lê’s les aubes (2000) and in memoriam (2007) portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201841 https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2007.2.2.306 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-13213-2_87 https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155804044094 https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knx254 https://doi.org/10.1016/s1636-6522(06)77374-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/s1636-6522(06)77374-3 https://doi.org/10.1353/wfs.2017.0017 https://doi.org/10.1080/17409290903096376 https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2005.0022 https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2005.0022 https://doi.org/10.1111/ajph.12230 https://doi.org/10.1111/ajph.12230 ni cheallaigh, g. 2015, ‘mad sisters, bad mothers and queer maternity in the work of linda lê,’ in solitaires, solidaires: conflict and confluence in women’s writings in french, (eds) e. hugueny-léger & c. verdier. cambridge scholars publishing, newcastle: 191–208. https://doi. org/10.7173/164913316820201634 ______ 2016, ‘linda lê’s antigonal refusal of motherhood,’ in women’s lives in contemporary french and francophone literature, (eds) f. ramond jurney & k. mcpherson. palgrave mcmillan,london: 61–76. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40850-7_5 rose, h. j. 2005 [1928], a handbook of greek mythology: including its extension to rome. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203421765 roberts, e. v. 2003, ‘a vietnamese voice in the dark: three stages in the corpus of linda lê,’ in francophone post-colonial cultures: critical essays, (ed.) k. salhi. lexington, new york: 331–342. https:// doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-3932 smith, l. 2010, ‘the disillusion of linda lê: redefining the vietnamese diaspora in france,’ french forum, vol. 35, no. 1: 59–74. https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.0.0112  yeager, j. a. 1997, ‘culture, citizenship, nation: the narrative texts of linda lê,’ in post-colonial cultures in france, (eds) a. g. hargreaves & m. mckinne. routledge, london & new york: 255–267. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315004921 averis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201842 https://doi.org/10.7173/164913316820201634 https://doi.org/10.7173/164913316820201634 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40850-7_5 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203421765 https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-3932 https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-3932 https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.0.0112 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315004921 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: kurmann, a. and do, t. 2018. introduction: transdiasporic rencontres in việt kiều literature. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 1-5. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.6174 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au introduction introduction: transdiasporic rencontres in việt kiều literature alexandra kurmann1 and tess do2 1 french and francophone studies, department of international studies, faculty of arts, macquarie university, sydney, nsw 2109. 2 department of french studies, school of languages and linguistics, faculty of arts, university of melbourne, vic 3010. *corresponding authors: alexandra kurmann. alex.kurmann@mq.edu.au. tess do. dot@ unimelb.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.6174 article history: received 12/05/2018; revised 03/08/2018; accepted 03/08/2018; published 22/08/2018 abstract this special issue follows a conference entitled ‘rencontres: a gathering of voices of the vietnamese diaspora’ that was held at the university of melbourne, december 1-2 in 2016 and which sought to enable, for the first time, the titular transdiasporic rencontres or encounters between international authors of the vietnamese diaspora. the present amalgam of previously unpublished texts written by celebrated francophone and anglophone authors of vietnamese descent writing in france, new caledonia and australia today is the result of the intercultural exchanges that took place during that event. literary texts by linda lê, anna moï and thanh-van tran-nhut are followed by writerly reflections on the theme of transdiasporic encounters from hoai huong nguyen, jean vanmai and hoa pham. framing and enriching these texts, scholarly contributions by established experts in the field consider the literary, cultural and linguistic transfers that characterize contemporary writing by authors of vietnamese origin across the francophone world. résumé ce volume spécial réunit les actes du colloque ‘rencontres : a gathering of voices of the vietnamese diaspora’ qui s’est tenu à l’université de melbourne les 1er et 2 décembre 2016 et qui visait à faciliter, pour la première fois, les rencontres entre les auteurs, chercheurs et universitaires internationaux de la diaspora vietnamienne. les fruits de leurs échanges interculturels y sont réunis dans ce présent recueil sous deux formes complémentaires : d’un declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.6174 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.6174 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:alex.kurmann@mq.edu.au mailto:dot@unimelb.edu.au mailto:dot@unimelb.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.6174 côté, les articles d’experts en littérature francophone comparée ; de l’autre, les contributions créatives de célèbres auteurs francophones et anglophones d’origine vietnamienne basés aujourd’hui en france, en nouvelle calédonie et en australie. les textes littéraires de linda lê, anna moï et thanh-van tran-nhut, suivis de réflexions d’auteurs par hoai huong nguyen, hoa pham et jean vanmai sur le thème des rencontres transdiasporiques, se retrouvent ainsi enrichis par les études savantes sur les transferts littéraires, culturelles et linguistiques qui caractérisent l’écriture contemporaine des écrivains d’origine vietnamienne dans le monde francophone. keywords vietnamese diaspora, transdiasporic literature, việt kiều literature, linda lê, anna moï, kim thúy; diaspora vietnamienne, littérature transdiasporique, littérature việt kiều this special issue follows a conference entitled ‘rencontres: a gathering of voices of the vietnamese diaspora’ that was held at the university of melbourne from 1 to 2 december in 2016 and that sought to enable, for the first time, the titular transdiasporic rencontres or encounters between authors of the vietnamese diaspora. việt kiều writers, that is, overseas vietnamese settled, in this instance, in france, the french pacific and australia, were brought together by tess do and alexandra kurmann to participate in a public reading event and study day. the occasion was aimed at showcasing, to both the academic and việt kiều community in australia, the linguistic diversity of cultural production created by refugees and migrants who had fled worn-torn, and later left communist, vietnam. in facilitating this meeting of minds we intended to bring to light the many ways in which diasporic authors and their texts relate to one another, creating a web of transnational, transcultural and translinguistic exchanges that interconnects three and more generations of one globally dispersed people. the prevalence of the prefix ‘trans’ in current research on vietnamese diaspora literature leads us to posit here what we consider to be the contemporary ‘transdiasporic’ turn in studies of vietnamese refugee and migrant writing. the texts chosen for this journal issue focus on the ‘trans’ in transdiasporic, drawing particular attention to the cultural, linguistic and literary transfers, translations, and transactions reaching ‘across’ and ‘beyond’ the global vietnamese diaspora (ghosh & hillis miller 2016: 3). as such, ‘rencontres’ stages a collection of transnational conversations between scholars and culture-makers, in a commitment to facilitating international, interdisciplinary dialogues that contribute to transformations in the wider landscape of world and global literature studies. to open the discussion, natalie edwards in her article, ‘linguistic rencontres in kim thúy’s mãn,’ engages with ‘translanguaging’ in the work of internationally celebrated author of vietnamese origin, kim thúy (garcia 2016). thúy, whose renown from her debut novel, ru (2009), has transformed her into a symbol of ‘refugee gratitude’ in canada (nguyen 2013), deploys an innovative blending of her adopted languages of settlement with her mother tongue in what edwards calls a ‘new form of communicating subjectivity in transit.’ french, english, and vietnamese inscriptions framing the narrative intertwine with one another in mãn in an illustration of the generative nature of diasporic literature in its capacity to cross multiple linguistic and cultural borders. moving from language to the act of writing, leslie barnes shifts the conversation to consider in-between spaces in the intertextual essays of the most prolific writer of vietnamese descent writing in france today: linda lê. rather than focus on what lies between the dichotomy of home and place of settlement and its proliferations (native and adopted language, belonging and unbecoming), an approach that has characterized kurmann and do portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 20182 exile writing scholarship for some time, barnes explores lê’s preoccupation with the spaces between ‘writing and not writing.’ for barnes, the double-faced janus figure—who represents beginnings and endings, lives past and present in lê’s novels in un si tendre vampire (a very sweet vampire, 1987) and conte de l ’amour bifrons (translated as a tale of love, 2005)— symbolizes the tension between writers’ silence and composition, and becomes the common ground on which encounters with lê’s literary precursors, most often european refugees, exiles and migrants, take place. elucidating further ways in which lê creates transdiasporic dialogues beyond the vietnamese-francophone context to convey universalisms of diasporic experience, kate averis demonstrates how lê moves beyond articulations of her own painful displacement ‘to offer a literary universe in which alienation is expressed through the depiction of resistant modes of being.’ averis reveals lê’s destabilization of received models of femininity and modes of behaviour in both the family unit and sexual relationships in the two novels, les aubes (dawns, 2000) and in memoriam (2007); in doing so she uncovers sub-textual feminist discourses in the work of a writer who overtly disassociates herself from named political movements. the evolving historico-political narrative of vietnam is inextricable from the story of exile, asylum and migration for the diaspora. jean anderson’s contribution of a translated extract of vietnamese-french writer thanh-van tran-nhut’s historical crime novel, l’esprit de la renarde (the spirit of the vixen, 2009), set in seventeenth century đại việt, is a timely reminder that the history of vietnam extends far beyond the heavily studied colonial and cold war periods. the work of translation enables the global vietnamese diaspora to read transnationally and transculturally to become acquainted with its many selves. australian historian, nathalie huynh chau nguyen, closes the scholarly section of rencontres with her article, ‘“my husband was also a refugee”: cross-cultural love in the postwar narratives of vietnamese women.’ shifting our discussion from the written word to personal oral history, she takes as her subject the intercultural exchange born of the shared experience of refugee flight in the doublediasporic couple. narratives of the marriage of two diasporic subjects exemplify, in the broadest sense, what we hope our notion the transdiasporic achieves—a movement beyond the borders of one diaspora in order to consider the interrelationality of peoples from diverse diasporic communities at points of cultural encounter across the globe. the second section of rencontres is divided into two parts: cultural production and writerly reflections. the three writers in the first section, linda lê, anna moï and thanhvan tran-nhut, are all born in vietnam. each lived part of their childhood in their native land before leaving for france and the usa (tran-nhut) at different times during and after the vietnam war. their leave-takings play a significant role in the ways in which they relate to the past and to their experiences as transnational writers. in ‘sauf-conduit’ (safe passage), lê evokes the fall of saigon on april 30, 1975, and scenes of panic-stricken vietnamese desperately seeking a way out of their country. she uses the motif of the french passport to reflect on how, at that historical moment, this official and highly coveted document, which allowed her to leave vietnam in safety, also bestowed upon her a new homeland and identity, one that she has left behind upon entering her declared new homeland of literature (landrot 2010). a prolific exiled author of french expression, lê refuses to use her books as a convenient passport to the safe refuge of the french literary tradition, opting instead for the rich disquiet of displacement and non-belonging. to create is to self-create, she argues, and only by opening oneself to the unknown and excluding oneself from any socially imposed cultural identity label that the writer, a cultural defector and citizen of nowhere, can one claim one’s uniqueness and creative freedom in a world built of introduction: transdiasporic rencontres in việt kiều literature portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 20183 nation states and controlled by cross-border gatekeepers. the question of the writer’s identity is also the focus of anna moï’s self-reflective text whose title, ‘meurtres sans préméditation’ (unpremeditated murders), refers to the symbolic killing of the mother tongue seen as the sine qua non of the birth of the translingual writer. in a light and witty style blending anecdote and literary essay, which is reminiscent of her recently published short story collection, le pays sans nom: déambulations avec marguerite duras (the country without a name: strolling with marguerite duras, 2017), moï takes issue with the imposed social identities that came with the names she was given, first as a child by her parents and later as a wife by the man she married. recalling how ‘anna moï,’ a business pseudonym that she had initially created for her parisian clothing boutique, allowed her to break free from a past that alienated her and brought forth the translingual novelist she is today, moï relates her own identity forgery to those of other translingual authors such as romain gary, ágota kristóf, milan kundera and jorge semprún. if her new identity led to a momentary confusion when she unexpectedly met an old classmate, marcelino truong (creator of the cover art of this special issue), whom she had known as marco, this confusion makes evident their respective shifting identities and prompts moï to reflect on her writing and the linguistic ‘murders’ she has committed each time she has deserted one language for another, that is, vietnamese for french and french for english. moving from the symbolic murder of the mother tongue to the murder of a child during the huế massacre in 1968, thanh-van tran-nhut’s fictional short story, ‘années du singe’ (years of the monkey) turns to one of vietnam’s darkest historical moments to reflect on the vietnamese transnational identity and offers, in retrospect, a somber and critical view of the past. true to her reputation as a crime fiction writer, tran-nhut builds a mystery plot in which, after thirty-six years of absence, a native of huế comes back to her city of birth in search of lost memories that may provide answers to her past. by using a first-person narrative for both the woman returnee and the murdered little girl, the author blends their stories and gives voice to the dead, the silent and often forgotten civilian casualties of war. in solving the enigma of the mysterious ‘nuage d’automne’ (autumn cloud), tran-nhut brings to the fore the distinction between the departee and the remainee, the việt kiều and the ‘việt d’outre-tombe’ (vietnamese beyond the grave), and the honoured memory of those who paid for the peace in vietnam with their own lives. hoai huong nguyen opens the section of writerly reflections with an analytical essay, ‘accords et correspondances’ (agreements and correspondences), which explores her two novels to date, l’ombre douce (soft shadow, 2013) and sous le ciel qui brûle (under the burning sky, 2017). set in vietnam and france in the period between the start of the twentieth century and the 1970s, her narratives express her transcultural position between the west and far-east and her interest in bridging these two seemingly opposite literary worlds. through the enduring romance and friendship of her french and vietnamese fictional couples, who are caught in the middle of a pitiless anti-colonial war that throws them into opposite camps, she evokes the connections between france and vietnam, war and peace, past and present, harmony and disharmony. reflecting on the relationship of correspondences between things and signs, she concludes her essay with a firm attestation to the resurrecting power of words in the face of human separation and loss. similar to hoai huong nguyen, hoa pham, born to vietnamese refugee parents in australia, grew up between two cultures and with the traumatic post-memory of the wars in vietnam. in ‘we are vietnamese—a reflection on being vietnamese-australian,’ pham draws on the life-changing encounters she had with vietnamese exiled writer, phạm thị hoài, in berlin and with zen master, thích nhất hạnh, in a buddhist retreat in vietnam, to reflect on what it means to be a vietnamese-australian kurmann and do portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 20184 author. she discusses how her meetings with these two influential figures have led her on a path of literary and spiritually self-discovery, and how their guidance has helped her forge a deeper connection between her australian and vietnamese selves. using the title ‘we are vietnamese’ as a mantra throughout the text, pham lays a strong claim to her place in the vietnamese community, and despite her inability to speak their language, reaffirms the interconnections between her and the vietnamese people. interestingly, pham’s claim clearly resonates with writer jean vanmai. born in 1940 in new caledonia, vanmai is the second generation of the chân dang, the vietnamese indentured workers who were recruited in huge numbers by the french colonial government for the new caledonian mining industry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. while, unlike pham, vanmai is fluent in vietnamese, he is nevertheless as eager as her to rediscover his roots through the connection with the vietnamese communities beyond the borders of his small island. recalling the enriching and comforting exchanges that he shared with other fellow-writers, readers and researchers at the rencontres colloquium, the ‘exceptional encounters’ (‘rencontres exceptionnelles’), as he describes them in his text, allowed vanmai to reflect on his personal literary trajectory, taking pride in being both an author of french expression and a true descendant of dragons and immortals, the legendary ancestors of the vietnamese people. references garcia, o. & wei, l. 2014, translanguaging: language, bilingualism and education. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137385765_4 ghosh, r. & hillis miller, j. 2016, thinking literature across continents. duke university press, durham. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373698 landrot, m. 2010, ‘linda lê: “j’aime que les livres soient des brasiers,”’télérama, 21 august: n.p. online, available: http://www.telerama.fr/livre/linda-le-j-aime-que-les-livres-soient-des-brasiers,59204.php [accessed 2 may 2018]. lê, l. 1987, un si tendre vampire. table ronde, paris. ______ 2000, les aubes. christian bourgois, paris. ______ 2005, conte de l ’amour bifrons. christian bourgois, paris. ______ 2007, in memoriam. christian bourgois, paris. https://doi.org/10.7202/037467ar ______ 2017, a tale of love, tr. s. robyns. mākaro press, wellington. moï, a. 2017, le pays sans nom : déambulations avec marguerite duras. l’aube, paris. nguyen, h. 2013, l’ombre douce. viviane hamy, paris. ______ 2017, sous le ciel qui brûle. viviane hamy, paris. nguyen, v. 2013, ‘refugee gratitude: narrating success and intersubjectivity in kim thúy’s ru,’ canadian literature, vol. 219: 17–36. thúy, k. 2009, ru. libre expression, montreal. tran-nhut. 2005, l’esprit de la renarde: une enquête du mandarin tân. picquier, arles. introduction: transdiasporic rencontres in việt kiều literature portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 20185 https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137385765_4 https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373698 http://www.telerama.fr/livre/linda-le-j-aime-que-les-livres-soient-des-brasiers,59204.php https://doi.org/10.7202/037467ar portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 2 september 2017 communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue, guest edited by anu bissoonauth and rowena ward. © 2017 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: correa, l. e. 2017. from little words, big words grow: annotations on the yo, sí puedo experience in brewarrina, australia. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:2, 103-123. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5392 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au research article from little words, big words grow: annotations on the yo, sí puedo experience in brewarrina, australia liliana e. correa university of technology sydney corresponding author: dr liliana correa, professional tutor, jumbunna institute for indigenous education and research, university of technology sydney, po box 123, broadway nsw 2007. lilianaedith.correa@uts.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5392 article history: received 05/02/2017; revised 12/09/2017; accepted 16/09/2017; published 05/10/2017 abstract this article is a reflection on the application of the cuban literacy methodology yo, sí puedo to the australian setting. the yo, sí puedo / yes, i can! model developed in cuba by the instituto pedagógico latinoamericano y caribeño, iplac (institute of pedagogy for latin america and the caribbean) has been successfully implemented across the global south as a strategy of adult literacy. it is a legacy of our latin american revolutionary roots, with its origin in the freirean pedagogy of the oppressed. expanding across continents this model continues to teach reading and writing to disenfranchised adults in marginal and indigenous communities, from the argentinean chaco to brewarrina in northern nsw, australia. its aim is to contribute to the hope of improving the health and educational outcomes of the country’s first peoples. this article is indebted to conversations with the cuban advisor of yes, i can!, josé manuel chala leblanch. observing him working in the classroom setting of brewarrina touched me at different levels: personally because it reminded me of my own family experiences with the education system in my country, argentina; and professionally as an educator negotiating different languages and cultures. it also reinforced my belief in the importance of incorporating indigenous ways of learning and teaching to western styles of teaching and learning. i built this reflection moving from personal and poetic—visual and textual—narratives and observations to academic interventions informed by researched literature on adult and indigenous education. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 103 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5392 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5392 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:lilianaedith.correa@uts.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5392 keywords adult literacy; indigenous adult literacy; yes, i can!;yo, sí puedo; cuban model of literacy education; brewarrina; australia; indigenous australians introduction a curious off-sider black cockatoos waking the morning sky, bre 2016 © liliana e. correa in december 2014 i submitted an expression of interest to become part of a team of community educators and administrators to work in the yo, sí puedo (yes, i can!) campaign in nsw. subsequently those of us who applied were invited to attend a seminar presented by the literacy for life foundation, at sydney university. the session was informative but the pedagogical process was only partially disclosed. in turn this created further curiosity about the program and its methodology as applied to the australian setting. in the summer of 2016 a second presentation was given by cuban educator josé manuel chala leblanch, who provided a firsthand acccount of his experience in wilcannia. he was about to begin the roll out of the campaign in brewarrina in northwest new south wales (nsw ). i approached him with the idea of conducting a short interview for the spanish media in australia; instead, my subsequent visit to brewarrina and our shared passion for education, and cuban and latin american culture, inspired me to write this piece. literacy, and in particular adult literacy, are issues very close me, coming from a family of selftaught women and being the only one in my close family to gain access to a higher education. before coming to australia, i was attending teachers’ college in buenos aires (instituto de educación terciaria, la plata). my aim was to return to corrientes and chaco, in the north east of argentina, to learn guaraní, my father’s language, and to move around the different remote communities as an educator. due to political and economic instability, i left argentina without finishing my teaching degree and travelled to sydney under a family reunion visa. after many years of working in the community arts sector i enrolled in a bachelor of arts in theatre studies and later completed further studies in adult and community education. during the 1990s and late 2000 i worked as community artist in a number of roles, from performer to director to interpreter correa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 104 on a number of educational, research and arts projects alongside diverse communities and professionals. these experiences provided the foundations for my later research on latin american cultural articulations in sydney and in 2012 i submitted my thesis, ‘the politics of cultural visibility: latin american arts practices in sydney,’ and obtained a doctorate of cultural research from western sydney university. the personal is political crossing from north to south on a late afternoon, tilting my head to the guts of the sydney harbour bridge, i noticed an enormous aboriginal flag floating over busy traffic—a red, yellow and black sunset marking my departure. twelve hours later the cityscape changed into the classroom space set up at the old back packers in brewarrina, nsw. walking to the classroom each morning josé and i talked about education and the need for transformative pedagogical processes that can affect change regardless of geographical location and language differences. our professional experiences, marked by mutuality and distinct cultural lenses alike, have informed our different ideas about education. coming to terms with a rapidly changing cuba, embraced by a globalized economy marked by socialist values and caribbean entrepreneurial flavor, josé’s career as an educator has taken him outside his beloved island to russia, england and, since 2012, australia. in contrast, my subaltern learnings of a different kind afford me some interesting opportunities as i thread the in-between waters of diasporic living while falling into the perils of casualization, with its tiresome struggle of ‘becoming’ into academia, community or contracted jobs of sorts. somehow our trajectories mirror ingrained differences between education in cuba and australia. yet, with us two distant islands meet on common ground, mobilized by the belief in education as emancipatory. but what does this really mean? can education really overcome the incommensurable social and political challenges faced by australian indigenous peoples? would taking the first steps to control a language of sustenance—english—facilitate overcoming systemic inequality? can songlines be mended by learning new conceptual frameworks? another question remains: would the master’s tool ever dismantle the masters’ house? (lorde 1984). it is impossible not to question what being literate really means and in what ways literacy affects the lives of the most vulnerable peoples, in an increasingly technologically and financially mediated world. my life experiences and choices have been framed by the politics of everyday struggles, growing up in an argentina under dictatorship and living in australia as a migrant. early in my career as educator and theatre practitioner i learnt that my conviction about the transformative power of education is anchored in the link between the personal and the political. the educators and artists of my generation saw that link in the work of brazilian educator paulo freire and of the brazilian dramaturge and director augusto boal. their ethical and philosophical frameworks underpin the work of cuban educators in developing literacy methodologies that can be applied across continents and diverse cultural and indigenous groups. a brief note on the origins of the australia campaign the yo, sí puedo / yes, i can! program is a legacy of our latin american revolutionary roots, with its origin in the freirean pedagogy of the oppressed. expanding across continents this model continues to teach reading and writing to disenfranchised adults in marginal and indigenous communities, from the argentinean chaco to brewarrina in nsw, australia. in australia the yo, sí puedo campaign was introduced in 2012 by the literacy for life foundation’s (lflf) steering committee in partnership with the wilcannia local from little words, big words grow: annotations on the yo, sí puedo experience in brewarrina, australia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 105 aboriginal land council.1 aboriginal leaders worked with academics from the university of new england to bring the project to australia, and in 2012 cuban educator, josé manuel chala leblanch, established the first pilot program in wilcannia, western nsw (boughton 2013b: 5). the program’s aim was to contribute to improving health and educational outcomes of the country’s first peoples. as has been historically demonstrated improvements in education can affect change at many levels: developing awareness, a sense of empowerment and an increase in the impact of capital on social conditions (boughton & durnan 2014a, 2014b; unesco 2006; torres 2009). the success of this pilot prompted the establishment of the program in enngonia, bourke, brewarrina and, most recently, in weilmoringle (boughton, ah chee, beetson, durnan & leblanch 2013). and in 2013 the literacy for life foundation began formally to lead and coordinate the national roll out of the literacy campaign. at the core of the program lies a pedagogical practice that intends to be humanistic rather than humanitarian. as paulo freire asserted: ‘the pedagogy of the oppressed cannot be developed or practiced by the oppressor. it would be a contradiction in terms if oppressors only defended but actually implemented a liberating education’ (1970: 8). a humanitarian program would deliver momentary relief, thus creating a culture of dependency; to the contrary, the humanistic approach aims at transformation and self -management. cuban educator josé manuel chala leblanch took part in the initial pilot in wilcannia in 2012. i asked josé to reflect on this experience: after a couple of months, i was entering the wilcannia rsl club with bob and without being asked william bates, from wilcannia, approached us and said: “the yic is the best thing that has happened in wilcannia in the last three years.” bob said to him: can i quote you and use what you just said?” and he went: “yes, of course.” the lovely and late ray jackson, whom i met at the end of my first visit to australia in 2012 while handing me the second aboriginal passport ever handed to a nonaboriginal person said: “this is what i have been waiting all my life for our people.” (personal communication, august 2016) josé’s recollection of that particular encounter makes reference to hope and expectation: hope about effective programs to assist a community, in this case through adult literacy, and the fulfilment of an expectation, that the program would be successful. numerous researchers have argued for the importance of implementing programs that make sense to a community’s goals and aspirations, and that are neither dislocated from their daily struggles nor detached from their aspirations about career goals and potential employment opportunities. as kral and schwab state: education must be part of the cultural and social framework of the community, that is, linked to community goals and aspirations. training and employment are essential elements in this future scenario, but emerging models for remote indigenous communities must integrate training and employment pathways that reflect the community reality and tolerate alternative definitions of employment that are characteristic of the locality. literacy, therefore, becomes relevant only if it is linked to roles and responsibilities in the community that are meaningful within this schema. (2003: 14) 1 lflf is a partnership between the national health research institute, the indigenous campaigner jack beetson, and the brookfield construction company. correa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 106 literacy is fundamental to the transition from dependency to agency; an illiterate adult who has survived by depending on others to navigate everyday life, bureaucracies and personal relationships may be powerless, subject to choices based on someone else’s understanding of the social and political world around them. a literate person is a person with potential for critical engagement with the social world, with agency and empowerment. reflecting on this, josé recalls the following encounter: when sister mary and ruth went to see clarence to interview and fill the survey form, he said he had been waiting for that moment, because he wanted to learn proper reading and writing and he is not good at it. he has been struggling with that since the beginning; one day, after going through half the course lessons he stood and began looking at every poster on the wall with the positive messages and he said: “now i can read them all. i used to pretend i could, but i could not. now i can.” now he feels more confident and is eager to continue learning and improving. he wants to write a letter to his former partner. (personal communication, august 2016) literacy is a fundamental right; its implementation is the responsibility of those in power who can facilitate literacy projects where needed. but the question remains: how to implement a program that makes sense in a technology mediated culture and, in particular, in countries such as australia, which has a dynamic first world economy? the 2004 unesco ‘education position paper: the plurality of literacy and its implications for policies and programmes’ offers the following definition of literacy: literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute, using printed and written (and visual) materials associated with varying contexts. literacy involves a continuum of learning to enable an individual to achieve his or her goal, to develop his or her knowledge and potential and to participate fully in the wider society. (unesco 2004:13) literacy as defined by unesco is the outcome of a natural progression for any person from early schooling to adult life. the unfortunate circumstances of indigenous children who do not complete formal education, and of indigenous adults who have not reached the literacy ‘ability,’ is shameful in contemporary australia. to ‘master’ an english-language dominated world framed by western laws, in my view, is to have agency. in turn that agency enables indigenous people to mitigate the tense negotiations of non-indigenous epistemologies. literacy can facilitate a continuum of learning that offers choice and creates a sense of hope that personal aspirations will be achieved. literacy in australian indigenous communities is further problematized by the divergences of educational access between urban and remote settings, as well as by the disparities in power relations between indigenous peoples, members of the dominant anglophone society, established migrant groups and recently arrived migrants and refugees. to unfold a mass literacy campaign anywhere in the world is a complex process and depends on the work of dedicated scholars and community leaders who have identified the long-term benefits of such an investment. conversing with josé about the practical implementation of the program, he commented: sometimes mobilizing is the biggest problem, but it is a process with its ups and downs due to historical issues affecting target students. they struggle with shame factor, and sometimes it is difficult to take them out of their daily routine as they incorporate from little words, big words grow: annotations on the yo, sí puedo experience in brewarrina, australia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 107 into a new life style. they are invited to share with us for 3 or 4 days a week, from 10 to 1. the results are amazing; they not only improve their literacy skills, but also acquire a greater self-esteem, a widened cultural perception, an improved performing in their own context and better life quality. beyond the acquisition of abilities and skills in the handling of letters and numbers, the “yes, i can!” [program] focuses on enhancing social functions carried out by individuals and communities in their daily life. (personal communication, june 2016) as josé points out mobilizing can be affected by underlying social factors that influence the day to day functioning of a community and the complexities of particular cultural practices. for example, over the course of my visit to brewarrina, there were two funerals; and some weeks before my arrival there were other deaths and incidents affecting the attendance of students and members of the community. death and grief are a constant presence in these communities. high levels of unemployment and lack of culturally appropriate services and support are added to the community’s profile. research conducted by the australian national university’s centre for aboriginal economical policy research (ross & taylor 2000) to determine the social and economic conditions of aboriginal population of bourke, brewarrina and walgett, highlighted the following: the overwhelming feature that distinguished indigenous school attendance from that of the rest of the school-age population was a steady fall-off in participation from as early as age 14, culminating in very low levels of attendance among 16, 17 and 18 year olds—only 30 per cent of indigenous youth aged 16 and 17 years attended an educational institution compared to 65 per cent of their non-indigenous counterparts. (ross & taylor 2000: 6-8) one of the findings of this research demonstrated that indigenous people in the three towns were nearly five times less likely to have a post-school qualification than non-indigenous people: the largest disparity was for the youngest age group, aged 15–24 years, with only 4 percent of indigenous people holding a post-school qualification compared to 32 per cent of their non-indigenous counterparts … in the prime working ages when formal education could be expected to have been completed only 10 percent of indigenous adults had a qualification compared to 42 percent of non-indigenous adults. (ross & taylor 2000: 17). while research outcomes are analyzed, quantified and coded in far remove from the realities of these communities, and in the comfort of academic enquiry, those involved in the literacy campaign have to deal with tensions arising from high local expectations of success: all involved want the program to be as successful as it has been in other countries. to ensure the continuity of the campaign in other remote aboriginal communities, the program must demonstrate its effectiveness through tangible outcomes. such outcomes include the graduation of students who acquired first levels of literacy and of students who continue with a post literacy course linked to skills and training. it is fundamental that continuity is maintained; this will, in turn, ensure the goals of the campaign. but these outcomes will be attained only with the uninterrupted participation of students. the recruiting and retention of students, in particular younger age groups, has proved to be a challenge. educators also negotiate daily tensions between the implementation of trusted processes, with a long-term vision, and measurable indicators that must be achieved as the correa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 108 campaign unfolds. an added consideration has to be the time available to the overseas experts in which they need to become familiar with new social and cultural contexts, and to adapt to local models of operation and accountabilities. and at a personal level the absence of family and close friends while staying away from home can also create emotional stress. it is inevitable that cultural frictions and misunderstandings occur when negotiating between, on the one hand, local indigenous cultures affected by historical colonial legacies, and, on the other hand, an expert educator who is coming from another country to implement a foreign system of learning and who, in turn, has to negotiate his/her own cultural and social needs while working on the campaign. brewarrina: a brief historical background a fish trapped, bre 2016 © liliana e. correa brewarrina is an outback town situated at the point where the barwon river becomes the darling, at 119 meters above sea level. the town is some 810 kilometres from sydney and 98 kilometres from bourke. brewarrina has a population of about 1,500 people, with a further 1,500 living on properties around the town. the first european settlers arrived in the district around 1839 and 1840, with the first landowners being the lawson brothers (‘brewarrina, new south wales’ 2017). riverboats reached the town in the late 1850s, leading quickly to the town becoming an important port on the darling river. brewarrina was the first town in nsw to have two state heritage listings of aboriginal significance (‘brewarrina, new south wales’ 2017). the first, known as the ngunnhu (noon-oo) to the local ngemba people, are the brewarrina aboriginal fish traps, which are estimated to be more than 40,000 years old. they lie on the bed of the darling river just downstream from the weir. the traps consist of a series of stone weirs and ponds arranged to form a ‘net’ that is in effect, a complex piece of engineering: ‘the fisheries are pieces of masterful ingenuity designed to trap the fish and to be sealed off so that the fishermen can catch and kill the fish at their leisure’ these fish traps are pieces of masterful ingenuity designed to trap fish and be sealed off so that the fishers could catch and kill the fish at their leisure’ (‘brewarrina, nsw’ 2017). from little words, big words grow: annotations on the yo, sí puedo experience in brewarrina, australia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 109 fridge, bre 2016 © liliana e. correa bre (warrina) is bree brewarrina with an accent on the a2 tall trees it means, he told me. pointing to the fish traps he exhorts, a dam an intervention to our way of catching fish. eight other different language groups each one with its ‘fridge’ where families store their weekly ration of fish. the ochres are for women repeat this or that word he commanded: i listened. how many times i heard his people’s story? of massacres and losses the guide’s script is worth $10 a tourist nothing holds truth. they are the keepers of the dreaming. what price does this hold? an arch’s grant? a corner of barangaroo? across the museum he points, my eyes follow, 2 the name brewarrina is derived from ‘burru waranha.’ correa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 110 a condemned building stands through its cracked walls new sounds filter while the morning sun warms up the alphabet to learn in the language of the other. interjección poética aiding to mend: other ways of learning incorporating new conceptual frameworks the yo, sí puedo adult literacy methodology has been successfully implemented in various countries around the globe, and has had to adapt to local cultural realities and expectations in the process. in new zealand, for example, ‘[c]ollaboration between cuban and maori educators produced an adult literacy program known as “greenlight” which employs maori words and cultural symbols’ (gutierrez cited in everett 2014: 260). in australia, as everett points out, ‘the [yo, sí puedo] model has to be adapted, in collaboration with indigenous educators in remote communities, to cater for linguistic needs’ (everett 2014). however, this is not a simple task. indigenous australians are not homogenous; they speak multiple languages and consequently levels of functional literacy are particular to each group, adding to their complex and often disadvantaged relationships with the dominant national language english. that said, educator diana eades highlights the important role that aboriginal english plays in maintaining and asserting aboriginal identity: ‘[a]s the linguistic situation before the british invasion shows, aboriginal people have long used language and speech as markers of group identity’ (eades 1993: 5). eades concludes, ‘respecting, valuing and understanding aboriginal ways of using english is a significant step in respecting, valuing and understanding the identity and self-esteem of [aboriginal] children’ (eades 1993: 8). aboriginal english is a symbol of cultural maintenance (malcolm 2001; sharifian 2006). sharifan offers a framework for understanding aboriginal uses of english and how the language embodies and communicates indigenous culture. english words are linked to schemas, metaphors and categories that have direct connections to aboriginal belief systems (sharifian 2006). in particular, aboriginal english is informed by different schemas in which words may relate to the recognition of kinship that, in turn, has implications for interspersonal responsibilities, set behaviors and territorial boundaries. reflecting on the urgent need to nurture the languages that still exist, the issue of literacy is loaded with further complexity and challenges. pennycook states: ‘we need alternative representations, alternative stories, alternative possibilities, and these needs to be in our classes, our english classes, our linguistics and applied linguistics classes, our esl classes, our teaching materials. we need to work in and against english to find cultural alternatives to the cultural constructs of colonialism; we desperately need something different’ (1998: 217–218). pennycook argues that english as the language of colonialism constructs particular cultural discourses, and it is through working in and against these constructions that alternative and opposing paradigms may emerge. the unfolding of the yo, sí puedo program can be a tool to rebuild discourses of dialogue instead of opposition, facilitating the re-righting of aboriginal peoples’ position in history. we need to make use of the masters’ tools to rebuild. pondering on these linguistic challenges, i asked josé for comment: ‘how do you reconcile the fact that aboriginal australians have lost so many from little words, big words grow: annotations on the yo, sí puedo experience in brewarrina, australia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 111 of their languages with the current move towards implementing a program that focuses on mastering english?’ he responded: it is a sad fact that in losing a language, an important part of the culture is being lost and not much is being done in order to reverse the process. though the language used in the lesson is english, we are trying to incorporate elements of the first nation’s language in the lesson as well, as they do original language lesson workshops after they finish the “yes, i can!” so they have more options to go from when they finish and recover the language which is being lost. students are reminded of the importance of the culture and how to expand through most of the lessons. (personal communication, june 2016) anzaldúa’s words resonate in my mind here: ‘so, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language … i am my language’ (anzaldúa 1987: 81). having lost my father’s language, guaraní, and as a migrant having to acquire a second language, i feel enormous empathy for those who have to negotiate between two or more linguistic and cultural worlds in order to be seen, heard and acknowledged. the literacy for life foundation identified that from urban to remote areas in the country, up to 65 percent of aboriginal people are functionally illiterate in english. the unesco standard settings instruments offer the following definition: ‘(d) a person is functionally illiterate who cannot engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning of his [her] group and community and also for enabling him [her] to continue to use reading, writing and calculation for his [her] own and the community’s development’ (1982: 4). this would be a shameful statistic in any country, more so in a country such as australia with a first world economy. this recalls the concept of language as cultural capital and language as one of the most effective instruments that help us create what bourdieu named ‘habitus.’ we embody this as a set of durable dispositions that shape our attitudes and behaviors. habitus relates to the ability to understand and operate successfully within the cultural norms and expectations of a dominant society (bourdieu 1984). symbolic capital is a resource available to an individual based on recognition within a culture. for aboriginal people, speaking aboriginal english, standard english and for many one or more indigenous languages means they inhabit multiple linguistic and cultural registers. those registers can be drawn upon to construct habitus in order to relate to and speak about their distinctive social worlds and to continue to build capital that can be passed on to their children. aboriginal english and other englishes have to be taken into account when designing and implementing the yo, sí puedo methodology, hence what appears to be a straight forward pedagogical exercise is in fact highly complex, and therefore requires ongoing evaluation and adaptation. josé explains: the yic [yes, i can!] can be adjusted to portuguese, french, english, creole and other languages. it can also be adapted to different social and cultural contexts covering all levels of society including indigenous peoples and their languages, those in rural and urban areas, those serving prison sentences, people with special educational needs, migrants, ethnic minorities, and paying special attention to women’s education. the humanistic approach, alphanumeric method, analysis and synthesis, traditionally the methods used for teaching reading and writing as methodological and pedagogical principles of the yo, sí puedo [campaign] have been proven to be effective wherever they have been applied. (personal communication june 2016) correa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 112 it is interesting to note the potential for the diverse applicability of this program, including braille. my experiences working with culturally and linguistic diverse communities have showed me that programs that are flexible, contextual and dynamic, validating local knowledges and languages, are effective and affect change. similarly at the core of the yo, sí puedo methodology is the belief in learning as dialogical, contextual and dynamic. this is what makes the program successful. boughton and durnan assert that the yo, sí puedo campaign is not a simple method of teaching literacy; rather ‘it’s a low-cost mass adult literacy campaign involving extensive coordination and mobilization of government, non-government agencies and actors and the population as a whole’ (2014b: 327). expanding on some of the points raised above, josé explains: addressing low levels of literacy in english in the aboriginal adult population would inevitable impact at many levels, in particular health but specially by acquiring basic literacy skills mean to take control over decisions affecting the community as a whole. (an aboriginal adult literacy campaign 2013) language is interpreted as an individual way to look for information and self-development. (personal communication, june 2016) taking into account indigenous histories and sociopolitical relations with colonialist society, the success of the yes, i can! project cannot rest on the shoulders of the community and its leaders and teachers; it also requires communities and community leaders to trust experts’ advice and the support of government agencies. the classroom ‘the language belongs to the land’ arrente elder 2 classrooms, bre 2016 © liliana e. correa from little words, big words grow: annotations on the yo, sí puedo experience in brewarrina, australia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 113 the fire is going and the click clack of typing in the background mixes with the roar of trucks passing through the town and black cockatoos crossing the morning sky. the lesson begins. stepping into the classroom one cannot stop feeling the contradiction emanating from its walls and the cacophony of morning office life. the room is divided into the ‘office section’ and the ‘classroom section’ where a traditional setting of lined desks is testimony of formal western education. a television set with video monitor sits to the left, handy to be brought into play as needed. walls decorated in colourful sticker notes establish boundaries of respect and classroom rules, with affirmations, posters and a white board that could easily have been a smart-board or an old blackboard for chalk. each desk has a pencil holder decorated with the words yo, sí puedo that i assumed students were asked to make during the warm up period. each table displays the alphanumeric key as a handy reference. this is the set up that has been reproduced in classrooms all over the world, and now in brewarrina, to deliver the yes, i can! model of adult literacy (boughton & durnan: 2014b). observing the class unfold i notice that as a cuban josé carries caribbean traits and a disposition that seems to fit with the students’ distinctive embodiment of time perception and construction. this is evident as the class unfolds each morning in what for some, like myself, can be perceived to be painful slow motion. as an outsider i cannot avoid feeling on my skin the contradictions, the juxtaposition of time and space belonging to two or more contrasting histories and synergies. i witness syncopated worlds in dialogue, but ask: is success possible in such a convoluted process? here the negotiation between bureaucracies and urgent needs have to be dealt with in a skillful manner for the benefit of the community. in hope the educators believe in the power of education and that one person’s jump from illiterate to literate status will have a ripple effect and change the lives of that person and others. sister mary jane waites, a bright and dynamic ngemba woman, arrives with johnny cakes, one loaf for afternoon tea and another in a special packet, with emu eggs for the teacher’s breakfast as promised. with efficiency and determination she prepares morning tea, introducing people, setting up equipment, running in and out, bringing or taking participants to classroom, doctors’ appointments and australian social security programs (centrelink) waiting chairs. the day begins at 8.30 a.m. for teachers, coordinators and a film crew documenting the process. the crew—black fella films—arrives to set up sound equipment and cameras to capture the first movements of the learning process. the crew is ready to document an image, a sound, a gesture that demonstrates the unexpected shift from a world of nonsensical lines on a classroom board to the sound of comprehension. the crew wants to capture the leap, the jump into sounds and symbols that moves from incomprehensible clatter and noise to definite comprehension, the ‘aha’ moment when a phrase is formed. the first emerging sounds of literacy are materialized when one of the students stands up and with a smile on his face begins to read the posters around the room. we all stop holding our breath; our smiles acknowledge his success. here two epistemologies contest each other, one wearing the scars of the other, and the fragility of this relationship is represented by the cracks on the wall. the light filters and blinks to us as the morning starts and moves into midday. the liaison officer arrives by car, bringing more students. other students turn up on bikes or are dropped off by relatives in cars with ‘p’ plates. the museum across the road comes to life early in the morning and monitors the ins and outs of community centre where the classes are taking place. on my first visit to the classroom i began at the museum, where a group of men sitting at the front gate awaited visitors. a ten dollar fee gave me entry to the fish-traps. i encounter a painful correa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 114 reminder of progress: a dam has interrupted not only the natural flow of water into the fish traps, but a way of being. the museum tour guide repeated to me several times that eight different languages coexisted here. these were their refrigerators; this was where men came to fish. the dam was built to cater for the cotton farms, without consideration of the already existing economy—including the cultural maintenance and survival—of the distinct groups that fed and practised rituals in the area, in particular within the fish traps and the surrounding land. the dam epitomizes the symbolic and real dynamics between aboriginal and european peoples established since early white settlement as a relationship between ‘us and them.’ two contrasting epistemologies confront each other in the classroom space as a reminder of this history. the guide comments that the community centre used to be a back-packers hostel, but the building was condemned and the hostel was closed down. this is where lessons have taken place since may 2016. in this intimate and vulnerable space, the process of coming into learning is exposed alongside bureaucratic functionality, like an open wound slowly and painfully being mended. teacher and students meet in this space now marked by the historical legacies of the slave trade in the caribbean and the brutality of first clashes between aboriginal and european peoples. between the waters of memory trust is gained. the language is english and the sounds that emerge before the the four walls of the classroom conjoin aspiration and necessity. i arrived in brewarrina during phase two of the yes, i can! campaign and was able to observe the implementation of the alphanumeric system in the classroom for a week. i noticed on each desk a ‘guide table’ with the abc correlating to the numbers 1 through 26. curious about how this guide table was used i asked josé to explain how the alphanumeric system works: numbers are combined with the letters of the alphabet of the language used to teach adults. it is the basis of the content of the lesson, as numbers are common knowledge of adults as a matter of skills survival: a-1, e-2, i-3, o-4, u-5, t-6, l-7, f-8 and so till 26 are associated to numbers. in the case of australia, adult students find the number association amazing as they relate to the bingo game and they learn about those associations and use it at the same time as they enjoy it. (personal communication, june 2016) alphanumeric guide. bre 2016 © liliana e. correa from little words, big words grow: annotations on the yo, sí puedo experience in brewarrina, australia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 115 a key to the application of the method is the use of video with playback scenarios that reinforce the lesson and allow the facilitator to observe and assess oral comprehension in real time classroom contexts. the facilitator plays an important role, as josé explains: the facilitator is the mediator between the dvd and the participant; observing and getting information off the students (participants) involved concerning learning or other issues affecting them; working with the coordinator, advisor and supervisors in designing strategies to implement; assisting in the classroom and providing individualized attention; mobilizing and maintaining students’ retention; following the students’ performance and progress. they gradually gain confidence and are able to work independently with little support. some of the facilitators from previous intakes are now working either at a small business, at a café or even at school. (personal communication, june 2016) on the wall: en la pared. bre 2016 © liliana e. correa in australia the issue of literacy has been approached by implementing small scale literacy programs run by accredited organizations with a focus on an individual’s developing skills, a common approach in most western countries (boughton: 2012). in contrast, a large mass literacy campaign involves the commitment and engagement of different government agencies, community members and ngos that can support each stage of the project. the campaign’s aim is the transformation of communities and the focus is on the collective not the individual. boughton summarizes three key elements that constitutes a literacy campaign: phase one, which we call “socialisation and mobilisation,” mobilises as many people as possible to take part, as learners, teachers, organisers and supporters, and seeks to enhance the understanding of society as a whole of the importance of literacy to wider social and economic development goals. it also builds organisation at national, regional and local levels to lead the campaign, widening the responsibility for raising literacy levels beyond the government education authority, enlisting support and commitment from all government agencies, from non-government and civil society correa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 116 organisations and from the community as a whole … phase two, consists of a set of basic literacy lessons, run over a short period, usually three months or less, in which non-literate and low literate members of the community are encouraged to enrol and supported to complete. these lessons are usually non-formal, rarely accredited, and taught and organized by non-professional local facilitators and leaders in the community, with the assistance of professional advisers and materials provided by the central campaign authority … phase three of the campaign, is for “post-literacy.” this consists of activities designed to help the newly-literate participants continue to build their literacy beyond what has been achieved in the basic lessons, and to create a more literate culture in the community. (boughton, chee, beetson, durnan & leblanch 2013: 9) early in the day – teacher and students, bre 2016 © liliana e. correa josé brings to the classroom more than 30 years’ experience as a teacher, translator and interpreter. as a language teacher, he pays particular attention to names and sounds. we comment on our own difficulty as spanish speakers in pronouncing certain english sounds or the names we encounter of animals, plants and relations that people spontaneously incorporate into their day to day language, observing: ‘charla with the r is the way many people say my last name (chala). the reason seems to be that the letter combination ‘al’ does not exist or is rare, as i found out, in paatkanji, the language of the wilcannia people. they tend to use arl instead, resulting in charla or charly, even in writing’ (personal communication, july 2016). after his involvement in the last two missions in australia josé reflects on the program’s methodology: this humanistic approach conceives literacy as a process that allows the overall shaping of the personality of the student, who then is able to understand, analyze and develop cognitive and motor skills. everything was new for all at the beginning; the “yes, i can” cuban literacy program has not been experienced in australia before and we were all learning. indeed, we are still learning after 8 intakes and more than 100 graduates in wilcannia, bourke, enngonia and now brewarrina. now we can call it a campaign, not a trial, pilot or program. it has been proven that the yic is from little words, big words grow: annotations on the yo, sí puedo experience in brewarrina, australia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 117 helping as well as it has done in other countries. being accepted by the community was crucial due to the fact that our role is to help, train and monitor and we are here by ourselves. it is a very interesting experience. the cultural bath is shocking. (personal communication, july 2016) expanding on this last sentence and josé’s form of expression, the implementation of the campaign could be said to have been a cultural shock for all parties involved. one does not have to be cuban to recognize the enormous cultural differences that exist between dominant australian culture and indigenous australians, or to grapple with enormous disparities in social conditions, resources and infrastructures between rural, remote and metropolitan settings. i then asked josé if he considered the methodology flexible enough in the future for the purpose of teaching indigenous languages. yes. as a matter of fact, a “yes, i can!” version has used original languages as the target language in some countries, such as tetum in east timor. flexibility is a key point in the success of the program. the english version created for grenada is the one used here and this version has been also used in namibia to teach english, though it is not its main purpose. the program for indigenous australians has not been created yet. this is a pilot. this dvd version is from grenada, the only one that exists in english. in nz, it was developed over 3–4 years and [involved] 6 specialised english teachers only. it will be up to the organization that gets funded to continue and produce the local material. (personal communication, july 2016) prior to the implementation of the program it is necessary to have a preparation and adaptation stage whereby the realities and idiosyncrasies of place are taken into consideration and the adapted model is absorbed and supported by the receiving community. boughton stresses that the ‘cuban literacy project carries the core values of brazilian educator paolo freire and cuban independence hero, josé martí, that requires a “political will” at all levels of society. popular support was mobilized at both the state level and local level’ (boughton 2010: 63). without this political will, and the appropriate coordination and development of culturally and linguistically relevant materials, the model will only reproduce a program, without achieving the desired linguistic and political transformations. as mentioned earlier the yes, i can! method encompasses three distinct stages—training, teaching, reading and writing—after which there is a consolidation phase. in order to deliver the material effectively, a teacher must assess the group’s literacy and gauge the group’s particular social conditions and kinship relationships. each stage has different durations and aims to be completed in a total of 65 classes: the first phase of training is delivered in 10 lessons, 42 [lessons] focus on reading and writing and the remaining 13 lessons aim at consolidation. a video recording of a lesson is brought it as introduction, this last 15 minutes and after a 10 minute break to return to class for 30 minutes incorporating discussion and analysis for 15 minutes (my translation, ‘programa cubano de alfabetización yo sí puedo’ 2011) during my visit to brewarrina i had the opportunity to observe josé in the classroom. the lessons followed the tightly structured 65–lesson model explained above. the approach is traditional in that it follows a conventional western pedagogical style, with the teacher in front and the students seating in orderly rows facing the white board and tv set. i arrived when the program was about to enter the final phase. only a few weeks later josé would begin to establish classes in neighboring communities. my observations are subjective; correa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 118 my reflections about the way the model is delivered challenged my personal views on how radical a program has to be to facilitate change in a community and address many years of educational neglect. observing josé’s interactions in class i could see a synchronicity of rhythms between the students’ personalities and jose’s cuban cadences, facilitated by a slow and patient approach interjected with humour and spontaneity. the classroom time was structured and run in a traditional way; but the dynamics and the rhythm within the four walls of learning denoted something different. there are many pieces to the puzzle and they have to fit in order to unveil a larger picture, a landscape with all its ugliness and beauty. the model only works when the project is embedded in a specific cultural setting and the local community owns the process and its success. the expert facilitator must become another member of the community and trainees must belong to the community as well. consultation, ongoing evaluation and flexibility of approach are three of the main characteristic of the yo, sí puedo methodology. josé mentioned the importance of respecting the community’s dynamics and feedback, stressing: we acknowledge local aboriginal leaders, coordinator and facilitators too. the work they do to help the campaign is essential to its success. if we are not accepted by them we don’t begin do it. the community should take ownership of the campaign and it is one of the key points of the success. the campaign also builds the capacity of the local staff and benefits the whole community. we listen to students, and to staff as well to community members, and to government and non-government agencies to find out if the campaign is helping people to build their literacy, and about other benefit the participant’s experience. they are asked about what additional support is needed to make the campaign more sustainable and how the campaign can be improved. (personal communication, july 2016) the yo, sí puedo methodology understands literacy as the responsibility of the community and not of the individual alone. this to me differentiates the concept of knowledge as constructed in the west from knowledges as formulated in the geopolitical south. the pilot undertaken by the university of new england in partnership with beetson and associates and local aboriginal organizations from 2012 to june 2015, in wilcannia, enngonia and bourke, has produced 89 graduates. by july 2015 the campaign started its first phase in brewarrina. by the end of 2016 a second intake had begun, and preparations for the first stages to take place in weilmoringle, followed by walgett, were underway with the aim, eventually, to reach other towns in nsw and the rest of the country. josé has worked on the wilcannia project; on finishing his post in brewarrina, i asked him what lessons he had learnt from both experiences: that we need to go on and get more support especially when dealing with communities which have suffered a lot. still it is difficult sometimes to engage students, due to many external and historical factors related to issues going on for many years which we eventually find and not always are able to manage. they are not beyond the possibilities of the program. always trust the process, as jack beetson always says. teamwork of community coordinators and facilitators has been the key to success. and we all know we need to keep on trying. (personal communication, june 2016) from little words, big words grow: annotations on the yo, sí puedo experience in brewarrina, australia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 119 coming back to land along the way from bre to sydney, june 2016 © liliana e. correa with eyes half open after almost nine hours driving away from brewarrina i noticed the colour of the earth changing to red. i cannot avoid thinking of corrientes, my father’s land, which abuts the south atlantic ocean. yet i am here, experiencing other sounds, smells, and textures on my bare feet, my thoughts scattering, co-existing with australia’s first nations under the same sky. i am learning to observe this country with different eyes, and to listen to the stones, to read the carvings and the signs that mark my way back, to name the way of the stars that disclose where to search and hunt. here is a culture that survived millennia and is still resilient, creative, innovative, strong, alive: how can we still be so blind before so much knowledge? it is, i argue, a conundrum to be educated in the language of the oppressor in order for one’s own language to be heard. for the yo, sí puedo / yes, i can campaign to work deeply, the campaign’s approach to literacy should involve the maintenance of languages in danger and the revival of lost languages. this may involve programs that acknowledge other epistemologies and community development educational strategies in which aboriginal englishes are included in literacy programs and skills development programs as a way of allowing stories to be told. as the maori scholar tuhiwai smith writes: ‘every issue has been approached by indigenous peoples with a view to rewriting and rerighting our position in history. indigenous peoples want to tell our stories, write our own versions, in our own ways, for our own purposes’ (2007: 332). as with other first nations australian indigenous peoples face the complex legacies of colonization, which include the loss of language, and intergenerational trauma that lingers despite records of survival. australia is a first world country that by chance is on the edge of the world’s most economoically dynamic region. its population of over 24 million has come from all over the world, adding to the dominant english language some 300 more languages. british colonialists imagined this land as an empty space of possibility; immigrants and refugees continue to regard it as a sanctuary. in contrast, for the traditional custodians of this land, ‘australia’ is a nation-state founded on mistaken policies and violent encounters; here, correa portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 120 the levels of poor health, deaths in custody, child mortality, domestic violence, racism and oppressive sociocultural and political conditions should be unthinkable. my last questions josé were: why is this important for cuba? as a cuban how do you feel when you are so far removed from your culture and facilitating literacy on the other side of the world? josé answered: ‘it is our modest contribution to better the world and especially the most disadvantaged people. showing solidarity is paying respect to australia’s first nations and making the world a better place’ (personal communication, july 2016). education can be the common ground on which our differences can be acknowledged. experience has taught us that big achievements arise from first steps and in the hope that change is possible. in practice the australian literacy for life foundation has taken the first steps to effect change with the knowledge that indigenous communities are fast learners and resilient. learning one sound at a time; from little words big words grow. it was my interest in this transformative potential and in the possibilities of collaborations between south-south peoples and knowledges that took me originally to brewarrina to meet the cuban advisor of yo, sí puedo / yes, i can. spending a week in brewarrina inspired the annotations and visual-poetic narratives that i have used throughout this text. i hope they can contribute to heightening the visibility of the yes, i can campaign and to ensuring that the implementation of literacy programs for indigenous peoples in australia remains at the forefront of public debates and consciousness. acknowledgements i would like to acknowledge cuban educator josé manuel chala leblanch for his contributions to this article. this paper would not have been written without his camaraderie and stimulating conversation, and for facilitating my visit to brewarrina. in addition, i am grateful to the australian literacy for life foundation (http://www.lflf.org.au/) for accepting my visit. references anzaldúa, g. 1987, borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza. aunt lute books, san francisco. boal, a. 1979, theatre of the oppressed. pluto press, london. boughton, b. 2010, ‘back to the future? 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australian national universsity (anu) centre for aboriginal economic policy research (caepr) working paper no. 8, anu canberra. online, available: http://caepr.anu. edu.au/sites/default/files/publications/wp/caeprwp08.pdf [accessed 8 august 2016]. sharifian, f. 2006, ‘a cultural-conceptual approach and world englishes: the case of aboriginal english,’ world englishes, vol. 25 no. 1: 11–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0083-2919.2006.00444.x tuhiwai-smith, l. 1999, decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. zed book & university of otago press, london & otago. unesco 2004, ‘education position paper: the plurality of literacy and its implications for policies and programmes.’ online, available: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001362/136246e.pdf [accessed 8 august 2016]. from little words, big words grow: annotations on the yo, sí puedo experience in brewarrina, australia portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 123 http://caepr.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publications/wp/caeprwp08.pdf http://caepr.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publications/wp/caeprwp08.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0083-2919.2006.00444.x http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001362/136246e.pdf portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 2 september 2017 communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue, guest edited by anu bissoonauth and rowena ward. © 2017 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: wolfers, e. p. 2017. sustainability: suspicions concerning attainability, with particular reference to the pacific. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:2, 87-101. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal. v14i2.5484 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au research article sustainability: suspicions concerning attainability, with particular reference to the pacific edward p. wolfers, csm cmg university of wollongong corresponding author: emeritus professor of politics edward p. wolfers, school of humanities and social inquiry, faculty of law, humanities and the arts, university of wollongong, northfields avenue, wollongong nsw 2522, australia. ewolfers@uow.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5484 article history: received 11/04/2017; revised 18/06/2017; accepted 07/07/2017; published 05/10/2017 abstract sustainability and unsustainability are frequently deployed in discussions of intended, predicted and observed changes occurring in or impacting on pacific islands societies. local communities often have their own distinctive understanding of the natural environment. their concern for sustainability frequently extends further afield – to languages, cultures, and other aspects of life. international agreements and the constitutions of a number of pacific islands countries address relevant issues. constitutional government in the region has been remarkably sustained. sustainable development has diverse dimensions and can be controversial. climate change and rising sea-levels threaten the very survival of low-lying islands. harvesting of non-renewable resources raises particular issues. pacific islands studies have made significant contributions to scientific knowledge and human understanding of issues and processes of wider, even global importance. keywords sustainability; environment; sustainable development; constitutions; pacific studies declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 87 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5484 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5484 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5484 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:ewolfers@uow.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5484 introduction sustainability has become something of a catchword, not only in the pacific, but globally, used to justify or legitimate a wide range of different activities, and to criticize or condemn others.1 key aspects of sustainability include continuity and support. a sustainable activity is one that can continue indefinitely or until its completion—and, in the case of an activity with wider possible impacts, without causing unnecessary disruption to other activities, society or the environment. a sustainable physical project can be expected to continue or operate if it is properly maintained. both the word and the idea of sustainability—and its opposite, unsustainability—are widely used in debates over intended, predicted or observed changes occurring in or impacting on pacific island societies. although there are questions about their scope and effectiveness, a growing number of regional and other international agreements have sustainability as a stated objective. the words ‘sustain’ or ‘sustainable’ appear in only three constitutions of the twenty pacific states and non-self-governing pacific territories on the leading website through which the region’s laws can be accessed, the pacific islands legal information institute: pitcairn islands, federated states of micronesia and fiji. however, the diverse environmental, cultural, economic and societal processes to which these terms have been attached appear in the constitutions of another eleven states and territories: northern mariana islands, marshall islands, nauru, niue, palau, papua new guinea, samoa, solomon islands, tokelau, tuvalu and vanuatu. questions of sustainability are relevant to almost every academic discipline embraced by pacific studies. in the case of cook islands, niue and tokelau, a 2010 report by a new zealand parliamentary committee raised important questions—and made interesting recommendations—in regard to the (un-)sustainability and the case for reform of existing arrangements in the new zealand realm (new zealand house of representatives 2010). for people living on low-lying coral atolls or other islands in the pacific, the threat that climate change poses to their very survival (unless they leave) as sea-levels rise means that questions of (un)sustainability are more than a matter of words or reform of existing arrangements. it is accordingly important to clarify what sustainability and unsustainability purport to mean, both in principle and in practice, and to assess their particular pertinence to the pacific islands. the following discussion addresses, in turn, the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development, specific aspects and examples of sustainability in the pacific, as well as issues and possible strategies of particular relevance to ensuring the sustainability of pacific studies. the diverse topics to which sustainability may be relevant—together with the variety of contexts in which sustainability is an attribute or an issue—mean that this paper draws on a variety of examples, countries and territories in the region, and academic disciplines in exploring and trying to explain what might be at stake in discussions of sustainability in the pacific. sustainability and the natural environment questions of sustainability are not novel in the pacific. as the late ron crocombe observed, the portrayal of early human settlers in the pacific ‘as natural ecologists, caring for the ecosystem, is exaggerated. like all humans, they learned to conserve and enhance the environment only after over-exploitation caused problems’ (crocombe 2008: 5). examples crocombe cited include the extinction of many species of birds in new zealand, the 1 this article draws on a keynote address to the australian association of pacific studies’ conference on ‘sustainability,’ held at the university of wollongong, 12–14 april 2012. wolfers portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 88 degradation of forests on wallis and futuna and other islands, the deforestation of easter island, and the disappearance of various bird species elsewhere. however, as crocombe also acknowledged, there have been significant instances of human behaviour in the pacific that displayed close understanding of the environment and the need to behave in ways that minimize negative impacts, whether for self-interested or other reasons. leaving agricultural land fallow between harvests is a case in point (2008: 6). other examples include ‘traditional’—pre-colonial—agricultural systems described by brookfield with hart (1971: 88), ‘in which the landscape is transformed,’ but not completely destroyed: by elaborate techniques of water control—both irrigation and drainage—by terracing, ridging and mounding, slope control and various methods for the control of fallow cover. in this class of systems, the cultivation landscape is quite different ecologically from the pre-existing landscape, and never returns to it while in occupation of man. (brookfield with hart 1971: 88) in yet other places, another author, edvard hviding, has described religiously motivated observances and taboos as ‘designed to maximize long-term yields of fishing grounds, garden lands and hunting areas’ (2003: 256). these practices were often based on local observations and experience. in this regard, it may be relevant to observe that pacific islands societies have not regarded themselves as distant or separate from the natural environment in the way that modern scholarly science seems to do. as hviding has observed—and other scholars have shown— pacific islands societies have their own scientific understandings of the environment in which they live, cultivate food-crops, hunt, and, as the case may be, fish. these understandings are based on first-hand experience, observations and customary beliefs (2003: 250). or, as the scholar and writer the late epeli hau’ofa (2008) put it, people in the pacific (not including those living in the interiors of larger islands) have their own understandings of the places they inhabit, and do not see themselves as living and working on islands separated by expanses of sea, but, rather, in ‘a sea of islands.’ despite the rhetoric of remoteness and isolation often invoked by outsiders, people living far inland are connected in various ways—through trade, ceremonial exchange, intermarriage, and conflict—with their immediate neighbours, and eventually with people on the coast (as the prevalence of shells used for purposes of exchange and personal adornment in the papua new guinea highlands suggests). it is, therefore, appropriate to recognize that sustainability is not simply a matter for the environment ‘out there.’ it is so intimately connected with people’s daily lives that a strong case can be made that the distinction between community and environment does not apply, at least not when it comes to people raised and living in the same or (in the case of some married people who have moved to their spouse’s home village or island) similar places to those where ancestral generations lived before. a related point is that pacific islanders often understand their natural environment in rather different ways to outsiders. communities whose ancestors lived alongside a river for some thousands of years might not regard a change in the colour of the water as inconsequential, even if scientists assure them that it has no significance. the same can apply if birds in an area cease singing, insects stop croaking, marine life disappears from local rivers, and plants (even plants that are not used for fuel, food or decoration) begin to die. for people who eat plants, birds, insects, or locally available species of marine life—or consume creatures that do so themselves—assurances to the contrary made by highly qualified and dispassionate scientists may also ring hollow. moreover, these observations are not merely academic. for sustainability: suspicions concerning attainability, with particular reference to the pacific portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 89 example, in bougainville, attempts by well-qualified foreign scientists to reassure local villagers that changes in their environment did not give rise to concern for the health or wellbeing of people in the area around the panguna mine led to a walkout by francis ona in the leadup to what became a conflict that engulfed bougainville for almost nine years. the conflict eventually cost an estimated 15–20,000 lives, many injuries, and widespread suffering, as well as the destruction of a great deal of public and private property in bougainville (independent state of papua new guinea 1991). sustainability, tradition and change sustainability is not necessarily or primarily a matter of concern for the natural environment. pacific islanders have considerable experience of other efforts to ensure sustainability— learning how to behave and what to believe from their parents and other community elders; learning from and participating in efforts by christian missionaries to change their beliefs and ways of life; obeying the instructions of colonial field officers; and, recently, listening to the advice of foreign consultants to government, non-government organizations, and national leaders and officials. as these examples suggest, sustainability has frequently not been a matter of preserving tradition. in the case of missionaries, colonial officers and other actors, the objective has often been the modification or abandonment of previous beliefs and practices, and sustainable—and sustained—change. the same has been true when it came to education and training, public service localization programs, and other activities, such as political education and a phased transfer of power, intended to ‘prepare’ pacific islands people for self-government and independence (where the sustainability of national government and other values, such as democracy and the rule of law, have frequently been the colonial governments’ specific objectives). similar concerns to ensure the sustainability of particular values and institutions in post-colonial societies can be seen in the efforts by foreign aid donors as well as regional and other international organizations to engage in capacity-building, institutional strengthening, and, recently, efforts to promote representation of women in national parliaments. other efforts (with sometimes debatable effects) include the world bank’s structural adjustment programs, aid donors’ support for the construction and upgrading of infrastructure, and the provision of academic scholarships and exchanges. as the foregoing outline suggests, sustainability has been an important consideration in a range of activities. however, a particular difficulty arises: what does ‘sustainable development’ signify? sustainable development ‘sustainable development’ was a key recommendation made—and, in certain respects, made famous—by the ambitiously named world commission on environment and development, established by the united nations and chaired by former norwegian prime minister gro harlem brundtland (which has become widely known as the brundtland commission). the objective was recommended in a report entitled ‘our common future’ (united nations 1987). according to this report, ‘sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (54). it recognizes that ‘living standards that go beyond the basic minimum are sustainable only if consumption standards everywhere have regard for long-term sustainability’ (84–85). in short, we live in an interconnected and mutually dependent world, a technologically more advanced and geographically wider version of the ‘sea of islands’ in which hau’ofa (2008) argued that pacific islanders have always lived. wolfers portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 90 but, even so, what are basic needs? food, shelter and clothing are frequently cited, as well as opportunities to earn an income, particularly in urban settings. however, anyone familiar with the effects of urbanization and changing lifestyles in rural villages knows that families from communities that have previously grown, hunted or fished for food often no longer do so (or not as frequently). they have become dependent on tinned meat or fish and rice. the question is whether these are ‘basic needs,’ particularly in rural areas, in the same way that these and other foods can be for people in other long-urbanized parts of the world whose families have been living for generations in slums with no village or land rights to which to return elsewhere. moreover, is the need for shelter not affected by climate or the educational needs of children? or, do women from countries where their predecessors moved around freely bare-breasted need clothes? many development advocates feel that they do. but warmth is often not their principal concern: it is a sense of modesty inculcated by churches, education, and exposure to mass media. additionally, what clothing do men need, particularly young men who are aware from television of the stylishness of certain t-shirts and jeans? it is all very well to declare that following the latest american or european fashions is not necessary, but what if young people disagree and steal clothes or money to buy clothes in order to meet a felt need? might it not be reasonable to conclude that aspirations—and feelings of relative deprivation, hence perceived needs—can change over time? such questions are important, complex, and, for many people, sensitive enough to warrant careful consideration. as sustainable development is more widely discussed and even accepted as an important objective and principle of public policy, so its application has become more diverse—and sometimes controversial. the very idea of ‘sustainable mining’ is, in certain respects, an extreme. what can it possibly mean? how can a non-renewable resource be mined in a way that ensures that all relevant factors and processes will continue? sustainability and non-renewable resources according to an australian government publication (2016), issued by the department of industry, innovation and science following consultation with australian mining industry and other interest groups: ‘in the minerals sector, sustainable development means that investments in minerals projects should be financially profitable, technically appropriate, environmentally sound and socially responsible.’ for its part, the former australian agency for international development (ausaid), which, together with its website has not been sustained (hence the absence of an online address for the following quote), described the concept of a sustainable mining sector as involving ‘making better use of revenues, improving socially and environmentally sustainable development, and growing the economy.’ in similar vein, the papua new guinea sustainable development program limited, which was set up to manage the equity of the former mine operator in the ok tedi mine in papua new guinea’s western province, has distinguished between mining itself and the socio-economic benefits to which it can lead, both while a mine continues to operate and following mine closure. one reaction to the ausaid publication by a young papua new guinean blogger, a former student turned betel-nut seller, has been a passionate accusation headed ‘ausaid’s neo-colonisation agenda extends to “sustainable mining,”’ which he describes as ‘this aussie crap!’ (namorong 2012). in the 1987 report ‘our common future,’ the world commission on environment and development recognized that the use of non-renewable resources sustainability: suspicions concerning attainability, with particular reference to the pacific portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 91 reduces the stock available for future generations. but this does not mean that such resources should not be used. in general the rate of depletion should take into account the criticality of that resource, the availability of technologies for minimizing depletion, and the likelihood of substitutes being available … sustainable development requires that the rate of depletion of non-renewable resources should foreclose as few future options as possible. (united nations 1987: 54) the report goes on to say: ‘in essence, sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development; and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations’ (united nations 1987: 55). so back to continuity and support, and the uncertain issues involved in trying to define, let alone to meet, human needs and aspirations. defining ‘sustainability’ and ‘development’ in certain respects, the entire discussion of sustainable development harks back to a set of issues that arose in previous discussions of development. whereas an early theorist on the subject, w. w. rostow (1960), tried to define stages of development without predicting what might follow stage five, the age of high mass consumption, others have argued that there are limits to growth—hence to sustainable development defined primarily in economic terms. some of the difficulties in defining sustainable development stand out, still unresolved. at one extreme there are sceptics, such as the british writer jenkins, who argued that ‘[t] he word sustainable should never appear in an act of parliament. it is a weasel word, an adjective not qualifying a noun, but lightly dusting it with vague political approval’ (2011: 3). however, having condemned the adjective, jenkins then argues that ‘sustainability’ is the sort of term that ‘gave us downsizing for sacking, and humanitarian intervention for war. the only sustainable meadow is a meadow. sustainable development is a contradiction in terms. it means development’ (2011: 3). whether there is or can be a process of sustainable development is clearly contentious. another difficulty arises from the diverse, often imprecise ways in which ‘development’ is defined. if it is a specific step forward, then sustainability is a matter of ensuring that a particular development is maintained—with, perhaps, some requirement of ongoing support. if, however, development is regarded as an ongoing, open-ended process, then the question arises whether ‘sustainable development’ is not just a matter of sustaining a particular step (or development) but an ongoing, perhaps open-ended process in which development itself continues to move ahead. in countries where the population is rapidly increasing, as in most of the pacific, this probably means that the development process must not only embrace more people but keep compounding incrementally so that poverty, new diseases, and other disadvantages are overcome, and more and more nutritious food, improved public health and access to education become more readily available—eventually, perhaps, beyond the targets and benchmarks set for the united nations’ millennium development goals (mdgs) and subsequently updated in the sustainable development goals (sdgs). here it is worth noting that only two pacific island countries, cook islands and niue, both of which enjoy the benefits that come with being in free association with new zealand, achieved all of the mdgs, while the independent states of kiribati, papua new guinea and solomon islands achieved none (pacific islands forum secretariat 2015: 8). wolfers portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 92 there is clearly a need to clarify terms not only for the sake of academic analysis and debate but so that proponents of sustainability in its diverse manifestations do not mislead or confuse where they purport to inspire, explain, or, preferably, undertake positive action. in this respect, students and practitioners in the field of pacific studies, particularly those committed to their advancement, have a scholarly responsibility and, arguably, a wider public role to play in clarifying both what has been achieved in the region, and the challenges lying ahead. sustainability in the pacific: national constitutions constitutions are, almost by definition, intended by those who make, implement or simply respect them to be sustainable—to guide and regulate significant aspects of governance, government and law—with public policy-making and implementation in accordance with relevant constitutional provisions to proceed indefinitely, subject only to amendment made in accordance with specified procedures. as previously noted, most pacific islands countries’ constitutions make specific reference to some aspects of sustainability and sustainable development. these include commitments to environmental conservation. no doubt because of their previous exposure to united states’ (us) nuclear-testing and the ongoing us military presence in the region, the constitutions of countries and territories previously part of the former trust territory of the pacific islands, including the commonwealth of the northern mariana islands and the three states now in free association with the usa (the federated states of micronesia, republic of marshall islands, and republic of palau) contain specific provisions regarding any agreements to test, store or dispose of nuclear or other toxic substances within their jurisdictions. the constitutions of papua new guinea, pitcairn islands and vanuatu refer explicitly (in language familiar to readers of key texts on sustainable development) to the obligations that people living now owe to the interests of ‘future generations.’ the constitution of nauru, a country that has arguably experienced more widespread and enduring degradation of its environment than any other country in the region (though parts of other countries are in similar situations), contains two rather unusual provisions. one requires the establishment of a long term investment fund, while the other exempts the nauru government from responsibility for rehabilitating land from which phosphate was mined until shortly before independence. the first provision appears to be directed towards enhancing nauru’s economic sustainability; the second seems designed to ensure that certain legal responsibilities cannot be sustained. the united nations convention on the law of the sea (united nations 1982) provides what might be regarded as a framework for various declarations, agreements and practical efforts—through the pacific islands forum fisheries agency and other regional organizations—to promote sustainable use of the region’s rich fisheries, particularly tuna. other international conventions concern endangered species, and the conservation of significant aspects of humanity’s heritage, including the natural environment. in the pacific, these are (intended to be) supported by the pacific education for sustainable development framework. however, crocombe (2008: 514) has acerbically commented, in regard to the 1995 suva declaration on sustainable human development, that the costs involved in negotiating some of these agreements and then in holding follow-up meetings may well outweigh the benefits. his conclusion was that ‘[w]hen people see that governance as practised by international agencies (quite distinct from governance as preached and defined by them) consists of platitudes, rituals and ripoffs, that is what they learn’ (2008: 514). the implications for relevant aspects of pacific studies seem clear: there is a need to look beyond what governments and international organizations say about sustainability and sustainable sustainability: suspicions concerning attainability, with particular reference to the pacific portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 93 development and to examine what they actually do. the result for fisheries, in particular, while open to improvement, is arguably not as grim as it appears to be in relation to other activities, such as forestry. in regard to forestry, it can be difficult for a lay person to arrive at an accurate and definite assessment. different analysts reach quite different, even contradictory, conclusions as to the rate of tree-felling that should be regarded as sustainable. while some, for example, write passionately about unsustainable logging in papua new guinea, others compare what is happening there with tree-felling rates in europe and even argue that there is room for increase; however, it is revealing when one sees how work on some timber projects suddenly falls silent when unknown visitors unexpectedly appear. moreover, experience suggests that rural communities are not necessarily opposed to having their land cleared of trees—perhaps for the income to be gained immediately, and even because of their hope that the land can then be put to different use. the way in which many papua new guinean communities have agreed to having their land cleared—in some observers’ views, unsustainably—under special agricultural business leases (sabls) is a case in point. the issue for many rural landowners may well be to take what they can get now, instead of waiting for the results likely to be gained from insisting on forms and rates of harvesting that are more likely to be sustainable in the mediumor long-term. however, according to the report on the commission of inquiry into sabls (commission of inquiry 2013: 9), the result has been a ‘drastic’ reduction in customary landownership: ‘[t]his present a huge problem in a country such as png where bulk of its population live in rural areas and are subsistence farmers living on their land for sustenance and survival’ (2013: 9). with population growth estimated at 7.5 percent, ‘customary land [has now] become scarce giving rise to land disputes and other social and law and order problems’ (2013: 9). an unusual form of sustainability, which has not attracted a great deal of academic (or other) attention, concerns the ways in which constitutional government in the pacific has generally been maintained or (as in the case of tonga and samoa, in particular) continued to evolve towards democracy. having experienced four military coups, fiji is an obvious exception, as is solomon islands, which experienced a coup by armed insurgents in 2000. however, what is remarkable to students of decolonization, constitutions and democracy in other parts of the world is the sustainability that has prevailed in most of the region subsequent to formal decolonization. clearly, the legitimacy of existing arrangements and a willingness to change them in accordance with their own procedures is key. in the case of papua new guinea, many observers predicted that the constitution adopted at independence would be disrupted by a military coup, an illegal seizure of power by a political party or faction, and/or widespread demands for secession. there have been a number of events which might be described as near-misses: the rooney affair in 1979 and 1980; the sandline affair in 1997; and the two competing claimants to the prime ministership in 2011–2012. however, to date, the way in which the independence constitution was made, and legitimated, on the basis of widespread consultation through public meetings and political discussion groups scattered throughout the country has acted to prevent such a situation arising (papua new guinea constitutional planning committee 1974). thus papua new guinea may be used as a control in comparative studies of military behaviour, particularly in newly independent countries. however, the bougainville conflict between 1989 and 1997 provides a significant qualification to generalizations about papua new guinea as a whole. the idea of a ‘home-grown’ constitution for an independent papua new guinea owed quite a deal to the samoan precedent (davidson 1967: 349–411), which was a marked wolfers portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 94 departure from the customary practice of formal decolonization in which the constitution of the successor state was either negotiated over the table with officials of the departing colonial power or simply imposed (roberts-wray 1966: 298–301). generational change might help to explain the current situation in papua new guinea, where a small minority of current national leaders was involved in the making of the national constitution and has developed a consequential sense of ownership and commitment. the rise in numbers of politicians from parts of the country where custom appears to retain greater influence than colonial rule is an example of how the sustainability of some influences may prevail over others, at least, for a time. other challenges when it comes to government services and the economy, the reality in many parts of the pacific has been that rapidly rising populations and the unwillingness of foreign aid donors to provide direct support for recurrent expenditures means that governments in the region find it difficult to meet the needs, let alone to provide opportunities for sustainable development, for their people. the resulting shortfalls in the provision of government services—often due to the absence or lack of adequately maintained infrastructure—mean that access to health, education and other services fall short of demand. while elites may travel abroad for medical treatment or send their children overseas for education, less fortunate fellow-citizens often miss out. sustainability, let alone sustainable development, involves ever greater challenges, such as securing support for sustaining previous developments, which—despite the rhetoric of partnership—foreign aid donors may be reluctant to provide (though neglect by recipients and subsequent ‘upgrading’ by foreign aid donors may achieve similar results). meanwhile, much of the potential for development in papua new guinea, in particular, seems to depend on revenues and employment opportunities to be gained from the extraction of non-renewable resources—with all of the challenges that such development poses for environmental and employment sustainability, even if substantial revenues are invested in, say, a sovereign wealth fund. the small, but significant, departure of graduates and other skilled personnel overseas poses a growing challenge, even as migration and the expectation of remittances becomes an increasingly significant aspect of some governments’ development strategies. moreover, many skilled personnel cannot be readily replaced should they leave. examples include doctors and nurses with particular experience of tropical diseases that their counterparts in other countries are frequently not as well-trained to identify or treat. the obverse involves architects and engineers who, lacking experience in geologically unstable environments, have come from abroad to design buildings, including a significant number in port moresby, which cannot be sustained. here, perhaps, is an argument for promoting continuity and support for personnel already in-country for the sake of diverse forms of sustainability. as previously observed, the most dramatic, proximate threat to the very survival of some pacific islands countries—and to parts of others—appears to be rising sea-levels occasioned by global warning. this is additional to the environmental stress previously visible on coral atolls, in particular, as a result of the availability and use of new kinds of metal tools, changing agricultural practices, and increasing populations. a noteworthy feature of these threats to the sustainability of entire countries, individual islands and many communities is the failure of the international community to find a way to describe the victims, let alone to provide for their future. they are not ‘refugees’ with ‘a well-founded fear of persecution’ on any of the sustainability: suspicions concerning attainability, with particular reference to the pacific portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 95 grounds mentioned in the united nations refugee convention; nor are they likely to qualify as ‘internally displaced persons’ of a conventional kind, and not at all in countries comprised almost entirely of low-lying atolls. in kiribati, as in other low-lying island states, rising sea-levels threaten the future habitability of the entire country. former president anote tong has been vocal in calling on the international community to act. he oversaw purchase of 6,500 acres of land in fiji for the possible future resettlement of people from kiribati, and expressed the view that young people from kiribati should be educated for life abroad (‘politics in kiribati’ 2016). however, the international community has given little or no consideration—at least publicly—to the question whether entire nations or significant communities within them should be enabled to emigrate together, and, if they do, what might be done to preserve their cultures and languages, let alone their political identities. there are, of course, precedents for the displacement and resettlement of populations both within and across political boundaries in the region, including colonial resettlement programs (connell 2012). however, certain issues are not being addressed, including the possibility, experienced in the case of pre-independence nauru, that communities offered resettlement might prefer not to go. on a related point, when the case for sustainability is made, it might be pertinent for there to be a debate on the pros and cons of particular issues. for example, a frequently made observation is that melanesia is the most linguistically diverse part of the world. much is made by some participants and commentators of the need to sustain existing languages and cultures. however, as increasing numbers of people marry partners from distant language and ethnic groups, their children frequently do not identify with a particular community. thus, numbers of young papua new guineans, when asked where they are from, give answers such as ‘kavieng and lae,’ ‘simbu and central,’ or other non-traditional combinations, which frequently draw on identities created during colonial rule or since independence. meanwhile, lingue franche such as tok pisin continue not only to spread and adopt new terms but to creolize and become the first languages of increasing numbers of people (the same is true, to a lesser extent, for english). linguists often stress the importance of maintaining existing languages and not allowing them to die out. however, parents ambitious for the future employment or business prospects of their children may well disagree (as parents have done even in some of the largest linguistic communities in papua new guinea, including enga, where the prospects for actually educating children in the vernacular seem likely to be much better than elsewhere because of the enhanced ability to recruit and train teachers from the area and to publish relevant texts economically). thus may sustainability be more strongly contested by prospective beneficiaries with different ambitions for their children, in particular, than advocates of sustainability might otherwise have anticipated. sustainability and pacific studies a book published by the world wildlife fund (2012), global 200, which purports to identify 200 places around the world ‘that must survive,’ includes only one in the pacific: the moist forests of new caledonia. students of pacific studies would, almost certainly, not have much difficulty in identifying many more in the region—from spectacular volcanoes shooting flames and smoke into the air through coral reefs inhabited by many different varieties of fish (including species that scientists have not identified, named, and studied) to seemingly untouched mountains, valleys and beaches that are home to diverse zoological and botanical wolfers portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 96 species that are still to be identified. the case of a particular species of bird springs to mind: when a television show that was relayed in papua new guinea reported the exciting news that a foreign researcher had discovered a poisonous bird, known as the pitohui, in the mountains behind port moresby, local residents reacted with the advice—conveyed to a biologist at the university of papua new guinea—that they knew of several similar such species. it is, in part, the discrepancy between local knowledge and mainstream science that enables scientists to produce public estimates of the number of species of fish, plants and other biological phenomena still to be identified and named in papua new guinea. local knowledge can be quite critical when it comes to the ‘discovery’ of previously unstudied rodents, reptiles, and even birds and mammals. and much the same seems to be true when it comes to the number of languages and dialects spoken by the country’s indigenous inhabitants: local knowledge can often be the key to identifying ‘new’ species. in this regard, it is pertinent to recall the insightful observation made by the distinguished anthropologist and author, epeli hau’ofa (2008: 28), concerning the ‘often derogatory and belittling’ ways in which outsiders have described and interacted with pacific peoples. cases in point include the many books that characterise entire societies in terms of a particular characteristic or set of characteristics, often set well in the past, such as ‘primitive,’ ‘savage’ and ‘cannibal.’ they make it difficult to refer young pacific islanders to what are often the only available sources of published information about the anthropology and/or history of the societies into which they were born. the point is not just a matter of ‘political correctness’ or mere words. it frequently goes to the heart of what is being explained and, more importantly, what is understood. this is, or ought to be, a matter of concern to students of the pacific who seek to promote mutual understanding, and respect both among the diverse peoples of the region and with people from other countries. pacific islands societies are not dominated by gaps in knowledge, misunderstandings and failures (though they may occur). the region’s societies encompass values, knowledge and behaviours of their own, as worthy of careful study and as likely to yield results of wider significance as other parts of the world. political and other forms of behaviour in the pacific are sometimes unique, and accordingly useful to highlight features of other societies that might otherwise be taken for granted. the role of kinship in shaping identity and social obligations, for example, can provide a useful way of highlighting and examining the growing individualism of people in advanced industrial societies. others actually resemble behaviours that have occurred elsewhere. for example, the conduct of parliamentarians and the character of political parties in papua new guinea—and elsewhere in the region—bear a certain resemblance to their counterparts in nineteenth century great britain, the australian states, and the early years of australian federation (compare, for example, loveday & wolfers 1976, and loveday, martin & parker 1977). many claims and justifications for pacific studies as a significant area for academic teaching and research emphasize the region’s proximity and importance to australia even though remarkably few australians seem to regard australia as being in—and so part of—the pacific region. while understanding neighbouring and nearby countries has merits of its own, there are other ways of justifying and promoting pacific studies. they include the contributions that studies of the region can make both to knowledge and to understanding of humanity and the world more generally. obvious instances of the region’s contribution to global knowledge and understanding include the contributions that travel through and studies of the region have made to geography and the study of evolution. indeed, an entire academic discipline (which, unfortunately, seems to be in decline, at least in australia) owes much of its main sustainability: suspicions concerning attainability, with particular reference to the pacific portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 97 methodology—fieldwork—and its contributions to social scientific understanding more generally, to work in and about the pacific: anthropology, in which bronislaw malinowski’s research in the trobriand islands played a pioneering role (1922). the idea that colonized people should be regarded and studied as active participants in making their own history can be found in the research and publications of the late professor j. w. davidson and other historians of the pacific long before post-colonialism became an academic discipline. by encouraging, supporting and assisting pacific islanders to write their own stories and creative works, the late ulli beier and ron crocombe worked to ensure that what postcolonial theorists have described as the voices of subalterns can be heard (or, at least, read). research and writing about papua new guinea, in particular, have earnt a number of important international academic and literary prizes (wolfers 2005; winduo 2005). they include the 1976 nobel prize in physiology or medicine, won by d. carleton gajdusek, for research on kuru, which eventually, provided useful insights into an outbreak in europe of creutzfeld-jakob or mad cow disease. other examples include the 1998 pulitzer prize for non-fiction, which was won by jared diamond’s book, guns, germs and steel: the fates of human societies (1997). reports of work in or closely relevant to papua new guinea have been recognized in the awards made to winners of the royal anthropological institute’s rivers memorial medal, which was originally given for ‘anthropological work in the field,’ as well as five gold-medallists of the royal geographical society. in the literary field, australian poet and essayist, j. p. mcauley, who served with the australian new guinea administrative unit (angau) in world war ii and then helped train post-war patrol officers in australia before they left for the field, wrote both poems and essays about papua new guinea, as have such best-selling writers as (ralph) hammond innes (author of a novel about bougainville), solomons seal (1980). other best-selling books about the wider pacific include james a. michener’s pulitzer prize winning work of fiction, tales of the south pacific (1947), and return to paradise (1951), among others, as well as paul theroux, whose books include the happy isles of oceania: paddling the pacific (1992). yet other wellknown authors, including robert graves, former professor of poetry at oxford and author of the historical novel, the islands of unwisdom (1949), have written about the region without seeing it. more recently, deborah carlyon, became the first author of papua new guinean descent to win a significant literary competition abroad, the 2001 queensland premier’s literary award for best emerging queensland writer, which was awarded for mama kuma: one woman, two cultures (2002). thus, studying and writing about the pacific can be rewarding. it need, and should, not be a matter of pursuing the interests and activities of australians in the region, as in the case of the current—and growing—interest australians take in the kokoda trail. it can also be rewarding in other ways, including some of particular pertinence to sustainability. in regard to governance, for example, particularly strategies for developing a constitution that is likely to acquire the legitimacy required to be respectfully sustained, the samoan experience of insisting on and developing a constitution based on a country’s shared cultural values has been a source of inspiration to other countries in the region, and might well be propagated elsewhere (even in countries affected by the north african and arab spring, which have inspired some young bloggers in the pacific). samoa’s legal autochthony is, in certain respects, a text-book model. people promoting or engaged in peace-making and peace-building in countries outside the region have already sought to draw on the bougainville experience. interrogating societies in the region can yield fresh insights into needs, circumstances and possible ways forward in other societies, including australia and countries in other parts of the world. wolfers portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 98 pacific islands societies have had remarkably little impact on australian society and culture. papua new guinea must be among the few former colonies that have had the least impact on the society and culture, including the arts and culinary tastes, of their colonizing powers—in this case, australia. however, a book like r. j. may’s kaikai aniani: a guide to bush foods, markets and culinary arts of papua new guinea (1984), and similar books on the cuisines of other pacific islands countries, can introduce outsiders to tasty food and recipes from the region. it is accordingly important that pacific studies not be confined to a regional framework but used to interrogate, to understand and to enrich the wider world of shared humanity and the global environment. conclusion it seems appropriate to suggest that students of the pacific, particularly researchers, concerned with the sustainability of pacific studies might also embark on other, more narrowly focused academic battles. ron crocombe strongly advocated the principle that scholars, particularly fieldworkers, engaged in studying the pacific have a reciprocal obligation to those who inform or otherwise facilitate their research to make the results of their work available in the region— and to publish there. the implications for the ways in which publications from the region are ranked in australia seem clear. the same is true of citation indices, which are less likely to produce impressive results for research and writing in and on the pacific than work on topics of greater interest to academics in other parts of the world (but not necessarily of greater intellectual distinction). it is, arguably, a sad commentary on universities in australia that some of the most active research groups working on the pacific exist not so much because their universities think they are important but because of the australian government grants on which they depend. these groups include the state, society and governance in melanesia and resource management in the asia pacific programs at the australian national university, and the centre for democratic institutions at the same university. instead of accepting that they must compete in publishing research, attracting citations and recruiting students—when the number of interested academics and books on the region located in canberra is so far ahead of other australian centres—academics interested in the pacific might reasonably see co-operation and appreciation for the existence of a relatively well-endowed resource centre in the national capital as a more useful approach. the comparatively small numbers and relative youth of many academics working at universities and research institutions in the region might also mean, as crocombe insisted, that researchers based in other countries might be expected to play a mentoring role and encourage students, researchers, and writers to publish their insights into the region. in short, while the sustainability of pacific studies appears to be at stake in australian universities—particularly, when the numbers of students likely to be attracted and the revenues to be earnt from the pacific are compared with other more populated and wealthier parts of the world—the challenge for students of the pacific seems clear: it is to engage more actively in advocacy (and, perhaps even protest), for the sake of advancing pacific studies, not only in australia but in co-operation with 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https://www.parliament.nz/resource/en-nz/49dbsch_scr4945_1/a1e8715f6c270cf5ff075f2d42f4e19f92aef10d https://www.parliament.nz/resource/en-nz/49dbsch_scr4945_1/a1e8715f6c270cf5ff075f2d42f4e19f92aef10d http://www.forumsec.org/resources/uploads/embeds/file/2015 pacific regional mdgs tracking report.pdf http://www.forumsec.org/resources/uploads/embeds/file/2015 pacific regional mdgs tracking report.pdf http://www.paclii.org/ http://www.paclii.org/pg/cpcreport/main.htm http://www.paclii.org/pg/cpcreport/main.htm https://www.economist.com/news/asia/21694548-south-pacific-climate-change-animates-presidential-election-making-waves https://www.economist.com/news/asia/21694548-south-pacific-climate-change-animates-presidential-election-making-waves https://www.economist.com/news/asia/21694548-south-pacific-climate-change-animates-presidential-election-making-waves http://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/convention_overview_convention.htm http://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/convention_overview_convention.htm http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1500&context=kunapipi http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1500&context=kunapipi http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1500&context=kunapipi https://www.worldwildlife.org/publications/global-200 https://www.worldwildlife.org/publications/global-200 japanese government policy portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 3, no. 2 july 2006 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal oda a la ambigüedad crónica susana chávez-silverman, pomona college claramonte, califas 11-ii-06 para p.a. y para d.w.f. pensé, por un momento eterno, que me habías perdido, que te había perdido. that we'd lost each other. ¿cuánto tiempo without words, without even a glimpse? how could we go that long without? después de ese torrential exchange que sólo ahora me vengo a dar plena cuenta you rely upon like nourishment. me lo dices en tu carta, pero antes, en otra carta, once upon a time, repudiaste, as excessive. discomfiting. waves of alivio wash over me, ahora que nos hemos permitido honrar, decir las palabras vedadas. pronunciamos palabras como amor, miedo, daring, souls alike. bueno, en realidad, souls bien different, pero touching. we tread, gingerly, por territorios no cartografiados. chávez-silverman oda a la ambigüedad crónica te permites (some dam broke in you—un límite traspasado—el otro día, and i am grateful), you allow yourself the luxury of recognising love. sencillamente esto: sin acusarlo de desviarte. aun en esta, una forma antes desconocida. unrecognized. camino rápido por esta sudden, too-early primavera. a small, icy rivulet of sweat runs down my spine. my tissue-weight turquoise cotton top se me pega, cual ventosa, a la piel, semi-transparentándose. my lips part slightly; tiny casi jadeos se me escapan. voy rápido, long-limbed. y hace un calor intenso, unnatural en este supposedly still invernal aquarius birthday season. un atroz rottweiler, slightly overweight, compact and dense as a rhino, me aborda, pegado a su equally-chunky dueño. me recuerda (me hace acordar, as they say en buenos aires), por un momento, el film “doggy love” con gael garcía bernal. toda esa flashy, desperate, gritty mexicanidad. i watched it voluptuously, yearningly en ese cine en buenos aires. missing, visceralmente, the smells, the sounds of home. de mi otro hogar. pero really, apenas veo al rottweiler, de reojo. camino tan rápido, casi estoy corriendo. and besides, you know me: mucho más mío es el olfato. blooming antes de tiempo, a deshora, las fuzzy mimosa blossoms despiden su pale, dusty yellow perfume. me saltan las lágrimas de repente, unbidden, casi inappropriate, even, on this blindingly hot, gorgeous mid-winter day: how long since i've been home? marcos y sara me platicaron el otro día de santa cruz, and they may as well have been talking about mars. ya no está mami, my last link to home. no es mío, ya no es mi lugar en el mundo. pero the mimosa branches used to cool my lazy afternoon walks, de vuelta a casa de la high school. whoosh, whoosh. soplaban en la brisa marítima. the eucalyptus scattered their pods; occasionally a seagull would venture the quarter mile inland, y graznaba portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 2 chávez-silverman oda a la ambigüedad crónica overhead mientras yo volvía a casa, avoiding scary huge dogs, componiendo poemas en la cabeza. camino, ahora. i reach up, overhead, and crush tiny red pirul berries. el paulie cree que son native to australia. yeah right, as if! ob-vio, son una introduced species. bueno, i might’ve thought they were nativos a califas, si no los hubiese visto, originally, en méxico. ahora agarro una rama frondosa de delgadas, pálidas hojas. i rub them between my fingers—oh, la pimentosa oscura fragancia—y estoy en zapopan, en verano. la última vez que estuve en guadalajara, con el “noviete” foster, fuimos en taxi y él platicándome de pizarnik y sus amores. y nomás circulamos por donde era, donde había sido mi barrio, y yo llorando por todo lo que se había ido. for everything i’d lost, por todo lo que ya no era. no puedo seguir así, rememorando. tendré que llorar; it's going to slow me down, y necesito sudar, extenuarme, para volver a casa apacible, focused, para escribir. pero estos olores son too much. no puedo no estar en otros lugares, (mis) otros lugares. tan faraway, tan míos, en mí, still. siempre. one of those places is (with) you. ecologically speaking (y little eye, lo soy: reciclo, hasta compro scratchy kleenex y todo), este definite sign of global warming, este premature heat, debería tenerme alarmada, en el infierno. y me choca el calor anygüey; tú lo sabes. sufro, quiero estar sólo adentro, moss green home-made velvet curtains drawn, fingiendo ser vampiresa. escribiendo. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 3 chávez-silverman oda a la ambigüedad crónica pero speaking from the heart—y antes de que comience el true, searing, imperio del interior summer blast furnace, allí por agosto, septiembre—right here, right now estoy en el cielo. y ¿sabes que? allí me quedo, un ratito. portal vol. 3 no. 2 july 2006 4 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: ross, p. 2021. dollar daze in the days of the big cv. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 134–135. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ pjmis.v17i1-2.605 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal cultural work dollar daze in the days of the big cv peter ross corresponding author: dr peter ross, honorary senior lecturer in humanities and languages, faculty of arts & social sciences, university of new south wales, sydney nsw 2052, australia. p.ross@unsw.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.605 article history: received 27/10/2020; accepted 05/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract the first miser i met was the supremely joyful scrooge mcduck diving in and out of pools of cash. the pandemic has shaken my miser, but finally he can’t not be gleefully optimistic that rentierismo will return in triumph, re-establishing the old order of inequality, exploitation, class relations and bins of moola for the few. keywords peter ross; poem; covid-19; dollar daze depression days back in. first i came for the toilet paper. then i came for the pasta. then i came for the rent. their hands holdin’ out, beggin’ for me to not act. the dollarz i hide in my head and under the bed. i count ‘em every day – all the time. okay, number away. don’t be so serious at a covid party. equality’s not permanent, thank godz. not even worth a dream. & everyones i know be okay – just holdin’ out. so, stats say i’m on the cv’s list. an’ so? i save. savings the thing. save me, o lord! save me o lord? i bend the knee to no one – but the cats when i feed ‘em a’mornins. free loaders! declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 134 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.605 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.605 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:p.ross@unsw.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.605 they paid me to learn betimes – and still, while others toil ‘ganst their wills. toil away, toilers, lookin’ ahead. what? think of ‘em? maybe. more to the point, i count my bills and coins, agan, agan. & food i have, power, roof, walls, and things – lots of ‘em. some wrapped in nostalgia. that bishop, e.g.. mexico? sure. caroline crumpet, she sold it me. bugger her. countin’ on worldometer always beyond the rest. who to win? total cases/new cases/total deaths/ new deaths/ total recovered/active cases/serious – critical/ total cases per mil/deaths per mil/ total tests/tests per mil/population. if i were a bettin’ man. but mizers don’t do it. too busy countin’ and hoardin’. but who to win? who to be the biggest loser? for me, it’s the usa. back to countin’ the dollarz. back to countin’ my cohort’s dead. more males dead by miles. you youngsters aimin’ to kill me. bastards! same boat? not you. i want . . . . what? more time? not really. pleasure? what’s that? outside of counting. evidence of resilience? maybe. dependents? the backyard wild rats and chooks; and inside the cats. the scattering, feeding arts. they’d survive – or not. the mynors, miners an’ doves have their world, an’ the lorikeets an’ magpies an’ wattles an’ . . . . not much else, but battlin’ it about like bad cat an’ the ratz. nuff said. you get the drift. an’ there be dollarz to count. runs the refrain in my brain: if only i had another sixty thou or seventy, was it or more? echoes of i’ve made a hundred thou. check the asx, agan, agan, agan. yeah! sure! i not be needin’ it. but to secure security, to securitize what remains of life. how much do i have? tote it again. positives and negatives. losses and gains. desires. could be gambling. could be cocaine. could be orgasm. could be reasonable. but it ain’t. it’s countin’ my money. watch out my renters! here i come! ross portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021 135 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: aveling, h.g. 2018. love’s crystal: a comparative study of a chinese tale and two francophone versions by vietnamese author pham duy khiem. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 125-137. https://doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v15i1-2.6240 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au cultural work love’s crystal: a comparative study of a chinese tale and two francophone versions by vietnamese author pham duy khiem harry g. aveling monash university corresponding author: adjunct professor harry aveling, school of languages, literatures, cultures and linguistics, menzies building, 20 chancellors walk, clayton campus, monash university, victoria. harry.aveling@monash.edu doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.6240 article history: received 03/08/2018; revised 04/08/2018; accepted 07/08/2018; published 23/08/2018 abstract the story of the fatal love of a poor fisherman for the daughter of a wealthy mandarin is widely known throughout vietnam. this paper traces its chinese origin and its retelling in two forms, a long and a short version, by the francophone vietnamese author pham duy khiem (1908–1974). it suggests that rewriting in this way helped khiem develop the sparse, melancholy style that is characteristic of mature work. keywords love sickness, my nuong, pham duy khiem, truong chi, vietnamese folktales declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 125 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.6240 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:harry.aveling@monash.edu https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.6240 the tragic story of my nuong and truong chi, the princess and the fisherman, is well known and widely loved throughout vietnam. it derives from a chinese story first recorded by feng menglong (1574–1646). my major concern in this paper is to recover the original for english readers and to compare it with the way that the story is told in two francophone versions by the vietnamese scholar and diplomat pham duy khiem (1908– 1974). the original chinese story feng menglong was a low level chinese mandarin at the end of the ming dynasty (13681662), who barely passed the national examination at the age of 57. much more to his credit, he was also the author of various collections of popular tales told in a simple colloquial style. one of his books, ch’ing shi (stories of love), is a collection of 841 love stories arranged in 24 chapters. some of the chapters are loosely arranged into sub-chapters according to their themes. chapter 11 is undivided and contains 18 entries on the theme of ‘transformation.’ in this chapter, love (ch’ing), especially that between men and women, is innate and sound but also everlasting and elusive. it is sometimes necessary to caste away the human body in order for love to manifest itself more appropriately and concretely. in these eighteen stories, love variously transforms itself into metal, stone, birds and plants, and even the wind. stone and metal are symbols of strong will power, determination and endurance—characteristics of men and women with strong ch’ing.1 one of the stories from this chapter is as follows. the transformation of iron2 there was once a travelling merchant who was extremely handsome. on one of his trips, he moored his boat by the side of the xi river. a beautiful young woman lived in a high tower on the riverbank. for about a month, the merchant and the girl constantly gazed at each other and in their hearts they fell deeply in love. however, they were unable to express their love because they were separated by a distance of ten hand lengths and afraid that every eye would look at them and every finger point. later, when the merchant had sold all his goods, he left. the girl was so full of 1love-longing1 that she fell ill and died. her father had the body cremated, but one part of her did not burn. her heart was not destroyed and turned to iron. her father took the piece of iron from the ashes and polished it. it showed an image of a boat and a tower facing each other. in the faint distance one could discern human figures. her father felt very curious and put it away for safekeeping. later the merchant came back again but when he found out that the girl had died, he was very distressed. he asked this way and that and eventually worked out the reasons for the girl’s death. he gave the girl’s father a gift of money and asked to see the piece of iron. at the sight of the piece of iron, he cried and his tears became blood. the blood dropped onto the iron heart and the heart immediately turned to ash. 1 this paragraph draws extensively on mowry (1983). 2 my thanks to dr lintao (rick) qi, monash university for his finding the original text, and also to professor anne mclaren, melbourne university, and dr xu yuzeng, la trobe university, for helping translate it. aveling portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018126 some vietnamese versions the story has travelled to vietnam and no doubt elsewhere in east asia as well. we particularly find it associated with the famous nineteenth century vietnamese tale of kieu. in verse 710, the leading character, kieu, laments: no tinh chua tra cho ai khoi tinh manh xuong tuyen-daichua tan the author of one edition of the tale, huynh sanh thong, links the verse to 1a chinese story1, unspecified but similar to the one above, and translates this verse into english as follows: till i’ve paid off my debt of love to him my heart will remain a crystal down below. huynh tells what he describes the ‘chinese story,’ in a slightly different way from feng menglong. in his recollection of the tale, the merchant fails to return for a long time and the girl misses him so much that she dies. the story continues: ‘when “the girl ” was cremated, it was discovered that her heart had turned into a hard rock, like ruby. upon his return, the merchant wept for the girl. his tears fell on the crystal, and it dissolved into blood’ (1983: 182, fn. 710). huynh notes that there is also a very different vietnamese version of the tale (again source unspecified). in this story the man is a poor boatman, the girl is the daughter of a king. the narrative ends with a dramatic twist: the man dies, not the woman. the story says: in his turn, “the boatman truong chi” was smitten with the princess and eventually died of unrequited passion. in the grave, his heart was transformed into a ruby, a blood red “crystal of love” (khoi tinh), which was later found and fashioned into a drinking cup. the princess received the cup as a present. when she poured tea into it, she saw the reflection of a boatman forlornly rowing his boat. now realising what she had done to the boatman she wept, and as her tears touched the cup it melted away. (ibid.) in a french edition of the tale of kieu, nguyen van vinh provides the following gloss: 1no (dette) tinh (amour) chua (pas encore) trà (payer) cho (à) ai (qui? lui, l’être aimé qu’on ne nomme pas)// khoi (bloc, amas, boule), tinh (amour), mang (porter), xuong (dans le sens de haut en bas), tuyen dai (le palais des sources, l’enfer, le séjour des morts) chua (pas encore) tan (dissipé, dissoudre)1. based on the gloss, a literal translation would be: ‘as long as debt of love not paid towards (someone) / i will carry the ball of love down into the resting place of the dead undissolved.’ he gives a verse translation too: ‘as long as i am never free of my debt towards that person/ i will always carry a legendary block which will never dissolve even when i am on the other side of the yellow springs.’ another recent version comes from vo van thang and jim lawson (2002: 263). their ending of this story is rather humble. the cups are made of wood, ‘precious wood’ admittedly. the conclusion is as follows: love’s crystal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018127 one day, “truong chi” sang his last song: not to be together in this life, i hope to be with you in the other world. then he threw himself into the river and disappeared beneath the silent, flowing water. his soul entered a tree by the river. it was a tree of precious wood and one day a craftsman cut off a branch to make a set of teacups. the teacups were presented to the father of my nuong at the time of a festival. one morning my nuong poured tea into one of the cups. when she lifted it to drink she saw the image of the fisherman slowly rowing his boat around the bottom of the cup. the sound of his voice came to her ears, loving, regretful and reproaching. a tear from her eye fell into the cup. it shattered into tiny fragments that melted away to nothing. clearly the story is highly flexible. the status of the two main characters can change. either the man or the woman can die. the remains of the lover’s heart can variously become iron, ruby or wood. in feng menglong’s version, the heart becomes ash. for the vietnamese versions, it simply melts, becoming water. pham duy khiem the story is the first tale included in pham duy khiem’s highly regarded anthology légendes des terres sereines (1942). born in hanoi in 1908, pham duy khiem was a graduate of the leading french schools, the lycée albert sarraut in hanoi, the lycée louis-le-grand in paris and the very prestigious ecole supérieure normale in 1935. he published two collections of folktales, légendes des terres sereines (1942) and la jeune femme de nam xuong (1944), which were united in a french edition in 1951, also entitled légendes des terres sereines (1942). following the war, he was ambassador of the republic of (south) vietnam to france (1954– 1957). he died, probably as a result of suicide, in 1957. khiem first told the story in a radio broadcast that was later published in may 1938 in le monde illustre (no. 179: 98). the story is deeply embedded in a commentary. aveling portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018128 a beautiful vietnamese folktale love’s crystal 1: the folktale i am about to tell you is known to all annamites. i cannot recall when i first read it, i don’t even know if i read it or heard it told, but i have loved it for a long time. i have become an old professeur who teaches greek, latin and french to young french students like you and to annamites of your age; i must, to that end, read many books, but of all the beautiful stories gathered along the banks of either the seine or the red river, the one i most prefer is the one that i am about to tell you. 2: you need to know that in other times the daughters of high mandarins led a cloistered life, without ever going out, without ever seeing anyone. they did not suffer because things had always been this way and that isolation was part of their very condition. the young girl of whom i speak had a minister for her father; she lived in a corner of the palace, in a tower, by the side of the river. 2: there was once, a long time ago, a chinese mandarin who had a daughter of great beauty. like all young girls of her estate, she saw no one and lived a secluded life in a high tower in the mandarin’s palace. she usually took her seat near the window, to read or embroider, sometimes pausing to look at the river which ran below her, and she dreamed while following it across the plain. 3: from her window, she saw only the monotonous rice-fields stretching to the horizon, and on the calm waters the boat of a poor fisherman. the man sang as he worked. from afar, the beautiful young noble woman could not see his face, she could scarcely distinguish his movements, but she listened to his voice as it rose up to where she was. every day, she listened to him. his voice was beautiful, but the song was sad. 3: from time to time she saw the tiny boat of a fisherman gliding on the calm waters. the man was poor and he often sang. from a distance, she could not see his face, could scarcely distinguish his movements, but she listened to his voice as it rose to where she was. his voice was beautiful and his song sad. 4: i do not know what sentiments and what dreams the song and the voice made blossom in the heart of the young girl, but we do know that one day the fisherman did not come to the river and she waited for him. 4: we cannot know what sentiments or dreams the song and his voice kindled in the young girl’s heart; only that, one day when the fisherman did not come to the river; she was surprised to find herself waiting for him until evening. 5: she waited several days, she became sick. the doctors could not discover the cause of her illness, her parents became anxious, the illness grew worse, then suddenly, the young girl was cured: the song had returned. 5: in vain, she waited for him for several days. she finally became sick from waiting. the doctors could not discover the cause of her illness, her parents were worried, when suddenly the girl recovered: the song had returned love’s crystal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018129 6: the high mandarin organised a search for the fisherman, he had the fisherman placed in the presence of the girl. 6: on being informed by a female servant, the high mandarin had the fisherman called and brought him into the presence of his daughter. 7: at her first look, something ended in her. she no longer loved to hear his voice … 7: as soon as she saw him, something in her ended; she no longer loved to hear his voice. 8: but the poor fisherman, himself, received a fatal blow from this manifestation. there is an untranslatable word in annamite to describe the illness he suffered ‘om tuong tu.’ in french one says amour-maladie, love-sickness, the love that kills, a fatal passion, a tragic love; but none of these expressions exactly translates the annamite. i think of racine’s heroines, i think of phèdre discovering the situation, lost, dying, dazzled by the day that disturbs her so profoundly; she must, if i may say so, poison herself if she is to die, while our poor fisherman loves without hope, can no longer live, falls ill and slowly dies, without having any desire to kill himself, without having been killed by anyone else. 8: but the poor fisherman, he received a fatal blow on seeing her. he was struck down by the disease of ‘tuong tu,’ lovesickness. consumed by hopeless love, he withered in silence and died, carrying his secret with him. 9: the years passed. in accordance with the custom, the fisherman’s family exhumed his remains to take them to another place. they found a crystallised mass in the coffin, a sort of large transparent stone. they attached it to the prow of the small boat, and, one day when the mandarin borrowed the boat to cross over the river, he admired the stone, bought it, had it cut to form a beautiful tea cup. 9: many years later, his family exhumed his remains to take them to their final resting place. they found a translucent stone in the coffin. using it as an ornament, they placed it at the front of his boat. one day, the mandarin passed by, and admired the stone. he bought it, and gave it to a craftsman to shape it into a beautiful teacup. 10: each time one poured tea into the cup, one saw the image of a fisherman in his boat slowly circling the inside of the cup. the young girl learned of this prodigy, wanted to confirm it for herself. she poured a little tea, the image of the fisherman appeared; the young girl remembered him and wept; a tear fell into the cup and the vessel turned to water and dissolved. 10: each time tea was poured into the cup, one saw the image of a fisherman in his boat, slowly sailing around the cup. the mandarin’s daughter learnt of this prodigy, and wanted to see it for herself. she poured a little tea, the image of the fisherman appeared: she remembered him and wept … a tear fell onto the cup and the cup dissolved. *** aveling portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018130 11: i am sure you can feel how poetic this folktale is. but let me add a few words so that you can better understand it. you will come to know why annamites love this folktale and you will recognise at the same time a little of the profound soul of that race, who live far from you and who now read the same books as you do. 12: normally, an annamite does not think of this folktale without immediately singing the well-known two lines of the verse that alludes to it. i will tell them to you, then i will translate them. do not laugh if they sound strange, but wait for the explanation: no tinh chua tra cho ai khoi tinh mang xuong tuyen dai chua tan 12: in a well-known annamite masterpiece, two lines allude to this legend: no tinh chua gia cho ai khôi tinh mang xuông tuyên dai chua tan. 13: here is a word for word translation: the debt of love has not been repaid; the stone of love has descended to the land of the nine springs, it has not melted. 13: as long as the debt of love remains, in the land where the rivers rise, the stone of love can never dissolve.*** 14: the land of the nine springs is the other side, they are the oriental elysian fields, the plain of asphodels, the shadow of the immortal myrtles. and this is what the two lines want to say, if one notices the logical connections between the propositions, as one makes the thought more precise, which is what the french language requires. 14: the nine springs, or the yellow springs, are on the other side; they are our plain of asphodels, the shadow of immortal myrtles. 15: ‘when the debt of love remains unpaid (or “if” the debt), the stone of love, even if it descends into the land of the nine springs, does not dissolve.’ love’s crystal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018131 16: one can see that this influences our story. but what is the precise meaning of 1a debt of love1? what has not been paid? and to whom must it be paid? a european mind would think: it was the young girl who should have paid the young man, since he died because of his love for her, since—and this is the essential reason—it was by weeping over the tea cup, on dropping a tear over this poor crystallised love, that she made it dissolve. her pity, her recognition of this love; i want to say that she was conscious of the love to which she had given birth but which she did not recognise, it delivered her, granted her, allowed her to recognise, managed to end the term of her destiny. 16: but what ‘debt of love’ is meant by this? who failed to repay the debt? one could think the young girl owed the young man something, since he loved her to the point of death, without being repaid by her. belatedly, she settled the debt, when by crying over the poor crystallised love, she made it melt. the pity that she felt for his fate; her regrets at having been the cause of his passing, must have appeased, beyond death, the torments of an inconsolable heart 17: this is a pretty interpretation, but you can also think of it in the following way: the young man was destined to love the young woman, but at first his love was ignored by the young girl, never reached her, was not fulfilled in its natural progression. he 1had to love her1 and, as long as she did not understand this, accepted it, his debt had not been paid to her. there is a second explanation, no less seductive than the first. and an annamite will tell you this if you take the trouble to consider his opinion. but i think these distinctions and nuances are useless. besides this, i don’t know whether, in seeking out these different meanings, i have given way to the oriental taste for subtlety or if i am obeying the occidental desire for precision. what is certain is that, for an annamite, the folktale that i have just told you is complete. it has to stop where it ends; we cannot imagine that it could be any other way. no one can tell us if the young girl loved the fisherman when she heard him singing without seeing him. further, no one can tell us the nature of her feelings when she wept over the translucent teacup in which the reflection of an indistinct dream glided 17: to an annamite, the folktale can signify more than that. he believes that all love is predestined, all unions are the inescapable consequence of a debt contracted in a past life; when two human beings bind themselves to each other, they are only freeing themselves of a mutual burden. so the beautiful daughter of the mandarin had to have her fated meeting with the poor fisherman, despite all that separated him from her. when she heard his voice rising from the river, when she then thought day and night about the face she had barely glimpsed, their paths searched for ways by which they might join with each other, and their blind hearts beat in accordance with the rhythm of destiny. but they were never united in his lifetime. the debt remained and the fisherman could not disappear after his death. what was found in the coffin was not only the material remains of a profound feeling which continued after his body dissolved; it was the whole man, his form beyond the grave, the face of an unrealised destiny which necessarily had to crystallise in view of the necessity of waiting. aveling portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018132 past. no one can try to make us feel moved by the illness and death of this hopeless lover. no one says anything of his pain. what matters is the meeting of two destinies in the broadest sense of the word, the fusion for a certain time of these two destinies, i do not say of these two human lives, since the tears of the woman did not fall for a very long time after the disappearance of the man. the debt of love is not a debt that the man should have paid the woman, it is not a debt that the woman should have contracted by inspiring the man to a fatal love. but their love is nothing more than a form of their common debt, the human debt to life: each of us must pay it when we pursue the difficult path that we must follow on this earth. besides, human beings do not live just one life, but submit to a circle of successive transformations. each earthly life has no meaning only in itself, the destiny of each individual is broader than they are and the union of two beings, a man and a woman, is nothing but the meeting of their two destinies, a moment in a chain, a point on the circumference, which is as incomprehensible to them as is the rest of their ephemeral existence, as inescapable for them as the rest of the rest. later, the woman came to lean over the diaphanous cup where there glided the reflection of a beautiful vanished dream. she had an intuition of the debt which bound her to the fisherman; she regretted having become aware of her path too late, at a time when she could no longer find true happiness. but she understood that their union must inevitably be accomplished, beyond their ephemeral existences. perhaps she sensed that a solemn moment was at hand … the cup received the tear which fell from her eyes and melted there in a communion which liberated them both. love’s crystal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018133 18: that is the basis on which this folktale rests. if i were wiser, i would show you that it is inspired by buddhism, i would speak of the influence of such beliefs on the annamese people, on their conception of life and of love. but i have only wanted to tell you a beautiful story. at least retain its poetic beauty, love it for all you can feel of its delicate sentiment: the voice rising from the river, the sincere and silent passion hat survived the dissolution of his body, the tear which freed him. think of the melodious fisherman when you see a fine porcelain tea-cup decorated with blue designs. you can say that, for an annamite, this story is not a folktale, but an historical tale. you can say that this happened in china, a long time ago, but no one will be able to tell you under which emperor, from such and such a dynasty, in this particular place. he believes this more than you believe in sleeping beauty. it is not a beautiful folktale to him, it is a true story. for me, even at the age when i scanned the verses of the ‘aeneid’ in a french high school, i would never have been astonished if i had learned that on the bank of the great lake, very near my school, someone had discovered the crystal of love. i would have wondered: ‘who will drop the tear which will dissolve this cup?’ rewriting a beautiful vietnamese folktale at the end of his broadcast speech, pham confirmed his knowledge of the chinese origin of the tale. (it is perhaps partly for this reason that the future book is entitled in the plural: ‘legends from serene lands’). but his retelling follows the vietnamese form of the story, although it is simplified for a french audience who might even be inclined to scoff at it. certain features remain constant between pham’s two versions (which for convenience we will call the long version, lv, and the short version, sv ). the characters have no names. it is the fisherman who contracts love sickness and dies; his body is dug up for further reburial; a lump of crystal is discovered and made into a tea-cup; the girl eventually receives the cup and sees the boatman sailing around the cup; she weeps and the cup dissolves. the lines from the national epic, the tale of kieu, are described simply as some ‘well known verses,’ being derived from an unnamed ‘well-known annamite masterpiece.’ but there are, of course, differences, as the very length of the two versions indicates. aveling portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018134 to begin at the beginning. sv has no introduction. in lv 1, khiem creates a personality for himself: ‘an old professeur who teaches greek, latin and french to young students like you and to annamites of your age.’ it is an authoritative position, because it gives mastery over french pupils. it also relates him to vietnamese pupils, placing the vietnamese colonial subjects on the same level as their colonial peers. in fact, it elevates vietnamese culture above french culture because this folktale is ‘the most beautiful’ of all the stories he has heard beside the seine and the red river. he is able to claim a special position with regard to the tale because he doesn’t know when he heard or read it, and when he first made its acquaintance. it is a part of his very identity. he is addressing the french in french. lv 2 recognises their ignorance. ‘you need to know …,’ he says. then he explains the isolation of ‘the daughters of high mandarins’ and justifies the custom: ‘they did not suffer because things had always been this way and that very isolation was a part of their condition.’ sv 2 (there is no sv 1) simply accepts her solitary state and distracts the listener’s attention by describing her activities, reading and embroidering. she is young, so of course she dreams while ‘following the river across the plain.’ (another version of the tale, by a french author of vietnamese descent, minh tran huy, adds other details: she read books of poetry, and while watching the river ‘dreamed of following its silvery waters to far-off places and of the people she might meet there’ (2008: 133). lv 4 and svc4 agree on her hearing the song of a poor fisherman. lv 4 includes the negative comment that the rice-fields were ‘monotonous.’ the next sections run in a parallel direction: the girl responded to his singing, and waited for him. when he did not come, lv 6 and sv 6, she fell ill. the doctors could not cure her. (i have taught this story, in the sv, with vietnamese students, by the way, and they found the mention of ‘doctors’ strange. but then they found the whole of khiem’s ‘translation’ unfamiliar and somewhat unpleasant. both versions are ‘exotic’). when the fisherman returns, the girl recovers. in svb7 it is a woman’s intuition that indicates to the mandarin that the fisherman has made an impression on the girl. the father calls the fisherman, and, in both accounts, the girl looks at him and no longer loves his voice. it is commonly accepted that the man is not just poor but, in fact, he is exceedingly ugly. khiem does not introduce this possibility. the effect of her response overwhelms the man. he is struck down by the fatal disease of ‘love sickness.’ sv 9 gives only the vietnamese term for this condition, tuong tu. although lv 9 describes this term as ‘untranslatable,’ it does provides a french equivalent, amour-maladie, and glosses it: ‘love-sickness, the love that kills, a fatal passion, a tragic love.’ in fact khiem goes further, which his status as an agrége of the ens entitles him to do: he compares the young girl’s condition with that of racine’s phèdre. again he matches french culture and goes further: phèdre’s death is deliberate and unpleasant, the fisherman’s condition is one of slow decline—he does not kill himself and no one else does so either. it is a sad but not malicious or violent ending. section 10 deals with the discovery of ‘a translucent stone’ (sv ) or ‘crystallised mass’ (lv ) in his coffin. the shorter version accepts a cultural practice that the french might find unpleasant: ‘his family exhumed his remains’ many years later. the custom was to exhume the dead three years after their death, wash the bones, and re-inter them again so that the soul may live in peace (lamb 2002: 195). the lv explains the practice simply as the need to take the remains ‘to another place.’ love’s crystal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018135 the mandarin has the stone made into a ‘beautiful cup’ (lv and sv10). inside the cup, one can see the image of a fisherman in his boat. the girl sees the image, remembers the fisherman and weeps. a tear fall onto the dup and it dissolves (lv and sv 11). again, lv 12, khiem recognises the sensitivity of his french audience: ‘i am sure you can feel how poetic this folktale is’ (lv 12), but also their ignorance. his aim is to help them understand 1the profound soul of that race who live far from you and who now read the same books as you do1, that is: whose level of civilisation is at least equal to yours. the vietnamese not only share the take, they also respond to it with poetry. lv 13 does not name the source of the two lives; sv 13 attributes them to ‘a well-known annamite masterpiece,’ which he does not name—the tale of kieu. as i have mentioned elsewhere this is rather like describing shakespeare as ‘a well known english poet’ (aveling 2010: 9). he recognises the french prejudice towards vietnamese language and literature (lv 13) and cautions his listeners not to laugh if the lines ‘sound strange’ but to wait for their explanation. in sv 14 he simply translates the lines. both versions provide a commentary on the verse and by implication on the story. sv 14 makes two possible steps. the girl may have owed the fisherman something. but there is more than that: all love is predestined, the couple were bound to each other in a past life, despite their different social statuses they had to meet. their love survived beyond the grave and when the girl wept over the cup, her previous loving feelings were accepted and the bond between them was once more affirmed … and dissolved. lv 14 is far more complicated. like sv 14, it glosses the ‘land of the nine springs’ in greek mythological terms: ‘the other side … our plain of asphodels, the shadow of immortal myrtles.’ they avoid the horrors of the vietnamese myth of the river that the dead must cross, avoiding nine vicious hounds of hell and the possibility of rebirth. khiem notes, in passing, the stultifying effect of french rationality, which is implicit in the french language. lv 15 continues this exploration of ‘the european mind.’ the young girl may have been in debt to the fisherman. this is a ‘pretty explanation.’ but there is ‘a seductive explanation,’ which the vietnamese will share, ‘if you take the trouble to consider his opinion.’ (obviously khiem did not expect that all europeans would.) it goes beyond ‘the occidental desire for precision.’ the european view is, in fact, sentimental: it imagines what the girl felt, what the man felt, but it does not realise that the story does not describe these. the actual debt is the result of their spiritual condition, what buddhism describes as the result of endless reincarnations, as souls are born and reborn, meet briefly, then separate gain. khiem does not expect his european audience to understand these matters (lv 18). he is leased if they can retain its poetic quality—this is what vietnam has to offer cold rationality. he admits that this is a myth, one that is not true—just as sleeping beauty is not true, although the aeneid might be! it is the same comment he made in his presentation of another vietnamese folktale to the french, the story of tu thuc (see aveling 2018: 19–20). and for the same reason: to claim equality and then push for the superiority of what the french may at first consider inferior to themselves conclusion the two versions of ‘love’s crystal’ are vietnamese versions of an ultimately chinese folktale, directed towards a french-speaking audience. they follow pham duy khiem’s practice with other stories—‘the absent father’ (aveling 2017) and ‘tu thuc’ (aveling 2018)—of moving from complex folktales intended to entertain and educate the french towards a simpler, more aveling portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018136 direct style of narration without surrounding commentary. there is a confidence about the story line of the final ‘love’s crystal.’ khiem has kept the story, simplified it, added to its pathos, and provided a simplified but tragic commentary. it has a message he took seriously enough to make it the final commentary to his one published novel nam et sylvie (1957), the story of the ill-fated love of a vietnamese normalian for a french girl. ‘nothing is ever finished in the world of the heart,’ nam concludes, ‘or rather it never ceases to be,’ he continues, quoting another six-eight poem. once you have crossed the river together, an acquaintance has been made; once you have spent a day together, that creates a debt and a common fidelity. (pham duy khiem 1957: 242) references aveling, h. g. 2017, ‘the absent father: a vietnamese folktale and its french shadows,’ translation studies, gema online journal of language studies, vol. 17, no. 2: 1–14. https://doi.org/10.17576/gema2017-1702-01 ______ 2018, ‘the shadow of the absent father: pham duy khiem, politics and plagiarism,’ translation review, vol. 100, no. 1: 16–27. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2017.1372253 hartmann, n. m. 2014, from translation to adaptation: chinese language texts and early modern japanese literature. doctoral dissertation, columbia university. hua-yuan li mowry 1976, ch’ing-shih and feng meng-long. doctoral dissertation, university of california, berkeley. ______ 1983, chinese love stories from ‘ch’ing-shih.’ hamdenn: archon books. https://doi. org/10.2307/40138118 huynh sanh thong (ed.) 1983, nguyen du, the tale of kieu. new haven: yale university press. nguyen van vinh (ed.) 2000, nguyen du, kim vân kièu. ho chi minh city: nvb van nghe. pham duy khiem 1937/1942, ‘une légende annamite.’ in mélanges. hanoi: taupin ______ 1942, légendes des terres sereines. hanoi: taupin. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.demopolis.494 ______ 1957, nam et sylvie. paris: plon. vo van thang & lawson, j. 2002, vietnamese folktales. danang: nxb da nang. appendix: the original chinese text. 化铁 昔有一商，美姿容，泊舟于西河下。而岸上高楼中，一美女相视月余，两情已契， 为十目十手所隔，弗得遂愿。迨后其商货尽而去，女思成疾而死。父焚之，独心中一 物，不毁如铁。出而磨之，照见其中有舟楼相对，隐隐如有人形。其父以为奇，藏 之。 后商复来访，其女已死，痛甚。咨诹博询，备得其由。乃献金于父，求铁观之，不 觉泪下成血，血滴于心上，其心即灰矣。 love’s crystal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018137 https://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2017-1702-01 https://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2017-1702-01 https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2017.1372253 https://doi.org/10.2307/40138118 https://doi.org/10.2307/40138118 https://doi.org/10.4000/books.demopolis.494 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: anderson, j. 2018. what’s in a name? thanh-van tran-nhut’s esprit de la renarde: translating characters’ names in historical crime fiction. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 43-52. https://doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v15i1-2.5761 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au research article what’s in a name? thanh-van tran-nhut’s esprit de la renarde: translating characters’ names in historical crime fiction jean anderson victoria university of wellington corresponding author: jean anderson, french studies, european and latin american languages and cultures, school of languages and cultures, victoria university of wellington, po box 600, wellington 6140, new zealand. jean.anderson@vuw.c.nz doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5761 article history: received 08/09/2017; revised 09/07/2018; accepted 03/08/2018; published 23/08/2018 abstract this is a translation of an extract from thanh-van tran-nhut’s 2009 crime novel, l’esprit de la renarde: une enquête du mandarin tân (spirit of the vixen), the fifth of eight in the mandarin tân series of investigations carried out in 17th-century vietnam (then called dai viêt). an introductory note assists in setting the scene and briefly outlining some of the translation challenges for the text, notably the range of names used in the original. these vary from the relatively exotic (madame liu) to the partly french (madame prune) and the fully french (contemplation retenue). résumé a partir de la traduction vers l’anglais d’un extrait du polar historique de thanh-van trannhut, l’esprit de la renarde: une enquête du mandarin tân (2009), le cinquième dans la série des huit romans qui suivent les aventures du mandarin tân dans le viêt-nam du xviie siècle, nous présentons ici quelques réflexions sur la traduction des noms propres. nous expliquons d’abord le contexte narratif de l’extrait, pour ensuite considérer les défis posés par ce texte, où figurent des noms exotiques pour un lectorat français (tel madame liu), des noms déjà ‘traduits’ en partie vers le français (madame prune), et des noms entièrement francisés (contemplation retenue). declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 43 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5761 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:jean.anderson@vuw.c.nz https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5761 keywords  thanh-van tran-nhut, l’esprit de la renarde, mandarin tân, historical crime fiction, translation of names, le polar historique, la traduction des noms propres thanh-van tran-nhut’s historical crime fiction series is scrupulously researched and—like other examples of the sub-genre—must maintain a delicate balance between informing the reader about the context of the crimes investigated and maintaining a focus on the pursuit and bringing to justice of the criminal. this focus must at the same time remain somewhat diffuse, since no reader wants the crime solved in the opening pages: the twists and turns and obfuscations of the plot are every bit as important as its revelations. in translating these kinds of texts, the translator must always bear in mind this need to maintain the puzzle element while at the same time making the context as ‘realistic’ as possible to a readership that, by definition, is not casually familiar with the time or place in which events unfold. as will become clear on reading this extract, the chief investigator, mandarin tân, is something of a rebel. while he works for the chinese imperial power within a colonised daiviêt, he is quick to see (and to condemn) signs of the corruption that was common practice within the system. to a large extent, tran-nhut uses humour to point out these failings: at the same time, a degree of formality marks the text as being of another era. while the humour invites the reader inside the circle of shared amusement and/or irony, the formality promotes a distance: another delicate balancing act that needs to be maintained in the translation. a further challenge, very much in focus in the following extract, concerns the names of the characters. tran nhut uses a variety of naming practices, from gallicised versions of vietnamese names (postillon fétide, pensées inquiètes) where the meaning of these names has already been ‘translated’ into french, to combinations of title plus translated names (madame prune) or imported names (madame kitsune, from the japanese), to combinations of title plus vietnamese names (le mandarin tân, monsieur phi, général tho, monsieur canh, le lettré dinh). the result, in the original, is a multilingual mixture which, arguably, reflects the mingling of nationalities in dai-viêt during this time period: preserving it in the translation is therefore important. finally, the knowledge that, as the author has stated on many occasions, the protagonist is based on one of her ancestors adds a dimension of responsibility to the translator’s task: while the work is clearly fiction, like much historical writing, it has roots in a very real—and in this case, personally important—past (tran-nhut 2018a). in the following extract, the mandarin is caught up in a series of cannibalistic murders and disappearances. in addition, his friend and companion scholar dinh, has been arrested and thrown into gaol in faifo, suspected of the murder of an elderly woman. this town (also known as hai pho or hôi an), was an important port from the 16th century onward, where japanese, portuguese, english, chinese, dutch and indian settlers and traders mingled, and where supporters of the trinh (northern) and nguyen (southern) lords might also clash. references tran-nhut. 2005, l’esprit de la renarde: une enquête du mandarin tân. picquier, arles. tran-nhut, t. v. 2018a, about the author. online, available: http://tvtn.free.fr/bio/bio_en.html [accessed 20 july 2018]. trần nhựt, t. v. 2018b, hồn hồ ly. hội nhà văn, hà nội. anderson portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201844 http://tvtn.free.fr/bio/bio_en.html extract from l’esprit de la renarde1 beneath the midday sun the tribunal of faifo sat as silent as the grave. dark shadows detached themselves from the longan trees lining the central pathway. the air vibrated with heat, making liquid pools on the white-hot sand. an old man was walking up and down in front of the apparently deserted building. he approached the entry, his shaved head dripping with sweat, only to back away again. to go in or not to go in? wondered the bonze troubled thoughts, as he dithered at the foot of the steps, eyeing them doubtfully. back and forth he went, chewing at his fingernails, unable to make up his mind. his wrinkled face wore an expression of doubt mingled with mistrust. the tribunal officers’ uniforms inspired in him a feeling of repulsion he couldn’t set aside. of course he couldn’t actually see a great many uniforms, because apart from one foot visible in the main entrance there was no sign of anyone on watch. the guardians of justice must be taking a little nap, sprawled like dogs across the cool tiles of the lobby floor. why had he dragged his skinny carcass here, when he could have been relaxing in the shade of the great pagoda? he wondered. but it was too late now, if he were to have any peace of mind he would have to confide in one of those long drinks of water in there. perking up at the thought, troubled thoughts went up a few steps. but what if they didn’t believe him and suspected him instead? he would be beaten mercilessly and his poor little frail person subjected to all kinds of tortures! he stopped, quivering with fear. turning, he saw an officer coming toward him. he was a tall fellow with a stern expression who must strike hard when he inflicted punishment, judging by his muscular appearance. feeling trapped, the bonze choked back a cry of distress. if he backed away, he would trip over the foot of the sleeping guard, who would be certain to give him a drubbing for interrupting his siesta. if he moved forward, he would fall into the clutches of the threatening officer who was closing in with long strides. seized with panic, troubled thoughts sent up a prayer to buddha when he saw the young man roll up his sleeves and loosen his collar. ‘don’t beat me!’ he squawked, raising his hands in front of his face. ‘what are you going on about?’ the man asked, eyebrows arched in surprise, wiping his forehead. ‘i’m not in the habit of abusing old priests, unless they’ve committed some heinous crime.’ eyes narrowed, he stared at troubled thoughts, and the monk shrank into the folds of his robe. it was all quite clear, the officer was about to seize him by the scruff of his neck and make him confess to a misdeed he hadn’t committed. his gut bubbling with fear, troubled thoughts set about mentally composing a eulogy in his own honour. ‘what have you come to the tribunal for?’ the young man asked. ‘i hope it’s not urgent, i think most of my colleagues are snoring their heads off. try again when they’ve come to, after the smell of their evening soup has tickled their nostrils.’ and he stepped around the priest to go into the building. miraculously saved from a fate worse than death, troubled thoughts grabbed him by the sleeve. 1 tran-nhut (2005: 116–134). l’esprit de la renarde has been translated into the vietnamese as hồn hồ ly (trần nhựt 2018b. what’s in a name? thanh-van tran-nhut’s esprit de la renarde portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201845 ‘no, wait! i can talk to you!’ he shouted, tired of waiting. when the official looked at him questioningly, the bonze began to spill the whole story. ‘actually, i’ve come to tell you about a disappearance.’ he pulled his companion away from the entry, toward a tree, and lowered his voice. ‘it’s about a nun i know. her name is quiet contemplation and she was on her way to the perfect lotus convent. but she never arrived, according to the nuns who live there. i’m am afraid a great misfortune may have befallen her!’ ‘how do you know her?’ ‘we were travelling together toward faifo. we’d had to leave cambodia, where armed conflicts are laying waste to the country. are you aware of the political situation there, officer ...?’ ‘tân,’ the man replied evasively, gesturing to the priest to carry on. ‘well, officer tân, you must know that cambodia has been in a pretty precarious situation for centuries, and that about thirty years ago the siamese invaded the country and turned it into a vassal state. but the khmers refused to submit, and have even recently called on the spanish in manila to free them from the yoke of their oppressors.’ the priest shook his bald head before explaining: ‘but the plan misfired and after several bloody conflicts the spaniards had all perished and siam was taking back control of the territory. in any case, we priests, followers of buddha, had to flee the country as it descended into chaos. between internal power struggles and foreign interventions, the people there are living through very difficult times.’ ‘and that’s why you came back to dai-viêt with your companion?’ officer tân asked. the other man paused to look nervously around him. in a conspiratorial tone, he added: ‘to avoid being slaughtered, yes, but mainly to warn our brothers and sisters in viêt monasteries.’ ‘warn them of what?’ the old man clicked his tongue before announcing in a lecturing tone: ‘the way of buddha is under threat from new arrivals who are preaching a new religion, catholicism.’ ‘yes, i’m aware of that,’ mandarin tân interjected, nodding. ‘the jesuits have already set foot on our territory here.’ troubled thoughts’s cheeks suddenly paled to yellow. ‘i knew it! they’re everywhere! they’ll end up grabbing us by the folds of our robes and twisting until we swallow our prayer beads! in the philippines, the spanish have started spreading their beliefs among a primitive population that hadn’t even heard of buddha’s teachings, and we should be fearful that these converts might soon start muscling in on more civilised places where we’ve built pagodas or temples.’ ‘bah, there aren’t many spaniards in our country. it’s the portuguese who came en masse.’ the bonze gave a snort of terror. ‘the portuguese! the scum of the earth! haven’t you heard how they established themselves in the moluccas, in the heart of the islamic realm? they pretend to be traders, but at the same time they bring in priests on the sly, who convert the people. they’re devious, they’re hypocrites, they’re depraved!’ mandarin tân waved a hand in a soothing gesture. anderson portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201846 ‘ah well, we all use whichever means of persuasion suits us best.’ ‘no, no!’ squawked troubled thoughts. ‘they happily mix trade, religion and armed force. the king of arakan has already called on several of them to fight myanmar and siam. not content with meddling in centuries-old conflicts, the foreigners are set on seizing power! don’t tell me you aren’t aware that the portuguese adventurer felipe de brito has taken over the port of syriam in myanmar! they’re supposedly catholic, but they worship only gold: they’ll fight for the siamese one day and the cambodians the next. i don’t know what their religion teaches, but they have no hesitation in going as far as the ganges delta in search of slaves to trade.’ breathless from this diatribe, the bonze had to pause. ‘my brothers have no idea what danger threatens them. i absolutely had to warn them.’ troubled thoughts surveyed the surroundings, fearful he might be overheard. he looked like a hunted rabbit in search of a clump of trees to take cover in. ‘the portuguese here are just traders,’ the mandarin tried to reassure him. ‘the ones who’ve chosen the soldier’s way are further to the west.’ ‘they’re all the same, i tell you!’ the monk insisted. ‘that despicable felipe de brito, an insignificant deckhand who has proclaimed himself regent, has committed a most egregious act against the buddhists of myanmar.’ in spite of himself, the old man clenched his fists in fury. ‘do you realise that animal stole the great bell from the shwedagon pagoda—where the eight strands of buddha’s hair are kept—with the aim of extracting the copper to make canons? and he wanted to get his hands on the precious gems that decorate it.’ troubled thoughts’s face lit up suddenly with a satisfied smile as he concluded: ‘but you don’t steal from buddha that easily. the miserable thief tied the bell to a raft behind his ship, then had to look on as it sank into the river, dragging the ship down with it. i rather think he’ll soon meet with a less than enviable fate because of his evil acts.’ pensively, mandarin tân looked at the monk, who had travelled so far to get back to his community, driven by rumours of war and destruction, in an attempt to rescue whatever he could of a religion and a world he held dear. frail and wrinkled, he had braved the fatigue and dangers of the journey, despite his fearful nature. ‘and your colleague quiet contemplation was also on her way back to warn her fellow nuns?’ he asked, in a gentle tone of voice. ‘that’s correct. but no one was expecting her: she wasn’t a member of the congregation. so i’m the only one to be concerned that she’s gone missing. that poor woman left me so she could get to the convent more quickly. she was hurt, from throwing herself with fierce hunger on a prickly durian, and she wanted to get help as soon as possible. between you and me, i think she was probably famished, it was an exhausting journey and we’d run out of food.’ troubled thoughts rolled the beads of his prayer necklace nervously between his parchment-dry palms. ‘i do hope the tribunal’s henchmen will find her in one piece. so long as lord tiger hasn’t made a meal of her ...’ his ears still ringing with troubled thoughts’s lamentations, mandarin tân ventured into the belly of the tribunal. he did his duty and woke up a scribe to take down the bonze’s complaint, then slipped away to avoid having to listen to his stream of woes again. what’s in a name? thanh-van tran-nhut’s esprit de la renarde portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201847 after his morning in the sunshine, the cool shade of the gaol felt good. it was time to find out how scholar dinh was doing, probably crouched pitifully in his cell. a small soy-stuffed cake nestled in the palm of tân’s hand, destined for the prisoner accused of murder. it wasn’t much, but it might give him a boost. tân skipped down the steps, only to be brought up short. ‘let yourself go! let it rip!’ a persuasive voice was saying, trembling with excitement. ‘don’t hold anything back!’ ‘i’m doing my best,’ scholar dinh muttered, sounding exasperated. ‘it doesn’t come on command.’ ‘would you like a little help?’ the other voice whispered enthusiastically. ‘absolutely not! keep your hands off!’ ‘concentrate! i haven’t got all afternoon!’ ‘i can’t do it,’ grunted a stubborn dinh. ‘oh no, don’t give me that! i have ways of making you ...’ ‘gerraway from me!’ there was the sound of a stool tipping over, then a quiet growl of contentment and a satisfied laugh. intrigued, mandarin tân moved forward in the dark cavern. whatever was going on in the depths of the tribunal? did he really want to know? the glow of a lantern on the floor flickered over a strange scene. as dinh hastily readjusted his clothing, his cellmate, the informer fetid spittle, let out a whistle of admiration. ‘not bad! that’s a pretty good amount!’ leaning over a bucket, an unknown person nodded with obvious satisfaction. the happy band jumped when mandarin tân coughed discreetly. ‘oh, it’s you,’ mumbled the scholar, scarlet-cheeked. ‘do you know that i’ve just relieved myself of a precious substance?’ ‘i do have some limits to my imagination,’ his friend responded, icily. ‘a little something to refresh you?’ the stranger interjected, holding out a huge cup filled with a greenish liquid. the mandarin stared at him with curiosity. his smooth face was flawless, the skin looked as soft as a rain-washed peach in the morning light. he was small, with the slender ankles and wrists of a little child, which sat oddly with the silk suit he wore, cut to fit a well-built adult. adding to the ambiguity of this character, his thickly-lashed eyes expressed both dreaminess and slyness. ‘go on, drink it all down,’ the stranger cajoled him with an enchanting smile, as the mandarin stared at him in a daze. ‘you’ll enjoy the citrusy flavour, believe me, monsieur ...’ ‘officer tân,’ the mandarin replied, coming out of his trance. ‘and you, you are ...?’ ‘monsieur bonheur,’ he answered modestly. ‘monsieur happiness, if you will. i’m the town doctor, and i visit the tribunal gaols to check on the state of the prisoners.’ he bowed to the mandarin, who returned the salutation. tân was on the point of sipping at the liquid, whose emerald highlights were dancing before his dreamy eyes. ‘if i were you, tân, i wouldn’t be swallowing any of that herbal infusion,’ scholar dinh said calmly. ‘it’s a powerful diuretic that will empty your bladder faster than tamarind soup. and that’s exactly what our kindly monsieur bonheur is after.’ anderson portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201848 the doctor gestured an almost sincere denial. ‘i wouldn’t dream of taking advantage of scholar tân’s natural reserves! it merely seemed to me that with the heat outside, a little bramble-root tea would please his palate and bring him a sense of well-being.’ ‘that said, our friendly quack wouldn’t turn up his nose at an addition to the bucket of golden fluid he came here for,’ fetid spittle commented, adding fuel to the flames. monsieur bonheur found this remark an offence against his dignity. ‘i would have you know that my work is carried out in the name of science. an ex-convict like you, a blackmailer with nothing but weasel words to justify his existence, can have no idea of the medical research associated with human urine.’ he turned to mandarin tân, who struck him as being more likely to understand the importance of his ideas than fetid spittle, who was slouching back against the mouldy wall, his face creased into a disrespectful sneer. ‘appearances to the contrary, my aim is not to carry out some sick, random collection of urine. in fact i’m working to refine the famous ch’iu shih, or autumn mineral, a chinese remedy of the greatest importance. it so happens that two barrels of the height of a man are needed to produce a few ounces of this mineral.’ ‘and you’re reduced to seeking the cooperation of prisoners?’ asked dinh, still saddened by his recent, unwilling contribution to science. ‘i take whatever i can get! if common decency allowed, i’d go door to door, but i’ve struck a high level of resistance from the locals.’ ‘well, it is something ... shall we say, private,’ dinh objected. monsieur bonheur shook his head. ‘if that were all ...’ ‘what do you mean?’ asked the mandarin, in surprise. the quack was already explaining: ‘the chinese began investigating the beneficial properties of the white crystals extracted from urine nearly two thousand years back. in a poem dating from several centuries ago, there’s an allusion to this extraordinary product, but it’s only recently that recipes for autumn mineral have been published.’ ‘i bet it’s a sexual cure,’ fetid spittle said, scratching his crotch. ‘that’s the only thing that motivates quacks.’ monsieur bonheur’s dignified tone seemed somewhat forced. ‘autumn mineral can cure sterility, by stimulating the physiological processes of the reproductive organs—not by sharpening a lustful, base impulse. i’m not trying to develop one of those vulgar love potions for coupling that the people you’re in the habit of blackmailing clamour for.’ ‘you mentioned crystallisation,’ mandarin tân interrupted. ‘does that mean it was the taoists, working away with their furnaces, who perfected the collection method for the mineral?’ ‘of course they were the ones who first began the tests. the alchemists of days gone by were remarkable experimenters who made huge advances in medicine, although some people keep on denying this.’ what’s in a name? thanh-van tran-nhut’s esprit de la renarde portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201849 ‘they were sorcerers, you mean,’ mandarin tân, an opponent of those free spirits who refused to be a part of the social fabric, could not help but comment. absorbed in his discussion, monsieur bonheur paid no attention to tân. ‘you’d be surprised by the uses of the mineral. it serves in the treatment of flagging virility, but also in the case of sex changes and even hermaphroditism.’ ‘i’ve never blackmailed a hermaphrodite,’ fetid spittle murmured thoughtfully. ‘some interesting possibilities there.’ carried away by his thoughts, monsieur bonheur raised a learned finger in the air. ‘it is also used to stimulate beard growth. did you know that the development of facial hair is directly proportional to testicle size?’ this statement, made with great frankness, created a pause in the conversation, during which the three other men discreetly contemplated the quack’s smooth cheeks. ‘this is all very much concerned with things sexual,’ dinh said, to break a silence that had become embarrassing. ‘of course,’ monsieur bonheur acknowledged. ‘and that’s why we distinguish between men’s and women’s urine. all the research is based on that difference.’ his eyes shining with enthusiasm, he looked at his audience. ‘the best specialists are working at this very moment on all the possible variations. there’s to be a particularly important conference soon in china, where the leading researchers will present their latest results. after all, it’s a field with a great deal of promise, not just from a medical point of view, but also for the economy!’ ‘but it’s just urine!’ mandarin tân protested, pulling a face. ‘what do you mean by “variations”?’ delighted by this objection, which gave him the chance to expand on his favourite theme, monsieur bonheur explained: ‘open your eyes! the composition of the urine is of prime importance. it possesses different qualities depending on whether it comes from a child or a dog, for example. might this precious liquid vary in composition depending on the country it comes from, the north or the south, or the degree of corpulence of the person who produces it? and that’s just a few of the fascinating aspects of the question.’ he stroked his smooth chin, with regret. ‘i’ve tried to keep up with research in the field. but it must be admitted that we are a long way behind china.’ monsieur bonheur paused to cast a desolate glance at the near-empty bucket. ‘the chief difficulty is the collecting,’ he concluded, somewhat sadly. ‘such a large quantity is needed for the experiments ...’ as none of his companions spoke, not wishing to raise the disappointed doctor’s hopes, he picked up his bucket slowly and wished them good day. he paused in the doorway, reluctant to leave, and turned toward mandarin tân, offering him the cup of bramble-root tea. ‘officer tân, are you sure you don’t want this deliciously refreshing beverage?’ as monsieur bonheur’s footsteps faded away on the stairs, mandarin tân sighed noisily. ‘what a strange obsession for someone who seems so normal otherwise!’ anderson portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201850 ‘he’s a strange fellow,’ dinh agreed, rolling his eyes in exasperation. ‘he turns up here with his damned drink and then off he goes with your amber essence!’ ‘but what he said opens up unthought-of possibilities,’ fetid spittle murmured, with a dreamy look. ‘i could make money not just from adulterers and sexual deviants, but from people with unsettled sexual identities ... now there’s an idea ... ’ he rubbed at his groin and leaned back into a corner to consider his potential new activities. the mandarin pulled up a stool and sat down facing dinh, who was eating the soy cake with great enjoyment. ‘while i was sacrificing my body in a dark, dank gaol, what were you up to, out there in the fresh air?’ the scholar asked between mouthfuls. ‘i managed to question the son of the woman you savagely butchered. he’s a brutish fellow by the name of monsieur phi, who practises extortion, plain and simple, down in the market. he’s totally convinced it was you who did it, but i was able to extract a few bits of information from him. it appears the old lady had been invited by her brother, monsieur canh’s father, to a banquet a few days before she died.’ he watched his friend wolfing down the cake as if he had eaten nothing for days. ‘you’ll have to go and question her brother, then. be quick about it, i’ve had enough of rotting away down here in this stinking hole with dubious company.’ ‘that was my intention precisely,’ the mandarin replied, stretching out his legs. ‘but on my way back to the tribunal, i was intercepted by a bonze who’d come to register the disappearance of a nun he was travelling back from cambodia with.’ ‘he must be the one who killed her,’ dinh declared firmly. ‘it’s a long journey and he couldn’t stand always being together, so he tried to violate her. she resisted, so after he took her virginity he took her life. it’s the classic story of a randy monk lusting after an appetisingly plump nun, you know what i mean.’ the mandarin couldn’t help laughing. dinh always did have a one-track mind. ‘except the monk is nearly seventy years old. before he could violate a nun he’d need his equipment to be in working order.’ ‘not necessarily,’ said dinh, his mouth full, sticking to his guns. ‘monsieur bonheur’s autumn mineral might be able to waken dormant impulses. no one is spared those murky, unspeakable desires that lurk in the heart ...’ his friend sighed. best to leave scholar dinh to rehash his grubby theories, if that’s what he wanted to do. ‘anyway, the old nun is missing in action. still, that will only make one hundred and twenty-five cases not solved by the zealous officers of this tribunal.’ ‘one more disappearance, and still no solution in sight.’ the mandarin and the scholar turned. fetid spittle had emerged at last from his professional musings. ‘how do you know that?’ asked mandarin tân. ‘they’re not terribly good with disappearances, haven’t you noticed? last year a painter disappeared without leaving the slightest trace, and he was never found. at one point, people were even wondering if he’d maybe wound up on the gourmet’s plate.’ ‘why would they think that?’ what’s in a name? thanh-van tran-nhut’s esprit de la renarde portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201851 fetid spittle massaged his neck. ‘well, that painter vanished just a few days before the four teenagers who did come to a sad end in the gourmet’s soup bowl.’ the sun had slunk behind pewter-coloured clouds by the time the mandarin emerged from the underground prison. gusts of wind snapped at the fringed pennants over the entrance to the tribunal and blew away the birds that had come to feast on the red ants in the trees shading the courtyard. revived by the coolness, he sat for a moment beneath a quivering longan tree, whose leaves fluttered away like drifting thoughts. his hair whipped by the squalls, mandarin tân felt as if his mind was in disarray too. never before had he felt so helpless. incapable of asserting justice as the emperor’s emissary, and forced to maintain a pretense here in the enemy south, bound hand and foot by that dratted dinh who had got himself into desperate straits, he was in a very difficult situation. there were too many additional factors in madame prune’s death. he was aware that the case was top priority, because dinh’s life depended on it, but he couldn’t help being intrigued by these unsolved disappearances which were apparently blamed on a cannibal called the gourmet. as a magistrate himself, he found it hard to accept that the local mandarin had left judicial matters in such a neglected state. a year with no conclusive results, for murders that were clearly claimed by the killer! of course, the facts were disconcerting—people vanished into thin air, young men were cut into pieces, old ladies’ severed limbs were found. but it was precisely these strange aspects that tickled mandarin tân’s curiosity, making him want to come to grips with these dark mysteries. his intellect yearned for enigmas, longed to launch itself into these obscure questions, and his sense of justice urged him on, to confront the culprit at any price. if only he had more time! but the pathetic image of scholar dinh being led away to be tortured after multiple beatings brought him back to reality. mandarin châu, that oh-so-worthy representative of lord nguyên, had ideas about punishment that brought his colleagues into dishonour. whenever he was unable to hunt out the real evildoers, who ran riot with impunity, he took it out shamelessly on those who had been thrown into prison on the basis of rumours and false information. poor dinh would be hanged or quartered before the week was out, tortured as an example to others and put on show as proof of the unworthy magistrate’s great power. mandarin tân slapped his thigh: there was no time to waste! if he could prove his friend’s innocence quickly, perhaps he could untangle the other cases too, before mandarin châu returned ... reassured by his decision, he concentrated on the clues he had gathered concerning madame prune. her son, that poxy, arrogant monsieur phi, had mentioned a family dinner not long before she died. if there were crucial elements to be revealed from that evening, they might throw some welcome light on a possible defence of the incriminated scholar. in any case, it was the only trail he had for the moment. he stood up, looking toward the office of the acting head of the tribunal. in the falling darkness, he saw no light in the room. too bad, he didn’t have enough time to go and question him anyway. he would go directly to the man’s father’s house in search of answers. anderson portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201852 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: dwyer, k.a. 2019. simón. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 16:1/2, 153-155. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v16i1/2.6662 portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 14492490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu. au/ojs/index.php/portal cultural works simón k. angelique dwyer corresponding author: associate professor k. angelique dwyer, chair of latinx, latin american, and caribbean studies, department of modern languages, literatures and cultures, gustavus adolphus college, 800 west college avenue, st. peter, mn. 56082 usa. email: adwyer@gustavus.edu doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6662 article history: received 09/02/2019; accepted 12/2/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract this creative non-fiction piece written in spanglish is called ‘simón.’ the overarching themes of this story are death, spirituality, animals and pets in a non-conventional american family raised in mexico. the narrative voice in this piece provides a unique perspective broadening dialogue(s) on mexican american identity. keywords: k. angelique dwyer; short story; ‘simón’ —‘¿te late?’ le pregunté. —‘simón.’ she replied. simón … casually meaning ‘yeah’ in current mexican vernacular, is also the name of my nephew’s donkey. following el piti’s footsteps, he has a vital connection with animals. los caballos, los perros, las chivas y los gallos. that’s where it’s at. pero la conexión que este niño de 8 años tiene con su burro va más allá. somehow, junior has managed to train this donkey into a docile and sweet companion. he stands on top of the donkey’s back, lays down, jumps up, ropes and hugs him. simón is chill. it’s a friendship that reminds me of how my toddler used to look at our golden retriever. i am instantly hit by the sting at the remembrance of having to tell a 5-year-old that her ‘big sister’ had to be put down. —‘¡no!’ gritó—followed by a sob—y lo único que nos cobijó fue el viento tropical mientras contemplábamos aquella playa. ese momento la marcó and it defines who she is still. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 153 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6662 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6662 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:adwyer@gustavus.edu http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6662 animals have always been a part of my life, of my dreams, even. el encuentro con un búho me ayudó a sobrepasar un reto académico. un búho blanco vino a avisarle a mi mamá sobre la noticia de la muerte de su hermano. la sra. linda has always been close to animals in spirit; she says it’s because her great grandmother was winedot and her ancestors were cherokee. i can already hear the readers in my subconscious mind complaining! esta pinche vieja no solo se las da de mexicana, sino además de indígena … white priviledge a todo lo que da. ojo: i’m not claiming this, i’m just telling you what my mom says. una vez en el grand canyon mi tía, mi mamá y yo estábamos manejando de noche and it could have been the enigma soundtrack playing in the background or the intense emotions we felt during the day: quien haya ido al canyón del colorado sabe lo que es enfrentarse con esas vistas y a ese viento that strips you down to your core. as we made a turn, standing in complete forest darkness, our headlights revealed a regal elk. we pulled over and sat in awe of this majestic animal. olvídate del hecho de que estábamos deslumbrando al pobre animal … it was spiritual. no sé cómo más describirlo. mi mamá y mi tía weaved together different thoughts about patriarchy, their dad, and their recently deceased brother, mientras que la seventeen-year-old yo tripiaba con la música de enigma y la emoción profunda que sentía en esa oscuridad que le hacía fondo a aquellas astas y a aquél pecho erguido. mine is a family of storytellers. most of my favorite family stories involve animals somehow: there’s the one about the hairy wood rat that crawled down my mom’s nightgown as they tried to shoo it from the house (esa es una de las mejores); the snakes that would swim by as my parents skinny dipped in table rock lake as newlyweds; el del zorrillo que nos meó a brenda y a mí, el del tlacuache que nos veía cenar noche tras noche por las ventanas del comedor; or the coyote that kept coming back for piti’s chickens. our bedtime stories as kids were about dogs: ‘big red’ and another one about a st. bernard i can’t seem to remember. luego, los libros cambiaron a cuentos sobre caballos ‘the black stallion’ y todos esos. tanto asocio a los animales con los cuentos que hasta mis hijos me suplican: —‘no more bedtime stories about animals!’ y yo que apenas me estaba emocionando … one of my favorites was the story about the dog that got stuck in the bear trap. los dwyers vivían en el bosque de missouri, junto a un lago, y tenían dos perros: pj and mrs. jackson. my dad used to cuddle with them and they would protect my mom and piti when he was a newborn. una noche, my dad got worried because one of the dogs didn’t come back. se oían unos aullidos a lo lejos, so he and the other dog went on a search. lo encontraron con la pata en la trampa de osos que algún cazador había puesto. my dad tells this story way better … but he had to push the clamp in further in order for it to release the dog’s paw y dice que vio al perro a los ojos, they locked eyes and he could feel the dog’s trust before it was released. lo cargó de vuelta y lo puso frente a la fogata. both dogs cuddled and layed by the fireplace together for days until the wound was healed. my niece’s bed was always covered in plush doggies. the vet set, the dog carrier, the food, blankies and other accessories were daily entertainment for her. uno de sus primeros juegos de nintendo era de perritos. siempre pensábamos que ella sería la veterinaria de la familia, pero fue la otra sobrina quien acabó escogiendo esa carrera, para luego cambiarse. they say our pets absorb our negative energies and sometimes get sick because of it. we’ve had two dogs die of cancer. what about our energies did they so honorably absorb to the point of self-sacrifice? tal vez es muy egocéntrico pensar así. se murieron porque se murieron y ya está … el ambiente, la suerte, la genética … as a teenager, el piti rescued a gray and white puppy that was part of our family for 10 years. she was loyal, brave and nurturing. she gave us 3 litters of beautiful mutts, dwyer portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019154 and mothered 3 baby kittens my sister-in-law found in a box. se murió de cancer, dejándonos con los recuerdos de su noble mirada y cálida compañía. she was cherished so much that my niece was given the same name. so, perhaps it’s not by chance that she loves dogs so much. hoy día, mi sobrina anda por ahí como kardashian con sus dos mini perros mejor vestidos que mis criaturas, all fluffed up and fab. hace poco fuimos a visitar a unos amigos que rescataron un gatito. mis hijos se asombraron al ver el tamaño del bibi que le daban. this baby kitty took me back to my farming days when we had cats galore. princesa gave birth to the litter that gave us fluffy, and fluffy gave us patches, pickles and timmy tip toes. i still remember discovering them under the camper top. i would crawl in through the little window and take her a can of tuna. nombraba -y disque bautizabaa cada uno de sus gatitos. no me acuerdo quién nos dio a beethoven y a nieve, pero esos dos gatos blancos no se hallaban: uno sordo y el otro arisco. once, i opened the back door and found 3 white mice cuddled up in a bucket. ese ya es otro cuento … —‘look at their red eyes!’ i said. y en eso que se acerca mi mamá a pegar el grito en el cielo. they were rats and the mama would be showing up soon. i loved every bit of growing up on a farm: las chivitas (bola de nieve y blanca nieves) who ate our geraniums and clothes hung out on the line as part of their daily routine; el ganado (uva y cara blanca) sus lenguas ásperas siempre me hacían reir cuando les daba sal; our rabbits, roosters, turtles and hamsters. el piti knew all too well the pain of having his colts and foals die. the coyotes seemed to smell the scent for miles and though he would often sit watch through the night con rifle en mano, i don’t think he ever got one. farm living doesn’t hide reality, eso que ni qué. i remember seeing our weimaraner, jenny, get hit by a car en la curva and die instantly. our neighbor’s palomino, named señor, drowned by falling into a well. seis peones trataron de sacarlo por las patas y hasta a una troca lo amarraron, but he was just too heavy. cuántas cosas no pasaron que se quedaron forever in my brain y que ahora forman quién soy and how i raise my kids. cuando mis niños y yo nos encontramos a un pájaro muerto en el jardín, le hacemos un hoyito en la tierra. our backyard is practically a dead bird cemetery. so, you’ll see that the same girl who used to visit the cemeteries of mexico with her family -stealing from the adorned tombs so that the bare ones wouldn’t be lonely or sad-, still lives within me. las tumbas de los pajaritos y de nuestra querida perrita fallecida. ante todo, el respeto a la vida … ay, la vida, la vida … y el culto a la materia restante del viaje espiritual, como la piel que deja una culebra. the same boy who rescued the gray and white puppy—y quien de muchacho ‘rescató’ a una gatita siamesa como mi regalo de quinceis the gringo mexicano who breaks wild colts today. our childhood animal-loving-selves live within us as we face the adult world. so, though simón has gone to pass and my eight-year-old nephew ahora es pleno quinceañero. that sweet boy still lies within the heart of an award winning charro, who trains with his borregos and his australian shepherd, max—o como le digo yo—maximiliano buendía. portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019155 simón © 2017 by james g. worner. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: worner, j.g. 2017. parallel lines. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:1, 24-29. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal. v14i1.5388 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 1 april 2017 abstract james g. worner is an australian-based writer and scholar currently pursuing a phd at the university of technology sydney. his research seeks to expose masculinities lost in the shadow of australia’s anzac hegemony while exploring new opportunities for contemporary historiography. he is the recipient of the doctoral scholarship in historical consciousness at the university’s australian centre for public history and will be hosted by the university of bologna during 2017 on a doctoral research and writing scholarship. ‘parallel lines’ is from a collection of stories, the shapes of us, which explores the liminal spaces of modern life: class, gender, sexuality, race, religion and education. the story looks at lives, like lines, that do not meet but which travel in proximity, simultaneously attracted and repelled. james’s short stories have been published in various journals and anthologies. keywords james worner; short story; ‘parallel lines’; the shapes of us cultural work parallel lines james g. worner university of technology sydney corresponding author: mr james worner, australian centre for public history, faculty of arts and social sciences, university of technology sydney, po box 123, nsw 2007, australia. james.g.worner@student.uts.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5388 article history: received 03/02/2017; revised 25/02/2017; accepted 01/03/2017; published 04/05/2017 transitions and dislocations, curated cultural works issue, curated by paul allatson. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 24 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5388 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5388 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5388 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:james.g.worner@student.uts.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5388 marta, mi hija, you have such beautiful … ¿how to say en inglés, ‘las uñas’? ‘finger nails,’ mamá. gracias. where … to, you know … para pintarlas? to paint them? i go to a salon in the city. we must go together while you’re here. ah, perfecta, mi amor. perfecta. i have had to learn to paint my own nails. tonight, i’m pleased with the result; as good as in a salon, i tell myself. i love the gloss of the final coat—this one: latin passion, a deep blackbrown. a hint of burning ember. the way it clings to the base is solid; lava-like, the way it flows across a surface. i touch the brush against the bottle lip and prepare to drive across the final plane, elbows out and fingers splayed, tongue tense at the side of my mouth. the brush slides out in two slow strokes, filling the nail with the molten ooze. and there! it is done. i rest the brush and swivel from the desk, raising my hand to the light, palm out towards the bookcase beyond. pin-pricks of light—the glow from the lamp—glint in the matte. wet, like stars above the altiplano or a final ferry to circular quay. i stand and move towards the bookcase, as if being drawn by my outstretched hand, drawn by the magic of the authors on the shelf. mis hermanas latinas. sitting in their quiet clusters, here are all my latina sisters. i hover my fingers across the familiar spines: here is maría luisa bombal; there is carmen boullosa; hello laura esquivel; hola marta brunet—my lovely namesake; hola señora allende, profesora mía. of the dozen shelves that soar from carpet-line to cornice, here sits my sorority. it is still early, though the sun has set and the evening sounds of sydney harbour can be heard beyond the balcony. the harbour never disappoints. i hear a ferry on approach and press myself into the curtain, pushing against the heavy drapes while listening to the landing line, thrown and looped and stretched against the back-whine of an engine; the bang of a gangplank dropping into place; the stomp of passengers crossing the narrow bridge. rigging clangs, rocking on the wake when the action is reversed. the engine whines and the ferry pulls away. it’s while in the folds of the curtain that i realise i am happy and the feeling takes me by surprise. is there a difference between happiness and simply no longer feeling sad? when is the moment when one thing can be said to have turned into another? perhaps a single degree of weightlessness across the design of things. a step back into the lamplight and i see myself reflected in the darkening window glass. a tall woman, certainly, of tentative angles and unfamiliar surfaces. but my simple dress curves where i like to curve. the patterned scarf and river pearls are generous with their elegance. and from elegance there comes confidence. i practise my smiles, one after the other, different crinklings of matching black-brown lips: this one soft, demure; this one steely, resolute; this one fiery latina. a hint of burning ember. yes, this is how i will make it work; this is the way to break the spell. perfecta. but the weightless feeling never lasts for long and soon the world is pressing in again. like the curtain at the window, i feel its pressure, smell its dust and imagine its decay. tomorrow, miguel will leave this city—i believe, and hope—one final time. tomorrow, both our lives will change forever. i don’t know whether to laugh or cry. of course i will miss miguel. he is sweet and smart and resilient and has suffered the worst of it for both our sakes. but it’s time for him to go; for me to let him go. parallel lines portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201725 in my dreams, i see a train. a locomotive on a track, steaming across the high andean plains where the sky seems close enough to touch. my outstretched palm, nails of latin passion, can pat the clouds; my fingers wrapped around a blade can slice the universe in two. i am in the middle of the wide expanse. the rails stretch long to two horizons; parallel lines appearing to converge—origin, this way; destination, that. the vision plays like a black and white movie—a hollywood western; a cinema in santiago; miguel hungry for the gift of english. these here parts are badlands, ma’am. we need to get to the other side. but the train must cross the space where los bandidos lie in wait. there is no postponing either journey or assault, no outrunning racing hooves. hiding here in silence is not an option and going back unthinkable. the question is simply how to meet the attack. i push the thought away—that is tomorrow’s struggle; miguel will have to cope—and allow myself a sigh. it turns into a puff of air shot across my drying nails towards the books—my books, marta’s books, perfectly arranged on these, marta’s shelves. still the words are not familiar, the name not sounding quite correct. but the shelves are sleek, and white and clean. the lines are parallel: vertical where the novels stand upright, side-by-side, and horizontal where stacked in thoughtful, counter-facing piles. the order is reassuring and calms me— telling me all will be all right; in this there’s nothing unfamiliar; in this sufficient truth. i tilt my hand by degrees against the straight-backed spines until black-brown headed bandidos have appeared, are leaning up against a barricade. i have never been clever with words, in spanish or in english, but here, in this room, in the company of my sisters, it seems even i have magical powers. i reach for the wine i have placed on the desk and drum my nails against the glass. the acrylic extensions tick like a beetle. it is a pinot noir from chile, the land of a childhood all-but forgotten: that mountain country so far from this place of water and light. i rotate the glass slowly then spin it with more force. perhaps i’ve drunk too much. there is an empty bottle under the desk. the wine washes the inside of the glass with a cleansing crimson wave. how far miguel has travelled from what might have been. i push my toes deeper into the comfort of my shoes but they pinch against my heels. somewhere over the isabel allendes, i notice the blister: a smudge of latin passion on the edge of the trailing nail. ‘¡pah, estúpida!’ the word explodes softly on my lips, barely audible but with a strength of emotion that surprises. i press my mouth closed to stem the spread of imperfection. a sea-wall closing on a surging tide. i knew the base coat wasn’t dry when i started with the colour but had been too excited by the cruet found at the back of the dresser drawer. a beautiful bottle: tall, heavy in the hand, deeply ridged with cut-glass folds. i find the blister with the pad of my thumb. i know my compulsions: that i will touch and worry and scratch until i dig it out with the razor of my thumbnail. for distraction, i look to the photos ranging over the shelves, between the books and travel treasures. i close my eyes to picture them, counting them one by one for i know them all by heart: miguel at graduation in his zegna suit with patterned tie and matching pocket square; of me with all my other sisters. it is my own face i can see, there in every one, black-brown eyes smiling from the frames on every shelf. i am proud of miguel’s achievements. and why not? if not pride, i am unsure what might flood inside. no one had thought escape for miguel was possible, let alone a life for me. i remember the look on mamá’s face when she was told the news. her response had crushed miguel: worner portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201726 mamá, i’ve been accepted. they want me at the university. i’m going to australia to be a lawyer. university? ¡pah! no place for stupid cockroach boy like you. at the thought of her, my gaze returns from the bookcase then drops beneath the desk. the light from the lamp does not reach there and i am overcome. the house of my earliest childhood still throws a shadow across the miles. i am emptied, my confidence sucked like an outgoing tide, exposing the delicate flats of a muddy self-esteem. i see once more the newspapers strewn in angry piles, crushed open at pages with names and photos of los desaparecidos marked in heavy circles; the too-loud sounds of telenovelas from the kitchen bench; the yellow creep of nicotine up the walls and on the ceiling; the slug-like burns around the edges of the table—cigarettes long ago lit and set and forgotten; the scorch marks no longer a protective force, as they were when i was a child, evenly deployed to defend the table perimeter. now they are a fleeing army, contemplating leaps to the unwashed floor below. i am breached and fill with memories of a thousand hurts. i feel with the pad of my thumb for the lacquer blister. a sound from the kitchen reminds me i am not alone. ronald reagan, the ginger tabby from number five, has reappeared. he comes in through the kitchen window whenever he is hungry, eats from the bowl i’ve placed for him, then disappears. he has sat with me by the fountain in the garden, when i’ve felt courageous, and i’ve been pleased to have his company. reagan appears from the kitchen corridor and makes a line towards me, arching up against my legs in equal measures bliss and undisguised disdain. i reach to the ground and stroke his ears then pick him up to rub him as i know he likes. i press my cheek against the ginger warmth till he hums his deep vibrato. ‘hello ronald. hola señor reagan. did you miss me? did you miss me mucho?’ something in the ordinariness of the moment makes me pause. ronald reagan relaxing in my arms, and the momentary outside lull, returns me to the lurking edge. the curtain luffs and i feel a sudden heat around the throat and ears. i picture again the engine, pushing across the grassy plains. steam shoots from the boiler stack; the whistle screams above the piston clack. i drop reagan to the ground and reach for the pinot noir. he sulks back toward the kitchen and is gone. in moments such as these, i glimpse but cannot hold a future for myself. and now i have a smudge. i should not have touched the cat. instinctively, i blow across the lacquer and shake my hand in the air. i should have waited til it was dry and now will have to start again. my gaze returns to the shelf and i search instinctively for isabel allende—knowing i need more than her soothing words right now. i curl a finger over the top of the spine and claw it from its place. daughter of fortune. i almost laugh but open the cover and smooth my hand across the pretty paisley endpaper, the curlicues of my name—‘marta’. my name is marta— smiling up over his, the one i have crossed out. my fingers feel along the cover’s hard edge and sharp corners. i bend the pages back against the spine to find the leverage i require. the pointed corner spears deep into the blistered varnish and i begin to saw across the surface, dropping black-brown specks of burning ember across the bright white surface. they spot the white like cockroach dust. i will be perfect. i will make it so. parallel lines portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201727 * * * miguel stepped to the window and blew gently across the surface of his coffee. it was a spectacular view and reminded him daily how far he’d travelled from what once had been his life. the morning sounds of the harbour floated in, busy already although it wasn’t yet sixthirty. a trail of city workers already made for the wharf, lucky too their daily commute was a fifteen-minute ferry ride. normally he’d be one of them but today there were other plans. the taxi to the airport would pick him up at midday. he sipped his coffee and shrugged the dressing-gown tight across his shoulders. he should look at the view more often; it was too magical to ever take for granted—even though the rent was killing him. he sipped again and turned to the pile of unread mail on the desk under the lamp. mostly junk, a fistful of local restaurant menus, and a statement from the bank. he pulled from the pile a coarser envelope with his name and unit number hand-written in stick-like letters, underscored by two upward angling lines, the unmistakeable mark of cilla, the neighbour from number five. as if on cue, ronald reagan—cilla’s ginger tabby—appeared from around the kitchen corridor and made a line for him. he curled around miguel’s shin, mewing for attention. miguel secretly enjoyed his company and was happy for him to come and go through the kitchen window, which cilla knew he left ajar. miguel reached to the ground and stroked his ears, then picked him up to rub him as he knew he liked. he pressed his cheek against the ginger warmth till reagan hummed his deep vibrato. ‘hello ronald. hola señor reagan. did you miss me? did you miss me mucho?’ he continued to read the letter in his hand. it was a home-printed note to all building residents, supposedly from the owners’ corporation but miguel knew enough of cilla to know it came from her alone. this time, apparently, a stranger had been spotted around the gardens—a woman, sitting by the fountain at odd moments through the day. was she a guest of anyone in the building? miguel imagined cilla behind her curtains on the second floor. residents were warned to be on the lookout for suspicious activity. ‘please be extra conscious of building security.’ this, he didn’t doubt, was directed at him—and marta—and his open kitchen window. miguel held the letter for a moment longer then tossed it with the envelope in the bin beneath the desk. his thoughts stretched out across the day ahead. a business class flight across the pacific, direct to santiago. he’d be in chile for seventy-two hours before the return flight brought him home. three days were all he needed. any time spent with his mother since he was a teenager had been difficult and this would be exceptional. but it was time for her to know. marta needed her, deserved her, too. what kind of future might they have together? what was possible for her and marta? his dream for marta involved sunny sydney days, morning coffee on visits from chile, and trips to city salons to have their nails done together. his gaze was drawn to the end of the bookcase, to his shelf of latin authors. an empty wine glass and a gap among the upright spines spoiled the otherwise perfect line. one book lay across the tops of its neighbours—the letters that formed both title and author, ‘daughter of fortune’ and ‘isabel allende,’ stretching like tracks across a void. as he put the novel back in line and lifted the empty glass, he noticed a subtle coating of black-brown specks along the white of the shelf. he looked at it remembering the night before with a hint of a smile. the smile was unrehearsed. he paused for a moment to look at his nails—now perfectly painted and blister-free, in a rich and deep black-brown. latin passion. a hint of burning ember. worner portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201728 he tore a tissue from the desktop box and rolled it between his thumb and finger pads. the day for dealing with los bandidos had arrived—the next step in marta’s release. his mother would understand as well. eventually. but, until then, it was up to him. he touched the tissue once to his face then wiped it along the length of the shelf, cleaning the black-brown dust in a single sweep. parallel lines portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 201729 © 2017 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: pascual, f. c. 2017. the penal colony museum in new caledonia and its identity constructions / le musée du bagne en nouvellecalédonie et ses constructions identitaires. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:2, 27-39. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5335 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 2 september 2017 communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue, guest edited by anu bissoonauth and rowena ward. research article the penal colony museum in new caledonia and its identity constructions / le musée du bagne en nouvelle-calédonie et ses constructions identitaires fanny cécile pascual  l’université de la nouvelle-calédonie (unc) corresponding author: senior lecturer fanny cécile pascual, université de la nouvelle calédonie (unc), nouméa, nouvelle-calédonie. fanny.pascual@univ-nc.nc doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5335 article history: received 02/01/2017; revised 02/05/2017; accepted 22/05/2017; published 05/10/2017 abstract in the south pacific, new caledonia and australia were penal colonies during the 19th century. analysing the discourse surrouding two museums based on these convict periods (hyde park barracks in sydney and the project for a museum in noumea), will shed light on the difficulties of facing this violent past. even if these two countries and their histories are different, they have a common aim to accept this part of their genealogies. after having been taboo, having criminal ancestors is now a pride; exile is no more seen as an expulsion from the english or french motherland, but has become a pioneer adventure. suppressing some aspects of this colonisation and downplaying the participation or the interactions of convicts or bagnards with other communities helps to build this memory. we must also keep in mind that museums have a political role. in new caledonia, it is obvious that the self-determination process between 2014 and 2018 has influenced the project of the museum in nouville: having a convict in the family will prove your belonging to the land and could justify voting rights for the 2018 referendum. these museums accordingly do not only deal with history, but influence the future. résumé au xixème siècle, la nouvelle-calédonie et l’australie étaient des colonies pénitentiaires dans le pacifique sud. l’analyse du discours muséal des deux musées (hyde park barracks à 27 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5335 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5335 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:fanny.pascual%40univ-nc.nc?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5335 sydney et le projet pour un musée du bagne à nouméa) se base sur la période pénitentiaire pour mettre en lumière les difficultés que l’on peut avoir à affronter son passé de violence. même si ces deux pays ont une histoire différente, le but commun est d’accepter cette partie de leur généalogie. après avoir été tabou, avoir des ancêtres criminels est maintenant une source de fierté; l’exil n’est plus considéré comme une expulsion de la patrie britannique ou française, mais plutôt comme une aventure de pionniers. ceci entraîne un déni d’autres aspects de la colonisation et réduit la participation ou les interactions entre communautés dans la construction de l’histoire mémorielle. nous devons également garder à l’esprit que les musées jouent un rôle politique. en nouvelle-calédonie, il est évident que le processus d’autodétermination prévu entre 2014-2018 a influencé le projet du musée à nouville. un bagnard dans la famille prouvera votre ancrage dans cette terre et pourrait justifier votre droit de vote dans le référendum. ces musées n’évoquent pas seulement l’histoire mais préparent aussi l’avenir. keywords museums; convicts; south pacific; new caledonia; penal colonies; identity; museo-history now we are ready to face the truth about our past, to acknowledge that the coming of the british was the occasion of three evils: the violence against the original inhabitants of the country, the aborigines, the violence against the first european labour force in australia, the convicts, and the violence done to the land itself. recognition of these evils is the beginning of wisdom for those who want to understand the history of our ancient continent. (manning 1988). les bagnes coloniaux du pacifique sont corollaires des théories carcérales, de l’intérêt de la marine pour les colonies, de la construction de l’état-nation en europe, de la révolution industrielle, de l’accroissement démographique et de l’indépendance des etats-unis (alors réservoir pour les exclus du royaume-uni). la nouvelle-calédonie et l’australie, aux antipodes de leurs métropoles, représentaient à la fois un laboratoire social, une économie basée sur la colonisation pénale et une terre de prétendus sauvages anthropophages. l’australie est la première colonie pénale du pacifique de 1787 à 1868. la nouvelle-calédonie installe son bagne entre 1864 et 1897. dans le pacifique sud, les bagnards font souche et participent au socle du peuplement de ces territoires. l’engouement pour cette histoire s’amplifie depuis quelques décennies dans ces deux payset cela n’est pas sans lien en nouvelle-calédonie avec le processus d’autodétermination en cours (accords de matignon et nouméa, 1988–1998).1 comment les descendants du bagne se construisent-ils une identité sur un passé de violences? comment réconcilie-t-on histoire et mémoires dans un contexte français de lois mémorielles, de discours présidentiels souvent révisionnistes, et plus encore dans le cadre d’accords pour un vivre ensemble? le projet de musée du bagne à nouméa (mbn) est le principal réceptacle de cette ambition. saura-t-il lier ‘vérité’ historique et devoir de mémoire, pris entre les enjeux politiques voire les tentations démagogiques? s’appuyant sur les principes méthodologiques 1 on cite comme évidence l’ouverture du musée de bourail dans les anciens magasins du bagne en 1986, du site pénitentiaire de cockatoo island en 2001, du fort téremba à la foa classé en 1989 avec une nouvelle muséographie en 2011, documentaire les forçats du pacifique diffusé en 2012; expositions convicts en 1999 au hpb, ile d’asile et terre d’exil au musée de nouméa en 2005 (sur la déportation), a convict in the family au musée de sydney en 2013, etc. pascual portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 28 de muséohistoire (louvier 2012), l’analyse de ce discours muséal, bien qu’en construction, sera comparé aux expositions australiennes de la ville de sydney, et plus particulièrement à celles du hyde park barracks (hbp). ce bâtiment est le premier dortoir de convicts en australie construit en 1819. a partir de 1848, les convicts restants sont transférés sur l’île de cockatoo,2 dans la baie de sydney, et le hpb accueillera successivement immigrantes, infirmes, orphelins de la grande famine irlandaise puis les services judiciaires et administratifs. ce bâtiment devient patrimoine local en 1981, un musée de site en 1990, patrimoine national en 2007, puis mondial via l’unesco en 2010.3 en nouvelle-calédonie, le musée du bagne est installé depuis 1996 dans l’ancienne boulangerie pénitentiaire. ce n’est pas le premier bâtiment pénitentiaire patrimonialisé en nouvelle-calédonie mais le premier bâtiment en dur du bagne de nouville, construit en 1868 (soit 20 ans après le départ des convicts du hpb). après la fermeture définitive du bagne, l’ex-boulangerie sert d’épicerie dans les années 30, puis d’atelier de formation professionnelle. la province sud la rachète en 1988 avec l’intention d’en faire un musée du bagne. il est classé au patrimoine provincial l’année d’après. l’association témoignage d’un passé concrétise ce projet en 1996 mais le musée ne prend pas l’envergure voulue par les autorités. sa rénovation en 2011–2014 le transforme en ‘musée introductif ’ du nouvel itinéraire du bagne soutenu fortement par les collectivités (province sud 2012b:12)4. toute une équipe composée d’experts scientifiques, de muséographes et de membres d’institutions publiques élaborent le projet scientifique et culturel (psc). mais l’inauguration initialement prévue en 2014 a été reportée et le projet aujourd’hui peine à mobiliser des soutiens politiques. le psc, dans l’attente de son application, fournit les éléments nécessaires à l’analyse. victime ou coupable de la colonisation pénale processus de victimisation l’enjeu est d’importance en nouvelle-calédonie. la reconnaissance des victimes de l’histoire a été le point de rupture et de réconciliation des deux camps en opposition, indépendantistes et loyalistes. alors que les affrontements physiques s’intensifient en nouvelle-calédonie, en 1983, les discussions organisées à nainville-les-roches entre les différents partis achoppent sur la définition des victimes de l’histoire. les indépendantistes revendiquent ce statut lié en tant que peuple colonisé; les loyalistes quittent la table des négociations se sentant relégués au rang de coupables. après une période de heurts violents dans les années 80, deux accords sont successivement signés en 1988 (accords de matignon) et 1998 (accord de nouméa). le préambule de l’accord de nouméa concentre l’esprit de cette réconciliation: ‘le passé a été le temps de la colonisation. le présent est le temps du partage, par le rééquilibrage. l’avenir doit être le temps de l’identité, dans un destin commun.’ il revisite l’histoire en accordant notamment le statut de victimes aux bagnards : ‘des hommes et des femmes sont venus en grand nombre, aux xixe et xxe siècles, … contre leur gré’ (préambule accord de nouméa 1998). désormais s’il devait y avoir un coupable, ce serait cette métropole colonisatrice et répressive, mettant sur un même destin de victimes, peuples premiers et colons pénaux. 2 le site débute sa restauration en 2001, ouvre au public en 2007, et devient patrimoine mondial en 2010. la visite présente les bâtiments mais ne donne aucune information sur la vie des convicts. 3 la première proposition de musée dans le site date de 1935 (peterson 2006: 10). il est ‘branch of sydney’s museum of applied arts and sciences – maas’ dès 1984 et est transféré au historic houses trust en 1990 (hht 2010: 6, 17) devenu sydney living museums en 2013. 4 regroupant fort teremba, les musées de thio, paita, et bourail ainsi que les panneaux des bâtiments datant de la période. attention la muséographie à l’état de projet est sujette à changement. the penal colony museum in new caledonia and its identity constructions / le musée du bagne en nouvelle-calédonie et ses constructions identitaires portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 29 cette reconnaissance se traduit dans les musées du bagne, en australie comme en nouvellecalédonie, par les listings exhaustifs, bases de données et témoignages des condamnés à disposition du visiteur. le bagnard est le cœur du dispositif muséal alors qu’il avait été déshumanisé: tondu, rebaptisé d’un matricule dès sa condamnation, dénué de droits civiques et sa correspondance censurée.5 de coupable en leur temps, ils deviennent victimes aujourd’hui. suivant cette logique politique, les musées (tant australiens que calédoniens) n’accordent aucune place aux personnes initialement lésées par le bagnard. la muséographie noie le crime/ délit dans des listes qui rappellent celles des lieux de massacre (shoah, bombardement, …) et participent à l’inversion les rôles. ainsi, l’ancêtre ne sera plus perçu comme un criminel mais comme un exclu. alors qu’en 1996, le musée n’évoquait même pas le jugement, la rénovation propose en premier espace, une reconstitution du tribunal des assises. l’accent est porté sur le durcissement du droit et de la politique de répression de la iiie république: en 1885, les récidivistes et les femmes peuvent être condamnés à la transportation ; c’est la peine la plus lourde avant la peine de mort. l’histoire de la colonie commence alors, dans la cour d’assises, avec la sentence et non au moment du crime (réservé à la métropole). les musées se veulent creuset de l’identité locale et non fruit d’une d’histoire complète. cette affirmation s’avère d’autant plus vraie lorsque l’on s’intéresse aux profils des bagnards exposés. en effet, le mbn traite peu des 8000 déportés (condamnés politiques) et relégués (récidivistes) mais se concentre sur les presque 22 000 transportés (condamnés de droit commun). ils constituent certes, la majorité des bagnards mais surtout la base du peuplement d’origine pénale. le projet affiche vouloir restaurer ainsi une justice envers ces condamnés dont on a encore honte dans certaines familles.6 en nouvelle-calédonie, une gradation s’installe entre les trois types de condamnés dans l’histoire mémorielle. il est de bon ton de déclarer une ascendance de déporté dont le niveau d’instruction devient source de fierté et qui ont sacrifié leur liberté pour des idéaux, notamment pendant le soulèvement de la commune (ici l’idéal républicain). ces exilés politiques en semi-liberté peuvent prétendre au droit de grâce et retournent presque tous en métropole. tous les opposants politiques ne bénéficient pas de ce statut: plus de la moitié des kanak emprisonnés pouvaient y prétendre. si, à l’époque, l’etat a tout intérêt à qualifier ces sujets révoltés politiques de criminels, la colonisation reste encore un sujet fort sensible en métropole; pour preuve en février 2017 le candidat à la présidentielle emmanuel macron a déclenché une polémique en qualifiant la colonisation de ‘crime contre l’humanité’ devant la presse algérienne. en australie, la distinction entre bagnards n’est pas faite sur le type d’infraction, sur son passif, mais confère déjà à chaque nouvel arrivant sa future place/utilité dans la société en création. le processus de réhabilitation est clairement enclenché ici face à l’opprobre en nouvelle-calédonie. ainsi au hpb, on distingue le gentleman convict (équivalent des déportés instruits ayant pour chef d’accusation, désertion de l’armée, détournement de fonds ou contrefaçon), le skill convict (bagnard à compétences) et les autres. 5 l’espace de l’exposition corps à corps avec l’histoire du musée de la ville de nouméa en 2011 sur le bagne s’intitulait corps déshumanisé: le corps du condamné. 6 le journal le chien bleu (2013, 183: 5) dans l’article ‘l’arrière-grand-père bagnard de frogier’ (exdéputé de nouvelle-calédonie et aujourd’hui sénateur) sous-titre ‘le sénateur entretient la confusion entre déporté et transporté … n’assumerait-il pas totalement son histoire?’ voir hpb, deuxième galerie greenway, cartel ‘who do you think you are’: ‘the “stain” of convict heritage was something to be hidden rather than celebrated. the 1970s were a turning point, with changing social values and a new openness to understanding our past … today finding a convict in the roots of one’s family tree has become a badge of honour.’ pascual portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 30 les indigènes et le bagne les musées restent prudents sur les interactions entre les condamnés et les autres populations. tout d’abord les femmes: la colonisation pénale est majoritairement masculine. au-delà du fait que les musées ne disent rien sur les viols et violences qu’induirait ce déséquilibre démographique, les femmes restent les grandes absentes de l’histoire calédonienne. or, le peuplement de l’archipel induit nécessairement un métissage, notamment avec les femmes kanak. beaucoup de familles calédoniennes découvrent depuis une trentaine d’années, via leur recherche généalogique, une filiation métissée, tue jusque-là. autre tabou: les autochtones. a sydney, le hpb ne mentionne pas la théorie de terra nullius qui justifia la colonisation de l’australie. il traite de façon ‘neutre’ les liens avec les aborigènes. il axe son discours sur la construction de la ville avec des plans, les biographies de l’architecte greenway ou encore du gouverneur visionnaire macquarie, et l’idée du convict bâtisseur. une carte interactive présent-passé met en lumière cette colonisation mais ne fournit aucune information sur la prise de possession de ces terres. au mbn, le projet n’ayant pas encore été finalisé, on ne peut que s’interroger sur la l’espace création de la nouvelle-calédonie qui remplacerait la section ancienne pourquoi la nouvelle-calédonie? l’espace expliquerat-il les raisons de la colonisation sur ce territoire ou de l’implantation du bagne? y verrat-on la vision des mélanésiens sur la colonisation et inversement des colonisateurs sur les indigènes? ce musée sera-t-il le réceptacle d’une communauté ou la base d’une vision croisée? ce musée caldoche sert-il à rétablir la balance avec le centre culturel tjibaou et le musée de la nouvelle-calédonie centré sur les premières communautés du pacifique? sera-t-il la continuité d’une historiographie ségréguée? en dehors de la relation colonisé-colonisateur, certains indigènes avaient intégré un corps supplétif chargé de traquer les évadés pour le compte de l’administration pénitentiaire. il sera néanmoins difficile d’obtenir les témoignages des descendants de cette police indigène. l’anonymisation des indigènes engagés est totale au mbn et hpb. en nouvelle-calédonie, la bipolarisation de la vie politique actuelle rend taboue toute collaboration historique entre kanak et colonisateurs, même si le nouveau psc du mbn prévoit d’exposer des armes traditionnelles dans une section dédiée. mythe du pionnier l’exposition temporaire de 1999 au hpb intitulée convicts, opte pour une introduction originale de l’histoire du bagne : une liste des lieux de transportation. l’on passe ainsi de nouvelle-calédonie avec plus de 29 500 hommes comme base de peuplement, à 56 enfants condamnés en nouvelle-zélande! certes la transportation et les camps sont des expériences anciennes et répandues mais leur système et leur intention diffèrent, qu’il s’agit d’exterminer une ‘race’ dans les centres nazis, de construire une colonie ou simplement de sanctionner et éloigner les indésirables (bogle 2008: 7). l’amalgame que ferait le visiteur entre les différentes expériences de transportation, mène bien sûr au point commun de la souffrance de ces âmes exilées. mais l’exposition permanente du hpb préfère faire ressortir l’aspect pionnier du convict car c’est l’espoir d’une vie meilleure qui distingue le transporté des autres types de prisonniers (carte 1 hope in hell, salle lieux). cette image de pionnier est également prégnante dans le mbn. esclaves ou pionniers bâtisseurs? le travail forcé fait de ces hommes les bâtisseurs de ces nouvelles colonies. or dans les discours muséaux, l’accent est mis sur ‘travaux’ et moins sur ‘forcés’ : en exploitant cette main d’œuvre parfois très qualifiée, la métropole réalise de sérieuses économies de temps et d’argent. the penal colony museum in new caledonia and its identity constructions / le musée du bagne en nouvelle-calédonie et ses constructions identitaires portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 31 les ouvrages urbanistiques sont monumentaux : tout est à faire dans ces colonies du bout du monde avec un approvisionnement irrégulier de la métropole en hommes et matériaux. le visiteur de ces musées ne peut imaginer la difficulté des chantiers les plus laborieux tels que les remblais ou la construction de routes. le visiteur peut lire que ces travaux sont effectués par les plus récalcitrants ou les condamnés sans compétences, mais il doit en déduire l’injustice du système qui privilégie l’utilité sur la bonne conduite! ces privilèges ne concernent pas les premiers transportés qui durent fabriquer à partir de rien la colonie et leur propre prison. ce discours convict-bagnard-bâtisseur omet que l’indigène est astreint aux mêmes travaux (reynolds 2000: 9). en nouvelle-calédonie, le régime de l’indigénat depuis 1887 impose des journées de corvée aux tribus, souvent pour la construction de routes. dans la première version du mbn, en 1996, ‘le fil conducteur était la présentation des réalisations et des occupations des hommes du bagne’ (province sud 2012b: 4) avec huit espaces sur treize traitant des métiers des forçats. la nouvelle muséographie n’en présente qu’un explicite sur les dix à venir ajoutant dans son panel thématique, l’espace 6, art au bagne une section mobilier. ainsi, après avoir changé les bagnards en pionniers, c’est maintenant en artistes que la nouvelle muséographie de nouville présente le forçat (ce qui lui confère non plus un savoir-faire appris mais un talent unique). outre les travaux publics, la main d’œuvre pénale est ‘louée’ à des privés, ce sont les fameux ‘contrats de chair humaine’ que l’administration pénitentiaire calédonienne passe avec les compagnies minières.7 il serait de la mission d’un musée d’interpeller le visiteur sur cette pratique: ‘transportation, though chiefly dreaded as exile, undoubtedly is much more than exile; it is slavery as well; and the condition of the convict slave is frequently a miserable one’ (molesworth 1838: 21). mais le sujet est délicat : raviver le passé sombre des entreprises toujours en activité, discréditer un secteur qui sert de rente à l’économie de ces deux pays inquiète. le bench book au hpb consigne les plaintes des convicts sur leur employeur (tous secteurs confondus). cette reproduction de l’archive sur écran interactif ne concerne que des femmes et l’on peut logiquement se demander si de telles protections existent pour les convicts hommes ou sont-ils à la merci de leur employeur? le parallèle entre bagnard et esclave est également perceptible sur la thématique du transport au hpb. un cartel précise les mauvais traitements opérés lors du 2e convoi organisé par une compagnie privée. le récit du voyage s’apparenterait aux transports négriers et même si l’esclavage en france est aboli en 1848 et dans certaines colonies britanniques en 1833, le blackbirding (pratique de mise en esclavage des populations du pacifique sud) pour le commerce du santal est pratiqué entre la nouvellecalédonie et l’australie. a nouméa, le mbn, après la salle assises, prévoit une reconstitution de bateau (espace 1.3 en route pour la nouvelle-calédonie qui était inexistant en 1996) mais on ne sait encore quel sera son discours. fera-t-il l’impasse sur les conditions de transport: la promiscuité, l’hygiène, le temps long, les violences à bord? de par leur condamnation, les bagnards ne peuvent être considérés comme des esclaves, mais l’interprétation des discours muséaux peut permettre le doute chez le visiteur ignorant la portée des termes. ce qualificatif a fait l’objet d’une loi mémorielle en france dite ‘taubira’ qui reconnaît l’esclavage comme un ‘crime contre l’humanité’ (loi n° 2001 – 434 du 21 mai 2001). injustement, cette loi exclut la zone pacifique. si elle devait l’intégrer, la notion ne concernerait que les kanak victimes du blackbirding et en aucun cas, les bagnards. 7 les sous-sections 1.4.5c.3 dans la présentation des sites dont thio-les contrats de chair humaine, et 5.4 les employeurs des forçats devraient en toute logique reprendre ce sujet. pascual portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 32 quelle place pour la métropole? si les colons viennent de la métropole, le personnel de l’administration pénitentiaire en garde la marque qu’il ait fait souche ou pas dans la colonie. les fonctionnaires métropolitains en nouvelle-calédonie sont affublés d’un surnom souvent à connotation péjorative : le zoreille. le maton en serait son plus lointain ancêtre. les musées exposent leur objet de contention ou leur mobilier fabriqués par les bagnards. les surveillants paraissent déshumanisés au hpb de sydney: simple silhouette noire dans un couloir contrairement aux convicts de la dernière salle en silhouette blanche avec leur fiche matriculaire complète. les surveillants présentés se révèlent sadiques mais nulle mention de leur problème d’alcool, de leur statut de ‘geôlier méprisé autant par les administrateurs que par les détenus’ (toth 2003). un ou deux noms maximum sont cités (province sud 2012a: 6) contrairement à la liste exhaustive des condamnés régulièrement affichée. précisons qu’au hpb les bagnards s’auto-surveillent. ainsi on pourrait retrouver les surveillants dans les listes de convicts mais ils ne sont pas spécifiés comme tels. seul le superintendant est un fonctionnaire. pour le nouveau mbn, une liste du personnel de l’administration pénitentiaire est prévue dans la section 2.1 mais elle reste soumise à l’approbation de familles descendantes. y aurait-il (à nouveau) opprobre sur leur mémoire ou cela risquerait-il de cliver les descendants et de contrarier le ‘destin commun’? si les petits fonctionnaires n’ont pas le beau rôle dans les musées, l’etat-métropole y est aussi représenté par ces hauts dirigeants. un trio est exposé dans les deux structures muséales. le nouveau mbn cite, dans une sous-section, trois gouverneurs français sur 18. deux d’entre eux mettent un terme à la colonisation pénale et bénéficient d’une présentation positive pour cela (guillain ‘crée le bagne,’ feillet ‘arrête les transports,’ guyon ‘liquide le bagne’). ce choix renforce le discours qui condamne la politique d’exclusion de la métropole peut-être même au détriment de l’aspect positif de la transportation : le peuplement. les calédoniens portent toujours ce sentiment de souillure face à la colonisation pénale. au hpb, ce ne sont pas les hommes qui ont implanté et fermé le bagne qui sont mis à l’honneur mais, encore une fois, les politiques d’intégration de ces hommes. on ne juge plus le bagne en tant que tel, mais bien ses effets. le hpb valorise la gestion visionnaire du gouverneur macquarie en 1819. ce dernier rassemble les convicts qui étaient en semi-liberté dans la ville, dans le bâtiment, en leur offrant logement et nourriture contre le travail exclusif pour la colonie. le taux de criminalité chute, l’intégration par l’emploi s’opère et la ville se développe autour du projet d’urbanisme du convict architecte greenway, présenté comme le produit de la régénération possible. le troisième personnage, bigge le commissioner, fait renvoyer le gouverneur et prône une politique plus répressive. la violence en héritage le hpb met en parallèle les récompenses et punitions au travers de la politique humaniste de macquarie faisant primer ‘la carotte sur le bâton.’ les punitions sont moins physiques que psychologiques (l’humiliation avec le port du costume ridicule exposé ou encore la cellule d’isolement). la grande-bretagne critique la tolérance de macquarie et durcit le règlement après son départ en 1830. au travers des procédés muséographiques, la violence est aseptisée puisqu’aucun témoignage n’apparaît. elle est aussi sous-exposée si l’on compare avec les expôts du quotidien ‘ordinaire’ comme la vaisselle, les vêtements, et couchages qui accaparent des pièces entières du musée. la muséographie définit clairement le hpb comme musée de site, cela certainement aux dépends de la compréhension globale de l’histoire des convicts. il faut aller au musée de la police et de la justice à sydney (lui aussi géré par le sydney living the penal colony museum in new caledonia and its identity constructions / le musée du bagne en nouvelle-calédonie et ses constructions identitaires portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 33 museums) pour y découvrir la liste crime and punishment.8 là, contrairement au hpb, le discours centré sur les violations de la loi et leur répression montre une société particulièrement brutale. même impression en nouvelle-calédonie, sur l’exposition temporaire corps à corps avec l ’histoire au musée de la ville de nouméa qui détaille les souffrances des condamnés. ses titres des cartels glacent le sang (corps broyé au camp brun par exemple) et contrastent avec la simple exposition de manille et poussette dans le premier mbn. le psc du nouveau mbn assume davantage cet aspect du bagne. il prévoit des objets, une reconstitution de la guillotine, un visuel d’exécution (lacourrege 1986:133) et des représentations des châtiments légaux dans l’espace 4 boulevard des châtiments. quoique cantonnée dans un espace, cette thématique trouve enfin une place, même si elle induit un statut de victime aux prisonniers. les violences entre bagnards restent peu évoquées dans les deux musées. cela contrarieraitil leur image, les renvoyant à leur passé de voyous brutaux. on les suppose avec un cartel sur la séparation des jeunes garçons des adultes au hpb (kerr 1984: 53) et dans l’espace 3, reconstitution de cases sur le boulevard du quotidien, au futur mbn. dans la case numéro 3, la phrase ‘la nuit, on ferme les portes et on ne veut pas savoir ce qui se passe dans les cases dortoir’ laisse au visiteur imaginer le pire. il faut alors lire les textes de l’exposition corps à corps avec l ’histoire du musée de la ville de nouméa, pour en réaliser les plus sombres aspects.  la sodomie est le chancre rongeur des prisons et du bagne. elle tue sans merci les condamnés, aussi bien au physique qu’au moral. elle engendre ces monstrueuses jalousies qui amènent les rixes et les coups de couteau. c’est elle qui pousse l’actif au vol pour satisfaire les caprices du passif  ; non seulement elle transforme le criminel en bête furieuse, mais elle altère encore profondément sa santé. (lacourrege 1975: 66) l’histoire du bagne est une accumulation de douleurs et de violences que les musées peinent à retranscrire. sortie du bagne, entrée dans les mémoires? les condamnés ont trois futurs : la mort, l’évasion ou la libération. puisque le musée s’adresse principalement aux citoyens, la libération sera le parcours privilégié. le documentaire les forçats du pacifique estime à 7000 le nombre de bagnards décédés pendant leur peine sur les 21 600 transportés de droit commun en nouvelle-calédonie.9 la mort est parfois plus douce que la vie pour certains condamnés. tandis qu’aucun chiffre n’est fourni au hpb sur les décès, le futur mbn réduirait cette thématique à une sous-section le bagne mouroir (7.2.2). l’évasion est une option risquée pour les bagnards puisqu’ils encourent la peine maximale et les pires châtiments s’ils se font prendre (ce que le hpb précise). s’évader ne permet qu’une pseudo-liberté : l’océan pacifique constitue leur réelle prison et leur nouvelle vie se résume à survivre dans un territoire hostile. il est difficile de savoir le taux de réussite des évasions puisque aucune publicité n’est faite (ni de l’ex-bagnard, ni de l’administration pénitentiaire qui avouerait son incompétence). la seule évasion du bagne calédonien, connue et même célèbre via le tableau de manet (1881), est celle du déporté communard henri rochefort en 1874. l’évasion fut possible grâce à l’argent et au soutien dont bénéficiait henri rochefort en france et ailleurs dans le monde. en australie, ned kelly incarne aujourd’hui le héros évadé, alors 8 salle n° 4, musée ouvert en 1991. 9 les forçats du pacifique, documentaire français de france télévision, réalisé par xavier-marie bonnott, 2012. pascual portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 34 qu’en son temps, il était craint par toute la société. il faut aller au musée de la police et de la justice de sydney pour appréhender la terreur et l’état de non-droit que faisaient régner les bushrangers, avec une salle entièrement consacrée à ces bandits de grands chemins. le terme bushranger, des convicts redevenus hors-la-loi, apparaît en 1805. 34 ont été pendus en 1822 sous l’autorité de macquarie. si ned kelly est devenu l’icône de la résistance face au système britannique, les évadés n’ont que peu de résonnance dans l’histoire calédonienne: inconnus, morts ou partis du territoire, aucune descendance ne fait office de relais dans la mémoire locale. la libération est la dernière option, le ‘happy end ’ romantique que le mbn prévoit dans ses nouvelles sections. il s’agit de la seule option génératrice de descendants. la pérennité du peuplement d’origine pénale se joue hors des murs du bagne, dans la construction d’une vie familiale, souvent après la peine. en nouvelle-calédonie, le libéré est toujours un paria et a les plus grandes difficultés à s’en sortir : le manque de femme pour fonder une famille, leurs enfants mis en orphelinat, une liberté restreinte de circulation etc.10 pour la minorité ‘privilégiée’ qui obtient une concession obtenue sur la spoliation des terres kanak, se pose le problème de cultiver une terre ingrate. ce thème rejoint les destins difficiles des petits colons libres venus chercher fortune. la section 7.1 la réhabilitation par la colonisation pénale devrait énoncer les conditions de libération. 63 pourcent des transportés ont été libérés en nouvellecalédonie mais la grande majorité a eu un avenir déplorable et certains demandent même à réintégrer le bagne pour s’assurer du gite et couvert. en australie, la réhabilitation est graduelle: le ticket of leave autorise le bagnard à travailler pour quelqu’un mais il reste soumis à un contrôle régulier. puis vient le pardon conditionnel; le sésame suprême reste le pardon absolu avec à la clé le certificat de liberté. le mot ‘pardon’ renvoie évidemment à la notion chrétienne puisque religion et état étaient toujours liés en australie. les différents systèmes sont expliqués au travers du livre de pardon qui note scrupuleusement les nouveaux ‘régénérés’ du bagne. ainsi en australie, la réhabilitation passe par des étapes aussi graduées que les classes de convicts, sorte de deuxième parcours du combattant. la quasi-totalité des convicts ne quittera jamais le continent australien et le visiteur ne sait si c’est de leur volonté ou une impossibilité faute de certificat de liberté. il manque également les proportions pour contextualiser le phénomène. comment retourner dans la métropole qui vous juge coupable, revoir ses proches que l’on a laissés dans la misère? si le hpb insiste sur la réhabilitation en australie, elle n’a pas beaucoup d’échos dans l’exmétropole … mais le musée présente surtout la colonie comme la terre de la nouvelle chance et non celle de la peine. en effet, les libérés ont une fortune égale voire supérieure aux colons libres issus de la ‘terreur sociale’ au royaume-uni. en nouvelle-calédonie, la réussite est plus difficile et la réhabilitation plus récente (lié certainement au décalage historique de la période du bagne avec l’australie). les transportés algériens ont été parmi les derniers à apparaître sur la scène muséale, en 2012, avec l’exposition caledoun. leur situation révèle une ironie : ces colonisés sont expulsés de leur terre pour devenir de futurs colons calédoniens. la revanche de l’histoire s’effectue donc avec les générations actuelles: si réhabilitation il y a, elle sera mémorielle et muséalisée. de libérés, ils deviennent véritablement pionniers dans les discours muséaux. on leur prête les qualités des colons libres (qui les ont tant méprisés), même s’ils n’ont jamais été volontaires pour cette ‘aventure’! qu’ils participent après leur condamnation, à la ruée vers l’or en australie, aux 10 exil à vie pour les condamnations supérieures à 8 ans de bagne. pour ceux qui ont le droit de rentrer en métropole, il leur faudra financer leur retour. cette barrière économique sonne comme une nouvelle sentence. the penal colony museum in new caledonia and its identity constructions / le musée du bagne en nouvelle-calédonie et ses constructions identitaires portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 35 travaux des champs en nouvelle-calédonie, ou développent un commerce, ils entrent dans le mythe national. le devoir de mémoire : assumer sa ‘peine’ l’australie et la nouvelle-calédonie sont deux terres de violence, deux terres de non-dits. les mots génocide pour l’australie ou invasion pour la nouvelle-calédonie ont peine à faire surface. dans ces deux territoires, on ne parle pas de guerre avec les autochtones mais bien de conflits, révoltes ou d’évènements, et on a longtemps tu l’histoire du bagne. pourquoi ce réveil des mémoires du bagne alors que des générations ont revendiqué ce droit à l’oubli en nouvellecalédonie?11 les revendications kanak indépendantistes s’intensifient dans les années 70 et la violence jalonne ce combat dans les années 80. les accords de matignon et nouméa (1988–1998) concrétisent le processus de décolonisation, faire face à ses ‘ombres’ du passé souvent juxtaposées: celui des réserves kanak et de la politique indigène, celui du bagne et de la colonisation libre. mais ce sont bien les revendications kanak qui ont permis l’affirmation de l’histoire pénitentiaire. face à un peuple premier qui fonde sa légitimité sur sa primauté, les blancs ont dû prouver leur attachement au pays notamment par leur ‘ancestralité.’ cette ancestralité donne lieu à une citoyenneté.12 après la révision constitutionnelle du 24 février 2007, l’article 77 restreint le corps électoral calédonien pour le référendum sur l’avenir du territoire prévu entre 2014 et 2018. bien plus qu’un simple site historique, le mbn est en quelque sorte un premier musée des ‘citoyens’ calédoniens blancs et un outil politique fort. dans les mémoires, c’est une concurrence de douleurs qui s’affrontent: la spoliation des terres et la perte de l’identité kanak versus l’exil forcé et la peine endurée pour apprivoiser cette terre. la politique patrimoniale a pris le relais en nouvelle-calédonie face à l’argument irréfutable des 3600 ans de présence kanak. la province sud, sous gouvernance loyaliste et représentant une population majoritairement blanche, classe les bâtiments coloniaux du bagne depuis 1973 et marque ainsi le territoire de son empreinte architecturale.13 ce patrimoine est avant tout destiné aux locaux. l’australie n’a pas la même histoire, ni les mêmes enjeux (pour exemple: la population aborigène est réduite à 2.5 pourcent de la population nationale en 2006), pourtant, les lieux muséalisés du bagne n’en fleurissent pas moins.14 ainsi 11 sites du bagne, symbole de la colonisation pénale, de politiques répressives, aucunement joyau artistique ou traditionnel, sont inscrits au patrimoine mondial de l’unesco depuis 2010. les sites de la transportation australienne relèvent surtout de l’histoire nationale (ce que ré-assène le hpb). comme en nouvelle-calédonie, ce passé n’a pas toujours été assumé mais il est aujourd’hui une fierté revendiquée. en australie, le hpb mentionne sur un cartel l’évolution des mentalités sur ce site devenu patrimoine: ‘an eyesore & a disgrace’ (1937), ‘nothing worthy of remembrance’ (1946), ‘just a barn’ (1968), ‘parthenon of australia’ (1980), ‘icon of australian identity’ (1990). ainsi depuis la première proposition de musée en 1935, les adjectifs sont négatifs jusqu’au fameux tournant des années 70. les musées (et les politiques patrimoniales) témoignent de ces changements de mentalités. 11 le mbn présente ce chemin mémoriel et historiographique dans section 7.3 l’effacement du bagne (et précise en 7.3.2 hier l’oubli, aujourd’hui devoir de mémoire) et 7.4 les ouvreurs des mémoires. 12 accord de nouméa, préambule, 1998, paragraphe 4 et article 188 de la loi organique. 13 arrêté n°73–103 du 19/2/1973. ce classement en 1973 englobe aussi les pétroglyphes kanak. 14 http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4705.0 pascual portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 36 conclusion le cas des bagnards est singulier: coupables d’un crime au 18e et 19e siècles, victimes d’un système selon les mémoires du 20e. des pulsions contraires influent sur la mémoire : il est certain que les coupables tout comme les victimes, n’oublient pas, mais tandis que les premiers espèrent qu’on les oublie – ce qui reviendrait à les acquitter – les seconds veulent au contraire que tout le monde sache, que l’on garde en mémoire la faute commise, sa violence et son injustice. ils s’en font un devoir. l’usure temporelle n’est donc pas toute puissante, et ce n’est pas tant le temps que l’inaction humaine qui mène à l’oubli. (sauvage 2005: 42) les musées de période historique sont majoritairement des musées de violences (guerre, génocide, colonisation, bagne). le musée servirait alors d’exutoire à une histoire douloureuse, serait une thérapie sociétale qui passe parfois par le mensonge, l’omission, le déni, l’acceptation et aussi le pardon. mais comment faire d’une histoire traumatisante un lieu attractif, un musée? comment parler de cette violence à un jeune public? comment censurer alors que la violence est médiatisée? comment autour de ce patrimoine construire une nation et faire reconnaître ce patrimoine à l’échelon mondial? autant de défis que les musées tentent de relever. ce que tout historien redoute dans l’effet de mémoire est ce schéma de reconstruction politisée. les lois mémorielles, sensées apaiser l’histoire et donc le présent, prônent une justice hors du temps. pour mieux assumer ce passé, le musée use des mêmes atours que les lois mémorielles, il ‘victimise’ (fassin & rechtman 2001: 38), ‘anachronise’ et paradoxalement ‘exacerbe,’ ‘banalise’ ou ‘tait’ certaines violences. pour mieux construire le ‘vivre ensemble’ (sauvage 2005: 30) alors que chacun vient d’horizons, d’histoires, de temps différents, on met entre autre la violence, la douleur en commun qu’elle ait été forte, lente, longue, courte, proche ou lointaine, injuste ou pas, subie ou donnée. la colonisation et le bagne n’ont créé que des déracinés-reracinés involontaires. peut-on dès lors parler de ‘traumatisme culturel’ (eyerman 2001: 2) ou de ‘traumatisme historique’ (fassin & rechtman 2001: 30)? les musées surfent principalement sur une mémoire communautaire et nationaliste, oubliant parfois que la petite histoire n’est rien sans la grande, que la mise en contexte est fondamentale. présenté dans les musées, le bagne devient l’édification d’une société, la richesse d’un pays, la rédemption d’individus, l’histoire de la périphérie des empires coloniaux et non plus de leur métropole. ainsi les musées liés au bagne ont la lourde tâche de présenter l’identité des blancs tant bagnards qu’administratifs sans omettre leur relation avec les autres communautés. sinon les bagnards seraient condamnés cette fois-ci à une prison mémorielle. en nouvelle-calédonie, la mémoire du bagne est une mémoire édifiée en opposition à la mémoire kanak mais aussi sur fond de construction du pays et notamment de la citoyenneté. tout comme en australie on cherche à préserver cette racine transportée. ces musées font le pari que la mixité sociale confère à tous les australiens ou calédoniens un aïeul colon pénal.15 dans la négative, ils conforteraient une division communautaire et seraient source de rejet. audelà de l’ascendance et du site, c’est bien l’histoire globale de son pays qu’il faut intégrer. ne pas voir le bagnard comme une ‘appellation d ’origine contrôlée généalogique’ mais voir en lui un élément majeur de sociétés faites jusqu’à ce jour, de flux migratoires et de mixité. 15 un australien sur dix aurait selon le hpb un ancêtre ‘convict.’ le ‘happy end’ clôt le mbn sur ‘le banquet à la cousinade.’ the penal colony museum in new caledonia and its identity constructions / le musée du bagne en nouvelle-calédonie et ses constructions identitaires portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 37 bibliographie bogle, m. 2008, convicts: transportation and australia. historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney. bonnot, x.-m. 2012, les forçats du pacifique [convicts of the pacific], documentaire français de france télévision. eyerman, r. 2001, cultural trauma, slavery and the formation of african american identity. cambridge university press, cambridge. fassin, d. & rechtman, r. 2001, l’empire du traumatisme: enquête sur la condition de victim [the empire of trauma: an enquiry into the state of victims]. flammarion, roubaix. hamish, m.-s. & anderson, c. 2013, ‘convict labour and the western empires, 1415–1954,’ in the routledge history of western 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la nouvelle-calédonie 1853–1920 [colonial experiences: new caledonia 1853–1920]. belin, paris. molesworth, w. 1838, report from the select committee of the house of commons on transportation. henri hooper, londres. peterson, j. 2006, hyde park barracks museum guide book. historic houses trust, sydney. ‘la politique des mémoires en france’ [the politics of memory in france] 2006, controverses, no. 2, juin. ‘professor charles forsdick launches a research project on “dark tourism.”’ 2006, languages at liverpool: modern languages and cultures’ blog, august 12. online, available: https://soclas.wordpress. com/2016/08/12/professor-charles-forsdick-launches-a-research-project-on-dark-tourism/ [accessed 30 november 2016]. province sud 2012a, descriptif du parcours muséographique pour la boulangerie de nouville [description of the museographic record for the bakery of nouville]. archives direction de la culture, nouméa, la nouvelle-calédonie. province sud 2012b, projet scientifique et culturel du musée du bagne (psc) [the scientific and cultural project of the bagne museum]. archives direction de la culture, nouméa, la nouvelle-calédonie. reynolds, h. 2000, black pioneers. allen & unwin, sydney. pascual portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 38 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315879499.ch7 https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/sites/default/files/2010-feb-hpbm-management-plan.pdf https://soclas.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/professor-charles-forsdick-launches-a-research-project-on-dark-tourism/ https://soclas.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/professor-charles-forsdick-launches-a-research-project-on-dark-tourism/ sauvage, a. 2005, idée de réconciliation et héritage colonial en australie 1991–2001 [the idea of reconciliation and colonial heritage in australia 1991–2001]. anrt diffusion thèse à la carte, lille. shineberg, d. 1967, they came for sandalwood: a study of the sandalwood trade in the south-west pacific, 1830–1865. melbourne university press, melbourne. terrier, c. 1994, etre caldoche aujourd ’hui [being caldoche today]. edition ile de lumière, nouméa. toth, s. 2003, ‘the lords of discipline: the penal colony guards of new caledonia and guyana,’ crime, histoire & société, vol. 7, no. 2: 41–60. https://doi.org/10.4000/chs.544 welch, m. 2015, escape to prison: penal tourism and the pull of punishment. university of california press, berkeley. the penal colony museum in new caledonia and its identity constructions / le musée du bagne en nouvelle-calédonie et ses constructions identitaires portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 39 https://doi.org/10.4000/chs.544 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: ian campbell 2019. puisi selatan. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 16:1/2, 143-152. https://doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v15i1-2.5843 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au cultural works puisi selatan ian campbell corresponding author: mr ian campbell, honorary research associate, department of international studies: languages and cultures, macquarie university, nsw 2109 australia. email: ialuca@iinet.net.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5843 article history: received 21/02/2019; revised 21/02/2019; accepted 08/04/2019;published 13/11/2019 abstract puisi selatan is a small selection of sydney-based poet ian campbell’s indonesian language poems taken from the author’s larger collection titled selatan-sur-south of indonesian language poems—which appeared in portal in 2008 (vol. 5, no. 1)—but now supplemented, for the first time, with english language versions that have been rendered by the poet himself from the ‘starting point’ of these original four indonesian language poems. in all there are here now eight poems—four in indonesian and four in english—with the common thread, for the poet, of being written ‘in the south.’ for the poet also, they now interact across languages as a set of poems that consider the ways in which the actions of ‘memorialising’ are often intertwined with specific responses to the natural environment. the poems ‘semenanjung bilgola’ and ‘bilgola headland’ reflect upon the efforts the poet’s parents made in the late 1960s and early 1970s to restore the natural environment on a headland of one of sydney’s northern beaches, which had been donated to the national trust. the indonesian language original poem was read by the poet himself and by indonesian poets in cities in west java in 2004 and also at the first ubud writers festival in 2004 by indonesian female poet, toeti heraty. the poems ‘berziarah di punta de lobos, chile’ and ‘pilgrimage to punta de lobos’ are also memorialising poems and reflect upon the idea of ‘pilgimage’ to a natural location near pichilemu on the chilean coast that is popular with surfers. in contrast, the poems ‘simfoni angin’ and ‘symphony of the winds’ describe the sights and sounds of a rural area near purranque in the south of chile, but here too the poet reflects upon the ways in which present evokes past. the final poems ‘buenos aires’—rendered as the title in both languages—explore the ways in which the argentinian café becomes a place in which memories of the city are declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 143 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5843 https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5843 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:ialuca@iinet.net.au https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5843 revealed anew through the processes of inversion of light and shadow, of internal and external shapes and sounds, as if through a camera lens. puisi selatan can be rendered in english as ‘poetry of the south’ as all poems derive their impetus from settings in australia or in latin america, specifically either chile or argentina. they were originally written in indonesian as part of the poet’s interest in using bahasa indonesia as a language of creative writing. keywords: ian campbell; puisi selatan semenanjung bilgola errichtet keinen denkstein. lasst die rose nur jedes jahr zu seinen gunsten blühn. (rilke) tiada batu nisan untuk memperingatinya. malahan barangkali kalau mawar berbunga tiap tahun, inilah tanda. (rilke) bangkit di sini bentuk benua kanguru dari tengah-tengah samudera. benua berkerikil yang tertua, semenanjung lembah batu, daratan garis utara pesisir sydney, antara jurang dan langit, arus angin memukul di sebelah lereng semenanjung ini yang mengorbankan diri terhadap perairan abu-abu. pada saat matahari bersinar cahayanya dan cuaca tenang, di bawah belukar bermain-main dan terbang burung kecil-kecil. mengisap madu dari bunga banksia kuning dan grevillea, yang rupanya seperti laba-laba lemah-lembut. orangtuaku percaya, seperti thoreau, kalau semua kota metropolis, kota metro apa pun, berlangsung bernapas, meneruskan berjiwa, seharusnya melindungi tanah sedikit dalam keadaan lingkungan alam asli. pada tiap akhir minggu mereka tolong-menolong berusaha melestarikan tanah di atas tanjung bilgola. sesudah ibuku wafat ayah menyebarkan campbell portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019144 abu istrinya ke tanah ini. tiada batu nisan, atau tumpukan tanah kuburan. hanya bahwa abu ibu yang diserahkan ke alam, pohon, dan belukar. ayahku meneruskan tugas sepi, membangun bangku sederhana dan tangga kayu, supaya rakyat biasa bisa menikmati alam tanah ini. banyak tahun sudah lewat. abu berkaitan dengan abu. entahlah kalau tugas suci dan penuh kemesraan ayah yang pendiam memastikan angkatan yang menyusul menjaga alam tanah ini. saya masih berpikir akan dia, pada saat waktu senja, bangku kayu hampir selesai, di atas tanah semenanjung bilgola batu, yang mengorbankan diri pada kedatangan arus angin dari samudera ini. (sydney, september 2002) bilgola headland errichtet keinen denkstein. lasst die rose nur jedes jahr zu seinen gunsten blühn. (rilke) set up no tombstone. perhaps if the rose blooms into flower each year, this can be the sign of remembrance. (rilke) in this place the kangaroo continent rises up from the ocean; northern sydney coastline, headland of sandstone clawing upwards, cleft between ravine and sky, where the wind beats against the tawny cliff face that offers itself in sacrifice to the grey waters below. if you are here when the sun shines high, and its rays burst through, when the weather is clear and still, below the shrubs small birds fly with playful wing, sucking honey from the yellow banksias and grevillea shaped like gentle spiders. my parents spent many a week’s end restoring that land. each thought, as thoreau, that if the great cities were to be able to breathe, to thrive, have a soul, some land needs to be conserved, in natural state. puisi selatan portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019145 mother had died, and father spread her ashes upon this land. no tombstone marks the place, or gravesite, only ashes given over to this place, its shrubs and low-rising trees. father continued in his task, built a simple bench, upon that land so ordinary people could rest awhile the years have come and gone, ash is now mixed with ash. sun going down, i think of him, bench of wood almost built, high upon bilgola’s stony headland, each day it sacrifices its being to the vastness of the currents and the coming of the winds. berziarah di punta de lobos, chili satu demi satu seorang surfer yang berziarah dewi lautan naik dengan merangkak, seperti kepiting sekeliling batu-batu hitam diliputi buih ombak-ombak. yang di atas kalbu dan belakang badannya, papan luncur sendiri yang mirip sayap-sayap serangga segera dipersiapkan terbang. sampai capai ke genangan tenang pemukaan air dari lautnya dijaga dari kekuasaan ombak-ombak memecah di sebelah depan pulau batu-batu ini. satu demi satu serangga ini melangkah masuk ke lubang celah di batu-batu hitam dipukul buih. tiba-tiba muncul dari batu-batu. menaiki ombak dengan papan luncur, ombak diukir gelombang-gelombang menggosokkan batu-batu di lautan. saya berdiri jauh ke atas sandiwara ini di atas semenanjung ditempatkan sebuah palang putih beton yang sudah diukir oleh si manusia, sekarang dilestarikan campbell portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019146 dengan cat putih palang ini, dua orang laki-laki dari guatemala: ‘dia ipar laki-laki saya.’ dua puluh tahun yang lalu remaja ini, umurnya empat belas tahun tenggelam badannya di batu-batu hitam ini jauh ke bawah. ayahnya dari amerika utara, ibunya dari selatannya. tak bisa mengucapkan kata-kata lain pun. hanya kata saya: “buen trabajo” (sudah patut, ya). tiap sikat buih cat putih mirip jiwa remaja ini. yang akan hidup seribu tahun. dunia yang fana. saat–saat buih gemilang luncur. sekali lagi, seorang surfer muncul dari lubang batu-batu hitam abadi ini. dengan sayap papan serangganya. yang fana menjelma abadi, berziarah di atas punta keadaan. (punta de lobos, pichilemu, chili, 2006) pilgrimage to punta de lobos one by one, the pilgrim surfers climb, like crabs upon the rocks, boards held, winged insects set to fly. they reach the pool of innocence between black rock sentinels, clambering with webbed feet, they disappear into the cleft between sheeted rocks. until they emerge in a rush, caught at speed a giant swell enfolds them and ejects them into the light. high above, on windy slopes others come with paint and cold memory to restore and tend a cement cross affixed on the ridge: puisi selatan portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019147 ‘era mi cuñado’— he was my brother-in-law, mother from guatemala, father from north america, four and twenty years past, in the black cleft, slit apart by the foaming anger of the sea. each brush-stroke of that white paint calls to mind the soul of that young one. let live for a thousand years. the foam erupts again, once more a surfer emerges from the cleft of the eternal darkness, with fragile insect wings, a pilgrimage to the point of existence, punta de lobos. yang fana menjelma abadi, berziarah di atas punta keadaan – can what is transitory become eternal at this point of pilgrimage? simfoni angin siang ini tersebar simfoni angin bersentuhan tiap-tiap pohon. yang melalui pohon-pohon cemara, dengan kerucut-kerucutnya bulat, nadanya dan ribut-ributnya menyerupai sekawan lebah. yang berlalu alamo yang tua, angin lemah-lembut sentuhan daun-daun halus mengosok-gosokkan daun-daun ini, menjelma desas-desus emas. yang memukuli terhadap penahan eucalyptus musik stravinsky yang desir dan desau selama penahan menangkap sebagian angin dari utara. campbell portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019148 angin dari selatan, datanglah angin sepoi-sepoi dari lautan, datanglah. kadang-kadang angin siang menemukan pohon-pohon buah tua, sisa-sisa saja yang tetap dari kebun sebuah rumah yang rusak, dari generasi tanpa keturunan. dipotong si pemiliknya, hanya tetap benih, menjelma prem dan ceri liar, yang berbunga. tak ada wali yang menjaga selama kesuburan. angin, cobalah lagi mencari mahkluk-makluk ini, yang menanami pohon. ternyata sia-sia angin mencari di tiap ujung dan celah bumi manusia ini. tapi angin masih berkuasa. selalu akan. saya akan kembali ke tempat ini. (purranque, chili, desember 2006) symphony of the winds in the afternoon what is abroad as i walk is a symphony of the winds, embracing the sturdy cypress, with its rounded cones of fir, resonating with the humming of bees, their tiny bassoon wings, mellowed by the light. when the winds court the old alamo tree there is gentle play upon hallowed leaves, which the wind caresses, and spins around in busy rumours of gold but if the wind beats against the eucalyptus trees, the entire line becomes a rite of spring, as north wind and south wind contend in atonal strife. puisi selatan portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019149 on this afternoon the wind and i encounter old fruit trees— all that remains in a deserted yard of a once-lively homestead. whomever the owner was is now long gone, cut down in the passing of time. yet even abandoned, flourishes still the old cherry tree and its mate, the wild plum, to flower untended and unguarded, as the seasons progress. come winds, find again all the spirits of the past whose traces linger and whose labour flourishes long after death. the winds search and search again every nook and every cranny of this earth of humankind, the winds are at work, they always are, until they find again other spirits of this land. and perhaps too i will come back to this place —like the winds? buenos aires muram cahaya, lampu-lampu di dalam salon ‘la perla’ (mutiara), berkurang cahayanya, tetapi cahaya paling jernih hanya bersinar melalui pintu terbuka salon; di atasnya ada lengkungan, di bingkai yang dipasang untuk saat sekejap saja manusia yang lewat di luar: terlihat seorang pemadam api sukarela, si pencopet, agen polisi yang menyusulnya, turis asing atau domestik, seorang penjual es, satu, atau barangkali dua bekas presiden yang pakai sandal dan kacamata hitam. saya asingkan diri dan mundur, dari dunia ini, hanya melemparkan pandangan lewat pasang pintu salon, dari nuansa ruang kayu berwarna kecokelat-cokelatan. campbell portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019150 di belakang saya dalam ruang muram ini ada foto-foto apa dan siapa -yang sudah pernah berkunjung ke salon dengan ukiran kayu berwarnanya ini selama masa lima puluh tahun: carlos gardel penyanyi tango, bill clinton dan saxofonnya, martin palermo, juara sepak bola tim terkenal ‘la boca’. di kemuraman ruang salon ini manusia ini mendapat nama dan peristiwa, yang dicatat, diidentifikasikan, direkam di dalam kegelapan saja. tiap ingatan digosok-gosok sekali lagi, dilestarikan ngengat untuk api abadi, untuk semua yang berziarah ke tempat ini. luar ruang ini, apa dan siapa tak diakui. saya keluar ke dalam kejernihan ini, mendapat sorotan manusia tanpa nama; tidak ditinggalkan apa pun di dalam kegelapan ini. dari kegelapan sampai kejernihan, dari kegelapan ke dalam cahaya gemilang. nurani, cahaya matahari, nuriah tetapi selalu di sini, tanpa nama. (buenos aires, argentina, desember 2006) buenos aires rays of light in the darkness, bulbs within their lampshades in la perla obscure in the dimness of the far corner of the salón whilst the unnerving clarity of the streaming ray shines through the doorway, where the arched supports frame momentarily movement beyond… the aperture exposes for a second or two a fireman, perhaps a pickpocket, maybe a policeman following, a foreign visitor, someone selling souvenirs, someone wearing dark glasses. puisi selatan portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019151 behind me, in this amber world of ageing wood grain photographs fade and curl, but have captured the silver traces of those who came before and left their names, carlos gardel, bill clinton and his saxophone, martin palermo, football star. in the glow of this room images come alive again, in the penumbra of half-light, and every glance at them renews the memory of a city and its past. i leave through the slender door shutters and emerge into the light, into the clear and bright light beneath the dazzling sun, where the passing throng bear no names, and the sun beats down upon those of whom no trace remains. campbell portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019152 aaig survey essay no 2 galley final portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. afro-americanophilia in germany special issue, guest edited by moritz ege and andrew wright hurley. © 2015 [moritz ege and andrew wright hurley]. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i2.4360 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal. periodizing and historicizing german afro-americanophilia: from counterculture to post-soul (1968–2005) moritz ege, university of munich andrew wright hurley, university of technology sydney this essay continues our thinking through of the implications of scholarship on what we have called ‘afro-americanophilia’ in twentieth century germany. we set out our reasons for using this term in the introduction to this special edition; however it is worth stressing again here that the term is intended to designate the african-americancentredness of german interest in black culture, as opposed to the more generically ‘african’ that negrophilia connotes, a term which is also often linked with a very specific phase in european culture, the 1920s.1 especially in the wake of technologies like the jukebox, radio, film and television, and after defeat and allied occupation in wwii, there has been a distinct german engagement with african american culture(s).2 our term includes a deliberate juxtaposition (black power prefix; greek suffix), which is intended to prompt attention to the tensions and ambiguities running through the ‘love.’ it is important to conceive of the complexity and implications of this love. in the 1 as in our previous joint essay, the culturally constructed yet crucial categories ‘black’ and ‘white’ will not be put in quotation marks or begin with a capital letter on the following pages (unless there is a context of identity politics and emphatic cultural pride among protagonists), but they should nonetheless be read as highly debated, unstable signifiers (with real-world references and effects in experiences, identities and politics), not as ‘neutral’, sociological denominations. 2 there are, of course, counterexamples, including the prominent novelist and ethnographer hubert fichte (1935–1986) whose works on african diasporic cultures and gay/queer sexuality spans the black atlantic, and the africanist janheinz jahn (1918–1973) who, a few decades earlier, wrote on numerous african but sometimes also african american literatures, and collaborated with léopold sédar senghor. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 2 hands of a white majority, afro-americanophilia might be personally and culturally enabling, but it can also involve racist projections, and can impose restrictive expectations on the people it supposedly loves. as we noted in our first survey essay and the introduction to the special issue, our objective here is to sketch out phases or eras in the german uptake of ‘black cultural traffic,’ based largely on recent literature, in order to obtain an overview of salient themes, distinctions, and political dynamics. we mean not to whitewash acts of afroamericanophilia, but neither to dismiss them out of hand. rather we intend to enquire into the breadth, patterns and political implications and effects of specific instantiations of the afro-americanophilia theme. while this is again often a story of white german afro-americanophilia, the larger narratives also involves afro-americanophilia amongst afro-germans and germans ‘with a background in migration.’ having followed a timeframe from imperial germany through to the postwar in our first survey essay, here we begin with the turning point of the late 1960s, encapsulated by the emblematic year, 1968, when german afro-americanophilia modulated and intensified, and we follow that forward to a point approaching the present day. in the process, we contemplate the rise of interest in the black diaspora amongst the new social movements, second-wave feminism, and afro-german activism in the 1980s. we also attend to important moments in the german reception and recontextualization of african-american coded popular music such as disco, techno and hip-hop, following some of the resonances evident in music journalism, literary writing and academia. this is not to deny that similar (or divergent) patterns may have existed in relation to ernste musik [‘serious’ or ‘high’ culture music], advertising, visual culture, film and literature. however, we have had to set some limits—complexity seems to increase in contemporary history—and we have thus focused most on the realms of popular music that are best known to us, and comparatively well covered in scholarly and/or popular literature. this essay also includes a discussion of the impact of migration, and the breakdown of previously unquestioned equivalences between germanness and whiteness. in that context, we will point to the complex triangulation of desire that figured within the reception and appropriation of us rap music and hip-hop by diverse groups of young people in germany in the context of cultural globalization. overall, we argue that, in some respects, the contours of afro-americanophilia shifted ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 3 considerably—the subject positions diversified and, especially in the course of the 1980s, new dynamics emerged that seemed to leave behind the ideas of racial ‘authenticity’ that had dominated german afro-americanophilia for a long time (and continue to do so in some of contemporary versions). our final objective for this essay is to return to the question of periodization that we raised in the introduction to this special edition, so as to query what a timeframe-based overview can and cannot address; most importantly the question of structural continuities in patterns of twentiethcentury afro-americanophilia in germany. we will plumb some of those continuities, and offer some conclusions on the usefulness of a periodization, notwithstanding. 1968–1975: counterculture, post-counterculture and the consequences of immigration in an essay on ‘1968,’ british cultural critic kobena mercer (1992) illuminates the global cultural role of the black power movement, and suggests that in the englishspeaking world ‘becoming black’ was a collective white countercultural fantasy at this time. such a pattern of fantasies also existed in germany, and in some respects it marked a clear break in regard to earlier types of german afro-americanophilia. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, german understandings of blackness were constituted by a peculiar confluence of radical politics, sexual emancipation, and popular culture. in some prominent cases, the pre-existing, primitivistic semiotic pattern of mutual exclusivity or complementarity between white-german and black was supplemented by a new pattern of imaginary equivalence and calls for solidarity, as moritz ege identifies in his article in this special edition in greater detail. other new factors were important. the volume of german-language writing about african americans and black diasporic culture—literature, politics and, to some extent, race and racism—increased markedly, as young (white) scholars began to specialize in african american studies, and german presses published translations of key works on black diasporic populations in the usa, haiti, jamaica and brazil.3 in such writing, academic research and contemporary cultural currents were closely intertwined. 3 most of these scholars wrote within the 1968 context, however others approached the topic from different historiographical traditions. for example, the (then) social-democratic historian immanuel geiss wrote books at this time on pan-africanism (1968) and african american history (1969). for bibliographies see: ege (2007), höhn and klimke (2010, boesenberg (2011), gerund (2013). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 4 the new politics of affinity and solidarity, which spanned different sociocultural fields between politics, literature and music, again diverged in the two german states. in the west, solidarity with the black power movement and its struggle against the us ‘power structure’ was, like the larger-scale anti-vietnam war movement, a form of protest against the west german government’s close ally. in the east, the government of the german democratic republic (gdr) did not embrace the black power movement as such; however its citizens were encouraged to protest against the usa in prescribed ways. officially sanctioned protest was therefore directed against the usa’s treatment of some spokespeople of the black power movement, such as the philosopher and activist angela davis.4 this context made solidarity with the black power movement less attractive to some oppositionally minded east germans. afro-americanophilia was not the only genre of racially inflected ‘-philia’ during the sixties. in comparison with the more superficial ‘exotica’ fad of the 1950s, large numbers of individuals now appropriated cultural materials and practices from abroad–– literature, furniture, clothing, food or music––more consciously, and attempted to integrate those products, signifiers, movements and affects into reformed ways of life, which they often understood in expressly political terms.5 the continuing role of particular racial imaginations and colonial histories in this new 1960s context is not well illuminated. but we can provisionally suggest that there was a tendency of wanting to supplement the 1950s novelty exoticism we outlined in our first survey essay (which self-described progressives or alternative [alternatives] considered unsophisticated, consumerist and provincially german) with more earnest and wide-reaching forms of appropriation. appropriation was not so much about momentary bereicherung (enrichment) through consumption, but implied a transformation of the self—at least, 4 after the marin county courthouse shooting davis was listed on the fbi’s most wanted list, leading to her arrest in 1970. davis, who had studied in frankfurt am main (west germany) and was a cpusa member, became a household name in germany. in the gdr, thousands of middle school children were encouraged to write postcards to davis in prison. in the frg, the new left rallied to her support, culminating in the conference ‘am beispiel angela davis’ [with angela davis as an example], organized by frankfurt school scholar oskar negt, in 1972. after her release in 1972, east german state officials sought to share the stage with her on more than one occasion, most famously at the weltfestspiele der jugend [world festival of youth] in east berlin in 1973 (höhn & klimke 2010, ch. 7; gerund 2013). 5 in this context, one could try to discern specific german groups by their particular geographic and cultural orientations and their practices of longing and appropriation. there were those who oriented themselves, more or less pragmatically, towards italy, france, spain, denmark, sweden, greece, great britain, the usa generally, india, palestine, israel, south america, morocco, or, in a different way, to china, as in the ‘chinoiserie’ of post–1968 maoist groups. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 5 this is how many people understood their own actions. cultural commentators–– pessimists and optimists alike––regarded such patterns as a flight from historically tainted germanness. this interpretation is plausible, overall, but the fact that similar processes were going on all over the world complicates the picture.6 afroamericanophilia was one of many –philias, then, but it was distinct in a number of ways, particularly by virtue of its focus on the usa; that is, its allegiance with the ‘other’ side of the dominant western world power, its strong articulation with popular culture, and its positioning in relation to the long-standing tradition of anti-black racism.7 these sociocultural processes are crucial for understanding the mindset of many members of a generation that later was to dominate (west) german culture and, in the late 1990s, politics through the green party and self-described progressive social democrats. they must, however, also be understood in terms of their interdependence with (and disconnect from) the large-scale labour migration that began in the 1960s. labour migrants came to west germany from southern europe (italy, spain, portugal greece and turkey) and also, to a smaller extent, from tunisia and morocco in north africa. small numbers also came from south korea. although the government put a stop to active recruitment in 1973, this did not halt actual migration, especially from turkey, as family members followed their relatives who had come earlier. immigration significantly and permanently changed the make-up of the country as well as the meanings of what germanness may mean. in this context, there were new and rewarmed discourses about difference and alterity (fremdheit), and such discourses touched on the african american world in various significant ways. for example, when referring to recent immigrants’ living and working conditions the west german press used expressions like die neger europas (europe’s negroes) and even ‘n-----s.’ within the german contemporary imagination, the racial situation of the usa supplied the paradigm of diversity and exploitation in ethnically heterogeneous societies. however, these were problematic discursive framings and analogies, not least because few of the immigrants were actually racially marked as black. the political scientist and historian karin schönwälder (2001, 2004) has demonstrated that west german policy 6 on the relationship of anglophone hippies to native americans, for instance, see stuart hall’s contemporary analysis (1968). for an analysis of the long-standing german fascination with native americans, see penny (2013). 7 on the latter, see moritz ege’s article in this special issue discussing the distinct yet sometimes overlapping countercultural and popular modes of relation and appropriation. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 6 makers strove that migrants would be (white) ‘european’ rather than african or asian, and the state put non-europeans under greater pressure to leave the country after their work contracts expired.8 there was an obvious, though not surprising contradiction between this ongoing structural exclusion of people of colour and the afroamericanophilia displayed in cultural quarters. however, despite restrictive labour migration policies, there were still more black people in germany than there had been in the 1950s, and not just within us army garrisons.9 afro-germans born shortly after the war came of age. a small number, like the soccer player erwin kostedde and the actor günther kaufmann, rose to fame in the late 1960s (kostedde & schmitz 2001; majer o’sickey 2001; kaufmann 2004; nagl & blankenship 2012). some african american soldiers stayed on, as did a few touring artists and other travelers, as well as students, migrants, and refugees from a number of african countries. a black german population was slowly growing––small in comparison to the population of southern european immigrants––however it could hardly be called a group or community in the sociological sense, as there appears to have been little group consciousness, institutions, or interpretive resources that enabled cohesion, and there were still no prominent black german spokespeople. on the contrary, many individuals seem to have felt the absence of community and a strong sense of isolation. this is not to say that these individuals were without agency when confronted by racism, including unwanted afroamericanophilia in their social milieu.10 on the experience of black germans at the time, there are pertinent observations in various collections and essays, and further historical work is in progress (oguntoye et al. 1986; wright 2004; partridge 2012; on afro-german autobiographic narratives, see lauré al-samarai 2004). 1975–1989: alternative post-counterculture and feminist afro-americanophilia between the fading-out of the student rebellion in the mid–1970s and reunification in 1989, cultural flows, appropriations and feedbacks become both more diffuse and complex. musical culture and subcultural life worlds still formed dominant arenas of white afro-americanophilia, but the literary realm and left-wing, feminist and antiracist politics were also crucial. however, it becomes harder to pin down an overall 8 the argument was made without explicit reference to racial categories. instead, policy makers and bureaucrats referred to non-european ‘culture’ and potential problems of ‘integration,’ thus foreshadowing the turn toward a ‘racism without races’ to use etienne balibar’s (1991) resonant term. 9 precise numbers are hard to come by as race was a taboo subject for surveys. 10 this could also include leaving the country. on such ‘imperceptible politics’ from a theoretical angle, see papadopoulos, stephenson and tsianos (2008). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 7 cultural theme during this (‘postmodern’) period, at a time when signs, genres and milieus were diversifying, hopes for radical emancipation were being disappointed (or ended via repression), new subject positions and identity politics struggled for recognition, and conservatives were elected to government, both in the usa and in germany. at the same time, it is important to keep in mind some basics of social history at the time: living standards continued to improve for large numbers of people in both countries, which allowed them more power to consume, and increasingly niche sensibilities. in the usa, the black middle class grew substantially, mostly outside of inner city areas, but poverty simultaneously took root, as inner city areas rapidly decayed and deindustrialization and drugs plagued poor communities, especially african american ones. in germany, the left-wing alternative culture and the so-called new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s like feminism, the anti-nato peace movement, third world solidarity groups and the environmental movement, formed an important socio-political milieu that in many ways grew out of the radicalism of the late 1960s (reichardt & siegfried 2010; reichardt 2014; and, in relation to switzerland, kuhn 2011). here, the african american world was not the central point of reference when it came to ‘foreign’ places of longing—india, south america, and native americans may have been more significant—but it was important (ege 2010; penny 2013). while white germans formed the great majority within these scenes, participants came from various backgrounds. these milieus contained diverse left-wing migrants (greeks, italians, turks, kurdish turks, iranians and others), who possessed different political orientations. the milieus also included a few african-american us army deserters and black panther sympathizers, albeit in small numbers (bojadzijev & perinelli 2010: 144). if ways of life in germany were partly liberalized and democratized at this time, as cultural historians like detlef siegfried (2006) argue, then it was partly the doing of these diverse milieux as well, and it did not happen without resistance.11 nonetheless, white-germanness and its ‘interior’ libidinal economies remained dominant within the new social movements, as the example of second-wave feminism 11 bojadzijev and perinelli (2010) reminds us that even within the german context, cultural appropriation by ‘normative’ german subjects was by no means the whole story; agency was distributed among different subjects. on multi-faceted processes of internationalization, see also the work of historian maren möhring (2012) on ‘ethnic’ restaurants; on the role of foreign students in shaping protest movements since the 1950s, see slobodian (2012). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 8 illustrates.12 in one of the few texts that explicitly take up this subject, american studies scholar sabine broeck has critiqued how afro-americanophilia operated in german feminism at that time. on the one hand, she argues that many white german feminists of the 1970s used african american masculinity (and their attraction to african american men) as a foil, as a metaphor for more physical and grounded ways of being in the world, and thus as a pathway to personal liberation. in contrast to the post-nazi german masculinities outlined by dagmar herzog (2005) but echoing deeper racial mythologies, african american men seemed to embody an ‘uncompromised virility’ (broeck 2007: 102).13 a familiar raced coding of physicality versus intellectuality is coopted here into feminist concerns about (white) german disembodied intellectualism and ossified patriarchal ways of life. on the other hand, german feminism’s afro-americanophilia was not all about men. writers and activists like angela davis and alice walker inspired german feminists and provided them with important reference points for political analysis. just as importantly, these women also communicated ways of being in the world through aesthetics and affects (broeck 2007, 2011; gerund 2013). however, broeck argues that black womanhood again primarily ‘served … white german women-identified women to satisfy both their aesthetic desire and their political need for an articulation of embodiment’ (2011: 129). she stresses that despite the rhetoric of solidarity and liberation, there was little dialogue with african-americans (or with black germans) in the 1970s and early 1980s. there were few attempts to understand racism other than as a metaphor for sexism or discrimination more generally, and in the exceptional cases german feminists tended to be concerned with situations in countries like the usa or south africa, or with guest workers generically. schematically put, black ‘others’ remained ‘other,’ but were useful for the self-improvement of white ‘egos’ (broeck 2011: 129). only in the mid–1980s, through an increasing exposure to black feminist writings, did the constellation change to some extent, a point to which we return below. the texts broeck reviews, from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, display what she calls an 12 for the purpose of this essay we count second-wave feminism as part of new social movements and alternative milieu, notwithstanding numerous disagreements about that association. 13 for instance, swiss feminist author verena stefan’s influential best-seller häutungen [skinnings] which dissects the inherent violence of heterosexual relationships, deploys her sexual relations with a black man—presumably african-american—as a crucial step towards ‘discovery of her rights and sexual claims as a white female’ and ultimately her identification as a lesbian (broeck 2007: 101). although sexual fulfillment came with women, stefan argued that black men ‘inhabit[ed] their bodies more directly than white people’ (broeck 2007: 101). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 9 ‘abolitionist sentiment’ [stellvertreter (surrogate/proxy) abolitionism], spanning time, gender, and politics. she suggests that a ‘local configuration of [american] sentiment’ was taken up by white germans for whom it underpinned their reception of black politics and cultural forms, thereby holding white german ‘guilt’ at a distance. such sentiment, and this does not only concern the feminist context, could not however ‘devise a critical epistemology which could have taken german anti-black racism, germany’s role in the history of the slave trade and colonialism, actual german implications in an international black diaspora, and a self-critical reading of white hegemony into account’ (2011: 128). despite convincing critical historical evaluations like broeck’s, which resonate with current critiques in critical race/whiteness studies and cultural anthropology (eggers 2005; partridge 2012), we can interpret some of this history of german engagement in a more positive light as well. in a basic way, the interest in african american literature, and in female writers in particular, yields further proof of the relevance of african american thought for various social movements and their models of subjectivity throughout the 20th century. it is also worth stressing that in this context a contentious international debate began to develop about the interdependence of racial and gender oppression. if white germans began to question the would-be universality of their perspectives, then this is one of the few sites where they—and feminist intellectuals in particular—started to do so. furthermore, despite the racializing implications of ideas about embodiment and the problematic resonances with sexualized cultural imaginaries of ‘authentic’ physicality, those ideas also broke oppressive social taboos, diversified ways of relating to the world and increased the freedom of choice in sexual partners for different groups of people. at the same time, of course, such choices did not occur in a setting devoid of power imbalances.14 afro-german activism and afro-americanophilia the main impulse prompting an awareness of race within feminism and the alternative culture came not from us authors, but from within germany. a major break in the 14 the most obvious point is that within the german citizenship and migration ‘border regime,’ hess and kasparek’s term (2010), marriage allowed non-citizens access to longer-term residency permits, which gave a certain amount of power to white germans, many of them women. damani partridge spells out the dynamic since the 1990s: ‘what previously would have been abject beings become subjects, but in a way that preserves and even depends on their position as outsiders. in the contemporary german context, black male bodies can be incorporated if white women see them as beautiful and if they successfully perform hypersexually. the process is not one of normalization, but of hypersexualization’ (2012: 81). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 10 racial ‘relationships of representation’ (hall 2013) occurred during the 1980s, as selforganized black groups were formed in germany and other parts of europe (blakely 2012). in the middle of the decade, a group of women writers, historians and activists, including may ayim [then named opitz], katharina oguntoye and others affirmed their identity as afro-deutsch (afro-german), and began to research black german history and anti-black racism in germany. the black german organizations initiative schwarze in deutschland (isd, blacks in germany lobby) and schwarze frauen in deutschland (adefra, black women in germany) were founded, with other groups following. an important catalyst here was the african american audre lorde––‘black lesbian feminist mother poet warrior,’ as she described herself––who gathered a group of black german students and others at the american studies department of freie universität berlin in 1984, when she was a visiting lecturer there.15 the landmark 1986 book by oguntoye, ayim and schultz, farbe bekennen. afro-deutsche frauen auf den spuren ihrer geschichte (translanted as showing our colors. afrogerman women speak out [1991]) emerged from this grouping. presented as ‘a collective biography of black history in germany,’ it consists of historical research, group discussions and portraits as well as poetry (piesche 2012: 11. see also el-tayeb 2011; gerund 2013). farbe bekennen marked a break in the relationships of representation in two ways. first, its authors articulated their experiences, shared historical research and postulated a diverse afro-german collective subject unwilling to wear the masks that racial discourses–– anti-black, exoticist and afro-americanophile––had created. second, the book situated afro-germans within both germany and a wider african or black diasporic world (piesche 2012: 15). meeting other afro-germans within a self-defined setting was empowering for many involved, particularly those who had grown up in an all-white environment, without much contact with their black parent.16 the book presented a critical feminist and black consciousness framework to the black german communityto-be, as well as to a wider german audience. there was now a visible and vocal black presence in germany that could no longer be defined as ‘outside’ germanness, and there were experts and betroffene (affected parties) who were available to be consulted. thirty years on, afro-german activism has an established history and has passed through various key moments. difficult debates about the relationship between black 15 dagmar schultz, who was on the teaching faculty and had been politically active in the women’s movement, assisted her. see schultz’s film, audre lorde: the berlin years 1984 to 1992 (schultz 2012). 16 some participants had their own transnational networks of black relatives and friends (piesche 2012). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 11 and white feminism, as well as between afro-germans, the african or black diaspora and other ‘people of colour’ have taken place (wright 2004; lauré al-samarai et al. 2007). nonetheless, many white germans have continued to use their own ideas of blackness as if nothing had happened.17 for our discussion of afro-americanophilia, two points should be highlighted. first, afro-german discourse extensively critiqued ‘positive racism’ and, implicitly, afroamericanophilia. in farbe bekennen a number of women testify to the sexualized exoticism and heightened interest in das fremde [the other] that they experience as forms of everyday racism. for example, may ayim (writing as may opitz) discerns how exoticism works to construe black germans as alien (fremd) in their own world, often by associating them with pleasurable difference, and by the eternally recurring question, ‘where are you really from?’ (see also kilomba 2008). laura baum, who notes how blackness is still routinely conflated with africanness, observes the process by which germans ‘attribute to african men and women that which they themselves lack’ (1986: 149). those attributes include ‘a primordial sense of rhythm’ and an ability to ‘live out their emotions’. within the alternative öko-milieu [environmental activist milieu], people like ayim would be expected to have ‘interesting stories’ to tell on the basis of their ‘race’ —the flip side of the alternative-scene afro-americanophilia mentioned by broeck. such ‘positive’ projections were problematic in themselves, and they also would not prevent difficulties arising elsewhere, for example when seeking to gain access to a nightclub with a black partner.18 some contributors to farbe bekennen stress their agency when dealing with ‘positive’ prejudice, showing how they can use it to their own advantage. but the overall attitude is summarized by adema adomako who comes to the conclusion that ‘i have to keep my head up in a society that seems neutral, but isn’t’ (1986: 201). farbe bekennen’s critique of exoticism partly represents a ‘black knowledge archive’ about the pathologies of whiteness and represents an exercise in ‘counter-memory’ (eggers 2005; campt 2004). maureen maisha eggers (2005) remarks that black germans have built up a largely informal ‘archive of knowledge’ about the pathologies of whiteness where, for instance, white germans’ insecurities and defense 17 continuing debates about the legitimacy of performances in blackface, for instance in theatre performances of genet’s the blacks or dea loher’s unschuld [innocence], or in günter wallraff’s 2009 undercover investigative journalism, which he undertook in blackface as a somali tourist in germany, are cases in point (thurn 2014; sieg 2015). 18 ayim points out the interrelatedness of these patterns (she also speaks positively about her experiences in cities like paris and london where she did not feel constantly classified and judged). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 12 mechanisms are the root of their projections, rather than inherent characteristics of the objects of their love and derision. in sum, the book squarely confronted the german situation, and did so from a new perspective. these accounts made it very clear that white german afro-americanophilia was not an innocent practice, but part of tangible power relations. the second point we would like to stress about farbe bekennen is that the black german movement of the 1980s should be understood in part through its complicated relationship with the african american world, since it relied heavily on african american thought, activism, and cultural heroes (gerund 2013). the afro-german activist and german studies scholar peggy piesche stresses, for example, how the east german angela davis solidarity campaign was meaningful to her in her younger years, providing her with a glamorous yet serious role model. in a similar vein, katharina oguntoye (in piesche 2012: 34) and maureen maisha eggers (2005) discuss the american expatriate josephine baker as a role model in their own afro-german biographies, drawing inspiration from how she attempted to circumvent and subvert stereotypes in her life (see our discussion of this aspect in our first survey essay in this special edition). these are not isolated cases. michelle wright speaks of an ‘intense identification some afro-germans express towards african-americans’ (2010: 268). this would be very important in the rise of german hip-hop culture, too, in which some black germans prominently figure. here, then, is a type of german (and simultaneously black diasporic) afroamericanophilia that differs, in some ways radically, from what we have reviewed so far. is it even appropriate or productive to speak here of ‘german afroamericanophilia’ or should we choose different terminology? after all, there are basic differences, experientially and politically. an individual who experiences racism and racialization in a society where, more often than not, whiteness functions as an unquestioned norm starts from a different position than white afro-americanophiles who opt into symbolic blackness, most likely during a brief phase in their life, and who probably never leave their place of privilege in the process. practices of adaption and appropriation might seem very similar on the surface, but the meanings and their performative effects can be radically different. very simply put, for afro-germans the politics of afro-americanophilia are likely to be much more emancipatory. this is a ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 13 point that is convincingly made in critical discussions about race and appropriation (aikins 2004). however, with these reservations in mind, we think it apposite to discuss these writings and activities under the title of german afro-americanophilia for several reasons. first, the term denotes a cultural theme, rather than offering a universal analysis of the politics of the phenomena. second, there are practical similarities given that black germans, too, have had to appropriate various aspects of black diasporic culture individually and collectively, since diasporic belonging takes practical, intellectual and emotional work, and does not just happen ‘naturally.’ afro-german translations of us culture also had the potential for misunderstanding, and in both cases the mass media was an important factor. not without reason, michelle wright (2010) uses the term ‘becoming black’ when speaking of black european experiences, including those of black germans. indeed, many afro-german activists were exposed to black us culture through the same media as other germans around them, and it was through mainstream media rather than a functioning community that many began to learn about the wider african diasporic world (wright 2010: 268). to denaturalize the connection is not to delegitimize it, however. moreover, it is necessary to consider the differences and the similarities between white and black forms of afroamericanophilia in germany in order to avoid a facile conflation of race, cultural practice and identity politics. it staves off any tendency to bracket blackness from germanness. even though afro-americanophile processes of appropriation and reproduction are based in hierarchical dualities of racial mythology, those processes cannot simply be conceptualized as a binary matter, but are multi-faceted and gradual. this point becomes clearer in the realms of popular music, which remained a crucial arena of german afro-americanophilia in the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. in the following sections, we limit our discussion to selected soundings of popular music and its social worlds in that historical period. music-based subcultural scenes must be understood as local versions of transnational genres and networks, and various scenes in germany have taken up genres of global, african american coded popular culture and constructed different imageries, semantics, and performative dimensions. we start our soundings in the german reception of african american musical culture since the 1970s by returning to the gdr. we then move through different musical genres and subcultures in preand post-unification germany where afro-americanophilia has figured. these areas include blues (and blues-rock), disco, techno, and hip-hop/rap. our ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 14 discussion again focuses on mimetic practices, on patterns of appropriation and on the diverse politics involved. the cultural significance and inter-subjective relevance of popular music depends not only on the discursive level. questions of rhythm, melody, and sound are crucial for a more complete account of musical afro-americanophilia, but we do not attend to those matters in this survey essay.19 blues, blues-rock and the paradigm of authenticity in the german democratic republic, domestication and control of western popular music replaced outright repression in the 1970s. modernization and (limited) liberalization tendencies took hold; the obsessively political reading of african american popular music by the state began to recede into the background (rauhut 2008). nevertheless, informal groupings of young people outside state-sponsored organizations such as the freie deutsche jugend [free german youth] were still seen as a threat, and some of these groups revolved around african-american culture. indeed, the so-called blueser [blues fans] formed the major oppositional youth subculture in east germany in the 1970s and early 1980s. aesthetically reminiscent of hippies, the blueser assembled in more or less clandestine meetings all over the gdr (kochan 2002; rauhut 2008). michael rauhut argues that their ‘almost religious’ admiration for the blues was conditioned by both a traditional ‘euro-romantic’ image of africanamericans as possessing existential ‘authenticity,’ and also by an identification with african american oppression (2008: 245). the blues became both ‘free space’ and ‘counter world’ for white east german adherents who saw in african american blues artists both an ‘ancestral history of their own suffering’ as well as ‘emotional purity’ (2008: 245). the blueser were an important presence in eastern germany after the fall of the wall, and well into the 1990s. there were similar circles and dynamics among blues-rock afficionados in the alternative milieu of the west, but they did not have quite the same cultural significance. overall, the blueser and others constituted part of a strong cultural continuity of rockist, primarily male afro-americanophilia that stresses a sensibility it considers earthy, primordial, pure and existentially authentic, in touch with an inner human nature. in this strand of afro-americanophilia, positively-coded attributes like authenticity are—implicitly or explicitly—contrasted with contemporary european life, which includes both the demands of a rationalized, industrial society, as 19 nor can we attend to the significance of other changes in auditory cultures, such as those that are being analysed by scholars working in the field of sound studies (eshun 1998; weheliye 2005). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 15 well as a pop musical culture that is regarded as plastic.20 this, too, remains compatible with primitivist german and european traditions, and, partly with the neger stereotype we discussed in our first survey essay. in west germany certain genres—initially blues-rock, then increasingly reggae––began to feature within the new social movements and left-wing alternative culture and its institutions (reichardt & siegfried 2010; ege 2010; reichardt 2014). here, too, music was not just an entertaining commodity but crucial––sometimes foundational––for countercultural subjectivities and aesthetics.21 beyond authenticity: munich disco and ‘pop’ sensibilities the blues (and reggae) fans, with their particular interest in the ‘authentic’ and their counter-cultural, critical disposition, form one end in a spectrum of music-cultural sensibilities of the late 1970s. at the same time, german ‘pop’ aesthetics were also becoming more complex, and in some cases self-aware and self-referential (shahan 2013; hurley 2015: 54, 79–80). disco represents an important moment in german (and international) music history here.22 it provides an example of a popular musical genre rooted in african american culture and in signs of blackness, but distinct from the common paradigm of ‘authenticity.’ the genre began in the early-to-mid 1970s and reached its international peak in the late 1970s, including in germany. as the musicologist peter wicke has observed, in the mid-1970s, popular music entered a new moment in germany and europe (quoted in wagner 1999: 113). if during late 1960s rock articulated with a sense of radical social upheaval—which, among some fans, included moments of symbolically ‘becoming black’—then for many there was a change in mood during the early 1970s. wicke 20 there is a need for more differentiated analyses of these dynamics that go beyond such schematic descriptions. for a description of the survival of (and ambiguities in) ‘rockist’ notions of ‘authenticity’ in germany into the 1990s and beyond, see hurley (2015: 119–158), and the references cited there. 21 we do not inquire here into the german reception and re-contextualization of reggae, nor its alignment with alternative culture in germany during the 1970s and 1980s (karnik & philipps 2007; schmidt 2002). however, the connection between the meanings of musical forms like reggae, alternative culture and emergent multiculturalism could be researched more extensively, especially in regard to the culturalist lens of difference and (more or less explicit) notions of authenticity held in that context. as an ideology, multiculturalism was taken up and elaborated in the context of the alternative milieu, and it was (partly) institutionalized by left-leaning city governments like the one in frankfurt am main. on multiculturalism and german cultural policy, see welz (1996), knecht and soysal (2007); lanz (2007). some versions of reggae also articulated with mainstream novelty exoticism in cultural works like the 1983 west german comedy film, sunshine reggae auf ibiza (sunshine reggae on ibiza). 22 in post-punk, citation pop and other sub-genres, aesthetics of artificiality and intertextuality also emerged as concerns (feiereisen 2011; shahan 2013; hurley 2015: 95–106). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 16 argues that in the 1970s many young people became more interested in hedonism rather than political upheaval as in the late-1960s (cited in wagner 1999: 113). this especially held true for that majority of young people who were interested in popular music but lived outside of alternative left-wing culture.23 on a musical level, munich’s scene illustrates the shift these writers talk about: whereas the late 1960s had spawned the radical music-commune, amon düül, by the mid–1970s it was home to munich disco. nelson george, an eminent writer on african-american popular music, has lamented that disco, especially ‘white’ varieties like munich disco, dealt a blow in the ‘death of rhythm and blues,’ which for him was an emphatically african american music (1990: 181-208).24 german authors and critics steeped in the rock tradition were similarly dismissive (elflein 1998: 256; witzel et al. 2005; wagner 1999: 110–116). however, the music’s intellectual supporters countered with a cultural-historical argument questioning narrow notions of authenticity, and such arguments are relevant to the history of german afro-americanophilia in a more general sense. disco emerged among african americans and latinas and latinos in cities like philadelphia and new york city in an ethnically diverse gay dance culture, and then became a world-wide mainstream pop phenomenon, popularized by musicians such as george mccrae.25 in munich, the producer giorgio moroder (born hansjörg moroder in southern tyrolia, italy) developed a munich disco style that relied heavily on synthesizers, most memorably in the 1977 donna summer hit, ‘i feel love,’ for which summer, moroder and pete bellotte were co-writers. other german-based disco-pop producers, such as frank farian, who created boney m, and michael kunze, also employed african-diasporic and african people as writers, musicians, band members and stage performers, although not exclusively. individual musical skills were sometimes decisive, but some choices may have been made because black (often female) bodies anchored the musical product in a type of appeal for producers and audience alike, they served as ‘harbingers of the exotic and foreign’ (weheliye 2014). 23 such a perspective may well echo the ‘rockist’ counterculture’s anti-disco stance, which some critics link to the anxieties of masculine heterosexuality faced with queer aesthetics and pleasure (frank 2007). 24 george’s account of the role of radio audience research and the culture of musical corporations is particularly compelling in his tale of the ‘death’ of rhythm and blues. see also perry hall’s pessimistic account (1997) of the effects that white appropriations of african-american music have had on musical developments, even though african-american musicians kept searching for new forms. 25 mccrae’s ‘rock your baby’ was also a number one hit for ten weeks in germany in 1974. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 17 in a few cases, blackness was also denoted in the titles of songs like boney m’s ‘everyone wants to dance like josephine baker’ (1989). on the basis of existing scholarship, it is hard to contemplate what types of afroamericanophilia the german consumers of this music might have exhibited at the time.26 was one less or more likely to generate fantasies of ‘becoming black’ whilst listening and dancing to this music in upper-middle class discos, or on the radio, compared with an earlier enthusiasm for soul music or jazz? in order to find out more about these dynamics of afro-americanophilia in disco music, including in networks of musical creation and value distribution, and in the lifeworlds of those it touched, it would be necessary to study in detail the semiotics and the materiality of the music itself, to assemble different accounts of the time, and to take into account the economic and contractual side of the music business. in addition, one would need to contemplate the social history of nightclubs and club-goers. in the latter context, alexander weheliye (2012) has already identified that many german disco-pop oriented discotheques and nightclubs were unusually diverse, cosmopolitan spaces. music historians and cultural critics have noted that the overall aesthetic of disco–– especially when it became more electronic, as in the munich sound––was happy with artificiality, with the ‘cheesy’ rather than ‘earthy’ sounds and arrangements of soul music. the notorious criterion of authenticity, which had dominated the discourse of german afro-americanophilia, hence became problematic and perhaps even obsolete in this context. this did not just relate to the music’s reliance on synthesizers. munich disco also witnessed the receding into the background of myths of personal or collective expression, given that some of it was produced electronically, that the production process was based on a clear division of labour between producer and musical workers, and that those who recorded the music were not necessarily those who performed it live.27 despite munich disco’s african-american roots and elements, and even though it often relied on associations with black performers, aesthetics, sounds and 26 dietmar elflein correctly identifies a ‘gap in sociological knowledge’ here (1998: 256). compare also the comparative lack of depth to mark terkessidis’ fleeting discussion (2006). the lack of knowledge is closely connected to the intellectual left’s dismissal of the disco scene as a-political, hedonistic and conservative—but maybe also to the fact that the 1970s and 1980s are only slowly being explored by historians. for a latterday appreciation of ‘mjunik disco,’ see hecktor (2008). 27 similar modes of musical production had predominated in, for instance, the rhythm-and-blues era, and also pertained to german schlager music. some left-wing german critics applied a marxist critique towards the alienation of session musicians from their labour (harun farocki cited in witzel et al. 2005). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 18 bodies, such music may not have been considered as intrinsically ‘black’ a sound, as say soul music, reggae, afro-beat or funk. in many ways, munich disco superficially relied on aesthetics of blackness, and on black performers. but in other ways, munich disco could be read as implying a level of indifference toward racial coding. post-soul aesthetics: techno and the pop-intellektuelle [pop intellectuals] such tendencies seem to offer a possible way out of the primitivist paradigm. we can speak of racial de-semanticization here: a stress on music’s sonic materiality, on physical experience and affect, whereby discursive anchoring becomes a secondary concern, or fades out in experience, so that specific sounds that could otherwise be read as ‘soulful’ and emphatically ‘black’ are decontextualized and do not necessarily stand for anything. this motif is relevant in a more fundamental sense to the development of electronic dance music, and this leads our discussion into the 1990s. techno is a particularly relevant case to discuss here because african-american musicians in detroit invented much of it, and at the same time it is often taken to be a particularly german music, both among germans and internationally (more so than house music with its disco lineage). german musicians and deejays have made significant contributions to the field, and some popular interpretations have tended to emphasise the form’s would-be germanness (kösch 1995; weheliye 2012).28 to situate our discussion of techno and german afro-americanophilia, it is helpful to first contemplate an important shift in some african american culture in the 1980s and 1990s, namely the rise of a so-called ‘post–soul aesthetic.’ as bertram ashe points out, this sensibility ‘lives in the unstable, wobbly interstices’ between what many had hitherto regarded as the ‘discrete cultural categories’ of ‘black’ and ‘white,’ and amongst practitioners who ‘use non-traditionally black cultural influences in their work’ (2007: 611). many african american artists and cultural workers who were born in or came of age during the civil rights era increasingly considered that ‘the black aesthetic [was] much more than just africa and jazz,’ as one polemic had it (ellis 1989: 234). such an aesthetic impinged on individual african-american artists who created musical forms like detroit techno in the 1980s. detroit techno had its own post-soul––indeed 28 a full discussion of afro-americanophilia in techno would have to include the case of westbam (maximilian lenz), one of germany’s most successful deejays, whose name, according to the artist himself, is an abbreviation of ‘westphalia bambaataa,’ echoing his home region in north-western germany and the african american music pioneer afrika bambaataa (see westbam & goetz 1997). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 19 germanophile––background; its protagonists were influenced by the electro-pop band kraftwerk, and in more house-based forms, by synthesizer-based munich disco. as with our speculative interpretation of munich disco, the post-soul sensibility would seem to forestall older forms of german afro-americanophilia or at least change the tone. it provides much less fodder for quasi-romantic ideas of black authenticity, as in the primitivist tradition that lived on in blues rock and reggae imaginaries in germany. nor does it support imagined resistance towards ‘the man,’ as in 1960s and 1970s counterculture, detroit techno group underground resistance notwithstanding. postsoul also eschews more vague semiotic associations with ‘black’ sensuality and hedonism, as in disco and, perhaps, in disco-derived house music.29 in the 1990s, new, more self-aware––or perhaps more sublimated––forms of afroamericanophilia also emerged in the writings of german music journalists, musicians, and other intellectuals who made their own sense of post-soul techno, a music that is purportedly not primarily about ‘meaning.’30 in some cases, the music’s historical emergence in black detroit in the 1980s allowed for afro-americanophile interpretations in which these historical roots are interpreted as the essence of the music (bachor 1995). of most interest to our discussion however are the desemanticizing interpretations that have contemplated techno as what, for want of a better term, we might call ‘afro/german’ (which is unlike the community appellation ‘afro-german’). for example the musician, broadcaster and writer thomas meinecke has been interested in the complex ‘transatlantic feedback’ between afro-america and germany, as well as in the mutually constituting imaginaries, and at a more prosaic level, in the decision by african-american dj-composers to record and live in germany, or collaborate with germans. here, afro-americanophilia becomes a highly self-reflexive matter that takes up a post-soul aesthetic where that which is being appropriated is quite conspicuously also white, european, and even german. an absorption with such complexities is evident in first take then shake, the 2004 collaborative recording by meinecke’s band, freiwillige selbstkontrolle [voluntary self regulation], and the african american dj anthony ‘shake’ shakir. it is also an ongoing theme in meinecke’s 2001 suhrkamp 29 the voice and cultural meaning of the (african american) soul ‘diva’ in house music is explored in jochen bonz’s ethnography (2008: 49–51) as constitutive for that musical world. bonz refers to the cultural figure of a black ‘superwoman,’ as analysed by michelle wallace (2000 [1979]). 30 as a style of the future that is now ‘sedimented’ (nye 2010), techno has been the subject of various german-language popular historical studies (see denk & van thülen 2012; rapp 2009). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 20 novel hellblau [pale blue]. the latter refrains from presenting any neatly digested interpretations, but seeks to index music discourse about techno, among other foci, as a way of investigating the transnational. the novel’s protagonists thereby query such categories as white and black, african american and german, just as meinecke learned to do in his own appreciation of forms such as techno (hurley 2012). the characters expressly précis and reflect upon paul gilroy’s notion of the black atlantic and other writings from primarily british and us academic critical race and gender/queer theory, seeking to transpose them into a middle-european context. meinecke is among a number of un-dogmatic left-wing and anti-racist (white) german writers and popintellektuelle [pop intellectuals] who, particularly since the mid-1990s, have written extensively on african american culture, politics, and criticism, as well as on the politics of afro-americanophilia—and have embodied it themselves. among these writers are günther jacob, tobias nagl, and, most prominently, the music and art critic-cum-theorist diedrich diederichsen, a former editor of spex magazine, a brainy, high-gloss music monthly.31 diederichsen has co-edited a volume of african american cultural criticism (yo! hermeneutics!), co-organized a semi-academic conference on afro-futurism, ‘loving the alien,’ and co-edited the resulting book with paul gilroy, further mediating the ‘black atlantic’ to german audiences. such writers provide numerous german musings on the question of why so many african american musical forms have encapsulated specific historic moments so powerfully, or otherwise had such purchase on listeners—why, simply put, afro-americanophilia is a very deserved love. but techno was not the only music form to draw out such musings in the 1990s. there was also a sizeable discourse on rap and hip-hop, musical forms that, in contrast with techno, are not desemanticized in a post-soul way, but on the contrary are very clearly enmeshed in black culture and politics, including cultural nationalism. moreover, artists have often commented directly on questions of cultural ownership and exploitation. hip-hop and rap became the dominant pop cultural aesthetic in the new millennium, something like a pop cultural lingua franca with many local varieties.32 they represent 31 in subito, a short story by the so-called popliterat [pop-novelist] rainald goetz, a character supposedly based on diedrich diederichsen is named neger negersen [negro negrosen] (1983: 158). on diederichsen, spex, and the advanced music journalism milieu in germany, see hurley (2015: 54–55, 79–83). 32 kenell jackson speaks of the ‘last surge of black cultural traffic’ and one ‘that we currently inhabit’; acknowledging that ‘hip-hop has traveled to new places on a scale unimaginable for earlier black cultural ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 21 the last cultural phenomenon we will consider in this essay––illustrating both the relevance and the complexity of afro-americanophilia in contemporary germany. rap and hip-hop in 1998 tom cheesman suggested that in germany, rap and hip-hop––initially regarded as essentially african american cultural forms––‘seem to have been received and adopted more enthusiastically than anywhere else in europe’ (1998: 194).33 hence, and for at least twenty-five years now, the issue of afro-americanophilia has returned with a vengeance to the forefront of german cultural debates. in contrast to the last high point in the late 1960s, however, the underlying context is of a more diverse german society that has undergone shifts and developments via reunification and an emergent new nationalism, as well as globalization and transnationalism, forces recognized by social scientists and the wider public as major developments in the post-cold war era.34 the german rap and hip-hop scene has long been pluralistic (elflein 1998: 264).35 at the levels of production and reception, hip-hop has adopted various subject positions, some of which we elaborate below. some musicians use the genre to express straightforward pop sensibilities and boy-meets-girl-stories. some use the idiom to articulate their own social (ethnic, racial, class) marginality, which may or may not mean adopting (and adapting) a gangsta pose. some express ‘transracial’ solidarity within the genre, and even anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal politics. others refracted the african-american cultural nationalism evident in some hip-hop into german variants. in the following section, we examine a few points in the complex history of german hip-hop, which represents a much larger phenomenon than earlier moments of afro-americanophilia such as the negrophile 1920s or the counter-cultural late 1960s. it is clear that the underground beginnings of rap in germany did not just come about via the mediation of the culture industry, but also through people who bridged material’ (2005: 23). he also argues that the rise of hip-hop represents arguably the main reason for the surge of academic and intellectual interest in popular culture—and laments that this focus has led to a widespread disinterest in other forms of black cultural traffic. given the importance of hip-hop, we nonetheless believe it is necessary to spell out its implications for afro-americanophilia here. 33 we should note, however, that similar diagnoses have also been made about france, which has a very active rap music scene and is an important market for us-origin rap as well. 34 see, for example, arjun appadurai’s influential writings on transnational/global ‘-scapes’ (1996). 35 on the history of the german rap scene, see: pennay (2001), krekow and steiner (2002), verlan and loh (2006), and loh and güngör (2002). on sociological aspects see: menrath (2001), kaya (2001), androutsopoulos (2002), bennett (2002), bock et al. (2007), brown (2006), templeton (2006). on german ‘gangsta rap,’ see szillus (2012), dietrich and seeliger (2012), and ege (2013). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 22 continents. these actors included djs and mcs who were african-american soldiers stationed in germany, and who frequented nightclubs in cities such as heidelberg/mannheim, stuttgart, frankfurt and berlin. from there, rap music moved into a small-scale, diverse youth-cultural scene, where the whole hip-hop package—rap, breakdancing and graffiti––was performed. this scene was fueled by music, hip-hop films like beat street, and the german-american co-production, wild style, as well as by various books and magazines that popularized hip-hop culture. the new medium of music television also played a significant role in making popular forms of rap more widely known, and in an audiovisual form. this was important because it meant that visual aspects and bodily styles could become key to local hip-hop culture. the scene comprised self-organized circles of enthusiasts, was supported by local cultural workers and youth centres, and formed the basis for ‘old school’ german rap. the emergence of this early german hip-hop scene coincided roughly with reunification in 1990. the subsequent surge in nationalism, anti-immigrant and racist violence and anti-immigration policies in 1992 and 1993 brought issues of race and racism to the forefront, and these trends had impacts on german hip-hop.36 some members of the early scene––itself socially, culturally and ethnically quite diverse––commented critically in their rhymes on everyday racism, and on the antiquated german citizenship laws. for example, advanced chemistry released a song titled ‘fremd im eigenen land’ [foreign in my own country], an early german instance of conscious, message rap. here, hip-hop represented a ‘universal,’ anti-racist youth culture where germans of colour and black germans such as torch could express an assertive political voice and, as it were, re-invent afro-americanophilia as a progressive project (loh & güngör 2002). the african-american origins of rap music and the concerns of african americans did matter a great deal to many in this scene. however, contrary to the impression of hiphop skeptics who often ridiculed the scene as full of wannabe-blacks, afroamericanophilia was not necessarily the core concern on a lifeworld level. for many, the main thing was to master the performative aspects of hip-hop, and the dynamics of the social world in which it takes place, or universalist ideas of a global hip-hop culture. in any event, political and oppositional message rap has remained an important element 36 the violence was, however, mostly not considered under the rubric of racism, but of ausländerfeindlichkeit [hostility to foreigners]. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 23 of german hip-hop.37 again, there have been overlaps and convergences between musical-subcultural circles and leftist countercultural-political scenes. for many young germans in the 1990s, including the ‘white’ majority, hip-hop played a crucial role in countercultural identity formation, where, to sketch just one important distinction, hiphop often articulated a more aggressive, masculinist sensibility than reggae.38 as in the early 1970s, contemporary popular music and radical political resistance again seemed to converge in the african american world, now represented in the figure of savvy, assertive, disciplined and emotionally ‘cool’ male rappers.39 german authors like günther jacob (2001) argue in this context that a great deal of rap is politically ambiguous, not least because it articulates an ‘oppositional consciousness,’ but can simultaneously convey what angela davis calls ‘a nationalism packed with misogynistic undertones’ (quoted in diederichsen 1993: 210). indeed, rap’s association with misogyny and assertive masculinity became a watchword in german debates about rap’s cultural significance. this again underscores how race, gender, and sexuality are interdependently defined, experienced and contested in german afro-americanophilia. the first german-language pop-rap hits by die fantastischen vier [the fantastic four] did not come from the subcultural ‘old school’ scene. their 1992 hit song ‘die da’ [her over there] had a novelty feel to it, even parodying the hip-hop aesthetic (verlan & loh 2006), and echoed other forms of exoticism in the 1950s or 1980s, or mimetic fads like the cakewalk decades earlier. most ‘real’ hip-hoppers despised this music, but similar songs and acts continue to play a role in german popular culture, including in the eurodance genre, another genre of ‘producers’ music,’ where the brief appearance of (mostly black) rappers became de rigeur (terkessidis 2006).40 significantly, the reception of hip-hop in west germany coincided with the coming of age of a generation of children of labour migrants and other germans of colour, and quite a few of these young people, in addition to some from the smaller group of black 37 these forms found a high point during the wave of post-wall xenophobia of 1992 and 1993, including on rap gegen rechts [rap against the right], a symbolic anti-nationalist music compilation, and, later on, in the (largely) afro-german crew, brothers keepers, which formed in response to racist attacks (eltayeb 2003; weheliye 2009). 38 individuals in these circles often read malcolm x’s 1965 (auto-)biography, published in german in 1992. 39 on afro-german rap, gender and the reach for blaxploitation (musical) iconography, see layne (2013). 40 in the late 1990s hedonistically-minded party rap crews such as fettes brot [fat bread] and absolute beginner [absolute beginners] bridged underground and mainstream, had more ‘credibility’ than die fantastischen vier, and dominated rap music sales. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 24 germans, gravitated towards rap and hip-hop culture’s performative dimensions, fashion codes, ideology, and poses (kaya 2001; brown 2006; gezen 2012: ch. 3; stehle 2012).41 this segment continues to include people from very different backgrounds and in very different positions, who have made very different music in different languages, including turkish and german. it would therefore be quite mistaken to construct turkish-german rap or migranten-rap (rap by migrants) as a cohesive genre. like elsewhere in europe, however, there has been a recurrent and much commented-upon theme whereby (post-)migrant youth have sensed and/or claimed a similarity between aspects of african-american culture and experience and their own experience as minorities.42 such appropriation, transfer and discursive comparison occur at the level of the aesthetics of everyday life.43 however, sometimes the music industry has also been involved, especially after the global turn toward gangsta rap during the 1990s. under the tutelage of labels like universal/bmg, ‘ethnic’ german gangsta rappers have performed to expectations of street-credibility and realness, long held by white adolescent german men.44 the commodification of realness became particularly clear around 2000, when various rappers from berlin and frankfurt am main, aided by media-savvy entrepreneurs, including the independent aggro berlin label, started performing taboo-breaking battle rap lyrics as well as tough german street rap, stressing their connections to the underworld, and their street wisdom. the post-industrial cityscape, increasing social inequality in the post-unification era, neo-liberal social policies, as well as anti-immigrant racism and islamophobia all provided the background for many such narratives and for the iconography of the ghetto, even though the structural situation was hardly comparable with postindustrial us cities. this broader phenomenon also included the controversial case of b-tight, an afro-german rapper from berlin who, very much in tune with the over-the-top-sensibility of his 41 this engagement has also been reflected upon in literature, especially by the turkish-german writer feridun zaimoğlu’s in his 1995 book, kanak sprak: 24 mißtöne vom rande der gesellschaft [kanaka lingo: 24 discordant notes from the margins of society]. there is an extensive literature on zaimoğlu and what leslie adelson has called the recent ‘turkish turn’ in german literature (see cheesman 2002, 2007; adelson 2005; cheesman & yesilada 2012). for an analysis of the way zaimoğlu’s characters engage in afro-americanophilia, see especially layne (2011: ch 6). 42 social anthropologist ayse çağlar has argued that this comparison was also promoted by many youth workers—a compelling argument that does not, however, explain the phenomena in toto. 43 rap music and hip-hop aesthetics have also been attractive to some young men in self-styled ‘street gangs.’ in berlin-wedding, for example, one 1980s predominantly turkish gang named itself the ‘black panterler’ (black panthers) (partridge 2012). these gangs began to form in the 1980s, for self-defence against racist attacks, to exert dominance over others, to kill time and to enjoy life. 44 similar dynamics are responsible for part of the success of gangsta rap in the usa, as various critics have pointed out (rose 2008). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 25 label’s roster, aggressively employed racist clichés of violence and sexual potency and was accused by black german activists, among others, of exploiting and reinforming stereotypes and exploitative structures. there were a few turkishand arab-german rappers, including ‘bushido,’ who claimed to have close links with drug dealers and extortion networks. they simultaneously asserted that white german rappers were too soft and lacked street credibility. some of these rappers even considered that the ‘urban’ hip-hop fashions of african-americans, and of a sub-culturalist (but not ‘street’) hiphop scene in germany, were less real, or even ‘gay’ (ege 2013). a few rappers also used racist language to distance themselves from rap’s african-american origins, and from black claims to ownership of the culture (aikins 2006). such highly contradictory positions illustrate the ambiguities of a situation where afro-americanophilia and traditional racism are both important cultural patterns, where art forms based in the black diaspora have simultaneously become part of a wider popular cultural repertoire and, to some extent, unmoored from their origins. in a general sociological sense, turning social marginality and negative ascriptions into a glamorous, empowering aesthetics of living in a ghetto has been an important discursive strategy within the identity projects and, in some cases, political strategems of many underprivileged young people in germany, among other places.45 imagery derived from rap and hip-hop, but also from a wider world of gangsta culture, has played a crucial role in that process, as german rap music and rap videos show (klein & friedrich 2004). this is not necessarily a serious trend—irony and self-reflexivity can figure prominently and a performative culture of ‘dissing’ is de rigeur. however, as priscilla layne (2011: ch. 6) has suggested of the german context, the strategy is a fraught one: it is very much open to debate how empowering are the iconographies of the ghetto and rampant forms of masculinity.46 the various positions towards straightforward racism and toward afro-americanophilia taken by afro-german rappers such as torch, sammy deluxe, afrob, harris, b-tight, 45 compare, to name a few: zaimoglu (1995); tertilt (1996); elflein (1998); çağlar (1998); soysal (2001; cheesman (2002); loh and güngör (2002); bennett (2003); waegner (2004); yildiz (2004, 2010); brown (2006); matthes (2008); el tayeb (2011); layne (2011: ch. 6); stehle (2012); and cheesman and yesilada (2012). 46 german hip-hop has also accommodated white nationalist strains, or what dietmar elflein calls ‘hiphop nationalization’ (1998: 260). this is the case with both the mid–1990s discourse of ‘neuer deutscher sprechgesang’ [new german recitative], which sought out german cultural precedents for rap, and later ‘street rap’ nationalists like ‘fler’ (the so-called ‘deutscha badboy’). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 26 liquid, lisi, and many others would be another important approach for a multiperspectival history of afro-americanophilia in the hip-hop world. one could also analyze both the common question of whether being black has aided or rather hindered their careers, as well as the conditions under which the question has arisen (klein & friedrich 2004; layne 2013).47 but then again, sorting rappers by backgrounds, race and ethnicity, is of very limited use and quite obviously problematic. the heterogeneity of the list above is testament to that. in recent years, new sub-genres and pop-rap acts have flourished, and, overall, rap has become a familiar element of popular culture, such that it has lost any novelty character and is far from exotic or alien. as rap has become a dominant pop cultural form globally, there are indications that it has lost or shaken off the association with its us origins and become, at least potentially, another racially desemanticized idiom in a larger pop cultural repertoire. our point here is not to try to represent this complexity in its entirety, but to acknowledge it, and to ask where it might leave the phenomenon of afro-americanophilia, and the racial dynamics from which it stems. in this arena, too, we encounter different forms that involve not so much a straightforward ‘identification,’ but rather a complex suite of recontextualizations, as well as the propagation and putting into discourse of stereotypical simplifications about african-america. there is not one version of afro-americanophilia in the context of german rap and hip-hop, but many, in which race is sometimes foregrounded and sometimes desemanticized. some conclusions and questions at this point, it seems apposite to ponder what the literature we have surveyed has accomplished. further, we must confront the inevitable question of whether there is a meta-narrative that makes sense of all the forms and patterns of afro-americanophilia in germany that we have described, and that relates them to larger forces, to worldhistoric ‘developments,’ to structures of racism, and to the struggles against them. it is not our intent here to advance one major theoretical narrative, but rather to ponder the succession of historical conjunctures, and to suggest some analytical tools for understanding them. from the beginning, we have contended that excavating the practices and patterns of afro-americanophilia (in the widest sense) can contribute to a 47 klein and friedrich’s argument about blackness as a career booster in german rap is dubious given that the most successful german rappers have not been black. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 27 cultural history of western-central europe and the african diasporas that acknowledges a variety of interconnections, contributions, overlaps, hybridizations, exploitative relationships and contestations. but we also heed the need to constantly re-think the terms with which to tell this narrative, and to invoke the fields and assemblages within which the practices, discourses, and affects of afro-americanophilia are situated. our provisional periodization, based on recent scholarship about popular music, subcultures, emancipatory politics, and literature, has allowed us to sketch the contours of some afro-americanophile conjunctures in germany since the mid-19th century. we have assembled a wide variety of african-american presences, cultural forms and discourses, and although these moments have been scattered and heterogeneous, marshalling them together makes it clear that the cultural history of 20th-century germany cannot adequately be told without reference to its afro-americanophile components, or in isolation of a wider world where people of the black diaspora have played crucial roles. german society and german peoples’ lives have been considerably shaped by cultural forms that originated in black diasporic worlds. as our essays have shown, the parameters determining the german fascination with, and appropriation of, african-american cultural forms have shifted considerably. the mid–19th century projection of abolitionism into a nationalist, romantic sensibility did not function in the same way as sexually coded, post-psychoanalytic 1920s primitivism, even though both partook of a common paradigm and ideology of white (european, christian) supremacy. the binary complementarity and mutual exclusivity of ‘black’ and ‘white,’ which formed the semiotic basis for the racial re-valuations of early–20th century primitivism, was in some ways superseded by patterns of imagined equivalence in opposition to the power structure in late–1960s countercultural afro-americanophilia. nevertheless, this latter moment also fed off the older pattern. there was never a complete replacement, as older patterns continued to affect exoticist strains of afroamericanophilia. some forms, such as those during the 1950s civil rights movement and among many feminists, had a strong ethical-moral tone, while others were much more hedonistically oriented. we could elaborate here on other patterns, but what we have already said suffices to make the general point about continuity and change. we have also sought to highlight different modes of afro-americanophile practices: intellectual engagement; consumption in carnevalesque moments; physical movement; ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 28 practical solidarity; and subcultural aesthetics, to name a few. we have stressed that these engagements take place in different social worlds, and with different expectations of authenticity and commitment. through some historiographical fragments, we have related how afro-americanophile moments have impinged upon the social history of black people in germany, for whom exoticist projections have often acted as an oppressive force. we have also mentioned, however, the covert forms of agency that are easily erased from such accounts, including for example tactical responses to the early german entertainment industry, and patterns of autonomy. we have stressed how afro-germans engaged in their own afro-americanophilia for political and cultural self-fashioning, particularly in the second half of the 20th century. juxtaposing a history of afro-americanophilia with the perspective of black people is vital, although the latter perspective cannot be adequately understood from a vantage point such as ours; it must be told in its own right as afrogerman history. nevertheless, one of the most important aspects of our survey has been to highlight the growing contestation of some aspects of white afro-americanophilia by black people, in germany and elsewhere, and how afro-americanophilia, as part of a transnational assemblage of forms and sentiments, has also functioned as a cultural resource for various migrant subjects and groups. even within our limited project of analyzing german afro-americanophile projections and practices of appropriation, there are some lacunae that we mentioned in the introductory section of this and our previous essay. these include an attention to how afro-americanophilia has played out in fields like advertising, film, theatre, reportage writing, photography, ethnography, classical music and sports (including basketball). gay (such as in the work of hubert fichte), lesbian and/or queer narratives, which have been subtexts in some sections, would also add greatly to this wider history. analytically, we have barely touched upon the connections with the wider african diasporic world and with mechanisms behind cultural flows. to do them justice, we would need to give a more detailed investigation of the processes of mediation in different genres and industries, of market dynamics, and of the ways different historical actors have interacted with them. we would also need to attend to specific transnational pathways. for example, we currently know little about how german attitudes to jazz may have been conditioned just as much by francophone jazz discourse, as they were by ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 29 discourses in the usa, or, for that matter, by german experiences of expatriate black caribbean culture in the united kingdom (see detlef siegfried’s article on the key figure of ernest borneman in this special issue). most importantly, any periodization should not eclipse the question of whether different instances of afro-americanophilia in 20th century german history are merely different versions of one common theme, of a longue-duree deep structure of racial dynamics that determines all of its superficial manifestations. are we, in other words, witnessing a restaging of the same scene, over and over again? our methodological decision to focus on specific conjunctures automatically downplays such continuities, but that is not to say that they are irrelevant. numerous theorists of racism have stressed continuities in (white) misrecognition and privilege, including sabine broeck (2011), who has discerned a pattern of continuity from 19th-century ‘proxy abolitionism’ to postwar west german afro-americanophilia. broeck argues that, under the surface, things essentially stayed the same for over a hundred years. our essays, and the analytical distinctions between historical phases and conjunctures we have used, have queried that position. however, we recognize that it can be important to stress overarching continuities in unequal power relations and resources, both from an analytical and a political perspective. we acknowledge the basic point that, even in many of its later instantiations, white german afro-americanophilia was based on and perpetuated racist hierarchies that stemmed from desire and misrecognition. still, we consider this point to be obvious enough to move on to micro-political analyses and attend to moments of reflexivity, challenge, and potential ‘lines of flight’ from the reproduction of racism. by gathering in scattered historiographical snapshots, a timeline of afro-americanophilia can also illuminate significant modulations in unmarked german whiteness.48 our overview may thus add some situational and conjunctural specificity to what is often— with some justification, given its continuing effects of exclusion and dominance— regarded as a monolithic structural force. how has unmarked german whiteness modulated in the period we have examined? early forms of afro-americanophilia emerged in the context of a long-lasting formation of openly supremacist german whiteness, based in nationalism and understandings of 48 this analytic category is problematic in the german context in that it can be used to downplay other forms of dominance and exclusion, most importantly anti-semitism and the racism that targets immigrants and their descendants for reasons other than their non-whiteness; but it is indispensable. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 30 culture and civilization that were closely entangled with patterns of european colonialism, and attempts to legitimate it. african american popular culture was seen as self-evidently alien to german culture, despite some romantic currents. this idea was still rampant, and openly articulated in public discussions, in both german states into the 1970s, and it gave the afro-americanophilia of self-described progressives a particularly combative tone and resistant flavour. in the new millennium, under the ambiguous conditions of globalization and new culturalisms, explicit cultural nationalist arguments are mostly—although not exclusively—to be found on the extreme right, and race-based definitions of national belonging are considered out of place in most polite discussion. recent afroamericanophilia (for example in some german rap of the 1990s and 2000s) is part of that conjuncture, where formerly racial attributions and meanings are desemanticized. however, scholars like fatima el-tayeb (2011) have pointed out that such desemanticizing attitudes have not diminished the importance of whiteness as an unmarked norm and structure of dominance. like many of their counterparts in the usa, many white germans now assume that they are colour-blind, or even claim that they are not really white, which seems to denote a more relaxed mode of cultural identity (sieg 2015). from a critical viewpoint, however, such statements can mask the inability to confront the ongoing privileges of being recognized as white in society that has not substantially confronted its racism, which it always situates elsewhere, abroad, among the ‘less enlightened,’ or below the line of middle-class respectability. furthermore, contemporary white german self-definitions often express an omnivorous form, in which they (or should we say we?) consider themselves beyond the particularities of culture and history, free to consume at will, whereas numerous others are seen as fixed in time, space, and culture (el-tayeb 2011).49 as a history of practices of appropriation afro-americanophilia has contributed significantly, even decisively, to such patterns. looking at changes to afro-americanophilia as it functions as a lingua franca across various social divides, especially its diversification into afro-german or (post-)migrant variants, also allows us to explore how and when unmarked german whiteness has been challenged. our chronological account has moved from histories of fremdheit (otherness/alienness), told from the viewpoint of an imaginary racially homogenous 49 many similar middle-class ideas of the self exist in other countries too (skeggs 2005). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 2 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 31 national self, to a contemporary scenario featuring diversity and contestation, where there is no clear, homogeneous national centre that defines what is other or exotic (terkessidis 2002, 2006). in the process, afro-americanophilia has diversified to include shared, parallel, analogue forms and experiences of social and political marginality amongst many different germans. we have followed a largely germany-centered timeframe, but ours has been a path of ‘strategic methodological nationalism,’ not intended to re-inscribe the importance of the national frame. in that sense, despite the ostensibly national focus of our two survey essays—‘afro-americanophilia in germany’—they have remained alive 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purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: marks, n. 2017. population, reproduction and ivf in new caledonia: exploring sociocultural and caring dimensions of sustainable development. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:2, 6-26. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v14i2.5410 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 2 september 2017 communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue, guest edited by anu bissoonauth and rowena ward. research article population, reproduction and ivf in new caledonia: exploring sociocultural and caring dimensions of sustainable development nicola marks university of wollongong corresponding author: dr nicola marks, school of humanities and social inquiry, faculty of law, humanities and the arts, university of wollongong, northfields avenue, wollongong nsw 2522, australia. nicola_marks@uow.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5410 article history: received 12/02/2017; revised 07/05/2017; accepted 21/05/2017; published 05/10/2017 abstract both sustainability and sustainable development have multiple meanings that are underpinned by diverse normative visions. nonetheless, sustainable development is currently centre-stage at the global level. the main goal of this paper is to critically examine these important concepts, in particular their social and cultural dimensions, and to make a conceptual offering: that of ‘caring sustainable development.’ this way of thinking about sustainable development aims to grapple in a situated way with the different normative underpinnings of sustainability in order to support the building of a common future. the paper briefly examines populations, reproduction (both biological and sociocultural) and human in vitro fertilization (ivf), as important sites for thinking about caring sustainable development. it draws on research in new caledonia examining which populations and which sociocultural practices are encouraged and sustained, or not. it finds that historically there are many examples of things and people being neglected and not cared for, or being encouraged to ‘develop’ in problematic ways. by contrast, recent practices associated with ivf suggest ways forward that would enable caring sustainable development. résumé la durabilité et le développement durable ont des significations multiples, qui sont soustendues par diverses visions normatives. néanmoins, le développement durable occupe declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the research for this paper was funded by an arc discovery grant (dp 150101081), for a project entitled ivf and assisted reproductive technologies: the global experience, chief investigators nicola marks, sarah ferber and vera mackie. 6 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5410 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5410 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:nicola_marks@uow.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5410 actuellement une place centrale sur le plan mondial. le but principal de cet article est d’examiner de manière critique ces concepts importants, en particulier leurs dimensions sociales et culturelles, et de faire une contribution conceptuelle qui est celle de la notion du ‘care dans le développement durable.’ cette façon de penser au développement durable vise à aborder ces différents fondements normatifs, de façon localisée, pour soutenir la construction à long terme d’un futur commun. l’article examine ensuite brièvement les populations, la reproduction (à la fois biologique et socio-culturelle) et la fécondation humaine in vitro (fiv ), en tant que sites importants pour penser à l’idée du ‘care’ dans le développement durable. il s’appuie sur la recherche en nouvelle calédonie pour analyser quelles populations et quelle pratiques socio-culturelles sont encouragées voire soutenues ou pas. l’article trouve que du point de vue historique, il y a de nombreux exemples de choses et de personnes qui ont été négligées et dont on ne se préoccupait pas, ou alors qui étaient encouragées à se ‘développer’ de manière problématique. en revanche, les pratiques récentes associées à la fiv suggèrent des moyens d’aller de l’avant qui permettraient de favoriser le ‘care’ dans développement durable. keywords new caledonia; ethics of care; caring sustainable development; stratified reproduction; postcolonialism; assisted reproduction; ivf sustainability and sustainable development are firmly on today’s international agenda. for example, in 2015 the united nations (un) released seventeen ‘sustainable development goals’ or sdgs (united nations 2015b) to replace the eight ‘millennium development goals’ or mdgs from 2000. the sdgs differ from the mdgs in a number of ways. in addition to targeting all states, rather than developing countries, they are more wide-ranging. they aim to promote sustainability in the areas of consumption, cities, industrialization and economic growth (sdg 8, 9, 11 and 12 [united nations 2015b]),1 and to combat hunger, illness, exclusion, discrimination, and environmental degradation (sdg 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 and 16 [united nations 2015b]). the sdgs include goals relating to sexual and reproductive health services (sdg 3 and 5 [united nations 2015b]), which were missing from the mdgs (newman et al. 2014: 53). they also highlight the importance of sociocultural factors, by placing ‘culture’ at the centre of their aims (unesco n.d.) and by referring to three key dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental (united nations 2015b: 3). recognition by the un that sustainability and its multiple dimensions are important is worth noting as it points to an appetite for nuanced and multi-faceted approaches to crucial global problems. however, the sdgs have also been criticized for not articulating how, in practice, different issues could be addressed to reach overarching goals, how different stakeholders would be involved, and how competing goals and trade-offs would be managed (international council for science & international social science council 2015: 5–9, 85–86). this is an important limitation as there are many complex and sometimes competing interconnected aspects of sustainable development, for instance when economic development leads to environmental degradation and increased poverty and ill-health. of particular relevance to this paper, sustainable development is entangled in intricate ways with reproduction, health and population dynamics; these are areas the un has struggled with 1 see also united nations (2015a). it is also worth noting that many of the sdgs are tightly interwoven (international council for science & international social science council 2015). population, reproduction and ivf in new caledonia: exploring sociocultural and caring dimensions of sustainable development portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 7 for several decades. in 1994, the international conference on population and development was held in cairo. according to the conference report, women’s empowerment and improved health (which can be partly achieved through education leading to reduced fertility) were important goals in and of themselves, but they were also deemed to be ‘essential for the achievement of sustainable development’ (united nations 1994: 22, see also 76). petchesky, however, identifies ‘fault lines’ in the cairo report. many arguments made by feminists and sexual health advocates seemed to have been heard, but their implementation was made impossible by the focus on ‘sustained economic growth’ (petchesky 1995: 157, my emphasis) and by the failure to recognize the broader macro-economic conditions that increase maternal mortality, for instance, and maintain global racialized health and economic disparities. the above stratifying arrangements need to be ‘unsettled’ (m. murphy 2015), and attempts at development, including sustainable development, need to be examined in specific sociocultural, political, economic and historical contexts in order to reveal potential ‘fault lines.’ in this paper, i first want to make a theoretical contribution to this unsettling by critiquing ‘modernist’ approaches to sustainable development, such as those that focus on economic development only, and by highlighting why the sociocultural dimensions of development are important. with that aim i propose the concept of ‘caring sustainable development.’ while the concept does not offer ready-made solutions or lists of how to do sustainable development properly, the notion of caring sustainable development offers ways of noticing and caring for some of the people and sociocultural dimensions that are currently neglected or not sustained.2 second, i want to make an empirical contribution to current debates on sustainability by examining development, sustainability and reproduction in a specific place, new caledonia, where the interconnectedness of sociocultural and other factors can be crucial. for instance, conservation projects need to be understood against the backdrop of diverse cultural identities, desire for land preservation and economic development, and complex colonial histories (horowitz 2008). my case study focuses on which populations and which sociocultural practices have been sustained or encouraged to develop. in what follows, the first section critiques diverse understandings of sustainability and development, and highlights how they are underpinned by different, often competing, normative visions. i argue that the social and cultural dimensions of sustainability, as well as the need to include ‘caring,’ are important, and propose a concept of sustainability that is multi-faceted, and of development that is nonlinear and not predetermined: ‘caring sustainable development.’ this concept can work through multiple normative visions and aims to construct a shared world. the next section examines reproduction and population through the lens of caring sustainable development. here i argue why reproduction, populations and sustainability should be considered together. it examines new caledonia’s history, in particular relationship between settlers from europe and indigenous kanak populations.3 the section suggests 2 in this paper, culture is understood in a broad sense as a ‘set of beliefs, practices, rituals, and traditions shared by a group of people with at least one point of common identity (such as their ethnicity, race, or nationality)’ (buchanan 2010: 105). the term ‘culture’ denotes artistic practices, ways of working the land, ways of thinking about family and kinship, and also everyday practices and ‘the glue holding society together’ (2010: 105). ‘society’ refers to ‘the ensemble of institutions, organizations, and relationships that give support to the individual’ (2010: 441). although the labels ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ are not synonymous, strict distinctions between the two cannot be easily made (2010: 105). in this paper, moreover, i talk about sociocultural sustainability, for example, to signal the focus on maintaining the cultural heritage of diverse groups, and on the diverse institutions and practices that might sustain these groups. 3 i use the label kanak to refer to indigenous melanesian people of new caledonia. this was the label used by indigenous people i met there when referring to themselves. marks portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 8 that there are a number of problematic assumptions around what needs to be sustained, and little evidence of paying attention to those that are neglected. i then turn to recent practices in human in vitro fertilization (ivf) and assisted reproduction in new caledonia; and i highlight instances of caring sustainable development. the final section concludes with reflections on how caring sustainable development, whilst not a panacea, can be useful in thinking about how new caledonia might move forward in sustaining and developing diverse groups and sociocultural practices. here i also make some suggestions about how ‘caring sustainable development’ might be useful in global discussions of sustainability. a conceptual offering: ‘caring sustainable development’ the first formal formulation of sustainable development is usually traced back to the 1987 report ‘our common future’ (or brundtland report, after its chair gro harlem brundtland) released by the un’s world commission on environment and development (or brundtland commission). it states: sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. it contains within it two key concepts: the concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs. (united nations 1987: 2.1) this definition is sufficiently vague as to have been taken up in a number of domains, and a range of practices and institutions have been set up in the name of ‘sustainable development.’ however, this interpretive flexibility has been criticized for rendering the concept meaningless or at least unhelpful (beckerman 1994; daly, jacobs & skolimowski 1995; luke 2005; springett 2005; vallance, perkins & dixon 2011). nonetheless, i will argue here that sustainable development can be understood in practical and politically useful ways. the idea of sustainability itself is meant to rest on the so-called ‘three pillars’: economic, sociocultural and environmental. these pillars are often conceptualized as compatible, but this is not necessarily the case (boström 2012: 3). for instance, a number of scholars argue that the main dimension of sustainability that was acted upon, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, was that of economic sustainability, understood as economic growth (robert, parris & leiserowitz 2005: 11; redclift 2005: 215). they argue that actions taken in the name of sustainability, but with the goal of economic growth, can be at odds with ‘green’ versions of sustainability that favour reduced consumption (boström 2012: 4). in turn more environmentally focussed versions of sustainability have been criticized for being detrimental to the world’s poor, for whom survival, rather than organic foods or hybrid cars, are important on a daily basis. thus the normative assumptions that underpin different versions of sustainability can be quite contradictory (redclift 2005: 215). the sociocultural dimensions of sustainability are arguably those that have been most sidelined (beckerman 1994; redclift 2005; k. murphy 2012). it has been suggested that this is because of some of the inherent conflicts between the different dimensions of sociocultural sustainability. for example, vallance, perkins and dixon argue that there are three types of social-cultural sustainability (they use the label ‘social sustainability’). the first aims to reduce ‘poverty and inequity’; the second aims to modify ‘behaviours so as to achieve bio-physical population, reproduction and ivf in new caledonia: exploring sociocultural and caring dimensions of sustainable development portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 9 environmental goals’; and the third is about ‘the preservation of sociocultural patterns and practices in the context of social and economic change’ (2011: 345). it is easy to see that some people’s desire to preserve a large residential block with room for a garden can be at odds with equity and access to housing for all, and with visions for high density sustainable urban living. because of the multiple perspectives on sustainability and its meanings, it becomes clear that when solutions for sustainability are imposed from above they often fail on a number of dimensions that were perhaps not considered relevant initially. this highlights the need to listen to diverse perspectives. as irwin argues in his discussion of the brundtland report: ‘there will be no “sustainability” without a greater potential for citizens to take control of their own lives, health and environment.’ he then adds that ‘success in this goal requires some careful thought about the relations between technical expertise, citizen needs and contemporary culture’ (1995: 7). this suggests the importance of locally relevant solutions to global problems. it also highlights how technical solutions alone will not be sufficient.4 the different dimensions of sustainability, including sociocultural ones, need to be considered, and voices from diverse people heard and acted upon. in addition to sustainability, the idea of ‘development’ has also been problematized. it is often seen to be part of neocolonial efforts whereby less ‘developed’ countries or peoples need to catch up with the so-called modern world. this conception is too linear, imposes unacknowledged normative views on populations with different perspectives and histories, and leaves very restricted options for ‘under-developed’ countries and people to become ‘developed’ (escobar 1995; leblic 1993: 10–21). this can even be the case when locals are consulted as part of development efforts (cooke & kothari 2001). this version of development can be called ‘modernist development’ where new technologies are regarded as apolitical and automatically leading to improved lives for those who adopt them (leach, scoones & wynne 2005: 7). technology is contrasted to traditions, customs and culture, which are seen to be backward and in need of modernizing. however, there is increasing evidence that there are multiple ways of being ‘developed’ and of resisting imposed visions of development, multiple pathways to development, and multiple ways of re-appropriating technologies for development (escobar 1995; leach, scoones & wynne 2005). therefore, we need a more dynamic conceptualization of development. the type of sustainable development i advocate here does not automatically reject old-fashioned practices as being underdeveloped; nor does it focus on freezing time or attempting to return to or sustain a nostalgic past in which everything seemed better. as jolly (2002) argues, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ ways of doing should not be thought of as incompatible. rather, sustainable development should consider old and new ways of doing, and recognize that practices can be sustained even as they change. in the case study considered below, this means not thinking of kanak culture as static and ‘traditional,’ or in need of eradication through westernization or rescuing. it means thinking of settler and kanak cultures as dynamic, evolving and inextricably linked. this understanding of culture as dynamic can also be found in the words of jean-marie tjibaou, the famous kanak independence leader, who led fights for political and cultural recognitions of indigenous peoples in new caledonia. he advocated a renewal of 4 for example, some scientists and corporations have championed golden rice, genetically modified rice fortified in vitamin a precursor, as a way to prevent blindness in malnourished infants. jasanoff (2005) discusses how such specific technical approaches are rejected by green groups, farmers and others who want broader conversations about the apparent corporate take-over of the food chain, postcolonial legacies of inequality, and whether genetically modified products are even desirable, let alone the magic bullets that they are sometimes painted in the media. marks portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 10 kanak artistic practices, which would include elements of settler and global practices (tjibaou 1996: 154–156, see also 42). the measures of success for sustainable development are not simply increased use of technology or increased economic wealth, but are related to locally set community goals, as well as broader goals of equity and inclusion. i elaborate on this below by considering the importance of care and affect. caring and sustainability contrary to the modernist idea of development and to versions of sustainability that focus on economic growth, i want to think of sustainable development as flexible and locallysituated (culturally, politically, historically, socially), and as underpinned by different normative visions and commitments. to do this, i draw on discussions about the ethics of care, since they shed light on ways of thinking through potentially conflicting normative visions of both development and sustainability. i draw on tronto and fisher, who argue the following: we need an understanding of caring that allows for contradictions and encompasses the whole range of human activities that serve to sustain us … we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair “our world ” so that we can live in it as well as possible. that world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web. (fisher & tronto 1990: 40, original emphasis) this way of thinking about caring is particularly attuned to the fact that ‘needs’ (the word used by fisher and tronto, and by the un) are diverse and variable across time and space. as such, ‘the caring process is not a gracefully unfolding one, but [rather it] contains different components that often clash with each other’ (fisher & tronto 1990: 40). by grappling with these clashes, and with the ‘rich and knotty texture of our caring experience’ (fisher & tronto 1990: 40), we can hope to generate locally-situated ways of living in sustainable ways. this idea of care has been built upon by puig de la bellacasa who advocates caring not as an ‘accusatory moral stance—if only you would care’ (2011: 95, original emphasis), but as a ‘commitment to neglected things’ (2011: 85; see also marks & russell 2015). puig de la bellacasa argues that we can care not only for and with humans, but also for and with multiple others (2011; 2015). in practical terms, this can mean observing instances of caring as a starting point. the next step is not to develop universal top-down norms since there is no ‘recipe’ for caring (puig de la bellacasa 2012: 211), but instead to make a commitment to instances of ‘ethical doings’ (puig de la bellacasa 2010: 162). this can involve inviting others to care, practicing care ourselves, making a ‘commitment to share troubles and burdens of those who are neglected,’ and maintaining the resources (affective and material) that enable caring (puig de la bellacasa 2010: 165, original emphasis). caring puts affect at the centre of our ways of thinking and doing. importantly, caring is not thought of here in the traditionally gendered way where care work is feminine work; nor is it something that involves an individual. rather, caring is about everyday practices that might crystallize in institutions, cultures, or ‘even global levels of thinking’ (puig de la bellacasa 2010: 165–166; see also tronto 1995: 145). it is not only about doing pleasant things, or things that make us feel happy; caring can also be about culling or killing (law 2010). caring reminds us of ‘the joint fortunes of all forms of life under socio-technical becomings’ (puig de la bellacasa 2011: 98) and therefore is central to sustainable development, especially if we accept that there are ‘limits,’ as posited by the un’s world commission on environment and development (wced) brundtland report (united nations 1987). population, reproduction and ivf in new caledonia: exploring sociocultural and caring dimensions of sustainable development portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 11 in addition to caring involving negative affect, positive affect does not automatically lead to the type of caring i am proposing. certain actions that make us feel good may ‘work with and through the grain of hegemonic structures, rather than against them’ (m. murphy 2015: 719). for example, as murphy demonstrates, some instances of feminist engagements with healthcare enabled positive affect by encouraging rich, mostly white us women to attend galas and donate money to support the health of poor, mostly brown women in africa or pakistan. these practices fail to attend to the stratified worlds these different groups inhabit, and do not address the colonial legacies that make some women in need of help (m. murphy 2015: 727-9). following haraway (2010), both murphy (2015: 722) and puig de la bellacasa (2012: 704) advocate ‘staying with the trouble.’ this means paying attention to colonial, racialized and gendered histories, to privilege, and to stratification; it involves ‘historicizing’ and ‘stirring up’ ‘hegemonic histories’ and structures of privilege, and it involves ‘reckoning with’ them (m. murphy 2015: 731). to sum up, my suggestion for caring sustainable development is to examine specific attempts at sustainability or development, and to pull out context-based ways of caring (these may be conflicting), make them visible, and highlight what ways of being or doing are being sustained. it invites, as puig de la bellacasa puts it, people to respect each other’s ways of caring in order to ‘build a common world’ (2011: 88), to ‘foster caring relations’ (2011: 97), and to ‘share the burden of stratified worlds’ (2011: 94). these examinations need to consider and unsettle hegemonic structures, especially those that impose unsatisfactory ways of being onto silenced or oppressed others. caring sustainable development is situated though, and criteria for success will vary. however, by tracing different instances of caring (and lack thereof ), one can extract what might be assembled to generate further caring relationships, and perhaps enable the equity and inclusion discussed in the previous section. reproduction, populations, culture and sustainability reproduction, including reproductive and sexual health, is worth examining through the lens of caring sustainable development because of its multiple interconnected dimensions, such as gender equity, cultural norms and population dynamics. newman et al. (2014) argue that advocates for gender equality and reproductive rights need to find ways of talking effectively with those who are focussed on the environment, food security and demographic changes, including urbanization and household composition, because none of these issues can be understood in isolation. indeed, reproduction can include individual access to contraception, pregnancy care, infancy care, or fertility treatments. however, reproduction is also about population birth rates and death rates, fertility rates, or fecundity rates. it is correlated with education levels and gender equality (educated women have fewer children), job opportunities and poverty (paternal and maternal income can influence fecundity), as well as environmental factors (semen quality can be affected by pollution) or cultural norms (expectations of bearing large or small numbers of children, or cultural taboos surrounding sexuality leading to increased sexually transmissible diseases and reduced fertility). there are many social determinants of human reproduction (eshre capri workshop group 2001) as well as fertility changes due to environmental conditions (association of reproductive health professionals 2010). the environment can be affected by fertility. one of the earliest and perhaps most notorious discussion of this is in the limits to growth: a report for the club of rome’s project on the predicament of mankind (meadows et al. 1972) which examined the interaction between global population growth and pollution, resources, industrialization and food production. the book marks portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 12 received strong criticisms as well as support (sandbach 1978; turner 2008). the link between population and sustainability is still widely debated; some people advocate ways of curbing population growth (smail 2002), whilst others see these approaches as impractical (bradshaw & brook 2014) or ethically problematic (newman et al. 2014). assisted reproduction and infertility treatments have also been linked to sustainability. richie (2015) argues that in order to be sustainable, countries need to stop supporting assisted reproductive technologies, especially where there is no biological reason for infertility. this stands in contrast to those who have raised concerns about the inequalities in access to infertility treatments and support in low resource countries (inhorn 2009). an ‘infertility belt’ has been documented in africa (inhorn & van balen 2002), and the silence from western countries surrounding infertility in third world countries has been criticized, as has the ‘tacitly eugenic view that the infertile poor are unworthy of treatment’ (birenbaum-carmeli & inhorn 2009a: 6). there are also heavy social and economic consequences to remaining childless in a number of countries (birenbaum-carmeli & inhorn 2009b; inhorn & van balen 2002). if we take seriously bellacasa’s invitation to relate with multiple others and to foster ‘caring relations’ especially with those who are neglected, then the question of who is and who is not ‘worthy’ of reproducing becomes central to a caring, rather than modernist, approach to sustainable development. we also need to consider what is being reproduced, both with assisted and non-assisted reproduction. a number of social scientists have argued that when we make kin, that is when we reproduce, we are reproducing much more than biological features such as genes: we are also reproducing society and culture (strathern 1992; franklin & ragone 1998). for instance, we might be reproducing and normalizing specific assumptions about what the ideal family looks like (the nuclear family for instance), and these assumptions may be deeply racialized or exclusionary. we can thus see the multiple, at times contrary, normative commitments underlying different visions of the relationship between sustainability and (assisted) reproduction. that relationship pushes us to consider who and what is being sustained or developed in different visions of sustainable development. are certain modes of sustainable development reproducing particular cultural perspectives at the expense of others? is the expansion of neo-liberal economics eradicating local cultures and ways of being? are some versions of development too narrow, hegemonic, racist or stratifying? these are some of the questions i seek to answer through my case study of new caledonia. i now turn to a selection of episodes from new caledonia’s history to suggest some of the complex ways in which population control, reproduction, cultural practices, normative assumptions about specific people, and visions of development are connected in complex ways to sustainability. i then examine the contemporary example of ivf practice. i draw on a range of secondary sources including public health reports, reports on employment data, case studies of indigenous development, and historical analyses of settler-indigenous relations. i also draw on primary sources including census data, law texts and interviews. the interviews took place in 2016 with four key professionals who are involved in healthcare, three of them directly in ivf. while the interview numbers are very small they represent most of the core-set of people providing infertility services in new caledonia, as they are the crucial gate-keepers to these services. one interview respondent was kanak and provided very interesting insights, even though these clearly cannot be taken as representing the kanak population in any way. population, reproduction and ivf in new caledonia: exploring sociocultural and caring dimensions of sustainable development portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 13 patients were not interviewed, as the data presented here are part of a broader project aimed at understanding professional views on ivf.5 a history of populations and sociocultural sustainability in new caledonia new caledonia is a french overseas country: it has relatively high levels of administrative independence from france, but is on the un list of countries in need of decolonization (united nations 2016). a referendum is set to take place in 2018 on full independence. at the last census, people from a range of communities were counted: 39 percent indigenous kanak, 27 percent european, 8 percent from the territory of the wallis and futuna islands, 8.6 percent ‘mixed communities,’ and 7.4 percent ‘caledonians’ (isee 2014). the country is relatively rich and has a high gdp (especially in comparison to its pacific island neighbours), but the economy is strongly propped up by france. there is free education and free healthcare for all, following french principles of equality. however, income, mortality, employment, health and other factors are unevenly distributed, as i discuss below. to understand this, it is essential to consider new caledonia’s colonial heritage, as well as present day socio-political configurations. new caledonia was settled by the french in 1853. it began mainly as a penal colony (discussed by pascual [2017] in this issue), until the discovery of nickel in 1875. today, new caledonia is the world’s 5th largest nickel producer, and nickel accounts for 97 percent of the value of the country’s exports. if we were examining this history, paying attention only to economic growth, we would see multiple examples of economic development, especially with the nickel mine and the huge riches enjoyed by absentee landlords such as maison ballande who own much new caledonian land but have never come to new caledonia (kohler & shineberg 1992). taking a caring sustainable development lens, we see a number of ways in which there were neglected others, hegemonic colonial structures, and heavy stratification; we can pay attention to ways in which some people and things were not cared for. the french always had a fraught relationship with indigenous kanak populations. as early as 1856, commander testard, responsible for the colony, described the indigenous person as ‘intelligent, but a monster of perversity.’ he then went on to argue: ‘we must start by destroying this population if we want to live in security in this country’ (cited in goblot 1985: 108). from 1859, kanak people were displaced by the settler government into reservations and there was an assumption that they would die out, partly because of natural evolution (leenhardt, cited in tjibaou 1996: 49). while early census figures are unreliable (shineberg 1986; leblic 1993: 60), it seems that kanak numbers dipped significantly after the arrival of european settlers, falling from an estimated 60,000 in 1853 to 27,100 in 1921 (munholland 2005). kanak people still accounted for the majority of the population until 1956 (leblic 1993: 30–32), except for the 1946 census when they briefly were a minority. the kanak were offered very few economic development opportunities. under france’s ‘code de l’indigénat’ [code of the indiginate], which lasted from 1887 until after the second world war, they were subject to strict curfew and restrictions on movements. kanak also had to pay taxes to settlers, usually in the form of free labour. even though cheap/free labour was needed after the discovery of nickel, the french preferred to bring in other islanders who were seen as more reliable (shineberg 1999). indigenous people only became full french citizens and were able to vote in local, as well as french presidential and other elections, from 1953. 5 the research was approved by the university of wollongong human research ethics committee. marks portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 14 this mistreatment has led to a number of clashes between european and kanak populations, and several strong calls for independence, most recently during ‘les évènements’ [the events] from 1984 to 1988. many revolts were violently crushed. overall, there has been what leblic (1993: 53–74) calls ‘la valse des statuts’ [the waltz of statutes], whereby successive french governments have given and reclaimed powers to and from local authorities (including kanak groups), have tried to include indigenous people in new caledonian life, but have also tried to quash calls for independence. strategies to maintain french control over new caledonia have partly focussed on populations and reproduction, as hinted at above. in 1972, there was an infamous directive from the then french prime minister, pierre messmer, to build an additional french country in the pacific by encouraging migration of french nationals from mainland france, tahiti and reunion to new caledonia, and by countering the nationalistic advances the kanak people were making at the time. this directive aimed explicitly to reduce the overall percentage of the kanak population so that it could not influence elections. the same year, the mayor of nouméa (the capital of new caledonia) asked french people to ‘faire du blanc’ [make some white] (leblic 1993: 30–32). reproduction and populations are thus key political sites in the territory. in addition to vast reductions in the kanak population, their ways of being and doing were threatened. for instance, the french language was imposed in all schools from 1853, and the teaching of all other languages was banned from 1863. we also see, contrary to irwin’s (1995) urging raised above, little evidence of kanak people being given opportunities ‘to take control of their own lives, health and environment,’ therefore making any goals of ‘sustainability’ harder to achieve. this is especially visible when we consider land rights. when european settlers seized new caledonian lands and sent kanak people off to reservations, they failed to consider the strong relationships kanaks have with the land; these relations shape a range of sociocultural practices (see pascual [2017] in this issue). this is, in part, because of a widely held belief that kanak people did not know how to look after the land, and had neither agricultural practices (shineberg 1986) nor a concept of land ownership (leblic 1993). this has been shown to be untrue: kanak people grow crops that are essential not only for food, but also for gifts and exchanges at important occasions (such as marriages). there are also codified ways in which people can work the land (with particular clans linked to particular lands) and complex irrigation systems that are integrated into the existing ecosystems. other moments of new caledonian history do suggest attempts to bring kanak and other populations together. there have been a number of attempts at ‘development’ as well as devolution of powers to kanak leaders. however, these were often deemed failures by the european settlers or the french metropolitan sponsors. such opinions reflect diverging criteria for success, a lack of recognition of the impact of colonization, and sometimes a lack of good will in acknowledging success. for example, in 1986, after a swell in support for independence, the french government devolved a number of responsibilities to local new caledonian governments, including health. local kanak-led governments developed healthcare in many remote places, and invested in disease prevention and public health education. this was essential since outside nouméa there were very few health facilities.6 despite initial positive results, this devolution was soon reversed by the french government, due to a desire to block 6 in addition, historically the kanak had not been treated in the same hospitals as settlers, instead undergoing treatment in the indigenous hospital in the capital. population, reproduction and ivf in new caledonia: exploring sociocultural and caring dimensions of sustainable development portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 15 further moves towards kanak independence (leblic 1993: 218–24). so success from the point of view of improving kanak health for instance was ignored, and the normative commitment to maintaining the integrity of the empire dominated; only colonial ways of doing were sustained and cared for. clashing normative commitments are also visible in attempts at kanak economic development. leblic (1993) argues that these were dominated by european visions of development, whereby kanak people were thought of as archaic and needing better assimilation into the new caledonian economy. many of the solutions (grants for local projects to support economic development) did not lead to increased integration of kanak people into the broader economy, or to commercial crops. the projects were deemed failures by the european sponsors. this can be attributed to a disregard for the historical stratification and colonial heritage of stolen lands, which was accompanied by the destruction of many dimensions of local culture. most interestingly, however, many of the kanak did not see these projects as failures, because they judged them by different criteria. for them the goal was often to regain their lands. if that meant having to apply to conduct a project on it, such as grow coffee, a crop not traditionally grown there and which locals said they did not ‘care’ for in the same way, so be it. whether the coffee brought them money or not did not matter, only the land did. the above is an example of sustaining or regaining access to particular cultural practices (leblic 1993: especially 389–397). even though the land practices were not the same as before colonization, if we accept that culture is dynamic rather than frozen, we can see kanak culture being sustained through a cooptation of colonial structures. the festival melanesia 2000 can be understood in a similar light, although it is a much more obvious success story of sustainable kanak ways of being and doing. melanesia 2000 took place in 1975 in nouméa (earlier than the above examples); it was the first festival in the world to celebrate melanesian art. over 2,000 kanak people attended, and there were 50,000 audience members (tjibaou 1996: 48). kanak independence leader jean marie-tjibaou explains that the festival occurred at a historical moment when kanak people were excluded from social and economic life and when discussions of devolution were stalling. nonetheless it ended up a huge success, and was recognized internationally and, perhaps more importantly, by local kanak and regional melanesian groups. kanak people had initially been reluctant to participate because they saw this as a colonial project; it was funded through the colonial administration and the french government initially saw it as a way to regain authority over kanak people (tjibaou 1996: 152). but the aims of tjibaou and others to make this festival about the kanak people and to enable cultural ‘renaissance’ were successful (tjibaou 1996: 42–43, 152). increased kanak recognition followed, and land reform proceeded, albeit slowly. however, in 1986, a new right wing president, jacques chirac, was elected in metropolitan france and reform once again stalled. despite some examples of kanak ways of doing being sustained, this section shows the significance of (post)colonial arrangements in neglecting kanak people. the ways in which things were cared for, and the kinds of things that were cared for, often ran with the grain of these hegemonic structures, to use m. murphy’s words (2015): they sustained economic enrichment (of some) and supported modernist sustainable development, usually at the expense of kanak people. there were few attempts at ‘building a common world’ (puig de la bellacasa 2011: 88) that included indigenous peoples and their ways of being and living. marks portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 16 ethical doings for sustainability in relation to reproduction and ivf today given the episodes noted above, in which kanak populations were seen as a threat to the french empire, it would seem likely that kanak peoples would not be encouraged to reproduce, and would not be imagined as recipients of assisted reproductive technologies such as ivf. however, this is not the case today. kanak populations, especially those living away from the capital are still over-represented in early deaths. but they have higher fecundity levels than european settlers (isee 2012).7 kanak people also have high levels of sexually transmitted diseases (direction des affaires sanitaires et sociales 2014). these diseases are considered either to be ‘white man’s disease’— which reflects colonial historical contexts—or women’s diseases—which reflects local sociocultural contexts (salomon 2000a). this results in women carrying the burden for these diseases, in diseases not being treated in men, and in high rates of disease; this, in turn, can lead to decreased fertility. in parallel, there is strong pressure on kanak women to become mothers, which salomon calls ‘obligatory maternity’ (2002). in combination, it is likely that involuntary childlessness levels are high. however, being infertile is taboo, leading to delays in accessing treatment and further chances of reduced fertility. it is vital, then, to explore to what extent involuntary childlessness in a group of historically marginalized people is being addressed. in many countries around the world assisted reproduction is big business (spar 2006; cooper & waldby 2014), and its use is heavily stratified along ethnic or economic lines (inhorn, ceballo & nachtigall 2009; mamo & alston-stepnitz 2015). however, the situation is very different in new caledonia. because the health system is based on the french one, it is public, and there are very generous provisions for access to infertility treatment. this includes at least four cycles of ivf, reimbursed to 90 percent. this is much more than many european countries (berg brigham et al. 2013). in addition to this, beside the hospitalization for egg retrieval and then embryo implantation, all the drugs, early consultations and blood tests are covered. also covered are transport costs for treatment, and this includes travel from the smaller islands to nouméa where the fertility centre is located.8 from this we can see that all people, including those with lower incomes and who live further away from the capital, are able to access ivf. this includes many kanak people who still have higher levels of unemployment and financial insecurity than the national average (ris 2013), and marks a big difference from the 1970s when there was a wish for white people to migrate to new caledonia and reproduce. in addition, during interviews, health professionals involved in infertility services expressed an explicit aim of ensuring kanak people having access to treatment. this includes high-tech ivf, and ivf doctors regularly travel to the islands and their dispensaries in order to consult with a range of kanak women. they do this in a culturally sensitive way, and do not advertise that they are infertility specialists, but rather set up more generic women’s health consultations. local midwives and word-of-mouth are essential here in letting women know they can discuss their fertility concerns. there are also lower technology interventions such as education 7 this is an estimate, based on using place of residence as a proxy for ethnicity, since collecting data linking ethic origin and health is problematic in new caledonia. 8 there is only one infertility centre in nouméa, with a chief biologist, a medical doctor and a technician. there are two main private ivf providers in the capital. most of the medical interventions (egg retrieval and embryo implantation) take place in the hospital in nouméa, regardless of whether the patient is private or public. population, reproduction and ivf in new caledonia: exploring sociocultural and caring dimensions of sustainable development portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 17 regarding sexually transmitted diseases. in addition, some ivf practitioners are conducting research in order to develop medical protocols for ivf that are specifically adapted to kanak women (for example specially adapted drug dosages). these examples clearly go against the historical attempts at eradicating kanak populations; rather they indicate how the population is being sustained. but is this at the cost of kanak ways of being and doing? the answer is complex. on the one hand, there are some shifts away from ‘traditional’ ways of doing towards western ones. on the other hand, ‘traditional’ ways are evolving into new contemporary kanak ways of doing. as i suggested above, it is artificial to separate ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’/’western,’ or ‘under-developed’ and ‘developed’ (leblic 1993). therefore, it is problematic to assume that any adoption of new ways of doing is necessarily at the cost of kanak culture. rather, as with all cultures, kanak culture evolves in dynamic ways. we saw an example of this above with the use of ‘modern’ economic development plans to regain access to land. the creation and renewal of ways of doing also need to be examined in the context of new reproductive technologies. while those couples who consult for assisted reproduction are low in number, according to health practitioners in the island dispensaries there is some evidence of growing knowledge about ivf, and of interest in the options it offers to counter involuntary childlessness9. this does not mean, however, that customary medicine is being replaced by so-called western or modern medicine. indeed, while the two have had an uneasy co-habitation (salomon 2000b; jolly 2002), traditional medicine is recognized and its qualities accepted in some circles (lormée, cabalion & hnawia 2011). in many instances, old and new ways of doing medicine are blended (lepoutre 2000). in the context of reproduction and creating families, the kanak health professional i interviewed suggested there was a shift towards more individualism amongst young kanak people. customary adoption, which still occurs in new caledonia, places a different emphasis on biological ties, compared to ‘western’ understandings of kinship. indeed, it is common for children to be adopted by others in the community: by a childless couple; by a maternal uncle; by another group. these open adoptions are done according to complex social and cultural norms (leblic 2000; 2003). thus any move towards assisted reproduction with the expectation of creating genetically related kin can be interpreted as a move away from kanak culture. however, this kanak health professional emphasized that assisted reproductive technologies and kanak culture were not incompatible. in fact she suggested the importance of moving forwards, as caledonians, whether or not independence was the outcome of the 2018 referendum, and of finding ways of doing biological, social and cultural reproduction to reflect kanak as well as european practices. one suggestion was to rethink the anonymity of sperm donation (imposed from mainland france) to better take into account kanak conventions of not masking one’s genealogy. caring sustainable development, then, would be possible by assembling both kanak and settler views into future practices and policies surrounding assisted reproduction. 9 this interest parallels shifts seen more generally in young kanak people, women especially, who are turning towards french laws rather than customary ones to resolve disputes about family violence (salomon 2003). marks portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 18 conclusions this paper opened by discussing the un sustainable development goals, as an illustration of the apparent international interest in sustainable development and its interconnected sociocultural, economic and environmental dimensions. however, these dimensions can be opposing and attempts at sustainable development may only support some dimensions, whilst failing to address broader stratifying elements. therefore, it is timely to examine some examples of development and sustainability in practice and to conceptually refine the idea of sustainable development. this paper has attempted to do both these things, in order to contribute to unsettling stratifying arrangements. i have accordingly critiqued modernist versions of sustainable development, which tend to have a reductive focus on economic growth, and imagine development as linear, without recognising the dynamism of different cultures and ways of doing, and the multiple pathways to (and end-points of ) development. instead, i proposed the concept of ‘caring sustainable development.’ this concept echoes the recent global recognition of the interconnectedness of economic, environmental and sociocultural factors, and their importance in trying to address complex issues such as poverty, sustainability and equity. to that, my concept adds a commitment to constructing and looking after a shared world, through ongoing support for caring practices. this builds on recent scholarship on caring and affect, which urges us to pay attention to multiple, often neglected, others, as well as to the historically-situated sociocultural arrangements that may stratify or exclude (puig de la bellacasa 2010; m. murphy 2015). caring sustainable development inspires us to observe examples of caring and sustaining in particular situations. here, the case study was new caledonia, specifically the ways in which populations and sociocultural practices are enmeshed in intricate ways and have (or not) been sustained. new caledonia is a place with complicated (post-)colonial relations. looking at historical events, we can see that policies and practices aimed at shifting indigenous versus settler population numbers as well as indigenous versus settler ways of being and doing have been key political sites, including during fights for independence. my analysis identified many instances when kanak ways of being and doing were not sustained, but colonial ones were, for instance when indigenous lands were seized by absentee landlords, or when white people were encouraged to immigrate to new caledonia and to have children. these were examples of exclusion and many attempts at development reproduced settler colonial practices at the expense of indigenous ones. there were examples of neo-liberal economics attempting to eliminate indigenous ways of doing. these versions of development were narrow and hegemonic; some of them were explicitly racist. there were also examples of colonial and neo-liberal arrangements being co-opted for indigenous purposes. for instance, some kanak people were successful at regaining access to their lands by applying for french-supported development funds and setting up coffee plantations. if we see kanak culture as dynamic, rather than static, these examples show ways in which kanak culture could be sustained, even though it changed. however, the modernist normative visions often took over again, and projects seen as successes by indigenous people were labelled failures by their neo-liberal sponsors, and were not maintained (cared for and sustained) into the future. a more complex example is that of melanesia 2000, which marked an important moment in kanak cultural renaissance, but which also took place just before yet another halt in the devolution of powers to kanak people. population, reproduction and ivf in new caledonia: exploring sociocultural and caring dimensions of sustainable development portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 19 these aspects of new caledonia’s history suggest many ways in which its indigenous population’s sociocultural customs were not cared for, developed or sustained. however, recent practices in assisted reproduction offer possibilities for caring sustainable development. the core team responsible for fertility services in new caledonia is committed to sustaining kanak reproduction. the team is focused on biological reproduction, but in a way that does not dismiss kanak ways of doing, and that is not hegemonic or stratifying. if we accept that kanak culture can change without being lost, and that indigenous ways of doing are not automatically in opposition to ‘modern’ or technical ways of doing, assisted reproduction in new caledonia offers an example of caring practices: helping infertile people and sharing their burden, regardless of their ethnic and economic background, without dismissing cultural taboos about infertility. new caledonia is at a turning point in its history. there are multiple moments in which the future of the country will be discussed and decided upon, including the vote on independence scheduled for 2018. based on the findings presented forward here, there are examples of ethical doings and of caring sustainable development that can be further built upon. this might include drafting a caledonian bioethics law (rather than just importing a law from mainland france) that recognizes particular kanak ways of thinking about kinship and genealogy when dealing with gamete donation for assisted reproduction. this is one way in which every day caring practices might crystallize into institutions (puig de la bellacasa 2010: 165–166). in the 2009 census, a ‘caledonian’ category was added to the section regarding to which community people belong. one interpretation of this (and certainly partly true) is a cynical one that suggests the shift was aimed at making it impossible to compare different census figures and see the relative decline in kanak populations. however, this category, which is growing—it went from 5 percent in 2009 to 7.4 percent in 2014 (broustet & rivoilan 2015)— can perhaps be a symbol of moving to ‘build a common world’ (puig de la bellacasa 2011: 88) in new caledonia, and also more globally. what broader lessons can we learn from these examples? a central message is that caring sustainable development will look different in different situations. however, there are elements that policy-makers in the un with an interest in tackling complex problems like sustainability might find useful. the first is making spaces for and paying attention to multiple voices, especially those that are traditionally neglected, and recognizing that there are multiple normative visions for development and sustainability. this cannot be done with something like a one-off focus group: it requires enduring commitment. the second is highlighting arrangements that can be stratifying or exclusionary (such as colonial institutions), challenging them, and sharing the burdens they result in. the third is providing support for caring ways of doing. this includes ongoing financial support, but also more symbolic support such as recognising the importance of local practices and not treating ‘traditions’ as backward or in need of development. a final element important for caring sustainable development is the acknowledgement of different criteria for success, and the integration of these criteria into decisions on whether or not to continue with particular ways of doing. these suggestions are not offered as a list of things to do that, if ticked off, signal an end to our work because we are ‘doing things right’; rather they are meant to encourage us to worry about what ‘doing the right thing’ looks like ( jansen & roquas 2005: 147). these elements can be assembled in diverse situated ways into a ‘life sustaining web’ (fisher & tronto 1990: 40) marks portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 20 acknowledgements the research for this paper was funded by an arc discovery grant (dp 150101081), for a project entitled ivf and assisted reproductive technologies: the global experience. i would like to thank my co-chief investigators sarah ferber and vera mackie for productive discussions about this work, and rowena ward and anu bissoonauth-bedford who organized the round-table on sustainability in the pacific where i presented an earlier version of this paper and who were fantastic in supporting my contribution to this special issue. thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and the editor of portal for their useful and insightful suggestions. most importantly, thank you to the people who accepted to be interviewed for this research. references association of reproductive health professionals 2010, environmental impacts on reproductive health. online, available: http://www.arhp.org/publications-and-resources/clinical-proceedings/rhe [accessed 3 february 2017]. barrera, p. 2017, ‘10 top nickel-producing countries.’ online, available: http://investingnews.com/daily/ resource-investing/base-metals-investing/nickel-investing/10-top-nickel-producing-countries/ [accessed 17 may 2017]. beckerman, w. 1994, ‘“sustainable development”: is it a useful concept?,’ environmental values, vol. 3, no. 3: 191–209. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327194776679700 berg brigham, k., cadier, b. & chevreul, k. 2013, ‘the diversity of regulation and public financing of ivf in europe and its impact on utilization,’ human reproduction, vol. 28, no. 3: 666–675. https://doi. org/10.1093/humrep/des418 birenbaum-carmeli, d. & inhorn, m. c. 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(https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: moï, a. 2018. meurtres sans préméditation. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 72-76. https://doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v15i1-2.5760 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au cultural work meurtres sans préméditation anna moï independent author corresponding author: tess do, school of languages and linguistics, the university of melbourne, vic 3010. dot@unimelb.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5760 article history: received 19/092/2017; accepted 08/11/2017; published 23/08/2018 abstract anna moï, appointed chevalier des arts et des lettres in 2006, is a well-established french writer whose acclaimed literary works span nearly two decades. her first two collections of short stories set in contemporary vietnam, l’écho des rizières (2002) and parfum de pagode (2003), were well received by french critics. one of the most respected voices of the vietnamese diaspora, whose key novels were published by gallimard, moï provides an intimate portrait of vietnam and its people through historical moments, weaving the stories of individuals in with the history of their country. riz noir (2004), which won the prize for the best french-language debut novel at the festival du premier roman in cuneo, italy, recounts the story of two young female students and revolutionary fighters imprisoned in poulo condor; rapaces (2005), set against the backdrop of the indochinese war and the famine in tonkin, tells of the secret love story between a sculptor and his model; le venin du papillon (2017), anna moï’s most recent novel to date, for which she received the prestigious littérature-monde prize, retraces the heroine’s journey from child to adult in the midst of postcolonial political and military turbulence. moï is also the author of a collection of essays on language and identity, espéranto, desespéranto (2006), which reflects on her use of french as a tool of expression. she was one of the 44 signatories of the manifesto pour une littérature monde en français (2007), a movement that put forward the concept of world literature in french to challenge the ‘francocentric’ view of literature written in france. this essay expresses my work as a translingual novelist—immigrating from vietnamese to french. it deals with the impossibility, as a fiction writer reborn in a new language, to recount reality, as the real world is reflected in at least two cultural zones. the use of a pseudonym is the first step toward this split reality. a decision that entitles me to a new identity and one that also led to confusion when i encountered a visitor from my own past mono-ethnic persona: marcelino truong, a french-vietnamese painter and author of graphic novels. we had first declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 72 mailto:dot@unimelb.edu.au https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5760 https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5760 met at sciences-po, the institute of political sciences in paris, prior to a professional meeting twenty-five years later when both our names and careers had drastically changed. i relate to other translingual writers such as romain gary, a virtuoso of disguised identities who wrote novels under two different pseudonyms. the second part of the essay is an inspection of tijana miletic’s arguments in european literary immigration into the french language: readings of gary, kristóf, kundera and semprún that reflects my own experience: the themes of the double and incest pervade translingual writers’ work, as they do mine. résumé anna moï, chevalier des arts et des lettres, est une écrivaine française de renom dont l’œuvre littéraire s’étend sur près de deux décennies. saluée par la presse française dès la parution chez l’aube de ses recueils de nouvelles l’écho des rizières (2002) et parfum de pagode (2003) qui ont pour cadre le vietnam contemporain, moï s’est distinguée par la suite comme l’une des voix les plus reconnues de la diaspora vietnamienne. publiés chez la prestigieuse maison d’édition gallimard, ses romans donnent à voir le vietnam et son peuple à travers des moments historiques et font émerger le lien entre la petite histoire et la grande histoire : riz noir (2004), prix du meilleur premier roman français au festival du premier roman à cuneo, raconte l’histoire de deux jeunes lycéennes et combattantes révolutionnaires incarcérées à poulo condor dans les années soixante; rapaces (2005) dévoile un secret d’amour sur le fond de la guerre indochinoise et la famine au tonkin en 1945; le venin du papillon (2017), dernier roman à ce jour et lauréat du grand prix de la littérature-monde, retrace le passage à l’âge adulte d’une jeune protagoniste prise dans les turbulences politiques et militaires postcoloniales de son pays. moï est l’un des 44 signataires du manifeste pour une littérature monde en français (2007), un mouvement contestataire de la perspective franco-centrique en littérature, et l’auteure d’un recueil d’essais sur la langue et l’identité espéranto, desespéranto (2006), dans lequel elle réfléchit sur son usage du français comme outil d’expression personnelle. cet essai exprime ma perspective de romancière translingue qui passe d’une langue à l’autre, à savoir, du vietnamien au français. en tant qu’écrivaine dont la renaissance à l’écriture s’effectue dans une nouvelle langue, je constate l’impossibilité de raconter la réalité du fait que le monde réel est reflété à travers au moins deux zones culturelles. l’emploi d’un pseudonyme dans mon cas constitue le premier pas vers cette réalité divisée. c’est une décision qui m’octroie le droit à une nouvelle identité et qui mène aussi à des confusions, par exemple, lorsque je recroise sur mon chemin un visiteur de mon passé monoethnique, marcelino truong, un peintre et auteur graphique franco-vietnamien. vingt-cinq ans avant cette rencontre professionnelle, nous nous sommes croisés à sciences-po à paris. nos noms et carrières ont radicalement changé depuis. je m’associe à des écrivains translingues tels que roman gary, un virtuose d’identités déguisées qui publie ses romans sous deux pseudonymes différents. dans la deuxième partie de mon essai j’examine les arguments de tijana miletic dans son livre european literary immigration into the french language: readings of gary, kristóf, kundera and semprún. ce qu’elle y décrit reflète ma propre expérience : les thèmes du double et de l’inceste imprègnent l’œuvre de ces écrivains, comme ils imprègnent la mienne. keywords anna moï, vietnamese diaspora, ‘meurtres sans préméditation’ meurtres sans préméditation portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201873 ma boutique-galerie rue du faubourg montmartre s’appelait « anna moï » —d’après l’une de mes identités. s’évaporer, puis reparaître en « sans-papier », sous une appellation sans origine contrôlée, est un exercice insolite quand on n’est pas japonais. au japon, cent mille personnes s’évaporent tous les ans, fuyant la pesanteur de dettes, de contraintes, d’un amour impossible. ils recherchent une nouvelle liberté. nos démarches ne sont peut-être pas si éloignées, dans le fond : moi aussi, en adoptant l’altérité, j’immole un passé dont je suis aliénée : une jeune fille escamotée par ses timidités, une culture originelle de l’obéissance, un mari qui m’a donné, par mariage, son nom. peut-être l’écriture de fiction est–elle une manière d’évaporation. une tentative de pasticher un univers où rien n’est définitif, ni le nom de naissance, ni les réincarnations futures. exilée de la réalité par un élan incontrôlable qui me pousse à l’imiter infidèlement, par défaut de mémoire et par ennui face à la reproduction des faits, je pratique la contrefaçon jusqu’à mon nom. le pseudonyme, anna moï, apparaît pour la première fois sur le fronton de la boutiquegalerie greffée sur l’emplacement d’un ancien atelier de couture. la tentative initiale de la nommer « moï », ou sauvage en vietnamien se heurte à la résistance de l’inpi : une autre société avait enregistré « moi », le tréma n’était pas assez distinctif. l’invention de la marque transita par l’évocation de l’annam (trop postcolonial), « tranoï » (le nom d’un salon de prêt-à-porter), « cygne céleste », la traduction de mon prénom de naissance (trop éthéré) avant qu’« annam » et « moï » ne s’amalgament pour faire naître un personnage annamitique, créatrice de vêtements et d’accessoires de mode. les murs de cathédrale qui culminent à quatre mètres de hauteur, peints en blanc sauf sur les zones que l’architecte de la rénovation a décidé de sonder, démasquant des pierres de taille par ci, des fresques mystérieuses par-là, sont des cloisons idéales où œuvres d’art chaperonnent robes en soie et bijoux de jade. côté vitrine, des mannequins avec leurs têtes moulées sur le modèle de bustes en bronze de l’école des beaux-arts de l’indochine sondent le spectacle de la rue, le regard gris, énigmatique. tous les deux mois, le décor change. un artiste expose ses photographies ou ses peintures souvent de grand format, le local ne se prêtant pas à l’étriqué. un photographe, thierry fonteneau, réussit à imprimer sur des toiles préalablement enduites de révélateur des portraits de femmes h’mong du nord-vietnam. des peintres révèlent leur version mythologique de l’asie. à la même époque, je signe mes premières nouvelles dans l’écho des rizières, une revue francophone pilotée par des expatriés français de saigon. mon recueil de nouvelles publié en 2001 porte, en hommage, le nom de la revue. une séance de dédicaces est organisée la même année à la boutique de la rue du faubourg montmartre. l’équipe est, depuis son ouverture quatre ans auparavant, rodée à l’exercice. pour l’inauguration, en 1998, l’idée d’une soirée « suite indochinoise » combinant les lettres avec jean-luc coatalem et les beaux-arts avec l’illustrateur de la couverture, paraît excellente. les éditions du dilettante préviennent l’écrivain et nous transmettent le contact de l’illustrateur et peintre marcelino truong. je repars au vietnam, et bientôt, voyage au japon pour une exposition de mes vêtements à tokyo. les cybercafés ne pullulent pas à cette époque, je n’ai pas de téléphone portable et jouis, peut-être pour la dernière fois, d’une escapade non-connectée. à mon retour, une semaine plus tard, mon répondeur téléphonique et ma boîte de courriers électroniques me rappellent qu’ailleurs, le monde n’a pas cessé de tourner : des messages affolés de la directrice de la moï portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201874 boutique m’apprennent qu’une coordination défectueuse a entraîné une forte contrariété de marcelino truong : le carton du vernissage illustré d’une de ses peintures a été imprimé sans son autorisation préalable. au téléphone, je cajôle l’artiste et lui donne rendez-vous à la boutique trois jours plus tard, le jour du vernissage. il arrive pour le déjeuner, habillé d’une salopette de peintre en bâtiment et chaussé de tennis maculés de peinture—moins fâché, plutôt débonnaire. après un déjeuner amical aux halles, nous faisons tandem pour accrocher les tableaux. lui juché sur l’escabeau, moi tenant les clous x, nous poursuivons notre conversation : – avais-tu fréquenté l’école des beaux-arts ? – non, non, pas du tout, mon parcours est atypique, je suis un réformé de sciences po. tiens, à l’école j’avais une très bonne amie vietnamienne qui portait le nom d’un aristocrate français. pendant que ses paroles se diffusent à mon oreille, un flash de mémoire se tétanise en deux mots : – c’est moi. à sciences-po, vingt-cinq ans plus tôt, j’avais connu un marco habillé de tweed et chaussé de weston. plus mince que marcelino, étiolé comme le sont les étudiants à vingt ans. il était en section « service public » et se destinait à une carrière de haut fonctionnaire, comme son père. il boycottait la sonorité hispanisante et selon lui exotique de son prénom marcelino et se faisait appeler marco. dans le même esprit, marguerite duras, née donnadieu, disait dans une interview aux inrockuptibles : « je n’ai jamais cherché à savoir pourquoi je tenais mon nom dans une telle horreur que j’arrive à peine à le prononcer » (duras 1974 : 23–24). pour ágota kristóf, écrivaine francophone, ce n’est pas son nom qui lui fait horreur, mais la réalité. son personnage claus dans « le troisième mensonge », déclare : « je lui réponds que j’essaie d’écrire des histoires vraies, mais, à un moment donné, l’histoire devient insupportable par sa vérité même, alors je suis obligé de la changer. je lui dis que j’essaie de raconter mon histoire, mais que je ne le peux pas, je n’en ai pas le courage, elle me fait trop mal. alors, j’embellis tout et je décris les choses non comme elles se sont passées, mais comme j’aurais voulu qu’elles se soient passées » (kristóf 1991 : 14). peut-être la réalité m’assomme-t-elle car elle ne peut exister à partir du moment où l’on vit entre deux mondes. on n’esquive jamais l’autre réalité. entre marcelino, qui a fini par se réconcilier avec l’exotisme, et moi, qui revendique la « sauvagerie », la connivence se rétablit autour de la duplicité, une fois connaissance prise de nos identités mouvantes. plus que quiconque, romain gary, né romain kacew, alias émile ajar, affabula son existence, n’hésitant pas à s’arroger un géniteur factice (un célèbre acteur russe) et surtout, deux pseudonymes, l’un (gary) qui signifie « brûle » et l’autre (ajar) « braises ». sa mère lui prépara efficacement le terrain des subterfuges, elle qui, pendant la guerre, écrivit des centaines de lettres confiées à une amie en suisse et transmises à son fils, toutes les semaines. romain gary apprit de manière posthume le décès de sa mère. comme mon prédécesseur russe francophone, je suis un écrivain translingue. nos fondations diffèrent, mais nos abscisses et nos coordonnées se croisent avec celles d’autres écrivains ayant immigré en français. d’après tijana miletic, l’auteur de european literary immigration into the french language : readings of gary, kristóf, kundera and semprún (2008), meurtres sans préméditation portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201875 la gémellité et l’inceste traversent les œuvres de ces auteurs. le jumeau incarne la personnalité dédoublée, et l’inceste symbolise une transgression de l’interdit : we might define incest in simplified terms as a moral violation of something that we love unconditionally. unconditional love is usually connected with those elements of our life we have no control over. for instance, we cannot choose the country we are born in, or our mother tongue.  (2008 : 237) miletic ajoute casanova dans la liste des auteurs transfuges : « casanova is one of the first literary immigrants into french to write about incest and doubling. doubling and incest are not only the main themes of his utopia icosaméron, but are also closely related » (2008 : 238). c’est au colloque « rencontres: a gathering of voices of the vietnamese diaspora » où j’interviens aux côtés de marcelino truong (1er décembre 2016, à l’université de melbourne), que j’entends une dramaturge australienne d’origine vietnamienne, chi vu, énoncer cette argumentation. elle note, par ailleurs, que les romanciers translingues ont tendance à faire décéder un père, une mère, ou un parent proche dans leur œuvre. nabokov a éliminé charlotte, la mère de sa jeune amante, dans lolita. momo, le personnage principal de la vie devant soi d’émile ajar, alias romain gary, est orphelin. les orphelins d’ágota kristóf, dans le grand cahier, sont jumeaux. tijana miletic écrit elle-même : « the status of the mother figure is implicated very deeply in the mother tongue and native country. in order to appropriate a new language and fully adapt to a new country, an immigrant must, at least temporarily, « kill » the mother tongue » (2008 : 259). pour ma part, j’accumule involontairement tous les critères de démarcation de la littérature translingue sans avoir jamais prémédité le meurtre de ma langue maternelle. je plaide noncoupable. il est bien vrai que je signe mes livres d’un pseudonyme, que dans la plupart de mes romans, le personnage principal, quand il n’est pas mon alter ego (xuân dans le venin du papillon) possède un double (une sœur, une amie), que l’inceste est un thème récurrent, et qu’un père décède toujours. dans le venin du papillon, écrit d’abord en anglais, je tue le père français, commettant ainsi le meurtre de ma deuxième langue. références duras, m. & gautier, x. 1974, les parleuses. minuit, paris. https://doi.org/10.2307/40129541 kristóf, a. 1991, le troisième mensonge. seuil, paris. miletic, t. 2008, european literary immigration into the french language: readings of gary, kristóf, kundera and semprún. rodopi, amsterdam. moï, a. 2017, le venin du papillon. gallimard, paris. moï portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201876 https://doi.org/10.2307/40129541 douglas morrey michel houellebecq and the international sexual economy douglas morrey university of newcastle, united kingdom the french novelist, poet and essayist michel houellebecq has, for some time now, proposed various interpretations of what we might call the economy of sexuality. this was made particularly explicit in houellebecq’s first novel, extension du domaine de la lutte (1996), whose title stems from the author’s contention that any struggle against the concentration of economic power must also extend to the domain of sexual power (the novel‘s title in the english translation, whatever, unfortunately loses all the polemical value of the original french). the novel painted a disturbing portrait of those who, denied access to sexual commerce in the same way that others are denied the benefits of global economic growth, harbour a murderous rage born of their sexual frustration. in his notorious second novel, les particules élémentaires (atomised, 1998), houellebecq imagined a future in which humanity abandoned sexual reproduction in favour of cloning, grateful for an end to the relentless drudgery of sexual competition. houellebecq’s concern with the economic role and monetary value of sexuality perhaps reached its apotheosis in his last, highly controversial novel, plateforme (platform), published in 2001. plateforme discusses at length the economies of tourism generally, and sex tourism specifically, and makes the provocative assertion that, in an increasingly globalised world, a kind of generalised sex tourism represents the logical evolution of both the leisure economy and interpersonal relations. no other sector, suggests houellebecq, will witness such significant growth over the coming century. houellebecq’s argument is that sex in the west has become practically impossible and is, in any case, undesirable. most of us are simply too busy propping up the service economy to meet new people and, even when such meetings occur, they are usually disappointing. the legacy of western sexual liberation has left us all (but—and let’s be clear on this—especially women) with ridiculously high expectations for our sex lives and, although we talk a lot about sex—indeed it often seems like our only topic of conversation—few people actually seem prepared to engage in the activity itself. as a result, it is increasingly common to resort to a purely mechanical discharge of sexual tension via masturbation and the use of pornography. but this simply perpetuates the portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 1 vicious circle of sexual frustration since the idealised bodies of porn stars remind us of our own inadequacies and leave us further disinclined to engage with the banal bodies of our peers. westerners, concludes houellebecq, ‘ne parviennent plus à ressentir le sexe comme naturel’ (‘no longer feel sex as something natural’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 236; 2003, p. 244). faced with this bleak picture, the only solution for the westerner seeking sexual gratification is to go abroad, to indulge in sex tourism. when those in the west have everything but sexual satisfaction and those in the third world have nothing to sell but their bodies, we are faced with ‘une situation d’échange idéale’ (‘an ideal trading opportunity’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 234; 2003, p. 242): sex tourism is quite simply ‘l’avenir du monde’ (‘the future of the world’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 107; 2003, p. 107). interracial sex further represents the salvation of all those who have been marginalised in the market economy of western sexuality, since the specific characteristics of sexual attractiveness valued at this particular juncture of history are by no means universal and therefore unlikely to pertain in non-western contexts. besides, as houellebecq’s narrator admits with disarming honesty towards the end of the novel: ‘il est moins humiliant de payer pour un être qui ne ressemble à aucun de ceux qu’on aurait pu séduire par le passé, qui ne vous rappelle aucun souvenir’ (‘it’s less humiliating to pay for someone who looks nothing like any of those you have seduced in the past, who brings back no memories’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 343; 2003, p. 354). there are a number of obvious objections one could make to this situation as presented in plateforme. houellebecq’s casual sexism and racism are, on occasion, quite breathtakingly offensive and have unsurprisingly drawn strong criticism. his view of the crippled sexuality of the west seems to be based, in no small amount, on his resentment of the social, sexual, and economic gains made by women over the past three decades or so. and he has no hesitation in reducing his portraits of women to a purely sexual description. one of the narrator’s first observations about valérie, who will later become his lover, is that her mouth seems particularly well suited to swallowing sperm (houellebecq 2001, pp. 48-49; 2003, p. 44). the novel also met with particular condemnation in france for its expression of racist sentiments, especially with regard to the muslim world, the author even being tried for (and acquitted of) incitement to racial hatred. houellebecq has stressed, somewhat disingenuously, that his problem is not with muslims as people but with islam as a religion, a point he tries portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 2 to convey by putting his tirades about islam into the mouths of arab characters, first an egyptian and later a jordanian. but this does little to soften the impact of such statements as: ‘l’islam ne pouvait naître que dans un désert stupide, au milieu de bédouins crasseux qui n’avaient rien d’autre à faire [...] que d’enculer leurs chameaux’ (‘islam could only have been born in a stupid desert, among filthy bedouins who had nothing better to do […] than bugger their camels’) (houellebecq 2001, pp. 243-44; 2003, p. 251). this practice of inventing minor characters to serve as the mouthpiece for objectionable sentiments occurs again when michel meets robert, a fellow french sex tourist and an openly-declared racist, in a thai massage parlour. robert insists that the first virtue of travel is to reinforce racial prejudice and that sex tourism can be seen as the harbinger of an impending global interracial war; far from michel’s nuanced economic analysis, robert characterises sex tourism as a kind of primitive struggle for the sexual conquest of women of colour. it could, of course, be quite reasonably argued that, in addition to being offensive, houellebecq’s view of the economic and sexual state of the world is just plain wrong. there is some doubt as to how far this notion of western sexual stagnation can be generalised beyond the small, neurotic parisian cultural class to which houellebecq and his narrator belong. at one point, wondering who can possibly be responsible for the global domination of the sportswear brands nike and adidas besides the juvenile delinquents from the housing projects on the outskirts of paris, michel admits: ‘il devrait y avoir des secteurs entiers de la société qui me demeuraient étrangers’ (‘clearly there had to be whole sectors of society who were still alien to me’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 263; 2003, p. 272). indeed so, and to begin with the massed, anonymous ranks of provincial middle-class families who keep the consumer society ticking over. it can sometimes be tempting to dismiss houellebecq’s arguments as the self-obsessed whining of a single sexual inadequate. the question, i suppose, is the extent to which the profound sexual disappointment of houellebecq’s anti-heroes is representative of real emotions existing within our societies. the tremendous, almost unprecedented commercial success of his writing would certainly suggest that it is. given the undoubted popularity of houellebecq’s work, it is worth considering his arguments seriously, particularly as his view of the global economic situation bears comparison to certain theoretical apprehensions of the same phenomenon, notably in portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 3 the philosophy of jean-françois lyotard. lyotard was, of course, one of the first thinkers to present a sustained theoretical elaboration of the postmodern economy. the goal of this post-industrial economy, argues lyotard, is to produce, in the first instance, not material goods but information, and this information serves to increase the complexity and performativity of the system as a whole. the more information one has at one’s disposal, the less likely one is to be caught unawares by an unpredictable event. by calculating the probability of such an event in terms of risk, postmodern capitalism seeks to give it a monetary value, a sum that can then be stored to safeguard against any such undesirable eventuality. what this means, though, is that the present is routinely subordinated to the future and so, in human terms, the desire for pleasure in the here and now is repeatedly frustrated by the constant injunction to save, both time and money (lyotard 1988, pp. 77-79). the deferral of sensual gratification is—in an apparent paradox—accompanied by a proliferation of sexual representation. as pierre klossowski has argued, sensual pleasure is adjourned in favour of the more ‘urgent’ needs of sustenance and survival, but, since the sexual drive itself knows no deferral, it becomes urgent that it be represented (1997 [1970], p. 52). the inability to catch up with ourselves, in temporal, financial or libidinal terms, that lyotard stresses in his description of contemporary capitalism, is clearly presented in houellebecq’s novel. when reading popular american fiction by john grisham and david balducci, michel is struck by the way that characters are defined by the number of hours they work: 80, 90, 110 hours per week; and later, jean-yves, valérie’s boss at the tourism company, will be described as working twelve to fourteen hours a day. valérie, admitting that she takes little satisfaction from her work, identifies the need to rethink her life, if only she had the time. free market capitalism offers no respite, she explains to michel: if you do not maintain an advantage over the competition through constant innovation, you will not survive. the first and most basic reason why sex has become impossible in the west is that we simply have no time. as michel laments at the end of the novel: ‘nous avons créé un système dans lequel il est devenu simplement impossible de vivre; et, de plus, nous continuons à l’exporter’ (‘we have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live; and what’s more, we continue to export it’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 349; 2003, p. 361). as the postmodern economy of western capitalism continues to absorb the rest of the portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 4 globe, states lyotard, its goal is not to improve our knowledge or tolerance of other cultures, but simply to assimilate them as components with which to improve the complexity and performativity of the system as a whole. in practice, this results not in improved communication and sensitivity, but in the growth of poverty and illiteracy (lyotard 1988, p. 75). as michel notes, thailand’s entry into the global market economy brought about a rapid devaluation of its currency, ending two hundred years of peace and prosperity. the corporate headquarters of the aurore tourism group on the outskirts of paris in evry becomes a microcosm for the inequalities of the global economy: while armed guards watch over the executives at work inside, a couple of miles away disenfranchised youths riot in bleak housing projects. jean-yves envisions a future on the model of são paolo, where the executive class moves from high-rise to high-rise, travelling exclusively by helicopter, the streets below having been definitively abandoned to the poor. it is in this context that michel’s projected image of affluent westerners exchanging cash for sex on third world beaches takes on a certain grim realism. although never expressing anything but contempt for global capitalism, michel seems to recognise its ineluctable character. for michel, it seems, economy is history, that is to say economic progression is an abstraction of the movement of history itself. he suggests as much when discussing his experimental attempt to keep up with current affairs by reading only the financial pages of the newspaper. and, in a move that would appear to equate to lyotard’s notion of a libidinal economy (lyotard 1974), michel implies that the flow of desire is contiguous to, and often overlapping with, the flow of capital and, as such, just as impersonal and ungovernable. if the dispassionate gaze that is cast over humanity in houellebecq’s novel frequently appears objectionable, it is perhaps largely because of the virulent anti-psychologism by which it is characterised. the novel refuses to present its characters as the conjuncture of individual psychological circumstances, portraying them instead as representative of broad social trends. indeed, michel argues that our obsession with individualism, identity politics and rights is a significant factor contributing to our sexual stalemate. (the cloned future of les particules élémentaires is imagined precisely as an escape from this tiresome egocentrism.) plateforme begins like a psychological novel with the death of the narrator’s father, yet immediately proceeds to empty this event of individual significance. the death of michel’s father is statistical evidence of the mounting sexual tension between races discussed elsewhere in the portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 5 novel, since he is murdered by the brother of the arabic maid with whom he has been sleeping. but michel himself remains impassive when confronted with the death of this man with whom he had no significant relationship. other deaths in the novel are the occasion for remarks upon the futility and banality of existence: the death of jean-yves’s father brings to the close a life without incident, prompting houellebecq to write: ‘c’est sans doute à tort qu’on soupçonne chez tous les êtres une passion secrète, une part de mystère, une fêlure’ (‘we are probably wrong to suspect that each individual has some secret passion, some mystery, some weakness’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 278; 2003, p. 288). and, when michel is preparing to die at the end of the novel, he is under no illusions as to the importance of his own life: ‘j’aurai été un individu médiocre, sous tous ses aspects [...] on m’oubliera. on m’oubliera vite’ (‘i will have been a mediocre individual in every possible sense [...] i’ll be forgotten. i’ll be quickly forgotten’) (houellebecq 2001, pp. 350-51; 2003, pp. 361-62). this refusal of individual psychology leads houellebecq repeatedly to explode the limits of political correctness. for, if racial and sexual generalisations are held to be offensive, it is because they rob us of our sense of individuality, of psychological uniqueness. but jean-yves argues that racial discrimination is sensible, not to say inevitable. he notes that he would be reluctant to hire someone of north african origin to work in public relations due to the number of clichés about arabic life routinely used to sell north african destinations to tourists; on the other hand, the same candidate might be ideal to handle negotiations with local service providers: ‘les origines des gens font partie de leur personnalité, il faut en tenir compte, c’est évident’ (‘a person’s origins are part of their personality, you have to take them into consideration, it’s obvious’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 195; 2003, p. 201). to suggest that we are all unique individuals is ultimately to partake of the metaphysical fiction of the eternal soul. michel says as much to a psychiatrist who is counselling him after the death of valérie in a terrorist attack on a holiday resort in thailand. when the psychiatrist suggests that michel needs to free himself from his attachment, michel responds: ‘je n’étais qu’un attachement. de nature transitoire, je m’étais attaché à une chose transitoire, conformément à ma nature [...] aurais-je été de nature éternelle [...], que je me serais attaché à des choses éternelles’ (‘i was nothing more than an attachment. inclined to the transitory by nature, i had become attached to a transitory thing, as was my nature [...] had i been inclined towards the eternal by nature [...], i would have become attached to portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 6 things eternal’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 333; 2003, p. 345). more than the unique psychology of individuals, then, houellebecq is interested in describing the collective behaviour of larger social groups. that said, he has no more time for sociologists than he does for psychologists, including in his novel a scene that ridicules the banal observations of a behavioural sociologist and ironically citing an article from the annals of tourism research whose conclusions are quite stunning in their obviousness. michel meanwhile describes with amused detachment the herd instincts of the group of tourists on his package holiday, particularly with regard to seating arrangements at mealtimes. the detachment of the narration is such that these descriptions frequently take on an almost evolutionary scope: the few complimentary remarks that michel finds to make about humanity are in this darwinian spirit: man, he grudgingly admits at one point, is ‘un mammifère ingénieux’ (‘an ingenious mammal’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 103; 2003, p. 102); elsewhere, the lush tropical vegetation in thailand inspires him to remark upon the courage required for humanity to colonise the cold regions of the planet (houellebecq 2001, p. 119; 2003, p. 120). two american tourists sizing up the lobsters in a restaurant are presented as a tableau of ‘deux mammifères devant un crustacé’ (‘two mammals in search of a crustacean’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 105; 2003, p. 105) whilst michel compares himself favourably to a toad, noting: ‘mon espérance de vie était analogue à celle d’un éléphant, ou d’un corbeau; j’étais quelque chose de bien plus difficile à détruire qu’un petit batracien’ (‘my life expectancy was comparable to that of an elephant, or of a crow; i was much more difficult to destroy than a small batrachian’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 128; 2003, p. 130). nonetheless, all life must come to an end, and plateforme demonstrates a certain morbid preoccupation with this general principle of entropy. on more than one occasion, houellebecq characterises life as a process of immobilisation or anchylosis whereby the things one was capable of in one’s youth gradually come to appear impossible. we might go so far as to say that, in houellebecq’s analysis, western sexuality itself has almost attained this ultimate state of inarticulation, and that his view of an international sexual economy merely represents that next evolutionary step for human sexuality. by discussing sexuality on this evolutionary scale and refraining from making moral judgements about it, houellebecq’s novel bears the influence, albeit largely unspoken, portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 7 of friedrich nietzsche. i say largely unspoken because, at one point, following an overview of thai history, michel comments ‘la volonté de puissance existe, et se manifeste sous forme d’histoire’ (‘the will to power exists, and it manifests itself in the form of history’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 82; 2003, p. 80). for nietzsche, this will to power is the most basic of drives, indeed it is simply the will to life. life is a process of ‘continually shedding something that wants to die’ (nietzsche 2001 [1887], p. 50), of subsuming the weak to the strong. since this is a question of necessity, says nietzsche, it cannot be one of morality. our tendency to discuss the processes of life in terms of morality stems from an anthropomorphic view of the world: the world, nietzsche insists, ‘is neither perfect, nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it want to become any of these things’ (2001, p.109), it has no purpose and obeys no laws. morality always operates to benefit a particular group at a particular time, and that which is judged immoral, or evil, is usually only that which is new. to want to eradicate cruelty and misery from the world is to want to cease all development, all change, yet this is the natural and only possible state of the world. this consideration of the paradoxes of morality within society informs nietzsche’s view of the development and decline of civilisations. the construction of something like an ideal free society requires the renunciation, or denial, of individual freedom in favour of the common good. but once freedom is attained, individuals are reluctant to give up that freedom, such that the continued development of that society eventually founders in decadence, leaving it open to attack or colonisation by neighbouring societies. this is precisely the mutation described in les particules élémentaires: the sexual liberation and utopian aspirations of the late-sixties counter-culture movements are seen to be largely responsible for today’s depressing impassivity before questions both moral and sexual, a cultural cul-de-sac that can only be transcended through an unlikely collective renunciation of individual freedom in the interest of the species. the grand, trans-human scale of these considerations is, however, not incompatible with the kind of ethics of sexuality discussed by foucault in his account of ancient greece. there, says foucault, the excessive tendency of desire was recognised, not as an evil, as in the christian tradition, but as its natural state (1984, p. 69). an ethics of sexuality must therefore address the question of how best to contain this excess within an economy. sexual morality is not a matter of proscribing certain acts or condemning desire itself, but a question of the attitude one takes towards pleasure (p. 69). from this point of portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 8 view, houellebecq’s fictions would simply seem to suggest that the current economy of desire is failing to contain this excess, and his ambiguous utopias merely argue for a different way of managing this libidinal economy. in plateforme, houellebecq describes a world in which the great emancipatory promises of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have reached their term. whether these great projects of humanity have been a success as in western europe or a failure as in socialist cuba is ultimately of little importance. what matters is that the world is ripe for the next phase of its evolution and the flow of desire and capital, the erotic and economic exchange between east and west, north and south, marks the beginning of that evolution. michel is only happy that he won’t be a part of it: ‘des mutations surviendraient, survenaient déjà, mais je n’arrivais pas à me sentir réellement concerné; ma seule motivation authentique consistait à me tirer de ce merdier aussi rapidement que possible’ (‘mutations would occur, were already occurring, but i found it difficult to feel truly concerned; my only genuine motivation was to get the hell out of this shithole as quickly as possible’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 288; 2003, p. 299). if all this appears unrelentingly pessimistic, it is to reckon without the playful humour with which houellebecq presents these undoubtedly serious observations. in this, too, houellebecq is similar to nietzsche, to the mischievous writer much admired by deleuze and derrida who, hiding behind a series of masks, ultimately implies that there is nothing behind the mask, no truth behind the succession of appearances. dominique noguez has lamented the way in which the furore around houellebecq’s novels has rendered them all but invisible as writing (noguez 2003, p. 20). in a lengthy analysis of the author’s style, noguez concludes that, if some of his pronouncements have become so infamous, it is largely thanks to the skill with which houellebecq formulates them (p. 97). in a similar spirit of recuperation, i want to analyse the ironic narrative humour with which houellebecq reinforces his argument in plateforme, preventing his first-person narrator from taking on the stature of a unified and authoritative ego. there is a persistent strain of self-deprecation in the work that balances the tendency towards self-pity and lends an ironic edge to houellebecq’s grand pronouncements about the future of human sexuality. initially we might note that houellebecq’s insistence on the impossibility of encountering a happy and fulfilled sexuality in the portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 9 west seems comprehensively undone by the narrative of plateforme in which michel falls in love and has frequent, graphic and imaginative sex with valérie. indeed we might argue that the terrorist attack that kills valérie at the end of the novel is a deus ex machina necessitated by houellebecq’s resolutely pessimistic discourse. and yet, if we look a little closer, we might suggest that michel and valérie’s relationship never exists at all except on the level of fantasy. in the first section of the novel, michel is repeatedly characterised by his social and sexual incompetence, his almost total withdrawal from any sexual activity that cannot be paid for. at one point he has an erotic dream about making love to a black woman on the metro in paris but dismisses it with the words: ‘tout cela ne pouvait en aucun cas se produire. c’était un rêve de famine, le rêve ridicule d’un homme déjà âgé’ (‘such things could never happen under any normal circumstances. it was the dream of a starving man, the ludicrous dream of a man already grown old’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 86; 2003, p. 84). when michel suggests to valérie that they could see each other again in paris, she responds with contempt and, upon his return to france, michel settles down for a weekend with a roast chicken, two bottles of booze and a copy of hot video. in this context, michel’s subsequent phone call to valérie, and the passionate sex that ensues when he is barely through her front door, appear utterly fantastical, the relationship coming across as a pure dream of wish fulfilment. indeed, immediately after they first make love, a descriptive passage suddenly seems to place us back in thailand. this is quickly revealed as a dream, and yet tends to have the effect of undermining the reality of the sex scene that has gone before. the erotic episodes with valérie that regularly punctuate the remainder of the novel are like so many sequences from pornographic movies: a threesome with the maid in cuba; a foursome with a black couple involving double penetration; sex on a train; another threesome in the steam-room of a health club; another foursome with two thai girls and so on. at times it is difficult not to read this as simply a masturbatory fantasy, and houellebecq perhaps slyly acknowledges as much when he shows us michel beating off to a scene in john grisham’s the firm. he is unperturbed when his sperm sticks the pages together, reasoning that ‘ce n’était pas un livre à lire deux fois’! (‘it wasn’t the kind of book you read twice’)! (houellebecq 2001, p. 91; 2003, p. 89) at the end of the novel, michel is miraculously unharmed by the explosion that kills valérie along with 116 other people, casting further doubts on the reality of the whole affair. the novel’s epilogue, in which portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 10 michel returns alone to thailand in order to end his days amongst the sexual detritus of western civilisation in pattaya, could quite easily be understood as the direct continuation of michel’s earlier visit to the country, with the book’s entire middle section dismissed as fantasy. in other words, it is a little as though, having needed the narrative device of valérie and her job in tourism to facilitate the exposition of his ideas about an international sexual economy, houellebecq sought, in addition, to reveal its status as narrative device, in order to underline his argument about the sterile cul-de-sac of western sexuality. but it is worth pointing out that the novel never actually invites the reader to consider michel’s narrative as a subjective fantasy since, as we have said, plateforme is not a psychological novel. rather, this narrative irony comes to be inscribed within the very structure of the work, as a result of the contradictions implied by trying to criticise the postmodern sexual economy without ever being able to speak from a position outside it. at one point in plateforme, michel, who works for the ministry of culture, listens to the pitch of a contemporary artist whose work consists of making plastic moulds of her clitoris. inspired by this to take a closer look at valérie’s anatomy, michel succeeds in bringing her more quickly to a more satisfying orgasm. thus, these mini sculptures will have fulfilled the traditional function of art, muses michel, since they encouraged him to ‘porter un regard neuf sur le monde’ (‘see the world in a new light’) (houellebecq 2001, p. 293; 2003, p. 305). much like the earlier joke at the expense of the firm, then, this episode implies the degradation of the humanist view of artistic value, and yet it also suggests, however facetiously, that art can still have immediate material benefits. it is ultimately perhaps in this spirit of the inevitable compromise demanded by the cultural marketplace, that plateforme takes up position: as a work with serious points to make about the evolution of sexuality within a globalised economy, but never at the expense of a good wank. reference list foucault, m. 1984, histoire de la sexualité ii: l’usage des plaisirs, gallimard (coll. tel), paris. houellebecq, m. 2001, plateforme, flammarion (coll. j’ai lu), paris. houellebecq, m. 2003, platform, trans. by f. wynne, vintage, london. klossowski, p. 1997 (1970), la monnaie vivante, rivages poche, paris. lyotard, j.-f. 1974, économie libidinale, minuit, paris. lyotard, j.-f. 1988, l’inhumain: causeries sur le temps, galilée, paris, portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 11 portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 12 nietzsche, f. 2001 (1887), the gay science, trans. by j. nauckhoff, cambridge university press, cambridge. noguez, d. 2003, houellebecq, en fait, fayard, paris. michel houellebecq and the international sexual economy douglas morrey reference list portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: pham, h. 2018. we are vietnamese. a reflection on being vietnameseaustralian. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 87-91. https://doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v15i1-2.5733 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au writerly reflection we are vietnamese. a reflection on being vietnamese-australian hoa pham independent author corresponding author: tess do, school of languages and linguistics, the university of melbourne, vic 3010. hoa@hoapham.net doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5733 article history: received 04/09/2017; accepted 08/12/2017; published 23/08/2018 abstract hoa pham is an author and psychologist. her novella, wave (2015), was translated into vietnamese by phương nam, a vietnamese publishing house. the other shore (2014) won the vive la novella prize. the lady of the realm (2017) is her latest novel and is a historical fiction set in vietnam from the 1950s to the present day. further information can be found at www.hoapham.net. she is also the founder of peril, an online asian australian arts and culture magazine. ‘we are vietnamese. a reflection on being vietnamese-australian’ is a creative non-fiction piece concerning being a vietnamese-australian author in the present day. it explores pham’s meeting with phạm thị hoài, a vietnamese author in exile in berlin, and her encounters with thích nhất hạnh the vietnamese zen master. it also interrogates the cultural perceptions of vietnam in australia and pham’s own subject position as a published asian australian author. résumé hoa pham est écrivaine et psychologue. sa nouvelle wave (2015) a été traduite en vietnamien par phương nam une maison d’édition vietnamienne. the other shore (2014) a remporté le prix vive la novella. son roman le plus récent, the lady of the realm (2017), est une fiction historique qui se déroule au vietnam depuis les années 1950 jusqu’à nos jours. de plus amples informations sont disponibles sur www.hoapham.net. pham est aussi la fondatrice de peril, une revue d’art et de culture australo-asiatique en ligne. ‘we are vietnamese. a reflection on being vietnamese-australian’ est un essai sur ce que signifie être un écrivain australo-vietnamien aujourd’hui. il explore deux rencontres marquantes de l’auteure : l’une avec phạm thị hoài, une écrivaine vietnamienne en exile à declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 87 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5733 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:hoa@hoapham.net https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5733 http://www.hoapham.net http://www.hoapham.net berlin, et l’autre avec thích nhất hạnh, le grand maître zen vietnamien. il remet aussi en question les perceptions culturelles du vietnam en australie et la propre situation de pham en tant qu’auteure australo-vietnamienne. keywords hoa pham, vietnamese diaspora, vietnamese-australian writers phạm thị hoài is a vietnamese diasporic writer in exile in berlin. her first book, the crystal messenger, had beautiful prose that could melt in your mouth. it was the politics of the book, a portrayal of a dwarf as a communist stalwart, that led to her exile. sunday menu, her short story collection contained marvellous minutiae and no politics. she then devoted the last few decades to journalism. i tracked her down by using the address of talawas, her vietnamese current affairs website. expecting an office i was surprised to find myself, with my father in tow, at an apartment intercom in inner city berlin. hoài knew german and vietnamese, i knew english and my father knew vietnamese and english. somehow we would all communicate i hoped. a young male voice said ‘was?’ through the intercom. dad said ‘phạm thị hoài?’ and the door opened to a dark stairwell. we ventured in, not knowing what to expect. a rectangular pool of light opened at the top of the stairs and we went up. a lanky eurasian teenage boy came out and behind him was a petite vietnamese woman. i recognised her from her author picture. ‘chào chị.’ my father said apologetically. ‘she is a writer and she has been looking for you,’ he continued in vietnamese. ‘we’d like to talk to you,’ i said in english. ‘she doesn’t speak vietnamese or german,’ my father said. ‘i’m just the interpreter.’ ‘i have a cold,’ she said, ‘perhaps you can come back later. like tomorrow.’ ‘yes that would be good,’ my father said. ‘sorry for disturbing you this way.’ ‘that’s ok,’ she said. ‘we are vietnamese.’ we are vietnamese. with that simple sentence she included me in a sense of community that i did not feel very often in australia. i was a second generation vietnamese australian, the child of refugees, born in hobart. i did not feel part of the vietnamese community because i did not speak vietnamese. hoài took us to where the best, most authentic pho was served in berlin, where the vietnamese community market stalls were sheltered in giant aircraft hangars out of the cold. phạm thị hoài told me i should make a name for myself and then publish through the web. ‘the book industry is run for publishers not writers,’ she said. she herself could not write fiction while concentrating on journalism. i remember a story i had heard that she wrote the crystal messenger for cigarettes. she would exchange pages for tobacco and papers. i gave her a book of mine for her husband to read in english. he was a german professor. i founded an on-line magazine, peril, for asian australian arts and culture and it has received australia council of the arts funding for the last seven years. it has 2337 followers this week. i identify as being asian australian, in a way that i do not identify as being australian. pham portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201888 my book, the lady of the realm, was first released as an ebook through the australian literary review along with a work by eleanor jackson. it had 183 downloads. it will be a while before my name will be known like phạm thị hoài’s is. we are vietnamese. nam le once asked me who the other vietnamese-australian writers were and i could only come up with myself, him, chi vu and dominic golding. that’s not very many, he commented, and that’s true. nam le is still the most well-known author. he has been purposefully misread by christopher lee, a canadian academic as an ‘american’ author, the argument being he was from the iowa writers’ workshop. this misses the important cultural differences between american and australian perceptions of the war and the positioning of vietnam in the national imaginaries of both countries. the vietnam that australians know about is mostly in the context of war. the latest war musical is rolling thunder vietnam. ‘rolling thunder’ was the code name for the american carpet bombing of vietnam for a few years in the sixties. it would be like naming a musical ‘operation desert storm.’ inappropriate. the battle of long tân is the most famous australian battle of the vietnam/american war where the australians won the battle, but lost the war. it made national news headlines when the vietnamese government put restrictions on the planned australian celebrations in long tân in 2017. they did not want a band playing and did not want thousands gathering in commemoration. the equivalent would be the japanese having a celebration at pearl harbour. unthinkable. miss saigon is still the most popular musical concerning vietnam—madame butterfly in a modern context. cloud wish, a young adult book about a vietnamese refugee girl by fiona wood has been awarded a children’s book council award. if the book was about a muslim girl or an aboriginal girl it would have been seen for what it was, cultural appropriation by a white writer. we are vietnamese. i did not feel at home in my own skin, a banana—yellow on the outside white on the inside—until i met other vietnamese-australian artists like chi vu who had vietnamese ancestry and artistic sensibilities. chi had a piece included in the pen anthology of australian literature, a sign of mainstream acceptance of vietnamese diasporic work. she also produced a play called the coloured alien about the issues facing asian playwrights. in my first adult book, vixen, i avoided writing about the war. i did not feel comfortable doing so since it was outside my immediate experience, i did not feel i could do it justice. in the other shore the war is experienced through psychic visions, through a naïve protagonist, kim, in her early twenties. through my recent work as a psychologist i have encountered survivors of war, so in the lady of the realm i am able to write about lien’s experiences of war. we are vietnamese. i say i am vietnamese-australian. though i do not speak vietnamese i have come to realise that my spirit is vietnamese buddhist through the teachings of thích nhất hạnh. i was privileged to go on a month-long tour with him in south vietnam in 2007, receiving dharma talks and going on a retreat with thousands of people at prajna monastery before it was destroyed. saigon he walks in silence ten thousand hushes and the world takes a breath we are vietnamese. a reflection on being vietnamese-australian portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201889 a lake of calm ripples outward from the heart an abbot kneels at his feet with a gentle touch he rises and all are made equal ‘i have arrived, i am home’ prajna monastery1 this seated buddha overlooks the waterfall grey robed novices show the way giggling like birds ‘i have arrived, i am home’ messages of meditation amongst straight young pine trees the green tea plantation mountains surround the prajna inside ten thousand hear his words ten thousand feel his mantra each moment, each breath being peace personified melbourne ‘i have arrived, i am home’ with this sangha i am never alone touching the earth i see the seeds of my ancestors in each cell of my body war, rape and illness exhaled soothing my soul with ritual i grieve, i heal, i inter-be. prajna monastery followed thích nhất hạnh’s teachings in vietnam and was destroyed by the vietnamese government in 2009. thích nhất hạnh is a well-known vietnamese zen master exiled in france with monasteries around the world including in australia. hoài asked me to take pictures of the protest held by the vietnamese german monastics in berlin. they held a peaceful walking meditation in the centre of the city, handing out yellow roses to passers-by. she told me that her son did not care about what happened in vietnam. i could not understand how a son could not care about his mother’s exile. perhaps they would say he was too german, the way i am told i am too australian. we are australian. i’m lucky to be australian, lucky to be born in hobart and not a war zone. though i’m not proud to be australian in this time and place, it offers opportunities that i wouldn’t get elsewhere, for instance if i were a vietnamese resident in vietnam. in vietnam i would not be able to write against the government, to write about sex or violence. nor would i be able to follow openly thích nhất hạnh’s teachings. after the destruction of prajna monastery, thích nhất hạnh said that prajna is now legend. the monastics who have mostly fled to thailand carry the seeds of prajna within them 1 prajna means insight in sanskrit. pham portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201890 with their practice. i had wanted to end the lady of the realm with messages of peace and reconciliation but instead it ends with the destruction of the monastery, with peace a hope rather than an actuality. a mainstream reviewer found the book beautiful but horrifying, with the ending surprising. she also thought that lien alone called the war the american war, rather than all of vietnam doing so. thích nhất hạnh suffered a debilitating stroke in 2016. he visited vietnam in 2017 quietly with no public teachings, to visit his root temple in huế. somehow he has found peace and a way forward with the vietnamese government in order to return. we are vietnamese. we are australian. we are vietnamese-australian. we are all connected. we inter-be. we are vietnamese. a reflection on being vietnamese-australian portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201891 portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal from the stereotypification of the non-european other to the prototypification of the european self: a case study of turkey’s membership to the european union from the french perspective ariane bogain and florence potot, northumbria university since the rome treaty of 1957, the conception of europe in the collective psyche has been gradually confused with membership to the evolving european union (eu). although expansion is intrinsic to the nature of the eu, the context of increasing globalisation of the past decade has emphasized the role of supranational organisations and thus accelerated its expansion process. whilst until the last enlargement in 2004 citizens throughout the member states supported the membership of new countries, the press and opinion polls carried out across those member countries show a clear opposition to turkey’s entry into the eu. interestingly, the debate surrounding turkey’s application to join the eu, though not new, has raised salient issues such as the notion of european identity, european culture, and european values, thus stressing the confusion between europe and the eu and implying that membership itself is the concrete representation of a corpus of commonality shared by members. whether in the french press or in opinion polls, issues about europe in general and the eu in particular arise in terms of identity, suggesting that the sense of belonging to a nation that exists at country level can be extended to the eu level. this confusion is fuelled by the press and political discourse; in both the terms europe and european are used liberally to refer to the european union and its citizens, thus implying that non-member countries might be non-european and therefore perceived as the other different from the self. bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 2 turkey’s potential membership to the eu epitomizes this dichotomy because beyond the question of the eu’s limits it leads to questioning the eu rationale. whilst opinion polls show concerns about turkey joining the eu in various countries, the debate is particularly earnest in france where it has become a matter of national import through the “no” vote on the european constitution in may 2005. consequently, the purpose of this study is to analyse french arguments, both in the press and in opinion polls, against turkey’s membership in order to determine whether or not a prototypification of europe, as the self, can be drawn from the french stereotypification of turkey, as the noneuropean other. the study thus focuses explicitly on the relationship between stereotype and prototype. in other words, this study explores what the french rejection of turkey reveals about the concept of europeanness in the french collective psyche. in the first part of the essay, we identify the salient traits commonly associated in france with turkey on the one hand, and europe and europeans on the other. the essay’s second part analyses the notion of europeanness drawn from these representations and evaluates to what extent that concept of europeanness is the antithesis of the stereotypical representation of turkey as the non-european other, since as pointed out by nachbar and lause ‘common stereotypes directly reflect our beliefs’ (1992, 244). methodology for the purpose of this study, a stereotype is defined as a belief, opinion, or representation held about a group and its members (amossy and herschberg-pierrot 2004, 28). in other words, the stereotype of turkey refers here to a collective image based on the traits typically associated with turkey in france. nachbar and lause (1992, 236) refer to stereotypes as ‘mental cookie cutters,’ standardised conceptions that simplify a complex reality by associating a set of characteristics, often related to age, sex, race, religion, vocation or nationality, to the members of a group. although a stereotype is at once a non-critical judgement and a form of second-hand knowledge, the stereotypification process is considered in social sciences to be a constructive part of the cognitive process. that is simplification and generalisation, even if sometimes excessive, are necessary to compare new situations or groups to familiar pre-existing models and thus understand the world, and plan and adapt our behaviour accordingly. a stereotype is: ‘un concept bien défini qui permet d’analyser le rapport de l’individu à l’autre et à soi, ou les relations entre les groupes et leurs membres individuels’ [a well defined concept that facilitates/enables the analysis of the relationship of an individual bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 3 to the other and to him/herself or the relationships between groups and their individual members] (amossy and herschberg-pierrot 2004, 28).1 as standardised conceptions, stereotypes generate by their very existence a commonality shared by members of a designated group about members of another group. according to nachbar and lause ‘popular stereotypes are images which are shared by those who hold a common mindset-they are the way a culture, or significant sub-group within that culture, defines and labels a specific group of people’ (1992, 236). consequently a stereotypical representation held by a specific group is derived from their beliefs and values. therefore it can be argued that ‘a stereotype is a valuable tool in the analysis of popular culture because once the stereotype has been identified and defined, it automatically provides us with an important and revealing expression of otherwise hidden beliefs and values’ (nachbar and lause 1992, 236). the concept of prototype originally appeared in cognitive psychology to refer to ‘les processus de catégorisation dans le cadre plus général de l’étude des structures des connaissances en mémoire humaine’ [the categorisation processes involved in the wider study of structures of types of knowledge in human memory] (dubois and rescherigon 1993, 373). however, for the purpose of this study, we mainly concentrate on the semantics of prototypes that establish a relationship of equivalence between category and word. the notion of prototype used here refers to the concept or mental representations associated with a term; it is ‘ le meilleur exemplaire communément associé à une catégorie’ [the best example commonly associated with a category] (kleiber 1990, 49). this implies that a prototype is a sub-category that typically represents the category associated with it, because it includes its most salient characteristics, and that there might be more than one prototype associated with any given category. from this point of view, protypification is the result of a process of typification and graduation (amossy and herschberg pierrot 2004, 93). in other terms, one prototype does not possess all the characteristics associated with the related specific category and all members of the category do not possess all the characteristics of the prototype. in this essay, the eu is a prototype of europe, and therefore the french concept of european is a prototype of europeanness. a prototype does not identify itself with the actual group but with the concept associated with the group (kleiber 1990, 62). 1 all translations in this essay are ours. bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 4 this study uses the psycho-linguistic notion of prototypes that defines prototypes as being instrumental to the semantic categorisation of a group. this study is based on information extracted from public opinion polls carried out in france and eurobarometers surveys published by the european commission, as well as from articles published between 2002 and spring 2006 in three french national daily newspapers. 2002 was chosen as the starting point given that in november of that year, mr valéry giscard d’estaing, former french president and president of the european convention in charge of the drafting of the european constitution, declared that ‘la turquie est un pays proche de l’europe, un pays important, qui a une véritable élite, mais ce n’est pas un pays européen’ [turkey is a country close to europe, an important country with a true elite, but it is not a european country] (de bresson 2004) and that to open the door to turkey would lead to the end of the eu. furthermore, the start of negotiations with a view to granting turkey full eu membership was agreed in 2002, at the copenhagen summit. the three daily newspapers were selected on the basis of the political preferences they display: le figaro on the right of the political exchequer; libération on the left; and le monde in the centre. those newspapers underpin this study because the choice of lexis and personalities invited to write in the daily press is a very important factor in the stereotypification process. indeed, stereotypes are secondhand knowledge acquired through cultural mediators who, voluntarily or not, contribute to the creation and the circulation of their own stereotypical representations based on their own beliefs and values. the stereotype will carry even more credit if the ‘truth’ is transmitted in articles written by ‘reliable’ experts. in the case of turkey, it has to be noted that all three newspapers have resorted to experts, such as robert badinter, a former president of the constitutional council and a former minister for justice, and valery giscard d’estaing, to either justify or oppose turkey’s application to join the eu, thus giving more weight to the opposed arguments on the turkey-eu question. typology of arguments against turkey’s membership opinions polls carried out at national or european levels since 2002 show that a clear majority of french people, irrespective of gender, age, professional status or education (although opposition strengthens with age or poorer education), oppose the possible enlargement of the eu to include turkey. this rejection of turkey’s membership is evaluated at between 64% and 68% in the eurobarometer polls, and between 56% and bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 5 75% in national polls for the 2002-2005 period (european commission 2002, 2003b, 2004, and 2005; ipsos 2002, 2004; ifop 2005). this rejection is not simply widespread; it is also entrenched, as shown by the fact that despite legal assurances that a referendum would be held in france on this matter before turkey is granted full membership, 22% of french people rejected the european constitution as an expression of opposition to turkey (louis harris 2005). that entrenching of anti-turkey viewpoints is also demonstrated by the fact that the application of countries such as morocco and tunisia, which many respondents would not class as european, would have more support (morocco: 36% in favour, tunisia 35%, turkey 30%) (tns-sofres 2005a, 2006). moreover, unlike in other eu countries, french opposition to turkey’s eu membership does not reflect a clear stance from political parties. although opponents to turkey’s membership are found more frequently in conservative parties, despite the support displayed by mr chirac, the french socialist party is greatly divided on the issue, as are many parties on the left. thus, although the rejection of turkey is deeply entrenched, the degree of opposition varies and many political parties, trade unions and political clubs are also divided on the issues, as reflected in newspaper headlines. in a dossier entitled ‘le débat français sur l’adhésion de la turquie à l’ue’ [the french debate surrounding turkey’s accession to the eu], which suggests that a consensus is far from being reached, le monde (2004) compiled articles that confirm the difficulty of categorising arguments for or against turkey’s membership according to political parties. amongst its contents are titles such as ‘valéry giscard d’estaing dénonce l’ “ambiguité” française face à la turquie’ [valéry giscard d’estaing denounces the ambiguity of the french towards turkey]; or, ‘le processus d’adhésion de la turquie à l’ue avive les tensions au ps et à droite’ [turkey’s accession process to the eu fuels tension within the socialist party and the right]. not only is the lack of consensus underlined by these articles, but it is also given magnitude by quoting such a key figure for the future shape of the eu as valéry giscard d’estaing, who led the convention on the european constitution. with the headlines ‘a l’assemblée nationale, les députés préfèrent un “partenariat privilégié” avec la turquie à son adhésion à l’ue’ [mps favour a privileged partnership over full membership], le monde shows that the issue of turkey’s membership splits the highest institutional levels of the country, with a parliament mainly against full membership, whilst the head of state, namely mr. chirac, supported it. the right is not the only bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 6 political sector to be divided, for the left, and the socialist party in particular, is too. isabelle mandraud (2005) indeed points out in that ‘le ps, embarrassé, hésite à définir clairement sa propre vision des frontières de l’europe’ [the embarrassed socialist party is reluctant to give an explicit of its views on europe boundaries]. what is at stake in this debate is not so much what turkey is or is not, but rather the questions and uncertainties it raises about europe, and most particularly the eu, considered in terms of the definition of the self as opposed to the other. this refers directly to the notion of identity in group terms. like social identity, national or here ‘supra-national’ identity results from what fishman calls l’adhésion à une opinion entérinée, une image partagée, (qui) permet à l’individu de proclamer indirectement son allégeance au groupe dont il désire faire partie. il exprime en quelque sorte son allégeance à une collectivité en assumant ses modèles stéréotypés. (1956, 40) [supporting a well-known opinion, a shared image enables the individual to claim indirectly its allegiance to the group he/she wants to belong to. somehow he/she expresses his/her allegiance to a group by endorsing its stereotypical models.] this division is apparent in the terminology used to refer to turkey’s opponents in the press, which reflects the division of intellectuals, politicians and public opinion over turkey’s membership of the eu, thus revealing the set of beliefs or values they adhere to. terms used range from ‘turcosceptics’ in le monde to ‘turcophobics’ in libération. whilst libération mentions the humiliating way the eu is treating turkey by reneging on the promises made over the past four decades and adding requirements to the copenhagen criteria as prerequisites for turkey’s membership, le figaro stresses that turkey’s inadequacies make it incompatible with eu countries. libération, however, also acknowledges that in the case of turkey, the application to join the eu is ‘une candidature à handicap’ [an application riddled with difficulties], but unlike le figaro does not see any incompatibility between turkey and the eu. for its part, le monde describes the ‘defi turc’ [turkish challenge]. these reasons for rejecting turkey’s potential membership need to be assessed critically. in the literature on enlargement a number of models have been used to evaluate the reasons for accepting or rejecting the process, including eichenberg and dalton’s rationality and identity model (1993) or deutsch et al’s transactionalist model (1957). in this paper, however, we have chosen sjursen’s model (2002). informed by habermas’s bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 7 classification (1993),2 the model’s analytical distinctions between pragmatic, ethicalpolitical, and moral arguments enables us to evaluate the reasons for accepting or refusing the enlargement process. we use this model to draw the collective image based on the typical traits currently associated with turkey and conversely with europe. for each of the categories described below, the arguments against turkey’s membership are contrasted with french people’s responses to opinion polls on the image european citizens hold of europe, our aim being to identify the salient traits that could define a stereotype of turkey and a french prototype of europe and the europeans. pragmatic arguments are means-ends calculation of utility, based on considerations of costs and benefits (new markets, more power, more prestige). many such arguments have been proposed by opponent’s of turkey’s eu entry: it is not economically and socially developed enough (for example, 77% mentioned that it was too far behind economically [european commission 2005]), and these disparities will lead to mass immigration towards the richer countries (64% in the same poll mentioned that turkey’s accession would increase immigration). moreover, the eu would not be stable with a volatile region in its midst (thus in that poll 55% felt that turkey’s entry would not improve the relationship with islam, and 54% that it would not improve security in the region). the same arguments are put forward in the press as epitomised by robert badinter (2005) in le monde when he questions what he calls the obstinant support for turkey’s membership and rejects every pro-membership argument put forward: ce n’est pas pour combattre le chômage. le salaire moyen des travailleurs turcs est inférieur à celui pratiqué dans l’europe des quinze et leurs avantages sociaux sont très limités. le risque d’accroitre les délocalisations au sein du marché unique est plutôt accru. ce n’est pas pour favoriser l’agriculture française. la population agricole en turquie représente environ le tiers de la population. la moyenne dans l’ue est de 5%. la pac devra donc nécessairement être transformée pour permettre aux agriculteurs turcs de subsister ou de se reconvertir dans d’autres activités. ce n’est pas non plus pour améliorer ou équilibrer le budget européen. le coût de l’intégration de la turquie sera au moins égal à celui des dix nouveaux adhérents à l’union européenne. [it is not to fight unemployment—the average wage in turkey is lower than that of the european union prior to its latest enlargement and social benefits are extremely basic. the risk of relocation within the eu is even greater. it is not to support french farming—about a third of turks are farmers. the average farming population in the eu is 55%. therefore the cap will have to be reviewed to enable turkish farmers to survive or opt for other activities. it is not to improve or 2 in his theory of communication action habermas stated that the bedrock of liberal democracy is actors’ rationality, i.e. their ability to justify their actions , understand the various forms of justifications put forward in a communication setting and determine which ones are acceptable or not. these reasons can be pragmatic (personal gain), they can be based on kinship and a sense of identity or they can be based on universal standards of justice. bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 8 balance european finances—expanding the eu to turkey would cost at least as much as it did for the 10 new members states. these arguments suggest, on the one hand, that french people see europe as an economically and socially advanced community, and, on the other hand, that they feel those high standards may be under threat. thus the negative attitude towards turkey clearly suggests a fear of economic difficulties and increased competition from a lowwaged country with its potential impact on unemployment rate, standards of living and social provisions. clearly, according to this attitude, turkey cannot be integrated into the eu because it does not share pragmatic characteristics with ‘europe,’ and is therefore definitely categorized as the other of that ‘europe’; but, at the same time, it also perceived as a threat to the already fragile cohesion of the existing european self, epitomized by eu membership. this view of the eu, in turn, is reflected in the barometer polls about the eu; all the polls suggest that there is a clear desire for a more protective eu. indeed, when asked about the future of europe and what the eu should be doing, preserving economic and social standards are by far the top priorities. fighting unemployment (71%), promoting economic growth (32%), and combating delocalisation (35%) were the list of priorities in a national poll (louis harris 2006), and in the latest 2005 eurobarometer poll, fighting unemployment (57%) and fighting poverty (53%) largely dominated (european commission 2005). the rejection of turkey on pragmatic grounds seems therefore to suggest that the french consider that the eu should be adopting a fallback position to preserve the standards of existing members. a similar conclusion can be drawn as far as defence and security are concerned given that security issues (terrorism, crime) are high on the list of concerns noted in the polls (european commission 2005). just as the french want a socially and economically more protective eu, they also ranked security issues among the main priorities of the eu for the future (european commission 2005). this is reflected in the press. robert badinder (2005), for example, examines the consequences that turkey’s full membership could have for france and the rest of the eu by enhancing the noneuropean characteristics of turkey and reminding readers of one of the founding principles of the eu: bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 9 rien ne justifie que l’union européenne s’installe en asie mineure, sur un territoire plus vaste que celui de la france et établisse des frontières communes avec l’arménie, la géorgie, l’iran, l’irak et la syrie. il n’y a pas de région du monde plus chargée de tensions et de menaces que celle-là. l’union européenne a vocation à contribuer à sauvegarder la paix et à protéger les populations menacées, plutôt que de se trouver directement impliquée dans des conflits régionaux où la turquie serait partie. [nothing can justify the eu expansion into asia minor, to a territory larger than france, and that shares borders with armenia, georgia, iran, iraq and syria. no other region in the world is confronted by such tensions and threats. the raison d’être of the eu is to maintain peace and protect populations under threat rather than ending up directly involved in regional conflicts involving turkey.] the first set of arguments suggests that turkey is rejected on utilitarian grounds. the stereotype at work here is that of a poor country threatening the well-being of existing eu members. the prototype is that of a union whose main aim is to enhance and protect the economic and social standards of its existing members. ethical-political arguments are justifications that ‘rely on a particular conception of the collective “us” and a particular idea of the values represented by a specific community’ (sjursen 2002, 494). these are ‘kinship-based’ arguments, that is the ‘duties and responsibilities emerging as a result of belonging to a particular community’ (494). in terms of enlargement, this means accepting new countries because they are part of ‘our’ community and share ‘our’ values. the analysis of opinion polls and articles from the previously mentioned newspapers reveals that turkey is rejected because it is not perceived as belonging to europe, whether geographically, historically and culturally. many articles refers to these three facets and in the polls, 64% mentioned that the cultural differences between the eu and turkey were too great, 54% felt that it did not historically belong to europe, and 48% that geographically it was not part of europe (european commission 2005). these arguments are most commonly cited as evidence of the incompatibility of turkey’s kinship with the eu, which would seem to suggest that french people see europe as a cultural community. however, the prototype of the eu as a kinship-based community is difficult to define for two reasons. first, the majority of concepts used to define the eu by the french people are not kinship-based (peace, democracy, cooperation, freedom of movements, economic cooperation, and market economy). second, when it comes to defining the shared or typical values of europe only 23% of the french mention a common history, 22% a common cultural heritage, and 15% a common religious heritage drawn from christian origins (european commission 2006a), well behind any other kind of arguments. furthermore, bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 10 in a 2006 poll, 90% of respondents considered that europe consisted of a variety of cultures but only 8% thought there was a european culture per sé (louis harris 2006). not only is there no clear notion of european identity, but 42% of french people perceive french membership of the eu as a direct threat to their national culture and identity, whilst 26% consider, on the contrary, that membership protects national cultures and identities (tns-sofres 2005b). however, in the autumn 2005 eurobarometer poll, 58% of respondents said that they felt both french and european (european commission 2005) and this figure rose to 60% in 2006 (european commission 2006a). also, in 2005, 54% of respondents revealed that they were rather proud of being european (european commission 2005). thus, alhough the attachment to the french identity is more prevalent and always supersedes a european identity, a large majority of french people do feel european. the prototype of a kinship-based europe might be difficult to ascertain but the fact that turkey is rejected because it is not perceived as being ‘european’ indicates the presence of a european ‘us’ versus a non-european ‘them.’ moral arguments are based neither on calculations of utility nor on references to the values of a particular community, but on ‘universal standards of justice’ (sjursen 2002, 494). for example, enlargement can be justified by the need to consolidate democracy in the candidate states, as was the earlier case with greece or spain. turkey is rejected on moral grounds because it has a poor record on human rights in general (88% respondents in the latest 2005 eurobarometer poll [european commission 2005]) and women’s rights in particular, minorities are not protected, and the armenian genocide has not been recognised (louis harris 2004). national polls show that when asked specifically about the typical criticisms levelled at turkey, 81% agreed that the refusal to recognise the armenian genocide was a very serious stumbling block to turkey joining the eu, 74% said the same about the role of the turkish army in the political system, 87% about the fact that minorities are not protected enough, and 90% about the non-respect of women (louis harris 2004). the results of the polls show that many french people share the question raised by sylvie goulard (2004, 35), a lecturer in political science: pouvons-nous vraiment, nous français et allemands, passer sous silence le refus turc de dénoncer le génocide arménien alors que nous sommes parvenus à l’apaisement en regardant l’histoire en face? bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 11 [could we, the french and the german, really ignore turkey’s refusal to denounce the armenian genocide when we have succeed in reaching a state of peace by facing up to our history?] not only are these questions perceived as legitimate, but, to a large extent, they are seen as a moral duty towards fellow members of the eu. french people extend the moral duty to question turkey’s claim that it shares the same values as the eu member countries to women and minorities’ rights and therefore is qualified to join. haddad mezri (2004, 28) in ‘le marchand de tapis et la stripteaseuse’ [the haggler and the stripper ] points out that, la turquie d’en haut a beau se targuer d’avoir accordé à la femme le droit de divorce (1923), le droit de vote (1934), le droit à l’avortement (1987), la turquie d’en bas continuera, jusqu’à ce jour, à pratiquer les ‘crimes d’honneur,’ les mariages forcés ou précoces … et les violences les plus barbares. [privileged turkey may boast about granting women the right to divorce (1923), the right to vote (1934), the right to abort (1987), but deprived turkey will still, to this day, resort to “crimes of honour”, arranged or underage marriages … and the most barbaric violence. despite its claims, turkey is not seen as being on a par with eu member countries. these discrepancies classify turkey in the ‘other’ category. michel wieviorka (2005, 41), analysing the arguments of those against turkey, extends this notion of otherness to the concepts of democracy and the secular republic. turkey is defined as ‘un pays non-démocratique qui ne progresserait pas comme il le devrait pour se conformer aux demandes de l’ue et qui ne devrait son allure républicaine qu’à un pouvoir militaire’ [an undemocratic country that is not progressing as it should to meet eu standards and whose so-called republican regime only relies on the military]. this suggests that the eu is defined as an etat de droit3 and, indeed, in various opinion polls conducted on the values shared by european citizens, the respect for human beings and their fundamental rights is rated by 44% of the french as one of the main values, if not the main value, most widely shared by eu citizens, closely followed by their attachment to democracy (43%) (tns-sofres 2005b). the stereotype of turkey and the prototype of the eu is unambiguous with this set of arguments. turkey is seen as a non-democratic country that infringes human rights, whereas the eu is a democratically run community with human rights as its core political value. 3 the concept according to which public authorities abide by the same laws as citizens whose rights are guaranteed by the state. bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 12 we argue that despite the large number of pragmatic or moral arguments, the ethicalpolitical arguments are the most salient and at the root of the deep and generalised hostility towards turkey joining the eu. the fact that in 2006 57% of french respondents asserted that even if turkey were to meet all the conditions set for its full membership they would still be against the country joining the eu, and that between 30% and 38% declare that turkey should never be part of the union for historical and cultural reasons (european commission 2006a), shows that turkey belongs to an ‘other’ category beyond pragmatic or moral arguments. in an interview for libération jean-louis bourlanges (2004, 4) epitomises the prevalence of ethical-political arguments in the rejection of turkey’s membership when, leaving no doubt on the otherness of turkey, he declares: l’identité historique de l’europe est indissociable, non des convictions religieuses des européens aujourd’hui mais du modèle culturel et politique façonné par quinze siècles de christianisme .… la turquie est étrangère à cette histoire, elle qui n’a pas connu la conversion romaine au christianisme, l’humanisme, la réforme, les lumières, le romantisme, etc … [the historical identity of europe cannot be considered separately, not from the religious beliefs shared by european citizens nowadays but from the cultural and political model shaped by fifteen centuries of christianity .… turkey is alien to this history, it did not experience the roman conversion to christianity, humanism, the reformation, the enlightenment philosophers, romanticism, etc …] a comparison with the 2004 enlargement provides further evidence of the prominence of ethical-political rejections of turkey. concerns were raised about the economic cost of the enlargement to the east (71% felt that it would be very costly for france), its consequences on possible immigration, and its impact on unemployment (46% felt unemployment would increase), social provisions in france (46% felt that the standards would decrease), and sectors such as agriculture (european commission 2003a). yet 74% felt that ‘we’ had a moral duty to reunify europe and 64% felt that enlargement was justified because the respective countries were historically and geographically part of europe. all perceived negative consequences were apparently acceptable because these countries were seen as part of the european family. the polls corroborated sjursen’s contention that pragmatic or moral arguments could not possibly have been the sole explanation for the eu’s attitude towards the 2004 candidate countries; rather, pragmatic worries or moral arguments were swept aside by kinship-based arguments (sjursen 2002, 508). by extension, it can be argued that all the pragmatic and moral reasons used against turkey could be swept aside as well but for the lack of kinship feelings towards turkey. a comparison with another candidate state, ukraine, illustrates bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 13 this point: the current reasons used against the country joining the eu are very similar to the economic, social and political arguments against turkey’s entry, and yet 54% would welcome ukraine in the future if it meets all the conditions for accession, whereas 57% would reject turkey even if it meets all those conditions. it appears, therefore, that the key aspect in determining the eu rejection or the acceptance of another country is the feeling of kinship, which in this case could be referred to as the notion of europeanness. if french people reject turkey because it does not belong to europe, i.e., it is not one of us, can a definition of the ‘self’ be drawn from the reasons given for this rejection? can turkey as the ‘other’ be the negative entity required for the common representation of the european self in france? what are the characteristics of this sort of europeanness? the concept of europeanness the question arises here whether or not geography might be the consensual criterion used to assess europeanness, given it is one of the main reasons put forward against turkey and is often suggested in the press. in his article ‘la turquie, alibi du oui et du non’ [turkey, the alibi of the “yes” and the “ no” supporters], the sociologist michel wieviorka (2005, 41) mentions the geographical arguments against turkey’s membership, c’est un pays d’asie, situé pour l’ensemble en dehors des frontières géographiques de l’europe. d’ailleurs le fondateur de la turquie moderne n’a-t-il pas choisi d’installer la capitale à ankara, en anatolie et non en europe? [this is an asian country with most of its territory stretching beyond europe’s geographical boundaries. besides, didn’t the founding father of modern turkey choose ankara as his capital city, the latter being located in anatolia, and not in europe?] this argument suggests that even turks themselves do not regard turkey as belonging to europe. the argument pointing out that 95% of turkish territory is in asia is a recurring one in the press, as illustrated by the ‘argumentaire des partisans et des opposants à l’intégration’ [list of arguments for and against turkey’s full membership] published in le monde in which alain lamassoure after examining the various ways to define a “european zone” concludes that ‘le moins mauvais critère est la géographie. le projet européen concerne toute l’europe, et rien que l’europe’ [the least bad criterion is geography. the european project is about europe as a whole and europe only] (clerc 2004). in other words, for lamassoure, geographical arguments might not be perfect, bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 14 but they are undeniable and valid.4 this view is also supported in the polls. in 2006, 47% of french people were of the opinion that definite borders should be agreed on before any further enlargement took place. although 50% thought that physical borders for the eu could not be defined, and that the eu should expand to any european country sharing its values (european commission 2006a), the reference to ‘european countries’ is clearly of a geographical nature. the eu is therefore perceived as a geographically bound entity that will eventually have clearly defined borders. however, no consensual boundaries are neither specified (which are these ‘european countries’) nor less agreed upon, as reflected in the various debates published in the press, and evident in headlines such as ‘jusqu’où repousser les frontières de l’europe?’ [how far should europe expand its borders?] (de bresson 2004). an article in libération, for example, ‘la turquie face à l’identité européenne’ [turkey versus european identity], states that ‘le débat sur l’adhésion de la turquie à l’union révèle la nécessité d’une redéfinition de l’europe, ce qui passe forcément par un débat sur ses frontières’ [the debate surrounding turkey’s membership highlights the need to rethink europe’s boundaries, which undeniably involves a debate on boundaries] (laidi 2002,8). this suggests that french people seem to be unsure of what the borders of europe should be, and in some cases, whether they should be physically defined at all, for to limit europe to a geographical entity would restrict the concept of europeanness itself. this argument is also developed in le monde, where pascal clerc (2002) states that geography is a ‘pretext’ used to reject turkey. he notes: la géographie a bon dos. juge de paix, elle aurait donné à l’europe ses limites intangibles, permettant ainsi de décider sans ambiguïté quels sont les etats qui peuvent revendiquer leur intégration dans l’union européenne et quels sont ceux qui doivent rester à la porte. [for many, geography is an easy copout that supposedly gives europe intangible limits, allowing a decision without any ambiguity about which countries can claim eu membership and which ones should remain on its door step.] deploring this fact, he points out that, les limites ne sont pas données par la nature, mais sont des productions culturelles. fixées dans des contextes historiques précis et pour servir des projets particuliers, ces limites sont susceptibles d’être modifiées et doivent toujours être interrogées. 4 alain lamassoure is a member of the european parliament for the south-west of france. he is a member of the union for a popular movement, which is part of the european people's party, and sits on the european parliament's finance committee. he also represented the european parliament at the european convention in 2002-2003. bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 15 [limits are not defined by nature but are cultural products. these limits have been drawn in specific historical contexts to serve particular purposes. they are likely to be moved and should always be questioned.] if geography is not a consensual criterion, then, might europe be seen as a community of values rather than simply a geographic entity? reference to values shared by european countries deployed to reject candidate states seems to suggest that a clear and homogenous set of values contributes to the shaping of a european identity. indeed, in 2006, 66% of french respondents agreed that the eu countries had common values, which make them different from the rest of the world (european commission 2006a). moreover, 71% felt that these countries shared a common culture that deserved to be defended against other cultures (tns-sofres 2004). however, the analysis of french responses in polls carried out on european culture and values show that the terms ‘culture’ and ‘values’ cover a wide range of meanings. these meanings include economic considerations such as the euro, which is often mentioned first, as if the shared currency itself grants the eu a federative status, prosperity, market economy, high standards of living, and social welfare (louis harris 2006; european commission 2006a, 2006b). although some of these meanings can be associated with the eu’s concrete achievements, they are not particularly typically european in themselves. this applies, as well, to other values quoted by the french respondents, such as human rights, women’s rights, democracy, peace and solidarity. if the most typical values shared by european citizens are of a cultural nature, a common history and a common religion are the only two cultural values mentioned by respondents, and by very few at that, 23% and 9% respectively (european commission 2006a). the reference to a common history blurs the notion of europeanness further: how can a common history be defined if the geographic ‘common’ element is not clear? for example, libération reported in 2002 that the then foreign minister, hubert védrine, was rightly concerned about the meaning of a european political project without welldefined borders. védrine pointed out the deficiencies of a corpus of values that is not reflected in a specific territory (duhamel 2002, 43). as religion is mentioned as a shared cultural value, should we assume that europe is defined as christian? indeed, alongside geography, religion is often cited as undeniable evidence of the incompatibility of turkey with the eu. for ignacio ramonet (2004, 1), writing in le monde diplomatique, bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 16 the debate surrounding turkey’s membership flags the current anxiety western societies have about their identity in relation to islam. the debate epitomises the islam-phobic feelings haunting virtually all political sectors. since a significant proportion of turkey’s opponents see islam as incompatible with europe and its values, should we conclude then that christianity is a typical european trait and therefore that what is not christian is not european? with this argument, the perception of the other (of europe) defined in religious terms would therefore give a clearer image of the european self. this is the argument put forward by jean-louis harouel (2005, 12) in ‘le legs du christianisme’ [the legacy of christianity] published in le figaro, in which he states that ‘précisément, l’europe est aujourd’hui ce qu’elle est grâce au fait qu’elle a refusé plus de mille ans durant de devenir musulmane’ [europe is what it is today thanks to its refusal to become muslim for over a thousand years]. he adds: c’est parce que l’europe a été capable de chasser de son sol les dominations musulmanes ... que nous vivons dans une société laïque, libre, tolérante, économiquement développée, à haut niveau de vie moyen et socialement généreuse. [it is only because europe was able to drive out muslim domination that it can today enjoy a secular society, freedom, tolerance, a developed economy, a high standard of living and social welfare.] however, whilst considering that islam provides a ground for the rejection of turkey’s entry into the eu (19% in 2002 and 25% in 2006 [ipsos 2002; 2004]), the french cannot be said to perceive christian heritage as being a federative trait of europe that bonds european citizens, since so few of them mentioned it as a european value. turkey is rejected with kinship-based arguments, yet what european kinship might be is not clearly defined in the polls and the french press; the vast majority of values used to define the eu are pragmatic and the few cultural ones are imprecise or not clearly substantiated. the dichotomy between the eu defined by pragmatic arguments and turkey being rejected on ethical-political grounds suggests that the rejection of the ‘other’ can generate a feeling of kinship around the rejection itself, rather than provide the rationale for this rejection. the strong opposition to turkey’s membership displayed both in opinion polls and the press seems undeniably more federative than the specific arguments that highlight why turkey does not belong in and to europe. clearly, the rejection of turkey on the basis of its differences, even if these differences are not consensual, is where the french-european consensus lies. commonality in terms of europeanness is yet to be defined in the french psyche, but the rejection of the ‘other’ bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 17 brings a sense of commonality in itself. commonality is derived from what is clearly rejected rather than what is vaguely shared. this process is emphasised in a press release from the cnrs in 2003 about one of its research programs on european identity: l’identité européenne demeure en effet une notion ambigüe. de multiples visions du ‘fait’ européen s’enchevêtrent sans pour autant se superposer: la réalité historique de l’europe ne coïncide pas avec les données physiques et géographiques, à tel point qu’il est pratiquement impossible de répondre à la question «qu’est-ce qu’un européen?». (...) l’accélération du processus de construction européenne conduit les citoyens comme les responsables politiques à s’interroger sur l’avenir des organisations fondées sur l’adéquation entre état, nation et territoire. ces interrogations prennent place dans un contexte où se développent à la fois un sentiment de fragilité face aux processus de globalisation et des tentatives de reterritorialisation ou de réinvention d‘identité dont le rapport au territoire semble précisément difficile à cerner. [european identity remains an ambiguous notion. multiple representations of europeanness coexist without matching; the historical reality of europe is not reflected by physical or geographical boundaries to the extent that it is virtually impossible to find an answer to “what is a european?” the increasing pace of the eu integration process is leading european citizens and politicians to question the future of organisations based on the relationship between states, nations and territories. these questions arise at a time when both the feeling of insecurity due to the globalisation process is increasing, and attempts to reclaim territory or re-invent an identity that is aligned with a territory are proving difficult to sustain. even if the status of a supranational state in the french standardised conception of europe is granted, the eu remains an entity associated with a set of characteristics that do not confer on the eu any specific europeanness. drawing a parallel with renan’s attempt to define a nation through the exploration of history, geography, anthropology, religion or politics, we can only conclude that like the nation, europeanness and europe encompass too vast a set of characteristics to be limited by a strict definition other than the conscious and manifest will that eu member countries have of being brought together (renan 1997). our contention is that this desire is fuelled by a tangible sense of kinship; it is not derived from a clearly defined notion of europeanness, but from a rejection based on a perception of non-european otherness, in this case, represented by turkey itself. conclusion our analysis of the opinion polls and the press leads us to conclude that despite common reference to pragmatic and moral arguments, the prominence of ethicalpolitical arguments against turkey’s membership of the eu, as presented in the sjursen model, shows that the feeling of kinship is the key element in determining the acceptance of the ‘other.’ the absence of the feeling of kinship will therefore lead to the bogain and potot from the stereotypification of the non-european other portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 18 rejection of ‘the other,’ as is well illustrated in the specific case of turkey’s application to join the eu. however, we also conclude that the french prototypical representation of europe and europeans cannot be drawn from their stereotypical representation of turkey. this emphasizes the cognitive nature of the stereotypification process itself, and suggests that if the french have a clear image of what is not european, they do not necessarily have a clear consensual representation of what constitute europeanness. at present, the only clear attempt at defining europeanness is limited to the copenhagen criteria, which has no kinship dimensions. for robert badinder (2005), turkey’s potential membership of the eu emphasises the existing haziness surrounding europe and what constitute europeanness, except as the name for an ever-expanding trading market. could this mean that europeanness is only currently associated with what is rejected on a kinship basis as opposed to what is accepted on that basis? does the ‘other’ when regarded as a threat requiring group protection create a bond between members of a group? turkey seems to epitomise the dangerous ‘other’ from whom the european ‘self,’ as perceived by french people, needs to be protected, but this ‘self’ is, at best, a concept riddled with many contradictions, and, at worst, an empty entity. the problematic lies, we suggest, in the lack of consistency by which citizens of eu member states in general, and france in particular, associate with the notion of europe or europeans in defining themselves. from this perspective, the issue of turkey’s membership is the trigger to more fundamental issues regarding the raison d’être of the eu and the direction it needs to take in the future. for that reason, we end with the words of the green party mep, gérard onesta (2005,1): dans une union en panne institutionnelle et budgétaire, et qui connaît des repliements nationalistes, la turquie va peut-être d’avantage s’inscrireet pour longtempsdans le tempo des consultations électorales nationales que sur l’agenda communautaire. pourtant la turquie est un véritable sujet européen, puisqu’il pousse chacun à divulguer son projet sociétal et ses vues géopolitiques à long terme, ce qui est l’essence même de la construction de l’union. il est vrai que tous les élargissements qu’a connus l’histoire de l’europe, c’est celui-ci, par sa nature et son ampleur, qui révèle le mieux les carences du processus européen. 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http://www.tnssofres.com/etudes/pol/051005_europe_n.htm [accessed: 15 apr. 2006]. ——— 2006, quelle europe ? la construction européenne vue par les français [online]. available: http://www.tns-sofres.com/etudes/pol/170306_europe.htm [accessed: 15 apr. 2006]. wieviorka, m. 2005, ‘la turquie, alibi du oui et du non,’ libération, 14 jun., 41. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: potts, j. 2018. futurism, futurology, future shock, climate change: visions of the future from 1909 to the present. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 99-116. https:// doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5810 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au research article futurism, futurology, future shock, climate change: visions of the future from 1909 to the present john potts macquarie university corresponding author: professor john potts, department of media, music, communication and cultural studies, faculty of arts, macquarie university, nsw 2109, australia. john.potts@ mq.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5810 article history: received 24/10/2017; revised 12/02/2018; accepted 16/04/2018; published 23/08/2018 abstract this essay charts a brief intellectual history of the futures—both utopian and dystopian— conceived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. it traces perspectives on the future since 1909, when the term ‘futurism’ was coined in the publication of the ‘the founding and manifesto of futurism.’ the essay maps changes in the vision of the future, taking a chronological approach in noting developments in the discourse on the future. a prominent theme in pronouncements on the future is technological progress, first in relation to industrial technology, later in the context of post-industrial or information technology. a turning-point in this discourse can be isolated in the early 1970s, when ideas of technological progress begin to be challenged in the public sphere; from that date, environmental concern becomes increasingly significant in discussions of the future. keywords future, futurism, futurology, climate change, environment. 1963/1984/2007/2018 in july and august 1963, a two-part article on the future was published in playboy magazine. the article documented the proceedings of a roundtable discussion featuring twelve of the declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 99 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5810 https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5810 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:john.potts@mq.edu.au mailto:john.potts@mq.edu.au https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5810 eminent science-fiction authors of the day, including isaac asimov, arthur c. clarke, robert heinlein and ray bradbury. the authors, considered experts on the future, were asked to predict what life would be like from 1984 to 2000. this remarkable text, recording the projections and predictions of famous science-fiction authors, is a document of the futurism of 1963. apart from their celebrated ability to imagine the future, several of these writers could claim expert status in technical and scientific fields: asimov in astronomy and chemistry; clark in space and sea exploration; heinlein in space travel and plastics. these authors, in other words, were superbly qualified as futurists. the roundtable conversation was a space age projection of a technologically advanced future society. the science fiction experts made the following confident predictions concerning the period 1984–2000: space stations on the moon in the 1970s; the conquest of human diseases; the disappearance of dull jobs; three months’ annual paid vacation by 2000; the elimination of the need for sleep; and a glorious age of ‘social emancipation and scientific revolution’ (godfrey 2007: 21). their vision of the future, as notated in the playboy article, was optimistic, grandiose, and wildly inaccurate. but of course, the writers’ earnest predictions can only be deemed wildly inaccurate from a perspective beyond their time-scale: beyond 1984, beyond 2000. in 2007, the irish artist gerard byrne exhibited a video installation work at the venice biennale entitled 1984 and beyond. this work, comprising three video channels of 60 minutes’ total duration, and 20 black and white photographs, used the text of the playboy article to recreate on video the 1963 roundtable discussion. byrne’s intriguing artwork plays with temporal disjunction: the writers in 1963 were asked to project to a time beyond 1984; yet we, as viewers of this artwork in 2007, or 2018, are situated in time well beyond that projection-point. we look back, with amusement and perhaps wonder, to this prediction of the future from 1963. their future, imagined with supreme optimism and unmitigated faith in technological progress, has long been incorporated into our past. the future conceived in 1963 is a space age construction; we file it within a history of the future, or of futures that have been imagined, predicted or projected; futures that were never realised. byrne’s artful recreation of the 1963 roundtable carefully situates the writers in their historical context. the actors playing the venerated science fiction authors are dressed in the fashion of 1963: turtlenecks and fitted cardigans, narrow ties and thin suits. they smoke pipes and cigarettes constantly; they stroll and pontificate against a high modernist architectural setting, the sonsbeek pavilion in the netherlands, originally built in 1955. the effect of the re-enactment is to seal off the futurist vision of 1963; even the surrounding buildings suggests the failed utopian vision of internationalist modernist architecture. the authors’ pompous pronouncements on space travel and a world of leisure are rendered ridiculous by their failure to become reality. but the overall effect of this re-staging of the beliefs of 1963 is not one of ridicule. it is rather a sense of distance: that the optimistic, utopian attitudes of this period are hopelessly lost. these attitudes are foreign to us, as is the undiluted faith in the future demonstrated by these zealous ‘futurists’ of 1963. the science fiction writers conceived a utopian future; but for us looking back at their beliefs and hopes, they represent, as lytle shaw has observed, a ‘utopian past’ (2007: 121). this essay proposes a brief intellectual history of the futures—both utopian and dystopian—conceived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. it traces perspectives on the future since 1909, when the term ‘futurism’ was coined in the publication of the ‘the founding and manifesto of futurism.’ the essay maps changes in the vision of the future, taking a chronological approach in noting developments in the discourse on the future. components potts portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018100 of this discourse, over a span of 108 years, include the published pronouncements of selfproclaimed futurists and futurologists. other contributors to the discourse on the future include industrialists, engineers, scientists, economists, architects, artists, writers, film-makers, entrepreneurs, technicians, activists and environmentalists. the rhetoric of advertising and public relations is also significant in promoting visions of the future, as found in the ‘futurama’ exhibits—sponsored by energy corporations—at world’s fairs in the twentieth century. a prominent theme in pronouncements on the future is technological progress, first in relation to industrial technology, later in the context of post-industrial or information technology. a turning-point in this discourse can be isolated in the early 1970s, when ideas of technological progress begin to be challenged in the public sphere; from that date, environmental concern becomes increasingly significant in discussions of the future. the discourse on global warming and climate change becomes highly influential when the future of the environment—and of the planet—is considered in the twenty-first century. theorising the future there is a substantial cross-disciplinary scholarship on future studies, drawing on sociology, anthropology, media and cultural studies, literary studies, studies of technology and society, and other disciplines. futurologists have made predictions in recent years based on economics, demographics, political theory and developments in information technology. the future studies scholarship in general adopts a critical sociological perspective, describing the socioeconomic and cultural determinants that shape visions of the future. as the anthropologist marc augé writes in his book the future: ‘the future, even when it concerns the individual, always has a social dimension: it depends on others’ (augé 2014: 2). the anthropologist arjun appadurai has considered the theoretical approach to ‘the future as cultural fact,’ taking into account the human preoccupations ‘imagination, anticipation, and aspiration’ (2013: 286). augé’s critical anthropology focuses on the political and economic forces shaping social development: ‘change is fundamentally economic and driven by technological development’ (2013: 47). globalisation, growing social inequality and environmental damage resulting from ‘the imperatives of development and growth’ (2013: 51) are for augé the factors determining the near future: ‘we can already see the outlines of a transnational planetary oligarchy and an unequal planetary society’ (2013: 52). augé’s vision of the future is a general one, proceeding from a projection of ‘globalization and the extension of the capitalist market to the whole planet’ (2013: 60). the economist jacques attali offers a far more detailed prediction of world societies up to the year 2100 in a brief history of the future (2009). attali’s vision of the future has an economic base similar to augé’s: ‘i predict that in the course of the twenty-first century, market forces will take the planet in hand,’ leading to the evolution of ‘super-empire’ (2009: xiii). attali makes the general observations that ‘every prediction is first and foremost a meditation on the present,’ and that a work of prediction is ‘also a political work’ (2009: xvii). more specifically, attali foresees a political and economic conflict between ‘super-empire’ and ‘hyper-democracy,’ a political system in which the market and globalisation are contained for the benefit of world citizens. his political hope is that the ‘common good’ and ‘collective intelligence’ of hyper-democracy will prevail by 2100 (2009: 271). other recent predictions of the future focus on the social impact of advanced information technology in the near future. in homo deus: a brief history of tomorrow (2017), yuval noah harari concludes his history of homo sapiens with a prediction of the species’ displacement by futurism, futurology, future shock, climate change portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018101 one of its own inventions: ‘dataism’ or the ‘data religion.’ harari defines dataism as the view that ‘the universe consists of data flows,’ with the corollary that ‘the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing’ (harari 2017: 430). harari projects a future of data controlled by algorithms and artificial intelligence, finding the possibility that ‘dataism threatens to do to homo sapiens what homo sapiens has done to all other animals’ (2017: 460). a number of scholarly publications have charted a ‘history of the future,’ tracing visions of the future in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the domains of science fiction and architecture. these texts include donna goodman’s a history of the future (2008), richard barbrook’s imaginary futures (2007), oona strathern’s a brief history of the future (2007) and the collection of essays histories of the future edited by daniel rosenberg and susan harding (2005). for these historical studies, ‘looking backwards is the precondition for moving forwards,’ as barbrook states in imaginary futures (2007: 11). previous imaginings of the future are located in their social, economic and political contexts. barbrook, for example, focuses on the grand showcases of new technologies as emblems of the future, beginning with the ‘great exhibition of the works of industry of all nations’ in london in 1851, and continuing in the ‘futurama’ exhibits at the new york world’s fairs of 1939 and 1964. in 1851, a futuristic building of iron and glass known as the crystal palace was built to house the new industrial products of the british empire. the various new machines produced by industrial capitalism were the stars of this ‘great exhibition,’ which offered a ‘public celebration of economic progress’ (barbrook 2007: 26) and a vision of a new prosperous social order. barbrook traces the growth of an international series of expositions and world’s fairs modelled on the 1851 crystal palace exhibition. the paris universal exposition in 1900 attracted nearly 48 million spectators: world expositions became international travel destinations and even ‘appeared to be prefiguring world peace’ (2007: 26). if that hope did not survive long into the twentieth century, the new york world’s fair later became a showcase for optimistic visions of the future founded on technological progress. corporations sponsored exhibits displaying the wonders of the near future: ‘building a world of tomorrow’ was the theme of the 1939 world’s fair. general motors’ futurama exhibit, depicting a high-tech usa twenty years into the future, was enormously popular with spectators. barbrook demonstrates the economic and political base of future imaginings in his study of these exhibits. the world’s fair, he observes, ‘expressed the productive potential of american industry’ (2007: 28), as did its vision of the future. the following essay takes a chronological approach, describing visions of the future made public since 1909. these imaginings of the future have economic, political and technological bases. for the first six decades of the twentieth century, optimistic visions of the future—such as those of the science fiction authors in 1963—emanated from a base of industrial capitalism, reflecting a faith in technological progress. however, a significant change to imaginings of the future occurred in the 1970s. environmental concerns punctured faith in technological progress, while industrial technology was targeted for the environmental damage it had caused around the world. new political imperatives—conservation, environmentalism, sustainability, the questioning of economic growth—influenced visions of the future. from the 1970s on, these imaginings were more likely to be dystopian than utopian, expressing anxiety for the future of the environment and for humanity. potts portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018102 1909: the caffeine of europe f. t. marinetti invented ‘futurism’ on february 20, 1909.on this date, marinetti—poet, provocateur, and the self-proclaimed ‘caffeine of europe’—published ‘the founding and manifesto of futurism’ on the front page of the paris newspaper le figaro. ‘we declare that the world’s splendour has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed,’ proclaimed the manifesto, identifying the motor car as the symbol of this new order. marinetti willed the future into being—and the future was built with industrial technology. he sang the love of racing car danger, of ‘broad-chested locomotives,’ electric light, factories and the tumult of cities. (marinetti 1961: 124) previous writers had predicted the future—jules verne, hg wells, edward bellamy in looking back, published in 1888 and set in 2000—but these were science fiction authors. political theorists had peered into the future with hope of new political orders. but marinetti invented the idea of futurism: a world-view perpetually geared to the glories of things yet to come. he inscribed the future into the core of a new art movement, which proposed a new way of life. this was the avant-garde: dragging the rest of society onwards into the future. marinetti’s new movement gave voice to a love of machines, youth and technological speed— and to a love of the future. based in milan, marinetti and his fellow futurists—artists, composers, architects, performers—were inspired by the newly industrialised northern italian cities, which promised liberation from the dreary agrarian past. futurism was proposed as a total art form, incorporating all available means including film and re-invigorating old forms, as marinetti’s typographically radical ‘words-in-freedom’ revolutionised the printed word. there was futurist music (the art of noises), futurist clothing, futurist sleeping (briefly, standing up) and futurist food: the futurist cookbook rejected pasta as too slow and heavy a food for futurists. marinetti’s face was turned only towards the future in his reverence for progress, which ‘is always right, even when it is wrong, because it is movement, life, struggle, hope’ (marinetti 1972: 82). this orientation to the future, this love of progress, was distinctively modern, unknown in the ancient world. only in the enlightenment of eighteenth century europe did the idea of progress gain currency (bury 1955). reason would drive a continual social progress until the perfect society was achieved; in this way the present could be considered superior to the past, and the future would be better than the present: the definition of progress. the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century transformed progress into technological progress: great railway stations became cathedrals of progress, as technological innovation raised living standards in the ‘age of improvement’. this was the version of progress—built on the advances of technology—inherited by the futurist marinetti in the early twentieth century. he had no doubt that industrial machines were forging a triumphant future: ‘progress is always right.’ coupled with this utopian zeal for the technological future was a contempt for the past: the ‘useless administration of the past’ must be let go, marinetti cried, if futurists were to hymn the beauty of mechanical speed (marinetti 1961: 125). marinetti not only repudiated tradition: he ridiculed it, insulted it, slapped it in the face. he challenged it to a duel and then overwhelmed it with modern military machines. in the founding manifesto, marinetti declared hostilities against: museums, which cover italy ‘like so many cemeteries’; libraries—‘set fire to their shelves, good incendiaries!’; academies; and even second-hand markets. the disdain for all ‘passéists’ extended to any individual cursed with middle age. this included futurists, whose time, marinetti reckoned, is up at forty. then ‘let futurism, futurology, future shock, climate change portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018103 other futurists, younger and more valiant, throw us into the basket like useless manuscripts!’ (1961: 125) the futurists’ embrace of youth, speed and novelty pre-dated the ‘hope i die before i get old’ youth culture of the 1960s by almost six decades. there was no place in the future for the old, the weary, the traditional—or anything associated with the dead hand of the past. 1913: assembly line to the future the american industrialist henry ford introduced moving assembly belts into his automobile manufacturing plants in 1913. this innovation yielded a massive increase in production of the model t ford, produced at affordable prices. by 1918, half of all cars in the usa were model ts, and henry ford was one of the wealthiest and most famous men in the world. the ford factory was a model for the new industrial process: efficient, mechanised, the paragon of time-and-motion control of labour. it was the realisation of frederick taylor’s vision, published in his book principles of scientific management in 1911. each worker performs a single task, timed to optimum efficiency, and repeated with machine-like monotony. every individual worker is in fact a small cog in a gigantic industrial mechanism. this new form of the workplace was later satirised by charlie chaplin in his film modern times of 1936: the dehumanising effects of the factory-machine are shown in the hapless worker unable to switch off his mechanical task. but for taylor, and ford, and the other industrialists who pursued the goal of ‘scientific management’ of labour, this was the way of the future. the assembly line was rationalised movement; it operated a strict control of effort in manufacturing the motor cars so revered by marinetti and his futurists. the industrialist ford shared the futurists’ zeal for technological progress, an orientation to the mechanised future. he also professed a complete disdain for history, which he dismissed as ‘more or less bunk.’ why look back when you can look forward with optimism? ‘we don’t want tradition,’ ford said in 1916. ‘we want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today’ (ford 1916: xxv) 1919: engineers know best the word ‘technocracy’—the management of society by technical experts – was introduced by the american engineer william henry smyth in 1919. smyth’s article ‘“technocracy”: ways and means to gain industrial democracy’ saw the future of democracy as ‘the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers’ (1919: 385). these were the technical experts who best knew the potential of technological systems to solve social ills. the technocracy movement, founded by howard scott in 1932, went further in proposing government by technical decision-making. technicians know better than politicians how to benefit society; the experts who run factories and machine systems should be trusted to organise the economy along mechanical lines. the technocracy movement even proposed energy as the new metric of value: money should be replaced by energy certificates measured in joules. if the politicians would only get out of the way, the technocrats could improve society—by making it run like an enormous benevolent machine. potts portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018104 1924: tomorrow is better than today in 1924, ‘planned obsolescence’ was introduced as a strategy by the head of general motors, alfred sloan. the idea was to make changes every year to the cars produced by general motors, so that car owners could be convinced to buy the new improved model. advertising pushed the imperative to upgrade as often as possible: why be stuck with last year’s model, when this year’s is so much better? and next year’s model will be better still! sloan called this production strategy ‘dynamic obsolescence,’ but critics preferred ‘planned obsolescence.’ this term incorporated the planning behind a vision of constant upgrading and purchasing of the new. the current model is only new for a short period of time; before long it becomes old, inferior, and in need of replacement. the tactic of planned obsolescence was copied by manufacturers of commodities everywhere. henry ford resisted the idea, seeing no need to tinker with his beloved model t; general motors surpassed ford in car sales in the us in 1931. 1930: flash forward clarence birdseye introduced the flash freezing of food in 1930. the birdseye company used new freezing technology to sell frozen vegetables, fruit and meats. freezing food makes all foods available at all times: no longer are we dependent on seasonal produce. this technological innovation was seen as another means of improving on nature, which stubbornly follows a seasonal cycle. now summer fruits could be thawed out in winter: the consumer does not need to wait. frozen food reached its peak in the 1950s with the frozen tv dinner. this ‘complete meal’ was designed to be heated up and eaten in front of the tv which, no doubt, screened ads on the modern marvels of the age such as plastics, synthetics and frozen foods. 1932: cathedrals of the future the ‘international style’ was the name given to modernist architecture in 1932 by philip johnson and henry-russell hitchcock. their exhibition modern architecture: international exhibition celebrated the distinctive style of modernist design and architecture as it emerged in europe and spread around the world. the european master architects—walter gropius (director of the bauhaus design school), le corbusier, mies van der rohe—were gurus of minimal, pure, rationalised design style. embellishment and decoration were banished, as were any traces of pre-modernist style. a house is ‘a machine for living in,’ le corbusier declared in towards a new architecture, originally published in 1923 (7). there was a utopian aspect to the modernist blueprint for architecture and urban design: gropius called the bauhaus ‘a cathedral of the future’ ( jencks 1989: 25). the purity of design was thought to have a spiritual dimension, which would uplift all those who experienced it. social problems would be eradicated in the near future by the sheer presence of modernist urban development. slums would be replaced by modernist design on a grand scale: high-rise buildings and vast housing projects full of uplifted inhabitants. in the gospel according to mies and le corbusier, the future would be pure, sleek, and free of the urban decay of the past. 1938: caffeine of the new world nescafé launched its instant coffee, based on an advanced refining process, in 1938. the benefits of this new form of coffee were sold by advertising: convenience and speed of preparation. it was the modern version of a traditional drink; in the succeeding years, other futurism, futurology, future shock, climate change portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018105 instant foods were successfully marketed, including instant gravy, instant mash potato, and whole pre-prepared meals. the convenience of these new foods was the key to their market success: they were quicker, easier, an improvement on the old ways. but surely even marinetti, the self-confessed caffeine of europe, must have had his doubts about this manifestation of technological progress? 1939: futurama the world’s fair of 1939, held in new york, followed earlier world’s fairs in showcasing technical innovations and gadgets. but the 1939 event offered to take visitors into the future. the theme was ‘the world of tomorrow’; corporate-sponsored pavilions showed off the homes and cities of the near-future; and visitors were given badges that proudly claimed ‘i have seen the future’ (turney 2010: 65). the central exhibit was ‘futurama,’ sponsored by general motors. futurama was a glimpse of tomorrow: super-cities linked by huge seven-lane highways. in the vision projected by general motors, technology is good, highways are good, energy is good, progress is good, and the future is a very happy place indeed. 1943: futurology in 1943, a german social scientist named ossip flechteim coined the term ‘futurology.’ flechteim proposed a new science of probability, drawing on scientific scholarship to make informed predictions of the future. futurology was meant to be systematic and scientific in its workings, enabling educated forecasts in a range of possible directions. in his 1945 article ‘teaching the future,’ flechteim recommended the study of the future as an academic discipline. this recommendation was not realised until 1966, when the first university course solely devoted to the future was founded by alvin toffler. ‘futurologist’ was increasingly used with ‘futurist’ to mean any scientist, social scientist or technical expert qualified to predict aspects of the future. 1945: a mad future a global policy ‘think-tank’ was established in 1945, along the lines laid down by flechteim’s new social science of futurology. the rand corporation was born at the end of world war ii, initially formed by douglas aircraft to advise the us military on matters of policy and long-range planning. rand would provide research, analysis and projections on all things military and geo-political. in 1948, it was decided that rand should become independent of douglas; henceforth it was funded by the us government and various corporations. rand became the planner and adviser to the us military through the cold war period. rand offered advice on the vietnam conflict, on the space race with the ussr, and—most famously—on the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. rand’s vision of the future during the cold war was based on the concept of ‘mutually assured destruction’ (mad), which would ensure a stand-off between the nuclear-armed superpowers. at times rand went further: in 1960 its chief strategist herman kahn proposed the idea of a ‘winnable’ nuclear war. kahn’s reward for this vision was to serve as one of the models for dr strangelove, the deranged military strategist in stanley kubrick’s satirical film of 1964. potts portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018106 1955: assembly line food businessman ray kroc opened his first franchised mcdonald’s fast food restaurant in 1955. the mcdonald brothers had opened their fast food establishment mcdonald’s in 1948, based on an assembly line kitchen for the quick and efficient preparation of hamburgers and fries. the premises were themselves designed to encourage customers to order, consume their food and leave in quick succession: the idea was not a restaurant where diners can linger for hours over a meal, but a bright, shiny outlet for the rapid production and consumption of simple meals. it was the rationalisation of food, along the lines of henry ford’s rationalisation of the factory. kroc saw the vast potential for replication of the mcdonald’s-machine, whereas the founders, sceptical of franchising, did not. by 1959, kroc had increased the number of mcdonald’s restaurants to 102; in 1961 he bought out the brothers and assumed command of a vast franchising empire. kroc saw the future of food: produced assembly line-fast, served in outlets everywhere the same, with the same limited range of items. he knew the value of the mcdonald’s model better than did the mcdonald’s themselves: by 2017, there were 36, 899 mcdonald’s outlets in 120 countries (2016 annual report 13). 1957: into space the space race—and the space age—began in 1957, when the soviet union launched sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, into orbit. stung by the demonstration of soviet superiority in space technology, the united states formed nasa in 1958. the soviets sent the first human, yuri gagarin, into space in 1961, prompting president kennedy to publicly announce the americans’ determination to catch up in the space race. kennedy pledged a moon landing by the end of the decade. the 1960s was the space age. new feats of architecture, including eero saarinen’s twa terminal at jfk airport new york, completed in 1962, suggested the look of space stations. popular culture was full of optimistic visions of a future lived in space: the jetsons, star trek. family picnic blankets were replaced by ‘space blankets,’ using the materials taken into space by astronauts. it was assumed that everyday necessities—like food—would increasingly become more like astronauts’ food: processed, squeezed out of tubes. the upcoming journey into space was the latest chapter in the wondrous story of technological progress. 1962: silent future an alternative perspective on the future appeared on 27 september 1962, with the publication of rachel carson’s book silent spring. this book, inspired by reports of birds dying as a result of the spraying of insecticide ddt, was a detailed account of the environmental devastation caused by pesticides. carson challenged the chemical industry and the narrative of scientific progress, posing instead a future without birds and wildlife as a result of the indiscriminate use of chemicals. the manufacturers of ddt, along with other proponents of the chemical industry, bitterly attacked silent spring. but the book became a focal point of the budding environmental movement, an inspiration for activists concerned for the future of the environment. futurism, futurology, future shock, climate change portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018107 1964: a jet-pack future 1964 was a big year for the future. at the california state fair, a pilot flew in with a jet-pack. imagery of this feat shot around the world, exciting dreams of a near-future when everyone would fly to work or school by jet-pack. robert ettinger, a college physics teacher, published his book the prospect of immortality and founded the cryonics institute. cryonics held up the promise of deep-freezing individuals, to be thawed out in the technologically advanced future. the first cryo-preserved person underwent this treatment in 1967. in his 1972 book man into superman, ettinger crystalised the futurist creed: ‘when the future expands, the past shrinks’ (lepore 2010: 29). the 1964 world fair, held in new york, was a joyous space age celebration of the future. a ‘millennium of progress,’ it was proclaimed, is culminating in the feats of today and tomorrow. nasa hosted a space park where its gigantic rockets were on display. general electric’s pavilion ‘progressland’ claimed to showcase ‘thermonuclear fusion’ in displays of light and noise. the ford exhibit situated its cars as the prototype for impending rocket ships. general motors once again hosted an exhibit called futurama, this time promising space travel, undersea holidays, and moving pathways in super-cities – all just around the corner. futurama showed the future process of constructing super-highways, as trees were felled by ‘searing laser beams,’ and a monster road-building machine cleared the jungle (turney 2010: 64). in the futurama vision, nature is no match for the powers of progress. 1965: moore is the law the future will be computer-powered, with processing power increasing exponentially— according to moore’s law, expounded in 1965. gordon moore, co-founder of intel, published a paper in that year entitled ‘cramming more components onto integrated circuits’. moore noted the doubling every year of the number of components fitted onto an integrated circuit, and predicted that this yearly doubling of capacity would continue into the future. revised by moore in 1975 to a doubling every two years, moore’s ‘law’ served as a target for the industry of semiconductor manufacturers. it was not so much a law as a challenge for technical innovation, a challenge successfully met by the computer industry over decades. integrated circuits became smaller and more powerful every year; by 2015 the intel chip was thought to cram two billion transistors, spaced 14 nanometres apart, onto a tiny surface. even moore by this time doubted that his law could continue, observing the saturation of chips at this infinitesimal scale. captains of post-industry, however, continue to aim at proving moore’s law: ever smaller, ever faster, ever more powerful. 1968: a connected future computers will not only become faster, they will connect with each other and enable a new form of communication. this prediction was made in 1968 in the paper ‘the computer as a communication device’ by computer scientists j. c. r. licklider and robert taylor. taylor was research director at the pentagon’s advanced research projects agency (arpa); he was frustrated that he needed a different computer terminal for each project. he and licklider envisaged a future in which computers would be connected, and users could communicate through that network. ‘in a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face,’ they wrote in 1968 (licklider & taylor 1968: 21). the two computer scientists looked forward to a new world of ‘on-line interactive communities’ potts portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018108 of ‘geographically separated members.’ these new communities would be founded ‘not of common location, but of common interest’ (licklider & taylor 1968: 26). their prescience was informed by a space age enthusiasm for the technological advances of the future, which would bring a ‘boon to humankind … beyond measure.’ like the science-fiction authors in 1963, the two scientists were convinced that unemployment ‘would disappear from the face of the earth forever,’ if only due to the magnitude of work in adapting the network’s software ‘to all the new generations of computer’ (licklider & taylor 1968: 31). their prediction of networked communication was realised to a limited extent in 1969, when arpanet launched as a network linking four computers. by the mid-1970s, this network had expanded to a network of networks—an internetwork or internet—for university researchers. the online interactive communities envisioned by licklider and taylor emerged globally after 1991, with the development of the world wide web and the opening of the internet to commercial traffic. 1969: first stop the moon in 1969, nasa did its part for the future by landing the first astronauts on the moon. this feat vindicated kennedy’s pledge at the beginning of the decade; it secured victory in the space race for the united states. it was also seemingly the first step in the trajectory of humanity to outer space. the science-fiction writers of 1963, it seemed, might well have been right in their predictions. 1970: future shock/on the run a new, discordant, voicing of the future appeared in 1970 with the publication of the book future shock by futurologist alvin toffler. this book documented the stress and disorientation occasioned by the ‘information overload’ of modern living (1970: 318). technological innovation could provoke negative responses, according to toffler, including fear of the future. future shock arises from ‘too much change in too short a period of time’ (1970: 12), as citizens of a technologically advanced society struggle to deal with the heightened pace of life. toffler characterised contemporary western societies as ‘post-industrial,’ drawing on the term coined in 1969 by sociologist alan touraine, and later popularised by daniel bell in his 1974 book the coming of post-industrial society. a post-industrial society has the majority of its urban workforce engaged in the service sector, dealing with information rather than industry or agriculture. toffler warned that future shock is the ‘disease of change’ in a post-industrial society, when individuals fail to adapt to the accelerating pace of this ‘roaring current of change’ (1970: 11). as a futurologist, toffler wanted to increase the ‘future-consciousness’ of his readers and to ‘humanise’ the future (1970: 14)—but future shock highlighted the adverse social effects for those, especially the elderly, ‘overwhelmed by change’ (1970: 11). the environment became more prominent in public life in 1970. in the usa, the environmental protection agency was founded, instituting new regulations on the chemical industry: ddt was banned in the usa two years later. popular culture was beginning to reflect concerns for the ecology as a result of pollution and industrial damage to the environment: ‘look at mother nature on the run in the 1970s,’ neil young sang in ‘after the goldrush,’ released in 1970. the following year, marvin gaye’s ‘mercy mercy me (the ecology)’ documented a range of environmental blights caused by industrial contaminants: pollution, oil spills, radiation, mercury-poisoning of fish and—echoing rachel carson’s silent spring—‘animals and birds who live nearby are dying …’ futurism, futurology, future shock, climate change portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018109 1972: coup de grace/applying the brakes 1972 brought a severe reverse for the ideals of modernist architecture and urban design. the architecture historian charles jencks dates the death of modernist architecture to ‘july 15, 1972, at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts). at this moment, a vast modernist housing project, ‘the infamous pruitt-igoe scheme’ in st louis missouri, was given ‘the final coup de grace by dynamite’ ( jencks 1987: 9). similar demolitions occurred around the world in the next decade. the utopian vision of a rationally ordered paradise, built with purity of design, had failed dismally. inhabitants had not been uplifted by the design; rather they had been alienated. faith in progress went into decline in architecture, as designers began using styles and ideas from the past—a practice previously outlawed by the international style. another check to the momentum of technological progress came in 1972, with the publication of the report the limits to growth by the club of rome. this club of industrialists, scientists, diplomats and academics had formed in 1968, voicing a concern for the future of humanity. the limits to growth, the club’s first report, generated computer simulations of five variables—population, food production, industrialisation, pollution, and consumption of natural resources. the report’s conclusion was that economic growth could not continue indefinitely due to depletion of resources. the limits to growth was heavily criticised by economists and technologists on publication, largely due to its discounting of the role of technological progress in solving problems of resource depletion. yet its warnings have been more favourably received in the twenty-first century, as climate change and environmental damage have been accepted internationally by scientists. since 1972, the limits to growth has sold 30 million copies in 30 languages, reflecting a major international impact. 1973: reverse thrusters one more year into the 1970s, and things were turning sour for the future. the oil crisis of 1973 showed the perils of dependency on oil and the energy industry. confidence was shaken in the vision of a future as energy-based prosperity without limits. the space age had evaporated, as the public lost interest in the apollo program. the last apollo was apollo 17, in december 1972. it seemed in 1973 that no-one was going any further than the moon, for some time. environmental awareness was growing, and with it a linking of industrial progress with ecological damage. throughout the 1970s, information emerged on acid rain, air pollution, nuclear contamination, oil spills and other environmental catastrophes. there was increasing concern that industrial development needed to be checked, for the health of the planet. 1975: a new warning in 1975, wallace smith broecker published a scientific paper in which he coined the phrase ‘global warming’: ‘climatic change: are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?’ broecker warned of the possibility that ‘we are on the brink of a several-decades-long period of rapid warming’ (1975: 460). climate change and global warming became more prominent terms as climate science built its case in the next decades. when surveying the environmental costs of industrial progress, it became increasingly difficult to agree with marinetti that ‘progress is always right.’ potts portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018110 1982: a new world awaits ridley scott’s science fiction film blade runner, released in 1982, was set in 2019. the world of 2019 has flying cars and other technological marvels—but it also has constant rain and what appears to be a chronically damaged environment. the wealthy are summoned to start a new life off the planet: ‘a new world awaits you …’ declares the advertisement for outer space living; anyone who can afford it abandons the contaminated earth. blade runner depicted a dystopian vision of the future, in contrast to the optimism of 1960s films and tv programs. a spate of science-fiction films in the 1980s and 1990s, dubbed technoir by critics, portrayed a ruined future of environmental catastrophe: terminator (cameron 1984), mad max (miller 1979), escape from new york (carpenter 1981), robocop (verhoeen 1987), dark city (proyas 1998), the matrix (wachowski l. & l 1999). in each of these films—and in many others—the future was no longer a world of wonders to be desired. it was a future to be feared, a future world destroyed by pollution, warfare and industrial damage. technology in films such as terminator and the matrix leaves humanity imprisoned and degraded. this trend culminated in the 2008 film wall-e (stanton), ostensibly a children’s film, but with a severe environmental message. the future of the earth in wall-e is as a blighted wasteland, destroyed by technology, where no living thing grows. humans, overweight and complacent, live off the planet. blade runner 2049 (villaneuve), released in 2017, depicted a world 30 years later than depicted in blade runner: the environment was even more devastated than in the original film. 1988: slow down/climate change the international slow food movement, founded in turin in 1988, valued tradition over progress, the past over the future, and slowness over speed in cooking. as revealed in its manifesto, it was anti-fast food, anti-industrialism; it was anti-marinetti. for slow food international, speed has become the ‘shackles’ of culture; the ‘fast life’ is denigrated as a ‘virus’ that fractures customs. the manifesto advocates instead ‘historical food culture’ and defends ‘old-fashioned food traditions’ (1989: 1). slow food, whose proud symbol is the snail, was one manifestation of a reaction against the dictates of technological progress. another was recycling; another was conservation. the virtues of speed and convenience were considered less valuable than the virtues of quality and traditional techniques of food preparation. lovers of food were encouraged to look back, to the lessons and techniques of the past. tradition was celebrated as a store-house of knowledge and methods. the future was less important as an idea than the present, in communion with the past. also founded in 1988 was the intergovernmental panel on climate change, set up within the united nations to provide an objective, scientific perspective on climate change. the ipcc’s reports, drawing on all published climate science literature, offer guidelines for policymakers to limit global warming in the future. its first assessment report, published in 1990, predicted that under a ‘business as usual’ industrial scenario, global mean temperatures will increase by 0.3 degrees celsius per decade in the twenty-first century. by the fifth assessment report of 2014, the prediction becomes more alarming: without new policies to restrict climate change, the global mean temperature in 2100 will increase by 3.7 to 4.8 degrees celsius. futurism, futurology, future shock, climate change portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018111 1994: welcome to the virtual in 1994, the web browser netscape was marketed. the new hypertext transfer protocol called the world wide web was transforming the internet into a vast web-based commercial entity. 1.3 million personal computers were already connected, and this figure grew exponentially; by 1997 there were 19.5 million. in 1994, an online store named amazon was founded. this new business soon described itself as the biggest store in the world—as a virtual store. new possibilities for the future, and for progress, emerged in this virtual environment. if heavy industry had been vilified as the contaminator of the environment, perhaps the online community could generate another, cleaner future. progress was quickly re-defined in post-industrial terms. technological speed was central, as it was for the futurists in 1909; now, however, the crucial speed was that of micro-processing, and the speed of connection. planned obsolescence re-emerged in the digital context: how can you be happy with last year’s computer when the new model is so much faster? 2006: truth be told in 2006, the release of an inconvenient truth—the book by al gore; the documentary by davis guggenheim—took climate change and global warming mainstream. the science was compelling, but more compelling were the images of parched environments, ruined natural worlds, and endangered species. heavy industry was portrayed as the villain; ideas of technological progress were refuted. the science of climate change uses computer models to chart the future. the documented rise in global temperatures since the advent of industrialism is modelled and projected into the future, showing us the likely increase in air temperature along with other impacts on the environment. extreme weather events are predicted to occur with greater frequency as a result of climate change: drought, bushfires, hurricanes, storms, floods. polar ice caps will melt, coral reefs will be irreparably damaged, islands will disappear under water. the future was now something to be feared: it promised global warming, ecological disaster, displacement of millions due to the effects of climate change, the doom of natural species. climate change was taught in schools; there were reports of school children frightened to tears by the spectre of a devastated future. a 2011 study found that 82 percent of us children aged 10 to 12 expressed fear regarding the environment, while a majority of children ‘shared apocalyptic and pessimistic feelings about the future state of the planet.’ a word— ecophobia—was coined to describe this fear of environmental problems (strife 2012: 37). 2008: smart takeover 2008 was the year mobile smartphones took over. the earliest smartphones had been developed in 1997, while their popularity increased from 2004, coinciding with web 2.0 and the rise of social media. the turning-point was 2007/2008: in 2007 apple launched its iphone, with improved rendition of web pages on a mobile phone; in 2008 google launched its android operating system for smartphones. internet access was a major feature of smartphones, allowing constant connectivity while on the move. the smartphone became ubiquitous in the years following 2008: by 2017 there were an estimated 2.6 billion smartphone users worldwide (lanchester 2017: 22). the mobile phone is now a customised information-system for each user. it is a user’s social media base; it provides access to constant information and entertainment; it is used to send potts portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018112 and receive texts, emails and phone messages; it takes photos and videos and uploads them in an instant; it is always and everywhere in use. teenagers sleep with them so that they are always connected, from the moment before they fall asleep and from the moment they wake up. the iphone is a sleek, glamorous, sophisticated personal object; each new model is the look of the future, rendering the previous models obsolete – or, at least, old. queues of avid users line up outside apple stores whenever a new iphone is launched, eager to seize the new model and hold it in their hands. 2011: all future, no past the ephemeral messaging app snapchat launched in 2011. this addition to social media was distinguished by its complete focus on the present message, the evacuation of the past. a ‘snap’ containing photos or text disappears soon after it is opened: the sender selects a time between one and ten seconds, after which the message disappears and is deleted from the server. in the constant stream of messaging that is social media, the vanished snap will soon be replaced by a new message. but there is no archive, no store of past message: the past is empty. the data-stream in other social media privileges the present message: previous messages are swept aside; anticipation rests on the next message about to be received. advertisers target social media users on an individual basis: algorithms process a user’s searches, purchases, and ‘likes,’ before sending suggestions for the next purchase. the future of consumption is designed by the algorithms. 2017/2075: disrupt or be disrupted in the early twenty-first century, the centre of the western world is silicon valley. here the future is devised by apple, google, facebook, twitter, amazon and countless start-ups, tech incubators, venture capitalists and angel investors. these are the captains of post-industry, the prophets of a digital and connected future. they cannot be blamed for the ills of heavy industry, because they are purveyors of information and connection, not pollution and chemical waste. indeed, the new digital products lead the way to a new green world: a kindle, ipad or iphone, used in preference to newspapers, magazines, and books, will save trees. the silicon valley leaders are the new technocracy. they have a vision of the world improved by technology that is just as strong as that of their predecessors in the early twentieth century. internet connectivity will find new pathways for democracy, interaction, and prosperity; the most helpful contribution politicians can make is to keep out of the way and let technology perform its wonders. futurologists working in many disciplines – economics, sociology, demography, information technology continue to predict the wonders of the future. a dominant focus remains technological change: driverless cars, networked objects, shops without checkouts. at the silicon valley comic con, held in april 2017, futurologists were asked to address the theme of the conference: ‘the future of humanity: where will we be in 2075?’ the event’s technology exhibits—for virtual reality, robotics and smart devices—echoed the ‘futurama’ exhibits, showcasing new technologies, found in the world’s fairs of 1939 and 1964. prominent in media reports of the conference were the pronouncements of steve wozniak, co-founder of apple in 1976. wozniak was deemed credible as a futurologist: apart from co-founding apple, he had predicted in 1982 the emergence of portable laptops. one of wozniak’s predictions in 2017 was that apple, google and facebook would continue to shape the future, well beyond 2075, if only due to these corporations’ enormous cash reserves, which futurism, futurology, future shock, climate change portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018113 allowed them to invest in a wide range of futuristic projects. wozniak made further predictions of life in 2075: new cities with domed structures built in deserts; special suits to allow people to venture outside the domes; smart walls for shopping and communication; technologyenabled medical self-diagnosis and doctor-free prescriptions; a colony on mars (swartz 2017: 12). wozniak’s optimistic predictions have a remarkable similarity to the positive vision of the 1963 science-fiction writers: technological advancements will lead us to an exciting future. the contemporary futurists can dream more expansively than did their predecessors: wozniak’s vision in 2017 extends to life on mars, whereas the authors in 1963 saw only as far as a colony on the moon. in silicon valley, everyone dreams of a new app that will disrupt the present and yank the world forcibly into the future. ‘disruption’ is the new term for progress, for effecting the future, as the historian jill lepore (2014) has noted in a critical article on disruption. it has an apocalyptic tone as a post-industrial incarnation of progress: the new must succeed over the wreckage of the old disrupted business or technology. disruption incorporates a contempt for ‘legacy’ industries and the dead weight of the past – a contempt for the world before the internet and social media. legacy forms, including old media, are consigned to the unloved past; the future belongs to the disruptors of networked technology. 2018: looking backwards/looking forwards if digital disruption continues the imperative of technological progress, displaced into a post-industrial context, it is not nevertheless the dominant factor in current imaginings of the future. the most significant ‘disruption’ in the future will not emanate from networked computers, unless the electricity needed to power the servers and computers is taken into account. climate change is a projection into the future publicised widely on an international basis, through the agency of the intergovernmental panel on climate change and other outlets. climate change is now incorporated into many models; insurance and risk management, professions whose business is managing the future, install global warming as a central factor in modelling the future. environmentalists demand of government and industry a future based on renewable energy sources rather than on fossil fuels, in a desperate bid to contain carbon emissions and climate change. melting permafrost and rising sea levels threaten islands and sea-level cities, with potential displacement of millions due to global warming. in april 2017, the new york times asserted that ‘our climate future is actually our climate,’ observing that the future ‘we’ve been warned about is beginning to saturate the present’ (mooallen 2017: mm36). record high temperatures and extreme weather events around the world in 2017 and 2018 provoked the growing fear that we are already living in the future. visions of the future now project anxiety for the state of the environment, and for all creatures—including humans—who depend on it. references appadurai, a. 2013, the future as cultural fact: essays on the global condition. verso, london. attali, j. 2009, a brief history of the future. allen & unwin, sydney. augé, m. 2014, the future. verso, london. barbrook, r. 2007, imaginary futures: from thinking machines to the global village. pluto, london. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt18mbdnv potts portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018114 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt18mbdnv broecker, w. s. 1975, ‘climatic change: are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?,’ science, vol. 189, no. 4201: 8 august: 460–463. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.189.4201.460 bury, j. b. 1955, the idea of progress: an inquiry into its origin and growth. dover, new york. cameron, j. 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(dir.) 1999, the matrix, feature film, warner bros. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1349-92604-6_53 potts portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 2018116 https://doi.org/10.1109/n-ssc.2006.4785860 https://doi.org/10.2307/3696992 http://slowfood.com/filemanager/convivium leader area/manifesto_eng.pdf http://slowfood.com/filemanager/convivium leader area/manifesto_eng.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2011.602131 https://doi.org/10.2307/3103025 https://doi.org/10.5093/cc2017a22 https://doi.org/10.5093/cc2017a22 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-92604-6_53 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-92604-6_53 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: nguyen, h.h. 2018. accords et correspondances dans l’ombre douce et sous le ciel qui brûle. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 83-86. https:// doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5727 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au writerly reflection accords et correspondances dans l’ombre douce et sous le ciel qui brûle hoai huong nguyen independent author corresponding author: tess do, school of languages and linguistics, the university of melbourne, vic 3010. dot@unimelb.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5727 article history: received 12/06/2017; revised 04/06/2018; accepted 02/07/2018; published 23/08/2018 abstract born in 1976, hoai huong nguyen is a french writer of vietnamese origin. she holds an aggregation in french literature and teaches at the university of versailles-st-quentin. her doctoral thesis explored the theme of water in the works of paul claudel and those of chinese and japanese poets. to date, she is the author of two collections of poetry, parfums (2005) and déserts (2008), published by l’harmattan, and two novels, l’ombre douce (2013) and sous le ciel qui brûle (2017), published by viviane hamy. l’ombre douce (2013) and sous le ciel qui brûle (2017) evoke the history of france and vietnam from the start of the twentieth century to the 1970s through the exploration of the relationships between past and present, war and peace, harmony and disharmony. these novels seek to create a poetic accord and relational connections not only between the western and far-eastern imaginations, but also between words and things—a quest that, in sous le ciel qui brûle, lies at the foundation of the poetic vocation of the novel’s hero, tuân. résumé hoai huong nguyen, née en 1976, est française d’origine vietnamienne. agrégée de lettres, elle enseigne à l’université de versailles-st-quentin et a rédigé une thèse de doctorat sur l’eau dans l’œuvre de paul claudel et celles de poètes chinois et japonais. elle est l’auteur de recueils de poésie : parfums (2005), déserts (2008) parus chez l’harmattan, et de romans : l’ombre douce (2013) et sous le ciel qui brûle (2017), parus aux éditions viviane hamy. l’ombre douce (viviane hamy, 2013) et sous le ciel qui brûle (viviane hamy, 2017) évoquent l’histoire de la france et du vietnam entre le début du xxème siècle et les années declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 83 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5727 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:dot@unimelb.edu.au https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5727 1970, en explorant les relations entre le passé et le présent, la guerre et la paix, l’harmonie et la dysharmonie. ces romans sont à la recherche d’un accord poétique et d’une relation de correspondances, non seulement entre l’imaginaire occidental et l’imaginaire extrême-oriental, mais encore entre les mots et les choses—recherche qui se trouve au fondement de la vocation poétique de tuân, le héros de sous le ciel qui brûle. keywords hoai huong nguyen, vietnamese diaspora l’ombre douce (2013) et sous le ciel qui brûle (2017) évoquent l’histoire de la france et du vietnam entre le début du xxème siècle et les années 1970, en explorant les relations entre le passé et le présent, l’harmonie et la dysharmonie. dans ces romans, les personnages principaux sont confrontés à la guerre à travers la bataille de điện biên phủ et l’offensive du tết. yann, mai et tuân de trouvent témoins d’horreurs indicibles ; leur itinéraire est ponctué de terribles dépossessions. cependant, s’il est indispensable de ne pas oublier la noirceur des conflits, il n’est pas interdit de considérer qu’une forme de lumière peut naître de la tragédie. malgré les divisions, il s’agit de laisser les clivages et les antagonismes à l’idéologie. il s’agit de ne pas s’en tenir à la dualité, à l’alternative, à l’obligation de faire un choix entre acceptation ou rejet, relation ou rupture entre l’est et l’ouest, ou entre le nord et le sud, mais de chercher une autre voie. dans le cas des relations entre la france et l’indochine, il convient de rappeler que le colonialisme fut par essence injuste dans le domaine politique, militaire, économique, social et par de nombreux aspects culturels, dans la mesure où il fut l’occupation et l’exploitation d’un pays par un autre sans aucune légitimité et par le recours à la guerre. parallèlement, l’œuvre d’artistes ou d’écrivains tels que victor tardieu, léon werth ou marguerite duras, nourrie d’interactions entre les cultures, a participé, tant au vietnam qu’en france, à la construction de savoirs et de formes, qui peuvent être appréhendés sous l’angle d’échanges ou de transferts culturels franco-vietnamiens—un champ ouvert à la recherche. c’est au cours de cette période qu’ont émergé le mouvement du thơ mới (nouvelle poésie), le roman moderne vietnamien à travers le tự lực văn đoàn ou encore la peinture d’artistes formés à l’ecole des beaux-arts de hanoï tels que nam sơn. au-delà du domaine de l’art et de la culture, une relation très forte s’est nouée entre le vietnam et la france. l’amitié passionnée d’eliane et tuân dans sous le ciel qui brûle en offre une image. en 1964, dans un discours prononcé à paris, l’écrivain vietnamien de langue française phạm duy khiêm disait au sujet de la france et du vietnam que « de mystérieuses affinités rapprochent nos deux peuples plus que jamais peut-être rien n’a rapproché deux peuples au monde ». si on a l’âme romantique, on n’hésiterait pas à voir là d’une étrange mais sincère histoire d’amour. et je trouve qu’il y a une justesse, même si cela peut paraître incompréhensible ou idéaliste, à sortir de l’injustice du colonialisme par l’expression de l’amour. un romancier peut parler de la violence, des déchirements, de l’absurdité du monde. de la même façon, il ne lui est pas interdit de rechercher la circulation et les échanges nés de la rencontre entre les cultures dans une écriture à la recherche de correspondances. s’inscrivant dans cette double perspective, mes romans tentent d’explorer les correspondances entre l’univers culturel français et l’univers culturel vietnamien. par ailleurs, ils s’attachent à chercher un accord entre ces univers. accord vient d’accordare, formé de ad (à) et de cor, cordis (cœur), influencé par chorda (corde), mot de musique. le verbe qui apparaît avec la valeur de nguyen portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201884 « réconcilier », s’utilise à propos de choses qui s’harmonisent ensemble. avec l’influence de chorda, le verbe s’emploie aussi avec un sens musical et artistique. il s’agit pour moi d’explorer en quoi les relations entre l’imaginaire occidental et oriental peuvent créer des formes fécondes. dans l’écriture, cela se traduit par une recherche d’accord poétique, comme on parle d’accord musical. lorsque des instruments tels que le piano et le violoncelle s’accordent pour interpréter un morceau, la tâche dévolue au compositeur n’est certes pas de discourir sur leurs différences, mais de s’appuyer sur leur altérité pour écrire une partition où ils entrent en résonance. le piano et le violoncelle ne se mélangent pas, ne fusionnent ou ne s’hybrident pas ; ils jouent ensemble un air présentant des rapports labiles et insaisissables, unissant les deux voix. et lorsqu’on écoute le morceau, on oublie les instruments qui n’ont plus d’importance en eux-mêmes, puisque c’est la musique qui compte : c’est elle qui scintille et porte la mélodie, qu’elle soit harmonieuse ou discordante. dans l’ombre douce, le personnage de mai se trouve au carrefour des deux cultures. par son nom, elle est la fleur jaune d’abricotier qui fait écho dans l’imaginaire de yann à la petite douve et aux fleurs d’ajonc du mois de mai à belle-ile. elle devient ainsi une image solaire, expression de la passion amoureuse et de la renaissance printanière. elle annonce les figures féminines de sous le ciel qui brûle, où est évoqué le souvenir des filles du feu de gérard de nerval. sous le ciel met en rapport des paysages de picardie et de l’annam. tuân s’imagine d’abord le valois par le biais de ses lectures de jeunesse. puis, une fois en france, il amène dans l’oise les paysages vietnamiens qu’il porte en lui. l’écriture établit ainsi une continuité entre les paysages naturels de son pays natal et ceux de la france : les sentiers sablonneux de la forêt de chantilly le ramènent sur les chemins du vietnam, comme la rivière de saigon le conduit en pensée au bord de la seine ; de même, les reflets des étangs de commelles lui rappellent la rivière des parfums, traçant une continuité entre le présent et le passé, l’ici et l’ailleurs, à travers l’imaginaire de l’eau. dans son esprit se dessine une analogie entre, d’une part, les temples et les palais de l’annam et, d’autre part, le château des princes de condé et la cathédrale de senlis, ainsi qu’avec les tourelles de sable que construisent des enfants au bord de la mer. il associe des figures mythiques occidentales (fées des légendes du valois et dryades) à des fées orientales (tiên signifie fée en vietnamien). dans son imagination, les filles du feu entrent en corrélation avec les esprits des défunts ou encore avec la petite fille inconnue croisée près du château de reine blanche. au fil des pages, on devine que tuân sera amené à recomposer ces divers éléments dans la poésie laissée dans l’avenir du texte. cette poésie non encore écrite, évoquée aux deux derniers chapitres, tissera peut-être un réseau de relations semblable à l’univers mental du personnage vietnamien qui trouve une nouvelle patrie dans la langue et la culture françaises. peut-être intégrera-t-elle ces deux univers à travers des mouvements de circulation et d’échanges qui sont fondateurs de la recherche poétique de tuân. peut-être donnera-t-elle à voir le valois d’une nouvelle manière : en le peignant du vert des rizières, en joignant la fraîcheur de la forêt de chantilly à la chaleur humide de huê, en peuplant les bois de chênes de fées annamites ou d’âmes errantes qui sembleront tout aussi réelles qu’un rayon de lumière. peut-être contribuera-t-elle aussi par conséquent à donner une nouvelle forme aux relations entre la france et le vietnam, délivrées de la nostalgie indochinoise pour prendre les traits et la résonance d’accords à inventer. s’il y a dans mes romans une recherche de correspondances entre l’imaginaire occidental et extrême-oriental, cette recherche s’inscrit aussi au sein de la langue elle-même. paul claudel considérait que « les mots ont une âme », c’est-à-dire qu’« il y a un rapport » de concordance entre la forme orale et graphique des mots et la chose qu’ils signifient (1973 : 91–92). ainsi, au moment où tuân découvre les premières jonquilles du printemps, le mot « jonquille » lui accords et correspondances dans l’ombre douce et sous le ciel qui brûle portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201885 apparaît à la façon d’une harmonie imitative, chaque lettre se dotant d’une forme et d’une qualité fantasmatique. de même, les noms de senlis, de l’oise ou de la thève se tissent dans ses rêveries d’adolescent indochinois avec la forme du jasmin étoilé, dessinant un paysage semblable à une dentelle du valois qui, lorsqu’il rencontre ces lieux dans la réalité, produit l’effet inverse de le ramener par la mémoire dans un annam disparu. cette sensibilité à la valeur symbolique des signes participe au cheminement de tuân vers la poésie. a l’origine de sa vocation, il y a le désir de retrouver par les mots un lien avec sa cousine tiên qui doit partir sur le front : l’écriture est ce qui lui permet alors de supporter la séparation. plus tard, c’est le souvenir des vers de rimbaud qui le préserve de la folie lorsqu’il découvre l’étendue de la dévastation de huế après l’offensive du tết. enfin, la poésie est le moyen grâce auquel il espère vaincre la mort, en faisant revivre ses fantômes aimés dans un texte où les âmes peuvent renaître sous une autre forme, en correspondance avec ce qu’ils furent. la vocation poétique de tuân repose ainsi sur sa conviction que la parole humaine serait capable d’accueillir de telles correspondances, c’est-à-dire d’inscrire quelque chose du monde spirituel dans le monde naturel—et de soustraire des êtres disparus au néant en restituant une part d’eux à travers les mots. le rôle de l’écriture poétique, et plus largement de la littérature, serait alors de représenter ce mystère sous la forme de signes à interpréter : le texte constituerait peut-être une trame semblable à la tapisserie ancienne dont tuân perçoit la trace dans le reflet des étoiles noyées dans la rivière de saigon où il essaie de deviner les constellations qui s’évanouissent dans le ciel noir. références claudel, p. 1973, œuvres en prose. gallimard, bibliothèque de la pléiade, paris. nguyen, h. h. 2013, l’ombre douce. viviane hamy, paris. ______ 2017, sous le ciel qui brûle. viviane hamy, paris. phạm, d. k. 1964, ‘discours d’usage.’ online, available: http://boujoum.blogspot.com/2011/ (2011) [accessed 2 july 2018]. nguyen portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201886 http://boujoum.blogspot.com/2011/ © 2017 by paul allatson. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: allatson, p. 2017. curated issue: cultural works—transitions and dislocations, introduction. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:1, 1-4. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5479 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 1 april 2017 abstract introduction to the curated issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, cultural works—transitions and dislocations. keywords transitions, dislocations, mabel lee, translation, gao xingjian, nobel prize for literature, ian campbell, james worner, susana chávez-silverman, gerardo papalia, régis debray, digisphere introduction curated issue: cultural works—transitions and dislocations, introduction paul allatson university of technology sydney corresponding author: associate professor paul allatson, school of international studies, faculty of arts and social sciences, university of technology sydney, nsw 2007, australia. paul.allatson@uts.edu.au; orcid #: orcid.org/0000-0002-2248-1605. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5479 article history: published 04/05/2017 transitions and dislocations, curated cultural works issue, curated by paul allatson. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5479 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5479 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:paul.allatson@uts.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5479 silvia spitta’s magisterial study, misplaced objects: migrating collections and recollections in europe and the americas, is driven by ‘the paradoxically simple thesis that when things move, things change’ (2009: 4). extending from foucault’s idea, expounded in the order of things (1973), that objects form the table on which a culture’s epistemology is ordered, spitta’s critical attention is drawn to the epistemological trouble inaugurated by migrating objects as they signify anew in displacement. as spitta glosses her argument, ‘every new cultural configuration and therefore every subject position depends upon transcultural processes: the uprooting of objects, the loss of place and memory that such uprooting entails, the reconfiguration of objects in foreign spaces, and the concomitant reorganization of the epistemological table of the receptor culture under the impact of those objects’ (2009: 21). for spitta, moreover, these new subject positions and reconfigured material objects, whether ‘human,’ human-made, or found in and produced by the so-called natural realm, merit close attention because they signify and embody the multidirectional transculturations set in motion by european and american encounters since the late fifteenth century. taking a cue from spitta’s claim ‘that when things move, things change,’ this curated issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies extends out from those european-american encounters to conjoin works by four writers—the australian trilingual poet ian campbell; australian fiction writer james worner; the us latinx code-switching writer of chronicles, susana chávez-silverman; and the chinese-born, paris resident gao xingjian, the 2000 nobel laureate for literature—and a renowned translator, mabel lee, in this case of poems by gao xingjian. their works—short stories, chronicles, poems, or their translations—invite readerly attention precisely because in these texts, things and people and the languages they use are in motion, and therefore reconfiguring once familiar literary tables. in short, the contributors to this issue of portal are responsible for texts that revel in transcultural forces of dislocation and reconfiguration. or, to paraphrase anna lowenhaupt tsing, these writers are presenting to us their literary and translational aspirations for transcultural connection and exploring how those aspirations are animated in and by ‘friction,’ that is, ‘the grip of worldly encounter’ (2005: 1). renowned for his work as a novelist, playwright, literary critic and translator, the chinese émigré gao xingjian is also an accomplished poet. this curated issue of portal includes translations from the chinese, by mabel lee, of poems from xingjian’s 2012 collection, wandering spirit and metaphysical thoughts (2012: 89–97). the poems were drafted in 2004 (and later worked upon or polished) following a particularly challenging time for gao xingjian in the wake of the cardiac arrest he suffered in 2002 while his opera, snow in august, was being rehearsed before its premiere at the national opera house in taipei, taiwan. after undergoing surgery in france in february and march 2003, gao xingjian was directing rehearsals for a new play, le quêteur de la mort at théâtre du gymnase, in marseille, france, when he collapsed and was again hospitalized. the poems translated here by mabel lee fittingly meditate on the fragility of life and mortality while exemplifying the spiritual nomadism that is a hallmark of gao xingjian’s writing; they are the first nine poems from wandering spirit and metaphysical thoughts. the curated issue continues with two offerings from the trilingual australian poet, ian campbell, who often writes back translations of poetry from one language to another in the three languages he works with: indonesian, english and spanish. the first poem, ‘charlie chaplin di ngamplang, 1927,’ first appeared in 2012 in the literary pages of the jakarta mass media daily kompas. its humorous focus is on a series of imagined events that befell the allatson portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 20172 famous film star and director charlie chaplin on his visit to the dutch colonial-era hill station of ngamplang in west java in 1927. in fact, the well-travelled chaplin visited the dutch east indies on three occasions between 1927 and 1932, the exact era in which he was also being confronted by the introduction of sound films, a technology he was reluctant to embrace.1 an english-language back translation is also included here. the second offering from campbell comprises three versions of a poem about the valle de elqui (elqui valley) in northern chile: a poem he first wrote in spanish, then in english, and finally in indonesian (‘lembah elqui’), the latter also first published in 2012 in kompas. the suite of three poems thus exemplifies what campbell calls trilingual poetics, namely what does a ‘concept’/poem idea look like if done in the three languages with which he works. this approach to linguistic dislocation and reconfiguration mirrors the three-pronged title ‘selatan–sur–south’ that he adopted for a trilingual set of poems published in portal (vol. 5, no. 1) in 2008. in each version now the key literary reference is to gabriela mistral (1889–1957), nobel prize laureate for literature (1945), whose burial place lies in monte grande in the valle de elqui of the poems’ title. both ‘charlie chaplin di ngamplang, 1927’ and ‘lembah elqui’ were included in campbell’s poetry and prose collection tak ada peringatan from 2013. susana chávez-silverman is a califas-born u.s. latinx writer who has published two collections of crónicas or chronicles to date: killer crónicas: bilingual memories/memorias bilingües (2004) and scenes from la cuenca de los angeles y otros natural disasters (2010). she is currently working on a new collection, our ubuntu, montenegro: del balboa café al apartheid and back, which adds afrikaans expressions to her linguistic repertoire of code-switching between english and spanish. however, the two chronicles included in this issue, ‘casi víspera / colibrí resucitado crónica’ and ‘black holes—deshielo crónica,’ are not from that work in progress. rather, both texts emerged from a year of personal and professional dislocation and distress as creative proof that the writing urge could somehow find productive outlets despite those challenges, outlets capable of transporting readers, to quote from ‘black holes,’ ‘a un lugar (o muchos) muy otro, completely unexpected.’ code-switching between spanish and english also peppers the short story ‘parallel lines’ by australian writer james worner, which charts the translational journey—physically and metaphorically—of a chilean australian about to fly back to chile and reveal a new self to her mother. and the chilean connections that appear across this special issue continue with the story’s references to marta brunet, isabel allende and maría luisa bombal (alongside the mexicans laura esquivel and carmen boullosa). ‘parallel lines’ is from a collection of stories in progress entitled the shapes of us. as worner describes it: ‘the story looks at lives, like lines, that do not meet but which travel in proximity, simultaneously attracted and repelled.’ or as the narrator asks tellingly at one point: ‘when is the moment when one thing can be said to have turned into another?’ the same question applies to all the contributions to this special curated issue of portal. * * * sitting outside the remit of the curated cultural works in this issue of portal is the speculation by gerardo papalia, ‘trump: just a berlusclone,’ which appears as a new perspective report. the piece provides a timely comment on the social media tactics deployed by president trump that evoke the mass-mediated aesthetic regimen favoured by 1 on a side note, there is remarkable home film footage by chaplin of his visit to java and bali in 1932: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjhdpwazge8. introduction portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 20173 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjhdpwazge8 former italian prime minister silvio berlusconi. papalia, however, does not regard trump as a simple clone of berlusconi. rather both leaders exemplify how power operates in the digital epoch—which papalia calls the ‘digisphere’—that has evolved out of the entertainmentand celebrity-driven ‘videosphere’ identified in 1993 by french philosopher régis debray, in his prescient study l’état séducteur: les révolutions médiologiques du pouvoir [the seductive state: the mediological revolutions of power]. for papalia the ‘digisphere’ functions temporally ‘as a period of increasingly fast circulation of imagery in all its forms, across multiple digital devices. in a manner akin to electronic commerce, the greater the speed of circulation, the faster the accumulation of social and political currency.’ in this epoch, papalia reasons, the success of trump and before him of berluscone demonstrate that we, ‘the vast audience (now no longer a public), has long ceased to reflect or to think, preferring surrender to the eye glazing procession of visual stimuli. it matters little whether trump, berlusconi or their epigones win, for the digital media that supports them has already taken over our thoughts, our emotions and ultimately our lives.’ and this victory over reason means that all participants in the vast digitized and social-mediatized audience ‘have [ourselves] become clones of these politicians we are so driven to decry.’ we are all, it seems, responsible digitally for trump and his ascent to extraordinary political, and always already celebritized, power. references campbell, i. 2013, tak ada peringatan. vivid publishing, fremantle, wa. chávez silverman, s. 2004, killer crónicas: bilingual memories/memorias bilingües. university of wisconsin press, madison, wn. chávez silverman, s. 2010, scenes from la cuenca de los angeles y otros natural disasters. university of wisconsin press, madison, wn. debray, r. 1993, l’état séducteur: les révolutions médiologiques du pouvoir. gallimard, paris. foucault, m. 1973, the order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. vintage, new york. gao xingjian 2012, wandering spirit and metaphysical thoughts. lianjing, taipei: 89–97. lowenhaupt tsing, a. 2005. frictions: an ethnography of global connection. princeton university press, princeton. spitta, s. 2009, misplaced objects: migrating collections and recollections in europe and the americas. university of texas press, austin. allatson portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 20174 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: doherty, g. and tirpak m. 2019. through the lens of color: an interview with gareth doherty, author of paradoxes of green: landscapes of a citystate. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 16:1/2, 166-172. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ portalv16i1/2.6836 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au author interviews through the lens of color: an interview with gareth doherty, author of paradoxes of green: landscapes of a city-state gareth doherty, interviewed by mark tirpak corresponding authors: gareth doherty, associate professor of landscape architecture and director of the master in landscape architecture program at harvard university graduate school of design, 48 quincy st, cambridge, ma 02138 usa. gdoherty@gsd.harvard.edu mark tirpak, urban researcher and planner. mark@urbanplanb.com doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6836 article history: received 25/09/2019; revised 27/095/2019; accepted 28/09/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract this interview with gareth doherty of harvard university graduate school of design, focuses on his paradoxes of green: landscapes of a city-state (university of california press, 2017). with paradoxes of green (2017) and via the interview, doherty recounts some of the findings of his ethnographic fieldwork in the kingdom of bahrain and describes tensions arising from differing conceptions of what ‘green’ means or signifies within this growing and predominantly arid region. an argument that doherty makes in paradoxes of green (2017) is that color and form are interlinked, and that color deserves deeper consideration by policymakers and other formal shapers of cities. the interview draws from paradoxes of green (2017) to discuss some of doherty’s findings as well as his latest work on the intersections between landscape architecture and anthropology. keywords: bahrain, green, desert, date palm, landscape, architecture, place-making, sustainability, ecology, urban, design, cities, anthropology, ethnography, colors, hues, arabian peninsula, persian gulf. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 166 interview tirpak: your research and teaching at harvard university graduate school of design is described as focused on the intersections between landscape architecture and anthropology. what have you found working at or focusing on these particular intersections? doherty: on one level, a very rich area between two established disciplines. and yet i see it as more than an interdisciplinary space—people and their relationships are so integral to landscape that i’m not sure it’s helpful to consider them separately. instead, i prefer to consider landscape architecture as [an] extension of anthropology. anthropology works with some of the raw elements of landscape, materials, people and space (doherty 2017: 77). tirpak: with paradoxes of green, you argue for ‘thicker’ understandings of colour and landscape by urban policy-makers in bahrain and elsewhere—or consideration of the economic, environmental, political, symbolic and other significances of different landscape elements (such a date palms) and their ‘urban’ or network characteristics. you suggest that landscape is a possible if not key generator of urbanization, which you refer to as landscape urbanism or the urbanism of landscape. could you share more about these ideas? doherty: in fact, i began by studying the urbanism of landscape in bahrain, which i understand as the hard and soft infrastructures that are necessary for the provision of urban landscape. by hard landscapes, i am referring to water and irrigation, for example, and by soft, i’m referring to the social and cultural conditions that drive that landscape. at the time i was motivated by ‘landscape urbanism,’ an argument that landscape is a primary driver of urbanization. i came to realize, however, that people in bahrain had different understandings of the word landscape to me. they often imagined luscious verdant gardens when i talked about ‘landscape.’ but i was interested in landscape as a horizontal surface that might include city, and desert as much as greenery. in order to communicate better with my interlocutors, i began to focus on green, because it became clear that they understood landscape as the contrast of constructed green with the indigenous beige desert. my fieldwork confirmed that green was definitely a driver of urbanization. for example, advertising for new residential developments were dominated by the greenness of the constructed landscapes rather than the buildings (doherty 2017: 192). tirpak: in paradoxes of green, you describe bahrain to be the ‘smallest, densest, and greenest’ arabian penisula state (p. 6)—an island defined by the ‘grey-greenery’ of date palm groves (p. 8), but also increasingly by the ‘monochrome’ green of lawns, parks and roadside landscaping (p. 9), as well as by arid conditions and other prominent colors such as desert beiges and the distinct red and white of bahrain’s national flag. you depict bahrain as being slightly ‘larger than singapore but smaller than london or new york’ (p. 10), and having a population of approximately 1.4 million in 2016. you also note that there is a high rate of per capita water use in bahrain and that urban land costs are arguably comparable with those of downtown chicago. are there any easy urban comparisons that can be made for those who (like me) are not familiar with bahrain? doherty: exactly that bahrain is approximate in area to singapore yet with a smaller population and, importantly, a very arid climate as opposed to a luscious tropical climate. in fact, bahrainis often have that comparison in mind too, especially for urban planning. i recall many references to the comparison with singapore in the various government ministries, yet the climate issue is critical. the extreme aridity of the climate in bahrain is something that always surprises people. when i had friends come to visit me there, it was the climate that they always remarked on. dust storms were especially prevalent during the year i spent there, sometimes lasting two to three days at a time. the air turns beige and it’s best to stay doherty and tirpak portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019167 indoors during that weather. for me, the spatial comparisons with other territories… such as singapore, london and new york [are important]. i grew up on a peninsula in ireland, which is exactly the same area as bahrain too, and i always had that spatial comparison in mind when i was walking through the island (doherty 2017: 175). tirpak: i was drawn to your descriptions of everyday interactions with the landscape that you observed in bahrain. for example, you note the informal farming of some decorative roadside date palms by foreign workers—i am an urban harvester or forager myself in the us, grabbing neglected citrus where i can pick it. you also describe cases where date palm groves have likely been poisoned with diesel in bahrain, as part of attempts by residents to try to outmaneuver certain religious statutes and legal requirements that are viewed by some as hindrances to use of land and advancement. you highlight some of the everyday politics of water and water use in bahrain—such as frequent car and building washing by the local elite and opinions about the use of groundwater, treated sewage effluent (tse) water and desalinated water. furthermore, you describe the stratified access to coastline that exists in bahrain. could you share more about these urban factors? doherty: just as blue mixed with yellow gives green, so water and greenery are interrelated in an arid desert environment. there’s a wonderful arabic phrase—translated as ‘three things take away sadness: water, greenery and a beautiful face’—which indicates that these are all anyone could want. as a consequence of the difficulties posed by green, and by its relative scarcity, green becomes the realm of the elites. historically, we can see how people bought date palm gardens in bahrain, not for the financial return on investment, but for the social status the greenery would bring to the owner. in the same way, access to the sea is something in bahrain that is reserved for the elites. having said that, there has not been the trend of beach-going as there is in other countries. tirpak: your depiction of the ashura festival or mourning ritual in bahrain also struck me as quite vivid, and i note that contrasting colors but also textures and materials (specifically human blood from self-afflicted and superficial head wounds mixing with sweat and water and absorbed by the white cloth worn by observers) marked the event that you witnessed. i was surprised and moved by your descriptions of landscapes generally speaking through color—as shaped by relationships with other colors but also time of day and season as well as by qualities of light, water, heat, humidity and even sand or dust and manmade pollutants in the air. overall, you argue for breaking any binary that might exist between ‘desert’ (associated with poverty in bahrain, apparently) and urban in contrast with notions of ‘green.’ could you share more about these experiences and understandings? doherty: i’ve an aversion to binaries. why is everything black or white? can’t we be open to all the colors of the rainbow? one of the main issues i confronted with my study of green was the fact that you can’t really come to understand green unless you also consider its contrast with other colors. there’s a wonderful greeting in the arabian peninsula, shlawnak?, which literally means ‘what’s your color?’ it’s an all-pervasive greeting in the peninsula yet no one ever answers with the color the question asks for. instead the reply is, in arabic, ‘praise be to god.’ of course, it would be great if we could answer with a color. part of the point i am making is that color and form are interlinked, yet we rarely discuss the importance of color. same when it comes to sustainability which is too often linked with green. but isolating green from other colors is not helpful. sustainable cities are blue, green, red and in-between. green is too often conflated with sustainability, yet there is a wider spectrum to consider; green is insufficient by itself (doherty 2017: 186). tirpak: you were raised and studied in ireland and also studied and work in the usa, adding to scholarship about aspects of bahrain’s landscape and urban culture, as well as to knowledge about through the lens of colour portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019168 the bahamas and other regions. what can you say about multidisciplinary international studies? where do you think you or the field will head next? doherty: in addition to working in the arabian peninsula and the bahamas, i’ve also been working in brazil and west africa, as well as in the region between ireland and northern ireland, where i’m from. what i find most intriguing is how studying in one region can affect your understanding of the other. i’m especially interested in concepts of landscape in countries and societies where there isn’t a formal landscape architecture discipline. for instance, there’s no precise translation of the word ‘landscape’ in arabic. this is one of the things that attracted me to the arabic-speaking world. through my fieldwork for paradoxes of green, i came to understand that landscape in bahrain, and by extension the arabian peninsula, is understood as the contrast of constructed green with an indigenous arid, beige, desert environment. so, landscape is understood and defined through the lens of color. meanwhile, color and color theory is not something we teach in design schools, despite everything we design having a color. likewise, in ireland, where i was born, we don’t have a word for landscape in the irish (gaelic) language. irish understandings of landscape were much more rooted in the cultural and agricultural practice than in a pictorial aesthetic. i say, ‘were’ because now we mostly speak english in ireland and this confuses, but not totally changes, our understandings of landscape. the irish understandings of landscape became clearer to me when we did collective fieldwork there in the spring of 2019 (carr 2019). i am principal investigator on a project where we were studying the impacts of brexit on the border region between ireland and northern ireland and the potential to understand the border as a region rather than as a line (doherty 2017: 282). tirpak: in the preface to paradoxes of green you mention teaching in australia prior to your first journey to the kingdom of bahrain and later doctoral studies (doctor of design, 2010) at harvard—which led to your fieldwork in bahrain. australia in especially the 2000s has faced extreme drought conditions, which prompted responses that continue to shape urban practices there and further afield. for example, i noticed during my doctoral fieldwork in texas that australian manufactured water-conserving dual-flush toilets have been installed in san antonio as part of municipal efforts to conserve water (ramirez 2012). could you share more about your australian experiences—or how australian practices, sensibilities or scholarship might relate to what you found in bahrain? doherty: i’ve spent a couple of extended periods in australia, first in brisbane where i taught at queensland university of technology [qut], and i really loved it there. later, i taught a landscape architecture studio at rmit university in melbourne, and on the same trip i was briefly a visiting scholar at the university of sydney. while i lived in australia i was confronted for the first time in my life with extreme drought. not to mention extremes of temperatures, and scale. i recall going on one 6-hour long drive inland and yet it was barely perceptible on the map of australia. my main memories from australia are that sheer scale of the continent but also the scale and magnitude of urban challenges that are linked to climate. bahrain is a very different scale, but [has] similar climate challenges, and water shortages. one of the things that attracted me to bahrain was its smaller, manageable, scale, the opposite of australia! but the problems and opportunities in bahrain are not always particular to bahrain but applicable to different regions all over the world including australia. tirpak: out of curiosity, is your work in any way influenced by nancy d. munn’s ethnographic studies of australian aboriginal societies and spatial practices that include walking? i was introduced to munn’s (1996) research via ben chappell ’s lowrider space (2013)—in which chappell uses ethnographic methods that include riding along with car customizers in their vehicles to explore doherty and tirpak portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019169 mexican american custom car culture and policing in austin, texas. i ask, as i am struck by your descriptions and use of walking to study different urban conditions in bahrain. doherty: i’m not as familiar with nancy d. munn and ben chappell’s work as i should be. when i first arrived in bahrain, i was not expecting walking to be as central to my method as it later became. i don’t drive, and public transport in bahrain was not something my upper middle class friends knew anything about or encouraged me to know about at first. so, i ended up walking everywhere and enjoyed it. i realized my walks always led to interesting encounters. people would stop me and say hello and ask if i was okay. so, i met lots of people i would not otherwise have met, including some people who became my friends and interlocutors. tirpak: i’m also curious if you encountered any hostilities or problems related to your research or approach? simply for comparison, i noticed and sometimes was caught up in relatively aggressive anti-homeless policing in sections of downtown san antonio, texas, as part of my doctoral fieldwork and daytime urban wanders there (tirpak 2018). doherty: i’m happy to say that my walks through bahrain were never problematic. i can’t recall any unpleasant encounters during my walks apart from the frustration of not being able to cross some of the highways …the island of bahrain today is not constructed for walking, so roads sometimes act as walls. there were some examples, which i mention in the book, where this becomes a form of exclusion. by building a shopping mall that no one can walk to, you create an exclusive space … with very few exceptions, people were open to my presence and welcoming. the only issues i faced came after my fieldwork was ended. i returned shortly after the political and social unrest of 2011 and was struck by the change in atmosphere and the militarization of the landscape (taylor 2015). people tell me i could not do today what i did ten years ago. my presence walking around the island could be viewed with suspicion. tirpak: do you have a sense for how paradoxes of green (2017) has been received in bahrain or the wider region? doherty: in terms of the book’s reception in bahrain, i haven’t been back since its publication in 2017, but i plan to return later this year. the manuscript was read by several bahrainis before publication. i tried to present a balanced view of a complex and delicate political situation. i hope people can see that the book is full of love for bahrain. i hear it has been received positively in bahrain, and i haven’t heard anything to the contrary. tirpak: how has publishing paradoxes of green changed or shaped your writing? doherty: there’s a general rule of thumb that for every hour one spends in the field, one should spend four hours actually writing about it. it is through the act of writing that we think about and interpret the experiences from the field. i tried to write up my field notes as frequently as i could, and kept re-reading them every day when i was in the field. it definitely makes me consider the writing process as an important part of the interpretation of field research. it is something one needs to keep plugging at. it is not something i can sit down and do, but there are many stages and layers to writing. tirpak: is there anything that you left out of paradoxes of green (2017) that you wish now you had included? doherty: one of the challenges of fieldwork is in the tension between your interlocutors and your research. there were several aspects my fieldwork which i deliberately chose not to include. some of these were political, others dealt with sensitive and personal information that might compromise the identities of my friends and interlocutors. i have no through the lens of colour portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019170 regrets about leaving anything out of paradoxes of green that i deliberately chose to leave out. for instance, writing about politics was very hard. because i wanted to give a balanced view and at the same time, the book is about green and not about politics. but i hope i have shown how green is central to the political life of bahrain. one of the biggest, and unintentional, omissions only became apparent to me when the book was going to press. as i sent the final artwork to the publisher it dawned on me for the first time that all my photographs were taken during the day—meanwhile most of my fieldwork was done at night. i had to do my fieldwork at nighttime because of the weather. although the weather for much of the year is delightful in bahrain, for several months of the year it is very hot. as a consequence, i could only walk after the sun went down. but nighttime was when public space would come alive, so it made sense to walk then too. i’ve since become intrigued with the nighttime as a design challenge. i think it’s fair to say that most public spaces are utilized at the nighttime in bahrain, yet all the plans i’ve ever seen designed for the region are designed and represented for the daytime. at night, colors change, perceptions of space change, and uses change. we had a conference at harvard on this topic as a result of this omission: after dark: nocturnal landscapes and public spaces in the arabian peninsula (raji 2017). this is one of my current research projects and a focus of a new design lab i am heading at harvard graduate school of design, the critical landscapes design lab [http://criticallandscapes.com/]. tirpak: do you have any advice for doctoral students thinking about taking on international, ethnographic and multidisciplinary approaches to research? any advice for universities in regards to structuring or supporting this type doctoral research? doherty: i realized quite early on in my research that for practical reasons, such as the difficulties getting access to archives, that i was going to have difficulty getting the information i needed. it was clear i would only be able to gather this information from an in-depth period living in bahrain. before leaving for the field, i remember speaking with my advisors about methodology. they explained that i needed to do what i needed to do. i think this was very good advice because it helped me to be flexible in the field. the primary advice i would give to students is to value chance encounters. i found the first weeks to be difficult as, in an effort to be efficient, i tried to plan most aspects of my fieldwork. then, i realized that not alone did my fieldwork rarely work out as i planned but that the most interesting results came from the unpredicted encounters. it was then when i came to appreciate the value of chance. and i began to create the chances of chance happening. for instance, the chance of chance was greatly helped by walking. i found that many of my most interesting and valuable encounters were during chance encounters. one of the main structural problems for universities in terms of supporting this type of research is probably financial. i was fortunate to find funding in the form of a travel fellowship i applied for. having access to funding is important for the ability to do this sort of in depth ethnographic work. tirpak: it’s a minor passage in the book, but i enjoyed your light critiquing of a leedcertified building on a manmade island in dubai as one example of less nuanced or more economically motivated understandings of urban ‘green’ or sustainable development in the region. i was also struck by your depictions of ‘green deserts’ in bahrain (pp. 121–122)—such as green lawns and traffic roundabouts along what you call ‘vip roads’ (p. 132). you suggest that, to some degree, such practices or politics are shaped by the perspectives of foreign expatriates and distant designers, but also by the interests of local ruling elites. could you talk more about this? doherty and tirpak portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019171 doherty: well this is one of the paradoxes behind the title: the paradox that to green is equated with environmentalism and to create green space in desert environments is not very green from an environmental point of view. it’s not good to talk about green without knowing which hue of green. ideas of green are very culturally specific, and there are many hues. and green is understood in terms of its relationship to other colors. so we need to consider other colors too when discussing landscape and the environment. references carr, g. 2019, ‘harvard graduate school of design redefines the post-brexit landscape of the irish northwest,’ harvard graduate school of design, 22 may. online, available: https://www.gsd.harvard. edu/2019/05/harvard-graduate-school-of-design-gareth-doherty-redefines-the-post-brexit-landscapeof-the-irish-northwest/ [accessed 10 october 2019]. chappell, b. 2012, lowrider space: aesthetics and politics of mexican american custom cars. university of texas press, austin. doherty, g. 2017, paradoxes of green: landscapes of a city-state. university of california press, oakland, ca. munn, n. d. 1996, ‘the figure in the australian aboriginal landscape,’ critical inquiry, vol. 22, no. 3: 446-46. doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/448801 raji, m. y. 2017, ‘after dark in the arabian peninsula,’ the harvard crimson, 5 may. online, available: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/5/arabian-peninsula/ [accessed 10 october 2019]. ramirez, d. 2012, ‘how to score a free toilet in texas: the water rebate round-up,’ stateimpact texas, 12 july. online, available: https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2012/07/18/how-to-score-a-free-toilet-intexas-the-water-rebate-round-up/ [accessed 10 october 2019]. taylor, a. 2015, ‘the bahraini uprising, 4 years later,’ the atlantic, 21 january. online, available: https:// www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/01/the-bahraini-uprising-4-years-later/384702/ [accessed 10 october 2019]. tirpak, m.a. 2018, ‘not your neighborhood taco truck?: a critical urban futures study of mobile food vending in san antonio, texas,’ phd dissertation, university of technology sydney, australia. through the lens of colour portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019172 portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal divergent accounts of equivalent narratives: russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever lars kristensen, university of st andrews when margareta winberg, then deputy prime minister and minister for gender equality in sweden, took up the film lilya 4-ever (2002) for public debate in 2003, she made it clear that the film’s most important function in her view was its depiction of gender equality. as a consequence of this admiration from the political establishment, the swedish foreign ministry was assigned to ‘export’ the film to countries from where human trafficking originates: russia and eastern europe. the aim of this ‘export’ was to reach political decision-makers—and opinion-makers—and to make explicit what facts and statistics had failed to do, that is, make the horrors of human trafficking tangible (hedling 2004, 327). this seemingly transnational1 feminist concern has larger consequences beyond the intentions of the film, because it makes explicit the postsocialist power system that emerged after the fall of the soviet union. here sweden and the west as a whole hold the banner of educators, and the post-socialist countries are the uncivilised learners, a phenomenon already described elsewhere (wolff 1994; neumann 1996, 1999). by demonstrating how lilya 4-ever performs a russian ‘return’ narrative, in this article i want to underline the ways in which the story of lilya adheres to a european ‘anxiety’ 1 in this essay, the transnational has different connotations than the international. where the international is considered as a bilateral, or multilateral, connection between states, the transnational is interconnected at the level of people, e.g. work co-operation. in the words of the swedish anthropologist ulf hannerz, the transnational is a ‘more humble, and often a more adequate label for phenomena which can be of quite variable scale and distribution’ (quoted in bergfelder 2005, 321). kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever narrative. the transnational mobility made possible since the lifting of travel restrictions in the post-socialist countries informs this anxiety, which envisions hordes of migrant workers flooding the nations in the west and undermining their respective welfare systems. contrary to moodysson’s intentions—as he states in a swedish tabloid newspaper interview, ‘if the film could make one young girl reconsider, then i have succeeded’ (hjerten 2002, 36)2—his film reiterates a prevalent european narrative of the transnational post-soviet russian girl/woman. my major concern with lilya 4-ever is not its horrific portrayal of human trafficking, which the film depicts with genuine credibility, but with its end flight into a ‘return narrative’ for its female protagonist, a salient russian, and in particular soviet, convention in cinematic representations of russians abroad. rather than arguing that lilya 4-ever is a misrepresentation or wrongly structured, my intention is to lay bare the transnational context as significant for the understanding of representations of post-soviet female russians in north-western europe. i want to compare lilya 4-ever to a late soviet glasnost film, interdevochka [intergirl] (1989), directed by petr todorovsky, which tells a similar story of a female russian travelling to sweden. we have, then, two cinematic accounts of female russians travelling to sweden; both have opted for selling sex acts and both move to sweden with the intent not to do it again. however, there is a big age disparity between the two russian females, for tanya in todorovsky’s film is a woman and moodysson’s lilya a child. this has consequences for the comparison of the films, as the narrative paradigm shifts depending on the maturity of the protagonist. if, for tanya the empowered sex worker, hers is an informed transnational journey, lilya’s is a child’s grim journey of human trafficking. yet, despite their differences, a comparison of the films enables a critical shift from the national level to the transnational. for example lilya 4-ever has been dealt with as a swedish film (hedling 2004) and a contemporary european child narrative (wilson 2005), while interdevochka has been analysed as a russian melodrama (lawton 1992, 211-13, and 2004, 61; gillespie 2003, 98). these traditional film/language studies accounts are useful, but they are all set in homogeneous contexts that exclude each other. by fusing the swedish/european and the russian/post-soviet 2 the interview appears under the headline: ‘the film is pitch-black—[moodysson] wants the audience to change their lives—and resonate’ (hjerten 2002). portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 2 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever contexts, my analysis aims at going beyond national particularities and providing a fuller transnational account of post-soviet russian females travelling abroad. transnationalism, nordic identity formation and post-socialist migrant workers in contemporary film studies, the transnational has come to inform understandings of cross-border cooperation, emigrating star personas, and cross-cultural audience readings, whether the topic of analysis is hollywood, national or global cinema. the transnational focus emphasises movement beyond the national, and makes unstable ‘the ability of cultural authorities to deploy the binarized us/them narratives upon which xenophobic nationalism depend’ (ezra and rowden 2006, 4). in this way, the concept of the transnational has replaced the once progressive postcolonial, which, as ella shohat writes, ‘has given way to a politically drained post-colonial term, due to the collapse of the second world and the crisis of socialism’ (1992, 101). the transnational, in this sense, refuses to take sides with either the top (champions of capitalism) or the bottom (various forms of marxism and socialism), but rather ‘unfolds as an essentially selfmotivated, and apparently amoral, cultural force’ (ezra and rowden 2006, 9). transnational cinema in this sense owes much to the older postcolonial cinema or third world cinema, only here, as an ‘amoral, cultural force’ it can make a claim to being devoid of ideological connotations. while it is easy to be hyperbolic and discuss the transnational as a new form of enriching cosmopolitanism, i believe it is useful to insist on a conception of transnationalism that still contains an us/them, a top/bottom, and a first/third world. this is because transnational female post-soviet russians3 represent the loss of the second world, and thus signify the uneasiness with which they are positioned within the first/third world dichotomy. therefore, i will discuss here the context of lilya 4-ever as (re-)establishing a swedish self where the female russian is not part of first world sweden, but represents that world’s other. in short, although lilya 4-ever depicts a transnational movement, the film (re-)produces the (neo-)colonial discourse of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ nordic cinema, which includes several minor national cinemas, is traditionally 3 in particular, russian women seem to fascinate (male) filmmakers, as can be seen in a trope of british films, from the glitzy starred birthday girl (2001) by jez butterworth, with nicole kidman in the leading role, to the realistic last resort (2000) by pawel pawlikowski, which stars dina korzun as a vulnerable and naïve young russian mother. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 3 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever considered transnational in its objective to fend off the cultural influx from the usa and hollywood. mette hjort analyses nordic co-productions as shifting towards a homophilic transnationalism, where ‘the assumption, expressed by filmmakers, producers, and policy makers from the mid-90s onward, is that co-operation across national borders is far easier in the nordic context’ (2005, 210-1). the rationale here is that the nordic countries share cultural, linguistic and historical affinities, an idea that translates as ‘we co-operate (communicate) with those similar to us.’ this form of transnational cooperation has its limitations, of course, in that it does not include crossborder communication with those dissimilar to ‘us.’ russians would be a case in point. lilya 4-ever was a nordic co-production between swedish memfis film and danish zentropa, and there is no evidence of russian involvement in the film’s production. newspaper reports on the film state that moodysson and representatives of memfis film went to moscow to organize casting auditions.4 thus although the film is a transnational production, and was made in line with the homophilic transnational cooperation identified by hjort, no russians participated in the production. indeed, the nordic transnational co-production of lilya 4-ever was sought in order to enhance the possibility of applying for grants within both the swedish and the danish funding agencies and allocating audiences beyond the national borders.5 frequently, european co-productions seek transnational partners when venturing outside the national context in order to gain local experience, audiences and funding, and to make filming cheaper, given that transporting a film crew and equipment to the desired transnational location is an expensive exercise.6 the transnational in lilya 4-ever’s production scheme points to a different kind of nordic identity formation, a kind that does not need the incorporation of the post-soviet russian. the film’s intention, i argue, is to portray cultural concerns that largely address the nordic context.7 4 alexandra dahlström, who starred in moodysson’s first film show me love (1998) as elin, worked during the shooting of lilya 4-ever as a russian interpreter. dahlström’s mother is russian. 5 the two film companies have a long-standing working relationship and are similar in their position outside the established national film industries. 6 it should be noted that memfis film co-operated with russian stv film company in the production of another film from 2002, bear’s kiss by sergei bodrov sr. this link with stv is further emphasised by the leading actress in lilya 4-ever, oksana akinshina; she starred in sergei bodrov jr’s acclaimed debut film, syostry [sisters] (2000), which was also produced by stv film company. despite this formal affiliation with stv in st petersburg, memfis film took on the job of producing lilya 4-ever without cooperation from their russian partners. 7 it should be noted that interdevochka was also a transnational collaboration with soviet mosfilm and swedish filmstallet. however, in the case of interdevochka, the coproduction was sought to ease the shooting of the film. unlike lilya 4-ever, there is no evidence that interdevochka had a transnational viewer strategy and the film was not released in sweden. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 4 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever the norwegian political scientist iver neumann has examined russia’s role in the identity formation of the nordic region, as part of the larger european identity formation (see also wolff 1994). according to neumann, the construction of the region partly hinges on two approaches, the inside-out model and the outside-in model (1999, 117-122). the inside-out model sees the region as sharing affinities, which render transnational cooperation as natural and proper. this is the model on which hjort’s homophilic transnational cinema seems to operate, as noted above. the other model, outside-in, establishes itself on a geopolitical level, where the geographical region’s position in between powerful states—great britain, germany and russia—constructs a forced affinity of the region as a counterweight to these states. here, the identity formation works in reverse order to that of the inside-out model, where those ‘who we are not’ inform the consolidation of ‘who we are.’ i read lilya 4-ever in this context, that is, as a (european) nordic narrative in which the russian female is constructed as the non-european other. this post-socialist female other fascinates us because we find her social decline unjust and horrific. the post-socialist decay portrayed in lilya 4ever—the grey housing blocks, the courtyard’s muddy look, the derelict marine base— all register as despair on the faces of the characters, which in turn rouses the viewers’ empathy and desire to rescue the film’s victims. moodysson’s rescue attempt lies outside the film’s narrative of lilya, who is grossly abused by people uninterested in helping her. moodysson wants to ‘save’ the postsoviet girls, who desire to travel to the west, by making explicit the mechanism of human trafficking and the western male sexual desire for prostitutes that facilitates such trafficking. in this regard, the film constructs the post-soviet russian female girl as other and as victim. as the swedish film scholar olof hedling has asserted, ‘the characters are reduced to victim/slave and perpetrator/slaver’ (hedling 2004, 324).8 leaving aside the fiction of lilya 4-ever for a moment, i want to highlight how postsocialist labour migration functions outside its cinematic representation and, in particular, how women play an important role in this system of transnational movement. leyla keough undertook research in the gagauz region in moldova, where she 8 hedling (2004) argues that lilya 4-ever has similarities to early 20th century representations of immigrants, as seen in the us film traffic in souls (tuckers 1913) or the danish film den hvide slavehandel [the white-slave trade] (alfred lind 1910). portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 5 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever conducted interviews with women who travel regularly to turkey in search of work. she says, [t]he blame for social disorder in moldova is placed upon migrant women—especially those who work in turkey, who are represented as irresponsible mothers, immoral wives, and selfish consumers. migrant women themselves counter that local disorder and their migrant work is caused by economic dislocation. they argue that in going abroad to work, they are selflessly sacrificing [themselves] for their children and thus are those more resourceful and better mothers (even if transnational ones) than those who stay. (keough 2006, 432-33) the women that keough talked to were narrating a different story, where the ‘good mothers’ leave for work in neighbouring countries in order to better their domestic situation. given that moldova is not part of the post-soviet baltic, which is the context for lilya 4-ever, keogh’s findings do shed light on a new transnational migration circuit in post-socialist countries (441). here the neoliberal economics imposed by first world institutions, such as the imf and the world bank, have stripped the nation-state of its responsibility for providing a social welfare system and creating jobs at home, hence the economists’ advice to use the ‘migrant labour as a tool for development’ (454). this is why the political involvement in exporting lilya 4-ever to post-socialist countries becomes incriminating and looks more preoccupied with anxiety about migration than with the welfare of its post-socialist subjects. since i want to compare lilya 4-ever with the soviet russian narrative in interdevochka, i will, as a way of distinguishing the stories, term lilya 4-ever a swedish-russian narrative and interdevochka a russian-swedish narrative. even though both films tell the story of a russian female travelling to sweden, their contextual, temporal and ideological frameworks are different. lilya 4-ever may have russian as its major language, yet it remains a swedish film informed by scandinavian identity concerns and world-view, as will be clear from a brief plot analysis.9 9 that said, when lilya 4-ever premiered in britain in 2003, julian graffy wrote in sight and sound, ‘it is one of the considerable strengths of lilya 4-ever that the swedish moodysson has made such a convincing “russian” film’ (2003, 21). the inverted commas around ‘russian’ imply that the film is, in fact, russian, although moodysson is swedish and not russian. and not only due to the fact that russian is the major language in the film, but because, according to graffy, it tells an ‘authentic’ russian story. graffy is referring to the drabness—‘the faceless, unmaintained blocks on the edge of an unnamed town, the derelict and trashed public spaces, the meagre adornments of lilya’s room’ (21)—which is the postsocialist estonian setting of the film. graffy’s inverted commas are warranted; but not in the way graffy implies. that is, they could be seen to indicate the film’s ‘inauthentic’ look, as it is narrated by a swedish european who constructs the post-socialist russian in line with a eurocentric view of the other. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 6 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever swedish-russian lilya the mother of teenage swedish-russian lilya abandons her in a post-soviet country10 when she leaves for the usa with her new husband, a russian-american. lilya’s situation goes from bad to worse until she has no other way out than to follow the path of a friend into prostitution. on one of her nights out, she encounters andrei, who at first appears to be the decent person that lilya has lacked all her life. in good faith, encouraged and aided by andrei, lilya travels alone to sweden with a promise of work—picking vegetables—and an assurance that andrei will join her later. however, andrei turns out to be part of a trafficking network. once in sweden, lilya is stripped of her fake passport, raped, and forced into prostitution in a cold and ruthless society. finally lilya escapes and commits suicide by jumping off a bridge. in death, back in her post-soviet country, she rejoins her soul mate, a boy called volodia, who had committed suicide after lilya’s departure to sweden. if not a blockbuster, lilya 4-ever was a considerable critical success. swedish critics, in particular, pronounced it a masterpiece. the film critic ingvar engvén, writing for the swedish film industry’s journal, applauded the film as a ‘harmonious masterpiece’ (engvén 2002, 35). he was not alone in his appraisals (for further examples, see hedling 2004, 326). the film was much anticipated in britain, as confirmed by the prepremiere article by julian graffy in sight and sound (2003, 20-22). but the following issue of the journal ran a review of the film that expressed disappointment and strayed far from the plaudits of ‘masterpiece.’ according to the review by tony rayns, ‘[the film] says nothing more useful than: isn’t this shocking? aren’t we powerless to do anything about it?,’ and he continues, ‘lilya is a brattish russian teenager, formed by her tough environment, but ultimately a tabula rasa’ (2003, 56).11 these opposing reviews indicate that critics were divided over the film and its portrayal of post-socialist 10 the country of origin in lilya 4-ever is never determined in the narrative, but stands for a post-soviet condition rather than one particular state. that said, the shooting location was in estonia, the baltic country that the nordic countries have regarded as the prime target in the region for political and economic cooperation. the historical bond between scandinavia and the baltic is alleged to be the reason for this esprit de corps. 11 it should be noted that not all reviewers outside sweden were unhappy with the film. kristin marroitt jones praises moodysson for not exploiting ‘akinshina’s doll-like prettiness by presenting it as anything but a magnet for predatory men’ (2003, 74). the new york times review contradicts tony rayns’s view of lilya as ‘brattish’ by saying that it is a heartbreaking film because lilya is not ‘an overprivileged brat mopily foraging in a land of plenty’ (holden 2003, e20). portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 7 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever trafficking.12 in the nordic context, the victimization of lilya, which rayns finds so revolting, is accepted as a given post-socialist reality. in this way, at the level of regional identity formation, as we saw in neumann’s assertions above, the nordic countries foster a russian other against which their own national identities are projected. moreover, the russian other is outside the traditional homophilic transnationalism that shares values and identities; although near in geographical terms, russia remains remote in reality. moodysson leave the space of his narrative elusive and undefined in terms of geography. therefore the film does not speak particularly of the post-soviet estonian context, in which it is filmed, nor about the particulars of the swedish town of malmö. rather, moodysson pinpoints social conditions that converge: post-soviet economic poverty and north-western european economic affluence and exploitation. however, when moodysson addresses russian audiences, he stresses that the film speaks of a swedish/nordic reality,13 which, in my opinion, underlines the aim of the film. mooddysson’s targeted aim is the social critique of north-western european affluence, and to a lesser degree of the post-soviet condition, which is offered only as a context. in january 1999, sweden introduced a law that made it illegal to pay for sex acts, while it still remained legal to sell sexual favours. the law discourages prostitution without criminalising sexworkers: it targets the men who purchase sex, while decriminalising the women. in lilya 4-ever, moodysson also targets the men through the camera work. in a montage sequence during the treatment that lilya endures from the men she is sold to, the camera assumes the position of lilya looking up or down on the grunting men, who because of lilya’s age (16), are essentially paedophiles.14 during the interview on 12 this split can also be detected in the audience numbers obtained from the lumiere database. although released in 23 countries across europe (still exceptional for a contemporary european film), only 600,000 people attended screenings of lilya 4-ever europe-wide. compared to moodysson’s two previous films, this is a considerable drop, fucking åmål [show me love] (1998) was seen by 1.5 million viewers across europe and tillsammans [together] (2000) by nearly 2 million. of lilya 4-ever’s 600,000 european viewers, over 400,000 came from the scandinavian countries alone, and 300,000 of these from sweden. this viewing pattern, which fused with the uneven critical reception, indicates a split in the acceptance of the film’s message. the different british-swedish reception of lilya 4-ever can also be explained by the different cinematic traditions, as nordic cinema has a stronger and more developed tradition of childcentred dramas, which in turn reflects different attitudes to children and child-care. 13 for example, when interviewed in rotterdam for the russian newspaper gazeta, moodysson says, “i think that lilya 4-ever is not just a russian theme. this is a global situation. not in the details, of course, but in the aim that in many countries people are enduring difficult experiences. i did not set out to concretely make a film about russia. rather about sweden – in so far as lilya turns up in that country. and when swedes watched the film, afterwards they spoke about a swedish reality” (chen 2005). 14 the age of consent in sweden is 15, but in cases where the person is either the offspring or in the care portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 8 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever the dvd edition of the film, moodysson explains that the cameraman became physically sick while shooting in this position and that moodysson himself shot some of these horrific scenes.15 moodysson aims to place the spectator in the position of the exploited, lilya, laying bare these newly criminalised men and their sexuality. moodysson’s investigation of middle-aged, male (hetero)sexuality—a line of examination which he continues in his following two films, et hål i mitt hjerte [a hole in my heart] (2004) and container (2006)—becomes in lilya 4-ever a quest into a male sexuality that facilitates prostitution and human trafficking. any portrayal of human trafficking is horrific, regardless of the country of origin, but for some it matters that lilya is of post-soviet origin. to one reviewer of the film, it is precisely this that ‘makes [her] plight infinitely sadder’ than if she were from a wealthy country (holden, 2003, e20). the post-soviet female russian, because of her fallen status, adds to the inhuman abuse of the child lilya, which in turn supports a view that the new swedish law is justified and in line with the dominating political sentiment. the law is still without parallel in the european union, which is divided on the question of prostitution, locked between viewing female prostitution as ‘sexworkers’ or abused women. sweden and the nordic countries see themselves at the forefront of combating prostitution, connecting strongly to feminist ideas that uneven society produces not only men empowered with the ability to buy sexual favours, but also women who are forced to sell themselves.16 the europe divided over prostitution can also be detected in the music score of the film. as an additional source for the film, moodysson recalls listening to bach’s mass in bminor one sleepless night and envisioned celebrating a religious mass of our time (gentele 2002, 60). moodysson’s goal was to unearth the divine in our time, the divine that gives hope even in the most hellish of situations. like bach, the lutheran composer writing music for the catholic mass, moodysson endeavoured to make a film that would awaken europe into following sweden’s lead in dealing with the exploitation of women. the reference to bach ties in well nationally with the use of the german heavy-metal of the perpetrator the age of consent is 18, the legal age of adulthood. in this sense, lilya is still a child and the men who use her paedophiles. 15 the interview conducted by danny leigh is also available on the guardian website (leigh 2002). 16 in countries with social security, prostitution is normally connected to drug addiction, domestic abuse and (at the margins) illegal immigration. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 9 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever group rammstein’s song mein hertz brennt [my heart burns] in the film’s opening, which shows a bruised and disorientated lilya running through the desolate streets of an industrial provincial town. obviously the opening song is a reference to how moodysson views the subject of the film, human trafficking. of the opening scene, emma wilson comments: ‘moodysson creates a staccato effect through jump-cut, with relentless repetition as the camera is closer, then more distant, then closer again. [s]uch cutting, and the blistering music of the soundtrack generate sensations of friction, of collision’ (2005, 335-36).17 the two music points of rammstein and bach are references pointing to a germanic affinity, which imparts the story of russian lilya to a nordic european setting, as opposed to a purportedly southern european laissez-faire attitude towards prostitution and human trafficking. thus, despite the fact that critics were divided in their perception of lilya 4-ever, the appearance of the film in a swedish context is linked to the introduction of the law banning the purchase of sexual favours, which is again reflected in the divided european opinion on how to tackle sex work. the film makes use of the russian other in commenting on a transnational european reality, where the post-socialist subject is seen as the victim of a poverty that strips the subject of agency. in this sense, swedishrussian lilya diverges from the soviet russian portrait of the same journey. russian-swedish tanya tanya, the central character in interdevochka, is a high-class sex-worker, who lives her life in two separate worlds. during the day, she works as a nurse and shares a modest flat with her mother, but at night she—of her own choice—turns to prostitution, selling sexual favours in glitzy foreign-currency bars and hotels. when one of her clients, the 17 contrary to wilson, tony rayns finds the use of rammstein’s song inorganic: ‘it is absurd to imagine that lilya would ever relate to—or even listen to—a rammstein track’ (2003, 58). as a critic who writes mainly on asian cinema, but occasionally ventures into other territories, rayns is making a rather harsh judgment. why should rammstein be out of reach for people living in post-soviet countries? is it because the band sings in german or because it is ‘western’? clearly, the level of foreign-language proficiency in the post-soviet countries is greater than in britain. moreover, the western music scene, rammstein included, has built up sizeable markets in eastern europe and russia. to izvestia, the russian daily, moodysson explains that he encountered rammstein while shooting lilya 4-ever in estonia: ‘when we were filming in estonia, i saw on a fence the word “rammstein.” i knew that this was a german group and decided to listen to it. i wanted to understand why this music attracts estonian and russian youngsters’ (kuvshinova 2003). contrary to rayns, i regard the arrangement of rammstein and the rest of the music score, including the russian girl-band tatu, as working effectively to reflect the feelings of both the character and filmmaker. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 10 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever middle-aged and half-bald swede, edward, proposes to her, she believes she has struck fortune. tanya desires to marry a foreigner in order to escape her soviet life and reach the western luxuries, which she can ill afford on salary as a nurse. edward’s marriage proposal becomes for tanya the ticket out of the soviet union and into the dreamt of western society. the first part of the film concentrates on tanya’s efforts in leaving the soviet union, getting papers stamped, convincing her mother of the sincerity of the marriage and seeing to her mother’s needs in her absence. in the second part of the film, tanya lives in middle-class suburban luxury in sweden, in an ikea styled home and with her own cabriolet volkswagen (this, of course, being the soviet idea of western luxury). the only problem is that housewife tanya has nothing to do and she quickly grows tired of her dull materialist lifestyle and develops a nostalgic longing for her mother—and her motherland, the soviet union. following an affair with a russian truck driver, tanya decides to leave sweden, but on the way to the airport she crashes her car and, we are left to assume, is killed. interdevochka [intergirl] was made in 1989 by petr todorovsky, who was one of masters of the soviet melodrama genre,18 but who, in the post-1991 era, has not managed to attain the success of his soviet films and, in particular, interdevochka. the film was a glasnost blockbuster, seen by 40 million russians in its first year of release alone (graffy 2000, 243). it won the popular vote contest in soviet screen, a leading soviet film journal, the same year (lawton 1992, 97). there are many factors contributing to the success of interdevochka. primarily, it was due to the ‘different way of life’; the high-class prostitution which the film depicts should not be disregarded as an audience attraction (bogomolov 1994, 22). the subject of prostitution in the soviet union would have been completely taboo only a few years earlier (graffy 2000, 243). nor should the critique of the soviet system that the film implies be discounted. the film implies that tanya’s choice of her nightly profession is a direct result of a system that breeds moral prostitution (lawton 2004, 61). another key factor in the popularity 18 best exemplified by the film, lyubimaya zhenshchina mekhanika gavrilova [the favourite woman of the mechanic gavrilov] (1981), starring the popular soviet actress lyudmila gurchenko. of later achievements, todorovsky remade abram room’s famous triangle drama bed and sofa (1927) with retro vtroem [ménage à trios] (1998). portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 11 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever of the film was the shooting of the second part on location in sweden, as opposed to the ‘phoney west’ of the soviet baltic republics (lawton 1992, 259-60 n85).19 this credibility of filming on location adds to the film’s public impact, insofar as interdevochka offered a glance into the forbidden west, which for many soviet citizens was considered utterly alien territory. opinions on interdevochka are divided. david gillespie, for example, observes that, ‘the message [of interdevochka] is clear: good girls stay in russia with their families and should not think above their (domesticated) station’ (2003, 98). anna lawton, emphasising the critique of the soviet system, adds that ‘it would be misleading to read the film in moralistic terms—bad girls go astray [and] meet with retribution’ (lawton 1992, 213). interdevochka is a simple melodrama, in that the film confirms a nationalistic ideal: the female russian should stay at home. the film plays out the dictum of ‘it is better to stay at home despite our troubled times.’ for example, tanya’s cultural capital as a nurse is cinematically constructed as positive and valuable, in order for the viewers to question her desire to leave. we, as viewers, are expected to question the usefulness of sitting in suburban sweden doing nothing, when one’s true skills could be put to better use where they are needed at home in the soviet union. in russia, the narrative of women failing to successfully migrate is not uncommon. karin sarsenov, a swedish russianist, analysing literary narratives about russian females abroad, describes two of the most popular rodina [motherland] narratives as a circular trajectory and a one-way journey (sarsenov 2006, 6). in the circular narrative, the protagonists travel abroad only to return and confirm that the motherland is far superior to the foreign country visited. this narrative can be seen in popular comedies, such as okno v parizh [window to paris] (mamin, 1994), or action films, such as brat 2 [brother 2] (balabanov, 2000).20 that said, the circular narrative, which is common to 19 tellingly, moodysson opts for estonia on the baltic as the shooting location; the baltic becomes a surrogate for ‘russia’ in a nordic filmmaking context. 20 in brat 2 the popular character of danila bagrov, played by the late sergei bodrov jr., ventures into chicago where he saves dasha, a russian prostitute who had immigrated to the us during glasnost, from her black pimp and repatriates her by taking her home to russia. saved by danila, dasha realises that it was wrong to emigrate and upon leaving the us at the airport, she forfeits her right to enter the country again. on board the plane back to russia the soundtrack plays a popular nautilus song, ‘goodbye america,’ that symbolises the end of post-soviet russia’s love affair with the usa in the early 1990s (also called the honeymoon period, 1991-1994). brat 2 by aleksei balabanov illustrates well the circular narrative, where home is preferred to abroad. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 12 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever russian cinema, frequently gets subverted when viewed from abroad. here, the return journey can reveal the opposite of finding russia superior. for example, in émigré narratives the protagonist often returns ‘home’ to find that leaving the country was the right choice.21 in these émigré narratives, the return home is not filled with salvation. the one-way journey centres on negative narratives regarding rodina [the motherland], in that they are concerned with the themes of treachery and exile. while both films considered are one-way journeys—both female protagonists die in sweden—in her afterlife lilya returns home. this makes the narrative of lilya 4-ever a confirmation of the russian myth of ‘rodina’ [the motherland] as superior to abroad. viewed in this light, interdevochka is a classic melodrama in which the fallen woman realises her mistake, but is tragically killed before returning home. in the russian-swedish narrative of tanya, the desire to travel abroad is equal to dishonour and the film thus projects a patriotic and nationalistic outlook. narrative structure and mother abandonment despite the different contexts of the two films, the structure of the two narratives is constructed in accordance with the same formula. both films have an extended spatial contextualisation of the soviet era, or the post-soviet-era in the case of lilya 4-ever, where the conditions of the female protagonists are explained. roughly at the same point in the narratives (two-thirds through) the films cut to the soviet/russian abroad,22 where the two females are not given the chance to be accepted as individuals. whereas swedish-russian lilya’s exclusion from swedish society is more obvious, russianswedish tanya is equally subject to rejection. for example, at a garden-party in sweden, she endures an attempted rape from a colleague of her husband, who repeatedly refers to her as the russian whore. in short, both protagonists are contained within their bodily profession—prostitution. both women fight this forced identity, but in vain, and subsequently face no other recourse but suicide. what, then, are the reasons for this 21 such a realisation occurs in the french production est-ouest [east-west] (1999) by régis wargnier. here french-russian émigrés are lured back to soviet russia in the 1940s by the promise of new lives, only to be arrested and sent to labour camps by the stalinist regime. leonid gorovets’s israeli film kafe v’lemon [coffee with lemon] (1994) also fits this category. here the protagonist returns to russia after failed migration to israel, only to be accidentally shot during the siege of the white house in moscow in 1994. both gorovets’s and wargnier’s films highlight the viewpoint of the émigré, which inverts the dominant russian motherland narrative. 22 while in lilya 4-ever, the protagonist is depicted flying to sweden, no diegetic travel is indicated in interdevochka. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 13 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever similarity in the construction of the russian transnational narrative? first of all, it is important that we keep the target audiences in mind. both narratives aim to comprehend the desires to leave the ‘home’ country, and each film does this with different incentives. in the russian-swedish narrative of tanya, the motivation is to present the protagonist’s wish for migration as morally dubious, risky, illegal, and against the dominant political ideology. while trying to obtain permission to leave the soviet union, russian-swedish tanya encounters many obstacles on the road to procuring her stamps, reminders to soviet russian audiences that the emigration process is filled with sacrifice, public rejection and personal loss. this is evident in the fate of tanya’s mother, who gets into trouble in her work as a teacher, directly because of tanya’s emigration application. tanya’s marriage and subsequent application to migrate raises questions about the mother’s position as a role model for young students. whereas the soviet contextualisation with regard to the russian-swedish tanya narrative is intended to make viewers doubt the value of migration, in the swedishrussian lilya narrative, the post-soviet environment functions to inform swedisheuropean viewers about the circumstances of transnational migration. in short, it emphasises why people in post-socialist countries contemplate migrating to sweden. similarly to the plot line for russian-swedish tanya, lilya’s mother also has a crucial place in this regard, because her abandonment of lilya triggers her downfall and eventually leads to lilya accepting the offer of going to sweden. the case of lilya’s mother and her migration to the usa without her daughter could be questioned in terms of plausibility, because official emigration involves following a strict set of bureaucratic rules to do with dependants.23 however, those rules are moot in this case; lilya 4-ever does not specifically address russian viewers. instead, the mother’s emigration functions to direct audience empathy to lilya, rendering lilya’s entry into prostitution as dictated by destitution rather than free will. therefore, according to wilson, the abandonment of lilya creates the most emotive scene of the film, wherein the spectator’s identification with the female protagonist reaches a high point: ‘lilya is the child the viewer has been [or] a child the viewer has left behind, a reminder of parental responsibility and its visceral ties’ (2005, 337). wilson’s analysis certainly makes sense in terms of the screened child and its audience reception, but the argument can be 23 russian-swedish tanya’s effort alone indicates that emigration is subject to vigilant control. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 14 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever further advanced. moodysson evokes a parental relationship of exploiter and exploited, of the rich parenting—or lack of parenting—the poor. and those relationships resonate for the target audiences of lilya 4-ever, firmly in place in the first world and, in particular, in the nordic countries. moreover, the abandonment of lilya infuses the mother with negative connotations, as she selfishly improves only her own situation, and hence the film refuels the negative narrative of transnational female migration. in her anthropological analysis of moldovan mothers in a transnational migration circuit between moldova and turkey, keough describes the representation of lilya’s mother and her choice to seek a better life as constructing ‘one solution for desperate women like lilya and her mother: don’t be a slave to passions for men or money; stay home, buck up, and take care of your responsibilities’ (2006, 457 n11). clearly, the bulk of the blame for lilya’s predicament, and her subsequent turn to sexwork, is placed upon the mother’s desire to better her life. had the mother not desired this, then lilya would never have become a prostitute, travelled to sweden, and later committed suicide. viewers are led to conclude that transnational female migration gives impetus to a negative trajectory for the postsocialist subject, confirming that, despite the impoverished and un-nurturing motherland, post-socialist mothers should avoid transnational endeavours. this ideology of lilya 4-ever confirms the ‘anxiety’ narrative and contradicts economic policies that would help the development of the post-socialist region. this would be the swedish-russian narrative’s message on transnational movement. agency and prostitution the leading protagonists in both films prostitute themselves prior to arriving in sweden, but in positioning the two protagonists’ act of allowing their bodies to be used for sexual favours against each other, the films reveal significant differences as to whether the two characters exercise any control over their respective actions. obviously, swedish-russian lilya lacks any control in her trajectory towards sexwork and her actions are forced upon her by others: her mother, her aunt, andrei, her polish-swedish pimp witek, and the ‘customers’ that use her. lilya lacks command over earthly life and only gains control (agency) in her after-life. due to lilya’s lack of agency, moodysson’s film inclines towards a neo-realist vision of the lower classes being pushed around by the ruthless forces of capitalism (see holden 2003). indeed, if italian portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 15 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever neo-realism was often explicitly left wing in its solution to the mess of post-war europe, this political purview is also evident in the public discourse on the film that moodysson generated in newspaper interviews. julian graffy compares lilya to the saintly prostitute sonia in dostoevsky’s crime and punishment (1866) (2003, 22). if dostoevsky’s sonia caused the murderous rashkolnikov to crumble with guilt, then equally it is moodysson’s intention that audiences should crumble under the guilt of the ruthless exploitation that governs lilya’s trajectory. as he states in an interview, ‘everybody has a responsibility to take on the fact that these children’s lives are a product of the society in which we live .… we all carry a tangible guilt for the hunger in the world’ (domellöf-wik 2002, 50). the fact that graffy makes this reference to dostoevsky’s character, sonia, who derives salvation through her own suffering, reenforces the idea that lilya 4-ever emerges from the mould of realism with a religious twang.24 neo-realism reacted against the middle-class melodrama, which is the generic base of russian-swedish tanya’s trajectory. where lilya is stripped of agency, tanya is in full control of her actions in soviet russia, at least. tanya’s choice to become a prostitute is made deliberately in order to gain agency over her life, without which it would have been a version of soviet middle-class ‘poverty,’ whereby white-collar workers had average incomes but no access to western luxuries. russian-swedish tanya’s desire to better her situation is fulfilled by prostitution. tanya can acquire western luxuries by prostituting herself. the two characters’ trajectory into prostitution resembles in this way the filmmakers’ divergent opinions on female sexwork: the exploited child lilya on the one hand, and the empowering sexworker in tanya on the other. yet, despite tanya’s agency, which empowers her over patriarchal political authorities, her subsequent migration and tragic death, framed by the generic conventions of the melodrama, mean that audiences are only expected to pity tanya and her endeavours. like swedish-russian lilya, if russian-swedish tanya had not migrated from the soviet union, but remained to question the rationality of the political ideology, she could have become a glasnost icon of feminist empowerment. as the films have it, then, 24 anna lawton compares tanya to another literary russian character. she asserts that if the melodramatic genre had an effect on readers of ‘poor lisa’ two centuries ago, then it did the same to glasnost audiences viewing ‘poor tanya’ (1992, 213). the former reference is to the ‘tearful tale’ of poor liza (1792) by nikolai karamzin, in which the slick dandy cheats the simple flower girl of her innocence, upon which she commits suicide in a lake (figes 2003, 59). portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 16 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever the agency purportedly at work in the protagonists’ choice of profession is depicted as failure; both lilya and tanya find their transnational progressions lead nowhere, and both films thus end with the suicide of the protagonists. two tragic ends the endings of the two films reveal their ideological values. in russian transnational narratives, the ending signifies whether the film has a positive return or a negative exile. this comparison is made possible by the fact that both protagonists die in an ultimately fashion at the end of the films and both characters end their lives at their own hands, by suicide. only lilya 4-ever contains a twist in its final solution, to which i shall return in a moment. after attempting to leave her husband, tanya is watching television, which reflects the emptiness of her swedish life. the film then cuts to the soviet context—the last of several jump-cuts that establish parallel narratives after tanya’s emigration—where a neighbour finds tanya’s mother dead on her kitchen floor. she has committed suicide upon finding out her daughter was a prostitute before leaving the country and after losing her teaching post on account of her daughter’s emigration. back in sweden, tanya senses that something has happened to her mother, rushes to the phone, and books a flight to leningrad. her husband edward returns home with reconciliation flowers, but tanya hides from him and leaves without saying goodbye. she takes her car and drives towards the airport. tears stream from her eyes, enhanced by the heavy rain falling outside on the windshield. the music score that accompanies tanya’s final journey is the choral rendering of the song ‘along the wild steppes beyond the baikal,’ which tells of a pre-revolutionary russian vagrant who suffers for the truth. this is, of course, a direct reflection on the emotional condition of tanya, who has realised her wrong doings and subsequently has to suffer for it. tanya lets go of the steering wheel and the film ends. interdevochka is more ambiguous on account of its climax, and indeed some accord tanya’s final demise to a mere traffic accident (lawton 1992, 212; gillespie 2003, 98). the russian review in iskusstvo kino [art cinema] is ironic in tone, but also points to todorovsky’s ambiguous end: portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 17 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever madame larson is speeding on the night highway leading to the airport, the lights from the oncoming cars beat into her eyes … and suddenly the headlights fill the screen … the film stops, we have arrived. no, worse: tanya is no more, she gets stopped forever in sweden. and we are sitting in a humble rural theatre, far away from moscow and stockholm, and cry over her fate. it’s a shame. poor devil, she was a good girl—sincere, ours, russian … (gul’tsenko 1990, 67) if todorovsky remains ambiguous in his film, then the novel on which the film is based is not. in it tanya commits suicide. thus, as sarsenov asserts, while tania is initially ‘placed firmly with the traitors, falling prey to western consumerism,’ in her tragic end ‘she is elevated to a righteous “exile” when her love for the motherland drives her to suicide’ (2006, 3). while i agree with sarsenov that tanya ends her life journey on the swedish road to the airport, in my opinion tanya’s act is less a sacrifice than a last resort. sensing that her mother has died, tanya believes she has no one left in russia to care for and hence no reason to return. a return seems as meaningless as staying abroad. tanya has reached a dead-end; the only solution left appears to be to put an ultimate end to any journey. the film’s end, then, is unambiguous. interdevochka is a one-way journey in which the russian female protagonist’s venture into the foreign cannot be redeemed by her return to the homeland. or, as karin sarsenov asserts, ‘tanya’s allembracing russian soul apparently could not fit into the petty, calculating, and materialistic environment, [but] her willingness to sacrifice herself redeems her from her former sins’ (2006, 3). for russian-swedish tanya, the return home is impossible because of her initial sin in wanting to migrate from soviet russia. in the swedish-russian narrative of lilya, the finale of the film returns to the beginning, where lilya is running along the desolate streets of malmö. as lilya reaches the bridge, a vision of volodia in angel wings joins her.25 despite volodia’s discouragement, lilya jumps off the bridge. as she lies in an ambulance, a male paramedic voice describes lilya as he sees her, while volodia’s ghost appears in-between the shoulders of the paramedics. as the paramedics attempt to resuscitate lilya, she opens her eyes. the film cuts to a scream from lilya; she is back in her mother’s apartment, again with volodia in angel wings. ‘you are for real’, she tells him. as she runs down the stairs, 25 volodia has done so on previous occasions, for example, when lilya in the capture of the apartment builds a hut from blankets over a coffee table, resembling the ‘cocoons-cum-coffins’ (wilson 2005, 336). this echoes lilya’s and volodia’s effort to separate themselves from the outside world. just as in the apartment scene, volodia appears at lilya’s side with angel wings, vindicating volodia’s suicide upon lilya’s departure to sweden. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 18 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever lilya tears out an intravenous drip and upon reaching andrei sitting in his car, she tells him, ‘i’m not going. you don’t pick vegetables in the winter. i’m no fool.’ back in the apartment, lilya and volodia play with volodia’s basketball refilled with air—its puncture symbolising volodia’s lost childhood—while the camera slows down and rests completely on lilya with her arms up to reach the ball and looking directly into the camera. the film then cuts to the rooftop of the building block where lilya and volodia are playing with the ball; lilya now also has a pair of angel wings. tanya in the russian story is elevated from being a traitor to tragic exile, confirming her status as ‘a fallen woman’ who has foolishly pursued her personal goals at the expense of failing her mother. but for lilya, in the swedish-russian narrative, death is the only way out of the hellish inferno that has entangled her. death for lilya is the only relief where she returns home to ‘russia.’ the swedish-russian narrative of lilya performs the circular return plot that is denied to russian-swedish tanya. moreover, in lilya 4-ever, the music score that follows the end scenes begins with rammstein’s song, but when lilya appears on the bridge, rammstein’s music disappears into the background and stops completely when lilya jumps. this is a pivotal point in the film. once in ‘the womb-like space’ of the ambulance (wilson 2005, 336), lilya is narrated by the reality surrounding her (the paramedic’s voice). this is the first time during the film that moodysson leaves the perspective of his character, and it is here that we find a significant change in the music score. rammstein is replaced by vivaldi’s violins, which stay with lilya as she returns to russia to redeem her wrong decisions, that is, to say no to andrei and refuse to travel to sweden. the score’s montage of rammstein and vivaldi, the germanic bleeding heart versus the italian light-romantic,26 signifies also the leap from realism to the meta-real. that this is a pivotal moment in the film is supported by wilson’s reading: ‘the film cuts to lilya in the ambulance, taking us beyond the point reached at its opening to lilya’s general circulatory arrest’ (2005, 336). while for wilson this ‘circulatory arrest’ is of no significance, in fact it is the point when lilya is given a second chance to choose not to travel and is transformed into an angel at ‘home.’ 26 in swedish interviews, moodysson alludes to a split in european attitudes towards prostitution when he reflected on the fact that lilya 4-ever premiered at the venice film festival in 2002. he is reported to have said, ‘it is interesting that lilya 4-ever is screened just there, in a country that has maybe the largest problem with young women from eastern europe. but it seems like the authorities are not really doing anything direct about it’ (domellöf-wik 2002). portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 19 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever it goes without saying that moodysson’s desire to make a grand finale for his ‘religious mass of our time’ has prompted this flight into the meta-real.27 lilya’s heaven is a wishfulfilment fantasy on three levels: for diegetic lilya, for the compassionate viewer and for the filmmaker, moodysson. with the ending, however, the narrative of lilya clings on to the russian circular ‘rodina’ narrative and resembles the old russian discourse of returning to the motherland. it is hardly surprising that interdevochka informs this motherland narrative, since it is a russian melodrama. because of this, lilya 4-ever, in my opinion, reinstates the female russian as other, as a european other, in a eurocentric framework. the female other is thus narrated as in need of rescue, but her rightful spatial location is always in the ‘home’ country. this reveals that the nordic/european anxiety narrative of post-socialist transnational labour undermining western welfare systems has the same trajectory as the russian return narrative, which is so loved by patriotic russian cinema and literature. for both narratives the return home enables salvation. the comparison i have presented here thus confirms that the swedish-russian narrative denies the post-soviet russian a transnational space within the european-nordic sphere, and reveals that post-soviet russia (re-)emerges as the border where europe ends—or starts, if the russian point of view is assumed. this continues to underline the russian female identity abroad as other in the european space, whether that identity is told by a swede or a soviet russian. conclusion: in the end, i rate moodysson’s film highly, and have no intention of belittling the importance of putting human trafficking on the political agenda, which lilya 4-ever does to a previously unimaginable degree. however, i find it revealing that the story of swedish-russian lilya has so much in common with the melodramatic story of russian-swedish tanya, which is considered conservative and patriotic by most critics. there is no question about moodysson’s sincerity in seeking to make explicit the horrors of the system of human trafficking, but he does this by reiterating a conservative russian ‘return home’ narrative. paradoxically, had he contemplated subverting this 27 this flight into the meta-real is also seen in the ending of lars von trier’s breaking the waves (1996), where the ringing of the bells in heaven signals the salvation of the leading female character, bess, and the redemption of her earthly self-sacrificial torment. swedish reviewers of lilya 4-ever often link the two films (see domellöf-wik 2002 and janson 2002). in my view, both trier in breaking the waves and moodysson in lilya 4-ever owe their focus on female suffering to the dostoevskian religious question: ‘can there be a god when there is so much suffering in the world?’ while dostoevsky mused over the question his entire life, the two young filmmakers answer with an emphatic yes. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 20 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever narrative, moodysson might have let lilya live a happy and prosperous life in sweden. but that was not an option. as he says, ‘i cannot lie. this is what society looks like’ (domellöf-wik 2002, 50). acknowledgements i would like to thank andrei rogatchevski, dina iordanova and emily munro for their helpful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts. i would also like to thank the attendees of diasporas, migration and identities, postgraduate conference (leeds university, 2006), for their encouragement of the initial paper. finally, i am grateful to portal’s anonymous reviewers for their keen critique, which helped vastly to improve this essay. reference list balabanov, a. 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[online] available: http://gzt.ru/culture/2005/02/03/071500.html. domellöf-wik, m. 2002, ‘moodyssons inlägg i debatten,’ göteborgs posten, 23 august. engvén, i. 2002, ‘inom verklighetens murar: lilya 4-ever,’ filmrutan, no.4, årgång 45. ezra, e. and rowden, t., eds. 2006, transnational cinema: the film reader, routledge, new york & london. figes, o. 2002, natasha’s dance: a cultural history of russia, penguin, london. gentele, j. 2002, ‘mörkt ämne i moodyssons nya film,’ svenska dagbladet, 16 august. gillespie, d. 1999, ‘new versions of old classics,’ in russia on reels, ed. b. beumers, i.b.tauris publishers, london & new york, 114-24. gillespie, d. 2003, russian cinema, pearson educational, harlow. gorovets, l. (dir.) 1994, kafe v’limon [coffee with lemon], gadi kastel. graffy, j. 2000, ‘petr todorovsky,’ in the bfi companion to eastern european and russian cinema, eds. r. taylor, n. wood, j. graffy and d. iordanova, bfi publishing, london. graffy, j. 2003, ‘trading places,’ sight and sound, vol. 13, no. 4, 20-22. gul’tsenko, v. 1990, ‘stokgolm slezam he verity,’ iskusstvo kino, no. 1, 1990, 62-68. hedling, o. 2004, ‘om lilja 4-ever—en svensk film,’ in från eden till damavdelning, eds. b. jonsson, k. nykvist and b. sjoberg, absalon, lund, 323-34. hjerten, l. 2002, ‘lukas moodysson: filmen är becksvart – han vill få publiken att förändra sina liv – och tänka efter,’ aftonbladet, 16 august, 36. hjort, m. 2005, ‘from epiphanic culture to circulation,’ in transnational cinema in a global north: nordic cinema in transition, eds. t. g. elkington & a. nestingen, wayne state university press, detroit, 191-218. holden, s. 2003, ‘hopes disintegrate into a life of degradation,’ new york times, 18 april, e20. janson, m. 2002, ‘mästerverk av moodysson – drama,’ svenska dagbladet, 23 august, 72. jones, k. m. 2003, ‘lilya 4-ever: lukas moodysson, sweden, 2002,’ film comment, vol. 39, no. 2, march/april 2003, 73-74. keough, l. j. 2006, ‘globalizing “postsocialism”: mobile mothers and neoliberalism on the margins of europe,’ anthropological quarterly, vol. 79, no. 3, 431-61. kuvshinova, m. 2003, ‘nikogda ne govori “navsegda”,’ izvestia, 15 april. [online] available: http://www.izvestia.ru/culture/article32683/. lawton, a. 1992, kinoglasnost: soviet cinema in our time, cambridge university press, cambridge. lawton, a. 2004, imaging russia 2000: film and facts, new academia publishing, washington, dc. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 21 kristensen russian-swedish interdevochka meets swedish-russian lilya 4-ever leigh, d. 2002, ‘lukas moodysson at the nft,’ the guardian, 20 november. [online] available: http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,848248,00.html. lind, a. (dir.) 1910, den hvide slavehandel [the white-slave trade], fotorama. mamin, y. (dir.) 1994, okno v parizh [window to paris], fontaine sarl. moodysson, l. (dir.) 1998, fucking åmål [show me love], memfis film. moodysson, l. (dir.) 2000, tillsammans [together], memfis film. moodysson, l. (dir.) 2002, lilya 4-ever, memfis film. moodysson, l. (dir.) 2004, et hål i mitt hjerte [a hole in my heart], memfis film. moodysson, l. (dir.) 2006, container, memfis film. neumann, i. b. 1996, russia and the idea of europe: a study in identity and international relations, routledge, london. neumann, i. b. 1999, uses of the other: ‘the east’ in european identity formation, manchester university press, manchester. pawlikowski, p. (dir.) 2000, last resort, bbc. rayns, t. 2003, ‘lilya 4-ever,’ sight and sound, vol. 13, no. 5, 56-58. room, a. (dir.) 1927, tretya meshchamskaya [bed and sofa], sovkino. todorovsky, p. (dir.) 1981, lyubimaya zhenshchina mekhanika gavrilova [the favourite woman of the mechanic gavrilov], mosfilm. todorovsky, p. (dir.) 1989, interdevochka [intergirl], mosfilm. todorovsky, p. (dir.) 1998, retro vtroem [ménage à trios], myrabel film. tuckers, g.l. (dir.) 1913, traffic in souls, independent moving pictures. wargnier, r. (dir.) 1999, est-ouest [east-west], ugc ym. trier, l von (dir.) 1996, breaking the waves, zentropa film. sarsenov, k. 2006, ‘kann den reisen sünde sein? drei russische romane über mobile frauen,’ osteuropa, vol. 6, 123-38. [english version available online: www.eurozine.com]. shohat e. 1992, ‘notes on the “postcolonial,”’ social text, no. 31/32, 99-113. wilson, e. 2005, ‘children, emotion and viewing in contemporary european film,’ screen, vol. 46, no. 3, autumn, 329-40. wolff, l. 1994, inventing eastern europe: the map of civilization on the mind of the enlightenment, california university press, stanford. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 22 divergent accounts of equivalent narratives: russian-swedish lars kristensen, university of st andrews entanglement and the modern australian rhythm method: lantana’s lessons in policing sexuality and gender entanglement and the modern australian rhythm method: lantana’s lessons in policing sexuality and gender1 kirsty duncanson, university of melbourne catriona elder, university of wollongong murray pratt, university of technology sydney ‘oh, what a tangled web we weave …’2; deceit and plotting in suburban sydney the idea of belonging and national identity has been a long-standing theme in australian film (dermody and jacka 1988). as with many other nations film in australia is often seen as an important cultural medium where national stories and storehouses of sense can be (re)produced. the ‘afi’ genre of film of the early 1980s3, many of which were successful both in local and global terms, created a body of films that reflected a particular (and for many people quite pleasurable) sense of australianness (o’regan 1996). since this time there has been a plethora of films that have responded to, moved away from, ignored or complicated this national(ist) genre, while nonetheless remaining engaged with contemporary australian issues. one such film is ray lawrence’s lantana, critically acclaimed at its release in 2001, and acquiring substantial international kudos ever since. the film produces a complex but optimistic view of australia. it provides a multi-centred representation that responds to and contests the simplistic early national vision of australia as a white blokes’ heaven. in doing so, it also contests the vision of a brutal, 1 sections of kirsty duncanson’s contributions were originally delivered at two 2002 conferences: ‘opening law, law and society’, wollongong, and ‘mediating law: law and literature conference’. the paper was presented in its current form at the 2003 institute for international studies workshop at lake macquarie. thanks to all those who commented, and in particular to paul allatson for his contribution to the introduction and planning of the paper, and for acting as discussant at the iis workshop. 2 sir walter scott, marmion: a tale of flodden field, 1808, canto xi verse 17. 3 the afi (australian film institute) genre is a term used to refer to films that emerged after the federal government tax assistance scheme was introduced to encourage local film production. films such as my brilliant career (1979), breaker morant (1980) and gallipoli (1981), which were high production quality period dramas that celebrated a particular type of australianness, and addressed what dermody and jacka refer to as ‘the riddle of national identity’, belong to this group. portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 1 racist australia which events such as the rise of the one nation party, the tampa incident, debates over saying ‘sorry’ and the detention of refugee children, produced. in a documentary feature accompanying the special edition dvd—the nature of lantana— the actors themselves talk of lantana in terms of its egalitarian direction and writing, noting the ‘quite different australian experiences’ (lantana [dvd] 2002) that are reflected through the intertwining connections and coincidence of the narrative community. the film, moving quickly from a few art-house cinemas to many multiplexes for many weeks, struck australian audiences, critics and award givers as a good film about ‘ basically good people’, people that rang ‘brilliantly’ true (ibid). moreover, its success as an international film produced a range of responses to lantana, some more rooted in the forms of australian identity it conveys—others passing these by to find tales of everymen and women with unanchored and possibly timeless resonances of beleaguered straight relations in a (largely) white country. this paper argues, however, that it is possible to read the film as producing a fantasy of a ‘good’ australia and, at the same time, conducting a filmic regulation of what constitutes australianness. in many ways the imaginary of australia offered in this film, to its contemporary, urban, professional and intellectual elite audience, still draws on and (re)produces a vision of an australian community that uses the same narrative framework as the cruder discourses of ‘white australia’ offered to an earlier generation of cinemagoers. in ghassan hage’s words the ‘good australian nationalist’ shares much the same vision of australia as the ‘evil white nationalist’ from whom those belonging to the former group confidently distance themselves (hage 1998). dominant narratives of australia, which have explored ideas of belonging, community and nation have drawn on ideas of ethnicity and land to shape them. the vision of the bounded australian nation (as island continent) that must be protected from a potentially ‘swarming’ external foe and an oscillating vision of an infant like/warlike ‘internal’ indigenous population, who also needed to be controlled, have dominated national discourses for a century. this film’s central motif of the lantana bush, the out of control weed, that is known as both foreign and local, once loved for its vivid pink and yellow clusters of flowers, now despised for the colonising tendency of its interlacing branches, is emblematic of this historical portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 2 tension. lantana self-consciously maintains this tension about the local and the foreign at its core. the ensemble cast, which includes well-known actors who are considered as to be ‘anglo’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘indigenous’, are presented, in many cases, as entirely unremarkable within the world they inhabit. the film plays with australian audiences’ understandings of themselves as ‘heir to’ a history of racism. the use of notions of ethnicity in this ironic and self-reflexive way suggests a maturity of response by the audience: any remaining potential for racism is understood and under control—we know how to be good mutliculturalists. in contrast, the trope of sexuality in lantana provides the real sense of edginess and anxiety about belonging. it is in this arena that the film sets up an idea of danger and— less self-consciously, and in the end more aggressively—marks out who is and who is not part of the community. a familiar vision of australia as a heterosexual nation, whose citizen’s duty is to increase the ‘white’ population through reproduction, haunts the film. in this context the motif of lantana signals an ambivalence about difference and the exotic. lantana is both desirable because of the difference in its attractive latin looks and repulsive or feared because of other qualities inherent within its difference: a refusal to behave and a propensity to get out-of control, spread and potentially takeover. the film here explores desire for a taste of the other (a gay man, a newly separated woman, a latin dance teacher). however, these fantasies are in the end emphatically shut down. the film ends by producing a vision of subtly normalised hetero, mono, familial (though not necessarily happy) forms of desiring, loving and reproducing in contemporary australia. felicity collins, reviewing the 2001 afi feature film awards, indicates the ways in which lantana appeals to both australian and international audiences, pointing to the film’s milieu as a construct built of ‘recognisable sydney habitats, from the inner-city renovation to the suburban double brick or weatherboard bungalow, to the architect designed bushland retreat’, while at the same time stressing its marketability ‘as a genre film featuring billable names’ (collins 2001, p. 20). building on collins’ focus on the contrasting home settings that the film uses, lantana is perhaps best described, in real estate terminology, as ‘deceptive’. as a murder mystery, the film is deceptively simple— a whodunit where nobody did, an american psychiatrist, struggling with personal portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 3 anxieties, goes missing: what has happened to her? as a love story, the tale of the male detective who needs to learn a hard lesson in self-expression, and of his partner, unhappy and frustrated by marriage, is deceptively banal: can salsa classes save either of them? yet close up, as michael fitzgerald (2001, p. 77) suggests, ‘lantana is a pungent, prickly tangle’. it is in liminal neighbourhoods and spaces—borderlands where the city meets the bush, or at least the suburban scrub—that lantana, if left unattended, grows out of control, chokes and threatens the native and the desirable. in keeping with the habit of the introduced and invasive weed signalled by the film’s title and its marketing sub-title, ‘it’s tangled’,4 these narrative tendrils spread rapidly, intertwining with other life stories, all of them eventually being snagged together in a dense understorey. the film’s storylines are nefariously bound up with a growing anxiety, which, mimicking the plant’s habit, tangles up and threatens to destroy those shoots of hope it encounters. in a similar way to the style of plotting employed by robert altman, lawrence’s ongoing exposition engineers chance meetings between characters who would otherwise not collide (literally in the case of leon bumping into claudia’s mystery man while jogging), while at the same time rhizomatically spreading otherwise discrete stories into each other. the narrative is organised around four couples (or once were and would-be couples). each of the couples is linked via the initially mysterious body of a woman held within the spines of lantana growth. each couple is positioned in a different stage in their relationship. the professional couple of psychiatrist valerie somers (barbara herschey) and john knox (geoffrey rush), a dean of law, has lapsed into a quasi-platonic set of routine arrangements since the murder of their daughter, eleanor, as they commute without communicating between the city centre and their northern beaches architectdesigned home. leon (anthony lapaglia) and sonya zat (kerry armstrong), an inner west police family complete with two sensitive teenage boys, are menaced throughout the film by a potentially terminal breakdown in trust, as leon plays away from home with 4 this subtitle appears on the cover of the video version of the film available in australia. the dvd cover replaces these words with an approximation of a phrase spoken by the character of john, “sometimes love is not enough”. portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 4 jane o’may (rachael blake), and sonya keeps secret her therapy sessions with valerie. major renovations are required, of the same order as the home improvements which their bijou terrace is undergoing. in less salubrious streets, jane is already apart from her easygoing husband, pete (glen robbins), showing little interest in getting back together with him—she wants her too tight wedding ring to be ‘cut off’. only jane’s fertile neighbours, paula (daniela farinacci) and nick d’amato (vince colosimo), impoverished, and perhaps the only characters clearly positioned with the film as ‘ethnic’, share an emotional and physical togetherness which, although tested by potential infidelity and lack of trust, contrasts with the sedate affection of the more ‘anglo’ couples. each couple is required to fend off a creeping malaise of lovelessness, and the risks of isolation that the failure of heterosexual coupledom may bring. on the fringes of these dyads, claudia weis (leah purcell), leon’s trusty detective sidekick, is moving steadily towards coupledom as she plots her moves on a man she sees often in the same restaurant, while patrick phelan (peter phelps), a gay man having an affair with a married man, who is in therapy with valerie, is set up as a potential threat to marital rejuvenation. imagining the community, or the parable of the good neighbour lantana self-consciously sets out to represent a more multi-dimensional australia than the international stereotype that gets regularly recycled in films about crocodiles or war experience. in this sense lantana in many ways represents australia in a global context, an ‘ethnoscape’, that is a ‘landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live’ (appadurai cited in kaplan 1997, p.12). as kaplan points out, appadurai’s idea extends benedict anderson’s notion of the ‘imagined community’ to ‘imagined worlds’—a useful way of ‘indicating how the globe has “shrunk”’(ibid p. 12), fitting the whole world into the paradigm of the nation. the motif of lantana (an import from south america), the now at home second generation italian-australian family and the latino dance teachers signify this ethnoscape. the film is, however, obviously set in a globally recognisable australia and, for a domestic audience, refers clearly to both earlier and contemporary debates about portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 5 australianness.5 as suggested earlier, the national vision which lantana projects is associated with a post-pauline hanson image of australia as a successful multicultural and tolerant community. the film represents australia as democratic, thoughtful, multiethnic, multi-sexual, and multi-class. this is most obviously demonstrated by the ensemble cast who are a cross section of sydney population—gay, straight, ‘white’, ‘ethnic’, ‘black’, professional, trade, married, single, and separated. the landscape of the film also traverses the different economic and social locales of sydney mapping the diversity of the australian economic, social and cultural landscape. the trope of lantana—an introduced ‘weed’ and an everyday suburban feature of the landscape— becomes axiomatic of this new australia. the subtly uneasy status of the plant as both local and exotic, as everyday and as something to be eradicated underscores a certain uneasiness with which this new australia is understood. through its structure, the film also encourages its viewers to be drawn into an idea of themselves as part of this new and ‘good’ australia. as mark freeman notes, the film is organised in terms of a ‘multi strand narrative [that provides for the] delicate interweaving of plotlines and characters to form a larger scale mosaic’ this mosaic structure can lead the viewer to experience the film in terms of a ‘community’s experience’ (freeman 2001, para. 1). this community feeling is built up through the connections that are slowly established between characters from different strata of the city. the resulting texture has a patterning, a paralleling which occurs in terms of the characters’ lives as couples within a wider community, a community that extends outward to include the audience itself, giving ‘the sense that this is not one particular person’s experience and therefore removed from my own’ (ibid). the idea of community and connection is also reinforced by the (local) audience’s knowledge of the actors who 5 see for example discussion about the use of the term ‘unaustralian’, mark dapin, ‘aussie rules’ sydney morning herald, 22 february 2003, good weekend, p.16-20. portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 6 play many of the characters. they are actors who are part of the ‘national community’, known for roles in many different productions about australia and australians.6 as richard white’s book, inventing australia, demonstrated nations (as culture) are always under construction and always contested (white 1981; kaplan 1997, p. 32). homi bhabha also notes national culture is ‘always [in] a process of hybridity, incorporating new “people” in relation to the body politic, [and] generating other sites of meaning’ (bhabha 1990, p. 4). lantana is a film that seems to open up a space for the recognition of the ‘new’ liberal nature of the australian (or at least the sydney) community. it constructs a vision that contests the howard-hanson view of the community. for example, within the ensemble the characters are not overtly marked according to ethnicity, though local viewers understand ‘who’ the actors are. this inter-textual (local) knowledge of colosimo, purcell and lapaglia as ‘ethnics’ informs the film without ever needing to be developed thematically. purcell’s well-known murri heritage, for example, is left unmarked within the film's diegesis. the audience are invited to view these characters simply as australian, or as sydney-siders, and so demonstrate their liberal leanings. the sexual preferences of the characters are similarly airily represented as unremarkable. the filmmakers seem to have aimed to represent a range of contemporary possibilities and , further, to unsettle stereotypes by engaging straight actors to play gay characters. yet when the tangled branches are teased apart, lantana contains traces of a more disciplining story that sees sexual and ethnic difference ambivalently—as desirable and yet troubling. in many ways the discourse that underpins lantana is the same common and limited understanding of diversity and tolerance that sustains lessliberal imaginings of the australian community. jennifer rutherford, in her book, the gauche intruder, examines an australian fantasy of neighbourliness that she observes at work ‘on both sides of the political divide’ (2000, p. 7). the narratives of pauline hanson’s supporters 6 cast members’ previous and well known roles include for example: kerry armstrong – sea change, peter phelps stingers, rachel blake – wildside, glen robbins – the panel, and geoffrey rush in his oscar winning performance in shine. portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 7 and those of her critics both employ a fantastic moral code that is, she writes ‘posited as uniquely australian’ (ibid). this is the fantasy of the ‘good neighbour’. this fantasy, rutherford writes, is inextricably caught up in an aggression towards alterity in both the self and the other (ibid p.12). together the fantasy and the aggression perform a regulation of australianness, of national character and national type. this regulation rutherford breaks down to a foucauldian ‘quotidian…microgesture and … policing of the self’ (ibid). while the ‘link between morality and aggression’ is relatively easy to identify in the crude discourses of right wing hate (rutherford 2000, p. 10), this codependent and regulatory couplet is also identifiable in the ‘most unexpected places’ (ibid p. 14), in the progressive visions of australia as ‘inclusionary, multicultural and sexually equitable’ (ibid p. 12). as rutherford observes, ‘closure is effective in the very moment when australian discourses of nation seem most open, most progressive, most liberating’ (ibid p. 22). that is to say the regulation of identity takes place in the very discourses that work to celebrate polyvancy. in this sense lantana, its marketing and its reception, can be seen as a moments of imagined community which can be read as simultaneously open, progressive, liberating and as closing down the potential freedom of such liberation through the regulation of a national character and an implementation of white australian moral codes. towards better homes and gardens – the place of the exotic in suburban marital design one of the key spaces where a regulation of australianness takes place in the film is in the subtle, and mostly unacknowledged, hetero-normativity that marks australian belonging. the couples are measurable, within the film’s value system, in terms of their ability to achieve or mimic a gendered heterosexuality, especially with regard to their familial roles. one of the couples (john and valerie) blamelessly fails to achieve the goal as the result of a grief from which there is no recovery. another (sonya and leon) teeters on the brink because the man in the couple is unable to overcome the emotional limits of blokey–australian masculinity. patrick, the unsympathetically portrayed gay man ‘fails’ not only because he eschews the heterosexual option, but also because he hangs around the edges of another family, as if drawn to the light. jane, more than estranged, strangely portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 8 detached, represents a similar threat both to leon and sonja’s marriage, and to the happy family next door as she revels in leading all on a merry dance. the film offers a solution for those who are failing. it is possible to learn the steps to passionate heterosexual happiness. in the film the characters that teach you the steps are ethnically marked. the key to heterosexual passion for couples is available by copying the steps of the salsa teachers—nameless and unrounded characters who present a caricature of latino passion. the salsa class, attended by the zats, and also by jane, frames the action with an early didactic lesson in ‘passion’—the one quality, we later learn, that sonya wants back in her marriage. leon, returning to his wife’s arms after a scene of infidelity with jane, is upbraided by the dance instructor—‘it’s about sex, about a man and a woman, groin to groin. get it?’ similarly, the key to family happiness is available by mimicking the easy–going lifestyle of the non–anglo family or by watching claudia’s honest and open approach to finding a partner. it is through the exotic that you get the hang of contemporary australian desire. exoticism figures in lantana as a potential catalyst for marital happiness—a sophisticated plan from other continents or cultures which, if followed correctly, can result in a successful renovation; the touch of spice that, if taken in moderation, can pep up the passion levels. yet, like the non-native shrub itself, this exotic other can easily get out of hand and take over. viewing the film from a contemporary australian perspective, it is difficult not to consider these motifs according to the pervasive rhetorics and fantasies of invasion, the perceptions of ‘swamping’ by an uncontrollable and unknowable otherness with which the howard government has cauterised public discourse on issues of immigration and asylum. however, the paradigms of nation in lantana operate in quite other, altogether more domesticated ways. as ghassan hage argues in against paranoid nationalism, ‘howard’s rule involves the recentring of an always existing but until now marginalised subculture of colonial white paranoia’ (hage 2003, p. 4), according to which ‘the nation, instead of a reality that needs to be protected, becomes a fantasy that needs to be protected from reality” (ibid). using portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 9 the metaphor of fencing off desirable property, or of self-maintenance, to describe this transformation in protective strategy, hage shows how the idea of a worrying country emerges through a sense of failure in the management of borders—the fences, the act of fencing itself, rather than kept discretely out of sight, when ‘conditions of hope scarcity’ prevail (ibid p. 32), becomes introduced within the national consciousness. with the possible exemption of a barely glimpsed gang of supporting drug dealers whose appearance may be sufficiently middle eastern to ‘alert’, the cast of lantana is, on the surface, unmarked by the ethnic faultlines of australian immigration/terrorism debates of the early 2000s. yet, akin to the forms of worrying which hage identifies as permeating contemporary national consciousness, anxieties about the nature and extent of belonging, security, and the home, are tangled up with the forms of plot-making, the mediation between fantasies and realities, in which its couples are engaged. while the casting of hershey as valerie was, as revealed by producer jan chapman as not initially planned (lantana [dvd] 2002), her american accent marks the character as an outsider, unable to interpret australia and its ways. valerie’s disappearance—from home, from the film where she is replaced by a spectacularly fake-looking dummy in the crime scene reconstruction—indicate moments of otherness not easily accommodated within the mosaic. marking the film’s clearest act of occlusion, her disappearance from the plot suggests a primary, but significant, subtle fencing-off of the australian specificity from more culturally pervasive anglo others. issues of ethnicity, however, are largely disregarded in the worldview projected by lantana. characters such as leon and sonya zat, claudia weiss, paula and nik d’amato belong squarely and unquestionably within a multi-heritage, although assimilationary, and therefore ultimately monocultural cityscape. these characters are positioned as just one other variant of being australian in the new ‘inclusionary, multicultural and sexually equitable state’ (rutherford 2000, p. 12). indeed, the worries that the characters share are less of the order of race paranoia, than of a concern with belonging per se, and most often in terms of coming to terms with a certain fragility about one’s place, or role within socially constructed sexual norms. portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 10 backyard blitz: time to get rid of unwanted pinks and painted lady chrysalises the search for passion, encouraged through a flirtation with an unknown is also dangerous. as the eponymous plant signifies there is the problem of what do with the exotic after its introduction. lantana is a film that seeks to demonstrate the tangled and often choking effects of relationships. in doing so it draws on discourses that have long underpinned ideas of australianness—ideas of an ‘other’ who when taken into the home, threatens to take over and destroy it. jane, patrick, and leon are having affairs. jane and leon with each other. patrick is having an affair with a married man. it is through the two characters, patrick and jane, as they traverse conventional moral codes, that the new fantasy of australia as a good neighbourhood simultaneously enunciates sexual equity and regulates the performance of white australian sex. the enunciation of sexual equity, although appearing, on one level, implicitly within the film itself, is drawn out more clearly in the extended packaging of the dvd. the interviews with the actors and the discussions of the producer, director and writer that make up the commentary track and the documentary, the nature of lantana, present a vision of australian community as egalitarian, progressive and open (lantana [dvd] 2002). the core creative team, jan chapman, ray lawrence and andrew bovell, document their participation in such a community in their description of the casting process. their refusal to engage with the stereotyping of homosexuality is asserted as they describe the difficulty in finding the right man for the part of patrick phelan. in choosing the wellknown heterosexual actor peter phelps,7 the team still faced problems as phelps instinctively added camp intonations to the dialogue. however, after much practice, we are told, the character of patrick began to emerge as the straight-acting gay guy they wanted to present. as they discuss this decisive negotiation of homosexual representation 7 phelps would be well known to audiences through his regular appearance in such popular series as sons and daughters and stingers on prime time television. portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 11 the team demonstrate their own progressive and open attitudes towards possible forms of sexual identity. australia appears as a sexually equitable nation. the fantasy of australia as a good neighbourhood is further established in their discussion of jane o'may. while producer jan chapman acknowledges the potential for judgement in the creation of jane's character (the woman having an affair with a married man), director ray lawrence insists in his own suspension of such judgement. chapman celebrates the depth and sympathy the actor brought to the part of jane, and lawrence celebrates his own positive attitude to all the actions and motivations of all the characters, but particularly that of jane. again, they spell out a progressive, non-judgmental australian community. however, both these characters ‘worry’, in hagian terms, the couples they encounter as they cross borders. jane, rootless, and a (family) invader, within this paradigm, is perhaps least perturbed of all the characters about her status as an unwelcome border crosser, yet she menaces the others with the potential revelation how flimsy are their own border protections. her freedoms from neighbourly conventions, manifested by inviting nik into her house, unaccompanied, for coffee, financial interference, and most disturbingly, taking on the roles of mothering and home maintenance during their absence, require ‘management’ by paula and nik next door, who successfully re-project the inviolable fences of their own coupledom sufficiently that they do not suffer. when jane softly intimates to leon that his sexual border crossing might be leading somewhere, he aggressively informs her that they are just having a one night stand over two nights. in order to imagine himself as ‘good’ leon must punish jane and himself. similarly when patrick enters into a bantering discussion about the rights and wrongs of adultery he so challenges valerie’s fantasy of her workable marriage with the reality of the lack of trust that underpins it, that she is left gasping for air. in the process of asserting this fantasy of sexual equity and rational suspension of moral judgement, a further, more subtle form of regulation of sexuality is taking place. in the very earnest quality of the creative team's endeavours to imagine and assert a 'new' portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 12 australia, a conventional national moral code persists. thus as lawrence documents his open attitude in directing the character of jane o'may, a discrete regulation of australian gender values occurs. while lawrence uses jane and patrick to demonstrate his suspension of moral judgement, the film still ‘punishes’ them for their non-compliance to the hetero-norm. patrick undergoes a slightly unprofessional basting from valerie about the morality of his choices, while leon in the matching conversation with valerie’s partner john is treated to a gentle lesson in trust over a single malt on the balcony. at the film’s end patrick stands forlornly on a street corner, observing his ex-lover back with his wife and child. in a similar vein, in the dvd documentary there is a need to state overtly that no moral judgement is made about jane having an affair, while it goes unremarked that a male character is doing the same. in fact, jane o'may has separated from her husband before embarking on an affair with a man who remains married. leon zat, still very much married with kids, is discussed, in the dvd supplements, not in terms of his the morality of his sexual decisions, but in terms of his vulnerability to judgement. it is not even conjectured that he might be judged as an ‘affair driven slut’ as actor kerry armstrong described jane. rather, our judgement of leon is forestalled as he is the character on a journey in this story—the character who learns from his mistakes. it is patrick and jane, representatives of a sexuality not ordered by monogamous heterosexual desire and reproductive imperatives, who worry both cast and audience and threaten to lower the tone of the neighbourhood. it is these challenges to the established order that , like lantana creeping up, need to be trimmed, hacked, uprooted and left to whither. writing of the outback’s inherent resistance to colonisation, hage connects this “‘undomesticisable remainder” even within domesticised spaces’ (2003, p. 51) with a sense of fragility which he locates within the australian colonial psyche: awareness of one’s fragility is usually considered healthier psychologically than denial of it, and it could be argued that this awareness has helped shape some of the better aspects of traditional australian culture, including its trademark self-deprecating sense of humour. however, when it is added to the nationalist drive to ‘domesticate everything’, it transforms into the anxiety vis à vis undomesticated ‘cultural otherness’ which has marked the australian psyche from the very beginning. (ibid p. 52) portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 13 the anxieties inherent in the lives of lantana’s couples indicate that it is possible to locate the problematics of cultural otherness somewhat closer to home than might be imagined, as a projected form of endogenous worry, the great white fear of ‘going bush’ which characterises a persistent uneasiness with the unresolved colonial enterprise. equally of note, however, is the extent to which domesticisation, and in particular the management of gender and sexual fragility is linked with lantana’s central motif, the exotic, or tropical form of latin(/o) ‘cultural otherness’ represented by both the invasive weed and the salsa classes. ‘so what are you telling me? you’re a man?’ (leon zak to his son) counterbalancing the trope of the robust and invasive lantana is the idea of a vulnerability of the ‘natives’. this dyad is represented from the first scene when the camera tracks over valerie’s broken body, caught in the lantana at the bottom of the cliffs from which she fell after running scared through the bush. in keeping with classics of australian cinema, such as picnic at hanging rock (weir 1975), the representation of women as susceptible to the hostilities of the untamed is not unexpected. images of women running, terrified through the bush are a familiar trope of the australian thriller/horror genre. cultural theorist meaghan morris takes it beyond cinema and suggests that it (the fear of the bush?) is a cultural memory—something the white australian community knows without having experienced it directly (morris 2002, p. 16). hage in a different context suggests that it is the impossibility of domesticating the bush that is at the centre of this fear. central to these ideas of the bush as unconquerable and something to fear is the notion that this fear is of nothing. the bush and more specifically the outback have long been represented as a nothing, a blank (haynes 1998). so valerie’s death is ultimately caused by her fear of threat that does not exist—she dies of nothing. although the framing of the chase scene, as narrated by the innocent nik, is true the sequence is interspersed with images constructing nik as a credible and potential threat. moving from the driver’s seat he appears ominously silhouetted in the ute’s headlights—arms held away from his body as he throws his cigarette aggressively into the roadside and turns to pursue her. portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 14 according to lantana, women’s security, mental health, wellbeing are defined according to their adherence to a heterosexual monogamous regime. while sonya eventually resists the fumbling advances of her potential latino lover (more, the camera suggests, because of the naffness of his car, his status as living with his mother, and advances), jane’s neediness, or perhaps the strength of her fantasy, blinds her to the moral consequences of her affair with leon, and her disregard for pete. valerie’s dash through the undergrowth, too, can be seen as her losing touch with the gendered, here supposedly asexual, realities of her relations with the male, while her classic case hysteria, as we have seen, is provoked by the fear that her sexuality will not be enough to anchor her flailing relationship with john, that making love to her will be, in the words of patrick’s hardest hitting parley, ‘like trying to fill an empty well’. yet, vulnerability in lantana is by no means a uniquely feminine attribute. it might be argued, in fact, that men in the film, and in particular leon zat to the extent that his story emerges as the central parable, are equally vulnerable, and, in keeping with psychoanalytical views on masculine repression, less able to cope with or express that vulnerability. drawing on carol staudacher’s men and grief, jean-pierre boulé identifies ‘risk-taking and excessive sexual activity’ as ‘a way to numb the pain of loss’. ‘a consequence of this behaviour’, he writes, quoting from staudacher, ‘is that all sorts of other emotions, including fear, will not be expressed and that the man is much less likely “to exhibit genuine compassion towards others”’ (boulé 2002, p. 73). leon’s affair with jane, although it is questionable what might count here as ‘excessive’, certainly represents for him a combination of risk and sexual activity. yet, rather than the result of his grief for a loss, in his case, the sequence of events seems to be awry: his sexual risk creates rather than arises from the possibility of loss—the loss of sonya who ‘might not be home’ when he returns; while the inability to express compassion seems to be at the very heart of his crisis in masculinity. it is through a series of set pieces—all involving leon and the other men—that the issue of masculinity, heterosexuality, and being a husband are explored within the context of portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 15 ideas of loss. both john and leon are suffering a grief—john for the loss of his daughter and the ongoing impact this has on his life and marriage, leon, as suggested earlier grieves for the potential loss of the marriage he treats so carelessly. similarly pete mourns the end of his marriage and claudia’s would-be date, who breaks down in leon’s arms mourns without explanation. not surprisingly the fears and fragilities of the men are not set in the bush and they are homo-social more than hetero-social. the interactions between the men as they try and figure out the nature of passion and trust take place in suburban streets and bars, and over alcohol, in an ironic nod to the stereotype of the ‘traditional’ aussie bloke. leon’s basic lesson, from the dance class’s homoeopathically measured injection of the exotic onwards, is in how to perform heterosexual passion. yet a closer analysis of other early components of the film—his fuck with jane, the domestic scene the following morning, his actions during the drug raid—indicates a more deeply rooted sense of crisis. his morning jog is punctuated by chest pains. then his eldest son, leaving for school, oedipally refuses to pleasure leon with a goodbye kiss—he’s sixteen now. leon’s questioning rejoinder, ‘so what are you telling me? you’re a man now? is there some point where a son stops kissing his father?’, rather than expressing ignorance this comment betrays a man all too aware, after the son’s earlier topless appearance and later re-enacted in the bong discovery scene, of the expiry date on his ‘droit de seigneur’ over his children’s being and bodies. next we have leon at work; putting the boot ‘a bit hard’, as claudia tactfully suggests. this qualified admiration from claudia prompts leon to attempt to put her in her place by asking if she is seeing anyone. all in all, the opening scenes conspire to depict leon’s masculinity as vaguely awry, dysfunctional, laconically (perhaps lacanianly) excessive. this hyper-masculinity, staged to hold together a vulnerable man, is most closely interrogated in a series of set-piece dialogues between leon and john (about whose heterosexuality aspersions are associatively cast through valerie’s misreading of patrick), that pit these two characters head to head in a struggle to maintain, perhaps retain, their fragile senses of acceptable masculinity. the moral victor in this clash, despite being for portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 16 leon ‘some kind of an academic’, is undoubtedly john. in their conversations leon lies continually in order to produce a sense of the type of man he wants to be. he says: his marriage is ‘fine’, held together by ‘loyalty, love, habit, passion and the kids’; he ‘tell[s his] wife everything’ and has never cheated on her. by contrast, john’s less showy approach to being a man is eventually vindicated when we discover ‘the real reason’ behind his non-assistance in valerie’s emergency—his regular visits to the scene of their daughter’s murder provide a valid explanation for his otherwise suspect behaviour. john is working through his grief, still held back by his mourning, during which time ‘[e]motions in general become more inhibited; in other cases it is mainly feelings of love which become inhibited’ (kleine quoted in boulé 2002, p. 73-4). leon’s inability to deal with his grief in any other way than aggressiveness (until it’s too late), his withholding of love, has no such justification. relating the jogging collision incident to pete o’may in the pub gents’ scene (with interesting parallels to the ‘mise-en-scène’ of the holocaust joke of mathieu kassowitz’s la haine) leon’s narration culminates in his distaste for the jogger’s tears (he thought, tellingly, ‘you fucking weak prick’). when pete asks if all men want to cry at some point, his blokey full stop to the conversation is ‘yeah, but you don’t’. central to this film about learning to ‘dance’ is a character whose crisis in masculinity and return to monogamy results in him punishing himself and all his ‘others’ for his real and potential grief. conclusion lantana’s ‘fumbling’ (freeman 2001, para. 7) attempt to trim back the narrative and thematic shoots which had threatened to suffer all that was great and good throughout takes the form of a closing coda, with which each of the characters’ rightful place in the greater australian scheme of things is assigned. claudia gets her man, john stares at the coast, jane dances alone with drinks and a ‘ciggy’ while nik and paula picnic with kids, patrick is left out in the rain—the exotic has been exorcised, the values of heterosexual, marital belonging in the australian community is reaffirmed and all is well in the garden. all? no, not quite. leon and sonya zat return once more to the salsa class, although now cleared of cumbersome extras, leaving them close up and personal. have they made progress, learned the steps to monogamous happiness on the stairways to their tolerant portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 17 australian heaven? to the backdrop of celia cruz singing te busco (i’m looking for you), the zats dance slowly, intimately crossing and recrossing the screen, to all appearances successfully joined at the groin this time round. yet, while leon only has eyes for sonya, his romantic gaze is never met. sonya, more resigned than reconciled, instead averts her attention, refuses the easy resolution just as she shook her head moments earlier as her husband struggled with the wrong words of atonement (‘i don’t want to lose you’), words which suggest that his emotional journey is not yet complete. their marriage, centrally positioned amidst the narrative entanglement as the epitome of modern australian belonging, has been choked by the excessive vigour of the introduced exotic. taking on that great emptiness that so terrified valerie, it can be understood according to the tradition of the great nothing of the australian landscape—the nothing so vast it kills. but this time, in the film, the nothing has been held in the figure of an exotic that has spread to become a weed so pestiferous in australia that government scholarships are offered for its control. the familiar narratives shift, and the lantana plant can be read itself as another layer of white australian law imposed on the landscape, imagined as overwhelming, in constant conflict with itself, self-consuming. the body of lantana regulates the gender and sexual laws that underwrite the community of the good neighbour in ultimately familiar ways. for all its engagement with traditional white australian narratives, the film lantana suggests a new problematic strata of regulatory law-making on the imagined white australian landscape. reference list bhabha, homi 1990, nation and narration, routledge, london and new york. boulé, jean pierre 2002, hiv stories: the archaeology of aids writing in france, 1985–1988, liverpool university press, liverpool (uk). collins, felicity 2002, ‘god bless america (and thank god for australia),’ metro magazine, 131/132, pp.14-24. dermody, s. and jacka, elizabeth (eds) 1988, the screening of australia, vol 2: anatomy of a national cinema, currency press, sydney. fitzgerald, michael 2001, ‘tangle of true lies: lantana’s thicket of suburban mystery twines around pungent themes of trust and alienation’, time, 22 oct., p. 77. freeman, mark 2001, ‘caught in the web: ray lawrence’s lantana’, senses of cinema[online], issue 16, september – october. available: http//:www.sensesofcinema.com/01/16/lantana.html hage, ghassan 1998, white nation, pluto press, annandale. portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 18 portal vol., 1 no. 1 (2004) 19 hage, ghassan 2003, against paranoid nationalism, pluto press, annandale. haynes, roslyn 1998, seeking the centre: the australian desert in literature, art and film, cambridge university press, cambridge. kaplan, e. ann 1997, looking for the other: film, feminism and the imperial gaze, routledge, london, new york. lantana (motion picture) 2001, sydney, jan chapman films. mitchell, juliet (ed.) 1982, the selected melanie klein, penguin books, london. morris, m., de bary, b. & de jonge, h. (eds) 2002, race, panic and the memory of migration, university of british columbia press, vancouver. the nature of lantana (documentary segment on special edition dvd release of lantana [2001]) 2002, sydney, jan chapman films. o’regan, t. 1996, australian national cinema, routledge, london, new york. picnic at hanging rock (motion picture) 1975, picnic productions pty ltd, mcelroy and mcelroy productions in association with patricia lovell. rutherford, jennifer 2000, the gauche intruder: freud, lacan and the white australian fantasy, melbourne university press, melbourne. straudacher, c. 1991, men and grief, new harbinger publications, san francisco. white, richard, 1981, inventing australia: images and identity, 1688-1980, allen and unwin, sydney. ‘oh, what a tangled web we weave …’�; deceit and imagining the community, or the parable of the good neighbour towards better homes and gardens – the place of t backyard blitz: time to get rid of unwanted pinks and painted lady chrysalises ‘so what are you telling me? you’re a man?’ \(le conclusion chapter 8 grassroots women’s activism in post-soviet russia: surviving social change together? rebecca kay department of central and east european studies, university of glasgow the economic, social and political changes which have occurred in russia over the last 10 years have had a profound effect on russian women’s lives. economic reform has brought poverty, insecurity and high levels of anxiety and stress to large sections of the population both female and male (undp 1999). in addition, women have been faced with a new enthusiasm in the media, political rhetoric and public opinion, for essentialist attitudes to gender and restrictive notions of women’s appropriate place and role in post-soviet society (attwood 1996; sperling 1999, pp. 73-80). as a result women’s position in the public sphere has been considerably undermined in terms of both political representation and access to paid employment. many women have welcomed a move away from the excessive burdens of soviet-style ‘emancipation’ which demanded both equal participation in the public sphere and primary responsibility for the family and domestic sphere from women. yet a simple retreat into the private sphere of home and family has proved neither financially possible nor personally acceptable for large numbers of russian women (khotkina 1994; mezentseva 1994; bridger & kay 1996). since the early 1990s many russian women have had to deal with new and difficult personal circumstances and have struggled to support their families and loved ones both materially and emotionally. in the face of these many challenges russian women have shown great courage and ingenuity in developing flexible survival strategies for themselves and their families and adapting to new demands and circumstances (kiblitskaya 2000; bridger, kay and pinnick 1996). as well as struggling individually, some women have come together with others like themselves, forming grassroots women’s organisations in an attempt to improve their circumstances and help each other to survive and, where possible, to prosper. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 1 this paper is based on the findings of a study into the position of women in post-soviet russian society and the aims, activities and circumstances of grassroots women’s organisations in the early to mid 1990s. the study involved extensive qualitative research amongst previously little-known grassroots women’s organisations in moscow and three provincial centres: tver’, saratov and tarusa, a small district-centre town in kaluga region. the fieldwork for this study was carried out in 1995-96 and involved in-depth interviews with over seventy members and leaders of twelve grassroots women’s organisations; participant observation at numerous seminars, meetings and events; an open-ended questionnaire survey and several group and individual interviews with a broader sample of women. this paper aims to present the circumstances surrounding the founding of these organisations, the aims which they set themselves, the ways in which they attempted to achieve those aims and their impact on the lives of their members. it will also investigate the ways in which these groups and their members positioned themselves in relation to the development of essentialist attitudes and opinions on gender within russia on the one hand, and a dialogue with ‘western’ feminist theory and practice on the other. grassroots women’s organisations as a response to social disintegration and the collapse of state structures the ten grassroots organisations studied in most detail were diverse in many ways1. each of them was explicitly defined as an organisation of and for women, yet most combined this with an additional focus on a specific group or constituency of women. several groups drew together women from a particular professional background, for example, a club for business women and an association of women lawyers, both in saratov, and the moscow branch of a nation-wide organisation of women in aviation, most of them pilots or expilots. other groups had formed on the basis of shared experience or life-style, a group of single mothers in moscow for example, and a club for unemployed women in tver’. in the smallest locality, tarusa, there was less scope for diversity and the constituency of women from which members were drawn was defined, above all, geographically. the organisation 1 it is not within the scope of this paper to describe each organisation in detail. fuller information about the organisations as well as the broader findings and conclusions of the study can be found in kay (2000). portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 2 studied was the only women’s organisation active in the town, simply calling itself the tarusa association of women (taruskoe ob’’edinenie zhenshchin). the narrower focus implied by this concentration on specific constituencies of women relates closely to the circumstances surrounding the establishment of these grassroots organisations. one of the consequences of the disintegration of the former structures of the communist state has been the loss of systems of welfare provision, networks of state sponsored social organisations and local party structures. the latter certainly did not fulfil the political functions of civil society as these have frequently come to be defined, based largely on the historical experiences of protest movements, lobbying groups and organisations for the liberation of socially and culturally disadvantaged groups in the countries of north america, western europe and australia2 (potucek 1999, pp. 37-8). yet they were able at times to provide an interface between the levels of state and society. access to welfare provisions and the redistribution of goods and services was primarily organised through the soviet workplace. nonetheless, social organisations such as the network of women’s councils functioning under the auspices of the soviet women’s committee also attempted to access goods and services for their members and to help families with many children, single parents, elderly women and others in difficult circumstances (browning 1992, pp. 106-9). soviet citizens were also able to make modest demands on those in positions of authority and seek representation and remedy if they felt they were being unfairly treated or their rights abused or ignored. this was achieved through appeals to local trade union, party or social organisations and through writing to the local, regional or national press, which paid an important role in interceding on behalf of wronged groups or individuals and prodding the appropriate official structures to life (riordan and bridger 1992, pp.1-4). the loss of such structures acting as sources of material support and channels of communication and redress has had a significant impact on a population confronted portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 3 simultaneously with poverty, insecurity and the undermining of both formal systems of law and order and more informal moral codes and modes of behaviour. in this set of circumstances the establishment of grassroots, community-based groups and organisations as a means of pooling resources and accruing collective power has a resonance with people’s immediate needs and circumstances which the development of more theoretically and politically oriented structures of civil society may not have3. the ‘political process model’ of social movement development posits that, ‘before they dawn, social movements must […] have achieved a critical mass of individuals who recognize that the discrimination or oppression they are experiencing is a systemic, or political, problem, not a personal one, and that the rectification of the injustice is possible’ (sperling 1999, p. 44). models such as this, developed in relation to distinctive historical, political and cultural phenomena, in this case the emergence of the american civil rights movement, fail to capture the subtleties and local significance of the russian grassroots women’s organisations studied here. they may also add to a false impression that this style of strategic and overtly political, public action has remained a priority for the majority of non governmental organisations in the countries of west europe and north america, many of which, especially at the local level, are also largely engaged in practical activities for the material and emotional support of members. on the whole, the grassroots women’s organisations which i studied in 1995-6 had not initially been founded with a view to defending women’s interests in a general, political sense. nor did they necessarily aim to mount a direct challenge to the developing status quo of essentialist attitudes towards women and restrictive notions of women’s appropriate roles and spheres of activity. instead many of the women involved in this study had chosen to form or join an organisation on the basis of much more pragmatic, local and often 2 for a critique of the universalism and ethnocentrism of concepts of ‘civil society’, ‘democratisation’ and ‘transition, as these have been applied to the post-soviet russian context by international advisors and the authors of programmes of foreign assistance, see hann and dunn (1996); verdery (1996) and wedel (1998). 3 see sperling (1999: 28) for a useful critique of the division of organisations into ‘pragmatic’ and ‘strategic’ categories. despite this critique, sperling appears to argue that the practically-oriented activities of many russian women’s organisations are redeemed by their underlying strategy rather than valuable in their own right. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 4 personal concerns. in several cases women had come together in order to establish a form of self-help group, to pool their resources, experience and energies. this desire was often described as having been reinforced by a recognition that help and support was unlikely to be forthcoming from any external source. in saratov the women’s league: initiative (zhenskaia liga: initsiativa) was engaged in a variety of activities including the promotion of women in the arts and creative work, attempts to found a centre for the social protection of children, political campaigning and assertiveness training. a founder member of the group explained, ‘the fundamental reason for setting up our organisation was to help each other, because no-one else will help us’. expressing similar sentiments, but from a more positive perspective perhaps, a member of the tarusa association of women said, ‘i think that the organisation is necessary and important because, well it is not only that it solves women’s problems, but it also somehow combines all women’s power’. in each case the kind of help implied was to be as practical and tangible as possible, focusing on the specific difficulties encountered by individual members of the group in question. for some groups of women a sense of lacking external support and succour was directly targeted toward the russian state. this was particularly true of members of the moscowbased single-mothers’ organisation, just mum (tol’ko mama), and of the women who had founded and were running a club for women’s initiatives (klub zhenskikh initsiativ) for unemployed women in tver’. although the latter was nominally attached to the local department of the federal employment service, it was officially registered as a charitable centre. the women working there saw it as very specifically separate from state mechanisms and described themselves as a counterbalance to state indifference to the plight of unemployed women and failure to offer them necessary help or support. one of the leading members of this organisation described the reasons for its inception in just such terms: why do we have a women’s club? well because it is characteristic for us and for russia as a whole that the problems, well specifically women’s problems, are so many, but they are not being dealt with at the state level. there is no state mechanism for dealing with and resolving these problems as there is in other countries and this is why we have a women’s club. that was the idea behind its foundation. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 5 formed at least partly in recognition of the enormity of the problems and challenges facing women, these small, local organisations also implicitly, if not explicitly, represented a site of empowerment for women and an embodiment of their faith in their own ability to make a difference and to overcome the difficulties they faced together. organisations as a source of practical support and collective strength with this perspective as a starting point many of the women who had been actively involved in the setting up of an organisation saw its main purpose as providing a source of collective strength and bargaining power for its members. in the first instance this strength in numbers was seen as a means of gaining access to and making demands on local authorities. as the leader and founder of the tarusa association of women explained: it is one thing if i go to the organs of power and make an inquiry […] then it is all like please do this, please help and so on. this is all very well, but it is one thing when you are just an individual […] and it is something completely different when you go as a whole organisation. one woman alone is like a single finger, but together we are an entire hand, which is much more useful. in tarusa this collective power had been formalised by a group of women from within the organisation who had developed a system of mutual support for any woman who had to go to court or who came into conflict with the local authorities or with her employer. several women had been in this position as a result of making complaints against corrupt officials, claiming unfair dismissal from their jobs or fighting eviction from their flats. when each woman’s case came before the courts, or if she was summoned to the offices of the official in question, the entire group would go with her, in order to ensure that she was treated with respect and that the proceedings were carried out correctly. support of this kind was described as vital: a group has formed of people who help each other out if in no other way than that they come to the court and are present throughout the case. what does this mean? it means that the judge will not dare to insult the person and there will be no tampering with documents because there are witnesses. it is really good and not only in this sense but also morally because the woman comes to court even for a very basic case, for instance she is getting a divorce and she has her women-friends beside her and so she feels that she has some protection. other women felt that the backing of an organisation not only gave them more bargaining power and protection in dealing with official structures, it also allowed them to preserve a sense of dignity and personal integrity when asking for help. this was particularly true for portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 6 those groups of women, like the single mothers in moscow, who felt that they might be stigmatised as undeserving scroungers. the founder and president of just mum described the benefits of an organisation in this respect as follows: to be honest, in some ways we are a collective of beggars. because a woman on her own doesn’t always feel able to open her mouth and ask for what she needs […] but altogether as we are now, it is much easier to ask when you are asking for the whole group. in this way, what many organisations offered to their members above all else was the opportunity to develop and benefit from collective survival strategies. many of the activities in which women might engage on an individual basis in order to provide for their families and preserve their own sense of dignity and moral integrity were made less daunting or seemed more likely to be successful when undertaken as part of a co-operative and mutually supportive group. some organisations’ more ambitious ventures eventually failed: attempts to procure long-term material support from international or local sponsors or authorities, for example, or projects to establish commercial enterprises as a form of job creation. yet the women most closely involved in the organisation and its activities often spoke of other benefits in terms of emotional support, personal empowerment and solidarity. whilst these may not have been part of the original aims behind the setting up of many of these organisations, nor the outcome that women had necessarily sought on joining, these less immediately tangible benefits came to be no less valued by the women who enjoyed them. moral support, empowerment and solidarity: positive side effects if not primary aims the power, strength and assertiveness gained by bringing together women with a shared set of experiences, problems or indeed skills might be used to achieve various ends and with a number of knock-on effects for the women involved. in saratov the lawyers, trainee lawyers and students of law belonging to the association of women lawyers (assotsiatsiia zhenshchin iuristov) had established a centre offering free legal advice to women, especially mothers of children with disabilities, as well as pensioners, veterans and people with disabilities. the young lawyers who staffed this centre gave up their time and offered their expertise free of charge despite their own financial difficulties and the pressure of intensive studies or a demanding job, often combined with childcare and domestic duties in portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 7 the home. in interviews each of these women spoke with pride of her involvement in this voluntary work often describing in great detail cases where she felt that her input had been particularly significant or where she had been especially pleased with the outcome. the youngest member of the organisation had yet to complete her university studies but had nonetheless spent a lot of time working in the centre as a legal assistant. this young woman stated that she had been attracted to the organisation precisely because of the opportunity it offered to be involved in positive and useful activity and to make a difference to other women’s lives: i heard about the association […] and i thought that really women in our country are faced with a mass of problems. to begin with i hadn’t given that much thought to this issue, but then i realised that it really would be worth working in this organisation, that it was worth spending my time and effort on this, because there are so many problems. women can’t get jobs. women have problems with their children. not all women have enough money for kindergartens and crèches. and as for problems like rape and violence […] i have realised that our country is almost totally undeveloped [in providing support for women]. many of the grassroots women’s organisations which were established in russia in the early 1990s tended, by their very nature, to attract women experiencing just the kind of problems described by this young law student. frequently members described their interest in joining or establishing an organisation as stemming primarily from a quest for some kind of help and support in response to a situation in which they felt unable to cope alone. this view of the organisation as a lifeline for women in crisis put considerable strain on groups with limited resources and was often particularly stressful for those women in leadership positions. nevertheless, several groups had organised intensive support for a member going through a particularly severe crisis, for example the life threatening illness of a child, an especially traumatic divorce or a period of extreme depression. in such cases organisations did their utmost to provide the most tangible support possible which might include raising funds for medical treatment, helping with childcare or supplying food, clothing and even taking over the domestic tasks of one woman for a restricted period. a general lack of resources within organisations made up almost entirely of women already existing near the limits of their personal means, both financial and psychological, meant that such activities often could not be sustained for more than a short while. yet for women undergoing a prolonged period of crisis, if such practical arrangements could not be kept in place, the portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 8 organisations could and did provide long-term emotional support, solidarity and informal counselling. in either case the consequences were broader than simply helping the woman in question to get through a difficult time. the women involved in offering rather than receiving support spoke of the personal benefits to themselves in terms of an increased sense of self worth, pride in what they had achieved and renewed hope and optimism for the future. for some women who had initially been on the receiving end, one of the most important outcomes, once their personal crisis had been at least partially resolved, was the empowerment they experienced from being able to pass on similar support to others. in tarusa, the local doctor had first come into contact with the tarusa association of women during a period of extreme personal crisis surrounding her divorce. a year later with considerable material, practical and emotional support from the organisation she had turned her life around and was eager to help other women in similar situations. i went through that divorce and it is only now that i know what it means. i survived that and suicide as well. three years ago i didn’t want to live. tragedy followed tragedy and it all mounted up. […] i got out of it because i had somewhere to turn and with the organisation’s help i got back on my feet. now i can offer this kind of help myself and i think that i have a duty to do this. i do help when people come to me because i have been through it myself and i know that emptiness, the dreadful emptiness. women who had not themselves been the recipients of such intensive support from their organisations also often spoke of the importance of being able to make a significant difference to other women’s lives. the leader of just mum, for example, explained that a primary activity in which the organisation had recently been involved was the collection and redistribution amongst members of children’s and women’s clothing, food and toys received either in the form of ‘humanitarian aid’ from church charities, foreign embassies, individuals and organisations, or by ‘recycling’ clothes and toys donated by members whose children had grown out of them to those with younger sons and daughters. this had been difficult to organise, not only demanding the input of a lot of time and energy in raising support from external bodies and groups, but also involving considerable logistical problems in organising the transportation, storage and redistribution of goods. she had personally played a central role in organising this process and explained that she had portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 9 frequently been exhausted, frustrated and upset by it. nonetheless, she also described with considerable pride the joy and satisfaction she received from being able to relieve her members from some of the ‘oppressive worries’ of seeking to provide for themselves and their children: yes, my life has got harder since i set up the organisation, but i also get a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from it. for example, last year i had an experience with one mum which really helped me. i came late and she was waiting for me with her son by the door to my building. she was in a dreadfully thin coat which didn’t suit the weather at all. her neck was all red and i saw that she was very cold. she came to me like that, but when she left she had a different coat. she left properly dressed and i was very pleased to see this. yesterday a woman came to see me and she was dressed almost only in clothes we’ve collected. if the organisation didn’t exist i don’t know how she’d get by, she has two daughters to raise alone. far from retreating into an individualistic mode of existence and dismissing communal activities and collective identities as vestiges of a defeated communist past, these women saw such strategies both as the guarantors of their collective survival and as a source of personal satisfaction and psychological well-being. indeed for some women this was more important than material or financial support. in saratov one of the members of an organisation simply known as dignity (dostoinstvo) explained that she had been attracted to organisational activity by precisely such needs. i came to join in this way, because i can’t go on just watching all that is going on around me. […]. in principal i can manage on the money i earn but my soul simply can’t bear to see all this misery […] i just couldn’t bear to watch anymore […] so i looked for people who would share my views, maybe some emotional support […] i don’t want to get paid for what i do [in the organisation], for heaven’s sake it is my own choice, it is what my soul craves that’s all, to have this socially-beneficial role. statements such as this stand in sharp contrast to the suggestions made by some international agencies and organisations that the russian population needs to be taught a sense of ‘social responsibility’. those supporting this view tend also to suggest that this can only be achieved through the implementation of programmes and projects funded by west european and north american government agencies and foundations and therefore also conceived and developed in accordance with their perspectives and priorities regarding the ‘best’ path for russia’s social and political development. a report on specialist training programmes run by the international research and exchanges board, an organisation partially funded by the united states department of state, suggests that: portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 10 one of the best ways to facilitate [a new public service ethos] is to promote the “transfer” of socially conscious individuals from ngos [non governmental organisations] to the government. also required is a broader sense of political responsibility among russians – a feeling that they are responsible for their own well-being and the well-being of their society’ (joselyn 1995, p. 16). this sense that russians do not possess the necessary qualities in order to demonstrate social conscience or become involved in public service work of their own accord is negated by the record of many of the organisations involved in this study. the myth is perpetuated however, in the mission statements and indeed titles of aid programmes and agencies such as the british department of international development’s ‘know how fund’ or the british foreign office funded ‘marshall plan for the mind’. there is increasing evidence of resistance to such condescending attitudes and approaches from within russian non governmental organisations. a recent report from workshops and plenary discussions involving activists from the russian regions at the bearr trust’s 2000 conference states ‘russian ngos want guidance on filling in application forms. otherwise, british ngos must listen to them, not tell them what is needed’ and calls on foreign non governmental organisations to ‘avoid patronising attitudes and a “top-down” approach.’ (bearr trust newsletter feb. 2001, pp. 2-3). challenging women’s oppression: personal empowerment or public activism? the majority of the grassroots women’s organisations involved in this study had not been established with the aim of changing public attitudes towards women, of developing a definition of sexism or challenging social restrictions on women’s activities and aspirations per se. on the contrary, many of the women interviewed had either very little knowledge of second-wave feminist theory or viewed it as having little relevance to their experiences or to the contexts in which they and their organisations were operating. concepts of equality and liberation were most often equated with the rather lop-sided version of women’s emancipation promoted by the soviet state. many respondents were quick to point out that this experience had often been oppressive rather than liberating given the pressure it placed on women to participate fully in the public sphere whilst retaining full responsibility for the family, childcare and the home. a member of just mum was forceful in her opinion on this point. she stressed her irritation with ‘western’ ignorance of what soviet ‘equality’ had portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 11 meant for some women. in her view the promotion of a ‘feminist’ agenda of equal rights by funding bodies and international organisations working in russia since the fall of communism was both inappropriate and insensitive in this context: i grew up in soviet society which strived to achieve a certain formula which we all learned by heart at university: to get rid of all differences between town and country, between intellectual and physical work, between men and women. in the end there were supposed to be no men and women anymore, just soviet citizens. i don’t want that sort of equality. i’ve had it up to here. people from the west just don’t understand because they have never experienced it. they have never seen the terrible infringements of women’s rights. […] that wasn’t equality at all, it was an infringement of a woman’s right to be a woman, to realise herself as she chooses. so only people without a clue talk about women’s equal rights in such absolute terms. despite this woman’s implicit recognition that a different and preferable form of equality might be possible, she, like many others, feared the consequences of any direct public campaign for equal rights or women’s emancipation. in response to the experience of soviet policies many interviewees stated their support for a less burdensome role for women, often paying lip service to the essentialist theories promoted by the post-soviet media and political rhetoric. yet the ways in which they organised their own lives, the wishes they expressed for their daughters and for other women demonstrated, at the very least, an ambivalence toward the notion of a full-scale withdrawal into the private sphere or a rigid and absolute division of characteristics, roles and responsibilities into mutually exclusive female and male categories.4 this complex set of often contradictory attitudes presented a special challenge to those organisations, leaders or individual members who did embrace a more explicitly feminist perspective. in tver’ for example, two young women were struggling to establish a new organisation, called step (stupen’). their specific aim was to attract younger women, in their late teens, twenties and early thirties, to an overtly feminist women’s movement. they were very aware however, that this could only be successful if their approach was subtle. they believed that the best formula would be if they could combine activities having immediate relevance to and practical benefits for young women’s lives, with an underlying 4 for a full description of the attitudes to work and public sphere activity expressed by the women of this sample, as well as their responses to essentialist gender discourses and the promotion of maternity as the ‘true portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 12 agenda of consciousness raising, education, discussion of women’s rights and combating sexual discrimination. with this in mind they had reviewed the skills and resources at their disposal and elaborated an ambitious but impressive plan. one young woman managed her father’s warehouse and retailing enterprise, giving her access to large and relatively comfortable premises from which organisational activities could be run. the warehouses were in fact part of a block of disused apartments and she had already identified one of these empty two-room flats which could be used by the organisation free of charge. her friend was a trained seamstress whose husband owned and ran a small fashion boutique in the centre of town. their plan therefore was to organise vocational training in dressmaking for young women, with the possibility of a commercial outlet for the garments produced through the fashion boutique. as the young seamstress explained, such a practical focus was not simply a way of attracting young women to their feminist agenda by stealth. it was also something which she personally viewed as a vital justification for their activities and indeed which formed the basis of her principles and beliefs: of course we want to do something a bit more tangible. […] in fact it is absolutely normal, if we want women to know more about us, if we want them to think like we do then of course we have to be able to give some account of what we do and about what we do in practical terms. because if i just say, ‘well we get together and talk for about two hours and drink tea together and then we all go home’, then obviously they will say that they have better things to do than drink tea and then go home. but if we can say we have done something more practical, well it will be a help to people. it is not the most important thing that people should talk about us or about our principles, the most important thing is that women should have easier and better lives. nonetheless, if they could attract members in this way, they hoped simultaneously to create an environment in which consciousness raising and empowerment would occur both spontaneously and as a result of their efforts. they had acquired a computer and printer with a small start-up grant from a us-government funded organisation and planned to use this to produce pamphlets, posters and stickers with catchy feminist slogans and information about sexual discrimination and means of combating it. they were also sure that once they had gathered a critical mass of young women, discussions of issues such as calling’ of all women see kay 2000. similar conclusions have been drawn by other studies see for example: bridger and kay (1996); bruno (1996); bruno (1997); dmitrieva (1996); attwood (1996). portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 13 sexual harassment, oppressive attitudes towards women and pressure to conform to stereotypical forms of behaviour and relationships would simply arise of their own accord. the young woman running the warehousing enterprise explained that she viewed this opportunity for young women to share experiences and viewpoints as possibly the most valuable aspect of the organisation: every time i talk to one of my female friends i see that for each person you need a different individual approach. […] basically i want it to be a club for communication and contact, so that it would be a place for people who like one another, who feel they have something in common, for women friends. all the same, no matter how or where women come into close contact with each other, these issues are raised between them and their talk always touches on the challenges and problems which are common to all women. they discuss their ways of solving them and that is the most important thing. because i can’t say that i will just tell them all what to do and it will always be right. a similar stance was taken by women in tarusa and saratov who explained that whilst they personally subscribed to a feminist ideology of equal rights and equal opportunities, this was not the main agenda of their organisations and not something they felt they had any right to impose on others. some women felt that openly stating a commitment to feminism would be counterproductive as it might alienate other members and make it still harder for them to get a hearing. others spoke of a general aversion to any attempt to impose a single ideology as the universal solution for all women, something which they found painfully reminiscent of soviet adherence to the party line. instead, many of those women who felt that it was important to challenge restrictive notions of female abilities, roles and spheres of activity believed that it was best to teach by their own example what women were capable of. they might model different life-styles, attitudes to work or the sharing of domestic roles in the hope that other women would follow suit, but they maintained that it was crucial for each woman to be allowed to choose what suited her best and not to feel criticised or condemned for her choice. the leader of the tarusa association of women stated her opinion in this respect quite succinctly: in my opinion, a woman should not be restricted within four walls. but some people think that they would like it and so i do not set out to prove anything to a woman who embroiders her pillow cases and prepares perfect dinners and considers that this is the purpose of her life. i would like to show her portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 14 that there are other ways of living too, but i am not out to force anyone to come over to this other way of life. thus challenging women’s oppression was something which was frequently seen as an underlying or secondary aspect of women’s organisations’ activities. even those organisations or individuals who believed strongly in the need for such activities were usually convinced of the need for a subtle and individualised approach. as a consequence work of this kind was more likely to take the form of encouraging personal empowerment and consciousness-raising than radical public activism or confrontational campaigns and demonstrations. combating specific forms of discrimination bringing discussions of women’s rights into the public sphere was often seen as excessively controversial and beyond the remit of the grassroots women’s organisations involved in this study. it was also something which an organisation’s membership could not necessarily be expected to support unanimously. combating specific forms of discrimination and particularly negative attitudes towards the particular constituency of women around which an organisation had been formed was seen in a slightly different light. organisations were more likely to see the relevance in organising to combat discriminatory attitudes or practices where they could be seen to be having an immediate and tangible impact on members lives and those of women like them. similarly in such cases, individual members were less inclined to shy away from confrontation or to see it as tangential to the more pressing concerns of their day to day lives. interviews with the members of ‘aviatrisa’, the organisation for women in aviation, revealed a wide range of attitudes towards gender and appropriate roles for women. despite their unorthodox professional careers these women could not necessarily have been expected to unite behind a banner of equality or campaign for women’s liberation. however, as a group these women were unequivocal in their view that women in aviation were faced with specific forms of discrimination which needed to be questioned and combated. they resented the fact that women who had achieved great feats as pilots and portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 15 test pilots, some of them engaging in military action during the second world war, were ignored and neglected by the russian state and society. many were outraged at the way in which women were being forced out of the profession and excluded from entering it and although they frequently described aviatrisa as having been set up initially as a social organisation, they were adamant that its remit now extended to defending the rights and dignity of women pilots. the organisation was engaged in many forms of activity aimed at providing support for members. the group attempted to provide practical support to pensioners, veterans and pilots who had lost their jobs. social events were organised as regularly as possible and were often described as an important source of emotional support and a chance for women to meet and exchange experiences with others from the same professional background. alongside these activities, members were involved in lobbying against the barring of women from the profession and from training schools, campaigning to raise the benefits awarded to war veterans and pensioners, and countering disrespectful attitudes in the media. these different spheres of activity were not seen as disparate or disjointed however, since for many the primary goal in each case was to help women, in this case women pilots, preserve their dignity and pride. one member who spoke at length of the importance of challenging discrimination against women in the field of aviation and particularly of combating negative representations of women pilots in the media was equally convinced of the importance of creating an environment in which these women could rediscover a sense of achievement and worth in themselves and their profession. when asked what she felt was the most important part of the organisation’s work she gave an example from a recent forum which they had organised bringing together women in aviation from across the former soviet union: take the example of our older women. at the forum when they asked all the sea pilots to stand and they all jumped up like that. don’t you think that made them feel good for a while to come? everyone’s forgotten them, forgotten they were pilots and the quality and valour of what they did. despite her conviction that the organisation should attempt to fight discriminatory attitudes and practices, this woman was less convinced than many of their chances of success. it was important she maintained not to accept such things without any resistance, not least because portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 16 putting up a fight would of itself bring women together and help to instil in them a sense of solidarity and self-respect. nonetheless, it was at the more individual and personalised level of making women feel good about themselves that she thought the organisation had the most significant role to play. in a similar vein, some of the members of just mum, believed that their organisation could play a role as an important counterweight to negative social attitudes towards single mothers, as well as campaigning for increased welfare benefits and better access to public services. during interviews many of these women complained that the difficulties they confronted financially and emotionally as a result of trying to raise a child alone were compounded by unsympathetic responses from the authorities and the general public. they felt that an important aspect of the organisation was that it brought together women who shared these experiences and could present a more positive model of what it might mean to be a single mother, to each other, as well as, perhaps, to the broader society. a leading member of the organisation explained this in the following terms: we are all single mothers, and more than that, we are almost all women who became pregnant and had our children out of wedlock, not divorcees or widows. this is significant because public opinion towards us is very bad. we are seen as having brought it on ourselves, but we didn’t get pregnant all alone you know and for most of us to have ended up in this position also means that we have been through some sort of psychological trauma and personal crisis. so the moral support and shared experience we get is also very important. women get to see that they are not alone, that there are others like them and that is very important in restoring their self confidence. once again, rather than giving up in the face of adversity, women in each of these organisations refused to accept the circumstances they felt were forced upon them by the reform process, by state indifference or hostility or by socially acceptable, negative attitudes towards single-mothers or women pilots. this resistance was manifested more often by the creation of a space for alternative perspectives and a supportive environment within the organisations themselves than by attempts to confront or alter public opinion or to engage in political activism and public debate. in several of the organisations studied a number of members felt that a more proactive and public approach might be called for, however, this was recognised as a controversial stance and often softened or abandoned in portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 17 order to prevent conflict within an organisation or repel members who might not share such a radical perspective. in conclusion: the achievements and impact of russian grassroots women’s organisations when considering the achievements and impact of grassroots women’s organisations in post-soviet russia, it is crucial that they be measured in terms of their own criteria, goals and perspectives. this may mean that those who study these organisations from without, in other words observers, academics and funding agencies from a different social background and cultural experience, will need to set aside preconceived ideas of what constitutes valid ‘civil society activity’ and look afresh at the motivations for and consequences of the work of such organisations. with the scales of our own sometimes arrogant assumptions lifted from our eyes we may discover a whole plethora of subtle factors at play, intricately woven into multiple layers of activity, some of which may even come closer to achieving goals of ‘democratic participation’, ‘civic responsibility’ and ‘challenging gendered oppression’ than we might otherwise have imagined. for the majority of the organisations involved in this study, the initial impetus which had brought women together, and which continued to bring new women to them, was a search for collective survival strategies and the hope that these would be more effective and sustainable than those which women were able to engage in as individuals. far from fragmenting into a society of isolated and self-centred individuals, women have sought one another out in order to gain, but also to offer, mutual support and solace and collective strength and bargaining power. from this perspective it is logical that women have been drawn to groups of other women sharing a particular background and set of circumstances, be they related to professional career, life-style, experience or geographical locality. these sources of closer identification have allowed groups to pool those resources and address those issues with the most immediate relevance for their particular constituency of women. once united in an organisation, these groups of women have quickly found numerous advantages in their collective identity. pragmatic goals and practical activities were often portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 18 given the highest priority and seen as the most valuable achievements in the first instance. organisations have been able to be effective in this respect in a number of different ways. some have engaged directly in lobbying local authorities and institutions of power for resources and against infringements of the rights of individual women or a particular group of women. others have been able to procure and redistribute material support, goods and services. even when external support has been almost entirely lacking, groups have managed to pool their own, often meagre, reserves in order to offer short-term support to women undergoing a particularly severe period of crisis. however, despite their principled prioritisation of such practically oriented activities, many members described a less immediately tangible but ultimately equally valuable impact as the most significant consequence of their engagement with a grassroots women’s organisation. organisations have often found it impossible to sustain many of their practically oriented activities on a long-term basis. this has largely been a consequence of lack of resources, financial and infrastructural support. it has certainly not been due to lack of commitment, ingenuity or perseverance on the part of the women involved. yet despite this disappointment, striking right at the heart of what had been often stated as an organisation’s primary purpose, members were adamant in the defence of their organisation and of the positive impact it had on their lives. in this context women spoke primarily of the importance of the moral support offered by an organisation. this support took a number of forms. for some it provided a much-needed contradiction to negative attitudes towards and stereotypes of women ‘like them’. for others it offered a mainstay to sustain them through a period of crisis simply because they knew they were not entirely isolated with their problems and could share their worries and feelings of despair with a group of sympathetic listeners. finally, many women explained that their active membership in a grassroots women’s organisation helped them to escape a sense of isolation, powerlessness, grinding anxiety and pessimism for the future. in addition, the activities of these organisations and their consequences for the individual women who were their members and leaders point implicitly towards broader social and portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 19 political consequences, even without these being an explicit part of their agenda. the majority of these organisations were not set up with the stated aim of challenging gendered oppression, nor of producing ‘socially responsible citizens’, nor of overcoming social apathy and disengagement. yet in many instances they had made incursions into each of these areas. the practical activities of these organisations had offered a focus and in some ways an outlet for the already existing social consciences of their members. women had gained self-confidence and pride from their engagement in activities from which they can quickly see clear benefits for other women and sometimes for themselves or their families. these organisations had brought together women who were able to model for each other a variety of responses to the essentialist attitudes to women, their appropriate roles and spheres of activity which had become part of the dominant discourse of gender in the public domain. they had empowered women individually and collectively by offering them a sense of their own ability to influence the impact of social change on their lives and the lives of their families and loved ones. in this way they had given their members a renewed pride in themselves and their ability to contribute to a positive and mutually supportive project and a degree of hope and optimism for the future which in the light of russia’s protracted and profound social, economic and political difficulties may be the most valuable gift of all references used attwood, l. 1996, ‘the post-soviet woman in the move to the market: a return to domesticity and dependence?’in women in russia and ukraine, ed. r. marsh, cambridge, cambridge university press. bridger, s. & kay, r. 1996, ‘gender and generation in the new russian labour market’ in gender, generation and identity in contemporary russia, ed. h. pilkington, london, routledge. bridger, s., kay, r. & pinnick, k. 1996, no more heroines? russia, women and the market, london, routledge. browning, g. 1992, ‘the zhensovety revisited’ in perestroika and soviet women, ed. m. buckley, cambridge, cambridge university press. bruno, m. 1996, ‘employment strategies and the formation of new identities in the service sector in moscow’ in gender, generation and identity in contemporary russia, ed. h. pilkington, london, routledge. portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 20 portal vol. 1, no. 1 (2004) 21 bruno, m. 1997, ‘playing the co-operation game’ in surviving post-socialism: local strategies and regional responses in eastern europe, eds s. bridger and f. pine, london, routledge. ‘conference builds bridges’, the bearr trust newsletter, february 2001, no. 32, pp. 1-3. dmitrieva, e. 1996, ‘orientations, re-orientations or disorientations? expectations of the future among russian school leavers’ in gender, generation and identity in contemporary russia, ed. h. pilkington, london, routledge. hann, c. and dunn, e. 1996, civil society: challenging western models, london, routledge. hemment, j. 1999, ‘russia’s democratization industry: civil society and the manufacture of the third sector’, unpublished conference paper presented at crees annual conference, 18-20 june, london. joselyn, b. 1995, ‘seminar series aims to strengthen “third sector’ in russia”, international research and exchanges board news in brief, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 1 & 16. kay, r. 2000, russian women and their organizations. gender, discrimination and grassroots women’s organizations in russia 1991-6, basingstoke, 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(eds) 1992, dear comrade editor: readers’ letters to the soviet press under perestroika, bloomington, indiana university press. sperling, v. 1999, organizing women in contemporary russia: engendering transition, cambridge, cambridge university press. undp regional bureau for europe and the cis 1999, human development report 1996 – russian federation, geneva, united nations. verdery, k 1996, what was socialism and what comes next?, princeton, princeton university press. wedel, j. 1998, collision and collusion: the strange case of western aid to eastern europe 1989-1998, new york, st. martin’s press. grassroots women’s activism in post-soviet russia rebecca kay department of central and east european studies, university of glasgow organisations as a source of practical support and collective strength moral support, empowerment and solidarity: positive side effects if not primary aims combating specific forms of discrimination in conclusion: the achievements and impact of rus references used portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: hassan, c., and mangiapane, g. 2021. respirare il tempo: re-azioni di superamento covid-19. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 36–44. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis. v17i1-2.7339 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay respirare il tempo: re-azioni di superamento covid-19 cadigia hassan and gianluigi mangiapane corresponding author(s): cadigia hassan, freelance journalist. padua, italy. cadigiahassan@ hotmail.com gianluigi mangiapane, department of philosophy and educational sciences, university of turin. corso massimo d’azeglio, 52 i-10126 turin, italy. gianluigi.mangiapane@unito.it doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7339 article history: received 20/07/2020; accepted 11/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract this reflective essays retraces the experience of ‘mirabilia’, an online project originated at the beginning of the italian lockdown (march 2020) by a spontaneous group made up of researchers from different disciplines, which had the purpose of showing human creativity and the ability to find strategies for survival and ways to cope with adversity. in particular, the essay illustrates “the breath of time”, a virtual exhibition created by mirabilia: through a public call, many images and narrations of personal and particularly significant objects were collected during the quarantine, and are here discussed and illustrated. keywords #iorestoacasa; iniziative dal basso; mostra virtuale premessa1 il lungo periodo di lockdown che l’italia si è trovata ad affrontare, dal 9 marzo al 3 giugno 2020, ha portato in tutti noi un senso di smarrimento, paura e incertezza. sia come singoli cittadini che come istituzioni ci siamo trovati impreparati ad affrontare un nemico invisibile 1 acknowledgement: l’autrice e l’autore di questo saggio confermano che parti dello stesso compaiono nel blog ‘il respiro del tempo,’ in particolare alla pagina https://www.respirodeltempo.it/mostra-e-percorsi espositivi/. [the authors acknowledge that parts of this essay appear on the blog ‘il respiro del tempo,’ on the page https://www.respirodeltempo.it/mostra-e-percorsi-espositivi/]. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 36 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7339 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7339 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7339 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:cadigiahassan@hotmail.com mailto:cadigiahassan@hotmail.com mailto:gianluigi.mangiapane@unito.it http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7339 https://www.respirodeltempo.it/mostra-e-percorsi-espositivi/ https://www.respirodeltempo.it/mostra-e-percorsi-espositivi/ https://www.respirodeltempo.it/mostra-e-percorsi-espositivi/ e subdolo, e per questo ancor più pericoloso. una cosa che è subito emersa è stata l’assoluta democraticità del covid-19: un virus che colpisce indiscriminatamente, livellando le differenze sociali, di genere, economiche, abitative, di provenienza. la crisi pandemica ha tuttavia messo in risalto vari gap tra la cittadinanza: tra chi ha un’abitazione in cui ha potuto osservare quel martellante quanto indispensabile monito ‘restate a casa’ (tradotto per la comunicazione via social nell’hashtag #iorestoacasa) e chi invece è stato costretto a vivere per strada o in contesti di sovraffollamento (si pensi, ad esempio, ai senza fissa dimora, ai richiedenti asilo ospitati nei centri di accoglienza o agli anziani accolti nelle rsa); tra chi, studente di ogni ordine e grado, poteva contare su una dad (didattica a distanza) fluida e chi invece è stato rallentato dalla mancanza di dispositivi elettronici o da difficoltà di connessione; tra chi ha potuto contare sullo smart working e chi invece ha perduto o sospeso il lavoro. si pensi, per esempio, ai precari, ai numerosi lavoratori a chiamata o ai prestatori sommersi di manodopera lavorativa (fenomeno piuttosto diffuso in italia). il covid-19 è stato quindi un disequalizzatore dalle dimensioni variabili quanto soggettive. per quanto riguarda le differenze in materia di accessi e consumi culturali, possiamo però dire che vi è stata una frenetica ed entusiasmante corsa livellatrice, sia top down (dalle istituzioni) che bottom up (dal basso). la crisi e l’esperienza di vivere in isolamento si sono intersecate con la creazione artistica e la conoscenza e potremmo citare un’infinità di esempi open access, in cui la cultura è venuta incontro al singolo, permettendogli fruizioni e interazioni altrimenti inaccessibili, facendolo sentire partecipe, protagonista, come in prima fila, nonostante la distanza mediata, e pertanto meno solo, isolato, angosciato e più stimolato e catapultato in un virtuale acculturato e incantato. il ministero della cultura italiano ha da poco presentato un report relativo a uno studio realizzato dal politecnico di milano su cento luoghi statali della cultura e i risultati sono molto significativi in quanto ‘durante l’emergenza pandemica, le attività di musei, parchi archeologici e istituti si sono riversate sui social e questo ha contribuito a raddoppiare la loro visibilità sul web, e di conseguenza la reputazione online, rispetto al periodo pre-covid’ (giraud 2020: paragrafo 1). questo ha portato molti musei a un continuo dialogo con il proprio pubblico e a una maggiore accessibilità all’offerta culturale rispetto al periodo precedente. iniziative dal basso: il caso di ‘mirabilia’ non solo le istituzioni statali e private sono state molto attive nel web in questi mesi, ma anche i singoli cittadini o gruppi che si sono formati in maniera spontanea hanno collaborato al benessere della comunità e contribuito al welfare culturale del paese, dove per ‘welfare culturale’ intendiamo la collocazione di processi di produzione e disseminazione culturale all’interno di un sistema di welfare, (…) che garantiscono ai cittadini le forme di cura e accompagnamento necessarie al superamento di criticità legate alla salute, all’invecchiamento, alle disabilità, all’integrazione sociale e a tutte le problematiche a cui si associa il riconoscimento di un dovere di tutela sociale. (sacco 2017: paragrafo 1) le iniziative culturali lanciate dal basso, da singole persone o da gruppi, in tempo di coronavirus sono state numerose in italia e sarebbe impossibile citarle tutte: hanno rappresentato comunque una risposta emotiva al vivere l’isolamento e talvolta sono andate a sostituire relazioni sociali in un lungo periodo con contatti fortemente limitati. fra queste però desideriamo segnalare il progetto ‘mirabilia’: in latino, il termine mirabilia indica ‘meraviglie,’ oggetti o circostanze che provocano uno stato spontaneo di ammirazione e stupore, un compiacimento reso ancor più esaltante per l’eccezionalità e l’imprevedibilità della sua manifestazione. in realtà, in latino, ha anche un’altra accezione, indirizzata alla letteratura periegetica e di viaggio: mirabilia erano delle guide create allo scopo di orientare pellegrini e viaggiatori nel loro peregrinare. questa iniziativa è stata lanciata all’alba del contenimento in italia, proprio il 9 marzo scorso, hassan and mangiapane portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202137 da un gruppo, in continuo divenire, formato da persone impegnate in diversi ambiti culturali.2 l’idea alla base di questo progetto consiste nel pubblicare quotidianamente una o più mirabilia, ovvero un oggetto, un evento o una pratica proveniente da diverse culture del mondo (sia vicine che lontane, nel tempo e nello spazio). l’obiettivo è quello di sorprendere, affascinare e meravigliare i lettori e le lettrici, mostrando la creatività dell’essere umano, anche nell’applicare strategie di sopravvivenza, modi di fronteggiare le avversità e il perturbante. le immagini e i corrispettivi articoli hanno trovato ospitalità sia sul blog, denominato ‘culturaemirabilia,’ sia sulla pagina facebook del gruppo.3 il respiro del tempo tra i vari lanci di mirabilia c’è poi stata anche una call pubblica promossa per raccogliere immagini e narrazioni dei personali oggetti d’affezione durante la quarantena. l’iniziativa ha riscontrato un buon gradimento e ha dato vita a un progetto autonomo: la mostra virtuale ‘il respiro del tempo,’ è stata visitabile online fino al 15 settembre, in italiano e inglese.4 la mostra parte dal presupposto che gli oggetti non sono mai neutri (miller 1991; miller 2005), ma sono simbolici di un periodo, un affetto, un desiderio, un malessere o una memoria, e sono al centro di reti di relazione che ci aiutano a conoscere la realtà e noi stessi. il percorso, quindi, è costituito dalle immagini di una trentina di oggetti scelti dalle persone che hanno voluto rispondere alla chiamata. i e le partecipanti hanno quindi mandato le fotografie di quegli oggetti—corredate da narrazioni personali—che hanno ritenuto significativi durante la pandemia 2020. l’idea alla base di questo progetto antropologico non era tanto quella di una rappresentazione corale tout court, quanto di lasciare—attraverso la rete—una testimonianza che consenta di ricostruire e visualizzare, nei tempi a venire, il ‘sentire’ collettivo di un periodo di lockdown, timore e incertezza. alla mostra virtuale hanno contribuito una trentina di autori e autrici, provenienti da italia, canada, grecia, lituania, spagna e svezia, di diverse età e professioni (e magari altri ancora contribuiranno in seguito, in quanto la call resta aperta fino alla chiusura della mostra). a proposito degli oggetti presenti in mostra, alfredo sgarlato, uno dei curatori, scrive sul sito web dell’iniziativa: molti degli oggetti scelti per questa esposizione virtuale manifestano un desiderio: il significato etimologico della parola ‘desiderio’ rimanda al prigioniero, che sente la mancanza del cielo stellato, quindi della libertà. così, tra gli oggetti fotografati dai partecipanti alla nostra chiamata, abbiamo molte scelte che si rifanno, inevitabilmente, al desiderio in senso più stretto, un moto dinamico verso l’altrove, che sia pratico (le scarpe, la cartina), o immaginario (il pennello, il taccuino). (sgarlato 2020: paragrafo 1) in alcuni casi, poi, gli oggetti rappresentano una soglia tra il dentro e il fuori, come, per esempio porte o sbarre, tra il passato e il futuro, facendo emergere un altro tipo di desiderio (fig.1): la volontà ‘di una continuità temporale’ dove ‘il prima (della quarantena) non rimanga un passato isolato ma possa connettersi al futuro, con gli oggetti come testimonianza di un passaggio a una nuova fase. (paragrafo 1). 2 l’autrice e l’autore del contributo fanno parte del gruppo di ‘mirabilia’, nato in maniera del tutto spontanea. 3 per il sito web si veda: https://culturaemirabilia.blogspot.com/ (2020) [accessed 16 november 2020]; mentre per la pagina facebook si veda sul social network: @culturaemirabilia. 4 si veda il sito web: www.respirodeltempo.it (2020) [accessed 16 november 2020]. hassan and mangiapane portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202138 https://culturaemirabilia.blogspot.com/ http://www.respirodeltempo.it secondo il curatore: ‘non manca la funzione apotropaica (degli oggetti, n.d.a.), inevitabile in un momento in cui il futuro è un’incognita’ (paragrafo 1). figure 1. sbarre alla finestra, 2020; © claudia marchi inoltre, lo stesso autore sostiene che ‘osservare questa serie di oggetti rinforza una riflessione,’ ovvero che il lockdown ‘ha riportato l’attenzione su un argomento che appariva tabù nella società attuale, dominata dal culto del profitto e dal principio di prestazione (il “discorso del capitalista,” direbbe lacan): il diritto al tempo libero, come elemento fondante dell’identità personale e collettiva’ (sgarlato 2020: paragrafo 3). del resto, questi ‘oggetti quotidiani diventano parti indissolubili di noi, così come parti di una totalità assoluta’ (paragrafo 4). la prima tentazione di mirabilia è stata quella di catalogare gli oggetti d’affezione pervenuti in aree tematiche, ma catalogare significa rinchiudere in gabbie interpretative fisse e relativistiche, quando invece ogni oggetto è in sé polisemico, evoca cioè immagini e significati soggettivi a seconda del vissuto personale e del contesto culturale e sociale di appartenenza (hassan 2020: paragrafo 1). si è deciso così di concentrarsi invece sul legame emozionale con l’oggetto, divenuto per alcuni transizionale per la sua capacità di offrire riparo, protezione e conforto psicologico. oggetti che sottolineano un ‘dentro’ e un ‘fuori,’ un ‘prima’ e un nunc sospeso. le sbarre alla finestra che un tempo tenevano al sicuro da ogni intrusione ora si fanno pesanti perché riflettono l’idea di essere in trappola pur se allo stesso tempo consentono di vedere com’è il mondo ‘dall’altra parte.’ le pantofole di lana e gli zoccoli estivi che dialogano attraverso una porta a vetri (fig.2) rimandano a un tempo che verrà, ciclico e tenace come il tempo della natura, racchiuso in una piantina di basilico vittoriosamente sopravvissuta all’inverno (paragrafo 1). hassan and mangiapane portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202139 figure 2. pantofole di lana e zoccoli estivi in dialogo attraverso una porta, 2020; © mariella brenna. l’immagine di una soglia, oggettiva o simbolica, di un limen, è molto ricorrente in questi contributi. d’altronde la stessa pandemia può considerarsi un rito di passaggio con i suoi tre stadi di separazione, transizione e reintegrazione (van gennep 1909). le scarpe lasciate sullo zerbino, senza testo descrittivo, spingono la mente a trovare molteplici allusioni mentre la porta a vetri di un corridoio di casa, che impedisce a un marito affetto da corona virus di contagiare la propria moglie, testimonia l’idea di confinamento nel confinamento, di un’assenza in co-presenza, con tutto il portato di solitudine, paure, pensieri e strategie di sopravvivenza (hassan 2020: paragrafo 2). perché è questo il primo pensiero dettato dall’istinto di conservazione: sopravvivere, ovvero ‘vivere sopra,’ al di là del rischio e del pericolo, per continuare ad esistere, ad esserci, a farsi testimoni. a questo pensiero ci si può aggrappare con la fantasia, con la creatività o con un oggetto dalle virtù apotropaiche: le famiglie ritagliate su carta che prendono forma per ‘andare restando’; l’albero secolare in giardino con la sua ferita di guerra, simbolo di resilienza (fig.3); il restauro del tavolo della nonna, custode di immagini e memorie lontane; un braccialetto-amuleto, un rosario, delle pietre significative o una mattonella in tessuto per allontanare lo stress e ritrovare la pace dell’anima; una poesia sull’immagine di un’alba o un taccuino per fissare le sensazioni e le tappe di questo tempo straordinario. hassan and mangiapane portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202140 figure 3. albero secolare con la ferita di guerra, 2020; © federica santoro un tempo costellato da diverse scansioni, che diventa pausa, attesa, silenzio, riflessione, occasione per staccarsi dal mondo, liberarsi dalle gabbie mentali e abbracciare il vero sé. un tempo ‘umanizzato,’ perduto e ritrovato in un autoritratto, in un’incitazione scritta sulla propria tazza preferita o attraverso il distacco regalato da un paio di cuffie auricolari (fig.4). e poi c’è l’evasione, l’arte del pensiero di fuggire da uno spazio che ci reclude e angoscia, rifugiandosi nei libri, inventandosi nuovi orizzonti attraverso pennelli e tavolozza (fig.5), perdendosi nell’infinita quiete del mare visto attraverso la finestra o promettendosi, davanti a una cartina geografica, di ritornare presto a vivere persone e luoghi conosciuti o inesplorati (paragrafo 2). hassan and mangiapane portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202141 figure 4. auricolari per smartphone, 2020; © gabriela diaz figure 5. auricolari per smartphone, 2020; © coco sardòn hassan and mangiapane portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202142 chissà se, come scrive un autore, questi oggetti rimarranno incisi nella memoria storica individuale oppure svaniranno—soffermandoci sull’immagine di un’autrice— come il respiro sulle lenti degli occhiali, una volta tolta la mascherina? d’altronde a decretare la differenza tra l’essere e il non essere è proprio il respiro, insediato in questo tempo pandemico da un nemico micidiale e invisibile, celebrato in tutti i rimandi, reali e onirici. il movimento ritmico del diaframma è insieme stasi e movimento, fissità e rinnovamento. il respiro cercato dalla corritrice svedese quando si inerpica sui boschi con i suoi stivali di gomma (fig.6) è parte di un respiro globale che ingloba tutti i regni della natura, umanità e oggetti compresi: è il respiro del tempo, il nostro tempo, lasciato magari a imperitura memoria. figure 6. stivali di gomma, 2020; © korridor karin verso un nuovo presente in questo percorso si è voluto documentare come il patrimonio personale e d’affezione, alla pari di quello conservato in istituzioni museali, abbia la capacità di ‘rispondere ad alcune domande del nostro tempo’ (amselle 2017: 31). sono infatti sempre più diffuse esperienze di ‘musei della società’ (chevallier 2013) che non si accontentano di immagazzinare ed esporre, ma che dialogano con il pubblico anche attraverso oggetti non musealizzati in grado di ‘parlare di noi e del nostro esistere’ (bodo et al. 2016: 21). d’altra parte, ‘la centralità delle relazioni per la vita moderna e la centralità della cultura materiale per le relazioni’ (miller 2014: 185) è un presupposto fondamentale per comprendere l’approccio de ‘il respiro del tempo,’ che nasce in un momento in cui le relazioni fra persone sono state profondamente modificate a causa del lockdown. alla fine della mostra, conclusasi il 15 settembre, la situazione della pandemia in italia, dopo un’estate in cui tutto era apparentemente tornato alla normalità, si è di nuovo aggravata: per questo motivo, il 5 novembre 2020, il governo italiano ha programmato un ulteriore lockdown per quelle ‘regioni rosse,’ in cui hassan and mangiapane portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202143 cioè sono presenti massima gravità e alto rischio5. il contributo non può e non vuole essere una disamina della nuova condizione, però, da giugno in avanti, è stato tangibile il desiderio da parte delle persone di ritrovare una socialità, costituita da incontri fisici, da vivere nel tempo libero o a scuola. in conclusione, l’esperienza de “il respiro del tempo,” e di molte iniziative digitali, potrebbe essere replicabile ma dovrebbe tenere conto di quanto sia forte (e lo sarà sempre di più) la spinta ad avere relazioni in presenza e non mediate da qualsiasi tipo di device. bibliografia amselle, j. l. 2017, il museo in scena. l’alterità culturale e la sua rappresentazione negli spazi espositivi. meltemi, milano. bodo, s., mascheroni, s., & panigada, m. g. 2016, ‘un patrimonio di storie: perché e per chi?’ in un patrimonio di storie. la narrazione nei musei, una risorsa per la cittadinanza culturale, (eds.) s. bodo, s. mascheroni, m. g. panigada. mimesis, milano: 21-22. chevallier, d. 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portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 85–90. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i12.7299 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay queer disidentification: or how to cook chinese noodles in a global pandemic? hongwei bao corresponding author: hongwei bao, associate professor in media studies, school of cultures, languages and area studies, faculty of arts, university of nottingham, university park, nottingham, ng7 2rd, united kingdom. hongwei.bao@nottingham.ac.uk doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7299 article history: received 29/06/2020; revised 05/11/2020; accepted 05/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract in this article, i offer a critical analysis of a video artwork titled lerne deutsch in meiner küche (learn german in my kitchen) (2020), created by berlin-based queer filmmaker popo fan. by focusing on fan’s negotiation of racial, ethnic, and cultural identities in the video, i argue that fan’s artwork offers a way to reimagine identities away from the identity politics that are widely circulated in the current pandemic discourse. my analysis draws on josé esteban muñoz’s (1999) notion of ‘disidentification,’ which describes minority subjects’ complex processes of identification— in particular, instances of identifying partially, conditionally and contingently— with dominant identities, discourses and ideologies. in doing so, i unravel the intricate politics of identity in the current global pandemic and highlight the role of queer disidentification as an important critical intervention in the current political debate about the covid-19 pandemic. keywords queer; china; covid-19; activism; popo fan; racism in an online research seminar titled ‘intimacies in asia in a time of pandemics’ (gcs sydney 2020), hans tao-ming huang, a queer studies scholar from national central university, taiwan, compares the geopolitics in the current covid-19 pandemic to a ‘new cold war.’ this war is characterised by an intense political and ideological antagonism between communist china and the liberal, democratic world led by the united states. jeroen de kloet, declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 85 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7299 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7299 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7299 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:hongwei.bao%40nottingham.ac.uk?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7299 jian lin, and yiu fai chow (2020) similarly point out that the current pandemic has triggered a type of ‘biopolitical nationalism’ in east asian societies— crystallised in the ‘we are doing better’ discourse in relation to covid-19— with profound ideological implications. the current pandemic has exacerbated the rising nationalism that stifles cultural identities in east asia and the world. how might we imagine alternatives? what types of critical and creative interventions are needed at this critical historical juncture? in this article, i examine queer diasporic responses to the pandemic discourse by using queer filmmaker and artist popo fan’s video lerne deutsch in meiner küche (learn german in my kitchen) (2020a) as an example. i argue that the queer diasporic ‘disidentification’ that fan uses in his artwork is an important critical intervention into the current pandemic discourse which prioritises identities and identifications. in his analysis of performances by queers of colour in the united states, josé esteban muñoz (1999: 11) points out that disidentification is a mode of dealing with dominant ideology that ‘neither opts to assimilate within such a narrative nor strictly opposes it’ and that ‘works on and against dominant ideology’: instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always labouring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance. (11-12) for muñoz, disidentification is a useful tactic practised by minoritarian subjects such as queers of colour or members of the queer diaspora. the tactic of disidentification is attentive to both structural changes— by challenging racism, homophobia and heteronormativity— and everyday resistances which may be mundane, minute and even imperceptible. for minority queer subjects, because of their dual marginalisation in both a nation-state-dominated cultural narrative and in a mainstream discourse characterised by heterosexual reproductionism, their process of identification with dominant discourses is bound to be partial, incomplete, and even unsuccessful. moments and instances of disidentification bespeak the minoritarian agency as well as the failure of the ideological interpellation and discursive closure. as was the case with the last cold war, the political and ideological affiliation of queer-identified people are under constant scrutiny in the current pandemic. queer people from china are often forced to take a stance by making a choice between china and the western world, and between a country where lgbtq rights are not recognised and the part of the world where same-sex marriages have been legalised and gay people can be ‘out and proud,’ and between illiberal neoliberalism and liberal neoliberalism. this is an easier choice for some than others. as a queer-identified person born in the people’s republic of china and currently living in the uk, although i may have constantly felt the pressure to declare my own political and ideological allegiances, the new cold war accompanying the global pandemic has only exacerbated the pressure. because i do not have an easy answer to this problem, i start to look around for examples to see how other queer people like myself are dealing with this issue. an example that strikes me is a short video made by the berlin-based queer filmmaker popo fan. originally from beijing, fan has lived in berlin for several years to pursue a career as an artist and filmmaker. he was the first person to take china’s censor, the state administration of radio, film and television, to court because of the latter’s censorship of his film mama rainbow (child 2015). fan’s current diasporic position was largely a personal choice: to go to a city where many artists gather and a city with unparalleled sexual freedom. berlin was an obvious choice, although fan constantly has to deal with issues such as language, bureaucracy and racism. although anti-foreigner and anti-immigrant sentiments have always existed to some extent in large cosmopolitan cities like berlin and behind the city’s legendarily liberal facade, the current pandemic has not only made visible but also exacerbated sinophobia and anti-asian racism (dw 2020). the invisible enemy of the coronavirus has provided many people with a good excuse to discriminate against and vent their hatred against people of bao portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202186 chinese or asian ancestry (goll 2020). fan has been verbally abused and even physically attacked at least twice in berlin’s public spaces. the most recent incident took place in march in a berlin u-bahn (subway) station where a young man shouted at him: ‘corona, du bist corona. f**k china, politische diktatur’ (coronavirus, you are coronavirus. f**k china, the political dictatorship) (amir in berlin 2020). knowing that there was no use arguing back to such an unreasonable accusation that mistook an individual for a country, fan took out his smart phone and recorded the incident. he subsequently took the video footage to the local police station to report it. the police registered the case. however, when fan followed up the case a couple of weeks later, the police had done nothing and instead claimed that they could not find the cctv footage on that day. based on his previous experience of reporting similar hate crimes, fan was familiar with this response. as an artist and filmmaker, he often uses his art to address social issues. he therefore made a video about his experience of being racially abused in the form of a comedy video. the short video titled lerne deutsch in meiner küche (learn german in my kitchen) was commissioned by rbb (radio berlin und brandenburg) as part of the radio station’s covid-19 short video series ‘4 wände berlin: 30 filme mit abstand’ (4 walls berlin: 30 films with distance). fan’s contribution to the series is a fun, youtube-style video that resembles a diy video combining cooking and language learning. with a duration of 2 minutes and 23 seconds, the video displays bilingual flashcards which divide the short video into several shorter sections. the words that appear in the video include: der reis (米, the rice), die karotte (胡萝卜, the carrot), die fledermaus (蝙蝠, the bat), die nudel (面, the noodle), der virus (病毒, the virus). each flashcard is followed by a german sentence with the word in it, emulating a language class. for example, the ‘der rice’ (the rice) flashcard is exemplified by the sentence ‘ich hatte einen reisbrei zum frühstück’ (i had rice porridge for breakfast). the video clip that illustrates this sentence shows fan making rice porridge using a saucepan. notably, most of the words displayed on the flashcards have an association with china or asia. the bat, in particular, has become a potent and controversial symbol used by many to criticise chinese for their grotesque dietary habits since the start of covid-19 (taylor 2020). these short video clips are linked by a cooking sequence, in which fan demonstrates the process of making a chinese-style noodle in his flat. although most words (such as rice, carrots and noodle) on the flashcards are represented by real objects, some are not. for example, the ‘bat’ is demonstrated by several plastic bats used for halloween decorations being thrown into a saucepan with boiling water as a reference for ‘bat soup.’ this sequence is accompanied by mysterious and ominous non-diegetic music often used in crime drama, intensifying its dramatic effect (the same sequence also appears at the beginning of the video to create suspense). the ‘virus’ flashcard is surprisingly followed by the video clip that fan shot with his smart phone about his own experience of being racially abused in a berlin u-bahn station, suggesting that the real virus is racism. resembling the style of a public interest advert, the video finishes with a line on the screen: ‘coronavirus unterscheidet nicht zwischen nationalitäten. und wir?’ (coronavirus does not make a distinction between nationalities. what about us?’), highlighting the video’s anti-racism message. fan’s video builds on, but at the same time challenges, western stereotypes about china/asia and chinese/asianness. food such as rice and noodles are often associated with chineseness and asianness, and bats have recently been seen as the mythical origin of the pandemic in the global circulation of misinformation. in the video, fan introduces one of his favourite foods, the reganmian (literally hot and dry noodle) from wuhan. here, in the midst of a global pandemic, the city of wuhan is not referred to as a place of plague and misery, or a land of bat-eating oriental barbarity, but instead as a place that is home to a type of local delicacy with a human and personal touch. following the ‘bat’ flashcard, fan is shown in the video shaking his head and saying ‘nein ich habe noch nie fledermaus gegessen’ (no, i have never eaten a bat). this statement helps dispel the myth that all chinese eat bats. but fan’s mode of address here is individuated. he is simply explaining that he has never eaten a bat himself and this does not preclude the possibility that someone else might have eaten a bat. by using an individualised mode of address, fan also refuses to represent, and speak for, a group of people, such as the whole chinese nation. for bao portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202187 fan, speaking for a group is a precarious act, as it can often create inclusions and exclusions. this belief is reflected in his wider work, especially in his queer community documentaries where he talks about queer family relationships without making a statement about a universalised ‘chinese queer’ experience. an individualised mode of address, in this context, challenges both the western accusation of the chinese as a bat-eating and barbaric nation, as well as the middle-class chinese collective denial of a possibly minoritarian dietary practice, demarcating the world along the primitive/civilised line. fan is an ‘out’ queer person. this video is in fact one of his rare non-explicitly-queer works. but the queer element is also embedded in the video. the whole video is autographic in nature and is characterised by a dramatic ‘camp’ style, which is an important aspect of queerness. in the opening sequence of the video, fan takes out a carrot from behind his back, grabbing the carrot with his hand as if he is holding a sex toy, and shouts ‘f**k’ when he attempts to catch a falling object. this sequence is followed by the flashcard for ‘rice.’ in english queer slang, rice is usually associated with asian gay men. for example, a ‘rice queen’ is someone (usually a caucasian gay man) who is sexually attracted to asian men; and the slang ‘sticky rice’ refers to asian gay men attracted to each other (caluya 2008). fan’s cooking sequence taps into the stereotype of a domestic— and perhaps slightly effeminate and desexualised— asian gay man in the western gay scene. but fan also challenges such a stereotype by refusing to play a quiet and docile role. the fact that he speaks german, makes videos, and even uses the video footage of his own experience of being racially abused to make social commentary about racism, disrupts the stereotype of a quiet and submissive asian male image. when i interviewed him on why he made this video, fan replied: i would like to show to others what i do and what i eat at home, and i hope this can disrupt some confusions about and stereotypes of asians. food is a particularly important element in my life. it is also a reason why many asians, and especially chinese, are stigmatised in the world. this video shows what asians really eat in a joking way. it functions as a form of self-irony and sarcasm. humour, irony, and sarcasm— these are the tools that fan uses to critique racism and sinophobia. as muñoz (1999: xi) points out, humour is a valuable pedagogical and political tool for queer minoritarian subjects; through humour, queer performers of colour find strength and solidarity in subverting the assumed seriousness of the dominant discourse. rather than being passive and pessimistic about the situation, fan adopts a more proactive and even activist approach to intervene in the current global pandemic discourse. apart from making videos, fan (2020b) also writes articles about his intimate life, reflecting on the transformation of queer intimacy in the current pandemic and satirising the queer-unfriendly, home-andcoupledom-centred, and heteronormative quarantine measures. he also leads virtual tours, showing aspects of queer asian life in berlin (fan 2020c). these function as forms of creative and critical interventions— and indeed, a queer asian political intervention– in the current debate about the pandemic. perhaps most important of all, fan identifies with being neither chinese nor german, neither with a political dictatorship nor a liberal democracy— he disavows these deeply embedded political and ideological positions reinforced by the new cold war accompanying covid-19. he turns instead to food, something to which people can relate to wherever they come from and whichever political camp they side with. this mundane reference to everyday life functions as a critique of fixed identities and entrenched political divisions, and a recognition of the messiness of everyday life that defies definition (probyn 2000). as part of a queer diaspora living in berlin, fan refuses to make national identifications. he prefers turning to the regional cultural imaginary of being asian, together with his queer politics, for self-identification— being both asian and queer. the closing message of the video: ‘coronavirus unterscheidet nicht zwischen nationalitäten. und wir?’ (coronavirus does not make a distinction between nationalities. what about us?) nicely sums up this political stance. at a historical moment marked by growing antagonisms based on rigid lines of nation states, group interests, politics, and ideologies, how do queer people— especially queer people of colour living in the bao portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202188 diaspora— position themselves? for queer scholars, activists and artists of chinese origin or working in chinese-language contexts, there has been an increasing demand for them to choose between contrasting alliances and affiliations, including ‘queer chinese,’ ‘queer sinophone,’ ‘queer asian,’ ‘queer diaspora,’ ‘queer transnational,’ ‘queer international,’ among others. each term embodies a series of institutional affiliations, group solidarity and citational politics. these efforts of demarcating territories are often premised on an identity politics against which queer theory has a tradition of fighting. they are mostly built upon a belief in an essentialised and unchanging nature of identity, as well as the exclusivity of such an identity: ‘either a or b.’ how about thinking of political and ideological positions in terms of ‘neither a nor b,’ or ‘both a and b,’ or ‘beside a and b.’ these fluid positionalities aptly recognise the messiness of human lives and their experiences, along with the multiple, fleeting, and contingent nature of social identities in real life. a living theory and a vital mode of political practice must be able to account for the complexity, richness and contingency of people’s identifications, experiences and affects. josé esteban muñoz’s (1999) notion of ‘disidentification’ is therefore useful here: instead of trying to identify with fixed identities and political positions, minority groups can also develop partial, incomplete, conditional, fleeting, contingent and constantly shifting identification with subject positions and politics. indeed, in the midst of a global pandemic and in the shadows of a resurging cold war, instead of asking what we identify with, perhaps we should also ask what we disidentify with, and why. queer disidentification is therefore a much-needed political position in the context of a global pandemic. references amir in berlin. 2020, ‘berlin talks 01: popo fan.’ youtube. online, available: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dqzknrrk_go&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=iwar3tgkuu98sjb9gua0cu_7xr-8fl6un5fqcuougws7wiqm6wm_ik-4vpdu [accessed 25 may 2020]. caluya, g. 2008, 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https://kulturama.goethe.de/event/ein-cineastischer-nachtspaziergang-mit-fan-popo-888?fbclid=iwar2wn86yu9jxi_uyfoqwlt9rim6poixljcn5ztes86fypvpkrvqqvwsd-k4 https://kulturama.goethe.de/event/ein-cineastischer-nachtspaziergang-mit-fan-popo-888?fbclid=iwar2wn86yu9jxi_uyfoqwlt9rim6poixljcn5ztes86fypvpkrvqqvwsd-k4 https://www.rbb24.de/politik/thema/2020/coronavirus/beitraege_neu/2020/04/rassismus-asiatisches-aussehen-berlin-attacken-beleidigungen.html?fbclid=iwar2xvhtfccceexidrxgkn0hf-la-rtm6rmnlluqklgkwbxl9e5xa9xifezy https://www.rbb24.de/politik/thema/2020/coronavirus/beitraege_neu/2020/04/rassismus-asiatisches-aussehen-berlin-attacken-beleidigungen.html?fbclid=iwar2xvhtfccceexidrxgkn0hf-la-rtm6rmnlluqklgkwbxl9e5xa9xifezy https://www.rbb24.de/politik/thema/2020/coronavirus/beitraege_neu/2020/04/rassismus-asiatisches-aussehen-berlin-attacken-beleidigungen.html?fbclid=iwar2xvhtfccceexidrxgkn0hf-la-rtm6rmnlluqklgkwbxl9e5xa9xifezy https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/31/bat-soup-dodgy-cures-and-diseasology-the-spread-of-coronavirus-bunkum https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/31/bat-soup-dodgy-cures-and-diseasology-the-spread-of-coronavirus-bunkum © 2017 by gao xingjian and mabel lee. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: gao. x. and lee, m. 2017. poems 1–9 from wandering spirit and metaphysical thoughts. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:1, 5-8. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5406 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 1 april 2017 abstract the 2000 nobel laureate for literature, gao xingjian, suffered cardiac arrest while directing rehearsals for his mega-scale opera snow in august that was due to premiere in late 2002 at the national opera house, taipei. he recovered, and the opera premiered as scheduled with the help of a co-director before he returned to paris to direct the comédie français premiere of his quatre quatuors pour un week-end. he underwent surgery in february and march of 2003, but was soon again back at work. the year 2003 had been designated ‘gao xingjian year’ by the city of marseille, and he would direct his new play le quêteur de la mort at théâtre du gymnase, and then his snow in august at opéra de marseille. it was during rehearsals for the former that he collapsed again, and was hospitalized: the play was co-directed by romain bonnin, 23–26 september 2003. large exhibitions of gao’s artworks had been held earlier that year, but the performance of snow in august was postponed. during his recuperation for most of 2004, he sometimes wrote poems, some of which he later polished or rewrote for his 2012 collection wandering spirit and metaphysical thoughts. these translations by mabel lee are poems 1 through 9 from that collection (taipei: lianjing, 2012, 89–97). keywords gao xingjian; nobel laureate; wandering spirit and metaphysical thoughts; mabel lee; translation cultural work poems 1–9 from wandering spirit and metaphysical thoughts gao xingjian1, mabel lee2 1 poet, paris 2 translator, university of sydney corresponding author: dr mabel lee, china studies centre, faculty of arts and social sciences, the university of sydney, nsw 2006, australia. mabel.lee@sydney.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5406 article history: received 07/02/2017; revised 08/02/2017; accepted 10/02/2017; published 04/05/2017 transitions and dislocations, curated cultural works issue, curated by paul allatson. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5406 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5406 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:mabel.lee@sydney.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i1.5406 (1) life for you is again so fresh you’re still in the human world indulging yourself and galloping around one more time what good luck! death was to have despatched you but god said wait let him have another turn the reprobate still has things to say and there’s no harm letting him finish that joker has too many ideas and should’ve dealt with them long ago says death who has equal rank with darkness god who is indeed the epitome of kindness has given him a horse treats him as his favourite son and forgives him again (2) right now, you’re close to the hoary sky far from humankind and the clarity you’ve just won ah, what great freedom! you look down at the human world the shambolic multitudes fighting and squabbling a totality of chaos everyone runs around oblivious to the big invisible hand that sometimes toys with them in the dark (3) a well endlessly deep god gao and lee portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 20176 is sitting inside eyes shut to conserve energy invisible to you and me (4) life is a miracle you came to the world by chance and in fact are inferior to a blade of grass whether you’ll make it through winter heaven only knows but the grass next spring will be swaying in the wind you’re insignificant inferior to dust when the allocated time comes you’ll be deleted with a brush stroke whereas the dust will go and return and can never be wiped away life comes by chance and goes by chance the dispersal of the spirit is faster than dust dust and life are essentially inseparable distilled and rarefied limitless times you are an ineffable miracle (5) a skull two black holes a fragment of the chin no longer speaks a disintegrating skeleton like withered branches of a tree poems 1 to 9 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 20177 (6) by taking a step back one can scrutinize the head even take it down and have fun playing with it if this gets boring nothing wrong with putting it back (7) the truth can’t be spoken once spoken it is no longer truth it’s enough just to know and whatever is unknown should be left to happen for example people invariably die and hearing this people will shrug or smile but when a smile isn’t possible it will have been verified (8) you know how hard it was crawling out of the quagmire so why clean the sludge you leave behind just let it return to the quagmire the noise behind you turns raucous and if life hasn’t ended even taking one step at a time is to walk one’s own road (9) you may as well recreate a weightless nature a garden of eden in your heart where you can wander leisurely to your heart’s delight gao and lee portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 1, april 20178 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: dwyer, k.a. 2019. gringos mexicanos. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 16:1/2, 160-162. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal. v16i1/2.6475 portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 14492490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu. au/ojs/index.php/portal cultural works gringos mexicanos k. angelique dwyer corresponding author: associate professor k. angelique dwyer, chair of latinx, latin american, and caribbean studies, department of modern languages, literatures and cultures, gustavus adolphus college, 800 west college avenue, st. peter, mn. 56082 usa. email: adwyer@gustavus.edu doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6475 article history: received 09/02/2019; accepted 12/2/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract this creative non-fiction piece written in spanglish called ‘gringos mexicanos’ stems from feelings of nostalgia and unrest within biculturalism and national identity. the piece deals with the degrees of belonging that two americans siblings raised in mexico have when contrasted to each other and to (mexican or american) peer groups. the narrative voice in this piece provides a unique perspective broadening dialogue(s) on mexican american identity. keywords: k. angelique dwyer; short story; ‘gringos mexicanos.’ cada uno de nosotros lleva su méxico dentro. gringo viejo, carlos fuentes. recently paco has been acting as intermediary between my brother and me. they’ve been friends since they were kids. se entienden. yo vivo en los estates and my brother lives in mexico. we never call each other. so, paco’s it. the link—el link. he was the one who told me about the award. —‘mis respetos a tu hermano ¿eh?’ me escribió en el fais. —‘tu hermano fue el único gringo mexicano que participó y, por eso, la presidencia le dio un reconocimiento.’ the photo he attached to the text thread proved it. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 160 el piti was the only gringo mexicano in jalisco who went on a historical reenactment to celebrate the bicentennial of mexico’s independence. fue una cabalgata de montones de hombres on horseback. the route he and many other riders took was part of a national project -called rutas 2010that mark the trails taken during las batallas de independencia de 1810 y en las de la revolución en 1910. meanwhile i celebrated the bicentennial at a liberal arts college in the midwest with a handful of mexican students and colleagues. our ‘gritos’ were barely heard, and more like sore aullidos. they gave me the mic ‘cause i knew the words to the mexican national anthem by heart. canté la de ‘méxico lindo y querido,’ a classic i learned from madre adelita back in grade school. she loved to sing. nos decía with tears in her eyes: —‘yo quería ser cantante pero mis papás dijeron: ¡o monja o nada! y aquí estoy cantando en nombre del señor todos los días.’ madre adelita. que en paz descanse. it must have been rough to have to be a nun just because she was the first born daughter. she’s the reason i’m such a passionate performer … and so crappy at math. en nombre de ella y de méxico i belted out a loud: ‘que digan que estoy dormido y que me traigan aquí. méxico lindo y querido, si muero lejos de ti …’ which in retrospect leads me to think: why did i leave mexico at 23? i mean, i know why, practically … but, rhetorically. and, why do i have to justify going back to mexico every single time? my husband, el caribeñito, dice: —‘¿otra vez pa’ méxico? ya fuimos el año pasado, mija.’ sí, mi rey, we were there last year for one week, and two years ago for two weeks and three years ago for two months. ¿y eso qué? i need more. extraño la parte de mí que vive ahí todavía. cada día, no matter where i am in the world: en las calles de praga, en la plaza central de asunción, en el café de iowa city o en las aulas de st. peter, me llevo a mi méxico dentro. tengo puesto a estados unidos y a gran bretaña por fuera, pero en mi lengua viven y conviven los dos, como uno solo. home: go to it take it in. land: sink your fingers into it. feel the air. el piti never left. he found a way to stay, and his heart eats, breaths and sleeps méxico (but totally drinks wendy’s frosties, dr. pepper and pickle juice). es más mexicano que los mexicanos: es charro, gallero, se echa sus tequilitas, and nobody from the city can understand his accent de pueblo. i mean, entre mi grupo de amigas gringas mexicanas i was always known as the more ‘mexican’ one—we used to characterize ourselves by degrees of mexicanness and i prided myself on being the one with the best spanish and the most knowledge on mexican culture. in other words, i knew why it was weird for two teenage gringas to enjoy flashing each other in the women’s bathroom. it’s also why i was so pudorosa around them. mexicana good girls don’t go flashing their business around, or change clothes openly in locker rooms. firstly, because there are no locker rooms in mexican public schools and secondly, because you change in the closed-door bathroom: como debe ser or you completely learn to maneuver the art of changing in public without an inch of skin showing. tampoco andas hablando de hasta dwyer portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019161 dónde llegaste ni con quién. al menos no en mi época … y tampoco estoy tan vieja. female sexuality is not a topic among mexican good girls, and even though my parents are from the midwest and were open to dialogue, i was totally raised like a good mexicana catholic girl. lie to all your friends about how far you got, unless you get caught and then, try to lie your way out. interestingly, aunque yo me llevaba el premio por ser la gringa más mexicana, i never liked being introduced by my friends in portland as ‘my friend from mexico.’ it used to piss me off so much. i guess you could say that before i negotiated my identities i was pretty much la india maría: ‘ni de aquí ni de allá.’ maybe i still feel that way. and though in my gringa friend’s eyes i was ‘más de acá que de allá,’ in el pití’s eyes, after i left home and didn’t return for several years, era ‘más de allá que de acá.’ ¿cómo explicarte que nunca me fui, que llevo mi méxico dentro? i never left, i just carried home with me, on my back, like anzaldúa said. how comforting it was to read her words for the first time. when my own family went back to my hometown in méxico to live there for six months during sabbatical, i was able to re-live so many childhood things through my own kids. was this what my parents experienced, way back when? no, wait. they didn’t speak a word of spanish in a pre-google, uber and waze environment. ‘ingue su… real revolutionary shit. my husband and i speak spanish to each other and to the kids, entonces, nada que ver. this was really different. the best part was how easily mexicanos let my family in: accepting, friendly, caring. méxico siempre me acogió como suya y al que dudara –generalmente los taxistas, por alguna extraña razónle contestaba que era de los altos de jalisco. whereas in the states, the ones who tend to challenge my mexicanness are usually chicanos: —‘… but your mom or dad is from méxico, right?’ nope. —‘… you mean you have no mexican blood?’ nel. —‘… then your grandparents, ¿no?’ ni mais. —‘… so, how is your spanish better than mine?’ yeah, i know. but all i can think is: why have you internalized the colonizers’ perspective? since when is blood, race and name the only claim to identity? it’s complicated. es un rollo. i mean, i get it, the more of a fight you put up against the mainstream to preserve your culture, más resentido estás. in the states, i can pass as an irish gringa whenever i want. in fact, i often do—particularly at the beauty salon … qué hueva … why do they need to know anything?— so, in those places, i’m katie from portland who happens to work at a college. i get that that’s a privilege. and in the chance that a monolingual gringa hears me speaking spanish to my kids at the local park and i get asked why i’m not ‘speaking american’ i can say i’m a spanish professor at a liberal arts college and i know i would get a free pass on the racism and xenophobia. ¡injusticia total! i can pass as ‘white’ non-latina. ‘cause techinically that’s what society has inscribed me as. pero, cuando no quiero ser katie de portland, me pongo mi camisa bordada que me da mi caparazón mexicano y me lanzo a platicar en español con la comunidad inmigrante de mi pueblo en minnesota, a contar mi historia. ahí soy la maestra angélica. that’s what my mom called me my first day of nun’s school in rural mexico. it was second grade and she said: did you know your name in spanish is angélica? so that’s what your friends can call you, and they still do. gringos mexicanos portal vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019162 untitled portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. the transcultural edge, curated by ilaria vanni accarigi. © 2016 [ilaria vanni accarigi]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v13i1.4829. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. the transcultural edge curated by ilaria vanni accarigi, university of technology sydney edges as aspects of landscapes have a long history in ecology. the edge is understood as a transition zone between two ecosystems, as an interface between two mediums: ‘it is the surface between the water and the air; the zone around a soil particle to which water bonds; the shoreline between land and water; the area between forest and grassland’ (mollison 1978: 26). edges are important because they produce certain effects. resources from both systems can be used, increasing productivity, for instance at the boundary of a forest and grassland. species from both systems are present at the edge interface, thus increasing biodiversity, such as the edge between coral and ocean. finally as transition zones edges have unique species, such as those found in mangrove habitats (mollison 1978: 26; turner davidson hunt & o’flaherty 2003: 440). however more recently edge effects have acquired less positive connotations. land use and natural or human-generated disturbances produce fragmented landscapes and reduced patches, smaller circumscribed zones with different characteristics from the surrounding areas. extended edges reduce the habitat of species living at the centre of a patch, and increase the chances of other species spreading (peters, gosz & collins 462). turner, davidson hunt and o’flaherty, writing about indigenous populations in three edge areas in canada, and adopting the more positive understanding of edge, have vanni accarigi the transcultural edge portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 2 proposed that access to ecological edges translates in social and cultural terms as resilience and a richer cultural capital: ‘cultural edges, rather than being border zones between discrete social entities, are zones of social interaction, cross-fertilization, and synergy wherein people not only exchange material goods but also learn from one another’ (2003: 440). business literature also provides ways to think about edges (hagel, seely brown & davison 2010). edges are defined as those projects and activities on the periphery of a core business, where people experiment, cross-pollinate, tinker and develop innovative ideas. because of the relative freedom to tinker, the interaction with people outside, and the intermingling of ideas and practices from different fields, these edges, like their ecological counterparts, are richer in diversity and more dynamic than cores. many technologies we use in our everyday lives were developed at first on the edge of companies. google maps, gmail, and google apps are examples of this dynamic. iphones started their life at the edge, as a music player, the ipod, that was supposed to be an accessory to apple computers. edges also provide my starting point to think about ecologies of transcultural processes. by this i mean to recognize that transculturation is not a matter that depends exclusively on humans. through the flows of migration and globalization edges as transition zones and interfaces are produced. and as in nature the effects they engender can be enriching, as is often theorized in happy hybridity theory, or they can cause struggles, strife, and unbalanced power relations, as many transcultural theorists have pointed out. one pertinent example comes from current news. as i write, a virus of the family flaviviridae has arrived in australia. it was first discovered in uganda in 1947, in the zika forest, from which it now takes its name: zika virus. it is spread through the bite of a tiny mosquito called aedes (the name means unpleasant in ancient greek). zika was also found in some tropical regions of asia and in french polynesia, where it contributed to the diversity of mosquito born fevers, but was classified as harmless. harmless, that is, until 2014, when it travelled to brazil––coincidentally benefiting, it is said, from the football world cup that brazil was hosting in june and july. in brazil the zika virus found optimal conditions and reproduced rapidly: at present there are some 1.5 million cases of infected people. the spreading of the virus across the americas is, according to the world health organization, a matter of time (douglas 2016). the zika vanni accarigi the transcultural edge portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 3 virus has been linked to the rise in cases of microcephaly in babies and it has been declared an international public health emergency by the world health organization. the arrival of the zika virus on the international scene does not only affect global health. it has gendered and social implications, as women, pregnant women in particular, are the most vulnerable group. the virus especially affects women living in poorer areas in the peripheries of north east brazil, where people store their own rainwater and where rubbish collection is not regular, factors that increase the breeding environment of mosquitos. the hot weather is also a factor, as women tend to wear shorts, increasing the possibility of being bitten and infected by the virus (douglas 2016). but the zika virus has also created an epistemological rift: the scientific community in brazil has very little knowledge of the newly arrived virus, or we could say the zika virus has disturbed the order of things of scientific knowledge (watts 20016). finally, the virus’s spread will also produce a chain of effects at the ecological level, as the only solution discussed by brazilian and other national authorities seems to be the chemical extermination of mosquitos. plants, bacteria, virus and animals pop up, altering the order of epistemological, as well as ecological, systems. objects leave their cultural frames, travel, reconfigure in new assemblages and start a chain of effects. languages, cultural formations, social practices collide. ideas, such as transculturation itself, traverse disciplines, question assumptions, generate different ideas, as paul allatson demonstrates in his genealogy of the concept of transculturation (2007: 229–232). allatson draws attention to transculturation’s processual character and returns the intellectual development of the concept to its latin american origins and evolution. where most postcolonial adaptations of the term often use it as a synonym of hybridity, transculturation from its first theorization described a set of concomitant processes. cuban anthropologist fernando ortiz coined the term transculturation in 1940 to explain the histories of cross-cultural encounters between european and african peoples in cuba. ortiz’s work was the result of his dissatisfaction with the idea of acculturation—the tacit acquisition of culture––deemed to illustrate a one-way situation, and proposed instead a set of processes including acculturation (cultural acquisition), deculturation (cultural loss), and neoculturation (the emergence of new cultural formations). other cultural theorists expanded on ortiz’s concept. nancy morejón (1982) introduced an analysis of the power struggles implicit in vanni accarigi the transcultural edge portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 4 transculturation, and highlighted how no group or cultural formation can ever over overrule others. angel rama (1982, 1997) writing about latin american literature elaborated transculturation as an analytical mode to query fixed philosophical, literary and cultural ideas. drawing on rama, walter mignolo (1995) linked transculturation with different and multiple speaking positions. mary louise pratt, in imperial eyes: writing and transculturation (1992), used transculturation to stress the reciprocity of exchanges between colonial centres and peripheries and to query the way in which the peripheries influenced the metropolis, including ‘the latter’s obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself’ (1992: 6). pratt also offers another useful, and influential, concept: the contact-zone. this describes the entanglement and co-presence of trajectories and people previously separated by geographical and historical factors. in a contact-zone, crucially, power relationships are always uneven. silvia spitta (1995) expanded on this lack of symmetry in power relations from a feminist angle, to remind us that colonizing projects in the americas started with violence against women. as a result, the gendered nature of power needs to be recognized in the discursive arenas of hybridity and mestizaje. spitta also opened up the discourse of transculturation to material culture. in her misplaced objects, spitta tells the story of objects that in the process of travelling from one place to another disrupted the established order of things and forced a ‘profound reshuffle of the known’ (2009: 5). objects such as montezuma’s headdress, misplaced in europe and cut loose from the web of meaning and cultural practices that had produced it, engendered by their very presence epistemological rifts, thereby determining a rearranging of categories and taxonomies, and destabilizing certainties (2009 5). for spitta: every new cultural configuration and therefore every subject position depends upon transcultural processes: the uprooting of objects, the loss of place and memory that such uprootings entails, the reconfiguration of objects in foreign spaces and the concomitant reorganization of the epistemological table of the receptor culture under the impact of those objects. (2009: 21) * * * in this inaugural curated issue of portal, i want to open up a space at the edge of academic writing, a site of interrelations, of disciplinary transitions, of cross-pollination vanni accarigi the transcultural edge portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 5 of diverse orders, and, above all, of tinkering with ideas and modes of writing. i thus present five works that engage with a variety of transcultural edges. i also want to mimic edge dynamics, bringing together elements from two distinct epistemological systems: transcultural theory on one hand, and ecology on the other. this dynamic opens up a series of possibilities to expand the ways we think about transculturation. i ask: how can we consider the work done by things, plants, animals, spaces––all that is more-than human—in processes of transculturation? similar questions are asked by stephanie springgay in her critical appraisal of canadian artist diane borsato, ‘learning to be affected in contemporary art.’ here springgay takes her departure point from a corpus of art projects to reflect on affective pedagogies and to argue that learning is not a matter of grasping notions or skills, but rather a matter of movement. in this proposition to learn is to be moved, animated by the multiplicity of things and beings. to illuminate this affective pedagogy, borsato’s work is presented as a series of snapshots that illustrate the artist’s concern with practices of embodied learning, or as springgay writes, borrowing from bruno latour (2004): ‘learning to be affected.’ we follow borsato as she transits across diverse cultural formations and practices: working with beekeepers in italy and learning italian; working with beekeepers in ontario and meditating; going mushrooming with mycologists in new york’s chinatown and walking, exploring, as springgay points out, ‘the mobility of thinkingdoing.’ the modality of this exploration is ecological: learning to be affected is an embodied pedagogy. things, animals, spaces, fungi, other humans and their interrelations––from the invisible mycelia of a canadian forest to the transnational trade flows of exotic mushrooms from asia to new york—are intrinsic to the way we apprehend the world. rox de luca’s contribution is literally the result of objects gathering at the edges, in this case plastic detritus washed up on sydney’s bondi beach. in her previous work de luca investigated histories of migration, concentrating on the transculturation of everyday objects, such as kitchen implements, personal items, or a collection of italian needlework patterns her mother used to buy. in her recent work, abundance, excess, waste, de luca maintains a close attention to misplaced objects: fragments of plastic broken up by the ocean and landed from elsewhere in sydney. it is an investigation of vanni accarigi the transcultural edge portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 6 an edge––the beach as the transition area between land and ocean––and of one of its effects: the constant making and unmaking of an assemblage of bits of human-made materials. from this edge de luca generates new assemblages, using jewellery making techniques, as coils of colourful plastic debris strung together with wire. in this process, collecting found objects on a beach, and reorienting them following aesthetic criteria, she questions how bits of colourful plastic can disturb and disrupt the order of things. this question is epistemological: how do we understand colourful garlands of rubbish assembled to look beautiful? and, tragically, material: how does plastic rubbish disrupt marine and land ecosystems? the southern californian susana chávez-silverman starts her ‘solstice hart-seer: recordando “la chascona” y “la sebastiana’ crónica ,’ a code-switching crónica––a transcultural and translingual genre per se––by reading a transcultural narrative in the travel section of the new york times about a writer’s visit to pablo neruda’s houses in chile. soon chávez-silverman despite herself is drawn into the story, echoing the journalist’s sense of being drawn into neruda’s houses by their materiality. the objects dripping with moods and affects unlock chávez-silverman’s buried memories of her own trip to chile and to neruda’s houses. two sets of memories are triggered by looking at the same photographs and remembering the same objects. this and other assemblages (in her own home, for instance) of objects that travelled from somewhere else, narratives and imagination unbend fragments of memory, which unfurl, like––she writes––‘ferns’ tendrils.’ this unfurling evokes the unheimliche, the un-homely, one of the traits objects acquire in the process of transculturation. as spitta writes, when things are uprooted, they lose their place and memory; then they are reconfigured in a new space, and this in turn leads to an epistemological reorganization (2009: 21). if in other works we see this process between cultural formations, in chávez-silverman’s crónica, objects reconfigure a private epistemology. leyla stevens in her first person visual essay ‘lomba merpati: place-making and communal signalling within javanese pigeon racing,’ offers a narrative of a transcultural encounter and a description of another entanglement between humans and non-humans. stevens finds herself walking through yogyakarta while on an artist’s residency. for the artist walking is a way to apprehend her new environment and to carve out her own sense of place from the multiplicity of stories and trajectories vanni accarigi the transcultural edge portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 7 animating the javanese city. during these wanderings stevens starts to recognize a particular spatial configuration: sites at the edge of rice fields, or transition areas between one kampung (village or neighbourhood) and another, alongside the river, delimitated by goal posts. these are training grounds for pigeon races. her narrative brings to mind another famous description of the intense relationship between birds and men in indonesia, clifford geertz’s 1973 essay on cockfighting in bali, ‘deep play: notes on the balinese cockfight.’ unlike geertz, who focused on the status and social implications of the game, stevens concentrates on the relationship between men and pigeons. at dusk men from the kampungs, gather in the training grounds with their pigeons. it is a waiting game, during which men, female birds, objects and the edge between the kampungs, are suspended in the time spent waiting for the male pigeons to return to their owners. while nothing seems to be happening at first sight in the photographs, we slowly understand that stevens is documenting the reciprocity of pigeon training: pigeons learn from men to fly back, men learn in response to pigeons to move, wait, and act. frans ari prasetyo, in ‘city performance: chinese new year in west kalimantan,’ presents a different type of transcultural entanglement in indonesia. we are in kalimantan (borneo), in the city of singkawang, a city unique in indonesia in having a chinese majority. the chinese new year local festival, documented in a series of photographs, gives the opportunity for prasetyo to start a reflection on the complex role played by the event in the negotiation of relationships between china and indonesia at a macro level, and between dayak (the indigenous people of kalimantan ) and chinese populations on the other. prasetyo’s presentation of the festival generates three meanings. the first meaning is the festival as an index of historical changes in the indonesian government’s legal treatments of its chinese-origin peoples, treatments that are shadowed by shifting foreign policy and international relations with china. the second meaning is as a site, or stage, of transculturation and the constantly negotiated power relations between chinese, dayak and malay peoples in the city. the third is as a successful performance of civic unity during which the city generates a self representation based on a cosmopolitan imaginary. prasetyo complements these overlapping readings with a detailed visual ethnography of the festival, showing how a chinese cultural practice is embodied in a specific historical and cultural local context. the festival could thus be understood as a transcultural edge, a site where unevenly vanni accarigi the transcultural edge portal, vol. 13, no. 1, january 2016. 8 distributed different cultural systems, representation, imaginaries converge and give rise to new transcultural practices. reference list allatson, p. 2007, ‘transculturation,’ key terms in latino/a cultural and literary studies. blackwell publishing, malden, ma and oxford: 229–232. douglas, b. 2016, ‘city at centre of brazil’s zika epidemic reeling from disease’s insidious effects,’ the guardian, 25 january. online, available: http://www.theguardian.com/globaldevelopment/2016/jan/25/zika-virus-mosquitoes-countries-affected-pregnant-women-childrenmicrocephaly [accessed 5 february 2015]. geertz, c. 1973, ‘deep play: notes on the balinese cockfight,’ the interpretation of cultures: selected essays. basic books, new york, 1973: 412–453. hagel iii, j., seely brown, j. & davison, l. 2010, the power of pull: how small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion. basic books, new york. latour, b. 2004, ‘how to talk about the body? the normative dimension of science studies,’ body & society, vol. 10, no. 2–3: 205–229. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1357034x04042943. louise, p. m. 1992, imperial eyes. travel writing and transculturation. routledge, london & new york. mignolo, w. 1995, the darker side of the renaissance: literacy, territoriality, and colonization. university of michigan press, ann arbor. mollison, b. 1978, permaculture 1: a perennial agricultural system for human settlements. transworld publishers, melbourne. morejón, n. 1982, nación y mestizaje en nicolás guillén. rodríguez feo, havana. ortiz, f. 1940, contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. j. montero, havana. peters, d. p. c., gosz, j. r. & collins, s.l. 2009, ‘boundary dynamics in landscapes,’ in the princeton guide to ecology, (ed.) s. a. levin. princeton university press, princeton, nj: 458–463. rama, a. 1982, transculturación narrativa en america latina. siglo veintiuno, mexico city. rama, a. 1997, ‘processes of transculturation in latin american narrative’ trans. m. moore, journal of latin american cultural studies, vol. 6, no. 2: 155–171. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569329709361909. spitta, s. 1995, between two waters: narratives of transculturation in latin america. rice university press, houston, tx. spitta, s. 2009, misplaced objects: migrating collections and recollections in europe and the americas. university of texas press, austin. turner, n. j., davidson-hunt, i. j. & o’flaherty, m. 2003, ‘living on the edge: ecological and cultural edges as sources of diversity for social-ecological resilience,’ human ecology, vol. 31, no. 3: 439–461. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/a:1025023906459. watts, j. & boseley, s. 2016, ‘scientific ignorance about zika parallels aids crisis in 1980s, say brazilian experts,’ the guardian, 2 february. online, available: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/02/zika-virus-scientific-research-lacking-latinamerica [accessed 5 february 2016]. transnational trajectories – regional integration and the role of the state transnational trajectories and cultural identity: lessons from the chilean-australian experience philippa collin, university of technology sydney this paper raises questions about the development of cultural identity as it transforms and impacts upon processes of regional integration in the asia pacific rim, through a consideration of the postnational tendencies created by transnational migrant populations. it focuses on an investigation into the responses of some chileanaustralians to issues of national identity and the current discourses on immigration, refugees and border protection, i have sought to move debates around immigrant identity in australia beyond the national. in employing theoretical frameworks from migration theory, namely diaspora and transnational studies, i critically engage with the ways in which australian identity is discussed in relation to, and by, migrants. these dialogues are then considered in the context of the creation of state-led transnational institutions in order to understand the relationships of power that might impact on transnational projects. despite contemporary debate on the decline of the nation state there is good reason for perceived national groups to maintain a vested interest in their home state, and for the state, in return, to pursue at least a paltry relationship with the nations that live within the boundaries of its territory. the volatile relationship between the state and nations is exemplified in the recent conflicts in the former yugoslavia, zimbabwe and aceh. the concept of nation is both a fragile and yet potent idea that operates along trajectories that are both unifying and dividing, that are productive and destructive, and which have a profound impact on all peoples occupying the globe in the so-called postcolonial era. the colonial projects of old have been conquered by the new wave of imperialist global capitalism and this in turn has produced the conditions in which regional integration has become the postmodern economic and political catch phrase. this is particularly evident in the economic and ‘defense’ alliances that have been formed over the last century, such as nafta, nato, asean and the eu. the impact of technology, the economic, cultural and political relationships between states and their expatriate communities and the ease of movement between countries portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 1 1 (which some groups enjoy) have changed the way we position ourselves in the world. individuals and groups may simultaneously imagine themselves as residents of a global village, as members of communities who may have no physical sited-ness or as independent stakeholders in several different communities whose physical locations and perceived characteristics are distinct and mutually exclusive. this demonstrates the seemingly arbitrary regulation of physical space, whilst allowing conceptual spaces (those that facilitate the passage of information and images) to virtually exist without controls. yet, at the same time as we are witnessing a period in which there is apparently greater freedom of movement, we see an international hysteria around border control emerging, particularly in the eu, united states of america and australia. refugees and so-called illegal migrants has created a debate on who should be able to enter and exit countries and how. this is despite the fact that there were fewer refugees in 2001 (12 million globally) than ten years earlier in 1991 (16.8 million) (unhcr, ‘basic facts’). nevertheless, state control of borders in the ‘minority’ world or the ‘north’ are becoming more stringent, whilst there appears to be a simultaneous departure or fragmenting of the concept of the ‘national’, as people, images, objects and ideas travel to and from different parts of the globe with varying degrees of regulation. (for instance, the movement of people is highly regulated in some areas whilst the transfer of products or images is hardly regulated at all.) however, in the context of these ‘global’ conditions, the challenges are not felt equally across all groups. the challenges that have been made to the status of the ‘nation’ by technology do not necessarily affect all people equally. for example, australian aboriginal peoples may be more concerned about the continuing erosion of their cultural heritage as a result of the persistent forces of neo-colonialism than they are about north american cultural imperialism (appadurai 1996a, 32). by the same token, immigrants may find that the pressures to assimilate in their host country can be subverted through the forging of online communities that exist outside the realm of the state. what forms might these communities take, particularly in relation to broader projects of regional integration? how are they given expression and by what means can we observe, participate in or understand them? portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 2 2 arjun appadurai has also argued that in order to fully comprehend the way in which humans organise, express themselves and develop in societies, we should now ‘think ourselves beyond the nation’ (appadurai 1996b, 40). this paper is similarly concerned with how the concept of national identity is being challenged in a postcolonial global order that is punctuated by the neo-imperialistic mechanisms of free-market neo-liberalism and the increasing advances of technology in communications, travel and exchange. the concepts of nationalism and the nation operate on several key levels. in general, the notion of a community defined by ‘ethnicity’ is considered essential because it symbolizes the common myths, rituals, values, objectives and traditions that unify individuals and groups. this ethnicity is then sited and bound in a physical location from which it may articulate its national identity in comparison with foreign nationalisms. this is what appadurai refers to as the ‘production of locality’ (appadurai 1996b, 42). the projection of ‘locality’ into non-sited spaces, by way of movement and technology produces interesting challenges for the successful operation of nationalism. localities are no longer dependent on space. they traverse space by way of technological advances and in the portable imaginations of migrants. these new localities have created a crisis for the modern state and have rendered the concept of the nation most problematic. more importantly they have opened up real possibilities for transnational identities to challenge the remnants of colonial power structures that shelter behind the faltering shadow of the nation-state. this perspective reveals conditions in which alternative political and economic structures might evolve that more equitably reflect the cultural conditions of societies. in particular this perspective offers an alternative to official policies of multiculturalism, which have historically been most vigorously (though differently) pursued by the governments of australia and the united states of america. this thinking now appears to reveal some of the serious fractures emerging in contemporary nationalist projects. what does multiculturalism really signify and why is it worthwhile searching for alternative ways to theorise cultural and ‘national’ identity where more than one ethnic group is a participant? the doctrine of multiculturalism has been heavily criticised in australia by ‘ethnic communities’ who feel they have been commodified and turned into a spectacle, whilst the inherited british culture has been naturalized as portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 3 3 the core culture of australian society (stratton 2000, 23). multiculturalism has also been trashed by the howard government’s anti-political correctness stance in an effort to ‘prevent the nation from fragmenting’, on the grounds that multiculturalism focuses on the things that divide us, rather than unite us (106). undoubtedly the policy of multiculturalism has a reputation for having made a contribution to the perception of australian society as a pluralistic and largely ‘tolerant’ society. however, the shortfalls of the policy of multiculturalism have been criticized most notably because, in the words of jon stratton, ‘official multiculturalism is formulated around stable – that is fixed and unchanging – national cultures’ (206). these consumable ‘spectacles’ are therefore stripped of claims to agency and operate in a core-periphery relationship with the ‘white anglo-celtic’ tradition (hage 1998). however, this perspective, i will argue, ignores the transnational influences and the referential processes in which countries, such as australia, are engaged with both the notion of ‘home and ‘host’ countries, (as also applies to british australians [stratton, 2000]) and the idea of australia’s place within the ‘regional’ and ‘global’. this paper departs slightly from the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, geography and political science, that traditionally contribute to the field of migration studies (vertovec 2001, 3). i take a cultural studies approach that is evocative, rather than purely analytical as i attempt to offer grounding for the directions that a closer, more comprehensive and in depth study might take. in pursuing this objective i therefore propose three points of departure for the study of immigrant responses to the notion of national identity. firstly, immigrant identities are framed by the postcolonial conditions that have propelled their migration. therefore, personal and collective experiences and reasons for immigrating to australia are profoundly implicated in the development of a sense of australian identity over time. this must be located within the structural, political and economic social conditions of being a migrant in australia, and a member of a community whose roots are still connected (if only symbolically) to a foreign birthplace. this assumption builds on the arguments forwarded by appadurai (1996a & b), bhabha (1990; 1994) and hall (1990; 1992; 1996) in relation to diaspora and identity. secondly, these identities are constantly engaged with and implicated in the struggle by the dominant national identity to retain control of the national imagination portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 4 4 (as has been discussed by stratton [1998; 2000] and hage [1998]) and these are dynamics which are powerfully felt within regional dialogues, specifically in relation to migration and development. thirdly, we must consider the impact of transnational institutions introduced from above on transnational populations, for instance, la region catorce and the cabildos culturales, in the case of chilean-australians. these propositions are considered in relation to responses of chileans to the issue of immigration and their reflections on their own chilean-australian identity. it is also discussed within the context of la region catorce, an initiative of the chilean government to creating formal and institutional links between the chilean state and the chilean expatriate community. searching for new views: identity, migration and the national subject— positionality and potentiality from a theoretical point of view, this paper is concerned with ideas of agency and subjectivity as fundamental to the development of an identity. the paper considers the proposition that if subjectivity and agency are fundamental elements of a ‘national’ identity, then migrant identities must be, by virtue of their passage through time, place and event, transnational. therefore, in a country such as australia, which is comprised of a large immigrant population, a new focus on the transnational nature of these identities signifies the possibility of a postnational conception of australian-ness. this paper explores this notion as it is experienced by the little-documented chilean ‘community’ in australia with regards to their experience of ‘being’ australian. this exploration of identity critically engages with theories of identity, particularly that which is described by laclau as the ‘articulated’ postmodern identity (laclau 1990, cited in hall, 1992, 278-279). employing this framework i seek to interrogate notions of national identity, particularly as it is understood and theorized in the australian context, focusing on the production of identity in immigrants. the point of departure is postcolonialism and the journey is navigated through the theoretical field of cultural studies, utilizing the work of diaspora studies and transnational studies, particularly drawing on basch et.al. (1994), appadurai (1996a & b), bhabha (1990; 1994), hall (1990; 1992; 1996), spivak (1988; 1990) and vertovec (1999; 2001). portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 5 5 what is meant when we evoke the notion of ‘culture’ in discussing national—or postnational—identities? some argue for the reconceptualisation of culture in terms of fluidity, encounter and disruption in a multidimensional and multidirectional flow across space and time (appadurai 1996; bhabha 1994; gupta & ferguson 1992). this is a flow, suggest gupta and ferguson, that not only traverses the postcolonial boundaries of modern nation-states, but that exists within the formal borders of these states – though these may be subverted by margin dwellers. these then become borders that are blurred and are transgressed as geographical limits or conventions from ‘within’. at the same time, they are challenged by individuals or groups who reside outside the state borders of their ‘nation’ as exiles, immigrants, refugees and expatriates (gupta & ferguson, 1992, 7). this idea has particular resonance when considering what a regional cultural identity might be and how it would develop. appadurai argues that identities travel across and exist in a multitude of dimensions— or ‘scapes’—that create the junctions—and disjunctions—between ‘economy, culture, and politics’ that destabilise the concept of the ‘national’ (appadurai, 1996a). therefore, the postmodern identity must be understood with recourse to influences and events that are peculiar to experience through time and space as it is simultaneously engaging with the rhetoric of the nation. the migrant traverses, intersects and subverts the boundaries of the modern nation-state, through physical movement and the portability of ideas, and in doing so ‘acts out’ multiple cultural and hence national identities across time and space. what i will also consider is the way that ‘difference’ is viewed through the lens of culture, and how difference and similarity are constructed in the formation of transnational identities, particularly as they engage with and impact on notions of inclusion and exclusion, and ‘the national’. traversing the field…who, why and how? i advocate the recognition of not one, but many socio-ethno-political centres in australia. the objective of this theoretical shift is to promote the generative transfers of experience, feeling and knowledge, as opposed to the powerplay between subjects for ‘voice’ or ‘ear’. this acknowledges the line of thinking promoted by stuart hall, that identity is fluid and unsettling. in discussing diaspora identities he suggests that they can be seen as ‘framed’ by two operative vectors: one of similarity and continuity; the other of difference and rupture. more generally, he suggests that the portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 6 6 narrative of displacement and difference impacts profoundly on certain immigrant subjects, while they simultaneously reach for that which is familiar and constant (hall 1990, 226, 236). furthermore, as james clifford explains, [t]hey are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments, and they encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host countries and their norms’(clifford 1994, 307). considering the positions of bhabha and gilroy on nationalism and identity, it is the performative transgression, the transformations generated by encounters between two or more ‘cultures’, that produce dialogues about the ‘national’ and contribute to the construction of (but are not constitutive of) identity. investigation of the experiences of migrants who have made the physical and emotional journeys must also consider the histories and social realities that shape the expatriate experience of new structures and relationships of domination. i propose that in the australian context, these negotiations occur within many spaces, some within the realm of the ‘dominant’ identity, others in transnational spaces peculiar to particular groups. this paper also draws attention to the way that certain groups create alternative spaces in an attempt to make sense of the identity politics at play, specifically in the context of australia. this has a direct bearing on how different groups, particularly those identified as ‘ethnic communities’, interact with and articulate notions of home and host national identities. as appadurai demonstrates, spheres of meaning are no longer confined to the margins of global discourse. they now operate within localized, globalized and transnationalized spaces (appadurai 1996a, 10). in this sense they not only respond to and reinterpret sites of immigration, but also influence and engage with localized and diversified cultures in transformative ways. i suggest that the struggle to be both in and between ‘places’ operates on the identity of immigrants through the experience of migration as they ‘arrive from somewhere else’ and that this in turn transforms the local, often naturalized, (though not indigenous) cultures. these multiple influences occur because the rhetoric in australia is simultaneously one that promotes a ‘multicultural’ society, recognizing the diverse influences on the nascent australian culture and yet, it is also a discourse that is uncertain about how it defines membership to the australian ‘type’.1 australian 1 australian ‘type’ in this sense evokes images and stereotypes promoted as specifically not ethnic, nesb, migrant australians. this draws from the way in which stratton uses the notion of an ‘australian type’ in his book, race daze (1998). portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 7 7 identity is not yet able or willing to remove the explanatory hyphen between that place one is ‘from’ and the place one is ‘at’ (gilroy, 1991). this is because the simplistic use of the hyphen in, for instance ‘chilean-australian’, draws attention to what is missing—or required—for unconditional membership, whilst simultaneously emphasizing the ‘ethnically’ defined cultural differences as sites of resistance to the national type (gilroy 1991, 281). in the australian context, this forms a paradox that works on immigrants as they are positioned as ‘ethnic’ subjects. their ‘ethnicity’ is rhetorically referred to as contributing to the ‘diversity’ of the australian community, (what it means to be an australian citizen, dima 1997) and yet, it is often viewed as signifying resistance to ‘traditional’ notions of australian-ness (smith & phillips 2001). hence, my interest lies in the ways in which this relationship is negotiated and ‘where’ or ‘how’ identity-constitutive dialogues emerge in those who traverse these shifting, incongruent and yet overlapping spaces. during 2002 i conducted interviews with chilean-australians in sydney. these interviews sought to explore the responses of chilean-australians to questions about national identity, place and home. subjects were also asked to comment on the current refugee and immigration policies as a way of thinking about how transnational identities interpret and engage with notions of belonging, membership and place. roots of the chilean community in australia there have essentially been four ‘waves’ of migration from chile to australia. the first occurred in the 1960s following industrialization, amidst continuous political conflict and increasingly unstable economies across the region. chileans who arrived in australia at this time immigrated at the end of the post 1945 boom in the wake of the white australia policy. the second wave came in the years around 1970, in the lead-up to and as a response to the election of the socialist government headed by salvador allende. these chileans were largely from the political right, fleeing what they feared would be a radical socialist regime. the third influx of migrants came after the 1973 military coup. these immigrants were fleeing into exile, escaping political persecution, torture and execution. the fourth wave may be considered as still ‘coming in’. it includes those who have arrived as participants in the family reunion program and those who have immigrated independently to australia following a period of steady economic growth and political stability in chile. the portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 8 8 greatest number of chileans arrived in australia during this period from 1973 to 1989; around 9,000 came between 1973 and 1978 and similar numbers arriving between 1984 and 1989 (1991 census).2 chileans who arrived in australia during this period found australia a generally welcoming place (caba 1988, 18-19). at the end of 2000, the department of immigration found that there were 33,838 chileans residing in australia (http://www.immi.gov.au/statistics/ infosummary/source.htm). the ‘everyday struggles’ of adjusting to life in a new country were matched by a direct and organized campaign during the 1970s and 1980s by many chileans in australia opposing the pinochet dictatorship (martin montenegro 1994, 44-46). the participation of chileans in formal politics, allied with australian trade unions, established a strong organizational tradition of bringing together chilean-australians for political, cultural and social activities. chilean history and culture are also ‘kept alive’, re-articulated and experienced in australia by various interest groups. beyond organized modes of cultural expression, chilean culture is increasingly consumed on a daily basis by way of technological advances. the internet and cable television have reduced economic barriers to purchasing satellite television taking the consumer beyond the filtered information of the spanish-language media and esta semana, a program made especially for chileans living outside chile. therefore, chileans—and their australian-born children—are able to experience being chilean through the direct consumption, not only of chilean news and events, but also of popular culture. however, for some chileans, their arrival in australia as political refugees is a particular point of reference in the process of developing a sense of australian-ness. in the australian context the migrant, particularly the refugee, has been awarded status of the ‘most’ other, what ashish nandy describes as the ‘intimate enemy’ in colonial times (papastergiadis 1997, 267). many chileans came to australia as political asylum seekers and their experience of being (in) australia is connected to the stigma of being a refugee. 2 it is not my concern here to analyse what these figures might reflect in terms of changes to government policy. but it would be interesting at another time to investigate how changes in government policy have affected the arrival of migrants from south america. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 9 9 http://www.immi.gov.au/statistics/infosummary/source.htm all of the chilean community that came over as refugees understand how hard it is, after what you have been through, then arriving in a new country, where you can’t speak the language, or find a job in your field (interview a). therefore i would like to consider three sets of circumstances that affect the ways in which chileans have engaged with the process of identity formation in australia. firstly, how does the immigrant engage with his/her own construction of the ‘other’ in relation to notions of australian identity, particularly as defined by multiculturalism and especially in prime minister john howard’s present post-multicultural age? secondly, how are chileans’ notions of chilean-ness disrupted or contested from ‘within’? and thirdly, to what extent are these negotiations affected by the movement and transfer of the immigrant subject across increasingly globalized times and spaces? as papastergiadis observes, ‘the arrival of a foreign text is never a perfect isomorph of another culture; it too, is formed by the travails of travelling’ (papstergiadis1997, 272). this process is described by fiedler: i try to put together my own self ravaged by the separation of those two hemispheres i happen endlessly to move between without ever leaving, without ever returning, without ever arriving. i am deluzean, i am experiencing the smoothness of the global. (fiedler 2000, 42) this process crosses over into the ‘territory’ of the ‘australian’ and disrupts the dominant myths, images and ideologies of australia and her struggle to come to terms with the presence of the ‘ethnic’ other. the subscription to a particular identity politics is the active and conscious exercising of agency and a deliberate positioning of subjectivity on the part of each individual or group. it cannot be assumed that assimilation to a new ‘national’ type is the inevitable and invariable outcome of immigration. on the contrary, it suggests that it is possible to subscribe to more than one identity at a time. this perspective is particularly useful when considering how identity studies can push postcolonial theory into a consideration of the postnational by focusing on the challenges posed to nationalism by migrants. as hall notes, there are several main, but not exhaustive, elements that constitute traditional notions of nationalism. these include an emphasis on a commonly accepted and valued narrative that emphasizes ‘origin, continuity, tradition and timelessness’(hall 1992, 294). logically, this definition suggests that members of a portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 10 10 nation assume the unique characteristics of the commonly accepted and valued narrative defined by hall. there are obvious problems with this conceptualization of nationalism. however, the inconsistencies, contradictions and inventions are precisely the factors that allow us to theorize more accurate representations of identity. what is particularly well illuminated by the diversity of chilean-australians, is that the challenges produced by attempting to theorize national identity, might well be best understood by theorizing beyond the ‘national’. indeed, alternative terminology most frequently used to describe migrant groups, such as diaspora or cosmopolitan, are simply inadequate for describing the ways in which migrants conceptualize their identity in relation to the doctrines of nationalism. for example it is difficult to speak with any great clarity of a chilean ‘diaspora’ given the breadth in experience and conceptualization of chilean and chilean-australian identity. however, regardless of these differences, most chileans will go to great lengths to defend their ‘australianness’ just as they will vigorously and proudly demonstrate their ‘chilean-ness’. perceptions of ‘identity’ in the australian context any formation of immigrant identity is implicitly affected by the dynamics of the discourse of national identity within the host country. thus, the development of a regional identity, as would form through the strengthening processes of regional integration, would also be influenced by the discourses of competing nationalisms as they engage with each other in the regional space. this must cautiously avoid the centralizing or naturalizing of any one cultural group, as was the legacy of the colonial era. as stratton has observed, australian identity has always been bound up in the idea of a ‘racially based australian type’. australian-ness has always been defined against what has been considered to be ‘un-australian’. indeed race has operated here as ‘…a marker to exclude those who were not considered to be eligible to be members of the nation’(stratton 1998, 9). despite the advances made since the end of the white australia policy, and the gains made by the practice of official multiculturalism during the 1980s and early 1990s, race and ethnicity are still key determinates in the perception of ‘australian-ness’. the major criticism, or failing, of multiculturalism is well debated and bhabha puts it simply when he says that the ‘…universalism that paradoxically permits diversity masks ethnocentric norms, values and interests’ (in portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 11 11 rutherford 1990, 208). to be more precise, what is referred to as ‘ethnicity’ might be better understood as signifying a set of behaviours characteristic of or associated with a non-anglo culture. therefore, ‘difference’ is the most prominent characteristic of what is referred to as ethnicity. this difference is linked in racist discourses in australia to the notion of the ‘anti-national’ or ‘un-australian’. in a recent study on notions of ‘un-australian’, respondents3 said that group behaviour that reflected placing foreign influences or loyalties above those of australia, or ‘ethnic separatism’, was seen as an affront to australian values and norms of civility (smith & philips 2001, 12). whilst overtly racist attitudes, such as those presented by pauline hanson were also held to be ‘un-australian’, the beliefs expressed by hanson were similarly reflected in the view that by ‘…allegedly remaining in ghettos, neglecting to learn english and failing to assimilate, certain minorities were perceived to be separatist, thumbing their noses at other australians’ (smith & philips 2001, 12). this focus on the perceived resistance of immigrants to the prescribed australian identity is seen by hage as a challenge to the ‘fantasy of white supremacy’ (hage 1998, 209). the implicit contradictions in the way in which nationalism is evoked in the australian context reveal the racist undertones of both the nationalist and the multicultural projects. essentially this has created a potent confusion in the australian psyche, affecting new immigrants as profoundly as it affects the later generations of the colonial society. several responses to my questions about how people viewed their own national identity were also caught-up in the contradictions exposed by hage’s critique of the ‘myth of white supremacy’. these chilean-australians defined belonging to, or involvement in, a multicultural community as the essence of being australian. difference as well as collective efforts to ‘contribute to the development of society’ was what gave one participant a sense of national identity and most participants also recognized that ethnic difference affected their entrance into the national discourse, but that this was achieved through a sense of participation and community: i feel very much a part of this society. i live in this area and i feel more a part of the multicultural society of australia. because in my view i see australian society, not as an anglosaxon society, i see australian society as a multicultural society. so that helps me to feel that i am part of this society and i feel that i am part of the development of this society that more and 3 respondents included people from non-anglo backgrounds. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 12 12 more is becoming into a multicultural society…it’s not like i forced myself to become part of it. but over the years i became part of it. that’s helped me a lot. the way that i see others, the way that i function within society because i feel part of something (interview b). therefore the contradictions also reinforce the divisions. the focus on difference, so greatly valued in the discourse of multiculturalism denies the ‘ethnic’ subject full membership to the traditionally defined australian national subject. however, transnational identities are able to subvert the self-appointed authority of nationalist discourse by creating alternative spaces that have greater perceived value than the ‘national’. for instance, the ‘local’ community is seen as a microcosm of society, while the transnational spaces are what contain the greater ‘community’. this suggests that whilst theories around hybridity and hage’s reading of the dynamics of multicultural identity in relation to a white core are imperative to a comprehensive reading, they are not authoritative or exhaustive. the articulated identities of migrants suggest that whilst transnational identities are affected by essentially racist discourses of assimilation, integration and multiculturalism, they are also able to disengage from these identity spaces and create and interact with identity spaces that are evoked under different sets of conditions. it is within this same conceptual space that the notion of a regional identity, located in the exchange and valuing of diverse cultures, can be generated—where the real and imagined boundaries of the nation have been ruptured. this contributes to the on-going negotiation of self-identity. several people who were interviewed pointed out that they will never be able to ‘not be chilean. that is where i was born. that is who i was’ (interview a). and yet, they stressed the fact that having lived in australia for fifteen or twenty years, their community, their lives have been made in australia, and it is equally impossible in this sense not to feel ‘australian’ too. one particular participant noted that, by virtue of her highly traumatic experiences and subsequent departure from chile, she felt she ‘owed’ a lot to australia, and that this gratitude formed the basis of her loyalty and identification as part of the australian community (interview e). hage observes that non-anglo immigrants to australia have consistently found that (the extent of) their ‘australianness’ is continuously being called into question, that they must ‘prove’ that they are just as australian as any anglo-australian (hage 1998, 218-219). this suggests that the non-anglo subject is constantly referring back to a ‘white’ centre to measure their relative closeness or distance from this ‘desired’ model. however, at the same time, portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 13 13 they express an identity that is not represented within the historical imaginary of the australian nation. this reflects self-referencing to and the active recreation of a foreign past and present, further evidence of active identification with a transnational identity. for several interlocutors, this is manifest in their experiences of return to chile and being confronted by a reality that did not fit their imagined place. so the first time i went back i am sitting there trying to be normal, trying to be myself, after 18 years, trying to be one of them, blah, blah. and i thought about my freedom there, and i observed people and how they act. and i was shocked. because, in my days, in my days there to 1975…you talked to people around, you started a conversation with the person sitting next to you. there was some kind of conversation or inter-relation to, actually even on the micro.4 but now there is nothing. and that was the first indication for me that things have changed (interview b). simultaneously, the process of struggling with the notion of what is or was chilean in them helps them to form an understanding of their own ‘australian-ness’. i argue that this is particularly challenging to the broader discourse of hage’s great ‘white myth’ because it demonstrates that immigrants do not construct their identity only in response to a ‘white’ core culture. rather, their experiences of migration and return, of negotiating the changes in their ‘indigenous’ sense of identity provides an equally powerful point of reference. in the words of papastergiadis: identity politics is born from the realisation that certain social and historical circumstances have effectively marginalised or negated the representation of their identity: the primary struggle is against self-negation. to reclaim, or to invent an identity that was previously prohibited, is a confrontation with the structures of power that privileged one form of identity over all others. it is this process of rethinking the relationship between the personal and the political that is disturbing. it introduces an awareness of the way identity is always a performative process and how identity is constructed across difference. it highlights the role of institutions for the establishment of roles and functions that affirm certain forms of identity (papastergiadis 1998, 31). what emerges for chilean-australians is a propensity for self-reflective examination of their identity as it emerges somewhere between the ‘home’ and the ‘host’. for chileans-australians there is the recognition that they engage with ‘separate’ identities. these identities are essentially transnational ones created because of the need, and the ability, to imagine identities that are not confined by the boundaries of the nation state (vertovec 2001, 1). in the case of chile, these different identities are composed with specific political and historical points of reference. most importantly, these points of reference vary dramatically depending on the individual stories of portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 14 14 chilean immigrants. i suggest that this negotiating of transnational identities, the process of revising and refining, articulating and de-articulating identity signifiers, directly informs the dialectics of the australian identity ‘crisis’ described by lattas (lattas 1990, 54 cited in o’reagan 1996; 319). therefore the australian identity is also responding to the increasing extension of the third space in the process of continuing globalisation (pieterse cited in mandaville 2001, 98). there is another factor in the specific case of chilean-australians that complicates these two perspectives. the production of their transnational identity has arisen due to, specific but varying, historical and political conditions. this is simultaneously positioned in conflict with the dominant identity of the host country, one that is definitively based on the exclusion of difference (hassan 1998, 28). therefore chilean-australians are in a constant process of ‘playing out’ different articulated identities that ‘travel’ across the scapes described by appadurai in response to notions of difference (appadurai 1996a, chapter 2.) it is possible that these identities may take different forms when engaging in regional spaces. when is one a chilean or an australian in a regional dialogue? how can we avoid the need to hyphenate the migrant identity? is the separation of the immigrant identity into two—past/present, home/host—inevitable, or is it a response to the structures that organise and control cultural interactions? this idea has particular resonance when considered within the context of the current debate over refugees. this point was emphasised by one interviewee who stated that while she could never forget why she came to australia, and what she went through, she did not feel, although she wanted to, as though she was free of the stigma of ‘refugee’ (interview e). another felt that by denying recognition of the positive contribution that refugees have made to the australian community, the dominant discourse was really denying them full ‘membership’ as australian: well, yes, every individual has different experiences, but sometimes when you meet, when you speak about the issues of refugees there is a lot of sadness, you know ‘i had such a bad time’. yeah, well okay we had that but, i say, well it is time for us to celebrate our contribution to the development of this society. yeah, we have to say that we suffered, we have to tell people our experiences. we have to tell that it is horrible to leave everything that you have and just go, to be tortured or traumatized, it’s awful. but we have to highlight that yeah, also we have contributed to this society. you see there are many, many refugees in fairfield and you find them in all areas, so its time for us to celebrate our contribution to this society, to the city of fairfield (interview b). 4 local public buses. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 15 15 the travelling subject: engaging with space, the state and society to a certain degree the ways in which migrant identities are articulated (hall, discussed by daryl slack 1996, 115) are the ways in which they imagine, interact with and pass through national and transnational spaces. the roles of institutions, particularly those that represent the state, have a profound impact on the processes and forms of articulation in migrant identities. what will be particularly interesting in the next few years is the way that the chilean community engages with the la region catorce and the cabildos culturales, both formal initiatives of the chilean government. la region catorce—the fourteenth region—and the cabildos culturales, or ‘cultural councils’, are both initiatives sponsored by the chilean government. whilst they both have transnational trajectories and contribute to an overall trend towards top-down transnationalism, they have slightly different objectives. the region catorce has emerged as a way by which the chilean government can enter into dialogue with the expatriate community, emphasising a reunion between the chilean state and those chileans living outside the physical boundaries of chile. whilst considered by many to be fundamentally rhetorical at this stage, the potential benefits both for the expatriate community and the state are considered to be significant, particularly by the government officials (spanish herald 2002, 4). the cabildos culturales were developed through a process of consultation with chilean people on the issue of culture and how the government should be supporting the internal and external development of and expression of chilean culture. it is a project that began in chile, but will also be executed through the chilean consulates in countries that have significant expatriate communities including switzerland, argentina and australia (corthorn 2002, 17). despite having different objectives, the cabildos and the region catorce have to a certain degree been confused in the minds of some chileanaustralians. the first conference of the sydney cabildo cultural was conducted on the 25th and 26th of april, 2002. it was attended by members of the public, invited chilean interest portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 16 16 groups and the chilean minister of foreign relations and the minister of education.5 in bringing together diverse sectors of the chilean community many issues were raised, ranging from interpersonal gripes to those regarding education and exchange programs, youth issues and specific concerns relating to the artistic, literary and communications-based communities. however, there was also a contingent of individuals and groups who felt that the cabildos should also address the long unanswered socio-political needs of the expatriate communities who had lived in ‘el exterior’6 for so many years. their objectives also included recovery of chilean nationality (in order for there to be dual citizenship status) for chileans who have taken australian citizenship, voting rights for externally based chileans, exoneration of political exiles, and the resolution of pension and national service issues for chileans living in australia (cabildos culturales 2002). in other words there was a great deal of confusion over the purpose of the cabildos culturales. in the words of one delegate: the thing was that the cabildos culturales was meant to cover cultural issues, you know, literature, poetry—there are many wonderful chilean poets—dance, folklore. but they also took the opportunity to discuss issues that are not related to cultural initiatives, such as the chilean pensions and dual nationality (interview d). because chileans have never before been presented with the opportunity to engage in direct dialogue with the chilean state, some felt that it was impossible to discuss ‘culture’ without addressing the ‘political’ needs of the community. these relate to citizenship rights, national identity and cultural and state relations with the chilean diaspora, which has traditionally been a strong lobby in favour of political reform, for instance the pro-independence movement during the dictatorship and the campaign for the prosecution of general pinochet (martin montenegro 1994). despite the confusion, the sudden interest of the chilean government in recovering direct links with the expatriate community has come partly through the recommendations of consultative groups in the (chilean) community. however this process might also be understood as a strategy for better utilising (and controlling) the influential and wealthy expatriate community. 5 conferences were also held in melbourne, canberra and adelaide. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 17 17 the chilean government is not the first to propose such a project. in 1991 the newly inaugurated president of haiti, father aristide referred to haitians living overseas (primarily in the u.s.) as the ‘dizyem depatman-an’—or ‘tenth department—haiti being divided up internally into nine departments (basch, l.g. et. al. 1994, 1-2). similarly, india has the category of non-resident indian (people of indian origin living outside india), which offers them special rights especially regarding taxation, property rights and freedom of movement in and out of india (appadurai 1996, 45-46). clear, though sometimes legally insubstantial, statements are made in attempts to tie expatriate communities to their ‘home’. this creation of a symbolic ‘tenth state’, or, as in the case of chile, ‘fourteenth region’, is a deliberate effort on the part of a state to reclaim the transnational space. this space has historically been occupied by the expatriate community that has effectively become a powerful political and economic force. basch draws our attention to the fact that in most circumstances, the expatriate communities continue to consider themselves to be a part of their home country and culture (basch et. al. 1994, 146). therefore, the emigrant population engages with such projects partly because it provides them with an opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue with the home state over issues pertaining to rights and compensation. it also offers, in some cases, an opportunity to be directly involved in the politics and social and economic development of their country of origin. the spanish language papers have focused on this function of the cabildos as a vehicle for dialogue between the state and the expatriate community. according to the el nuevo espanol en australia, quoting another chilean bureaucrat: explico como ese organismo que esta promoviendo la organization de los grupos comunitarios que se estan agrupando para dar presencia a la region del reencuentro, y cuyo proposito es lograr que los chilenos del exterior refuerzen sus vinculos con chile y se mantengan integrados al pais (corthorn 2002, 17). what the cabildos has demonstrated is that the australian-chilean community is deeply divided over the sorts of issues that these consultative bodies should address. to some extent this reflects the political divisions in the community. for instance, in general, people who identify with the political right do not want to engage in discussions relating to compensation issues for victims of the dictatorship. there is a 6 ‘the exterior’, or overseas. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 18 18 strong split within the community between those who feel that institutions such as the cabildos culturales must also have a political role, and those want to create a depoliticised cultural project. leftist chilean organisations in australia have a strong tradition in promoting chilean culture, particularly during the dictatorship, as a way of undermining the violent oppression and injustices practised by the chilean state (martin montenegro 1994, 46). in consideration of the historical divisions along political lines, it is not unexpected to find that what is constructed as ‘culture’ is politicised by the ‘left’, whilst it is rendered apolitical, or beyond the political, by the ‘right’. despite these differences of opinion, there are significant issues, such as dual citizenship (currently not recognised by the chilean government), that potentially reach beyond the political differences within the community, raising questions about identity for all its members. this draws into question the changing role of the state in relation to the emerging importance of the transnational population (vertovec 1999, 5). the split in the chilean-australia community complicates a reading of chilean transnationalism, as the ‘community’ can hardly be considered a unified group although there was a strong institutional push to promote the cabildos culturales as a forum in which all chileans were welcome to contribute to the debate on what form spaces for dialogue should take (spanish herald 2002). in fact, with regard to the experience of the cabildo that was held in sydney, this project of identity (re)formation highlights what langer identifies as the tension within the ‘fictive bounds of ‘ethnic community’” (langer 1998, 166). the fictive separation of culture from politics, which langer argues is implicit in the multicultural project, emerged in the sydney cabildo culturales as a primary point of contention, one which illuminated the debate about what being a chilean-australian meant. for some, the cabildos culturales were an opportunity for the community to utilize the elements of its ‘successful’ insertion into australian society to further ‘cultural’ projects in chile and between chile and australia. but in the words of one man: the cabildos have achieved nothing because they don’t, you know, deal with issues for being chilean. if i still cannot be an australian and a chilean citizen, then for me, chile has not portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 19 19 become really democratic. i can’t be australian or chilean, because i don’t really have that choice (interview a). the top down approach of the cabildos culturales to extend the democratic reform of chile to those living in the exterior was seen as a farce by many. according to another man: the cabildos are a political project, not a social project. they are about power and the political parties in chile really just want to use the chileans living outside of chile as a way to destabilise the current chilean government (interview f). the efforts of certain members of the community to exclude others was largely based on political differences, and diverging ideas about what the cabildos culturales were intended to achieve: well, yes, basically there were some people and groups who weren’t invited. it was all organized in a bit of a rush and for instance the mapuche group – representing the indigenous people of our country, you know, like the australian aborigines – they weren’t invited. neither was the group, the communists. so there were people there, they came anyway, and they started arguing about why this other person was invited and not them, and it became pretty political…(interview d). the confusion around where the boundaries of the nation are drawn give rise to the need for the development of new state institutions that can reflect and engage with these diversified identities. participants were largely skeptical about what the cabildos culturales had achieved in terms of meaningful dialogue between the chilean government and the various groups of chilean-australians although, in reflecting on the outcomes of the cabildos culturales, all of the participants were positive about the networks that had been formally established between certain sectors of the australian community and chilean government. however, they also recognized that the cabildos culturales had only emphasized the divisions between chilean-australians along political and historical lines. finally, the ‘arrival’ of the cabildos culturales and the region catorce by no means reflect an emerging transnationalism in the chilean community. conversely, these initiatives arise nearly thirty years after the first semblance of transnationalism emerged (martin montenegro 1994, 42). chileans, particularly those from the political left, and especially those who arrived as refugees, have maintained transnational relationships as theorised by basch et. al. (1994), vertovec (1999), portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 20 20 itzigsohn (2000), and webner (2002) since their arrival in the early 1970s. i suggest that the cabildos culturales and the region catorce represent a new thread in chilean transnationalism whereby the specifically transnational experiences of chilean-australians are being appropriated by the state and assimilated into the concept of the nation. as itzigsohn points out, it is only really in the very recent past that american and caribbean states have been engaged in meaningful dialogue with their expatriate communities (itzigsohn 2000; also explored by basch et. al. 1994). therefore, this development signifies a shift on the part of states to recover control, or to redefine the parameters of national identity as they apply to transnational cultures, but does not suggest that communities themselves have not already navigated these borders. therefore ‘official’ transnationalism is really about control, and the recapturing of the transnational imagination. at the same time as the hyphen between ‘nation-state’ is shifting internally, the efforts of the state to control the national identity is extending outside the boundaries of the state, responding to the conditions created by migration and the identity scapes theorised by appadurai (1996a). this is both prompted and counteracted by the needs and demands of a transnational population unbound by the traditional structures of the state that are producing the conditions for new institutional and state structures. a concept introduced by schein that is useful in the analysis of chilean-australian identity and the way that they are responding to these events is the concept of ‘identity exchanges’ (schein 1998, 300). it helps us to conceptualize the process of redefining transnational identity as reflected in the ways in which chileans engage with critical political and social issues within australia. this concept is particularly useful in appraising the cabildos culturales and the region catorce and the dialogues being generated between chile and australia and within the various groups that represent the chilean-australian ‘community’. schein employs the term ‘identity exchange’ to ‘describe the multiple agencies that comprise this overall, yet, fragmented project out of which transnationality is being forged’ (schein 1998, 300). essentially, chilean-australian identities emerge out of a process of exchange, between past and present contexts, real and imagined experiences and the relationships that make chilean and australian identities meaningful to individuals and groups. this demonstrates the centrality of the transnational to the development portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 21 21 of chilean-australian identity. it challenges the ‘core white culture’ as the central reference point for the development of identity in chilean-australians. the unstable status of national identity: concluding comments stuart hall (1990) advocates for the theorization of identity precisely because it enables us to conceptualize new kinds of subjects. theorizing identity establishes new places ‘from which to speak’ and, as this paper argues, renders visible the places— outside the discourse of the national—where dialogues are already being created. the experience of chilean-australians in migrating to australia, living in australia and adopting, rejecting, interchanging and recreating identity characteristics which are extracted from experience, memory and imagination, are filtered through discourses of the national, just as they are affected by political and historical events. the formation of identity in chilean-australians is equally, if not more so, affected by being in and passing through the transnational spaces between ‘home’ and ‘host’, as they are defined by the notion of a core culture, to which the migrant is assumed to assimilate. what this suggests is that the notion of the ‘national’ is not the central force when it comes to transforming migrant identities. they are not sculptured by the desire to somehow become like all other australians, but rather, become australian by way of a variety of connections, processes and engagements which actively and productively extend the notion of the ‘australian’. furthermore, a transnational reading of identity—one that favours transnationalism as the central point of reference for understanding immigrant identities, and thus, the broader australian identity—directly refers to the ‘spaces in between’ and the ‘process’ of cultural and identity transfer. i argue that australian culture, and hence, australian identity is being generated in these spaces. this destabilizes the fabricated authority and dominance of the western centre, particularly the fantasy of a cultural core, by focusing on agency and movement as key determinants of identity. this is not to claim that the colonial experience has not produced a powerful legacy with which all postcolonial societies must in some way engage. rather, i suggest that it is losing its limelight, fading into the wings of a globalized stage now occupied by transnational identities that subvert the borders of the state and that are not controlled by the heavy gaze of the nation. as ulrick beck has observed, globalization creates portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 22 22 the context in which ‘sovereign national states are criss-crossed and undermined by transnational actors with varying prospects of power, orientations, identities and networks’ (cited in vertovec 2001, 3). the implications of this proposition are supported by the discussion that i have laid out in this paper. therefore, i suggest that in the australian context, transnationalism may be used as a theoretical framework for the development of a postnational conception of australian identity: an identity whose core characteristics are unbound by fluidity, dynamicism and progressiveness. the theoretical framework of transnationalism lend itself to projects in regional integration because it directs focus to the importance of creating meaningful and representative regional spaces that reflect the changing nature and role of identity. it emphasizes the ways in which we must make these initiatives more genuine, dynamic and engaging across and between different members of a common region. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 23 23 reference list appadurai, a, 1996a, modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization, university of minnesota press, minneapolis. ———1996b, ‘sovereignty without territoriality: notes for a postnational geography’ in, the geography of identity, ed. p. yaeger, university of michigan, usa. basch, l. schiller, n.g. & blanc, c.s. 1994, nations unbound: transnational projections, postcolonial predicaments and deterritorialized nation –states, gordon and breach, langhorne, pa. bhabha, h. 1990, nation and narration, routledge, london. ———1994, the location of culture, routledge, london. bureau of immigration, multicultural and population research, 1991, community profiles, 1991 census, chile born, australian government publishing service, act. caba, g. 1988, hidden heritage: the fairfield community, fairfield city council, wakely, nsw. carta de sydney, cabildos culturales, sydney 2002. clifford, j. 1999, ‘diasporas’ in migration, diasporas and transnationalism, (eds) s. vertovec & r. cohen, edward elgar publishing ltd., cheltenham. corthorn, h. 2002, ‘cabildo cultural unio a la comunidad chilena’, el nuevo espanol en australia, sydney, 30 april, 17 daryl slack, j. 1996, ‘the theory and method of articulation in cultural studies’ in stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, eds david morley, & kuanhsing chen, routledge, london. department of immigration and multicultural affairs 1997, what it means to be an australian citizen, commonwealth government of australia. department of immigration and multicultural affairs, http://www.immi.gov.au/statistics/ infosummary/source.htm, accessed july 2002. fiedler, s. 2000, beyond pinochet: class, power and desire in pinochet’s chile, phd. thesis, school of sociology, university of new south wales, sydney. gilroy, p. 1991 ‘“it ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at”…the dialectics of diaspora identification’, third text 13 winter, pp.3-16 sourced here in migration, diasporas and transnationalism, eds s. vertovec, & r. cohen 1999, edward elgar pub.ltd, cheltenham. gupta, a. & ferguson, j. 1992, ‘“beyond culture”: space, identity and the politics of difference’, cultural anthropology february vol.7, no.1, pp. 6-23. hall, s. 1990, ‘cultural identity and diaspora’ in identity: culture, community, difference, ed. jonathan rutherford, lawrence and wishart, london. ———1992, ‘the question of cultural identity’ in modernity and its futures, eds s. hall, s. d. held, & t. mcgrew, polity press in assoc. with the open university, cambridge. ———1996, ‘new ethnicities’, in stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, eds d. morley & c. kuan-hsing, routledge, london. hage, g. 1998, white nation: fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society, pluto press, sydney. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 24 24 http://www.immi.gov.au/statistics/infosummary/source.htm hassan, i. 1998, ‘counterpoints: nationalism, colonialism, multiculturalism etc. in personal perspective’, in multicultural states: rethinking difference and identity, ed. david bennett, routledge, london. itzigsohn, j. 2000, ‘immigration and the boundaries of citizenship: the institutions of immigrant’s political transnationalism [1]’, international migration review winter 2000, v.34, i.4, p.1126. langer, b. 1998, ‘globalisation and the myth of ethnic community: salvadoran refugees in multicultural states’, in multicultural states: rethinking difference and identity, ed. david bennett, routledge, london. mandaville, p. 2001, transnational muslim politics: re-imagining the umma, routledge, london. martin montenegro, g.a. 1994, la campania de solidaridad de australia con chile: 1973 – 1990, m.a. (honours) thesis, university of new south wales. morely, d. & chen, k-h. (eds) 1996, stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, routledge, london. o’reagan, t. 1996, australian national cinema, routledge, london. papastergiadis, n. 1997, ‘tracing hybridity in theory’ in debating cultural hybridity: multicultural identities and the politics of anti-racism, eds p. webner & t. modood, zed books, london. ———1998, dialogues in the diaspora: essays and conversations on cultural identity, rivers oram press, london & new york. pereira petruzzi, a. (ed.) 2001, report of the first national convention of chilean organisations in australia, sponsored by hon. bob carr premier nsw, fairfield city council. rutherford, j. (ed.) 1990, identity: community, culture, difference, lawrence & wishart, london. schein, l. 1998, ‘forged transnationality and operational cosmopolitanism’ in transnationalism from below vol 6, eds m.p. smith & l.e. guarnizo, transaction publishers, new brunswick. smith, p. & phillips, t. 2001, ‘popular understandings of “unaustralian”: an investigation of the un-national’, journal of sociology, dec 2001, v.37,i.4., p.323(19) stratton, j. 1998, race daze: australia in identity crisis, pluto press, sydney ———2000, ‘not just another multicultural story’, journal of australian studies september, victorian historical association, p.23. cristobal valdes saenz, chilean ambassador to australia, ‘letter to the editor’, spanish herald 23 april 2002,p. 4 spivak, g.c. 1988, in other worlds: essays in cultural politics, routledge, london & new york spivak, g.c. 1990, & harasym, s. (ed.) the post-colonial critic: interviews, strategies, dialogues, routledge, new york united nations high commissioner for refugees, ‘basic facts’, http://www.unhcr.ch/cgibin/texis/vtx/basics/+cwwbmelqzw_wwwwmwwwwwwwmfqtfeifgihfqouf ifrz2itfqtxw5oq5zfqtfeifgiafqoufifrz2idzmxwwwwwww1fqtfeifgi/ope ndoc.htm vertovec, s. 1999, ‘conceiving and researching transnationalism’, ethnic and racial studies vol. 22, i., 2, p.447. ———2001, ‘transnationalism and identity’, journal of ethnic and migration studies, oct. 27(4): 573. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 25 25 http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/basics/+cwwbmelqzw_wwwwmwwwwwwwmfqtfeifgihfqoufifrz2itfqtxw5oq5zfqtfeifgiafqoufifrz2idzmxwwwwwww1fqtfeifgi/opendoc.htm http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/basics/+cwwbmelqzw_wwwwmwwwwwwwmfqtfeifgihfqoufifrz2itfqtxw5oq5zfqtfeifgiafqoufifrz2idzmxwwwwwww1fqtfeifgi/opendoc.htm http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/basics/+cwwbmelqzw_wwwwmwwwwwwwmfqtfeifgihfqoufifrz2itfqtxw5oq5zfqtfeifgiafqoufifrz2idzmxwwwwwww1fqtfeifgi/opendoc.htm http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/basics/+cwwbmelqzw_wwwwmwwwwwwwmfqtfeifgihfqoufifrz2itfqtxw5oq5zfqtfeifgiafqoufifrz2idzmxwwwwwww1fqtfeifgi/opendoc.htm werbner, p. 1997, ‘introduction: the dialectics of cultural hybridity’ in debating cultural hybridity, eds p. webner & t. modood, zed books, london. ———2002, ‘the place which is diaspora: citizenship, religion and gender in the making of chaordic transnationalism’, journal of ethnic and migration studies, jan vol. 28, i.1, 119-134. carta de sydney and informe de la comision cultural politico-social, cabildos culturales, 2002. list of interviews interview a – 19.05.02, canley vale, n.s.w. interview b – 29.05.02, fairfield, n.s.w. interview c – 01.08.02, sydney city, n.s.w. interview d – 05.08.02, strathfield, n.s.w. interview e – 15.08.02, canterbury, n.s.w. interview f – 15.08.02, canterbury, n.s.w. interview g – 29.05.08, fairfield, n.s.w. interview h – 12.08.02, via internet (to canberra) portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 26 26 searching for new views: identity, migration and the nationa perceptions of ‘identity’ in the australian context the unstable status of national identity: concluding comment reference list o’reagan, t. 1996, australian national cinema, routledge, lo list of interviews rural-urban migration in china: rural-urban migration in china: temporary migrants in search of permanent settlement beatriz carrillo garcia institute for international studies, university of technology sydney since 1978, china’s transitional economy has been characterized by its dynamism. profound changes in its structure and the introduction of a market economy have intensified china’s links to the outside world. the opening up of the economy and its strong regional ties with asia pacific have contributed to china’s repositioning as one of the largest trading nations, and as a major player in the world economy. china is now the largest recipient of foreign investment, mainly as a result of increasing interest in its internal market and the availability of cheap labour. economic reform has been a gradual process that has expanded from the east and south to the north and more recently to the central and western regions. reactions to economic reform have varied from province to province, and economic development has been far from even. regional variations make it difficult to come up with a generalized idea of the impact and meaning of economic reform. nevertheless, some common processes have been developing throughout the country. one of those has been the increasing internal movement of peoples. massive population flows from rural to urban areas not only constitute ‘the phenomenon of the century’ (zhang 1998) for china, they also constitute the largest flow of labour out of agriculture in world history (taylor 2001, p. 5). these rural to urban migration flows have had consequences on almost every social, economic, and political issue in the people’s republic of china [prc]. migrants have been described both as agents of change at places of origin, and as essential contributors to economic growth in destination areas. 1 rural peasants – through migration – have become part of the globalization process and have also become the link through which rural and interior 1 roberts and wei, for example, have shown how instrumental migrants have been in the economic growth of shanghai. tracing both official population growth and economic growth in this city since 1978, they found that registered population remained constant and then declined, while economic growth boomed. they state migrants provided the necessary labour to support this growth. roberts, kenneth d. & wei jinsheng 1999, ‘the floating population of shanghai in the mid-1990s’, asian and pacific migration journal, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 479-83. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 1 areas can be indirectly incorporated into that same process (taylor 2001, pp. 5-11). in the case of china, regional economic integration has also been of great importance for economic growth and for the development of internal markets. the creation of an internal labour market is yet another result of this economic integration and the consequent division of labour. economic reform and international trade by themselves cannot explain the social dislocation created by the massive population movement experienced since the middle of the 1980s. reform has also brought important policy changes in a wide range of sectors, of which relaxation on population mobility control is probably the most significant, with consequences not envisioned by the leadership of the chinese communist party [ccp]. to understand the importance and magnitude of the growth in internal migration it is necessary to look back to the antecedents. the obvious characteristic of the current regime is the previous existence of a planned economy with particular socialist goals. the not so obvious include a restrictive population movement regime and a clear cut politico-administrative division between rural and urban populations. before the 1980s – in line with socialist goals – the communist regime had started an industrialization process in which urban areas were to be privileged and its proletarian class enhanced. the government then articulated a social security network that provided the urban population with free access to health care, education, grain and oil rations, as well as subsidized housing and lifetime employment. in the meantime, the rural population had been left to rely on its own resources through the commune for its daily necessities and received little economic help from the central government. since 1978 economic reform in the countryside and the introduction of rural markets gave households in those areas more freedom over the means of production and the allocation of labour. the incipient demand for labour in both rural enterprises and the service sector in the urban areas was responsible for attracting those who were surplus to agricultural production or who needed to diversify the household income. despite the previous restrictions to entering the cities, the government started to lose its ability to control and restrict population movement. nonetheless, the government could still make use of its household registration system (the hukou system) to keep those from portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 2 the countryside separate and maintain its network of social benefits only for the official urban population. the simple act of migration did not and still does not entitle a peasant to change their formal household registration, and only temporary residence permits and labour contracts are available for migrants. a change in registration status usually only occurs when a person is officially transferred; spontaneous migration has then no legal basis or support. as solinger put it ‘if the household registration changes, the person has migrated, if not, the person is floating’ (1999, p. 15). the majority of migrants holds rural registration and is therefore not counted as part of the official population of cities, thus remaining part of the floating population. the latter category includes tourists, individuals attending meetings or doing business, as well as those who come to the city for medical treatment. however, migrant labour constitutes by far the biggest proportion of the floating population, frequently calculated as being as large as 100 million people. the lack of an urban registration denies migrants the ‘civic inclusion’ that comes with the ‘access to institutions that provide capacities and resources’ (solinger 1999, p. 4). excluded from urban citizenship, migrants have developed their own resources to cope with the lack of public services. they have mainly relied on kinship and native place connections for mutual assistance and community formation at destination areas. two of the most important outcomes of this congregation have been chain migration and the establishment of migrant enclaves. the more advanced of these entities have developed into self-sufficient communities separate from the state; offering cheap housing, job opportunities, schooling, and health care. their activities fall outside any official jurisdiction, and are thus a possible source of social disunity. however, these complex communities are still a minority; most peasant migrants are not always able to organize such sophisticated organizations. after a succinct description of the earlier internal migration regime prevalent in the prc this paper will aim to chart and explain migrant flows into the cities, especially those of migrants with very little skills, few economic means or ‘connections’ (guanxi). through the analysis of government institutions and policies it will explain the different consequences of the segmented incorporation of migrants into the cities. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 3 the analysis, although top-down, will include some of the migrants’ responses to their exclusion in the cities. conclusions point to the need to dismantle the hukou system and to expand welfare provision to incorporate all members of society. internal migration before 1978 china’s past is full of examples of large-scale population flows, but these came to an end in 1954 shortly after the foundation of the prc. it was only after 1978, and then again on a larger scale after 1984 – as a result of important policy changes on population mobility – that population movement became a significant issue again. this change is highlighted by the earlier background of a restrictive migration regime in place during the mao era, which left no room for spontaneous migration. these antecedents are crucial to understanding both the problems and challenges that a process of such magnitude presents not only for the government but for society in general. the core of that problematic is to be found in the social dichotomy that has prevailed between rural and urban residents, which creates economic, political, and status differentiation. the aftermath of the chinese civil war saw important internal population movement. most of the people on the move were those being relocated to their home villages, or those entering the cities in search for employment; cities became magnets for rural peasants who looked forward to becoming recipients of state benefits. however, the government soon became aware of the increasing number of peasants entering the urban areas and the problems this posed for the construction of socialism, especially in terms of employment provision (cheng and selden 1994, p. 650). by 1954 government officials were already criticizing the ‘blind flow’ of people into the cities,2 and soon thereafter restrictions on mobility became a reality for most part of the following three decades. one of the major tools used by the government to check population movement was the household registration or hukou system. chan and zhang have described it as ‘one 2 that same year the new constitution established in its article 90 that both freedom of residence and freedom to change residence were to be guaranteed. this freedom of movement and of residence was never again mentioned in official documents after 1955. cheng, tiejun & selden, mark 1994, ‘the origins and social consequences of china’s hukou system’, the china quarterly, no. 139, p. 646. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 4 of the major tools of social control used by the state,’ and as ‘part of a larger economic and political system set up to serve multiple state interests’ (1999, p. 819). the hukou system divided population into four categories, which in turn separated chinese society into two major groups. the first two categories refer to a person’s place of registration or hukou suozaidi (rural or urban), and the other two deal with a person’s type of registration or hukou leibie (agricultural or non-agricultural) (chan and zhang 1999, pp. 821-22; wu 1994, pp. 674-75). this registration system drew a clear distinction between the agricultural labour force and that of the cities, creating spatial hierarchies between city and countryside (cheng and selden 1994, p. 644). each household was supposed to have a registration book though, in reality, registration was tied to the workplace (lei guang 2001, p. 482). the hukou system by itself was not able to successfully control population movement. government control over other economic and social activities helped maintain hukou differentiation and kept migration at low levels (chan and zhang 1999; cheng and selden 1999; lei guang 2001; roberts & wei 1999; solinger 1999; davin 1999). the state monopoly over job and housing allocation, grain rationing, and a strict enforcement of the hukou system in urban areas – aided by the surveillance of local residence committees (davin 1999, p. 7) – hindered peasants from moving into the cities. recruitment policies where dictated by the central government, which restricted urban enterprises’ employment of peasant workers. although it is also true that government did allow for temporary urban labour contracts from the rural areas – as was notably the case during the great leap forward – as soon as their contracts ended peasants had to return to their place of origin. moreover, after the disaster of the great leap forward labour migration was halted and net urban migration rates greatly decreased. rural to urban migration was also discouraged through the rationing and distribution of grain and other products of first necessity, like cooking oil, fuel and cloth (davin 1999, p. 7). without grain ration coupons and without an official contract from a state enterprise it was close to impossible for peasants to stay in the cities for long periods. by securely closing the cities from rural in-migrants the government was able to guarantee a series of social privileges – free access to health care services, education, grain rations, subsidized housing and lifetime employment – to city dwellers. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 5 meanwhile, the rural population was left to depend on the communes for subsistence and received no further economic help from the central government. commune resources were mostly pooled from local rural households, who ultimately financed most local social and welfare services (ibid., p. 66). economic reform and the consequences for population mobility the pre-reform migration regime was successful in establishing an artificial division in china’s population, which was believed to be the foundation of socialist economic goals and social order. reform, introduced at the end of 1978, gradually changed the economic structure of the prc, and in turn brought about dramatic social changes. increased population mobility has been one of the processes unchained by reform with far greater social consequences than originally envisaged. with time, it has come to be perceived by central and local authorities as the biggest threat to social unity and stability. the introduction of local markets – first in the rural areas, later on throughout the whole country – the official adoption of a market oriented economy in 1992 and the opening up of the economy to foreign trade and investment were responsible for an increasing labour demand that lay the foundations for an incipient labour market. eastern coastal provinces became large magnets for rural labour, a process triggered by the boom of town and village enterprises [tves] and by the economic dynamism that resulted from the reception by these provinces of large shares of domestic and foreign investment (davin 1999, p. 57). responding to those demands and looking for better economic opportunities tens of millions of peasants have migrated to the eastern coastal cities and other interior urban areas in search of work. mobility was first enhanced by the newly implemented household responsibility system [hrs], which in 1982 dismantled the communes and gave rural households individual contracts to farm agricultural land (lei guang 2001, pp. 483-84). a more efficient and productive use of resources – including labour – allowed for greater agricultural output and income, as markets for rural products thrived. the household became the main unit of production, at the same time that it acquired greater freedom of labour allocation as well as in migration decisions (keely 2000, p. 51). both portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 6 household size and structure (the household development cycle) 3 as well as land cultivation needs became important determinants of household surplus labour (mallee 2000, pp. 42-6). in order to diversify the household income, surplus labour began to engage in offfarm work. however, the pull factor created by enterprise labour demand lead many peasant workers to leave the countryside even when they were not surplus to agricultural production (croll & huang 1997, p. 139). in line with government policy to keep peasants in the rural areas, those peasants were channeled to the newly established town and village enterprises [tves], which by 1996 already employed 30 per cent of the rural workforce (davin 1999, p. 41). tves, however, were not able to absorb surplus labour for very long. job creation in rural enterprises started to decline from the late 1980s, with a strong downturn between 1989 and 1990, when 14.5 million employees were fired from rural enterprises (zhang 1998). meanwhile, the big metropolitan areas started to attract an increasing number of migrants (zhao yaohui 2000, p. 22), thanks to relaxations on employment through non-state channels that allowed foreign and private sectors to become important employers. the hrs and the development of rural markets have at the same time helped break the state monopoly over grain rationing. higher productivity levels in rural areas allowed farmers to comply with state grain quotas, while retaining considerable surpluses that can be sold at higher market prices. the availability of grain in the market made it possible for migrants to buy grain at urban destinations without the need for ration coupons. moreover, mobility has further been ensured by a set of policies diminishing central state control over provincial and lower administrative units, which can now establish their own economic priorities. the new provincial and local economic strategies – especially in middle and larger urban areas – include bringing in cheap labour to work in construction, manufacturing and other service sectors. on the other side of the spectrum, decentralization policies in the rural areas have encouraged local governments to actively promote and facilitate out-migration in 3 number of household working members, their age, marital status, education, etc. mallee, hein 2000, ‘agricultural labor and rural population mobility: some observations’ in west, loraine a. & yaohui zhao (eds.), rural labor flows in china, institute of east asian studies, university of california, berkeley, p. 45. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 7 order to increase village living standards through migrant’s remittances. increasing proportions of rural households and village income are indeed being derived from both migration and other non-agricultural activities. urbanization and the management of migration urbanization through migration has been described by development theorists as one of the major consequences of industrialization. that has been china’s case since economic reform began. however, china’s industrialization did not begin in 1978, but had been launched with the first five year economic plan in the 1950s. as already described, throughout the mao era authorities were urged to check urban growth, and mechanisms were employed to keep the rural population away from the cities and urbanization rates low. the main reason for this policy was the heavy economic burden of supporting the urban population, which needed to be provided with a wide range of benefits plus a social security system. between 1950 and 1977 urban population grew at 2.7 percent per annum (wu 1994, p. 691); increasing from a share of 12.46 per cent of total population in 1952 to a 17.34 per cent share in 1977, even when the total population had increased by more than 400 million (figure 1). these figures show both the low rates of urbanization and policy efficiency on internal migration control. despite low urban growth, chinese cities suffered from poor and insufficient infrastructure development, and together with demographic explosion put severe pressure on an already crammed living environment. figure 1: china’s urban population growth year total population urban population proportion % 1952 574,820,000 71,630,000 12.46 1977 924,200,000 160,300,000 17.34 1990 1,143,330,000 301,910,000 26.41 1999 1,259,090,000 388,920,000 30.89 source: china statistical yearbook, 1999. given the low standard of living in the places that migrants came from, large numbers of migrants responding to rural economic incentives were only to be expected. income differentials as well as labour demand in industry and the service sector soon attracted portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 8 the rural population, even when moving into urban areas did not necessarily mean gaining the same benefits as the local population. the gradual breakdown of the state monopoly over the different means of population mobility control was accompanied by a gradual modification of the hukou system. the reform of this registration system has been an on going process that is supposed to lead to the abolition of the system in the near future. the state development planning commission announced in 2001 its aim to abolish the hukou system in the following 5 years (china reforms residence registration system), however, registration still continues to play an important role in the reconfiguration of chinese society. this, as will be explained later, has had important implications for the type and permanence of migrants; the relationship between urban dwellers and rural migrants in the cities; migrant settlement and adaptation in urban areas; and for the relationship between migrants and their place of origin. the reasons behind the prevalence of the hukou system are rooted in the rural-urban dichotomy and the ‘urban benefits network’ created in the 1950s. even when the government lost its power to restrict entrance into the cities, the registration system still allows local governments to deny migrants access to essential public services and goods. the system has also allowed the government to retain a certain degree of control over permanent settlement in urban areas, although its role has been one of a more regulatory character. migration scholars have stressed the importance of government intervention in shaping recent migration processes, while describing government actions as an attempt ‘to ensure that the state retains a critical role in reconstituting the rural-urban divide in china’ (lei guang 2001, p. 483). the new settings – which include the introduction of a market economy – allow migrants into the cities but institutionalize their discrimination and commodification. the rush for economic gain seems to have permeated through government institutions, with bureaucrats benefiting from the cheap labour provided by peasant migrants, but also wining important cash incomes through fees imposed on outsiders or even through the commodification of local registration (solinger 1999; chan & zhang 1999). how did rural-urban migration start? besides officially sanctioned migration of sent down youths – who were allowed to return to the cities and recover their urban registration – a more subtle and less state organized movement of people started to portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 9 take place in the 1980s. even though all outsiders staying in urban areas for more than three days had to get approval from different agencies at both place of origin and at their destination, until 1984 there was no regulatory framework that dealt with migrants who intended to stay for longer periods in the cities. that year, for the first time, the government officially sanctioned migration into smaller urban areas, providing migrants brought or acquired their own grain at a non-subsidized price, and that they relinquished their agricultural land in their home village. the new policy allowed many de facto migrants to legalize their situation and that of their families, but still left them out of the urban social security network. the promotion of migration into small towns was part of an attempt to develop rural industries, to keep peasants in the countryside ‘litu bu lixiang’ (leave the soil but not the countryside), and to reduce the movement of people into the larger urban areas (davin 1999, p. 41). that same year, the central government introduced a temporary resident permit for all urban centers. rural migrants older than sixteen had to obtain migration approval at place of origin and register with the public security bureau at destination, in order to apply for a temporary residence permit that had to be periodically renewed (woon 1999, p. 478). the introduction of this temporary permit triggered the establishment of a locally based migrant registration system, where each city implements its own set of temporary permits, classifying migrants depending on their duration of stay, as well as their education and income levels or their contributions to the local economy. in time the new classification created a stratification of migrants, with educated and wealthier migrants able to gain easier access to a local hukou. the new regime of temporary permits varies greatly with the size of the city. again, small urban areas offer greater facilities for migrants who want to acquire local registration. the promotion of smaller urban areas was later on backed by a redefinition of urban categories and boundaries. at the same, a new urban categorization that allowed for towns to have lower proportions of non-agricultural population, resulted in the establishment of 3,430 new towns in 1984 (and increasing the total number of towns to 6,211); but reduced the proportion of non-agricultural population of those towns from 72 per cent to 39 per cent of total urban population (wu 1994, p. 681). this trend resulted from the influx of rural migrants who acquired a temporary residence permit in those towns, but who maintained their rural registration. even though this portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 10 new redefinition has mainly affected smaller urban areas, some larger cities have also seen their population enlarged with the inclusion of suburban rural areas into their jurisdiction. the locally based system of temporary residence permits and the commodification of urban registration led the central government in 1992 to approve a locally valid urban registration, referred to as the ‘blue-stamp’ card. this registration system was approved by the central government on the principle of ‘local need, local benefit, local responsibility, local validity’ (chan & zhang 1999, p. 838). eligibility for a blue stamp card in the big cities like shanghai, beijing and shenzhen requires extremely high educational levels and skills, as well as high income levels; while the smaller urban centers demand little or no skills and charge much lower fees to migrants (woon 1999, p. 499). the blue stamp card, however, is not synonymous with a permanent local hukou, and even when holders of this kind of permit can have access to many of the public services denied to temporary workers, they enjoy limited rights and obligations compared to those of the official urban population. in general migrants with a blue stamp card are considered ‘preparatory’ residents, who will soon acquire permanent status (chan & zhang 1999, p. 839). the various temporary migration regimes have also followed government policy promoting urbanization in smaller towns, while implementing a strict filter on migrants entering the larger metropolises. the new regime shows increasing practices of residence permit commodification, and a clear cut delineation of who is to be fully incorporated and who is not. these practices leave poorer peasant migrants who do not have the required skills with little possibility of changing their hukou status. furthermore, they relegate them to temporary settlers who can make no claims on any of the public services of the cities or even lobby for the betterment of their situation, keeping them peripheral to urban life and development. temporary migration, translocality, and the creation of distinct labour markets temporary and circular migration have dominated internal population flows in china since the late 1970s. one of the reasons for this trend has been the relationship of migration to agricultural cultivation cycles. many of the peasants engaged in off-farm portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 11 work and those who have migrated as a result of the introduction of the hrs are not surplus to production all year round. therefore, if their labour is indispensable for agricultural production, seasonal mobility becomes their only option (mallee 2000, p. 42). it has also been common for young married man in the countryside to migrate and leave their spouses in charge of farming, coming back when cultivation cycles require their labour contribution. in many rural areas, however, returns from agriculture have severely decreased, while investment costs for improving the quality of the land are increasingly on the rise (croll & huang 1997, p. 137). farming has ceased to be a priority for many rural households, who nevertheless have to hold on to their land (the right to use the land) in order to be able to comply with prevalent state grain quotas, and because the land represents the only asset they can call upon when employment in rural or urban enterprises is slack. this practice has been described as the major obstacle to the consolidation of farmland and the modernization of agriculture, as well as being blamed for the deterioration of land resources (woon 1999, p. 499). deteriorating conditions in the countryside have sometimes led migrants to bring the whole family to the urban areas, where migration represents more of a survival than an income diversification strategy. up until the 1990s most of the rural labour movement happening in china had been to nearby destinations (roberts & wei 1999, p. 478). peasant workers generally choose off-farm work in local enterprises over migration, and it has been observed that rural areas with more opportunities for local non-agricultural employment usually have fewer migrants (croll & huang 1997, p. 134). nevertheless, more recent research has shown migrants are increasingly traveling longer distances to find work (rozelle et al. 1999; liang 2002). migration decisions, however, imply making considerations beyond the purely economic; traveling longer distances and the prospect of having an unstable condition in the city can have high psychological costs for rural migrants (zhao 1999, p. 778-79). strong links with the place of origin and with agriculture are in great part the consequence of that semi-settled condition of peasant migrants in the cities. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 12 migrants’ temporality in the cities has a close relationship with the legal restrictions on permanent settlement, and is also closely linked with the need to secure the flow of remittances to the countryside (schmitter 2000, p. 84). this situation reinforces the ties between migrants and their place of origin, turning migration into a translocal phenomenon ‘whereby migrants operate in social fields that transgress geographic, political, and cultural borders,’ and where home and host society act as a single arena of social action (brettel 2000, p. 104). the translocal arena represents more secure ground for migrants, because most of their social links – and sometimes even their economic connections – remain those with their fellow villagers, even though they are interacting in two or more geographical locations. in line with structural models of incorporation, where host society institutions interact with the specific characteristics of the newcomers (alba & nee 1997), the hukou system has only allowed for a segmented integration of peasants into urban life. the migrant labour market has remained a secondary labour market ‘of unskilled jobs, poor wages, and insecure employment’ (schmitter 2000, p. 81), showing no signs of integration with the local urban labour market (west 2000, p. 9). those migrants who secured employment in a state owned enterprise [soe] have faired better than those working in the collective or the private sector. jobs at soes gave greater stability than those in the other economic sectors, and in some cases provide basic services of housing and health care (roberts & wei 1999, p. 503). until the mid 1990s, soes and collectives were still the major employers in china, but their share of urban recruitment is expected to decline as these enterprises experience restructuring or bankruptcy processes. many of those enterprises are laying off their permanent workers and hiring temporary migrants, precisely because they offer cheaper labour and the company is not obliged to give them any benefits. nowadays, even the state owned sector does not represent a securer employer, since temporary workers can always be easily laid off (davin 1999, p. 99). since 1995 some of the larger cities like shanghai, shenzhen, and beijing have restricted migrants’ access into different job categories, limited their participation in some sectors, or completely banned them from others (lei guang 20001, p. 492). one newspaper article in beijing, for example, announced that from 2002 migrant labour – excluding nannies – could only account for 20 per cent of total labour employed in the portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 13 service sector of the city (beijing qingnianbao oct. 29, 2001). moreover, some employers have even established specific requirements aimed at discarding the rural applicants. one employer insisted applicants should be of at least a minimum specified height. the purpose of this requirement was to get rid of the short people, who tended to be from the countryside and would therefore not be suitable for the job (davin 1999, p. 104). these regulations show the increasing obstacles imposed both by urban authorities and by employers to exclude poorer and less educated migrants from entering the primary labour market, reducing their chances for upward mobility. other artificial barriers include high housing costs and regulations making it harder for migrants to rent housing in the cities, pushing them to suburban areas where the lack of social services and police protection is pervasive (zhao 1999, p. 778). in the larger cities rural migrants are increasingly being pushed into the periphery both in geographical and economic terms; assimilation with the larger urban society has been possible in very few cases. smaller urban centers have shown a higher degree of marketization of housing and basic food items, making it easier for migrants to access cheaper housing and food stuffs (woon 1999, p. 498), a situation that could enhance closer interaction between migrants and locals. this hypothesis needs to be further tested; so far the few studies documenting the situation of rural migrant workers in small urban areas and villages have had mixed results. in her field research in a small town in the western delta of the pearl river in guandong province, woon (1999) found that migrants are ‘well integrated into the community.’ ‘they socialize with and receive help from local people and cadres’ (p. 492). migrants in this area of the province have helped fill the labour gap created by big numbers of locals migrating to the united states. in another study by yang yao in four villages located in the east coast, yang describes the persistent exclusion of migrants from the local community (2001, p. 9). despite the rhetoric of more openness, extensive hukou reform has been a reality only in the smaller and medium urban centers, which are less attractive for migrants or which are not able to provide enough good job opportunities for the rural labour surplus. even when those urban areas can offer migrants an equal residence status to that of the rest of their official population, it is mostly the case that public services and urban benefits are severely limited or lacking in these cities. urbanization through portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 14 amalgamation of rural population – the result of a government strategy to increase urban population without incurring the costs of expanding public services and social security systems – could well be a solution for overcrowded metropolises, but is doomed to fail if conditions in the small and medium urban centers are not improved. networks, chain migration, and migrant enclaves nowadays, migrant presence in urban areas is highly visible. in 1990 the ‘floating population’ in the eight largest cities of china already accounted for between 11.1 to 27.5 percent of the total de facto urban population (ma & xiang 1998, p. 546). in 1990 temporary migrants accounted for 37.8 percent of the population of hangzhou and 12.4 percent of the population of tianjin, while by 1994 those migrants made up a quarter of the population of beijing (davin 1999, p. 107). migrants are everywhere doing all kinds of jobs mostly in the service and informal sectors. they are mainly engaged in the 3-d jobs – difficult, dirty, and dangerous (ma & xiang 1998, p. 547) – jobs that the urban population does not want because they are too hard or demeaning. ‘in cities like beijing, where local people are reluctant to do such work, migrants predominate to such an extent that there are complaints when enterprises close at chinese new year in order to allow their workers to return home for the holiday.’ (ibid., p. 102). some migrants have been in the cities for long periods, others – from nearby rural areas – stay in the cities for shorter periods, returning on a more regular basis. there are those who come to the cities to sell their vegetables, fruits, rice or chickens. others collect cans, bottles, or carton and get together at informal sites to sell their merchandise. migrant women form a large part of the waitresses in restaurants and hotels, and are also commonly seen doing menial work in shops and other public places. in busy intersections one can come across migrants with small carts selling food or doing all kinds of repairs. train stations are another place where migrants usually gather, waiting for possible employment or waiting for a train to go back home. regardless of whether or not they have secured a job before coming to the city, migrants’ situation in the cities is not an easy one. their condition is similar to that of a non-citizen in a foreign country; they are not considered full members of the host portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 15 society, and their presence is regarded as temporary. residence permits have to be renewed every year for a fee, and it is also common for migrants to be charged with other fees throughout the year. although the ministry of labour has recommended certificates should not cost migrants more than 10 yuan, one finding showed that in 1996 migrants were spending around 223 yuan each year to pay for certificates and an employment card (zhao yaohui 2000, p. 24). many migrants who want to avoid the fees do not register with the local public security bureau, making their situation even more vulnerable. there has been a closer watch on temporary migrants and an overemphasis on clamping down on crime believed to be committed mostly by migrants, especially by those without legal documents (zhao shukai 2000, pp. 101-4). those without a proper registration certificate become easy target for the police, who can extract money from them or who could until last year ‘deport’ them back to their home village. a state council decision late in 2003 banned the custody and repatriation system used to detain migrant workers, after a college graduate and migrant worker from hubei province was beaten to death by the police in a guangzhou detention centre (tong yi 2003). clashes, however, have taken place not only with the police but also with local residents, who – as in many other societies – are not happy about the increasing presence of migrants. because of the vulnerability of their situation, migration has to be a well prepared and planned event. networks – ties of kinship or friendship – have been the key to facilitating migration, and securing work and accommodation at the place of destination. rural institutional barriers – like the household responsibility system – and transportation have not represented big obstacles for migration (rozelle et al., p. 369). the fact that migrants are increasingly traveling longer distances in search for work confirms this. social networks and chain migration have played an exceptional role promoting internal population movements. not only do they reduce the costs and risks of migration, but they provide help with settlement and adaptation. such an important role for chain migration in china is considered to be related to ‘the poor institutional structure available to migrants at urban areas’ (rozelle et al., p. 390). chain migration has then become a cumulative process where ‘each act of migration itself creates the social structure needed to sustain it’ (brettel 2000, p. 107). portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 16 migrants bring their relatives and friends to the cities, find them a job at their workplace or else employ them or establish joint small businesses with them. accommodation varies according to the type of activity they perform. construction workers are commonly housed next to their worksite, with accommodation varying depending on the size of the project. some employers provide workers with austere dormitories; in other cases workers have to build shacks or find tents to live in. migrant sales people use their stalls as living quarters, while many waitresses have to sleep in the restaurants where they work. there are accounts of waitresses working for up to sixteen hours and spending the night sleeping on a chair (solinger 1999). maids and nannies live with their employers. the rest of the migrants live in hotels, hostels or rentals, while others camp out. finding a place to live is not an easy task. cheap housing is commonly not available in the city, pushing migrants to the suburban areas where they rent rooms from local households. about 40 per cent of migrants live in the homes of residents (solinger 1995, p. 133) either staying with friends and relatives, or renting a room from the locals. the problem of unsatisfactory housing is an important one. none of the different types of accommodation mentioned seems to be reliable or suitable for permanent settlement. not only that, their location at the periphery means they seldom interact with urbanites and assimilation is almost non-existent (zhao 1999, p. 767). ‘instead, they formed a patchwork of people in “parallel communities,” plus some stragglers, all of them eking out existences for the most part outside the state’ (solinger 1999, p. 242). in both the labour force and society migrants are a clearly distinct and separate group in the urban environment. they have reshaped the physical and social landscape of chinese cities, but that has still not won them a better position inside those cities. community formation has been one of migrants’ responses to improve their living environment. migrant enclaves not only offer cheaper housing, but can sometimes have well organized – though simple – education and health care premises. some migrant communities have been able to create successful enclave economies that provide a good alternative to the secondary labour market to which migrants are relegated (schmitter 2000, p. 81); but also offering opportunities for capital portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 17 accumulation that can be invested in education or other means of upward mobility (solinger 1995, p. 117). ‘a relatively complex division of labor within their trade also works to enhance the potential for the provision of community welfare’ (solinger 1999, p. 251), representing safer ground for migrants who decide to bring their spouse and children to the cities. even though family migration accounts for a very small percentage of total migrants (3.6 per cent) (zhao yaohui 2000, p. 26), the ministry of education estimated that in 1996 there were between 2 and 3 million children with migrant parents in urban areas in 1996 (davin 1999, p. 106). migrant enclave formation has taken place over the last ten to fifteen years, and is the result of chain migration; reflecting not only an increase of migrants and their families in the host cities, but proving that more migrants are setting roots there. migrant enclaves have been structured around their ties with the place of origin; the sense of belonging that ‘plays a powerful role in shaping migrant behavior at both ends of the migration spectrum’ (ma & xiang 1998, p. 557). these enclaves have become so important for some villages that they have established offices to protect the interests of their laoxiang (native-place fellows) at destination areas (ibid., p. 561). enclaves have been set up in suburban areas, which have been partially urbanized by migrants and their economic activities (davin 1999, p. 108). the most important and better studied migrant communities are those established in beijing; ‘zhejiang village’ being the largest one, followed by ‘xinjiang village’, and by other less cohesive and geographically differentiated communities like ‘henan village’ and ‘anhui village’ (ma & xiang 1998, p. 567-69). there are also other accounts of community and shantytown formation in guangzhou, shenzhen, and in shanghai’s pudong district (solinger 1999, p. 250). migrant enclaves act as self-contained communities of people from the same province, county or village, who engage in a specific economic activity. zhejiang village has specialized in garment production; xinjiang village is the place for halal restaurants; henan villagers are engaged in collecting garbage and waste materials; while anhui village has been an important vegetable market (ma & xiang, p. 566). not all enclaves offer the same security or show the same degree of organization and community solidarity. zhejiang village has been the most successful case, becoming a ‘comparatively stable community,’ where ‘increasingly winning toleration from the portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 18 state arises from its extraordinary economic success’ (davin 1999, p. 111). many of the residents in this village are successful entrepreneurs who have the economic means but do not have the urban hukou. because they are regarded as informal settlements the government provides no services to these communities. in the case of zhejiang village, the community has been able to organize its own schools, clinics and hospitals, restaurants, child-care centers, hairdressers, repair shops, and markets, as well as make-shift toilets and longdistance phone lines (solinger 1999, p. 254). this complex system allows its residents to have access to services that they would otherwise not be able to obtain from the government because of their lack of urban registration. the quality of the services is not comparable to that of state-provided ones, but they are better than having no services at all. recently, periodic police sweepings have threatened the stability of these enclaves. after it was announced that beijing had finally been selected to hold the 2008 olympic games, authorities have launched several initiatives to clean and beautify the city. migrant enclaves have been specifically targeted by the new policy. not only are stalls and small enterprises being torn down, migrant schools have also been threatened with closure. 4 most migrant families cannot afford to enroll their children in local public schools, since they would have to pay the higher tuition fees that apply to those who do not hold an urban hukou. they also fear their children will be looked down upon by local children. the services provided by their community are therefore indispensable in the daily lives and economic activities of migrants. parents can drop their children at the child-care centers or at the local schools and be relieved that they can offer their children at least a basic education, while they are working for the improvement of their condition. zhejiang village, however, remains an exceptional case; most migrants usually do not count with such sophisticated community organizations and have to cope with the lack of free health care and education services, and their exclusion from the social security system with few alternatives. 4 eckholm, erick 2001, ‘district in beijing to shut schools for migrants’ new york times 31, oct. an earlier campaign carried out by the central and beijing government in november-december 1995, left most migrant housing compounds demolished. li zhang 2001, ‘migration and privatization of space and power in late socialist china’, american ethnologist, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 192-194. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 19 challenging institutions: urban citizenship and the need for migrant inclusion with the implementation of economic reform and the introduction of a market economy, government institutions and its social system have been challenged and transformed. the regime has been able to reinvent itself and retain an important role reshaping economic, political, and social institutions, though with different degrees of agreement and discontent. reform has certainly benefited the majority of the population, but as transition advances ruralites are being left behind. it has become evident that some regions, especially large urban areas, have particularly benefited from economic reform. not only have income disparities between rural and urban areas been significantly enlarged since the mid 1980s, the income gap between the rich eastern coastal areas and inland regions has also widened. per capita gdp in the poorest province, guizhou, is now only 8 per cent of per capita gdp in the wealthiest, shanghai (wang & hu 1999, p. 200). internal migration in china has been both a response to those income disparities and to increased mobility and individual freedom. embedded in the dichotomy between urban and rural populations, internal migration has challenged the earlier social order by bringing that duality to the cities. the consequences of rural to urban population movements have been manifold, but it has become evident that the situation of migrants in the cities demands further transformation and even dislocation of the old institutions governing people’s lives. at the core of the problem are those institutions that confer and deny rights and privileges to different members of society. even though the government can no longer restrict the entrance of peasants into the cities, through the hukou system it is still able to establish who can and who cannot be a legitimate urban citizen. those with a rural registration – without the necessary skills, economic means or connections – are being increasingly discriminated against and segregated from the rest of the urban population. they are being treated as noncitizens and denied of the rights bestowed on the urban population, just by the fact of their registration status. denying urban citizenship to those members of society, as marshall has stated, has important consequences for social inequality and cohesion (cited in schmitter 2000, p. 85), creating increasing class differentiation in a society that once praised itself on its equality. this and other social problems – like unemployment and the surge of urban poverty – have moved social issues to the fore portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 20 on the prc’s domestic agenda. social stability has indeed been a top government priority, and is considered to be a prerequisite of a smooth economic transition and of the continuation of the political supremacy of the ccp. reform of the hukou system has been high on the central government agenda since the 1980s, although it was only until 1993 that the government considered abolishing the system altogether. relaxation of population mobility control, together with the decentralization of decision making, allowed local governments to regulate migrant labour more closely, in accordance with their economic priorities. urban registration became a new commodity and authorities were quick to benefit from it. a wide range of temporary residence permits allowed for migrants’ stratification according to their skills, income levels, and duration at destination. only a small minority with the human capital, economic means, plus the necessary connections (guanxi) was to be able to gain (or buy) legal permanent urban registration. the system has been relaxed to allow further urbanization in the small and medium urban areas, but it is still restrictive in the larger cities. the problem with the reform of the hukou system rests in its implications for the provision of urban benefits and the expansion of the social security system. since reform started those same urban benefits have been dwindling, and the state is no longer ‘holding itself responsible for allocating public goods even to its native urban dwellers’ (solinger 1999, p. 287). employment, health care, and education are being offered in the non-state sector, while securities are soon to be opened to foreign investors (china further opens insurance market, china daily). many urban workers are no longer part of the benefits package channeled through state owned enterprises, while private and collective enterprises are rarely filling the gap on welfare provision. nevertheless, important reforms in health care and retirement pensions have been proposed or are already being implemented with the aim of including all urban workers (new socialized medicare to benefit more people, xinhuanet). the education system has also been reformed and upgraded, and there has been a slow deregulation of housing prices. the problem with these reforms is that they fail to include temporary migrant workers or the rural areas, further widening the disparities between the urban and the rural while keeping rural migrant workers as second-class citizens. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 21 recently, beijing announced a new medical insurance scheme that will incorporate all self-employed and freelancers (healthy reform covers all, xinhuanet). the announcement, however, clearly stated the new provision will only apply to ‘all selfemployed individuals registered in an urban household in the capital’, leaving no room for the inclusion of temporary workers and migrant entrepreneurs. most migrants have to bear all medical costs themselves, and when seriously ill may opt to return to their villages rather than pay the prohibitive medical fees of urban hospitals and clinics. this is part of a prevailing practice where ‘administrative management agencies plan their work and projects only in accord with the size of the registered permanent population within their respective jurisdiction’ (wu ruijun cited in solinger 1999, p. 16); without consideration of the hundreds of thousands of migrants who represent an important proportion of the population of most large cities in china. as with healthcare provision, peasant transients have to deal with the lack of other basic services that are considered fundamental for the integration of newcomers, and which are rights established by law for all citizen of the prc. compulsory education for all children between seven and twelve years old is stipulated in china’s law on compulsory education (solinger 1999, p. 266), although in very few cases have urban authorities been willing to grant that right to migrant children. migrant parents who can not afford to educate their children in the city, either leave them behind in the countryside or else bring them to the cities as apprentices, receiving no formal education (solinger 1995, p. 119). some citizenship scholars have regarded the right and duty to receive education as ‘the most universally approximated implementation of national citizenship’ (solinger 1999, p. 266). moreover, education has generally been recognized as an important mechanism for upward mobility. improving skills and literacy levels can thus offer opportunities for better jobs. however, not only have migrant workers been channeled into a secondary labour market, but also the jobs available to them usually demand few skills and rarely provide training. the recently promulgated labour law (1994) stipulating workers’ equal right to employment and choice of occupation has not stopped urban governments from securing specify jobs only for official residents (zhang 1998). conditions vary with place and industry, but the general situation does not look very portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 22 promising. as enterprises become more dependant on migrant labour, employers might be pushed to offer better deals for their workers. one research report indicated that enterprises with higher proportions of migrant workers ‘are more willing to take measures to retain migrant employees by providing housing, transferring household registration, and arranging education for migrant’s children’ (tan & ma cited in zhao yaohui 2000, p. 12). this, however, is not a general trend. migrant workers are increasingly being hired precisely because there is no obligation to provide them with any benefit or service. because of the poor skills development among migrant labour some experts worry china’s large labour population will lack skills and know how necessary for economic development and international competition (zhang 1998). for the migrants this situation means much more than just losing international competitiveness. they complain about pervasive discrimination and the lack of guarantee of their rights (solinger 1999, p. 247), a situation that makes their future in the cities highly unstable and unpredictable. the inhospitability of the urban environment has led migrants to rely more and more on their connections with those of their native place, friends, or relatives. they have come to realize that the government has little intention of incorporating those that – in their opinion – can contribute very little to the urban environment. ‘these people, though nationals, were barred by the hukou prohibition from acquiring city citizenship and so were denied any means of pressing their needs legally on urban and higher-level governments’ (solinger 1999, p. 252). up until now migrants’ organizations have been very loose and temporary, although there have been a considerable number of illegal strikes and demonstrations staged by migrant workers. close watch by local police makes organization a risky endeavor. however, even government advisors recognize that ‘once they get organizations with an educated leadership and a political program, the floating rural population could be molded into a political force, a mobile, armed, and formidable antisocial coalition’ (lei guang 2001, p. 491). the formation of migrant communities and enclaves that aims to develop self-reliant groups separate from the state is a direct response to that segregation. these enclaves might be able to promote the economic mobility of their members, but they can also deter their incorporation into the larger social spectrum (brettel 2000, p. 112). furthermore, as has already been stated, enclaves can develop direct antagonism portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 23 towards local government and societies, thus becoming a possible threat for social unity. even though the possibility of migrants’ organizations becoming a political opponent of the communist party is still far from a reality, there is a real possibility of social unrest if migrant’s issues and problems are not given prompt responses and solutions. the recent accession of the prc to the world trade organization [wto] might further increase the pressure to abolish the hukou system altogether (chi fulin 2001, pp. 10-12), though that would only be part of the solution to migrant exclusion. including migrants into the official population of the cities will allow local authorities to better control migrant groups, while allowing closer contacts between the two. only by giving migrants a fairer treatment can authorities build a relationship of mutual trust, one that can allow for mutual cooperation to stop illegal commercial activities and crime. the costs of incorporating those migrants do not have to be absorbed solely by the state; local governments can ‘withdraw from some activities in the provision of insurance and basic social services in order to leave more space for private for-profit and non-profit engagement’ (jutting 1999, p. 3). a recent report on the reform of china’s social security system emphasizes this idea of expanding social security provision through a socialized system where enterprises from all economic sectors are included (song 2001, pp. 5-10). dismantling the hukou system has therefore become a crucial requirement for reverting the rural-urban divide and for the incorporation of millions of peasant migrants, who have for almost two decades been a central element of urban development. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 24 reference list ‘china further opens insurance market’, china daily [online] (nov. 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1999, ‘labor migration and earnings differences: the case of rural china’, economic development & cultural change, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 767-82. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 26 internal migration before 1978 urbanization and the management of migration temporary migration, translocality, and the creation of dist portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: hammond, c. 2021. pleas through a glass. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 125–126. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ pjmis.v17i1-2.7419 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal cultural work pleas through a glass chad hammond corresponding author(s): chad hammond, 649 evergreen boulevard saskatoon, sk, canada s7w 0y7. nascent.knowledge@gmail.com doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7419 article history: received 12/09/2020; accepted 05/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract this poem enters one of many craters left by the covid-19 pandemic and bears witness to the divisions exposed within. keywords pandemic; covid-19; essential workers; racism; women tucked away from sight the new are catching the old. third today, she coughs, wheeling the chair to the window where the young glares await. how does one entrust to an other so hated the care of her mother? tonight behind this glass she asks please mme, thank you, not mine, lift your hand to hers before you go. #stayhome, there in-between shuttered windows and shattered screens. post all your juvenile pleas to the other side of these sublimate the fate you dread. a petried mind cuts and swipes declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 125 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7419 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7419 mailto:nascent.knowledge%40gmail.com?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7419 her way back to the others. tonight behind this glass she asks please, peers, take these times broadcast a future beyond boredom. big boxes, big windows bring a glow to a shutdown heart. food before virtue, ‘cept for the workers underneath transparent skin they move ‘long this hungry machine. she works the stocks, runs the yards, pushed on all fronts much too far. tonight behind this glass she asks please, sir, you don’t need to shout, what are you searching for? downtown, still life displays the quiet ruptured storefronts, streets rattle the shades with fury, her boy’s life pressed into a fragile photo frame. she reads signs of foreclosure est. ’74, gone today. tonight behind this glass she asks please, god, bring to those past eyes a glimmer beyond their wake. hammond portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021126 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: dwyer, k.a. 2019. la manda. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 16:1/2, 156-159. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal. v16i1/2.6663 portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 14492490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu. au/ojs/index.php/portal. cultural works la manda k. angelique dwyer corresponding author: associate professor k. angelique dwyer, chair of latinx, latin american, and caribbean studies, department of modern languages, literatures and cultures, gustavus adolphus college, 800 west college avenue, st. peter, mn. 56082 usa. email: adwyer@gustavus.edu doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6663 article history: received 09/02/2019; accepted 12/2/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract this creative non-fiction piece written in spanglish called ‘la manda’ reflects upon faith and ritual practices from a personal and transnational perspective. from dance, to fairs, to nun school, this story focuses on the difference in religious perspective held by two american siblings raised in mexico. the narrative voice in this piece provides a unique perspective broadening dialogue(s) on mexican american identity. keywords: k. angelique dwyer; short story; ‘la manda’ una manda is a promise you make to a saint, to god, o a la virgen. it’s a negotiation, an agreement. every year el piti, goes to talpa on horseback to see la virgen de talpa. son cuatro días a caballo de ida y vuelta. it’s a pilgrimage. he’s never told us why he does it, he just does. cada año sin falta. when he comes back, tiene la cara pálida y cansada, pero en paz. i’ll never forget the first time i saw mandas. it was a saturday night y estábamos en la plaza. it must have been fall because the air was cool and the bobos were out, swarming around the lamp posts. adults would sit around the plaza, chatting and eating elote or churros mientras corríamos y jugábamos all sorts of elaborate games involving singing and rhyming. cuando eran días de fiesta, tocaba el conjunto: todos de vaquero y con camisas brillosas. bailábamos en la plaza, alrededor del kiosko o en el salón de eventos, depending on what type of event it was. si era quinceañera, pues en el salón; if it was an average weekend, conjunto en la plaza; si eran las fiestas, venía la banda al kiosko. geña taught me to dance cumbia when i was ten. it was weird because mecano’s ‘ay, que pesado’ was playing on the radio and that’s not a cumbia, declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 156 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6663 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6663 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6663 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:adwyer@gustavus.edu http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6663 but geña taught me anyway and the rhythm she gifted me that day, still remains in my core like a heartbeat. i loved going to saturday night dances. it was a family affair. when my school friends would stay overnight, we would all go al baile and i’d show them how to dance. as soon as a song started and they’d see a boy approaching them, they’d ask me: —‘¿esta cómo se baila?’ —‘quebradita …,’ i would whisper in their ear as they walked onto the dance floor: —‘lenta,’’ if it was a slow one, —‘cumbia,’ if it was a fast one danced apart. the gringuita middle schooler was teaching her mexican peers the nuances of rural social dance. in college, i brought my friends home to the fiestas, the fair, and … same thing exactly: ‘íñorrr. íbamos a los toros and we’d all jump down into the bullring at the end, mientras tocaba la banda el limón. if we wanted to be real crazy we’d go to the bullfights in santa maría and dance to every song la recodo played. the first time my brother and i saw mandas no sabíamos what to make of it. we were all playing in the plaza, when in the corner of my eye i saw a kid my age dressed like an altar boy. i had never seen anything like it outside of church. no era halloween, ni era época de posadas, it wasn’t for a school play. ¿qué onda? cuando alguien hace una manda they dress up like the saint they pray to. this boy was dressed like san martín de porres: de blanco y negro con un rosario colgando. believers make a promise to an intermediary of god, in exchange for a miracle. la familia del niño se compromete a vestirlo en honor al santo for a period of time of their choice, in exchange for his continuous health after surviving an accident, or something. i also remember seeing girls with their hair cut off short and lots of kids wearing escapularios. do those even exist anywhere else outside of méxico? creo que estaba como en tercero de primaria when i ran home and begged my mom to buy me an escapulario immediately. madre filipita said if we died without wearing one we might rot in purgatory. i didn’t know what that was but it sounded horrible y ni mais que yo quería eso. this was the same nun who had us kneel every morning with our arms extended and hands in the form of the cross, while we prayed the rosary aloud. by the end of it, my triceps would be burning. madre luz maría was much kinder. her warm demeanor me hacía acordarme de mi abuelita paterna. in fourth grade, i remember telling her i didn’t want to confess. qué raro, arrodillarme al lado de un padre al que ni conozco y decirle todo lo que hice mal. that’s just weird and scary. de adulta, valoro la noción de responsabilizarse por los errores que uno comete and owning it, but back then … qué susto. madre luz maría had me confess anyway, but after our grade’s first communion she said i could just confess frente a una imagen de jesucristo antes de comulgar. did i mention she was one of my favorites? los domingos veíamos a la gente entrar a misa de rodillas. church parishioners would kneel at the entrance and make their way up to the altar, rezando todo el camino. when we saw this for the first time, el piti asked la sra. linda: —‘do we have to do that?’ with a scared look on his face. —‘why do they do it?’ i chimed in. —‘faith’ contestó. interesting concept. faith. my dad says mine wavers. mi amiga costarricense dice: —‘si no crees en dios ¿de qué te agarrás, maje?’ dios. la divina madre. madre tierra. dwyer portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019157 i went to an encierro juvenil when i was fifteen and hated it. they kept playing tricks on us: we were all sinners, we had to repent. it doesn’t surprise me that i was one of the initiators who planned a failed youth retreat midnight escape. nos cacharon al brincarnos la barda. —‘bájense, hijas de la …’ —‘pos, ya ni modo’ we said. they caught us and i falsely promised i would say the rosary every day in repentance. —‘cada rosario es como una rosa que le das a la virgen’ said the nun in charge. and, of course the poet in me wanted to cover la virgen with roses (much like alma lopez did in her art piece). but in reality, i just couldn’t commit to saying a rosary a day just because someone said i had to. la fe nace; no se impone. maybe that’s why la fe del piti es tan fuerte. ‘the force is definitely strong with him.’ tenía un cuadro de san martín de porres en su cuarto. el santo mulato que cuida a los enfermos y a los pobres, el que se comunica con los animales. i never saw el piti dress like san martín, but that same boy who questioned if we had to kneel from the entrance of the church to the altar, now understands why it’s done, desde dentro. his four-day pilgrimage every year, his faith en la virgen de talpa, his fasting, his blackened, swollen feet illustrate why. meanwhile, i walked among pilgrims in santiago de compostela a few summers ago, and i fast intermittently, still studying the benefits of why. i question faith and religious institutions. creo en algunas cosas, pero en otras no puedo. i find peace in nature: en la divina madre. my church is a panoramic view of a body of water, the breeze is the music, the pews are the tall grass. los colores del cielo unidos son el saludo de paz. when i last visited el piti’s house, i was faced with an enormous image of our lady of guadalupe kissing the pope’s forehead. surrounding it, were all the wallet-sized family photos i’ve sent him over the years. la fe nace y en él floreció. i can lecture you on it, pero en mí no nace así. as a cultural analyst, informed by anthropology and performance theory, respeto los rituales y me interesan las diferentes expresiones de fe. in portland, i grew up surrounded by middle eastern and asian family friends. during sleep-overs i would see my muslim friend and her family pray, hablaban urdu y pronto aprendí a distinguir las frases en árabe que decoraban las paredes de su casa. de muchacha, me invitaron a una mezquita in portland, where women of all ages had an open discussion about hygiene during menstruation. the younger women in the mosque complained about not being allowed to shower during their period, while the older women claimed it was dirty to let their period blood run down their bodies. por dentro, me moría de la risa. my thirteen-year-old self, kept wanting to burst into laughter every time i heard ‘period blood’ mentioned with such distress, but the intensity in the mood quickly made me control myself. faith and rituals can unite and separate communities. pareciera que me contradigo: i question religious institutions but enjoy visiting places of worship. me interesa estudiar diferentes rituales, pero tiendo a rechazar las que -en teoríame aplican. i pick and choose, pero estoy en paz. la fe es personal. mi papá me decía: ‘follow your bliss’—porque es fanático de joseph campbell—y, eso es lo que he hecho a lo largo de mi vida. i remain open to what la manda portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019158 calls me; me rijo por el instinto. so, when my friend was battling breast cancer, i didn’t think twice when her jewish mentor offered to include me in the blessing offered for my sickly friend. i respectfully bowed my head, said: ‘shalom’ and felt a part of that faith community. las mandas, más que una negociación divina, are a coping mechanism for people who feel the need for action as a means to silence their worries; son un performance cultural del sincretismo latinoamericano. mandas are a performance of faith. when we were kids, mom and dad took us horseback riding through paricutín. there we were, surrounded by volcanic rocks, imagining what the-now half swallowedchurch looked like in its full splendor. a couple years ago i went back with a group of college students. while i was there i couldn’t help remembering the pictures of el piti and me: two gringuitos riding a pelo. his nike shirt, my rainbow brite tennis shoes—the definition of otherness, amongst the backdrop of indigenous, rural paricutín. being there again facing the buried church sparked introspection. was it the memory of the idyllic time our family spent there? ¿era el imaginarme lo que pudo haber sido el pueblo sin la devastación causada por el volcán? ¿… el contacto entre lo celestial siendo tragado por lo que parece ser el inframundo? no sé … it remains one of my favorite places to visit. el piti wears his escapulario proud, while i only wear my virgen de guadalupe necklace when i travel. more recently, i added una medallita de san cristóbal, patron saint of journeys para no sentirme tan sola en mi camino. my faith waivers, but my inner self is strong. maybe el piti and i aren’t so different after all. dwyer portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019159 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 18, no. 1/2 feb 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: campbell, i. 2022. sur – otros puntos de vista. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 18:1/2, 20–25. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis. v18i1-2.7693 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal cultural works sur – otros puntos de vista ian campbell corresponding author: mr ian campbell, honorary research associate, department of international studies: languages and cultures, macquarie university, nsw 2109 australia. ialuca@iinet.net.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7693 article history: received 18/04/2021; accepted 25/08/2021; published 25/02/2022 abstract this suite of short poems with latin american references draws from original versions written in spanish in 2008 and early 2011. it follows on from other poems with latin american references written by the poet in languages other than spanish as part of the poet’s interest in ‘trilingual poetics.’ spanish is not the first language of the writer nor is the poet of latin american heritage. it is part of a corpus of poems which aims to explore the potentialities of multiple language perspectives associated with or derived from a single poetic theme or set of themes. it is also part of the poet’s explorations of what can be derived from some identification as a poet ‘of the south.’ keywords ian campbell; trilingual poetics; latin american poetics; multiple language perspectives the selection commences with meditations on the river that traverses the chilean metropolis of santiago and then moves to the site of the now casa museo of pablo neruda known as la chascona, which he had shared with matilde urrutia. the exhibitions at the museo chileno de arte precolombino become a site for contemplating the occupation of the lands by peoples who came before the spanish conquistadores. the gaze then turns to aspects of the ‘south’ of chile and the island of chilöe, located off the coast near current-day puerto montt. the ulmo (eucryphia cordifolia) tree is used in chile as a source of honey but sometimes also for wood for household heating. houses in the south have generally been mostly constructed using the wood of the forest and imported tree varieties. the foreigner or sojourner once used postcards to record stages of a journey as if they had a magic-realist quality. the mood changes declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 20 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v18i1-2.7693 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v18i1-2.7693 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:ialuca@iinet.net.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v18i1-2.7693 as we reflect on how natural phenomenon have altered land and human perspectives after the impact of the tsunami in the chilean mid-north. briefly, the gaze moves to montevideo in uruguay, where the façade of the original office building of montevideo gas becomes an unlikely point of departure for a tracing of changes over time in a city’s history. the penultimate poem is a humorous tracking of the story of the novel, ardiente paciencia, by chilean writer, antonio skármeta, with its references to the cultural figure of ‘neruda,’ in posthumous forms. the suite of poems ends with a reference to the borges short story ‘sur’ (south) and the unfinished journey that faces us all in a world of changing climatic conditions. oda al rio mapocho ‘seis y media de la tarde en las riberas del mapocho, la inevitable cicatriz de santiago’ – de ‘la vibración del rio sobre la ciudad,’ por francisco veja. no es solamente la cicatriz que cruza la ciudad; trae hielo y nieve, a su hora punto, a través de la tierra llana del valle. rodeado de cemento, lleno de arterias de coches, correas de puentes, y ‘entretenido’ por las esculturas del parque. pero, estoy celoso: tanta agua, tan poco tiempo, cada gota de su prisa, al mar. oda a la chascona al pie del zoo, atrás de la colina, pelo silvestre y desenfrenado. botellas extrañas, figuras orgullosas, ¿león o tigre? campbell portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202221 gorros del desierto ‘la cabeza – como el punto más prominente y visible del cuerpo – constituye el lugar privilegiado para expresar mucho de la amplia diversidad étnica y social que caracterizaban a las antiguas sociedades andinas.’ desierto no hispanohablante vigilante y guarda sus huesos. y gorro: háblame con palabras tejidas, amarillas, azules, y rojas. con cada color de ocre, cada vida reaparece en el espejo de cristales de arena. leñas del sur leñas de ulmo, soldados de colas largas destinados para el frente, humo, fuego y miel. madera del sur casa de madera, hundiéndose y cambiando su horizontal y su vertical, solamente la cerradura es nueva. bajo la superficie gris el grano de madera vive, difícil de verlo. campbell portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202222 chilöe 1 buscando piratas ingleses, en las bahías azules, barcos de fantasmas desaparecen dentro de los muros de la fortaleza; en sus grietas de trescientos años crecen flores blancas. chilöe – 2 basas de piedras y madera de ciprés, estructura de alerce, ciprés y coigüe, tabla machihembrada a mano, techo de tejuelas de alerce. iglesia, madera de christus, sangre del pueblo. oda a las postales postales en colores de loros de arco iris, volando dentro y fuera del buzón jaula. arrebatan las semillas de las flores del desierto. luego partieron. pájaros de realismo-mágico, vuelan, van, hacía el cielo infinito. loros de arco iris! campbell portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202223 ruta de evacuación, la serena asientos en el chatito cortés, caleta san pedro, nosotros elegimos comer locos. yo leo mi panfleto, ‘sugerencias y orientaciones ante un tsunami’. ¡no pienso ir al café tzunami hoy! su larga permanencia proclaman hasta ahora las palabras, ‘ex fumo dare lucem,’ en el mantel del edificio montevideo gas. preservar ese edificio es conservar su energía, de una forma simbólica, de la larga permanencia, no solo los rastros intangibles de la compañía inglesa, sino los de sus antepasados, los hermanos isole (1852) y sus herederos de hoy. piedra a piedra, cañería por cañería, hasta la lucidez. campbell portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202224 oda al círculo nerudiano skármeta escribió en 1984 su libro ardiente paciencia; y dirigió el largometraje del mismo titulo –‘un homenaje a su amigo, el gran poeta pablo neruda.’ en 1994, radford, ingles, llevó esa novela al cine, ‘il postino’, en italiano, filmado en parte en una de las islas italianas. lentamente, y después de este rodaje, la arena en la playa ahora famosa, ha disminuido – debido a tantos visitantes en speedboats! en 2010 se estrenó ‘il postino,’ en forma de ópera, por daniel catan, en los ángeles, con placido domingo en el papel de neruda. en viena, domingo apareció con israel lograno como mario ruoppolo, el famoso cartero. en 2022 ruoppolo, ahora más famoso que neruda, escribió su autobiografía, confieso que he vivido. ‘siempre quise escribir algo sobre mi vida un poco surreal,’ respondió ruoppolo, ¡con su entusiasmo característico! lejano sur se fueron al sur, acompañados de los caballos viejos, se despidieron de la avenida rivadavia, en dirección a la tierra de polvo, reino de paradoja, salieron los bordes altos de la esencia de la vida – piedra, viento, agua – y fuego sobre hielo. campbell portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202225 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: averis, k. 2021. ni una menos: colombia’s crisis of gendered violence during the covid19 pandemic. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 91–96. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis. v17i1-2.7367 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay ni una menos: colombia’s crisis of gendered violence during the covid-19 pandemic kate averis corresponding author: kate averis, universidad de antioquia, calle 67 número 53– 108 p.o box 1226, medellin, colombia. katherine.averis@udea.edu.co doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7367 article history: received 13/08/2020; accepted 09/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract in spite of the shared nature of the global suffering caused by the pandemic, the lockdown imposed to reduce the spread of covid-19 has exposed and exacerbated the crisis of gendered violence in colombia. while many countries around the globe have reported an increase in gendered violence during the pandemic, colombia’s lockdown has taken place in a context of already high rates of violence towards women and girls. such an environment has proven propitious for the propagation of incidents of gendered violence throughout all strata of society, with indigenous women and girls, and those living in precarious conditions, in particularly vulnerable to often life-threatening circumstances. this article charts the particular impact of the lockdown on gendered violence in colombia and discusses the reactions of feminists, journalists, academics, writers and artists. keywords gender-based violence; colombia; covid-19; lockdown; feminisms in spite of the shared nature of the global suffering caused by the covid-19 pandemic, the lockdown imposed to reduce the spread of the new strain of coronavirus has exposed and exacerbated the current crisis of gendered violence in colombia. while un women has reported an emerging global ‘shadow pandemic’ of violence against women and girls coincident with the spread of covid-19, colombia’s lockdown has taken place in a context of already ‘pandemic and structural’ violence against women and girls (atencio et al. 2019). this article charts the particular impact of the lockdown on women and girls vulnerable to gendered declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 91 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7367 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7367 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7367 mailto:katherine.averis%40udea.edu.co?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7367 violence in colombia and discusses the reactions of— the predominantly female— feminists, journalists, academics, writers and artists who have responded to this crisis. the many and profound disruptions occasioned by the covid-19 pandemic have occurred in a context of already high rates of gendered violence in colombia (as documented by graciela atencio et al. 2019). these have been receiving increasing attention in recent decades, from the codification of equality between women and men in the 1991 constitution to the passing of laws in 2008 and 2015 that enshrine mechanisms of recognition, prevention and punishment of violence against women and girls. ana güezmes, the representative of un women in colombia, has called for the effective enforcement of these laws in light of the fact that violence against women and girls in colombia has increased in recent years (sarralde 2018). this appeal has been echoed by feminist, women’s and human rights organisations throughout the country, from the national women’s network to the colombian branch of the women’s international league for peace and freedom, limpal colombia, who have consistently warned of the heightened danger faced by women and girls in colombia, and repeatedly denounced the government’s failure to ensure their safety. gendered violence in colombia is not limited to any particular age range, with assaults recorded against victims from one month to eighty-four years of age in 2020 (ofc 2020). nor is it limited to any particular socio-economic background. while women and girls who are indigenous, lgbtqi+ or living in precarious social and economic circumstances are proven to be particularly vulnerable to gendered violence, a number of recent cases show gendered violence to affect women throughout society: in academia, as illustrated by 131 students’ accusations of sexual harrassment at the universidad distrital francisco josé de caldas (el espectador 2020); in politics, with the denunciation of regional mayors vicente young and daniel quintero for sexual abuse (sepúlveda 2020; bohórquez and urbina 2020); and in the arts, with the publication of the testimonies of eight women who describe being sexually harassed or abused by the filmmaker ciro guerra (ruiz-navarro and londoño 2020). where the perpetrator of a reported case of sexual violence is identifiable, this is most frequently someone known to the victim, be it through personal, family, social or occupational connections, although a significant proportion of such crimes are also committed against women who are prominent in their communities for carrying out roles of organisation and leadership for which they are targeted by both state and non-state actors (ofc 2020). güezmes notes a marked increase in recent years in intimidation and attacks against female community leaders, emphasising the gendered nature of the violence with which they are targeted which often takes the form of sexual violence and threats of violence to other (particularly female) members of their families (sarralde 2018). the contributing factors behind the particular context of gendered violence in colombia that have been exacerbated during the period of lockdown are many, complex and interrelated. in addition to the structural criminality in operation in many regions that effectively creates what the argentine feminist anthropologist rita segato (2016) has described as a ‘second state’ that allows and cultivates a ‘low-level war’ against women and girls, colombia’s history of armed conflict also plays an important role in intensifying violence against women and girls, who have more frequently been at the receiving end of physical and sexual violence. further exacerbating this historical context of gendered violence is a political context of misogyny from local to national level, as illustrated by the statement of regional town councillor, ramón cardona, that ‘women, like laws, are to be violated’ (martínez 2017) and the former defence minister, luis carlos villegas’ dismissal of the systemic assassination of community leaders and human rights defenders in colombia as driven by ‘líos de faldas’ [skirt-chasing] (va 2017). such institutional misogyny is echoed in the speech acts of everyday sexism, where female professionals are often referred to by their forename while surnames are used for their male colleagues, and the term ‘mujer’ [woman] is frequently discarded when referring to women in preference for ‘niña’ [young girl] or ‘vieja’ [old woman], contributing to an averis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202192 environment in which women’s achievements are downplayed or go unrecognised. the reproduction of such misogyny in colombia’s notoriously weak institutions translates into a failure to investigate and prosecute the vast majority of incidents of gendered violence, with only 17 per cent of cases of sexual abuse charged, and only 5 per cent tried (sarralde 2018). for the members of the feminist anti-militarist network who have created and manage the observatory of femicides in colombia (ofc), these statistics indicate that most perpetrators enjoy virtual impunity for crimes of physical and sexual violence against women and girls (atencio et al. 2019). these circumstances that produce, enable and authorise violence against women and girls have been exacerbated by the lockdown imposed to contain the spread of covid-19 in colombia, pronounced on 20 march and partially lifted on 1 september. statistics that reveal the incidence of violence against women and girls during this period capture only the incidents that have been reported or where victims have sought support. given the reluctance of victims to report and the lack of systematic institutional data collection (ofc 2020), statistical data tell only a partial story of the increase of gendered violence during lockdown. they nevertheless indicate a sharp increase, with an 8.6% rise in femicides in the capital, bogotá, and a 230% surge in calls to the city’s municipal helpline for women at risk of violence (torres n.d.) confirming, for the national women’s network, that ‘the home is the most dangerous place for women, where most rapes and murders occur’ (nww n.d.). dora saldarriaga, medellín town councillor, cites 5,717 reports of domestic violence made in the period from 20 march to 8 may 2020, up from 1,782 in the same period in 2019, calling for the declaration of a humanitarian crisis of violence against women on behalf of estamos listas [we’re ready] colombia’s only women’s political party (noticias caracol 2020). such a dramatic increase is not limited to colombia in the latin american context and similar hikes have been observed, most markedly, where support and services have been reduced, as seen, for example, in mexico (aquino 2020). compounding the lack of conclusive data that would reveal the full extent of gendered violence in colombia, both during and preceding the lockdown, is its inconsistent and often sensationalised media coverage. in her report on the 150 femicides recorded in the first half of 2020, salomé gómez-upegui highlights the fact that most people will not be able to name even five of these women due to the selective nature of media reports on gendered violence which she describes as largely consisting of the repetition of reports produced by ngos that cite accumulated cases and new records surpassed without telling the individual stories behind the statistics. the effect of such selective reporting is, for gómez-upegui, that many believe that gendered violence in colombia is limited to isolated cases rather than due to systemic factors. in an attempt to document the systemic nature of gendered violence, natalia arenas (2020) has recorded the stories of forty-two women and girls murdered during the first sixty-eight days of the lockdown in colombia, relying on regional newspapers and women’s organisations as sources. while the national newspaper, el tiempo, has dedicated reporting on sexual violence against women and children since 2009 in the ‘no es hora de callar’ [now is not the time to remain silent] campaign directed by jineth bedoya, it has largely been feminist journalists in smaller outlets that have undertaken the task. in addition to female journalists, prominent female academics in colombia have reacted publicly to the crisis of gendered violence during the lockdown. judith nieto lópez, professor at the university of antioquia, decried the indifference of local, regional and national governments to the increasing rates of femicide, denouncing the ‘barbarian’ state that permits the murder of women and girls and the ‘reigning patriarchy’ that demands women and girls’ compliance to certain cultural expectations (2020). nieto lópez also highlights the particular vulnerability of women and girls of colombia’s 115 indigenous groups by dedicating her intervention to the thirteen-year-old girl of the emberá katío nation who survived rape by seven members of the colombian army in june, an institution with a record of sexual abuse of, in particular, indigenous women and girls (bedoya n.d.). lucía gonzález, member of the truth commission formed to facilitate the process of peace and reconciliation in the implementation of the historic peace treaty signed by averis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202193 the colombian government in 2016, argues for a reconsideration of the seven soldiers’ act not as attributable to monstrosity or pack mentality but as a symptom of a hegemonic patriarchy in need of deconstruction in order for women and girls’ humanity, subjectivity and bodily integrity to be recognised and respected. she also argues for a true valorisation of the diversity of the colombian population— which includes significant afro-colombian and indigenous ethnic minorities— in order to combat the intersectional compounding of suffering, and for policies and governance that prevent deprivation converting into violence. latin american feminist organisations beyond colombia have also been urgently calling attention to the crisis of gendered violence during lockdown in the continent, most notably ni una menos, the now continental movement against gender-based violence that originated in argentina in 2015. lastesis— the chilean feminist art collective that drew worldwide attention to the complicity of the state in gendered violence in latin america (and beyond) with ‘un violador en tu camino’ [a rapist in your path] in november 2019— has drawn attention to the fact that the state mandate to remain at home confined many women and girls to the very space that is the most dangerous for them with little if any provision for their protection. the unrelenting rhythm, focus on female bodies contorted into confined domestic spaces and banality of the culinary actions and utensils featured in the video ‘nos roban todo, menos la rabia’ [they steal everything from us but rage], released by lastesis on 22 june during the chilean lockdown, depicts women quite literally ‘atrapadas sin salida con las armas homicidas’ [trapped with the murder weapons and with no way out]. female artists have long played a key role in pushing back against the high rates of gendered violence in latin america, and feminist writers in colombia are a particular case in point. laura restrepo, one of colombia’s foremost writers, has consistently addressed the most pressing political and social issues affecting colombians, with recent publications focusing on partner violence and child abuse (2016; 2018). adopting a journalistic approach in her fictional writing that is based on investigation and interviews, restrepo makes up for what has been occluded from the historical record in novels that emphasise the contexts and impacts rather than the acts of violence. in los divinos [the divines] (2018), she attempts to imagine the circumstances that led rafael uribe noguera, from a well-connected bogotá family, to kidnap, torture, abuse and murder a seven-year-old indigenous yanakuna girl, yuliana samboní, in 2016. in a pointed effort to avoid recreating the violence perpetrated against yuliana, restrepo focuses her narrative on the privileged social and economic circumstances of the perpetrator, highlighting the intersection of sexism, racism and classism that produced and enabled such a crime. restrepo is one of many female writers, filmmakers and artists who have reacted to the crisis of gendered violence in colombia, from laura mora to doris salcedo. salcedo, whose sculptures and installations have long focused on the violence committed against women during colombia’s historical armed conflict, created her 2018 installation, fragmentos [fragments] from 37 tonnes of firearms that were melted and recast as slabs whose moulds were beaten and shaped by women who suffered physical and sexual violence during the conflict. the resulting 1,296 slabs were then laid to form the floor of an exhibition space located one block from the presidential palace in bogotá. the colombian president, iván duque, declined the invitation to attend the inauguration of salcedo’s ‘counter-monument’ to the signing of the historic peace deal signed between the colombian government and the farc [revolutionary armed forces of colombia] in 2016, illustrating the governmental indifference that feminists such as judith nieto lópez have decried. the current crisis of gendered violence in colombia thus stems from a history of violent conflict, an institutional and social context of misogyny, and entrenched gendered, ethnic and class hierarchies that have compounded the sanitary, economic and security tensions fostered by lockdown. while it is a commonplace to hear in press conferences and media 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http://www.udea.edu.co/wps/portal/udea/web/inicio/udea-noticias/udea-noticia/!ut/p/z0/fy4xd4jadix_igsj6al46kgctiydgzfwi2mg0slcavem_nsphyyls9pv9b2xgoemjmu7x1dywawd50afv-vnbjomaq90olwqd8liodvojycfozd_dagbq64zkzjcwaghqna6xraessjiof-lq2vos49zyp1wwegj9u5blt3o-squzrt-dfcbe7kc8tp2tejxm1tuk4f2zvix1ap3eq!!/ http://www.udea.edu.co/wps/portal/udea/web/inicio/udea-noticias/udea-noticia/!ut/p/z0/fy4xd4jadix_igsj6al46kgctiydgzfwi2mg0slcavem_nsphyyls9pv9b2xgoemjmu7x1dywawd50afv-vnbjomaq90olwqd8liodvojycfozd_dagbq64zkzjcwaghqna6xraessjiof-lq2vos49zyp1wwegj9u5blt3o-squzrt-dfcbe7kc8tp2tejxm1tuk4f2zvix1ap3eq!!/ http://www.udea.edu.co/wps/portal/udea/web/inicio/udea-noticias/udea-noticia/!ut/p/z0/fy4xd4jadix_igsj6al46kgctiydgzfwi2mg0slcavem_nsphyyls9pv9b2xgoemjmu7x1dywawd50afv-vnbjomaq90olwqd8liodvojycfozd_dagbq64zkzjcwaghqna6xraessjiof-lq2vos49zyp1wwegj9u5blt3o-squzrt-dfcbe7kc8tp2tejxm1tuk4f2zvix1ap3eq!!/ http://www.udea.edu.co/wps/portal/udea/web/inicio/udea-noticias/udea-noticia/!ut/p/z0/fy4xd4jadix_igsj6al46kgctiydgzfwi2mg0slcavem_nsphyyls9pv9b2xgoemjmu7x1dywawd50afv-vnbjomaq90olwqd8liodvojycfozd_dagbq64zkzjcwaghqna6xraessjiof-lq2vos49zyp1wwegj9u5blt3o-squzrt-dfcbe7kc8tp2tejxm1tuk4f2zvix1ap3eq!!/ https://noticias.caracoltv.com/antioquia/hay-mas-mujeres-victimas-de-violencia-que-contagiadas-de-coronavirus-concejala-en-medellin?00000171-f5e2-d349-a37f-f5fe57570000-page=2 https://noticias.caracoltv.com/antioquia/hay-mas-mujeres-victimas-de-violencia-que-contagiadas-de-coronavirus-concejala-en-medellin?00000171-f5e2-d349-a37f-f5fe57570000-page=2 https://noticias.caracoltv.com/antioquia/hay-mas-mujeres-victimas-de-violencia-que-contagiadas-de-coronavirus-concejala-en-medellin?00000171-f5e2-d349-a37f-f5fe57570000-page=2 http://www.observatoriofeminicidioscolombia.org/ https://volcanicas.com/2020/06/24/ocho-denuncias-de-acoso-y-abuso-sexual-contra-ciro-guerra/ https://volcanicas.com/2020/06/24/ocho-denuncias-de-acoso-y-abuso-sexual-contra-ciro-guerra/ https://www.eltiempo.com/justicia/investigacion/naciones-unidas-advierte-sobre-impunidad-en-colombia-en-crimenes-contra-mujeres-300772 https://www.eltiempo.com/justicia/investigacion/naciones-unidas-advierte-sobre-impunidad-en-colombia-en-crimenes-contra-mujeres-300772 https://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/otras-ciudades/alcalde-de-la-tebaida-quindio-es-acusado-de-abuso-sexual-518090 https://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/otras-ciudades/alcalde-de-la-tebaida-quindio-es-acusado-de-abuso-sexual-518090 https://www.eltiempo.com/bogota/pandemia-del-feminicidio-99-mujeres-asesinadas-en-lo-corrido-del-2020-509910 https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2020/4/statement-ed-phumzile-violence-against-women-during-pandemic https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2020/4/statement-ed-phumzile-violence-against-women-during-pandemic https://verdadabierta.com/ligerezas-verbales-del-ministro-de-defensa-exponen-a-lideres-sociales/ aaig survey essay no 1 galley final portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. afro-americanophilia in germany special issue, guest edited by moritz ege and andrew wright hurley. © 2015 [moritz ege and andrew wright hurley]. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i2.4359 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal periodizing and historicizing german afro-americanophilia: from antebellum to postwar (1850–1967) moritz ege, university of munich andrew wright hurley, university of technology sydney in this essay, which builds on the methodological considerations and the definitions we sketched in the introduction to the special edition on what we are calling twentiethcentury german afro-americanophilia, we delve into the history of afroamericanophilia in germany and of its precursors. afro-americanophilia denotes the affirmative, enthusiastic, even loving approaches to african american culture, politics, and people. these, in turn, are heterogeneous acts that encompass imaginations, practices and social relationships. such acts have been theorized with concepts such as mimesis, identification, desire, translation, misunderstanding, appropriation, expropriation, fetishism, hybridisation, or becoming-minor. our aim here, however, is not to theorize afro-americanophilia, but to establish a preliminary, mostly descriptive periodization and to draw out some of the particularly significant moments, ruptures, and continuities within it. in the process, we also identify some of the salient ways scholars have interpreted afro-americanophilia during those periods. the timeframe we cover in this first review essay stretches from the nineteenth century until the mid– 1960s, from which point the second essay continues. focusing on a variety of appropriative practices, communicative media, actors and forms of agency, power differentials, and sociocultural contexts, we discuss positive images of and affirmative ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 2 approaches to black people in german culture and its imaginary prior to the colonial era, and then during the colonial, weimar, nazi and postwar eras.1 as we argue in the introduction to this special issue, our main term’s juxtaposition of the term ‘afro-american’—which gained prominence in the 1960s in us civil rights discourse—with a greek suffix that may have clinical connotations to some readers is intended to indicate the internal contradictions and occasional self-reflexivity of the phenomenon. the term thus resembles the earlier negrophilia, which we take up as a more historically specific concept later in this essay when discussing the 1920s. we use the term afro-americanophilia for pragmatic reasons to refer to diverse occurrences at different points in time and in distinct contexts. we maintain that the phenomenon’s political meanings cannot be exhaustively evaluated on a transhistorical level. instead, those meanings must be analyzed in regard to specific historical situations, which nevertheless take place under unequal, pre-structured conditions. our interest in afro-americanophilia should not be read as an attempt to downplay racism. the german engagement with african-american culture has by no means only been one of love. many germans actively fought against the influence and presence of black people, including african-americans, and some continue to do so. describing and analyzing in precise and open-minded ways recurring acts of afro-americanophilia is important, but should not be taken to suggest that afro-americanophilia is socially dominant. continuing everyday racism against people of colour, and violence against refugees (immediate and structural), make that abundantly clear. in a similar but analytically distinct sense, we also do not wish to view the ‘love’ for african-american culture monochromatically. racism can come in many forms, including some that profess love but are based on misrecognition and the more or less subtle exertion of dominance. it is also clear from the work on stereotyping and from psychoanalytic approaches to racism that a -philia can rapidly switch into a -phobia (gilman 2013). again, we do not delve into the psychological, cultural, sociostructural 1 the culturally constructed yet crucial categories ‘black’ and ‘white’ will not be put in quotation marks or begin with a capital letter on the following pages (unless there is a context of identity politics and emphatic cultural pride among protagonists), but they should nonetheless be read as highly debated, unstable signifiers (with real-world references and effects in experiences, identities and politics), not as ‘neutral,’ sociological denominations. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 3 and economic explanations of such ambiguities here.2 it should be kept in mind, however, that racism and afro-americanophilia are closely interdependent, and they are often hard to separate. in surveying afro-americanophilia we give snapshots of the published research that touches on black presences, real and imagined, in germany and in german-speaking lands and cultures.3 it should be clear that in selecting the literature we draw from, our decisions on inclusion and exclusion are contingent and debatable. we have been guided both by our perception of the field, which takes up different areas of social, cultural and intellectual history, and by our own joint research interests that are—as the second survey essay makes clear—particularly strong in the area of popular music. the article thus takes up prominent examples of afro-americanophilia from the areas of everyday aesthetics, popular music, political organizations, and to some extent literature and advertising, but pays relatively little attention to classical music, painting, theology, sports, theatre, film, and reportage. those areas must be covered in future work. still, in drawing these many strains together in the following sections, we attempt to sketch the outlines of a more complete picture. while our main interest is in practices of afro-americanophilia, focussing on the actors is equally important. this immediately poses questions of agency and about the beneficiaries of afro-americanophilia. who is active in afro-americanophilia, and in what ways, and what are the effects of that agency? the main focus of this survey will be on the ‘lover’ side of the equation, the white afro-americanophiles, but—without attempting to write a history of african americans, black people in germany, or black germans—we also inquire into the ways in which some of the people who are the objects of that love have reacted to (and sometimes suffered under) the expectations levied upon them, or have been able to engage with the demand for ‘black cultural traffic.’ in the first sections of this paper, we stress a few salient aspects of real and imagined presences in pre-modern times, so as to identify some potentially long-lasting themes and discontinuities, before approaching the late nineteenth century where a modern dispositif of racial meanings takes shape. 2 theoretical approaches are treated more extensively in ege (2007). 3 ‘german speaking lands and cultures’ refers both to the time before the german nation-state (1871), as well as to austria and switzerland (a few sources relate to these german-speaking countries). we do not refer to the history of these latter countries in their entirety, however. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 4 a pre-history a pre-history of 20th century afro-americanophilia can be found in ambivalently ‘positive’ figures that arose among germans in representations of the crusades, and of the lives of certain christian saints and so-called hofmohren [court moors, that is subjects from north africa and islamicized spain], as well as other exceptional individuals such as the philosopher anton wilhelm amo (gilman 1982; martin 2001; van der heyden 2008; honeck, klimke & kuhlmann 2013).4 a few basic points about the changing attitudes to black people and the idea of blackness before the 19th century are pertinent to later forms of afro-americanophilia in germany. for instance, the historian peter martin discerns in the 16th and 17thth centuries an ‘afrophile’ tendency within the aristocracy, for whom the figure of the moor represented an advanced and wealthy ‘oriental’ culture (2001: 12). black people were sought out as servants who could give their masters the opportunity to associate themselves with a signifier of luxury and to create an ‘oriental’ mise-en-scène in their everyday life. as a mode of appropriating and exhibiting otherness, these orientalist forms shared some features with 18th century elite tastes for chinoisierie or japonerie: black people figured as exotic and as signs of luxury. at the same time, of course, white aristocrats exerted their dominance over people of colour, both practically and symbolically.5 the history of european preconceptions of black people devolved from the figure of the in-some-ways-sophisticated mohr to that of the radically inferior ‘neger’ (negro). ‘enlightened’ anthropological speculations in the late-18th century and the scientific racial theories of the 19th century were more unambiguously negative than earlier ways of thinking.6 as peter martin puts it, by approximately 1830—that is, by the time the bourgeois society ceased to be simply a theoretical concept—... all of the central elements had emerged that continue to determine the image of africans amongst many germans to this day. blacks were largely regarded as being incontrovertibly foreign and demonic, as being creatures of their drives and vices, as being without 4 according to historians, black people who lived in germany before the late 19th century can be numbered in the thousands only. it should be noted that the late 17th century was the time when the kurbrandenburg (later prussia) established a brandenburg gold coast colony in today’s ghana. this colony remained in brandenburg hands until the 1720s. partly with this era of european colonialism in mind, the german anthropologist karl-heinz kohl (1987) has written about white european ‘cultural defectors’ who attempted to leave behind their home cultures. before the 18th century, kohl argues, such ‘defectors’ were mostly members of the underclasses. 5 in a slightly different sense, gypsy masquerades, popular in courts and the theatre, allowed the masqueraders to mimic a supposedly more free (but, in reality, harshly oppressed) group and at the same time condemn its way of life as inferior and dangerous (bogdal 2011). 6 on scientific racism in germany, see pyenson (1985) and especially smith (1991). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 5 culture, reason and history, as being people with an animalistic embodiment and childlike behaviour. (2001: 13, our translation) as historians of racism have pointed out, such ideas served an important function in the context of slavery and modern colonialism of legitimizing exploitation and dehumanization. within this context of the intellectual systematization of racism in the 19th century, modern ‘black cultural traffic’ begins. for german-speaking audiences, the first large-scale exposure to africans in north american slavery was mediated through harriet beecher stowe’s sentimental-romantic abolitionist novel uncle tom’s cabin, which was published in german translation in 1852. the book was widely read, and as various sources suggest it precipitated a pattern of emotional identification and imagination among thousands of white german readers. numerous imitative songs, poetry, and plays soon followed, creating a veritable onkeltom-industrie [uncle tom industry] (paul 2002, 2005; broeck 2011). however, there is little to suggest a deeper interest in, let alone fascination or love for, the american ‘negro’ or her/his culture at that time.7 rather, the german reception of beecher stowe’s book demonstrates how new world slavery primarily figured as a metaphor for old world, classand sometimes gender-based social injustices, and as a stage for white hero or saviour figures, in a discourse that would prove to be long-lasting.8 colonial and jim-crow era subsequent german demand for (us) ‘black cultural traffic’ arose during the postreconstruction, jim crow era in the usa, at the same time that germany became a colonial power.9 this phase roughly coincides with kennell jackson’s periodization in 7 there was a significant enough faction among german-americans in the 1840s and 1850s that was strongly opposed to slavery and white supremacy for fredrick douglass to claim that ‘a german has only to be a german to be utterly opposed to slavery. in feeling, as well as in conviction and principle, they are antislavery’ (levine 1998: 56. see also honeck 2011; strickland 2011). this was, of course, a huge exaggeration, but the left-wing german-american anti-slavery faction was strong. indeed numerous failed 1848 revolutionaries emigrated to the usa and became vocal abolitionists. many german émigrés volunteered for lincoln’s civil war army. particularly significant abolitionist activists included ottilie assing, who was fredrick douglass’s collaborator, lover and translator (diederich 1999). however, the overall tendency among german-american authors in the 19th century can be described as an increasing allegiance to whiteness, as literary scholar heike paul (2005) argues. this attitude is largely analogous to that of other western and central european immigrant groups in the usa. 8 from the early 19th century germans employed a discursive rhetoric to contrast their own fate (as ‘free’ white people) with that of slaves. like other europeans, they often referred to their birthright as white people to be free from slavery, as opposed to black people of african descent, whom god had supposedly placed in a lower position (paul 2002: 29). 9 from the mid-1880s until the mid 1910s––wwi and the end of the kaiserreich [german empire]–– germany held territories on the african continent including large areas around what are now togo, ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 6 which the time between the 1890s and the 1920s is characterized by ‘intense [black] cultural traffic’ (2005: 20).10 many aspects of later racial iconography, semantics and thought, as well as a structural coloniality of knowledge and power are rooted in 19th century (and earlier) colonialism.11 it was also during this era of intense urbanization and industrialization that modern mass culture began to emerge and would evolve to have a key role in the mediation of afro-americanophilia, as david ciarlo (2011) has shown in his work on racial iconography in german advertising culture. in this context, schaulust [freud’s scopophilia] became an increasingly important mode of relating to the world (gilman 1985; hall 2013). the exhibition of colonial ‘others,’ which displayed the spectacle of race and difference as a discourse of ‘civilizational’ hierarchy, infused with curiosity and desire, developed into mainstays of mass culture and advertising (mcclintock 1995; bechhaus-gerst & klein-arendt 2003, 2004; poignant 2004; dreesbach 2005; wolter 2005; langbehn 2010; ciarlo 2011; aitken & rosenhaft 2013). german entertainment entrepreneurs, sometimes aided by anthropologists, created völkerschauen [shows of peoples] or völkerausstellungen [exhibitions of peoples] that featured scenes of life in far-away lands, including african and asian colonies. this fulfilled an apparent mass desire for ‘foreign,’ especially black bodies that were put on display in order to be observed and, sometimes, touched.12 concurrently, older european folk culture like carnival also became infused with colonial themes and with performances of racial difference and domination, including re-enactments of colonial wars (bausinger 2005: 77; kramer 2012: 193ff). such grassroots instantiations of german imperialism illustrate that even genocidal colonial war could be turned into participatory entertainment ‘at home,’ and folded into the traditional carnivalesque pleasure of transgression via costumes, masks, and paint. this was not afro-americanophilia, of course, as neither schaulust nor carnival cameroon, rwanda, burundi, as well as deutsch-ostafrika (german east africa, now tanzania) and deutsch-südwestafrika (german southwest africa, now namibia). 10 jackson (2005) also stresses that in comparison with the period between the 1840s and 1880s there was a growing emancipation from the ‘plantation show formula’ among african american artists, including traveling singing groups. 11 there is an extensive literature on german colonialism, and its prehistory and legacies: zantop (1997); berman (1998); lennox, friedrichsmeyer & zantop (1998); el-tayeb (2001); grosse (2000); wildenthal (2001); bechhaus-gerst & klein-arendt (2003); kundrus (2003); ames, klotz & wildenthal (2005; walgenbach (2005); baranowski (2010); langbehn (2010); langbehn & salama (2011); perraudin & zimmerer (2011). 12 about 400 völkerausstellungen troupes toured germany between 1875 and 1930; some performers self-confidently fought for their own interests; a few also had liaisons with white germans (dreesbach 2005: 240). on attempts to reconstruct their lives see poignant (2004). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 7 performances document anything reminiscent of love. that said, scopophilic events such as the völkerausstellungen did become enmeshed in erotic and fetishistic desires, and discourses about those events form another important german prehistory of more recent afro-americanophilia.13 in a more general sense, sexualized fears of boundary crossing, contagion and degeneration—also crucial for 19th-century anti-semitism—shaped colonial-era racial discourse from the beginning. the idea of transformation, of cultural defection, of ‘becoming black,’ loomed large within the white german colonial cultural imaginary. questions of interracial desire and miscegenation were intertwined in colonial discourse with the motif of verkafferung [kaffirization] and later vernegerung [negroization], racist terms that were used, in the beginning, to express disdain for less respectable, lower-class (white) german settlers who appeared to escape the discipline of european colonial life and succumb to the purported lure of native life (wildenthal 1997; axster 2005; o’donell 2005).14 still, german racial iconography tended not to sexualize the african female other, as much as, say, the french counterpart (ciarlo 2011: 99–101). intimate personal relations between colonizers and colonized persons confronted the german colonial administration and the parliament at home with practical, legal and intellectual challenges: how to manage marriage rights and, most pressingly, the citizenship of spouses and interracial children? could there be black germans? in order to deny the existence of the latter, the empire instituted ius sanguinis laws of citizenship that cast a long shadow beyond the actual demise of the colonies (reich 1998; grosse 2000; el-tayeb 2001; campt 2004; walgenbach 2005; nagl 2007). from the 1890s on, a few hundred colonial migrants—mostly from today’s cameroon—posed similar questions within germany (aitken & rosenhaft 2013).15 some socialists (notably rosa luxemburg) and christian groups opposed colonialism on political and humanitarian grounds, but anti-colonialism did not become a popular movement before germany lost its colonies. on the contrary, its support grew over time. in its later phase, even within the political (social democrat) opposition to the imperial government, most germans supported colonialism as a benign civilizing mission. 13 on racial fetishism see mercer (2013). 14 on these biopolitical resonances see the classic study by stoler (1995). 15 the ‘loss’ of the german colonies in the period 1914–1918 did not stop colonial subjects from the erstwhile colonies coming to germany. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 8 concurrently, jim-crow-era popular culture from the usa—especially post-bellum minstrelsy—also began to reach continental europe.16 numerous african american musicians toured western and central europe around the turn of the century, performing mostly in variété theatres in cities and towns, and enjoying a certain amount of freedom in the process, as the discographer and historian rainer lotz has shown.17 the social and cultural meanings of minstrelsy in the usa are hotly debated, especially since eric lott (1996) argued that its performative dimensions of masking and play involved not only ridicule and disdain, but also a carnevalesque combination of ‘love and theft.’ in germany, literary scholar jonathan wipplinger argues that fin-de-siècle blackface performances––acted by whites and blacks––marked an important and long-lasting ‘point of discursive confluence, by which popular culture was constructed as both black and american’ (2011: 459). this image reworked germany’s new colonial status, which meant that the presence of black people had to be acknowledged in a new way, as did the contemporary geopolitical rise of the usa and the high phase of urban, capitalist modernity. the blackface image created ‘a unique situation in which significant spillage could (and did) occur between the discourse of africa and blackness and that of america and african americans’ (2011: 460). this americanized the preexisting racial stereotype of the ‘neger.’ because blackface could pose questions of racial difference, american modernity, and the grotesque, it ‘function[ed] as a nodal point of societal uncertainty in late-nineteenth century germany’ (wipplinger 2011: 458). within commercial culture the influence of minstrelsy was decisive, overwriting earlier colonial iconography with more evidently racialized images, an effect that was to be long lasting (ciarlo 2011). continuing this pattern, the turn of the nineteenth century saw a global craze for the ‘cakewalk,’ an african american dance that, in its original context, mimicked and parodied the formal dances of upper-class southern whites. black and white blackface minstrels danced the cakewalk and early film, visual representations and sheet music facilitated the spread of the craze too. in germany, as historian astrid kusser (2012) points out in her important monograph, the cakewalk was seen as a humorous, contemporary, and modern cultural form. the ‘primitive,’ which we explore below in 16 antebellum minstrelsy, from the 1830s on, may have been the ‘first atlantic popular culture’ (lhamon 2003), but it hardly reached continental europe. on great britain, see pickering (2008). 17 for example, approximately one hundred black people performed in germany in 1896, alongside a large number of white ‘blackface’ performers (lotz 1997; ciarlo 2011: ch. 5; wipplinger 2011). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 9 our treatment of the weimar era, was not the master signifier here. racial stereotypes about the ‘neger’ and binary oppositions about white and black certainly played a role, but the cultural practice of reception had other aspects, kusser argues. most importantly, people danced the cakewalk with many also having their pictures taken in ‘grotesque’ cakewalk poses. for a history of afro-americanophilia and its practical forms, its subjects, and its media, it is important to note the shift in prevalent modes of engagement. the cakewalk was the first of many such dance fashions or ‘crazes’ that were a matter of mimetic bodily experiences, of physical movements and a different way of experiencing the dancing self. in contrast to older phenomena, this was not solely a matter of visual or aural spectacle, or of imaginary ‘identification’ (kusser 2008, 2012). such turn-of-the century engagements with blackness and with african american cultural forms in germany have for a long time been overlooked in the writing of cultural history, and recent interdisciplinary scholarship has done important work in reconstructing them. there is a strong case for considering blackness a crucial component of turn-of-the-19th-century german popular culture, and the case strengthens once other types of images and texts are taken into account, such as anthropological and travel writings or philosophical texts in which ideas of the so-called primitive figured prominently, providing the contrast for european ideas of culture and civilization. the reach of racialized advertisements and depictions in illustrated newspapers was also significant. at the same time, it must be noted that blackface represented only one of several popular culture novelties at the same time, and was not the dominant one for ‘society as such,’ or even for definable subcultures or age groups.18 german nationalism and identity were defined at the time to a large extent through anti-semitism, and the attempt to better understand the relationship between these forms of racism should not downplay the importance of anti-semitism. we must then be careful not to overstate the case. at the time, most germans’ exposure to actual black diasporic culture was very limited, and personal contact even more so, as temporary guests like w. e. b. du bois, who studied in berlin in the early 1890s, noted.19 18 one could also cite, for example, the enthusiasm for the wild west and for ‘red indians,’ as demonstrated by the popularity of wild west shows and karl may’s novels (kocks 2004; kort & hollein 2006; penny 2013), or the revival of late-18th-century ‘indomania’ in buddhist-inspired theosophy and the fin-de-siècle lebensreform (life reform) movement, a more up-scale preoccupation (mcgetchin 2009). 19 see beck (1996); hopkins (1998); bechhaus-gerst (2005); edwards (2006). see also the standard biography of du bois by levering lewis (1993). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 10 in summary, on a semantic, discursive level, racial differences were primarily construed as categorical and absolute at this time. racial ideologies were cemented in ways that seemed to justify colonialism and colonial wars (gilman 1982; campt, grosse & lemke muniz de faria 1998; grosse 2000). still, in a way that presaged the future, there were some moments where abstract questions of white-germanness and american blackness became confused, particularly in the register of the grotesque and via corporeal experience, as in the cakewalk craze. weimar: ‘négrophilie’ [negrophilia] and transnational migrancy the weimar republic, a somewhat out-of-joint era between 1919 and 1933, saw dramatic political and cultural conflict and transformation. it coincided with a high phase of artistic modernism in europe and the usa, early blues and jazz in the usa, the harlem and other renaissances, and the cultural theme of négrophilie in france, as well as a larger interest in what europeans continued to regard as the ‘primitive.’ afroamericanophilia (using the term retrospectively) was quite pronounced during the weimar era as well, in terms of its extent and the novel forms it took.20 during world war i, germany lost its colonies (which were taken over by other european powers), and after the defeat in the european war, the country became an unstable parliamentary democracy. in the process, one durable german myth of blackness emerged. in german east africa, the german reich was able, with assistance from colonial troops, to hold out until 1918 against the allies. the assistance of those troops gave rise to the trope of the ‘loyal askari,’ which remained in place during the weimar era and thereafter and came into contact with other portrayals of blackness (mass 2006; michels 2009; lewerenz 2011). in 1919 and 1920, other racist anti-black representations flooded german visual culture as conservatives became scandalized by the presence of french african colonial soldiers in the rhineland. this discourse was often braided with mourning over germany’s loss of its colonies. yet it was also set against a backdrop of broader white european anxieties about the ‘decline of the west,’ fed by contemporaneous socialist and communist revolutions, and by colonial uprisings (martin 1996, 2004a, 2004b). the rhineland occupation seemed to have reversed the 20 on negrophilia during this period, see, for example: gilman (1982); hopkins (1998); nenno (1997); naumann (1998); partsch (2000); martin (2001); martin and alonzo (2004); nagl (2009; lewerenz (2011); aitken & rosenhaft (2014). on other black renaissances beyond the well-known harlem example, see jackson (2005). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 11 colonial racial hierarchies; in a part of germany, black foreigners now seemed to hold the upper hand over white germans. campaigners used crassly racist images of black people as hardly human savages or apes in their appeal to white european solidarity against what they termed die schwarze schmach [‘the black disgrace’ or ‘the black horror’]. in particular, they foregrounded the spectre of black soldiers raping white german women, or of women having sexual relations of any sort with colonial soldiers, insinuating both symbolic national ‘disgrace’ and racial degradation, since their ‘mixedrace’ children would ‘pollute’ german blood (campt 2005: 100).21 in a twist, antisemitic, racist german nationalists regarded jewish conspirators to be the real forces behind the presence of black soldiers.22 the sexualization of race is critical. throughout the 20th century, many germans, particularly though not exclusively those on the political right, regarded any black presence that was not deferential and asexual as a threat to national culture and to the collective body of the volk.23 on the other end of the spectrum—but by no means disarticulated from the conservative discourse––‘blackness’ became an important, positively connoted signifier within an urban, hedonistic, and cosmopolitan-oriented culture. so-called negrophilie [negrophilia] manifested itself in music, literature, visual culture, dress and dance. the german phenomenon was a transposition, to some degree, of the (larger) french négrophilie phenomenon. in paris, african american intellectuals and artists mingled with migrants from french colonies in africa and the caribbean, where other black modern ‘renaissances’ were taking places, creating a highly productive crucible not only for modernist art and anti-colonial political thought, but also for an urban entertainment culture.24 practices such as going out to listen and dance to jazz, putting on ‘african’ jewelry and clothing, adorning the home with masks and other ‘racial’ items, or going to themed parties, bars, and cabarets, provided access to what people considered black or generically african culture.25 what started as the prerogative of a few, upper-class or bohemian city-dwellers soon ‘trickled down’ to the popular world and to more provincial regions via advertising, visual culture, recorded music (a novelty) and touring 21 see also pommerin (1979); koller (2001); mass (2006); wigger (2007); lewerenz (2011). 22 on the confluence of anti-black and anti-semitic racism, see haehnel (2010). 23 on conservative german anti-black racism in debates about mass and/or popular culture, see maase (1997: 175ff). 24 berlin’s negrophilie came somewhat later and never matched paris (lotz 2004: 256). on german negrophilie see hopkins (2011); on french négrophilie see archer-straw (2000) and shack (2001). 25 as before african and african american imagery were semiotically conflated, partly due to a lack of adequate musical and sociocultural knowledge (lotz 2004: 259). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 12 musicians, and film.26 smaller variété routines developed into larger-scale revues like the ‘chocolate kiddies,’ the ‘revue nègre,’ and ‘black people.’ some performers— most famously josephine baker—even became household names (nenno 1997; archerstraw 2000). musically, ragtime gave way to jazz, which was the soundtrack to fashionable new dances like the charleston, shimmy and foxtrot, and became a symbol of weimar era culture in the course of the 1920s (lotz 1997; 2004; nagl 2009: 692). jazz became an embodiment of newness, urbanity and americanness (weiner 1991; lange 1996; partsch 2000; budds 2002). americanness and ‘mongrel’ american culture had themselves become themes for german cultural criticism from the 1910s (jelavich 1993: 174–175; ciarlo 2011: 312–314; mattl 2008). straightforward anti-black racism and negrophilia did not exclude each other here. they might have been contradictory, but at the same time they were mutually constitutive. for example, a backlash of racist opposition and legal battles over supposedly ‘un-german’ performances made negrophilia more risqué, perhaps even oppositional. a 1929 performance in munich by josephine baker was, for instance, banned by local police because of the supposed threat to public decency posed by the ‘negro-naked-dancer.’ sexuality was at the core of such sentiments. for negrophiles and opponents alike there was a chain of equivalence where transgressing sexual propriety articulated with transgressing racial boundaries.27 hence, in some crucial ways, negrophilia itself retained the racial dichotomy of black physicality and white intellectuality (weiner 1991; nagl 2009: 636–761). the influential notion of ‘primitivism’—a major cultural theme of the 1920s—underscored this dichotomy. many artists and psychoanalysts (among others) believed that ‘civilized’ westerners might find less repressed ways of life within their own inner 26 for example, entertainment venues like haus vaterland in berlin, famously dissected by siegfried kracauer, provided popular forms of ‘formatted exoticism’ for the new, white-collar class (nagl 2009: 732). as siegfried mattl notes, according to a survey from 1920s vienna, young blue and white collar workers were the main audience for jazz on the radio, and the catholic church was its most vocal opponent (2008: 86). 27 see for example klaus mann’s mephisto, and other literary texts to which marc weiner (1991) refers in his study of jazz in weimar era literature. this is also a theme in the 1922 entertainment novel das blaue mal [the blue mark] by viennese author hugo brettauer, which was influenced by w. e. b. dubois’s writings, and features a viennese dandy of african heritage who emigrates to the usa and foresees an inevitable ‘racial war.’ siegfried mattl ultimately interprets this afroamerikanismus [afroamericanism] as an example of ‘popular modernism’ and, more concretely, of a ‘new utopia of a liberal viennese jew in the context of virulent anti-semitism and aborted jewish emancipation in central europe’ (2008: 87). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 13 desires and drives, but also within ‘primitive’ societies or ‘races.’ some sought access to such layers through cultural forms like jazz, or via avant-garde art practice, and in some cases through ethnography.28 generally, negrophilia sat within this wider preoccupation with primitivism in its many hues. nonetheless, the engagement of artists with it could be comparatively self-reflexive, and open to irony.29 as an example, josephine baker famously played to the expectation of ‘primitiveness’ and with racializing images. in some of her german performances she would dance before a grotesquely caricatured image of her body. she would attempt to replicate the pose, with intentionally humorous effects that could only challenge the racializing expectations of her audiences (ciarlo 2011: 322). primitivism was not the only way of approaching african-american culture. other ways of thinking about jazz used it as a catalyst for thinking about political struggles in the usa and elsewhere.30 and as the francophone négritude movement showed, primitivist discourse could also be reworked into a means of empowerment by anti-colonial black intellectuals. a few thousand black people (mostly from the former colonies) are known to have lived in germany in the 1920s, most of them under precarious conditions, and their history is now being researched extensively (oguntoye 1997; aitken & rosenhaft 2013; rosenhaft & aitken 2013).31 in the inter-war era, european cities became nodes in the transatlantic, transnational network of diasporic travel, trade and communication: a ‘transnational dialectics between colonial migrants, blacks born in germany and black u.s. americans’ was set in motion (nagl 2009: 639). indeed, between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s, a black german community began to form. we 28 see, for example, carl einstein’s engagement with sub-saharan african sculpture during the 1910s (gilman 1982; fleckner 2006). on jazz and primitivism, especially in the french context, see gioia (1988). the history of ethnographic surrealism is a slightly different, but related phenomenon (on this, see clifford 1981; nettelbeck 2004: 110–114). on ‘primitivism’ directed at rural german farmers, ‘deviant’ groups and the ‘lower’ levels of the psyche, see warneken (2006: 17–89). jackson’s periodization (2005) of global black cultural traffic mainly situates primitivism before the 1920s, but it certainly was an important feature of german negrophilia at that time. 29 an element of self-reflexivity, but also, possibly, condescension, was evident, for example in the neologism ‘negern’ [to negro-ise], which was coined to refer to fashion, art collection, and carnivalesque transgression practices (see martin & alonzo 2004: 352). on how the weimar era image of the ‘funny savage’ could allow a ‘theatre of irony,’ see ciarlo (2011: 321–322). 30 tobias nagl observes that in some cases, such as viktor klages and viktor trivas, jazz was seen as a medium through which various political and cultural emancipatory movements could be communicated to german audiences (2009: 667). marc weiner (1991) also attributes a more nuanced reading and portrayal of jazz culture to herman hesse in his novel steppenwolf. 31 some sojourners’ biographies—josephine baker, louis douglas, sidney bechet—are well known; others, like those of mohamed husen and louis brody, have been reconstructed as well (nagl 2002, 2012; bechhaus-gerst 2007). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 14 cannot delve into this important social history here, however crucial questions arise about the relationship between black people in germany and negrophilia. how did it have an impact on their lives? and how did they influence the cultural formation? these people worked in a variety of jobs, including as language assistants, small business owners, merchants, servants, manual laborers and craftspeople. however performing in show business was particularly important and, for many, it became a survival strategy. various factors were at play including the economics of german colonial nostalgia.32 however, negrophilia created an increased demand for black american culture and quite a few africans toured as ‘american’ musicians. (here the term afro-americanophilia seems better than the more diffuse negrophilia.) some were able to make careers that even spanned decades (aitken & rosenhaft 2013). employment and relatively good pay were available in the film industry, but most individuals had little or no artistic control over their typecasting. others were waiters in themed negerbars [negro bars]. they too performed to a demand for blackness and black culture, that is to the collective expectations of (white) patrons, and to micro-level demands from managers, directors, and others. stars like josephine baker enjoyed more individual and artistic autonomy. among black people in germany, however, there were also attempts at political selforganization. although some colonial migrants accommodated themselves to the mood of colonial nostalgia and the image of the ‘loyal askari,’ many demanded recognition as black germans. black entrepreneurs founded associations to protect their interests, for example. in hamburg, a short-lived afrikanischer hilfsverein [african assistance association] emerged. some became involved in the communist international’s attempt to unite its own struggles with those of the colonized, by way of hamburg’s internationales gewerkschaftskomitee der negerarbeiter [international union committee of negro workers] (aitken & rosenhaft 2013).33 these histories indicate that despite the precarity of citizenship black german agency was far from hamstrung. there were also ‘hidden transcripts’—anthropologist james scott’s term for lived experience and the collective knowledge it produces (1990)—behind performances to 32 on colonial nostalgia in weimar germany, see: schmokel (1964), ames, klotz & wildenthal (2005), and mass (2006). 33 under the auspices of this organization, willi münzenberg and george padmore published the negro worker magazine between 1928 and 1933, using hamburg’s port as a base for international distribution (martin 2004; aitken & rosenhaft 2013). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 15 negrophile expectations. for instance, tobias nagl argues that whilst negerbars were ‘establishments, where [white patrons] could consume race in a danger-free setting, [they] simultaneously also represented important crystallization points in the black german alltag’ (2009: 733; our translation) contesting audience expectations, and devising practical strategies for survival, dignity and recognition—in short, a degree of agency—are very much part of the story of afro-americanophilia, even though they are hard to reconstruct. the weimar era was marked by a negrophile tendency, of which afro-americanophilia was a significant part, and by the extreme racism that surfaced in the rhineland occupation discourse and the rising nazi movement. negrophilia enabled and constrained employment strategies and subjectivities of black germans and other black people in germany. the process involved people and the power relations between them, not just discourses and cultural forms. conservative opposition to negrophilia stemmed from both völkisch [racial] german nationalism, as well as from anxieties about the fate of europe and from fixed gender ideas. negrophilia, in practical terms, took the form of cultural reception, mimetic practices and consumption. black cultural forms were made accessible and consumable through the new media of film and recorded music. as with the earlier cakewalk craze, they could take the carnivalesque form of corporeal, physical experiences of dancing, dressing up and feeling immersed. these tended to be momentary entertainments for white germans, rather than longer-standing engagements and forms of self-fashioning in milieus or subcultures. advertising and visual culture further meant that negrophile images had a large reach. in its content, 1920s negrophilia was ambiguous. it could accommodate both primitivism and an image of futuristic american modernity, and sometimes selfreflective irony. despite some exceptions, most cultural texts regarded black and white as polar opposites. blackness was understood as a ‘racial’ essence that was radically different and, at best, complementary to the ethos of contemporary white europe: it was taken to embody what white europe had repressed and overcome. in that regard, the basic semiotic structure of much 1920s primitivism was actually more radically binary than some earlier versions of the imagined black/white relation. in leftist politics, the weimar era saw a new, transnational paradigm of strategic communist worker solidarity, but on a rather small scale. here, too, black people were often sought out as blacks, ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 16 although not for the cultural reasons we have examined here, but rather in the context of a global geopolitical strategy and anti-capitalist politics. the categorical exclusion of black people from german society continued both legally and discursively during the weimar era, and pre-empted what was to come. indeed, the forced sterilization of black germans––particularly of the 600–800 children of french african colonial soldiers––was mooted as early as 1927, although it was only carried out in the subsequent nazi era (campt 2005: 84; pommerin 1979). as early as 1931, the conservative (yet pre-nazi) national government announced that there were to be no more stage performances by african americans (nagl 2009: 670; partsch 2000: 218). similar piecemeal bans (of jazz music, for instance) soon followed on different levels, even though they were not always followed and the situation on the ground was more complicated than those bans might suggest (schröder 1988; nagl 2009: 744). the nazi era the nazi era saw the sharpening of racist discourse, with, for instance, racial science beginning to be taught in schools. there were also very practical consequences, with legal and administrative action taken in relation to african-americans and black people more broadly. this era transformed the völkisch nationalist rhetoric into state policy and state-promulgated violence, which would have dire effects for the group of colonial migrants, black people born in germany and visiting african-americans (samples 1996; massaquoi 1999; lusane 2002; bechhaus-gerst & klein-arendt 2004; campt 2004; martin & alonzo 2004; dreesbach 2005; bechhaus-gerst 2007).34 black performers and individuals were subjected to restrictions of various kinds, with most being denied entry or being deported after 1933 (lewerenz 2006; nagl 2009: 744; aitken & rosenhaft 2013). black communists and their supporters were forced into migration, or were interned (martin 2004), as were others, without political reasons. the forced sterilization of the afro-german children born during the occupation of the rhineland has already been mentioned. while there was no consistent policy of killing all black people in germany during the nazi era, some black people were murdered in concentration camps. furthermore, the government criminalized interracial relationships by forbidding marriages and it tried to force people out of the country. a few hundred black germans lived through the nazi years and the war, but the community that had 34 on the nazi racial state generally, see burleigh and wippermann (1991). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 17 begun to form before the nazi era disappeared. a few black entrepreneurs and performers resorted to forming the deutsche afrika-schau [german africa show], a travelling troupe that functioned in the tradition of colonial exhibitions (lewerenz 2006; aitken & rosenhaft 2013). the government supported the afrika-schau for some time and forced a number of black people in germany to join it as a means of keeping them under surveillance and control. here, performance really was a last resort for survival. discursively, a brief curtailment of overt racism occurred during the 1936 olympic games in berlin, where the african american track runner jesse owen was welcomed enthusiastically by the crowd and the regime attempted to show a friendly façade to the international audience. however, this episode had no long-term impact (gassert 1997: 193). building on the earlier tradition of anti-americanism, nazi-era ideological writings about the usa at once scandalized ‘race-mixing’ and predicted the downfall of the usa because of its ethnic heterogeneity. some authors also appealed to white solidarity in the global north (gassert 1997: 240). but there were odd contradictions. it is striking that the nazi press, despite its conspicuous anti-black racism, used segregation and lynchings in the usa to accuse that country of hypocrisy. in the view of these authors, integrated, multiracial societies simply could not function; black people had to be oppressed and any professed liberal values were a sham. nazi ideologues continued to rail against african-american art forms, and jazz was again a particular focus now deemed to be a dangerously sexual music. that is, it could undermine the gender-sex order and thus the nation and particularly the morality of ‘aryan’ women. they also revived the anti-semitic nationalist idea of neger-judenjazz [negro-jew-jazz] as part of a jewish-propagated plot. jazz even became an aural equivalent of miscegenation: indeed some ideologues, here the national socialist ideologue richard litterscheid, regarded jazz as pernicious precisely because it was a mischprodukt [hybrid product] (quoted in hoffmann 1996: 99). rhetorical parries were met with administrative action, as media outlets and performance venues were subjected to piecemeal restrictions on the broadcast and performance of swing and jazz (see schröder 1988; jost 1997; lotz & bergmeier 1997; zwerin 2000; budds 2002; kater 2003). however, as michael kater (2003) has shown, the situation on the ground was more complex. ideological battles were fought out between the reactionary völkisch wing and more pragmatic voices within the nazi party; but it was recognized that there ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 18 was a need for modern, light entertainment dance music. in this context, swing-like music was rebadged as ‘german dance and entertainment music.’ what, then, of negrophilia and afro-americanophilia during the nazi era? the fad did not suddenly dissipate by decree. afro-americanophile jazz culture even existed in the concentration camps. some internees performed for their own entertainment or, at other times, at the beck and call of camp staff (schumann 1998; fackler 2000; peitzmeier 2013). in less extreme circumstances, some young people continued to savour jazz and swing dancing in german cities, their interest sustained by foreign broadcasting, the inherent unpoliceability of music, as well as by privately owned and circulated recordings. the so-called swing-jugend [swing youth] informal groups comprised largely of middle-class young people, resisted the regime’s attempts to co-opt youth within the banner of the hitler-jugend [hitler youth] and the bund deutscher mädel [association of german girls].35 many young germans thus found themselves at loggerheads with the regime (kater 1994, 2003; barber-kersovan & uhlmann 2002). many individuals were subjected to chicanery in the process; some were incarcerated in concentration camps for failing to toe the line. however, kater (2003) is somewhat sceptical about the extent to which sych subcultural practices with their musical and stylistic afro-americanophilia articulated with pre-existing resistance to the regime. he also points out that there were swing and jazz enthusiasts who could accommodate an interest in african-american culture with right-wing ideological convictions. proximity and moral afro-americanophilia in postwar west germany after the 1945 defeat (or liberation) of germany and the consequent occupation by the allied powers, most germans’ ideological and cultural allegiances seemed to shift rapidly, at least among the younger generation. in that process, blackness figured in complicated ways and afro-americanophilia—now clearly dominant over a more general negrophilia toward black people—became an important, one could argue foundational, cultural theme in both east and west germany. the post-nazi era in west germany provided its citizens with the liberties of a (somewhat) liberal democracy, strategically tied to the us. globally, newly founded supranational organizations 35 the importance of african american references is documented anecdotally in autobiographical narratives. in one source, a group of jazz fans in essen in 1938 recorded a song called ‘harlem,’ which one protagonist retrospectively describes as a ‘holy’ artefact among his high school classmates and as expressive of ‘a worldview’ (eine weltanschauung). see ns-dokumentationszentrum (n.d.). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 19 including the un and unesco sought to counter racism and the category of ‘race’ as such (broeck 2011: 129). discussions of blackness in 1950s and 1960s germany were increasingly attentive to the changing fate of african americans and the us civil rights movement. but interest in blackness, black people and black culture also related to a broader ‘historical optimism’ (jackson 2005: 22) about decolonization, spurred on by such events as the afro-asian bandung conference in 1955, and the independence of numerous african states in the 1950s and early 1960s. this surge of interest was embedded in wider developments and cannot be regarded as a german phenomenon alone: jackson (2005) sees the time between the mid–1940s and the mid–1960s as the first of two globally resonant postwar phases that were qualitatively and quantitatively significantly more ‘crowded’ with ‘black cultural traffic’ than earlier decades. in the west of germany, occupation by the usa, france and the uk meant that real and mediated engagement with african americans greatly increased. african americans were crucial to the great cultural-political topic of the time, americanization, which, as historian kaspar maase (1992) points out, primarily meant africanamericanization for many young german people. the images and sounds of african america were mediated via newly accessible film and popular broadcast media, including the american forces network, and the us cultural industries played a pivotal role throughout. the us administration promoted amerikahäuser [american cultural institutes] as well as american studies programs in some german universities, within which african american studies began to play a significant role (haselstein & ostendorf 2005; boesenberg 2011). for many who lived in the western zones, the experience of liberation and occupation was connected with a new and unexpected experience of proximity with african americans (and, in a lesser way, with black french and british soldiers). in today’s popular iconography, images of friendly african american soldiers passing out chewing gum to children stand as metonyms for the entire era, but what is less often said is that such images implicitly gained their meaning and heft from the stark contrast with nazi propaganda of ‘savage’ black rapists. returned pows held in the usa between 1942 and 1946 often also had their own positive experiences of african americans (reiss 2002). despite some conflicts between us soldiers and german civilians in garrison communities, there was considerable sociability and intimacy (höhn 2002; goedde 2003; schroer 2007; partridge 2008). many relationships, mostly between german women and american ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 20 men, became a topic of local and national discussions. prostitution was a part of the story, but there were many more reasons why german women sought american servicemen as partners—including african americans who were often seen as more approachable and interested than many white american soldiers (schroer 2007).36 again, under the circumstances of occupation and liberation, race, nation and sexuality function as interdependent categories. damani partridge argues that in this context the ‘transformative force of inofficial wishes and longings’ was as powerful as more materialistic forces for change in postwar germany (2008: 97). it is difficult and controversial to ponder how important sexual afro-americanophilia—the fetishization of black bodies and collective positive expectations of what black men (and, to a lesser extent, women) were like in bed—might have been in individual relationships, but it is unlikely that those relationships were untouched by racial discourses. in any event, african american men began to figure as players in an amorous adventure in a much more concrete sense than before. sexual relationships no longer needed to take place in fantasy alone. on the african american side, although black gis did encounter racism in germany, lower levels of race-based restrictions for occupation soldiers stationed there impelled many of them to favourably compare their german experiences with the racial order at home, especially in the south. some black servicemen stayed in germany. others used their german experiences to fight for equality at home (schroer 2007; höhn & klimke 2010a).37 there were, of course, other strands of afro-americanophilia, other ways in which germans called upon african-america. some people in the western part of the country who felt they were under the yoke of their american occupiers claimed to identify––in a more rhetorical sense than anything else––with the oppressed station of african americans (höhn 2002; poiger 2000). colonial history—and a perceived distance from it—was also important. (west) germans, having lost ‘their’ colonies during world war 36 there were black women who worked in nightclubs catering to a predominantly (white) male crowd (herb 2009). however, this is not well illuminated in the research on what kevin mumford (1997) in another national setting calls ‘interzones.’ on similar issues from the 1990s onwards, see partridge (2012). 37 for an early, fictionalized account, see also william gardner smith’s 1948 novel, last of the conquerors. the sexual interest in black men (african american and afro-german) and a sense of feeling ‘used’ as ‘forbidden fruit’ is mentioned also in the well-known memoir by hans-jürgen massaquoi, the son of a white german mother and a black liberian father, who later emigrated to the usa and worked as an editor for ebony magazine (massaquoi 1999: 288; partridge 2008). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 21 i, watched decolonization with detachment or, in some cases, self-righteousness, as their european neighbour, france, fought its own brutal war in algeria.38 afro-americanophilia was also prevalent with music enthusiasts, among whom new modes of mass-scale appropriation and subcultural connoisseurship began to form and would provide new social forms for the engagement with african american aesthetics and culture. in the era of early television and mass-mediated pop music, which most historians date as beginning in the mid–1950s, youth subcultures represented a new social form to display afro-americanophilia. as dick hebdige (1978) explored in his classic study of postwar subcultures in britain, the appropriation of black us and jamaican styles––musical, sartorial, and bodily––was vital in the formation of many of the fashions that teddy boys, mods, skinheads and rockers displayed. whilst german subcultural life-worlds were far from being as diversified or iconic as their british counterparts in the postwar era, german afro-americanophile musical enthusiasts of the 1950s and 1960s comprised distinct groups. these groups included rock ’n’ roll fans––often defamed as halbstarke [literally ‘half strong,’ but designating something like juvenile delinquent]––who enjoyed, among other things, the physical release of dancing to rock ’n’ roll. there were also self-described true jazz devotees who associated music that had been brought to europe, in part with support of the us state department and its cold war cultural programs, with earnest artistic endeavour, and sometimes twinned it with an interest in french existentialism.39 the jazz enthusiasts mostly came from a bourgeois student and bohemian milieu, and the rock fans from the working class, at least initially. at the same time, new attitudes to popular culture and tendencies of cultural dehierarchisation began to put such divides in question (maase 1992; lange 1996; poiger 2000; budds 2002; siegfried 2006; hurley 2009). outside of such aesthetically committed subcultural circles, the 1950s saw new waves of popular exoticism and a symbolic internationalization of burgeoning consumer culture, including in the worlds of popular schlager [hit] music, film, cooking, and interior design. there were some african american-derived elements here, including pop jazz or a ‘black collectible’ (goings 1994) fad for stylized female negro figures 38 sabine broeck (2011), for instance, speaks of a widespread postwar german desire to finally be on the ‘right side of history.’ 39 on the jazz ambassadors and state department programs, see von eschen (2005). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 22 (bausinger 1961; kramer 2012).40 however, the black atlantic was clearly not the primary source of popular exoticism at the time; it was not yet a mainstream place of longing across the generations––a sehnsuchtsort––like, say, mediterranean southern europe or the pacific islands.41 the spread or ‘democratization’ of commodity exoticism, facilitated by an expanding postwar economy and by the embourgeoisement of the lower middle class, made such foreign commodities—which had formerly been a privilege of the few, or, perversely, available through wartime experience—far more accessible to everyday people. this mid-century tendency towards a democratized commodity exoticism is an important milestone in the history of cultural transfers and appropriations and of the shifting significance of alterity. serious political discourses about the meanings and the morality of race and racism were also part of the life-worlds of germans, of course. in both german states, visits by martin luther king, jr, and other activists brought broad attention to discrimination and to the civil rights movement in the usa (höhn & klimke 2010a; broeck 2011). in the literary field, some african american authors, like the paris-based expatriate james baldwin, were translated into german, or set as english-language texts for german high school students. these works (baldwin 1963a, 1963b, 1963c, 1964, 1965, 1968) made baldwin’s insights into the workings of race and racism in the usa accessible to a large german readership. his bestselling essays elaborated, among other things, a critique of the ‘white negro’ hipster figure propagated by norman mailer, making that critique at least theoretically available in germany at the time.42 the methodological challenge posed by the co-presence of these different strands of african american politics and culture is to grasp the potential interrelation between these spheres, that is, their intertextual, interdiscursive and intermedial resonances, transfers and contradictions. whilst examples like jazz and baldwin’s literature may make it seem as if a sudden wave of appreciation for black people and black culture swept post-nazi society, 40 on pop jazz and its role in german schlager films from the 1950s, see hurley (2010). 41 on the exoticization of west german schlager during this time, see karnik and phillips (2007, ch. 3) and mendivil (2008). a useful approach to the spatial-temporal hierarchies in such discourses is suggested by alexander weheliye’s remarks on popular ‘allochronic technologies’ (2014). 42 the german translation of the fire next time (hundert jahre freiheit ohne gleichberechtigung; baldwin 1964) sold at least 35,000 copies on its first printing. the essay ‘the black boy looks at the white boy’ baldwin’s critique of his former friend mailer’s ‘noble savage’ stereotype of black men, his heterosexual white male ‘sexual panic’ and refusal to face realities dwelling instead in fantasies, was published in german in 1963 (baldwin 1963a). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 23 postwar relations with african americans and black people should generally be read within a polarized context and a general awkwardness. talk of race and aryanism might have officially become taboo but the two german states still held their citizenry to be white (linke 1999; chin, fehrenbach, eley & grossman 2006; fehrenbach 2007; schroer 2007). in the cultural sphere, deeply embedded racist stereotypes of the neger and a belief in the inferiority of black people lived on, thereby maintaining older european traditions, which in some cases were exacerbated by the after-effects of nazi education and propaganda. in many ways, frantz fanon’s contemporaneous analyses (1980 [1952]) of anti-black racism in france hold true for the basic binary codes of racial meanings in postwar germany as well. in a general sense, the relationship of blackness and whiteness was characterized by an understanding of essential difference, mutual exclusiveness (complementarity) and a civilizational hierarchy. this was similar to, but for most enthusiasts no longer as radical as, earlier modes of primitivism. it was also accompanied by the racialized desires that baldwin and others critiqued. extreme forms of racism also continued. in particular, interracial sexual liaisons were an on-going concern for conservative politicians and commentators, who—as they had done decades earlier—made declarations about loose morality and the ‘national disgrace’ (höhn 2002; schroer 2007). afro-german children of black us servicemen caused anxiety among west german lawmakers, especially when they approached school age in the early 1950s, and their schooling and future life-ways were subject to debate. while many within the west german polity deliberately used the children as an embodied site from which to demonstrate to the western world that it had learned its lessons from nazism, those few thousand children were, at least in dominant national discourse, categorized as not german. as a number of memoirs by (massaquoi 1999; nejar 2007; michael 2013) and biographies of afro-german authors (achenbach 2004), vividly illustrate, discrimination against afro-germans and their parents occurred frequently in everyday life and led to existential crises, but many individuals nonetheless lived their lives within a new german normality (massaquoi 1999; achenbach 2004; laure-al samarai 2004; nejar 2007; michael 2013). it was initially assumed that these afro-german children should be held in readiness for some future repatriation to north america or even africa, and indeed many were taken to the usa ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 24 (lemke muniz de faria 2002; höhn 2002; fehrenbach 2007).43 the idea of a white national body politic remained thoroughly dominant. as heide fehrenbach notes, liberal west german society was able to advocate ‘racial tolerance but insist on maintaining racial difference’ (2005: 150). within left-liberal west german discourse, opposition to racism was a morally charged, even foundational conviction that was perceived as part of a larger break with nazi ideology (broeck 2011). in that sense, some forms of aesthetic afro-americanophilia took a strong moral, quasi-abolitionist tone. postwar lovers of jazz, for example, perceived culturally conservative critiques of jazz to be holdovers from the indoctrination of the nazi era. as andrew hurley’s article in this special issue shows, postwar german opposition to jazz had many bases and political colourings, ranging from the unreconstructed nazi through to the leftist cultural criticism of adorno, but it tended to be viewed by the music’s enthusiasts in monochromatic moral terms. anti-racist, moral and political afro-americanophile discourses on the political left represented an important sea change in post-fascist society, but they were not without their limits. this holds true for the capitalist west and for the communist east, albeit in different ways. when left-liberal and socialist german discourses indicted anti-black racism, as they often did, they generally referred to american racism––to other people’s problems, as it were. german leftists made important arguments, but they tended to overlook everyday forms of racism and anti-semitism at home. it can even be argued that heightened interest in american racism could, via a series of moralistic defence mechanisms and projections, surrogate african-americans for jewish victims of the third reich. postwar afro-americanophilia was often marked by a desire to rule a thick line between oneself and the national socialist past, and rhetorically countering us racism came at little cost. but the dividend was high; in a mostly unconscious logic of moral displacement and surrogation, it could render postwar liberal germans ex post facto good.44 sabine broeck has called such moralising discourses ‘stellvertreter 43 the 1952 west german film toxi (dir. robert stemmle) illustrates compellingly the underlying postwar racial liberalism. it is critical of racial prejudice and various ways of instrumentalizing the child, but it finds its happy end when toxi is adopted by her (respectable) black family from the usa (fehrenbach 2007; fenner 2011). for some afro-germans, transatlantic lifeworlds are an important reality and resource, typified by the founding of the black german cultural society in the usa in 1999. 44 on race, ethnic drag and surrogation in postwar germany see sieg (2009). by virtue of the longstanding association between african americans, jews and jazz, it is possible to read postwar interest in ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 25 [surrogate] abolitionism,’ whereby postwar german ‘campaigns of political solidarity with black liberation were … oftentimes predicated on rather vague kinds of emotional ‘elective affinity’ with black humanity suffering at the hands of white u.s.-american bigotry’ (2011: 128). in the process, african americans were frequently represented ‘pornotropically’ as passive, yet simultaneously eroticized, victims of racism in the usa. african american culture and political concerns in the gdr in the german democratic republic (gdr), which was under russian occupation, actual contact with african americans was very limited and americanization obviously did not occur on a comparable scale with the west german experience, which is not to say that ideologues did not regard it as a considerable danger for society, especially before the berlin wall was built in 1961. aside from a few left-wing african american expatriates, like the berlin-based singer and teacher aubrey pankey, the relatively small group of black people in east germany consisted of african and african diasporic diplomats and students. a larger black population (though certainly not an african american one) would only emerge in the east german guest worker programs of the 1970s and 1980s.45 even though the resident population was tiny, african american culture and political concerns featured prominently in many east german discourses. there was, in a basic political sense, an elective affinity between the socialist state and some important african american intellectuals of the time, including w. e. b. dubois, richard wright and paul robeson, who were at least sympathetic toward communist ideals and the antiimperialist socialist camp in world politics. building on the interwar communist tradition, the gdr saw itself as an anti-racist state above prejudice, and opposed to forms of imperialism in which racial exploitation was rooted—it attempted to ‘see through race’ as loren kruger (2003) puts it. official whistle blowing on us racism was an important form of anti-us propaganda, although it could build on genuine desires for social justice. jazz as a type of surrogated philo-semitism (hurley 2008). on the postwar shift between locating race in jewishness to blackness, see fehrenbach (2005: 156). 45 on pankey and his opposition to being typecast in operas, as well as the sympathy that he generated, see rauhut (2008: 237). on the place of ethnic and racial ‘others’ in the gdr, see behrends, lindenberger and poutros (2003), which shows how refugees and guest workers were exposed to quite ambivalent messages from both the local populace, and from the regime. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 26 in the realm of aesthetics and culture, the east german state propagated readings of african american expressive forms that were primarily focussed on ‘materialist’ aesthetics and ideology, very much in tune with the ways in which the state viewed culture in general. some african american culture was identified as a ‘second culture’ in lenin’s terminology, that is, as the legitimate folk voice of an oppressed workingclass people (rauhut 2008: 232). in that context, african americans were seen as the epitome of the other america in a positive sense (rauhut 2008, n. d.; höhn & klimke 2010b; grossman 2011; gerund 2013). music like work songs and folk-blues were considered appropriate and worthwhile cultural forms. spirituals were also thought palatable, provided they could be interpreted in a socialist or more widely humanist frame. indeed, official approbation was showered on african american spiritual singer and actor paul robeson (whose records were also distributed widely in the gdr and after whom streets and schools were named) because of his socialist-communist politics and his work-song and spiritual repertoire.46 in that sense, a specific kind of afroamericanophilia was part of state cultural policy in the gdr. some of the critical arguments about the limits of anti-racism to which we referred in the paragraphs above are relevant in this context, too. it should not be forgotten, and most gdr citizens were certainly aware of it, that state anti-racism was propagated by a government that itself oppressed its population in a more straightforward way than in the west. there was, furthermore, a strict dividing line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ culture. it is striking that east german cultural authorities (similar to conservatives and many ‘old left’ thinkers in the west) clearly wanted black music, for instance, to be appreciated in a well-mannered and rational way. excess like that displayed in a pop cultural frame was inappropriate. hence, if spirituals and folk-blues were ideologically acceptable, then other forms of african-american culture were more problematic. in particular, jazz was met with alternating phases of snap and thaw, alternating ‘like a sine wave,’ as michael rauhut puts it (2008: 232). prior to a relaxation in the late 1960s, the only jazz that was thought appropriate was ‘trad’ or folk-tinged jazz––as opposed to the ‘less authentic’ modern jazz (rudorf 1964; noglik 1996; poiger 2000; bratfisch 2005; sellhorn 2005; schmidt 46 on robeson, see dyer (1986) and duberman (2005). on his relations with the soviet bloc, see lewis (1998) and caute (2003: 446–450). ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 27 rust 2010, 2011). rock ‘n’ roll––and especially the beat music of the early 1960s––and its fans suffered in rather radical and violent state crackdowns on supposedly deleterious and supposedly fascist youth behaviour (poiger 2000; rauhut 1993, 1996). in this unruly and excessive form, and given the clear enthusiasm for us popular cultural heroes, grass roots afro-americanophiles were seen as subversive to the socialist order of things and detrimental to an enlightened, educated, civilized ‘socialist personality.’ for many young people, that was also partly what it was about. many functionaries also dismissed these musics in openly racist vocabulary. despite official denials, anti-black racism was clearly a part of east german life (poiger 2000). this narrative could go on. not everything that is of relevance can be covered here; nor has it all been adequately researched. among the lacunae in a more complete history of afro-americanophilia in postwar east germany, we should mention the state reaction to the civil rights and black freedom movements (compare höhn & klimke 2010a), the connection between these strands and the gdr’s ‘anticolonial’ foreign policy, and, on the cultural side, gdr translations of african american literature like richard wright’s native son (1969). a consumer culture began to develop in the gdr too, but it did so more slowly than in the west, and consumption was not supposed to form a primary mode of relating to the world. rather, the models were international solidarity and exchange as at the world festival of youth and students held in berlin in 1951 and at events like the annual festival des politischen liedes [festival of political song]. in this context, blues and blues-rock had a special history in the gdr as a niche (sub)culture, as we will elaborate further in our second survey essay. a full cultural history of what these forms meant for listeners and readers has yet to be written. clearly, state afro-americanophilia stands out when compared to other sociocultural constellations in the gdr. this had a politically rationalist form, as opposed to the hedonism of consumerand popculture and their risqué qualities. its base was in the state, rather than in oppositional groups and subcultures or amongst fan-scholars and aesthetic experts. it professed humanist, anti-racist ideals, with a high grade of abstraction. this officially promulgated type of afo-americanophilia also existed in a context where there was a striking difference between official pronouncements and the lived reality of a populace that was widely sceptical of and hostile towards the government it considered red and russian. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 28 conclusions in summary, when compared not only with the nazi era but also with the late colonial and weimar eras, the postwar era saw a continued cultural (and, in the west, political) americanization. in this context there was a rapid rise and diversification in forms of afro-americanophilia. what had primarily been an urban, and more diffusely negrophile fashion in the 1920s, now also became more specifically african american. it also spread and became democratized amongst a larger group of people. african american culture, or, more precisely, mass-cultural representations based in african american culture, again became something to consume and dance to. we have sketched how afro-americanophilia connected with the emerging culture of pop music and with consumer culture more generally. in the process of reception, many young germans incorporated african american culture into their everyday life-worlds. in the west, they also encountered african american soldiers and began personal encounters and, in some cases, liaisons. seen from the perspective of african americans, west germany became a temporary—in some cases, permanent—place of residence with racial rules that differed significantly from the usa, especially the us south. new spaces of contact and interaction emerged. official us foreign policy also promoted american culture through a number of channels. high-cultural readings of jazz, for example, propagated a more austere, modernist afro-americanophile sensibility. at the same time, many forms of postwar german afro-americanophilia were tinged by a remarkable earnestness and moral fervour that set them apart from the ironic, ‘funny savage’ theme in much 1920s negrophilia. we can only speculate about how this earnestness articulated with wider tendencies of postwar culture—with the legacy of the millions dead; the destruction; the felt or repressed guilt; the simultaneously felt sense of german victimhood—but it seems clear that it was closely connected with a wide-spread desire for a new, ethical position in the world. the moral fervour of some afro-americanophile sentiment sprang from a combative context of racism and antisemitism in a post-nazi society, where opposition to african american culture was, often for good reason, equated with the legacy of national socialism. it could also be connected to optimistic socialist-humanist sentiments of human equality in both countries, official policy pronounced a radical break with nazi philosophy and opposed explicit anti-black racism. in that sense state policy was afro-americanophile. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 29 yet, notably in regard to citizenship and immigration rules, there were limits to the antiracism policies of both states. with some exceptions there also seems to have been a broad cultural continuation of categorical thinking about race. there was also no complete break with both the primitivist mode of 1920s negrophilie and its implication of a ‘complementary’ separation of black and white. in this way, postwar afroamericanophilia, despite all its complexities and ambiguities, often reproduced racist images and patterns of thought, albeit weighted positively. in our second joint survey essay, we examine more of the implications of such projections and encounters. the division of germany added an extra layer of complication. some african american-derived cultural forms were welcomed within the east german state’s cultural policy, indeed more so than by conservative western politicians. but these forms needed to be read in socialist terms, and various unruly aspects of african american culture were subjected to crackdown when they seemed to be deleterious to the socialist project. african american culture also became a us tool in cold war era politics, via broadcasting, so-called ‘jazz ambassadors’ and other means. a rationalist and folkloristic mode of afro-americanophilia, together with clear political statements against us racism and imperialism, characterized the east’s public sphere, but that did not necessarily converge with the logic of informal everyday life, where the regime had little credibility. in the west, a more consumerist version of ‘xenophilia’ gained in importance, and youth subcultures formed in various contact zones. despite the west german government’s official anti-racism, there was a ‘cultural bloc’ of conservative politics and culture, which clearly continued to display a racialized understanding of what was and was not german. younger afro-americanophiles, be they pop-cultural or of the more serious and moralistic strand, discerned the continuation of nazi patterns. these shifting sands could render certain types of german afro-americanophilia political in different ways at different times. with this as a preface, we now leave the first part of our timeline in the mid-1960s, prior to the rise of the counterculture in germany and the emergence of the black power movement in the usa. at that point afro-americanophilia took different forms and radicalized significantly, and its patterns afterwards also came to be directly challenged, including by a self-identifying afro-german community. those are matters addressed in our second survey essay. ege and hurley periodizing and historicizing 1 portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 30 reference list achenbach m. 2004, fasia—geliebte rebellin [fasia, a beloved rebel]. asso-verlag, oberhausen. aitken, r. & rosenhaft, e. 2013, black germany: the making and unmaking of a diaspora community, 1890-1960. cambridge university press, cambridge, uk. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139649575 ames, e., klotz, m. & wildenthal, l. 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the critical intellectual as an agent of change in contemporary german culture1 in an attempt to relate the notion of the ‘critical intellectual’ to the notion of the ‘agent of social change’, we start from the usual reference of ‘intellectuals’ to a social grouping of writers, artists and scientists, who are often seen to be important shapers of public opinion through their prominent role in public discourse. they are seen as consciously acting agents, in contexts involving structural forces such as developments of technologies, forms of ownership and/or control of means of production, and access to power. the meanings of ‘critical’ may be more problematic, in that this term involves culturally very specific notions that we shall attempt to discuss in some more detail in section two. our ‘critical intellectuals,’ then, form an interesting semantic field of potential agents of change. regarding ‘agents of change’ as the superordinate term, we have a polyphyletic classification, based on the criteria of sex/gender, profession, spatial (dis-)location and cultural (dis-)location. obviously, an individual may have multiple memberships of such criteria. hence, the class of ‘critical intellectuals’ to be discussed here is a socio-cultural type, defined in culture-specific ways, acting in socio-economic 1 i am very grateful to feng chongyi, alberto gil, peter godglück, michael halliday, ruqaiya hasan, nicole klingenberg, leo krämer, elke teich, wolfram wilss, and two anonymous referees, who have provided critical (in more than one sense) inputs to my remarks in this paper. none of these mentioned should be held responsible for anything that i have written here—because my own judgement and perspective have often prevailed over theirs. steiner critical intellectual thought in germany contexts, and members may (or may not) be agents of change as determined by other criteria. the term ‘german’ will be used to designate both a political and a socio-cultural context, which includes the former german democratic republic (gdr) and the federal republic of germany (frg)2; but in our examinations of current usage in section 2, we shall more generally consider publications in german. germany is a nation-state, the political expression of economical and social systems to which the labels post-modern and consumer are frequently applied, in ways similar to other western states. in a somewhat broader historical perspective, however, post-modern and consumer are cultural terms that denote current forms of expression for what continues to be a capitalist economy and a bourgeois democracy. such basic properties still define essential aspects of the relationship of human beings to the means of production, as well as to each other; at the very least, the ‘capitalist’ aspect permeates all of socio-cultural space to a degree unprecedented in history. this is not to deny the heuristic value of notions such as postmodern and consumer, but it is to dispute claims that these types of societies represent something radically different from earlier capitalist ones, at least economically. globalisation and internationalisation are more important and much more pervasive than ever—but they are not something ‘qualitatively new’ in human history (hopkins, 2003). one of the overriding questions for this paper, then, will be whether under such conditions the concept of the ‘the critical intellectual’ is still a plausible one, whether it has changed over the past decades, and what the critical intellectual’s role might be.3 2 a very insightful discussion can be found in the online version of the internationales archiv für sozialgeschichte der deutschen literatur, see http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de (accessed 5 may 2003) for a discussion of writers as critical intellectuals in these two contexts since 1945 see emmerich 2001, for east germany in particular, see mittenzwei 2001. 3 in what i am going to suggest here, i am writing not as someone whose usual academic pursuit is to elucidate such notions as ‘intellectual’, ‘critical’, ‘change agent’ and so on. my own background was originally in english and german philology, with subsequent specialisations in linguistics, computational linguistics and translation studies. i have thus been involved, over the years, in investigations into the workings of language and texts, often on micro-levels (steiner 1991), sometimes in technological applications, such as machine translation and multilingual text generation (steiner et al. 1988), and also in teaching students and researchers in the area of translation and multilingual text production (steiner and yallop. 2001). my main expertise is thus in the area of the micro-level realization of discourse, that is lexis and grammar, rather than in the area of the more macro-levels, such as would be the province of literary portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/ steiner critical intellectual thought in germany there is yet another sense in which ‘being critical’ enters into not only the contextualisation of our activities in everyday research and development, but into that activity itself: the crucial agencies of development and power have their home and enter into interaction with each other in crucial contexts of production in a society. and it is there that the critical agent has to meet them and engage with them, and not only in discourses about those contexts. i shall thus attempt to illustrate in section 3 how ‘being critical’ may translate into everyday productive activities in research and development, in my case linguistics and translation studies. 2. the meaning of kritische(r) intellektuelle(r) in an attempt to elucidate the meanings of the german phrase kritische(r) intellektuelle(r)4 we shall take two steps. the first will be an—extremely brief— exploration of some important historical and philosophical contexts that gave and give meaning to the term. the second will be a consideration of patterns of current usage, relying on a large-scale electronic textcorpus of german and on the internet as sources. the phrase kritische(r) intellektuelle(r) will be used in german here to emphasise its cultural specificity, whenever this is judged necessary. we shall return to the english usage of ‘critical intellectual’ in section 3, once some of the specifics of the german meanings have been explored. historical contexts considering the development of the meanings of kritische(r) intellektuelle(r) in a historical (geistesgeschichtlicher) perspective, we have to restrict ourselves to a global review of the etymology of the terms and of the history of some main strands of ideas, studies, sociology or philosophy. however, the question of what it may mean to be an ‘intellectual’, and even more, to be ‘critical’, has often posed itself in explanations of what i believe to be a socio-cultural, rather than a technical, phenomenon – human language, and human discourses (steiner 1985, 1996, 2000). and that question cannot be avoided even in in-depth micro-level investigations of language and text, if we accept the responsibility for what we are doing as researchers and teachers in our socio-cultural environments. 4 in singular usage this term is most frequently used in the ‘generic’ masculine, which does have gender implications. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany mainly from the enlightenment onwards. starting with kritik as the noun from which kritisch is derived, we shall discuss its modern development, and some key concepts associated with it, most notably truth, human activity, and contradiction (krings et al. 1973 vol. 3, 807ff). in (very roughly) pre-enlightenment texts, kritik, the ability to engage in criticism, is associated with bildung (education), rather than with a specialist knowledge and training in any one of the sciences. this finds its continuation in the more humanistically oriented post-enlightenment philosophy, as represented by kant and the tradition deriving from his work, founded on an ethics of a reasonable, humane life. with the rise of the sciences, and scientific methodology in modern post-enlightenment times, the latter demanded the status of the kritische methode, often in opposition to the more rhetorically based classical meaning. for many scientists, being kritisch, for example in the sense proposed by popper, is a method not connected to any ethics, except that of the scientific method itself. twentieth-century kritische theorie (adorno, horckheimer, habermas5’) joins the humanistic line of reasoning in its criticism of a merely ‘positivist’ critical method, re-asserting the all important role of a ‘reasonable social order’ (‘vernünftige gesellschaftliche ordnung’) that it derives from construing the course of history as the product of an economic process, or rather as an interplay between economic and sociocultural processes, following marxist lines of reasoning. in this framework, kritik is not merely method, but also something through which we can gain access to ‘truth’, or at least through which we can expose falseness. kritik in modern times is thus either a balanced judgement against a background of an assumed general education (humanism), or a scientific method, or a socio-political activity based on notions of ‘progress and justice’. at least in the first and third of these readings, kritik is always a process, in the course of which some state of affairs is judged relative to some (system of) norms, some ethics. it may be one of the specifically modern (in the sense of post-enlightenment) readings of kritik that the norms themselves may 5 for an overview see habermas (1988). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany become objects of criticism, together with the acknowledgement of competing systems of norms, as in the works of influential, though very different writers, such as hegel, kant (‘kritik der reinen vernunft, kritik der praktischen vernunft’), and marx (‘kritik der politischen ökonomie’). criticism in older periods, therefore, is more often than not a criticism of authorities—but this may be less a change in the logic of the term, than a historically contingent fact. also, and importantly for our context, kritik usually sets out from an experience of contradictions and non-truths (unstimmigkeit) in human activities or in states of affairs related to human activities. it is human activities that we criticise against a system of ethics, whereas we do not criticise natural processes, harmful though they may be. kritik thus presupposes human freedom and choice in acting, and it presupposes responsibility and truth. this truth, however, can in modern times no longer be assumed to be given in one system of ethics and norms, but instead it is negatively defined as the avoidance of its opposite, of errors, of falschheit through the critical process. truth, although a presupposition of kritik in a logical sense, is its result in the sense of the process. the meanings of ‘critical’ and ‘concerned’ as epithets of ‘intellectual’ in our current discussion are thus clearly related, but not synonymous: being critical seems to be closely related to cognition, whereas being concerned may be largely related to affect and instinct. just as both forms of existence and activity, the cognitive and the affective, are central to being human, and to the languages we know. the two qualities should not lose touch, although temporarily, there may be closer or weaker connections between them. having discussed some developments in the meaning of kritik, and by implication kritisch, let us briefly consider the ‘intellektueller/intellectual counterpart (mainly ritter and gründer, 1976 vol. 4, 446ff). the latin-based term is old, as is the greek-based kritik, but its modern meanings (adopted into german from french) are difficult to pin down, because they are partly ambiguous, partly vague. we shall use it here mainly as a sociological term, referring to a social grouping of künstler, wissenschaftler und schriftsteller (artists, scientists and writers) who assume a public (öffentliche) and a critical (kritische) role in socio-culturally crucial discourses. in addition, the definition of portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany the term ‘intellectual’ is often tied to the specialized creation and communication of symbolized knowledge. all the specialists whom we shall discuss in section 3, for example, are intellectuals in this sense, and they are all specialists concerned with symbolized knowledge, rather than with knowledge expressed in non-symbolic forms. but only some of them would be ‘concerned’ or even ‘critical’ intellectuals, and we shall try to give more specific meaning to these attributes in the following sections. a number of discursively recognized intellectuals will be named, and we shall discuss to what extent and in what sense they may or may not be specifically ‘critical’ intellectuals. for the specific academic field that will be discussed in depth in section 3—linguistics and translation studies—we shall specify a number of characteristics and features of their activities, which make them concerned (socially-oriented), critical, or else simply specialists. one implication will be that in the end, it is activities, more than individuals, that are ‘concerned’, ‘critical’ or otherwise. indeed, most of us are variously critical or non-critical in different contexts at different times. before moving on to patterns of current usage, let us very briefly address the question of the relationship between critical intellectuals, in the sense just discussed, and the state. historically, this is a changeable picture. intellectuals have always been dependent on the socio-cultural subsystems that were able (and willing) to support them, because intellectuals as a group are only possible in societies that allow the creation and support of a relevant number of people freed from manual labour. the state, specifically, is a formation that is relatively recent, dating from greek antiquity, at least in mainstream western historical writing. the nation-state of post-enlightenment times—and here we would definitely like to restrict ourselves to german history, in which the united nation state formally came into existence only in 1871 as a consequence of the franco-german war of 1870/71—has figured as a very changing environment for intellectuals. occasionally and in parts of the nation, the state provided a home for them. more often, and particularly for critical intellectuals, it marginalised them, the extreme example being german fascism between 1933-45, when it was extremely difficult to be critical and not to be in exile or physically extinguished. since the second world war, and especially portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany since the end of the 1960s, saw more freedom for critical intellectuals relative to the state, but very rarely with positive support of one for the other. patterns of current usage moving away from a diachronic perspective, let us now consider patterns of current usage, using a recent on-line debate on kritische intellektuelle, then a large-scale electronic text corpus of german, and finally the internet, as sources. scheideler (2002) has generalised the following leading topics about intellectuals out of current critical discourses in a recent online discussion forum: the intellectual as a discursive phenomenon; as the specialist for discourse and the intellectual community; as the voice of universal values; as the voice of ethics, morale; the writer as the prototypical intellectual; and, the end of the intellectual?6 here several traditional concerns are reflected, but alongside new ones. also others that are partly new. there seems to be a tendency, even though much less prominent than in english post-modernist parlance, to emphasise the kritische(r) intellektuelle(r) in discourses less as an individualised personality, and more as a type of voice. another contemporary topic may be seen in the widespread and deeply rooted suspicion towards ‘universal’ values, although there is also a strong current of argumentation that regards exactly those values as essential for a critical perspective. and, arguably also typical of our times, the possibility of the kritische(r) intellektuelle(r) is critically examined and questioned. if our entire culture and society is permeated by capital, and the value of everything is more than ever reduced to exchange value, rather than use value, and if furthermore all judgements are equally relative—with all sorts of ‘differences’ to be equally respected—how should there be any designated point of origin for a critical perspective? from this structured and focussed debate in the internationales archiv für sozialgeschichte der deutschen literatur, let us move on to two less focussed, but at the 6translated into english by the author, for the forum see internationales archiv für sozialgeschichte der deutschen literatur 2002, http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de, [accessed 2 january 2002]. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/ steiner critical intellectual thought in germany same time very representative, sources for explorations of the current meanings of our terms. our source here is the institut für deutsche sprache’sgesamtkorpus geschriebener sprache (full corpus of written language), which can be accessed at http://corpora.idsmannheim.de. in december 2001, when my searches in the electronic corpus were carried out, this resource held 374 million words, mainly from german language newspapers, including swiss and austrian publications, collected during the 1990s. in a search on 6 december 2001, we had 40 hits for the morphologically different variants of kritischer intellektueller (4), kritische intellektuelle (17), and kritischen intellektuellen (19). methodologically, we are opting here for precision, as we are demanding all and only the occurrences of the phrase as such. our ‘recall’ is probably relatively weak in the sense that we are not getting any analytical occurrences, such as intellektuelle, where the epithet ‘kritisch’ occurs somewhere else and/or in different morphological shape, in the same context. by way of comparison, intellektuelle on its own received 1,597 hits in the same corpus. the following are the topical contexts in which the terms occurred: the critical intellectual versus.: practical politics (4) emotional public stasi sublimation (verdrängung) of the truth (2) market ideologies censorship general opinion right-wing politics globalisation, kohl arabic critical intellectuals vs. west national groups of critical intellectuals: serbian (3), indonesian kaundan iranian portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 http://corpora.ids-mannheim.de/ http://corpora.ids-mannheim.de/ steiner critical intellectual thought in germany nigerian gdr (2) czeck opposition named individuals: althusser enzensberger (3, but ambivalent) habermas (2) reemtsma horckheimer filip gramsci, barber freud (gisèle) jelinek grass sarkuhi walzer drawert bourdieu critical intellectuals are characterised as/ by: being weakened by the collapse of communism having vision of a better world (2) left-wing political leaning (2) supporting human rights having links with liberal media and elite in germany a pursuit of truth. in terms of current usage, then, kritische intellektuelle are seen to be in opposition to political powers, among them market ideologies and globalisation. specifically, they are seen in opposition to different types of political oppression, and there is a certain range of named individuals grouped under the term. interestingly, among those names, enzensberger is discursively positioned on the borderline between the critical intellectual and the merely public intellectual. kritische intellektuelle are also associated with visions of a just society, but not necessarily with the masses. it has to be noted, though, that the cosmas corpus we have been using here largely consists of texts from the daily or weekly press, which partly explains the relative lack of philosophical depth of the field of discourse—this is not a criticism, but something quite predictable from the medium. for portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany the same reason, in our forum in the internationales archiv für sozialgeschichte der deutschen literatur discussed above, a high level of philosophical expertise and specificity characterising the tenor of discourse—this is also quite predictable in terms of the medium and the participant relationships. the third source used here is the internet, where we conducted a google-search on the full net on 2 january 2002. in this search, the data for the german search involves websites written in german, full text. we obtained 753 hits, which was almost 20 times the number obtained for the cosmas corpus. it has to be emphasised, though, that we have no information about the size of the corpus at that time, except that the full multilingual search space would have been more than 2 billion websites. it is also interesting to note that we obtain many more results in a search allowing the spelling variants and intruding text between the two node words (approx. 7,800 on 2 january 2002). a comparative search for the english ‘critical intellectual/ critical intellectuals’ yields 2,157 hits in the more constrained search mode, many of which, especially in the case of ‘critical intellectual,’ were not in contexts involving the terminological meaning with which we are interested here. that number, not surprisingly, explodes to 935,000 in the less constrained research mode. returning to the german data, we noted in a fast and incomplete overview of the citations obtained that the main topics which we found in the cosmas corpus are corroborated, although in much more breadth and detail. a substantial number of citations are, in fact, from discourses thematizing non-german intellectuals, e.g. chomsky, rorty, bourdieu, hobsbawm. in general, and in terms of level and specificity of expertise, we find a combination of relatively general-audience press discourses on the one hand, and of quite discipline-specific specialist debates on the other, due to the fact that the internet is used both by the general media and by scholarly and academic communities. we would also like to quote here an internet ranking of ‘the 100 most important german public intellectuals’ (frankfurter allgemeine sonntagszeitung (fas) nr. 4, 27. january portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany 2002, p.21)7. this count was about ‘public’, not necessarily ‘critical’ intellectuals. the method used was to count people writing in german, regardless of nationality, and excluding ‘journalists-only’ and ‘writers-only’. obviously, there are some methodological weaknesses here, because it is far from obvious what these categories mean exactly. furthermore, this way of counting is not empirical in the sense that the names to be tested have to be chosen first, so that important intellectuals may not have entered the list simply because they were not considered candidates in the first place. this weakness does not apply to our own more truly bottom-up approach using google, as we are counting all occurrences of the term kritische(r) intellektuelle(r)—although this method also has its own problems of recall: we may miss occurrences of names simply because they do not occur in the neighbourhood of these phrases. still, the ranking in the fas is interesting enough to deserve at least a mentioning of the top ten names, which are (in this order): günter grass, jürgen habermas, rudolf augstein, joseph ratzinger, peter handke, hans magnus enzensberger, ulrich beck, christa wolf, maertin walser and marcel reich-ranicki. the first of these had 18,297 hits, the tenth 6,534 (measured as an average value between google and alltheweb searches). johann wolfgang von goethe, by comparison, scores an average of 425,885. in terms of profession, we find among the first 10: writers (5), a philosopher (1), a journalist-editor (1), a cardinal (1), a sociologist (1) and a literary critic (1). 3. linguistics and natural language technologies as a critical context we have above given a sketch of some of the meaning(s) of kritische(r) intellektuelle(r) in philosophical, literary and historical discourses (geistesgeschichtlich), and we also have attempted to trace some of the current usages and thematic configurations in which the term surfaces. one of the developments that we can see in such considerations is that whereas in earlier periods, say during and before the middle ages, intellectuals, and notably ‘critical’ intellectuals, were usually writers, artists and theologians/ philosophers, it may be considered to be typical of modernity that scientists (in the broad sense, which includes the arts and humanities, social sciences and natural/ technical sciences) have 7 see posner (2001), who reports on an earlier and similar analysis for the united states. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany joined the ranks. they may do so either in their capacity as specialists8, or else, unrelated to their area of specialisation, in their capacity as critically thinking human beings9. without in any way criticising the second way of being critical, it has long seemed to me that nowadays the ‘being critical’—in’ the sense of uncovering false images in and about what we do, mean and say--has to be part of, rather than only a comment on, at least some share of the researcher’s activities. in other words, it cannot be kept out of how and what we do as specialists in our subject fields. of course, there are big differences between disciplines depending on what their objects and methods of study may be, and how directly they interfere with socio-cultural reality, for to the extent that they have a bearing on our societies and our cultures, being critical matters. the assumed position of the pure critical intellectual outside scientific and technological production, and of the critical activity as a comment on what others ‘do’, appears to me to be less feasible than it ever may have been. we shall describe one form of a critical discourse in my own area of linguistics and translation studies, in order to illustrate how the general property of ‘being critical’ may be translated into methodological questions inside an academic discipline.10 more specifically, we shall review a debate about schools of linguistics, formulate a thesis about basic types of orientation in the study of natural language, then characterise the opposing schools identified in the debate, before explaining how such characteristics translate into specific methodological orientations in studying language. at the end of this section, we shall argue that if we evaluate the two orientations in the study of language against the aim of being socially responsible and being critical, one of them is clearly more suitable than the other. 8 for example (weizenbaum 1976, 2001) for computer science and artificial intelligence, (bourdieu 1991), (negt 2001) for sociology, (eagleton 1996) for literary studies, (halliday 1967); (halliday and martin 1993) for linguistics. 9 for example, see chomsky (2000) and his numerous political writings. 10 see steiner (1996, 2001) for more detail on this. extended parts of section three of this paper are drawn from the 1996 paper. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany controversies in the course of the 1990s between different approaches to language (beaugrande 1994; jäger 1993; grewendorf 1994; bierwisch 1993) were, in our view, part of a wider debate about different ways of scientific theorizing (weizenbaum, 1976; heintz, 1993; wajcman, 1994; braverman, 1974; bijker et al, 1987; ahrweiler, 1995; marx n.d.; altvater, 1992; negt 2001). the aspect of the debate that we focus on here is that of what is, and what should be, the responsibility of the scientific community for the effects of scientists’ work, directly and indirectly, once that work is realised in some form of technology. the terms ‘chomsky-theory’ and ‘mead-theory’ are taken from a debate between jäger (1993), on the one hand, and bierwisch (1993) and grewendorf (1993), on the other, later followed by a whole series of further contributions from a range of perspectives. jäger’s main thesis (1993, 79) is that the history of linguistics over the past two hundred years (at least) can be seen as that of a mainstream, which he designates ‘chomskytheories’, and that marginalized an older position, or’mead-theories’ (taking the names of chomsky and mead as the defining labels for these trajectories). in the progress of these theoretical developments, the object of inquiry, language, has been more and more eroded and specialized, until in the present time the term no longer supports the unity of one discipline or sprachwissenschaft. language, in all of its interrelationships with culture, society and history, thus disappears from the agenda, being reduced to a technical and biological/psychological mechanism. bierwisch (1993) responds to jager’s thesis by arguing that it completely misrepresents the essence of the chomsky-paradigm and its historical context, has itself nothing to contribute to a serious study of language, and leads to incompetence in formal and technological modelling of processes associated with language. debates of this kind can be understood as re-instantiations of an older and more general debate between logic/philosophy-oriented and rhetoric/ethnography-oriented approaches to language study. in modern times, the opposition between rationalist and empiricist portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany seems to be based on the same general discussion, as does the opposition formalist versus functionalist, at least in many cases. in the present paper, we would like to argue that yet another pair of headings under which debates are currently conducted is the one of ‘technologically-oriented theories’ versus ‘socially-oriented theories’. what remains to be seen is whether the opposition ‘chomsky-theory’ versus mead-theory’ can be mapped one-to-one onto the ‘technologically-oriented and socially-oriented’ opposition, and whether it is the socially-oriented variety alone that offers a discursive space to critical intellectuals. let us begin by formulating briefly a thesis before moving on to a consideration of examples. at the end of this chapter, we shall evaluate types of linguistic theorizing relative to the goals of being critical and of being socially responsible. we assume that two basic orientations can currently be identified in the study of natural language, which we shall label ‘technologically-oriented’ (type 1) versus ‘socially-oriented’ (type 2).11 technologically oriented theories structure their discourses after the model of the technical disciplines and/or formal and philosophical logic. they represent a rationalist and logic-oriented paradigm. socially oriented theories structure their discourses after the model of the social sciences, rhetoric or descriptive grammar. they represent a more empiricist and rhetorically oriented paradigm. the assumption of basic types of orientations in linguistics is shared by many people in the field. type 1 above would include chomskyan, but also most other schools of formal linguistics. type 2 would include prague, czech, british, dutch and west-coast functionalism, but also substantial orientations in cognitive grammar. 11 these are not the only types of approaches to natural language. in particular, type 2 above is not identical to approaches deriving from or situated in traditional philology and hermeneutics, which represent an important third type (3). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 14 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany we would like to suggest some general characteristics of our two categories— technologically oriented and socially oriented—before considering some of their realizations in terms of the methodological characteristics of distinct linguistics schools : breadth of coverage: theories and models of type 1 tend to take a highly specialized and restricted view on what constitutes a scientifically legitimate share of their object of study. in linguistics, their approved areas of study are clause syntax, formal (model theoretic) semantics, phonology and phonetics, and within all of these the focus is on competence rather than performance, i.e. idealized knowledge rather than instantiation of that knowledge. specialization and formalization of methods: within approaches of type 1, nonformal methods are held to be unscientific. methodology and terminology tend to be highly specialized and require education and socialisation into the corresponding academic communities. the distance to everyday knowledge is considerable and tends to increase. theories of type 2 adopt a more cautious approach to formal methods, allowing methods from non-formal linguistics, as well as traditional and modern rhetoric. they, too, go through cycles of increasing specialization in their development, yet are based on greater breadth of coverage and on a continuous confrontation with relatively ‘rich’, i.e. natural, data. orientation towards knowledge as an instrument of dominance vs. an instrument of emancipation: approaches of type 1 have a tendency to generate and apply highly specialized and relatively inaccessible knowledge and therefore lend themselves easily to discourses of exclusion and social dominance. the institutional environment of approaches of type 1 is sometimes elitist. approaches of type 2 have a tendency to generate and apply knowledge as a relatively accessible instrument of social action; the institutional environment is often nonelitist and open. orientation towards neighbouring disciplines: type 1 approaches see themselves as ‘sciences’ (grewendorf, 1994), or as related to, or even part of, cognitive science and psychology (see edelman, 1992). in their contacts to philosophy, links are established with logic, and analytical and formal philosophy, rather than portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 15 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany with more rhetorically or historically oriented fields in philosophy. the typical professional profile of graduates is in research, or, in the few areas where that stage has so far been reached, development. type 2 approaches have stronger links in interdisciplinary contexts with the social sciences and pedagogy, although significant interdisciplinary work has been underway for a considerable time between prague, dutch, and british functionalism and computer science, for example in computational text generation. within philosophy, links are sought with rhetoric, speech act theory and related areas. the typical professional profile of graduates is, apart from research, oriented towards areas such as language teaching, intercultural communication, or translation. role of application: type 1 approaches emphasize their status as ‘theoretical’, rather than ‘applied’, and the assumed borderline between these two orientations is sharp and rigid. type 2 approaches tend more towards a dialectical view of the relationship between theory and application with the borderline between these fields being assumed to be continuous and gradual, rather than sharp and categorical. life span of (versions of) theories: the life span of (versions of) a theory within approaches of type 1 tends to be short. chomskyan linguistics, for example, has seen four substantially different versions of theories of syntax and language over the last 45 years. such life spans are usually longer in the case of theories of type 2, which is, of course, partly a consequence of the fact that these latter theories do not, or not without reservations, subscribe to the corresponding ‘hypotheticodeductive’ view of progress from one (version of) a theory to the next. approaches of type 1 largely exemplify a perspective on science and technology in which theory is far removed from application, without responsibility for that application. chomsky himself seems to share this uncritical view of science (grewendorf 1994, 393)—quite a remarkable position in view of the fact that his views on politics in general are anything but uncritical (chomsky, 2000, for one of numerous examples). he is thus a portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 16 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany prime example of an outstanding intellectual who is critical in one context, yet extremely uncritical in the other. after considering characteristics of types of linguistic theories, and after looking at some methodological consequences of these characteristics, let us suggest a few implications for evaluations of theories of language, intercultural communication, and translation in particular. we believe that these implications form part of a critical perspective within our discipline. models of language processing, if they are to provide us with instruments to effectively influence the process of the social construction of technological systems in the area of multi-lingual nlp, have to contain significant elements that facilitate an understanding of probable effects of those technologies. what is of interest here are the influences on the entire system of linguistic activities of participants in the processes concerned, rather than only influences on a few isolated parameters. a certain breadth of coverage, as well as interand trans-disciplinarity, are thus important. the process of a responsible social construction of technologies will derive little meaningful input from models that: are overspecialized and drastically reduced in their perspective on their object of study, i.e. language and translation; are dominated in their view of the object of study and their choice of methods by questions of formalizability and deductive reasoning of a restricted kind (as in ‘formal linguistics’); largely exclude the social sciences from their interdisciplinary discourse; conceive of their role as distinctively ‘theoretical’ rather than ‘applied’. a constructively critical and socially oriented approach to the social construction of technological systems has to: portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 17 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany come from inside the disciplines concerned and therefore involve the responsibility of researchers, developers and teachers, rather than being added on to the core process of construction as a purely reflective exercise in interpretative discourse. a `black box approach’ to the evaluation of technological systems, which is usually characterized by the non-participation of the relevant research communities, is highly problematic both in terms of insights to be gained and in terms of effective influence; be allowed to exert effective social and political influence, rather than being assigned the role of a non-influential discourse about different ways of making a pre-existing technology maximally acceptable to users and consumers; take the form of an ‘early intervention’ in all stages of the process of the social construction of a technological system. even at present, when for example systems for fully automatic translation are more a research activity than a productive force on the market and in relevant communication processes, and when their application as systems for ‘raw translations’ is still rather tentative than wide-scale, these very immature technologies already have three types of negative effects on people engaged in translation professionally: the quality of the final product in a process in which machine-generated raw translations are used and post-edited may, in many cases, be markedly inferior in quality to a human translation. however, there are lines of argumentation in and around the relevant industries and research communities according to which the large-scale acceptance of such texts is advocated as one way of making a very immature technology acceptable for reasons of ‘efficiency’. that type of argumentation should not be acceptable in a responsible process of technology construction. the space of creativity and control which is constituted by the choices a human translator makes when producing a text in the target language is severely reduced and re-structured by bringing into it a machine-generated raw translation as a first stage. the consequences are that the quality of the result suffers (see above) and portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 18 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany that the process of translation becomes psychologically unsatisfying and demotivating. there is already a popular discourse, especially in funding agencies, parts of the ‘natural language processing’ research community and in a few sectors of industry, through which the human capacity for translating is becoming de-valued and made available at cheaper prices. advertising and marketing strategies of companies offering machine translation systems, together with unrealistically optimistic announcements of high-performance systems by the research and development communities, combine to create the impression that translation is or will be, at this point in time or in the very near future, a scientifically wellunderstood and technologically controllable process. as a result, the human translation capacity becomes de-valued and underestimated. this may be a trend that lies behind some of the observed processes of under-financing both in terms of salaries and in terms of other forms of material support for translating as a social activity. none of the negative effects just postulated appears unavoidable, yet such effects may well increase in strength if the process of technology construction in the areas of translation, and to a lesser extent, multi-lingual text production, continues in its present socially irresponsible and in that sense unintelligent way. in considering the implications of what we have said, we cannot focus on computational technologies exclusively, or even predominantly. we have to develop a perspective on processes such as translation and multi-lingual text production both in their specifically technological and non-technological realizations. it has been apparent for a considerable time that those areas of productive activities that are ‘taylorized’12 and fractionated lend themselves most easily to mechanisation. the predecessor of the highly mechanized, ‘paperless’ and de-populated office is the integrated and taylorized secretaries’ pool of 12 that is, treated in the compartmentalised or assembly line method of production pioneered by the american industrialist fw taylor, that came to be known as scientific management portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 19 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany earlier decades. the predecessor of the de-qualified, de-motivated and underpaid posteditor of machine-produced raw translations may well be the highly taylorized translators’ department in big institutions or companies. a productive criticism of aspects of developing technologies will therefore have to involve a re-consideration of working practices in the area concerned, in both their technological and non-technological aspects. we have, in the current section, discussed some mutual influences between professionalism, specialisation and intellectual life. using linguists as a relevant group of specialists as an example, we have attempted to show how specialisation on the one hand, and being socially oriented, concerned and critical on the other, do not necessarily exclude (nor necessarily include) each other. we have also attempted to identify properties of ‘concerned’ and ‘critical’ approaches for that field. the intellectuals referred to here (have to) accept specialisation and professionalisation as necessary forms of existence. and this very specialisation and professionalisation gives them some degree of freedom from more unpleasant, alienating types of labour. at the same time, it ties them into the ideological systems of the institutions they are working for, and thus, as it were, reduces to varying degrees the critical edge of their statements. this latter constraining characteristic of their intellectual condition is certainly deplorable, but has, to varying degrees, always and necessarily been part of existence for the overwhelming majority of intellectuals. the implication in processes of specialisation does not in itself prohibit a critical perspective, i believe. however, it may reduce it, sometimes to the extent of making it almost non-existent. yet even more pressing is the question of whether there are elements and properties of the intellectual process itself that are either constraining or else enabling for intellectuals to be ‘critical’ or ‘concerned’. some of these elements and properties will be addressed in the final section. what appears to be undesirable from a social perspective—and has to be clearly made visible by a critical discourse—is the fact that an extreme rationalist orientation exists in some of the social sciences and humanities, which treats human knowledge and human language as individual (i.e. non-social), as thoroughly and exclusively representable portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 20 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany through formal methods, and thus as amenable to existing technologies without any view to the context in which knowledge and language are situated. if this rationalist orientation joins forces with the ‘natural’ flow of capital investment into technology, rather than into social and human relations, this rationalism will contribute significantly to already existing trends to marginalize social man/woman out of the perspectives of both science and technology. that process started not later than modern capitalism, but has gained significant momentum in the past decades. a socially oriented, and thus socially committed, theory of language is an expression of counteracting forces in the fields of education and intercultural communication. but in addition to being socially oriented, it has to practice extreme care in maintaining a critical and self-critical stance, in order to avoid the dangers of rigid dogmatisms that have unfortunately disfigured—all too frequently—originally critical approaches intellectually. 4. on the possibility of a critical perspective after illustrating in some detail how elements of a critical and intellectual perspective might manifest themselves within the particular field of theories of language and of natural language processing technologies, we shall broaden our perspective into a wider set of questions relating to the role of the critical intellectual, in german (and other?) contexts. our two questions here will be where we anchor value judgements, and our ethics, on the one hand, and whether there are forces driving the development of our cultures and societies, sources with which we can, however partially, identify and align ourselves in order to give direction to socio-cultural development. our first question revolves around the notions of values and ethics. do we assume that the role of the critical intellectual is inherently connected to some systems of values, either in the sense of the enlightenment, and/or marxism, and/or some other system of ethics. or do we believe that the position of a critical intellectual could be defined without any recourse to some system of norms about what constitutes a ‘good life’? is there something like ‘truth’, ‘progress’ or ‘justice’, other than what is successful on the market in the sense of having a high exchange value? is there a kind of bootstrapping portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 21 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany process by which human cultures can derive norms out of their socio-cultural existence without a metaphysics? ever since classical times, the notion of kritik has involved the judgement of some discovered ‘truth’13. the judgement, however, was usually assumed to be operative against a given system of absolute norms. it may be seen to be a feature typical for modernity that these norms themselves can become objects of kritik. kant’s kritik der reinen vernunft and numerous writings in that tradition have corroborated this again and again, as has been the case with hegel, marx, and many others. but even though specific systems of norms became the objects of kritik, the critical activity itself was not separated from a judgement based on a normative ethics. and even in the twentieth century, normative judgements by critical intellectuals were seen as anchored in the specific position of intellectuals and their capacity—and obligation—to recognize, formulate and defend non-particularistic ethics (bourdieu 1991, 17, 46; negt, 2001). (neo-)marxists, in particular, have often criticised variants of postmodernist philosophical discourses for failing to recognise and aim towards a fulfilment of such capacity and obligation (e.g. habermas 1988, 390ff; eagleton 1996, 131ff). it appears to me that in order to be critical, we have to assume that there is a perspective from which distortions of our picture of realities become visible, and others from which they don’t. these would be perspectives that demand an ultimate respect for the intrinsic value of the human being, and which oppose the market-driven ideology that makes everything into a tauschwert/exchange value that can be realised on the market. the dignity and value of the human individual is something that cannot be priced and that commands the highest respect in itself. societies, cultures and ideologies of whatever type that do not respect this have to be exposed through the process of critique. yet, the plural that we used when talking about ‘critical perspectives’ indicates that there is no single such position; several different positions at least are possible, and, indeed, 13 see via inveniendi versus via iudicandi in the writings of cicero and quintillian (krings et al. 1973: 810ff). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 22 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany necessary in order to derive knowledge out of differences and, more strongly, contradiction. furthermore, in order to remain critical, we need the ability to judge developments by something other than success on the market. in other words, we need to postulate a primacy of some form of politics (in a generalised sense) over economics— which does not in any way imply, of course, a disregard for the importance of a system of production or distribution as a basis for the life of a society and as a system for systematic feed-back about our actions in the socio-economic sphere. these positions, conjointly, are likely to encompass a fundus of important values—which is not the same as exchange values—and norms that, through a long process of critical investigation, provide the notions of ‘truth’, ‘progress’ or ‘justice’ which we need as a basis of that same process. and it is only through the elaboration of such notions that we can differentiate the critical intellectual from the ideologue, on the one hand, who argues for particularistic interests (partikularinteressen) only, and from the mandarin on the other, who does not practice kritik, because it would endanger the privileges derived from his or her association with the agencies in power (scheidel 2002, 5ff; lepsius 1964). some contemporary postmodernist victimisation discourses concerned with identity positions have moved from the position of the ideologue to that of the mandarin without even so much as touching on a critical perspective—and not least of all, because the necessity of some widely valid ethics was thought irrelevant or even harmful. our second question in this section is whether there are ‘driving forces’ for socio-cultural processes that motivate change, and, to use a more teleological term, evolution. if we make the crucial assumption of some truth, or at least non-falseness that we can recognise through the critical process, and if we assume that there will be perspectives from which such a critical process becomes possible, then such perspectives must in some sense become knowable, and criticisable, in the sense of distinguishable from other perspectives in an epistemological sense. is there something like driving forces in sociocultural systems that motivate change (and evolution?) in societies, and cultures, and, by association, with which we gain insight into ‘true’ rather than ‘false’ relationships in reality? and do these driving forces leave traces in representations of realities that we can portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 23 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany use as clues for points of access to knowledge, however imperfect and historically limited that knowledge may be? several formulations of hypotheses about such driving forces have been elaborated into philosophical systems. one important driving force is that of the relationship of contradiction, either between entities, and relationships such as means of production versus relationships of production (marx n.d., negt 2001), or between systems and their environments in general systems theory and cybernetics, to name two candidates. another important epistemological category is that of contradictions between our hypotheses about some aspect of reality, and empirical reality, or between what ought to be the case, in an epistemic sense of ought to, and what is. the first set of contradictions would be driving forces for socio-cultural systems; the second would be driving forces for our active investigation in order to resolve the contradictions we notice. both of these are epistemologically important as possibilities of learning, and of avoiding falseness. this category of contradiction is in no way exhausted by the category of difference as currently debated (hegel 1951: 61). there appear to be important implications for the role of the ‘critical intellectual’ if we assume an important role of contradictions in the critical process. if the crucial ability to discover contradictions involves human activity, and if this activity is productive, reproductive, but in both senses social activity, then the potential of being ‘critical’ arises out of participation—rather than only out of passive reflection upon—critical activities. this process thus brings us in contact—and conflict—with crucial socio-cultural agents and agencies. we have attempted to exemplify in our discussion of types of theorising and modelling in the area of natural language technologies above, what some of the issues may be in one particular instantiation. beyond possibilities of discovering and critique-ing/ distinguishing falseness from truth, we need systems of ethics and norms that are guided by some idea of a good society, just society—and these we can only obtain from what is best in the humanistic elements of portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 24 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany human belief systems across cultures, including science, religion, and art. these ethics, an emergent property of processes of human activity, are preconditions and consequence of processes of critique. we thus obtain driving forces for our critical activity of a different nature, arising out of contradictions between what we observe empirically, and what we believe ought to be the case according to our ethics. critical activity has to be grounded in a desire to guarantee a maximally worthy (würdig) form of existence for human beings—and in the diagnosis that counter to the claims of the ideologue and of the mandarin, this existence cannot arise out of the interests of particularistic groups; nor is it in reality guaranteed by the existing order. let us end with a conclusion that critical intellectuals—in germany and elsewhere—have usually subscribed to, which is that states, such as germany, may be historically contingent contexts, but nothing more, for intellectuals. even cultures and societies, though less rigidly fenced into boundaries than states, can be roots and crucial contexts of development, but never the boundaries and exclusive discursive habitat for critical intellectuals, even less than for others. finally and most importantly, just as there never were, and still aren’t, nation-states that can legitimately claim to be the exclusive home of critical intellectuals, so there are no sociological spaces that can lay claim to ownership of the epithet ‘critical’. there is no necessary connection between being an intellectual sociologically and being critical,14 for the critical mind nowadays has every reason to reject being imprisoned in any space—be it geographical or otherwise. reference list ahrweiler, p. 1995, künstliche intelligenz-forschung in deutschland. die etablierung eines hochtechnologie-fachs, volume 114 of internationale hochschulschriften, waxmann, münster and new york. altvater, e. 1992, der preis des wohlstands, verlag westfälisches dampfboot, münster. beaugrande, r. de 1994, ‘function and form in language theory and research. the tide is turning’, functions of language, 1(2), 163-200. bierwisch, m. 1992‚ ‘grammatikforschung in der ddr: auch ein rückblick’, linguistische berichte, (139), 169-81. 14 as is argued very convincingly by honneth (2002). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 25 steiner critical intellectual thought in germany ——— 1993‚ ‘ludwig jägers kampf mit den windmühlen anmerkungen zu einer merkwürdigen sprach(wissenschafts)verwirrung’, zeitschrift für sprachwissenschaft, 12(1) 107-112. bijker, w. & hughes, t. & pinch, t., (eds.), 1987, the social construction of technological systems, mit press, cambridge/ mass. braverman, h. 1974, labor and monopoly capital: the degradation of work in the 20th century, monthly review press, new york. bourdieu, p. 1991, die intellektuellen und die macht. hg. v. irene dölling, vsa-verlag, hamburg. chomsky, n. 2000, rogue states: the rule of force in world affairs, the south end press, cambridge, mass. eagleton, t. 1996, the illusions of postmodernism, blackwell, oxford. edelman, g. 1992, bright air, brilliant fire: on the matter of the mind. harper collins, new york. emmerich, w. 2001, ‘deutsche schriftsteller als intellektuelle. strategien und aporien des engagements in ost und west von 1954 bis heute’, in zeitschrift für literaturwissenschaft und linguistik 124, 28-46. grewendorf, g. 1993, ‘der sprache auf der spur: anmerkungen zu einer linguistik nach jäger art’. zeitschrift sprachwissenschaft, 1(12), 113 -132. ———1994, ‘interview with noam chomsky: notes on linguistics and politics’, linguistische berichte, 153, 386–95. habermas j. 1988, der philosophische diskurs der moderne. zwölf vorlesungen. suhrkamp, frankfurt am main. halliday, m. a. k. 1967. grammar, society and the noun, h.k. lewis and co., london. halliday, m.a.k. and martin, j.r. (eds.), 1993, writing science, falmer press, london. hegel, georg wilhem friedrich. 1951. wissenschaft der logik, 2. teil. leipzig: meiner verlag heintz, b. 1993, die herrschaft der regel. zur grundlagengeschichte der computer, campus verlag, frankfurt. hegel, g.w.f. 1951, wissenschaft der logik, 2. teil, meiner verlag, leipzig. honneth, a. 2002, ‘die mythischen mächte zerstören. gesellschaftskritik im zeitalter des normalisierten intellektuellen’, in: neue zürcher zeitung, internationale ausgabe nr. 57 9/10 märz 2002, 49f hopkins, a.g. (ed.), 2002, globalization in world history, pimlico, london. iasl 2002, internationales archiv für sozialgeschichte der deutschen literatur 2002, see http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de [accessed 2 january 2002] jäger, l. 1993, ‘language, whatever that may be. die geschichte der sprachwissenschaft als erosionsgeschichte ihres gegenstandes’, in zeitschrift für sprachwissenschaft, 12(1), 77-106 krings, h. baumgartner h. m. & wild, ch. (eds.) 1973, handbuch philosophischer grundbegriffe. bd. 3. kösel verlag, münchen. lepsius, m. r., 1964, ‘kritik als beruf. zur soziologie der intellektuellen.’ in: kölner zeitschrift für soziologie und sozialpsychologie 16, 75-91. maas, u. 1973, grundkurs sprachwissenschaft i die herrschende lehre, volume 1424 of taschenbücher der wissenschaft. 2nd. ed., list, münchen, portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 26 http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/ steiner critical intellectual thought in germany marx, k. n.d., das kapital. dietz verlag, berlin. mittenzwei, w. 2001, ‘die intellektuellen’. literatur und politik in ostdeutschland von 1945-2000. faber & faber verlag, leipzig. negt, o. 2001, arbeit und menschliche würd, steidel, göttingen. posner, r. a. 2001, public intellectuals: a study of decline: a critical analysis, harvard university press, cambridge, mass. ritter, j. and gründer, k. (eds.), 1976, historisches wörterbuch der philosophie. wissenschaftliche buchgesellschaft, darmstadt. scheideler, b. 2002, ‘iasl diskussionsforum online geschichte und kritik der intellektuellen. einleitung in die diskussion’ in: iasl 2002 steiner, e. 1985, ‘the concept of context and the theory of action’ in: language and the nuclear arms debate, chilton, p. (ed.), 1985, frances pinter, london, 213-230. ———1991, a functional perspective on language, action, and interpretation, mouton de gruyter, berlin and new york ———1996, ‘systemic functional linguistics: a chomsky-theory or a mead-theory?’ in: proceedings of the anglistentag 1995 in greifswald. klein, j. und vanderbeke, d. (eds.), niemeyer, tübingen, 169-92 ——— 2000, ‘translation evaluation: some methodological questions arising from the german translation of goldhagen’s ‘hitler’s willing executioners’, in: discourse and the community. ventola, e. (ed.), 2000, gunter narr verlag, tübingen, 291307. ———2001, ‘arbeitnehmereinfluss auf entstehung und funktion neuer informationstechnologien im bereich der interkulturellen kommunikation’ in: kooperativ forschen. meister, h. und roßmanith, b. (eds.), 2001, röhrig universitätsverlag, st ingbert, 223-34. steiner, e., schmidt, p. and zelinsky-wibbelt, c. (eds.), 1988, from syntax to semantics insights from machine translation, frances pinter, london. steiner, e. & yallop, c. (eds.) 2001, exploring translation and multilingual textproduction: beyond content. series text, translation, computational processing. mouton de gruyter, berlin, new york. vandijk, t. a. 1993, elite discourse and racism. sage, london. wajcman, j. 1994, technik und geschlecht. die feministische technikdebatte. campus verlag, frankfurt etc. weizenbaum, j. 1976, computer power and human reason, w.h. freeman and company, san francisco ———. 2001, computermacht und gesellschaft. suhrkamp, frankfurt/main. winograd, t. & flores, f. 1986,understanding computers and cognition: a new foundation for design, ablex, norwood, new jersey. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 27 historical contexts reference list portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? damian spruce, university of technology, sydney the political geography of europe has, for centuries, been based around the borders of its nation-states. the ability of the nation-state to control its territory and police its borders has been essential to the practices of war and diplomacy, the legitimacy of governments, immigration policies and trade. but processes of globalization and european union (eu) integration have transformed the borders of europe and the nation-states within it. while globalization theorists tend to posit an opening up of borders to global flows of capital, information and people, the changed nature of the border is itself often left unexamined and it is assumed that borders have simply disappeared. some scholars and activists, however, are now arguing that, rather than fading away, borders are proliferating in the globalized world and their functions spreading into many different areas of society. this article examines the transformation of the ‘classical’ border of the nation-state into a number of new forms, using the work of theorists such as balibar (2004a, 2004b), mezzadra (2004), rigo (2005) and walters (2004). it then examines how these theories have been applied in recent literature, and in particular chris rumford’s (2006) analysis of the european neighbourhood policy and his argument that this represents a ‘cosmopolitanization’ of european borders. the classical border the history of the modern nation-state begins in europe in 1648 with the treaty of westphalia. borders were from the very beginning an essential component of this new political form; the key terms of the treaty were exclusive sovereignty over the state’s particular territory, and the clear delineation of the borders between the conflicting spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? powers, the french and swedish states and the principalities of the holy roman empire. the treaty established one of the most important aspects of sovereignty at the time, the principle of ‘cuius regio, eius religio’; that is, each state could determine the religious practice within its territory (green 1954, 324). with the treaty the role of the holy roman empire began its decline, marking ‘the end of the medieval conception of europe which had long been dying and the emergence of the modern state’ (green 1954, 326). however it is not until the nineteenth century that the nation-state in europe fully comes into being (agnew 2003) when european nationalisms and the colonial ambitions of european states became dominant. at this time the european nation-state model is exported around the world and, rigo (2005) argues, comes to dominate all other forms of geopolitical divisions: ‘the world-wide success of the territorial system of national states transformed every frontier of expansion into a boundary between homogenous and symmetrical political entities, overshadowing all other meanings of political and territorial borders.’ mezzadra (2004) argues that this is the time of the ‘classical’ concept of the border, marking out a direct geophysical correspondence between nation, state, and territory. he quotes georg jellinek’s (1900) argument that the unitary nature of the territory of the state, that is the clarity of its borders and the absence of overlapping territories and sovereignty, is one of the essential elements of the state’s definition. the german school of political geography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of which jellinek was a member, took the theorization of the border as an important part of its work. one of its leading figures, ratzel, wrote of the need to divide up and apportion territory into bordered areas: ‘every state is a portion of humanity and a portion of territory. man is unthinkable without land, and much less the greatest works of man on the planet, that is the state’ (1897, 2). the division and bordering of both territory and people is viewed as a fundamental component of the establishment of the nation-state. similarly, the british imperial administrator lord curzon, whose work involved drawing up the borders of britain’s colonies, argued that unitary borders and defined territories were the basis on which states were founded; indeed, ‘the integrity of its borders is the condition for existence of the state’ (1907, 2). borders were also essential to international order and for curzon were thus ‘the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 2 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? of life or death to nations’ (1907, 2). balibar argues that these types of borders are as much a product of modernity as the nation-state itself, replacing pre-modern boundary forms, such as ‘marches’ and ‘limes’ (2004b, 3).1 the nation-state drew together administrative, juridical, fiscal, military and even linguistic functions into a particular territory, controlled by a monopolistic state power. without the border in its classical definition the nation-state as we know it would not have been possible. but despite the predominance of nation-state borders, other boundaries have also marked the european continent. the historian ferdinand braudel (1976) has traced the emergence of the mediterranean as a border between the lands on its north and south shores. prior to the sixteenth century, he argues, it had been primarily a space of connection and interaction between the countries that lie on its shores (braudel 1976; driessen 1998), but from the 1500s it developed into a barrier, leading to differential social and economic development that has continued into our own times. another example of a boundary beyond the borders of the nation-state was the iron curtain, separating non-communist europe from the soviet union and other communist countries after the second world war. the transformation of borders after the collapse of communism and the major advances in the integration of the eu in the 1990s, the borders of european nation-states have undergone profound changes. the work of analysing european borders, of course, is essential to the study of europe and its relationships with the regions on its edges. but europe’s borders have also had important impacts at a global level and their influence continues today. balibar argues that the process of drawing borders in europe was also, in the epoch of european colonization, a process of dividing up the whole earth, as europe considered itself the centre of the world (2004a, 7). european boundaries were extended from europe to cover the globe, drawing borders through territories in africa, asia and the americas and assigning them to particular european powers (which themselves were defined by their territorial existence). today, europe’s borders continue to be an important object of analysis. mezzadra (in 1 a march is a zone between two territories where there is interaction and assimilation between two or more peoples. i discuss walters’s use of limes later in this essay. portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 3 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? bojadzijev & saint-saens 2006) has argued that important qualities of the eu itself can be identified through its borders. he uses the work of beck and grande (2004) to suggest that the eu’s borders are metonymic of the eu, particularly in its move to a postfordist ‘flexible’ capitalism. in particular, he sees in the flexibility and mobility of european borders a key characteristic of the institutional architecture of the european union itself. the transformations in its borders, then, can provide a new perspective on the direction of the eu and the integration process. flexibility need not only be associated with postmodern capitalism. the flexibilization and deterritorialization of europe’s borders and the blurring of the in/out, us/them, and nation-state/federation dichotomies (outhwaite 2006) has the potential to lead to a desirable outcome, to the sort of cosmopolitan, ‘reflexive’ europe envisaged by beck and grande: ‘europe is another word for variable geometry, variable national interests, variable concern (betroffenheit), variable internal and external relations, variable statehood’ (2004, 16). the borders of the european union also have a more direct influence on its character, it is argued, through the way that the border regime creates the conditions of possibility for the ‘extracomunitari’ to exist inside the eu: ‘their function is not only one of control but also of inclusive selection. their transformation is closely related to the development of european citizenship and the management of migration flows, and the border regime itself ‘produces’ the foreigner’ (mezzadra in bojadzijev and saint-saens 2006). borders not only block or control flows, they also produce them. bauman (1997, 17) similarly argues that the eu’s borders produce ‘otherness,’ that the stranger is created through the mechanisms of the border. balibar’s four geospatial dimensions of europe before considering how the transformation of europe’s borders has been theorised, it is useful to consider spatial theories of europe as a whole. one of the most compelling frameworks for understanding these theories comes from balibar’s ‘humboldt lecture in human geography’ (2004b), in which he sets out four different patterns or dimensions to europe and its borders. balibar argues that in the current global age we no longer live on the edge of a simple international ‘borderline,’ as we did in the cold war. ‘rather we are situated increasingly in the midst of an ubiquitous and multiple portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 4 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? border’ which connects almost all parts of the world with each other, a ‘world-border.’ the territorial sovereignty of the state has been dismantled progressively over the last few decades, with some border functions being reinforced (police functions, immigration control), others weakened and separated from the borderline (e.g. monetary independence, fiscal control). in europe this has linked up with the eu integration process: european borders have been rendered open to indefinite expansion along the current model of a confederation of states (balibar 2004b). balibar posits four dimensions to the european political space, each of them also being a different way of understanding the border within it. the first is that of samuel huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis (1993), whereby the world’s conflicts largely become religious and cultural, or ‘civilizational,’ and the borders or faultlines of these conflicts lie in multicultural states. europe itself is becoming a major faultline or intermediary zone of competition between rival civilizations. the second dimension draws on the models of castells (1996) and sassen (1996, 98), who propose that circulation processes (and deterritorialization) become more important than territoriality and territorialization. boundaries are still significant, but they are always being transgressed, and diasporic and nomadic subjects start to assert their control and become the norm, rather than the rooted or embedded subjects of the nationstate. when these ideas are applied to europe, balibar argues, they tend to phantomize the continent: the flows of capital, population, communication and political action all go through europe but never elect it as a permanent site (2004b, 10). europe is deterritorialized and delocalized, becoming more part of the imaginary and less part of the real. the third dimension sees the eu structured around central states, with increasing concentric circles of belonging, moving out from france and germany to the states that do not yet have the euro, and to the newly joined states, candidate states, and neighbour states that are unlikely to become part of europe, but that will always be close and economically integrated into it in some ways. the distance from the core to the periphery is a political distance rather than a geographical or physical one. further from the centre it is harder to draw boundaries, and borders appear more and more like medieval marches or limes. in the final dimension, that of cross-over/overlapping folds, portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 5 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? there are no centres, only peripheries, the overlaps of one area (or centre, perhaps) on another. these marches are characterized by hybridity and cultural invention, and in this sense the balkan ‘patchwork’ can be seen as the epitome of europe rather than as an exceptional area. walter’s analysis of the deterritorialized border walters (2004) draws on balibar’s work in his analysis of eu borders, examining the mechanisms and technologies used to police and control frontier spaces. he argues that while national borders remain the preeminent boundaries in geopolitics, the borders around regional blocs are also becoming geopolitically significant. he uses the idea of geostrategy to look at developments around regional borders, and identifies several important geostrategies, each of which involves a particular way of territorializing the space of the border. the first is that of the networked (non)border which builds on and deepens the second spatial dimension discussed by balibar, that of circulation processes and deterritorialization. it involves ‘the removal of border controls from fixed positions along the geographical borderlines of most eu states’ and their replacement with ‘networks of control’ (walters 2004, 679-680). the networked (non)border resonates with the themes of deterritorialization and visions of ‘borderless worlds’ and conforms to neoliberal principles aimed at the removal of obstacles to the free movement of peoples, goods and services. despite this rhetoric, however, it should be recognised that the removal of border controls brings with it new forms of regulation, for example: cross-border police cooperation, mobile surveillance teams on each side of the border, exchange of information between states, harmonization of migration and asylum policy, and the recognition of common standards in border management. one example of these developments is the way that the schengen regime replaces internal borders with external zones of police co-operation, which is to say that the old border is being dispersed or diffused, a process of deterritorialization. deleuze and guattari (1980, 17) argue, however, that any movement of deterritorialization will be linked with a process of reterritorialization that ‘striates, draws lines, fixes, orders, localises and segments’ (walters 2004). so as this new geostrategy disconnects one particular territorial relationship it establishes at the same time new relationships with portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 6 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? the geophysical environment in which it is located. there is a movement of reterritorialization, a new method of policing these borders and marking out this land, and a new territory emerges from the old one, cutting across and emerging tangentially from it. the police forces on both sides of the border work together to keep the border secure, reconfiguring themselves as networks involving joint tasks that take the same networked form. rather than a line which divides armed installations, or a zone of confrontation, the border becomes a joint responsibility and the locus of a new practice of police cooperation … the enemy is the networks, gangs, terrorists which cut across/under borders …. under this dispensation the logic is to unite the police agencies and authorities across borders in the name of a perpetual struggle or war against a postnational (and postpolitical) enemy. (walters 2004, 682) instead of the edge or the wall, the border becomes a strategic node within a transnational network of control. the networked (non)border also points away from the border as a contiguous space, a kind of skin for the state. the space of border control is disconnected from the politico-territorial borders of the state so that, for instance, there is much more concentration of border control at airports, far within the geophysical borders of the state, than there is along the physical border. march the networked (non)border model suggests a growth in the processes of deterritorialization in europe, but conversely it also indicates that we should remain alert for new territorializations. the old border areas of eastern europe which were known as marches may well be fertile grounds for these processes. the word ‘ukraine,’ for instance, means borderland. eastern european states are now seen as a buffer zone or march between western europe and the crumbling chaos of the soviet union, and more generally as a barrier to the flows of refugees and economic migrants. the ‘safe third country’ provisions in european migration agreements exemplify these zones. as mezzadra and nielsen (2003) have explained, under these provisions ‘a number of states contiguous to the eu have been identified as “safe third countries,” meaning that if a migrant passes through one of these territories on their way to the eu, they can now be returned to that country.’ portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 7 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? agreements are also made between these safe third countries and others further away from the ‘core’ of western europe: rigo (2002) describes how agreements for expulsion between eu nations and so-called ‘safe third countries’ are in turn supplemented by agreements between these ‘safe third countries’ and nations further afield from the powerful western european states. for example, a migrant who enters germany through poland can be expelled to poland, which in turn has signed agreements with the ukraine, slovakia, romania, and bulgaria. (mezzadra and nielsen 2003) as border technologies are exported from europe’s west, a system of increasingly difficult border crossings is established and linked to the territories that have been integrated, or have the possibility of being integrated, into the eu. but the march can also be diffuse and detached from a territory, just as networks can. so the ever larger space, over which are stretched carrier-liability provisions, liaison officers, visa policies and other measures to intercept unwanted immigration before it reaches the border, becomes an extended march. the colonial frontier as well as the networked (non)border and the march, walters turns to two strategies derived from colonialism and imperial borders to help explain the complexities of the eu’s borders. his justification for this is that as the eu incorporates more and more diverse nation-states into its territory and its borders expand, it comes to share characteristics with imperial regimes. the metaphor of the eu as empire has been taken up in many analyses, as walters notes: with the likelihood of further enlargement, and of an asymmetrical and multi-speed integration project, ‘both nato and the european union may begin to look more like traditional empires, with [the distinction] between centre and periphery becoming almost as important as the distinction between members and non-members.’(walters 2004, 686, quoting hassner 1997) walters argues that the ideology of the colonial frontier espoused by frederick jackson turner in his 1893 essay, ‘the significance of the frontier in american history’ (1920), can be useful in analysing current developments in the eu’s borders, particularly its expansion into eastern europe. while acknowledging the racialized and ethnocentric basis of turner’s work, and its central role in justifying the westward colonial expansion of white america into native american lands, walters still believes that the turnerian frontier thesis provides a tool with which to name ‘a certain kind of border strategy’ in the eu context (walters 2004, 687). portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 8 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? the danger with walter’s approach is that in applying the colonial american frontier model to the eu, injustices, errors of analysis and racialized and colonialist viewpoints similar to those applied on the ‘frontiers’ of the usa may be replicated in analyses of the european sphere. the qualifications that walters applies—he is aware that turner’s work ‘betrays many of the racial and ethnocentric assumptions of its time’ (walters 2004, 686) but argues that once this is recognised as objectionable turner’s ideas can still be used—might be valid if the unpalatable elements could be neatly excised from turner’s theory. it is not possible to do this, however, as turner’s racialized and colonialist assumptions are fundamental to his frontier thesis. as an example of this, one of the central elements in turner’s model of the frontier is the notion that the areas through which the frontier expands are a ‘wilderness,’ occupied by ‘savagery’ rather than ‘civilization.’ similar to the doctrine of terra nullius that was applied to australia, this logic denies the legitimacy of native american peoples and their claims to territory. as turner put it, by expanding through this ‘wilderness’ space the frontier creates the new land and identity of america (turner 1920, 3). this logic cannot be simply excised from turner’s theory as a typical racialized and cultural perspective of his time, given that the logic itself provides a key structuring element of his frontier thesis. indeed, that logic is what walters introduces into his own analysis of the eu’s expanding eastern frontier; as the eu border passes through the marches of eastern europe and expands the eu zone, it produces a new eu. walter’s argument is therefore subject to the same critiques as turner’s. positing a wilderness or blank space through which the border expands effaces and ignores the histories, cultures and societies that already inhabit the territory in question. this effacing thus enables walters to argue that the colonial frontier ‘represents a zone where an organised power meets its outside in a relationship of transformation and assimilation. it is the setting of an asymmetrical relationship in which the expanding power assumes a right to define what is appropriate and just’ (2004, 688). a necessary critical response to this approach is to understand and bring out the importance of the people and societies that existed in these spaces prior to and during this colonising process. despite his adoption of turner’s model, walters does also look at these arguments in the eu context, providing a counterpoise to the idea that the eu’s portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 9 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? expansion eastwards is a simple process of articulating eastern european states into the eu system. rather than passing through a zone of emptiness or ‘wilderness’ in the integration process the eu has to interact with the norms and values already in place and its expansion involves the disruption of settled regional, economic and geopolitical relations. it is not just the articulation into the new eu network that should be examined but the disarticulation from the old networks, such as the warsaw pact and the soviet bloc. eastern europe was not ‘unintegrated’ before the eu; rather it was integrated in different systems. for instance, the ukraine is often characterised as a state struggling to achieve democracy (through the orange revolution, for example) and to achieve the level of political development required for it to join the eu. russia is depicted as an outside, undemocratic influence. however this understanding effaces the history of the ukraine’s connection with russia. one of the meanings of the word ukraine is ‘outskirt,’ and the country was named in this way because of its position not as a european outskirt but as an outskirt of the russian empire. the predominance of the eu as a regional system should not be assumed, and in the ukraine’s case the eu must be seen as a secondary regional system to that in which the country has been enmeshed historically. limes as well as the geostrategies described above that connect up two different areas, walters (2004) also reintroduces to debates on european space the concept of the limes, which represents an edge, a fringe, a limit. it is between a power and its outside, in some ways like the colonial frontier described above. however, ‘whereas the expansionary frontier reflects an aspiration to assimilate, to stabilise through expansion and colonisation, the limes draws a line’ (walters 2004, 691). walters identifies limes across the mediterranean, drawing a line between the north and south, between europe and africa. a good example is the wall built around the spanish enclave of ceuta, on the moroccan coast, to keep african immigrants out. in contrast to walters, michael mann names limes as part of an ‘exclusive’ or portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 10 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? ‘ostracising’ imperialism (2001, 53). it is useful to keep this in mind as a counterexample to the rhetoric of the universality of globalization, with one part of the world economy dominating that of the other. the limes can be used to exclude one section of the globe from the western globalized order, cutting it off from markets and flows of finance, technology, goods, information or labour. the problem for those on the outside, as hirst and thompson argue, is ‘not imperial domination or attempts to annex their resources, it is neglect and exclusion’ (1995, 419). these geostrategies are not exclusive and more than one can apply to each border, but usually one will be dominant. for example the mediterranean border can be seen as a limes with the euro-mediterranean partnership strengthening the geophysical boundary between europe and africa. but with its zones of cooperation, and regional assistance for good government, the mediterranean border can also be seen as seeking to transform the limes into a colonial frontier like the one gradually moving through europe’s eastern nation-states. and the increased cooperation in policing the boundaries between north and south also has elements of the networked (non)border. rumford: cosmopolitan borders in a recent essay, ‘borders and rebordering,’ rumford (2006) explores the analyses of the eu space by balibar and walters described above, and argues that the eu’s borders are being ‘cosmopolitanized.’ the concept of the cosmopolitan border is based on the argument that ‘borders and mobilities are not antithetical.’ rather they are both intertwined: ‘borders connect the ‘inner mobility’ of our lives both with the multiplicity of communities we may elect to become members of and the cross-cutting tendencies of polities to impose their border regimes on us in ways which compromise our mobilities, freedoms, rights and even identities’ (rumford 2006, 183). cosmopolitanism becomes a necessary part of these structures, understood here ‘as an orientation to the world which entails the constant negotiation and crossing of borders … a cosmopolitan lives in and across borders’ (183). at first glance the idea that borders and mobilities are not opposed to each other seems nonsensical. the increasingly sophisticated border controls implemented by states around the world are testament to the checks and prohibitions on mobility embodied in contemporary borders. it is true that rumford does not seem to give significant weight portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 11 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? to the power of the border security apparatus, and to the obstacles and dangers that it poses for those crossing of borders without authorisation, and i shall deal with this issue more fully below. however his argument usefully shifts emphasis away from borders merely as obstacles to movement and towards borders as connections between territories. referring to sassen’s work (1996), he argues that ‘borders should not be thought of only as dividing lines, but as circuits which cut across two or more discontinuous systems’ (rumford 2006, 187). borders link up as well as divide. rumford uses this perspective on borders to critique two models of european space and border areas, those that he terms ‘schengenland’ and ‘network europe.’ in the first model, the schengen process is deemed to have turned the eu into a space where internally borders have disappeared, while the external borders of the eu have been hardened and securitised. such a perspective sees borders only as barriers to movement and ignores the potential for linking and connection between the eu’s mediterranean and eastern european neighbours through their respective border areas. the network europe model, on the other hand, effaces borders as it posits europe as a place of capital, information and labour flows that are eroding the traditional boundaries of the nationstate. it is hard to justify this view of an increasingly borderless world, however, in the face of the proliferation of national and regional border controls in recent times. if borders are seen as providing connections between territories, controlling and facilitating flows as well as stopping them, then a more credible analytical model can be provided. this idea corresponds to one of the border typologies developed by walters (2004), that of the networked (non)border, which highlights the way that the border is no longer just a dividing space but rather a node connecting networks inside and outside a territory. along with his critique of schengenland and networked europe spatial models, rumford argues that there is a ‘cosmopolitanization’ of europe’s borders. the ‘proliferation of borders within (as well as between) societies’ leads to the rise of cosmopolitanism throughout these spaces(rumford 2006, 191). as rumford puts it, ‘the multiplicity of communities which can emerge within and between existing polities makes for a greater number of border crossings: the negotiation of borders becomes an integral aspect of both mobilities and identities’ (2006, 191). the example rumford provides to illustrate this point is the eu’s neighbourhood policy, which, he portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 12 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? argues, multiplies borders between the eu and its neighbours in asia and africa, and confuses the categories of inside/outside that are applied to these states. the neighbourhood policy represents an extension of eu governance beyond eu borders: ‘countries which are not likely to become official candidates for full membership can be brought within the orbit of the single market and other pan-european projects’ (rumford 2006, 186). in this way the eu projects its powers beyond its borders, integrating the countries around it into europe without formally shifting its geophysical limits or incorporating those countries into its institutions. thus some of the border functions are shifted outwards while others remain in their current positions, further differentiating the various levels of eu borders. the neighbourhood policy suggests ‘a shift away from fortress europe in which borderlines must be policed vigilantly towards the idea of borders as buffer zones, comprising a ring of well governed and compliant states’ (rumford 2006, 187). this is a vision of cosmopolitan borders, of crossings and exchanges across national and regional frontiers. it envisages a network of countries ‘drawn into an increasingly close relationship, going beyond cooperation to involve a significant measure of economic and political integration’ (european commission 2004). rumford argues against the adequacy of the ‘schengenland’ and ‘network europe’ models to explain europe’s changing borders. instead he argues for the idea of their ‘cosmopolitanization.’ borders have proliferated, becoming more numerous, more frequently shifted and more mobile: ‘the multiplicity of communities which can emerge within and between existing polities makes for a greater number of border crossings: the negotiation of borders becomes an integral aspect of both communities and identities…. national borders have been supplanted by shifting eu borders and borders are diffused throughout society’ (rumford 2006, 191). the eu’s neighbourhood policy exemplifies these phenomena, where fixed borders and static concepts of inside/outside and member/non-member are confused as borderlands are created. as borders become more numerous and borderlands spread, cosmopolitanism becomes increasingly necessary. although rumford concentrates on the european neighbourhood policy, another significant aspect of border proliferation occurs with the borders that are being created not on the edges or outside europe, but within the metropolises of the eu itself. in italy portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 13 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? this is exemplified in the growth of immigration detention centres or cpt (centri di permanenza temporanea). an article on the immigrant advocacy website melting pot, entitled ‘the border right through us: cpts and new safety devices in our cities,’ analyses the way that cpts allow the border to invade the heart of the city: ‘today, the cpt is all around us, it’s made of ghettos and exclusion, of differentiated inclusion and stratifications of citizenship levels’ (melting pot editorial 2007). such a development supports rumford’s argument that cosmopolitanism, in the sense of living on and between borders, is becoming a more and more important part of the eu structure. border crossing is not something that happens only on the edge of europe; it also occurs within its core metropolitan areas: ‘ghettos, entire neighbourhoods and city areas that are inhabited by immigrants, because they are forced to, play an important role in the process of inclusion/exclusion as well …. the cpts are an integral part of this network, strictly connected to the social context around them’ (melting pot editorial 2007). although providing an interesting perspective on the european neighbourhood policy, rumford’s analysis seems to overly rely on the eu’s own description of this process. he takes at his word, for instance, romano prodi’s promise of integration without enlargement so that the eu’s neighbours can share ‘everything but institutions’ (rumford 2006, 186).2 rather than critiquing the eu’s rhetoric he focuses on the more attractive aspects of this process, that corresponding to the networked (non)border in walter’s analysis (2004) and the border as linkage in sassen’s view (1996). but, as walters argues, borders can have many different dimensions to them, and while not denying the existence of the elements that rumford identifies, it is also true that the limes aspect of these borders should also be taken into account. that is, the neighbourhood policy may create borders as a fringe or edge, a point of exclusion between europe and its outside. despite prodi’s rhetoric of integration in all but name (prodi 2002), many of the agreements with bordering countries under the eu’s neighbourhood policy are accompanied by highly exclusionary provisions. while at the level of heads of government, businesses and bureaucracy there may be integration across these borders, 2 in 2002 romano prodi famously promised to those countries bordering on the eu that became involved in the european neighbourhood policy that they would be given the incentive of de facto economic integration with the eu as a reward for their participation (prodi 2002). portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 14 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? at the level of the general populace barriers may, in fact, be being raised. in return for aid and access to markets, one of the key demands of european states and the eu in their agreements with developing countries in north africa has been the introduction of migration control measures to prevent africans entering european territory (andrijasevic 2006, 16). this has been the case in italy’s agreements with libya in recent years, which have involved the establishment of offshore detention centres to control the flows of migrants to italy (andrijasevic 2006, 2). these requirements have also been present in various pilot schemes for the creation of offshore processing centres in north african countries, and most recently were part of the negotiations at the euro-african ministerial conference on migration and development in rabat, morocco (noll 2006). these negotiations suggest that concealed within the more positive dimension of the networked border is a vision of the border as limes. rumford’s analysis thus needs to go deeper in uncovering this element of the european neighbourhood policy. this is not to say that the harsh, anti-humanitarian side of the neighbourhood policy and of eu borders in general impels a rejection of rumford’s cosmopolitanization thesis. there is little doubt that borders continue to proliferate in and around the eu and that the cosmopolitan ability to live in and across borders is more and more necessary. but it does mean that the understanding of cosmopolitanism offered by rumford has to be deepened beyond the jet-set, multicultural citizen of the world. rumford does point out that to be cosmopolitan means much more than this; however, his analysis does not fully engage with the difficulties faced by the disadvantaged and marginalized in their border crossing, and with the sort of tactics required to deal with those borders. one possible answer to this omission lies in peter nyer’s (2003) concept of ‘abject cosmopolitanism,’ a term he has developed to describe the subjectivities of the migrants engaged in struggles to assert their rights when border control mechanisms are exercised against them (and in particular the practice of deportation). the activist strategies and tactics employed in these struggles, such as those of ‘taking place’ and ‘taking speech,’ suggest that cosmopolitanism involves not just living across and negotiating borders but also challenging and contesting them. rumford presents a valuable synthesis of the theoretical work that has been carried out in recent years on the transformation of borders at both a european and a global level. portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 15 spruce the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? the introduction of the cosmopolitan concept to the theory of the border brings a useful new perspective by emphasising the way that borders connect up diverse territories and act as bridges while also dividing and partitioning. as borders proliferate both outside and inside the geophysical boundaries of the traditional nation-state and the european union, cosmopolitanism, as a way of living in and across borders, becomes more and more important. this is true not only for the privileged international professional elite, but also for larger sections of society, including immigrants, both authorized and clandestine, who traverse and challenge these pre-established boundaries. however, rumford’s understanding of this type of cosmopolitanism could be deepened by dealing more with the subjectivities and experiences of struggle of those who are forced to live everyday in and between the borders he describes. the concept of cosmopolitan borders could be expanded by taking into account the ethnographies and theoretical work of scholars such as balibar (2004a; 2004b), mezzadra (2004), rigo (2002; 2005) and nyers (2003) who are engaged, both within and outside the academy, in the cosmopolitan struggle for the rights of migrants. reference list agnew, j. 2003, geopolitics: re-visioning world politics, 2nd ed., routledge, london. andrijasevic, r. 2006, ‘the southern gate to fortress europe,’ policy perspectives: islam and tolerance in wider europe, ed. p. kilpadi, open society institute, budapest, 30-50. balibar, e. 2004a, we, the people of europe?: reflections on transnational citizenship, j. swenson (trans.), princeton university press, princeton balibar, e. 2004b ‘europe as borderland: the alexander von humboldt lecture in human geography,’ institute for human geography, universiteit nijmegen. 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the context of eu enlargement,’ citizenship studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 3-22. rumford, c. 2006, ‘borders and rebordering,’ in g. delanty (ed), europe and asia beyond east and west, routledge, london and new york, 181-193 sassen, s. 1996, losing control: sovereignty in an age of globalization, columbia university press, new york. turner, f.j. 1920, the frontier in american history, henry holt and company, new york. walters, w. 2004, ‘the frontiers of the european union: a geostrategic perspective,’ geopolitics, vol. 9, no. 3 (autumn), 674-698. portal, vol. 4 no. 2, july 2007 17 the cosmopolitanization of the eu’s borders? the classical border the transformation of borders balibar’s four geospatial dimensions of europe walter’s analysis of the deterritorialized border march the colonial frontier limes reference list portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: karamanian, a.s. 2019. ‘he wasn’t able to understand what i was saying’: the experiences of returnees’ speaking western armenian in ‘eastern’ armenia. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, http://epress.lib.uts. edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal, 16:1/2, 120-140. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6290 portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 14492490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu. au/ojs/index.php/portal. general article ‘he wasn’t able to understand what i was saying’: the experiences of returnees’ speaking western armenian in ‘eastern’ armenia armen samuel karamanian corresponding author: dr armen s. karamanian, faculty of arts and social sciences, university of technology sydney, po box 123, broadway nsw 2007, australia. email: armen.karamanian@uts.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6290 article history: received 09/09/2018; revised 25/08/2019; accepted 27/08/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract since armenia’s independence in 1991, thousands of diasporans have made the decision to return and settle in the ancestral homeland. the returnees, who speak western armenian, one of the two standardised forms of modern armenian, are switching to the use of eastern armenian, the official variant of the homeland. using two determinants of language perception—standardisation and vitality—this paper analyses the reactions received by thirty returnees who emigrated from nine countries, when speaking western armenian to an eastern armenian-speaking society. the vitality of the language shows signs of increasing through an encouragement by locals aware of the language’s historical significance, and an admiration of its ‘beauty’ and terminology. a heightened vitality has led returnees to feel confident about its use during social interactions and the possibility of the standard being incorporated into the nation’s linguistic narrative. however, confusion and ridicule due to a differing pronunciation, vocabulary, terminology, and the inability to be understood by some in armenian society, has led to discomfort by returnees who are shifting to the usage of eastern armenian. at present, the use of western armenian in the homeland remains within the confines of family, friends and returnee circles. despite the changing status of western armenian through a notable welcoming of the language into the linguistic narrative of the country, some segments of armenian society do not perceive western armenian as declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 120 an acceptable standard for broader use in armenian society and national institutions. the homeland’s inconsistent, and at times questionable, acceptance of the language perpetuates the status quo that western armenian remains an unacceptable standard within the homeland and for use only in the diaspora. keywords: armenia; armenian; homeland; language attitudes; returnee; western armenian over the past century, armenia has experienced numerous waves of return migration from descendants of those forced to flee the homeland during and following the armenian genocide (herzig & kurkchiyan 2004). these returnees arrived and settled in their ancestral homeland with varying degrees of success, often encountering challenges to their narrative of ‘armenianness.’ the challenges were often in relation to the returnees’ armenian identity (lehmann, 2012; pattie 1999), ideology (lehmann 2012), or their variant of spoken armenian (lehmann 2012). the latter received significant attention in academia following the large-scale return of armenians from throughout the diaspora to soviet armenia during the midto late 1940s. recent scholarly research, however, although thoroughly examining the varied experiences of return migration to armenia, has overlooked this important aspect of the returnees’ transition—language. issues relating to the acceptance of the returnees’ variant of the armenian language, an explanation on the frustrations that returnees experience, and barriers on the returnees’ path to integration have been overlooked, particularly following armenia’s independence in 1991. armenia, officially the republic of armenia (1991–) is the successor state to the democratic republic of armenia (1918–1920) and the armenian soviet socialist republic (1921–1991). all three states upheld the official status of the armenian language. however, the dominant variant of the armenian language utilised in the republic of armenia is eastern armenian,1 one of two standardised variants of the language. as the official variant, eastern armenian is used within the state apparatus and is consequentially reflected in social settings, where the use of other variants has been historically kept outside of national institutions. reasons behind the hesitation to accept western armenian as part of the nation’s official linguistic register have included: societal perceptions of western armenian as a dialect rather than a standardised branch of the modern armenian language; the historical division of the armenian nation in the nineteenth century when divided under the rule of competing empires (marchesini 2017); and the ‘shaping’ of an eastern armenian linguistic narrative during the soviet period (dum-tragut 2009).2 the narrative shaped during the soviet period left an enduring mark on the mindset of society in the homeland as to what is and what is not an essential component of ‘armenianness.’3 since independence, thousands of western armenian-speakers have made the decision to return and settle in the ancestral homeland. these returnees are typically third-, fourth 1 the official language of armenia according to the armenian language law of 1993 is standard armenian in its modern eastern armenian variant. 2 dum-tragut (2009: 4–5) describes the changes to the re-shaping of eastern armenian as, the explicit description, definition and labeling of the specific linguistic functions of the language; the acquiring of new linguistic functions related to the political, administrational, juridical, scientific and economic domains; and the assigning of the status of official national language. 3 the term ‘armenianness’ is intended to reflect one’s quality or state of being armenian. ‘karamanian portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019121 or fifth-generation diasporans motivated by the desire to live amongst their ethnic kin. scholarly research on return migration, in general, has investigated the motivations behind individuals wanting to return to a homeland, for reasons including having a place to call ‘home’ (lehmann 2012; winland 2007), participating in the development of the homeland (darieva 2011; fittante 2017), financial security (cook-martin & viladrich 2009; tsuda 2010), and nationalist desires (winland 2007). these motivations act as key drivers for generations of diasporans seeking a return to their ancestral homeland, including armenians from the usa (fittante 2017) and other parts of the diaspora (kasbarian 2015), croatians from australia (skrbiš 2017) and canada (winland 2007), greeks from the usa (christou 2002), and jewish peoples to israel (lev ari & mittelberg 2008). however, within the critical literature, there appears to be as many, if not more, negative experiences than positive, particularly in relation to the returnees’ identity and language. the assumption that the returnees’ arrival and subsequent integration will be successful, merely on the basis of a shared historical ethnic and cultural background, is far from the experiences they encounter. in the armenian context, several repatriation movements from throughout the diaspora to soviet armenia took place, the largest between 1946 and 1949. during this period, soviet armenia welcomed home thousands of diasporans as part of a pan-armenian repatriation movement known as nerkaght (‘in-gathering’). the nerkaght movement saw the arrival of 89,637 armenians, the majority of whom were western armenian-speakers from iraq, lebanon, the usa, syria, greece, bulgaria, romania, palestine, egypt, france, turkey, cyprus, great britain and jordan. these returnees were said to be ‘yearning for a homeland, [and] an opportunity not to live in “exile” anymore’ (lehmann 2012: 182). however, upon arrival, the returnees were ridiculed and labelled ‘illiterate’ for not speaking ‘proper’ (eastern) armenian (lehmann 2012: 198). many returnees, particularly those of the older generation, were said to have been ‘surprised and disappointed at feeling themselves “strangers in their own land”’ (pattie 1999: 117). drawing on a study of western armenian-speaking returnees, this article demonstrates that much like the experiences of returnees to soviet armenia during the 1940s, returnees to an independent armenia who speak western armenian are continuing to switch to the use of eastern armenian. while the returnees feel their language is valued by segments of society aware of its historical and cultural importance, the misunderstanding that ensues during communication due to a differing pronunciation and vocabulary diminishes the value of the language as a medium for communication in the country. furthermore, this misunderstanding often leads to the rejection of the language for not reaching a standard of armenian able to be utilised within the linguistic domain of the country. data used in this article derives from a larger research project exploring the homecoming experience of western armenian-speaking returnees to the homeland. the returnees interviewed as part of the project originated from countries with traditionally western armenian-speaking communities,4 taken to include countries outside the former soviet union and iran.5 the ‘returnees’ are so-called due to their return being to what they perceive as the remaining portion of the armenian homeland—the republic of armenia. the use of quotation marks, although absent throughout this paper, is also a reflection that their ancestors 4 acknowledging the growth in eastern armenian speakers across the globe following events such as the revolution in iran (1978–1979) and the collapse of the soviet union (1991). 5 the variant of armenian spoken in the former soviet union and iran is eastern armenian. he wasn’t able to understand what i was saying’: the experiences of returnees’ speaking western armenian in ‘eastern’ armenia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019122 never originated from the territory of the present-day republic of armenia.6 rather, their ancestors originated from what is historically termed western armenia or ‘turkish armenia’ (suny 2005) prior to the armenian genocide, and which was located east of the second and third armenian republics (see figure 1). the next section of the paper provides a background of the modern armenian language, a historical overview of the armenian language within the territory of armenia and the presence of western armenian in the republic of armenia (1991–). figure 1 the territory from which the ancestors of western armenian-speakers originated—labelled ‘wilsonian armenia’ and historic armenia/cilician armenia (hewsen 2001). background the modern armenian language: a brief overview the standardisation of the modern armenian language can be chronologically placed from the 18th century onwards, following classical armenian (5th–12th century) and middle armenian (12th–early 18th century) (clyne 1992: 326). the two branches of the modern armenian language, eastern and western, present a story of competing empires and the linguistic division of their respective armenian communities. the origins of modern armenian stem from two dialectical branches of armenian (clyne 1992: 326), each representing the vernacular that was codified and spread throughout armenian communities within their respective empires (dum-tragut 2009: 3). western armenian, based on the 6 the use of quotation marks is an idea borrowed from anastasia christou, who labels secondgeneration greek american ‘returnees,’ as they believe to be returning to their ancestral homeland, despite their place of origin being outside of greece. ‘karamanian portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019123 dialect of constantinople, spread throughout the communities of the ottoman empire. eastern armenian, centred on the dialect spoken on the ararat plain,7 was to be used by the armenians of the russian and persian empires. the spread of literature in one of the two standardised forms of modern armenian, and the general lack of interaction between these communities or their respective literatures, further divided the armenian people. the diatopic nature of modern armenian was also exacerbated with the division of the two groups: a post-genocide diaspora, and a sovietised homeland. throughout most of the 20th century, the homeland-diaspora relationship would be described as an eastern and western armenian relationship. western armenian would be used by the armenian communities of the middle east, europe, and other parts of the diaspora (with the exception of iran8); eastern armenian would be the language of soviet armenia and the armenian communities of the soviet union (clyne 1992: 325). linguistic history of the three armenian republics (1918–) the declaration of the first armenian republic was made on 28 may 1918 following the collapse of the russian empire. the fledgling state declared armenian its official language. historical and geopolitical factors of the time meant that the eastern variant of armenian would be used in the state apparatus and amongst the population. however, the first republic was short-lived. in 1920, armenia became a socialist state and was later incorporated into the union of soviet socialist republics. during the first decade of soviet rule, the armenian language, or more specifically eastern armenian, was transformed into the language of the courts, government institutions and schools (suny 2005). following a period of nativisation,9 the country underwent a period of russification. it was during this period, known as nerkaght (in-gathering), that soviet armenia welcomed thousands of repatriates, mostly western armenian-speaking diasporans, who would introduce challenges to the nation and its accepted eastern armenian standard. newcomers encountered a hostile environment in which their variant of armenian was discredited and branded the antithesis of the modern armenian language (lehmann 2012). authorities would continue to emphasise the teaching, learning and adoption of eastern armenian and russian for newcomers, seeking not to have the armenian language tarnished by the ‘dialect of constantinople’ (lehmann 2012). this large influx of western armenian-speakers had a minimal impact on the linguistic landscape of armenia, due to large numbers falling victim to stalinist purges and their offspring adopting eastern armenian (clyne 1992: 342). eastern armenian and russian would continue as the official languages of soviet armenia until its independence in 1991. the status of western armenian in the republic of armenia (1991–) article 20 of the armenian constitution declares the official language of the republic to be the armenian language. however, past actions, or rather inactions, have put into question the state’s willingness to accept both variants of armenian for official use. the status of western armenian within the republic of armenia remains ambiguous, even under the protection of 7 the majority of the ararat plain is located within the present-day territory of the republic of armenia. 8 the armenians of iran speak eastern armenian. this is due to the estimated 500,000 armenians forcibly resettled in persia (iran) in the early 17th century having originated from parts of (then) persianarmenia and whose population spoke an eastern dialect of armenian. 9 the policy of ‘nativisation,’ known as korenizatsiya (russian: коренизация), was an early policy of the soviet union, which promoted, amongst other things, the languages of national minorities. he wasn’t able to understand what i was saying’: the experiences of returnees’ speaking western armenian in ‘eastern’ armenia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019124 article 15(2) of the constitution, which guarantees that ‘the armenian language and cultural heritage shall be under the care and protection of the state.’ numerous language conferences, teaching programs, university initiatives, and countless promises by politicians have resulted in little change to the mostly passive position of the homeland towards western armenian. language conferences have suggested the opening of western armenian language schools (‘conference calls for western armenian’ 2010), a reaffirmation of the government’s position that armenia must help preserve the existence of western armenian (‘conference on issues of convergence’ 2015), and the creation of online tools and yet more conferences (western armenian language in armenia 2016). a recent statement by a member of armenia’s parliament suggests the inclusion of western armenian in schools throughout the country (armenian mp 2019). conferences and initiatives aimed at strengthening the presence of the western armenian language have thus far only concentrated on implementing changes to increase the presence of the language in armenia and fall short of initiatives aimed at introducing and familiarising society with the language.10 thus, the attitudes of society towards the language remain overlooked. theoretical approaches to language attitudes to understand the motivations behind certain shifts in people’s speech styles during social encounters, researchers have made use of communication accommodation theory. developed by howard giles (1979), the theory seeks to explain and predict why, when, and how people adjust their communicative behaviour during social interaction, and what social consequences result from those adjustments (dragojevic, gasiorek & giles 2015). one example of communication accommodation was demonstrated in a study by s’hiri (2002) when analysing the language spoken by tunisian arabs working with speakers of ‘sharqi arabic’ (middle eastern arabic) in london. the study found that tunisian arabs did not solely switch to fusha (modern standard arabic), but used elements of tunisian arabic, fusha and some english words, revealing a pride felt by the tunisian arabs in being able to code-switch. communication accommodation theory is able to demonstrate modification of the speakers’ speech during interactions. however, the theory does little to provide a holistic insight into the attitudes and reactions of the listeners that may result in language shift among speakers. in order to understand the reasons behind the language shift process suggested by communication accommodation theorists, it is first important to take into account the language attitudes of a society. the concepts ‘language attitudes’ and ‘language ideologies’ are used interchangeably within scholarly research, both typically invoking speakers’ feelings and beliefs about language structure or language use (kroskrity 2016). differences between the concepts apply to the usage of qualitative and quantitative methodologies; however this appears to be a tendency of researchers as opposed to a set process (kroskrity 2016), as numerous studies utilise both methods interchangeably (fazakas 2014). studies have made evident the significance of attitudes to the study of language, describing their role in the restoration, preservation, decay or death of a language (baker 1992). for this reason, this essay analyses the opinions, beliefs and thoughts of individuals about languages, which are transformed into language ideology once accepted by the community (fazakas 2014). 10 i do, however, acknowledge the efforts aimed at introducing western armenian at select schools and universities in armenia. ‘karamanian portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019125 research on language attitudes has primarily focused on the attitudes towards standard and nonstandard language varieties (dragojevic 2017). karatsareas’ (2018) study comparing the attitudes towards standard modern greek and cypriot greek for greek cypriots residing in the united kingdom, found the use of cypriot greek to be discouraged in informal settings such as the home, given the perception of standard modern greek as prestigious, proper, and ‘correct.’ similarly, xu (2016) suggests that differences in societal attitudes in china have strengthened the understanding of mandarin as a national language in comparison to other languages, which are perceived as ‘dialects.’ these studies demonstrate the importance societal attitudes have on the classification of a language despite official classification as standards or dialects. the factors that influence society’s attitude of a language’s classification include the vitality of the language. the vitality of a language is reflected by the forces that lead to a shift in language use and in its symbolic value (ryan, giles & sebastian 1982). thus, the more a language is used as a means of communication in various social circles (inside and outside of the home) the higher its vitality. pavlenko (2013) provides a unique account of a language’s vitality, when describing the ‘relatively smooth and rapid’ transition of armenia’s public service from russian to armenian following independence in 1991. the smooth transition was due to the high level of standardisation of the armenian language, societal loyalty to the language and the homogenous demographic of the population, all of which increase the vitality of armenian in the country. the standardisation of a language is said to be a characteristic of the social treatment of the variety, not the property of the language itself (ryan, giles & sebastian, 1982:3) as was demonstrated in karatsareas’s study of cypriot greek and modern standard greek in which negative perceptions of cypriot greek contributed to its non-standard status (2018). similarly, in gu’s study of putonghua in hong kong (2011), it was found that despite its status as a national standard in mainland china and hong kong’s official policy of trilingualism, the language was regarded as having a low status by participants in the study. in the case of western armenian, while it is officially classified as a standard of the modern armenian language, its de-territorialised nature as a diasporan language justifies the need to re-evaluate its status as a standard language in armenia. the significance behind understanding the language’s classification in armenia is explained by inoue (1991), who argues that society’s treatment of a language and attitude towards it are part of the standardisation process (inoue 1991). thus, the attitudes of society in armenia towards western armenian may determine the language’s status as a standard language within the homeland, given that its acceptance as a standard involves its acceptance by the speech community. for both attributes (standardisation and vitality), it is important to distinguish between the actual characteristics of a language variety and the variety’s characteristics as perceived by members of the relevant speech community. the perceptions of these attributes are more important for attitudes than their actual existence (giles & johnson 1981; street & hopper 1982). for this purpose, a quadrant graph is used to illustrate the vitality and standardisation of a language based on societal attitudes (see figure 2). the graph is an illustrative version of research carried out as part of ryan, giles and sebastian’s book, attitudes towards language variation (1982), and displays the researchers’ findings on various languages during the 1980s. though dated, the graph is relevant to this study as it provides an illustrative and useful insight into language attitudes by positioning languages on a vitality and standard scale. it is worth noting that ryan, giles & sebastian (1982) use the official classification of languages as ‘standard’ or ‘nonstandard.’ the ‘standard’ classification on the graph adapted for this essay he wasn’t able to understand what i was saying’: the experiences of returnees’ speaking western armenian in ‘eastern’ armenia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019126 reflects society’s perceptions of the language as a ‘standard’ or ‘nonstandard’ variant in the republic of armenia. the intention of the graph, much like its original purpose, aims to be illustrative rather than definitive, with reactions being thematically grouped and positioned on the graph. the findings of this paper reveal the attitudes in armenian society toward a ‘standard’ variant of armenian, not considered official in the republic of armenia. given the relative absence of literature addressing the status of western armenian in armenia, the findings will be of significant interest to researchers in the fields of migration, diaspora, and language studies, notably for those interested in pluricentric languages. figure 2 standardisation and vitality quadrant. methodology participants: this article is based on research conducted in yerevan, armenia, over two months in 2016, during which thirty participants were chosen to take part in the study. these eligible participants met the following criteria: participants were required to have been of adult age (18 and over) at the time of their return to armenia; their return to armenia was to have taken place following the nation’s independence in 1991, meaning they were born and raised in the diaspora;11 their armenian education must have been completed in western armenian; and, they must have settled in armenia on a permanent basis. participants were chosen through the assistance of the repat armenia foundation, a nongovernmental organisation. the foundation sent an email of introduction to a large group of returnees in their database, requesting interested participants contact the researcher directly. 11 as specified, the diaspora for the purpose of this research is intended to represent communities who reside outside the territory of what was previously the soviet union, and specifically those who speak the western branch of the modern armenian language. ‘karamanian portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019127 the first thirty eligible participants were selected to take part in the study. the following is a brief description of the sample group, including country of origin, family composition, sex and duration of time in armenia: figure 3 country of origin. country of origin: participants had migrated to armenia from nine countries, which included argentina, australia, canada, cyprus, france, israel, lebanon, syria, and the usa. these countries represent the participants’ countries of birth, or the country in which they spent most of their time before settling in armenia (see figure 3). family composition: of the 30 participants, 20 arrived in armenia alone, five arrived with partners (spouse, fiancé(e), girlfriend or boyfriend), four arrived with family members (parents, siblings or children), and one arrived with a friend. sex: out of the 30 participants, 12 identified as female and 18 identified as male. period of residence: the duration of time each participant had been in armenia at the time they were interviewed, varied from six months to over 14 years. the average time was five years. fluency in western armenian: all 30 participants were raised speaking western armenian, with all but one participant having received their education at an armenian community school in the diaspora. the 29 participants were educated at a mainstream (full-time) community school. however, attending an armenian community school does not imply fluency in armenian. in general, participants originating from the middle east had a stronger command of the armenian language given the emphasis placed on language education in their respective countries. participants from western countries had a somewhat weaker command of the language, although still able to hold conversations, provide responses, tell jokes and stories. researcher positionality in terms of positionality, i am very close to the research undertaken. the hybrid nature of my identity, as an australian born to armenian parents enabled me to build a level of trust and comfort with the individuals i interviewed. the participants’ willingness to meet and provide honest and meaningful responses to the questions asked was surely influenced by their ability to identify with me as ‘one of them.’ the professional relationship that developed between the participants and myself was based on an understanding of a shared hybrid identity. this commonality was evident, as most participants used possessive pronouns such as ‘us’ or ‘our,’ he wasn’t able to understand what i was saying’: the experiences of returnees’ speaking western armenian in ‘eastern’ armenia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019128 subconsciously including myself in their descriptions of both the diaspora and western armenians. however, this commonality was not without its challenges. as a researcher who shares a common identity, i remained mindful of any bias when asking questions, as well as when analysing the responses. the interview questions were scrutinised by university professors in australia and a copy of the questions provided to the participants before commencing the interview. data collection the data for this research was collected through a qualitative method of in-depth interviews. these interviews were intended to collect the thoughts and experiences of each participant through statements, short responses and detailed stories. anastasia christou, who specialises in the counter-diasporic return movements from the greek diaspora, explains that ‘qualitative methods are much better suited than quantitative methods for addressing and further exploring meanings, processes and experiences in individuals’ lives that are not easily quantifiable’ (2006, p. 833). the interview questions were prepared in armenian and english, with participants able to choose their preferred version. in general, participants originating from the middle east (in addition to the participant from argentina) chose to respond in armenian. participants from australia, canada and the united states of america chose to have the interview conducted in english. most participants who chose to speak in english had a tendency to switch to armenian when discussing certain topics or recalling interactions with locals in armenia. discussion: the western armenian language the republic of armenia welcomes thousands of western armenian-speaking diasporans to the homeland, including tourists, volunteers, long-term/permanent residents, and citizens. their presence continues to revive the issue of language conflict between the two branches of modern armenian that has been unaddressed for over a century. returnee experiences reveal that the country’s contemporary linguistic discourse is unfamiliar with western armenian and a population mostly unaccustomed to the presence of the language in its national and social institutions. however, not all in armenia are unfamiliar with the language, as i discuss. support and encouragement of society: high vitality returnees to armenia describe the attitudes and impressions of locals when addressed in western armenian as one of encouragement and support. the displays of encouragement and support were said to be most common amongst people aware of the historic and cultural importance of the language to the armenian people and nation, and those fascinated by what they perceived to be a ‘beautiful’ and ‘pure’ language. quite often, returnees deemed the homeland to be patriotic and well educated, and many had a good understanding of armenian history and culture. returnees were often delighted when meeting people who possessed such an awareness of armenian issues, particularly those who appreciated the historical and cultural importance of the western armenian language to the greater armenian nation. lorig, a returnee from lebanon, decided to pursue her post-secondary education in armenia, aware of the fact that she may need to learn eastern armenian in order to be successful in armenia’s tertiary education system. this was, however, not an issue for lorig who had been educated at one of beirut’s more prominent armenian ‘karamanian portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019129 language schools. lorig’s fluency in eastern armenian meant she was able to easily transition her speech from western armenian to eastern armenian. this shift in language use was not disconcerting for lorig, until one day at university when presenting in eastern armenian: i was giving a presentation at university and speaking in eastern armenian. the teacher stopped me and asked, “aren’t you western armenian? why are you speaking eastern armenian? you have to preserve your language! let others learn something about western armenian language and culture.” it was at this stage i realised just how right she was. i will always remain true to my western armenian roots. (lorig, lebanon) this display of encouragement was a defining moment in lorig’s homecoming journey to the ancestral homeland. it is not considered an uncommon reaction, yet the absolute insistence displayed by the teacher towards lorig’s use of western armenian made an impact on lorig’s decision to continue to use western armenian when interacting with locals. the teacher’s insistence for lorig to speak western armenian demonstrates her understanding of western armenian as a standard of equal status to eastern armenian and one that is to be accepted for use in armenia. the teacher’s willingness to hear lorig present in western armenian, demonstrated not only her willingness but, indirectly, that of the whole class. it was evident that the teacher as well as others lorig would meet during her first year or two in armenia were aware of the western armenian language and its precarious position in the world’s languages,12 as perceptions of the language had changed within society, encouraging the use of the language during social interactions. the comments, aimed at encouraging the use of western armenian within public institutions and social interactions, made clear the increasing vitality of western armenian within the republic of armenia. the heightening vitality of western armenian is in sharp contrast to the demonisation speakers of western armenian experienced during the soviet period at a time when soviet policy labelled it the antithesis of modern armenian (lehmann 2012). since independence, the importance of western armenian has become increasingly apparent with statements made by government officials demonstrating a shifting position. statements by armenia’s previous minister of diaspora, hranush hakobyan, referring to western armenian as a ‘cultural treasure’ of the armenian nation (arewmtahayereny 2015) and a recent proposal by an armenian member of parliament (from the ruling party) calling for western armenian to be taught at schools throughout armenia (armenian mo 2019). support from different segments of society towards the use of western armenian are signs of a changing mindset by society in the homeland towards the inclusion of western armenian in the nation’s linguistic discourse, if not its narrative. in addition to reactions of support and encouragement, returnees explain how common it was to hear locals describe the western armenian language as a ‘beautiful,’ ‘pure,’ and ‘musical’ language. three returnees explain: when my local friends hear my western armenian accent, they say it is a pretty language. a few people thought it was krapar (classical armenian) when i was speaking western armenian. [roupen, canada] 12 in february 2010, western armenian was added to unesco’s online ‘atlas of world languages in danger’ (unesco 2010). he wasn’t able to understand what i was saying’: the experiences of returnees’ speaking western armenian in ‘eastern’ armenia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019130 they react positively by saying how beautiful western armenian is and that they like the sound of it. they describe it as a soft dialect,13 one friend said to me, “don’t switch to eastern armenian because you speak western armenian very well.” [krikor, usa]. they accept it with great joy and encourage us to continue to speak western armenian, telling us that it sounds beautiful and very musical. they think that eastern armenian sounds quite rough compared to western armenian. [ani, syria] descriptive words such as ‘beautiful,’ ‘pretty’ and ‘musical’ are perceived very positively by the returnees, who at times are shocked at how interesting locals find the language they were raised speaking. these words are reflective of three realities. first, they demonstrate society’s willingness to accept the variant of armenian spoken by the returnees, manifested by the language’s absence within institutions of the homeland for close to a century. second, the disjunction in syntax, lexicosemantics and dialectical influence that differentiate eastern and western armenian (cowe 1992) make the variant distinct to the ‘ararat’ dialect of eastern armenian spoken in much of armenia. lastly, the appeal of the western armenian language is due to its speakers’ reluctance to use contemporary or foreign loan words commonly used in armenia. the terminology of western armenian, although influenced by loan words from turkish, arabic and french, remained unaffected by the russification policies of the soviet era. this meant that society in the homeland was able to make use of various foreign loan words during conversations, in place of the armenian equivalent. the returnees are mostly aware of the fact that society knows the armenian equivalent of the foreign loan words they use, but tend to use them as the words have become a part of everyday life in armenia. some examples of foreign loan words used in armenia are listed in table 1. table 1 examples of foreign loan words word western armenian eastern armenian common usage in armenia information deghego’wt’iwn teghekowt’yown1 informacia corruption gashar’agero’wt’iwn kashar’akerowt’yown kor’owpcian: the word kashar’akerowt’yown made up of the word kashar’q (bribe) denotes one form of corruption—bribery refrigerator sar’naran sar’naran khaladzer’nik 13 the usage of words such as ‘dialect,’ ‘language,’ ‘vernacular’ or ‘accent’ by returnees was common. returnees were unfamiliar with the scientific definition of the terms or the correct classification of western armenian and therefore used the terms unintentionally. ‘karamanian portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019131 when using the armenian word in place of the foreign equivalent,14 one returnee was encouraged by a local to keep using the ‘correct’ terminology. the reason for the returnees’ use of armenian terminology is two-fold. returnees need to be understood when interacting with society in armenia, therefore the use of arabic, turkish, french, or english equivalents that are used in the diaspora may be unfamiliar to society in armenia. the other reason is due to homeland society’s unfamiliarity with colloquial words used in western armenian. arsen, a young syrian-armenian returnee, explains that it’s not that i want to sound ‘like a 20th century poet, but i need to use words that people around me will understand.’ one example is the word automobile (see table 2). table 2 inqnasharzh (automobile) western armenian english translation composition eastern armenian equivalent composition inqnasharzh automobile inq (self) + sharzh (moving) avtomeqena or meqena avto (auto) + meqena (machine) the commonly used word for ‘car’ in western armenian is not inqnasharzh15 but the colloquial word oto (oթn). therefore, rather than risking confusing the local, the returnees choose to use the formal word inqnasharzh. interestingly, the returnees reluctance to use the informal word for automobile and instead make use of its formal equivalent in western armenian, increases the prestige of the language within society in armenia, leading to both a heightened vitality as a language accepted for use by society in armenia, but also reaffirms the status of the language as a ‘standard’ given its distinct use of terminology. confusion and misunderstanding: medium-low vitality the misunderstandings that arise during interactions between local eastern armenianspeakers and the western armenian-speaking returnees are mostly due to differences in pronunciation and terminology. these differences can at times result in positive reactions, as noted previously, in the use of distinct terminology, but on other occasions they can lead to confusion. the experiences of misunderstanding and subsequent confusion are a reality that most returnees are accustomed to, seemingly aware of the experiences of western armenianspeakers who repatriated to soviet armenia during the period of nerkaght (1946–1949). the differences in pronunciation of certain letters of the armenian alphabet (aypenaran) differ for eastern armenian and western armenian speakers. for example, the second letter of the alphabet, բ, is pronounced ‘b’ in eastern and ‘pʰ’ in western, the third letter գ is pronounced ‘g’ in eastern and ‘kʰ’ in western, and the fourth letter դ is pronounced ‘d’ in eastern and ‘tʰ’ in western. there is also the absence of differentiation in the western armenian pronunciation of the letters չ (tʃʰ), ջ (tʃʰ) and ց (tsʰ), ձ (ts). these letters are pronounced 14. differences in spelling are due to some letters having different phonetic sounds between eastern armenian and western armenian. 15 the words used are the russian equivalent: информация (informacia), коррупция (kor’owpcia), and холодильник (kholodil’nik) respectively 16 words are transliterated from armenian script to latin letters using the appropriate armenian phonetic keyboard (eastern armenian or western armenian keyboard). see http://am.translit.cc/. he wasn’t able to understand what i was saying’: the experiences of returnees’ speaking western armenian in ‘eastern’ armenia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019132 distinctly in eastern armenian as չ (tʃʰ), ջ (dʒ) and ց (tsʰ) and ձ (dz), respectively. this often creates confusion and unease for eastern armenian-speakers accustomed to hearing the distinct differences in pronunciation, with western armenian-speakers often having trouble hearing the sounds. raphael, a young returnee from canada, experienced one such encounter when ordering a glass of water at a bar. i asked the waiter for some water, but the waiter kept asking me what i wanted. he wasn’t able to understand what i was saying when i was asking for water in armenian. i still don’t understand the difference between the western armenian pronunciation ch’o’wr and the eastern armenian jowr. [raphael, canada] raphael’s interaction with the waiter makes apparent the ongoing difficulty some in the homeland have with understanding the pronunciation of some western armenian words (see table 3 for some further examples). the confusion that takes place during these interactions causes discomfort for the returnee who is likely to switch to pronouncing words in eastern armenian to prevent further confusion. table 3 words with differing pronunciation western armenian pronunciation english equivalent eastern armenian pronunciation ch’o’wr water jowr ko’h’n colour goyn tzo’wg fish dz’owk misunderstandings also arise from differences in the vocabulary of eastern and western armenian. tina, a returnee from israel, explains: in the beginning i used to get upset when they wouldn’t understand the words i was using, however, after living here for a long time i began to understand that those words really have a different meaning for them in eastern armenian. one time i went to the shops to purchase a kednaxntzo’r [see table 4], but this is the name of a completely different vegetable for them. [tina, israel] the returnees’ usage of western armenian words that have a different meaning in eastern armenian is a shift returnees willingly make. returnees, in general, feel that using eastern armenian words when interacting with locals is more appropriate. for returnees, this is a matter of different meanings, not a differing pronunciation or use of a foreign loan word; this was simply about fitting into society. accommodation theorists explain this behaviour as the changes that people make to attune their communication to their partner. in this case, returnees were found to accommodate the meaning of words used in eastern armenian. some examples of differences in meaning and vocabulary are listed in table 4. returnees who continue to use western armenian words that differ in meaning will encounter situations in which their sentence is understood but misinterpreted. roupen, a returnee from canada, insisted on using the western armenian word for ‘community,’ only to be looked at strangely for referring to where he is from as a ‘colony.’ this was a word less commonly used nowadays, but previously used to refer to a group of people coming from the ‘karamanian portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019133 table 4 words with differing meanings western armenian word meaning of the western armenian word meaning of the western armenian word in eastern armenian kednaxntzo’r potato gooseberry shinel (verb) to make to build goxel (verb) to press ‘plunge’ also a colloquial word for sexual intercourse. tzah’r the edge the end kagho’wt’ community colony same country and residing in a particular section of a foreign country. the usage of these words is met with confusion, shock and a sense of unease. the shock is even more apparent should the returnee use the western armenian verb ‘to press,’ leading to an awkward reaction by the local as well as disapproving stares by others in the vicinity (see table 4 for the meaning of the word). such reactions cause the returnees to think twice about word selection, choosing instead to accommodate the usage of the eastern armenian equivalent. the misunderstanding that comes with a differing pronunciation, vocabulary and meaning is a learning curve that both returnees and locals in the homeland experience. for returnees, however, it is the unwillingness of most in the homeland to attempt to understand western armenian pronunciation, vocabulary and meaning that affirms their position that the western armenian language remains an ‘irrelevant’ language for most in the homeland. raphael explains the attitudes of some locals when hearing words in western armenian: there are locals who are interested in western armenian, whilst on the other hand, there are locals who don’t understand it. in my opinion, it’s a matter of choice, it is your choice to understand it or not. if i can understand eastern armenian, or at least make an effort to understand it, then the person in front of me can make the same effort i think. however, some prefer not to make that effort. at my workplace, for instance, if i speak in western armenian to my co-workers the response will be like ‘ha? what?,’ which means that they are not making the effort to understand. [raphael, canada] the unfamiliarity with western armenian pronunciation and vocabulary reduces the vitality of the language in armenia as the language is used less frequently during interactions, given the misunderstanding that takes place. this in turn prevents the language from securing a status as a standard language in the territory of armenia, leaving the language unanchored in the homeland. rejection: low vitality less common than reactions of encouragement or misunderstanding, were instances when returnees were met with laughter, ridicule and amusement when speaking western armenian. these reactions were considered offensive and difficult for returnees to forget. however, what was more enduring than the offence caused by the comments, was the shift in language choice returnees experienced. this shift in language choice was due to the returnees’ reluctance to speak western armenian, not wanting to meet unfavourable reactions. he wasn’t able to understand what i was saying’: the experiences of returnees’ speaking western armenian in ‘eastern’ armenia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019134 more than two-thirds of returnees interviewed raised at least one instance of embarrassment or ridicule when speaking western armenian. two returnees, krikor and zarmig, described the reactions of work colleagues: they will make fun of the western armenian sounds, telling me that i am not pronouncing the letters ց (tsʰ) and ձ (ts) properly. i always try and explain to people that the same phonetics don’t exist in western armenian, but they can’t understand it. they would just laugh. [krikor, usa] it’s not necessarily in a bad way, but locals tease the way western armenian is spoken. but the teasing has a lot to do with the class of people; many say how beautiful it is, whilst others call us ‘aghparner,’ it just depends on the person. [zarmig, lebanon] although offended by the signs of ridicule, most returnees were generally dismissive of ‘harmful’ comments made by locals, preferring not to address the incident. the dismissal of such harmful behaviour can viewed as the returnees’ way of blending into society by gradually transitioning to eastern armenian. this shift in language further contributes to the lessening vitality of western armenian in the homeland, as users of the language are reluctant to use it at the workplace, amongst friends and in other settings. returnees’ stories of ridicule and laughter were generally followed by a reassurance that the laughter was not ‘loud’ but instead a ‘soft giggle.’ these justifications are interpreted as the locals’ way of not offending or insulting the returnee but rather a way to express how humorous they found the difference in pronunciation. however, the reassurance can also be interpreted as the returnees’ technique of shielding potentially harmful behaviour, justifying the ‘infrequent’ negative behaviour as an issue of education and unfamiliarity. although western armenian is the language of instruction for thousands in the diaspora and within the majority of language schools outside armenia, it is perceived as a language of irrelevance to many in the homeland who are unwilling to accept its differences. this rejection is most apparent by those in the homeland using the word aghpar when referring to the returnee. aghpar, is a corruption by eastern armenian-speakers of the western armenian pronunciation for the word ‘brother’ (yeghpayr). the word was used as a denigrating term signifying both the claim and the negation of national unity—as the use of the word ‘brother’ represents an acceptance of the returnee, while its incorrect usage signifies society’s rejection. the term is frequently referred to in research on soviet-era western armenian return (see lehmann 2012). the majority of the returnees had at one time or another since their arrival in armenia been referred to as aghpar or their language as aghparagan (language of the aghpar). present-day returnees attribute the use of this term to lower-class members of society in the homeland unable to accept their arrival or their differing identities. the use of this term was most common amongst older generations who may have heard the word being used during the soviet period at a time when differences in language and identity between homeland and the diaspora were more apparent. however, it is worth noting that the term is also used by some in the homeland to refer to diasporans or western armenians, without the intention of causing offence. one example is cited in pattie’s (1999) research, in which aghparagan geragoor (food of the aghpar) signals something delicious. the historical definition of the term as harmful is the meaning returnees tend to associate with the word. the reactions of locals towards the use of western armenian demonstrate the perceptions of segments of society towards the language as a low status language. these segments of society are unwilling to accept the classification of western armenian as a standard language within the republic of armenia. the scaling-down of the language’s vitality in armenia and the disregard ‘karamanian portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019135 of its status as a standardised language, discourages returnees from utilising their language in public and instead compels them to switch to eastern armenian. language switching is a conscious decision made by most returnees who had adjusted easily to eastern armenian, given both branches of modern armenian are, for the most part, mutually intelligible. the decision to switch from western to eastern armenian was common for returnees who wished not to have their language ridiculed, and for longer-term returnees who had resided in armenia for greater than ten years. returnees who had arrived in armenia during the earlier years of repatriation (1991 to mid-2000s) experienced greater animosity as western armenian-speakers, given the smaller number of returnees living in or visiting armenia at the time. they were met with comments such as ‘what language is she speaking?’ or ‘where is he from?’ in general, returnees feel the western armenian language has a limited future in armenia. the language is increasingly used among friends, family members and other diasporans: i use western armenian in the right situation, after all i’ve come to armenia and i’m not here to create difference or annoy people; if i’m at the shops or a place like that, i will speak the way the people who work there speak, so there’s no confusion or misunderstanding. [arsen, syria] taking into consideration whichever country you migrate to you learn their language, here the official language is eastern armenian so we have to learn that. the important thing is it’s armenian, regardless of whether it’s western or eastern. [vahé, cyprus] i still use western armenian when speaking to other diasporans i meet, however i talk like a local with the locals. i sometimes teach them western armenian words such as aghvor (nice), which they don’t use, but generally they are the ones teaching me words, as i need their language more than they need mine. [lorig, lebanon] the returnees’ decision to speak eastern armenian when interacting with locals in the homeland, demonstrates their acceptance of the standard of armenian used in armenia, and their reluctance to create confusion and difficulty during interactions. the switch to eastern armenian appears to be a process of negotiating identities with the intention of adapting to life in the homeland, avoiding discomfort, yet maintaining the use of western armenian amongst other western armenian-speakers. the comments (above) by arsen, vahé and lorig most importantly demonstrate the returnee accommodating the language of the majority, as the benefit of using eastern armenian is intended to assist their social integration. this position, arguably, weakens the continued presence of the western armenian identity in armenia, both in terms of its vitality as a language used in various social settings and as a language to which eastern armenian-speakers are exposed. illustrative summary of attitudes towards western armenian the two-dimensional graph (see figure 4) is intended to be an illustrative, rather than definitive, summary of the various attributes of the western armenian language as perceived by society in the homeland with which returnees have interacted. various themes were derived from the experiences of the returnee when speaking western armenian, including the ‘beauty of the language,’ its ‘historical significance,’ the usage of ‘correct’ terminology, ‘ a differing pronunciation,’ a ‘differing vocabulary,’ ‘differing phonetics,’ and a reference to western armenian-speakers as ‘aghpars.’ each theme is positioned on the graph based on its effect on the vitality of the language in armenia and its weight on influencing the perception of the language as a standard in the homeland. he wasn’t able to understand what i was saying’: the experiences of returnees’ speaking western armenian in ‘eastern’ armenia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019136 figure 4 standardisation and vitality quadrangle graph for western armenian. western armenian continues to be perceived by many in the homeland as a language of the diaspora. the language is accepted by some for its historical significance and beauty, though is rejected by others due to its differing phonetics, pronunciation and vocabulary. reactions of encouragement and support experienced by returnees are signs of a significant change in discourse on western armenian from the soviet-era. this encouragement leads to the growing vitality of the language within armenia as returnees feel comfortable using the language during interactions. nevertheless, the misunderstanding and less than frequent mockery, severely reduces the vitality of the language, as returnees feel their language is irrelevant in armenia and are compelled to switch to eastern armenian, as a step towards integration. conclusion the return of thousands of western armenian-speaking diasporans to the republic of armenia has resulted in what was once a centuries-old diatopic relationship within competing empires, into an issue of language use and acceptance. the western armenian-speaking returnees, much like returnees to soviet armenia, are shifting to the use of eastern armenian. the returnees’ language shift to eastern armenian is due to societal attitudes towards the western armenian language. segments of society in the homeland are found to provide encouragement towards the use of western armenian; attributing the use of the language to its historical significance, perceptions of the language as a ‘beautiful’ and ‘correct’ language, and an admiration for the distinct terminology used by western armenian-speakers. these signs of encouragement demonstrate a shift in society’s mindset when compared to research on the treatment of western armenian-speakers during the soviet period. reactions of encouragement by homeland society towards the use of the language during social interactions, ‘karamanian portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019137 increases the vitality of the language and the possibility that the language being included as a standard to be used in the nation. the vitality of the language is however hampered by experiences of misunderstanding, confusion and ridicule, as a result of a differing pronunciation, vocabulary and terminology, unable to be understood by some in society. these reactions lead to discomfort by returnees who are reluctant to encounter confusion, misunderstanding and ridicule when speaking western armenian. this in turn led to the returnees switching to the use of eastern armenian pronunciation, vocabulary, and terminology in order to ‘fit-in’ and simplify daily interactions. instances of misunderstanding and ridicule counter growing signs of western armenian’s vitality in the homeland, which in turn leads to returnees’ hesitating to use the language during social interactions. the lowering vitality of the western armenian language diminishes the possibility of the language becoming an ‘acceptable’ standard of use in the republic of armenia. societal perceptions of the language that lead to the lowering of its vitality and limiting its chances of being ‘accepted’ as a standard in the homeland, result in a shift in the returnees’ language from western to eastern armenian. the growing shift towards the use of eastern armenian by returnees means the western armenian language will remain a language for use within the confines of personal circles, including friends, family and visiting diasporans who speak the language. the status of western armenian in the republic of armenia remains unclear. there appear to be evident shifts in societal attitudes towards the language and its inclusion in the nation’s linguistic narrative, notably in comparison to the treatment of the language during the soviet period. however, frequent reactions of misunderstanding and ridicule, coupled with the growing trend of language shift by returnees to eastern armenian, makes the acceptance of 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2016, ‘speech community theory and the language/dialect debate,’ journal of asian pacific communication, vol. 26, no. 1: 8–31. doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.26.1.01xu. he wasn’t able to understand what i was saying’: the experiences of returnees’ speaking western armenian in ‘eastern’ armenia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019140 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: vallis, cj. 2021. heaven on earth. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 116–124. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i12.7411 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal cultural work heaven on earth cj vallis corresponding author: cj vallis, phd student creative writing, school of arts and sciences, the university of notre dame, 140 broadway (po box 944), broadway nsw 2007, australia. carmen.vallis@my.nd.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7411 article history: received 06/09/2020; accepted 11/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract ‘heaven on earth’ is a creative non-fiction piece which juxtaposes life under lockdown in sydney 2020 with my experience of curfew in kashmir in the 1990s. the covid-19 crisis is explored from the resonances and dissonances across place and time. in this hybrid personal essay, i reflect on how a sense of space is constructed from wealth and community, and how a white, middle-class status benefits from lockdown, juxtaposed against the ongoing political and social isolation of kashmir. keywords covid-19; creative non-fiction; curfew; kashmir; sydney outside is as quiet as a truce. usually, from six in the morning, cars whoosh past my house, on their way to work and school. instead cars are parked in their driveways. we too are parked; safer to stay inside. planes are also parked somewhere, i hear birds on the wind, calls from different birds. for the first time in seven years since i’ve lived in this suburb, i wonder what caws and screeches. gulls, butcherbirds and magpies most likely, the odd cockatoo and rainbow lorikeet. we are almost still, uneasy in sydney, and this strangeness reminds me of kashmir. * declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 116 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7411 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7411 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7411 mailto:carmen.vallis@my.nd.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7411 heavenly nigeen lake, 1991; © c.j. vallis sunset prayer—god is great—and gunfire echoed around the valley. like the kingfisher birds, the noise no longer bothered me or moved me from nigeen lake, srningar. i paused until it settled, before asking abdul, ‘when will it end? when can we go out?’ abdul’s smile was hard to read as he explained—an army checkpoint was blown to bits by a bomb, hidden in a basket of temple flowers. yesterday soldiers captured seven militants and chopped off their arms. but we were safe on marco polo super deluxe aaa houseboat, so he said. the fighting was in the distance. even under curfew, nigeen lake was paradise in comparison to delhi and its traffic snarls, hubbub and flyblown street stalls. in this space, i was protected from delhi’s touts and frustrated men, their grinning faces and roving hands. ‘kashmiri suffer from india and pakistan.’ abdul collected our tea glasses on a tray, stood and sighed. in 1991 i was for adventure. i didn’t mind. as long as i had supplies of gold flake cigarettes to smoke and abdul to play snap with me, even if he cheated because his luck was bad and couldn’t win fair and square. we sat inside at a lacquered walnut table, encircled by shelves of british raj furnishings, flowery bone china and embroidered curtains. in that intersection of time and space, i could fool myself that abdul enjoyed my company and that i was not another demanding white tourist. that could come and go as i pleased. soon the sky was dark and pricked with stars. * at this point, corona is a mexican beer, best served with lime. 2020 is off to a biblical start. in january summer heat, i board a bus where an elderly lady wears a full gas mask to protect her lungs from the bushfire smoke that palls over sydney, punctured only by a small apocalyptic red sun. to stop myself staring at her monstrous mask, i look out an ash-blackened windowpane as fire engines speed past us on broadway. in february, torrential rain is a relief; drenching armageddon blazes around new south wales and rinsing the sky. we rally at town hall in thousands about climate change, as the ocean rises to wash away more of the coast and some beach backyards. next is pestilence; let’s call it an epidemic. the virus seems like another sars or swine flu, mostly bad for travel, and for international students locked down in china who have to delay their semester in sydney. in australia, pessimists are panic-buying toilet paper, pasta and rice. (i laugh at doomsdayers while buying extra paracetamol and ibuprofen just in case.) hundreds are dying in italy and iran, and new york, the vallis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021117 greatest city on earth (or so the americans say) is sick. covid-19 is upgraded to pandemic status on 11 march 2020. the date comes from a work email that warns staff of unprecedented challenges. without the email, i’d struggle to remember the details; generally, i’ve outsourced dates and times to virtual calendars and their invisible data empire of server farms with forever memories reminding me what to do when. my poor memory is imprinted in tracks of inside and outside spaces. there’s only room in my brain for magnetic experiences that stick to these grooves. growing up, i walked grassy footpaths along wide bitumen roads with no trees, no shade, pretending i was unafraid of the unleashed dogs behind small chain wire fences. a car, i wished, if only i had a car to protect myself from sprawling boredom. * embroidered curtains kashmiri houseboat, 1991; © c.j. vallis abdul was proud of his indian car, his ‘embassador’, which resembled a newly manufactured morris minor. he promised to drive me to the mughal gardens and markets and winked as he said we’d haggle over pashmina shawls and visit friends to drink chai and eat pakora. he always skipped the part about having to bypass mosques and avoid the indian military bunkers that cut srinagar into ribbons. if i asked abdul when will curfew end his answer was soon. soon we’d book that mountain trek to gulmarg. ‘heaven on earth’, was his description, and charm aside, i could tell he believed it. days blurred and bled together. i got sick of trying to write the great australian novel. for something to do, i plucked out my leg hair with tweezers as i sat on the houseboat prow, gazing at nigeen lake, a powder blue mirror of snowy peaks. a powder keg, really. i took to swimming in the lake, past lilies and algae fed from houseboat sewage, until my face broke out in a rash that could only be cleared by antibiotics. so i was glad to have company when a young backpacker couple rented the neighbouring houseboat for a few days. i invited them over to marco polo to slurp kashmiri tea, warm with cinnamon and cardamom, and compare travel stories. the israeli guy, eli, wanted the low down on abdul. he was incensed that abdul had tried to sell him a carpet, and then ranted about how abdul wouldn’t let him hire a shikara to paddle around, supposedly for his own safety. then he boasted of his military service and how israelis could defend themselves. no way vallis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021118 would he pretend to kashmiris that his thick hebrew accent was german. abdul’s warnings about militants were designed to scare him away from competition and comparing prices. etcetera. his dutch girlfriend only seemed to half-listen. she spotted my tarot deck and asked if i could read for her. eli mocked her request and my ‘fortune telling’. unfazed, she told eli she was thirsty and sent him back to their houseboat to purify water. as soon as he left, i laid out a short, two-card tarot spread for her. the six of swords was her key card: a warrior who is focused and stubborn. didn’t go down too well. luckily they moved to dal lake in a huff not long after. for myself, i shuffled seven times, cut with my left hand, and drew the three of cups; enjoyment of others, or reversed, exploitation. * in sydney we are a long way from curfew in srinagar and the military occupation of kashmir with hundreds of thousands of indian troops (zia 2020: 360). nsw schools close, my local café switches to takeaway, and some shops close though their windows are not boarded over. so long as we follow rules, we’re allowed to shop, visit the doctors and exercise, no permit required. access to unlimited electricity and internet keeps me occupied and docile. i become a bit obsessed with the latest statistics and locations of outbreaks. it seems that in a pandemic, crowds have to be controlled for the greater good (some of us just can’t act responsibly and have to be fined or arrested). usually lockdown is imposed on prisoners; now we are our own guards. in the suburbs, we’ve always social distanced anyway. i couldn’t have less physical interaction with my neighbours. our windows and bedrooms are a few metres apart, but i am only familiar with their noise pollution; the hum of their vacuum cleaner, the television extra loud for the footy, lawn mowing and whipper-snipping on weekends. i walk a lot to the cooks river foreshore. on one day i stop and chat five times to people i know from soccer, school, an old workplace; people i rarely see otherwise. friends and i socialise by strolling together past the river’s smelly mangroves, ignoring the plastic refuse and abandoned shopping trolleys beached on its mudflats at low tide. it’s hard to envision my protected sydney in 2020 as a ‘place of disciplinary monotony,’ unless protection and tedium agrees with me (foucault 1996: 141). order and surveillance are still methods for controlling the pandemic. authorities brutally enforced the lock down of citizens in segmented space during the bubonic plague. in seventeenth century europe, i can imagine faceless men with shields and safety glass, dressed in long-sleeved aprons and disposable surgical gloves; quarantine soldiers monitoring and measuring disease. the only discontinuity in my make-believe scene is the ppe. foucault had a point—distributing and enclosing individuals in designated spaces, by whatever means, is a more effective way of controlling crisis than staging public executions to scare people. * vallis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021119 traces of the jammu kashmir liberation front (jklf), srningar 1991; © c.j. vallis after yet another blackout, abdul invited me to dinner with the family, to listen to bbc world news on a short-wave radio. i spent a long time dressing for the occasion, draped a downy scarf over my head, and still i felt i was no fit to this place in my tight jeans. on the family’s doonga boat, parked behind my fancy marco polo houseboat, abdul introduced me to four brothers who i never knew existed. i tried not to gawp at the youngest brother sitting by a window with a home-made fishing rod and line in the water. the older brothers nodded, ‘salam alaikum,’ oiled black hair gleaming in the reflected light of spirit lamps, entered and left in turns to pray in the back room. then came baba, abdul’s father, who wore a faded loose tunic, white skull cap, and stroked his grey beard instead of greeting me. ‘what’s the matter?’ i whispered to abdul. ‘baba say allah is angry.’ following baba, mother muoj crab-walked in carrying a pot of steaming dahl. baba was served, next the brothers, finally me. she urged us to eat. when we were done (my taste buds still burning from chilli), muoj unhooked her dangly earrings, pointed at my ears, until i understood we were supposed to swap. after muoj cleared the dishes and went to eat, baba switched on the news. ‘and now to kashmir, india, where authorities have raided suspected militant hideouts to search for two swedish nationals, abducted by militants while en route to a ski resort, northwest of the state capital of srinagar.’ abdul started shouting kashmiri at the radio. a frown from baba muzzled him. abdul, the fixer and wheeler-dealer, forced his gaze down to the wooden floor planks, bare apart from a faded carpet and cushions. back on marco polo, abdul eased out a floorboard under the walnut table. hey presto he extracted a bottle of black label johnny walker. the first sip burned as it soothed. so did the second, third and fourth. after the fifth, i was blathering. ‘jesus, hope those swedes are released soon.’ abdul poured another tumbler-full, ‘in sha’allah.’ the power came back on. magically his brother appeared, with a hash joint and a borrowed bollywood film, despite the curfew. he connected the old vcr, retreated to the doonga. hindi music shrilled through the tinny speakers, heavy drumming of tabla and high-pitch duet. on the television screen was shimmering lake, pink dusk and himalayas as a backdrop, indian coffee-cream actors sang love in a boat. vallis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021120 ‘very romantic.’ the tone of my voice was anything but. ‘it is about heart.’ abdul smiled. by this stage i was flushed and loose and could only giggle. more scotch. cigarettes. we were both grinning like nobody ever got killed in kashmir. * why say lockdown, not curfew? like fast fashion, words trend, wear out quickly and are thrown away for new styles and cuts or sewn into other stories. in singapore lockdown is called a stay-home notice (shn). lockdown has been layered into stages. army could come around to check you are at home. lockdown or curfew, going out without permission means risking a fine and possibly arrest. the pandemic is changing many definitions. trust the hindustan media to explain the nuances—the times of india, india business insider, and india today, explain curfew as an emergency state regulation to force you to stay inside at certain times. lockdown is self-imposed, if you flout lockdown rules you are accused of being selfish. self-isolation, selfquarantine; it’s all about self-self-self. is my-self any different? ‘for lease’ signs are sprouting in sydney shop windows, though toilet paper is back on supermarket shelves and i have a well-paid job. plus, work from home suits introverts like me. in my home space i can independently and asynchronously think and reflect, rather than react, which has improved the quality of my work and my life (despite an overload of zoom meetings). by luck of birth, i am centered in a big family, home and yard, and i don’t need to catch public transport where i might catch miss rona. instead of a lockdown or curfew, with prison yard principles and army enforcers, i daydream of cultural proxemics—couldn’t we learn to expand our bubbles of personal space? i almost convince myself that a new understanding of the anthropology of space will help (low 2009). that everything works out for the best. * police in kashmir, 2018. by tasnim news agency, cc by 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?curid=75342944. in the morning, i woke with a stupendous hangover. after downing aspirin, i shoved clothes into my backpack. on top came the ‘guaranteed’ hundred percent silk kurti, and the paper-mache bowls i bought vallis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021121 https://www.ica.gov.sg/covid-19/shn https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75342944 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75342944 from saddam hussein’s second cousin, who spluttered out his chai when i complained i was low on cash. ‘smoke my hookah, carmeni,’ he coughed. ‘forget your very bad situation.’ to begin with, abdul just shook his head when i asked him to take me to the bus station. lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings. ‘stay, stay. tourist can come.’ slowly he registered my expression as i told him, ‘you can’t make me stay.’ my right to enter and leave was inalienable, i was certain. driving, abdul and his little brother were silent. shops were shuttered down in lal chowk, the streets empty. near the market, abdul pulled over—‘business.’ his brother jumped out and retrieved a wicker basket from the boot. he strode away to the market without a backward glance, the basket’s woven handle tucked securely under his arm. soon after, a door to a boarded-up sari shop opened and he disappeared inside. abdul slowed for a checkpoint. from nowhere, an army jeep veered onto the road behind us and accelerated. i screamed. the jeep slammed into the embassador. our bodies jerked forward. whipped back. the bumper bar fell with a heavy metallic clang. eyeballing me, abdul covered his mouth with his hand—i should shut my cake-hole. a soldier swaggered over, barking hindi, until he spied me. ‘memsahib!’ grinning betel-stained teeth, the soldier wagged his finger at abdul, ‘bad driver.’ abdul’s jaw was tensed to a polite smile. he gripped the steering wheel as he stared straight ahead. another soldier with a bushy moustache struck abdul’s door with a big stick. both soldiers appreciated this slapstick. thwack, thwack; abdul flinched at the loudest blows and the soldiers laughed and laughed until they tired of denting and scratching the embassador’s shiny body. * somehow we are getting used to social distancing and a u.s. president that advises drinking bleach to kill contagion. masks. middle class friends have stopped baking sourdough bread and are commuting back to work, at least a few days a week. i long to see friends and families overseas and interstate; social events and milestones like graduations are cancelled. lockdown and curfew disrupt a sense of time while waiting for a return to normal. planning ahead is impossible under these conditions which ‘acquire a surreal power over the society’s temporal order’ ( junaid 2020: 308). yet the pandemic has not quite managed to dislocate the narratives we tell ourselves of the world and natural order of things. about which lives matter. * at srningar bus station, i was still shaking and blathering to abdul—i’d spread the news about kashmir’s injustice. ‘shhh!’ for a moment, abdul grabbed my hand—‘come back with husband for honeymoon’— bequeathed a block of hashish that i swallowed on the spot. as i turned to leave, he rivetted his eyes on mine. ‘all are moral, god forgives everything.’ for the ride out of srinagar, i had two seats to myself behind the bus driver, thanks to abdul’s friendly chat with him before i embarked. during the ten-hour trip i slept in snatches as the bus lurched around bumpy mountain roads into jammu. at jammu railway station, platform two, i had another five hours to meditate on abdul’s parting words as i sat on my backpack waiting for the delhi express. i convinced vallis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021122 myself that his family would be fine, abdul with his smooth-talking would shield them. anyway, what had i done? why should god forgive me? at that time, i turned to tarot reading and asked all the wrong questions. * police, protesters clash after eid prayers in kashmir september, 02, 2017. by tasnim news agency, cc by 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75340912 * my bollywood honeymoon in the himalayas never eventuated (pal 2020). instead, i’ve collected tweets about kashmir that i can’t reproduce here. one twitter account in particular, called ‘lost kashmiri history,’ was suspended along with its facebook account in late 2018 (zia 2018). it documented grieving mothers with faded snapshots of boys and men who have disappeared or been killed, among other photos of bulletridden militants laid out by soldiers. abdul (not his real name) and his family are nowhere to be seen in these tweets. would i recognise them after so much time and space? srinagar, kashmir, heaven on earth, is still in curfew and lockdown. references ahmed, b. 2019, ‘call the crime in kashmir by its name: ongoing genocide’, the conversation, 19 august. online, available: http://theconversation.com/call-the-crime-in-kashmir-by-its-name-ongoing-genocide-120412 [accessed 15 july 2020]. foucault, m. 1996, discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. 2nd ed., random house, new york. ishaq m. j. 2020, online, available: https://twitter.com/jalal_ishaq/status/1291083709391802369 [accessed 19 august 2020]. junaid, m. 2020, ‘counter-maps of the ordinary: occupation, subjectivity, and walking under curfew in kashmir,’ identities, vol. 27, no. 3: 302–320. 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https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2009.041 https://www.inversejournal.com/2020/06/02/looking-into-settler-colonialism-through-indias-occupation-of-kashmir-by-subhajit-pal/ https://www.inversejournal.com/2020/06/02/looking-into-settler-colonialism-through-indias-occupation-of-kashmir-by-subhajit-pal/ https://twitter.com/haziq_qadri/status/1273596933836136451?s=20 https://twitter.com/rajatalib79/status/1291023144531222530 https://www.facebook.com/ather.zia.31/posts/10161591996900144 https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2020.1750199 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: lê, l. 2018. saufconduit. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 66-71. https://doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v15i1-2.5519 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au cultural work sauf-conduit linda lê independent author corresponding author: tess do, school of languages and linguistics, the university of melbourne, vic 3010 australia. bourgois-editeur@wanadoo.fr doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5519 article history: received 02/05/2017; accepted 02/05/2017; published 23/08/2018 abstract linda lê is the most prolific french author of vietnamese origin writing in france today, having published twenty-four books to date. her diverse and richly intertextual literary oeuvre includes novels, essays, a play and short stories and frequently deals with the subject of exile: lê left vietnam in 1977, two years after the fall of saigon, with her mother and sisters. she published her first book in 1987 and since 1993 has published almost exclusively with the parisian publishing house, christian bourgois. her dystopian novel, cronos, won the wepler-fondation la poste prize in 2010 and her letter-novel, à l’enfant que je n’aurai pas (nil), won the renaudotpoche prize in 2011. a year later, lame de fond (2012), a polyphonic novel in which lê weaves together different exilic narratives, was nominated for the goncourt and the goncourt des lycéens prizes. her last publications to date are exils and chercheurs d’ombres (2017). ‘sauf-conduit’ provides a rare historical reflection on the part of lê on the refugee exodus out of vietnam at the fall of saigon in 1975 and the means of escape sought by those abandoned in subsequent months and years. discussing aspects of her own flight, for the first time, lê reckons with the ‘bénédiction’ that her grandmother called owning a french passport and with a subsequent departure once in france to the world of literature as her new homeland. in the light of other exiled writers, as discussed in her volumes of literary essays, lê considers here, in a notably personal tone, how the writer who may lay claim to no one passport or identity instead seeks to purvey to a world built of nation states the rich disquiet of non-belonging. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 66 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5519 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:bourgois-editeur@wanadoo.fr https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5519 résumé auteure de vingt-quatre livres à ce jour, linda lê est l’une des écrivaines françaises d’origine vietnamienne la plus prolifique en france aujourd’hui. son œuvre littéraire se distingue par la diversité de genres (roman, essai, nouvelle, théâtre) et leur richesse intertextuelle, et aborde fréquemment le thème de l’exil : lê a quitté le vietnam avec sa mère et ses sœurs en 1977, deux ans après la chute de saigon. lê a publié son premier roman en 1987 et depuis 1993 elle publie quasi exclusivement chez l’éditeur parisien christian bourgois. plusieurs de ses livres ont été couronnés : son roman dystopique cronos a obtenu le prix wepler-fondation la poste en 2010 et son roman épistolaire à l ’enfant que je n’aurai pas (nil) le prix renaudot-poche en 2011. l’année suivante, lame de fond (2012), roman polyphonique dans lequel lê entrecroise plusieurs récits d’exil, a été finaliste du prix goncourt et du prix goncourt des lycéens. ses dernières publications à ce jour sont exils et chercheurs d ’ombres parus en 2017. ‘sauf-conduit’ offre une rare réflexion historique de la part de lê sur l’exode des réfugiés vietnamiens à la chute de saigon en 1975 et la quête d’évasion de ceux qui se retrouvèrent abandonnés au pays dans les mois et les années suivants. se penchant pour la première fois sur les aspects de sa propre fuite, lê reconnaît la ‘bénédiction’ selon les mots de sa grand-mère, que constitue le fait de posséder un passeport français et, une fois en france, l’adoption du monde de la littérature comme sa nouvelle patrie. à la lumière d’écrivains en exil, comme ceux évoqués dans ses essais littéraires et, sur un ton très personnel, lê examine comment l’écrivain qui refuse la détention d’un passeport ou d’une identité vise à y insuffler, dans un monde constitué d’états-nations et délimité par des frontières nationales, l’intranquillité de la nonappartenance. keywords linda lê, vietnamese diaspora, sauf-conduit sauf-conduit portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201867 septembre 2016 dans dialogues d ’exilés, écrits en finlande entre 1940 et 1941, brecht fait dire ironiquement à l’un de ses personnages : « le passeport est la partie la plus noble de l’homme. d’ailleurs, un passeport ne se fabrique pas aussi simplement qu’un homme. on peut faire un homme n’importe où, le plus étourdiment du monde et sans motif raisonnable ; un passeport, jamais. aussi reconnaît-on la valeur d’un bon passeport, tandis que la valeur d’un homme, si grande qu’elle soit, n’est pas forcément reconnue. » quarante ans après la fin de la guerre du vietnam, quand ils se remémorent les dernières semaines avant la « débâcle » – ou la « victoire », tout dépend du camp auquel ils appartiennent –, les témoins du 30 avril 1975, jour où les tanks des « libérateurs » nord-vietnamiens défoncèrent les grilles du palais présidentiel de saigon, se souviennent surtout que très nombreux étaient les vietnamiens, amis et alliés des américains, à tenter de s’enfuir à tout prix. pour ceux-là, il fallait coûte que coûte figurer sur la liste des évacués, ce qui leur permettait ensuite de faire partie des convois de réfugiés que l’amérique, après avoir soigneusement trié les arrivants pour empêcher toute infiltration communiste parmi les « fuyards », était prête à accueillir sur son sol, puisqu’elle se devait malgré tout de ne pas abandonner ceux qu’elle avait jusqu’alors protégés. plus de cent mille vietnamiens furent ainsi « exfiltrés », pour employer une expression pas encore en vogue alors. les témoins de ces jours de ténèbres selon les uns, de ces jours de gloire selon les autres, se rappelleraient longtemps les convois descendant le mékong chargés de réfugiés, les foules saisies de panique qui assiégeaient l’ambassade des etats-unis, d’où s’envolaient des hélicoptères, ultimes espoirs de ceux qui n’étaient que trop certains, s’ils restaient, de s’exposer aux représailles des « frères » du nord. ces réfugiés avaient, pour beaucoup d’entre eux, brûlé leur passeport vietnamien. ils n’étaient plus les citoyens d’un état qui n’allait peut-être pas être reconnu par les autres gouvernements. ils n’avaient donc plus d’existence légale. quelques années encore, et leur famille, leurs amis, leurs voisins, qui n’avaient pu partir en avril 1975, allaient à leur tour s’échapper en s’embarquant à bord de rafiots, sans hésiter à affronter les dangers de la haute mer, pour eux moins redoutables que les périls qui les guettaient au pays des enfants de l’oncle hô. on leur avait dit que s’ils avaient la chance de trouver refuge sur une île de malaisie par exemple, il fallait détruire leur passeport pour ne pas être renvoyés chez eux. eux aussi, après les évacués d’avril 1975, étaient des citoyens fantômes. ceux qui n’avaient pu s’envoler à bord des hélicoptères de l’armée américaine, mais n’étaient pas disposés à s’aventurer en mer de chine, ne s’attardaient cependant au vietnam qu’en étant à l’affût de la première possibilité de départ qui s’offrirait à eux. les plus fortunés, nantis de biens dissimulés, soustraits à l’attention des nouvelles autorités, cherchaient par tous les moyens à conclure un mariage blanc avec un des membres de cette catégorie qui, depuis la grande victoire nationaliste, suscitait beaucoup de convoitise : les vietnamiens détenteurs d’un passeport français. épouser l’un de ces bienheureux, c’était avoir la certitude de pouvoir quitter le pays en toute légalité, sans avoir à prendre le risque de périr en mer, d’être volés, violentés et assassinés par des garde-côtes ou des pirates. forts du précieux document en leur possession, ces privilégiés n’étaient pas condamnés à devoir s’évader comme des criminels, mais allaient être « rapatriés », qualificatif pour le moins étrange appliqué à leur situation, puisque la plupart de ces citoyens français, nés au vietnam de parents vietnamiens, n’avaient jamais vu leur « patrie ». quelle que soit la raison pour laquelle ils avaient demandé et obtenu lê portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201868 ce passeport qui, sous l’ancien régime, celui du gouvernement « fantoche » sud-vietnamien, ne leur procurait aucun bénéfice, mais au contraire les obligeait chaque année à s’acquitter d’une taxe, ils acquéraient, au lendemain de la « chute » de saigon, un statut à part, en vérité assez enviable, même si, pour ceux qui souhaitaient être « rapatriés », se voir attribuer un visa de sortie relevait de la course d’obstacles, les pots-de-vin n’étant pas du tout dédaignés par certains gardiens du nouveau paradis socialiste. mais il se chuchotait que cette espèce à part était réellement bénie des dieux : elle ne courait pas le danger, par exemple, d’exciter la colère d’un commissaire de quartier ou, pis encore, d’être envoyée dans un camp de rééducation. ces citoyens d’un ancien empire disloqué appartenaient pour la plupart à la classe des gens aisés et, une fois qu’ils avaient eu leur visa, une fois que le consulat avait organisé leur départ vers la « patrie », leur assurant qu’ils voyageraient à bord d’un avion d’une ligne régulière faisant escale à bangkok, leur principale préoccupation était de décider comment ils pourraient sortir du territoire diamants et bijoux de prix. il se chuchotait que, pour leur départ, ils portaient des chaussures avec de très épais talons, qui en réalité avaient été évidés pour servir de caches aux pierres précieuses. j’ignorais, en me rendant à l’aéroport de saigon pour m’envoler vers paris en compagnie de ma mère et de ma grand-mère, si ces dernières, les bienheureuses détentrices d’un passeport français, avaient usé de ce que mes sœurs et moi appelions entre nous le « stratagème des chaussures », sans rien nous en révéler, j’ignorais si ma grand-mère, « spoliée », comme elle disait, par les « petits hommes en noir venus du nord », était encore assez riche pour avoir l’audace de défier les douanes vietnamiennes, privant ses compatriotes de ce qui les aurait peutêtre sauvés de la famine. elle répétait qu’avoir un passeport français était une bénédiction. je ne pouvais, quant à moi, m’empêcher de penser au fait qu’en l’occurrence, le passeport de ma mère et celui de ma grand-mère, joints à notre connaissance, certes très imparfaite, du français, constituaient un sauf-conduit, à savoir un laissez-passer, un document qui nous permettait de nous rendre, saines et sauves, de l’autre côté. une fois que, écrivant en français, je me suis résolue à entrer dans cet autre pays qu’est la littérature (qui, d’une certaine manière, représente aussi l ’autre côté, peut-être la face noire de la réalité, peut-être le versant pas toujours riant de l’existence), j’ai souvent repensé à cet épisode où, sans vraiment tout comprendre, mais en devinant presque tout, comme souvent à l’adolescence, j’ai déserté le sol vietnamien munie d’un passeport français et du statut de « rapatriée », alors que si l’on m’avait interrogée à ce moment-là pour savoir où était ma patrie, j’aurais répondu qu’elle était sans doute dans les livres que je lisais. j’aurais certainement répondu aussi qu’à travers la lecture, j’avais appris à franchir des frontières en brandissant comme signes de ralliement les rêveries du promeneur solitaire ou vingt mille lieues sous la mer. en tout cas, m’apprêtant, à quatorze ans, à laisser derrière moi ma terre natale, je n’aurais pas dit que désormais ce qui constituerait mon identité, ce serait l’exil. j’aurais prétendu que chaque livre aimé représente pour moi un sauf-conduit, ce qui me donne la possibilité de traverser une zone ennemie, ou de séjourner dans un territoire inconnu, hostile parfois. ils ne sont pas des antidotes au sentiment d’avoir été banni. grâce à eux, je suis, comme je l’ai déjà dit, une transfuge. ils sont ma sauvegarde. ils m’ont menée vers des chemins qui bifurquent. un jour, dans un débat public, quelqu’un m’avait lancé que mes livres, écrits au fil des ans, ces romans sur les êtres passionnés, endeuillés, égarés dans un univers qui échappe à leur entendement, ces essais sur les écrivains non moins passionnés, inconsolables, perdus dans un monde qu’ils se refusent à comprendre, sont mon passeport, le passeport qui me permet de clamer haut et fort mon sentiment de non-appartenance. un peu interloquée, je n’avais pas su répondre à ce lecteur certainement bienveillant, qui m’offrait la chance de saisir la balle au bond et de sauf-conduit portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201869 développer peut-être l’argument selon lequel un écrivain se doit de n’avoir qu’une patrie : la littérature dans laquelle il se reconnaît. mais il m’était impossible alors de ne pas penser à ces écrivains qui, exilés, continuent à écrire dans leur langue natale – de ceux-là qui, parfois, sont déchus de leur nationalité, peut-on affirmer que leurs livres sont leur passeport ? doit-on dire de norman manea, qui a émigré aux etats-unis mais continue à bâtir une œuvre considérable en roumain, qu’il est un écrivain roumain ou l’écrivain des apatrides, avec un passeport américain et la certitude qu’il n’y a pas de remède à cette maladie qu’est l’écriture ? doit-on dire de ceux qui ont changé de langue et se sont résolus à écrire dans un idiome d’emprunt, qu’ils sont des traîtres, doublement renégats, puisque, non contents d’avoir un passeport faisant d’eux les citoyens de leur patrie d’élection, ils ont décidé que leur littérature se fera sous le signe d’une nouvelle langue, une langue d’adoption, acquise au prix de nombreuses luttes et difficultés ? silvia baron supervielle, quittant buenos aires pour paris, délaissant l’espagnol au profit du français, choisi comme langue d’écriture, parle, dans la ligne et l ’ombre, du « no man’s land discordant entre soi et la langue, comparable à la discordance entre soi et la vie, soi et les autres, soi et soi-même », qui fut pour elle la révélation d’un langage. une des premières choses que, souvent, un émigré cherche à découvrir lorsqu’il s’initie à la langue de sa terre d’accueil, ce sont tous les mots et expressions péjoratifs, offensants, qui servent à désigner un étranger. un exilé qui débarque dans un pays où il compte se fixer, tente toujours de ne rien ignorer de l’infiniment riche palette d’insultes réservées aux métèques que peuvent se targuer de posséder même les gamins des écoles. et peut-être n’appartienton réellement à un pays qu’une fois qu’on a saisi toutes les nuances de ces injures, des plus méprisantes aux plus ordurières. doit-on dire que le fait de « connaître à fond » toute la gamme de ce lexique constitue un passeport par lequel on distingue « l’enfant du pays » de celui qui est un immigré de fraîche date, encore ignorant des subtilités en matière d’amabilités réservées aux venus d ’ailleurs ? cette connaissance fait partie du bagage dont il faut que même les exilés les moins habitués à s’encombrer du superflu, se dotent, car elle constitue une espèce de rite de passage, elle authentifie, bien plus parfois qu’un passeport, son appartenance à une communauté, qui se construit uniquement sur la base de l’exclusion, en formulant cette exclusion, en trouvant les mots qui expriment de façon définitive cette exclusion. identifier celui qui est désigné comme étant l’ennemi, le ridiculiser, le mettre en quarantaine en en faisant un pestiféré ou seulement un individu méprisable, le disqualifier en lui niant toute qualité humaine : ce qui cimente la communauté, c’est aussi son implacable refus d’admettre cet autre qui menace sa cohésion. pour revenir aux événements d’avril 1975 qui ont fait de quelques millions de vietnamiens des évadés en quête d’un port d’attache, les ont transformés en proscrits dont l’exode a bouleversé l’occident avant que celui-ci n’opère un revirement et, las de la rhétorique compassionnelle des journaux et des bateleurs de la politique, ne décide que le flot de réfugiés doit être endigué, que « la barque est pleine », et qu’il est dorénavant d’une extrême urgence de dissuader les « candidats à l’émigration » (selon l’expression devenue à la mode, se substituant au mot de « réfugié », qui éveille toujours une certaine empathie) de tenter la périlleuse aventure qui les conduisait à demander l’asile à l’europe et à l’amérique, de plus en plus réticentes à accueillir ceux qui n’étaient pas encore tout à fait des indésirables, mais ne suscitaient plus réellement l’intérêt, la réunification du vietnam et la fin de la guerre détournant l’attention des opinion leaders de ce petit pays qui, pendant près de vingt ans, avait occupé les devants de la scène médiatique. les modes passant et la compassion changeant d’objet aussi vite que les unes de la presse, il ne suffisait plus de rappeler à ses interlocuteurs lê portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201870 qu’on était originaire du vietnam pour bénéficier aussitôt d’une certaine sympathie, ce saufconduit qui permet parfois de franchir bien des terrains minés. le personnage de brecht n’a pas tout à fait tort quand il prétend qu’on peut faire un homme n’importe où, le plus étourdiment du monde et sans motif raisonnable – un passeport, jamais. au sens propre comme au sens métaphorique, le passeport non seulement certifie l’identité d’un quidam mais facilite l’accès à un ailleurs qui peut être l’autre côté de la frontière ou tout simplement ce qui le fait passer à une dimension différente. aussi, la question posée par le lecteur pour qui toute lecture est une odyssée intime, l’éveil à une surréalité, n’est pas tout à fait sans fondement quand il s’interroge sur la possibilité que les livres offrent à leur auteur, non d’avoir des certitudes touchant son appartenance à telle ou telle communauté, mais de faire l’expérience d’une transfiguration. la littérature peut-elle être un sauf-conduit, ce qui permet à celui ou celle qui s’y adonne de se lancer dans un voyage aventureux avec un certain sentiment de sécurité ? bien évidemment, cette conception de l’art comme refuge est bien trop peu stimulante pour qui écrire, c’est risquer le tout pour le tout. revendiquer son identité en brandissant un passeport dûment délivré par des autorités dites compétentes, se réclamer d’un groupe, quel qu’il soit, se doter d’une légitimité en se plaçant dans une lignée : le paradoxe est qu’un écrivain, si exilé soit-il, est contraint aussi de passer par ces rites de passage avant d’espérer pouvoir affirmer sa singularité. il a beau savoir, avec marina tsvetaeva, qu’un poète doit faire voler en éclats les frontières, que toute définition, qui l’enferme dans un cadre étroit en précisant sa nationalité ou ses origines, est pitoyablement réductrice, il ne peut échapper à la fureur classificatrice de ses contemporains, si ennemis de ce qui ne se laisse pas étiqueter. et peut-être pour l’exilé le dilemme est-il d’autant plus crucifiant. d’une part, occuper une place quelconque lui ôte le sentiment d’imposture, celui de devoir sans cesse se demander qui il est, d’autre part, chacune de ses actions ne tend que vers un seul but : le délivrer de ce qui l’emprisonne dans telle ou telle catégorie. créer, c’est se recréer, et il est impossible de se recréer si l’on s’accroche à son identité, fût-elle celle de l’écrivain. n’être rien ni personne, c’est se rendre à ce point disponible que s’ouvre à vous l’inconnu. quel artiste n’a pas rêvé d’être une sorte d’allié des fantômes, batelier fou recueillant des naufragés pour les conduire vers d’autres rives, ou sentinelle protégeant des anonymes sans leur demander d’où ils viennent, sans leur demander si, dirait benjamin fondane, ils vont passer en fraude une nouvelle beauté panique, s’ils vont fomenter des désordres – car en vérité, c’est ce qu’il attend : que ces anonymes lui apprennent comment se livrer à la contrebande d’idées que ne tolérerait aucune autorité, surtout si elle est pétrie de « moraline », comment être le citoyen d’un nulle part qui n’exigerait pas de lui qu’il « montre patte blanche » et se laisse asphyxier par ce qui lui dicte la loi du plus grand nombre. il y a des révoltés trop obstinés pour suivre la voie commune, et aux yeux de qui le scepticisme et l’attitude de refus sont le passeport qui permet de se soustraire à toute emprise des juges selon lesquels ils sont comme de la mauvaise herbe, à éradiquer. dans un monde de plus en plus régi par des contraintes administratives et au moment où l’europe voit à nouveau se masser à ses portes des migrants prêts à tout pour obtenir l’asile et le précieux papier qui rendrait possible leur séjour en ce qui est presque la terre promise, cela relève peut-être de la provocation de faire des écrivains des internationalistes s’insurgeant contre l’obligation de détenir un passeport, contre le carcan que la société tente d’imposer en réduisant chacun au fait qu’il est ou non persona grata du point de vue des garde-frontières chargés de refouler les brebis galeuses, mais nous sommes quelques-uns à avoir rêvé de faire inscrire sur notre passeport – « profession : pourvoyeur d’intranquillité. » sauf-conduit portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201871 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: ilongo, f. n. 2021. covid-19 angst. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 127–133. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i12.7530 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal cultural work covid-19 angst ilongo fritz ngale corresponding author: ilongo fritz ngale, senior lecturer faculty of education, department of adult education, university of eswatini, private bag 4, eswatini. nfilongo@uniswa.sz doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7530 article history: received 12/09/2020; accepted 05/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract the covid-19 pandemic has disrupted traditional physical, social, psychological reference points and perspectives, through immediate lockdown, discontinuity of supply, exacerbation of demand and the generation of fear, uncertainty and panic. the latter scenarios could be reframed and reviewed through a creative and poetic lens as the matrix for creative reinterpretation by highlighting the impacts of covid-19 on space, time, mind, consciousness, emotions, thinking, and behaviour, as seen through ‘space implosion,’ ‘the matrix of creativity,’ ‘i and i,’ ‘technological kinship’ and ‘time explosion.’ keywords matrix; space; time; introjection; lockdown; covid-19 understanding our sense of place and space space implosion minds are akimbo caught in limbo the traditional impression of forward movement is suddenly backpedalling now from expansion to contraction, projection to introjection and even introspection, with the sudden lockdown declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 127 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7530 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7530 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7530 mailto:nfilongo@uniswa.sz http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7530 clamping down on freedom of movement dampening the motivation to explore, radical coping demanding a return to basic environment that of family, reactivating the nuclear cell as the last refuge from space implosion through covid-19. the boundaries are tight getting tighter by the day especially psychologically, as thought returns to self, the ego becoming the effect of its boomeranging cognitions becoming more and more morbid, finding few outlets at first in its thirst for wider spaces, forced now to drink at pool of contracted mental routines, surrounded by same faces and tasks which quickly become irritants, cues for constant stress reactions stressing the point that there is space implosion following covid-19. it’s like people have become manacled shackled by visible and invisible chains, causing pains in minds and bodies both hemmed in by physical walls and government instructions, veritable stalls in which are crouching the interned internalizing their unexpressed thoughts stunning their creators by spinning in vicious circles of hopelessness and despair, the pall of contracting scope difficult to cope with and even the impulse to elope finding no response, there being nowhere to escape to thanks to the imprisoning implosion of space. * lockdown and creation of art and knowledge ilongo portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021128 the matrix of creativity forms are crumbling some are grumbling minds are fumbling decisions are bungling fates are dangling spaces are contracting time is fragmenting wills are freezing, fauna are flourishing flora are blooming nature is breathing humankind is masking, part is returning to chaos the other is u-turning to bliss, the crucible is waiting ready to bring forth new creation from the matrix of creativity. the mix up is fertile ground the soil of infinite possibilities making impossible not-a-thing, meaning all is now possible, as all return to the base matter that which is not yet materialized but is materializable for the courageous who will look within to perceive the hidden ideas, soul seeds waiting for conception and formulation by positive imagination, to then burst forth as jewels of beauty through the matrix of creativity. artists are in demand more than they can supply, but they need their supply to flow to be in infinite demand the way to flourish if they can polish their art, to become part of the renaissance rebirth of artistic magic beyond the sense of the tragic, to open up new horizons beyond the omnipresent horizontal lockdown, ilongo portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021129 to initiate the way to the take-off to higher and higher dimensions thanks to the matrix of creativity. * emotional responses to lockdown i and i previously i only knew my names but now i have come to a standstill, thanks to enforced lockdown forcing me to stay home, and not just that but to begin to perceive that the other parts of me that have been forgotten thanks to countless distractions which are now gone are now getting attention, and i am woebegone realizing that at last i have come to roost to become unwilling witness to the hidden dramas suppressed now seeking expression because covid-19 has made me to face myself as i and i. a pall of fear arises and i realize my mind is in crises mode, for the mood is of anxiety as the subconscious tries to make conscious the repressed layers of myself that my ego rejects, but these echoes will not go away, and they start playing games with my thoughts and imagination now run riot, beginning to formulate terrors and horrors hordes that threaten to drown my sense of being, and i remain tense ilongo portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021130 all the time and times, in this shrinking space which is now my only scope of restricted pacing, and it is beginning to seem i and i are in some kind of permanent shadow boxing. i seem to be in a fight with myself or other selves as me, which now taunt and sneer and another part is gaunt from insomnia, what with these maniacs on my neck, and in despair i intend to react, and i fight back but this is no good, so i begin to take note of my rejected parts, slowly getting into conversations with the them in me, gradually understanding their points of view which seem new to me, but my perceptions too start changing, and so too does thinking about us-me, creating new feelings, e-motions based on unification and forgiveness, to then release from negative complexes the power of harmony, and the hour of peace, the pieces now coming together gathered into dynamic equilibrium, source of authentic power from i and i reconciled. * reimagining social relations and kinship when touching is restricted technological kinship family links have shifted no longer now a function of blood ties, but of electronic interconnectedness, creating new avenues for access and communication based on ownership of technological appliances, ilongo portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021131 the new blood or life force being data bundles, determining availability for online dialogue, possibilities of communication breakdown and information blackout real possibilities, based on electronic connectivity and servers’ bandwidths determining technological kinship size through virtual, audio-visual interactions, physical contact now anathema thanks to covid-19, ushering in new family lineages integrating all races, continents, and languages in pockets of quasi-universal clans identified as new normal technological kinship. behind the mechanical and technical masks in addition to the physical ones, emotions are de-personalized captured in and by emoji, replacing previously shared laughter, tears, fears, and joys, sending across signals few can totally interpret, for technical mastery might be different from real feelings of hidden manipulators, sending out cues linked or not to their personal experiences, expression taking precedence now, expressing what it seems but what it means is another issue, as the masses slowly build up the tissue of technological kinship in numbers of followers, platonic or knee-jerking compliant, not to talk of the silent majority seeing, hearing and doing nothing, part of the invisible, passive and uncategorised members of the technological kinship. * perception of time through the crisis and in lockdown ilongo portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021132 time explosion previously time seemed certain running through the grooves of unwavering routines, set into mechanical gears even with business as usual the motto as conservative motor of most systems, motivating repetition of the same in the name of stability and security quickly becoming fixity until the bombshell struck to fragment time into times freezing the past out of sight squeezing the present tight and scribbling the future with uncertainty graffiti, to be without clear cut features when the covid-19 crisis caused time explosion. pieces of senses fly off accompanied by disoriented faculties, those of thought, feeling, and will in disarray all trying to make sense of the shifting contexts caught in some disorientation ballet, as each and all try to cope to understand the scope of the new paradigm which tests minds to the extreme, through extremes of adaptation and maladaptation in the ceaseless see-saw accompanying time explosion. the sun rises and it sets but really the past has seemingly set forever, with face-to-face scenarios now only memories, distant histories of education which is now beginning to tell the online stories in the company of other alternatives, the actors and actresses of yesteryears having to readjust drastically, quickly for there’s no time to stand still, now in the ceaselessly moving kaleidoscope of continuously contracting and widening scopes difficult to cope with following time explosion! ilongo portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021133 portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies between east and west: contemporary aesthetics for the global market emiko okayama, macquarie university, and francesco ricatti, university of the sunshine coast the perceived privileged relationship between italian art and the nation has been rarely challenged by intellectuals since the unification of the state. this is despite the extraordinary diasporic history of italy: a history of immigrations, emigrations, invasions, exiles, colonialisms, and fragmentations. furthermore, this history includes the migration and exile of many representative artists. noteworthy is the case of italian literature, which is often interpreted and taught as the constituent element of the nation and its language. one of the most important critical goals of contemporary italian cultural studies is to challenge this privileged relation, by means of theoretical approaches that consider the essential features of globalisation and ‘modernity at large’ (appadurai 1996). within this context, and from this theoretical perspective, we examine the work of simone legno, an italian designer who works in the usa and is strongly influenced by japanese art and culture (figure 1).1 simone legno’s work, which essentially consists in designing and commercialising his personal fantasies of japan and japanese women, has been highly successful in the usa and europe, as well as in many asian countries, including japan, hong kong and thailand. legno’s work thus challenges received ideas about contemporary italian art and design, and global cultural trends in contemporary capitalism. in particular his work 1 the copyright of all images in this article is held by tokidoki and simone legno; the images are published here courtesy of simone legno. okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies figure 1: simone legno, project fox for volkswagen, image courtesy of the artist. poses questions regarding what could be defined as gendered orientalism, the typical attempt to romanticise the orient through oriental women, and the old but persistent and pervasive male western stereotype of oriental women as ‘submissive, subservient, [and] exotic’ (prasso 2005: 8). while legno’s representation of japanese women as beautiful, sexy, self-confident, and innocently licentious, yet also sweet and reassuring, is partially consistent with some aspects of gendered orientalism, we argue that legno’s tokidoki needs to be framed in terms of the present global diaspora and hybridisation of cultural signs and symbols, thus requiring a broader critical approach than that provided by the critique of orientalism. as ravi, goh and rutten (2004: 2) suggest, it is essential to challenge the ‘centreperiphery conception of europe-asia relations’ particularly when focusing on the recent evolution of globalisation. following the lesson of bhabha (1994), we avoid considering legno’s work as a unilateral projection of western fantasies onto or about the orient, and focus instead on the reciprocal and complex cultural and economic influences that link japan, italy and the usa. as goh argues: the disruptions opened up by recent interrogations of western and non-western modernity and the ways in which these experiences are made to appear distinct under the aegis of various type of agency across time and space not only forces a recognition of new modern imaginaries, practices and categories but also challenge us to think of how, now more than ever, the contemporary world offers occasions for a dialectical encounter between the west and non-west. (2004: 95) due to the global and decentered nature of contemporary capitalism, it is increasingly important to consider the in-between of different cultures (hall 2000). to see cultural identities as ‘a matter of “becoming” as well as of “being”‘ (23) implies that anderson’s portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 2 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies notion of imagined communities (1992) must be considered not only from within—for example, italy inventing italy, japan inventing japan—but also from transnational and global perspectives. here the concept of locality within globalisation is central. for appadurai (1996) locality is both deterritorialised and invented. he (2003: 39) uses the example of asian martial arts in hollywood and the hong kong film industry to illustrate how asian traditions can create new transnational cultures of masculinity. tokidoki and its success operate similarly in creating new cultures of femininity out of japanese artistic forms of production and distribution as reinvented by an italian designer within a global economy. while these new cultures of femininity could be read simply as being new euro-american projections of an orientalised femininity (or a feminised orient), we argue for the importance of reading such phenomena as the fruits of reciprocal, complex and ambiguous influences between different cultures within contemporary capitalism and global consumerism. iwabuchi suggests that we need to bear in mind ‘the shifting nature of transnational cultural power’ that determines decentering and asymmetrical cultural flows (2002: 39). tokidoki was originally created by simone legno in the late 1990s on his personal website (www.tokidoki.it), which he continues to use as an online portfolio to showcase his graphic work. between 1999 and 2006 legno was the creative director of vianet (www.vianet.it), a successful new media design company that has worked with advertisement companies, such as leo burnett and saatchi and saatchi, and has designed web sites and other new media projects for multinational companies, such as mtv, sony, toyota, fiat and renault. many of these projects were characterised by exotic representations of asian women, and advertised european and japanese products for the italian and european market.2 however, vianet has also developed many projects for an asian audience.3 in 2003, simone legno moved to los angeles and, together with one of the founders of hard candy cosmetics, transformed tokidoki into a fashion label. todidoki is now an 2 see, for instance, the project fox for volkswagen (http://www.vianet.it/clienti/projectfox), the advertisement for daihatsu in italy (http://www.vianetlab.com/daihatsu/), and the awards winning project for benq in europe. 3 see, for instance, the way out, a web anime produced for the central narcotics bureau of singapore (http://www.vianetlab.com/cnb/). portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 3 http://www.tokidoki.it/ http://www.vianet.it/ okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies established brand and its products have been produced, distributed and sold in collaboration with companies such as sanrio, lesportsac and fornarina.4 products designed by legno for tokidoki include clothes, bags, jewellery, toys, watches, and uchiwas (japanese fans for women). these products are distributed in asia, north america, europe and australia. in our correspondence with ivan arnold, tokidoki’s president, arnold emphasised how ‘the success and proliferation [of tokidoki] has been unprecedented.’ he also remarked that tokidoki does not target a specific group of customers. while it is particularly popular with young asian women both in asian and western countries, its general audience is ‘as diverse as anything we could ever imagine, including pretty much every race and every age.’ a sign of the brand’s success is the ease with which fake reproductions of tokidoki’s products can be purchased in many countries, as well as on the internet. legno has declared that he has a particular love for japan, ‘from the ultra modern face of shibuya to the serious magic silence of kyoto’ (legno n.d. about: para. 2). however, this personal fascination needs to be set in context, given the huge influence of anime (japanese cartoon) in italian culture, particularly for the generation of italians, such as legno, born in the 1970s. many important japanese artists, writers and cinematographers are well known in italy, including katsushika hokusai, murakami takashi, tanizaki jun’ichiro, murakami haruki, yoshimoto banana, kurosawa akira, and kitano takeshi.5 however, the most influential aspect of japanese culture for the generation of italian children born in the 1970s was the broadcasting on tv of japanese cartoons, although edited and dubbed. italy was one of the first european countries to import anime. from 1977 to the early 1980s more than 100 anime series were broadcast on italian public and private tv channels at national and local levels (castellazzi 1999). italian fans of anime have been recently able to recall almost 400 anime broadcasts in italy.6 while these cartoons were strongly criticized by some sections of the public, most italian children and adolescents born in the 1970s watched anime many hours a day for many years (castellazzi 1999; pellitteri 2002; raffaelli 2005). the generation of simone legno often identifies and defines itself through these cartoons and through the first home videogames. many italians of the same generation as legno are still able to 4 see: http://www.tokidoki.it/collaborations/. 5 in this essay japanese names are written with surname first followed by a personal name (e.g. murakami takashi rather than takashi murakami) following the japanese convention. 6 see: http://digilander.libero.it/francescaromana1/lista_anime.html. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 4 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies sing hundreds of italian jingles that opened and closed each episode of these japanese cartoons (benecchi 2005). while the actual cultural and social impact of these products on italians has not been deeply investigated, there is no doubt that the japanese society represented in those anime still exercises a strong fascination for young and middle aged italians. despite the strong editing and the not always faithful translations made by the italian tv channels, elements of japanese culture have now been at the core of italian childhood for almost thirty years. these cartoons, as broadcast in italy, are the hybrid product of japanese cartooning and italian editing, translating, dubbing and songs. moreover, if legno’s generation was the first and perhaps the most influenced by these products, the same generation later became the target for the commercialisation of manga in italy and other western countries. japanese anime and manga (as well as video games) are relevant not only for the impact they have had on legno’s design, but also for the emotional attachment that his references to japan can create for consumers from italy and other countries who grew up watching cartoons and reading manga. it has been argued that these products have become part of a common global culture in which japan plays a very significant role (see allison 2004: 36; iwabuchi 2002). when considering how specific aspects of japanese culture influence legno’s work today, it is essential to shift the focus towards two key and strongly related trends in contemporary japanese culture and design: the blurring of the distinction between high and popular culture; and the emergence of the kawaii aesthetic. the former trend is a global phenomenon that has found fertile ground in japan, thanks to artists such as murakami takashi. the latter trend is typically japanese but has become a global phenomenon, and is iconically illustrated by the products of the japanese company sanrio, in particular hello kitty merchandising, and the japanese magazine cawaii! murakami takashi became internationally recognised in 2003 when his life-size figure miss ko2 [sic] was sold at a sotheby’s auction for us$500,000, the record price for a work of japanese modern art at the time. inspired by modern japanese subcultures based on anime, manga and otaku, murakami first received critical acclaim and popularity outside japan before being ‘re-exported’ to his native country. his recent collaboration with louis vuitton, in which he introduced bright colours to traditionally portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 5 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies monochrome vuitton products, has been so successful that vuitton products now attract long waiting lists world-wide. in 2007 new york’s moca (museum of contemporary art) opened a large exhibition devoted to murakami’s work that will later travel to europe. apart from his own artistic activities, murakami also manages a group of young artists called kaikai kiki, overseeing their exhibitions, coordinating their publicity and managing the production of their merchandise.7 the pop side of murakami has become so famous that few people know of his background in traditional japanese painting. murakami was the first phd graduate in the discipline of japanese painting at tokyo geijutsu daigaku (tokyo national university of fine arts & music). his work is characterised by duality, and peculiar mixes of seemingly opposite elements. as his ‘super-flat’ catch phrase indicates, his anime-inspired figures and illustrations are supported by the flatness and structural qualities of traditional japanese painting that similarly inspired van gogh, monet and other modernist painters over a century before.8 his collaboration with louis vuitton melds art and commercialism, and pop and high culture. in a similar vein is his collaboration with a confectionary company, for which he produced thirty thousand miniature-size figurines of his famously expensive figures, such as miss ko2 and hiropon (1994), as novelty freebies in packets of sweets that cost only 350 yen (approx. au$6.00) each. this is a challenge to conventional concepts of ‘what is real’ and ‘what is art.’ the figurines are obviously copies of ‘art’ but as they are created by the artist and his technical staff, they are at once real and fake. to make the work even more complex, the original life-size figures are also modelled on existing anime and manga characters whose creators were not murakami. here, an analogy may be made to one of the ‘oldest’ japanese buildings, the ise shrine. the shrine itself has survived over a thousand years but the group of buildings within the shrine has been periodically rebuilt, as a rule every twenty years, in the same style using the same material and techniques passed on from generation to generation within the same families. can the current shrine, which is less than twenty years old and a replica of a succession of replicas, be considered authentic? both the murakami and ise shrines, as well as much other japanese art, challenge the conventional views of authorship and copyright that 7 see: http://www.takashimurakami.com/ and http://english.kaikaikiki.co.jp/artists/list/c4. 8 murakami (1999: para 5) states that japanese aesthetics did not seek three-dimensional expression, but were best expressed on a two-dimensional surface. he further extends ‘super-flat’ to japanese social structure and sees it as a characteristic of japanese cultural sensibilities (kato 2002: para 3). portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 6 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies are often privileged in the contemporary western art system. in a 2003 interview with journalists, murakami stated that, ‘in japan art has to be accepted by the general public and selling real art as toys at convenience stores is a progress in the long history of art’ (funatsu 2003: para. 6). this blurring of the boundaries between art works and consumer goods also continues a strong japanese tradition. edo prints, now treasured as art, were mass-produced and sold for popular consumption. they often bore publicity for kabuki actors and promoted kimonos and other products. in this sense, murakami’s attempt to bring art to a popular domain is a modern continuation of edo consumerism. also reminiscent of the edo art industry is his approach to artistic production through a ‘studio,’ where he acts as master/producer and business manager and where most works are created by assistants.9 simone legno has explicitly recognised the influence of murakami takashi: ‘[murakami] tamed the chaos of images, icons, characters and inputs to make us all understand how wonderful its essence can be’ (n.d.: pervasive persuasion). legno’s positive words (‘understand,’ ‘wonderful,’ and ‘essence’) need to be emphasised; they indicate how he applies the lesson of murakami in creating a chaotic world that, nonetheless, is also neat, sweet and reassuring. his use of digital and fashion design, and lively colours that fill clearly defined sections of two-dimensional screens and clothes, has certainly facilitated this goal. the chaos is not a dark hole in which one becomes lost, but a childish flat world where we can, from our external position as amused spectators, spend time looking for cute, little surprises (figures 2 and 3). indeed, as okayama and shelton state, this is the kind of ‘graphic diet upon which young japanese visual sensibilities are nourished’ (2007: 172). pre-school comics such as tanoshii yochien feature wonderfully intricate and dense magazine covers. various graphic forms—scripts, pictures, anime characters, and hybrid images—crowd their covers’ surfaces ‘with no dominant centre and no obvious periphery’ (okayama and shelton 2007: 172). they are ‘read’ not by linear progression but random scanning; readers return to them again and again for more detailed inspection, and each time 9 other critics have made similar links between contemporary and edo processes of art production. for example, the art critics hikosaka (2008) and kitani (2001) note the connection between murakami’s studio system and the kano school painters and the group of anonymous assistants supporting hokusai. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 7 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies explore the comics by a different route or series of helicopter-like ‘landings,’ all of which give viewers long lasting pleasure. figure 2. tokidoki hell. figure 3. tokidoki heaven. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 8 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies another, very important characteristic of murakami’s work that has probably influenced legno is his attention to commercial opportunities. legno and his commercial partners have demonstrated their ability in creating business opportunities by exploiting three important characteristics of contemporary design: the hybridisation of high and popular culture and different artistic traditions; the emotional value that design contributes to contemporary consumerism; and design’s global dimension. from the beginning, legno’s design has attracted the attention of multinational advertisement agencies and companies. his mixture of italianess and exotic orientalism has built bridges in the global market between western companies and asian consumers, as well as between asian companies and western consumers. his interplay between child-like cuteness and sensuality has created a fantastic world where contrasts are avoided and the encounter between different cultures and sensitivities becomes possible. while murakami, following the lesson of warhol, is a representative of high culture playing with popular culture, legno directly and almost exclusively devotes his work to the design of reproducible clothes and objects. in a sense, the traditional and conservative dichotomy between high and popular culture that still seems to foster media and critical debates about murakami’s art and his commercialisation cannot be applied to tokidoki. legno’s creativity and commercial attitude are consistent with the italian tradition of refined, ironic and sexy design in advertising and for the production of objects to be commercialised. while legno is fantasising about japan, his roots in italian design should, therefore, not be overlooked. legno is aware of the importance of selling himself as an italian designer in love with japan. as one of his fans has argued: ‘when simone creates tokidoki, it is japan seen through his eyes and so it is like looking at japan through italian binoculars with special lenses’ (topo 2006: para. 1). in consumerist fantasies, legno has acquired by birth (that is, by being italian) the ‘right’ to be recognised as trendy, stylish, and refined. it is not by chance that legno’s website address (www.tokidoki.it) immediately recalls both japan (through the word tokidoki) and italy (through the .it that locates the website). nor it is by chance that many of legno’s vinyl toys have italian names such as bruttino, carina (figure 4), polpettina and bastardino. his most recent bags also have italian names, including luna, denaro, buon viaggio, avventura, campeggio, nuvola, caramella, trenino (figure 5), zucca, gioco, and stellina. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 9 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies figure 4. vinyl toys: mozzarella and moofia, ciao ciao and adios, bruttino and carina. figure 5. trenino pirata bag. regarding the centrality of the kawaii aesthetic in legno’s work, it is perhaps useful, first of all, to consider critically the role that such an aesthetic plays in contemporary japan, where it originates. according to the japanese art historian yomota (2006: 2936), the word kawayushi (an old form of kawaii) meant ‘embarrassing’ and ‘pitiful’ in the twelfth century; but by the sixteenth century it had lost its negative connotation and acquired the meaning of ‘lovable,’ and was used mainly to refer to small, innocent and portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 10 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies vulnerable things such as children and small creatures. in the twentieth century, kawayushi transformed into kawayui and then eventually into kawaii: in the process it extended its semantic range to include adults and large animals. these days, kawaii is used for almost everything that is cute, depending on one’s sensibility: old men and worms can be kawaii in certain contexts. for example, the philosopher washida (2004: 57) reports his encounter with some girls at a museum who referred to a display of parasitic worms as kawaii. in this case, kawaii indicates an extremely subjective viewpoint, and connotes ‘grotesque’ or ‘revolting.’ having developed from ‘embarassing’ and ‘pitiful,’ kawaii has repossessed its original meanings without discarding its newer ‘cute’ and ‘lovable’ connotations.10 thus, kawaii has a much wider sociocultural meaning and set of uses than ‘cute.’ although japan has traditionally cherished small and delicate objects and found beauty in them, the popularisation of cute culture has evolved since the 1970s. kinsella (1995: 223) suggests that the rise of kawaii culture coincided with the cute handwriting craze among young japanese women that became a nation-wide phenomenon. she states that kawaii culture ‘started as youth culture amongst teenagers’ and as a rebellion against traditional japanese culture, whose style is ‘all about acting childish’ in order to recreate a romanticised childhood (249). her conclusion is that ‘cute style is anti-social, it idolises the pre-social,’ and its primal aim is ‘to escape from the restrictions governing’ the lives of young japanese women (252).11 her investigation of kawaii culture is insightful in highlighting the historical and social aspects of the trend. however, as yomota argues (2006: 14), whether young japanese who are immersed in the kawaii culture are conscious of that culture’s political dimensions is highly questionable. he stresses that the uniqueness of japanese kawaii culture lies in a consistent absence of politics. when asked why they buy kawaii things, most japanese would answer, ‘because they are kawaii.’ this sentiment is shared by other asian youth (mainly chinese, korean, taiwanese and thais) interviewed at various locations by koh et al (1999: 54-59) and asked about japanese products: ‘they’re cute, they’re in, they have a smart style’; ‘they’re fun, snazzy and top-quality’; and ‘they are so darn cute.’ interestingly enough, these comments recall similar comments from tokidoki’s fans in 10 or, to be precise, it never lost its original meanings but has kept its ambiguity. 11 the us cultural critics laura miller (2003; 2004) and anne allison (2003; 2004; 2006) have written extensively about the emergence of an ethos of ‘kawaii’ in japan. they find in japanese girls’ interactions with ‘kawaii’ positive qualities, such as playfulness, energy and gender critique. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 11 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies the usa. for instance, answering to the question ‘why is tokidoki so popular?,’ fans on the weblog purseblog gave the following answers: ‘the bags just make me happy’; ‘as i always say, they’re art ... awesome, functional, wearable art’; ‘it’s so cute and lovable you just want to hug it!’; ‘it’s silly and funny and happy and makes me smile’; ‘the artwork is craaazy cute’; ‘i dont know ... i like the artwork so much because it’s just so cute i can’t resist and i love pink … and a lot of the bags have pink haha. i hope this isn’t just some pop culture thing that will fizzle.’12 there is no doubt that ‘cute’ is a big money spinner cleverly marketed by industry heavy weights such as sanrio, nintendo, and various anime companies. but it is much more than that. cuteness gives to japan cultural and economic power on a global scale (allison 2003). as koh et al (1999) state, the growing population of asian fans of japanese pop culture represents a new generation who either do not know of japan’s past role as a colonial power in the region, or do not care about it. what they see in today’s japan is its cultural sophistication. a hong kong scholar, lisa leung, says, ‘we’re envious of their deep culture. we haven’t got much [of that]’ (koh et al 1999: 56). a hong kong journalist, ann tsang, adds that the japanese ‘have the ability to find the weirdest, most obscure thing and turn it into a trend’ (koh et al 1999: 56). these comments reflect a rising awareness in asia of cultural closeness between japan and the recipient countries of its products. unlike us or european cultural models, asian youth finds it easier to identify with japanese pop culture. dick lee, the sony music asia vice president, says, ‘mickey mouse and donald duck are not cute … pokemon is cute’ (koh et al 1999: 55). he, too, feels more comfortable with pokemon because it is not entirely foreign to him. while it is apparent that tokidoki is characterised by the kawaii aesthetic, the fact that it enjoys great success with a global, heterogeneous audience challenges any attempt to define that audience in national, generational, gendered, or socioeconomic terms. this also makes it difficult to generalise about an anti-social, pre-social or disengaged attitude on the part of tokidoki’s fans. yet, perhaps, this is precisely what the globalised version of kawaii is all about: creating a child-like yet ‘sexy’ world where conflicts are avoided through a simple, yet refined and elegant, design. for instance, in the tokidoki 12 see: http://forum.purseblog.com/tokidoki-and-lesportsac/why-is-tokidoki-so-popular-128933.html. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 12 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies world the national flags of both japan and italy consistently appear as underwear for babies and ‘sexy’ women alike (figure 6). figure 6. japanese woman with italian flag underwear, serving spaghetti to death. the image is called buonappetito. this is not a provocative attempt to ridicule national symbols. rather, it signals the transformation of boundaries across which conflicts erupt; thus, in legno’s cute decorative portrayal of an imaginary world, conflict seems to be not simply unacceptable, but impossible. on perhaps a more philosophical level, legno transformed the traditional image of death into two cute vinyl toys, ciao ciao (the skeleton-girl in pink) and adios (the skeleton-boy in black) (figure 4). there is a similar transformation in his reworkings of hell and heaven (figures 2 and 3), represented as parallel and similarly cute worlds where the only, almost irrelevant, difference between them is that the woman is surrounded by cute angels (in heaven) and by demons (in hell). even the mafia is reinvented by legno as an innocuous game in the series of milk box toys named moofia, and in the cow with a sub-machine gun named mozzarella (figure 4). considering now the complex question about gendered orientalism, it is noteworthy that the absence of male figures in the tokidoki website and products masks the portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 13 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies presence of its male creator. murakami and legno have achieved the unlikely marriage of innocence and sexuality by giving glamorous bodies to cute anime or manga faces. the absence of male figures indicates a difference in gender viewpoint at both creator and audience levels. in murakami and legno’s works, the objects of kawaii are always women or cute puppets. men do not feature on the screen because they are the creators and viewers. the female figures in murakami’s and legno’s works, then, are the objects of their own fantasies and desires. men want to possess them. in contrast, women are both objects and viewers. in other words, they want to be possessed and to possess the images. this basic understanding of tokidoki is consistent with both the highly profitable ‘commodification of “racialised” and “sexualised” images typical of contemporary fashion’ (matthews 2007: 751-52), as well as the ‘trajectory of western racial and sexual imagery across the terrain of the female body’ (756). the fact that the ‘god’ creator of this world is a western man, however, should not lead to the conclusion that his representations of asian women in a world without men are based on a typical racist uses of asian women as a male western answer to their threatened masculinity in contemporary society (prasso 2005: 6). nor should these representations be regarded as proof that ‘asian femininity becomes a marker of powerless, sexual exoticism and eroticism and by default whiteness becomes a signifier of power and superiority’ (matthews 2007: 759). even the assumption that this kind of mono-gendered worlds is framed by a rigidly heterosexual perspective can, at least partially, be challenged. with regard to tokidoki it is not simply that men want to see beautiful and exotic, yet submissive, women. nor it is simply that many women accept this model in order to attract men. rather this is an ambiguous matter that needs to be articulated in more nuanced terms. when analysing tokidoki images, many elements superficially support interpretations of legno’s work as characterised by a form of gendered orientalism. yet a high degree of ambiguity and contradictoriness characterises his design. tokidoki women never gaze back at their spectators; their ‘oriental’ eyes are small clefts and the pupils are never shown. this ensures that men can gaze at ‘ideal’ japanese women who have a shy and sometimes submissive stance (figures 7 and 8). this is clearly inconsistent with japanese manga, where women’s eyes are usually large and open. it is also clearly different from traditional western productions (from tv ads to pornographic movies, portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 14 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies including movies showing asian women) that aim at arousing male desire: these represented women usually gaze back at men who, from a psychoanalytical point of view, are in fact objectified by the women’s gaze from the screen (žižek and salecl 1991). it could be argued that this reading of tokidoki’s products would only make semiotic sense if the objects in question were consumed by men, as is often the case for soft and hard pornography. however, our impression is that while tokidoki proposes a model of femininity created as a male fantasy, that model is directed toward a female audience of consumers. this apparent contradiction needs to be addressed. figure 7. other images of tokidoki’s women. as evident in the images above (figure 7), tokidoki women often assume unnatural yet sexually evocative positions. for instance, by adopting a turned stance they show simultaneously their back, in particular their bottom and upper body, as well as their breasts and/or cute faces. yet they rarely open their legs in a frontal position. this contributes to the refined sensuality of the image. these images ‘want’ to be provocative, yet they are not really ‘available.’ they are exotic, but their look also evokes the bodies of top models. they wear sexually alluring clothes, yet are never common or unrefined. they are gentle, perhaps even submissive, but ironically they are also self-confident, happy, and completely unavailable to the men they attract. their portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 15 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies world is full of cute puppets, angels, and toys, and in that world men are never represented. indeed, legno’s imagined world does not need men in order to be happy. the only tokidoki image that we have found in which a man appears shows a kabuki actor’s image tattooed on a woman’s left arm. that image is representative of a theatrical world far removed from quotidian reality (figure 8). it could be argued, then, that these women are created to look sexually appealing while ‘living’ in a postheterosexual world. it is precisely around such an ambiguity that the success of tokidoki revolves. figure 8. kabuki actor tattooed on the left arm it should not come as a surprise that this representation of ultra-feminine and reassuring, yet also independent and confident, women appeals first of all to female consumers. while it would be difficult to deny a degree of gendered orientalisation in legno’s designs, we suggest that this model of femininity can also appeal to women who try to define and locate their identity in the liminal space between, on the one hand, a dominant and traditional heterosexuality, and, on the other, post-heterosexuality. by focusing on the ultra-feminine cuteness of tokidoki’s women, and the absence of men in the pictures in which those women appear, the emergence of post-heterosexual fantasies portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 16 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies can be identified. this can be related to the phenomenon of the shōjo girls who, as treat (1996: 281) explains, seem to extend their sexual interests toward puppets and kawaii objects. for miller (2004: 156), ‘the concept of shōjo implies an adolescent postpubescent space that revels in all that is cute, pink, fluffy, and adorable, with an absence of heterosexual experience.’ allison interprets this phenomenon on a more general level of consumption, emphasising how these girls ‘pursue desires of self-pleasure by consuming clothes, accessories, music, and digital games’ (2003: 387). this is not to deny that tokidoki can also be read as a masculinist appropriation of the feminine within a rigidly heteronormative perspective. on the contrary, these two apparently contradictory drives foster and sustain each other. tokidoki production recalls a line of male japanese illustrators who have contributed to the creation of ideal images of girls for fashion magazines, manga and stationery since the 1920s. takehisa yumeji (1884-1934) was the first modern artist to specialise in drawing young women in the 1920s and 1930s. he also created accessories, wrapping paper, advertisements and posters that were ‘must-have’ items among girls in the taisho period (1920-1935). nakahara junichi (1913-1983), who succeeded yumeji, worked for junior soreille (first published in 1953), the first japanese fashion magazine to target teenagers. nakahara’s illustrations were highly influential among young japanese girls, and some critics argue that they changed young women’s values from wanting to be kirei (beautiful) to being kawaii (suzuki 2004: 3). since the early 1960s, takahashi makoto (born 1934) has created cover pages and illustrated stories for young girls’ comic books, such as nakayoshi (first published 1954) and margaret (first published 1963). his girls with starry eyes were, and remain, greatly admired by young readers. again, male figures are invariably absent in the illustrations of these influential artists. a relevant difference between the post-war illustrations of girls by nakahara and takahashi and legno’s illustrations, however, is the complete absence of sexuality in the former and the strong sensuality of the latter. nakahara and takahashi’s girls were portrayed as pure and innocent, and free from daily chores, thus attracting young female readers who longed to be like them. legno’s innovation can be rigidly and superficially interpreted as a sexist tool only by ignoring the sexual, social and economic independence acquired by women in the last sixty years, not only globally, but also in portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 17 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies japan and progressively in many other asian countries.13 of course legno is not the only representative of this new trend, which operates within a consolidated tradition. for example, in journalist brian bremner’s 2002 interview with sato kazuhiko, chief editor of cawaii!,14 a magazine that targets a late-teen readership, bremner asked sato (a sociology graduate in his late forties) how a middleaged man can stay abreast with trend-happy japanese girls and create images and consumer products that appeal to them. his answer was simple: he does not, but he employs young women who do.15 here, one senses that the control and exploitation of kawaii culture regards that culture as a consumerist resource. sato stresses that there is nothing either unhealthy or subversive about cute culture because, quite simply, ‘girls are trying to be cute to get more attention from boys’ (bremner 2002: para.15). yet this masculinist and heteronormative perspective may not correspond to that of cawaii’s female readers and consumers. producers of commodities do not necessarily have control over, and understanding of, the reasons why their products are purchased and consumed. kitty hauser (2004: 19) has argued that what can be read as the ‘playful expression of a fluid postmodernity’ can also be seen as ‘a depressing cul-de-sac in which consumption is the only remaining option.’ when considering global phenomena, this ambiguity, and the infinite possibilities of agency on the part of different consumers across the world, should be kept in mind. as yomota (2006: 174) points out, the worldwide success of japanese cute products cannot be explained if detached from the current epoch of globalisation. riding on this wave of globalisation, assets the sociologist iwabuchi, japan’s cultural exports in the last few decades partake of a certain ‘cultural neutrality’ (iwabuchi 2001: 27). iwabuchi lists karaoke, walkman, and murakami haruki’s novels as key examples, and stresses that they have entered the global market in exchange for their japanese identity. this process may also apply to cute products. hello kitty was initially introduced to 13 it is worth recalling without ideological judgement that the tokidoki world is a restrained one when compared, for instance, with the explicit violence and sexuality of japanese ‘ladies’ comics,’ successful pornographic manga created by women and for women, and in which women are routinely raped, beaten and humiliated (jones 2005). 14 cawaii is an alternative romanisation of kawaii. replacing an angular ‘k’ with a round ‘c’ gives a cuter impression (see, “what is cute?,” new york times, january 3, 2006) 15 in fact, many japanese companies, including the mobile phone giant, docomo, employ female work teams and focus groups to understand what the target consumers want (miller 2003: para 18). portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 18 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies japanese consumers in the 1970s as signifying something ineffably western, but it made little impact until the mid-1990s (yomota 2006: 177). the cultural climate of the 1990s is also well illustrated by the rise of hong kong as an asian centre for the global media industry and the expansion of the middle class in several asian countries, notably china, taiwan, and korea. high-speed global communication, rising consumerism and cultural awareness in east asia have all contributed to the spread of kawaii culture. the western reaction to kawaii culture has followed a different process in which two paths met. one is the changing concept of female beauty and childhood. the other is the emergence of a generation familiar with anime and manga. okude naohito (1987: 96116), a japanese scholar of us culture, analyses the change in the popular image of ‘american beauty’ from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. he finds that the stereotypical american beauty with blond hair and a glamorous body, as embodied by marilyn monroe, is relatively new, and dates back only to the 1930s. before that, beauty was represented predominantly by the genteel, dark-haired, slender, intelligent and sexually suppressed anglo-saxon woman. he lists hollywood movies and miss america contests, among other factors, as having influenced the reversal of this image. girls from less privileged or migrant families started to appear on movie screens as symbols of a new multicultural america. by also embodying democracy and the ‘american dream’ they challenged prevailing class codes: one did not have to be from an old family to be ‘beautiful.’ unlike the rather puritanical and traditional ‘dark beauty,’ the new hollywood and miss america models were not shy to show off their physical attributes as commodities. as these new gender models became popular and displaced the old ideal of american beauty, the notion that class superiority, stoic morality and intelligence were attached to ‘dark hair’ was also lost,16 thus creating a naïvely sensual, non-threatening blonde beauty. half a century after the rise of the blonde stereotype, television and the internet have pushed the popularisation of american beauty further and created a celebrity culture in which seemingly ‘dumb, silly but cute’ girls such as paris hilton, and the superficially dumb blonde, but smart, elle woods (a character in the 2001 film, legally blonde, played by reese witherspoon), have become role models. in a society where children 16 note, however, that according to okude (1987: 110), these virtues became male attributes. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 19 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies were once expected to grow up and behave like adults on reaching maturity, cute blonde girls showed that it is socially acceptable to remain as children. in this context, america was ready to accept cute culture. the anime generation, the other contributing force in the rise of western cute culture, started as a minority interest group or sub-culture in the usa and elsewhere from the 1970s. initially japanese anime and manga were accepted by this generation as diverging sharply from the offerings of home grown disney animation and us comic books. their popularity grew rapidly as major television stations started to broadcast japanese anime for us children in the 1970s. later the successes of hello kitty, pokemon and dragon ball in the 1990s were supported by a new generation of young americans who grew up with imported japanese pop culture and whose cultural sensibilities were, in part, cultivated by it. as well, the us music industry was quick to respond to the new trend with stars (such as gwen stefani) incorporating over-the-top japanese fashion and cute features, and japanese calligraphy, in their video clips. thus, by the turn of the millennium ‘cuteness’ was well established in us popular culture. the acceptance of cute culture in the usa was a result of the popularisation of an exaggerated girl-next-door beauty, the cultural prolonging of childhood and the introduction of anime to a new generation. along with legno’s cute creatures, his women with japanese faces and supermodel bodies symbolise the melding of western popular beauty and cute culture. just as european migration changed the us movie industry’s s image of american beauty in the 1930s, japanese pop culture, along with global television and the internet, are producing new images of cultural hybridisation. legno’s representation of japanese women, then, is not really japanese. what he produces, reinforces and complicates is a stereotype of the west’s image of the japanese woman with long straight black hair and slanted eyes. few japanese artists, in manga or fine art, would paint a japanese woman’s face and body in the manner of legno. in this paper we do not want to sustain the essentialist myth that pure japanese or italian cultures and identities have been lost in the process of globalisation. more appropriate and interesting is to consider whether or not tokidoki is emblematic of hybridising processes. appadurai argues that ‘the united states is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images, but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 20 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies imaginary landscapes’ (2003: 29). when considered from appadurai’s theoretical perspective, the tokidoki world is one of the many ‘imagined worlds’ that comprise a global space of ‘multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe’ (2003: 31). as we have tried to demonstrate, tokidoki has solid roots in consolidated stereotypes, in national traditions, in local forms of production and distribution, and in the continuous reinvention and commodification of femininity. the ‘national’ is here celebrated from the outside, from a transnational perspective that refuses to engage with national conflicts. if, as morreal argues, cuteness is the feeling of tenderness and affection that the round, soft, vulnerable appearance of whelps produces in adult animals, so that whelps are nourished instead of being killed and eaten (morreal 1991), then cuteness (kawaii, il carino) makes possible the ‘soft’ encounter of (invented) traditions and stereotypes that define different national cultures and identities. considering the statements posed at the beginning of this article, an ironic question could be asked. will italy ever be able to include artistic productions of the intellectual diaspora and global hybridisation, such as legno’s tokidoki, within its national rhetoric and cultural heritage? a more general, and perhaps more important, question is implied. are italian cultural and political institutions ready to reconsider italian cultural traditions and artistic productions from a new perspective, by challenging the imaginary boundaries of the nation? portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 21 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies reference list allison, a. 2003, ‘portable monsters and commodity cuteness: pokémon as japan’s new global power,’ postcolonial studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 381-95. allison, a. 2004. ‘cuteness as japan’s millennial product’ in pikachu’s global adventure: the rise and fall of pokemon, 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artificers of cute femininity in japanese,’ in japanese language, gender, and ideology: cultural models and real people, (eds) portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 22 okayama and ricatti tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies s. okamoto, j. smith and j. s. shibamoto, oxford university press, new york, 148-65. mirzoeff, n. 2000, ‘introduction: the multiple viewpoint: diasporic visual cultures,’ in diaspora and visual culture, (ed.) n. mirzoeff, routledge, london and new york, 1-18. morreal. j. 1991, ‘cuteness,’ british journal of aesthetics, vol. 31, no. 1, january, 39-47. murakami, t. 1999, po+ku art revolution, lecture given at kyoto seika university, 30 september, online, available: http://www.dnp.co.jp/museum/nmp/artscape/topics/9911/murakami/ murakami.html [accessed 11 april 2008]. okayama, e. and shelton, b. 2006, ‘between text and pictures in japan,’ visible language, vol. 40, no. 2, 155-176. okude, n. 1987, ‘amerika bijin no ikoroji: shion no musume kara maririn monro made,’ herumesu, special issue, no. 2, 96-116. pellitteri, m. 2002, mazinga nostalgia: storia, valori e linguaggi della goldrake-generation, king, rome. prasso. s. 2005, the asian mystique: dragon ladies, geisha girls and our fantasies of the exotic orient, public affairs, new york. raffaelli, l. 2005, le anime disegnate: il pensiero nei cartoon da disney ai giapponesi e oltre, minimum fax, rome. ravi, s., goh, l. and rutten, m. 2004, ‘introduction,’ in asia in europe europe in asia, (eds) s. ravi, m. rutten, and b. goh, institute of southeast asian studies, singapore, 1-12. suzuki, t. 2004, otome no himitsu oshiemasu online, available: http://media.excite.co.jp/book/news/topics/111/p05.html [accessed 22 january 2008]. ‘takashi murakami.’ kaikai kiki co. n.d. online. available: http://english.kaikaikiki.co.jp/artists/list/c4 [accessed 22 january 2008]. takashimurakami.com n.d. online. available: http://www.takashimurakami.com/ [accessed 22 january 2008]. topo. 2006, tokidoki. online, available: http://art.commongate.com/post/tokidoki#images [accessed 15 february 2008]. treat, j. 1996, ‘yoshimoto banana writes home: the shōjo in japanese popular culture,’ in contemporary japan and popular culture, (ed.) j. treat, university of hawaii press, honolulu, 275-308. washida, k. 2004, kotoba no kao. chuo koron shinsha, tokyo. yomota, i. 2006, kawaii ron. chikuma shobo, tokyo. žižek, s. & salecl, r. 1991, ‘interview with salvoj žižek and renata salecl,’ radical philosophy, no. 58, 25-31. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 23 the endless reading of an interpretation portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ the endless reading of interpretation? said, auerbach, and the exilic will to criticism guilan siassi, university of california, los angeles in one of his last public appearances less than a year before his death, edward said gave a series of four lectures at cambridge university on the theme of humanism and knowledge.1 having outlined the changing bases of humanistic study and called for a ‘return to philology,’ said devoted his final talk to ‘the example of erich auerbach's mimesis2.’ it is no mere coincidence, in said’s view, that auerbach composed this ‘greatest book of general humanistic practice since world war ii’ (said 2004, 6) during his turkish exile from nazi germany. the figure of auerbach as both exemplary literary scholar and precursor of the ‘public’ intellectual (said 2004) occupied an important and, it seems, increasingly central place in said’s thought over the course of his career, becoming most visible in the latter’s formulation of a new humanism built upon secular criticism and the ‘executive value’ of intellectual exile. indeed, if foucault’s systematic archaeology of knowledge influenced various aspects of said’s critical thinking, auerbach’s humanistic philology informed nearly the whole enterprise of his critical activity. 1 the content of these lectures was recently published under the title humanism and democratic criticism (2004). 2 in this hallmark of comparative literary history, auerbach undertakes a systematic study of the ‘representation of reality’ in a wide array of canonical works from antiquity to modern times. approaching each text, from greek epic to the old testament to the proustian novel, in its original language and with a careful consideration of its broader context, auerbach demonstrates how narrative representations mediate lived relationships to a particular historical reality. ultimately, mimesis serves to show how texts are not only shaped by such historical conditions but also how they encompass interpretive paradigms within which they perform their own idiosyncratic ‘readings’ of that reality. siassi the exilic will to criticism said’s concern with humanism as a viable praxis executed in the service of culturally relevant and, indeed, necessary forms of criticism, gives rise to his occasional reservations about foucault’s theoretical project, whose ‘circularity,’ he fears, leaves little if any room for individual resistance and will.3 in contrast, much of his work serves not merely to delineate, catalogue, and archive various régimes du savoir as part of an impersonal network of power relations and anonymous discourse, but to ‘reveal the dialectic between individual text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his work is a contribution’ (said 1979, 24). in such projects, said shows himself to be far less interested in the deconstruction of culture through critical thought than he is, as we will see, in the reconstruction of humanistic values through critical engagement with the world. to this end, he holds up the model of auerbach to demonstrate how an intellectual must not only unearth cultural artifacts through the reading of texts, but also transform those historical fragments, through an act of synthetic interpretation, into both an artillery for resistance and a tool kit for reparation of the cultural machine. it is in the exercise of a personal ‘interpretive art’ enabling such cultural recuperation and synthesis that said brings his own worldly and historical situation, his humanism, and his exilic subjectivity and agency into dialogue with his intellectual forebear. * * * * * perhaps the most appropriate starting point for an inquiry into the nature of said’s transhistorical dialogue with auerbach is his 1969 translation of the latter’s essay, philology and weltliteratur, first published seventeen years earlier. as said points out in his preface, the title of this essay suggests the intersection of humanism and historicism in the domain of comparative literary studies. auerbach alludes to the 3 despite his admittedly large debt to foucault, said does not hesitate to critique and revise the more cynical aspects of the latter’s thought, particularly those emphasizing the inevitable determinism of social life. the divergence of said’s thought from foucault’s theory of authorless production and circulation of knowledge, for instance, is evident throughout his writings; even in as early a text as orientalism, he affirms that an ‘otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like orientalism’ nonetheless carries the determining imprint of individual writers (1979, 23). more explicitly, in his essay, ‘travelling theory,’ said critiques the self-enclosure of foucault’s archeologies, insofar as they ‘make not even a nominal portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 2 siassi the exilic will to criticism goethean ideal of a ‘world literature’ which aims to give expression the common goals and aspirations of humanity, tying this vision to the pedagogical orientation of german romance philology, whose rigorous methodologies inaugurated the practice of historicism (auerbach 1969, 1). in this vein, auerbach advocates a historicist humanism that seeks to penetrate and evaluate weltliteratur so that an ‘inner history…of mankind achieving self-expression’—what he calls ‘our myth’—could be written (4-5). however, auerbach is also very much aware of his own historical moment as ‘a period of conclusive change’ faced with a ‘mighty and rapid’ process of leveling and concentration that imposes uniformity upon cultures. though admitting that the new circumstances have made it more difficult than ever to engage meaningfully in a critical activity whose goal is to trace man’s ‘advance to consciousness of his human condition and to the realization of his given potential’ (5), auerbach does not believe that such humanistic aims have become altogether superfluous in the modern age. thus, he argues, while such goals should by no means be abandoned, their priority must nonetheless be reconsidered. when an ‘ahistorical system of education’ not only threatens to impoverish society but also ‘lays claim to dominating us’ (6), the philologist’s first duty, auerbach writes, is to counter its representations by revealing our historical contingency and by demonstrating that the history of the present moment determines not only who we are, but also what we can become. auerbach writes that the goethean concept of weltliteratur and its philology, with its vision of ‘a spiritual exchange between peoples’ (6) is no longer tenable in the modern environment; that any such exchange between cultures not already bound together politically would have little effect on culture or on the ‘reconciliation of peoples’ as such. in light of these changes, the goal of philology can no longer be a spiritual aim of ‘designating man’s place in the universe,’ but only a secular and social one of making men conscious in their own history (16-17). advocating this new conception of weltliteratur as the ‘diverse background of a common fate,’ and accepting the standardization of world culture as an inevitable fact, allowance for emergent movements, and none for revolutions, counter-hegemony, or historical blocks’ (said portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 3 siassi the exilic will to criticism auerbach holds that the philologist should facilitate a cultural dialogue between two partners brought together ‘in the terminal phases of their fruitful multiplicity,’ through political developments. the philologist should render and articulate precisely the ‘fateful coalescence’ of those two cultures in such a way that the story of their merging will become ‘their myth’ (7). this account, if anything like the universal, spiritual ‘myth’ auerbach describes earlier in the essay, would also relate ‘the research of reality which fills and rules our life’ (4). for the most part, auerbach remains reticent in his scholarly work about strictly political concerns. still, the fact that he was a jewish exile from germany writing mimesis at the height of the holocaust cannot be ignored. as such, the work can be, and has been, read for its broader political implications, for instance, as an engaged response to the crisis of european civilization that culminated in world war ii, or more specifically as an interpretation of humanistic realism meant to expose nazi ideology as legend and thus oppose the literature of totalitarianism. while we may discern in auerbach’s work a general criticism, tinged with nostalgia, of the modern cultural and political state of affairs, and a call (albeit one that remains either implicit or muted in its explicitness) for change, auerbach himself seems to entertain little hope that his philological activity can have any immediate political impact. in fact, he appears uncertain as to whether this objective—to evoke a political response—should even be the central aim of weltliteratur and philology at all. that is, on one hand, auerbach recognizes the need for critical work committed to immediate political objectives, and on the other hand, sees this new critical imperative as a meager auxiliary, and even a degradation of the old goethean ideal of a philology promoting human spiritual advance. he seems to find a compromise between these worldly and spiritual poles in a humanism that sets interpersonal understanding, cultural exchange, and individual selfawareness within history as its ultimate goal. indeed, the closest auerbach comes to expressing a political agenda is when he acknowledges his aim to achieve ‘an insight into the diverse implications of a process 1983, p. 246). portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 4 siassi the exilic will to criticism from which we stem and in which we participate, a definition of our present situation and also perhaps of the possibilities for the immediate future’ (quoted in green 1982, 12). however, stipulating that such an insight could be gained only in the most favorable of circumstances, he goes on to describe not these current-day and future political ramifications of the historical process, but rather a personal reflexivity and self-refinement to which philological criticism gives rise and which, he seems to believe, is its only certain function: ‘in any event, such a method compels us to look within ourselves and to set forth our consciousness of ourselves here and now, in all its wealth and limitations’ (12). thus, although auerbach acknowledges the broader humanistic import of philology and designates the critic’s work as a task specific to his time, his theoretical reflections do not carry the explicit claim of political agency that we will find, one generation later, in the work of his greatest admirer and champion. * * * * * evoking auerbach, said offers a significantly revised view of the critical project in his celebrated essay, ‘secular criticism.’ as auerbach voiced his disquiet over the processes of ‘concentration’ and homogenization of culture, said also begins this essay with a concerned reflection on the practice of high culture in the modern era which, he argues, has been marginal to the serious political concerns of society. emphasizing the immediate relevance of comparative literary criticism to the exigencies of contemporary social life, he describes the critic as an opponent of the hegemony, an agent of resistance and radical reform ‘allied to contesting classes, movements, and values’ who produces ‘non-coercive knowledge in the interests of human freedom’ (said 1983, 15). putting into practice this concept of ‘secular criticism’ in his essays, said ‘affirms the connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life, politics, societies, and events.’ it is precisely such ‘realities of power and authority—as well as the resistances offered by men, women, and social movements’ that, he claims, ‘make texts possible, deliver them to their readers, [and] solicit the attention of critics’ (5). indebted as he is (despite their differences) to foucault, said also holds that any claims about the universal, spiritual value of cultural production and consumption are invalid portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 5 siassi the exilic will to criticism so long as we naïvely view ‘the cultural realm and its expertise [as] institutionally divorced from their real connections with power’ (2). said has in mind here the ‘camouflaging of the cultural world’ facilitated by a kind of high humanism—from which even the goethean model is not exempt—that would exonerate anyone ‘cultured’ from charges of political corruption and irresponsibility. there is no reason to believe, said insists, that one who reads and presumably appreciates humanistic literature in the realm of culture—like the nazi who read rilke while giving orders of genocide—can not carry out the most anti-humanistic practices, and even become a ‘cold-blooded butcher’ in the realm of politics (3). in his insistence that the secular critic must mobilize his powers of interpretation as an act of resistance to the hegemonic culture, said promotes a new humanism to replace the vision propounded in the nineteenth century by imperialists and complicit intellectuals alike.4 said understands culture as ‘an environment, process and hegemony in which individuals (in their private circumstances) and their works are embedded’ (8). because culture is consecrated by the state and assimilated to its authority, it is overseen at both the top, by the so-called superstructure, and at the base, by the methodological attitudes governing how individuals may interpret that cultural world or produce new knowledge within it. the power of a state-sanctioned culture, according to said, lies in its ability to differentiate not only between itself and its ‘outside’ but also between that which is or is not valuable within itself. discriminating both within and beyond its domain, the hegemonic culture appropriates ‘the entire matrix of meanings we associate with ‘home,’ belonging, and community’ (11). in light of these observations, said not only resists and challenges a cultural system of values which dominates from above and saturates downward to the material base of society but, in his resistance also refuses the proprietary process involved in ‘belonging to’ a culture or assuming a cultural identity. it is in the context of this political materiality of culture that he lays out his schema of the possibilities of resistance and agency for the worldly-situated intellectual who engages in secular criticism. 4 such a vision is perhaps exemplified by matthew arnold’s culture and anarchy, to which said’s culture and imperialism has been read as a response. portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 6 siassi the exilic will to criticism said notes that ‘in the transmission and persistence of a culture, there is a continual process of reinforcement.’ that is, because all forms of discourse rely on the authority of culture, the expression of opinions from a position of power and the translation of those opinions into political acts tend merely to ‘validate the culture to itself.’ the dominant culture assumes greater authority through its associations with national identity and the state, through its institutions or ‘external forms and assertions of itself,’ and most importantly, through its ‘vindicated power as victor over everything not itself.’ consequently, the state and the related ideological apparatuses to which the power of culture is assimilated, ‘tend to be successful in enforcing their hegemony’ (1314). but, said points out, in spite of this rather depressing state of affairs—or perhaps because of it—resistance to cultural pressures by individuals and groups, has been present from time immemorial. said provides macaulay’s minute of 1835 as an example of a case or cultural precedent by which ‘superiority and power are lodged in a rhetoric of belonging, or being ‘at home’… and in a rhetoric of administration’ (13). in showing how an individual can exploit and re-interpret the authority of culture so as to justify an act of colonial subjugation, said locates agency in an act of reading (macaulay’s expressing his ‘opinion’) situated strategically and instrumentally within the rhetorical power of culture (a locus where ‘opinion’ translates into a ‘decision’ to act). however, said implies that this agency is not restricted solely to imperialists whose power derives from the hegemonic culture, its nationalist discourse, and its rhetoric of belonging and ‘home.’ rather, the performative speech act, when uttered by any ‘individual consciousness placed at a sensitive nodal point’ (15), becomes the point of departure, or ‘beginning,’ from which one executes his or her intentions, critically and methodically, in the world. * * * * * just as the reader begins to wonder by what mechanism the critic can gain access to this decisive point, this position of discursive power, said reminds us in one evocative word: auerbach (16). it is no accident that said’s overture to his radical reversal of portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 7 siassi the exilic will to criticism arnoldian humanism and his revision of foucauldian cultural criticism is none other than an account of the circumstances under which mimesis was composed and the ‘executive value of exile, which auerbach was able to turn into effective use’ (8). for said, auerbach is the icon of exile, a critical consciousness situated in a liminal space. in this figure, he sees a man whose continual discomfort opens up his vision and affords him a certain mobility of thought; a subjectivity which, by virtue of its threshold position, is capable of passing back and forth between two worlds. when said asserts that distance from his national home made possible auerbach’s undertaking and enabled his ‘concrete critical recovery of europe’ (16), he views this possibility of writing differently than auerbach himself admitted or even imagined.5 said links the writing of mimesis not just to the physical inaccessibility of a surfeit of material, but to its author’s psychological dissociation from the cultural paradigms to which any interpretive act belongs. said insists that more important than this academic isolation, which allowed auerbach to write his philological interpretations without inhibition, was his cultural alienation and the corresponding exilic perspective, which permitted him to read literary history anew. thus, it was exile in the first instance that inspired unique and powerful critical insights and consequently enabled a significant act of cultural recuperation. said is intent on showing that the exile’s critical recovery of this cultural mythos or ‘home’ is not only a personal recuperation—a psychic repairing of one’s own fractured self-consciousness—but indeed a concrete political act: an infinitesimal but still meaningful restructuring and reconstruction of the fragmented world. he stresses that the critical consciousness is an isolated voice out of place in its social world ‘but very much of that place’ and of the literal body it inhabits. standing for a ‘professedly universal or humane set of values’ it is ‘not by any means an escape’ from the world. (said 1983, 15-16). however, the oppositional critic must straddle the line between 5 auerbach explains that his exile in istanbul, which required him to dispense with scholarly materials, may have led to some oversights in his research on the one hand, but that it may just as well have been responsible for the success of his undertaking on the other: ‘it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library. if it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, i might never have reached the point of writing’ (557). portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 8 siassi the exilic will to criticism inside and outside, metropolis and periphery and refuse all binding affiliations that would limit his or her ability to move freely between the two spaces. he elaborates on the political potential of this ‘ascetic code of willed homelessness’ in rather specific terms. far from being restricted to the physically displaced, the exilic perspective depends more on a degree of intellectual ex-centricity acquired through historical knowledge and humanistic learning. such a ‘worldly self-situating’ enables ‘a sensitive response to the dominant culture’ whereby the individual consciousness can introduce ‘circumstance and distinction where there had only been conformity and belonging’ (15). the individual who stands at a critical distance from the culture troubles the ‘quasi-religious authority of being comfortably at home among one’s people, supported by known powers and acceptable values, protected against the outside world’ (16). in this way, the exilic mode, as janmohamed points out, is an ambiguous border crossing and a constant shifting back and forth, that elucidates ‘the politics of cultural construction of subjects and how the latter can begin to break free from their indigenous formation’ (janmohamed 1992, 99). we may couch this notion of exile as a tactical position in neo-foucauldian language: the intellectual ‘subject’ of the cultural system depends for his authority upon the power relations governing its regimes du savoir—depends on them even in his opposition to them, in order to be heard as a legitimate dispenser of new knowledge. that is, since the sphere of knowledge to which the intellectual speaks is constituted by the power of culture, any claims falling outside of it would lack authority: said understands that were he to locate himself definitively outside of this dominant culture, his position would appear, by definition, illegitimate. thus, by refusing to assume any positive identity in his opposition, by refusing to define himself in any terms other than that of an ‘ironic’ difference6 from the hegemony itself, he remains within the sphere of recognized power and does not forfeit his authority. he can thus mediate, 6 said describes the irony of a criticism that is constitutively opposed to all reified, totalizing identities in the following terms: ‘if criticism is reducible neither to a doctrine nor to a political position on a particular question, and if it is to be in the world and self-aware simultaneously, then its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of thought or of method…. criticism is most itself and, if the paradox can be tolerated, most unlike itself at the moment it starts turning into organized dogma’ (wtc, 29). portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 9 siassi the exilic will to criticism contrapuntally, between the outside and the inside, the metropolis and the periphery, the hegemonic and the subaltern. as robbins points out, exile in this sense becomes an inversion and redefinition of authority that entails ‘a recomposition of cultural capital’ (34) and a redistribution of knowledge in the economy of cultural resources. still, if said views exile at the political level, as a potential site of creativity and cultural re-appropriation, he never doubts that at the level of personal experience, it is little more than a ‘condition of terminal loss’ (said 2002a, 173). reading this loss into literary representations and interpretations in the world, the text, and the critic, said further elaborates his dialogical position with respect to auerbach. in keeping with his view that exile is not only a physical condition but also a state of mind, said universalizes his personal sense of dispossession; that is, he tacitly compares the loss of home suffered by the exile to a general condition of psychological ‘homelessness’ in human experience and cultural life in the modern era. he expands on this idea by delineating various ‘failures of the generative impulse’ (said 1983, 16), and by critiquing the resultant affiliative modes by which we respond to such filiative loss. in doing so, he offers a response to the critical imperative auerbach outlines in ‘philology and weltliteratur’: a call for the philologist/critic to trace, preserve, and indeed shape— through interpretation—the ‘inner dream’ of mankind as a spectacular production of our historical unraveling. auerbach’s sense of urgency in this regard is clear: the loss of such a spectacle—whose appearance is thoroughly dependent on presentation and interpretation—would be an impoverishment for which there can be no possible compensation. to be sure, only those who have not totally sustained this loss would be aware of privation. even so, we must do everything within our power to prevent so grievous a loss (auerbach 1969, 5). thus, the fear auerbach articulates here in terms of the loss of this inner dream, said addresses in terms of another kind of loss: namely that of exile. indeed, he suggests that the only way to avoid losing this ‘spectacle’ of our historical becoming is, ironically, to approach it from our own inherent—though largely unacknowledged or disavowed— condition of exile in the modern world. said elaborates this notion of exile as a uniquely modern critical orientation within a schema of dispossession, mourning, and palliative reparation of ‘home’: the exilic portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 10 siassi the exilic will to criticism perspective is both a symptomatic and a strategic response to the breakdown of what said calls genealogical bonds of filiation within modernity, a modified world view resulting from such inevitable losses and yet one which allows us to construct in their place surrogate relations of affiliation through which the very meaning of ‘home’ is redefined. indeed, modern literary and cultural representations attest to the problematic and universally-fraught nature of such ‘vertical’ human relationships based on direct genealogical descent and suggest the impossibility of any natural continuity between people ostensibly bound together by patrimony, class, nation, or other fruits of inheritance and ‘heritage.’ this perceived failure necessitates ‘new and different ways of conceiving human relationships’ (said 1983, 17), and gives rise to a compensatory order of ‘horizontal’ affiliations, which come in the form of partisan and institutional allegiances, sets of cultural values or religious beliefs, and other ideologies or ‘worldvisions’ (a negative example of which is orientalism). affiliations are constructs of mind which serve as a ‘general system of brakes that restrains the always accelerating irrationality of human behavior’ (112), putting in check our natural tendency to destroy filiative bonds.7 thus, as an alternative to impossible natural relationships, affiliations substitute social bonds for generational family ties and thus ‘preserve the human race… making certain that human history continues by repeating itself according to a certain fixed course of events’ (said 1983, 112). at the same time, such affiliations allow for intellectual freedom and enable originality, which according to said is a type of loss in its primal sense (133). indeed, it is the cooperation between filiation and affiliation, said asserts, that lies at the heart of critical consciousness (16). the example of auerbach demonstrates this point: by substituting a relationship of affiliation with the cultural history of europe for his destroyed sense of filiation with the modern nation of germany, auerbach recovered the inner dream of his lost world and reconstituted it as a 7 in his essay, ‘on repetition,’ said makes this point explicit by giving the example of sexual desire and its thwarting by institutions: ‘intentionally, in an unmediated and wholly natural way, filiation gives rise not only to conflict but is driven by a desire to exterminate what has been engendered, the abandonment of offspring. unintentionally however, [as a result of affiliative constructs], the opposite takes place: marriage as an institution is established, offspring and parents become bound by it’ (118). portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 11 siassi the exilic will to criticism modern-day ‘myth’—an interpretation ascribing causal meanings and imparting historical, or at least aesthetic, coherence to a traumatic experience or event. auerbach’s filiative loss and the affiliative alternative he adopted enabled his unique interpretive synthesis: the construction of a narrative relating the ‘fateful coalescence’ of the worlds and peoples he saw to be approaching the end of their ‘fruitful multiplicity.’ directing his critical will to tracing historical processes and sketching patterns without advancing any rigid, totalizing theory, auerbach could produce a dialectical, dramatic narrative (as opposed to a static vision) of european civilization. * * * * * but why is now the time for us to reconsider and learn from the example of auerbach’s mimesis? because while affiliation remains the most viable alternative to conceiving human relationships in the modern world, it has also come to pose major problems to the socio-cultural order. said points out that as natural bonds and forms of authority become transpersonal, affiliation comes to resemble a cultural system with its own hierarchy and totalizing world-view, and ‘the process reproduces the filiative discipline supposedly transcended’ (said 1983, 21). in other words, ‘for the first time the compensatory affiliative relationships interpreted during the academic course of study in the western university actually exclude more than they include’ (21). this degradation is evidenced by two trends: the critic’s coalition with the hegemony of culture (in the guise of traditional humanism) on one hand, and his betrothal to philosophical, theoretical systems on the other. both critical systems merely duplicate the tightly knit family structure that secures generational hierarchical relationships and ‘succumb to the inherently representative and reproductive relationship between a dominant culture and the domain it rules’ (24). with its alliance to cultural dogma that expresses a ‘barely sublimated’ ethnocentrism and nationalism, and with its ahistorical retreat into textuality, criticism merely perpetuates a ‘quasi-religious quietism.’ in other words, it becomes ‘unworldly.’ in this vein, said warns us of the irrelevance of criticism to modern social, cultural, and political experience, the danger of its ‘enormous complaisance’ in both its public portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 12 siassi the exilic will to criticism affirmation of ‘our culture’ and in its private unleashing of ‘the unrestrained interpretation of a universe defined in advance as the endless misreading of a misinterpretation’ (25). here, said emphatically asserts his constitutional opposition to such hermeneutical enclosures—what he views as socially irresponsible, antihumanistic modes of reading and interpretation. the example of mimesis serves to demonstrate an alternative to the blind allegiances of such affiliations, which merely reinstate vestiges of traditional patriarchal authority in a new hermetic system. that is, auerbach teaches us how an exilic will to criticism—the product of an organic loss— can partake in affiliative recuperations of ‘home’ without falling into the filiative trap. said believes that history and literature are not ‘inert bodies of experience’ but two terms ‘mediated by the critical consciousness, the mind of the individual reader and critic,’ whose critical agency—namely, interpretation—supplies the ‘missing middle term’ which connects the two (said 2002b, 457). said uses the example of mimesis as a platform upon which to bring this idea into contrapuntal relief. it is telling that the conceptual thread tying the essays of mimesis together is auerbach’s view that the ‘figural’ method of interpretation8 formed the basis of realism and left its defining mark on western literature from earliest times to the modern period. with this thesis, auerbach not only emphasizes a historicist understanding of literature but, by showing how the conceptual framework of classical antiquity and the interpretive framework of biblical tradition together determined the kinds of representations produced in european culture, also points out the primacy, in shaping cultural history, of interpretation itself. auerbach narrates his synthetic mythos of human history by tracing literary representations of reality—human pasts and presents—as signs pre-figuring their ‘fulfillment,’ embodying emergent meanings, or bearing a significance to be revealed. 8 this hermeneutical method was based on a form of scriptural exegesis that reached its culmination in the middle ages. projecting an essentially allegorical operation, figural interpretation attempts to decode the hidden moral and anagogical levels of meaning in the old testament by reading that text as a pre-figuration of truths contained in the new testament (i.e. as a foretelling of the life of christ, as an elaboration of christian doctrine, or as an allusion to the larger eschatological promise of the religion as a whole). figural interpretation is thus the basis for any hermeneutical mode whereby a text is read according to a particular theological or ideological ‘master narrative.’ portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 13 siassi the exilic will to criticism he shows how the dialectical relation of two literary traditions—those of classical antiquity and those of the old testament—shaped the representational and hermeneutical aesthetic of his culture. while the former contain ‘no secret second meaning,’ biblical narratives are mysterious, ‘fraught with background.’ they thus demand ‘investigation and interpretation’ and hold out the promise of revealing the ‘truth’ of the reader’s worldly situation, of showing him to be ‘an ingredient of the divine plan’ (auerbach 1953, 16). consequently, a method of interpretation which sees everything that happens in the world as an element in the narrative structure of universal history, could claim absolute authority and spread to other traditions: ‘interpretation in a determined direction becomes a general method of comprehending reality’ (16). this idea, the ansatspunkt, as it seems, of auerbach’s philological undertaking, has further implications: that cultural development is intricately tied to schematic hermeneutical conceptions or ‘readings’; and that more importantly, it is bound to a general critical will. in other words, auerbach shows how a particular style of representation evolved in response to an existing will to interpretation—one which sought to make immanent the meanings it believed latent in worldly history. thus, the concept of figura was in essence auerbach’s re-reading of a history of interpretation as represented in realistic literature. auerbach writes that the ‘order and the interpretation of life’ is to be discerned in the thoughts, consciousness, and ‘in a more concealed form,’ in the words and actions of individuals: for there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own self. we are constantly endeavoring to give meaning and order to our lives in the past, the present, and the future, to our surroundings, the world in which we live; with the result that our lives appear in our own conception as total entitities—which to be sure are always changing…. (auerbach 1953, 549). the overlapping, complementing, and contradictions of such formulations of the world ‘yield something that we might call a synthesized cosmic view or at least a challenge to the reader’s will to interpretive synthesis’ (auerbach 1953, 549). though subject to revision and expansion, such an act of interpretive synthesis reflects one’s unique critical style and is in this sense a ‘personal art’ in its own right: a product of personal portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 14 siassi the exilic will to criticism intuition which carries nonetheless the possibility of ‘centrifugal radiation’ from the ‘circumscribed set of phenomena’ it comprehends (auerbach 1969, 15). it is in this way that the critic writes a history-from-within against a broader background—a myth that is at once enduring, unified, and perhaps even universal. it is this emphasis on interpretation in auerbach’s philology that seems to have influenced said most as he undertook his own readings of ‘western’ history and culture. indeed, at the most fundamental level, said’s orientalism is an account of how a will to interpretation (primarily religious and political) set in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of ‘orientalist’ representations. but in contrast to auerbach, whose interpretation of literary representations and historical events traced the cultural development of europe in terms of its inherited identity (greco-roman and judeo-christian), said’ synthetic analysis traces this development in terms of its exploited alterity (oriental and muslim). thus, through a contrapuntal reading from his own exilic perspective, said offers an alternative description of a world ‘unified in its multiplicity,’ a counter-narrative of what auerbach calls the ‘inner history’ of western culture. weaving his own notion of loss into the fabric of dialogical critique, said further expands and revises his forebear’s instructions for advancing humanistic goals through critical engagement in the world. for said, the ‘inner dream of mankind’ unfolding in literary representations of human experience, is to be interpreted by the well-trained critic as a collective consciousness not only sedimented in historical time but also scattered throughout exilic space. my interest in auerbach’s method… unlocked the system of correspondences between history and literature that is the cornerstone of a whole tradition regarding temporality as both the repository of human experience… as well as the mode of understanding by which historical reality can be comprehended (said 2002b, 457). but while auerbach’s philological activity was based on a temporal approach, said affirms that a hermeneutical technique mapping the movements and migrations of representational discourse—a literary topography—is now equally necessary. that is, the ‘system of correspondences’ said describes above can be gleaned through an interpretive mode of mediating time or—and this becomes the emphasis of exilic portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 15 siassi the exilic will to criticism criticism—a mode of mediating space. indeed, though an interpretive discipline grounded in temporality is still essential, in the age of globalization, spatiality must be regarded as a substantial ‘repository of human experience’ and hermeneutical mode by which we can comprehend historical reality as well. * * * * * said opens his ‘introduction’ to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of mimesis with the following quote from gabriel garcia marquez: …human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them to give birth to themselves. this epigraph in many ways summarizes the intersection of said’s reading of auerbach, his concept of filiation and affiliation, and his notion of exilic criticism. it suggests that writing, both creative and critical, is a perpetual accouchement—a ‘kind of self-making within the context of the specific dynamics of society at a very precise moment in its development’ (said 2003, xiii). for said, auerbach serves as a model of the critic situated psychologically and intersubjectively in the world, who like said himself, enacts the personal drama of being expelled from ‘home’ and of his endless quest to make a new home for himself—or rather, to remake himself within the rented space of his writing—through cultural critique. it is thus that the relationship of said, the readercritic, with auerbach’s text and indeed with auerbach-as-text becomes a ‘sympathetic dialogue of two spirits across ages and cultures’ (xiv). within this transhistorical exchange, the dialectical shifting in cultural space between filiative and affiliative processes that said delineates in modern culture is comparable— and in many ways a response—to the backwards and forwards oscillation of literary representations in historical time that auerbach plots in mimesis. said sees these representations as the mediatory methods and optics through which individuals, situated in a particular cultural space and historical moment, view and articulate reality. moreover, he asserts, whether they take the form of creative writings or interpretive readings, they play an important role in shaping human history and society: portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 16 siassi the exilic will to criticism the ‘representation’ of reality is taken by auerbach to mean an active dramatic presentation of how each author actually realizes, brings characters to life, and clarifies his or her own world…. [auerbach], in turn re-realizes and interprets and, in his unassuming way, even seems to be staging the transmutation of a coarse reality into language and new life (said 2003, xx). can we not see this transmutation as an effort to recuperate the loss of his filiative home and redeem it for a more broadly human affiliation with the world? as said writes, mimesis is the emblem of such a ‘recuperative and redemptive human project,’ through which auerbach could reconstruct the history of his own time (said 2003, xxxi). it is, said emphatically affirms, the impossibility of finding a home—either in inherited filiations or adopted affiliations—that leads one to remain precariously wedged in marginal spaces and to assume a critical perspective between ‘culture and system.’ like auerbach, he aspires to resemble the ‘perfect man’ of hugo of st. victor, one who finds virtue in changing ‘invisible and transitory things’—worldly attachments, filiations and affiliations—only to thereupon ‘leave them behind altogether.’ (said 2002, 185). it is this homelessness, this orphanhood, that said believes, leads the exilic writer to construct in his text a temporary shelter—a house that is conducive to perpetual self-creation and personal growth. but, when the exilic writer finally reaches this ‘perfect’ state of seeing the entire world ‘as a foreign land,’ a ‘need to rewrite and redo’ renders his text ‘uninhabitable’ and reveals his situation to be, ironically, all the more appropriate. quoting adorno, said points out, ‘in the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.’ clearly, more than the ‘proprietary solidity of permanent ownership,’ said values this sense of the ‘provisional and contingent’—an inconclusiveness which, he concludes, is nonetheless preferable to the ‘sleep of selfsatisfaction and the finality of death’ (said 2002c, 568). had auerbach not been driven from his german home in 1935, would he have felt the same urgency to reread the cultural history of western civilization? had said not been forced to leave the land to which some of auerbach’s fellow exiles laid claim, would he have gained access to the exilic space and critical perspective from which he could do the same? obviously, this is a rhetorical question. but in the answers we carve into its blank spaces, against the backdrop of its hypothetical time, we may perhaps find— albeit for only a fleeting moment—our own historical and cultural ‘homes.’ portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 17 siassi the exilic will to criticism reference list auerbach, e. (1953), mimesis: the representation of reality in western literature, princeton university press, princeton. ———(1969), philology and weltliteratur. the centennial review, xiii (winter), 117. green, g. (1982), literary criticism and the structures of history: erich auerbach and leo spitzer, university of nebraska press, lincoln. janmohamed, a. r. (1992), worldniness-without-world, homelessness-as-home: toward a definition of the specular border intellectual, in edward said: a critical reader, ed. m. sprinker, blackwell, oxford and cambridge mass. robbins, b. (1994), secularism, elitism, progress and other transgressions: on edward said's 'voyage,’ social text, 40 (autumn), 25-37. said, e. w. (1979) orientalism, vintage books, new york. ———(1983), the world, the text, and the critic, harvard university press, cambridge. ———(2002a), reflections on exile, in reflections on exile and other essays, ed. e.w. said, harvard university press, cambridge, mass, 173-186. ———(2002b) history, literature, and geography, in reflections on exile and other essays, ed. e.w. said, harvard university press, cambridge, mass, 453-473. ———(2002c), between worlds, in reflections on exile and other essays, ed. e.w. said, harvard university press, cambridge, mass, 554-568. ———(2003), introduction to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of mimesis, ed. e auerbach, princeton university press, princeton, x-xxxii. ———(2004) humanism and democratic criticism, columbia university press, new york. portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 18 guilan siassi, university of california, los angeles portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: wang, p. 2021. struggle with multiple pandemics: women, the elderly and asian ethnic minorities during the covid-19 pandemic. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 14–22. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i12.7400 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay struggle with multiple pandemics: women, the elderly and asian ethnic minorities during the covid-19 pandemic pan wang corresponding author: dr pan wang, senior lecturer in chinese and asian studies, faculty of arts & social sciences, university of new south wales, sydney nsw 2052, australia. pan.wang@unsw.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7400 article history: received 01/09/2020; accepted 03/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract the covid-19 pandemic resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths in the first six months of 2020. it also exposed and led to increases in the inequalities that exist worldwide. this paper draws attention to the prejudices and biases toward three vulnerable social groups— women, the elderly and asian ethnic minorities during the crisis. it shows that while women ‘held up more than half of the sky’ both inside and outside the house, they struggled against rising domestic violence and various forms of sexism. the elderly, the most at risk of infection, are being ‘abandoned,’ ‘abused’ or ‘obliged’ to sacrifice themselves to the capitalist market economy. ethnic minorities, especially asian/chinese immigrants in western countries have been subjected to racial stereotypes in their everyday life. although the coronavirus will disappear, the ‘shadow’ of the pandemic will undoubtedly remain unless we rebuild solidarity and work together to reflect, reconcile and redress the inequalities entrenched in our societies. keywords covid-19; pandemic; inequality; gender; ageism; racism the 2020 year of the rat has led the world into a dark tunnel— a lethal coronavirus called covid-19 detected in wuhan, china in december 2019, swept across all six continents within six months from asia to europe, north america, south america, the middle east, declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 14 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7400 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7400 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7400 mailto:pan.wang%40unsw.edu.au?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7400 africa and oceania. by 31 august it had infected more than 25 million people and killed 844,312 in 213 countries, areas and territories, leaving antarctica the only continent free from the disease (who 2020). the pandemic also shattered the world economy, increased the political division between countries, disrupted the social order and amplified the long-standing inequalities embedded in the social, political and economic systems of our societies, marked by heightened gender inequality, ageism and racism in many countries and territories around the globe. in this article i draw on examples from the west and the asiapacific to show that such inequalities have caused a severe impact on women, the elderly and asian ethnic minorities. uneven division of labour, domestic violence and sexism: gendered impacts on women women have held up more than ‘half of the sky’ both inside and outside the house during the covid-19 pandemic. un women’s statistics show that 70 per cent of frontline workers in the health and social sector are women, including nurses, midwives, cleaners and laundry workers (un women 2020a). in hubei province, the original epicentre of the crisis in china, more than 90 percent of the frontline healthcare workers are women (un women 2020b). in the americas, 86 percent of nurses are women; in europe, 84 percent; in south-east asia, 79 percent; in western pacific, 81 percent; and in africa, 65 percent (who 2019: 3). women thus face a greater risk of catching the coronavirus. meanwhile, women undertake 75 percent of unpaid care and domestic work in households and communities every day (un women 2016). this is an average of 4.1 hours of unpaid care and domestic work per day compared to 1.7 hours for men (un women 2020c). since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, different countries have imposed mandatory lockdowns, leading to the closure of schools, nurseries, care centres and other relevant services. as a result, the economy has shifted from paid to unpaid work (lewis 2020). although the crisis has in many instances prompted men to help with household duties, women’s household burden has increased (un women 2020d: 12). the covid caregivers survey conducted by the boston consulting group from 20 march to 3 april 2020 shows that, among the 3,000 working parents in the us, the uk, italy, germany and france, women spend an average of 15 hours more on unpaid chores than men every week (krentz et al. 2020). in the asiapacific, the international labour organization (ilo) found that women spend an average of 4.1 hours more on unpaid domestic labour than men on a regular day during the crisis. this figure can increase to 11 hours in some countries (mercado, naciri & mishra 2020). given it is a common practice in the asiapacific region for older people to live with their children, women are expected to provide adult care as well (un women 2020e). the gendered division of labour highlights the inequalities between men and women within households— the ‘free labour’ devoted by women is ‘invisible’— unpaid and uncounted in the gdp. this invalidates ‘women’s essential contributions to social and community life’ and contributes to the reproduction of gender inequality in everyday life (erickson 2005: 338). it also exposes the structural inequalities in the labour market, as most women work in sectors that are hardest hit by the pandemic, including hospitality, leisure, retail and tourism. with many working part-time, having lower skilled positions and/or being paid less than men, they are more likely to lose their jobs during workplace changes. the situation is even worse for women of colour in the usa. black women, for example, are twice as likely as white men to report financial issues such as being laid off, furloughed, or receive pay cuts (leanin.org & surveymonkey 2020). ironically, women’s informal work/hourly employment is typically the result of their existing childcare and family responsibilities. there are thus fewer educational and skill development opportunities available to women compared to men. wang portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202115 the crisis has simultaneously amplified the global issue of domestic violence. many european countries such as france, spain, germany and the uk have reported surging cases of domestic violence during the lockdown. hans kluge, director of who’s european region, said the emergency calls made by women subjected to violence by their intimate partners had increased up to 60 percent in europe in april 2020, compared to the same period the year before (un 2020a). the situation was no better in the asia-pacific. in singapore, the association of women for action and research (aware) women’s helpline recorded a 33 percent increase in calls related to family violence in february compared with the same period the year before (elangovan 2020). in thailand, domestic violence cases almost doubled between february and april (handley 2020). in australia, the number of domestic and family violence victims seeking urgent assistance reportedly surged by 10 percent since the country’s lockdown in march 2020. this prompted the government to inject aud $150 million to boost services tackling domestic violence (cormack 2020). also, there was an increase of 75 percent in the number of google searches relating to domestic violence since the first coronavirus case was reported (poate 2020). countries including china, india, thailand and indonesia similarly witnessed a staggering rise in domestic violence since their respective quarantines. on the surface, the increase in cases of domestic violence was triggered by women’s long-time exposure to their abusive partners, stress and anxiety caused by various factors such as extended quarantine, financial loss and overloaded domestic duties. to borrow the un’s term, the ‘shadow pandemic’ alludes to the hidden and rampant gender inequalities within households around the globe. such concealed ‘normality,’ however, has been unmasked by the covid-19 pandemic and brought to international attention. such inequalities are ingrained in societies due to various cultural, religious and socio-economic factors. for instance, many women choose to tolerate domestic violence because they see it as normal marital behaviour rather than a social problem (wang 2015: 80– 81). many women are socially and economically dependent on men, and many do not want a divorce as they see divorce as either sinful or inherently wrong. in addition, women’s lack of awareness of legal protection and the unresponsiveness of local authorities to their requests for help can also aggravate such inequality within families. sexism has increased the gendered impacts on women during the lockdowns. under the movement control order (mco), women in malaysia were advised to follow the ‘household happiness’ posters made by the women, family and community development ministry (kpwkm) to ‘groom as usual,’ ensure the home was clean during the pandemic, and to not ‘nag’ their husbands. if things went wrong, they were advised to mimic the voice of doraemon, a japanese cartoon character who speaks with a high-pitched voice, when speaking to their husbands (ng 2020). in china, a sexist document published by education officials in jinan, shandong province on 8 february, suggested that in families with small children in which both parents were employed, women should take the initiative to apply to their employers for stay-at-home childcare during the school term delay (global times 2020). the policies in malaysia and china not only reproduced gender stereotypes but also encroached on the privacy of households. similarly, women scientists from north america and europe claimed that the overarching scientific response to the pandemic has been sexist as women medical professionals (and leaders of colour) involved in covid-19 research/practice have been underrepresented in the media (buckee et al. 2020). this gendered discrepancy in science/academia ultimately reinforces the supremacy of (white) male power in the public health sector and hampers women’s career advancement. overall, as noted by the united nations, this pandemic could undermine decades of advancement on gender equality (un 2020b). ageism: economy over the elderly? it is disheartening that aged care centres became the ‘hotspots’ of the pandemic. according to a statement made by hans kluge from who, older people are at highest risk from covid-19. some 95 percent of covid-19 deaths were among people aged over 60, and more than half of all deaths involved people aged wang portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202116 80 or above (kluge 2020). moreover, older adults tend to have weaker immune systems and are likely to have pre-existing health conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or respiratory illness (sandoiu 2020). these all increase the risk of infection and diminish the chances of surviving the crisis. in addition, older people with dementia or similar forms of cognitive impairment may have difficulty understanding the dangers of infection, forget to follow hygiene rules or safety precautions such as washing hands or maintaining social distance (sandoiu 2020). many, also, have difficulty communicating clearly with others and hence may be unable to receive the help they need. it’s even more disappointing that the pandemic has magnified the problem of elderly abuse and abandonment. such wrongdoings were widespread at the start of the pandemic in europe, prompting italians to name the pandemic the ‘silent massacre’ of the elderly and many families in milan made allegations against nursing homes’ mishandling of the crisis (privitera 2020). in spain, soldiers sent to disinfect nursing homes found elderly residents either abandoned or dead in their beds (bilefsky 2020). in montreal, canada, older residents at a nursing home named residence herron were found ‘dehydrated, unfed for days and lying listless in bed.’ some were covered in excrement, others had fallen to the floor while two deaths had gone unnoticed for days (bilefsky 2020). a similar phenomenon was witnessed in melbourne, australia where many elderly residents were left dead in their beds for up to six hours at epping gardens aged care, while a get-together function was being held by staff (smith 2020). the situation worsened in some countries when policymakers demanded prioritizing the economy over the lives of the elderly and the weak. for example, following us president donald trump’s call to ‘open up the country for business’ in march, texas lieutenant governor dan patrick said in an interview with fox news that ‘we should get back to work,’ suggesting that grandparents like himself should be willing to sacrifice themselves to help the country’s economy (danpatrick.org 2020). in the same month, ukraine’s former health minister illia yemets commented on different occasions that we should ‘calculate how much money we need to allocate for the living people, not for the corpses [people aged over 65],’ adding ‘this virus does not affect children, now all the pensioners will die’ (sorokin 2020). prioritizing the economy is not a focus of a few powerful politicians. on social media including twitter, instagram and facebook, ‘millennials’ used the term ‘boomer remover’ to refer to the coronavirus with reference to the high mortality rate among older people (60+) infected with covid-19. some even used the simpsons cartoon to claim that the virus was the earth’s revenge on the baby boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964 during the post-world war ii baby boom) (godfrey 2020). in japan, a coronavirus cartoon was posted on twitter in march 2020 with the comment ‘hope this achieves earlier.’ it received 71,000 likes and was retweeted 16,000 times (@hashimotoganjia on twitter 21 march 2020). it reveals how the younger workforce in japan feels burdened by the aged population, a problem conveniently solved by the coronavirus as it has helped to remove (or kill) the old. although the offensive term and cartoons used by the millennial generation are by no means representative, they do expose the tensions and division between the two generations triggered by various factors including changing demographics (ageing), deepening economic recession and disputes over issues such as inaction on climate change. meanwhile, older coronavirus patients are further marginalised— doctors in countries such as italy, spain and the uk were confronted by the moral dilemma of deciding who should continue to live when there is a shortage of icu beds and ventilators— the sickest patients or people, usually younger, with greater chance of survival (seegert 2020)? in italy’s worst-hit region, a front-line doctor reportedly said in march that due to the limited number of respirators available, patients over the age of 60 could not be connected to a ventilator, prioritizing instead younger patients (ferguson 2020). in switzerland, the switzerland academy of medical sciences’ guidance for triage decisions stipulates that when no icu beds are available, people over 85 years of age are not to be admitted to the icu (sams 2020: 5). similarly, a letter sent out by a welsh surgery in the uk asking patients to sign the ‘dnacpr’ form [do not attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation] aimed to direct scarce medical resources and emergency services to the young and fit and wang portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202117 away from the old and ill as the former were considered to have a greater chance of surviving. the letter asks mostly old and ill people to agree that ‘in the event of a sudden deterioration in your condition because [of ] covid infection or disease progression the emergency services will not be called and resuscitation attempts to restart your heart or breathing will not be attempted’ (busby 2020). the letter upset many patients and resulted in an apology by the surgery. while the higher number of deaths among older adults highlights the biological vulnerability of the old and ill to the pandemic, it also underlines a series of social and moral issues that are inadequately addressed. these include dysfunction, poor staffing and lack of care in nursing homes and the socially engrained, widespread ageism outlined by butler (1980): 1) prejudice against older adults 2) discrimination against older adults and 3) institutional practices and policies supporting stereotypes and reducing opportunities for older adults. altogether, whether intended or not, these ageist practices may reinforce each other and have harmful effects on the mental and physical health of the senior population. this can also de-personalise vulnerable groups and render them ‘lower-class’ citizens or even lesser human beings. the pandemic has stretched health systems to the verge of collapse. ageism may not only topple the system but also have an impact on solidarity. sinophobia, xenophobia and prejudice: resurrection of the ‘yellow peril’? i am a chinese-australian living in sydney. in april, when a ‘white’ woman shopper saw my friend and i buying two packs of toilet paper in a coles supermarket in my local community, she yelled at us: ‘do not sell it to china!’ when we were about to pay for the groceries at the check-out counter, the operator confiscated one pack and put it underneath her counter. she uttered ‘you two can only purchase one!’ she was supported by the store manager. this incident ended with the coles headquarters issuing an apology to us as the local store violated the policy of ‘one customer one pack’ for the pandemic period (with notices visible throughout the store). the covid-19 pandemic caused a frenzy of toilet paper-buying in australia from march to april. this panic buying led to a shortage of toilet paper and triggered a higher than usual demand for the product. stocks of toilet paper were limited and a source of friction. reflecting on my unpleasant experience at the supermarket, such friction was intertwined with racism and institutionalised prejudice against ethnic minorities— apparently, the woman shopper was ignorant of the fact that 40 percent of australia’s toilet paper is imported from china and in her imagination, we (buyers of asian appearance) were purchasing agents intending to capitalize on the ‘toilet paper business’ during the pandemic. my experience is, however, dwarfed by the ‘blunt’ racism (both verbal and physical assault) others have experienced since the start of the pandemic. hundreds of covid-19 related racist incidents against asians in australia include chinese students physically attacked by strangers in the melbourne cbd (woolley 2020); a woolworths employee in western australia ‘aggressively’ prevented customers with an asian look from entering the store for fear they will spread coronavirus (rolfe 2020); and in new south wales, white australian teenagers publicly shamed vietnamese-australian sisters by calling them ‘asian whore,’ ‘asian dogs,’ ‘asian sluts’ and spat in their eyes and faces (tan 2020). the rise in pandemic-inflicted racial abuse highlights the gap in australia’s human rights legislation given there is no federal law punishing racist acts as a crime (tan 2020). this is despite racist acts being deemed ‘unlawful’ in the racial discrimination act 1975 (section 18c, australian government 1975). similar actions, including racism against non-asian ethnic minorities and prejudice within the same ethnic groups, were reported in numerous countries and regions. for example, in the us, after the start of the pandemic, vendors on amazon started to sell t-shirts with coronavirus chinese national flags, as well as t-shirts and mugs with the catchy slogan ‘coronavirus made in china.’ in hong kong, south korea and wang portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202118 vietnam, local businesses, including restaurants, shops, beauty stores, hotels and taxis either posted online messages or displayed signs at their premises barring mainland chinese customers and non-locals (rich 2020). in singapore and malaysia, tens of thousands of residents signed petitions to ban chinese nationals from entering their countries. in china, african nationals were reportedly evicted from their homes by local police in guangzhou for fear they were spreading coronavirus. in saudi arabia, the image of a south asian migrant worker dressed as a human hand sanitiser while wearing a face mask for saudi’s oil giant aramco went viral and sparked great controversy on social media (aljazeera news 2020). and in australia, when melbourne became the epicentre of the coronavirus in july, a sydney local pub placed a sign labelled ‘chinese coronavirus plan’ with the words ‘if you are from melbourne or look like you are, you will be asked to leave’ (9news 2020). these incidents reveal growing mistrust and division among social and ethnic groups. the rising racist sentiments have been fuelled by media coverage of the covid-19 pandemic. in january alone, numerous media outlets published reports containing anti-chinese sentiment. the danish newspaper jyllands-posten used the coronavirus particles to represent the chinese national flag; the sydney-based australian newspaper the sun-herald called the novel coronavirus a ‘chinese virus’ and ‘pandemonium’ on its front page. the american wall street journal published a similar opinion piece titled ‘china is the real sick man of asia.’ and in france, a regional newspaper le courrier picard warned of a ‘yellow alert’/‘yellow peril’ in its headline (a racist term originating in the 19th century that suggests asian immigrants/laborers are ‘uncivilized,’ ‘dangerous’ and posed serious threats to the ‘civilized west’). these reports sparked outrage on social media as they served to reproduce stereotypes of chinese/asians and perpetuated racial discrimination against asian ethnic minorities. these reports simultaneously violated the guidelines issued by the who in 2015 that specified that disease names shall not include ‘geographical locations’ including cities, countries, regions and continents or draw references to a particular culture or population (who 2015: 3). as erin chew, national convener of the asian-australian alliance stated, ‘anti-chinese sentiment’ was just a ‘symptom’ of the broader issue of ‘anti-chinese sentiment,’ fuelled by public discussions about china’s growth and influence (in australia) in recent years (yang 2020). this attitude may also apply globally as the rising racism against chinese/asians can be interpreted as a reflection of the deep-rooted and still prevalent notion of ‘yellow peril’ in some (western) countries. the difference is that the modern ‘yellow peril’ has ‘transformed into something else to adapt to modern-day racism’ (yang 2020). overall, the covid-19 pandemic has exposed multiple ‘pandemics’ embedded in our everyday life— gender inequality, domestic violence, sexism, ageism, and racism. this has placed severe and long-lasting impacts on vulnerable groups including women, the elderly and asian ethnic minorities. it has also revealed a chain of inequalities entrenched at different levels and exercised by different parties– government, media, institutions and individuals. however, these inequalities are merely the tip of an iceberg as many remain hidden, undiscovered and unmentioned in this paper. such inequalities will presumably be further exacerbated when they intersect with various factors such as gender, ethnicity, class or disability. among all the dilemmas brought about 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https://data.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/documents/covid19/unlocking_the_lockdown_unwomen_2020.pdf https://data.unwomen.org/resources/surveys-show-covid-19-has-gendered-effects-asia-and-pacific https://covid19.who.int/?gclid=cj0kcqjwv7l6brdxarisagj-34qjqwzmqfeldmsuz_2esskoc0sxhx5i3bz8bcw4mlcc-6a3t0ekejkaamleealw_wcb https://covid19.who.int/?gclid=cj0kcqjwv7l6brdxarisagj-34qjqwzmqfeldmsuz_2esskoc0sxhx5i3bz8bcw4mlcc-6a3t0ekejkaamleealw_wcb https://covid19.who.int/?gclid=cj0kcqjwv7l6brdxarisagj-34qjqwzmqfeldmsuz_2esskoc0sxhx5i3bz8bcw4mlcc-6a3t0ekejkaamleealw_wcb https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/163636/who_hse_fos_15.1_eng.pdf;jsessionid=2d3acab4efa659e7da31bce3bb910725?sequence=1 https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/163636/who_hse_fos_15.1_eng.pdf;jsessionid=2d3acab4efa659e7da31bce3bb910725?sequence=1 https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/311314/who-his-hwf-gender-wp1-2019.1-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/311314/who-his-hwf-gender-wp1-2019.1-eng.pdf https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-university-of-melbourne-international-students-assaulted-in-unprovoked-racist-attack-c-983675 https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-university-of-melbourne-international-students-assaulted-in-unprovoked-racist-attack-c-983675 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-06/coronavirus-woman-racist-attack-in-melbourne/12216854?nw=0 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-06/coronavirus-woman-racist-attack-in-melbourne/12216854?nw=0 bb portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 1 the emergence of a transnational advocacy network: international election monitoring in the philippines, chile, nicaragua, and mexico arturo santa cruz, university of guadalajara introduction it is commonplace nowadays to hear claims about how the associational life traditionally confined to states has reached a global scale. thus, for instance, michael walzer asserts that ‘there is today an international civil society, the very existence of which raises questions about the usefulness of the state’ (walzer 1998, 3). similarly, jackie smith, charles chatfield, and ron pagnucco (smith, pagnucco et al. 1997) edited a volume on transnational social movements and global politics, and paul wapner (wapner 1995) talks about ‘politics beyond the state.’ nonstate actors have certainly become relevant and ubiquitous in the international arena. i think the ‘global civil society’ argument, however, is not warranted. instead, i would argue that what we have witnessed in recent years is the emergence of a myriad of transnational advocacy networks (tans) working intermittently on innumerable issues, ranging from the environment, to land mines, to female genital mutilation. although similar in some respects, tans and global social movements (gsms) are not quite the same thing. in this paper, i elaborate on this distinction and illustrate the emergence and development of a tan, one concerned with international election monitoring (iem). this paper takes form in the following manner: in the first section i elaborate on the distinction between gsms and tans, and suggest an unexplored way in which emergent norms might be adopted internationally. in the next four sections i follow the evolution of the iem tan. thus, the second section deals with the foundational 1986 philippine case; the third section with the 1988 chilean plebiscite; the fourth with the 1990 nicaraguan elections, and the fifth with the 1994 mexican electoral process. i conclude in the sixth section by evaluating the usefulness of the path of norm-diffusion which i suggest, and by discussing how the practice of nonstate actors has contributed to the redefinition of both state sovereignty and the international system. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 2 what’s in a name? what does the concept ‘global civil society’ imply? for starters, a denser social cohesion than the real existing one among nonstate actors at the international level—unless, of course, one adopts a minimalist understanding of civil society. paul wapner, for instance, defines global civil society as ‘as a transnational domain in which people form relationships and develop elements of identity outside their role as a citizen of a particular state’ (wapner 2000, 261). i contend, however, that definitions of this sort do not take us very far, not only because they are too broad, but also because they are misleading. by transposing to the global realm a concept firmly established at the national-state level, they incur conceptual stretching. as giovani sartori warned over thirty years ago, when concepts are applied too broadly they cease being useful (sartori 1970). global civil society is not a subtype of civil society, like bureaucratic authoritarianism is a subtype of authoritarianism. global civil society is supposed to be civil society writ large. instead of moving up the ladder of abstraction in order to avoid conceptual stretching, as sartori suggests, many analysts simply extrapolate the civil society concept to the global level. but this poses serious problems. take, for instance, the question of the state. state and civil society are mutually constitutive; if one takes away the former, the latter vanishes (migdal 1994). thus, national social movements have been a fact on the ground since the eighteenth century, in large part because it was at that time that the national-state became the dominant form of political organization (tarrow 1996, 7). the existence of global social movements, without a global counterpart, would therefore stand as a major anomaly—an anomaly that, i would argue, has not yet taken place.1 so what do we mean when we talk about ‘social movements’? and what is the larger context in which they develop? david meyer and sidney tarrow argue that social movements ‘are best defined as collective challenges to existing arrangements of power and distribution by people with common purposes and solidarity, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities’(meyer & tarrow 1998, 4; italics original). similarly, friedhelm neidhardt and dieter rucht define a social movement as ‘an 1 claims about ‘the transnational phenomenon [being] older than the state itself’ (ghils 1992, 417) are, of course, anachronistic. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 3 organized and sustained effort of a collectivity of interrelated individuals, groups, and organizations, to promote or to resist social change with the use of public protest activities’ (cited in della porta & diani 1999, 3). the larger context in which this composite of sustained interaction and protest thrive is the state—as marchini’s paper in this issue illustrates. and it is precisely the state-society symbiosis that produces what the resource mobilization approach calls ‘political opportunity structure’ (pos). although pos is thus an eminently domestic concept it has been extrapolated to the international level. thus, for instance, jackie smith has written that ‘transnational political opportunity structures influence movements’ capacities for mobilization as well as their strategic alternatives’ (cited in della porta & kriesi 1999, 18). in her argument, the existence of ‘supranational arenas’ seems to warrant talk about a transnational pos. this is because, as donatella della porta and hanspeter kriesi have put it, ‘in the globalizing world, issues emerge which transcend national frontiers: the internationalisation of markets, nuclear fallout, the greenhouse effect, the destruction of the ozone layer, famine, poverty, international migration on a worldwide scale, women’s and minorities’ rights’ (della porta & kriesi 1999, 21). a (rather weak) pos might indeed exist in those issue areas, if we grant that they constitute an instance of international governance (i.e., authority), although it is clear that they are not quite the functional equivalent of the national state. but what about the social movement requirement of sustained collective mobilization and protest? if we take the first item out of the equation, we end up with nothing more than sporadic ‘contentious politics’—certainly not an international social movement.2 lasting collective mobilization is not a feature of most groups working on some of the most salient transnational campaigns, such as the ones having to do with the environment or free trade. and if we get rid of the second requirement, protest, we would then have just some sort of sustained campaign. but public protest, as donatella della porta and mario diani have pointed out, is a ‘characteristic aspect’ of social movements (della porta & diani 1999, 145). many, although perhaps not the most visible, international campaigns do not involve open protest. the bulk of the activities carried out by amnesty international, for instance, 2 cf. doug imig and sidney tarrow 1999. for them, ‘contentious politics’ is ‘not as consistent as a social movement (112).’ portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 4 involve working through institutional channels in a manner that can hardly be characterized as protest.3 similarly, as alfaro’s article in this issue shows, mexico’s zapatista movement, at least in its international dimension, might best be conceived of as a ‘virtual movement.’ so it seems to me that we can better refer to these and other nonstate actors as tans. according to margaret keck and kathryn sikkink, tans include ‘those relevant actors working internationally on an issue, who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services’ (keck & sikkink 1998, 2). interestingly, tans are not formed exclusively by nonstate actors, such as ngos and religious groups; they might also include some state agencies, and even intergovernmental organizations (igos). this means: 1) that tans are not necessarily in an external position vis-à-vis the state (or the state system), and; 2) that they do not constitute an ‘international social movement.’ as keck and sikkink put it, ‘because part of states and international organizations also participate in these networks, the process of negotiation within the emergent cosmopolitan community is not “outside” the state’ (216). furthermore, unlike social movements, the focal points of tans are events, not mobilizations (keck & sikkink 1998, 236). that is, tan activists do not seek to maintain collective mobilization. the ‘emergent cosmopolitan community’ is seen as an alternative to mass mobilization. activists focus on communication and information exchange. tans can thus be thought of as ‘communicative structures’ (3). as such, they create discourses which frame issues in novel ways, thus bringing them to the international agenda. take the case of ‘female circumcision.’ it was only after a network of women activists framed the issue in terms of ‘genital mutilation,’ which highlighted its aspect of castration, that it acquired new salience, which placed it into the international agenda (with the un, for instance, emitting a series of recommendations) (20). a tan is thus both a structure and agent. as the former, it patterns the interaction of its members, and infuses them with identity; as the latter, it puts forward specific policy proposals in the international arena. the key to its dual character lies both in its decentralized and horizontal organizational arrangement, and in the kind of strategies it 3 this is not to suggest, of course, that any act of protest is coterminous with social movements. these portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 5 employs. the core of the network is not a bureaucratic apparatus of a continuously mobilized membership, but a small group of political entrepreneurs and, more fundamentally, the information its members exchange. the social nature of the information gathered (and constructed) becomes the raw material for a new discourse. this social structure is then enacted by concrete actors who employ a strategy keck and sikkink call the ‘boomerang pattern.’ as they put it, ‘when channels between the state and its domestic actors are blocked, the boomerang pattern of influence characteristic of transnational networks may occur: domestic ngos bypass their state and directly search out international allies to try to bring pressure on their states from outside’ (keck & sikkink 1998, 12). thus, for instance, the mothers of the plaza de mayo in argentina enhanced their cause and put pressure on the argentinean state by resorting to human rights activists outside their county. by ‘throwing’ the boomerang, network activists thus become players on the international scene. the practice of tans as agents helps redefine not only the role of nonstate actors in the international arena, but also the structure of the interstate system. as authors from the english school noted decades ago, and constructivists more recently, the interstate system is not solely characterized by a hobbesian state of nature in which only material capabilities, as such, matter (bull 1977; wendt 1999). at bottom, the modern state system is constituted by institutions and norms which infuse both anarchy and material factors with meaning. that is, a normative structure underlies the basic components of the state system. although tans are not state actors, their actions affect interstate politics. states are, after all, shot through and through with societal elements. take the issue of sovereignty: from being a ‘principle’ for appropriate behaviour among states in the eighteen century, by the twentieth century, it had become a ‘territorial ideal,’ in which the focus is on the relationship between territory, power, and accepted forms of political organization (murphy 1996, 87, 91). this transformation had profound consequences both for the way states related to one another, and for the way states related to their population. in a similar vein, as sikkink has noted regarding the effects of tans activity in the human rights realm, ‘when the state recognizes the legitimacy of international interventions on the topic of sporadic acts might be better regarded as instances of contentious politics. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 6 human rights and changes its domestic human rights in response to these international pressures, it reconstitutes the relationship between the states, its citizens, and international actors’ (sikkink 1993, 414-5). it is then through the practice of state and nonstate actors that the state system is reproduced and transformed. that is why it is important to trace the ‘life history’ of international norms, and not just to postulate their existence. how is it that norms that we now take for granted in the international arena came to be what they are? furthermore, what is the origin of norms? it is usually assumed that norms are internalised by states. that is, that norms originate at the international system, and then trickle down, permeating states. jeffrey legro, andrew cortell and james davis, have provided us with valuable insights about the mechanisms of norm-diffusion from the international to the domestic level (legro 2000; cortell & davis 1996; cortell & davis 2000). but how do norms make it into the international realm in the first place? many might just originate at that level; but i suspect that at least some ‘international’ norms have their genesis in specific countries. that is, some norms might require a successful instantiation in a particular state before they can successfully diffuse to other latitudes—and to the international system at large. the issue, though, cannot be reduced to a ‘demonstration effect’ in which in order for the norm to spread all that matters is that the state where it was first instantiated be a powerful one—although of course that is oftentimes relevant. but my point is that some norms travel and others do not, depending on their ‘fit’ to the international normative structure. in the tan i trace below, for instance, the 1986 philippine experience became foundational because its main motivation (the right to have one’s voice heard in the electoral process) resonated with the liberal aims of the western world. a tan pushing for the adoption of slavery, for instance, most likely wouldn’t have fared very well—because it wouldn’t have resonated with the wider international discourse. taking this structural element into consideration, thomas risse and kathryn sikkink (risse-kappen & sikkink 1999) have recently argued that the process by which international norms are internalised by states can be thought of as a process of ‘socialization.’ they develop a five-phase ‘spiral model’ of norm socialization: 1) repression and activation of network; 2) denial; 3) tactical concessions; 4) ‘prescriptive portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 7 status’; 5) rule-consistent behaviour (22ff). risse and sikkink’s model is useful in tracing the process by which international institutions encourage the spread of norms around the world. as they put it, ‘the ‘spiral model’ accounts for the variation in the domestic effects of international norms (6; my italics). furthermore, the model is based on the prior existence of international institutions (19). thus, the ‘spiral model’ reproduces the previous bias of taking an outside-in approach, in which the focus is the impact of the external environment on specific states.4 a remaining task is then to 1) identify those norms whose early phase was closely associated to a specific country, and 2) trace their diffusion to the international arena. that is, in order to complement the prevailing outside-in approach, we need to reverse the inquiry: inside-out. martha finnemore and kathryn sikkink have developed an approach that points in this direction (finnemore & sikkink 1998). they refer to it as the norm ‘life cycle.’ finnemore and sikkink’s life cycle model has three phases: emergence, cascade, and internalisation. in the first phase, norm entrepreneurs ‘create’ issues by ‘framing’ them. this process might take place at the domestic level. the crucial link comes in the second phase, for it is necessary for the emergent norm to reach a threshold, and then ‘become institutionalised in specific sets of international rules and organizations’ (900). without institutionalisation, norm diffusion from the bottom-up becomes more difficult. finnemore and sikkink pose two ways norms might reach a tipping point. the first is when the emergent norm reaches a critical mass. that is, as more states adopt the norm, there comes a moment when ‘norm cascade’ begins (they suggest this usually happens only after one-third of the total states have adopted the norm). the second way an emergent norm can reach a tipping point is when critical states adopt it (critical states are ‘those without which the achievement of the substantive norm goal is compromised’ (901)). finally, in the third, ‘internalization’ phase, norms work down from the international to the domestic level. finnemore and sikkink’s approach moves us forward by effectively tracing the origins of international norms. its only shortcoming, for my purposes here, is that it leaves out a third 4 although at least two chapters in the edited volume (the one by stephen ropp and kathryn sikkink, ‘international norms and domestic politics in chile and guatemala,’ and the one by anja jetschke, ‘linking the unlinkable? international norms and nationalism in indonesia and the philippines’) might be considered an exception to the outside-in approach. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 8 way in which norms might reach a tipping point. this third way is a constitutive one, in which neither sheer numbers or the consent of ‘critical’ states is essential. in this path, norms cascade simply by ‘expressing’ a foundational element of the international cum domestic system. since the element in question, for instance, popular sovereignty, is so deeply embedded into our understanding of what a polity ought to be (from a domestic and international point of view), it is very difficult for state leaders to ignore it. as r. b. j. walker has observed, ‘sovereignty expresses and works to reproduce a specific relation between claims to difference and claims about the forms of commonality and structure that permit claims to monopoly [to legitimate authority] to have any meaning at all’ (walker 2000, 28). hence, state leaders, willingly or not, talk-the-talk of the norm at stake. it might then be possible for a few, not necessarily ‘critical’ states to instantiate and thus catapult the emergent norm—making it reach a tipping point. in a sense, then, it can be said that the emergent norm was always there: both in the outside (the international system) and in the inside (the domestic structure) in a latent state. it is thus the nature of the emergent norm, more than the number or the type of states which adopt it, that is critical in this path. the constitutive way does not negate the other two; it subsumes them. once a norm is realized in this path, it spreads out quickly—with or without any the other paths being present. my probe of the iem tan is intended to illustrate this third way, and to test its usefulness. the philippines 1986 the 1986 philippine electoral process is the cornerstone of the iem tan.5 as eva-lotta hedman has noted, the 1986 effort is ‘the most effectively mobilized and widely celebrated of election-watch campaigns to date in the philippines (or anywhere else)’ (hedman 2001, 156). the network that emerged in the late 1980s stood on the shoulders of philippines’ ‘people power’—and the muscle of that power was the national movement for free elections (namfrel). tellingly, the story of namfrel had little to do with processes of globalisation and regionalisation, or with the end of the cold war. in fact, the origins of namfrel go back 5 not that this was the first instance, but for practical purposes it became foundational; cf. carothers 1999. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 9 to the dawn of the cold war. thus, after its debut in the 1951 senatorial elections, namfrel launched a wide-ranging campaign, which included election watching, for the 1953 presidential elections. this early incarnation of namfrel relied heavily on the philippine veterans legion, and to a lesser extent on civic and religious associations such as the jaycees, the lions, and catholic action of the philippines (hedman 2001, 66). on 10 november 1953, with about 5000 members at polling places across the philippines, namfrel not only obtained a high profile on the media, but also lend credibility to the electoral triumph of the opposition candidate (110). two things are worth pointing out here: one, that the organization of a monitoring effort of this magnitude points to the existence of a solid civil society in the philippines, only a few years after it had obtained its independence; two, that the civic efforts that crystallized on election day did not develop into a sustained organization or movement. thus, elections were not monitored in the philippines again until the late 1960s. and this was done by another organization, the citizens national electoral assembly (67). furthermore, this effort again relapsed until the modern namfrel emerged in 1983. the political scene in the philippines of this time was substantially different from that of the previous two electoral processes. the regime of ferdinand marcos had become truly authoritarian, as was made crystal-clear with the declaration of martial law in 1972. dressed in strong anti-communist, cold war rhetoric, the measure came as a big shock to a country that had lived with more or less democratic institutions since the 1930s. marcos’s ‘constitutional authoritarianism’ (jetschke 1999, 139), as he used to refer to his regime, thus gave diverse civil and political factions to unite against a common adversary: ferdinand marcos. opposition to marcos became so widespread that even his key international ally, the united states, began to put pressure on him by the mid 1980s. this was no small setback for the philippine government, and certainly not an easy step for a u.s. administration concerned with its global battle with the still existing ‘evil empire.’ the (in)famous history of u.s. support for the authoritarian philippine government is well known. for my purposes in this paper, it suffices to state that the united states began to abandon its traditional wholehearted support of marcos in 1985. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 10 but the role played both by foreign governments and foreign activists was secondary in the eventual downfall of marcos. this was a domestically-crafted feat—one in which namfrel played a crucial role, as made patent by the legions of volunteers that participated on the 1986 electoral process. ironically, the marcos regime provided the key incentive for namfrel’s re-emergence. two months after the assassination of opposition candidate benigno aquino in 1983, a diverse group of business, civic, professional, and religious leaders got together and organized what, one more time, came to be known as namfrel. the new organization was an ad hoc one, with no further aims than the civic effort to work for free and fair elections. it was also a merely civic (in the sense of not overtly political, and certainly not radical) effort. as kaa byington notes, referring to the 1983 initiators: ‘what these founders had in common was a long-time interest in civic, rather than political, organizing, and some organizations that they jointly belonged to’ (byington 1988, 37). but the backbone of namfrel was undoubtedly the philippine bishops-businessmen’s conference, an uncommon association of organizations dealing with matters as diverse as the bottom-line and the salvation of souls, which proved tremendously successful, however. co-chaired by a bishop, antonio y. forthic, and entrepreneur, jose s. concepcion, the new namfrel first got involved in the 1984 assembly elections. on that occasion, approximately 250,000 volunteers participated. as the domestic situation deteriorated and international pressure increased, marcos was forced to make some concessions. thus, although presidential elections were not scheduled until 1987, in november 1985 he announced on an abc news program that they would be held one year early. this otherwise welcome announcement took the opposition by surprise. at first, it was reluctant to participate, but within a month it had agreed on a presidential candidate: corazón aquino, the widow of the slain leader. in this critical context, namfrel would become a key actor in the electoral process. the 1984 experience lent namfrel credibility and widespread recognition. it is telling in this respect that the ‘general instructions for the board of election inspectors’ for the 1986 presidential elections had a section on ‘watchers’ (republic of the philippines, commission of elections, 1986; republic of the philippines, commission of elections, ‘general instructions’ section iii). furthermore, namfrel was accredited as the citizen arm of the portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 11 commission of elections on 24 december 1985. thus, with 500,000 volunteers on election day, as gretchen casper has put it, ‘marcos’s modus operandi was constrained’ by namfrel (casper 1995, 116). during both the 1984 and 1986 campaigns, as hedman notes, ‘the rank and file of namfrel volunteers was filled in large measure by corporate employees and professional affiliates in many localities around the country’ (hedman 2001, 117). the engine of this success was one of the co-chairmen, ‘joe con’—as the charismatic and hyperactive entrepreneur who became the symbol of namfrel was known. ‘joe con’s theory of organization,’ according to kaa byington, ‘[was] simple: network’(byington 1988, 38). this is not to suggest that namfrel was a one-man show. instead, what i want to emphasize is both the reformist agenda of the organization, and the important role played by groups not usually identified with social activism. this dual character gives a hint to the kind of specimen the monitoring of elections would evolve into at the international level. and it is precisely when international actors entered the scene in the philippines that both the domestic effort was potentiated, through boomerang effect, and that an iem tan was born. the support foreign actors, mainly u.s. actors, gave to the opposition forces and namfrel was crucial. to begin with, as noted, the united states changed its position vis-à-vis the philippine government by the mid-1980s. the senate foreign relations committee’s chairman, senator richard g. lugar, led an unprecedented election monitoring mission to the philippines. right from the start, his assessment of the electoral context was far from complacent. lugar accused marcos of attempting to manipulate the electoral process (national democratic institute for international affairs 1991, 117). in parallel, the u.s embassy in manila maintained close contact with namfrel throughout the period leading to the snap elections (hedman 2001, 183). as thomas carothers has noted regarding the change in us foreign policy that took place in the mid 1980s: ‘the philippines was the crucial first case’ (carothers 1999, 37). portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 12 but official u.s support for the democratic forces came late, and was wavering. right after the rigged electoral process, for instance, reagan declared that fraud had taken place on both sides. consequently, as anja jetschke notes, ‘until late 1985 the us administration largely followed events in the philippines, rather than actively shaping them’ (jetschke 1999, 153). however, at the request of senators lugar and clairbone pell, the center for democracy sent a preliminary delegation to the philippines. in its report, the center established a set of requirements they considered critical in evaluating the 7 february electoral process. among these, was the accreditation of namfrel as a pollwatching organization (national democratic institute for international affairs 1991, 8). more decisive, although equally late, was the support provided by other organizations, especially that of the national democratic institute for international affairs (ndi). founded in 1983, it is one of the four core grantees of the national endowment for democracy (ned), established the same year. although the ned is mostly funded from congressional appropriations, it operates autonomously from the executive branch of the u.s. government (diamond 1992, 39). ndi receives most of its resources from the ned as does its counterpart the national republican institute for international affairs (nriia). thus, both can be thought of as quasi-governmental organizations. ndi began its activities in the philippines in january 1986.6 it is worth noting that marcos himself, at the same time he went on u.s. tv to announce the snap elections, had noted that international observers would be welcome. this was undoubtedly a strategic move by marcos, who calculated that he could win the election, and that foreign observers, given the short interval before the elections, would not be able to denounce eventual irregularities. nevertheless, as the delegation’s final report consigns, during their first meeting with members of the commission of elections ‘several commissioners explicitly warned against ‘foreign interference”’ (national democratic institute for international affairs 1991, 9). furthermore, before the delegation left manila on 11 january, the commission passed a resolution, rules and regulations against foreign intervention, which established that foreign observers could not be within 50 meters of the voting tables (10). 6 the mission was organized jointly with the ndi/nriia, but the final report was written by a ndi staffmember (larry garber), and published by ndi. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 13 comelec’s hostility did not reflect the general mood toward observers, though. both presidential candidates and namfrel welcomed them. thus, a 44-member ndi-nriia delegation, headed by british parliamentarian john hume and colombian former president misael pastrana, arrived in philippines 12 days before the election (national democratic institute for international affairs 1991, 11). in their short stay, delegation members were able to witness plenty of irregularities. the delegation issued its highly critical preliminary findings on february 9, two days after the election. the official u.s. observer delegation was also highly critical, and eventually even the reagan administration openly chastised the marcos regime for the handling of the electoral process (13). all the negative foreign publicity, steven rood noted, prevented the election from serving one of its purposes, that of ensuring foreign support for the marcos regime (rood 1987, 9). but the determining factor in marcos’s failure was home grown. the day before the batasang pambansa (philippine congress) declared marcos the winner, the catholic bishops conference denounced the elections as ‘the most fraudulent in philippine history,’ while namfrel’s joe con declared that ‘never has a more vigilant populace witnessed a more pervasive travesty upon the sanctity of the ballot box in our history’ (national democratic institute for international affairs 1991, 14). as the civic group would put it in its report: ‘namfrel believes that the overall outcome as officially proclaimed by the batasang pambansa is a complete mockery of the right of suffrage and does not reflect the true will of the filipino people’ (4). the reformist movement would have quite a momentous ending. after marcos’s refusal to accept his defeat, an aborted military coup and counter coup took place, prompting hundred of thousands of philippines to the street to form a human shield to protect the reformist soldiers (hedman 2001, 185). finally, on 25 february, after an arrangement worked out with u.s. senator paul laxalt, marcos left the philippines for exile in hawaii (national democratic institute for international affairs 1991, 15-6). as the previous narrative suggests, the bulk of the monitoring effort in the 1986 electoral process in the philippines was carried out by domestic actors. without namfrel, foreign observers would have probably just been used by the marcos regime. not because they would have wanted to be its accomplices, but because if to the short period they spent in the portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 14 country, we add the absence of a well-organized domestic counterpart, their effectiveness would have certainly decreased. this is not to suggest that international observers were superfluous. far from it. namfrel enthusiastically supported their presence, and eventually got 800 of them accredited (byington 1988, 189). namfrel also received financial support, approximately $1 million, from foreign donors. among them were the united states agency for international development, and the ned (hedman 2001, 183). the defining feature of the philippine experience was then the interaction between domestic and international actors in a novel arena; election watching. it was this extremely successful interaction that made the international monitoring of elections acquire certain modularity (hedman 2001, 29). as the ndi-nrii report notes, ‘as a result of the philippine experience, there has been increased attention on the role of the international community in supporting democratic development in different countries (national democratic institute for international affairs 1991, 2).’ the philippines would then become a foundational experience for iem in general and for the ndi in particular. thus, as a result of its involvement in the asian archipelago, d. stoelting has noted, ‘the national democratic institute has emerged as the most prominent ngo in the election observation field (stoelting 1992, 423).’ for ndi, ‘namfrel [has served] as a model for organizing individuals who are not politically active and sensitizing them to political issues in a manner that will not arouse their fears’ (national democratic institute for international affairs 1991, 75). one might thus argue that the origins of the iem tan might be found in the philippines. at the time the snap election took place, actors working internationally had not yet established a ‘dense exchange of information and services’ (keck & sikkink 1998, 217), that would allow us to refer to it as an international network. a still not fully articulated international norm, the right to free and fair elections, materialized for the first time in the philippines, and became then a more concrete referent for state and nonstate actors. there was certainly a critical mass of people, mainly in the philippines and the united states, that allowed the boomerang pattern to take place. but it was only because a well-organized domestic network of activists threw the boomerang in the first place, that it picked up strength from the americas before coming back to the philippines. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 15 chile 1988 the philippine election monitoring effort was an important referent for the 5 october 1988 chilean plebiscite. heraldo muñoz, a chilean who participated in an ndi’s iem mission to the philippines summarized it well in the title of an article he wrote in 1987: ‘lesson from the philippines: organization and participation in free elections’ (cited in national democratic institute for international affairs 1991, 81). the 1988 plebiscite in chile was held in accordance with the 1980 constitution approved by the junta (whose members had overthrown the democratically elected government of salvador allende in 1973). according to the new legislation, general pinochet was named president of the republic for an eight-year term, but sometime before the end of that term, the government was required to conduct a plebiscite in which the electorate would be asked to accept or reject the government’s presidential candidate. a ‘yes’ victory would then mean the government’s candidate serving another eight-year term, after which multicandidate elections would be held. a ‘no’ victory, on the other hand, would mean that pinochet would remain in office for one more year, and would be required to hold multicandidate elections ninety days before his term came to an end. the plebiscite was thus not an election. this protracted and controlled mechanism was one of the pillars of what pinochet claimed his regime was creating for the well-being of his fellow citizens, a system of ‘protected democracy.’ thus, on 30 august, when the junta announced both the date for the plebiscite and that general pinochet would be the name people would cast their ballot for or against, the opposition had already gone a long way in negotiating a common front: the concertación de partidos por el no (association of parties for the no). the concertación represented the coming together of 15 (eventually 16) political parties of diverse political orientations with one objective: ‘to defeat pinochet and the regime in the plebiscite’ (aylwin azócar 1998, 341). paralleling the mobilization of the political class, civic, religious, and human rights activists also joined forces. the aim of such a convergence was twofold: first, to organize a drive for voter registration, and, second, to monitor the electoral process. as in the philippine experience, this effort was substantially home grown. but also as in the case across the portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 16 pacific, the synergy created by the coming together of domestic and external activists potentiated the effectiveness of the endeavour. furthermore, their mere association with foreign actors became a sort of ‘insurance’ for chilean activists, since it made it more onerous for the government to retaliate against them. thus, the cruzada por la participación ciudadana (crusade for civic participation, also known as civitas), was formed in march 1988 to encourage voters to participate in the plebiscite. civitas also cooperated with another civic organization in conducting a quick count on election day (nevitte 1997, 52). likewise, the catholic church’s vicaría de la solidaridad (vicariate of solidarity) was very active not only in human rights issues but also on those related to the transition process. it became a focal point for foreign observers of the plebiscite. similarly, chilean intellectuals played a very important role in the months leading to the plebiscite, both in the political campaign against the regime properly, and in the monitoring of the plebiscite itself. as jeffrey puryear has amply documented, the financial and technical support these intellectuals received from foreign donors became instrumental in the successful transition to democracy in chile (puryear, 1994). but it wasn’t only the intellectuals who received external assistance. during 1988, ndi administered a $1 million fund to support the democratic transition in chile (national democratic institute for international affairs 1988, 7). thus, it provided grants for civic education and monitoring to civic organizations, such as civitas. furthermore, this time multiple international nongovernmental organizations (ingos), such as the international human rights law group, the washington office on latin america, the latin american studies association, america’s watch, nriia, and ndi sent delegations to monitor the plebiscite. of these, the most conspicuous, both for the resources at its disposal, and for the profile of its members, was the last one. with two former presidents among its leaders, adolfo suárez of spain, and misael pastrana of colombia, ndi’s delegation consisted of 55 members (iii). in the time between the philippine snap election and the chilean plebiscite, ndi had been actively involved building bridges between civic organizations of the two countries. thus, for instance, two namfrel members took part in a november 1987 workshop in santiago, sponsored by ndi, dealing with issues of voter registration and mobilization. similarly, a month and a half before the plebiscite, namfrel specialists portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 17 went to chile to oversee the monitoring efforts of civic the command for the no and of the committee for free elections (83). the presence of foreign observers in chile elicited contradictory responses. on the one hand, the opposition forces and civil groups openly welcomed their presence. the committee for free elections, for instance, sent a letter to ndi welcoming the presence of its delegation because it demonstrated ‘international support for a free and fair plebiscite’ (reproduced in national democratic institute for international affairs 1988, 70). the chilean government on the other hand, had a rather ambivalent position vis-à-vis the presence of observers. some senior officials, including pinochet himself, several times complained that the presence of foreign observers was an intervention in domestic affairs. thus, in a diplomatic note sent by the foreign ministry to foreign diplomats accredited in chile in may 1988 the chilean government stated that it would ‘not recognize for any foreign citizen the attributes of “inspector”, “comptroller” or “examining observer.”’ but the chilean authorities also made clear in the same dispatch that ‘foreign citizens may witness the development of the election acts in which voters recognized by the political constitution and legislation are participating’ (20). in the end, the government did not raise obstacles to international observers. this, of course, was not just a gratuitous concession by the military regime. what darren hawkins has noted about human rights applies as well to the right to democratic government in chile: in countries where human rights norms are more firmly established, either by historical precedent or by a growing diffusion throughout civil society, authoritarian elites have greater difficulty evading international pressures. to demonstrate their legitimacy, they must adopt the language of human rights and claim some adherence to human rights standards rather than simply arguing, as do many asian regimes, that westernized international norms do not apply (hawkins 1997, 409). the pinochet regime did indeed embrace the democracy discourse, beginning with its already noted self-characterization as a ‘protected democracy.’ in any case, by this time two things were clear: first, that national elections were in the process of becoming international affairs. as former adolfo suárez put it in the foreword to the ndi’s report on the chilean plebiscite, ‘the recent chilean plebiscite, although formally an internal matter falling within the sovereign rights of chile, also had an international dimension of major relevance’ (national democratic institute for international portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 18 affairs 1988, v); second, that an iem tan was in the process of consolidation. as paul drake has observed, ‘the chilean democratic forces tapped into a global network of activists in factor of democracy and human rights’ (drake 1994, 28). one more element in the international environment played in favour of the democratic (partisan and non-partisan) forces in chile: the change in united states policy toward the pinochet regime. the open support of the united states to the military government since its inception had been a general rule (with the partial exception of the carter years). the change in policy that began to take place in 1985 was all the more surprising given the zealous support the reagan administration was bent on providing to anti-communist regimes, such as pinochet’s—regardless of their democratic credentials or human rights record. nevertheless, in march 1986 secretary of state george shultz referred to chile as one of the western hemisphere’s ‘odd men out’ (along with cuba, nicaragua, and paraguay), and the us ambassador to chile, harry g. barnes, prepared a draft resolution for the un human rights commission condemning pinochet’s human rights record (dogget 1988, 29, 31). as time went by, the bilateral relationship deteriorated, and the issue of the plebiscite acquired unprecedented salience. the u.s congress established the committee to support free elections in chile, under the joint presidency of democratic senator edward kennedy and republican senator richard lugar. the committee also included former presidents james carter and gerald ford (muñoz and portales 1991, 97). thus, drawing on a rich associational life tradition, and with the decided support of foreign actors, chileans working against the pinochet regime were able to build an impressive organization for plebiscite day.7 they achieved voter registration of 92 percent. on 5 october, all 22,131 polling places were monitored (valenzuela 1989, 130), and a turnout of registered voters of 97 percent occurred (national democratic institute for international affairs 1988, 1). the ‘no’ option won with 55 percent of the votes. whether or nor the pinochet regime had contemplated stealing the election in case of adverse results, it is clear 7 interestingly, the traditionally well-organized popular sectors played only a marginal role during the transition. as philip oxhorn has noted, ‘as the possibility of an actual transition to democracy became increasingly imminent in 1987 and 1988, political parties joined together to dismantle the [popular social] movement as part of the collective effort to secure the transition (oxhorn 1995, 280).’ portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 19 that the vast network of domestic and international monitors contributed to making that possibility extremely remote. nicaragua 1990 by the time the 25 february 1990 nicaraguan elections took place, the iem tan was already established. paradoxically, though, in this case nonstate actors played a secondary role in monitoring the electoral process. the main role fell to two igos: the organization of american states (oas), and the united nations (un). since overthrowing the somoza regime in 1979, the sandinistas had had a difficult relationship with the united states. at first, under the carter administration, which promoted a less interventionist foreign policy, and placed more emphasis on the promotion of human rights, the bilateral relationship seemed manageable. but the arrival of ronald reagan at the white house changed everything. convinced that the sandinistas were communists who represented a direct threat not only to the isthmus but also to the united states, the reagan administration did not hesitate to fight a proxy-war against the revolutionary regime. the united states government thus began funding the ‘contras,’ putting pressure on the honduran government so its territory could serve as a base for what reagan used to call ‘freedom fighters.’ by the second half of the 1980s, it became evident that neither the sandinistas nor the u.s. government was going to prevail. for the sandinistas, the situation was of course particularly delicate, since the political and economic conditions of their country were going from bad to worse. but the problem was not limited to the bilateral relationship, or to nicaragua. it had become a problem for the whole central american region. thus, in the framework of the regional peace plan known as esquipulas ii agreement, the five central american presidents committed themselves in 1987 to ‘promote an authentic democratic process that is pluralistic and participatory, which entails the promotion of social justice and respect for human rights.’ furthermore, the presidents also committed themselves ‘to invite the organization of american states (and) the united nations... to send observers to verify that the electoral process is fair and free’ (beigbeder 1994,165). as jennifer mccoy, larry garber, and robert pastor have pointed out, esquipulas agreement ‘represented a conceptual breakthrough in international relations, slicing through the cord connecting alongside these highly visible teams, there were a myriad of ingos monitoring the electoral process. there were nearly 2000 accredited foreign observers from over 200 portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 20 internal strife and external intervention by dealing with both dimensions of the conflict at the same time’ (mccoy, garber et al. 1991, 103). on march 1989 nicaragua made an official request to the secretary-general of the un to send a mission of observers to its february 1990 elections. four months later, the secretary-general made public his decision to establish the un observer mission to verify the electoral process in nicaragua (onuven). in communicating it to the general assembly, the secretary-general was careful to stress that although the un had supervised elections in the context of decolonisation, it had not been its practice to do so in sovereign states. furthermore, he pointed out that ‘on a number of occasions over the years, we have declined invitations from member states to that effect’ (cited in franck 1992, 80). this was in fact the first time that the un would observe a national election in a sovereign country, since the isolated 1977 observing mission to panama had dealt with a referendum on an international treaty. thus, the secretary-general justified acceding to the nicaraguan request in terms of it being part of the central american peace plan (franck 1992, 80). similarly, in approving the creation of onuven the general assembly noted that this was an ‘extraordinary measure,’ one that was justified only by its relation to the maintenance of international peace and security in the region. furthermore, the general assembly stated explicitly that no precedent was being created with this operation (beigbeder 1994, 166). the un and the oas thus established the largest and most comprehensive electoral observation mission ever in a sovereign country. the oas team alone consisted of 433 observers. this amounted to an impressive quantitative and qualitative difference compared to previous oas observation efforts, in which only a few distinguished persons were sent to provide what was symbolic support for democratic reform. although cooperation between the un and the oas teams was not always easy (pastor 1990, 18), the extent to which both organizations got involved in lending credibility to the february 1990 electoral process in nicaragua was unprecedented. the un and the oas became central actors in the electoral process. ngos present in nicaragua on election day (pastor 1990). among the organizations which sent missions were: hemispheres initiatives, center for democracy, international human rights law group, washington office for latin america, and the carter center.8 interestingly, ndi did not send a delegation to nicaragua (although that same year it sent missions to bulgaria, the dominican republic, guatemala, and haiti). nevertheless, several of its leaders provided advice to the carter center’s delegation, and a ndi staff member took a temporary leave to join the center’s mission (carter center 1990, 10). with a permanent representative in nicaragua since late 1989, the carter center’s mission eventually came to have 34 members. among them was genaro arriagada, the former spokesman of chile’s concertación de partidos por el no. the presence of arriagada underscores the permanence of the tan born in the philippines four years before. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 21 but undoubtedly the most important member of the delegation was the person after whom the center was named; james carter. as a widely respected former u.s. president, carter was in a privileged position. he was able to act as a mediator not only between his country’s government and nicaragua’s, but also between the sandinistas and the opposition, whose bulk coalesced around the candidacy of violeta barrios de chamorro (the widow of the slain journalist joaquín chamorro). and carter did indeed act as a mediator between the government and the opposition—but not only during the electoral campaign. during the transition period, from the moment when ortega recognized his defeat at the polls, and until chamorro took power on 25 april, both leaders looked to the former president to guarantee a smooth transfer of power (pastor 1990). four points are worth highlighting about the nicaraguan experience: the fact that igos played the most visible role in monitoring the electoral process is significant for what it says about the institutionalisation of a practice largely initiated by a tan. it was precisely the nicaragua precedent that encouraged the oas to create in 1991 the democratic promotion unit. since its establishment, the unit has undertaken 37 electoral monitoring missions in over half of the oas member states (oas). 8 the carter center’s mission was organized under the umbrella of the ‘council of freely elected heads of government,’ but since the staff, resources, and even the idea for the council itself came from the carter portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 22 following the steps of the regional organization, the united nations (un) created in 1992 the electoral assistance unit, which since that time has been involved in more that 100 electoral processes world-wide;9 a single ngo, the carter center, played an exceptionally important role during the electoral process and afterwards. this was in large part due to its unique nature (i.e., that it was founded and directed by a former u.s. president), but also to the fact that the carter center built on ndi’s ‘model’ for observing elections (carter center 1990, 10). this fact underscores the evolution of the iem tan, one that had started only a few years earlier in the philippines; the copious presence of foreign observers (over 2000) drives home the point that an iem tan was perfectly well established by 1990. that is, at this time sikkink’s requirement ‘to speak meaningfully of a network,’ that ‘enough actors must exist and be connected’ (sikkink 1993,416), was met; the monitoring effort relied entirely on foreign actors: the elections were not monitored by domestic groups. this rather paradoxical feature of the nicaraguan case underscores the international bias of the network literature. this bias, i would argue, is concomitant with the tendency to focus on the impact of international norms on domestic politics. the nicaraguan peculiarity, i suggest, might be explained by two factors. first, in contrast to chile, where the democratic tradition had accompanied (or built upon) a rich associational life, nicaragua’s history was certainly not notable for either of those features. no democratic tradition or rich associational life existed in nicaragua. second, the polarization of political life in nicaragua was such that it made the emergence of a civic, non-partisan monitoring group very difficult. it would not be until 1996 that a nicaraguan organization, ética y transparencia, first monitored domestic elections. tellingly, ndi, and through it the iem tan, was instrumental in the emergence of this organization.10 center, i refer to the mission as the center’s and not the council’s. by doing this, i want to point out, i do not intend to belittle the valuable contribution of the council’s members. 9 the unit was upgraded to division in 1994. the data come form the division's web page. 10 interview with melvin estrada, executive secretary of ética y transparencia, managua, 8 october 2001. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 23 mexico 1994 it was not until 1994, with the 21 august presidential elections in mexico, that the convergence of the three vectors—international actors, domestic civil society, and igos— took place. in a way, the story comes full circle in this case. on the international front, it is worth noting that mexico had traditionally been (at least until 1993) one of the staunchest supporters in the international arena of the principle of non-intervention in domestic affairs. for instance, when in 1992 the oas general assembly voted to amend the charter so that a government which overthrows a democratic regime can be suspended from the organization, mexico cast the only dissenting vote (millet 1994, 14). as late as december 1993, in un resolution 48/124, mexico expressed its opposition to foreign election monitors (benitez manaut 1996, 541). the mexican government's concern with foreign observation was a sign of the times. significantly, it was a non-issue only a decade before. thus, for instance, in 1988, when election monitoring was not yet a prominent issue in the international arena, it was not an issue in mexico's presidential election that year either. but after the uproar caused by the fraudulent elections of that year, which was an implicit endorsement of the electoral path, involvement in electoral issues entered the agenda of domestic ngos. significantly, though, it was only after the head of the non-governmental mexican human rights commission, sergio aguayo, was invited by the carter center to observe the 1990 haitian elections, that the idea of domestically monitoring mexican elections emerged. as aguayo puts it: ‘monitoring by outside observers seemed to me an effective way to promote fair elections, but i found that exercise expensive, and not enough in any case to consolidate a culture of democracy. the logical alternative for mexico was electoral observation by the country's own citizens (aguayo quezada 1995, 158). although aguayo’s preference for domestic observers was more a pragmatic than principled issue, the mere possibility of external monitoring aroused suspicion in the mexican government. in october 1990, mexico’s foreign minister declared that the country's problems regarding democracy would need to be solved by mexicans ‘and not by importing specialized observers from atlanta or milwaukee who tell us how to do things’ (quoted in chabat 1991, 14). as jorge chabat put it at the time, ‘it would seem as though portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 24 the mexican states's [sic] traditional concept of sovereignty has found its last refuge in the ballot box’ (17). with a grant from canada's international centre for human rights and democratic development, the mexican academy for human rights was able to put a 300-observer team for the 18 august 1991 elections in san luis potosí. this was the first case of election monitoring in mexico. between then and 1993, the academy and other ngos monitored 15 local elections. as the practice of domestic monitoring began to spread, the issues of inviting foreign observers reappeared more forcefully. some ngos invited observers to watch local elections without government consent. this was the case of some canadian legislators who observed the 1992 elections in the states of michoacán and morelos. the pressure on the salinas administration to reconsider its position on foreign monitors began to increase. but the mexican government remained firm. although the 1993 electoral reform for the first time legislated on the issue of domestic observers, recognizing them as legitimate actors in the electoral process, foreign observers remained explicitly banned from it. in october 1993, on the eve of the formal start of the 1994 presidential race, foreign minister fernando solana declared: ‘the mexican government will not allow foreign observers in the electoral processes, only mexican observers. the most fundamental exercise of sovereignty are the elections, which should always be in the hands of the citizens of mexico’ (quoted n benitez manaut 1996, 539). nevertheless, once again foreign observers defied the government's policy. the carter center, for instance, sent a mission when the presidential campaigns started. it was in this context of increased domestic and international pressure that the mexican government, at the un general assembly, in december 1993, reiterated its opposition to the participation of foreigners in the electoral processes of other countries. but a few weeks later, when the peasant uprising in chiapas broke out, the political environment in mexico changed so dramatically that the government was forced to make concessions on several fronts. the government of carlos salinas consequently changed its position on election monitoring. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 25 in march 1994, mexico’s ambassador to the un declared that accepting foreign observers ‘does not mean abandonment of sovereignty, but declaring that there is nothing to hide and that electoral processes in mexico can be observed freely (quoted in benitez manaut 1996, 547).’ by that time, in stark contrast to the nicaraguan case, the work of domestic ngos to mount a massive observation campaign was well under way. civic alliance/observation 1994, an umbrella organization that came to unite more than 300 ngos, was legally constituted in april 1994. earlier that month, several of its founding organizations had approached the national endowment for democracy to request funds. in the months leading to elections, the mexican academy for human rights and the washington office on latin america elaborated a report on the forthcoming elections, calling their joint effort ‘one symbol of the growing desire of civil society in mexico and the united states to promote more democratic and humane societies’ (dresser 1995, 330). at that point the salinas administration was aware that there was nothing it could do to prevent the presence of foreign observers. as a former adviser to the then interior minister put it: it soon became clear that contrary to the mexican government’s sentiments, international observers would be in mexico, despite the absence of supervision by mexican electoral authorities or rules governing their behaviour. the risk of diplomatic incidents resulting from the activities of international observers could not be ignored. for example, what would happen if the carter center decided to send an observation mission and it was expelled from mexico under article 33 of the constitution? (alcocer 1997,699).11 thus, in april the mexican government informally invited the un to provide assistance for the forthcoming elections. significantly, the mexican request to the un omitted the issue of foreign observers. the mexican government wanted the un to play an indirect role in the monitoring of the elections. its task was confined to two areas; to elaborate an analysis of the political and legal conditions of the electoral process, and to provide technical assistance to national ngos engaged in election monitoring. the un provided technical and financial assistance (between 2.5 and 3 million dollars) to 16 organizations, of which the most conspicuous was civic alliance. although both kinds of assistance proved valuable, its significance was of a different order. as sergio aguayo, one of the most prominent leaders of civic alliance put it, ‘the greatest contribution of the outside world was the recognition that it granted to the civic alliance as a legitimate representative of the portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 26 mexican society’ (aguayo quezada 1995, 162). this is reminiscent of namfrel’s status as comelec’s ‘citizen arm.’ but un recognition went not only to civic alliance, but also, as i noted above, to 15 other election-watching organizations. thus, with their function recognized in the amended electoral laws, and with the support of the un, 81,620 domestic observers registered at the ife for the presidential elections. finally, facing increasing external pressure from several ngos, the mexican government decided to allow the presence of ‘foreign visitors’ (the euphemism used to refer to foreign observers). according to aguayo, the salinas administration ‘came to realize that it needed a certificate of “good democratic conduct” from the outside world’ (aguayo quezada 1995: 162). thus, on 23 june 1994 the ife issued the guidelines for international visitors. significantly, a former advisor to the minister of the interior has recognized that the existence of the un electoral assistance division played an instrumental role in the government’s acceptance of ‘international visitors’ (alcocer 1997,702). in the absence of an un institution, whose establishment was in part made possible by the existence of an iem tan, the mexican government would have been unlikely to accept international monitors. among the organizations that sent missions to the 1994 mexican elections were the washington office on latin america, equal exchange, the carter center (in association with ndi and iri), and the international foundation for electoral systems. ultimately, 777 foreign observers registered with the ife attended the electoral process. significantly, more than half of them were affiliated with civic alliance. as in the philippines eight years earlier, domestic actors were at the forefront of the monitoring effort; but as in chile six years earlier, the input of foreign nonstate actors was vital to the domestic monitoring effort; and as in nicaragua four years before, the involvement of igos gave the involvement of external nonstate actors an aura of legitimacy. beyond being the first instance when all these factors converged, the distinguishing feature of the mexican case was the reluctance of the mexican state to be engaged in this kind of practice—a reluctance that, without the presence of the iem tan, would have most likely not been overcome. 11 article 33 states that ‘foreigners will not be allowed, in any way, to interfere in domestic political matters.’ portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 27 concluding remarks as the trajectory of the iem tan shows, the right to free and fair elections had become an issue of international concern by the late 1980s. this concern, however, was primarily manifested by nonstate actors working internationally. by rescuing from the domestic cum international system a basic element that had lain dormant at least since the bipolar world was inaugurated, these nonstate actors foreshadowed the changes to come with the end of the cold war. it was precisely the synergy created by domestic and transnational actors that made the rapid consolidation of the iem tan possible. but what is more remarkable about this network is the way it contributed to the redefinition of the issue it implies: sovereignty. by making explicit that the people’s right to free and fair elections (and more fundamentally, to democratic governance) transcends state boundaries, the iem tan promoted an understanding of sovereignty in international relations that, while not novel, had fallen into oblivion. iem activists were thus recuperating the social nature of sovereignty—even at the international level. the international system has been partially altered by the practice of nonstate actors. but this has not been an anti-state quarrel. on the contrary, the activities of the iem tan can be seen as state affirming; their aim is to make the world be constituted by the right kind of states, not by organization other than states, or a world government. the iem tan directly engages the state. this feature makes the iem tan unique. it differentiates it, for instance, from what paul wapner has called ‘world civil politics.’ in this practice, ‘ngos turn their gaze away from the state system and concentrate on other entities within global civil society to win support and the instantiation of their goals’ (wapner 2000, 272; my italics). it is clear that the iem tan did not look away, even for a moment, from the state system. this tan is also different from what sidney tarrow considers would be the effect of potential transnational movements: to ‘challenge the continued autonomy, sovereignty and control by the national state over its own territory’ (tarrow 1996, 6). the iem tan was not challenging state sovereignty. this issue brings me back to my initial discussion about social movements. oftentimes the effect of thinking of tans as gsms is to put them in an inherently adversarial position vis-à-vis the states and the state system. but this disposition is not portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 28 intrinsic to most kinds of transnational activism; it is, in any case, an empirical matter of the issue in question. yet more fundamental is the fact that a functional equivalent of the domestic pos is absent at the international level. without a pos to host it, a global social movement remains an abstraction. thus, what most international campaigns concentrate on are specific domestic structures. this is not to deny the importance of international regimes, but the fact remains that as the constitutive elements and ultimate enforces of those regimes, states remain the central actors—and the focal point for transnational action. it could perhaps be argued that the current gsms are simply a decentralized version of their traditional homologues. since most nonstate transnational activity, that of the iem tan included, does indeed confront a domestic pos, it would seem that the ‘decentralized gsm’ idea is well founded. there is some validity to this argument. but again, international interaction is generally episodic (and generally it does not involve public protest), thus making its conception as a gsm misleading. one thing is clear: there is no global pos for gsms to hold on to. what the international system does embody, though, are constitutive elements whose seed can be brought into life globally. that is what the path of norm-diffusion i suggested above is all about. had the popular cum territorial notion of sovereignty been absent from the international system, the iem tan would not have thrived in the way it did. in this particular case, the number of states supporting the emergent norm (iem), or the fact that its main players were not ‘critical’ states, was secondary. the gist of the emergent norm was so fundamental that it was difficult for both states and igos to reject it. the mexican experience of 1994 is a clear illustration of this. but the case of the iem tan might, after all, be over determined. many factors, among them the end of the cold war and the acquiescence of the remaining superpower, undoubtedly contributed to its rapid institutionalisation at the international level. the third way of norm diffusion i suggested might, therefore, be of more theoretical than of empirical relevance. it is still important, i would like to think, to keep it in mind when pondering how norms that we now take for granted came to be what they are. reference list portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 29 aguayo quezada, s. (1995), ‘a mexican milestone', journal of democracy 6(2), 157-167. alcocer, j. (1997), ‘the international observation of electoral processes: the mexican experience in 1994’, houston journal of international law 19(3), 689-703. aylwin azócar, p. (1998), el reencuentro de los demócratas: del golpe al triunfo del no, santiago, ediciones b. beigbeder, y. (1994), international monitoring of plebiscites, referenda and national elections: self-determination and transition to democracy, dordrecht, martinus nijhoff publishers. benitez manaut, r. (1996), ‘la onu en mexico. elecciones presidenciales de 1994', foro internacional 36(3), 533-565. bull, h. (1977), the anarchical society, new york, columbia unversity press. byington, k. (1988), bantay ng bayan: stories from the namfrel crusade (1984-1986), manila, bookmark. carothers, t. (1999), aiding democracy abroad: the learning curve, washington, carnegie endowment for international peace. carter center (1990), observing nicaragua's elections, 1989-1990, atlanta. casper, g. (1995), fragile democracies: the legacies of authoritarian rule, pittsburgh, university of pittsburgh press. chabat, j. (1991), ‘mexico's foreign policy in 1990: electoral sovereignity and integration with the united states', journal or interamerican studies and world affairs 33(1), 1-25. cortell, a. p. & davis, j. w. j. (1996), ‘how do international institutions matter? the domestic impact of international norms and rules’, international studies quarterly, 40, 451-478. cortell, a. p. & davis, j. w. j. (2000), ‘underst&ing the domestic impact of international norms: a research agenda', international studies review 2(1), 65-87. della porta, d. &. diani, m.(1999), social movements: an introduction, blackwell. della porta, d. & kriesi, h.(1999), 'social movements in a globalizing world: an introduction', social movements in a globalizing world, eds d. della porta, h. kriesi and d. rucht, london, macmillan, 3-22. diamond, l. (1992), ‘promoting democracy.’ foreign policy (87), 25-46. dogget, m. l. (1988), ‘washington's not-so-quiet diplomacy’, nacla 22 (2), 29-39. drake, p. w. (1994), international factors in democratization, madrid. dresser, d. (1995), 'treading lightly and without a stick: international actors and the promotion of democracy in mexico', in beyond sovereignty: collectively defending democracy in the americas ed. t. j. farer. baltimore, johns hopkins university press, 316-341. finnemore, m. & sikkink, k. (1998), ‘international norm dynamics and political change', international organization, 52(4), 887-917. franck, t. m. (1992). ‘the emerging rigth to democratic governance’, american journal of international law, 86(1), 16-91. ghils, p. (1992), ‘international civil society: international non-governmental organizations in the international system', historical sociology(133), 417-431. hawkins, d. g. (1997), ‘domestic responses to international pressure: human rights in authoritarian chile’, european journal of international relations 3(4), 403-434. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 30 hedman, e.-l. e. (2001), in the name of society: from free election movements to people power in the philippines. (forthcoming) imig, d. & tarrow, s. (1999), 'the europeanization of movements? a new approach to transnational contention' in social movements in a globalizing world, eds d. della porta, h. kriesi and d. rucht london, macmillan, 112-133. international human rights law group (1988) supplemental report on the chilean electoral process, washington, d. c. jetschke, a. (1999), 'linking the unlinkable? international norms and nationalism in indonesia and the philippines', in the socialization of international human rights norms into domestic practices: introduction, eds t. risse, s. c. ropp and k. sikkink, cambridge, cambridge university press: 134-171. keck, m. & sikkink k. (1998), activists beyond borders: advocacy networks in international politics, ithaca, cornell university press. legro, j. w. (2000), ‘the transformation of policy ideas', american journal of political science 44(3), 419-432. mccoy, j., garber l., et al. (1991), ‘pollwatching and peacemaking', journal of democracy 2(4), 102-114. meyer, d. s. & tarrow s. (1998), 'a movement society: contentious politics for a new century', in the social movement society: contentious politics for a new century, eds d. s. meyer and s. tarrow, lanham, rowman and littlefield, 1-28. migdal, j. s. (1994), the state in society: an approach to struggles for domination, in state power and social forces: domination and transformation in the third world, eds j. s. migdal, a. kohli and v. shue, cambridge, cambridge university press, 7-34. millet, r. (1994), 'beyond sovereignty: international efforts to support latin american democracy', journal of interamerican studies and world affairs, 36, 1-23. muñoz, h. & portales, c. (1991), elusive friendship: a survey of u.s.-chilean relations, bolder, lynne rienner. murphy, a. b. (1996), 'the sovereign state system as political-territorial ideal: historical and contemporary considerations', in state sovereignty as social construct, eds t. j. biersteker and c. weber, cambridge, cambridge university press, 81-120. national citizens movement for free elections (namfrel) (1986), the namfrel report on the february 7, 1986 philippine presidential elections, manila. national democratic institute for international affairs (1988), chile's transition to democracy: the 1988 presidential plebiscite, national democratic institute for international affairs. national democratic institute for international affairs (1991), reforming the philippine electoral process: developments 1986-88, washington, d. c. nevitte, n., & canton, santiago a. (1997?), ‘the role of domestic observers', journal of democracy 8(3), 47-61. oxhorn, p. (1995), organizing civil society: the popular sectors and the struggle for democracy in chile, university park, pensylvania state university press. pastor, r. a. (1990), ‘nicaragua's choice: the making of a free election', journal of democracy 1(3), 13-25. puryear, j. m. (1994), thinking politics: intellectuals and democracy in chile, 1973-1988, baltimore, john hopkins university press. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 31 republic of the philippines and commission on elections (1986), general instructions for the board of election inspectors, manila. risse-kappen, t. & sikkink, k. (1999), 'the socialization of international human rights norms into domestic practices: introduction', in the power of human rights: international norms and domestic change, eds t. risse, s. c. ropp and k. sikkink, cambridge, cambridge university press, 1-38. rood, s. (1987), baguio citizen response to the february 1986 snap election and revolution, baguio city, cordillera studies center, university of the phillipines college baguio. sartori, g. (1970), ‘concept misformation in comparative politics', american political science review, 64(4), 1033-53. sikkink, k. (1993), ‘human rights, principled issue-networks, and sovereignty in latin america', international organization, 47(3), 411-41. smith, j., r. pagnucco, et al., (eds.) (1997), transnational social movements and global poltics: solidarity beyond the state, syracuse, syracuse university press. stoelting, d. (1992), ‘the challenge of un-monitored elections in independent nations', stanford journal of international law, 28, 371-424. tarrow, s. (1996), fishnets, internets and catnets: globalization and transnational collective action, estudios/working papers 78, madrid. valenzuela, a. (1989), ‘the chilean plebsicite: defeat of a dictator,' current history, 88(536), 129-132, 152-3. walker, r. b. j. (2000), 'both globalization and sovereignty: re-imagining the political', in principled world politics: the challenge of normative international relations, eds p. wapner and l. e. j. ruiz, lanham, rowman & littlefield, 23-34. walzer, m., ed. (1998), toward a global civil society, providence, berghan books. wapner, p. (1995), ‘politics beyond the state: environmental activism and world civic politics', world politics, 311-340. wapner, p. (2000), the normative promise of nonstate actors: a theoretical account of global civil society, in principled world politics: the challenge of normative international relations, eds p. wapner and l. e. j. ruiz, lanham, rowman & littlefield, 261-274. wendt, a. (1999), social theory of international politics, cambridge, cambridge university press. what’s in a name? what does the concept ‘global civil society’ imply? for star ‘the palestinians, as is well known, are making use of the ancient jewish strategy of exile and have removed themselves from h portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ imagining exodus for israel-palestine: reading the secular and the sacred, diaspora and homeland, in edward said and david grossman anna hartnell, university of london, goldsmiths college the palestinians, as is well known, are making use of the ancient jewish strategy of exile and have removed themselves from history. they close their eyes against harsh reality, and stubbornly clamping down their eyelids, they fabricate their promised land. (david grossman) there is no israel without the conquest of canaan and the expulsion or inferior status of the canaanites – then as now. (edward said) the one who merely flees is not yet free; in fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees. (hegel) introduction the exodus narrative functions allegorically in the service of all participants in the palestinian-israeli dispute. this paper will concentrate specifically on israeli renderings of this ancient story. the creation of the state of israel suspends conceptions of jewish identity between the tropes of diaspora and homeland, secular zionism and religious messianism, and the question of exodus emerges as a central paradigm through which to examine religion as a major facet in what is often considered to be a predominantly secular israeli identity. itself caught in the tension between enacting a gesture of belonging and one of escape, the exodus narrative calls into question the possibility of its central meaning: a going out, a new departure: exodus. by conjuring the dream of the ‘promised land’, this biblical myth weaves together national and religious sensibilities and projects them onto the same site. in so doing it links nationhood to an economy of redemption and thus seemingly problematizes those narratives that locate zionism within a framework of so-called ‘exodus politics’. for can a movement drawing on a discourse of redemption also claim to hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine have secularised itself, as zionism so often states it has done in its particular projection of jewish identity? moreover, does the logic of exodus in fact posit secularism as impossible, irrevocably haunted by the religious terms from which it springs and seeks to flee? does this then mean that ‘exodus politics’ (dooley 2001), a term deployed by various postmodernist discourses to indicate a dispersal of meaning, in fact traces the gesture of identitarian recuperation which it claims to hold in abeyance? the physical return of the jews to the ‘promised land’ seriously problematizes the current trend in contemporary theory to elevate jewish identity as exemplary of the fundamentally homeless, exiled identities that inhabit the postmodern world.1 and yet perhaps the failure here is less that jewish identity falls short of this ideal in practice, and more that the theory not only contradicts itself, but also consistently simplifies the profound need and desire for self-determination which proves much more the shaper of national realities than do facile postmodernist theories. the question that this paper will try to examine is; how does religion relate to the tropes of diaspora and homeland that shape the nature of the israeli national investment? and specifically, does judaism serve to support or undo these distinct and often contradictory foundational premises of the israeli state? if the latter alternative is the case, then perhaps the biblical exodus narrative is not such an inappropriate symbol of the act of escape to which its name alludes. this exploration will take place primarily through the writings of david grossman, whose construction of jewish identity is envisaged through the regulating, competing and collaborating tropes of zionism and diaspora.2 against grossman’s position, whereby a specifically jewish ‘diasporic consciousness’ coexists and reconciles itself with the ‘ingathering of the exiles’ (avineri 1981, 114), i will posit edward said’s position which argues for the rigorous distinction between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ cultural affiliations. as zionism has been said’s natural target of criticism, his work speaks particularly powerfully to the debate surrounding the religious genealogy of 1 this constitutes a large body of scholarship, much of which has taken its cue from the work of emmanuel levinas. specific examples cited later in this paper include susan handelman (1982) and daniel and jonathan boyarin (1995). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 2 2 for the purposes of this exploration i am limited to the use of the english translation of the original hebrew text: david grossman, 1999, see under: love, trans. betty rosenberg, vintage, london. hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine jewish identity. taking account of said’s distinct and broad interpretation of these crucial categories, i argue that his act of separation, like grossman’s act of reconciliation, lies on shaky and ultimately questionable grounds. exodus as a blueprint for zionsim: a debate between michael walzer and edward said in 1984 michael walzer wrote a book entitled exodus and revolution, a book which sparked a bitter dispute between himself and edward said over the enduring legacy of the exodus narrative. walzer attempts to secularize the biblical text and presents it as paradigmatic for this-worldly revolutionary politics. said reads this account as a thinly veiled justification for the political positioning of the present-day state of israel. commenting on this debate, william hart suggests that their disagreement encompasses ‘not only competing views of how a religious narrative should be represented, but differing views on the nature of secularism’ (hart 2000, 1). walzer portrays the exodus story as one that ultimately envisions liberation, and yet, as said points out, the narrative seemingly ricochets along the hegelian dialectic between the figures of master and slave, a movement that seriously questions its supposedly progressive trajectory from oppression to freedom. said then links this textual tension to that which trammels zionist thinking. for said argues that while the zionist project envisaged freedom for the jews of the diaspora within a matrix of nationalism, it did so by taking up the mantel of european colonialism. in an attempt to obliterate the jew’s position as the stateless ‘other’ inside europe, the zionists created a new condition of statelessness amongst people who constituted an otherness decidedly exterior to europe: the palestinian arabs who populated what came to be known as ‘the land of israel’. said thus designates his response to walzer a ‘caananite reading’ (said 1988), one which pinpoints the exclusions that continue to unfold from the legacy of this religious text. as william hart suggests, at the centre of said’s objections lies his desire to re-instate marx’s insistence that ‘the premise of all criticism is the criticism of religion’ (marx quoted in hart 2000, ix). part of said’s critical project consists in laying bare the fact that the secularising modalities of race, nation, and culture substituted the existential paradigms of religion with new content. while the discursive overlaps between portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 3 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine nationalism and religion have long been noted, said advocates continued vigilance to their complicity as different yet complimentary discourses that promote exclusionary narratives of belonging. his consequent notion of ‘secular criticism’ therefore finds fertile grounds in a text like walzer’s, which appears to justify the existence of a supposedly secular state via a sacred text that explicitly interweaves religious and national sensibilities through the will of a decidedly partial god. said’s primary concern is with walzer’s apparent unconcern for the canaanites figured in exodus, who are, as walzer states without comment, ‘explicitly excluded from the world of moral concern’ (walzer 1985, 142). said complains that ‘walzer offers no detailed, explicit or principled resistance to the irreducibly sectarian premises of exodus, still less to the notion of a god as sanguinary as jahweh directly holding them in place’ (said 1988, 167). thus at the heart of said’s problematization of the exodus text lies the idea of ‘chosenness’, an idea which flagrantly underscores the potentially sectarian nature of religious passions and which said trenchantly positions himself against. it is what he perceives as religion’s nativist bent that leads said to brand all forms of dogmatism and essentialized identity politics as the products of ‘religious thinking’ (said 1983). his critical project thus mobilizes this somewhat radically expanded sense of ‘religion’ to weed out uncompromising and deeply rooted cultural investments. as a movement which can hardly avoid drawing on the exodus myth, and whose claim to have severed itself from its religious connections has been precarious at best, zionism is particularly vulnerable to said’s critique – although, as this paper will attempt to show, perhaps not in quite the way he would have envisaged. in his book the making of modern zionism: the intellectual origins of the jewish state, schlomo avineri claims that ‘at the root of zionism lies a paradox’ (avineri, 1981, 3), one which specifically relates to the somewhat anomalous relationship between jewish identity and the notion of secularism. he writes: what singled the jews out from the christian and muslim majority communities in whose midst they have resided for two millennia was not only their distinct religious beliefs but also their link – tenuous and nebulous as it might have been – with the distant land of their forefathers. it was because of this that jews were considered by others – and considered themselves – not only a minority, but a minority in exile (avineri 1981, 3). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 4 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine and yet there was ‘on the one hand a deep feeling of attachment to the land of israel, becoming perhaps the most distinctive feature of jewish identity; on the other hand, a quietistic attitude toward any practical or operational consequence of this commitment’ (avineri 1981, 4). in other words, it took a secular jewish movement to actualise the return to the land that religious jews believed had been promised by god. this was because the practice of judaism had become so geared towards accommodating life in exile that jewish religious thought had also developed ‘a very strong scepticism about any active intervention in the divine scheme of things. divine providence, not human intervention, should determine when and how the jews will be redeemed from exile and returned to zion’ (avineri 1981, 4). those who emerged as prominent zionist leaders did not on the whole come from traditional religious backgrounds, and it was left to figures like rabbi kook to reconcile religious jews to what some saw as blasphemous zionist aspirations, by undertaking ‘a radical interpretation of the whole religious tradition in order to turn a passive religious messianic hope into the basis for collaboration with an activist political secular movement’ (avineri 1981, 189). having recognised this marked schism between jewish religious and nationalist sensibilities, avineri goes on to discuss why it was that this dream of a return to jerusalem, a dream that had remained dormant apart from the occasional stirring of a messianic movement – for eighteen centuries, became a force for action in the latter half of the nineteenth century. explanations relating zionism to the jewish spiritual link with ‘the land of israel’ clearly fail to account for this specific historical moment. and yet the most commonly proposed argument attributing zionism to a heightened anti-semitism also ignores the fact that jews had been persecuted for centuries and, moreover, zionism appeared at a time when jewish communities were emerging as major beneficiaries of the enlightenment and religious emancipation. it was in fact the new complexities opened up by religious emancipation, avineri suggests, which largely created zionism. avineri argues that it was the principles of equilibrium and apartness that, in spite of the ‘occasional and horrifying breakdown, enabled the jews to survive in a basically hostile environment’ (avineri 1981, 8). post-emancipation, jews did not easily slide portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 5 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine into the secular identities imagined for them by modern liberalism. a whole host of cultural rituals such as observance of the sabbath presented everyday dilemmas even to the most secular of jews. moreover, jewish cultural visibility prevented them from easily allying themselves with the various national groupings that emerged alongside liberalism and secularism in post-enlightenment europe. as the dreyfus affair highlighted, jews were seen first and foremost as jewish rather than french, english etc, and so the first to be named ‘judas’ when issues of loyalty to the nation arose (avineri 1981, 11). zionism was thus born as a movement of national self-determination for the jewish people at a time of burgeoning nationalism in europe; it was not simply a reaction to persecution, neither was it the culmination of religious hopes to return to zion. zionism was necessarily secular as it is in many ways conflicted with judaism, yet it arose out of a perception amongst some jews that jewish communities so marked out by signs of religious observance – would never properly reconcile themselves, nor be seen to be reconciled to, the secular conditions of modern europe. going back to the debate between edward said and michael walzer, in the light of what is perhaps the unique place of religion within jewish identity, said’s objections to walzer’s project in the name of ‘secular criticism’ call for some scrutiny. in defence of his textual leap from the sacred to the secular, walzer writes: ‘judaism intersects with and partly determines the culture of the jews. the religious tradition is a battleground and since i am concerned about the outcome, it makes sense to join the battle’ (walzer in hart 2000, 191). this response suggests that said’s notion of secularism is not adequately inflected with an awareness of jewish cultural difference. and perhaps it cannot therefore deal persuasively with the conflicted terrain that is the jewish encounter with the ‘secular’. the somewhat anomalous relationship between judaism and the notion of the ‘secular’ is illuminated by nietzsche’s genealogy of secularism, which explicitly identifies it with that of christianity. as nietzsche’s writing shows, the tenets of liberalism and secularism were the offspring of christian civilization; there is an internalising movement within christianity that survived the death of god by crowning the modern subject in the figure of western man (derrida 2002, 40-102). and as derrida points out, the kantian thesis, which claimed the possibility of a portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 6 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine ‘religion within the limits of reason alone’ one based on liberating a reflecting faith in fact stipulated that the subject ‘act as though god had abandoned’ him. ‘the moral law inscribes itself at the bottom of our hearts like a memory of the passion’ and ‘when it addresses us, it either speaks the idiom of the christian or is silent’ (derrida 2002, 50). that this idiom was haunted by the traces of hebrew from which it originated made the jewish presence in europe a continual affront even after the socalled religious emancipation. religious ‘freedom’ therefore presented itself as a highly qualified category in a language steeped in the terms of covenantal responsibility, one supposedly addressed directly to god. as derrida asks, ‘how can one translate, in the sacred hebrew or in the semantics enjoined by it, the word verweltlichung? what is the jewish equivalent for the spiritual/worldly, sacred/secular opposition, etc? is there such an equivalent…’? (derrida 2002, 220). derrida uses the german word for secular here as he is discussing a letter written in german – by gershom scholem to franz rosenzweig, in which scholem ‘confesses’ his concerns over the so-called secularisation of hebrew, the sacred language. scholem’s letter vividly demonstrates that jewish immigrants to the promised land did not escape the complexities presented to them by the somewhat culturally alien notion of secularism that had confronted them in the diaspora and which had hastened their departure. as developments in modern hebrew literature show, the secular signs that elaborated european ideas of nationhood followed the jews to palestine. nowhere is this vexed jewish cultural tension between the sacred and the secular, divine providence and human agency, more pronounced than in the sphere of language. to return momentarily to said and the colonial comparison, it is perhaps possible to see in the zionist assumption of agency somewhat ironically the ‘religious-cultural effects’ of a tradition looking more like christianity than judaism. as scholem writes, it is the christian conviction regarding the redemption which has already come that lends this activism a special seriousness and its special vehemence – and thus its significance in world history. in the jewish realm, from which it originates, this activism remains singular and strangely powerless precisely because it is aware of the radical difference between the unredeemed world of history and that of the messianic redemption (scholem 1971, 16). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 7 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine said’s critical efforts are on the whole geared towards exposing the lingering and pervasive influences of christian notions of redemption on the supposedly secular west; nowhere does he admit that the very idea of the secular that he employs is at root christian itself, neither does he allow for the possibility of a religious tradition that itself might cast shadows of doubt over the legitimacy of a project of national founding. scholem’s letter captures well the horror of a religious jew, himself a zionist, recoiling from the moment whereby the language of god is shorn of its sacred context and usurped by man for the utilitarian purposes of everyday speech. so while said’s ‘secular criticism’ may well still be relevant as a tool for exposing a movement entrenched in the identity politics that he seeks to deconstruct, one perhaps engaged in ‘religious thinking’ in the saidian sense, his objections to walzer’s use of exodus lacks a nuanced awareness of judaism as jewish culture. as hart writes, ‘we begin where we are with the resources at hand, including religious narratives’ (hart 2000, 7). interestingly, walzer too, in spite of his admission of the need to engage with the jewish religious tradition, entertains a notion of secularism indicating ‘religionabolished’ as does said. walzer is careful to distinguish his version of ‘exodus politics’ from religious messianism, which he sees as plaguing the politics of right wing zionists whose views, he believes, are largely aberrant to the movement. one might here agree with said’s conclusion that walzer’s book is more the product of a political agenda than an interrogation into the philosophical issues to which it gives rise. scholem’s letter speaks eloquently to walzer’s simplification of the relationship between zionism and messianism. scholem is on the one hand, according to joseph dan, concerned to demonstrate that ‘zionism is an ‘existential’ movement, rebelling against the futility of historical activity in an unredeemed world, claiming that historical achievements can be brought forth without any transcendent intervention and without waiting for one or depending on one. zionism, according to his concept, is a complete departure from all conflicting views and attitudes of jewish messianism put together: it rebels against the demand to wait for divine redemption, and it refuses to see itself as the culmination of one’ (dan 1992, 126). and yet on the other hand, as derrida points out, ‘scholem acknowledges that messianism aims at the “re-establishment of a lost [historical] reality”, even though portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 8 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine “it went beyond that”’. thus in his letter to rosenzweig, scholem presents secularisation both as a risk run by zionism and as an actual impossibility: secularisation ‘is only a facon de parler’, ‘a ready-made phrase’. thus, as derrida suggests, ‘it is a secularisation that allows us to speak of a secularisation that does not take place.’ haunted by the possibility of the impossible, hebrew is therefore potentially a ‘language that turns against those who speak it’ (grossman 1999, 210), one which incorporates the logic of vengeance and assigns a responsibility which ‘exceeds individual responsibility’. scholem’s letter thus reads as a warning to future generations who will have to make sense and re-signify the explosive ‘tradition’ one stalked by the threat of secularisation on the one hand and an ‘eruption of the ‘sacred’ on the other that is their inheritance (derrida 2002, p189-228). scholem thus portrays zionism as an impossibly secularised messianism. it is essential that it be distinguished from jewish religious – and messianic traditions, yet it inevitably runs with them in the same stream. this unavoidable paradox renders walzer’s project of secularisation naïve as said’s secularism is so often blind. moving from the debate on exodus between a jewish american and a palestinian american, this paper will now attempt to trace the movements of exodus at work in the writings of israeli author david grossman, whose hebrew narratives take on the very threat of secularisation that scholem so vividly depicted, narratives which illustrate scholem’s powerful metaphor for the nation: ‘this country is a volcano’ (scholem quoted in derrida 2002, 226). david grossman: negotiating diaspora and the promised land ‘this country is a volcano. it houses language. one speaks here of many things that could make us fail. one speaks more than ever today about the arabs. but more uncanny than the arab people another threat confronts us that is a necessary consequence of the zionist undertaking: what about the “actualizaton” of hebrew? must not this abyss of a sacred language handed down to our children break out again?’ (scholem quoted in derrida 2002, 226) grossman’s hebrew novel see under: love speaks to this warning of scholem’s in that he dramatizes the ‘burden’ placed on future israeli generations in explicitly linguistic terms. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 9 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine grossman’s text is specifically concerned with israel as a destination of escape from the horrors of the holocaust. first and foremost israel emerges as a site onto which a new conception of jewish ‘destiny’ may be mapped through an alternative sign system from that which was available in europe. grossman thus portrays a flight from the tyranny of instrumentalized language, from ‘the first person plural, where one is weighted on scales: “my jew for your jew”; “according to my calculations, i killed only two and a half million,” etc’ (grossman 1999, 165). against the brutal reality of deportation to the death camps that lurks behind nazi euphemisms such as ‘exodus or migration’ (grossman 1999, 284), grossman’s characters envisage a different kind of escape: ‘i don’t mean in the usual sense of the word, but in the special sense… someone who crosses the prescribed and generally accepted borders and brings himself into the magnetic field of a different dimension of existence, travelling light…’ (grossman 1999, 100). thus bruno metamorphizes into a creature of the sea and escapes the fate of european jewry by becoming an artist and ‘fertilizing language’ in order to illustrate that ‘the truly crucial things had to be said in the singular’ (grossman 1999, 165-166). similarly, anshel wasserman becomes ‘a fugitive from human language in order to protect himself from all the words that cut his flesh’ (grossman 1999, 283). he is the jew that cannot die, and against the logic of neigel, the nazi officer to whom wasserman tells his story, he does ‘wage a war with words’ (grossman 1999, 285), one that exceeds the power of neigel’s gun that would make him stop. wasserman’s and bruno’s experimentation in narrative therefore interrupts the economy of intentionalized speech, ‘a language that will admit a sentence like “i killed your jew… in that case, i will now kill yours”, etc.’(grossman 1999, 168). in plumbing the depths of the sea, bruno’s ‘escape strategy’ attempts to find a new way of reading, one which recognizes that ‘there are deeper abysses than we can possibly conceive of’ (grossman 1999, 133). evading the issues faced by momik in the novel such as ‘how to be a real jew’, bruno instead loses his identity in ‘the vastness of the sea, the joy of life, compassion and communion, and defiance and knowledge of impotence’ (grossman 1999, 130). in giving himself over to linguistic indeterminacy, in ‘murdering’ conventional linguistic meaning in order to give portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 10 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine language new life, both bruno and wasserman recognize their responsibility to language, a responsibility that becomes inseparable from questions of faith. for against the calculating and brutalized ‘rationality’ exemplified by the nazis, these storytellers demonstrate that the enormity of the holocaust exceeds the human desire to render it meaningful, to capture it through representation. ‘while other tragedies can be translated into the language of reality as we know it, the holocaust cannot, despite the compulsion to try again and again’ (grossman 1999, 124). the significance of the nazi crime against humanity exceeds the significance of the nazis themselves, thus constituting a transgression in the face of being – being here suggesting a plurality that constitutes something greater than, and not reducible to, individual beings. so in a sense, grossman’s characters re-establish their place in the correct order of things by self-consciously wrestling with a language whose authority overreaches their own. this metaphor of wrestling recalls the hebraic tradition of the covenantal responsibility, of ‘the paradigmatic portrait of god wrestling with his people in every generation, always ensuring that his promises continue from generation to generation’ (dennis olson quoted in zornberg 1995, 91). this promise is sealed in the endless possibilities of the future to which language must address itself. see under: love almost mimes a midrashic search for meaning in which the definitions it seeks constantly gesture beyond themselves. thus the novel moves away from the subject-centred sense of reality that is one of christianity’s defining features what susan handelman describes as ‘the theology of silence’ (handelman 1982, 5) – towards a tradition that has always located divinity in the text. in this sense, then, it is possible to locate grossman’s work in the specifically jewish religious tradition that was discussed above. ‘god’ emerges a principal character in the world of the novel – for while grossman describes himself as a secular jew, the question of the divine is as inescapable for him when negotiating his jewish identity as it is for his protagonists. the characters that populate see under: love are constantly addressing themselves to god: ‘o lord, said bruno (who had never been religious), to what end do you impel these millions of salmon in endless circles around the world?’ (grossman 1999, 128). hannah pleads ‘god, god, how long must i wait for you, god’ (grossman 1999, 73) portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 11 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine and throughout the novel she attempts to ‘seduce’ him. the seduction metaphor is suggestive of the temptations that much of the judaic tradition seeks to guard against: the human desire to usurp the power of god by acting in his name. unlike in the christian tradition, jews were not meant to ‘act as if god had abandoned them’. god may be seduced but it is his human agents who must consistently assume responsibility for the consequences of this: it is the jews that have been ‘chosen’ to meet the challenge of a dialogue with and directed by god. see under: love therefore exemplifies the crossovers between postmodernist discourses on the text and jewish thinking on language. this notion of god as the invisible yet ever-present addressee of speech is essentially deconstructive, rendering all human action as provisional and open to what is other. responsivity to the constant and perennial call of futurity is thus responsibility to the relational. hence in the novel wasserman claims that decisions are never permanently valid and call for reaffirmation each time the decision is acted upon. neigel’s horror at this proposal perhaps demonstrates its potentially radical nature as well as the validity of what becomes one of the central refrains of the novel: the idea that ‘you don’t “start” to do evil, you only continue doing it’ (grossman 1999, 296). this deconstructive sense of the need for continual revision recalls derrida’s ‘dredging machine’(derrida 1986, 204). and indeed the name of ‘god’ has been explicitly invoked by derrida in his more recent writings as one of the names, along with ‘justice’, ‘responsibility’, the ‘other’ etc, that act as an interruptive force on the present. this specifically jewish notion of the messianic, the variant that holds self-identity in abeyance, has thus been a major influence, perhaps the major influence via the work of derrida and before him levinas on what can very generally be described as ‘ethical postmodernism’. i use this very vague term in contradistinction to the celebratory or indeed pessimistic theories of postmodernism that act as diagnosis for the contemporary world as opposed to those that seek to re-think it with an eye to change. these often noted connections between jewish thought and postmodernism have led some theorists to suggest that jewish identity is paradigmatic for the sense of homelessness that pervades the postmodern world. thus susan handelman writes: ‘the “play of difference” advocated by derrida is the torment of the christian thinker, the unacceptable exile.’ the jews, on the other hand, ‘are so strangely at home in portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 12 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine exile, in the play of signs, in the wanderings of figurative language, and in their own constant physical wanderings’ (handelman 1982, 120). jonathan and daniel boyarin go as far as to invoke the metaphor of jewish male circumcision as a symbol of “connection by separation”. they name the foreskin as “supplement” and claim that judaic theories on circumcision exemplify a “sensibility [that] resonates with the poststructuralist critique of the modern image of a dematerialised human subject” (boyarin & boyarin 1994, 23-26). there is a leap being made here between traditions in jewish thinking and the practical experience of being jewish. david gunkel, in a paper discussing exodus, describes the force behind much postmodernist thinking as an ‘escape velocity’, for, he writes, there is a ‘curious association between the postmodern and liberation’ (gunkel 1998, 237). seen in this light, then, handelman’s and the boyarins’ comments imply that the jews have perhaps uniquely managed to escape the trappings of identity that plague the contemporary world. forced to experience home as alienation, the jews’ physical conditions have followed the path first laid down by god’s command of ‘lekh lekha’ in the hebrew bible. and yet, returning to grossman’s text, this dialogue with god for which the jews have seemingly been singled out threatens throughout the novel to break down. in fact, while the jewish notion of god actualized in social space is continually assumed by the protagonists in the novel that try to address him, there is a sense that their appeals to him are futile. ‘mrs zeitrin is… angry with god’ (grossman 1999, 15), suggesting that although he may not have abandoned her, he certainly has let her down. the text thus expresses the perhaps failed attempt to reassemble the fragments of a tradition, one based on faith in god, in meaning, in the aftermath of the holocaust. the possibility of the ‘absence of an addressee’ (sicher 1998, 20) lurks behind every word. while as effriam sicher suggests, the necessity to remember and repeat the experience of the holocaust mimics the injunction to continue telling the story of the exodus from egypt (sicher 1998, 23), it may be that while the latter confers a shape to the notion of freedom, and of language as responsibility to this freedom, the former runs the risk of the negation of meaning in language. so while see under: love highlights some of the theoretical similarities between postmodernist and jewish thinking on language and identity, it also underscores the historical event that perhaps confirmed the connection between the two and which in portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 13 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine fact considerably complicates the casual slippage between ‘postmodern’ and jewish notions of identity. the event of the holocaust acts as a potent symbol of a world seemingly bereft of moral coordinates that is the hallmark of pessimistic theories of the postmodern. the image of the jews led to be massacred by the nazis ‘like lambs to the slaughter’ becomes a synecdoche of a world with no logic, meaning, or means to map itself. the experience of the holocaust lent painful imagery to the jewish tradition of religious passivity, and grossman’s novel is suffused with portraits of waiting, and of the often helpless sense that ‘only god can help… god help us’ (grossman 1999, 76). for as scholem explains, ‘in judaism the messianic idea has compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished’. the very trend in judaism – that is, messianism that links jewish thinking to that of the postmodern ‘corresponds’, writes scholem, ‘to the endless powerlessness in jewish history during all the centuries of exile, when it was unprepared to come forward onto the plane of world history’ (scholem 1971, 36). thus thinkers like handelman who imply that the jews are somehow ‘happy’ with the condition of exile that has been forced upon them shy away from the fact of the state of israel’s rise, the existence of which was secured by the brutal event that defined the second world war. as scholem sees it, the jewish return to zion was motivated by the ‘enticement to fulfilment’ dormant in messianism and activated by the utopian elements coexisting with it. intimately connected with the messianic hope then, zionism nonetheless broke with it by moving onto the historical plane and bringing about ‘irrevocable action in the concrete realm’. zionism’s relationship with messianism is therefore much more entangled than walzer would have it. yet zionism ‘has not given itself up totally to messianism’ (scholem 1971, 36). the conflation of notions of jewish – ethnic identity with the anti-essentialist identities promoted by postmodernism is a suspect move even when the emphasis is on the diasporic consciousness of jews living in exile. it becomes even more tenuous when speaking of zionist notions of jewish identity that embody a logic decidedly in opposition to diaspora. this is precisely the move made by grossman in some of his non-fiction writing, as i will attempt to show below. in see under: love momik’s attempt to tame the ‘nazi beast’ represents his own impulse to evade self-definition by the jewish experience of diaspora. the crushing portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 14 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine burden of his parents’ expectations of him lead momik to scorn their generation who have ‘never done anything in their lives to fight back, they just sit there bickering about those stories no one gives a damn about’ (grossman 1999, 83). and yet his desire for exodus from the past does not lead him to seek the kind of borderless freedom realized by bruno in the sea. while the underwater population propels itself ‘ever onward, wandering homeless’, momik pines for the security of place offered by the promise of solid grounds. as his reaction to the ‘messiah’ episode reveals, he ‘loves’ his ‘fetters’ and does not want to answer the messiah, ‘the one who calls us to freedom’. the ‘final conclusion’ offered by the messiah is one in which all trappings of self-understanding fall away, and while this ultimate loss of identity is proffered as ‘the big secret’, the ‘truth’, momik rejects this chaotic version of reality, claiming that ‘some of us need orderly framework, law, to continue.’ (grossman 1999, 166 – 184). the messiah episode outlines the cruelty inherent in the denial of human selfdefinition, and it in many ways seems to be grossman’s confirmation that the jewish desire for self-determination does not dovetail with messianism, it is rather a legitimate deviation from it. and yet writing elsewhere, he seems to suggest otherwise. in his introduction to an edition of exodus, grossman vividly depicts this anxious tension in jewish identity between the figures of diaspora and homeland. he juxtaposes the jewish ‘taste for wandering’ with ‘an intense longing for a ‘promised land’” and evokes the paradox of ‘freedom’ which seemingly calls from both directions (grossman 1998, xii). like walzer, grossman draws on the exodus narrative as an allegory for the foundation of the state of israel and the movement from which it was founded. but exodus becomes more for grossman in this piece than simply a founding cultural myth. the ‘tortured existence’ of the israelites of ‘exodus’ becomes ‘a “history” and a religion’ (grossman 1998, x).while ‘history’ is placed in quotation marks, he does nonetheless trace his ‘forefathers’ to ‘the children of israel’ while modern israeli jerusalem is named ‘the promised land’ (grossman 1998, viii). given grossman’s position as a critic of israeli treatment of the displaced palestinian population, it is perhaps surprising that he deploys such controversial tropes with such apparent ease. the journey of the jews to israel is thus configured by grossman as a postcolonial ‘return’, and the ‘history’ of exodus lends a ‘unique status’ to ‘the jewish people’, portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 15 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine who are particularly ‘vulnerable to tragedy in a world that is all definition and borders’ (grossman 1998, xvi). while grossman seems concerned in see under: love to portray israeli self-determination as a protestation against an enforced homelessness, in this piece on exodus he manages to portray ‘wandering’ as a ‘national end in itself’ (grossman 1998, xiii) for the jewish people, making no attempt to distinguish these people from those now firmly lodged in a jewish national home. while few would dispute the vulnerability of the location of contemporary israelis, the ‘definition and borders’ which currently threaten them are of their own making and cannot be compared to those which threatened their destruction in europe. this slippage between the two masks a contradiction. grossman would like to have it both ways: that the jewish propensity to a ‘life lived in deferment’ is maintained in the historically realized promised land. but the jewish religious safeguard against the dangers of fulfilment vividly illustrated by moses’ dying glimpse of the promised land – cannot be seamlessly extended to encompass the decidedly realized dream of the jewish state. the israeli conflict with the palestinians cannot write itself into the narrative of ‘the tragedy of jewish fate’ (grossman 1988, 218). this contradiction, i would argue, is not simply glossed over in see under: love literature perhaps being a medium better able to maintain what are often mutually exclusive alternatives. so while in his piece on exodus, grossman describes the israeli ‘national character’ as being drawn through the crucible of ‘victimhood’ and fails to note – while in many ways exemplifying the attendant dangers of this, his novel displays an acute awareness of them. thus momik, who describes himself as ‘a regular holocaust homing pidgeon’ (grossman 1999, 151), is told by ruth that he needs to ‘admit it isn’t the gas chamber every time somebody swears at you at an intersection’ (grossman 1999, 136). although this is clearly making a very large leap, this comment can perhaps be connected to jacqueline rose’s claim about the need to differentiate the debris resulting from palestinian suicide bombings and that which came from the nazi death camps (rose 1996). in the novel, fried, who has been ‘battered’ by life lives it as if it were ‘his booty’ (grossman 1999, 354). again, perhaps, the connection can be made with another statement by rose: ‘trauma, far from generating freedom, openness to others as well as to the divided and unresolved fragments of a self, leads to a very different kind of fragmentation – one which is, in portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 16 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine freud’s own words, “devastating”, and causes identities to batten down, to go exactly the other way: towards dogma, the dangers of coercive and coercing forms of faith’ (rose in said 2003, 76). these allusions to the dogmatism inherent in some forms of faith recall edward said – this is no coincidence as rose here is responding to his lecture on ‘freud and the non-european’. in his introduction to the hebrew edition of totems and taboo, freud famously described himself as ‘ignorant of the language of holy writ’, ‘completely estranged from the religion of his fathers’ and unable to ‘take a share in nationalist ideas’ (freud quoted in said 2003, 70-71). he then suggests that perhaps, therefore, he represents the very ‘essence’ of jewish identity. said’s interpretation of freud latches onto this non-essential essence to speak about how freud opens up jewish identity to its non-jewish beginnings by emphasizing the egyptian origin of moses. said claims that freud ‘mobilized the non-european past in order to undermine any doctrinal attempt that might be made to put jewish identity on a sound foundational basis, whether religious or secular’ (said 2003, 45). rose’s critique of said presents an interesting scenario in which she cautions one of the principle spokespersons for the palestinian cause against unqualified invocations of a trend in jewish thinking running through zionist discourse that has the effect of suppressing the palestinian narrative: the idea that it is somehow ‘the task of jewish particularity to universalise itself’ (rose in said 2003, 72). the irony of the situation is compounded by the fact that rose here is reminding said, the vocal critic of the ‘religious’ dogmatism at the heart of identity politics, that an emphasis on the ‘irremediably diasporic, unhoused character’ (said 2003, 53) of jewish identity can congeal into an – ultimately unhelpful – article of unexamined faith. rose offers a corrective to said by saying ‘we should see freud less as purely the diagnostician of – more squarely inside – the dilemma of identity which he describes’ (rose in said 2003, 74), this, of course, is the same dilemma faced by all of the writers discussed in this paper: that their critical insights into identity are considerably tempered by their own personal investments in the collective sense of self. so just as wasserman wrests the ‘permission’ to ‘continue the story’ (grossman 1999, 287) from the nazi officer neigel who has played a role in actively suppressing it, and grossman thus voices his vision of jewish identity, said demands ‘the permission to portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 17 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine narrate’ (said 2000a, 243) palestinian identity from those who would have it silenced. in this move his advocated critical mode of the ‘exilic consciousness’ is granted the right to contemplate the object of ‘home’. this then surely transgresses the contours of the irremediably exiled character by which ‘secular criticism’ defines itself? what emerges as appealing in said is that he never succumbs to the temptation to mask over the contradictions in his thinking. while he fails to admit that his insistence on an identity politics for the palestinians does not remain true to his promotion of nomadic, anti-essentialist self-definition, nowhere is reconciliation attempted. these tensions stand out as glaring and thus productive while those in grossman, as i have tried to show above, require illumination. touching on the question of zionism, said’s ‘secular criticism’ begins to dissemble, and yet it is this very process that shows the name of ‘god’ to be both everywhere and nowhere in the discursive field of jewish identity. conclusion: the trauma of chosenness through linking jewish identity to the archetypal self envisioned by discourses of the ‘post’, theorists take up ‘the task of jewish particularity to universalise itself’. this move needs to be questioned, particularly when deployed in discussions of zionism for which it can often become an apology. in the same vein said questions walzer’s use of exodus as a vehicle with which to merge the religious and the historical. said therefore objects to the move made by walzer when he describes the cruelties to which the hebrews were afflicted as ‘the first of a series of attempts on jewish peoplehood that culminated in the nazi death camps’ (walzer 1985, 26). walzer’s connection here is part of a wider and to some degree understandable tendency to link the historical traumas suffered by the jewish people to the religious burden of having been chosen by god – a tendency exposed and refuted in grossman’s see under: love. as suggested above, the jewish tradition is more vulnerable to this confusion than most. hence said’s approach is helpful in unravelling such textual complicities, yet not necessarily, as he would have it, to guard the secular from the sacred, but rather, and often, to preserve the integrity of what derrida names the religious ‘scruple’. for as scholem puts it, the decision inherent in zionism, for better or worse, removed the jewish people from the nebulous realm of ‘meta-history’ and consigned portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 18 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine them to the planes of ‘history’ (scholem 1971, 36). that history, then, offers itself up to judgement and cannot claim exemption via notions of jewish exceptionalism. ahad ha-am wrote: ‘every true jew, be he orthodox or liberal, feels in the depths of his being that there is something in the spirit of his people – though we do not know what it is – which has prevented us from following the rest of the world along the beaten path’ (ahad ha-am quoted in said 2003, 43). as this paper has tried to argue, one of the distinguishing marks of jewish identity is the unique locus of religion within jewish culture. if, as freud claims, trauma is what binds a common people, then in the case of the jewish tradition, a distinct religious identity is intimately tied to this trauma. it is not surprising, therefore, that jewish suffering – in history and consequent means of redemption – again, in history should take on the status of a sacred text. nowhere is this link better dramatized than in the exodus story, where the traumatic denial of ‘home’ and the subsequent search in the desert occasions a special election by god. that this notion of chosenness has become bound up in the traumatic history of the jews has seriously problematized the position of the ‘victims of the victims’ to the point where many are actually ‘blaming the victims’ (said 1988). there is almost a perception that the jews, chosen by god to suffer themselves, cannot therefore inflict suffering on others. when michael walzer rejects said’s notion of secular criticism as that of the minority, he states: ‘even the oppressed need their critics’ (walzer in hart 2000, 193). this claim could very easily have come from the opposite direction: the palestinian right to self-determination buckles under the shadow of the persecuted past of the diaspora jew. as joe cleary writes, ‘palestinian suffering is always measured in the scales with jewish suffering in the diaspora’ (cleary 2002, 170). said’s notion of ‘minority’ criticism as secular stems from an uneasy coalescence within his thinking of postmodernist visions of exiled consciousness tempered by a strong dose of marxian materialism. thus the condition of exile often rendered universal by postmodernism is particularized in said, who wants to hang on to the very distinct and real difference between states of mind and those of the body. this tension in said’s thinking creates an interesting dialogue with the contradictions inherent to grossman’s work: both writers identify the secular as a point of reference portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 19 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine but have a tendency to leave it behind when their eyes fixate on the image of homecoming. the groundlessness negotiated by them in their complex encounters with postmodernism both solidify and disintegrate the image of land which neither is ultimately willing to relinquish. postmodernist discourses which wish to theorize identity politics out of existence often tend in their attempts to avoid over-valuing their object of critique to undervalue it and thus ride over these material differences so important to said. said thus advocates a constant reassessment of those conditions in the interests of the minority. his method is deconstructive yet it maintains a fully recognisable and to some degree intending human subject as its motivating force. and herein lies the major divergence between said and grossman: grossman’s work slides neatly into the postmodern critique of humanism and his version of israeli identity politics is universalised under the aegis of a ‘wandering’ (read: exiled, postmodern) nation; said’s projection of palestinian identity politics relies on the notion of agency and thus remains susceptible to accusations of ‘essentialism’ which grossman’s construction, somewhat problematically, attempts to bypass. given said’s sense of the need to maintain the idea of human agency in the face of the postmodernist attack, it is unsurprising that the focus of his own attack on zionism does not hinge on the activist aspirations of the jewish national movement. yet in the light of said’s attendant emphasis on the need for critical distance and an alienated consciousness when acting as spokesperson, it seems that in many ways judaism might act in relationship to zionism as just this ‘scruple’, this potentially critical and disruptive force that might undermine a culture from within. judaism could harbour within itself that very deconstructive mechanism which might prevent the act of escape from rebounding on itself and recreating those very conditions from which it sprung. the zionist movement ran into this fact by founding the jewish state on the basis of the very ethnic oppression that they wished to leave behind in the diaspora. the state of israel is in many ways thus a monument to the anxieties inherent to judaism surrounding the corruption of power and the potential corruption of religion if it ever came to be identified with that power. just as rabbi kook remained sceptical ‘about portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 20 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine the desirability of the jews gaining political power so long as the world is not redeemed’ (avineri 1981, 197) in spite of his fierce support for zionism so ben gurion confirmed his fears, telling yeshayahu lebowitz ‘i will never agree to the separation of religion from the state. i want the state to hold religion in the palm of its hand’ (ben gurion quoted in leibowitz 1992, 115). in see under: love neigel mocks the ‘jewish god’ who would disallow the rebuilding of the second temple because the king had blood on his hands (grossman 1999, 406). this is the kind of ‘god’ udi aloni imagines when he describes ‘the transience and the responsibility that is in the secular’ (aloni 2004, 97). this deconstructive sense of the sacred gestures towards messianic time and aspires to a transformed vision of the world not dissimilar to that encapsulated in the saidian notion of ‘secular criticism’. this notion embodies a much more complex sense of the secular than said will admit, one which ricochets between the sites of home and alienation, the secular and the sacred, human agency and a postmodern maze of an always already determined world. just as leibowitz portrays ‘chosenness’ as a goal rather than a gift, saidian criticism aspires towards and constantly reinvents what it might mean to truly achieve exodus. reference list aloni, u., 2004, local angel: theological political fragments, trans. howard cohen, ica, london. avineri, s., 1981, the making of modern zionism: the intellectual origins of the jewish state, weidenfeld and nicholson, london. bayoumi, m & a. rubin, a (eds.), the edward said reader, granta, london. boyarin, d. & j, boyarin, 1995, ‘the double mark of the jew’, rhetorics of self making, ed. d. battaglia, university of california press, berkley. budick, s. & g. hartman, (ed.), 1986, midrash and literature, yale university press, new haven & london. caputo, j.d., 1997, the prayers and tears of jacques derrida, indiana university press, bloomington & indianapolis. cleary, j., 2002, literature, partition and the nation state, cambridge university press, cambridge. cohen, j., 1990, voices of israel, state university of new york press, albany. dan, j., 1992, ‘scholem’s view of jewish messianism’ in modern judaism, vol.2, 119-126. derrida, j., 1986, glas, trans. j p leavey, jr, & r rand,university of nebraska press, lincoln & london. ———, 2002, acts of religion, routledge, new york & london. dooley, m., 2001, the politics of exodus, fordham university press, new york. grossman, d., 1988, the yellow wind, trans. haim watzman, picador, new york. ———(ed.) 1998, the second book of moses, called exodus, authorised king james version with an introduction by david grossman, canongate, edinburgh. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 21 hartnell imagining exodus for israel-palestine ———1999, see under: love, trans. betty rosenberg, vintage, london. gunkel, d., 1998, ‘escape velocity: exodus and postmodernism’, soundings, vol. 81, no.3-4: 437-459. handelman, s., 1982, the slayers of moses, university of new york press, albany. hart, w., 2000, edward said and the religious effects of culture, cambridge university press, cambridge. leibowitz, y., 1992, judaism, human values, and the jewish state, trans. eliezer goldman, harvard university press, cambridge massachusetts & london. rose, j., 1996, states of fantasy, oxford university press, oxford & new york. said, e., 1983, the world, the text, and the critic, harvard university press, cambridge massachusetts ———1988, ‘michael walzer’s exodus and revolution: a caananite reading’, in blaming the victims: spurious scholarship and the palestinian question, eds. c hitchen & edward said, verso, london & new york ———2000, reflections on exile, granta books, london. ———2003, freud and the non-european, verso, london & new york. scholem, g., 1971, the messianic idea in judaism shocken books, new york shlaim, a., 2000, the iron wall, penguin books, london & new york sicher, e., (ed.), 1998, breaking crystal: writing and memory after auschwitz, university of illinois press, urbana & chicago. walzer, m., 1985, exodus and revolution, basic books, new york. zornberg, a. g., 1996, genesis: the beginning of desire, the jewish publication society, jerusalem & philedelphia. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 22 introduction exodus as a blueprint for zionsim: a debate between michael conclusion: the trauma of chosenness reference list portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: ward, r. 2019. ‘national’ and ‘official’ languages across the independent asia-pacific. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 16:1/2, 82-100. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ portalv16i1/2.6510 portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 14492490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu. au/ojs/index.php/portal. research article ‘national’ and ‘official’ languages across the independent asia-pacific rowena ward corresponding author: dr rowena ward, school of humanities and social inquiry, faculty of law, humanities and the arts, university of wollongong, northfields ave wollongong, nsw 2522, australia. email: roward@uow.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6510 article history: received 15/03/2019; revised 02/08/2019; accepted 16/08/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract in november 2018 new caledonians went to the polls to vote on whether the french territory should become an independent state. in accordance with the terms of the 1998 noumea accord between kanak pro-independence leaders and the french government, new caledonians will have the opportunity to vote on the same issue again in 2020 and should they vote for independence, a new state will emerge. in another part of melanesia, the people of the autonomous region of bougainville (arb) will vote on 23 november 2019 on whether to secede from papua new guinea and form an independent state. with the possibility of two new independent states in the pacific, the possible political and economic consequences of a vote for independence have attracted attention but little consideration has been paid to the question of which languages might be used or adopted should either territory, or both, choose independence. this article explores the question of language choice, specifically whether in several decolonized countries in the asia-pacific a choice has been made to designate ‘national’ and / or ‘official languages or not. it first examines the concepts of ‘national’ and ‘official’ languages of a select number of independent countries in order to consider the possible linguistic configurations which could eventuate should residents of new caledonia and/or bougainville vote for independence. it then surveys how national and official languages are adopted by states post-independence, and how this relates to concepts of national identity. it returns to consider the linguistic options for new caledonia and bougainville, should they choose to become independent. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 82 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6510 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6510 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:roward@uow.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6510 keywords: national language; official language; independence; decolonisation; pacific with elections on independence occurring in two separate locations (new caledonia and the autonomous region of bougainville) in the pacific and therefore the possibility of two new independent states coming into being in the near future, there has been considerable media and scholarly focus on the possible political, economic and social effects consequences of a vote for independence in either location, and what the future might be (fisher 2018; maclellan and regan 2018; robertson 2018; woodbury 2015). little attention, however, has been paid to the question of which languages might be used or adopted should either new caledonia or bougainville, or both, choose independence. the asia-pacific region, used here to denote countries in south east asia and the western pacific ocean, is politically, economically, socially and linguistically diverse. it includes countries with very large populations (indonesia) and some with very small populations (tuvalu) and hosts more than 20 percent of the world’s languages. this includes vanuatu which, with a population of around 272,000, is home to some 130+ separate languages, and the island of new guinea where over 1,000 languages are spoken. few countries in the asia-pacific region were not colonised by european powers. thailand and tonga remained formally independent but others were brought under colonial rule in a variety of forms. the colonial history resonates through the contemporary linguistic landscape, and the countries discussed below, all of which became independent after 1945, demonstrate the choices of languages made in pursuit of ideological and practical goals. the asia-pacific is still in the process of decolonisation, and some countries are still relatively young. the federated states of micronesia for example, was only created in 1994 following decades of administration by the united states of america as a un trust territory. for an independent state, the choice of a language carries important political and social considerations as a common language (or languages) plays an important role in nationbuilding and achieving a cohesive national identity. such a decision has an important role in the construction of what benedict anderson called an ‘imagined community’ (1981). it is also an affirmation of state sovereignty, as the decision to adopt a national or official language (or not to adopt, or defer the decision) is a political choice. with two potential new independent states in the foreseeable future it is timely to consider the linguistic options that are available. national and official languages in independent states at independence, or in the lead up to independence, political leaders have the opportunity to choose the national and / or official languages for the new state or none at all.1 a ‘national language’ is commonly chosen to represent the ‘nation’ whilst an ‘official language’ is one that is designated by the state for use in government documents, acts of parliament, court proceedings and so on. where the national and official language(s) are specified in legal instruments such as the constitution, they have de jure status but where their use is established through use or function but not legally specified, they are de facto national and/or official. the use of english in australia is one example of both a de facto national and official language: it is widely used 1 sign languages are not discussed in this article although they are a de facto official language in some countries, such as papua new guinea. ward portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201983 and is the language of government and the courts, but has never been legally designated as the country’s official language. across the tasman sea, maori is spoken by fewer people than english in aotearoa new zealand, but since the introduction of the maori language act in 1987, is an official language together with english.2 english was the de facto national and official language until then as part of an attempt to foreground the country’s indigenous culture in a privileged bi-culturalism (spoonley et al. 2003). the former condominium of new hebrides (vanuatu since 1980) was one of the few places governed concurrently by two colonial powers (united kingdom and france), a situation which has led to a lasting linguistic division across the independent state. with two colonial languages spoken in different parts of the new state, in the lead up to independence, vanuatu’s pro-independence leaders chose to adopt bislama—a hitherto disparaged pidgin—as the state’s national language (thomas 1990; see below). english and french, together with bislama, were made official languages. whilst all states which opt to adopt a national language also make it their official language, some states have no national language but a number of official languages (for example, fiji) and some do not specify either (for example, solomon islands). some states also utilise the concept of ‘working languages’ that are neither national nor official but are used to communicate with staff of external organisations, many of whom do not speak the national or official languages.3 an example of working languages can be found in timor-leste where both indonesian and english were used as working languages during the years when it was under united nations administration (see below). it is important to note that the concepts of national and official languages are unrelated to the linguistic notions of a pidgin, creole and dialect. a pidgin is a created language, often borrowing heavily from one, two or more languages to create a means of communication between people from different language backgrounds. a pidgin, which is never spoken as a first language (hereafter l1) by any of its speakers, is not comprehensive enough to cover all topics of communication (volker 2015: 4–5) and, despite its effectiveness as a means of communication, is commonly viewed negatively by speakers of a more dominant language. over time, a pidgin may develop sufficiently to be used in a broader range of topics, at which time children begin to grow up speaking it as their l1. at such time, a pidgin has become a creole. bislama—the national and official language of vanuatu—is one such an example: it contains words from english, french and several ni-vanuatu languages, and is spoken at home by 34 percent of the population (vanuatu census 2009: xii). in honiara, solomons pijin emerged as a useful means of communication between the 80 or so language groups present, but over time, children have grown up speaking it as their l1 and hence it is now a creole (even though it continues to be called ‘pijin’). importantly, pidgins and creoles are not dialects or derivatives of a language with links to a specific region and / or social group. despite the importance of language, discussions about the language(s) for the potential new state are often not prioritised by agitators for independence. this is despite language often being at the heart of how a community justifies its difference from the population from which it wishes to become independent and/or how it manifests its resistance to the government. 2 the maori language act was revised in 2016. 3 this concept of a ‘working language’ differs from the legal status of ‘procedural’ languages used in supranational organisations, such as the united nations. ‘national’ and ‘official’ languages across the independent asia-pacific portal vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201984 the east timorese for instance, used both portuguese and tetum languages in their resistance against the indonesian occupation of their country (see below). the choice of languages for a newly independent state is a political decision. as argued by dardjowidjojo, the decision on a national language ‘is determined not so much by linguistic as by political and social factors’ (1998: 35). the state can be deliberately inclusive, for example when making a decision to adopt a widely used local language, or it can be deliberatively exclusive, for example when it is decided not to adopt the language of the former colonial administration. the choice can be pragmatic or more precisely, made with the view to nationbuilding. the decision to adopt bislama as the national language of vanuatu, for instance, meant that neither english nor french speakers were prioritised over the other, whilst a local language was prioritised. conversely, papua new guinea’s decision not to designate a national language meant that no one language was given precedence over others. the national language is always an official language, but the reverse is not necessarily the case. as noted earlier some countries have only a national language which is also the official language (indonesia), others have no national language but a number of official languages (fiji) and some do not specify either (solomon islands). in indonesia, bahasa indonesia (hereafter indonesian) is both the de jure national and de jure official language (see below). in many cases across the asia-pacific region, the language of the former colonial power is, at least, an official language (fiji). whilst rare, the official language can be a non-local indigenous or introduced language which is not the language of the former colonial power, for example, fiji hindi which is a local variant of hindi and an official language in fiji (see below). the selection of the national and official languages can lead to a hierarchy in the status or standing of languages with the languages chosen assuming a higher status than those which are not. the status applies irrespective of the regularity of use. a pidgin for example, may be widely used but it is rarely the national or official language. a negative relative status can see speakers of other languages develop pessimistic attitudes towards the language(s) they speak, which in turn, can cause them to use the higher status language more often. this language shift can result in language loss as speakers increasingly use the higher status language at the expense of their l1.4 the designation of a language as a national and / or official language can contribute to this language shift. in the next section i discuss a number of states that have de jure national or official languages. official and national language countries the countries covered here are not exhaustive and have been chosen to illustrate the diversity of language configurations across the region. indonesia indonesia serves as an important case study for any discussion of language choice in the asiapacific as it has a history of being both the colonised (by both the netherlands and japan) and a coloniser. the dutch were present in the indonesian archipelago from the late 16th century, and the vereenigde oostindische compagnie (voc, dutch east india company) began establishing small trading colonies across the archipelago from 1619. the nederlands(ch)indië (netherlands east-indies) was formed officially under dutch government rule in 1800 4 language loss can also be the result of policies which deliberately suppress the use of a language. ward portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201985 when the areas owned by the voc were nationalised. while dutch was the language of administration and of education for local dutch children and the children of non-dutch elites, it was never widely spoken. upon occupying the netherlands east indies in march 1942, the japanese authorities banned the use of dutch in both public and private (brown 2003: 141). whilst the japanese authorities’ medium-to-long term plan was to make japanese the national language, it recognised that it was not feasible in the short-term. as well as sponsoring nationalist anti-colonial movements the japanese made indonesian5 the language of education, administration and media and consequently texts which had previously only been available in dutch were translated into indonesian for the first time (pauuw 2009). accompanying this development was a rapid expansion in the indonesian lexicon (simpson 2007: 327). the japanese occupation thus enabled the spread and development of indonesian. according to teeuw (in abas 1987: 42), the shift to indonesian under the japanese, constitutes ‘a much greater revolution’ than the declaration of indonesian as the national language in the 1945 constitution, which in itself was an important part of indonesia’s decolonisation. article 36 of the 1945 indonesian constitution reads: ‘the national language shall be indonesian (bahasa indonesia)’ (constitution of the republic of indonesia, 2003).6 in deeming indonesian to be the national language at the proclamation of independence on 17 august 1945,7 the indonesian leaders consciously rejected dutch as the language of the new country. this decision was based on, first, the fact that it was the colonial language and not indigenous (that is, it was a deliberate rejection of the colonisers’ language); and second, dutch was not as widely used globally as english or french so it was not seen to be internationally useful. while the decision to adopt indonesian was in accordance with the declaration made at the 2nd congress of indonesian youth in 19288 that indonesia would have ‘one language,’ it was spoken as a l1 by fewer than 5 percent of the population at independence (pauuw 2009: 3). in comparison, javanese, which was spoken by a large number of members of the educated elite, the country’s leaders and almost half of the country’s entire population, was rejected. as dardjowidojo writes, ‘most of the young nationalists spoke dutch better than malay’ (1998: 37). the decision was partly made in recognition of the absence of codified hierarchal language in indonesian, which is a complex feature of javanese (simpson 2007: 324). this makes indonesian comparatively easier to learn. the history of indonesian as the lingua franca across the coastal areas of the archipelago also helped in its selection as the national language (paauw 2009: 3). importantly, as it ‘would not appear to confer unfair native language advantages on any major, numerically dominant ethnic group’ (simpson 2007: 323), the rejection of javanese facilitated indonesian becoming the language of national unity. today, indonesian is the most widely understood language 5 according to simpson (2007: 327), the japanese called the language ‘malay.’ 6 moeliono (1986: 26) argues that the wording in the 1945 constitution does not equate to ‘national language’ but to ‘state language.’ there were no changes to article 36 in the 1999 to 2002 amendments to the constitution. 7 the netherlands did not recognise indonesian independence until december 1949. in november 1945, after re-colonising indonesia, the dutch authorities declared indonesian a co-official language with dutch (moelino 1986: 27). 8 according to abas (1987: 38), indonesian was first used instead of melayu (malay) at the 1928 2nd congress. paauw (2009: 3) notes that discussions were held in indonesian at the 2nd congress whereas they had been in dutch at the 1st congress in 1926. ‘national’ and ‘official’ languages across the independent asia-pacific portal vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201986 across the country even though it is not the l1 of a majority of the population. rather, large numbers of indonesians speak, to name a few, javanese, sundanese, balinese, and mandarin or other chinese languages as their l1, but attend school in indonesian, where the learning of english is also compulsory from junior secondary level. interestingly, since the fall of the suharto regime in 1998, there has been a softening in the official attitudes towards, and use of, chinese languages. following the alleged 1965 communist coup, the ‘basic policy for the solution of the chinese problem’ was introduced in 1967 (setijadi 2016: 143). under this policy, chinese-language schools were phased out and the use of chinese script in public places was banned. according to setijadi (2016: 143), these policies were part of an ideology that viewed ‘non-native’ languages as contrary to national unity. most of the legislation was revoked by either presidents b. j. habibie (in office from 21 may 1998–20 october 1999) or abdurrahman wahid (in office from 20 october 1999–23 july 2001) as part of the reformasi policies adopted after the collapse of the suharto regime. some international or ‘national-plus’ schools (schools primarily for local students, but not under the auspices of the indonesian ministry of education) now offer ‘classes delivered in a combination of indonesian, english and mandarin’ (setijadi 2016: 145) and chinese script is now seen in public (setijadi 2016: 144–145). whilst these changes do not affect the overall status of indonesian, they do demonstrate a significant change in official attitudes to nonnative languages, especially chinese languages, and the country’s linguistic landscape. during the 1960s and 1970s, indonesia occupied both west papua and the former portuguese colony of timor. as part of its policies of national unity through ‘indonesianisation,’ indonesian was imposed as the official language of both territories. timor-leste there are few opportunities available to witness the processes involved in choosing languages for a new state, largely because new states themselves are relatively rare. one exception is the case of timor-leste, which gained independence in 2002. with its long history of colonisation, timor-leste serves as a fascinating case study of the choice of national, official and other languages. timor was declared a portuguese colony from 1702. decolonisation began in 1974 and in late november 1975 timorese leaders declared independence.9 a week later, on 7 december, timor was invaded by the indonesian military, and it remained under indonesian occupation until 1999. under portuguese colonial rule, portuguese was the language of administration, but it was not widely used outside the capital of dili. according to hajek (2000), it was not until the 1950s that a large-scale portuguese language education program for the colony was introduced. under this program, by the mid-1970s, many east timorese had attained a ‘rudimentary or otherwise’ understanding of portuguese (hajek 2000: 403). at the time of portugal’s withdrawal in 1975, portuguese was reportedly the l1 of less than 5 percent of the population (afonso and goglia 2015: 197), many of whom were members (and their families) of the ruling elite. many of the remainder of the east timorese had some knowledge of portuguese but it was not widely used outside official interactions. interestingly, one 9 hajek (2000: 401) notes that despite portuguese contact beginning in the 1500s, it was not until 1912 that portugal achieved full control of the colony. in 1914 the island of timor was formally split into dutch timor (west timor) and portuguese timor (east timor). the former dutch timor remains part of indonesia. ward portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201987 consequence of portuguese rule is that tetun-praça (hereafter tetum)10 became the l1 of many residents of the colonial capital dili, when previously the mambai language had been dominant (hajek 2000). over time, ‘tetun-prasa’ has become the dominant form of tetum spoken in timor leste. at the beginning of indonesian rule in 1975, portuguese and chinese dialects were banned and indonesian made the official language. one effect was that tetum became the language of solidarity for those opposed to indonesian rule, a situation reinforced when, in the early 1980s, the catholic church made it the language of the liturgy. at the same time, as many of the exiled timorese leaders spoke portuguese, the indonesian authorities promoted english in the belief that it would ‘weaken the position of portuguese amongst the educated elite’ (hajek 2000: 406). in 1998, the conselho nacional de resistência timorense (cnrt, timorese national resistance council) published the magna carta which was to be the basis of timor’s postindependence constitution (hajek 2000; taylor-leech 2009). in the magna carta, tetum was designated as the future country’s ‘national’ language and portuguese an ‘official language’ (hajek 2000: 408). makoni and severo suggest that this choice was a deliberate challenge to ‘indonesian and australian domination’ (2015: 157), but taylor-leech suggests that cnrt’s intention was to restore ‘the linguistic order of 1974/75’ (2019: 302). following a vote on whether to become an autonomous territory within indonesia was firmly rejected in 1999, timor-leste was administered by the united nations transitional administration in east timor (untaet) until 2002. largely because most of the international military, police and advisors spoke neither portuguese nor tetum, and the people generally spoke better indonesian than portuguese, during the period of untaet administration both english and indonesian became ‘working languages’ (macalister 2016: 334). this situation continues to this day (see below). on independence in 2002, in accordance with the magna carta, the authorities made tetum the national language and portuguese and tetum official languages. the decision to make portuguese an official language enabled timor to become a member of the community of portuguese language countries (cplp) from which it received financial and other support for portuguese language teacher training (afonso and goglia 2015: 197). initially, it was the government’s intention that portuguese would become the dominant and most widely used language, and that indonesian would fade from use in 10 years (taylor-leech 2009: 37). whilst the dominance of indonesian has decreased, due to the history of portuguese as the language of colonial rule, some timorese hold negative attitudes towards it, and many younger people prefer to learn english (abc radio national 2004). due to the popularity of english among timor’s youth and the possible inclusion of timor leste in the association of southeast asian nations (asean), which uses english as the sole working language (kirkpatrick 2010), macalister (2016: 340) questions how long portuguese can maintain its importance. similarly, hajek (2000) and taylor-leech (2009) suggest that the importance of portuguese may fade once the old portuguese-speaking elite are no longer in control. however, in order for this suggestion to be realised, major changes would need to be made as all laws are at present written in tetum and portuguese. 10 tetun-praça (city tetun) is sometimes referred to as tetun dili or tetun prasa. in tetun, the language is called tetun, but in english the spelling is tetum, based on portuguese orthography. ‘national’ and ‘official’ languages across the independent asia-pacific portal vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201988 part 1: section 13 of timor’s constitution clearly states the national and official languages; however part vii: section 159 on ‘working languages’ reads: ‘indonesian and english shall be working languages within the civil service side by side with official languages as long as deemed necessary’ (constitution of the democratic republic of timor-leste, section 159). the inclusion of english and indonesian as working languages clearly recognises the historically unstable linguistic landscape in the country and the widespread use of english during the untaet years. kerber (in spolsky 2018) acknowledges the importance of english during the untaet period and its importance for communication with international agencies and the business community. at the time of writing it is unclear when either or both languages will no longer be needed, although the results of the 2015 population and housing census give some indication of the contemporary language landscape. the 2015 census statistics shows that 30.6 percent of the population speak tetum as their ‘mother tongue,’ while 55 percent speak it as their second language (hereafter l2) and a further 1.1 percent as their third language (hereafter l3) (statistics timor-leste 2016). that is, more than 85 percent of the population speaks tetum as l1, l2 or l3. reflecting the relatively recent end to indonesian occupation, just 0.2 percent of the population speak indonesian as l1, however 6.1 percent speak it as a l2 or l3. that is, less than 7 percent of the population speak indonesian. interestingly, a higher proportion speak english as l1 (0.6 percent) but with only a combined total of 1.2 percent speaking it as a l2 or l3, the overall proportion of speakers is fewer than of indonesian. in the case of portuguese, 0.1 percent speak it as l1, 2.4 percent as l2 and 2.8 percent as l3 (statistics timor-leste 2016). that is, the census statistics show that whilst tetum is the most widely spoken language, indonesian remains a little more widely spoken than portuguese (5.3 percent). however, the growth in portuguese as l2 or l3 suggests that this could change in the future.11 nevertheless, as all timor-leste’s land borders are with indonesia, irrespective of any negativity towards the indonesian occupation, indonesian may need to remain part of the linguistic landscape for the foreseeable future. the position of english is more complex: it is not as widely spoken as either indonesian or portuguese but, as is the case of new caledonia (see below), timor is located in a largely anglophone region, which may mean that english (spoken by less than 2 percent of the population) remains at least a working language for some time to come. according to leach et al’s survey of tertiary students undertaken in timor-leste in 2010, 90 percent self-identify as fluent in tetun-dili, 78.5 percent in indonesian, 10 percent in english and only 4.5 percent in portuguese (2013: 121). in regards to language as criteria for national identity, 88.5 percent considered the ability to speak tetum as ‘very important’ and a further 8.5 percent as ‘fairly important,’ while 52 percent consider the ability to speak portuguese as ‘very important’ and 31.0 percent as ‘fairly important’12 (2013: 131). interestingly, the figures for ‘very important’ had not changed since 2007 although the figures for ‘fairly important’ had increased from 7.5 percent in the case of tetum and 28 percent in the case of portuguese. on this basis, it appears that among timor-leste’s future leaders, portuguese continues to hold an important role in their attitudes to national identity. 11 according to statistics timor-leste (2017), an analysis of the 2015 census data shows that for people 5 years and over, 62.5 percent of people speak, read and write tetum, 30.8 percent speak, read and write portuguese, 36.6 percent speak, read and write indonesian and 15.6 percent of people speak, read and write english. the proportion of people who do not ‘speak, read or write’ portuguese (39.3 percent) or indonesian (38 percent) is far higher than the proportion that does. 12 neither english nor indonesian were included in the question about national identity. ward portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201989 fiji fiji became independent from britain in october 1970, almost 100 years after it became a british colony in 1874. since then, fiji has undergone significant political change, including becoming a republic following two coups in 1987.13 fiji is ethnically diverse, both historically and as a result of migration policies implemented during the colonial era. according to the 2007 census, 54 percent of the population are native fijian and 38 percent are of indian descent (fiji bureau of statistics 2017).14 most indigenous fijians resident in fiji speak itaukei (fijian) either as a l1 or l2. similarly, fiji hindi15 is spoken by almost all fijians of indian ancestry although some speak another indian language, such as gujarati, at home. that is, fiji hindi is the l2 of at least some indian fijians. according to mangubhai and mugler (2003: 371) itaukei and fiji hindi are spoken as l1 by around 95 percent of the population. most of the remaining 5 percent speak english as l1. since independence, fiji has changed its constitution on a number of occasions. in the original 1970 constitution, there was no mention of a national language and the only reference to an official language was in terms of english as the ‘official’ language of parliament (mangubhai and mugler 2003: 371-372). section 4.1 of the 1997 constitution read, ‘the english, fijian, and hindustani languages have equal status in the state’ (mangubhai and mugler 2003: 372). in 2003, the then member of parliament, mr samisoni tikoinasau, argued that the lack of non-english versions of the constitution meant that it was not understood by all fijian citizens (mangubhai and mugler 2003: 375).16 chapter 1 article 3.3 of the most recent (2013) constitution specifically stipulates that the ‘constitution is to be adopted in the english language and translations in the itaukei and hindi languages are to be made available’ (constitution of the republic of fiji 2013). importantly, translations of the constitution in both languages are available, at least online (constitution of the republic of fiji 2013). the wording of article 3.3 is also important as it is the first time that itaukei (previously referred to as ‘fijian’) and hindi (previously ‘hindustani’) are used.17 this change indicates a shift from a colonial lexicon to a more decolonised one. nevertheless, the use of ‘hindi’ implies a more homogenous indian linguistic population than was historically the case. as siegel (1975) and lynch (1998: 263) show, indian migrants came from a wide range of language communities and did not necessarily speak hindi. moreover, the preeminent position of english is clear from chapter 1 article 3.4 which reads, ‘if there is an apparent difference between the meaning of the english version of a provision of this constitution, and its meaning in the itaukei and hindi versions, the english version prevails’ (constitution of the republic of fiji 2013). as such, english has a higher status than both itaukei and hindi. 13 there was a third coup in 2006. 14 according to the fiji bureau of statistics (2018) ‘there was no reliable collection of data on ethnicity in the 2017 census’ and consequently, statistics from the 2007 census are used. manghubhai and mugler (2003: 370) note that the remaining 8 percent is composed for a diverse mix of ‘europeans,’ rotuman islanders, other pacific islanders and ‘others’. the rotuman islands were incorporated into fiji in the colonial era. 15 fiji hindi, due to influences from other indian languages which were spoken by indian migrants to fiji, has semantic differences to hindi spoken in india. verb conjugations are also simpler than standard hindi. 16 section 4 of the 1997 constitution required translations of the constitution be available in both fijian and hindustani. according to mangubhai and mugler (2006: 27) summaries were available but no full translations. 17 mangubhai and mugler (2003: 374–375) suggest that hindustani is a more accurate word for the fijian context. ‘national’ and ‘official’ languages across the independent asia-pacific portal vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201990 in short, fiji has a unique combination of languages with three official languages—an indigenous language, the language of the former colonial power, and an introduced migrant language—but no national language. vanuatu the french-english condominium of the new hebrides became the independent state of vanuatu in 1980. with a population of around 272,000 and comprising 83 islands of which 65 are inhabited, and some 110 languages spoken, vanuatu is considered the world’s most linguistically diverse country per capita (crowley 2006: 157). during the colonial era, france and britain ran separate education and legal systems and the population was split into anglophone and francophone communities. although the english and french education systems were merged at independence, there is still an unofficial separation line between regions where english or french were taught at school as schools have largely maintained their adherence to the pre-independence languages. vanuatu remains the only place in the pacific where the anglophone and francophone worlds meet (crowley 2000). at independence, the creole bislama18 was designated the national language and three languages—english, french and bislama—were made official languages. vanuatu’s designation of two colonial languages as official languages is unique. according to crowley, the wording of the french version of the constitution indicates that the writers’ intention was ‘that bislama would function as the official spoken language at the national level, while english and french would function as the official written languages’ (2000: 51). the decision to make bislama the national language was the result of its neutral status between those leaders educated in english and those educated in french (lynch 1998). interestingly, all three languages—including bislama which as a creole is not indigenous— were ‘introduced during european colonisation’ (francois et al 2015: 3). according to the executive summary of the 2009 census, bislama is spoken at home by 34 percent of the population whilst english and french are spoken by 2 percent and 1 percent respectively (vanuatu national statistics office 2015).19 leach et al.’s survey of tertiary students shows 95 percent to be fluent in bislama, 46 percent in english and 34 percent (2013: 87). in terms of language as a criterion for vanuatuan national identity, 54.5 percent consider the ability to speak bislama as ‘very important’ compared to 60 percent for english and 48.5 percent for french (leach et al. 2013: 94).20 in addition to designating the national and official languages, the constitution stipulates that local (vanuatu indigenous) languages are ‘part of the national heritage’ and should be protected (government of the republic of vanuatu 1983: chapter 1 article 3:2), while the same article leaves the option open for other languages to be declared ‘national languages’ in the future (crowley 2000). the growing importance of bislama means that this is unlikely to occur. according to charpentier, while french and english ‘theoretically’ have equal status with bislama, ‘they are not equal in reality’ as the number of bislama speakers has increased at the expense of the other two languages (2006: 133). charpentier also predicted that the number 18 bislama (bichelamar in french) has a largely english-based lexicon. 19 the census shows that 63 percent of the population speak a local language at home. 20 all percentages are lower than for ‘respect tradition and kastom’. ward portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201991 of french speakers would continue to decline. this prediction has proved correct and it is one of the reasons behind the french government’s financial support for the establishment of the vanuatu national bilingual university (‘new caledonia to provide funding’ 2018),21 with support from the university of new caledonia. the prominent position given to bislama is partly the consequence of support given to it by the new hebrides national party (later vanua’aku party) which encouraged its members to see ‘bislama not as the language of domination created by europeans but as the language of survival and solidarity created by melanesians’ (thomas 1990: 238). this encouragement helped to undermine the negative attitudes towards bislama generated by the colonial powers and enabled its selection as a national language. nevertheless, bislama is not spoken by all nivanuatu22 as their l1. bislama is spoken by many urban ni-vanuatu, particularly those resident in the capital of port vila and of luganville, the country’s second largest city as their l1, but in other parts of the country it is more commonly the l2 after a local indigenous language. de facto national language countries the countries discussed in the section below are multilingual but have not specified any language as a national or official language even though a particular language may be used. as such, the general use of a language makes that language a de facto national or official language. papua new guinea papua new guinea (hereinafter png) achieved independence in september 1975. the country is ethnically and linguistically diverse with 851 individual languages, 840 of which are living (ethnologue 2019). according to ethnologue (2019), twice as many languages are spoken in png than in europe. this includes 30 languages spoken in the autonomous region of bougainville (arb) which is going to the polls on 23 november 2019 to vote on independence (see below). between 1945 and independence, english was the language of administration in png as well as the language of the first years of formal education in government schools. in nongovernment schools, many of which were church run, tok lotu (church inspired pidgin) or tok pisin were used. the latter, formerly the language of rule in german new guinea, was originally a pidgin but has undergone creolisation. since independence, the use of tok pisin has become more widespread. it is now the l2 of more than 50 percent of the population and the l1 of many residents in urban centres. it has largely replaced hiri motu, which was the lingua franca of the former australian territory of papua, in parts of that region (mühlhäusler 2003: 2). according to leach et al.’s survey of tertiary students, 78.7 percent indicated that they were ‘fluent’ in tok pisin, 55.9 percent in english and 5.2 percent in hiri motu (2013: 30). interestingly, 56.5 percent of the students considered the ability to speak tok pisin as ‘very important’ and a further 26.5 percent as ‘fairly important’ for a person to be ‘truly’ papuan new guinea (leach et al. 2013: 34-36). in contrast, only 1.5 percent considered it to be ‘not at all important.’ the figures for english were 70.5 percent, 17 percent and 5.5 percent and for hiri motu were 9.5 percent, 23.5 percent and 28.5 percent. that is, more of the 21 the proposed university was originally referred to as ‘vanuatu national university.’ 22 ni-vanuatu is used locally to refer to citizens of vanuatu. ‘national’ and ‘official’ languages across the independent asia-pacific portal vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201992 country’s future leaders consider english to be more important than tok pisin for national identity. as noted above, papua new guineans made a conscious choice not to designate a national language at independence. according to may, this decision ‘implicitly acknowledged the potential for conflict if one lingua franca were chosen over another’ (2003: 292). the png constitution does not specify a national or official language. however, article 67 stipulates that literacy in pisin, hiri motu or a vernacular is necessary for non-citizens to become a png citizen (national parliament of papua new guinea n.d.).23 as such, tok pisin and hiri motu are legally acknowledged, even though they are not the language of the constitution, or of parliament, which is english. at the same time, the absence of a named language means that there is no overt legal discrimination against any language. whilst it is difficult to predict whether tok pisin will be more overtly recognised as a de jure national or official language in png in the future, its transformation into a creole and the increase in the number of those who speak it as a l1 means that its designation as a de jure official language would not be out of place, possibly along with english. solomon islands the ethnically and linguistically diverse country of solomon islands gained independence from britain in 1978. according to ethnologue (2019) it features 76 individual languages of which 73 are living and three extinct. as in png, there is no reference to a specific national or official language in solomon islands’ constitution, which is written only in english. however, unlike the png constitution which identifies two languages in which applicants for citizenship need to be proficient, the only mentions of language in solomon islands’ constitution are in relation to criminal trials, and to the requirement that applicants for citizenship show ‘respect for the culture, the language and the way of life of solomon islands’ (solomon islands’ constitution, chapter iii, 20.4 f ). there is however no definition of which language is needed. solomon islands pijin,24 the country’s lingua franca, is the de facto national language, whilst english is the de facto official language ( jourdan 1990: 168). despite being the country’s lingua franca, pijin held a marginal status in the solomon islands’ linguistic landscape until recently (keesing 1990). this was largely because of the negative attitudes towards it which emerged during the colonial era. the de facto official language of the british solomons islands protectorate was english from 1893, when the islands nominally came under british control, through to independence in 1978. pijin was first introduced into solomon islands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by those returning from labouring in the queensland’s sugar cane industry. according to jourdan (1990: 167-167; 172-173), pijin was used by solomon islanders from different parts of the protectorate to communicate and was spoken overwhelmingly by men. since that time, pijin of the queensland cane fields has been creolised in solomon islands, hence pijin is now a misnomer. 23 article 67 applies to applicants who are not applying for citizenship by descent. 24 solomons pijin, bislama (vanuatu) and tok pisin (png) are collectively referred to as ‘melanesian pijin.’ there are differences in the lexicon but are largely mutually intelligible. all varieties have their roots in the queensland canefields where pijin developed as a means of communication between speakers of different languages. tryon and charpentier (2004) provide a good introduction to this issue. ward portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201993 at independence, pijin was spoken mostly as l2 or l3 by many solomon islanders, but since independence its usage has spread and is now viewed ‘as the panacea for the heterogeneity of the country’ ( jourdan 1995: 141). with the urbanisation of honiara drawing people from all over the country, solomons pijin is the main means of communication for many young urban solomon islanders. this is especially the case for those who parents speak different languages, and who use solomons pijin in the home. yet, it remains as a l2 for solomon islanders living outside the cities ( jourdan 2007). for instance, in western province pijin has replaced roviana which was previously widely used due to the influence of the methodist church (keesing 1990). this expansion has encouraged solomon islanders to see pijin as ‘part of solomons’ cultural heritage and national identity’ (hicks 2017: 858). at the same time, jourdan (2007: 34) suggests that the spread of pijin is partly due to its nonalignment with any particular ethnic group. in 1998, violence erupted near honiara and continued until international a multinational taskforce, known as the regional assistance mission to solomon islands (ramsi), was deployed. during the years ramsi was in place (2003–2017), there was no focus on local languages, although jourdan suggests that the use of english by ramsi advisers, military and police personnel was ‘bound to alter the language game’ (2013: 280 fn 10). it remains to be seen what those changes—if any—involve. nevertheless, while english remains the language of law, the widespread use of pijin across the country and in parliament may see it become the de jure national language in the future, rather than its present de facto status. national and official language choices in future independent states in november 2018 new caledonians went to the polls to vote on whether the french territory should become an independent state. the result saw 56 percent of eligible votes cast opting to retain the territory’s current status as a sui generis overseas collectivity within the french state and 44 percent of votes in favour of independence. while the overall result was not unexpected, the proportion of votes for independence was higher than had been expected. in accordance with the terms of the 1998 noumea accord between kanak pro-independence leaders and the french government, new caledonians will have the opportunity to vote on the same issue again in 2020. in another part of melanesia, the people of the autonomous region of bougainville (arb) will vote on 23 november 2019 on whether to secede from papua new guinea and form an independent state. these two polities are more similar than they may seem at first glance. as maclellan and regan (2018: 1) note, they are similar in population (new caledonia: 270,000; bougainville 300,000) and the major industry in both territories is mining. the linguistic landscape in each territory, however, is considerably different. according to the 2014 census, the population of new caledonia is 39.1 percent kanak, 27.1 percent european, and 7.4 percent caledonian. the remaining 28.4 percent includes people of asian heritage and those from the wallis and fortuna islands (institute de la statistique et des études économiques nouvelle-calédonie, 2015). in addition to french, 28 kanak languages are used across the territory, which for administrative purposes is broken into three provinces: north, south and loyalty islands. the unexpected close result in the 2018 referendum and the potential electoral impact of demographic growth among the kanak populations now mean that new caledonians may well vote for independence in any future election.25 in the context of the possible 25 see chauchat (2019: 265) for a discussion of the possible timing of future elections. ‘national’ and ‘official’ languages across the independent asia-pacific portal vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201994 decolonisation of new caledonia, section 4 of the preamble to the noumea accord is important: ‘le passé a été le temps de la colonisation. le présent est le temps du partage, par le rééquilibrage. l’avenir doit être le temps de l’identité, dans un destin commun’ [‘the past was the time of colonisation. the present is a time of sharing and rebalancing. the future should be a time of identity in a shared destiny’] (accord sur la nouvelle-calédonie 1998). what form the ‘shared destiny’ will take will become clearer over the next few years. the national or official language(s) of the potential new state will form an important element of the shared destiny but as of yet, the issue has not been formally addressed. most assume that french, as the lingua franca, will have a prominent role. a small survey by bissoonauth (2015: 282) for instance, shows that 83 percent of the population believe that french would remain the dominant language. as an example of this attitude, one respondent said, ‘french will stay the cement language, since it is the linking language among everybody. everyone speaks more or less french’ (bissoonauth 2015: 283). whilst this respondent rules out the possibility of change, another of bissoonauth’s informants recognises the possibility that a kanak language might replace french. according to this informant, ‘[a] lot of melanesians speak their languages and if there is a vote in favour of independence, france will not be linked to new caledonia and melanesians would favour their cultures, languages etc’ (bissoonauth 2015: 283). given that many of the pro-independence leaders use french as a language in common and no one kanak language is dominant, it is highly probable that french will remain the dominant language for the foreseeable future. some new caledonians, however, believe that due to the comparative lack of french speakers in the pacific, english may be given a greater role in the event of independence. as an informant in a survey by bissoonauth and parish said: ‘we feel a little isolated … because throughout the pacific everyone speaks english. there aren’t many of us who speak french: tahiti, wallis and new caledonia.’ (2017: 40). a respondent to another survey was even more direct: ‘we live in an anglophone zone. it would be more useful for us to speak english and to preserve french as a historical language’ (bissoonauth 2015: 283). for more than a decade, in recognition of new caledonia’s location in a predominantly anglophone region, local education policy has promoted the teaching of english from primary school. already the impact of this policy is evident with 90 percent of respondents in one survey indicating that they had studied english at school (bissoonauth and parish 2017: 45– 46). whilst it is unclear how new caledonians will vote in future referenda, discussions about the preferred language configurations for a possible independent new caledonia are needed. thirty languages are spoken in the autonomous region of bougainville where the use of any individual language or dialect constitutes a ‘marker of political identity’ (tryon 2005: 31). most of the population speaks tok ples (the local vernacular) as their l1, although no more than 20 percent speak any one language. according to the bougainville audience survey (autonomous bougainville government 2017: 9), 93 percent of bougainvilleans speak tok pisin, which as the lingua franca serves as a means of communication across the various language communities. importantly, tok pisin is not ‘owned’ or associated with any specific language community which means that should bougainvilleans vote for independence, it is probable that it would serve as, at least, a de facto national or official language. yet, the language for the potential new state has not yet figured in discussions about the independence referendum scheduled on 23 november 2019, but if voters opt for independence, then language might be a topic for discussion in the not too distant future. ward portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201995 conclusion the discussion on national and official languages in independent states and other territories of the asia-pacific shows a diversity of approaches to languages and language configurations. it demonstrates that decolonisation can be a motivating factor in rejecting a colonial language as a national (indonesia), but in more cases, the state has adopted the colonial language as a national or official language in either a de jure or de facto manner (timor-leste, fiji, vanuatu, png).the decision not to adopt a local language is more inclusive than may be initially recognised as it means that the speakers of that language are not prioritised over speakers of other languages. an unanticipated result may be that it also enables the people to engage in global affairs more than otherwise would be the case. in the absence of viable alternatives, it is likely that french would remain at least a de facto official language in an independent kanaky (if that becomes new caledonia’s independent name). if the decision of bougainvilleans is for independence, it is unclear whether it will take the same route as png and not designate any language as a national or official language, or whether it will specify a local language, which may include tok pisin, as at least an official language. acknowledgements i would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, professor marc williams, dr charles hawksley and dr angela giovanangeli for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. references abas, h. 1987, indonesian as a unifying language of wider communication: a historical and sociolinguistic perspective. pacific linguistics series d, no. 73, department of linguistics. research school of pacific studies, australian national university, canberra. online, available: 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terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: nguyen, n.h.c. 2018. ‘my husband was also a refugee’: cross-cultural love in the postwar narratives of vietnamese women. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 53-65. https:// doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5848 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au research article ‘my husband was also a refugee’: crosscultural love in the postwar narratives of vietnamese women nathalie huynh chau nguyen monash university corresponding author: nathalie nguyen, school of philosophical, historical and international studies, monash university, clayton vic 3800. nathalie.nguyen@monash.edu doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5848 article history: received 08/09/2017; revised 09/07/2018; accepted 20/07/2018; published 22/08/2018 abstract this article explores the representation of cross-cultural love in the postwar narratives of vietnamese women. the end of the vietnam war in 1975 and vietnam’s reunification under a communist regime led to one of the most visible diasporas of the late twentieth century, in which more than two million vietnamese left their homeland in order to seek refuge overseas. the main countries of resettlement were the united states, australia, canada and france. vietnamese women in australia who chose to marry outside their culture constitute a minority not only within the diaspora but also within australian society and the vietnamese australian community. in contrast to the largely negative representations of cross-cultural relationships in novels and memoirs of colonial and wartime vietnam, these women’s accounts highlight underlying commonalities between themselves and their european partners such as a shared understanding of political asylum or war. the narratives of these women illustrate cross-cultural rencontres that were made possible by the refugee or migration experience, and that signify a distinct shift in the representation of exogamous relationships for vietnamese women. oral history provides these women with the opportunity to narrate not only the self but also the interaction between the self and the other, and to frame and structure their experiences of intermarriage in a positive light. résumé cet article explore la représentation de l’amour interculturel dans les récits de l’après-guerre des femmes vietnamiennes. la fin de la guerre du vietnam en 1975 et la réunification du declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding interviews in this article were conducted as part of a large research project on ‘vietnamese women: voices and narratives of the diaspora,’ funded by the australian research council in 2005–2010. 53 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5848 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:nathalie.nguyen@monash.edu https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5848 vietnam sous un régime communiste mena à une des diasporas les plus visibles de la fin du vingtième siècle, pendant laquelle plus de deux millions de vietnamiens quittèrent leur pays pour se réfugier à l’étranger. les pays principaux de réinstallation furent les etats-unis, l’australie, le canada et la france. les femmes vietnamiennes en australie qui ont choisi de se marier à l’extérieur de leur culture constituent une minorité non seulement dans la diaspora mais aussi en australie ainsi que la communité vietnamienne en australie. contrairement à la représentation largement négative des relations interculturelles dans les romans et les mémoires du vietnam colonial et en temps de guerre, les récits de ces femmes surlignent les points communs entre elles et leurs compagnons européens telle une compréhension mutuelle de l’asile politique ou de la guerre. les récits de ces femmes illustrent des rencontres interculturelles rendues possible par l’expérience d’être réfugié ou migrant, et qui signalent un changement net de position dans la représentation des relations exogames concernant les femmes vietnamiennes. l’histoire orale permet à ces femmes de raconter non seulement le moi mais aussi l’interaction entre le moi et l’autre, et de structurer et d’encadrer leurs expériences de mariage interculturel de manière positive. keywords vietnamese women, vietnamese diaspora, cross-cultural marriage, oral history, narrative, migration; femmes vietnamiennes, diaspora vietnamienne, mariage interculturel, histoire orale, récit drawing on the oral narratives of vietnamese women who left their country in the postwar years and resettled overseas, this article explores women’s portrayal of love across ethnic and cultural divides. in contrast to the largely negative representations of cross-cultural relationships between vietnamese women and foreign men in novels and memoirs of colonial and wartime vietnam from vu trong phung’s ky nghe lay tay (the industry of marrying europeans, 1934) to kim lefèvre’s métisse blanche (white métisse, 1989), these relationships highlight underlying commonalities—for instance a shared experience of political asylum or war—that led to these rencontres or encounters, and strengthened the ties between these women and their european partners. the end of the vietnam war in 1975 and vietnam’s reunification under a communist regime were the catalysts for one of the most significant diasporas of the late twentieth century, during which more than two million vietnamese left their homeland to resettle overseas. this exodus was driven by widespread state repression in postwar communist vietnam, including the internment of one million people in re-education camps, the forced de-urbanization and displacement of another million to the new economic zones, the execution of 65,000 citizens, the curtailment of free speech, individual and religious liberties, the nationalization of commerce and industry, and the discrimination against all those associated with the former south vietnamese government as well as ethnic chinese and amerasians.1 set against the backdrop of mass trauma in the former south vietnam, mass migration, and within the context of multicultural australia, the narratives of these women illustrate cross-cultural relationships that were made possible by the refugee or migration experience, and that signify a distinct shift in the representation of exogamous relationships for vietnamese women. 1 see desbarats (1990: 60–64); hitchcox (1990: 37–68); valverde (1992); debonis (1995); mckelvey, (1999); united nations high commissioner for refugees (2000: 82); and freeman & nguyen (2003: 7). nguyen portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201854 oral history enables the recording of voices that have been marginalized by history. as noted by beth robertson, ‘one of the most important uses of oral history is to record the perspectives of disadvantaged people who traditionally have been either ignored or misrepresented in conventional historical records’ (2006: 3). vietnamese women refugees and migrants of the postwar years contribute such perspectives. their lives are shaped not only by their firsthand experience of conditions in the newly created socialist republic of vietnam but also by that of diaspora. their voices are rarely heard in the public arena (thomas 1999: 170–171). the major countries of resettlement for refugees from vietnam were the usa, australia, canada and france, while vietnamese communities were also established in countries as diverse as norway and israel. in australia, the vietnamese community grew from 1,000 people in 1975 to 277,400 in 2016 or just over one percent of the australian population (australian bureau of statistics 2018). this article focuses on the narratives of two women who resettled in australia in the 1980s and 1990s. they form part of a small percentage of vietnamese women who intermarried with europeans.2 only 13 percent of first generation vietnamese women in australia married outside their culture (khoo, birrell & heard 2009: 20). as such, these women represent a minority voice on multiple levels: as migrants, as members of the vietnamese community in australia, as female members of that community, and as women who opted for partners from a different ethnic and cultural background. cross-cultural relationships in vietnamese literary culture ‘vietnamese,’ writes neil jamieson, ‘have long had an extreme preoccupation with maintenance of the ethnic boundary, first between themselves and the chinese, later and even more traumatically between themselves and the french’ (1995: 339). this historic hostility is illustrated in the following words by toan anh in 1968: vietnamese from well-behaved families look upon marrying a foreign husband as a bad thing to do, no matter what rank or status the man may have. when she marries a foreigner, a vietnamese woman feels ashamed no matter what her social class … the act of taking a western husband is an act of losing one’s origins; the act of going astray by someone who has severed her roots. (quoted in jamieson 1995: 339–340) as neil jamieson notes, this level of xenophobia was exacerbated in times of colonialism and war (1995: 339). vietnamese literature portrays the failure of cross-cultural relationships in colonial and postcolonial contexts. in vietnamese francophone novels set in france and colonial indochina in the 1920s, such as truong dinh tri’s and albert de teneuille’s bà-dâm (the frenchwoman, 1930), or set in france in the 1930s, such as pham duy khiem’s nam et sylvie (nam and sylvie, 1957), love across ethnic divides cannot overcome the pressures and stresses of colonization and inevitably ends in sundering.3 vu trong phung’s ky nghe lay tay (the industry of marrying europeans, 1934) satirizes not only relationships between vietnamese women and european legionnaires but also vietnamese customs and traditions, and the institution of marriage.4 the damaging legacy of cross-cultural relations is detailed in kim lefèvre’s autobiographical novel métisse blanche (white métisse, 1989), in which she 2 the women were interviewed as part of a large research project on ‘vietnamese women: voices and narratives of the diaspora,’ funded by the australian research council in 2005–2010. for further narratives of intermarriage, see n. h. c. nguyen (2009: 121–139). 3 see n. h. c. nguyen (2003: 104–129). 4 see vu (2006) and tranviet (2006: 14). ‘my husband was also a refugee’ portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201855 relates the story of her mother, a vietnamese woman who fell in love with a french officer in indochina in the 1930s and defied convention to live with him only to have him abandon her when she became pregnant. she was ostracized by her vietnamese family and community, and this ostracism was extended to her eurasian daughter, who suffered the triple disadvantage of being born female, illegitimate, and of mixed blood in colonial indochina. this experience of rejection had a marked impact on lefèvre, who writes: tout en moi heurtait mes proches: mon physique de métisse, mon caractère imprévu, difficile à comprendre, si peu vietnamien en un mot. on mettait tout ce qui était mauvais en moi sur le compte du sang français qui circulait dans mes veines … je n’ai gardé aucun souvenir des premières années de ma vie, hormis ce sentiment très tôt ressenti d’être partout déplacée, étrangère. j’en ai beaucoup souffert, non comme d’une injustice mais comme d’une tare existentielle. (1989: 18) 5 the marginalization of eurasian children during colonial times was experienced in turn by amerasian children—the offspring of vietnamese women and american military and civil personnel—after the end of the vietnam war in 1975. amerasians were referred to as bui doi (the dust of life).6 their stories and that of their vietnamese mothers have been conveyed in numerous oral histories and in memoirs such as kien nguyen’s the unwanted (2001). like lefèvre, kien nguyen never knew his father. lefèvre and nguyen bore the stigma of their mixed blood against a background of vietnamese nationalism and xenophobia, and both eventually left vietnam to reconstruct their lives overseas, lefèvre in france, and nguyen in the usa. cross-cultural encounters between vietnamese and soviet personnel in postwar communist vietnam are also portrayed with negative outcomes as in duyên anh’s mot nguoi nga o saigon (un russe à saigon, 1983),7 in which the relationship between a southern vietnamese woman and soviet engineer ends in tragedy. the novel relates that vietnam and the soviet union may have been socialist friends but ‘[l]’amitié concerne les peuples, pas les individus.’8 changes in the representation of exogamous relationships are a feature of the vietnamese exodus, in particular vietnamese women’s diasporic narratives and memoirs. the cross-cultural relationships conveyed in women’s autobiographies and oral histories post migration reveal ‘confluences of culture, border crossings, exchanges, and fluid terrain, rather than simple unidirectional flows of power or desire’ (constable 2005: 7).9 even before 1975, the work of ly thu ho, a vietnamese female writer living in france, illustrated wartime interracial relationships in a positive light. in ly thu ho’s novel, au milieu du carrefour (in the middle of the crossroads, 1969), set during the vietnam war, the relationship between xinh, a young vietnamese woman, and john, an american soldier, is portrayed as an attraction of opposites. when john is badly wounded, xinh proposes to him, and both leave vietnam for the usa. 5 ‘everything about me was deeply offensive to my relatives: my eurasian looks, my character which they found unpredictable and difficult to understand—in short, everything about me was un-vietnamese. my french blood was blamed for all that was bad in me … i have no memories of my early childhood, apart from the sensation of being everywhere displaced and a stranger. i suffered greatly as a result of this. i did not see it as an injustice but as an existential flaw.’ author’s translation. 6 see, for example, valverde (2001: 136). 7 see duyên (1986). 8 duyên (1986: 142). ‘friendship concerns peoples, not individuals.’ author’s translation. 9 see n. h. c. nguyen (2009: 121–139). nguyen portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201856 although contemporaneous with toan an’s negative assessment of relationships across cultures, ly thu ho’s approach differs significantly from his. vietnamese american yung krall’s memoir, a thousand tears falling (1995), depicts her love for a us navy pilot during the war and her move to the usa to marry him in 1968. while leaving her country was a difficult experience for krall, it is a marriage that endured through war and the postwar years. in autumn cloud (2001), vietnamese american jackie bong-wright relates her marriage to an american foreign service officer in 1976. she was a refugee and widow with three young children, and had initially met him in saigon during the war. vietnamese canadian writer thuong vuong-riddick writes of a cross-cultural relationship that sustained her in her poem ‘he covered me with a blanket’: he covered me when i was sick useless, hopeless, when i was naked in the world’s eyes. in montpellier station, he took all my luggage on his back, put his arms around me. mother said: ‘he is the one for you.’ (1995: 198) these verses allude to the shock of being a refugee bereft of country and compass, and finding shelter and love with a partner who was able to comprehend the enormity of that loss. while negative perceptions of cross-cultural relationships may have existed in colonial vietnam and throughout and after the indochina war (1946-1954) and vietnam war (1955–1975), it is also clear that there were positive and sustaining relationships that occurred during that time as conveyed in vietnamese family histories and vietnamese women’s diasporic narratives after 1975.10 the nature of the postwar diasporic experience—in other words, state repression, forced migration, and resettlement in a country of second asylum—in turn provided the circumstances that enabled women to form relationships with partners from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. a closer look at these relationships reveals that it was perceived personal and political commonalities across ethnic and cultural boundaries that made these relationships possible and that the women themselves highlighted these aspects of their partnerships in their life histories. the narratives of two women who chose european partners after migration and resettlement will be explored in depth in the next section. the narratives of yen and tran the first narrative is that of yen, born in saigon in 1945. 11 yen volunteered for military service at the age of nineteen in 1967, and became an officer in the women’s armed forces corps 10 in the author’s own family, examples of successful intermarriage date from the 1930s onwards. intermarriages from the 1930s to the 1950s were between vietnamese men and western women (as vietnamese men went overseas to study) while intermarriage between vietnamese women and western men occurred in the following generation during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as after 1975. 11 yen. oral history interview, adelaide, australia, 13 january 2007. for reasons of confidentiality, the women who took part in the oral history project are only identified by a single name. ‘my husband was also a refugee’ portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201857 (wafc) of south vietnam. the wafc formed part of the republic of vietnam armed forces (rvnaf). the only daughter in a family of five sons, yen remembers that her father loved her and was proud of her. as a young girl, yen dreamt of ‘going overseas for [her] studies and going to different places’ (yen). she saw an advertisement on television about recruiting female officers and applied. servicewomen in the wafc all volunteered while their country was at war, serving in a wide variety of roles as ‘typists, supply clerks, switchboard and teletype operators, social workers, nurses, and medics’ (phung 1970: 7). by 1975, there were more than 6,000 women in the wafc, including 600 officers (ho 2001: 18). a lieutenant and an instructor at the wafc school, yen was at her post until midday on the day saigon fell on 30 april 1975.12 the end of the war not only signaled the collapse of south vietnam and its armed forces but also the end of her career and of life as she knew it. she responded to the communiqué issued by the new communist authorities in may to present herself for re-education, and followed instructions by bringing enough food and clothing for ten days. she was interned for three years in a series of re-education camps during which internees were subjected to indoctrination and forced to write repeated confessions, which she refers to as ‘a form of mental torture’ (yen). she was released from detention at the end of 1978, and escaped from vietnam by boat in april 1981, relating that she was lucky in that their boat reached hong kong safely after only ten days. eleven months later, she was resettled in adelaide, australia, in march 1982. yen’s trajectory of service, internment and escape is one that is replicated in the life histories of many former south vietnamese military personnel. as a female officer in the rvnaf, yen was directly involved in south vietnam’s twenty-year struggle against communist north vietnam. when south vietnam and its armed forces collapsed in 1975, many servicewomen, like servicemen, were interned without trial in communist re-education camps, vietnam’s ‘bamboo gulag’ (nguyen 1983: 188). yen’s account of being advised to pack for ten days but then spending three years in internment, was a common experience. it was not only former service personnel who were incarcerated in prison camps but also civil servants, teachers, journalists, writers and academics as well as escapees and their families, in other words those who tried to escape from vietnam by boat or land and were caught by vietnamese authorities (desbarats 1990: 50–63; hitchcox 1990: 37–68; robinson 1998: 179–180; nguyen 2001: 245). detainees were interned for periods ranging from a few months to fifteen years (unhcr 2000: 82; freeman & nguyen 2003: 7). the war left enduring scars in the south, however it was the severity and extent of political repression after the war that led to the mass exodus from vietnam from the late 1970s through to the 1990s. yen’s personal story takes place against a backdrop of forced migration from vietnam, and refugee resettlement and acculturation in australia. it was in adelaide that she met her polish husband. she relates: my husband is from poland. he was in a refugee camp in austria and he had just arrived in adelaide. we knew each other in english class and five months later, we celebrated our wedding. did you know that poland was the first country to topple the communist party? other countries followed the example of poland. 12 for further details of yen’s story, see nguyen (2009: 56–88). nguyen portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201858 my husband also escaped. from the time he was thirteen, fourteen years old, he realized that people were living under an unjust communist regime. he worked for the government then applied for a passport to go to austria. it took a long time but he persevered. once he got the passport, he applied to go to austria as a tourist. there was a refugee centre there helping people who wanted to escape from the communist regime to resettle in another country. my husband knew that because he used to listen to voice of america on the radio. at that time, the communist government hid news like that from the generation population. he did whatever he could in order to get the passport. once in austria, he went directly to the refugee centre. he spent a year in austria before arriving here. he was thirty-two or -three, two years younger than me. we had the same situation, we matched each other. (yen) yen and her husband have an only son, whom they took to vietnam when he was twelve. she states: he could not stand the water in vietnam; he developed pustules all over his body and he did not dare go back after that time. he speaks a little vietnamese. when he was young, i sent him to study vietnamese and he could speak some then but the older he got the less he spoke. we live in an area where there are not many vietnamese. he gradually forgot his vietnamese. he can understand all right but cannot express himself in vietnamese. we mostly speak english at home. he learnt some polish but he is not very good at it either. he is now twenty-three years old. the future looks good to me. when my husband and i first came here, we had to work very hard but we are rewarded with financial security. we agree that we owe a lot to this country, and that we are living in a quiet and peaceful country. after retirement, we plan to spend our time travelling around australia in a caravan. we are waiting for our retirement to embark on the adventure of our dreams. (yen) it is noticeable that yen refers to the personal and political dimensions of her shared experiences with her polish husband. her life narrative is not only strongly anchored in her community history but also encompasses that of her european partner. both she and her husband made the deliberate decision to leave communist states, planned their escape over a number of years, and successfully reached refugee camps in neighbouring countries of first asylum. when yen notes that her husband believed that communist poland was an ‘unjust … regime’ and ‘hid news’ (yen) from the general population, she is alluding not only to political repression in poland but also to her own experience of unjust internment and censorship in communist vietnam. although she does not provide any specific dates regarding her husband’s experiences as a refugee from poland, it is likely that he was among the 20,000 poles who were granted refugee status in austria in 1981 even before the imposition of martial law in poland in december 1981 (lewis 1981: a11; moritz 1981). his application for a polish passport and travel to austria as a tourist in order to seek political asylum reflects the experiences of other polish refugees during that period (lewis 1981: a11). yen’s narrative highlights parallels between the political systems of vietnam and poland, and between her personal trajectory and that of her husband. it was their firsthand experience of living under communism that prompted them to leave their respective homelands. the process of planning their escape was time-consuming and took patience and persistence. she was released from detention in 1978 but it took her another three years in order to leave vietnam. she relates that it took her husband likewise ‘a long time’ (yen) to get his passport so that he could leave ‘my husband was also a refugee’ portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201859 poland. even the amount of time they spent in refugee camps prior to being accepted for resettlement in australia was comparable: eleven months in hong kong in her case, a year in austria in his. as she underlines: ‘we had the same situation. we matched each other’ (yen). when she points out that poland was ‘the first country to topple the communist party’ (yen), she is referring to the momentous events of 1989, the fall of the berlin wall, and the collapse of communism in europe. her narration reinforces the underlying message that both she and her husband had sought asylum from one-party states. yen and her husband met in an english-language class in adelaide, a meeting ground for migrants and refugees from different countries and cultures seeking to adapt to australian society and construct new lives. this common thread, in addition to their shared experiences as political refugees in the early 1980s, shapes a relationship between two people who would not have met in other circumstances. although yen does not refer to difficulties in terms of linguistic communication or cultural adjustment either in relation to herself or her husband or their being migrants in australia, her portrayal of their australian-born son’s response to his dual vietnamese and polish heritage illustrates some of these difficulties. as she notes, he learnt vietnamese initially and still understands it but no longer speaks it, and although he learnt some polish, he is not good at it either. he retains only a smattering of his parents’ native languages. the common language in their household is english, which constitutes a second language for both yen and her husband. yen relates that she and her husband worked hard to establish themselves in australia, and registers gratitude to the country that granted them asylum and rewarded them for their hard work and diligence. the second narrative is that of tran, born in bien hoa in 1957.13 her family was chinese vietnamese and owned the second largest bookshop in south vietnam. tran was the eldest of eight children and loved books. she grew up reading the novels of tolstoy, romain rolland, balzac and thomas hardy. the family bookshop was a source of inspiration for her, and nurtured her imagination, her love of european literature, and her desire to go overseas for her university studies. she recalls: ‘i wanted to get high marks and win a scholarship … i’ve wanted to study overseas since i was fourteen’ (tran). all of these dreams were ruptured when south vietnam collapsed in 1975. the communist authorities confiscated all the books and closed the bookshop. she remembers that ‘they came in trucks and took everything away, they even confiscated all the stationery [her] father had, compasses, pencils, pens, colours, rulers, they were all gone’ (tran).14 tran and her family experienced discrimination directed against the ethnic chinese community in vietnam in the postwar years, and became second-class citizens. chinese schools and newspapers were closed in 1976, and ethnic chinese or nguoi hoa had to register their citizenship (hitchcox 1990: 37). more than 260,000 ethnic chinese fled northwards to the people’s republic of china (hitchcox 1990: 37; robinson 1998: 272). tran’s family tried unsuccessfully to escape from vietnam by boat twice, in 1977 and again in 1978. having poured all their savings into these escape attempts, they had no remaining funds, and were trapped in vietnam. tran never gave up on her dream of leaving the country, however, and finally realized this dream twenty years later, when she won a scholarship to australia in 1995. she met her husband ray, an irishman, in australia in 2002. she relates: 13 tran. oral history interview. sydney, australia, 5 december 2006. for reasons of confidentiality, the women who took part in the oral history project are only identified by a single name. 14 for further details of tran’s story, see nguyen (2009: 11–33). nguyen portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201860 i met ray when i went to brisbane to see an exhibition entitled “viet nam voices.” ray was in the exhibition but i didn’t know him at the time. i knew another mutual friend, peter daly, who was on the curatorial board of the exhibition. when i said that i wanted to see the exhibition in brisbane, peter said: “you must meet my friend, he can take you around.” i met ray, he was still living with his ex-wife and their two children at the time. a short while after, ray moved out of the house. we communicated by phone and then he went to sydney and we formed our relationship. we share so many things. first of all, i would like to talk about the similarity between ireland and vietnam. ireland is divided between north and south, there is not so much conflict now but in the past there was conflict between the north and south. the same thing happened between the north and south in vietnam, and that conflict is still relevant in vietnam now. when you talk about southern people and northern people, you feel the differences between the two groups. ray and i share experiences as migrants to this country and i feel very natural with him, as if i’d met him twenty years ago and have been living with him for twenty years. when i apply for australian citizenship, ray will also apply for australian citizenship. (tran) ray served for one year with the australian army in vietnam. he states: i come from northern ireland, from belfast, and i have a british passport. northern ireland was at war, there was conflict with the ira and all the sectarian violence, and i didn’t want to know anything about it. i had a very good education and then suddenly the political situation intervened in my life until everything was frozen, and i thought, “this is a terrible situation.” so i went to england and hitchhiked all over europe for six months and then decided to migrate. i became a “twenty-pound migrant,” it was easy for british people to come to this place as migrants. i came here as an eighteenyear-old and by the age of twenty, i was conscripted, and was in the infantry. i am now on a military pension, a disability pension from veterans’ affairs. (tran) when they met, tran was separated from her husband in vietnam, and the mother of two children. like yen, she draws on the similarities in terms of the personal and political between herself and her husband. her narrative points to parallel trajectories. both came from divided countries that had been partitioned into north and south – ireland in 1921 and vietnam in 1954 – and experienced the violent legacy of partition. for tran, that legacy was two decades of war in vietnam followed by the reunification of north and south under a repressive communist regime that discriminated against ethnic chinese amongst others and triggered a mass exodus, while for ray, it was political insecurity and sectarian violence in northern ireland in the late 1960s that also led to emigration (trew 2013: 51–52). both made the decision to leave their homeland. while ray left northern ireland for england, and travelled in europe before making the decision to migrate to australia, tran attempted twice to leave vietnam but was unable to do so. her fate and that of her family is a reminder of the many people who tried to leave vietnam in the postwar years and failed despite repeated attempts. since the process of planning an escape was fraught with anxiety and entailed financial commitment and a high level of risk, failure was devastating. this experience left internal scars for tran. even after resettlement in australia, she suffered from nightmares of arrest by the vietnamese authorities. she remembers: ‘in vietnam, i’d lived with trauma for so long, i’d dealt with suppression for so long. i didn’t say a word about the loss of my parents’ business. ‘my husband was also a refugee’ portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201861 who could i talk to? what could i say? i couldn’t trust anyone. so the losses stayed inside, like an infection’ (tran). while ray’s experience of migration was not as traumatic as tran’s, he left political violence in northern ireland only to find himself serving in the vietnam war. he said that there were servicemen from other commonwealth countries such as south africa for example, who had, like him, migrated to australia, spent two years in the country, and were then conscripted into the australian army. on a personal level, both tran and ray had children from previous relationships when they met. these relationships had proven problematic, and this provided another point of connection between them—a shared understanding of managing difficult partnerships from the past. ray’s service in vietnam led to his interest in art, and this provided further common ground between them—they met, after all, at an art exhibition on vietnam. as tran underlines, ‘i feel very natural with him, as if i’d met him twenty years ago’ (tran). this partnership relatively late in their lives revealed personal and political synergies and provided love, understanding and a sense of familiarity. intermarriage yen’s and tran’s portrayals of cross-cultural relationships are embedded within life narratives that encompass living through wartime in south vietnam, experiencing political persecution in postwar communist vietnam, and emigration. their accounts not only relate their own individual stories as women and as refugees or migrants but also position them within their communities and in relation to their partners. the narratives of both evince a strong sense of individuality and agency. both women display patience and perseverance, and the will to overcome significant obstacles in order to leave their homeland. the same will is evident in their decision to marry outside their ethnic group. their experience of state repression, transnational displacement, and cultural adjustments are all echoed to a certain extent in the life histories of their european partners. both women preface their accounts with statements that they had wanted to travel overseas since they were young girls. these infer that they were by nature pre-disposed not only to openness to other cultures but also to the possibility of partners across ethnic and cultural boundaries, and to migration and resettlement in another land. by choosing a partner from another culture, they are not only unusual but also ahead of their generation. while the rate of intermarriage among first generation vietnamese women in australia is low, it is considerably higher in the second generation (khoo, birrell & heard 2009: 22). the trajectories of these two women, while marked by hardship, loss and trauma in their homeland, reveal a successful enmeshing of personal openness to others, flexibility in dealing with difference, and appreciation of the strengths and understanding involved in cross-cultural relationships. a principal difference between these narratives of cross-cultural love in multicultural australia and earlier colonial and postcolonial representations is that they do not reveal imbalances of power such as that between colonizer and colonized nor the fraught context of colonial or wartime indochina. in the narrative of yen, both partners were refugees from communist states in the 1980s, and were equally vulnerable to the policies of countries of first asylum towards refugees, whether asian or european. both had to await acceptance by a country of second asylum, learn to adapt to a new language and culture, and work hard to reconstruct lives in a new host country. yen and her husband had to learn english as adults in their thirties, and communicate with each other in what is for both a second language. learning a language signifies an opening into a different culture and mindset, and they have attempted to convey this nguyen portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201862 dual asian and european heritage to their son with mixed success. in the narrative of tran, both partners met each other later in their lives, after failed marriages. both had migrated to australia and had a shared understanding of broken pasts and nationwide violence and traumas. while ‘[d]ifferent behaviours in social situations, different manners, different courtesies, different values all put a strain on an interracial couple’ as suggested by june owen (2002: 182), neither yen’s nor tran’s narratives contain references to cultural or religious differences or tensions. challenges in cross-cultural marriages include understanding racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and coping with the stresses that can be generated by differences in values and belief (kim et al. 2017: 1096). negative perceptions and differential social acceptance of interracial marriage can further strain relationships (kim et al. 2017: 1096). instead of relating potential difficulties such as communication barriers or cultural misunderstandings, however, both women have chosen to focus on the strengths of intermarriage, including an expanded worldview, and commonalities across political and national lines. oral history has provided these women with the opportunity to not only narrate the self but also the interaction between the self and the other, and to frame and structure that cross-cultural encounter in a positive light. migration appears to have given the women and their partners a chance to start anew, and to put aside the weight of the past, even while they acknowledge that it was precisely these difficult pasts that drew them close to their partners. pasts marked by war and trauma have led to the recognition of affinity with partners who have had similar experiences. concomitant to this is a marked appreciation for the peace and stability provided by the relationship and by the resettlement country. as yen notes: ‘we agree that we owe a lot to this country, that we are living in a quiet and peaceful country’ (yen). tran for her part, remarks: to me vietnam has too many restrictions that i just can’t stand. vietnam as a country is a lovely place, but as a regime, as a nation, there are so many things wrong there that need to be corrected … to me australia provides other options, australia provides alternatives, and i like that fact, i like living in australia. (tran) these statements justify the women’s decision to migrate, and their appreciation of the wider possibilities afforded by australia. their life narratives are coherent and reveal not only a strong sense of identity as vietnamese women and as migrants but also a clear engagement between themselves and the society in which they live. in conclusion, there are two distinct aspects to these cross-cultural relationships. the first is the explicit reference to a shared understanding of adversity between themselves and their partners. both women choose to highlight this. this shared adversity is not only personal but also political and communal, referring either to repressive communist regimes or the damaging legacy of partition. the second is that while these intermarriages took place in australia neither partner is australian-born. all are refugees or migrants in the context of multicultural australia. rosemary breger and rosanna hill note that: living in a mixed marriage can be an intimate performance of juggling identities and the ideologies associated with them, a dance sometimes threatening to perform as well as to behold. it is sometimes enriching but always calls into question deeply held assumptions about the nature of one’s own identities, and those of one’s reference groups. 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of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: duruz, j. 2021. mourning le temps perdu (proust 1988– 1990): eating together in pestilence. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 110–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ pjmis.v17i1-2.7326 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal cultural work mourning le temps perdu (proust 1988– 1990): eating together in pestilence jean duruz corresponding author: dr. jean duruz, adjunct senior research fellow, university of south australia, gpo box 2471, adelaide sa 5001, australia. jean.duruz@unisa.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7326 article history: received 14/07/2020; accepted 11/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract this creative piece of non-fiction was written in response to the challenges of everyday life in the early weeks of the pandemic in australia. i wanted to convey the emotional economy of experiences— the longing, sense of loss, traces of guilt in processes of remembering and storytelling, particularly when these feelings might seem unjustified and selfindulgent. keywords culture; everyday life; emotion; memory i live in a small village called mile end. it’s actually a suburban enclave of the city of adelaide, south australia, the village’s name referencing its colonial british history (with, for example, mile end, london and mile end, montreal embedded in that same history). my neighbors are greek, italian, vietnamese, afghani, ethiopian, irish, scottish, german, chinese, malaysian and anglo-australian (city of west torrens 2016). we, the lucky ones, live on quarter acre plots carved from fertile river flats, planted with olive trees, pomegranates, lemons, apples, figs, apricots, persimmons, almonds and grape vines. meanwhile the mediterranean climate ensures that market gardens, orchards, vineyards and olive groves prosper to the north and south of the city. we have enough food. remember this. enter covid-19. a few steps from our front gate, the local supermarket (at its best, notably cosmopolitan in its range of offerings) is awash with people, somewhat mysteriously purchasing toilet paper. the shelves quickly empty of this. as well, overnight, pasta, rice, declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 110 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7326 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7326 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:jean.duruz%40unisa.edu.au?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7326 passata and tinned tomatoes become coveted items. understandable, certainly, not only in terms of the presence of elderly italian neighbors but also common knowledge that spaghetti bolognaise is a ubiquitous comfort dish on australian dinner tables (special broadcasting service 2013). on the other hand, the panic itself is less understandable. while south australians have not displayed the checkout violence occurring in other states, rationing of certain products has been introduced. shopping then becomes a grim affair, as if our lives and livelihoods depended on the size of our stockpiles. is there not enough food, after all? the prime minister, headmaster-fashion addresses the nation with an injunction against hoarding. ‘stop it!’ he barks and accuses hoarders of being ‘un-australian’ (sky news 2020). the national farmers’ federation produces an advertisement with the back view of an iconic suntanned farmer figure (who, interestingly, looks like a woman) with the byline ‘don’t panic. we’re experts at working from home’ (farm online 2020). the text continues comfortingly that the nation produces enough food for triple the population (which begs the question why are we exporting our own food and importing others’ so much?). however, without resorting to trumpish australia-first kinds of arguments, the advertisement concludes ‘a food shortage is one thing you don’t need to worry about’ and that all we need to do is ‘shop sensibly.’ so, is there plenty of food to go around (even of ‘food you love’) after all? if food security is not really the issue, then what is? i want to suggest that, leaving aside fears of the virus itself and its health, economic and social ramifications (people dying, hospitals failing to cope, job losses, families unable to visit each other), there is a miasma of mourning hanging over our cities. the grief is inchoate but acute. a sense of loss, of proust’s temps perdu [lost time]. as i walk through the deserted streets of my neighborhood, i pass the café where almost daily i used to have a piece of torta de spinaci [spinach pie]. the café is, to all intents and purposes, closed with furniture stacked away and no sign of life except for a small takeaway sign. i wonder about the fate of the staff— casuals, students, who are unlikely to benefit from current government rescue packages. at nearby henley beach, it seems almost unthinkable to go for my mandatory ‘exercise’ without sitting at an outdoor table with a strong flat white [coffee] to mark the achievement. i could do it by regulation, but find myself too nervous to do this. the fitness activity minus this small pleasure seems unfinished somehow, though, disturbingly, the seascape in its crisp autumnal beauty looks serene and familiar. people (on skype, zoom and facetime) reassure me we’ll all have more time now for growing vegetables, for household board games, for cleaning out the kitchen cupboards, and, for academics in particular, we’ll have the gift of precious time for writing. enterprising cafes, restaurants and food shops are offering a vigorous program of takeout and home deliveries, as well as donating meals to those out of work. these are all admirable activities and i don’t want to sound selfish at a time when people are really struggling not only with the risk of disease but also with a loss of income, homelessness, disability and poverty. nonetheless, i want my life back, even while acknowledging its privilege. i have enough food. however, i miss particular foods, particular rituals attached to shopping, cooking, eating and eating out, and miss the intimacy of non-screen mediated moments of ‘eating together’ (duruz and khoo 2015). there is an emotional absence that i expect the newly impoverished are feeling as well as those lucky enough still to have an income. eating is, after all, about emotional sustenance as well as physical survival, crucial as the latter is. the suffering hospitality industries, together with the many congenial people who work in them, meant so much more to us than mere nutrition. so did the homecooked meals shared with friends. that is why at a time when primarily we fear we’ll have to mourn loved ones, or face the risk of job losses, we also feel grief for a lost way of life. references city of west torrens 2016, city of west torrens community profile. online, available: https://profile.id.com.au/westtorrens/ancestry?webid=10 [accessed 2 april 2020]. duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021111 https://profile.id.com.au/west-torrens/ancestry?webid=10 https://profile.id.com.au/west-torrens/ancestry?webid=10 duruz, j. & khoo, g. c. 2015, eating together: food, space and identity in malaysia and singapore. lanham ml: brown and littlefield. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1598240800009152 farm online. 2020, farmers tell australia: we’ve got your back. 6 april. online, available: https://www.farmonline.com. au/story/6714016/farmers-tell-australia-weve-got-your-back-video/?cs=2603 [accessed 13 november 2020]. proust, m. 1988-1990, à la recherche du temps perdu. 7 vols., paris, gallimard. special broadcasting service. 2013, ‘about modern australian food,’ sbs food, 16 september. online, available: http:// www.sbs.com.au/food/article/2008/07/01/about-modern-australian-food [accessed 28 february 2020]. sky news. 2020, ‘just stop it: crazed coronavirus hoarders slammed by the prime minister.’ sky news, 18 march. online, available: https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6142425073001 [accessed 2 april 2020]. duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021 112 https://doi.org/10.1017/s1598240800009152 https://www.farmonline.com.au/story/6714016/farmers-tell-australia-weve-got-your-back-video/?cs=2603 https://www.farmonline.com.au/story/6714016/farmers-tell-australia-weve-got-your-back-video/?cs=2603 http://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/2008/07/01/about-modern-australian-food http://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/2008/07/01/about-modern-australian-food https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6142425073001 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: correa, l. e., and copperwaite, f. 2021. poetics in the time of pandemic. there is always going to be a before and an after. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 23–35. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i12.7505 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay poetics in the time of pandemic. there is always going to be a before and an after liliana edith correa and frederick copperwaite corresponding author: liliana edith correa. liliana.correa@alumni.uts.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7505 article history: received 10/09/2020; accepted 14/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract this paper reflects on the impact of lockdown in sydney on artists and creatives. we share our personal story of how we imagined our lives would be before covid-19 and the changes we observed after entering in pandemic mode. intertwining images taken with a mobile phone and text, we offer our observations on the evolving new language that appears around us in supermarkets, on walls and on the footpath: signs determining social interactions and affecting behaviour. we also touch on the idea of how writing can bring us home and make us feel closer to our languages and countries of origin. we underline theatre’s importance to tell stories from the time of the pandemic, when governments have been found wanting due to lack of care of the most vulnerable, in particular first nations peoples. we reflect on the need for reinvention, accepting change, reassessing our human values and making present our links to the natural world. as the pandemic takes us from one stage to the next, we suggest that creativity is the one possible space that offers relief and hope and opens up possibilities to make sense of our new reality while contributing to a collective sense of humanity. keywords theatre; covid-19; signs; poetics introduction this paper is a personal reflection on the effects of covid-19 on our lives as two mature aged professionals, living in sydney, working in education and the arts. it poses a number of questions and presents some observations on the evolving changes we are experiencing. we wake up every day with many impossible questions, from the most profound to the simplest, declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 23 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7505 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7505 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7505 mailto:liliana.correa@alumni.uts.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7505 on hold, while we navigate this existential and philosophical crisis and share moments of collective anxiety. from early march 2020, i (liliana) began collecting images using my mobile phone that i felt were expressing community sentiment, signs of support reminding those alone that we were all going through the same experience. government and business quickly developed a clearer and specific set of signs to be implemented widely and consistently across the city. we reflect about notions of space and place as two cultural constructs that touched us deeply when movement is restricted and our lives are under surveillance. theatres are closed and jobs in the education sector competitive and scarce. as storytellers we value the sharing of stories, and in this way, we can be part of a process of healing contributing to a sense of collective health, a way of quietening our spirits and minds while we wait attentively, for the next moment. our before a poster on an under path in enmore, nsw; © liliana e. correa i am a writer and educator and after years of jumping from one teaching gig to the next, i have finally earned my accredited professional precariousness. my partner is a theatre director who was ready to explore the next stage of his professional and personal life. our ‘before’ was a constant chasing of the next teaching contract, the next play, the next project. we both learned the preciousness of sustenance and absence, movement and place. i am argentinian and he is a bunuba man from the kimberley, western australia. 2020 was going to be our year to escape the sydney scene and finally do something for ourselves together. we often spoke of our yearning to return to that other home. reconnecting and deepening ourselves in culture, community and language, and walking together on our respective countries. we saw ourselves in a small coastal town south of buenos aires, riding our bikes to the bakery every morning, sipping mate and volunteering at the local primary school. but we also imagined time spent in country in the kimberley, camping, fishing, hunting, painting and sitting with the old people. correa and copperwaite portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202124 our after begins at home enter the protagonist covid-19 and overnight our dreams of a nomadic existence—travelling from the atlantic to the pacific as desire would take us—was now an impossibility. the great australian expectation of freely travelling within the country and overseas came to a grinding halt. despite being accustomed to uncertainty due to the precariousness of our respective careers, this time is different, moving from stage to stage as part of a larger narrative with an open ending has created a sense of double precariousness as well as demarcating strict physical borders right now impossible to transgress. for very different reasons, since our early twenties, my partner and i have led unconventional lives. moving from one place to the next became intrinsic to our inner sense of survival, but we also learned to change and adapt, letting go when we had to without resistance. we both believe that in order to survive we must change. life is never simple for the dislocated a café in coogee, nsw; © liliana e. correa personally, the national lockdown raised many more perplexing questions about those closest to me in my home country. when will i share a meal with my brothers again? when will i be able to take my kids back home? will my 94-year-old father wait for me? each time i landed home i surrendered to the whole of who i am. my relationship to my language deepens, and my yearning for touching, smelling, tasting, and wondering the streets of my city is fulfilled. over there, there is no need for translation or transliteration or any sort of interpretation. the lockdown clearly demarcating two distinctive spaces, ‘over there’ and ‘over here’ but only one possible place to inhabit. in both these spaces i feel deep emotional links, i can name both spaces as ‘home’ but can only pertain to one and only in one i truly belong. with such uncertainty about flying back to buenos aires any time soon, my only way home was through my imagination. i decided to approach an argentinian friend, she is a writer and a teacher, to collaborate on a writing project. each time we see each other, mediated by our mobile technologies, we discuss literature, we exchange stories, and we talk about politics and family. i see the tall and skinny poplar trees through her kitchen window, or the way light plays on the walls of her library on those early argentinian winter mornings. i feel a vicarious pleasure each time we meet and, in this way, just for those few hours a week, i am back to my language and my home, regaining a sense of cultural place through story. this is my poetics in time of pandemics. correa and copperwaite portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202125 the great equalizer unmasked the pandemic may seem to affect us all, around the world equally, however, it is evident that wealthy western economies have access to more advanced technologies and resources. it is perplexing to observe, therefore, that those same wealthy nations which should be leading the world in the fight against covid-19, are in fact experiencing the most devastating effects of the virus. it is true that virtually all nations and far too many lives have been touched in some way by the pandemic, but the reality is that the underlying level of international world inequality, particularly in capitalist societies has revealed a need for an urgent paradigm shift. the virus is reminding us of the interconnectivity between humans and the natural world. covid-19 has proven to be indiscriminatory and at the same time has exposed the lack of preparedness of current governments not only in australia but also around the world. freezing and wet july: lawrence 5g wears a raincoat with a message about the environment, he is protected but in thongs, extending his right hand like an opening of a bud, pink and swollen to passers-by outside broadway shopping centre. it reminded me of the performer i saw during the latin american film festival in habana, back in 1994 during the cuban economic crisis, known as the “special period– período especial ”. outside broadway shopping centre, sydney; © liliana e. correa lawrence reassured me he had a dried place to sleep that night. correa and copperwaite portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202126 here we stand early signs haymarket, nsw. march 2020; © liliana e. correa in this here and now, we returned once again to the ordinary day to day concerns of domestic life, but these concerns were no longer ordinary but extraordinary. strangely everything appears as ‘normal’ as it had always been but at the same time completely different, layered with new rhythms, new boundaries and new preoccupations, further from our individual worries. we are also beginning to think about our collective health, a sharp awareness about the other next to us, our individuality forced to shift focus and pay attention to the collective. en estado de luto theatre plays a crucial social, political, cultural and spiritual role in our society but for too many years now successive governments in australia have misunderstood the power of the theatre and the arts, preferring to concentrate financial support on industries that are considered more productive, more important or more serious. theatre, in those rare moments when it is given any attention at all is viewed at best as an entertainment and at worst, a frivolous past-time, an amusement, an antiquated curiosity. this lack of respect was never more evident than following the lockdown in march. the arts were amongst the industries hit hardest, overnight theatres across the country went dark, hundreds of performances were cancelled, many small to medium companies collapsed entirely and the long term survival of thousands of actors, directors, playwrights, producers, stage managers, lighting, sound, set and costume designers and arts workers was thrown into chaos and uncertainty. at this point, everything was put on hold and we felt, as they say in spanish, en estado de luto, in a state of mourning for the loss of theatre. by nature, the arts industry is temperamental, not for the faint hearted, and to achieve success in an increasingly competitive profession, artists need determination and perseverance, unswerving self-belief, connections and networks, luck, a good reputation and talent and opportunity to develop new work and continue to practice and grow skills. storytelling is truth telling. the word ‘theatre’ comes from the greeks and it means ‘the seeing place.’ it is a place where we ‘see’ the truth about ourselves; who we are, how we live correa and copperwaite portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202127 and what it means to be human. this truth can only be expressed aesthetically through story. only when ideas are expressed poetically through image and symbol, do they begin to explore the depth and reality of our existence and bring a deep understanding and meaning to our lives. the theatre does not tell us who we are and how we should live, but rather asks questions of us to find the answers for ourselves. an audience enters into a contract with the theatre when they see a play. they agree to bear witness to the world of the play, there is an exchange. during the pandemic that fundamental exchange between the theatre and the audience became silent. but the absence of theatre does not mean the silencing of its makers. one inhabits the space of the artist as a life choice. the word vocation is probably considered old fashioned today but only the most successful artists live out that sense of calling. one does not stop acting, painting, writing or dancing when work is unavailable, or even when we do other types of work to cover the cost of living. people in the theatre are incredibly resourceful. for instance, in an attempt to sustain the life of the theatre, many artists around the world turned to the internet to create concerts, plays, poetry readings, arts forums, etc. these events gave us at least a small glimmer of hope that the arts and potentially the theatre, could continue to exist, even if it was presented in a form completely foreign to itself. ultimately, however, the theatre’s power lies in the simple fact that it is happening now, in this present moment not at any other time. this mysterious, intangible, fleeting exchange between a group of people in present time is a phenomenological experience and technology mediated spaces can never replace that. the pandemic has forced us to reflect in a much deeper and broader sense about the value of our profession and our commitment to our practice. for example, we are concerned about the very real danger of losing a generation of young theatre artists who may never have the opportunity to work and develop their careers. covid-19 has exposed already existing inequalities in relation to the arts. lack of funding, resources, opportunities and a general sense of respect have all contributed to a feeling of neglect and discrimination. now, more than ever, we need the theatre to tell the stories of our time, to make sense of and bring meaning to what is happening to us when many things we assumed about life are no longer true. the theatre is dead … long live the theatre! non gendered sydney uni footpath; © liliana e. correa on our daily walks, we noticed a set of new symbols around us, an evolving lexicon, as weeks went by becoming more sophisticated, personalised and clearer. visual and sound cues popping up everywhere, not only from government departments, but spontaneous messages from anyone to anyone, an emerging graffiti onto virtual and real walls, commanding a different exchange of communication and behaviour. social media caught up with this much faster and earlier than government advertisements, second by second all social media platforms were inundated by conspiracy theories, personal stories and jokes and recipes on how best to keep the virus at bay. all these signalling comic relief and hope, and at the same time feeding our correa and copperwaite portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202128 anxiety with the establishment of precise clear inner and outer borders, from the individual, physical body to the geographical space from state to state and land to land. catching public transport or going to the markets on the weekend amongst many other mundane activities of daily blessed urban life have taken a turn, a covid turn. evolving signs, camperdown royal price alfred hospital nsw. july 2020; © liliana e. correa after the first week of government announcements in early march, images such as the one above marking where to stand, were scarcely found around bus stops and not yet evident in other public spaces such as shops or cafes. as weeks passed and creativity kicked in, business began to find ways of reassuring consumers by implementing a number of different measures to avoid complete closure. paddy’s markets, sydney; © liliana e. correa security guard, appears: shouting and gesturing waving arms. no pictures! no pictures! come in please. numbers are recorded on a log book and a wrist’s tag is attached to us, making sure that the restricted number of patrons allowed in are accounted for. in supermarkets such as harris farms, the evolution of signs and hand sanitation was interesting to witness from one week to the next. its management adapted and improved its sanitation stations, building consumers’ confidence and creating a covid-19 safe shopping environment. correa and copperwaite portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202129 harris farms signs, sydney; © liliana e. correa eddie avenue, sydney; © liliana e. correa 348 bus to leichardt, nsw; © liliana e. correa correa and copperwaite portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202130 august 2020; © liliana e. correa government signs are now clearer and more specific, adding to the single ‘stand here’ a number of other signs that are by now common and expected in every public shared space. every day we stayed alert to the next health report, the newest government guidelines, the announcement of the latest death toll and the number of infected people here and around the world. evolving signs make us aware of the invisible presence of a predator setting the rules of engagement of our new reality. central station tunnel, sydney; © liliana e. correa the city quietened down and there was a change in streets’ rhythms, places and spaces of gathering and entertainment silenced. one of the first things i noticed very early during stage 1 was the heavy policing in unexpected places like supermarkets and the beach. as a young woman growing up in argentina in the time of the dictatorship, i was forced to sharpen my senses to the ominous presence of danger that was embodied in police brutality and the military abuses. but after many years of living in sydney i learnt to normalise the police presence, and the absence of uniforms from daily news reports, there was no military presence on the streets of my new city, which gave me a sense of lightness. however, my migrant’s privileges are always overshadowed by the systemic state violence suffered by australian’s first peoples (read: policing correa and copperwaite portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202131 of communities, intervention in the northern territory, removal of children, youth in detention and youth suicide rates, low literacy etc). it was during lockdown in sydney that george floyd was murdered by police in minneapolis and the black life matters (blm) movement resonated deeply with the aboriginal communities in australia. also founding voice across the world, mobilising ordinary people of all races, creeds and colours who truly believed that for all lives to matter then black lives must matter. the ugly face of white supremacy, brutality and silence was again exposed for all to see. armed with hand sanitiser, face masks and abiding social distancing rules, we, like so many others defied the government and we marched. blm, sydney. a masked city has lost its’ mask. © liliana e. correa blm, sydney. there should not be any numbers. © liliana e. correa from the amazon to the kimberley, first nations have been fighting the virus of racism. covid-19 is one more added disease, establishing further levels of injustice and complexity into the lives of most vulnerable people. this pandemic has exposed a lack of preparedness and insufficient support from governments to protect and arm first nations communities against the virus. correa and copperwaite portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202132 blm, sydney. same story different soil. © liliana e. correa there is kindness in our communities and covid-19 has also exposed our humanity, our need for the closeness of others, our vulnerabilities and our capacity for reinvention. several community-based organisations such as the addison road community centre are supporting international students by providing them with emergency food hampers. a restaurant in glebe has a handwritten note on its window saying it is offering free meals. a protagonist requires an antagonist. if the virus is mandating the main narrative of this collective story, we have to write our own counternarrative and reclaim our voice. we cannot be passive. king street, newtown sydney; © liliana e. correa correa and copperwaite portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202133 the green mushroom, glebe sydney; © liliana e. correa in conclusion movement and the idealisation of a transient life, freely travelling from one country to the next, from one state to another are now on hold. in a deeper and more pressing manner we have to re-imagine ourselves and value this place of stillness and reflection. reassessing our purpose in direct connection with our natural world has exposed our human frailties. the myopic view of governments has exposed the unpreparedness of even the richest countries in the west. the pandemic introduced us to a new lexicon and commanded new behaviour due to the establishment of distancing regulations. at an affective level we are becoming closer, neighbourhoods have grown friendlier, there are street lanes where people are sharing food, cooking or shopping for the elderly. the virtual of everything is becoming the norm, from birthdays to funerals; from now on our human connectivity is technologically mediated. if before we had an option, after covid-19 we don’t. tradition is the illusion of permanence and the natural world has an intelligence far beyond the imagination of humans. our intelligence pales in comparison. we have built this world on the notion that our human achievement will last forever, that our society will continue to grow and prosper, confident that this is the only way to live. covid-19 is forcing the world to recognise that our relationship to our own collective health, the health of animals and the health of the environment is not separate. we are learning to become more aware of our interconnectedness. correa and copperwaite portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202134 valhalla on glebe point rd. sydney; © liliana e. correa there will be a new life that comes out of this. let’s hope it’s a kinder, smarter, more selfless, integrated life where the support and respect for human, animal and environmental health is paramount. correa and copperwaite portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202135 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: grikun, y., kubincová, m., luk s. m., petrova, a., rands, d., saberi, e., and ugoretz, k. 2021. from ise to the world in a time of pandemic. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 45–61. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis. v17i1-2.7415 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay from ise to the world in a time of pandemic yuliya grikun1, mária kubincová2, sau man luk3, anastasia petrova4, david rands5, elham saberi6, kaitlyn ugoretz7 1 kyiv national linguistic university 2 university of turku 3 chinese university of hong kong 4 institute of oriental studies, russian academy of sciences 5 austin peay state university 6 hiroshima university 7 university of california, santa barbara corresponding author: david rands, associate professor, austin peay state university, 601 college st, clarksville, tennessee, 37044, usa. randsd@apsu.edu doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7415 article history: received 10/09/2020; accepted 06/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract a collection of reflections on covid-19 by scholars from around the world who relate their participation in a study program in japan in the early stages of the pandemic, and their subsequent experiences returning to their home countries. as the virus spread around the world, they communicated with each other from their respective countries and documented their experiences. written in multiple styles and with diverse perspectives, these reflections provide insight into the similarities and differences and the shared and dis-equalizing aspects of the world’s response to the pandemic. keywords covid-19; japan; ise; pandemic; experiences; comparative in february 2020, a group of scholars from around the world met for a three-week program in ise, japan. participants included scholars from the us, iran, russia, the ukraine, poland, finland, germany, italy, india, hong kong, and china. the participant from china was unable to attend as the virus had already restricted the movement of chinese people. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 45 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7415 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7415 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7415 mailto:randsd%40apsu.edu?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7415 we met in ise on february 16 and stayed as a group until march 7. during that time, we witnessed japan rapidly change its response to the pandemic including the closing of schools and the use of face masks. some of the scheduled activities were canceled and towards the end of the program, everyone grew concerned about their journeys home. after arriving at our respective destinations, we maintained contact, experienced the prejudices that the virus provoked, suffered the seemingly random regulations of unprepared bureaucracies, and gained interesting perspectives of the pandemic from across the globe. the chronology of the spread of the pandemic was insightful: the us was feeling smug while the italians and iranians were reeling. situations soon reversed. while participants in march were concerned about getting home from japan, restrictions are now placed on travel in the opposite direction. the following reflections show the progression of the pandemic from seven perspectives and highlight ways covid-19 served as both a shared experience and a great dis-equalizer. david rands— clarksville, tennessee two days after arriving in ise, i received a package of face masks from my mother-in-law in the tokyo area. this was my introduction to inequalities of the covid-19 pandemic. even though i didn’t grasp the ramifications, i had the personal protective gear that others couldn’t find in stores. during the next three weeks, we were given precious masks and hand sanitizer. we were able to visit historically and culturally significant shrines in kyoto and nara without the crowds of tourists that usually flood the cities. as the program drew towards its conclusion, returning home became a concern as airlines started changing schedules. one of the participants was scheduled to fly from japan to seattle and then back across the pacific just to get to hong kong. flight changes and uncertainty of what awaited us at the airports upon our return caused anxiety. mask usage increased. at nagoya airport, i sent a picture of the traditional girl’s day dolls wearing little medical masks to the participants who would be flying out later, then got on my flight to tokyo, where i would connect with my us-bound flight. traditional girl’s day doll; © david rands grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202146 traveling at the outset of the pandemic allowed me to witness different national reactions. in japan, masks were highly recommended and on the flight from nagoya to narita there wasn’t a person without one. on the flight to los angeles, however, many of the masks disappeared. there was no screening, and no one asking if i had any symptoms. i felt conspicuous for wearing a mask. the government was telling people that masks were not recommended. to my shock, the airport was busy. arriving in nashville, participants soon started to compare our travels. kiev was the only airport taking everyone’s temperature upon arrival. the biggest problem for us returning home was a broken seat belt that delayed a flight from helsinki to poland and strict customs controls in rome. we may have made it home, but things were far from returning to normal. although it was the middle of the semester, my university was just starting spring break which had been extended, and once the scope of the pandemic took hold, classes were moved entirely online. because i had recently returned from abroad, i was asked to self-isolate for fourteen days and prohibited from visiting my office. those returning from rome and the uk had no such requests made of them, and i was able to see how the pandemic was considered an asian issue by americans. for two weeks i avoided all contact fearing that any positive test would be traced back to me. the lack of direction and uncertainty of the scope of the pandemic was not limited to my situation. communication with other participants from ise indicated that others were also dealing with uncertainty. a fellow participant returning to finland was greeted by a rubber-gloved friend disinfecting her luggage. on march 9, princeton closed and the following day schools in poland closed. people in the ukraine were told to both stay home and go in to work. the lack of clarity magnified the rumors and illegitimate news stories. our discussion of whether russia was letting the lions out of the zoos to keep people out of the streets was one of the more humorous exchanges. while universities in santa barbara were closing, people in hong kong were considering a move back to normal. on march 11, there was news of closures in kiev and a shut down in slovakia. in rome the report was that the ‘streets and shops are empty; you rarely meet people going for a walk. it’s surreal.’ by march 14, boredom was setting in as people realized that the disruption was going to last beyond a week or two. in russia nobody was wearing a mask, there was no disinfectant, and everything was quite normal. in slovakia, borders, airports, and schools were closed, but people were ignoring the quarantine and going skiing. in hong kong, announcements were made that from march 23, the normal workweek would resume, but two days later, russia and india were closing universities and going into quarantine. american media was awash with images of death in italy. as i was finishing my required self-isolation, participants in russia, finland, and italy were starting to be locked down. student visas began to be cancelled on march 18. to a group so invested in international studies, the prospect of being unable to travel is dire. summer programs started to be cancelled and i had to tell my students that our annual study-abroad trip was postponed. by march 21, hong kong was experiencing another outbreak. in germany people were requested to stay home. now out of self-isolation, i was able to venture back to my office to gather materials and survey the situation in tennessee. it was not very different from the images i was getting from other places. limits on commodities like toilet paper were common and rice, flour, and noodles were disappearing from store shelves. by april, the pandemic was ravaging new york, and the cavalier attitude of the previous month was disappearing from american media and policy. many americans had grown weary with social distancing while in russia the same feelings were held in check by governmental pressure. japan, too, declared a national emergency with everybody on red alert. however, our ukrainian colleague noted, ‘unlike war, pandemics somehow unite people. we all have the same problems and have to struggle together.’ the dis-equalization of scarcity became a uniting factor. while living in quarantine we shared pictures of the japanese cherry blossoms, pets, and views from our windows. our italian friend even tried pineapple on his pizza. by the end of may, the lockdown led to the realization that we could value everything around us that grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202147 we had missed. while we do not know what the future holds, the pandemic has allowed us to see similar dis-equalities in places as diverse as moscow, kiev, delhi, rome, nashville, and hong kong. mária kubincová— a slovak living in turku, finland when we were kissing the last minutes of 2019 goodbye, few of us could imagine what 2020 was about to bring. as the first three cases of covid-19 were detected in france on january 27, the threat of the novel coronavirus stopped being an alien (read: asian) concept. finland was yet to have any confirmed cases, so talk about whether it was safe to travel to asia were common. i found myself considering cancelling the trip particularly due to pressure from my parents in slovakia. nevertheless, i decided to travel to japan and follow the rules and restrictions that were in force. after the initial cases in finland, people hurried to buy hand sanitizer, disposable face masks and various other goods, which seemed to be in high demand in many countries with confirmed cases (such as canned foods, toilet paper, and soap). i was unable to buy face masks in bulk before my flight to japan. i could only find pricey n95 masks at a pharmacy in the helsinki vantaa airport. naively hoping i could buy more masks in japan, i only bought two and ended up having to use a scarf to cover my face until i arrived in nagoya. fortunately, the host university provided us with face masks for the entire duration of the program, but pharmacies, supermarkets and convenience stores in japan were hopelessly sold out. the program was conducted under certain restrictions, which became stricter towards the end of our stay. i was amazed to see the cities so empty. it was a refreshing experience. the situation during the first half of the program was not as concerning as the second half when flights were being cancelled or rescheduled. some participants were forced to return using very indirect routes. each day, the participants became increasingly concerned, often exchanging fears of not being able to return, or being stuck at an airport. fortunately, all participants got home safely. it was intriguing and sometimes bizarre to follow up on everyone’s experiences in their home countries upon returning from japan. some were clearly advised to self-quarantine, while others were told it was optional. i arrived in finland on march 8, and as japan was not on finland’s list of high-risk countries, neither a covid-19 test nor quarantine was required from me. however, i voluntarily decided to self-quarantine to rule out the possibility of spreading the virus asymptomatically. three days later, on march 11, the covid-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic by the world health organization. on the last day of my fourteen-day self-quarantine i started feeling unwell with dry cough and sneezing, but as pollen season was just starting in finland, and i had no signs of fever or any severe symptoms, i was advised to just continue my self-quarantine. at the time it was virtually impossible to be tested in finland unless returning from a high-risk country or had severe respiratory symptoms. the countermeasures against covid-19 have been somewhere in-between strict and mild. schools and universities reacted quickly by shifting to distance teaching. workplaces transitioned to remote work wherever possible and restaurants, cafes and certain shops temporarily closed. social distancing was enacted but in turku masks were scarcely worn. news about the coronavirus was broadcast in several minority languages, such as somali or farsi, as the contagion quickly spread among minority communities, where large families often live in crammed apartments. most of the restrictions were gradually lifted throughout the months of june, july and august and finland enjoyed a rather quiet summer. by the end of summer, cases began to rise as the country prepared for a second wave. meanwhile, in my home country slovakia, the first coronavirus case was detected on march 6, and the government promptly adopted some of the strictest precautions in europe. primary and secondary schools closed and shifted to remote learning, events were cancelled, border controls reinstated, and airports shut down. compulsory fourteen-day quarantine for returnees from abroad was introduced. face masks in public transport and shops were required. from march 16 only essential shops could stay open and from march grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202148 25 face masks were ruled compulsory in all places. a new government was elected in february. several political scandals came to light including the lack of disposable face masks, despite the new law that made them compulsory. yet, citizens took matters into their own hands and via social media, organized a countrywide initiative to produce hand-made face masks and distributed them to those in need, as well as medical professionals. people learned how to make masks by watching trending instructional videos on social media. the scale in which slovakians made thousands of face masks is rather exceptional. slovaks showed a heart-warming unity when it came to mask production, but many underestimated the severity of the situation and when schools closed went on vacation to popular ski resorts. testing became relatively accessible in the country, and the government launched an initiative to send medical staff to poor roma settlements to ensure the virus would not spread due to lack of access to information about the dangers of the pandemic. slovakia was able to control the numbers of new cases and even enjoyed consecutive days with no new cases. it was even named a success story in the international media. however, an easing of the restrictions and re-opening of airports and borders led to another surge. my daily reading of the latest news in slovakia was coupled with video calls with my parents and siblings. fortunately, we have access to video calls, and this has certainly helped me better cope with the lockdown, as i had to cancel my plans to visit my home country in summer. comparing the three countries, i see drastically different approaches to the pandemic. being in contact with friends and family, i was able to see how a lockdown was very difficult for many to endure. the sudden loss of personal freedom weighed heavily on people, especially those who are highly sociable. while slovaks might have disliked the idea of a complete lockdown, many abided by the restrictions, whereas in finland many strongly criticized the government’s decision to impose a lockdown on the capital city area. the lockdown in japan was never enforced and treated as more of a recommendation. the idea of lockdown evokes many strong emotions in people, including sadness, anger or even relief. i spoke to several people who found the lockdown to be a salvation from their stressful jobs or studies. however, a rise in cases of domestic violence and divorce was an undesired side effect as people suddenly had to spend prolonged time together. this is one of several areas where a lockdown poses a threat to certain citizens and makes it more difficult for victims to reach out for help. it is ironic to think how one virus can create a shared experience all around the world, and people of different nationalities, cultures, or religions, face the same situations. one virus could put an entire country in lock down, leaving buzzing international airports deserted and popular tourist destinations ghost towns. i hope that whatever lessons we learn the outcomes of this pandemic will not surprise us in the future. anastasia petrova— moscow, russia in moscow we started to receive news about covid-19 sometime in january. but this was a story about china. it was far away, so we paid little attention to the news. nobody really cared (masks, sanitizers, washing hands; who even thought about all this every day?). this would surely not touch us. would it? a consequence was that people started to be afraid of china and everything chinese. a typical joke at that time was: ‘just in case, we decided to throw away all chinese things. now we’re sitting nude in an empty apartment.’ people reacted to my planned trip to japan by questioning whether it was a good idea and safe. i said i was going to japan not china, that i believed japan to be the safest country in the world. in midfebruary i arrived in japan and found myself on a different planet. people were wearing masks, covidannouncements were broadcast on every train, and sanitizers were available at the entrance of every supermarket. i thought, ‘wow, people here in japan are really serious about this disease!” i was not surprised, but a little confused. grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202149 it was thrilling to watch the situation become more curious. during the first week of our program we were given masks and hand sanitizers in class— but we were quite free to use them or not. during the second week, we were required to wear masks on the campus and during our study trips. during the third week, the prefectural government started to cancel public events, so some of our excursions were canceled as well. at that time, italy experienced a sudden covid-19 outbreak, and some airlines started changing and cancelling schedules. on march 8 i arrived in moscow (i flew from nagoya via helsinki), and found myself (again) on a different planet. nobody was wearing masks, no covid-19 announcements, no sanitizers, no screening or taking temperature at the airport. i thought, ‘wow, people here in moscow don’t seem to care about this disease!’ i was once again not surprised, but a little confused. i called the special hotline to inform the government that i had come from japan. they assured me that neither japan, nor finland, were considered dangerous, so i did not need to quarantine. i put on my mask and went to work. i felt like i was the only one in the whole moscow metro who was wearing a mask. everybody was discussing italy: ‘poor italy … it’s so terrible … we’re so sorry … we wouldn’t be so stupid to let this virus attack us …’ people returning from italy, spain, iran, germany and some other countries were asked to self-isolate for fourteen days. a typical joke of that time was, ‘you know, i’ve got the virus!— oh, i’m so sorry! you mean that chinese one?— no way! it’s pure italian!’ on march 16, our moscow government suddenly closed schools, universities and some other institutions. my work moved entirely online. i received a message from the moscow government that read, ‘as you’ve returned from finland, you have to stay in self-isolation for fourteen days.’ i could not help laughing because it had already been twelve days since i returned from finland. rumors were in the air that we all would enter lock-down soon so people started to panic. almost all shops had run out of toilet paper, buckwheat, canned food and sugar. somehow, i felt united with the world. i realized that although the world is big, in this moment, everybody everywhere was facing the same situations. social media allowed us to share our experiences. in moscow, the elderly and people with chronic diseases were asked to self-isolate. on march 20, everybody was locked down. in april and may, we were not allowed to leave our houses without written permission and had to wear masks in public places. people could only leave their homes to shop, throw away garbage, or walk their dog (within 100 metres from their house). a typical joke of that period was that sharik, the only dog in a multi-story apartment block was exhausted because he went for 156 walks per day. everything moved online. there were online lectures, online meetings, online discussions, and even online parties. everybody learned how to use zoom and social media. we were isolated but not alone. i felt like i had more social interaction those days than ever before. i was teaching online and i was learning online. i learned to play the koto, a traditional japanese instrument. during the quarantine, my teacher and i tried to organize online lessons and it was terrible. my husband who plays taiko, japanese drums, also tried to take lessons online. this turned out to be entirely impossible because zoom does not transmit the sounds of the drum! after two months of self-isolation, people got very tired and angry, so more of them started to ignore the quarantine. people went for long walks and ran away from the police to avoid punishment. there were many people who refused to believe that covid-19 really existed. some people blamed the government or other countries. some espoused that it was all an american plot. grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202150 koto; © david rands at the beginning of june, the moscow government initiated a schedule for walks. it stipulated which days people from each house could go out for walks so that people would not be out at the same time as their neighbors. it is impossible for me to express the disdain people had for the policy. on june 7, selfisolation was suddenly cancelled. many think this cancellation was political and had nothing to do with the virus. our government wanted us to go and vote for changes to our constitution. a typical joke of that time is difficult to translate completely but explains the situation well. it reads, ‘our country began a recovery.’ in russian, the words ‘recovery’ and ‘changes’ sound very similar, so this joke is a play on words, with the second meaning that ‘our country goes for changes (meaning ‘changes to constitution’). the prevailing feeling was that the russian government forced the moscow government to end the quarantine early. some quarantine measures are still in effect. we must wear masks and gloves in public places and keep social distance. there are people who ignore these restrictions, but they are not as numerous as expected. the moscow metro now has free sanitizers at every station. there are some restrictions for public events, but schools reopened in september. our world is separated, but at the same time, we are united like never before. it is the same virus, the same situation, and the same problems everywhere. our future is uncertain but there is one thing of which i am sure. the world will never be the same. still, i hope that eventually there will be many positives among the changes we are going to witness. grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202151 yuliya grikun— kyiv, ukraine the camellia bud: or how we realized the value of real-life the land of the rising sun is truly a country full of wonders that are expressed every time a new side of japan is revealed. ise city is a pearl of hospitable mie prefecture and the capital of shintoism. perhaps this explains why this region has a wealth of nature. wide ranges of greenery, mostly evergreen shrubs, soften the gloom of wintertime. my attention was especially drawn to enchanting shrubs of camellia japonica with their red, pink and white flowers. their simple and sophisticated beauty cannot leave one indifferent. among all the discoveries ise gave me, i would like to recognize this magically beautiful flower. one can come across blossoming camellia shrubs near shrines and temples, in mountain landscapes. as the poet issa noted (2000): camellia bud; © yuliya grikun also facing the sea… winter camellias1 the camellia’s beauty fascinates as it adds bright colors to winter. not without reason the camellia became an object of various poems (haiku) and paintings. and for me it is one of the symbols of japan (in the ukraine camellias are only found in private gardens or as an indoor plant). that led me to investigate this beautiful and mysterious flower. i found out many interesting facts about the camellia flower and, needless to say, as a lecturer, i was eager to share these and many other discoveries with my students upon my return to ukraine. 1 lanoue, d. g. tran., 2000, haiku of kobayashi issa. online, available: http://haikuguy.com/issa/index.html [accessed 12 november 2020]. grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202152 http://haikuguy.com/issa/index.html at the beginning of march, however, covid-19 started to get worse in japan. even though the situation was still calm in ukraine, i realized that everything could suddenly change. the calm could quickly become turbulent. ukraine news discussed the prevention measures that would be taken in the case of an outbreak of the disease. on march 3 the first case of covid-19 was registered in ukraine. my concern was how to reach ukraine safely. doctors boarded our plane upon landing in kyiv-boryspil airport on march 8 to take everyone’s temperature. fortunately, they let all the passengers disembark, alleviating the tension and anxiety. upon my arrival to kyiv, i could not meet my colleagues, students, or friends, because i was asked to self-isolate for two weeks. our university shifted teaching online. i did not feel like sharing my impressions and discoveries of my study trip to ise with my students online since i value real-life interaction and communication. i had a dream of making this presentation, drinking japanese green tea, and enjoying the matcha-biscuits from ise with my students, and in the process increasing their interest in japan, japanese language, and culture. i was hopeful that at the beginning of april the quarantine would be over. alas, the situation got worse and the lockdown was extended until april 24, and then again until may 11. both my students and i are still looking forward to meeting in person. although the biscuits had to be eaten, the photographs remain, and i am still eager to introduce my students to ise and japan with my story. i desire to push them at least one step closer to this wonderful country and to deepen their comprehension of its culture. then, as issa notes, the camellia flower will come into blossom: camellia; © yuliya grikun without seeing sunlight the winter camellia blooms.2 luk sau man— hong kong the trip to japan at the beginning of the global outbreak of covid-19 made me understand how easily one’s attitude towards an epidemic is affected by surroundings. 2 lanoue, d. g. tran., 2000, haiku of kobayashi issa. online, available: http://haikuguy.com/issa/index.html [accessed 12 november 2020]. grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202153 http://haikuguy.com/issa/index.html as early as december 2019, rumors of an outbreak of an unknown disease in mainland china began to circulate. with experience fighting sars in 2003, many started to wear masks in public areas, despite the risk of getting into trouble with the police, as at the time covering one’s face at demonstration sites was banned by the government. by the end of january, you could not see anyone on the street without a mask. face masks soon disappeared from drug stores in town. people turned to online stores in taiwan, japan and korea, but everything sold out within two or three days. we had an early lunar new year in january. travelling to the mainland to visit relatives is typical for many hong kongers. however, by mid-january people started to consider cancelling their trips. my parents cancelled their tour to the mainland as the situation worsened. one of my colleagues went to china to visit her mother. after the holiday, she was ordered by her company to self-quarantine for fourteen days. work from home for government employees started right after the lunar new year holiday. the education bureau announced an extension of the lunar new year holiday in schools until further notice. on my way to nagoya. doctors suggest wearing glasses over contacts during a pandemic; © luk sau man the number of confirmed cases in hong kong climbed rapidly. the infected cruise, the princess diamond, became the central focus in both hong kong and japan in early february. only days before my departure, kansai international airport announced that flights between osaka and hong kong were being suspended. fortunately, i was able to get to nagoya as planned. before boarding, about 60 per cent of people put on disposable raincoats, including me. some even wore goggles. upon arrival in nagoya, the customs officials did a semblance of an anti-epidemic check: a simple questionnaire asking if you had been to hubei, china in the past fourteen days. i stayed at a hotel next to the airport to wait for the others to arrive the next day and went to a nearby shopping mall for dinner. i did not see many people wearing masks. at least not as many as in hong kong the day before. the breakfast was a buffet as usual. grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202154 facemasks and alcohol were always ready for use in the classroom; © luk sau man ise is a town with a small population making social distancing easy, except on public holidays when tourists rush in. in the first week of our study program, covid-19 seemed a remote concern for the local people. young people said things like ‘what a pity for yokohama (because of the cruise)’ or ‘tokyo is so dangerous.’ it was always something happening outside to others. not many people wore face masks on the street. i felt some resistance to taking off my mask on the first two days, but being the minority made me feel awkward, so i eventually stopped wearing a mask all the time. by the end of the first week, several travelers who had arrived at chubu centrair international airport, nagoya, had tested positive. things started to change. workshops and seminars, which had been planned to be open to the public, were scaled down to closed events. the university and city government office kept on reminding us not to forget our face masks and to disinfect our hands with alcohol before entering any building. grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202155 ‘as an infection prevention measure, the temizuya is closed. thank you for your understanding’; © luk sau man it was easy to notice that people in big cities like kyoto and nara were more alert to covid-19, compared to people in ise. some shrines allowed people to pray with their masks on, while some closed the temizuya where people were supposed to purify themselves before praying. the situation became worse in other parts of the world, including in some of our home countries. some members of the group had families who were worried, requesting them to return as soon as possible, or their government or workplace ordered them to self-quarantine for 14 days. we joked about those things, feeling that people were overreacting. our understanding of the pandemic was overwritten by our localized experiences in ise. after being annoyed by chaotic flight arrangements, we were all able to leave japan by march 8. i again stayed at the same hotel near the airport to wait for the early morning flight. breakfast reflected a change in people’s awareness— set meals were prepared beforehand, wrapped in plastic. grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202156 breakfast on march 8: wrapped set meals; © luk sau man soon after arriving home i started another round of readjustment. while japan was just starting to discuss measures such as work-from-home and remote learning, those were all in effect in hong kong. my three weeks in japan made me thing about living in an overcrowded city. maintaining physical distancing is a major challenge in a city like hong kong. in contrast, it is much easier to require face masks in hong kong compared to where my colleagues and friends live. normal working hours and classes resumed in april and may, and most restrictions on public gatherings in indoor areas were lifted in june, but the masks never left our faces. things change every day. hong kongers thought they were going to say goodbye to covid-19 but the third outbreak came in late july and even stricter restrictions were enforced. although we are facing the same virus, and the same disease, the situation differs from place to place, and person to person. our experiences may help others to overcome something in the future. who knows what happens next? grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202157 elham saberi— a persian living in hiroshima, japan a letter to my son i spend my days away from you, and they are the most painful moments of my life. i never thought i would spend my time away from you while i was achieving my life’s biggest goal. i dreamt for years that this would lead to the most fruitful and beautiful moments of our lives together and never thought it would keep us apart for so long. i know you have grown from the last time i saw you. you are taller. indeed, it will soon be the second year that i am not with you on your birthday. know that i wrote this letter to you with tears in my eyes and a saddened heart. on the day when all hopes of bringing you to japan were dashed, i determined to show the bureaucracy that separated a mother and her son that i could overcome all difficulties. my only hope for life and support was god. however, i have to say that now coronavirus has added another obstacle. with all its cruelty, coronavirus reinforced the bureaucracy in keeping people apart. it seems the more i struggle, the farther i am pulled away from you, but know that my heart aches every moment that i am not with you. i am not laughing as i did in the past. you may not believe it, but i have been crying for days and asking god to defeat this disease because i miss seeing you. i hope that this disease will be overcome soon, so that this oppressive separation can end. there are nights that you are unaware of; nights when i am alone in these streets crying out in hope of seeing you and holding your hands and hugging you. it is a relief that no one knows my language and does not understand me here. they just look at me in surprise. maybe they think i am crazy; a madwoman who cries to see her love. i try my best to build a successful life here, but you cannot realize how i spend my time without you. watching and seeing beautiful photos and videos is a relief to my broken heart and helps me persevere. i know this virus will be overcome. do not the cries of a mother’s begging have some impact? how can this pandemic be so insensitive? i am sure days of kindness will come back. i know that we will be reunited someday soon. our merciful god does not leave us alone. i forgot to wish you a happy birthday. this is the second year that i am not with you. i hope that we will be together from now on, and this will be the last year that i cannot be with you on your birthday. always remember these things: when there is a god, there is hope. time and distance do not mean anything when we know we will embrace and hold each other again. without you, it seems like living in a cage without my strength. however, the times of this evil will soon end, and i am sure the bright future that awaits us will appear. please forgive that i was not there with you as the heartless virus infected you. it hurt me that i could not care for you, but my heart was with you and cared for you in spirit. please be strong, please let us be strong. you do not know how much i cried and begged for this virus to go. please forgive that i could not be there to protect you. i promise to you to build the life that you have always wanted. please do not lose hope. i know we are desperate, and you are disappointed; but realize the entire world is in this situation. who ever thought the earth would be locked down? however, we have each other. let us pray for the wonderful day when we will see one another’s smiles instead of masks. when everyone smiles, we will defeat the pessimism of this pandemic. grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202158 sincerely, your mother elham, she who has cried a thousand times in the days away from you. kaitlyn ugoretz— santa barbara, california stage 1: denial when i left california for a three-week study program in japan, my greatest concern was catching all my flights on time. covid-19 posed a danger to my relatives living in wuhan, china, but certainly not to me. at several family members’ request, i grudgingly wore an n95 mask that i had been saving for the next wildfire season. i confidently told airport security on each leg of my journey that i had not been to china in a few years, and i had not had a fever or flu-like symptoms in the last 14 days. soon enough, my worst fears came true— my arrival at nagoya airport was delayed an hour. when my fellow participants and i entered the international building classroom that would be our home base for the next few weeks, we found that our hosts had set up a table at the entrance with disposable masks, hand sanitizer, and printouts with hygiene guidelines. this gesture— taking contagious illnesses and the safety of others more seriously— struck me as quintessentially ‘japanese.’ how does the cliché go? when in rome … i followed along as any good guest and international ambassador would, conspicuously grabbing a mask to wear outside during our daily excursions out into the city and a handful of sanitizer on my way in and out of the classroom. at this point, my concern about the covid-19 virus was primarily performative. stage 2: anger/fear after a week or so, the omiyage gifts i had painstakingly chosen and brought to show my appreciation for our local hosts— seasonal goodies from california’s own ghirardelli chocolate company— sat ungiven in my backpack. i started to wonder what was going on. if we were not going to be meeting lots of people, why were we instructed to bring gifts? planned events and activities slowly began to disappear from our program schedule without explanation. eventually, it started to dawn on me that i was missing something. my suspicions were confirmed when our program leader made a special announcement stressing that we wear masks every time we were out in public. he explained that a large group of foreigners wandering around the city without masks would be a bad look for the program’s image and could cause our neighbors alarm. several more activities and lectures in our program were cancelled, and scrutiny on our rag-tag group of international scholars increased, as we were an obvious potential vector for covid-19. it did not seem fair. here we were, risking international travel to participate in this program to bring global understanding to the region; our foreign-ness was both commodity and curse. in retrospect, this was the privileged, self-centered naiveté, born from the rhetoric of american exceptionalism, that, as an aspiring east asian studies scholar, i work to dispel in the classroom. however, in the moment, as everything around us started to shift, i admit that i was most concerned for my individual welfare. suddenly, the wuhan virus affected me— affected all participants— on a personal level. stage 3: bargaining over meals during our last week in japan, we agreed our relatives back home were overreacting. news sources were reporting that covid-19 was just another strain of flu, and no one shut down schools and cancelled flights during flu season. my parents urged me to buy my own plane ticket home, abandon the program, and leave immediately. i assured them that i was fine; we were being careful and well cared for. grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202159 i did not want to miss the opportunity to present my dissertation research in japanese, attend the closing ceremonies, and thank my hosts and new friends for their kindness and generosity. then, airlines began to cancel international flights in droves. i started to panic— not because i feared the spread of covid-19, but because i feared becoming stranded in a foreign country, or worse, missing more classes and my quarterly exams back home. i was scheduled to take my comprehensive exams to advance to phd candidacy in june. what would i do if i had to undergo two weeks of quarantine in los angeles, or was stranded in japan until april? as the global response to covid-19 grew more serious, it dawned on me that perhaps the virus was something to be worried about after all. my friends’ return flights to italy, india, and hong kong were cancelled and rerouted multiple times a day. ok, i said to myself, things might be worse than i thought. just let me get home. i don’t care about quarantine anymore, as long as there is wi-fi. more flights to the united states were cancelled. my thoughts turned to the hope that if i got stuck, it would be in japan where friends could let me borrow their couch and not during a layover in korea. i repeated my contingency plans over and over in my mind. i promised myself to be careful about the virus if only i could get home. i do not know if it was luck or divine intervention, but somehow my flight was the only one not cancelled, and i managed to make it home. i held up my end of the bargain. i dutifully wore my mask every second. i did my best to avoid touching surfaces. i washed my hands often and for twenty seconds or more each time. in the airports and on my flights, i tried to maintain six feet of social distance between others and myself. during each layover, i checked in with my friends. i let them know that i had made it to my gate in seoul safely and i would be boarding the last leg of my journey soon. we all commented on how much things had changed since we had left for japan. everyone was much more careful. stage 4: depression when i arrived back in los angeles, the surge of relief i felt quickly gave way to shock and anger. it seemed like i had traveled back in time while in the air. huge crowds of people milled around the terminal without masks or regard for others’ personal space. there was no mention of quarantine as i made my way through customs. weren’t they concerned that i had been through three international airports in the last twenty-four hours? it was exactly this sort of behavior that was causing the rapid spread of covid-19, the closing of borders and the cancellation of flights that had made my return home nearly impossible. i was profoundly uncomfortable with the situation. the following day, i checked my university’s student health website. self-isolation was not recommended if i was not experiencing flu-like symptoms. having heard that the incubation period for the virus was at least two weeks and knowing that my friends from japan were in quarantine, this guidance seemed outdated. i stopped by the administrative office on campus where i worked part-time as a funding adviser for fellow graduate students to ask my supervisors if they thought i should stay home. they replied that it did not seem necessary. still worried, i offered to work remotely if any of my co-workers were immunocompromised or simply uncomfortable with the risk my proximity might pose. sure enough, one of my colleagues responded that they had a weak immune system and would greatly appreciate my working remotely. i quickly packed up my things and headed home, joking with my boss that in the unlikely case the university closed due to covid-19, spring break was only a week away and it might be nice to have a few extra weeks of vacation. less than twelve hours later we got our wish. the university chancellor sent an email that the school was closed effective immediately. desperately wanting to see my family after the last few weeks’ challenges, i moved up my flight to new york. the national conferences i had been accepted to present at were cancelled. international fellowships i had just been awarded were indefinitely postponed and current fellows recalled. grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202160 businesses were shut down. armed only with the few books i had checked out of the library (now closed) to read on my flights to and from japan, i prepared for my phd qualifying exams on my parents’ couch. i wrote my essays at the small desk in my childhood bedroom. i could not quite name the weight that i felt in my heart every day, as all my careful plans and arrangements went up in smoke, until i read an article that was aptly titled, ‘that discomfort you’re feeling is grief.’ my carefree travels in ise with my group of international friends felt like it had happened in another time. in another life. in another world. such a program is currently unthinkable, with the japanese border closed to international travel, particularly to citizens of countries suffering severely and dealing poorly with the epidemic like the united states. little had we known that while we were listening to lectures, taking selfies at tourist destinations, and sharing meals, we were sitting in the eye of a storm the likes of which no one has seen in a century. stage 5: acceptance i would not say that i have come to fully accept the current situation concerning covid-19 yet. the global pandemic continues to upend my carefully laid plans. each week, i try to move heaven and earth to begin my dissertation research fellowship in japan. each week, the japanese border remains closed and the visa application process suspended. i run the risk of losing my health insurance, housing, livelihood, and potentially my career in academia if i am unable to start my fellowship soon. i suppose this cycle of contingency and grief for what has been lost is what i understand as the ‘new normal.’ it is all too easy to become consumed by self-centered pity and personal grief. however, the relationships that i built with my friends from the ise program have provided an incredible opportunity to break out of these insular thoughts and refocus my attention as a scholar of asian religions and as a human being on what matters most while social distancing during a global pandemic: interdependence and mutual aid. the thirteen of us are once again spread across the world, but we remain connected and in communication with one another. through the internet, we share our challenges and observations of what is going on in our home countries, as well as happy photos and memories of our adventures together. i hope that the world will learn from the hard lessons of the 2020 pandemic, and that we ise and japan study program alumni will all be able to reunite again soon. conclusion after spending the beginning of the pandemic together, the authors returned to their home countries to face varied experiences of lockdown. their reflections highlight some of the common reactions to the pandemic; yet each author’s narrative also underlines some of the dis-equalizing aspects of covid-19, whether it is the inability to share matcha and tea with students, a mother separated from her sick child, borders closed for vital research, increased control by the bureaucracy, or the scarcity of face masks. as covid-19 continues to rage, and subsequent disasters will undoubtedly follow, it is vital to see the varied experiences as both the shared, yet dis-equalizing, forces that they are. grikun, et al portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202161 lewisformattedwithimageaug242008 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal from/de infernal : romantic vek lewis, university of sydney image © raúl eberhard lewis from/de infernal : romantic portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 2 compra él abre su bolsa de trucos sus navajas resplandecientes que el amor es peligroso no hay lugar a dudas este no es un don juan cualquiera ni criminal ni malviviente, no nada de pásame un varo hermano mi amor es un vagabundo, le digo sin comida ni trago ni donde caerse muerto me fijo en su rostro generoso su soledad de samurai rozar la piel al filo de cada navaja sería muy tonto pero no hay mercado negro como el suyo purchase he opens up his bag of tricks – its resplendent knives that love is dangerous, he asserts, there can be no doubt no don juan of the suburbs, this no miscreant, no brother can you spare me a dime? my love is a pauper, i answer without rest, food or home i examine his generous face its samurai loneliness to run my skin along each blade would be folly & yet there is no black market like his lewis from/de infernal : romantic portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 3 sacrosanto te llevo en el cuello como las calaveras hechas añicos de los niños que consumí para ahuyentar a la muerte o la mirada de los desconocidos el hedor, pues, es exagerado nadie se atreverá a cruzar mi camino escucho lo que dicen de mí, sí leyendas de mi origen las honduras de la laguna profecías de mi desaparición, esperanzas plebeyas que rehuyo como sangre derramada cada día las piedras malditas se apilan más – y asciendes infernal ajeno a todo – sacrosanct i wear you round my neck like the shattered skulls of infants i’ve consumed to ward off death or the attentions of strangers the stench is a bit much no one dare cross my path i hear the stories, yes, tales of my origin some deep lagoon predictions of my demise, plebeian hopes i shirk like spilt blood daily the cairn of stones piles up – & you rise infernal oblivious – lewis from/de infernal : romantic portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 4 amor de perros me afierro a ti, mi amor como perro pitbull me tienes que quitar quirúgicamente ahora mis fauces cuelgan de la repisa de tu chimenea símbolo de la cacería último remedio eterno recurso de los desesperados las veces que no quise rendirme… (tu olor a sangre hipnótica) vuelvo a matar llámalo lo que quieras: instinto las cosas que hago para saciarme la panza hecha un hueco mi tenacidad infrarroja (y tú que tienes miedo a los perros) dog-love i lock on, my love, like a pit bull you have to have me surgically removed now my jaws hang above your mantel piece symbol of the hunt eternal, proverbial last resort the times i wouldn’t give up lewis from/de infernal : romantic portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 5 (the smell of you hypnotic blood) i come back for the kill call it instinct the things i do to sate myself the empty belly my infra-red tenacity (& you with your fear of dogs) lewis from/de infernal : romantic portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 6 palabras, suturas no ha sido por el temor a la muerte de un juicio real, objeto de ciertos reyes entretenimiento mordaz pornográfico anticlímax para todas las narrativas concluyentes fue la propia compulsión de scheherezade de desahogarse el hara kiri de la historia – extirpando la raíz ante la impaciencia de dioses personales bailando en el aire como mortajas grises la historia… una, dos, tres, cuatro mil y una noches cada una da prueba bobinada como gotas de sangre húmeda como carne de mango <invertida> profunda amarga bendita llenando el hueco del silencio como una herida y sus palabras suturas tejiendo los costados a duras penas rojas salvajes words, sutures it was not under pain of death by royal court, object of some king's abject entertainment pornographic (anti-)climax to every narrative denouement it was scheherazade’s own compulsion to get it out a hara kiri of story excising that source to less than patient private gods spinning like winding sheets the story, one two three four.... a thousand & one nights each a reproof spooled like bits of blood lewis from/de infernal : romantic portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 7 humid as mango flesh turned inside>out deep bitter kind filling the silence like a wound & the words sutures knitting together edges in rough compliance red, un-tamed portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: brown, a. 2021. transnational memory and the fukushima disaster: memories of japan in australian anti-nuclear activism. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 136-151. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ pjmis.v17i1-2.7094 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal general article (peer reviewed) transnational memory and the fukushima disaster: memories of japan in australian anti-nuclear activism alexander brown corresponding author: dr alexander brown, jsps international research fellow, department of studies on contemporary society, faculty of integrated arts and social sciences, japan women’s university, kawasaki, japan; honorary associate, school of international studies and education, faculty of arts and social sciences, university of technology sydney, sydney, australia. alexander.brown@uts.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7094 article history: received 13/03/2020; revised 02/06/2020; accepted 08/06/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract this paper argues for the importance of transnational memories in framing australian anti-nuclear activism after the fukushima disaster. japan looms large in the transnational nuclear imaginary. commemorating hiroshima as the site of the first wartime use of nuclear weapons has been a long-standing practice in the australian anti-nuclear movement and the day has been linked to a variety of issues including weapons and uranium mining. as australia began exporting uranium to japan in the 1970s, australiajapan relations took on a new meaning for the indigenous traditional owners from whose land uranium was extracted. after fukushima, these complex transnational memories formed the basis for an orientation towards japan by indigenous land rights activists and for the anti-nuclear movement as a whole. this paper argues that despite tenuous organizational links between the two countries, transnational memories drove australian anti-nuclear activists to seek connections with japan after the fukushima disaster. the mobilisation of these collective memories helps us to understand how transnational social movements evolve and how they construct globalisation from below in the asia-pacific region. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 136 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7094 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7094 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:alexander.brown%40uts.edu.au?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7094 keywords memory; nuclear; history; culture; protest introduction in march 2011, dramatic images of a hydrogen explosion at the fukushima nuclear power plant flowed through global mediascapes (appadurai 1996: 35– 40) to australia, where they appeared again and again on television screens, online media sites and in newspaper reports in the weeks and months following the disaster. one of the first public figures in australia to respond to the disaster was yvonne margarula, senior traditional owner of the mirarr people, whose country is located in the heart of the world heritage listed kakadu national park in australia’s northern territory that includes the ranger uranium mine. she wrote to the then united nations secretary-general ban ki moon to express her concern that ‘given the long history between japanese nuclear companies and australian uranium miners, it is likely that the radiation problems at fukushima are, at least in part, fuelled by uranium derived from our traditional lands’ (gundjeihmi aboriginal corporation 2011). margarula remembered the transnational dimension of the mirarr people’s struggle against uranium mining in her letter, noting that the decision to mine uranium on her traditional land was the result of a 1974 agreement between australian prime minister gough whitlam and japanese prime minister tanaka kakuei. after fukushima, she felt a direct connection with the people whose lives had been affected by the nuclear accident in northeast japan and a responsibility for the poison that was taken from her country. for margarula, this responsibility was extinguished neither by the distance the uranium ore had travelled nor the fact that the decision to mine was made elsewhere. as sociologist ulrich beck (2000: 11) observes, today ‘nothing which happens on our planet is only a limited local event; all inventions, victories and catastrophes affect the whole world.’ the development of the nuclear energy industry in the 1950s and 1960s is an example of this. australia’s discovery of uranium ore and japan’s need for imported yellowcake was imbricated in the development of a global nuclear fuel cycle and in the transnationally connected struggles against uranium mining, nuclear power and nuclear waste disposal. as anti-nuclear activists in australia responded to the fukushima disaster, they drew on the legacy of anti-nuclear activism in both countries, including histories of joint action and solidarity, to argue that australia should abandon its involvement in the global industry. in this paper i consider the way transnational memories of nuclear harms and anti-nuclear struggle informed australian nuclear activism after fukushima. i argue that activists articulated their domestic activities within a transnational frame by remembering and commemorating histories of nuclear harm. the transnational implications of the great east japan earthquake of march 2011 and the tsunami and nuclear disasters which it triggered have been the subject of a number of studies (hindmarsh and priestley 2015; tsunekawa 2018). nevertheless, as jones, loh and satō (2013: 602– 603) observe, there remains a tendency to restrict narratives about the fukushima disaster to the national scale, depicting it as a failure of japan’s corporate and regulatory culture. they suggest that ‘directing our attention to global, national, and local scales reveals alternative, intersecting narratives about what nuclear power meant, what interests it served, and who benefited’ (619). given the way nuclear fallout diffuses so readily through the atmosphere and the oceans, it seems self-evident that we should pay attention to the transnational when studying nuclear things. moreover, viewing the disaster through a transnational frame provides an opportunity for contributing to the debate in area studies about the need to move beyond methodological nationalism. recent historiography on japan increasingly takes a transnational approach (iacobelli leary & takahashi 2016; avenell 2017). tessa morris-suzuki has called for an ‘anti-area studies,’ proposing an approach that ‘uses knowledge of a variety of places and a variety of disciplinary approaches in order to elucidate problems which cross boundaries’ (2000: 22). she rejects the methodological nationalism implicit in japanese studies brown portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021137 that focus on the bounded territory of ‘japan’ and posits an approach that allows ‘people and places in australia [to] become part of the problem to be understood and “read”— in an interconnected series of points upon the earth, not only reflecting but becoming objects of reflection’ (22). chapman and hayes (2020) exemplify such an approach in their recent collection of essays on japan in australia, underlining how the modern histories of these two pacific nation states have been mutually constituted through transnational cultural flows. in this paper i apply a similar methodological approach by investigating the presence of japan in the memories of australian anti-nuclear activists, showing how memory practices facilitate activism beyond borders. when the great east japan earthquake struck in 2011, i had already planned to travel to japan to conduct research on social movements in tokyo. the earthquake and nuclear disaster threatened to derail my plans as australian government travel warnings and anxious cautions from friends and family made me question my plans to travel to a potentially radioactively contaminated city. ultimately, however, i decided to take the journey and arrived in japan in late september for an eighteen-month research trip. having already been involved in anti-nuclear movements in australia before fukushima, i re-engaged with the resurgent anti-nuclear movement after the disaster. this included grassroots organising in my hometown of wollongong in australia between march and september 2011 and extensive engagement with the movement in japan during my eighteen months living there. these experiences drew my attention to the intersections between anti-nuclear movements in the two countries and caused me to reflect on the contours of the transnational civil society that emerges from this intersection. this paper thus draws in part on my own personal experiences of the transnational movement and connections that were formed in the wake of the disaster, a methodological approach routledge (2013) describes as ‘activist ethnography.’ i begin by reviewing some of the literature on globalisation, transnational social movements and transnational memory, noting the gap in the literature regarding australia-japan as a transnational space for grassroots political action. i then provide some background on anti-nuclear struggles in australia before fukushima and the way these struggles engaged with japan’s history as a target of nuclear attack and as a growing nuclear energy producer. i then explore two examples of transnational anti-nuclear activism between the two countries after fukushima: transnational activism by australian indigenous people and the staging of anti-nuclear demonstrations on hiroshima day in the regional australian city of wollongong. in each case i show that practices of remembering previous struggles served to connect the movement in australia transnationally with that in japan. transnational activism and transnational memory for beck (2000: 12), globalization is an ongoing process which ‘create[s] transnational social links and spaces, revalues local cultures and promotes third cultures.’ he distinguishes contemporary processes of globalisation, which are characterised by the ‘scale, density and stability of regional-global relationship networks and their self-definition through the mass media, as well as of social spaces and of image-flows at a cultural, political, economic and military level’ (12) from a long-established globality, which was created in earlier waves such as colonialism. studies of social movements increasingly focus on the transnational. the alter-globalisation movement in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which was epitomised by the mass protests against the world trade organisation in seattle in 1999, inspired a range of studies that sought to understand these movements and the ways in which activists, ideas and practices circulate beyond the borders of the nation state (della porta 2007; starr 2000). the seattle protests were made possible by the networking of activists, ngos and other civil society groups under the umbrella of people’s global action, which enabled them to develop a coordinated response to corporate globalisation (graeber 2002: 63). in this dynamic form of grassroots globalisation, activists develop transnational networks in response to the challenges of corporate globalisation and use them to articulate a global vision based on solidarity brown portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021138 rather than competition (reitan 2012). the need to pay attention to the transnational can also be seen in recent historical studies of labour and other social movements (piccini 2016; van der linden 2017). when compared with the substantial literature that has emerged on the alter-globalisation movement and its transnational practices, however, the transnationalism of social movements in east asia remains underexplored. one approach to thinking through transnational social movements is to examine the transnational circulation of memories of struggle. the bombing of hiroshima and its memorialisation were central to the development of global memory culture (zwigenberg 2014; yoneyama 1999). the global turn in memory studies challenges the privileging of the nation. mackie and crozier-de rosa (2019), for example, explore memory practices in transnational feminism, a social movement that has always carried with it either an explicit or implicit transnational frame. as mackie and crozier-de rosa (2019: 3) point out, the notion of collective memory has been criticised for its homogenising tendencies and stress the need to emphasise the mutability and contested nature of memory-making. notions of collective memory have tended to privilege the nation as a site of remembering, particularly given the importance of place in understanding how memory is produced beyond the individual level. global memory culture provides a transnational frame through which to look at spatially contextualised historical events, as can be seen in the way memories of the holocaust in europe have produced a set of ethical and political imperatives that go beyond the nation state. yet, as sundholm (2011: 2) points out, the construction of a global memory culture does not obviate the need for thinking about memory practices in local contexts. james clifford (2013: 41) observes that the global-local dichotomy is a false one, in which ‘both ideas equally abstract and ideological’. he calls instead for a ‘realist’ approach, ‘which works with “big-enough,” more-than-local narratives.’ australia-japan as a space of movement and memory remains unexplored. one of the few exceptions is renwick and walton’s (1992: 112) study of peace movement relations between australia and japan, which includes anti-nuclear movements. they found that a ‘multi-tiered and multi-dimensional’ relationship was maintained through organisational and individual contacts through multilateral, bilateral, formal and informal channels, though they were sometimes ad hoc. however, they conclude that ‘the fragmentary nature of the respective movements complicates their interaction’ and ‘restricted organisational contacts’ (120– 121). they found that that connections between movements in the two countries depend ‘largely upon individuals with some form of personal interest or commitment to japan-related peace issues’ and experiences of living and working in japan, friendship networks and other relationships (114). renwick and walton do not use the language of memory to interrogate australia-japan social movements. instead, they draw on an undefined concept of ‘organisational memory’ in order to posit that a lack of organisational continuity between movements in the two countries leads to a deficit of ‘organisational memory’ (121) at the transnational scale. in management studies, the notion of ‘organisational memory’ refers to ‘stored information from an organization’s history that can be brought to bear on present decisions’ (walsh and ungson 1991: 61). they apply this approach to the problem of organisational continuity and its strategic implications for cross-border peace movement relations. this perspective is common to both instrumentalist sociologies of social movements and to many social movement actors, who often see movement culture as a tool for achieving movement goals rather than as an end in itself (eyerman & jamison 1998: 168). indeed, organisational theory has been influential in structuralist social movement theories (davis et al. 2005). my approach draws on a different understanding of social movement culture as representing ‘an alternative vision and way of life to that of the dominant society’ (eyerman & jamison 1998: 170). i have also observed the lack of clear organisational continuities between movements identified by renwick and walton in australia and japan in my own activist ethnography of australia-japan social movements. my focus in this paper is therefore to consider how struggles over issues such as uranium mining and nuclear power continue to produce lively cross-border interchanges despite a lack of organisational continuity. brown portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021139 my hypothesis is that while the ‘organisational memory’ of an australia-japan anti-nuclear movement embedded in formal structures is weak, this weakness is compensated by the culture of transnational struggle that has been created and communicated through collective memories. a number of recent studies have examined memory within social movements. anna wiemann (2019), for example, examines how movement intellectuals use history and memory to frame their accounts of the anti-nuclear movement in tokyo after the fukushima disaster. wiemann draws on ann rigney’s (2018) framework for understanding the relationship between memory and activism. rigney identifies three instances of what she calls ‘the memory-activism nexus’: memory activism, memories of activism, and memory in activism. in memory activism, activists engage directly in the struggle to produce cultural memories. memories of activism concerns the ways in which we remember past struggles. finally memory in activism refers to the ways in which cultural memories of past struggles inform new movements. bringing these three instances together, she notes that ‘remembering the past, shaping the future remembrance of the present, and struggles for a better future feed into each other’ (372). in this paper, i am particularly concerned with the third of these categories, the role of memory in activism, and the way it has served as a link to connect preand post-fukushima nuclear activism in australia with japan. discussing the terminological profusion that plagues memory studies, kansteiner highlights assmann’s (1995) distinction between cultural memory as the forms of objectified culture through which societies develop and transmit an image of themselves and communicative memory, the ‘everyday communications about the meaning of the past characterized by instability, disorganization, and non-specialization’ and which tends to occupy a time-span of less than one hundred years (kansteiner 2002: 182). if applying this distinction to memories of the nuclear age, we are entering the terrain of communicative memory that is in the process of becoming cultural memory. kansteiner explains how the more ephemeral processes of communicative memory leads to the creation of more widely shared and institutionally embedded cultural memories: ‘collective memories originate from shared communications about the meaning of the past that are anchored in the life-worlds of individuals who partake in the communal life of the respective collective’ (188). for activist movements, communicating memories of nuclear harms helps to develop a collective memory about the nuclear past which they hope to embody in the construction of a nuclear-free future. the power of collective memories lies in how they are articulated with individual memories. the affective dimension of memory seals this connection. eyerman and jamison’s work on music and memory in social movements provides a useful point of reference here. they use a ‘structure of feeling’ model for understanding collective memory, arguing that music ‘creates a mood … and in this way can communicate a feeling of common purpose, even amongst actors who have no previous historical connections to one another’ (1998: 161– 162). they stress the ways in which music ‘can be recorded and reproduced … to such an extent that it can be recalled or remembered at other times and places.’ music, however, is not the only cultural form that is capable of structuring feelings and communicating emotion across time and space. below i examine examples of indigenous testimony and an activist protest ritual where the affective power of memories derives from the individual and family experiences of the witnesses and from participation in the protest ritual. my analysis explores how memories of nuclear harm and anti-nuclear protest are produced and reproduced in a transnational space that incorporates australia and japan. but first it is necessary to briefly outline some of the historical legacies of the nuclear age in the australia-japan context. radioactive legacies after the second world war, the united states sought to promote its allies’ development of civilian nuclear power technologies in a plan outlined by president dwight d. eisenhower in a speech at the general assembly of the united nations in 1953. japan was eager to take advantage of the technology transfers available under the new policy, dubbed ‘atoms for peace.’ conservative politician nakasone yasuhiro brown portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021140 shepherded japan’s first bill appropriating money for a nuclear power programme in march 1953 and chaired a bipartisan committee in the national diet that saw the basic legal framework for nuclear power established by the end of 1955 (yoshioka 2011: 69– 72). however, the early development of japan’s nuclear programme was plagued by technical problems. the first commercial nuclear reactor, using imported british technology, commenced operation in 1965. by 1970, japan had four functioning reactors. following the oil shock crises of the early 1970s, japan’s determination to pursue the nuclear option increased as part of a strategic orientation away from dependence on imported oil. by 1980 japan had 22 reactors, making up 11 per cent of world nuclear generating capacity (nuclear energy agency and the international atomic energy agency 2006: 22). while the development of japan’s nuclear power industry was premised on the quest for energy autarky, japan lacked sufficient domestic reserves of uranium leading utilities to import uranium to guarantee supply (nuclear energy agency and the international atomic energy agency 2006). the establishment of nuclear power infrastructure in japan and other countries in the 1960s stimulated a boom in exploration activities in australia. significant uranium reserves were discovered between 1969 and 1975, including a number of large deposits in the alligator rivers region of the northern territory such as ranger and jabiluka (falk, green & mudd 2006). in 1966 japan began to look overseas for supplies, including to australia (nuclear energy agency and the international atomic energy agency 2006: 286). on returning to japan from a research trip to australia in february, kamiyama teiji of the power reactor and nuclear fuel development corporation, gave a press conference where he urged that ‘as a nation we too need to look to australia,’ and warned that ‘if we do not act quickly to develop uranium mining in canada, australia and other foreign countries we will be too late’ (asahi shimbun 1967: 7). in february 1972, australia and japan signed an agreement for cooperation in the peaceful uses of atomic energy. the agreement, which replaced an earlier 1962 agreement, was intended to facilitate the transfer of nuclear materials, including uranium ore (asahi shimbun 1972: 2). this set the stage for the establishment of the uranium trade from australia to japan. however, as the controversial global nuclear industry expanded across the world, so did opposition to it. when australian prime minister gough whitlam promised his japanese counterpart tanaka kakuei that australia would supply japan with uranium, his decision triggered the birth of an anti-uranium movement in australia (o’brien 2003; burgmann 2003). activists in australia held protest actions such as the ride against uranium in 1975, which took the anti-uranium message to canberra in a multiday bicycle protest originating in melbourne, sydney and adelaide. in 1976 the whitlam government commissioned the ranger uranium environmental inquiry, to examine the uranium mining proposal, making the uranium debate a major public focus. as the movement opposing uranium mining grew, activists established links with activists in japan (sibatani 1977). in the early days of the nuclear energy industry in japan, opposition was largely limited to local struggles against particular reactor siting plans. however, over the course of the 1970s, these groups began to co-ordinate their opposition and a number of prominent scientists joined the cause. this led to the development of national and international movement links. japanese environmentalists and anti-nuclear campaigners became aware that japan’s high economic growth relied on resource extraction and the export of polluting industries to poorer countries, often former japanese colonies, thus contributing to a broader transnational understanding of their struggle (avenell 2016, 2017). the controversy over uranium mining at ranger was captured at the time in the documentary film dirt cheap (1980). the film includes a hidden microphone recording of fraser government minister for aboriginal affairs peter viner telling traditional owners that they have no choice but to assent to uranium mining on their country so that australia could supply the japanese uranium market. following the meeting, traditional owners signed an agreement under pressure giving consent to the construction of the ranger mine (cawte 1992: 158– 61). when the mining lease for ranger was granted in 1979, the brown portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021141 government quickly sold off its interest and a new company, energy resources australia, was formed in which a japanese consortium held a 10 per cent stake. doug anthony, minister for trade and industry in the fraser government, justified the sale on the grounds that ‘only because overseas interests had a direct equity interest in the venture that they were prepared to enter into long-term contracts’ (cawte 1992: 162). this is indeed what took place in 1978, when kansai electric power, shikoku electric power and kyūshū electric power signed long-term supply contracts to purchase uranium from 1982 to 1996 (tsūshōsangyōshō shigen enerugii chō kōeki jigyōbu genshiryoku hatsuden ka 1987: 269– 70). as edgington (1984: 1024) explains, this was a typical pattern of japanese investment in the australian minerals sector in the early 1980s, with firms holding small equity stakes in mines and signing long-term contracts to purchase the output. much of the concern about uranium mining in australia in the 1970s and 1980s centred on nuclear weapons proliferation. the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki provided a clear example to many why uranium should be left in the ground. hiroshima day rallies had become an annual protest ritual for antinuclear campaigners as early as the 1960s, before the uranium mining issue had penetrated the political agenda in australia. in 1961, 5,000 marched in sydney and 3,000 in melbourne. by 1962 hiroshima day was becoming ‘with may day another fixture in the calendar of the left in australia’ (mccausland 1999: 84– 85). globally, the movement registered a major success in 1963 with the conclusion of a partial test ban treaty. as hiroshima day became an established ritual of commemorative protest in the australian calendar, it served as a focus for further peace and anti-nuclear protest waves. opposition to the vietnam war became the major focus for hiroshima day in 1965 and the day remained a key protest event for the anti-vietnam war movement. when uranium mining concerns surfaced in the 1970s, hiroshima day once again became a symbolic day for taking action. as australia withdrew from vietnam following the election of the whitlam government, much of the anti-war movement turned its attention to the impending plans to export australian uranium (adamson 1999). even after the commencement of mining at ranger, opposition to nuclear weapons and uranium mining fuelled major social movements throughout the 1980s, such as the campaign against the roxby downs uranium mine in south australia and for a nuclear free pacific. a second major wave of anti-uranium mining protests took place in australia in the 1990s, when the newly elected howard government cleared the way for the owners of the jabiluka uranium deposit near ranger in the northern territory to begin mining as part of a much-talked-about nuclear renaissance. the mirarr people, traditional owners of the jabiluka mine site, opposed mining and led a national and international campaign that helped to prevent mining of the jabiluka deposit. senior traditional owner yvonne margarula was at the forefront of this struggle (branagan 2014: 4– 11). appeals to international law were an important part of mirarr strategy in their struggle against the expansion of uranium mining on their country in the 1990s, when their gundjeihmi aboriginal corporation sought to have the kakadu national park listed as a world heritage site in danger during their battle against the proposed uranium mine (hintjens 2000: 379). the jabiluka campaign made links with activists around the world, including in japan, and japanese activists highlighted the connection between uranium mining on indigenous lands and the nuclear energy industry in japan (itō 2004). jabiluka action groups took action on hiroshima day in 2000, showing how the day continues to serve as a mnemonic link with the history of nuclear devastation in hiroshima and at the maralinga nuclear test site in south australia, which like uranium mining has disproportionately affected indigenous peoples (hintjens 2000: 379). indigenous memories i opened this paper with reference to yvonne margarula’s letter to the united nations, where she drew attention to the way the transnational history of nuclear power in japan and australia implicated her traditional lands in the fukushima disaster. before fukushima, australia was a major source of uranium brown portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021142 for the japanese nuclear energy industry, supplying approximately one third of its needs (nakamura 2011; world nuclear association 2019). margarula’s suspicions about the source of the uranium fuel that was melting down inside the stricken reactor vessels of the fukushima nuclear power plant, were later confirmed by dr robert floyd, director-general of the australian safeguards and non-proliferation office in the department of foreign affairs and trade. on 31 october 2011, floyd told a joint standing committee of the australian parliament that ‘australian obligated nuclear material was at the fukushima daiichi site and in each of the reactors— maybe five out of six, or it could have been all of them; almost all of them’ (commonwealth of australia 2011). his office was able to confirm the presence of australian uranium at the fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant as part of its role in ensuring australia meets its international obligations under a variety of safeguards agreements. australia’s uranium export policy obligations under these agreements involve ‘precisely accounting for amounts of australian-obligated nuclear material (aonm) as it moves through the nuclear fuel cycle’ (department of foreign affairs and trade n.d.). the mirarr people’s memories of their struggles with uranium mining and those of other indigenous groups who had collective memories of nuclear harms were central to the actions they took in solidarity with the people of fukushima after the march 2011 disaster. prior to the disaster, gundjeihmi aboriginal corporation had begun working with environment centre nt, a local environmental ngo, to reissue the 1980 film dirt cheap, which depicts the struggle over uranium mining on mirarr country in the 1970s. the reissued film dirt cheap 30 years on: the story of uranium mining at kakadu (2011), incorporates sections of the original film alongside messages about fukushima and the ongoing struggle against uranium mining in kakadu. historical footage of toby gangale and other indigenous leaders and environmental activists fighting the plans to mine at ranger is prefaced with a commentary aimed at a post-fukushima audience. the documentary begins with a montage of australian television news footage reporting on the hydrogen explosion and subsequent meltdown at fukushima. this ensures that viewers make a direct connection between ranger’s history and the fukushima disaster by inviting them to remember these histories, highlighting ‘the lessons and legacy of fukushima [that] have a particular relevance to australia today.’ the documentary asks us to remember the original injustices which surrounded the signing of the ranger mining agreement when we remember the fukushima disaster. when margarula referred to the ‘long history between japanese nuclear companies and australian uranium miners’ in her letter to the un, she evoked her own family’s struggle documented in dirt cheap (gundjeihmi aboriginal corporation 2011). in dirt cheap 30 years on, margarula explains how her father was dragged along to these meetings to negotiate on the ranger mine, eventually signing the paperwork under pressure that assented to the mine. in margarula’s letter and her video testimony, she interprets the fukushima nuclear disaster as a direct realisation of these fears. her ability to conceptualise a local issue in a transnational frame exemplifies the transnational imaginary that informs indigenous anti-nuclear activism in australia and the role of history and memory in sustaining anti-nuclear struggle. a shorter clip from the film containing margarula speaking about her father’s struggle against uranium mining in the park was also shared via youtube (keb1974 2013). this clip highlighted the slogan ‘australian uranium fuelled fukushima,’ which bookends margarula’s testimony in stark, unadorned white letters against a black background. this slogan, which highlights the dependency of the japanese nuclear industry on extractive industry, encapsulates the main argument made by australian anti-nuclear activists when communicating with their counterparts in japan. it was observed at anti-nuclear demonstrations across australia (workers bush telegraph 2012; mackie 2015). the film clip has been shared widely on social media, despite the relatively small number of activists involved in the campaign. furthermore, it continues to serve as a reference point for activists working between australia and japan, such as the smile with kids programme in cairns. this small charity in cairns partners with earthwalker, a not-for-profit organisation based in fukushima prefecture. they organise short-term respite trips for children from fukushima brown portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021143 prefecture who experience elevated radiation levels in their environment to come to cairns and play freely outside without fear of elevated radiation levels while engaging in a wide range of educational activities. the olympic dam mine near roxby downs in south australia is the largest uranium mine in the world. like ranger, it has a bitterly contested history and local indigenous groups and individuals have long memories of the impact of the mine and of other nuclear harms on their country and communities. in early 2012, south australian indigenous leader peter watts, an arabunna man and co-chair of the australian nuclear free alliance, travelled to japan to address the global conference for a nuclear-power free world: a major event held at the pacifico convention centre in yokohama on 14– 15 january 2012. the conference attracted 11,500 people over two days and included a hundred invited international guests from thirty countries (global conference for a nuclear power free world 2012). its stated purpose was to ‘give birth to concrete support for the people of fukushima, be a further step towards creating a future without nuclear power plants, and develop into ongoing global action’ (yoshioka 2012). like margarula, watts spoke directly from his own and his people’s collective memories of harms both historical and ongoing caused by nuclear weapons testing and uranium mining on country. watts’ traditional lands include the site of bhp’s olympic dam mine, which supplies uranium to customers in japan. in speaking to the japan times, watts made reference to ancestral memories of the harms associated with uranium, stating: ‘our ancestors knew of the uranium … they called the places (of uranium deposit) “poison country”’ (arita 2012). both margarula and watts’ testimony about the impact of uranium mining on their lands carries a powerful affective charge because of the deeply personal impact of nuclear issues on themselves and their family members. the emotional power of the testimony comes through clearly in their acts of public witnessing on the transnational stage and in the sympathetic responses they generate. when the abovementioned middle school students from fukushima watched the footage of margarula describing her family’s experiences, they recorded a range of emotional reactions on the public archive of their tour. all were struck by the responsibility margarula felt for the fukushima disaster and a number noted how it had changed their own perspective on what happened. one student wrote, ‘she felt really sorry and apologised. when i heard it, i felt like we japanese were also the perpetrators. i had mixed feelings.’ another wrote: ‘these people are not to blame; in fact, it’s the people who did not listen who are bad. so why are they feeling so sorry about it and grieving so much? if it were me, i would just say, ‘i warned you but you didn’t listen!’ ... the uranium people are very kind’ (smile with kids 2019). watts’ journey to japan also led to emotional encounters with local victims of the fukushima disaster. during a visit to a tent embassy protest established by anti-nuclear activists outside the ministry of economy, trade and industry building in kasumigaseki, watts shed tears with a visiting woman from fukushima as they exchanged their experiences of nuclear harms (brown 2012). these affective encounters create powerful memories, outlasting the specific circumstances in which they occurred and potentially opening up an affective space of transnational memory that encompasses the australia-japan space. remembering hiroshima to remember fukushima as vera mackie (2015) explains, alongside uranium mining indigenous anti-nuclear consciousness in australia is also tied to the memory of hiroshima and nagasaki and to the experience of british nuclear testing at maralinga in south australia. indigenous activism highlights the importance of memories hiroshima in providing a framework for understanding later nuclear events such as fukushima. for indigenous opponents of uranium mining, the threat of imbrication in a hiroshima-like situation was one of the reasons they articulated for opposing uranium mining. when toby gangale, yvonne margarula’s father, explains his opposition to uranium mining in dirt cheap with reference to the use of nuclear weapons at hiroshima: brown portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021144 i didn’t like the mine you see  … big danger mine. very dangerous. what if they make an atom bomb or something? very dangerous. same thing they did in japan. flat. all the big houses, all the big buildings. very danger. that’s why we’re worried. given the way hiroshima day connects australia’s history of anti-nuclear protest with histories of nuclear harms in japan, a number of commemorative events organised that year had a focus on fukushima. these took place along the eastern seaboard, in the state capitals of brisbane, sydney, melbourne and hobart as well as in regional centres like wollongong and broken hill (ross 2011). sydney hiroshima day committee organiser denis doherty noted that while hiroshima day in sydney has ‘been largely ignored by japanese expats’ since its inception in 1978, ‘this year is different. japanese people are calling up and wanting to help organise the rally, join the rally. fukushima is bringing them out’ (ross 2011). vera mackie (2015), too, describes how the melbourne-based japanese for peace group, which was organised by the expatriate japanese community in melbourne in 2005, became actively involved in anti-nuclear protest after fukushima. the response to the fukushima disaster drew on existing conceptions of a transnational civil society and the global memory culture that had strong local roots in some australian communities. as discussed, hiroshima day became an important commemorative protest ritual linking anti-nuclear weapons, anti-war and anti-uranium campaigns in australia from the 1960s right through to the jabiluka campaign of the late 1990s. furthermore, the importance of hiroshima day was not limited to major capital cities but has become entrenched in the labour and social history of some regional centres, such as my hometown of wollongong on the south coast of new south wales (brown and southall 2019). an advertisement for the 1986 hiroshima day rally appearing in a university of wollongong student newspaper, for example, articulates the connection activists made between nuclear weapons, nuclear power, peace and military bases in slogans such as ‘no foreign bases,’ ‘no nuclear ship visits,’ ‘radiation knows no borders,’ and ‘stop uranium mining’ (‘hiroshima never again’ 1986). the rally was part of local efforts to embrace the united nations’ designation of 1986 as the international year of peace (iyp). in that year, 1,000 people turned out for the hiroshima day march (‘1000 in peaceful march’ 1986). the organising committee also installed a brass plaque commemorating the international year of peace in the city’s central mall where the abovementioned rallies took place. i had been attending the annual hiroshima day commemorations in wollongong for a number of years prior to the fukushima disaster. the usual format for the event involves a small group of dedicated peace activists, primarily veterans from earlier waves of peace movement activism, gathering early in the morning to sing songs of peace, make short speeches and observe a minute’s silence at 8:15am, the time the atomic bomb was dropped on the city of hiroshima. when issues arise that demand a response from peace and anti-nuclear activists, this annual commemoration and protest serves as a focal point for rallying anti-nuclear sentiment and regular participants in the commemorative event form part of a loose network of peace and anti-nuclear activists. after the fukushima disaster, i joined with a group of local people to form a new anti-nuclear activist group in response both to the fukushima disaster in japan and to plans by the australian government to build a medium-term radioactive waste dump on aboriginal land at muckaty station in the northern territory (brown 2011). the group quickly forged links with existing local networks of peace, trade union and student activism. we resolved to hold a rally on hiroshima day to protest fukushima and the nuclear energy industry. mindful of the existing annual commemoration, we timed our rally to take place later in the day at the same location in central wollongong around the international year of peace plaque. around 30 people turned out for this commemorative event, which has been organised annually by the local hiroshima day committee since 1979. later in the morning approximately one hundred people attended our ‘rally for a nuclear free future.’ speakers at the rally denounced both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. after a welcome to country from a local indigenous elder, a number of speakers addressed the crowd. one feminist activist from japan brown portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021145 spoke at the rally, reading aloud from the poem ‘when we say “hiroshima”’ (in dougherty 2011) by the hibakusha poet kurihara sadako. in this poem, kurihara invokes the memory of japan’s own wartime atrocities into the narrative of hiroshima. she reminds her readers that the victims of japan’s own war crimes should be remembered alongside those of hiroshima and nagasaki (styczek 2010: 113).1 the poet reinserts non-japanese victims of wartime atrocities into the collective memory of hiroshima. reading the poem at our rally, the activist reminded us of the japanese nuclear industry’s dependence on uranium mining on indigenous lands in countries like australia and connected their memory struggles with the ongoing and contested memorialisation of hiroshima. ron eyerman and andrew jamison’s (1998) work on music and memory in social movements discusses the role of songs as ‘channels of communication’ for activists within particular movements, between movements and across generations. the same is true of poems such as kurihara’s. the poem, like much of kurihara’s work, is deeply emotionally affecting. performed in the context of a hiroshima day rally in wollongong after fukushima, its emotional charge helped create an affective link between the reader, the attendees at the rally and a collective memory that is shared by anti-nuclear protest groups at the transnational scale. when i was asked to speak at a subsequent hiroshima day rally in wollongong in 2018, i too chose to read one of kurihara’s poems. i had learned about the poet and her work at the earlier event in 2011. i struggled to read ‘let us be midwives!’ (in dougherty 2011), choking back tears as i engaged in the affective journey of the poem, which describes a midwife helping to deliver a baby while hiding in a basement room in the aftermath of the bomb before succumbing to her own injuries. a tiny group of people gathering to commemorate hiroshima and the history of nuclear harms might easily be dismissed. however, when viewed as an occasion to forge an affective transnational memory of nuclear harm, we can see how these memory practices can maintain the community of memory over time, even in the absence of strong ongoing organisational structures. conclusion renwick and dalton (1992: 121) worried about the lack of ‘organisational memory’ in the australia-japan peace movement in their survey. in this paper i have discussed the way memory practices in indigenous activism, filmmaking and demonstrations, help sustain a transnational collective memory of activism that encompasses australia and japan. this memory culture is sustained by organisations such as gundjeihmi aboriginal corporation, wollongong’s hiroshima day committee and twang, as they enact practices of remembering. existing organisations in wollongong and sydney, which had been holding hiroshima day commemorations for a number of decades, provided a ready-made organisational and symbolic container for anti-nuclear power messages after fukushima. while organisational memories of activism linking australia and japan remain tenuous in institutional terms, practices of memorialisation insert transnational memories back into domestic anti-nuclear activism in australia, providing an ongoing framework for connecting with anti-nuclear struggles in japan. the fukushima disaster provided a powerful incentive for anti-uranium activists in australia to reforge connections with japan in the hope of reducing demand for uranium and thereby curtailing uranium mining activities in australia. some anti-nuclear activists in japan, too, looked outward and sought to address the ways in which the disaster in japan was connected to the global nuclear fuel cycle. the slogan ‘australian uranium fuelled fukushima’ encapsulated this attempt to highlight the connection between uranium mining and the disaster in japan. memory practices enable the performance of otherwise ephemeral connections to maintain the consciousness of global interconnectivity among activists. for the indigenous activists discussed in this paper, the memory of hiroshima and nagasaki informs their opposition to 1 kurihara’s poetry has undergone its own transnational circulation in english translation as well as in a number of other languages. in addition to styczek (2010), see also hayakawa (2012). brown portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021146 uranium mining on country. similarly, for anti-nuclear activists in wollongong, the memory of hiroshima and the annual rituals of commemoration and protest that kept those memories alive provided a theoretical and organisational infrastructure that sprang into life after the fukushima disaster. beck (2000: 31) observes that one of the defining features of globalising ‘lies in the empirically ascertainable scale, density and stability of regional-global relationship networks and their self-definition through the mass media, as well as of social spaces and of image-flows.’ drawing on such reflexive understandings of their global situatedness enables local activists to situate themselves in global spaces through acts of commemoration such as the hiroshima day events and by viewing and sharing their activities in traditional media and via the internet. indigenous activists and the environment centre nt, for example, produced dirt cheap 30 years on and made short clips for circulation on youtube in order to intervene in global mediascapes and share their message about the connection between australian uranium mines and japanese nuclear reactors. despite the challenges posed by the physical and cultural distance between australia and japan, the mediatisation of transnational memories helps produce and maintain a transnational imaginary, even where one-to-one contacts between individuals in different countries remain limited. nevertheless, as kansteiner (2002: 195) notes, we are living in an era in which ‘the consumption of history becomes more and more discontinuous and fragmented in time and space.’ this leads to a proliferation of memory communities who struggle to shape broader collective memories. for the anti-nuclear movement, the terrain of struggle is to expand the community of memory, generalising the memories of nuclear harm as cultural memory and thereby making uranium mining and nuclear power generation culturally and politically unacceptable. the declining fortunes of the nuclear industry in the post-fukushima era suggests that memories of the disaster have had a powerful impact. attitudes towards nuclear power in australia have become much more negative since the disaster (bird et al. 2014). for social movements, the impetus remains to continue communicating memories of nuclear harm so that they take on an enduring form as cultural memories. global memory culture in the nuclear age is a culture in the making. the way we remember the past seems set to remain central to the work of nuclear activists into the future. 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https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/japan-nuclear-fuel-cycle.aspx https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520914896 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107775442 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107775442 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 15, no. 1/2 august 2018 © 2018 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: edwards, n. 2018. linguistic rencontres in kim thúy’s mãn. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 15:1/2, pp. 6-19. https:// doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5738 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au research article linguistic rencontres in kim thúy’s mãn natalie edwards university of adelaide corresponding author: natalie edwards, department of french studies, university of adelaide, sa 5005, australia. natalie.edwards@adelaide.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5738 article history: received 27/10/2017; revised 01/05/2018; accepted 03/08/2018; published 23/08/2017 abstract linguist ofelia garcia proposes the term ‘translanguaging’ to refer to a ‘dynamic bilingualism’ that ‘is centred, not on languages as has often been the case, but on the practices of bilinguals that are readily observable in order to make sense of their multilingual worlds.’ in this article, i examine francophone vietnamese writer kim thúy’s practice of translanguaging in her 2013 text mãn. in this text, thúy blends french and vietnamese to create a dynamic, plurilingual idiom. i focus on three narrative strategies that thúy develops: her bilingual inscriptions in the margins of each page; her frequent citations of vietnamese with no accompanying translation; and her creation of words and expressions that meld the two languages to create plurilingual neologisms. taken together, these strategies move her text beyond the blending of two discreet languages to the invention of a new form of communicating subjectivity in transit. résumé la linguiste ofelia garcia propose le terme ‘translanguaging’ pour représenter un ‘bilinguisme dynamique’ qui est ‘basé non sur les langues, ce qui est souvent le cas pour les théories du bilinguisme, mais sur les pratiques observés chez les individus bilingues pour donner du sens à leur monde multilingue.’ dans cet article, nous analysons la pratique de ‘translanguaging’ de kim thúy, écrivain vietnamien d’expression française, dans son texte mãn (2013). dans ce texte, thúy mélange le français et le vietnamien pour créer un langage dynamique et plurilingue. nous nous concentrons sur trois de ses stratégies littéraires: les inscriptions bilingues dans les marges de chaque page ; les citations fréquentes du vietnamien sans traduction ; et la création de nouveaux mots et expressions qui mélangent les deux langues pour inventer des néologismes plurilingues. ensemble, ces stratégies forment un texte littéraire declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 6 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5738 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:natalie.edwards@adelaide.edu.au https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v15i1-2.5738 qui n’est pas fondé sur la combinaison de deux langues discrètes mais qui invente une nouvelle forme de subjectivité en mouvement. keywords translation, translanguaging, quebec, forced migration, vietnamese script, la traduction, le québec, la migration forcée, l’alphabet vietnamien kim thúy achieved fame for her first published text, the partially autobiographical ru, in 2009.1 this work recounts the tale of her departure from vietnam at the age of ten as one of the ‘boat people,’ headed for canada. the main protagonist narrates in vignette style memories of her childhood, her mastery of the french language and her growing personal and professional success in quebec; she rises from a seamstress to an interpreter to a lawyer to the owner of a highly successful restaurant. although far from an exclusively happy, optimistic tale of leaving asia and thriving in a western state, ru, which has been translated into several languages, has been criticised for what some interpret as glossing over the trauma involved in forced migration.2 thúy’s subsequent text mãn, which appeared four years later, is notably more sombre. as literary critic lidia menendez points out, this text is not as autobiographical as ru but is presented as a continuation of the earlier text (2014: 182). the story is again of a young girl from vietnam who migrates to quebec and it contains echoes of tropes of the first work, such as the importance of the mother figure, shattered families, separation and professional success. yet, also discernible in this text is a more poignant sense of loss, as the narrator becomes involved in a doomed multinational love affair and the tone of the text becomes more intimate, more confessional and more melancholy. what is most interesting about this later text is its sustained reflection on the subject of language and of living, loving and writing as a multilingual person. this is not to say that the vietnamese language was absent from ru. several of the vignettes in this earlier text allude to language or to multilingualism. language is foregrounded by the narrator’s work as an interpreter for the new york police department, as she makes her living through being a polyglot. she writes that ‘ma mère voulait que je parle, que j’apprenne à parler le plus rapidement possible le français et aussi l’anglais, puisque ma langue maternelle était devenue non pas dérisoire, mais inutile’ (29).3 in a later reminiscence that points to the pain of language loss and the consequences of privileging another language over one’s mother tongue, she laments that ‘j’ai dû réapprendre ma langue maternelle, que j’avais abandonnée trop tôt. de toute manière, je ne l’avais pas vraiment maîtrisée de façon complète parce que le pays était divisé en deux quand je suis née … comme au canada, le vietnam avait aussi ses deux solitudes’ (87).4 while ru contains references to bilingualism, language learning and the connection between language and identity, these do not translate into a sustained reflection on the narrator’s language use or choices but remain in the background of the text. 1 i thank tess do for the significant linguistic and cultural insights from which this essay has benefitted. 2 for an analysis of the migrant ‘success story’ and of the narrative of gratitude that this text stages, see nguyen (2013). 3 ‘my mother wanted me to speak, wanted me to learn french and english as quickly as possible since my mother tongue had become not derisory but useless.’ all translations are my own. 4 ‘i had to relearn my mother tongue, which i had abandoned too early. in any case, i hadn’t completely mastered it because the country was divided in two when i was born … like canada, vietnam also had its two solitudes.’ linguistic rencontres in kim thúy’s mãn portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 20187 in mãn, by contrast, linguistic variation becomes an integral part of the text. this later work is marked by a rich tapestry of languages—english, french and vietnamese—and by extended discussion of the differences between them. in this article, i analyse thúy’s language practice in mãn, arguing that she develops a rich form of ‘translanguaging’ to disrupt traditional understandings of multilingualism. i demonstrate that thúy develops strategies to meld her languages (mostly french and vietnamese) into a dynamic form of language use to achieve a language-focused self-narrative. i focus on three narrative strategies that thúy develops: her bilingual inscriptions in the margins of each page, her interweaving of french and vietnamese, and her differing approaches to translation. taken together, these strategies move her text beyond the blending of discreet languages to the invention of a new form of self-narrative in transit. translanguaging and literary studies traditionally, bilingualism has been considered according to a monoglossic view that suggests bilinguals have two separate linguistic systems. more recently, linguists have been questioning this premise and calling attention to the dynamic processes practised by bilingual and plurilingual speakers. sociolinguist christian lagarde reminds us that ‘l’identité linguistique, parfois considérée en tant qu’essence, est en réalité sans cesse en construction, portée par une dynamique, par des stratégies’ (2007: 21).5 applied linguist ofelia garcía uses the term ‘translanguaging’ to refer to this ‘dynamic bilingualism,’ pointing to a theory of language use that ‘is centred, not on languages as has often been the case, but on the practices of bilinguals that are readily observable in order to make sense of their multilingual worlds’ (2009: 140). the term ‘translanguaging’ comes from the welsh word trawsieithu (an amalgam of ‘traws’/‘between’ and ‘ieithu’/‘languages’) and was first used by applied linguist cen williams in 1992 to describe a pedagogical approach that asks language learners to alternate language, incorporating both the target language and the native language into tasks (garcia & wei 2014: 20). translanguaging, therefore, is predicated upon two languages functioning together and suggests that bilinguals practice a heteroglossic, dynamic system of language use; as garcia summarises, ‘responding not to two monolingualisms in one but to one integrated linguistic system’ (2009: 120). linguist canagarajah underscores the ability of bilinguals to transform the two languages that they inhabit, suggesting that ‘the term translingual conceives of language relationships in more dynamic terms. the semiotic resources in one’s repertoire or in society interact more closely, become part of an integrated resource, and enhance each other. the languages mesh in transformative ways, generating new meanings and grammars’ (2013: 8, my emphasis). the critical tool of translanguaging opens up new possibilities for interpreting literary texts that incorporate more than one language. it is important to point out that the practice of writing bilingually or multilingually is nothing new. there is, for example, a long tradition of authors who have adopted a language other than their own in their literary writing. literary critic rainier grutman (2007) points to the number of writers who have achieved literary acclaim in france despite the fact that their mother tongue is not french; to his list of andré makine, milan kundera, hector bianciotti and françois cheng can also be added rachid boudjedra, jonathan littell, julien green, nancy huston and many others—many long before the twenty-first century. grutman notes, however, that ‘dans les médias parisiens, on 5 ‘linguistic identity, which is sometimes considered to be an essence, is in practice always in the process of being constructed, brought about by a dynamic, by strategies.’ edwards portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 20188 aime bien les écrivains venus d’ailleurs mais qui se sont “convertis” au français, illustrant du même coup l’universalité de cette langue, un peu comme au bon temps de rivarol … a-ton assez remarqué toutefois que ces auteurs ont tous eu la politesse de laisser leur langue maternelle au vestiaire?’ (grutman 2007: 38).6 the french tradition is specific in this regard due to the regulation of its very standardised literary language through the académie française and to the imposition of french through colonialism. more recently, however, authors have begun to include lexical items from other languages within their french-language writing, using techniques such as footnotes or glossaries to convey their meaning.7 the context of quebec, the home of the author under discussion here, is slightly different but standardised french still dominates quebecois literary and academic writing. in this article, i examine how thúy practises translanguaging in her writing, arguing that french and vietnamese are not presented in this text as two discreet entities in a monoglossic system but as a dynamic, productive dialogue that emphasises the practices of the contemporary bilingual individual. bilingual inscriptions in mãn thúy develops a number of narrative strategies to ‘translanguage’ in mãn. one of the most striking is the bilingual inscriptions that appear on every page. the text is written in vignette style as the narrator recounts isolated, often disjointed memories of growing up in vietnam and moving to canada. most of these vignettes are less than one page long. literary scholar jenny james analyses this narrative technique in ru, interpreting it as a reflection of the fragmented nature of experience in diaspora (2016: 67). in mãn the same technique is evident but with the addition of a bilingual element. the title of each vignette appears in the margin and, crucially, is presented bilingually: both the vietnamese title and its french translation are displayed. the title, mãn, is not translated, presumably because it is a name, but the titles of all of the chapters appear in both languages. most interestingly, the vietnamese is on top, followed by the french below: an ironic reversal of the power relationship between the two languages, perhaps, especially since the text itself is written predominantly in french. the text thus becomes a visual representation of the mixing of languages in literature, as the two languages appear next to each other and are foregrounded at the top of almost every page of the text. on the rare pages with no title, since the vignette is more than one page long, there is an example of the vietnamese language within the writing, so that there is barely a page in the text in which the two languages are not visible. the vietnamese language is recorded in quốc-ngữ, the romanised script invented by the french in the 17th century to record the vietnamese oral language. this script was initially used in indigenous schools to support the teaching and learning of the french language and was appropriated by the vietnamese people as their national written language. this script thus originated through french colonisation and was developed by the french but became a way for the vietnamese to reclaim power over their language. the visibility of this language and script on every page of mãn—especially with the vietnamese inscribed above the french language—stands as a reminder of this reappropriation. moreover, the two scripts serve as a visual representation of the intertwining of the two linguistic systems in thúy’s self-narrative. 6 ‘in the paris media, they love writers who have come from elsewhere but who have “converted” to french, illustrating the universality of the language, like in the good old days ... have they noticed, however, that these writers have all had the good manners to leave their mother tongue in the closet?’ 7 for examples of how writers have incorporated other languages into their writing, see kellmann (2000) and karpin (2013). linguistic rencontres in kim thúy’s mãn portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 20189 the titles of the vignettes are typically short: either one word or a short expression. interestingly, some of the titles draw attention to the differences between the two languages, including linguistic nuances and cultural signification that only the astute learner or native speaker would likely discern. for example, in a poignant example of a culturally specific term that separates the two languages, the title ‘tiển đưa’ is translated as ‘dire adieu, accompagner quelqu’un jusqu’au point de départ’ (52).8 the short vietnamese phrase with its much longer french translation indicates the specific context in which the departures were taking place. many vietnamese people emigrated at this time, during which communist vietnam was isolated from the rest of the world due to the american embargo. the vietnamese who emigrated during this time were thus departing with no hope of return, hence thúy’s use of ‘adieu’ rather than ‘au revoir.’ in this vignette, the narrator recounts her own departure from vietnam. in contrast to the other passengers, who were accompanied by emotional family members who assumed their departing relatives would never return, the narrator departed alone and on instruction from her mother to forget her past. she was clearly not granted access to the important cultural practice of ‘tiển đưa’ and this is presented as a source of regret for her, especially since the vignette ends with the admission that, on the subject of forgetting, ‘c’était impossible’ (52).9 a further example of a title that plays with linguistic and cultural nuances is in the vignette that presents the character, hồng, a vietnamese woman who works in the narrator’s restaurant and who is the victim of domestic violence. the title of the vignette is ‘hồng/rose ou parfois rouge’ (75).10 the non-vietnamese speaking reader can only imagine that the name is also a colour and that this colour has a wider spectrum than simply ‘rose,’ alluding to the differences between languages in discerning concepts such as colours. the reader with some knowledge of languages of the region will recognise that quốc-ngữ is a phonetic script for both vietnamese and sino-vietnamese words and that thúy uses elements from both languages in her writing; ‘hồng’ means ‘pink’ or ‘rose’ in vietnamese but ‘red’ in sinovietnamese. thúy’s text thus demonstrates the multilingual layering of vietnam and reinforces its impact upon her narrative of identity. the multilingual presentation of the titles thus serves as a visual reminder of the overlapping of languages and of how this bilingual narrator brings languages and scripts together in order to achieve self-expression. the bilingual inscriptions that form the titles to each vignette highlight cultural differences but also serve to nuance the writer’s unique self-narrative. sometimes the titles are clearly related to the subject of the text and consist of one key word taken from the vignette. for example, in the vignette that recounts the narrator’s visit to new york, the only one in which the titles are the same in vietnamese and french, the vignette is simply entitled ‘new-york/new york’ (64). it is interesting to note that thúy did not use the vietnamese word for new york in this instance, preferring to anglicise her title and thereby refuse any consistent approach to the representation of bilingualism in the text.11 in another example of an explicit connection between the title and content of the vignette, she recounts an episode of her journey from vietnam to canada entitled ‘thuyền nhân’ and gives the translation in english and in italics as ‘boat people’ (14). this vietnamese term is a literal sino-vietnamese translation of the term ‘boat people,’ which was widely used for the vietnamese refugees in 8 ‘to say goodbye, to accompany somebody to their point of departure.’ thúy’s spelling is also incorrect, which is a common mistake by southerners. it should be spelt ‘tiễn.’ 9 ‘it was impossible.’ 10 ‘hông/pink or sometimes red.’ 11 nữu-ước is the vietnamisation of new york. edwards portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201810 the 1970s and 1980s who landed in countries where english is spoken rather than french. although the accepted french term ‘réfugiés de la mer’ exists, the english usage refers to this specific history and hints at the unsuitability or the limits of the french language. there are several examples, however, in which the titles are not clearly linked to the subject of the text. in a vignette recounting the narrator’s mother’s practice of giving her daughter dictations in the evening from maupassant’s une vie, a book that they had to hide to avoid it being confiscated by the communist authorities, the title of the text is ‘lỗi,’ which is translated as ‘fautes’ (24; 45).12 the word ‘fautes’ does not appear in this vignette, which succinctly summarises the mother’s nightly instruction in dictation and ‘analyse logique, grammaticale et syntaxique’ (45).13 the ‘fautes’ may refer to the mistakes that the narrator must have made in the process of learning french and testify to her difficulties in learning the language. the allusion to a ‘faute’ might also refer to the illegal action of owning a book at this time, especially a french book. the fact that the illegal book is une vie, the tale of a solitary, abandoned mother whose child leaves, is telling. the title of the vignette is not in the text, then, but it forms the backdrop to her memory – and, importantly, not the french word but the vietnamese. even though the writing is predominantly in french, vietnamese is omnipresent and interrupts the french language to nuance the narrative of self that this multilingual author develops. one specific usage of the bilingual inscriptions of the titles deserves more exploration. the vignette that appears on the third page of the text incorporates a list of words in both french and vietnamese, as opposed to the one-word or one-phrase titles elsewhere. here, the narrator describes the way in which her mother learnt the word lundi and how she taught it to her daughter. the title presents the days of the week in vietnamese followed by the french beneath each one: from ‘thứ 2/lundi’ to ‘chủ nhật/dimanche’ (11). the days in vietnamese follow the pattern of day two for monday, day three for tuesday, day four for wednesday and so on, so do not have different words to express them, apart from sunday.14 this will immediately strike a note of unfamiliarity in the french reader who has no knowledge of vietnamese. moreover, the narrator’s mother learnt the french word lundi by conjoining two vietnamese words and linking them to an action; the narrator explains lon means canette and đi means partir, thus the mother taught her to point at a can and kick it away, saying lon-đi at the same time. the two languages are thus not treated in a way that isolates them as discreet systems but as ways of imagining different meanings and of calling attention to the ways in which languages are built of the same phonemes but imbued with different meanings. in this case, the two phonemes of the french word, lun and di, form a different expression in the vietnamese language and are infused with a different meaning on a general level—to any speaker of vietnamese—and on a personal level; the narrator refers to the fact that her mother learnt this from her mother, who died before teaching her the remaining days of the week. this particular word is therefore imbued with the loss experienced by the narrator’s mother and the rupture in maternal legacy—even more acutely since di in vietnamese can also mean ‘to die,’ as can ‘partir,’ used metaphorically. by isolating the phonemes of one language—vietnamese is a monosyllabic language—and translating these phonemes literally into french, the text shows 12 ‘fautes’ translates to ‘mistakes’ or ‘errors’ in english. 13 ‘analysis of logic, grammar and syntax.’ 14 this pattern follows not the french but the portuguese days of the week (monday is lundi, which is thứ 2 in vietnamese and segunda-feira in portuguese. in fact, as pierre brocheux and daniel hémery state, the quốc-ngữ script that the french jesuit alexandre de rhodes perfectioned was initially created by portuguese missionaries (2001: 221). linguistic rencontres in kim thúy’s mãn portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201811 the intermingling of two languages in the practice of the bilingual; french and vietnamese are not presented as separate phenomena that exist in different realms or are employed in different circumstances or for different purposes. instead, the two are presented in terms of the heteroglossic, dynamic view of bilingualism proposed by garcía. the two languages of this bilingual author appear on every page as a visual reminder of the constant presence and interweaving of the two systems and of the different meanings they produce when brought together. transcultural imaginings within the vignettes, the two languages are frequently interwoven to highlight the cultural differences between vietnam and canada. discussion of language itself is constantly foregrounded in this text; language becomes more important than plot or characterisation and the narrator devotes more time to discussing language than she does to telling her story or sketching her characters or events. the tale moves quickly in a chronological, forward movement but skips over vast amounts of time. much is left unsaid, therefore, and many questions remain about the narrator’s character and the experiences that she undergoes; discussion of language is often the only thread that ties the vignettes together. for example, as early as the seventh vignette, the narrator discusses the morphology of vietnamese and its cultural signification. this episode introduces the narrator’s future husband, one of the ‘boat people’ who settled in canada. returning to vietnam in search of a wife years later, his knowledge of several significant vietnamese customs is inconsistent. his hesitation in addressing the family, particularly the narrator’s mother, is immediately apparent: ‘il l’appelait pêle-mêle ‘grande sœur’ (chị), ‘tante’ (cô) et ‘grande-tante’ (bác). personne ne lui en a tenu rigueur parce qu’il venait d’ailleurs, d’un lieu où les pronoms personnels existent pour pouvoir rester impersonnels’ (15).15 the language-culture nexus is accentuated in this instance, as this episode presents a situation in which language use should be determined by a speaker’s knowledge of cultural matrices. what is more interesting about this meeting is that the man is a native speaker of the language but that his linguistic errors are forced by his lack of cultural knowledge. the narrator writes in this quotation that he comes d ’un lieu, from a place, in which pronouns are different, although he originally comes from the geographical space of vietnam and from the linguistic background of the vietnamese language. the language, she hints, is a complex system of foreignness that can be impenetrable even to the native speaker. she foregrounds discussion of such linguistic difference throughout the text, instructing her french-speaking reader about the intricacies of the language and, crucially, about its importance to her self-narrative. the interplay between languages is a constant presence in this text as the narrator underlines her dual linguistic heritage and the mixing that this necessitates. rather than negating, downplaying or eliding the two languages, she underscores linguistic difference and elevates it to an integral part of her narrative of identity. as the interplay between the two languages is foregrounded, the vietnamese language peppers the text, mostly through italicised words and phrases as in the quotation above. often vietnamese appears as a way of providing additional information about a character, a place or an event that cannot be accurately expressed in french. such occasions highlight the gaps between languages—not just in words but also in the world views and perspectives that inhabit 15 ‘he called her indiscriminately ‘older sister’ (chị), ‘aunt’ (cô) and ‘great-aunt’ (bác). nobody insisted because he came from elsewhere, from a place where personal pronouns exist in order to remain impersonal.’ edwards portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201812 different languages. for example, the narrator points out that vietnamese people do not refer to their hair or eye colour as a distinguishing feature since there is minimal variety: ‘les asiatiques n’ont qu’un ton: brun très foncé jusqu’à noir ébène.’16 as a result, when she attempts to express the colour of her french lover luc’s eyes accurately, she struggles to do so in her native language. she uses the word xanh, green, but feels obliged to nuance this, explaining that ‘son xanh ne représentait pas le bleu mais bien le vert, un vert des eaux de la baie de hạ long ou un vert jade foncé et vieilli; celui des bracelets portés par les femmes pendant des décennies’ (88).17 language use such as this calls attention to the specificity of language and to the fact that this text is written by a bilingual author who approaches language in a different way to a monolingual person; she claims to experience colours and numbers more readily in vietnamese than in french, for instance, and records these colours and numbers in her native tongue. she hints that her experience of the world is mediated through different languages at different times and that the melding of both—in her own specific use of translanguaging—is essential to her understanding of her self. the vietnamese language is inserted into the text even on the level of the sentence, producing changes in syntax that reflect the interweaving of two languages in the practice of a bilingual person. thúy develops a number of strategies to accomplish this. since the narrator is a cook and becomes a restaurant owner, as is the case in the more consciously autobiographical ru, she frequently refers to culinary terms in vietnamese. cooking is the backdrop to the narrator’s story and is the skill that enables her to settle in canada, cooking in a small café that her husband buys before increasing the size and scope of the business. indeed, the final section of the text is a sample list of traditional vietnamese recipes and is entitled ‘des mots et des mets’ (145), in a telling example of the two things that tie the book together. the names of vietnamese foods and dishes are frequently included among the french sentences. sometimes the french comes first but the vietnamese is always included; the narrator refers to the traditional preparation of ‘piments vicieux,’ for example, but includes the vietnamese immediately in parenthesis in italics: ‘ớt hiểm’ (12). the two languages may exist side by side, then, but french cannot replace the use of vietnamese for this narrator. sometimes these terms are not translated due to the impossibility of an equivalent, such as when she mentions that there are dozens of varieties of bananas but ‘seules les bananes chuối xiêm peuvent être aplaties sans se briser et glacées sans noircir’ (13).18 in this instance, the vietnamese term features in the french sentence easily as she glides from one language to the other without a footnote, a parenthesis or any break in the language. in addition to using vietnamese words in french sentences in a way that creates a seamless meaning for her, the author also brings the two languages together in ways that create new formations. referring to her early practices in montreal of making simple vietnamese dishes for the local population of vietnamese heritage, she writes ‘les jours les plus occupés, les clients amis se contentaient d’une boule de riz recouverte d’un œuf óp la (au plat) salé à la sauce de 16 ‘asians only have one tone: very dark brown to ebony black.’ 17 ‘his xanh was not blue but green, green like the waters of the bay of hạ long or a dark, old jade green; the green of bracelets worn by women for decades.’ 18 ‘chuối xiêm bananas are the only ones that can be crushed without breaking and frozen without turning black.’ linguistic rencontres in kim thúy’s mãn portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201813 soja’ (42).19 this example shows both a culinary and linguistic mixture but what is interesting is that the french phrase is instead written phonetically according to vietnamese script. rather than simply state that it was an œuf au plat within the french sentence, the author insists upon the vietnamisation of a french expression. not only does she insist upon a vietnamese rendering of french words, she also reverses the hierarchical power relationship between the majority and minority language; rather than vietnamese being forced to conform to the rules of the french language, here the french language is modified by the vietnamese. in a similar example, in a vignette entitled ‘đông-tây/est-ouest,’ in which the narrator convinces her mother to migrate from vietnam to canada, she explains a further linguistic play. the east-west movement is not confined to the narrator’s mother, as she also recounts in this vignette that she employs a french patisserie chef to reinvent vietnamese desserts, which lack the sophistication of french dishes. she writes ‘les vietnamiens appellent les gâteaux d’anniversaire ‘bánh gatô’ alors que le bánh veut déjà dire ‘pain-gâteau-pâte.’20 nous devions importer ce mot parce qu’il s’agissait d’une tradition culinaire inusitée. il fallait apprendre à utiliser le beurre, le lait, la vanille, le chocolat … des ingrédients qui nous étaient aussi étrangers que les méthodes de cuisson’ (69).21 the absence of ingredients and cooking methods in vietnam lead to the importing not just of these ingredients but also of the words to denote them.22 gâteau becomes gatô in a transliteration of the french language, again producing a vietnamisation of the french expression and relegating the french language to a secondary position. the french word enters the vietnamese language but is subject to a spelling change and to the position of a suffix, an addendum to the original vietnamese word bánh. this is not presented as a contamination of the vietnamese language but as an addition to it that solidifies vietnamese as the dominant language. this example thus represents cultural and linguistic movement as a two-way process, not a simple, one-directional development in which a more powerful language corrupts the purity of a less powerful one. thúy’s text thus presents the two languages as necessary to her self-expression in certain circumstances and demonstrates the ways in which they work together to produce meaning for her highly individual narrative. thúy’s use of translanguaging when discussing foods and culinary items necessitates another linguistic dimension, which points up an important element of her text. she refers to smoothies (16) and to local québécois foods, such as when she writes of ‘smoked meat à la tourtière’ (54). as can be seen in this phrase, english impacts upon the narrative of thúy’s experiences in montreal. this usage highlights something that is never discussed in her text but which is necessarily a backdrop to her life writing; she is living in a bilingual environment. the linguistic reality of life in montreal adds a further dimension to the background of her text. english rarely enters the narrative but the instances in which it becomes visible remind the reader of thúy’s multilingual lived experience: she lives her life not just in french and 19 ‘on the busiest days, the customers/friends were happy with a bowl of rice with a fried egg on top seasoned with soy sauce.’ thúy uses several other words throughout this text that are borrowed from french and subjected to vietnamisation, such as min/mine, xich-lo/cyclo-pousse, cao-su/caoutchouc, caphê/café, va-li/valise, thereby underscoring the ways in which the two languages have melded to create meaning. 20 ‘bread-cake-pastry.’ thúy’s definition here is selective, since she omits to mention that ‘bánh’ also means ‘wheel.’ 21 ‘the vietnamese call birthday cakes ‘bánh-gatô’ although bánh already means ‘bread-cake-pastry.’ we had to import that word because it referred to an unusual culinary tradition. we had to learn to use butter, milk, vanilla, chocolate … ingredients that were as foreign to us as the cooking methods.’ 22 except for ‘lait’ (milk), all the vietnamese names of the other ingredients are borrowed from french: ‘bơ’/beurre, ‘va-ni’/vanille, ‘xô-cô-la’/chocolat. edwards portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201814 vietnamese but also in english and in an environment in which bilingualism is a feature of the everyday linguistic landscape. to quebecois authors, translanguaging is certainly not a new phenomenon, as they frequently incorporate english and french into their literary writing. translanguaging in quebec is more complex than in france given the historical and linguistic conflict between french and english. in contrast to many quebecois authors, thúy complicates quebecois literary practices by melding not two but three languages and concentrating upon two (french and vietnamese) that depart from the standard frenchenglish couplet. the particularities of montreal as a site of transit and resettlement mean that thúy’s text is not an expression of a decontextualised french but one that reflects, intervenes and complicates a particular multilingual context. translation and translanguaging in addition to moving between the two languages within sentences and thereby emphasising the necessary place that both of them occupy in her self-narrative, the text also develops innovative approaches to translation. translation has become an area of significant scholarly interest and scholars have long questioned a view of translation that views languages as neatly separated, discreet entities. roman jakobson famously suggested that there are three types of translation: interlingual, between two different languages; intralingual, between signs in the same language; and intersemiotic, between linguistic and non-linguistic signs (1959: 239). jacques derrida, by contrast, criticises such a view as primarily monolingual, suggesting that translation is more than the passage from one language into another (1985: 72). purity of language is a fiction, he indicates, as there are always many languages, many signifiers and many deferrals at work in any linguistic system. in thúy’s text, the narrator moves back and forth between her two languages— along with incursions into english—in a way that demonstrates that in her own linguistic system, there is no purity of language but a constant, productive linguistic contamination that enables her to develop innovative literary techniques to convey her experience. this is perhaps most apparent in thúy’s references to literature, which occupy a central role in mãn. as we have seen, maupassant’s une vie is a significant text in the narrator’s learning of the french language and an important representation of the cultural restrictions in vietnam at the time. when her friend and business partner makes a library in their restaurant space and fills it with literary works, the narrator is overwhelmed and proceeds to recount the difficulties in obtaining literature during her childhood in vietnam. she explains that books in french and english were confiscated and that sometimes isolated pages were recovered: ‘on ne saurait jamais par quel chemin étaient passées des pages entières pour se retrouver entre les mains de marchands qui les utilisaient pour envelopper un pain, une barbotte ou un bouquet de liserons d’eau … on ne pourrait jamais me dire pourquoi j’avais eu la chance de tomber sur ces trésors enfouis au milieu de tas de journaux jaunis’ (57–58).23 she isolates specific words that she retained from these individual pages, such as ‘lassitude’ from françoise sagan, ‘langueur’ from verlaine and ‘pénitentiaire’ from kafka.24 these words are not translated into vietnamese but are retained in the original french. she explains that her mother frequently did not know the french words on the page so they had to appeal to the ‘dictionnaire vivant’ (59)25: a local man 23 ‘we will never know the path they had taken, these whole pages used by shopkeepers to wrap bread, catfish or flowers … i will never know why i had the fortune of happening upon these treasures buried among piles of yellowed newspapers.’ 24 ‘lassitude,’ ‘languor,’ ‘penitential.’ 25 ‘a walking dictionary.’ linguistic rencontres in kim thúy’s mãn portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201815 who had a french dictionary, which was confiscated but which he had memorised. the act of translation is thus personified, as this individual becomes the guardian of bilingualism. he is considered mad by the neighbours who see him reciting his absent dictionary aloud, but he underscores the need to meld the two languages—isolating each word and explaining it in his own language—to preserve linguistic diversity. what is particularly interesting about this image is that the man attempts to preserve the language of the coloniser. french was under threat in the former colony at this time but the neighbour wished to preserve its presence. this passage points to the importance and value of both words and of linguistic diversity and the neighbour in this sense functions almost as a metaphor for the central message of this consciously bilingual text. the narrator also refers to several literary works in the vietnamese language. she uses various techniques to present these to a french-speaking reader, taking a variety of approaches to the question of translation. she alludes to a poem, for instance, as she is describing her mother’s life. the narrator gives the title as truyện kiều (the tale of kiều) in italics but with no french equivalent, then writes the poem in french translation (25). she explains that her mother would recite the poem to her father when he was unable to sleep and that it has a wider, collective resonance; the poem, which has over 3,000 verses, tells the story of a young girl who sacrificed herself for the family and it is said that as long as the poem exists, vietnam will be protected. even illiterate vietnamese, she tells us, can recite several of its verses. this poem and its presentation in the text are particularly pertinent to this author’s approach to translanguaging. truyện kiều is the most well-known poem in classical vietnamese literature and its author, nguyễn du, wrote it in nôm, an ancient vietnamese script. the poem thus points to the literary and linguistic heritage of vietnam, demonstrating that a literary tradition in the vietnamese language continues to resonate with vietnamese people. it also highlights the linguistic tradition of vietnam in two ways. first, it refers indirectly to a script that predates the quốc-ngữ developed by the french, thus emphasising the history of the vietnamese language and its written systems that predate the colonial period. second, it reinforces the oral tradition of the vietnamese language. the narrator and her compatriots are more familiar with the spoken than the written form of the poem, since it travels across time, across generations and across nations in oral form. the text appears to claim that there are many different ways to preserve a language, including written scripts and oral forms. thúy’s varied approach to translating examples of vietnamese literature thus points to a nuanced representation of the history and diversity of the language. in other examples of literary texts cited in mãn, the original vietnamese is foregrounded. one such example is when the mother again teaches the narrator a poem that we learn all vietnamese people know by heart. the title is absent but the opening lines of the poem are included, first in vietnamese in italics, followed by a french translation by thúy herself (81). the poem describes the lotus, its flowers and colours, and emphasises its sensory aspects. as we have seen, thúy pauses to reflect upon the ways in which the two languages present sensations differently. one may assume that the translation is provided here to point up these differences and also to personalise the account; the translation that she gives is her own, as the sensation that she experiences in her own language is unique to her. this is also an unauthored folk poem as opposed to the classic poem truyện kiều that has been translated many times by well-known translators. thúy thus waivers between using published translations and her own knowledge of the language, changing her strategy depending upon the instance and not conforming to a singular, rigid model throughout the text. moreover, the narrator prints this poem in both vietnamese and french translation on pieces of paper that she gives to edwards portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201816 customers in the restaurant as a means of starting a literary space. students of literature start to congregate in the restaurant garden and write, in order to ‘échanger un mot contre un autre ou rassurer ceux qui paniquaient devant la page blanche’ (81).26 the text thus proclaims the importance of individual words and emphasises how individual language users will engage with them differently. in another example of literary citation, thúy quotes two poems in english and provides translations of them in french but not in vietnamese (86, 123), and selects an epigraph that is a french translation of a german text with no vietnamese translation (7).27 the decision to omit the vietnamese translation does not diminish the importance or position of this language; rather it highlights thúy’s non-standard approach to translation. sometimes she includes translations and sometimes she does not, and she weaves between using published translations and her own. she thus refutes any linguistic conformity or standardisation, instead inscribing her experience in language that makes sense to her regardless of the highly codified language in which she mainly writes. the different approaches to translation that are discernible within the text emphasise the individual bilingual’s range of linguistic practice and the dynamic shifting between the two languages. bilingualism is represented as a dynamic, moving process that insists upon instability, rather than existing as a static, unwavering system. translation is presented in the same way. the author insists that translation is not a simple matter of substituting one word for another but is instead a moving process that points up the plurality of meaning within languages and cultures. the narrator recounts teaching her friend julie to pronounce the tones of vietnamese, for example: ‘elle prononçait les “la, là, lạ, lả, lãi …”’ en distinguant les tons même si elle ne comprenait pas les différentes définitions: crier, être, étranger, évanouir, frais’ (65).28 by drawing attention to this monosyllabic language’s individual syllables, phonemes that are each imbued with different meanings, the author draws attention to the intricacy of the vietnamese language and to the different web of signification in which it operates. most interestingly, she applies this perspective to the french language, breaking down the words into phonemes that create different signification. she describes her father’s second wife as her ‘mẹ ghẻ’ (23), for instance, and gives the literal translation into french of ‘une mère froide.’29 nevertheless, she adds that ‘il faut dire que ghẻ signifie aussi “gale”’30 and proceeds to nuance her description of this character from the perspective of two translations of the word. such attention to the plural signification of individual phonemes in vietnamese further nuances her french-language text. rather than downplaying or oversimplifying the language, thúy writes in a way that brings the two languages into dialogue with each other, using narrative strategies and approaches to translation that enrich rather than contaminate them both. furthermore, by taking an external perspective on the french language, she uses a less powerful language to undercut a dominant one. as pierre bourdieu wrote, ‘la langue n’est pas simplement un instrument de communication ou même de connaissance mais un instrument 26 ‘exchange a word for another or reassure those who are panicking in front of a blank page.’ 27 from ernst jandl, which the author explains was quoted in french from richard david precht’s amour: déconstruction d’un sentiment (2011), which had been translated from the german by pierre deshusses. 28 ‘she would pronounce ‘la, là, lạ, lả, lã …’ distinguishing between the tones even though she didn’t understand their different meanings: to scream, to be, foreign, to faint, cool.’ 29 ‘a cold mother.’ 30 ‘i should say that ghẻ also means “scab.”’ linguistic rencontres in kim thúy’s mãn portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201817 de pouvoir’ (1977: 19).31 the power that a colonial language has over the languages of its former colonies emanates from a web of social, economic and cultural relations that serve to reinforce the legitimacy of one over the other. pascale casanova states in la langue mondiale: traduction et domination that languages are ‘socialement hiérarchisées selon leur proximité au pouvoir et à la légitimité ou (ce qui revient au même) selon les profits symboliques qu’elles procurent’ (2015: 11).32 in mãn, however, thúy refuses a hierarchical approach to languages and subverts the traditional power relationship between a colonial and a colonised language. she explains her very personal approach to language thus: il y a plusieurs de ces mots que je tente de comprendre par leur sonorité, comme « colossal, » « disjoncter, » « apostille, » et d’autres par la texture, l’odeur, la forme. pour saisir les nuances entre deux mots cousins, par exemple pour distinguer la mélancolie du chagrin, je pèse chacun d’eux. quand je les tiens dans mes paumes, l’un semble planer comme une fumée grise alors que l’autre se comprime en boule d’acier. (91)33 this sensual approach to words rejects any sense of power, hierarchy or superiority. words are important, the text proclaims, due to the possibilities of signification that they constitute and these possibilities are increased through intermingling with other languages. by breaking down the french language into individual words and phonemes, thúy thus underlines the similarities between the two languages and points up the added layers of meaning that they can produce through coming into contact with each other. overall, then, mãn proclaims the importance of bilingual writing for expressing subjectivity in diaspora and for exploring the possibilities of self-expression. french and vietnamese do not merely brush up against each other in this text but join each other in this author’s individualised practice of translanguaging. the text pluralises the notion of translation, subverting the idea that one word in one language signifies one word in another by insisting upon the dynamic processes of movement between languages. crucially, moreover, thúy does not chide the french or the french language for linguistic domination, but merely gives a different perspective on it. she hints that the french language can be viewed differently, as a product of other linguistic encounters over time. by calling attention to her bilingual existence in her writing, and specifically in a way that complicates the bilingual environment of quebec, she contributes to a change in the sensibility and in the status of the writer. rather than being straight-jacketed into a mode of writing that is monolingual, monocultural or monoethnic, thúy lays bare the dynamic processes in language switching that many of the world’s inhabitants perform on a daily basis. references bourdieu, p. 1977, ‘l’économie des échanges linguistiques,’ langue française, vol. 34: 17–34. https://doi. org/10.3406/lfr.1977.4815 31 ‘language is not simply an instrument of communication or of knowledge but also an instrument of power.’ 32 ‘socially hierarchised according to their proximity to power and to legitimacy (which come down to the same thing) according to the symbolic benefit that they procure.’ 33 ‘there are several words that i try to understand by their sound, like “colossal,” “short-circuit,” “annotation,’” and others by their texture, smell, shape. to understand the nuances between two similar words, such as melancholy and chagrin, i weigh each one of them. when i hold them in my palms, one seems to wisp away like grey smoke while the other constricts into a ball of steel.’ edwards portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 15, no. 1/2, august 201818 https://doi.org/10.3406/lfr.1977.4815 https://doi.org/10.3406/lfr.1977.4815 brocheux, p. & hémery, b. 2001, indochine, la colonisation ambiguë 1858–1954. editions la découverte, paris. https://doi.org/10.2307/4127327 canagarajah, a. s. 2013, translingual practice: global englishes and cosmopolitan relations. 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https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137385765 https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674731615.c18 https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlw027 https://doi.org/10.3366/tal.2002.11.1.139 https://doi.org/10.3366/tal.2002.11.1.139 https://doi.org/10.7202/1037126ar https://doi.org/10.21071/ced.v10i.5558 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: mckinlay king j. 2019. a soul divided: the un's misconduct over west papua. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies 16:1/2, 59-81. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ portalv16i1/2.6532 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal research article a soul divided: the un’s misconduct over west papua julian mckinlay king corresponding author: julian mckinlay king, school of humanities and social enquiry, faculty of law, humanities and the arts, university of wollongong, northfields avenue, wollongong nsw 2522, australia. mckinlayking@hotmail.com doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6532 article history: received 04/01/2019; revised 14/07/2019; accepted 16/08/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract the soul of the papuan people is divided. separated by an arbitrary line established during the early colonial period—dissecting language groups, tribal lands, gardens, and villages—the people to the west of this line are regarded as indonesian and live under a military dictatorship described by legal scholars and human rights advocates as systemic terror and alleged genocide while those people to the east of this line enjoy freedom within the independent state of papua new guinea. this paper revisits the range of agreements between the united nations, indonesia, and the netherlands from 1962, which include the 1969 so-called ‘act of free choice’ that placed west papua into the indonesian state. it argues the west papuan people have been denied their rightful independence through a flawed decolonsation process as a result of multiple breaches of the charter of the united nations covertly orchestrated by the united nations secretariat. it examines the un’s collusion with indonesia’s sukarno and suharto dictatorships, and how the people of west papua were illegally transferred to the united nations, and subsequently to indonesia. it also argues that there is an opportunity to correct this historical injustice through the united nations system, as the process through which the incorporation was executed was conducted in contravention to the un charter. keywords: west papua, decolonisation, united nations, international law, netherlands, indonesia, human rights, genocide, opm declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 59 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6532 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6532 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:mckinlayking@hotmail.com http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6532 the papuan people have a saying, ‘one people, one soul,’ that reflects their common ancestry and melanesian culture where land and resources are equally owned by all through their tribal groupings.1 papuan people, however, have been severely impacted by both colonialism and decolonisation. in 1826 the island was divided along an arbitrary vertical line—the 141st east meridian—that separated melanesian communities who have enjoyed autonomy for many thousands of generations. the people on the eastern side eventually gained internationally recognised independence, albeit under a western-imposed european system of social representation, whilst those on the western side were transferred from the netherlands to the united nations in 1962 and then to the republic of indonesia in 1963. since then west papuans have been subject to an oppressive military dictatorship for nearly 60 years. this paper examines why the people in the western side of the island were denied independence under the united nations (un) system of decolonisation whilst those in the east gained independence. it analyses the history of west papua from when it was a nonself-governing territory of the netherlands, then turns to the creation of indonesia before assessing the conduct of the un secretariat prior to and during the period of un and indonesian administration up until 1969 when indonesia assumed sovereignty over west papua. this paper adds to the work by john saltford—who analysed the 1962–1969 period of un involvement in the territory—and hopes to advance debate on the un secretariat’s breaches of international law and its complicity in the denial of the west papuan people’s right to self-determination. using historical records, recently released archival material, and reports, the paper argues that: the un brokered agreements between indonesia and the netherlands in 1949 regarding the transfer of sovereignty and the creation of the republic of the united states of indonesia were never upheld; indonesia never intended to honour the 1962 un brokered agreement between the netherlands and indonesia; the un not only knew this but covertly assisted the drafting of the 1962 agreement and the transfer of authority in breach of its own charter; indonesia, with un complicity, conducted a sham vote amidst brutal human rights abuses that continue to this day; and the un could and should overturn the illegal annexation of west papua due to the multiple breaches of international law and indonesia’s consistent abuses of the human rights of the people of west papua. indonesia and west papua in 1945 following the signing of the charter of the united nations (‘charter’) in june 1945, two parts of the island of papua were designated as non-self-governing territories. to the east of the 141st meridian australia administered the united nations trust territory of new guinea2 in the north and the non-self-governing territory of papua to the south. on the western side of the 141st meridian was the non-self-governing territory of west new guinea administered by the netherlands. prior to indonesia’s international recognition as a sovereign nation via admission to the united nations on 28 september 1950, the founding fathers, sukarno and hatta, held little claim to the non-self-governing territory of west papua. they respected the people’s right to determine their own future, and recognised that the people of papua had little 1 dr john otto ondawame, director, west papua project, centre for peace and conflict studies, university of sydney, personal communication (2000). 2 formerly the colony of german new guinea and later league of nations mandate. 60 mckinlay king portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 understanding of geopolitics. indonesian historian muhammad yamin quotes the founding fathers speaking in 1945.3 sukarno stated: as to papua, i do not know the desires of the people of papua, but i am willing to assume that the people of papua has as yet no understanding of politics. we are not the heirs of the dutch. we will not negotiate with the dutch or with the british, but we will talk with japan and japan will decide what the territory of indonesia will be. hatta stated: personally, i am quite willing to state that i do not bother at all about papua: that can be left to the people of papua themselves. i recognise that the people of papua too has the right to be a free nation. with the defeat of japan in august 1945, the question arose as to the future of the netherlands east indies. the un brokered the round table conference in 1949 due to ongoing hostilities between indonesia and the netherlands. the united nations commission for indonesia was established, resulting in the 1949 round table conference in the hague. the netherlands agreed to transfer complete sovereignty over its east asian empire in indonesia to the republic of the united states of indonesia. this offer did not however include west papua. article 2 of the charter of the transfer of sovereignty, stipulates that: with regard to the residency of new guinea it is decided … that the status quo of the residency of new guinea shall be maintained with the stipulation that within a year from the date of transfer of sovereignty to the republic of the united states of indonesia the question of the political status of new guinea be determined through negotiations between the republic of the united states of indonesia and the kingdom of the netherlands. (united nations commission for indonesia, appendix vii: 67) agreement also included indonesian recognition that: ‘the clause in article 2 of the draft charter of transfer of sovereignty reading ‘the status quo of the residency of new guinea shall be maintained’ means: ‘through continuing under the government of the netherlands’ (appendix xxiv: 164–165). the agreement concerning the assignment of citizens further stipulated that: ‘none of the provisions in this agreement shall apply to the nationality of the inhabitants of the residency of new guinea in case the sovereignty over this territory is not transferred to the republic of the united states of indonesia’ (appendix xii: 88). thus, it was agreed that the sovereignty of west papua would remain with the netherlands should agreement not be reached to transfer the territory to the republic of the united states of indonesia. a further outcome of the round table conference was agreement that all territories within the netherlands east indies, as listed in the draft constitution of the republic of the united states of indonesia ‘unite in the federal relationship of the republic of the united states of indonesia in free self-determination’ (‘united nations commission’ appendix vi: 23). these territories, not part of the republic of indonesia, thus had a legal right to determine whether they wish to join the united states of indonesia or to remain separate. article 2 part 1 of the agreement on transitional measures states that: 3 as translated and reproduced by the netherlands representative mr schurmann in general assembly plenary meeting 1055, para 205–211, 15 november 1961. 61 a soul divided: the un’s misconduct over west papua portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 a plebiscite will be held amongst the population of territories thereto indicated by the government of the united states of indonesia upon the recommendation of the united nations commission for indonesia or the other united nations organ referred to, on the question whether they shall form a separate or component state. (united nations commission, appendix xi, article 2: 81) part 2 states that: each component state shall be given the opportunity to ratify the final constitution. in case a component state does not ratify that constitution, it will be allowed to negotiate about a special relationship towards the republic of the united states of indonesia and the kingdom of the netherlands. (81) as such the un brokered agreements arising from the 1949 round table conference respected the autonomy and right of self-determination for the many territories of the dutch east indies island archipelago, including the option to maintain a ‘special relationship’ with the kingdom of the netherlands. the autonomy of these territories and their right to selfdetermination were similarly agreed to by indonesia in the earlier linggadjaati and renville agreements of 1946 and 1948 respectively. these agreements, however, were never honoured, and indonesia was never held to account. on 12 december 1950, the un general assembly recognised that ‘the full independence of the republic of indonesia has been followed by the admission of that state to membership in the united nations’ (general assembly resolution 448 (v ), 1950). furthermore, indonesia’s acceptance into the un—as with all un member states—was on condition that it abide by the un charter (including those articles governing decolonisation). as west papua’s legal status was already determined to be that of a non-self-governing territory by the un’s decolonisation committee, indonesia thus had no legal claim to the territory. soon after being accepted into the united nations, however, sukarno quickly forgot about the agreements arising from the un brokered round table conference regarding autonomy, plebiscites, and self-determination for the territories detailed above. only in 1952 did sukarno turn his attention to the take-over of west papua, the non-self-governing territory that was listed on the un decolonisation committee as ‘netherlands new guinea’.4 the netherlands offered to have the dispute resolved by the international court of justice, it being ‘the principle judicial organ of the united nations’ (charter, article 92), but indonesia rejected this legally binding solution arguing that the dispute was political rather than juridical. with separatist movements still seeking to break away from the indonesian dictatorship, the issue of west papua was used by sukarno as ‘a rallying point for national unity’ (australian embassy washington 1958). preparing all papuan people for independence: 1957–1961 australia and the netherlands had the obligation of preparing the non-self-governing and trust territories they administered on the island of new guinea for independence, as required under the charter and associated general assembly resolutions.5 they recognised 4 see for example ‘territories on which information is transmitted under article 73 e of the charter (1960),’ un doc st/tri/ser.a/19. 5 see chapters xi, xii, and xiii of the charter governing decolonisation and general assembly resolutions 1514, 1541, for example. 62 mckinlay king portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 the indigenous melanesian culture and the need to coordinate their administrations so that the papuan people might one day emerge as one nation. this was reflected in the 1957 joint netherlands/australian statement. furthermore, the netherlands and australian governments reported annually to the un on progress being made towards delivering independence to the inhabitants of new guinea as required under the charter. the last netherlands report in 1961 to the secretary-general as required under article 73e describes how: [t]he institution of the new guinea council has had a catalytic effect on the political awakening of the population of the territory with the population resolved: 1. to call themselves papuans and to refer to their country as west papua; 2. to design a flag of their own (the design of which was laid down by ordinance) and; 3. to adopt a national anthem to be played on official occasions after the netherlands national anthem. (‘report on’ 1962) with increasing military incursions by indonesia and no support from their traditional allies, the netherlands attempted to have the un take over the territory in 1961 via a un trusteeship, as available under article xii of the charter, in order to ‘relinquish sovereignty to the people of netherlands new guinea’ (general assembly plenary meeting 1016, para 90). the proposal, however, failed to gain the required two-thirds majority in the general assembly due to cold war and religious affiliations taking precedence over the legal rights of the west papuan people.6 pressure from the us government over indonesia’s threat to align with communist soviet union was used to coerce the netherlands into relinquishing the territory to indonesia (kennedy 1962). the indonesia netherlands agreement of 1962 on 15 august 1962, the netherlands and indonesia signed the indonesia and netherlands agreement ( with annex) concerning west new guinea ( west irian) (herein the ‘agreement’).7 this was adopted by the un general assembly on 21 september 1962 under resolution 1752 (xvii), and commenced the un’s period of administration of the non-self-governing territory. the un subsequently used its discretion—as available under article xii of the agreement—to transfer administration to indonesia seven months later, on 1 may 1963. based upon article 73e of the un charter, colonial powers of non-self-governing territories must report on progress being made towards self-determination, except when these territories are subject to chapters xii and xiii governing trust territories. the agreement logically shifted west papua’s legal status from a non-self-governing territory of the netherlands to a trust territory of the united nations (colony of west papua 2012–17; mckinlay king 2017; sui & guzel 2018). importantly, given that the terms of this draft trusteeship agreement were never ‘approved’ by the general assembly, as required under article 85 of the un charter, west papua logically remains a non-self-governing territory having been abandoned by the netherlands, occupied by united nations security forces and subsequently invaded by indonesia (mckinlay king & johnson 2018: 72). 6 see un general assembly plenary meeting 1066 for discussions and voting outcome and general assembly plenary meeting 1055 for additional discussions. 7 often referred to as the ‘new york agreement’ having been signed at the un headquarters. 63 a soul divided: the un’s misconduct over west papua portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 an opinion from the international court of justice on west papua’s legal status can be sought by the un trusteeship council under article 96 of the charter as authorised by general assembly resolution 171(iii). any member or inhabitant of the territory can lodge such a request under the rules of procedure of the trusteeship council via an agenda item or petition respectively (mckinlay king & johnson 2018: 89). the united nations secretariat and resolution 1752 (xvii) of 1962 while much has been written about breaches of the agreement (saltford 2003; drooglever 2010; janki 2010), a second agreement, 6312, united nations and indonesia and netherlands: understandings relating to the agreement of 15 august 1962 between the republic of indonesia and the kingdom of the netherlands concerning west new guinea ( west irian), was also signed on 15 august 1962. this second agreement is primarily concerned with the implementation of a cease fire, directions to the netherlands to cease its legal responsibilities over the territory, and financing the united nations administration in west papua. this agreement however was never presented to the general assembly for consideration, debate, let alone voted on and approved. this agreement would, therefore, appear to have no legal standing under the charter. agreement 6311 between indonesia and the netherlands was only provided to ambassadors for consideration on 19 september 1962—some 5 weeks after its original signing on 15 august in breach of article 102 of the charter8—and just 48 hours prior to its introduction to the general assembly on 21 september at 3 p.m.9 with such short notice, few governments had time to consider and discuss the draft agreement prior to its introduction to the general assembly. at plenary meeting 1127 of 21 september 1962, the president of the general assembly effectively blocked discussion of the draft resolution, announcing: ‘in order to enable the general assembly to deal with this matter expeditiously, i propose to call first on the sponsors of the draft resolution and then, if the general assembly agrees, to proceed to the vote’ (general assembly plenary meeting 1127: para 171). the continued threats and military invasions by indonesia, the definition of the territory under the charter, and the terms of the draft agreement were only raised after it had been introduced by the president, voted on, and adopted as unga resolution 1752 (xvii). the resolution did not seek ‘approval’ by the general assembly but instead only ‘takes note’ of the agreement, which legally ‘neither approves nor disapproves’ a general assembly resolution (ruder et al. 2011: 46). many countries spoke out after the plenary meeting, raising grave concerns for the west papuan people. representing australia, sir garfield barwick spoke at great length.10 he drew attention to the requirement of self-determination for the inhabitants, and expressed australia’s desire that the peoples of the island could have the opportunity to unite as one nation as envisaged in the 1957 joint netherlands–australian statement. he drew the general assembly’s attention to the availability of the international court of justice to resolve disputes between un members, and he reminded the general assembly that australia only 8 article 102 of the charter states ‘every treaty and every international agreement … shall as soon as possible be registered with the secretariat and published by it.’ 9 see general assembly plenary meeting 1127, 21 september 1962 10 see united nations general assembly plenary meeting 1127, agenda item 89, paragraphs 209–224, 21 september 1962. sir garfield barwick also went on to sit as an ad-hoc judge with the international court of justice. 64 mckinlay king portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 recognised the netherlands’ sovereignty over the non-self-governing territory. he suggested that the full weight of the claims of the indigenous inhabitants had been obscured, that a bona fide performance of the self-determination provisions in the agreement was essential to maintain stability in the region, and that the welfare of the papuans must be respected above all other considerations regardless of ‘whatever the proper [legal] status of the territory in relation to the charter may be’ (general assembly plenary meeting 1127: para 209–224). as revealed in the now-declassified secret archives from the period, australia, like indonesia and the united states, was fully aware of the legal status of west papua as a non-selfgoverning territory, and that the draft agreement was indeed a draft trusteeship agreement governed by chapter xii of the charter (mckinlay king & johnson 2018: 86–88). mr zollner, representing dahomey (now benin), was less diplomatic. he stated that: [a] people of 700,000 is transferred from one power to another ... without previous consultation with the party chiefly concerned, the papuan people … not once—i repeat, not once—do we find in the text any mention of a “referendum” … and … the actual public expression of opinion will be organised entirely by the party which has the greatest interest in the yielding of results that are favourable to it. (general assembly plenary meeting 1127: para 242–243) the behaviour by the president of the general assembly at the time, mr muhammad zafrulla khan of pakistan—denying time for members to review the draft, debate, and no doubt amend before proceeding to the vote—invites scrutiny. as evidenced in earlier plenary meetings and resolutions regarding west papua, pakistan had consistently voted in support of indonesia’s claim to the territory (general assembly plenary meeting 509 1954, para 295). the actions of the president indicate that he was using his position to deny the west papuan people’s right to self-determination, and was instead supporting indonesia’s illegal claim to the territory. similarly, the acquiescence of the acting secretary-general, u thant of myanmar, head of the un secretariat, invites examination as to why the secretariat waited a full five weeks before providing copies of the draft agreement to un member states, and why the president of the general assembly was not called to account for failing to facilitate debate before going directly to the vote. some explanation for these events may be found in the fact that just days prior to the introduction of the draft agreement to the general assembly, the swedish secretary-general dag hammarskjöld, well known for his ardent support for decolonisation, was killed in a plane crash in katanga, the congo. hammarskjöld’s death delivered the united nations leadership to u thant of burma, a friend and supporter of sukarno (general assembly plenary meeting 1812: para 83). in the general assembly deliberations leading up to resolution 1752 (xvii), sweden was a great advocate for the west papuan people’s right to independence (general assembly plenary meeting 447 1954: para 209) while burma (now myanmar) had often spoken at great length taking the side of indonesia’s illegal claim to the territory (general assembly plenary meeting 509 1954: para 238–265). the likely murder of hammarskjöld (borger 2017) and his replacement by u thant thus played a crucial role in the denial of the west papuan people’s legal right to ‘complete independence and freedom’ as required under the 1960 un declaration on the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples. an aide-memoire from the acting un secretary-general u thant contained in agreement 6312, united nations and indonesia and netherlands: understandings relating to the agreement of 15 august 1962 between the republic of indonesia and the kingdom of the netherlands concerning 65 a soul divided: the un’s misconduct over west papua portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 http://general assembly plenary meeting 1127 http://general assembly plenary meeting 1127 west new guinea, states that: ‘the transfer of authority to indonesia will be effected as soon as possible after 1 may 1963’ (‘united nations’ 1962: 10). this, however, is in contravention to article xii of the agreement—put before the general assembly for adoption—which states ‘the united nations administrator will have discretion to transfer all or part of the administration to indonesia.’ this instruction from the acting secretary-general u thant was never provided to the general assembly for review and debate, nor was the assembly given the opportunity to vote and approve this second agreement affecting the fate of a non-selfgoverning territory. the un secretariat colluded to delay the publication of the draft agreement to member’s ambassadors for dispatch and consideration, blocked debate, withheld clarification on the legal status of the agreement, and prevented possible amendment before proceeding to the vote. the second agreement between the un, indonesia and the netherlands was never dispatched to un members for consideration, nor introduced to the general assembly for debate or discussion, which suggests the instructions it contained may have no validity under international law governed by the charter. the secretary-general’s covert assistance to sukarno a close examination of the conduct of the un secretariat with respect to the issue of west papua shows multiple irregularities with the un’s own charter and processes, showing foreknowledge, breech of procedure, manipulation of process and covert conduct. evidence gleaned from now declassified government archives, the un archives from the period, general assembly plenary meetings, and published news stories from the period demonstrate foreknowledge. a now-declassified american cia document marked ‘top secret’ reveals the acting secretary-general u thant was in collusion with president sukarno to facilitate the indonesian take-over. it states: west new guinea: indonesia apparently is prepared to resume secret preliminary talks with the dutch on west new guinea under the auspices of ambassador bunker as soon as arrangements can be made. foreign minister subandrio, who had just conferred with president sukarno, informed the us ambassador of indonesia’s position on 30 june. he added that the indonesian delegate, adam malik, would be ready to begin discussions by 9 july at the latest. indonesia’s decision apparently results from u thant’s letter of 28 june to president sukarno in which sukarno was once more assured that the netherlands is willing to postpone a plebiscite in new guinea until after the transfer of the area’s administration to indonesia. the dutch still insist however on adequate safeguards for native self-determination. subandrio told the us ambassador that he hopes the transfer of west new guinea’s administration to indonesia can be accomplished as soon as possible. sukarno has demanded a transfer before the end of 1962 rather than after the two-year period stipulated in the bunker plan. subandrio said he hoped the dutch would not request a “cease-fire” in new guinea while talks are in progress; he stressed that the discussions could break down on this issue. indonesia officials have repeatedly stated that military operations in new guinea will continue even if the talks resume … (remainder redacted). (central intelligence 1962: 7) the document confirms the us government had prior knowledge of the planned transfer of west papua to indonesia and reveals how acting secretary-general u thant was taking 66 mckinlay king portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 covert steps to assist indonesia’s takeover of west papua, and was thus complicit in the sham vote that followed. article 100 of chapter xv of the charter applying to the un secretariat states: 1. in the performance of their duties the secretary-general and the staff shall not seek or receive instructions from any government or from any other authority external to the organization. they shall refrain from any action which might reflect on their position as international officials responsible only to the organization. 2. each member of the united nations undertakes to respect the exclusively international character of the responsibilities of the secretary-general and the staff and not to seek to influence them in the discharge of their responsibilities. the secretary-general’s covert assistance to sukarno was in clear breach of article 100 and thus a breach of international law. the secretariat of the united nations aided and abetted indonesia’s illegal territorial expansion over west papua. indonesia’s ongoing military aggression whereby ‘military operations in new guinea will continue even if the talks resume’ is yet another breach of the un charter, where article 1 states: the purposes of the united nations are: to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace. indonesia’s ongoing military incursions, even during attempts for a negotiated settlement with the netherlands, occurred in clear violation of international law. as member states of the un, the usa, indonesia, and the netherlands are legally bound to uphold the charter—not to mention the secretariat of the united nations itself—yet all secretly colluded against the legal rights of the west papuan people. prior to united nations officials arriving in west papua, united nations security forces (unsf) arrived in late september. the all-pakistani unsf were made available by the acting secretary-general under article vii of the agreement. their presence in west papua was first revealed on 26 september by the president of the general assembly, just five days after the agreement had been introduced to the general assembly (general assembly plenary meeting 1133: para 40). it seems that the acting secretary-general had made prior arrangements with the pakistani government in anticipation that the draft agreement would be adopted unchallenged by the general assembly. united nations takeover on 1 october 1962 british scholar john saltford accessed previously classified united nations archival documents from the period of un administration resulting in a doctoral thesis and publication appropriately subtitled the anatomy of betrayal (saltford 2003). these now declassified united nations temporary executive authority (untea) documents further reveal the un’s culture and complicity in human rights abuses during this period. 67 a soul divided: the un’s misconduct over west papua portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 article vii of the agreement gave the secretary-general the ‘discretion’ to utilise the indonesian armed forces in west papua—a military commanded by members of the former fascist japanese imperial army (tjandraningsih 2009: 1) and the former enemy of the dutch and west papuan people—who had already made numerous armed incursions seeking to illegally take-over the territory in breach of international law. given the terms of the agreement are not in accord with general assembly resolutions governing decolonisation and the charter,11 nor had they been ‘approved’ by the general assembly as required under article 85 of the charter, the arrival of the pakistani unsf organised by the acting secretarygeneral without united nations security council approval may be deemed a military occupation, if not an invasion. prior to the arrival of the united nations in west papua—but after the agreement had been adopted by the general assembly—the netherlands referred the agreement to the new guinea council for their opinion. it was vehemently opposed with half the councillors walking out in protest. one councillor predictably described it as a ‘death warrant’ (saltford 2003: 21). the untea took over administration of west papua from the netherlands in october 1962, just weeks after the adoption of general assembly resolution 1752. as detailed earlier, the netherlands reported yearly to the un on its progress towards decolonisation. untea in 1962 however—as the new administrator and trustee of the still non-self-governing territory or trust territory—failed its legal obligation to report either to the secretarygeneral under article 73e of chapter xi governing non-self-governing territories, or to the general assembly under article 88 of chapter xiii governing trust territories, regarding the administration’s progress towards decolonisation. in breach of article xiii of the agreement, whereby united nations security forces will be replaced by indonesian security forces after completion of the first phase on 1 may 1963, untea allowed the invading indonesian security forces to assist during its period of administration. within weeks of untea’s arrival, indonesia commenced a campaign for the early withdrawal of the un and the abandonment of the act of self-determination. one untea divisional commander informed the administrator that the people had no faith in the dutch nor indonesia, and correctly predicted that once indonesia was in charge, it would coerce 99 percent of the population to vote in favour of remaining with indonesia (saltford 2003: 61). in direct violation of the agreement guaranteeing freedom of speech and assembly, planned flag raising ceremonies across the territory on 1 december 1962 to commemorate the first anniversary of the raising of west papua’s morning star flag were banned by untea following threats of violence from the indonesian armed forces (saltford 2003: 73). indonesia clearly had no intention of adhering to the agreement, nor guaranteeing the right to self-determination, and west papuans were fully aware. on 20 november 1962, the west papuan chairman of the committee on self-determination of new guinea wrote to the acting secretary-general, drawing his attention to the following news reports: 1. reuter reports the arrest by the indonesians of silas papare on november 10 because of his starting a campaign for an independent new guinea. the anti-dutch papuan papare has since 1949 devoted himself to the affiliation of west new guinea to indonesia, where he became a member of parliament as a representative of west irian. he was a member of the indonesian delegation at the signing of the accord on new guinea in new york on august 15. 11 see general assembly resolutions 1514 and 1541 in particular 68 mckinlay king portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 2. a.p. reports that the commission of foreign affairs of the indonesian parliament has decided that indonesia take over control of new guinea by the end of this year and that no plebiscite be held in 1969; this decision has been passed onto the indonesian parliament. we are of the opinion that the reuter report shows us what exactly the chance of the papuans ever to decide on their future will be. (ritzens bos 1962: 1) on 15 november 1962, indonesian troops blocked a road near the town of sorong and assaulted passing papuan police. an armed police detachment then returned accompanied by 300 civilians to attack the indonesian troops but were thwarted by a un police inspector. on 10 december, indonesian troops opened fire on an anti-indonesian demonstration in the town of merauke injuring two people, while in sorong indonesian troops attacked a papuan police station killing one and injuring three (saltford 2003: 74). an untea report from divisional commander g.s. rawlings dated 12 december 1962 describes the general attitudes of the indonesians and west papuans at the time and clearly recognised the coming indonesian invasion: the indonesians strike me as out to attain their ends quite ruthlessly if necessary. they brook no serious discussion of facts or ideas contrary to their doctrinaire beliefs. in fact, in this they are very like the japanese before the war. it cannot be long before they get themselves most intensely hated … by far the majority of the papuans in my division dread the consequence of the indonesian invasion and it would take little to influence some of them to resist, whether it would do them any good or not. (rawlings 1962: 4) a three-day visit to west papua by un under secretary-general narisimhan in february 1963 saw him meet not one single west papuan representative due to threats from indonesian intelligence officers upon the local population (saltford 2003: 93). also in february after allegedly being fired upon by indonesian troops, the papuan volunteer corps staged a mutiny and demanded the expulsion of all indonesians. the indonesian troops ran back to their barracks, and the following day the indonesian corps commander in collusion with un officials had the papuans disarmed by deception (95). in the administrator’s report to the secretary-general dated 30 april 1963, dr djalal abdoh draws attention to indonesia’s planned militarisation of the territory. in diplomatic language, he states: the possibility of the exercise of certain control by the military in the affairs of the territory was confirmed by the fact that, although sometime ago the indonesian government announced that the control of indonesia by the war administration would end on 1 may, the execution of this decision has been put off for the time being. the fact that the indonesians planned to make west irian a province of the republic of indonesia indicated that the same sort of control might apply also to this territory after 1 may … towards the end of april, twenty air force planes landed in the territory with our approval to take part in the 1 may ceremonies. also, some thirty warships and supporting vessels arrived in biak and hollandia waters. (abdoh 1963: para 29–31) in the same report under the heading ‘representative bodies’ it details dr sudjarwo’s statements to the indonesian press on 17 april that the elected new guinea council ‘would be replaced by a provincial council composed of members nominated by president sukarno’ (para 45). self-governance was clearly outlawed. 69 a soul divided: the un’s misconduct over west papua portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 discretion to transfer administration to indonesia under article xii of the agreement, ‘the united nations administrator will have discretion to transfer all or part of the administration to indonesia at any time after the first phase of the untea administration.’ indonesia’s numerous military threats, incursions, and thwarted invasions leading up to the signing of the agreement, the continuing military incursions after the signing of the cease-fire agreement (also in breach of the charter), seven months of increasing indonesian hostility, armed assault and murder, not to mention ongoing protests and petitions from the papuan people themselves, indicate that the un transference of administration to indonesia did not promote peace and security, let alone prepare the territory for a free and fair act of self-determination. the failure by the un to use its discretion highlights yet again complicity in the illegal transfer of this territory and its peoples to the fate of a brutal military regime. indonesian takeover on 1 may 1963 speeches on 1 may by the united nations administrator dr abdoh failed to mention the required act of self-determination, while a speech delivered by under secretary-general narisimhan on behalf of secretary-general u thant ended with saying only that he was confident indonesia will ensure the people’s right ‘to express their wishes in the future’ before he and all remaining un personnel flew out of west papua ‘that very night’ (saltford 2003: 107). article xvi of the agreement states: at the time of transfer of full administrative responsibility to indonesia a number of united nations experts … will be designated to remain wherever their duties require their presence. their duties will, prior to the arrival of the united nations representative, who will participate at the appropriate time in the arrangements for self-determination, be limited to advising on and assisting in preparations for carrying out the provisions for self-determination except in so far as indonesia and the secretary-general may agree upon their performing other expert functions. they will be responsible to the secretary-general for the carrying out of their duties. in breach of the agreement, not a single un official remained in the territory to advise, assist, and prepare the people for the act of self-determination. with no un presence—or any other international observers for that matter—the indonesian military was unrestrained. now-declassified secret us dispatches describe how they commenced a program of loot and plunder. a now declassified us report by frank galbraith reads: perhaps the most oft-cited grievance of the irianese is that the indonesians cleaned out the shops and storehouses in the period immediately following their takeover of west irian administration in 1963. missionaries reported that they had witnessed indonesian military personnel loading up air force planes at night with goods taken from local merchants. within months of indonesian takeover on may 1 1963, there was an acute shortage of food and consumer goods. (galbraith 1969) the human rights situation also deteriorated markedly. indonesia introduced anti-subversion law no 11 and presidential decree no 8. ondawame (2010: 54–55; 70–71) describes how these denied the papuan people: ‘freedom of expression, association, demonstration, publication, and movement ... [while the new laws] empowered the indonesian authorities 70 mckinlay king portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 to intervene, arrest, detain, and imprison any suspected papuan political activists.’ this was in direct contravention of article xxii of the agreement guaranteeing ‘free speech, freedom of movement and of assembly,’ and of article 55 of the charter regarding fundamental freedoms and human rights. the united nations secretariat remained silent and thus complicit. frank galbraith’s report also detailed how military commanders run the local towns, ‘expropriate’ commodities intended for sale, and operate as a ‘fiefdom of vested ... interests.’ he describes them as ‘trigger happy’ with a backdrop of ‘[m]ilitary oppression fears and rumours of intended genocide’ (galbraith 1969: 3–4). indeed, the fear of genocide amongst the population soon became a reality. in 1964 the new under secretary-general rolz-bennett made a visit to west papua and received numerous petitions from papuans demanding independence. and according to one australian diplomat, the usg was ‘disinclined to discuss article xvi’ of the agreement requiring un experts to remain in the territory and participate in the arrangements for self-determination (saltford 2003: 108). australian government documents from the time reveal that indonesia was very pleased when the under secretary-general informed indonesia that he had received petitions but was ‘ignoring them.’ three years later in 1967 the papuan petitioners were taken from teminabuan prison and publicly executed (115). organised resistance: the birth of organisasi papua merdeka in 1965 in 1965, after nearly four years of military oppression, mass murder, and anticipated genocide, the west papuans were driven to defend themselves forming a guerrilla revolutionary army of 14,000 people, and took to the jungle. the indonesians named the guerrilla force ‘organisasi papua merdeka’ (opm) (ondawame 2010: 64). their first assault was on indonesia’s kebar military post near manokwari on 26 july during an indonesian flag raising ceremony which resulted in three indonesian soldiers being killed. the revolutionary army raised the morning star flag and made their first declaration of independence. two days later they attacked the indonesian battalion 641 in arfak seizing 1,000 arms and destroying military and police posts (ondawame 2010: 64). a now declassified us telegram 542a dated september 15 1965 under the heading ‘manokwari rebellion’ describes the indonesian military’s response: ‘indo reaction was brutal. soldiers next day sprayed bullets at any papuan in sight and many innocent travellers on roads [were] gunned down’ (united states embassy djakarta 1965). the under secretary-general and the ‘act of free choice’ in 1969 on 29 june 1967, general suharto appointed sarwo edhie as commander of west papua, now renamed ‘west irian,’ in an effort to eliminate the opm prior to the upcoming act of free choice (‘act’).12 edhie was praised in the indonesian media describing how he: ‘acquitted himself with great distinction by unleashing a campaign of terror and extermination against all elements traditionally opposed to the central government in jakarta’ (saltford 2003: 135). due to the ongoing opm rebellion, indonesia delayed the arrival of the united nations 12 article xviii of the agreement states ‘indonesia will make arrangements, with the assistance and participation of the united nations representative and his staff, to give the people of the territory the opportunity to exercise freedom of choice.’ this is commonly referred to as the ‘act of free choice.’ 71 a soul divided: the un’s misconduct over west papua portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 representative ortiz-sanz until 23 august 1968. based in jakarta, the secretary-general’s representative rarely visited the west papuan territory, and then only accompanied by indonesian officials who provided the only transport and controlled the agenda (saltford 2003: 140). the secretary-general’s representative received several hundred petitions, with the vast majority opposed to indonesia taking control of west papua. they called for ‘one man, one vote,’ complained that the representative councils were solely appointed by indonesia, and detailed how the people were forbidden to criticise the indonesian administration. reliant on logistical support from indonesia, un representatives witnessed only 195 of the 1026 assembly representatives being selected across the vast territory to take part in the act of free choice, and failed to report on the conduct and method employed (saltford 2003: 190). petitions also called for the indonesian administration to be replaced by the un until the act of free choice had been held, and demanded the release of political prisoners, estimated at 900, across the territory (saltford 2003: 142). the response of the secretary-general’s representative was to state that, regrettably, the united nations did not have the executive authority under the agreement to deal with these issues (saltford 2003: 141). however, under the agreement—not to mention the international law of the charter and the universal declaration of human rights—freedom of speech, freedom of association, and self-determination according to international practice are guaranteed. the role of the united nations was to provide experts, maintain a presence, advise and participate, and ensure such legal rights were upheld. instead, the un’s ortiz-sans advised jakarta to transfer ‘anti-state’ papuans to java, thus aiding and abetting indonesia’s human rights violations, while students and others were imprisoned in fear of protest during the so-called act of free choice (197). newspapers leading up to, and during, the day of the act of free choice reported that all foreign journalists had been expelled, 10,000 west papuans had been killed in continuing battles, and 2,000 west papuans had been jailed for urging self-government. news stories detailed how indonesia had hand-picked only 1026 papuan representatives to cast votes out of an estimated population of 700,000 (‘free choice’ 1969). the new york times printed admissions from the indonesian government that they had no intention of allowing an act of self-determination: ‘we are going through the motions of the act of free choice because of our obligation under the new york agreement of 1962 … but west irian is indonesian and must remain indonesia. we cannot accept any alternative’ (shabecoff 1969). while guerrilla warfare was being waged against the indonesian military in the jungle, underground networks mobilised the people. on 13 april 1969, two days before the last act was conducted in jayapura, petitions containing thousands of signatures were handed to the secretary-general’s representative demanding independence. this was followed by a rally of more than 5,000 people who marched through the capital shouting merdeka! merdeka! (freedom! freedom!). speakers called for direct un intervention to guarantee the international practice of ‘one-man, one-vote’ and to demilitarise the territory. they urged the united nations and indonesia to respect the un charter and the universal declaration of human rights. the indonesian military ‘responded with an iron fist firing on the massed crowd indiscriminately’ (ondawame 2010: 72–73). australian academic edward wolfers was one of a handful of independent observers who witnessed the act of free choice in 1969. in 2014 wolfers detailed, for the first time on record, how the indonesian authorities threatened and intimidated the population as they conducted mock rehearsals of the act. in the township of manokwari he saw a young man 72 mckinlay king portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 calling for independence ‘swooped on’ by the indonesian military, while indonesian warships appeared to have their cannons trained on the local population. he recalls how when his group walked about in public: ‘we frequently had letters of protest thrust at us saying that the former dutch new guinea should be free, [or] being spoken to quietly to similar effect by people who approached us [who] suddenly become silent ... if they suspected they were being watched or overheard’ (hill 2017: 19–22). now-declassified secret dispatches expose that the usa, united kingdom, and australian governments were fully aware of the views of the west papuan people and the atrocities being perpetrated by the indonesian military. in frank galbraith’s report under the heading ‘west irian: the nature of the opposition,’ it states: ‘regarding the magnitude of the opposition to indonesian rule ... possibly 85 to 90 percent, are largely in sympathy with the free papua cause or at least intensely dislike indonesians.’ this dispatch further reveals that the west papuan people were fully aware of the un’s complicit role in denying their rightful independence and describes how: ‘[b]old activists declare their intention to assassinate un ambassador ortiz-sanz (or ambassador sudjarwo, interior minister amir machmud, or military commander sarwo edhie) the next time he comes to town’ (galbraith 1969: 3). another declassified us dispatch dated 4 october 1968 details a meeting with ortiz-sans in jakarta following his first visit to west papua. it states he was ‘attempting to devise a formula for an “act of free choice” in west irian which will result in affirmation of indonesian sovereignty’ (lydman 1968: 2) in clear violation of international law governed by the charter. another american dispatch in june 1969 headed ‘assessment of west irian situation’ reports that the act was: ‘unfolding like a greek tragedy, the conclusion preordained … [where indonesia] … has no intention of allowing west irian choose other than incorporation into indonesia. separation is unthinkable.’ this document reveals that the us government recognised indonesia as a javanese dictatorship, and that the loss of west papua ‘would give impetus to fissiparous tendencies in other parts of [the] archipelago where anti-java feelings run strong … [and] … distrust of indonesians (such as already exists in sumatra, minahasa, and ambon) toward [the] javanese’ (united states embassy 1969: 1–3). throughout this process, the secretary-general’s representative was covertly planning the transfer of a non-self-governing or trust territory to a hostile military dictatorship. the dispatches above also reveal the full knowledge that us officials had of the transfer, and their failure to act in accordance with the charter.13 the united nations secretariat and resolution 2504 (xxiv) of 1969 article xxi of the agreement requires indonesia and the united nations representative to submit final reports to the secretary-general who will report to the general assembly on the ‘conduct of the act of self-determination.’ un delegates only received the secretary-general’s report one or two days before a draft resolution on the report was tabled for discussion in the general assembly on 13 november 1969. in plenary meeting 1810 numerous requests were made by member states to have the report released earlier to allow time for consideration. as expressed by the representative for dahomey, un delegates were ‘[o]bviously [unable] to transmit it to [their] respective governments for study and for instructions’ (general 13 under articles 55 and 56 of the un charter, all member states pledge themselves to uphold ‘the principles of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.’ 73 a soul divided: the un’s misconduct over west papua portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 assembly plenary meeting 1810 1969: para 42). several other delegates requested two– or three–week postponements as the documents needed to be sent by post to their governments for consideration, and their governments then needed to reply. representing togo, mr ohin made the assembly aware of numerous breaches of the terms of the agreement and recalled how he had encountered the very same difficulties when his country ‘was under the trusteeship of the united nations,’ where united nations missions ‘encountered hindrances and faced great difficulties created by the administering authorities’ (general assembly plenary meeting 1810 1969: para 76). he recognised the importance of west papua’s legal status and emphasised that ‘any report submitted by a mission returning from a trust territory or non-independent country must be studied with great care [and that] the fate of the inhabitants … the papuans, seems to have been relegated to the background’ (general assembly plenary meeting 1810, 1969: para 78). after several more delegates demanded additional time, it was agreed to adjourn the meeting by six days with a new date fixed at 19 november 1969. reconvening discussion in plenary meeting 1812, mr nicol (representing sierra leone) expressed his country’s ‘grave concern at the methods adopted,’ noting that the secretary-general’s representative observed how the west papuans had been denied full ‘freedom of speech and expression.’ he stated that the educated west papuans had ‘a strong desire for the complete independence, eventually, of the whole island’ and suggested that the entire papuan population be given the opportunity for self-determination but ‘this time by international standards of freedom of speech and election’ (general assembly plenary meeting 1812, 1969: para 3, 4 and 9). mr akwei (representing ghana) drew the assembly’s attention to indonesia ‘having withdrawn its co-operation with the united nations during the period 1 may 1963 to 23 august 1968,’ which meant that, by default, the terms of the agreement were ignored. he noted indonesia’s rejection of the secretary-general representative’s advice for direct voting in the towns and cities, and the representative’s displeasure with indonesia’s system of consultation. he detailed the many breaches of the agreement saying it makes ‘a mockery of the democratic process and a breach of the principle of self-determination, a principle so clearly enshrined in the charter of the united nations’ and proposed a new act of selfdetermination in accordance with international practice (general assembly plenary meeting 1812, 1969: para 15-44). in plenary meeting 1813, mr davin (representative of gabon) drew attention to the lack of time made available to examine such an important document and the fact that ‘only government authorized organizations, and not opposition movements, were able to present candidates’ (general assembly plenary meeting 1813, 1969: para 12). similarly, the representative for zambia could not understand why the secretary-general’s representative found it acceptable to agree to indonesia’s consultation with ‘1,000 notables appointed by the indonesian government ... unless of course the agreement has been amended since.’ he further detailed how the secretary-general’s representative had received both written and oral complaints regarding ‘suppression of the rights and freedoms of the inhabitants’ in direct violation of article xxii of the agreement (general assembly plenary meeting 1813, 1969: para 62–63). the general assembly rejected an attempt by ghana to adjourn the debate to allow for the preparation of amendments to the draft, however, it adopted an amendment by the republic of the congo (congo-léopoldville) for a separate vote on the words ‘takes note of the report of the secretary-general’ (general assembly plenary meeting 1813, 1969: para. 74 mckinlay king portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 119–170). the plan by the secretary-general’s representative to have the report: ‘submitted to the [general assembly] sometime towards the end of the 1969 session in order to avoid continuing, possibly contentious, debate if the report were delivered earlier in the unga session’ (united states department of state 1968: 4) was thus successful. in the general assembly plenary meeting 1813 of 19 november 1969 the general assembly adopted resolution 2504 (xxiv ), which: 1.takes note of the report of the secretary-general and acknowledges with appreciation the fulfilment by the secretary-general and his representative of the tasks entrusted to them under the agreement of 15 august 1962 between the republic of indonesia and the kingdom of the netherlands concerning west new guinea (west irian); 2. appreciates any assistance provided through the asian development bank, through institutions of the united nations or through other means to the government of indonesia in its efforts to promote the economic and social development of west irian. like resolution 1752 (xvii) of 1962 concerning the agreement, resolution 2504 (xxiv ) concerning the secretary-generals report, never received general assembly ‘approval’ and, as defined by the united nations secretariat, the wording ‘takes note’ is neither approval nor disapproval (ruder et al. 2011: 46). thus, the general assembly never approved the contents of the report, or the sham ‘act of free choice.’ it was only noted. speaking at the un on 11 september 2019, however, indonesia still argues that resolution 2504 was ‘approved’ by the general assembly in justifying the continued occupation of west papua (yasmin 2019). the act of free choice has been used since 1969 by indonesia to stake its claim for the full incorporation of west papua into its territory. as the above argument has shown, the act of free choice was manipulated by indonesia with the covert assistance of the united nations secretariat in violation of international law. the agreement and the act of free choice thus have no legal standing. and, by default, west papua has never legally been incorporated into indonesia. as the co-founder of international lawyers for west papua, melinda janki, put it: ‘there is nowhere anywhere in the united nations general assembly a resolution which says the general assembly approves the integration of west papua into indonesia’ ( janki 2017). discussion after the united nations takeover in september 1962, and more so under indonesian occupation from may 1963, the people of west papua were subjected to indonesian military oppression including mass murder, starvation, terror, and torture—mass human rights violations that meet the definition of genocide under the 1948 convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (brundige et al. 2004; wing & king 2004; elmslie & webb-gannon 2013). while genocide is yet to be proven in a competent court, and access to west papua by the international media and united nations human rights investigators is still denied despite presidential guarantees (‘un rights chief ’ 2019), the indonesian military’s systematic acts of terror and atrocities continue to emerge on a near daily basis.14 while the opm freedom fighters continue guerrilla warfare (‘opm rebels shoot’ 2019), the recent civil uprising 14 via social media west papuan activists and supporters are reporting on the ongoing oppression. see for example webpages stop the west papuan genocide, and free papua movement on facebook. 75 a soul divided: the un’s misconduct over west papua portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 across the territory (‘thousands take to the streets’ 2019) sparked by racial abuse and police harassment of papuan students in surabaya is a new development and highlights both the desperation and mounting bravery of the papuan population. social media and connection to the outside world is raising awareness and increasingly puts indonesia under the spotlight to the point where the regime took the unprecedented action of blocking the internet (‘indonesia extends mobile’ 2019) after footage emerged showing the indonesian military opening fire upon the demonstrators (langeberg 2019) and mobilising thousands of additional police and military in fear of further uprisings and international attention (dyah da 2019). while many were killed by the police and military, the uprising has resulted in the indonesian president being reported to have agreed to discuss demands for independence (‘governor says jokowi’ 2019). another east timor now looms on the horizon, raising the spectre of increased separatism and national dissolution. the root cause of this oppression however rests not with indonesia but with those responsible for the covert manipulation of international law that allowed indonesia to take control. as demonstrated in this paper, the conduct of the secretariat of the united nations in the case of west papua puts the united nations into irretrievable disrepute and makes it complicit in the ongoing genocide and oppression by the indonesian military from that time onwards. in a letter to the acting un secretary-general in 1962, the chairman of the committee for self-determination for new guinea forlornly warned: the dutch were forced to leave new guinea and abolish their solemn pledge towards its people. the u.n. stepped in. we should be grateful to learn what steps the u.n. will take to ensure the rights of the people, inclusive of its right to real self-determination. we express the hope that your world organisation will not bow for any machinations on the side of indonesia, lest what hope we can still have in it, since its behaviour in the dutch-indonesian dispute about new guinea, gets completely lost. (ritzen bos 1962) the independence that was planned for the papuan people by australia and the netherlands was hijacked, along with the right to autonomy and self-determination for the other territories of the former dutch east indies. failure by the united nations, and the international community generally, to hold indonesia to account only encouraged further human rights abuses and territorial invasions. this was continued under suharto in an even more brutal fashion with successive indonesian leaders failing to address their appalling history of human rights abuses. arguably under the doctrine of responsibility to protect, indonesia has abrogated any claim, however spurious, to occupy west papua. the general assembly’s 1960 resolution 2621 (xxv ) programme of action for the full implementation of the declaration on the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples: reaffirms the inherent right of colonial peoples to struggle by all necessary means at their disposal against colonial powers which suppress their aspiration for freedom and independence … [and directs] … member states [to] render all necessary moral and material assistance to the peoples of colonial territories in their struggle to attain freedom and independence. under article 4 of the charter governing membership of the united nations, all member states have a legal obligation to uphold the laws of the charter. and under articles 55 and 56 76 mckinlay king portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019 all members pledge to take joint and separate action in co-operation with the united nations to uphold the principles of equal rights and self-determination. this exploration of the covert and illegal actions by the un and member states in the case of west papua’s decolonisation shows clearly that such noble principles as equal rights and self-determination are in deficit. if member states cannot uphold the international law of the charter and protect human rights, surely, the international community 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https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/398405/un-rights-chief-unable-to-secure-west-papua-visit?fbclid=iwar3gpmhvs5pj5hjoatj1szvvt7t9o69c_e2mzxlgtucsvsxiwgm0hwbeay0 https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/398405/un-rights-chief-unable-to-secure-west-papua-visit?fbclid=iwar3gpmhvs5pj5hjoatj1szvvt7t9o69c_e2mzxlgtucsvsxiwgm0hwbeay0 https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/398405/un-rights-chief-unable-to-secure-west-papua-visit?fbclid=iwar3gpmhvs5pj5hjoatj1szvvt7t9o69c_e2mzxlgtucsvsxiwgm0hwbeay0 http://sydney.edu.au/arts/peace_conflict/docs/westpapuagenociderpt05.pdf http://sydney.edu.au/arts/peace_conflict/docs/westpapuagenociderpt05.pdf https://jakartaglobe.id/context/indonesia-restates-commitment-to-human-rights-at-un-meeting-in-geneva?fbclid=iwar3hc2jtt4x1jjxtl-suxi63q7qlrebr_rnycjtcofgqce1anv6smhxnibw https://jakartaglobe.id/context/indonesia-restates-commitment-to-human-rights-at-un-meeting-in-geneva?fbclid=iwar3hc2jtt4x1jjxtl-suxi63q7qlrebr_rnycjtcofgqce1anv6smhxnibw https://jakartaglobe.id/context/indonesia-restates-commitment-to-human-rights-at-un-meeting-in-geneva?fbclid=iwar3hc2jtt4x1jjxtl-suxi63q7qlrebr_rnycjtcofgqce1anv6smhxnibw portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: gao, m. 2021. covid-19 and political polarization: notes on australia’s chinese communities. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 97–103. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i12.7365 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay covid-19 and political polarization: notes on australia’s chinese communities mobo gao corresponding author: professor mobo gao, school of social sciences, university of adelaide, south australia 5005 australia. mobo.gao@adelaide.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7365 article history: received 12/08/2020; accepted 07/12/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract in this article i draw from my personal observations as a participant in two wechat groups; a group with my university classmates most of whom are now residents of australia, and the other a skilled migrant group based in south australia. i explore the main narrative threads of these two groups in relation to their responses to the covid-19 pandemic during the first half of 2020. i argue that the covid-19 pandemic sharpened the political polarization that exists between denouncers of the people’s republic of china [prc] and their detractors, and also underlined particular moral dilemmas. keywords covid-19; china; chinese australians; emotions; political polarization introduction this article analyses the polarized response of chinese australians of mainland china background to covid-19. i draw from my personal observations as a participant in two wechat groups; a group with my university classmates most of whom are now residents of australia, and the other a skilled migrant group based in south australia. wechat is a social media app that has multi-purpose functions such as messaging, video conferencing, telephone and mobile payment. it was developed by a chinese company tencent, first released in 2011, and is now the world’s largest standalone mobile app. the australian prime minister scott morrison is reported to have a wechat account (sbs news 2019). it is often described as china’s ‘app for everything.’ wechat group identities can be anything, ranging from those declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 97 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7365 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7365 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7365 mailto:mobo.gao@adelaide.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7365 who identify themselves as alumni of a high school or university, or migrants from the same city or province in china. group members can communicate by posting news articles, video clips, websites, or they can add comments. i explore the main narrative threads of these two groups in relation to their responses to the covid-19 pandemic during the first half of 2020. i argue that the covid-19 pandemic sharpened the political polarization that exists between denouncers of the people’s republic of china [prc] and their detractors, and also underlined particular moral dilemmas. i explore this in the context of the chinese migrant experience in australia, which i am a part of. as wechat communications are private and personal membership identity is not revealed, sources identified and cited are only those that are publicly available. background chinese australians come from a variety of backgrounds, including southeast asia, hong kong and taiwan. from the mid-19th century, chinese migrants from guangdong and hong kong used to be the most numerous in australia and they also maintained chinese cultural traditions such as ancestral worship and clan identities (petty 2009), symbolized by the iconic chinatowns built in most capital cities. more contemporary migrants of chinese ethnicity are from mainland china, beginning with 18,000 students who were able to stay, and then obtain resident status, subsequent to the 1989 tiananmen square events (liu and gao 1998). in one of the most emotional responses to that event, the then australian prime minister bob hawke appeared tearfully on tv announcing the extension of visas to chinese students (fang and weedon 2020). this source of migration continued and expanded to include the immediate families of the students (liu and gao 1998), businesspeople and investors, and skilled migrants. chinese australians who have migrated from the prc to australia are therefore of very diverse background. although it is commonly claimed that chinese australians of mainland background are not active in australian public life as they are mostly busy with educating their children and running businesses that are related to their emigration origins, this stereotype is being challenged by second and third generations of chinese migrants who participate in sports and take a more active role in australian public life. quite a number of students from the prc with entrepreneurial spirit also often start community media outlets such as local papers, radio or social media in chinese in various australian capital cities as a way of obtaining australian residence status. this is generally perceived as a good way to migrate since it is a middle class profession and the capital requirement is low. migrants who come to australia in the investment visa category sometimes donate to politicians for publicity and to open up business opportunities. recently, these lobby and media activities by those with china connections are considered by some australian politicians to be chinese interference in australian domestic politics (hamilton 2018). covid-19’s impact on politically polarizing positions and attitudes as a chinese migrant myself, i am in regular contact with other chinese migrants living in australia and i also keep in contact with people living in the prc. wechat groups are a convenient way to make and keep connections with such communities. as a group member of two wechat groups, i am fascinated by the way the participants express their ideological disposition towards the prc. generally speaking, i situate the participants into two broad groups: those who denounce the prc and those who defend it. based on my experience of these two wechat groups and the self-identification of the group members, the members that tend to denounce china tend to be prc chinese who migrated to australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s whereas the china defender members tend to have migrated to australia more recently. although i am not suggesting that the political spectrum of the participants is so black and white, i am interested in discussing the political polarization i perceive in these groups and which, in my opinion, has sharpened since the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. gao portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202198 on one end of the spectrum are the participants that denounce the prc. i refer to this ideological group as the ‘whateverists’: whatever china does is wrong and whatever the usa does is right (gao 2008). they reject whatever reports or comments are positive about the prc and support reports or comments that are positive about the usa. there are roughly about five members that take this ideological position in both wechat groups. indeed, to support their ideological position, the whateverists post any report or comment that is positive about the usa. for instance, they tend to support former president donald trump, or at least they do not explicitly criticize him. but they are very critical of the former democratic candidate bernie sanders, labelling him as a naïve ‘white leftie’ or bai zuo in chinese (fang kecheng 2020). on the other end of the spectrum are those opposed to the whateverists and who defend the prc. there are also five active members that take this ideological position in both wechat groups surveyed in this paper. they respond to the whateverists with whatever information they can find either in english or chinese for a tit for tat rebut. but whateverists condemn anyone who is defensive of china as “five cents” or wu mao in chinese, a term used to refer to those who are supposedly paid to defend china cheaply—five cents for an apologetic piece. events and issues that have emerged from the covid-19 pandemic have consequently aligned with this political polarization. for instance, in the case of dr li wenliang in wuhan who was reported to have raised the alarm of the virus in social media but was castigated by local authorities, the whateverists posted comments that claimed dr li was a heroic whistle blower. those who tend to defend china argued that dr li was just an eye specialist and his warning to his friends on his personal social media was off the mark. he was rightfully initially censored, they argue, for fear of spreading rumours, as any authority would do when the exact nature of a virus is unclear. another major event that induced heated debate in the wechat groups i participate in was the publication of fang fang’s diaries in wuhan. fang fang is a controversial wuhan-based writer who wrote a novel soft burial (2016) that was banned in china for its exploration of the violent aftermath of the chinese revolutionary land reforms. in a series of social media posts, which have now been published as ‘wuhan diary: dispatches from a quarantined city’ (2020), fang fang is very critical of the local government’s initial response to the emergence of covid-19 in wuhan ( johnson 2020). the whateverists argue that fang fang is a contemporary lu xun1 and that what she describes in her diaries was the truth of wuhan at that time. in order to validate their attitudes of support for li wenliang and fang fang, the whateverists not only repeated li’s ‘a healthy society allows more than one voice’ (he yuhuai 2020) but also posted a chinese youth daily article praising noam chomsky as a great critic and patriot of the usa (zhang wei 2010). this is the only time, as far as i know, that the whateverists on these wechat groups have posted an official chinese commentary. but that commentary was published ten years ago in the context of chomsky’s visit to china when he gave a speech at peking university in which he, as he usually does, condemns us imperialism. those who defend china, however, argue that although some of fang fang’s diary entries record the real situation, many of her accusations and condemnations of the chinese government have proven to be false and inaccurate. they also argue that fang fang’s is politically biased against the chinese communist party (ccp), as is evident in her novel soft burial. the appraisal of racism towards asians in general, and chinese in particular, in australia is another issue regularly discussed in the wechat groups. the whateverists argue that racism has not been an issue during the covid-19 pandemic. they point to two pieces of evidence to support their argument. one is that they 1 lu xun (1881–1936), arguably the greatest chinese modern writer, was very critical of not only chinese culture and society but also the character of the chinese person. gao portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202199 themselves never experienced any racism, even though there was a reported increase in racism against asians (biddle et al. 2020). two, that both the prime minister scott morrison and some state premiers came out to condemn racism and to praise the contribution that chinese australians have made to australia. the prc defenders, on the other hand, although they acknowledge that political discourse is important, also underline the importance of political action. hence, they regularly post reports of incidents of racism in australia and argue that continual negative media reports of china might incite racism. some chinese australians therefore launched a call for virtual demonstrations against racism in australia, a call that the whateverists immediately rejected. the association for australian values (ava), largely organized by chinese australians and aligned with the whateverists’ position, issued a statement claiming that those who wanted to demonstrate were ungrateful people who were ‘coordinating with a certain government’ and were instruments and pawns for the united front of the ccp: ‘we chinese australians should not allow ourselves to be kidnapped by a dictatorial ship that is about to sink’ (ava 2020).2 the whateverists, moreover, post news and comments by the western media and the usa that question the officially published numbers of covid-19 cases and deaths by the prc. their comments highlight that democracies such as japan, south korea and taiwan did well in combatting covid-19 (marlow 2020) and that the who was manipulated by the prc government. the whateverists also supported australia’s call for an independent investigation into the origin of covid-19 (dziedzic 2020). defenders of the prc, on the other hand, argue that australia’s call for an independent investigation had a spurious geopolitical purpose. they often post reports and comments that put the usa in a negative light, for instance a report that the usa intercepted a planeload of medical equipment destined for europe (willsher et al. 2020). the polarized responses to covid-19-related events demonstrate how the crisis has, in my view, entrenched opposing, polarized attitudes in the chinese migrant community in australia. it is not surprising to me why the chinese australians of mainland background have such polarized attitudes towards china and the west as represented by the usa. those uncompromising positions reflect the historical cleavages of post-revolution china. the 1949 chinese revolution, and its subsequent developments, consisted of a series of antagonizing and polarizing political events. the land reform in the rural sector and nationalization of properties in urban sectors turned many, not surprisingly, into communism haters. political movements such as the anti-rightists further antagonized the intelligentsia. the subsequent cultural revolution alienated not only the intellectual middle class but also the political elite in the system. thus, those who converted to western religions and above all western values of political freedom and democracy, likely do not identify themselves with a communist government. participants in the university wechat group consists of members who went through the education system in the late 1970s and early and mid-1980s when the ‘literature of the wounded’ expressed a popular backlash against the cultural revolution. chinese intellectuals picked up the theme of the 4th may 1919 enlightenment, which castrated chinese traditions with the symbolic slogan ‘down with the confucian shop.’ during the 1980s the chinese intellectual class launched what was called a neo-enlightenment to ‘farewell the revolution’ and to reorientate china towards the west. with this context, a warm welcome by australia certainly made some of them firm anti-communists. defenders of the prc likely come from families that were not victimized, and actually benefited from, communist china’s political development. though very happy living in an affluent society like australia, they still have positive attitudes towards china and do not harbour hatred of communist government. 2 the statement is in chinese and the actual words in chinese are “不感恩，是配合某政府，是统战的工具和马前卒， 独裁政权已经在国际上空前孤立，世界众多文明国家已不愿与之为伍。我们不能被绑架在他们即将沉没的船上。拒绝做独裁 政权的殉葬品” gao portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021100 moral conundrum though neither the whateverists nor those who defend china hesitate to express their attitudes and lay out their political positions, the impact of covid-19 exposes some moral conundrums. for those who defend china the moral dilemma is more apparent. when the whateverists present the argument of the intrinsic value of critical freedom by posting li wenliang’s ‘a healthy society allows more than one voice,’ those who defend china appear rather defenceless. even though noam chomsky was not a familiar figure among the wechat groups, the message that an intellectual could be a patriot while at the same time criticize his own country, was mobilized to defend the ccp critic fang fang and to praise li wenliang. whateverists criticize the prc’s defenders as maoist-style leftists. in china the left is often identified with many of the excesses of the mao era: violence, material backwardness, and above all with lack of freedom and suppression and victimization of the political and intellectual elite during the cultural revolution. china’s defenders thus do not have much of a discursive position to fall back on because they cannot repeat maoist revolutionary discourse since the denunciation of the revolutionary discourse is accepted by both groups. hence, the whateverists’ accusation of them being cultural revolution red guards was deemed the best way to silence the defenders. the anti-left ideological position of the whateverists links defenders of china to other western movements that they deem ‘radical’ such as the black lives matter movement. echoing the discourse of former us president donald trump, the whateverists claim that ‘leftists’ are implementing their own destructive cultural revolution in the usa (smith 2020). one whateverist posted a comparative listing of the chinese cultural revolution in the 1960s with the 2020 western cultural revolution (yu zi 2020): • black lives matter = 革命无罪，造反有理 (it is not a crime to make revolution; rebellion is justified） • silence is not a choice = 人人表态过关 (everyone should declare their position to pass the test) • shut down stem & academia = 工农兵占领学校 (schools occupied by workers, peasants and soldiers） • defund the police = 砸烂公检法 (dismantle the public security, the procuratorate and the court) • you are the privileged = 清理黑五类 (clean up the black five categories) • burn books and remove statues = 破除四旧 (destruction of the four olds)3 however, whateverists also have moral conundrums of their own. the most obvious one is the question of cultural and ethnic identity. this is reflected in a story posted by one of the whateverists. one little girl asked her father whether she was really australian since she did not look like other (white) australians. her father replied that it was not the outside appearance but the inside values that decide whether or not one is an australian. if you identify with australian values, then you are an australian. the association for australian values was set up by some chinese australians along the lines of this rationale. the racism experienced by many chinese australians during the pandemic complicates the discussion of values versus outside appearance. when you are bearing the brunt of racist attacks there is no use claiming that you are not chinese. defining what australian values are is also not something easy to identify or measure. when the australian government announced its wish for an independent international inquiry into china’s origin of covid-19, although some whateverists supported the call, other whateverists kept silent on the issue. a related call for china to pay compensation for the breakout of covid-19 (moffett 2020) was of course condemned by the defenders while the whateverists again remained silent. many whateverists also face another conundrum. how do they handle china and their chinese background while at the same time consider china morally inferior? they have families and/or extended 3 generally speaking, most first-generation chinese australians are not sympathetic with the black lives matter movement including the ones surveyed in these two wechat groups even though they have contrary positions regarding other matters as discussed above. gao portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021101 families back in china and many have properties and related financial and business connections there. if china does well it is good for them as well; and if china is in trouble it affects their well-being here in australia. for instance, one wechat participant is engaged in a tourism business that relies entirely on tourists from mainland china. this person demonstrated great anxiety in the midst of the pandemic on top of the deterioration of the australia-china relationship. it is really not a morally comfortable position to be in, especially for the first generation of migrants, if you hate your origins but cannot cut off the connection completely (sun 2002). conclusion this essay draws on my experience using two wechat groups in south australia to argue that responses to covid-19 have not only aligned with two polarizing positions that chinese migrants from mainland china hold towards the prc—whateverists and defenders—but that the pandemic has heightened and accelerated this political polarization. the two polarized attitudes are so hostile that some of the participants in the groups analyzed in this essay opted out of the group after some fierce exchanges. although my reading of the political polarization described in this essay is only a small sample, both poles actually have a lot in common: they both seem to enjoy the benefit of china’s post-mao reforms and none seem to recall the old days as ‘the good old days.’ but this small case study underlines certain dis-equalizing aspects of the covid-19 pandemic. first, it demonstrates covid-19 has had a singular impact on chinese migrant communities in countries such as australia. not only did international attention on china’s role in the spread of the pandemic often lead to racist attacks, but it prompted already polarized communities to navigate those 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http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal unhomely europes1 dimitris eleftheriotis (university of glasgow), murray pratt (university of technology sydney) and ilaria vanni, (university of technology sydney) as for europe, no one can say whether it is surrounded by the sea or not, neither is it known whence the name of europe was derived, nor who gave it name… herodotus, histories, iv, 45 when mercury had inflicted this punishment on the girl for her impious words and thoughts, he left pallas’s land behind and flew to the heavens on outstretched wings. there his father calls him aside, and without revealing love as the reason, says ‘son, faithful worker of my commands, go, quickly in your usual way, fly down to where, in an eastern land, they observe your mother’s star, among the pleiades, (the inhabitants give it the name of sidon). there drive the herd of royal cattle, that you will see some distance off, grazing the mountain grass, towards the sea shore!’ he spoke, and immediately, as he commanded, the cattle, driven from the mountain, headed for the shore, where the great king’s daughter, europa, used to play together with the tyrian virgins. royalty and love do not sit well together, nor stay long in the same house. so the father and ruler of the gods, who is armed with the three-forked lightning in his right hand, whose nod shakes the world, setting aside his royal sceptre, took on the shape of a bull, lowed among the other cattle, and, beautiful to look at, wandered in the tender grass. in colour he was white as the snow that rough feet have not trampled and the rain-filled south wind has not melted. the muscles rounded out his neck, the dewlaps hung down in front, the horns were twisted, but one might argue they were made by hand, purer and brighter than pearl. his forehead was not fearful, his eyes were not formidable, and his expression was peaceful. agenor’s daughter marvelled at how beautiful he was and how unthreatening. but though he seemed so gentle she was afraid at first to touch him. soon she drew close and held flowers out to his glistening mouth. the lover was joyful and while he waited for his hoped-for pleasure he kissed her hands. he could scarcely separate then from now. at one moment he frolics and runs riot in the grass, at another he lies down, white as snow on the yellow sands. when her fear has gradually lessened he offers his chest now for virgin hands to pat and now his horns to twine with fresh wreaths of flowers. the royal virgin even dares to sit on the bull’s back, not realising whom she presses on, while the god, first from dry land and then from the shoreline, gradually slips his deceitful hooves into the waves. then he goes further out and carries his 1 the authors wish to thank maja mikula and francesca da rimini for sharing their thoughts on europe, borders and myth. eleftheriotis, pratt and vanni unhomely europes prize over the mid-surface of the sea. she is terrified and looks back at the abandoned shore she has been stolen from and her right hand grips a horn, the other his back, her clothes fluttering, winding, behind her in the breeze. ovid, metamorphoses, bk ii:833-875 jupiter’s abduction of europa in the story told by ovid (metamorphosis bk ii, 833-875) europa is collecting flowers in a meadow near sidon, in present-day south lebanon, in the company of some nymphs, when zeus, disguised as a white bull who breathes a saffron crocus from his nostrils, seduces her. he then carries her on his back across the mediterranean sea to crete. homer (iliad iv, 321) writes that europa was the daughter of phoenicio, king of phoenicia, on the coast of present-day syria, lebanon and north israel. this foundation myth is complicated across the centuries by the layering of additional stories, and by numerous interpretations. although this is not the place to explore the myth and its readings in depth, especially given that passerini (2002) has written about the variations of the myth, its symbolic impact, historical becomings and its interpretations in her book il mito d’europa, some of the elements of the myth can be brought into play to think about europe today. in particular, in relation to this issue of portal, the myth can shed some light on the making and thinking of ‘european values.’ this process, although imagined as a collective effort towards ‘harmony,’ comes into being as a process of friction, intended as the engagement of often particular, narrow and localised issues with global developments, an engagement that for anna tsing is ‘shaped and transformed in long histories of regional-to-global networks of power, trade, and meaning’ (2005, 3). friction can be used to understand how in europe particular local histories and local knowledge intersect with global issues, and conversely how what appears to be ‘european’ is, in fact, the result of global encounters. narratives of european values need to be located in this striated space, while friction as an organising metaphor also explains the slippage and relation between the lived, heterogeneous embodiments of contemporary europe and abstract notions of values. in the wake of the now infamous dutch and french 2005 rejections of the european union’s (eu) draft constitution, politicians and media commentators have also called for revised definitions of europe, with an emphasis emerging on multiple europes, divergent and flexible borders, and new, more relevant, definitions of european values and belonging. austrian chancellor wolfgang schüssel argued in the wake of the referenda that the eu’s first priority should be ‘to accentuate more clearly the identity portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 2 eleftheriotis, pratt and vanni unhomely europes question’ and to send the message that ‘there is no european uniform mass, but more identities, that constitute the european sound’ (in beunderman 2006). analysts responding to the referenda results have also called for new conceptualisations of europe’s values, borders, and citizenship. many observers regard such developments as proof that europe and the idea of europe are, if not yet ‘dead’ (as seen from the greekaustralian perspective of novelist christos tsiolkas, discussed in nicholas manganas’s contribution to this issue), at least in crisis. this special issue of portal constitutes an indirect, sideways reflection on the eu’s move toward (re-)discovering, establishing, and promoting shared cultural values. it seeks to unveil not the official historical contexts and traditions in which contemporary inventions of cultural identity occur. rather, its aim is to discover and listen to competing voices and alternative visions—be they cultural, social, political, literary or cinematic—that give different shape to trans-european identities and model union, commonality, and belonging, according to transregional or translocal values. the special issue, then, is an exploration of possible forms of frictions occurring across the european cultural and historical landscape. it questions the pre-eminence of formal eu discourses on values, and the branding of europe in the global marketplace, by listening to marginalised, unheard or discordant euro-voices. the issue demonstrates the need for more rigorous theorisations of notions such as ‘value,’ whether ‘shared’ or ‘cultural,’ in the european region, and posits alternative mappings and visions of european belonging and identity. the essays included in this special issue consider europe as a locus of frictions, consensus, tension, contestation and reconciliation. this locus is capable of co-locating scotland with the costa brava, crossing swedish views of russia with their converse, recognising a europe of borders that continuously unfold, acknowledging the interference of historical memories, and inflecting the houellebecquian eurofuturescape with greco-australian undertones; to cite a few examples of vibrant transvaluation occurring in the issue. to better understand this emerging europe we start from the myth as narrated by ovid, and are seduced, like europa, by the bull, and by the images the story leaves behind. these are images of the beginning of change and of movement, for europa is represented in the moment when she leaves ‘home’ with the bull, destination unknown. images of otherness and strangeness—the white bull, who breathes a crocus through his portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 3 eleftheriotis, pratt and vanni unhomely europes nostrils as a party trick. these are images of a subtle power struggle: surely the bull appears more powerful than the girl europa, but it is after all europa who first leaves ‘home’ of her own volition. the myth can help us to think about a europe without a (cultural) ‘home,’ an un-homely europe as it were, where the familiar and the once repressed (other) coexist. we use un-homely with a specific reference to the english translation of the freudian concept of unheimlich, sometimes translated as uncanny, which has been used to describe a feeling of something that is frightening, that ‘arouses dread and horror’ (1919, 193), but that is not external but ‘that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (195). freud further unpacks the semantic layers of unheimlich by playing with the ambivalence of the word in its constructed opposition to heimlich, that which is familiar. what interests us most in this long extract is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word ‘heimlich’ exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, ‘unheimlich’. what is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich.… in general we are reminded that the word ‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other what is concealed and kept out of sight. (freud 1919, 199) thus, as freud suggests, the feeling of the unheimlich emerges in places where one should feel most secure, or familiar: ‘everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’ (1919, 200). more interestingly, for freud the unheimlich is not simply ‘not home,’ for it is that which is familiar but forgotten, that which having being repressed comes to light in the most familiar of places. this approach to the play between the familiar and the repressed allows us to ask what the eu has forgotten in the push towards ‘shared cultural values.’ what are the stories that seem to vanish at the margins of europe when constructed as a successful brand, and what is this europe’s constituent imaginary? what is returning to haunt familiar perceptions of europe? is the un-homely at the core of the tension between imaginary, symbolic and political constructionsof europe? how do we conceptualise and understand the multiplicity of europes? in addition to the complexities implicit in the idea of europe, we have inherited theoretical tools to think about europe as a geopolitical space that were developed to think about nation states, but not about a diverse, multicentered region in becoming. this inheritance is a good example of the pervasiveness of european categories, the idea of the nation-state itself one of the concepts europe disseminated along with its colonial portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 4 eleftheriotis, pratt and vanni unhomely europes project. can we rescue any of these tools to think about nation-states in our analysis? what happens, for instance, if we update and move benedict anderson’s imagined communities (1991) into contemporary debates on european identities? according to anderson we can better comprehend the nation and nationalism if we analyse the cultural system out of which they came into being: the century of the enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness .... [few] things were (are) suited to this end better than the idea of nation. if nation states are widely considered to be 'new' and 'historical,’ the nation states to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past and ... glide into a limitless future. what i am proposing is that nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which—as well as against which—it came into being. (19) according to anderson, 18th century developments in print media, including newspapers and the novel, were a factor in the rise of the nation intended as a geopolitical and social entity. it was possible to imagine nations because people agreed on their sovereignty, assumed there were deep horizontal relations between inhabitants and recognised a common territory marked by identifiable boundaries. according to this theory, borders are fundamental to the establishment of a sense of nation because they define what is outside it. similarly borders, as the debate on european enlargement indicates, and as damian spruce explores in his contribution to the present issue, are vital factors in the definition of what europe is, and, more importantly, what europe is not. exchanging anderson’s print media for more contemporary forms of communicative and cultural practices, and moving his notion that nations are ‘imagined communities’ into a regional sphere, this issue of portal considers the ways in which europe is always already an ‘imagined community.’ each contribution demonstrates that shifting, de-materialising and re-materialising borders—geopolitical, historical, social or cultural—play a central role in the process of imagining europe. luisa passerini (2002, 28) proposes that in going back to the myth of continental origin, europe can start to heal its ‘symbolic deficit.’ borrowing from passerini we propose that, in the collection of essays presented here, a europe intended as the smooth space of shared values envisaged by the european union also suffers from an ‘imaginary deficit.’ while the eu has invested and invests resources in the shaping of a common symbolic realm, from the invention of rituals and symbol (the flag, the anthem) to the construction through specific cultural policies of european cultural repositories and of a portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 5 eleftheriotis, pratt and vanni unhomely europes european ‘cultural home’ (see, for instance, tobias thieler’s political symbolism and political integration 2005), the un-homely europe produces its own dystopic imaginary. down the track from measurable successes in achieving economic, political and social integration, the domain of cultural integration, most often thought of as ‘european values,’ is increasingly identified by the eu as the area where ‘work needs to be done.’ the urgency of this work can be detected beyond the failure of the constitutional project in tendencies such as the inability of the belgian electorate to recongeal as a coherent national community, at the very heart of the officially imagined european home, following the 2007 elections. a parallel dystopic tendency is the continuing miscommunication between the eu and its eastern neighbour russia, while another is exposed by the social and economic discrepancies driving both internal and external migration flows across europe’s striated landmasses. it is not by chance, therefore, that the eu is preparing for its ‘2008 year of intercultural dialogue,’ an explicit bid to forge a sense of belonging and common citizenship across its member states and the communities that span them. with the addition of more member states since 2004, the increasing certainties of migration and global capital flows (and, one could add, of terrorism and the causes of terrorism), europe has undergone some of the most important changes in its history in the opening years of the 21st century. the enlargement of european borders and the rearticulation of national ones have transformed the understanding of what constitutes european identity, emphasising a need to transform europe from a ‘mosaic of cultures’ to a region where different cultures are in constant dialogue (figel 2005). as a result, the european commission is promoting a number of policies and initiatives aimed at endorsing cultural diversity in a bid to ‘move from a multi-cultural society to an intercultural society’ (figel 2005). the arts, in particular, are considered instrumental in bringing about this change by providing citizens with the appreciation of cultural values and knowledge of one another through cooperation between artists, cultural producers and institutions (article 151; european council 2002; commission for the european communities 2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2006). the result is a flourishing of cultural projects that explore the changes to european borders and the consequent transformation of europe as a region of contact zones between different cultures, and the emergence of an interest in the borders and borderlands that cross europe, and that are crossed in accessing its shores. the 2008 ‘european year of intercultural dialogue’ has the aim of portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 6 eleftheriotis, pratt and vanni unhomely europes fostering the understanding of cultural differences as ‘an essential tool in forging closer links both between european peoples themselves and between their respective cultures’ (european commission 2005). this special issue of portal identifies the need for constant redefinitions and renegotiations of european identities, acknowledging that being european, and being in europe, are the result of past histories and of the transnational networks of globalisation. in contrast with any homogenising narrative of europe that describes the region as a clearly distinguished space with correspondingly easily defined characteristics, this issue echoes hassan and dadi (2001) by setting out to ‘examine critically the contradiction between europe’s homogenising official narratives, and localised experiences of urban life, where heterogeneity, cross-cultural influences, and hybridity have long been the living norms’ (2001, 12). this issue of portal, therefore, serves to interrogate the official discourse on common destiny and shared values with a different perspective of europe as a site of production of overlapping encounters across cultures: europe as borderlands. this approach recognises that definitions of europe are arising well beyond the geopolitical borders of the european union. at the same time, our approach recognises a proliferation of new types of social, political and cultural borders within various regions of europe, and within europe’s metropolitan centres, which turn all of europe into a borderlands. as a consequence of such borderisation, the whole of europe can be conceptualised as a contact zone of different cultures, a vast borderlands were identities are fluid and in constant transformation. according to balibar this new european space is affected by the complex historical relations between european states, national conflicts, and imperialism, so that ‘contemporary european people can be all considered post-colonial communities, or projections of global diversity onto the european space’ (2004, 34). the essays collected in this issue point towards the process of the frictions that play, to echo tsing (2005, 4), in all their awkwardness, inequalities and instabilities, across european differences. other conceptual models are possible. one 2007 publication, the special issue of culture, theory and critique edited by murray pratt and mireille rosello entitled ‘creolising europe: towards a non-eurocentric europe,’ develops the related notions of creolisation, community and cosmopolitanism in relation to europe’s changing socioscape. a multidisciplinary approach is necessary to portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 7 eleftheriotis, pratt and vanni unhomely europes understand the complexities, not only of hybrid practices deployed in the european cultural project, but also of the entanglements of the examined projects with current political, philosophical, and social debates. further synergies between the essays in the issue merit attention. they each assume transformation processes that are incomplete or ongoing, at either geopolitical or cultural levels. europe therefore emerges as a project in becoming, one that is still open to different articulations, and viewed in askance. the essays also indicate the extent to which europe’s past remains a problem, as a legacy or contemporary burden that needs dealt with (beattie, medeiros), or as a dystopia or dead weight (manganas). the state of flux at the imaginary level (goode, sicard-cowan, kristensen) is reflected by the state of flux at a geopolitical level (spruce) and in evolving processes of sociocultural identification (fernandes). in short, europe is indeed the vrai bordel (complete mess) identified by xavier, the border-crossing exchange student in cédric klapisch’s l’auberge espagnol (the spanish apartment, 2003). this issue goes some way towards suggesting that new models are needed when thinking about europe, and more specifically, how to narrate and figure diversity and heterogeneity as lived actualities against the ubiquitous temptation of politically expedient ‘harmonisation.’ the opening essay of the collection, by nicholas manganas, offers a sustained mediation on the narratological drives and tensions underpinning the move to cultural unification in europe. unearthing an unbridled optimism at the dark heart of eurodiscourse, manganas teases out the contradictory and tenuous storylines on which that discourse is founded. his consideration of novels by michel houellebecq and christos tsiolkas constitutes a subversion of the eurooptimist moment, one that renders the continent’s futurology as necessary yet impossible. in a fascinating interplay between the extra-european and the traditions and myths of the continent, a new imaginary emerges in his discussion that is far removed from the assumed norms of formal eurocracy. a second literary essay, by ana medeiros, takes a more local approach to the issue of how contemporary europe is haunted by its pasts. medeiros’s skilful analysis of assia djebar’s la femme sans sépulture draws on genre theory and the context of the novel’s production to rethink the ways in which today’s europeans, whatever their origins and stories, are in debt to the continent’s colonial histories. as with the narrator of the novel that medeiros considers, our duty is to hear the voices, portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 8 eleftheriotis, pratt and vanni unhomely europes however faint or unfamiliar, that constitute our geoculturally embodied (rather than nationally reconstituted) collective memories. the focus on the past continues with andrew beattie’s contribution, which examines the role of history and memory in the discussions of european values and identity. the article critiques recent suggestions that europe could learn from german experiences of confronting multiple difficult pasts as a starting point for considering what lessons those experiences might hold for ‘europe.’ the essay considers some of the political implications raised by a contemporary trend that posits germany’s unification (the merging of the german democratic republic with the federal republic of germany in 1990) as a model case for european unity. identifying the lack of plurality in the german process as an important shortfall, beattie suggests that the european context has the potential to address more openly questions of diversity and difference in historical accounts of the past and in popular memory, both within nations and between them. but by focusing on debates about the east-west division of the cold war, and the place of communism and nazism in public memory, beattie also cautions that contrary to common assumptions german experiences are not necessarily worthy of, or appropriate for, european emulation. damian spruce takes as his point of departure the idea, discussed above, that notions of borders are central to the constitution not only of european geopolitics but of an european imaginary as well. spruce recognises how processes of globalisation and eu integration have transformed the borders of the european nation states. in an analysis that complicates readings of globalised flows of capital and people alike, spruce concentrates on reading the changes of borders in themselves. he thus aligns his work with recent debates among scholars and activists who argue that rather than fading away, borders are proliferating in the globalised world and their functions are spreading into many different areas of society. moving from the political sphere to the cultural (although the two cannot be easily dissociated), martine fernandes’s vibrant analysis (in french) of blogs by frenchportuguese teenagers offers an insight into the ways that national demarcations fail to take anchor within the new european borderlands. at once (and not) portuguese and french, the identities of the bloggers is over-determined in their eagerness to ride portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 9 eleftheriotis, pratt and vanni unhomely europes national hobby horses, under-determined in their ability to sustain the coherent and exclusive rhetorics of nation-mongering, and haunted by the political experiences of their own generation, as well as those of their parents and grandparents. emerging from fernandes’s analysis is a sense of cultural dissonance, an interplay between social flux and cultural patriotism, that colours the luso-franco-blogosphere in new forms of territorialisation that fail to respect official parameters. the special issue’s contributions on european film raise several of the issues posed in this introduction. ongoing scholarship in the discipline of film studies has shifted the focus from national formations to transnational exchanges and flows. the paradigmatic shift in film studies is twofold, in that on the levels of theory and methodology the borders of the national are consistently ‘de-materialised’ as the search for historical unity and cultural identity is exchanged for mappings of difference. this is signalled clearly by the central position that the study of hybrid films, co-productions and international audiences (to mention a few) is currently occupying in the discipline. that is, in the cinematic objects of study and research the ‘unhomely’ is now (paradoxically) familiar. the three essays included in the present issue offer a clear manifestation, then, of cinema’s potential to contest and displace ‘europe.’ hélène sicard-cowan offers a close reading of western (manuel poirier, france, 1997), which identifies multiple transnational axes. this film by a peruvian-born french director has an international cast and a story, set in brittany, that revolves around the relationship between ‘a european man and a “nomadic” foreigner.’ furthermore, the film, as its title suggests, knowingly mobilises imaginary and symbolic conventions of a genre (the western) that has a distinctly non-european genealogy, anchored as it is in the cinematic, historical and mythical imaginaries of the us nation. as sicard-cowan demonstrates, the use of an ‘alien’ genre in conjunction with the narrative of interaction, defamiliarises the landscape and enables a vision of brittany as a multicultural and multilingual space of alterity. lars kristensen’s contribution is possibly even more explicit about the inescapable centrality of the transnational when imagining and thinking about europe. his essay compares lilya 4-ever (lukas moodysson, sweden/denmark, 2002) and interdovochka (petr todorovsky, 1989, ussr), films with a strikingly similar story line (russian woman travelling to sweden) but made in different countries and, more significantly, at different moments of european history: portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 10 eleftheriotis, pratt and vanni unhomely europes prior to and after the collapse of the soviet union. kristensen’s sophisticated reading of lilya pays particular attention to the critical reception of the film and offers a valuable insight into the complex dynamics of cultural exchange in a (new) europe. he argues that the theme of human trafficking is articulated in the form of a ‘return narrative’ that is symptomatic of a widespread european ‘anxiety.’ kristensen suggests that the narrative theme also offers an opportunity to enact fantasies of western european cultural and moral superiority as an antidote to anxieties around change and expansion. finally, ian goode explores how certain perceptions of europe, and, in particular, of european cinema, can influence in profound, aesthetic, political and institutional ways the formation of a peripheral cinema, in this case that of scotland. goode examines the multiple and contested nature of discourses on europe and the ways in which such discourses can interact with regional and national hegemonic struggles around culture and identity. in demonstrating how multivalent forms of connectedness and identification crisscross european experience, in film and beyond the cinematic world, his essay provides a necessary coda to this issue’s attempt to identify the new articulations, discursive associations and tidal flows by which europe is viewed and voiced in the first decade of the 21st century. reference list anderson, b. 1991, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, verso, london and new york. balibar e. 2004, we, the people of europe?: reflections on transnational citizenship, princeton university press, princeton n.j. beunderman, m. 2006, ‘fresh eu presidency attacks european court of justice,’ friends of europe. [online]. available: http://www.friendsofeurope.org/index.asp?http://www.friendsofeurope.org/news_detail.asp?id=56 8&page=det&frame=yes~bas. [accessed 25 february 2007]. commission of the european communities 2004a, communication from the commission making citizenship work: fostering european culture and diversity through programmes for youth, culture, audiovisual and civic participation. [online]. available: http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/education_culture/comcitizen_en.pdf. [accessed 25 february 2007]. commission of the european communities 2004b, proposal for a decision of the european parliament and of the council establishing the culture 2007 programme (2007-2013). [online]. available: http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/lex/lexuriserv/site/en/com/2004/com2004_0469en01.pdf [accessed 20 august 2007]. commission of the european communities 2005, proposal for a decision of the european parliament and of the council concerning the european year of intercultural dialogue (2008). 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[accessed 25 february 2007] european council 2002, ‘council resolution of 21 january 2002 on the role of culture in the portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 11 http://www.friendsofeurope.org/index.asp?http://www.friendsofeurope.org/news_detail.asp?id=568&page=det&frame=yes~bas http://www.friendsofeurope.org/index.asp?http://www.friendsofeurope.org/news_detail.asp?id=568&page=det&frame=yes~bas http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/education_culture/comcitizen_en.pdf http://europa.eu.int/comm/culture/portal/events/pdf/proposal_en.pdf http://europa.eu.int/comm/culture/eac/sources_info/official_doc/article151_en.html eleftheriotis, pratt and vanni unhomely europes development of the european union,’ official journal c 032, 5 february. figel, j. 2005, ‘the role of artists and cultural actors,’ speech 05/118 delivered to the european commission conference on ‘dialogue between peoples and cultures,’ brussels. [online]. available: http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressreleasesaction.do?reference=speech/05/118&format=html&ag ed=0&language=en&guilanguage=en [accessed 25 february 2007]. freud, s. 1977, ‘the uncanny,’ in writings on literature and art, stanford university press, stanford, 193-233. hassan, s. and dadi, i. 2001, ‘unpacking europe,’ in unpacking europe, towards a critical reading, s. hassan and i. dadi (eds), museum boijmans van beuningen nai publishers, rotterdam. [online]. available: http://europa.eu.int/eurlex/lex/lexuriserv/site/en/com/2004/com2004_0469en01.pdf. [accessed 25 february 2007]. klapisch, c. 2003, l’auberge espagnol (the spanish apartment), twentieth century fox film corporation. passerini, l. 2002, il mito d’europa. radici antiche per nuovi simboli, giunti, firenze. pratt, m., and rosello, m. (eds) 2007 ‘creolisation: towards a non-eurocentric europe,’ special issue of culture, theory and critique, spring. thieler, t. 2005, political symbolism and political integration, manchester university press, manchester. tsing, a. 2005, friction. an ethnography of global connection, princeton university press, princeton, nj, and oxford. portal, vol. 4, no. 2, july 2007. 12 http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressreleasesaction.do?reference=speech/05/118&format= html&aged=0&language=en&guilanguage=en http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressreleasesaction.do?reference=speech/05/118&format= html&aged=0&language=en&guilanguage=en http://europa.eu.int/eurlex/lex/lexuriserv/site/en/com/2004/com2004_0469en01.pdf unhomely europes dimitris eleftheriotis (university of glasgow), murray pratt reference list portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: attig, r. 2019. el clock de la estación, by fabián severo. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, http://epress.lib. uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal, 16:1/2, 141-142. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal. v16i1/2.6298 portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia.issn: 14492490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu. au/ojs/index.php/portal cultural works el clock de la estación, by fabián severo remy attig (translator) corresponding author: dr remy attig, department of modern languages, immaculata hall 207, st. francis xavier university, 2360 notre dame avenue, antigonish, nova scotia b2g 2w5, canada. emails: remy attig: remy.attig@gmail.com; fabián severo: fabiansevero@gmail.com doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6298 article history: received 19/09/2018; accepted 12/2/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract fabián severo’s collection of short stories, viralata, was originally published in portuñol, a hybrid mix of spanish and portuguese, as it is spoken near the city of artigas in northern uruguay. portuñol, like other hybrid border varieties, has rarely been published, though it would seem that interest is growing since the 1990s, particularly in uruguay. as a scholar of hybrid, diaspora, and transnational languages i decided to explore the possibility of translating this work into spanglish, the hybrid mix of spanish and english commonly heard among latinxs in the usa. though the cultural realities of portuñol speakers and spanglish speakers are different, there are some important parallels: literature in both has emerged only relatively recently, little has been translated into either language variety, education is not conducted in either, and the dominant discourses around language in both contexts have traditionally favoured literature written in the prestige varieties of english, spanish, or portuguese—which should come as no surprise. given this, i wondered about the experience, aesthetic, and cultural value of putting two distant borders of spanish in contact through translation. this is my first translation of fabián severo’s work. the text was translated and published with the author’s permission. the original story is from viralata (rumbo editorial, montevideo, 2015). keywords: fabián severo; viralata; spanglish; translation declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 141 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6298 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6298 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6298 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:remy.attig@gmail.com mailto:fabiansevero@gmail.com http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6298 el clock de la estación el clock de la estación is stuck on nine to show that time is stopped en la frontera. on the shady side of the ibirapitá time slows down. if you spent much time there you could feel that the alma de los trenes still left people con ganas de llorar. i didn’t see the trenes porque cuando my roots started to spread they were already buried. pero mi padrino told me many travel stories, always moving entre los campos, sintiendo the size of the world en el perfume del monte, in the arroyo that makes someone want to be happy. no sé por qué, en artigas, they let the restos de la estación rot away como si the life of the bricks no valiera nada and the bones of the vías, rusting away in front of our eyes. acá es así, when the hands on the clock stop turning, todo se envejece as if falling ash painted the walls of the city. i played with trains en el patio de mi casa. pondría one box of fósforos inside another and would travel the pueblos de mi patio, imagining the people subiendo y bajando, carrying bags filled with recuerdos in the rows of the car. en mi cabeza the trips that i had seen on tv se mezclaba con la imagen de los restos of the tracks tossed by the station. i tried to put my dreams en la caja de fósforos. sometimes, cuando mi madre hacía frijoles en la olla a presión, i thought i heard the train travelling from room to room in my house. una vez i asked if that’s how a train sounded and she said: ‘chicharra, tu siempre con la cabeza en las nubes.’ but she didn’t tell me si el tren tenía la voz de la olla. almost my whole like was like that, filling the holes that artigas left in my skin con la imaginación. the day the last train entró en el olvido, este pueblo turned to dust. that’s why el polvo is always flying around, settling on everything. el polvo se va pegando en la piel and even if you bathe everyday you’re still gonna have a dark line on your neck. lavo mis manos varias veces al día, and the water always runs off brown. i have dust in my throat, in my eyes, en el corazón. en artigas, whoever doesn’t get out in time, envejece para siempre. maybe that’s why the train wanted to get out, para que su espalda wouldn’t hunch over, it wanted to keep the cry of its tracks alive, se salvó de transformarse into a statue with a stone tongue and tombs for feet. en la frontera, for twenty years it’s been nine o’clock. attig portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019142 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: balma-tivola, c. 2021. who are you? what do you do? what do you bring? a florin! on reclusions, dissidences, mutual aid, kinships, and irony during italian lockdown. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 79–84. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i12.7423 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay who are you? what do you do? what do you bring? a florin! on reclusions, dissidences, mutual aid, kinships, and irony during italian lockdown cristina balma-tivola corresponding author: cristina balma tivola, cbalmativola@gmail.com doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7423 article history: received 12/09/2020; accepted 20/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract this essay elaborates upon some ethnographic notes taken during informal participant observation by a freelance cultural anthropologist living in turin (capital of piedmont, one of the regions most affected by covid-19) during the pandemic in italy. the essay explores many issues faced by italian residents during the lockdown, including inequality and grassroots initiatives, isolation conditions in a variety of contexts (home, prisons, retirement homes), stereotypes of italians from abroad, the misunderstanding of personal distancing guidelines and the concept of family and community. keywords italy; lockdown; dissidence; irony; community; mutual aid essential chronicle phase 1 of the national lockdown to contain the spread of covid-19 began in italy on march 9, and consisted of the obligation to stay at home, the closure of all services, all commercial activities (excluding grocery stores, pharmacies and newsstands), jobs, schools, and social, cultural, religious activities, among others. movement was prohibited except to find goods for survival. encounters with family members not living together were also prohibited. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 79 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7423 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7423 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7423 mailto:cbalmativola@gmail.com http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7423 initially lasting one month, the lockdown was extended for a second month with the loosening of some restrictions (i.e. reopening stationery and clothing stores and allowing walks within 200 meters from home). on may 4, phase 2 began and the government reopened commercial and cultural activities (if able to comply with sanitation requirements and physical distancing), public parks, and also allowed public sporting activities. phase 3 finally began on june 15 when coexistence with the virus coincided with freedom of movement and action at the national level. forms of inequality government measures were strictly observed. the risk of large fines and—more crucially—the shocking image of 60 coffins transported with a column of military vehicles from bergamo to nearby cities for cremation, deterred potential offenders (see berizzi 2020). the situation, however, was experienced in very different ways depending on one’s place of residence, available home space, economic and social conditions, family situation and so on. it is not the same to be confined in a small apartment in the city, perhaps in close contact with family members and in precarious economic conditions, as to enjoy a large house, perhaps with a garden, by the sea, the mountains or the countryside, in solitude and without economic stress or work problems. italy’s health care system, which is guaranteed to everybody, was the only egalitarianism i observed. despite increasing privatisation since the ‘80s and initial priority unjustifiably given to vips and politicians at the onset of the covid-19 crisis, we always had hope, albeit among a thousand difficulties, of being assisted. other aspects of existence, such as economic and social conditions, work and education—all elements that put many people and families at risk of survival—were not adequately managed by regional and national governments. social and personal fragilities were similarly ignored by state institutions until phase 2. the decree #iorestoacasa: plausible measure of protection or house arrest? the decree that determined the national lockdown had the denomination #iorestoacasa [#istayhome] in the form of a hashtag. the only exception to isolation was the purchase of food, pharmaceutical products or newspapers. in all these cases, a special self-certification was needed to leave the house (a downloadable form from the government website had to be filled in with personal data, time of exit, reasons and places of destination). law enforcement agencies, and in some cases even the army, had set up checkpoints to verify the plausibility of people’s excuses to leave their homes. ironically, this prompted citizens to think of the sketch by massimo troisi and roberto benigni in the film nothing left to do but cry (1984), in which the two are listlessly interrogated by a customs officer who concludes his rhetorical questions with a request for a florin to let them pass. although the decree was national, its application was partly left to the regions, whose regional presidents enforced it, sometimes sensibly, and at other times in authoritarian ways (see romanelli 2020). in piedmont, high penalties were imposed on individuals who flouted the rules bordering on the grotesque and accompanied by the continuous refrain from the regional president that we were ‘in a situation of war.’ to define the pandemic in such a way is incorrect because it creates a distorted reality as many intellectuals pointed out in their public speeches at that time. but above all it authorises the possibility of the state establishing special laws to deprive the citizenship of political and social rights, and even to abuse of the state instruments of control. and yet, many of my acquaintances and i, seeing the satisfaction of the councillors at the reeling in of the numbers of (albeit very rare) transgressors, and in their encouragement of citizens to report individuals circulating on the streets to the police, began to feel a great discomfort. the same councillors were not balma-tivola portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202180 making any real effort to properly manage the situation. they did not provide solutions for the very serious shortage of personal protective equipment both in hospitals and in stores. they did not invest in providing resources to hospitals. nor did they design any plan or implement any measure to protect the most vulnerable people. while observing the lockdown guidelines, many of us took advantage of the few guaranteed rights of movement to enjoy a daily walk, to meet our friends, and to bring help to people in fragile conditions. strategies of dissidence, that is: how we managed to get out anyway the first week of lockdown in italy was broadcast worldwide. the classic stereotype of italians as a people characterised by the need for sociality that takes every opportunity to party was confirmed to be correct. the decree relegated citizens home but did not prevent them from using balconies to go out, sing, play and hang colourful rainbows accompanied by the words ‘everything will be fine.’ italians’ infamy for breaking rules was evidenced by using the excuse of walking the dog to explain their outings, excuses that reached such absurd heights that the sardinian town of mamoiada felt obliged to specify that the dog should be alive. those who decided to leave their home following the decree had to, as indicated, fill in a form to justify why they were going out. i moved from time to time on foot, by bicycle, or by car, enjoying a city where the air was finally clean and the noises muffled. dramatically, the only remaining sound, with a certain continuity, was that of the ambulances, which continuously brought to mind the real situation far from the apparent idyll. on the form i indicated the places where i would go to satisfy basic needs for myself and my family, and i indicated a distance of 3 kilometres, justifying it with the need to find special food for my fragile health. in this way, i would guarantee myself every day a walk of a few kilometres, where i could meet friends and acquaintances, and also my partner who lives one kilometre away from me on the road to the market. this strategy, to partially lie on the form to extend the distance and time of the outings, allowed people to bring help to their fellow citizens in situations with no institutional support. even though it was to remedy the absolute shortcomings on the part of the institutions, it was still an illegal act. reclusions, inconveniences, massacres at the beginning of the pandemic, the detainees in italian prisons rioted due to overcrowding and the impossibility of being protected by sanitation and distancing measures, causing twelve fatalities (see f.q. 2020). in the absence of alternatives, the government will decide in the future the possibility of detainees serving sentences under house arrest for those convicted of minor crimes. inexplicably, the 376 detained under ‘high security 3’ for mafia crimes will also benefit from this opportunity. the decision is now under investigation by the magistrates (see pipitone 2020 and abbate 2020). the situation is quite different in the permanent centres for repatriation (cpr), where migrants remain imprisoned without any possibility of being guaranteed the abovementioned measures of protection of their health and are completely isolated from the outside. in turin not even the complaint of monica gallo, guarantor of the city for the rights of detainees, will be heard by those in charge (see parisotto 2020). the requests for support from elderly people, families with disabled people, people suffering from mental distress or serious psychiatric disorders, and homeless people, have not been heard and they all remain without home care, day and night centres, and outpatient services. in addition, there are now those who, despite the absence of previous discomforts, find themselves unable to cope alone with anxiety, depression and stress. according to giorgi (2020), at the end of the lockdown there will be 70 suicides directly related to the pandemic. furthermore, the first two months of lockdown led to an increase in violence against women and children, exacerbated by forced cohabitation. but even here no measures are implemented balma-tivola portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202181 to protect them. according to lombardi (2020), at the end of the lockdown there will be 11 victims of femicide. several local administrations including piedmont, lombardy and lazio used retirement homes as places of long-term care for covid-19 patients, taking advantage of pre-existing buildings (although the rooms are not isolated and lack the necessary equipment for the proper management of such patients). healthcare personnel already contracted for the care of elderly guests now suddenly find themselves managing covid-19 patients without proper training (see scacciavillani 2020; barlozzari and benignetti 2020; di benedetto 2020a and 2020b). this decision, which was taken without informing the families of the elderly, led to a large number of deaths and is now currently being investigated by the magistrates (see bazzi 2020). fragile citizens, and grassroots answers italy is a country in which a significant part of the social support of the most fragile segments of the population is undertaken by associations and non-state bodies of various socio-cultural, political and religious orientations, sometimes in consortium with public institutions in charge of these functions, sometimes even replacing them. in turin, a large part of the support interventions for people in difficulty during phase 1 consisted in providing food and basic necessities to those who were in precarious economic conditions and completely abandoned by public institutions that had closed. this action was carried out by both increasing the activity of public canteens in parishes and religious welfare organisations, and by distributing packages of basic necessities by associations and cooperatives and also radical squats (csoa gabrio, prinz eugen). initiatives from merchants included the provision of food boxes for those in need. merchants used their locations as donation and distribution points to provide wooden boxes filled with food and other goods. these were often placed at bus stops and crossroads. despite the risk of the food boxes being stolen by those who didn’t need them, this strategy was successful because it was simple. with so many boxes in so many locations, anyone who went out to do the shopping would see them and perhaps put something in them. i myself spent several days riding my bike with my backpack to put rice, pasta, legumes (even on behalf of my family who stayed at home) in the boxes in my neighbourhood. alone and on my bike, i was able to go unnoticed in a situation where leaving home without a valid excuse could be punished. spacing, social relations, relatives another issue related to the government’s management of the emergency was the conceptual misunderstanding of the term ‘social distancing’ that was used to refer to personal/physical distancing. this semantic misunderstanding had several consequences. anthropologist edward t. hall’s (1996) theory of proxemics distinguishes ‘personal distance’ (characterised by the interactions among good friends or family and reaching the distance of about 120cm between two interlocutors) from ‘social distancing’ (characterised by the interactions among acquaintances and reaching the distance of about 370cm between two interlocutors). following hall’s prescription, it would have been much more correct to talk about ‘personal distancing.’ this confusion between a specific measure (‘one meter physical distancing’) and a blurred subjective concept such as that of ‘social distancing,’ deprived the citizens of their responsibility towards their own safety and of those around them and allowed the government and councillors to implement compulsory restrictions (see bennato 2020). the popular conflation of ‘physical distance’ as being some sort of ‘social isolation,’ led, in many cases, to dramatic loneliness—especially when intersecting with various fragilities by and beyond the pandemic. people’s need for sociality led to a tendency to talk to acquaintances who otherwise would be avoided. the cartoonist zerocalcare, much loved and followed in italy, drew a strip in which he asks the head of balma-tivola portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202182 the government to promulgate an amnesty once the pandemic is over, declaring we are all free to forget our promises to each other during the lockdown. not surprisingly, we secretly felt a complicit joy when a motorist who visited his lover’s residence during phase 1 because he and his lover were unable to resist the desire, was stopped by police only when already on his way back home. the pandemic invoked in me and in others the instinct to take care of our community. hence, the baking of apple pies (always heartening) and gifting cuttings from my flowering plants to my neighbours, but also my adherence to online projects designed to provide company and a smile and a vision of human creativity. i congiunti/the conjuncts during phase 1 many of us resorted to the trick of making appointments at stores to see our friends. the phase 2 decree on may 4 provided for the possibility of meeting among congiunti (literal translation: conjuncts). who are conjuncts? italian residents had to ask themselves the same question. this antiquated, unused and extremely formal term, refers to family members with whom you have a ‘stable affection.’ the possibility of only meeting with congiunti caused citizens to revolt, as they generally cared little about being able to meet an unknown third cousin and who instead wanted to see their friends. this government policy uncorked a bottle: from that moment we started meeting again, filling in the new self-certification form provided by the government with our own interpretation of the term, sometimes with hilarious results. an anthropologist colleague circulated a fake certification online in which patterns of clans and lineages were reproduced, questioning whether marriage was monoor polygamous and residence matrior patrilocal, and we invented all sorts of stable relationships that included bogus sapphic relationships, undeclared adoptions and putative fraternities. anything, in order to meet whom we considered our real ‘family,’ even without blood ties. three months later to leave our region and/or go abroad, we had to enter phase 3 at the beginning of june. but as the economic and human costs of the pandemic and the government’s mishandling of the crisis became clearer, many of us experienced a deep distrust towards the government and councillors. a gap emerged between those who, despite the pandemic, still follow institutional initiatives, economic measures and strategies, and those who oppose or resist them. summer vacation mostly occurred within national borders, but wherever you moved there was always the shadow of the virus lurking. this risk has penetrated people’s minds to such an extent that we now wear masks everywhere on our own initiative and we only meet loved ones who we know to be equally attentive. what i hope for in the coming months is that we remain healthy and that this situation—if it must continue—will last so long that we will mature as a society, but not so much to destroy us as a community. my hope is that nothing returns as it was before, but that everything becomes much better than it was before. wouldn’t that be a wonderful outcome for such a tragic event? references abbate, l. 2020, ‘esclusivo: coronavirus, i mafiosi al 41bis lasciano il carcere e tornano a casa,’ l’espresso, 21 april. online, available: 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https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/03/19/coronavirus-in-lombardia-pazienti-covid-in-residenze-per-anziani-sindacati-non-e-soluzione-non-hanno-spazi-e-mascherine/5741352/ https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/03/19/coronavirus-in-lombardia-pazienti-covid-in-residenze-per-anziani-sindacati-non-e-soluzione-non-hanno-spazi-e-mascherine/5741352/ portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal introducing hyperworld(s): language, culture, and history in the latin american world(s) paul allatson and jeff browitt, university of technology sydney many of the articles published in this special edition of portal responded to what we hoped would be the provocative, yet conceptually open, theme of the 2006 biennial conference of the association of iberian and latin american studies of australasia: „hyperworld: language, culture, history.‟ 1 the conference, and subsequent call for papers, aimed to elicit critical engagement with the processes by which, in the early 21 st century—an information age of hypertechnology, post-nationalism, post-fordism, and dominating transnational media—culture and economy have become fused, and globalizations tend towards the mercantilization, commodification, and privatization of human experience. we recognized that access to the technologies of globalizations is uneven. although cyberspace and other hypertechnologies have become an integral part of workspaces, and of the domestic space in most households, across western industrialized societies, and for the middle and upper-classes everywhere, this is not a reality for most people in the world, including the latin american underclasses, the majority of the continent‟s population. but we also agreed with pundits who recognize that that limited access has not prevented a „techno-virtual spillover‟ into the historicalmaterial world. 2 more and more people—including those not in possession of the technologies—are increasingly touched by the techno-virtual realm and its logics, with a 1 organized by jeff browitt, paul allatson, marivic wyndham, david cahill, and blanca tovías, the vii international australian and iberian studies association conference was held at the university of technology, sydney, 27-29 september, 2006. 2 we are indebted to ilaria vanni for her inputs into the discussion here, and for the term „techno-virtual spillover.‟ allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 2 resultant transformation of global imaginaries in response to, for instance, the global spread of privatised entertainment and news via tv, satellites and the internet, and virtualized military operations (wars on terror, drugs, and rogue regimes). under these hyperworldizing conditions, we asked, how might we talk about language, culture and history in latin america, especially since language has an obvious, enduring importance as a tool for communication, and as the means to define culture and give narrative shape to our histories and power struggles? the question is particularly pertinent given that 2005 marked the quincentenary of the publication of perhaps the most influential literary work in the hispanophone world, volume one of cervantes‟s el ingenioso hidalgo don quijote de la mancha. the novel‟s early „american‟ history—a tale of intrigue, power, and resistance—is salutary here: due to the inquisition‟s ban on importing novels into (and publishing them in) spain‟s american colonies, the text was smuggled to clandestine readers in wine barrels (vargas llosa 1995). in our contemporary hyper-technological world, parallel struggles are legion. media pirating, the anarchic spread of data over the internet, and „nonlinear network dynamics‟ across diverse communication modes—print, satellite, radio, tv, virtual and the quotidian verbal (terranova 2004)—aim to challenge, and often do defeat, drives to censorship and control over illicit publication and, therefore, reading and the capacity for subversion. but that drive is confronted by state capacities (e.g. china, burma, iran, and cuba, but also governments everywhere) to block communication and www access, thus engendering ever-morphing and proliferating modes and venues for counter-action. the example of don quijote is instructive for our theme in another way: the protagonist‟s struggle to differentiate reality from illusion plays out against the epochal and epistemic shift from the medieval age to the renaissance. that period witnessed the first recognizable wave of globalization driven by christian imperialism and the plundering of the non-european other. it was responsible for the colonization of the continent‟s indigenous peoples and the integration of the region into a nascent world economic circuit. cervantes himself was no mere bystander to that historical shift: he lost an arm in the so-called greatest naval battle of the renaissance—the battle of lepanto—which pitted the „holy league‟ of christian nations against islam in the form of the ottoman turks. allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 3 a terminological heir to that epistemic transformation, „hyperworld(s)‟ presented—and still does—numerous conceptual and epistemological challenges. whether unintended or not, it evokes cyberspace, thus gesturing toward either the seamless integration of physical and virtual reality, or its converse, a false opposition between the historicalmaterial and the virtual. the term may also evoke unresolved contradictions between discourses of technophobia and technophilia and, by extension, lead to dichotomized readings of the age in terms of the limits to, and capacities for, political resistance. michael hardt and antonio negri‟s descriptions of the current age of empire—a vast zone of „peace‟ somehow outside history (2000: xiv-xv) that reconfigures class struggle (213)—plays with those evocations. positing that future resistances to „the places of power‟ will be engineered by the world‟s poorest inhabitants (a migratory „specter‟) in tandem with „flows of political refugees and transfers of intellectual labor power‟ (21213), hardt and negri caution that those movements seem to generate „a new rootless condition of poverty and misery‟ (213). they therefore advocate two new modes of desertion: an „anthropological exodus‟ composed of resisting bodies „incapable of submitting to command … of adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the regulations of a traditional sex life, and so forth‟ (215-16); and a virtual „machinic exodus‟ through which „the subject is transformed into (and finds the cooperation that constitutes it multiplied in) the machine‟ (366-67). the revolutionary result, hardt and negri posit, will be a struggle between agents of the real and the virtual to seize „the processes of machinic metamorphosis‟ (367). that struggle, interestingly enough, appears to be alive and well in popular sci-fi films such as the matrix trilogy (dir. a. & l. wachowski, 1999, 2003, 2003), a tale of the conflicts unleashed by the dissolving boundaries between embodiment and virtuality. it would thus seem that many contemporary producers and consumers of popular culture regard that dissolution as, if not yet a representation of actual lived experiences, then, at the very least, imaginable, the cinematic fiction predicting the inevitable virtualized (machinic) human future. in a 1999 interview with media mente also concerned with that future, paul virilio spoke of the risks that new technologies present in terms of losing a sense of what is real, a loss linked to the accelerated velocity of contemporary human life, from information exchange to the virtualization of human relations. virilio recognizes the positive possibilities that hyper-technology may provide, but he calls for a more balanced and unified „stereo-reality.‟ in europe the renaissance created a new sense of allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 4 reality by a change in perspective. we are now called upon to do the same, he argues, in order to establish an equilibrium between the local, concrete material existence in which we find ourselves, and the virtualized global world with which we interact and communicate „live‟ in real time, and that increasingly conditions and dominates our perceptual and conceptual faculties, the „techno-virtual spillover‟ again. in the past the economy was in a recognizable relationship to the human body and its productive capacities, but now, con l‟accelerazione delle tecnologie propria del ventesimo secolo—ripensiamo a marinetti, ai futuristi—è evidente che c‟è bisogno di un‟economia politica della velocità. il nostro è il mondo dell‟accelerazione assoluta; … si è passati dalla velocità locale e relativa dei trasporti, a quella globale e assoluta delle trasmissioni ... (1999) 3 one recognizable upshot of the instantaneous transfer of data is that financial markets become unstable and seemingly subject to rapid collapse. for virilio, absolute velocity can lead to absolute inertia, since „non abbiamo più bisogno di andare incontro alle cose, tutto arriva fino a noi.‟ 4 he adds: „temo l‟avvento di un senso di claustrofobia globale, e come ho detto questa è una delle grandi questioni ecologiche che riguardano le future generazioni. la terra è troppo piccola per la velocità assoluta.‟5 however, in this initial foray into the concept, we regard such evocations of the velocities underpinning (future) world virtualization as partial in characterizing the contradictions of (contemporary) hyperworld(s). perhaps hyperworld(s), then, can be employed to gesture toward—without prescription—all those changes in the contemporary world once registered as effects or exemplars of „late capitalism,‟ „postmodernity,‟ „globalization,‟ „post-fordism,‟ „global assemblages,‟ „neoliberalism,‟ „hyperreality,‟ „empire,‟ „dromology,‟ the purported „end of history,‟ the triumph of the „spectacle‟ or the „simulacrum,‟ and the rise of „cyborg culture.‟ such terms—which combined indicate there is no single explicable model of globalization; rather there are myriad possible globalisms, or global imaginaries—come to us from numerous theorists—virilio (1986 [1977]), lyotard (1979), eco (1983), baudrillard (1983), 3 „with the acceleration of twenty-first century technology—let us recall marinetti and the futurists—it‟s clear that we need a political economy of velocity. our world is one of absolute velocity; … we have passed from the local and relative velocity of transport to the global and absolute velocity of transmissions …‟ our translation. 4 „we have no need to search for things, everything comes to us.‟ our translation. 5 „i fear the advent of a sense of global claustrophobia, and flowing from this is one of the great ecological questions confronting future generations. the earth is too small for absolute velocity.‟ our translation. allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 5 harvey (1989), haraway (1991), jameson (1991), fukuyama (1992), debord (1994), baumann (1998), hardt and negri (2000), and sassen (2006)—to mention some of the most influential figures in this arena of grand-narrative speculation and assertion. 6 in the view of these and many more critics, human life has entered a new age, one marked by the waning of history (with a capital h) as a hitherto unproblematic court of truth. in this age we encounter the hyper-acceleration and evanescence of global flows of culture, products, money, people, and even crime, diseases, and human-made pollution against a background of market totalitarianism, ethnic cleansing and growing religious militarism (zionist, islamic and christian fundamentalist, hindu nationalist), processes that register in numerous, often contradictory, and yet potentially insurrectionary and surprising ways, as the following selected examples attest:  the techno-intertextualization of the image and the word and the digitalization of communication, as announced by the digitally enhanced and filtered news reporting (from the usa) of armed conflicts (without corpses or carnage) since the first gulf war;  the aestheticization of politics, perhaps best exemplified by the post-cold war triumph of kitsch over totalitarian ideologies in post-soviet europe, a process also at work in the still-communist world (hoberman 1998; abreu 2001; allatson 2007a);  the post-fordist restructuring of economies across the planet (lipietz 1992; ash 1994). this has not simply caused the immaterialization of labour (precarity) with the shift (in industrial economies) „from jobs based in industry to jobs based in the service industry, namely producing communication, information and knowledge‟; it has also caused the immaterialization of goods, „such as affect, social relations and desire‟ (tarì & vanni 2005). another sign of postfordism is the „programming‟ of both labour and immigration so that working bodies in certain capitalist sectors (indian call centres, for example) need no longer cross national lines to do their work or to be players in another state‟s economy (aneesh 2006);  the cyborgization of human bodies and genders, at least among those with the means to take corporeal and identificatory advantage of such technology (haraway 1991);  the rise of downloadable modes of consumption, from shopping and entertainment to recording (and then relaying) the minutiae of daily experience (witness spectators at sporting, musical or any manner of public or private events paying mediated attention to proceedings as they make video mementoes on their cellular phones);  the conversion of the www into the main communicative venue of our epoch (despite, or perhaps, because of the hegemony of cyberenglish) for finding information, assessing an individual‟s „impact‟ or worth, and hosting a multitude 6 for more detailed elaborations, see the section on globalization in milner and browitt (2002). allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 6 of autobiographical (named and re/misnamed) fragments, cvs, wish-lists, desires, opinions, images, and personal me-too-bytes. moreover, given that the cybertrawler‟s imprints and tracks elude the best attempts at erasure, the www potentially forever chronicles the evidential data of a logged-on existence;  the simultaneous conversion of the www and other technologies into technologies of resistance, as typified by activist communities that use texting to facilitate rapid, impromptu mobilizations, and by the indigenous zapatista movement in chiapas, mexico, which for a decade and a half has transmitted its communiqués and manifestoes via the www, accessed innovatively and clandestinely from power grids and telephone lines in forays from the movement‟s jungle bases (coronado & hodge 2001);  the hosting by immigrant receiver states of transnational or satellite communities, which are connected by the telephone and the internet, routines of circular travel, creative neocultural adaptation to life in two (or more) states, and the sending of remittances. one example is the indigenous mexican mixtecs who have made california another home, in the process becoming oaxacalifornios/ians (kearney 2000; cohen 2001);  the amorphous reproduction of „terrorist‟ cells with no identifiable centralized order or command and, in direct response, the sequestering of purported enemy combatants in legal black holes outside the reach of national or international jurisdictions;  the technologization of national border security, from iris-recognition software at immigration-control desks to satellite and infrared surveillance along permeable frontiers. one example is the us-mexico border, the busiest land frontier in the world, a key line in the region‟s economic reorderings announced by nafta, and one along whose us side roam vigilantes opposed to ongoing undocumented immigration by workers from the south, and anti-vigilantes concerned to assist such workers and safeguard their welfare, hence one pundit‟s description of it as a „hyperborder‟ (romero 2007).  the rush for genomic patenting and copyrighting, the genetic modification of crops, and the inexorable reduction of access to diverse seed varieties faced by farmers across the globe, and not only in the so-called third world, and a proactive glocal chain of market spaces in which such diversity is being preserved and re-circulated;  the accelerating rates of global warming and the reduction of biodiversity, and increasing deployment of new or refigured power-generating technologies to address those processes;  and so on … these tendencies—diverse, proliferating, intersecting, contradictory—seem to have advanced us further into a dizzying swirl of human activity—veritable hyperactivity— that is disorienting even for the most reliable of pundits and futurists keen to reveal and explain the future to us. yet despite the confidence of the speculations made by numerous critics, we would suggest that economic and technological change may be running ahead of our ability to socially and culturally critique, let alone comprehend, their long-term effects. allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 7 how do these changes affect language, culture and history, which were once taken to reliably represent nations and their imagined communities? one need look no further than the managerial economic speak of „futures markets,‟ „hedge funds‟ and „sub-prime mortgages,‟ of discourses of war that seek to depersonalize life („collateral damage‟) or project it into a pop cultural, disney-fied, quasi-religious realm predetermined by manichean logics („evil empires‟; „axis of evil‟), or reduce it to absurdity („false intelligence‟). it is not so much that language is being debased here (as if it carried an inherent set of values beyond what we arbitrarily assign it), as it is reflecting the hierarchized power relations—and their selective, unpredictable logics of exclusion/inclusion—that underpin the contemporary world. as george orwell once pointed out, the integrity of language depends on the integrity of those who use it: „political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind‟ (1946). it is important to note that even those communities or individuals seemingly outside, or left behind by, globalizing processes or mundializaciones (remote farming communities, indigenous peoples resisting state strictures of the singular nation-state community, developing nations, anyone or thing discarded by capitalist advancement) nevertheless suffer from, and yet are often enticed by, its economic, cultural and environmental effects and promises. there is no autarkic outside of contemporary hyperworld(s) (or whatever term may be used to describe current globalisms). it is also necessary to stress that technology and virtualization are not negative in, and of, themselves. they are merely ciphers for concrete political, economic and cultural changes under globalizations. being against technology and globalisms or change itself is like being against oxygen. it makes no sense, and it is life-defeating. indeed, one of the ironies of anti-globalization movements is their dependence on, and productive use of, global technologies, from mobile phones to the internet, as exemplified by the zapatistas mentioned earlier. what matters is what is said and done, and for whom, in the name of technology and globalization, to choose two words that for many people trigger visceral reactions, both positive and negative. as jerry everard argues, the question of uneven access to the technologies of hyperworldization—the „hypermedia‟ identified by deibert (1997)—is perhaps better treated as a divergence between those who have, in a foucauldian allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 8 knowledge-equals-power sense, the means of knowing, and those who do not: the distinction between haves and have nots in the information economy will be only in part a distinction of access to specific items of information. rather the distinction will be one of access to a way of looking at the world. people without access to such technologies will find themselves increasingly less able to comprehend and to deal with the emerging changes in global economy. (everard 2000: 161) similar arguments have been made by gabriela coronado and bob hodge who, analyzing current claims that we have experienced a „virtual revolution,‟ re-read marx‟s understandings of surplus value and ideology through an optical (virtual) lens: capitalism has developed a new array of devices to fulfill its old aim, to extract surplus value wherever it can. all these devices to some degree draw on resources of virtuality: “virtual surplus value” makes it easier to appropriate other kinds of surplus value .… yet these are only the dreams of one class, shadows projected onto the screen of virtuality, which has space for many other projections. outside the camera obscura of capitalist ideology the struggle continues, precarious or strong labour against strong or precarious capital, in a field of struggle unpredictably affected by new technologies of production and information. virtuality has conditioned all forms of labour to some degree, creating different classes of worker, set against each other, not conscious of the web of virtuality that links them all into a single multitude. that unity is virtual in one sense—a potential that could be activated by virtuality in another sense, the resources of the net. the connections are not being made at the moment, by the real users who are the only ones who could make this grand alliance virtual, and thence real. but will they? (coronado & hodge 2005) the continuities that coronado and hodge identify between the virtualization of labour and surplus value today and the history of capitalist labour exploitation remind us to be wary of making „the virtual‟ into yet another grand narrative, the governing technology or metaphor of our epoch and its ills and possibilities. and as nick dyer whiteford (1999) and tiziana terranova (2004) demonstrate, if there has been a „virtualtechnological revolution‟ in the current information age, then that revolution also opens up numerous options and spaces for new political struggles, resistances and insurgencies. in our conception, then, hyperworld(s) cannot be contained by the term virtuality; it encompasses, exceeds, challenges, and devours it. the production of hyperworld(s), or hyperworldization, connotes acceleration and hyperactivity on social, economic and financial levels, the intensified commodification of most aspects of human life, the time-space compression of communication and much cultural production, the reordering of social relations themselves over-determined by technology wedded to capitalist market values, and, as a result, the re-ordering of daily life, cultural expression, and political activism for individuals and communities across the planet. even human desire is inflected by the promises evoked by a virtual world. these processes and intensities mean that new modes of reading the interactive and contradictory discursive allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 9 fragmentations of the current age are required. thus, rather than regarding cyberspace as the age‟s technological hallmark or dominant trope, we might make deeper sense of hyperworld(s)—the bracketed plural implying myriad intersecting worlds within „the‟ world—by identifying how the interactive logics of virtuality suggest narratorial entry points into contemporary lived historical-material and imagined complexities and potentials. as mackenzie wark wryly puts it, „the virtual is that world of the potential ways of life of which the way things are is just an instance‟ (1999: 11). useful here is marie-laure ryan‟s nuanced detailing of virtuality as narrative links, webs of interactive story-telling modes and discursive fragments that are continually renarrativized, reformatted, „upgraded,‟ and even lost by cyberproducers and cyberconsumers alike (2001: 19). ryan‟s innovative reading of the virtual implies that „the real‟ consists of multiple narratives or „branching texts‟ across distinct, yet always potentially interlinked and cross-referenced, historical, geopolitical, socioeconomic, linguistic, and cultural times and spaces. also useful for our purposes is everard‟s argument that „states are above all cultural artifacts,‟ just as the internet is: another way of looking at this is to see states as information produced by and through practices of signification—from the writing of foundational documents (constitutions) to the discourses of smart bombs and the global spread of coca-cola. sovereign identity, then, is comprised of bits, rather than atoms. (2000: 7) if states emerge as bits, bytes, networks, and flows, all of us, everard claims, „are already living in virtual states,‟ the state being „a legal fiction—an important one, but a fiction nonetheless,‟ which hinges on its capacity to narrativize acceptable national identities—yet more bits, bytes, networks, and flows—in a bounded, finite space (2000: 152). for everard, it is no coincidence that the word cyber „comes from the greek “κυβερ,” which means to steer, to discipline or to govern. so there is a sense of governance embodied within the term “cyberspace”‟ (152). but it is a tenuous sense of governance for states and the internet alike. in their very boundary-marking procedures states—paralleling the operations of cyberspace—conceal and reveal the ways by which they are ever-morphing narrative constructs. the state‟s attempt to generate nationalized identities falters because it and its identities occupy a virtual (in the imaginary sense) nowhere. the fate of states is to defer narrative crisis by maintaining the fiction that national ideals and identities can be retrieved intact and ready for deployment. the virtual trouble of nationality lies in the state‟s inability to repress rival narratives of allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 10 national or antiand non-national potential, a point to which we will return with regard to the post-revolutionary struggles over the idea and fact of „cuba.‟ 7 how do latin american critics conceptualize the recent transformations wrought by technological change, capitalist globalisms, and the transformation of state functionality? as opposed to the cheerleaders of neoliberalism and the notorious washington consensus, many social and cultural theorists view these changes with dismay. néstor garcía canclini, writing in 1999, finds it „curioso que esta disputa de todos contra todos, en la que van quebrando fábricas, se destrozan empleos y aumentan las migraciones masivas y los enfrentamientos y regionales, sea llamada globalización‟ (1999: 10). 8 in this scenario, the traditional public sphere of national politics and its regulatory capabilities no longer seem to function with „national‟ promise: al mismo tiempo que se la concibe como expansión de los mercados y, por tanto, de la potencialidad económica de las sociedades, la globalización estrecha la capacidad de acción de los estados nacionales, los partidos, los sindicatos y en general los actores políticos clásicos. produce mayor intercambio transnacional y deja tambaleando las certezas que daba el pertenecer a una nación. (1999: 21). 9 as in much of the world, the effects of globalisms and technological change are most evident in latin american cities, especially with the hyper-mobility of capital, information and the production of symbolic goods for the cultural industries. latin american cities oscillate between what one collection of essays calls cruelty and utopia (bednarek 2003). that is, the utopian projections of successive urban planners co-exist with the residues of failed modernization processes; the orderly layout of cities on a utopian model of the civitas dei collapses into the anarchic sprawl of the favelas, villas miserias, colonías and tugurios of the 21 st century (lejeune 2003). mass internal migration from rural areas to the mushrooming chaos of latin american cities has further entrenched urban class segregation and violence. at one end of a hyperworldized spectrum, elegant and exclusive, wealthy neighbourhoods are protected by private security guards, walled communities and closed roads. at the other extreme 7 this discussion reworks points made in allatson (2004). 8 „curious that this struggle of all against all, in which factories go bankrupt, employment is destroyed, and mass migration and inter-ethnic and regional conflicts increase, should be called globalization.‟ our translation. 9 „at the same time as we conceptualize [globalization] as market expansion, and by extension the economic potential for societies, globalization limits the capacity for action by national states, political parties, trade unions, in general the classical political actors. it produces greater transnational exchange, but leaves wobbling the certainties that national belonging once offered.‟ our translation. allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 11 this process is perversely mimicked by the no-go slums ruled by armed gangs protecting their drug distribution networks and their trade in stolen goods. that trend is also visible in what mary pat brady calls the „narcoglocal‟ respatialization of daily life in the usamexico borderlands, a zone that is also witnessing rapid urbanization (2002: 186-201). these trends speak of a kind of neo-feudalism and are further mirrored in the class divide in immigration: the wealthy move to the exclusive suburbs of cities like los angeles and miami, 10 the poor to its most abject slums or to the nafta-led promise of the maquiladora (assembly plant) zones in central america and along the us-mexico border. george yúdice (2003) tracks the cultural implications of contemporary globalisms through cultural change, or what he terms the „expediency of culture‟: culture is increasingly being invoked not only as an engine of capital development, as evidenced by the ad nauseum repetition that the audiovisual industry is second only to the aerospace industry in the united states. some have even argued that culture has transformed into the very logic of contemporary capitalism .… this culturalization of the economy has not occurred naturally, of course; it has been carefully coordinated via agreements on trade and intellectual property, such as gatt and wto, laws controlling the movement of mental and intellectual labor (i.e. immigration laws), and so on. in other words, the new phase of economic growth, the cultural economy, is also political economy. (2003: 17) and for yúdice, intellectual property rights (whether in the culture industries, technology itself, or pharmaceuticals) go to the heart of much contemporary capital accumulation („a new control regime‟), since the invention of a product or process suitably patented guarantees virtual capital accumulation in perpetuity, since the labor expended to produce the surplus value („the expropriation of cultural and mental labor‟) is dissociated from the corporate, share-holding class that ultimately benefits from patent use: „with the aid of new communications and informatics technology, [such expropriation] becomes the basis of a new division of labor‟ (2003: 19). and as a consequence of this culturalization of the global economy, we perceive and experience the world—and our labour and capacities to resist the multiple sites of power—in hyper-accelerated and contradictory ways. *** the essays and cultural works comprising this special issue of portal gesture in 10 in miami‟s case, interestingly, the trend often distracts observers from noting the city‟s routine appearance in annual rankings of the five poorest us metropolises. allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 12 direct and oblique ways to many of the themes touched upon above as they pertain in mexico, cuba, colombia, argentina, the usa, and elsewhere. these contributions offer a snapshot of processes occurring all over latin america as the region engages nervously and energetically with the juggernaut of euro-north american, and increasingly east asian, economic and technological change. in „discourses of anti-corruption in mexico. culture of corruption or corruption of culture?,‟ gabriela coronado takes issue with the way mexico and mexicans have been unfairly branded as inherently „corrupt‟ (a national „cultural‟ characteristic). coronado links that process to ongoing euro-north american colonialist ideologies that equate a country‟s level of civilization with its purported level of corruption. coronado examines the way corruption is culturally represented and how such representations conform to what she terms dominant „globalized managerial discourses‟ and their attendant raft of conditions that must be met for global trade purposes, which themselves actively produce „corrupt representations of national cultures and peoples behaviours, instead of targeting local and global sectors that gain from institutionalized corruption.‟ coronado thus highlights how, in our contemporary era, mass-mediated representations of culture becoming enormously powerful, not only for constructing (or deconstructing) national identities, but also for city and country „branding‟ in a hierarchy of economic-cultural „ratings‟ to further serve neocolonial economic penetration. 11 coincidently, that framework also undergirds what coronado and hodge have dubbed the „hypertextual multiculturalism‟ of contemporary mexico (2004). in an even more perverse misrepresentation of mexican hyperreality, vek lewis demonstrates the way tragedy and crime are literally commodified and mass-mediated as histrionic entertainment in a mexican television soap opera. in „of lady-killers and “men dressed as women,”‟ lewis returns to the notorious serial murder of elderly women in mexico city between 2003 and 2005. according to hearsay in which the potential murderer was described as „a man dressed as a woman,‟ the mexico city police department set about raiding transgender prostitutes working the city‟s streets. what intrigues lewis is how the case was co-opted for television entertainment by 11 see donald and gammack for elaborations on contemporary brandings of cities in the pacific rim, especially their discussion of the virtualization of life in the interactive city „as bits‟ (2007: 16-21); the notion of the „city of bits‟ is elaborated by the australian critic mitchell (1999). allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 13 mexico‟s principal television channel, which allowed the false accusations to be woven as a second layer of fiction within the concluding episode of one of its popular soaps, thus contributing to a now well-established practice of gender profiling that positions travestís as inherently suspect, abject, and on the bad edges of the law. what is significant, besides a gross misapplication of state police justice, is the sheer immediacy with which rumour and innuendo (stoked by the chief public prosecutor announcing that the killer could be a travestí) are taken up as more grist for the mill for the everhungry culture industries‟ addiction to sensation as commodity. as lewis notes— drawing on susan rotker‟s (2002) observations about urban violence in latin america—the entwined historias of „real-world‟ serial killer and fictive, telenovelized murder exemplify how mexico city has become „just one among several latin american cities seized by its own sense of vulnerability and danger, whose impacts are increasingly seen in social relations, and whose register is the real turned hyperreal.‟ another indicative phenomenon of hypercultural flows in the americas and elsewhere is the inevitable generation of cultural mixings and transculturations that defy locational fixing. a historical case in point is salsa, the neocultural outcome of puerto rican and cuban musical migration to new york in the post-world war ii era. according to william rowe and vivian schelling (1991: 101), salsa‟s origins and morphing into multiple sites of production typify the hyperworldization of culture per se. 12 as the authors argue, afro-caribbean musical traditions anchored in the plantation and slave economies—and their attendant sociocultural resistances—evolved and translocated in line with the caribbean region‟s 20 th century entry into an international capitalist order, one that also impelled numerous immigrant trajectories: rural to urban, island to island, and caribbean island to the new york metropolis. thus, by the 1970s when new yorkbased cuban and puerto rican musicians were popularizing the then „new‟ sounds of salsa, the genre could not be fixed or homed in a single cultural or national tradition. that is to say, its many origins sustain its constant morphing in numerous worldly sites, with deep consequences for cultural signification in and beyond the americas. thus, if salsa is both „product and symptom of the globalization of culture,‟ further challenges „to received notions of what “latin/o” culture signifies in a globalized epoch are posed 12 the main centres of salsa production remain new york, cuba, puerto rico, and colombia, although the genre has practitioners across the usa, in most hispanophone countries, and in many nonhispanophone countries, including australia. allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 14 by japan‟s orquesta de la luz, which emerged in the 1990s to international acclaim with songs such as “salsa no tiene fronteras” (salsa has no borders), and salsa celtica, a scottish celtic and salsa fusion band formed in 1996, which combines bagpipes and flute with afro-caribbean percussion‟ (allatson 2007b: 208-9). a second example of musical morphing in the americas is tango, a musical form considered in this special issue in guillermo anad‟s „la nueva guarida del tango.‟ the tango is archetypically associated with argentina, another instance of country branding (and city branding in the case of buenos aires) through culture. anad‟s essay explores the fate of the tango form during the period hitherto classified as the período contemporáneo, which coincides with military dictatorship (1976-1983), the increasing mass-mediation of argentine society, and the emergence of rock en español as a new cultural form in argentinean popular music, and in the broader hispanophone world, a phenomenon with multiple genealogies that coalesced with mtv‟s penetration into latin american television markets. in order to give a more inclusive and political reading of the tango‟s trajectory during the período contemporáneo, anad renames the era la nueva guarida del tango (the new hideout/den/shelter of tango) and realigns its reformation with the refashioning of new subjectivities and identities among the youth who fused elements of tango and the globalizing rock music phenomenon. in a related if tangential way, jim levy and peter ross offer a politico-economic reading of late nineteenth-century argentine liberalism as a cautionary tale for our contemporary era. in „the limits of liberalism in argentine provinces 1890-1940: an analysis of provincial expenditures,‟ levy and ross analyze population shifts and economic development during a key historical period of argentine liberalism in the country‟s provinces. their contention is that the limitations of classical liberalism were exposed in this era, thus driving societal and governmental changes that challenged the philosophical and, to an extent, the economic foundations of the liberalist model. levy and ross‟s analysis reminds us of how late nineteenth-century laissez faire economic liberalism was an earlier manifestation of contemporary neoliberalism, starkly reprised under carlos menem, especially in relation to what the authors regard as „the underlying antagonism between the laissez-faire liberal state dominated by political-economic elites and underpinned by a discourse of „law and order,‟ and fair and equitable social welfare provisions for the poor.‟ neoliberal hegemony in latin america mimics this allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 15 antagonism with its mantra of the need for the withdrawal of the state from the social realm. only after two decades of mostly disastrous neoliberal policies have social democratic reforms re-asserted themselves in political discourse, if not in practice. if the „hyper‟ in „hyperworld(s)‟ has relevance here, then, it is not only in terms of expanded speed, reach, links, and spatial dimensions—many of the standard dimensions of capitalist expansion since the industrial revolution and, as virilio argues, of modern warfare and media structures (1986)—for it also extends to the liberal philosophical underpinning in which the individual is privileged over the collective. but whatever fantasies of freedom that hyperworld(s) might proffer the individual, „materialism cannot be completely overcome or ignored. the sting in the tail of the sustained trip into the hyperworld is increased stress in the real world of time, human relations and environmental well-being.‟ 13 moreover, hyperworld(s) themselves may become more disordered and dangerous, in eerie parallels of numerous science fictional accounts that depict societies careering out of control. as noted earlier, such questions of control very much pertain to the nation, and in this issue are raised in two articles dealing with post-revolutionary cuba. like all national illusions, cuba attains meaning in terms of its ability to generate a nationalized identity that might be called cubanidad, or cubanness. 14 but the nation‟s identity productions emerge, to borrow nicole stenger‟s definition of cyberspace, from a place that like „cyberspace, is like oz—it is, we get there, but it has no location‟ (1991: 53). virtually nowhere, cuba operates in what is, to borrow again from stenger, „a sort of atmospheric depression in history,‟ concentrating in itself „aspirations for fundamental re-sourcing‟ (56). by this stenger means data storage in the virtual realm and its interactive retrieval by cyberusers. but in the case of the cuban nowhere, „re-sourcing‟ would also encompass rival (island, exile and other) aspirations to secure and maintain image-sets of national identity that can be retrieved ready for ideological deployment. as a result, cuba represents a scenario of competing virtues and virtualities, with implications far beyond the imagined boundaries of the cuban nowhere. crucial here is the aura of postrevolutionary cuba in continental american imaginaries. since 1959, and particularly during the cold war stand-offs of the 1960s, especially the failed bay of pigs invasion 13 we thank jim levy and peter ross for permission to include their informal observations here. 14 this section on cuba-as-virtuality reprises and reworks arguments made in allatson (2004). allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 16 (1961) and the cuban missile crisis (1962), cuba has occupied a central role in a panlatin american imagination that interpreted the island‟s struggle against the usa as paradigmatic of broader continental power struggles, economic inequities, and ideological polarizations. the corollary of this has been the centrality of a demonized cuba in the usa‟s own hemispherical presentation of itself as a bulwark against marxist-leninism, and as a cold-war champion of democracy and capitalist enterprise. and intertwined with those versions of cuba are the many fantasy cubas that emerged, according to alan west, from the island‟s history of subjugation and exploitation under the spanish and the us empires: pearl of the antilles, tropical paradise, whorehouse of the caribbean, cuba as gold mine, cane field (slave trade), military outpost (strategic location/geopolitical pawn), tourist haven, exotic folkloric locale (flesh depot, fun in the sun, shed your inhibitions), investment opportunity (source of cheap labor), or revolutionary menace/terrorist haven (a u.s. nightmare). (1997: 2) but whatever the potential in the past for military engagement between the two countries, this has been displaced onto media and cultural battles for hearts and minds around the world. such battles have been prosecuted through media representations and cultural initiatives trading on manichean versions of cuba as both „potential‟ and „lost ideal,‟ a notable example being the eruption into global media view of the bitter custody battle over elián gonzález in 1999/2000. 15 the historical competition between these imaginaries continues to overdetermine the virtual potentiality and governing (national and ideological) logics of the cuban nowhere in its post-1959 guise. cuba as „lost ideal‟ expresses the lament on the left for either a sense of betrayal (castro‟s authoritarianism) or loss in the face of conservative reaction (revolutionary cuba‟s failure is all the fault of us interventionism and thus cuba‟s now eternal „special period‟). cuba as „lost ideal‟ among liberals and conservatives turns on an image of pre-revolutionary cuba idealized by both the us middle-classes (cuba as exotic cabaret) and the displaced cuban upper and middle classes in south florida (cuba as tropical paradise with radical class and racial disparities conveniently expunged). such crude manichean readings have made it difficult to say what and where cuba is, or is supposed to be, and what it was before rival devils (imperialism and communism) squared off. a space of present-absences 15 for divergent elaborations of the extraordinary (hyper) impact and importance of the elián case see, fernández (2000), mclaren & pinkney-pastrana (2001), bardach (2002), rowe (2002), banet-weiser (2003), de la torre (2003), allatson (2004), sahlins (2004), molina guzmán (2005), and demo (2007). allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 17 (ramos 2000: 155), the cuban cultural artefact thus obeys logics very much like those stenger identifies as guiding the appeal, and danger, of the cyber-nowhere. cuba, too, occupies an inexhaustible „ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time‟ (1991: 55), but it is always faced by ontological stalling and proliferation. in his analysis of one controversial struggle over the control of cuba‟s hyperworldized image, „at the crossroads between paris, texas and the buena vista social club, havana: wim wenders and ry cooder as collaborators,‟ stephen gregory uses the motif of the „crossroads‟ to theorize the kind of politics that wenders and cooder practice in their world-wide hit documentary about a group of aging cuban musicians who have witnessed cuba both before and after the revolution. for gregory, buena vista social club is not an instance of cultural imperialism or imperialist cultural appropriation, the charge that has been often levelled at the film by critics in the usa and elsewhere. rather gregory highlights how the „controversy‟ (only an issue, it seems, on the left) was part of a much wider struggle in the americas over control of historical memory within a context of collapsed utopian narratives. marivic wyndham and peter read‟s „memory and a hard place: revisiting central havana,‟ approaches a similar struggle between competing cuban memories and imaginations since the revolution. in their piece the struggle over the cuban image is displaced onto central havana as perceived by two aging cuban men—one a resident of miami and a television celebrity, and director of the clandestine video, la habana de hoy y de siempre (villaverde 1991), and the other a havana local, raúl, a dockworker— as well as by the authors themselves, who recount their 2000 walking tour of the central havana in question, accompanied and guided by raúl, in the process becoming shadowy interactive agents in the narrative that unfolds. that narrative becomes a tale of unmet expectations, evocations (on villaverde‟s filmic part) of a purportedly halcyon pre-revolutionary idyll (not shared by raúl), mourned as „lost love,‟ and habitations of separate universes that are yet to converge „with good will and understanding.‟ in „doris salcedo‟s melancholy objects,‟ vera mackie discusses colombian artist doris salcedo‟s installation „atrabiliarios,‟ a highly acclaimed work that metonymically comments on violence, death and the waning of historical memory by allowing shoes to stand in for the absent bodies of victims. mackie regards the artworks as indicative of a allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 18 dialectic between the processes of melancholy, mourning, and fetishism. mackie‟s analysis tracks multiple representations of the women‟s shoe—on viewing salcedo‟s „atrabiliarios‟ she finds herself recalling other shoes in visual art, fairytales and film, a shop in san francisco‟s china town, the auschwitz museum, and an iconic image from cold war australia—with two aims. first, to assess how viewers can acknowledge the specific historical-material contexts in which such representations are made and circulated. second, to make ethical sense of the cultural politics inherent to museums as repositories for memory. as mackie says, „there is no such thing as an innocent or blameless viewing position for tourists, travellers, scholars, or spectators in museums. we are all implicated in multiple matrices of power, and need to choose an ethical position from which to approach such sites.‟ another mode of memorialization, the crónica (chronicle) is a strikingly apposite exemplar of the messy transculturations that have characterized hyperworldization in the americas. little known or produced in the english-speaking world—until, perhaps, the rise of the chronicle-like blog—the crónica is a european textual form dating from medieval times with antecedents in greek, roman, hebrew and arabic textual traditions. chronicles melded history, autobiography, and scientific observation and exposition, and were characterized by a (at times loose) chronological ordering of material. medieval chronicles could be in poetic and/or prose form, and incorporated observational details of interest to the chronicler, as well as elements drawn from myth and legend, christian debates and texts, historical events, insights into local trade, agriculture, artisan work, and the natural and physical sciences, and genealogies of important people. a highly intertextual and transgeneric (hypergeneric) means of constructing the past, chronicles often looked to earlier chronicles for material and inspiration as well. european chronicles such as the anglo-saxon chronicle (800s ce) and the french chroniques by jean froissart (early 1400s ce) survive as important repositories of historical detail and data. the chronicle also provided a textual venue for recording the spanish conquest of the americas and the early spanish colonial era, the form being used by conquistadors and priests, and a few indigenous writers, to document spanish activities, local indigenous sociocultural traditions and customs, and scientific observation of plants, animals and „new‟ american geographies. many contemporary latin american critics and writers regard the colonial chronicles as the continent‟s foundational literary form, one that later writers have drawn upon and allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 19 modified. at times the genre‟s traditional respect for historical linearity has been parodied, as exemplified by the colombian gabriel garcía márquez‟s short novel, crónica de una muerte anunciada (1987), which casts into doubt the purported veracity of the chronicle as a „true‟ account or historia (the spanish word neatly denoting history and fiction, thus ensnaring both terms in epistemological uncertainty). notwithstanding the chronicle‟s transportation to the americas as a textual tool for recording conquest, and its subsequent decline in europe since the 15 th century, the crónica survives in latin america as a respected, popular and widely practiced genre. a resurgence of the chronicle has occurred in many latin american countries since the 1960s, where it takes the form of short meditative pieces that combine personal confession, quotidian observation, memorialization, and commentary on contemporary sociocultural trends and political events. contemporary crónicas—which may appear as regular newspaper or magazine columns—draw from, combine, and evoke any number of textual forms: autobiography, testimony, the diary, epistolary communication, history, the short story, the essay, journalism, and the political tract. notable cronistas include the mexican carlos monsiváis (his first collection appearing in 1969), and the chilean pedro lemebel, the latter responsible for adapting the chronicle into a personal account of aids among the locas of santiago. 16 in „there‟s no place like home/camino a casa crónica,‟ included in this special issue, chicana author susana chávez-silverman takes the form in a new „american‟ direction by resolutely refusing the separation of english and spanish and, by implication, of supposedly distinct „american‟ worlds. chávez-silverman‟s particular approach and linguistic intentions with regard to the crónica were announced in her collection, killer crónicas: bilingual memories/memorias bilingües (2004), a lyrical account of the author‟s year spent in argentina, which evolved „virtually‟ from the crónicas that she sent to friends and family in the form of emails. eschewing the genre‟s traditional chronological structure, and shifting creatively between english and spanish, killer crónicas also builds implicitly on the chronicle-like characteristics of previous codeswitching and genre-blurring chicana texts such as gloria anzaldúa‟s influential 16 see the reference list of this essay for details of monsiváis‟s and lemebel‟s published collections of chronicles to date. for provocative analyses of monsiváis see egan (2001), and for lemebel see palaversich (2002) and poblete (2002). allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 20 borderlands/la frontera (1987). while the code-switching on view in killer crónicas, and in „there‟s no place like home/camino a casa crónica,‟ might seem to be a hallmark of us spanglish, the author rejects that label‟s application to her texts. despite their intertwining of english and spanish, her narratives depend on bilingual facility in both languages, a claim that does not preclude monolingual speakers of either idiom from making interactive sense of proceedings. chávez-silverman thus appears to take up anzaldúa‟s linguistic challenge—„until i am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without always having to translate … my tongue will be illegitimate‟ (1987: 59)—in a revolt against national-linguistic purists of both english and spanish who decry those languages‟ quotidian and literary interpenetrations inside us borders. in its unique autobiographical reach, and its exposition of multivalent linguistic and geocultural homes, „there‟s no place like home/camino a casa crónica‟ demonstrates that code-switching between spanish(es) and english is a progressive, creative elaboration grounded in the everyday. chávez-silverman‟s crónica thus offers a neocultural insight into the lived realities of millions of us latina/os, a testament to the fact that socioculturally neither latin america nor the usa achieve definitional meaning and locational certainty at the us-mexico border. the final contribution to this special issue‟s cultural works section is by ian campbell, an australian poet who writes predominantly in bahasa indonesia, an unusual idiom for australian writers despite australia and indonesia‟s adjacency. as the title of the poetry suite included here attests—„selatan—sur—south‟—campbell‟s poems meditate on the concept of the south as a contested spatialization and geocultural imaginary for diverse residents of the southern hemisphere. that focus is enabled, and encoded in, the poem‟s internal geographic, literary and cultural references, which, like their places of authorship, shift seamlessly between sites in australia, indonesia and latin america. while chávez-silverman‟s crónicas in part recreate the enunciative characteristics of peninsular, argentinean and chicana spanishes as they tangle with us english, campbell‟s poetry enacts a trilingual translation between indonesian, australian and latin american (chilean, argentinean) cultural fields and dominant languages. a case in point is his translation from spanish to indonesian of a famous poem by francisco urondo (1930-1976), an homage to the great tango artist, carlos gardel, a name synonymous with the „buenos aires‟ city brand in the first few decades of the 20 th century. with his translation campbell manages a deft rebranding of the tango, and its allatson and browitt hyperworlds portal, vol. 5, no. 1, january 2008. 21 greatest exponent, for indonesian readers. noteworthy, too, is the selection‟s concluding statement, „lejano sur (ke kejauhan selatan) further south.‟ incorporating references to borges‟s strict definition of where the south part of buenos aires begins, and the title from the australian playwright douglas stewart‟s „fire on the snow,‟ campbell here posits the „south‟ as „a land of dust/ where paradox reigned.‟ it is an apposite summation of a set of poems that defies geocultural fixing as it links disparate parts of the „south‟ through transcultural interactions—bits, bytes, networks, flows—as befits the qualities of the hyperworld(s) into which we have forayed, exploratively, here. acknowledgements we would like to thank the participants at the vii international ailasa conference, uts, 27-29 september, 2006, for their discussions into the possible ramifications and conceptual/epistemological contours of hyperworld(s). deep thanks, too, to trish hill for her careful reading, and to ilaria vanni for her challenging comments on 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2002) and john dunnage (2002), have considered how changes in consumer identities were related to developments in the mass media and, in particular, the influence of television, and programs such as carosello, which showcased consumer items and brand names in a way that was new to italians. it can be argued, however, that such influences do not operate equally in all settings and that not all consumer groups reacted in the same ways to the new possibilities opening up to them. clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 2 following the end of world war two, living conditions throughout italy changed and for the most part improved radically, a process that has been documented by contemporary historians and sociologists (dickie 2007; de grazia 1996). however, this phenomenon has generally been approached by researchers from the perspective of the widening possibilities that were readily accepted by consumers as certain products were made available to them and their disposable incomes increased. somewhat less attention has been given to the various local factors that might have precluded or affected the direct modernization of eating habits in certain parts of the country. background this paper is based on information taken from interviews that formed part of an ongoing research project into social change in southern italy. for this purpose i conducted a series of interviews in six participating communities in august and september 2007, with people who experienced the post-world war two period either as adults or in their youth, and thus were born between 1920 and 1946.1 in total some fifty interviews with both male and female participants dealt with a range of topics including food and diet. using this information i analyse the particular situation in the amalfi coast from the perspective of the consumers, and not from the point of view of producers and advertisers, as is the case with previous studies. information gleaned from interviews can clarify how consumer changes came about, and how shifting patterns of food consumption in the mid-twentieth century were moderated by the particular geographical and socio-economic conditions of an area such as the amalfi coast, including high levels of self-sufficiency and irregular patterns of work. lack of space prevents me from discussing here the methodological issues raised by the use of oral history as my main source of information, notably the reliability of informants and their possible tendency to exaggerate either the extent of change or the hardships of the past. but the emergence of similar themes in so many of the recollections i recorded does suggest that the resulting picture confirms the extent to which consumer culture was affected by local conditions. 1 specific information is drawn from six out of the fifteen communities that constitute the community of the amalfitan peninsula or cmpa: atrani, maiori, minori, ravello, scala and tramonti. clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 3 traditional geographic and socio-economic influences on consumption the comunità montana penisola amalfitana, or cmpa, consists of fifteen communities on the peninsula known as the amalfi coast, a part of the italian south that, on account of its spectacular and inspirational landscape, received considerable attention from various authors and artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. the coast is attributed with directly influencing the works of such individuals as richard wagner, john ruskin, and maurits escher. however, less attention has been paid to the local inhabitants of the area, and how the landscape and the social implications of its geography have ultimately shaped their lives. although the region is often thought of primarily as a coastal area, it can be further divided into coastal (atrani, maiori and minori) and mountain-based (ravello, scala and tramonti) communities. interestingly, despite the relative vicinity of these communities to the sea, the altitudinal differences between these particular communities are significant: while some villages rise directly from sea level, others are located at a considerably higher altitude and consequently experience quite different weather patterns and socio-geographic conditions. these particular circumstances mean that despite being geographically close to the city of naples, in the post world war period the people of the amalfi coast were living in small communities and had only restricted access to modern consumerism. many houses dated from the middle ages and were often small with extremely limited space. the area’s geography ensured that buildings were clustered together, often on the side of hills or mountains; thus, extending homes to accommodate new facilities or building larger ones was difficult. many homes contained only a modicum of furniture, and people had little more than something to sleep on, a table and a few chairs, a fact confirmed by interviewees from each of the six communities, in particular, scala and tramonti. the resource of water was approached with great respect: many locals accessed it from external sources, such as fountains and springs, or via a tank that collected rainwater for general consumption. this water was then used, whenever possible, to keep foods cool, in addition to other domestic needs including direct consumption. in many homes rudimentary stoves were used to cook and create heat when required, as noted by people from five out of the six participating villages. houses were often difficult to access; and were not directly served by a route accessible clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 4 to motor vehicles.2 indeed it is still not unusual for people in this area to have a considerable number of steps to ascend or descend to come or go from their home; depending on the particular community in question this can range to over 700 steps, which would certainly influence local lifestyles and eventual changes to them.3 it is also of note that geography and climate have historically influenced the area’s ways of life and work, wider economy and local diet. a combination of low monetary incomes and poor transport links meant that food consumption was largely restricted to what could be produced in the immediate locality, so that the way of life was intimately tied to geography, which influenced what people ate and where they would have bought foodstuffs and other consumables. furthermore, certain communities historically traded with more populated centres. this allowed them to supplement their incomes, and to purchase items that they might not have had access to in their immediate vicinity. the coastal communities often used the sea to facilitate their external contact, whereas mountain communities crossed the mountains, as exemplified by recollections of the scalesi (the inhabitants of scala) walking to gragnano or lettere.4 when people living in these communities in the first half of the twentieth century are questioned about what they ate and their general lifestyles, it emerges that life was difficult. people worked hard, ate little and had few expectations as such. the poverty and wider social conditions, often a direct result of the natural conditions of the area, had the effect of shaping a simple local diet that was not subject to great variation, and much of which was produced locally or grown by a family. methods of preparing and cooking the area’s traditional foods were also simple and reflected wider socioeconomic conditions. as previously noted, people had access to very few appliances and most cooked on small fires or braziers that offered little control over the cooking process. indeed, at times of extreme hardship cooking in itself was impossible without access to fuel, generally charcoal or wood. moreover, in most of these communities people did not have ovens in their homes; rather they paid to use private ovens elsewhere in their own, or nearby, communities, the clear exception to this being tramonti where a number of families owned ovens. 2 while this remains a problem today, in the post world war two period the road infrastructure was rudimentary and less developed. 3 in this area distances are normally thought of not in terms of kilometres or meters but in steps, reflecting the local geography and lifestyles. 4 scala and gragnano, for example, are twelve kilometres apart, but a mountain range runs between them, complicating the journey between the two considerably. clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 5 on a daily basis, beans (most commonly borlotti or fave) and other vegetables and legumes accounted for the bulk of what people ate. these would be supplemented with bread, potatoes, oils, fats, or similar alternatives to which people had more limited access. families in each community kept animals, and while pigs were commonly reared in the area for domestic consumption, cattle, goats and poultry were also kept in certain villages, primarily for products such as eggs and milk.5 as interviewees confirmed, other than pigs, animals would only be slaughtered if they were injured or hurt, and only then would they be used for their meat. virtually all parts of slaughtered animals were used, including the bones, blood and innards, or offal. in order to prolong the season when foods could be eaten, excess meat, vegetables or other produce would be preserved, so that a family had edible food reserves when supplies of fresh food, and other resources, were scarce. this, in turn, would be supplemented by a form of barter economy, and by visits to small local shops that provided items not generally produced in the area. however, credit was a fundamental part of those visits, as will be discussed later in this paper. for foods that local shops did not sell interviewees revealed that traditional fairs, which came to the area once a season, were generally used as a means of stocking up on other affordable items. interestingly, what is generally considered to be one of the staple and stereotypical traditional foods of the italian poor—pasta—was not accessible on an everyday basis to the majority of people in this region due to economic constraints. many people only associated pasta with sundays and special occasions, when they strove to eat a more substantial meal—incorporating meat and pasta when possible—than was possible the rest of the week. consequently pasta, like meat, was regarded as a luxury; these were the first things that people looked to consume more often when their economic circumstances improved. special occasions were often marked by the consumption of particular foodstuffs associated with religious and festive observances, such as baccalà or stoccafisso, which 5 the animals farmed in each community depended heavily on the topography and the climate in the different villages. pigs were commonly reared in the area for domestic consumption. meat products included meat and fat; salamis would also be produced in order to prolong consumption. clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 6 ate if possible at christmas, or capitone, eaten at new year.6 the often fraught attempt to eat such food appears to have been a marker of such events, as several interviewees confirmed: [t]here was a set menu; some could buy it, some couldn’t. i remember a time, at christmas, that my father was ill and was in bed, he couldn’t go out. i said to him one day, “but, dad, this year it hasn’t been christmas” [because they hadn’t eaten the traditional foods]. he replied, “pray that for new year i’m better, because we haven’t bought the eel [yet]; if i’m better we’ll buy it.”7 despite the geographical situation of these communities, and the reputation that some had as fishing centres, for many families fish was largely limited to times such as christmas. as one interviewee from a fishing community noted: ‘you waited for christmas to have spaghetti with salted anchovies or sardines.’8 sugar was another ingredient with a limited role in most people’s lives up until the economic miracle. interviewees emphasised how valuable sugar was, and when and how they ate it. for the most part people could identify the regular foods made using sugar, and when they would have eaten them. some of the most widespread sugar-based foods included the pastiera, generally eaten at easter, and the zeppole, made at christmas.9 the topic of bought products, such as sweets and cakes, was also raised by interviewees. however they stressed that although a shop in amalfi sold cakes, or rather a type of cake, this was not something that many people would have eaten.10 in terms of other sweet foods that people had exposure to but that they might not have eaten, it emerges that although the fiere and markets that came to the area during the year, and particularly during important celebrations,11 brought such items with them, people rarely had money to spend on them and contented themselves by merely looking. 6 baccalà and stoccafisso are varieties of dried cod, which are dried using either salt or air. capitone is a variety of eel. 7 “c’era un menu fisso, chi lo poteva comprare, e chi no, no. io mio ricordo una volta che mio padre, era di natale, lui stava male, stava al letto, che non poteva uscire. gli dissi un giorno, proprio così, “papà quest’anno però non è stato natale”. lui disse “prega a dio che sto bene per capodanno che non abbiamo comprato il capitone; se sto bene lo compriamo.” [interview: tram9] 8 si aspettava a natale per fare gli spaghetti con le acciughe o le alici salate. 9 the pastiera is a type of cake commonly made at easter in campania; traditionally it was made using either rice or grain. zeppole are normally made at christmas and were originally boiled producing a type of sweet dumpling. 10 andrea pansa opened a shop in amalfi in 1830. until the economic miracle he was the only baker in the area, but the cakes exclusively consisted of millefoglie. [interview: tram5] 11 market stalls were, and are, a common accompaniment to significant community celebrations, including those dedicated to patron saints. clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 7 furthermore, while some families kept chickens, it emerged from interviews that eggs were such a valuable and scarce resource that people would do their best to acquire enough to make seasonal dishes on special occasions. a clear example of this emerged in tramonti when an interviewee recounted an incident from his youth. he remembered accidently breaking the dozen eggs that his mother had obtained for their pastiera; unable to afford replacements, his mother, went round her neighbours, each of whom gave her one or two until she had enough eggs for the cake.12 what this arguably underlines is not simply that she felt it was important enough to put herself in the position of owing her neighbours for helping her out; rather, her quest must have been perceived by those around her to be of such importance that they willingly reduced the number of eggs that they themselves could use. changing ideas on food and diet although mass emigration, which began in this area in the period following unification, did have an impact on people’s lifestyles and habits, the period after world war two saw the start of more significant cultural and behavioural consumer changes. interviewees confirmed that during the post-war period, not all migrants sent regular remittances to their relatives at home, and even when such gifts were sent, the gestures were less influential than changes within the ‘home community.’ significant changes came about as a direct result of changing economic activity in the area and as people began to have a more direct rapport with the world beyond their immediate neighbourhood, much of which was achieved through increased access to the media, which propagated new ideas and influenced people’s ways of thinking and acting. there was already a certain level of tourism in this area, particularly directed towards specific communities, such as ravello and amalfi. yet it was not yet something that most inhabitants of the local communities came into direct contact with. it also emerges that people in the area did not at first aspire openly to copy visitors’ ways of dressing, manners or dietary habits. local expectations and aspirations would start to change only as contact with the wider world and new influences increased and became more relevant to personal situations. moreover, it does not appear that ideas changed rapidly or dramatically. shifts in diet and other forms of consumption related to food occurred gradually, beginning with increased consumption of products that were already familiar, 12 interview: tram4. clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 8 and not with any dramatic switch to other types of foods. perceivable influences such as television can be said to have encouraged the development of new consumer values on two levels.13 advertisements for developing products—coffees, olive oils or alcoholic drinks, which featured in an increasing proportion of transmission time through programs such as carosello14—influenced consumption through the propagation of new ideas about food, drink and other consumables. they encouraged a shift away from pre-existing self-sufficiency towards brand names and the different prospects of a modern consumer culture. furthermore, the increased ownership of consumable durables, such as white goods and motor vehicles, was advocated, and this encouraged more structural developments and the integration of different consumer goods into people’s lives. the purchase of a car or other motorised vehicle might not seem directly related to changing dietary habits; yet it should be remembered that it was impractical to buy large quantities of foodstuffs from the new shops and supermarkets that developed in italy in the 1950s and 1960s if people did not have the means to bring them home.15 similarly, however attractive the advertising, simply being able to afford a new product would not necessarily entice the fledgling consumer to buy that product. people needed to store the new foods appropriately and to cook them according to instructions. thus, a certain degree of home infrastructure was required before such people could become modern consumers. geography and infrastructure also influenced the acquisition and integration of larger household items that could facilitate consumption in the region. new cooking apparatuses and refrigerators encouraged new approaches to food conservation and preparation. however the integration of these appliances was complicated. the purchase of a new refrigerator or cooker was a large investment for any family. even when they were affordable, other factors had to be considered beforehand. before large household 13 from interviews it emerges that the television, together with cinema, were the main forms of media with which people had contact. indeed only two interviewees discussed having read magazines or newspapers at the time of the economic miracle. [interviews atra6 and scal1] 14 carosello was a highly popular, and influential, extended commercial break made up of a series of ten entertaining ‘mini-stories. it was transmitted in the early years of television in italy, beginning in 1957, and was subsequently followed by other programs such as arcobaleno and tic-tac. for many italians this show provided the first contact with modern consumer ideas and behaviours. 15 a number of supermarkets were established in the 1950s and 1960s. the department store standa, originally established in 1931, opened the first supermarket standa in 1958, while supermarkets italiani (now trading under the name gs) were launched in 1961. clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 9 appliances can function, basic utilities such as water and electricity must not only be present but adequate. the item had to be transported to the family home and installed; the location of homes, then, was an important factor in consumer developments. amalfi coast communities were connected to electricity and water in stages between the 1930s and the 1970s. however, the region’s terrain prevented certain villages from being brought, via amenity infrastructure, into ‘modern’ italian society. interviewees from each community recalled the introduction of domestic supplies of water or electricity, and often stressed that the original connection was minimal. in many cases amenities were insufficient to run the appliances that arrived during the economic miracle, or even to provide adequate lighting for a home. in the region, moreover, amenities such as water and electricity did not necessarily arrive in any set order. thus some people might have had electricity, and therefore the possibility of a refrigerator or an electric cooker, some years before they received running water. this was particularly the case for a number of relatively isolated villages and hamlets in scala and tramonti. although the inhabitants had certain amenities in their homes, the new appliances other people had purchased were fundamentally unsuitable for their personal circumstances, even supposing that they had a suitable place for them in their house. as previously noted, many houses were small and over time their internal space had be altered to meet new requirements. this often resulted in an uneven use of space, such as rooms that served several purposes; for example, in many homes a bathroom was eked out of a kitchen area and limited space remained for other items. beyond the presence and adequate provision of utilities another consideration has to be taken into account: where could someone buy a new appliance? a small number of shops sold electrical goods in the amalfi region. this implies that locals had to travel to another region in order to shop for such goods, particularly given that in small shops there is likely to be a limited amount of stock and, therefore, choice. yet, interviewees from atrani and minori described people accepting what their nearest shop could offer them, rather than setting their sights on a specific brand that might prove to be unobtainable: ‘[t]o tell the truth it was normally the case of what they had in the shop in amalfi. there was not much choice, but otherwise you wouldn’t have got anything so clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 10 that was alright for us.’16 moreover, a shopkeeper’s choice of stock may have disadvantaged local consumers, both in terms of not having available the most modern appliances or those of a particular brand. additionally, the pricing of new consumer goods would be far from advantageous for the buyer, given that a local merchant had limited direct competition and could therefore set his own prices. in general, given the wider socio-geographic conditions in the amalfi region, the relationship that people had with new commodities was ultimately determined by the retailer. changing consumer behaviours and relations in the 1950s and 1960s a shift took place in which larger shops and supermarkets started to offer people convenient places to purchase what they needed. however, the trend did not necessarily diffuse throughout italy at that time. the amalfi coast is an example of an area that did not follow this pattern, and it continued to honour more traditional routines. one of the most elementary reasons for this appears to be that no single location was suitable for housing a large store, particularly one intended to service all of the nearby communities. given the size of the village populations—in 1960 between 1499 and 5854 inhabitants each—the construction of a large store for a single village or community would almost certainly have been impractical, even had a suitable location been found. the sheer number of steps in the region posed a range of problems to development and to consumers alike, the latter finding it more convenient to continue to buy small quantities of food when passing by their local shops or when food was needed. supermarkets were thus unlikely to open in the region given the low numbers of potential customers. the particular socioeconomic characteristics of the area further discouraged the arrival of supermarkets. as many interviewees in the area confirmed, in the pre-economic miracle period poverty was common. subsequently, credit was fundamental for the maintenance of many families and was not viewed in any way as a stigma or unusual. as one interviewee from tramonti confirmed: ‘you didn’t have money, the shopkeeper wrote down everything that you bought, and later, when you could pay, he did the bill and you gave him the money.’17 however, while a shopkeeper might have granted credit to a family in the local community, it is less likely that a new shop, particularly one that was part of a chain, would have granted that same privilege 16 ‘a dir la verità si trattava di solito di quello che avevano ad amalfi, lì in negozio. non c’era tantissima scelta, ma altrimenti non ne avremmo avuto per niente e quindi a noi andava bene così.’ [interview atra3] 17 ‘non avevi i soldi, il negoziante scriveva tutto quello che tu compravi e poi, successivamente, quando avevi la disponibilità faceva il conto e gli ridavi questi soldi.’ [interview tram2] clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 11 to its customers. paradoxically, the pre-existing relationship between the two parties of locals—shopkeepers and consumers—could also undermine the possibility of new consumer relationships developing, for old loyalties remained important considerations in shopping habits. established independent shops were likely to regard themselves as providing a service to the community, beyond the making of profits, and to a degree the latter would in fact depend on the former. this would not have been the case with new supermarkets and chain-owned outlets. it has to be recognised that there were also large areas in both the north and south of italy where, for many reasons, the larger shops did not appear. the amalfi coast is arguably representative of a wider trend. the historically limited levels of consumption in the amalfi region, then, were fundamental factors in the ways consumer habits and behaviours changed. indeed, while customers might not have been able to influence what a shop sold, increasing economic well-being did start to strengthen their position in the consumer-retailer dynamic. previously, families were familiar with the idea of using a local shop where they bought items—if in stock—and often relied on the credit offered to them. people limited what they bought to necessities they did not grow or produce themselves, such as salt, pasta or oil. most of these foodstuffs were sold sfusi, or loose. local people clearly recalled the way in which they bought such items: everyone had a large piece of cloth [their fazzoletto] which they used for salt and pasta … pasta was loose then, there weren’t any packets. you took it to the shop, they took the[ir] five kilo bag and then they weighed out the kilo or half kilo that you wanted, they put it in the piece of cloth and then you took it home.18 oil was generally bought 100 millilitres at a time, in small bottles that people took to the shop to fill when they required it.19 and as these practices reveal, consumers had little real choice in what they purchased; there were no recognised brands and often people ate items that others would not, such as the strugatori20 and polponi,21 which people from atrani and ravello remember. locals did not regularly buy legumes, fruit and vegetables from a shop unless they did not have land to tend or could not eat their 18 [tutti avevano] un fazzoletto grande, si portavano quel fazzoletto e ci mettevano quel po’ di sale …[o pasta]. la pasta era sfusa, non c’erano i pacchetti chiusi. prendeva quella [busta] da cinque chili e poi pesava sulla bilancia un chilo, un mezzo chilo, quello che volevi, lo metteva in quel fazzoletto e lo portavi a casa. [interview: tram5] 19 interviews: tram1 and tram5. 20 strugatori were a form of black coarse pasta left over from production processes. [interview atra5] 21 polponi were a type of coarse black pasta made when people had no flour. its primary ingredients were ground black olives, capers and dried tomatoes. [interview rave2] clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 12 own produce for other reasons. when necessary, however, people bulked out their food with natural produce, generally local wild plants that in more affluent areas would have been classed as grasses and weeds.22 given that traditional background, and amidst the changing consumer behaviours of italians in general, it is fascinating to note the appearance of brand names in small local shops, albeit on a limited basis, in the amalfi region in the 1950s and 1960s. as economic conditions started to improve and poverty became less marked, people were able to acquire and consume foodstuffs, such as packaged pasta, that they could not previously obtain or afford. slowly, these purchases replaced what they had bought previously. thus, since locals did not radically change their consumer behaviours, and those behaviours were tempered by the geography and particular conditions, the changes that did occur differed somewhat from those often represented as having taken place in italy. a degree of appreciation for brand names did come to the area and certain brands started to earn the trust of people; however this came about gradually, as and when economic circumstances allowed. although locals continued to frequent small local shops and local products remained popular, their wider behaviours only slowly become more consumer orientated. changing consumer behaviours in the amalfi region were negotiated in a similar way, hence general marketing methods were adapted to the particular local situation.23 thus advertisements and promotions in the smaller shops encouraged change and the breaking down of old ways of thinking about food and its consumption, thus influencing new consumer-orientated behaviours. although it can be argued that television in itself was not directly connected with changing eating patterns in ways cognate with the arrival of the fridge, given its direct role in preserving and preparing food, television nonetheless can be viewed as a facilitator of consumer developments that merits consideration. through exposure to advertisements and the general promotion of new or different products and behaviours, people became aware of new ideas and alternatives to consumer goods that they had previously taken for granted. for the people of the amalfi coast, television arrived from 1956 onwards and, as was the case for many italians, the early stages of television 22 interview rave2. 23 not only was this area relatively isolated, but its landscape and population dispersal meant that billboards and other forms of mass advertising had to be adapted and altered in order to service the area. posters could be used, but they had to be used differently from large posters in a city. clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 13 viewing were characterised by collective use, rather than private exposure. in certain communities or hamlets television viewing did not become a domestic activity until much later. what then, was the impact or the implications of exposure to television on the people of the amalfi coast during those first years? the question suggests the need to understand how the first advertisements, which were a significant part of the earliest television italian transmissions, were perceived by local people in the amalfi region. as stated earlier, television advertisements did not necessarily introduce people to new foods, but rather to new presentations of food products with which they were already familiar. products that featured on programs such as carosello included branded olive oils, pasta and processed cheese, and although the foodstuffs themselves would have been known by people, the brands would not. indeed in this period many brands changed from being local to national in nature, and as such moved into previously unknown markets. the questions that then have to be asked is what was the relevance of such products to people in the amalfi coast, and was there any resistance to such products given people’s unfamiliarity with them, particularly in the 1950s before both increased economic wellbeing and new communication media arrived. interestingly, the first memories different villagers in this area have of packaged pasta is that the paper was blue; the name appears to have been unimportant and has disappeared from their memory. nor was the new packaging of particular note to consumers in the area; what they did remember, however, was how their fazzoletto was gradually replaced by the new packaged products. a further consideration is that many items would initially have been somewhat extraneous to people in this area, and while perceptions of such items change within the context of material culture, such attitudes were multifaceted. products could represent shifting daily needs and preconceptions of food types, or the appropriateness of those same items, and thus indicate new conceptualisations or perceptions. a further consideration, over and above the role that such goods would play in someone’s life, is the availability of such items. in the amalfi area there was not simply a lack of shops or lack of interest in new items or ideas, but rather a general environment that encouraged the maintenance of traditional social roles and behaviours. it does not appear that migration or reverse migration, a significant factor in altering wider economic circumstances in italy, impacted significantly on the transformation of food clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 14 consumption in this area; rather ideas about acceptable behaviour remained anchored to past practices. what emerges in relation to both consumable and durable items is a clear indication that the dynamics of consumer behaviour were not influenced solely by the physical possibility of buying something, being able to afford it, or having somewhere to put it within a home. also at work was an element of local acceptance of the product and an equally local understanding of where it might fit into someone’s life. thus the relationship with new consumer goods emerges as multidimensional: not only was the development of buying habits dependent on geographical, social, economic and cultural factors, but the same applied to the perceived place for new products or behaviours in someone’s life. new consumption patterns in comparison with what they ate before and immediately after world war two, by the late 1960s people in the amalfi area had a much more varied and balanced diet. however, it was not only what people ate that changed in that timeframe, but also the relationship that they had with the foodstuffs themselves and those who brought it to them. one of the most significant developments in this period was that, if previously people had primarily eaten foods that originated in the area, by the late 1960s they were consuming a considerably higher proportion of products that originated outside their immediate vicinity. this era saw a significant decrease in the self-sufficiency that had previously been central in the survival of generations of inhabitants in the amalfi coast. a proportion of villagers who had previously been engaged in agricultural activities aimed at sustaining their families started to take on paid employment, for example in the rapidly developing tourist and service sectors. the increasing demand for foodstuffs of different types that decreasing self-sufficiency brought about meant that shopkeepers looked to take advantage by increasing the range of products they offered, and hopefully the quantities they sold. furthermore it can be argued that increased economic well-being and disposable incomes increased the ongoing economic viability of shops, especially since most had run on credit and sporadic incomes, and in turn this may have influenced the range of goods that they sold. however, as noted earlier, given the geographical constraints of the area, this increased dependence on retail sources for foods was not manifested in terms of new types of shop in the immediate area. rather small, local shops continued to service their local clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 15 communities, and people continued to buy small quantities of foods, albeit more regularly, again as a result of the local geographical conditions. due to this gradual improvement of their economic position consumers who had previously had a relatively weak position in comparison with a shopkeeper would have found themselves in a new and more powerful position, whereby they could withhold their business should they wish, or choose the particular items they wanted to purchase. considering that credit was no longer a necessity for many people, at least not to the previous degree, where it did occur this was likely to be a tool of convenience and something a consumer could choose to use. this change in the customer-shopkeeper relationship suggests that not only would retailers have lost much of their earlier power within the local socioeconomic dynamic, but that they would also have had to start to earn a particular customer’s business, and as such might have had to start to offer their clients more in return for their continued custom. most likely, a part of this general process would have been the increased number of products that people could buy from local shops, including a growing number of the branded foods emerging in italy at that time. nevertheless it has to be considered that brands, particularly brands that were being marketed and advertised in italy in general, do not necessarily appear to have penetrated the amalfi area immediately. while people increased their consumption of packaged goods but they also consumed increasing quantities of locally or semi-locally produced items rather than national brands, and this continues to be the case today. if, in basic terms, the bulk of what people ate in the first decades of the twentieth century was composed of legumes and vegetables, this changed considerably during the years of the economic miracle when the consumption of pasta, meat and fish increased, as did that of sugars and other processed foods. dishes and foods previously associated with particular occasions and special events came to be eaten on a more regular basis. more importantly, families strove to eat different courses, namely primi piatti and secondi, more frequently. people were thus able to reinforce their newfound economic stability and distance themselves from the hardship that had been so common in their lives up until then. interestingly, many traditional dishes from the amalfi communities were not replaced during the 1950s and 1960s, as new foodstuffs became available and accessible. rather clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 16 recipes and cooking methods were refined and made more sophisticated over time. foods such as baccalà and capitone, which were historically eaten at christmas and new year, maintained their place in the calendar. their place was now more secure, even as the way in which they were cooked and eaten became more complex. two examples of such developments are the pastiera, which is eaten at easter, and the christmas zeppole. in the case of the pastiera, the traditional recipe base of rice was substituted with wheat, or grano, as and when people could afford to make the switch.24 as for zeppole, not only were additional ingredients, such as liqueurs, added to the mix, but increasingly they were fired rather than boiled, thus changing both their texture and flavour considerably. beyond the increased quantity and variety of ingredients that people started to use, the new appliances that so many people had in their homes also changed what they ate, and how it was cooked and stored. in tandem with the preparation of foods using these new appliances, people started to eat more cooked foods. additionally, many people in communities such as atrani and scala, who had previously used privately-run ovens, now had ovens in their homes and were able to cook dishes that they would not have been able to before, including baked and roasted foods. storage possibilities increased with rapidly developing kitchens, and refrigerators started to open up many opportunities, providing more convenience than the traditional use of external water tanks. however, for certain foods such as cheeses, including mozzarella and caciocavallo, and salamis, many people continued to use traditional storage methods. conclusions although changes in terms of food consumption took place throughout italy in the 1950s and 1960s, this development was not necessarily a one-way process, whereby ‘consumerism’ simply imposed itself on local communities, and with the same impact to the same extent on people throughout the country. the example of the amalfi coast provides an insight not only into changing patterns of consumption but also into the ways by which consumer modification was influenced by geography and local habits or traditions. what people ate and drank in the amalfi area did change significantly in the 1950s and 1960s, but not necessarily in the ways that observers might have expected. 24 the name pastiera comes from ‘pasta di ieri’ or leftover pasta; however, respondents explained that in the early twentieth century it was generally made with rice. clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 17 people in the amalfi coast did not radically alter their consumer behaviour; rather they modified what they ate and how they approached food. for the first time, foods that did not originate within the area itself started to feature more prominently in peoples’ lives. although relationships between consumers and retailers did develop, for many villagers they represented a continuation of old habits whereby people continued to use small, local shops. that use survived the strengthening of people’s consumer power that meant they no longer depended on credit for their survival. as people became better off for the most part they manifested their increased affluence not through the consumption of new and unfamiliar foods but through the increased inclusion of already familiar ingredients, such as pasta and meat, which had previously featured primarily as festive luxuries. they also started to buy items such as pasta, salt and oil in packaged-form for the first time. the increased availability of a wider range of foods and better-equipped kitchens also influenced the updating and improving of traditional recipes. this evolution constituted one of the first indicators of changing socio-economic conditions, and the adoption of ‘modern italian’ ways of life promoted by advertising and the media. consumer identities in this part of the italian south changed neither in a simple or clear manner, nor in a linear progression. often people were exposed to new consumer ideas well before they had any potential place in their lives. despite critical claims that television influenced greatly italian social behaviours, people in the amalfi area had a more complicated relationship to the new medium than has been credited. people within the wider amalfitan community were somewhat passive in the face of technological developments in their lives, and were not often placed in a situation where they could make educated consumer choices. rather they were negotiating an awareness of the consumer choices available to other people in a stronger economic position than themselves. in terms of access to infrastructure and everyday foodstuffs, there was generally a stage when someone else facilitated the expansion of choice for the people in this area. this change was always predicated on an imbalanced relationship. thus, while consumers did start to take gradual control over their own consumer choices, this was only one feature of the broader socioeconomic changes that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. clark changing consumption, changing consumers portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 18 changing food consumption allows an insight into the nature of such transformations, illustrating that while people’s value systems and traditions are not necessarily replaced by increased economic stability, on occasion they are modified and enriched by that stability. what emerges in relation to both consumable and durable items is a clear indication that consumer behaviour was not influenced solely by the physical possibility of buying something, being able to afford it, or having somewhere to put it within a home. changing patterns of consumerism also required an element of acceptance of the product and an understanding of where it might fit into someone’s life. food consumption in the amalfi coast did not change simply because items became available but only when new consumer goods were accepted and adapted by the people themselves reference list de grazia, v. 1996, ‘establishing the modern consumer household,’ in the sex of things, (ed.) v. de grazia, california university press, berekeley, 151-162. de grazia, v. (ed.) 1996, the sex of things, california university press, berkeley. de rita, l. 1964, i contadini e la televisione, società editrice il mulino, bologna. dickie, j. 2007, delizia! the epic history of the italians and their food, hodder and stoughton, london. dunnage, j. 2002, twentieth century italy: a social history, longman, london. foot, j. 1999, ‘television and the city: the impact of television in milan, 1954-1960,’ contemporary european history, vol. 9, no. 3, 379-94. foot, j. 2002, ‘inside the magic rectangle: recent research on the history of television,’ contemporary european history, vol. 11, no. 3, 467-75. helstosky, c. 2004, garlic and oil: politics and food in italy, berg, oxford. ohaformattedjuly2008 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mutiple strokes obododimma oha, university of ibadan oha multiple strokes portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 2 i tell me, will new york always remain new? with its streets leading to abraham lincoln and its grocery stores selling original paris behind an irish steinbeck? by the way, where have they hidden the jazz stories of manhattan with all this rap and hip-hop and sagging pants? ii is it the crook that is crooked or crooked that is like a crook? why do they say politicians & drug barons launder stained money overseas when the laundryman cannot find a single dollar when he searches and searches the breast pocket before eyeing the washing machine? iii what the hell is wrong with english that it con/fuses the world with its words & meanest meanings? do boxers put their opponents in boxes, or in a state where their brains cannot whisper to their wishes? why call a game a fight when you have a phd in english and a necktie to hang all the errors gathering in your throat? iv ok, if prayer is the act what do i call the person who prays? where will the prayer warriors sharpen their spears, if what we have done is the same as what we have failed to do? and must that big-time preacher always say a-men when he ministers to women? v and why are english teachers not always from england? that multicultural classroom thinks too much about the difference between where you are and what you are, little wonder all the grammar books in this class smell of pizza and nigerian suya. when i spell a word, am i also under a spell? what the hell is wrong with english that it says i shouldn’t call a spade a spoon when they use the spade to feed the yawning earth at death o’clock? oha multiple strokes portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 3 vi a live ammo does not live, it is only few vowels away from your slip of tongue that’s why my thanks sound like tanks conversing at the border between georgia & russia when they exchange prisoners let them also exchange vodka & the patience to read what their guns cannot write well vii and since a poem, they say, is not finished, why shouldn’t i abandon this one when i’ve already run out of ideas? 844-4151-6-le portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. ‘the space between: languages, translations and cultures’: special issue edited by vera mackie, ikuko nakane, and emi otsuji. issn: 1449-2490: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. competing desires and realities: language policies in the french-language classroom angela giovanangeli, university of technology, sydney one of the first concepts i teach a beginner level french language class, in an australian university context, is that nouns in french have genders: they are either masculine or feminine. fairly early on in the semester we also look at professional titles. in the first lessons students learn that despite being a woman, i am le professeur, which is the masculine noun for teacher. yet, while the dictionary confirms this noun is masculine, in everyday language the female version, la professeure, is used by the french to make the distinction between a female and male teacher. other professional nouns like un écrivain (a writer), un auteur (an author), un ingénieur (an engineer) share similar fates: in popular idiom the female nouns une écrivaine, une auteure, une ingénieure refer to a female writer, author or engineer. as with le professeur, in grammar books or dictionaries written and published in france, only the masculine appears. as a language teacher i thus have to explain to students that the french sometimes use words that reflect female professional titles even though they are not officially acknowledged in the formal references of the french language. the same can be said of words that are borrowed from other languages, english particularly. i have come across structures spoken by the french like j’ai booké une chambre d’hôtel (i have booked a hotel room). the verb booker, an obvious english borrowing, replaces the french verb réserver. officially, the verb booker does not exist in french. similar examples, j’ai forwardé ton email, and, j’ai emailé, deploy the english words to forward and to email. the use of these words, however, is frowned upon by french language authorities. giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 2 in the french-language classroom students are confronted with the reality of the gap between unofficial terms and idiomatic usages on the one hand, and on the other, the desires of language authorities in france. those authorities strive to maintain terms and grammatical structures that do not always reflect the changes that language undergoes. this is clearly a common phenomenon in all languages. in france, however, specific french language policies determine how the language should be spoken. discussing these concepts in the classroom creates, in a sense, a type of space where the official and unofficial converge uneasily and where students are asked to make choices on how they learn and speak the french language, and why. this article examines some of the policies and agencies created in france over recent years that affect the french language and how it is taught. surprisingly little research has been undertaken on the consequences of french language policies for the teaching of french as a foreign language in classrooms, either in english speaking countries like australia, or in france. among the existing scholarship, three trends are evident. some critics examine language policies in france from a social and political point of view (adamson 2007; de certeau et al 2002), others discuss the historical place of french in europe (réau 1938), while the third trend analyses the relations between the french language and its foreign rivals (walter 2001; gilder 1993). in part addressing the dearth of studies on language teaching and language policy, in this essay i argue that a space is created within the language classroom that requires a negotiated compromise between the language policies of the french government and the idiomatic realities of contemporary french society. due to my location, i also attend to the more specific question of how french language policies affect french language classes in an australian university in sydney. my discussion here is not exhaustive; but it does present some of the significant challenges i encounter as a language teacher of french contemplating how french language policies affect the teaching of the french language elsewhere in the world. this article, then, refers to observations and reflections of my experiences in the language classroom over many years and is shaped by informal discussions i have had with colleagues involved in teaching french. french language policies french language policy has historically centred on the ways by which french can be identified as a dominant and influential language, both within france and internationally. giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 3 since the middle ages, french political figures have encouraged the promotion of french by allowing the french language to serve as a political tool. on a national level, french has been used to centralise political power through the creation of an official language and the suppression of local and regional linguistic expression. beyond france’s borders, french has been imposed on conquered peoples, the language thus serving as a mode of domination in the process of colonisation. language was also used to promote france’s international status throughout europe when french became a diplomatic language in the 1700s. today some leading french politicians and thinkers (magnant 2009; lang 2000) have inherited the long-standing historical concern to protect french within france’s borders, and beyond france as an international language. laws and debates continue on how the french language should be spoken. however, the reality of the situation is that, on the one hand, laws exist that identify how french is to be written and spoken; but on the other hand, french usage in france does not conform to rules set in place by state and linguistic apparatuses. this conflicted situation has implications for the way the french language is taught in french language classrooms across the world. in france language policies have centred on regulations and associations that aim to increase and protect the use of french in everyday society. researchers of language policies are quick to point out that language policies in france stem as far back as 1539, when françois 1er issued an edict known as the ordonnance de villers-cotterêts, requesting the use of french instead of latin in legal judgements (adamson 2007: 2). in 1635 the académie française was created to fix the rules of correct language usage and to protect the french language from outside influences. this process further strengthened the notion that the language required protection and codification.1 in addition, the relationship between language and political power was a motivating factor for the implementation of language policies. in the hands of the monarchy and aristocracy, the french language was a tool that enabled the centralisation of national power around court life. by the early 1700s speakers of the french language were able to pride themselves on seeing french established as the european language of diplomacy, a key moment in the evolution of the idea that french was a universal language. from the 1714 treaty of rastadt, which recognised french as the official 1 according to adamson (2007: 2-4) the codification of the french language in the 1700s was considered a way to protect french from the rising influence of the italian language in french court life that had begun in the high renaissance of the 1600s. giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 4 language of diplomacy in europe, until the treaty of versailles in 1919, this diplomatic status was maintained. desires of universality the preoccupation with the french language and its universality, adamson reminds us, still exists today (2007: 9). in his essay on the french language, gilder explains that a language’s universality is measured by the number of people who speak it. whilst gilder laments the decline in the number of french speakers in the world today (only three percent of the planet) (1993: 19), figures on the website of the french ministry for foreign affairs paint a contrasting, positive picture. in 2007, according to this website, there were 200 million french speakers in the world. this number jumped to 264 million speakers if people in contact with the french language, such as learners and residents of partly francophone countries, are taken into consideration. this expanded remit, according to the website, accounted in 2007 for eleven percent of the world population. the website also claimed in that year that ‘french has never been spoken by so many around the world. it counts among the planet’s great languages’ (ministère des affaires etrangères 2007). these figures, however, do not take into consideration the nuances that exist between the different ‘types’ of french spoken around the world. for example, the french language spoken in former french colonies like senegal has its own particular structures and vocabulary not found in the french spoken in france. the underlying motives and reasons for such concern over the total number of french speakers have been clearly documented by researchers and reinforced by political figures, and are linked to the close parallel between language and national identity in france as well as the historical connection between language and cultural and political hegemony. france in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries inherited a language ideology based on the promotion and the defence of the french language. this ideology was, and remains, supported by the number of government associations created to defend french, such as the office de la langue française (1937, office of the french language), office du vocabulaire français (1957, office for french vocabulary), commission de terminologie pour l’enrichissement de la langue française (1972, terminology commission for the enrichment of the french language) and the commission générale de terminologie et néologie (1996, general commission for terminology and neologisms), to name a few. giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 5 these institutions were accompanied and bolstered by government legislation, such as the 1994 toubon law restricting the use of foreign terms in the french language and establishing quotas on the number of french songs to be played on french radio stations. some prominent french institutions have been known to impose the use of english in their internal communications or discussions, only to have that policy contested by government officials. for example, the institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (iserm, national institute for health and medical research), stipulated in 2005 that english was to be used in certain domains within the institution. this decision was disputed by two french unions, and a court order in 2008 ruled that iserm could not legally impose on its employees the sole use of english. with regard to the language teaching context and my personal experience teaching french in an english-speaking country, two language matters that are not only intriguing, but important in the establishment of a french language space of learning, are the use of english words in french and the feminisation of professional titles in france. these two trends have been widely covered by researchers and political thinkers and are the subject of many controversial debates. walter (2001) and sonntag (2003) have covered the english debate, while brick and wills (1994, 2002), vandendorpe (1995), rey-debove (1999), houdebine-gravaud (1999), and yaguello (2002) examine the feminisation of job titles. i examine these two debates from a language teaching perspective in more detail later in this article. preceding that discussion it is necessary to consider how the extensive number of agencies concerned with the way the french language is constructed, affect french public attitudes towards the use of english in the french language and the feminisation of professional titles. french attitudes towards the french language in the context of the english versus french debate, evidence of how language policies define public behaviour are cited in ‘chirac contre l’anglais,’ a 2006 article by charles bremner, paris correspondent for the times. here bremner describes how former french president jacques chirac stormed out of a european summit in 2006 because a french delegate had addressed a session in english. bremner points out that this incident is ‘a fine example of france’s quixotic battle against reality,’ given that the ‘resistance to english has long ago faded among the younger generation and the world of business and technology’ (2006). examples such as this highlight the tension giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 6 between the desire to preserve french language as unsullied, intact and internationally important and the realties of a social epoch that tolerates the use of english in the political, economic and cultural spheres. despite the increasing acknowledgement by many french speakers of these realities, a more recent controversy over the french contribution to the 2008 eurovision song contest confirms that those tensions remain highly charged. singer sébastien tellier represented france with his song divine, which was written almost entirely in english, thus entangling himself in a debate over his preferred choice of language usage. the conservative rightwing politician françoismichel gonnot, from the union pour un mouvement populaire (ump, union for a popular movement), expressed his outrage in the media that a song in english was going to represent france. he consequently asked the french minister for culture, christine albanel, ‘to explain the decision to parliament,’ given the fact that ‘this choice shocks a lot of citizens who do not understand why france is thus giving up the defence of its language before hundreds of millions of television viewers’ (bremner 2008). while the above examples reflect deep-seated antipathy toward the use of english in place of french, that attitude is paralleled by wide concerns about the introduction and use of english words in the french language. in his 1993 study, et si l’on parlait français? essai sur une langue universelle (what if we spoke french? essay on a universal language), gilder took a pessimistic view by identifying a growing degradation in french language usage. he bemoaned the increasing use of english words as brand names (for example, renault’s scenic, or the cigarette brands blueway and news) (1993: 31), and the trend toward english pronunciation of identically written french words (for example, ‘management,’ ‘bacon’ and ‘challenger’) (69). gilder closes his study by providing a glossary of common english words used in french that should be replaced by their french equivalents (for example, camisette for t-shirt). gilder is emblematic of the many defenders of the french language who provide unrealistic lists as a way of trying to keep english borrowings out of the french language. the reality is that english terms continue to be borrowed and used in french. language students of the french language, whatever their background and the country in which they are studying, often have questions about which english words exist in french and how they are to be pronounced. regardless of the fact that defenders of the french language would like to maintain the purity of the language, students of french across the globe do require a space in which to discuss these linguistic realities. giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 7 the issue of the feminisation of professional titles in french, like the use of english loan words, has also sparked charge debates. language use has been a significant target in the fight for the equal treatment of women, as is evident in the ongoing discussions on the need to reform professional titles in france. since the late 1990s, french women in politically influential positions have been vocal about how they would like professional titles to be formed. for example, women in the ministry of the socialist prime minister lionel jospin’s government in the 1990s, frustrated by the male title of minister, made requests to be officially addressed using a female equivalent. jospin published a circular in 1998 in favour of the feminisation of professional titles, and supporting the change of the masculine word for le ministre (minister) to the feminine la ministre. this action was regarded at the time as a way of acknowledging the equal treatment of women in the workplace and also of avoiding possible misunderstandings and grammatical complications when referring to women in the masculine. indeed, in her article ‘language policy and gender issues in contemporary france,’ conrick highlights how ‘the gender of individual terms affects other grammatical features of sentences or larger blocks of language’ (2002: 215). she explains that this occurs when ‘the grammatical gender of a term may be at odds with a female referent’ (215). conrick provides numerous examples of professional titles that lack female equivalents, which consequently pose problems for speakers when ‘trying to ‘fit’ a female referent into a grammatically masculine category’ (215). for example ‘nous aimons ce professeur, mais elle va nous quitter’ (we like this teacher, but she is leaving us), creates grammatical awkwardness given that the noun teacher (un professeur) is masculine and the pronoun she (elle) is feminine. this example generates another aspect of the language debate that brick and wilks (1994) point out in their work on the feminisation of professional political titles. noting that a 1977 decree allowed the use of a female pronoun to refer to a masculine noun, brick and wilks question why it is possible to legitimise changes in the use of the pronoun but not permit the feminisation of the noun (1994: 237). another example of grammatical confusion created by masculine professional titles is the sentence: ‘un pompier a accouché la semaine dernière’ (a firefighter gave birth last week). the use of the masculine title for firefighter (un pompier) thus gives the impression that a man has given birth (conrick 2002: 216). brick and wilks also discuss how in the early 1990s the french media struggled to construct sentences dealing with then prime minister edith cresson’s term giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 8 in power. the media often had to juggle the masculine noun for prime minister (le premier ministre) with adjectives in the feminine, as this sentence illustrates: ‘entretien du premier minister, vêtue … d’une veste noire (interview with the prime minister, dressed … in a black jacket). here the media chose to use the masculine title with the feminine adjective vêtue, thus defying what is considered correct grammatical agreement (brick & wilks 1994: 237). in and since the 1990s, guidelines recommending female equivalents of masculine titles have been created in france. for example, the 1999 guide femme j’écris ton nom. guide d’aide à la féminisation des noms de métiers, titres, grades et fonctions (woman i write your name. guidelines to feminine equivalents of professional titles, positions and ranks) prepared by the institut national de la langue française (national institute of the french language ), proposed feminine equivalents to many male occupational titles. this guide was circulated in government ministries, including the ministry for education, to help employees find solutions to grammatical ambiguities in french. the guide is, as its title attests, just a set of guidelines, and official changes to the language have not been made. on the contrary, the académie française, which regulates the use of the french language, has opposed the feminisation of titles. it has justified this in the media by declaring that such feminisation would lead to the creation of ridiculous female equivalents, and reiterating that the french masculine has the capacity of relating to both genders. houdebine-gravaud, however, describes the negative and purist reactions of certain french speakers as verging on the hysterical when it comes to questions of the feminisation and modification of professional titles (houdebinegravaud 1999: 46). these attitudes, it must be noted, reflect the contemporary situation in france. other french-speaking countries like canada and belgium have been much more willing to modernise the french language in the face of social and cultural change (conrick 2002: 212). many french canadian dictionaries, for example, include both masculine and feminine forms of professional titles, and job advertisements in canada also address both genders. the french-language learning classroom what do these policies mean in the context of the french-language classroom in a country such as australia? a brief description of the university context in which i work is helpful here for understanding the impact that french policies may have on language giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 9 teaching and learning experiences outside france. presently i teach in the french language and culture program offered as part of an international studies degree program at an australian university. the international studies program offers classes in french from beginner to advanced levels, either to students studying french as a compulsory part of their international studies degree, or to free elective students. alongside french, spanish, italian, german, chinese and japanese are also taught. students come from a range of disciplines—science, engineering, it, nursing, law, design and architecture, education, communication, and business, all in combination with international studies—and are concentrated in the beginner or intermediate levels. they may have different linguistic backgrounds, many are bilingual and multilingual, but all have english as a common language. students learning french in the combined degree program in international studies study language for two years before proceeding to study in france for one year at a french university. i work with a team of three to four french language teachers in australia, and also travel to meet the french language teachers in france who teach our students when they are on in-country study. the language pedagogies that i and other teachers in this program use, like those increasingly adopted by teachers elsewhere in australia and in france, indicate the application of new developments in, and modes of thinking about, approaches to the teaching of language over the last few decades. in the past, the traditional view of language learning involved the teaching of grammar to students so they could best gain access to literature and other products of ‘high’ culture. today there is an emphasis on communicative strategies and blended learning.2 there is also a greater recognition of the interrelationship between language and society. in his analysis of the convergences between language and society, fairclough observes that both have ‘an internal and dialectical relationship’ with each other (2001: 19). that is, linguistic phenomena are social phenomena, in that language use is determined by sociocultural conventions that are underpinned by the power relations underlying the same conventions. at the same time, language plays a role in constructing, maintaining 2 according to the language and culture subject outlines given to my students, and those studying all the languages taught at my institution: ‘the pedagogical key concept we adopt in our curriculum development is blended learning which incorporates independent learning and classroom instruction into a coherent program to provide students with a steady progression in language proficiency to enable them to gain full literacy skills in the target language and to equip them with the skills of self-directed learning.’ giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 10 and changing sociocultural conventions. fairclough’s earlier work on critical discourse analysis (1995) also drew attention to the relationship between discourse and ideology, with the former referring to the actual language used, and the latter to a link between social power and the way it is manifested in language use. this relationship has political implications for how the role of language teachers is understood. teachers may either contribute to the preservation of normative positions in regard to dominating social practices, or they can challenge them. in the case of the latter, teachers need to promote a class environment that encourages a critical and self-reflective discourse for both students and teachers. this practice needs to be supported by a curriculum and materials that facilitate linguistic and reflective exploration. an awareness of the links between discourse and ideology, and their implications for language teaching and learning, is required whenever introducing new practices, materials or debates into the language classroom.3 in terms of the relationship between the french-language learning classroom and formal french language policies emanating from france, students should be given the opportunity to understand and discuss the implications that such language policies have on the language, and on their own learning. students need to reflect on what language authorities desire of the french language and its speakers, and how language is spoken and written in french society. an examination of some of the teaching material used in the french language curriculum at my institution indicates that debates about the feminisation of professional titles and the use of english terms in french are neither developed nor detailed in that material.4 much of the published teaching material used in french tertiary institutions is written and printed in france, though some textbooks have been written locally in australia, and others have been produced in frenchspeaking countries like canada. in such texts a great deal of the cultural and social content about language usage is therefore influenced by what is happening in france. from what i have experienced and observed, it is thus left to the teacher to explain to students the discrepancies between the official use of professional titles and the realities 3 similar observations have been developed by de vincenti, giovanangeli and ward (2007) on how the role of the language teacher is understood in today’s teaching and learning context. 4 recently published textbooks used in beginner and intermediate levels, such as campus 1&2 (girardet & pécheur 2002a, 2002b), forum 2 (baylon et al. 2002), connexions 1&2 (mérieux & loiseau 2004a, 2004b), studio 60 (lavenne et al 2001), studio100 (lavenne et al 2002), taxi 1 (capelle & menand 2003) and rond point 2 (flumian et al 2005), were some of the material i considered in making this observation. giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 11 of feminine versions slowly creeping into everyday language usage. i have also noticed that explaining the dilemmas of the feminine versus the masculine debate often frustrates students because they are left with the burden of having to make their own choices when, in reality, they want to understand the correct way of using the language. making students aware of the situation in france is a step closer to helping them resolve how to feminise professional titles, despite the fact that answers are not readily provided in their textbooks. also, making students aware of guides in current circulation and written to help the french themselves negotiate these debates and linguistic changes, such as the femme j’écris ton nom noted earlier, is a way of making these choices easier for students. the use of english words in french is more problematic. the feminisation of professional titles has legible support from political spheres as women take on increasingly important roles in the workplace. language reflects this change through the appearance of new feminine forms for professional titles, and the publication of guides about how to use those titles. however, defending the french language against the use of english is seen by some critics as the local ‘defence against global linguistic monoculture inherent in the spread of english’ (sonntag 2003: 47). politicians such as the former minister of culture under president mitterrand and socialist deputy leader, jack lang, have written papers on how globalisation, and its connection to us capitalism, is creating a global monoculture against which france must defend itself (sonntag 2003: 46). thinkers like lang associate language with the need to oppose global english hegemony. as a teacher i am faced with the dilemma of choosing whether or not to encourage the use of french whenever possible, and in this way join or reject the fight to protect the french language. after all, prominent figures like lang, and institutions like the académie française, stress this is the right thing to do. or do i simply explain to students that english words creep into french and encourage them to look at how this is happening, for example, by studying french radio podcasts or blogs written by french speakers in france that provide examples of english loan words in french structures. the assignments i receive from my students while on in-country studies in france, and that ask students to reflect on contemporary social change in that country, confirm to me that these structures do confront students. one assignment i received recently, on the giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 12 use of public space within a particular french city and unrelated to the use of english in french, contained an appendix with interviews the student had conducted in the street with young french speakers. one interview alone showed that english terms such as le street, le skate, les spots, and l’aspect underground were happily integrated into french sentences. if i were to teach these terms to my language students, would i then be encouraging the use of english in french? i tend to agree with the linguist henriette walter (2001) who believes that french is not threatened by english. some words evolve, while other words are borrowed only for a certain time and then fall out of fashion. she also makes a point of listing examples of french terms used in the english language. for walter words have been travelling from language to language for centuries (2001: 15). there needs to be room in the language classroom to examine and to explore these sorts of interchanges. in the first few pages of a beginner language textbook currently used in our language program, the term adresse électronique (email) is the only option given for the term email, despite the fact that the french also use the english word ‘email’ extensively (mérieux et al 2004: 24). the onus falls on the teacher to explain that both terms are acceptable in everyday french idiom. the teachers i have worked with often speak within a space where they explain: ‘here is the french word but you will also see this english term used.’ concluding comments this essay identifies the difficulties that are created within a language classroom when conflicting information exists between the realities of french language usage and the desires on the part of individuals and institutions either to police the language from corrupting influences or to act as agents in its inevitable evolution. a teacher may choose to explore the french language by presenting it in a desired pure form, closely aligned to the way the académie française or french politicians would like it to be taught. the reality, however, indicates that students of the french language are confronted with a language that is evolving in everyday speech in order to meet the challenges of constant sociocultural change. two areas stand out as problematic in the debates over a desired french language and that language’s quotidian realities: the feminisation of professional titles; and the inclusion of english terms in the french language. dealing with these issues poses challenges for language learners; but the ideal place for confronting these challenges is giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 13 within the space of the language classroom where language desires and realities can be discussed. recognising the interrelationship between language and society is crucial; the language classroom space is a place where linguistic structures and policies are able to meet. for students studying french, this space is a venue in which to raise awareness about the sociocultural aspects of language and to develop discussion about, and awareness of, the implications that language policies have on french as it is lived, and taught and learned. indeed, i have argued here that excluding from the classroom debate over language policies, and the defenders of the french language, risks marginalising the linguistic reality of france today. it is essential for french language teachers to take a critical approach towards material and activities in order to give students the framework to explore the sociocultural and political ramifications of the french language and its evolution. this paper, then, is a preliminary meditation on those ramifications. some areas for further elaboration include how to develop an enquiry-based approach in the french language curriculum using materials and activities that allow students to explore how language policies affect the french language while also developing their language learning skills. as technology is increasingly used in language classrooms, it would be worth exploring the quotidian evolution of the french language through such authentic material as blogs, podcasts, advertisements and virtual spaces (for example, second life), and thus better identify how desired language policies diverge from the realities of the french language in all its registers. in addition to the activities that promote language learning, the classroom should be a space that investigates the language debates taking place in france. discussions on whether french singers can choose english or french in the eurovision song contest, or whether national french companies can be taken to court for imposing the use of english in the workplace instead of french, must take place in classrooms wherever french is taught. giovanangeli competing desires and realities portal, vol. 6, no. 1 january 2009. 14 reference list adamson, r. 2007, the defence of the french. a language in crisis?, multilingual matters, clevedon. baylon, c. et al. 2002, forum 2, hachette fle, paris. becquer, a., cerquiglini, b. & cholewka, n. (eds) 1999, femme j’écris ton nom. guide d’aide à la féminisation des noms de métiers, titres, grades et fonctions, institut national de la langue française, paris. bremner, c. 2006, ‘chirac contre l’anglais,’ times online, 24 march. online, available: http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/charles_bremner/2006/03/chirac_contre_1.html (accessed 8 october 2007). bremner, c. 2008, ‘french drop le pop in search of eurovision win,’ times online, 16 april. online, available: http://www.timesonline.co.uk.tol.news/world/europe/article 3754191.ece (accessed 18 april 2008). brick, n., & wilks, c. 1994, ‘et dieu nomma la femme: observations sur la question de la féminisation des noms d’agent er sur les désignations d’edith cresson dans la presse,’ french language studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (september), 235-39. brick, n., & wilks, c. 2002, ‘les partis politiques et la féminisation des noms de métier,’ french language studies, vol. 12, no. 1 (march), 43-53. capelle, g. & menand, r. 2003, taxi 1, hachette fle, paris. conrick, m, 2002, ‘language policy and gender issues in contemporary france,’ in french in and out of france: language policy, intercultural antagonisms and dialogue, (ed.) k. salhi, peter lang, new york. 205-35. de certeau, m. julia, d. & revel, j. 2002, une politique de la langue, gallimard, paris. de vincenti, g., giovanangeli a. and ward, r. 2007, ‘the queer stopover: how queer travels in the language classroom,’ electronic journal of foreign language teaching, vol. 4, suppl. 1, 58-72. online, available: http://e-flt.nus.edu.sg/v4sp12007/ward.pdf (accessed 29 july 2008). fairclough, n. 1995, critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language, harlow, longman. fairclough, n. 2001, language and power, 2nd ed, harlow, longman. flumian, c. et al. 2005, rond point 2, presses universitaires de grenoble, grenoble. gilder, a. 1993, et si l’on parlait français? essai sur une langue universelle, le cherche midi éditeur, paris. girardet, j & pécheur, j. 2002a, campus niveau 1, cle international, paris. girardet, j & pécheur, j. 2002b, campus niveau 2, cle international, paris. houdebine-gravaud, a-m. 1999, ‘femmes/langue/féminisation: une expérience de politique linguistique en france,’ nouvelles questions féministes, vol. 20, no. 1, 23-50. lang, j. 2000, ‘l’amour de babel,’ in langues : une guerre de mort, panoramiques, corlet, courbevoie, 128-30. lavenne, c. et al, 2001, studio 60, didier, paris. lavenne, c. et al. 2002, studio 100, didier, paris. magnant, a. 2000, ‘le français est-il encore une langue internationale ?,’ in langues: une guerre de mort, panoramiques, corlet, courbevoie, 124-27. mérieux, r. & loiseau, y. 2004a, connexions. méthode de français, niveau 1, didier, paris. mérieux, r. & loiseau, y. 2004b, connexions. méthode de français, niveau 2, didier, paris. ministère des affaires etrangères. 2007, francophony/french language. last update july. online, available: http://diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/france-prioties_1/francophony-frenchlanguage_1113/francophony_1932/prsentation_4278/index.html#sommaire_2 (accessed 5 october 2007). réau, l. 1938, l’europe française au siècle des lumières, albin michel, paris. rey-debove, j. 1999, ‘féminisation de la langue: une affaire d’usage,’ le français dans le monde, mai/juin, no. 304, 59-60. sonntag, s. k. 2003, the local politics of global english. case studies in linguistic globalization. lexington books, lanham. vandendorpe, c. 1995, ‘du fondamentalisme linguistique ou de la tentation de rectifier la pensée par le langage,’ discours social. l’esprit de censure, vol. 7, no. 1-2, 135-52. walter, h. 2001, honni soit qui mal y pense. l’incroyable histoire d’amour entre le français et l’anglais, robert laffont, paris. title ideas portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ beauty in bastardy? breytenbach on afrikaans and the afrikaners brian kennelly, webster university the afrikaner is bursting out of his definitions of himself as well as those of others. —willem de klerk, former editor of rapport throughout the twentieth century activists in south africa for the afrikaans language struggled with, yet never resolved, the language/people, afrikaans/afrikaner issue, as hermann giliomee points out in his recent ‘biography’ of the afrikaners (2003, 389). was the afrikaner community a racial or linguistic one? was the push to promote afrikaans subordinate to the entrenchment of a white supremacist government and ruling party? was there a hegemonic or counter-hegemonic relationship between language and ethnicity? if the social identity of the afrikaner was to be shaped by the acceptance of afrikaans as a public language on equal footing with english, the creed that the language constitutes the entire people (‘die taal is gans die volk’) had to be race-blind. in the ever-changing south african society of the twenty-first century, it is no surprise that old labels and new identities are still ‘simmering’ (swarns 1999). the concept of afrikaner ‘identity’ is situated in a field of contesting meanings (wasserman 2001, 37). new patterns and relationships are yet to be established (brink 1998, 119). south africa constitutes a ‘virtual battleground’ for the various actors who are trying to define afrikanerskap (vestergaard 2001, 28). the democratic political dispensation has given rise to the ‘decolonization of colonial contact zones’ (steinwand 2002, para. 6) and ‘new south africa-speak’ (wicomb 2002, 146). all are testing the depth of afrikaners’ identification with cultural issues they once held dear (van zyl slabbert 2000, 157). kennelly beauty in bastardy the conservative party, for example, joined forces in september 2003 with the freedom front and the afrikaner unity movement to become the freedom front plus, a party ‘irrevocably committed to the protection and advancement of afrikaner interests’ (vryheidsfront plus). ferdi hartzenberg, who had led the conservatives, was asked to define the term ‘afrikaner.’ he brushed off and sidestepped the question, deeming it both irrelevant and passé. he claimed that the issue that had long plagued language activists had been settled: ‘all the people know what an afrikaner is. the african national congress knows what an afrikaner is. the time for formulating such definitions has passed’ (de beer 2003, para. 1). by focusing on the present at the same time as looking forward to a more enlightened future for youthfully postcolonial south africa (wicomb 1996, 7), hartzenberg and others like him cannot, however, overlook the 43 years constituting its deeply troubling recent apartheid past. in the latter half of the twentieth century, white supremacists were the architects and overlords of its system of exclusive and legalized racial intolerance. indeed, they had been the group defining afrikaners. they had distinguished, but also tainted themselves by participating in what south africa’s third nobel prize winner, john maxwell coetzee, terms ‘an audacious and well-planned crime against africa’ (1992, 342).1 frederik van zyl slabbert, the former leader of the progressive federal party, seems more reasonable, and certainly more reflective, than hartzenberg. he grapples in his writings with the perennially thorny problem of how to define and categorize afrikaners. in his effort to tackle tough questions of identity and politics as they are rehearsed and rerehearsed both locally and nationally in the ‘rainbow nation,’ van zyl slabbert privileges compromise and exchange, idea-sharing over stonewalling.2 ‘to be called an 1 a more ‘enlightened’ future is, of course, no guarantee of its stability. interviewed at the voortrekker monument at the same time as reconciliation day celebrations were taking place not far away, don pretorius for example painted a bleak future for certain south africans: ‘it's actually very unsure for us here. we don't know if the same thing will happen here as happened in zimbabwe’ (dixon 2004). 2 in his article on identity and nation-building in post-apartheid south africa, gary baines notes that archbishop desmond tutu is usually credited with coining this term (2003, para. 2). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 kennelly beauty in bastardy afrikaner,’ he therefore cautions, ‘is the beginning of a discussion, never the final word’ (2000, 24). such discussion is made more salient by giliomee’s more-than-seven-hundred-page study the afrikaners: biography of a people, which reveals that the very concept of ‘afrikaner’ has always been contested in spite of the predominant sense of ethnic unity (alexander 2003). the writings of the ‘sometime’ (schalkwyk 1994, 24) afrikaner artist, playwright, essayist, ‘terrorist,’ and poète maudit breyten breytenbach on the afrikaans language and afrikaner people further nuance, extend, and even complicate the discussion. in the wake of the acrimonious debate provoked by this self-described ‘nadaist,’ ‘nomad,’ ‘afrikaner azanian pariah’ (1996, 8, 15), ‘one-eyed wind jackal,’ and ‘philosidiot’ (2000, 11) during the apartheid years over the bastard nature of afrikaner identity (schalkwyk 1994, 27), what is breytenbach’s ‘controversial conception’ (1986, 94) of what it might mean, or have meant, to be an afrikaner and to speak afrikaans? and in the cacophony over afrikaner cultural identity (vestergaard 2001, 22) as south africa moves beyond the dark legacy, the ‘lengthy dismemberment and agony of cultures and ethics’ (breytenbach 1988, 115) of its past and rebuilds itself for a more inclusive future, how can the redefinitive role breytenbach envisions for afrikaners and the language they speak be seen both recuperative and reconciliative? from bastertaal to the law of the bastard the sense of being afrikaner had only crystallized by the end of the eighteenth century for the colonists in southern africa who had previously referred to themselves as burghers, christians, or dutchmen (giliomee 2003, 50-1). by the end of the twentieth century, however, the term ‘afrikaner’ had become increasingly limited and ideologized. as white afrikaans speakers, the afrikaners were that part of the afrikaans language community forming the ruling class (wasserman 2001, 37). described by the philosopher martin walser as a ‘people on the wrong side of history’ (brink 1998, 72), they saw themselves as a volk. they had a teleological belief in their historically defined role (reckwitz 1993, 21). they were, breytenbach sarcastically states, ‘a people with a mission, put there by god with a purpose’ (1986, 197); they were to fulfill their destiny portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 kennelly beauty in bastardy as christians, as a civilization (moodie 1975, 11). they were the only whites in south africa who saw themselves as having become ‘truly indigenous’ and who were prepared to fight to the end for white supremacy (giliomee 2003, xvi). the term, afrikaner, coetzee observes (1992, 342), had been first hijacked by a primarily anti-british but also anti-black political movement calling itself afrikaner nationalism. ‘afrikaner’ thereby became an exclusive classification. those speaking afrikaans as their first language however were not accepted as afrikaners if they failed to meet further racial, cultural, and political criteria. with the sharply drawn group identities enforced by this eugenically based system (van zyl slabbert 2000, 79), apartheid was intolerant of variation. just as blacks could be imprisoned for not carrying a ‘pass,’ white afrikaans speakers who disagreed with or acted against the racial, indeed racist, policy of the government were seen as opposing not only their people but the will of god. heretical, these ‘bad afrikaners’ could also be judged guilty of treason. by 1983 breytenbach no longer considered himself an afrikaner. he had served seven of the nine years to which he had been sentenced for conspiring against the state—two of them in solitary confinement. for him, the ‘concept’ (1983a, 6) had taken on a political and cultural content with which he could no longer identify (1986, 102).3 to be an afrikaner, in his eyes, was to have been successfully ‘programmed’ by die burger, state television, and the syllabi of such cultural bastions as the universities of stellenbosch and pretoria. it was to be a life-long hostage of the broederbond, prey to the journalists, teachers, commando officers, and pastors who, he warned, were really ‘opinion-spinning spiders’ (1986, 30). to be an afrikaner, he furthermore opined, was to be ‘a blight and a provocation to humanity,’ ‘a living insult to whatever better instincts [...] human beings may possess and struggle to maintain’ (1983b, 280, 354). as a result, breytenbach emphasized at that time, nothing could ever bridge the gap between himself and the 3 breytenbach was tried and convicted for terrorism in 1975. he had returned incognito to south africa from france (where he had lived since 1961 in exile with his vietnamese, and thus legally ‘non-white,’ wife) and attempted to garner support for the resistance group ‘okhela,’ for which he had written the political platform. he returned to paris in 1982. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 kennelly beauty in bastardy authorities of the afrikaner tribe. these ‘overdogs,’ ‘bastards in power’ (linfield 2000-1, 270) were ‘tragically defending a superannuated vision of western civilization’ (breytenbach 1986, 197). he has since come to terms with his afrikaner identity, however. he realizes that his exiled ‘years of dawdling by the fleshpots of paris’ ultimately did not make him any less of an afrikaner (1996, 32). he wrote in 1993, for example, of ‘scratching’ for his afrikaner roots again (1993, 80). * * * * * while not exclusive to them, the first language of afrikaans is today the ‘primary’ or probably the ‘simplest’ means by which to identify members of the afrikaner tribe from whom breytenbach so distanced himself more than two decades ago. as such, speaking afrikaans could be considered their ‘most common characteristic’ (louw-potgieter 1988, 51). in essence, afrikaans was a dialect of dutch that over time underwent a limited measure of creolization (giliomee 2003, 53). it was shaped in large part by those unable to speak proper dutch (brink 1998, 76). it had, moreover, been scorned by the english newspaper the cape argus in the nineteenth century as ‘a “miserable, bastard jargon” […] not worthy of the name of “language” at all’ (giliomee 2003, 203). likewise, readers of the cape times considered it ‘mongrel,’ ‘kitchen,’ ‘hotch-potch,’ ‘degenerate,’ and ‘decaying’; it was only fit for ‘peasants and up-country kraals’ (giliomee 2003, 367). in fact, as late as the early twentieth century, shortly before being codified and elevated by the afrikaans ‘culture brokers’ (willemse 1991, 261) as ‘the youngest prince of the family of the germanic languages’ (breytenbach 1983a, 6), afrikaans still carried the stigma of a bastard tongue (bastertaal). it was considered the language of the uneducated (giliomee 2003, 224). breytenbach sought to dissociate himself from the ‘official’ afrikaans imposed on south africans during the apartheid years. he long viewed it as the ‘excuse and reinforcement for the utter perversion of racial baasskap’ (2000, 10), the ‘language for tombstones’ (1991, 182), and portrayed it in his poetry, for instance, as ‘a grey reservist of a hundred years old and more,’ with a ‘grammar of violence’ and ‘syntax of destruction’ (1983b, 356-7). but he finds ‘astonishing beauty’ (1986, 102) in its bastardy today. he notices portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 kennelly beauty in bastardy that afrikaans, now one of eleven official languages in south africa but ironically the only language on the continent to call itself ‘african’ (1988, 115), still clearly bears the traces of its ‘beautiful, bastard’ (2000-1, 271) origins: ‘that marriage between the sea, the story of sailors and slaves from many regions, and the inland vernacular of settler peasants and indigenous peoples’ (1988, 15). in his 1999 memoir, breytenbach ties the bastardy for which afrikaans was long stigmatized to the losses and gains of past and present: my language speaks of the loss of purity, i mix europe and the east and africa in my veins, my cousin is a malagasy; my tongue speaks about moving away from the known, about overflowing into the unknown, about making; of dispossessing, plundering, enslavement, mixing; of the transmission under guise of a ‘new’ language of that which refuses to be forgotten, of discovery but of agreement also (because comparison is as well a compromise), of the land and of light, of the art of surviving. i’m a dutch bastard, my father is french and my mother is khoi. each grave in this purple earth is a place of exile [....] our specific language, afrikaans, is the visible history and the ongoing process not only of bastardisation, but also of metamorphosis (175-6). like the company gardens, the strategic halfway house for dutch east india company sailors, the language spoken there bridged and ultimately incorporated continents and cultures. similarly, as afrikaans speakers trekked from the southern tip of africa into the harsh hinterland, their language survived as they did—by adapting. no less ‘new’ than ‘specific’ to the people its speakers dispossessed, plundered, and enslaved, breytenbach paints yet praises his native tongue as illicit and impure. the poet breytenbach suggests that afrikaans should be seen as ‘a new avatar of that supple lingo of seafarers, slaves and nomads—of people who constantly have to invent themselves’ (1993, 211). it should, furthermore, be recognized as dynamic and under perpetual reinvention. it is far richer and robust than the funereal, government-imposed language from which he once distanced himself.4 novelist andré brink, for example, observes that at the same time afrikaans was turned into the language of apartheid by ‘misguided ideas of ethnic and linguistic purity,’ an ‘alternative’ and resilient afrikaans 4in his study of how afrikaans was portrayed in the ‘overtly afrikaner nationalist-inclined’ south african textbooks during the years of apartheid, hein willemse argues that the history of afrikaans was, for many years, ‘essentially an invented myth.’ during that time popular, advocated notions of the origins of afrikaans were ‘characterized by a deafening silence on or slighting of the non-germanic or black impact on afrikaans.’ in fact many afrikaner linguists still limit that influence today to a few lexical items, thereby implicitly dismissing the contribution of black people, for example, to the structure of afrikaans (1991, 251, 260-1). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 kennelly beauty in bastardy continued to exist (1998, 218). indeed, the distinguished afrikaner writer, broadcaster, and former newspaper editor max du preez noted recently that the language ‘has never been richer’ (roup 2004, 16). readily apparent in the increasing numbers of singers and writers, for instance, who use afrikaans as a medium of expression, the ‘new vibrancy’ of afrikaans (vestergaard 2001, 27) is moreover celebrated annually at the klein karoo national arts festival in oudtshoorn, which is attended by more than 100,000 fans of afrikaans theater and music. south africa’s 2001 census revealed that more blacks than whites spoke the language at home.5 this is additional evidence of afrikaans’s linguistic renaissance, of the unfinished, unfolding process of its ‘adaptory dialectics of corruption and invention’ (breytenbach 1988, 116), of the ‘heartbeat that helped to burst the congested afrikaner arteries’ (2000, 10). of course, this may also be explained in part by the fact that afrikaans was forced on blacks as a medium of education during the long apartheid years. but as a result of the socio-political changes that have occurred in south africa since 1994, and of the ‘concomitant democratization’ of the broad south african speech community (kotzé 2003, para. 27), the language has also lost its ‘tutelage, its dependency, its privileged link with the state’ (dimitriu 1997, 87). today, it consists of, if not embraces and incorporates, several sub-languages, or alternative forms (adhikari 1996, 14). this development further dramatizes the ‘bleeding-in of images of different origins’ and the transformation of the result into something totally different. according to breytenbach (1986, 102), both phenomena accompany the inherent and ongoing bastardization and metamorphosis of afrikaans, which fifteen years before the most recent census he had recognized as not ‘belonging’ to the whites. while eastern frontier afrikaans (oosgrensafrikaans), which was spoken by privileged whites, became the ‘standard,’ ‘pure’ or suiwer afrikaans during the apartheid years, non-white forms now include cape afrikaans (kaapse afrikaans) and orange river afrikaans 5of the 13.3 percent of the south african population speaking afrikaans, 68 percent live in the northern cape, 55.3 percent in the western cape, 14.4 percent in gauteng, 11.9 percent in the free state, 9.3 percent in the eastern cape, 7.5 percent in the north west, 6.2 percent in mpumalanga, 2.3 percent in limpopo, and 1.5 percent in kwazulu-natal. available:http://www.southafrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/demographics/census-main.htm> [accessed nov. 2003]. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 http://www.southafrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/demographics/census-main.htm> kennelly beauty in bastardy (oranjerivierafrikaans), as well as various counter-hegemonic discourses and antilanguages (mesthrie 1996, viii). the afrikaans as spoken in the countryside of gauteng is very different from the afrikaans one might hear spoken by whites on the campus of the traditionally afrikaans-speaking university of pretoria. in the same way, popular, or everyday ‘street’ afrikaans is as distinct from the formerly ‘official’ afrikaans as is the non-standard gangster and black yuppie patois, tsotsitaal—also known as flytaal or flaaitaal, meaning ‘smart talk’ or ‘jive talk.’ this dynamic, rapidly evolving and varying creole of afrikaans, english and black languages such as zulu and sesotho, which is widely spoken by males in urban areas, developed in the mines and places such as sophiatown, to make communication easier among the different language groups. similarly, kaaps—also known as kapie-taal—or the dialect of cape afrikaans spoken in the areas near cape town by 80 percent of the coloured community, and which includes english and xhosa words, is rising in importance.6 understandably, as increasing numbers of afrikaans speakers find jobs in the media, and as writers from the formerly marginalized groups of the afrikaans community gain access to production channels (wasserman 2000, 96), previously non-standard variants are becoming sanctioned and more widely accepted (kotzé 2003, para. 27). this diversity in varieties of afrikaans spoken as a first language in south africa today results in part, breytenbach explains (1999, 35), from ‘the glorious bastardization’ of the ‘men and women mutually shaped by sky and rain and wind and soil’ who speak it. just as afrikaans was spoken mainly by ‘coloured’ people before attempts were made to wrestle it away from them and consciously transform it into a ‘white man’s language’ (brink 1998, 106), the name ‘afrikaner’ designated mainly people of mixed blood in the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries. as andré brink notes in a text on the afrikaners that was commissioned and published by national geographic magazine in the 1980s, when the british threatened the survival of the small boer republics that had been established in the transvaal and orange free state in the last quarter of the 6 in her essay on shame and identity in the cape coloured community, zoë wicomb points out that when afrikaans was rejected by blacks as the ‘language of the oppressor’, in 1976, there was a movement amongst coloureds in the cape province to dissociate their first language from oppression. kaaps asserted ‘a discursive space for an oppositional colouredness that aligned itself with the black liberation struggle’ (1998, 97). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 kennelly beauty in bastardy nineteenth century, a sense of national, racial, and religious consciousness arose among south africans, mainly of dutch descent: ‘from then onwards “afrikaner” acquired a more explicit political and religious connotation and afrikaans was deliberately propagated as a “white” language’ (1998, 76). but for most of the twentieth century, the definitive bastardy of the afrikaners, considered by breytenbach to be ‘one of the most mixed and mixed-up tribes of history’ (1988, 115), who under the laws of the dutch east india company once spoke dutch and whose members were commonly called baster, or by the dutch word bastaard (giliomee 2003, 40), was covered up. as breytenbach points out, it was downplayed, if not made invisible, by the ‘tribe-bound blindness’ (1986, 77) of the governing nationalist party (np), leaders of the so-called ‘white tribe of africa’ (brink 1998, 77). by attempting to protect the ‘fallacious purity’ (breytenbach 1988, 115) of the afrikaners, the np necessarily but problematically ‘strain[ed]’ its surroundings through a ‘simplifying eye’ (1986, 60). from 1948 to 1994, when the first free elections were held in south africa, the np’s totalitarian regime ran the country. it brainwashed generations, ‘constantly redefin[ing] purity’ (1986, 60) under what breytenbach in 1980 termed ‘the law of the bastard’ (156) in his characteristically apt but cheeky fashion. the np got itself ‘entangled in a frenzy of frontier tracing, creating weals, cutting into the living fibre of family and nation’ (1996, 15). as a result of ‘separate development’ and the ‘pass’ laws, of ‘bureaucratic arbitration, tribal superstitions and ideological genetics’ (1988, 125), the government moved people ‘willy-nilly to justify demarcations, expropriations’ (1993, 91). as a consequence, those who during the years of apartheid so desperately wanted to validate their power and consolidate their ‘supposed tribal identity,’ offended others; they fenced off, defended, and entrenched themselves. at the same time they retained what they had won. they made their difference and their illegitimacy the norm, if not the ideal. they were indeed ‘a bastard people with a bastard language’ who had fallen into ‘the trap of the bastard who acquires power’ (1980, 156). yet the afrikaner statesmen were, breytenbach adds, little more than ‘degenerate descendants crossing off lives with a stroke of the pen behind their desks of state’ (1993, portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 kennelly beauty in bastardy 175). they were in reality not the spokespeople of some ‘purer’ culture but the ‘offshoot of a shotgun marriage’ (1986, 46). they were the offspring of an inevitable intermixing between colonized people and colonizers, of liaisons between europeans, slaves, khoi and subordinate blacks. they were, as a result, the descendants of sailors, mercenaries, downgraded civil servants, and ‘difficult’ minorities such as the huguenots. their ancestors were emigrants who were either forced off the northern continent or ill-adapted to it. just as the syllables of afrikaans place names have, breytenbach observes, weathered to a ‘smooth sheen from being told through the fingers,’ so too their history has been effaced with time and their stories modified for political reasons.7 with the ‘abscess’ that was ‘adroitly used by those in power to divert attention from other developments’ now lanced, and with the remaining shackles of apartheid lifted, those stories can finally be told. their resonance can be researched and recognized, and the true beauty in their bastardy beheld: riviersonderend, bredasdorp, swellendam, stormsvlei, halfaampieskraal, buffeljagsrivier, leeurivier, voorhuis, karringmelk, soetmelkrivier, reisiesbaan, dekriet, suurbraak. listen, there’s a story buried behind each and every one of them. whose? my forebears with the deep eyes of injured baboons and the cumbersome hands and the dark chintz dresses? my other ancestors in their borrowed clothes and the ostrich feathers in their hats? those who had the memory of rocking ships in their gait? those who roamed for centuries behind flocks of beasts, from oblivion to an inaccessible skyline? (breytenbach 1993, 27-8) breytenbach’s rhetoric intervening within a rich literary context, he celebrates the south african landscape in an attempt to elaborate on his national self-identification (foley & carr, para. 39) through extension. the ‘local’ stories buried behind these western cape toponyms echo and thus include those of all of his bastard brethren, whether those of the seas or sands, slaves or nomads, trekboere or burghers, huguenots or hottentots. the situation, breytenbach reminds us (1986, 55), is essentially no different from that of ‘the pale virgin with the dark-skinned brood.’ from the outset, he explains (1986, 189), afrikaners suffered from the ‘rigid sense of insecurity of the half-breed.’ but they passionately affirmed the nature and principles of their tribe: locally non-european blood was mixed in; the blood of slaves, the blood of the conquered ones. neglected, unsupported and unprotected by the motherlands—until diamonds and gold were 7 there is notably increasing tension stemming from the perception among many people in south africa that cultural identity can only be linked to african names. see, for instance, kasrils (2000), brandt (2002) and machaba (2003). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 kennelly beauty in bastardy found—they soon imposed, in the first place upon themselves, their view of what they thought themselves forced to be: a new ‘people’, still white; an extension of european culture—which meant calvinist puritanism—into hostile but covetable surroundings [….] doubt will be suppressed, purity must be preserved, descendence is to be white-washed and there results a pathetic clinging to ‘european’ culture (1986, 55). with their blood estimated to be 71 percent ‘non-white’ (brink 1998, 77) and their minds ‘warped’ by ‘european exclusivism’ (breytenbach 1993, 80), they pretended to be what they were told they ought to be (‘what they thought themselves forced to be’), with the ‘outward and fossilized signs of european ways.’ as these ‘unassimilables’ (1986, 55) were offloaded onto the third world, the métissage, or ‘new mixture of existing truths’ (1993, xiii) began. in the ‘mixing’—the suppression of doubt—the bastard origins or non-european colorations were whitewashed. from bastardy to the greater othering after nelson mandela was freed from prison and the ban on the african national congress (anc) was lifted, breytenbach traveled from france to south africa. he had not revisited the country since being released from prison there in 1982. upon arriving, in addition to english he heard german and portuguese being spoken outside the airport. what right, he wondered, did these speakers of ‘foreign’ tongues, these apparent ‘intruders’, have to strut arrogantly on the tip of the african continent? as they walked their luggage to the parking area, they acted like long-time residents, as though south africa—with which and from which he found himself schizophrenically identified and dissociated (reckwitz 1993, 13)—belonged to them. breytenbach’s self-posed rhetorical questions gave rise to others, equally as uncomfortable, and all pushing definitional and national limits: but then, since when is this ‘my’ country? who am i? i and my kind, those who look and speak like me? and the blacks? of course the country is theirs, that’s what the struggle has been all about and am i not black too? yes, but actually the land belongs only to those who are locked in a battle for life and death. can there be degrees of nativeness? black and boer and brown, ok. indian? come now, do i really see them as fully south african? and the anglo-whites? wait a minute there, don’t ask all these uncomfortable questions. the other white immigrants then—greek, dutch, polish, italian, german, portuguese? how long before they can qualify as african? and the black immigrants from mozambique and botswana and even further north? should they have a better claim than the pale europeans? (1993, 9) one recent tendency in the effort by ‘enlightened’ afrikaners such as breytenbach to negotiate these ‘degrees of nativeness’ has been to couple an afrikaans identity with portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 kennelly beauty in bastardy other identities. in order to avoid the awkward disqualifications prompted by the identity politics of pitting blacks, boers, and coloureds against indians and whites of british stock, for example, certain afrikaners now refer to themselves in dual terms, as ‘afrikaners and south african,’ ‘afrikaners and afrikaanses’ (giliomee 2003, 664). the latter appellation was recently invented to designate all afrikaans speakers, regardless of their race. in the subtitle to his work on the ‘tough choices’ south africans face today, van zyl slabbert notably proclaims himself an ‘afrikaner african.’ others refer to themselves as members of ‘the afrikaner community’ (schmidt 2003, para. 7), or in terms of the language they speak at home, as ‘afrikaans-speakers,’ ‘afrikaans-users’ (van zyl slabbert 2000, 82).8 with the recognition there have always been ‘alternative’ afrikaners and that it is ‘normal’ to be ‘different’ (breytenbach 2000, 18), the ‘blueprint’ of the afrikaner has been broken.9 yet despite the consequent flux of afrikaner ‘identity,’ given the opening up of previously sacrosanct afrikaner ‘enclaves’ to all races (schalkwyk 1994, 43) and the move to transcend afrikanerhood into a larger whole (brink 1998, 123), breytenbach is hopeful that his bastard people will be able permanently to free themselves of the yokes of the past. he believes that together with their south african compatriots afrikaners can participate in the ‘memory-making’ of the ‘greater othering,’ ‘die groot andersmaak’ (1996, 31), the remaking of south africanness by appropriating khoi tradition through mixing and ‘other-standing’ (1996, 148). afrikaners can thereby rearticulate the relationship between subjects and discursive practices, by establishing some form of supra-ethnic or supra-‘national’ south african nationality or citizenship (1986, 180). they can knit the ‘torn fibres’ of apartheid finally into ‘a serviceable national cloth’ (1996, 44). breytenbach sees this self-reinvention as perpetual and ongoing. it is both an itinerary and topography of ‘becoming in the making’ (1996, 31). likewise, it is an 8for adriana stuijt, afrikaners are really—and only—boers. they have lost their ethnic identity largely due to the efforts during the apartheid years of the afrikaner broederbond, which deliberately wrote their true history from the history books. she cautions that they are at risk today of losing their ethnic identity even further and of losing their rights to remain in the ‘unique, ethnically different nation’ of south africa (2004, para. 8). 9for more on the role of such ‘alternative’ afrikaners in the south african press during apartheid see for instance claassen (2000). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 kennelly beauty in bastardy ‘exciting challenge’ and a ‘miserable fate.’ afrikaners must, in other words, keep on reinventing their identity, authenticity, and usefulness. they must decide upon the weight to ascribe to historical memory. they must determine and maintain the appropriate, sustainable balance for keeping alive the creative tension between sharedness and differences (1996, 9). as a means to supersede the ‘maniacal cutting and chopping’ of identities (1986, 94) that for so long has been prevalent in south african society, and thereby to move from the early african past to a new african future, breytenbach reaches back into that past to bring things full-circle. suspicious of the centralizing and homogenizing tendencies of the current anc government, he understands that because south africa consists of strong and diverse groups, is a ‘construct,’ the ‘result of dreams,’ and a ‘dangerous puzzle’ (2000, 17), it challenges and tests traditional notions of a nation-state. the definitions of cultural identity that have long had currency elsewhere are ill-fitting and outdated there today (dimitriu 1997, 86). he recognizes that definitions are ‘perforce part-time and shifting’ (1996, 15). in the place of these clumsy efforts to give new ideological content to the label of ‘afrikaner,’ breytenbach favors replacing it altogether. he thus revives and poetically revalues the ancient term afriqua, which was the name given centuries ago to the mixed offspring of the khoi and passing sailors (1993, 227). with the suffix –qua added to khoi names indicating ‘the people, the sons, the men of’ (1993, 227), this resurrected term conveys the ‘true mongrel nature’ of afrikaner culture (jacobs 2000, 78). it better fits their cultural complexity than an invented, if not stilted, term such as ‘afrikaanses.’ furthermore, to ally afrikaners and khoi in such a way acknowledges the ‘unwritten’ history, customs, and attitudes of the khoi, the ‘invisible presence’ of the khoi in the make-up of afrikaners (breytenbach 1993, 211).10 for three centuries, breytenbach asserts (1996, 100), his ‘people,’ a ‘profound métissage of cultures,’ have been ‘nothing other’ than afriquas, or ‘of africa’ (1993, 75). the 10 an anonymous reviewer of this essay suggests that such an allying of afrikaner and khoi might be viewed more cynically as a pitting of local (‘cape’) against national politics, an attempt to offset the confident majority of ‘africans’ and the anc. see breytenbach’s ‘open letters’ to nelson mandela (1991 and 1994) for more on his fraught relationship with the anc. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 kennelly beauty in bastardy potential value of the afriqua culture, as he sees it, will lie in the extent to which it allows other cultures to coexist (1986, 48). the ‘bastardization’ at its heart, its engine, can thereby not only give rise to linguistic variation, it should also be looked at closely as a motivation for an ongoing intellectual, cultural, and political renaissance that charts new terrain for democracy, and pushes boundaries or a ‘theological, political, ideological, and practical enquiry into the methods and contents of africanization.’ afrikaners as afriquas might, as a result, attempt to see where they fit into the third world, outline their role in the south-north relationship, and determine the nature and trace the results of their reconciliation in this new, more inclusive and revealing cultural context (1996, 35). for stuart hall, cultural identity can be seen in two ways: as fixed or dynamic. in the first way, it is viewed in terms of one shared culture, much like the afrikaner ‘culture brokers’ viewed their own afrikanerskap during the years of apartheid: ‘a sort of collective “one true self”, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves” which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common’ (1994, 393). breytenbach’s view that it is no longer necessary to affirm one’s separateness in order to fix one’s identity (1993, 74-5) conforms to the second ‘unsettling,’ less familiar view of cultural identity described by hall. the supra-ethnic, supra-‘national’ afriquan cultural identity that breytenbach envisions is a fragmented, discontinuous, and dynamic process. it is not the static, stable framework of meaning to which the architects of apartheid had clung in their efforts to fix the state of being that they had claimed for afrikanerskap. the cultural identity of the afriquas is as much a process of ‘becoming’ as a state of ‘being.’ it is a positioning towards history and the future, within full knowledge that the schism with the apartheid past is complete yet always already subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power (hall 1994, 394). reconciliation for breytenbach is also a ‘hybridization’ (1996, 35). but while breytenbach might believe the term to invoke the loss of domination and the acceptance of change, hybridity is also a contested notion. robert young, for example, cautions that hybridity was historically used to refer to the successful breeding across species (animals, plants) that resulted in sterile offspring. thus the transfer of the concept ‘hybrid’ to races portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 14 kennelly beauty in bastardy of people implicitly equates differences of race to those of species and dooms the offspring of interracial couplings to sterility. accordingly, young claims, ‘the interval that we assert between ourselves and the past may be much less than we assume. we may be more bound up with its categories than we like to think’ (1995, 28). corresponding to the ‘internal resistance’ that a ‘complicit postcolonial’ offers (wasserman 2000, 99), could the concept of hybridity articulated, indeed glorified by homi bhabha more aptly contextualize the challenges and promises inherent in negotiating, embracing the inclusive, recuperative afriquan cultural identity championed by breytenbach? as bhabha shows in his study on the location of culture (1993), the most creative forms of cultural identity work counter-hegemonically. they are produced in the boundaries between forms of difference, in the intersections and overlaps across the spheres of class, gender, race, nation, generation, and location. they thereby promise to undermine and stifle the cultural differences that, in the context of this discussion, were oversimplified during the apartheid years and forced into binaries of ‘race,’ into the notion of ‘homelands,’ and the old south africa’s devastating dialectic of ‘difference.’ always relational and shifting, with its meaning and symbols ultimately having no primordial order or fixity, could afriquan culture be constructed in bhabha’s contradictory and ambivalent ‘third space’ of enunciation? can the past, racist and exclusive signs of afrikanerdom be reappropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew in this space, where claims based on a hierarchical purity of cultures might no longer be tenable? (1994, 37). yet, when tested in the south african context, bhabha’s theory of hybridity is problematic. given the country’s many years of suppressed miscegenation and slave origins (easton 2002, 243), and its codification of ‘hybridity’ in the exploitable adaptability of a ‘coloured’ identity (noyes 2000, 52), the concept of the hybrid can also be seen as offensive. because of the specificity of the cape coloured community, for example, the concept would at least require further contextual elaboration. as zoë wicomb argues, the ‘shameful’ vote by many cape colored people for the np in south africa’s first democratic elections represents the ‘failure, in coloured terms, of the grand portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 15 kennelly beauty in bastardy narrative of liberation.’ working-class coloured communities were led by the np to believe that africanization could only be achieved at their expense and would ultimately deprive them of their culture (1998, 99). as a result, their celebration of ‘inbetweenness’ served conservatism. rejecting bhabha’s theory, wicomb asks how it might be possible to frame more sensibly the questions of postcolonial ‘hybridity’ and identity. how might we better understand ‘the territorialization or geography of belonging within which identity is produced’? at what point is ‘lived experience’ ultimately displaced by ‘an aesthetics of theory’? (1998, 94). wicomb rejects the notion of hybridity as articulated by bhabha because it cannot account for the current coloured politics in south africa. still, robert young notes that ‘there is no single, or correct, concept of hybridity’ (1995, 27). the longer history of the term reveals it to be ‘perfectly accommodating’ (easton 2002, 243), hence the range of shifting definitions for hybridity. in place of such a contested notion, wicomb proposes ‘multiple belongings’ as an alternative way of viewing cultural life in the larger south african community. perhaps this is more in line with the inclusive, recuperative, ‘creolized’ (nuttall & michael 2000, 7) afriquan culture envisioned by breytenbach. like the term ‘afriqua,’ or even ‘identity,’ which is ‘a temporary awareness meeting and mating moment to moment’ (breytenbach 1996, 159), breytenbach’s poem, ‘7.8,’ might as a consequence take on new meaning and be revalorized today. the poem was anthologized in and death white as words (1978), translated into english by ernst van heerden, and published during the apartheid years. its title suggests temporariness in movement or incremental progress. in rewriting the ‘lord’s prayer’ to be more accommodating, breytenbach’s poem seems actually to rehearse the sense of multiple belongings and inclusiveness by which the notion of hybridity might also be revealed as reconciliatory: our generous god of all that is sweet and beautiful let thy name always stay stored in us and therefore hallowed, let the republic now come about, let others shoot their will away— let go! let go! so that we too may have a say, a say like a sea portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 16 kennelly beauty in bastardy around the coasts of our heavenly still mountains give us this day the chance to earn our daily bread and the butter, the jam, the wine, the silence, the silence of wine, and lead us into temptation of various kinds so that love may jump from body to body like the flames of being—being from mountain to mountain brambles of fire brought to the whitest moon but let us deliver ourselves from evil so that we may reckon with the trespass of centuries of stored up exploitation, of plunder, of swindling, and the last rich man dies, poisoned by his money for ours is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever and just as ever as the shadows and the frontier posts of man when he tears the earth from heaven like a god ah men! ah men! ah men! (1978, 65) traditionally suggesting ownership that is at the same time supreme (the prayer of the lord) and collective (the prayer to the lord, the shared father), god’s will in breytenbach’s revised version of this well-known prayer gives way to the new afriquan nation to be characterized by ‘love,’ by ‘temptation of various kinds’ (even if myriad bastard births might result), and by the belief in the shared value, the capacities of all (‘ah men!’).11 this can only come about, however, by giving up supreme, selfish ownership (‘let go!’) and by replacing the individual will (‘thy will be done,’ ‘let others shoot their will away’) with the collective will (‘let the republic now come about’). echoing a verse from the united states’ national anthem (‘oh, say can you see’), breytenbach asks that the voice of all afriquans (‘a say like a sea’) be finally heard. belonging to all, rescued from centuries of ‘trespass’ and ‘exploitation,’ this land that he prays be ‘torn from heaven’ might thus resemble heaven on earth. with ‘death-white’ a phantom shade from south african’s past thus replaced with the all-inclusive colors of the afriquan rainbow, with ‘thine’ ceding to ‘ours,’ the divine made part of all men— evidence of the refinement of knowledge and insight that is a sine qua non for survival (breytenbach 2000, 18)—, the true beauty and enunciative power of breytenbach’s 11 the poem is originally from breytenbach’s 1970 volume of love poems, lotus. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 17 kennelly beauty in bastardy hopeful, ‘re-articulated,’ admittedly ‘bastardized’ prayer remains to be seen in the twenty-first century and beyond. reference list adhikari, m. 1996, ‘coloured identity and the politics of language: the sociopolitical context of piet uithalder’s ‘straatpraatjes’ column’, in straatpraatjes: language, politics and popular culture in cape town, 1909-1922, eds r.h. pheiffer, f. ponelis and hein willemse, j.l. van schaik, pretoria, 1-17. alexander, n. 2003, review of 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______1983b, the true confessions of an albino terrorist, harcourt brace, new york. ______1986, end papers: essays, letters, articles of faith, workbook notes, farrar, straus and giroux, new york: ______1988, judas eye, faber and faber, london. ———1991, ‘panel discussion following “cold turkey”’, in the writer in politics, eds. w.h. gass and l. cuoco, southern illinois university press, carbondale, 175-91. ______1993, return to paradise, harcourt brace, new york. ———1996a, the memory of birds in times of revolution: essays on africa. new york: harcourt brace. ———1996b, ‘an open letter to nelson mandela, 1991’, in the memory of birds in times of revolution, harcourt brace, new york, 74-81. ———1996c, ‘an open letter to nelson mandela, 1994’, in the memory of birds in times of revolution, harcourt brace, new york, 82-7. ______1999, dog heart: a memoir, harcourt brace, new york. ______2000, ‘fire in the fingers:a foreward.’, in tough choices: reflections of an afrikaner african, by van zyl 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tough choices: reflections of an afrikaner african, tafelberg, cape town. vestergaard, m. 2001, ‘who’s got the map? the negotiation of afrikaner identities in post-apartheid south africa,’ daedalus 130.1, 19-44. vryheidsfront plus/freedom front plus. available <http://www.vryheidsfront.co.za/index.asp?1=e> [accessed nov. 2003]. wasserman, h. 2001, ‘intercultural dialogue in recent afrikaans literary texts: a discourse of identity’, in pretexts: literary and cultural studies 10.1: 37-50. _______2000, ‘re-imagining identity: essentialism and hybridity in post-apartheid afrikaans short fiction’, current writing, 12.2, 96-112. wicomb, z. 1996, ‘postcoloniality and postmodernity: the case of the coloured in south africa’, auetsa, southern african studies, 1, 5-16. _______1998, ‘shame and identity: the case of the coloured in south africa.’ in writing south africa: literature, apartheid, and democracy, 1970-1995, eds d attridge and r. jolly, cambridge university press, new york, 91-107. _______2002, ‘zoë wicomb in conversation with hein willemse’, research in african literatures, 33.1, 144-52. willemse, h. 1991, ‘securing the myth: the representation of the origins of afrikaans in language textbooks’, in knowledge and power in south africa: critical perspectives across the discipline, ed. j.d. jansen, skotaville publishers, johannesburg, 249-63. young, r. 1995, colonial desire: hybridity in theory, culture, and race, routledge, new york. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 20 http://www.vryheidsfront.co.za/index.asp?1=e http://www.suntimes.co.za/2003/10/26/insight/in01.asp http://www.ndsu.edu/rrcwl/v4/steinwand.html mailto:realiteit@boer.co.za http://www.vryheidsfront.co.za/index.asp?1=e brian kennelly, webster university from bastardy to the greater othering reference list microsoft word goirogobete4 april er dr galley.doc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. geographies of identity special issue, guest edited by matthew graves and elizabeth rechniewski. © 2015 [daniela rogobete]. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i1.4378 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. global versus glocal dimensions of the post-1981 indian english novel daniela rogobete, university of craiova, romania whether condemned or wholeheartedly embraced, globalisation has become the new bogeyman of this millennium, dividing the world into opposite camps, each trying to legitimise their arguments for or against. the indian novel written in english (ine) of the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first raises a number of questions when read against the ‘globalising’ paradigm. this article analyses the way in which the ine, in its evolution from a variety of local traditions steeped in the protean realities of india to the embrace of western literary forms, has gradually become one of the most efficient vectors of passage from a multitude of regionally fragmented literatures written in local languages, to a cosmopolitan writing that subtly combines global and glocal dimensions. considering the ine as a complex literary phenomenon, i dwell on the particular strategies of cultural legitimation it has used in its evolution, especially after 1981, which led it to share many of the characteristic features generally associated with the global novel. i also question both the degree to which the description of ‘global novel’ can be applied to the ine and the problematic issue of ‘localism’ and its literary representations. although the ‘internalisation of english literature and language’ was a contested phenomenon in india, the emerging hybrid ine, and its remarkable use of local and global spaces as realms of emulation and contestation, contributed to the success of the national project of self-affirmation and cultural legitimation. the significant changes rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 2 initiated within the realm of ine by salman rushdie’s 1981 booker prize winning novel midnight’s children and continued by other remarkable indian english texts show that, in this case, despite global recognition and circulation the balance between local specificity and universal issues, between national and diasporic identities and, finally, between regional and cosmopolitan perspectives, is yet to be attained in the ine. thinking global, feeling local seen as a normal stage in the evolution of modernity triggered by the advancement of media and technology, globalisation has been variously defined in terms of sameness versus otherness, space versus locality, deterritorialisation and interconnectedness, according to economic, political, social and cultural considerations. starting from david harvey’s (1989) concept of postmodern time-space compression and its globalising consequences, various theorists have tried to shed light upon one of the most controversial concepts of our time. they have emphasised its benefits—‘the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’ (robertson 1992: 8)—as well as its role as an ideological tool, highlighting its drawbacks that are related to a cultural leveling, a ‘compression of cultures … brought into contact and juxtaposition’ (featherstone 1995: 7). the newly created interdependence between the local and the global has triggered a feeling of ‘global closeness’ (tomlinson 1999: 4) that is seen as either beneficial or destructive at the level of national and regional cultures. zygmunt bauman, one of the major theorists of globalisation envisages the phenomenon as a particular manner of treating difference, given its reliance on a new international division of labour, a process of internationalisation of finance, new technological systems and the homogenisation of consumer markets (bauman 1989). bauman is also one of the many theorists who deal with the concept of glocalism and glocalisation in relation to globalism and globalisation. initially referring to an agricultural method of adjusting farming techniques to local conditions, the term glocalism has gradually been taken over by business jargon where it defines globalising strategies adapted to local conditions (iwabuchi 2002: 93). from this perspective glocalisation becomes ‘a blending of foreign and local’ (straubhaar 2007: 149). mike featherstone mentions the connection between this term and the japanese ability to indigenise anything foreign and globalised: rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 3 if the term japanisation of the world means anything, it is in terms of a market strategy built around the notion of dochaku or “glocalism.” the term refers to a global strategy that does not seek to impose a standard product or image, but instead is tailored to the demands of the local market. this has become a popular strategy for multinationals in other parts of the world who seek to join the rhetoric of localism. (featherstone 1995: 5) ‘global standardisation’ is thus being replaced by what is generally seen as ‘global localisation’ or ‘glocalisation.’ similarly, arjun appadurai theorizes the idea of ‘global cultural flow’ in relation to six categories at play in shaping cultural globalization—the ethnoscape, referring to the world of moving groups of people and their cultural crosspollination, the mediascape, related to the dissemination of information, the technoscape, related to global technological configurations, finanscape, defining the distribution of global capital and, finally, ideoscape, referring to the ideologies thus engendered (1996: 33–37). the complex processes of cultural globalisation are generally defined in relation to cultural, linguistic or economic factors. tomlinson, for example, speaks about global culture in terms of ‘deterritorialisation,’ reinforcing the newly defined connection between culture and the increasingly compressed physical space, and referring to cosmopolitanism and to a new form of ‘complex connectivity’ (1999: 2) between economy, politics and culture. in tomlinson’s opinion the utopian endeavour of creating a global culture through globalisation—that is, ‘a single culture embracing everyone on earth and replacing the diversity of cultural systems that have flourished up to now’ (1999: 71)—reveals its shortcomings in that the final result can only be a globalised culture instead of a global culture. the same idea is shared by mike featherstone who argues that the idea of ‘global culture’ still seems utopian since it is tightly related to a nation-state and to such values as homogeneity and integration, whereas ‘cultural globalisation’ refers to a broader concept that implies processes of cultural integration and disintegration that operate on transnational and trans-societal levels (1990: 1). given the above conceptual approaches, the concept of the ‘global novel,’ usually related to post-colonial productions inherently ‘born translated,’ is generally thought to imply a wide range of literary endeavours that exceed local interest and appear to have a universal appeal. the ‘global novel’ also implies publication in multinational publishing houses, international recognition and circulation, the presence on book markets and fairs, and attendant favourable statistics related to the number of translations, sales figures, rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 4 marketing strategies and international reading public receptions. when enlarging upon the possible definitions of the ‘global novel,’ j. m. coetzee’s fictional author, elizabeth costello, speaks in contrastive terms, opposing regional and global literature and establishing style, audience and scope of relevance as three decisive factors in legitimising regional literature and giving it the status of global cultural production (coetzee 2004). she draws attention to the fact that defining global literature according to the criterion of ‘universality’ provided by the choice of style and content necessarily and readily accessible to a global readership only proves the impossibility of the attempt to completely displace literature from its regional context and to project it onto a global scale. the necessity of ‘immediate accessibility’ also raises the issues of linguistic as well as cultural translations of regional texts: ‘yet how can you explore a world in all its depth if at the same time you are having to explain it to outsiders? … it is too much for one person, it can’t be done, not at the deepest level. that, it seems to me, is the root of your problem. having to perform your africanness at the same time as you write’ (coetzee 2004: 51). costello’s remarks about the african novel can also be applied to indian literary spaces since ‘performing indianness’ and translating indian languages, cultures and oral tradition are equally complicated tasks: ‘a french or an english writer has thousands of years of written tradition behind him … we on the other hand are heirs to an oral tradition’ (2004: 44); and ‘a novel about people who live in an oral culture is not an oral novel, just as a novel about women is not a women’s novel’ (2004: 53). critics have highlighted the dangers of globalisation in relation to fiction, mainly in terms of the loss of local specificity and national identity and the annihilation of regional and national literatures, given the so-called imperative to level their differences and embrace monologism. the most vehement anti-globalisation voices have defended literatures written in national languages, putting forward the argument that the ‘perfect translation’ is impossible, and they have pleaded for the freedom to rewrite one’s own history, using one’s own literary tradition. these critical approaches include thomas friedman’s the lexus and the olive tree: understanding globalisation (2000) on the dangers of globalisation and ‘unhealthy glocalism’; mike featherstone’s undoing culture: globalisation, postmodernism and identity (1995); peter singer’s one world: the ethics of globalisation (2004), and mark rupert’s ideologies of globalisation: contending visions of a new world order (2000). rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 5 when analysed from economic and cultural perspectives and set against appadurai’s (1996) various scapes, the ine mainly produced after 1981 share many common features with the global novel defined by the critics noted above. the ‘think global’ part of the syntagm is sustained by a powerful combination of mediascapes and technoscapes that facilitates the access to global markets and global readership, and by an ideoscape that makes use of transnational and transcultural dimensions. at the same time, the ‘feel local’ part seems to be less powerfully represented by an ethnoscape identified with a substantial indian diaspora that tends to ignore the multitude of significant regional voices. though protean and polyphonic, playing on an indianness difficult to define, translate and contain within theoretical frameworks, the ine is often accused of letting itself be wholeheartedly engulfed by globalism. the western world has always tried to simplify india’s immense diversity and make it more accessible through a ‘unifying project’ engendered by what sara suleri calls the ‘anxiety of empire’ and designed to counteract the ‘unreadability of india’ (1995: 6). critics have often drawn attention to the inappropriateness of general terms such as ‘indian literature’ and ‘indianness’ that only perpetuate erroneous oriental representations and offer simplified representations of the multitude of indian regional literatures and cultures. from this perspective, even the denomination of the ‘global indian novel’ seems doomed from the start as it tends to first, focus only on texts published and circulating outside india, and second, to overlook the large body of literature produced in regional languages. the temptation of placing an ideally and falsely unitary india into a ‘generalised elsewhere’ and a ‘global anywhere’ (meyrowitz 2004) is amplified by increased media technologies and the pressures to indulge a western readership that might get lost in the difficult translation of india’s traditions of orality and the country’s cultural diversity. in relation to indian literatures glocalism, generally defined as the strategy of combining the local and the foreign, seems to account for features most often attached to cultural borrowing, appropriation, hybridisation and indigenisation. friedman, for example, identifies glocalism thus: the ability of a culture, when it encounters other strong cultures, to absorb influences that naturally fit into and can enrich that culture, to resist those things that are truly alien and to compartmentalise those things that, while different, can nevertheless be enjoyed and celebrated as different. the whole purpose of glocalising is to be able to assimilate aspects of globalisation into your country and culture in a way that adds to your growth and diversity, without overwhelming it. (friedman 2000: 326) rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 6 regional literatures and indian english literature are often placed in stark opposition on account of the languages they use, the ideological stance they adopt or the perspective they embrace. nonetheless regional literatures and indian english literature share the aim of offering different representations of the ‘idea of india.’ it all comes down to the type of ‘idea’ the writers want to engender, the readers they choose to address and the cultural-political identity they create. as gayatri chakravorty spivak argues, the relationship between the writer of ‘vernacular’ and the writer of indian english literature is ‘a site of class-struggle … a struggle in the production of cultural or cultural-political identity’ (1996: 126–127) and more recently a site of competing ‘localisms.’ moreover p. p. raveendran argues that these writers, sharing the same nationality but with different ‘contexts, mindsets, experiences, lifestyles, languages and sensibilities … dwell in different indias, and to speak of them as sharing a common indian literature would be, to adapt sahitya akademi’s dictum on the oneness of indian literature, to say that they are writers divided by the same literature’ (raveendran 2006: 2563). the worldwide recognition of indian literature today is generally taken as a good example of successful integration and assimilation, a complicated and problematic process initiated during the nineteenth century with growing interest in sanskrit writings and indian mythology, and the awareness that the multitude of regional languages made it impossible for any local non-english speaking indian writer to succeed in western markets. the illustrious exception of rabindranath tagore, whose gitanjali (1912) was awarded the nobel prize for literature in 1913, marked a crucial moment in the evolution of the indian literature written in english and turned him from a bengali writer translating his own plays and poems into english into a widely recognised and appreciated member of the western literary canon. srinivasa iyengar described tagore’s remarkable achievement as ‘but the beginning of a drama of recognition on a global scale to which there cannot be many parallels in literary history’ (1962: 84). these words turned out to be prophetic as the struggle of indian authors for global recognition continued for almost a century and involved a multitude of literary and publishing strategies adjusted to the particular circumstances of the indian context. the immense popularity ine enjoys in the west today is paralleled by the critical voices that denounce its purported lack of authenticity, its presumed promotion of a rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 7 false image of india, its either excessively romantic or denigratory characteristics, and its supposed perpetuation of colonial stereotypes. such criticism is generally directed against what some observers regard as the ‘inauthenticity’ and falsehood engendered by the requirements of globalisation, and a concomitant indulging of western taste. chandrahas choudhury (2009: 96), for example, argues that: ‘what readers around the world frequently find instructive, fresh and moving about indian novels available to them in english is often experienced by indian readers as dull, clichéd and superficial.’ what choudhury formulates as the paradox of ine is restated by harish trivedi, who also draws attention to the absurdity of a ‘globally constituted’ post-colonial discourse that ‘hardly begins to address either the post-colonial indian reality or its post-colonial literature except perhaps in some incidental and tangential ways’ (2000: 243). in its evolution, indian literature written in english has received various denominations, most of them charged with ideological connotations, and many dogged by the critical disputes i have already noted above. interestingly, srinivasa iyengar analysed most of these terms in his now canonical work indian writing in english from 1962. the general term, ‘indian literature’, proved its inappropriateness due to its ambiguous reference to literatures written in any of the regional languages, including english. ‘anglo-indian literature’ referred to texts produced by the british residents in india— later by people of mixed races treated as ‘bastards of the raj’ or ‘midnight’s orphans’ (d’cruz 2003: 106); ‘indo-anglian literature’, a term coined by j. h. cousins (1883) and popularized by iyengar (1962), defines the body of indian fiction written in english. even within this category, the scholar and major force in kannada literature, vinayaka krishna gokak, adds the denomination of indo-english to designate works produced in regional languages and translated into english, whereas indo-anglian remains mostly attached to texts produced in english by indian writers (gokak 1970). m. k. naik (1982) added ‘indian english literature’ as a better alternative for the less inspired ‘indo-anglian literature’ (also see khair 2001). in the twenty-first century, acronyms such as iwe (indian writing in english), iel (indian english literature) and ine (indian novel written in english), the latter my preferred term, are also in use. aside from debates over nomenclature, another critical point that is generally brought into discussion about indian english literature is the impossibility of the project it proposes, that of trying to suggest an essential indianness through a basically western rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 8 literary endeavour. in the analysis of ine and the degree of compromise it is forced to make, the criterion of ‘authenticity’ (mostly attached to regional literatures) is generally replaced with ‘specificity,’ assessing the extent to which diaspora writers and their novels succeed in preserving local specificity, truthfulness in any language, the capacity to lead others to a ‘renewal of consciousness’ (anand in naik 2009: 41) and to prophesise. one possible solution for the current crisis of the ine seems to be a glocal fictional formula that would encompass both the diasporic, cosmopolitan representations of india and its local portrayals that are produced by regional literatures. from anglo-indian to indian english fiction the nineteenth century is considered to be the beginning of modern indian literature given the century coincided with the introduction of the english language and novel, and, perhaps, the initiation of a ‘globalising literary project’ avant la lettre through assimilation, integration and internalisation. throughout its history, india has built a solid reputation as an assimilator, achieving a balance between tradition and modernity, cultures and religions, pre-colonialism and colonialism. purity—whether related to ethnicity, religion or literary genres and styles—has never been a highly appreciated value on the indian sub-continent. eclecticism, inclusiveness and plurality have instead been the stable foundations for india’s diverse cultures. when analysing the evolution of the indo-english novel, fawzia afza-khan (1993) discusses the articulations of various ‘strategies of containment’ as theorized by fredric jameson (1981) and edward saïd (1978) in relation to indian english literary productions. afza-khan critiques the ideology of containment visible in many indian english novels which she relates to the perpetuation of cultural and historically-biased perspectives and erroneous assessments of the other; she also identifies the operations of an ideology of liberation focused upon the return to a mythical mode and to a reevaluated and mythologised past. she thus argues that the sometimes self-imposed containment within such a stereotypical representational framework can lead to imitation of colonial patterns, or what she calls a ‘self-hating’ literature. (1981: 32). vidiadhar surajprasad naipaul, afza-khan states, is representative of this type of literature due to his tendency to adopt a very critical position on the problematic realities of the colonies and to confine the ‘featureless’ india of his childhood to a dark space of magical thinking and petrified existence (1981: 32). rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 9 afzal-khan also refers to two fictional modes recurrent in indian texts written in or translated into english: the realist and the mythic. this is helpful: the entire history of ine, a hybrid cultural formation, is often analysed as an intricate process of oscillation, coexistence or mutual exclusion of the realistic and the mythic modes. the need to abandon the english novelistic formula seems to have arisen from the incapacity of such a ‘pure’ genre to render the ambiguity and alienation produced by post-colonialism and its powerful effects upon the culture, language, national identity and social life of britain’s colonies. the resulting ‘formula of hyphenation’ (appadurai 1993: 803)— exemplified by such terms as anglo-indian—was an attempt to reconcile the english language, culture and its unitary and canonical literary tradition, and a multi-sided india, plural in terms of languages, literatures, cultural spaces and identities. it also tried to better depict the protean reality, the extreme diversity, the epic extent and eclectic mode of indian thinking. used and abused, assimilated and metamorphosed, the english novel (as well as the english language) has undergone drastic transformations in india. these changes were often embraced by authors in an attempt to make the novel ‘engulf’ the multitudes of india and thus achieve the almost impossible task of grasping the country’s infinite variety, of condensing ‘india’ within the limited and limiting dimensions of a novel written in the colonisers’ language but bearing the sound of so many indian regional languages and specificities. the evolution of the indian writing in english was a long and dramatic process initiated during india’s literary ‘renaissance,’ widely regarded as centred on bengal and dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1940s. the intensive study of the english language and literature during this period had the unexpected effect of both encouraging ine and giving literary creations in regional languages a new impetus. most of india’s important writers in this period were bilingual, meaning they could choose to write in regional languages and then translate their texts in english, or write only in english. the literary tradition consolidated during the ‘renaissance’ in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth advocated the regeneration and modernisation of indian culture through the combined processes of a return to tradition and a critical assessment and assimilation of western principles. the ‘renaissance’ period promoted such authors as bankim chandra chattopadhyay (the father of modern bengali prose), henry derozio (whose poetic work combined his romantic love for india and the critical spirit of a social reformer), michael madhusudan dutt (who chose rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 10 to continue the romantic tradition and to write in bengali and english), and toru dutt, who rendered the subtle flavours of india into english verses by writing poems that oscillated between melancholy and exuberance, magic and reality, and by translating sanskrit tales and legends and popularizing them in the west. sri aurobindo, the indian poet, philosopher, politician and yogi, as well as sarojini naidu, the nightingale of india, continued to combine social criticism, political agitation and poetic lyricism in the attempt to awaken national consciousness and fuel hope in what such authors regarded as a divine humanity. the legacy of local representations of india thus engendered either by english indian texts or by works produced in vernacular languages marked a transition from the picturesque and mostly romantic depictions of india that characterised earlier writing to a greater social and political critical awareness, and to more realistic portrayals of different indian communities and regions. during the first decades of the twentieth century writers emphasised the redefinition of national identity and the cultural remapping of indian spaces according to the ever increasing indentured labour and diasporic movements, processes of cultural hybridity and the rise of new political reconfigurations. the ‘literature of concern’ based on human commonality further stressed the shift to simplicity and realism and created ambiguous responses to the problematic combinations of myth and realism, tradition and westernisation, as in the novels and short stories written in urdu and hindi by munshi premchand, who succeeded in adapting indian topics of social interest—the hard life of indian peasantry, women’s plight and political corruption—to western literary styles, and mulk raj anand, often regarded as the founder of the indian english novel,1 famous for his realistic portrayals of the indian poor. in the works of such authors, myth stood for spirituality, mysticism, wisdom; but it also gestured toward resignation, stasis, isolation in tradition. on the other hand, realism was taken to stand for rationalism, progress, flux, change, but also de-indianisation, westernisation, excessive materialism and mercantilism. raj anand, r. k. narayan and raja rao managed, in spite of the difficulties engendered by the independence movement, to boost the ine and to gain international recognition. anand’s humanism and enthusiastic nationalism, and his social criticism— 1 note that the first indian novel ever written in english was rajmohan’s wife by bankim chandra chattopadhyay; it was serialised in the periodical the indian field in 1864 (mehotra 2003: 12). the novel was published as a monograph in 1904, some ten years after the author’s death. rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 11 evident in the novels the untouchables (1935) and coolie (1936)—and raja rao’s mixture of history and myth, of philosophy and social concern, in the description of rural india in the novel kanthapura (1938 [1966]), marked a new direction in the evolution of ine, deeply rooted in indian historic and social realities but attuned to western stylistic expression. steeped in indian national tradition, relying both upon myth in all its coordinates—tradition, religion, mysticism, community—and critical realism, r. k. narayan’s fiction achieved an important quality that was resumed and rediscussed in post-1981 literary productions: the inner balance between self and society, individuality, social awareness and responsibility, and local specificity and tradition on the one hand and ‘global’ topics and themes on the other. the post-world war two generation of indian writers continued to dwell on different aspects of indian social or domestic life. some offered insightful analyses of the impact of history and politics on everyday life, as exemplified by khushwant singh’s seminal portrayal of indian rural life in the wake of the partition in train to pakistan, from 1956. others dealt with the social and cultural clashes of eastern and western values, for instance, kamala markandaya’s depictions of indian urban and rural societies affected by the advent of western modernisation in such novels as nectar in a sieve (1955), some inner fury (1956) and a handful of rice (1966). a third concern was with the tragic dimensions of people’s confrontations with the economic, social and bureaucratic evils of the day, typified by bhabani bhattacharya’s novels from 1947 through to 1966. such authors prepared the literary world for the new generation of indian writers, who were to take the western canon, market and readership by storm, re-discussing the problematic issues of indian multiple identities, of migrant and diasporic experiences, of marginalisation and cultural hybridisation. the urgent necessity to go global, to acquire international visibility and enjoy circulation on global markets has created a rift between indian writers producing texts in regional languages or indian-based writers (arundhati roy, shashi tharoor, raj khamal jha, manju kapur and aravind adiga) and representatives of the indian diaspora: salman rushdie, amitav ghosh, anita desai and kiran desai (new york), gita mehta (new york/london/new delhi), vikram chandra (oakland), rohinton mistry (toronto), vikram seth (salisbury, uk), v. s. naipaul (wiltshire, uk), hanif kureishi (london), jhumpa lahiri (rome), and hari kunzru (uk). though not rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 12 enjoying international critical acclaim, literary texts in vernacular languages are considered to possess a higher degree of authenticity, objectivity and relevance as compared to diasporic productions deemed inauthentic, artificial and biased. this dichotomy has given rise to a long lasting controversy that finally seems to come down to a dispute of principles between localism and cosmopolitanism. diasporic writers seem more inclined to focus on the cultural clash between india and the western world and on its impact on people caught between spaces and identities, between the moral values inspired by the mythic imagination and individualism and the ones inspired by social involvement and responsibility. a growing awareness of the necessary acceptance of the colonial past, of the impossibility of a unifying project that might describe india as a coherent whole perfectly translatable and adjustable to western readers’ tastes and understanding also brought about the recognition that any essentialising fictional strategy attempting to depict indian diversity is doomed to fail. whose localisms are these, anyway? the novel, as a literary genre, has always had an inherent global feature visible in its global expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on a par with western europe’s colonial expansion and its appropriation by most of the peripheral spaces. here, ‘the modern novel first arises not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a western formal influence (mostly french or english) and local materials’ (moretti 2000: 58). the ongoing debate concerning global literature and the various perspectives from which it has been defined has made theorists wonder whether this concept is a new reformulation of the old notion of world literature or another step in its evolution. in his groundbreaking analysis of the novel in relation to the historical process of globalisation and its discourses, mariano siskind suggested two models of analysis—the globalisation of the novel and the novelisation of the global (2010: 336360), models that can also be applied to ine. these conjoined aspects regard the novel as a hegemonic literary genre of modernity leading to global networks of transmission and reception and to a systematic production of images of a globalised world, textualised in novels. the ideal goals global literature sets out to achieve are connected to the creation of a global space of cultural consensus and coexistence including literary productions coming from all the regions of the world. as products of ‘the infinitely varied mutual rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 13 contest of sameness and difference’ (appadurai 1990: 308), they should promote a global, essentialised concept of universality, transcend national ‘locality’ and narrativise a modern, reconciled cosmopolitan world in possession of a globalised literary canon. to the often criticised attempt to find a globalising formula of cultural essentialisation, ine responds with its ‘un-essentialisable’ plurality. there is no formula for a perfect leveling and assimilation of so many ‘indian essences’—assamese, bengali, gujarati, hindi, kashmiri, kannada, maithili, malayalam, marathi, oriya, punjabi, sindhi, tamil, telugu, urdu, not to mention sanskrit—best suited for such a hyphenation. hence the difficulty in assessing this hybrid novel following either oriental or western criteria of critical evaluation, a dilemma first stated in 1962 by srinivasa iyengar, still relevant today: shall we judge it as english literature because it comes to us with an english skin (though a little tanned, shall we say, by the tropical sun), or shall we judge it as indian literature because it is, after all, the creation of indians? … there are peculiarities of indian life and experience and speech that don’t easily admit of translation into english terms. if the translation is not attempted, one fails in one’s duty as an indian; if the attempt doesn’t succeed, if the result is an exotic, an oddity, an excrescence or an absurdity, one fails as a writer in english. (iyengar 1962: 19–20) in order to avoid falling ‘between the stools,’ iyengar suggested a compromise, that a ‘new mutation’ be operated in both fictional and critical realms. this ‘experimental new literature’ was necessary in order to reflect the conflicting realities of india and at the same time the deeply felt need for a new critical perspective. the problem of authorship in the case of these hyphenated novels highlights the strange situation of their hyphenated authors (british-indians, indian-americans, indian-canadians) that underlines an obvious crisis of identity discussed by indian critics. the general atmosphere of scepticism built around authors writing about india but living outside it and around their capacity to faithfully depict india, made other writers such as hari kunzru deny his indian roots and declare himself a british writer. indian english literature has not yet succeeded in reaching that reconciled space of absolute cultural consensus promoted by global literature, since the literary productions of the indian diaspora and the frequent redefinitions of national identity they propose have led to ongoing debates over the legitimacy of those representations of a country one has deliberately left behind, over the false pretences of a unitary image of india and over the readership they choose to address. the controversy between salman rushdie and amit chaudhuri is a good example in this regard. rushdie’s statement in the rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 14 preface to the vintage book of indian writing (rushdie & west 1997: x) that ine proves to be ‘a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the “16 official languages” of india,’ and that it represents ‘the most valuable contribution india has yet made to the world of books,’ is illustrative of a particular western perspective on indian literatures. amit chaudhuri’s reply came in the preface of the picador book of modern indian literature he edited where he interpreted the trope of ‘ideal hybridity’ embodied by ine as a pretext for the west to offer a ‘reinterpretation of itself’ and its ‘historical quest’ (chaudhuri 2001: xxv). beyond such disputes, tabish khair identifies a ‘degree of commonality between indian english novels and regional ones, based on references to a shared heritage of indian classics’ (2001: 50) providing common topics, strategies and perspectives. the globalising strategies generally promoted by the global novel in its attempt to devise formulas of essentialised representations and all-encompassing tropes that might, for instance, generalize the experience of post-colonialism, found their specific application in indian english literature. while indian writers have found that the formula of adhering to cultural globalisation is not exempt of criticism and contestation, it however legitimated one side of india’s struggle to find the perfect balance between so many conflicting identities, languages and cultural, political and historical dimensions. magic realism has been universally embraced as a globalising strategy due to its wide spread from latin america to asia and europe and to its capacity to preserve local specificity and package it into a globally appealing exoticism. its remarkable success with the literature of former colonies translates the tendency to view it as providing the best suited narrative metaphor of a post-colonial nation. one major endeavour in indian english fiction has thus been the attempt to preserve specificity by using mythology— myths mostly functioning as ‘digressive techniques’ as in rushdie’s case, or as ‘structural parallels’ in narayan’s and rao’s fiction, according to mukherjee (1974: 131)—and the historic values of the past. but this looking back is never simple and unproblematic as it often challenges these very myths and demythologises traditional heroes and historic events. salman rushdie is among the first writers to have used myth as a strategy of liberation, a means of avoiding ‘history petrification’ (afzal-khan 160). blending myths and history, reality and fantasy corresponded to a long tradition of rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 15 eclecticism that excluded monologism and purity. in comparison with the indian epic and poetic tradition oriented toward long, winding heroic sagas, with interminable digressions and side stories, remnants of an ancient oral tradition, the novel brought concision, cohesion and a new focus upon the realism of everyday life. perhaps the most widely discussed literary strategy that continues to divide critics is that of indianising english. it is by no means a unique phenomenon given that after the linguistic unification of english (1707) and its spread around the globe through colonisation a variety of ‘world englishes’ was engendered (kachru 1996: 136–138). in india this corresponded to the raj phase of the hybridisation of english, with very important consequences upon culture. through linguistic assimilation and internalisation, india has succeeded in shaping english—the official language of globalisation—according to its needs. raja rao was among the first indian writers whose stated intention was to use the english language in such a way as to reshape it according to the rhythm and inflexions of his vernacular kannada. his highly acclaimed endeavour, articulated in the meaning of india (1996), was that of translating india into a foreign language while preserving its ‘essence’ as far as possible, keeping in mind the fact that india is not a desa but a darsana, not a country, but a perspective in need of a fresh idiom that would combine the mythical, the poetical and the political. rao’s use of english has been a valuable source of inspiration for many post-1981 authors as it opened new, unexpected grounds for linguistic innovations and strategies of self-affirmation. in the foreword to kanthapura he stated the difficulty a writer has to face when trying to translate indianness: one has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. one has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. i use the word “alien,” yet english is not really an alien to us … after language, the next problem is that of style. the tempo of indian life must be infused into our english expression, even as the tempo of american or irish life has gone into the making of theirs. we, in india, think quickly, and when we move we move quickly … we tell our interminable story … (rao 1966 [1938]: n. p.) linguistic liberation envisaged the creation of diverse variants of english (interlanguages) meant to provide the proper transition between a metropolitan language felt as imposing and stifling, and a reincarnation of the same language remoulded after the rhythm, structure and metaphoric patterns of native languages. indianised english was rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 16 the solution found for the perpetual dichotomy between pre-colonial recuperation and post-colonial syncretism (ashcroft, griffith & tiffin 2002: 29) and the opposite danger of getting stuck and isolated into a revived pre-colonial past ignoring contemporary multicultural realities. linguistic liberation has also led to an opening up of the western canon, triggering profound changes in world literature and influencing the reception of new literatures written in english. manipulating and mongrelising english was an attempt to achieve a different type of decentralisation and legitimation by challenging the central position of the colonial language and offering instead a multiplicity of ‘englishes’ through indigenisation, creolisation, pidginisation, indianisation and relexification. we can’t simply use the language in the way the british did; … it needs remaking for our own purposes. those of us who do use english do so in spite of ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies. to conquer english may be to complete the process of making ourselves free. (rushdie 1991: 17) along with other writers who made use of indianised english (g. v. desani, bharati mukherjee, uma parameswaran) and advocated the adaptation of english to native linguistic needs, raja rao praised the flexibility of english; he gave it the same sacred status as sanskrit, claiming that language is ‘an accidental thing’ and what really mattered was ‘the authenticity of experience’ (jussawalla & dasenbrock 147). in his turn, r. k. narayan saw english as the proper medium of cultural exchange, stating that ‘the english language, though sheer reliance and mobility, is now undergoing a process of indianization in the same manner as it adopted us citizenship over a century ago, with the difference that it is the major language there but here one of the fifteen’ (1979: 22). anita desai spoke about an ‘expanded’ version of english resulting, after its ‘buggering,’ into a ‘patchwork of languages’ that might facilitate the linguistic and cultural cross-over (1994: 87). angela carter considered this linguistic transformation of english into hinglish ‘the ultimate revenge of the colonised’ (1996: 208). the year 1981 was generally acclaimed as the moment in which the ine was affirmed and legitimated, the moment when india finally made its voice (though speaking in english) heard on the international literary stage, imposing its particular combination of local specificity and universal human values, western perspectives and eastern counter perspectives, diasporic identities and hybrid spaces. the booker prize and other rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 17 international prizes variously awarded to a series of indian authors2 came as a meritorious recognition of the literary value of ine. these prizes, however, cemented the idea that indian literatures could be represented by texts produced in english that enjoy a high degree of international visibility to the detriment of other productions in vernacular languages, authored by remarkable writers. rushdie’s midnight’s children became emblematic of the impressive post-1981 metamorphosis of the novel, coming as a response to the crisis of the fictional genre in indian english literature and to the search for a new novelistic idiom that would ‘engulf multitudes,’ redefine national identities and map out cultural, political and linguistic spaces. built on a highly critical and idiosyncratic synthesis of postmodern narrative strategies and post-colonial issues, and a subtle combination of cultural, mythological, religious and political elements, midnight’s children triggered a genuine rushdie-mania and a huge interest in indian cultures and literatures with a particular focus on indian literature written in english. this interest was further intensified in the following years by the many positive critical studies, commentaries and analyses dedicated to the literary productions of indian authors belonging to the younger generation, residing in or outside india. the ine embraced in fact a multitude of strategies and perspectives, besides the cosmopolitan approaches displayed by salman rushdie’s and amitav ghosh’s novels and the rhetoric of exile and its redefinitions of identity, home and away (as illustrated by bharati mukherjee, shiv k. kumar, bhabani bhattacharya and nayantara saghal). the criticism of a westernised, excessively cosmopolitan ine that favours migrant perspectives and dwells on clashes of cultural values rather than on topics of immediate indian interest had the effect of proliferating the texts depicting indian social realities. contemporary ine displays a wide range of such concerns: caste-based conflicts (arundhati roy3 and rohinton mistry), class and gender inequalities (anita desai, manju kapur), the indian countryside (kiran desai), the mysterious recesses of bombay (vikram chandra, altaf tyrewala) and the huge discrepancies between the rich and the poor (aravind adiga and vikas swarup). the plurality of ‘localisms’ thus engendered, promoted indeed a multifaceted image of global india, closer to its complex diversity but equally problematic. even highly acclaimed novels such as aravind 2 the 1975 booker prize was awarded to the german writer, indian by marriage, ruth prawer jhabvala for her novel heat and dust. 3 on account of her political activism and social criticism, the new york times declared arundhati roy to be ‘india’s most impassioned critic of globalization and american influence’ (dugger 2001). rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 18 adiga’s the white tiger (2008) or vikras swarup’s q&a (2005), that tried to demolish consecrated stereotypes and focus on lower-class individuals ascending the social ladder, were not exempt from criticism. the representations of poverty here were once again treated as inauthentic since they present the west with a sordid reality comfortably located in a distant and circumscribed ‘localism’ that does not pose the threat of contamination. the new mutations of ‘localisms’ attuned to western phobias and delights become emblematic of friedman’s warning against the perils of ‘unhealthy glocalism’ triggered by an exacerbation of localisms that act as ‘the cancer virus that fool you into thinking something belongs, but doesn’t’ (2000: 328). most of the post–1981 indian novels in english written by representatives of the indian diaspora in europe and north america met with warm critical acclaim for their narrative and representational strategies that appealed to a global market and readership and at the same time with violent criticism for their somehow restrictively essentialised understanding of india. these critical voices claim that the globalising strategies they use are relying upon ‘national allegories’ and metaphoric images meant to mediate the conflicting aspects of indian multiplicity. though criticised for their attempts to create a simplified image of a falsely unitary india, for preserving a convenient distance and writing in and for the west about a long forsaken easternness (thus translating india for the westerners instead of explaining india for the indians themselves), the present generation of writers of indian descent have achieved global recognition, affirming the legitimacy and undeniable worth of a novel that tries to combine indian imagination and local specificities with the western analytical mind. nevertheless, this idiosyncratic combination of western and eastern values is meant—beyond the desire to fascinate and conquer the west—to underline india’s eclecticism and multiplicity, and finally, its eternal untranslatability. conclusion in achieving its present status of worldwide recognition, the indian english novel has made a long, meandering journey that took it from the appropriation of the english novel during the nineteenth century and the first indian novel written in english up to the unanimously celebrated and innovative fictional formula based on a combination of genres, cultural values and perspectives, cast in an idiosyncratic idiom. rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 19 whereas the post-independence novelists struggled to achieve the right balance between eastern and western values, visible in the variable geometry between mythical and realist modes, the post-1981 ine further ideologised this relation by giving it a local versus global dimension. what is generally understood by this new dichotomy opposing local indianness and global westernness translates in fact a convergence of the indian imagination, its story-telling tradition and its disconcerting multiplicity with the input of western realism, its analytical approach, postmodern fictional techniques and postcolonial theoretical paradigms. to analyse indian literary productions in relation to ‘global culture’ or to the ‘global novel’ is to make choices among the plurality of indian cultures and literatures and then to promote those choices as emblematic of indian literature as a whole. most of the time this selection has favoured the ine, which enjoys fashionable status on international book markets. ine fully exemplifies the operations of globalism in terms of economic factors (sales, profit), cultural visibility (positive reviews, good reception, international awards) and the promotion of cultural hybridity and dialogue. however, the ine always faces the danger of prosecuting a utopian projection of an idealised essential indianness into the western literary world. trying to find a middle ground between the ‘homogenisation and essentialisation of locality,’ and a globalism that makes use of electronic media and mass migration as forces that ‘seem to impel (and sometimes to compel) the work of the imagination’ (appadurai 1996: 4), the ine, in its most recent productions, has tried to embrace a glocal approach. thomas friedman once stated that cultural globalisation will be sustainable only if it ‘turns out to be a confederation of distinct cultures and not a homogenisation of them, and if it promotes a more culturally diverse universe, rather than a soulless, standardised globe’ (2000: 337). the particular balance that the ine novel has finally managed to achieve, between regional and national realities, between texts written in local languages and texts translated into/written in english, or between local and global values, seems to have placed ine on track towards achieving a balance between an eclectic, inclusive, multi-sided and polyphonic india and the western literary canon. rogobete global versus glocal portal, vol. 12, no. 1, january 2015. 20 reference list adiga, a. 2008, the white tiger. atlantic books, london. afzal-khan, f. 1993, cultural imperialism and the indo-english novel: genre and ideology in r.k. narayan, anita desai, kamala markandaya and salman rushdie. penn state university press, university park, pa. anand, m. r. 1935, untouchable. arnold associates, new delhi. anand, m. 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(ed.) 2009 (1979), aspects of indian writing in english. macmillan, new delhi. naipaul, v. s. 1981, an area of darkness: a discovery of india. vintage books, new york. narayan, r. k. (1979) 2009, ‘english in india: the process of transmutation,’ in aspects of indian writing in english, (ed.) m. k. naik, new delhi: macmillan publishers india ltd: 19–23. rao, r. 1963 [1938], kanthapura. oxford university press, bombay. rao, r. 1996, the meaning of india. vision books, new delhi. raveendran, p. p. 2006, ‘genealogies of indian literature,’ political and economic weekly, vol. 41, no. 25: 2558–2563. robertson, r. 1992, globalisation: social theory and global culture. sage, london. rupert, m. 2000, ideologies of globalisation: contending visions of a new world order. routledge, london. rushdie, s. 1991, imaginary homelands. granta books, london. rushdie, s. 1995, midnight’s children. vintage, london. rushdie, s. & west, e. (eds) the vintage book of indian writing, 1947–1997. vintage, london. saïd, e. 1978, orientalism. random house, new york. singer, p. 2004, one world: the ethics of globalisation. yale university press, new haven, ct. singh, k. 1956, train to pakistan. chatto & windus, london. siskind, m. 2010, ‘the globalisation of the novel and the novelisation of the global. a critique of world literature,’ comparative literature (winter), vol. 62, no. 4: 336–360. spivak, g. c. 1996, ‘how to read a “culturally different” book,’ in colonial desire/post-colonial theory, (eds) f. barker, p. hulme & m. iversen. st. martin’s press, new york: 126–127. straubhaar. j. d. 2007, world television: from global to local. sage, thousand oaks ca. suleri, s. 1994, the rhetoric of english india. penguin books, india. swarup, v. 2005, q&a. doubleday, new york. tagore, r. 1912, gitanjali. india society, london. tomlinson, j. 1999, globalisation and culture. polity press, cambridge. trivedi, h. & meenakshi, m. (eds) 2000, interrogating post-colonialism: theory, text and context. glorious printers, delhi. “regional integration in the pacific rim: global and domestic trajectories: the social impact of regional integration” social movements facing the processes of globalization: beyond the paradigms of class and identity veronica alfaro, university of guadalajara new social movements as result of a new socioeconomic order in our era, the process of globalization is not the cause of a different socioeconomic order, but rather is a different order in itself. this statement does not pretend to oversimplify the various processes that make globalization; nor does it take for granted assumptions about the social nature of the contemporary world. social change must be understood in a broad, dynamic sense. change, as a social process, is obviously linked to structural and material changes, but also to superstructural events that have to do with flows of information, technology, media, culture, and politics. the acceleration of those flows implies a reordering not only of economy and world politics, but also a reinterpretation of each individual’s lifestyle. that said, although the process of globalization has generated some positive outcomes, more often than not it has posed serious problems for some groups in the crossroads of unequal social change. most often, the south, the rural, and the underdeveloped sectors find it more difficult to keep the pace of economic integration and liberalization. this essay focuses on a particular expression of globalization and regionalization that entails social, political, cultural and economic dimensions: social movements. over recent decades, the impact of global and regional changes on local communities has often generated movements in opposition and protest. transnational corporations, industries, and financial institutions are seen as the triggers of changes that affect national and regional economies, policies and individual lifestyles, marginalizing some sectors of population in their pursuit of economic profits. if it is true that social movements are nothing new, what is interesting is that their form and claims have become an inherent expression of the discontents of globalization and regionalization processes. but, why is it that movements now seem to go beyond class portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 1 and identity claims? i will argue that current social movements are not necessarily articulated only in terms of class struggle—as the major labor movements were for the last two centuries. neither do they articulate their protests only in terms of identity and recognition—such as women’s movements did in the 1960s. social movements are now most commonly organized around a discourse that combines those two dimensions. contemporary social movements are expanding from the structural economic and industrial system (and thus abandoning the form of traditional class struggles) to cultural and identity grounds. new social movements are now seen more and more as symbolic challengers, because power—that affects everyday life and tries to manipulate and give social meaning to things—is being contested by individuals in both the public and private spheres. thus movements have a more symbolic function: they are a new kind of media, fighting for symbolic and cultural stakes, and for a different meaning and orientation of social action. however, constructing a collective identity within a social movement is not definitive. a movement’s identity is constructed on an everyday basis, and within the process of globalization, the contact and social interaction with others –with the other, which allows the definition of one’s own identity—is not only possible but also necessary. this paper considers the zapatista rebellion in chiapas as an empirical approach to social movements expanding from regional, local mobilizations and discourse, to more global oriented contentious activities. i argue that the zapatista movement’s identity in 1994 was quite different from the one it has now: the ejército zapatista de liberación nacional (ezln, or zapatista national liberation army) discourse has been transformed, from having an ethnic, communitarian point of view to a more global or transnational oriented vision. the zapatistas’ globally constructed image is now not only that of a particular, local revolution, but also reflects a pretended universalism in their political proposal: a reordering of the necessary and irreversible global structural transformation. the movements’ demands are thus an aspect of the actual process of configuring an ‘alternative revolution of global scale’, as a rejection of the new political, social and economic order, both at the local and global levels. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 2 in the case of zapatismo, the form of the movement has become a message, a symbolic challenge to the dominant global patterns that redefine the meaning of social action for the local society—namely, neoliberal policies. in other words, what is new—although not exclusive to zapatismo as a social movement—is that what is at stake in its discourse is the production of humanity, related to the transnational nature and effects of globalization and the interdependence of the world system. class, identity and social movement theories this section is an overview of some of the theoretical frameworks that deal with the complexity of social movements within the context of globalization and regionalization. there is no single paradigm that can take into account the amount of historical, political, and global conditions and interactions necessary to the comprehension of such phenomena. the goal here is not to conscript zapatismo in any given paradigm, but rather to use it as a starting point to compare some of the strengths and weaknesses of the resource mobilization and rational choice approaches, as well as the european paradigm of new social movements, and the american school of political opportunity structure. to analyze the social movements that are now inserted in the logics of globalization/regionalization, with regard to a local and—at the same time global— movement, we must transcend the theoretical dichotomies and ideological battles between paradigms. going beyond the divisions and polarized conflict would integrate the different approaches’ emphasis on the role of structural processes, political opportunities and collective identity that are crucial to understanding contemporary movements. the resource mobilization (rm) theoretical framework and its variants study the concept of political opportunities and the relationship of social movements to the state— supported by, among other social scientists, charles tilly (1981; 1995) and douglas mcadam (1995). these approaches focus on the micro mobilization of activists, in how portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 3 networks are used for recruitment through the use of incentives, the conditions under which people participate, as well as tactics for fund-raising. this paradigm also studies the free rider effect, by introducing the concept of costs and alternatives. such an approach focuses on inter-organizational relations, coalitional work, organizational conflict and internal divisions. at first sight, the american rm model, with its strong dose of rational choice theoretical foundation, seems an inappropriate tool for analyzing the zapatista movement. it does not take into account the role of social solidarity, motivation or the role of meanings and culture. those cultural creations are nevertheless part of a symbolic discourse that is fundamental for social movements. how these symbols and their meanings change through history is not studied by the resource mobilization theory, which does not have any linguistic, cognitive or emotive elements to analyze meaning systems. moreover, though rm may be useful for explaining cycles of collective action and contentious repertoires, it does not consider the particular orientation of every historical period. however useful it may be for the analysis of globally networked movements, the rm approach does not take account of values and ideology. other analysis of movements take motivational meanings into account, considering their ends and values as moral commitments of individuals and groups. behaviors affirm values, and social movements are committed to such moral principles that promote alternative lifestyles. this fact explains why new social movements that base their analysis in consciousness and class conflicts are studied out of rm framework, in the manner of the european theorists alain touraine and manuel castells. in the same vein, but framed within the american school of social movements, are some elements of the paradigm of political opportunity structure (pos), which are useful to analyze the opening of spaces for anti-globalization collective mobilizations that are ‘clustered’ around a set of protests concerning social change. sidney tarrow, working within this theoretical stream, argues that the base of all social movements, protests and portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 4 revolutions is contentious collective action (tarrow 1998). his main argument is that changes in political opportunities and constrains create the most important incentives for initiating phases or cycles of contention. those actions create opportunities for the original early insurgents, but also for latecomers and eventually for the opponents and power holders. contentious movements, according to tarrow`s view, emerge when people respond, in a rational way, to the opportunities that lower the costs of collective action, reveal potential allies, show the vulnerable points of elites, and trigger social networks and collective identities into action around a common purpose. once triggered, opportunities produce a cascade of information and incentives for new movement organizations. in short, the pos approach analyzes political opportunities along five structural elements: a) the opening of access to participation for new social actors -because ‘rational people’ do not attack when opportunities are closed; b) the instability and uncertainty of political alignments; c) conflicts within and among elites; d) actions of influential allies within the political system; e) the degree of repression or facilitation of state policies to oppositional movements. in other words, the pos model is focused on when and how contention broadens into general cycles and in the phases that characterize the parabolic ‘life’ of contentious cycles, that can be characterized as follows: first of all, there is a conflict that is diffused to members of the same group whose identities are activated by new opportunities and threats. early risers trigger a variety of processes of diffusion, extension, imitation and reaction among other groups. secondly, new weapons of protest and contention (repertoires) are fashioned. third, cycles of contention make use of old organizations and stimulate the creation of new ones. finally, contentious cycles produce information flows and political attention that increase the interaction among challengers and challenged. it may seem that the zapatistas were, at one point, part of a contentious cycle of antiglobalization movements around the world. however, the weakness of the pos paradigm is the argument that contention is more closely related to opportunities for collective portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 5 action than to social or economic factors –that are crucial to understand the emerging not only of zapatismo, but also of other movements. on the other side of the spectrum of social movements’ theories is the identity-oriented paradigm (melucci 1995). the role of collective identity in the analysis of contemporary social movements is a tool to explain the relations between behavior and meaning, as well as between objective conditions –such as history, economy an social changesand subjective motives and orientations. the use identity as an analytical tool allows explanation of how individual social actors become a collectivity and recognize themselves as part of one; how they maintain this identity over time; how collective action makes sense for the participants of a social movement; and whether the meaning of collective action derives from structural preconditions or from other individual motivations. by trying to bridge the emphasis on identity and the sociopolitical structures of the former models, some elements of the european paradigm of new social movements are helpful to interpreting contemporary struggles against hegemonic global structures. for instance, alain touraine’s approach to social movements is interesting because it emphasizes the power of civil society, the autonomy of social movements vis-à-vis the state, and the emergency of collective identities that are not subject only to class frontiers but are united against a broad hegemonic system. it must be recognized, however, that touraine’s european paradigm is based on western assumptions about state formation, democracy, modernity and sociohistorical contexts that cannot be applied to latin american structures. but, to this point, there are few theories that take into account the complexity of social movements in the historical crossroads of social models. touraine has a particular view of the societal model that corresponds to the era of globalization and regionalization processes. his sociology of action maintains that in the post-industrial or late-modern societies we are living in, or, as he puts it, in programmed societies, class domination consists in managing the production and data, ensuring the portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 6 control of supplies and organizing social life (touraine 1981). therefore, a certain type of technocracy rules the new social order, and resistance to its domination cannot be limited to a particular sphere. new defenses against such apparatus of domination are carried out in support of a population’s right to choose its kind of life and support its own political potential. social movements, for touraine, are a combination of three principles: identity, opposition and totality –or identity, adversary and societal goal, in castells’ later interpretation. movements, still viewed as manifestations of class struggle, penetrate historicity and criticize old traditions, producing an ideology, a representation of their social relations. in other words, they become identified with the stakes of the struggle and historicity itself. the action of social movements is thus a class action, directed against a true adversary. but it is not necessarily directed against the state and is not always a traditional political action contesting state power—as we have seen from the protests against the world trade organization in seattle, prague, new york. contemporary social movements struggle more and more for the social control of historicity: that is, for the control of the cultural orientations by which a society’s relationships are organized. in other words, what we have now, against the concentration of power and the penetration of decisionmaking apparatuses into all aspects of social and cultural life, are new social movements that take as their main objective not the conquest and transformation of the state, but the defense of the individual, of interpersonal relations, of small groups and minorities, of differences and alternatives, against a centralized power. the activity and discourse of the ezln in recent years expresses this defense of alternative lifestyles and the right to be different. in this context, we are seeing a violent rejection of a neoliberal, quantitative conception of human needs, a rejection that takes the form of an appeal to deep, fundamental (sometimes fundamentalist) and natural needs. these notions are indicative of a will to oppose another mode of life and other preferences to the technocratic modeling of demand. therefore, new social movements oppose social nominations in the name of the only thing that may yet escape it: nature. in what touraine calls ‘programmed society’, portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 7 the field of social struggles is the social actor in any role –it is the human being as living being (touraine 1988). today’s society is therefore a society of dynamic protest, of imagination and utopia, because is traversed by the conflict of the logic of power and programming, versus creativity and alternative ways of life.1 it must be recognized that the european approach has been more popular in latin america, because it emphasizes the role civil society, the autonomy of sm vis-à-vis the state, and the emergence of non-class identities. however, all those existing paradigms are built on western assumptions about modernity, democracy, citizenship, state formation and specific historical experiences. latin american politics and society differ greatly from those of developed western countries. thus, there is still a need for a specific approach that could be able to grasp the complexity of their particular movements, from the role of culture and identity to structural conditions and class interactions. the case of zapatismo: from a local to a global movement the construction and use of discourses by social movements plays an important and positive role in challenging relations and structures of power, both in respect of concentrated sites of power and in the way that power is embedded in everyday social relations. following castells’ argument that social movements ‘are what they say they are’, an analysis of the zapatista discourse throws a light on several issues: the way in which they construct their own collective identity, solidarity and collective action, and what pretends to be the ‘newness’ of the movement (castells 1997, 70). moreover, the ezln discourse establishes causal relationships between the movement’s practices and values, and the social processes to which they are associated: globalization and regionalization. according to its own discourse, what is new in zapatismo? what makes this movement different from other contemporary movements based in ethnic nationalism, or from other mobilizations against globalization and neoliberalism? i would say that as actors, 1 about the role of imagination in the construction of the subject in late modernity, see appadurai (2000). portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 8 zapatistas aim to create public spaces in social arenas for the affirmation of their identity and demands against modes of old and new domination, just as other movements around the world do. what makes their approach somewhat different from traditional movements, is the plurality of political actors and action within civil society that are involved and viewed increasingly not as means but as ends in themselves. in other words, part of what is new in zapatismo is the claim that a global civil society is expanding, and has become the indispensable terrain on which social actors organize and mobilize. zapatistas pose a challenge in two ways: one, by questioning public sites of traditional power; and two, in the way that symbolic power is embedded in everyday social relations. on the one hand, they combine instrumental demands: political, economic or social. on the other hand, they have an expressive dimension oriented towards norms, values, identities and lifestyles. alberto melucci (supporting the identity-oriented paradigm) and alain touraine agree that social movements are expanding from the economic and industrial system to cultural and identity grounds. new movements are now seen as symbolic challengers, because power that affects everyday life and tries to manipulate and give a meaning to things, is currently being contested by them. therefore, the function of actors in conflicts is to ‘reveal’ to the states and to announce to society that certain problems exist. movements, as movement networks or areas, have a symbolic function: they are a new kind of media, fighting for symbolic and cultural stakes, and for a different meaning and orientation of social action –what touraine calls ‘historicity’. in the case of a movement such as zapatismo, the form of the movement has become a message. in the same way that in the global village, ‘the medium is the message’, social movements in the era of globalization are now a symbolic challenge to the dominant patterns that redefine the meaning of social action for the whole society.2 in other words, what is new of zapatismo as a social movement, is that according to its discourse, what is 2 the global village, however, must not be understood as a mediated process of cultural homogenization and consensus at a global level. on the contrary, it is about the social relations that are proper of this age: individuals, extending themselves through media, are in touch with a diversity of other individuals and communities. the first in proposing this idea was marshall mcluhan (1964). portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 9 at stake now is the production of humanity, being related to the transnational nature and effects of globalization and the interdependence of the world system. as i noted earlier, the construction of identity is never definitive. in order to exist and resist, a movement’s identity has to be constructed on an everyday basis. the zapatista identity in 1994 was quite different from the one they have now: it has notoriously broadened. it is clear that zapatistas’ identity has evolved through their years of public struggle—its discourse has transformed, first from having an ethnic, communitarian point of view to a more global, or transnational oriented vision, and lately they seem to have completed the circle back to a local movement. the public mediated zapatista uprising coincided with the implementation of nafta in 1994. but, though some activists relate the zapatismo with a direct critique to the politics of neoliberalism and globalization, the movement’s origins were quite different: first, early zapatistas were a clearly local movement that later on gradually changed their discourse to a critique to the forms and politics of globalization. if it is true that at the beginning there was no ‘timing’ of the movement to coincide with the entrance of the nafta in january 1st 1994, it must be said that this particular date became a symbol of the oppression to the poor, as a result of the neoliberal policies that global economy had been imposing on the country since the 1980s, when mexico entered the gatt and began to accede to the policies of the imf and the world bank. what early zapatistas did was to take advantage, as tarrow would say, of the political opportunity that resulted from a diversity of factors, which included local politics, as well as the ‘democratic transition’ that mexico was living at the beginning of the 1990s. the transition of the zapatista movement, from local to national and then international movement, is reflected in its discourse and rhetoric, which have continually incorporated a diversity of social demands. if in 1994 the ezln communiqués ‘declarations of the lancandona rainforest’ were a direct war declaration aimed to the mexican government and army, the discourse evolved to a constant, latent presence in the media with pacific, democratic messages adapted to very different audiences and demands. women, children, portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 10 the elderly, the young, indigenous peoples, ecologists, homosexuals, hiv positives, artists, intellectuals, farmers, union workers, students, ngo’s and other social actors were all addressed by ezln’s communications strategy. at first, in the zapatista indigenous rights stage of discourse, the most important statements were the demands to recognize the particularities of indigenous groups and their rights to autonomy and citizenship: the indigenous problem will not have a solution if there is not a radical transformation of the national pact. the only way to incorporate with justice and dignity the indigenous to the nation, is recognizing their own social, cultural and political organization. their autonomy does not imply separation, but the minority integration into contemporary mexico. (marcos, third declaration) until the fifth declaration of the lacandona rainforest, the zapatista movement was basically a struggle for indigenous rights. the ezln invited national civil society and independent politic and social organizations ‘to fight against war and for the recognition of indigenous rights, for the transition to democracy, for an economic model that helps people and not helps itself, for a tolerant, inclusive society, for the respect to differences, for a new country where peace with justice and dignity may be for all’ (marcos, fifth declaration). later on, ecology and environmentalist concerns were incorporated to the core of the zapatista discourse, becoming a crucial factor for the incorporation and support of other national and international actors in the movement. zapatistas argue that indigenous communities are always among the first interested in the conservation of natural resources. they see themselves as the guardians of biodiversity, of natural ‘genetic banks’ as well as of their traditional knowledge. they criticize transnational companies and international research and development institutions that go into the rainforest area to investigate and patent genomes and the indigenous knowledge concerning them, and assert the necessity of indigenous peoples being recognized as part of the biodiversity of the region. in this way, they affirm: the conservation of biodiversity, which begins with the conservation of our indigenous culture, old and new, [the] intelligent strategies of conservation which allow the gradual enrichment of the soil [and] the participatory and inclusive management of everyone in our biodiversity and our country (marcos, with war there can be no democracy). portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 11 as both a global and regionally oriented movement, the zapatistas’ activities have had two dimensions of impact. at the national level and national politics, sympathizers of the movement are experimenting with new ways of expression and organization, in contradiction with the state’s hegemonic forces, often developing grassroots organizations. mobilizations of students, peasants, and ngo’s have proliferated as a result of the opening of spaces, independently of their degree of instrumental success. in castells’ words, ‘the power of identity, as claimed by marcos and the zapatistas […] has built bridges between the real indians, the real poor, and the educated urban sectors in search of new mobilizing utopias’ (castells 1997, 286). the collective mobilization of the zapatista movement at the international level is more complex. the image of the zlna movement is not anymore that of a particular, local revolution, but has become a universal proposal: a social reordering of the global structural transformation of late modernity. thus, this movement’s demands are intended for inclusion in the actual process of configuring an ‘alternative revolution of global scale’, as a rejection of the new political, social and economic (dis)order. part of this intent were the ‘intergalactic encounters for humanity and against neoliberalism’, that gathered people from all around the globe to discuss various forms of impact of neoliberal policies on humanity.3 starting from the premise that ‘rebels start to recognize each other, equal and different’, this first zapatista meeting against neoliberalism attempted to construct a chain of mobilization on a global scale. to this end, marcos says: this ‘prescindible’ people rebel and resist the power that wants to eliminate them. women, children, the elderly, the young, indigenous peoples, ecologists, homosexuals, hiv positives, workers, farmers and all whom are not only in excess, but also annoy the world order and its progress. […] pockets of resistance are multiplying. if humanity still has survival hopes, those hopes are in the pockets formed by the excluded, the scraps, the disposable (marcos, ‘the fourth world war has begun’). 3 there were delegations from italy, brazil, great britain, paraguay, uruguay, chile, philippines, germany, peru, argentina, austria, guatemala, belgium, venezuela, iran, denmark, nicaragua, zaire, france, haiti, ecuador, greece, japan, kurdistan, ireland, costa rica, puerto rico, cuba, sweden, switzerland, holland, south africa, spain, portugal, the usa ; the basque country, turkey, canada, bolivia, australia, mauritania, and obviously mexico. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 12 gradually, zapatistas have redefined their adversaries—their opponents—according to their own identity evolution. if, initially, the enemy was one-party rule in mexico (embodied by the pri) and its ‘bad government’, now it is globalization and neoliberalism, which embodies evil in the zapatista discourse. to use sub-commandant marcos’ terms, neoliberalism and its institutions are against the most elemental of human rights, having created ‘an excess of human beings that are not necessary for the new global order: they don’t produce, don’t consume, are not credit-subjects... in sum, there are disposable’ (marcos, ‘the fourth world war has begun’). the oppressor of humanity has thus been symbolized by capitalist organizations such as the international monetary found, the world bank, and transnational enterprises and corporations exploiting the labor and natural resources of third world countries. media and the construction of global virtual movements some scholars maintain that anti-globalization or ‘globaliphobic’ movements resemble a pre-political movement type –such as the one described by eric hobsbawm, a ‘robin hood-style’ movement, aiming for material equality for the poor and a redistribution of wealth for the dispossessed (hobsbawm 1959). i would argue that, though some of those movements might seem like primitive social movements –guerrillas and armed rebellions-, they have evolved and adapted to a global dynamic of social change, posing some interesting questions to contemporary social movements’ theories and to the study of their contentious repertoires. one of the questions that seems to be central in the historic crossroads of the ‘twin processes’ of globalization and regionalization is, which social movement will occupy the central position equivalent to that held by the worker’s movement in industrial society, and the civil liberties movement in the market society? what kind of movement will embody now the resistance against the hegemonies resulting from a new socioeconomic order? right now, movements such as women’s rights, the ecology, indigenous peoples, and human rights appear to be becoming global social movements, meaning that they are both global in scope and have an overtly global orientation. in contemporary movements, where public opinion and mass media ‘mediate’ all claims, protest and contention has portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 13 become a professional public performance. especially, the discussion about mass media and social movements poses some interesting questions about a mediated collective action, particularly through virtual contentious networks in cyberspace.4 at first sight, it might seem that global ‘virtual movements’ are the new movements par excellence, the ones that inherited the banner of worker’s and labor movements. the case study for this essay demonstrates that the transnational character of zapatismo has been constructed through media interaction and particularly through the use of cyberspace. the ezln’s success as a movement has been largely due to communication strategies; to the point that they can be called the first ‘informational guerrilla’ movement, conducting ‘a paper and internet’ war. actually, it is precisely the extensive use of cyberspace that allows the ezln to diffuse information throughout the world instantly, and to create a global network of support groups and organizations. manuel castells considers the zapatista rebellion to be a classical case of use of the internet to construct an advocacy network (castells 1997; tarrow 1998). in this context, the ezln’s home page on the internet and its broad presence in cyberspace, as well as the use of print and mass media, suggests that zapatista contentious politics are public performances. because of the use of those global communications, zapatismo can be seen as a kind of ‘master protest frame’: by dramatizing contradictions between resonant cultural values and conventional social practices, the movement links other protest identities and movements within society, adapting to its own agenda other innovative contentious action forms and new cultural items. nonetheless it must be stressed that cyber activists construct their identities, loyalties and solidarity ties not in base of a physical presence or belonging to a particular regional space, but based on a common discourse and use of symbols. the broader the discourse, the broader the community. in a few years, zapatistas have become a symbol 4 by cyberspace, i mean not only the internet, but the whole universe of digital networks as a world of social interaction, including its cultural and economic conflicts. its tentative definition refers to the new media of information transmission and navigation that include but is not limited to: hypertext, the world wide web, interactive multimedia, video games, simulations, virtual reality, telecommunications and software. i agree with pierre levy in that cyberspace is an open-ended space in constant construction, that ‘brings with it methods of collective perception, feeling, remembrance, working, playing and being’. see levy (1999). portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 14 for virtual communities that are not necessarily related to the original demands of the indigenous peoples: land and freedom (the original motto of emiliano zapata was ‘tierra y libertad!’) the notion of a global network of communication—very much in the sense of a virtual community—was first envisioned by zapatistas in the summer of 1994, during the first ‘intergalactic meeting for humanity and against neoliberalism’. this time, sub commandant marcos said: we make a network of communication among all our struggles and resistances, against neoliberalism, and for humanity. this network will attempt to create channels so that words may flow to all paths that resist. it will be the medium by which distinct resistances communicate with one another. this network is not an organizing structure, nor does it have a central head or decision maker, nor does it have a central command or hierarchies. we are the network, all of us who speak and listen (marcos 1996).5 the internet was crucial for the organization of that first meeting and subsequent ones in brazil and spain. it connected activists from all around the world, very often related to other grassroots organizations and diverse struggles for diversity and anti-globalization issues. but however positive, the use of technology poses certain risks for mobilization: as castells puts it, virtual action may replace real action. now, writing a protest e-mail to an invisible someone, or hacking a governmental or commercial server and/or website (such as the white house, the wto, nike), occurs more frequently than actual physical engagement in a strike or protest situation. cyberspace and the use of technology are instruments of contention that have changed the dynamics of some social movements, in which it is no longer necessary to ‘give face’, or to compromise one’s body and integrity, since a virtual presence is enough. in this context, the problem of free riders within the movement reappears, with people not having a formal or physical commitment. virtual collective action may also imbue people with a sense of power that is not real. in tarrow’s point of view, for instance, a collective network of virtual movements is a safer, easier alternative for people: there is no contentious action, no commitment, no emotivity, and no sense of place (tarrow 1998). in other words, without concrete action, it is difficult to measure the success of a social movement. it is true that, in the one hand, 5 for a good compilation of marcos’s texts in english see ponce de leon (2001). portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 15 cyber activist groups attempt to engage people to social reality with their advocatory emails, diffusion of news, petitions and calls for action. however, after a while, the calls to engage in real social agency loose their efficacy, and people end up deleting e-mail chains without even reading them. for many social scientists, traditional activism, based still in the physical commitment of the body to a cause, remains paramount. alain touraine still insists that social movements are basically composed by ‘naked bodies against an opponent, fearing to become dead naked bodies’ (2001). in the case of zapatismo, the physical involvement of the body in the movement is still a key factor for the achievement of political and democratic changes. on the one hand, it is true that the virtual zapatista network of communication is the cause of the existence of a broad, global virtual community, and the zapatista strategy of netwar, where they claim that ‘our word is our weapon’, found its perfect medium in cyberspace.6 but on the other hand, the real, local presence of the physical bodies and voices of zapatistas (either struggling within conscripted communities in chiapas, or marching to mexico city) has been definitive for the consideration of their community demands and struggle to be included in a democratic political system. that is why virtual movements, though they strive to direct attention to their claims, are still regarded more as global networks of advocacy than real movements. what is, then, the value of social movements in this late-modern ‘virtual sphere’? does cyberspace play a purely instrumental role in expressing social protest and political conflict? or is there an actual transformation of the political into cyberspace that ultimately affects the forms and goals of movements and political actors? from what we have seen in the case of zapatismo, the use of cyberspace has provided the material basis 6 refer sub commandante marcos’s writings in ponce de leone; for sources, visit the main website of ezln, http://www.ezln.org, and some links of the virtual community of zapatistas: http://www.chiapasmediaproject.org. in italy: http://www.ipsnet.it/chiapas, http://www.ecn.org/ezln-it/ another italian community related to the zapatista and other struggles: http://www.ecn.org/la.strada/ .in ireland: http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico.html .in amsterdam: http://www.dds.nl/~noticias/prensa/zapata/. in australia: http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/3849/zap.html. in france: http://www.zapata.com/yabasta.php3; http://ouvaton.org/cspcl/. in the usa: http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/7083/, http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/1364/cpage1.htm, http://zapnet.rootmedia.org/, http://members.tripod.com/~pplp/ portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 16 http://www.ezln.org/ http://www.chiapasmediaproject.org/ http://www.ipsnet.it/chiapas http://www.ecn.org/ezln-it/ http://www.dds.nl/~noticias/prensa/zapata/ http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/3849/zap.html http://www.zapata.com/yabasta.php3 http://ouvaton.org/cspcl/ http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/7083/ http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/1364/cpage1.htm http://zapnet.rootmedia.org/ for the movement to engage in the production of social networks. according to castells, social change is still based upon the collective actions of individuals, and these actions are ‘empowered’ by the use of technology and communication tools (2001). but it is not clear whether ‘the political’ is affected by cyberspace in the same extent that this latter is affected by sociopolitical changes and dynamics such as global flows of money, information and cultural products. but cyberspace and virtual movements fit within the characteristics of what has been called a new social stage: late, liquid or reflexive modernity.7 for the moment, it seems that social movements have found an appropriate medium of organization according to the rapid global flows that shape society, thus helping to envision new forms of social change in at least one way: global movements need to match the global reach of the powers that they oppose (neoliberalism, globalization and so on), and they need to achieve a global impact and visibility through media. in short, cyberspace was expected to be an instrument to achieve democracy. it is true that, on the one hand, cyberspace has in a few cases, encouraged the interaction between citizens and government. it has also been the origin of high hopes in having everyone’s voices heard and thus consolidating a stronger global civil society. however, at the moment, the achievement and ideal of a global democracy is still far away. global movements transcending dichotomies this article has focused on how contemporary social movements are an expression of the socioeconomic changes of globalization and regionalization, and of the related individual and communitarian claims that result from them such as the right to reproduce one’s own culture, identity and lifestyle. i suggested that the integration of different social movement theories’ emphases on structural processes, political opportunities and collective identities may open a new point of view to analyze recent events of movements within the overarching globalization tendencies we are experiencing. in short, this paper promotes the need to transcend the dichotomies and ideological battles between social 7 for an interesting discussion on the direction and characteristics of globalization in the era of latemodernity, see bauman (2000); also beck, lash & giddens (1994). portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 17 movement theories. in this context, i have looked at the question of what are the characteristic and claims of social movements—specifically zapatismo. i argued that what we have now, ranged against the supranational concentration of power and the penetration of hegemonic decision-making apparatuses into social and cultural life, are movements that take as their main objective not necessarily the conquest and transformation of the state, but the symbolic defense of the individual, of interpersonal relations, of small groups and minorities (ethnic or not), and of differences with alternatives to central power. in brief, contemporary social movements go beyond old discourses of class, and struggle to gain social control of historicity: for the control of the cultural orientations by which a society’s relationships are organized. in other words, new social movements are about the right to choose one’s own lifestyle. as an expression of globalization, social movements cannot detach themselves from the processes of global flows, especially from the informational and technological ones. they are influenced by those flows, and most commonly, they try to use them to their favor. i have considered the role of new electronic technologies and media as inherent global flows that social movements can’t ignore. in particular, this essay considered the use of internet and satellite communications as new tools that are challenging old ‘contentious repertoires’ and proposing new, virtual ways of social agency. i have argued that the experience of cyberspace is changing a specific form of social interaction. electronic media is the message, and could be an experience of democratic participation in an open and global dialogue. the form of cyberactivism of zapatismo encourages and stimulates the analysis of challenges specific to social movements; the creation of a resistance identity and solidarity, but also the exploration of how the electronic medium that movements use to spread its word has, in a way, become the message. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 18 all social movements that are born within a particular sociohistorical context will eventually die. it is only insofar as social movements succeed in shifting life norms and values, as a well as winning instrumental demands that they will be able to shift relations and structures of power and thus reconstruct historicity. to this moment, it seems that the more global relations hold a central position in the discourse of zapatistas, the movement will attain a higher level, and will achieve a maximum of possible historical action. reference list appadurai, arjun 2000, modernity at large. cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis, university of minnesota press. bauman, zygmunt 2000, liquid modernity, cambridge polity press. beck, ulrich, lash, scott and giddens, anthony 1994, reflexive modernization politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order, standford, stanford university press, 1994. castells, manuel, 1997, the power of identity. the information age: economy, society and culture vol ii, cambridge ma, oxford uk, blackwell; p. 70 ——2001, computer networks, civil society and the state’; in the internet galaxy: reflections on the internet, business and society, oxford, oxford university press. hobsbawm, eric 1959, primitive rebels: studies in archaic forms of social movements in the 19th and 20th century, new york, praeger publishers, 1959. levy, pierre 1999, collective intelligence. mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace, cambridge ma, perseus books, 1999 mcadam, doug, ‘initiator and spin off movements: diffusion processes in protest cycles’, in) repertoires and cycles of collective action, ed. mark traugott, duke university press, 1995. mcluhan, marshall, understanding media: the extensions of man, massachusetts institute of technology, 1964. marcos, subcomandante 1996, ‘second declaration of la realidad for humanity and against neoliberalism’. ——, n.d. ‘third declaration of the lacandon rainforest’, ezln web page, available at www.ezln.org ——, n.d. ‘fifth declaration of the lacandon rainforest’, ezln web page, available at www.ezln.org ——, n.d. ‘the fourth world war has begun’, ezln web page, available at www.ezln.org ——, n.d. ‘with war there can be no democracy’, ezln web page, available at www.ezln.org melucci, alberto 1995, ‘the process of collective identity’, in social movements and culture, ed. b. klandermas, minneapolis, university of minnesota press. ponce de leon, juana (ed.) 2001, our word is our weapon: selected writings, new york, seven stories press. tarrow, sidney 1998, power in movement: social movements and contentious politics, portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 19 cambridge university press. tilly, charles 1995, ‘contentious repertoires in great britain 1758-1874’, in repertoires and cycles of collective action, ed mark traugott, durham, duke university press. tilly charles and tilly, louise (eds.) 1981, class conflict and collective action, new york, sage publications. touraine, alain 1981, the voice and the eye: an analysis of social movements. cambridge university press. ——1988, the return of the actor, minneapolis, university of minnesota press, 1988. ——2001, ‘the new sociological imagination’, new school for social research, graduate faculty working paper, spring 2001. virtual communities of vapatistas websites: virtual community of zapatistas: http://www.chiapasmediaproject.org. australia: http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/3849/zap.html. france: http://www.zapata.com/yabasta.php3; http://ouvaton.org/cspcl/. italy: http://www.ipsnet.it/chiapas, http://www.ecn.org/ezln-it/ http://www.ecn.org/la.strada/ .in ireland: http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico.html . netherlands: http://www.dds.nl/~noticias/prensa/zapata/. usa: http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/7083/, http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/1364/cpage1.htm, http://zapnet.rootmedia.org/, portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 20 http://www.chiapasmediaproject.org/ http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/3849/zap.html http://www.zapata.com/yabasta.php3 http://ouvaton.org/cspcl/ http://www.ipsnet.it/chiapas http://www.ecn.org/ezln-it/ http://www.dds.nl/~noticias/prensa/zapata/ http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/7083/ http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/1364/cpage1.htm http://zapnet.rootmedia.org/ new social movements as result of a new socioeconomic order class, identity and social movement theories at first sight, the american rm model, with its strong dose media and the construction of global virtual movements portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: messina, m. 2021. 107 days and counting.... portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 104–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ pjmis.v17i1-2.7412 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay 107 days and counting... marcello messina corresponding author(s): marcello messina, programa de pós-graduação em música, universidade federal da paraíba, cidade universitária cep: 58051-900, joão pessoa (pb), brasil. marcello@ccta.ufpb.br doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7412 article history: received 12/09/2020; accepted 20/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract in this essay, i reflect on my experience of social/physical distancing in brazil, one of the current epicentres of the covid-19 pandemic. i draw upon achille mbembe and denise ferreira da silva to explore how necropolitics underpins the brazilian government’s response to the crisis, framed by a colonial and racialised logic that privileges whiteness and trivialises the deaths of brazilians. i conclude the essay by making reference to my track 107 jorna (107 days), written on 1 july (and premiered online by the glasgow-based lights out listening group), where i combine sicilian speech and electronic noise in order to articulate my own astonishment, impatience and indignation with the current situation. keywords pandemic; brazil; italy; death; racialisation; musical composition introduction when i began writing this essay it was roughly five months since my family and i had started our quarantine in joão pessoa, the easternmost city in brazil, and capital of the northeastern state of paraíba. to this day, we are still mainly at home, trying to avoid any form of physical proximity with people from outside. i say ‘mainly’ as very recently, encouraged by a consistent fall of infections and deaths in our city, we started considering the idea of going out for groceries and for other essential tasks. starting from the end of february, as immigrants—proudly not ‘expats’—coming from italy, we experienced two main phases of the covid-19 global crisis. in march and april, with shock and despair, we were following the daily death bulletins coming from italy; from may declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 104 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7412 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7412 mailto:marcello@ccta.ufpb.br http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7412 onwards, the progressive easing of the situation in italy coincided with the escalation of contagions and deaths in brazil. may 4 was a key date for us: the progressive easing of the lockdown restrictions that started in italy coincided with the introduction of mobility restrictions in the municipality of joão pessoa that forbade access to squares, markets, beaches, parks and waterfront walkways. by that time, while the daily deaths curve in italy had already fallen considerably, brazil’s curve was rapidly rising towards a peak that eventually would exceed one thousand deaths per day in june, only to hit a ‘long, deadly plateau’ that lasted four months (montes & agarwal 2020). the seven day moving average of daily deaths slowly descended from 997 on 22 august to about 300 at the beginning of november, only to worryingly skyrocket again to about 500 in a matter of a few days between 10 and 15 november (gaspar 2020), heralding a second peak in many brazilian cities, including joão pessoa (bertoni 2020).1 although we had considered travelling back to italy we resolved to stay in brazil and wait for the worst to pass. in mid-november, at the time of submitting the last version of this essay, we reckoned that we might be equally in peril by staying in brazil as returning to italy. necropolitics, self-destructive desires and unworthy victims the constant minimisation of the pandemic and of its gravity, perpetrated by the brazilian government in the person of the current president of the republic is too well known to deserve any recapitulation here.2 in his famous essay necropolitics, achille mbembe coined the eponymous term by looking at ‘those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations’ (2003: 14). the association of bolsonaro’s politics with signifiers such as ‘genocide’ and ‘necropolitics’ is in fact very frequent among political commentators. gislene aparecida dos santos, associate professor at the university of são paulo, directly connects necropolitics with covid-19 deaths in poor and black communities in brazil: necropolítica é o modo como o estado, por meio de suas políticas, decide, a cada minuto, quem vive e quem morre. penso que, agora, isso possa estar ocorrendo em hospitais de todo o mundo. não faltam dados para indicar que o tratamento das pessoas pobres e pretas, nos serviços de saúde, também é desigual. se tiver que escolher, quem “o médico” escolherá para a uti e para o uso do respirador, para o hospital com equipamentos de ponta e para o hospital de campanha? podemos nos esquecer dos algoritmos que dão preferência a brancos, em detrimento do atendimento dos negros, como revela pesquisa de ziad obermeyer e outros?. quem são as pessoas que apresentam, em maior medida, as comorbidades que as fragilizam para a covid-19? e por que apresentam tais doenças crônicas? (santos 2020) [necropolitics is the way in which the state decides, through its policies, who is to live and who is to die. i think that this may be occurring in hospitals all around the world at the moment. there is enough data available indicating the unequal treatment that poor and black people receive from health services. should the doctor have to choose, which patient will be sent to intensive care and provided a respirator? whom will the doctor send to the bestequipped hospital, and whom to the field hospital? can we afford to disregard the algorithms that prioritise white patients to the detriment of the quality of assistance provided to black patients, as 1 update: as of 10 december, the second peak is confirmed as the moving average hit 642, while daily cases run on an average of 42,290. 2 good introductions on the issue are kibuuka (2020) and jorge (2020). messina portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021105 ziad obermeyer et al.’s research reveals?3 who are the people suffering to a greater extent from the pre-existing conditions which render them vulnerable to covid-19? and why, in the first place, do they suffer from these chronic ailments?] in this context, the growing scenario of trivialisation of death mentioned by veiga (2020) may be deciphered critically by drawing upon denise ferreira da silva’s description of brazilian society as characterised by a violent desire of ‘erasure of the “indigenous” and of the “african” in favour of the ‘self-production of the european’ (silva 2006: 62). silva explains that this desire positions brazil’s ‘sujeito social subalterno mestiço4’ [‘subaltern mestiço social subject’] as ‘the subject of a destructive desire’ and ‘the agent of his/her own annihilation’ (silva 2006: 62). critically addressing the work of brazilian historian gilberto freyre, silva argues that: while the product of portuguese desire, the mestiço, becomes the symbol of brazil’s specificity— being a fundamentally unstable figure as it is a temporary incorporation of brazilianness and a necessary step for its real expression—the brazilian subject is always white, because freyre, like others before him, construes the portuguese as the authentic subject of brazilian history. (silva 2006: 63) silva’s critique of the racial imagery that inscribes mestiçagem is far from the positive uses of the concept proposed by chicana authors like gloria anzaldúa (1987) or chela sandoval (2000). other important contributions about mestiçagem in brazil, such as those by larissa pelúcio (2012) and maria thereza alves (2018), might also differ from silva’s view. regardless of these different views on mestiçagem, all these authors seem to agree that the legacy of european colonialism has shaped and informed a self-inflicted genocidal logic (cf. alves 2018: 34), by which, in times of pandemic, brazilian deaths might actually appear to brazilians as less tragic than european ones: ‘quando na itália morriam 800 pessoas por dia, todos aqui estavam apavorados, mas e agora? no brasil em média são 1200 por dia, mas não tem mais graça? na europa é mais chique morrer?’ (carvalho 2020) [when 800 people per day died in italy, everyone here was terrified, but what now? in brazil, on average, 1200 are dying per day, but is that not horrible anymore? is death fancier in europe?]. this trivialisation of death aligns with edward s. herman and noam chomsky’s notion of worthy and unworthy victims: our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion. in contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage. (herman & chomsky 1988: 35) as a great dis-equaliser, covid-19 therefore foregrounds—even more than usual—the intolerable racial and socio-political imbalances that characterise brazilian society. i cannot refrain from connecting ferreira da silva’s aforementioned claim that the portuguese are construed as ‘the authentic subject of brazilian history’ (silva 2006: 38) with my own legacy as an italian migrant in brazil, and italians’ undeniable contribution to an entrenched settler colonial fantasy of whitening the country (beneduzi 2011). after the east asian period of the pandemic ( january–february) and the european period (march– may), and up until the deadly second wave in europe (october–present), the pandemic had mainly become 3 the author refers to a 2019 paper titled ‘dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations’ (obermeyer et al. 2019). 4 ‘mestiço’ [fem. ‘mestiça’] in portuguese, or ‘mestizo’ [fem. ‘mestiza’] in spanish, indicate mixed-race people. ‘mestiçagem’ or ‘mestizaje’ indicates the condition of being mestiço/a or mestizo/a. messina portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021106 a developing countries’ disease. brazil, india, mexico, iran and peru are among the ten countries with most victims, with argentina and colombia not far behind, the former having just hit 35,000 deaths on 13 november 2020 at the time of finishing this essay. up until the second wave in europe, the virtuous rich countries (except the usa) seemed that they had beaten covid-19 and had started looking down at poor countries and labelling them as ‘threats’ (pittet cit. chade 2020).5 i noticed that when things started getting serious here and at the same time were easing in italy and europe, a sudden lack of interest from many italian/european friends and relatives kicked in: these were people who we would often contact during the worst days over there to ask how were they doing and cheer them up. while they were getting back to life we were sinking more and more into an endless quarantine. the musical track i present in the last part of this essay is precisely a piece about being stuck in perennial isolation when thousands were dying around us, and people back home were hurting us with their indifference. predictably, as the second wave in europe spread, many of our covid-related conversations with people in italy restarted. 107 days and counting my fixed-media piece 107 jorna (107 days) was written on 1 july and premiered on 29 july 2020 during an online event by the glasgow-based lights out listening group. in 107 jorna, i combine my own sicilian speech, recorded sounds and electronically synthesised noise in order to articulate my own astonishment, impatience and indignation with the current situation. the 107 days mentioned in the title refer to the time since i started observing physical distancing: 107 jorna, that is, 107 days—and counting. i put this track together on 1 july 2020, exactly 107 days since 16 march, when we (myself plus my wife and son) started our quarantine. we’re still in the quarantine, and it’s been almost five months now. the piece contains a spoken text composed of just a few sentences, characterised by various repetitions, that very simply outlines the current situation from my point of view: 107 jorna, 107 jorna, 107 jorna: chiossài ri tri mmisi, tri mmisi e mmenzu ca stamu ccà. i ggenti tunnanu a nesciri, e nuatri semu ccà, nficcati rintra. javi ru misi, tunnanu a nesciri, ddha bbanna finìu, e nuatri semu ccà, ancora, nficcati rintra. [107 days, 107 days, 107 days, more than three months, three and a half months that we’re here. people resumed going out, and we’re here, stuck inside. it’s been a couple of months, they resumed going out, over there it’s finished, and we’re here, still, stuck inside.] i opted to write and recite a text in sicilian as this is part of a precise artistic and political manifesto (see messina 2015) and because i considered it the most appropriate language to convey my status as an immigrant (not expat) here in brazil, while disavowing the hegemonic significance that italianness imposes in this geographical context. my disavowal of italianness, among other things, might be read as a response to italy’s disavowal of italian citizens stranded in brazil (and in several other countries), who were initially denied any help to get back home while their flights were repeatedly cancelled (focone 2020) and then were literally prohibited to travel to italy if not registered as a resident in the country before the decree (palma 2020).6 5 more specifically, pittet singled out the usa, brazil and mexico as the country to be wary of. what struck me about this claim was that it conveniently came a few days after mexico surpassed uk to (provisionally) reach the third highest death toll in the world. in the context of the general reopening of europe during the northern hemisphere summer, it was as if countries like italy, the uk, spain and france had suddenly ceased to be worrying pandemic hotbeds. 6 the legislation that regulates this travel ban is a decree of the ministry of health from 16 july 2020 <https://www. gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/id/2020/07/16/20a03912/sg> [accessed on 3 september 2020] messina portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021107 https://youtu.be/-ifxchxp0ei https://lightsoutlisteninggroup.wordpress.com/july-4/ https://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/id/2020/07/16/20a03912/sg https://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/id/2020/07/16/20a03912/sg the recited text is placed against the backdrop of a domestic soundscape,7 composed of radio static noise, bits of voices, a blender, and some synthetically generated sounds. clichéd fetishes of several generations of experimental composers, the radio and the blender are used in their denotative capacity as objects that materially constitute a part of the domestic space where i have been spending my quarantine; a space regulated by precise narratives that have specific political implications. home, as an intimate family space compulsorily turned into a dedicated place for work—in my case musical experimentation and, most importantly, academic tasks such as teaching and research—hosts a series of everyday negotiations that have to do with one’s ‘conflicted identities’ within and outside the family, for example as a ‘worker, parent and partner’ (armstrong 1995: 4; keller et al. forthcoming). in this context, the verbatim repetition of the spoken text is devised precisely to convey the endless cycles of life negotiations at home: while the weeks and the months go by and everything stays as it is, people keep dying and going out remains unsafe. on july 1 when i wrote the track, it was 107 days. when i completed the first draft of this text, on 6 september 2020, it was 174 days. in mid-november, at the time of revising this paper before publication, we are still counting the days of our quarantine here. references aguileira, r. 2020. covid-19 in latin america: were we doomed from the start?. lse latin american and caribbean. online, available: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2020/08/19/covid-19-in-latin-america-was-theregion-doomed-from-the-start/ accessed 5 september 2020]. alves, m. t. 2018. ‘canibalismo no brasil desde 1500 …’ muiraquitã, vol. 6, no. 1: 26–40. http://www.forumpermanente. org/revista/numero-4/textos/canibalismo-no-brasil-desde-1500 [accessed 5 september 2020]. https://doi. 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https://noticias.uol.com.br/ultimas-noticias/deutschewelle/2020/08/23/o-brasil-vive-a-banalizacao-da-morte.htm https://noticias.uol.com.br/ultimas-noticias/deutschewelle/2020/08/23/o-brasil-vive-a-banalizacao-da-morte.htm portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: chávez-silverman, s. 2021. crown crónica. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 113–115. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ pjmis.v17i1-2.7210 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal cultural work crown crónica susana chávez-silverman corresponding author: professor susana chávez-silverman, romance languages and literatures, pomona college, 333 n. college way, claremont ca 91711, usa. susicronista@ gmail.com doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7210 article history: received 18/05/2020; accepted 18/05/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract this creative non-fiction piece (written in my signature su(s)i generis spanglish) called ‘crown crónica’ stems, as much of my writing does (al menos partially), from an email exchange. this time with a student, who found suddenly being back home with her parents (sent packing, like many university students, in the early weeks of crownvirusmundo) to be hazardous to her (mental) health. in trying to comfort her, i grapple with the issue of shame, its paralysing grip on so many of us. in the ironic coda, added some 8 months later, i show just how wildly misplaced those feelings of shame were, and reach toward a tentative sense of plenitude, even gratitude, as crownaño 2020 draws to a close. keywords susana chávez-silverman; short story; crown crónica 22 abril, 2020 earth day encuevada en casa, claramonte, califas para marian ‘pink’ williams y para mis médicos una longtime estudiante mía, lozana y brishante, en su 3rd (4th?) class with me, me mandó un e-macho pidiendo disculpas por haber ido mia last week. results that tiene un desorden (i had no idea) y que estar patrás en casa, thanks to crownmundo, le desestabiliza. believe me, i can relate. nuestro exchange produjo esta accidental croniquita—my first after months of sequía. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 113 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7210 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7210 mailto:susicronista@gmail.com mailto:susicronista@gmail.com http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7210 encuentro que home sweet home is anything but para mucha gente, i wrote her. es difícil tener que regresar al ‘nido,’ i get it. even in non-pandemic times. yo dejé mi casa a los 17 y no regresé (except for visits). me llevaba muy bien con mi papá. con mi mamá fue … otra historia. which i’m exploring for a new book, even as we speak. it was a hard week for me, ella me dijo, but i think i’m getting past the embarrassment and shame i felt. me to her: well, good thing que tus padres se dieron cuenta ¿no? also: shame sux. it’s unproductive and just straight-up awful. hablo de mí. it hit me yesterday: i’ve had a practice of 3-mile healthwalks (3-4 times/weekly) desde 2005. since that time, i also practiced yoga weekly. llevo diciéndome que i fell off the healthwalks maomeno since october 2019, después de lo del catastrófico verano, con el custody case de mi hijo, providing infant care (todo el verano) para jem and then the excruciating, mysterious physical pain that started up about mid-october, y que me ha machacado cual freight train ever since. pero eso no es cierto. de hecho: cuando volví del trip to london, con mi ex-estudiante (ahora amiguísima) la pink, in early june last year, and was immediately caught up in custody battle madness … that’s when i began to seriously neglect my own routines, my body and overall bienestar. it was like … not exactly a death wish sino una especie de dogged, anxious self-erasure. me convertí en warhorse, vulnerable a los desperate entreaties del juvenil (él a su vez vulnerable a la cruel roller coaster de un mental disorder), espoleada into action by the thought of him—us--losing my infant nieto, jeremiah. coño, me di cuenta. i’ve been ‘on lockdown’ loooonng before el guapetón del ricachón del gov gav de califas made it a thing. since about mid-2019! almost a year! esto me cayó como ton of ladrillos. and then (predictably): the sickening, acid-drip of shame. que how can i be a good mentor, preaching about boundaries y mindfulness y wellness a mis students si yo misma soy tan hipócrita, y bla bla. i don’t even take my own fucking advice about exercise, meditation, creativity … anygüey, i began to improve un little hair con los at-home exercises (2x/day) de benjamin chen, el genial (virgo) physical therapist que me tocó dizque al azar, en kaiser permanente. i’ve done them faithfully desde el 12 de marzo, día en que llovía a cántaros, i remember. y … after that, the darkness. no más inperson appointments. crownvirusmundo nos clausuró … well, todo. ben’s ever-more-byzantine exercise regime has helped—un poco. the pain is not as lacerating or 24/7 as before. o tal me parece, a veces. pero last friday el ben dijo que i had to return to the healthwalks, pues los muscles están en desuso, and this produces oxygen-deprivation, dolor, stiffness and even impinges en los nervios (hello, numb, encased-in-cemento brazo derecho y fingies). el problema (o excusa) que me inventé en crownmundo es que el thompson creek trail, where i always go (and where i’ve hatched some of my best writing), está closed for crown. pero ni modo. el ben insistió en que caminara ‘around the barrio,’ even if i start out really slow. so i made of tripe, heart y … lo he hecho twice. el primer día hice solo 20 minutes (oh, the shame). pero ayer hice media hora. disturbingly, far from the trippy, meditative jouissance del trail, where i can really pick up steam, y hacer zen-out con todos los endorphins, me sentí … odd. off. baby birdish—unsteady in my gait, endeble, tiesa, apaleada. una stand-outish, ridiculous cruza entre gumby y el tin man. i worried i was almost limping! yo, que siempre he tenido un caminar elegante, giraffe-like (so they told me cuando vivía en africa). plus, es banal y anodino caminar por un suburb, refunfuñé. no es como el health trail. por acá, in my own neighborhood, tengo que concentrarme, pa’ no tropezar en las sidewalk cracks, parriba y pabajo en los curbs. salí de casa en esta sudden, global calefaction heatwaveish spring en una pandemia mundial y doblé, titubeante y grouchy, en la shenandoah (suddenly tarareando la epónima canción, “oh shenandoah, i long to hear you…,” que tocaba mi mamá en la guitarra), giving wide berth a las zorro-like parejitas con sus baby strollers (ya que yo iba maskless) y dejando que otros (unos runners bien fornidos y chix en full socal sports gear, tipo trendy leggings y sports bras con sus ubiquitous, annoying water flasks at the ready) me pasaran. chávez-silverman portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021114 i was going slow, pero ojo: i was going. subí por la lindenwood, en honor a mi pana el wim (su surname—lindeque—significa ‘linden tree’ en belgian o flemish or some sexy viking scando-lingo, no me acuerdo bien). to my horror, vi que en vez de tilo esa calle ostentaba jacarandás. ya sé, it’s my fave tree, i should have been mega-chuffed. pero estos trees eran dweedly, yellowish and scraggly, disconsolately prebloom y además, well, lo que venía al caso eran los linden trees ¿no? pero ni modo. esa false-advertising callecita led to a sort of park: a largish circular grassy space, con un little paved path around it, donde caminaban, purposefully, más newly healthwalk-inclined parents con sus prams, y una mujer asiática, masked, ridiculously walking backward (en un private, hyper-sporty challengeto-self, supongo), pendejamente swinging her arms como me había aconsejado el ben chen. —you can do this, me dije. medio grimly al principio, pero after a while—especially tras ver los tiernos earth day chalkings de unos neighbor kids on a curb, ya casi patrás en casa, ‘love your mother’ y ‘every little thing is gonna be alright’—con algo más de convencimiento. —you can do this. well it may or it may not be alright, kids, les dije pa’ mis adentros. pero my eyes welled y se me ensanchó el corazón (mi oddly mushy pero igual de arisco heart), remembering, de golpe, ese primer earth day, hace ya (omg) 50 años. cuando—esto lo alega mi hermana sarita, yo no tengo memoria—ella y yo descubrimos (en el garage de nuestra casa en santa cruz) los kittens que había parido nuestra gata. pero— nostalgic sigh—esa es otra. crown crucible coda 8 diciembre, 2020 those sharp teeth cut through every other circumstance to bite my life clean and set an unforgettable edge on eternity. mimi foyle next to nada de lo que escribí arriba—almost 8 months ago—tiene sentido ahora. lo siento lejano, todo eso. los meses de unexplained, epic pain. todas las arcane theories que barajamos: que auto-immune disorder, que early-childhood unresolved trauma. all that seems so remote now, cual si fuese otro planeta. or as if i myself were the alien, extraña ahora de ese mi antaño-ser. so much has been revealed en este pluto-saturn transit (uncannily solapado con este annus horribilis en crownmundo), hovering over me cual enorme murciélago, pitiless pero a la larga benévolo. velvety undermundo wings and sonar-guided maniobras pointing the way, según los astrólogos, hacia una total metamorfosis. porque todo se esclareció—todo ese fuzzy kaleidoscope of gasp-inducing, 24/7 dolor, ese terrifying numbness, ese caminar de robot—el 1 de junio cuando el neurólogo, dr. lee, y el neurocirujano, dr. tashjian, took one look at my mri y al tiro me pusieron at the top of the list para emergency spinal surgery. simón, gente: el 8 de junio—exactly 6 months ago today—me salvaron la vida. en medio del (first) crown-surge! a couple of more weeks and it would’ve been cortinas—o al menos quadriplegia—for me, según el dr. scott, mi longtime primary care physician. so por smarmy e insólito as it sounds, este crownmundo/pluto-saturn transit may have taken me down to the pegs, pero a la vez it threw mi a lifeline (indulge me las mixed metáforas). y heme aquí hanging on for dear life, carnales. simón, i’m undeniably, hasta gratefully hanging on. @susana chávez-silverman chávez-silverman portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021115 acceptance – on 1956: desire and the unknowable portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ acceptance: on 1956: desire and the unknowable sue hajdú people robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. susan sontag , on photography on the afternoon of october 23 1956, the first day of the hungarian uprising, my father (hajdú lászló) was one of the thousands of students, intellectuals and workers who gathered in budapest to demonstrate for political reform. they rallied for imre nagy, their chosen political leader, but when he failed to deliver the desired speech, the crowd eventually dispersed. the fateful shooting that triggered the ensuing violence had already occurred outside the radio building. my father chose neither to go to the radio, nor to the stalin statue, which was then being pulled down. instead, he joined a group of youths anxious to have the students’ demands printed. he spent the night with these strangers in a basement printery. the printers discovered all sorts of ‘technical problems’ that prevented them from printing up the demands. at dawn, my father left buda, crossed the danube and arrived at his room in downtown pest. his immediate instinct was to reach for his camera. he went out on to andrassy avenue and took his first photograph—a soviet armoured personnel carrier running along the street; in the background one of the city’s oldest pharmacies and a few people huddled in a doorway. for the next eleven days he wandered the streets of budapest, his camera hidden behind his overcoat or under the sandwiches in his satchel. officially, the uprising continued until november 4, when several thousand soviet tanks crossed the borders into hungary. hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable stationed on almost every street corner, they shot at the first sign of human movement. this effectively put an end to my father’s picture taking. in all, he had made 145 exposures. he took the films with him on his escape to austria in december 1956, where they were subsequently developed and printed.1 i discovered these prints during my teens and would look at them from time to time. in these first experiences, what had stirred me most was the presence of death. many of the photographs are images of bodies—the soviet soldiers, hungarian citizens and secret police (allamvedélmi osztály: avo) who died during those weeks. they lie on the streets covered in lime, flowers and flags, or rubbish, depending on their role in events. on the edges of the frame are the feet of budapest’s citizens, looking [see figure 1]. figure 1: photograph of dead avo, by hajdú lászló, budapest, 1956. my parents were not the type to tell stories or reminisce about the past. they never explained these pictures, so i was unsure of the exact significance of such details. i knew that the photographs depicted the uprising—the ‘revolution,’ as the hungarian émigrés called it—but i could not identify anything beyond ‘october 1956.’ yet i recognised in portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 2 1 he and my mother met some months later in one of the refugee camps in austria. hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable that date a tumultuous event that my parents had experienced and that had brought both of them to the edge of death. this was enough to make me cry over these pictures on several occasions. the experience resonates strongly with susan sontag’s well-known encounter with photographs of bergen-belsen and dachau (1977). my emotions were also aroused by a vague sense of myself as hungarian. the photographs represented a past (event) that cut me off from my past (ancestry). i recognised parts of myself in those photographs. i can liken my feelings to those of anne mcdonald when viewing a photograph that her father had shot when they were tourists in new guinea: ‘i find i am secretly hoping it will reveal a memory; i become immediately enthralled by evidence of my past ... urgent with longing, i accuse the image for not facilitating a return to that…memory’ (1988, 61). the photograph reduces mcdonald to fundamental questions: ‘who was my father when he took that photo?’ and ‘why am i here now?’ (1988, 61). for me, this feeling is particularly intense in my father’s 1956 photographs. as a child of hungarian refugees who immigrated to australia—as a member of the diasporas that typify the 20th century—i feel that in many ways my past is a foreign country. this only became evident to me when i returned to hungary in 1990 and again in 2000. place is important here, but so too is story. the parts of hungary that vibrate strongly with spirit of place are those that my father or my relatives tell stories about. becoming aware of the generational chain back across time makes me feel i do indeed have a long and compelling past. meanwhile in australia i feel rootless. we have no past there beyond the year of my parent’s arrival: 1958. as the diasporic returnee, i underwent a process of re-sensitization to past and to place, by listening to stories and working with old photographs. albeit in a different context, this process in beautifully expressed by ross gibson in the catalogue essay of crime scene, an exhibition of forensic photography held in sydney in 1999: portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 3 hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable you begin to feel a deep emotional charge running through your city…. you sense that every street corner, every vacant lot, back-alley and culvert in this city is energised by past humanity. call it history, call it spirit of place—whatever name you give it, it starts to follow you everywhere you go. (1999) but the past is gone, and no photograph can retrieve it. what gibson gained from viewing photographs was not the past as it was, for that is impossible. what he gained was a sense of the past; or more precisely, his sense of the past. ……………………………… even without privy knowledge i recognise my father as an amateur in his photographs. perhaps the biggest clue is the safe distance of his framing.2 he had no professional reasons for risking his life to get a close shot. generally he frames the entire scene, often including a wide expanse of road in the foreground. in other pictures his photographic skills betray him—sometimes the centre of interest is obscure, or the photographs are blurry, or poorly exposed [see figures 2 & 3]. figure 2: photograph of the grand ring road, by hajdú lászló, budapest 1956. figure 3: photograph of the dead with national flags, by hajdú lászló, budapest, 1956. photographs taken by professional photojournalists play a large part in creating and maintaining memories of historical events. underwritten by the authority of the media, 2 there were political reasons for his safe framing as well. he was aware that if the films were to be found by the avo, the people in the pictures could be identified. thus, he maintained a distance and also usually asked those in the foreground of the shot to turn around. his fears were realistic—in the aftermath of the uprising, many people were executed or imprisoned after being identified from photographs. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 4 hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable such images make a strong claim to truth. in the discourses of war photography, we rarely consider images by the unknown, fumbling amateur—the local citizen—for whom possibly much more than his own physical safety is at stake. but vernacular photographs can tell very different stories. there is something more adhoc, more subtle, in the way amateur photographs depict historical events. my father does not organise his pictures in the manner of the professional photographer, but i see the value of his work precisely in the way that it bypasses such technical and conceptual skills. as a result, his photographs pick up details that would have been deemed either too un-noteworthy or too unpalatable to be put into public circulation. this allows a more complex message about the nature of war to slip through. in the following discussion, i will focus on three of my father’s recurring motifs, all of which work to subvert the standard etiquette of war photography. these are the dead body, the gazing crowd, and (the non-motif of) non-heroism. i have encountered multiple forms of representation of 1956—stage plays that were put on by the hungarian community in melbourne, photographs, posters, collections of photography such as cry hungary (gadney 1986). repeatedly, the message is that the revolution was heroic and tragic. growing up in melbourne, i had always felt instinctively ambivalent about all these depictions of the hungarian heroes. surely those hungarian émigrés that formed my parents’ social circle could not have all been heroes. the urge to represent heroism can sometimes be so strong as to over-ride the ‘truth’ of photo-journalism. in a provocative analysis of robert capa’s death of a republican soldier, caroline brothers (1997) argues that this photograph, rather than capturing the soldier at the moment he fell, was in fact a fake.3 she concludes that ‘the fame of this photograph is indicative of a collective imagination which wanted and still wants to believe certain things about the nature of death in war …what this image argued was that 3 my father encountered a similar situation in budapest, when he witnessed jean-pierre pedrazzini, shooting for paris-match, staging a shot of one of the ‘freedom fighters’ firing a rifle into the distance. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 5 looking at this photograph with the critical eye that i have gained, i have no doubt that it was staged. hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable death in war was heroic, and tragic, and that the individual counted and that his death mattered’ (1997, 183). this is what most of us, including the hungarians, would like to believe about death in war. my father’s photographs whisper something different. they show me that caution, passivity, the mundane and the everyday play a very large part in war and revolution. my first inklings of this came with making work prints of his negatives. these revealed details that had not been visible on the proof sheets. i noticed the caution of his framing. i also started to see into the crowds, and instead of heroic freedom fighters i found ordinary people wandering the streets, standing around, or peering out of apartment windows. by and large they are onlookers, not participants. some even appear disinterested in the extra-ordinary events going on around them. in one photograph, a statue of a red army soldier is being hammered to pieces. while the noise must have been deafening, a man and a woman chat away amicably in the background. in another shot, a man pushes his bicycle across a bridge as two soviet tanks rush by. perhaps he was more concerned about being able to eat dinner that night, than the presence of the tanks. john maccormac, writing for the new york times about the uprising, called such scenes ‘a touch of unreality’, indicative of the extent to which professional images appearing in the media shape our sense of the reality of war (gadney 1986, 58). while my father took two or three photographs of men engaged in gestures that could be interpreted as heroic, what strikes me about his work is its lack of a constructed emotional appeal. indeed, the physical distance of his framing is paralleled by an emotional distance in his gaze.4 his photographs appear cool, almost matter-of-fact.5 this is also true of his portraits of the dead. 4 for me personally, there is a tension between this seemingly disinterested gaze, and my expectations about the emotions my father must have been feeling watching his capital destroyed and his countrymen dying. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 6 5 interestingly, in the interviews i conducted with my father, he spoke very matter-of-factly about what happened in his pictures: ‘you see this? well, this happened, and then that’, was his typical style of explanation. while he used the term ‘freedom-fighter,’ he very rarely used words such as ‘hero’ not to mention ‘bravery’ or ‘tragedy.’ his personality or his personal interpretation of the event could account for this. nevertheless, it does not detract from what is going on in many of his photographs. hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable in contrast to his street scenes, my father tended to photograph the dead from close range. in one picture of a soviet soldier, i can see the insides of his leg—run over by a tank— mashed and puffed up at the same time. in another photograph it is as if i can see into the dead man’s skull. another photograph frames an avo corpse. the head is so mutilated as to be barely recognisable; cigarette butts are scattered all over the torso, mixed with dry blood and dirt. these are all enemy bodies. but whether enemies or loyal citizens, my father’s photographs of the dead do not sensationalise, and in their coolness, their matterof-factness, they resonate strongly with barthes’s argument that the amateur photograph stands closest to the noeme of photography: ‘that-has-been’ (1980, 76). they lie close to the underbelly of history. if we can filter though our distinctions of enemy/non-enemy, we are left with a compelling indication of what happens to bodies in wars. of the logic of war, vis-à-vis the body. and always, on the edges of the picture, is the presence of the crowd. what feelings and thoughts flooded the minds of those who gathered to gaze at the dead, i am not sure, but my father’s photographs tell me that they wanted to look [see figure 4]. a dozen pairs figure 4: photograph of a lynching at republic square, by hajdú lászló, budapest, 1956. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 7 hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable of feet circle the dead body of an avo, confronting its disfigurement, its smell. a man’s shoulder is caught in the camera’s parallax error as he takes in a scene of the black and twisted foot of a boy lying under an exploded vehicle. in the aftermath of the battle at republic square, crowds of bystanders strain for a view over the people in front of them. clearly others are as interested in looking at death as i am. the repetition of this motif of the crowd that has gathered to look, and the intense compulsion for visuality, is of particular interest to me as an artist who works with photography. it is significant that my father chose not to take up a gun, but to wander the streets specifically to see and to record. my relationship with his photographs duplicates this desire for knowledge through the visual. most of the images in the individual panels in 1956: desire and the unknowable are massive enlargements of tiny sections of my father’s negatives. in deciding the arrangements of these panels, i worked with a photocopier over the course of three or four months, repeatedly enlarging different sections of the work prints in different scales. the final panels were created first by printing sections of his original images, and then re-photographing smaller areas of these sections in order to create final work negatives. the prints that form the panels are thus 5th generation croppings and enlargements of my father’s original pictures – the final product of a compounded, compulsive homing-in. ……………………………… the printed image excites a double desire in history: on the one hand, for the careful sifting and assembling of detailed and objective records; and, on the other, for the restoration of history as ‘lived reality’ (tagg 1995, 290). looking at my father's photographs always prompts the question: ‘what was it like—to be there, to experience that?’ but the sheets of silver-gelatin before me yield little. i ask my father the same question, and he answers in a few terse words that fail to communicate the depth and intensity i desire. my desire for a ‘lived reality,’ for an experiential history, prompted me to visit budapest with my father in 2000, in order for us to retrace his steps. while it was impossible to go portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 8 hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable back in time, i could at least go back in space, and walk the same streets. i found myself becoming obsessed with the minutia of noting exact addresses for buildings and becoming concerned with the exact position from which he took the pictures. i wanted to ‘see’ the photographs in the same way, so as to ‘see’ history in the same way. i remember the first time i stood in the precise location he had stood in fortyfour years ago. holding the print (my overriding reality of budapest, which i had gotten to know so intimately in the darkroom) in my hands—comparing it to the scene which now stood before me, i was overwhelmed by a feeling that the past was about to come breaking through the veneer of the present. it was this ‘visual’ experience that partly prompted me to present this work in a grid. the spaces between each image function like a mesh, through which the picture seems to want to melt and re-form itself before the viewer—a visual experience of the work that was particularly strong in the exhibition of this work in between ranke and the sublime. at night in budapest, i used to look over my father’s photographs and write out notes about the day’s findings. i wondered what ‘newsreel images’ might be running through my father’s head, what he must be dreaming of, and longed for that experience to somehow be implanted into my own mind. but as he slept peacefully beside me i realised that his memories could never be mine. there was an unbridgeable gulf between us, because my experience of walking those streets in search of those pictures was inevitably different to his. my hope that i could know what it was like to be in the historical event, by knowing his pictures as accurately as possible, failed. it was then that i came to understand the inadequacy of the rankean will to access the truth of history through the document. for the past is ultimately unknowable, irretrievable through any medium. it has slipped by in the instant of the shutter. the sense of loss, the often inarticulate recognition that we can never return, is the ‘lingering laceration’ produced by the photograph (shawcross 1997, 109). i suspect that this is what compels us to keep looking at photographs. and in my case, the experience of looking at those particular photographs was layered with the portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 9 hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable inarticulate condition of diaspora experience—that that past, my past, which is not my past, cannot be returned to, cannot ever be claimed fully. i came to accept that no matter how intensely and methodically i worked with my father’s photographs, the events of 1956 would remain like hayden white’s historical sublime (1986): ultimately incomprehensible: formless, irregular, absurd, grotesque; marked by disruption, dislocation and discontinuity; lacking a centre, inherently uncertain and inherently meaningless. the traditional narrative is unable to express such a conception of the past, because requirements such as plot and narrative closure snuff out the sublime. instead, new literary techniques such as splitting and fragmentation, and the avoidance of ‘narrative omniscience over events’ become necessary. (burgoyne 1996, 114-15) this is particularly true post-holocaust, because of the impasse in imagination and explanation we are brought to by this event. thus, ‘anti-narrative non-histories’ offer the ‘only prospect for adequate representations of the kind of “unnatural’ events”—including the holocaust—that mark our era and distinguish it absolutely from all the “history” that comes before it’ (white 1996, 32). my gradual acceptance of such theoretical issues contributed to resolving many of the formal decisions that were part of the creation of this work. my father’s images are fractured as they ‘pass through’ the grid, but the individual pieces are arranged so as to stimulate the human urge for continuity and unity. depending on viewing distance, at first glance we may be deceived into seeing a complete picture. however, we soon realise that the pieces in each section do not come from one image that has been split up and spread out, but from separate images. a tension emerges between our recognition of the splintered fragments, and our now self-conscious desire to join the picture up into a comprehensible whole [see figure 5]. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 10 hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable figure 5: detail from 1956: desire and the unknowable, by sue hajdú 2001. such tension is expressive of our post-modern relationship with history and the narrative. for while the contemporary world is clearly different to the modernist one, it is still suffused with modernist residue—the comfortable, familiar concepts in which we still wish to believe but which are no longer adequate. we long for wholeness, we long for explainability. our minds know that this can never be the case, but our hearts persist in their longing. the tension produced between the grid of 1956: desire and the unknowable and the images themselves, parallels our oscillation. the grid functions similarly to the traditional narrative in that it ‘excludes the irrational, the non-causal, perceptual links that lie outside of what might be called the “agreeable.” the grid provides a void-as-space in which form can exist in a way that is agreeable, measurable, common-sense-truth’ (loveday 1999). yet it strains to perform this function against the irrationalities, distortions and mysteries within the images. the prints are dark, often obscure. traditional respect for tonal scale and shadow detail—the hallmarks of the modernist ‘good print’—have been abandoned. the question ‘what are they looking at?’ cannot be answered. it lies obscured in overly portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 11 hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable enlarged grains of silver and black lacunas that deny visuality. the work lacks a clear centre of interest. distortions in scale and perspective disorient the viewer, as do the repetitions. this kind of story-telling becomes ‘not an explanation, but an obsessive recounting, not a consistent description but a series of impressions, polarising coherence and cohesion’ (clive 1999, 225-27). we are left with a relationship between photography and the historical event that is radically different to that of a documentary practice. my decision to re-photograph prints of my father’s images, rather than working directly from his negatives, produces a grainy result which is clearly a copy, thereby acknowledging my essentially vicarious relationship to the past. this expresses the double-index of his/my their/our desire to know the historical through the act of looking. 1956: desire and the unknowable thus becomes my vision of 1956, rather than my father’s [see figure 6]. figure 6: 1956: desire and the unknowable, by sue hajdú, 2001. selenium-toned silver gelatin prints, mounted on pvc. dimensions: 125cm x 81 cm (individual panels: 9 x 9cm). ……………………………… the question remains as to what i gained from my research trip back to budapest with my father. the lived reality of the hungarian revolution proved inaccessible to me. however, i was able to stand in almost all of the locations in which he took his portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 12 hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable photographs and i was able to trace the route that he once walked, from negative to negative, as he photographed. and then there were the hours spent questioning, listening, recording, remembering. i feel comfortable saying that my knowledge of his pictures is now as intimate as his, albeit in a different way. this process has resulted in a transferal, but not only of facts and stories, which almost any stranger can gain. it is the transferal to the body—the result of all that walking side by side—that interests me more, because some of the knowledge that exists in his body has now been passed on to mine. i am his daughter. so this is a process of generational transferal. a diasporic inheritance of both the intellect and the body. budapest does indeed now resonate with past humanity, with spirit of place. i can no longer look at those pavements and buildings innocently. this bodily transferal of historical knowledge relates closely to my discussion about looking in the second section of this paper. i interpret the desirous looking of the crowd as the human compulsion to ‘take in’, in an attempt to come to terms with both the biggest mysteries of life and the enormity of 20th century events. writing about the vietnam war in dispatches, michael herr relates a scene in which a soldier, hit by a mortar round, has propped himself up against a tree: making himself look at the incredible thing that had just happened to his leg, screwed around about once at some point below his knee like a goofy scarecrow. he looked away and then back again, looking at it for a few seconds longer each time, then he settled in for about a minute, shaking his head and smiling, until his face became serious and he passed out. (1978, 33) i do not interpret looking at the body in this way as morbid or voyeuristic. to ‘take in’ death, to endeavour to know death in this way, is the same as the attempt to come to terms with the mystery of the human body in birth, or in the sexual act. it is here that i appreciate the coolness of my father’s gaze the most. because of the way he neither flinches at, nor sensationalises, nor moralises the scenes where crowds look at the dead, where they clearly want to look at the dead, i am able embrace this desire as a part of my humanness. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 13 hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable nevertheless, it must be a difficult task to look at scenes where one human has caused another such damage. even amongst those who had good reason to hate the avo, there must have been some who looked away. the complexity involved in such acts of looking is discussed by inga clendinnen in reading the holocaust. she quotes charlotte delbo, writing about a woman being dragged to the gas chamber: ‘try to look. just try and see’ (1998, 63). why? because to look at the dead on budapest’s streets or in the concentration camps, is not only to take in death, but also to take in history—to know, in the most unmediated manner, what man has done to man. there is a moral imperative in this act. for to make oneself witness, to retain that information in one’s body and to hopefully one day pass it on, was to resist the ultimate horror of the camps: the deliberate destruction of all records of the destruction. visual representation of the body in war is a similarly fraught issue. while my father’s photographs are discreet and respectful, they reveal rather than obscure physical mutilation. we must have access to images such as these, to an alternative to press photography of war. because governments do send bodies into war and annihilate them, whilst denying this reality in representation. meanwhile the glorification of heroism continues. it is better to know. the act of staying attentive to the past counts. clendinnen places that duty of attention squarely on our shoulders, and not on those of the survivors of painful historical events. luckily for all of us, some did survive, and are willing to tell. the rest of us have the moral imperative to ask, to listen and to look. and i agree with clendinnen’s view that these acts should be as disciplined and as critical as possible (1998, 206) we should strive to know as accurately as possible, as much as possible, even while admitting that there will be inevitable absences and lacunas. it is this tension inherent in a post-modern historiographical position that i have intended to ride in my work. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 14 hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable as such knowledge is transferred to the next-generation body, the voice of the diaspora child becomes able to speak. if my father were of a different temperament, or had different abilities, perhaps he would have compiled his photographs and published them. that task has now become mine. 1956: desire and the unknowable was my first attempt at addressing his oeuvre, and it was a very personal statement. in the course of researching and producing this piece i realized that our cross-generational project had not yet reached its full potential. so the oral history interviews have continued, as has my research. our collaboration across time will result in the publication of a book, entitled my father’s photographs. my father’s vision will be retained through each of his photographs, presented in sequence. beside them, my words. another voice, and a narrative that is accepting of the fracturing, the silences and omissions, the desire to comprehend sitting against the incomprehensibility. a voice that places that past in the now. many of the themes raised in this paper will appear, as will references to our interviews, our relationship to each other through the event, my relationship with his images and with that history, his motivations, my desire to know him as he was then, my position as diaspora – precisely because of that event. ……………………………… history’s dead are gone. what remains of their actions once they are gone? as scott mcquire writes, ‘the permanence or impermanence of any memory always depends on others, on the extent to which the living are prepared to assume responsibility for the lives of the dead’ (1998, 164). the dead. not just my father, one day; but all of them. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 15 hajdú 1956: desire and the unknowable reference list barthes, r. 1980, camera lucida: reflections on photography, trans. r. howard, fontana, london. brothers, c. 1997, war and photography: a cultural history, routledge, london and new york. burgoyne, r. 1996, ‘modernism and the narrative of nation in jfk’, in the persistence of history: cinema, television and the modern event, ed. v. sobchack, routledge, new york and london, 113-125. clendinnen, i. 1998, reading the holocaust, text publishing, melbourne. clive, s. 1999, the spoken image: photography and language, reaktion books, london. crime scene: scientific investigation bureau archives: 1945-1960, [exhibition] 13/11/1999 – 2/10/2000, justice and police museum, sydney. gadney, r. 1986, cry hungary: uprising 1956, weidenfeld and nicolson, london. gibson r. 1999, crime scene: scientific investigation bureau archives: 1945-1960 [catalogue], justice and police museum, sydney. herr, m. 1978, dispatches, picador, london. loveday, t. 1999, catalogue essay in material matters, ed. j. rath, uts gallery, sydney. mcdonald, a. 1988, ‘girl dancer at rigo festival’, photofile, south pacific, vol. 6, no. 1, 60-63. mcquire, s. 1998, visions of modernity: representation, memory, time and space in the age of the camera, sage, london. shawcross, n. m .1997, roland barthes on photography : the critical tradition in perspective, university press of florida, miami. sontag, s. 1977, on photography, penguin, new york. tagg, j. 1995, ‘the pencil of history’, in fugitive images: from photography to video, ed p. petro, indiana university press, bloomington & indianapolis, pp. 285-303. white, h. 1996, ‘the modernist event’, in the persistence of history: cinema, television and the modern event, ed. v. sobchack, routledge, new york and london, 17-38. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 16 acceptance: on 1956: desire and the unknowable sue hajdú reference list portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 2023 © 2023 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: de luca, b. 2023. the human dredger: triggering nostalgia. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 19:1/2, 1–7. https:// doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v19i12.8306 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal creative work the human dredger: triggering nostalgia billy (guillermo) de luca corresponding author: billy de luca, husherdeluca@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v19i1-2.8306 article history: received 04/08/2022; accepted 17/01/2023; published 22/05/2023 abstract the human dredger is a non-fiction, autobiographical recount of the writer’s education through food and its importance to society. the piece was written in june 2022 and includes scenes from melbourne, australia and amalfi, italy. the work explores the nature of memory regarding cuisine and its impact on growth from childhood into adulthood. the piece conveys how, foundationally, the understanding of different cultures can be approached through their interpretation of and appreciation for food. the writer reflects upon his childhood experiences with food and his changing perspectives as his palate develops. the story follows this human growth through a developed maturity of the palate. replacing a linear timeline, the author’s life is spelled out in a series of courses. keywords food; sensory memory; italian culture; gastronomy; palate growth; olfaction i mushrooms, olives, capers, capsicum, eggplant, beetroot, brussels sprouts, salad dressing, and mustard. mustard. at the age of twelve, i hated all of it. no parmigiana melanzane, no beetroot tartare, no stupid sauce on the bland leaf-based salad, no olives or capers in the livornese pesce spada, no mushrooms in the risotto. not even a touch of mustard on a hot dog would tickle my tongue. an italian passport holder too. one could assume that if they knew of my dislikes, they would declare the document null and void. cooking is the palimpsest handed down by generations; it is the crux of italian culture from an outsider’s perspective. it is the constitution. my cousin’s wife (girlfriend at the time) once ignored me for a week because i refused to try her cooking. she happened to have made a mushroom and eggplant lasagne with a monkfish livornese and a french fish soup which boasted even more flavours than i was willing to try. 1 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v19i1-2.8306 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v19i1-2.8306 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v19i1-2.8306 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:husherdeluca@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v19i1-2.8306 one dinner. i didn’t even try the cucumber and tomato salad—the dressing stunk up the fridge within ten minutes. the thought of consuming such miasma terrified my mouth shut. my refusal was taken… well, it was taken in one way, that’s for sure. she was fuming. i had crossed my arms and said ‘no’ like some self-determined right-wing bigot. she shrugged it off and moved on with the dinner—i thought she must have—only a little more silently than before. i remember how my cousin stared at me from across the table, his eyes quivering in shock and knuckles white as pearls. he said nothing. my mother said nothing. my dad chuckled. my cousin’s eyes were bidding me ‘good luck’ and ‘you are screwed.’ if i were to have access to such dishes now, without having (poorly) cooked them myself or ordered them off a menu, i would be singing their praise and leaping over the dinner table for seconds before firsts were even finished. i thought myself an irreproachable child but was veiled by irreproachable stupidity. and undeveloped taste buds. if i were older and still didn’t like the quality of food that i do now, or the variety of ingredients one could muster, i would have crawled below that table in embarrassment. i would get up and leave if the table were more forgiving. alas, she remained polite and composed. the table? well, that thing was inescapable. the dinner table was no easy feat to access. three metres of soft-polished granite heaved its head-thick mass over an unvarnished frame with pillar-like legs that rose from bulbous wooden buns layered up from the salmon-tiled floors. that thing was heavy, too heavy for an insolent child to move by himself. the table required not only the strength of two, but the press of legs of a third, their back on the ground and legs bent to their heads to push the table away from them. the table was so heavy that it had its own gravitational pull. the festive feasting family season involved smaller tables surrounding and joining with the main table; the international space station with ‘the hub’ being the cold grey stone heart of the home, its swells of folding tables and side tables would push out with gastronomic curiosities. the table had two long wooden pews, which i think had been purchased at some auction many years after the table was cast. yes, the pews were heavy too, only worse: to move the damned thing, one required the involvement of all party members (whoever was sitting on the bench) to lift themselves from the seat and assist in shifting the pew away from the table. the even greater trouble was getting out when you were sitting in the middle of the three-metrelong seat, with the seat needing to be lifted back. then everyone else would have to tighten back to allow for a shuffle across to the exit—unless you were brave enough to hop out from behind the backrest, involving a vault or step up and out from the table’s pull. the night of the ‘insult’ just so happened to be a night in which i was seated in the middle of the table, providing me with a vantage point for all the food i disliked and an arm’s reach from the gorgonzola which i loved. you have to love cheese. i always loved cheese. my lactose intolerance did not. she had spent hours labouring away, entering the kitchen with two boxes of fruit and vegetables and a tote bag with her computer and book. my cousin held one of the boxes. she came in with her frock, crocs and smock, ready to surprise. me? i didn’t budge. i was only ten, though, but no, no excuses. she ignored me for the rest of the night, speaking though hardly raising a lip for a smile. i was offered dessert begrudgingly; i accepted gladly. strawberries and yoghurt could always be tolerated, even though the mint leaves confused me. one week of ignoring? somewhat deserved in retrospect. to this day, i have struggled to find a cook that even neared her abilities and experimental aptitude. after that week, i had learnt my lesson. i summoned and declined the offer of solely having a separate salad (undressed) and decided to have whatever was prepared. mushrooms. it took me ten years to try them. now? probably my favourite vegetable— discounting the sweet taste of shallots, which is undoubtedly my greatest ally. my cousin’s wife was no ordinary cook either. since childhood, i would not only jump at their invitation for dinner at their place but listen intensely to every comment she would make about the food. i listened to every recommendation she would give regarding restaurants, coffee, dishes, and even the pairings of wine she would see as more fitting to a dish. it took me trans-continental travel to redefine my narrow mind and take a bite out of the most strange but beautiful tastes in the world. the opportunity was always there. the fork just never pulled back for a bite. de luca portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 20232 ii following my embarrassing olive-less childhood, maturity brought me to venture outside of ordinary and bland food. much of this was due to my growing interest in certain aspects of puberty and the need to ‘act your age.’ a man who can cook—and eat—is hot. a man who is uncomfortable with olives and salad dressing and is picky and whiney with what is put in front of him, well, that is not. so, i began to eat. and i ate well. sure, my mother had never been one for experimental recipes, nor had my father been too keen to try anything too spicy or textured. instead, he would opt to make baked beans on toast or a simple spanish omelette rather than adding chilli or trying new food that required developing skill and creativity. instead, i was left to my own devices, always thrilled when i would see family, always ecstatic when i was assured of a good meal. not only was the southern part of my family great cooks, but they grasped all the fecund land they could find and grew absolutely everything that they could: ‘if it is this good here, how good must noma really be?’ my uncle practically had his own vegetable farm at the back of his house. the back shed is the heart of a wire web holding tripodal beams that cast nets to keep growing plants and tarpaulin shade covers that spread long blue shadows over brilliant green leaves. he had never ceased working on it, constantly labouring to maintain food production and expand in variety and quality. his backyard farm and its relentless manufacture meant two things: first, the products selected to cook were what was in season—a facet of cuisine he taught me as i sat cross-legged on hand-tied cross beams wrapped by tomato leaves, snacking on yellow zucchinis like bananas; and second, i gained an understanding of the importance of each and every ingredient before they were all mixed. i established the beauty of raw ingredients (like the yellow zucchini) and developed a tongue to pair them. experimenting with food was one of my favourite parts of packing my bags and heading down south to the italians, being brought new dish after dish, always something new. the new flavours that smacked my tongue like a half-coarse whip took deep, challenging questions to decipher. after such discoveries, i would try to experiment with dishes at home. even if half of them failed, the experiments were usually pleasant experiences since i learnt not only how to pair ingredients but what ingredients do not pair well together. this lesson was invaluable, although most of the failures occurred while i was a young man trying to impress some girl on a low-budget date and an expensive fillet of salmon soaked in terrible sauce. i like to look back and hope that they at least appreciated what i was trying to do. all it ever took was to try. from being thrown a weird type of plum from a tree on the backyard farm to being carried around by my cousin and his wife to try alchemic levels of mixing and matching. from tasting raw vegetables and sashimi to avoiding mistaking ingredients not in season. even after believing i had developed a more advanced sense of taste, i ate half a dish of admittedly tasteless artichokes in a djerbien couscous in marseille, thinking they were a ‘weird sort of potato thing.’ italian cooking allows you to understand simplicity. simplicity in preparation—learning to dice onions in equal sizes to ensure they all cooked through without some burning to coal. simplicity in timing—knowing the order in which thicknesses of scallop should come off a skillet (thick on first, thin on last and off first etc.). simplicity in garnishing and ingredients was my most influential lessons. garnishing? easy. add olive oil. ingredients? start with garlic and olive oil. get that done and your dish will be guaranteed not to suck too badly. the difference between cherry tomatoes and plum tomatoes can be one thing, but the flavours of basil in a bruschetta? now that changes everything. the flavours and textures are as contingent on you as they are dependent on the type, freshness and quality of your ingredients. they are the difference between being a driver and being towed by your tongue, and nobody likes being towed. just wait for the worst to happen and become a vegan. wait for the worst to happen and take up your morning tea with the flavour doused in too much milk. watch your sauté spit dewed fresh kale as it fries and flies out of the pan. now add vinegar and dance in your clogs over the cracked wooden floors. i will weep like a funeral if i am in a de luca portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 20233 place for over a day without a stovetop and icebox. i will softly say to myself: ‘salads can still be interesting’ over and over as if preaching ‘we are all worthy of love.’ the saviour of such an instance came wrapped in prosciutto and had the name ‘rockmelon.’ no, not the antipasti dish you will undoubtedly have dragged 10 euros out of your pocket for in rome; but the ability to cook without adding heat. christmas with italians can teach you many things—seeing that long, polished granite heavy table covered with meticulously paired dishes without the click of a kettle or a sizzling pan can be helpful. of course, many cultures have mastered this; the popularity of the tartare in nearly every parisian bistro or the italians and their carpaccio. it is not always necessary to add heat and fire to everything. acidity is all it takes to make a dish perfect. the ideal for me? ceviche. thank you, peru. in the antipodes, my home was blessed with parks that rounded green grass onto barbeque stations, letting heat be used almost as a requisite for ‘good food.’ of course, people who do not believe that food can be had without heat are usually the people who order ‘well-done’ steaks and still don’t eat their veggies for dinner. europe and most parts of the world are not as privileged to boast free cooktops for public use. instead, they can be bought from a supermarket or, if you are lazier, one could just as easily buy a variety of ingredients and make serious charcuterie energy with the tap of your amex and basic knowledge of dish composition. don’t get me wrong, i understand that cured meats are not necessarily raw. still, your little beachside picnic does not always need to be from a takeaway box or red, yellow, and brown paper bags. eat more cheese, but that discussion will be held another time. iii it never matters what italian town you are in, there is always a labyrinth. at times, a labyrinth may be easy to navigate. it can be difficult to wind one’s way through the craquelure of walkways and passages, especially when the untrained eye has not experienced the uncanny similarities of nearly every road when wrapped by small homes and cream-coloured buildings. how is one to find their way across the precariously signed side streets in such towns? well, surprisingly, it is easy. simply forget your intended destination and wander around until you find what looks right for you. keep in mind that if you have a train, plane or ferry to catch, you should probably just check your phone and head in that general direction—no one cares if you get lost, just be where you need to be on time. when one is exploring a place, they perhaps use a device to geolocate themselves, or perhaps they have a map—and that’s ok too. but what is the most effective means to get about? sound, and yes, smell. if it smells good in one direction, go that way. if it smells like rotting fish, dead cat carcasses or minced mice from mutilating cars? go the other way. but, if the smell of fresh garlic, glowing brown onions, and discarded two-litre tins of diced tomatoes seeps through the nooks in the walls and the limestone walls, you have to at least see what is going on there. if it is a restaurant, that is preferable. if it comes from a home, then maybe let that go and keep walking as nobody really likes a break-and-enter situation. excuses of ‘but the zumo di pomodoro just smelt so good’ are not gastro-legally acceptable excuses. but hey, if you knock and tell them ‘it smells great…’ good luck to you. i would rather have a guaranteed sure-thing for my lunches. don’t expect the movie scene cliche of being invited into the home of a lonely grandmother to try some of the coq au vin she happened to be making. expectations dampen pillows. restaurants not only cater to you as you trundle into the doors after smelling their cassoulet from three blocks away but have menus that allow you to even order what you want! i know, life changing. i once underwent the same realisation. i was wondering the streets in amalfi, or perhaps it was minori, and smelt something i had not smelt in a long time. i was in italy for an entire month before then so maybe a long time is a slight exaggeration but for weeks i had wished to enjoy the smell of crustaceans. specifically, that buttery, spiced silky sauce from crab meat which, if made properly, de luca portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 20234 can make one’s mouth salivate, drawing them like the glasses of teeth on old bed stands. the sauce, however, was just a tad different. i needed to know how. a man in his mid-fifties ushered me in; his exclaiming face had warm eyes and a smile which seemed almost paternal. he ran the joint. the owner wore black pants and a black shirt, his slicked-back grey hair stuck rigidly to the top of his head like rice to a pan, and his bark skin was spotted and peeled after hours—or years—in the sun, leaving his nose red fresh with a new epidermal facade. his restaurant was small, no larger than a wine bar in sentier. the walls cascaded down to the aquamarine blue tiles, which revolved around the salon like a stationary conveyor belt, pilled and dark against the metallic white walls and grey floors. i ordered the crab—usually only prepared for two—and the owner sat and talked with me as i waited for my entree to arrive: swordfish carpaccio topped with olive oil, black pepper and rocket. he used to be a ceramicist, or was it a tileist—is that even a word? he owned his shop, where he sold his works on ceramic plates and sculptures he would hand paint. he decided to run a restaurant instead, which, to my surprise, he thought would be easier than art. ten years later, he had a stable business in his pocket, and he loaded his salon, bathroom and storerooms with his tile art. a pocketed stable business in a pocket of a building in a pocket of amalfi with a rag-tag family, each operating as a contingent part of the business. his first two sons? one was the maître d ’, and the other ran the back-ofhouse accounting. his youngest son was the runner, only about twelve or thirteen by the looks of his black, greasy hair and noisy tracksuit, which he wore under his apron but sounded out loud every move he made. the chef was the only team member who was not directly related to the family. he was also the only person who stayed in the kitchen for the entire time, unassisted—besides a couple of other cooks and the dish-pig who liberally took a smoke break for what felt like ten minutes every half an hour. he would be ashing and discarding his butts in the general direction of the nearby restaurant, which had a slightly larger capacity and sat only ten metres from the closest terrace chairs. friendly littering fuels friendly competition. i wish i had known the other cooks too. i never got to hear their stories. they seemed nice. cheerful smiles and well-worn hands. following the carpaccio, which went down smoothly with the dry franciacorta in my right hand, the wind had picked up from the alleyway, which fed out to the sea. the breeze had whispered past me for the last half hour without making its movements obvious. however, as the day swept past, the white paper tablecloths popped past the grasp of the tiny aluminium vices, forcing a clacking disappearance of the u-shaped metal pegs. the corners lifted briskly, and the bottle and bread and glass and booklet were placed over the table to avoid the crab being cradled away by the strengthening wind. my broken italian grasped little, but my eyes noted the owner’s chuckling glance as he handed me the crab, which looked up at me as if to say: ‘i am on a time limit… there’s no space for you inside the restaurant.’ i looked into the tiny little dining room with the ten or twelve tables steaming with guests. then i looked up at the owner, who looked up at the sky and then back down at me. my hair was too long to escape landing over my eyes and into my mouth, dropping follicles on my fork. the dish was buttery and rich and complex in its flavours; complex too was the process of pulling apart the crusty exoskeleton to unlock the meat which lay sizzling inside. malignant complexity can reap the greatest reward if the crab is good. and the sauce? give me a minute. the bright reflection of the hand-painted plate and the light red tinge of my wine turned dull and obscure, the light from the sun now begotten by cloud and rainfall. it was soon to hit the restaurant, the town, and the ferry, which was my one way home. i had thirty minutes to get under cover. of course, most people would not think to find this sort of situation even remotely challenging: ‘why not just eat faster or ask for the waiters to bring the table closer under shade…?’ i suppose i still do not know why i didn’t… maybe it was the sauce. beautiful things in this world deserve attention and time. especially a good sauce. i finished in time. the crab? outstanding. the juices ran through the body and onto the cracked legs where freshly cooked meat stretched patiently across the joints like bodies before massages. the meat did de luca portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 20235 not need to wait very long before my hands met with grease and oil and my lips attracted the juices that run from them and onto my chin and fingertips. the plate was mopped clean with my bread to save no sauce for the sink. iv sometimes i forget that i was born. i chase my past and try to bite deep into its juices to remember how it felt. to remember how memory feels, grasp at it and for the scenes and shapes and colours to flood into the mind. a pressure so solid and forceful, putting to shame the pitiful attempts to replicate it in the movies; they would flare lenses and fog viewpoints and give us flashbacks. all of it, all the digital editing in that blurry screen provide the illusion of achievable recollection. i was not born in any circumstances that were nuanced, interesting or noteworthy. born in a barn wrapped in scratchy canvas cloth with veins of hardship and eyes of turmoil? not me. i was not held in darkness, kissed by angelic light, or blessed to sleep through the night by the day’s gift. i was just there, and no memories truly seeped in until my age turned four, and i could run around the boat that swung from springs by the old school yard. childhood playgrounds tend to spark some thoughts for quite a few. before then? the eyes go foggy, and the head singes and pushes its path to have just… something. most of the time, we remember what we think are memories but are later memories of events captured in time: a stormy day in coastal spain and oversized red jackets shielding me from rain. that is what first comes to mind, the video, not the event. but one sense that holds itself true and unswayed in the mind’s windy passing is, for me, smells. olfaction. like your sense of taste, a chemosensory section bears roots in the past. sure, it can be hard to associate smells from childhood with adulthood. kids are dumb nuts and can hardly correspond to an object with its aroma. however, as one grows, it is relatively easy to recollect. a past lover and their favourite perfume, the washing detergent used in the family home of your best friend, the smell of your grandmother, the smell of your uncle’s house, which was always woody from years of carpentry etc. the tests of aromatic memory are as vast as our palate. for me? well, i got pretty lucky. i was always connected to my sense of smell. i was so attached to it that i displayed tendencies similar to synaesthesia: i could practically taste shapes and hear colours when i was younger. later, i realised how my mouth felt swarmed by flavours that drove by from an auditory road into my gustatory driveway, popping up like pop rocks and warheads met with sprite. and when i reach as close as i can get to anything close to my birth, i remember the smells instead of remembering something i saw. not the smell of my grandma or mother, not the smell of my family home or the salt water from the nearby beach. i smell garlic. and olive oil. both of them sometimes. finely chopped and poured over a heating pan soaked in oil and perfusing a smell so deep and robust and significant that even with a short description, one could say ‘garlic and oil on a pan’ and you could imagine what that would smell like. one could smell it from the other side of the house if they thought against positioning themself directly in line with the movement of the heated garlic as it pirouettes out into the room and nestles just outside your nose; just close enough to sense it, but urging you further, urging you to keep breathing it in. that addictive sense pulls your nose from your neck as your chin pops out, and you lower yourself into the pan for another deep breath in… and out. italian crack. the olive oil is the pipe to get you where you need to be. that first pour of olive oil to coat a pan, the lathering of it into a tin, the drenching of salads and vegetables, the golden goodness is the foundation of all of it. at least for italians and the spanish too. i remember being in the same kitchen in amalfi or minori—i still cannot remember—and i talked to the chef after destroying the crab and the entree before the wind blew me inside to pay. in the restaurant (no, you still do not get the name), we spoke about the dishes i had ordered, and i questioned him thoroughly since my eyes had practically been gouged from my de luca portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 20236 sockets after tasting his stuff. ‘that crab, man, that beautiful crab,’ i said, reminiscing over the dish that had only just left its plate to rest in my stomach. compliments barraged him, and my eyebrows had jumped nearly into my hair thanks to my excitement. he humbly thanked me and shrugged off the compliments, wiping his brow of sweat and tucked the towel back into his pants. i asked, or more pleaded for his story, getting ahead of myself already after being invited into the back. a warm man, with a holed smile and petite purple patches under tired eyes and worn brows, seemed calm all of a sudden; the calm after an adrenaline rush leads to a tiredness that only double-espressos can fix. after telling me about his relations with the fishermen in the port, he indulged me in how he managed to get the crustaceans into the restaurant from the morning catch. then, he briefed me on his history with cooking, which, as i should have anticipated from a thick-spoken southern italian, ‘all started with garlic and olive oil.’ laughs were heard in the kitchen. he was leaning on the benchtop, which had just been wiped down following the lunch rush hour. the service had yellowed his whites and shined out his head with beads of sweat bedazzling his forehead like a blue-collar tiara on a bald grown man. he was good-spirited but tired and still working. during the lunch hour, i watched him as he rinsed the octopus-filled sink in prep for the night. singular noun for octopus, yes; that thing was big and still breathing at the time. that night it had gone down amazingly with a sauce that i could recognise from my childhood— possibly because it had garlic and olive oil in it or because it was just as good. i asked him about it as we chatted about his thirty-five-year stint at the local restaurant and how he had been a cook for forty-seven years of his life. he only ever cooked italian food. he never even left the country. not once in his entire life. he liked the simple life, a tuscan technique of cooking transferred to his simple and beautiful style of life: minimal ingredients with significant results. the sauce, to my surprise, was not made by him. i must have come across a tad too startled, the type of startled reaction which occurs when one realises that even italians go through immense amounts of butter when they cook. as we spoke, a cold block of butter sat behind my head as it rested on the shelf, oozing into my nose. he chuckled and shook his head jollily, pointing to the glass bottle in the mise-en-place, which was filled with the same reddish diluted and cloudy liquid i had seen between the gills of a coda fish étouffée when walking past the pass. ‘my mother makes it for me at home,’ he whispered, holding back a laugh between his gapped teeth and dry lips. ‘she taught me how to cook and gives me interesting sauce ideas to try when she gets bored of the political crap that’s always on the tv.’ he lifts the reddish bottle and gives it a turn as a tiny chunk of garlic revolved around the glass. forty-seven years of cooking, and your mum still makes the sauce? i imagined the six-foot-bald momma’s boy cooking in the tiny kitchen of his mother’s house, most likely around the corner from the place he only just moved into after leaving home. italia. he popped a teaspoon into the bottle and extracted a rippling mouthful, offering it to me. the sauce was brilliant, and he gave me a warm smile as the beginnings of a tumult were heard from outside. ‘more customers,’ i shrugged, watching him as he snatched up his knife and pounded its side onto some cloves, producing a crunch. ‘here we go,’ he shouted to the rest of his crew, who probably had still not rested from the last rush. he whipped his bottle of olive oil onto a pan, and then the frizzing began when the garlic met with the steel as the restaurant doors flooded once more. de luca portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 20237 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: suzuki, t. 2019. diasporic mourning: commemorative practices among okinawan repatriates from colonial micronesia. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 16:1, 29-45. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ portalv16i1/2.6276 portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 14492490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu. au/ojs/index.php/portal research article diasporic mourning: commemorative practices among okinawan repatriates from colonial micronesia taku suzuki corresponding author: associate professor and director, international studies, taku suzuki, denison university, 100 west college street, granville, ohio 43023, usa. email: suzukit@denison.edu doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6276 article history: received 25/08/2018; revised 27/5/2019; accepted 10/06/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract could colonial settlers who repatriated from colonies to metropole after the empire’s fall be considered ‘diaspora’? how do these migrants of decolonization maintain their collective memory of the past and solidary identity as a group? this article explores the historical experiences of okinawan colonial migrants to the japanese mandate of micronesia (which includes the northern marianas, palau, and chuuk) and these migrants’ forced repatriation to okinawa after the devastating battles in the western pacific in 1944–1945. it also ethnographically examines the okinawan repatriates’ pilgrimages to the islands throughout the post-wwii years to visit their childhood homes and locations of their loved ones’ deaths. these okinawan repatriates, who had been twice-displaced in their lifetimes and survived the brutal war, continue to visit the islands to reminisce about their childhood and pray for the loved ones who had died on the islands. this article argues that such migrants of decolonization could not only be considered a diasporic group but also a group who retain a strong sense of solidarity and collective memory. further, this article claims that formal and informal ritualistic practices, such as those ethnographically portrayed in this essay, play a pivotal role in creating and recreating collective memory and identity among the migrants of decolonization as a diaspora. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding research leading to this article has been supported by the japan foundation’s japanese studies fellowship (2013–2014), denison university’s robert c. good faculty fellowship (2013–2014) and research foundation grant (2014, 2015) and great lakes colleges association’s individual japan travel grant (2015). . 29 keywords: diaspora; postcolonialism; identity; memory; okinawa; micronesia on saipan where palm trees grew, we were lovingly raised. we were striving for a promising future. let’s talk about it at the southern cross club. on the green plains of tinian, we proudly built a mound of sugar canes. the world-renowned ‘sugar island.’ let’s talk about it at the southern cross club. —a song sung at an informal gathering of the minami-jūji-kai (southern cross club), a group of okinawan repatriates from the japanese mandate of the northern mariana islands. on the evening of may 25, 2015, the welcome reception was held for the 46th annual pilgrimage by the members of nan’yō guntō kikansha-kai, or the micronesia repatriates’ association of okinawa (mra).1 the reception was hosted by the mayor of saipan of the commonwealth of the northern mariana islands (cnmi). the president of the mra thanked the hospitality shown by the mayor and the people of saipan. he then said as follows: i grew up on this island, and consider this place to be my second … no, my first home. i have come to this island [after repatriating to okinawa] numerous times to pray for my sister and father who were killed during the war. every time we come here, people greet us by saying, “welcome home!” we the repatriates consider you, the islanders, to be our konpanī, dear friends. in 2015, a pilgrimage of approximately 90 okinawan repatriates and their family members traveled to the saipan and tinian islands of cnmi and joined ‘the ceremony to pacify/console the spirits of the dead’ (ireisai) who had died in the battle of the marianas in 1944. the pilgrims toured the key sites that are relevant to both he okinawan colonial immigrants and the battle. during the limited free time they had during the packed itinerary of the four-day tour, the pilgrims visited the remains of their former residences and elementary schools, often assisted by the children and grandchildren of the indigenous islanders they had befriended during the colonial era. taking a cue from recent scholarly works on the postcolonial migration of former colonists after the fall of empires (borutta & jansen 2016; buettner 2016; shimamura 2013; smith 2002a; tamanoi 2009; watt 2009), this article examines the experiences of okinawan repatriates from the japanese mandate of micronesia. more specifically, it focuses on the northern mariana islands after world war ii in relation to the ‘migration of decolonization’ (smith 2002b: 26). it provides a historical overview of okinawan migration to the northern marianas under japanese rule and the migrants’ forced return to okinawa immediately after the war. this was the period during which the okinawan colonial migrants and repatriates— along with the french, dutch, german, and portuguese migrants of decolonization— 1 kikansha-kai literally means ‘association of the returnees.’ however, the official english translation of the organization’s name says ‘repatriates,’ so this essay also refers to the members as repatriates. suzuki portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201930 witnessed ‘considerable brutality’ during the battle of the marianas, departed from their long-time ‘home’ on the mariana islands ‘in the context of the utmost chaos,’ and underwent ‘difficult incorporation ... into [local] communities’ after their ‘return’ to metropolitan homes (smith 2002b: 16, 27). thus, this article argues that the okinawan repatriates from colonial micronesia match robin cohen’s foundational definition of ‘diaspora’ (1997: 26–27) as a population displaced and/or dispersed from their homeland, who remain nostalgically connected to their often-idealized homeland and maintain a strong collective identity and memory, often over generations. this article then ethnographically examines a practice by which okinawan repatriates maintain what zeruvabel (1996) calls a ‘mnemonic community.’ i suggest that the okinawan repatriates’ mnemonic community is underpinned by their shared sorrow about their displacement, their desire to connect to the romanticized past ‘home,’ and their mourning for lost lives. it describes an irei (a ritual to pacify or console the spirits/souls of the dead) pilgrimage to the cnmi as a key mnemonic device that helps the okinawan repatriates and their offspring shape a solidary identity through spatial practices. namely, these practices are formal and informal ritualistic performances to remember the past and mourn for the war dead. these ethnographic ‘snapshots’ suggest that diasporic communities of colonial repatriates can be maintained when the communities are drawn from more than nostalgia for the homes from which they were displaced but instead from a profound sense of loss, often underpinned by the deaths that continue to haunt the living. this article is based on the data i obtained between 2013 and 2015. i conducted approximately 50 structured and unstructured interviews with okinawan repatriates from the northern marianas, along with 10 children of the repatriates who had participated in the irei tours to the islands. i also conducted participant-observations of numerous formal mra-related meetings and informal community gatherings, and i participated in the mra’s irei pilgrimages to saipan and tinian in 2014 and 2015, during which time i had informal conversations with the okinawan visitors. to protect the informants’ identities, the names that appear in this article are all pseudonyms. migrants of decolonization as a diaspora one of my contentions in this article is that okinawan colonial migrants, who ‘returned’ to okinawa after the war and decolonization, are diasporic subjects. smith (2002a) calls the migrants of decolonization ‘invisible migrants,’ for despite their considerable scale and historical significance, they have garnered little scholarly attention or exerted little influence on theoretical development in migration studies. two edited volumes, europe’s invisible migrants, edited by smith (2002a), and vertriebene and pieds-noirs in postwar germany and france: comparative perspectives, edited by borutta and jansen (2016), contain some of the few comprehensive studies on postcolonial repatriates and returnees to europe. cooper points out that this form of migration was ‘not just a migration among many others’; it was historically significant as a ‘sudden, mass movement caused by a political crisis in a place’ and was ‘profoundly affected by the demise of the category of empire’ (cooper 2002: 172). buettner (2016), for instance, comparatively chronicles the repatriation and resettlement processes of the british, dutch, belgian, french, and portuguese. smith’s volume introduces such studies as willems’ (2002) study on dutch migrants from the former east indies (now indonesia); jordi’s (2002) examination of french repatriates from algeria, or pieds-noirs, resettling in marseilles in the early 1960s; and lubkemann’s (2002) historical inquiry into diasporic mourning: commemorative practices among okinawan repatriates from colonial micronesia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201931 portuguese returnees, or retornados, from angola and mozambique. these works allow me to surmise that there are similar characteristics between european migrants of decolonization and okinawan repatriates after their ‘return’ to ‘home.’ both groups suffered from what lubkemann refers to as becoming ‘internal strangers’ (2002: 76) in their metropolitan homeland upon their return. in line with this, borutta and jansen’s volume compares the experiences of german vertriebene, or ‘expellees,’ from eastern europe with those of french pieds-noirs returning from algeria. for example, schwartz (2016) compares east and west german state policies for absorbing expellees into society, ahonen (2016) analyses the political functions of german expellee organizations, and weger (2016) investigates german expellee associations’ commemorative practices and their symbolic communication to express german expellees’ heritages. according to these studies, both the german expellees and french repatriates migrated to their metropolitan homeland en masse in a relatively short period of time, causing a great socioeconomic strain on the host societies, especially because the repatriates, having just escaped from political upheaval and/or war, had little material resources to re-establish their lives. smith’s introductory chapter in europe’s invisible migrants claims that the repatriates or returnees from the former colonies to european metropoles can be viewed as a diaspora. smith lists key common features, drawn from cohen’s criteria for diaspora (1997: 26): 1) dispersal from an original homeland; 2) expansion from a homeland in search of work or trade or to further colonial ambitions; 3) collective memory and myth about the homeland; 4) idealization of the putative ‘home’ and a collective commitment to its maintenance, restoration, or creation; 5) the development of a return movement to its homeland; 6) a troubled relationship with host societies; 7) a sense of empathy and solidarity with other members; and 8) the possibility of a distinctive, creative, enriching life in host countries. smith found that european migrants of decolonization satisfy most of those criteria but expressed doubt about the longevity of the collective memory and identity. similarly, schwartz (2016: 82) claims that by 1960, german expellees who had resettled in west germany ‘already considered themselves as settled down in their new homeland.’ also, cohen observes that by the late 1990s, the older generation of pieds-noirs was ‘slowly disappearing and the younger one [was] not as committed to the memory of algérie françaiseís’ (2002: 144). smith calls for an expanded scope of inquiry into the invisible migrants of decolonization, such as japanese repatriates from its colonies (2002b: 29–30). indeed, there have been few english publications about these invisible migrants, let alone publications that attempt to approach these migrants as diasporas. notable exceptions are tamanoi’s (2009) monograph on the orphaned japanese civilians who repatriated from northeast china and lori watt’s (2009) historical inquiry into japanese and okinawan repatriation after wwii. my study seeks to answer smith’s call by examining the okinawan migrants of decolonization from the japanese mandate of micronesia. my first argument in this article is, thus, that okinawan colonial migration to japanese mandate of micronesia from the 1920s to the early 1940s, and the abrupt mass ‘return’ of the okinawan colonists to okinawa in 1945–1946 is a diasporic phenomenon. the okinawans have dispersed from their original homeland (i.e., okinawa and then micronesia) for work but continue to foster collective memory and solidary identity based on their idealized and nostalgized notion of childhood ‘home.’ this is due in part to a challenging period of re-establishing their socioeconomic status after their forced repatriation to okinawa after wwii. suzuki portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201932 mnemonic community formation and maintenance the second argument i attempt to make in this article is that okinawan repatriates form and maintain a sense of community based on their collective memory of the colonial past. as both smith’s and borutta and jansen’s volumes emphasize, the formation and maintenance of collective memory of the colonial homeland is a crucial element of repatriates’ collective identity. in his groundbreaking work on collective memory, halbwachs recognizes the critical role physical space plays in collective memory, as ‘the image of a place conjures up thoughts about an activity of the group associated with that place’ (1992: 54). building on this insight, olick proposes that one of the common ‘mnemonic devices’ (olick 2003) that help a group create and maintain its collective past is a ritualistic spatial performance. one such ritualistic performance conducted in a certain physical space is a commemorative ceremony or ritual. numerous sociological and anthropological studies on national and religious identity formation, for instance, have examined how embodied collective performances, such as parades on national holidays and collective singing of a national anthem (cerulo 1995; connerton 1989; spillman 1997), cater to collective memory production and the reproduction of national identity. zerubavel (1996: 294) claims that through these collective actions, individuals undergo ‘mnemonic socialization’ that absorbs them into ‘mnemonic communities.’ this process involves ‘the integration of various different personal pasts into a single common past that all members of a particular community come to remember collectively’ (294). in short, then, collective mnemonic practices such as rituals and ceremonies serve as ‘interactive opportunities to tune the symbolical repertoire of the mnemonic community, contextualizing the present through the evaluation of the past’ (vélez 2008: 41). one could consider group travel as such a performance. graburn (1977) famously argued that group travel is akin to a collective ritual, in which participants together undergo a state of communitas: an intense feeling of solidarity and belonging (turner 1973). as numerous ethnographic studies of pilgrimages (badone & roseman 2004; cohen 1992; collins-kreiner & kliot 2000; collins-kreiner & gatrell 2006; eade & sallnow 1991; frey 1998) suggest, a shared belief among the participants that they are on a collective mission, which purports to seek a more noble—religious or otherwise—purpose than touristic pleasure, produces a strong communal bond among them. baussant (2016), while not drawing on the communitas concept or highlighting pilgrimages’ role in creating one, examines the pieds-noirs’ pilgrimages to a commemorative shrine, théoule-sur-mer, near cannes in southern france. she argues that the pilgrimages ‘brought together believers with their roots in the same diocese … [and pilgrimages] draw on a host of different networks based on social ties and kinship and are often grounded in the past’ (216). she recognizes the power of travel and a place, which together bring ‘commemoration and heritage as a touchstone,’ and argues that through a pilgrimage, ‘various symbolic and concrete forms of memory give rise to practices of spatial appropriation and performative expression of social bonds founded on ties with both past and present’ (225). my examination of okinawan repatriates’ performative practices during irei pilgrimages departs from the existing studies on migrants of decolonization by taking an ethnographic approach to the processes of ‘spatial appropriation and performative expression of social bonds’ (225) among the diasporic repatriates. i argue that the bonds are underwritten by the okinawan spirituality, which posits that souls of those who have died tragically outside of their ‘home’ must be pacified, consoled, and retrieved from the locations of death. diasporic mourning: commemorative practices among okinawan repatriates from colonial micronesia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201933 irei pilgrimages by japanese and okinawans japanese sociologists and religion scholars have studied the practice of going to former battlefields for the purpose of irei. this practice began after the san francisco peace treaty between japan and the former allied states in 1951. after a series of negotiations between the japanese and us governments, groups of japanese travelled in 1953 to pacific islands under us military rule, such as saipan, tinian (now cnmi), wake and guam (now unincorporated territories of the usa), angaur and peleliu (now the republic of palau), iwo jima and minami-tori-shima (now japanese territories) (hamai 2008). many of these trips, especially in the early years, involved the excavation, collection, and retrieval of the remains or bones of the war dead (awazu 2010; figal 2007; kitamura 2005, 2009; nishimura 2008a, 2008b). in his attempt to conceptualize overseas battlefield pilgrimages among bereaved family members of the war dead, nakayama (2008) argues that these trips show two key characteristics of japanese and okinawan assumptions about the souls of the dead. the first is that the souls of the war dead stay where they died, and the second is that these souls remain religiously ‘unprocessed’ and, as ‘raw’ souls, remain frozen in the time of their deaths (nakayama 2008: 204–205). pilgrimages to former battlefields enable the visitors to encounter the unprocessed souls, along with their bodily remains, frozen at the times and places of their deaths, and to bring them back to their rightful places—typically family tombs, shrines, or memorial markers in their hometowns—to properly honor their souls. similarly, nishimura (2008b) says that overseas battlefield pilgrims are motivated by their desire to ‘meet’ the souls of the war dead and bring them home across the spatiotemporal distance. however, nishimura also draws on turner (1973) and kitamura (2005) to argue that the pilgrims create a state of communitas, in which the bereaved family members develop a strong sense of solidarity, underpinned by shared sorrow, as together they seek spiritual connections with dead family members. following these insights, this article argues that by pursuing intense spiritual communication with the war dead and achieving communal bonding with fellow pilgrims, the camaraderie among okinawan repatriates in postwar okinawa and their pilgrimages to the marianas represent the repatriates’ creation and preservation of collective identity and memory. furthermore, the repatriates’ bond is not only based on shared nostalgia; it is also underwritten by the common connection with the war dead with which the repatriates have attempted to re-unite through travel. okinawan postcolonial repatriates as a diaspora japanese colonization of nan’yō, or the japanese mandate of micronesia, created sizable diasporic okinawan communities in the marianas, palau, and other western pacific islands. after its 1898 defeat in the spanish-american war, spain ceded guam to the usa and sold the remaining northern islands of the mariana islands to germany in 1899. japan took over the islands that had been under german rule, including northern marianas, when in 1918, the central powers lost to the triple entente, which japan had joined as a british ally. the nan’yō kōhatsu kabushiki kaisha (nnk, south seas development company), a japanese government-backed developer of the northern marianas, recruited okinawans, who had struggled with severe poverty after japan annexed the ryūkyū kingdom in 1879, as migrant laborers on the islands. the japanese population of the marianas, 60 percent of whom were okinawans, exploded in the 1930s. in 1935, more than 19,000 japanese lived on saipan, as opposed to some 3,500 indigenous islanders and some 200 korean migrants. the majority of the okinawans worked as farm laborers on nkk’s sugar plantations; tuna fishermen; suzuki portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201934 manual or clerical workers for the colonial government; or small retail business owners. escaping from the economic destitution in okinawa, the migrants appreciated their relative economic stability in colonial marianas, even if they suffered from backbreaking farm labour in sugarcane fields and the nkk’s exploitative labour practices. during my interviews with the okinawan repatriates, they emphasised their parents’ long working hours and taxing physical farm labour as well as their own busy days with numerous domestic chores, but they were quick to add that it was worthwhile because their lives were improving. the colonists were hardly well-off, but the repatriates favourably compared their lives to the living standards of those who stayed behind in okinawa. they remembered that their parents had told them that unlike their counterparts living in okinawa, they were lucky to be able to ride bikes to school, wear leather shoes and, most importantly, never go hungry, thanks to abundant fruits, livestock, fish and japanese food items available at nkk-owned general stores (shuho), where they could purchase daily necessities on credit. for the okinawan migrants, therefore, micronesia, unlike okinawa, provided economic security and stability, even if they were made possible by an exploitative colonial system. during the battle of marianas in 1944, around 44,000 japanese soldiers, 10,000 japanese civilians (more than half of whom were okinawans), and an estimated 1,000 koreans and indigenous islanders (combined) were killed. in the japanese mandate of micronesia, 13,000 okinawans were estimated to have died in battle and its aftermath in 1944–1945 (aniya 1995: 16). many okinawans died not only from the relentless shelling by the us fleets, but also from group suicides. through the militaristic school education that emphasized unconditional loyalty to the emperor, many okinawan colonists had come to believe that it was shameful to surrender to the enemy, and that had they been captured by the americans, all men would be enslaved, tortured, and killed, and all women would be gang-raped, by the captors (shimojima 2012). the survivors who had been captured by the americans were interned in the displaced persons’ camps on the islands, then were repatriated to okinawa from january to december 1946 (imaizumi 2005: 14). approximately 33,000 okinawans were sent to okinawa (aniya 1995: 13). when the repatriates were sent to okinawa, their ‘homeland’ had just undergone its own devastating war in the spring of 1945, which killed about a quarter of the local population and decimated the prefecture’s social infrastructure. for those who were born and/or raised in colonial northern marianas and who had just lost hard-earned economic stability there, migrating to the war-torn okinawa to restart their lives, on top of overcoming the trauma of war and loss of family members in the marianas, was a daunting prospect. in fact, a majority of okinawans wished to remain in the marianas and petitioned the us military government to allow them to resettle in tinian after the war (imaizumi 2005: 16; irei 1995: 57), but this plan never materialized and all the diasporic okinawans in colonial micronesia were forcibly repatriated. diasporic okinawans who were born and/or raised in the mariana islands but were repatriated to okinawa after the war became what lubkemann refers to as ‘internal strangers’ (2002: 76) in okinawa. after arriving in okinawa, those with no next of kin in okinawa, or those whose family estates had been expropriated by the us military, had to spend months in temporary accommodation, forming what was referred to as nan’yō buraku, or the ‘south seas ghetto,’ in koza city (imaizumi 2005: 16). masahide kanemoto,2 who was born in saipan but relocated to okinawa as a teenager, lived in koza’s ‘south seas ghetto’ for six months because his family’s inherited property in kadena village was taken over by the us military 2 the names appearing in this article are pseudonyms to protect the interviewees’ identities. diasporic mourning: commemorative practices among okinawan repatriates from colonial micronesia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201935 to build an airbase. the us military government of okinawa, which needed a large number of laborers to build and operate the fast-expanding military bases, became a major employer of the repatriates from the former japanese colonies, such as micronesia, the philippines, and taiwan (toriyama 2013: 43). as a diasporic group, the repatriates felt alienated in their own ‘homeland’ by having to work under a foreign occupier, the us military. many of the male repatriates i interviewed joined the fast-increasing number of okinawans working in us military jobs as soon as they were able, while also maintaining small farms in their home villages. they were attracted by the higher paying jobs and the many opportunities to obtain overstocked construction materials or discarded canned food from the facilities. some female repatriates also worked at the us military bases as house maids, laundresses, and sales clerks at product exchange stores on the bases. the repatriates from the marianas, who had already worked under the americans while they were in the civilian internment camps in saipan and tinian before repatriation, could find military work in okinawa with relative ease, but they did not enjoy it. the okinawan military workers were not only profoundly ambivalent about their role in helping the foreign military occupy their home island; they were also resentful of what they perceived as american racism, such as the wage gap between american and okinawan employees (okinawa taimusu chūbu shisha henshū-bu 2013). the okinawan repatriates, in other words, struggled to restart their lives in their own ‘homeland,’ and pined for their true ‘home’ in the mariana islands where they used to enjoy economic security and stability. the repatriates from micronesia also felt ostracized by the local okinawans. a japanese journalist learned that nan’yō-gaeri, or ‘returnees from south seas,’ were looked on with suspicion and pity (shimojima 2012: 89). toshiyuki tōyama, a repatriate from saipan, recalled feeling out of place in okinawa, despite it being his ‘home’ (furusato), because everything was so unfamiliar to him (saipan-kai 1994: 424). for example, as the repatriates grew up learning the standardized japanese language in school and used it in the multi-ethnic colonial society, they had difficulty understanding the dialects spoken by other okinawans. although my okinawan repatriate interviewees jokingly talked about this challenge, many were bullied by their classmates at okinawan schools because they could not speak the dialect accurately. kensei aniya, a repatriate who grew up in saipan, tried hard to learn the okinawan vernacular by writing down the words and expressions his classmates taught him. he later learned that these words were all ‘bad words,’ and he was reprimanded by adults when he unsuspectingly used them. hideko tōma, who was born in saipan and repatriated to okinawa when she was ten, also bitterly remembered that she was mercilessly bullied in her family’s home village by her school classmates, who took advantage of her lack of fluency in the local dialect. economically and socially marginalized in okinawan society, the diasporic okinawans who had returned from colonial micronesia longed for their ‘home’ in the western pacific. hundreds of okinawan repatriates connected with other repatriates from colonial micronesia and formed the mra in february 1948 to launch a campaign for the us military government of okinawa to permit them to re-migrate to the northern marianas (imaizumi 2005: 28–30). according to the mra’s survey among the repatriates from the japanese mandate of micronesia, 94 percent of the respondents wanted to re-migrate there, and among them, 40 percent listed poverty as their primary reason. in contrast, about half of the respondents considered that material life in colonial micronesia had been ‘prosperous (yutaka),’ and less than ten percent thought that they had ‘struggled (komatteita)’ (imaizumi 2005: 30). the respondents’ nostalgia for the colonial marianas was, in other words, rooted in their yearning for the socioeconomic conditions they had enjoyed before the war, pitted against their postsuzuki portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201936 repatriation struggles in okinawa. in war-ravaged okinawa, a group of repatriates, led by a formerly successful business owner and the president of the okinawan association in saipan during the colonial era, conducted the first ireisai in okinawa and established mra in 1948. in 1963, mra began to organize pilgrimages to the marianas and other micronesian islands. in its peak years, a group of more than 1,000 okinawans travelled together to the cnmi on an mra-organized trip, and more than 6,000 okinawans have joined the pilgrimages over the years. given this historical context, i suggest that the okinawan repatriates from the northern marianas satisfy most, if not all, of cohen’s proposed criteria for a diaspora. what particularly stands out here is their continuing desire to return—even briefly—to the places of their birth and/or youth, even after having (re-)established a livelihood in postwar okinawa. in the following section, i will ethnographically portray how the repatriates continue to maintain a strong collective identity and solidarity among themselves. in so doing, i argue that this collectivity is created and recreated through communal and ritualized travel, such as group pilgrimage. this collectivity is reinforced by the shared sense of loss of their ‘homeland’ and common experiences of their loved ones’ deaths. collective memory and identity (re)construction: ethnography of a pilgrimage it emerged from the surveys and interviews i conducted with the participants in the 2014 pilgrimage to saipan and tinian of the cnmi that participants’ objectives in traveling to the islands were to visit the places of their family members’ deaths and ‘retrieve’ their souls, which many participants believed had not yet arrived in a peaceful after-world. the deaths of family members on battlefields present unique challenges to the living who seek to properly send the deceased to the after-world. for instance, the vietnamese survivors of the vietnam war viewed a dead body of a war victim who could not be retrieved for burial in a family tomb as ‘the body of a nonperson,’ and the soul of the dead was imagined to remain in ‘the imagined state of tragic afterlife’ (kwon 2006: 13). similarly, in his study of okinawan rituals to mourn the victims of the battle of okinawa of 1945, kitamura found that okinawans who had lost their family members considered that the dead’s souls were ‘wandering around and looking for the help from the living relatives, because they could neither move into the after-world (gusō) nor could they return to this world’ (kitamura 2009: 235). therefore, the okinawans who could not retrieve their loved ones’ bodies or bones tried to identify the locations of death to the best of their knowledge and conducted nujifa and unchikē rituals, by which they tried to ‘retrieve’ these souls from the places of their deaths and transport them to their family tombs at home (kitamura 2009: 239). the okinawan pilgrims to the northern marianas have experienced the same agony, as many of them were unable to recover the bodies or bones of their family members who died during battle, let alone properly bury them in the family tombs in their home villages in okinawa. during the pilgrimage, they conducted collective and personal rituals to encounter (and retrieve when possible) their dead relatives’ souls and carry them home. as a collective ritual, the official memorial ceremony is held at the northern edge of saipan, where the okinawan civilians retreated to and died during the battle by committing suicide. the ceremony in front of the okinawa memorial marker (okinawa-no-tō) consisted of speeches by the mra leaders and local dignitaries. then, all participants sang a japanese folksong to a harmonica played by mr jinsei nakamura, a repatriate from saipan, who had lost diasporic mourning: commemorative practices among okinawan repatriates from colonial micronesia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201937 his father and two siblings during the battle. during the 1944 battle, the okinawan civilians retreated to the northern end of the island, and, fearing capture by the approaching us troops, hundreds died by jumping off a cliff or pulling the pins of grenades given to them by japanese soldiers. the 2015 ceremony’s mc was the mra vice president, who began the program by emphasizing that the ceremony was not just for the okinawan war victims but for all those who had died during the war. after a moment of silence and a prayer (offered by a catholic priest from saipan), the mra president and a representative of the bereaved families, a son of the late former mra president, gave speeches. the mra president expressed his gratitude to the saipan municipal government in particular, and locals in general, for keeping the memorial marker clean. he also thanked the spirits of the war dead for enabling the pilgrimages to continue over the years. then, the former mra president’s son claimed that his father, who was his family’s sole survivor from the 1944 battle, dedicated the rest of his life to ‘console the spirits of the dead’ and express ‘his love of the micronesian people’. as the pilgrims sang together, many were overcome by emotion and cried. then, one by one, all the pilgrims partook in shōkō, a buddhist ritual of pinching and burning powdered incense, the smell of which is meant to approximate the after-world, and held hands for a silent prayer in front of the memorial marker. the pilgrims, many of whom did not know other participants before the trip, got to know each other during the trip and often formed an intimate bond, especially when they travelled together to their childhood homes and neighbourhoods, or the places of their family members’ deaths. their conversations usually began with the questions ‘where were you?’ (ie, where did you live before the war?) and ‘who died (ie, during the war)?’ such conversations led to pilgrims sharing their childhood memories of the colonial marianas and how the pilgrims had survived the war, ending with an exchange of condolences for each other’s losses. mr zenshō igē, a war orphan, and mr hiroshi kinjō, who lost his sister during the war, had never met before the trip. yet they took an excursion together to find their childhood homes in tinian. they began exchanging childhood memories, which revealed remarkable anecdotal details, such as dance music at fall festivals, fishing trips with their fathers, and the smell of flowers in their backyards. mr igē joked that walking on tinian’s soil improved his otherwise deteriorating memory.3 indeed, although mr kinjō was suffering from a recent leg injury, he was so eager to find his former family home’s foundations that he walked into a rocky forest, disregarding his accompanying children’s concern. nearly all participants spent the last half-day of the pilgrimage on a guided sightseeing tour of saipan, organized by a local travel agency. the tour stopped at the sites related to the japanese colonial era and the war, such as a former hospital, a rebuilt shintō shrine, and the site of the civilian internment camp in southern saipan. the touring pilgrims often supplemented (or interrupted) the explanations given by the tour guide, a japanese mainlander who had lived in saipan for decades. one participant was overcome with emotion at saipan shrine, where she had played as a young child living in the same neighbourhood. there, she began telling the guide, her accompanying daughter, and fellow pilgrims that her entire family had survived the war and repatriated to okinawa. for the last 70 years, she had longed to return to saipan and thank the shrine’s god on behalf of her family, because they believed that the god had protected them during the trying years of the battle, internment, and repatriation. 3 curiously, these conversations rarely extended to sharing stories about their postwar lives in okinawa, as if their lives had been suspended in the time-space of the colonial and wartime marianas. suzuki portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201938 in addition to the formal collective ceremony and group tour, some pilgrims conducted their own individual rituals during the trip. many visited their childhood homes and/or the locations in which their family members had been killed. to conduct these private rituals, many pilgrims made great efforts to close the spatiotemporal distance between their deceased loved ones and themselves by asking for help from academic historians or those who had visited the island numerous times to find out the approximate location of their deceased family member’s death prior to the trip. others consulted with yuta, a spiritual shaman in okinawa, before their trip to locate the locations of their family members’ deaths (allen 2002).4 ms takeko yonaha was born in naha, okinawa, but her father moved the family to saipan’s southern district to become a tenant farmer for nkk. her niece was killed by the us gunships’ bombing in 1944. for the 2015 mra pilgrimage, ms yonaha wanted to pray for her niece in a quieter setting than the official irei ceremony and pray for her friend’s uncle who died off the coast of saipan. on the fourth and final day of the trip, dr. yumiko imaizumi (who has extensively researched the okinawan and japanese colonization of and migration to micronesia), and i joined ms yonaha when she fulfilled her wishes. a local acquaintance of dr. imaizumi took a day off from her work and offered to give us a ride for the day. she had never met us, but having known a grandchild of a former japanese settler was a good enough reason for her to help us. the first destination was the okinawa memorial marker. ms yonaha told us that her prayer was rushed during the official irei ceremony, as she knew that the others were waiting their turns behind her, so she wanted to spend more time to pray for her niece’s death. she burned okinawan-style incense and uchikabi (mock money given to the dead for meeting their needs in the afterlife). it was a windy day, and she was having difficulty lighting the incense, so dr. imaizumi and i surrounded her to block the wind. ms yonaha placed water and sātā andagī, or okinawan donuts, in front of the cenotaph and read aloud a buddhist prayer for about ten minutes, as three of us watched. the next destination was the summit of mount tapochau, where the statue of christ is located. it is an important site for catholic indigenous islanders, but it is also a popular tourist destination. after waiting for a group of chinese tourists to leave the site, ms yonaha tried to light candles to pray for her friend’s uncle. due to the strong wind, however, she handed three of us unlit candles instead. all four of us silently prayed for ten seconds while holding the candles for ms yonaha’s friend’s uncle by looking over the southern shore of saipan. during these collective ceremonies and tours and individual excursions and rituals, the pilgrims often seek a sign of encounter with the souls of the dead. for instance, the mra vice president, who emceed the saipan ceremony, repeatedly mentioned the clear weather of that day as a sign that the souls of those okinawans who had been killed during the battle of the marianas on the island were welcoming the visitors. many former pilgrims i interviewed recalled what they believed to be supernatural phenomena they experienced during the pilgrimages: a sudden rain shower that interrupted a memorial ceremony; beautiful white birds perched on the memorial marker during prayers; and a sudden wave that washed away food offerings immediately after the pilgrims finished praying for their dead parents. ms michiko iha, who was born in okinawa but raised in saipan, lost her father, two brothers, and a niece 4 both collective and individual rituals followed the okinawan mourning practices. even the memorial marker in tinian is modelled on a traditional okinawan tomb, which is said to resemble a womb, a pathway between ‘this’ and ‘that’ worlds in the okinawan spiritual worldview. offering a prayer at the childhood home is also modelled on a similar ritual in okinawa, as it is believed that people in this world are merely borrowing land from a god, and one must thank the god that lets you live there and keeps you and your family happy and healthy. diasporic mourning: commemorative practices among okinawan repatriates from colonial micronesia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201939 during the battle of saipan and was captured by us soldiers after unsuccessfully trying to kill herself by diving into the sea. she has participated in more than thirty pilgrimages and recalled her first pilgrimage experiences in the 1970s: ‘during my earlier trips to saipan, i could see everyone who died there. i could see so many of them near the ireitō (a cenotaph to pacify the war dead’s souls).’ these anecdotes, which they shared among themselves during the trip, created a strong bond with other participants, who were willing listeners and believers of their stories. these stories, however, also highlight the spatiotemporal paradox of pilgrimage to ‘encounter,’ ‘retrieve,’ and ‘accost’ the souls of dead loved ones: the trip enables pilgrims to come so close to, yet also remain so far from, the dead.5 the participants’ sincere yet pained quests to encounter and retrieve the souls of their loved ones, quests which generate such stories of supernatural episodes, infuse their group pilgrimage with a shared spiritual purpose and facilitate the formation of solidary identity. * * * these ethnographic snapshots of pilgrimage provide glimpses of how collective identity among the pilgrims was formed, underpinned by their shared grief of having lost their loved ones in the war, and the shared desire to spiritually connect with the war dead’s souls remaining in the place of death, through group travel. additionally, these ritualistic performances during the trip helped the pilgrims create the shared memory of the colonial and wartime past among the colonial repatriates, and, in many instances, their accompanying children and grandchildren, who joined the trips to assist their aging parents and grandparents. it is important to point out that what is generally missing in the mnemonic practices during annual pilgrimages to the northern marianas: the colonial others, namely, indigenous islanders and korean labour migrants. the repatriates’ collective remembering of the colonial past was accompanied by collective forgetting of the past and depoliticization of the collective memory. even though the mra leaders’ speeches at the memorial ceremonies were dedicated to the war victims of all nationalities, including korean migrant laborers, local islanders, and american soldiers, the pilgrims’ conversations among themselves and personal prayers to their dead family members rarely mentioned japanese imperialism overtly. nor did they explicitly mention the exploitative system of the marianas’ colonial economy that discriminated against local islanders and koreans, or the militarism of imperial japan that drove many okinawan civilians to commit suicide rather than surrender. pilgrims visited the sites where their family members or relatives died tragically during battle, but few visited the memorial markers dedicated to the indigenous islanders who died in the war, or the american cemeteries for fallen soldiers. because the pilgrims’ intimate desire to encounter the souls of their dead family members underpinned this travel, therefore, the collective memory and mnemonic community generated through ritualistic travel (sturken 1997) also screened the participants from acknowledging certain aspects of the past. as a result, the pilgrims often failed to view their own collective past as part of broader legacies of colonialism and war. in addition to the shared sorrow among the pilgrims who suffered from the battles in the northern marianas, my interviewees pointed out the repatriates’ shared sense of responsibility to pray for the family members and friends who had died on the islands. in okinawan folk belief, which blends indigenous nature and ancestor worship with the buddhism and confucianism brought into the ryūkyū kingdom (1429–1879) from japan and china, the 5 nishimura (2008b) articulates this paradox in his study of battlefield pilgrimage among the warbereaved family associations. suzuki portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201940 world of the living and the world of the dead (gusō) are deeply connected. further, the people living in this world are expected to keep paying respect to, communicating with, and pleasing the souls (mabui) of dead ancestors. the soul of the dead person is led into the family’s turtleshell tomb, where the soul, after numerous soul-pacifying rituals, steadily turns into a spirit and, after the 33rd annual pacifying ritual, into an ancestral god or ukami (hamasaki 2005). yuta often play a crucial role as intermediaries between the two worlds, as the dead speak through yuta’s mouths to the living (akamine 2002). yuta not only helps the bereaved family members conduct the ceremonies properly but also serves as a folk healer and therapist (allen 2002). yuta’s diagnosis (hanji) of the client’s physical ailments or other unusual conditions often points to insufficient or improper prayer and respect given to dead ancestors (known as the state of uganbusuku), which leaves the souls of the dead unable to turn peacefully into ancestral spirits and gods (fujii 1978: 147; hamasaki 2005: 10). conversely, showing an abundant amount of respect and gratitude to the dead ancestors’ souls by frequently and properly praying at the tomb, as yuta would suggest, is believed to provide good health and fortune to those who live in this world. one interviewee told me that she had consulted with multiple yuta when she was suffering from chronic fatigue, and their diagnoses were that she was suffering from uganbusuku. this is typical of the okinawan masses’ religio-spiritual attitudes towards the dead, as is this particular interviewee’s declaration that her friend’s good health and stable employment in old age were direct consequences of his numerous pilgrimages to the marianas. many okinawan repatriates believe that pilgrimages to the northern marianas are intended to pacify the souls of their dead relatives and friends because the lack of proper care might result in the suffering of both the living and the dead. in fact, most interviewees who had participated in the marianas pilgrimages in the past told me that their primary purpose was to get as close to the places their family members died during the war as possible and to offer a prayer to console those souls still there. as stated, several okinawan repatriates who had participated in the pilgrimages told me that they had witnessed ghosts of the war dead in saipan and tinian, especially near the cliffs from which many japanese and okinawan civilians jumped off to kill themselves. these souls, the okinawan repatriates believe, were unable to leave the sites of their deaths and return to their family tombs. as a result, their tortured souls remained at the locations of their deaths in the form of ghosts, which yuta and others who possess strong spiritual capacity could see clearly (hamasaki 2005: 11). in these private pacifying rituals at the presumed sites of their family members’ or relatives’ deaths, apart from the mra’s official group ceremonies conducted at the stone cenotaphs on saipan and tinian, individual pilgrims often conduct nujifa, or a rite to lead the restless soul (mabui) of the dead to the after-world. typically, a family member of the deceased conducted nujifa, literally ‘taking out the soul’ from one location and moving it to another, after someone died outside his or her house. this ritual involves praying to the gods residing in the place of the death and asking their permission to take the soul out of there. nujifa at the northern marianas is accompanied by unchikē, or accosting, another ritual that transports the souls in a material object, such as a stone or incense, as a vehicle (yorishiro) to the family tomb in the shima, or natal community, in okinawa (inoue 2007: 169). for many of the okinawan pilgrims, in other words, the trip to the northern marianas represents much more than a mere journey of nostalgia. indeed, the repatriates’ stories of witnessing the wandering ghosts of the war dead in the marianas, and the pilgrims’ insistence that the survivors and relatives of the war dead must continue to visit and pray for their souls all indicate that it is not merely the memories of a nostalgically romanticized childhood diasporic mourning: commemorative practices among okinawan repatriates from colonial micronesia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201941 and the agony of the war and repatriation that continue to unite the repatriates even after more than 60 years after the end of the war. their collective identity as repatriates is crucially fortified by their shared belief that they are all forever attached to their dead okinawan relatives and friends whose souls remain in the islands. and these deaths and the souls of the dead, more importantly, serve as an indispensable intermediary among the repatriates to maintain their collective memory and identity. conclusion this article has attempted to make two central claims. first, it sought to demonstrate that the migrants of decolonization, such as those okinawans who had migrated to, or been born and raised in, the japanese mandate of micronesia, including the northern mariana islands, and were forced to ‘return’ to okinawa after the violent battle of the marianas in 1944, could be considered as a diasporic population. they were displaced—twice—from ‘home’ under colonial and postcolonial conditions; they have maintained collective memory and myth about the romanticized vision of ‘homeland’ over the years; they initially sought to return to the marianas under us rule; they experienced challenging years of re-establishing livelihood and getting accepted by the okinawan locals after repatriation; and they have maintained a strong sense of empathy for and solidarity with each other. second, the article attempted to demonstrate the mechanisms of collective memory and identity maintenance by ethnographically analyzing ritualistic collective practices. specifically, these were annual pilgrimages to the marianas during which formal and informal rituals were held. in both sets of rituals, i argued, the deaths and souls of the dead played a critical intermediary role in forming and strengthening pilgrims’ sense of solidarity with and empathy for each other. this is deeply rooted in okinawan spirituality in regards to ancestors and souls of the dead. the okinawan repatriates as a diaspora who maintain collective identity through ritualistic pilgrimages to the marianas, however, may not continue to exist beyond the repatriate generation. like pied-noirs in france (cohen 2002: 144), the repatriate generation is slowly disappearing and their children are not as committed to the memory of their parents’ diasporic experiences, such as childhood on the islands, war and internment, and repatriation, despite the mra leaders’ effort to bring them into the organization, and the repatriates themselves bringing their children on the pilgrimages. while the marianas pilgrimages may continue in the foreseeable future, the collective memory practices will inevitably change their forms as the new generation has ‘naturally looser bonds to the memory’ (ibid.) of the colonial and wartime micronesia. references ahonen, p. 2016, ‘the german expellee organizations: unity, division, and function,’ in vetriebene and pieds noirs in postwar germany and france: comparative perspectives, (eds) m. borutta & j. 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university press, amsterdam: 33–60. zerubavel, e. 1996, ‘social memories: steps to a sociology of the past,’ qualitative sociology, vol. 19, no. 3: 283–299. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02393273 zerubavel, y. 1995, recovered roots: collective memory and the making of israeli national tradition. university of chicago press, chicago. diasporic mourning: commemorative practices among okinawan repatriates from colonial micronesia portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201945 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1, january 2005 welcome to the special issue on exile and social transformation in memoriam: leslie hajdú hajdú lászló 1929, csongrád, hungary 2005, melbourne, australia this special issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, jointly edited by jo mccormack and myself, is dedicated to exile and social transformation. some of the papers presented here derive from a highly successful workshop and symposium on exile held at the institute for international studies, university of technology sydney, in july and december 2004. others arrived in response to a call for papers sent out in early 2004, which attracted a great deal of attention. we would like to thank all those involved at the first two events for their productive discussions and feedback, and extend our thanks to the many people who responded to the call for papers on the topic. the next issue of portal will also be a special issue, “strange localities: utopias, intellectuals and national identities in the 21st century,” with three guest editors: alistair fox (university of otago), murray pratt (university of technology, sydney), and hilary radner (university of otago). and, as always, we would like to encourage international studies practitioners and cultural producers working anywhere in the world, and in any of the portal languages, to submit material for future issues. finally, and returning to this issue’s special theme, it was with great sadness that we learned from one of the contributors to this issue, sue hajdú, of her father’s recent death. sue’s critical and creative meditation on her father’s status as a hungarian exile is one of this issue’s highlights. on behalf of the members of the portal editorial committee, this special issue is dedicated to him. paul allatson and jo mccormack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1, january 2005 welcome to the special issue on exile and social transformat portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: gaitanidis, i. 2021. studying abroad at home: the meaning of education abroad during the pandemic. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 67–72. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i12.7409 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay studying abroad at home: the meaning of education abroad during the pandemic ioannis gaitanidis corresponding author: dr ioannis gaitanidis, assistant professor, graduate school of global and transdisciplinary studies, chiba university, 1-33 yayoicho, inage ward, chiba, 263-8522, japan. gaitanidis@chiba-u.jp doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7409 article history: received 09/03/2020; accepted 11/04/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract the covid-19 pandemic virtually ended studying abroad. new (online) formats are offered, but this has not stopped universities from having to revise curricula, renegotiate partnerships and consult with students about studying abroad in 2020 and beyond. this short essay stems from the author’s experience of cancelling his own japanese study abroad program in late february 2020 to avoid the program participants taking unnecessary risks in the face of the unknown speed at which covid-19 was spreading in europe. the cancellation of that study trip brought to the fore, however, entrenched issues with short term study abroad programs and pushed the author to consider what the value of the ‘abroad’ in ‘study abroad’ had been until then. a short comparison with the practice of ethnography ensues, inspired by early pandemic debates on the future of anthropological fieldwork, which is another endeavour that has traditionally depended on relatively extended stays abroad. the essay closes with two problems that study abroad organisers will have to think about in a post-corona world. keywords study abroad; higher education; japan; digital anthropology; inequality; financial issues since 2014, with colleagues at chiba university ( japan), i have been involved in the organization of a short-term collaborative study abroad program called global study program (hereafter gsp), which has acquired a reputation for being very intensive. the reason for this reputation, which has been both a blessing (because we mostly receive applications from declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 67 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7409 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7409 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7409 mailto:gaitanidis%40chiba-u.jp?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7409 motivated students) and a curse (because the number of these applications is lower than the other shortterm study abroad programs at our university), is as much related to the program’s format (which i will not dwell upon here) as it is to its length: only two weeks. indeed, the trend towards shorter and shorter stays abroad for students has become ubiquitous in higher education, with at least sixty per cent of japanese university students choosing to study abroad for less than a month (yokota et al. 2018). many program organizers who wish to make the most of such limited time spent abroad, have therefore tended to lengthen the span allocated to preparing and reflecting on these programs, preand post participation. and the gsp is no exception. in fact, since its inception, the pre-departure education for students who take part in the gsp has expanded from a few sessions to nearly fifteen classes of ninetyminutes each. by mid-february 2020, as my small group of 12 chiba university students was getting ready to fly to greece for a thirteen-night stay at aristotle university of thessaloniki (auth), we had already completed at least twelve hours of lectures and perhaps about the same amount of time on tasks that students were asked to engage with at home and in online conversations with our counterpart group from auth. then the pandemic came, and one week before departure, everything had to be cancelled. it is difficult to describe the disappointment of students at the time. i kept in contact with them for at least until the start of april, but it was evident that the escalating crisis in japan and abroad meant that any eventual postponement of the program was impossible. since the beginning of march, educators around the world have started pondering on the future of study abroad, with many universities already offering online study abroad programs to make up for what we can assume will be a year with the lowest number of international student travel ever. however, the appearance of these new online alternatives essentially brings back to the fore the eternal question: can study abroad have meaning without the physical mobility of students from one place to the other? how does student immobility affect our conception of the pedagogical value of studying abroad? in this essay, i explore ideas coming from the fields of anthropology to think about the future of study abroad where i live and work, in japan, and the potential changes in the perceptions regarding the pedagogical objectives of this type of education. i argue that, like new anthropological manifestos calling, for example, for a post-pandemic patchwork ethnography (günel, varma, & watanabe 2020) based on issues already existing in the field, study abroad had even before the pandemic been replete with inequalities. in fact, during the last decade, study abroad programs have dramatically benefited certain types of students and encouraged certain kinds of experiences that the new online environment, whether we consider it capable of replacing the ‘traditional’ study abroad or not, may be in danger of reinforcing. this essay is based on my experience of cancelling and dealing with the post-cancellation of a study abroad program during the first months of the pandemic. i am an assistant professor at chiba university ( japan). i have worked for the last six years with several study abroad programs in japan, have been a member of various university committees managing such programs, and have also contributed to a university-wide study abroad preparation course that is currently optionally offered to 2,500 first-year students. i am, however, neither an (online) education expert nor an anthropologist, at least by-training. my broad field of training is japanese studies, and my research usually deals with contemporary religion (in japan) which i look at from a multidisciplinary perspective, using historical, sociological and anthropological theories and methods. my particular interest in anthropology stems from the impact that my supervisor, the social anthropologist victor t. king, had on both my formation as a doctoral researcher and on my understanding of area studies. gaitanidis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202168 https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography cancelling the gsp and re-thinking the value of “abroad” i still vividly remember the several days of sleepless nights spent weighing the pros and cons, before i finally decided on 20 february 2020, to cancel the gsp. the reason for that decision was at the time related to three risks: 1) the risk of taking the virus with us to the as yet uninfected greece; 2) the risk of having one or more students infected during our stay in thessaloniki and therefore having to quarantine (and cancel the program on-site); and 3) the (perhaps lesser) risk of facing discriminatory behaviour that had already been reported in other european countries (coste and amiel 2020). three days before our previously planned departure, on 26 february 2020, greece announced the first confirmed case of infection: a woman resident of thessaloniki. on 12 march, two days before what would have been our final day of the program, greece announced its first death from the virus, and all educational institutions had, by then, already been closed down by government request. japanese schools had been in the same situation since 2 march. i believe that this must have been one of the best decisions i have ever taken in my professional life. my decision, however, brought to the surface and made me reconsider entrenched inequalities in the implementation of study abroad in higher education. the first and perhaps most significant problem that immediately became apparent was financial: even though the purchase of a more expensive group ticket with a good cancellation policy had been recommended to all students, some students had taken the risk of buying a far cheaper option that could not be refunded. luckily, the university decided to compensate all students of study abroad programs cancelled in march 2020 due to the pandemic. still, it was evident that perhaps half of the students had searched deep into their pockets to finance that two week-trip to a country like greece, which, except for the airfare, has a significantly lower cost of living than chiba.1 and even for those students who had been granted a scholarship for this study abroad program (80,000¥), the stipend would have covered only between 70% and 85% of the airfare. this is perhaps no surprise: there are less and less students who can afford even a 2-week program, so as expected, it is often the same privileged students who gain from multiple opportunities to spend time outside of japan. no one discourages repeaters, but the fact that there is a lot of them does not necessarily mean that there are fewer students willing to participate in study abroad programs. of course, the financing of such programs is not a japanese particularity. but contrary to the fact that students spend more and more time preparing for shorter and shorter study abroad programs that they can barely afford, it is my impression that the majority of teachers would agree that the ideal study abroad program, especially for someone who wants to study at a foreign university, would last at least six months, if not the classic span of one year. admittedly, shorter study abroad programs were initially meant to offer opportunities to students who had less time, money or language capabilities to experience studying in a different pedagogical and sociocultural setting. intensive language learning formats have perhaps been the more successful in achieving their goals despite shorter spans. other programs include pedagogical excursions to visit locations and communities discussed in class on some aspects of the history, society or religion of another country; international workshops framed around a specific target that mixed groups of students collaborate on; and volunteer work or internships at non-governmental organizations or multinational companies. the breadth of what is being called ‘studying abroad’ in our age of timeand cost-efficiency has expanded both in scope, content, but also in quality. in a sense, like a regular course, the more limitations are introduced, the more effort is expected on the part of the course organizer to ensure the achievement of its learning outcomes; otherwise, it is time, and (in the case of study abroad) money wasted. everyone understands the importance of ‘study’ in ‘study abroad.’ but how about the ‘abroad’? what is the value of that? this question might sound silly, but in the covid-19 age of (thankfully) an increasing number of opportunities to access online 1 the website numbeo.com reports that, in general, prices in thessaloniki are between 35 and 45 per cent lower than chiba, japan. (accessed 29 august 2020) gaitanidis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202169 http://numbeo.com pedagogical material, lectures and academic scholarship from around the world, what would be the value of encouraging someone to make a trip abroad? ‘well, the experience, of course!’ would be a standard answer to my question. be there, see things with one’s own eyes, taste, smell, touch. ‘go native,’ as many anthropologists of the last century would have (problematically) encouraged their students to do. similar to anthropological fieldwork the value of ‘abroad’ lies simultaneously in and outside of ‘study.’ it is in the ‘being here,’ the tiny details that one notices in a foreign classroom, in the experience of learning to adapt to an environment one is unfamiliar with. i would even argue that the ‘study’ in ‘study abroad’ is sometimes only a minor element in a study abroad program; the cherry on the cake, the reason such programs acquire budgets, course credits and the support of often hesitating parents. but, as i mentioned above, there are not only less and less people able to afford them; students are also constrained in terms of time, work/study and family commitments, to fulfil the ideals of a long-term life experience in a new location. there is, therefore, a gap between the ideal length of study abroad, the fragmentation of study abroad objectives based on curriculum and student needs, and the reality of university lives. indeed, thinking back to the various dilemmas related to the yearly selection of gsp participants, besides the question of affordability, timing has been another significant problem: between part-time jobs, promises to return to their family home for the holidays, job hunting and extracurricular study to pass a language proficiency test, a driving license or another form of qualification, the shorter the study abroad programs have become, the more difficulty students face to fit one into their already busy schedule. qualifications that students can acquire between semesters are often worth more than a two-week trip to greece, which, by the end of their undergraduate degree, would only appear as a 4-credit course among the (at least) 124 credits required by chiba university’s conditions for degree conferment. to put it bluntly: if one had only two weeks to spare and a hard-earned, small budget to fund a trip abroad, why would they choose a study abroad program that takes 20 hours to prepare before departure? i am not necessarily underestimating the students’ willingness to learn; i only want to argue that the meaning and ‘value’ of going abroad to study, under increased unequal access to such opportunities, has shifted. can the digital replace the physical ‘abroad’? one of the first pandemic webinars i took part in was a fascinating roundtable of scholars from all over the globe on the topic of fieldwork in an era of pandemia: digital (and other) alternatives, organised by the world council of anthropological associations in may 2020. like many researchers who need to physically visit specific locations outside of their own country to collect their data, anthropologists, for whom ethnographic fieldwork is nearly a prerequisite of their discipline, immediately worried about access to their areas of interest. one of the first solutions that was immediately brought up was digital anthropology, which has been developing for several years now as a sub-discipline with textbooks and dedicated postgraduate degrees (see, for example, horst & miller 2012). the audience immediately reacted, of course, by suggesting that despite the many possibilities that digital ethnography offers in an increasingly networked world, there are still communities around the planet that do not possess (regular) access to the internet, and even for those who do, that part of their activities represents only a fraction of their daily lives. on hearing these comments, i could not but think back to our dilemmas over study abroad programs: listeners of the webinar, like teachers’ ideal image of studying abroad, considered that going abroad and living there could not be replaced by fragmented pieces of interaction and (digital) information. the digital sounded like an exciting alternative, but for many, perhaps, only an alternative. gaitanidis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202170 https://www.waunet.org/wcaa/videos/index even before the pandemic, as gunel, varma et al. point out: ‘traditional’ anthropological fieldwork was in trouble. for some time now, ethnographers have been questioning fieldwork truisms: separations between “field” and “home,” the gendered (masculinist) assumptions of the always available and up-for-anything fieldworker, and anthropology’s proclivities toward suffering subjects.’ (günel, varma & watanabe 2020: para. 1) these troubles can be found in our assumptions about studying abroad too, albeit under different forms. first, the idea that skills acquired by studying abroad cannot be honed at ‘home’ has been repeatedly challenged by educational programs and institutions that aim to offer a ‘foreign’ learning environment to students who want to ‘study abroad at home.’ in japan, for example, english language camps promise ‘the real english experience’2 and put into question the degree to which study abroad reifies nation-based cultural divisions and, thus, ignores that increased globalization (and internationalization of education) have already weakened the ‘foreignness’ of ‘abroad.’ secondly, as discussed, students are less and less able to put aside both money and time to freely spend on a free-spirited experience abroad. hence, they need more detailed learning plans and better preparation, which, in my experience, often ends up putting into question their originally ingrained images of ‘the foreign’ and helps them reflect on the ever shifting and often self-imposed boundaries between national identities. finally, anthropologists’ traditional tendencies to go abroad to research others’ problems, reminded me of the general tendency of candidates for study abroad programs to divide the world in two: the countries that they think are doing much better than their own (which for japanese students often means countries where english is the primary language, or scandinavia) and countries where they can learn about social issues and development (which, again, for japanese students often means southeast asian and african nations). this third issue has been really difficult to solve, although progress can be seen when there are genuine efforts to foster interaction between home students and the (pre-pandemic) increasing population of international students on japanese university campuses. as i write this essay, my university has implemented temporary online measures to fulfil students’ wishes to take part in classes taught in languages other than their own. it is impossible to know if (physical) study abroad will be allowed in the next academic year, but my initial impression is that, from a crisis management perspective, negative news on some countries’ reactions to the covid-19 pandemic may impact on students’ initial choices of destinations. there are more immediate issues at hand, however, and i would like to end this essay by laying two of these out below. 1) once restrictions are lifted, those students with the financial stability to travel abroad (even for leisure) will perhaps not feel much of a change, but the slowdown of the economy and the accompanying loss of part-time job opportunities and struggle for parents to make ends meet, perhaps means that study abroad will remain at the bottom of study priorities well after the pandemic is over. 2) the lack of international student mobility brought upon by the pandemic (and, particularly in the case of japan, the ostensibly problematic nationality-based restrictions regarding non-japanese long-term residents)3 has and will continue to impact the much-needed internationalization of our campuses, which as i already mentioned, helps break down stereotypes regarding the image of ‘abroad’ among home students. i risk sounding unnecessarily alarmist if i say that the pandemic’s highlighting of entrenched issues in the ways both teachers and students imagine and actualize their dreams of extended time spent abroad, should 2 see for example, the organization british hills (https://www.british-hills.co.jp/english/). 3 foreign nationals on long-term visas, such as permanent residents, even if they have lived, worked and raised families in japan have been subject to stricter conditions for re-entering the country than japanese nationals (dooley 2020). gaitanidis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202171 https://www.british-hills.co.jp/english/ be a wake-up call to totally re-think what is and how we foster the pedagogical value of ‘experience abroad.’ like anthropologists, we ought perhaps to rethink our methods of implementing such programs into our curricula and to lay the ground for more informed and equal opportunities for prospective participants. references coste, v., & amiel, s. 2020, ‘coronavirus: france faces “epidemic” of anti-asian racism,’ euronews, 3 february. online, available: https://www.euronews.com/2020/02/03/coronavirus-france-faces-epidemic-of-anti-asian-racism [accessed 3 september 2020]. dooley, b. 2020. ‘japan’s locked borders shake the trust of its foreign workers,’ the new york times, 5 august. online, available: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/business/japan-entry-ban-coronavirus.html [accessed 2 september 2020]. günel, g., & varma, s. & watanabe, c. 2020. a manifesto for patchwork ethnography. 9 june. online, available: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography [accessed 3 september 2020]. horst, h. a., & miller, d. (eds) 2012. digital anthropology. london, berg. yokota, m., ota, h. & shimmi, y. (eds.) 2018. impact of study abroad on career development and life [in japanese]. tokyo, gakubunsha. gaitanidis portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202172 https://www.euronews.com/2020/02/03/coronavirus-france-faces-epidemic-of-anti-asian-racism https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/business/japan-entry-ban-coronavirus.html https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography aaig siegfried galley final portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. afro-americanophilia in germany special issue, guest edited by moritz ege and andrew wright hurley. © 2015 [detlef siegfried]. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i2.4396 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft: ernest bornemans ethnologie des jazz detlef siegfried, university of copenhagen der spätere sexualforscher ernest borneman (1915–1995) galt als einer der ‘world’s foremost jazz critics and scholars,’ dessen stimme vermisst wurde, als er in den 70er jahren das schreiben über jazz einstellte (hentoff & mccarthy 1959).1 er war der erste, wie werner grünzweig festhielt, der mit einem ‘“europäischen” hintergrund das phänomen des jazz wissenschaftlich untersuchte’ (1995: 113f). hinzu kam: wohl kaum ein anderer jazzkritiker—schon gar kein deutscher—hatte ein international so weitreichendes netzwerk geknüpft und war so intensiv mit den jazzszenen in kanada und den usa, großbritannien, frankreich und der bundesrepublik in berührung gekommen, weil er dort für längere zeit gelebt hatte. borneman hatte, als exilant mit einer jugendsozialisation im linken berliner kulturradikalismus, nachfolgenden studien der musikwissenschaft und anthropologie und der praktischen erfahrung mit jazzmusikern und -adepten seit den 30er jahren die entstehungszusammenhänge und praktiken des jazz untersucht. als jazzpublizist bekannt wurde er mitte der 40er jahre durch die artikelserie ‘an anthropologist looks at jazz.’ in den 50er jahren eilte borneman, der sich inzwischen u.a. als kolumnist des melody maker einen weiten leserkreis erschlossen hatte, über die grenzen hinweg der ruf eines jazz-ethnologen 1 aus großbritannien verlautete, ‘borneman’s loss to jazz writing in this country is severe’ (jazz journal, bd. 29. 1976). die sekundärliteratur zu ernest bornemans bedeutung als ‘jazz critic’ ist überschaubar: (grünzweig 1995: 111–115; schaal 2003–2004). vgl. allerdings jetzt meine biografie: siegfried (2015). siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 2 voraus. in den späten 60er und frühen 70er jahren publizierte er noch einmal größere arbeiten über jazz und beteiligte sich an der diskussion um die frage, wie sich ‘race’ und ‘class’ als kulturstrukturierende faktoren zueinander verhielten. als einer der ersten begriff der autodidakt den jazz nicht als autonome sphäre, als ästhetische form, die von individualgenies oder ‘rassen’ geschaffen wurde, sondern führte ihn grundsätzlich auf die gesellschaftlichen bedingungen seiner entstehung zurück (borneman 1940a: 1). borneman argumentierte damit anti-essentialistisch, interessierte sich aber für die kulturellen komponenten des jazz, für die verbindungen, die die in verschiedenen kontexten entstandenen kulturelemente unter jeweils konkreten umständen eingingen. dieses interesse konstituierte seine ethnologische perspektive auf einen gegenstand, der, als er mit seinen forschungen begann, noch kaum in den blick der wissenschaft gerückt war. jazz ist immer mehr gewesen als ein musikstil. er war, wie john gennari konstatiert hat, eine quelle der kulturellen imagination in der moderne, ein archiv mythologischer bilder und ein ästhetisches modell für neue formen des schreibens, des sehens und der bewegung (2006: 4). jazzkritiker übernahmen es, diese neue sinnliche erfahrung in worte zu übersetzen und sie dadurch mit bedeutung aufzuladen. der anteil, den borneman an der konstruktion dieses kraftquells der moderne hatte, soll im folgenden im hinblick auf die spannung von ‘rassischen’ und sozialen faktoren skizziert werden. im mittelpunkt steht die genese seiner positionen, wie er sie in seiner schrift ‘an anthropologist looks at jazz’ vertreten hat, sowie die frage, warum borneman angesichts der argumentation zum blues im umfeld der black-power-bewegung ins schweigen verfiel. die erfahrung des schwarzen london ernest borneman entdeckte den jazz in einem politischen kontext, der seine haltung als jazzkritiker entscheidend prägen sollte: inmitten des sich radikalisierenden panafrikanismus der 30er jahre an seinem brennpunkt london, und im entkolonialisierungsschub der literarisch-philosophischen ‘négritude’-bewegung im paris der späten 40er jahre. er bewegte sich unter schwarzen intellektuellen, die diese bewegungen anführten und mit dem panafrikanismus die ‘eigentliche ideologie’ (geiss 1968: 11) der entkolonialisierung in afrika entwickelten, damit zugleich die grundlage für die radikale emanzipationsbewegung der afroamerikaner in den 60er jahren legten. siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 3 jazz betrachteten sie als ausdrucksform eines neuen, afrikanisch geprägten selbstbewusstseins. in london, wo er seit dem 8. juli 1933 lebte, verkehrte der junge emigrant in den jazzclubs nest und shim sham, er trat dem rhythm club no. 1 aus dem mecca café bei und verdiente einen teil seines lebensunterhalts bei abendlichen auftritten als jazzmusiker, anfangs als pianist, dann als bassist.2 dabei ergaben sich gemeinsame auftritte mit louis armstrong, cab calloway und duke ellington, später in kanada mit oscar peterson und mezz mezzrow (borneman 1977: 361). sein erstes jazzkonzert in london erlebte borneman bei einem benefizabend für die ‘scottsboro boys,’ eine gruppe jugendlicher afroamerikaner, die 1931 zu unrecht der vergewaltigung weißer frauen beschuldigt und verurteilt worden waren, wogegen die organisationen schwarzer und die kommunistischen parteien der usa und europas protestkampagnen organisierten (borneman 1977: 357ff). ‘so happy!!!,’ notierte der 18jährige nach den ersten tagen und nächten in london, die er zwischen party, jazzclub und flugblattverteilen verbracht hatte und die bei ihm jenen entdeckungsschock auslösten, von dem viele jazzadepten berichteten (vgl. borneman 1933).3 es war nicht nur die musik allein, sondern eine umfassende erfahrung schwarzer aktivität und expressivität. in den aus dieser zeit überlieferten autobiographischen notizen wird deutlich, wie sehr ihn die vielfalt der londoner nachtschwärmer faszinierte—‘alle sprachen, farben, schichten, verbrecher, reporter, nutten, seeleute,’ so schilderte er die mischung des blue café— vor allem aber die begegnung mit schwarzen (borneman o.d.a.). in den ersten jahren wurde bornemans londoner umfeld bestimmt von einer kleinen gruppe schwarzer revolutionäre, die aus den britischen kolonien, insbesondere aus der karibik, in die hauptstadt des empire gekommen waren und im begriff waren, mit dem panafrikanismus eine vorform der black-power-bewegung zu schaffen (fryer 1984; vgl. robinson 1983; und buhle 1988). prägenden einfluss hatte der 14 jahre ältere c. l. r. james, ein historiker und politischer aktivist aus trinidad, der kurz vor borneman, 1932, nach england gekommen war, sich anfang 1934 in london niederließ und dort ein führender trotzkistischer intellektueller wurde. gemeinsamkeiten gab es beim jazz und dem marxistischen ansatz, wobei der ältere den jüngeren in drei richtungen 2 zur neuen form der geselligkeit auf dem gebiet des jazz in london vgl. den einblick bei klaus nathaus (2009: 245). 3 zum ‘life-changing shock of discovery,’ siehe gennari (2006: 8). siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 4 beeinflusste: politisch hin zur offenheit gegenüber der nichtstalinistischen radikalen linken, kulturell zum interesse für afrika und die karibik (nicht als gegenpol, sondern in der interdependenz mit europäischer kultur) und im hinblick auf die arbeitsweise, die empirisch-enzyklopädisch war und sich auf ein breites spektrum an themen und medien erstreckte. james lebte in verschiedenen wohngemeinschaften, und die erste von ihnen, ‘hermitage’ genannt, bildete er zusammen mit ernest borneman und dem deutschen lehrer ernst perl. borneman hatte neben vielen anderen studierenden aus den kolonien auch james im internationalen studentenclub ‘student movement house’ am russell square kennen gelernt und sich mit ihm angefreundet (trevelyan 1941). die gemeinsam gemietete dreizimmerwohnung war treffpunkt schwarzer intellektueller, die in bornemans erinnerung tag und nacht diskutierten—über politik und kunst, darunter die richtungskämpfe im internationalen kommunismus zwischen stalinisten und trotzkisten, aber auch über das projekt einer linken, von den weiß dominierten parteien und gewerkschaften unabhängigen bewegung der schwarzen (dhondy 2001: 55; worcester 1996: xv; vgl. held 1995). zu denen, die dort regelmäßig verkehrten, gehörten jomo kenyatta (geb. 1893), der von 1934 bis 1938 in london studierte und später erster präsident kenias wurde, und eric williams (geb. 1911), der in oxford, stark beeinflusst von james, seine doktorarbeit zur aufhebung des sklavenhandels in westindien verfasste und später erster premierminister von trinidad und tobago wurde (vgl. kenyatta 1968; und williams 1961).4 hinzu kam george padmore (geb. 1902) aus trinidad, ein jugendfreund james, der 1930 von der kommunistischen internationale mit der leitung des international trade union committee of negro workers in hamburg beauftragt worden war und zeitweise gemeinsam mit kenyatta in moskau studierte, aber nach seiner kritik an der volksfrontpolitik aus der sowjetischen und der britischen kp ausgeschlossen wurde. borneman hatte ihn schon kurz vor seiner emigration in hamburg kennen gelernt und sah ihn ab 1935 in london fast täglich (borneman 1977: 301). das war der kontext, in dem sich der jungmarxist im londoner exil bewegte und entscheidende anregungen erhielt. dass sie sich vor dem hintergrund seiner studien bei 4 williams recherchierte mitte der 30er jahre zwei jahre lang im british museum für seine dissertation, ‘inward hunger. the education of a prime minister’ (williams 1969). siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 5 dem ebenfalls nach großbritannien emigrierten berliner musikethnologen erich von hornbostel um die gesellschaftlichen grundlagen des jazz drehten, der den alltäglichen hintergrundsound des postkolonial-revolutionären wertehimmels bildete, war da nicht verwunderlich. ohne zweifel waren die ersten jahre des exils für den jungen borneman formative jahre. ‘all of us,’ so fasste er später die grundstimmung in der ‘hermitage’ zusammen, ‘were nearly penniless, all of us were in exile, but we did not have the slightest doubt that we were going to change the face of the globe’ (1970: 27). fast nichts von dem, was borneman zuvor im entrée des deutschen akademischen elfenbeinturms erdacht hatte, ‘could withstand the test of the negro movement struggling for control of whole continents. i had to scrap almost everything i had worked out till then, and i had to give up once and for all the idea that music can be conceived as something developing on its own—something but slightly influenced by the hot breath of social struggle’ (1970: 27). als ebenso schockierend beschreibt er die erfahrung, mit schwarzen jazzmusikern zusammenzuspielen. borneman arbeitete nahezu täglich in der british library, an seinen romanen und theaterstücken, mit denen er geld verdiente, aber auch an seiner ‘bibliography of american negro music,’ die dort entstand; die frühesten in seinem nachlass auffindbaren notizen zum jazz stammen von 1935 (borneman 1935). bornemans interesse für den jazz als volksmusik wurde sichtbar von james beeinflusst, für den die massen die triebkräfte der geschichte waren, und der kulturelemente der karibik, wie den calypso, als ausdruck der entstehenden westindischen nation begriff (worcester 1996: xiif). kulturelle formen und praktiken wurden durch ihren jeweiligen sozialen und historischen kontext bestimmt, während gleichzeitig ‘the emotions, activities, and experiences of the great mass of the population’ die wichtigsten aspekte sozialer bewegungen darstellten (in james 1983: 266). auch im jazz konnte man sie aufspüren. ‘a history of american negro music’ in seinen ersten londoner jahren wollte borneman sich auf dem gebiet des films einen namen machen. schon hier spielten schwarzer habitus und schwarze sozialisation eine zentrale rolle. im exposé eines auch formal geradezu avantgardistischen streifens werden sujet und haltung sichtbar, wie sie auch in späteren projekten in verfeinerter form wieder auftauchen sollten. ein ausgelaugter schwarzer betritt einen nachtclub und wird vom rhythmus der jazzmusik mitgerissen. von den (weißen) gästen der bar siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 6 mit alkohol abgefüllt und am ende erschossen, wird der atem des sterbenden ‘zum pulsschlag … der dumpf und unwillkürlich in die bilder seiner träume hineinklingt. dort wird er zum rhythmus der sklavenlieder seiner vorfahren,’ aber auch ‘dem emanzipierten neger zum takt seiner tanzmusik, mit der er die welt, die er verloren hat, wieder zu erobern beginnt’ (borneman o.d.b.).5 das alles ereignet sich in jenem merkwürdigen zustand zwischen wirklichkeit und traum, in dem die ventile des kontrollierenden bewusstseins aufbrechen und dem druck der langangestauten, stets zurückgedrängten massen im unterbewusstsein nachgeben. der neger erlebt in diesem zustand die ganze leidensgeschichte seines volkes, unterdrückung, sehnsucht, hoffnung, die er kennt, da sie ja auch sein eigenes leben sind. (borneman o.d.b.) das script hat eine klare politische botschaft. durch die bewusstmachung der schwarzen leidensgeschichte wird der film ‘zum sturmbaum, mit dem wir alle mauern menschlicher dummheit, trägheit und schwäche einrennen können’ (borneman o.d.b.). medium der selbstbefreiung schwarzer ist der jazz. hatte er noch 1934 eine textidee abgelehnt, weil er ‘nichts von musik verstehe,’ so arbeitete borneman sich in den folgejahren intensiv in die geschichte und formen des jazz ein (borneman 1934). im frühjahr 1940 nahm er an einer radiodiskussion über ‘jazz for moderns’ u.a. mit humphrey lyttelton teil und brachte eine dreiteilige serie ‘outlaw ballads’ in der bbc. im selben jahr, kurz bevor borneman nach kanada deportiert wurde, lag ein 580 seiten starkes manuskript ‘swing music. an encyclopedia of jazz’ vor, das nach einleitenden abschnitten zur geschichte der amerikanischen kunstmusik, der sklaverei und sklavenemanzipation die geschichte der afroamerikanischen ‘folk music’ in den verschiedenen teilen amerikas rekonstruiert. ein zweiter teil beschreibt lokale szenen in den us-amerikanischen jazzmetropolen wie new orleans, chicago und new york sowie den ‘jazz in europe,’ betrachtet über die nationalen szenen und ihre clubs. als dritter teil folgt ein kapitel ‘what is jazz?’ über musikalische und sprachliche charakteristika. das manuskript war unter verschiedenen titeln wie ‘the history of american negro folk music’ zur publikation vorgesehen. borneman schickte es bekannten zur kritischen durchsicht, versuchte es mehrfach bei verlagen unterzubringen und kündigte freunden und kollegen gegenüber die drucklegung an—u.a. war von harvard university press die 5 begriffe aus den quellen wie ‘neger,’ die zu diesem zeitpunkt auch als selbstbezeichnung üblich waren, werden im folgenden übernommen und nicht weiter kommentiert, auch wenn klar sein sollte, dass sie inzwischen aus guten gründen als rassistisch eingeordnet werden und in den auseinandersetzungen der zeit zum gegenstand vieler bennenungspolitischer diskussionen wurden. siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 7 rede (borneman 1945a, 1945b). doch dazu kam es nicht, ebensowenig wie bei mehreren nachfolgenden manuskriptvarianten. gleiches gilt für die etwa zeitgleich entstandene, 214 seiten starke und mit etwa 1.000 titeln bestückte ‘bibliography of american negro music’ (borneman 1940b). mehrfach auch versuchte borneman, seine überlegungen durch forschungsprojekte wissenschaftlich zu untermauern, die aber keine finanzielle unterstützung gewinnen konnten (borneman 1945–1946). borneman hatte das buch nach eigenen angaben zehn jahre zuvor begonnen mit notizen zu einer hausarbeit für den berliner musikethnologen erich von hornbostel. ursprünglich gedacht als enzyklopädische studie zur entwicklung amerikanischer musik seit dem ersten weltkrieg, grenzte er das thema auf afroamerikanische musik, speziell den jazz, ein und richtete die arbeit auf einen soziologischen fokus aus. angesichts der ursprünge des jazz bei den nach amerika verbrachten afrikanischen sklaven stellte der autor fragen wie: ‘is culture race-bound? is it bound to district and climate? will it survive a transplantation into a different culture, a different country, a different race, a different form of social organization?’ geleitet wird die studie von einem ansatz, der alle formen menschlicher aktivität, auch die musik, als ‘mere sublimations and elaborations of the elementary needs of human society’ betrachtet (borneman 1940a: 24ff). wie der film war der jazz eine kunstform, die jener arbeitsteiligen, große menschenmassen einbeziehenden gesellschaftlichen organisation entsprang, wie sie in den usa entstanden war: jazz music is a more highly socialized form of art than any other form of music—more, in fact, than any form of art except cinema which, like jazz music, came to existence at a time when human society had developed a structure of such complexity that almost every human being took part, in one way or another, in the production of almost every product produced by any other human being at any other spot where human beings lived. it is no accident that both jazz and cinema should have developed in that excellent melting-pot of peoples and races which is america. here the process of international and intersocial penetration reached its height in the form of a merchant civilization which commercialized all forms of art at a rate which left europe dazzled and agape. (borneman 1940a: 24–25) gegenstand von bornemans untersuchung war die frage, wie die soziale entwicklung der amerikanischen gesellschaft den jazz und umgekehrt der jazz die gesellschaft beeinflusst hat. im grunde ging es dabei darum, wie kunst zu analysieren sei—nämlich nicht ausgehend von vorgefassten ästhetischen normen, sondern aus ihrem jeweiligen entstehungskontext heraus. der jazz war jedoch nicht vollends aus seinen sozialen faktoren abzuleiten, sondern weist als kunstform einen bestimmten grad an autonomie auf. er wurde nicht nur durch die amerikanische gesellschaft geprägt, sondern siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 8 beeinflusste sie auch. hier wurde das verhältnis von ‘basis’ und ‘überbau,’ oftmals in einem kruden materialismus als einseitiges abhängigkeitsverhältnis betrachtet, auf seine frühmarxistischen füße gestellt. auch in seiner historischen perspektive lehnt sich bornemans theoretischer rahmen stark an bertolt brechts ideal eines ‘theaters des wissenschaftlichen zeitalters’ an, das auf experimentelle weise gesellschaftliche gesetze erkennbar machen sollte, und zwar durch die einnahme einer distanzierten position. ideelle aussichtstürme waren die geschichte und das künftige ‘wissenschaftliche zeitalter.’ wie brecht operierte auch borneman auf der zeitachse geschichte—gegenwart—zukunft, die eine distanzierte position und damit kritik ermöglichte: ‘the theories and the critical standards of art which are based on an aesthetic analysis of existing works of art are totally untenable: they must be replaced by a theory that is flexible enough to stretch not only from the past to the present, but also beyond the present to the future’ (borneman 1940a: 519). diese theorie war der marxismus—allerdings nicht in seinen parteidogmatischen formen, sondern als ‘linksabweichung,’ die den nicht ökonomischen faktoren, darunter der kunst, eine relativ autonome position beimaß (anhand brechts, müller 1972; 1983). der jazz war in einer sackgasse angekommen, ‘from which only one way can deliberate it: that of a social change which liberates it from nightclubs and turns it back to folk music’ (borneman 1940a: 550). hier wird eine von bornemans grundpositionen sichtbar: anstatt sein heil im schlager oder in der aufwertung durch anlehnung an die europäische musiktradition zu suchen, sollte der jazz als volksmusik bewahrt werden: ‘in order to make such an advance possible jazz must drop the commercialism of tin pan alley and of broadway, the lulling saccharine of “sweet jazz,” the cheaply aphrodisiacal “jitterbug jazz”—all those elements of social and sexual dope which are now associated with the functions that jazz is forced to fulfill in the modern nightclub’ (borneman 1940a: 550). grundsätzlich gehörte dem jazz als tendenziell klassenloser musik die zukunft, während oper und symphonie als präferenzen einer bestimmten klasse zum untergang bestimmt waren: ‘upper class music with its symphonic tradition of “subject first” is dying, just as the upper class itself is inevitably moving closer to death with every day of its existence. the new music of the people which began with jazz music is as certain to conquer all music as the people is bound to conquer all society’ (borneman 1940a: 550). siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 9 im hinblick auf eine ethnische komponente des jazz: wenn die musik durch die bedürfnisse der gesellschaft beeinflusst wird, welche rolle spielt dabei die zugehörigkeit zu einer ‘rasse’? keine besonders große, meinte borneman, wenn überhaupt. die nachkommen der aus westafrika verschleppten sklaven reproduzierten in den usa nicht einfach ‘afrikanische’ musik, sondern kombinierten die wenigen, durch die älteren überkommenen westafrikanischen traditionselemente (borneman nennt sie ‘sekundären afrikanismus’) mit den vielfältigen kulturellen einflüssen der gegenwart, die sich aus den verschiedensten ethnischen oder nationalen traditionen zusammensetzten, wie sie im schmelztiegel usa vorzufinden waren. aus all diesen elementen entstand: ‘a new music that had very little resemblance with original african music. it was no longer negro music at all, nor was it negro-music-diluted-by-themusic-of-the-white-red-and-yellow-races-of-america; it was simply no longer racial music at all. in fact, it had never been racial music’ (borneman 1940a: 565ff). unter berufung auf hornbostel erklärte borneman, wenn westafrikaner nicht in die usa, sondern nach china verschleppt worden wären, hätten sie musik nach chinesischem stil gemacht. ‘music is formed by the social structure of society and not by its racial structure … the difference between african and european music is not the difference between two different races but the difference between two different forms of social organisation’ (borneman 1940a: 565ff). und mit melville j. herskovits, dessen berühmtes buch the myth of the negro past er während seiner zeit beim national film board of canada las und für den ethnographischen dokumentarfilm auswertete, argumentierte er: ‘the musical customs in america changed—not through the impact of another race but through the impact of another people with a different musical custom which was the result of a different social system’ (borneman 1940a: 565ff). ‘the anthropologist looks at jazz’ im juni 1940 als ‘enemy alien’ interniert und bald darauf von england nach kanada deportiert, arbeitete borneman nach seiner entlassung aus dem internierungslager im august 1941 beim national film board of canada für den dokumentarfilmpionier john grierson. er produzierte eine reihe von dokumentarfilmen, genoss das nachtleben in ottawa und toronto und baute seine jazz-kontakte in nordamerika aus (vgl. etwa borneman 1942). die korrespondenz mit seiner in england verbliebenen freundin und späteren ehefrau, eva geisel, widerspiegelt eine intensive beschäftigung mit der jazzszene, nicht nur der musik, sondern auch der tänze, der bekleidung und anderen siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 10 elementen der jazzkultur. von beginn an begriff borneman jazz nicht nur als sound, sondern als ein soziales phänomen, dessen symbole und rituale eine lebensweise begründeten. kurz vor kriegsende begann er jene intensive publizistische tätigkeit zum jazz, die ihn zu einem der international bekanntesten jazzkritiker seiner zeit machen sollte. grundlage seines ruhms war die achtteilige artikelserie ‘the anthropologist looks at jazz,’ die er von april 1944 bis februar 1945 in der 1943 gemeinsam mit gordon gullickson gegründeten jazz-zeitschrift the record changer veröffentlichte. die serie erschien 1946 in monographischer form und hatte so großen einfluss, weil sie, wie der verleger max jones in seinem vorwort erläuterte, den jazz aus einer wissenschaftlichen perspektive untersuchte, nämlich aus der des kulturanthropologen und soziologen, und damit ‘valid critical standards’ etablierte (borneman 1946). jones, der die 53-seiten-broschüre in seinem verlag ‘jazz music books’ herausgab, war wie borneman an den sozialen hintergründen des jazz in den usa interessiert, insbesondere an rassismus und armut als bedingungsfaktoren des blues, den er als essenz des jazz betrachtete. seine von 1942 bis 1953 erschienene zeitschrift jazz music widmete sich diesen themen, und dieser marxistische ansatz, der in den usa geläufig war, aber in großbritannien ‘a radical shift in the dialogue about black music’ darstellte (schwartz 2007: 149), wurde durch die publikation von bornemans aufsätzen aus dem record changer untermauert. volksmusik, so bornemans auffassung, konnte nur überleben, wenn man komponisten und arrangeure von ihr fernhielt (borneman 1945c). jones schrieb ihm anfang 1945, gegenüber dem mainstream der jazzkritiker seien diejenigen, die nach derart puristischen idealen über jazz dachten, ‘few and scattered and generally incoherent’ (jones 1945a). er und seine freunde, believe very much in your approach to the subject and don’t minimise the strengths of west african survivals in afro-am. folk art of all kinds … like you, i think i can listen by the hour to the good race discs which these panassians find boring and unimaginative. and to my older paramounts by blind lemon j., elzadie robinson, norfolk jubilee 4 and so on, and some of the fine lomax albums … i can soak up in them but find it difficult to write down just what is so hard and honest and moving about them. (jones 1945a) weil borneman eben dies gelang, wurde a critic looks at jazz paul oliver zufolge eines der ‘most authoritative works published on the origins of jazz and the role of blues’ (2007: 32). die fragen, die der verfasser in swing music (borneman 1940a) aufgeworfen hatte, wurden jetzt verfeinert. zwar ging es nach wie vor um die kernfrage, inwieweit siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 11 kulturen ‘racial achievements’ seien, aber im mittelpunkt stand die wechselwirkung von sozialen und kulturellen mustern, konkret die art und weise, in der die sklavenarbeit afroamerikanische musik und andersherum schwarze musik das soziale gefüge ihrer umgebung verändert habe (borneman 1946: 28). die ursprünge des jazz ließen sich nicht allein auf ‘afrikanische musik’ zurückführen—eine viel zu grobe kategorie. gestützt auf herskovits unterschied borneman basistypen von songs, die zu verschiedenen gelegenheiten gesungen wurden und postulierte, nach der ankunft auf dem amerikanischen kontinent seien nur jene tradiert worden, die auch in dem neuen kontext eine funktion hatten—wie etwa arbeits-, liebesoder hochzeitsund beerdigungslieder.6 vor allem aber seien im kontakt mit den anderen einwandererpopulationen deren kulturelle traditionen aufgenommen und mit den noch überkommenen afrikanischen traditionselementen zu einem ‘whole new wealth of afro-american music’ verschmolzen worden (borneman 1946: 32). die empirisch zu beobachtende wechselseitige aufnahme jeweils neuer kultureller impulse brachte borneman zu der schlussfolgerung: ‘the racial element seems to be of amazingly small importance in the determination of musical archetypes. there is no such thing as pure “negro music” in america; nor is there any such thing as racial inheritance or racial proclivity in music’ (borneman 1946: 36). zwischen ‘rasse’ und kultur, so argumentierte er mit herskovits, gab es keine korrelationen. tradition war kein ‘rassisches’ erbe, sondern ergebnis von erziehung, volksmusik ein resultat von umweltfaktoren. den stärksten und nachhaltigen einfluss auf die amerikanische populärmusik hatte der blues, der den ambivalenten fortschritt der sklavenbefreiung ohne gesellschaftliche anerkennung symbolisierte, zum ‘archetypus des jazz,’ aber auch von weißen folksängern aufgenommen und so ‘one of the backbones of american folkmusic’ wurde (borneman 1946: 38). jazz war die revolutionärste kulturform der moderne, weil sie demokratisch war, von jedermann auch ohne musikalische erziehung ausgeübt werden konnte. er barg den revolutionären sprengstoff lang unterdrückter revolten und zugleich das kulturelle opiat des scheiterns, des substituts für die und die flucht vor der politischen aktion: [jazz], at its best, became the american’s negro’s music of protest and assertion: jazz, at its worst, became the white man’s music of indolence and escape; more than even movies, it has become the opium of the people … it is up to us, the lovers and critics and collectors of jazz, to decide which of the two we will support and which of the two we shall conquer. (borneman 1946: 47) 6 gegen borneman ist eine stärkere kontinuität behauptet worden von john storm roberts (1998: 57f. u. 71); vgl. gennari (2006: 16). siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 12 bornemans statement endete mit einer kritik des kommerzialisierten bigband-jazz, der an die stelle der improvisation das arrangement gesetzt hatte, und im bekenntnis zur wiedergeburt des jazz als volksmusik, die nicht rational, sondern intuitiv entstand (borneman 1946: 53). aufgrund des großen leserechos richtete der record changer eine kolumne ‘questions and answers’ ein, die vom juli 1944 bis lange über das ende der ‘anthropologist’-serie hinaus fortgesetzt wurde, bis zum juni 1947, als nesuhi ertegun an bornemans stelle als herausgeber der zeitschrift neben gullickson trat (ertegun 1947). im rückblick arbeitete borneman zehn fragen heraus, um die die etwa 500 zuschriften hauptsächlich kreisten. die wichtigsten fragen richteten sich auf den ‘rassischen’ charakter des jazz: ‘if jazz is a form of negro folk music, how does it affect white musicians and white listeners?’ ‘could the theory of african survivals in american negro music not be interpreted as a form of racism, and is it therefore not objectionable from a social point of view?’ aber auch bornemans weigerung, populäre formen wie den new orleans jazz als minderwertig zu diskreditieren, löste diskussionen aus, bei denen es um die spannung von demokratischer und avantgardistischer kunst ging. zum ersten problemkomplex machte borneman noch einmal klar, dass kultureller afrikanismus nicht biologisch, sondern sozial begründet sei (borneman 1947: 6f. u. 14).7 immer wieder kam er darauf zurück, dass es der jazz-kritik nicht darum gehen könne, geschmäcklerisch einzelne musiker zu kritisieren, sondern darum, den sozialen zusammenhang ihrer kunst zu beschreiben: wenn man bestimmte musikalische formen kritisiert, dann muss man das ganze bedingungsgeflecht angreifen, das schlechte musik populär macht—ihren kommerziellen hintergrund. in der hochzeit des europäischen jazz in den 50er jahren publizierte borneman in zahlreichen zeitschriften, darunter special-interest-blätter wie jazz journal und down beat, aber auch große magazine wie harper’s bazaar und variety. für den melody maker, das bedeutendste wochenblatt für afroamerikanische musik, schrieb er schon in der zweiten hälfte der 40er jahre regelmäßig, vom 6. mai 1950 bis zum 12. dezember 1953 zunächst wöchentlich, dann im längeren abstand, als autor der kolumne ‘one night stand.’8 der kontakt zum melody maker war über max jones entstanden, der 7 hier war borneman in kritischer auseinandersetzung mit rudi bleshs buch shining trumpets (1946). 8 vgl. zeitungsausschnitte in akademie der künste, berlin (adk), ernest-borneman-archiv (eba), 34. siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 13 sich während bornemans internierung darum bemüht hatte, seine diversen jazzmanuskripte zu publizieren (jones 1945b). unter seinen arbeiten finden sich viele konzertbesprechungen, aber auch grundsätzliche artikel zum jazz der gegenwart, zu historischen entwicklungen, einiges zum jazz in london und in der bbc sowie kommentare zu polizeirazzien in jazz-clubs. gleichzeitig behielt er immer die kontinentale und insbesondere die deutsche jazz-szene im blick. im rückblick schält sich heraus, dass borneman hier entwicklungen vorantrieb, die große folgen haben sollten. so war er als ‘avantgardefigur des blues-proselytismus’ daran beteiligt, das feld für den britischen blues-boom der langen 60er jahre zu bereiten, indem er immer wieder ‘mit evangelikaler leidenschaft’ darauf drängte, die durch den protektionismus der britischen musikergewerkschaft von afroamerikanischen musikern abgeschnittene szene der insel durch konfrontation mit dem ursprungsimpuls zu revitalisieren (schwartz 2007: 147).9 die isolation und sterilität der britischen tanzmusik konnte nur durch einen neuerlichen zustrom von ‘native afro-american folk music’ aufgebrochen werden. borneman gehörte damit dem anfangs kleinen kreis derer an, die den ursprünglichen, ‘reinen jazz’ (paul oliver) suchten und propagierten, nicht zuletzt als gegenprogramm zu der kommerzialisierung, die der jazz etwa als bigband-swing erlebte. einmal formulierte er es so: ‘der blues ist wahrlich das herz des jazz, und ohne blues wird der jazz verfallen wie eines menschen leib, dessen herz aufgehört hat zu schlagen’ (graves 1961: 7).10 wie viele seiner freunde und verbündeten bei der etablierung des blues, max jones, rex harris oder paul oliver, propagierte borneman seine auffassungen von den traditionen des jazz nicht nur in kleinen spezialmagazinen, sondern auch in großen blättern und bei schallplattenvorträgen, die er auf einladung von jazzclubs oder im radio präsentierte. dadurch kamen junge musiker wie alexis korner mit dem blues in berührung und lernten eine musik kennen, ‘that no british band, no british singer, no british accompanist could have furnished for any amount of money,’ wie borneman 1952 im melody maker bemerkte (zit nach schwartz 2007: 157).11 dem rock’n’roll stand er skeptisch gegenüber, verteidigte ihn aber dennoch, weil er darin eine berechtigte reaktion der jüngeren gegen zwei zeitströmungen sah: ‘beatless pop’ und ‘beatless bop,’ die beide gleichermaßen ein zentrales bedürfnis der jungen nicht bedienten: das bedürfnis zu tanzen (borneman 1957a o.d.c.). 9 ein klares bekenntnis zum blues gab borneman noch einmal 1963 ab, inmitten des britischen bluesbooms (borneman 1963a: 6–8). 10 für den hinweis auf dieses zitat danke ich michael rauhut. 11 orig. in: melody maker, 30 august 1952. siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 14 wie alle anderen jazzkritiker konnte borneman nie allein von dieser arbeit leben, sondern musste auf mehreren gebieten bei unterschiedlichen medien aktiv sein (gennari 2006: 7f). nur selten ergaben sich dauerhaftere einkommensquellen. seine arbeit für den national film board of canada in ottawa und für die unesco in paris sicherten ihm zwischen 1941 und 1949 ein regelmäßiges auskommen und ließen ihm gleichzeitig zeit für das studium der jazz-szenen in kanada, den usa und der französischen metropole. neben der arbeit für den record changer stand er mit zahlreichen musikern, veranstaltern und jazz-kritikern in kontakt, schrieb für down beat und variety über jazz in paris, wo zur gleichen zeit u.a. richard wright, james baldwin und sidney bechet lebten. in den 40er und 50er jahren wurde die französische hauptstadt zu einem europäischen mekka für afroamerikanische künstler, die sich dort weniger diskriminiert fühlten als in den usa (campbell 1995). er war eng mit dem existentialistischen universalgenie boris vian befreundet, der seinen ‘bon ami borneman’ in artikeln über jazz immer wieder zitierte (vian 1999: 169).12 liiert war er in paris mit jacqueline walcott, einer schwarzen tänzerin aus der truppe von katherine dunham (borneman 1977: 367). borneman publizierte auch in der 1947 gegründeten zeitschrift présence africaine, die als neue stimme der ‘négritude’bewegung eine panafrikanische perspektive in europa verankern wollte, und dessen herausgeberkreis neben u.a. jean paul sartre, andré gide und albert camus auch richard wright angehörte, unter den autoren waren léopold sédar senghor, e. franklin frazier und c. l. r. james (borneman 1948; rowley 2001: 363f). als afrikanisch inspirierte kulturformen spielten jazz und blues in présence africaine eine bedeutende rolle, präsentiert und diskutiert u.a. von dem französischen jazzpropagandisten hugues panassie, wright und borneman (wright 1953). 1949 ging borneman mit seiner inzwischen aus kanada nach europa übergesiedelten familie zurück nach london. er war produktiv wie nie und hielt bei der bbc und zahlreichen deutschen rundfunkanstalten radiovorträge zu den verschiedensten aspekten des jazz, die er durch tonbeispiele von eigenen schallplatten musikalisch illustrierte. inhaltlich interessierte er sich dabei zumeist für die autochthonen aspekte des jazz—also regionale oder nationale ausprägungen, die aus jeweils spezifischen kulturellen amalgamierungen entstanden. stets lehnte er das ab, was er als ‘kopie des amerikanischen jazz’ betrachtete. so empfahl er 1953 den britischen jazzmusikern, 12 orig. in: jazz hot, nr. 23, mai 1948. siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 15 nach inspirationsquellen im commonwealth ausschau zu halten. in der forschung ist bemerkt worden, borneman habe im bedürfnis, den britischen jazz als eine innerhalb des empire entstandene musik zu konzeptionalisieren, ‘determined ingenuity’ an den tag gelegt (moore 2007: 65). eine wahrnehmung von ‘britishness’ aber entstand nicht nur durch die entsprechende interpretatorische rahmung, sondern auch durch die zuschreibungen, mit denen die musik selbst und ihre ausdrucksformen bedacht wurden. indem sie new orleans jazz nationalisierten, bereiteten britische kritiker und musiker den boden für den späteren british sound, der diese als autochthon verstandenen wurzeln zu einem idiom von globaler popularität transformierte und in den usa als ‘british invasion’ wahrgenommen wurde (miles 2009; harry 2004; perone 2009). borneman interessierte sich seit den 50er jahren besonders für diejenigen formen des amerikanischen jazz, in denen sich afrikanische mit spanischen und französischen einflüssen mischten—also für die in der karibik entstandene volksmusik. seit seiner dreiteiligen bbc-serie über ‘folk music of cuba’ von 1953, aber auch in anderen britischen und westdeutschen radiosendungen, beschäftigte borneman sich intensiv mit diesem thema. von 1954 bis 1957 schrieb er für den melody maker die kolumne ‘tropicana,’ die den lateinamerikanischen sektor behandelte. bornemans these lautete, der jazz sei ursprünglich bei den französischen und spanischen kreolen mit ihrem rythmischen afrikanischen erbe entstanden und vollende sich mit dem afro-kubanischen trend der gegenwart. ‘i believe that the most interesting prospect both for jazz and for jazz criticism lies in that borderland which is framed on its three sides by african music, spanish music and jazz. it is here, i believe, that tomorrow’s folk music is growing today’ (borneman 1957b). ‘wir stehen heute,’ so hieß es 1959 in einem seiner radiomanuskripte, am anfang einer musikalischen revolution, die der des ersten weltkriegs ähnelt. wie damals der jazz die welt zu erobern begann, so hat heute die kubanische volksmusik angefangen, die internationale musik der teen agers, der jungen generation aller länder, zu werden. überall auf der welt wenden die jungen leute sich von jazz und rock ‘n’ roll zu twist, pachanga, mambo und chachacha. (borneman 1959a) es folgten die kolumnen ‘the latin touch’ und ‘exotica’ für record review. borneman sah in der verschmelzung afrikanischer mit spanischund französischsprachigen elementen im karibischen jazz eine ‘zweite symbiose’ afrikanischer und europäischer musik nach dem einfluss der maurischen musik im mittelalter und einen siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 16 gegenpol zu den hauptsächlich untersuchten fusionen von afrikanischen und britischnordeuropäischen einflüssen im jazz. weil borneman im melody maker als erster auf den kreolischen raum ‘als musikalische einheit’ hingewiesen hatte, reiste joachim-ernst berendt anfang der 50er jahre nach london, um ihn zu interviewen und blieb bis zu seinem lebensende mit ihm in freundschaftlichem kontakt (berendt 1995: 116; 1977: 20). bei seiner reise in die bundesrepublik von 1954 traf sich borneman mit jazz-publizisten und musikern wie dietrich schulz-köhn, dieter zimmerle, berendt und günter boas, besuchte jazz-clubs und sprach im nwdr und afn über jazz (borneman 1954). auch bei späteren besuchen, etwa 1958 und 1960, traf er sich ausweislich seiner kalender mit zahlreichen persönlichkeiten der westdeutschen jazz-szene—radioleuten ebenso wie konzertveranstaltern und musikern. insgesamt war er von den letztgenannten nicht besonders begeistert: ‘the german musicians are not really very good. they’re accurate and some have fine musicianship, but if you hear them as often as i do now, you realise that there’s very little originality, very little creative drive, and—worst of all—no depth’ (borneman 1963b). insbesondere waren europäische bands im gegensatz zu amerikanischen nicht in der lage zu swingen, irgendeine art von wärme zu entwickeln oder einfach nur tanzmusik zu machen. kurz, der europäische jazz—und so auch der deutsche—war ‘clever, imitative, cold and swingless’ (borneman 1964: 26). hier deutet sich schon an, dass borneman den modernen stilen bop und free jazz mehr als skeptisch gegenüber stand. er war, wie berendt berichtet, ‘vor allem den älteren stilen des jazz zugeneigt. es schien mir sinnvoll, ihn mit den neueren bekannt zu machen. ich lud ihn deshalb zu einem frankfurter konzert des großen saxophonisten john coltrane ein. ernest—neben mir sich vor unbehagen windend—konnte wenig mit dieser musik anfangen’ (1995: 117). dies aber war nicht eine frage des geschmacks, sondern ihrer soziopolitischen funktion. ‘after black power, what?’ 1965, nachdem das westdeutsche ‘freie fernsehen’ gescheitert war, dessen aufbau borneman als programmchef geleitet hatte, und die tätigkeit bei einer amerikanischen werbeagentur ihn nicht ausfüllte, nahm er erneut die arbeit an seiner ‘geschichte der amerikanischen negermusik’ auf.13 in den folgejahren rückte er jedoch von dem ziel 13 zum fernsehprojekt und bornemans rolle dort: steinmetz 1996. siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 17 ab, eine kohärente geschichte der afroamerikanischen musik zu schreiben, weil es die kräfte eines einzelnen überstieg, der trend in der ethnomusikologie zur detailstudie ging statt zum großfächigen überblick, vor allem aber, weil im umfeld der blackpower-bewegung die meinung vorherrschte, weiße könnten sich keine meinung zu schwarzer musik erlauben. as a non-negro musicologist, you can therefore still write on seleted aspects of american folk music in which the negro has played a part. but to single him out as a creative force, as a cultural entity with a clear profile, has become inadvisable to the extent that the negro himself, who is to be the beneficiary of any such research, feels that the harm of it outweighs the benefits. (borneman 1970: 30) daher war das, was borneman anfang der 70er jahre vorlegte, nicht die geschichte des afrikanischen musikalischen erbes in der neuen welt, sondern eine geschichte der sozialen spannungen und ihres einflusses auf die afroamerikanische musik. nur in einer hinsicht sollte es über das früher einmal geplante hinausgehen: indem es die reaktionen von schwarzen auf die wahrnehmung schwarzer musik durch weiße einzubeziehen begann. zwischen 1970 und 1972 veröffentlichte die zeitschrift jazzforschung/jazzresearch unter dem titel ‘black light and white shadow. notes for a history of american negro music’ in zwei teilen einige wenige exzerpte des auf weit über 20 kapitel geplanten dreibändigen werkes, das in monographischer form nie erscheinen sollte (borneman 1970, 1971-72). dennoch ergibt sich aus der serie der seit 1940 vorliegenden manuskripte und publizierten fragmente, die mit der letzten größeren veröffentlichung zu den folgen der black-power-bewegung von 1972 endet, ein relativ geschlossenes konzept, das gleichzeitig einen über mehr als drei jahrzehnte sich vollziehenden wandel abbildet. auf der zweiten internationalen konferenz über jazzforschung, die im april 1972 im österreichischen strobl abgehalten wurde, reflektierte borneman über die konsequenzen der black-power-bewegung für die jazzforschung. vorangegangen war eine auseinandersetzung über die frage, inwieweit weiße in der lage seien, afroamerikanische musik—insbesondere jazz und blues—zu verstehen oder gar selbst zu spielen. seit ende der 60er jahre beschäftigten sich, ausgelöst insbesondere durch leroi jones [nach 1967 amiri baraka] und vorangetrieben durch den kommerziellen erfolg weißer bluesmusiker wie eric clapton oder john mayall, viele adepten von jazz siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 18 und blues mit dieser frage. ähnlich wie aktivisten der westdeutschen studentenbewegung sah der westdeutsche jazz-‘papst,’ joachim ernst berendt, die erfolgsgeschichte des blues am ende der 60er jahre als gewinn an, obwohl der kommerzielle erfolg oftmals nicht den schwarzen urhebern der musik zugute kam, sondern ihren weißen interpreten. denn im grunde hatte sich norman mailers idee von der ausstrahlung eines spezifisch schwarzen habitus auf junge weiße verwirklicht. die ‘rassische maginot-linie’ wurde nicht mehr von schwarzen überschritten, sondern nun erstmals massenhaft von weißen (berendt 1970 o.pag., unter berufung auf eldridge cleaver).14 wie viele andere jazzkritiker—nicht nur in deutschland—hatte berendt eine romantisch-essentialistische vorstellung von schwarzer kultur, allerdings mit einer antirassistischen stoßrichtung (hurley 2009: 60ff). für ihn waren schwarze träger positiver kultureigenschaften, von denen weiße nur lernen konnten. am ende, so sein ideal, sollten gegensätze der ‘rassen’ ganz aufgehoben werden. in seinem 1970 veröffentlichten blues-buch, das seine bisherigen überlegungen zu diesem thema zusammenfasste und vor dem hintergrund des aktuellen blues-booms neu pointierte, hielt berendt fest, die weißen bands könnten die ‘authentizität’ des schwarzen blues zwar nie ganz erreichen, transportierten aber ‘die schwarze “message” noch viel gründlicher in die weißen seelen’ als elvis und die beatles (berendt 1970).15 allerdings blieb es dabei: die originale waren nicht clapton und mayall, sondern b.b. king und john lee hooker. im kern also blieb der blues trotz seines erfolges unter weißen jugendlichen schwarze musik—dies war wichtig, um seine inspirationskraft in der weißen welt zu erhalten. gleichzeitig hatte die black-power-bewegung weißen afroamerikanophilen erstmals systematisch das diskursmonopol über jazz entzogen und sie dazu gezwungen, ‘sich auch dialogischen anfechtungen’ zu stellen (ege 2007: 72). hier dominierten abwehrbewegungen. berendt wies den insbesondere durch leroi jones popularisierten vorwurf zurück, weiße hätten die schwarze musik gestohlen, um sich zu bereichern. auch helmut salzinger lehnte jones’ konstruktion als undifferenzierten ‘schwarzen rassismus’ ab, der ‘objektiv ebenso idiotisch ist wie der weiße’ (1974: 20). durch derartige deutungen retteten deutsche kommentatoren die aneignung schwarzer musik durch weiße, ohne ihre authentizistische vorbildwirkung 14 noch einmal bekräftigt wird dies in berendt (1981: 178ff). 15 einige passagen berendts buches entstammen seinem artikel in jazz podium, nr. 10, 1968. siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 19 zu zerstören. werner sollors, später afroamerikanist in harvard, und bernd weyergraf, die leroi jones’ blues people ins deutsche übersetzt und 1969 im underground-nahen melzer verlag veröffentlicht hatten, gingen radikaler zu werk und stellten ganz die politische rolle der schwarzen in den mittelpunkt ihrer deutung. in ihrem nachwort betrachteten sie den blues mehr oder minder als folklore im herablassendem sinne— ein ästhetisches phänomen, das das schwarze proletariat zwar thematisierte, aber nicht mobilisierte. sie kritisierten, jones spreche in wirklichkeit ‘jene gebildete minderheit einer schwarzen und weißen mittelklasse [an], die in künstlerischer sprache die konflikte zu verdrängen neigt, von denen doch die rede sein soll’ (sollors und weyergraf 1969: 299f). die autoren geißelten jones’ ‘kleinbürgerliche harmonievorstellung’ und ein ‘folkloristisches interesse an einem kulturellen nationalismus’ und forderten einen ‘revolutionären schwarzen nationalismus,’ der rassengrenzen übersteigen und sich gegen kapitalisten jeglicher hautfarbe richten sollte (sollors und weyergraf 1969: 308ff). auch manfred miller attestierte in seinem vorwort von 1981 dem verfasser, der schwarze kultur für per se fortschrittlich erklärt habe, eine ‘rassische’ position, weil sie die schwarze bourgeoisie nicht aus klassenbewusster haltung kritisierte, sondern wegen ihrer ‘anpassung an die weiße kultur,’ und die tatsache ausblende, dass pauperisierte weiße in den südstaaten ebenfalls ‘authentischen blues’ spielten (1981: o. pag.). radikale deutsche konterten die von black power in den mittelpunkt gerückte differenz der ‘rasse,’ indem sie die ‘klasse’ in den vordergrund stellten und damit den schulterschluss mit rebellisch gesinnten schwarzen aufrecht erhielten. angesichts der tatsache, dass die entscheidenden positionen in der schallplattenindustrie und auch in der jazzkritik von (fast ausschließlich männlichen) weißen besetzt waren, ist die entschiedenheit verständlich, mit der sich manche schwarzen jazzmusiker und die wenigen schwarzen kritiker im umfeld von black power gegen diese vormacht richteten. selbst wenn sie jene ‘white exceptions’ betrafen, die als jazzkritiker nicht nur selbst schwarzer kultur mit offenheit entgegentraten, sondern auch in der breiteren öffentlichkeit für sie geworben hatten (gennari 2006: 9). ernest bornemans deutung unterschied sich von den oben referierten positionen dadurch, dass er aus der warte der black-power-bewegung argumentierte, ohne das element der ‘rasse’ zugunsten der ‘klasse’ aus der welt zu definieren. gerade weil er ihren rassismus kritisierte, war es wichtig, den elfenbeinturm zu verlassen, sich mit ihr zu solidarisieren und sie zu einer siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 20 position zu bewegen, die von einem rassismus unter umgekehrtem vorzeichen abstand nahm. ‘wertfrei’ konnte jazzforschung nicht mehr sein (borneman o.d.d.). so it seems to me that it is my duty as a student of afro-american music to support the maker of afro-american music in his struggle for liberation, just as i consider it my duty to fight against all attempts to push jazz into a ghetto. the black freedom movement, with all its childhood troubles and inner dissensions, still remains one of the few hopeful, creative developments on the american horizon today. we cannot afford to dissociate ourselves from it. but we cannot afford, either, to keep silent out of mistaken tact where we see our black brothers stumble innocently into the same errors which have already cost us a good many battles in our own struggle for liberation. (borneman 1971–1972: 34) die ‘kinderkrankheiten’ bestanden, wie schon bei lenin, in einem radikal überzogenen verständnis eines tatsächlichen problems, hier der nach wie vor bestehenden rassendiskriminierung, die borneman seinem publikum in einem ebenso langen wie luziden historischen durchgang erklärte. diese kritik richtete sich implizit auch gegen leroi jones, der kurz vor dem erscheinen seines berühmten buches blues people (1963a) borneman massiv kritisiert hatte. jones berief sich in dem buch auf ihn, um zu belegen, dass afrikanische musik nicht, wie seinerzeit vielfach unterstellt, minderwertig sei.16 zu recht ist in der forschung bemerkt worden, jones habe sich auf borneman gestützt, um eine widerständige schwarzen kultur zu begründen (radano 1993: 26). er habe bornemans schriften sehr geschätzt, beteuerte jones, kritiserte ihn aber wegen seiner kritischen haltung zur zeitgenössischen jungen jazz-avantgarde. diese kritik bezog sich auf einen anfang 1963 in der ersten ausgabe der neuen zeitschrift jazz erschienen aufsatz des ‘contributing editors’ borneman, in dem dieser einige ‘jazz-mythen’ demontieren wollte. zu diesen mythen gehörte die vorstellung, der jazz der gegenwart müsse sich im zeichen des fortschritts von traditioneller ‘uncle tom music’ distanzieren (borneman 1963a). borneman kritisierte die zeitgenössisch modernen formen des jazz à la dizzie gillespie, sonny rollins etc., die gemeinhin als revolutionär betrachtet und im entstehenden black nationalism als sprache der befreiung gefeiert wurden. borneman: wenn die kunst erzeugende spannung zwischen form und inhalt verloren geht, weil allein die form in den mittelpunkt gestellt wird, dann wird die ihres inhalts beraubte kunst zu bloßem ornament. ‘most jazz is musical ornamentation—high class doodling. or intellectual doodling.’ (borneman 1963a) die von der jazz-avantgarde hochgehaltene abstraktion beinhalte keine für den jazz oder die gegenwart positiven werte. 16 zitate aus bornemans 1959 erschienenem text ‘the roots of jazz’ (borneman 1959b) in jones (1971 [1963]: 24f., 31, 42). siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 21 if you want to judge a jazz musician’s work, ask yourself not only how well he plays his instrument, how original he is (how different from others), but also what he has to say. ask the unfashionable questions: “what is he expressing?” “what’s the subject matter?” “what’s it about?” and you will find that the accepted jazz hierarchy falls into a completely new order. (borneman 1963a) für jones war borneman ein ‘aging liberal,’ und er forderte ihn auf: ‘mr borneman, listen to what you want to, and leave off with the diatribes, already. they’re very unbecoming from a man who has contributed so much in the way of intelligent writing about the music’ (jones 1963b: 23). die reaktionen auf bornemans artikel waren vielfältig, aber insbesondere diejenige von leroi jones verbitterte den 48jährigen und mag dazu beigetragen haben, dass er seine jazz-publizistik mitte der 60er jahre vorübergehend einstellte—‘mit einer gewissen resignation,’ wie berendt notierte (1977: 201). wenn jones borneman den vorwurf des ‘konservatismus’ machte, so war die linie zwischen traditionalismus und progressivität weniger leicht auszumachen als es auf den ersten blick scheinen mag. denn wo borneman das eigentlich relevante potenzial des jazz lokalisierte, in der traditionslinie des blues, wo er volksmusik war, sah jones eine veraltete, passive form, ‘onkel-tom’-musik, die der wilde artifizielle jazz überwand. hingegen war es gerade die blueslinie, die bei den jungen leuten in großbritannien auf einen fruchtbaren boden fiel und den britischen blues-boom der 60er jahre auslöste, worauf borneman sich in seiner replik auch dezidiert berief. auf der einen seite habe man die avantgarde der intelligenten und technisch brillanten jazzmusiker, die mit ihrer hochartifiziellen sprache nur ein kleines, elitäres publikum erreichen konnten, auf der anderen seite das erbe des rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll, twist und beat musik mit ihrem riesigen publikum, das völlig mit den produzenten der musik harmonierte: ‘here, as in the old days, you don’t have to explain anything’ (borneman 1965). wie in der malerei, so hielt borneman auch im jazz das ideal der abstraktion für formalistische spielerei ohne inhalt. tatsächlich ging der konflikt zwischen dem künstlerisch-revolutionären und dem volkstümlich-traditionellen quer durch die jazz-gemeinde, wie sich am beispiel der zeitschrift zeigte, in der dieser konflikt ausgetragen wurde. die spaltung verlief keineswegs entlang einer altersgrenze, wie jones suggerierte, denn nicht wenige der jüngeren gingen vom jazz über den blues zum pop über—ebenso wie die zeitschrift jazz insgesamt, die seit 1966 immer mehr über folk und rockmusik berichtete und sich 1967 in jazz-pop umbenannte. eine entwicklung, die der als wirtschaftsunternehmen gegenüber markttrends besonders siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 22 sensible melody maker aus kommerziellen gründen schon in den 50er jahren genommen hatte, gingen andere aus gründen der neigung, des kreativitätsgewinns und der massenkompatibilität im laufe der 60er jahre. später sollte borneman seine kritik an leroi jones noch erweitern. dieser stützte sich zwar auf bornemans forschungen, stellte aber dessen recht, sich überhaupt zu diesem thema zu äußern, in abrede. so jedenfalls sah es der autor von ‘black light and white shadow’: ‘those of us who have spent three or four decades studying black music and preaching its virtues to blacks who did not want to be reminded that they were black, are now being told by the children of those whom we taught that black was beautiful, to shut up and cultivate our own white garden’ (borneman 1971–72: 13f.). jones’ glaube an die ‘rasse’ als definitive kulturelle scheidelinie parallelisierte borneman mit europäischen rassenideologien und der südafrikanischen apartheid. keinesfalls war es die hautfarbe allein, die die gesellschaft strukturierte, sondern mindestens das zusammenwirken von ‘rasse’ und klasse, wobei auch schon die bedeutung der geschlechterunterschiede einfließt, wenn borneman im vorgriff auf seine 1975 erscheinende große studie zum patriarchat den männlichen chauvinismus des ‘rechten,’ muslimischen flügels von black-power anklagte. zudem reflektierte er den hier ebenfalls vorfindlichen antisemitismus, der sich auch gegen jüdische vertreter des liberalen establishments richtete, das sich besonders für die gleichstellung der schwarzen einsetzte. eben deshalb wurde es von den radikalen kräften als besonders gefährlich betrachtet wurde—weil es rassengleichheit propagierte anstatt separatismus anzuerkennen. ‘schwarz’ und ‘weiß’—derart grobe kategorien täuschten darüber hinweg, dass beide damit bezeichneten gruppen in sich derart vielfältig waren—ganz abgesehen von den zahlreichen zwischenformen –, dass sie so gut wie keinen sinn ergaben. fazit bei dem privilegierten zugang, den jazzkritiker zu schwarzer kultur hatten, ist häufig eine spannung zwischen offenheit und begeisterung auf der einen und der neigung zum rassenmystizismus durch überidentifikation auf der anderen seite zu beobachten. es ist, wie john gennari zu recht festgehalten hat, nicht leicht, der emotionalen komplexität gerecht zu werden, die aus diesem konflikt resultiert (2006: 8). ‘ich möchte wohl ein neger sein’: dieses bekenntnis, von dem 18jährigen borneman siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 23 niedergeschrieben am 12. juli 1933, nach seinen ersten vier tagen in london, reflektiert die spontane faszination, die die intensive begegnung mit schwarzen, das erlebnis ihrer musik und die bekanntschaft mit ihren politischen ansichten ausgelöst hatte (borneman 1933). nicht zuletzt waren james, padmore und kenyatta im begriff, das antlitz der welt zu verändern. in dieses sentiment mischte sich kritik an konkreten verhaltensweisen und anschauungen konkreter schwarzer. die emotionale identifikation mit schwarzer politik und kultur war gleichwohl schwer zu kontrollieren. borneman versuchte durch die einnahme einer analytisch-wissenschaftlichen position romantische projektionen zu überwinden. mit ‘rassischen’ eigenschaften hatte die musikalische qualität des jazz, anders als viele seiner anhänger meinten, nichts zu tun. sondern mit der spezifischen mischung unterschiedlicher, konkret zu untersuchender kultureller traditionen im karibischen raum und den usa, wo aus westafrika tradierte rhythmen eine wichtige rolle spielten. auch bei borneman sind gelegentlich essentialistische deutungen des schwarzen zu beobachten, aber sie bestimmten nicht seinen ansatz. dieser war dezidiert anti-essentialistisch. dass rassendiskriminierung aufgehoben werden musste, war selbstverständlich, die rassenspaltung eine politische tatsache, der entgegenzuwirken war. weil aber ‘rasse’ für ihn generell keine besonders relevante kategorie war, konnte es auch nicht darum gehen, ihre vermeintlichen gegensätze in einer höheren einheit aufzuheben. vielmehr zeigte er immer wieder, wie kulturelle verschmelzungen aus einer vielzahl von traditionen entstanden. ethnizität spielte eine gewisse rolle, aber nicht als genetischer faktor, sondern eher als bestimmungselement sozialer kohäsion. jazzmusik war im kern das, was borneman als ‘volksmusik’ bezeichnete: ‘musik des amerikanischen mischvolkes aus weißen, negern, indianern und anderen’ (borneman 1935). eine im gegensatz zur europäischsymphonischen tradition im kern ‘rassen’und klassenlose musik, der die zukunft gehörte. zwar war auch bei borneman das ‘volk’ kulturträger, aber auf sozialer, nicht ‘rassischer’ grundlage. dass er nicht daran glaubte, dass ‘rasse’ kulturstiftend sei, war vor dem hintergrund der holocaust-erfahrung, der jüdischen wurzeln in seiner familie und einer marxistischen grundhaltung nicht verwunderlich. es verdient angesichts seiner engen verbindung mit panafrikanischen intellektuellen, die er verehrte, dennoch beachtung, denn der grat zwischen der legitimen aufwertung einer aus ideologischen gründen nicht anerkannten kulturleistung und ihrer ‘rassischen’ begründung war siegfried ‘rasse’ und gesellschaft portal, vol. 12, no. 2, july 2015. 24 schmal. im gegensatz zu vielen deutschen intellektuellen der nachkriegszeit, die aus einem gefühl der benachteiligung oder einer vorgefassten korrektheitsvorstellung heraus schnell mit dem begriff des ‘schwarzen rassismus’ hantierten, hatte borneman die frage, wie sich ‘rasse’ und kultur zueinander verhielten, zum ausgangspunkt seiner forschungen gemacht. er bezweifelte, dass es so etwas gab wie eine ‘rassische entität’ namens ‘negro jazz’ (borneman 1963a: 7). das unterschied ihn von vielen anderen jazz-kritikern und -musikern, die das romantische bild des ‘edlen wilden’ aktualisierten, wie es durch die idealisierenden selbstdeutungen der négritudebewegung nur bekräftigt worden war. dass borneman nicht ‘colorblind’ war, verhinderte nicht seine enttäuschung angesichts der vom black nationalism vorgenommenen exklusion entlang der hautfarbe. literaturverseichnis berendt, j.-e. 1970, blues. gerig, köln. ______ 1977, ein fenster aus jazz. essays, portraits, reflexionen. fischer taschenbuch verlag, frankfurt am main. ______1981, das große jazzbuch. von new orleans bis jazz rock, 5., vollst. überarb. u. aktual. ausgabe, fischer, frankfurt am main. ______ 1995, ‘ernest borneman und die 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1945–1946, american negro music. a preliminary inquiry into the origin of ring shouts, ‘spirituals, work songs, blues, minstrelsy, ragtime, jazz and swing music,’ unpublished ms. ______ 1946, a critic looks at jazz. jazz music books, london. ______ 1947, ‘the anthropologist looks back,’ the record changer, august: 6f., 14. ______ 1948, ‘les racines de la musique américaine noire,’ présence africaine, no. 4, sommer: 576– 589. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/presa.9484.0576 ______ 1954, kalender, adk, eba. ______ 1957a, brief an pat brand, 19. februar, adk, eba. ______ 1957b, [selbstverfasste kurzbiografie], mai, adk, eba. ______ 1959a, ‘die kubanische volksmusik’ [radio ms.], bremen, april, adk, eba. ______ 1959b, ‘the roots of jazz,’ in jazz, (hrdg.) n. hentoff & a. j. mccarthy. holt, rinehart & winston, new york: 1–20. ______ 1963a, ‘some jazz myths questioned,’ jazz, january: 6–13. ______ 1963b, brief an jeffrey kruger, london, 25. juni, adk, eba. ______ 1964, ‘ninth german jazz 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1941, brief, student movement house appeal (mary trevelyan) an under secretary of state, home office, 18. juli, adk, eba. vian, b. 1999, œuvres. bd. 6, hrsg. v. ursula vian kübler u.a., fayard, paris. williams, e. 1961 [1944], capitalism and slavery. russell & russell, new york. ______ 1969, inward hunger: the education of a prime minister. markus wiener, princeton, nj. worcester, k. 1996, c. l. r. james: a political biography. state university of new york press, albany. wright, r. 1953, ‘introducing some american negro folksongs,’ présence africaine, vol. 3, no. 6: 70–75. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/presa.006.0070 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 18, no. 1/2 feb 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: kho, t-y. 2022. covid-19 and the corpse of neoliberal globalization: an intercultural view. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 18:1/2, 26–43. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i12.7720 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal general articles (peer reviewed) covid-19 and the corpse of neoliberal globalization: an intercultural view tung-yi kho corresponding author: dr tung-yi kho, research fellow, centre for cultural research and development, lingnan university, hong kong. kho.tungyi@yahoo.com doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7720 article history: received 11/05/2021; accepted 08/12/2021; published 25/02/2022 abstract the covid-19 pandemic is as much a process of globalization as it is its outcome. in the wake of the death, socio-economic devastation, and radical uncertainties it has unleashed, this paper re-examines globalization anew. this paper’s focus is on the role that neoliberalism has played in precipitating the covid-19 disaster, especially in the wealthiest nations of the west. re-visiting history, the paper takes issue with the rhetoric of globalization that had been sold as a project ushering in an interconnected global village exalting culture and community. against such exuberance, the paper recalls that globalization was a post-cold war project celebrating liberal-capitalism’s ‘triumph’ over state-socialism. it reveals globalization to be foremost about economic accumulation, not community edification. moreover, in the realm of ideology and policymaking, the past four decades have seen liberalism devolving into neoliberalism, and many national states becoming financialized corporate states. especially in the west, the liberal state has been captured and financialized. austerity—not redistributive growth—has reigned, engendering historically unprecedented social polarization which covid-19 has exposed and exacerbated. globalization, i argue, has served as rhetorical cover for the social destructiveness of ‘neoliberalism’. the approaches and outcomes of pandemic management in much of the west are a further indictment of neoliberalism. whereas ‘herd immunity’ had been the early de facto pandemic strategy of many neoliberal western governments, most of east asia a state-led commitment to ‘zero transmission’ and minimum casualties, leading to vastly different health outcomes. keywords covid-19; pandemic; globalization; neoliberalism; anti-statism; herd immunity declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 26 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7720 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7720 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7720 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal about:blank http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7720 we live in fundamentally uncertain and confusing times. covid-19, identified as being caused by the virus sars-cov-2, entered the global imagination when it was detected in wuhan china in december 2019 before it swept across the globe.1 it was stopped neither by national borders nor differences of ideology, creed, class, age, race, or gender, underlining the pandemic as a profound expression of neoliberal globalization, albeit of an unexpected and undesirable kind. in view of the deaths, border closures, lockdowns, quarantines, economic re-openings, and re-closings that have occurred due to the virus and the ensuing measures to contain it, the pandemic has disrupted our erstwhile practices—political, economic, societal, familial, and personal. in the process, it has laid bare the relations that had previously undergirded and sustained these areas of life. it is important here to note the distinction between the virus and the pandemic, not least its sociopolitical origins and consequences. the virus implicates biology, the science of life, whereas the pandemic that it has caused draws us into the realm of the social, societal, and cultural, in turn implicating the social sciences, epidemiology, sociology, anthropology, politics, economics, and ideology. my focus in this paper will be on the sociocultural and political realms, namely, the sociopolitical causes and effects of the pandemic and their ensuing cultural responses, specifically highlighting the cultural differences extant between the west and east asia. an important caveat about the terms, the ‘west’ and ‘east asia’, is warranted. these terms are deployed foremost as cultural—and not geographical—signifiers and should be interpreted accordingly. since the advent of modernity/coloniality ensured ‘east asia’s’ entanglement with the west (quijano 2000; latouche 1996), neither cultural zone should be thought to be culturally autonomous. to be sure, modernity ensured not only that the logos of coloniality would spread from the west to east asia upon their historic civilizational encounter, but that it would persist even after the end of formal colonization. nonetheless, despite the persistence of coloniality in east asia and the ensuing subjugation of its ways of knowing and being, this paper submits that a comparison of the management of the sars-cov-2 virus and its mutations in the west (exemplified by the u.s. and u.k.) vis-à-vis east asia (exemplified by china) discloses important cultural and civilisational differences still extant across these cultural regions. the covid-19 pandemic has exposed the structural fault lines that lie beneath what we may regard as ‘normal’ in our era of neoliberal globalization, perhaps more accurately termed globalized neoliberalism. the adjective ‘neoliberal’ is used here to distinguish capitalism as practised in the west over the past forty years from that which existed between the end of the second world war until the early 1970s upon the collapse of the us dollar-gold standard. between the end of the second world war and the 1970s, the economic regime that existed in the west can be described as a form of keynesian liberalism, a predominant characteristic of which was state-managed, fordist-industrial capitalism. it was against such a political and socio-economic context that neoliberal globalization emerged. i will offer here a critique of popular, celebratory accounts of neoliberal globalization by way of an analysis of the current pandemic. i submit that the predominant discourses celebrate globalization largely as part of the rhetoric of coloniality (mignolo 2007), the aim of which, indeed, is to conceal globalization’s colonial logics. the point that i am alluding to, in other words, is that despite its appearance of being ‘normal,’ globalization involves the perpetuation of coloniality on a global scale. this essay has been prompted by a recognition of the deep structural crisis confronting planetary life and, correspondingly, by my ambivalence about a return to ‘normality.’ indeed, despite our collective yearnings for a return to some semblance of normalcy after nearly two years of pandemic-related disruptions, it is past 1 the origin of covid-19 has become politicized and has been a source of heated contention since the beginning of the pandemic. the virus was known to chinese authorities in december 2019 but identified in january 2020. subsequently, there have been reports that patients in europe and the u.s. had been suffering ailments from a mystery virus as early as in september of 2019 (parodi and aloisi 2020; the straits times 2021). kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202227 time to reflect on what such normality means. are our societally and ecologically exploitative and extractive ways of life desirable? and if so, for whom? who gains and who suffers from them? is such a way of living socially and ecologically sustainable? the pandemic represents an obvious crisis of and for globalization as we have known it since the 1980s and presents us with an opportunity for contemplation and urgent cultural and societal transformation. i submit, following the scholarship of fei (1992), ames (2011), and zhao (2009), that the west and east asia have different cultural orientations, marked by an ontology of individualism in the west vis-à-vis that of a certain collectivism in east asia, which accounts for their contrasting pandemic responses. cultural orientations are not fixed nor pre-determined in any way. while culture certainly plays a significant role in distinguishing between the west and east asia, with strong individualism preponderant in the former compared with the more relational and role-bearing modes of being in the latter, it is important to note the respective socioeconomic institutions these cultural orientations engender (lee 2021). hence, i suggest that whereas radical individualism tends to be compatible with profit-driven political economies and wholesale adherence to neoliberalism, cultures weighted towards more relational socialities tend to veer towards stategoverned mixed political economies which mitigate against neoliberal excesses (hudson 2021a). i am by no means invoking cultural essentialism here. indeed, because of the malleability of culture, traditionally more collectivist and relational societies (e.g. china, vietnam) can choose to implement neoliberal policies as readily as individualistic societies (e.g. u.s., u.k.), allowing private (or market) forces to be preponderant over public (state) regulation. this has certainly been inevitable as a consequence of coloniality. nonetheless, current pandemic management practices in most of east asia, not least china, suggest that state control seems still to hold sway over market-determined ones. in what follows, i sketch the outlines of our pre-pandemic neoliberal global economy. i then discuss the pandemic and the various national—and, more importantly, cultural—responses to it. of pertinence here is the comparison of the pandemic management performances of the industrialized countries of the west on the one hand, with that of many east asian countries on the other. i conclude the paper with a brief discussion about the prospects of the four-decade old neoliberal world order. retrospect: neo-liberal globalization—or globalized neoliberalism—in the post-cold war era up until the sars-cov-2 virus emerged and unleashed its deleterious effects around the world, globalization had for much of the past four decades been celebrated by the mainstream media. this trend is well represented in the writings of the new york times columnist thomas l. friedman (1999), who held that countries hosting mcdonald’s franchises seldom went to war with each other. the champions of globalization proposed that as information technologies (it) proliferated, economic integration and cultural convergence would result, and humanity would be uplifted (ohmae 1990; friedman 1999; vangrasstek 2013). moreover, with the cold war ostensibly over, with capitalism triumphant over socialism, the world had supposedly arrived at the ‘end of history’ (fukuyama 1992). this phase of contemporary globalization had been in the making for some time. as early as the early 1980s, margaret thatcher (1984) had in the united kingdom already declared there to be no alternative (tina), as she committed to a position of corporate-led, free-market anti-statism, an economic programme of market fundamentalism that simultaneously found common cause with ronald reagan’s supply-side economics program in the united states. globalization was thus thought to be the fate of humanity, characterized by an anti-statist and freemarket orientation. with the dissolution of the soviet union and the fall of the berlin wall by 1990, followed by the induction of the people’s republic of china into the world trade organization in 2001, the expressed optimism in the globalized future was perhaps warranted. with just a handful of marxist-leninist/ kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202228 socialist regimes still standing (the people’s republic of china, north korea, cuba, vietnam, and laos), it was anticipated that the new information technologies would help transform the world into a ‘global village.’ cosmopolitanism was fashionable and associated with a certain progressive openness while the nation-state was considered parochial, closed, and smacked of a reactionary nationalism (friedman 2003). cosmopolitanism was thus thought consistent and pari passu with globalization. the latter was understood as the desirable global spread of market imperatives against nation-state attempts to regulate them. here, then, we see globalization identified with the ideology that nourishes and propels it: neoliberalism. in other words, globalization was neither a natural nor an inevitable phenomenon; it was the lovechild of a certain political ideology known as ‘neoliberalism,’ waged by the powerful and wealthy to buttress their interests against the overwhelming majority of the world’s population (see saad-filho and johnston 2005; harvey 2005). as saad-filho and johnston note, ‘neoliberalism is part of a hegemonic project concentrating power and wealth in elite groups around the world, benefitting especially the financial interests within each country, and u.s. capital internationally. therefore, globalization and imperialism cannot be analysed separately from neoliberalism’ (2005: 1).2 yet because contemporary neoliberal globalization is infused with colonial logics, it would necessarily involve modes of coercion that render it ill-suited to engendering human or societal well-being. this would make globalization appear to be at odds with the sanguine accounts propagated by its adherents, who highlight it as a boon to culture and community. since these seemingly mythical accounts are also the most popular, they tend to promote wishful thinking about globalization while eliding its most deleterious aspects (coloniality). these mystifying accounts therefore constitute what mignolo (2007: 449) has identified as the ‘rhetoric of modernity.’ such rhetoric is alluring because it inflates the benignity of globalization while concealing its neoliberal perniciousness. it is to the task of unpacking and unmasking this rhetoric that i now turn. decoding the rhetoric of globalization: does globalization edify culture and community? the popular account of globalization continues what the salvationist rhetoric of modernity began insofar as it performs the same obfuscatory function. i take issue with two obfuscations that reveal the conceptual confusions—constituting what is a categorical mistake—that the rhetoric of globalization trades on. i then show that owing to such a categorical mistake, it leads to misunderstandings of the phenomenon of globalization and also the perception of the social consequences of globalization through rose-tinted glasses. the reality is that the costs that globalization inflict are more severe and far-reaching in scope than such illusory optics allow. the early appeal of globalization in the 1980s and 1990s rested on specific myths. they include the following: (i) globalization invigorates community by creating a global-village and village-like solidarities. and, as a corollary, that (ii) globalization will—via its cosmopolitanism—generate a celebration of culture, particularly an appreciation for cultural diversity. instead of such presuppositions, i contend that globalization is neither about community nor cultural edification but is foremost an economic concern. additionally, i argue that the conceptual confusions inflicted by the popular globalization discourse have prevented an understanding of the actual and enormous societal costs the project inflicts. it is for this reason that i consider it obfuscatory to deploy the term globalization as a descriptor of international developments over the past few decades without modifying it with the adjective neoliberal, the ideology which informs it. after all, globalization connotes not only a sense of inevitability, but a certain benignity about it as well, especially after the end of the cold war. in other words, globalization is oftentimes a semantic choice which serves as a euphemism for neoliberalism, in large part as a cynical ideological move to hide the surreptitious 2 see (quijano 2000; mignolo 2007; kho 2017, 2009 for discussions on neoliberal globalization’s inextricable entanglement with ‘imperialism’ or, more aptly, ‘coloniality.’ kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202229 but societal assault which it involves (see saad-filho and johnston 2005; harvey 2005). of course, as covid-19 now propagates unfettered across virtually every contiguous national boundary—ironically as the very expression of globalization itself—these costs have been laid bare. hence, although the invocation of ‘global village’ as a popular metaphor for globalization seems appealing, it is at best a superficial half-truth that would suggest the metaphor to be misplaced. global interconnectedness can hardly be analogous to village-like intimacies. equally problematic is the uncritical conception of globalization as being virtuous by default, especially in the face of (commodified) universal cultural convergence, a phenomenon highlighted in tom friedman’s proselytization of mcdonaldization (friedman 1999). mcdonaldization is a motif that george ritzer (2015) picks up but takes in a more analytically critical direction. for ritzer, globalization is exemplified by a process of mcdonaldization, referring to socio-political-economic organization around the globe that increasingly adheres to the rationality associated with bureaucracy and capitalism. in other words, ritzer’s formulation of mcdonaldization sees the principles of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control by nonhuman technology, dominate social life worldwide. in equally critical fashion and invoking similar symbols of the popular culture, benjamin barber (2001) speaks of globalization as a process bringing into collision the worlds of jihad and mcworld, the forces of reactionary fundamentalism on the one hand, against those of integrative modernization on the other. while it is apparent that ritzer (2015) and barber (2001) were offering careful critiques of globalization as opposed to tom friedman’s (1999) venal apologetics, it was the latter which would prevail in popular discourse. the triumphalism of the ‘end of history’ spared no time for circumspection. yet it is now abundantly clear that the slogans deployed by the likes of a tom friedman to promote globalization have led to serious misunderstandings about its implications and impacts. there has never been any necessity for globalization to cohere with local concerns, for it was foremost about the exaltation of the capitalist economy and the coordination of world markets, not culture as such. bill clinton’s u.s. presidential campaign slogan of 1992 aptly captured the zeitgeist: ‘it’s the economy, stupid!’ tom friedman’s attempt to sell mcdonaldization as a boon for world peace should thus be understood as deliberate ideological mystification, a distraction from what was truly at stake, particularly for those societies confronted by the juggernaut of capitalist— and especially, american capitalist—culture via globalization. to cut through the mystification produced by such discourses one can, following ritzer (2015), ask: in its rationalising mode is mcdonaldization not a form of cultural evisceration and does it not signify cultural convergence? furthermore, does convergence here not imply cultural commodification? if so, are we not speaking of a fundamental political economic process instigated by powerful capitalist states and transnational corporations? is globalization not verily a euphemism for economic, cultural, and other forms of neo-imperialism, of coloniality all over again (quijano 2000; mignolo 2007; kho 2017, 2009)? these questions seem to affirm saad-filho’s and johnstone’s observation above that globalization, imperialism, and neoliberalism cannot be analysed separately from each other. indeed, i submit that they are cut of the same cloth, for it is coloniality—or colonialism’s logic—that undergirds them. as an extension of coloniality, it is little wonder that neoliberal globalization should proceed with global imperatives taking precedence over local ones, and that its concerns are foremost economic and not cultural. the project of neoliberal globalization is not committed to culture in the sense of acknowledging cultural differences around the world, nor is it attempting to affirm their right to exist. instead, intimately connected to the project is the subordination of all cultural phenomena under the aegis of capitalist economic logic, a logic that has in the last four decades taken on a radically more extreme hue than that which informed capitalism in the west in the post-second world war era. but if globalization is primarily about economics and not, as widely claimed, about enhancing community or cultural forms, what level of the social polity does it affect? who gains, and who is hurt by it? it is these questions that i now address. kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202230 globalization and the devolution of society into corporate oligarchy as an institutional phenomenon, neoliberal globalization has accelerated the interconnection of national economies within the interstate modern capitalist world system, a process which can arguably be said to have begun with the supposed ‘discovery’ of the new world some five centuries ago. it is worth nothing that while its present neoliberal incarnation has continued with such past trends, its key animating agents have been transnational corporations and their representatives. in recognizing the nature of this latest variant of globalization, it also becomes clear that the very nature and constitution of states militate against village sensibilities. yet the mass-media propagated message about globalization appears to have neglected this fundamental anthropological and sociological insight. in the eagerness to celebrate globalization, crucial differences between largeand small-scale social systems have been overlooked. key among them is the difference between gessellschaft (civil society) and gemeinschaft (community) as distinct social forms (tonnies 2001[1887]: 17). this has resulted not only in their erroneous conflation, but the concomitant failure to recognize the respectively different relationalities they imply. according to classical sociologists such as tonnies (2001[1887]), society was an abstract—rather than a natural— social form. it was collective existence brought under the rationalization of the nation-state and its laws to cement the impersonal social ties of its members. the latter were, in turn, rendered autonomous, rights-bearing individuals as they bore no prior organic relations with one another. in the absence of the traditional bonds of mutual reciprocity between community members, the conferment of abstract a priori individual rights appeared necessary to make mass-society—qua the nation-state—possible. since human existence, particularly in the west, was conceived to be antagonistic, a war of each against all a la hobbes (1997 [1651]: 78), it was believed that peaceable social relations and the enforcement of private property could be attained only via the state regulation of an individualistic, rights-based regime. yet, as such a rationalised notion of rights became the ubiquitous regulatory norm operating in virtually all modern societies, important pre-modern insights about our species have been obscured, if not wholly forgotten. arguably, modernity was a watershed event that signified a deviation from our selfunderstandings as relational, interdependent, and co-creative beings. and as the modern system of rights displaced the traditional community scheme of reciprocity, the world’s denizens inadvertently came to understand themselves as free-standing, atomistic, and autonomous social units (tonnies 2001[1887]). such was the civilisational and cultural revolution that constituted modernity, first beginning in the west with the late-sixteenth century reformation (toynbee 1946), then spreading to the rest of the world, giving rise to what is understood in tonnies’ formulation to be the displacement of ‘community’ by ‘society’ (tonnies 2001[1887]). late twentieth-century neoliberal globalization has thus represented the latest extension of these developments. it witnessed the reinforcement of nation-state processes on the world system on the one hand, alongside the consolidation of capital accumulation within and across it, on the other. and it is exactly because of such a demonstrable alliance between nation-states and capital that the primary motives and forces of globalization have irrefragably been both political and economic, prioritizing societal over community interests, the large-scale over the small-scale, gessellschaft (civil society) over gemeinschaft (community) relationalities (tonnies 2001 [1887]). but if the emergence of the modern, liberal state constituted an historically undesirable and unnatural social deviation from our communal pasts, globalization since the late twentieth century has been informed by practices even more removed from that past. i now turn to examining these practices and their logic to disclose how the liberal state has devolved into the neoliberal corporate oligarchy it is today. kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202231 globalization and its libertarian underpinnings: liberalism vs. neoliberalism fredrich von hayek criticised socialist central planning as a threat to freedom, arguing that the government takeover of economic decision-making and the economy was a sure way to totalitarianism (2001: 91-104). this doctrine would find a keen following in the lead nations of the west beginning in the 1980s, with thatcher and reagan becoming its most ardent proponents. in keeping with this libertarian doctrine, policymaking in the us and uk, and, increasingly, also around the world, would see the state’s traditional political and economic functions being ceded to the market, specifically private and corporate interest groups. set into motion, therefore, was not so much a government takeover of the economy as warned by hayek, but the converse: a corporate takeover of government. it is exactly because of such market and, specifically, corporate dominated trends in the global polity since the late-1980s that the past four decades can be described as neoliberal, involving the seizure and control of state power to bring about market-friendly economic ends (mirowski 2018: 122). the neoliberal project specifically aimed to turn society into a market economy and, as such, to depoliticize it. this was a posture thatcher had already alluded to, admitting ‘economics are the method, the goal is to change the soul’ (1981). against this backdrop, the conclusion of the cold war and collapse of state socialism were not just viewed in the west as portending socialism’s defeat; it also meant the defeat of the traditional liberal conception of the state. consequently, globalization since the early 1990s can be seen to involve a reordering of the world according to the interests of corporations, with the latter increasingly usurping the functions of nation-states. kapferer has noted that whereas the activities of corporations had in the past been constrained by state power, the neoliberal phase has been marked by the growing independence of corporations from state control (2005: 290). consequently, the power of corporations has exceeded that of states. not only are the world’s largest corporations wealthier than many states, as kapferer has noted: ‘they are assuming increasingly state-like potencies but without the obligations of the state’ (kapferer 2005: 290). their only obligation is to their shareholders—the global elite—to the singular goal of wealth accumulation. meanwhile, states have themselves been corporatized, re-made in the image of, and run as if, they were corporations. within the nation-state, public administration has been displaced by corporate management. in keeping with these neoliberal trends, national governments are expected to demonstrate fiscal responsibility and not spend more than they earn (kelton 2020: 9). ideally, they would deliver budget surpluses that are now regarded as unqualified virtues by governments worldwide. yet there is something misplaced about nation-states saving and accumulating money as an end-in-itself. the state, after all, is a unique institution bestowed with seigniorage, money-creating powers. seigniorage is therefore a characteristic of sovereign statehood, allowing sovereign states the capacity of money-creation to facilitate economic provisioning for their respective societies (mitchell, wray & watts 2016: 122). it would follow, then, that there is no necessity for the state to pursue a budget surplus in and of itself, for the state is in fact a public institution not politically analogous or comparable to a household or individual eking out an existence. rather, the sovereign state has the power to configure the terms under which a national economic system operates, including the issue of its own currency. seen from a macro-systemic perspective, money—or credit-creation—is the institutional mechanism by which the state initiates economic activity within its territorial boundaries (mitchell, wray & watts 2016: 130). when the state generates economic activity in this way, financing it with an infusion of money (credit) into the economy, a fiscal deficit necessarily results, for fiat money is, by definition, an iou: it is the state’s promise to pay. it follows that although predominant economic wisdom automatically casts government debt (fiscal deficits) as ‘bad’ it needs to be recognised that government debt in fact has an expansionary effect on the economic system. conversely, fiscal surpluses brought about by cuts in public spending (i.e. austerity) exert an opposite, contractionary, effect. in other words, balanced-budgets—much less, budget kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202232 surpluses—are not in themselves good. nor are budget deficits in themselves bad. these positions appear to be little more than the pervasive myths of libertarian thought, existing in its anti-statist, neo-classical, and neoliberal variants. in contrast, if the understanding of money was not distorted through such libertarian lenses but was taken for what it is—as a public institution by which sovereign governments deploy to grease the wheels of the economy—then a country’s fiscal position would not simply be judged as good or bad on the grounds of it being in surplus or deficit. determining a nation-state’s health solely on its negative or positive fiscal positions seems to miss the point about sovereignty and the fiat money that characterizes it: it is to succumb to a crude quantitative fetishism. just like a healthy library should not be judged by how full its shelves are but how many of its books are in circulation, the health of a national economy should be evaluated by whether the state’s fiscal behaviour meets the needs of its national economy and its participants. in short, money as a public institution is—and ought to be—a means to social, public provisioning. it is only via a libertarian distortion and the neoliberal capture of the state and its institutions that money has widely come to be fetishized, understood as an end-in-itself. i. the financialized corporate state fiscal austerity represents the corporate takeover of the state, amounting to the latter’s financialization, involving the financial-sector takeover of the state polity. indeed, this trend may be observed to have occurred throughout the globe, with the result being an application of rentier— and rent-seeking—logics to what were the traditional state functions of public-provisioning: healthcare, food, education, public utilities, and infrastructure.3 such financialization took root and expanded across the globe soon after the collapse of the bretton woods monetary system in 1971, when the u.s. dollar—as the world’s reserve currency—went off the gold-standard and became a fiat currency. this engendered the gradual, surreptitious takeover of wall street interests over those of main street, finance over industry, rents over profits,4 and the fictitious over the real economy (hudson 2021b). perhaps the financialization of the state and its policy-making apparatus should not surprise, for economists have long argued that the ability of financial markets to reflect realtime price changes attest to the supremacy of the market as the ultimate bearer of truth (mirowski 2019: 7-10). abetted by information technology, finance is thus the very embodiment of the exalted virtues of the market. ii. anti-statism, neo-liberalism, and neo-conservatism: western imperium redux? it is in this context that anti-statism has risen alongside the discourse of neoliberal globalization, especially in the west. such anti-statism is a historically longstanding feature of capitalism and is constituted by considering government social provisioning to be undesirable. kalecki identified the reasons for such anti-statism when writing about full-employment through government spending eight decades ago: ‘full employment would cause social and political changes which would give a new impetus to the opposition of the business leaders. the “sack” would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. the social position of 3 the noun ‘rentier’ and its associated behaviour of ‘rent-seeking’ is derived from ‘rent,’ a concept which exists alongside ‘profits’ and ‘wages’ in nineteenth century classical political economy. just like ‘profits’ and ‘wages,’ ‘rent’ is a class designation, signalling one’s social role in economic production and, concomitantly, one’s distributive share in accordance with it. in the socio-economic context of nineteenth century england, ‘rent’ was that which accrued to the landed aristocracy; it was that portion of national income that was paid out to the landlord class. yet it was often associated with unearned or unproductive income. a more generalised definition conceives of ‘rent’ as the difference between an economic activity’s market-price and its value (based on the necessary labour costs of its production). here, the notion that it is unearned or unproductive is again underscored. indeed, it is in this sense of being unproductive that financialization is invariably connected with rentier and rent-seeking behaviour. i am indebted to michael hudson for clarifying these concepts in conversation. see also: hudson 2021b. 4 kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202233 the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow’ (1943: 324). for these reasons, kalecki writes that ‘budget deficits necessary to carry out government intervention must be regarded as perilous; (1943: 323). the political economic reasons for anti-statism, in other words, are simple: (government) social provisioning not only crowds out private commercial opportunities; it blunts the disciplinary power that the captains of industry wield over the working population. however, the state-market, public-private conflict is seldom understood in such realist political economic terms but almost exclusively through an individualistic, rights-based libertarian framing. this libertarian orientation, encompassing both liberal and neo-liberal offshoots that spawn from it, tends invariably to frame the state-market conflict in terms of the state’s encumbrance of the individual and his or her attendant rights. the present neoliberal milieu thus witnesses a sustained critique of the state, which is thought to unduly interfere with individual choice. this anti-statist critique is sustained axiomatically: since government action disrupts market mechanisms it is inefficient and ultimately detrimental to society. a more strident anti-statism maintains the state (government) as an irredeemably oppressive institution that threatens individual liberties. in international relations, this anti-statist posture can be observed in western leaders’ expressions of disapproval against the governments of china, russia, iran, venezuela, cuba, and north korea, whose claims of sovereignty against western neoliberal domination (i.e. the washington consensus) typically result in their demonization. accordingly, the governments of these countries are routinely regarded in the west as authoritarian and dictatorial, in accordance with the prevailing liberal (and neoliberal) common sense. while these countries have strong state-regimes led by strong personalities—perhaps a necessity in the face of the tremendous political challenges they face—it is careless to equate neoliberal markets with individual freedoms on one hand, and strong states with authoritarianism on the other. certainly, such associations trivialise both the notions of freedom and authoritarianism. if strong and authoritarian national leadership should be considered problematic, it is equally pertinent to ask if neoliberalism’s global presence has not itself been the result of its own forms of coercion. indeed, it is worthwhile asking: to what extent has such nationalistic authoritarianism been a response to the global-scale neoliberal assault on nation-state and parastatal structures over the past four decades? additionally, does neoliberalism necessarily rule out coercion and authoritarianism simply because declarations about individual rights and freedoms have been built into its rhetoric? lottholz et. al., after all, note that, ‘“authoritarian” and “illiberal” framings are part of an orientalist and western-centric worldview that distracts attention from the discontents and violence inherent in capitalist modernity’ (2020: 421). are we complicit in conflating rhetoric with reality? it bears remembering that since the end of the second world war, western domination of the global polity has occurred through various seemingly multilateral institutions: the bretton woods institutions, the corporate-led world trade organisation (wto), and the direct military interventions of the u.s. and nato (north atlantic treaty organisation). in the latter instance, we observe a case of neoliberalism devolving into neoconservatism, with overt or covert military operations undertaken to engender desired western geopolitical outcomes.5 additionally, one must not forget the geopolitics of knowledge featuring dominant western knowledge institutions (e.g. media, universities, think tanks, and ngos) imposing eurocentric civilization on the world, whether in its judeo-christian, liberal, neoliberal, or neoconservative, incarnations. indeed, coloniality in the realm of knowledge has been necessary for maintaining the colonial 5 the relationship between neoliberal financialization and u.s. militarization, which u.s. neoconservatives advance unapologetically, can be explained by the hegemonic status of the us dollar as the world’s de facto reserve currency. the us dollar’s hegemony allows the u.s. state to issue treasury bonds or ious without constraint, permitting the u.s. government to finance its military budget (hudson 2021c) without the need to ever consider having to repay its debt obligations. us dollar hegemony—or the absence of an alternative global currency—ensures that the balance-of-payments (bop) surpluses of foreign countries (such as china) are re-invested in us treasury bonds, reinforcing the us dollar’s standing, in turn, perpetuating the said militarization. there is, of course, an inescapable irony residing in the fact that insofar as china has been the u.s’ largest creditor, channelling its bop surpluses into the purchase of u.s. treasury bonds, the chinese state has inadvertently been paying for its own military encirclement. kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202234 matrix of power (quijano 2000). as the history of western empire attests, this has been a trend since the sixteenth century, with neoliberalism and neoconservatism being but its latest incarnations. do these ongoing attempts by the west to make and re-make the world in its image not verily entail its own brand of authoritarianism, one that is imbued with universalist pretensions? despite the west’s much-touted opposition to any kind of authoritarian governance in its professed commitment to individual liberties, it is evident that its historic attempts to shunt the world towards an increasingly unilateral and unipolar (i.e. eurocentric) global world-order since the sixteenth century (which has persisted until recently), could neither have emerged nor been sustained without an authoritarian governing regime. instead, the contrary has been evident: world system domination has required that a veritable kind of authoritarianism be enacted on a world scale, to the extent that by 1941, 84% of the world had been colonized by the west (hoffman 2015). indeed, is the west’s (u.s. and nato member states and their allies) current opposition to the governments of china, russia, iran, cuba et. al. not verily an example of ongoing efforts to re-westernize the world? and do such attempts at re-westernization not arise from an apparent fundamental intolerance of anything but a judeo-christian, liberal-secular, neoliberal, or neo-conservative world order? is this not the democratic west’s attempt at totalitarianism, contradictions notwithstanding? or is such a variant of authoritarianism acceptable and beyond reproach for being derived from the exceptionalism of the u.s., its leading nation? living with covid vs zero-transmission: neoliberal epidemiology and its cultural alternative two years after the pandemic began scientists are still grappling with newer mutations of the virus. the latest omicron variant has underlined the immense damage inflicted by the pandemic on public health and economies. the levels of mortality, morbidity, and economic devastation that have ensued from covid-19 are obvious, even if their distribution has been uneven. in the u.k. and the u.s, two nation-states that constitute the vanguard of the neoliberal experiment, they have disproportionately claimed the lives of the indigent, elderly, infirmed, and essential workers. as the virus mutated, we observed similarly devastating trends in india in may 2021 (prashad 2021; roy 2021). while the pandemic has claimed the lives of over five and a half million around the world (as of 10 january 2022), the billionaire class in the u.s. saw a manifold expansion of its wealth within the first few months of it (collins, ocampo & paslaski 2020). in the meantime, government responses to the pandemic have been myriad. national strategies have included herd immunity at one pole and zero-transmission (or elimination) at the other, with various permutations in between. there is now considerable cross-sectional data allowing us to draw contrasts between the outcomes and relative efficacies of these different strategies table 1. covid-19, deaths per million of country’s population 12-sep-20 3-feb-21 13-sep-21 10-jan-22 usa 596 1378 2034 2573 uk 600 1586 1965 2194 sweden n.a. 1166 1441 1504 taiwan 0.3 0.3 35 36 japan 11 46 133 146 s. korea 7 28 46 118 source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/. kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202235 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (see, for example, oliu-barton et.al. 2021). although the available data is subject to interpretations and could easily be politicized, i contend that there is sufficient data to allow useful working hypotheses to be made. unlike most infectious diseases in the past, covid-19 has hit the rich countries of the west particularly hard. especially prominent is the u.s.a, topping the world in recording the highest number of infections to date. with just four percent of the global population, it has as of 10 january 2022 accounted for nearly 20 percent of the world’s total infections while also registering an extremely high number of deaths. table 1 documents the covid-19 mortality rates of some of the leading neoliberal nations such as the u.s.a and u.k. and compares them with those of the east asian nations of taiwan, japan, and south korea. the u.s. effort seems to have had many parallels with the laissez faire approach adopted by the u.k. and swedish governments at the start of the pandemic. indeed, the u.k. government was an early proponent of herd immunity, some variant of which the u.s. and some others in the west—including sweden (see dewan 2021) —have deployed as their de facto pandemic strategy. herd immunity is said to occur when the virus can no longer spread because it is constantly running into people who have developed immunity to it (world health organization 2020). in contrast to the u.s. and u.k., china, the world’s most populous country with 18 percent of the world population and the initial ground-zero of covid-19, had on 13 september 2021 accounted for only about 0.042 percent of the world’s total infections since the pandemic began. by 10 january 2022, china’s cumulative number of infections made up 0.0034 percent of the world’s cumulative total. this was a reduction from 0.085 percent on 3 february 2021, which was in turn a decrease from 0.30 percent on 12 september 2020. arguably, the chinese state has demonstrated its commitment, determination, as well as its capacity to control the spread of the virus by persisting with a zero-tolerance elimination strategy even as other countries have abandoned such a course in favour of the economy over the short-run. it follows that china’s covid-19 mortality rate on 10 january 2022 stood at around 3 deaths per one million, a striking contrast with all countries in table 1, including the east asian ones. if china’s apparent success at managing the pandemic somehow lacks credibility because of its authoritarian governing regime (green & medeiros 2020), one may consider the performance of other east asian nations such as taiwan, japan, and south korea, all liberal democracies firmly entrenched within the u.s. geopolitical orbit. although these east asian nations are liberal democracies in the mould of the u.s. and u.k., associating them on the grounds of their outwardly shared political forms can be misleading. it is more important to note that notwithstanding their apparently similar political systems, these east asian nations, including authoritarian china, appear to share a common, implicit statist-commitment to ensuring public safety. these statist commitments militate against the excesses of anglo-american neoliberalism and seem to explain the general adoption of zero-transmission or elimination strategies in east asia against the de facto herd immunity or mitigation approaches more commonly found in the west (freeman 2020, oliu-barton et. al. 2021). again, no cultural essentialism is being suggested here: east asian countries are as free to choose mitigation as countries in the west zero-transmission. for instance, new zealand and australia, two western nations with a considerable history of neoliberalism adopted cautious zerotransmission policies throughout 2020 and 2021 and were successful keeping infections and deaths down to a minimum. even then, despite its earlier successes, australia—led especially by its commercial centre of new south wales—has since late 2021 abandoned its zero-transmission policy in favour of a more laissez faire approach, with predictable devastating consequences (west 2022). as the pandemic persists and herd immunity has proven elusive due to the virus continuing to mutate into ever more infectious strains (delta, omicron), the discourse has shifted towards the virus being endemic. this has given rise to the policy of living with covid becoming the concomitant pandemic strategy (pearlman, cheong & huang 2021), which i discuss below. kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202236 the neoliberal corpse i have highlighted the chasm between the pandemic outcomes of east asia vis-à-vis u.s. and the u.k., the leading nations of the west, specifically to throw more light on the foregoing discussion of neoliberalism. i submit that the abysmal pandemic management outcomes in the west viz. east asia is an indictment of neoliberalism and its laissez faire, ‘personal responsibility’ approach to public safety and welfare. as discussed, the neoliberal fetishization of markets converts public goods such as healthcare into commodities, rendering them accessible only to those with the means to pay. furthermore, following ritzer (2015), a globalized neoliberal society is one which is subject to the rationalizing process of mcdonaldization; whatever is needed for its commoditized healthcare system is produced and distributed ‘just-in-time’ so as to ensure the minimization of costs while maximizing profits. but it is also because such a rationalized and privatized healthcare system creates rent-seeking monopolies that the u.s. has been judged by the world health organization to have the world’s costliest healthcare system while ranking 37th in terms of performance (who 2000; see also parramore 2021). it is also in adhering to these same neoliberal forces that the u.k. has taken a wrecking ball to its national health system (zapata 2020; pilger 2019; gill and mcfadyen 2019). yet the experiences of the u.s. and u.k. during the current pandemic have demonstrated the limitations of a privatized and rationalized healthcare system. a pandemic demands a robust state-public response that is not forthcoming from a just-in-time healthcare system that seeks the constant lowering of costs and efficiency gains. the aims of such a system are to lower costs and maximise profits, not save lives. hence, when deaths occur, they are thought to be inevitable. it is no surprise, then, that when measured in deaths per population, the u.s. and u.k. count among the worst-hit in the developed world. it is useful to recall that the u.s. and u.k are the historic birth-sites of neoliberalism and remain its vanguard today. of course, such outcomes do not have to be, save for an uncompromising commitment to neoliberal ideology and practice. how many more need to die in the service of an ideology that exalts the sanctity of individuals while materially denying them the very right to life?6 in faithful service to neoliberal ideology, governments eager to re-open their economies typically do so by reiterating that people need to work to live. indeed, this government position speaks to the desperation of the precarious who are characteristically confined to a hand-to-mouth existence. the claim of ‘having to work to live’ is as trivial as it is cynical, especially when coming from neoliberal governments, for it conveniently elides the fact that it is entirely within the political purview of governments to intervene in the interest of public welfare and well-being, be it in economic provisioning or health. the question of why people should be (rendered) so desperate as to risk their lives to make a living is seldom asked, much less addressed. perhaps this is understandable, for such a line of inquiry probes deep into the system’s structure and exposes it for what it is—a system of iniquitous expropriation that preys on the insecurities wrought by individualism. indeed, the justification for government safeguards in the public interest becomes all the greater in times of crises. yet such a social orientation generally seems to be lacking. because of our globalized neoliberal milieu and its resulting consciousness, today’s common sense determines that matters of personal welfare, whether livelihood or health, are one’s private affairs. furthermore, it is also a widespread belief that the individual is always free to choose. in a curious distortion, the neoliberal ideological doctrine of individual choice is augmented when states prioritise the economy over public safety and renege on their traditional governmental duties to safeguard public health. for example, individuals can be said to be exercising their 6 in march 2020, then democratic presidential candidate and now newly elected u.s. president, joe biden, announced his intention to veto ‘medicare for all’ legislation, maintaining the status quo. the standard pretext about ‘costs’ was offered for not doing the socially necessary and responsible, which this author has hopefully shown in the foregoing discussion to be hogwash. see higgins (2020). kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202237 choices effectively —to the point of being prepared to die for their decisions—when they return to the workplaces and schools that governments have re-opened despite the virus still spreading. yet what this appearance of individual choice-making has done is to essentially transfer the pandemic’s structural risks from governments onto individuals. such risk-transfer is in lock-step adherence with neoliberal ideas in that it absolves governments of the responsibility to underwrite public safety while it passes the pandemic’s dangers on to individuals. moreover, it is useful to note that these risks are not distributed equally but are unduly borne by society’s most vulnerable. such uneven exposure to the pandemic in the u.s. along the divides of social class and race have been highlighted in a brookings institute report, which note: there are numerous ways in which the burdens of this covid-19 have fallen disproportionately on less advantaged demographic groups. this essay highlights just one: the burden of continuing to work outside the home while the virus continues to spread through the populations is disproportionately born (sic) by lower wage, less educated, and non-white workers. (kearney & pardue 2020). similarly, a u.k. office for national statistics report highlights a similar correlation between social class and covid-19 mortalities in the country between march and may of 2020. it states: people living in the most deprived local areas, and those living in urban areas such as london, have been found to have the highest rates of death involving covid-19… today’s analysis shows that jobs involving close proximity with others, and those where there is regular exposure to disease, have some of the highest rates of death from covid-19. (windsor-shellard & butt 2020: 3). these findings about the u.k. have been affirmed by the even more recent report by the health foundation and the institute of health equity (2020) titled, build back fairer: the covid-19 marmot report. the report attributes the country’s high death-toll to: (i) ‘the governance and political culture’ that have ‘damaged social cohesion and inclusiveness, undermined trust, de-emphasised the importance of the common good’ (ii) ‘widening inequities in power, money and resources’ which ‘generate inequalities in health generally, and covid-19 specifically,’ and (iii) ‘government policies of austerity’ that ‘succeeded in reducing public expenditure in the decade before the pandemic … the effects were the regressive cuts in spending by local government including in adult social care, failure of health care spending to rise in accord with demographic and historical patterns, and cuts in public health funding’ (2020: 6). the explanations for the pandemic debacles of the u.s. and u.k. offered by these reports are in keeping with the critique of this paper. together, they are an indictment of the four-decade old project of neoliberal globalisation. yet while the covid-19 pandemic has exposed the corpse of neoliberalism, neither the ideology nor its acolytes seem willing to go quietly into the night. ryan laments the prospect of neoliberal continuity: ‘if neoliberalism … survive(s) this pandemic crisis, it also has the potential to become immune to critique and, quite fearfully, perhaps become even stronger’ (2021: 90). such fears appear justified. after all, as i have argued, neoliberalism’s individualistic—and, necessarily, anti-statist—posture continue to be embedded in the discourse of ‘herd immunity’ and of ‘living with covid’ (see kuldorff, gupta & battacharya 2020). and they seem to be gradually becoming official policy in much of the west and beyond, with highly vaccinated singapore being a notable southeast asian example (see ong 2021). the convergence between neo-liberalism, herd immunity and living with covid hardly seems accidental. with these ideas appearing to be nourished by a libertarian-derived individualism inherent to the heart of historical capitalism, they seem consistent with the priority for businesses to carry on as usual while the system culls those that it deems weak and dispensable. this is indeed the very idea of living with covid: to have everyone accept the possibility of dying from covid-19 doing all the things we did pre-pandemic. never mind about questioning the social, economic, and ecological sustainability of pre-pandemic life. for many national governments adopting such a narrative, the latest objective has been to get most of their kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202238 populations (60-80%) vaccinated. important a goal as that may be, they mostly regard vaccination alone to be the pandemic’s silver bullet, and, apparently, their only responsibility to public health. in keeping with the central thesis of this paper, i submit that the conception of sars-cov-2 as endemic and the concomitant strategy to live with covid represent the latest iteration of herd immunity arguments. they are similar insofar as they implicate the neoliberal desire not only to return to pre-pandemic business as usual but to minimise the role of the state in doing so. like no other comparable event in the recent history of the world, the extent of death and disease due to the covid-19 pandemic in the lead nations of the west has exposed the misanthropy that belies an unconstrained commitment libertarianism and its neoliberal offshoots. the project of neoliberal globalization has run its course. it is past time to consider other ways of being in the world. conclusion our lives, like our social systems, and our natural ecologies, are grossly out of balance. the covid-19 pandemic, and our institutional (non)responses to it, serve as an ample demonstration of this unbalance. my concern in this paper has been to take issue with globalization on one hand, and neoliberalism on the other, with the former serving as a euphemism for the latter. the rhetoric of globalization conceals the perniciousness of neoliberalism and its entanglements with coloniality. i have in this paper removed the veil that permits such a concealment, dispensing with the illusion that globalization consolidates cultures and communities. instead, i have highlighted the perniciousness of the underlying logic that fuels globalization. it is precisely in seeing past the wishful but illusory rhetoric of globalization and wishing to re-present things more accurately, that i submit the term neoliberalism to be more appropriate than globalization. given our deep civilizational crises it would seem necessary that we call things what they are. the logic of neoliberalism has constituted the central, operative dynamic that has shaped the globe’s social systems for over the past four decades. it is to neoliberalism and its libertarian-inspired cognates (e.g. individualism, freedom), popularised by austrian and chicago school free-market (neoclassical) economics since the 1970s, that i attribute the most dismal of government performances in managing the pandemic. it is unsurprising that neoliberalism’s vanguard nations, the u.s. and u.k., count to be among the worst performing governments in the developed world in managing the pandemic. in view of this, it seems reasonable to say that those governments still choosing to pursue neoliberal policies during the pandemic do so at the peril of inflicting utter destruction upon their societies. since such destruction will invariably be borne most heavily by the most vulnerable such a course of action would seem like an abdication of the traditional responsibilities of government. there should be no doubt as to why the wealthiest western nations have endured such gratuitous devastation and death in the face of the pandemic. i have here disclosed neoliberalism’s singular contribution to precipitating the social disaster before us. neoliberalism, after all, has involved the corporatisation of the state and its re-purposing towards market-friendly ends, a phenomenon which has manifested in the state’s financialization today. finance has been the essence of neoliberalism in that it embodies the supposed virtues of the market as the bearer of truth. abetted by revolutionary developments in information technologies, financialization has been the governing process and logic of the global system over the past four decades. and since one of the consequences of financialization has been the imposition of austerity on governments, we have observed states around the world cutting back on their traditional (liberal) function of public provisioning, sometimes abandoning it altogether to make way for private, corporate healthcare profiteers. whereas traditional state-sponsored health provisioning is based on the needs of a country’s population, for-profit corporate healthcare provision exists exclusively for the maximisation of corporate profits. the former is predicated on a notion of social reproduction and care and based on human need, whereas the latter on economic production based upon the proclivities of greed. in many areas of social kho portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202239 provisioning, we have noticed the liberal justification for the state increasingly becoming obsolete over the past forty years, snuffed out by neoliberalism, which is effectively the ideology of the rentier class. the cutback in national public health spending by neoliberal governments in favour of pro-market and profit orientation has meant that many nation-states have become increasingly vulnerable to pandemics and other public health crises. austerity, or for-profit healthcare is short-term in orientation, which militates against preparation for contingencies. certainly, maintaining additional capacity in the healthcare system— much needed in times of crises—is to be avoided in the interest of maximizing earnings and minimizing costs. such ill-preparedness in public health cannot be made more obvious than by the devastation wrought by the current covid-19 pandemic. perhaps it is exactly because of the failure of many neoliberal governments in the west—as well as non-west—to prepare for public health emergencies that herd immunity has been morphed into a convenient pandemic strategy in such countries. this is a contrast with the predominant state-sponsored strategies of many east and southeast asian governments. this herd immunity strategy has been deployed to provide convenient pseudo-scientific cover for a return to business as usual, while allowing the virus to spread. with the narrative of ‘living with covid’ now being popularized, the need for the appearance of scientific legitimation could soon become superfluous: living with covid, as with neoliberalism, is unabashedly social darwinian in character. for these reasons, i submit that herd immunity or living with covid is neoliberalism applied to the field of public health management. it can alternatively be termed ‘neoliberal epidemiology,’ which is an oxymoron. while epidemiology is a cornerstone of public health, its neoliberal expression is centred neither on the public nor on health since ‘there is no such thing as society’ a la thatcher. it is a strategy that seems committed to only the survival of the fittest individuals. if the weak are eliminated in due course, so be it. such is the perfidious ideology of neoliberalism. it is significant that the very same moral issues that have been exposed by the covid-19 pandemic are also at stake in the looming ecological crises and climate emergency: either ‘we’ solve it together, or not at all. there is no ‘self ’ without the ‘other’— no ‘i’ without ‘we.’ yet neoliberalism is antithetical to the notion of a shared existence. if the past four decades have been marked by neoliberal globalization, the epoch has surely been brought to an ignominious end by the sarscov-2 virus, in what is a quintessential unfolding of globalization itself. the neoliberal project is morally dead. covid-19 has displayed its corpse. it is time that it be entombed. acknowledgements i am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their generous comments on an earlier version of this essay. i am also grateful to nicholas manganas and alice loda for their editorial work bringing this essay to print. references ames, r. 2011, confucian role ethics: a vocabulary, the chinese university press, hong kong. https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctt1p9wqgm barber, b. 2001 (1995), jihad vs. mcworld. ballantine books, new york. collins, c., ocampo, o. & paslaski, s. 2020, ‘billionaire bonanza 2020: wealth windfalls, tumbling taxes and pandemic profiteers,’ institute for policy studies report, april 23. 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https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/herd-immunity-lockdowns-and-covid-19 https://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf https://www.thenation.com/article/world/destroy-britain-nhs-privatization/ https://www.thenation.com/article/world/destroy-britain-nhs-privatization/ https://doi.org/10.1177/0392192109102149 https://doi.org/10.1177/0392192109102149 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: dwyer, k. a. 2021. la vaca. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 152–154. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ pjmis.v17i1-2.7257 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal cultural work la vaca k. angelique dwyer corresponding author: associate professor k. angelique dwyer, associate professor of spanish, chair of latin american, latinx, and caribbean studies, gustavus adolphus college, department of modern languages, literatures and cultures, 800 west college avenue, st. peter, mn 56082, united states. adwyer@gustavus.edu doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7257 article history: received 19/06/2020; accepted 11/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract this creative non-fiction piece written in spanglish is called ‘la vaca.’ the overarching themes of this story are birth, motherhood, siblings and the creative force in a nonconventional american family raised in mexico. the narrative voice in this piece provides a unique perspective broadening dialogue(s) on mexican american identity. keywords gringos; motherhood; feminism; siblings; new masculinities; coatlicue every day i grow. i am mother nature. i am mother. una mañana, bien tempranito—i remember it well, because we ended up getting the day off from school—nos despertaron los gemidos de la vaca. it was ‘dark morning’ as el piti called it when he was little. we could hear the cow moaning, announcing the arrival of her calf. piti and i hurried to put our uniforms on for school and ran down to the barn. sebas and his dad were already there working the field. it was one of those daybreaks donde coatlicue usa el cielo de canvas para pintar con colores pastel. the sun wasn’t fully awake yet either, but its warmth and hope were well received by my mom and me who stood side by side in anticipation of the calf ’s arrival. el becerro nació y la vaca lo lamía, orgullosa. we all stood declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 152 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7257 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7257 mailto:adwyer@gustavus.edu http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7257 there watching the perfect picture of motherhood: la vaca con su becerrito. after only a couple minutes, the calf stood itself up, como tripié and began to nurse. lo que más me asombró sobre mi primera experiencia de parto—what a transition, right?—was that my body instinctively knew exactly what to do. nadie me dijo qué hacer, there was no: ‘push!’ continually yelled at me, like in the movies. it was my own body that naturally began to tremble, and tighten, and flow. fui de un gemir bajito a un staccato, terminando en un altissimo, similar al de aquella vaca. y fui yo quien le dije a las enfermeras que sentía venir a la niña. —‘are you having a contraction?’ the nurse asked me. ‘duh…’ is what i wanted to say as i huddled over, but instead just said: —‘she’s crowning,’ which led the nurse and doula to run and get a doctor. eran las cuatro de la mañana cuando llegamos al hospital. it was a full moon y todos los cuartos estaban ocupados. so, i started off in a small waiting room and then was moved to a birthing room with a tub, where i completed my labor, as suggested by my doula. it was the perfect labor team: el caribeñito, our doula and me. it was dark, quiet and the water was warm. each contraction got stronger and moved me to my core. birthing, i thought, is something that connects women throughout the ages, and i asked for their strength. i knew my mother, grandmother and great grandmother all gave birth many times. i mentally pictured the photo my mom has of our 4 female generations, and i asked for their strength as i brought a 5th female to join us and continue the legacy. la doctora entró and tried to fish me out of the tub because of hospital regulations. —‘common, we need to get you to the birthing table,’ she announced, thinking there were still a couple hours of pushing left. so, i got on my hands and knees in the tub, con la niña coronando. —‘¿la ves?’ le pregunté a su papá who tried to peek under the water. but, since the doula nor the staff spoke spanish, they simply pulled me up out of the water. hasta hoy día agradezco con todo mi fervor que nunca subí la pierna para salirme de la tina, because just then, my bungy-jumping-like, olympian-divinglike, ever-so-rebellious-like, spirited girl sprung out, being caught by six hands in midair. y así nació mi niña. as i look at my child thoughts of my mother echo in my mind. ‘precious girl,’ whispered into my sleepy ear. ‘niña linda’ le digo a la mía. i remember my mom holding me in her arms while we both showered. bonding skin to skin, woman and girl. that special human connection. can there be anything more pure? i saw a film a couple years ago, una guatemalteca, de una madre quiché que baña a su hija que está embarazada: tres generaciones cuidándose entre sí. women caring for women, past and present. way before the slogan ‘walk in a woman’s shoes’ could have had any meaning for my brother, he wore them home. en aquellos tiempos teníamos una combi blanca alemana con orange and black checkered curtains and upholstery. we were driving home late on a sunday evening after a primera comunión in poncitlán. back in those days taking the brecha was the quickest way to get home, but it was also the darkest. no había postes de luz ni nada por el estilo en esos terrenos, so when the van broke down and dad couldn’t fix it no había de otra más que irnos caminando hasta la casa. the first half hour was like watching an oral reenactment of my parents performing the clash’s ‘should i stay or should i go.’ shortly thereafter, it was established that… ámonos, was the verdict. so, we all just walked in the pitch darkness, bien catrines: peinados y perfumados, we walked home in our best shoes with sore feet del bailongo que ya nos habíamos echado. la señora linda, a tall and attractive lady, had on her best gray 80’s heel pumps. after managing to dwyer portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021153 walk half of the way up hill through the dirt and gravel, she needed to stop. and just like that, piti took off his size 10 sneakers and wore my mom’s heels all the way home. little did i know then, as we reached home in the bliss of daybreak, the importance of raising men who understand women. years later, when i birthed a second time, my fish boy came to me. the sweetest boy a man could be, con el corazón tierno y la disposición abierta. named after a rebel and a city, but answers to dogs and flows to the rhythm of the sea. as i did some freelance curricular work teaching spanish for veterinarians, i searched for images of birthing cows, and remembered that day. no hay mañana como esa, ¡no la hay! y como dice la criada de gone with the wind: ‘the best times are when babies are born,’ no importa si eran mis gatitos, los cachorritos de la vicky, el becerrito de aquella mañana, when i find birds in a nearby nest, or, best of all, when it’s my own nest full of niños, sobrinos y cuentos. dwyer portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021154 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 18, no. 1/2 sep 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: ghosh, d. 2022. silence, exile and cunning: concealment and worship at the holy infant jesus church, bangalore. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 18:1/2, 125–137. https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis. v18i1-2.7877 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal research article (peer reviewed) silence, exile and cunning: concealment and worship at the holy infant jesus church, bangalore devleena ghosh corresponding author: honorary professor devleena ghosh, school of communication, faculty of arts and social sciences, university of technology sydney, 15 broadway ultimo nsw 2007, australia, devleena.ghosh@uts.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7877 article history: received 02/07/2021; accepted 02/09/2022; published 27/09/2022 abstract in the context of escalating religious tensions in india, sites that still openly welcome practitioners of different belief systems or encourage a propensity for interreligious ritual engagement face a range of complex challenges. at the holy infant jesus church in bangalore, there is a shrine set aside for people of non-christian religions, both hindu and muslim, who view this deity as a jagrata or ‘awake’ god who responds to the ‘desire’ of the supplicant, granting boons and wishes. despite the contemporary hardening of boundaries and the quest for religious purity, this site exhibits the persisting appeal of ritual engagement across religious boundaries. the consequence of such engagement is not always open connections or dialogue but rather concealment (silence), cunning (skill) and exile (creating of a liminal space to enable syncretic practices from others in the supplicants’ communities). against this background, this paper explores the following questions: is religion a site of interaction rather than of intra-communal withdrawal? is religious synthesis now threatened by multiple quests for religious purity? why are some syncretic practices more resilient than others and how do people engaged in such practices make sense of what remains and what is lost? keywords religious syncretism; indian christianity; hinduism; islam; jagrata 125 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7877 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7877 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:devleena.ghosh@uts.edu.au https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7877 prologue in this article, i borrow the words of stephen dedalus who chooses ‘silence, exile and cunning’ as weapons to defend his quest to be a writer in james joyce’s a portrait of the artist as a young man (1992) to explore the ways in which religious pressures and political differences in india in the last decade re-shaped the public spaces where, previously, religious boundary crossings had been common. i discuss the ways in which majority community (hindu) access and use of a christian religious space (the holy infant jesus shrine) led to minorities, in this case, muslim, to use similar weapons to enable behaviours that might have been unacceptable to their own communities. setting the scene it is a hot and muggy thursday in the it city of bangalore. i pick my way through small hillocks of garbage into a narrow street lined with various stalls. the first shops are those selling meat; the visceral sight of hanging carcasses gives way to cheap clothing, then religious offerings of flowers and garlands and last of all temporary stalls with miscellaneous flimsy objects that might be picked up for a song. the street in all its dirt, business and squalor contrasts with the large edifice in the compound opposite it, the blue and white church dedicated to the holy infant jesus. the church is well kept, the paint meticulous and the compound obviously swept and mopped on a regular basis. there is a massive chariot on the left which is used to ferry the image of the infant jesus around bangalore on the major feast days. it is impressively, if gaudily, decorated and resembles closely the giant chariots of the jagannath temple in puri. i am not visiting the church, however. my destination is the building on the right, the shrine to the infant jesus that is open to people of all religious persuasions who believe that a particular set of rituals as well as visits on thursdays can effect miracles and grant boons. inside, it is cool and dark and very crowded. there is a large statue of the infant jesus high up on the wall opposite the entrance with the epigraph ‘the more you honour me, the more i will bless you.’ on either side and lower down are two smaller versions of the statue. men and women mill around these smaller images, jostling to put garlands around their necks, or incense and candles at their feet. there is the murmur of numerous indian languages, kannada, tamil, bangla and hindi. it is like a confluence of the diversity of india. this polyglot environment seems appropriate to bangalore, a city which, in the twenty-first century, symbolises the aspirations of the new global india, while simultaneously lending itself to the designs and orientations of global capitalism. it takes pride in its flexibility, new technical workers and embrace of elitist global lifestyles. integrated into the circuit of global capitalism, the city and its landscape, identity, orientation, and its key actors have been appropriated and altered to suit the needs and regimes of the new flexible capitalism. the employees of the hyper-new modes of production in the dazzling edifices of the it companies in electronic city are serviced by the myriad spaces of consumption: gated residential communities, vast, sparsely populated malls displaying global brands of consumer goods, international food chains and luxury cars. unlike hyderabad, delhi and mumbai, bangalore, until recently, could boast a salubrious climate. the mounds of garbage on the way to the shrine of the infant jesus, however, point to the fact that the infrastructure of the city, long neglected, has collapsed under the weight of the now voluminous population and traffic. stagnant drains, unpaved sidewalks, pitted roads and crowded streets become the bane of an aspiring international city (vasavi 2008). it is vastly different to the city i first visited in 1992 when i was woken by the clip-clopping of horses being exercised by the army, down hundred feet road. these signs of global lifestyles are uneasily linked with the larger social and economic realities of the city. bangalore is the destination for large numbers of migrant workers, not only from within karnataka, but from further afield. the beauty salons are staffed by women from the north-east, migrant workers from all ghosh portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022126 over india work in garment factories or as domestic labour. at the same time, new-age spiritual gurus, like sri sri ravi shankar, have set up their bases on the outskirts of bangalore, and their devotees, both indian and foreign, throng the ashrams that combine aspects of resorts and therapeutic centres with spiritual abodes. for ordinary people in india, sites of pilgrimage and shrines are an integral part of life. worshippers stop by them steadily throughout the day, marking them as dynamic spaces, replete with the power of faith, not leftovers from the past. diana eck writes that ‘there are so many tīrthas (pilgrimage sites) in the sacred geography of india that the whole notion of “sacred space” as somehow set aside from the profane is cast into question. in hindu india, sacred space is so vastly multiplied that there is little untouched by the presence of the sacred’ (eck 2012: 76). these spaces, she writes, are created not only by priests and sacred literature, but also ‘by the countless millions of pilgrims who have generated a powerful sense of the land, location and belonging through journeys to their hearts’ destinations’ (eck 2012: 76). according to srinivas (2006: 321), there are several ‘accretions of change’ in the embedded and experiential world of popular religion. she argues: in the changing, competitive and multisectarian field of urban sacred landscapes in india, [priests, both hindu or christian] act as “religious entrepreneurs” and agents of change to create “dynamic” adapted rituals that enable innovative approaches in order to expand their devotee base. the restructured and revitalised rituals lead to the invention of a “new cultural grammar” that allows a reinterpretation and contextualisation of the language of traditional ritual to suit the needs of “modern” devotees. (srinivas 2006: 321) the clergy of the infant jesus church have adapted their devotional grammar to accommodate thursday visits to the shrine by devotees of non-christian religions. examples of these adaptations are the acceptance of the presentation of garlands and sweets and the procession of infant jesus in a chariot in january, both of which have hindu antecedents. it is in this context that the shrine of the infant jesus flourishes. it is a location of aspiration, a space of desire, a destination that promises everything that its devotees need or want. the migrant worker, the it expert, the domestic help, the young urban professional, all congregate at this point to hope for those things that might not accrue to them in the normal processes of their lives. the shrine is a place where one’s religious, class and ethnic identity are immaterial. all that a devotee needs is an unshakeable belief in the infant jesus; all devotees are equal at this shrine, a liminal space between religious belief and worldly aspiration. in india, over the last three decades, various communities have vehemently protested apparent or real disrespect of their religious beliefs, whether criticisms of personal and civil codes, caste discrimination or the status of women. such hostilities between communities do not necessarily reflect only past experiences but also emerge out of contemporary situations. thus, the context of any particular event is constituted of a multiplicity of factors. if this is the case, how do communities deal with sites that are presently locations of multi-religious rituals and beliefs? how does past conviviality transform in the face of contemporary hardening of boundaries? how do worshippers deal with the history and context of such sites in the continuing political present? in this article, i analyse a site of shared worship to illuminate the contradictory and contested nature of boundary crossing. ways of worship every thursday, the deccan herald, the local newspaper of bangalore, has many paid testimonials of ‘thanksgiving’ to the infant jesus of the viveknagar/ijipura shrine for fulfilling various petitions (narayanan 2004: 23). it is clear from the names on these testimonials, and those on the shrine’s website, that the ghosh portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022127 petitioners are mostly hindu and christian who are expressing gratitude for jesus’s help in solving domestic or professional problems or for receiving a boon (hawley & narayanan 2006: 6; thanksgiving notices 2020). the infant jesus church is a very popular shrine dedicated to the infant jesus of prague. the parish and shrine are relatively recently established in india’s religious landscape, founded in the late 1960s. no one really knows when non-christians, especially hindus, began to come in large numbers or why they chose this particular church rather than another. large numbers of devotees attend the nine thursday novena masses and the seven sunday masses. the church serves a primarily tamil speaking community, but also has masses in seventeen other languages. the official foundation story of the church and shrine is that, in the mid-1960s, a parish priest saw a rose garden and thought that it would be a good place for a church: one day as the parish priest was walking; he entered a garden in somanahalli. it was a wellmaintained rose garden. he was impressed. “if only i could get this land for the church,” he wondered. “oh! how nice it could be.” but then, he felt that it was impossible, because over a lakh of roses were exported per week from there. (infant jesus church, history) according to narayan, ‘after saying a cycle of nine novenas daily to the infant jesus of prague for two months, his wish was fulfilled and the land bought for the church’ (2004: 23). the father at the church in 2015 confirmed this story and pointed out that roses, of course, are sacred to mary. he added some unofficial stories which were more mundane and less symbolic. a priest sleeping in a hut on the site heard a baby crying for seven nights running but could not find the infant. he then had a dream in which the infant jesus told him that he was weeping because there was no church on the site. in 1969, a foundation stone was laid but permission to build a church on the site was only acquired after a series of supposed miracles, all of which happened on thursdays. several other miracles have since been reported and the shrine sees itself as another lourdes. this narrative is immediately emotional, emphasising the ‘infant’ nature of jesus and the personal and direct nature of his intervention; the feelings of empathy for him as a baby needing/ desiring attention and evidence of his willingness to respond to that need provides the basis for the universalist appeal of the shrine. this jesus is not the jesus in agony on the cross or christ resurrected; this christ child is like the mischievous baby krishna or the child murugan (narayanan 2004: 3). the votive practices resonate with the ones in hindu temples or in local dargahs. a shop run by the church, as well as a set of open stalls and small covered shops, sell stainless-steel and silver oil lamps, such as those used in hindu rituals, candles, cassette tapes and pamphlets. i also saw menorahs for sale. the church is approached through narrow streets, studded with the piles of garbage which are a perennial sight in bangalore. there were crowds, colour, noise, butcher’s shops, clothes stores, stands of flowers, a tamil song playing ‘wondrous child, yesu’ loudly in the background. the words seemed familiar-very pious but sharing in the common idiom of hindu piety rather than being uniquely christian in tone (narayanan 2004: 1). the shrine’s motto, ‘the more you honour me, the more i will bless you,’ is a peculiarly instrumental attitude to prayer; it resonates, however, with a common strand of indic religions. devotion is seen as a transactional relationship to god which in turn provides the blessings of good fortune and prosperity and the latter are among the goals of spiritual life. landy (2020) recounts an incident where two women were praying in the shrine for the return of properties they had lost when a nearby slum was cleared to make way for the construction of a new shopping centre. the women had brought their title deeds to infant jesus for examination. they pointed out that, among the pictures of politicians on a large poster facing the shrine, seeking blessings from the infant jesus, was the very politician who had been discovered taking huge bribes from the wealthy and displacing many poor people. he had, they claimed, ‘illegally demolished their homes,’ but police were preventing the return of the inhabitants (landy 2020). i heard similar stories many times at the shrine; students about to sit for examinations came with books to be blessed by the infant jesus; a couple who wanted to buy an apartment brought the purchase ghosh portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022128 documents for infant jesus to approve; a young man applying for jobs brought the advertisements he was considering to infant jesus for perusal. sight (darśan) and touch (pranāma) associated with hinduism appear to be crucial at the site and is an example of the adaptation of christian godhead to hindu practice. the corporeality of seeing and touching are intrinsic to a real and tangible apprehension of the divine. the saint or deity and the devotee must both be in sight of each other. another essential component is the haptic one—to touch marks both respect and corporeal connection. both catholic and hindu worshippers touch the feet of the religious statues in the hindu sign of devotion. consequently, many churches have been putting their images of saints and deities behind glass barriers to discourage dirt and the touching by devotees. as mentioned above, at the infant jesus shrine, there are two small images whose feet may be touched while the larger, central image is placed higher and so may only be seen. at the base of the statues, there are small dishes, heapings of salt, peppercorns, coconut shards or other sweets. the shrine is busy every day but the crowds desiring darshan of the infant jesus on thursdays snake all the way out of the doors and into the covered veranda. hindus of all castes and walks of life, as well as christians, prostrate themselves hindu-style before the infant jesus, offering garlands or lighting candles. they ask for boons. another common practice is the hindu style shaving of the heads as an act of piety. they also dedicate votive images, another popular practice in hindu temples, muslim dargahs, and other christian shrines in south india. i was reminded of the milagros i saw being offered at shrines to the virgin de guadalupe in mexico. people seeking cures from diseases can buy pieces of silver etched with images of the ailing parts of the body from one of the many vendors near the shrine and place them in the offering box. these votive images are not just limited to body organs. those who wish to acquire houses, cars or motorbikes offer etchings depicting these images. students buy models of pens or carved books to dedicate to the infant jesus to ensure that they get good results in examinations. another shrine notable for these practices is the basilica of our lady of the mount or mount mary church in bandra, mumbai, a church which claims that miracles are performed on its site. non-christian worshippers conceive of these customs as a kind of sympathetic magic, bringing their piety and practice with them (narayanan 2004). i saw many examples of the offerings in 2015 and 2016 in a large room on the first floor of the shrine that is dedicated to their display. when i went to the shrine for the first time, i heard a devotional song, kuzandha yesuve saranam, that repeated the word saranam or refuge. other devotional songs repeated this trope: jesus, saviour, lord, lo, to thee i fly; saranam, saranam, saranam; thou the rock, my refuge that’s higher than i: saranam, saranam, saranam. devotees who attend the infant jesus shrine might go to a dargah, hindu temple or mosque for similar devotional reasons. particular sites of the ‘other’ religions may possess an inherent ‘power’ or shakti, similar to many other sacred places in hinduism. hindu pilgrims often call these places ‘jagrata’ or ‘awakened’ and my interlocutors repeated this word. this power or shakti comes from the fact that the deities at these particular places are awake and responsive to the pleas of their devotees. this trope of the waking god is reinforced by the narratives of miracles performed there and by all the other devotees who flock there with the same hope. their deity is a font of strength and pity, a divine being who is beyond earthly desires but understands them and rewards those who are still caught in the mundane world of maya. as narayanan (2004: 9) says, divinity is both generic and specific; it may appear in many sacred places, but is particularly powerful when, as in the form of the infant jesus, it is local. people who come to the shrine of the infant jesus are acutely aware that this is a christian place of worship but they do not think that they are betraying their faith by their attendance. the infant jesus shrine is near the sai temple and my hindu interlocutors knew the difference ghosh portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022129 between the two and many went to both on the same day. they instinctively believed that there was spiritual power in particular spaces which transcended institutional identification and categories. narayanan concludes that ‘it is perhaps this feature that distinguishes many hindus from their christian neighbours who may live and participate in a diverse, pluralistic society, but theologically be connected exclusively to their own deity’ (2004: 28). religious crossings or trojan horses? the christianity of madura under the jesuits was indeed disguised idolatry. except that the image of the virgin mary was worshipped in the temples and paraded upon the cars, there was little change in the old ceremonies and processions of hindooism. there was the same noise of trumpets and taum-taums and kettledrums, there was the same blaze of rockets and roman candles and blue lights, there were the same dancers, with the same marks of sandal-wood and vermilion on their naked bodies. (kaye 1859: 3) as veena das comments, ‘shifting ideas of sovereignty, public order, and the new pressures generated by the diversity of religious groups within a single polity, bring certain anxieties (e.g. about conversion, religious freedom, or public order) within the public domain even as these processes at the level of the state become the conditions of possibility for new kinds of boundaries to be drawn around groups’ (2013: 75). her research in ten low-income urban neighbourhoods in delhi, made obvious that social relations extended beyond one’s own community so that there were many quotidian ways of connecting to the presence of the other in one’s social life. hindus and muslims living together produced certain kinds of sociality in these areas, though events with potential for hindu-muslim conflict—such as the destruction of the babri masjid or the pogrom against muslims in gujarat in 2002—affected seriously the relationships between these local communities. das found that the residents of these areas developed strategies to deal with such moments of crises and that hindus and muslims inhabited the same social world in a mode of agonistic belonging rather than in complete peace and harmony (2013). or, as ashish nandy says, sometimes relationships between communities ‘can stand enormous asymmetries and even the strange or esoteric cultures of other communities, because these are not seen as humiliating but as peculiarities of these communities’ (nandy 2010). i interviewed hindu, christian and muslim worshippers at the infant jesus shrine in bangalore over a period of six years. all claimed that it was a place where they felt welcome. they visited the shrine and participated in mass public rituals such as the chariot procession without any obvious signs of disagreement. did this apparent amity signify a particularly harmonious approach specific to that shrine? or do worshippers at the location take a conscious or unconscious decision to keep silent about a plethora of disagreements concerning both the sacred and the profane? does this lack of conflict conceal deep differences in social, political and moral values, in attitudes to co-existence, community relationships and personal connections, or is it das’s agonistic belonging? is it possible that the ‘lack of disagreement’ stems from the fact that the space of the shrine is public? maybe the ritualised nature of some of the events (for example, the chariot procession that i describe below) allows participants to stick to circumscribed roles, whereas more unstructured mingling with the potential for spontaneous interaction might have created opportunities for disagreement. these questions are fascinating though i have no clear answers. in 2014, before the election of the current government in india, i spent two weeks visiting the infant jesus shrine and talking to the priest there, father m.a. the father was an erudite man who told me the various myths that surrounded his sacred site and, when he found out that i was interested in syncretic practices or ritual crossings, became voluble. ‘lots of hindus come,’ he said. ‘they sometimes come and see me to ask for advice or prayers. i often give them copies of novenas and bibles. they say that our infant ghosh portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022130 jesus is more powerful than any other god that they have encountered.’ he smiled when i asked him if there were muslim visitors as well. ‘not as many as the hindus,’ he replied. ‘but they do come. most of them have some personal, some domestic problems. they are not happy in their lives or their families. some come and talk to me and ask me for advice, what to do. i try to help. they are not christians but all are human beings. we help them all.’ this spirit of amity was visible during the festival day for the infant jesus in early january of 2015, in the ratha yatras or chariot processions. thousands assembled to watch the image of the infant jesus in richly decorated robes ride in the ornate wooden chariot around the roads of prosperous viveknagar pulled by several hundreds of devotees. i watched as these impressive vehicles were carefully serviced and fitted with new parts. a busy laneway fronts the church with vendors selling images of the infant jesus—produced in much the same style as a baby krishna. at a quick glance, it would be hard to distinguish them from the images of gods at hindu temple festivals. in recent years, such celebrations have increased and father m.a. expressed pride that the devotees attending the festival were increasingly from all religious groups. by 1989, the magazine frontline reported great enthusiasm for chariot festivals at temples (waghorne 1999: 97). it noted, ‘the pomp and splendour and pageantry of the car culture has an appeal to christians and muslims also ... a hindu institution, the car festival through the centuries has influenced other religionists too thus serving as a symbol of “unity in diversity”’ (ganapathi stapati 1989). this annual chariot procession is loved and attended by the roman catholic community of the holy infant jesus church as well as hindus. these outward manifestations of faith make a claim to the public space of the city through their progress through the streets as well as ‘exhibit god/s in public on the uncertain periphery of their domains. everyone is invited to come together in these public streets at the borders where all worlds meet. the very site of the procession is a shared public space where no single deity or religious tradition can claim clear title’ (waghorne 1999: 96). waghorne (1999: 99) further comments that shared forms of public ritual may not imply a shared theology, even though they may use a common religious idiom. this idiom, like the chariot, rather than blurring the distinctions between the god/s who ride them, ‘serves to stress difference’ (waghorne 1999: 99). in the cool month of january, devotees of various faiths know that the infant jesus is established on the chariot pulled through the street and not a hindu god like the jagannath of puri. however, this infant jesus contains within him a multitude of deities, inserting christianity into the indian world of spectacle. church rituals in india nowadays often include hindu religious customs such as chariot festivals or displaying a ritual flag. in the past, the catholic clergy in particular maintained strict boundaries between christian and non-christian rituals but since the mid twentieth century, the church promoted accommodation with local religious practices and inculturation was accepted as enabling converts to transition more smoothly to their new religion. this was a response to anti-conversion feeling in india which increased steadily in this period. it is a matter of speculation as to whether the enthusiasm for these chariot processions is because devotees of different religions seek shared spaces for worship in contrast to new resurgent religious movements within india wishing for a subservience to hindu nationalism. the answer to the question above is mixed. tensions have arisen in the last five years or so, with militant hindus arguing that missionaries were using ‘hindu’ or ‘local’ customs as trojan horses with the covert motive of conversion, deliberately misleading the unsuspecting pilgrim or devotee. the hindus to whom i spoke were most comfortable when christian rituals were differentiated from hindu ones. they were uncomfortable, for example, with indian/hindu forms of music and dance being used to teach the gospel. they felt that saffron clothes for nuns and priests, yoga, sanskrit epithets, or calling jesus or god by the name of local deities, and vegetarian food on feast days were ways to smuggle christian teaching into nonchristians via a shrine that was supposed to be open to all religions. they claimed that they had always disapproved of such specific ritual crossings but they ‘never talked about it.’ ‘no one does,’ they said. one ghosh portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022131 said, ‘it is better to keep quiet but we tell our friends and children that we enter the shrine as hindus and leave as hindus.’ on the other hand, some christians at the shrine expressed both dismay and a tinge of resentment at what they saw as a hindu takeover of the site and its rituals. they were proud that their divinity pulled in so many from other religions but were both puzzled and resentful of the increasingly loud and divisive hindu rhetoric in the public sphere. the last time i spoke to father m.a. he looked old and tired. i asked him about the shrine and its visitors and his response was defensive and brusque, very different from our conversation four years earlier. the same priest who, in 2014, spoke of muslim women who had consulted him on the best novenas to say for certain boons had apparently forgotten this on my visit in 2017. he strongly asserted that the clergy at the holy infant jesus church were definitely not converting anyone or giving out bibles. ‘yes, hindus come to the shrine,’ he said, ‘but that’s their business. we don’t interfere, we don’t even talk to them.’ ‘but,’ i said, ‘i thought they came to you for advice and reading material?’ ‘no, no, i tell them to go to their own priests and if they want reading material they can buy it in the shop.’ ‘how about the muslim women?’ i asked. ‘i don’t know,’ he said irritably, ‘i don’t keep watch.’ ‘don’t they come to see you anymore?’ i asked. he closed the conversation by saying, ‘look, we don’t try to convert anyone. if someone is interested in the infant jesus, we tell them to buy information booklets from the shop—or whatever else they want. i don’t like talking about this, it just leads to suspicion and ill feeling. everyone is welcome here, that’s all i have to say. and we’ve told our congregation, leave the shrine to the others. you have the church. go to the church and pray to the infant jesus. he will give you all you need.’ silence, exile and cunning: looking for the elusive muslim other i will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as i can and as wholly as i can, using for my defence the only arms i allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning. ( joyce 1992: 191) at the time i was doing my fieldwork, the presence, indeed the dominance, of hindu worshippers at the shrine was obvious during my many visits there. yet, all my interlocutors told me that they had seen muslim women at the shrine. they were not sure if muslim men came but they knew about the women because they wore the all-enveloping burqas. many said that they came very early on thursday mornings. others said the muslim women came in the afternoon, which made sense as this was a period of lull from domestic work. i visited the shrine at various times, early on a thursday morning, in the afternoon, later at night. i didn’t see anyone in a burqa or a hijab. my random conversations with people every day highlighted this trope. yes, there were muslim women who visited; they hadn’t been seen for a while but my informants had seen them recently, or a few months ago, or last year. one winter afternoon in 2016 as i was sitting outside the shrine with my recorder, deciding on my next interviewee, i saw a group of seven or eight young women, dressed in casual modest clothing, laughing and chattering at one of the doors to the shrine. they were toting large bags and had clearly come from college. they didn’t seem to be accompanied by family and my interest was piqued. i went up to talk to them. the women were college students and were at the shrine to ask the infant jesus to grant them good results in their forthcoming examinations. out of the eight, three were hindus, two christian and three were muslims. the latter were very reluctant to be recorded, so i took notes. i have called them layla, nusrat and niloufer for this essay. layla and nusrat used to come with older female family members to the infant jesus shrine until the latter stopped visiting a few years before. ‘why?’ i asked. ‘our family and community don’t like it anymore,’ they replied. ‘they say that it is a christian shrine but it has idols.’ niloufer said that her father considered it a christian place of worship dominated by hindus and not welcoming or proper for muslims. nusrat’s ghosh portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022132 mother said that the last few times she visited she felt uncomfortable, as if the other devotees were staring and talking about her. she felt disturbed, somehow. the pressure to abandon the shrine was relatively recent and came mostly from men in their families and male community leaders. the shrine was no longer seen as a safe space in which to worship; rather it now represented a dual sign. it was a christian place of worship; it was dominated by hindu worshippers. the very characteristics that had given the space its shared and welcoming ritual aspects had become unstable. i asked if the older women in their families who used to visit the shrine missed those experiences. all three agreed. yes, they said, they did miss these early thursday morning visits. besides, nusrat confided, her aunt’s boons had all been granted. her son had found a good job and her daughter had given birth to a son. according to layla, her mother just liked coming here. it was spiritual and welcoming, she loved just sitting here quietly. she had a few problems at home; conflict with her mother-in-law. she liked getting away from that. but now layla’s father and grandfather had forbidden her to come. when asked why they themselves continued to come, the answers were confused and contradictory. all three admitted to peer group pull; other women in their group at college frequented the shrine and so did they. they were also influenced by their female family members’ positive memories of the shrine. clearly, though this was not fully articulated, the shrine represented a space away from the constrictions of family and community. niloufer, the most vocal of the three, said, ‘there is so much we are not supposed to do. my mother fought hard to make sure that i went to college. i want to be a fashion designer but i have to wear a burqa to and from my (girls’) college.’ nusrat added: ‘i had to fight to go out with my friends after college and, even so, i have to be back by a certain time every day. i like coming here and i pray to infant jesus that my father gives me more freedom.’ ‘anyway,’ added layla, ‘jesus is a prophet for us as well. so there is really nothing wrong with it; it’s like praying to a saint. it’s just a nice time to spend with our friends and pray for what we want.’ ‘do you always get what you want?’ i asked. niloufer laughed. ‘oh no, some boons are granted, some not. but i think that those not granted are boons in disguise. infant jesus knew that they would not be right for me.’ ‘obviously, your family and community know nothing about this,’ i said. all three burst into giggles. ‘oh no! that would be terrible. we go somewhere after college on thursdays to take off our burqas and come here. no one knows who we are or that we are muslim.’ one of them added, ‘we keep dupattas (scarves worn with the churidar kurta by both hindu and muslim women) over our heads of course.’ but after a moment, their christian friend said to nusrat, ‘i think your mother and aunt know. the last time i popped into your house, they asked me if i still went to the infant jesus shrine and whether i would pray that you did well in your exams.’ layla becomes quiet for a bit, looking off into the distance. ‘you know, i think they may suspect. but i don’t think abba wants to know. as long as i don’t go out late, say my prayers, and all that stuff, he just doesn’t ask.’ nusrat adds, ‘and my cousin knows. he covers for me sometimes. he doesn’t see any harm in it. he says, “it didn’t do any harm when amma visited regularly; in fact i got a good job after all their prayers.”’ the visits by these muslim women to the infant jesus church open up contradictions in the way in which religion is conceptualized in modern india. there is no desire for the dramatic rupture of conversion, breaking with the old and a wholescale adoption of new beliefs, practices, social networks and sources of authority. rather than a rejection and repudiation of their old beliefs, this is a partial openness to the other bolstered by the fact that it is part of their (female) family tradition. elements of this other (‘jesus is also our prophet,’ ‘i just like sitting here quietly’) are selectively adopted and adapted in the context of the different logic and values of their own cultural and religious systems in the encounter. maurus reinkowski uses another term, ‘crypto-religion,’ to designate the religiosity of people whose ‘real religious views are not in accord with their official religious affiliation and who frequently may seek to hide this fact from the broader public’ (2007: 409). this is not the case here. layla, nusrat and niloufer remain devout muslims. their ghosh portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022133 secret visits to the infant jesus shrine are rather a supplement that they do not wish purified out of their belief systems; something excess to islam rather than other to islam. in his classic essay, ‘the secret and the secret society,’ georg simmel analyses secrecy by discussing the telling of untruths. lying is the basis of all social interactions and the give and take of knowledge. simmel posits that the secret is a ‘consciously desired concealment’ which enables the retention of power. keeping secrets means that group cohesion is maintained as the social distribution of knowledge is managed and restricted. secrecy is intrinsic to the networks of society, especially to the technologies of power and control (1950: 312–317). in relation to the muslim women’s visits to the shrine, the fashioning by these visitors of their own social and religious practices is crucial. for example, how do this group of women parse their intersubjective domains of secrecy? what if these visits are part of a ‘public secret,’ one that most people in their community or family know, but no one is willing to speak openly? michael taussig’s idea of public secrecy in defacement: public secrecy and the labour of the negative (1999) offers ways to examine the relationship between public secrecy and transgressive boundary crossings. taussig deploys elias cannetti’s argument that ‘secrecy lies at the core of power,’ positing that the sacred can be produced by both defacement and concealment (cannetti 1984; taussig 1999: 7). the revealing of a familiar public secret is transgressive and dramatic; and its power lies in the fact that, paradoxically, the public secret is maintained by an active notknowing. this is why the ‘secret’ requires periodic disclosure and then concealment so that the potential for re-enchantment is renewed. liminal spaces and boundary crossings depend on public secrecy to exist as well as enable and subvert the regimes of power. these processes of revelation and concealment connect public secrecy to local history and politics. all the women in the group talked about how their visits to the shrine cemented their friendships, and the non-muslim women were careful not to give their muslim friends away. whether hindu, christian or muslim, the girls worked together to maintain the secrecy around their visits. the social and psychological dynamics of secrecy both complicated and cemented their relationships. the attendance of muslims at the shrine is a public secret. christians and hindus claimed to me that muslims visited the site, but they did not personally know any who did so and they could not introduce me to any. the relationship of these muslim women to the site is open to polyvalencies and ambiguities since uncovering and concealment are an intrinsic part of the logistics of power in their own community and the larger society. while everyone assures me that muslims go to the shrine, the visitors keep themselves concealed, setting up a public secret, which is invoked at particular moments of crisis or conflict in the context of interfaith politics. revelation and concealment are hinged on the perception that such crossings are now increasingly shrouded in silence. through these visits to the shrine, layla, nusrat and niloufer were trying to express themselves as freely as they could in their limited circumstances using the only weapons they had: silence, exile and cunning ( joyce 1992). the group maintained silence and secrecy about their visits. layla, nusrat and niloufer found in their clandestine attendance at this christian site a space of temporary and self-chosen exile from the restrictive milieu of home and community, a means of securing a measure of autonomy as their lives became increasingly circumscribed by the patriarchy in their own communities and the hardening religious boundaries of india. the muslim women who earlier came to the shrine wore burqas. layla, nusrat and niloufer wear them to college and take them off before visiting the shrine so that they are shorn of obvious religious markers. the putting on and removing of obvious muslim markers is a display of strategy to enable them to continue their visits. the shrine becomes a liminal space where a suite of transgressive practices and public secrets are revealed only through the attempt at concealment. it enables plausible deniability. they know what not to know. ghosh portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022134 the end and the beginning karnataka, where this fieldwork was undertaken, banned the wearing of hijab/burqa in schools and colleges some months ago (ellis-peterson 2022). this ban was upheld by the state high court (dhillon 2022). these events imbue the recounting of my narrative above with melancholy for times lost. in my fieldwork, i can see the foreshadowing of the breakdown in relationships between majoritarian hindu governments in india and minority communities. it is incumbent on me to state that it is very likely that the conversations and friendships i reported might not be possible under the current dispensation in india. my fieldwork attempts to illuminate the nuances of the ‘religious’ relationships between worshippers and this site. historically, hindus associated christianity with hospitals and education; this is less true in the post-colonial era where the state has entered, however partially, the area of healthcare and education provision, especially for the poor (narayan 2004: 22). religiously, according to narayan ‘while hindus might enthusiastically participate in certain rites … in some christian places of worship, and for specific reasons, they certainly do not participate in many other practices and do not frequent all churches’ (2004: 22). in the social context, while hindus might have a cordial relationship with the christian management of their children’s school or have good christian friends, in the current era of hindutva politics, they might not approve of some of the conversion rhetoric and strategies utilised by christian missionaries (narayan 2004: 22). on the other hand, for muslims, this form of concealment, according to kent ‘is a direct result of the same processes of cross-cultural encounter, conflict and mutual influence that give rise to conversion and syncretism’ (2011: 700). it is often motivated , she adds, ‘by starkly unequal power relations,’ both within the muslim community and the larger hindu majority society, resulting from persecution or the threat of it for those who ‘opt out of the dominant religious worldview’ and endeavour to maintain their own views or compromise between two otherwise irreconcilable worldviews (kent 2011: 700). romila thapar contends that we should be wary of projecting onto the past what emerges from the experiences of the present (2004: 230). by the same token, we should not conflate present harmonious co-existence with the absence of dissonance. in this article, i have explored the relationships that various communities have with the infant jesus site, asking whether the apparent amity exhibited at the site is an exorcism of past differences or whether this is a withdrawal from discussion and dialogue and a retreat to silence. i have also discussed attempts by some muslim visitors to the site to negate offence to their own communities, and to the majority communities, by deploying various strategies that i have called silence, exile and cunning. since my last visit to the infant jesus church, there have been many popular movements against attempts to marginalise minority groups in india. there have been protests against government instruments such as the citizenship amendment act (caa) 2019, which offers citizenship to hindus, sikhs, christians, parsis, buddhists and jains, who arrived in india before 31 december 2014 to escape religious persecution, but excludes muslims facing persecution in, for example, myanmar. soon after the reading of the act, a group of muslim women began occupying a patch of street at delhi’s shaheen bagh, registering their protests against the act and the proposed national register of citizens. the sit-in protest made national headlines and became a focal point of resistance for people of all religions and classes, unfolding across the country. the protest site was replete with images of gandhi and ambedkar, the poetry of faiz ahmad faiz and street theatre and performances. the protesters withstood months of vilification. this sit-in was attended by grandmothers, women and families with children and women were at the forefront till the demonstrations were forcibly dispersed by the government. besides opposition to their marginalisation in their own country, these muslim women made a powerful and poignant claim to their rightful place within the imaginary and the idea of india. it is interesting to speculate whether these claims made an impact on the views of muslim women who covertly visit the shrine of the infant jesus. did the performance poem by syeda umme ghosh portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022135 kulsum quoted below resonate with their secret resistance to internal and external, family and community pressures? i am a daughter of hindustan i put vermillion on my forehead i cover my head when the azaan sounds i spread my hands at the dargah i fold those hands at the temple i am a daughter of hindustan. 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doi.org/10.1515/9781503617131 waghorne, j. p. 1999, ‘chariots of the gods: riding the line between hindu and christian in south india,’ in popular christianity in india: writing between the lines, (eds) c. dempsey & s. raj. suny press. albany: 11–37. vasavi, a. r. 2008, ‘brand bangalore: emblem of globalising india,’ in multiple city: writings on bangalore, (ed) a. de. penguin books, new delhi: 264–267. ghosh portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022137 https://doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1535 https://doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1535 https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004158221.i-507.81 https://doi.org/10.1080/00856400601031948 https://doi.org/10.1080/00856400601031948 https://churchwonders.com/india-churches/infant-jesus-church-and-shrine-bangalore-india/thanksgiving-notices/ https://churchwonders.com/india-churches/infant-jesus-church-and-shrine-bangalore-india/thanksgiving-notices/ https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503617131 https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503617131 ohashiformatportaljan2009 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. ‘the space between: languages, translations and cultures’: special issue edited by vera mackie, ikuko nakane, and emi otsuji. issn: 1449-2490: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. natural conversation reconstruction tasks: the language classroom as a meeting place jun ōhashi, university of melbourne introduction key concepts in postcolonial discourse, such as pratt’s ‘transculturation’ and ‘contact zone’ and bhabha’s ‘third space,’ have influenced the goals of second/foreign language education in europe, the u.s.a. and australia.1 the goals of l2 teaching and learning have shifted from ‘communicative competence,’ which aimed at native-level competence,2 to ‘intercultural competence,’ which develops a cultural position in order to mediate the learners’ cultures and the cultures of the target languages (crozet and liddicoat 1999). in studies of colonial interactions, it has been noted that conquered or colonised peoples retain considerable agency in determining the extent to which they absorb elements of the dominant culture in which they must live; the version of the dominant culture that they adopt is, to a significant extent, one they have created themselves. pratt (1991: 523) recognised and promoted this form of agency with the term ‘transculturation,’ originally coined by the cuban ethnographer fernando ortiz in 1940 to describe cultural interactions and new cultural formations between the spanish and african background communities in cuba.3 pratt observed that transculturation is at work in everyday situations, such as are found in classrooms, as well as in broader social contexts. pratt also uses the idea of ‘contact zone’ to 1 second language and foreign language are not distinguished here. the term l2 (second language) is used throughout the paper. 2 ‘native-level competence’ is used here, rather than ‘native-like,’ which is commonly used in the studies of second language acquisition and applied linguistics in general. the assumption that speakers attain complete communicative competence as so-called ‘native speakers’ simply through birth or heritage has been challenged through the observation of experiences of diaspora and migration. 3 ortiz used the term to conceptualise changes in identities that arose through evolving social contacts, from ‘hostility and suspicion through tolerance to cooperation’ (1942). ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 2 draw attention to the cultural contact points that develop between communities. such zones are highly mobile, are not geographically fixed, and have a temporal aspect: ‘“contact zone” is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect’ (pratt 1992: 7). this notion is particularly relevant in australia, a multicultural society where migration and diaspora are significant features of the national cultural landscape. in other words, the contact zone is a useful concept for understanding any society where people with different ancestral roots are living together, and thus negotiating and co-constructing their multicultural identities. the ‘contact zone’ is the place where, for example, conversationalists negotiate and develop hybrid cultural forms and identities. it also has clear similarities with bhabha’s ‘third space,’ in which a dynamic process of identity formation denying ‘primordial unity or fixity’ is possible (1994: 37). like the ‘liminal stairwell,’ a related concept from bhabha, the ‘third space’ is an in-between place, an ‘interstitial passage between fixed identifications [which] opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy’ (1994: 4). these notions of ‘transculturation,’ ‘contact zone’ and ‘third space’ emerged from postcolonial discourse to inspire scholars in a variety of fields, including leading second language pedagogues in the u.s.a., europe and australia (kramsch 1993; byram 1997; crozet, liddicoat & lo bianco 1999; liddicoat et al. 2003, to name a few). the adoption of such concepts has led to a shift in the goals of l2 teaching and learning from ‘communicative competence’ to ‘intercultural competence.’ as pegrum argues: ‘intercultural competence deemphasises the acquisition of a native-like identity and encourages the learner to carve out a ‘third place’ (kramsch 1993) from which he or she will be able to negotiate and mediate between the native and target cultures’ (2008: 137-138). adapting the notions of transculturation and third space in l2 education the need for the shift towards emphasising intercultural competence in the second language classroom has been discussed by zamel (1997:350) in terms of its potential to empower the decision-making of l2 learners. this approach can make allowances for the cultural variations associated with l1 and l2, promote ‘intercultural competence,’ and give prominence to the learners’ own generative and inventive choices. in applying pratt’s discussion of transculturation to creative writing in esl contexts, zamel highlighted l2 learners’ agency in adaptation, and dismissed traditional assimilation and acculturation ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 3 models of learning that assume a need for those learners to conform to so-called ‘native speaker’ norms. zamel thus celebrates her students’ diverse linguistic backgrounds and their contributions to redefining the objectives of language teaching. as she states: ‘variation of language and rhetoric, precisely because of their diverse perspectives and their startling, unexpected effect, can enrich our reading and transform our definition of what it means to be a better writer’ (1997: 347). zamel’s argument is concerned with esl and teaching and learning creative writing, but it is certainly also applicable in oral communication in l2 contexts, as part of the search for what it means to be a good communicator. the leading pedagogues who have promoted intercultural language teaching (kramsch 1993; byram 1997; crozet, liddicoat & lo bianco 1999; liddicoat et al. 2003) use the term ‘third place’ in the context of l2 pedagogy. this term is semantically linked to the ‘third space’ conceptualised by bhabha (1994), but in the context of language teaching it refers mainly to the l2 learning context as a symbolic ‘meeting place’ where l2 learners of various cultural backgrounds open their minds and freely explore interculturality, thus potentially transcending their cultural boundaries (crozet, liddicoat & lo bianco 1999: 13). as crozet and liddicoat put it: ‘the third place is not a fixed point which will be common to all learners, rather the nature of the third place is negotiated by each user as an intersection of the cultural perspectives of self and other’ (1999: 181). transculturation takes place in the space between l1 and l2, where l2 learners strive to find their new hybrid identities. liddicoat et al. (1999: 181) argue that the idea of ‘developing a third place between the native linguaculture and the target linguaculture, between self and other,’ should be promoted in intercultural language learning. the notion of the third place where transculturation takes place helps us move away from the assumption that one language has one culture, and, by extension, homogeneous and static patterns of behaviour and values. it also challenges the assumption that where two cultures meet, often in the context of native and non native speakers’ conversations, the inevitable result will be dissonance, misfit, miscommunication and conflict. such a view has been influential in studies of intercultural and interethnic communication (shea 1994: 357), and indeed in interlanguage and crosscultural pragmatics studies.4 4 ‘native speaker judgment’ has been used to highlight and problematise l2 learners’ non-native speaker-like performances. a study by eisenstein and bodman (1993), for example, included japanese background speakers’ responses to a discourse completion task, which asked: ‘what do you say to your friend who offers to lend you $500?’ two uncorrected examples were: ‘thank you very much. i hope you won’t have trouble with this. i'll return it as fast as i possible’ (184); and, ‘i’m sorry. i’ll always remember the debt of gratitude’ (74). the ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 4 the recognition of the third place in the context of second language education empowers learners, because it shifts the purpose of l2 teaching and learning from native-level production of the language, which disregards the learners’ l1 and their preferences, to the ‘intercultural competence’ with which learners make choices that exceed cultural boundaries in intercultural contexts. those who have been exposed to contextual understanding of other cultural ways of communication and world views (who says what for what purpose and intention on what occasion), have the potential to evolve into interculturally competent communicators who can embrace differences in cultural orientations and manage interactions with people outside their cultural boundaries. the teaching of the japanese language is an important example of the ‘third place’ in the australian context given that, for the last two decades, it has been one of the most popular languages other than english (lote) across the educational spectrum, from primary to university level (japan foundation 2006). it has also been the most preferred lote choice among overseas students from asia who are studying in australia. since the japanese language serves as a common l2 for people from many backgrounds, it can help both domestic and overseas students explore intercultural language activities ‘without an assumed or imposed hierarchy’ (bhabha 1994: 4). promoting intercultural competence through japanese language, or any other lote, can also redress some of the problems identified with the idea of intercultural competence (see holmes 2006).5 accordingly, in this essay, i introduce a language task that promotes intercultural competence in order to show how learners of japanese reflect their l1 cultures in making sense of a naturally occurring japanese conversation as a ‘meeting place.’ researchers evaluated these responses as ‘problematic,’ ‘difficult to interpret,’ and ‘uncomfortable and confusing.’ such labelling problematised the japanese background speakers’ performance as ‘non-native like.’ this kind of research approach still prevails in studies of interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics. 5 drawing on his interviews with fifteen chinese overseas students at a university in new zealand, holms argues that ‘intercultural competence’ does not ‘fully account for the power relations embedded in intercultural communication’ (2006:19). she reports that cross-cultural exploration and mutual understanding were not always achieved between chinese and new zealand students. some chinese students commented on the challenges they faced when confronted by the racist and rude behaviour of new zealand students. such negative experiences may prevent chinese students from accessing the intercultural competence that ‘account[s] for the reconstruction and renegotiation of cultural identities” (holmes 2006: 20). given the increase of international students in the australian and new zealand higher education sectors, and their concomitant transformation of tertiary learning environments, intergroup boundaries—‘ingroup’ and ‘outgroup’—tend to be formed. while many positive cultural exchanges feed into these countries’ multicultural identities, some negative consequences may have been inevitable due to the magnitude of overseas student numbers. with the privileged status of the english language as the international language and its associated history of colonisation, certain power relations are embedded in intercultural communication involving english. holmes (2006:19) argues that this has not been fully accounted for in the current model of intercultural competence. indeed, japanese language as a preferred lote among overseas and domestic students can create a ‘meeting place’ where all students enjoy intercultural exploration without replicating the imposed power relationships of an english-dominant setting. ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 5 natural conversation reconstruction tasks natural conversation reconstruction tasks (ncrts) use a transcribed excerpt from a naturally occurring conversation from which some conversational turns are left out. the task asks l2 learners to consider and predict what would have been said in these missing turns. it employs the verbal protocol method (ericsson and simon 1993) in a wider sense to elicit participants’ verbal responses to, and during, the task completion.6 ncrts do not attempt to analyse the participants’ cognitive and psychological processes. rather they encourage participants to exchange their views freely in both an introspective and a retrospective manner. the task discussed in this article was originally designed for a crosscultural pragmatic investigation of thanking that involved native speakers of japanese (ōhashi and ōhashi 2003); it is now used as one of our key teaching tools in teaching intermediate and advanced learners in tertiary education. conceptually, an ncrt provides a snapshot of a real life speech event that occurred at a certain point in time and place. in this task, learners try to make sense of the meaning of a conversation as a whole while predicting missing turns. therefore, the provision of rich contextual information—such as the age, gender, and social status of the conversationalists, and what prompted the conversations—is crucial. the task provides learners with a ‘virtual reality’ in that they explore and articulate what they think they know about l1 and l2 norms. in our experience learners at first try to see the meaning of the conversations through the eyes of the conversationalists, and thus they try to imagine what, for example, a japanese man of sixty might say in this specific context. however, as they actively explore possible options they find themselves considering what they would say in the given context by considering their own identity, social attributes and previous experience through interactions with others in similar speech events. thus we often witness the active shifting of their viewpoint across cultural borders and social attributes such as gender and age. in other words, these learners explore cultural boundaries and the possibility of their own hybrid new identities. thanking: balancing debt and credit, a symbolic settlement the ncrt on this occasion featured the ‘traditional’ japanese way of thanking: o-rei. with this task i aimed to illustrate how l2 japanese learners make sense of o-rei ritual conversations. as i have argued elsewhere (ōhashi 2008a), o-rei is an aspect of specific japanese culture norms in thanking episodes, whereby benefactor and beneficiary try to 6 the verbal protocol method stems from experimental cognitive psychology, but its application in studies of second language acquisition has spread widely since the publication of faerch and kasper’s paper (1987). ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 6 achieve a symbolic settlement of the debt-credit equilibrium. the beneficiary insists on investing in thanking and/or apology speech formulae to compensate his/her debt incurred by a gift/favour received. the benefactor, meanwhile, tries to minimize the imbalance by denigrating the gift/favour giving. both benefactor and beneficiary, then, jointly create this highly conventionalized o-rei ritual. such orchestrated balancing acts continue until the benefactor changes the topic. thus, the prolongation of ‘arigatō gozaimasu’ (thanking speech formula) or ‘sumimasen’ (apology speech formula) plus ‘ie ie tondemonai’ (no, no, heavens no) conversational pairs is common, as illustrated below (figure 1): a: sumimasen hontōni apology formula really b: ie ie tondemo nai no no heavens no a: arigatō gozaimasu thanking formula b: ie ie no no figure 1. theories of speech acts and politeness developed to describe the english language cannot predict the conversational organization and the choice of speech formulae in japanese o-rei rituals. the o-rei rituals are oriented towards the norm of reciprocity, but this norm has not been fully integrated into the theories of speech acts and politeness (see ōhashi 2008a: 2151). figure 2. a(5): omiyage sumimasen ne hontō ni wa[zawaza] present ap ip really going through the trouble (i’m sorry [you went to such trouble for] the present, i’m really [grateful]) b(6): [ie ie tondemo]nai desu no no heavens no be (no, not at all) a(7): mōshiwakenai itsumo kiotsukatte moratte meiwaku kakete doumo ap always consideration b receive trouble cause tf/ap (i’m really sorry…thanks, you are always so considerate) b(8): honno honno okuchi yogoshi. just just hon-mouth dirty (literal translation: it’ll just make your mouth dirty; or, in idiomatic translation: no, it’s nothing special) a(9): iya iya tondemo nai desu yo no no heavens no be ip (no, not at all.) b(10): ashita wa? tomorrow tm (what about tomorrow?) a(11): e[::] ashita ano[::::] well tomorrow well (aahmm, well, tomorrow) key: ap: apology formula; be: copulative verb; b: benefactive verb; hon: honorific polite form; ip: interactional particles; tm: topic marker; tf: thanking formula. ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 7 the ncrt used for this study presents a number of the quintessential characteristics of japanese o-rei rituals: first, the prolongation of ‘thanking-denial’ sequences; second, the use of apology formulae; and third, a sudden topic change (see ōhashi 2008a: 2170). it is based on an edited version of an excerpt of an actual conversation, set out above (figure 2). the learners participating in the exercise are provided with detailed context including the age and sex of the conversational participants and what prompted the conversation. here a (a male, 70 years old) and b (a male, 65 years old) are both occasional voluntary helpers in their local neighbourhood association (chōnaikai). they have been meeting regularly for the last five years. b has returned from a trip and called in on a, who was not at home. b left a bag of sasakamaboko (a kind of fish cake) worth ¥1,500 (¥80/a$1) with a’s wife as a souvenir of the trip. the following day, a rings b, and the conversation used for the task takes place (figure 2). for the version of the conversation prepared for the ncrt, the beneficiary (a)’s turns are left out. the learners, in pairs, are asked to discuss and predict what a would have said in (5), (7), and (9). eight advanced learners of japanese were involved in this study. all of them started japanese in secondary school and are enrolled in a japanese language unit in the advanced stream at an australian university. they have all stayed in japan for periods of between 2 months and 12 months (average 4.2 months). four of them are of asian background (chinese background speakers), and the other four are of non-asian background (anglo-european backgrounds). the learners, each paired with another person from a similar cultural background, were asked to reconstruct the conversation. they were also asked to think aloud while they determined what the japanese speakers described in the task would have said in the missing turns. the whole process was audio-recorded, then transcribed. it was expected that a(5): ( ) b(6): [ie ie tondemo]nai desu no no heavens no be ( no, not at all ) a(7): ( ) b(8): honno honno okuchi yogoshi. just just hon-mouth dirty (literal translation: it'll make your mouth dirty) a(9): ( ) b(10): ashita wa? tomorrow tm (what do you do tomorrow?) a(11): e[::] ashita ano[::::] well tomorrow well figure 3. ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 8 their comments would reflect their l1 cultural norms and their knowledge of japanese language and culture. figure 3 is an example of the ncrt. in the next three sections i discuss the learners’ comments in the order of the missing conversational turns: a(5), a(7) and a(9). turn a(5) all of the learners, bar one, chose the thanking formula, arigatō gozaimashita for a(5). the following comments show their thought processes involved in determining their responses. i don’t know any other ways of thanking so…he would say dōmo arigatō gozaimashita. it’s obviously got to do something along the line of ‘thanks for the present from the other day.’ i think in australian culture, if you are thanked you can say you are welcome, you can acknowledge thanking rather than denying it. in australia older generations tend to deny it more. it gets annoying, why don’t they accept and say thank you and you are welcome? a is grateful since it’s worth 1500 yen. a would not just simply say thank you, but will probably say along the line of, hontōni dōmo arigatō (thank you so much for your kind gift), maybe not dōmo just arigatō gozaimashita. because a is 70 and older, even though he is thankful he wouldn’t be perhaps so polite because b is younger saying, ieie tondemo naidesu. in the original conversation, a in (5) chose to use an apology formula, sumimasen ne. only one student, who had spent 12 months in japan, chose the apology formula. she commented that: ‘i know that japanese people often apologize in this situation, but we don’t say that in english. more likely to say—‘thank you very much’—in english.’ such comments suggest that after many years of formal language learning, apology speech formulae are not associated with ‘japanese thanking’ by the learners. both asian and nonasian background learners apply australian norms to their target language, and the thanking formula is their preferred choice. it is also interesting to observe that the learners were at first paying a lot of attention to the conversationalists’ social attributes, especially age, but gradually they started offering their own views based on their own individual attributes. turn a(7) the learners commented on a(7) predominantly in english. this suggests, again, that their linguistic repertoire does not extend beyond the thanking formula arigatō gozaimashita. no, you really have helped me and i really appreciate it. i don’t know how to say it in japanese. some learners chose to compliment the gift and express further thanks for the gift. maybe saying how he liked it a lot: honto ni oishikattadesu arigatō gozaimashita (it was really delicious. thank you) ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 9 some learners chose from their repertoire in english. you didn’t have to do that, it was very thoughtful of you. he would say something like, ‘you don’t have to do that.’ sonna koto shinakutemo ii? (you didn’t have to do such a thing) in the original conversation, a(7) said: mōshiwakenai itsumo kiotsukatte moratte meiwaku kakete dōmo (i’m sorry and thank you for always considering me). he chose an apology formula mōshiwakenai (literal translation: sorry, i have no excuse), and a benefactive verb, moratte (highlighting the act of receiving), to acknowledge b’s consideration, and further apologized for having put b to the trouble of buying a souvenir. in other words, a invested in a lot of linguistic politeness to compensate for the debt incurred. while it should be noted that what the learners proposed for this turn, in english and/or japanese, would not amount to conversational misfit or pragmatic dissonance, it is significant that none of them considered the option taken by a. turn a(9) the interpretation of b(10) ashita wa? (tomorrow?, plus topic marker wa) varied: ‘talking about tomorrow,’ ‘how about tomorrow?,’ and, ‘what are you going to do tomorrow?’ some participants tried to make sense of the ‘a(9)-b(10) ashita wa?’ sequence by attending to the speech act level of meaning. in other words, they interpreted this as an ‘offer of repayment/ acceptance of the offer by specifying the date.’ some attended instead to the pragmatic level of meaning, hearing ashita wa as the benefactor’s signal to end the cyclical ‘thanking-denial’ routines, and thus, as intended, to save the beneficiary’s as well as the benefactor’s face. oishikattadesu (it was delicious), then b, i think, changed the topic because he has been thanked three times in a row and he has denied it twice. so rather than denying it three times he just changed the topic since he was embarrassed. a(9) would say something like ‘i am sorry to trouble you’; b said ashitawa just to end the gift giving procedure. a(9): sō dewa nai, arigatō gozaimashita (that is not true, thank you very much). b then changed the subject; probably he was uncomfortable and embarrassed with thanking, and also perhaps he felt that a had said enough according to the code of politeness. three times is enough to say thank you and keep moving on and save embarrassment for both of them. those who interpreted this conversation in the speech act level, made sense of the ‘a(9)b(10) ashita wa?’ sequence as an ‘offer of repayment/acceptance by specifying the date,’ as in ‘can i make it up to you?,’ ‘i will take you out sometime’, or ‘do you have time tomorrow?,’ followed by ashita wa? (how about tomorrow?). some learners commented that this interpretation was motivated by their knowledge of japanese culture, which they ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 10 expressed as, ‘give something in return,’ or ‘in japanese culture, you feel more obliged to give something in return when you receive a present.’ a chinese background speaker commented that ‘japanese culture is similar to chinese culture, where if you receive a present you have to repay the favour and gratitude.’ some learners sensed that there was a rudeness in this interpretation of ‘an offer of repayment/how about tomorrow?,’ saying, ‘but that’s not right, and i think it’s rude,’ and, ‘actually i don’t think it’s polite to say ashita wa straight away.’ however, in the original conversation, a(9) had a different goal, a pragmatic one. he actually said iyaiya tondemonaidesu yo (no, not at all) in reacting to b(8) who had denigrated the gift (literal translation: it’ll make your mouth dirty). thus, b(10) ashitawa (tomorrow?) has no sequential relevance to a(9). in fact, this ashita wa can be interpreted as a sudden topic change to end the cyclical o-rei ritual and therefore save embarrassment for both the beneficiary and the benefactor. other comments made by the learners refer to their beliefs about what is required in their l1 in a similar situation in comparison to what they believe to be the case in the l2. the ncrt inevitably caused the learners to attend to both their l1 cultural norms and their knowledge of japanese language and culture. in other words, the learners found themselves transcending cultural boundaries in order to come to a mutually satisfying understanding of the ncrt. the teaching method thus provided them with a ‘meeting place’ where intercultural exploration could take place. thanking and use of l1 cultural norms as research on cross-cultural pragmatics looking at naturally occurring conversations increases, we gain better understanding about particular politeness orientations in various languages. for example, hassall (2002) reports that australian learners of bahasa indonesia thank significantly more than indonesians themselves. it appears that the learners apply their australian cultural norms and conversational patterns in deciding when and how to thank in indonesian. koutlaki (2002) offers a strong counter-example in discussing how expressions of thanks are used profusely in refusing an offer in persian. she states that an ‘offering-thanking’ conversational sequence serves the purpose of enhancing face for both interlocutors. according to her, the formulaic expression qabeli naedare (it’s not worth anything) is used by shopkeepers to ritually refuse payment; the customer will then express thanks for the offer but insist on paying. the sequence may be repeated a number of times (koutlaki 2002: 1753). ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 11 in the task reported above, the learners used their l1 cultural norms to make sense of japanese o-rei thanking. yet most students, including chinese background speakers, referred to and applied australian norms; in other words, they tried to work out the japanese conversation with australian norms in mind. however, the chinese background speakers demonstrated some ability to compare japanese and australian culture from the ‘outside’ vantage point of chinese culture. for the chinese background speakers, japanese language is at best their third language. speaking chinese at home and living in an english-speaking country, they have direct personal awareness of negotiating different sets of cultural values. one of the chinese background speakers commented: ‘in australia, i don’t think people focus on the present so much, they talk more about the person, how was the trip, how was the weather. talking about and listening to how b enjoyed his trip is an indirect way of showing a’s gratitude.’ another chinese background speaker sees japanese cultural norms as similar to chinese customs: ‘japanese culture is similar to chinese culture where if you receive a present you have to repay the favour and gratitude.’ however, the learners from non-asian backgrounds offered similar comments based on their current level of understanding of japanese culture: ‘in japanese culture, you feel more obliged to give something in return when you receive a present.’ two of the non-asian background learners commented on the prolongation of ‘thanking-denial’ sequences in japanese thanking as distinct from australian english. they came across similar o-rei rituals during their stay in japan: i think there is a set of codes in japanese culture. there are certain expectations, souvenirs are expected, ‘thank you so much’—‘oh, no, no’ is extended. ‘thank you so much’—‘no no, it’s nothing’—‘no no, thank you,’ is particularly japanese. of these, the first student has stayed in japan for twelve months and the second for four months. the length of the participants’ exposure to the l2 environment may be a guide to their possession of such knowledge. but it is the participants’ awareness of pragmatics and the quality of teaching input that are critical for their ability to formulate certain hypotheses. as crozet and liddicoat suggest, culture must be taught explicitly: ‘culture is not learnt by osmosis, it requires an intellectual effort because culture is not readily accessible to be noticed’ (1999: 116). implications for teaching the ncrt can be useful for teachers to find out the thinking processes of their learners. this ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 12 will enable teachers to develop more appropriate teaching materials. furthermore, with ncrts learners are made aware of culture-specific aspects of l2 in relation to their l1. the learners’ comments noted in this paper suggest that the ncrt can also be a useful tool to raise learner awareness about the pragmatic features of both l1 and l2. kasper (1997) advocates the necessity of consciousness-raising activities and subsequent communicative activities in l2 pragmatic teaching. thus, an excerpt from real world conversations in the form of a ncrt is desirable; it allows learners to explore the third place and help them achieve intercultural competence. ncrts can be designed to teach other cultural differences in other languages as described in the abovementioned studies by hassall (2002) and koutlaki (2002). for example, a ncrt could feature a possible thanking episode in which native speakers of indonesian would not thank in a similar situation.7 some conversational turns in which thanking would be expected in accord with australian norms could be left out, and the learners could be encouraged to guess the missing turns and make sense of the whole conversation. the teacher, then, would show the missing sequence to the learners. students could be asked to discuss the gaps between what they guessed and the original conversation, and to make hypotheses about the speaker intention and social norms and values of the targeted speech community in indonesia. the teacher could also ask about their preferred choices and explain the possible cultural implications of their choices. some culture-specific ritualised conversations in persian discussed in koutlaki (2002) could also be taught using ncrts. more research on these lines is needed to expand our knowledge of what counts in a crosscultural sense as thanking, and indeed, other speech acts, and to take those speech acts into account in second language teaching. the ncrt can be employed to teach culturespecific phenomena and rituals and their underlying social norms. as such, the task encourages the learners to explore both l1 and l2 norms, so that their l1 cultural background becomes a significant resource to be included in discussing what are universal features and what are not. therefore, in the use of ncrts, the learners’ diverse l1 cultural background is an added value rather than a challenge to overcome. the learners’ comments i have analysed in this paper indicate that the ncrt enabled those learners themselves to discover what thanking is and what its crosscultural social meanings might be. culturally diverse classrooms 7 the ncrt is primarily intended for the intercultural exploration of language learners, and thus it is not suitable as role play material. as discussed throughout this paper, native-level competence and manner are not sought in the pursuit of intercultural competence. it is also important to note that a ‘native–non-native’ conversation may involve different expectations on the part of native speakers. therefore it is not suitable for the learners to recite and memorise conversations that occurred at a particular time and space between particular native speakers. ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 13 do not only increase the understanding of culture-specific patterns of communication; they also create mutual interest, curiosity, and respect between different cultural groups. conclusion in this article i have suggested some ways in which ncrts can be used to encourage learners’ intercultural exploration and empower their decision making as they gain intercultural competence. such tasks encourage learners to explore the intersections where language use, speaker intention, and l1 and l2 cultural norms meet. the ncrt method helps learners to become aware of socially expected patterns of communication in l1 and l2 in terms of speech act choices, formulaic expressions, sequential organization, and politeness orientation. the focus on the ncrt in this paper indicates that method’s potential for helping learners to transcend their cultural boundaries, in this instance by overcoming their narrow understanding of ‘thanking’ as ‘expressions of gratitude and appreciation’ and by widening their crosscultural views of what counts as thanking. with the ncrt, and some subsequent explicit teaching on the social meaning of o-rei, including the etymological meaning of o-rei and the importance, particularly among japanese, of debt-credit equilibrium, learners will be able to engage in japanese thanking episodes in a crossculturally appropriate manner, or make their own choices with better understanding of the possible implications of their linguistic and pragmatic choices. i have illustrated one example of a ncrt in order to underline its potential use in promoting l2 learners’ intercultural exploration. however, in actual implementation, multiple examples of thanking episodes in different contexts could be developed. language learners need to be informed of diverse conversational patterns in l2 (as well as in their l1), and their changing nature—which is often led by younger generations—should also be discussed. as stated earlier, what counts as thanking, and the social meaning that accrues to it, differs markedly from culture to culture. such meanings, moreover, are not immune to social change. japan has experienced a major reformation since 1945, and what is commonly referred to as westernization now prevails throughout japanese society. such historical trends have created a significant difference between older and younger japanese generations in terms of patterns of behaviour and communication. it is therefore important to include more examples of thanking episodes in the ncrt to avoid simplistic overgeneralisation about the cultural protocols of everyday communication.8 a natural conversation database, then, potentially 8 see ōhashi (2008b) for examples of how young japanese engage in thanking episodes. ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 14 provides learners with an ideal learning environment in which they may discover how people outside their cultural boundaries manage interactions and human relationships. teaching l2 pragmatics should not simply aim at encouraging native-level production; it should also aspire to developing awareness of diverse patterns of communication and their meaning, as embedded in l2 culture, in a broader context of intercultural competence. this process gives learners numerous opportunities to reflect on their l1 culture and l2 knowledge and to express their individual preferences, beliefs and strategies for achieving positive human relationships as good communicators who are competent in intercultural communication. acknowledgements i would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their insightful comments. i also thank hiroko ōhashi for allowing me to use her original idea of ncrt in the context of intercultural exploration. reference list bhabha, h. 1994, the location of culture, routledge, london. byram, m. 1997, teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence, multilingual matters, clevedon, uk. crozet, c., liddicoat, a. 1999, ‘the challenge of intercultural language teaching: engaging with culture in the classroom,’ in striving for the third place: intercultural competence through language education, (eds) j. lo bianco, a. liddicoat, and c. crozet, language australia, melbourne, 113-25. crozet, c., liddicoat, a., & lo bianco, j. 1999, ‘intercultural competence: from language policy to language education,’ in striving for the third place: intercultural competence through language education, (eds) j. lo bianco, a. liddicoat, and c. crozet, language australia, melbourne, 1-20. eisenstein, m. and bodman, j. 1993, ‘expressing gratitude in american english,’ in interlanguage pragmatics (pp.64-81), (eds) g. kasper and s. blum-kulka, oxford university press, new york. ericsson k a, simon h. a. 1993, protocol analysis: verbal reports as data, mit press, cambridge, ma. faerch, c. and kasper, g. (eds) 1987, introspection in second language research, multilingual matters, philadelphia. hassall, t. 2002, ‘do learners thank too much in indonesian?,’ australian review of applied linguistics, vol. 24, no. 2, 97-122. holmes, p. 2006,‘problematising intercultural communication competence in the pluricultural classroom: chinese students in a new zealand university,’ language and intercultural communication, vol. 6, no. 1, 18-34. japan foundation. 2006, survey report on japanese-language education abroad 2006: present condition of overseas japanese-language education-summary. online, available: http://www.jpf.go.jp/e/japanese/survey/result/index.html (accessed 1 november 2008). kasper, g. 1997, ‘the role of pragmatics in language teacher education,’ in beyond methods: components of language teacher education, (eds) k. bardovi-harlig and s. hartford, mcgraw hill, new york, 113-16. koutlaki, s. 2002, ‘offers and expressions of thanks as face enhancing acts: tae’arof in persian,’ journal of pragmatics, vol. 34, 1733-56. kramsch, c. 1993, context and culture in language teaching, oxford university press, oxford. liddicoat, a., crozet, c. & lo bianco, j. 1999, ‘striving for the third place: consequences and implications,’ in striving for the third place: intercultural competence through language education, (eds) j. lo bianco, a. liddicoat, and c. crozet, language australia, melbourne, 181-87. liddicoat, a., papademetre, l., scarino, a., & kohler, m. 2003, ‘report on intercultural language learning,’ department of education, science and training, canberra. ōhashi natural conversation reconstruction tasks portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 15 ōhashi, j. 2008a, ‘linguistic rituals for thanking in japanese: balancing obligations,’ journal of pragmatics, no. 40, 2150-74. _____ 2008b, ‘thanking episodes among young japanese: a preliminary qualitative investigation,’ japanese studies, vol. 28, no.3, 291-304. ōhashi, j., and ōhashi, h. 2003. ‘orei and the speech act of thanking: a cross-cultural pragmatic investigation using natural conversation reconstruction tasks,’ paper presented at eurosla 2003. online, available: edinburgh. http://www.hw.ac.uk/langwww/eurosla/ (accessed 1 november 2008). ortiz, f. 1940, cuban counterpoint: tobacco and sugar, trans. h de onís, duke university press, durham and london. _____ 1942, ‘on the phases of transculturation (from a speech made at club atenas in havana, 12 december 1942).’ online, available: http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/race/ortiz-2.htm (accessed 29 july 2008). pegrum, m. 2008, ‘film, culture and identity: critical intercultural literacies for the language classroom,’ language and intercultural communication, vol. 8, no. 2, 136-54. pratt, m. l. 1991, ‘arts of the contact zone,’ profession, vol. 91, 33-40. _____ 1992, imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation, routledge, london. shea, p. d. 1994, ‘perspective and production: structuring conversational participation across cultural borders,’ pragmatics, vol. 4, no. 3, 357-89. zamel, v. 1997, ‘towards a model of transculturation,’ tesol quarterly, vol. 31, no. 2, 341-52. vanniintrojuly2008_copyediteiv portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal writing italies, an introduction ilaria vanni, university of technology sydney i feel uncomfortable when i travel to italian universities and meet elderly, and not so elderly, baroni, like those who taught me as an undergraduate. they ask polite questions: ‘so, what do you do?’ and when i reply ‘cultural studies,’ they look a little amused and a little blank. some recover quickly to ask: ‘you mean letteratura?’ others, more adventurous perhaps, nod: ‘like cultural anthropology.’ some want to know if cultural studies includes filologia romanza. at times i try to translate in italian: ‘studi culturali,’ but that creates some confusion with beni culturali, a corso di laurea that is apparently now taught in every single italian university. unlike cultural studies. in their introduction to italian cultural studies (1996: 2), david forgacs and robert lumley noted how the fundamental untranslatability of cultural studies in italian is due to different academic taxonomies, which mean that italian universities would teach as separate disciplines what in british and us institutions is called cultural studies. this institutional separation has also posed a certain difficulty for people hoping to engage with a holistic approach: historians of literature engage with literature, and anthropologists with cultural rituals, customs and practices. translated into italian studies at a global level this approach has meant that the study of canonic letteratura e lingua has predominance in italian departments worldwide (galli stampino 2001; west 2001). this dichotomy also reflects two different approaches to culture: on one hand a ‘strong association with education and literacy, and more generally with “print culture”’ vanni writing italies portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 2 (forgacs and lumley 1996: 3), and on the other hand, the idea that everyday practices are explicable as either folklore or cultura di massa. this distinction finds its origins in a humanist-intellectualist tradition associated with the philosophers benedetto croce (1866-1952) and giovanni gentile (1975-1944, the designer of the 1923 school reform under mussolini’s government), which identified culture with the production of intellectuals (forgacs and lumely 1996: 3). until the 1960s, the decade when, during italy’s economic boom, a fringe group of scholars including umberto eco started to introduce new intellectual traditions and new disciplines, such as semiotics, to studies of la cultura di massa (forgacs and lumley 1996: 6), culture in italy meant predominantly the history of italian literature and, to a certain extent, the arts, but only of the past. la cultura di massa itself was shunned as the evil impoverishment of cultura caused by commodification (forgacs and lumley 1996: 6). la cultura di massa was opposed in its inauthenticity to la cultura popolare, or folklore, to which antonio gramsci (1891-1937) devoted several pages of his prison notebooks, which was studied in the post-ww ii years by innovative anthropologists such as ernesto de martino and alberto maria cirese.1 the questions asked of me, and of what i do, by numerous baroni belong to this cultural tradition. on one level my exchanges with baroni make me happy i left l’ università italiana and its disciplinary power silos. yet those exchanges have also influenced my reflections on what it might mean today to speak of italian cultural studies. is there a specific genealogy to the study of cultures in italy that intersects with the anglophone definition of cultural studies? is italian cultural studies confined to cultural practices in italy, or does it expand to include the cultural practices of the italian diaspora? if there is an italian cultural studies tradition, where is it? what do italian cultural studies academics write about? i am not the first, of course, to explore the idea of italian cultural studies by posing these questions. the middle and late 1990s saw a growing number of academics on both sides of the atlantic becoming involved in a move to define and map italian cultural studies, although it is important to note that most of this mapping has appeared in 1 see forgacs and nowell-smith’s english edition, selections from cultural writings (1999). for an overview of gramsci’s influence on italian anthropology, see nicoletta pireddu’s chapter, the ‘anthropological roots of italian cultural studies’ (parati and lawton 2001). vanni writing italies portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 3 english, rather than italian. forgacs and lumley’s italian cultural studies (1996) was quickly followed by allen and russo’s revisioning italy, national identity and global culture (1997), and dombroski’s special edition of annali d’italianistica titled italian cultural studies in 1998. dartmouth college, in new hampshire, organised the first conference of italian cultural studies, which became also the first cohesive collection of essays to explore what this label might actually mean (parati and lawton 2001). by serendipity, and outside the field of italian studies and academia, in 1999 giannino malossi edited volare. the icon of italy in global pop culture, in conjunction with an exhibition by the same title held at stazione leopolda in florence as part of the program fashion engineering unit, dedicated to research on fashion cultures. malossi approaches ‘italy, not italy as it is, but italy as it is imagined to be’ (1999: 24), and provides a left-of-field and innovative contribution to questions of cultural practices, identification processes, pop/high culture distinctions, media, consumption, fashion, and sport. in 2001 barański and west’s cambridge companion to modern italian culture opened up the idea of ‘italian culture’ to a variety of critical approaches and cultural productions, cutting through false dichotomies of high versus popular cultural forms and providing a widespread introduction to the cultural study of post-unification italy. in italy itself the journal studi culturali (www.studiculturali.it) was first published in 2004 and has since become a point of reference in the field. all of these texts and initiatives constitute a precious library and genealogical resource for those of us who teach and research italian contemporary cultures, whether in italy or elsewhere. building on these studies, a decade after the first published formulations concerning the very idea of italian cultural studies appeared, this special issue of portal aims explicitly to reopen the debate and see how, if at all, the field has changed in the intervening years. the articles included in this special issue constitute a wide-ranging and multifaceted contribution to italian cultural studies, migrating at times from and/or between the concerns upheld in traditional departments of italian studies to non-area and transnational studies. while building on a variety of disciplinary genealogies the articles assembled here are linked by a shared preoccupation with social change as inscribed in broad cultural practices rather than with specific cultural texts. in this sense this special issue of portal engages with italian culture as sets of processes that come into being in vanni writing italies portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 4 the grip of tractions between local knowledges and global imaginaries, national and international capital flows, and intersections across the cultural landscape. it is clear at first glance that the italy written here is a mutant, displaced, provincialized and diasporic place, one imagined elsewhere by the authors. even alice mattoni, who writes her contribution to this issue from florence, does not work from a base inside an italian university. the nuances and rhetoric of social change during the italian miracolo economico in the 1960s are examined by ailhlin jane clark in her article on food consumption in southern italy. ‘changing consumption, changing consumers: an analysis of changing food consumption in southern italy in the mid-twentieth century,’ is based on interviews clark conducted with people on the amalfi coast. the article argues against the grain of traditional narratives that identify change in consumption with change in the availability of products. clark concludes that the adoption of ‘new’ consumable and durable food items along the amalfi coast was made possible by a local communitarian disposition to accept, negotiate and integrate newness into pre-existing habits and traditions and in pragmatic relation to geographical surrounds. the messy business of constructing shared meanings in an italy that has always been home to minorities, and that over the last few decades has very rapidly become diasporic, multiethnic and multiculturalism is explored by john kinder. in his analysis of the italian language debate, ‘language and identities: the exceptional normality of italy,’ kinder proceeds from gramsci’s famous note on the link between the surfacing of language debates and the pull towards some form of cultural hegemony. kinder argues that the questions opened up by those debates in terms of identity and otherness reflect frictions internal to languages themselves. examining italy’s linguistic richness and diversity kinder redresses the perception that italy presents a national case of constant exceptionality, and argues instead that linguistic confusion is at the core of italy and hence europe itself. myths such as the story of babel point to a shared imaginary of linguistic diversity while illustrating the paradox of creating shared meaning through encounters with differences. according to kinder, the tensions surfacing in the ongoing discussion about an italian language canon both reflect and confirm the frictions and contradictions present in current italian identity debates. vanni writing italies portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 5 in kinder’s article the first language planner and policy maker to emerge in a region that would become known as italy was dante, a figure able to mediate between different layers of language from the supra-national latin to volgare to vernaculars. however, in joseph pugliese’s ‘whiteness and the blackening of italy: la guerra cafona, extracomunitari and provisional street justice,’ dante becomes the symbol of mythical purity, of italian monoglossia. the marble statue of dante in piazza dante in naples, now a complex palimpsest of graffitied commentary, provides pugliese with the opportunity to observe counter-responses to the monoglossic paradigm of heteroglossia. the encroaching graffiti on the dante statue, he suggests, challenges not only the longing for a pure language but also the northern italian desire for cultural hegemony. moving away from the piazza dante, pugliese maps vernacular politics of resistance across a wide timeframe that spans southern brigandage, a practice of insurrection against the italian nation in the immediate post-unification (1861) years, and contemporary hip hop. that music and cultural form enables pugliese to draw an arc linking counter-nationalist movements in the global south, and to find political and cultural connections between immigrants and southern italians. pugliese concludes his article, by contrast, with an analysis of the 2008 lega nord election campaign posters, arguing that the formation of a hegemonic italian identity rests, historically, on the premises of the exclusion of southern italians and extracomunitari alike through the deployment of the ‘invisible visibility’ of whiteness. creative practices of contestation and conflict are also examined by alice mattoni in her essay on the role of media in recent struggles against precarity in italy, ‘serpica naro and the others. the media sociali experience in italian struggles against precarity.’ mattoni, arguing that the role of social movements includes the production of symbolic resources that, in turn, create new forms of collective identities, focuses on media sociali, or socialized, distributed, media. with this label, coined by the milanese group the chainworkers crew, mattoni identifies links between a range of case-study practices: the creation of san precario, the new patron saint of precarious workers; a series of political actions around milan fashion week in 2005, involving the construction of a spoof fashion designer, serpica naro; and the invention of a set of super-heroic figures, gli imbattibili. each case study enables mattoni to explore the mechanisms through which i media sociali produce forms of political socialization and, according to some activists, of conflict through networking and politics of recognition. vanni writing italies portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 6 tiziana ferrero regis’s contribution, ‘fatto in italia: refashioning italy,’ discusses the role of the fashion system, and of the ‘made in italy’ trend, in the recovery from the shrinking economic growth of the 1970s. fashion, she argues, played a key role in the definition of a new modes of italian identification after the anni di piombo, an era defined by the domination of rampant consumerism at the expenses of political engagement. linking the making of ‘made in italy’ with the rise of milan in the 1980s as capital of the ready made, the success of the socialist party (1983-1987), economic growth and riflusso, regis contends that fashion and design in the 1980s became the main site for the rearticulation of italianness. as such, fashion and design replaced other cultural industries, in particular cinema. providing a precise and wide ranging contextualized analysis of fashion as it was inscribed in the 1980s economic system and political climate, regis proposes that italian identity was redefined through fashion, and that ‘made in italy’ became a powerful new cultural model for the entire nation. finally, the global connections of contemporary italian design are explored by emiko okayama and francesco ricatti in ‘tokidoki, cute and sexy fantasies between east and west: contemporary aesthetics for the global market.’ the article considers the work of the italian born, los angeles-based designer simone legno, whose creations are predicated on an invented world of cute, sexy figures inspired by a range of japanese aesthetic styles and traditions. the idea of japan deployed by legno is a fantasy world influenced by childhood memories of japanese anime, which were reproduced and repackaged for italian television in the 1980s, and by a global ‘cute’ (kawaii or il carino) aesthetic emanating from japan that has found avid consumers throughout east asia and beyond that region. tokidoki, the authors argue, is the result of the meeting, assemblage and reinvention of multiple cultural imaginaries. legno’s design world thus raises questions about the nature of ‘the national’ italian cultural heritage, as well as about the processes that at once impel and defeat attempts to define certain globally circulating cultural products as ‘italian’ only. those questions meld with those underwriting this special issue of portal. that is: how might italian cultural studies in the twenty-first century best respond to the making, imagining and writing of multiple italies within italy itself and in the diasporic, provincialized italies, and between those entities, with a perspective that is both global and informed by specific local knowledge? vanni writing italies portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 7 reference list allen, b. and russo, m. 1997, revisioning italy. national identity and global culture, university of minnesota press, minneapolis and london. barański, z. g., and west, r. j. (eds) 2001, the cambridge companion to modern italian culture, cambridge university press, cambridge. dombroski, r., and cervigni, d. 1998. italian cultural studies, annali d’italianistica (16). forgacs, d., and lumley, r. 1996a, ‘introduction: approaches to culture in italy,’ in italian cultural studies: an introduction, (eds) d. fogacs and r. lumley, oxford university press, oxford, 1-12. forgacs, d. and lumley, r. (eds) 1996b, italian cultural studies: an introduction, oxford university press. oxford. galli stampino, m. 2001. ‘what we talk about when we talk about [italian] cultural studies, and why (with apologies to raymond carver),’ in italian cultural studies, (eds) g. parati and b. lawton, bordighera press, boca raton, fl, 27-51. malossi, g. 1999, volare, the icon of italy in global pop culture, the monacelli press, new york. parati, g. and lawton, b. (eds) 2001, italian cultural studies, bordighera press, boca raton, fl. pireddu, n. 2001, ‘the anthropological roots of italian cultural studies,’ in italian cultural studies, (eds) g. parati and b. lawton, bordighera press, boca raton, fl, 66-90. west, r. 2001. ‘the place of literature in italian cultural studies,’ in italian cultural studies, (eds) g. parati and b. lawton, bordighera press, boca raton, fl, 12-26. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 14, no. 2 september 2017 communities acting for sustainability in the pacific special issue, guest edited by anu bissoonauth and rowena ward. © 2017 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: georgeou, n. and hawksley, c. 2017. challenges for sustainable communities in solomon islands: food production, market sale and livelihoods on savo island. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 14:2, 67-86. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal. v14i2.5411 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://portal. epress.lib.uts.edu.au research article challenges for sustainable communities in solomon islands: food production, market sale and livelihoods on savo island nichole georgeou1*, charles hawksley2 1 senior lecturer, humanitarian and development studies, school of social sciences and psychology, western sydney university, locked bag 1797, penrith nsw 2751, australia 2 school of humanities and social inquiry, faculty of law, humanities and the arts, university of wollongong, northfields avenue, wollongong nsw 2522, australia *corresponding author: dr nichole georgeou, senior lecturer, humanitarian and development studies, school of social sciences and psychology, western sydney university, locked bag 1797, penrith nsw 2751, australia. n.georgeou@westernsydney.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5411 article history: received 12/02/2017; revised 02/05/2017; accepted 26/06/2017; published 05/10/2017 abstract this article highlights the challenges of community sustainability in the emerging market economy of solomon islands. it examines the ways in which solomon islanders from savo island engage with the honiara central market (hcm), the largest fresh food and vegetable market in solomon islands. we focus on the produce sold and income earned by the farmers from savo island. data from five focus groups from three villages on savo island reveals the critical importance of cash income from market sales at the hcm. the article also demonstrates the mix of logistical and environmental challenges for long-term community sustainability on savo island that arise when trying to earn money by selling food. keywords savo island; community sustainability; honiara central market; solomon islands declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding this research was made possible through funding from the australian catholic university and the university of wollongong. 67 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5411 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5411 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5411 http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au http://portal.epress.lib.uts.edu.au mailto:n.georgeou@westernsydney.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5411 this article examines the challenges of community sustainability on savo island, some 35 kilometres from the capital of solomon islands, honiara. it examines tensions of rapid urbanization in and around honiara, and then describes research on community sustainability conducted on savo island during 2015. an analysis of the data obtained through focus groups on savo island, and other data gathered through observation of sales at honiara central market, highlights the key challenges to food production, export crops and the sustainability of savo island communities. we argue that economic linkages between city and village are vital to communities on savo island and in honiara, as the islanders require cash to sustain their livelihoods, and the urban dwellers require fresh vegetables. community sustainability in solomon islands community sustainability can be defined as ‘the long-term durability of a community as it negotiates changing practices and meanings across all the domains of culture, politics, economics and ecology’ ( james et al. 2012: 9). broadly this definition refers to people who are aiming to feel confident about their long-term prospects of safety and security. the capacity of a population to obtain food for itself and for future generations without destroying the environment is a key feature of community sustainability, and it integrates the political, economic, environmental and resource factors within the wider concept of human security. a population’s ‘food security’ requires both sufficient quantity and nutritional quality of food, but it also depends on the availability and accessibility of food. threats to food security, and therefore community sustainability, include political instability and conflict, weatherrelated shocks, natural disasters, food price volatility and climate change, while factors that may enhance food security include a growing and equitable economy, growth of agricultural productivity, and the growth of domestic and international markets (fao 2015a: 26). the fao hunger map 2015 ranks most of oceania as having a very low (<5 percent) threat of undernourishment, however two states have moderately low (5–14.9 percent) levels of undernourishment, with higher percentages of their populations classed as undernourished: vanuatu (6.4 percent) and solomon islands (11.3 percent). as far as the statistical collection in oceania goes, solomon islands appears to be the most at-risk state for food security and undernourishment (fao 2015b). in some ways this is no surprise as solomon islands experienced five years of conflict between 1998 and 2003. since then the country has enjoyed a period of peace and continued economic growth. the regional assistance mission to solomon islands (ramsi) was deployed in july 2003, and ramsi worked on the principle that stability will lead to investment and growth in solomon islands. since 2003 the gdp has quadrupled from sbd$1,790 million in 2003 to sbd$7,202 million in 2014 (adb 2016). while solomon islands is the second largest recipient of australian aid in the pacific, australia’s aid program now gives less aid as a percentage of gross national income (gni) than at any time since the 1970s. australia is now looking to the market to provide the spark for development in the pacific, especially through initiatives such as ‘aid for trade’ (georgeou & hawksley 2016). the growing emphasis on the market as a means of lifting people from poverty articulates with un sustainable development goal (sdg) 17 (development partnerships), while encouraging small farmers to produce articulates with un sdg goal 2 (end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture) through labour and land productivity increases, as these flow directly to increased food availability and family incomes (fao 2015a: 26). in short, smallholder farming is seen as a path from poverty, yet food security remains elusive in solomon islands. georgeou and hawksley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 68 smallholder agriculture is the main source of incomes and food security for solomon islanders, and those in rural areas produce as much as 60 percent of their own food (siso 2015). agriculture (crops and livestock) accounts for 14.5 percent of gdp (sig 2014: 20); however, there is a decline in traditional crop production as agricultural land and natural resources have become limited. food production in solomon islands is facing threats from pests and disease, while intensification of land use in several provinces is leading to soil degradation, which now challenges subsistence viability (fao 2012: 125). solomon islands is also vulnerable to climate change and sea level rise, earthquakes, tsunamis and extreme weather events such as floods and cyclones (abm & csiro 2014: 260–279). in solomon islands national waged employment is less than 20 percent of the population, and around 80 percent of people still live semi-subsistent lifestyles in rural areas. the capital honiara is home to two-thirds of all urban solomon islanders, and is a natural centre for the sale of agricultural produce. honiara city council (hcc) staff estimate there are now 85,000 residents within the honiara city limits (fieldnotes 2014), and in 2012 former ramsi special coordinator, nicholas coppel (2012: 8) estimated an additional 15,000 people were residing on the boundaries of the hcc area in the peri-urban settlements of white river, to the west of the cbd, and burns creek, to the east. together, this urban and peri-urban population now numbers at least 100,000. many rural communities in and around honiara, both on guadalcanal and on the neighbouring islands of malaita, savo and ngella, gain cash income from the sale of their produce to these urban residents, who produce as little as 10 to 15 percent of their own food (siso 2015). household consumption patterns have changed, and there has been a rise in the consumption of cheaper processed foods as a proportion of diet (fao 2012). in honiara, estimated household spending on cereal and cereal products was steady at approximately 23 to 25 percent of household income between 2005/6 and 2012/13 (siso 2006; siso 2015). in the same time period spending on bread and biscuits was 11 percent, compared with 16 percent on fruit and vegetables. most significantly, during this period people in rural areas spent up to 50 percent of their income on cereals and cereal products, almost twice as much as those in urban areas (fao 2012: 125; siso 2015). rice is a major staple across solomon islands, comprising of between 12 to 19 percent of all food expenditure. traditional dietary staples such as potatoes and tubers comprise 21 to 40 percent of food expenditure across all provinces, except in urbanized honiara, illustrating a decline in the consumption of traditional foods in urbanized settlements (siso 2015: 40). the largest fresh food market in solomon islands is the honiara central market (hcm), which is the main market supplying fresh produce to the urban residents of honiara (unw 2014).1 farmers transport fresh vegetables, fruit and fish to the hcm by both road and boat. solomon islanders who sell at market are facing increased competition from cheaper alternative imported food products, especially rice (fao 2012: 131) and instant food, such as two-minute noodles. at the same time, evidence from adb figures (2016: 4) supports the contention that food prices rose around 11 percent between 2009 and 2015. while this creates a greater need for cash income to purchase fresh food in honiara, it provides opportunities to those who can deliver fresh food to the market of honiara. there is however, a lack of 1 hcm and is one of two hcc managed markets in honiara. betel nut sellers dominate the other market, kukum market. hcm is centrally located, and has space for around 1,200 stalls. there are other smaller unregulated markets at talise, borderline, and fishing village. some farmers use these markets to sell produce that would spoil quickly (for example, seasonal savo apples), or if hcm was difficult to access, either through the volume of marine vessels or because the hcm is full. challenges for sustainable communities in solomon islands: food production, market sale and livelihoods on savo island portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 69 coordinated commercialization of fresh food among solomon islands’ farmers (georgeou et al. 2015), and limited use of formal market contracts and market facilitation undertaken by farmers’ organizations. bringing fresh food to market is difficult, as the transport infrastructure is poor, expensive and often results in damaged produce. at the time of the study the quality of food supply at hcm was affected by poor food storage facilities, particularly a lack of affordable refrigeration spaces. other issues that affected food safety standards for fresh produce were overcrowding, and inadequate water and sanitation facilities.2 tensions between farmers and re-sellers (discussed below in this article) have been identified as a potential risk to income generation (fao 2012: 128; georgeou et al. 2015). despite the sign at the entrance noting trading days as monday to saturday, the honiara central market (hcm) actually operates seven days per week. it is the city’s main source of fresh vegetables, fruit and fish, drawing produce and sellers from guadalcanal and neighbouring islands.3 vegetables and fruits come to the hcm by road from both east and west guadalcanal. most larger fruits (melon and pineapple), and some marine foods such as crabs and shellfish, come by boat from malaita. isabel island supplies hcm with reef fish, lobster, and squid, while the islands of the central province (particularly savo and ngella islands), contribute fruit and vegetables. large whole fish (including tuna) are available for purchase. farmers from more distant provinces, such as temotu, engage less frequently with the market due to the distances involved, and make only seasonal visits as the quantity of crop (such as taro) required to make a profit means frequent travel is not viable (fieldnotes 2014; fieldnotes 2015). savo islanders sell most of their market crops through the hcm; however, selling occurs at other sites including kukum (in honiara), fishing village (to the east of the central business district [cbd]), white river (to the west of the cbd), borderline (in the hills above honiara), and talise markets. hcm is centrally located about one kilometre from the main shipping and ferry wharf at point cruz, and it has space for 1,000 to 1,200 stalls, around 500 of which are under cover. there are specific areas for vegetables and fruit, whole fish, chicken, seafood, and for handicrafts such as carvings, jewellery, printed sarongs and flowers. products such as fertilizer, firewood and hot food (particularly fish and chips) are available. honiara residents, including restaurateurs, comprise the bulk of the customers. like honiara itself, the hcm is crowded, with up to 2,000 vendors rotating through the many stalls. women comprise approximately 90 percent of vendors of fresh fruit and vegetables at hcc (hedditch & manuel, 2010: 2), while fishmongers are predominantly male. hcc charges fees to sellers based on the type of goods being sold, as well as on the area of ground space occupied, based on a cost per metre squared. extra fees are charged for overnight storage of produce in lockups. agricultural produce can be sold in single units (for example one mango), or in bunches, such as beans or peppers. seafood such as reef fish, lobster, bugs, prawns and squid, are sold by weight (genova et al. 2010). large fish such as tuna are only sold by unit, with a price per whole fish. second class frozen tuna sourced from (dominantly) 2 hcm has since installed water tanks, and improved sanitation and food storage areas. 3 given the initial construction of the 1998–2003 tensions along ethnic lines (braithwaite et al. 2014: ch 7; hawksley & georgeou 2015: 135–139), it is quite possible that hcm has similar tensions, and that specific groups dominate specific trades, areas of sale at the market, and even the blackmarket trade, however the savo island sellers we spoke with referred to blackmarket sellers as a group, and the only savo islander to comment on the ethnicity of blackmarket sellers (in this article) noted they were ‘a mix of islanders from everywhere.’ georgeou and hawksley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 70 korean tuna fishing boats is widely available and competes with fresh tuna supplied by local fishermen. honiara central market stall rental and storage costs (2015) daily price (sbd$) item value crops $13.00 esky fee fish $31.00 coconut sale $17.00 cooked food $25.00 clothing stall $13.00 clothing storage $17.00 handicraft $13.00 esky fee coconut $25.00 esky chicken $13.00 fire wood $18.00 large building material $18.00 parking fee $7.00 medium esky storage fee $17.00 small esky storage $15.00 figure 1 source: fieldnotes (2015) the market is managed by the honiara city council (hcc) and, depending on the volume of trade, the fees raised from the hcm is the second or third largest source of revenue for hcc (fieldnotes 2014; fieldnotes 2015). the busiest market days are friday and saturday, when hcc can collect up to sbd$22,000 (aud$4,000; usd$2,750) in market fees.4 for some years hcm has been operating at full capacity, and there is no adjacent space available for expansion. hcc is aware of this problem and is seeking solutions. methodology a united nations women (un women) baseline survey of the hcm conducted between july and october 2013 identified savo island as a common source of agricultural produce, and it is likely that savo island vendors represent around 12 to 15 percent of all vendors at hcm (un women 2013: 10). savo island, therefore, was selected as the site for this study because of its proximity to honiara, and because it contains all of the elements in the rural-urban nexus: food production by small-holder farmers, sale at market and income generation, and food security for urban areas. in addition, savo islanders transport their produce to market by boat, a feature common to other farming communities on nearby islands. the analysis of data presented in this article therefore identifies some of the main issues and features of food production, market sale and income generation as they relate to community sustainability on savo island. 4 an exchange rate of 5.50 sbd to the australian dollar (aud), accurate during july 2015, has been used for this article. for usd, a simple conversion rate of 8 sbd to 1 usd would give an approximation. challenges for sustainable communities in solomon islands: food production, market sale and livelihoods on savo island portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 71 description of the research site savo island is located some 35 kilometres north-northwest of hcm. by outboard motor boat5 (obm, also referred to as a ‘canoe’) the trip to honiara takes around an hour. an alternative route is to take produce by obm 14 kilometres due south from savo island across to vila on guadalcanal, and then to load this onto a truck or car and drive along the sealed road to honiara, 34 kilometres to the west. data were drawn from three villages in the north and east of savo island: panueli—a large village of over 45 households in the north of the island; paibeta—a medium sized village of approximately 20 households in the east of the island, and host to the island’s only secondary school; and leboni—a small village of approximately 10 households on the east of the island (fieldnotes 2015).6 there are no roads on savo. all transport is either on foot, or by obm. some people use diesel generators to create electric power. at the time of the study there were no banking services on the island. in the one shop we observed, transactions are in cash, but some barter was accepted for megapode eggs, which were exchanged for canned or processed food such as noodles. the eggs were then cooked in the volcanic pools and taken to hcm to be sold (fieldnotes 2015).7 figure 2 the location of savo island within solomon islands, and of villages on savo island (from cronin et al. 2004: 107). panueli is the northernmost village, while leboni (lemboni) and paibeta (paembeta) are to the east. 5 an outboard motor boat (obm) is a flat-bottomed fibreglass craft of around 5.5 to 7 metres with a small storage hold at the bow. it is powered by a single petrol driven engine and can carry six passengers comfortably, but often carries many more. 6 the spelling of village names varies. for this study we have adopted panueli, paibeta, and leboni, as these are how local people spell the names of their villages. the south of savo island was not considered for this study due to concerns of ‘survey fatigue’ following the extensive surveys conducted by the geodynamics energy company as part of its proposed geothermal power development to supply honiara with electricity generated from savo island’s volcanic superheated water (geodynamics 2014). 7 a megapode egg is around twice the size of a chicken egg and sells for around sbd10–12 per egg. savo islands from panueli have a highly organized system of ownership and rights to the main megapode laying field close to the shoreline. nests of birds in the interior used to be protected by tambu (taboo) and kastom (local customary practice), but these prohibitions are breaking down. georgeou and hawksley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 72 research design and data collection after seeking permission from village leaders in each of the three communities, we sought to convene separate focus groups for men, women and youth, to explore their different roles in agricultural production and marketing. separate focus groups for men and women are vital to discovering the gendered experiences of actors as solomon islands society has separate spheres of action for women and men, with different levels of influence on decision making (kruijssen et al. 2015: 31), and women often do not speak freely in front of men, or contradict them in public. focus groups were large (over 20 participants) and took the format of community meetings comprised of the representatives from the majority of households in each village. in total the research involved five focus group discussions (fgds): in paneuli, one group for men and one for women; in paibeta and leboni, one combined group of men and a separate combined group of women. a fgd for the youth of all three villages was facilitated from the island’s only secondary school to identify how young people articulate with production for market, as while young people are also engaged in market production, they are rarely involved in key decision making due to kastom (local customary practice). all fdgs were facilitated in solomons pijin (pidgin), but some explanations were given in savo savo, the local language of savo island. in their comments most savo islanders used pijin, although some participants expressed themselves in english. the fgds were facilitated by two solomon islands’ research assistants, both of whom lived in honiara. the female researcher (mk) was the chief facilitator for all focus group sessions; she spoke english, pijin, and two other languages from her place of birth to the west of honiara on guadalcanal. the male researcher (wt) was originally from savo island and spoke savo savo, pijin and english. three non-indigenous researchers took notes during the fgds, and followed up on specific points made during later one-on-one semi-structured interviews. one of these (ar) has lived in honiara for over six years and is fluent in english and pijin. chief investigator 1 (ng) conducted interviews in pijin and english with mk, while chief investigator 2 (ch) conducted interviews in pijin or english, depending on which language the respondent chose to speak. the separate fgds for men, women and youth attempted to facilitate savo islanders to express their views and concerns. the diversity of views provided nuanced insight into the production and sale of crops. triangulation of data was achieved by cross-reference to existing literature, and subsequent community follow-up discussions for data crosschecking. data were collected using a standard interview schedule for each focus group. the interview schedule comprised of thematically organized, open-ended exploratory questions, which were based on a literature review of peer reviewed publications and grey literature on agricultural production, food security and gender in solomon islands. the note taker/observers made written notes about key concepts that arose during focus group discussions and identified points for later discussion and clarification. notes assisted with subsequent data coding and analysis. research comprised a total of three visits to savo during 2015, with the research team returning to the research sites to provide feedback to focus group participants, and to crosscheck data findings identified by the researchers. the first visit to panueli from 15 to 18 february was a data gathering exercise, during which we held a general information session, and then separate fgds for men and women. the second visit to paibeta and leboni from 18 to 20 march convened focus groups for men and women. during this visit, a separate focus group with youth was held at the paibeta community high school. youth were asked to draw challenges for sustainable communities in solomon islands: food production, market sale and livelihoods on savo island portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 73 pictures on paper in response to questions, and to then discuss their drawings. a third visit to all sites on savo island occurred between 14 and 15 july and aimed to cross-check the data and the validity of the research analysis with the research participants. data analysis the qualitative methodological approach chosen for this study was interpretive phenomonological analysis (ipa) as it can provide rich and detailed data from focus groups and semi-structured interviews. researchers were conscious of their outsider positionality and engaged in critical self-reflection throughout the data analysis phase of the research process (elliot & timulak 2005: 152). this involved checking and auditing all steps of the analysis and careful archiving of each step of the analysis for later checking, as well as cross-checking of data analysis by other team members. recordings of fgds were listened to and workshopped by the research team within two days of each focus group being held. recordings were then transcribed from pijin and savo savo directly into english (wt, mk and ar). data were then independently and manually coded (ar). during this initial reading, emerging insights and understandings were recorded as memos. the data were then divided into distinctive meaning units, which were constantly compared (glasser & strauss 1967) to each other and to other emerging categories, to develop codes and categories, later organized within broader thematic domains. ng and ch independently reviewed the coded data to ensure the rigour of the study, at times asking the other researchers to double check specific points and translations. to assess the validity of the analysis, the main findings from this study were discussed with invited participants from solomon islands government and donor agencies on monday 13 july 2015 at a briefing workshop held in honiara. this was followed by a third visit to all sites on savo between 14 and 15 july, to relay the content of the discussion with government to the study participants in the villages, and to conduct a final audit of preliminary research findings. the final visit sought both to confirm the interpretation of data, and to discuss how the research could be used by savo islanders to address the concerns they had themselves identified. once preliminary findings were confirmed, they were disseminated in report form in late august 2015 to community chiefs, government departments, non-government organizations and the honiara city council. results the research team explored food production, market sale and income generation on savo island by examining trade with the hcm. a total of 76 participants spoke in the savo island fgds about production for market, getting goods to market, and sale at market. they provided a sample that is large enough to be indicative, although it is clearly not an exhaustive survey. the survey should be read as a snapshot of how one part of one island in one province links directly into the food needs of honiara residents. the following section presents the study findings in the words of savo islanders. it highlights several common trends relating to community sustainability, particularly issues of food production, market sale and income generation for savo islanders. key findings from the study concern the issue of asset creation as savo islanders in the three sites surveyed transition from subsistence lifestyles to greater engagement with markets. gathered data indicates that the production and sale of agricultural produce on savo island is primarily subsistence-based and organized by household, with husband, wife and children georgeou and hawksley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 74 deciding what will be grown and working together. some focus group participants reported working with other families at harvest times or employing young men to assist in the harvest. all of the youth in the sample group had been involved in harvest of produce and had been to the hcm with their parents to sell goods. respondents at the three sites sold the following products at hcm, or at other markets in honiara: slippery cabbage; cacao; cassava; chickens; corn; eggplant; kumara (sweet potato); mango; megapode eggs; watermelon; nuts (betel nut, cut nut, ngali nut); pawpaw; peanuts; pineapple; pumpkin; savo apple; tomato; and several varieties of beans and capsicum. we have divided these products into two categories and defined them as follows: export crops—crops grown specifically for export and sold in bulk to companies in honiara for processing (on savo island there are two products: cacao and copra);8 and market crops—which fall into two categories: crops grown specifically for sale at market, such as melons and peanuts; and crops taken to honiara for sale when there is a surplus. while most produce is sold at the hcm, some is taken directly to purchasers, or sold in smaller markets. savo islanders grow particular crops such as melon and peanut specifically to sell at market. other harvested products (savo apple and nuts) are sold when in season. crops such as cassava and kumara are generally staple foods for savo islanders, but are also sold at hcm if there is sufficient surplus. tomatoes, beans and cabbage are low cost items and are mostly grown for local consumption, or sold to other villagers on savo island. vegetables are only sold at hcm when farmers have a surplus. producers sell cash crops (watermelon and peanuts), as well as seasonal fruit and vegetables, and there is some specialisation in production between villages. panueli residents were the most engaged with the hcm, with many specifically growing watermelon and peanuts for market sale, while people from leboni and paibeta on the whole engaged less with the market. at the time of the first and second field visits during february and march 2015, it was the wet season, and many participants were concerned about lower production during this time. cassava was identified as a crop that could still be grown, harvested and marketed in the rainy season, while other crops (such as peanuts) can spoil in wet weather and were not being sold. factors affecting livelihoods the participants’ comments below concerning selling produce at hcm can be generally divided into: general conditions at the hcm; the operation of blackmarket/resellers; personal security at hcm; and transporting goods to market. conditions at hcm the market site itself is perceived by farmers as a necessary evil. while the site allows savo islanders to sell their produce, there are numerous issues that make it a less than attractive destination, a factor that is largely responsible for the interest in selling to ‘blackmarket,’ and at smaller markets. fgds of men, women and youth in all communities noted security at hcm was poor: it’s not safe to stay at night in the market; you see women lying down, pickpockets come, people cry, that’s how it is. (female farmer, leboni) 8 copra is the dried flesh of the coconut, pressed to extract coconut oil, with the remaining solid shredded for use in cooking, including as desiccated coconut. challenges for sustainable communities in solomon islands: food production, market sale and livelihoods on savo island portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 75 if you go and come back in morning, things are lost; storage at the market is not good. well, at the moment there is no storage—people lay produce all about— that’s why people sleep at the market. (female farmer, leboni) we also want to have lights—it’s there but it doesn’t turn on. when drunken people enter the markets at night we are afraid, but there’s nothing we can do, and security would not do anything. so we would sometimes stay [to guard produce] and wait until daylight. (female farmer, panueli) the market is a place which takes a lot of revenue for the town council, so the place should be safe. women hear men fight and run away. they are frightened, then [they] come back and their food is gone (male farmer, leboni) when you go to market, pickpocketers and beligas [thieves] come too. another problem too is $100 flies from your pocket [either stolen or spent]. (male farmers, paibeta) uniformly across communities, market fees were identified as a problem faced by both farmers and sellers, but for different reasons. for some the prices were too high: sometimes, you pay the fees for the market table and storage fees and then you are hungry, and you do not have money to pay for food for yourself. you go hungry. (female farmer, leboni) i have a question: town council use the fees for what? there is no building of other markets, or improvement at the markets. what is the use of it? (male farmer, paibeta) for others, the problem was the variety of fees charged for those who required long stays in the market, as well as differing fees for different crops: i want to tell about the market fee. we pay three times a day—in the morning you pay market fee, and in the afternoon a storage fee, and you have different fees for different crops. coconut and root crops and melon, different fees. suppose you line up your goods—cassava, peanut, coconuts, whatever—there is a different fee. if you take melon, pineapple and coconut, sometimes you pay a total of three to four hundred dollars. (male farmers, paibeta) participants across the different communities suggested that fees should be collected once a day or be charged for a particular time period, and that fees should only be charged by area and not by type of product sold: they [hcm] do not follow the crops that people take. some take a lot, some not so much, but on the ticket it doesn’t put how many crops you take. for example, those on the guale [guadalcanal] plains take a lot of potato compared to her two to three baskets, but the ticket is the same price, it’s not right. (male farmer, leboni) the men at the market should have a standard fee across the board, for everyone. then they should also look at the timeframe. some people just go for one day. look at these areas and make a fee which fits everyone. why not make one fee only across the board. or a one-week fee, or a three-day fee. but when you sit down with melons sometimes it takes five or six days. (male farmer, paibeta) georgeou and hawksley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 76 space at hcm was identified as very limited, which led to negative effects for consumers and market sellers: if we can’t find any space then we can’t sell our goods, so then we usually wait for the next day and this would force us to remain overnight, where our products can turn bad. so to spend the night we will pay an overnight fee. when it rains we will remain there and just bear it; we live like we’re in a pigpen. (female farmer, panueli). the market house is too small, compared to the population that comes to the market. it’s crowded inside and hard to get around to do what you need and do your market. the current market house does not cater for it. (male farmers, paibeta). the problem with sales and the market is there is only one place—people are squeezed up, then you see sales are low, demand is low; supply high, demand low. if there are two to three market outlets, that would be better. (male farmers, paibeta). the organization of market space and facilities, particularly water and sanitation, was also criticized: i would like to stress to the city council that they should have separate buildings for the sale of fish and for the sale of the crops. this is because of hygiene, because it is very bad at the moment. the foreigners would also hate the smell that it gives out. (female farmers, panueli) the toilets at the markets are also in very bad condition. there are some people that just shit on the floor and the water doesn’t come every day. they would even shit at the wharf. they would not bother to find water and flush, and the toilet would fill up. (female farmers, panueli) tell the town council to get fresh water for the market sellers. (female farmers, panueli) the lack of secure and suitable places to store food meant it was necessary for market sellers to sleep at the hcm with their produce. participants said the lack of storage facilities negatively impacted sales and food quality: storage affects the quality of produce; storage at honiara market is like a copra dryer [too hot]. (male farmer, paibeta) sometimes, this market house, i see something that is not right; it’s full up with blackmarket people, and people who stay in the sun pay the same fee—they should have a lower fee. town council should improve or extend on this house to make the fee fair for everyone, all farmers; those outside face the rain and sun, but the fee is the same. produce is not good to sell for the customers after it’s been out in the sun. everyone should have shelter. (male farmer, leboni) resellers (‘blackmarket’) if hcm was crowded or difficult to access due to weather, or if savo farmers had items that might spoil quickly (such as seasonal savo apples), alternative market sites could be used at challenges for sustainable communities in solomon islands: food production, market sale and livelihoods on savo island portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 77 kukum, fishing village, white river, borderline, and talise markets, or farmers might sell the entire crop to a ‘blackmarket’ buyer: blackmarket people conduct another way of paying. when there is lots of produce they will buy and sit down with it—whatever people want to get rid of as soon as they reach the market. they will take especially things like banana that need to be sold quickly; then blackmarket is used. (male farmer, paibeta) a more accurate term for blackmarket sellers, and the term preferred in honiara as the activities undertaken are legal, is ‘resellers.’ these people are not themselves farmers but are, rather, wholesale purchasers who buy an entire crop from a farmer and then sell the produce in smaller quantities at hcm. resellers often live at the market and sell all year round, so have fewer production costs and overheads (such as fertiliser, labour, transport, or accommodation) than farmers; however, they do need to pay all selling fees and storage, if used. people from panueli village complained about intimidation and arguments resulting from disagreements between farmers and blackmarket/resellers. such complaints mainly concerned the monopolization of stalls and space at the hcm, and to some extent the way resellers profit by selling smaller quantities of produce than farmers, but at the same price. the blackmarkets always chase away us growers from the markets—we would tell them that we pay our fees, but they wouldn’t even be considerate and give us space. (female farmers, panueli) the blackmarkets are a mix of islanders from everywhere. we would like to have the blackmarket practice to stop. they would be there as if they live there. they have their mattresses, pillows and sometimes they have sex there. (female farmers, panueli) the blackmarkets should be taken out from the main market and allocated to another place. some of them would buy parcels of nuts from the collectors and they would, in turn, take out some of the nuts from the parcels and then sell them for the same price with fewer nuts. there is no need for blackmarkets at all. (female farmers, panueli) when i go market, the blackmarket spoils us people who pay and sell there. they put a high price; if we lower the price they are cross. i fight them, because i have harvested at home. (male farmer, leboni) in the smaller community of paibeta, however, blackmarket activity was not seen as such a problem. in fact, some savo farmers even reported dabbling in the reselling trade themselves, buying produce from others from savo on arrival in honiara, and then selling the combined crop to resellers (fieldnotes 2015). security at the hcm focus group participants were concerned by the unregulated flow of people through the market during both daytime operating hours and after the market closed at night. theft of produce and money also featured prominently as a concern, but as they explained, the problems faced at hcm were not only from those in the market to buy and sell, but extended to the conduct of security staff employed by hcc to guard hcm. significantly, two thirds georgeou and hawksley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 78 of the comments on unsafe conditions at hcm noted security staff were part of the problem. stealing and harassment of women were also noted. villagers identified the two most commonly cited problems with security staff as drinking alcohol with wantoks,9 and not doing their jobs: security staff should look after the market and the people; they should check on us every now and then. there are times they would flirt with the girls or the women. (female farmers, panueli) securities should be there the whole day, and a supervisor should be there to monitor the securities to make sure that they are doing their jobs. (female farmers, panueli) when drunken people enter the markets at night we would be afraid, but there’s nothing we can do, and the securities would not do anything. (female farmers, panueli) security staff are not doing good work, and then the fee is high, then there are many thieves around the market … the market, it’s not good—security is not doing their job; people go around to steal. (male farmers, leboni) also, lots of people use the place to sleep, but it’s not safe. people fight and security is slack and people who stay … then others come and steal … so problems come up. it is not safe. the youths use marijuana and kwaso10—drunken people … they need good security there, to tighten it up, to take out these people. the farmers are the ones that buy [pay] fees for the market, not the marijuana and kwaso people (male farmers, leboni) women were particularly vulnerable to violence, sexual harassment, theft and intimidation. most women felt that they could do little about this, with one woman commenting that making a formal complaint meant she felt she could become a victim of violence at the hands of security staff: one time i reported security staff at the honiara market. i went to the policeman and reported two to three security guards. i paid the storage fee and they stole my food. they [hcc] sacked them because they were drunk, but then i was frightened and came home. (female farmer, leboni) others had witnessed hcm authorities try to intervene, but to no effect: the market manager tried to do something; one time i heard him say to those drinking and smoking marijuana “you must go out”. so, they tried but it’s hard. so they need good security and law enforcement … “if you do not have work in the market, get out” they say, “if you pay, come—it’s not a place for rest.” they say it on the speaker, but it does not happen. (male farmer, leboni) 9 wantok (literally ‘one-talk’) denotes a reciprocal social relationship between people with linguistic, kinship or other area village or island ties. 10 kwaso refers to any illegally distilled alcoholic spirit. it can have a particularly high alcohol content. solomon islands government has attempted to combat kwaso production and consumption through an intensive public education campaign since 2012. challenges for sustainable communities in solomon islands: food production, market sale and livelihoods on savo island portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 79 transporting goods to market transport of agricultural produce to market is the highest cost item incurred by savo islanders when selling goods at hcm. at the time of the research there was no port or jetty on savo island that would facilitate the transfer of produce to and from the hcm. previously a ship had regularly serviced savo island but this was no longer the case, so the only means of transporting goods to market is by obm. savo island farmers claimed they were at a distinct disadvantage compared to people in neighbouring provinces, who enjoy subsidized passenger and produce shipping. obm owners and operators are exclusively male, and there is a lack of competition on the pricing of obm charters. smaller communities also reported a lack of competition with respect to prices and routes. a charge of sbd$100 per person per trip (savo-honiara, or honiara-savo) is a set price among transport providers, despite other variations in the costs related to running a boat, such as fuel. freight is charged per bag, and prices vary depending on weight and volume. the charter price for a full boat of produce is generally sbd$1000: it’s better if petrol is down like this month; they should lower the fare for the canoe, then it would be good for us. i complain to the owners of the canoes “you should talk to us”; every time we go market, costs are the same. suppose we had a ship, then it would be good. (female farmer, leboni) while transport is the highest cost item in getting produce to market, it is also a risk, for both farmers and their produce. participants commonly mentioned that using obms to transport goods to market often resulted in spoiled produce, and noted that the journey can be a dangerous one: transport is a sad problem because the boat is not safe to transport goods to market. no matter if you cover it with plastic, produce can get spoiled. big waves can come and if the water spills on melons or peanuts it’s ok, but for other crops like cassava it lowers the quality and there will be a smell on the produce. (male farmer, paibeta) when the sea gets rough, we would have to throw away [overboard] some of our bags because we would be afraid for our lives. (female farmer, panueli) while the most commonly mentioned problems regarding transport were cost and spoiling of produce during the sea journey, some participants, particularly those in the smaller communities, mentioned the absence of a schedule of boats. produce that is ready for market requires immediate transport, but if the transport is not available at that time the produce begins to spoil, and farmers cannot then charge full price at hcm. most villagers prefer to go directly to honiara rather than to vila and then by road. hcm is however a difficult location at which to berth, due to the wrecks situated near its landing area, as well as the volume of vessels, rough seas, and rubbish and debris on the docking areas. a more common drop off point for savo islanders is the small sandy beach adjacent to the point cruz yacht club. transporting produce then requires a taxi ride to hcm, which further reduces profit: some taxis charge $100, i said to them, how can it be $100 to get a boat from savo then $100 to get from the yacht club to the market? sometimes men insist we give these prices, so we give it. (female farmer, leboni) georgeou and hawksley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 80 seafare [by obm] spoils the market, you have to pay for everything you take, melon, cassava, pineapples, fares—you must give for everything, your money will be down. you get to market, then you need a taxi or anything, you’ve already spent your money on sea fare; it downs the profits. (male farmer, paibeta) women in panueli also noted obms could run out of fuel and deliver passengers to areas outside honiara (such as mamara river, 7 kilometres west of honiara), which then required them to take a longer taxi ride to the hcm. the above comments suggest that taxis take advantage of farmers who need to get their food to market, especially when considering a standard per person fare for foreigners with luggage to travel the 11 kilometres (about 20 mins) from henderson airport to honiara cbd is sbd$100. despite the problems of transporting produce to market by obm, paibeta farmers mentioned that maritime transport sometimes provided savo people with a competitive advantage at hcm. for example, during flooding and damage to roads on guadalcanal (april 2014) it was still possible for savo islanders to bring produce to market, and to profit from the reduced competition. while the bulk of savo farmers take their produce to the hcm, some have found a profitable alternative is selling produce directly to buyers in honiara: i don’t market very much, so what i do is i sell chickens. i contact first the buyers on mobile phone and ask the chinese [shopkeepers/restaurateurs], “how many chickens do you want?” [the chinese answer] 10 [chickens]. i say “i will sell [chickens] for $70 [each],” they say “that’s too much: $60.” “no,” i say, “us here at home will pay $100.” so, i go and sell them [directly to the chinese in honiara for $70] and it’s good, to take sideline pay. chickens are good. (female farmer, leboni) one farmer in panueli liaised with office workers in government to provide bulk produce (melons) on a specific pre-arranged date (coinciding with a pay day), and would charter a boat and a taxi to deliver the goods. he would collect all the money on the same day (fieldnotes 2015). several participants noted that what they earned from sales at hcm is an issue directly linked to the incomes of honiara residents, a factor that requires further investigation for long-term food security of honiara residents. the lack of disposable income, blackmarket price fixing and low quality produce are factors that could affect the diet of honiara residents, and the profits of farmers on savo island. income generation savo islanders traditionally practice matrilineal property inheritance, however as political decision-making and economic systems are dominated by men (hedditch & manuel, 2010: 140), women’s traditional power as landowners is weakening. this pattern of changes in attitudes and policies with respect to land management results in women’s loss of power, and has occurred in other parts of solomon islands. the drivers appear to be market demand for land and large-scale development such as logging, mining and plantations (hedditch & manuel, 2010). the primary purpose of agricultural production for market and small-scale animal husbandry on savo island is to obtain money. the profits made by market sellers and farmers from the hcm were generally spent and not saved. in the smaller communities, people usually sold at market to raise funds for a specific purpose, such as contributions after a death, or for the church. challenges for sustainable communities in solomon islands: food production, market sale and livelihoods on savo island portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 81 production of some agricultural products for market is heavily gendered. for example, peanut, a product commonly grown for sale at hcm for between sbd$2 and $5 a stack, was predominantly grown and harvested by women. watermelon, a high value crop fetching prices from sbd$50 to $100 a unit, was predominantly grown and harvested by men. men and boys do the bulk of the work to prepare copra for sale, including taking it to honiara. the very heavy weight of the sacks of copra (between 70 and 100 kilograms) was cited as a major reason for men being responsible for the copra trade. some savo island men enjoy large profits from their market trade, particularly through the sale of melon. indeed, in panueli, people said ‘farmer winnim wokka’ (a farmer could make more money than a person working for wages), and there was a particular focus on generating profit from sale at market whenever possible. this was in contrast to the dominant pattern in paibeta and leboni, which favoured sale at market to meet a specific purpose, such as to pay school fees or other community-related obligations. in the discussions with youth, while both young men and women said it was likely they would take produce to market in the future, young women were less keen than young men to do so, citing the labour-intensive work of growing, harvesting and selling crops as being harder than paid employment. when it came to selling, most participants noted that only immediate family (spouse, children) were trusted to handle money, and they did not rely on extended family in the selling of produce. women are the principal vendors at hcm of most agricultural produce from savo island. there would be times when the men would go, when the women do not feel up to it. but usually it is the women that would do the marketing. (female farmers, panueli) usually it is the women who sell the produce at the market because the men are not brave enough to do it. most men are not used to doing the marketing. (female farmer, paibeta) male farmers in paibeta indicated that the issue of who sells produce at market is organized, and sometimes negotiated, within the family unit: they will decide at the home, “you wife will go” and the woman will go, and no matter if it’s heavy or not the women will go. or sometimes the man will go, “i’ll go” like that, they’ll decide in the home now. (male farmers, paibeta) sometimes … the family will identify themselves [who should go to market]—the man is not good to sit down at market, so the women will go; sometimes women are not good at it, so the man will go. (male farmers, paibeta) my experience at the market is that some men have bad luck, some women too. no sales will come. so people decide “father will go” or “mother will go”; they will decide who will go. (male farmers, paibeta) if the food is heavy, then men will go, or men and women together. (male farmers, paibeta) women were generally perceived as being better at managing the money earned at market, and the men in all of the male focus groups stated that women were better at saving the money from sales at the hcm to bring back to the village, rather than spending it in honiara. georgeou and hawksley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 82 when the women travel to the market they would go with the mentality of the price that they would aim to get for that day. when the amount is taken and the money returned, then the father and mother would discuss about the household goods that they would need to buy, including the children’s welfare and the church as well. (female farmer, panueli) women know how to budget—a man if he wants to go six [buy a six-pack of beer], he does it. (male farmers, leboni) some men are ashamed … [of misusing money when they go to market], some men go to market; everyone is not the same, but women are better at the market. (male farmers, leboni) in many families how to spend money gained from market sales was negotiated by the husband and wife, and in other cases the wife managed the household expenditures. in my case, my wife holds the money from market, not me. that’s the idea. when she comes back from the market we sit down with the family and then say “ok, this is for this, this is for that”. that’s what we do, i mean for my family. (male farmer, paibeta) the wife is the boss of money. (male farmer, panueli) when asked about the positive and negative impacts of gaining revenue from market, the youth focus group reported that men were more likely to spend market profits on alcohol and gambling than to return cash to savo: the good side is we can get money for food, another one is school fees, money for school fees and satisfying our needs, clothes, plates, teaspoon, cup, pots, things like that. bad impacts of it [cash money] is sometimes people use it for alcohol, to drink beer. the other thing is gambling—some fathers take money and just use it for gambling. this is what we think. (males in youth focus group) ok the good impacts we see are food, clothes, uniform and house building. when you make good money you can build a good house, then household things, plates, cups, things like that. bad effects are alcohol, smoking, playing casino … ok a likely example—when a man from here dies we spend money on that time, deaths okay? playing casino, when men take money from melon or peanut they take money and misuse it, go play cards, casino and stuff. another one too is when they take money to buy cigarettes, same as alcohol. (females in youth focus group) gender and asset creation the data reveal important implications for community sustainability on savo island, which is clearly linked to effective transport of agricultural surplus, ease of marketing and income generation. significantly, our findings from savo island are in line with broader patterns of gendered agricultural production in solomon islands, where women are responsible for the production of the majority of subsistence foods and also make up the majority of market vendors, while men tend to be more involved in the production, sale and marketing of more financially lucrative cash crops, such as watermelon (hedditch & manuel 2010). challenges for sustainable communities in solomon islands: food production, market sale and livelihoods on savo island portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 83 cash gained from the sale of agricultural produce at hcm is the primary source of income for most savo islanders. it is therefore important to highlight that as women were primarily responsible for the marketing of agricultural produce, the money they raised from this activity was typically the only source of cash for the family, and thus an important feature of community sustainability as savo islanders engage with the market economy. women’s position as the primary source of cash flow to the household provided them with access to and control over resources necessary to pay basic household expenses, such as school fees and food, cited as areas of most common spending. no participant in this study mentioned having a bank account, and money was spent soon after its collection. several said banking and saving might be more desirable than dealing only with quick flows of cash. the profitability of farming is further affected by the type and cost of transport available to savo islanders, as well as by market fees. the costs of transport and the length of time spent at hcm clearly affect the profitability of farming. the absence of a wharf or wharves on savo island means that obm is the only way to transport produce to market. this has resulted in a fixed price among obm owners, who benefit from every voyage. storage and market fees also eat into costs for all farmers who do not sell their crop to resellers. some farmers volunteered the information that they might get as little as sbd$200 from an entire crop of peanuts, after all costs were deducted. melons are a large cost item, but are also heavy, and several boats may be required to take a crop of 800 to 1000 melons to market. while some participants in the study sold to resellers, the majority of farmers felt that blackmarket was monopolizing the best lots at the hcm, which they felt affected their profits at the market. resellers were seen as intimidating, and savo islanders felt they were responsible for pushing up the price of fresh food, and reducing value for money for the customer by charging more for smaller quantities of produce. the overcrowding of hcm presents problems for farmers wishing to gain access. farmers also linked the presence of resellers to overcrowding and security issues in the market. farmers, especially women, are overwhelmingly concerned about hygiene and sanitation in hcc, their personal security and the security of their produce. savo island women stay overnight in the hcm, often for up to a week at a time, which broadly affects village life and precludes them from engaging in alternate income generating activities. they go to hcm to sell the produce, and in the process are exposed to a range of security and health problems, including the risk of assault and poor sanitation. the gendered roles in the provision of transport, selling of produce at hcm and managing of household income have repercussions for economic development on savo island, and for community sustainability, particularly as women are central to securing and managing the income essential for household expenses. conclusion the aim of this article has been to unpack the challenges and tensions inherent in engaging with an emerging market economy while building sustainable communities. it provides evidence-based research that can inform government and donor responses to economic issues of rural food production, transportation to market, and the articulation of farmers with consumers in honiara. the emphasis placed on market sale by savo islanders points to the growing importance of the cash economy for rural communities, and on removing transport and safety barriers that hamper wider and more effective market engagement. georgeou and hawksley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2, september 2017 84 acknowledgements this research was made possible through funding from the australian catholic university and the university of wollongong. ethics approval for the research was gained through the australian catholic university: hrec registration no: 2014 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http://www.statistics.gov.sb/statistics/demographic-statistics/household-income-and-expenditure-surveys http://www.statistics.gov.sb/statistics/demographic-statistics/household-income-and-expenditure-surveys http://www.statistics.gov.sb/statistics/demographic-statistics/household-income-and-expenditure-surveys https://www.unwomen.org.nz/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/m4c-soi-project-sites.pdf https://www.unwomen.org.nz/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/m4c-soi-project-sites.pdf edwelcomejuly2008 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress. editor’s welcome to portal vol. 5, no. 2, 2008. this special issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies is entitled ‘italian cultures: writing italian cultural studies in the world,’ guest edited by ilaria vanni (university of technology sydney). the issue aims at updating existing scholarship and scoping the proliferation of interests in the growing field of italian cultural studies, whether conducted in italy or outside that country. the issue proceeds from the premise that cultural studies practitioners write multiple italies within italy itself and from provincialized italies, with a perspective that is both global and informed by specific local knowledge. as vanni says in her introduction to the special issue, a number of questions arise when critics attempt both to imagine and work within the relatively recent field of italian cultural studies: ‘is there a specific genealogy to the study of cultures in italy that intersects with the anglophone definition of cultural studies? is italian cultural studies confined to cultural practices in italy, or does it expand to include the cultural practices of the italian diaspora? if there is an italian cultural studies tradition, where is it? what do italian cultural studies academics write about?’ the contributions included here respond to such questions by drawing on a range of disciplinary and critical traditions to problematise received ideas about what italy signifies and for whom. this issue of portal also contains an essay and two cultural works in its cultural works section. ‘in the age of schizophrenia, icebergs, and things that grip the mind,’ from the vietnam-based visual artist, curator, and writer, sue hajdú, is an evocative meditation on saigon as represented in the work of five vietnamese photographers— ngo dinh truc, lam hieu thuan, nguyen tuong linh, bui the trung nam, and bui huu phuoc— who were born in the 1970s and whose work is reproduced by permission here. in her response to these young artists’ representations of contemporary saigon, hajdú notes how each photographer is inevitably grappling with the historically and nationally specific notion of contemporary vietnamese time, ‘the monumental demarcation line’ signified by 1975. we also include in the cultural works section a suite of spanish and english-language poems, ‘from/de infernal : romantic,’ by sydney based vek lewis, and a poem entitled ‘mutiple strokes’ by the nigerian writer and critic, obododimma oha. paul allatson, chair, portal editorial committee portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: camellia, s., and fattah, k. n. 2021. torn between two worlds: unsettled sense of place and belongingness between old and new homelands during a global pandemic. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 62–66. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i12.7418 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay torn between two worlds: unsettled sense of place and belongingness between old and new homelands during a global pandemic suborna camellia1 and kazi nazrul fattah2 1 radboud university 2 university of melbourne corresponding author: suborna camellia, doctoral candidate, gender & diversity studies, radboud university, houtlaan 4, 6525 xz nijmegen, netherlands. s.camellia@gmail.com doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7418 article history: received 11/09/2020; accepted 11/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract the covid-19 pandemic has impacted migrants physically, emotionally, economically and socially in both the global north and south. emerging scholarship argues that to understand the dis-equalising impacts of covid-19 on migrants it is necessary to consider their specific social situations across diverse contexts. in this essay we reflect critically on our experiences as first-generation aspirational immigrants in australia and explore how the pandemic has unsettled our senses of place and belongingness in both our old and new homelands (bangladesh and australia). the closing of borders during the covid-19 pandemic has underlined that immigrants experience unique vulnerabilities as they struggle with the burden of belonging in two different worlds. keywords covid-19; belongingness; immigrants; vulnerabilities; social inequality introduction in june 2020, andrew dawson, professor of anthropology at the university of melbourne, wrote that the experience of living in australia during the covid-19 pandemic has strengthened his sense of belonging to his adopted country (2020). reflecting on australia’s successful handling of the crisis compared to his home country the united kingdom, he declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 62 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7418 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7418 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7418 mailto:s.camellia%40gmail.com?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7418 explained that the australian way of dealing with the pandemic made him feel ‘more australian’ and strengthened his sense of national identity. our personal experience has little resonance with dawson’s. as recent immigrants to australia from bangladesh, we had hoped to develop a sense of belongingness to australian society. our endeavour to create a better future in australia was interrupted by our caring responsibilities in bangladesh, a country that has largely failed to ensure care for elderly people during the pandemic and the shrinking australian labour market. in this paper we reflect critically on our experience of living through the pandemic and argue that unlike professor dawson whose social context allows him to deepen his ties to his adopted homeland, the pandemic in our case has unsettled our sense of place and belongingness in both our old and new homelands. from bangladesh to australia: escaping the past for a better future we are among the group of people often called ‘diaspora’ or ‘transnational’ in academic literature, and ‘skilled migrants’ in australian immigration policies. we, however, prefer to view ourselves as aspirational bangladeshi immigrants. we have material aspirations, such as securing a stable career in academia and owning a small but beautiful apartment/house somewhere in australia. we also aspire to live in an equal, fair society. in bangladesh we both had well established careers in our respective fields and could afford a fairly decent middle-class life. there were no economic reasons for us to migrate to australia. we chose to leave behind our life of convenience in dhaka to escape a deep frustration and anxiety with the widespread corruption and injustice in almost every sector in bangladesh and the increasing normalisation of intolerance towards people who share alternative views about religion or politics. being part of the higher educated middle-class in bangladesh we had the ‘capacity to aspire’ (appadurai 2004) for a better future and the ability to migrate to a fairer and just society. yet, we could not escape our past in bangladesh as we had to leave behind our elderly parents who need care. several years after migrating to australia, we are still managing the care responsibilities for our parents in dhaka while also completing our phds. aged care in bangladesh is largely neglected in existing healthcare policies. the absence of formalised aged care services leaves adult children responsible for their elderly parents’ health and wellbeing. prior to leaving bangladesh, we had managed to set up an informal care system for our parents with support from friends and relatives. even in a developing country like bangladesh, managing care responsibilities from another continent became possible due to internet and mobile technologies and a small number of caring friends and relatives. however, once the pandemic hit bangladesh the informal care system that we had set up for our parents ceased to function due to continued lockdown and mobility restrictions. the feeling of frustration and anxiety that we were so eager to escape from intensified. despite physically being in australia, in our minds we remain in bangladesh, perhaps more so than ever. by putting people we love and care for in an extremely vulnerable position, covid-19 has in effect unsettled our sense of belongingness in australia. it led us to question the ways we relate to our old and new homelands. covid-19 in bangladesh the first three covid-19 cases were reported in bangladesh on march 8 and as of november 5, the total reported cases according to government sources, are 412,647 with 5,983 deaths (directorate general of health services 2020). because of the government’s ‘not-so-secret’ policy of suppressing reporting on covid-19 cases, many believe that these numbers are the tip of the iceberg (cousins 2020). while elderly people everywhere are particularly vulnerable to covid-19, in bangladesh this vulnerability is multiplied due to their dependence on others for basic needs. this has been exacerbated because of extended periods of lockdown and huge social stigma surrounding the disease. there have been reports in national media of ailing elderly parents being abandoned by their sons and daughters upon suspicion that their parents camellia and fattah portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202163 contracted the disease (‘mother with covid-19 symptoms’ 2020). in some cases, patients are turned away at hospital doors if they have covid-19 symptoms (chowdhury 2020). there are numerous incidents of contradictory test results, leaving people in doubt about the quality of the testing procedure (bappa 2020). thousands of test results have been faked by government-authorised hospitals (sullivan 2020). furthermore, corruption and theft during procurement of medical supplies and equipment government agencies has made the situation worse (balland 2020). against this backdrop, every day has become a struggle for us to cope with an overwhelming feeling of stress and anxiety. at the beginning, those getting infected were unfamiliar— positive cases were represented by numbers and statistics— distant and nameless. gradually, it came closer and closer, the numbers suddenly morphing into the names and faces of close friends, relatives, neighbours and former co-workers. we knew that the consolidated number of deaths reported by the media each day contained many of those names and faces. since then, we wake up every morning apprehensive of receiving bad news and at night go to bed with constant fear of losing dear ones in bangladesh. what would we do if our parents fall ill? that is the fear we are living every moment. we have been standing on the verge of giving up on our dream of living a better life in australia. as much as we would like to be there for our parents, we are scared to go back to that unjust world which we worked very hard to leave behind. covid-19 in our new home australia australia is one of the few countries that has been dealing with covid-19 successfully and as of november 2020 has suffered far less deaths from the pandemic compared to many other similar countries. in the quiet, leafy suburb in queensland where we live there seems to be little sign of an ongoing pandemic aside from the now almost ubiquitous notices advising people to maintain physical distancing. yet, living in one of the safest places in the world does not make us feel safe while our other home has become one of the world’s most dangerous hotspots of the virus. the contrast we live between our two homes is bizarre and painful. our feeling of insecurity heightens with the current travel ban on australian residents. soon after the global outbreak of covid-19, we decided to leave australia to be with our parents. however, as we were preparing to relocate to dhaka, the government issued an international travel ban for all australian residents that barred us from leaving the country. not being able to support our parents in these difficult times takes a huge toll on our emotional wellbeing. our permanent resident status in australia has put us in a vulnerable situation. the shutdown of the job market in australia has worsened the situation by significantly increasing the feeling of uncertainty and insecurity. the shutdown of businesses led to the first economic recession in 30 years and nearly one million australians have lost their jobs since the onset of the pandemic ( janda 2020). it is highly unlikely that this situation will improve in the near future. we are about to complete our phds and had been looking forward to starting an academic career. that now seems a distant reality. we came to australia because we wanted to contribute. we do not want to receive the government jobseeker payment to survive. for us, developing a strong sense of belongingness and becoming australian lies in the contribution we want to make to australian society. our sense of belongingness to australia has been further unsettled by the racial abuse against asian and indian immigrants (zhou 2020; grewal 2020). the common racist remark ‘go back to your f***ing country’ shouted from fast moving cars as they pass by, questions our very existence in a society where we look forward to contributing and belong. the constant feeling of insecurity which we wanted to leave behind in our old homeland in bangladesh has now become part of our everyday life in australia. covid-19 has made us relive our past insecurities. the past has become very immediate as we worry about our parents there and our future here. camellia and fattah portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202164 our dreams of building a better home in australia has drifted further as we move deeper into a state of uncertainty of place and belongingness. we feel torn between two worlds, between past and future and between two homes. we remain suspended in an in-between space, neither fully belonging here nor there. should we return to the insecure world we left behind in bangladesh? or should we continue to endure the uncertainties in australia, despite the huge toll on our mental health and productivity, to see what the future may hold for us here? that is the question that defines our everyday life during the pandemic. conclusion the everyday experiences of living through a global pandemic has very dissimilar social, economic, and emotional impacts on immigrants. for us, the anxieties of losing loved ones in bangladesh to covid-19, combined with the growing insecurities of making a foothold in the shrinking australia labour market, have become part of our everyday lives. covid-19 is a symptom of a much larger, albeit hidden, problem. our marginalisation cannot be understood simply as an impact of covid-19. it gets shaped at the intersection of multiple and multi-dimensional axes of social inequalities that needs to be investigated, questioned and dismantled. our story explains why we are unable to feel ‘more australian’ like professor dawson. for us immigrants from the global south, the dream of belonging remains an elusive proposition. references appadurai, a. 2004, ‘the capacity to aspire: culture and the terms of recognition’ in culture and public action, (eds) v. rao & m. walton, stanford university press, stanford, ca: 59–84. balland, s. c. 2020, ‘bangladesh and covid-19: a disaster within a disaster,’ asia times, 18 june. online, available: https://asiatimes.com/2020/06/bangladesh-and-covid-19-disaster-within-a-disaster/ [accessed 8 september 2020]. bappa, a. t. 2020, ‘dghs facing criticism for providing contradictory results,’ the finance today, 28 july. online, available: https://www.thefinancetoday.net/article/health/12878/dghs-faces-criticism-for-providing-contradictorytest-results [accessed 8 september 2020]. chowdhury, t. 2020, ‘covid-19: bangladesh hospitals forced to turn away patients,’ al jazeera, 7 april. online, available: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-bangladesh-hospitals-forced-turnpatients-200407131633280.html [accessed 8 september 2020]. cousins, s. 2020, ‘bangladesh’s covid-19 testing criticised,’ the lancet, vol. 396, no. 10251: 591. https://doi. org/10.1016/s0140-6736(20)31819-5 dawson, a. 2020, ‘how covid-19 made me more australian,’ public 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https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/local-news/mother-with-covid-19-symptoms-abandoned-in-sakhipur-forest [accessed 8 september 2020]. sullivan, h. 2020, ‘global report: bangladesh hospital owner accused of faking thousands of covid-19 test results,’ the guardian, 16 july. online, available: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/16/global-reportbangladesh-hospital-owner-accused-of-faking-thousands-of-covid-19-test-results [accessed 8 september 2020]. zhou, n. 2020, ‘asian australians threatened and spat on in racist incidents amid coronavirus,’ the guardian, 24 july. online, available: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/24/asian-australians-threatened-and-spat-onin-racist-incidents-amid-coronavirus [accessed 8 september 2020]. camellia and fattah portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202166 https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/local-news/mother-with-covid-19-symptoms-abandoned-in-sakhipur-forest https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/16/global-report-bangladesh-hospital-owner-accused-of-faking-thousands-of-covid-19-test-results https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/16/global-report-bangladesh-hospital-owner-accused-of-faking-thousands-of-covid-19-test-results https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/24/asian-australians-threatened-and-spat-on-in-racist-incidents-amid-coronavirus https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/24/asian-australians-threatened-and-spat-on-in-racist-incidents-amid-coronavirus portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 18, no. 1/2 sep 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: frøystad, k. 2022. through the looking glass: the involuntary cosmopolitanism of black magic and possession in modi’s new india. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 18:1/2, 96–110. https://doi. org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i12.7808 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal research article (peer reviewed) through the looking glass: the involuntary cosmopolitanism of black magic and possession in modi’s new india kathinka frøystad corresponding author: professor kathinka frøystad, department of culture studies and oriental languages, university of oslo, po box 1010 blindern, 0315 oslo, norway, kathinka.froystad@ikos.uio.no doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7808 article history: received 02/07/2021; accepted 24/02/2022; published 27/09/2022 abstract in spite of modi’s promise of good days (acche din) in 2014, many indians still struggle with unemployment, low income, poor health and other difficulties. though some problems eventually find solutions and middle-class metropolitans increasingly seek help from gurus and psychologists, long-term misfortune and disturbances are still frequently attributed to black magic or possession. drawing on anthropological fieldwork in kanpur and bareilly, this article examines the unintended cosmopolitan effects of such practices, which occasionally unfold in ways that traverse and unsettle official religious boundaries, even in polarized times. heuristically contrasting modi to alice in wonderland, the article spells out the double bind of many low-income hindus who seek supernatural assistance in times of crisis: should they follow the logic of inexpensive efficacy, even if necessitating engagement with unfamiliar ritual worlds in heterotopic spaces associated with the religious other? or should they rather follow the emergent hindu nationalist logic of hindu exclusivism, according to which ritual remedies beyond a hindu ritual repertoire would be inappropriate? the persisting prevalence of the former logic under modi is illustrated with three cases, two of which are interrelated. firstly, we meet a female professional seeking help against suspected black magic from a rustic sufi-muslim healer. secondly, we meet a kali devotee seeking help against spirits that disturbed his career and marriage in a renowned sufi-muslim dargah. the final case shows how familial neglect, economic hardship and an interreligious marriage conducted two generations earlier came together in a case of possession. the cosmopolitan effects of such instances, the article argues, lie in their tendency to form an anti-structural, heterotopic counterweight to aggressive hindu nationalism. 96 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ file:https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7808 file:https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7808 file:https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7808 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:kathinka.froystad@ikos.uio.no file:https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7808 keywords exlusivism; kanpur; affliction; dargahs; black magic; hindu nationalism people who experience long-term misfortune frequently state that ‘someone must have done something,’ as the social anthropologist veena das notes in her insightful book affliction (2015: 56, 93). health problems, financial distress, familial disagreements, property disputes, mental ‘tension’ or other hardships that persist despite wholehearted efforts to resolve them, often trigger suspicions that a jealous human being or malevolent spirit has ‘done something’ to cause them. just like in the azande witchcraft famously discussed by e. e. evans-pritchard (1937), attributing misfortune to occult forces enhances the sense of causality: in addition to explaining how misfortune happens, it also explains why and at the behest of whom/what. yet, while the azande of the 1930s relied on a singular divination system in which chicken and friction oracles were used to identify and disarm the root cause, indian hindus, who live in a complex multi-faith society, have long traditions for crossing religious boundaries for diagnosis and curative practices. this religious ‘promiscuity’ does however not sit easily with the hindu nationalist project of making india more hindu, which became an undeclared state policy with the spectacular ascent to power of the bharatiya janata party (bjp) in 2014. given the apparent friction between these cultural logics—one driving religious crossings, the other discouraging them—this article considers how suspicions of malevolent forces played out during modi’s efforts to build a new india during his first period as prime minister (2014–2019). based on longitudinal anthropological fieldwork in kanpur,1 it makes a two-pronged argument. firstly, to cross official religious boundaries in pursuit of a reliable diagnosis and effective cure remained surprisingly common in spite of the growing entrenchment of hindu nationalism—indeed, in some ways even because of it. secondly, such crossings served as an involuntary religious cosmopolitanism that formed a subtle counterpoint to the hindu nationalist project. in certain ways, the effort to make india more hinduized, prosperous, genderequal and technologically sophisticated thus worked against itself. this expression is neither meant to invoke a model of politics as directly self-destructive (as in baruah 1999), nor to rehearse the common argument that the hindu tradition is fraught with internal contradictions (see hesteerman 1985; inden 1986: 763). what i suggest is that the push for a new hindu india generated anxiety-ridden gaps between the dizzyingly imaginable, the affordable and the socially appropriate that were occasionally handled in ways that involved superhuman powers or practitioners of the ‘wrong’ kind, even if increasingly done discretely. the first part of the article elaborates on the two contrasting logics and the unfulfilled expectations of the first modi government; the second part exemplifies how religious boundaries were crossed when the going got tough. what to do when the going gets tough? the contrast between the logics that respectively drive and discourage religious crossings may be heuristically illustrated by contrasting modi to alice, the fictional girl from lewis carrol’s children’s books. the two could hardly be more different. narendra modi is a septuagenarian man of flesh and blood with spectacles, white beard and a purported 56-inch chest who in 2014 became the prime minister of the second most populous country in the world. alice, in contrast, is an imaginary nineteenth-century english girl, originally depicted as a child of 8–10 years with long wavy hair, frock and apron. my reason for contrasting them is, however, not their physical differences but their opposing orientations to ontological 1 the fieldwork—funded by the research council of norway—was conducted in a low-income neighbourhood in the periphery of kanpur by means of annual field visits from 2013 to 2019 and regular social media contact in-between and afterwards. as explained elsewhere (frøystad 2016, 2021), the fieldwork made its point of departure in a kali temple and used a person-centred method to follow its main protagonists across social and ritual contexts. frøystad portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202297 alterity. while modi personifies what i analyse as an emergent ‘logic of hindu exclusivism,’ alice personifies the openness inherent in what i term ‘the logic of inexpensive efficacy.’ the logic of inexpensive efficacy alice is an ontological explorer who constantly finds herself in situations that upend much of what she has come to take for granted. in alice’s adventures in wonderland (carroll 1865) she falls into a rabbit hole and enters wonderland, where animals talk, alice grows and shrinks depending on what she eats and drinks, pebbles turn into cakes and playing cards work in the queen’s garden. in through the looking glass (carroll 1871), alice walks through the mirror on the mantelpiece, where flowers talk, poems make sense despite being pure gibberish and time goes backwards and forwards simultaneously. granted, alice’s adventures had nothing to do with problem-solving. her fall into wonderland was accidental and her sojourn through the mirror was prompted by a wish to escape boredom. yet her willingness to enter alternative realities and learn enough about how they work to navigate in them, resonates strongly with the openness towards unfamiliar, if not transgressive, ritual spaces and procedures that characterize hindus who suffer from longstanding misfortune. entering the unfamiliar is rarely the first choice but has long been a last resort if nothing else works or is affordable. for most of the hindus i have come to know or read about over the years, their problem solution proceeded approximately as follows. whenever a problem arose, their first impulse was to solve it by practical means. they visited a doctor, talked sweetly to their creditors, sought help from their extended kin and network of connections, visited local political leaders (netas) to ‘get their work done,’ initiated court proceedings or, on the other side of the law, forged papers or paid money under the table. if their problems persisted despite repeated attempts, their second impulse was to seek divine assistance. they began with the god(dess) with whom their family identified, trying to please him or her by an elaborate sacrifice (a coconut, goat or whatever else s/he appreciates), rigorous fasting, a devotional singing session (kirtan), food distribution (bhandara), voluntary temple service (seva), karma-enhancing philanthropy, a vow or the like. if this deity proved unable to help, they approached others, each hindu god having its specializations. in so doing some maximized their chances by visiting sikh temples and sufi muslim grave shrines (dargahs) in addition to hindu temples for protective blessings. if not even that helped, surprisingly many pious hindus then began to suspect the involvement of supernatural forces such as the evil eye (nazar), possession or black magic, in which case some found it necessary to cross religious boundaries in search for a renowned muslim specialist—living or dead—for diagnosis and cure. scholars who have studied such cases up close, describe a number of reasons why hindus occasionally cross religious boundaries for divine assistance, even if as a last resort. one is the widespread reputation of dargahs as sites of wish-fulfilment, especially in cases of childlessness and unemployment. as noted by heitmeyer (2011), both deceased and living saints (pirs) are believed to have substantial power to intervene in such matters, perhaps—as suggested by gold (2013)—because their closeness to this world makes them better positioned to interfere in human affairs than the increasingly abstract pan-indian hindu deities. another is the shared belief in jinns, which given their muslim origin must be pacified by islamic experts if they trouble humans by possessing them or otherwise (gottschalk 2000), though there are also hindu exorcists who claim to know the islamic incantations required to make them leave humans alone (frøystad 2021). a third is the perception of dargahs and certain other islamic spaces as representing alternative sovereignties to which perceived injustices can be addressed, almost like in legal courts, a point made particularly forcefully by taneja (2018) but also emphasised by bellamy (2011: 92). a fourth, also discussed by taneja, is their reputation as spaces in which socially inappropriate desires can be articulated more safely than in one’s own religious spaces. a fifth is the importance allotted to what mittelmayer (2011) terms ‘visitational dreams,’ such as when troubled hindus dream about a muslim saint that orders them to seek his help (taneja 2018: 74-5) or have disturbing dreams that sufi-muslim mystics are best placed to help frøystad portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202298 them interpret (frøystad 2016). a sixth is the relative anonymity offered by ritual spaces in which the risk of bumping into relatives and other representatives of patriarchal orthodoxy is low, as emphasized by bellamy (2011, 2013). anonymity, she continues, is increasingly afforded by the availability of inexpensive transport and women’s growing freedom of movement and is vital for the formation of the alternative communities that facilitate healing. for hindus in search of black magic (kala ilm) practitioners, a seventh is the conviction that muslim practitioners are better at inflicting harm than their hindu counterparts, whether because transgressive behaviour is more easily ascribed to the religious other or even because muslim healers are believed to have a ‘reservoir of hate against hindus’ that can be activated (das 2015: 55). to consult individual specialists can, however, be expensive whatever their religious denomination, so workingclass hindus generally make do with bringing their knottiest problems to a dargah. whatever the specifics that motivate distressed hindus to cross official religious boundaries in pursuit of divine intervention, they share alice’s inclination to enter a part unfathomable world that their social circle is likely to consider unfitting. what, if anything, could be cosmopolitan about crossing religious boundaries to overcome misfortune? as we just saw, the motivations are driven by entirely different concerns and may even be rooted in deep anti-muslim prejudice. yet they still have certain cosmopolitan effects. true, sharing religious sites and practices has not succeeded in curbing polarization (see ghassem-fachandi 2011; heitmeyer 2011). moreover, several shared religious spaces are contested and have thus provoked considerable interreligious friction in their own right (hayden 2002; sila-khan 2004; sikand 2004; hayden 2016). nevertheless, scholars who have done long-term fieldwork within shared religious spaces document how suffering clients of different denominations rub shoulders in ways that foreground common problems, say, as struggling breadwinners, drug addicts, abandoned wives or mothers of sickly children. for flueckiger (2006), for instance, the sufi-muslim healing room she studied served as a ‘crossroads’ (caurasta) that bracketed religious boundaries, which resonates with bellamy’s point (2011) about alternative community-formation. repeated visits and longer stays will moreover make the initially unfathomable increasingly familiar. if resulting in perceptible improvement, it will also become more difficult to dismiss its ontological foundations and ritual repertoire. phrased in more general anthropological terms, one could thus say that one cosmopolitan dimension is the sense of ‘anti-structure’ and ‘communitas’ afforded by such spaces, concepts that turner (1969) once launched to bring attention to the fleeting sense of togetherness that occasionally arises during rituals, demonstrations and so on. another cosmopolitan dimension is alluded to by samuel and rozario (2012), who analyse sufi-muslim shrines as foucauldian heterotopia due to their attraction for people in crisis and their suspension of ordinary causality. if we combine these perspectives, ritual spaces and practices emerge as what we might call ‘heterotopias of suspended difference.’ in this way, the cosmopolitan effect of dargahs thus surpasses that of anderson’s ‘cosmopolitan canopies’ (anderson, 2011), which denote spaces in which people mix, rub shoulders and experience one another’s commonplaceness before returning to mono-ethnic localities and activities again. dargahs are also spaces in which ontologies may be expanded and changed. though even alice eventually returned from wonderland and the reverse side of the mirror, her extraordinary experiences clearly expanded her mind. those who have made such sojourns will inevitably internalize a fragment of ‘the other’ and frequently gain confidence in some of the very stuff that generates religious alterity. this confidence is however contingent: as we will see later, it can flip if the problem aggravates. the emergent logic of hindu exclusivism unlike alice, india’s prime minister narendra modi is not the kind of person who would visit a heterotopic religious space except to ostentatiously pay homage in pursuit of non-hindu votes. in fact, he hardly even does that: his annual offering of a sacrificial cloth (chadar) to the famous dargah of moinuddin chishti in ajmer is usually done by sending someone else with the chadar after a photo-op. the political ideology frøystad portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202299 he represents, hindu nationalism, considers hindus as the rightful heirs of india and treats muslims and christians as lesser indians at best. the founder of the organization that groomed modi as a political leader, the rashtriya swayamsewak sangh (rss), held that indians who have their ‘holyland’ abroad, should not have the same rights as hindus, sikhs, buddhists and jains (savarkar 1989 [1923]: 113). though the present rss leader’s stance is more inclusive (pandey 2019), hindu nationalists frequently vilify muslims and, to a lesser extent, christians, constantly worrying that each of these religious minorities endangers hinduism by conspiring to take over india, and constantly generating anxiety about how soon this will happen unless the political power is safeguarded by modi’s bjp (anand 2011; frøystad forthcoming). though few hindu nationalists argue explicitly against india’s present religious freedom, they clearly value some religious spaces and practices over others. the religious traditions they promote are all hindu; as is the religious architecture they heritagise, restore and promote as ‘indian.’ the rest are either treated with indifference or made subject to hindu claims of ownership. even indo-islamic architecture protected by unesco and the archaeological survey of india increasingly has been targeted by claims that a hindu deity was born, or once had a temple, on the exact spot where a mosque, grave shrine or another indo-islamic building now stands.2 as noted by gandhi (2020), modi’s hindu nationalist government thus constructs an imagined hindu past on india’s modern ruins, and though the babar mosque in ayodhya is the only major building to be demolished so far, the 2019 supreme court judgement that gave hindu beliefs precedence over formal muslim land ownership leaves little doubt that they—at least under modi—have secured sufficient influence over the judiciary to win through. to some observers, it is only a question of time before savarkar’s vision of unequal citizenship is enshrined in law. the passing of the controversial citizenship amendment act in december 2019 could certainly be seen as a first formal step in that direction. in order to unite purported hindu autochthones to push back the imagined muslim and christian takeover—supposedly occurring through interreligious marriage, proselytization, illegal immigration, unrestrained fertility and financial support from abroad—hindu nationalists have also found it crucial to strive toward greater homogeneity among the many communities classified as ‘hindu.’ linguistic and cultural differences aside, hinduism comprises a plethora of doctrines and practices that matured over thousands of years and which threaten the political unity among hindus. the promotion of some hindu doctrines and practices as more treasured than others extends back to the religious reform movements of the nineteenth century ( jones 1990) and has later been spearheaded by the rss and bjp when in power. the tenets they promote include vedic hinduism, sanskritic traditions, vedanta, worship of pan-hindu gods, cow veneration and, more recently, guru movements. those they ignore include low-caste practices such as possession, village deity worship, non-sattvik offerings of meat and alcohol and, not least, so-called ‘left-hand’ practices such as the aghori tradition. whether promotion occurs by means of sponsoring temples and festivals, textbook revision, assimilationist education for marginalized children, popular culture or reliance on religious leaders as ‘grey eminences’ ( jaffrelot 2012), the outcome is a normative hinduism that hierarchizes and reduces the ‘diversity within.’ for basu, drawing on schmitt, this is due to a tacit monotheistic imperative: ‘for there to be a hindu nation and a hindu state, there had to be a hindu monotheism’ that simplified, compacted and absorbed regional eccentricities (basu 2020: 3-4). basu’s use of the monotheism term is not meant to downplay the continued prevalence of polytheism and multicentricity in normative hinduism as much as to indicate a vector. this vector, i suggest, also involves a gradual shift from inclusivism to exclusivism, that is, a declining propensity to accept external religious elements as true and incorporate them into one’s own practice (halbfass 1988; laine 2014: 6). it began with a declining hindu attendance of public muslim rituals from the late nineteenth century onwards, proceeded with a declining hindu turnout at sufi-muslim grave shrines and continues with a growing hindu reluctance 2 such claims have been made about the babri masjid in ayodhya (which was demolished by hindu nationalist activists in 1992), the gyanvapi mosque in varanasi, the shahi eidgah mosque in mathura, the taj mahal in agra and the qutub minar in south delhi, among others. frøystad portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022100 to consult muslim practitioners openly to alleviate crisis. the emergent exclusivism is moreover more prevalent among brahmans and other upper castes than among lower castes. yet as michelutti notes, even young yadavs in uttar pradesh, a state once renowned for its composite culture, began to turn away from dargahs in the late 1990s, claiming that they had no need for ‘muslim gods’ (michelutti 2008: 57). these youngsters, who would have reached their mid-thirties when modi came to power, hint at the double bind that increasingly affects people looking for ways out of their hardship: the path they believe might work without emptying their coffers would not necessarily be acceptable to their consociates. taking the cue from sax (1998), we can however identify a possible double movement: as hinduism undergoes a slow monotheization, it will probably become increasingly necessary to step across the boundary to other religions—the more ‘other’ the better—for practices that are sufficiently transgressive to gain a reputation as efficient. unfulfilled aspirations to understand the continued prevalence of distress in the modi era, we must also briefly consider the growing gap between expectations and real-life experiences on the economic front. modi’s main election promise in the spring of 2014 had been to usher in ‘good days’ (acche din) for everyone (kaur 2015). this would be done by expanding the so-called gujarat model of ensuring basic infrastructure, efficient governance and inexpensive land to the corporate sector (schöttli & pauli 2016), which he claimed would eventually enhance economic security for everyone. government efficiency would be improved by a combination of hard work and eradication of corruption. as modi famously stated, he would neither ‘eat’ bribes himself, nor let anyone else in his government do so (in hindi: na khaunga, na khane dunga; sukhtankar & vaishnav 2015). he also advocated gender equality. during the run-up to the 2014 elections, he tweeted that ‘women empowerment is crucial to india’s growth. days of seeing women as “home makers” have gone; we have to see women as nation builders’ (modi 2014). and finally, so was communications technology, which modi famously promoted by conducting part of his election campaign by appearing as a hologram (warrier 2014). modi, in short, conjured up a new india cleansed of poverty, dust and quick fixes of the kind hindi speakers refer to as jugad ( jeffrey & young 2014), an india that would become a hindu counterpart to singapore and japan. many voters found these promises hugely appealing, and aided by solid backing from bjp’s shrewd election strategizing and social media campaign, bjp came to power with what many scholars then described as ‘the biggest win by any party in 40 years’ (see baig 2019).3 a few years into modi’s prime ministership, reality began to strike. to be sure, he worked hard to meet his ambitions and many of his voters literally deified him. yet his promises were not easy to fulfil. firstly, it became increasingly clear that the gujarat model failed to make incomes trickle down, that corruption was difficult to eradicate, that many girls and women remained subjugated, that the electrification and cleanup campaigns had serious shortcomings, and that communications technology was a double-edged sword, to summarize some of the critiques raised against the modi government during its first years in power. secondly, in november 2016, the modi government suddenly invalidated all the 500and 1000-rupee notes, asking people to deposit them in the bank or exchange them with new currency notes by the end of the year, though not enough new notes had been printed. in this way, modi hoped to strike down on black money and counterfeit currency while digitalizing and formalizing the economy (lahiri 2020). however, the modi government had also introduced a goods and services tax (gst) a few months earlier, and the combination of these steps proved disastrous (lahiri 2020: 68-72). in the formal economy, the unemployment rate rose to a 45-year high of 6.1 in 2017–18 (business today 2019). this pushed millions 3 the bjp made an even better performance in the subsequent election in 2019. frøystad portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022101 of white-collar workers and highly educated people into the informal economy, which in turn pushed a lot of others out of it. moreover, many employers in the informal economy now lacked the cash required to pay their workers. and thirdly, the appealing changes modi had envisioned in his election campaign did not necessarily put an end to the deep-rooted moral obligations that many people felt constrained by. as a result, the gap between aspirations, responsibilities and real-life experiences widened more than ever before. as noted by anthropologists working in melanesian and african societies, accusations of supernatural involvement frequently arise in such gaps. for rio (2019), the ‘witchcraft crisis’ reported in international news media following the turn of the millennium, was rooted in the tendency to blame the dissonance generated by profound social change on destructive supernatural forces, while moore and sanders (2001) go as far as claiming that witchcraft is a way of engaging with the modern moment. let me now exemplify how comparable processes played out on the ground in some of the many low-income pockets of uttar pradesh. i present three cases, two of which are interrelated, to bring out how unfulfilled aspirations and conflicting obligations triggered suspicions of supernatural involvement that somehow provided a reluctant counterweight to modi’s effort to craft a more exclusivist new hindu india. kamini and the cardamoms ‘kamini’ was a 35-year-old woman who had grown up in the low-income kanpur locality in which i did fieldwork, but who had long since moved away for marriage and work.4 having completed her education as a chartered accountant, her parents had married her off to a man from the same mercantile caste (baniya), after which she moved into his family’s apartment in noida, east of delhi proper. kamini’s transition to noida was not merely a geographical relocation but also an upward leap of class. even when revisiting her hometown, kamini dressed like a big-city woman, and with her trousers, blouse and long loose hair, she stood out amidst the local hindu housewives in saris and hair buns and the sikh ones in salwar-kurtas and braids. kamini’s career would have made modi proud. even after becoming a mother, she had retained her work in a bank. local whispers claimed that she earned as much as 100,000 rupees a month, more than double of any of my male acquaintances in kanpur. though i did not find it appropriate to try to verify these rumours, it soon became evident that her salary was at the root of her trouble. some years into their marriage, kamini’s husband had lost his job and began to kill time by hanging out with friends. he often returned drunk late at night. eventually he became an alcoholic who frequently beat her in frustration over his misery. their 8-year-old daughter often bore witness to their fights. a few generations ago, most indian women would have had to endure such behaviour in silence. consider the episode described by the feminist philosopher uma narayan: as a child in the 1960s she overheard how one of her aunts ‘cried and cried in the kitchen’ over the beatings and humiliations she had to endure in her in-laws’ home, cries that were muffled to avoid the ‘cultural “shame” of exposing such “private” matters’ (narayan 1997: 10-11). today indian women are increasingly reluctant to put up with such treatment (see sen 2007 for a poignant example from a mumbai slum), particularly if they have kamini’s education and self-confidence. all kamini wanted to do now was to move out with her daughter and seek a divorce. since she was economically independent, this would be easily realisable. or so kamini thought until she began to cough up cardamoms and develop insomnia. cardamoms are common in indian cooking but also have ritual potency. in kamini’s natal town i had occasionally seen women placing green cardamoms alongside the rice grains, red roli powder and wristbands (rakhi) with which they blessed their brothers on the day of raksha bandhan. a tantrik ritual acquaintance of mine had also described how he made female clients of exorcism seal their bodies by stuffing a black 4 all given names are pseudonyms, which explains the quotation marks. frøystad portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022102 cardamom into their vagina to prevent the spirit from re-entering. so when kamini began to cough up cardamoms without having tasted this spice in her food, she immediately suspected that ‘someone had done something.’ when she began to cough up cloves as well, she became practically certain. this is when she decided to seek help once she reached her mother’s house in kanpur for the chaitra navaratri holiday. kamini’s first step was to approach the aforementioned hindu tantrik, which is how i came to meet her. should he be unable to help, she was told, he could put her in touch with someone with deeper expertise on the problem at hand. since the tantrik kept his hands off black magic, he brought kamini to a muslim ritual healer known as pul baba. pul is the hindi word for bridge, and his nickname derived from his headquarters’ location under a flyover where trucks thunder past all day. only five metres away from pul baba’s outdoor ‘office’ there were railway tracks, which makes his location eerily modern-yet-traditional: sufi muslim practitioners often settle where rivers meet and different worlds converge. it was by these railway tracks where kamini sat down in front of pul baba and tearfully began to describe her ordeal. since her salary was crucial for making the household in noida go around, her brothersand sisters-inlaw did everything they could to talk her out of divorcing her husband. for kamini, the cardamoms and cloves she had begun to cough up convinced her that they used some kind of black magic to terrorize her into changing her mind. ‘could “someone” have infused them with ritualized evil power and concealed them in her food?’ she asked. a psychologist might have said that she objectified the conflicting pressures of protecting herself and her daughter from further misery and saving her affinal joint family from breakup and loss of face, but the person she consulted was a muslim ritual healer, not a psychologist. tears streamed down her face as she talked. pul baba listened empathetically while preparing the remedies he prescribed to dispel the black magic he agreed was harming her. these included photocopied paper scraps with islamic writings rolled around incense sticks that were to be burned. he also asked for her passport photo, the full names of her parents and grandparents, and the home villages of each, and instructed her to tell her mother to bring her a bucket of water with which she could cleanse herself before re-entering her natal home. what interests me is the complete surrender with which kamini, a successful upper-caste hindu professional, poured her troubles out to a rustic sufi muslim practitioner, hoping that his ritual powers would exceed those of her hindu in-laws. since pul baba’s powers relied on an in-depth knowledge about how to take help from the jinns, kamini would need to acknowledge the existence and supreme efficacy of such beings in order to make her consultation worthwhile. therein lies the ontological deviation from her prime minister’s non-stop promotion of hinduism as a source of all knowledge and truth. even hindus agree that jinns are of a distinctly islamic origin, and those who experience improvement after consulting practitioners such as pul baba are unlikely to ever forget that they once were assisted by jinns and an experienced ritual specialist able to ask favours from them. unfortunately, the covid-19 pandemic made it impossible to follow kamini’s case beyond her visit to pul baba. santosh’s double trouble ‘santosh’ was man in his thirties whom i came to know in the kali temple in which i began my fieldwork. hailing from a low-income obc family, he had worked since the age of 12, initially as a restaurant helper and later as a domestic servant. when i first met him in 2013, he had spent seven years as a cook for a local big shot and lived in his employer’s servant quarters with his wife and 3-year-old daughter. in his breaks, he frequently came running to the temple to polish the brass lion that guarded the inner shrine as a service (seva) to the goddess. though santosh initially appeared content and he frequently praised his employer, he was unhappy over being disrespectfully addressed as chotu (the small one) wherever he went, including in the temple. frøystad portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022103 his first plan was to change profession by becoming a kali medium. to this end, he entered an apprenticeship with an experienced medium. yet santosh proved unable to control his possessions. not only did they resemble spastic movements more than a goddess who spoke to and blessed her devotees; the timings were also inappropriate. soon the temple regulars whose admiration he craved began to laugh at him, and since he frequently fell over in spasms when he was supposed to make lunch, he eventually lost his job as well. his next employment was at a wealthy household some five kilometres away, and his family now relocated to the empty factory building that his new employers used as servant quarters. here his wife began to change and one day she disappeared: having emptied santosh’s bank account, she had run off to another man and his mother. though santosh eventually managed to bring her back by convincing her that she had been bewitched by the man’s mother, he never recovered his savings. having returned to the factory building, his wife began to have scary visions of naked old women whom she identified as churail (demonesses or witches). santosh then resigned. this time he became the housecleaner for a wealthy jeweller, but since the jeweller’s servant room barely had space for one, his wife and daughter had to live elsewhere. solitude aggravated his wife’s condition further, and when their daughter—now around 7— began to refuse to go to school, her mother was too preoccupied with her own problems to talk her around. when i first met santosh, his main ambition had been to give his children a more secure future than what he had had himself. he had been a warm supporter of modi’s beti bachao, beti padhao (save daughters, educate daughters) campaign, which aimed to reduce india’s gender gap (verma, dhaka & agrawal 2018). santosh worked extremely hard to this end. but when the unemployment rate began to grow in 2016–17, his life took another turn for the worse. servants were now sacked for the smallest reason since they were so easy to replace. and modi’s demonetization made the informal economy, in which santosh worked, so short of cash that not even the wealthy jeweller had enough bank notes to pay his domestics. santosh then brought his family to his ancestral village near bareilly, where he had inherited a small piece of land from his father. here he constructed a small brick house, hoping that the stable sociality of the village would do his wife good. from here the city would only be a 45-minute bicycle ride away, but employment proved difficult to find and easy to lose. in the following years, he worked from hand to mouth, helping his brother prepare lunch packs for white-collar customers, painting houses, frying jalebi (a sugary snack), working in a college canteen, trying his luck in additional upper-class households, and so on. inbetween there was neither money nor much food. though his daughter was content in the village, his wife detested its purdah custom, which not only forced her to start wearing saris for the first time of her life, but also to cover her face and serve tea as soon as an elder male relative of her husband entered their courtyard. after some months they decided that she would be better off working and before long she left for a servant position in delhi while santosh stayed back, a solution that forced them to send their daughter away to her paternal aunt in another village. what did santosh do to improve his fate besides working hard and continuing his daily worship of goddess kali? initially he began to suspect that his uncontrollable possessions could be of a brahma raksha (spirit of a fallen brahman) instead of mother kali and began to look for someone who could help him tame or dispel it. the only specialist he found was a hindu baniya engineer reputed for having acquired supernatural powers after becoming possessed by a muslim spirit as a young boy. however, the engineer lived in another city, and repeated consultations would require more payment, travel costs and days off than santosh could afford. his only practicable solution was thus to seek divine assistance closer to home and, like many others in bareilly, he ended up at the hazrat shahdana wali dargah. this sufi-muslim shrine is renowned for its power to heal unwanted possession. though healing is slow, the grave’s protective barkat is believed to normalize things little by little. one can also make offerings, as santosh claimed to have done with his wife in hope that the deceased sufi mystic could direct some jinns frøystad portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022104 or angels (farishtas) to dispel both her churails and his possible brahma rakhshas. so far, i have accompanied santosh here twice. being a woman, i was not allowed to follow him into the inner shrine. yet sitting down with other sufferers gave me a fair impression about the clientele: most were muslim, underprivileged and soft spoken except when they got fits in which their inner spirits made them howl, curse, become violent, tear off their clothes or inflict harm on themselves.5 on our second visit, santosh and i were accompanied by two ethnographic filmmakers who, being men, could join him in the shrine with their camera. watching their footage, i see santosh crying bitterly inside, as if placing all his agony and misery at the feet of the long-deceased sufi mystic. sadly, santosh is yet to overcome his problems. by 2022 his wife had run off to the other man again and stayed, santosh had relocated to first agra and then back to kanpur, and their daughter remains with her aunt and is still virtually illiterate at 11. judging from his social media activities, santosh has moved from being a budding hindu nationalist in 2013 to promoting interreligious understanding in 2016–18 (which is when he visited this bareilly dargah most actively) until the intense social media campaign to ensure modi’s re-election in 2019 made him hindu nationalist again, this time fiercely so. though the dargah certainly provided experiences of protection, hope and a common fate with some of the other clients, his case also underlines how fragile the cosmopolitan effects of heterotopic ritual spaces can be: unless life improves, they evaporate. shabnam and rani the final case i will present pertains to santosh and his wife’s adopted daughter shabnam while adding some intriguing complexities about santosh’s family history. shabnam, who lived with santosh’s mother near rampur, had entered the family as a toddler around 2004. according to santosh, he and his mother had been at the railway station in bareilly when they heard a train approaching and suddenly noticed a little girl and a goat on the tracks. her biological parents may well have left her there on purpose. santosh (then around 25) promptly jumped down, grabbed the girl and threw her into the arms of a tea seller on the platform. the railway police initiated a search for the biological parents, but the search was in vain, and one month later, santosh and his mother were informed that the girl would be sent to an orphanage unless they took her in. they took her in and began the paperwork required for adoption, registering santosh as her legal father. yet since santosh was still unmarried and worked as a domestic servant in delhi, shabnam remained with his mother, a setup that continued after santosh married and his wife gave birth to the daughter i mentioned in the previous section. the first time santosh handed me his worn-out mobile phone to show me a photo of shabnam, i was surprised to see that she was veiled though i already knew why: santosh’s mother originally hailed from a muslim family. some years following the demise of her husband, she relocated to her native town of rampur and in so doing felt it safer to reassume her muslim identity, which she in turn passed on to her adopted granddaughter. in the 1970s, marrying across religious divides had been less controversial than it came to be under modi (gupta 2018, frøystad 2021). none of the families were pious, santosh’s mother was never made to officially convert, and since they lived in the city, where they both worked (he in a factory, she as a nursemaid in a hospital), nobody interfered. santosh had fond memories of sitting in his grandfather’s lap to learn to read urdu in addition to the devnagari and latin alphabets he learned at school, which indicates loving family relations in spite of the common muslim reluctance to marry daughters ‘out’ of the faith. 5 see bellamy (2011) for an insightful discussion about the transition from hidden (gum) possession, which results in unwellness, misfortune and alienation, to open (khuli) possession, in which the spirit takes control over the body, reveals his/her identity and occasionally specifies the conditions for leaving it. frøystad portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022105 interestingly, however, santosh’s paternal grandparents had never told their extended kin that their daughter-in-law hailed from a muslim family. consequently, santosh’s relatives in the village he relocated to in 2017 were unaware that the skinny old lady and shy-looking granddaughter (now teenaged) who occasionally came to visit them, had left rampur as muslims, unveiled somewhere along the two-hour bus journey, and arrived as hindus. the complexities of abandonment, secrecy and intra-familial religious boundaries had now begun to affect shabnam just at the time she began to realize that her future aspirations of becoming a doctor were hopelessly unrealistic. the second time i visited santosh in his ancestral village near bareilly, i was—as mentioned earlier— accompanied by two ethnographic filmmakers. it was november 2017, and for this occasion santosh had invited his mother and shabnam over from rampur. this was the first time i met them in person though i had spoken with both on the phone on several occasions. his mother, now a thin and wrinkled woman, currently earned her living by cleaning utensils for others, whereas shabnam, now a curvy ninth-class student, loved school and particularly maths but had been ill for the past six months and was now falling dramatically behind. santosh explained that she had a ‘psychological’ condition (using english) that affected her mind (dimag nahin chalta) and made her feel faint, for which she had been prescribed a medicine that caused swelling. shabnam’s dwindling dream of becoming a doctor was thus aggravated by her illness. as we sat outside talking softly, shabnam’s condition suddenly deteriorated, and santosh carried her indoors. one of the filmmakers followed them and recorded a 20-minute scene in which shabnam’s body came under the control of a female hindu spirit named rani.6 the first minutes show shabnam clutching her throat and gasping for breath, after which she faints. once a folding bed is brought inside, santosh lies her down, strokes her hair and tickles her naked feet to rule out that she is acting. no reaction. when she wakes up, the voice that speaks belongs to rani and, when prompted by santosh, she explains that she was a young girl who died of yellow fever because her parents, both farmers, could not afford medical treatment. rani then notices shabnam’s smart phone in her pocket and tries to operate it but cannot. santosh asks her why she keeps troubling shabnam and what she requires to leave for good. rani then states that she wants a havan (vedic fire sacrifice) to be conducted in the name of lord krishna where the kosi bridge crosses the ganga.7 santosh promises to do what she requires, gives rani some ganga water and instructs her to leave. after some minutes, shabnam clutches her throat and gasps, falls unconscious for half a minute and wakes up again as herself. following this incident, her family members admitted that it was rani who had troubled shabnam for the past six months, and since no medicines had helped, santosh now vowed to follow her instructions. if we apply a psychological optic, we would probably bring out how shabnam’s possessions were prompted by an unspeakable desire for a more prominent place in santosh’s nuclear family combined with a growing realization that none of her caretakers would ever have the economic means to support her through higher education. for the purpose of this article, however, the question is how her possessions articulated with her familial religious complexity. for shabnam, seeking a vedic-inspired cure against spirit affliction had precious little to do with getting to know heterogeneous others. nor was it reducible to ontological expansion. by placing herself at the centre of her father’s concern and ritual activities, she not only rejected the straitjacket that forced her to divide her life between being a muslim girl in rampur and a hindu girl in her father’s village. by logical extension she also rejected the increasingly dominant either/or model in favour of a both/and model that enabled her to move around more seamlessly. taking the cue from taneja (2018), we can also ask how shabnam’s possession challenges conventional linear temporality. whereas 6 i thank dipesh kharel for sharing his footage with me. 7 conducting vedic sacrifice in the name of a post-vedic hindu deity such as krishna would probably not make much sense to brahman priests or scholars of classic hinduism. the kosi bridge, west of rampur, is named after the kosi river, which joins the ganga further downstream. frøystad portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022106 taneja’s case material shows how contemporary sufferers appeal for justice from spirit ‘courts’ that represent long gone sovereignties, shabnam’s case illuminates rather different chronological mashups. granted, rani seemed to be perceived as having passed on relatively recently given her familiarity with modern bridges, medical diagnoses and smartphones (the latter of which she was nevertheless incapable of operating). even so, shabnam’s affliction exemplifies how a period in which india’s religious plurality was less conflictridden than under modi can erupt into and unsettle the increasingly exclusionary and polarized present, just like das (2012: 142) shows how troubled times such as partition can give rise to spirit possessions that destabilize families and their religious identities several generations later. by folding temporalities into one another, spirit possession runs counter to historical periodization, which entails that, just as the modi era includes surprising traces of its predecessors, its own traces will outlive modi himself by far. concluding remarks the long-term development is probably undeniable: the hindu nationalist movement promotes a modality of hinduism that emulates the exclusivism of the monotheist religions. this development is driven by the need for a sufficient hindu homogeneity and unity to realize the ambition of hindu statehood as much as by the common tendency to unwittingly emulate that which one opposes, in this case islam and christianity. yet what many scholars of political history fail to take into account is the countermovement: as long as india’s residents struggle with uneven development, chronic illnesses, shattered aspirations and unfulfillable desires, some will continue to seek relief in ways that cross religious boundaries. and as the diversity within hinduism shrinks, people will increasingly have to cross official religious boundaries for transgressive intervention, thus making hindu nationalism work against itself. for each modi, there will be many small alices. if future bjp governments were to prevent this development, they would not only have to do far more to prevent hardship and expand low-cost but high-quality medical and psychological services. they would also have to use their leverage to encourage more innovation within hindu-style ritual healing, including transgressive ritual forms, rather than putting all their energy into revitalizing an imagined hindu golden age. this will be no less important following the devastating covid-19 pandemic that raged across india in 2020-21, causing enormous economic hardship as well as an unprecedented number of ‘bad deaths’ such as shabnam’s rani. acknowledgements the fieldwork on which this article is based, was funded by the 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https://doi.org/10.18203/2394-6040.ijcmph20182139 https://doi.org/10.18203/2394-6040.ijcmph20182139 https://www.rediff.com/news/special/ls-election-meet-the-man-who-shot-narendra-modi-in-3d/20140505.htm portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: grewal, k. 2021. privilege, precarity and the epistemic and political challenge of covid-19. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 7–13. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis. v17i1-2.7527 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay privilege, precarity and the epistemic and political challenge of covid-19 kiran grewal corresponding author: kiran grewal, reader, department of sociology, goldsmiths, university of london, new cross, london se14 6nw. k.grewal@gold.ac.uk doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7527 article history: received 20/11/2020; accepted 30/11/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract reflecting on the loss of my privilege as a transnational scholar during the london lockdown, in this essay i explore whether the covid-19 pandemic may provide an important moment to return to questions of solidarity, resistance and progressive politics. comparing my own experiences with those of people in my research fieldsite of sri lanka, i ask: do we have the necessary skills, tools and imagination to respond to this time of crisis? i suggest that the covid-19 crisis has opened up possibilities of self-reflexivity that allow for the emergence of new epistemic and political practices that are not only more ethical but also more productive, radical and disruptive of the existing order. keywords covid-19; subalternity; privilege; critical theory; radical politics introduction this is, i confess now, a self-indulgent piece. it runs the risk of sounding patronizing and may make the reader dislike me quite intensely for the pompous, puffed up academic that i am. the argument also runs fast and loose. it contradicts itself, begins ideas that are then left unexplored and introduces literature and concepts out of nowhere without justification or explanation. i say this up front not by way of excuse. what follows is a set of personal reflections that track some of my thoughts over the last nine months and i take full responsibility for them. i provide this preface to explain that this piece serves to illustrate the rather basic point i want to make in response to this weird covid-19 world (buried declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 7 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7527 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7527 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7527 mailto:k.grewal@gold.ac.uk http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7527 somewhere in a whole lot of words): i don’t know what to think or say! i am confused, shaken, lost and reeling. this disorientation makes me incapable of polish and shine, but i hope it provides me an important and humbling lesson that will shape my future political and intellectual life. so with this disclaimer i begin. my initial shock at lockdown was the result of a loss of privilege. as a middle class professional working mother and transnational scholar, i have constructed a life based on movement and freedom. yes, i have ties that bind me: i am a single parent and a recent migrant to london, so my support network is somewhat limited. but with money i have been able to secure childcare and my career has allowed me to live simultaneously across three countries on three continents. so suddenly being locked in a small flat in london with restricted movement and full-time work and caring responsibilities was unsurprisingly a traumatic experience. as the weeks turned into months, it became clear to me that i was mourning the illusion of constantly ‘moving forward’: of not being able to escape, feel a sense of momentum and freedom, see a horizon of possibility. at the same time, as the world began to slowly reopen, i became conscious of how being ‘locked down’ had been a privilege in itself. not everyone had that luxury. both in my local setting of south east london and in my research ‘field site’ of sri lanka, many had not been able to secure themselves at home—ordering food (and anything else they desired!) delivered to their door, avoiding all forms of public transport, working from home, doing home renovation, youtube workouts, taking up new hobbies. reflecting on the question of privilege from these two angles, i wonder how the covid-19 pandemic may provide an important moment to return to questions of solidarity, resistance and progressive politics. many of us elites see ourselves as the vanguard of struggles for social change and social justice. yet our impatience with the present (let alone the past!), reliance (conscious or not) on ideas of progress and experience of constant movement make us ill-equipped to sit in an uncomfortable present and uncertain future. do we have the necessary skills, tools and imagination to respond to this time? meanwhile the realities of extremely disadvantaged and marginalized people are that they have never had the luxury of relying on a social, political and economic system to support them. as a result, while they have often been terribly affected they have not been shocked by the idea that they would be affected. instead they have found (sometimes subversive) ways to survive and organize, have developed informal networks of support and creative forms of resilience. how might we rethink, then, which agents and whose knowledge might be most valuable in this moment when trying to articulate responsive and transformative politics and practices? how might this allow for a richer understanding of not only the experience but also the possible responses to the precarity that has become a dominant contemporary reality? and how might new epistemic and political practices emerge that are not only more ethical but also more productive, radical and disruptive of the existing order? grinding to a halt i vividly remember the week before lockdown in the uk. my friend and i hit all the local supermarkets in peckham (south london) both laughing at the panic and making our own small attempts at stockpiling (not pasta and toilet paper but olives, harissa paste, red wine). when an incident caused the local budget chemist superdrug to evacuate us, i joked that it was like a scene from shaun of the dead—the cult zombie spoof set in london that was also repeatedly aired on tv at the time – and i was just waiting for us all to start bleeding from our eyes. my flippancy soon ended when, drinking red wine as our kids played, my friends and i watched the prime minister’s emergency address to the nation announcing that, like europe, we too would be going into lockdown. shocked—i had uncritically reproduced the discourse of ‘never in england!’ when my friends on the continent began needing permits to leave the house—i remained buoyant. even when schools closed grewal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 20218 https://femrev.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/resisting-the-violence-of-common-sense/ https://femrev.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/resisting-the-violence-of-common-sense/ we came up with our own homeschooling plan, bought extra craft supplies and set up a makeshift obstacle course on the common across the road. then reality hit. on monday evening, end of our first day of homeschooling, it was announced that starting first thing the next morning we would be going into a full national lockdown. everyone was to remain within their own household. my world shrank and i reeled. up until then i had been blasé about getting covid-19, saying to my friends that i almost wished i would get it and get it over and done with. in lockdown i suddenly felt very vulnerable. if i got sick, who would care for my child? it was only the two of us in the flat with no family anywhere close by and all our friends in states of panic, holed up in their own homes. over zoom drinks a few friends and i decided to develop a blog series to critically respond to the narratives of ‘home’ and ‘household’ that formed the basis of government discourse and policy. the intense self-pity receded as i sought to entertain myself and my five-year-old with online workouts (thanks joe wicks), books, puzzles and games (ordered through amazon until i heard that bezos had become a trillionaire and at the same time cut overtime pay) and yoga. our basic needs were never an issue. my job was one that could easily shift online and was flexible even as, along with many other female academics, i worried about ‘falling behind’ in research output. i could order groceries and more importantly wine online. i upgraded my internet and kept in touch with friends around the world via zoom parties. there was something almost relaxing about the experience. the slowing down, the time to rest and do nothing was, i told myself, good for me. i had spent most of the last decade (at least) on the move: living between australia, south asia and europe in different configurations and travelling on an almost monthly basis. i was tired. but i had created a life for myself that prized freedom and movement above everything. so as the weeks turned into months my sense of self started to suffer. the transnational activist scholar identity i had cultivated gave way to a stagnant over-privileged middle class mum doing workouts in the park. this, i reasoned, was why when i was asked to reflect on the future in relation to rights and politics for an ma event at my university, i could not think of anything useful to say. when no end seemed in sight i succumbed to unmanageable rage and despair: pacing my apartment and going nowhere, trying to practice mindfulness and stay in the present, but feeling anxious at my inability to see a future of any sort. living when the future is cancelled one image kept coming to mind during my pacing: of women i had met in sri lanka. they had been maintaining roadside protests in various towns in the north and east, demanding the return of their disappeared loved ones or the return of their lands. when i first met them in mid-2017 they had already been sitting in the road for many months. in total some of them spent up to two years protesting, living in makeshift shelters with minimal supplies and nothing but straw mats and a couple of plastic chairs. at the time i am pretty sure i felt pity for them. the only explanation for their inertia was desperation. there was nothing else they could do. i didn’t mean to be patronizing but i was. as were so many of the human rights activists i met. we all assumed that as victims they were passive objects. we were the potential agents of their salvation, debating which mechanism of justice, which forms of memorial, which political strategies and tradeoffs would provide a solution. now, suddenly, i saw those women differently. they seemed to have a strength that i did not have. a silent, sustained ability to sit in the present and refuse to let go. while i constantly wanted to run towards something else, they remained committed to an unresolved and most likely unresolvable past. i don’t romanticize their suffering: it is very real. and i know many of them would not see their actions as conscious heroism but the result of having no other choice. but i wish to pay tribute to their courage and their ability to do something i cannot. in that process of sitting they have not only sustained themselves, grewal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 20219 https://femrev.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/confronting-the-household/ they have built new communities and they have remained a thorn in the side of an otherwise impervious state and society. this form of everyday embodied politics is a far cry from the grand gestures of political theory. it is perhaps more radical. the women, by not buying into the myths of progress—even if simply because they cannot—and by remaining stubbornly rooted in the past and present, pose a challenge to all of us. this includes those of us who consider ourselves ‘progressives’ (a hint of the problem is in the name) rendering our own investments in ‘progress’ both visible and problematic. even though many of us are critical of the western imperial and enlightenment undertones of ‘progress,’ we are still driven towards an idea of moving forward, towards chasing ‘the new.’ this is an idea as tied to imperial violence, the artist and theorist ariella azoulay (2019) argues, as extraction and exploitation in the ways it condemns others’ lives and practices to extinction. it is this myth of progress that covid-19 has perhaps most brutally exploded. in a rather strange book about mushroom pickers written a few years before the current crisis, the anthropologist anna tsing suggests that perhaps the matsutake mushroom—that flourishes in unlikely places and often as result of decay—might be a useful metaphor for the world we are now forced to confront (2015: 2). while the less fortunate, she points out, have long had to live with precarity and lack of certainty, growing environmental disaster is forcing more and more of us to confront the reality that the ‘handrails’ of progress have been removed (2015: 2). if climate change had made this observation pertinent before, covid-19 has smacked us in the face with it. suddenly even the most economically secure, comfortable and socially upwardly mobile among us have been thrown into chaos, forced to reinterpret life as one of inertia rather than constant movement. how do we even start to find the resources necessary to survive, respond, imagine again? we certainly cannot look to so-called intellectual elites like me for inspiration. everyday life as resistance the severity of lockdown eventually eased and some limited movement became possible. i headed back into peckham, tentatively grasping for some sort of return into the world, a little shell shocked as if emerging from a bunker (i really had watched too many dystopian science fiction films). i was not really prepared for what i found. while my life felt like it had ground to a halt, life teemed in the street and market. indeed it was almost possible to forget that we were even in the midst of a pandemic. sure, people were wearing masks, many shops were shuttered and there were long queues outside the supermarkets. but one could be forgiven for assuming that this was just the further degradation of an area and community that had long been ravaged by poverty and deprivation. the idea that we were all ‘staying home, staying safe’ was countered by elderly men and women hobbling into shops and onto buses dragging heavy shopping trolleys and bags. while some (particularly right wing commentators) will present this as evidence of the ignorance and recklessness of people, it was necessity that made it impossible for many of these people to stay home. supermarkets’ online shopping pages had queues of up to 40,000 waiting to place orders and even i baulked at the amount of money required to make use of gourmet home delivery services. and if you have no car, how else are you going to get from a to b? given that the statistics in the uk (clumsy and incomplete as they are), reported that those from black and ethnic minority backgrounds, along with those suffering socio-economic disadvantage have been disproportionately affected by covid-19—both in terms of contracting and in terms of dying from it (public health england 2020)—i couldn’t help but wonder who the lockdown was protecting and how. were we in fact just protecting middle class peoples’ health? those who could effectively isolate, who have space and living conditions that make it possible not to encounter the outside world, who can work from home, afford luxury online food deliveries and who have cars to transport them when they do want or need to move around? and if so, was this form of lockdown really the most effective way of managing the grewal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202110 risk or was it just the easiest strategy in a world that always already privileges the experiences and views of this group? i have no answers to these questions. i raise them to highlight my own ongoing confusion and inability to make sense of, never mind respond to, the current pandemic. how, i asked the men working on the fruit and vegetable stalls along rye lane, had they coped with lockdown? i made sympathetic faces and noises saying i could imagine it had been hard. they simply laughed and shrugged. life had gone on for them and they managed with stoicism and resilience. many are from afghanistan. they have lived and seen a lot. the experience of precarity, uncertainty and insecurity is not new. thus while i felt like i had been run over and was trying to gather up the tatters of my life, it was clear that it was my privilege that made me inflexible and vulnerable. not only was my saviour delusion shattered—i could do nothing to help anyone—i found myself unable to even look after myself. the fragility of privilege i spoke about this with friends in sri lanka. many had been involved in relief efforts for desperate day labourers who without work were literally starving. this took an emotional toll for obvious reasons. but often it was the feeling of helplessness and frustration at all the ways in which the system failed those who were most marginalized and vulnerable that seemed to feed despair. at the same time, as a couple of friends from eastern sri lanka observed, rural communities in the villages close to where they lived were finding ways of surviving and supporting each other. these communities were largely unmoved by the new situation. as a few people wryly commented, this was not the first time they had had to live in bunkers (invoking their wartime experiences). and some of the veddah1 communities had always existed on the margins of the state, relying only on themselves. they were therefore surprised when my friend called to ask them how they were managing and if they needed any help. again, i want to be careful here. this is not an argument to say subaltern communities have not suffered or that because they are used to suffering it is no big deal. nor is it to romanticize and mythologize their lives and practices in the genre of the ‘noble savage.’ rather what i am trying to think through is whether there is some lesson to be learnt out of this pandemic for those of us used to imagining ourselves as the agents—through thought and/or practice—of salvation. i can’t help but wonder if one of the greatest weaknesses of ‘progressive’ elites is our constant shock that the systems do not work. i have written about this in relation to human rights: the vitriolic deconstruction of human rights’ false promises only really makes sense if you ever believed in these promises in the first place (grewal 2016). many of the most marginal in the world are not and never have been under the illusion that institutions and law will work for them. they survive not through blind faith—needing the critical theorist to cure them of their false consciousness—but through strategic, contingent, often compromised, sometimes subversive acts of self-preservation and resistance. i am constantly reminded of the conclusion of rohinton mistry’s devastatingly beautiful novel, a fine balance (1995). while the two subaltern characters—the dalit uncle and nephew who escape the misery of their village to be subjected to further violence by the emergency era indian state—somehow find the capacity to continue, it is the more privileged, middle class student manek who ultimately finds the despair overwhelming and commits suicide. this sensitivity could be read as his more heightened consciousness versus the brute experience of sensation so often ascribed to the world’s oppressed (see rancière 2009). but i suggest that he might encapsulate the very fragility of privilege: a fragility that in fact makes us illequipped to imagine or lead any truly radical political project in dark and difficult times. 1 indigenous hunter gatherer communities. grewal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202111 learning to see the fireflies: the politics of survival in 1975 the italian filmmaker and social critic pier paolo pasolini declared in a public letter that the fireflies of his youth were dead. he meant this both literally and metaphorically, invoking a nihilistic picture of a europe that, post-world war ii, had completely succumbed to a form of consumerist totalitarianism. the argument is complicated but it is the response of art theorist georges did-huberman2 (who introduces this letter in his evocatively titled book survival of the fireflies (2018) that i wish to focus on here. have the fireflies really disappeared, didi-huberman asks, and if so, how? isn’t it rather the case that: ‘they disappear from the viewer’s sight because the viewer remains in place, which is no longer the right place to see fireflies’ (didi-huberman 2018: 22)? if fireflies represent survival, desire and hope that continue to flicker even in the darkest of moments—however momentary, fragile and banal they may be—then is the grounded activist scholar (me) a contemporary pasolini, declaring death to something she can just no longer see? that luxury—of declaring the hopelessness of the current situation, deconstructing it with cool intellectual rigour, of engaging in endless critique—is not available to many. and not because they lack the intellectual capacity. rather because they are too busy surviving in the here and now. the casualized precarious contractors, daily wage labourers, the agricultural and factory workers, the rural villagers that make up so much of the world’s population have had to find ways to survive and continue. this is in spite of the horrendous hardship and suffering that not only the virus but also government and social responses to the virus have unleashed upon them. they don’t have the luxury of waiting for the future to deliver salvation. they have suffered and continue to suffer and that suffering requires acknowledgment, redress, outrage. but their survival also requires acknowledgment and perhaps some humble self-reflection. how might looking at the survival strategies and techniques employed by the worlds’ subalterns shine a light on both the depths of injustice that this seemingly indiscriminate virus renders more extreme and the possible sites for imagining appropriate intellectual and political practices in response? practices that are embodied, contextual, avoid abstraction and generalization, that are affective, heterogenous and defy attempts at essentialization and reduction to institutional logics? recognizing and learning from such practices is not only needed to assist with the process of desubalternization. it might also assist in our own process of critical self-reflexivity that will allow us to save ourselves. if before the challenge to learn to see and listen differently was an ethical one (spivak 2004; dhawan 2013) now it seems epistemically, politically and practically, an urgent one. references azoulay, a. 2019, potential history: unlearning imperialism. verso, london and brooklyn ny. dhawan, n. 2013, ‘coercive cosmopolitanism and impossible solidarities,’ qui parle, vol. 22, no. 1: 139–166. https:// doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.22.1.0139 didi-huberman, g. 2018, survival of the fireflies, trans. l.s. mitchell. university of minnesota press, minneapolis and london. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv4rfqxs grewal, k. 2016, the socio-political practice of human rights: between the universal and the particular. routledge, london and new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315552620 mistry, r. 1995, a fine balance. mcclelland and stewart, toronto. public health england. 2020, disparities in the risk and outcomes of covid-19. online, available: https://assets. publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/908434/disparities_in_the_risk_ and_outcomes_of_covid_august_2020_update.pdf [accessed 4 december 2020]. 2 i want to thank my dear friend magdalena zolkos for introducing me to didi-huberman’s work and thought. grewal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202112 https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.22.1.0139 https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.22.1.0139 https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv4rfqxs https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315552620 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/908434/disparities_in_the_risk_and_outcomes_of_covid_august_2020_update.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/908434/disparities_in_the_risk_and_outcomes_of_covid_august_2020_update.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/908434/disparities_in_the_risk_and_outcomes_of_covid_august_2020_update.pdf rancière, j. 2009, ‘the aesthetic dimension: aesthetics, politics, knowledge,’ critical inquiry, vol. 36: 1–19. https://doi. org/10.1086/606120 spivak, g. c. 2004, ‘righting wrongs,’ the south atlantic quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2/3: 523–581. https://doi. org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-523 tsing, a.l. 2015, the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton university press, princeton and oxford. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc77bcc grewal portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202113 https://doi.org/10.1086/606120 https://doi.org/10.1086/606120 https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-523 https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-523 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc77bcc portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: manganas, n., and loda, a. 2021. a borrowed life: introduction to the great dis-equalizer—the covid-19 crisis. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 1–6. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis. v17i1-2.7536 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay a borrowed life: introduction to the great dis-equalizer—the covid-19 crisis nicholas manganas1 and alice loda2 1 university of technology sydney 2 university of technology sydney corresponding author: nicholas manganas, school of international studies and education, faculty of arts & social sciences, university of technology sydney, 15 broadway, ultimo nsw 2007, australia. nicholas.manganas@uts.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7536 article history: published 28/01/2021 abstract introduction to the curated issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, the great dis-equalizer: the covid-19 crisis. keywords covid-19; pandemic; new normal; crisis; virus; affect we are all in this together. we are all in the same boat. this is the new normal. the covid-19 crisis—as much economic and political as biological and affective—is a shared global event that made present the fragility of the world we live in. the crisis was quickly heralded as the onset of a new normal, as media and political elites rushed to reassure us that the pandemic was the ‘great equalizer’ and that we all had to come together in solidarity to defeat the spread of the virus. the tendency to universalize the lived experience of the crisis and living in lockdown by asking people to adapt to the ‘new normal’ by appealing to their sense of vulnerability and affective bonds, only served to underscore that the pandemic did not, in fact, affect people equally. this special issue of portal presents diverse accounts declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7536 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7536 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7536 mailto:nicholas.manganas@uts.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7536 of living in lockdown or through the pandemic in ways that significantly unsettle the narrative of the covid-19 crisis as the ‘great equalizer.’ the collection hosts a series of self-reflective essays and cultural works that discuss the authors’ individual experiences of the covid-19 crisis in diverse contexts, including australia, south and north america, asia, africa and europe. the collection of first-hand narrative accounts aims to contribute to reframing the pandemic as the ‘great dis-equalizer.’ we begin by reflecting on the virus itself. a virus is an infectious agent capable of multiplying exponentially in living cells. in biology, viruses occupy an uncanny transformative space between the living and the nonliving (villareal 2008). more android than living organism, its etymology can be traced to the latin vīrus, a polysemantic word that includes ‘poison’ as one of its most attested meanings (villareal 2008). determining whether viruses are living organisms is complicated by the difficulty in defining life itself (villareal 2008). while viruses display some of the characteristics of a life form, they do not exhibit many others. the survival of a virus depends on host cells, leading virologists van regenmortel and mahy to suggest that viruses lead ‘a kind of borrowed life’ (villareal 2008; our emphasis). this is an apt metaphor because the covid-19 virus has accentuated how our very existence is beginning to resemble a borrowed life in the sense that the act of borrowing is increasingly defining our everyday existence. we borrow money to survive (debt); we borrow our identities (appropriation); we borrow from other languages (loan words). our lifestyles, too, increasingly borrow trouble; that is, our actions result in adverse reactions or repercussions, from climate change and environmental degradation to loneliness and precarity. to keep up with the neoliberal demand of always presenting the best version of ourselves we adorn ourselves with borrowed plumes, never too sure what is truly our own. a borrowed life has become, in many instances, all we know. covid-19 was an unflinching reminder that ‘viruses matter to life’ (villareal 2008), that a borrowed life can overturn life itself. the merriam-webster dictionary defines a virus as ‘something that poisons the mind or soul.’ indeed, alongside the viral infection that attacks our lungs, the pandemic assaulted our minds, also exposing the ideological viruses that had been circulating in our societies for a number of years: racism, fake news, conspiracy theories (žižek 2020: 39). there is a growing sense—whether real or imagined—that civil society is being poisoned by the extreme polarization of the mediasphere. social media either echoes our thoughts or makes us mad, as we scroll down in search of borrowed memes, unconsciously absorbing the decision of algorithms that decide for us what is of interest and what is not. the poisoning of the mind or soul filtered through the technologies we crave is intimately mirrored in yet another definition of a virus: ‘a computer program that is usually disguised as an innocuous program or file, that often produces copies of itself [...] and that when run usually performs a malicious action’ (merriam-webster 2020). the covid-19 virus is similarly embodied in our hard drives; we put up our firewalls and await its malicious intent. it is curious that antiviral medications cannot kill a virus as it is difficult to kill something that is not quite alive. instead, they can only hope to shut off a virus’s replication process, inhibiting its development. the virus itself remains, planting its seed of doubt in our bodies and minds. viruses have been often described as apolitical, democratic, and not distinguishing between the rich and poor (žižek 2020: 42). as covid-19 spread rapidly in china and then the world, as country after country succumbed to its reach, there was a real sense that indeed we were all in the same boat, connected through our incapacity to fight it and perhaps in our hopes and fears. in many cases, we watched the same news, we spoke with our families and loved ones across oceans, shared stories of our treks to buy toilet paper. zoom became, for many, a daily companion in both professional and personal lives. old friends messaged to check-in, often after years of silence. distance was experienced in unprecedented ways. the importance of those we care for and the value of our communities became extremely tangible in a moment when touching was restricted or impossible. a novel, unfamiliar, and radical solitude appears in many observations of life through the pandemic, including in this special issue. and yet, we also find in this collection an account of manganas and loda portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 20212 the many strategies that individuals and groups have put in place to manage these feelings, and the diversity of situations and personal responses that it is generating. this special issue underlines that the idea of the pandemic as a universalising force needs to be deconstructed, complicated and challenged. humans have an innate desire for shared experiences and community building. the tendency to universalize experiences is rooted in religion which seeks to propagate the universal applicability of one (or multiple) gods and one truth. in philosophy, universality claims that universal facts exist and can be discovered. and indeed was it not a fact that the covid-19 virus could infect anybody regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status? and was it not the case that lockdown and restrictions were imposed on all sections of society? however, calling covid-19 the ‘great equalizer’ because it could infect us all equally reduced the pandemic to its biological essence, an absurdity when the lived reality of the lockdown and the pandemic was experienced so unequally as many of the articles in this special issue underscore. in order to deconstruct the idea of the covid-19 pandemic as ‘the great equalizer’ it is important to reflect on it in light of the critical notion of crisis. crises are often hijacked by the state to justify a host of critical changes to society, including to workers’ rights and conditions. as large portions of the world entered varying forms of lockdown, long-standing cleavages (both political and socioeconomic) that had been conveniently forgotten by neo-liberal regimes, once again reared their ugly head. the truism that during a crisis everyone is a socialist could not conceal the disparity between the propertied classes and the working poor, between secure and insecure work. in australia, the second wave of the virus that hit melbourne in july 2020, spurred a national conversation on the need for paid sick leave for insecure and precarious workers. what a few months before had been considered a privilege was now deemed a public health priority. the government’s ‘socialist’ largess also did not extend to all workers equally. workers at australian universities, for example, did not meet the criteria that the government set for its jobkeeper program. by october 2020, nearly 12,500 workers had lost their jobs at australian universities (around 10 per cent of the pre-pandemic workforce) (zhou 2020). the mediumand long-term consequences for the sector remain to be seen. in italy, some medical professionals were forced to triage their treatment of patients, sorting and ordering patients based on who they deemed had a greater chance of survival (horowitz 2020). whereas triaging is standard practice when hospitals are overwhelmed, necropolitical discourses about which lives are expendable and which lives need to be protected, circulated in many troubling contexts. in a heart wrenching episode of q&a on australia’s abc, human rights lawyer rosemary kayess, highlighted the inhumanity of such discourse when it is your own life that is determined to be expendable because of your disability: ‘it was such a visceral reaction that i had [...] my life wasn’t valued and i was dispensable [...] i was not one of the real people’ (2020). australia’s ex-prime minister tony abbott railed against the ‘health dictatorship’ that seeks to prioritize the saving of lives over the health of the economy: ‘in this climate of fear, it was hard for governments to ask “how much is a life worth?” because every life is precious, and every death is sad, but that has never stopped families sometimes electing to make elderly relatives as comfortable as possible while nature takes its course’ (sbs news 2020). each national context had its own examples of uncomfortable conversations that sought to grapple with who could potentially be left to die and whose life should be saved. such conversations often took place alongside online and street protests by negationists (those who sought to deny the virus’s existence or at least its deadly impact). lockdowns have been the most controversial aspect of the pandemic, pitting the scientific logic behind forced quarantine against the ideological imperative to curtail the various elements of a state of exception: surveillance, expanded executive powers, restrictions on movement. italian philosopher giorgio agamben became the poster child for the ideological resistance against lockdowns by suggesting that epidemics have now replaced terrorism as the justification for exceptional measures (2020a). for agamben, the new normal is the fact that we have become habituated to governments relying on the state of exception: ‘states of manganas and loda portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 20213 collective panic,’ he argues, ‘are the perfect pretext for governments to limit freedoms in the name of safety’ (2020a). his premise that ‘society no longer believes in anything but bare life’ leads him to question the worth of a society that values nothing other than survival (2020b). his argument is rather flimsy when you consider that many european countries, including italy, lifted restrictions in the summer, opening up its national and regional borders, underestimating health advice in an attempt to stimulate the economy. the strategy worked but by september a second wave of the virus swept through europe (and other parts of the world). although this time national governments were not caught by surprise, the psychological toll was arguably worse as time seemed to stand even more still, testing people’s patience for perhaps a moment too long. bruno latour likewise questioned whether covid-19 is a dress rehearsal for the impending climate change catastrophe. he suggests that war against the virus is unjustified and the health restrictions a caricature of foucault’s biopolitics: pandemics awaken in leaders and those in power a kind of self-evident sense of “protection”—“we have to protect you” “you have to protect us”—that recharges the authority of the state and allows it to demand what would otherwise be met with riots. (2020) for latour, although the nation-state can readily perform biopolitics by mobilizing against a virus, it is ill-prepared to fight against the imminent ecological crisis (2020). others like jeffrey frankel suggested that covid-19 and the climate crisis belong to the same battle (2020). but slavoj žižek rightly warns that we should resist seeking any deeper meaning in the covid-19 crisis (2020: 14). although we might find such meaning reassuring because it means that somehow our existence matters, we should not forget that we are merely one species, on one planet, with no particular significance (2020: 14). we have, though, a responsibility to read the stories of the crisis, to engage with its plot points, its genres, characters, settings and conflicts. this special curated issue was put together in haste but also with deep care and thought to begin mapping out those plot points. we wanted to capture this moment in time, document the year 2020, reflect on its ups and downs. this is why we opted to publish self-reflective essays as well as poems and short stories. we want to read and share lived experiences, get a sense of what the pandemic has meant across diverse national and transnational contexts, underline the affective rhythm of the virus on our mobility and sense of time, as well as deconstruct our privileges and restrictions that impact on each of us in different ways. in the coming months and years, cultural theorists and social scientists will investigate the pandemic from all angles. peer-reviewed research will unpack the injustices, contradictions and ethics of lockdown. but for now portal offers a selection of non-peer reviewed articles and cultural works that are often challenging, at times provocative, but always emotionally engaging. this underscores the desire, in a time of confusion and incertitude, to both own and share our stories and our personal and emotional strategies and responses. the first section of the special issues includes thirteen reflective essays. kiran grewal reflects on solidarity, resistance and power, addressing the politically disruptive and radical potential of the present crisis. her essay conveys the point of view of a transnational scholar experiencing lockdown in london and reflects on experiences and trajectories that revolve around her research fieldsite in sri lanka. pan wang’s essay exposes the inequalities made visible by the pandemic, analysing prejudices and biases toward women, the elderly and asian ethnic minorities. liliana correa and frederick copperwaite reflect on being artists and creatives during the pandemic and on the transformation of sense of time and place that they observed over the last few months. they advocate for the radical potential of voicing stories to contest inequality and lack of care of the most vulnerable, in particular first nations peoples. cadigia hassan and gianluigi mangiapane write about a grass-root initiative in italy that aims to capture a snapshot of the crisis through an analysis of the objects of affection that populate and accompany everyday life in lockdown. the essay by yuliya grikun, mária kubincova, sau man luk, anastasia petrova, david rands, elham saberi and kaitlyn ugoretz manganas and loda portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 20214 presents a critical and emotional bridge between the life before and during the pandemic, documenting the path of a group of scholars that were together in japan for a study seminar at the time of the first outbreak, and their subsequent individual experiences of returning to their home countries. suborna camellia & kazi nazrul fattah document the emotional, social, physical and economic impact of covid-19 on migrants. they reflect on their own experience of migration from bangladesh to australia, discussing precarity, belonging and in-betweenness. ioannis gaitanidis reflects on the disruption of study abroad programs in a japanese university and on how mobility can be re-thought and reconceptualized in the present transformed context. noah riseman reflects on his privilege as a tenured professor at an australian university and how the pandemic exacerbated the inequalities between tenured and casual academics. cristina balmativola offers a participant observation of the experience of lockdown in turin, and a reflection on how communities reacted to measures imposed by the italian government. hongwei bao’s essay, through an analysis of a video artwork by berlin-based queer filmmaker popo fan, unravels the politics of identity in the current global pandemic, pinpointing the role of queer disidentification as an important critical intervention in the current political debate circulating around the pandemic. kate averis reflects on the ways in which lockdown exposed and exacerbated gendered violence in colombia, also discussing the responses of feminists, journalists, academics, writers and artists. mobo gao reflects on australia’s chinese communities, analysing political polarization in relation to responses to the covid-19 pandemic, as observed in the main narrative threads of two wechat groups. finally, marcello messina’s essay conveys his experience as an italian migrant in brazil, reflecting on the intersections between the covid-19 pandemic, necropolitics, citizenship, and settler colonial contexts. the second section presents six cultural works. jean duruz’s creative piece of non-fiction conveys the emotional economy of everyday experiences across the pandemic. susana chávez-silverman spanglish narrative addresses issues of family, belonging and shame in the context of returning home during the outbreak. cj vallis’s visual creative non-fiction text juxtaposes life under lockdown in sydney 2020 with the author’s experience of curfew in kashmir in the 1990s. chad hammond’s poem enters one of the many fractures created by the covid-19 pandemic and pinpoints the divisions that it exposes. ilongo fritz ngale’s verses offer a creative reinterpretation of impacts of covid-19 on space, time, mind, consciousness, emotions, thinking, and behaviour. finally, peter ross’s verse illuminates issues of inequality, exploitation, and class relations in the pandemic context. the covid-19 crisis is a story with no real end or beginning, no clear delineated chapters that can signpost to the reader where its narrative arc is heading. but inside this special issue of portal you will find some fragments of the story from diverse locations in the world. each essay, reflection or cultural work is a word, a sentence, a page, of the overall story. we invite you to read these fragments and join us on a journey to slowly piece together the story of a virus called covid-19. references abc q&a 2020, ‘the age of loneliness,’ 14 september. online, available: https://www.abc.net.au/ qanda/2020-14-09/12644106 [accessed 10 november 2020]. agamben, a. 2020a, ‘the invention of an epidemic,’ european journal of psychoanalysis. online, available: http://www. journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ [accessed 10 november 2020]. _______ 2020b, ‘giorgio agamben: “clarifications,”’ an und für sich, march 17, trans. a. kotsko. online, available: https://itself.blog/20/03/17/giorgio-agamben-clarifications/ [accessed 10 november 2020]. frankel, j. 2020, ‘covid-19 and the climate crisis are part of the same battle,’ guardian, 2 october. online, available: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/02/covid-19-and-the-climate-crisis-are-part-of-the-same-battle [accessed 9 december 2020]. manganas and loda portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 20215 https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/2020-14-09/12644106 https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/2020-14-09/12644106 http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ https://itself.blog/20/03/17/giorgio-agamben-clarifications/ https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/02/covid-19-and-the-climate-crisis-are-part-of-the-same-battle horowitz, j. 2020, ‘italy’s health care system groans under coronavirus – a warning to the world,’ new york times, march 17. online, available: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/world/europe/12italy-coronavirus-health-care.html [accessed 9 december 2020]. latour, b. 2020, ‘is this a dress rehearsal?’, critical inquiry, march 26. online, available: https://critinq.wordpress. com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/ [accessed 10 november 2020]. sbs news, ‘health dictatorship’: tony abbott rails against victoria’s coronavirus response,’ 2 september. online, available: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/health-dictatorship-tony-abbott-rails-against-victoria-s-coronavirus-response [accessed 9 december 2020]. villareal, l. p. 2008, ‘are viruses alive?’ scientific american, august 8. online, available: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-viruses-alive-2004/ [accessed 9 december 2020]. zhou, n. 2020, ‘almost 10% of australian university jobs slashed during covid, with casuals hit hardest,’ guardian, 7 october. online, available: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/oct/07/almost-10-of-australianuniversity-jobs-slashed-during-covid-with-casuals-hit-hardest [accessed 9 december 2020]. žižek, s. 2020, pandemic!: covid-19 shakes the world, polity, new york. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16t6n4q manganas and loda portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 20216 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/world/europe/12italy-coronavirus-health-care.html https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/ https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/ https://www.sbs.com.au/news/health-dictatorship-tony-abbott-rails-against-victoria-s-coronavirus-response https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-viruses-alive-2004/ https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/oct/07/almost-10-of-australian-university-jobs-slashed-during-covid-with-casuals-hit-hardest https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/oct/07/almost-10-of-australian-university-jobs-slashed-during-covid-with-casuals-hit-hardest https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16t6n4q financial liberalization, banking crisis and the debtors’ movement in mexico financial liberalisation, the banking crisis and the debtors’ movement in mexico geneviève marchini, university of guadalajara introduction in the aftermath of the 1982 external debt crisis and in a very restrictive international environment, mexico abandoned its inward-looking economic model and adopted a more open, export-led and market-oriented stance. since 1988, the authorities have taken critical steps that induced an increasing level of internationalisation of the economy, and, in 1994, regional integration through the implementation of the north american free trade agreement (nafta). these reforms have led to important transformations in the country’s economic structure as well as in its trade patterns. on the social and political side, they have widened the income gaps between different social sectors and regions, and eroded support for the ruling party, the partido revolucionario institucional (pri, institutional revolutionary party). pri has lost some of its traditional allies, weakening the old corporatist structures and stimulating the creation of new social movements. a few months before the ejército zapatista de liberación nacional (ezln, zapatista army for national liberation) uprising in chiapas, another protest movement was being born in the rural sector. unlike the chiapas rebels, it didn’t represent poor, indigenous, landless peasants, but rather, heavily indebted small and medium producers. after the december 1994 crisis, the barzón debtors’ movement expanded at the national level to include urban small and medium enterprises (smes) and household borrowers. this new type of social movement rapidly became an important social and political agency that compelled the authorities and the banks to take its demands into account. this paper seeks to understand the emergence of this movement and its main features and its achievements. the paper is divided into five sections. the first reviews the main features of structural reforms in mexico and their results, to explain the context in which the debtors’ organisation is rooted. the second and third parts of the paper show how financial opening and bank deregulation produced a growing indebtedness of rural producers, portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 1 industrial smes and households, leading to the birth and first steps of the barzón movement in 1993-94. the fourth section accounts for the explosion of the debtors’ movements since 1995, while the last deals with its successes and failures in defending its membership. structural reforms in mexico: main characteristics and political economy mexico’s main liberalising reforms were launched in 1988 during the last year of the de la madrid administration and they were pursued ‘aggressively’ by the new government of carlos salinas de gortari, who took office at the end of the year. structural reforms were coupled with a new stabilisation program that had been introduced earlier, in december 1987, in order to attack a threatening inflationary economy. although the previous stabilisation policies (applied since december 1982)1 succeeded in restoring the current account balance and mexico’s capacity to serve a restructured external debt, they failed to achieve fiscal balance and price stability. macroeconomic imbalances grew wider, as the overall fiscal deficit reached 14.4 per cent in 1987 (15.6 per cent in 1982), and the inflation rate (consumer price index) climbed to 159.2 per cent in 1987 from 98.9 per cent in 1982. moreover, these poor results were obtained at a high cost: steady growth didn’t resume after the 1983 recession, living standards plunged, and the income distribution disparity worsened. as part of the effort to balance the federal budget, public investment in physical infrastructure and human capital sank while private investment remained at a low level; obsolescence became widespread among the industrial sector. some structural reforms were sketched out during the 1982-1987 period; a few minor privatisation operations were carried out successfully, but, above all, the authorities took several important steps towards trade liberalisation. in 1983 they introduced the program 1 the program was a standard stabilisation package supported by the imf. the main measures included a sharp devaluation of the currency, restrictions of domestic demand achieved through cuts in public expenditures and lower real wages. they sought to reduce the excessive domestic demand while stimulating the overall demand for domestic goods, either through higher exports or switching domestic demand from imports to local goods. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 2 aimed at developing in-bond maquiladora (assembly plant) industries, while in 1985, some of the non-tariff barriers implemented in 1981-82 were lifted, and higher-range tariffs were lowered. finally, in 1986, mexico became a member of the general agreement on tariffs and trade (gatt). these measures did not appear to have stimulated the adjustment and modernisation of domestic tradable sectors; on one hand, an undervalued peso protected them from foreign competition, while on the other, the gloomy perspectives of the domestic economy, combined with the credit crunch suffered by the private sector, further dissuaded mexican entrepreneurs from undertaking new productive investment. in the financial realm, the nationalisation of the banking system was not wholly reverted,2 but all the subsidiaries of the banks, and especially their market arms, the brokerage houses, were returned to the private sector. this measure, combined with the monetarist reform of public sector financing,3 caused extensive change in the composition of the financial sector. on one side, financial repression limited the development of banks, which were dedicated mainly to satisfying public sector financial needs; on the other, as the government relied increasingly on market financing, this same deficit fostered the development of money market securities and private market intermediaries. furthermore, this measure has had important consequences for the relationship between the government and the leading sectors of mexican big business. as a matter of fact, the main initial purpose of the privatisation brokerages was a political one, since it was aimed at restoring this sector’s confidence, a high priority goal for president de la madrid. its relations with government had been deteriorating since the early 1970s. mexico’s entrepreneurs disliked the populist rhetoric of presidents echeverría (1970-76) and lópez portillo (1976-1982), as well as the increasing participation of the public sector in productive activities. the conflict became more acute in the late seventies, when it provoked increasing capital flight, and it culminated in 1982 with the nationalisation of the banking sector. this last measure led to further criticism of government authoritarianism, and to demands to put an end to the pri’s hegemony and to democratise the political structure (kessler 1999, 52). thus, the 2 this highly controversial measure had been taken in late august 1982 by the lópez portillo administration, together with the suspension of payments on the external debt. this last populist move contrasts dramatically with the market-oriented character of the next administrations. 3 in 1985, deficit finance from the central bank had been forbidden and access to cheap sources of funds through legal reserve requirement severely curtailed. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 3 brokerages’ privatisation, combined with a public restructuring program for corporate foreign debt, ‘helped the ruling party regain its credibility among mexico’s economic elite’ (55). whatever its success in winning back the confidence of mexico’s big business, the administration was unable to regain support from the popular and middle classes, nor from medium and small businesses as well. as a consequence, although carlos salinas officially narrowly defeated his leftist contender, cuauhtemoc cárdenas, and the pri conserved its majority at congress, the results of the 1988 elections confirmed the new strength of opposition parties. while the partido de acción nacional (pan, national action party) gained frustrated middle class and small and medium entrepreneurs votes, its leftwing competitor, the frente democrático nacional (fdn, national democratic front; now partido de la revolución democrática, prd, democratic revolution party),4 received increasing support from the urban and rural poor. moreover, ‘public outrage, repeated denunciations from opposition parties, and increased international exposure put the pri leadership on notice that future electoral victories—at least at the national level—would have to be legitimate’ (kessler 1999, 84). as economic failure appeared to be the main explanation for the pri’s electoral vulnerability, the salinas administration deemed it had just six years to achieve economic recovery and growth in order to secure a fair victory for the ruling party in 1994. these social and political circumstances certainly explain partially the speed and the sequence of the structural reforms that were introduced between 1988 and 1992. indeed, the characteristics adopted by these policies can be explained either in these terms or on economic grounds. the new ‘heterodox’ stabilisation package had been implemented in december 1987. it was based on a diagnostic that dismissed excess domestic demand as a cause for the increasing level of inflation; instead, it explained it in terms of inflation inertia.5 this program’s key mechanism, the so-called ‘pacto’ (pact for economic solidarity), was established as a tripartite agreement between the government and the representatives of 4 this party had been receiving members of the pri’s leftist currents, as cuauhtemoc cárdenas himself, who opposed the new pro-market stance adopted by pri governments since 1982. 5 see agénor & montiel 1999, chapter 10, for a review of heterodox stabilisation programs. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 4 labour and business, reflecting the particular political structure of the country. its main features combined a pegging of the exchange rate to the u.s. dollar, a temporal freeze of wages, private and public sector prices, and further fiscal adjustment. in 1988, the initial fixed exchange rate was replaced by decreasing daily devaluations of the nominal rate of the peso, while prices and wages were adjusted in line with projected inflation. the mechanics of the program were maintained throughout the whole salinas administration; and, adjustments were agreed in tripartite bargaining every december. the program succeeded in stopping inflation quickly. in turn, this success was instrumental in achieving fiscal balance.6 however, the peg created a real appreciation of the peso that was not reversed, and in 1994, the mexican currency was severely overvalued. as a consequence, since 1988 mexico has posted increasing current account deficits that threaten the viability of the program. as we shall see, the features of this program, coupled with a specific combination of structural reforms, have also been harmful for mexico’s tradable sectors, and particularly for small and medium enterprises. since they were initially designed to support the adjustment process, some of these structural policies, especially fiscal reform and trade liberalisation, had already been launched in 1987. fiscal reform (1987-90) helped to strengthen federal revenues and to diminish their reliance on oil revenues. trade liberalisation was accelerated in december 1987; tariffs were lowered as was their dispersion, and import licenses were mostly removed. this policy sought to discipline domestic producers, as increased foreign competition would induce them to moderate price adjustment. the salinas administration intensified these policies and broadened the scope of liberalisation. for analytical purposes, the measures can be classified into two broad groups: those aimed at reducing the direct intervention of the mexican government in economic matters; and those which were intended to re-establish the country’s access to international finance. in the first group, we can list the elimination of subsidies to production and consumption and the end of industrial policy, the deregulation of some key domestic sectors, like telecommunications or transport, the privatisation of big state-owned enterprises (soes) between 1989 and 6 an analysis of the sources of the budget deficit shows that in 1987 it was due mainly to the inflationary component of interests paid on the domestic public debt. as inflation slowed and nominal interest rates declined, the deficit disappeared. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 5 1992, and the liberalisation of the domestic financial system (1988-92). in the second group, the main measures were the signing of a brady plan agreement (1989-90), and the opening of the capital account of the balance of payments (1989-92). in a few words, speed and simultaneity of adjustments characterised these reforms, which were classified by the world bank as ‘shock therapy,’ since the main measures had been introduced in less than two years. such a pace of reform had been made possible by the high degree of autonomy traditionally enjoyed by the mexican president.7 it has been motivated on political grounds by the need to regain support for the ruling party through economic success, and, on the economic side, by the intention to give strong signals, so as to attract the foreign funding needed to pursue the stabilisation package. together, these policies, and especially the brady agreement, the privatisations of big soes, and the opening of domestic securities markets to foreign investment (domestic public debt and equity markets), allowed mexico to receive the inflows it urgently required.8 thus, structural, long-term reforms were used as instruments in supporting the short-term stabilisation process. as expected, these policies had dissimilar effects on the various social and productive sectors. a dichotomy of winners and losers would put mexican big business, the upper and middle classes and non tradable sectors within the first category, and producers of the tradable sectors, and especially small and medium enterprises, and the urban and rural poor as well, within the second. mexican big business has clearly been the major beneficiary of structural reforms. it has been favoured by the privatisation process, which strengthened it greatly while reinforcing its ties with the ruling party as well as its capacity to influence economic decision making. moreover, financial liberalisation, which facilitated its access to foreign markets, combined with the currency appreciation, enabled it to finance its modernisation in a cheaper way. as a matter of fact, industrial sectors that succeeded in adapting to the new environment, 7 in fact, carlos salinas was the last mexican president to enjoy such autonomy. 8 however, since mid-1992, real domestic interest rates had to be increased in order to keep funds flowing in. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 6 keeping their domestic markets and expanding their exports, were the more highly concentrated, capital-intensive and well-connected abroad, such as chemistry, plastics, electric appliances, cars and car parts. together with the in-bond industries, they now explain a major part of mexican manufactured exports. part of this success stems from an increased proportion of imported intermediate goods, which doubled in a few years; the main exporters like car and electric appliances producers had already reached 40 per cent and 58 per cent respectively in 1990.9 consumers, and particularly the upper and middle classes, also benefited from the results of the structural adjustment package. mexico registered a consumption boom between 1988 and 1994. consumers enjoyed a greater variety of cheaper imported goods, which compensated for the painful austerity of the de la madrid sexenio (six-year rule). upper and middle classes consumers were also granted access to domestic credit: since fiscal balance coupled with deregulation freed massive resources, the banks looked for new ways of allocating their funds. as a result, consumer credit and mortgages soared, further stimulating demand for imported durable goods and the domestic construction industry. together, these changes led to a reduced household saving rate: in 1990, it was estimated to be 6.5 per cent of gdp, compared with a 12.2 per cent level in 1985 (dubcovsky 1994). however, as we shall see, credit was extremely expensive, and its expansion would prove unsustainable, leading to the incorporation of urban consumers in the debtors’ movements. tradable labour-intensive sectors where small and medium enterprises predominate were clearly the losers of the adjustment process. when trade began, they were already at a disadvantage, since inefficiencies and obsolescence were widespread in the heavily protected mexican industry and in the undercapitalized rural sector as well. in these conditions, they were exposed simultaneously to trade liberalisation, whose effects were compounded by the currency real appreciation, and to the withdrawal of state support— subsidies and industrial policy programs were removed early. moreover, access to credit was restricted to a small fraction of these enterprises, presumably the more formalised and competitive, and for those who qualified, interest rates were high. as a result, productivity 9 this section draws on marchini 1997. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 7 improvements were rather low in those sectors, and some of them, such as the apparel and garment industry and shoe producers, contracted in absolute terms. at a political level, these producers did not succeed in articulating their demands. their old corporatist body, the cámara nacional de la industria de la transformación (canacintra, national chamber of manufacturing industries), still heavily controlled by the ruling party, prevented it, and, contrary to the case of big business, no other representation was available or created. as for the urban and rural poor, reforms did little to enhance their situation directly. on one hand, employment in the formal sector could not increase in the proportion required to absorb the supply of labour, leaving the so-called informal economy or the rural subsistence sector as the only alternatives. in fact lay-offs increased as several labour-intensive tradable sectors were struggling to adapt to the new environment. on the other hand, nominal increases of the minimal wage rate negotiated in the pactos were consistently lower than the consumer price index (cpi) inflation rate. although the average real industrial wage regained almost all the purchasing power it had lost since 1982, the lower-end wages, which affected a significant part of the workforce, kept losing real value.10 however, some segments of these social sectors benefited from the reforms in an indirect way, as they were the recipients of a patronage-type redistribution of revenues. the privatisation of big soes, and particularly banks sales, reported important one-time revenues to the central government. these windfalls seem to have been used with two purposes: to reduce the debt service and enhance the relationship of the ruling party with the popular sectors, through new politically oriented income-redistributing programs, like solidaridad. in sum, the special features of the stabilisation and structural reforms package produced short-term results that were highly praised abroad, such as an apparently successful stabilisation process, a more market-oriented economy, and a new trade pattern that transformed mexico into an exporter of manufactured goods. at the political level, these results were instrumental in enabling the victory of the ruling party in the 1994 general 10 the index of industrial real wage (1982 = 100) reached its lower level in 1988, with 66 points. in 1994, it increased to 96.8 points. by contrast, the minimal real wage established itself at 59.2 points in 1987, and at 42.3 points in 1992. see marchini 1997, 154. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 8 elections. however, the longer-term costs of this strategy were extremely high, since the goals of modernisation and enhanced competitiveness of a wider range of domestic enterprises were neglected, leading to the dismantlement of whole sectors. moreover, the deeply rooted problems of poverty, unequal distribution of personal income and wide regional differences worsened. as a result, growth, which had picked up swiftly in 198990, became sluggish after 1991, while the current account deficit kept growing and external finance came in an increasingly risky way, as foreign direct investment was replaced by portfolio investment as the first source of funds. this clearly unsustainable path was broken soon after the new government of ernesto zedillo took office, in december 1994. the results i have just mentioned were compounded by the dynamics of bank liberalisation. combined with the devaluation of the currency, they set off an already menacing banking crisis. financial reforms, credit boom and non-performing loans conditions in which bank liberalisation and privatisation occurred were designed to make them a highly profitable investment in the short-term so as to maximise the amount of revenues the government could get from this operation. the main features were as follows: banks were liberalized first, between 1988 and 1991, and only then privatised, when they were already profitable institutions. liberalisation included a thorough reform of bank operations, since directed credit and legal reserve requirements were completely suppressed (in 1989 and 1991),11 and interest rates were freed (1988-89). furthermore, universal banking was reestablished and financial holdings were authorised.12 privatisation also led to the reconstitution of financial-industrial groups. barriers to entry in the sector were not lowered, and they effectively prevented the incorporation of new competitors until 1994, when the new nafta rules allowed the participation of new domestic and foreign actors. the choice of a lesser level of 11 in 1989, legal reserve requirements were replaced by a 30 per cent liquidity coefficient, to be invested in short-term government securities. in turn, this coefficient was suppressed in august 1991 and the transitory mechanism that replaced it only lasted a few months more. 12 financial groups were introduced at the beginning of the 1970s, and universal banking in 1976. in 1982, bank nationalisation reversed these reforms. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 9 competition can be explained on economic grounds: on one hand, it would allow the creation of stronger institutions, able to compete internationally, and on the other, it could also help to scale down systemic risk. however, political explanations are perhaps more likely: first, protection would enable the government to strengthen its alliance with financial big business, and second, as it implied future economic rents, protection would raise the expected revenues of the privatisation process, which could later be used to regain support from the poor (kessler 1999, 94). privatisation affected18 banks; concentration, which has traditionally been high in the mexican banking sector, allowed the sector to behave like an oligopoly. concentration measures reflected the powers of the three bigger intermediaries; together they controlled more than 50 per cent of assets in 1994. the public development banking network was extensively restructured. the main reforms consisted in merging and closing down institutions, and in reducing the scope of their activities, which were refocused towards compensating market failures, i.e. financing viable smes that were not granted access to commercial bank credit. in the rural sector, for example, the biggest producers were directed to commercial banks while profitable small and medium farmers qualified for loans of the development bank, banrural.13 direct lending was also scaled down. funds were to be allocated by commercial banks and development banks would discount these loans. moreover, interest rates subsidies were suppressed and, since 1988, market rates have been applied. as a result of the reforms, banks appeared to be a highly productive investment. at the beginning of the 1990s, mexico was clearly under-banked, and within the context of structural reforms, the growth prospects of the sector seemed excellent. the banks, which had concentrated on government finance throughout the recession, were financially sound. furthermore, they had been granted a protected environment with few competitors within the financial system, since non-bank intermediaries had a limited scale and the scope of public development banks had already been reduced during the first years of the reforms. banks shares were consequently priced very highly during the privatisation process: on 13 the poorest peasants were to be attended by social programs. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 10 average, they were sold at 2.8 times their book value, well above the 2.2 average international relativity (aspe armella 1993, 181).14 in the overall context of stabilisation and structural reforms, bank deregulation and privatisation led to a private sector credit boom. two factors combined to stimulate a high rate of growth of private loans. first, stabilisation, which removed the budget deficit, freed large amounts of funds, which were allocated to new private borrowers. second, deregulation, which lifted legal reserve requirements, intensified this upward trend. the last measures taken during the privatisation process—which eliminated the so-called liquidity coefficient, and any remaining compulsory investment in public securities, respectively in september 1991 and in april 1992—further accelerated it, at a time when non-performing loans (npls) were already soaring. eanwhile, credit allocation had changed dramatically. selective credit policies had ar , me xico: dome s tic source s of loans (1981-2000) -10% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 198 0 198 2 198 4 198 6 198 8 199 0 199 2 199 4 199 6 199 8 200 0 -10% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% cent ral bank lending/aggregat e lending deposit money banks ot her financial inst it ut ions s ou rce : imf fi gu re 1 m traditionally concentrated allocation of funds in industry and agriculture, and in popul housing as well. when these restrictions were lifted, banks allocated funds to new sectors like trade and services, upper and middle-class mortgages and consumer credit, all of them 14 the privatisation process, which had been publicised by the government as a transparent and objective operation, was exposed during the banking crisis as a very political project, as close connections between buyers and ruling party officials were revealed. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 11 expected to return higher yields. although credit expanded in absolute terms and as a percentage of agricultural and industrial gdp, funds allocated to the other sectors grew faster pace, and they gained relative importance: between 1988 and 1993, the stock of credit expanded to 123.7 per cent for the industrial sector, while it grew almost 300 per for trade and service activities and 472 per cent in the case of housing and construction. as a result, industrial activities, which used to receive 42 per cent of total private credit in 1982-87, only got 19 per cent in 1993, while construction and housing activities almost doubled the proportion they received, from 14 per cent to 27 per cent.15 consumer credit peaked in 1991 with 16.5 per cent of aggregate private credit, from an average level that remained stable around 6 per cent of this total between 1970 and 1987. although credit flowed, it remained expensive. moreover, loans were m at a cent ostly allocated on exible terms; borrowers were bearing the risk of future higher rates. during the first years .9 as a mexico: lending to the private sector (1980-2000) 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 19 80 19 82 19 84 19 86 19 88 19 90 19 92 19 94 19 96 19 98 20 00 in p er ce nt o f g d p dep. money banks ot her fin. inst it ut ions s ou rce : imf fi gu re 2 fl of stabilisation, real rates were very high, a common pitfall of financial liberalisation when it is launched without fiscal balance being attained. later, the need to attract foreign funding kept the base rate—the certificado de la tesorería (cete, treasury certificate) rate—high. the wide intermediation margin requested by the banks compounded the effects of high base rates for the borrowers; privatised banks increased this margin from 4 per cent in 1991 to 7.1 per cent in 1993 (gavito, silva nava and zamarripa 1998, 96). 15 development banks followed a somewhat different pattern: loans allocated to industrial and agricultural activities kept a higher proportion of the overall credit, while trade and services activities increased their relative part. housing and construction picked up later. however it should be pointed out that real credit allocation from these banks contracted severely during the period. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 12 result, average real base lending rates rounded 40 per cent in 1988 and 1989, and after falling to 11.5 per cent in 1991, they started increasing again to reach 17 per cent in 1993. this evolution may be explained, on one hand, by the uncompetitive oligopoly structur the banking sphere, promoted by the authorities, which enabled the banks to lower the interest on deposits while increasing lending rates. in fact, with the exception of instruments available to corporations and wealthy individuals, rates paid on a wide rang deposits have consistently produced negative real yields. on the other hand, the ti market, associated with a high demand for loans from households and businesses that had been credit-constrained for more than a decade, put the banks in a strong position in relation to potential borrowers. given the high level of nominal e of e of ght credit and real interest rates, the result of a tight monetary policy ombined with the wider intermediation margin, a high portion of loans were very risky tes as they teriorating record of growth on one hand,16 eficient allocation of funds by the banks on the other, accounted for rapidly increasing more other c investments. for example, most mortgage loans were allocated on the basis of overoptimistic expectations: they were a gamble on the expectation of future lower interest ra as during the first years, capital due increased as part of the interest was capitalized, exceeded the payment capability of the borrower. in short, these loans could have been repaid only in a much better ‘state-of-the-world’, with declining real interest rates and an improving macroeconomic background. high credit rates in conjunction with a de d non-performing loans.17 problems first emerged in the agricultural sector. almost immediately after the deregulation of interest rates, npls jumped to 30 per cent of aggregate loans to the sector for development banks, and increased, although much slowly, in the case of commercial banks, reaching 10.6 per cent in 1993. as for the activities, a clear deterioration in the quality of loans occurred after 1992, soon after the completion of the privatisation process, while real interest rates started climbing again. 16 unfavourable weather conditions also affected the rural sector by causing crop failure. 17 in its 1992 and 1993 annual reports, the central bank, banco de méxico, remarked that banks had an underdeveloped screening system, and that loans had been allocated on the grounds of over-optimistic evaluations of debtors’ repayment capacity. banco de méxico, informe anual, méxico, 1993, 62; banco de méxico, informe anual, méxico, 1992, 51. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 13 the emergence of the debtors’ movement: 1993-94 ot surprisingly, the debtors’ movement was born in the rural sector. in this highly n and the withdrawal of the state y acute e ever, ir s he movement’s name, the barzón, which translates as ‘the yoke,’ alludes to a popular corrido (ballad) of the mexican revolution, which referred to the painful existence of nth l m n fragmented and differentiated sector, trade liberalisatio came after decades of erratic public policies and under-investment, worsening alread problems and widening inequalities between farmers. as a consequence, two of the most important social movements of the 1990s in mexico, the zapatista (ezln, ejército zapatista de liberación nacional, zapatista army of national liberation) rebellion and th barzón debtors’ movement, emerged from this sector within a short time span.18 how while the zapatista rebellion represented the poorer levels of the rural population, the barzón movement expressed in its origins the ‘rebellion of large portions of medium and small rural producers who suddenly found themselves insolvent and unable to serve the debts, on the verge of losing their properties through lawsuits’ (castro castro 2000, 118). since they belonged to the upper group of producers who had qualified to receive credit, it members were not marginal peasants but small, medium and sometimes big landowners who had tried to modernize their farm and produce for the market. t peones (farm hands or labourers) on extensive haciendas (rural properties) in the ninetee century. those peones lived in bondage, with debts being transferred from parents to children (torres 1997a, 268; torres 1997b). although debtors’ movements proliferated after the december 1994 crisis and expanded into the urban areas, these rural roots stil appear in their generic name, the barzón, which the movements kept, and in the rural emblem—a green tractor—they continued to use. the motto of the movement, ‘debo no niego, pago lo justo’ (i don’t deny what i owe, but i’ll pay what’s fair), also derives fro the same founding movement (kessler 1999, 122). 18 the ezln rebellion broke out in january 1994, while the barzón’s first important moves took place in september 1993. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 14 although similar initiatives were launched almost simultaneously in the northern state of hihuahua, and in zacatecas, the movement seems to have had its roots in the western roducers s at the very beginning of the movement? cartón de grammont resses they included medium and big rural producers over indebted with commercial ly, e ebt al ks g c jalisco state. harmed by bad weather conditions and a drop in export and domestic prices for their products, a group of farmers sought the president’s mediation in order to solve their overdue loans problems. the old corporatist organisations, the local affiliate to the confederación nacional campesina (cnc, national peasants confederation), and the federación estatal de propietarios rurales (fepr, state federation of rural landowners), were kept out of the movement (del castillo 2000, 94). from the mid eighties, they had been losing their efficiency as bargaining channels between p and the authorities. who were the debtor st banks, as well as small farmers who couldn’t repay their loans to banrural (cartón de grammont 1997). the average value of the debts of the former was higher. consequent in 1993, the overdue loans of the rural sector could be split as follows: 62 per cent of th aggregate bad debts were due to commercial banks (by 27 per cent of the producers), while banrural concentrated 38 per cent of the value of npls (and 73 per cent of debtors). accordingly, some indicators suggest that the size of the debtors’ properties was greater than the average (cartón de grammont 1997, 1-3). their demands already included d rescheduling, interest discounts, and new loans to finance working capital. from the beginning they had asked for ‘a tripartite dialogue between debtors, bankers and the feder government’ (castro castro 2000, 131).19 when the ensuing negotiations with the ban failed in mid 1993, demonstrators arrived on their tractors and took over downtown guadalajara for 52 days. other demonstrations included the blocking of the international bridge in ciudad juárez (chihuahua), and a protest walk towards mexico city, durin 19 cartón de grammont stresses that the barzón movement tried to rebuild bargaining channels between producers and the authorities, especially with the secretaría de agricultura (sahr), which used to be the negotiator in the old corporatist system. he argues that these efforts failed because the government refused to intervene in the conflict between producers and the banks. moreover, the sahr had been transformed into a technical body, with the balance of power shifting in favour of the secretaría de hacienda y crédito público (shcp, secretary of economy), much more orthodox in matters of economic policy (cartón de grammont 1997, 12.) portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 15 which the leaders were jailed. the official birth of the movement took place on november 7, when the national confederation of rural producers, ‘el barzón,’ was created, with participation of delegates representing eight states (castro castro 2000, 99). during this first phase, membership was estimated at 10,000 participants, almost exclusively of farmers (torres 1997a, 268). at that time, demonstrating with tractors, threatening the banks with moratorium on their debts, and seeking the presidents’ intervention, were the movement’s main tactics. in agreement the a with torres (1997a), my analysis identifies 1994 as the beginning of a distinct cond phase in the early life of the barzón. debtors were by then well aware that the er ke up l s close t he pri presidential candidate prompted the mexican uthorities to increase domestic interest rates as part of an emergency package aimed at se authorities and the banks would not accept negotiations or accommodate their demands readily. as a consequence, they needed to organize new and stronger protests. moreov the macroeconomic slowdown accelerated the evolution of the barzón. indeed, the movement expanded greatly its membership while its composition underwent a deep transformation, rather unexpectedly for its leaders. at the same time, the barzón bro into two organisations. although it inproclaimed its independence from parties, the movement split over the political preferences of its leaders—pri or prd oriented—as wel as on regional lines. the barzón unión (bu), also called the new barzón, which wa to the prd, had a higher participation in the state of zacatecas, in the federal district, and in the south east of the country, while the barzón confederación or old barzón (bc), itself close to the pri, had deep roots in jalisco and el bajío region (mestries). the two organisations were still establishing goals exclusively related with the rural sectors,20 bu the deterioration of the macroeconomic background was already leading new, more urban borrowers to enter the movements. in march 1994, the assassination of t a preventing financial outflows.21 this measure worsened the already fragile situation of 20 the b.u. planned to create a genuine agrarian party, while the b.c. preferred promoting non-political rural associations. 21 the analysis of inflows and interest rates shows that the chiapas uprising had little effect on investor’s moods. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 16 numerous debtors, and npls increased. gavito et al provide evidence of over-indebtedn in the mexican private sector (gavito, silva nava and zamarripa 1998). as for families, income-expenditure surveys indicate that debt service as a percentage of higher deciles household expenditures increased from 3.6 per cent in 1989 to 5.7 per cent in 1994, whil ‘the real growth of housing and credit card debt service expenditures increas[ed] more than eight times that of real income from 1992 to year-end 1994.’ (94). regarding the firms, additional evidence tends to corroborate the high indebtedness of ‘sectors that comprise mostly small and medium firms,’ while sectors where firms were ‘large, capital-intensive and frequently, related to foreign trade,’ had low ratios of domestic debt to gdp (94). consequently, the domestic private sector as a whole became a net debtor of the financ system. ess e , ial s a result, the bu expanded in an uncontrolled way, becoming a predominantly urban r al risis, over-indebtedness and the debtors’ movement: 1995-2000 initiated an open ts in 1995, real wages falling 15 per cent and unemployment reaching its highest historical a movement with a support base spread across the entire country. in december 1994, 80 pe cent of its members were small urban entrepreneurs, mortgage and credit card borrowers, with a high proportion of women (torres 1997b). by contrast, in 1994 the bc remained a more regional and rural movement, and engaged intensively in local politics. the tactics employed by the two movements increasingly reflecting their different membership, but they coincided in creating civil resistance committees to prevent banks from acquiring leg possession of debtor’s properties. c the december 1994 peso devaluation and the ensuing financial crisis banking crisis. while the international rescue package enabled mexico to solve rapidly i external financial problems,22 easing its return to international financial markets in september 1995, recession spread in the domestic markets and interest rates sky-rocketed. indeed, mexico experimented its worst recession in decades, with gdp dropping 7 per cent 22 in march 1995, mexico received a us$50 billion credit line offered by several international institutions, with the u.s. treasury department, the i.m.f., the world bank and the b.i.s. being the main contributors. finally, mexico only used half of these funds, since during the 4th quarter of 1995, it was able to come back to voluntary financing in the international capital markets. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 17 level. as average interest rates rose from 18 per cent to around 120 per cent (kessler 1999, 122) debt service and repayment became impossible for a majority of borrowers. npls al soared, putting the whole banking system on the verge of a systemic crisis.23 the first moves of the authorities were intended to help the banks. these were so the stitutions that suffered from the worst financial situation. those where fraudulent hemes onds.25 he 1 is onto the national stage and collectively ecame an active and resourceful actor that confronted successfully the authorities and f , in activities had been detected were subject to intervention,24 and two capitalisation sc were launched in order to assist the banks in meeting new, tougher capitalisation requirements. the major plan concerned all the institutions of the system, and it consisted of an exchange of loans for government guaranteed non-negotiable zero-coupon b loans were sold at 75 per cent of their value to the fondo bancario de protección al ahorro (fobaproa, the bank deposit protection fund), the agency in charge of the program, but the banks remained responsible for their own administration. as part of t deal, the owners of the banks agreed to inject more capital in their institutions, with a 2: peso ratio. after the 1997 polls, when the pri lost its majority in the congress, the analys of these operations showed that mismanagement, discretionary operations and favouritism had been the rule, and these issues became a political bomb. it also appeared that wealthy individuals and big firms benefited from the rescue package, as their loans were transferred to fobaproa and they were not being served. in this context the debtors’ movements exploded b bankers, securing better repayment conditions for borrowers. in august 1995, estimates o the universe of debtors gave an aggregate number of 7,885,217 borrowers, 6,033,955 of whom were credit card holders, 866,218 mortgage borrowers,26 and 504,927 firms. 75 per cent were small borrowers, with debts lower than 200,000 pesos for mortgages and firms 23 default rates jumped and affected about one third of outstanding loans. 24 in 1995, authorities intervened in 8 banks, and the number rose to 13 in 1997, including 3 institutions that d one in 1999, at that time the third theoretical level, performing and non-performing loans as well could have been sold to 268). had begun operations in 1994. three more banks were targeted in 1998, an bank of the system. 25 the program did not specify the quality of the loan, but only that it should have been qualified and duly provisioned. so, at a fobaproa. 26 in may 1996, the mexican bankers association estimated the number of mortgage debtors at 911,000. (torres 1997a, portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 18 and lower than 5,000 pesos for credit cards (calva 1997, 31). as for the debtors’ movements, the bu estimated its members at 1 million in may 1996, while the total membership of all movements reached 2 million. we can thus calculate that rough quarter of the borrowers belonged to a debtors’ organisation. after 1995, the movement underwent new transformations. fi ly a rst of all, debtors’ rganisations mushroomed. the asociación nacional de deudores de la banca (national a newly lla , the ceased to represent the rural sectors exclusively and began to ttract other interests, it established a wide front. it was proclaimed to be a ‘patriotic, d .’28 in its s o association of bank borrowers), the asociación nacional de tarjeta-habientes (national association of credit card holders), the alianza para la defensa del patrimonio familiar (alliance for the defence of family patrimony) and the movimiento ciudadano ‘salvemos nuestra casa’ (citizen movement, ‘let’s save our home’), were some of the new organisations that appeared on the stage. although they kept their atomistic nature, the 18 different movements succeeded in creating a united national coalition, gathered in created front called alianza nacional ‘el barzón,’ which was born at congress in december 1995 (mestries, 9) the movement also reorganised on sectoral bases and in a decentralized way, creating the agrobarzón and the barzón empresarial, and later incorporating strong groups such as transbarzón (transport), tortibarzón (mills and torti producers), barzón metropolitano, and the barzón del agave. finally, in april 1999 asociación ciudadana ‘movimiento mexicano el barzón’ (citizen association ‘mexican movement el barzón’) was registered as a national political grouping by the instituto federal electoral (1999). as the debtors’ movement a nationalist, genuinely plural, multisectoral and polyclassist movement,’27 aimed at ‘promoting the organization of agriculture, trade, industrial and services producers, an credit users, to defend their common interests and improve their standards of living statements, the bu stressed the importance of human dignity and the need to restore it: a 27 boletín el barzón, cited in (mestries, 6.) ww.elbarzón.org 28 barzón union web site, available: http://w portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 19 they said, ‘we fight to defend outraged dignity.’29 this is also emphasised in the common statement signed by the barzón and the ezln movements: ‘tenemos vergüenza, tenemos dignidad, tenemos valentía y saldremos adelante’ (‘we have shame, we have dignity, we have courage and we will go ahead’).30 as neo-liberal policies were considered to be the main cause for the economic debacle suffered by the country and by the debtors, ‘defendin the family patrimony, the domestic productive plants, employment and the country’s sovereignty’ was regarded as a duty. this last assertion reflects the efforts made by the debtors to broaden the scope of their interventions, from purely defensive actions to m proactive and political activities, in which the new economic model was criticised and proposals were made to build an alternative one. g ore the activities carried out by the different movements diversified and embraced ‘active’ ivil resistance actions, legal defence, negotiation and political action.31 they also sought to e ral ng ne e negotiation activities, which developed at the local level to solve specific cases, and on the c form alliances with a great variety of other social actors, from the ezln movement to th catholic church and business corporatist organisations. as for civil resistance, the movement experimented with other, sometimes innovative forms of protest, which earned them notoriety and popularity among the mexican population. torres stresses that ru habits and urban practices merge to form these manifestations (torres 1997a), which ‘ranged from funny and smart to aggressive and semi-violent’ (torres 1997b, 337). amo many other activities,32 perhaps the more significant and publicised actions were, on o side, the numerous operations against the repossession of the debtor’s properties by the banks, and, on the other side, the capture and holding of bank branches, law-courts, and highly symbolic places and institutions, like the secretary of domestic affairs offices, th central bank and the congress. massive mobilisations were also designed to support 29 some testimonies of the members of the barzón have been published recently. see barzonistas: el palpitar de un corazón colectivo, programa de apoyo a culturas municipales y comunitarias, consejo nacional para la cultura y las artes, méxico, 2002, in http://www.conaculta.gob.mx/saladeprensa/2002/05jun/barzonis.htm. see also la gota 21, december 24, 2001, http://us.geocities.com/antiteo/gota21.html, for the testimony of barzón leader lucha castro. 30 barzón union web site. 31 barzón union web site. 32 examples of these actions included dumping vegetables at bank branches, multiple cashing of one peso checks, backwards demonstrations, public nakedness, lip and eyelid sewing, burning credit cards, and use of tractors. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 20 http://www.conaculta.gob.mx/saladeprensa/2002/05jun/barzonis.htm http://us.geocities.com/antiteo/gota21.html national stage as well. after 1995, the barzón released several statements and lobbied for proposals aimed at finding a suitable solution to the bad debts problems of its member the main proposals were the moratorium bill of december 6, 1994, the concord trust project of may 1996, the rescue program for small mortgage, agriculture and business debtors bill of december 5, 1997, and finally, the jubilee project of 2000. other statemen and proposals had broader goals, as they demanded changes in economic policies, extern debt management, nafta rules, and so on.33 legal defence actions were undertaken at several levels. at the local and individual levels, the different movements began hiring lawyers a s. ts al nd offering legal assistance to their ffiliates from 1994. as a consequence, thousands of lawsuits were instituted against banks. rder to e the 1997 polls, olitical engagement of the debtors increased, as various leaders stood as candidates, ases, e ón a the movements also supported voluntary payments of interests and principals of loans, deposited at law courts or at the nacional financiera public development bank, in o signal the disposition to pay out the borrowers. furthermore, at a nationwide level, the barzón engaged in a legal controversy, questioning the lawful character of anatocismo (interest capitalisation), which reached the supreme court of the nation. finally, concerning political action, the barzón abandoned efforts oriented at getting a presidential mediation and switched its attention towards congress. befor p mainly on the prd lists. as representatives, they defended several bills and tried to stop others that would have strengthened the powers of banks. however, it should be pointed out that the political engagement of its leaders were not always accepted by the local b leading them to leave the movement on several occasions. initiatives in the political spher were not only oriented towards the national level, but concerned also the states. in sum, the debtors’ movements adopted different and innovative tactics in order to attain their goals. they were especially active between 1994 and 1997, when ‘the barz 33 the main examples of these sorts of statements are the guadalajara statement, of august 1995, the agreement for economic recovery, productive plant strengthening and employment, of march 1996, and with more political goals, the common pact ‘pacto de intocabilidad,’ signed with the ezln movement in july 1996. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 21 captured social grievances in such a way that it is best described as a clearinghouse of ies. urpose, i will review the various initiatives launched by the movement, ordered as they ugh the balance is mixed, successes have of many debtors. however, the ajor successes of the movement were attained in an indirect way. although the barzón loan o e he ireca programs (1 and 2) offered rescheduling and interest discounts, but these benefits of complaints for producers and consumers negatively affected by the 1994 devaluation and the economic adjustment that preceded it (williams 2001, 30-51). since 1998, the movement has decayed, although in recent months it has developed several new activit the results: what did the movements achieve? in this final section, i will analyse the successes and failures of the barzón. for that p have been addressed in the previous section. altho been attained in almost all the type of actions undertaken. inasmuch as they impeded the banks’ ability to repossess properties, protests and demonstrations certainly succeeded in protecting the assets m was not officially acknowledged as a partner by the zedillo government,34 and its proposals in favour of collective negotiation, rescheduling, and interest discounts were dismissed, its protests prompted the authorities to create a series of debt relief schemes. pressures generated by the movement, by means such as encouraging the spread of defaulting also translated into increased concessions made to the borrowers, especially t the small and medium ones, and in decreased legal actions against them. however, all th deals were made on an individual level, as claimed by the government and the banks. the first program concerned exclusively the rural sector, and it was launched in march 1994, one month after an important demonstration from the barzón had taken place. t s were considered insufficient by the borrowers, and did not moderate the npls problems the sector. moreover, the salinas government also introduced a patronage-type program, procampo, to regain support in the rural sector. after the december 1994 crisis, the authorities’ first moves consisted of creating a new 34 however, congress received the barzón in several opportunities. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 22 investment unit, the (udi, unidad de inversión), indexed on cpi inflation, converting nger-term debts, especially mortgages, from pesos to udis. the program included . it ers ided with the main relief schemes, which granted more enefits to the debtors and ultimately proved more costly for the authorities. the additional program , 75 s, the 4 lo rescheduling and sought to avoid anticipated amortisation of capital due to high inflation the borrowers would pay real interest rates, with a theoretical top set at 12 per cent. the program failed in attracting a majority of the borrowers, and for those who entered it, rapidly proved insufficient: deteriorating revenues and high inflation rates combined to make payments unsustainable. as a result, the government introduced a new scheme, the ade (relief agreement for bank debtors), oriented towards small and medium borrow in agriculture or industrial activities, and towards consumer and mortgage debtors. the scope of this program was nevertheless limited, since it only included rescheduling and a one-year subsidy on interest rates. the following years, 1996 and 1997, which were those during which the debtors’ movements were most active, coinc b relief scheme for mortgage debtors (may, 1996), the finape program (support for agriculture, husbandry and fishing), and the fopyme program (support program for micro, small and medium entreprises) considered massive subsidies on payments, applicable in a decreasing percentage over a ten-year period (banco de méxico, 1997).35 these last three programs were a success for the authorities, as the percentage of debtors who choose to participate was high: 84 per cent for the mortgage borrowers’ scheme per cent for the finape and 63 per cent for the fopyme (banco de méxico 1997). finally, in january 1999, a ‘punto final’ program was launched by the banks in order to clean their balances. as the last programs, this relief scheme included important discounts on debt service (estimated between 45 and 60 per cent) and was directed towards sme rural sector and mortgage debtors. although these programs did not entirely resolve the npls problems of the banks—almost seven years later, bad debts still represent a high percentage of aggregate credit—they did resolve the financial troubles of many borrowers. as a consequence, they clearly contributed in releasing the pressure maintained since 199 35 discounts varied from 30 to 40 per cent of debt service. the costs of subsidizing interest rates were shared by the government and the banks in the cases of fopyme and finape; but the costs of the mortgage scheme were supported exclusively by the authorities. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 23 by the debtors’ movement on the authorities and on the banks. concerning the legal aspects of the barzón’s activities, some successes and a big setback need to be reported. their legal representatives argued successfully that interest had been omputed illegally and erroneously, and that lenders had not seriously evaluated the more useholds’ atrimony, declaring minimum intangible assets, and lessening legal pressures on the their e ic c capacity of borrowers to service loan repayments. however, the major legal battle over ‘anatocismo’ or interest capitalisation was lost, as on october 7, 1998, the supreme court declared it legal, as expected.36 after that decision was made it became considerably difficult for a borrower to win a lawsuit, although victories occurred in several cases (el fianciero, 1999). nevertheless, legal defence did not stop. in march 2002, the organisation announced it had defended 99,730 debtors over the previous two years.37 if we consider next the political sphere, some additional successes must be attributed to the debtors’ movements. first, some 15 states enacted new laws protecting ho p defaulting borrowers. in some cases, the local government mediated between the banks and the debtors’ movements and/or declared a legal truce.38 second, at the national level, debtors’ representatives could not win the approval of their own bills, most notably rescue program for small mortgage, agriculture and business debtors of december 5, 1997, supported by the prd. but, in april 1996, they partially succeeded in convincing th representatives not to approve some points of a reform package that would have made the debtors more vulnerable, strengthening the position of the banks. however, changes introduced in the bill did not prevent a differentiation from being established between ‘old’ and ‘new’ debtors, effectively curtailing the growth of these organisations (torres 1997a). as for their broader propositions, very little results are acknowledged, as the econom model has not yet been discussed or modified. finally, social and political analysts have identified some broader effects of the debtors’ 36 this legal battle created a hot debate in mexico, which can be retraced in the numerous newspapers articles published on this particular topic. 37 http://www.cimacnoticias.com/noticias/02mar/s02030501.html. 38 these measures created a conflict between the federal government, and the mexican bankers association on one side, and the local congresses and authorities on the other. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 24 http://www.cimacnoticias.com/noticias/02mar/s02030501.html movements. mestries mentions their democratising impact, especially in the countryside, here they introduced more democratic practices, competing with, or changing from d ore ms and economic opening were introduced rioritized short-term economic adjustment and its associated political benefits, and harmed edium producers, particularly those belonging to tradable sectors. the erience w within, the corporatist structures (mestries). cartón de grammont concentrates on two genuine contributions of the barzón: the creation of a new citizenry, more participative an conscious of its own rights, and its fighting for the rule of the law and for a new and m inclusive national project (1997).39 although the authorities tried to dismiss it as ‘nonpayment culture,’ ‘barzonismo… became a term that connoted a sort of civic-minded attitude of resistance. it called up images of peaceful groups of neighbors and townspeople encircling properties in defense against moneylenders and police who would come to repossess properties’ (williams 2001, 39-40). conclusions in mexico, the way in which structural refor p small and m problems experienced by these sectors were compounded by the dynamics of bank deregulation and privatisation. in 1993, the barzón debtors’ movement began in the rural sector, and spread in the cities after the december 1994 devaluation, when urban borrowers were hit by interest rates increases. smes debtors, who had not been able to articulate their opposition to liberalisation policies, and the middle classes, who had benefited from the same reforms, then gathered and joined the rural protesters to defend their properties against banks, emphasising their right to human dignity and security, seeking ‘protection from sudden and harmful disruptions in the patterns of daily life’ (united nations commission on global governance 1995, 80). the shock created by the debt problem has pushed thousands of individuals and small economic and social actors to gather in the barzón movement and temporarily leave behind their collective action problems. membership of the movements was dispersed over the whole national territory. members belonged to different parties or were politically indifferent. some had previous exp 39 the author stresses that small and medium producers, who had been losing their privileged position as modernizing agents since the introduction of the new economic model, were looking for a new identity and a new role in mexican society. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 25 of protest, others none. the movement reflected this diversity, being itself a coalition of ter its d role, montiel, p.j, 1999, development macroeconomics, 2d ed., princeton university press, princeton. spe armella, p. 1993, el camino mexicano de la transformación económica, fce, ico, is.htm different organisations. indeed, the movement became an important actor on the national stage, and it contributed to improvements in the rescheduling and interests discounts schemes, and the defence of debtors’ properties and rights. it also expressing broader protest against the neoliberal economic model sponsored by mexican governments since 1982. although the movement lost momentum at the end of the 1990s, seven years af eruption on the social and political scene, the barzón was still active. in march 2002 it organized meetings to prepare the civil society forum that paralleled the monterrey international conference on development finance, and it also tried to create links with argentinean debtors. in june and july of the same year, new demonstrations enabled barzón to negotiate with the authorities on behalf of indebted farmers. more recently however, some local debtor movements decided to dissolve into rural organizations aime at defending broader interests of farmers. in sum, the very success of the movement in winning better conditions of loan repayment dispersed its membership and reduced its yet in 2004 barzón remains a factor in mexican politics. during its few years of intense activity, it certainly made a relevant contribution to the democratization of mexico’s political life. reference list agénor, p-r, & a méxico. banco de méxico 1992, 1993, 1997, informe anual, méxico. barzonistas: el palpitar de un corazón colectivo, programa de apoyo a culturas municipales y comunitarias, consejo nacional para la cultura y las artes, méx 2002, available: http://www.conaculta.gob.mx/saladeprensa/2002/05jun/barzon . correa (eds) crisis bancaria del c o,’ calva, j.l. 1997, ‘crisis de los deudores,’ in a. girón and e. y carteras vencidas, unam-uam, méxico. cartón de grammont, h. 1997, el barzón ¿un movimiento social en contra de la crisis económica o un movimiento social de nuevo cuño?, working paper, iis-unam, méxico. castro castro, i. 2000, ‘el movimiento barzonista en el campo zacatecano: significado y perspectivas,’ in j. regalado (ed.) política y acciones colectivas en el occidente de jalisco,’ universidad de guadalajara, guadalajara. astillo, a. 2000,‘el barzón: la revuelta contra la modernidad en el campo de jalisc in j. regalado (ed.) política y acciones colectivas en el occidente de jalisco, portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 26 universidad de guadalajara, guadalajara. astillo, y,‘au mexique, des mutations culturelles et del c sociales sur fond de globalisation dubc social at the conference ‘ahorro privado, flujos garri risis: t kaewthep, k., ‘reactions to currency crises in méxico and thailand: a comparative kessl xico’s financial marc omique, rangères, méxico. , working paper, available: rodr agro: la resistencia de los ol. iv of h. cartón de s) la sociedad rural mexicana frente al nuevo torre e ———1997b, ‘las siete vidas de el barzón: tensiones en la construcción de una fuerza f willi ondage: fighting banks and the state in subordonnée,’ working paper, ucl/sped/dvlp, université de louvain-la-neuve. ovsky, g. 1994, acervos y flujos financieros en una estructura de contabilidad méxico 1980, 1985, 1990, paper presented de capital y ajuste económico en méxico,’ el colegio de méxico, méxico, 1994 do, c. 1997, ‘actor bancario y poder financiero en méxico – incertidumbres y desafíos,’ in j. m. ramírez and j. regalado (eds) los actores sociales, vol. 4 in e. gutiérrez garza (gen. ed.) el debate nacional, cucsh-universidad de guadalajara and ed. diana, méxico, 1997, 55-85. gavito mohar, j., silva nava, a., & zamarripa escamilla, g. 1998, ‘recovery after c lessons for mexico’s banks and private sector,’ in mexico’s private sectorrecen history, future challenges, ed. r. roett, lynne rienner, boulder. perspective,’ working paper, project on latin america and the pacific rim, university of california, san diego. er, t.p. 1999, global capital and national politics – reforming me system, praeger, westport. hini, g. 1997, mexique: crise d’un modèle économique? un bilan macroécon cemca & ministére des affaires et mestries benquet, f., el barzón ¿asociación ciudadana, organización de productores o movimiento político?, unam www.unam.mx/rer/francis.html íguez gómez, g.& torres, g. 1996, ‘el barzón y la com agroproductores a la política’ in h. cartón de grammont and h. tejero (eds) los nuevos actores sociales y procesos políticos en el campo, v grammont and h. tejero (gen. ed milenio, inah, uam azcapotzalco, unam, plaza y valdés, méxico, 1996, 153179. s g. 1997a, ‘el derecho de ‘barzonear’ y sus efectos políticos,’ in la democracia d los de abajo, eds j. alonso and j. m. ramírez, la jornada, consejo electoral del estado de jalisco & unam, guadalajara. política nacional,’’ in los actores sociales, vol. 4. eds j. m. ramírez and j. regalado in (ed) el debate nacional, ed. e. gutiérrez garza, cucsh-universidad de guadalajara & editorial diana, méxico. united nations commission on global governance, our global neighborhood: report o the commission on global governance, (new york, ny, oxford university press, 1995), p. 80. ams, h. 2001, ‘of free trade and debt b mexico,’ latin american perspectives, 28 no 4 pp. 101-28. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 27 geneviève marchini, university of guadalajara introduction financial reforms, credit boom and non-performing loans the emergence of the debtors’ movement: 1993-94 crisis, over-indebtedness and the debtors’ movement: 1995-20 the results: what did the movements achieve? conclusions reference list portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal language and identities: the exceptional normality of italy john j. kinder, university of western australia unity and diversity: a tension at the heart of language1 on 11 october 2007, the italian minister for the interior, giuliano amato, spoke at a rome conference on immigration at which a report, commissioned by his ministry and entitled ‘social research on immigration: italy,’ was officially presented. when magdi allam, deputy editor of italy’s largest-selling newspaper corriere della sera, suggested that italy introduce a language exam for immigrants as holland had recently done, minister amato responded ‘i do not agree with the dutch, who perhaps are frightened by islam, but we are a diverse society. we must not raise the drawbridge’ (aduc 2007).2 in his initial remarks, minister amato had said, ‘a number of centuries of history have made us tendentially white and christian, but we must be prepared to “welcome differences”, even if there are some differences that are difficult to fit together’ (ministero dell’interno, 2007, italics added).3 minister amato’s comments would warrant examination on many fronts, but their most remarkable feature is the conjunction italicized above. on one side of the but is an assertion of identity, though this identity has admittedly been imposed by ‘history’ and is ‘tendential’ at best. on the other side is a declared openness to difference, to the other, 1 this article is based in part on an address given at the 28th meeting for friendship among the peoples, rimini, august 2007. i am grateful to the two anonymous portal reviewers for helpful suggestions. 2 non sono d’accordo—ha spiegato amato, rispondendo ad una sollecitazione del vicedirettore del corriere della sera, magdi allam—con gli olandesi, che forse sono impauriti dall’islam, ma noi siamo una società diversa. non bisogna alzare il ponte levatoio. 3 alcuni secoli di storia ci hanno reso tendenzialmente bianchi e cristiani, ma dobbiamo essere disposti ad ‘accogliere le diversità,’ anche se ci sono alcune ‘diversità difficili da comporre.’ kinder language and identities to dialogue. the conjunction that links these two propositions—ma—is defined by grammarians as ‘adversative,’ ‘expressing contrariety, opposition, or antithesis.’ thus for the italian interior minister identity and openness to the other are in a relation of opposition. identity is posited as an obstacle or limit to true openness to difference, and the welcoming of differences can only happen despite or against the identity of the welcomer. identity is a threat to dialogue rather than its essential pre-condition. the experience of diversity is presented as a problem to be resolved, ‘fitted together,’ rather than as an encounter between identities, each perceiving itself and its interlocutor as other, each open to encounter as an elementary mode of knowledge. it is no surprise, however, that the minister’s comments should have been made in response to a question on language. language has always been a symbol and barometer of cultural life. antonio gramsci’s judgement can apply to all modern nation states, though he was referring specifically to italy’s ‘questione della lingua,’ the debate on the nature of the national language that raged from the 16th to the 20th centuries: ‘every time the language question surfaces, in one way or another, it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore: the formation and enlargement of the governing class, the need to establish more intimate and secure relationships between the governing groups and the national-popular masses, in other words to reorganize the cultural hegemony’ (gramsci 1985: 183-84).4 issues of language policy loom large in contemporary cultural debates in italy. the fundamental issues are perennial and unchanging but are being negotiated in a rapidly evolving social and cultural context. at the centre of these language debates is a tension that lies at the heart of language itself. language is at once a way to imagine the world and communicate that conceptualization to an other and build shared understandings. through being at the whim of its users, language is also a source and instrument of miscommunication. language is both an expression of elemental human experience, which is universal and common, and also the symbol of the uniquely different concrete set of circumstances through which each of us lives that common elementary core. language is a tool for building unity, and an expression of irreducible difference. 4 ogni volta che affiora, in un modo o nell’altro, la quistione della lingua, significa che si sta imponendo una serie di altri problemi: la formazione e l’allargamento della classe dirigente, la necessità di stabilire rapporti più intimi e sicuri tra i gruppi dirigenti e la massa popolare-nazionale, cioè di riorganizzare l’egemonia culturale. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 2 kinder language and identities language provokes questions of identity, otherness and dialogue because it contains the inevitable tension between those same forces within itself. languages are constantly caught between the opposing forces of disintegration and recomposition, of differentiation and homogenization. indeed it would seem that the centrifugal force, towards ever increasing diversity, is a ‘natural’ part of the relationship between language and culture, while the opposite force, of centripetal standardization and reduction of language diversity, is external to language and is the result of non-linguistic factors or interventions. this tension within language is paralleled, on the level of theoretical reflection, by the opposition between ‘relativistic’ views that languages are necessarily tied to, and formed by, certain specific forms of thought, behaviour and culture, and ‘universalistic’ views that search for the deep constants that unite all human languages (de mauro 1996). this paper examines italy’s contemporary linguistic landscape and debates in the light of this understanding of the contradiction at the heart of language. i argue that by placing italy’s linguistic history against a wider, european and global, perspective, the exceptionality often claimed for italy’s persistent diversity appears not so much an exception to a general rule, but on the contrary, a particularly clear example of universal trends. while these trends have been diverted in particular directions in other places, italy carries on an atavistic tension between diversity and unity in thoroughly modern terms, a kind of exceptional normality. language and languages in contemporary italy italy is a place of wondrous linguistic diversity.5 though the national language is now universally spoken by the native-born population, it behoves us to recall how recent and rapid the italianization of the country has been. italian speakers at the time of national unification in 1861 were little more than one-tenth of the population: estimates range from 2.5 per cent (de mauro 1963) to 9.5 per cent (castellani 1982) and twelve per cent (serianni 1990: 18). in 1951 italian-only speakers were still a mere eighteen per cent of the population, another eighteen per cent alternated use of italian and dialect on a daily basis, while for the remaining sixty-four per cent of italians the only language used with daily regularity was their local dialect. 5 summary information can be found in the language entries in the routledge encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture, listed at moliterno (2000: xvii). portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 3 kinder language and identities it is worth recalling, too, that in the italian context dialects are ‘in effect separate romance languages and they can differ from each other as much as french differs from spanish. these italian dialects are not derived from italian, nor are they varieties or adaptations of the national language’ (lepschy, lepschy & voghera 1996, 70). the latest language survey by istat (2007) reveals that in 2006 use of dialect within the home (usually together with italian) is still a daily reality for nearly half the population of italy (48.5 per cent). dialect usage correlates positively with age, male gender, bluecollar occupations, and with the north-east, south and islands, although the geographical differences are diminishing in recent years. the long predicted demise of the dialects is slow to materalize. the corriere della sera (2007) somewhat ambiguously reported the findings of this istat survey by declaring italy to be a ‘babele di dialetti.’ language borders, so determinant in creating identities, interweave across and around italy’s external political borders and through the internal borders of regioni and province. the romance language ‘family’ is conventionally divided into a ‘western’ group including portuguese, spanish, catalan, french, and so on, and an ‘eastern’ group including sardinian, sicilian and romanian. the conventional divide, the socalled ‘la spezia-rimini line,’ passes from east to west right across the peninsula, so that the dialects of northern italy belong to western romance while those of central and southern italy belong to eastern romance. a striking feature of the contemporary scene is the presence of islands of languages other than italian. there are nearly 3,000,000 individuals, in thirteen out of italy’s twenty administrative regions, who speak a mother tongue other than italian or an italian dialect. italy’s linguistic minorities, most of which can be traced to historical immigrations or changing borders, are found mainly in border areas (valle d’aosta, alto-adige, friuli, etc.), or in scattered enclaves. sardinian and friulian are now recognised as ‘minor languages’ rather than dialects. since the 1970s immigration has brought into italy languages of all the continents, especially northern africa, eastern europe, the indian sub-continent, eastern asia and south america. the number of ‘regular’ immigrants in 2006 is estimated at 3,690,000, with a little over 120,000 ‘irregular’ migrants (caritas/migrantes 2007). the istat portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 4 kinder language and identities survey cited above (2007) claims that five per cent of italian residents regularly speak ‘another language’ in the home, that is, neither italian or a dialect, nor one of the ‘historical minority languages.’ in other words, the new linguistic minorities are already as numerous as the old ones. this vital diversity is often depicted as something exceptional, even extraordinary. the construction of italian ‘exceptionality’ is a recurrent topos among english-language italianists (as discussed by moss 1989, and in several chapters in forgacs & lumley 1996) and is characteristic of certain external projections of itself by mainstream italian culture: italy as unique, different, refractory, unsusceptible to analyses that work for other places. i own a t-shirt featuring a memorable cartoon by altan, that says ‘the italians are an extraordinary people, i really wish they were a normal people.’6 but in matters of language, italy is not exceptional except in being, as it were, exceptionally normal. the language diversity found within italy is simply a particularly clear microexample of the diversity that characterizes us as a species. language and languages in the world the most fundamental and most obvious characteristic of human language as it exists in the real world is, in fact, its diversity. how many languages are there in the world? or rather, how many communities are there who recognise themselves as ‘native speakers’ of a particular language? these questions are as frequently asked as they are difficult to answer accurately. leaving aside questions of definition, for example ‘language’ versus ‘dialect,’ one reliable estimate is 6,809 (gordon 2005). the distribution of languages world-wide is rather like the distribution of wealth, with a small number of very large languages, and many very small ones. a mere 347 (or approximately 5 per cent) of the world’s languages have at least one million speakers and account for ninety-four per cent of the world’s population. by contrast, the remaining ninety-five per cent of languages are spoken by only six per cent of the world’s people. a mere eight million persons, 0.2 per cent of humanity, speak half the world’s languages. five hundred languages are spoken by fewer than one hundred people each, and thus will presumably disappear for ever 6 l’italiano è un popolo straordinario, mi piacerebbe tanto che fosse un popolo normale. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 5 kinder language and identities within the next two or three generations. at the same time, the number of languages that have developed a written form—a useful, perhaps necessary, condition for long-term survival—has risen to 2,400. our multilingual planet is populated for the greater part by multilingual humans. the multitude of languages is not shared out on an exclusive basis: the 6809 languages are distributed across the 191 sovereign state members of the united nations. on the other hand, many of these states use the same language: twenty-two claim ‘arabic’ as an official language and a similar number claim ‘spanish,’ while a larger number claim ‘french,’ and an even larger number claim ‘english’ as a national or official language. as far as we can tell, the majority of states have been multilingual and the majority of humans bilingual, in all historical periods and in all continents. that multilingualism is such a constant in human history makes it all the more strange that language diversity is universally seen as a problem, as subversive, even a curse; those who do not speak the language of the powerful are, on those grounds, denied rights, civilization, even humanity. for the ancient greeks, ‘barbaros’ was a non-greekspeaker whose language amounted to nothing more than babble (‘ba ba’), a discriminatory view that the romans were quick to adopt and that survives in many modern european languages. unity and diversity in language myths all cultures have a story explaining the diversity of human languages, and thus of customs and cultures: a babel story (steiner 1975). most of these stories attribute language diversity either to a terrible mistake—someone opened something and they all got out—or to a punishment of the gods. in the judaeo-christian tradition at the heart of european reflection on language diversity there are, in fact, two stories. in the first, the babel story of the old testament, multilingualism is defined as a divine punishment: and the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. and it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of shinar; and they dwelt there. and they said one to another, go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. and they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. and they said, go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. and the lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. and the lord said, behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. go to, let us go down, and there confound their portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 6 kinder language and identities language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. so the lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. therefore is the name of it called babel; because the lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (genesis 11:1-9) at babel humans denied their true nature as their first ancestors had done before them. the first chapter of genesis says: ‘god created human beings in his own image [...], male and female he created them. god blessed them and said to them, “be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it”’ (genesis 1: 27-28). their vocation is to multiply and fill the earth so as to manifest the presence of the creator and make the world like a garden of eden. one of the creator’s gifts was the one common language, with which humans could speak to each other and to god. in the babel story humans stop taking this destiny seriously; they lose interest in the earth and seek to conquer the heavens (lustiger 2001). the ‘image’ wanted to become its own model, or god’s image without god. but the human who turns themself into their own idol forgets their true origin and destiny, and risks becoming the victim of their own destructive selfishness. dante, in de vulgari eloquentia (i, ix), explains events at babel as a forgetting (prioris oblivio); the tower builders forget the original language given by god and are condemned to a plurality of mutually incomprehensible tongues, in a confusion of languages, the confusio linguarum. and the confusion did not end there. heller-roazen (2005: 219-31) argues that, since it was from confusion that all languages departed and multiplied in time and in space, ‘confusion’ would remain inseparable from the idioms to which it gave rise. it would constitute ‘the invariable core of the variable being we call a tongue’ (225). this confusion of the old testament story, however, is redeemed in the new testament account of pentecost: and when the day of pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. and suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. and there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. and they were all filled with the holy ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the spirit gave them utterance. and there were dwelling at jerusalem jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. and they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, behold, are not all these which speak galilaeans? and how hear we every man in our own tongue, portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 7 kinder language and identities wherein we were born? parthians, and medes, and elamites, and the dwellers in mesopotamia, and in judaea, and cappadocia, in pontus, and asia, phrygia, and pamphylia, in egypt, and in the parts of libya about cyrene, and strangers of rome, jews and proselytes, cretes and arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of god. (acts 2:1-11) whatever actually happened in the historical record, the meaning of this event is clear in relation to the story of babel. the divine intervention at pentecost does not reverse the linguistic diffusion created with the building of the tower of babel. the early christians do not remember the original adamitic language; nor do they emerge all speaking the same language. the spirit does not close the ‘breach’ begun at babel but, as benedict xvi (2005) put it, overcomes the breach and opens borders. the newfound ability of the disciples to speak, or at least to be understood in a diverse array of languages, suggests that the word of god is multilingual, not monolingual. language myths in italy’s linguistic history for de mauro (2004: 58) the ‘spirit of pentecost’ played an important role in the development of writing, and as such was crucial for language survival. evangelization and the dissemination of sacred texts both presupposed a close attention to individual languages, the development of writing systems where these did not exist (the cyrillic alphabet elaborated by st. cyril in the ninth century is merely the most illustrious example), and the translations of texts into various languages. babel returned to the surface of european consciousness in the decades following the language reform of charlemagne (wright 1982). through his radical language policy intervention and re-definition of ‘latin,’ charlemagne set up a new diglossia in southwest europe. his definition of latin, especially its pronunciation and grammar, produced a form of language that was incomprehensible to all but the tiny literate elite, while the forms of language that were in daily (spoken) use—and had been considered to be ‘latin’ before the reform—were now in effect given a new definition. new spelling systems were extemporized on the basis of previous experimentation, and texts written in them appeared at various points near borders between the ‘romance’ cultural area and other cultures: strasbourg, on the border with the germanic world; capua, a city in the part of southern italy that had maintained its longobard character during and after the carolingian period and is situated not far from the greek areas of extremesouthern italy; and rioja, near the border with the muslim territories in spain. these portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 8 kinder language and identities were the new vernacular languages of the latin world, the first records of what would become french, italian and spanish. the biblical symbol of linguistic confusion appeared in artistic representation at this time to signify the new confusion in which speakers of (neo-)latin vernaculars now found themselves, beneath the roof of official, carolingian ‘latin.’ the first public babel appeared on the altar of the cathedral of salerno around 1050, and there was a ‘flood of towers’ (eco 1995, 18) in the next few centuries. this period also saw a wave of intense theoretical speculation on the origin and nature of language, beginning with the speculative grammars of scholastic philosophy. eco describes this moment as the birth of europe as a self-conscious cultural reality. europe was born as a new confusio linguarum out of its vulgar tongues. only afterwards was it a mosaic of nations. these myths of linguistic origin, and their parallel versions in all the cultures of the world, seem to be an attempt to account for some obvious facts about language diversity. that diversity is a constant of human experience and history, but it eludes explanation in terms of the rational use of resources. the cultural ecology of the human race would have been much more efficient, on the face of it, if the cultures of the planet had used an ever smaller number of languages instead of producing more and more of them. that is, the tension between pluralism and operative efficiency might have been resolved on a global scale more along the lines of the united nations with its 192 member states and five official languages, instead of the european union model with its twenty-seven member states and twenty-three official languages. for all other (non-linguistic) forms of cultural expression, a darwinian explanation may satisfy. they are all in some way a response to the environment in terms of adaptive variation and selective survival. but this will not do for language. it is not the case that surviving languages have more desirable characteristics than dead ones. there appears to be no correlation between linguistic wealth and the other resources of a community. the aboriginal languages of australia have a morphosyntax as complex as classical latin and ancient greek. no language is demonstrably adaptive in this sense. one obvious, if partial, response to this issue is that language is much, much more than just communication. language is the tool of thought and expression of identity, central portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 9 kinder language and identities in any construction and representation of humanness in both individual and collective senses. it is a truism that languages are the banners and ensigns of human groups. furthermore, languages guard our memories and preserve our past knowledge, transmitting it to later and future generations. any human language binds together a human community by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories. languages make possible both the living of a common history, and also the telling of it (ostler 2005). however, the telling of a ‘national’ story is an evolving process of selection and rejection, inclusion and exclusion. just as language allows the story to be imagined and told, the very acts of imagining and telling can only happen in chosen varieties of language. the construction and expression of unity is also and always a declaration of difference and a judgement. myth in the italian historiography of language the narratives of language history and literary history are constructed to explain deeply shared cultural myths and to justify the formation of modern nation-states. the origins of the italian language are traditionally traced back to ad 960, the date of the placito di capua, the earliest document in which ‘latin’ (of the officially sanctioned sort) and the local vernacular appear side by side (migliorini & gwynfor griffith 1984). tiraboschi’s storia della letteratura italiana of 1781, the earliest work bearing that title, took its starting point from the ancient etruscans, but after de sanctis’ storia of 1871, histories of italian literature, in the usual sense of literature written in italian, begin with the thirteenth century. note that the word italiano was not used to refer to language (lingua or linguaggio) until the early 1400s, by leonardo, machiavelli, bembo and others, as exemplified by the entry on ‘italiano’ in the grande dizionario della lingua italiana (1961). and in both linguistic and literary histories the term ‘italian’ is now used for all periods: there is no universally accepted ‘old italian,’ to correspond to ‘old french,’ ‘old spanish’ or ‘old high german,’ for example, but rather a narrative of unbroken continuity. language planning and policy intervention in italy starts undisputedly with dante, who laid the foundations, in both theory (de vulgari eloquentia) and practice (divine comedy) for an ‘italian’ vernacular standard (lo bianco 2005). dante imagined a portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 10 kinder language and identities nation and theorized a language with which to build it. between the two extremes of supra-national latin and sub-national vernaculars, he describes an intermediate, national, linguistic form. but the different layers did not exclude or cancel each other. dante seems to have imagined multiple identities, each expressed via characteristic linguistic varieties. sapegno (1986) cautions against speaking of a ‘politically divided italy’ in dante’s time since it risks the ahistorical projection of modern categories onto a different reality. italians in the middle age, she says, did not feel politically divided but simply members of one state among many, each having its own history and cultural identity. certainly members of the italian states felt more in common with each other than with ‘barbarians,’ but sapegno suggests paradoxically that what united italians then was their common interest in defending their own single autonomies from the arrogance of other italians or of foreigners. the theoretician of the official language of the new italian state, alessandro manzoni, saw, like dante, no contradiction between the official tongue and the local speech forms. manzoni did not live to see the anti-dialectal distortion of his views by his fervent followers, and it was left to ascoli (1873, xxviii) to point out what science and experience demonstrated, that ‘our bilingual children have a privileged position in the order of intelligence.’7 these are the terms of language debates in italy up to the present. the arguments are now being recast in the light of two events: the formation of united europe with the consequent debates on borders and identities, and the diasporic movement of people from and into italy. these developments are presenting a challenge to reread these earlier, linear accounts. in the context of radical debates on external and internal borders of european nations, the post-enlightenment orthodoxy of ‘one nation one language’ has been not so much discredited as replicated at more and more local levels, ‘one region one language,’ or even ‘one town one language’ (dal negro 2005). this new identification of language and local identity contains within it the potential for language to be used as a means of division and exclusion. one of the more acute tensions in contemporary debates on indigenous language rights in italy turns on the inclusions and exclusions operated by the categories used. 7 che è anzi una condizione privilegiata, nell’ordine dell’intelligenza, questa dei figliuoli bilingui. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 11 kinder language and identities a particularly interesting example of this is the definition of ‘language minorities’ in post-war italy. article 6 of the 1948 constitution proclaimed that ‘the republic protects the language minorities with appropriate measures,’8 but the terms of this article were only defined in a law of 1999—law 482/99—‘norms for the protection of the historical language minorities.’9 the title already indicates a distinction between the traditional minorities and the newer communities formed in recent decades, and, in fact, the opening paragraph of the law provides a specific list: ‘in compliance with article 6 of the constitution and in harmony with the general principles established by european and international bodies, the republic protects the language and culture of the albanian, catalan, germanic, greek, slovenian and croatian populations and of the populations which speak french, franco-provençal, friulian, ladin, occitan and sardinian.’10 this law was a significant step forward but opens two questions. first, it treats all minority languages in a single category, despite their very different linguistic, cultural and political histories, and operates from an ‘oversimplified and flattened image of what is actually a complex and multifaceted linguistic landscape’ (dal negro 2005: 116). second, the law’s definition of language minorities excludes both dialects as such—the word dialetto does not occur once in the text of the law—and the newer minorities that are the result of post-1970s immigration. emigration offers challenges to dominant constructions of identity and language in various ways. carsaniga (1985) had already hinted at the way italian emigration to australia illuminated italy’s ‘multicultural’ past. raffaele simone uses the history of italian language and dialects abroad as a mirror to shed light on hidden aspects of the linguistic past of italy. in his introduction to a volume by hermann haller on the italian language in the usa, he observes: ‘this book also speaks of us’ (simone 1993: x). the third volume of serianni and trifone’s storia della lingua italiana is entitled le altre lingue (1994), with chapters on the dialects, and also a chapter on ‘l’italiano fuori d’italia’ (italian outside italy) and one on ‘aspetti sociolinguistici delle eteroglossie in italia’ (socio-linguistic aspects of heteroglossic communities in italy). 8 la repubblica tutela con apposite norme le minoranze linguistiche. 9 norme in materia di tutela delle minoranze linguistiche storiche. 10 in attuazione dell'articolo 6 della costituzione e in armonia con i princípi generali stabiliti dagli organismi europei e internazionali, la repubblica tutela la lingua e la cultura delle popolazioni albanesi, catalane, germaniche, greche, slovene e croate e di quelle parlanti il francese, il franco-provenzale, il friulano, il ladino, l'occitano e il sardo. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 12 kinder language and identities anthropologists show how italian identities in italy have been contested and reworked through post-unification emigration, post-wwii internal migrations, and the immigration of the past three decades (maher 1996). and in italian communities abroad the second generation claim identities in ways not foreseen, and often not accepted, by their parents or the official culture of the country of origin (baldassar & skrbis 1998). in cultural studies, postcolonial readings of migrant writing turn a spotlight on ‘hybridities’ and multiple identities within ‘italian culture.’ the several contributions to burns and polezzi (2003) open up questions of identity negotiation among emigrants, returned migrants and immigrants. in considering the growing number of writings by immigrants in italy (gnisci 2006), it is significant that parati (2005: 54-55) has abandoned her earlier coinage of the term ‘italophone literature’ because of the way it ‘places the emphasis on language and on the difference between native speakers and non-native speakers, who acquire a new language through the process of migration.’ but such debates can be set against an italian canon that is already itself internally diverse. since the codification of what we know as ‘italian’ in the late renaissance, the presence of writing in dialect has made italian literature ‘essentially the only great national literature whose dialect production forms a visceral, indissoluble whole with the rest of the heritage’ (contini 1970: 611).11 haller speaks of italy’s ‘pervasive dual literary canon, in tuscan and in a myriad of dialects’ (1999: 3). an exceptional normality? language also unites and divides through the handing down from one generation to the next. languages are learned by the young from the old: the very act of acquiring the mother tongue is a process of transmission of knowledge, culture, and wisdom. italian educationalist luigi giussani (1997) stresses the central role of tradition in any educational process. tradition is the working hypothesis given us by nature to confront reality: each one of us is born into a certain tradition. nature casts us into the dynamic of existence, arming us with this complex instrument with which we can confront our surroundings. every man and woman faces their external reality endowed by nature with elements that one finds in oneself as given, already offered. tradition is that complex endowment with which nature arms us. we do not possess tradition in order to become fossilized within it, but to develop it, even to the point of profoundly changing it. but in order to transform it, we must first of all 11 l’italiana è sostanzialmente l’unica grande letteratura nazionale la cui produzione dialettale faccia visceralmente, inscindibilmente corpo col restante patrimonio. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 13 kinder language and identities act ‘with’ what has been given to us; we must use it. and it is through the values and richness which i have received that i can become, in my own turn, creative, capable not only of developing what i find in my hands, but also changing radically both its meaning, its structure, and perspective. (giussani 1997: 37-38) the handing down of language and the handing down of tradition are, in many respects, synonymous. the passage from one generation to the next is, at the same time, an act of continuity and rupture, of stability and of change. we long for unity, for the recomposition of the fragmented post-babel world we now speak and think in; and we long to live our diversity as mutual complementarity, as completion. we long to remember the language we have forgotten. we invent languages like esperanto (the root is the latin verb ‘to hope’: sperare), but this disembodied set of language rules attempts to simply cancel or ignore difference, and will always remain, as its name proclaims, a pious hope, a soul without a body. in language, then, the desire to communicate—literally, to ‘make common’—coexists, inextricably, with the desire to be different, the desire to be one with the desire to be other. of course communication between humans takes many forms, and language is not the only means of communication. but communication of a uniquely human kind happens through language, which in its concrete manifestation always, inevitably, is a declaration of diversity. current language debates in italy are reworking these essential tensions, with each contribution giving greater weight to this or that aspect of language according to the identity or identities being privileged. if italy is exceptional in its linguistic landscape, this is simply because it embodies most clearly the tensions and differences that lie at the heart of language and all language communities. the enduring linguistic and cultural plurality within the area known as ‘italy’ has provided a context where language debates have been played out against a backdrop of the essential normality of the tension between diversity and unity. contributions to italian language debates from the medieval period to the twentieth century have taken a position within this essential tension. however, newer views, like those of minister giuliano amato, attempt to dissolve the tension by airbrushing out the identity of one of the interlocutors in encounters defined as ‘intercultural.’ portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 14 kinder language and identities contemporary italy is enjoined to ‘welcome differences,’ but at the same time to define its own centuries-old identity as merely ‘tendential.’ this is a new and strange approach to dialogue that would require ideological interpretations, but that is beyond the scope of this paper. the multiple cultural and linguistic identities theorized by dante and many others down to the present continue to form and reform, against the best efforts of power elites. recent debates on the linguistic dimension of identities in italy show, again, how the heart of the matter is a tension that lies at the core of language itself. reference list aduc. 2007, ‘amato contro esame lingua italiana per immigrati.’ online. available: http://www.aduc.it/dyn/immigrazione/noti.php?id=196706 [accessed 19 november 2007]. ascoli, g.i. 1873, ‘proemio,’ archivio glottologico italiano, vol. 1, v-xli. [also in scritti sulla questione della lingua, ed. c. grassi, einaudi, torino.] baldassar, l. & skrbis, z. 1998, ‘the second generation and the transmission of culture,’ in refashioning sociology: responses to a new world order, eds. m. alexander et al, queensland university of technology, brisbane, 454-459. battaglia, s. (ed.) 1961-2002, grande dizionario della lingua italiana. utet, torino. benedict xvi, 2005, ‘homily, pentecost sunday,’ 15 may 2005. online. available: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2005/documents/hf_benxvi_hom_20050515_priestly-ordination_en.html [accessed 24 july 2007]. burns, j. & polezzi, l. (eds), 2003, borderlines: migrazioni e identità nel novecento, cosmo iannone, isernia. carsaniga, g. 1985, multiculturalism and italian studies, la trobe university, melbourne. caritas/migrantes. 2007. immigrazione: dossier statistico 2007. online. available: http://www.dossierimmigrazione.it [accessed 7 december 2007]. castellani, a. 1982, ‘quanti erano gl’italofoni nel 1861?’ studi di linguistica italiana, vol. 8, 3-26. contini, g. 1970, varianti e altra linguistica, einaudi, torino. corriere della sera. 2007, ‘l’italiano? no grazie, io parlo dialetto,’ 21 april 2007. online. available: http://www.corriere.it/primo_piano/cronache/2007/04_aprile/20/dialetti_lingua_straniera_italiani. html [accessed 23 april 2007]. dal negro, s. 2005, ‘minority languages between nationalism and new localism: the case of italy,’ international journal of the sociology of language, vol. 174, 113-24. de mauro, t. 1963, storia linguistica dell’italia unita, laterza, bari. de mauro, t. 1996, ‘linguistic variety and linguistic minorities,’ in italian cultural studies: an introduction, eds. d. forgacs and r. lumley, oxford university press, oxford, 88-101. de mauro, t. 2004, ‘cari italiani, come state parlando?’ lingua italiana d’oggi, vol. 1, 55-70. eco, u. 1995, the search for the perfect language, trans. j. fentress, blackwell, oxford. forgacs, d. & lumley, r. (eds) 1996, italian cultural studies: an introduction, oxford university press, oxford. giussani, l. 1997, the religious sense, trans. j. zucchi, mcgill-queen’s university press, montreal. gnisci, a. (ed.) 2006, nuovo planetario italiano, città aperta, troina. gordon, r.g. jr. (ed.) 2005, ethnologue: languages of the world, 15th edition, sil international, dallas, texas. also available online: http://www.ethnologue.com [accessed 19 november 2007]. gramsci, a. 1985, selections from cultural writings, eds. d forgacs and g. nowell-smith, trans. william boelhower, lawrence & wishart, london. haller, h.w. 1999, the other italy: the literary canon in dialect, university of toronto press, toronto. heller-roazen, d. 2005, echolalias: on the forgetting of language, zone books, new york. istat. 2007, la lingua italiana, i dialetti e le lingue straniere. online. available: http://www.istat.it/salastampa/comunicati/non_calendario/20070420_00/ [accessed 23 april 2007]. lepschy, a.l., lepschy, g. & voghera, m. 1996, ‘linguistic variety in italy,’ in italian regionalism, ed. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 15 http://www.aduc.it/dyn/immigrazione/noti.php?id=196706 http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2005/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20050515_priestly-ordination_en.html http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2005/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20050515_priestly-ordination_en.html http://www.dossierimmigrazione.it http://www.corriere.it/primo_piano/cronache/2007/04_aprile/20/dialetti_lingua_straniera_italiani.html http://www.corriere.it/primo_piano/cronache/2007/04_aprile/20/dialetti_lingua_straniera_italiani.html http://www.ethnologue.com http://www.istat.it/salastampa/comunicati/non_calendario/20070420_00/ kinder language and identities c. levy, berg, oxford, 69-80. lo bianco, j. 2005, ‘globalisation and national communities of communication,’ language problems and language planning, vol. 29, no. 2, 109-33. lustiger, j.m. 2001, ‘caritas and the city,’ helder camara lecture delivered at notre dame university, fremantle, western australia, august. maher, v. 1996, ‘immigration and social identities,’ in italian cultural studies: an introduction, eds. d. forgacs and r. lumley, oxford university press, oxford, 160-177. migliorini, b. & gwynfor griffith, t. 1984, the italian language, faber & faber, london. ministero dell’interno. 2007, ‘il ministro amato ha presentato la ricerca makno sull’immigrazione in italia.’ online. available: http://www.interno.it/mininterno/export/sites/default/it/sezioni/sala_stampa/notizie/__ministro/089 8_2007_10_09_presentazione_guide_in_italia_in_regola.html_2019699775.html [accessed 19 november 2007]. moliterno, g. (ed.) 2000, encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture, london, routledge. moss, d. 1989, ‘italy viewed: opportunities for an australian perspective,’ in understanding italy, eds c. bettoni & j. lo bianco, frederick may foundation for italian studies, sydney, 43-56. ostler, n. 2005, empires of the word: a linguistic history of the world, harper collins, new york. parati, g. 2005, migration italy: the art of talking back in a destination culture, university of toronto press, toronto. sapegno, m.s. 1986. ‘italia, italiani,’ in letteratura italiana. vol 5: le questioni, ed. a. asor rosa, einaudi, torino, 169-221. serianni, l. 1990, il secondo ottocento, il mulino, bologna. serianni, l. & trifone, p. 1994, storia della lingua italiana. iii: le altre lingue, einaudi, torino. simone, r. 1993, ‘premessa: l’italiano d’oltremare,’ in h.w. haller, una lingua perduta e ritrovata: l'italiano degli italo-americani, la nuova italia, firenze, ix-xii. steiner, g. 1975, after babel: aspects of language and translation, oxford university press, london. wright, r. 1982. late latin and early romance, francis cairns, liverpool. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 16 http://www.interno.it/mininterno/export/sites/default/it/sezioni/sala_stampa/notizie/__ministro/0898_2007_10_09_presentazione_guide_in_italia_in_regola.html_2019699775.html http://www.interno.it/mininterno/export/sites/default/it/sezioni/sala_stampa/notizie/__ministro/0898_2007_10_09_presentazione_guide_in_italia_in_regola.html_2019699775.html language and identities: the exceptional normality of italy john j. kinder, university of western australia unity and diversity: a tension at the heart of language language and languages in contemporary italy language and languages in the world unity and diversity in language myths language myths in italy’s linguistic history myth in the italian historiography of language an exceptional normality? search | portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies quick jump to 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federation portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ writing the square: paul carter’s nearamnew and the art of federation jennifer rutherford, macquarie university ted hughes tells a story of the polish poet milosz lying in a doorway watching the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him and reflecting: ‘that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually do die. but some is’ (feldstein 2001, 199). in milosz’s reflection one hears an echo of the question of the ancients, ‘how is one to live?’ and interior to this question another, ‘how is one to write?’ or, ‘how is one to write in order to live?’ the attempt to answer these questions—to write a poetry for life—is found in many of his poems that return again and again to the question of responsibility to the legacy of the dead, naming them, recording the event of their deaths and the culpability of those who survived in a poetry which is never only that, but which masters an orientation he describes as to ‘remain aware of the weight of fact without yielding to the temptation to become only a reporter’ (milosz 2001). in this paper i want to take up this question, posed by milosz—of a poetry ‘equipped for a life in which people actually do die’—to consider what form such a poetry might take in australia, where whole populations have died, and the culture en masse is intent on keeping the weight of this fact uninscribed. robert manne recalls that in 1968, w.h. stanner broke a historic silence on the part of the entire australian social science community in relation to aboriginal dispossession and its aftermath with a lecture, ‘the great australian silence’ broadcast on the abc. that lecture launched a generation of scholars and activists into, as manne writes, ‘ a collective work’ aimed at shattering the silence (manne, 2003, 1-2). but while this rutherford writing the square collective work continues, the public openness to this epoch of ‘truth-telling’ appears to have closed. the election of the howard government for an historic fourth term underlines a collective tolerance for his concerted campaign to restore the myths of australian history. his refusal to apologise to the victims of the stolen generation, the labelling of the testaments of aboriginal experience as ‘black-armband history’ and his expressed determination to take ‘identity’ off the national agenda in order to make australians ‘comfortable’ has undoubtedly found an audience with those many australians who wish for simple stories and residence in an heroic past. for them, better howard’s battlers and pioneers than uncomfortable truth telling about stolen children and entrenched and institutionalised racism. and what chance the truths of the past when the lies of the present—the children overboard affair, the myth of weapons of mass destruction—make no dint in howard’s popular appeal? this deep inhospitality in contemporary australia to acts of parrhesia—of truth saying— challenges the creative imagination to generate new forms of speech, writing and formgiving that speak to the cocked ear of the future. but what forms of speech might be generated that can navigate a path through the compressed spaces of the present? and how can speech itself create concrete effects at a time when acts of testimony, story telling and critical argument appear to leave no trace? if australia is, as peter read reminds us, ‘a storied country’ (2003) how can spaces be created for these stories to be told—and heard? one answer to these questions—and they are questions that need many answers—is given in the form of nine concrete poems that mark time in melbourne’s federation square. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 rutherford writing the square paul carter in collaboration with lab architecture studio, nearamnew, federation square, melbourne (2003), detail. photo: paul carter. reproduced with permission australia approached the centenary of federation in 2001 in those dark years of the late nineties. years that evinced de certeau’s words: ‘the past it rebites’ (2001, 3-4). one hundred years after federation the demands that had led to the infamous white australia policy resurfaced in pauline hanson’s maiden speech in federal parliament in 1997—the speech that inaugurated a far-right popular mass movement—hanson declared: ‘if i can invite who i want into my home then i should have a say in who comes into my country’(hansard 10 september 1996). in the federal election of 2001, the howard government, riding the billy-cart of hansonism, seized an election victory with full-page advertisements that read, ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstance in which they come ‘ (liberal party, 2001). these were the demands (to portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 rutherford writing the square control the influx of ‘aliens’) that had been the rallying cry for the newly imagined nation inaugurated in australia’s federation in 1901. when the conservative kennet government of victoria commissioned lab, a london based architecture firm to design a public place in the heart of melbourne to commemorate federation, one might have anticipated the mythmakers to seize the moment to concretise a heroic and linear vision of australia’s past. instead a complex structure of radical conception was designed for the site and postcolonial theorist and public artist paul carter commissioned to create an artwork to mark the site ‘as a focus of historical, social and political negotiation’ (carter 2002, 404). while social and political controversy waged over the external and visible structure of federation square, nearamnew slipped almost unnoticed into residency. nearamnew is a quiet work cut into the sandstone cobbles that line federation square. walking quickly over the hill and dale surface of the square you could walk right over nearamnew and not notice what was below your feet. perhaps it is this quietness that has allowed the work to come into being or is it that like poe’s purloined letter, nearamnew hides by being present to view? certainly the quietness of the work—a speaking underfoot—figures the history of the stories the work gives voice to. perhaps those who might have protested at the stories the work tells, walked too quickly or didn’t pause between strides to hear the ground speak. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 rutherford writing the square paul carter in collaboration with lab architecture studio, nearamnew, federation square, melbourne (2003), detail. photo: paul carter. reproduced with permission carter’s concern has long been the ground, or in his words the lie of the land; the echoes and murmurings of a ground that continues to speak despite the ‘haussmanisation’ of colonial practice. in diverse creative acts ranging from public art works, sound installations, and performance pieces to the spatial histories of the road to botany bay, and the lie of the land, carter has attempted to speak a dwelling space into existence where imperial history and its clearings have deprived us of a house of being. we could characterize his work as an attempt to make its auditors hear differently, to hear the already said, the lost speech that colonial practice silences. carter calls this practicing an art of the gap, which he understands as the structural counterface of colonial discourse. his art of the gap is an art for the post-colonial subject dislocated, homeless and resident in the symbolic and imaginary confinement of ‘abysmal discourse’; the discourse a culture such as white australia generates to occlude its own history of colonisation, portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 rutherford writing the square systematic genocide and silencing. this includes the discourse that cuts a path in the land itself clearing and erasing every physical trace of aboriginal inscription. ‘…as the colonist advances in this way’, carter writes, ‘he wipes out every sign of difference, covering up the swerve of historical experience, reducing the land to a blankness. his corrupted travel clears the way for representing the world in a table.’ for carter to be ‘in the gap’ is to refuse residence in this abysmal discourse and hence to be in the truth of white-australian culture ‘laid bare’ (carter n.d., ‘beyond’). this opposition between abysmal discourse and an art of the gap structures carter’s poetics; a poetics he clarifies as an art of speech rather than of writing, or of speech-filled writing. his argument is that in the same way colonisation clears the land in order to write its own monologic text as if on a tabula rasa, writing takes out the noise of speech. in australia the first acts of writing involved suppressing the untranslatable, irreducible elements of cultural difference. land was cleared, the country silenced, speech reduced to monologue. in writing, unlike in dialogue, no other answers back, no other refuses the story being told of the world. for carter, writing homogenises and decontextualises language from the social and visceral flux of living bodies. it stabilises linguistic form and in doing so it concretises and fixes meanings and social relations. carter concurs with lacan that it is through language that the other is reduced to an image of homogeneity. but while lacan puts the emphasis on language itself and the mirroring potentiality of speech, carter argues that the dialogic nature of speech—in contrast to writing—has the potentiality to recall the other side of language. this to and fro of dialogue has an irreducibly visceral component. in speaking one encounters the other in their corporeality—bodies speak to bodies—and language overflows the passage of words. because of this unruliness speech has the potential to betray the speaker, to speak beyond rational intention and in speaking face á face with an ‘other’ to bring the social nature of speech into view. in this interface of speech and writing carter situates an imagined encounter. for carter there is a madness afoot in the colonial situation itself, which dislodges language and allows speech momentarily to sound. in the colonial context, european culture loses its portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 rutherford writing the square frame; meaning loses its reference, its familiar rhetorical systems and its linear surety. it crosses a line. he writes: ‘kant notices that it is commonly said of someone whose mind has stepped over the border: “he has crossed the line” just as if a man who crossed the equator for the first time were in danger of losing his understanding’(carter, n.d., ‘beyond’; kant, 1974). this spatial dislocation of colonisation engenders a bouleversement of reason and its limit, but madness is on the side of kantian reason, and to cross its limit is to open a dialogue, a potentiality. carter imagines an encounter in this moment when two cultures that don’t share a language have to communicate. he is interested in communication that can’t proceed in a normative environment and in the way communication straining in the absence of a shared language reveals aspects of normal communication lost to our perception. when two cultural groups meet, sympathetic identification enables them to take advantage of mere coincidences and grammatical similarities in order to improvise a discourse. new forms are created out of the phonic convergence of the two languages. carter’s stress is on the performative nature of speech at the moment of this encounter when mimetic gesture, intonation, repetition and identification become the visible foundation of communication. he is not suggesting that this is the form of the colonial encounter, but its potentiality—a potentiality lost through the monologic drive of white culture to write out the speech of the other. the task that he sets himself is to recall this speech in writing; a speech-filled writing that in its gaps will forge an encounter between the reader and the unheard speech of both self and other. to practice an art of the gap then, is to be recalled to these lost moments of dialogue written over by white australian culture, and in recognising the self in them, to begin to devise a speaking position as a new place of residence. what carter is attempting in this formulation of an ethics and a writing of the gap is a new theoretical articulation of the art of becoming oneself. to practice an art of the gap is to find voices in the past that answer to one’s condition and in being witness to these voices to begin to become oneself. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 rutherford writing the square paul carter in collaboration with lab architecture studio, nearamnew, federation square, melbourne (2003), detail. photo: paul carter. reproduced with permission if bullets can lift cobbles out of streets and lives out of bodies what of a work of poetry that lays down cobbles and revoices a square with lost lives? nearamnew is a work inscribed in the cobblestones of federation square consisting of nine regional forms constructed out of the letters that name the site—each containing a local vision of federation. these regional forms and their embedded concrete poems are three dimensional. cut into three depths of the surface of stone each layer of text interconnects diagonally and vertically. the letters run into each other and the words themselves break up and entangle into different patterns as they repeat and intermix in the rock-face. read linearly, they are anacoluthon, scrimped and yet eerily beautiful; but because of their form, the interconnections and fragmentations of the poems, they are ‘word shards’ resisting any linear or incorporative approach to their meaning. one can’t ‘eat these words’. they can only be introjected, approached relationally, and partially, as one makes portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 rutherford writing the square out patterns of meaning within the fractal patterns of the work. uncannily, they are etched in the calligraphy of the gravestone so that one is viscerally and visually in the field of death, but the rock-face is alive with voices—many voices singing in the rock. this structural form calls forth a type of reading that carter calls treading; the reader performs the work through the act of treading its surface. to tread nearamnew one has to get down on one’s hands and knees and clamber over the surface of the ground deciphering the songs that sound in the rock by tracing out their letters in a braille that hovers between a language one knows and a linguistic form one cannot identify. knowing and unknowing, the reading is slow, the memories it conjures partial and the grasp of the text always there at the edge of one’s reach. elsewhere, carter has written that we need to slow the pace to hear what is between two strides. he recalls the peculiar stride of beckett’s character, watt: watt’s way of advancing due east, for example, was to turn his bust as far as possible towards the north and at the same time to fling out his right leg as far as possible towards the south, and then to turn his bust as far as possible towards the south and at the same time to fling out his left leg as far as possible towards the north, and then again to turn his bust as far as possible towards the north and to fling his right leg as far as possible towards the south . . . and so on, over and over again, many many times, until he reached his destination, and could sit down (beckett 1953, 30). watt’s stride, curious, ungainly and awkward, seems destined not to arrive. it twists the body on its own axis slowing locomotion to a parody of human movement—two legs moving widdershins to will. there is something of this arrested stride in all of carter’s writing where he delays the reader intent on action and on a narrative that reaches its end. carter wants to stall his reader’s intention in the form of the saying, to slow the reader down in their anticipation of the writer’s linear intention. his style intends if not to paralyse, then at least to arrest the reader in the space between two steps; and in this pause where meaning falters to forge an encounter between the reader and something new. in nearamnew this space between two strides is rendered literal; one cannot read the text if one keeps walking. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 rutherford writing the square paul carter in collaboration with lab architecture studio, nearamnew, federation square, melbourne (2003), detail. photo: paul carter. reproduced with permission the form of nearamnew is a global whorl pattern taken from an etching composed of braided lines folding over themselves representing water flowing between tyrell creek and tyrell lake. these lines of turbulence were created by a boorong artist as a bark etching made near lake tyrell around 1860. what justifies incorporating the artist’s design into nearamnew —making it in fact the form of the work—is not the formal and aesthetic convergences between the pattern and a federal system but rather, carter argues, that the etching was made in a time of crisis and was a sophisticated attempt to create a mytho-poetic form in postcolonial circumstances. carter understands mytho-poetic work as occurring at a time of crisis when myth has been forgotten or no longer works and in this sense nearamnew attempts to create a new myth-form for a federated society, when the old myth of federation no longer holds. in this he draws on the earlier work as an attempt by an artist to generate a culturally and environmentally sustainable myth form. the original etching integrated elements of white settler culture, technology and scenes of portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 rutherford writing the square indigenous social and ceremonial life and as such, attempted to create a place of collective renewal. like nearamnew it tried to create ‘places made after story’. ‘creating place made after story’ is one answer to the question i posed at the beginning of this article: how is one to write in order to live? nearamnew is a poetic act that creates the place of federation after story; it remains true to the weight of the past but is never merely reportage. as carter writes: ‘there is no writer apart from the matrix of language: and the writer merely recognises the pattern inherent (unopened) in what lies around, and slashing this way and that way with his knife, and sewing and sewing, identifies a possible plot or ground’ (carter, n.d., ‘nearamnew’ ). nearamnew’s poems are created from fragments of forgotten language, carter’s own voice as writer submerged by these other voices that he brings into poetic dialogue. central to this reconstitution of already given stories is the refiguration of the story of the nation’s federation within an already storied place. instead of commemorating the moment in colonial history when the nation is inaugurated, this moment fits back into a richly historied past in which aboriginal federal systems embodying a federal vision of social organization provide the form of the work and its many voices. commemorating federation creates a testimony to the idea of federation as it structured aboriginal society and engenders a forward thinking imaginary of what a properly federated future might be; a system of interconnectedness with the global, regional and local balanced, in dialogue, intermixing and mutually respectful. carter writes: ‘lines of communication and exchange within a federal system are often likened to the turbulence patterns in clouds and water, decisions form at the heart of whirlpools, groupings of people produce what are called dissipative structures, leading to the emergence of new places of civility, sociality, and empowerment’ (carter, n.d., ‘nearamnew’). this act of remembering aboriginal federated systems of social organization involves what carter calls ‘remembering forward’, or remembering the past in order to imagine the future differently. just as the migrant must carry their past with them and live between the two worlds of past and future carter remembers forward retrieving fragments from the past that allow us to live in the movement towards a different future. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 rutherford writing the square the melancholic act of remembering federation and its stain of racism and disposession transforms into an act of mourning. the past and its brutalities are not elided (they are there inscibed in the rock) but nor are we locked into an untraversable and hence encrypted memory of federation and its acts of white nation formation. the act of federation looses its monumental status. alfred deakin’s place of federation becomes only one moment in a long history in which the site of federation square has long been a meeting ground for a federated society. place becomes differently told. each word shard in each concrete poem sounding a story fragment that recalls or echoes different pasts. in the first words of ‘the maker’s vision’ for example, ‘o earth maker clay mould of man’ the story of bunjil sounds, who the aborigines of the yarra, say, made the earth. ‘he went all over it with (with his knife or sword, cutting it in many places and thereby formed creeks and rivers and valleys.’ or in another form of the story⎯‘pundjel made of clay two males’ (carter 2002, 1 [fn 1]; reference to brough smyth, 1972, 423). a recorded scrap of dialogue tells a different story of beginning—‘in time men and women became very numerous and they were wicked pundjel punished their wickedness, entering their escarpments and cutting men and women into small pieces however the pieces did not die but moved as the worm moves and great whirliwinds came changing them into flakes of snow which were carried over the earth.’ ‘the surface figure into which this text is inscribed’ carter writes, ‘imitates this process of multiplication through self-division. at the beginning the text repeats itself, it produces more words which in turn scatter into more. but as the words are flung out from their source, they diminish in size settling into the warp and weft of a moiety woven society.’ (carter, n.d., ‘nearamnew’, 25). in another poem, ‘the child’s vision’, hopscotch symbolises the lines that arbitrarily mapped the country, lines the child leaps over in a game of hopscotch. this act of hopscoth perhaps best characterises the game at the heart of nearamnew. it is a work that thinks anew; hopping over the story lines of white history, jubilantly making up a new game of story. it makes stories for the future without forgetting the past. in ‘the colonist’s vision’ the rock speaks the unbearable destruction colonisation has caused: ‘ portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 rutherford writing the square thirty tomahawk’s dividing limb from limb/ knives slicing ward from ward /man from child/ scissors severing night from day/stars tear out their hair/yarra branches bleed/ tight lipped rock splits and roars/20 pairs of blankets cannot bandage up the ground/ 200 handkerchiefs cannot stay quell tamp or dam this spirit cleaving flood.’ one can crawl over the text and reconstitute its stories although any act of treading will give only a partial reading. one enters a text that like language, memory and history is greater than the stories anyone of us can know or remember. the monumental, linear and singular vision of history collapses into multiples. and it is this very idea, of more than one that has rocked contemporary australian society with its reseizure of the idea of ‘one nation, one people, one language’, and one memory path… against this vision of one are metaphors running through the square like the idea of the square mirroring the night sky, its whorl pattern of words, a constellation embedded in the universe of rock, or another of a word trail spilling down the yarra and sedimenting in the plain of the square. there are love trails too scattered throughout the text promising a way forward out of a history of cutting and clearing: ‘ take my hand/ my word/i want your company/then treat me tenderly/the track is life/near, there and far spreading…’ remembering forward nearamnew imagines a time when all these stories will come to light, when children will play its game, deciphering its many puzzles, when migrants, visitors, artists, makers and even colonists will come to a new understanding of place through treading the stories of the square. its hundreds of word shards testify to the weight of fact, and recall and recast that fact in a poetic form that writes itself viscerally, erotically, joyously and mournfully on those who tread its paths. and for those who walk too quickly, it remains, silently insistently there cut into the rock waiting for a pause when the nation might once again hear in the space between two strides. speaking and respeaking a new a homeland into being carter has created a work in which words mark home or, as milosz writes, in which—‘to find my home in a sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal’ (2001, 452). in the word shards of nearamnew there are many homes and all of them cut into rock. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 rutherford writing the square reference list australia, parliament, house of representatives, official hansard 10 september 1996. beckett, s. 1953, watt, grove press, new york. brough smyth, r. 1972 (1878), the aborigines of victoria: with notes relating to the habits of the natives of other parts of australia and tasmania compiled from various sources for the government of victoria, john curry, o’neill, melbourne. carter, p n.d., ‘beyond nostalgia’(unpublished material that informed the draft of material thinking). ———n.d., unpublished notes to ‘nearamnew’. ———2002, ‘inscriptions as initial conditions; federation square (melbourne australia) and the silencing of the mark’ in inscribed landscapes, eds b. david & m. wilson, university of hawaii, hawaii. ———2004, material thinking: the theory and practice of creative research, melbourne university press, melbourne. certeau, m. ‘psychoanalysis and its history’ in heterologies: discourse on the other, trans. b. massumi, theory and history of literature, vol. 17, university of minnesota press, minneapolis. feldstein, e. 2001, ted hughes: the life of a poet, weidenfeld & nicholson, london. kant, i. 1974 (1798), anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, trans. m.j. gregor, martinuis nijhoff, the hague. liberal party 2001, media campaign advertisements that appeared in sydney morning herald prior to the 2001 australian commonwealth election. manne, r. 2003, ‘introduction’, in whitewash: on keith windschuttle’s fabrication of australian history, ed. r. manne, black inc. agenda, melbourne. milosz, c. 2001, new and collected poems 1931-2001, allen lane, the penguin press, london. read, p. 2003, haunted earth, unsw press, sydney. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 14 reference list 848-4335-3-le portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. ‘the space between: languages, translations and cultures’: special issue edited by vera mackie, ikuko nakane, and emi otsuji. issn: 1449-2490: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. translational japanese: a transformative strangeness within judy wakabayashi, kent state university introduction in japan there has long been an acceptance, and even a welcoming, of language with a distinctly ‘foreign’ origin and texture. openness toward this foreign-tinged style in translations into japanese, and in original writing influenced by translations, contrasts with the inward-looking expectation in anglophone circles that translations should sound smooth and natural in the target language. the relative pervasiveness of this foreign-influenced style of written japanese has given rise to talk of a liminal ‘third language’ that exists between the various source (foreign) languages and the target language (japanese), as well as talk of a ‘third literature’ that is neither entirely foreign nor entirely indigenous in nature. in this article, i probe the notion of translational language in the japanese context, identifying some recurring features and examining how it differs from ‘translationese’ in its causes, motivations, and how it is perceived. the influence of translational language is also explored, including its use in original japanese writing. as i argue, attitudes toward translational language are not only genredependent but have changed over time, with translational language becoming a more important and integrated part of the japanese language even as it has attracted criticism. i conclude the article with a discussion of the putative ‘betweenness’ that is often problematically ascribed to translational language. the question is whether translational language in the japanese context lies between the source language(s) and japanese (that wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 2 is, external to both) or whether it is a part of the japanese language. i suggest that translational language does not constitute a language ‘between’ the source and target languages; rather, it is an integral part of the japanese language and an innovative force that has contributed to the modernization of the japanese language, literature and thinking, while translation as a whole elides the boundaries that artificially demarcate source and target languages. nor are translators neutral entities ‘between,’ but figures committed to a particular cultural framework, however that might be defined. translational language in 1813 the german theologian friedrich schleiermacher argued that ‘any language into which so many works are translated harbours a special domain just for translations, and much must be allowed them that would not otherwise be permitted to see the light of day’ (1997: 238). quite independently from schleiermacher, japanese translators have put this idea into practice, albeit without the nationalist agenda of schleiermacher. this special translational style is known as hon’yakuchō. although the term is sometimes rendered in english as translationese, its pejorative associations do not apply in the japanese context. the term ‘third code,’ as used in the dictionary of translation studies (shuttleworth & cowie 1997: 173), seems more appropriate, although the idea of a code separate from (between) the source and target codes is problematic, as discussed below. shuttleworth and cowie comment that ‘the term third code generally denotes more subtle deviations from tl linguistic norms, and its use implies on the part of the writer … a lack of disapproval … the third code can extend and enrich the linguistic repertoire’ of the target language (1997: 173). a relative lack of disapproval and the extension of the linguistic repertoire are features of hon’yakuchō, which consists of language with a recognizably translational origin or influence. the fact that this usage is often intentional differentiates it from translationese, which is the default retention of source language features as a result of negative interference or translator incompetence. (admittedly, without a translator’s foreword, for instance, it is often difficult to determine cause and motivation.) translations exhibiting distinctive source-derived features, or features used with different frequency from original texts, are by no means unique to japan. what characterizes the japanese situation is the degree of acceptance of such features, particularly in certain genres, such as legal texts (arguably including the 1947 wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 3 constitution), textbooks and academic writing, and some literature. translational language is regarded in japan as having value in its own right, and despite occasional criticism there is no strong norm against sounding like a translation.1 what makes hon’yakuchō of particular interest is its contribution to shaping the japanese language, literature and even thinking. linguistic markers of hon’yakuchō hon’yakuchō is signalled by the (co-)presence of certain recurring features, including a range of common lexical features.2 roundabout expressions and unusual wording (atypical collocations) include kaigi o motsu (to hold a meeting), shōri ni you (to be drunk with victory) and kanjō ni shihai sareru (dictated by emotion). some of these expressions have become so common that they no longer seem unusual (for example, a bakari de wa naku b [not only a, but also b]; a de areba aru hodo b [the more a, the more b]). there is a higher-than-usual frequency of katakana loanwords, and a higherthan-usual proportion of difficult chinese compounds, particularly as nouns. many of these nouns were devised as equivalents of european words (for example, kōsatsu as an equivalent of consideration). shifts in meaning are another recurrent lexical feature. some existing japanese words changed meaning when they were adapted for use as equivalents of imported words. one oft-cited example is jiyū. nakamura keiu’s 1872 translation of john stuart mill’s on liberty as jiyū no ri played a decisive role in establishing jiyū as the translation of ‘liberty.’ in traditional japanese usage jiyū had meant selfishness, egoism or ‘license,’ but it came to be used as a sociopolitical concept (see chapter 4 in howland 2002 for an in-depth discussion). although this particular translational equivalent has become thoroughly naturalized, the cumulative effect of similar semantic shifts over the past century or so as the result of putting existing words to new uses, combined with loanwords and newly coined words, has nudged the japanese language off its previous trajectory. this is, of course, a natural part of 1 a similar situation apparently exists in china. chang (1998: 266) maintains that in china ‘linguistic and stylistic peculiarities in translations are deemed not only inevitable and normal, but even desirable to a certain extent as their very presence is proof that there is a self-effacing translator letting the original author speak without his/her intervention. on the other hand, acceptability-oriented strategies that make the target text read like an original rather than the original will immediately arouse suspicion that the translator has intervened.’ 2 miura’s discussion (1979) of the influence of english on japanese grammar also includes the ‘translation passive’ (no longer regarded as foreign), personification, beki and beku as equivalents of the to-infinitive, cognate objects, new ways of expressing comparisons, and the use of chinese-derived affixes (for example, teki) to translate english affixes. wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 4 linguistic evolution, but the scale and rapidity of this change in japan was remarkable, and until these new usages became fully assimilated they added to the foreign air of texts in which they appeared. common grammatical features of hon’yakuchō include the frequent use and repetition of explicit subjects, which interrupt the cohesion and flow of thought enabled by the implicit subjects typical of traditional japanese writing, where the focus is instead on the predicate. in particular, inanimate entities—for example, denwa (phone)—including abstract nouns—for example, hōki (abandonment)—could not traditionally act as the subject. in the 1960s, ikeyama (1963: 221) commented that abstract words had still not been integrated into japanese writing. two decades later, however, they had greater acceptance, leading yoshida (1985: 101) to state that literal translations of inanimate subjects had a particular impact on literature and provided new ways of thought. for instance, they can be used in dialogue to convey the impression that a speaker is tense, and they might indicate that events are unfolding regardless of the speaker’s intentions (yoshida 1985: 117–18). nevertheless, suggested yoshida, the use of inanimate subjects still sometimes created friction with modern japanese (1985: 126). also routine is the increased use of personal and demonstrative pronouns, such as literal equivalents of it—for example, sore wa aru atatakai haru no hi datta. many translations feature a higher frequency of the second-person pronoun omae than in original writing, and the translational equivalents kare (he) and kanojo (she) have become common since the meiji period, even though originally there were no thirdperson personal pronouns in japanese.3 the reflexive form sore jitai (in itself) was coined under the influence of translations of european texts and initially had a very novel ring. another common feature is the use of tokoro no as an equivalent of relative pronouns—for example, fukushi ni kanshite kokka ga toru tokoro no gensoku (the principles that the state adopts towards social welfare). schepers (1989: 56) has argued that the introduction of features such as relative pronouns, and expressions creating subordinate clauses, ‘allows more precise and logical statements and an expression of the subject-object dichotomy.’ 3 see yanabu (1998: 54) and levy (2006: 165–68). yanabu maintains that it is questionable whether personal pronouns exist in authentic japanese even today (1998: 16). wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 5 yet more lexical features of hon’yakuchō are long and frequent noun modifiers. in right-branching languages such as english, modifiers follow the noun being modified, but when translated into japanese, a left-branching language, they precede the noun that is the focus. thus readers are sometimes forced to reread the text to grasp the meaning properly, and excessive emphasis is placed on the noun head (yanabu 1978a: 152). to these are added the causative use of adjectives of emotion—for example, … wa watashi o kanashiku saseru (… makes me sad), instead of the traditional (watashi wa) … ga kanashiku naru—and new uses of verb forms. for instance, de arō has come to be used not just in the sense of probability, but also as a future marker. frequent and unnatural use of connectives is also common. yanabu (1998: 68–70) traces the equating of soshite and shikashi with and and but to the translator-writer mori ōgai (1862–1922), who tried to link phrases by connectives, as in western writing, so as to write more logically. this had a great impact on young writers of the time. hon’yakuchō also includes frequent use of logic-related expressions such as naze ni and naze naraba. at least up until meiji times expressions equivalent to ‘because’ were not often used in japanese (maruyama and katō 1998: 85). stylistic markers of translational language include stiffness and verbosity resulting from a tendency toward explicitness and repetition and a tendency to use many exceptive clauses (ikeyama 1963: 217–18). the presence of foreign cultural elements and foreign logic—for instance, following english discourse patterns rather than traditional discourse patterns—further heightens the sense of foreignness. writing in the late 1970s, yanabu (1978a: 142) asserted that such features make the translational status of a text apparent to any japanese reader. more recently, claims as to the readily identifiable nature of translated texts have been tested by yuri furuno (2004). she found that not all of the subjects in her study were, in fact, able to distinguish between translated and non-translated texts. furuno suggests (2005: 153) that one reason might be that hon’yakuchō ‘has become such a part of japanese writing style that readers can no longer tell the difference between the two writing styles.’ in a language that accepts everything, it can be difficult to determine what is heterogeneous, and all modern japanese prose is to some extent translation-style. this openness toward foreign writing belies the oft-heard criticisms of japanese insularity and suggests that at least in linguistic matters the japanese are receptive to heterogeneity, even if these imported wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 6 elements are eventually assimilated and transformed. schäffner and adab (2001: 169) have argued that even if imported features are present in translations, successful communication requires sufficient authentic features. in the japanese context, however, one particular mode of ‘success’ entails exhibiting the qualities of a translation, rather than (just) those of an authentic text. possible causes and motivations the origins of hon’yakuchō can be traced back to the ways in which chinese texts were rendered into language retaining chinese overtones—that is, kanbun kundoku (interpretive readings of chinese texts) and mixed sino-japanese. thus, when european languages arrived in japan in the sixteenth century there was a precedent for allowing foreign languages to penetrate and affect japanese, rather than requiring them to conform fully to japanese conventions. just as the practice of reading chinese texts in accordance with japanese syntax and glosses gave rise to the style known as kanbunmyaku (japanese texts with strong chinese overtones), a somewhat similar practice as applied to the reading of texts in european languages led to the style known as ōbunmyaku (japanese texts with strong european overtones4), and it was this that acted as the forerunner of hon’yakuchō. there are several possible causes or motivations behind hon’yakuchō. the first is that hon’yakuchō is translationese resulting from incompetence. this certainly is and was far from uncommon, and it has contributed to the prevalence of translational language, but this unintentional form of hon’yakuchō is not our main concern here. moreover japan’s centuries-long status as a cultural recipient rather than transmitter encouraged an attitude of accommodation with the other (kornicki 1998: 18). japan is not just a receptor culture; it is also a receptive culture. in comments that are equally applicable to meiji times, furuno (2005: 147) observes that in postwar japan, ‘acquiring new ideas or information from the west was so important that the ‘acceptability’ of the product—that is, authenticity and naturalness of the language—was considered to be of secondary 4 according to egoyama (1964: 134), the following elements constitute ōbun-myaku: passive expressions; expressions using the progressive form; expressions where an inanimate entity, especially an abstract noun, is the subject; fresh metaphors, particularly personification; expressions with a clear subject and predicate (particularly subject); connectives, particularly the use of conjunctions linking sentences together; the use of deictics; expressions that insert an explanation using an em dash; expressions linked by adnominals that are easy to understand if suru tokoro no is added in the function of a relative pronoun; the use of non-traditional punctuation marks; and, other expressions peculiar to european writing. wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 7 importance.’ hon’yakuchō can be interpreted as indicating an openness to linguistic and cultural alterity. nohara (1998) attributes the acceptance of or demand for hon’yakuchō translations to two factors: japanese readers actually enjoy the shock of experiencing foreign cultures; and, the widespread belief that a translation using hon’yakuchō reflects more faithfully and transparently ‘the author’s logic, emotions and thought patterns than one written in more natural japanese.’ translating foreign works into natural japanese might conversely impart a sense of dislocation, calling ‘undue attention to itself in the most unnatural way of all’ (levy 2006: 217). in meiji times the status associated with the ability to comprehend translations of works from such different linguistic and cultural environments was perhaps one factor behind their acceptance. koyano (1997: 228–29) asserts that even today some translations in japan are regarded as important precisely because they are so difficult to understand. in a non-japanese context, savory (1958: 58–59) has suggested that readers who once knew but have forgotten the language of the original might want a recognizably translational rendition. this perhaps applies in japan, where most people today have studied (and often largely forgotten) english. another possibility is that hon’yakuchō is a means of quarantining or even parodying foreignness so as to protect legitimate japanese writing and keep japan’s others at arm’s length. if that were the intention, it has manifestly failed. statements by various writers indicating their deliberate adoption of a translational style in order to reinvigorate (rather than conserve) japanese writing do not support this interpretation. alternatively, hon’yakuchō might represent an attempt to subvert the source language and culture. schäffner and adab note that ‘the effect of dislocation created by the hybrid text may serve to disparage or promote the foreign source culture, text type and use of language, and also the ideological content of the message’ (2001: 174). although a conceivable outcome of hon’yakuchō, evidence to suggest that this is a common motivation behind its use is lacking. another possibility is that hon’yakuchō constitutes an ethical refusal to domesticate foreign texts. discussing translationese (but without the negative connotations usually associated with that term), sturrock (1990: 1010) proposes that ‘a voluntary ‘translationese,’ systematically followed, would be … a drawing of our attention to the irrevocably mediate [‘in-between’] status of the language of translation.’ i return to this alleged ‘mediate status’ below. wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 8 the practice of resistant translation deriving from a desire not to ‘violate’ the original text refers, however, to situations where the target culture is regarded as superior to the source culture (not the typical scenario with translation into japanese) and where translation is used to resist the effacing of the source culture’s otherness. in japan the emphasis on communicating linguistic and cultural differences lacks these particular ideological overtones. rather than presenting a resistant or conflictual space, hon’yakuchō is valued for its creative potential. for instance, the domesticated (naturalsounding) translations produced by people such as uchida roan, a meiji critic and writer who was the first japanese to translate dostoevsky, prompted a reaction in the early twentieth century in the form of calls for dai-nihongoka (‘enlarging,’ or enriching the japanese language5) by translating in a manner that literally followed the foreign wording in what has been called a neo-literal approach (kimura 1972: 377). this target orientation differs from a source-oriented respect for otherness. a related possibility is that hon’yakuchō constitutes ‘foreignization,’ which in the specific sense popularized by venuti (1995) entails an ethical decision to disrupt readers’ complacency through a variety of linguistic means already available in the target language. hon’yakuchō, however, is not usually motivated by a desire to jar readers or subvert (as distinct from enriching) japanese language conventions. moreover, it draws not on the target language, but on the source languages—on linguistic means that were not available in japanese or were used rarely or in a different function. the end result—defamiliarizing language—does, however, share similarities with that of foreignization. for instance, in his translations of poetry and prose (such as his 1924 rendition of paul morand’s novel ouvert la nuit, titled yoru hiraku), horiguchi daigaku boldly injected the expressions of a different language system into japanese, without trying to graft them onto the japanese language forcibly, or he incorporated them as similes, creating a new style that differed from that of the original and had a great impact (watanabe 1982: 386). hon’yakuchō might represent an instance of exoticism, but not in the sense usually associated with translation into modern western languages, which implies grasping or mastering the (inferior) other as a textual object. instead the ‘exotic textual other’ is 5 this was opposed to shō-nihongoka (‘making the japanese language smaller’), which signified translating into fluent, smooth japanese. wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 9 recognized as ‘an ontologically superior linguistic alterity’ (levy 2006: 15). the outcome is ‘a distinctly exoticist desire to identify with but not assimilate the foreign’ (215). levy (224–25) quotes shimamura hōgetsu’s observation in 1912 that because of the resulting foreign atmosphere, we are able to grasp a work’s power, flavor, and the like by entering into details that would elude our attention had we simply glided over the words … in other words, it is possible to make a work stronger by borrowing the help of the foreign scent, namely, exoticism … put in positive terms, this is a more profound way of savoring the work; in negative terms, it is an overestimation of the work’s value. these complex and sometimes contradictory possibilities (for instance, does hon’yakuchō function to welcome heterogeneity or to keep it at a safe distance?) suggest that there is more to hon’yakuchō than what is typically associated with translationese or foreignization. the outcome regardless of the motivation, hon’yakuchō has had a significant impact on translations and original writing in japan, where the domesticating impulse common in angloamerican translation circles has long been subordinated to more foreign-tinged approaches. intentional or otherwise, the outcome has been innovation. the nontraditional features embodied in hon’yakuchō have often struck japanese readers not as second-rate but as fresh, and they have reshaped the japanese language. in a nonjapanese context devy (1998: 62) argues that ‘collectively, many translations create a convention of linguistic compromises, which then becomes a sub-system within the tl [target language]. depending on the cultural importance of the kind of works translated, such a sub-system or systems may come to occupy a more central position within the dominant literary dialect of the tl.’ this is precisely what occurred in japan. it should be noted, however, that the process of incorporating foreign influences can result in both enrichment and endangerment of the target language. achieving a balance is difficult, even if there were agreement on the nature of such a balance.6 tanaka (1982: 194) has argued that if translation is an act of betrayal, as has often been suggested, then the betrayal (which might be interpreted here as contamination from the source language) is greatest when european languages are translated into japanese, 6 isoya (1978: 9) suggests that hon’yaku-chō is regarded in a negative light if the result is no good and as ‘new’ japanese if the result is good. this is a circular argument, because no criteria are given for determining whether the result is good or not. wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 10 because of the radical linguistic differences. tanaka’s implication that the proportion of negative transfer is a function of linguistic difference does, however, overlook other potentially relevant aspects. for instance, toury (1995: 278) maintains that tolerance of interference might depend on the relative power between source and target cultures, with greater tolerance when the source language or culture has more prestige than the target culture. japanese readers, however, seem to have not just tolerated but accepted translational language largely irrespective of the status in japan of the source languages or cultures. kobayashi (1995: 26) argues that no matter how diverse the source languages, they all end up sounding the same in hon’yakuchō. although he does not elaborate on or substantiate this claim, possible reasons might relate to the fact that the main source languages in modern japanese translation history have been european languages that do, in fact, have genetic ties, leading to certain similarities when they are rendered into japanese. another possibility might be that over time certain standard renditions and usages, such as those mentioned above, have developed as part of the repertoire of japanese translators, with stock expressions and structures being associated with the act of translation itself, rather than with a particular source language. achieving acceptance as a translator in japan, then, might derive at least in part from conforming to these norms of translation, rather than from measuring up to the norms of more autochthonous japanese. in other words, regardless of source language this similarity might reflect a desire to ‘mark’ translations as such, even if not to the extent of quarantining them from other types of writing. the relative homogeneity among translations seems to stem from japanese expectations of, and respect for, translations per se, rather than the relative prestige of particular source languages or cultures. the long contact with translational language in the context of western works seems to have engendered a perception that ‘this is what translations are like,’ and this has spilled over into translations from languages and cultures not necessarily regarded as prestigious. the upshot is that japanese translations from diverse languages arguably bear a certain resemblance to each other, constituting a subsystem shaped by the very fact of translation, rather than by factors associated with the source language or culture. toury (1995: 278) suggests that tolerance of interference is also likely to be affected by the prestige of different text types. in meiji japan the impact of translational language was of particular importance in translated literature and even in original literature (see wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 11 next section). more specifically, inoue notes that ‘in the early shôwa era ... this style came to be widely accepted as the style of anthologies of world literature. by and by, it influenced the literary style of the generation of authors born in the 1930s and 1940s, who grew up reading literature translated in this way’ (1996: 5). contemporary readers of translated literature, notably the more popular genres, have greater expectations of idiomaticity, but what today is regarded as idiomaticity has been influenced to a great extent by what in earlier decades was distinct from the idiom of the time. translational language has also been widespread in academic translations, perhaps because in such works the interest in content outweighs concerns over unnaturalness, although these stilted renditions have also attracted their share of criticism. an example of translational language in an original academic work is the following extract from hirano yoshitarō’s nihon shihonshugi shakai no kikō (the structure of japanese capitalist society; 1934), in a reference to prussia’s outwardly constitutionalist parliament: ‘ippō de wa, tsuika sareta kanfu toshite no ichi kōsei bubun o nashi zenjinmin ni tairitsu suru to tomo ni, tahō de wa, sono gaikenteki jidōsei ni oite, burujoa shakai no genjitsu o, sono keishiki no uchi ni kaishō suru.’7 markers of the translational style here include the overall density resulting from the high proportion of chinesebased words relative to native japanese words (the use of zen-jinmin to signify the concept of all the people), the use of opaque vocabulary such as jidōsei (self-identical sameness), and opaque wording such as the underlined section (‘[it] resolves the reality of bourgeois society within its form’). literature and academic writing both constitute prestigious genres, which might lead to the expectation of greater resistance to translational writing. the fact that this has not been the case is a further indicator of the prestige associated with foreign-influenced language in japan. at the level of more quotidian texts and popular literature, however, the demand for enjoyment and/or easy access to the content unhindered by the challenges presented by translational language has resulted in a preference for more natural japanese. 7although no translation into english can fully convey the flavor of this passage, it reads roughly as follows: ‘on the one hand, together with constituting one component part of the government as an added government office and being opposed to all the people, on the other hand, in its external self-identical sameness [the parliament] resolves the reality of bourgeois society within its form.’ wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 12 translation-inflected language in original writing the intrusion of foreign words and new linguistic formations in japanese has moved beyond the realm of translations. levy suggests that translations that privilege foreign forms render ‘the foreign text obsolete by offering it up for use (not merely ‘knowledge’ or aesthetic appreciation) in a new linguistic environment. once the initial resistance to this kind of translation is overcome, its use by other writers will result in the transformation of the target language and thus, paradoxically, the complete naturalization of the foreign text to the native linguistic environment’ (2006: 20). although the completeness of this naturalizing process in japan is open to debate, translational language has often been used in original writing, thereby constituting a broader sphere of translation-inflected style that does not derive from specific source text influences. according to yanabu (1978a: 143), in fact, translational style is more common outside of translations, particularly in academic writing or writing on ideology. amongst the leading meiji writers of literature who adopted a translation-influenced style were futabatei shimei—most notably in his novel ukigumo (floating clouds; 1887)8—and mori ōgai, with his blending of japanese, western and chinese rhetorical conventions. the intricate descriptions of nature introduced through translations in meiji times are an example of the aesthetic impact of translations on original writing. in the early twentieth century modernist writers drew on translation for inspiration, out of a belief that the new ideas and emotions of the modernizing nation called for new syntax and expressions, even if at first they might sound strange. for instance, in his 1913 translation of flaubert’s salammbō, ikuta chōkō used literal translation of the original word order to achieve a distancing effect in an attempt at dai-nihongoka. one example was his translation of ‘pétrifié de peur’ [english: ‘petrified’] as kyōfu ni kaseki shita, which is ‘very weird and exotic indeed’ (keene 1980: 39). satō haruo’s supein ken no ie (the house of a spanish dog; 1917) skilfully employed a style absorbed from translated literature, using the present tense and expressions such as soko de watashi wa soko o magaru (inoue 1994: 338), while yokomitsu riichi’s naporeon to tamushi (napoleon’s ringworm; 1926) made adept use of the effects found in literal translations of european works in an attempt to stimulate readers’ senses. another example of translational language can be found in hori tatsuo’s 1930 story 8 see cockerill (2006) for a full discussion of the impact of translation on futabatei’s writing. wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 13 “seikazoku” (holy family; 1949), with its abundance of pronouns and frenchinfluenced word order. in ambarvalia (1933), the much-praised and highly influential first poetry anthology in japanese by nishiwaki junzaburō, original writing and translation combined to produce a new poetic language. speaking of its newness, hirata (1993: 49) observes: in nishiwaki’s idiosyncratic use of translation, effecting a radical deformation and foreignization of the japanese language … some of the poems included in ambarvalia are more or less direct translations of poems originally written in foreign languages by nishiwaki himself. consequently the text reveals a peculiar japanese language, one willfully affected by nishiwaki’s sometimes extremely “literal” translations. keene (1987: 630) maintains that most modernist writers eventually ‘reverted to older literary styles’ because of the intractability of this idiom. writing in the 1950s, however, nakamura (1952: 1145) commented that the overall style of contemporary japanese novels at that time was characterized by a kind of imitation translational style. this claim was substantiated by mishima yukio in his 1959 bunshō tokuhon (1959/1973: 30–31), where he commented that translational-style writing had been regarded in a negative light before world war ii, but after the war that was no longer the case. according to mishima, authentic japanese writing was now rare. although highly critical of this translational style, mishima himself deliberately tried to utilize the unnatural techniques of translated plays in his sado kōshaku fujin (madame de sade; 1965), which was set in france. the nobel prize-winner ōe kenzaburō is a contemporary author whose writing is often regarded as having been affected by foreign works and translations. as he says: ‘my style is influenced by all the foreign-language literature i’ve read, but i first convert that into the japanese literary style that’s prevailed since the meiji era … and build my own style from there’ (2007: 54). thus nathan (2000: 58) argues that it is ‘nonsense’ to describe ōe’s language as ‘translationese’ (nathan’s term). he suggests instead that ōe uses translation to ‘destabilize his own original, and thereby to discover new possibilities inherent in it … a kind of simulacrum in ōe of this interchange between the original and translation’ (62). the recognition ōe has won is indicative of the success of this creative approach. according to inoue (1996: 7), an affinity with translational style is evident in postwar writers such as kurahashi yumiko, shōji kaoru, yoshimoto banana (‘who claims to wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 14 have read nothing but comics and translated novels’), shimada masahiko (‘who is feeling his way towards “a literature of artificial exile,” free of the fetters of the japanese language’), and yamada eimi (‘who writes what can only be described as “english expressed in japanese,” or “translations for which there are no originals”’). translations have also been influential in shaping the iconoclastic style of murakami haruki, who regards translation as his teacher (kelts 1999). murakami’s writing style is very aware of european syntax. for instance, he uses long sentences, expressions that seem to be literal translations from english, and many personal pronouns, differentiating between the singular and plural first-person pronouns boku and bokutachi. the result is ‘a detached, almost anesthetized narrative voice that sounds to the japanese ear as if it were translated from another language’ (coleman 2000: 57). changing attitudes attitudes toward strangeness in translations can be expected to shift over time as a result of sociocultural changes or as the strangeness becomes assimilated and attenuated. hon’yakuchō was particularly prominent in the meiji period, when the content of translated texts (western ideas and knowledge) was regarded as more important than the form (adherence to traditional style), and when translation was perceived as a way of enhancing the expressive capacities of the language in line with the needs of the modernizing nation. translational language continued to be held in esteem in the taishō period. kobayashi (1995: 10) suggests that hon’yakuchō took on negative connotations in the shōwa period—perhaps around the time when akutagawa ryūnosuke was criticized for the unnaturalness of his translation-like writing. as noted above, however, in 1959 mishima claimed that despite criticisms of translational language before world war ii, it had become the mainstream style even for original writing. yanabu (1978b: 16) subsequently took a different tack, suggesting that full assimilation of translational language into japanese might be difficult even over a long period, just as the distinction between japanese and chinese writing had persisted in mixed sino-japanese. yanabu (1978a: 143) believes that hon’yakuchō, which he refers to as a ‘third language,’ has obscured the fundamental differences between european languages and japanese, blinding people to the difficulties or impossibility of translation. according to yanabu, in japan translation first occurs into this intermediate language, and it is only later that the smoothness of the translation as japanese is wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 15 considered (147). he argues that although the final stage is the most challenging, the initial stage determines how japanese regard translation—there is a belief that a more or less mechanical substitution of words has already conveyed the meaning, so nothing further is necessary. ōhashi (1978: 176) goes so far as to claim that any attempt to translate into pure japanese today would result in a parody or distortion. some contemporary critics continue to ‘assume that the japanese version [of foreign literature] should sound strange, that it should not sound like natural japanese because it’s foreign literature’ (hibbett 2000: 49). this suggests a residual awareness of the difference between translated japanese and natural japanese—not a resistance to translational japanese, but a desire to mark its foreign origins. although the acceptance of opaqueness in loanwords remains strong, recent years have also seen increasing expectations of fluency in translations. as inoue (1996: 7) argues: a loop of productive feedback has formed between the translation style of modern japan and contemporary literature: translations have a revitalizing effect on the literature of the age, and the renewed vitality of contemporary literature is reflected in the literary style of new translations. the trend towards the unification of the written and spoken language is a good index of the yawning gulf between the original and the translation, which provides much of the creative tension that informs this feedback loop. when the gap becomes indistinct, the loop stops working. this means that the unification of the spoken and written languages is complete for the time being and that translation style has entered an age of stability … such a dislocation occurred in the 1970s, between the two translation booms of the 1960s and the 1980s.9 in the early 1990s a backlash against the stiffness of many translations appeared in the form of chō-hon’yaku (‘ultra-translation’). this term was associated with the loose transcreations (total rewriting into a readable, idiomatic japanese narrative) of sidney sheldon’s novels. satō (2000: 20) suggests that students today find the style of translations—especially their manner of description and expression—lacking in appeal. so perhaps japan is becoming more like the anglo-american translation world—even if the chō-hon’yaku phenomenon of the 1990s was limited in scope and impact and even if, as venuti (1995) has argued, fluency is not necessarily a desirable quality. the 9 by the 1960s japanese society had achieved a certain stability, and the postwar gloom was replaced by a desire for more enjoyable works and an interest in becoming more cultured. the success of a five-volume anthology of non-fiction works from around the world, published by chikuma shobō in april 1960, led to the publication of numerous anthologies of world literature. the boom was accentuated by the comeback of translations of american novels and by translations of american works on management methods and the youth culture of the 1960s. in the 1980s the social cachet associated with reading foreign literary classics was replaced, to some extent, by interest in reading more popular american fiction, fostered in part by translations by murakami haruki and tie-ins with hollywood movies. translations of books for young readers, and translations of science fiction and the social sciences, were also popular, as were translated technical, economic and industrial books. wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 16 weakening acceptance of translational language might be linked to japan’s growing cultural confidence. one outcome, however, is reduced opportunities to expand and reorient the japanese language. problematizing betweenness the notion of betweenness—an interlingual or interstitial ‘mid-speech’ (steiner 1975: 333)—does, however, need reexamination. as noted in my introduction, the key question is whether hon’yakuchō lies between the source language(s) and japanese or is a part of the japanese language. i concur with nohara (1998) that the acceptance and importance of hon’yakuchō in japan mean it is ‘not a usage outside the entity of ‘proper’ language.’ the domain of hon’yakuchō is neither external to the japanese language system nor marginalized, but an integral part that is even positioned close to and has influenced the mainstream, such that it almost provokes no strangeness any longer, even if it still triggers occasional criticism. in one sense, the foreignness inherent in hon’yakuchō paradoxically represents not heterogeneity, but a certain homogeneity in and of itself, since the linguistic features that mark hon’yakuchō are so widely practised and accepted in translations and even original writing. it constitutes a (sub)norm whose transgressive thrust is not so much to violate japanese norms as to transform them. hon’yakuchō is not a space between, but a space within. and this interior space is not a hermetic compartment isolated from its surroundings, but a porous entity whose seepage affects the larger system within which it is located. discussing not hon’yakuchō specifically but the ‘third space of translation’ as a whole, thornber suggests that rather than occupying a ‘between’ position, ‘the third space of translation overlaps with and eventually subsumes the first and second spaces’ (2008: 79). that is, by creating a third space, translations acknowledge the interdependence and textual intertwining of the source and target spaces, highlighting ‘the artificiality of conventional categories and … the need to understand cultural products as constantly moving, transforming entities, not as static artifacts in dusty archives that are best classified and examined along linguistic/cultural/national lines’ (92). if translators operate not in a space between the source language and target language, but in a system inclusive of both, then in what larger system might japanese translators and writers who adopt hon’yakuchō be operating? does this consist of the pure wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 17 language where meaning instantly becomes truth, as posited by walter benjamin in his seminal essay of 1923? benjamin regarded translation as an attempt to integrate the many languages into one true language, and the aim of literal translation as allowing a glimpse into this pure language. although many foreign-derived linguistic features are present in japanese translations, they have not usually been regarded in japan as an attempt to peel away the semantic accretions to reveal the underlayers of meaning. ōe kenzaburō, however, has claimed that translators exist in a special dark void between the language of the source text and the supposedly corresponding japanese, and that this cultural no-man’s-land is rich with potential for generating new things and is perhaps where lurk the universal properties of human language (uncited source mentioned in yanabu 1978b: 9). nonetheless the deliberate use of hon’yakuchō seems to have been more motivated by a target-oriented aspiration to invigorate japanese language and literature than by a desire to draw closer to the pure language purportedly underlying all human languages. thus the outcome of translational language might conceivably represent a move toward pure language, if we accept that concept. although the term ‘third code’ is problematic in that it implies something external to the source and target languages, it is worth relating it to homi bhabha’s concept of a ‘third space’ (1994: 36–39). for bhabha, the third space refers to the non-fixedness of nontextual hybrid identity, which is ‘celebrated as a privileged position of intelligence due to the advantages of in-betweenness and the ability therefore to negotiate the difference’ (fenton 2004: 5). despite this non-linguistic focus, the third space ‘results in the same cultural signs carrying different meanings on different occasions of their enunciation’ (batchelor 2008: 54)—a phenomenon that could be applicable to the foreign signs reenunciated in hon’yakuchō. as wolf (2000: 141) argues: the space-in-between is therefore a fertile and, at the same time, disquieting space where the dialectical interaction of at least two cultures takes place. it is a place where the dominant culture and language can be subverted, and thus functions as a sort of resistance. if we consider the third space as the potential and starting point for interventionist translation strategies, we realize that such strategies go far beyond the traditional concepts of ‘original’ and ‘translation,’ and the old dichotomy of ‘foreignizing’ versus ‘domesticating’ in all its implications. these strategies imply a shift toward the centre, where cultures encounter each other, and where meanings are effectively ‘remixed.’ batchelor has criticized wolf’s reading of bhabha’s third space because he conceives it ‘primarily in spatial terms,’ whereas bhabha developed the concept in relation to ‘the time-lag between event and enunciation’ (2008: 54). nevertheless, wolf’s notion of a wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 18 cultural encounter and remixing of meanings is relevant to the japanese situation— although this occurs not in a ‘space-in-between,’ but within the target culture. some scholars have also considered the third space in relation to the figure of the translator. tymoczko, however, argues against views of translators as agents positioned between the source and target languages, outside of their own culture and with no position in the other culture, as this would imply a lack of ideological engagement. she maintains that ‘the translator is in fact all too committed to a cultural framework, whether that framework is the source culture, the receptor culture, a third culture, or an internal cultural framework that includes both source and receptor societies … the ideology of translation is indeed a result of the translator’s position, but that position is not a space between’ (2003: 201). although the metaphor of the translator as a ‘bridge’ between cultures is not uncommon in japan, the notion of the translator as a hybrid figure privileged with the ability to negotiate between the source and target languages and cultures has not been a notable part of the japanese discourse surrounding hon’yakuchō. instead, the emphasis has been on how translators and writers have used hon’yakuchō within the japanese language to redefine the contours of the language. conclusion the existence of translational language means that translation in japan cannot be regarded in clear-cut terms of source and target languages and that the notion of target language in japan is not monolithic, but differentiated. the foreign-derived elements within japanese translations and original writing introduce a certain bivocality. furthermore, as levy (2006: 4) points out, the recognition of translation as ‘one of the key sources of stylistic originality in the target language, rather than simply a pale derivative of the “original” text,’ upsets conventional notions of imitation and originality. even if deliberate internalization and use of these foreign influences have not always met with creative success on the part of individual japanese translators and writers, translational language has collectively acted as a creative medium for reorienting the japanese language through incremental changes over time. in japan translation-inflected language has not necessarily been regarded in a negative light or as something between or alien to the source and target languages, but as a vital part of the target language that has played a key role in reshaping the japanese language and offering new ways of perceiving the world. wakabayashi translational japanese portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 19 reference list batchelor, k. 2008, ‘third spaces, mimicry and 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sekai no. 3, 6–21. yokomitsu, r. 1926, ‘naporeon to tamushi,’ in yokomitsu riichi zenshū vol. 6, hibonkaku, tokyo, 1936. yoshida, s. 1985, ‘eibun chokuyakutai ni tsuite,’ aichi daigaku bungaku ronsō, vol. 80, december, 101–32. nation and immigration portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ nation and immigration ali behdad, university of california, los angeles a close friend of mine, who happens to be a neuroscientist—well acquainted with all the vicissitudes of our brains—recently told me: ‘you know, i always thought you had a highly theoretical and abstract mind, but i now realize that you are really a meat and potato kind of guy!’ though i was initially hurt by his rather blunt and unsolicited observation, as i thought about it more i began to realize that there was perhaps some truth to what he was saying and that being a ‘meat and potato guy’ is not so bad after all! i begin by recounting this conversation both to apologize if what i have to say in this article sounds a bit too commonsensical, and to contextualize my seemingly anachronistic return to such ‘old-fashioned’ concepts as nation and immigration in what appears to be a globalized world populated by ‘nomadic subjects’. even a cursory glance at the recent works of cultural critics and postcolonial theorists will suffice to confirm that keywords such as nation and immigration are no longer in vogue today, as new concepts such as postnation and diaspora have displaced them in our current intellectual parlance. encouraged by seemingly radical changes heralded by economic globalization, transnational migration across the globe, and the spread of electronic culture, most cultural and postcolonial theorists have suggested that overmastering and monologic notions of identity and culture associated with a particular nation or ethnicity impair intellectual freedom, suppress creative interaction between members of various communities, and ultimately fail to describe the nuanced and complicated hybrid formations that characterize our global relations today. these critics therefore view the nation form as an obsolete model of community, cultivated only by behdad nation and immigration ethnic fundamentalists and oppressive regimes, while considering nationalism a dark, antiquated, and repressive discourse producing only ethnic conflicts and monolithic forms of identification. roger rouse, to cite a seminal example of this position, remarks: we live in a confusing world, a world of crisscrossed economies, intersecting systems of meaning and fragmented identities. suddenly, the comforting modern imagery of nation-states and national languages, of coherent communities and consistent subjectivities, of dominant centers and distant margins no longer seems adequate (rouse 1991, 8). most cultural critics, like rouse, have theorized often in a celebratory fashion, tropes of mobility such as exile, travel, displacement, nomadism, and diaspora as keywords to account for contemporary forms of cultural identity. in several of his works, edward said, for example, while attentive to the psychological losses and political disenfranchisement that dislocation entails, quoted the words of a thirteenth-century monk, hugo of saint victor, to argue that total exile and absolute refusal to belong is the most complete form of identity and intellectual subjectivity (said 1984). distance and alienation, as horrendous as they are to experience, according to him, nonetheless enable critical insight and originality of vision, forcing us to abandon fixed notions of identity as well as eschewing ideologies of mastery and nationalistic attachments. similarly, stuart hall has constantly valorized diaspora identities, describing them as capable of ‘constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference’ (hall 1990, 235). like said, hall views the decision to live in self-exile, without the security of one’s culture, as a redemptive movement, one that mediates a dialogic awareness, thus enabling the creative process of writing and critical thinking. and finally, homi bhabha has further claimed that postcolonial people, as deterritorialized subjects, ‘displace some of the great metropolitan narratives of progress and law and order, and question the authority and authenticity of those narratives’ (bhabha 1990b, 218). according to bhabha, diasporas, as exemplary communities of the global world, are necessarily politicized and oppositional, always working collectively against oppressive power relations and cultural hegemony while displacing nationalist forms of identification with their nomadic subjectivities. i have titled my paper ‘nation and immigration’ by way of intimating my intellectual alignment with an alternative theoretical position that is critical of celebratory theories of portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 behdad nation and immigration postcoloniality. i have in mind here scholars such as kitty calavita (inside the state: the bracero program, immigration, and the ins, 1992), maxim silverman (deconstructing the nation: immigration, racism and citizenship in modern france, 1992), william barbieri (ethics of citizenship: immigration and group rights in germany, 1998), and paul gilroy (‘there ain’t no black in the union jack’: the cultural politics of race and nation, 1987). in the works of these critics, situated terms (like immigration, citizenship, race, and racism) displace abstract notions (like diaspora, deterritorialization, exile, and hybridity). in what follows, therefore, i wish to offer a critical assessment of the cultural and political implications of postcolonial and cultural critics’ abandonment of situated terms like immigration, citizenship, race, state, and their celebratory embracing of such unmoored notions as nomadism, deterritorialization, exile, hybridity, and postnation. on the one hand, i hope to demonstrate that postcolonial critics’ valorization of displacement’s redemptive power mystifies the oppositional possibilities of hybrid consciousness. on the other, i wish to argue that such theoretical projects fail to both historicize the particularities of postcolonial cultural formations and the importance of the politics of location in describing various manifestations of the global. in his seminal essay, ‘patriotism and its futures’, appadurai posits the concepts of ‘postnation’ and ‘postnational’ to describe the cultural and political conditions of global formations today (appadurai 1993). he uses these terms to elaborate three related implications of globalization as a general phenomenon, transforming cultural, economic, and political relations everywhere in the world. first, he employs these terms to mean ‘the [historical] process of moving to a global order in which the nation-state has become obsolete and other formations for allegiance and identity have taken its place’. second, he has in mind the ‘alternative forms for the organization of global traffic in resources, images, and ideas—forms that either contest the nation-state actively or constitute peaceful alternatives for large-scale political loyalties’. and third, the notion of postnation implies what may be labeled diasporic nationalism, which, encouraged by ‘the steady erosion of the capabilities of the nation-state to monopolize loyalty,’ are ‘largely divorced from territorial states’ (169). the example that appadurai cites to drive these points home is, interestingly, the united states, an enormously wealthy superpower that portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 behdad nation and immigration has been able to organize itself around ‘a modern political ideology in which pluralism is central to the conduct of democratic life’—a nation where various immigrant communities have been able to manufacture what he calls ‘delocalized transnations’ that retain special ideological links to a putative place of origin but are otherwise thoroughly diasporic collectivities (173). insightful though appadurai’s argument is in locating the cultural implications of globalization, his salutary claims about the disappearance of nation-state and the emergence of diaspora communities appear problematic, especially since 9/11, a tragic event that not only ushered a powerful form of patriotism in the united states, but also helped fortify the power of state apparatuses such as fbi, cia, and the ins, linked and centrally organized now under the rubric of the new department of homeland security. i have discussed the impact of 9/11 elsewhere (behdad forthcoming), but let me restate here parenthetically a crucial point about the specific context of the united states before i proceed with my discussion of appadurai’s argument. what is remarkable about the hurried passage of the usa patriotic act that essentially curtailed certain constitutional rights of citizens after 9/11 was the powerful way in which the figure of the immigrant/foreigner once again provided the differential other through whose threatening presence in the nation a state of emergency was declared, enabling thus the entrenchment of disciplinary apparatuses and surveillance procedures as necessary security measures to protect the democratic polity from the other’s terror—apparatuses and surveillance procedures that had already been tested and used at the u.s.-mexico border long before the tragic events of 9/11 gave the government the perfect rationale to extent them to every port of entry. not only was a substantial part of the patriot act devoted to the enhancement of regulatory immigration procedures that denied foreigners, immigrants, and permanent residents habeas corpus and due judicial review and permitted indefinite detention of those in violation of any immigration status, including such a minor offense as overstaying a visa, but the bill also implicitly depicted the brown-skinned immigrant—middle eastern, southeast asian, and latino, among others—as a threat to the democratic nation in an apocalyptic fashion that called for an armageddon on the part of the state to eradicate the (terrorist) foreigner or immigrant. but, as i suggested above, even before such legislative changes, it was already evident that, although with the emergence of global politics and the spread of free-trade zones, portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 behdad nation and immigration the borders of nation-states had become increasingly porous, national governments continued to exercise a great deal of power in planning and shaping the ways in which their countries are globalized. indeed, international organizations depend on individual state agencies to regulate trade and security, markets and systems of communication. now, to return to appadurai’s argument in the context of my critique of postcolonial theories of postnation and hybridity, i think it is important to note that appadurai’s argument about the disappearance of the nation-state and the emergence of diaspora consciousness holds a mimetic relation with anti-colonial discourse on nation and nationalism. as one reads appadurai’s compelling argument about the disappearing of nation-state, the specter of fanon appears above and beneath every sentence—fanon who first described the predicaments of national consciousness in the colony in his seminal book, the wretched of the earth (1963). describing nationalism as an ‘empty shell’, fanon cogently observed that ‘the battle against colonialism [and oppression] does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism’ (148). as a cosmopolitan intellectual, he considered internationalism as the goal of anti-colonial movement, arguing that at the heart of liberation movement an ‘international consciousness lives and grows’ (248). and yet, in the following chapter on national culture, fanon claimed that ‘every culture is first and foremost national’, and that the demand for nationhood, the desire for national culture, and the process of decolonization are intertwined (216). the task of the colonial intellectual, then, was to help produce an ‘authentic national consciousness, freed from the psychological and ideological forces of colonialism’—a consciousness that involved a movement away from what he labeled ‘western culture’ toward a popular and democratic form of nationhood that empowered every social strata. what we encounter in the discourses of postnationalism and diaspora today is a similar ideological ambivalence toward what constitutes national consciousness and belonging. whether we read said, bhabha or appadurai, we notice the paired critique of nationalism and celebration of a more cosmopolitan, imagined community—for said, it is the calling for a palestinian nation that haunts his celebration of exile as a metaphor of ideal subjectivity; for bhabha, it is the ‘scattering of the people that in other times and other portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 behdad nation and immigration places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering’ (bhabha 1990a, 291); and for appadurai it is the delocalized transnation that is celebrated against the white nation. what are we to make of these contradictory articulations of the nation form? how are we to go beyond the problematic binary of good nationalism vs. bad nationalism implied in this critical debate? a starting point to address these questions is to unpack the relation between state and nation and explore their roles in the global flow of people, capital, and commodities that characterize our contemporary world. what is striking about critiques of nation and nationalism by cultural and postcolonial theorists is the absence of any substantial discussion of the state, especially problematic because the nation and state are often linked—that is, in the nation-state—if not fully equated. often reduced to a repressive apparatus, the notion of state is considered passé in today’s western academy, associated with an outdated marxist paradigm that limited its function to maintaining class domination. but i want to suggest a return to this key term and question the extent to which the rhetoric of globalization has obscured the important role states and governments play in transnational relations of power. indeed, state apparatuses continue to retain, if not exclusive, tremendous power over deployment of force as well as the authority to regulate how transnational corporations invest their resources and engage in business transactions. we should ask, therefore, what functions do states, as agencies of representation, perform in the broader system of international regulation? do global agencies and transnational corporations really undermine the sovereignty of national governments? have states become the local agents of corporate interests? or, does the fact of their being ultimately answerable to their citizens make them the local shields against global capitalism? can states re-create a sense of national identity in response to the political and economic constraints of globalization? or, do state apparatuses mobilize the idea of the nation to enable economic interests of transnational corporations? i raise these questions both to underscore the problematic tendency among postcolonial and cultural critics to overlook the function of states and their apparatuses in how global networks and transnational relations are formed and to offer new areas of inquiry in unpacking and understanding the impact of global interconnectedness. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 behdad nation and immigration but the overlooking of the roles of nation and state in recent theories of diaspora and postnationalism seems also problematic given the speed with which new nations and nationalism are actually emerging today, the peculiar propensity for and the intensity of border fortification in spite of the global flow of people and commodities across them, and the forging of new partnerships between certain states and the global capital market. i want to suggest that while national borders may no longer impede most of the international trade and other global economic transactions, they do nonetheless matter greatly when it comes to human subjects whose movements are carefully regulated. i have shown elsewhere that in the past twenty years the principle of governmentality in the united states has actually been solidified, as demonstrated, for example, by the expansion of the prison industry and the proliferation of the technologies of border control at the us-mexico border (behdad 1998). similarly, the integration of europe in the form of a union has also meant tougher restrictions on the movement of people from the middle east, africa, and most of asia to europe. moreover, in spite of the increase in global cultural contacts, nationalist sentiments persist throughout the world and states continue to exert a great deal of power as to how a national community is globalized. on the one hand, as r. radhakrishnan points out: neither the deracinating multior inter-national spread of capitalism nor the marxist theoretical assimilation of the national question within an internationalist communism has been able to do away with the urgencies of the imagined communities of nationalism (radhakrishnan 1992, 83). nationalism and state apparatuses remain powerful everywhere, in iran and the united states, in serbia as well as france. and, without romanticizing the role of states and nationalism, one may add that in an era of foot-loose capitalism, certain nationalist sentiments or state forms of sovereignty may in fact prove useful in countering the lack of accountability on the part of giant transnational corporations. on the other hand, even the social scientists who argue that ‘the contemporary globalization of politics is transforming the very foundations of world order by reconstituting traditional forms of sovereign statehood and reordering international political relations’ have to acknowledge that the concept of state ‘sovereignty has by no means been rendered redundant’ and that portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 behdad nation and immigration ‘political community continue to be shaped by the territorial reach of state sovereignty’ (held et al 1999, 85-86). in other words, neither the internationalization of politics, nor the globalization of capital implies the disappearance of national form or state government. quite the contrary, globalization has actually reinforced their role as arbitrators in international processes. there remain indeed many questions to be answered yet about the problem of the nation-state and its ideological apparatuses. how, for example, is the nation-state re-imagined in our globalized world? what roles do states play in the particular ways in which globalization is embraced and practiced in different locations? how are we to account for the rise of nationalist, religious, and ethnic fervor in a world that has become increasingly more transnational? what are the ways in which the formal universality of nationalism as a socio-political concept can be understood in the context of the irremediable particularity of nationalism’s concrete manifestations? and finally, how can we simultaneously critique the regressive tendencies of nationalism in bosnia and rwanda while advocating, say, a palestinian or kurdish nation? saskia sassen in her illuminating essay ‘spatialities and temporalities of the global: elements for a theorization’ cogently suggests that globalization ‘persists as a partial condition’ by which she means that there is significant overlap and interaction between the global and the national (sassen 2000, 215). she writes, ‘each sphere, global and national, describes a spatio-temporal order with considerable internal differentiation and growing mutual imbrications with the other’ (216). one direction, she seems to suggest, is not to forget the nation in our postnational consciousness, but to study instead the ‘dynamics of interaction between the global and the national’, a dynamic that sheds light on the ‘incipient and partial denationalization of domains once understood and/or constructed as national’ (216). what the more nuanced discussions of globalization such as sassen’s make evident is that the uneven flow between nationalism and globalization is fundamentally context-dependent, and that while transnational circuits are appearing throughout the world, their formations are always socio-historically contingent and culturally specific. indeed, the strategic nature of economic globalization, as sassen cogently argues, suggests that ‘most global processes materialize in national territories portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 behdad nation and immigration and do so to a considerable extent through national institutional arrangements, from legislative actions to corporate agenda’ (228). the second issue i wish to raise with regard to appadurai’s exemplary description of the global is the question of diaspora and its liberating potentials. diaspora is at once the cause and effect of postnational consciousness and as such it occupies a central role in the way new identities are imagined in the global village, according to him. appadurai, like most postcolonial critics, views the presence of diasporic communities in the united states in salutary terms, considering them essential in fashioning a new ‘postnational politics’ that would ultimately resolve ‘the tension between the centripetal pull of americanness and the centrifugal push of diasporic diversity in american life’ (appadurai 1993, 173). the emergence of delocalized transnations, he argues, is forcing american society to ‘confront the needs of pluralism and of immigration, to construct a society around diasporic diversity’ (173). i take issue with appadurai’s claim for several reasons. to begin, as a specific claim about the new global order, it overlooks the fact that the united states has always constructed its national identity around diversity and immigration. indeed, beginning with j. hector st. john de crèvecoeur’s invocation of america as ‘every person’s country’ in 1782, through the celebration of the country as a ‘nation of many nations’ in the poetry of walt whitman in the nineteenth century, to john f. kennedy’s portrayal of the united states as a ‘nation of immigrants’ in the twentieth century, the official archive of the nation is replete with examples of this founding myth that defines immigration as the cornerstone of national identity. but what appadurai fails to further observe is that such a construction of identity is a forgetful articulation that suppresses historical knowledge about the economics of immigration, while producing a pseudo-historical consciousness about what it means to be an american. i have elaborated elsewhere (behdad, 2005) the productive function of the myth of immigrant america, but it is worth pointing out in passing that the benign myth of immigrant america is frequently called upon to shore up a sense of national pride and to enable cultural renewal. such a project of national identification remains potent because it disavows the ways in which the formation of american polity was achieved through the violent conquest of native americans, the brutal exploitation of enslaved africans, and portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 behdad nation and immigration the colonialist annexations of french and mexican territories, not to mention the fact that the narrative of immigrant america helps us turn a blind to the nation’s long history of xenophobia and to the disciplining and criminalizing of aliens today. moreover, on an empirical level, it is not evident that geographical displacement necessarily leads in most cases to any originality of political vision, to the breaking of intellectual and cultural barriers, and to solidarity in opposing hegemonic power of the majority, as most postcolonial and cultural theorists tend to suggest. for, even the most superficial acquaintance with the ethnic politics of a city like los angeles reveals how stratified and conflicted third world-origin and minority communities are in this city. not only are there fundamental cultural and economic differences among various diaspora communities, but also these differences have often sowed mutual hostilities across immigrant and minority communities, as the los angeles riots in 1992 painfully demonstrated. the ‘postnational’ communities in los angeles are often more chauvinistic and nostalgic towards their countries of origins than the citizens of those nations, a fact that is sociologically evident in the rise of ethnic enclaves throughout the city and their nostalgic re-invention of certain arcane traditions. in many cases, the sense of loss and disenfranchisement among many immigrant communities has led to a new form of tribalism characterized by antagonism and racial superiority toward other minorities. as james clifford points out, ‘indeed, some of the most violent articulations of purity and racial exclusivism come from diaspora populations’ (clifford 1997, 251). in short, it is not clear that ‘delocalized transnations’ are free from the chauvinism of nationalism or the forces of state apparatuses, as appadurai seems to suggest, nor is it evident that they necessarily constitute oppositional alternatives to the hegemonic power of the majority by displacing ‘the great metropolitan narratives of progress, law, and order’, as bhabha claims (appadurai 1996, 169; bhabha 1990b, 218). in addition, it is important to note that, as edouard glissant has cogently argued, ‘the permutations of cultural contact change more quickly than any one theory could account for. no theory of cultural contact is [thus] conducive to generalization’ (glissant 1989, 19). hence the importance of the local and the impossibility of a generalizing notion of portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 behdad nation and immigration postcolonial or postnational subjectivity, for transnational forms are always interpolated by the politics of location, and as such their manifestations can be quite varied, and always over-determined. there are, for example, obvious differences between the experiences of various immigrant communities in the united states—for instance, while some communities, such as armenians in glendale, california, have been able to maintain a sense of collectivity and cultural particularity across their national backgrounds, caribbean immigrants in new york city have fashioned a creolized identity with blacks and latinos, an identity that is less ethnically rigid and more culturally fluid. in addition, there are also radical permutations even within a single immigrant community, permutations that, again, are over-determined by class, gender, religion, and language. such differences within and across immigrant communities demand an understanding of interculturality that is attentive to the specificity of their historical formations and geographical locations. my aim in raising the issue of diasporic exclusivism and its local interpolation is not to pose a binary relation between the symbolic and the real. nor is it my aim to claim nationalist sentiment as an antidote to global disempowerment. rather, my hope is to draw attention to the discrepancy between celebratory explorations of diasporic consciousness by academics, writers, and artists and the complex and over-determined itineraries of many immigrants caught in the tailspin of a globalization that has made them immigrate to the west in hopes of upward economic mobility and political freedom. this discrepancy is symptomatic of the difference between what the political theorist john armstrong calls ‘mobilized and proletarian diasporas’ (armstrong 1976). armstrong acknowledges the vagueness of the term ‘diaspora’ to describe ‘any ethnic collectivity which lacks a territorial base within a given polity’. but he attempts to make this term more useful by introducing what i consider to be a very helpful, albeit insufficient, distinction between the proletarian class of diasporas who are ‘a disadvantaged product of modernized polities’ (for example, mexican farm and service workers in southern california) and the mobilized class, defined as ‘an ethnic group which does not have a general status advantage, yet which enjoys many material and cultural advantages compared to other groups in the multiethnic polity’ (for example, portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 behdad nation and immigration iranians in southern california or indians in northern california) (393). armstrong raises not only the issue of social class or even symbolic capital here, but he also discusses a broad range of other factors such as religion, language, labor, cultural myth, networks of family and personal relationships to schematize the critical differences that exist between various communities of immigrants. obviously, no diasporic community fits neatly into these categories, because immigrants occupy a plurality of social and economic positions, but this sort of distinction is critically necessary, because it calls into question the unmoored metaphors of border-crossing, nomadism, and hybridity so prevalent among postcolonial intellectuals and cultural critics. the kind of distinction armstrong introduces is useful in helping us differentiate various trajectories of displacement and become attentive to the historical taintedness of tropes of mobility that are so fashionable in intellectual circles today. moreover, armstrong’s distinction between mobilized and proletariat diasporas is helpful in understanding why émigré writers and intellectuals from the ex-european colonies as privileged diasporas—privileged by virtue of access to discourse and representation— view displacement in celebratory terms while representing the everyday struggles of ordinary immigrants in western metropolises in their aesthetic and critical discourses, representations that, as gayatri spivak has cogently shown, are often marked by a double contradiction: a misrepresentation of alternative histories of colonialism and a misconception of the neo-colonial condition (spivak 1989). to ignore the crucial economic and cultural differences among immigrant communities by generalizing and labeling them all ‘postnational others’ marginalized by the white nation-state or western narrative of progress, as appadurai and bhabha do in their works, is not only intellectually problematic, but also politically dangerous. i say intellectually problematic because such claims tend to assume a binary relationship between center and periphery, power and opposition, hegemony and resistance, and nationalism and exile in describing the predicament of geographical displacement, and as such fail to address the complex and over-determined configurations of transnational relations of power that force or enable migration. and i say such claims are politically dangerous because they portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 behdad nation and immigration risk inflating the privileged itineraries of certain postcolonial intellectuals and expatriate professionals with those of disenfranchised immigrants and displaced refugees, a conflation that participates in the mobilization of the myth of immigrant america to shore up patriotism and enable cultural renewal. mahatma gandhi was once asked what he thought of western civilization and he responded: ‘it would be a good idea!’ gandhi’s insightfully sarcastic response captures this paper’s position with regard to tropes of mobility and discourses of transnationalism. the popular rhetoric of postnationalism and diaspora suggest that the world is becoming a better place to live through an intensification of economic interdependence, technological interconnectedness, and cultural hybridization. the demise of state power, according to the boosters of globalization, has led to a positive diffusion of authority, while technological advances have enabled a more mobile and pluralistic sense of cultural and political identity. these would obviously be salutary developments were it not for the fact that they are available only to a tiny and privileged minority. as pico iyer insightfully observes: one of the most troubling features of the globalization we celebrate is that the so-called linking of the planet has, in fact, intensified the distance between people: the richest 358 people in the world, by un calculations, have a financial worth as great as that of 2.3 billion others, and even in the united states, the prosperous home of egalitarianism, the most wired man in the land (bill gates) has a net worth larger than that of 40 percent of the country’s households, or perhaps 100 million of his compatriots combined (iyer 2000, 25-26). if i espouse the skeptical position in these postcolonial debates it is not to undermine the advantages of cultural, economic and political interconnectedness, but to draw attention to how the boosters of transnationalism and diaspora have failed to address the contingent and uneven nature of global flow. what seem urgent now are not more paeans to the global ideal, but a willingness to confront the challenges that stand in the way of its realization. counter-intuitively perhaps, a global future demands a present engagement with the enduring issue of unequal and uneven development. to conclude, what i have been obliquely attempting here has been to suggest that a critical form of postcolonial discourse can offer a historical corrective to the celebratory theories of diaspora and postnationalism. i think cultural theories of transnationalism and portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 behdad nation and immigration globalization have been blinkered by the misty notion of ‘time/space compression’, coined by david harvey as a postmodern phenomenon to describe the ways in which new technologies of communication have shrunk geographical and temporal distance, enabling a condition of instantaneity in human interactions as well as the possibility of transculturation and hybridity (harvey 1989). the speed and widening of global interconnectedness seem to have rendered history and geography obsolete, as the transnational flows of people and commodities, ideas and images, capital and information are claimed to dismantle such temporal and spatial barriers as nation and state. this popular view of our contemporary condition not only dissimulates the spatial segregation that characterizes the current form of globalization but it also overlooks the (neo-) colonial dimensions of its complex genealogy. a historically informed engagement with the unequal geography of transnationalism can constitute a critical step in a new direction for postcolonial theorists. in other words, instead of ‘going beyond’ what postcolonialism has already theorized about european forms of imperialism by jumping on the bandwagon of globalization discourse, we may deploy the historical and political knowledge that (post)colonial works have already produced to explore the unequal geography of globalization and its historical links with european colonialism and the process of decolonization. economists have singled out two historical periods, 1870-1939 and 1950-1973, as central to the rise of global order: while in the first period ‘markets for key goods began to acquire a global dimension’, during the second period, labeled the ‘golden age’, ‘trade volumes grew at 5.8 per cent per annum, … [and] world output grew at an unprecedented rate of 3.9 per cent per annum’ (held et al 1999, 163-164). what has been overlooked by economists, however, is the role of european colonialism and de-colonization in the rise of global order, neither acknowledging nor exploring the fact that these periods coincided with the height of european colonialism and its dismantling, respectively. postcolonial discourse, i think, is well positioned to map the colonial contexts of global flows to discern the unequal geography of our global condition. in particular, postcolonial historiography can provide a critical genealogy to explicate the political shift from european colonialism to american imperialism. what are the conditions, we may ask for portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 14 behdad nation and immigration example, that enabled the global spread of imperialism after the spectacular phenomenon of de-colonization? what cultural attitudes, political practices, and economic strategies from the colonial period continue to persist today? why have ex-colonized nations failed to reap the benefits of global trade? there are certainly no easy answers to these questions, but to grapple with the issues they raise may provide a springboard, if not a framework, towards a postcolonial genealogy of globalization. reference list appadurai, a. 1993, ‘patriotism and its futures’, public cultures, vol. 5, no. 3, 411-429, reprinted in appadurai, a. 1996, modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization, university of minnesota press, 158-177. ———1996, modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization, university of minnesota press, minneapolis, 169 armstrong, j. 1976, ‘mobilized and proletarian diasporas’, the american political science review, vol. 70, no. 2, 393-408. barbieri, w. 1998, ethics of citizenship: immigration and group rights in germany, duke university press durham, nc. behdad, a. forthcoming, a forgetful nation: on immigration and cultural identity in the united states, duke university press, durham nc. ______1998, ‘ins and outs: producing delinquency at the border’, aztlan: a journal of chicano studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 103-14. ——— 2005, a forgetful nation: on immigration and cultural identity in the united states, duke university press, durham nc. bhabha, h. 1990a, ‘dissemination: time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation’, in nation and narration, ed. h. bhabha, routledge, new york, 291-322. ______1990b, ‘the third space’, in identity, community, culture, difference, ed. j. rutherford, lawrence and wishart, london, 207-221 calavita, k. 1992, inside the state: the bracero program, immigration and the ins, reference details? clifford, j. 1997, routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth century, harvard university press, cambridge, 1997. fanon, f. 1963, the wretched of the earth, trans. c. farrington, ballantine books, new york. gilroy, p. 1987, ‘there ain’t no black in the union jack’: the cultural politics of race and nation, hutchinson, london. glissant, e. 1989, caribbean discourse: selected essays, trans. m. dash, university of virgina press, charlottesville. held, d. et al 1999, global transformations : politics, economics and culture, polity press, cambridge hall, s. 1990, ‘cultural identity and diaspora’, in identity, community, culture, difference, ed. j. rutherford, lawrence and wishart, london, 222-37 harvey, d. 1989, the search for postmodernity, blackwell, oxford. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 15 behdad nation and immigration iyer, p. 2000, the global soul: jet lag, shopping malls, and the search for home, vintage books, new york. radhakrishnan, r. 1992, ‘nationalism, gender and the narrative of identity’, in nationalisms & sexualities, ed. a. parker, m. russo, d. sommer and p. yaeger, routledge, new york, 77-95. rouse, r. 1991, ‘mexican migration and the social space of postmodernism’, diaspora: a journal of transnational studies, vol. 1, no. 1, (spring), 8-23. said, e. 1984, ‘reflections on exile, granta, vol. 13, 159-172. sassen, s. 2000, ‘spatialities and temporalities of the global: elements for a theorization’, public culture, vol. 12, no. 1, 215-32. silverman, m. 1992, deconstructing the nation: immigration, racism and citizenship in modern france, routledge, london. spivak, g. 1989, ‘who claims alterity?’, in remaking history, ed. b. kruger and p. mariani, bay press, seattle, 269-292. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 16 nation and immigration ali behdad, university of california, los angeles portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: mackie, v., baudinette, t., chakraborty, m. n., chan, d., elfvinghwang, j., pendleton, m., and suganuma, k. 2021. remembering romit dasgupta. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 155–182. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ pjmis.v17i1-2.7470 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay remembering romit dasgupta vera mackie1, thomas baudinette2, mridula nath chakraborty3, debbie chan4, joanna elfving-hwang5, mark pendleton6, katsuhiko suganuma7 1 university of wollongong 2 macquarie university 3 monash university 4 university of western australia 5 university of western australia 6 university of sheffield 7 university of tasmania edited by vera mackie corresponding author: professor vera mackie, honorary senior professor, school of humanities and social inquiry, university of wollongong, wollongong, nsw 2522, australia. vera@uow.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7470 article history: received 13/10/2020; accepted 27/10/2020; published 28/01/2021 abstract romit dasgupta lectured in japanese studies at the university of western australia until his untimely passing in 2018. he was posthumously awarded the philippa maddern award in 2019 by the university of western australia academic staff association. the citation described him as ‘[p]rofessional, highly organised and respectful to all …proactive and willing to help others in regard to any issues, consistently demonstrating his passion in supporting his colleagues and students.’ in the essays collected here, romit’s friends and colleagues reflect on romit’s qualities and his academic contributions. romit dasgupta’s work ranged across gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, cultural studies, cultural history, asian studies and asian-australian studies. each of the authors discusses the inspiration they received from romit dasgupta’s work in these fields. keywords dasgupta; gender; sexuality; asia; australia; migration declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 155 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7470 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7470 https://doi.org/10.1080/10357820903153731 https://doi.org/10.1080/10357820903153731 https://doi.org/10.1080/10357820903153731 mailto:vera%40uow.edu.au?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7470 preface: the gifts of romit dasgupta vera mackie university of wollongong figure 1. souvenir paperweight from turkey; © vera mackie. romit dasgupta lectured in japanese studies at the university of western australia until his untimely passing in 2018. he was posthumously awarded the philippa maddern award in 2019 by the university of western australia academic staff association. the citation described him as ‘[p]rofessional, highly organised and respectful to all, … proactive and willing to help others in regard to any issues, consistently demonstrating his passion in supporting his colleagues and students.’ in the essays collected here, romit’s friends and colleagues reflect on romit’s qualities— his gifts. in academic terms, romit’s work ranged across gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, cultural studies, cultural history, asian studies and asianaustralian studies. he was fluent in japanese, having majored in japanese in his first degree, and went on to mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021156 complete a master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation based on research and fieldwork in japan. his doctoral dissertation formed the basis of his monograph, re-reading the salaryman in japan: crafting masculinities (dasgupta 2013). as can be seen from the essays collected here, dasgupta’s work on masculinities has been hugely influential, well beyond the boundaries of japanese studies. in his recent work he was interested in the relationship between japanese studies and turkish studies, embarking on the study of the turkish language as an adult and spending time in turkey as a visiting fellow. in addition to being a gifted scholar, romit was also gifted in the personal qualities described in the citation above. all of the essays here provide a combination of academic reflection inspired by dasgupta’s work and personal reminiscences of our friendship with romit. i also cherish many actual gifts from romit. both bengali culture and japanese practise gift-giving. over the years romit would come back from trips with some small gift— turkish delight; chocolates from hokkaido; a paperweight from turkey (pictured above as figure 1); and, most poignantly, a shawl which had belonged to his beloved mother. such gifts as these provide a tangible link to my memories of romit dasgupta.1 reference dasgupta, r. 2013, re-reading the salaryman in japan: crafting masculinities. routledge, oxford. 1 these essays developed from a special plenary panel held at the biennial conference of the japanese studies association of australia at monash university in july 2019. we would like to thank laura dales, beatrice trefalt and carolyn s. stevens for their encouragement and facilitation of this panel. thanks also to monash university’s technical staff who supported remote participation by some panellists. samson soulsby provided invaluable editorial support. founding editor of portal paul allatson encouraged this project and current editors nick manganas and alice loda steered it through to completion. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021157 dwelling on masculinity studies katsuhiko suganuma university of tasmania when people write about japanese masculinities, they often cite the works of romit dasgupta. his name repeatedly appears, almost as if compulsory. as a consequence, people may perceive that works by dasgupta are all about japanese salarymen, or the masculinities of those men. but to me, that is somewhat misleading. drawing on raewyn connell’s (2005 [1995]: 77) understanding of gramscian hegemony, what dasgupta does is point out that the hegemonic form of salaryman masculinity is always constructed in relation to other forms of subordinate masculinities. in other words, dasgupta’s work aids in our understanding of how not only the dominant but also minoritarian forms of masculinities (or even femininities) are contemporaneously ‘crafted’ (kondo 1990: 48). for someone like myself who has looked at minoritarian and queer forms of masculinities, i have always appreciated dasgupta’s forms of analysis, which are intersectional and open-ended. this intersectional and open-ended nature of dasgupta’s inquiry also provides us with critical insights into understanding some of the complexities involved in the constructions of post-salaryman masculinity. at the end of his monograph, re-reading the salaryman in japan (2013), dasgupta offers his observations on some alternative forms of masculinities that have assumed a dominant status in recent decades. by way of de-pathologising the qualities of ‘otaku,’ what may be termed techno-otaku masculinity has now been hailed as the foundation of an identity shared among many who live in what azuma hiroki (2009 [2001]: 54) has called a ‘database’-centric and individually atomised consumption society. perhaps related to this phenomenon, critics and scholars alike have referred to the rise of non-‘alpha male’ masculinity, known in japan as sōshoku-kei (herbivore) masculinity (fukasawa 2009; nihei 2013). as dasgupta reminds us at the end of his book, however, the emergence of these alternative forms of hegemonic masculinities does not necessarily represent the liberation and subversion of existing gender and sexual norms (2013: 159). whether it be techno-otaku masculinity, or herbivore men’s masculinity, these alternative masculinities have, as pointed out by other scholars, manifested in response to the demands of a rapidly accelerating socio-economic structure of our time, namely neoliberalism (condry 2011: 265; suganuma 2015: 94). i echo dasgupta’s reservations about treating the rise of techno-otaku masculinity or herbivore masculinity as signs of gender liberation and deconstruction. upon closer inspection, what is operating underneath the constructions of those alternative masculinities are, more often than not, androcentric concerns and misogyny (uno 2017: 453, 460; charlebois 2013: 99– 100). worse still, the rise of these ostensibly ‘emancipatory’ masculinities has been manipulated by some political figures for the purpose of evoking a sense of nostalgia for past cultures and traditions. japan’s former prime minister abe shinzō, us president donald trump and the proponents of brexit all exemplify a surrogate ‘father’ to those who are in fear of uncertainty within neo-liberal states and are in need of resuscitating their allegedly deprived sense of self. with the breakdown of so-called masculine ‘grand narratives,’ such as the cold war, student uprisings, and a championing of capitalist corporate culture, including salaryman masculinity in japan, we now live in a time when there are no longer any ‘big brothers’ operating. database consumption culture (azuma 2009 [2001]) and its augmented reality (uno 2017: 75), which has been rapidly enhanced by digital technology, only assist people in looking inward and being concerned about their own self-interest. as uno tsunehiro (2011) suggests, we, the ‘little’ people, now live looking for a fellow ‘little brother’ in order to create alternative forms of belonging. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021158 taking privileges away from their lives may instil fear in many hetero-normative, able-bodied men. needless to say, such a limit on resources is a common experience among numerous members of gender and sexual minorities. the recent developments of the ‘#metoo’ movement and the legalisation of same-sex marriage across many countries put further pressure on a number of heteronormative able-bodied men to question their belonging to the status quo. are we having a ‘crisis’ of masculinity after having lost ‘grand narratives’? a sense of crisis comes when one feels out of sync, having stepped out of the designated path without knowing how to get back on track. as dasgupta discusses in his book, many salarymen that he interviewed already felt that the ideals of corporate masculinity were hard to attain; nothing but fairy tales which were far removed from their own reality (dasgupta 2013: 45). and yet, many salarymen then still had a perfect ideal male corporate figure whom they could aspire towards becoming. now that preordained path is lost and has been replaced with several alternatives. despite the fact that not all of these alternative routes of masculinities are necessarily liberatory or deconstructive, what indian writer pankaj mishra (2018) rightly calls the recent ‘frustration and fear of feminisation,’ is not merely detrimental to the heteronormative male population. this moment may just provide the necessary opportunity for these men to come to terms with their diverse masculine possibilities– – and put themselves in someone else’s shoes— the shoes of people whose identities have been undermined due to their minoritarian gender and sexuality. a little personal anecdote is in order. romit dasgupta was my academic mentor as well as a good friend. as his close friend, you could not help but notice that he had a great interest in collecting numerous pairs of shoes. every time he attended a conference, he went shoe shopping. to be honest, i do not think that he wore all of the shoes that he purchased. but i can only guess that he liked the idea of trying on shoes of different shapes, styles and colours, imagining how he might look in them, and what he could become. he was not afraid of difference and change. a ‘crisis’ often occurs when one cannot cope with difference and change. being afraid of dealing with differences and changes only prompts us to ignore them in order to alleviate the very sense of crisis. for me, then, it is counterproductive to use the term ‘crisis’ of masculinity to describe the current situation. it is more sensible to suggest that we live in the time of ‘confusion’ of masculinity. confusion accompanies multiple ways of being and ways of thinking. unlike crisis, which more often than not propels fear, confusion allows us to dwell on the moment of reflection and consideration. take japan and the united states for example. there is an uncanny coexistence of two types of popular ‘little father’ or ‘mother’ figures— abe shinzō versus (cross-dresser personality) matsuko deluxe in japan, and donald trump versus (drag queen) rupaul in the united states. are these popular figures— conservative masculinist politicians on one end of the spectrum, campy gender deconstructive divas on the other— two sides of the same coin? or, does each represent a competing form of masculinity in the twenty-first century? the discussion of masculinities is complex and confusing. let us not fear this complexity but dwell on it with patience as dasgupta (2013: 159) taught us. much of dasgupta’s work was concerned with japan. his scholarship could also, however, have significant implications in any cultural context. the time is ripe for dynamic and intersectional analyses of masculinities across nations. this is not a call for a globalist approach to masculinity studies. it is rather a need for ‘connective studies’ (hokari 2007: 15, 18), which attempt to draw productive connections among unexpected subject matters, geopolitics, perspectives and methodologies. i feel that dasgupta attempted his version of ‘connective studies’ when he shifted a focal point of his research from japan to turkey toward the end of his life. we are left with the seeds he planted. dasgupta’s work has and continues to be an inspiration for expanding our enduring understanding of masculinities in japan and beyond. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021159 references azuma, h. 2009 [2001], otaku: japan’s database animals, trans. j. e. abel & s. kono. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-75429 charlebois, j. 2013, ‘herbivore masculinity as an oppositional form of masculinity,’ culture, society & masculinities, vol. 5, no. 1: 89–104. https://doi.org/10.3149/csm.0501.89 condry, i. 2011, ‘love revolution: anime, masculinity, and the future,’ in recreating japanese men, (eds) s. frühstück & a. walthall. university of california press, berkeley: 262–283. connell, r. w. 2005 [1995], masculinities. polity, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1525/ california/9780520267374.003.0013 dasgupta, r. 2013, re-reading the salaryman in japan: crafting masculinities. routledge, oxford. fukasawa, m. 2009, sōshoku danshi sedai: heisei danshi zukan [herbivore men’s generation: an illustrated guide to the men of the heisei era]. kōbunsha, tokyo. hokari, m. 2007, ‘mediating on connective studies: indigenous histories of australia and japan in the era of globalisation,’ in on the western edge: comparisons of japan and australia, (eds) m. tada & l. dale. networks books, perth: 15–22. kondo, d. k. 1990, crafting selves: power, gender, and discourses of identity in a japanese workplace. the university of chicago press, chicago. nihei, c. 2013, ‘resistance and negotiation: “herbivorous men” and murakami haruki’s gender and political ambiguity,’ asian studies review, vol. 37, no. 1: 62–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2012.760528 mishra, p. 2018, ‘the crisis in modern masculinity,’ the guardian, 17 march. online, available: https://www. theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/the-crisis-in-modern-masculinity [accessed 22 june 2020]. suganuma, k. 2015, ‘queer cooking and dining: expanding queerness in fumi yoshinaga’s what did you eat yesterday?,’ culture, society & masculinities, vol. 7, no. 2: 87–101. uno, t. 2011, ritoru pīpuru no jidai [the era of little people]. gentōsha, tokyo. ______ 2017, bosei no disutopia [maternal dystopia]. shūeisha, tokyo. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021160 https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-75429 https://doi.org/10.3149/csm.0501.89 https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520267374.003.0013 https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520267374.003.0013 https://doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2012.760528 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/the-crisis-in-modern-masculinity https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/the-crisis-in-modern-masculinity consumption of japanese gay pornographic films: erotic salarymen and fantasies of straightness thomas baudinette macquarie university a key theorist within the study of contemporary gender in japan, romit dasgupta was a kind and generous colleague that i had the privilege of first meeting towards the end of my phd candidature. since our first meeting at a conference in adelaide some years ago, romit provided me with immense support as i navigated my way through the transition from phd student into an at times bewildering academic career. dasgupta’s excellent scholarship has been essential to my own work on the gendered politics of japan’s gay culture and i often dialogued with him as i completed my first book manuscript and embarked on new projects. romit’s advice over the brief time that i knew him has greatly shaped my own emerging career within the japanese studies community and i wish to pay tribute to his conscientiousness and, above all, to his willingness to mentor early career researchers such as myself. romit’s generosity, his free spirit, and his enquiring mind will continue to live on in the work of all of us that he has mentored. indeed, his legacy is inscribed into the work of a generation of scholars of japanese society for whom he represented an intellectual giant, inspiring mentor, and supportive friend. in this brief reflective essay, i draw upon romit dasgupta’s important study of white-collar masculinity in japan (2013) to elucidate how pornography contours desires for hegemonic masculinity among young japanese gay men. gay pornographic films— known as gv— play a particularly prominent role in influencing young gay men about the nature of their same-sex attraction in japan. over the past seven years, i have interviewed men about how media consumption impacts their understandings of their desires. i have also conducted a longitudinal ethnography of tokyo’s gay district of shinjuku ni-chōme. it has become increasingly apparent that gv are key texts that young men draw upon to learn about sexuality and gender expression. indeed, walking along naka-dōri, the main thoroughfare of ni-chōme, one is assaulted by pornographic images of men in various stages of undress utilised to advertise the district’s gay bars. encountering pornographic texts is even more common within the stores dotted throughout the district. these adult stores represent one of the major distribution centres for gv. throughout my ethnography of ni-chōme it became apparent that coming to browse through these stores’ pornographic content is a significant social practice within this gay homosocial space. through my ethnography and interviews with approximately fifty young gay men, i learnt that not only is pornography deployed by young men to make sense of the mechanics of sexual behaviour (‘learning how to fuck’), but gv also produce a political economy through the privileging of certain body types and gendered performances that strongly impact consumers’ understandings of what is and is not desirable (‘learning who to fuck and why’). in this brief article, i analyse how the figure of the white-collar worker or ‘salaryman’ is deployed within japanese gay pornography as one of many tactics that produce an idealised heterosexual man (or nonke in japanese gay slang) for gay male consumption. through interviews with four key informants with the pseudonyms junho, yōichi, haruma, and shōtarō,2 i then elucidate how the consumption of porn has impacted understandings of same-sex attraction by inculcating desires for otokorashisa (manliness) and nonkerashisa (straightness). in so doing, i extend the ground-breaking work of romit dasgupta (2013) to reveal that the salaryman plays an integral role in contouring japanese gay men’s 2 these four men were all in their early twenties at the time of first interview and possessed sufficient economic capital to regularly visit ni-chōme, identifying as middle-class. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021161 understandings of bodily comportment and style, extending our understandings of this crucial symbol of post-war japanese masculinity. katrien jacobs, in discussing the potential of internationalised porn studies in the asian region, has noted that many consumers of pornography in mainland china and hong kong do not ‘easily endorse [the] western ideologies or bodily aesthetics’ which have become central to porn studies research (2014: 115). that is, jacobs argues that rather than images of extremely muscular and well-endowed men, asian consumers of pornography prefer the slender, ‘soft’ bodies of so-called bishōnen (beautiful male youths) (2014: 115). examining pornographic media produced for women in japan such as boys love (bl) manga, ladies’ comics and the films of female-friendly porn company silk labo, jacobs’s statement does appear to hold true (see also mori 2010; hambleton 2016). japan’s gay pornographic media, however, paints a different picture. when asked to describe the content of gv, for example, both junho and yōichi utilised the phrase kin’niku bakuhatsu or ‘an explosion of muscle’ with reference to the typical physicality of performers. through analysis of 810 gv films, i discovered that many films do indeed feature men possessing a heavily muscled body (with prominent pectorals and rippling abdominal muscles). this body type is referred to as gatai and is privileged throughout japan’s gay culture as normatively desirable (baudinette 2017: 520– 521). the sex depicted in such films was also often rough and violent, with rape and the uncontrollable nature of men’s sexual desire forming a common trope. through analysing the promotional material for 810 gv films, i discovered that 95.5 per cent of the films (767/810) only featured models explicitly marketed as nonke, whereas 4.5 per cent (43/810) featured models identifying as gay men. i also uncovered that gv films deployed three specific discourses throughout this corpus to justify why nonke would engage in sex with other men. these three discourses were to emphasise the ‘first time’ nature of the nonke model’s gay sex act to create a sense of adventure; to present the sex act as being ‘forced’ upon the nonke (often evoking images of rape and pain); and to focus upon the unexpected nature of a nonke’s ability to enjoy having sex with men. throughout the corpus of films, nonke were positioned as objects of desire, privileged as specimens of an ideal masculinity. discussions with gay men revealed that most regular consumers of gv always already understood gv performers to be amateur straight men. yōichi explained to me that one of the principal pleasures of watching japanese gay porn was seeing nonke either ‘get fucked’ by the gv film company’s staff or ‘fuck each other’ and that this was empowering for gay men who are often positioned as somehow lesser than straight men in society. the passivity of the nonke body within gv thus rendered them commodities, with heterosexuality rendered a symbolic object for gay male consumption. the overwhelming presence of nonke models in gv has strongly influenced how young gay japanese men understand their desires, inculcating in many the belief that the nonke represents an ideal sexual partner and subsequently driving them to seek out sexual and romantic partners whom they described as upholding ‘nonke characteristics’ (nonke no tokuchō). junho, yōichi, and shōtarō particularly expressed a desire to find partners who possessed a nonke’s idealised gatai body. their belief that an ideal nonke would have a gym-trained, muscular gatai body derived from the heteronormative ideologies which circulate throughout the japanese gay media landscape. this led many japanese gay men to conflate the bodies they viewed in gv with the notion of nonkerashisa or ‘straight-acting nature.’ how did this conflation come about? i would argue that the belief that an ideal nonke would possess a gatai body developed due to the common appearance of salaryman characters within gv. within the corpus of gv films that i analysed, approximately 30.7 per cent (249/810) of the films contained at least one scene where a model explicitly performed the role of a salaryman (often marked through wearing the salaryman uniform of a black suit, white shirt and tie). promotional images in which salarymen reveal their heavily muscular torsos are common within gv. it is unsurprising that consumers would make links between the salaryman image and a gatai physique within such circumstances. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021162 in his ground-breaking work on the symbolic role of the salaryman within japanese society, romit dasgupta (2013: 2) persuasively argues that the salaryman has come to embody hegemonic understandings of masculinity in post-second world war japan. throughout his career, dasgupta traced representations of the salaryman within media (including gay media) and interviewed white-collar workers to paint a picture of the role the salaryman plays in educating japanese men about what it means to be a man. dasgupta reveals that the salaryman’s ideological positioning as ‘bread-winner’ (figuratively referred to as daikokubashira, the black pillar which supports the roof of the house) to his wife and children is central to definitions of otokorashisa (masculinity or ‘male nature’) (46). this promotes a narrative in japan that ‘true’ men are active in both the workforce in an economic sense and in the bed in a sexual sense, since the salaryman is intimately tied to the image of the father and husband. that is, as a symbol for ideal fatherhood and as representative of the postwar ‘corporate warrior’ (kigyō senshi) (ueno 1995: 215– 216), the salaryman image embodies what my informants termed ‘nonke characteristics’ (nonke no tokuchō). for my four key informants, the salaryman is more than just a symbolic representation of an ideal masculine ‘role.’ the salaryman also represented an aesthetic, a bodily comportment or style. the gatai bodies possessed by the models in gv became tied to a fetish for the salaryman as an index for an ‘attraction’ or akogare for straightness (nonkerashisa) itself. in my work on pornographic consumption among gay japanese men i have also found an aesthetic within japan’s gay culture that resuscitates hegemonic masculinity within a social space that mainstream society often understands as ‘failing’ to uphold ‘normal’ masculine ideals. that is, the prevalence of salarymen in japanese gay pornography produces ideologies that teach japanese gay men to fuck men possessing ‘nonke characteristics’ because such characteristics embody ‘normative’ masculinity. during interviews, junho, yōichi, haruma and shōtarō each candidly admitted that consuming gv had indeed inculcated within them a desire to ‘fuck straight guys’ because their ‘masculinity’ (otokorashisa) was considered to be both physically attractive and emotionally appealing. these informants, as well as other gay men i met in tokyo over the years, explained that watching films and reading comics depicting straight men ‘being fucked’ represented an important fetish in the japanese gay culture. junho, yōichi, haruma and shōtarō explained that they had developed a desire to experience sex with a nonke at least once in their lives through their consumption of gv. the four men’s comments resonate quite strongly with the experiences of hong kong gay men who subscribe to the so-called ‘sissy’ sub-culture as reported by yau ching (2010). extrapolating upon her informants’ desires to sleep with straight men, yau ching notes: [that] the fantasy to date or have straight boys might be closely akin to a naturalized/socialized desire to access normativity— to be as close to being normal as possible because it is through sleeping with straight boys that one can imagine being close to getting married, having children and building families. thus, the moment of being closest to normativity is also the moment of confirming the impossibility of one’s desire… [it is] the moment of knowing one’s queerness. (2010: 3, emphasis in original) while i doubt that these four men’s reported desire to sleep with nonke also indicated a desire to participate in such heteronormative activities as marriage and child-rearing, their fetishised desire for straight men as embodied within the image of the salaryman speaks volumes about how consuming pornography has influenced their understandings of their desires. moving forward, it will become essential to continue to tease out the role of the salaryman within this process. in so doing, i hope to further extend romit dasgupta’s work and bring nuance to our understandings of the complexities underlying masculinity in contemporary japan. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021163 references baudinette, t. 2017, ‘the spatialization of desire in a japanese gay district through signage,’ acme: an international journal of critical geography, vol. 16, no. 3: 500–527. online, available: https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/ view/1357 [accessed 17 september 2019]. dasgupta, r. 2013, re-reading the salaryman in japan: crafting masculinities. routledge: oxford. hambleton, a. 2016, ‘when women watch: the subversive potential of female-friendly pornography in japan,’ porn studies, vol. 3, no. 4: 427–442. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2015.1065203 jacobs, k. 2014, ‘internationalising porn studies,’ porn studies, vol. 1, nos 1–2: 114–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268 743.2014.882178 mori, n. 2010, onna wa poruno o yomu: josei no seiyoku to feminizumu [women read porn: women’s desire and feminism]. seikyūsha: tokyo. ueno, c. 1995, ‘kigyō senshi-tachi’ [corporate warriors], in danseigaku: nihon no feminizumu bessatsu [men’s studies: japan’s feminism supplement],’ (eds) inoue teruko, ueno chizuko and ehara yumiko. tokyo, iwanami shoten: 215–216. yau, c. 2010, ‘dreaming of normal while sleeping with impossible: introduction’, in as normal as possible: negotiating sexuality and gender in mainland china and hong kong, (ed.) c. yau. hong kong university press: hong kong: 1–14. https://doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789622099876.003.0001 mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021164 https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1357 https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1357 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2015.1065203 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2014.882178 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2014.882178 https://doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789622099876.003.0001 researching corporate masculinities in south korea joanna elfving-hwang university of western australia in my contribution to this collection of essays i will illustrate the wider currency of romit dasgupta’s work beyond japanese studies. reflecting on dasgupta’s intellectual contributions in an interdisciplinary and trans-asian studies context is particularly fitting as romit was someone who understood that working together as a community of asian studies scholars could only strengthen our country-focused research areas as a whole. he was, however, also sympathetic to asian studies colleagues who felt the need to create ‘area studies silos.’ this was sometimes to ensure that their programs remained country-focused so as not to fall victim to the next institutional restructure seeking to merge ‘similar’ disciplines, and sometimes because of limits dictated by external funding from national governments which demand a country-specific research focus. as a scholar, romit dasgupta was certainly not wedded to a single geographic context (1997, 2015). in fact, over the years working with romit at the university of western australia, i was often struck and inspired by his intellectual curiosity about fields of study that seemed to have very few overlaps with his own and his constant desire to build connections across geographic and disciplinary boundaries. for me, as a uk-educated scholar of korean studies where i felt that the boundaries within asian studies were sometimes rigidly guarded, romit’s enthusiasm for the intellectual work of his colleagues was not only humbling but also inspirational. there were many quiet saturday afternoons when we were both in our offices attempting to catch up on the endless list of outstanding administrative tasks and overdue deadlines. at these times we often wondered why— despite the obvious historical and cultural overlaps and affinities (as well as animosities) that japan and korea share— more transnational research projects were not common in our respective fields. we wondered whether our respective academic communities could ever escape these historical legacies. dasgupta’s work on salaryman masculinities is one example where the field of korean studies can benefit from a transnational focus. in this essay i will illustrate how dasgupta’s work, and the many corridor conversations i had the privilege to have with romit over the years, have influenced my own work on south korean masculinities. while masculinity studies now exist in south korea as an area of academic enquiry, the main impetus for the initial development of gender studies in korea (and by extension in korean studies) was the focus on women’s rights as workers and as mothers. as academic feminist movements gained foothold in korean academia from the 1980s, scholars influenced by contemporaneous gender studies scholarship in the us and france began to analyse the place of visual and textual representations of femininity in the patriarchal symbolic order (an 1992; chŏng, s. 1992; chŏng, y. 1999; hŏ 1996; pak 1992; sŏng, m. 1994; sŏng, c. 1995, 1996). by the 1990s the field of global korean studies had no shortage of korean and non-korean scholars (myself included) engaged in social, historical, literary and discursive analyses of why patriarchal structures had proved so pervasive in korea; how these ideas permeated cultural discourses of gender and femininity; and how these influenced individual women in their everyday lived contexts. by contrast, masculinity remained, until recently— as todd reeser has observed in the context of european masculinities— invisible as an object of academic enquiry beyond providing a discursive structure against which analyses of patriarchal oppression were conducted (2010: 16– 21). it was not until korean scholars began to illustrate how hegemonic masculinities are tied to notions of militarised masculinity and national identity that we have begun to draw the contours of how hegemonic masculinities continue to underlie notions mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021165 of citizenship as a community of men (choi 1998; han & ling 1998; moon 1998, 2005). this link between idealised hypermasculinity and authoritarian statehood has been further advanced by other scholars (murphree 2008). these studies have been helpful in explaining why challenging the continuing patriarchal dividend in the workplace is necessary and also why violence against women’s bodies continues to evade appropriate legal consequences in korea. it also explains why men who aspire to non-heterosexual relationships, or who are uncomfortable with hegemonic notions of militarised masculinity, have been portrayed as non-normative or even deviant in media, identity politics and legal protection of sexual diversity. notions about what an ideal (male) worker should look like have been fashioned in and through men’s fashion and self-help magazines and books. since the 1980s these publications have provided guidance for average working men on how to perform corporate masculinity in the workplace in order to maximise their career opportunities. in this respect, what we might call corporate somatic aesthetics have always been recognised as an important part of men’s professional identities. these performances of corporate masculinity through clothing and body language have become highly recognisable in popular culture. some of the most popular recent tv series in korea feature the travails of hapless corporate soldiers who struggle to hold on to their jobs in the precarious workplace (elfving-hwang 2017). the immense popularity of these fictional representations among male viewing audiences attests to how relatable these narratives are. in the context of my own work on the way in which men embody corporate masculinity in the workplace, dasgupta’s work on salarymen in japan has been helpful in conceptualising how men negotiate ‘ideal’ hegemonic masculinities in national and local company culture contexts while rarely being able to entirely measure up to them (2000: 191). instead, men utilise what dasgupta refers to as ‘a host of individual ontologies of masculinity that engage with the dominant in varying ways’ (2000: 191). the corporate cultures within which japanese salaryman masculinities developed in postwar japan were not entirely dissimilar to the masculinised (and militarised) corporate cultures of korea in the 1980s and 1990s. echoing the corporate soldier in the japanese imaginary that dasgupta identifies in his work on the salaryman (2013: 29), the connection between military cultures and company cultures has also played an important role in korea in constructing corporate masculinities in terms of ‘corporate soldiers’ fighting for the benefit of the national economy. furthermore, larger south korean corporations developed company-specific corporate cultures, manifested in ideas about appropriate corporate attire, ways of addressing colleagues, and values that employees were expected to adhere to (renshaw 2012: 67; elfving-hwang 2020: 146). this corporate culture was effectively used to build a strong sense of belonging to the company as a community of workers. when i embarked on this research project on corporate masculinities in south korea in 2015, partly inspired by my corridor conversations with romit, i found that surprisingly little research had been done on how individual korean men negotiate within corporate cultural and aesthetic expectations and what social meanings they attach to these social practices of the body and presentation of self. i soon discovered during my field research in korea that the stereotypical corporate ‘saellŏrimaen’ is increasingly a thing of the past. structural changes in workplace practices have meant that most middle-aged men leave (or are forced to leave) corporate employment in their 40s or are only able to secure short fixed-term contracts. in this context, many of the techniques to enhance a sense of belonging through ‘crafting’ men to fit into corporate expectations of body language, correct conduct and corporate attire. these formed the company culture (hoesa munhwa) that all employees were expected to learn in order to fit in and succeed. these observations resonate with what dasgupta discovered in his study on how japanese men responded to the changes in the workplace in the ‘post-bubble’ japan (2000: 190) and illustrate the importance of bodily capital for men in contemporary korean workplace. i interviewed 15 men aged 33 to 55 living in the seoul metropolitan area who all worked or had previously worked in a corporate setting. some were managers whereas others had not managed to climb the corporate ladder very far before having been offered a redundancy package and joining the growing mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021166 number of men over 40 years of age who are self-employed or under-employed. none of the men felt that they embodied the kind of suave global corporate masculinity that they thought well-paid employees of larger corporations such as samsung, hyundai and lg might wish to project on a daily basis. they were all, however, very aware of the need to learn, embody and perform corporate masculinities appropriate to the company culture within which they worked. most aesthetic labour performed in the workplace contexts was therefore informed by a desire to conform to shared cultural values, and most of the participants expressed anxiety over potential inadvertent transgressions in this respect. moreover, company culture-specific dress codes intersected with performing heterosexual masculinity in the workplace as a site for producing ideal bodies for the homosocial gaze (and the gaze of their managers in particular), rather than for the admiration of female co-workers. the drivers behind aesthetic labour and specific choices of what aspects of their bodies the participants chose to invest in were seen to be closely linked to bodily capital and often had less to do with neoliberal notions of branding self as a useful ‘asset’ to the employer. ‘bodily capital’ here refers therefore not only to how physical appearance is linked to assumptions of professionalism, knowledge and skills (bourdieu 1984: 192– 193) but also to the ability to utilise everyday somatic etiquette to smooth social relationships in the workplace. the participants explained that projecting youthful vitality through fashionable clothing, a (relatively) fit body, good skin and remedying thinning or greying hair was not considered simply a way to signal continuing ability to work hard to the managers making decisions about the participants’ contractual status. more than this, aesthetic labour was seen as a matter of social etiquette in the workplace, through which internal values such as reliability and loyalty could be signalled to enhance social harmony and a sense of belonging. for men in this age group, turning 40 also often meant that they felt anxious about staying ‘relevant’ and in-touch with concerns and interests of younger workers. for many, then, focusing on maintaining youthful and fit bodies was seen as a ‘social lubricant’ to ensure that they appeared relevant to and in touch with the world views of their younger colleagues. it is perhaps in this highly social and affective aspect of performing corporate masculinities that comparative studies on both south korean and japanese corporate contexts might yield some interesting findings that have the potential to benefit the field of masculinity studies as a whole. in this short essay i have demonstrated how dasgupta’s intellectual influence is woven into the fabric of my work on corporate aesthetics and the sociology of the body. his influence has not been limited to ideas presented in his publications, but i also benefited from his generous feedback on my work. it was in this dialogue with romit, and recognising the similarities and transnational flows of ideas (that are often so obvious but all too often not taken advantage of ), between south korea and japan that my research directions on corporate masculinities in south korea have taken shape. i am glad that through my work i can in some small way continue to build on his intellectual legacy. yet above everything else, for all of us who had the good fortune to know romit dasgupta, it is his kindness, collegiality and the care that he showed to us all that have left the most valuable legacy to pay forward to future asian studies students. references an, s. (ed.). 1995, han’guk yŏsŏng munhak pip’yŏngnon (한국여성 문학 비평론) [the theory of korean women’s literature]. kaemunsa, seoul. bourdieu, p. 1984, distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste, trans. r. nice. routledge and kegan paul, london. choi, c. 1998, ‘nationalism and construction of gender in korea,’ in dangerous women, gender & korean nationalism, (eds) e. h. kim and c. choi. routledge, london: 9–31. chŏng, s. 1992, han’guk munhak gwa yŏsŏngjuŭi pip’yŏng (한국 문학과 여성주의비평) [korean literature and feminist criticism]. research centre for korean studies, seoul. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021167 chŏng, y. 1999, han’guk p’eminijŭm munhak yŏn’gu (한국 페미니즘 문학 연구) [a study of korean feminist literature]. choŭnnal, seoul. dasgupta, r. 1997, ‘thoughts on the nexus between japanese studies and cultural studies,’ japanese studies, vol. 17, nos. 2–3: 4–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10371399708727626 dasgupta, r. 2000, ‘performing masculinities? the “salaryman” at work and play,’ japanese studies, vol. 20, no. 2: 189–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/713683779 dasgupta, r. 2013, re-reading the salaryman in japan: crafting masculinities. routledge, oxford. dasgupta, r. 2015, ‘pushing boundaries: turkey and the reframing of asia and asian studies,’ asian currents: 8–10. http://asaa.asn.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/asian-currents-february-2015.pdf elfving-hwang, j. 2020, ‘competency as an embodied social practice: clothing, presentation of self and corporate masculinity in south korea,’ in making it like a man: men, masculinities and the modern career, (eds) k. aarvik & j. hoegaerds. walter de gruyter gmbh: berlin: 137–151. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651874-008 elfving-hwang, j. 2017, ‘the aesthetics of authenticity: corporate masculinities in contemporary south korean television dramas,’ asia pacific perspectives, vol. 15, no. 2: 55–79. han, j. & ling, l. 1998, ‘authoritarianism in the hypermasculinized state: hybridity, patriarchy and capitalism in korea,’ international studies quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1: 53–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/0020-8833.00069 hŏ, m. 1996, han’guk yŏsŏng munhak yŏn’gu (한국여성문학 연구) [a study of korean women’s literature]. t’aehaksa, seoul. moon, s. 1998, ‘begetting the nation: the androcentric discourse of national history and tradition in south korea,’ in dangerous women: gender and korean nationalism, (eds) e. h. kim & c. choi. routledge, london: 33–66. moon, s. 2005, ‘trouble with conscription, entertaining soldiers: popular culture and the politics of militarized masculinity in south korea,’ men and masculinities, vol. 8, no 1: 64–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184x04268800 murphree, h. 2008, ‘transnational cultural production and the politics of moribund masculinity,’ positions: asia critique, vol. 16, no. 3: 661–688. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-2008-017 pak, h. (ed.). 1992, yŏjaro malhagi, momŭro kkŭl ssŭgi (여자로 말하기, 몸으로 글쓰기) [speaking the feminine, writing the body]. tto hana ŭi munhwa, seoul. reeser, t. w. 2010, masculinities in theory. wiley-blackwell: chichester. renshaw, j. r. 2012, korean women managers and corporate culture: challenging tradition, choosing empowerment, creating change. taylor and francis, florence. song, c. 1996, p’eminijŭm pip’yŏng gwa han’guk sosŏl (페미니즘 비평과 한국소설) [feminist criticism and the korean novel]. kukhak charyuwŏn, seoul. song, c. 1995, tasi ssŭnŭn yŏsŏng gwa munhak (다시 쓰는 여성과 문학) [rewriting women and literature]. p’yŏngminsa, seoul. song, m. 1994, munhak kwa sŏng ŭi ideollogi (문학과 성의 이데올로기) [literature and the ideology of gender]. saemi, seoul. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021168 https://doi.org/10.1080/10371399708727626 https://doi.org/10.1080/713683779 http://asaa.asn.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/asian-currents-february-2015.pdf https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651874-008 https://doi.org/10.1111/0020-8833.00069 https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184x04268800 https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-2008-017 the zero mobo: erasing the modern boy in interwar japan debbie chan university of western australia although romit dasgupta left us in july 2018, his academic legacy in the study of gender remains, particularly his work on the japanese salaryman. dasgupta wrote extensively on the emergence and crafting of japanese salaryman masculinity as a hegemonic ideal (2013). in this essay, i consider a form of masculinity which shared continuities with the salaryman discourse in the 1920s and 1930s but eventually disappeared from media use by the late 1930s. i am referring to the figure of the ‘modern boy’ (modan bōi, or mobo), who was generally seen paired with the ‘modern girl’ (modan gāru, or moga). unlike the salaryman discourse that continued after the second world war and grew in cultural prominence and prestige, the modern boy became a relic of the interwar period, at best mentioned today as a nostalgic or artistic symbol of the early decades of the twentieth century (kaikō 5-toshi mobo moga o sagase! : hakodate, niigata, yokohama, kōbe, nagasaki, 2012: 6– 7; mobo moga ga mita tōkyō, 2018: 8– 9; mizusawa 1998: 5– 7; sakamoto 2003: 1– 4; ātsu 2016: 5). in the early years of dasgupta’s career researching the salaryman’s early twentieth-century origins, he drew continuities between the japanese salaryman and the modern boy. on the surface, there may appear to be little in common between the emerging discourse of salaryman masculinity (which appeared to conform to the requirements of the ideology [of the] modernizing nation-state) and the ostensibly non-conformist mobo masculinity. yet i would argue that in many respects, these two forms of masculinity intersected and overlapped with each other… both the salaryman and the modern boy were quite clearly products of urban modernity— specifically the urban new middle class. (2004: 73) indeed, dasgupta’s documentation of a sketch of the salaryman’s flirtation with a waitress presumably at a café (figure 1) bears resemblance to the sexual frivolity commonly associated with modern boy representations.3 not much more about the modern boy is mentioned in dasgupta’s subsequent works but this insight into the modern boy as a competing form of urban masculinity in connection to salaryman masculinity during japan’s interwar years raises certain questions. if the modern boy was a newly emergent figure of urban masculinity during the interwar years that overlapped with the figure of salaryman, why and how did the modern boy not become a more dominant masculine ideal like the salaryman? indeed, in the 1920s and 1930s, a definitive distinction between the two was at times impossible. by the 1950s, however, the differences were stark as the post-war hegemonic ideal of salaryman masculinity centred on the fulfilment of the nation-state’s agenda via economic productivity (dasgupta 2013: 29), traits very much in opposition to the non-conformist, non-productive and consumption-focussed modern boy of the 1920s. this was a historical shift in the ideological underpinnings and embodied practices of urban masculinity, reflected in the way the modern boy disappeared into obscurity within a few short years of his emergence. 3 an article in a women’s magazine links the modern boy to foreign (western) influence, romance and sexual flirtation with the modern girl in public spaces such as cafes, train stations and cinema theatres. fujin gahō [women’s pictorial], 1 june 1931: 90. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021169 figure 1. ‘the art of kissing,’ the salaried man, 1930, vol. 3, no. 7: 28. the modern boy’s emergence and subsequent disappearance in media discourses therefore need to be analysed as indicative of the changing discourses of gender, modernity and identity during the interwar period. the interwar trajectory of the modern boy provides a certain insight into the processes of gender construction, stigmatisation and erasure in japanese interwar society. we can trace the power dynamics involved in the social elevation of salaryman masculinity and the erasure of modern boy masculinity, despite overlaps and interconnections between the two. in this brief essay, i touch on deepening anxieties regarding female emancipation and what was seen as ‘western’ modernity. these anxieties underpinned many negative portrayals of the modern boy. i explore how the modern boy’s erasure as a relevant and socially viable masculinity in interwar japanese society was discursively engineered and co-opted for the consolidation of a patriarchal and nationalist masculine identity. the mobo as a ‘zero’— deepening social anxieties modern boy masculinity was constructed in discourse as introducing new directions for urban masculinity in the vein of the new, the modern, and the emancipatory, but this construction was almost always an ambivalent one. a strong trend of the modern boy discourse was the invalidation of these new directions in the form of parody, derogatory critique and dismissals.4 in a roundtable discussion on modernity involving several intellectuals, the modern boy was described as a ‘zero,’ a ‘minus,’ and a ‘meaningless existence’ in that there was no valid justification for the man that he was (shinchō january 1928: 134– 135). in other words, the modern boy was socially invalidated as a viable type of masculinity in interwar japanese society. other media sources commenting on the modern boy also reflect this trend, most often in relation to issues of gender and modernity. 4 various sources discussing the modern boy in the late 1920s and early 1930s frame him in terms of mockery and parody. a 1928 article in shinchō magazine entitled ‘modan seikatsu mandankai’ [a conversation about modern life] and a book section entitled ‘modan bōi shōsatsu’ [laughing off the modern boy] in nanpa dairokkan [the sixth sense of male seduction] are just two examples that describe him in terms of a humorous dismissal and a parody of masculinity. see shinchō january 1928: 134– 135 and sakata toshio 1928: 154– 161. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021170 gender a salient aspect of the modern boy discourse was the notion that the modern boy and modern girl blurred fixed notions of gender. at a time when a female work force was emerging and female progressiveness was celebrated as part of japan’s new modern culture (harootunian 2000: 9– 12, 25), representations featuring the heterosexual dynamic of the moga mobo relationship typically positioned the modern girl as a dominant and threatening woman in antagonistic opposition to an emasculated and feminised/effeminate modern boy. the modern boy therefore was commonly associated with gender ambiguity or cross-dressing tendencies (figures 2 and 3) or depicted as a powerless victim of the modern girl (figure 4). these illustrations articulate an anxiety regarding what was perceived as a role reversal between the sexes, which needs to be contextualised within the debate surrounding the heterosexual dynamics of power and the apparent emancipation of women in interwar japanese society. figure 2. ‘moga mobo fuku no torikae’ [moga mobo clothes swap], asahi gurafu [asahi graphic], 1928, vol. 11, no. 10: 21. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021171 figure 3. ‘chūsei jinbutsu’ [androgynous person], asahi gurafu [asahi graphic], 1928, vol. 10, no. 9: 27. the magazine caption labels this person as a ‘mogabo,’ a composite figure of the moga and mobo. figure 4. asahi gurafu [asahi graphic], 1928, vol. 10, no. 2: 8. the threatening figure of the modern girl is juxtaposed with the wounded modern boy who bears scars on his hands from her claw-like fingernails. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021172 there are two problems with such representations. first, even if the modern boy discourse negotiates alternative meanings of masculinity, these meanings are rejected by ‘othering’ them as feminine attributes instead of expanding the cultural meanings of masculinity. secondly, the modern boy in partnership with the more autonomous type of femininity in the modern girl is depicted as non-masculine and in antagonistic opposition to the modern girl as a victim of her domineering aggression. this has significant repercussions on the viability of a feminist type of masculinity in any society that sets up an oppositional binary between the two sexes and subscribes to a zero-sum conception of heterosexual gender relations. when women grow in power and autonomy, it seems, men necessarily diminish.5 western modernity aside from deepening gender anxieties, fashion pictorials depicting the fashionable modern boy and girl in the late 1920s and early 1930s also increasingly express anxieties over a western modernity that was perceived as incommensurate with interwar japanese society and identity. a 1929 fashion spread, for example, labels modernity as a ‘disease’ and modern girls and boys as sufferers of this disease (figure 5). essentially, modernity in japanese society was being fragmented into western and japanese constituents that were constructed as oppositional and mutually exclusive. this splitting of modernity and identity into eastern and western constituents involves equating western modernity with the modern girl and boy. the modern boy is presented as a non-indigenous construct: a westernised, ‘foreign’ person who needs to be expelled from japanese society in the consolidation of an authentic japanese identity. figure 5. ‘modan-byō’ [modern disease], asahi gurafu [asahi graphic], 1929, vol. 12, no. 15: 4– 5. the text reads: ‘tokyo is changing, like the rest of the world. for one thing it is by degrees getting used to its “mobo” and “moga”. what may look silly to one is the supreme raison d’être of another! here are shown some of those suffere[r]s from “the strange disease of modern life” in tokyo.’ by the 1940s, the modern boy term seems to have disappeared from media use. fashion spreads and articles on the modern boy were replaced by an emergent nationalistic and militarised youth ideal associated with bodily regulation, patriotism, self-sacrifice and the technological advancements of modern warfare (figure 6). the erasure of modern boy masculinity did not start in the 1940s. it was there from the very 5 on the difficulties and potentialities of a feminist masculinity that is in support of feminist objectives, see kimmel (1987), gardiner (2002) and wiegman (2002). for a recent study exploring the concept of a zero-sum perspective of gender, see ruthig et al. (2017). mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021173 beginning of the modern boy’s emergence in japanese society, when the new ideas of masculinity he represented were increasingly denounced, so much so that few people, if any, self-identified as one.6 figure 6. ‘shōnen-hei to kodomotachi’ [youth soldiers and children], taiyō [the sun], 1944, vol. 3, no. 1: 10– 11. a closing in remembrance i started this essay with a question arising from dasgupta’s work on the japanese salaryman— how and why did the modern boy discourse diverge so far from the hegemonic ideal of the salaryman when both seemed to have similar points of origin? in the exploration of the modern boy in terms of his eventual erasure as a relevant and socially viable masculinity in interwar japanese society, i have argued that social anxieties in the interwar period constructed the ‘modern boy’ as a negative example of a modern man, ensuring his marginalisation and subordination to other masculinities such as the salaryman or the soldier. it is dasgupta’s work on the crafting of the salaryman as a hegemonic ideal that constantly reminds me of the politics at work in processes of gender construction. this invites my line of questioning on the role that alternative masculinities such as the modern boy play in the reinforcement of a particular ideology of masculinity as hegemonic. my continuing research on the modern boy is in honour of dasgupta’s keen inquiry into the complexities of an interrelated understanding of gender, identity, culture and power. references asahi gurafu [asahi graphic], 4 january 1928: 8. ______ . [asahi graphic], 22 february 1928: 27. ______ . [asahi graphic], 5 september 1928: 21. ______ . [asahi graphic], 10 april 1929: 4–5. ātsu, m. (ed.). 2016, eien no modan bōi: tanaka seihyō [the eternal modern boy: tanaka seihyō). suiseisha, tokyo. 6 the 1928 shinchō roundtable discussion on modernity, for example, included some tongue-in-cheek comments when the topic of who among the participants was a modern boy. when posed this question, nii itaru hesitates on being labelled as a modern boy, before asserting that he is a ‘modan nasshingu’ (modern nothing). see shinchō january 1928: 136. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021174 dasgupta, r. 2004, crafting’ masculinity: negotiating masculine identities in the japanese workplace, (doctoral dissertation). curtin university of technology, perth. dasgupta, r. 2013, re-reading the salaryman in japan: crafting masculinities. routledge, oxford. fujin gahō [women’s pictorial). 1 june 1931: 90. gardiner, j. k. 2002, ‘introduction,’ in masculinity studies and feminist theory, (ed.) j. k. gardiner. columbia university press, new york: 1–29. harootunian, h. 2000, overcome by modernity: history, culture, and community in interwar japan. princeton university press, princeton, new jersey. kaikō 5-toshi mobo moga o sagase!: hakodate, niigata, yokohama, kōbe, nagasaki [in search of a modern boy-modern girl in 5 port cities: hokadate, niigata, yokohama, kobe, nagasaki]. 2012, bankart, yokohama. kimmel, m. s. 1987, ‘men’s responses to feminism at the turn of the century,’ gender and society, vol. 1, no. 3: 261–283. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124387001003003 mizusawa, t. 1998, mobo moga ten, 1910–1935 [modern boy modern girl exhibition: 1910–1935]. kanagawa kenritsu kindai bijutsukan, kamakura. mobo moga ga mita tōkyō: mono de tadoru nihon no sekai bunka [tokyo as seen by the modern boy and modern girl: tracing japanese lifestyle and culture through things]. 2018, tabako to shio no hakubutsukan, tokyo. ruthig, j. c., kehn, a., gamblin, b. w., vanderzanden, k., & jones, k. 2017, ‘when women’s gains equal men’s losses: predicting a zero-sum perspective of gender status,’ in sex roles, vol. 76: 17–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11199-016-0651-9 sakamoto, f. 2003, tenshin ranman: chichi wa modan bōi datta [naïve innocence: my father was a modern boy]. birudo, tokyo. sakata, t. 1928, nanpa dairokkan [the sixth sense of male seduction]. hihyōsha, tokyo. shinchō [new tide]. january 1928: 123–147. taiyō [the sun]. 15 january 1944: 10–11. wiegman, r. 2002, ‘unmaking: men and masculinity in feminist theory,’ in masculinity studies and feminist theory, (ed.) j. k. gardiner. columbia university press, new york: 31–59. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021175 https://doi.org/10.1177/089124387001003003 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-016-0651-9 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-016-0651-9 queering grief mark pendleton university of sheffield romit dasgupta was a mentor and a friend. i first met him at an asiapacifiqueer conference in the early 2000s, part of that early wave of queer asia scholarship in australia that was hugely inspiring for me as a then undergraduate, but we got to know each other properly after i started studying for a doctorate with vera mackie, who had also been romit’s phd supervisor. romit later asked me to compile the index for re-reading the salaryman in japan: crafting masculinities, his major book-length work and a touchstone for most work on japanese masculinities since (dasgupta 2013). despite knowing romit for many years, in the lead-up to the roundtable commemorating his life at the japanese studies association of australia conference in melbourne in july 2019, i struggled to get my thoughts together. i would stare blankly at an empty screen for hours. the night before the roundtable i was up all night tossing and turning. this is not my normal, or recommended, pattern of paper preparation. as i was walking into the auditorium, though, it hit me— this may not be my style but it certainly was romit’s. he would regularly slip away from opening night conference receptions to pull an all-night writing session, and then turn up to panels with a sheaf of papers, still making notes as he started to speak. perhaps my subconscious had been channelling romit. there was something else that had been bothering me. i had been hit hard by romit’s passing, partly because it did not happen in isolation. romit was the sixth queer male friend of mine between the ages of about 35 and 55 who had died within a year or so of each other. these men did not know each other but were all connected to me through varying layers of intimacy and across several spheres of my life. i am a queer man in his forties and a historian who has read lots of queer history. i am just young enough to have missed the worst horrors of the aids crisis when the funerals of young men were all too common. the deaths among my friends were clearly just a strange fluke— random accidents and sudden illnesses that took a series of men around my age in what appeared to be a pattern, if only to me. the effect of such a cumulative series of deaths is, though, given our history, inevitably felt more acutely. as i was thinking about why i had been so affected by romit’s death, and those of the other five, it got me thinking not for the first time about grief and queerness. for many queer people, relationships with birth families can be troubled. they certainly are in my case. queer people are also well aware of our positions within histories of trauma and exclusion that continue to shape community dynamics. in our best iterations, we collectively hold that pain in our community structures and inter-personal relationships. the writer cee frances (2018) described it this way: if the aids crisis has taught us anything, it’s that our community absorbs the pain of members far and wide, and exchanges this load generationally by necessity. we feel the loss of strangers through their close proximity to our social orbits, political values and personhood— we grieve, through sharing the stories of their suffering. by remembering, we are reminded of why we must continue fighting current crises. frances identifies here an important connection between the retention and distribution of grief and action that is often absent in many heteronormative narratives of grieving, which maintain a sense that the goal of mourning is to compartmentalise and move on. that is a particularly popular cultural reading that we can trace to freud’s distinction between (positive) mourning, a conscious process of letting go of the lost love object, and (unproductive) melancholia, an unhealthy retention of that object in the unconscious (1957). as mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021176 frances suggests, though, this has never quite worked for queer communities, particularly not once aids decimated the community (2018). the art critic and act-up activist douglas crimp is one of many queer thinkers who have grappled with this problem in a number of essays written from the frontlines of the aids crisis in the usa (crimp 2002). in writing back against lee edelman’s construction of the famous act-up slogan silence=death as the triumph of the literal over the figurative (1989), crimp argued that the slogan instead serves as a graphic figuration of the demands of a social movement that was contesting the ‘facts’ of the virus and society’s response. nevertheless, crimp cautioned that the urgent movement orientation of the politics of the time had some unintended consequences for queer communities, namely that the focus on action prevented a serious consideration of the effect of deaths on us as people and communities: ‘we ourselves are silent precisely on the subject of death, on how deeply it affects us’ (2002: 130). in the three decades since crimp wrote these words, i am not necessarily convinced that we have become any better on the subject of death. frances praises a community that absorbs pain and distributes it generationally, but that is at best highly differentiated by age and other markers of difference. i wonder in particular if that feeling is as evident for queer people (particularly men) of mine and romit’s age, with decimated generations just above us and vibrant communities forming below. perhaps my profound sense of loss about these dead friends was a feeling that queer men of our generation sit in between the silences of the past and the promise of better queer futures. there is a feeling that queer deaths remain significant, and necessarily political, but what are we to do in cases of simple human tragedy, with deaths that are mundane and unremarkable in their everydayness, but nevertheless deeply felt? sara ahmed (2004) is another queer thinker who has interrogated this distinction between productive and unproductive mourning, arguing for a queer reclamation of melancholia (something i also tried to do in an essay a decade or so ago about victim activism after the 1995 tokyo subway gassing [pendleton 2009]). for ahmed, the positive aspects of melancholia lie in the fact that it forces the subject to integrate the memory, or better said, the impression of the deceased into their own consciousness— giving the no longer real an existence that lives on through the melancholic. [t]o lose another is not to lose one’s impressions, not all which are even conscious. to preserve an attachment is not to make an external other internal, but to keep one’s impressions alive, as aspects of one’s self that are both oneself and more than oneself, as a sign of one’s debt to others. one can let go of another as an outsider, but maintain one’s attachments, by keeping alive one’s impressions of the lost other … to grieve for others is to keep their impressions alive in the midst of their death. (ahmed 2004: 160) alongside this process of grieving for romit, i co-edited with lucy fraser and jennifer coates the routledge companion to gender and japanese culture (coates, fraser and pendleton 2020). our companion contains forty chapters that seek to map the state of the field of japanese gender studies— a total of some 225,000 words. each chapter of about 5,000 words is designed to provide a snapshot of a subfield of gender studies that will be useful both as an introduction to new researchers and for teaching undergraduates. as we were finalising the manuscript in the period after romit’s death, i was struck again by how important his work has been. he is cited in many of the chapters, on topics ranging from ethnic urban gendered identities to work and the family. the most sustained consideration comes from a chapter explicitly dedicated to him, by the masculinity studies scholar emma cook, who positions dasgupta’s work as influential in shaping the field of masculinity studies, as others in this series of essays have also argued. cook notes in particular dasgupta’s engagement with the work of raewyn connell in articulating the ways in which the white-collar male salaried employee at a large company (the ‘salaryman’) embodies a hegemonic type of japanese masculinity. this hegemony functions, as dasgupta and others have argued, to shape the kinds of ways in which men’s identities are conceptualised in japan. mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021177 one of the reasons for such continued reference, even for authors writing about alternative masculinities, is that many people in japan refer to ideals that are embodied in this figure. in particular, there is a continued focus on male productivity, labour, bread-winning, and specific types of familial responsibility. it thus becomes hard to ignore a figure whose representation is ubiquitous even if not, strictly speaking, particularly common (cook 2020: 50– 51). so, in thinking about how we can, in ahmed’s words, ‘maintain one’s attachments, by keeping alive one’s impressions of the lost other,’ one, perhaps not recommended, option is to adopt romit’s sometimes chaotic paper preparation style. another is, as several authors tried to do in our routledge companion, to re-read and reincorporate dasgupta’s scholarly work into our own thinking about japan and gender and postwar society. there is also a third way, which is perhaps one that i can leave us with as i circle back to the personal. in another image of conference attendance romit can be found at the reception, drink in hand and ensuring that everybody, particularly early-career researchers, know each other. that image of building connections through generosity and kindness— never punching down, but always looking to bring colleagues up— is one that we can all learn from. romit’s legacy, then, will remain in his work— a model of critically-engaged scholarship that will continue to shape the field of masculinity studies for some time— but i hope also in the way we relate to each other in japanese studies and beyond. if we can relate with more kindness, more generosity, more, dare i say, love, then we will be keeping the impression of romit dasgupta alive in ourselves. references ahmed, s. 2004, the cultural politics of emotion. routledge, oxford. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700372 coates, j., fraser, l., & pendleton, m. (eds). 2020, the routledge companion to gender and japanese culture. routledge, oxford. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315179582 cook, e. 2020, ‘masculinity studies in japan,’ in the routledge companion to gender and japanese culture, (eds) j. coates, l. fraser & m. pendleton. routledge, oxford: 50–59. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315179582 crimp, d. 2002, ‘mourning and militancy,’ in melancholia and moralism: essays on aids and queer politics. mit press, cambridge, ma: 128–149. dasgupta, r. 2013, re-reading the salaryman in japan: crafting masculinities. routledge, oxford. edelman, l. 1989. ‘the plague of discourse: politics, literary theory, and aids,’ south atlantic quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1: 313–314. frances, c. 2018, ‘on queer grieving: the community crisis of vicarious trauma,’ the lifted brow, 19 november, online, available: https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2018/10/2/on-queer-grieving-the-community-crisis-ofvicarious-trauma-by-cee-frances [accessed 13 october 2019] freud, s. 1957 [1915, 1917] ‘mourning and melancholia’, in the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, vol. 14, (trans. and ed.) j. strachey. hogarth press, london: 243-258. pendleton, m. 2009, ‘mourning as global politics: embodied grief and activism in post-aum tokyo,’ asian studies review, vol. 33, no. 3: 333–347. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357820903153731 mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021178 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700372 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315179582 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315179582 https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2018/10/2/on-queer-grieving-the-community-crisis-of-vicarious-trauma-by-cee-frances https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2018/10/2/on-queer-grieving-the-community-crisis-of-vicarious-trauma-by-cee-frances https://doi.org/10.1080/10357820903153731 mourning and meaning in the death of the asian in australia mridula nath chakraborty monash university i did not know romit dasgupta in the way my colleagues write— either personally, or as friend, colleague or mentor in the flesh. my first interaction with romit was in may 2017. i had recently become national convener of the asian australian studies research network (aasrn) and wished to invite him to aasrn’s biennial asian australian identities conference to be held later that year at the immigration museum in melbourne. the theme for that year was embodiments and inhabitations. dasgupta’s work on the querying of, and queering in, asia provided a productive way for re-thinking the diasporic, immigrant and transnational identities associated with asian australia. romit had been an early member of our network, beloved among the turkish diaspora in perth due to the work he did on considering that anatolian outlier as a heuristic in re-conceptualising asia, and asian studies, from its putative margins. he had now moved on to a more specifically japan-turkey angle, with australia remaining more of a conceptual framework for (re-)considering the perimeters of the ideational entity known as ‘asia.’ romit sent me an article of his to explain how he was working with notions of ambivalence, of ‘fluid, shifting delineations’ and of ‘being both a bridge between two worlds and being caught in the faultlines’ (dasgupta 2015: 1– 3). as i write in memorium of romit, i return to these words, ambivalences, bridges, and faultlines. in january 2018, nadia rhook, a colleague from la trobe university, moved to the university of western australia and also took on the position of regional convener for our network. aasrn has existed as a robust and energetic online platform for asian australian artists, activists and academics for the last ten years, conceived, nurtured and sustained through the indefatigable efforts of tseen khoo and the voluntary labours of its membership. members also meet up ‘in the real world’ from time to time in the cities where they reside. on my suggestion, nadia invited romit, among others, to gather for the first perth meet-up she was organising. again, romit expressed his inability to participate, not only because the direction of his work had changed, but because he was now in a ‘family care-situation’ with his father. the next i heard of romit was that he had had a heart attack and had passed away in the first week of july. to say that the rest of 2018 passed for me under the shadow of this death is an understatement, even though i did not know him long or well enough to warrant such deeply-felt, and unpin-downable, sorrow. denise woods, another aasrn member from perth, confessed to me in an email conversation that she too was extremely shaken by the news. when we posted a note on the aasrn webpage about his passing, numerous members wrote in to speak of romit’s presence and his practices of care for others. so how do i, who had known romit for so brief a time, remember and honour romit today? i have titled this rumination in memoriam as ‘mourning and meaning in the death of the asian in australia.’ below, i expand on the fragments of signification that i conjure up on what ‘dying in a strange country’ (naqvi np) may mean for those marked and ‘multicultural’ bodies of asians whose names are usually not legible on gravestones at numerous cemeteries that lie scattered across the span of this settler nation. bodies that are cremated according to non-mainstream rituals often do not make the same kind of imprint upon its soil, for posterity to claim as signs of inalienable presence, even though memories and writings like this may linger longer in some evanescent archives. such fugitive ephemera then, from the pages of facebook, obituary notices, commemorative pieces, correspondences and conversations, may remain as witness and wreath for a life lived, loved and long mourned. in these few words that speak more of inevitable human impermanence, i interleave dasgupta’s work, and what his untimely passing denotes, mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021179 for the fields in which i research, namely diaspora, ethnicities, migrations and postcolonial anti-racist work. to weave my speaking through these fleeting skeins of kinship and friendship that carry on the memory of such lives, i focus mainly on the conceptual framing of transnational, non-biological, self-chosen, queer asian families that dasgupta sketched out so poignantly in 2014. what it means to live in his essay, ‘queer imaginings and travelling of “family” across asia,’ dasgupta uses arjun appadurai’s concept of ‘scapes’ to speak to what he terms the ‘emotion-scapes…. in relation to imaginings of notions of family and kinship, and the ways in which they traverse borders and scapes, both globally, but more specifically in the context of asia’ (2011: 99). dasgupta offers readings of three visual media texts: the japanese television mini-series, dōsōkai [reunion] (naitō and kikuchi 1993), the south korean film, bonjijomp’urul hada (bungee jumping of their own) (kim 2001) and the singapore/hong kong film, rice rhapsody (bi 2005). the essay analyses how normative understandings of traditional family structures are queered across and within asia, and how they rupture hegemonic western readings of the concept of family. dasgupta deploys gayatri gopinath’s ‘scavenger methodology’ for research, julianne pidduck’s concept of the ambivalence that characterises the relationship between family and kin for queers, ruth vanita’s exploration of the fictive kinship bonds for incorporating a non-family friend/lover into the folds of the family (105) and tom boellstorff ’s ‘discursive disconnect between the institution of heterosexual marriage and nonheterosexual identity’ (106). the essay ‘frames the ways in which queer individuals have carved out spaces, both historically and into the present, within, and in relation to “family” in varied contexts and settings’ (102). in doing so, dasgupta locates himself squarely within a body of diasporic theorising that is part and parcel of the way in which aasrn functions. scavenger methodologies of film, fiction, non-fiction, essay, editorial, exhibitions, traditional writing, spoken word, memoirs, one-person shows, curatorships, blogs and vlogs mark the ambivalences of the being and belonging to asian australia. they also attest to the fault lines that emerge in the embrace of any identity position when not accompanied by a politics. these and other issues populate aasrn’s facebook pages and offer a genealogy as well as living documentation of its members, and indeed bear testimony to asian australian existences. in the face of the innumerable erasures that mark asian presence in australia, in its histories, institutions and contributions even today, aasrn provides a running, continuing proof of ‘the’ contested category of the asian in australia. dasgupta’s work and life remains an indelible part of such a fabric and provides a palimpsest of mediated migrant settlement on this unceded indigenous land. in addition, for me, the citations of a transnational network of south asian queer theorists in reconceptualising frames of reference for non-normative sexualities is both a validation and an oppositional politics. these inclusions chart a space of queer imaginations and inhabitations that defy hegemonic colonial discourses and continue to offer anti-racist ways of doing academic work, through subversion and a radical questioning of categories, concepts and labels which trouble mainstream ways of thinking about identity in our lives. they also afford pleasures of a chosen subcontinental academic family that coheres around the politics of home. what it means to pass death is the moment when the nation state and normative family structures interrupt and intervene in what is a fundamental human condition. death and death rites continue to define, and defy, notions of belonging and inclusion in the final analysis. romit’s moment of passing is tabulated in notices on the uwa web pages, in h-net ( japan) by vera mackie, on aasrn’s facebook pages (and perhaps in many other electronic sites), by bowra and o’dea’s funeral services, and by barbara hartley’s dedication in mutual images. hartley pays homage to dasgupta’s work, to his warmth, compassion and generosity towards fellow mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021180 scholars, and ends with the following paragraph: ‘romit had a deep and abiding love for his family. he was the very devoted son of mihir and mira [both now deceased] and the beloved brother of arijit (bapi). we send his family and friends our fondest thoughts and deepest condolences.’ in the fault lines between romit, the human being, and dasgupta, the scholar, remains the ambivalence built into an academic career, where one is known, on the one hand, by one’s institutional affiliation, alma mater, publications, citations, metrics, student evaluations (and the toll they take), and on the other, by a community of social beings, family, friends, lovers, fellow travellers in the journey of life, all of which remain to remind one of the human being and individual whom loved ones memorialise in obituaries and on online forums. in these all-too brief moments of appearance are embedded a life that is more than a cluster of words. in those days that followed the news of romit’s untimely and unexpected death, i was reminded of queer indian writer akhil katyal’s poem (2018 n.p.), ‘but who will take care of you in your old age?’: that eternal worry of asian parents who have accepted the choices their queer children have made, but who still remain tied to conventional ideas of familial blood lines and socially sanctioned families: “but who will take care of you in your old age?” is the only question my parents ask that actually stumps me. it’s the only one i have stopped finding reasonable-sounding answers to. i lay down my arms with “i do not know.” under my breath, i still refuse to treat love as a retirement policy. but maybe it is just that. why should i stud it with moons and stars. why should i bejewel a simple need. maybe all of life does come to “but who will take you to the hospital when you will fall down.” i foreclose the thought under a violet moon. in those days following romit’s passing, i remained haunted by the thought of his aloneness, though i had no way of knowing if or whether he had indeed been alone at that moment of breath passing out of life. then in those weeks following romit’s passing, something cropped up on the aasrn facebook page, which afforded some small comfort and condolence: this was elizabeth tan’s essay titled ‘a life, passing’ on her father’s death, which ‘spurred a reflection on growing up asian australian’ (2018 n.p.). tan’s piece touches upon the connotations of passing as in dying and passing as in obeying the dictats of shibboleth, of knowing what to do when you are moving in and out of closed groups. she speaks of a father born in singapore, who came to be buried in midland, australia, ‘in a graveyard much like one he had liked as a boy … — a peaceful place, he’d said, because all the headstones were the same, uniform heights and shapes’ (n.p.). she continues: my father passes, and over the next month, people come up to me and say that he sponsored this family or that family when they migrated to australia, that he was the reason they migrated in the first place; they say he paved the way for asian lawyers in perth. people talk of my father before he was my father, before he was charles the migrant— a dockyard worker in his teens, a scruffy longhaired rebel, a ringleader of sit-in protests, a cash-strapped hitchhiker peddling counterfeit watches and blood. in the case of romit, i know, as a fellow bengali speaker and as someone who shares his linguistic-ethnic identity, that he has been cremated, perhaps according to his own wishes stated some time to someone, or according to some understood and recognised hindu ritual. i have written elsewhere of how migrants who die on alien soil leave no remains behind if they are cremated, whose histories of arrival and genealogies are not apparent immediately from some headstone (chakraborty 2011). today, as australia tries to re-invent itself within an asian imaginary, the stories of those whose bodies have marked this land, who have left mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021181 behind a legacy of belongingness, nurturance and futuring of asian australian possibilities, become all the more important so as to trace genealogies of arrival, living/settling (in all its problematic nuance) and death. in romit’s case, i have to take consolation that he remains, like tan’s father, a bridge between worlds, indian and australian, japanese and turkish. he remains a beloved incantation on the land that testifies to that old fault line. you belong once and for all when you are interred in the land where you have lived, your arrival and mediated being imprinted on that landscape of imagination for ever. you belong when your work, in print, on students’ lives, in communities academic and social, has left behind a legacy such as romit dasgupta’s. references appadurai, a. 1990, ‘disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy,’ theory, culture and society, vol. 7:2: 295–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327690007002017 bi, k. 2005. rice rhapsody [alternative title hainan chicken rice]. hong kong and singapore. chakraborty, m. n. 2011, ‘leaving no remains: death among the bengalis in jhumpa lahiri’s fiction,’ south atlantic quarterly. special issue on death scenes, (eds) david ellison & katrina schlunke, vol. 110, no. 4: 813–829. dasgupta, r. 2015, ‘pushing boundaries: turkey and the reframing of asia and asian studies,’ asian currents, february 15: n. p. dasgupta, r. 2014, ‘queer imaginings and travelling of “family” across asia’ in queering migrations: towards, from and beyond asia, (eds) c. quero, j. n. goh & m. sepidoza campos. palgrave macmillan, new york: 99–121. gopinath, g. 2000, ‘queering bollywood: alternative sexualities in popular indian cinema,’ in queer asian cinema: shadows in the sun, (ed.) a. grossman. harington park press, new york: 283–297. https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315877174-13 hartley, b. 2018, ‘dedication,’ mutual images: japan and asia: representations of selfness and otherness. vol. 4: 1–2. https:// www.mutualimages-journal.org/index.php/mi/issue/view/4/vol4 [accessed 9 november 2020]. katyal, a. 2018, ‘but who will take care of you in your old age?’ the times of india, 16 september. https:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/poetic-licence-but-who-will-take-care-of-you-in-your-old-age/ kim, d. 2001. bungee jumping of their own (bonjijopm’urul hadai). south korea. naitō, e. & kikuchi, t. 1993, dōsōkai [reunion], japan. naqvi, t. 2001, dying in a strange country. tsar: toronto. tan, e. 2018, ‘a life, passing,’ lenny letter, august 7. https://www.lennyletter.com/story/what-it-means-to-pass? [accessed 9 november 2020]. pidduck, j. 2009, ‘queer kinship and ambivalence: video ethnographies by jean carlomusto and richard fung,’ glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, vol. 15, no. 3: 441–468. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2008-031 vanita, r. 2005, love’s rite: same sex marriage in india and the west. penguin books: new delhi. https://doi. org/10.1057/9781403981608 mackie, et al. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 2021182 https://doi.org/10.1177/026327690007002017 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315877174-13 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315877174-13 https://www.mutualimages-journal.org/index.php/mi/issue/view/4/vol4 https://www.mutualimages-journal.org/index.php/mi/issue/view/4/vol4 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/poetic-licence-but-who-will-take-care-of-you-in-your-old-age/ https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/poetic-licence-but-who-will-take-care-of-you-in-your-old-age/ https://www.lennyletter.com/story/what-it-means-to-pass https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2008-031 https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981608 https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981608 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: shinnosuke takahashi 2019. memories of struggles: translocal lives in okinawan anti-base activism. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 16:1/2, 46-58. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal. v16i1/2.6520 portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 14492490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu. au/ojs/index.php/portal research article memories of struggles: translocal lives in okinawan anti-base activism shinnosuke takahashi corresponding author: dr shinnosuke takahashi, lecturer in japanese studies, school of languages and cultures, victoria university of wellington, room 708, von zedlitz bldg kelburn pde, wellington, new zealand. email: shin.takahashi@vuw.ac.nz doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6520 article history: received 20/03/.2019; revised 15/09/2019; accepted 05/10/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract one of the key characteristics of recent japanese grassroots civic activism is the number of individual citizens who began to go out on the streets to participate in public demonstrations. in many places around japan, people who used to be seen as ‘apolitical,’ such as youth, office workers (so-called salary-men and salary-women) and other individuals, now join and lead public demonstrations that address a range of pressing social issues and problems, including nuclear energy, workplace harassment and constitutional change. today the ‘progressiveness’ of activism is born from, and reinforced by, participants’ own everyday concerns. by associating larger social injustices with personalized forms of concern, today’s progressive movements enable what perhaps used to be overlooked as private issues to become inspiration for collective actions. therefore, these civic movements encompass a mixture of different personal and social narratives, symbols, styles and objectives; they are not homogenous about ‘who we are’ and ‘what we want.’ by highlighting two case studies that shed light on the okinawan decolonization movement, i argue that the translocal participation of different social actors in creating a particular sense of ‘locality,’ or place-based identity, is essential in understanding the complexity of collective representation. the okinawan decolonization movement, primarily represented in the form of the okinawan anti-us base struggle, is particularly important because it demonstrates how place-based identity maintains rootedness and boundedness of locality while maintaining inclusivity to extra-locality. okinawa’s case can be an important contribution to the field that enables us to extend our geo-social imagination over the new forms of contentious politics and collectivity in today’s world. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 46 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6520 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6520 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6520 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:shin.takahashi@vuw.ac.nz http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6520 keywords: okinawa; okinawan anti-us base activism; social movements; translocal; collectivity; locality; grassroots activism; japan; narrative one of the key characteristics of recent japanese grassroots civic activism is the number of individual citizens who began to go out on the streets to participate in public demonstrations. in many places around japan, people who used to be seen as ‘apolitical,’ such as youth, office workers (so-called salary-men and salary-women) and other individuals, now join and lead public demonstrations that address a range of pressing social issues and problems, including nuclear energy, workplace harassment and constitutional change. from an arcade street in a rural city to the overcrowded hachikō-mae plaza in shibuya, tokyo, an iconic zone for japanese consumeristic culture, today non-partisan, self-motivated, individually organized activism has become an ever more important social force in japan. in this social environment, the assemblage of activist individuals is a new representation of collective action. in the past japanese social movements were formed around cohesive ideological principles pertaining to progressive, most typically marxist, agendas. today the ‘progressiveness’ of activism is born from, and reinforced by, the participants’ own everyday concerns. by associating larger social injustices with personalized forms of concern, today’s progressive movements enable what perhaps used to be overlooked as private issues to become inspiration for collective actions. therefore, these civic movements encompass a mixture of different personal and social narratives, symbols, styles and objectives; they are not homogenous about ‘who we are’ and ‘what we want.’ how do individuals organize collective identity in contemporary japanese social activism? taking a constructivist approach, this article examines how different social actors weave their personal narratives into a collective identity. by highlighting two case studies that shed light on the okinawan decolonization movement, i argue that the translocal participation of different social actors in creating a particular sense of ‘locality,’ or place-based identity, is essential in understanding the complexity of collective representation. i emphasize the usefulness of personal narratives to understand the formation of collective identity from a grounded perspective as opposed to a deductive perspective. while the deductive approach tends to assume the core collective value as a priori and regards the individual narratives as conciliatory with it, the importance of personal narratives is that they can show the processes that create shared values among different actors. as i discuss below, the okinawan decolonization movement, primarily represented in the form of the okinawan anti-us base struggle, is particularly important because it demonstrates how place-based identity maintains rootedness and boundedness of locality while maintaining inclusivity to extra-locality. although the mainstream literature on social movements still tends to draw on the framework of western contexts, most typically western europe and north america, okinawa’s case can be an important contribution to the field that enables us to extend our geo-social imagination over the new forms of contentious politics and collectivity in today’s world. creating collective identity while a multifaceted collectivity is steadily replacing a homogenous mode of social formation, one of the remaining questions facing protest communities is the state of connectivity, or how to examine and evaluate complex representations of ‘us’? this is not a new question. in fact, the form and meaning of connectivity has been discussed since the emergence of new shinnosuke takahashi portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201947 social movements (nsms) in the 1970s (touraine 1981). one of the great legacies of nsms is their emphasis on social action both as the object of research and a constructive force in re-imagining social collectivity in the post-industrial era. in this regard, i am indebted to arberto melucci’s seminal text nomads of the present (1989). in it, melucci discusses how the mobilization of popular movements is possible in what he calls ‘complex society.’ by highlighting the heterogenous nature of contemporary society, melucci discovers the importance of everyday life as a foundation upon which the representation of social collectivity can be constituted in heterogeneous settings. from a different perspective, another source of inspiration is american sociologist john brown childs and his concept of ‘transcommunality.’ brown-childs, who is an activist of the civil rights movement as well as a scholar, highlights social action at the core of his analysis. based on his commitment to the local santa cruz community movement and other grassroots activities, he examines the processes of multiethnic coordination for community actions. his notion of transcommunality sheds light on how cross-cultural collaboration is a transformative experience for community participants that allows them to see themselves in a reflexive manner and eventually to try to establish a common ground, instead of insisting on identity boundaries (brown childs 2003). however, neither of these theorists deal in any detail with the significance of space in understanding collective identity of social movements. to be fair, the question of space has become more important since the end of the cold war when globalism arose as an alternative civic norm. the increasing influence of transnational social movement organizations inevitably directed scholars and others to question the conventionally understood political and social domains and practices bounded by national territories (see smith et al. 1997; tarrow 2005, 2011; della porta & tarrow 2005). nonetheless, in many cases, locality was not seen as a space of contention or dynamics but as a discourse that defines one’s cultural ‘origin.’ in this respect, while a fixed notion of locality was seen as a source for creating dynamic transnational activisms, yet it does not mean the locality itself is the product of dynamic socio-cultural relations. however, due to the active involvement of social and cultural geographers as well as sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists, this view on locality is changing, and it is increasingly considered as a social space where dynamic politics of territorialization, deterritorialization and re-territorialization take place. the recent shift of critical attention to locality is a key to understanding how various forms of place-based social movements are participating in making globalism from below. central to this perspective is the different agencies involved in the representation of ‘locality’ and how they articulate, or disarticulate, global norms in producing their local space. for these reasons, colin macfarlane’s notion of ‘translocal assemblage’ (2009) allows me to consider collectivity from different spatial scales. that is, place-based social movements are not solely a local phenomenon but stand somewhere between the local and global spheres, and play a role in transforming different levels of political space. macfarlane differentiates between three ‘orientations.’ first, translocal assemblage explains the exchanges of material and immaterial resources and practices across sites. second, translocal assemblage indicates a deeper meaning to these sites than a mere ‘node’ with a highlight on histories and the labour required to produce these sites. third, translocal assemblage signifies practices such as ‘doing, events and performance,’ as well as spaces that emerge as a result of practices (macfarlane 2009: 562). the usefulness of this concept is that it enables us to analyse how social movements are shaped by a particular context beyond the fixed representation of locality or a simple local-global binary. through the lens of translocal assemblage, we can highlight the agents and agencies involved in producing social spaces that can be both local and global. memories of struggles: translocal lives in okinawan anti-base activism portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201948 yet, given the fact that a multiplicity of social actors and their contexts is a foundation of today’s social formations, how could this assemblage be operative as a collective movement across borders? in other words, the question becomes, how are ‘extra-‘ or ‘non-‘ locality involved in making place-based social movements a propelling force for ‘globalization from below’ (appadurai 2000; 2002)? also, how can translocal perspectives allow us to analyse and understand place-based social movements without us being trapped by the simple local-global binary? here, i examine the anti-us base activism in okinawa as a site for two case studies, drawing on the personal accounts of two individuals who founded or have been involved in a group called okinawa-korea people’s solidarity based in naha. regionalized locality while tokyo’s dynamic and heterogenous public demonstrations draw scholarly and popular attention, regional areas offer insights into a deep, and often overlooked, layer of modern japanese social politics. borderlands such as okinawa are particularly important for considering the ambiguous or precarious state of citizenship in historically marginalized areas. once an indigenous maritime nation in the east china sea, okinawa (or ryūkyūs or ryūkyū kingdom) lost its semi-autonomous diplomatic relations, and territorial sovereignty, after the japanese empire completed incorporating the area in 1879. after that incorporation, okinawa was seen and used as a stepping stone for japan’s southward expansion first to taiwan, then china, then to the pacific. after okinawa was ravaged in the war between japan and the allied nations, in the latter half of the twentieth century its location in the north-western pacific made it one of the usa’s offshore strategic outposts vis-a-vis the chinese state, the korean peninsula, vietnam, and the northern pacific. in this sense, the geopolitical position of okinawa shaped its modern experiences throughout the twentieth century and today. the okinawan anti-us base struggle (okinawa hankichi tōsō), which started as far back as the early 1950s, is in essence a social struggle that challenges the geopolitical realism of the global order. this is especially clear when it is understood that from 1945 until 1972 okinawa was under us military administration. the anti-base struggle has its roots in us soldiers violently evicting farmers from their farms, and therefore their livelihoods, on iejima (ie shima) island in order to construct a military exercize facility. since the quasi-local authority, the ryūkyū government, could not fully resolve the military violence, the farmers and other villagers began non-violent actions, such as sit-ins and public demonstrations, including ‘the beggars’ march (kojiki kōshin)’ in 1955. the anti-base movements have continued ever since with local people demanding justice against the us military’s six-decade occupation of okinawan land and sea territories. in this sense, the okinawan struggle demonstrates the resilience, as well as vulnerability, of a marginalized place and its people beyond japan. according to historian moriteru arasakai (2005), okinawan civic activism has unsettled the us occupation of okinawa and post-war japan-us security system three times since 1945: in 1956; in the late 1960s; and in 1995. the first instance was when over 100,000 people organized protest meetings in different places of okinawa island after washington denied the ryūkyū legislature’s demands on land policy. this so-called ‘first’ island-wide protest occurred as the result of military violence, censorship, strict travel regulations, suppression of okinawan progressive parties, including the okinawan people’s party, and the us military administration’s unfair compensation policy in regards to the forced confiscation of land. the second momentous period was in the late 1960s on the eve of okinawa’s ‘return’ to japan. this mass mobilization, the so-called ‘fukki undō (reversion movement),’ was underpinned by okinawans’ increasing nationalistic sentiment as japanese citizens and received support from shinnosuke takahashi portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201949 mainland japanese mainstream conservatives as well as more progressive sectors. a growing country-wide expectation that okinawa would be returned to japan and the malaise within the usa due to the war in vietnam resulted in japanese prime minister eisaku satō and us president richard nixon signing okinawa’s reversion treaty in 1971. subsequently, okinawa ‘reverted’ to japanese sovereignty in 1972. the third period was in 1995 when mass civic protests occurred in response to the rape of a local school girl by three us military personnel. this movement, which received unanimous support beyond political factions, provided the momentum for then governor masahide ōta, a renowned progressive politician and critic of post-war us-japan relations, to refuse the renewal of the land lease contract between the usa and japan for the use of land for military facilities. ōta’s political challenge caused significant unease for japanese and us political leaders in the middle of the reform of their security policy in the post-cold war asia-pacific. to pacify this political unrest, the defence authorities of the two countries established a joint task force or the ‘special action committee on okinawa’ in november 1995. the special action committee released a plan to reduce the size of us bases in okinawa the following year. this last island-wide struggle was remembered by some okinawan activists as another watershed event in the recent history of okinawan activism for a different reason. the repercussion of this mass protest campaign went beyond the existing relationships of the base politics (okinawa, japan, and the usa), and drew attention from civic activists around the globe, including south korean activists. after the political and economic democratizations that progressed quickly in south korea after the late 1980s, some local citizens became more vocal about a series of crimes committed by the us military personnel stationed there. in 1993, these concerned korean citizens founded a civic group called the headquarters of the national campaign for the eradication of crimes by us troops (juhan migun beomjoe geunjeor undong bonbu, or jumibun in korean). in 1996, after reading a small column about okinawa’s mass protest demonstration and its major impact at the governmental level, one korean male activist, kim yong han, visited okinawa to observe the actual social situation first-hand. this visit was the impetus for the citizens of the two places to start an interregional anti-us base solidarity campaign across the sea between the two locations. kim’s visit in 1996 was followed by a visit by forty-three korean activists, human rights lawyers and other experts’ visit to okinawa the following year. the visitors urged the okinawans to create a group which could act as a host and a point of contact in okinawa. this encouragement is how the okikan minshūrentai or okinawa-korea people’s solidarity (okps) group was started by five male japanese and zainichi korean activists. okps, together with the okinawa women act against military violence, was one of the earliest groups which were dedicated to extending the local anti-base movement beyond okinawa. over the last two decades, despite scarce resources, the members have been actively committed to the exchanges of people and their stories of respective anti-base struggles. one of the positive measures they introduced to the local movement is that, through okps as a medium, the okinawan anti-base movement could connect with similar civic activist groups in south korea. this meant that okps demonstrated the possibilities, and the challenges, for other okinawan and other japanese civic groups in collaborating with asian societies. as i have discussed elsewhere (takahashi 2018), one of the major difficulties for okps was the problem of japan’s colonial past in the post-colonial east asia. while okinawa has been marginalized vis-à-vis japan and the usa, okinawan activists were compelled to realize their own representation as part of the japanese colonizers for the korean activists. nonetheless, as a second point, local activists’ ambiguous identity as okinawan/japanese led to a reflexive memories of struggles: translocal lives in okinawan anti-base activism portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201950 perspective that enables them to reinterpret and reposition the meaning of their activism in the regional context. this reflexivity was the enabler for the local activism to acquire a new agency, or what i tentatively call a regionalized ‘asian-okinawan’ subjectivity, in the discourse of okinawan identity. the new agency fostered by okps demonstrates how a heavily localized movement such as the okinawan anti-base struggle could become a social actor in making regionalism, and eventually globalism, from below in the post-cold war east asia. in my earlier work (takahashi 2018), i discussed the historical formation of this collectivity. nonetheless, the question as to why okps could maintain such reflexive positionality was not answered. in the next section, i look at personal accounts based upon my interviews with two key okps members.1 the first interviewee, toshio takahashi, is a social worker originally from shikoku region. the second interviewee is a second-generation zainichi korean resident in japan, or the so-called zainichi korean yeongja yu. she is a buddhist nun based in yomitan-son village in okinawa prefecture. by examining their memories of struggles, i consider how okps’s translocal agency was created, and how these activists were able to articulate historical reflexivity in their activism. ‘walking on broken glass with bare feet’: becoming a ‘local’ a tall, grey-haired gentleman who is always quiet with a warm smile on his face: this was my early impression of toshio takahashi—a calm middle-aged man. yet, later, i learnt that in his youth he used to be a leader of one of the most militant and violent revolutionary sects in modern japan. although toshio takahashi originates from mainland japan, he has become a highly regarded activist in the okinawa struggle. he is one of the five founding members of okps and is the main coordinator of the group. whenever people receive notices of the next meeting and minutes of the previous meeting, takahashi is responsible for those emails. takahashi is also one of the organizers of a protest community, futenma bakuon soshōdan (citizens against the noise from futenma airbase). based in futenma in ginowan city, takahashi and other members are working to bring a lawsuit against the local us military and the japanese government over the loud noise from the airbase in futenma town by collecting signatures from the town’s residents. takahashi was born in nangoku city, kōchi prefecture, in 1953.2 as in many other parts of japan, there was a large korean community in nangoku city. he said that the community was built in the early 1940s by korean workers—who had been mobilized by the japanese during the war to build local infrastructure, such as dams and airports—and their families. takahashi’s house was located near this local korean community. he lived in kōchi until he graduated from high school. in 1971, takahashi became a university student at tōhoku university in sendai, in the north-eastern part of honshū. he majored in mechanical engineering. when he was a first-year student, takahashi became involved in and joined a progressive student activist group. it was not unusual for japanese university and high-school students and young labourers to participate in progressive movements inside and outside their schools, universities 1 the interviews were approved by the ethics committee of the australian national university (protocol number 2011/539). 2 interview with toshio takahashi, 24 november 2011. this interview was conducted at the office of the citizens against the noise from futenma airbase in futenma city. shinnosuke takahashi portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201951 and work-places. in fact, university students who were concerned with issues related to social justice such as war, discrimination against cultural minorities, poverty and hard labour conditions, were the main actors in the movement. while takahashi’s friends gradually abandoned activism, takahashi’s commitment became so serious that he could not continue his studies. he left tōhoku university without graduating in the early 1980s and moved to kanagawa prefecture, south of tokyo, with his wife, a move enabled by her appointment to a teaching position at a local primary school. another reason was that there was a base of his group, the revolutionary workers’ association, at kanagawa university in yokohama city at that time. takahashi spent a short period as the leader of that group. takahashi joined the student movement in the early 1970s, a decade after the height of new left student activism in japan. the peak of japan’s new left student movement was from 1959 until 1960 when the bunto (bund), an umbrella organization, gathered in the centre of tokyo with larger progressive groups such as the nation-wide workers’ union, sōhyō, to prevent then japanese prime minister nobusuke kishi from renewing the japan-us security treaty. over 300,000 people joined the public demonstration in front of the national diet building in june 1960, in what is known as rokujū-nen ampo tōsō (1960 ampo struggle against the japan-us security treaty). although the security treaty was renewed, kishi and his cabinet had to resign. after the mass protests, the bunto was dissolved, and a non-partisan progressive movement, led by former members of the bund and trotskyists who did not belong to the japan communist party or japan socialist party emerged. after the dissolution of the bund, the student movement gradually lost its momentum and became individualized, depending on ideological differences, and went underground. takahashi also participated in violent struggle as a leader of his group. although he did not tell me much of his past, during the 1959–1960 period takahashi changed his name and was known as masaaki izumi among his fellow activists. in order to increase the support for his group, and to avoid arrest, takahashi kept moving from one place to another. after living in kanagawa for a while, takahashi moved to okinawa in the mid-1980s to create a local branch of his group and to construct hegemony over the local anti-base movement. initially, his stay in okinawa went as he wished. takahashi joined some of the local antibase activist groups and developed personal connections with fellow okinawan activists. however, it did not take long for okinawan anti-base activists to realize takahashi’s hidden intentions. after his political agenda was revealed, some local activists began a campaign to attack takahashi as an infiltrator who disguised his career and name in order to use okinawans and the okinawan struggle for his own sake. under the principle of non-partisan civic activism, okinawan anti-base activists often had strong distrust for mainland japanese activists. okinawans thought that these student activists would harm their own aspirations; they knew from experience that such japanese activists often aimed to divide local anti-base movement for their own ideological purposes. in this environment, takahashi could not remain engaged in local okinawan activism. however, to return to the japanese mainland was not an easy option because his family, including two sons, had already settled in okinawa. also, his group, rwa, which was targeted by the police as a subversive ‘extreme left violent group’ in okinawa, was unable to support takahashi due to financial constraints. furthermore, many of his former colleagues had left political activism. consequently, takahashi’s life as a revolutionary activist came to a dead end. at that time, takahashi turned to several people for help, including nishio ichirō, a pastor and a long-term activist who was also a mainland japanese in okinawa. in the midst memories of struggles: translocal lives in okinawan anti-base activism portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201952 of the ‘anti-takahashi campaign,’ nishio offered takahashi his house as a temporary haven. meanwhile, this senior activist worked to persuade other okinawans to pardon takahashi’s past and let him stay on the island. through nishio’s and friends’ efforts, takahashi was allowed to remain in okinawa on one condition: that he leave his previous career and live as ‘an okinawan.’ he did not have any other option but to change his political beliefs. remembering those days, takahashi described this period as though he were ‘walking on broken glass with bare feet.’ after he left student activism, takahashi started working as a social worker. he gradually resumed studying korean language and its problematic historical relations with japan. takahashi, who later became a korean expert in okinawa, visited korea for the first time when he was a university student in may 1974. takahashi was involved with a petition campaign to release his friend who was in jail in south korea. that friend, a zainichi korean who studied at tōhoku university’s medical school, was arrested in seoul on suspicion of involvement in anti-south korean government activism when he was a visiting student at seoul national university. the purpose of takahashi’s visit was to submit a petition to the japanese embassy in seoul on behalf of civic groups working to release the korean student. takahashi was chosen to visit seoul as a delegate of his group because many senior activists had records of being arrested, and takahashi was one of the few with no such record. in those days, the political situation in south korea was extremely tense. after the coup d’état in may 1961, then president of south korea park chung-hee introduced a hardline campaign of policing pro-communist, socialist and student activists. park’s regime also targeted educated zainichi koreans who visited south korea, particularly those suspected of having relations with the chongryon or chōsen sōre (general association of korean residents in japan, gakr), which had close ties with north korea. after the execution of cho youngsoo—an executive member of the mindan (korean residents union in japan, kpuj)— because of his active role in establishing the newspaper minzoku jihō (the people’s times) in december 1961, a number of zainichi koreans were arrested by park’s government.3 park’s regime became even more oppressive towards dissidents after he won the presidential election over kim dae-jung, an influential opposition leader who later became the fifteenth president of south korea. after his narrow victory, park declared martial law. in protest against the new government controls, south korean university students from the democratic youth student association (dysa) started taking political action, and nearly two hundred students were arrested, including takahashi’s friend. upon his arrival in seoul with the petition, takahashi saw first-hand the unpopularity of the japanese government in south korea. the stains and shells of the eggs thrown at the wall of the japanese embassy caused great embarrassment and shock to this young student. also, his first experiences of life under martial law, such as the night-time curfew, exacerbated his sense of unease. he was perhaps one of the most well-informed south korean nationals in japan about the harsh political oppression and anti-japanese sentiment of park’s dictatorial regime. however, his trip to seoul in the early 1970s remained a deeply disturbing, and haunting, experience. after this visit, he avoided being directly involved with the korean political movement until he joined okps. 3 mindan (kpuj) is one of two major organizations representing zainichi koreans in japan. the other is gakr. in contrast to gakr, kpuj is known for its support of the south korean government. shinnosuke takahashi portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201953 a turning point came in the mid-1980s, when takahashi had a chance to re-engage with korea. he, and future okps founders, were introduced to park sunam, the zainichi korean film director who was interviewing okinawan local islanders about the memories of korean forced labourers and ‘comfort women’ in the kerama islands, a remote group of islands near okinawa island. the trip to kerama was the impetus for takahashi and others to consider the entangled historical relationship between okinawa and korea. together with other friends who helped with park’s film making, takahashi became involved in starting the action committee for solidarity with asia (acsa) project, which became okinawa korea people’s solidarity (okps) in 1997. feeling the need to learn korean, takahashi and other okps members started going to korean language lessons. while many other learners gave up, takahashi was one of the few students who developed fluency in both written and spoken korean; he became proficient enough that he could simultaneously interpret from korean into japanese. complex boundaries: life as a zainichi korean in okinawa buddhist nun, mother, and a second-generation zainichi korean, yeongja yu’s personal journey to okps reveals a highly complex set of boundaries that she had to negotiate, and a complementary set of insights into okinawan activism to those of takahashi. yeongja yu is one of the very few participants in okps who has familial and cultural connections with korea. also, together with takahashi, she is one of the few activists who has been involved in the group as a language expert. these factors make her essential for the group, especially when okinawans host korean delegates or when they travel to korea. but perhaps her most important function is that her presence is regarded as neither japanese nor okinawan, nor indeed mainland korean; rather she is perceived to be kakehashi (a bridge) between these three places.4 although she joined the group relatively recently, her likeable character, witty jokes and an open mind made her a central figure in the group. her presence also highlights the strictly gendered world of okps and the okinawan anti-base movement. other okps members, who are either middle-aged or older men who have been involved with civic activism for decades, affectionately call her nuna, which means ‘elder sister,’ a korean word for addressing older women by younger men, or haha (mother in japanese). while they use these titles out of respect, the names also indicate something of the roles that she is expected to act in her community. this personal characterization is not a spontaneous response to her work, but a result of the various challenges she has negotiated throughout her life. yu was born in hiroshima in 1951. she was the youngest child of nine siblings. her parents moved from korea’s jeolla province to japan during korea’s colonial period.5 the family moved to kobe when yu was little. at the time, kobe was one of the world’s busiest industrial port cities and for this reason kobe was known for its large international population, most typically people from korea and other parts of asia. as a result, the zainichi korean community in kobe was active in the civil rights 4 interview with yeongja yu, 2 march 2012. this interview was conducted at café rui in naha. 5 jeolla province, as well as jeju island and south gyeongsan province, the southernmost region of korea, were the major provinces from which koreans migrated to japan during the 1920s and 1930s. they were traditionally known for their rich soil, and the japanese government conducted land reform specifically in these areas to increase the production of rice during those periods. affected by this land reform, a substantial number of peasants lost their lands and fled to seoul to become wage labourers. in the same manner, a large number of former peasants also migrated to japan to work in industrialized areas such as hiroshima, kobe, akashi and osaka (moon 2005). memories of struggles: translocal lives in okinawan anti-base activism portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201954 movement even under the allied occupation of japan (1945–1952). one of the earliest and the most well-known examples was the hanshin education struggle of the late 1940s. the kobe and osaka branches of the chōsenjin renmei (the korean league) protested against the local japanese police and american occupation forces over the right to conduct ethnic education and the protests involved physical clashes with police and the occupation forces. in kobe, yu went to the local zainichi korean school run by the general association of korean residents in japan (gakr or chōsen sōren) until high-school. although her family originated in southern korea, which was by then part of the republic of korea, yu’s parents, like many others in this period, sent their daughter to a school closely affiliated with the democratic people’s republic of korea (dprk, north korea). however, political ideology was not a major issue for her parents. rather, they wanted yu to be educated in a way that would maintain her korean identity. neither of her parents was literate, so they wanted their children to be educated in ways they were not. at school, yu learnt korean and became a ‘zainichi korean in japan’ or what she calls ‘chōsenjin.’ she also met her future husband who was a leader of the school’s student activist groups. although yu was never a student activist, she was still interested in the politics around her community and had a dream to become ‘a wife of a famous korean activist.’ they married after graduating from high school. yu’s husband later became an art teacher at a local japanese high school, and yu ran a korean-style barbeque restaurant in kobe while raising three children. nonetheless, she was increasingly entering the world of korean civil rights movement. the first instance was as a member of the protest campaign against the compulsory finger printing of foreign residents in japan.6 zainichi koreans, who were categorized as ‘special permanent residents,’ were the most affected and targeted by the introduction of this system. in 1980, an anti-finger printing movement was started by a tokyo-based zainichi korean, han jong-sok. although he risked either a penalty of one year in prison or a fine, han chose to refuse to be finger printed, insisting that this system was against the international covenant on civil and political rights, to which japan became a signatory in 1978. when yu saw fellow koreans participating in the campaign, particularly people from a similar generation to her own, she decided to join her friends. what inspired yu most was the fact that this protest campaign was not started by the major ethnic associations such as gakr or kpuj or by political parties, but rather by fellow zainichi koreans and japanese citizens who joined the campaign as concerned individuals. however, when she decided to join the campaign, her husband opposed her decision; despite his earlier involvement in korean student activist movements, he had lost interest in political campaigns. instead, he told yu that the finger printing issue was a problem for japanese society, which needed to be corrected by japanese, not ‘us.’ her other family members also gave similar advice to yu. yet the opposition from her family could not stop her even after her husband finally said that he would divorce if she insisted on getting involved. remembering those days, yu said that her answer was ‘yes’ to divorce. she even told him: ‘let’s divorce and i won’t bother your life.’ she was confident and thought she would be able to live freely without him. in the end, the couple did not divorce. instead, he and other family members decided to support her. together with her korean and 6 the finger printing system was introduced in 1955 as a part of the alien registration act, which was enacted three years prior in 1952 with the aim to control and monitor non-japanese residents in japan. when foreign nationals needed to live in japan for more than 90 days, they were obliged to be issued with an official certificate of registration, the alien registration card, by the municipal governments in the area where they live. until 2000, foreign nationals had to have their finger prints taken at the time of submitting their applications for the renewal of the registration certificate. shinnosuke takahashi portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201955 japanese friends, her first job was to publish a community journal, peace people. as a principal organizer, sitting at the table of her barbeque restaurant after business hours, she wrote many articles. the next life-changing moment came soon after she started participating in the antifinger printing campaign in the late 1980s. one of her friends introduced her to a local study group on world war ii and colonialism in himeji, a city not far from kobe. the event was organized by a local buddhist group from the jōdo shinshū school. at first, yu was not interested in the event, because she was a strong atheist. but the name of kinjō minoru, a prominent okinawan sculptor, writer and activist, as a guest speaker on a flyer for the event attracted her interest. this event was part of a series celebrating the japanese buddhist monk shinran—the 12th–13th century founder of jōdo shinshū. participants read shinran’s texts and learnt his way of thinking by discussing historical and contemporary problems in japanese society. until that event yu had thought that religion dealt with morals based on strict rules in order to ensure a good life after death. her impression of the jōdo shinshū school, one of the largest buddhist schools, was also negative, given its deep historical involvement in japanese colonial projects in east asia and the pacific. promoting a mixture of syncretic buddhism with national shintoism, the school had played a crucial role in enforcing japanese-style buddhism across korea. however, what yu learnt from one of the monks at the venue changed her views. her scepticism about buddhism was shaken when she learnt about the school’s ideas of the past, present and future of human existence. for shinran, the monk told her, buddha does not answer the question of whether there is life after death. instead, the monk continued, shinran’s buddhism respects the present moment, which can be found when one realizes the calls from both past and future and their historical limits. based on this view and on remorse about their political-religious activities during the colonial period, the monks and believers who participated in the study group were all critical of japan’s colonial history. this is how yu became fascinated by jōdo shinshū and its precepts. she started attending the study group as a regular member. yet, this attendance did not satisfy her intellectual interests. in order to know more about shinran’s thought she decided to study at otani university, one of the buddhist universities founded by jōdo shinshū, where she was granted a qualification to become a nun when she was 52 years old. there, yu met a zainichi korean professor, chung cho-myo (also known as chung sanae), who was teaching ancient korean history. chung introduced yu to studies of south korea. like many of the fellow zainichi koreans of her generation who were educated strictly to become, literally, ‘a local delegate of general kim il-sun’ at the zainichi korean school, yu did not have a positive impression of south korea. despite the fact that it was her parents’ home country, yu knew almost nothing about it. chung understood yu’s suspicions so she took yu to south korea to show her the ‘motherland’ in 1999. born in japan as a member of an ethnic minority, yu felt that her visit to south korea enabled her to finally feel her ancestral roots and embrace a ‘korean’ identity. forty years after her marriage, yu decided to live apart from her husband in kobe, and she and one daughter moved to okinawa in the early 2000s. the motive for that move was that she was asked to open a local study group on shinran and jōdo shinshū by minoru kinjō, who had become a close friend. at the same time, as she drew closer to 60 years of age, yu wanted to have new challenges. she thought that there was no better chance for her than the invitation from her friends in okinawa. her husband also supported her suggestion to live apart for some months each year. yu thus started living in yomitan village for part of the year and kobe for the rest of the year. she organised a study group upon her arrival in the village, memories of struggles: translocal lives in okinawan anti-base activism portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201956 the venue a corner of kinjō’s studio. because of her likeable character and welcoming manner, and notwithstanding her religious background, the class soon became popular among the locals. as she had experienced in her first class in himeji, yu read and discussed shinran’s texts with attendees and tried to relate those works to japanese history. thus, she created her own critical religious practice that was anchored in her korean background. this was demonstrated by the clothes she would wear for the class. usually in front of her students,she wore a black buddhist gown called kesa. but occasionally she came to class wearing chima jeogori, the traditional korean women’s dress. after her relocation to okinawa she started participating in public gatherings on okinawa’s us-base problems and she was introduced to the founding members of okps. although yu’s active involvement with the okinawan anti-base movement was mostly welcomed by fellow activists, it was not always the case. one significant event took place in 2010, when she attended a public gathering in front of the okinawa prefectural government. prior to this gathering, she was told by her friends that the next protest demonstration would aim to pressure the okinawa prefectural government by representing the voices of all okinawan residents who disagreed with the relocation of the us military base from futenma to henoko. yu decided to attend the event in her favourite korean dress. however, during the protest, she was surrounded by a group of local female activists, one of whom asked her why she had come in ‘such a strange dress.’ yu replied that the dress represented her cultural origins and that it was a formal dress to wear at a public event. the woman responded by telling her it was inappropriate to wear that sort of dress because the protest should be a gathering for and by ‘okinawans.’ after the event yu seriously considered returning to kobe. despite that encounter many of yu’s close okinawan friends tried to dissuade her. they were frustrated that such a divisive view was prevalent within certain groups of okinawan activists. of those friends, yu recalls a warm comment from setsuko miyagi, a highly respected senior activist. ‘okinawans needed a person like you,’ miyagi told yu. furthermore, her strong supporter minoru kinjō, who is a community leader in yomitan village, said that okinawans should work together with zainichi koreans in japan as they both share unresolved historical wounds caused by mainland japanese. hearing such encouragement, yu was reassured that her decision to move to okinawa was not the wrong choice. yu’s life in okinawa was not always easy. above-mentioned cases or similar ones still occur ‘occasionally,’ she told me. but after living in okinawa for nearly fifteen years, yu also found many reasons to stay. in yomitan village, henoko and elsewhere, she has found welcoming communities. inspired by yu’s life and religious views, some of her friends, including influential politicians and activists, started studying jōdo shinshū, and chibana shōichi, a local activist, later studied to become a qualified buddhist monk. conclusion the life histories of takahashi and yu—one a mainland japanese, the other a zainichi korean nun—introduce us to the memories of social struggles that they experienced. the two respective stories show the moments, events, and human relations that are involved in the navigation of translocal lives in okinawa. nonetheless, these personal accounts touch upon a number of the social struggles that japan has experienced since 1945. student radicalism of the 1970s and the korean civil rights movements are some exemplars among many stories that are involved in extra-local okinawan anti-base activisms. while okinawan activism and activism in the rest of japan tend to be considered separately, takahashi’s and yu’s stories emphasize how the two places inform post-war japanese social activism more broadly. the shinnosuke takahashi portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201957 translocal lives of takahashi and yu show how a place-based activism with decolonizing features, such as the okinawan anti-base movement, became a movement that fosters a social re-imagination beyond local, and national, or translocal, boundaries references appadurai, a. 2000, ‘grassroots globalization and the research imagination,’ public culture, vol. 12, no. 1: 1–19. doi: org/10.1215/08992363-12-1-1. ______ 2002, ‘deep democracy: urban governmentality and the horizon of hope,’ environment & urbanization, vol. 13, no. 2: 23–44. doi: org/10.1177/095624780101300203. arasaki, m. 2005, okinawa gendai-shi [modern okinawa history]. iwanami shoten: tokyo. brown childs, j. 2003, transcommunality: from the politics of conversion to the ethics of respect. temple university press, philadelphia. della porta, d. & tarrow, s. (ed) 2005, transnational protest and global activism. rowman & littlefield, lanham. macfarlane, c. 2009, ‘translocal assemblage: space, power and social movements,’ geoforum, vol. 40: 561–567. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.05.003 melucci, a. 1989, nomads of the present: social movements and individual needs in contemporary society. hutchinson radius, london. moon, g. 2005, gendai kankoku-shi [contemporary south korean history]. iwanami shoten, tokyo. tarrow, s. 2005, the new transnational activism. cambridge university press, cambridge. ______ 2011, power in movement: social movements and contentious politics. cambridge university press, cambridge. smith, j., chatfield, c. & pagnucco, r. (eds) 1997, transnational social movements and global politics: solidarity beyond the state. syracuse university press, new york. takahashi, s. 2018, ‘beyond minority history: okinawa korea people’s solidarity and internationalization of the okinawa struggle,’ in rethinking postwar okinawa: beyond american occupation, (eds) h. matsuda & p. iacobelli. lexington press, lanham: 81–101. touraine, a. 1981, the voice and the eye: an analysis of social movements. cambridge university press, cambridge. memories of struggles: translocal lives in okinawan anti-base activism portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201958 https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-1-1 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f095624780101300203 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.05.003 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 18, no. 1/2 feb 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: lempert, d. 2022. a question of tone: the mythological barrier between westerners and the vietnamese language and culture. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 18:1/2, 44–65. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis. v18i1-2.7539 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal general articles (peer reviewed) a question of tone: the mythological barrier between westerners and the vietnamese language and culture david lempert corresponding author: dr. david lempert, visiting scholar, institute for asian and african studies, humboldt university of berlin. unter den linden 6, 10099 berlin, germany. superlemp@yahoo.com doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7539 article history: received 18/12/2020; accepted 16/12/2021; published 25/02/2022 abstract language as a source of communication can also be a form of establishing an identity and setting barriers to communication. this article presents one example of such barriers in a major national language: vietnamese. the vietnamese language is one of the markers of identity that vietnamese often claim as the distinguishing feature of their culture, particularly its use of tone. as an assimilative culture changing rapidly due to its absorption into the global, urban economy, the vietnamese language is now one of the only fixed identity markers of the vietnamese. this may be why the vietnamese now seek to establish it as both a symbol and a barrier. as an american anthropologist i critically examine the vietnamese perception of their language and its role among other identity markers in creating boundaries between vietnamese and outsiders as an example of how stronger markers of ethnicity that promote cultural survival and sustainability are replaced by shallow markers reinforced by mythologies. keywords language; identity; culture; colonialism; vietnamese; tonality declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 44 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7539 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7539 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7539 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:superlemp@yahoo.com http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7539 introduction language as a source of communication can also be a form of establishing an identity and setting barriers to communication. this article provides an ethnographic case study of the barriers between east and west and of the reinforcement of a national cultural identity based on language even when stronger aspects of culture disappear. it focuses on the claimed inability of westerners to understand vietnamese language tones as a case study to explore how ethnic groups, including nation states with a national language, try to establish their identities by looking for a difference that they can use as a marker in setting barriers, even though this marker may not be the actual barrier that it is claimed to be and may not even be an effective way of establishing their identities or protecting cultural survival or sustainability. this paper therefore critically examines the perception the vietnamese have of their language, as reported from ethnographic field work over several years in vietnam, and its role among other identity markers in creating boundaries between vietnamese and outsiders. as an ethnographic anthropological study, the focus on this paper is on language as an expression of identity. my identification of the importance of language in vietnamese identity was one of the results of my ethnographic fieldwork in vietnam rather than an initial research question itself. this is a different approach to the one taken by linguistic anthropologists who typically focus more on the language itself and who pose a specific question about language and identity at the outset. i begin by outlining the preliminary results of the fieldwork and describe the ethnographic methodology used, followed by background information on the vietnamese language as an identity marker. i reflect on the vietnamese language and its tonality as well as how tonality is presented in vietnamese language study and in foreign language dictionaries. i then show how the six tones in the vietnamese language can be found in english in some fixed tonality on english words that helped to bridge what are claimed as rigid barriers to communication. i follow this with some hypotheses on the role of tone and sound in vietnamese language and how they may reflect parts of cultural identity that have disappeared. in the following sections, i then test and challenge what i find to be a vietnamese myth—that the use of structured tonality (word intonation) that has an overlap with the concept of tones (fixed pitch pronunciation for specific words) is somehow alien to speakers of english and other european languages. i examine in depth the finding that a weak identity marker like language is magnified by mythology and discuss its import on contemporary identities. my discussion concludes by considering how globalization and the organization of peoples into entities such as nation states may be forcing the creation of certain markers and myths of identity. i argue that peoples are constructing identities that serve as little more than political boundaries given the disappearance of cultural attributes that were fit to pre-globalization eco-systems that are disappearing in an emerging, global, urbanizing ‘anthropocene’ monoculture, in which cultural survival and sustainability are at risk (lempert 2010). background: the larger ethnographic methodological context on vietnamese identity in looking back at the post-world war ii independence struggles of minority peoples of asia, africa, and the americas against european colonialism, one of the questions that is and will increasingly be asked in light of independence followed by processes of globalization in which cultural distinctions rapidly disappeared is—what did these newly independent peoples actually win and what is it that they communicate among themselves and others about those identities? some twenty years ago i began research in ha noi and throughout viet nam on vietnamese (kinh/viet) identity, the historical relationship of the vietnamese to their geography and environment, the contemporary responses of vietnamese (kinh) lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202245 to globalization and modernization, and their views on what they were historically fighting for and against in their resistance to the americans, the french, and other groups in recent and ancient history. my study included examination of the vietnamese kinh’s characterizations of their culture in national media, in localities with historic sites and shrines, and among the vietnamese public, including their descriptions of their relations with other cultures encompassing periods of historical peace and conflict with the han chinese, the japanese, the cham, the khmer, and many different ethnicities now within their current borders, including many tai groups and proto-tai whom they also claim as part of their ancestry on the red river. the methodology that i employed in this research was that of ethnography and participant observation— well-established techniques in anthropology for holistic study of societies (malinowski 1922; spradley & mccurdy 1972)—with a focus on the city of hanoi/ha noi (hà nội) as a complex city (warner 1947). i centered my observation on economic and political institutions following a classic tradition of participant research in a complex society with commentary on political culture that also has a long tradition including scholarship in the u.s. in the nineteenth century (see tocqueville 1835-1840). the techniques that i applied included interactions ‘up’ and ‘down’ the social structure and its institutions including ‘studying up’ with government officials (nader 1972). other techniques i used included the study of use of language (osgood 1964) and interactions between different groups and the approaches of interpretation and meaning of words (cottam 1986). given my ability to remain in viet nam for several years, with work in several different capacities, my study was not limited to a specific institution or strata but included diverse and extensive interaction with the vietnamese across class, region (with travel outside of ha noi and to its surrounding areas), age, and types of relations (work, friendship, economic transactions, teaching). i began my language study in viet nam in the foreign language school in ha noi, following just a short introduction to the language in a night school class in the u.s. i further developed my language skills while undertaking fieldwork over eight years in viet nam, consisting of visits to every area of ha noi and surroundings in a radius of some 100 km in unobtrusive visits by bicycle to traditional villages, housing projects, markets, religious sites, health clinics, almost every kind of shop, eating street food, and in interactions with peddlers, farmers, and government officials at all levels. i attended a cooking course for vietnamese (mostly for women) at the women’s union and worked with an entrepreneur selling tapes of children’s stories and schoolbooks. i taught at the university to students and ministry officials, took a case to the local courts, studied guitar with local musicians, ran occasionally with a vietnamese running club as well as another one mixed with foreigners and vietnamese, attended weddings and funerals, visited hundreds of local community eateries with simple food and the common draft beer, and spoke with everyone from the wealthy to street children. i worked alongside vietnamese colleagues on a ministry publication and was also interviewed in vietnamese on television and for print publications. my work is reported in much more detail elsewhere that i hope to make more widely available soon. my eight years in viet nam were followed by several years in the neighboring countries of cambodia, laos and thailand (lempert n.d. 1; lempert n.d. 2) and also followed prior extensive fieldwork and analysis of russian culture and the (soviet) russian empire (lempert 1996). since i am not a linguist but rely here on the scholarship of linguistics, my approaches are not controlled experiments to test specific hypotheses in laboratory conditions but focus instead on the relational, social and political aspects of language interactions. the tests that linguists use and the questions that they ask are largely limited to the use of a language and language acquisition, rather than the feelings of native speakers about their languages and identities and how they feel about and interact with foreigners learning their language in multiple settings. i have not used a sociological survey to elicit this information not because my discipline of anthropology discourages such research (i have conducted various types of surveys including surveys of entrepreneurs and consultants in vietnam). the reason i have not used it here is that for questions of identity on a national scale i consider such research to be unreliable both for reasons of lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202246 sampling (inability to construct a random sample or even an acceptable survey methodology) and for political reasons. in ha noi, and in viet nam in general, questions of national identity are politically sensitive. viet nam remains a one-party state and the leadership is sensitive about its foreign relations, image and identity. indeed, in many cases where i was engaged in international consulting or teaching work in vietnam, government officials formally and informally controlled information and results even where those activities were for research purposes and/or were officially approved. such formal research is likely impossible for foreigners and, even if it were possible for vietnamese, would still be subject to such pressures to distort results and controls that in the past have included jailing, damage to careers, and pressure on family members. in my own experience authoring pieces for vietnamese publications in english, a vietnamese editor introduced me to the expression that vietnamese intellectuals used regarding truth and censorship: ‘this is too true to be good,’ an inversion of the english expression ‘this is too good to be true.’ the value of ethnographic research that crosses into the broad range of anthropology, including linguistics, is that the low profile of such research avoids triggering political sensitivities and allows for more freedom to construct hypotheses, apply a theoretical approach, and allow for political interpretation. the tradeoff is that ethnography is indeed subjective as both a science and an art. it both allows for and recognizes the limitations of individual and personal observation and commentary (i.e., opinion) in promoting wider ranging results in what is considered ‘interpretive anthropology’ (geertz 1973). comments on politics are therefore not an aberration to be eliminated (as opinionated) but are an integral part of the interpretive process. my focus on the vietnamese language needs to be placed within the larger context of my conclusions and characterization of vietnamese (kinh) culture and identity from much more detailed ethnographic work that i can only briefly summarize here. as a result of constant questioning about vietnamese pride, identity as well as examinations of how it was officially presented, my conclusion is that vietnamese (kinh) culture has become an imitative culture. this is an observation hinted at in earlier studies (woodside 1988) and reflects a process of how cultures are patterned partly in relationship systems with other cultures as well as by their environments (lempert 2014). my expanded research suggests that the vietnamese today do not really have much of a sense of what they ‘won’ with independence or what they have protected beyond one set of leading families and alliances over another. the vietnamese resistance struggles throughout history— including those of the twentieth century—appear to have been driven by economic insecurity channeled into racial aggression and violence in which vietnamese mostly fought (and fight) against each other— rather than foreigners—and construct a cultural system that they claim to be ‘independent’ and run by vietnamese. an examination of their political and social system indicates they continually recreate the same inequalities in a continuity of hierarchies that include foreign sovereigns to which they pay forms of tribute. perhaps the major difference that occurred following the independence struggles of the twentieth century is that the foreign part of the political hierarchy in which the vietnamese kinh are embedded today is now better hidden than it was in the past. thus, those foreign powers enforcing it are not seen to be directing it within the country itself, though they do so through economic and military hegemony (china, russia, the u.s. and global institutions like the world bank). in seeking to define what differentiates viet nam from neighboring countries in the process or globalization and/or from countries whose cultures they have largely copied, the conclusion of my fieldwork was that most vietnamese today seem to be unable to articulate anything specific about their own cultural identity. my consistent finding through questioning, interactions, and research, is that the only major distinguishing cultural marker the vietnamese (kinh) seem to recognize beyond political borders and land is language. in asserting the uniqueness of their language, vietnamese make several claims about it that may be myths, while also using language and communication to create barriers against outsiders to establish an identity that they find difficult to base on anything else. with this conclusion as a starting point, in this article i narrow in on the vietnamese (kinh) claims that their language is somehow impenetrable to lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202247 foreigners by focusing on the peculiar ways in which they affirm language and sounds. in highlighting this aspect of my fieldwork, i also draw on the work of linguists in characterizing both vietnamese and english, as well as the learning of vietnamese as a second language, to confirm my own participant observations. my study of the vietnamese language started in 1996 on my first visit to the country for a consulting project, followed by a short night course. between 1990 and 2006 i lived in ha noi and continued using the language in communication in visits to the country until 2015, as well as in continuing contacts with vietnamese communities in neighboring countries (laos, thailand, and cambodia) as well as the united states and europe. one of the most common comments that i heard from vietnamese listening to foreigners (including myself and others) and to particularly western (american and european speakers) was that the main barrier to understanding vietnamese was the inability of foreign speakers to understand its tones. western speakers learning the language also agreed, frequently claiming in discussions on vietnamese and vietnamese culture that they were and are often unable to use or recognize its tones. alongside this belief on both sides is the oft-repeated statement that english and other western languages do not have tones, only intonation, making it difficult or impossible for most western speakers to hear or produce tones. the idea of tones as a barrier, i argue, is claimed to be a much greater obstacle than it is, suggesting that it may in fact be an artificial construct or myth that has been accepted on both sides. that raises the key research question in this article—if the idea that vietnamese tones and vietnamese language are a nearly insurmountable barrier to mutual understanding between vietnamese and westerners is an artificial construct, what purpose does it serve? to highlight this point—and as a starting point for the rest of the paper—i offer the following vignette showing how even my own name has tones and that the vietnamese with whom i interacted recognized this clearly even while claiming foreign languages had no tones and that westerners could not recognize vietnamese tones. in written communications, vietnamese leaving messages for me using my english name david would (correctly or incorrectly) spell out the name without any tones in direct approximation to the english intonation of flat tones (often ‘devid’). yet, when using the biblical version of my name from hebrew דויד —also a non-tonal language that i sometimes used in pronouncing my name—they would write the name as it sounded to them in the way my intonation reflected a specific tonal pronunciation on the second syllable, with the same tone that is used in english in words like ‘need’ or ‘speed’ or ‘creed’ or ‘kid’ or ‘did’ or like the spanish name el cid. they recognized it, as i also would in vietnamese, with a tonal mark, a sắc rising tone on the second syllable (possibly also to distinguish it from actual words with that syllable that have a meaning in vietnamese). as with other foreign words, vietnamese apply an interpretation that gives these words tonality, a phenomenon that linguists call phonological adaptation (kang 2010), which they in fact often have. in my interpretation of their transcription of my name most vietnamese with whom i interacted—and who would also tell me that non-asian languages had no tones—were in fact recognizing the very tonality in other languages that they claimed did not exist. in writing my name, they all chose the same tone in the choice from among the six tones that could be used in vietnamese. along with this belief in the barrier that tones present to westerners, the vietnamese offer several other related assertions regarding sound in communications in ways that purport to create barriers. among them are beliefs that i directly heard several times in fieldwork, that the vietnamese are more musical and poetic, more peaceful and spiritual, and that vietnamese speakers are more emotionally restrained without the need for intonation in use of language (i.e., vietnamese do not raise their voices but know how to restrain emotions in speech so as not to be viewed as immature). i found these perceptions also largely contradicted by ubiquitous street and rural noise, electronic noise, and ever-present conflict that one encounters in contemporary viet nam, though true in meetings dealing with authorities and in public where one needed to use restraint and self-censor. lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202248 focusing research on the vietnamese majority ethnic group (kinh)’s markers of identity including language in many cultures, including that of the vietnamese kinh1, language has come to be an historical marker for cultural distinctions. this is not surprising given the amount of time required for distinct languages to emerge (approximately a thousand years according to classic linguists, anthropologists, and historians) (wang 1982; sarich & miele 2004), though that is now somewhat disputed given the definition of a language is contested. language does not in itself define what is specific to a culture and how cultures are differentiated from each other even though language may contain some of the historic record of some past differences, but it is a marker of ‘distance’ that emerges between groups and that differentiate them. when language is the key remaining marker of cultural identity, however, without other differences in social, political, or economic behaviors, it may either suggest that a culture is a derivative or ‘copying’ culture among powerful neighbors or that a culture has assimilated or lost its traditional distinctions, making this question a good one to ask about the vietnamese kinh. indeed, the vietnamese kinh culture today largely appears to be both a derivative culture and one that is assimilating (lempert n.d. 1; lempert n.d. 2). as a key identity marker (along with certain rituals and clothing that retain information from the past), attitudes towards the language can create a window into attitudes about that vietnamese history and current cultural choices. although there is controversy within the field of anthropology today as to the meanings of concepts like ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ and when and how they emerge (barth 1969; wolf 1982), and on the processes of the formation of ‘identity,’ there is still an evolutionary and linguistic record of population differentiations throughout history (eriksen 1993). among these distinct groups is the vietnamese kinh majority that anthropologists recognize as an ‘ethnicity’ and that the vietnamese kinh majority government seems to recognize as a ‘race’—perhaps because of the disappearance of earlier aspects of vietnamese culture. the vietnamese government’s use of race today as a means of determining vietnamese citizenship is, however, problematic since the vietnamese kinh population shows characteristics of the historical mixing of populations—chinese han from the north and other waves of chinese migrations in the south, tai peoples up and down the red river, malayan cham peoples, mon khmer, and others—in a variety of genetic characteristics specific to sub-regions of asia and southeast asia. those characteristic genetic adaptations that exist are part of the evolutionary historical record of physical adaptations to different environments in the region over a few millennia. similarly, the language differentiation in the region—including that of the vietnamese language and its dialects that are regional products of mixing—reflects similar processes of isolation, differentiation, and mixing, as well as the cultural adaptations and behaviors of local groups. in viet nam, there are some long-term cultural continuities over several thousand years that are embedded in the vietnamese language. for example, rice was the staple dating back to the hoa binh period and water management for rice cultivation and flood protection through dykes dates back to the dong son bronze era around 300 b.c.e. when the red river was occupied by tai tribes and flourished during the period of han chinese occupation over the following several centuries (taylor 1983). basic cultural forms of economic production and consumption (the structural differences of vietnamese life), however, are challenged today as markers that are reflective of the vietnamese kinh’s identity. words like đất-nước (literally ‘earth-water’ the word for country) and cơm (‘cooked rice’ the word for food) exist in the language as markers or ‘superstructure’ of the culture (kroeber 1944) but the cultural structure they reflect is disappearing. like vietnamese rituals that are also markers of cultural differentiation and still exist as symbols of structural differences between vietnamese and other groups, neither the rituals nor the language 1 within the boundaries of the nation state of viet nam some 85% of the country’s 90+ million population (general statistics office, vietnam, 1996) and in overseas populations of several million (largely in the u.s., france, cambodia, and laos) identify as majority kinh. lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202249 are structural (institutional and behavioral choice) differences. instead, they are merely the remaining markers of what historically existed. while vietnamese historians today seek to present history and identity as a continuous stream of resistance to the northern invaders (the han chinese who began to emerge in different empires some two thousand years ago) (ủy ban khoa học xã hội việt nam 1971; nguyễn 1993; nguyễn 1995; trần 2001), non-vietnamese historians generally see vietnamese identity emerging with the formation of early vietnamese empires of the nam yue (nam viet or southern barbarian group in relation to china) during the first millennium and then with the formation of dai viet (great viet) in the early second millennium (taylor 1983). what is problematic with the vietnamese official presentation of identity as that of ‘resistance’ to northern invaders, is not only that this contradicts the actual vietnamese origins as northern tai (the red river civilization of au lac defeated from the north in the third century b.c.e. may have been ethnically tai) or australo-asian/mon, but that the vietnamese empire that emerged as a result of the so-called ‘resistance’ was largely modeled on the chinese han empires to which it may have continuously (and possibly even today) been a vassal/subordinate state paying tribute as part of a larger hierarchy. vietnamese identity as a separate culture may just be a mythical creation to build support for local leaders breaking away from centralized chinese control during periods of economic collapse and instability and ruling over areas where tribal languages and customs, including those that were distinctly ‘vietnamese’ (rooted in tai or australo-asian/mon), had mixed with those of the chinese han. many of the key attributes of early vietnamese (or red river or perhaps red river bronze or vietnamese-tai) culture before the chinese invasions (including prominent political and economic roles of women, a system of local lac lords, and local nature worship), were erased or supplemented by chinese han influences in politics, foods, technologies, religions, and language (taylor 1983). though vietnamese fought against the chinese han they appeared to live under the chinese without incident for a much longer period of history. moreover, the eras of independence (including independence in 1945, 1954 and 1975), were not marked by any return to reverse the attributes of the colonial cultures from which the vietnamese became independent but by decisions to largely embrace and copy those attributes under local leadership (nguyễn 1993; nguyễn, 1995). ironically, rather than just attributes that reflect the difference with china in having a warmer, southern climate and its natural products, many of the elements of vietnamese society today may reflect french and european influences that make the vietnamese distinct from the chinese or at least from the chinese of yunnan and southern china, along with some absorption of some cultural aspects from india (indianization) and customs of the cham and khmer. french clothing, foods, architecture, colonial administration, music, and other attributes are part of vietnamese cultural forms today. these are visible today in technology, economics, treatment of minorities, and the organization of the nation state (evans 1992; lempert 2000). foreign technologies and globalization continue today to homogenize the country in terms of family structure, mobility, technology, workplace, and fashion. many key cultural attributes of the past, including those recorded not long ago by anthropologists, have disappeared (hickey 1964; crawford 1966; lê 1993; jamieson 1993; templer 1993). the key cultural attributes that i have identified in my ethnographic fieldwork that continue and could be seen as unique to the vietnamese even with industrialization, urbanization and globalization are (1) natality (early marriage and childbirth to generate population expansion rather than large families) and (2) a belief in spirits (superstitions) rather than science. such a cultural strategy might be described as one of ‘breeders and palm readers’ and is characteristic of empires (militarism), as well as cultures defined by copying rather than innovating (with innovation limited to specific spheres that promote intensive use of resources and density). lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202250 with current vietnamese staple foods replacing rice and now serving as a sign of foreign influence (corn from the americas now grown in the country along with african yams and increasing consumption of imported wheat), and with most of the traditional cultural attributes either culturally borrowed and not specifically vietnamese or under threat, there is little left of identity other than the borders of the nation state and the cults and symbols of viet nam’s current leadership in the form of a small group of families (rather than dynastic kings). with the leadership largely in place with the help of foreign powers and support, traditional vietnamese political networks such as the monarchy and local lords, village ties and leaders, have been replaced. most vietnamese are thus left searching for some kind of symbol of identity. during the early revolutionary period against the french in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sons of the local vietnamese elites who were working with the french, like ho chi minh (nguyen that thanh), did seek to restore the vietnamese monarchy and even its symbol in the language: the traditional vietnamese nom (chữ nôm) (chinese character-based) script to replace the modified portuguese western alphabet of vietnamese that had been introduced in the seventeenth century. but this can vuong (cần vương, ‘aid the king’) movement was quickly replaced by revolutionary movements that were effectively more like coup d ’états replacing the elites while maintaining the colonial culture and hierarchy they established. while nom itself was based on chinese characters (but with different pronunciations), it is hard to define as more vietnamese than the adapted portuguese alphabet that replaced it with critical markers to indicate the six tones. indeed, it is the vietnamese language that is the record of various foreign influences and transformations and that may be one of the main (or only) markers that distinguishes the country from the chinese and other urbanizing and industrializing countries during this era of globalization. like many languages, vietnamese is filled with borrowed words reflecting, for example, the changes in production and staple diet. in vietnamese there are large recognizable categories of borrowed words from identifiable cultures and time periods including words from french like bánh (panne)/bread along with ga-tô (‘gateau’)/cakes, kem (crème)/ ice cream and bơ (beurre)/butter as well as khoai tây (literally western potato) supplementing local root crops and yams. while the vietnamese language cannot be described as indigenous given all of its influences, it is exactly this language that incorporates the amalgamated cultural influences that define vietnamese kinh culture and history. while linguists (and vietnamese) might suggest that it is the vietnamese who are taking foreign objects and influences and making them vietnamese (in much the same way that words like ‘viet nam’ and place names are transformed in reverse into other languages like english with the wrong tones such as hanoi pronounced like the word ‘annoy’ with the rising tone on the second syllable ), ethnographers recognize as a principle of cultural interaction that changes can occur in both cultures and particularly in the weaker ones. language provides a record of those changes even though native speakers may not even be conscious of it (alves 2009). this amalgam of chinese, australo-asian (mon and/or tai), and french, with a portuguese induced script, is itself the marker that the vietnamese use for their identity. vietnamese language: overview of differences from european languages although native speakers of vietnamese are only about one percent of the globe’s population, its roughly 90+ million native speakers make it among the ten to 20 most widely spoken languages in the world. while it shares many commonalities with other nearby languages including thai, lao and minority languages (tonality and basic words) and chinese (its word block pairs linking two concepts to form common twosyllable words comprising nearly half its vocabulary though the measurement and classifications are still subject to debate), it has a distinct writing system as well as a distinct mix of words reflecting historic influences (particularly recent borrowings from french). even though its system of tones is not unique in lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202251 the region, it may be the tone system that appears at first glance to be most unusual to native speakers of european languages. linguists classify vietnamese as an austroasiatic language and a mon-khmer language in the same category as languages found in cambodia and among minorities in the south of viet nam today and throughout laos and thailand before the entrance of tai peoples from yunnan and the chinese (by land and sea). yet, vietnamese also has many common words with modern thai and lao that indicate a common origin at least during the first millennium b.c.e. with bronze era trade up the red river between yunnan, china and the sea, as well as the commonality of having six distinct tones. there was no vietnamese written language prior to invasions of the chinese and vietnamese writing originally adapted chinese characters (nom). the current alphabet abandoned the characters and replaced them with the western alphabet, supplemented with additional letters and with markers to indicate the tones at the initiative of a portuguese missionary alexander de rhodes in the seventeenth century (rhodes 1991 [1651]; nguyen 1986). tone that characterizes the language is described as the use of musical pitch for distinguishing meaning of words (yip 2002; trask 2004). due to historical mixing of peoples, these tones differ by region and the language exists in a number of dialects though the leading families in ha noi along the red river in the north define their dialect as the standard (though it also includes aspects of other dialects) since vietnamese imperialism and colonialism historically spread from there. in the center of the country, the vietnamese mixed with the cham (indianized malayan peoples) and in the south with the khmer, whose empires they invaded and whose lands they conquered and whose languages generally do not have tones (though some dialects like utsat and eastern cham do). in the north, it was heavily influenced from the invading chinese han, though chinese also left its mark in the south as in other countries of southeast asia, from migrating chinese and chinese merchants. mandarin chinese (literally the language of the han) has only four tones (only one falling tone rather than two as in vietnamese and no rising-falling tone) though this distinguishes the han chinese from southern peoples in china whose languages have six to nine tones (depending on how they are defined). northern vietnamese speakers use six tones while speakers in other regions have partly lost the rising-falling tone and the rising-falling-rising tone (vũ 1982; ferlus 1996; brunelle 2009). in my experience studying vietnamese, (mandarin) chinese, lao, thai, and khmer, vietnamese as both a spoken and written language was the easiest to learn among these tonal languages. the simplified vietnamese writing system that replaced nom (using complex forms of chinese characters not for their pictorial representations but for their sounds) reinforces the tones by presenting them individually. lao and thai use letter systems but the tones are dependent on rules and shift of certain consonants, while chinese characters do not encode the tone. table 1 presents the six tones as they appear in northern viet nam where i conducted my fieldwork.2 the final column notes whether or not english and other western language speakers can find these tones in ordinary intonation or exclamation in english. generally, the hỏi tone can be found in certain question words in english while the ngang or level (no tone) tone is described as the common english pronunciation. it may be possible to hear most of these tones in english in intonation and some others associated with particular expressions. note that while linguistic anthropologists often investigate why certain types of sounds develop in a language and what advantage they might offer (schafer 1993; bull & back 2004; feld & brenneis 2004) as well as why particular types of body language (hall 1963) and expression (proshansky, ittelson & rivlin 1970) might exist (e.g. vietnamese laughter to express embarrassment and relieve tension rather than only for humor as in english), it is not my goal here to seek to explain the reasons for vietnamese tones, though i present some hypotheses in the discussion section below. 2 there are dialectic differences in the country with the southern and central parts of the country using different tones for several words. lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202252 the evidence of tones in english: its absence in presentations of vietnamese language to europeans and in how the vietnamese present european languages although english word intonation does not use precisely the six tones in the same way as they are found in vietnamese (in the six clear distinctions for words), and though english is not characterized by tones throughout the entire language, examples of the vietnamese tone system do in fact exist in english given the breadth of intonation used in english (ladd 2008). at the same time, the pronunciation of vietnamese words can also add elements of intonation as in english (brunelle, ha & grise 2012; ha 2012; michaud & vaissiere 2015). in english, the uses of pitch in speech that overlap the pitches found in vietnamese can be found both in the use of intonation to distinguish meaning, as well as in tones assigned to specific words to distinguish meaning for different parts of speech used with the same spelling and sometimes for homonyms where slight spelling differences also reinforce pronunciation in different tones.3 in the five tables below, there are examples of how vietnamese tones are used in english and how listeners hearing only individual words (or in some cases just specific syllables from words) taken out of the context of sentences, can infer the meaning of the sentence only from specific tones of those words or syllables. this, in fact, is the essence of tonality. merely seeing the same word or syllable (or list of consonants) in print without the tone (or in some cases without linked letters or syllables that trigger the 3 although such presentations may exist in language books for teaching vietnamese to english speakers or in language books or dictionaries for teaching english pronunciations to vietnamese speakers, i have yet to find one and neither could the four reviewers of this article. table 1. tones in vietnamese and analogues in english and other western languages name of tone in vietnamese symbolic representation description analogue in english and western languages sắc ʹ symbol over the vowel rising tone possibly used in exclamation and surprise but not generally recognized as affiliated with a word. hỏi ᾽ (hook or question mark shaped symbol) over the vowel rise and falling tone yes, in some question words when emphasized like “why?”, “how?”, and “when?” ngang none no intonation yes. viewed as the common pronunciation. ngã ˜ (the spanish “tilde” symbol) over the vowel slight rising, falling and rising not recognized though possibly used as intonation with some questioning words as a sign of exasperation, such as “wha..t?” and “where” and other exclamations like “whoa” or “no...”. huyền ˋ symbol over the vowel long falling tone. not recognized as affiliated with words though possibly used as intonation for emphasis of sadness. nặng . underneath the vowel. short falling tone. not recognized as affiliated with words. lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202253 tone in english) would not be enough to distinguish meaning. tones in english may not be as distinct as the vietnamese tones and may offer a bit of choice for the speaker (sometimes, for example, between long or short falling tones) and may not exactly match the vietnamese tones, but vietnamese hearing them would be able to assign a vietnamese tone to what they heard (i have tested the pronunciations with a native vietnamese speaker). note that of the six distinct vietnamese tones, only the ngã tone cannot be affiliated with specific english words, though it can be used electively (as described in the section above) in some question words for emphasis. several vietnamese linguists have also documented this both experimentally (nguyễn 2017) and anecdotally (nguyen 1970a; nguyễn 1980; ho 1997). each of the tables presents the english word, its non-tonal dictionary pronunciation in english as reflected in the international phonetic alphabet (ipa) and then a tonal pronunciation for the word with english spellings and the addition of vietnamese tonal marks in a final column to indicate which vietnamese tone can in fact be associated with the english pronunciation. in some cases, two different tones may be possible or a cross between them (usually the two falling tones, the huyền and nặng tones). no english-vietnamese dictionaries offer pronunciation keys to english that offer vietnamese tonal equivalents and one can open any english-vietnamese dictionary to note this absence (phụng 2003). tables 3 through 6 also contain definitions and parts of speech (noun, verb, pronoun) to indicate that different meanings of a single word that are associated with the different tones that are used in pronouncing the word. in these tables, sample meanings are chosen from among several to reinforce the differences.4 table 2 shows how certain parts of speech in english require the use of the sắc rising tone in the first syllable (such as the gerund case of verbs) followed by no tone in the second syllable. in these polysyllabic words, pitch (tone) is a correlative of stress. without this kind of tonality (in this case a fixed pitch on specific syllables in these words), there is no other way to correctly pronounce these words. for linguists, this is not the same thing as tone because it is not occurring in single syllable words. but it indicates that the use of pitch in a fixed way partly shares a feature—in some words in a non-tonal language—that is found throughout a tonal language like vietnamese. in just hearing the first syllable, listeners know they are hearing a verb form of the word. table 2. sample gerund case words with fixed syllabic tonality english word dictionary pronunciation vietnamese tonal depiction of english word shopping ʃɑːpɪŋ shóp-ping boxing bɑːksɪŋ bóx-ing table 3 offers four different couplets of words that are homonyms in english in both noun and verb forms and where the verb and noun form come from the same root meaning. for each of these words, the verb and noun form take on different but distinct fixed tones to distinguish the meanings. the noun forms may be no tone, huyền, nặng or sắc while verb forms are usually no tone or sắc. in other words, four of six tones found in vietnamese are commonly represented in english usage. table 4 also presents a series of noun and verb homonym couplets with the four tones also used to distinguish the forms and meaning. what is different about these couplets is that the two forms are not from common root words. in english, different root word origins could also lead to different tonalities to distinguish words of common spelling. 4 in all of the tables below, dictionary definitions and the ipa pronunciations have been taken directly from the free dictionary online at: http://www.thefreedictionary.online/ (free dictionary 2015). lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202254 http://www.thefreedictionary.online/ table 5 offers examples of one syllable words where the use of tones in english indicates additional parts of speech with different meaning and not just nouns and verbs. here where the meaning is a usage that is a command, one may find the hỏi tone, as in question words that are used as questions (in table 1). while it is rare to find homonyms in english with both different spelling and different tones, table 6 offers two examples of such pairs. here the different spelling is a marker of a different tonal pronunciation. there is no rule here where a specific letter serves to indicate a different tone, but the different spellings mark the usage of different tones. despite this clear existence of tones in english, in specific word forms and not just intonation, none of the books i used in the 1990s in language study from the u.s. and available commercially (e.g. lam, steinen, & emeneau 1944; nguyen 1967; nguyễn 1970b) or from government (the u.s. foreign service/ monterrey institute) or in viet nam (produced by ha noi’s foreign language institute as well as commercially and by government publishers in the country) nor those for teaching english to vietnamese, recognized english as having tones. the new sets of teaching materials are now broader in their methods (moore 1994; nguyen 1997; hoang, nguyen & trinh 2000; healy 2004; catlett 2008; ngo 2013) and include a variety of dialects such as the southern vietnamese dialect, but they still do not recognize tonality in english. table 3. noun-verb homonym pairs in which tonality distinguishes the forms of similar root meaning english word couplets particular meaning dictionary pronunciation vietnamese tonal depiction of english word part n. 1. a piece or portion of a whole pɑːt part v. 22. to divide or separate from one another; take or come apart: párt hope n. 1. (sometimes plural) a feeling of desire for something and confidence in the possibility of its fulfilment həʊp hòpe v. 6. (tr; takes a clause as object or an infinitive) to desire (something) with some possibility of fulfillment hópe bite n. 22. a wound, bruise, or sting inflicted by biting baɪt bịte or bìte v. 1. to grip, cut off, or tear with or as if with the teeth or jaws bíte start n. 20. a slight involuntary movement of the body, as through fright, surprise, etc. stɑːt stárt v. to begin or cause to begin (something or to do something); come or cause to come into being, operation, etc. start lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202255 what explains the perceived and reinforced barrier of tones although the vietnamese language is not easy for native western language speakers to learn, it is not nearly as hard as chinese and may not be as hard as languages like lao and thai which also have tones given that the written vietnamese language directly contains and cues the tones in the spelling. the idea of tones as being a barrier to foreigners largely appears to be a myth. it seems to be part of a set of barriers that vietnamese impose in communications and interactions with foreigners to try to establish some kind of identity as well as to reinforce the traditional vietnamese cultural boundaries with outsiders not within their families, communities, and other networks. there is no denying that it is not easy for western language speakers to learn vietnamese compared to learning other european languages given the lack of common word roots other than for some french words. there is also no denying that the need to focus on the tones of many words that use the same consonants and vowels imposes an additional burden on language learners even though the problem may not be the idea that tones are completely new and do not exist in western languages. studies have found this additional burden for westerners (wang et al. 1999; wayland & guion 2004; so 2005; nguyen & macken 2008) table 4. noun-verb homonym pairs in which tonality distinguishes the forms, where root meaning is not determinative english word couplets particular meaning dictionary pronunciation vietnamese tonal depiction of english word court n. a. an extent of open ground partially or completely enclosed by walls or buildings kɔːt còurt or cọurt v. a. to attempt to gain; seek cóurt rot n. 4. pointless talk; nonsense rɒt rot v. 1. to undergo decomposition, especially organic decomposition; decay ròt shorts n. 1. (clothing & fashion) trousers reaching the top of the thigh or partway to the knee, worn by both sexes for sport, relaxing in summer, etc ʃɔːts shọrts v. to short-circuit. shórts sports n. 1. (general sporting terms) an individual or group activity pursued for exercise or pleasure, often involving the testing of physical capabilities and taking the form of a competitive game spɔːt spòrts or spọrts v. 13. (clothing & fashion) (tr) to wear or display in an ostentatious or proud manner: spórts smarts n. 2. slang intelligence; expertise smɑːts smárts v. 10. to feel, cause, or be the source of a sharp stinging physical pain or keen mental distress smarts lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202256 even of vietnamese origin (tăng 2006; đào & nguyễn 2017). native speakers of asian tonal languages also have difficulty when they learn a different tonal language, suggesting that learning rates depend on the familiarity with the specific tones themselves and not with tones overall (so 2005). but tones may not be the most difficult part of learning the vietnamese language. there are other subtle sound differences that are found differently in english (the ‘t’ and ‘th’ sound that is seemingly more subtle in vietnamese than the difference between ‘d’ and ‘t’ in english, different diphthongs, and distinctions in vowel pronunciations that also have different spelling differences). though there do not appear to be studies by linguists on the difficulties in consonant pronunciation, several studies do confirm the difficulties that western learners experience with some of the vowels and note that it is not just western learners (winn et. al. 2008) but also other asian learners such as korean and japanese (đào & nguyễn 2018; đào & nguyễn 2019a; đào & nguyễn 2019b) and therefore not the idea of tonality itself. one of the problems that i noted in my own learning in distinguishing vietnamese tones is not their existence but the fact that they do change and blur with intonation/emotion and with position in sentences. but this is a normal process that i have discovered in language acquisition in languages with and without tones, highlighting again that the barrier claimed by vietnamese is one that is created and imagined in order to establish distance. the real barrier to communication in vietnamese in the past was in written communication given the difficulty for vietnamese and foreigners to achieve literacy using the written characters that existed in nom and came from the chinese. indeed, most vietnamese could not read these characters. today, only a handful of scholars read nom and perhaps it is a source of embarrassment that vietnamese are unable to directly read most of the documents containing their history without translation. moreover, the history that is available is ‘official’ history that is selected, interpreted and censored to meet specific government objectives. that is also often the case for documents in museums from the french period (as well as in russian for table 5. homonyms where tonality indicates different meanings for same or different parts of speech english word couplets particular meaning dictionary pronunciation vietnamese tonal depiction of english word lot n. 2. a collection of objects, items, or people lɒt lot pr. 1. (preceded by: a) a great number or quantity lɒt lót right n. 35. any claim, title, etc, that is morally just or legally granted as allowable or due to a person raɪt ríght n., adj., adv. 1. in accordance with accepted standards of moral or legal behaviour, justice, etc right sentence substitute: 50. a. indicating that a statement has been understood rìght don’t v. (declarative) 1. contraction of do not dəʊnt don’t or dón’t v. (imperative) 1. contraction of do not dəʊnt dỏn’t or dọn’t lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202257 leaders who went overseas). this is not to imply that alphabets are better than pictographs but simply to note the time and effort required to achieve basic literacy, something that many countries recognize in choosing to simplify their languages. while some earlier generations of vietnamese scholars, including those like ho chi minh (hồ chí minh) and earlier nationalists of the cần vương, (save the king) movement of the late 19th century, saw an advantage to learning both nom and chinese for relations with china and a view of solidarity of the ‘east’ against the ‘west,’ vietnamese today who seek relations with the west see the current alphabet as an advantage. today, vietnamese erect other barriers to outsiders trying to understand them. the reference to tone may politely hide attempts by vietnamese in their relations with foreigners to maintain distance through use of slang or through other tactics to avoid communication, while blaming it on the tone. in some cases, vietnamese culture is changing so fast that vietnamese themselves may be unable to communicate with foreigners who know certain technical language or even information about vietnamese culture and history (and affiliated words with it) that vietnamese themselves do not know. this may also be a source of embarrassment that prompts them to hide behind the idea that they cannot understand the tones rather than specialized concepts outside of their own vocabularies or understanding. many political and ideological terms and explanations used by government elites today also create confusion and embarrassment for vietnamese (lempert 1999). when i first arrived in viet nam, certain contacts with foreigners could still be subject to political sanctions and there were incentives to avoid communication or to claim lack of understanding on several types of topics. even now, i find that in communications with vietnamese government officials, they often claim they are unable to understand anything that foreigners say and require translators. i have often had the experience of speaking vietnamese to a vietnamese translator who then either censored or reformulated my vietnamese into an official or ideological or jargon-filled vietnamese for the listener, with the listener pretending that i was speaking something other than vietnamese to the translator. the claim of foreigners not understanding tones is often a cover for vietnamese being unable or unwilling to entertain certain kinds table 6. homonym pairs where tonality indicates different meaning and where spelling differences key the different tonality english word couplets particular meaning dictionary pronunciation vietnamese tonal depiction of english word not adv. a. used to negate the sentence, phrase, or word that it modifies nɒt nót knot n. 3. a tangle, as in hair or string nɒt knọt quarts n. a. a unit of volume or capacity in the us customary system, used in liquid measure, equal to 1/ 4 gallon or 32 ounces (0.946 liter). kwɔːts quarts quartz n. a very hard mineral composed of silica, sio 2 , found worldwide in many different types of rocks, including sandstone and granite. kwɔːts quàrtz lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202258 of questions or ideas. hence, tonality itself is not the barrier that is claimed. many foreigners who are fluent in vietnamese report the same phenomena—fluent communication exchanges with many but artificially created barriers claimed on tones with others. in general, vietnamese are very scripted at first meetings, asking a very specific set of questions to ascertain age status (for hierarchical relations), marriage status, and (now) salary and economic status. only after establishing relationships and eliminating some aspects of the scripts (gendered interactions; official interactions) is there a possibility of communication. along with beliefs about the vietnamese language are other myths about vietnamese communications and interactions that the vietnamese tell themselves and foreigners, but that also do not hold up to historical and cultural examination. vietnamese kinh often maintain that they speak softly and that their language is musical because they are historical peaceful and song loving not warlike or colonial. yet, viet nam itself is an empire like china and has been since the tenth century (as the đại việt (great viet), with a well-recognized history of colonial expansion (starting in the north and moving into the areas of the cham, khmer as well as northward into the territories of some 50 other recognized ethnic groups that the chinese once referred to as the 100 barbarian tribes of the south that are now part of the nation state of viet nam and under control of the majority kinh) (evans 1992; jamieson 1993; kiernan 2019). the country’s history has been marked with perpetual war and internal conflicts and revolts as well as imperialism. it is hard to avoid this understanding because it permeates the vietnamese landscape in statues of kings, imperial cities and palaces, religious shrines to military heroes, and everything from children’s stories to films. similarly, vietnamese claim that speaking loudly or engaging in conflict are frowned upon in their society and that one must keep a moderate tone. this may be true of unmarried women in viet nam who speak in a soothing tone that is not found among overseas vietnamese, and the idea of speaking softly and managing conflict may be culturally important in a society of high density and potential for violent conflict. but even though the country is not particularly violent today, it is not quiet. much speech is suppressed but the vietnamese are not afraid to shout within their households or among neighbors. conflict in daily life is common everywhere from the market to traffic. everywhere in the country one hears the blaring of horns in traffic, loud engines, and electronic noise, at decibel levels that endanger normal hearing. overall, there appear to be ideological and cultural reasons for vietnamese creating barriers in speech with foreigners—not wanting to get close; not wanting to feel colonized; not being able to compete with certain kinds of systemic thinking/free thinking and logic and wanting to force conformity. at the same time there may be a need to claim that there are real differences and that the culture is not disappearing through urbanization, as well as to claim that those cultural attributes that remain are not just what are considered culturally backwards to outsiders (unsustainable population and resource consumption/lack of planning; lack of science/spirituality that is based on magic and luck; lack of concepts of social contract and citizen empowerment and rights). tones must have developed in southeast asia for some advantage, though what this advantage is has not yet been answered despite some historical work on the question (haudricort 1954). although environmental theories are not currently in favor in anthropology or linguistics and some have been discredited (collitz 1926), possible explanations may also include components of how sound carries in particular environments with specific voices. the air in viet nam is heavily laden with moisture, either from rain or fog. the traditional form of labor was work in rice fields or in small rivers. communicating across these distances may have required some way of precise enunciation that would also distinguish sound from animals in the environment (buffalo, pigs, chickens). today, however, with vietnamese urbanizing and globalizing, the advantages that tonality once offered may no longer be needed and may just be an historical vestige like much of what remains in the vietnamese language. that itself may be the reason that the vietnamese seek to stress it, without knowing or practicing the original reasons that led to its development. lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202259 discussion and conclusion in overcoming barriers to communications and in establishing understanding, language can work to impose mythical barriers to promote a form of identity even when stronger and more important ideas of cultural identity today (promoting sustainability with resources and promoting a diversity of ideas) are disappearing. the idea of vietnamese identity and nationalism today, of a collection of autonomous and sustainable nationalities living in harmony with their eco-systems and each other and promoting their separate languages and practices (which is what ho chi minh represents to the country’s minorities and to viet nam’s neighbors in winning their support for the ‘independence struggle,’) is not what exists in practice or may have never existed. most of the country’s cultural (and language) diversity is disappearing by design (lempert 2000). while the vietnamese language is the one that is promoted, much of its own culture is disappearing but not the aspect of vietnamese hegemony over minorities and exertion of pressures on neighbors. this is not something new that arose in reaction to the recent era of colonialism (lempert 2000). it is rooted in a history of vietnamese kinh imperialism that can be traced back centuries (lempert 2014). nevertheless, given how heavily the vietnamese have borrowed from the chinese, including this approach to neighboring cultures and internal minority groups, it is hard to specifically define what it means to be vietnamese. in an era of globalization where identities are even further blurred, and with the global system reinforcing the boundaries of nation states that essentially assimilate or destroy minority cultures within these national borders, the assertion of identity is even more problematic. in viet nam, the vietnamese kinh majority largely asserts identity based on language and myths about what makes that language somehow impenetrable. while this may be seen to be something new, it apparently dates back centuries and has been recognized in vietnamese works a century ago encapsulated in the aphorism ‘tiếng ta còn, nước ta còn’ (our language is still there, our country is still there) (phạm 1924). but today it has a new emphasis as cultural identities are under increasing pressure with globalization. even though language is only an historical record of past cultural strategies and borrowing and does not act to affirm specific cultural strategies (other than perhaps continued borrowing and mixing in the case of the vietnamese), it works for the vietnamese in resolving contemporary questions about identity and boundaries, even if they are just political boundaries. the modern nation state of viet nam does not reflect any specific principles or cultural attributes that clearly distinguish it as socialist or even vietnamese (as opposed to a province of china) that vietnamese today find easy to identify other than recognized borders of a nation state, a language and a specific group of ruling families. this is despite the government promoting this idea of a common vietnamese identity as part of its expression of contemporary nationalism and perhaps explains while they also reach for the idea of ‘race’ as another way to create an idea of difference without having to identify and define real systemic differences (lempert 1999; lempert 2000). this creates difficulties for the vietnamese people particularly in an era of greater travel and information exchange. while there are certainly differences between vietnam and china and other countries in choices of policy, leadership, climate, and fashion, many of these are cosmetic differences that are not much more than regional differences. they are not deeply rooted cultural differences and that is a source of some confusion (and embarrassment) among vietnamese. the political implications of the vietnamese government’s remaining silent on china’s hegemony over minority peoples in its borders and even over taiwan are that they strip away protection of viet nam’s own legitimacy and autonomy as an independent nation state. given that viet nam was under chinese sovereignty for the majority of the past two thousand years in much the same way as china’s current internal minorities, china’s historical claims to rule over viet nam are as good (or better) as they are over taiwan, tibet, or the areas of yunnan that were part of the bac viet/bai yue (100 tribes) that included the nam yue (viet nam). indeed, even the country’s name today in the vietnamese language identifies it in a way that suggests the country is just a ‘tribe’ (viet/yue) to the ‘south’ (nam) that pays tribute to the lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202260 central kingdom of china (trung quoc/chung guo). this contradiction is not only problematic for the vietnamese (and for its leaders that seek to maintain claims of autonomy), but it often leads to discussions today among educated vietnamese as to whether the government is, as it was historically, secretly under chinese sovereignty as chinese extends its influence in southeast asia (and globally). sovereignty in viet nam today is exerted by a group of kinh families over the non-kinh minorities and over the kinh population through military force with the help of foreign arms. the ruling party in viet nam has broken promises to minorities and citizens regarding local autonomy, human rights, and elections, that were part of the social contractual agreement with minorities in its revolutionary/independence struggles in the anti-colonial wars with france, the u.s., and the people’s republic of china. today, the several families that currently rule over viet nam as a nation state have little claim or legitimacy to representing and protecting something uniquely vietnamese (they wear western suits, drive foreign automobiles, and essentially copy foreign cultures as they join the global economy). though they have created national symbols and cults, such as popularity cults of ho chi minh and other communist party symbols in ways that do reflect vietnamese traditional worship cults of leaders and symbols (e.g. red and yellow flags are the traditional colors of chinese and, by imitation, vietnamese royalty), they have a very difficult time defining a vietnamese identity apart from this multi-family and military control over the state. relying on genetics as a boundary marker is also problematic for the leadership given the long intermixing of chinese and other foreigners in the different genetically regional mixes in the country (cham and tai in the central region from which ho chi minh hailed, indianized mon khmer in the southern region as well as southern chinese). while the leaders of the anti-colonial struggles (whose children and grandchildren now inherit control of the country in a form of caste or dynastic rule) claimed that they opposed the dynasties of the past, they now continue to fill leadership positions with members of their families and build statues to worship the past imperial dynastic kings. though this may be what they mean to preserve from traditional vietnamese culture and identity as they also enter into the hierarchies of globalization and the cultural aspects of industrialization and urbanization, these attributes of caste and dynasty are those that they do not wish to openly acknowledge, along with other cultural continuities of imperialism. that leaves little left as a marker of identity other than language. in the case of vietnamese, it is a barrier that can be too easily crossed by educated foreigners, including the overseas born children of vietnamese who emigrated for political reasons. as such, it is not surprising that vietnamese seek to make the barrier seem insurmountable to foreigners by reinforcing attributes that are unusual in the language such as tone, especially when overseas foreigners learning the language whose families are from the southern or central regions of viet nam and whom the leadership wishes to keep at a distance, or who are taught by these emigrants, are also likely to use different tonal pronunciations from those of the leaders in ha noi. given the pressures that vietnamese leaders now exert in concert with foreign powers to internationalize the country and to encourage globalization through the teaching of foreign languages like english as well as chinese, they may also need this particular myth more than ever before (le & o’harrow 2007; le, ha & dat 2014). this is not to say that this case is unique to viet nam or even to non-european nation states and ethnic groups. the author’s experience in the former soviet union, in eastern europe and even in western and central europe, suggests that countries today seek to create similar types of boundaries based on language or other identity markers, even as they strip away those very cultural attributes that may be needed for their future sustainability. language is a marker of ethnic identity, but ethnicities are historically the product of interactions with environments and attempts to fit sustainably within those environments. the focus on shallow markers may protect those markers while destroying meaningful identity, sustainability, survival and diversity which is what may also be necessary today for human survival (lempert 2010; lempert & nguyen 2011). lempert portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202261 biographical note david lempert, ph.d., j.d., m.b.a., e.d. 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it rains so much my bones are damp and will not dry. i live in a mad house. it is comforting. i am here, apparently, because i am a murderer and a mad man. these words are shabby things, worn thin by a language that never knew me. one that never felt the glowing heat of the sun in its face. one that never knew the strength of silence, or the unspeakable moments that inhabit every heart. perhaps it is the story that chooses the man and wraps him in it until he suffocates. for me, it was the sun that made up my mind, and the sun became my story. despite the blood that persists in flowing through me, i am no longer the person i was born to be. i did not write my life, and therefore cannot tell you in simple terms what happened to effect such change. i have left that task to the images that have fallen from my fingers since my youth. i have let them fall, so that one day they might be picked up. my pictures describe me correctly. i have lain my head on the grey sheets of bedlam and was not allowed to leave. i have dabbled in visions. this is the tiny image of me that the pinhole of people’s minds has illuminated. but what of before? the fulcrum of my life took place when i was 25, the year i grew old and died as others knew me. it was the same year i discovered another realm, a place inhabiting a truth that is, i have been told, no more than an elaborate fiction. where have i come from to arrive at this place? my recollection changes with every re-telling. for the moment, this is the story that slips from me. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 2 london, july 1842 i have heard the heat there is so great it inhibits the singing of birds. i have not slept for days. my head is filled with infinite lists. sir toby speaks as if he were eating boiled eggs. as if they press hard against the inside flesh of his cheeks, against his tongue. something must account for the way he forms his words. they meet resistance at every vowel and wobble into silence. the sun, isaac. you will not believe the sun. you will have to struggle at first to accommodate it to your skin, to your appetite, to your palette. my ignorance of sunlight gives him inordinate pleasure, and although i do agree with him on one count, that my flesh is more accustomed to rain than heat, i cannot look him in the eye because his assessment of my ability is so skewed. namely, i know that struggle will be unnecessary in adapting such light to my palette. the idea of sun has been growing in me since i was born, like a bone growth that affects my every movement. if i have been so far deprived of the actual experience of it, except at its most pale and withered, i have not for a moment been deprived of dreaming. i have dreamt of light through a cloth, dripping through a wing. i have dreamt in yellow and gold. i have felt my sight singe my imagination. i have leapt into consciousness so hot i cannot breathe. it will be astonishing not to have to imagine such light, but to see and feel it, to move through and feel its presence even in the architecture and the skin of the people it has chosen to live among. my fingertips are restless and beg permission to begin. they long to become active, to be things that undo in order to release something else: buttons, hard lines, colour, the cloth that covers us. to collect tickets, shade eyes, dance with pencils. they will insist, i know, on revealing my skin, to let it swim. i have never ridden a camel. i have never touched sand that did not lead to water. i have never been surrounded by a language i do not speak. will sweat change the colour of cloth i wear? is egyptian dust more difficult to remove from a collar, from a waistband, than the grime of piccadilly? time finally. it is time. the clouds disappear and the sky heralds my future with unencumbered sunlight. the sky smiles down at me. the crowds at the dock resemble a flock of gulls fighting over fish. my sisters and brothers are convinced i will come home dead or worse. arthur john has already inquired as to whether he will be allowed to join the rescue party, when i am made a slave. little john alfred begins to sniff and rub his nose, sophia, resplendent in blue, droops. her eyes are so wet and desperate i can hardly bear her presence. recently, she has gazed too often at me with such a look. she is growing so fast i find her hard to recognise. fifteen. her mind is too quick for her wits, for her body to keep pace. she trips herself up all the time. her legs are no longer hers. she does not know how to occupy her hands. she tugs at her hair, distracted, until it comes out in thick, sad strings. sir toby, who is in effect my employer, pats her reassuringly and stresses she will not even notice her brother’s departure. he will be back so soon. my job is to be companion to sir toby and to draw pictures for him of everything we will see. sophia recoils from him. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 3 i am used to her honesty, but flinch at his words for a different reason my return is something so distant, so unasked for, i cannot imagine it. all of my energy is absorbed in my leaving. sophia looks at sir toby with opaque, bewildered eyes. she will not be patronised and presses closer to me. sarah, cool sarah, shakes her head and steps away, as if to distance herself from sophia’s heat. are all families so formed of opposites as mine? sophia clings to my arm like someone adrift. oh let him be, sophia. he will need to breathe if he is to embark. jane clicks her tongue in annoyance. sophia glares at jane, averts her face and clings all the harder. i wink at jane. she looks at me with lowered lids and sighs through thin lips. sarah adjusts her bonnet, rearranges an invisible hair and rolls her eyes. i cannot bear their dreadful primness and touch sophia’s elbow. it is hot and her skin is twitching. the blue of her dress shines like a bruise. father’s face is a welcome distraction from my bickering sisters. he looks at me as if he cannot hear them. his pride makes my throat sting. kisses. the tears of the girls, in varying degrees of intensity, their faces averted behind depressed dark curls. all except sophia, of course, who looks at me as if i were a drink and she a thirsty man. sophia. sophia. her hot worried hand slips into mine and her lips approach my ear. i feel the hair lift lightly from the skin at my temple at her closeness. her voice is as quiet as a sigh. isaac. perhaps you should reconsider. i pull away from her and admonish her softly. sophia!, please, do not do this to me. not now. i will not listen to her. father gazes at us with curious eyes. she has irritated me with her darkness, but knows me too well, and, sensing my displeasure, swallows and attempts a smile instead. i stroke her cheek. my arms feel stiff in their new coat. good girl, i say, and hold her hand until it cools. when i return you will laugh at yourself. she arranges her eyes and gazes at me, her face blank and hard. i turn away from her. a handshake with father, his good, glowing face. sophia puts her hand in my pocket. she feels like a stone inside me. she will not let me leave. she would drown me in the bay with herself in the sack. father takes my one hand in his two and holds it tight. i wait for your letters isaac. if you have to wait too long, father, it will not be my fault. you must remember this: the horse must have fallen, the boat sunk. we laugh. he wraps an arm around my shoulder and i breathe him like a child and turn to john alfred who is begging to know if a ship is faster than a galloping horse. much faster, i say. he looks at me in awe, then away and scratches his nose. faster than a train? he scratches harder. don’t scratch!, barks jane and slaps his hand away from his face. he glares at her and looks to me for an answer. we are all silent a moment. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 4 john alfred? i say quietly. he will not say a word. he will no longer look at me. i talk to the side of his face, quietly, so only he will hear. john alfred, a ship is much faster. a ship has the wind to thank. a ship does not need a road. he turns and beams at me. i see jane’s hand twitch. a drop of blood colours his nose. he wipes it away with the back of his hand. suddenly, everyone speaks their goodbyes. departure has ceased to be an idea. the noise of that farewell! hundreds of feet stamping up the gangway, the creaking and blowing and shouting of porters and horns, the sobs of girls with sailors, the awful brave faces of my fractured family way below me as we, sir toby and i, lean on a rail and wave. jane with her mothers eyes, sophia and sarah so little, so opposed, so clutching as they strain their faces upwards and shake their small white hands so hard the air might snap their fingers. the boys with their mouths open, thunderstruck and envious of the size of the ship that will take their brother away. fathers presence wrapped around them like a cloak. all of their eyes linked in a common destination: me. and mine turned towards one i do not know. i am full of unborn images. it is only a matter of miles before they will begin to assume shape. pictures almost resident in my head. paintings almost glazed upon a wall. the first room the ship is released, slips away, bellows. faces stained with leave-taking avert naked eyes. we retreat to our cabins, to wash, to prepare for supper, to regain the expressions we wore before such emotion made its mark. sir toby has a cabin next to mine. meet you in an hour isaac? in the saloon? our doors slam, the room sways, a cup jiggles on a saucer. i whistle. my head is as light as a single hair. i could dance with anticipation. a bed with a small rail. i have never so immediately loved such a small room. a dear, round window. it is like seeing the world through a looking glass. seagulls enter and leave its circumference, flung about like scraps of paper. i shall take an image specimen of the ocean and the birds and hide it away. i may need an ocean when i find myself in the desert. i am dizzy with exhaustion. i am a poor man given a gift, plucked from the gloom. the ship ploughs its way towards my pictures. the cold grey sea never looked more like a blank thing. it could have been built to take me away, so i will be able to see the things inside my head waiting to be released. a child talks of death i walk fast along the deck, the sea wind pouring into me and lifting me high. birds float below the clouds. i have a belly full of breakfast and do not know what i shall see at any given moment. i fairly crackle with the energy of it all, and laugh out loud. i catch a ball that appears in the air in front of me. it is hotly pursued by a small bundle portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 5 of a boy, who stops abruptly and gazes at my new possession. an imperious voice issues forth from his tiny, fat mouth. his hair flies up. it is mine. give it back. there is something arresting about this child. perhaps it is his rather old eyes. i look into them, and they look into mine, filled with fury. tell me why i should give you this ball. without hesitation he replies: because if you don’t i shall have you killed. i am taken aback. by whom? by my minions. oh. your minions. and how shall they kill me? some with guns and some perhaps with swords. one or two may employ crossbows. it will hurt. now give it back. i hold onto the ball a little longer. it is wrong to kill. where is your mother? he is impatient with me, and bored now. it is not so wrong. you, sir, have done me an injustice. my mother is resting. where is yours? a good question. i think for a moment. i am a motherless man and you are not god. only god has permission to give or take lives. he rolls his eyes. kings kill lots of people and they are not gods. and anyway, no man is motherless. my mother died. and you are not a king. how did she die? and how do you know i am not a king? i pause. this is not a straightforward child. god wanted her by his side. and you are too short for a king. i silently hand him his ball back, and he begins, indifferently now to bounce it. he calls back over his shoulder i shall spare your life, this once only. i thank him, gravely. sea travel i have looked so hard at the exterior of ships that being inside one is like entering a body, or a sculpture, or the mind of someone you have admired from afar. my cabin is the revelation of a secret. i feel more myself than i have in months. perhaps it is the sharp clean air, which has spring-cleaned my head and lungs, washed away the accumulation of too much talk in too many smoky rooms. or perhaps it is the reassuring instability that accompanies every moment, the groaning deck and the creaking, straining sounds of the sail. it is as if a large, benevolent beast had decided to facilitate our movement from one point to another. a ship is somnambulant, for all its apparent function, conjuring reveries in its movement towards land, hinting at stories one can only guess at. a ship is stained with the grip of infinite travelling hands and the perfumed grime of infinite ports. so much pleasure is to be had in this floating village: the sliding plates at mealtimes; the necessity of choosing each step in a considered and balanced fashion. the look of concentration on a man’s face as he walks towards me swaying; the way womens’ dresses billow in the wind, as their arms curve in often futile attempts to secure hats to heads. the absurd sight of men taking control via elbows, books, meal orders. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 6 a stray curl whipping a red cheek. i am leaving. i have left. my family is gone from the port and i, however briefly, from their lives. i have never been without them before. they will grow without me. of their own accord and in a brief few months, their height will increase and they will form opinions, the provenance of which i will be ignorant. all will change except father. he is more permanent to me than a rock. my father will never not be my father and i will never not know him. beneath us are invisible fish and sea beasts. my hands will not be still in their attempt to place on paper what i have not seen. i have tried to draw the idea of fish. it has amused me no end. these are not sketches i would show to sir toby. he would sniff out their apparent lack of gravitas. although we have seemingly talked at length about painting, to all intents and purposes we may as well have remained silent. our talk is richer and more real when we discuss our respective families and the details of our journey. he is a kind man, if a little pompous. travelling with him will assist me in developing a rich internal world. my lips taste deliciously of salt as i direct my pencil towards its destination. a family walking into the breakfast room, i once again encounter the small boy, but without his ball and accompanied by a lady i assume to be his mama. he points at me and says loudly, that is the man who took my ball, mama. but i spared him. people turn and stare. i am embarrassed, revealed to all as a ball-thief. i open my mouth but am silent. i cannot think of anything to say, but am saved by the lady, who smiles at me. she has a warm face and small, dark-lashed eyes. a mossy green hat like something growing. hush, tom. i am sure the gentleman did not mean to steal your ball. she looks directly at me and faint dimples appear in her cheeks. unless perhaps you did? such a hat, such eyes! i’m afraid, madam, i stand guilty as charged. i did steal the ball. i planned to sell it, and make a tidy profit. we both laugh. tom does not. mama, papa is waiting. i am hungry. another smile. excuse me. a glare from tom. i bow. i watch her walk into the dining room and sit beside a man with a large, red beard, who glances at her, before resuming his scrutiny of a newspaper. she murmurs something to him, he murmurs back and touches her hand. she reaches for a teacup. the boat lurches, her hand returns to her husband’s, and i stumble slightly. tom is suddenly a little boy and clings to her arm. she gently takes his hand. they are a family. three people sitting at a table, holding hands as a ship sways and plunges. when all is once again calm, they laugh, look at each other, and laugh again. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 7 then she fills her teacup and pours some milk for tom. he sips it with a satisfied face. i do not know why, but the sight of it is enough to make me weep. disorientation i cannot guess at what a sustained sea voyage would do to one’s sense of orientation. i have been afloat only a few days, and, although out of sight, the earth is close enough for reassurance, in the untired birds, in the knowledge of imminent arrival, in the memory of recent departure. but to travel to the other side of the world, to not see land for months, to be suspended between the most transient, the most unstable of elements! i would like to try it one day, to see the pictures such detachment from the earth would force into my head and out of my hand. i would like to learn to use the stars as my maps. i know it would change the way i hold my pencil. it would change the way i looked at the world, the way i walked across land. it would change my relationship to the night. i would need to navigate by the moon. it is appropriate we are on water. as if we are nowhere and everywhere, as if what will happen will happen soon. the coast reveals itself like a rabbit from a top hat. we crowd the stern to watch its arrival, to greet it. men give their hands permission to be foolish, and wave like children at nothing that can respond. ladies sigh and lean and gaze. how lovely their dresses are, when they swell in the wind. i wonder if one has ever caused a woman to float away. women, to my mind, are even more mysterious than ships. the seagulls sing their song of arrival, fly up from the decks and descend sharply into the waves. it is impossible to imagine the fear that inhabits fish at the thought of such attack. imagine the beak flashing through the waves, glittering, determined and blurred. imagine the dull clack and snap of its bite. it is too terrible to countenance. i would not wish the fate of a fish eaten by a bird on my worst enemy. had i one. ostend a place of fish smells and varnish beneath a thin, grey sky. of flat, dull bread and desolate, nagging birds. of inscrutable fisherman in clumsy wooden clogs and wide blue trousers that seem to flap even when the men are inside, seated at the long brown tables this place supplies so well. the older women have flat faces and swollen, floury bodies. but the young girls, with their soft, bright eyes and their skin like apricots and hard eggs, i could almost nibble. they have delicious sturdy waists and busy strong hands. the boys are cleaner than any boys i have ever seen, with shining eyes. perhaps it is the wind or the omnipresent rain that washes them so effectively. or perhaps it is the clean presence of their god, who would appear to be a simple man of few words and fewer opinions. their churches are plain and scrubbed, which is right for such a place. i was so little when i first saw a live fish. my father held me by the hand and we walked by the river. my mama was just dead. my father was quiet as was i. i do not know what he was thinking. i was thinking about my mama going to heaven and searched the sky for a portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 8 ladder. i was worried. mama was so weak and tired now she was dead, how would she ever climb so high? we silently threw stones into the water and looked down and saw a small thin fish trapped beneath a rock. i crouched and saw its eyes fixed on nothing, like tiny swollen raisins. my father lifted the rock and the fish swam away. i did not think of my mother then, watching that fish depart. it shone in escape. my father looked up at the sky and then at the water and he held my hand and we both laughed as the fish disappeared away from us, down the brightly shining river. where were my brothers and sisters then? who was holding their hands? i do not know. increasingly i have no memory of occasions i should recall. i imagine scenes leaking from my mind and finding solace in my skin, a kinder, warmer place. occasionally they erupt in me, beyond my control, and flow like lava through me, heating everything i have ever felt. i do believe there are things that affect me, of my own making, which i cannot name. as if they live in me, and around me, but are ungraspable. the people here speak like underwater creatures, in murmurs and gargles. they rarely smile but when they do, i believe they do so truthfully. but it is also possible to imagine these low land people living even lower, beneath the earth for a while. perhaps it has something to do with the way they seem to be perpetually blinking in surprise, as if they had only recently emerged into daylight. they are earth bound, obviously in love with the colour brown and all of its cousins, despite their apparent affinity with water. they fish for a living and are, quite clearly, at home on the sea, but the colour of the sea, even at its most grim, does not spring to mind when i think of them. it is perhaps significant that it is rare to find a painting of the sea here. all that i have so far witnessed appears to be preoccupied with interiors or tables. these images often depict rooms that throb with an atmosphere of recent departure. if you listen very hard you can almost hear the squeak and slam of a door, then the sudden silence of an empty room. perhaps the people here have assumed the guise of fishermen. and if so, who are they truly? i wonder who dug them up, who washed them so well. a woman who weeps and speaks english walking along a narrow path along the shorefront with sir toby, we come across an elegant woman, sitting on a low wooden chair outside a small cottage. she is quite openly weeping. we slow down as we approach her, and do not know what to do. she is wearing a dress of silver grey. her hair is loose and brown. sir toby coughs and looks about nervously. i imitate him. i can think of nothing better to do. she is impossible to ignore. the path leads almost directly to her, before veering away. i assume she is a widow and is weeping at her loss. she is not weeping like a woman who has misplaced a trinket or broken a cup. we are obliged to stop. she looks up at us and hiccups. she has narrow, pale hands and holds one to her mouth. a thin gold ring shines softly beneath a knuckle. she is panting slightly. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 9 we keep looking at her, as we have no better plan. then sir toby speaks loudly, as is his wont with foreigners. madam. do you speak english? may we be of assistance? she holds his gaze with wet eyes. yes, i speak english. her voice is low, her accent difficult to place. french perhaps? i do not need your help. but thank you. sir toby shifts awkwardly on his feet. i look at her face. she looks haunted. i speak foolishly, as if the sound of my words might aid her recovery. can we do anything? surely. she almost laughs and looks at her feet. no. thank you. really, you are kind people. and hiccups again. i feel uncomfortable at that. i do not think sir toby and i are especially kind. we merely stopped because the path was narrow, and a woman was weeping. we nod stiffly, and move on, impotent. the sea moves beyond us like a sodden brown handkerchief. i look back at the woman. she has stopped her crying and sits very still and quiet gazing at the sea. sometimes grief rejects words like a river sinks boats. supper and painting every evening we dine simply off fish, boiled well with potatoes and washed down with harsh ale. sir toby busies himself after supper with letter writing, after telling me, in no uncertain terms, about who and what these people are. he treats me at once like a student, an honoured servant and even, after drinking, a friend, despite the fact that conversation with him often culminates in a rebuke. an example: these lowland people are, according to his logic, good, unimaginative, god-fearing and hard-working people, but could not be poets because the light is wrong, the presence of fish too pervasive. but sir toby, i ask him in all candour, with how many of these people have you spoken? he pulls himself up slightly in his chair and stands, his cheeks suffused with a slight red wash. i have been here before isaac. i know this country. people are the product of their locale. their land forms their minds as surely as a mother gives birth to their bodies. it is a flat land. where is the spirit of art in these buildings, isaac? where is the undulation in their thinking? when you see the venetians you will understand how art must reflect the world outside the window of the artist. there is no light here to speak of, isaac. there is no light. he is breathless from such a speech. i search my pockets for a pencil. surely he must intend me to take notes? i struggle with his logic, according to which i should make paintings that reflect chatham’s damp air and heavy earth. (i remember: i am small and full of thoughts. i ask my father: what will happen to me when i am grown? he pauses. whatever you choose. an occupation that suits your temperament. a wife. a family. and if i choose to be something that does not yet exist? portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 10 he thinks seriously for a moment and then laughs. well then isaac, you will bring it into being. chatham was never posited a possible source of my future selfhood.) before i could question sir toby further, he retired to his room, his corpulent little body moving with some efficiency out of the door. his absence filled the room pleasantly, and left me time to contemplate a painting on the wall of the little communal sitting room. sir toby could not have felt justified in his comments if he had really looked at it. such a plain little painting, but so replete with things unsaid. practically pulsating. a fish, but such a fish! scales like a robe, sad eyes full of sea. why, this fish is so perfect it must have wriggled its way onto the canvas! how the elements in it glow: a lemon, the obvious bitterness of which makes me shiver in my chair; a thin, thin glass filled with cold wine; a crisp white cloth; and three walnuts, all set against a deep dark background. i gaze at it for a long time, and find myself perplexed. i do not know why. perhaps it is the skill with which the painter communicated painting’s most compelling paradox, namely, a close description of the real world often emphasises how unreal it is. the fish somehow more than the sum of its fishiness! a meal that will never be eaten! a meal that may not have ever existed, here before me more alive than the chairs i can touch. i do believe that this is what a painter should be doing, presenting the world back to itself, minutely observed, yet also imagined and so altered. i would have liked to take this painting with me, as a constant reminder of how complicated a nut might appear to someone who might look upon one with an unbiased mind. my room is small and clean and satisfyingly foreign. i fall asleep to the tug and push of waves on shingle. in a coach the next morning, sir toby, sombrely attired with a dark coat and a grim expression, treats me like a slightly backward student he may have met once a few years earlier. come boy, it is time to leave. of course, sir. yes, i am ready. you have remembered everything? yes. i think so. he sighs. isaac, merely thinking is never enough. we will never return to this place. do you know, for a fact, that you have everything? i look at the earth. it holds me upright in a solid, friendly fashion. of course, sir toby, you are right. i am sorry. i do know, for a fact, that i have everything. i have looked beneath my bed and in the cupboards. i can assure you sir, i have left nothing behind. he sniffs. well then. let us depart. i nod. the horses groan. and so, we leave. in deference, i become silent and respectful, pausing only momentarily on our way out of that convivial inn to secretly wave goodbye to my small friend, the fish. we settle into our carriage like a couple of old women. i cluck over sir toby and he portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 11 begins to warm to me once again. he begins to hint that i may once again be filled with potential. i am sure i glow. it takes so long to reach our next destination. i cannot imagine how many decades it might take us to reach the other side of europe. to imagine standing on the banks of the nile is to try and imagine floating upwards, through the air, to a place beyond the sky. the countryside is monotonous, the conversation even more so. the roads are bad. after an hour we are groaning with backache. reading is impossible, the words leap about so, and sir toby is too enthusiastic in his opinions for any real exchange of ideas. we stop for lunch in a small inn in a village flanked with forests. it is clean and friendly. an elderly smiling woman with collapsing curls and a thin mouth brings us bread and cheese and wine. it is so plain every separate taste sings. the woman speaks a little english and is proud of the fact. she asks me where i am from. i tell her chatham and london. from england. she says, is chatham most lovely? it is very strange to hear the word chatham in a foreign place. i reply that it is not. she looks a little disappointed and so i add: but there are many ships as if ships will make my birthplace lovelier. she looks satisfied at that, and fills my glass with wine while sir toby wrestles with a button on the sleeve of his coat, cursing. i feel obliged to compliment on her village of choice. you have a fine inn here. and your village is charming. she looks at the floor with pride, then speaks quietly. yes. we have good spirits here. sir toby snorts. i am taken aback. what kind of spirits? a man at the next table calls out impatiently for service and so she nods to me, and leaves our conversation adrift. i feel an urgent need to know. what spirits? but the woman disappears into the kitchen and we do not see her again. back on the road, i long for air, and would like to travel with the door open, to hang my head out of this cramped space and breathe in the strange light that unifies such tedious countryside. in truth, i would like to be attached to a large balloon and be pulled along behind the carriage, and hear sir toby’s thin alto from a long, long way away. his questions are interminable. i gaze out at trees, and look for spirits. i do not see any. isaac, how would you best render that brown? tell me isaac of your assessment of your teachers at the academy. isaac, what criteria do you employ to choose your images out of so many available passages from shakespeare’s plays? isaac, do let me tell you an anecdote about my sister’s youngest child. isaac, i tell you, that coachman is a scoundrel. don’t ask me how i know, i have more portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 12 experience than you in these matters. isaac, keep your eyes trained on our luggage, if you can. i know it is on the roof, but do your best. can you not strain your neck a little further to see out a little more clearly? he may have an accomplice tucked away somewhere. he may have hidden him behind our cases. oh isaac, please do not look so sceptical. you are an artist isaac. i know you feel the world keenly. oh isaac, are you awake? isaac, is your energy fading? are you tired isaac? we shall be stopping soon. why, you are pale isaac, while i am as robust as i was at the moment of our departure. much laughter. ad infinitum. a painting, i feel suddenly like shouting, is no more than a suggestion, a product of the imagination expressing itself truthfully, and is never, except in its crudest manifestations, a lecture. but i do not utter a word. his voice increases in intensity as night begins to fall, as if he must convince himself, via me, of his lack of exhaustion, his capacity for being interesting. we are surrounded by darkness, bounced about like two stale loaves in a widow’s basket. i cannot sleep yet do not want to stay awake. i choose, instead, to look upwards, and watch, with tired eyes, the stars die. i begin to hallucinate beds. first night in germany dumb and sightless with exhaustion we stumble into some nameless inn, a dimly lit place in a tiny village. not a dog barks, not a word of welcome is uttered. an old sighing man staggers out grumbling incomprehensibly to meet us and carries our cases inside. i am too far gone to assist him and feel his resentment of my youth and empty hands. i do not care. i am beyond compassion. sir toby has finally, wonderfully, lost the power of speech. we do not wash before our meal, we are too feeble and too hungry. sir toby is almost white with tiredness and a little ashamed of his defeat as a result. i silently give thanks to the spirits responsible. we are fed by a woman whose face i forget as soon as she has placed our soup in front of us. two men argue in hisses as the next table. i do not understand a word they are saying, but their eyes, which thrust themselves occasionally in our direction, are full of vitriol. the soup is watery, none too hot, and punctuated with the occasional thin hair. i eat like a sleepwalker, my back still trembling to the rhythm of the coach. my face has another skin, stuck with foreign dust and unuttered words. i can hardly lift my head and take it to my room. i do not remember saying goodnight to anyone. all i notice is that everything in my room is wood, except me. my flesh shines pink in the moonlight before it slips into darkness. the feeling when you are almost awake in another country is it possible birds sing in different languages? i do not recognise the muffled song that floats into my sleepy head. the wind sounds hollow. my room is clean and bright. i have no memory of it from the night before. all i remember is my aching back, which has decided to stay with me. my bones are sore, my muscles stiff. i could sleep for a week. a tree knocks on the window. i hear faint, affectionate, masculine mumbling. i think it portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 13 is a man with cows. i cannot help but wake up now. i hear words i do not understand and am filled with the thrill of incomprehension. i am in a country i have never slept in before. now a knock on my door and not a tree but a girl with eyes so low i cannot see their colour enters my room and takes my water jug and fills it with water from a pail. her hands are quick and red. she has obviously filled many a water jug in her time. her yellow hair is covered with a white cap. she murmurs something i cannot understand. i am filled with a sudden urge to ask her about her family, to have her look at me. but i do not know how to begin conversation with this girl, the likes of whom i have never encountered before, and sink back into my pillows and feel my tongue crowd my mouth. i watch the slow movements of her back, which is broad and round shouldered and wonder what she must think of me, if she thinks of me at all. a foreigner in his nightshirt, not much older than she is, and still in bed so late in the morning, staring at her. her large behind moves from side to side beneath her dress, and comes to a stop, wobbling. what is your name? my voice startles me. she turns and looks away, blushing, silent. why will women so rarely speak truthfully with men? i persist. do you speak english? she shakes her head and refuses to look at me. i am irritated by her coyness, but after some thought have to admit that i would not like my sisters in such close proximity to me if i were not their brother. brothers and sisters. each one different from the other. none of them in most likelihood the person i assume them to be. i reverse the thought: what do they know of me? they know me only by the words i have spoken in their presence, and by the movements that have propelled me around them. but i am, of course, and in all modesty, so much more than i appear to be. as they are. but what remains if you strip a man of his words and his body? do they question this too? what is left of me when i am not with them? do they doubt their knowledge of me? i am sure they do not. they behave towards me as if they own me, and that such possession is a god-given right. but knowledge and ownership is, of course, more than proximity and biology. where, for example, do they travel when they sleep? and who, in their true hearts, would they like to touch? i do not know. except for sophia. everything is different every day but still sophia and i talk to each other’s heart, without acknowledgement. we are often silent together. such silence makes other girls, and in particular other sisters, appear shrill. but then, sometimes they could be shouting, but i would not hear them. without a doubt, at this point in time, right now, unless she is sleeping, sophia will be looking very hard at something and thinking about it. however insignificant the object of her attention, sophia’s gaze will always transform it into a something magical. it is a thought i find reassuring. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 14 but i am in a foreign room. i will not let myself forget this. i will not travel backwards. memories can be terrible transporters. this solemn girl clutching a water jug, this girl who i have already forgotten and who i do not know, slams the door on her way out. she still does not look at me. she either loathes me or would like to kiss me. perhaps it is the same thing. she is not my sister and does not care for me. my bed is warm and soft and i slip down between unfamiliar sheets and am swallowed by a large foreign animal. i think about kissing that girl whose eyes i cannot see. i imagine her small soft tongue on my silent one, her fat round breasts in my hands. she would whisper to me and i would not understand what she was whispering. the thought is intense and unsettling. i shake myself and stretch and my dream tumbles on top of me, as sudden as an avalanche, as clear and as awful as when i was asleep. in my dream sophia is crying and crying, standing in the middle of a sunny, empty room. i walk up to her, to hold her, to comfort her, but she does not see me, and i am aware that five men have cursed her and must be dealt with if she is to be free. i ask them to leave, so i might speak to my sister. they do not reply. i am filled with rage. sophia cries all the more loudly. i grab hold of her hand and pull her towards me, but her hand falls apart and disappears and i am in a river floating towards the sun that is so bright i assume it will explode. but i do not mind the thought. i am so happy to be away from that dreadful room that i cry into the gentle tide as i stagger ashore. the sun dries my tears. i am hot and alone. sophia is nowhere to be seen. i know the men are dead. another knock on the door rescues me. a loud knock this one, from an apparently large fist. isaac, are you awake? i am, sir toby. good lad. sleep well? he shouts as if he were waking me from a midnight sleep, a thousand miles from where he is standing. i laugh into my pillow and cough. thank you, sir toby, very well. and you? like the dead, boy, like the dead. much laughter through the door. it is time for breakfast, isaac, time to eat. please hurry up. i imagine him with his hands cupped against the wood of the door, spraying the cupola of his fingers with spittle. i will be with you sir toby, i will be with you. allow me ten minutes. ten minutes, boy. we must be going. yes. we must be going. an alpine way we can hear the horses panting and straining as the road becomes more and more steep. we are tilted back against the seats as surely as if a boy were holding our feet high. we have left the long, brown road of the rhine behind us. i have memorised the ambiguous beauty of its castles. we are alone in the carriage. it is difficult to sense the countryside we are travelling through because the windows are too thick with grime. the sky is obscured by mountains grown dim with dust. you will feel like a young apollo isaac, when we have scaled these heights. you will feel like apollo both in body and in mind. for a mountain, isaac, is like a poem that has lifted your body high into the sky. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 15 sir toby blushes at his sensitivity and modestly lowers his eyes. these mountains, he continues in a hushed voice, will prepare you for the heights i know you will ascend on your return, isaac, those artistic heights we all know you will not disappoint us with. us? who else is sitting in this carriage? i look about me. as far as i can still see, it is only sir toby and i in the carriage but his comment has filled me with an anxiety i cannot name. i smile weakly at him and say nothing. my toes press against my shoe leather. i pinch myself hard on my arm beneath my coat sleeve. inspiration boy. inspiration. spring is on its way! you are in the springtime of your life boy, so much to grow in that head of yours! are you inspired isaac? are you ready to be elevated? sir toby is over-excited. i counter-attack. sir toby, do please tell me the story of your first visit here. was it springtime, when you first visited the continent? he laughs out loud, happy at my question. my dear isaac, it was not spring, but autumn! my trip had been delayed, but in hindsight, it was a blessing. the colours, isaac! the colours! i read verse in a forest i am allowed once more to retreat inside myself as his story continues. it is interminable and soothing, and demands nothing of me but the occasional admiring eye and nodding head. a painting is not a mountain. nothing is more paralysing to me than the idea that a picture is something to scale. a picture is something to be crept into, peeled back, dug away, clothed, undressed and dreamt. there are no mountains to be scaled in my pictures and never will be. my pictures are places to hide in. a new place to sleep our inn, which we reach after what seems to be an eternity of horse changes, precipices, staring strangers, claustrophobia, hunger, backache, tedium and unfamiliar languages, is more, to my mind, like the idea of an inn than an actual inn. how is it possible that every splinter of wood, every blade of grass has been washed? every pebble polished? every breeze dusted down before it was allowed to blow so freely? waking up here is like stepping into a story i do not understand. although a good imitator of human-ness, this alien author had not been properly informed of how grubby we human beings really are. i look everywhere for a sign that warns: enter this place and be filled with the scents and sounds and surfaces of a world that bears an uncanny similarity to the real world we think we recognise so easily, but is, in fact, a beautiful fraud. i could not paint such a place. such beauty is somehow inaccurate. i would be called a liar, a sentimentalist, an idealist, and that would not do. mountains, the tips of which are touched with a faint white brush, frame the sloping roof of our inn, which was built to facilitate the removal of snow in winter. i cannot imagine snow in such a place, surrounded as we are with such growth and such gentle sunshine. an exercise an exercise: i have decided that i will try not to think about anything that does not present itself to my immediate eye. my head is tired of travelling back and forward, in and out of memories. it is difficult to halt a conversation one is having with oneself. instead, i will deflect the energy of these exchanges. i will become a better observer. i will learn to understand the world by examining it more closely. the rest will follow. it must. where else could it go? portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 16 i want simply to observe the different shape of petals and the muted colours of leaves. to spy on the occasional deer that stares at us through pine trees. to notice how the mouths of girls form their words differently from the mouths of boys. how the old men scratch their eyebrows. to try and commit to memory how the mountains fill my eyes, and not think too hard about why they confuse me. to understand how such an underworld place can reach so high up. did he exist? one morning i was lying beneath a tree examining this foreign sky to see if i could discern any difference between it and the sky i am so familiar with in london, when a man came up, with goats. i heard their bells and sat up. the man was whistling and looked at me. i looked back at him. he had a face like polished wood. his age was impossible to guess. the goats leapt about him but he seemed oblivious to their antics. i smiled at him and he smiled back and touched his cap. i touched mine in return before realising my head was bare. the goatherd laughed and i laughed back and then he went on his way. i could not speak to him, but nonetheless we communicated clearly. i lay down and slept without dreams for the afternoon. when i awoke, i was deeply rested. then i remembered the goatherd and wondered, did he exist? and then realised i had no way of knowing from where it was he came. small things although smaller, there are things here that are more complex and heart-rending than mountains, despite their inferior visibility. i will learn to look hard at them, these objects that litter the world and so easily become states of mind. for example: the sun tugs the wildflowers skyward, where their petals wither. birds are playful and busy. women beat dusty mattresses and sing songs that sound like the movement of little rivers over rocks. farmers smoke carved pipes and blow their smoke long and hard above their heads as they converse with each other. they pronounce their words with such measure and concentration it is difficult to believe they are talking simply about cows or cheese or the weather, the subjects i imagine alpine farmers talk about. i have never seen grown men enjoy a glass of milk more. clean white sheets blow in the wind. young girls wear their hair in buttery plaits, and dress in bright colours, which they cover with pinafores. their lips are often glossy. i glimpse their smooth plump calf muscles when they run. i am convinced their skin is soapy. it must be. it is soft at the edges, like something seen through water. the bread here is shaped like mushrooms and is as heavy as rock. it fills me, scours me, cleans me. we eat it thick with cheese and sour jam for breakfast. i carry it inside me for hours like the presence of a friend. shutters fling back to reveal checked curtains which are always about to billow. the air trembles occasionally with the drifting sounds of cowbells. the boys glance away when i say hello. they wear small gold earrings and have legs built for leaping. i have never seen such aggressive agility. they do not speak to the girls, who are also proud but, i feel, feign their shyness. they realise that i notice their eyes sparkle as they watch me eat my meals. they do not sparkle quite so hard at sir toby. when i sparkle back, however, they look away. like most girls, they do not know what it is they are looking at, what it is they are looking for. that, i suppose, is because they have never been told. they do not know the names of the things they need in their hearts, and in their bodies. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 17 what sir toby loves sir toby loves this place, and simply to walk up a hill and sit on a bench and order something refreshing fills him with a feeling akin to ecstasy. we sit outside an inn and he pulsates with sheer joy at the raising of a tankard to his lips. i am touched, for once, by his hunger for living and burst out laughing, because at this moment in time our travels are filled at once with a sense of possibility and a sense of achievement. sir toby, i say, we have already travelled so far, and still have so far to go, and he laughs out loud as well, and puts his ale down on the table and looks at me. is this what you expected, isaac? is there anything better on earth than this? no, sir toby, i doubt there is. i will drink to that, and so i lift my glass and he lifts his and we crash them together. to travel, isaac! sir toby, to travel and isaac, to art! to the knowledge you will take back to london and transform the world of painting! i toast this one in a manner that is a little more subdued. oh, that i could do such a toast justice. to art, sir isaac. and to knowledge. to the things you love. ah isaac his eyes fill with happy tears. another crash of metal, the slopping of liquid. the foam of the beer as he drinks sticks to his moustache, and transforms him, for a moment, into an old man i do not know. families families here group together around the mountain like litters of puppies suckle a sweet, fat bitch. they know where they were born, and they know where they will be buried. families marry other families, and so this community becomes, truly, one big family linked by flesh that weaves its way around the village like a vine made from skin. i imagine these families embracing the hills and mountains and giving birth to clouds and never speaking a word about it. if you were happy to be embraced by these families, they would feed you well and nothing would be better than such closeness. yet if you disagreed with them, to live here would be like being imprisoned by overwhelming flowers, the petals of which would make your hands bleed as you tore at them. there must be families here who live in the mud and filth, but they are hidden from the traveller. there are moments, however, when i am sure i can hear them mutter. nonetheless, it has occurred to me that i would like sophia to live for a while in the sunlight and air of such a place. such solid parameters could only do her shaky ones good. i think of her next to these girls and imagine how wan she would appear. i would like to see sophia run panting up a hill. i would even like to see her kissed, briefly, by a strong brown boy, if only it would make her smile. i will write to sophia and attempt to make her laugh. i had not realised how simple her problems really are. perhaps some sun might bleach her darkness blonde. some laughter will fill her with light. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 18 fathers and sons everything is ordered here, and everything appears placid, but for the crucifix on my bedroom wall. the artist of this object has insisted i be made aware of every detail of christ’s torture, and how he suffered in a very human way for his otherworldliness. his eyes are twisted upwards, full of the knowledge that his father let this happen. his broken body, denied its natural collapse towards the earth, writhes in suffocation. nails skewer and torment his splintered flesh and bones. his ribs leave no room for his breath to escape. his throat is full of congealed life. it is a terrible, moving image to have above one’s bed, to sleep beneath, to wake beneath. when i wake i turn my eyes heavenward and see the souls of christ’s feet, bleeding, above me. what kind of a father was god to let his son suffer so? why did he not protect his only son? what result could be worth such a sacrifice? if god were mortal he would never have let anyone push nails through his own skin. what then gave him licence to let it happen to his son? the thought of it fills me with fury. he is god. when i look at the world, i know he is the greatest artist, and, as such, was possessed of a terrible imagination. if he had wanted to, he surely could have invented a better way to communicate his message. we will stay here a while. sir toby wants us to climb more mountains. he says again and again how much he enjoys the ale. climbing in germany we pull ourselves high and breathe the air hard. there is little time for drawing, which does not worry me as perhaps it might elsewhere. i have realised this is not a place that lends itself easily to lines. gradations of colour and tone stretch far beyond any line a person could draw, even in their heads, where the possibility of drawing is always infinite. my head is so fit to bursting with images, it seems almost unnecessary to apply them to paper. they are so vivid in front of me. soon, however, i know i must or my hands might suffocate each other from boredom. (something preoccupying me: where does an image go if it is not drawn?) a thought has wriggled its way into my mind and will not rest or resolve itself. it is this: if the mountain is in itself a perfect creation, why should i bother to recreate it, in a manner that cannot help but be inferior to the original? this is a thought capable of dangerous seduction. it stumbles me in the dark recesses of my mind, fills me with lassitude then picks me up and continues: what, it whispers, in your field of vision, exists that only you could make? i will mull on this problem. i will not let it take me over. i reassure myself: a drawing is simply another type of mountain to scale. another valley to explore. the colours are predominantly cold or brown in this country, but they are colours that are occasionally lent some warmth when they bleed. the green here is not to be trusted. blue lends itself to variations on the theme of blue. this blue stretches high and fades away, into cloud, wet like a watercolour with too much water. like the hand of a heavyhanded artist has been at it. up in the sky, on the top of the mountains, we look down and the villages radiate like inconsequential ships. clouds touch my face. such hungry vertigo feeds my imagination. i portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 19 draw a line with my finger in a pocket. and another. sir toby holds his bony, thinning head up and laughs. he cracks his walking stick against the hard, high earth and slaps his thigh with his large spare hand. i don’t doubt he would plant a flag if he had one. he laughs from deep inside himself. the sound of his laughter (i can hear sophia’s description: a sustained cackleato. she would linger on the words, then smile her laughter loud at me over the heads of others who cannot see her as clearly as i), wraps around my throat and stops my eyes and stills my fingers as surely as a cork in a bottle stops the spilling of liquid. sir toby puffs and groans and grins and swells at his victory over gravity. he has climbed a hill!. almost twice your age isaac, he shouts as if i were on another peak. in my head my voice is dry and commanding: i am but a foot away, sir toby, a foot. i veil my wince and look up and feel the air on my skin. permission granted to breathe again. i feel my legs. my hands touch the air that has fallen off my face. it is good to have such aching muscles. muscles are, i have discovered, a distraction. i have not walked this far, or so high, ever. i have begun to make acquaintance with my limbs and lungs. they are more connected to each other than i ever knew. my blood must surely be bubbling now with all the air i have allowed it to drink. my belly presses hard against my innards. my back is full of spine, an arrow to my head. i bite the air, the air bites me back. i am almost happy. we climb down and feel faint and proud but too tired to talk or boast. we retreat to our respective rooms, and scrub the mountain flush from our cheeks, perform our ablutions. i hear sir toby sing through the wall, a line from a popular operetta. his german is clumsy and his voice booms and trembles. i smile at his pleasure. the peace in my room is tangible. lie back awhile empty and clean and contemplate the ceiling, the blessed, silent relief of my dear companion, the ceiling. a knock. isaac, he calls, isaac. ready for a small pre-supper refreshment yet boy? bid farewell to the ceiling. drinking the tavern is as knotty and as dark as the inside of a tree. sir toby calls me fellow conqueror and cracks his tankard against mine. we sing songs together, i make up the words, we laugh, he links his arm in mine and we sway on a worn, wooden bench, grinning at fellow revellers, other travellers, artistic types i strain to distance myself from. please lord, i pray into my beer, do not speak to me of pictures. how marvellous, sir toby bellows, and blows the froth from his ale into the air. oils? delivered with a roar. a fresh young face turns to him, looks at me, looks away, turns back. yes, oils, at home, but here of course, i use only watercolour and pencil i do not hear anymore, his voice is drowned in smoke and song an anyway, i do not want to hear it. a thousand eyes, a million ears. we are close in intoxication and in the blurring of vision, if not in language or outlook. my hands are rough things, clumsy, strong, unfamiliar appendages on the ends of my arms, transformed here to accommodate rocks and tankards and holding stout sticks. not a brush in sight. but what of my fingers, and the blood that connects them to my head? portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 20 nights in a german inn we sleep in rooms of wood and lace beneath fat crisp sheets, stuffed with the plumage of a thousand slaughtered birds. i can hear sir toby split the night with his snoring in the room next to me. he makes the wall between us vibrate with his exertions, and i cannot sleep, and so watch what happens around me when the world thinks me unconscious. my arms are heavy and pin me to myself, my legs as still as old logs. i feel the slyness beneath my lids, how my eyes might look closed to one who didnt know to look. this is what i see. a small soft feather escapes and drifts away, a white thread curls in the cold night breeze. the miniature feet of tiny german mice whisper and tip toe around me. (they were also born. every living thing born.) the wood floor creaks. the suggestion of trees against the far wall, undeceived by my heavy lids, waving and bowing like old friends. the night moans gently. i smother my happiness with my pillow. (how was it i came to be born? out of what coincidence or calamity? from what confluence of spirit and lust? my father’s? my mother’s? it is unthinkable. they were always clothed, even alone, i am convinced of it.) i hear my father’s voice. he whispers to me, so my sisters cannot hear, isaac, are you drunk? he smiles beneath the sentence. father i reply, i blush, i am simply becoming myself. i do not know what i mean. the room moves slightly, as if it is afloat. it is not me, it is the walls. they sway and laugh at the floor. my father created me. surely he would understand. i send him a thought, which i am convinced he will receive and reply to, when the wind’s soft lips kiss mine as it creeps through the window and lies beside me. i forget my father, and leap between tenses. time throws me to the wind and she catches me adroitly. i murmur to her, tell me a story. she replies at once, and with wonderful clarity: oh! i have come a long way to reach you. from rocks. from stars. from the mouths of long dead gods. my night room is filled with such an amiable crowd! a sleepy excitement fills my heart and mind, to be honoured by such company. the wind draws breath and begins. she tells me so many tales, my eyes begin to nod with the strain of hearing her whisper, but i cannot fall asleep with such words in my ears. if only i could embrace such a storyteller. i am filled with loneliness. the wind tells me how she wraps her thin arms around the hats of young girls and lifts them off their heads and flings them into rivers. she tells me how she has blown a jewel into the path of a beggar, a bullet into the heart of a banker. she has tickled the cheeks of babies, been filled with fury and dashed ships against rocks and then, consumed with remorse, pulled survivors ashore by their coat tails and petticoats. she has fanned fires, destroyed towns and then comforted the cheeks of fire-fighters with a breeze. she has boiled water for the tea of explorers, melted ice caps, irritated old women damp with rain, blown curtains open to reveal illicit kisses, pushed back the petals of flowers to show a child a dancing fairy, cooled the portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 21 brow of the prince of denmark when he was a child. her stories jostle for space in my mind until i beg her to stop. i can only hear so many tales in one night. as she leaves me, lamenting my exhaustion, she tells me, sighing, she is lonely again. i keep the window open, to hear more clearly the movement of birds. there is an owl out there. it, too, is alone. it sings like a foghorn. a strange bird to hear here, it sings the same song it did in chatham, but is, without doubt, a different bird. i suspect its wings are browner and touched with a trembling hint of red. i would laugh if they were. imagine, nature applied so accurately to geography. do birds adapt their plumage to the place in which they are born? how would a bird choose a colour for its feathers in london? no wonder the pigeons in trafalgar square are so dull. wood in germany there are so many things growing here, things you cannot see, you would doubt the possibility of cold, but despite the warmth that fills the air it is a cold place. this food must have fought hard to be born, to push through such earth, which must surely remain cold even as the sun shines hot on its surface. for this, i have realised, is a frigid country, even in summer. there is grass, of course, green grass that covers the brown earth, but i do not believe in it enough to credit it with real colour or any warmth. as a matter of fact, it has occurred to me that the grass here is full of deceit, too pretty, too full of spring to be real. its green is too consistent, too constantly applied. it is like rouge on an old cheek. i could never lie on this thick, soft grass. there is an undercurrent of secrecy, of violence in the genial faces of our hosts. it is best to be alert. of course, their language is not necessarily secretive. perhaps it is only my lack of knowledge of the words they use. but their sunburnt hands are as sly as they are strong. it is wise to be aware of the places they could go. of the things they might touch without permission. as our landlord speaks to us of breakfast options, his fingers drum the leather of his trousers. his face and his hands tell me different things, as they move in different directions. i prefer bodies unified in their messages. our plates are obscene and nourishing. grinning sausages, shiny potatoes, beer. eggs with yolks like orbs. milk that coats my tongue, and makes me cough. cheese it takes a strong wrist to slice. however, notwithstanding my reservations about the honesty of this place, i must admit i have never so deeply enjoyed the sensation of swallowing, or the feeling of a full, tight belly. i am all body and appetite, and arrive at the table like another might arrive for a fight he secretly craves. i have a picture in me of all this, but cannot place it, cannot put a colour to it, nor a line, nor a true word. it is to do with a sensation that sets my bones shivering and my mind racing in a direction i find hard to follow. it is to do with wood and spirits, which are more evident here than at home. on the wall of the breakfast room, faces come at me from wood knots. small, leering faces, with slurred shoulders and peaked caps and gnarled fingers. it is difficult not to imagine how their limbs might swell beneath their undergarments, quite despite the fact that the image of them, their carved images, stop where their shoulders begin. i have been forced to sit and chew with my face averted from their fixed, over-spirited, portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 22 impish stares. children roar and laugh at their repellent features, but i would warn them of their seriousness, if their mamas weren’t so close and protective, their fathers so brimful of misguided confidence in an art that might pretend to be cheerful, but is, in reality, an accurate rendering of possibility. i shake sir toby off me, and walk in the woods alone, to try and imagine the man who carved such compelling aberrations. there is a very present feeling of metamorphosis in these german trees, a metamorphosis that is transferred into the carvings the artists mould from their limbs. of speechless creatures coming from wood, curling out from under the dormant flowers, from beneath the wings of flying things. where are the fairies here? are they as busy as they are at home? perhaps it was not an artist who built such sculptures. the thought starts me shivering. he first hit me in the forest, when i could hardly walk i was so little. i had seen a cat, a large, dark cat and told him so, and he told me there were no cats in this forest, and i said no, he was not right. and he hit me. he was not much older than me, but i can still feel his fist on face, whenever i walk beneath trees. he called himself my friend. then the memory fades, and once again, the branches become somewhere to hide. i trust the watchful birds to keep guard, as the small animals burrow more deeply into the earth, for safety. sir toby has laughed at me for what he calls my fancy in seeing anything in these wooden figurines. they are simply toys, isaac, carved from dead stories. ah, boy, wait till we get to italy. a smirk, followed by dismissal. these stories are alive in me, and in the people here, and they almost shout out to be heard. sir toby cannot hear such things. he blocks himself from them. he may travel extensively, but travelling for him is simply a reiteration of what he thinks he already knows. he travels to see his prejudices carved in stone. but he is easy to block. i look away and he is not there. i do not doubt for a second that there is something in these shapes beyond the delineation of the carver’s tool and eye. a story gluts each blade of grass in this strange country, stories we are not privy to, not having been born here. these stories come from somewhere true. why, otherwise, would they be born in someone’s mind? who put them there? images are bled from me in tiredness. drinking songs drift up through the floorboards and lull me to sleep. guilt sir toby is so good and healthy after his climbing i am filled with guilt at my churlishness at his pleasure. i must give him his due, his lack of complication is not always an irritation. sometimes, it is rare, but just sometimes his jolly face and manner are a tonic to my head, which lately has been as tired as my climbing limbs. without any intention on his part, he has let me glimpse the possibility of a simpler world. i remember: walking to make pictures of the boats in medway. the heavy way their shapes docked inside me, and how i struggled to extract them. how the water lapped beside my easel, and how its rhythm frustrated me in its possible combinations. i know there is a confused logic to every thought i have. this is a clear, good, reassuring portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 23 feeling because it tells me that every idea has a counter-idea, every fear some solace in its very human fallibility. all that aside, i must say: sir toby is in awe of the mountains in the same way another man might be in awe of his bank manager. the idea of italy. germany is a strange apprenticeship for italy, which disturbs me in anticipation. here it is not lines that are so apparent in nature but shapes and undercurrents. i cannot imagine the laying on of colour in such a place, but know some have done it well. in italy i predict a clear light, a mastery of line, a marriage of idea and colour, of spirit and intention, the transformation of rock into marble. but i do not wish to wish too much. the rhine is the brown wash across an old painting. i feel we will need to travel south to strip it clean from the images it obscures. i have dreamt and shivered the paintings i expect to see. i have seen them in my minds eye, i think, and yet not believed them. but perhaps my mind is wrong. how could it possibly anticipate pictures i have not seen? perhaps my anticipation is to do with a kind of self gratification. i need to see the images that will confirm the correctness of my path. perhaps my prejudices are as firmly cemented as sir toby. we stride along narrow streets, my travelling companion and i. it is inevitable, perhaps, that sometimes we do not notice the windows that we pass. sir toby delights in my trepidation and is smug in the knowledge of his previous visits. he has seen these images and speaks of them with propriety, as if he invented them himself. if his face could rub itself together in glee it would. his stout little nose curls up to his eyes, which squint at me with a knowing geniality. he has seen them before, he tells me again and again and again. he knows what is to come, but i would prefer not to listen to his preview. the words he employs when he speaks of pictures are all wrong. his is a mind filled with images that stack together like the dry leaves of a ledger. i admit he is a kind and generous and harmless man, but that does not mean he is not wrong. the intimations are too clear to ignore. in truth, sir toby would shout with as much joy at the sight of cool pale ale as he would at a correct line, the perfect intimation of another’s experience. (but then perhaps he is right in this. his is a life certainly filled with more lightheartedness than mine. his enjoyment of the world makes me thin and tight with jealousy.) at moments, i believe he forgets himself and cannot see who i am. different architects italy. the word has become associated in my mind with another arrival. another room, another ceiling, another sky. different architects, different sounds from different mouths. i am filled with awe at the infinite permutations of travel. the infinite combinations. the infinite reworkings of a well trod path. strange to think of the horses pulling the carriage the same way every day, and each day smelling and seeing something different. i would like, i think, to converse with the horses, to ask them about what they have seen, how the cold, hard bit feels between their teeth, the difference between pulling a man and a girl. i would ask them if they do their job gladly, or if they long to be a different beast, a milking cow perhaps, a lap dog, or a kitten. i would ask them if they ever plot revolution, or portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 24 can smell the different grasses as they canter down a rocky hill. i am curious as to whether they miss their mothers and in what way the men who drive them so hard differ in cruelty and intent. if they ever bolted or are whipped hard. if they long to read or to look at pictures. i share another carriage with sir toby. we have already been in so many together. i never spent so long in such proximity to another human being. we know more about each other now than we did before. for example: we know to ignore each other’s moans, which increase without our permission, when the journey becomes interminable. we know how to remain silent for long stretches. this has become our modest, if shared talent. we also now know that we do not share the same vocabulary. another arrival we leave switzerland behind us. we pass through the border, which is filled with young men, loitering in uniform. a sense of unrest is present in the glances soldiers direct at us. we make it clear to anyone who will listen that we are not french, but english, the defeaters of napoleon. we gave them back their country, sir toby repeatedly informs me, but it has once again become, it would seem, many countries. fighting is in the air. the gradual stripping away of officialdom is like the countryside loosening its collar. with every village we pass through, the eyes of the inhabitants become more indolent, more charming. the girls look up into our carriage, their mouths parted slightly. they smile at me as if i were buying them. it is rather unnerving. i look away, and look back again to see them once more. oh, despite its vulgarity, such a soft place! the women have heated skin. the air is almost laughing. birth and death. i am so immediately intoxicated that i do something i rarely do. i speak my mind. sir toby and i are drinking in a small inn. we look at each other and smile, hearing the sounds of italy around us. it is a noisy place, but the voices are not speaking german, and so the atmosphere is noticeably different to anywhere we have come from. in germany, voices sounded like chopping carrots. in italy, they sound like bubbling oil. i drink and my head becomes immediately light. sir toby, this may perhaps sound foolish, but i feel we have arrived in a place where everything seems to be in the process of both being born and dying. sir toby laughs as if i have said the funniest thing in the world. i think my seriousness makes him nervous. ah isaac. surely the same could be said about london? i think for a moment. but in london, transitions are separate. a child is born. someone dies. here, everything seems to be happening at once. in the midst of life, isaac, we are in death. do not forget that. lord, the man tires me. he does not ask me what i mean. i ask myself, and realise i do not know. so i change the subject and talk about the quality of wine. sir toby once again breathes portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 25 easily. but, i cannot help but notice it everywhere, dead things surrounded by eyes and mouths brimming to overflow with life. italy is a place of tumultuous noises and yielding colours, of gazes that slip and hold. there is a feeling here not of deceit, but of concealment: in the copious skirts of women, in the deep pockets of young boys, in the eyes of everyone. i can imagine a hand moving smoothly into mine and grabbing it so tightly it would still the veins in my wrist. everything is soft that breathes here, and everything brutal is hidden in every soft breath. lakes fell from the mountains we came from. like the descent into laughter from the sermon of sedate switzerland, a place of measurement and excellent ale, of churches empty of images. churches full of a quiet, good faith, but no eye. italy. the joyfulness that touches every sound in every alley, even in the sound of a weeping child. a pot clangs, a donkey glares at me with a sardonic eye. hands fly up to argue, the eyes merry, theatrically tragic. here every gesture is a song. mothers and fathers and children in chatham i grew up to the sound of hammers. i recall slipping into the great sheds where the mighty men of war were built, to draw their interlocking lines and masts, or running, beneath a wet sheet of a sky, to the cornfields or orchards or hopfields with my water-colours. i hid damp and cold, and looked close at the shape and colour of bark or apple or blade of grass, and attempted to describe an ant from memory, or a pebble, or clod of thick earth. i searched for nests and never disturbed the eggs but wondered how best to render their shape, which begins nowhere and is never finished. i hunted elusive light to escape the squalid streets that surrounded us. my father asked me again and again, isaac, where do you go? i could not tell him. my images were powerful because they were invisible to everyone but myself. my sisters, my brothers, my life chorus: isaac, where do you go? my father loves to look at pictures. i could not show him mine when i was little. i was too ashamed of the lines that did not go where i wanted them to go. i have seen fathers here swell with pride at the sight of their ragged offspring doing nothing more impressive than eating. such sights make me look away. a father’s love is knotted in me tight, too tight to draw, whereas mothers are a mystery to me, and fill a space i do not know how to describe. italy is a country in which it is unimaginable not to have a mother. if your mother is no longer alive, in every church, another mother with a gentle face and open arms can be found to kneel before. i realise i am an aberration, a twice motherless man. my mother died, to be replaced by another, who also died, and when i was little there were no mothers in any churches, only angry fathers and bleeding sons. perhaps in england mothers are weaker, or, perhaps, gentler, than fathers. the sounds in the street are even louder than the hammers, but the noises are touched with exuberance. i envy these children. i envy their smooth, warm plumpness and their odd portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 26 elegance, the smothering arms and wet kisses of their mothers. the urchins of chatham would look like drowned kittens next to these young gods. perhaps my admiration for the way they look is the merely the sentimental ramblings of a traveller. it must be true that they have their fair share of weeping behind closed doors, their fair share of beatings. even so, no sentiment on my half alters the fact of the ubiquitous sunlight. these are children born into sun. i no longer remember her face, although i know i carry it inside me. where is mother now?, i asked my father. father was sitting, doing nothing, looking at a wall. he shook his head to my question. i am your mother now, isaac he replied. i was shocked. father, you are not my mother. in a swift, violent movement he smashed his fist onto the delicate table beside him. it cracked and buckled. a maid came to the door and stood and looked and scratched her leg. father ignored her, and slumped in his chair. your mother is no longer here. i will have to suffice. i stood my ground. so if she is not here, she must be somewhere. where then, father, can i find her? if she is not here, where has she gone? he sat again, his hand bleeding. she is dead and gone to heaven. i cried then. well i shall go there too and fetch her back. how do i get there? you have to die, isaac, and then you might arrive, but only if you have been good. but you can never bring her back. people do not return from heaven. he continued to stare at wall. i did not move. and was mama good? silence. yes, she was good. he did not look at me, and i, suddenly, did not like looking at him. and so i left. the maid touched my hair but i did not know the touch of her hand and pushed it away. i did not know where to go. religious sense despite the abundance of churches and the opulent crucifixes that adorn the necks of every female, there is surprisingly little religious sense here. although priests abound, their faces do not indicate great self-denial. the women pray with hands that would just as happily cook or stroke. they would swap this god for another without a thought, like a vegetable exchanged for a fresher one, in a corrupt market. the devil, i can almost hear them mutter, what would the devil matter, if he made our lives more pleasant? after all, he too was once an angel, like we are. it is enough to know he was once good. i enter a church and see the worshippers stained by the reflection of the glass windows. at first the sight is beautiful, but the closer i look, the more it becomes apparent, the rainbow light lends their skin the appearance of violent bruises. they look touched, damaged, wrong. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 27 i would not like to suggest that god was making something apparent to me, but must admit, it did occur to me. why would people look so damaged in a church if god had not willed me to see it? why, unless they were meant to be punished? it is all very beautiful and very worrying. venice venice could not have been designed by a mortal. i would not believe it even if an angel were to inform me it were so, and showed me the paperwork to prove it. even the beggars are perfect, with their soulful eyes and elongated, supplicating hands. the lower class of people is far more picturesque than anywhere else i have been: their grace of motion and noble carriage are striking. i have tried to make pictures of their likenesses and in doing so compared them to my mental images of their equivalents in london. the comparison is nothing short of ludicrous. they are so far removed from the sickly pallor and whining gestures of the english poor as to be from another planet. perhaps in england, having had only one god, we never had enough god to go around. here they have had such a plethora of gods, and these gods, if we are to believe our ovid, were so easy with their affections, it is no wonder the mortal population inherited something of their beauty. gods and their blood must have somehow filtered through to the populous, but whatever the reason or cause, it is difficult to imagine where such lowly people found such aristocratic bearing. perhaps from the swans and trees the gods became to couple with women, perhaps from the delicate clouds they hid in. i have heard that lord byron used to swim in the canal and can only assume his submersion was a form of baptism, an homage, an act of devotion. if i were to allow my head beneath the waters of venice, i would not breathe again, so happy would i be to welcome such sweet suffocation. i have walked the narrow lanes at dawn and seen buildings emerge, new born into the light, buildings built of cobweb, steam and precious jewels. i have floated alone down the grand canal at midnight, convinced that such palazzos are, despite their bricks and mortar, edifices built from dreams. i have seen the pigeons explode at sunset above st marks, the cacophony of their wings like applause at such magnificence. it must be one of the most gorgeous temples conceivable. no material has been spared. the range of the most costly and various marbles and mosaics is astonishing. the altars are the richest i have ever seen, adorned to excess and with the lights burning in various degrees of intensity, the incantations of the most sombre and otherworldly priests imaginable officiating and children, old men and women, young, veiled beautiful women, in fact all manner of people kneeling and unified throughout this fantastic interior an extraordinary sight for the eye. venice is a city built of pictures that have floated into my head like a lobster into a pot. i will die with them in my heart, and be joyful at the heat they generate, at the impossibility of them ever escaping my mind. but the gondoliers and the street sellers! they must be god’s joke on a people who have allowed themselves to become indifferent to the beauty that surrounds them. they are the greatest villains on earth, or, to be entirely accurate, water. sir toby and i were conveyed by two who swore and shouted at each other and, after a few minutes of this violent argument actually struck one another with their broad oars, yet still, on delivering us not a little nervous, asked for a gratuity! everyone here who has something to sell seems to take for granted their right to plunder travellers. they expect to be paid for the slightest services, for example, telling one the time, or pointing the way to the market, or even smiling. i am surprised it portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 28 hasn’t caught on, and half expect sir toby to demand a few coins when i pass him the salt at supper. when we leave our hotel they swarm about us with cruel, greedy faces and clutching fingers, anxious, like their own detestable fleas and mosquitoes, to get the last drop out of you. never have i been made so aware of the difference between men. they look upon us as if we were wildly and extravagantly rich. i am the first to acknowledge, we perhaps are by their standards. but i violently object to their assumptions. i object to anybody assuming anything about me. there have been moments when i have exploded with a rage that has surprised even me. sir toby, ever the experienced traveller, patronises me with sniggers, murmuring beneath his breath, ah! isaac, you will learn, you will learn. at times i could have gladly exchanged him for the worst of them. but their architecture and their paintings are enough to assuage the wrath of even a misjudged and ignorant artist. italian painting i almost could not look, because looking drained everything from me, and replaced it with a void i had never before recognised in myself. jealousy. where did they get it from, this blazing perfection. and how did so many receive the gift? i have attempted to convey this idea in letters home, to friends, to my family. my words, however, are such thin things. they could not move or inspire the reader as much as a toenail painted by tintoretto. i have had to depend on words that reflect nothing of the experience of looking, and so feeling. however, if i am to be bled dry i will be grateful for my lack of every drop. tintoretto. the miracle of st mark. the fury of the painter only matched by the consummate fury of the subject. the trembling, raging goodness of such paint. it is terrible and fascinating that a man could summon such images. or veronese, full of daylight. the artist manipulating the material until the material itself disappears. the soft, rabid paint of titian. the italian mouth of the bellini madonna, in a few strokes annihilating all of our preconceptions about the spiritual laziness of these people. i walk with my arm around the shoulders of giorgione’s ghost, which is restless with the impotence of unfinished pictures and premature death. i would like to protect his spirit as it walks the alleyways of venice, haunted by titian, who is trying to kill him. i have felt tiziano’s wild breath upon my cheek, his rage undimmed by extinction. giorgione trembles, his head full of tree women and the hidden places beneath the earth, and secret coded stories, filled with the terrible knowledge that lightening would strike him many times. giorgione did not know how to protect himself. he was not mad, and he was pursued. he knew this much and was not believed. poor giorgione, in danger of his life, painting pictures which dissolve into the deflected light of the canals. painting pictures that dullwitted people find impossible to fathom because they are not full of the meanings most people crave. these men who stand perplexed before giorgione must have dull safe marriages and reveal nothing to their wives, because there is nothing for them to reveal. the few women i have witnessed looking at his paintings appear somewhat more confused than the men. they glance, turn away, then turn back again and look with wide eyes. perhaps women expect less and so see more. i do not know. these paintings turn everything around that can be turned around. paintings to fall into. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 29 sir toby reads aloud from vasari in front of each painting until i crumble in embarrassment. he finds people to dine with us. i think he has begun to find my silences dull. i do not blame him. i am mute to him. i cannot speak about painting to sir toby. after all, i could not speak german to germans because i do not speak their language. somehow, although our language anchors us to our geographical origins, in the space that truly counts, we bear no relation to each other, are not kinsmen. we come from different places on this planet. from cities so far, far away from each other, the possibility of communication between us is impossible. i am nothing and so must begin again. ballad mongers when i was a child, ballad mongers visited our town to sell their songs. they hung their pages up for inspection like lines of sheets on washing day. people peered into them and as they read, imagined the sound they might make when sung. i recalled these itinerants when i received word from my father. i held the pages of his letter before me, and could have sworn i heard music. the weight and texture of the paper of my father’s letter were as familiar to me as his face. the shape of his writing echoed the strong shape of his good hands. to hold his words was at once immensely familiar and immensely strange. like seeing someone you did not expect to see in a place you have never visited before. he wrote to me of my brothers and sisters (well), and of his business bronzing and watergilding (steady). he described paintings he had recently seen (nothing interesting) and briefly discussed the weather (bad) and friends (friendly). in other words, he wrote me an entirely predictable letter, which i found immensely reassuring. i carry it in my pocket like an anchor. letters home sir toby is buried too deeply inside that corpulent body of his and will not read the signs that surround him. but he writes all the time, despatching letters to that family of his, so many and such long letters he must include the number of ants we have seen, and weigh the amount of sunlight every day he is forced to carry on his sturdy shoulders. i am sure i caught him counting the crumbs i leave on the table after supper. a cigar isaac? i accept one and look for his notebook. surely this momentous event must be recorded. isaac has smoked a cigar. what does he not leave out though? he writes of everything but the hard, true things, the ones that permeate our conversation without a word spoken. i have begun to read some of his letters. i am ashamed to admit it, but was too filled with curiosity about what it was he was recording. to resist. the first time, he left his letter on the sideboard and went to fetch a book. i heard him conversing with our landlady. i picked up his letter and read it. i did not realise we had done so much. oh, how he goes on! about what we have eaten, what we have seen. his letters are contracted like a housekeeper might order her weekly accounts in pages and pages of lists. i would not be surprised if he drafted his letters in columns. he writes like a genial accountant, and includes the price of every sip of tea. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 30 i am filled with frustration at the thought of the conversations we could have had, the letters he might write home. i know that this is unfair of me, but in truth, i cannot veil my thoughts. i dwell, almost obsessively i must admit, on the exchanges we might have had if he were someone else. i feel an overwhelming need to have my assumptions challenged. namely: a dissection, a clarification of what happens in the space that occurs between the mind and the image. we could have discussed why images are necessary. we might have argued deep into the night about the possible existence of a world more real than the one we now inhabit, or disagreed about the meandering degree of truth telling that exists at the heart of all truths. we might have agreed about the complicated urges that make a man want to own an image when he has seen the thing he wants to draw, which is in effect the thing that moves him most, either in passion, in curiosity or in the spirit of experimentation. sir toby, i would like to ask you: in your opinion, which is bigger, mountains or grass? a drop of rain, a sliver of glass? the potential of a calf or a lamb? the power of the sun or moon? mars or venus? woman or man? sir toby, tell me, what is the difference between a song and a picture in its recreation of a feeling? sir toby, why are some sculptures considered great and others indifferent? would you really be able to see the difference, sir toby? and sir toby, tell me, what is it that separates me from you. i would dearly like to know. he speaks to me about the origins of architecture, but not about the bricks and the slaves and the heat and the flies, or the desire of one man to own more bricks than his neighbour. i have discovered i do not want to know about the bricks so much as to understand the impulse that said to someone, somewhere, i am tired of retreating inside myself and so must build a wall. yes. i would like to learn more about the origins of rooms. sir toby, tell me how a flower speaks, in what language, and how i might better read the words that fill the sky. sir toby, can you translate a bird’s song? would you like to try? we could start with a common trill. sir toby, tell me, now, about the space between you and i and what fills it. tell me why a story should be transformed into an image. tell me how the image might transmit both an atmosphere of the real and a semblance of imitation, which, in its constant ambiguity, ensures the life of the subject so depicted. every line is full of lies and every lie is full of truth. the problem exists in the sorting, the sieving, the ruthless looking. but you cannot teach a man such things. he has to find them out himself. that is my travelling sorrow. i am impatient. these are only some of the questions and some of the observations which never gain entrance into sir toby’ missives home. sophia writes a slim letter and stained, from grubby fingers and perhaps tears. i wish, unfairly perhaps, that she would not tell me the things she tells me. because once i have the words inside my head, words she has sent from such distance, they stick there and will not budge. she tells me, in abrupt, painful sentences, of how she sews and yawns. she lets me know that she cannot sleep for dreaming too hard. she has written, quite simply, of her love of the colour blue, and how she will dress in no other. and of how she has decided not to speak for a week. or eat more than four mouthfuls of food a day, and how she has abstained from kissing the cheeks of loved ones, in order to know their minds more closely, and refrained from smelling flowers, so she will learn to look more closely at their shapes. she tells me father is too busy to notice anything and her brothers, apart from me, never speak to her. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 31 she enquires about my travels with questions that are close enough to my own way of thinking to make me uneasy: come home isaac, and tell me about the different light. have you held your face to the stars? are they differently coloured there, isaac? she is mute about sir toby. she tells me she cannot imagine what we eat. she tells me little about my family, although i can imagine what they are doing. but they cannot imagine the places i move through. that is the difference. it is difficult to believe it exists we travel to rome through dusted golden countryside. we drink wine in our carriage to alleviate the discomfort. sir toby becomes voluble. one field appears, full of poppies, then another overflowing with yellow flowers. there are no birds in the sky. it is absurd but the coachman breaks into a mournful song. my senses cannot take much more. sir toby sighs and sips. i love this country isaac. do you feel that? that you love it, sir toby, or that i love it? both. i am a different man here isaac. something in italy casts england away from me. i look at him. apart from his cheeks, which are red from the sun, he looks exactly like the man i left england with. i am curious. what is it that has been cast from you, sir toby? a reticence, perhaps, to speak one’s mind honestly. a reserve in one’s attitude to strangers. i feel more forthcoming. do you know what it is i am speaking of? i think for a moment. i think of the women i have seen here i would like to embrace. the thought has occurred to me more often in italy than in any other time of my life. i have blushed more in a week in the streets of venice than i have in a year in london. i think of the unspeakable paintings. these are thoughts i find impossible to communicate. and so i lie. yes, i think i do understand. it is in the air. the air and the light. it is more accommodating than at home. accommodating, isaac? of what? sometimes you speak the truth despite yourself. i am caught out. accommodating of pleasure, sir toby. when the skin is touched by such air it creates a benevolence in one’s attitude towards one’s fellow man. silence. he thinks. then turns to me. do you know, isaac, i do think i agree with what you are saying. he turns his head and gazes intently at something in the far distance. look at that isaac. it is hard to believe it exists. i look towards where he is pointing. a tower on a hill, its edges dissolving in the sunlight, its base hovering above the earth. tall cypress trees flank it like ladies-in-waiting. a thin road curves up to it. the whole scene is absent of people. sir isaac is right. it is difficult to believe that it exists. a dream in rome i dreamt there was too much lethargy in rome. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 32 i dreamt that this lethargy was endemic and that the only way it could be eradicated would be to frighten people here into understanding that their own energy, their own possibility for transformation, like the sky in a tintoretto or the discovery of the edge in a titian, was by the spilling of blood. that sometimes transformation demands, nay deserves, blood. their religion is wrong. it is wrong because it satiates their need for the body which it gives them at every ceremony and makes them self-satisfied. their capacity for painting has disappeared from them. there are reasons for this. the church and the painting are inextricably connected, and cannot, should not be separated here, but the laziness of these people has forced a weakness to occur in the connection. they have a greater need for moral strictness than anywhere else i have been. but they have diffused their religion with sensuality. i am overwhelmed by the people i see in the street. they rub their crucifixes and spit. the men and boys walk into churches looking at the girls. i have seen them feign prayer and slip a hand beneath the skirts of kneeling supplicants. seeing such believers is like seeing a river stripped of light, a woman without breasts, the sky without a sun. a bellini without a madonna. it should be unimaginable for never was a country so blessed with the possibility of beatitude. but no-one has woken them up. in my dream i slit the throat of their lazy pope and replace him with a blazing angel. when i woke from this dream, i knew that it was not wrong, but that this country, emotionally and spiritually, is wrongly located. sir toby calls it a charming place and is worn out from winking. it is as charming as a deconsecrated church operating as a brothel and filled with the most beautiful whores imaginable. this dream has made me sad and nervy. i do not feel myself. the coliseum after a month in rome, i am glutted on ruins and see things in their cracks and crevices i never noticed before. we visit the coliseum, again. it is a different place every time. cats mewl and curl around our legs as we attempt to wander through the crumbs of this once terrible place. the crickets scream incessantly and the sun is white. the wind lifts the dust into our eyes. beggars cry out at the gates, and tiny gypsy children attempt to slip their fingers into our pockets. sir toby stamps on the bare feet of a little girl, who runs away howling. her cries bounce off the heartless stone. i try to intervene, to protest. sir toby, she is only a child. he rises before me, stout and indignant. she is grown enough to know right and wrong. she was intent on robbing me, isaac. and then, where would we be? my protest is lame, my words impotent. but sir toby, she is probably no better than a slave. a child slave. he does not dignify my observation with a response and walks away from me with an angry back. this place fills me with sadness and dread. this is a place where christians were killed, but our outrage at such crimes is, i feel, a little misplaced. i cannot wander through this ancient tomb and not think of our own terrible tyburn, where men swing for crimes that more often than not should, in my view, warrant little more than a rebuke. i read that the emperor hadrian gave the populace spices to honour his mother-in-law, and ordered essence of balsam and saffron to be poured over the seats in the coliseum. he considered them sweet smells to watch death by. the image plagues me. but, perhaps, it was not so simple and i should not dwell on a history that may have no basis in reality. truths shift and alter with each telling. i could imagine how i might write portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 33 another’s story, or even, and this is the strangest thought, my own, and how, if held up against the life it was meant to replicate, this story would seen to appear riddled with holes and artifice. nothing could reproduce my breath here or now. who can tell the thoughts that crowded hadrian’s head as he sat by his loathed wife’s mother and watched screaming men and women and even children have their limbs torn away. who can tell? history is more and more unclear to me. i do not know who to believe or which story to heed. it is easier to draw, to look at the curve of rock or stone or brick and to try and fathom how it interacts with the sky and the earth than it is to contemplate the mechanics of the mind of the man who ordered that this architecture be placed so perfectly. greece patras argos mycanae corinth athens... the sounds of these words! as dusty as the schoolroom, as difficult as memories i have dreamt but never experienced. it is hard to reconcile myself to the fact that these words are, quite simply, the names of towns, practical naming devices like chatham or london or hastings. but i cannot grasp it. they sound like words waiting to be translated, tainted with the blood of animal battles or romances that have straddled time. words that clang like a faint bell on the edge of my mind, calling together a congregation of nursery stories, of ulysses, of troy, of helen, of giant fictitious horses and women who turn into fish, of songs that could kill a man, of gods and demigods and heroes. the sounds of these words in no way prepare the weary traveller for the very real filth spilling out from every doorway. how different the reality to the actuality! history has crumbled these towns as effectively as if it had taken a sledgehammer to their bricks and statues and books. but the more they crumble, the more mythical, the more buried, their origins become. these are the elements of greece about which our teachers remained mute, but perhaps their silence was born of ignorance. the stained marble, the crumbling fingertips of masterpieces, the filthy huts that coexist with tear stained splendour. the ruins of the ancients have become as integral to the living habits of the locals as bread. but with less sustenance, less meaning. the people here live in such a strange way, they hardly feel like fellow humans, but yet their curiosity in me is mirrored by my own in them. their eyes are almost uniformly beautiful, thick lashed, heavy and profoundly and deeply dark, but they hug their filth and dirty habits to them like friends. perhaps though, in such a country where the air tastes like a wonderful drink, they do not crave the same order as i do. their lives are as dreamt as they are lived. the air is full of lemons and wild thyme and the gentle percussion of goat bells. it tastes like syrup tinged with something harsh and insubstantial, perhaps the whispering of ghosts who stand on every corner and behind every bush. the sun cannot be the same sun we have in england. it might be perhaps a distant cousin, but nothing closer. greece is populated with characters from fairy tales, the diluted descendants of gods. i have seen a pirate with a knife in his boots speak in a language i cannot recognise, to a woman who leant up to kiss his cheek as tenderly as a child. i have seen an old woman walk through a village with a sheep leaping at her side linked to her hand by a piece of string. i have seen a child in a doorway, a goat asleep at her feet as she spun the narrow wool from its back. i have tried to distract my restless mind by eating fresh tomatoes. i eat them like apples and they taste as delicious as the sun and the air. i have watched a gypsy family sing a vicious beautiful song. i have no access to those portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 34 words, but i understood their sentiment with a fluency that surprised me. i have heard incantations to ward off profanity and sinfulness. i have heard shepherds recite poetry beneath cypress trees. i have tasted oil squeezed from the small hard berries of the olive tree. everything exists only once in a market sir toby calls to me will you look at this, isaac. busy as i am examining pots, i am obedient to his summons. he is examining a fossil at a stall. a long-dead insect curled into stone, permanently asleep. it is worn out, plain and beautiful. do you like it, isaac? i do, sir toby. very much. do you? it is terribly overpriced. but i have not seen one like it before. will you buy it, then? he thinks, strokes it with a large finger, mops his brow. no, isaac, i do not think i will. there will be others to buy, similar to this one, but less expensive, i am sure of it. the fossil is the price of modest ale in london. the seller begins to yell, no no no. you are wrong. none cheaper, none cheaper. sir toby hands him back his relic and we walk on, attempting to ignore the man’s irate cries. sir toby puts on his moral face. perhaps i should have bought it, isaac. but i do not like to support these thieves. thieves, sir toby? yes, isaac, thieves. he was a thief. it was obvious. his eyes. i think about the fossil but do not tell sir toby that he should have bought it. everything exists only once. he will never find another one like it. looking becomes lines this is a seductive country. it facilitates desires to drowse in the afternoon and wake and eat and then wander the streets until the early morning. its climate encourages nocturnal activities. i have become drunk on retsina, and sucked the harsh smoke of their cigarettes deeply and gratefully into my lungs. i have felt the heat from kitchens cooking food i cannot name. i do not recognise their smells. they are mostly delicious and make me lightheaded with hunger, even when i have recently eaten. (sir toby speaks with wistful longing of roast dinners.) i have tried to read the signs around me but cannot. this greek script dances and leaps about the page. it blocks my passage to comprehension. it insists that this place and these people will continue to remain enigmatic to me. i am dependent on translation, which makes me feel somewhat detached, as if i were hearing and looking at the world through a thin muslin cloth. i have seen sir toby’ face swell with the effort of bargaining for a carpet. i have tried to make my watercolours echo with the sounds of the port. i have painted endless windows, and the faces that look and in and out of them. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 35 i have attempted to draw connections between the air and the earth. the blue doorways are wonderfully cheerful, and the villages look like polished white rocks that have been miraculously stained by the colour of the sky. greece is a luminous bone, an infinitely fascinating graveyard. the longer i spend here, trying to fathom its complexities, the more it laughs at me for my seriousness, and chides me for my lack of application. but i have only had twenty-five years on this planet, i say in my defence. you have had more than two thousand. greece has made me feel as if i know nothing. as if i were born in a new place. as if my family are frauds and the ghosts whose language i cannot speak or understand are my real kin. i feel my lies so deeply embedded inside me, i do not know where or how to begin to extract them. these are the lies we are given at birth. about god. about knowing the truth despite evidence to the contrary. about feeling a connection to an idea that is truthful, namely the idea of cleansing. i do not know what i mean by this. but i have an urge to clean something, someone, i do not know. i dream of the magdalene washing christ’s feet. i think of the filth that stained lucifer’s hooves. i look down and think of how far these boots of mine have travelled since my departure from england. cleansing. the word bounces inside me like a child’s toy. like a spinning top. like the refrain in a song. bathing shall we bathe, sir toby? the water looks inviting. we have been following dusty paths across rocky fields, looking at ruins. the sea is even older than the most ancient crumbling temple but so shiny it looks new born. sir toby’ face is very red and hot, despite the fresh breeze. he looks about. there is no one in sight. i would like to be naked here, beneath such a sky. why not, isaac. there is no one here. we walk to the beach and take our clothes off, careful not to look at one another. then we are in the water. it is cool and clear like glass. the water wakes us up. we both draw our breath in and then breathe out noisily. the sky is curved and blue and does not move. everything is silent. we walk into the water until it covers our chests. i put my head beneath it and am baptised. i have been immersed in ancient waters. gods swam here once. we are clean now, if only momentarily. sir toby sighs with pleasure and holds his face up to the heavens and closes his eyes. mine have been opened so wide the light burns into them. portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 36 the sea that surrounds greece the sea is absurdly blue, a transparent, seductive place that is unlike any place i have ever seen. it is possible to watch an octopus converse with a mullet 20 feet below and to see the irritation in their eyes at the interruption of a boat. octopi are a delicacy here. the fishermen stand in a row and bash the poor creatures repeatedly until they have broken every muscle in their bodies. this violence apparently makes their meat very tender. the men chat together and smoke, while their arms flail up and down with indifferent, murderous intent. but then i have also seen a fisherman cradle a dying fish, and observed children dive deep into the blue and emerge with silver shells. i have walked in the dim corridors of monasteries built from cliffs, risen from the sea. i have seen islands appear from the faint, misted horizon, where the day before nothing existed but water. even sir toby has commented on this phenomenon. land would seem to exist at whim in this singular country. such miracles make me reflect on the solid earth that gave birth to me, the predictable hills and sodden skies of chatham. i have wondered if chatham wasn’t as equally magical as greece, only more secretive in the manifestation of its magic. it never, after all, was ruled by such a confident god as zeus. i have wondered if landscapes can know one another, if they ever meet, and possibly converse in a common language, in another realm. i have tried to convey this thought to sir toby, who, in his infinite simplicity, called me a fanciful artist to ask such questions. this, i tried to tell him, has no bearing on art whatsoever, but he would not listen. he would prefer not to have his experience of reality, which is what is really at stake, even slightly stirred. the parthenon i have never seen marble breathe so violently in its death throes as i have in athens. the parthenon was sad enough to weep at, so empty of gods it echoed with their absence as we walked up its steps. (where do the gods go when they die? who buries the last dead god?) the steps are lined with thin grooves. an old woman approached me as i was examining them. she was so stooped that to look at the ground was her natural posture. without further ado, and without asking me if i wished to know, she told me that these thin lines were carved into the stone to ease the passage of animals up to the heights of the temple for sacrifice. the grooves were there so their little hooves would not slip. this made me feel very sad. sir toby noticed my sadness and chided me. isaac you are too sentimental. why, in england we slaughter beasts every day. you are happy to eat their flesh. he is right. it is astonishing that i have never thought about the thoughts of the animals i eat. i could weep at my lack of compassion, which is only indicative of an even greater, widespread lack. we are a cruel culture, perhaps even crueller than the ancients, because we do not call our cruelty its real name. we disguise the slaughter of our animals under the rubric of normalcy and need, and delight in accusing less hypocritical countries than our own of barbarism. rhodes the steamer will not arrive and so we are stranded here, but it is less of an imprisonment that a stroke of luck. sir toby leaves me alone to sketch and as a result i have achieved more portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 37 in a few days here than i have in weeks on the road. being reunited with my pencil has returned normalcy to my hands. i did not realise how restless they had become. the sun penetrates everything here, even when it is not hot. the gulf of corinth there are lost things in the water i cannot find. jewels perhaps or lives even. glances flung from the decks of anonymous boats, or handkerchiefs, or grapes. i believe i saw a small mirror drifting quietly beneath the surface of the sea, but it sank before i could be sure of what i had seen. it is all i can do to lean as far as i can over the rail to peer even further. in every wave a picture hides from me, but none i can mention or describe to my companion. the reasons for my reticence are manifold. some of the objects i witness are indescribable, on account of their beauty. others are too cruel for my imagination to accommodate. some i would prefer not to believe are possible. others, i must be honest, most, in fact, i do not have the vocabulary for. how is it possible to communicate thoughts that have not been shaped into an appropriate language? this secrecy in me is beginning to tire even myself, and i would not persist if it were not necessary. but we are on our way to delphi, and there lies are sure to be revealed. so i must keep quiet until we arrive. i am anxious only on one count. i do not remember if withholding information constitutes lying. but we will soon drink the inspiring waters of the castalian fountain. delphi alas! although i have never been here before, i know for a fact this place is so changed as to be almost unrecognisable. where formerly priestesses ranted and raved about the oracle of the deity, spilling their wisdom about as casually as water, now angry washerwomen scream an intolerable level of abuse at each other. these sacred waters, once deemed full of inspiration, are now thick and full and uninspired, inhabited by frogs and watercress; indeed any goddess who decided to live here today, indeed might be forced to sell herself in order to survive. we walk the ruins, and again and again our footsteps echo with absence. the vanishing of past meanings, the lack of any replacement. the absence of any feeling between sir toby and myself, and between sir toby and i and the local people, who see us only as types. i see them look at us convinced we are the same. it is enough to make me gag, to have myself associated with such a man. i attempt to distance myself from him, but cannot. his presence, even when he is not beside me, clings to me like a stain. delphi is the site of a vanquished army, a sad place of ruins. and not only the ruins of buildings, but the ruins of hope. religion has floated to the surface of this place and become a thing, not a spirit. nothing will flourish here again. this is a rancid place. fictions we have left europe behind, and, for me, it was a sweet, if harrowing, departure. the strangeness of travel is something i wish to embrace. i do believe i have to dive as deeply into its dislocation with the exuberance of the children we witnessed in greece diving for sponges. europe is a word i knew once, but now, it must be left behind, if i am to portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 38 understand it accurately. i have often understood a painting more profoundly when i have not seen it for a while, as if leaving its colours behind allowed me to feel its content all the more keenly. we are now in africa, and, without a moment’s rest, we have looked at stories carved into walls. sir toby did not realise their lack of fiction. for him they are exotic things, devoid of a life outside the sphere of the guidebook, the sketch book, the adventurer’s tale. he does not realise they are not stories. time, i have discovered, is not a series of discreet rooms. it is built by an invisible architect, who often makes his walls from water. i wonder at sir toby’ growing distrust of me, which he would be the first to deny. have i become so transparent that he can sense my indifference to him? has he become so visually literate that the layer of skin that enfolds me has begun to reveal how thin a covering it is? in the dark, my hands fly about and fill the void that surrounds me with line and then my still hands tremble on the counterpane. i feel the dilation of my pupils, the absorption rate of my eyes, denied their illumination. i am no longer in a place that i recognise. [to be continued portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005] portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. 39 exile, return and restitution in the czech republic portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ exile, return and restitution in the czech republic katherine vadura, university of south australia the period of development of a new state brings with it many experiences spanning the political, social and economic. the individuals and communities that make up the new state together forge a path that does not always run smoothly. the movement of people within the new borders and across borders is often a result of reactions to events both internal and external, and the resulting experiences can impact on people’s lives in very fundamental ways. the experience of exile, its causes and consequences, can shape the development of a state and change the course of history. the czech republic or czechoslovakia as a newly created state in 1918 had in the relatively short span of about seventy years brought to the people residing within its territory a number of different experiences of exile. the focus of this paper is on the sudeten germans, a former minority in the czech lands sent into exile at the end of world war 2, my specific interest being to analyse key periods in exile experiences between 1918 and 1995. the development of the relationship between the czechs and the sudeten germans still remains problematic in the eyes of many of the protagonists. among the many questions raised by that relationship is whether this form of exile was a legislated banishment or a form of mere displacement. in addition, the question of guilt has arisen over the years, both as a mechanism for invoking the forced transfer of a population and also as a justification for receiving recompense. the conceptual basis for this paper centres on nationalism, identity politics and minority rights as an underlying framework for analysing the experience of exile of the sudeten germans and their complex relationship with the czechs, in the attempts to establish a homeland. the end of the first world war brought with it many changes to the geo-political landscape of europe. it resulted in the defeat and dismantling of empires, and gave independence and new international standing in the form of statehood to territories which vadura exile in the czech republic had previously been under their jurisdiction. the peace settlements after the war resulted in the creation of a number of new nation-states including czechoslovakia. as the granting of statehood had been based on the right to self-determination according to the principle of nationality, a common problem for all of the newly independent states was the place of minorities. this extended to how to include or integrate these sometimes-reluctant minority groups into the new state framework. the german minority in the czechoslovak state found itself to be part of a state that it had not wanted to join, and in a subservient position, a reversal of its previous majority status. the exile experiences in the czech lands occurred after significant political upheavals that destabilised the institutions and structures of the state. these population movements occurred after the two world wars and also as a result of border revisions and regime changes, and they impacted on all nationalities in the new state. similarly the experiences of return and restitution that flowed from the various exiles have also been varied in the post-war and post communist periods. what is the relevance of the metaphor of guilt for exile? the struggle between two of the nationalities that had co-existed in the territory of the former czechoslovakia and resulted in various experiences of exile, produced a cyclical effect which in this paper is represented by the metaphor of guilt. guilt represents a metaphor for the consequences and implications surrounding the pursuance of particular actions. as barkan states, ‘guilt is a potentially powerful mechanism for transforming daily sentimentality and universal humanitarianism into a political agenda’ (2000, 316). in the example discussed in this paper, the political agenda manifests itself in a discourse on restitution. one community’s guilt may have been another community’s freedom, but freedom brings with it new guilt. this new guilt stems from an entrapment in the past. following the end of world war ii, karl jaspers (1967) discussed and debated the question of german guilt surrounding the war, and the concept of collective guilt. guilt can arise by virtue of being part of a particular national group. this means that there is a degree of responsibility for the wrongs committed by that group simply for being a member of that group. therefore freedom can only be achieved by taking or acknowledging responsibility and then acting portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 2 vadura exile in the czech republic accordingly, by restitution or the making up for wrongs. all national groups participate in this cycle, which is self perpetuating until all parties acknowledge their responsibility (both collective and individual). the act of acknowledgment is the first step in the process of freedom towards achieving purification or reconciliation. true freedom and breaking of the cycle at the national level can only be achieved if authority is handed over to a higher body, a strong supporting argument for the development of the supranational institutions of today. according to jaspers, purification through restitution is the only way to achieve freedom from any form of guilt. background to exile – the sudeten german dilemma war and conflict proved to be a consistent backdrop to developments between the sudeten germans and the czechs. change, in the sense of historical change, was inevitably a catalyst for dramatic solutions in the attempt to create an atmosphere of stability. the issues and questions surrounding the sudeten germans have remained true to this drive, and their appearance on the international stage as a minority has stood as testimony to their continued dissatisfaction. the peace conferences at the end of the first world war created a number of new nation-states out of what had been the austro-hungarian empire, of which the czechoslovak republic was just one. at the same time, those germans who had lived scattered across the entire territory of the austro-hungarian empire remained as minorities in these new states. thus, the sudeten germans were relegated to minority status with the formal recognition of the czechoslovak republic in october 1918. depending on the structure of the new states, these german minorities were given either a greater or lesser political voice. in the case of the sudeten germans, whilst they were given political and human rights, they never attained the status of equal partners with the czech population. the czechoslovak republic became one of the new states that consisted of a patch work of nationalities, of which the sudeten germans formed the single largest minority, comprising a population that was larger by one million than the slovak population in the republic. the conception of the state in this form presented an increased probability of it falling into a situation of instability primarily as a result of the size of the sudeten german group and their dissatisfaction with not achieving equal status or the right to self determination. in relation to the notion of identity politics, this representation of a multi-ethnic state raised significant questions concerning the feelings of belonging of all the groups that found themselves to have a minority status. as portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 3 vadura exile in the czech republic campbell says, both the czechs and the sudeten germans had a similar view of nation and homeland. however, when the right to self determination was not granted to all national groups, in becoming a minority the sudeten germans found themselves in a situation of competing loyalties, where the nation and the homeland were not congruent (campbell 1975, 75-76). the foundation for the first phase of the cycle of guilt and freedom had been laid. in summary, the czech and slovak peoples were successful in their united bid for self determination and the creation of their own nation-state. the sudeten germans had miscalculated on the interests of their german neighbours, and the subsequent reaction of the allies. the sudeten germans had attempted to explore a number of avenues by which to also achieve self determination, including committing themselves to becoming a part of greater austria, and on another occasion to joining the german reich, which had been met with disinterest on the part of germany. therefore, to all intents and purposes the question of international recognition of the right to self determination for the sudeten germans was resolved, in that it was denied, and the beginnings of a sense of exile inside a new state developed. the only remaining option was for this minority to work within the confines of the new state and attempt to seek some form of right to autonomy through the available democratic channels. munich agreement and a new experience of exile september 1938 was to prove to be the deciding month both for the future of the first republic of the czechoslovak state and for the fate of the sudeten germans. time was clearly running out for the czech head of state eduard beneš, and all attempts at negotiation to settle the tensions and growing conflict with the sudeten germans had failed. the fate of the czechoslovak state seemed to rest with the benevolence of hitler and the combined strength of britain and france. when hitler demanded the return of the sudeten territories to the reich at this time with the open threat of war, the appeasement policy of britain prevailed and the british and french governments agreed on a proposal that allowed for the transfer to germany of certain sudeten territories where the german population made up more than fifty percent of the total population. the czechoslovak government, and in particular beneš, found this most objectionable, especially since they had always upheld the idea that they would not tolerate the international community portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 4 vadura exile in the czech republic meddling in their domestic affairs. thus, they found the proposal to be unviable and rejected it, a move that angered both britain and france to the point where they threatened to renege on the terms of their alliance. only the soviet union promised to stand by the czechoslovak republic and send assistance should the country come under any direct threat. this promise was not binding in that the soviet union, under the terms of its treaty with the czechoslovak republic, was only obliged to assist if france interceded first. when it became clear that czech isolation was complete and peace had been maintained, hitler opted to again push with further demands, this time in relation to disputed border claims by hungary and poland. hitler set the deadline of october 1, 1938, for the return of the sudeten lands, after which he proclaimed decisions about new borders could be made. the use of the idea of return in itself tapped into the issues of identity and belonging that had been left unresolved from the sudeten point of view. in a final attempt to avoid war, both britain and france sent separate requests to hitler to negotiate. finally, on september 28 hitler agreed to a conference with britain, france and italy. when the leaders of the four countries arrived in munich the next day, the result of the conference was already a forgone conclusion; hitler’s demands would be met at the expense of the czechoslovak republic, which importantly was missing from any of the negotiating process. the sudeten germans were considered to be represented de facto by hitler, as he had been the architect of the munich crisis. on september 30, the munich agreement was finalised and accepted. the terms of the agreement saw all of hitler’s demands realised; the occupation of the sudeten territories would be completed in five stages, a transfer of the czech population would take place over the following six months, and all sudeten german prisoners being held for political offences were to be released (kral 1964, 336). this heralded a new phase of exile experiences in the czech lands. the munich agreement was received with jubilation on the part of most sudeten germans and with great sadness on the part of the czechs. the repercussions of the munich agreement were to be felt for many years by the czechs, both in the anger and hostility harboured against the sudeten germans and in their sense of abandonment by their allies. the latter feeling was particularly skilfully used by czech nationalists and advocates of pan slavism during and after the war. the lack of czechoslovak representation at the munich conference resulted in the munich agreement being referred to as a diktat by the czechs the future of their state was being decided by external issues, in the sense of portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 5 vadura exile in the czech republic european and international security and political goals, and they were denied any opportunity to defend their state. the munich agreement resulted in a frenzy of claims against the czechoslovak state from all sides: germany regained its oppressed german minority; poland revived its claim to the disputed tešin region; hungary eagerly sought to regain the border villages that had become part of slovakia in the post-war carve up after the treaty of versailles. czech bureaucrats struggled in an up hill battle in giving adequate attention to all the claims, while at the same time trying not to aggravate the situation in case more territory were lost. the resentment created by the munich agreement was so strong that it permeated all future foreign policy negotiations, directly in relation to germany, and indirectly in relation to other european powers. munich thus marked the end of the first republic, and the ensuing second republic was short lived and followed by occupation and war. for many czechs the sudeten germans represented a so-called fifth column, a disloyal minority vis-à-vis the state, nation and homeland, and a group that deserved to be expelled. this idea was in many ways a continuation of thought that had already existed at the time of the creation of the czechoslovak republic. as the state had been established on the principle of nationality, an inherent tension between loyalty to the state and to the nation and homeland existed for those not of the czech majority. after munich, beneš felt ‘that when czechoslovakia … managed to recover her historic borders there would have to be a ‘radical and final’ solution of the german minority problem’ (cornwall 1992, 185). the impact of munich and the politics of exile it must be remembered that not all of the sudeten germans supported the munich agreement, or participated in post munich jubilation or the subsequent occupation of the czech lands. many of the sudeten german social democrats found themselves in a situation where they were persecuted and sent to concentration or labour camps for their anti-hitler stance. in the czech lands, the sudeten german social democrats had a difficult time, and were consistently let down by the czech government. many of them, in fact, were turned over to the nazis by the czechs as anti-fascists. the czechs sent 20,000 sudeten social democrats, who had fled to the czech lands in search of safety, back to the sudeten german territories. only 3000 of the social democrats made it to exile in england (prinz 1995, 73). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 6 vadura exile in the czech republic by october 7, 1938, the nazis occupied the four border areas outlined in the munich agreement. a policy of transfers was drawn up to ensure that those czechs were removed from there, setting a precedent for the use of expulsion as a means to establish ethnic homogeneity in a particular territory. beneš remained president for only a short time after the conclusion of the munich agreement. he left the czech lands on october 22, ending up in britain where he was persuaded to take up the position of leader in exile (paneth 1943, 90). by 1940, a government was formed out of the national committee, and beneš was elected as its president. other former members of the czechoslovak parliament who had fled the country rose to prominence in the new government in exile. politically active members of the sudeten germans communists also fled to london, where wenzel jaksch, a social democrat, came to be known as one of the more outspoken members of the sudeten german community.1 therefore, a semblance of democracy was created by the formation of an opposition, which on the czech side included the former prime minister and leader of the agrarians, milan hodza, as well as the sudeten germans in exile. however, due to fundamental differences in belief, the sudeten germans in exile found themselves unable to present a unified stance, a factor that would further destabilise their position in the future czechoslovakia. the war years for beneš and the rest of his government in exile were spent focussed on the restoration of the czech state by lobbying for the annulment of the munich agreement and finding a lasting solution to the minorities problem. beneš was ultimately successful in lobbying for recognition of his government as the free czechoslovak government. importantly for the fate of the sudeten germans, it was from his position in exile that he proceeded to draw up his plans for the post-war czechoslovak republic, one without minority issues. for the sudeten germans there was a further division between the followers of jaksch who fought against the calls for expulsion, and those sudeten germans who became a part of beneš’s inner circle and supported his plans for post-war czechoslovakia. 1 in discussions between jaksch and beneš in early 1939 it was clear that a resolution to the sudeten german question needed to be found. jaksch at this point in time still felt confident that a post-war multinational state would be established, along the lines of the earlier proposed swiss model. (vondrová 1994, 19, doc. 4). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 7 vadura exile in the czech republic during the period of the protectorate in the czech lands there was only one constitutional element that remained free; the presidency in exile. beneš was the holder of this office, and the argument followed that as his resignation after munich came about as a result of external pressure, his presidency was invalid. that said, beneš nonetheless ‘became the obvious leader and focal centre of czechoslovak democracy as reconstituted abroad’ (taborsky 1945, 148). beneš was determined not to make what he considered to be the same mistake again, namely to rely on the western powers for assistance. munich had convinced him of the futility of pursuing such action. the idea of western patronage had failed, and this lead to his decision to choose a new patron with the feeling that a slavic link might prove more reliable. therefore, the czech government in exile proceeded to conclude several important treaties with the soviet union. the košice program established a new policy in relation to questions of identity and belonging in the redefined state. as the war drew to a close, beneš and his cabinet followed one of his ministers němec back to the liberated regions of czechoslovakia from moscow (roucek 1948, 369). solving the minorities problem in the czech lands attempts at restoring the balance in the post-war state were focussed on implementing a lasting solution in relation to the perceived problem of a disloyal german minority. the pursuit of ethnic homogeneity by eliminating or removing the unmanageable minority, in this instance through transfer, had the end goal of creating more favourable conditions for the majority czech population. from the czech side there were a number of justified reasons for pursuing their policy of ‘removing’ the minorities problem. shortly after the munich episode, beneš had decided that if there was to be any stability in the future state, a solution would have to be found to the minorities problem, as he held the sudeten germans almost solely responsible for the destruction of the czechoslovak republic. in 1939 beneš presented an idea for this solution. this idea was based on a system of cantons (župa), which had already been debated in the 1920s. the importance of this idea lay in the fact that these cantons would be ethnically or nationally homogenous (cornwall 1992, 186). on the other hand, czech nationalists were in favour of a far more radical solution to the sudeten problem, preferring a radical cleansing of the czech lands of all ethnic germans after the war. through their influence beneš adopted the expulsion solution with regard to portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 8 vadura exile in the czech republic the sudeten problem, a solution for which he spent the majority of the war years attempting to gain international acceptance. after 1941, beneš was no longer making any reference to the introduction of a canton system. the years during the war were then spent trying to come up with an equitable expulsion solution. the idea of expelling or transferring an unwanted population was not a new one. an international precedent for the transfers was found in the 1920s post-war treaty allowing for an exchange of populations between greece and turkey. the rationale for the potsdam transfers was established despite the fact that at the time it was felt that the principle of transfer as a means of solving a minority problem should not be repeated: the resulting trauma was not worth the net gain (macartney 1996). the process of gaining international approval for the expulsion of the sudeten germans thus took several years. this also meant that it was no longer possible for the sudeten germans and czechs to work together in exile, and the sudeten german social democrats embarked on a mission of protest against the expulsion idea. however, the harshness of nazi rule in the czech lands led to a lack of sympathy for the sudeten germans in the international arena. in may 1941, beneš made his first public speech in britain advocating a solution to the sudeten problem by way of population transfer. the following year beneš proceeded to pursue the expulsion solution, only this time he raised the guilt criterion. the idea was initially rejected by the allies, but by the end of the war they too had accepted the idea (cornwall 1992, 189-92). therefore, in the early 1940s the dialogue was changing from what sort of a solution to implement to how many sudeten germans should be expelled in order to maintain internal stability in czechoslovakia after the war had ended. the idea of redrawing czech borders with germany, and thereby reducing the german population in the czech lands, was again proposed, just as it had been in 1918 and 1919. however, by the end of 1943 beneš was being advised by a molotov deputy ‘simply to chase the germans out without ceding any territory’ (cornwall 1992, 188). beneš maintained that ideologically the sudeten german problem was a fight on a global scale between democracy and totalitarianism; therefore the expulsion was equated with moral restitution. in opposition to this, jaksch questioned how the expulsion of solely the sudeten germans could be justified on the basis of collective guilt/collective responsibility if the slovaks were also not expelled. this argument was based on the premise that the slovak population was just as responsible for the post-munich break up of the state. to portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 9 vadura exile in the czech republic this argument, beneš responded by saying that 80 percent of the slovaks had not abandoned their loyalty to czechoslovakia (prinz 1995, 79-81). beneš openly expressed the justification for territorial transfers to be grounded in the principle of guilt, in particular, the collective guilt of the german minority in the destruction of the czechoslovak state and that minority’s collaboration with hitler. he then had to decide to what degree the concept of guilt should be applied: to all sudeten germans or only to those who were confirmed nazis.2 the implications of the beneš decrees one of the more controversial decisions of the government in exile under beneš was to enact a set of decrees. in košice the now provisional government released its new program, the important points of which related to the expulsion and denationalisation of the sudeten germans and the confiscation of their property, unless they could prove their loyalty to the czechoslovak state. this program was made into law, thus legitimising what has come to be known as the beneš decrees. due to the recognition of the continuity of the office of the president in exile, the decrees passed by beneš were converted into law after the war when the provisional national assembly took on its executive role in the liberated czechoslovak state. the assembly then passed a constitutional law in march 1946, which converted all of president beneš’ decrees into law. the two most controversial decrees passed by beneš, in relation to the sudeten germans, were those concerning the loss of citizenship and the confiscation of property (čtk, feb. 17 1995, 40). in this context, the czech communists started to push strongly for the expulsion of the sudeten germans. from their point of view such a stance could only be of benefit to their party and its popularity as an antithesis of nazism and right-wing politics. subsequent programs of nationalisation were a direct result of the desire to move as far away as possible from the extreme right-wing politics and policies of the war years, and the fact that these programs also resulted in germans losing their property was regarded popularly as an added bonus. also, aside from the sudeten germans, there was a population of 2 beneš was warned by anthony eden about the potential dangers of apply the principle of guilt to the expulsion of the sudeten germans, as a restrictive mechanism in relation to the number of transferees (zeman 1991, 209). also see doc. 148, 23 november 1944, ‘memorandum of the czechoslovak government on the transfer of germans from czechoslovakia’ (vondrová 1994, 303-8). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 10 vadura exile in the czech republic reichsdeutsche in the czechoslovak republic that numbered approximately 100,000 people. all people of german nationality found themselves in a reverse situation to that had applied at the time of the protectorate. now the germans were given less rations than the czechs and were forced to wear armbands bearing the letter ‘n’ for němec (german)3. the months immediately after the war were particularly strained as small areas of nazi resistance remained in the region. added to this, some of the czechs who had returned from german concentration camps were appointed to positions of authority from which they were able to vent their feelings of hatred against the sudeten germans and succeeded in fuelling czech nationalism. czechs who had been expelled from their homes in the sudeten regions after the munich agreement started to return to the region, along with looters and other revenge seekers. this brought about a situation of frontier justice; many loyal sudeten germans found themselves at the mercy of a mob sanctioned by the interior ministry under the control of the communists. some moderate members of the beneš government attempted to avert the impending disaster, but with no success. the czechs remained convinced that the sudeten germans still had, and were pursuing, their agenda of undermining the state. wild expulsions and organised transfers the potsdam peace conference did not initiate the idea of transferring or expelling the german population from the countries of eastern europe. rather, it merely gave allied approval to a measure that was already taking place. when beneš returned to prague in may 1945, he publicly announced his program for the expulsion of the sudeten germans. in many ways, this announcement sanctioned the start of the period that was known as the ‘wild expulsions,’ which lasted until the autumn of 1945. the number of sudeten germans expelled from the czechoslovak republic came to about three million. the exact figures for the numbers vary according to the different studies undertaken on the czech and sudeten german sides. however, there is consensus that prior to the potsdam conference a significant portion of sudeten germans were either expelled as a result of the ‘wild expulsions,’ or fled the country ahead of the liberating armies. when the potsdam 3 as a result of the introduction of the beneš decrees many of the rights and freedoms previously experienced by sudeten germans as citizens were removed (die sudetendeutschen 1995, 152). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 11 vadura exile in the czech republic conference put an end to the ‘wild expulsions’ there were some 800,000 fewer sudeten germans in the czechoslovak republic than at the time of the munich agreement.4 at the potsdam conference it was agreed that the borders of germany would revert to 1937 boundaries, and that the sudeten regions claimed by germany at munich would revert to the czechoslovak state. the conference also outlined a policy for the settlement of german refugees, and accepted the transfer of the german minorities from the czechoslovak republic, poland and hungary (grenville 1987, 224). in ending the ‘wild expulsions’ the potsdam conference thus sanctioned a more orderly transfer of the sudeten german population. the allocation of these expellees was divided up in the following way: soviet zone: 750,000 from czechoslovakia and 2,000,000 from poland, british zone: 1,500,000 from poland, american zone: 1,750,000 from czechoslovakia and 500,000 from hungary, and french zone: 150,000 from austria (bauer 1995, 89). as far as the czechs were concerned the most important decision was allied recognition for the expulsion of the sudeten germans. however, the conference also deemed that the expulsions should be stopped until the required infrastructure could be established in the occupied zones in germany (wiskemann 1956, 110). the end of the forced expulsions thus brought to an end a particularly turbulent phase in the relationship between the sudeten germans and the czechs. a lasting solution to the minorities problem – the initial post-war years the situation in the czechoslovak republic after the war was a difficult one. when the transfers of the sudeten germans were postponed, the czechs took action to try and minimise the reaction of the czech population. several schemes were initiated, including a compulsory work scheme that was introduced in part to ensure that the economic situation was improved after years of german/nazi usurpation. the sudeten germans who remained in the country were faced with three choices: to clear their names of any nazi related activities; to contribute their specialised work skills to the czech economy; or, for those who did not satisfy the first two options, internship in camps. the aim of the camps was to diffuse some of the tension in the community by removing the sudeten germans, 4 in this first wave of expulsions between 700 000 and 800 000 sudeten germans were removed from czechoslovakia, of these 150 000 were sent to austria and the others to germany (bundesministerium fur vertriebene 1994, 112). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 12 vadura exile in the czech republic and to serve as collection centres for those who were to be expelled (zeman 1991, 122; schmidt-hartmann, 1996). the integration of the german refugees and expellees into germany took place over a four-year period after the war, from 1945 to 1949. the experiences and integration processes of these people varied according to where they came from and where in germany they ended up. the fate of the expellees who ended up in the soviet occupied zone of germany differed from those in the western occupied zones. some 1.75 million sudeten germans, the largest group, ended up in the american zone, while approximately 750,000 had originally been sent to the soviet zone a number of these people later fled to west germany (de zayas 1988, 101). the largest number of sudeten germans found themselves in bavaria (bauer 1995, 199215), part of the american zone. at first they received a cool reception as many germans felt that they had helped to bring about the war in europe. also, the arrival of so many ethnic germans became a highly visible reminder of having lost the war (kuhn 1989, 177). this perception was not improved by the sudeten germans’ cultural traditions, which were seen to be fundamentally different to those of the existing german population. many sudeten germans found themselves having to adapt to a reformulated identity, one that would provide them with a semblance of belonging. others were extremely resentful of the loss of cultural characteristics that for them were representative of their identity, for example their dialect. this view was taken to great lengths by some of the sudeten germans who were opposed to mixed marriages, seeing themselves as ethnically distinct from the germans of their host society (larres et al. 1996, 40-41). although ethnically german, these sudeten germans had evolved as part of austria, in a different national environment, and regarded themselves as members of a group with a distinct history and culture, and a distinct nationality. some sudeten germans felt that it was their patriotic duty to resist any attempts at integration, as this might be interpreted as giving up on claims to their right to self-determination. it was not until 1947 that the first expellee policy in the occupied zones was adopted, which allowed for ‘uniform integration and implementation procedures on a zonal rather than a state or local basis’ (schoenberg 1970, 45). following this the american authorities established special advisory boards at all legislative and administrative levels to oversee portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 13 vadura exile in the czech republic refugee and expellee affairs. the membership of these boards consisted of equal numbers of west germans and expellees. the developments in this area took place over a number of years. the marshall plan was to play a useful role in 1948 in these developments, given that ‘the authorities of the plan made nearly sixty million dollars available exclusively for the needs of german expellees and refugees’ (paikert 1962, 24). grosser raises the point with regard to the integration of the expellees that in the case of germany, the term integration was not synonymous with assimilation. the reason for this was that if the government were to try and assimilate the expellees it might be seen to be admitting or recognising the oder neisse border, thus effectively putting an end to calls for the return of the homelands of the expellees. this terminological distinction was also supported by the landsmannschaften, associations of ethnic germans from central and eastern europe, who saw that it was to their own political advantage if the government pursued this line of reasoning (grosser 1978, 274). again, these positions iterate how each of these expellee groups perceived that they had their own distinct national identity. they felt that assimilation would negate this sense of national belonging and would result in their inability to make future claims for self-determination on the grounds of being distinct nations. the path to normalisation of relations between czechs and sudeten germans from a czech point of view, even prior to the communist coup of 1948, concerns were being raised in the government about the potentially divisive nature of the sudeten germans abroad, thereby making the process of normalisation of relations a difficult one. toward the end of the 1960s, at the time when west germany was seeking to re-establish relations with czechoslovakia, and with the signing of the prague treaty (1973), the sudeten germans commenced a vigorous program of lobbying for their perceived rights and for recognition and upholding of the rights of ethnic germans remaining in czechoslovakia. the situation in west german politics in normalising relations with the countries of eastern europe, and in particular czechoslovakia, followed a different path to that taken in relation to east germany. the main reason for this was the influence of the expellees and refugees who had been able to gain a political voice. specifically, the sudeten german portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 14 vadura exile in the czech republic problem for west germany was the fact that they had inherited the border problems as a legacy of hitler’s germany and of the munich agreement. therefore, on behalf of the expellees, including the sudeten germans, west germany demanded their right to a homeland. these demands led other countries, both from the west and east, to interpret these calls as a means for germans to return to the territories from which they had been expelled. following from this, fears were raised that once such populations had re-instated themselves by way of self determination, they would be able to re-include themselves into the territory of germany. thus, the development of west germany’s ostpolitik was hampered not only by internal party politics disputes but also by external perceptions. thus, the main source of contention between the czechs and the germans, including the sudeten germans, were the legacies of munich. west germany was still the only state not to recognise the munich agreement as invalid, and the sudeten germans in germany were determined not to allow the german government to recognise its invalidity. from the point of view of the sudeten germans the prague treaty left unresolved the issue of their right to their homeland and to self-determination, two inalienable human rights that could not be relinquished. the sudeten german landsmannschaft in bavaria continued to maintain that the treaty would ultimately fail, as it had not been concluded with their direct participation. the landsmannschaft proceeded to use this argument to reassert their influence when post-1989 negotiations started between germany and czechoslovakia for a new treaty of friendship and good neighbourliness. the old issues that were debated during the negotiations surrounding the prague treaty resurfaced once again. this time, however, they were further complicated by the czechoslovak restitution laws that were introduced with a cut-off date of 1948. change in the political sphere ushered in the potential for renewed attempts at reconciliation; however the process of achieving this goal was not to be a simple one, and had an impact on the exile experiences of many people. czechs after 1989 and restitution for the sudeten germans, the changes underway in czechoslovakia after 1989, in an atmosphere of democracy, signalled a potential opportunity for a redress of their grievances and potential reconciliation, especially given that so many changes and new legislation were being introduced. this period brought to a forefront in a czech forum the portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 15 vadura exile in the czech republic many issues that the sudeten germans had been discussing in germany in the post-war years and were now able to discuss openly in their former homeland. however, the fundamental elements of the sudeten question remained unresolved during this period despite continued negotiations and the signing of a new treaty of friendship between the two states in 1992. the new era of reconciliation was to leave many sudeten germans disappointed as it focussed on the future with nothing more than a verbal acknowledgment of past injustices. the situation after the velvet revolution, and the fact that czechoslovakia, and later the czech republic, modelled themselves closely on the first republic, rekindled old fears and grievances on both the czech and german side in relation to the sudeten germans. these fears were on several occasions exacerbated by sudeten german associations based in germany. whilst the munich agreement was nullified, issues concerning the beneš decrees and their possible negation, and questions regarding restitution were very much alive. in germany, the sudeten community was still adhering to its long established policies on reconciliation and restitution, in place since the post-war expulsions. from the sudeten point of view, the signing of a new friendship treaty between the czechs and germans presented an opportunity for their grievances to be redressed. this feeling was encouraged by developments in czech politics in the area of coming to terms with the past, with the new government attempting to right the wrongs of the previous regime. the principles put forward by the sudeten landsmannschaft were comprised of the following: a renunciation of retribution and revenge for the events surrounding the expulsions: a claim for restitution of all losses that had resulted from the expulsions; a claim that their homeland be returned to them; and a claim that they had a legitimate right to pursue self determination (blumenwitz 1985, 117-18). the last two claims had existed since the establishment of the first czechoslovak republic. the process by which the czechs tried to deal with these unresolved questions from the past is central to the reconciliation debate. that debate has been marked by the development of a new political relationship between the germans and the czechs on a state level, and by the discussions of the moral dimensions of the sudeten case at a presidential and intellectual level. the reconciliation process remained divided between the intellectual push towards a dialogue and the populist approach to the problem. however, there would seem to a common viewpoint on the czech side that the sudeten germans were victims of their own actions and therefore not entitled to participate in the portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 16 vadura exile in the czech republic restitution process. the isolation of the sudeten germans in the form of a lack of external support delegitimised their claims (barkan 2000, 140-41). in january 1991, the german government decided to avoid any questions relating to compensation or ownership in the treaties to be concluded with poland and czechoslovakia. negotiations for the treaty with czechoslovakia commenced in march. this was followed by a statement by czech premier petr pithart to parliament that property confiscated prior to 25 february 1948 would not be returned, in accordance with the czechoslovak restitution law. at the same time, it was announced that there would be no rescinding of the beneš decrees by any czechoslovak government. both policies came under question by the czech media and politicians, and inspired strong lobbying by various sudeten german organisations. however, the czech government has stood firm on both policies. despite occasionally giving out contradictory statements and fighting a case in the constitutional court against the beneš decrees, no changes in policy have been made. in treaty negotiations the czechoslovak foreign ministry conceded that it would accept a zero option where no property claims would be made by either side; however it insisted that this would in no way affect czechoslovak claims for compensation by victims of nazism. by september 1991, when a draft of the treaty had been prepared, the sudeten german landsmannschaft (through its spokesperson franz neubauer) spoke out strongly against this document, stating that sudeten germans grievances were not addressed, namely restitution of property and right to homeland, and again calling for direct talks between the sudeten germans and the czechoslovak government. despite this dispute, finally in february 1992 the czechoslovak-german treaty on ‘good neighbourly relations and friendly cooperation’ was signed in prague. the treaty was ratified by the czechoslovak federal assembly on april 22, and by the bundestag on may 20 and the bundesrat on june 26, 1992. restitution and return following the collapse of communism in eastern europe there was widespread feeling that the wrongs committed by the previous regime needed to be corrected as a means of dealing with the past. many countries, czechoslovakia included, chose to adopt various forms of restitution legislation as a means of redressing grievances against the old regime. restitution became a political mechanism for ensuring some form of negotiated justice. in portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 17 vadura exile in the czech republic the countries in transition during the 1990s, the restitution process promised a fast route to capitalism and privatisation, with the benefit of establishing economic viability and a stable state (barkan 2000, xxxiv, 112). restitution has been defined in the following way: ‘one way among others to transfer state-owned assets to private holders of property titles on the basis of rights’ (offe et al. 1993 30). on one level states saw restitution as a means to simply return property to private ownership, a way of reversing one of the pillars of communist ideology. however, restitution also raised questions about whether such a practice was in itself not creating further moral wrongs: ‘any attempt to compensate for known wrongs will only move us from one morally objectionable situation to another’ (sher 1993, 38). wrongs were defined as actions that resulted in the removal of fundamental rights, liberties and freedoms from citizens. political theorists also turned their discussion to the fact that by correcting the moral wrongs of the past, restitution laws were also simultaneously shaping the national identities of the new states in the early post-communist period. for avineri, the restoration of rights occurred only in a specific historical context that, in turn, circumscribed the conditions of restitution and reparations. not only was restitution law a victory of norms of private property over communist ideology and practice, it was also a means of constructing a post-communist national identity (avineri 1993, 35). holmes has raised the question that if together economic and moral arguments against restitution seem unbearable, why is the process continuing? approaching the debate from the standpoint that the concept of restitution is morally unjust, he concludes that it is good policy if such a cleansing process will assist in the establishment of a new democratic system (holmes 1993, 33). in the case of the sudeten germans, however, the problem was not a matter of simply identifying the victims. in a collective sense this was easily recognised, but on an individual level it was slightly more difficult, as it required distinguishing between distinct levels of guilt (or innocence). this posed a dilemma in much the same way as that faced by czechs in relation to dealing with communist collaborators and the choices presented in the lustration law. there were also the additional questions of to what extent should property be restituted and where should the cut off point be. although ‘compensation for losses presupposes proof of loss’ (offe et al. 1993, 25), it is obviously easier to provide proof in some cases like confiscation or imprisonment than in cases like ill-health or loss portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 18 vadura exile in the czech republic of opportunity stemming from displacement; a situation exacerbated because documentation required for proof can be difficult to obtain. many questions must be tackled and resolved if any form of reconciliation process is to be achieved between those who are perceived to have done wrong and those who have been wronged, as can be summed up by the following statement: ‘the discourse of restitution aims at the morally possible, not at the politically utopian’ (barkan 2000, 349). the process of correcting past wrongs generated great debate and deliberation in czechoslovakia after the velvet revolution. the resulting series of rehabilitation and restitution laws sought to provide some recompense for injustices committed by the communist regime. from a czech government perspective the main rationale for adopting any form of restitution legislation was simply to put into place a mechanism for returning property into private ownership. on the one hand, this would reverse the program of nationalisation that had been implemented by the previous regime. on the other hand, restitution was also seen as being the fastest, and most direct, way of re-establishing private ownership (jezek 1997, 482). a concern on the part of several politicians was that returning property to its original owners might slow the privatisation process down, due to potential legal controversies resulting from questions of ownership or inheritance rights. however havel, as president, was consistently a strong supporter of the restitution legislation and its aims to achieve ‘historical justice’ while ‘not slow[ing] down or hinder[ing] the country’s radical economic reforms’ (bren 1994, 18). the process of legislating for the return of property to private ownership, and the system of restitution did not occur in one simple step. in fact a number of laws passed in 1990 and 1991 related to the issue of restitution, and several laws concerned with the privatisation of industry by the voucher method were also introduced. after the division of czechoslovakia, both the czech republic and slovakia inherited the restitution laws and the legal framework that had been previously established. in the czech republic, the focus of the restitution debate soon turned to the sudeten germans, as well as to the restitution of jewish property and that of the former nobility. yet, while the large restitution law did ensure that many people received compensation, it did not include those who had had their property confiscated prior to february 1948. the cut-off date in an otherwise generous restitution law was chosen to preclude the sudeten portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 19 vadura exile in the czech republic germans from claiming back their property, as did the new citizenship and residency requirements enshrined in the legislation, which made the process difficult for emigrants. it should be pointed out that all political parties were in agreement over this legislation, with some even wanting to prevent the sudeten germans from returning to the country. in relation to émigrés and the restrictions placed on them by the restitution laws, changes to the act came after a long drawn out process of lobbying. amendments made to this large restitution law in subsequent years included the restitution of property confiscated prior to 1948 to those germans who had remained in czechoslovakia, for example spouses of czech citizens, and those who had been affected by the confiscations. after 1948 these people had czech citizenship, but not their property, returned to them (bren 1994, 20). by may 1994 there was renewed pressure on the czech government to start a dialogue with the sudeten germans. this coincided with discussion of rescinding the beneš decrees (kohler 1995, 6), which was initiated by a czech of german origin, rudolf dreithaler, who lodged a petition in the czech constitutional court. his petition sought principally a re-examination of the constitutionality of beneš decree no. 108, concerned with the confiscation of property from disloyal minorities (pehe 1994, 12). the reconciliation process between the sudeten germans and the czechs during the genesis period, and attempts at dealing with the different exile experiences, thus seemed to become focused on one issue, the debate over restitution versus compensation (kubes 1995, 3). the debate again confirmed that despite the post-world war two czech government’s attempt to secure a lasting solution to the ‘disloyal’ minority of the sudeten germans in the form of their expulsion, the result would be a long-lasting stalemate between calls for restitution on the sudeten side, and calls for compensation on the czech side. the return of the old ghosts of exile experience in march 1995, the czech constitutional court made a significant decision in relation to the sudeten question by rejecting the abolition of beneš decree 108 (confiscation of the enemy's property and on nation restoration funds). also, german opposition parties started to urge the bundestag to take decisive action on the matter of compensation for czech victims of nazism, and to make a government statement on bilateral relations. reconciliation between the czechs and sudeten germans seemed to reach a tense standoff when discussions became focussed on righting past wrongs, namely providing portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 20 vadura exile in the czech republic compensation for damages sustained by individuals both during and after the war. one of the central truths of the debate appeared to be that remedies sought to rectify injustices of the past inevitably lead to emotional debates and cries of further injustices. the euphoria of 1989 and the subsequent transition to a free market resulted in the adoption of many new laws attempting to change or redress the so-called wrongs of the previous communist regime. the split of czechoslovakia in 1993 was in itself a peaceful one; however in relation to the sudeten german question a new storm started to brew; namely, the issue of restitution of property confiscated after the war, and the right to return. the question of restitution was in itself a controversial one, given the implications it held for acknowledgement of sudeten german grievances. at the centre of the controversy was the fact that, since 1989, the czech government had consistently expressed the view that the return of property to the former sudeten german minority was out of the question. the year 1995 was to mark a turning point in the road towards reconciliation and dialogue between the czech republic and germany over the sudeten question, although still not directly with the sudeten germans. in a speech in may that year, premier klaus expressed his regret at the injustices suffered by the sudeten germans after world war ii. he called for a rapprochement between the sudeten germans and the czechs, but also made the point that success would rest very much on the attitude of czech politicians (čtk press reports, 1995). at that point in time both governments had reached consensus on one fact, namely that they would not allow nationalist sentiments to hamper developments in czech-german relations. this was again a significant step forward, and to all intents and purposes marked the end of this phase of the cycle of guilt and freedom in relation to the varied experiences of exile in the czech lands. reference list avineri, s a. 1993, forum on restitution, east european constitutional review, vol.2, no.3, summer. barkan, e. 2000, the guilt of nations. restitution and negotiating historical injustices, w.w. norton, new york. bauer, f j. 1995, aufnahme und eingliederung der flüchtlinge und vertriebenen. das beispiel bayern 1945 1950, in benz, w (ed.), die vertreibung der deutschen aus dem osten, fischer taschenbuch verlag, frankfurt am main. blumenwitz, d. 1985, der prager vertrag, kulturstiftung der deutschen vertriebenen, münchen. bren, p. 1994, czech restitution laws rekindle sudeten germans' grievances, rfe/rl research report, vol. 3, no. 2, 14 january. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 21 vadura exile in the czech republic campbell, g f. 1975, confromtation in central europe. weimar germany and czechoslovakia, university of chicago press, chicago. cornwall, m. 1992, dr eduard beneš and czechoslovakia’s german minority, in morison, j (ed.), the czech and slovak experience, st martins press, new york. crane, j o. crane, s. 1991, czechoslovakia: anvil of the cold war, praeger, new york. čtk daily news (czech press agency), prague, czech republic. de condole, j. 1993, czechoslovakia: the end of an illusion, institute for european defence and strategic studies, prague. de zayas, a. 1988, nemesis at potsdam: the expulsion of the germans from the east, 3rd ed., university of nebraska press, lincoln. die sudetendeutschen – eine volksgruppe im herzen europas 1848 – 1988 von der frankfurter paulskirche zur bundesrepublik deutschland,, 1995, sudetendeutscher rat, münchen. bundesministerium fur vertriebene, fluchtlinge und kriegsgeschadigte, 1994, die vertreibung der deutschen bevölkerung aus der tschechoslowakei eine dokumentation, vol. 1, herausgegeben vom ehemaligen bundesministerium fur vertriebene, fluchtlinge und kriegsgeschadigte, weltbild verlag, augsburg. grenville, jas. 1987, the major international treaties 1914-1945 , methuen, london. grosser, a. 1978, geschichte deutschlands seit 1945, 6th ed, dtv, münchen. habermas, j. 1998, the inclusion of the other. studies in political theory, ed. by c. cronin, p de greiff, polity press, cambridge. havel, v. 1994, toward a civil society, nákladatelstvi lidové noviny, prague. holmes, s. 1993, a forum on restitution, east european constitutional review, vol.2, no.3, summer. jaspers, k. 1967, philosophy is for everyman: a short course in philosophical thinking, transl. hull, r f. wells, g. harcourt brace and world, new york. jezek, t. 1997, the czechoslovak experience with privatization, journal of international affairs, vol. 50, no. 2, winter. kohler, b. 1995, schutzwall für die beneš-dekrete: die tschechischen reihen sind geschlossen, frankfurter allgemeine zeitung, march 10. kral, v. 1964, die deutschen in der tschechoslowakei 1933 1947. dokumentensammlung., nakladatelství, československé akademie věd, prague. kubes, m. 1995, positive stimmen in der tschechischen presse: ‘die vertreibung war unrecht – machen wir es wieder gut!’, sudetendeutsche zeitung, 11 august 1995, münchen. kuhn, e. 1989, nicht rache, nicht vergeltung, ullstein, frankfurt am main. larres, k. panayi, p. 1996, the federal republic of germany since 1949, longman, london. macartney, c a. 1996, national states and national minorities, in woolf, s. (ed.) nationalism in europe 1815 to the present. a reader. routledge, london. offe, c. bönker, f. 1993, a forum on restitution, east european constitutional review, vol.2, no.3, summer. paikert, g c. 1962, the german exodus. a selective study on the post-world war ii expulsion of german populations and its effects, martinus nijhoff, the hague. paneth, p. 1943, eduard beneš a leader of democracy , alliance press limited, london. pehe, j. 1994, the czech republic: a successful transition, rfe/rl research report, vol. 3, no. 1, january. prinz, f. 1995, ‘odsun němců’, die vertreibung der sudetendeutschen 1945: ein kritischer rückblick, in odsun. die vertreibung der sudetendeutschen. beglietband zur ausstellung, sudetendeutsches archiv, münchen. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 22 vadura exile in the czech republic roucek, j s. 1948, central eastern europe. crucible of world wars, prentice hall, new york. schmidt-hartmann, e. 1996, tschechoslowakei, in benz, w, dimension des völkermords. die zahl der judischen opfer des nationalsozialismus, dtv wissenschaft, münchen. schoenberg, h w. 1970, germans from the east, a study of their migration, resettlement, and subsequent group history since 1945, martinus nijhoff, the hague. sher, g. 1993, a forum on restitution, east european constitutional review, vol.2, no.3, summer. taborsky, e. 1945, czechoslovak democracy at work, allen & unwin, london. vondrová, j. (ed.), 1994, češi a sudetoněmecká otazká 1939 1945, dokumenty, ústav mezinárodních vztahů, praha. wiskemann, e. 1956, germany’s eastern neighbours. problems relating to the oderneisse line and the czech frontier regions, oxford university press, london. zeman, z. 1991, the making and breaking of communist europe, basil blackwell, oxford. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 23 exile, return and restitution in the czech republic katherine vadura, university of south australia background to exile – the sudeten german dilemma munich agreement and a new experience of exile the impact of munich and the politics of exile solving the minorities problem in the czech lands the implications of the beneš decrees wild expulsions and organised transfers a lasting solution to the minorities problem – the initial p the path to normalisation of relations between czechs and su czechs after 1989 and restitution restitution and return the return of the old ghosts of exile experience portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: ireland, b.h. 2019. nippo-kanaks in post-war new caledonia: race, law, politics and identity. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 16:1, 11-28. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ portalv16i1/2.6438 portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 14492490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu. au/ojs/index.php/portal research article nippo-kanaks in post-war new caledonia: race, law, politics and identity benjamin hiramatsu ireland corresponding author: dr benjamin hiramatsu ireland, assistant professor of french, modern language studies, scharbauer hall 3207, texas christian university, 2855 main drive, fort worth, tx 76109 usa email: b.ireland@tcu.edu doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6438 article history: received 21/01/2019; revised 30/07/2019; accepted 16/08/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract this article interrogates both the legal and social identities of japanese-melanesians (or ‘nippo-kanaks’) residing in the free french territory of new caledonia at the beginning of the twentieth century to the years following the second world war. the first part of the article details how, fearing an imminent japanese attack on new caledonia after the bombing of pearl harbor, the french empire began the process of deporting nearly all japanese emigrants residing throughout new caledonia to australian internment camps on 8 december 1941. french officials in new caledonia sequestered all property belonging to the japanese émigré community, and later sold it to the french public. nippo-kanaks, who were children at the time of the incarceration and deportation of their japanese fathers, maintained a problematized legal identity as japanese nationals residing in pacific french territory. although the french empire granted french citizenship to mixed race kanaks in 1946, french authorities in new caledonia specifically denied french citizenship to nippokanaks, who then had to petition for french naturalization. the second part of this article interrogates the social identity of nippo-kanaks viewed from the perspective of jeannette yokoyama, a second-generation nippo-kanak whose japanese father was deported to australia. yokoyama’s father was forcibly repatriated to japan after the second world war, but by writing letters he maintained communication with his family in new caledonia. the letters that jeannette received from her father allowed her to forge personal memories of her absent father that shaped her social, mixed race identity as a nippo-kanak. for yokoyama’s father, the letters served as a means to enculturate jeannette as a japanese daughter from afar. jeannette’s declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 11 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6438 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6438 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:b.ireland%40tcu.edu?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6438 memories of her beloved father, coupled with the embrace of her japanese heritage, represent a symbolic resistance to french administrators’ efforts to erase the presence of the japanese community in new caledonia. keywords: nippo-kanak; kanak; japanese; french; new caledonia; citizenship. there has been a recent rise in critical interest pertaining to the naturalization and citizenship processes of japanese emigrants and their wives residing in the free french empire of new caledonia before and shortly after 1941. in this regard, rowena ward (2017; 2018) has examined the nationality statuses of female japanese citizens in new caledonia prior to 8 december 1941, as well as the citizenship statuses of women within other minority asiatic groups in new caledonia, such as tonkinese and indonesian women. despite research published on the japanese in new caledonia, including works by mutsumi tsuda (2006; 2008; 2012) and tadao kobayashi (1992), there currently exists no extensive analysis on the children born between an indigenous melanesian (or kanak) mother and a japanese father, namely children identified as ‘nippo-kanak’. philippe palombo (2002; 2012) briefly touches on the citizenship status of nippo-kanak children, basing his assessment of citizenship status on archival documents in the archives de la nouvelle-calédonie.1 this essay expands on palombo’s research by specifically focusing on several case studies of second-generation nippokanaks interviewed for purposes of this article, including nippo-kanaks who had served in the french military. their cases differ slightly from palombo’s findings and shed a new light on the new caledonian french empire’s political, economic leverages over the japanese emigrant population, as well as on questions about the citizenship status of nippo-kanaks. framed by these considerations of citizenship, this article also interrogates nippo-kanak social identity by examining the role played by letters written by a japanese father to his kin left behind in new caledonia. although the japanese would send most of their letters from australian internment camps, there were rare cases in which japanese fathers, having been repatriated to japan in 1946, would send letters from japan to their separated families in new caledonia.2 in most cases, repatriated japanese fathers would contact their kin in new caledonia to inform them that they would no longer return to the archipelago due to financial constraints. such letters were typically brief, and correspondences between repatriated fathers and their new caledonian families would no longer continue (michel 2018). this article presents the testimony of second-generation nippo-kanak jeannette tomiko yokoyama (b. 1936) who recounts her childhood memory of receiving her japanese father’s letters. the atypicality of yokoyama’s case is underscored by its rarity: yokoyama’s testimony remains the only one of its nature in which a japanese father would continue maintaining close contact with his family in new caledonia, particularly keeping open communication with his nippo1 on studies examining the citizenship statuses of mixed-race youth across the french empire, see: stoler (1992) and saada (2012). 2 japanese internees were repatriated to japan from melbourne, australia, on 21 february 1946, onboard the koei maru, which arrived in japan on 13 march 1946 (ward 2017: 63). ireland portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201912 kanak daughter whom he would ‘raise’ from afar.3 yokoyama’s letters were didactic in nature in which her father, tomiki yokoyama, would write to her about his japanese culture, further offering affectionate instructions to his former kanak cohabitational partner on how to raise jeannette as a japanese girl in his place. jeannette’s mother would burn all letters and photographs from tomiki for fear of being caught by the abusive frenchman whom she was forced to marry after tomiki’s deportation. the paradoxical presence and absence of jeannette’s father manifested in the disembodied voice of each letter allowed him to channel his shared japanese heritage with his daughter from afar. as a child and adolescent, jeannette’s social identity was japanese and kanak, as opposed to her legal identity that was strictly japanese. her legal identity existed in a liminal zone until she officially became a french citizen through marriage. jeannette’s nippo-kanak social identity was nevertheless structured by the paternal affect and japanese ethos channeled through her father’s letters. yokoyama’s letters served as vessels through which she became a recipient of her father’s memory and cultural heritage—a heritage that the french empire sought to eliminate through the deportation process. accordingly, yokoyama’s letters became a means to enculturate jeannette to the japanese culture that she could only experience from new caledonia. jeannette’s relationship with her father through his instructional letters constituted a resistance to the erasure of jeannette’s japanese identity prompted by her own father’s incarceration and deportation. accordingly, jeannette’s personalized memorialization of her father through each letter allowed her to reconstruct whom her father was—namely, as her own father in absentia—during the most formative years of her adolescence. as jeannette shared during her interview, the personal memory of her japanese father has served as the framework of her kanak identity today in which her japanese identity and essence have long flourished. the legal identity of nippo-kanaks nippo-kanak children traditionally assumed the citizenship of their japanese fathers through jus sanguinis (the right of blood), and kanak wives would also assume the japanese nationality of their husbands. the french administration in new caledonia would grant nippo-kanaks japanese citizenship on behalf of the japanese government, yet no proof exists that the japanese government officially recognized them as japanese nationals. while philippe palombo argues that the french administration regarded nippo-kanaks as sujets français (french subjects) (2012: 454), there exists select cases in which french officials in new caledonia denied granting ‘sujet français’ status and french citizenship to nippo-kanaks after december 1941.4 oral testimonies from the few remaining nippo-kanaks alive who 3 given that this article only examines the topic of japanese letters in tandem with yokoyama’s case, i am aware of the potential dangers of generalization and subjectivism. this article thus illuminates an interpretation of nippo-kanak identity seen specifically from yokoyama’s perspective and shared oral history, which may offer salient entry-points into assessing how nippo-kanaks have both personally and collectively faced the traumas of losing their japanese fathers during the incarceration and deportation processes. although there is no physical evidence of yokoyama’s letters to date, jeannette has provided in her oral testimony what she recalls hearing from her mother, who would dictate each letter to her. jeannette indicated that she cannot recall for how long the exchange of letters lasted between her father and her family (jeannette yokoyama 2016 & 2018). 4 the passing of the february 1919 jonnart law allowed the new caledonian french administration to grant a legal, colonial identity to the autochthonous population of new caledonia called ‘sujet français’ that barred members of the indigenous populace from certain rights and privileges only allocated to those holding french citizenship (girault 1938: 146). notably, nippo-kanaks were excluded from maintaining this legal status. nippo-kanaks in post-war new caledonia: race, law, politics and identity portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201913 shared their experiences of naturalization processes for purposes of this article were strikingly inconsistent with one another. their testimonies on the naturalization processes also differ from what is recounted in archival documents. this section will demonstrate that the french empire did not automatically grant french citizenship to nippo-kanaks despite the passing of law lamine guèye on 7 may 1946 that in theory abolished the ‘sujet français’ legal identity and granted french citizenship to kanaks and to mixed race kanaks.5 the reason for not granting nippo-kanaks french citizenship pertains to the politics associated with the sequestration of japanese property. in this regard, the french administration could legally seize and sequester japanese property in new caledonia if nippokanak inheritors—namely, the children of the deported japanese—were viewed legally as japanese citizens and thus children of enemy aliens.6 furthermore, french administrators did not automatically grant french citizenship to nippo-kanaks who had completed their service in the french military, despite having provisionally granted nippo-kanak soldiers french citizenship at the onset of their military service. nippo-kanaks who had served in the french military were reconverted to japanese citizens by the french government. from 1952 their fathers’ properties were subsequently sequestered and later auctioned to the french public in new caledonia (palombo 2008: 339, 341). the lack of clarity on the legal identity of nippokanaks—whether they were seen as french or japanese citizens—defined and problematized their placement within society as continually marginalized. the new caledonian french empire’s prescription and revoking of citizenship for nippo-kanaks constituted a praxis by which french administrators could exercise state-sanctioned forms of socio-political control. such control would operate over a vulnerable mixed race populace that was not only deprived of their japanese fathers’ properties, but also dispossessed of their own legal identities. before 8 december 1941, the japanese in new caledonia had earned a respected reputation among european settlers and with members of the kanak communities through interracial marriage, cohabitational unions, and a hard work ethic.7 japanese men would often own neighborhood stores that both french and kanak clientele would frequent. such stores would sell kimonos; sandals; japanese-brand cameras; and groceries, particularly sugar and bread items (normandon 2018). japanese shopkeepers would maintain favorable relations with kanak clientele, often opening shops near kanak tribes to facilitate kanaks’ access to provisions. these stores would often be the meeting point where other neighboring japanese would come to socialize with the japanese shopkeeper. there were thus economic exchanges between kanak clientele and japanese shopkeepers, and the cordial relationships between kanak clientele and japanese shopkeepers were largely underwritten by mutual trust and 5 law lamine guèye guaranteed french citizenship to all autochthonous and half-autochthonous populaces, albeit in theory, across the overseas french empire. the french administration in new caledonia ultimately granted nippo-kanaks the opportunity to become naturalized french citizens after all property belonging to their japanese fathers was sequestered and sold by the new caledonian french government after 1952. on the politics of law lamine guèye and french citizenship in overseas territories, see cooper (2014: 88–89, 129). 6 the french empire deported nearly all japanese men in new caledonia, save approximately twentyfive, to australian internment camps to prevent the possibility of war with japan. neither nippo-kanaks nor kanak wives/cohabitational partners were deported in this process (archives de la nouvelle-calédonie [hereafter anc] 107w 58–52, ‘liste des japonais naturalisés français à maintenir dans la nationalité française,’ report dates 1942). 7 the population of the japanese in new caledonia peaked in 1918 with 2,458 inhabitants and progressively decreased to 1,110 inhabitants by 1933. by november 1941, there were 1,104 japanese residing in new caledonia. for more statistical details on the japanese population in new caledonia including the gender balance, see ward (2017: 58). ireland portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201914 support. these frequentations between kanaks and japanese would generate an upstanding image of the japanese among kanaks, and tribe leaders would often encourage adolescent female kanaks to become partners or wives of japanese men on the basis that japanese men ‘would never physically abuse kanak women unlike male kanaks who would often take recourse to alcohol’ (yoshida 2018). additionally, kinship links with the japanese would allow kanaks access to resources that would otherwise be unavailable if a kanak woman did not wed or enter into a cohabitational union with the japanese man. marriages between kanaks and japanese were historically far less common than cohabitational unions. the legal statuses surrounding married and cohabitational unions were complex, primarily because the new caledonian french government regarded nippo-kanaks differently in terms of citizenship from other mixed race asians and kanaks in new caledonia. furthermore, there are numerous identity cards that show japanese males having fathered nippo-kanak offspring, but on these cards the french administrators never listed the nationalities of the mixed race children. such is the case with kama seenchi’s identification card (figure 1). seenchi’s nippo-kanak daughter marie-joséphine apatyée recounted, ‘j’ai été reconnue par la mairie de touho comme citoyenne française, mais je n’en ai jamais vu la preuve’ [‘i was recognized by the mayoral bureau of touho as a french citizen, but i never saw documented proof of this’] (apatyée 2018).8 later, marie-joséphine married a kanak man from tiwaka, which allowed her to obtain french citizenship through her marriage. the french administration in new caledonia would change the citizenship of kanak women marrying japanese men from ‘french subject’ to ‘japanese.’ such was the case for marie anne wamytan who married otojiro nakamura in 1925. nakamura opted to become a french national, a status the french government in new caledonia granted to him in 1930. this meant that wamytan’s legal identity was reconverted to french subject status following her husband’s naturalization (formis 1999: 11–12).9 as another case shows, the new caledonian french government did not necessarily make accurate changes to kanak women’s citizenship statuses on their identity cards upon marrying a japanese. for instance, the nationality indicated on the identification card of the kanak wife of katsutaro yamamoto, named marie madeleine of the ita tribe in poindimié, reads ‘française (indigène)’ [french (indigenous)].10 french officials often did not specify cohabitational partner status (concubinage) on the identity cards of kanak women. that mary madeleine, a kanak woman, was listed as a ‘french indigenous subject’ on her identification card despite being married to a japanese man leads credence to two possibilities. first, when completing identity cards french administrators perhaps did not distinguish cohabitational partners (or concubines in french) from actual wives. in french law prior to 1941, all kanak wives of japanese men would have legally been japanese by marriage. however as ward notes, ‘to be eligible for japanese citizenship, people had to be listed on a japan-based family register (koseki) which are maintained by local municipal authorities (i.e., city, town or village) in japan … [c]ompleting the registration formalities was difficult due to the lack of japanese consular representation in nouméa before march 1940’ (ward 2018: 49). to date there exists no documented proof 8 marie-joséphine passed away shortly after this interview in august 2018. 9 at least twenty-five japanese, having become naturalized french citizens, were not stripped of their french citizenship during the deportation process (anc 107w 58-52 ‘liste des japonais naturalisés français à maintenir dans la nationalité française’). a justification for their exemption was that their children were enlisted in the french military. 10 see figure 2. similarly, the kanak wife of kama seenchi, françoise kabo, has ‘french’ listed as the citizenship on her identity card despite her marriage to seenchi. nippo-kanaks in post-war new caledonia: race, law, politics and identity portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201915 that a representative of the japanese government validated any registration (michel 2018). second, the french could have labelled the birth nationalities of kanak women married to japanese men without making any updates to the information on their identity cards after their marriage. thus, it is possible that french administrators did not update the identity cards of kanak women married to japanese men to reflect their change in legal identity from ‘indigenous french subject’ to ‘japanese citizen.’ accordingly, assessments of the citizenship of kanaks and nippo-kanaks strictly from archived identity cards must take into consideration the frequency of erroneous information potentially contained on each card. figure 1 identity card of kama seenchi, deported in january 1942. the column nationalité that should indicate the nationalities of his five children strikingly remains empty. the card labels seenchi as the husband of françoise kabo, a kanak of the kokengone tribe near poindimié, new caledonia (anc 34w 39) © archives de la nouvelle-calédonie, used with permission. unlike kanak women in marriages, those kanak women who remained in cohabitational unions with japanese men maintained their french subject status. nippo-kanak children thus presented a legal conundrum. all japanese in new caledonia had an identity card on which their names, nationality, place of birth, place of arrival, as well as the name of their cohabitational partner or wife appeared, but curiously many of these cards (available for viewing at the archives de la nouvelle-calédonie) do not have any nationalities designated under the appropriate column for nippo-kanak children (see figure 1). furthermore, on cards ireland portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201916 that do list the nationalities of nippo-kanak children, some children are listed as ‘japanese’ while others are designated ‘french-by-option.’ that is, at the time the cards were issued, nippo-kanak siblings would oftentimes have separate nationalities with no supplementary indication on the identity card explaining this peculiarity. for instance, japanese citizen, tiju maeda, born in kumamoto, japan, on 22 november 1877, was married to a woman named oela who was originally from dutch-controlled indonesia. they had six children—two were labelled as nipponaise [ japanese] and two were marked français par option [french-by-option]. none of the children were granted dutch citizenship from the mother, which indicates that citizenship prior to 1941 in new caledonia was either patrilineal—passed jus sanguinis from the japanese father—or selected by the child at the age of eighteen (with the acknowledgment that the child would be japanese until eighteen years of age.)11 interviews with second-generation nippo-kanaks reveal many were under the impression that they were japanese, while others affirmed that they were french subjects (masukata and toyoda 2018). what is certain, though, is that they were not legally considered ‘stateless subjects,’ that is, without nationality, because all nippo-kanak births before 1941 were registered by hidekio nishiyama, the de facto representative of the japanese community in nouméa, who sent each child’s dossiers to the japanese consulate in sydney for validation (michel 2018).12 these birth registries were presumably sent by nishiyama; however, no record of such items exists at the japanese consulate in sydney. the birth registries of nippo-kanak children kept at the local municipal level in new caledonia furthermore do not indicate the nationality of the children (kashima and arawa 2018). what further complicates the issue of nippo-kanak nationality, besides the lack of officially documented nationalities listed on birth registries and parental identity cards, is the means by which the french government declared naturalized-french nippo-kanaks as japanese nationals after 1941 in order for their families to pay a foreigners’ tax (taxe des étrangers)—a tax implemented in 1920 for all non-french citizens to pay (nakano 2018).13 in some cases french administrators falsely promised the nippo-kanak children of deported japanese fathers that they had successfully obtained french citizenship. such were the situations for half-japanese lucien nakano and charlie akinaga, who were both enlisted in the french army as french citizens-by-option at the age of twenty and twenty-one, respectively.14 upon being discharged from their military service, french officials reported to nakano’s and akinaga’s residences, informing them that they were japanese citizens and were obliged to pay the foreigners’ tax. entering the military in 1957 and having been stationed in tahiti and new 11 french officials erroneously labeled maeda’s indonesian wife as dutch (see figure 3). as ward has affirmed, ‘under the 1892 dutch nationality law which applied at the time, dutch women who married non-dutch men lost their dutch nationality’ (ward 2018: 49; vink 2005). accordingly, maeda’s wife would have been a japanese citizen when viewed from the perspective of french nationality law at the time. 12 this is contrary to dalmayrac’s (2007) claim that nippo-kanak children were apatride or ‘legally stateless.’ 13 see also ishikawa (2007). beginning in 1940, there was an increase in the foreigners’ tax, which was ‘considered as directed against the japanese’ to discourage migration into new caledonia. the tax increased from 125 francs to 300 francs per year from 1 january 1940. numerous japanese were ‘prosecuted for non-payment of this tax and arrears’ (national archives of australia [hereafter naa] a2670 confidential report, canberra, dated 4 february 1940). other french colonies, including la réunion and mauritius, imposed a foreigners’ tax beginning in the late-nineteenth century that impacted chinese and indian emigrants. on this point, see widmer (2005: 19). 14 charlie akinaga is a second-generation nippo-corsican-indian; however, as akinaga confirms, french officials in new caledonia treated him in the same manner as nippo-kanaks with whom he was associated legally (akinaga 2018). nippo-kanaks in post-war new caledonia: race, law, politics and identity portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201917 caledonia, nakano recounts that shortly after being discharged and returning to voh, two french officials presented themselves at his residence and demanded that he pay the foreigners’ tax. nakano, remarking that one of the officer’s surname was zimmerman, vehemently admonished the young officer, telling him: ‘j’ai lutté pour les français. votre nom de famille n’est même pas français. comment osez-vous me demander de payer une taxe d’étranger quand vous ne la payez pas vous-même? dégagez!’ [i fought for the french. your surname isn’t even french. how dare you tell me to pay the foreigners’ tax when you aren’t even paying it yourself. get lost!]. the french officials, at a loss for words, promptly left his residence. nakano’s nationality was formalized as french shortly thereafter, and he never did pay the foreigners’ tax upon being discharged from his military service (nakano 2018). figure 2 identity card of katsutaro yamamoto on which his wife marie madeleine is listed as ‘french (indigenous)’ despite her marriage with yamamoto, a japanese male (anc 34w 46) © archives de la nouvelle-calédonie. used with permission. there were other noted cases where nippo-kanaks attempted to obtain a french passport despite having completed their military service, including andré nakagawa, who appealed to a french judge sympathetic to nakagawa’s case after being told by a french passport issuing officer: ‘it is regrettable, but (your military service) does not give you the right to be french’ (palombo 2002). nakagawa was able to gain support from a certain judge lerat, who ireland portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201918 furnished him with a legal document attesting to nakagawa’s eligibility to be a naturalized french citizen given that he and his mother were born in new caledonia. with this legal document, nakagawa was able to become a naturalized french citizen, despite having faced considerable legal pushback from the french government (palombo 2002). figure 3 identity card of tiju maeda, deported in may 1942. under the column for nationality, maeda’s children can be seen maintaining differing nationalities. those who are french are designated par option, meaning that they opted for french citizenship at the age of eighteen and renounced their japanese citizenship © archives de la nouvelle-calédonie. used with permission. although nakagawa does not specify the exact legal documentation that he was given, it is highly probable that judge lerat provided a declassified document from robert dartnell, the head of the judiciary service in nouméa, that was written at the time to the secretary general. on this documentation, dartnell notes that all mixed race subjects born of a kanak mother and a foreign father after 1937 were to be granted the status of ‘french subjects’ (anc 107 w ). it is noteworthy that in this same document, dartnell indicated that two nippokanak children, a certain adèle and olédi, were born prior to 1937. dartnell acknowledged that ‘[c]omme aucune législation avant cette date ne s’est souciée de prendre en considération la situation d’un enfant né d’un père étranger et d’une femme indigène’ [‘(a)s no legislation nippo-kanaks in post-war new caledonia: race, law, politics and identity portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201919 before this date has been concerned about taking into account the situation of a child born from a foreign father and an indigenous woman’], this post-1937 decree would be applied retroactively to all nippo-kanaks born before 1937 (anc 107 w ). this decree would thus grant all nippo-kanaks born before 1937 the status of french subject, but only if, like adèle and olédi, a request to become français(e) par option (french by opting) was made when the subject turned eighteen years of age. if no request was made, the french administration continued to regard nippo-kanaks as japanese nationals, despite the decree of 1937. a noted case exists with eugène kitahara enzo who recalls that he maintained double french and japanese nationality (palombo 2002). this is contrary to kitahara’s recollection that nippo-kanaks with japanese surnames were automatically labelled as japanese via their paternal lineage and were not granted automatic dual japanese-french citizenship, french citizenship, or french subject status. it is also contrary to palombo’s findings that nippo-kanaks were considered french subjects (2012: 454). nippo-kanaks could undergo a naturalization process from french subjects to french citizens only if they, once eighteen years of age, made a formal request by opting out of their japanese citizenship at their residential mayor’s office after the passing of law lamine guèye in may 1946. kanak women who were formerly married to deported japanese men were able to reconvert to french citizenship, and many chose to do so (ward 2018: 49). to complicate issues further, there were no means to prove that nippo-kanak males, once eighteen years old, passed from japanese to french citizenship by enlisting in the military. their change in legal identity was oftentimes never officialized on paper (akinaga 2018). charlie akinaga, whose japanese father arata akinaga was deported to australia, was enlisted in the french military in new caledonia from 1958 to 1961. french administrators falsely promised that he would keep his french citizenship upon completion of his military service. akinaga remembers the following: j’ai été français jusqu’au moment où les français sont venus me voir pour demander de céder les propriétés appartenant à mon père japonais sous prétexte que j’étais japonais comme lui. si je voulais garder les trois propriétés que mon père a travaillé si dur pour obtenir, et n’oublions que c’étaient les français qui ont mis sous séquestre les propriétés et les biens de mon père, je devais déposer une demande de devenir de nouveau français. après, une fois français, je pourrais racheter les propriétés de l’administration française et figurez-vous je l’ai fait. (akinaga 2018) [i was french until the moment the french came to see me to demand that i relinquish the properties belonging to my japanese father under the pretext that i was japanese like him. if i wanted to keep the three properties that my father worked so hard to acquire, and let’s not forget that it was the french who sequestrated all of my father’s properties and belongings, i had to place a petition to become french again. afterwards, once french, i would be able to repurchase my father’s properties that the french administration had taken; and believe it or not, i did it.] in 1963, akinaga petitioned to become french. he was able to purchase two of the three seized properties formally owned by his father for 600,000 francs. he was unable to finance the purchasing of the third property, which had already been sold. the above instances demonstrate that french officials did not always record nippo-kanak children’s nationalities on birth records, or if nationalities were recorded—either on their parents’ identity cards or in some form on nippo kanaks’ military enlistment records—these nationalities were hardly officialized. although the law lamine guèye granted kanaks ireland portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201920 french citizenship in new caledonia, as well as in all french colonies, the same law excluded nippo-kanaks because nippo-kanak families presented an economic opportunity for the french administration. by excluding nippo-kanak families (which by 1946 meant secondgeneration nippo-kanaks and single kanak mothers formerly married to japanese men), from the application of lamine guèye, the french government in new caledonia had the self-administered legal right to: (1) impose on these persons a foreigners’ tax and (2) label them as japanese. the latter gave french administrators the right to sequester all property and materials—namely, anything of monetary value—belonging to the nippo-kanak family. ultimately, the new caledonian french empire would use these monies to pay the costs of the incarceration and deportation processes of japanese emigrants to australia (naa a6445, 37/1941).15 because the citizenship status of nippo-kanaks was never formally indicated on paper or reflected in dossiers that were presumably validated by the japanese counsel in sydney, french administrators easily labelled nippo-kanaks as japanese.16 this placed economic constrictions on nippo-kanaks and kanak widows who were too impoverished and vulnerable—as japanese nationals—to repurchase the property formerly owned by their japanese fathers/ husbands. as akinaga’s case confirms, french officials would only resell seized, sequestered japanese property to nippo-kanaks if they ‘re-became’ french citizens. the french proposed financially exaggerated amounts to nippo-kanak children who wished to reclaim their japanese father’s valuables when such items were auctioned to the french public in new caledonia in the 1950s and 1960s. by the time nippo-kanaks petitioned to become french, their japanese father’s sequestered items had oftentimes already been sold. the social identity of nippo-kanaks: japanese letters from afar notwithstanding nippo-kanaks’ legal identity that transitioned from japanese to french, nippo-kanaks were able to maintain a social identity as kanak with culturally inflected japanese elements that were memorialized and transmitted from their japanese fathers. this section examines second-generation nippo-kanak jeannette yokoyama’s history and the role that letters from her repatriated japanese father played with regard to the formation of her social identity. yokoyama’s case is atypical in that very few nippo-kanak adolescents received letters from their repatriated fathers, as most fathers ceased communication with their kin in new caledonia upon their repatriation. fathers who wrote letters from japan did so only to indicate that they would no longer return to see them due to financial constraints, and many repatriated fathers would return to their families that they had left behind before coming to new caledonia.17 to date in the archives in new caledonia, australia, and japan there are no 15 naa a6445, 37/1941, ‘telegram to department of external affairs, canberra.’ 16 there were certain nippo-kanaks who were not considered french citizens even fifty years after the passing of the law lamine guèye in 1946. such was the case of yvonne yokoyama, who is jeannette yokoyama’s younger sister. yvonne petitioned for a passport in 2000 but was denied on the account that she was still japanese and did not have official documents to prove her french nationality. she later sought the help of a politician’s secretary, who handed her official documentation attesting that she would be eligible to be a french citizen, much to the apparent surprise of the passport-issuing officer (yvonne yokoyama 2018). 17 lucien nakano’s and charlie akinaga’s fathers are thought to have remarried in japan after their repatriation (nakano and akinaga 2018). additionally, kama seenchi repatriated to japan and is currently buried in osaka (apatyée 2018). there were approximately sixteen repatriated japanese who returned to new caledonia shortly after the second world war (michel 2018). nippo-kanaks in post-war new caledonia: race, law, politics and identity portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201921 letters of japanese internees; letters that do exist are accessible in preciously-guarded family archives.18 jeannette’s father, tomiki yokoyama, born in 1889 in fukushima, japan, settled in voh, new caledonia, where at the age of twenty-five he met andrée cook, a melanesian-new hebridean adolescent of fourteen years. she became his cohabitational partner and together they raised five children, three of whom died due to illness. in their home, tomiki would speak french while tending to his primary occupation as a farmer and tailor in koné, new caledonia. he was recognized as an award-winning jockey, hailed in 1936 and 1937 as winner of the prestigious course de chevaux in koné, with his prized horse gigolette.19 jeannette recounts that french officials took her father from his domicile when she was four years old. subsequently, tomiki was deported to camp loveday, australia, before repatriating to japan at the end of the second world war in 1946. tomiki would send letters addressed to his family, but particularly to jeannette, in which he would lament his solitude being in japan, as well as describe his longing to reunite with his wife and children ( jeannette yokoyama 2016). jeannette’s father did not send any letters to her or her mother until after the war. after her former partner’s repatriation to japan, andrée married louis maccam, a half-french, half-english violent man with a penchant for alcohol, and with whom she later raised four children. jeannette recounted an episode in which maccam had threatened his wife during one of his drunken fits: ‘monsieur maccam était un homme violent. il a dit à ma mère, “si le japonais revient en calédonie, je vais te tuer’ [‘mr. maccam was a violent man. he said to my mother, “if that jap returns to caledonia, i am going to kill you”’] ( jeannette yokoyama 2016). jeannette and andrée would receive letters from tomiki, whom jeannette remembers as a caring father. andrée would secretly read her former japanese partner’s letters to jeannette when maccam was not home. andrée was initially shocked to have received her first letter from tomiki years after her cohabitational partner’s arrest, as she believed that tomiki had perished in australia. each time andrée would receive letters in french from tomiki, she would hide them from maccam and quickly read them to jeannette before she would burn them in fear of her family’s lives. to this day, jeannette has no letters from her father; however, from her recollection, jeannette recounts the following: dans toutes les lettres que ma mère lisait de mon père, il y avait toujours des instructions à ma mère sur comment m’élever à la japonaise. c’était clair qu’il m’aimait tant, mais il n’avait ni l’argent ni le désir de revenir surtout que ma mère ne pouvait pas sortir de son mariage avec m. maccam. j’imagine qu’il en savait tout, mon père. c’était une triste histoire. ( jeannette yokoyama 2016) [in all the letters that my mom would read from my father, there were always instructions to my mother on how to raise me in a japanese way. it was clear that he loved me so, but he had neither the money nor the desire to come back especially because my mother could not leave her marriage with monsieur maccam. i imagine that he knew everything about the situation. it was a sad story.] 18 mutsumi tsuda reproduces letters written by japanese internee denzo higa in camp hay and his kanak wife laura leroi in her most recent monograph (2012). 19 although french authorities seized all property belonging to the japanese and their nippo-kanak inheritors during the sequestration process beginning in 1952, yokoyama’s prized gigolette was not part of yokoyama’s seized property (yvonne yokoyama 2018). ireland portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201922 in addition, tomiki would share facets of his life in japan, cultural descriptions, and his daily routines in each letter, along with giving jeannette instructions on remaining humble and steadfast in the face of adversity. tomiki would also offer instructions to his daughter to assist her mother and other members of her family in his place. jeannette recounted in her interview that she would run to her room and sob each time her mother would read her father’s letters to her. jeannette would respond by writing to him, but she never knew if her father received any of her mail since he would never directly respond to what she had written in her letters. jeannette indicated that each letter would allow her to reconstruct her father as a loving figure who attempted to be as present as possible in spirit with his family despite the physical separation. although jeannette has regarded herself as part-kanak given her upbringing within her mother’s side, she proudly sees her nippo-kanak identity as having been profoundly shaped by her discoveries of japanese culture in each letter. remarking how the letters would enculturate her to the japanese values that her father would describe, jeannette responds: figure 4 one of the remaining photographs of jeannette’s father, tomiki yokoyama, on his prized gigolette, preserved and handed down to jeannette by her mother © jeannette yokoyama. used with permission. j’adore la culture de mon père, ses nuances, tout ce que j’ai appris, et je suis fière de mon métissage et de mon héritage japonais que mon père partageait avec moi même s’il n’était pas ici. tout de même, il était ici et il est toujours ici. mes derniers mots avant de quitter ce monde seront: “papa, merci. je t’aime.”’ ( jeannette yokoyama 2018) [i love the culture of my father, its nuances, everything that i learned; and i am proud of my mixedness and my japanese heritage that my father shared with me even if he was not nippo-kanaks in post-war new caledonia: race, law, politics and identity portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201923 here. yet he was and has always been here. my last words before i pass will be, “papa, thank you. i love you.”] yokoyama recounted that although her father’s letters were written in french, tomiki may have been using a transcriber: ‘c’est probable que quelqu’un écrivait ses lettres pour lui parce que dans une lettre quelqu’un avait écrit entre parenthèses que c’était la première fois qu’il transcrivait un français si bien parlé d’un japonais’ ( jeannette yokoyama 2018) [‘it is probable that someone was writing the letters for him because in one letter, someone had written in parentheses that it was the first time that he was transcribing a french so well-spoken by a japanese man’]. yokoyama added that her mother andrée had secretly hid several photos of her former partner tomiki, whom she had admired greatly, often calling him by the playful nickname of ‘jockey.’ after a period of time, jeannette and andrée did not receive any more letters from tomiki and concluded that perhaps he became too unwell to continue correspondence. jeannette shared the news of her grandchild’s recent birth during the interview, indicating that her grandchild, rené tomiki redon, was named in honor of her father. today, she affectionately calls her grandchild by his japanese middle-name: ‘tomiki, mon petit jockey’ [‘tomiki, my little jockey’] ( jeannette yokoyama 2018). an important theorization of nippo-kanak mixed-raceness can be extrapolated from yokoyama’s biographical context. the cultural transmission between melanesian mothers and japanese fathers to their nippo-kanak children was notably french and kanak given their children’s minimal to non-exposure to the japanese culture while residing in a francophone territory. such was the case because the japanese culture was virtually eliminated in new caledonia after the deportation process. yet, as michel foucault has suggested in his analyses on sexuality, the structuring of social systems is made possible through the interlocking phenomenologies of kinship and intimacy, which he defines as a ‘deployment of alliance’ and a ‘deployment of sexuality,’ respectively. foucault contends that the former signifies ‘a system of marriage, of fixation and development of kinship ties, of transmission of names and possessions’ (1980: 106). the biological components of being nippo-kanak are in effect products of deployments of alliances between two distinctively different races and ethnicities, though both were subjected to the colonial power of the new caledonian french empire. accordingly, the deployments of alliance between the japanese and kanaks under french empiric rule—although not directly modes of social management or state-sanctioned administerings of intimacy—created cross-racial kinship bonds indirectly controlled by french colonialism because of the absence of the japanese father. it is possible that the intermarriage between kanaks and japanese emigrant men functioned, when viewed from the perspective of the french metropole, as an inevitable mode of governance—a significant transmission of french culture to the nippo-kanak children— that ensured that nippo-kanak children would not have recourse or exposure to the paternal japanese culture. for nippo-kanaks, the memories of their fathers were darkened by the forced expulsion of nearly all japanese in new caledonia following the attack at pearl harbor. nippo-kanaks ultimately moved into adulthood with no knowledge of japanese culture or language beyond what they were able to learn and internalize through their fathers’ letters sent from australia or japan. in essence, the absence of japanese fathers serves as the key agent that propagated the erasure of japanese identity for nippo-kanak children. the destruction of japanese cultural presences in new caledonia was engendered by the physical uprooting of ireland portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201924 japanese emigrants, thereby suggesting the double expulsion of japanese: the physical banning of japanese subjects from new caledonia; and the epistemic erasure of japanese heritage and cultural value systems of which nippo-kanak children were deprived. yokoyama’s case is unique in that tomiki’s letters were didactic: they offered instructions on how jeannette should be raised as a japanese daughter, further enculturating her as japanese with a kanak heritage.20 as tangible proxies, these letters offered jeannette and her mother indows into tomiki’s quotidian routines in post-war japan. however, the necessary act of burning all letters out of fear of maccam’s potential reprisals symbolically effaced the memory and affect imbued within each letter. tomiki’s letters thus served as affective channels of paternalism that bound his nippo-kanak children and andrée to japan, and to a parental japanese ethos. through his letters, tomiki was able to re-establish from afar the family unit that had been dismantled upon his deportation, despite being physically separated from his family. jeannette’s personal and lasting memory of her father—a loving father-figure whom she would reconstruct and (re)imagine through each letter—resisted the physical act of erasure of the japanese prompted by their deportation. yokoyama’s memorialization of her father continues today, which she has proudly transmitted to her part-japanese descendants. jeannette has attributed the pluri-dimensional essence of her identity as kanak and japanese to her father’s letters—letters that imparted to her the cultural nuances and sensitivities of the japanese that have uniquely enriched her mixed race heritage and the lives of her descendants ( jeannette yokoyama 2018). conclusion this article has contributed to recent research on asian minority citizenship in francophone new caledonia by offering an analysis on the legal identity, namely the naturalization process and citizenship, of nippo-kanaks before and after the second world war. for nippo-kanak men bearing a japanese surname, french officials often did not record official citizenship statuses on identity cards, even if these men enlisted as french to complete their mandatory military service. although temporarily french citizens, these nippo-kanak men were reconverted to japanese citizens upon exiting the military, which allowed french administrators to seize the properties belonging to their japanese fathers. nippo-kanaks would ultimately have to petition to become french citizens after 1946 and at eighteen years of age. the opting/naturalization process entailed a legal procedure of an indefinite period of waiting during which time nippo-kanaks were subject to a foreigners’ tax because they were still considered japanese citizens. nippo-kanak women bearing their japanese father’s surname remained japanese nationals until marrying a french citizen, at which point they would become french citizens by marriage. unmarried nippo-kanak women would remain japanese until petitioning to become french citizens after 1946 and at the age of eighteen. finally, a kanak woman married to a japanese man would be legally japanese in the eyes of french law prior to 1941 and could reconvert to french citizenship if french officials deported her japanese husband. the french administered empty japanese citizenship labels on behalf of japan, which allowed the french a strategic, politico-economic leverage vis-à-vis the new caledonian japanese community over which they could maintain control. nippo-kanaks were specifically excluded from the law 20 jeannette’s sister yvonne evoked during the interview that she has no recollection of her father’s letters, as she was too young to remember them (yvonne yokoyama 2018). nippo-kanaks in post-war new caledonia: race, law, politics and identity portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201925 lamine guèye that granted french citizenship status to all kanaks for reasons linked to the sequestration process. the article also examined the formation of nippo-kanak social identity through the exchange of letters between a repatriated japanese father, tomiki yokoyama; his nippokanak child jeannette; and his kanak cohabitational partner andrée. these letters were didactic in nature to the extent that each letter’s content would shed light on how he envisioned raising his nippo-kanak daughter as japanese from afar. the letters channeled an affective, paternal bond, acting as a mediation reinvigorating a familial unit ruptured by tomiki’s sudden deportation. in tomiki’s case, the paternal influence and japanese cultural elements encapsulated in his letters became personalized, internalized memories that forged the foundation of jeannette’s nippo-kanak social identity. this case shows that despite the destruction of japanese values and the resultant ethnocide in new caledonia after the japanese deportation, nippo-kanaks were able to guard their social identity as kanak and japanese through their memories. in jeannette’s case, her father’s letters—written in french so that she would be able to read them—allowed her to envision her imagined father in japan whom she would never meet again. this spectral father figure appearing in letters, only to disappear each time her mother would burn them, evolved into the affectionate voice behind jeannette’s memories that continue to underwrite her nippo-kanak identity today. acknowledgements my sincerest gratitude goes to marie-josé michel, robert michel, ismet kurtovitch, christophe dervieux, paul paturel, jacques and germaine barny, rowena ward, charles hawksley, philippe palombo, and nippo-kanak descendants of the japanese community and the amicale japonaise in new caledonia who graciously agreed to be interviewed. this article was written with the support of the research and creative activity funds and junior faculty summer research program grant, awarded by texas christian university. interviews akinaga, charlie. la foa, new caledonia, 14 july 2018. apatyée, marie-joséphine sceuchi (seenchi). second-generation nippo-kanak, poindimié, new caledonia, 12 july 2018. kashima, germaine néouwé and aimé arawa. second-generation nippo-kanaks, la foa, new caledonia, 14 july 2018. masukata, rose and maurice toyoda. second-generation japanese descendants. dumbéa, new caledonia, 8 july 2018. michel, marie-josé. honorary japanese consul of new caledonia and third-generation japanese descendant. nouméa, new caledonia, 16 july 2018. nakano, lucien. second-generation nippo-kanak, voh, new caledonia, 10 july 2018. normandon, victoire. second-generation nippo-kanak. ouégoa, new caledonia, 11 july 2018. yokoyama, jeannette. second-generation nippo-kanak, nouméa, new caledonia, 17 july 2016 and 8 july 2018. yokoyama, yvonne. second-generation nippo-kanak. koné, new caledonia, 8 july 2018. yoshida, david. second-generation nippo-kanak, nouméa, new caledonia, 7 july 2018. ireland portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201926 references archives de la nouvelle-calédonie (anc). various series. cooper, f. 2014, citizenship between empire and nation: remaking france and french africa, 1945–1960. princeton 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trans. k. raulet. société d’études historiques de la nouvelle calédonie, nouméa. national archives of australia (naa) a2670. 1941, full name of file. naa a6445, 37/1941, ‘telegram to department of external affairs, canberra.’ palombo, p. 2002, la présence japonaise en nouvelle-calédonie (1890-1960): les relations économiques entre le japon et la nouvelle-calédonie à travers l ’immigration et l ’industrie minière [the japanese presence in new caledonia (1890–1960): economic relations between japan and new caledonia through immigration and the mining industry]. 2 vols. atelier national de reproduction des thèses, lille, france. ______ 2008, ‘les séquestres japonais’ [‘japanese sequestrations’], in la nouvelle-calédonie: les kanaks et l ’histoire [new caledonia: kanaks and history], (eds) e. wadrawane & f. angleviel. les indes savantes, paris: 339–348. ______ 2012, la présence japonaise en nouvelle-calédonie (1890–1960): les relations économiques entre le japon et la nouvelle-calédonie à travers l ’immigration et l ’industrie minière. [the japanese presence in new caledonia (1890–1960): economic relations between japan and new caledonia through immigration and the mining industry]. gmbh & co. kg, saarbrücken, germany. saada, e. 2012, empire’s children: race, filiation, and citizenship in the french colonies. university of chicago press, chicago & london. doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226733098.001.0001. stoler, ann l. 1992, ‘sexual affronts and racial frontiers: european identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial southeast asia,’ in hybridity and its discontents: politics, science, culture, (eds) a. brah and a. coombes. routledge, london & new york: 19–55. tsuda, m. 2006, feu nos pères: les émigrants japonais en nouvelle-calédonie [fire of our fathers: japanese emigrants in new caledonia]. adck, nouméa. ______ 2008, feu nos pères: les émigrants japonais en nouvelle-calédonie: rapport d ’activités (2003– 2008.). [fire of our fathers: japanese emigrants in new caledonia: activity report (2003–2008)]. comitié du projet, nouméa. nippo-kanaks in post-war new caledonia: race, law, politics and identity portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201927 https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400850280 https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226733098.001.0001 ______ 2012, âmes errantes: le destin brisé des émigrants d ’okinawa en nouvelle-calédonie. [wandering souls: the broken destiny of okinawan emigrants in new caledonia]. trans. y. tsuchiya desvals. madrépores, nouméa. vink, m. 2005, limits of european citizenship: european integration and domestic immigration policies. palgrave macmillan, new york. doi: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230514379_3. ward, r.g. 2017, ‘the internment and repatriation of the japanese-french nationals resident in new caledonia, 1941–1946,’ portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 14, no. 2: 54–66. doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5478. ______ 2018, ‘female japanese citizens in new caledonia: pre-december 8, 1941,’ pacific dynamics: journal of interdisciplinary research, vol. 2, no. 1: 45–52. widmer i. 2005, la réunion et maurice: parcours de deux îles australes des origines au xxe siècle. [reunion and mauritius: journey of two austral islands with twentieth century origins]. institut national d’études démographiques, paris. ireland portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 201928 https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230514379_3 https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v14i2.5478 exilesleadpaper portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ exile and the creative imagination olu oguibe, university of connecticut manchester, connecticut, june 2004 in the summer of 2003, the migros museum für gegenwartkunst in zurich staged a spectacular exhibition of works by african artists under the theme: the african exile museum. included in the exhibition were works by fernando alvim, oladele bamgboye, aime ntaciyika and several other artists including this writer. regardless of the museum’s objectives, the project of an exile museum offered a most auspicious opportunity to revisit a theme that has been central to the african imagination and predicament over the past century. it is the case that exile has marked the lives of many of the continent’s most prominent creative individuals, from wole soyinka, lewis nkosi and breyten bretenbach who seem to have survived it, dumile feni, arthur nortje, and alex la guma who tragically succumbed to its unbearable grief, to nuruddin farah, ibrahim el salahi, and innumerable others who languish still in its infinite wilderness. the theme of exile has also been a fixture across the canon of modern african art and literature, from the fiction of chinua achebe and ayi kwei armah to the drawings, paintings and installations of obiora udechukwu, gerard sekoto, uzo egonu, kay hassan and numerous others. a comparison between armah’s and achebe’s fictionalization of exile is telling. in armah’s novel, fragments (1974 [1970]), the brooding, unsociable hero is marked, then driven insane—he is literally chased through the streets till he breaches the symbolic perimeters of civility, whereby he is brought down, bound and delivered to a sanitarium. on the other hand, okonkwo, the hero of achebe’s things fall apart (1958), is banished by his kinsmen for the reckless and near-fatal act of shooting at his wife in a fit of rage on oguibe exile and the creative imagination a sacred day, an abomination believed capable of bringing the entire community to peril. for this he is sent into exile for seven years. although in the popular imagination as well as in contemporary discourse exile almost always evokes a state of victimhood, the example of achebe’s hero reminds us that it needs not do so since excommunication and banishment could indeed serve positive purposes in regulating conduct and checking individual excess within the commune, or safeguarding the moral apparatuses that ensure the stability and cohesiveness of a world. foucault does make this point in his work but by ostensibly recusing himself of all moral considerations, ironically places greater emphasis on the penal dimension of exile while holding the concept of communal survival suspect, whereas achebe points to its validity by contextualizing okonkwo’s predicament. that said, the psychological burden of exile is the same irrespective of the circumstances of exit, and no form of exile is less painful, injurious, or frustrating than the other. in an itinerant, cosmopolitan age in which movement and relocation are as ubiquitous as they are inevitable, it would seem as though the fixation with home, place and geography with which the exile is preoccupied, is a primitive affliction from the distant past, a residue from a long forgotten, sedentary epoch when humans ventured no farther than the boundaries of clan and nation. but there lies the irony of the exile condition, for exile is not so much about movement, relocation or departure as it is about loss: loss of the freedom to remain or return to things familiar. exile is a rupture, the cessation of things previously taken for granted, the collapse of a world of relative certainties, and therein lies its sting. in ‘a song for occupations’ (originally published in 1855), walt whitman celebrated the elemental desires and conditions that sustain the spirit in an itinerant age, including the will to depart but even more importantly, the liberty to return. ‘will you seek afar off?’ whitman asks of his wayfaring protagonist; … you surely come back at last. in things best known to you finding the best, or as good as best, in folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest, happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place; not for another hour but this hour. (1950, 175) our age may be marked by unprecedented freedom to depart from home, to sojourn, and portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 2 oguibe exile and the creative imagination to venture even to the farthest reaches of the universe; yet what emboldens us to leave and venture is the knowledge that no matter when or how we depart, or how long or far we journey, we may readily return, of our own free will, to all that is familiar to us: the scents, smells, liberties and safeties that we call home. what gives exile its peculiar poignancy, then, is not so much the essential act of departure, as the nature and condition of that departure. the sojourn of exile is particularly tragic because it is inevitably, inescapably bracketed by the fact of loss, not of things willingly forsaken but of things forcibly left behind, things from which separation is a violent act that leaves a wound for which there is no healing, even to the grave. even in the bravest and most optimistic of circumstances, exile is also marked from the beginning by the fact that the exile leaves or flees certain only that they may never return. exile, therefore, is the very antithesis of the cosmopolitan spirit, for where one is marked by the freedom to roam and return, the other is defined by an essential conditionality in the form of denial of the liberty to remain or return, and forcible severance from all that is dear and familiar. exile demands contemplation because it is unavoidably real for those who experience it. more than a word, exile is also a condition. it is a place, a knowledge, a narrative, but most importantly, it is a psychic space that is obvious to those who inhabit it, those who must engage and wrestle with it because only by so doing can they come to terms with it. it is often observed that exile is a fertile ground for the creative imagination, but this is so not because it offers a choice but precisely because it does not. every engagement with the lived experience of exile finds its most persuasive explanation not in fascination, for there is no such thing as fascination for exile, but rather in the individual quest to come to terms with the fact of exile. every such effort is an attempt to explain exile more to oneself than others, to shore up against one’s ruins. engaging with exile is a technology of the self. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 3 oguibe exile and the creative imagination figure 1: oso ndu [flight], 1984 for as long as i recall, exile has recurred in my work as an artist and thinker, beginning with the very earliest art that i made as a child, a line drawing of an endless train drawn in the sand on the grounds of my father’s parsonage in 1968, at the height of the biafra war. my family and i thrice fled from that war as refugees. the theme of exile recurs, again around the image of the train, in ‘the exile train’, a drawing from my late teens, and in ‘oso ndu’ (flight), a monotype from the same period, both of which were informed by my experience of flight as a child in biafra (see figure 1). we may even infer the same theme in yet another drawing from that period, a pastel erroneously titled ‘the louisiana seventeen’, which drew its subject matter from the myth of ibo landing. a central motif of lore in the u.s. south, ibo landing recalls an incident from the era of slavery when a group of igbo men and women, having been abducted and sold to slavers in west africa, and having survived the long and horrific journey on the middle passage to the americas, alighted on the coast of the carolinas. but rather than proceed into slavery, they turned back and walked into the sea, whereby they drowned together, holding hands and singing. the condition of their departure, and the horrors of the middle passage, had foretold the future of their exile. rather than live that prospect, those distant kinsmen of mine chose instead to die, but not without the supreme symbolism of doing so while facing homewards, dying in the course of a futile return. they would not be buried in a strange land. in my work the theme of exile makes its most impassioned appearance, perhaps, in the self-evidently titled poem, a song from exile (1990), written shortly after my arrival in england in 1989. on the face of it, i had traveled to england to study, but the bitter truth was that my journey was no less than a painful, deeply conflicted and reluctant flight from persecution at home. in the long poem published in london and bayreuth in 1990, the protagonist equates his departure with the loss of voice and tongue, and quite contrary to the convention which associates exile with creative fertility, implies that exile instead is a journey from fertility to aridity, a journey of irreparable loss. ‘i have journeyed away portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 4 oguibe exile and the creative imagination from the sea into the desert’, the poet-protagonist states in the first stanza of the poem, ‘the songster has journeyed without his voice.’ though the poem is consumed by the nostalgia that plagues both expatriate and exile alike, the same nostalgia that we find in sekoto’s paintings recalling south african townships or uzo egonu’s paintings recalling a beatific childhood in nigeria, it is nevertheless underpinned by that deeper sense of loss and inconsolable anguish that distinguishes expatriation from exile and sometimes manifests in an acutely romantic phantasie of home. in this instance, such phantansie seems paradoxical since the protagonist’s dilemma is predicated precisely on the condition that home had proved inhospitable. why would one fantasize about an inhospitable home from which they have fled into exile? to resolve the paradox, the poem pitches home against the place of exile, and paints a picture of the latter as equally inhospitable, if not more so. by repeatedly employing the metaphor of the abused mother, the poem carefully implies that, far from being inherently inhospitable, the home from which the protagonist fled is as much a victim as the protagonist. the poet fled home not because home was inhospitable, but because it was under the rule of what christopher okigbo described as ‘the pot-bellied watchers [that] despoil her’ (1971, 50). this being the case, exile may offer refuge but not solace or a sense of pride. so strong is the protagonist’s sense of alienation in exile that the fourth movement of another poem of mine from the period, ‘for you, homeland’ (1992, 78) manifests the same sentiment that drove the heroes of ibo landing to drown in the sea, namely the determination not to be buried in exile. in the second stanza of the movement, the poetprotagonist states: and if my years be blown away in distant lands like husks of millet in harmattan wind i want to be buried in a free country among my own people beside my ancestors (1992, 78) these sentiments were echoed in several drawings and paintings that i made in the late 1980s and early 1990s. in a watercolor from 1990 titled ‘exiles’ there are two figures, a couple. one of them has lines hatched across the forehead that represent facial scarification, in particular those found on igbo men of distinction. the figure with the portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 5 oguibe exile and the creative imagination scarification has a blank stare; his companion is downcast. caught in the blank landscape of exile where all things must start anew, the painting appears to suggest, the past becomes mere memory for the couple, and because this memory is all that the exile is left with, it is so dear that the thought of its loss strikes terror in the heart. in the iconography of the painting the most important motif, perhaps, is also the least obvious, which is the scarification on the exile’s brow. in the old igbo society, an individual so distinguished as to earn the scarification on the brow could never be subject to the humiliation of exile unless he committed the very worst abomination. however, with the advent of a new dispensation, the world that created and sustained that condition fell apart and even the sacred was made profane, making it possible to contemplate a fate as unthinkable as the exile of an igbo noble. the humiliation of colonialism was most poignantly inscribed in the banishment of men of status and distinction, like jaja of opobo, who was banished to the caribbean by the british, or the edo monarch oba overamwen, who was banished to calabar after the sack of his kingdom. these were pillars of society who by their very status and integrity represented the order of things that colonialism violated and ultimately destroyed. as would become evident, postcolonialism did not restore that order, but instead created new machineries of debasement and ruin, the results of which include the involuntary exile of citizens, noblemen and commoners alike, now scattered around the world in a new, infinite diaspora. the motif of the scarified noble in exile symbolizes this unraveling while reflecting the anxiety and grief that arise from the terrifying knowledge that time wounds all heels. another watercolor titled ‘the poet and his mother’ (see figure 2) addresses the subject more cryptically using the same metaphors that occur in a song from exile, with home or the homeland as the mother, and the exile as the poet. the image of the mother and child was already a leitmotif in my work, beginning with the teenage drawings and paintings mentioned earlier, and was inspired not by the convention of the madonna, but by the equally biblical theme of the only son whose mother was a widow, as narrated in the seventh chapter of luke’s gospel. in my earlier work including paintings from the middle and late 1980s, the image of the orphan and his widowed mother as well as the figure of the absent father addressed the agonies of war, specifically the biafra war in which so many of my generation were orphaned. it also implied a special bond between mother and son, a bond that derives from the demands and inevitable truth of common loss. in ‘the portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 6 oguibe exile and the creative imagination poet and his mother,’ as in my a song from exile (1990), the image is employed to symbolize the parallel bond between the patriot poet and his homeland. in the watercolor, the prospect or fact of the poet’s separation from his mother represents the acute grief and loneliness of exile in same way that the image of the only son and his widowed mother represented the insufferable tragedy of war and loss in my earlier work. unspeakable grief was the recurrent theme. figure 2: the poet and his mother, 1990 a few years after a song from exile was published, i wrote a brief essay called ‘imaginary homes, imagined loyalties: a brief reflection on the uncertainty of geographies’ (1996), which dealt with the problematic, twin notions of home and homeland. as if weaning itself from the purple nostalgia and consummate grief of the poem, the essay seemed instead to celebrate the cosmopolitan utopia of freedom from the burden of belonging, which these notions contradict and often compromise. the essay proposed a concise history of the idea of home, and traced it to a natal absence and longing, an almost biological yearning which derives from the trauma of separation from the womb and ultimately manifests in a proprietary claim to a familiar geography where such claim may meet the least possibility of contestation. home and homeland, it insisted, are mere projections with little anchor in physical or indeed reciprocal, emotional reality, portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 7 oguibe exile and the creative imagination fictions whose purpose is to satiate a perennial longing for the womb as well as the human instinct to name and possess. because the object of claim, that is, the place called home, does not reciprocate the claim made on it or return the affection projected on it, it was my conclusion that such affection is essentially narcissistic and delusional, and the bond on which it is assumed to rest merely fictional, just as it is treacherous. and, since the larger notion of homelands and the purported rights that accrue from that notion build upon this fiction of a bond between individual and natal geography, it was my conclusion that the idea of homelands is also delusional if ingenious, and those who latch onto and swear by it are often repaid with betrayal. the fiction of home and homeland, the essay further proposed, reveals itself in the decoupling act of expatriation, after which we discover especially upon return and often to our surprise, even heartbreak, that the bond between the individual and the homeland is tenuous. not only do we find that the homeland is inherently indifferent; sometimes we discover, also, that it is capable of treating us no better than the geographies of exile. the more we travel, the more we learn, and should we return after having departed home, we often realize that home and homeland, the objects of our patriotic projections, care little for us or our loyalty. the idea, then, that we belong to a place, and that that place in turn belongs to us, merely exposes us to disappointment, and conditions us to contest for and die over a fiction, which, by its very nature, denies and defies belonging. like all theories and propositions, the essay in question had its limitations and obviously placed several valid considerations outside its sphere of concern. more importantly, although it revolved around the will to escape, to detach oneself or self-excommunicate, or simply to celebrate the absence of geographical or natal anchorage, it was nevertheless still part of my long, perennial wrestle with the predicament of exile in what one might call its third phase. whereas the teenage drawings referred to earlier emerged from residual grief over the refugee experience in biafra, and the paintings and poetry from my years in england drew from the grief of exile, this essay, written in the very first months of my relocation to america, seemed to resolve the emotional and existential complexities of what one might call the odyssey on the exile train by contesting the logic of attachment to home and homeland without which, indeed, there is no exile. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 8 oguibe exile and the creative imagination there was another context or background to the essay and its attempt at what we might call the logic of renouncement. in the mid-1990s when the essay was written, there was a resurgent, euphoric discourse around what was at best a revived utopia, namely the birth of a new territory of cosmopolitan freedoms called the interzone, a territory beyond the constraints of nation and faith, a borderless zone of unimaginable possibilities. fuelled by the advent of new information technology, especially the internet, as well as certain streams of cultural studies that sought to posit clarity and identity as irresoluble by introducing notions such as hybridity, discourse at the time ignored the realities of geography and its politics and adopted escapism by envisioning an imminent, new ‘postnational’ world where technology erased all boundaries and extant truths, and granted infinite connectivity and unbreachable community to all world citizens. this new, postnational world, the latest in a long line of ‘post-’ conditions, with its universal brotherhood of the dislocated and its grand technological advancements, channels of navigation, and re-negotiated relationships, would supersede the archaic structures and inefficiencies of all prior forms of belonging. the new age would be one without regulation, an age of triumphal cosmopolitanism. scholars and pundits such as homi bhabha (1994) and nicholas negroponte (1996) mesmerized the intellectual community with visions of this hybrid, borderless post-humanism which, as bhabha seemed to argue, represented the inherent nature of postcoloniality. the period was one, also, of seemingly unprecedented cosmopolitan prominence for intellectuals from the provinces: francis fukuyama published the end of history and the last man (1992), bhabha followed nation and narration (1990) with the location of culture (1994) and the ultra-conservative dinesh d'souza (1993, 1995) achieved shortlived celebrity in america with a series of polemical propositions. the rhetoric of a borderless post-histoire was on the ascendant. the appeal of this borderless vision was strong and understandable. anyone for whom every border-crossing is a march through golgotha, a ritual of persecution, a crucifixion in which the body is laid bare and the soul abused, would understand the appeal of its promise: more so those who were already loose of anchor and thus carried their nation in their suitcase. hence the enthusiasm with which many began to embrace the notion that the nation is a fiction, and worse still, a disposable one. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 9 oguibe exile and the creative imagination however, it was not long before one was reminded that the ‘world city’ or cosmopolis at the center of this vision is not the imagined, lawless wilderness of the interzone: that the cosmopolis, after all, is an owned territory. the cosmopolis derives its name from kosmos, the cosmos, but at no time in the past and hardly so now, was the cosmos ever understood to represent any more than the ‘known world’, that is, the world as known and determined by the culture that defines it. each society and culture constitutes its own world, in its own way and according to the perimeters of its knowledge and the dictates of its interests. there is therefore no single world or cosmos but many, and every cosmos is the material and spiritual property of the culture that creates or defines it. every world is owned. needless to say, the mere fact of presence or habitation does not grant access to a world because a world transcends physical geography. a world is more than a place or polity or constellation of dominions. each world is a territory in the mind, also, and the borders of the mind are more intractable than borders on a map. to have access to a world requires belonging, and habitation in a world, by itself, does not equal belonging unless the subject is in his or her natural surroundings, for, it is one thing to inhabit a place and quite another to be in one’s place. so that mere physical presence, or even the mental projection of belonging—the wishful assumption of belonging—does not in real terms translate into being part of a place; to be in a place is not the same as to be of that place. and if the foregoing appears rigid and problematic, especially against the background of the utopia described above, or indeed the propositions of my earlier essay on imaginary geographies, perhaps the reader ought to be reminded that this perspective is not peculiar to those who are often seen to have come from the so-called peripheries of the world, but is in fact a shared truth among most who journey outside their homeland irrespective of their provenance. in other words, skepticism towards the utopia of the borderless postnation is not a postcolonial or subaltern affliction. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 10 oguibe exile and the creative imagination pablo picasso spent almost all his adult life in paris, one of the great ‘world cities’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. he was, to all intents and purposes, parisien par excellence and hardly anyone in his time could be considered more so. however, it is also known that on several occasions picasso applied to the authorities to become a french citizen, not in order to deny his spanish origins but so as to consolidate his sense of belonging in paris, of belonging to it. however, that wish was never granted till his death. later in his life, thanks to the repeated rejection, picasso’s nationalistic feelings towards spain hardened into defiance and he was known to declare with marked vehemence that he was a spaniard and would remain so till death. after numerous years living in paris and, indeed, helping to define that city for his age, picasso’s efforts to obtain french citizenship derived from a profound knowledge of what it takes to claim a city and a place, an understanding that without being french he could not truly claim paris. for, while the two might appear autonomous, in truth they are bound together like mother and child; there is no paris without france, and the world for which paris is a world city is a french world no matter who inhabits the city or that world, or where they come from. picasso did not belong in the french world. having lived in paris as long as he did, picasso understood that in every world city, every cosmopolis, there are two categories of inhabitants, two categories of cosmopolitans. there are those who walk with the steady gait of belonging, their feet solidly planted in the knowledge that they not only inhabit the city but own it as well as the world that defines it. and then there are those who walk with the mechanical uncertainty of all who pitch their tents on the sandy, tidal beaches of rented habitats. the people in the latter category may inhabit the world for which the city is a center but they do not define or own that world and as such. whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, they live permanently on borrowed time and the succor and restfulness of home is eternally denied them. they may call the city home, but deep within them they know that home must feel different, no matter how vague and inchoate, even unsavory, it seems. this knowledge i have carried all my life. little surprise, then, that the theme of exile and belonging should reemerge in my work at the turn of the century, this time in the installation, ‘game’ (see figure 3) which was made in the summer and early autumn of 2002 in the studio of master ceramicists anna maria pacetti and ernesto canepa in the little, seaside resort town of albisola marina on portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 11 oguibe exile and the creative imagination the italian riviera. the elaborate ceramic piece, comprising a mural and a group of terracotta figurines, was exhibited the following year in the old atelier of the late lucio fontana across the bridge in the twin town of albisola majore, the first work by another artist to be shown in the late master’s studio. fontana, whose revered atelier had passed into the custody of the municipality, was a native son once removed who left his birthplace in argentina to return to live, and die, in italy, his ancestral home and the land of his forebears. it was in this atelier that fontana created his famous slashed canvases. figure 3: game, 2002-2003 in certain respects, ‘game’ began its life in a third-floor, brownstone apartment in brooklyn, new york where it was conceived a few weeks before i set out for italy. when i arrived in albisola to produce it, only the barest details were certain: that the work would comprise a tiled mural of a certain dimension, the image for which was as yet to be determined, as well as a group of statuettes or figurines, the number and specifics of which would equally be determined in the course of their making. each figure on the four-meter mural was conceived in the process of its painting. so were the hundred and one figurines, some of them loosely based on iconic sculptures from different west and central african cultures. the name of the work too would change. at first it was titled portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 12 oguibe exile and the creative imagination ‘strangers and gods’, with reference to a suspect yet enthralling image in a favorite line at the end of t. s. eliot’s 1927 poem, ‘journey of the magi’: we returned to our places, these kingdoms, but no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. (1969, 104) though eliot’s lines refer to an ancient aristocracy on the eave of an upheaval, nevertheless, since my arrival in the west, his image of an alien people clutching their gods has always represented for me the stream of migrants and strangers that i come across in city after city and equally evoked in my a song from exile (1990). these masses have come from all corners of the world, from the nearest and farthest border posts of empire, to seek refuge and revenge in the imperial cosmopolis. they are travelers and exiles, prospectors in the dry and coarse mines of the center, claimants to a vague yet barely forgotten right to the riches once taken from their homelands and funneled to the west, upon which the paved streets of empire were built, each man, woman and child bringing with them a speck of dust from whence they came, a pouch filled with the earth on which they or their ancestors once walked only to leave behind, perhaps forever. aliens clutching their gods; strangers, of whom i am one. it was my intention that the figurines in the work (see figure 4) should represent these multitudes and their gods, the number hundred and one representing as it does in my other works an infinite mass of peoples of all nations, faiths and tongues, a legion. and, though the figurines or statuettes would formally be modeled on vague recollections of god-images and effigies, the gods in the work would be represented not by the statuettes but by a number of life-size male figures in the mural who shall tower over the statuettes like distant yet ever-present lords and masters. the roles would be reversed and the strangers would be the gods and the god-images would be the strangers. however, there is another version to the narrative that begins in albisola itself, for although the form of the work that i made there took shape in new york, some of the thoughts and emotions that inspired it began two years earlier in the same italian town while i was a guest there. it was the summer of 2001, and the leaders of the group of eight industrialized nations were meeting in genoa, a score miles away from albisola. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 13 oguibe exile and the creative imagination figure 4: pieces for game, 2002-2003. the region was aswarm with security personnel and there was tension in the air that uneasily recalled an unnamable period in italy’s not so distant past. before long, running confrontation between the security forces guarding the meeting and masses of protesters who came to voice opposition to the visiting leaders and their global policies turned into tragedy. a young protester by the name of carlo giuliani was slain by police, making him the first open martyr of the emergent battle against triumphant capital in the new millennium. the slaying in genoa remained on my mind for the next two years, as did the issues that led to the young man’s martyrdom. and as i prepared to work on the installation in albisola the image resurfaced of a group of strong men who regulate and oversee the fate of the world’s weak and dispossessed, from factory workers to refugees, from immigrant tomato pickers and indentured laborers in citrus orchards to coal miners, men at whose behest the weak would be murdered in the streets and citrus orchards and factory floors. the latter—the immigrants and refugees and office cleaners and factory hands of the world, the loose populace of the globe, fanon’s wretched of the earth—would be the portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 14 oguibe exile and the creative imagination strangers in my work, while the former, the men of power, wealth and strength, would be the deities, the modern day gods. as significant as the event in genoa was for me, then, so was a longer and much deeper preoccupation with the larger question of the fate of the rootless among these masses, these alien people in the centers of the west or wherever they may be, for whom home is at best a far away place and, at worst, a mere notion in the mind. these are the refugees and exiles and expatriates of the world who are condemned to dream of homelands, and in whose faces i see my own. i dwell on their fate in order to understand mine. at the turn of the century, as wars of colonial occupation rage on the one hand, and nationalist struggles drag out on the other, and the industrialized nations continue to seal their borders against invading aliens clutching their gods, the soporific discourse of postnationality and interzones has dissipated, as it should, because the experience and fact of unbelonging upon which it was largely built does not, in and of itself, realize or substantiate the utopia of the post-nation. in time we have come to acknowledge that the only free movement across territories that the present allows is the trespass of the powerful against the weak. the triumph of global capital, or so-called globalization, has failed to quell the march of powerful nations to seize and possess territory. paradoxically, globalization has produced its own dislocated and dispossessed by destroying the economic and cultural fabric of hapless societies from gujarat in india to chiapas in mexico, and fuelling strife around the globe, from the persian gulf to the congo. individuals as well as whole populations continue to flee persecution, deprivation, cataclysm and war, and the global refugee train continues to swell. for most who suffer these calamities, the question of home is particularly acute because it codifies the very barest essence of their humanity in a cruel and restless world. those who take the privilege of a safe home and a protective homeland for granted cannot imagine the trepidation and loneliness that is the fate of strangers. it is a terrible thing to be alone in the world, and those who have no place to call home are the loneliest of the lonely. to suffer the loss of home and homeland is to be truly dispossessed. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 15 oguibe exile and the creative imagination exile persists, and its persistence speaks to the resilience and relevance of geography. it also underlines the inescapable desirability of belonging. it may be questioned, even ridiculed, but only those who have experienced the loss of home can understand the rootlessness—and ruthlessness—of existence in the shiftless, treacherous territory of exile. how, then, does one cope with the fact of exile? the persistence of exile explains its recurrence in the work of artists and writers, not only in africa but around the world, whose fate it is to deal with the predicament. the preoccupation with exile recurs in my work and those of others because art provides us with a handle on the fact and memory of dislocation and unbelonging; a safe space to dream and contemplate, even mourn. as noted earlier, exile is poignant because it is bracketed by loss—of territory, of the familiar and the familial, of certainty—but most frighteningly, by the grave probability of the loss of memory. exile is also an in-between place where nothing is firm. in exile no project is possible except as either reflection or proposition, as prolegomena, at once underlined by the sensitive and fragile memory of loss and beset by the anxieties and uncertainties of dreaming in a place without guarantees. this is why exile may only be lived down fruitfully in that embattled yet mobile and secure territory called the republic of the imagination. in exile every act is an act of faith, and only projects of the imagination may exist in the present tense. art, and faith, therefore, are the only possibilities open to the exile because they transcend the strictures of the existential. like little safe havens, art and faith provide a space from whence dream and determination may battle the myriad traumas of survival away from home. through art the exile is able to escape the burden of circumstance, even the temptation of bitterness and recrimination, and thus question, explore, ruminate, and attempt to repossess fragments of that which is lost. the creative imagination allows the artist to repossess and re-inhabit home while away, and live its anguishes and truths, like nuruddin farah has done through his novels and dumile feni and ibrahim el salahi did through their drawings, like pablo picasso through ‘guernica’. through art the exile may portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 16 oguibe exile and the creative imagination return, in a manner of speaking, by reconstituting the past, participating in the present, as well as envisioning a new world. in dealing with exile, art and poetry have served me as spaces in which to reminisce, contemplate, fantasize, and ultimately transcend the exile’s habit of pain. reference list achebe, c. 1958, things fall apart, william heinemann, london. armah, a. k. 1974 [1970], fragments, william heinemann, london. eliot, t. s., 1969, ‘journey of the magi,’ in the complete poems and plays of t.s. eliot, faber and faber, london and boston, 103-4. fukuyama, f. 1992, the end of history and the last man, free press, new york. bhabha, h. (ed.) 1990, nation and narration, routledge, london and new york. bhabha, h. 1994, the location of culture, routledge, london and new york. d’souza, d. 1993, illiberal education: the politics of race and sex on campus, vintage, new york. d’souza, d. 1995, the end of racism, free press, new york. negroponte, n. 1996, being digital, vintage, new york. oguibe, o. 1990, a song from exile, bumerang-verlag norbert aas, bayreuth. oguibe, o. 1992, ‘for you, homeland,’ in a gathering fear, 2nd ed. kraft books, ibadan. oguibe, o 1996, ‘imaginary homes, imagined loyalties: a brief reflection on the uncertainty of geographies’ in interzones: a work in progresseds. o. zaya and a. michelsen, tabapress, copenhagen. okigbo, c. 1971, labyrinths, william heinemann, london. whitman, w. 1950, ‘a song for occupations,’ in leaves of grass and selected prose, modern library, new york. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 17 exile and the creative imagination olu oguibe, university of connecticut manchester, connecticut, june 2004 reference list shame and the transplanted cuban: “la cubana arrepentida” portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ nostalgia, shame and the transplanted cuban: ‘la cubana arrepentida’ olga lorenzo use of literature in illuminating shame literature can illuminate and extend our understanding of the affect of shame. in this paper, i will use extracts from my fictional works, published and in progress, and other fictional work and poetry by cuban and cuban-american writers to illustrate some aspects of shaming in relation to the experience of being a cuban-american migrant in the united states, particularly relative to the sense of exilic nostalgia for the lost homeland. i will also look at how shame is used by the minority culture to control, erode or slow the process of assimilation and to try to maintain the illusion of the superiority of the minority culture. humanist psychoanalyst carl goldberg specifies that the word ‘shame’ designates ‘internalised and unrecognised shame as well as feeling ridiculous, humiliated, chagrined, mortified, shy, reticent, painfully self-conscious, inferior and inadequate’, and differentiates between being shamed and being ashamed, the latter denoting incidents where the person himself is the main source of critical assault on self-esteem (1991, xvii). paradoxically, it is because shame revolves around the self that it can be inspired by acts not committed by the self but by a social group with which the self is connected. in the current reconciliation debate in australia, the philosopher raymond gaita has written that ‘…though guilt may be plausibly limited to what one has done, shame cannot be. people can feel ashamed of their parents, their friends, their church and their country, even though they played no role in what they feel ashamed of’ (1997). likewise, goldberg states that ‘unlike shame, one does not feel guilty for events and actions (even those involving oneself) which were not in one’s control or choosing’ (1991, 56). this is lorenzo the transplanted cuban an excellent and crucial distinction, and, if thought through carefully, goes a long way towards clearing up some of the confusion between shame and guilt. shame attaches to the self, and so it is possible to feel ashamed of other things that also attach to the self: one’s friends, country, family, school, race, etc. guilt, on the other hand, is more circumscribed and demarcated – it has to do with an action. if one didn’t do it, one generally won’t feel guilty about it. some linguistic limitations in the shame-guilt tango (tangle) in the realm of language and culture, one has to say that shame, the word available in the english language, is inadequate to its manifold descriptive tasks. spanish offers vergüenza and deshonra, both of which work as nouns and verbs, as well as the noun pudor, which conveys a sense of modesty closely affiliated with the english-language sense of bodily shame. spanish also allows for distinguishing between shame related to personal acknowledgement of regret or wrongdoing, as opposed to just sympathy for another’s disappointment, so that ‘what a shame your day isn’t going well,’ becomes es una pena que … or qué lástima que… (the word shame therefore doesn’t have to enter into it). shame theorists have pointed out that other languages have several terms for what english attempts to embrace with the one word. greek has aischyne, aeikes, entrope, elencheie, and aidos, while german has scham and schande and french offers honte and pudeur (schneider 1977, 18, 145). while we defend against shame personally, we are quick to try to inflict it on others. part of this is linguistic expediency. it can be said that a certain person, act or belief is shameful, but not that it, he or she is guiltful. perhaps through arbitrary custom, we never say ‘guilt on you’. interestingly, although guilt is rarely (and only incorrectly) used as a verb, it is twice used in this was by ricardo ortíz in his exploration of guilt and nostalgia in a trans-cultural cuban-american context, ‘café, culpa and capital: nostalgic addictions of cuban exile’ (1997). ortíz writes ‘the cuban mother guilts her son’ and later mentions ‘motherly guilt(ing)’ (parenthesis his), referring to a mother’s reaction to perceived abandonment (1997, 64). perhaps these linguistic liberties are facilitated by the many instances where sentiment is either forcefully or less than comfortably translated from spanish to english in cross-cultural investigations. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 2 lorenzo the transplanted cuban if language first constructs and then reflects experience, then the paucity of words that describe different phenomena in english presently lumped together as shame, coupled with the confusion surrounding the meaning of shame, indicates that as a concept it is itself in a state of flux, and that the work of construction is not yet complete – in fact, has only just begun. wurmser, who has done much to further an understanding of shame, hints at this when he writes of the benefits of interpreting human experience through several languages. he writes: ‘not only is it true that “who does not know another language, does not know his own” (goethe), but i strongly feel that to learn a new language means to live in a new form and to see the world in an unaccustomed light (apprendre une langue, c’est vivre de nouveau)’ (1981, xii). the work of constructing meaning via a search for forms of language and texts that enhance our understanding of the emotional state of shame and the effects of shaming is an ongoing project. it is important if we are to clearly and correctly apprehend the effects of shaming on others, particularly children. in turn, as a writer, it is one of my objectives to understand and advocate practices that are constructive, rather than destructive, of the emerging self. in the novel i am now finishing and in my earlier novel the rooms in my mother’s house (1996), i have seen the depiction of the effects of shaming as something desirable and worthwhile. the hyphen in life on the hyphen, gustavo pérez firmat refers to what cuban sociologist rubén rumbaut called the ‘1.5’ generation, the generation born in cuba but which was educated and came of age in the united states. rumbaut argued that members of this generation were marginal to both the old and new worlds and not fully a part of either (1994, 4). pérez firmat, however, is mostly interested in looking at the benefits accrued from this intermediate position. he writes that the one-and-a-halfers, (a category to which i seem to belong, having been born in cuba but raised in miami) have a unique ability to negotiate the new culture by virtue of their intercultural placement. ‘one-and-a-halfers are no more american than they are cuban – and vice versa’ writes pérez firmat (1994, 6). ‘spiritually and psychologically you are neither aquí nor allá, you are neither cuban nor anglo’ (1994, 7). he asserts that while this is not a choice freely made, it does create the conditions for ‘distinctive cultural achievement’ (1994, 7), and he examines the portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 3 lorenzo the transplanted cuban contributions to culture made by ricky ricardo, gloria estefan and oscar hijuelos, among others. in this paper, however, i want to look again at the difficulties inherent in this position, difficulties pérez firmat fleetingly acknowledges when he writes that oneand-a halfers ‘may never feel entirely at ease’ in either the old or new cultures (1994, 5). in a strong critique of pérez firmat, max castro argues that the ‘deliciously seductive’ life on the hyphen ‘manages to systematically underplay, elude or ignore the conflictladen and asymmetric aspects of the relation cuba(n)/america(n)’ (2000, 293). castro makes the point that much of pérez firmat’s argument about cuban-american(ness) rests on the popular assumption, seemingly accepted by pérez firmat, that the ‘cubanamerican comes into existence when he is gazed at by the u.s. public: to be (cubanamerican) is to be perceived (by the american)’ (2000, 294). castro points out the unequal power distribution between the migrant group and the ‘host’ country, an inequality that i believe predisposes the cuban minority to shame and the american majority to arrogance and shaming. although not explicitly exploring shame or shaming, castro refutes that there is a ‘carnal affair’ between the two groups, pointing instead to the many instances of ‘unrequited love’ by the non-cuban americans for their cuban counterparts, as evidenced most dramatically in a 1997 miami herald poll that gave post1980 cuban migrants the most negative rating of any migrant group (2000, 300).1 castro writes: ‘cuban-americans may believe that cuban + american is a viable, even ideal formula, but many non-cuban-americans continue to voice their disagreement in the strongest terms’ (2000, 302). castro traces much of the disparagement of the cuban culture (which i believe is tantamount to shaming) to the economic success and political empowerment of the migrant group ‘in a single generation, a process probably without parallel in american history’ and describes how this process amounts to ‘a major transgression against unstated … anglo assumptions about immigrant and latino subordination’ (2000, 303). castro traces several reasons for anglo resentment of cuban-americans: their economic success and how that success has resulted in cuban control over miami’s government and destiny, which in turn has led to anglo backlash and black anger, reinforcing ethnic lines of division (2000, 303). the resultant ‘disparaging view of the latino other’ (castro 1 the poll in question is written up in ‘immigrants from cuba facing image problems, poll shows,’ miami herald, june 16, 1997. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 4 lorenzo the transplanted cuban 2000, 304), i argue, manifests in many small and large instances of shaming and attempts to shame. pamela maria smorkaloff, in cuban writers on and off the island, conceptualises and problematises the literary contribution of the hyphenated, cuban-american writer. she writes extensively about the urge to idealise the past on the island through nostalgia, something explored in many novels about cuban exile, including my the rooms in my mother’s house (1996), cristina garcía’s dreaming in cuban (1992), and oscar hijuelos’s empress of the splendid season (1999). in the rooms in my mother’s house, i write that consuelo first re-encounters her lost true love, daniel, …at the miami dade auditorium where the first of the annual nostalgic extravaganzas – añorada cuba – was being staged. that was where she saw him, in the foyer where she nervously waited for pedro to buy the tickets. she was nervous because they should not have been there. they scarcely had enough money for two meals; they needed clothes and furniture and a million other things and she knew it was simply insane. yet the program, our beloved and much-missed cuba, seemed to promise some relief from an even deeper hunger. so she waited desperately, hopefully, and the children felt her anxieties, as always, so that carlos darted about her legs in a little white shirt too small for him, and ana, in a lacy dress with many flounces that was also too small and which consuelo had hand sewn in cuba in another lifetime, stood staring about her and biting her nails to the quick. consuelo wore her one good dress, a green and yellow sheath like the upholstery on a sofa, too warm for a florida winter. her gaze was severe and unhappy. she was calling to carlos to come stand at her side when she raised her eyes and saw him, stared in disbelief, and then faltered, leant against a pillar, lowered her eyes and waited for pedro. añorada cuba indeed. (1996, 272). i am writing about nostalgia as it is defined in the macquarie dictionary (1995) as ‘a longing and a desire for home, family and friends, or the past’. interestingly, webster’s defines nostalgia as something more lethal: ‘homesickness; esp., a severe and sometimes fatal form of melancholia, due to homesickness’ (1998). while there are no fatalities due to nostalgia in my writing, there is a greatly impaired sense of self. the night after seeing daniel at añorada cuba, consuelo has a particularly troubled and sleepless night, where she seems to fall away from time, so disconcerted is she by her situation: she has stumbled through an unknown door. she is somewhere else, not where she thought she was, but in the past. she is in cuba, in a marble-tiled house in el vedado… there is the window… she stands like this for many seconds, for minutes, for a very long time, for years that spin backward, for the erasing of years. she does not think about anything at all. she allows herself to rest in the past. the night streams past her, dreamlessly. (1996, 273-74) here, as in hijuelos’ the mambo kings play songs of love (1989), nostalgia for the lost portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 5 lorenzo the transplanted cuban homeland is coupled with lost love, serving to accent and intensify the sense of life mislived, opportunities missed and the wrong road taken. all of these factors erode the migrant’s self esteem and compound a sense of inferiority and ‘wrongness’, leading to a diffuse but debilitating shame in goldberg’s sense of the word as designating, among other things, feelings of being ‘ridiculous, humiliated, chagrined, mortified, shy, reticent, painfully self-conscious, inferior and inadequate’ (1991, xvii). the need to mythologise the lost homeland and the lost love, to elevate these to unrealistic and glorified spheres, is part of a reaction to the shame of feeling chagrined and inadequate (i.e. shameful) in the new land. although not referring to shame but to the related concept of guilt, ortíz makes the point that cuba and culpa (culpability or guilt) have been juxtaposed by both the cuban writer guillermo cabrera infante (1994, 4)2 and the cuban singer albita. ortíz writes: ‘that one’s cubanness should become the marker of one’s guilt, the incontrovertible sign of one’s culpability, results precisely from the necessity of bearing that mark, of confessing to one’s cubanity, outside cuba’ (1997, 70). ortíz describes ‘the nostalgizing practices in cuban-exile literature and culture’ arguing that ‘in and out of exile’, cubans are caught in a chronic addiction to ‘fantasies of return, reunification and restitution…’ (1997, 70). in drama of nostalgia, the self, under attack in a situation for which it was not prepared, lacking in knowledge of language and cultural mores, and further facing prejudice from the ‘host’ people, looks to a lost self, wholly idealising it. as well, the self idealises the country and the loves left behind as a reaction against the prevalent, amorphous and debilitating shame of the new existence. the mythologising of the lost homeland can be seen simply as nostalgia, but nostalgia is never just a hankering for the old; it is mixed and cannot be separated from feelings in and for the present. this is again illustrated in the following passage from the rooms in my mother’s house (1996), where consuelo is dragging her sick children through the miami streets and comparing those streets unfavourably to havana’s boulevards: (earlier the narrator comments that ‘miami, unlike havana, was not considerate towards pedestrians’ [1996, 265]): consuelo thought of the life she had lost. she thought of her stylish dresses and leather pumps and the pearls that had adorned her neck. she thought that she should be strolling along el malecon at this time of the day, with ana in an expensive stroller and pedro holding carlos’s hand, pausing to 2 ‘cuba is, of course, mea maxima culpa… guilt is not a feeling foreign to exile’ (cabrera infante 1994, 4). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 6 lorenzo the transplanted cuban greet friends, to buy un helado de mamey, to watch the sun set on their city. she should be ignoring the admiring glances of men, safe in her world, the world she had worked so hard to etch out (1996, 261). another way that the past on the island is idealised by the miami refugees is illustrated by daniel, who, also affected by seeing consuelo in the distance, begins to participate in counter-revolutionary activities: daniel, for his part, began to find himself once again in the company of the plotters and schemers and the desesperados – the hotheads who longed to splatter their blood in the dirt of la patria. in his mind, in his torment, daniel’s desire to regain his past with consuelo merged with a passion to regain cuba. in this he was not alone. the cuban refugees found life in miami a caricature of what they felt life should be. their pining for home was so intense, so purely an expression of life lost, that it infected everything they did. when consuelo and pedro took the children to miami beach for the first time, all they could talk about was the beaches of varadero. their superlatives were so exaggerated, their nostalgia so acute, that always afterwards ana maria would imagine a place where caster sugar ran to greet the sea. (1996, 276) the desperation of these ‘plotters and schemers’ is more than just political fervour. it is also a desperate need to feel macho again, that sense of – to put it in its vulgar but culturally recognisable form – having the biggest cojones [testicles], which is a thread in the cultural legacy of the cuban male. that is not to devalue patriotism or to be overly cynical about the cultural associations that lead to a fervour to fight for a lost homeland. i am rather suggesting that a sense of inadequacy, even of shame, about being a migrant in a new land can be one of the many factors compelling the migrant to look back towards home. pamela smorkaloff explores this prevalent theme of nostalgia in cuban-american and other latino writing. she notes that when the dominican-american julia alvárez was ‘asked why her novel how the garcia girls lost their accents moves backwards in time, alvarez responds succinctly: “because this is how memory functions.” this inverse movement, she adds, “is peculiar to those who abandon their country. you run a risk: that of falling into the constant nostalgia of idealising the past. like constructing a garden of eden in the territory of memory. in my case that would be to imagine an idyllic childhood on that island when in truth there was an abominable dictatorship, with disappeared and terror”’ (smorkaloff 1999, 8). while this is patently true, it does not answer the question of why the migrant has such a strong need to deny the past. what does such a denial offer the self, caught in the exigencies of a new land? i would argue that the landscapes of the past are idealised through nostalgia as a means of shoring up a portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 7 lorenzo the transplanted cuban floundering self, a self besieged by the demands of the new land. narcissism leads to a defence of the shamed self so that the past reality – even as brutal a reality as an abominable dictatorship – is made over. the lost land is idealised in the mirror reflection of the lost self. the lost land was honey and roses, and the old self dwelt in this paradise of perfection as the first man and woman did in eden, before the shame of the fall. smorkaloff writes that the ‘hyphen of her writer’s existence’ is described by alvarez as ‘a space of conflict, rather than complacency or nostalgia. the hyphen sparked her writer’s imagination precisely because it is “the place where two worlds collide”’ (1999, 8). an existentialist feeling that life in exile has forced the exile into an untenable compromise, and that the self-chosen exile has failed in his duty to fight for the liberation of ‘la patria’, the place where life – where everything – was infinitely better than it is in the united states – is part of the encoded and unacknowledged shame of ‘consejo al niño cubano’ [see appendix], a poem i will look at in detail below. in ‘consejo’, the narrator urges the second generation to sacrifice everything for the liberation of the homeland, to take up arms, to acknowledge the bitterness of exile – all things that the previous, unhyphenated generation has for the most part failed to do, despite having had a much bigger investment in this stance by virtue of the greater material and psychic loss, of the relatively greater unfamiliarity with american customs and the english language, and of the close familial ties ruptured by the move. yet it is precisely the shame of this failure that lends the emotional stridency to ‘consejo.’ as well as the feelings of shame, mostly buried and hidden from the self, which emerge from the sense of paradise lost when speaking of the cuban exile experience, there was the need to cope with another shame: that of being a member of a despised minority, threatening the homogenous anglo culture supposedly previously enjoyed by ‘native’ (read anglos – the indigenous people of florida like those of other colonised lands were marginalised to the point of being all but invisible) miamians before the waves of the cuban onslaught. prejudice against one as an ethnic minority is in some ways easier to defend against than the inner, more private shame of not having fought for ‘la patria’ [the fatherland]. the shame of being a member of a despised minority is also a theme in the rooms in my mother’s house: the caldwells who lived at the corner and who all had round sheared heads and were slow at school called out cuban spics! whenever any of the santiagos passed by. pedro would have liked to get out portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 8 lorenzo the transplanted cuban of his car and slap their faces for them and kick them in their culos until they rolled on the ground but he didn’t dare and he couldn’t speak to their parents either because he was ashamed of his english. (1996, 312) at school the teachers were middle-aged and matronly and worried about what the cubans and the blacks were doing to their town. they were scared of the blacks and couldn’t believe their impudence but the cubans were sometimes worse, with their rude chatter that you couldn’t understand in your own country and their loud clothes and louder radios. they were not pleased to see carlos and ana in their classrooms, even such well-behaved and bright children as carlos and ana did nothing to please them. if anything, the fact that the two did not conform to their prejudices was even harder to handle, was quite disconcerting. when the boys scuffled in line and reached over to torment carlos it was carlos who was sent outside to run laps… the teacher forgot to end the punishment, and carlos’s migraine lasted for days. (1996, 313) ana, like her father, is ashamed of her english: whenever ana’s turn came to read aloud to the class, there was always some word like yellow which ana would mispronounce as jello. it never failed to send the class into fits. (1996, 313) for a long time ana does not understand that the hostility directed against her and her family is nothing more than discrimination because of her ethnicity. it was not until much later that she understood neither she, nor any of her family, were any longer welcome at the school or in the neighbourhood or even in the old house on 25th street. (1996, 31314) andrea, the protagonist in my latest novel (working title all of a piece), experiences many forms of shame, all exacerbated by the losses of migration. the origins of shame in the family can be traced from the protagonist’s mother’s background and her grandmother’s sexual promiscuity and from the protagonist’s father’s childhood experiences of abandonment, and the concurrent shame that this engenders. the mother’s sexual repression, a by-product of shaming, contributes to her problems with breastfeeding, and the family uses shame as a device to control and diminish others. among other topics surrounding shame are the transgression of boundaries, shame in relation to wildness, the natural or animal nature, the unwanted infant, bodily functions, cleanliness, the inside/outside dichotomy, horror over homo-erotic contact, abjection, the passing down of shame from one generation to another, abandonment, group normativity, shame and sexual fantasies, avoidance, and dealing with shame by seeking to shame others. it seems like an awful lot when i list it that way, but as pattison (2000) writes, shame-bound families have a multitude of ways to shame others, and most of them happen around us without our scarcely realising. many novels deal primarily with shame; some of the more obvious ones are steinbeck’s east of eden, toni morrison’s the bluest eye and margaret atwood’s cat’s eye. obviously, the main character in the novel, andrea, has a problematical sense of self, dependent on external validation from significant others, or portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 9 lorenzo the transplanted cuban what i and others (bowen 1978; schnarch 1991; schnarch 1997) have called a reflected or mirrored self. andrea has interiorised her parents’ shaming, but the novel charts the first step towards self-healing—the beginning of her journey towards greater selfawareness, understanding and a more ‘whole’ self. shaming used to discourage assimilation (‘la cubana arrepentida’) i don’t remember exactly how i came across the poem by the cuban journalist and poet ernesto montaner, who went into exile in miami after the cuban revolution. i have a dim memory of my father handing me his daily newspaper, el diario de las américas, and me being so struck by these verses that they formed the forward to the scrapbook of my life that i made during the long summer days at the end of the sixth grade. montaner’s plea to the cuban child to not change his broad cuban accent, to never prefer ‘yes’ to ‘sí,’ and to bear in mind that the homeland awaits him, is the sort of literature that paul allatson and jo mccormack (2004) describe as written for the sake of the exiled generation much more than for their offspring. it is the older generation’s fond, wistful hope that the future generation maintain these mythologies, but couched in the exhortation itself is the acknowledgement that this probably won’t be the case. these values – of irrevocable patriotism, of duty to the homeland, of nostalgia for the past – are daily being eroded and already disappearing, and as such the poem is indulgently sentimental rather than able to express a ‘real’ sentiment. the poem exhorts the second generation child to resist assimilation by essentially rejecting the host american state, variously described as a warm coat generously offered (reducing the most powerful nation on earth to the status of a garment), a friend, a sister nation, a lent or borrowed country, a place where it is preferable to shed one’s blood than put down roots, and finally, the best place to live (‘pueblo mejor no existe’) but still insufficient to keep a cuban from his own homeland. the host nation is variously disparaged, compared unfavourably, found lacking, or else its supposed superior virtues are acknowledged and simultaneously dismissed as of no consequence. in all of this, the poem recalls the most shameful thing a cuban could say to another cuban in my school days – to call him or her cubana(o) arrepentida(o). the word arrepentida, according to my collins spanish-english dictionary, suggests something slightly different from ashamed; rather it denotes ‘regretful, repentant, sorry.’ but it was used daily to shame portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 10 lorenzo the transplanted cuban anyone who was perceived as in any way critical or less than proud of their cuban background. to speak negatively of any aspect of cuban culture, to laugh at the doings of santeros or the dead chickens and other sacrificed animals clogging the okeechobee and miami rivers because of santería (the blend of religions that combines the worship of traditional african yoruban deities with the worship of roman catholic saints), or to sneer at the sometimes giant statues of saints set out in shrines in the front yards of hialeah, to hang out with the anglos or wear levis rather than high-waisted polyester pants and gold jewellery, was to invite a cold appraisal and the scathing judgement of ‘cubana arrepentida’. at the time i gave little thought to what i was accused of repenting, but now it occurs to me that to be repentant suggests that a crime was committed in the first place – the crime, it would seem, of having been born cuban, a sentiment also featured in a popular song refrain by albita rodríguez, ‘¿qué culpa tengo yo de haber nacido en cuba?’ – what fault is it of mine that i was born cuban? (1995). but i daresay that as far as the coinage of the phrase, the use of ‘repentant’ is tongue-incheek, part of the black humour of cubans, meant to be taken ironically rather than to denote any real sense of shame over being born cuban. still, the compulsion to shame and disparage the cuban who might seem to be moving towards assimilation is integral to the putdown of ‘cubana arrepentida,’ and part of what is being dealt out in montaner’s poem. the child is reminded that a cuban without a flag is unworthy of martí – the cuban statesman and poet who led the struggle for independence from the spanish, often from exile in america. the child is also exhorted to be worthy of maceo, another leader of the independence. he or she is instructed to say that ‘así es el cubano’ – this is how cubans are and there is therefore no other option than to take up arms and fight the tyrant; to do anything less would be to lose one’s ‘cubanness’, to have it summarily stripped from one like a soldier’s insignia after a court martial. as a child i experienced a burst of patriotism when encountering this poem, an emotion heightened by the rare experience of feeling that i belonged to something important and even precious – which i certainly didn’t experience in relation to the anglo community, from which i felt excluded and rejected more often than not. in my excitement, i did not stop to wonder if the ‘niño cubano’ being addressed was not the masculine-feminine amalgam of all children, but actually the male child who is also ‘niño.’ i could not have portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 11 lorenzo the transplanted cuban then seen that, among so much else ‘wrong’ with these lines, is also an implicit machismo (or rather masculinismo, without the overt bragging): an over-valuing of the masculine at the expense of the feminine; what is needed is fighters and soldiers, and when this was penned and published sometime in the early seventies, that was a guntoting male. so much is at stake for the cuban child here: he must not ever accept ‘otras formas de regreso’ – other ways back to the island. ‘las glorias de un pueblo preso han de ser reconquistadas’ – the country is imprisoned, so its glories must be reconquered. nothing less is acceptable. to live in a borrowed homeland is to live in agony – the mambises, the army of cuban national insurrection against spain – taught cubans to fight this way (here montaner is also alluding to the line in the cuban national anthem: ‘to live in chains is to live immersed in opprobrium’). montaner’s words, roughly translated as ‘to the yankee who would pretend to make a yankee of you’ have particularly disparaging overtones, referring to the pretence, the naïve hope, of the yank. as well, of course, the word yankee is never used with entirely serious or flattering intent. the child is further told, in second person narration, that he must prefer to die with a gun in hand… because that is better than to stop being cuban, a sentiment that leaves very little alternatives or room to manoeuvre. the exhortations continue, cascading rhythmically: tell him affectionately that this is how a child feels who belongs to that ‘patria mambisa’. in fact, one should be in a hurry to give one’s blood in torrents. the cuban child is told that he cannot know how to live without a star on his forehead, a reference to the lone star of the cuban flag. in the last four stanzas the sentiment escalates a fraction closer to sheer hysteria as the verses reach for the exalted: the cuban landscape is so beautiful that the sky changes its suit in order to better reflect himself in her. her star comes from the arcane mysteries that god himself tore with his hands for her patrimony and is the greatest pride of cuba and cubans. and then, in the penultimate stanza, being cuban is likened to being christ – if you were born in this (north american) soil, say that christ was born in bethlehem but continued to belong to heaven. such are the heights for which the cuban child must strive – either a christ-like glory or a fall from grace so complete that he should no longer even consider himself cuban. there is nothing in between the two extremes of exaltation/death for the motherland and apathy/shame/ceasing to be cuban. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 12 lorenzo the transplanted cuban language, acculturation and shame interestingly as far as the theme of shame, pérez firmat traces a song played in miami as late as 1974 that made a connection between bilingualism and homosexuality. the song’s protagonist is abelardo, or ‘abe’ for short (pájaro or ave is cuban slang for homosexual), who avers with a lisp: no ha sido la culpa mía i can’t be blamed haber nacido varón for being born male pero de que yo sea bilingüe but that i am bilingual de eso no hay discusión. there is no doubt. (pérez firmat 1994, 106). here heterosexuality is equated with speaking one language, and the obverse is implicated in culpability. as pérez firmat points out, ‘by using bilingualism as a metaphor for homosexuality, the song identifies acculturation with effeminacy. notice that the target of derision is not someone who has forgotten spanish but someone who has also learned english’ (1994, 107). pérez firmat adds that speaking english, by implication, makes abe a renegade cuban, a ‘cubano arrepentido’ (1994, 107). the disclaimer of culpability is a repetition of the theme in the albita song mentioned above that proclaims, ‘what fault is it of mine that i was born cuban?’ these protestations point to either bypassed, unacknowledged shame, or to a defence against shaming by others, or possibly both. pérez firmat writes: ‘miami spanish includes a term that, so far as i know, is unique to the city of sun and solecisms: nilingüe. just as bilingüe is someone who speaks two languages… a nilingüe is someone who doesn’t speak either: ni español, ni inglés’ (1994, 46). he gives as an example the actor ricky ricardo, whose spanish deteriorated as he aged. his occasional on-screen spanish was corrupted with anglicisms: ‘falta’ for culpa, ‘introducir’ for presentar. but his english didn’t improve with time either. in exploring the use of word nilingüe in miami’s streets and the claim that some cuban americans have no language, pérez firmat falls into the incorrect assumption that two languages, spoken poorly, is tantamount to having no language. what is interesting nevertheless is the phenomenon of the erosion of the language of origin while the speaker struggles to acquire proficiency in the new tongue. clearly what pérez firmat is witnessing in the street when the word nilingüe is heard is a sense of shame transmitted through portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 13 lorenzo the transplanted cuban exaggerating the loss of language. i knew someone in the unfortunate position of losing spanish without fully acquiring english when i was an undergraduate at washington university in st louis, missouri. a worker in the dormitory mailroom, rosa had been born in cuba but immigrated to the states when she was 16. if she had gone to miami, her spanish might have remained intact, but in st louis rosa had little opportunity to practice it. on the other hand, at 16 it was much harder to acquire a new language than it might have been had she been a young child. rosa was left in that shameful no man’s land, without great fluency in either tongue. it was a striking loss. my father, despite his 40 years in miami, never acquired english. this failure made me acutely uncomfortable in my youth, and still astonishes me. what i felt in his presence when he commanded me to translate for him, (olga maría, dile…) was nothing short of shame. shameful fictions there are many ways a minority culture can try to defend itself against the onslaught of the majority. some of these involve attempts at censorship of free artistic expression, particularly of the written word, but also of critical art such as cartoons and caricatures that may lampoon or satirise cultural icons. this is especially the case when a culture does not have a long tradition of encouraging free expression of emotions. a road well travelled (doran et al. 1988) is a collection of interviews with cuban-american women. one of the things the researchers report was the difficulty they had getting older cuban women to express their feelings. one woman said, ‘in cuba, you don’t ask yourself all kinds of questions like, who am i? what do i want with my life, and why? here (in the united states) it is natural to have a psychoanalyst, or a clergyman, or somebody you can trust, and you know, go and empty your garbage’ (doran et al. 1988, vi). it is significant that she describes expressing feelings as emptying garbage – feelings are obviously something associated with the shameful, contaminated and abject. smorkaloff writes that edmundo desnoes, in his 1981 anthology los dispositivos en la flor: cuba, literatura desde la revolución, declared in his prologue: ‘no es prólogo para cubanos (this is not a prologue for cubans)’ (1999, ix). this, smorkaloff tells us, breaks ‘with the old notion that a collection of cuban narratives published in the united states portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 14 lorenzo the transplanted cuban would, whether welcomed or denounced, necessarily circulate primarily among cubanamericans’ (1999, ix). in fact, for a long time anything vaguely critical of cubans written by cubans was soundly denounced and ‘cubano arrepentido’ was again trotted out. but it is true that cuban-americans no longer write just for other cuban-americans; the novels of cristina garcia have been widely translated and even with my own the rooms in my mother’s house (1996), my main source of royalties is currently greece. still, when i tried to find a publisher or agent in the united states, the reply i heard most often was that while the book was very good, they could not see how to market a cuban-american who lived in australia: a cuban-american-australian had no place in the scheme of things. i am thus a double hypen, or even a cubana-americana-australiana arrepentida. smorkaloff refers to those cuban-americans who depart miami for paris or new york ‘to continue the dream of “otherness”’ (1999, 23). i have long thought that paris, where zoe valdés has lived, spain (as the mother country), or at a stretch london where guillermo cabrera infante resided, were the only possibilities if one wanted to get published as a cuban exile outside miami. cuba looked towards europe as the new world looked to the old, but melbourne has no co-ordinates on this cultural map, does not even exist except as the place where one falls off the edge of the world. my parents have confided to me their shame that their daughter would choose to live ‘so far away.’ despite elements of the community that might work against free expression, there are also strong traditions of unfettered creative expression in cuban literature and these have been manifest in the work of cuban-americans and other cuban expatriates. zoe valdés’s te di la vida entera (published in australia as i gave you all i had, 1996) pushes the boundaries of conventional literature in terms of form, style, voice, point of view, and, most of all, in the way gritty hyper-realism slides into magic realism and surrealism seemingly at a whim. it captures the cuban vernacular, with its colourful word play, witticisms and vulgarities as well as colonial corruptions and miss-sayings. juxtaposing floridly formal language with the absurdly vulgar and a black, camp, humour, it has the earthiness of the grunge novel but is anchored in social satire. the story revolves around cuca, a country girl abandoned by her parents and raised by her godmother, whose son attempts to rape her. the godmother arrives just in time and opens his back with a nail at the end of a board. but she doesn’t save cuca’s brother, simply referred to always as the ‘asthmatic religious fanatic.’ the godmother’s son rapes portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 15 lorenzo the transplanted cuban him in a scene of blood and excrement witnessed by cuca, who is dismayed by the look of pleasure in her brother’s face. there are, as well, instances of almost pornographic perversity. cuca goes to havana. she hears a romantic song on the radio; her vagina is immediately moist – she is having a ‘spiritual reaction’. she meets the undeserving object of her life-long passion and the hole, as yet unexplored, of her vagina does not stop beating since the moment when his halitosis-ridden mouth explores hers. his stench is caused by onions, dental caries and throat plaque. henceforth the damsel recognises her love by his mouth odor. there is very little poetry in this novel; at one point i noted ‘voz de brisa de cañaveral’ – a character’s voice is likened to the breeze through cane fields, a relief from the relentless, if colourful, vulgarities. when the revolution renders cuca’s life the most bitterly ridiculous, valdés abandons any claim to realism. the cynicism is rife; one line struck me in particular: ‘we cubans are like that – given the choice between going to see a relative at a funeral or a show at the tropicana, 99 percent of us choose the second’ (1996, 82). the insouciance in this contrasts sharply with montaner’s feverish exhortations ‘dile que cuba es así, dile que así es el cubano…’ another version of ‘we cubans are like that.’ valdes’s endless farce is practically shameless, a revelling in triviality and decadence, particularly during the batista years of the novel leading up the revolution. even after the revolution there is more of the same – the narrator cuca refers to ‘this shit story of this shit-eating country.’ point of view slips in and out of first and third person narrative, even sometimes twines around in the space of a single page. eventually a plethora of narrators emerge – not only different characters but also the unseen narrator’s conscience and another unknown narrator’s voice and in the final pages, the author herself, confronting the reader from a park in madrid where she is playing with her daughter (the only point where the book abandons its satirical, sarcastic edge). in the end, the novel finds its moral centre in a scathing indictment of the castro regime, but it never ceases to be shameless in its embrace of the scatological and even the pornographic. it projects a sense of the author herself as posturing shamelessly – a child who manifests as agitated, brazen and somewhat out-of-control. it is literature at its most provocative, and it offers no peace of mind. valdés has a literary precedent in reinaldo arenas. his before night falls (1993) is, among other things, a scandalous experience. arenas was ostracised and marginalised in portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 16 lorenzo the transplanted cuban castro’s cuba for his homosexuality and fought to express himself as a writer, paying a high price in cuba’s prisons. one of the things that comes across most poignantly in this autobiographical work is his fight to just have a room of his own, anywhere, a place to write, to enjoy sex, and just to be. despite the difficulties, arenas continued to write subversive, satirical and one could even say shameless literature. much of what passes for personal anecdote in his autobiography is scarcely believable and reads much like valdés’s satire. for instance, writing about growing up in the country, on the pages where he is six and has just started school, arenas writes: ‘my sexual activity was all with animals. first there were the hens, then the goats and the sows, and after i had grown up some more, the mares. to fuck a mare was generally a collective operation. all of us boys would get up on a rock to be at the right height for the animal, and we would savor that pleasure: it was a warm hole and, to us, without end’ (1993, 10-11). there is, then, a sense of claiming the right to write the unspeakable throughout much of arenas’s work. it is as if, having lived outside the norms of so-called respectable society because of his homosexuality, he is free to move beyond other boundaries of ‘propriety’. in this sense there is a shamelessness in his work that corresponds to an embracing of the abject in kristeva’s (1982) sense of ‘internalised pollution’, which sees defilement and dirt as moving from the external into the internal sphere, thus becoming incorporated within the notion of the self, an idea that has very close ties with the sense of shame as accruing to the self in opposition to guilt which is more associated with an act (lewis 1971; pattison 2000). arenas’s writing evokes ceremonies of defilement that not only breach boundaries but also describe and reinscribe a regression to an anarchic level. another cuban-american writer, achy obejas, explores shame extensively in her memory mambo (1996). among the sources of shame are the different expectations between the parents who consider themselves unwilling exiles and their children, the oneand-a-halfers, and the shame of not sufficiently knowing the cuban homeland. in this case the family is in chicago, part of a small cuban enclave, but the cultural tensions are very similar to what one would find in miami. one of obejas’s short stories, reproduced in cubana (1998, 179), takes its name from the following observations by the nameless narrator: ‘we left cuba so you could dress like this? my father will ask over my mother’s shoulder … and for the first and only time in portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 17 lorenzo the transplanted cuban my life, i’ll say, look, you didn’t come for me, you came for you; you came because all your rich clients were leaving, and you were going to wind up a cashier in your father’s hardware store’ (1998, 187). here one finds an example of shaming and countershaming. the parents attempt to shame through the suggestion that sacrifice was made in leaving the island, sacrifices that have not paid off as the child has failed to grasp the opportunity to properly prosper, to take advantages of the capitalist possibilities offered by north america and to dress appropriately. the child responds with counter shaming: no sacrifice was made for me; you left for your own selfish self-interests. it is said for the ‘first and only time’ as such impudence, in my experience, is not readily tolerated in cuban-american households. smorkaloff argues that memory mambo ‘explodes false memory, nostalgia and the mythology of exile,’ achieving a ‘definite break with narratives of nostalgia and evocation’ (1999, 32). what is sought instead is a series of individual truths, faced fearlessly, in order to do away with the ‘lies that separate, divide, and ultimately conquer the characters’ (1999, 39). in this sense we have a clearing away of hidden shame, because shame does not exist where there is openness and acceptance and tolerance. false memory, in the form of nostalgia that has no place in reality, and that attempts to privilege the past and deride, devalue or arouse shame about the present, is explored, exploded and rejected. however paul allatson problematises smorkaloff’s analysis of identity in memory mambo. in his discussion of the many dislocated versions of self caught in gender, cultural and political cross-currents in memory mambo, allatson writes that: the unstable figurations of the lesbian in this family-centric environment must always be related back to the complicated web of transcultural processes encoded in the hyphenated conjunction of cuban and american. so far, those implications have been only hinted at; and they are introduced now in cognisance of the hyphen’s inadequacy, its implication of separating, yet uniting, assumed equivalences of power and meaning. in any guise, the lesbian in memory mambo is like the novel’s other diasporic subjects, whatever the scripts of gender or sexuality allocated them in the narrative. her body, like theirs, is never beyond, never unaffected by, the rival culturally and linguistically contingent bodily economies that meet in juani’s families and communities. (2002, 172) allatson questions smorkaloff’s claim that ‘juani’s is a journey into historical truth’ (1997/98, 6), asserting that ‘whether conceived as monolithic and graspable, or as plural, irresolvably complicated, and resonant beyond cuban-u.s. antagonisms, historical truth is one of the novel’s casualties’ (2002, 163). allatson goes on to demonstrate how the portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 18 lorenzo the transplanted cuban novel is replete with characters who cannot be ‘unequivocally located in one or another kinship group’ (2002, 165), who resist categorising by problematic gender classifications and/or national and cultural affiliations, and who above all, to varying degrees, embody an ‘identificatory slipperiness’ (2002, 166). allatson in particular examines these problematical identities as written through the lesbian narrator’s (juani’s) struggles with the character of jimmy. for my purposes of exploring how shame is implicated in problematical identity issues, jimmy’s reaction to juani’s open lesbianism, one of affront, confusion and aggression, works as a shaming mechanism which complicates his own precarious albeit machismo gender identity. very early in memory mambo the ambivalent nature of the narrator’s relationship with cuba is alluded to in language that is scatological and thus touches on the abjectshameful. ‘i just sit at the kitchen table, playing with the edge of the plastic placemat, which says cuba and has a map of the island, a picture of the flag, and a bouquet of palm trees. on the placemat cuba looks like a giant brown turd’ (1996, 15). similarly, as smorkaloff observes, in hijuelos’s our house in the last world (1993), cuba is depicted as a source of contagion, with the word microbio appearing repeatedly, ‘suggesting that cuba is also an illness, physical and mental’ (1999, 46). in both cases, a sense of being cuban as a shameful condition is being suggested. another comment, this about jimmy, the shameless ‘macho’ in the novel, also points to a sense of cuban identity as shameful: ‘there is something disgustingly cuban about him’ (obejas 1996, 60). shame over racial background has been carried out of cuba by the narrator’s mother in obejas’s memory mambo: ‘but what really kills them is when patricia tells them that, if indeed we’re descendants of las casas, chances are we’re the spawns of an illegitimate child conceived with some indian woman he probably raped. my mother practically faints over this – not because it so tampers with the historical image of our supposed ancestor but because it would mean that, in spite of our mother’s best efforts, we’re not so white after all’ (1996, 34). this mother left after the revolution, her daughter claims, not because of castro’s communism but because he inverted the racial order that had oppressed her but that she had endorsed, just as the slave legitimises its master because of introjected shame: ‘when the revolution triumphed in 1959, nothing stunned my mother more than the fact that that crazy raul and his black friends were riding on tanks with fidel through the city… in that instant, my mother – who’d been struggling to pass her portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 19 lorenzo the transplanted cuban entire life – could see that the order of things had just been altered’ (1996, 35). similarly, when a puerto rican musician is asked to play at her daughter’s wedding, the mother is scandalised: ‘now every picture is going to have a negro in it,’ she said, rolling her eyes, as if mario were actually black instead of mulatto, or the only black person invited – and as if any of that mattered to anybody but her’ (1996, 69). the narrator is also sharply aware of the different cultural values and cross-currents that hold her in an uncomfortable place. her cousin pauli’s father is a drunkard, but this fact allows differing reactions in the two cultures: ‘in american terms, pauli refused to enable her father. in cuban terms, she was an ingrate’ (1996, 63). by american standards, she has a responsibility to not be a co-dependent, thus to ‘enable’ his alcoholism entails a shameful dereliction of her responsibilities to her self and to her father. such an attitude however is inconceivable in cuban terms: her moral responsibility here is nonjudgemental filial loyalty. the two cultures could not be further apart, and the judgemental, shame-laden word ‘ingrate’ is the bullet in the cross-fire. pauli is enough of a rebel to add shame to this shame-ridden extended family. ‘these were minor skirmishes – charges of loitering, disturbing the peace, nothing serious like drugs or assault – but the family as a whole felt great worry and shame’ (1996, 66). but one of the largest sources of stress and shame for the family is the narrator’s lesbianism: my father’s worst fear, i think, is that i’ll say something to him about it. because he can think of nothing worse than having to look me in the eye and make a decision about whether to accept or reject me, my father creates an illusion of normalcy about the emptiness of our interactions… because he’s afraid i won’t lie, it’s vital to him that i not be provoked into the truth. in my family, this is always the most important thing. (1996, 80) smorkaloff observes that in obejas’s story ‘we came all the way from cuba so you could dress like this?’: the young narrator and her parents have… radically different responses to the existential question of who they are, where they came from and where they are going … the father’s immobility, his spiritual and historical stasis, causes him to paralyze temporarily the daughter, literally knocking her down with kicks and blows, since he cannot otherwise prevent her from growing away from him and into the world around her. (1999, 5) this scenario is well known to me and is one i wrote about in the rooms: the father faces the new world with shame about his own inadequacies. unable or unwilling to meet its demands, he humiliates his offspring through physical and verbal abuse, in an effort to portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 20 lorenzo the transplanted cuban also keep them down, in order to avoid facing the shame of their superior ability to move out into the world. respect is thus a constant motif in much of the writing about the cross-over generations. smorkaloff writes about pablo armando fernández’s novel los niños se despiden (1968) and quotes: ‘what had to be loved and respected, to say it in family terms, was geography. we had a very poor concept of history; we were ahistorical. the important thing was being cuban, feeling cuban, and that could only be determined by our geography, its climate and nature. we were cuban because we had been born here and not somewhere else…’ (cited in smorkaloff 1999, 193). i find this very poignant, and mystifyingly so. there is an emotional anti-intellectualism about it that seems to capture something of my own experience of being cuban-american: an appeal to a base fact (you were born in cuba) that privileges it over all other possible knowledge including knowledge of historical verities. respect is demanded and must be unquestioning: this is what it means to be cuban. but the new generation, the hyphenated writers, are finding ways to both understand the exigencies of their father’s and mother’s lives, with compassion as well as clear sightedness. they are moving beyond the demands for respect and nostalgia towards an appreciation of history, reality, and truth. in these slippery slopes, they are finding places to write. the poignancy in much of this inter-generational writing formed in exile lies in precisely the to-ing and fro-ing – one can never fully detach from the parent generation and their failure and supposed, assumed, shame, nor shake off the irrational shame placed on the one-and-a-halfers for failing to do what our parents also didn’t do. yet we remain bound together, passing shame back and forth. because, like it or not, as ray gaita observed (1997), we are also shamed by the actions of others who are close to us; this is a part of the human condition. none of us can fully stand outside wrong-doing or even wrongful thinking, we are always somehow complicit, whenever and wherever we touch it. no wonder we avoid shame more than we do guilt, that even freud avoided it; no wonder the self goes to so much trouble to armour against it. it is elastic, sticky, evasive, endlessly rebounding, pervasive, and ultimately, if sufficiently chronic and pernicious, soul(self)destroying. it seems the only way to deal with it is to look it squarely in the eye, expose it to the light of day, and force it to shrivel in the glare of, for example, literary acceptance. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 21 lorenzo the transplanted cuban appendix 1 consejo al niño cubano advice to a cuban child por ernesto montaner by ernesto montaner (my translation) ven acá, niño cubano come here, cuban child que estás hablando en inglés: now speaking in english nunca prefieras el ‘yes’ never choose ‘yes’ over al ‘sí’ de tu castellano. the ‘si’ of your castillian spanish. no cambies tu acento llano don’t change your broad accent que te viene del mambí, which comes to you from the mambi y nunca arranques de tí and never uproot from within you a esa patria que te espera, that homeland that awaits you que un cubano sin bandera for a cuban without a flag es indigno de martí. is unworthy of marti. a esta nación generosa to this generous nation que te ha brindado su abrigo, who has offered you a jacket dale tu mano de amigo give it a friendly handshake con gratitud respetuosa. with respectful gratitude. mas, al verla tan grandiosa and, when seeing her grandeur, no turbes tu mente sana, don’t trouble your healthy mind dile a la nación hermana tell the sister nation que se grabe en la memoria to engrave in her memory que no cambias ni la gloria that you won’t even exchange heaven por tu bandera cubana. for your cuban flag. hazle saber que arde en tí make her know that burns in you el fervoroso deseo the fervent desire de ser digno de maceo to be worthy of maceo y ser digno de martí. and be worthy of marti. dile que cuba es así. say that cuba is like that. dile que así es el cubano say that a cuban is like that y que no juras en vano that you don’t swear in vain si juras que has de volver if you swear that you will return para morir o vencer to die or vanquish con el fusil en la mano. with a gun in your hand. que no aceptas, tramitadas, that you will not accept otras formas de regreso: other forms of return las glorias de un pueblo preso the glories of an imprisoned people han de ser reconquistadas. demand to be reconquered. dile que en patrias prestadas say that in borrowed motherlands vivir, es agonizar to live is to agonise y que tu sangre has de dar and that your blood you must give si hay que sembrar las raíces. rather than put down roots dile que así los mambises say that this is how the mambises3 te enseñaron a pelear. taught you how to fight. 3 the revolutionary army that fought for independence from the spanish. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 22 lorenzo the transplanted cuban al yanqui que pretendiera to the yank who would pretend hacer un yanqui de tí to make a yank of you dile que cerca de aquí tell him that near here hay una patria que espera. there is a homeland that waits. que no cambias tu bandera that you won’t change your flag y que irás contra el tirano and that you’ll go against the tyrant con el fusil en la mano with a rifle in hand a morir si esa es tu suerte, to die if that is your fortune porque prefieres la muerte because you would prefer to die a dejar de ser cubano. rather than cease being cuban. dale tu mejor sonrisa, give him your best smile pero dile con cariño but say with fondness cuál es el sentir de un niño what is the feeling of a child de aquella patria mambisa. of that mambisa country. ve y dile que tienes prisa go tell him that you are in a hurry por dar tu sangre en torrente to give your blood in torrents por la cuba independiente, for an independent cuba, y que prefieres morir and that you would prefer to die porque no sabes vivir because you don’t know how to live sin una estrella en la frente. without a star on your forehead. dile que cuba es tan bella say that cuba is so beautiful y es tan bello su paisaje and so beautiful her landscape que el cielo cambia de traje that the sky changes its suit para reflejarse en ella. to reflect himself in her. dile que tiene una estrella tell him that she has a star de los misterios arcanos from the arcane mysteries que arrancó dios con sus manos that god tore off with his hands para patrimonio tuyo for patrimony with you y que es el mejor orgullo and it is the pride de cuba y de los cubanos. of cuba and of the cubans si naciste en este suelo if you were born in this land dile por cuba también say for cuba as well que cristo nació en belén that christ was born in bethlehem y siguió siendo del cielo. but still belonged to heaven. dile – y dilo sin recelo – tell him – and say it without rancour que a este pueblo lo amarás that you will love this country ¡ay! tanto como el que más, as much as he loves it most que pueblo mejor no existe, that a better country doesn’t exist pero cubano naciste but you were born cuban y cubano morirás. and cuban you will die. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 23 lorenzo the transplanted cuban reference list allatson, p. 2002, latino dreams: transcultural traffic and the u.s. national imaginary, portada hispánica series, no. 14, amsterdam and new york, rodopi. allatson, p. and mccormack, j. 2004, ‘exile: typologies of displacement and displaced activism.’ position paper presented at the institute for international studies annual research symposium, exile and social change, university of technology, sydney, nsw, july. alvarez, j. 1991, how the garcía girls lost their accents, algonquin, chapel hill, nc. arenas, r. 1993, before night falls: a memoir, viking penguin, new york. bowen, m. 1978, family therapy in clinical practice, jason aronson, new york. bybee, j., ed. 1998, guilt and children, academic press, san diego ca. cabrera infante, g. 1994, ‘shipwreck with a sunrise in the background,' in mea cuba, trans. k. hall, farrar, strauss, giroux, new york castro, m. j. 2000, ‘the trouble with collusion: paradoxes of the cuban-american way, in cuba, the elusive nation, eds. d. j. fernández and m. c. betancourt, university press of florida,gainesville, florida. dalziell, r. 1999, shameful autobiographies: shame in contemporary australian autobiographies and culture, melbourne university press, melbourne. desnoes, e., ed. 1981, los dispositivos en la flor: cuba, literatura desde la revolución, ediciones del norte, hanover. doran, t. et al. 1988, a road well travelled: three generations of cuban american women, latin american educational centre, fort wayne, indiana. fernández, d. j. and betancourt, m. c., eds. 2000, cuba, the elusive nation. university press of florida,gainesville, florida. fernández, p. a. 1971, los niños se despiden, centro editor, buenos aires. gaita, r. 1997, ‘not right,’ quadrant 41: 46-51. garcia, c. 1992, dreaming in cuban, knopf, new york. goldberg, c. 1991, understanding shame, jason aronson inc, northvale, new jersey. hijuelos, o. 1990, the mambo kings play songs of love, perennial library, new york. ———1993, our house in the last world, persea books, new york. ———1999, empress of the splendid season, harpercollins, new york. ‘immigrants from cuba facing image problems, poll shows', miami herald 16 june 1997. kaufman, g. 1989, the psychology of shame: theory and treatment of shame-based syndromes, springer publishing company, new york. kristeva, j. 1982, powers of horror: an essay on abjection, trans. l. s. roudiez,, columbia university press, new york. lewis, h. b. 1971, shame and guilt in neurosis, international university press, new york. lichtenberg, j. d. 1999, ‘george eliot and dilemmas of the female child', in scenes of shame: psychoanalysis, shame, and writing, eds j. adamson and h. clark, state university of new york press, new york, 101-110. lorenzo, o. 1996, the rooms in my mother's house, penguin, ringwood, victoria. macquarie dictionary, 1995, second edition, the macquarie library, sydney. mcfarland, b. and baker-baumann, t. 1990, shame and body image, health communications, florida. miller, s. 1985, the shame experience, the analytic press, hillsdale, nj. ———1989, ‘shame as an impetus to the creation of conscience', international journal of psychoanalysis 70: 231-43. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 24 lorenzo the transplanted cuban nathanson, d. l. 1992, shame and pride: affect, sex and the birth of the self, w.w. norton & company, new york. obejas, a. 1996, memory mambo, cleis press, pittsburgh. ———1998, ‘we came all the way from cuba so you could dress like this?’ in cubana: contemporary fiction by cuban women, ed. m. yáñez, beacon press, boston. ortíz, r. l. 1997, ‘café, culpa and capital: nostalgic addictions of cuban exile', the yale journal of criticism 10.1, 63 -84. parker, d. and dalziell, r. et al., eds 1996, shame and the modern self, australian scholarly publishing, kew, victoria. pattison, s. 2000, shame: theory, therapy, theology, cambridge university press, cambridge uk. pérez firmat, g. 1994, life on the hyphen: the cuban-american way, university of texas press, austin. rodríguez, a. 1995, ‘qué culpa tengo yo.’ no se parece a nada (cd), sony music. schnarch, d. 1991, constructing the sexual crucible. new york, w. w. norton. ———1997, passionate marriage: love, sex, and intimacy in emotionally committed relationships, w.w. norton, new york. schneider, c. 1987, shame, exposure, and privacy. new york, w.w. norton. smorkaloff, p. m. 1999, cuban writers on and off the island, twayne publishers, new york. smorkaloff, p. m. 1997/98, ‘canon and diaspora: a literary dialogue’, proyecto cuba: http: www.soc.qc.edu/procuba/escritores.html. tangney, j. 1998, ‘how does guilt differ from shame?’ in guilt and children, ed. j. bybee, academic press, san diego, ca, 1 14. valdés, z. 1996, te di la vida entera (reader's copy given to o.lorenzo by text publishing for reader's report), text: published as i gave you all i had. webster's revised unabridged dictionary. 1996, micra, inc. wurmser, l. 1981, the mask of shame, john hopkins university press, baltimore. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 25 exilesleadpaper portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ en/countering the new language of exile in uche nduka’s the bremen poems obododimma oha, university of ibadan introduction the city of bremen in germany inscribed itself as a city of art, a city in close dialogue with art, and of course, a city to be celebrated by artists, when it became a member of a network referred to as ‘cities of refuge’ in the country.1. being recognized as a ‘city of refuge’ means reinventing and signifying the self as desirable, and, in fact, promoting what in politeness theory has been identified as ‘fellowship face,’ which refers to the want to be seen as a desirable member of community, or the desire to be included (lim and bowers, 1991). as a ‘city of refuge,’ bremen speaks the language of hospitality, of civilized welcome. obviously, this project of re-identification is particularly strategic especially at a time when it has become urgent to re-imagine ‘home’ and ‘exile.’ in a conversation with cecile sandten, a nigerian poet, ogaga ifowodo, whose political activism put him at odds with the military government in his country, comments that: in a world that is increasingly intolerant and where a noose is fashioned for the word, where the writer is either hanged, or imprisoned or driven into exile i think the concept of ‘cities of refuge’ is a brilliant one, and that we should in fact be ashamed that it took so long for it to come into some form of practical demonstration. bremen should congratulate herself for being one of the first cities to accept this concept. (sandten 1999, 19) a city that provides refuge to writers – especially those from contexts of wrath – would inevitably be an interesting subject of their writings. in their portraitures of the city, one is likely going to encounter interesting semiotic and stylistic practices, especially those that reveal their psychological, social and cultural adjustments to the exilic city space. a ‘city of refuge’ presupposes a contrast with another space where a person was previously located; it also presupposes the existence of respite. in an interesting way 1 the establishment of ‘cities of refuge’ for writers who are being persecuted in their home countries, which was first suggested by salman rushdie, took effect from the campaign of the international parliament of writers in 1997 (olaniyan 2003). oha en/countering the new language of exile too, the writing of encounter with the space of the city of refuge becomes an important autobiographical act, especially if one joins kenneth mostern (1999, 11) in conceptualizing autobiography as ‘that process which articulates the determined subject so as to actively produce a newly positive identity.’ this process of articulation and production of identity is essentially rhetorical because it must create the pattern of the subjectivity of the new self to the new space. a nigerian poet, uche nduka, who went into self-exile in germany, also took refuge in bremen. one of his collections of poems entitled the bremen poems (1995) is an attempt at articulating and representing his bremen experience. indeed, it is an attempt at taking poetic snapshots of experiences – even ‘mental’ experiences – of this city of refuge. his writing of bremen represents another interesting attempt by an african writer to ‘write’ europe and his presence in europe, indeed a literary third-worlding of europe2, which amounts to what rudiger kunow (2002, 177) would refer to as ‘globalization from below.’ such writing of a european context of one’s mind is worthy of attention because it could show us images of europe constructed by the writer, and how such images relate to existing stereotypes, for instance the stereotype of germany as a racialized and racist context. one would want to know what language the context of exile speaks in these ‘bremen’ poems (and by language we mean generally the stylistic articulation and expression of experience).3 it is even more interesting, because this ‘racist’ context now ironically offers refuge to an african writer who does not feel safe in his african homeland, or that tries to promote african art and writing, while the african ‘home’ rather fashions a ‘noose’ for such a writer. an african writing of europe in this case (in which a european righting of africa is implicit) therefore raises salient issues about the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘exile.’ what or where is ‘home,’ especially for a writer seeking refuge? when does ‘exile’ become a ‘home’? how stable is the concept 2 this perspective is based on the view by gyan prakash that ‘the first world’ is in ‘the process of being third worlded’ (quoted in kunow 2002, 176). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 2 3 a german/english edition of the bremen poems was published by yeti press, bremen, in 1999, a bilingualization that tends to suggest the in-betweenness of the text and, indeed, of the poet in exile. although the german translation, bremer gedichte, done by maren hancke (a first-time translator) is, as the poet has disclosed to me in an e-mail, unsatisfactory, it suggests an attempt by the poet to ‘speak’ with the voice of the exile-home, to cross a linguistic border, in other words, an attempt at identifying with the ‘new’ home. given what one may call the an anxiety of re/identification of the self, a writer would be particularly concerned about the translation of his or her text, or even quarrel with the translator for mistranslating, not minding the argument that it is impossible to have a perfect translation. alice kaplan has observed that: ‘writers want to control language – it’s their job! – and they’re only too ready to believe that their talent for words extends across all linguistic boundaries’ (2003). oha en/countering the new language of exile of ‘home’? and, turning specifically to uche nduka’s poetry, how is the ‘exile home’ imagined? how are the visual, verbal, and other languages of the exile space en/countered in the rhetoric of the bremen poems? the term language used in the paper refers generally to the stylistic articulation and expression of experience. en/countering playfully conveys the experiencing and interrogation of the language that the poet-persona perceives the context of exile to be speaking to him. ‘in this city of falling leaves’: sketching a portrait of desire in a recent essay entitled, ‘exile: threshold of loss and identity,’ wole soyinka confronts the questions ‘when is exile?’ and ‘where is exile?’ by explaining that exile is both a state of mind and a physical space (2000, 62). living in exile, for a writer, requires encountering ‘the new language of the frontiers of exile, its joys and anguish, its challenges’ (2000, 63-64). indeed, as soyinka argues in the same essay, ‘the condition of exile is the daily knowledge, indeed the palpable experiencing of such frontiers’ (64). in nduka’s the bremen poems, the physical european context of exile is experienced and articulated in many interesting, sometimes conflicting, ways. but we obviously find a process, a journey that goes on in these poems towards grasping a consolatory and affectionate image of the city of bremen, to probably compensate for the loss that exile, as a removal from ‘home,’ entails. it is indeed a search for what can make ‘exile’ a ‘home.’ experiencing the city is, first of all, a visual act. nduka’s visualization of the city of exile – which may require a mental reconciliation of images of his past or context of origin (home) and images of the present world -is thus an important aspect of his ‘writing’ of the exile context, which also influences his search, his journey. i have, therefore, foregrounded this visual dimension of his writings and his quest through the sub-title i have given to this section of the essay, a sub-title that is derived from the following poem (‘in this city of falling leaves’) in the collection: in this city of falling leaves and misty skylines portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 3 oha en/countering the new language of exile tramhoppers, smoking roofs, high on hope and promises, i serenade your face. (6) the city is first of all an image, or rather an aggregate of images, which would become part of the ‘language’ learnt and spoken by the poet that it has given refuge. in the poem cited above, the poet does not just observe the cityscape, but uses it as a background to express his quest. as in actual painting, the background is also part of the meaning being conveyed, mainly because it located the major subject being represented and helps to shape the viewer’s/reader’s comprehension and response to it. the lover, whom he exophorically refers to,4 acquires significance in the context of a european environment that wears its typical look – ‘falling leaves’ and ‘misty skylines’ (climatic change), tram-hopping, and ‘smoking roofs’ (obviously not a reference to danger). in this romantic contentment, the tribute is paid to the imaginary lover, but as we will see later in our discussion, this city reappears as the lover that is found irresistible. in ‘arrival,’ bremen is configured as an ‘open name screamed/ at the world...’: the plane has bruised the tarmac. the peppered weather has tripped the tourist. and the witness is the open name screamed at the world: bremen! (11) why an ‘open name’? hospitality? refuge? and what is a ‘closed name’? it looks as is the manner of articulation of the name ‘bremen’ (the open-ness of the mouth/lips) is playfully appropriated to represent what the city means to the visitor? obviously, the open-ness of the lips/mouth in the screaming or articulation of the name has no logical relationship with what the city is, or the character of the city. it is even very difficulty to read a modern city, even figuratively (oha 2002). what the poet writes is his feelings portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 4 4 exophora are linguistic items that refer outside the text, i.e. to the extra-textual situation. as opposed to endophora, which refer to or signal relations within the text, exophora are textually non-cohesive as noted by halliday and hassan, and do create obscurity within a text. poets therefore use them sometimes in making meaning more elusive in their poems. pronouns in english that are typically exophoric, as katie wales has pointed out, are the first and second person types. oha en/countering the new language of exile about the city (of refuge), and what the sound of the name seems to convey. such a fallacy of association (and about the open-ness of the name) is already suggestive of the poet’s quest to understand the city, to give the city a meaning. giving meanings to a european context in which they have relocated appears to be a common practice and engagement on the part of non-european migrants in europe. it is part of the process of experiencing and articulating europe, of knowing europe, even though, given the diversity of the continent, such knowledge would still be inadequate and subject to interrogation. bill bryson, in his profoundly humorous book entitled neither here nor there: travels in europe, writes: one of the small marvels of my first trip to europe was the discovery that the world could be so full of variety, that there were so many different ways of doing essentially identical things, like eating and drinking and buying cinema tickets. it fascinated me that europeans could at once be so alike – that they could so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotels rooms and cosy and inviting places to eat and drink – and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from each other as well. i loved the idea that you could never be sure of anything in europe. (1998, 40) the attempt at articulating the european context is indeed a process of re/invention, of fiction-making, in seeking to create a complement or supplement for the version of the host. the physically-visualized european world seems to merely provide the signifiers, the tropes, for the constructed meaning of itself. the meaning that is sought is never complete, never stable; it is often displaced and replaced. ‘open name’ also appears to reveal attitude: it is open and cannot be immediately decided. an ‘open name’ would be tolerant of alternative meanings, not only inhabited by native meanings, but capable of being altered, of being vocalized and coloured by the new-comer’s strange accent – what amounts to a pollution and does stimulate resistance or prejudice from the host who claims to have and know the sound and sense of the city. the city as an ‘open name’ would tolerate heterogeneity or multiculturalism, which is probably more of a hope than a reality. a ‘closed name’ is already pre-determined, and tolerates no alternatives, no heterogeneity in membership and identity. indeed, many migrants and exiled people would want a europe that includes them, not only a europe that provides accommodation or refuge. refuge or accommodation may be temporary and does portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 5 oha en/countering the new language of exile suggest difference that, to an exile poet, would postpone the quest for ‘home,’ but it also questions the host’s idea of otherness, and the presence of self in the order of the other. the impossibility of being included, of being in the order of the other, would make such a poet to retreat further into a mental exile where those desires (for a ‘home’) are fictionally satisfied. some writers would seek this desire in making a mental journey nostalgically to the ‘roots,’ as we have in the case of femi oyebode in master of the leopard hunt (1995). just as soyinka says, exile may hanker for a sympathetic environment, one that traits an umbilical cord to abandon roots, as if a handful of earth has been sneaked into the baggage and delivered ahead of the wanderer at destination. mentally, the newcomer does the papal rites – kneels down and kisses the ground. there indeed, a close duplicate of habitation is recognized and adopted – while the self is schooled in a few minor adaptations. or else – schooled to exist in a kind of paradox, a state of tension where the mind simultaneously embraces an anchor in alien territory yet ensures that it stays at one remove from the alien milieu. (2000, 63) but in the bremen poems we do not have this nostalgia for african roots, surprisingly. rather we have a romantic desire to be with the city of refuge (as a lover), a desire that would eventually meet with disillusionment. in ‘bremen trailed,’ the city is configured as a lady-lover, and the relationship is intensely imagined as being inextricable (which is understandable, since such love affair is part of the seeking of refuge from hate or threat to one’s life in the african homeland): like a snail bremen trailed, slowly, through my skin, my friend, my flourishing friend my raw camera. how could i abandon her? how could i refuse her hand in my hand? (29) love protects; hate destroys. it is quite ironical that the outside (exile space) has taken over images normally associated with, or evoked by, home space. ‘her hand in (the poet’s) hand’ tells of love that is co-operative, love that is being poetically celebrated.5 indeed, the poetry is partly the writing of bremen as the artist’s lover, and it is interesting to think of europe that loves not just the african artist but also african art. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 6 5 ‘her hand in my hand’ could also refer to influence, i.e. the unavoidable influence of the city on the poet’s writing. in this case, an ambiguity results in the (figurative) uses of ‘hand’ in the poem. the city’s ‘hand’ is the hand of influence, while the poet’s ‘hand’ is the poetic (artistic) response, which seems to support our view about the city writing itself through the poet for whom it provides refuge. oha en/countering the new language of exile it must indeed be acknowledged that european countries (especially germany) and european institutions have been in the vanguard of the promotion of african studies generally, giving scholarships and fellowships to african scholars, and promoting their careers. the interest sometimes is surprising, especially when we find that africans do not seem to be similarly committed to african (cultural) studies the way that europeans or other outsiders are. some african critics may say that such a favour from europe is a ‘greek gift,’ but then it reveals reasons why africa may not be a ‘home’ for an african artist who is never encouraged or promoted in africa. those of us who worry about ‘brain drain’ may, therefore, have to think about what survival means for the one who owns the brain. tejumola olaniyan (2003), in an online article, puts it more appropriately: ‘exile may be anguish and alienation, but home is neither warm nor welcoming.’ one such case of the unfriendliness of the homeland to an african writer is seen in the experience of jack mapanje, a malawian poet, in the hands of the government of hastings banda in his country. as recorded by jules smith in his short biography of mapanje (2005), published electronically by the film and literature department of british council, mapanje’s collection of poems, of chameleons and gods (1981), was banned by the censorship board in malawi and his work was withdrawn from bookshops, libraries, and educational institutions in the country. mapanje was imprisoned without trial by the banda government in 1987, and upon release from prison in 1991, he sought refuge in europe. his the chattering wagtails of mikuyu prison (1993), writes jules smith (2005), ‘reflects deeply upon his own exile and the condition of malawi, with its scurvy children, a ‘queue of skeletal hands,’ and ‘our fat-necked custodians’…. it is a country of roadblocks, gun-point burials, and the relevance of a new verb, to ‘accidentalize’ (political killings represented as accidents).’6 the poet, nduka (an african), cannot abandon bremen (europe) that, unlike the african homeland, appears welcoming, and which has become his ‘raw camera,’ offering him a means of capturing, expressing, and articulating his experiences as an artist. as tim unwin (2001) has appropriately pointed out in an introduction to a recent special issue of the online journal, mots pluriels, which focuses on exile, the experience and context portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 7 6 similar unwelcoming picture of the malawi homeland is painted by mapanje’s compatriot, frank chipasula, who has been living in self-imposed exile in the usa since 1978, in his own collection of poems, whispers in the wings (1991). oha en/countering the new language of exile of exile do often sharpen the creative sensibility and ability of the literary artist. and in nduka’s case, we have a place of exile that already gives him a special regard as an artist, and appears to be determined to promote him professionally. this situation would certainly not be the same for other africans who have migrated illegally to europe, in search of ways of becoming rich. their own writing of europe would probably present pictures of the struggle for survival in which the host is imagined as the villain. many poets often celebrate their attachment to, and affection for, geographical spaces, in amorous terms, imagining the spaces as female. this feminisation of space, which may have other interesting psychoanalytical readings that i am incapable of providing, and which could be seen as a strategy for valuation, enables the poet to express primitive emotions in a powerful way. and for a poet in exile, imagining the space as female becomes particularly a revelation of the desire to possess and be possessed by the exile space. such condition of possession, such at-one-ment, could be seen as the beginning of the process of hybridisation – because it should be a relationship of giveand-take, not necessarily one that implies loss of memory for roots. edouard maunick, a poet from mauritius, may after all be right in believing that ‘hybrid is the colour of exile, hybrid the culture of exile’ (soyinka 2000, 69). going into exile is already a creation of an opportunity to deconstruct the idea of roots, not in the sense of discarding origin entirely, but in transforming the rooted self into a dynamic self that could converse with the other, with another culture, another space. interestingly in nduka’s case, the host cultural space also provides the symbolic means of engaging in this conversation as a ‘raw camera’: the european city provides itself as a means of visualizing and vocalizing its world: i reap your flute where fountains dance and voices make love. (‘i reap your flute’ 32) the city, in a sense, writes itself through the poet-persona as an experiencer. the exile poetry mediates the meaning of the city as a living world of human experience. in ‘bremen’s ears,’ too, still visualizing the city as a loving, richly dressed lady, the poet presents what seems to suggest a sense of entrapment, of helplessness, which reminds one of keats’ lady in ‘la belle dame sans merci’: portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 8 oha en/countering the new language of exile bremen’s ear are not starved of earrings her mouth does not lack the kiss within kisses the tongue opening all the flowers of the flesh. (31) even though the city is feminised and configured as a lady-lover, yet it (she!) has its (her) many puzzles, its many paradoxes, through the capacity of ‘opening all the flowers/of the flesh.’ if the city stimulates emotions, it is also possible that some of such emotions would make the ‘body’ a site for the enactment of power and control. already, how could i abandon her? how could i refuse? her hand in my hand? (in ‘bremen trailed’) reveals a difference of power in the love relationship, paradoxically, for it seems that it is bremen (the lady) who surrenders itself/herself, and it is the poet (the male) who has no choice but to accept the relationship. it can, therefore, not be understood as a relationship based on equality and mutual attraction. this would deconstruct the idea of love based on understanding, as speculated earlier. love, as a correlate of refuge (in the ‘city of refuge’), is the subjectivity of one body to another. ‘how can i refuse?’ and ‘how can i abandon her?’ already suggest this helplessness. furthermore, the boundary between pain and pleasure, between the pain of punishment and the pleasure of the flesh, is so thin, just as the pleasures of the city (as a body) do not obscure the fact that such a space has laws, is being policed: it is therefore not entirely a site of freedom; the ‘city of refuge’ as a lover has ‘kiss(es) within kisses, which may include the kiss(es) of the police baton, of the oath book before the jury, et cetera. the body of the ‘lady-over’ is watched by the law, claimed by the law, such that a kiss may be read as a transgression. bremen, although not quite like some modern cities in industrialized europe for instance paris, which bryson (1998, 52) says has ‘the world’s most pathologically aggressive drivers – drivers who in other circumstances would be given injections of portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 9 oha en/countering the new language of exile thorazine from syringes the size of bicycle pumps and confined to their beds with leather straps – and you give them an open space where they can all try to go in any of thirteen directions at once,’ presents a sharp contrast from say, an african village. it has its own moments of hustle-and-bustle, noises of techno-culture, and sights of utopia that could surprise a visitor. and so in ‘where have i run to?,’ a poem that enlists the strategy of rhetorical questioning, the poet expresses a surprise at what makes the city seem not to be the much-desired fulfillment or the much-desired (utopian) ‘home’: streetcars overthrow the silence of tomatoes. where have i run to? tearing itself street by street bremen closes and opens. this much is the raining city dangling with lights and marbles. who will take the feast there? bremen swings inside a string, hops out of god’s boots. where it goes no one knows. (22) quite interestingly, the poet has shifted in his perception of the city, as clearly marked in the stylistic use of ‘it’ or ‘itself,’ instead of ‘she,’ ‘her’ or ‘herself’ as we have in the poems cited earlier. as the city becomes more and more difficult to read, to understand, it ceases to be fixed in the referential person deictic form of the (human) feminine. it become neuter and inanimate, and ceases to be intimate. realistically, the industrialized european city space would prefer to be impersonal. it would rather prefer to be distant from everybody that is embodied in it. it would prefer to shun familiarity, and may only tolerate familiarity with its members that mind their businesses. it would also make its inevitable demands, even through hosting of other forms of otherness that negotiate space in the pavements: the scene cranks out iron, billboard, tar and the riotous zeal of junkies. their begging hands circle my heart, the limping beggars beside a tramstop. not claim in the pavement of noon, the city is their merciless host too. (‘in the pavement’ 27) merciless host? gradually, affection for the city becomes paradoxical, and we begin to understand other meanings in the poet’s reference to the city as ‘an open name/screamed / at the world....’ its open-ness also means the presence of what contradicts the idea of portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 10 oha en/countering the new language of exile refuge. bremen cannot be a ‘city of refuge’ if it plays a merciless host. whatever affection the poet (or any other person) has imagined and associated with the city has some costs: with a bill of love the city came calling; through railtracks ran redemption’s hand; a new scroll opened where, like butterflies, raindrops wandered through dispersed and dispersing clouds, wandered, wandered where we travelled black, drank white ladies. (‘with a bill of love’ 26) if the city commiserates with the exile, the ‘refugee,’ it seems to be only temporary. analogised as a tree (which seems to regress to the speed of a moving train), the city’s affection/concern wanes. redemption therefore remains remote for the exiled poet. in fact, one could say that with such disillusionment, the poet moves into another kind of exile that is no longer a physical place but a mental space, what soyinka, in the essay we cited earlier, rightly refers to as ‘a condition of internal exile’ or ‘a ghetto of internal exile’ (2000, 64-65). in fact, soyinka’s representation of the identity of esu, the yoruba ‘trickster,’ ‘prankster,’ and iconoclastic god, as a wandering, liminal being in perpetual state of exile, seems to apply to the experience of the poet in the bremen poems. soyinka observes that ....esu is a creature of liminal existence, just like the exiled writer whose residence is the frontier of reality, of the ambiguity of threshold, and one who is mostly content to be there.... an exiled writer is surely a creature of double alienation – one as a consequence of his transformative temperament and secondly of course by his physical displacement. (2000, 68) like esu, the exiled writer would fail to find real admittance even in the ‘city of refuge,’ especially when he is occupied in his own mind with a sense of his difference. the terms ‘travelled black’ and ‘drank white ladies’ seem to have strategic meanings. travelling ‘black’ might mean travelling as a black person, or still possessing black african ways of life, in which case racial identity may attract attitudes of discrimination in a predominantly white society. racial prejudice has often been the main problem portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 11 oha en/countering the new language of exile encountered by black africans in europe, especially in germany, and those who practise racial discrimination or fling racial insults at public places do not care whether their targets imagine the european context as a lover/home or not. in fact, being aware of such imaginations could even exacerbate the prejudice, given that racists try to resist attempts by racial outsiders to want an inclusion or sameness, to violate what appears to be a natural legislation on difference. the african exile in europe cannot escape traveling black, the articulated hospitality of the ‘city of refuge’ notwithstanding. the african writers in the ‘city of refuge’ would always have to step out of the invented space where welcome is concelebrated to travel black through the streets where racial prejudice would peer at them. even within the context of the celebration of such protected writers, the fact of being black and african remains pronounced. writing, in line with this argument in his article entitled, ‘african intellectuals in the belly of the beast: migration, identity and the politics of exile,’ francis n. njubi draws attention to the unfortunate debt one has to pay for being an african in the space of the western other: what exactly does it mean to be an ‘african’ in europe or america? one quickly learns that the answer is not pretty. it is written in the faces of obnoxious waitresses, the teacher who slams the door of opportunity, the policeman who treats you like a criminal. it is reflected in the floods of negative media images that poison people’s minds with racist stereotypes. (2002) traveling black in a white world then means being unable to escape the perceptions of this black identity. it indicates the persistence of the memory of cultural identity, which must be reconciled with the demands of the immediate exile context, or rather the reconciliation of then and now, of there and here, of ‘where you’re from’ and ‘where you’re at,’ which, ien ang (1998) argues, is what ‘the idea of diaspora attempts to be a solution.’ also, travelling ‘black’ and drinking white ladies playfully presents an ambiguity. ‘white ladies’ could be read, on the one hand, as the name of a type of drink, a wine maybe, but it could also playfully refer to real white ladies, who have love affairs with black men. indeed, the crossing of the racial divide through love affair is common among black african immigrants and exiles in europe. some previous writings by africans such as ayi kwei armah’s why are we so blest? (1972) and the healers (1979), and dilibe onyeama’s sex is a nigger’s game (1976), have focused on blackwhite sexual crossings of racial boundary, but with different attitudes. while in armah portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 12 oha en/countering the new language of exile it always ends in fatality for the black african, for onyeama it is an appropriation of stereotypes of the black african’s sexuality in trying to expose european hypocrisy about its own sexuality. drinking ‘white ladies,’ metaphorically, may, therefore, be a means of undermining racism that has no sympathy for either the african immigrant or the african artist seeking refuge in europe. one african colleague, with whom i once discussed the issue of racism, and who studied in austria, observed that racism in europe is ‘white-male.’ according to him, the white european male stands at the border with a whip saying. ‘no entry to blacks!,’ while the white european female is beckoning on the black male to please cross the border by any means and embrace her! this might be a rude joke, a verbal cartoon, but it seems to convey an important idea about gender as a variable in the discourse on racism, which may be a sub-text couched in ‘we travelled black,/drank white ladies.’ interestingly, too, imaginations of love affair with either the white european lady or the european city are not without some intersections with some strategies used by some africans fleeing to europe to make good their stay. for instance, an african immigrant for acquiring a residence visa and/or citizenship. very much an interesting way of drinking white ladies! traveling black and drinking white ladies interestingly suggests the ambivalence of the exilic and diasporic imagination, which operates in the in-betweenness of cultural origin and immediate present of the exilic context. ang (1998) has observed that: ‘the diasporic imagination is steeped in continuous ambivalence. this ambivalence, i would suggest, highlights the fundamental precariousness of diasporic identity-construction, its positive indeterminacy.’ the exilic african writer who travels black and drinks white ladies is an adventurer that demonstrates that transgressive act of the third-worlding of europe. uche nduka has described himself and his poetry as follows: ‘i am an adventurer and poetry is my adventure’ (2000). the adventure of his poetry in terms of style – and his being a cultural traveller entering and working within the racial space of the other – is much an adventure of african writing outside of its cultural setting. the author of four collections of poems, which include flower child (1988),second act (1994), and chiaroscuro (1997), if only the night (2002), and the editor and translator of an anthology of recent nigerian poetry into german (und auf den straßen eine pest: junge nigerianische lyrik, 1996), nduka has demonstrated remarkable energy in his use of portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 13 oha en/countering the new language of exile shifting images and compelling language in his poetry.7 whereas in flower child (1988), which was written and published in nigeria, one could find traces of influences from african (igbo) traditions of poetry and from igbo poets like the late christopher okigbo and pol ndu, in the bremen poems we find a colouration by the experience and context of exile. of course, this is inevitable, for every serious work of art also communicates its context, what more when the collection is clearly devoted to bremen. entering the space of the (cultural) other necessitates a dialogue between texts and between the cultural contexts of those texts. we expect a situation described by the semiotician, yury lotman, as ‘culture within culture’ and ‘text within the text,’ which implies a transformation of style. the writing of bremen as a cultural space necessitates another form of exile from nduka’s context of igbo culture, for he must speak some language of this new context. in a sense, this is part of the process of re/identification, for, as odile ferly reminds us, ‘exile necessarily brings about some cultural adjustment, an adaptation process that leads to a redefinition of identity’ (2001). this adjustment process is part of the ‘adventure,’ in which an attempt is made to create a ‘new’ self, a new voice. the voice that we hear in the bremen poems does not contain those rhetorical features we commonly associate with african poetry – those aspects of orality like proverbs and rhythmic patterns sometimes modelled from or designed to suit performances with the drum, the flute, or even folk speech, as one may find in the poetry of well-known practitioners like niyi osundare, oswald mtshali, and kofi anyidoho. this linguistic or stylistic exile demonstrates another sense of adventure in the exilic writing. it is an adventure into a cultural devoicing and re-voicing of a new self. the memory that is reflected for african literary tradition only occurs in a testimonial reference to the late igbo poet, pol ndu : in a corncrib pol ndu says ironbenders love eating salt. the beaching man needs his aspirins his myths, his voyages, his mirthmaking. have a toke, he says, from a speeding verse. fleece my fears. walk the centre of my sobriety. (‘in a corncrib,’ 32) portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 14 7 for a detailed profile of the poet, visit his homepage at http://www.pluriverse.de/uche. oha en/countering the new language of exile in this case, link with the voice of indigenous african literary tradition is indirect: it is through a quotation of a more faithful poet. t.s. eliot, in his famous essay, ‘tradition and the individual talent,’ writes that ‘no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,’ but that his poetry is made on the achievements of dead poets and within a tradition that is ordered and already complete, but which the poet now transforms in negotiating a place(ment) (1986, 2207). ‘in a corncrib’ partly exposes the poet’s leaning on the nsukka tradition of poetry in which poets like pol ndu, christopher okigbo, kalu uka, kevin echeruo, and many others, were already notable for attempting to tie up indigenous igbo meanings and rhythms with european modernist stylistic practices, especially because of the nature of their formal university education. many of them had studied european writers like gerard manley hopkins, t.s. eliot, and ezra pound, under professors who had tremendous admiration for these modernists and for the so-called ‘great tradition.’ in the case of uche nduka, therefore, we are dealing with a poet nurtured by those who had been accused by african critics like chinweizu, jemie, and madubuike, in their controversial book, toward the decolonization of african literature (1980), of being (already) stylistically and culturally exiled in their writings. but indeed, what obtains in the case of the nsukka tradition of poetry is an attempt at creating something new through a dialogism of the foreign and the indigenous, a postcolonial tendency that appears inevitable, and which has continued in other forms of cultural production like music, painting and fashion. remembering tradition (or art) in ‘in a corncrib’ could as well mean remembering the fact that there is no more a ‘home’ that presents a univocal african culture. indeed, it is this sense of the changing nature and meaning of ‘home’ that may make an exiled african writer not languish in nostalgia about roots, about ‘sympathetic environment... that trails an umbilical cord to abandoned roots,’ as soyinka (2000) calls it. the awareness of the inability to find a ‘home,’ either in africa or in europe, creates a sense of permanent strandedness, permanent exile, as expressed in ‘note to a season’: shall i luxuriously cradle my betrayal and write the ballad portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 15 oha en/countering the new language of exile of my maimed country? i have become a tree thrust between the arms of a lonely sky. (10) a ‘maimed country,’ it seems, is not worth celebrating, not worth romanticising. the same pessimism has been expressed by many nigerian writers, but perhaps with different tones. wole soyinka, for instance, concludes his highly depressing narrative in the open sore of a continent (1996) with a conditional sentence: ‘if the nation is to live, its resuscitation must commence where its heart first stopped beating’ (143), which sounds like a rephrasing of chinua achebe’s wise saying about the need for africans to begin to look for where the rain started beating them. the bremen poems is about europe as much as it is about africa, specifically nigeria, or rather about africa using europe to express its agony of endless search. it is about home and exile, about home in exile and exile at home. this perpetual strandedness is perhaps interestingly reflected in the fact that the poems in the collection are conceived as ‘notes.’ they are short, but precise. a stranded person could still be productive – what more when the poet has some support as a guest at the heinrich boll haus in langenbroich, and has had a stipendium from goethe institut, which brought him to bremen, and also teaches african literature part-time at the university of bremen. but the shortness of the poems seems to speak strategically about time, and about the state of the mind. i have already referred to them as ‘snapshots’ of experience, which are capable of being developed (just as film negatives are) for the images to become clearer. but images being undeveloped, unclear, is a communicative strategy; it tells about the condition of exile, of being physically and mentally unsettled. a short poem, however, speaks more powerfully, semiotically, than a long one, because it surprises us. it abandons us suddenly, so that we are forced to pay more attention to it. it does not bore us, unlike the long poem, but rather disturbs us. moreso, nduka is in love with images; when these images are conveyed in short poems, they are much more striking and effective. most of the recurrent images are those of night, wind, ocean, tide and ‘lonely sky,’ which are archetypal images that evoke fear. in the poem, ‘tragic is the magic,’ for portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 16 oha en/countering the new language of exile instance, the images of fear (blinding season, night and tide) are used in conveying the sense of despair: tragic is this magic this season blinding the eyes of this tune. torment, flamenco hornpiping roots of night calling beyond bremen beyond the pearl of farewell. the staggering line. the lonely tune in the tide. (18, italics added) there is, of course, sufficient rationale for the use of the images of fear, particularly the image of night. exile, filled with uncertainty, may be considered a ‘night.’ the poet searches in its darkness for security and comfort. but, in spite of what the intended meaning of the ‘city of refuge’ may be, the real exile would continue to mean loneliness to the poet. just like ‘the staggering line’ – an impressive syntactic construction of meaning (since the last lines/phrases in italics are indeed staggered, the lonely phrases becoming sentences) – the questing persona staggers in an exilic night, his poetry sounding as a ‘lonely tune in the tide.’ concluding remarks in this essay, i have tried to show that the poet in the bremen poems does not eventually find refuge in the ‘city of refuge’ in europe, even though he tries to construct such as illusion in feminising bremen and in expressing his deep affection for ‘her.’ although one cannot speak of a homogeneous europe, the physical world of the european city, with all its complexities, as presented in the bremen poems, forces the poet into an inner exile. exile also means a stylistic exile in his poetry, not only because we are provided with dense and rapidly shifting images, but also some diminished link with african rhetorical traditions. physical exile in europe has greatly shaped the poetic style in the bremen poems, especially as the poet tries to articulate his experiences and to arrive at some meaning of exile. as this writing of exile is semiotically tied to europe (and with europe), it not only narrates the european space (from the perspective of the refugee) in an interesting way, but also reveals a ‘travel’ beyond the physical exile space itself. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 17 oha en/countering the new language of exile reference list ang, i. 1998, ‘migrations of chineseness: ethnicity in the postmodern world.’ mots pluriels, no. 7, http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/motspluriels/mp798ia.html armah, a. k. 1972, why are we so blest?, william heinemann, london. armah, a. k. 19798, the healers, william heinemann, london. bryson, b. 1998, neither here nor there: travels in europe, black swan, london. chinweizu, o. j. and i. madubuike. 1980,toward the decolonization of african literature, fourth dimension, enugu. chipasula, f. 1991, whispers in the wings, william heinemann, london. eliot, t.s. 1986, ‘tradition and the individual talent.’ the norton anthology of english literature, vol.2 (5th edition), w.w. norton, new york, 2206-213. ferly, o. 2001, ‘giving birth to the island’: the construction of the carribean in julia alvarez’s fiction.’ mots pluriels, 17, http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/motspluriels/mp1701of.html. halliday, m.a.k. and r. hasan. 1976, cohesion in english, longman, london. kaplan, a. 2003, ‘translation: the biography of an artform.’ mots pluriels, 23, special issue on ‘translated lives: autobiography between language and cultures,’ http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/motspluriels/mp2303ak.html. kunow, r. 2002, ‘at the borderline: placing and displacing communities in postcolonial narratives.’ in postmodernism and the fin de siecle. american studies monograph series, volume 81. eds. gerhard hoffmann and alfred hornung, universitatsverlag/ c. winter, heidelberg, 175 – 202. lim, t., and j. w. bowers. 1991, ‘facework: solidarity, approbation, and tact,’ human communication reasearch, vol. 17, no. 3, 415-50. lotman, y. 1994, ‘the text within the text.’ pmla 109.3, 377-84. mcfarlan, d.m. 2003, dictionary of the bible, geddes & grosset, new larnark. mapanje, j. 1981, of chameleons and gods, heinemann educational, london. ———1993, the chattering wagtails of mikuyu prison, heinemann educational, london. mostern, k. 1999, autobiography and black identity politics: racialization in twentieth-century america, cambridge university press, cambridge. nduka, u. 1988, flower child, concord press of nigeria, ibadan. ———1994, second act, no details. ———1995, the bremen poems, newleaf, bremen. ———(nd tr.) 1996, und auf den straßen eine pest: junge nigerianische lyrik, horlemann verlag, bad honnef. ———1997, chiaroscuro, yeti press, bremen. ———1999, bremer gedichte, tr. m. hancke, yeti press, bremen. ———2000. ‘ich will nicht still sein,’ die tageszeitung 13.7: http://www.taz.de/pt/2000/07/13/a0227.nf/text ——— 2002, if only the night, sojourner press, amsterdam. njubi, f. n. 2002, ‘african intellectuals in the belly of the beast: migration, identity and the politics of exile.’ mots pluriels, no. 20, http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/motspluriels/mp2002fnn.html oha, o. 2002, ‘signs, cities, and designs of capacities: the semiotics of road monuments in some nigerian cities,’ the african anthropologist, 7.1, 33-47. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 18 http://www.taz.de/pt/2000/07/13/a0227.nf/text oha en/countering the new language of exile olaniyan, t. 2003, ‘african writers, exile, and the politics of global diaspora,’ west africa review, http://www.westafricareview.com/war/ onyeama, d. 1976, sex is a nigger’s game, satellite books, london. oyebode, f. 1995, master of the leopard hunt, ijala press, moseley, birmingham. sandten, c. 1999, ‘a political animal’: an interview with ogaga ifowodo.’ acolit 44, mai 1999, 18-21. smith, j. 2005, ‘jack mapanje.’ cw, www.contemporarywriters.com, film and literature department, british council. accessed 5.2.2005. soyinka, w. 1996, the open sore of a continent: a personal narrative of the nigerian crisis, oxford university press, new york. ———, ‘exile: thresholds of loss and identity.’ anglophonia/caliban 7, 61-70. unwin, t. 2001, ‘writing exile: separation and continuity.’ editorial, mots pluriels 17, http://www/arts/uwa.edu.au/motspluriels/mp1701edito.html. wales, k. 1990, a dictionary of stylistics, longman, harlow, essex. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 19 http://www.contemporarywriters.com/ en/countering the new language of exile in uche nduka’s the bremen poems obododimma oha, university of ibadan introduction and the witness how could i refuse does not lack the tongue this is the html version of the file http://www portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ introduction: rethinking utopia in the wake of postmodernism alistair fox, university of otago, dunedin in 1998, the introduction to a special issue on the utopian thought of fredric jameson in the journal utopian studies began with a quotation from paradise, a recently published novel by toni morrison: how exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin the human imagination became trying to achieve it…how can they hold it together, he wondered, this hard-won heaven defined only by the absence of the unsaved, the unworthy and the strange? (moylan 1998, 306) the different elements in the quotation from toni morrison have proved to be particularly pertinent in the opening years of the twenty-first century. it is clear that the human wish for permanent happiness persists, especially on the part of those who—like the members of diasporic transnations, or of ethnic minorities, or marginalized subcultures—feel excluded from the affluence sought by globalized capitalism, or oppressed by the conditions that are required to achieve it. at the same time, postmodernism and its consequences have, as jameson formulated it, deepened ‘our constitutional inability to imagine utopia itself’, or at least our despair that it can ever be attained (jameson 1982, 153). the essays in this special issue of portal examine ways in which the contemporary utopian impulse is expressing itself, both in the search for utopia, and through the exposure of false utopias. many of them focus on the question of identity. where can identity be located in a world experiencing the effects of postcolonialism, postfeminism, postmodernism, transnationalism, multiculturalism, the globalization of culture, and economic globalization? how does a given subject take up a cultural identity within a given locale or context? how is it possible to sustain a local position fox introduction in the face of hybridity and global culture? how do the complex intersections between indigenous, local, national, diasporic, and international cultures contribute to the production and circulation of ‘national’ identity? where can authenticity be located? is it a subjective category, or a structural one? does it have an ontological status, or merely a performative one? is it still possible, in the circumstances of the twenty-first century, to sustain a utopian vision and construct a forward looking imaginary that is capable of shaping the future identity of a community, or nation? finally, what should be the role of the intellectual, and of the academy itself (especially the humanities) in addressing these issues, and what would make possible effective interventions on their part? this project has arisen out of dissatisfaction with the current state of scholarly understanding concerning these issues. many scholars have become dissatisfied with the way that postmodernism's valorisation of heterogeneity has, paradoxically, threatened to suppress identity, rather than open up a space for it. how is it possible for the individual subject to construct an empowering, coherent sense of identity in a world defined by ‘competitive interpellation’ in which the subject is ‘bombarded by competing messages simultaneously’, when the discursive practices he or she is enjoined to follow, which are celebrated as emancipatory, lead to fragmentation and de-centred subjectivity? (collins 1989, 143). at a macro level, something similar occurs with respect to ethnic, national, and cultural identities, which has led to questions about the viability, in human terms, of the whole postmodernist intellectual project. postcolonial theory, to date, has also been unable to do justice to the identity of postcolonial subjects in terms of the lived reality of their actual lives, their sense of themselves, and their aspirations. according to postcolonial theory, the distinctive identity of those who live in nation states should be disappearing as a consequence of a generalized condition of 'hybridity' resulting from the combined influence of transnational migration and the spread of first-world global culture. ‘authenticity’ of identity, it is argued, is no longer feasible, because it is impossible to ‘subtract a culture, a history, a language, an identity, from the wider, transforming currents of the increasingly metropolitan world’ (chambers 1994, 74). nation states, however, are not disappearing, as witnessed by the emergence of an increasing number of portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 fox introduction ethnically based nation-states in certain parts of the world – for example, in africa, the balkans, and the former soviet union. is this simply a resurgence of fascism? or is there something more fundamental at work springing from a desire that members of a community feel to preserve their collective identity whenever they experience the real or potential threat of having it suppressed? the tenacity with which not only nation states, but also indigenous and ethnic minorities seek to assert their distinctive cultural identity suggests that, as charles taylor has argued, a sense of authenticity is a ‘vital human need’ that impinges upon one’s self-esteem and sense of well-being (taylor 1994, 26). some scholars are equally unhappy with the way in which postmodernist theory has led to a conceptual impasse that makes it impossible to evaluate or inspire action, especially within the political sphere. this is manifest in an erosion of agency, understood as the right of action on behalf of a belief, a cause, or a group. feminists, for example, have argued that the postmodernist assumption that, ‘all discourses are equal, with each diversity being as good as the next’, means that ‘there is no chance of utopia, of the universal place of the imagination’, so that the emancipatory project begun in the 1960s has stalled (grant 1994, 249). aijaz ahmad has also denounced the ‘politics of contingency’ that has arisen from the obliteration of historicity, and from the pairing of hybridity and agential displacement that he detects in certain expressions of postcolonial theory (ahmad 1996, 286). in his exploration of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, fredric jameson showed how the logic of the simulacrum, with its conversion of older realities into images and conceptual mirages, serves to abolish any practical sense of the future, and of the collective project, thus pre-empting the possibility of a socialist transformation of society (jameson 1991). related to this dissatisfaction is a further dissatisfaction with the idea, promoted by james clifford, edward said, and others, that intellectuals can only speak with any validity from a dis-located position; i.e. as migratory, cosmopolitan nomads, committed to no particular locality, who are able to gain true vision because of their detachment from the societies they observe. what does this say about those who are not forced into exile, or those intellectuals who choose voluntarily to remain in their home countries and commit themselves to the betterment of the local societies in portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 fox introduction which they live? indeed, some people have become uneasy about the celebration of a diasporic cosmopolitan intellectual culture that seems self-congratulatory, privileged, and even parasitical in the context of a world that is still characterized by social injustice, economic exploitation, environmental destruction, the degradation of marginalized groups and minorities, and violent oppression in many places. where has the idea of reform and social change gone in the vision of these ‘gadfly’ intellectuals? increasingly, the idea that the role of the concerned intellectual is to engage with the problems of the day for the well-being of society appears to have been replaced by mere paralysis, if not a smug lassitude. the essays included in this issue of portal present a range of responses to these interconnected issues. the pernicious consequences of the appropriation and commodification of indigenous and local cultures for the sake of appealing to global consumers is identified by tania ka’ai in her analysis of the recent film, whale rider, from an indigenous perspective, while hilary radner, through her examination of coverage of the lord of the rings in the new zealand magazine pavement, shows how a local culture can become complicit in its own subversion because of the aspiration of groups within it to constitute a community parallel and comparable to those in europe. conversely, sylvie blum-reid, in her study of gadjo dilo by the gypsy film-maker tony gatlif, shows how the western urge to preserve ethnic minority cultures as if they were ethnographic collectibles is itself being interrogated by those very cultures. a significant implication of all these essays is that a critical genealogy of globalization needs to be established in order to trace the shift from european to american colonialism –– if the destructive effects of globalism on local identities is to be restrained or prevented. issues relating to diasporic identity emerge as more problematic than is usually acknowledged by postcolonial theorists. far from leading to assimilation through hybridity, trans-national migration is producing a new tribalism and inter-ethnic conflict in some societies (for example, the usa). moreover, ali behdad observes that diasporic communities are often the most fervent supporters of nationalism in the countries of origin. on the other hand, a sense of ‘arrived otherness’ on the part of portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 fox introduction immigrants often leads to a sense of being alienated from the uniqueness of their own identity. vijay mishra argues that multiculturalism – which is nearly ubiquitous in twenty-first century societies – when it is conceived as a postmodern tolerance of heterogeneity, provides no remedy for the protection of cultural identity in societies that incorporate a number of ethnic minorities. indeed, the doctrine of multiculturalism may be complicit in a process that obliterates the corporeality of the ‘other’. as such, it may actually be no more than a control mechanism that keeps minorities where they are in the guise of (white) respect of cultural difference without changing the unified selves of the ‘managers’. what all these essays suggest is an urgent need for the realities arising from trans-national migration to be addressed more justly and effectually at the level of state policy and social practice. in this regard, ali behdad in his examination of the interactions between the national and trans-nations, and david macdonald in his investigation of the use of the holocaust in the construction of serbian nationalism, demonstrate how the power of the state to shape or resist the way that nations are globalised has been vastly underestimated by those who have been preaching a homogeneous ‘hybridity’ as the inescapable condition of postmodernity. they argue a need to unpack the relationship between ‘state’ and ‘nation’, with the relation between the national and the global being at least as important as that between the global and the local, if not more so. another group of essays examine how myth-making, narrativisation, symbolism, and poetry continues to be used in attempts to construct a forward-looking imaginary. jennifer rutherford shows how a public space has been deliberately designed in melbourne for the purpose of re-speaking a homeland into being with a new awareness of identity. federation square does this, she argues, by inviting those entering into it to read and hear the suppressed histories, so that by addressing traumas from the past, those who experience the square can ‘remember forward’ in order to find a new place of residence. in his analysis of the draft constitution of the european union, murray pratt reveals a further attempt at utopian myth making at a national level, but this time one that undermines itself from within. he argues that in seeking to perpetuate the idea of a culturally unified, superior set of nations fulfilling a common destiny––figured in the image of an indissoluble marriage––this document actually reveals suppressed fear that local autonomies threaten the very existence of portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 fox introduction the union that the document is seeking to proclaim. at the other end of the spectrum, david macdonald, by examining the serbian identification with the jews as a victimized chosen people, shows the power of negative imagery to construct a dystopian national myth—in the case of serbia, one which was used to support the genocides perpetrated against other ethnic groups under the leadership of slobodan milosevic. three of the essays in the collection explore the issue of where, and whether, utopia can be found. two of them analyse utopian searches that are represented symbolically in the form of a journey. the first, sylvie blum-reid’s examination of the gypsy road movie, gadjo dilo, traces an attempt to locate and preserve authentic identity, figured in the search of a young french traveller to find the elusive voice of nora luca, a gypsy singer recorded by his father. she shows how the ambiguity of the film’s ending, in which the protagonist buries the tapes he has gathered, raises questions as to the ethics and feasibility of attempting to capture authenticity outside the actual experience of it by those to whom it pertains. the second, alistair fox’s analysis of ben okri’s latest novel, in arcadia, traces the attempt of a displaced diasporic nigerian film-maker to find utopia in a world fragmented by the consequences of postmodernism. he shows how okri draws upon earlier fables to construct his own new utopian imaginary, in which utopia is located neither in a determinate location, nor in transcendence, but in a nurturing myth of the human imagination capable of generating a constructive action within the labyrinth of this contemporary world. speaking from an indigenous viewpoint, sina va’ai looks at the historical and ongoing attempts of pacific islands nations to redefine a new oceania freed from the wounds of colonialism. this project, she argues, requires a decolonization of the mind, and a recognition that identity can reside in the paradox of the many in one, of which the metaphor of a ‘sea of islands’ is a wonderful symbol. finally, feng chongyi examines the role of the intellectual in the contemporary world, identifying the threat to that role posed by the postmodern assumption of the death of universal knowledge and truth, the specialization and professionalism that now characterizes the intellectual within the academy, and the integration of intellectuals into society’s power structures. optimistically, he concludes that despite these threats the project of the enlightenment is not dead, and ends with a call to portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 fox introduction intellectuals to maintain their traditional role, even if this means working with the state and the market, rather than in opposition to them. taken together, the essays in this collection are a sign not only of a growing disenchantment with globalization and the ideologies that wittingly or unwittingly underpin its ambitions, but also of the ongoing life of the utopian impulse. the essays reflect the discovery of a paradox at the heart of postmodernism: what has been celebrated as good and desirable in its intents, has, in many instances, turned out to be bad and undesirable in its effects. whereas the heterogeneity fostered by poststructuralist theories of self and society appeared to be emancipatory, it now appears to be repressive –– by obliterating cultural identity, and by serving as an instrument for the conversion of ‘citizens’ into mere individual subjects who define their selves through purchasing and consuming the commodities thrust before them in the global marketplace. the clear message of many of the essays is that things cannot be left to drift as they are, on a sea of relativized heterogeneity without any sense of social mission or responsibility. even if fredric jameson is right in supposing that utopia is located beyond an ever-receding vanishing point (jameson 1998), his critics are also right to insist that utopian hope needs to be brought into a relationship with political engagement––by allowing ethics to pull ‘praxis into the pragmatics of local struggles’ (moylan 1998, 5). the essays in this special issue show various efforts to do just that. collectively, they give an accurate sense of the issues that are now engaging academics across a range of disciplines as a result of their own ‘utopian imaginings’ and ‘productive doubt’ (to use jameson’s phrases). in so doing, they indicate the opportunities and challenges that confront contemporary societies in the ongoing search for human happiness and justice. reference list ahmad, a. 1996, ‘the politics of literary postcoloniality’, in contemporary postcolonial theory: a reader, ed. padmini mongia, arnold publishers, london and new york. chambers, i. 1994, migrancy, culture, identity, routledge, london. collins, j. 1989, uncommon cultures: popular culture and post-modernism, routledge, new york and london. grant, l. 1994, sexing the millennium: women and the sexual revolution, grove press, new york. jameson, f. 1998, ‘comments’, utopian studies, vol. 1, spring 1998. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 fox introduction _______1991, postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, verso, london. _______1982, ‘progress versus utopia; or, can we imagine the future?’, sciencefiction studies, vol. 9, part 2, no. 27 (july), 147-158. moylan, t. 1998, ‘jameson and utopia’ (special section on the work of fredric jameson), utopian studies, vol. 1, (spring). taylor, c. 1994, ‘the politics of recognition’, in multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition, ed. amy gutmann, routledge, new york. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 1 the twilight of the public intellectual: germany’s literary intellectuals and the end of the cold war alison lewis, the university of melbourne six weeks after the terrorist attacks of september 11 2001 on the twin towers of the world trade centre, the german weekly magazine der spiegel published an article with the caption: ‘are the towers still standing?’ (schnibben 2001, p. 223). the towers which journalist cordt schnibben had in mind were not those of the world trade centre but another set of pillars of stability and certainty that had been toppled a decade earlier. he was referring to germany’s writers and intellectuals. it had not taken long for the events of september 11 to be turned into an occasion for expressing disappointment with the nation’s intellectuals. schnibben’s point is simple enough: the terrorist attacks, as worrying as they were, had alerted germans to a perennial blight on the post-war intellectual landscape: the failure of the country’s writers and social commentators, intellectuals and philosophers. what was particularly disturbing was that the country’s intellectual classes appeared to have no answers as to why the attacks had occurred. germany’s intellectuals had not only failed to foresee the disaster that struck on september 11, they had been unable to offer an explanation for the attacks or to provide an analysis of the causes. to reinforce the point that this was a collective failure, schnibben singles out public figures by name: ‘we have read günter grass in the faz, peter schneider in the woche, botho strauß in the spiegel, diedrich diederichsen in der taz, alexander kluge in the sz (süddeutsche) and were amazed that they were as clueless as we were’ (p. 223). as the ‘advisors of the powerful’ and advocates for all manner of things, for ‘ostpolitik and vietnam, for the emergency laws and chile, abortion and biafra, nuclear energy, nicaragua and rearmament, always to hand whenever the world’s conscience was called for’ (p. 223), germany’s intellectuals had failed the nation once again. the spiegel article invokes a trope of failure and betrayal that has been a habitual feature of german intellectual life in both the federal republic of germany and its now defunct socialist other half, the german democratic republic. in west germany attacks on the integrity and politics of intellectuals were made with predictably regularity under the conservative governments of adenauer and erhard in the 1960s, portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 1 during the student movements in 1968, in connection with left-wing terrorism in the 1970s right up until the end of the 1980s. each change of government was accompanied by a shift in intellectual climate, as the incoming political parties favoured those intellectuals, historians and philosophers who allied themselves with their cause and discredited those others associated with the opposition (evans 1989, p. 15ff). in the gdr as well the intelligentsia was repeatedly accused by the ruling party of failing to live up to its expectations and of letting the populace down. the intelligentsia was the object of political witch hunts and show trials, it was subjected to secret police surveillance and undercover operations, censored and imprisoned, forced into exile and towards the end the more unruly members of the critical intelligentsia were sold off to the west in exchange for money. intellectuals in the east were moreover blamed for economic impasses and intractable political problems, they were regularly forced to confess to trumped-up ideological crimes and their works were pilloried and denounced in the highest circles of power. the forty-year long division of germany into a capitalist western-style democracy and a soviet-style socialist republic had resulted in radically different conceptions of the public intellectual and diverging notions of the ‘concerned’ intellectual. when the two paradigms from the two germanies collided with the unification of east and west in 1990 the conflicts were intense, protracted and highly personalised. german unification may have saved east german intellectuals from direct state interference but it did not put an end to the reproaches of betrayal and the accusations of irrelevance. on the contrary, the end of the cold war saw in many respects an intensification of the rhetoric of failure, fuelled by a diffuse and widespread desire to find new scapegoats on whom to vent public disapprobation with unification. this was most in evidence in the months and years immediately following the collapse of the gdr in november 1989. the dissolution of the sed and the breaching of the wall in november 1989 precipitated a rather ugly showdown of particularly dramatic proportions in the german print media during which many respected and highly esteemed public figures came under sustained and at times vicious attack. the main target of the attacks were those critical but loyal east germany’s writers and public intellectuals, those frequently referred to as the ‘dagebliebenen’ (‘those who remained behind’), who had opted to stay in the former gdr and who had come, somewhat unfairly, to be more or less identified with the regime. not only were portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 2 aspersions cast on the sorts of choices they had made in life, choices such as whether to go into exile or whether to stay in the gdr; the assaults extended to their entire life works and their integrity and morality as public figures. german unification was thus to become a watershed not only for the most prominent cohort of east german writers who for various reasons did not go into exile; it was a watershed for literary intellectuals in both states. in general terms, it precipitated a crisis for engaged or concerned intellectuals of socialist, leftist or left-liberal persuasion on both sides of the east-west divide. first and foremost, the end of really existing socialism posed a radical challenge to the east german intelligentsia. this in turn implicated many west german writers, who found themselves embroiled in the debates about their east german countrymen and -women and unable to keep out of the crossfire. by and large, however, by far the greatest brunt of the blows was borne by intellectuals from the east. the debates about intellectuals were significant for a number of reasons. first, they forced journalists and publicists, writers and literary historians to rethink their understanding of the role of the intellectual in society. second, they promoted discussions of the function of literature in a post-communist era. third, they posed a challenge to the post-war consensus regarding the role of the writer and politics, hastening a reconfiguration of the post-war ‘literary field’ and the intellectual classes. the focus of this paper will be on the question of whether german unification resulted in a wholesale retreat of intellectuals from politics and engagement with social issues, as the rhetoric of failure would indicate, or whether the key debates of the period can be read instead as a sign that germany is on the road to becoming a more ‘normal’ european nation. before returning to this question at the end of this paper i wish first to provide a broad historical and theoretical context for my discussion of the role of the concerned intellectual in germany, before offering an overview of the respective functions of literary intellectuals in both german states in the post-war period. i will then address a series of key debates and discussions in 1989 and the early nineteennineties that were responsible for changing the forms of engagement in intellectual debates in post-unification german society. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 3 charges of failure, betrayal and irrelevance levelled at the intellectual class require careful contextualisation and need to be measured against the various ‘horizons of expectations’ of the historical period in question. in the case of germany, it would certainly hold true that the higher the nation’s expectations the greater the disappointment when the designated ‘crystal ball gazer’ or ‘high priest’ of the nation, as german intellectuals are invariably seen, fails to see any more of the future than anyone else. laments and accusations of failure among the intelligentsia have become, some would argue, something of a parlour game among germany’s intellectual classes themselves. in many respects, they are the result of infighting or factional warfare within the ‘intellectual field,’ as various cohorts of intellectuals fight for cultural hegemony and seek to negotiate intellectual orthodoxies and heterodoxies (müller 2000, p. 13). these ‘culture wars’ over the role of intellectuals are fought out less between different professional groupings in the intellectual field, such as between writers and journalists, historians and literary theorists, academics and journalists than between different political factions of the intelligentsia. germany has a long tradition of elevating its literary intellectuals to iconographic status that extends back to the age of enlightenment and the golden age of german classicism. in his famous 1784 essay on ‘was ist aufklärung’ (‘what is enlightenment’), german philosopher immanuel kant explicitly exhorted scholars (gelehrte) to make public use of their faculties of reason, rather than private use, for the greater public good (kant 1922, p. 168). even today both left-wing and right-wing nationalism owes much to a largely unspoken ‘myth of origin,’ that can be traced back to herder’s notion of the kulturnation and german cultural nationalism and the belief that germany is a nation of ‘dichter und denker,’ of writers and thinkers, poets and philosophers. by the same token, it should not be forgotten that germany has an equally long tradition of persecuting its intellectuals, of monitoring their activities, censoring their writing and of forcing them into exile. it was for instance this countertradition that originally gave rise to the figure of the public oppositional intellectual who first made an appearance during the metternich restoration of 1815-1848. the turbulent years of the weimar republic necessitated the recreation of this figure of the oppositional intellectual as someone who was forced into exile and who came to see it as his/her public duty to oppose power and its abuses in fascism. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 4 in the post-war era, these two opposing traditions of intellectual life — of idealization and demonisation — have continued to exist side by side in uneasy symbiosis. on the one hand, both post-war german states habitually looked back with pride on past achievements, drawing much of their sense of national identity from the rich intellectual traditions of 18th and 19th century germany, even though each state emphasised different parts of the heritage in the name of vastly different political and ideological agendas. both germanies publicly invoked the national cultural heritage (kulturerbe) through commemorative events such as anniversaries of the births and deaths of important german writers, thinkers and philosophers, competing in this way for ownership of german cultural traditions. it was logical that such reverence for the cultural heritage fostered a certain degree of respect for the makers of these traditions. on the other hand, however, there remained the massive stumbling block of the holocaust in german national consciousness. the holocaust undeniably dealt germans’ faith in their intellectual leaders and national traditions a severe blow that has left its stamp on all subsequent intellectual endeavour. in particular it stymied neo-conservative and nationalistic attempts to establish positive continuities with the german past. while oppositional intellectuals were open about expressing their shame for what their forefathers had done, conservatives in west germany saw the holocaust as a hindrance to fostering greater national pride in the polity (moses 2001, p. 94-95). in west germany, expressions of national pride, when tolerated by the left, have been restricted to pride in german intellectual traditions in the fields of culture and the arts, philosophy and music, poetry and opera, which is encapsulated in the notion of the kulturnation. particularly in foreign cultural policy this quiet pride in the cultural achievements of the past has been translated into the sort of benign cultural imperialism that has brought us institutions such as the goethe institute and research fellowship schemes such as the alexander von humboldt foundation. generally speaking, however, it was far harder to find explicit expressions of national pride in the former federal republic of germany than it was to witness a highly circumspect and frequently overtly critical stance towards the country’s writers, philosophers and poets. while germans’ scepticism towards the figure of the public intellectual may well be regarded a healthy sign of a functioning democracy, in many respects it is indicative of a national predilection for over-investing in the abilities of intellectuals. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 5 in the former west germany writers were regularly chastised and berated in the media, less so for their silence and passivity than for their failings, their lack of understanding and timely insight and, somewhat surprisingly, for their lack of foresight. germany’s intellectuals arguably proved to be a constant source of disappointment because the nation had come to have such high expectations of them. much of the discourse of failure and inadequacy serves, perhaps for this reason, a purely rhetorical function, helping to create an air of high drama and a sense of impending crisis as a catalyst for action. the ‘hothouse’ atmosphere that the media regularly induce and, indeed, produce at various turning points in the political life of the nation, has itself become something of a regular occurrence. while the media obviously see some benefit in perpetually re-staging this crisis of intellectuals, we need to be wary of taking statements of irrelevance and disinterest entirely at face value. intellectual debates often serve the political purposes of the incoming government of the day (as can be argued in the historians’ dispute) and can be staged for a range of instrumental reasons, such as the desire to create a scandal around the publication of a new novel by a contentious author or the need to boost flagging sales of a newspaper. it should not be forgotten that for the author of a polemical piece published in the weekly der spiegel there are no mean financial rewards to be had. one of the enduring effects of the well-documented moral failure of intellectuals during the third reich has been, with good reason, to raise the moral stakes. the holocaust could not help but heighten awareness of the fallibility of intellectuals as human beings. charges of failure can therefore be seen as the necessary corollary to lifting the bar for moral-ethical action and may ultimately tell us more about how persuasive the moral imperative to remain vigilant after the holocaust in germany became after second world war. the amount of public invective that is vented on the figure of the concerned or engaged intellectual, whether by journalists, politicians or by fellow-intellectuals, has perhaps less to say about the actual failings of intellectuals than it does about the importance placed in germany today on fostering a vigilant culture of memory, guilt and responsibility. michel foucault has written that the post-war era saw the demise of the ‘universal’ intellectual and the rise of the ‘specific’ intellectual. the ‘universal’ intellectual used typically to be a writer who was the bearer of universal values and who spoke as a portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 6 ‘master of truth and justice’ (foucault 1984, p. 67). after the catastrophe of the second world war, foucault argues, the universalist commentator was replaced by the specialist who derives his or her authority from specialist knowledge in a range of disciplines. the activity of writing is no longer as important as expert knowledge and specialist know-how. disciplinary knowledge such as biology and physics become, according to foucault, privileged zones of the formation of the new personage of the specific intellectual. concomitant with development was the ‘disappearance of the figure of the “great writer”’ (p. 71). in both west and east germany, foucault’s thesis appears to hold true, but with one major qualification. in the post-war era the moral-ethical figure of the universal intellectual, who represented the conscience of the nation, was preserved for one domain of specialization and professionalization, namely the literary field. in both german states literature became a fiercely protected and cultivated zone of intellectual activity that made claims to universality. this is not to say that historians and philosophers have not played a significant role in shaping the intellectual debates and culture of germany — indeed philosophers such as theodor w. adorno, herbert marcuse and jürgen habermas have been instrumental in framing the terms of many post-war debates as have conservative historians such as ernst nolte, andreas hillgruber, michael stürmer and liberals such as hans-ulrich wehler in the historians’ dispute — but these intellectuals have intervened in debates in their capacity as specialist intellectuals, not as ‘universal’ ones. their engagement has been based on the specialist knowledges they possess in their capacity as professional historians and philosophers. it appears to have only been in the area of literature that intellectuals were permitted to comment on issues that go beyond their competence as writers of fiction. the special nature of this zone was such that the national writer of fiction was permitted, indeed, actively encouraged, to act out the anachronistic part of the universal intellectual. the writer spoke out on general matters of moral concern to the nation and not merely on matters pertaining to art and literature. that is, the writer was permitted and indeed expected to comment on areas in which s/he had no specialist competence or knowledge, as if the act of writing literature in some way gave him or her privileged access to the truth. the writer’s opinion was sought out especially on political issues, as if there were an intrinsic connection and natural affinity between literature and politics. the truth to which the writer had access was portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 7 one, moreover, to which the nation’s political leaders were often not privy. hence, the writer was needed to compensate for the shortcomings of politics and politicians, either to make sure that politicians remained aware of their historical responsibilities or to humanize the cold, cut-throat world of ‘mere’ politics. before turning to the debates about the purported demise of the public intellectual in 1990, it will be necessary to first give a brief overview of the respective status of the writer in east and west germany along with an appreciation of the very different constraints under which writers in both countries laboured prior to the collapse of communism in 1989. i will attempt to position the meta-commentary in germany about the place and time for intellectuals in society within the broader trend of what zygmunt bauman, richard rorty and a whole host of others have called the ‘disengagement of the knowledge classes’ with social issues. in a collection of recent essays, bauman asks whether the current ‘gospel of the “end of ideology”’ or the “demise of grand narratives” (and overarching them all, of the “end of history”) is an act of surrender on the part of the knowledge class or whether it can be seen as a newer version of the “self-organic” strategy and, accordingly, of that ideology which supplies its justification and raison d’etre’ (bauman 2001a, p. 197-198). the question to be answered in this context is whether a decade on from unification german intellectuals have become more like their american and european counterparts and hence increasingly self-referential and introspective. or is the rhetoric of irrelevance and failure simply part of a broader process of normalization whereby writers have become more specialized and hence freer to choose whether to engage in politics or not? writers and politics in east and west germany 1945-1989 in the post-war reconstruction period both german states looked to its writers for guidance on moral and ethical issues and, increasingly, on questions of day-to-day politics and current affairs. in the case of the first ‘worker’s and peasant’s state’ on german soil, the german democratic republic, writers were afforded a status unparalleled in the western world and even unmatched in the eastern bloc. this applied to writers of poetry, fiction, screenplays and drama. from the outset, the literary intelligentsia was burdened with a task of immense national importance in the fledgling new republic. it was the duty of the antifascist writers returning from exile portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 8 in moscow in 1945 to inculcate the populace with the new socialist values and to root out vestiges of fascism and authoritarianism. in relation to the state and its apparatuses, socialist writers were expected to play a key role in state building as well as in the formation and dissemination of state and party ideology. the ruling socialist unity party (sed) demanded partisanship from its writers at all levels of their comportment: in their daily lives as well as in their writings. partisanship was a central pillar of the dominant socialist realist aesthetic but it was much more than this; it was also an attitude to one’s government, even a way of life, that was policed and enforced by various state apparatuses and organs of the party, mainly by the ministry for state security, the ministry for culture and the official writers’ guild. in the first two decades the state apparatuses adopted an overly instrumental attitude to its writers and artists that resulted in strongly didactic and heavy-handed works being written in the 50s and early 60s. while the 1970s and 1980s saw considerable liberalization in the party’s attitudes to the narrow functionalist role it had forced on the arts, literature —as well as the producers of literature — never entirely managed to shed the ideological baggage it was forced to carry (lewis 1992, pp. 252-255). unlike their counterparts in czechoslovakia and poland, intellectuals in east germany continued to adhere to the belief in the reformability of the socialist system and to the viability of a socialist alternative almost up until the end of the cold war. the reasons for this are complex and have to do partly with the generational differences and partly to do with existence of west germany and the common fascist past of both countries (bathrick 1995, p. 10). the persuasiveness of the antifascist discourses of the sed and west german left-wing movements effectively meant that west germany was never acknowledged, not even by dissidents and trenchant critics of the socialist system, as a desirable alternative to really existing socialism. this was because west germany was thought to be the natural successor state to hitler’s germany, due to the dominant association of the time between capitalism and fascism. the sed based its legitimacy on its commitment to the antifascist cause, interweaving antifascist legends into the foundational narrative of the new socialist order. thus, the antifascism of the sed proved an immensely effective means of binding intellectuals to the socialist project and the party’s socialist utopia. to be socialist meant to be antifascist and to be antifascist meant that intellectuals embraced the socialist dream. to contemplate west germany and its belief system as an alternative to socialism would be to betray portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 9 this antifascist commitment. by declaring itself the heir to antifascist resistance movements, and the antifascist resistance fighters the new heroes of the fledgling nation, the new regime managed to bring its intellectuals on side. since the logic of this rhetoric necessarily yoked together fascism and capitalism, it conveniently projected all blame for nazi germany onto the federal republic. as a result, the values of freedom and democracy on offer in the west were regarded with far more scepticism than, say, by dissidents in poland. dissidents and ‘critical-loyal’ intellectuals alike, as the term now given to writers like christa wolf and heiner müller, both continued to work towards a ‘socialism of a third way’ or a socialism with a human face, long after their counterparts in czechoslovakia, hungary and poland had abandoned all hopes for reform. the party liked to present an image of the country as a ‘leseland,’ as a land of voracious readers and writers that had high-brow tastes and disciplined reading habits. as a literary nation, east germany hoped to be seen as the heir to the great german tradition of poets and philosophers and was keen to be seen to appropriate aspects of this tradition. but cultural politics was extremely selective in its acknowledgment of entire schools of thought and artistic movements, regarding with especial suspicion all forms of modernism, the avantgarde, expressionism and formal experimentation. one problem with the undue importance attributed to literature and the arts was that the socialist writer was constantly at risk of being harnessed to the state’s narrow ideological interests. s/he had to walk a fine line between falling from favour and toadying to the powerful. public accolades and state interference were the flip sides of the same socialist coin. if co-operation with the state’s ideological goals was not offered freely through a state-subsidized system of inducements, awards and scholarships, it had to be more or less enforced in less subtle ways. hence, the heights to which state institutions and structures elevated the nation’s writers could be rather precarious places to inhabit. while intellectuals were revered, they were also feared for the power they were imagined to have in influencing the working masses through their works. their power could all too easily have unintended and random effects, if not managed properly, just as it could readily be ‘abused’ from the perspective of authorities for the more sinister purposes of ‘political-ideological diversion’ and the spread of ‘ideological deviance’. furthermore, as literature came increasingly to serve a crucial function in socialist society, one that was not originally intended by the portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 10 ruling elites, by acting as surrogates for other forms of media, as substitutes for the lack of a genuine public sphere and for an independent media, the literary field became one of the more powerful fields in east german society. herbert marcuse once described marxism at that ‘danger zone of philosophical transcendence.’ when marxism lost its attraction as a locus of alternative visions for the bulk of east germany’s intellectuals, it was partially left up to art and literature to fill the void. even as late as the nineteen-eighties literature and lyric poetry were regarded by the party as a particularly dangerous ‘zone of transcendence’ with the power to subvert prevailing orthodoxy and to disturb the status quo (bathrick 1995, p. 70). literary discourse and literary countercultures were able to offer throughout the history of the gdr a serious challenge to official discourses and contributed to what bathrick has called the ‘erosion of a monosemic public space’ (p. 23). for bathrick the ‘power of speech’ that he attributes to the written word and to works of literature derives not only from the status of the writer as a public figure. literature was important in the gdr because ‘the power of poetic speech as a system evolves precisely from its historically derived potential refusal to partake in the language of power; from its generic status as a seemingly genuine voice of alternative meaning’ (p.44). there is some irony in the fact that in the end it was the high value accorded the arts and literary discourse that opened up possibilities for change. this enabled literary elites to forge alternatives and counter discourses that covertly challenged official ideology and dogma. thus, there were considerable opportunities available to writers to reinterpret ideological imperatives and refashion aesthetic orthodoxy if they were careful and inventive and of course persistent. many writers experimented with forgotten traditions and genres in such ways that allowed them to broach taboo topics in the form of literary disguises such as historical and biblical allegories and genres such as fantasy, fairy-tale and science fiction (reifarth 2003). in this way writers were able to give expression to a greater range of concerns of the population and to address issues that were not being met by an unresponsive bureaucracy and a static and dogmatic cultural politics. east germany produced, for instance, some of the most experimental and interesting feminist literature of the seventies and eighties, by portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 11 making innovative and bold use of an eclectic amalgam of fairytale, fantasy, myth and science fiction. there was, to use a phrase coined and theorized by stuart hall, a much larger degree of ‘re-articulation’ present in the east german culture industry than is often admitted. hall understands articulation to mean the ‘continuous struggle to reposition practices within a shifting field of forces, to redefine the possibilities of life by redefining the field of relations – the context – within which a practice is located’. articulation is, according to bauman, the way in which we can fashion a different number of stories out of the same experiences and thus enable practices to have different effects or outcomes. in the context of east german intellectuals this meant that writers had a degree of artistic license to embed stories in other narratives and to articulate the lives they told into alternative narrative patterns about life under socialism. this became a fruitful way of ‘foiling the censor’ and permitting writers to respond to their reader’s needs for open discussion about taboo topics. the east german writer of prose, drama and poetry was in many ways a universal socialist intellectual, who derived his or her authority to speak from far more than his or her talents and skills as a writer alone. writers commanded respect, both nationally and internationally, because of the perceived influence of their craft. this in turn placed them in a unique moral and political position. but this status was in many respects a straightjacket, since it brought with it a high level of responsibility and many hidden obligations to their readers and to the population at large to speak out about injustice and to oppose oppression. at the national level, the writer was valued like a national treasure or resource who was accorded ‘an institutional status’ unheard of in the western world, even thought this reputation was partly built on the writer’s international renown (p. 30). writers were spokesmenand -women on issues of moral and political importance, as well as being the transmitters of cultural policy. this in turn enabled them to use their power and influence to help small groups and individuals who had been imprisoned by the stasi. writers like christa wolf in fact used their power to act as intermediaries between the population and the party hierarchy. in the absence of a democratic public sphere, writers were often called upon by less well-established authors or writers in distress to put their connections with power to good use. but the honours so generously bestowed on them, all too portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 12 frequently turned into a poisoned chalice. conformism and a certain degree of complicity were asked in return for the privileges the state showered on its cultural ambassadors, privileges such as the chance to travel to the west, to be published without tedious delays or the right to have a voice in one’s own country at all. writers thus had the dubious distinction of acting both as ‘figures of official legitimation and as a source for social change’ (p. 24). as long as the gdr existed, the moral obligations on the figure of the writer were limited to helping colleagues in need or more vulnerable writers who did not have the protective safety net of a reputation and a reading public in the west. with the implosion of the gdr, however, these moral obligations were suddenly to shift, as we shall see later. the relative importance accorded the literary field was, as bathrick has argued, largely the result of the failure of official ideology to offer binding value systems. writers were thus able to ‘speak a language of ‘authenticity’ in a moment of crisis’ (p. 24). many such as christa wolf, heiner müller and günter kunert walked a tightrope for much of their careers between dissidence and support for the regime. on many occasions, they found themselves ‘on both sides of the power divide,’ offering a challenge to official discourse from within and participating in the struggle for more freedom of speech within the socialist paradigm. only the younger generation of poets and writers from the prenzlauer berg eschewed all forms of engagement with official discourse and the language of power. with the exception of the last generation of intellectuals, such as those hineingeborene, all intellectuals and writers were caught in the same socialist double bind. as bathrick reminds us, the ‘fact that some of them had been censored, hunted, questioned, and ridiculed does not belie the fact that they were also – and sometimes even simultaneously – privileged, nurtured, courted, and coddled’ (p. 11). for all their differences, developments in the western half of germany echoed in some surprising ways those in the east. while literary concerns and politics were perhaps never so far apart as they were in the nineteen-fifties, subsequent eras nevertheless saw the progressive politicisation of literature and its authors. from the late fifties onwards the post-war era was dominated by the generation of writers that was born between 1927 and 1929. this is the generation that jan-werner müller has called, in reference to helmut schelsky’s eponymously named study about the postportal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 13 war generation born around 1930 (schelsky 1963), the ‘sceptical generation’ (müller 2000, pp. 8-9). also described as the hitler-youth generation, the generation of flak helpers and the 45ers (moses 2000), the ‘sceptical generation’ cultivated a ‘culture of suspicion’ towards all ideologies. this was the generation above all that was profoundly committed to addressing the problem of the ‘post-fascist democratic deficit’ in west germany by embracing the values of the rechtsstaat (moses 2000, p. 246). they saw it as their duty to draw appropriate lessons from the failures of the past, in particular from the quietism of the weimar anti-democratic mandarins and aristocratic intellectuals who refused to sully their hands by engaging with the world of politics (müller p. 11). in many ways the rise and fall of the figure of the politicised left-liberal intellectual parallels the rise and fall of the social democratic party and the radicalisation of the young knowledge classes — of students and professionals — at the end of the sixties. literature and drama started to address directly the themes that had been suppressed under adenauer: peace, the threat of war, auschwitz, the unmastered nazi past, revolution, collective guilt and consumerism. in west germany, this cohort of writers assumed, along with the slightly older writers such as heinrich böll (born 1917) – without any prompting or coercion from above – increasingly more public roles as spokesmen on all manner of moral and political questions. after the post-war literary scene had been polarised between the apolitical expressionism of gottfried benn and the revolutionary idealism of bertolt brecht, the sixties saw the rise to prominence of the members of the ‘group 47,’ a loose grouping of post-war writers who shared no particular ideologies or political visions other than the determination to break with the fascist past. writers such as heinrich böll (19171985), walter jens, günter grass (1927), hans magnus enzensberger (1929) and martin walser (1927) all came to be regarded by various sections of the polity as embodiments of the ‘conscience of the nation’, a title some wore more reluctantly than others. like their fellow writers in the east, and perhaps even in unconscious imitation of the legendary communist writer’s struggles with authority, they intervened habitually in political debates from the sixties onwards. they commented publicly on diverse issues ranging from the media’s treatment of the student movement, the baader-meinhof group and left-wing terrorism, the division of germany, capitalism and the springer media empire, the arms race and the portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 14 deployment of nuclear missiles on german soil, and again in the nineties on asylum seekers, the building of a holocaust memorial and german reunification in 1990. west german writers with leftist allegiances came to exist and operate in a curious symbiotic relationship with their counterparts in the east. while working under radically different conditions, they frequently came to mirror and echo the habitus of writers in communist regimes, sometimes to an uncanny degree, railing variously at ‘the repressive tolerance’ of the west and the ‘police state’ methods of conservative governments. they even saw themselves as struggling under similar conditions of censorship in what they preferred to refer to as the ‘the so-called free west.’ they cultivated a critical conscience and rallied behind left-wing political movements and parties. heinrich böll protested against the introduction of new emergency laws in 1967-68, lent his support to soviet dissidents and made election speeches for the spd in the 1970s. he styled himself as a christian moralist whose main contribution to politics was through his literary works. he considered his literature to be through and through political and spoke of the ‘impossibility of political neutrality in literature’ (böll 1978, p. 484). while he remained coy about his role as conscience of the nation, he remained convinced that writers have a duty to act as a prompt to politicians when these are reluctant to act: there is the danger that conscience becomes a dried flower in the lapels of different ideologies if politicians do not comprehend that they are the ones who can convert moral pressure into political pressure and if they do not relinquish the hypocritical concept of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states.’ (böll 1980, p. 23) günter grass, on the other hand, regarded himself more explicitly as an interventionist in political matters and actively campaigned for the spd in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies. his political speeches are deeply literary and deploy to great effect literary technique as political rhetoric. when böll died in 1985 the baton was handed to the younger grass, who has continued to intervene in public debate to this very day. the end of east german communism and the failure of intellectuals 1990-1993 the collapse of eastern european communism and the abrupt end to the cold war – which came about in germany with the fall of the berlin wall and the velvet portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 15 revolution of the east german populace in 1989 – marked a radical turning point in the life of the german nation and its intellectuals on both sides of the iron curtain. in the heated debates that broke about the ambivalent role that prominent east german figures had played in the revolution, writers and intellectuals from both countries faced the first serious and lasting challenge to their moral authority since the war. the end of the cold war period was to have far-reaching consequences for intellectuals and literature in both east and west germany. in particular, it brought to a rather unceremonious close the pact between geist and macht, intellect and power that had held sway — to different degrees and under different political banners — in both germanies since their inception. as a result of the very public castigation and chastisement that significant numbers of german intellectuals received at the time, it looked very much as if german writers had retreated from public engagement with matters of political and social concern, divorced themselves from politics and reverted to doing what they did best, writing literature. i will return to this perception at the end of this paper. from about mid-november 1989, when the popular revolution was at its height, it started to become clear that prominent intellectuals in germany would play quite a different role from their counterparts in other communist regimes in eastern europe. unlike writers in romania and czechoslovakia, who spearheaded the reform movements in their countries, east german intellectuals found themselves embarrassingly out of touch with the feelings of the population. instead of leading revolutionary movements, they struggled to position themselves at the vanguard of the revolutionary foment sweeping the country and failed spectacularly to capture the mood of the population. in particular, they were compromised by their less than enthusiastic response to the prospect of unification. the rather optimistic prediction of pierre bourdieu in 1989 that ‘the poet, the writer, the intellectual … will win back his original role as group spokesman or – more modestly – as a public writer’ was proved – in the case of germany at least – to be disappointingly wide of the mark (bourdieu 1989, p. 3). in the immediate months following the breaching of the berlin wall in november 1989 those same intellectuals that had offered beacons of hope to their less privileged countrymen and women only months before found themselves overtaken time and again by the events of history. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 16 according to andreas huyssen the end of the cold war marked a paradigm shift in which key elements of ‘a long-standing, broadly based consensus’ were dismantled (1991, p. 109). in 1991 he identified three ‘cumulative’ phases in what he correctly identified as a ‘crisis of intellectuals.’ the first phase was characterised by debates about the future of the gdr and how whether the socialist state could and should be reformed. the second phase focused on issues of culture and literature and the third he saw erupting in response to the gulf war in 1991. huyssen summarises the first phase in which the failure of intellectual discourse first became apparent as follows: east and west, the rhetoric and behavior of german intellectuals seemed mostly out of step with events. it lacked sovereignty, perspective, and compassion; it betrayed self-indulgence and arrogance, a fatal aloofness from reality and a desperate clinging to projections, and, when under fire, melancholic self-pity and unrepentant self-righteousness. (p. 110) during the tumultuous events of october and november of that year, in which the largest demonstrations were staged in cities around the country and in which thousands of disgruntled citizens fled over the borders into hungary and czechoslovakia and subsequently to the west, writers remained unmoved in their resolve not to abandon the socialist project. prominent figures such as christa wolf, christoph hein, helga königsdorf and a host of others made a clear decision to rally behind those sections of the demonstrators that were calling for reforms. in doing so they sided with civil rights groups and citizen action groups (bürgerrechtler) and deliberately against the sections of the demonstrators who were calling for travel freedoms and the lifting of visa restrictions. for a brief moment at the beginning of november 1989 it looked like the nation’s writers would take their rightful place at the vanguard of the revolutionary movement. barely a week before the startling announcement of the politbüro to open the borders to the west, a group of writers and intellectuals responded to demands of the refugees occupying the embassies in prague and warsaw and those others in germany anxious to follow them to the west. they reacted by staging a public demonstration on the 4th november 1989 on the alexanderplatz in the very heart of east berlin. the demonstration received, rather surprisingly some thought at the time, official approval portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 17 to go ahead, and the stasi was made full aware of the organizers’ plans. the dominant theme of the demonstration was the need for reform, albeit reform under the socialist banner, which was expressed in calls for a revolution that retained the sovereignty of the gdr state. in her speech at the rally christa wolf threw down the gauntlet to what she mistakenly supposed was still a captive audience: ‘just imagine, we have socialism, and no one leaves,’ she cried, in a play on the catch-cry of the peace movement of the eighties (‘just imagine we have a war and no one goes off to it’) (wolf 1994, p. 13). a few weeks later stefan heym, who had the status of an elder statesman of the gdr, started a similarly doomed initiative that was designed to steer the revolution back onto a socialist course. on the 6th november 1989 heym, who had been dubbed by the spiegel the ‘doyen of the protest movement,’ had applauded the demonstrators in leipzig and berlin in an article for the spiegel (1989a, pp. 30-31). he praised the ‘mob’ for having the courage to finally thrown off the yoke of paternalism and socialist tutelage and to take to the streets demanding sovereignty. ‘hurray for the mob,’ he cried. the ‘mob’ had not forgotten its historical mission as a catalyst for revolution and had, as indeed heym himself was trying to do, well and truly seized the day. at the end of november heym attempted to get together a petition for reform that bore the evocative patriotic title ‘for our country’ (heym 1989b). the petition was duly signed by an impressive list of the country’s prominent writers and intellectuals and was even read out on national east german television. it advocated in unequivocal terms a return to the antifascist and humanist ideals of the gdr in an effort to stem the mounting tide of anti-socialist sentiment that was threatening to engulf the entire country. it was not until it became publicly known that honecker’s successor and the crown prince to the gdr throne, egon krenz, had opportunistically added his signature to the list that heym was forced to withdraw the petition. since the only marginally less hardline krenz had endorsed it, it was rendered virtually meaningless as a lever for genuine change. this was further evidence that east germany’s intellectuals had seriously misjudged the climate in the country and the will of the people. the petition represented only one of a series of similarly misguided attempts on the part of heym and others to belatedly breathe life back into socialist ideals. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 18 a rather acrimonious spat that ensued between the younger east german writer, monika maron, and stefan heym provides an additional example of the sense of helplessness and loss that the older generation of east german intellectuals felt at the collapse of the gdr. a number of heym’s compatriots, notably günter kunert and monika maron, were especially outspoken in their dismissal of heym’s defense of the socialist project. where was there evidence of the noble ideals of solidarity, maron rightly asked in an article in the spiegel on the 12th february 1990, when dissidents were being arrested (1993, p. 86)? how could one talk of antifascist traditions in the face of the draconian censorship practices in the gdr, she reminds him (p. 87). a month after publicly lauding the east german people, heym published another article on 4th december 1989 in the spiegel commenting on the population’s reactions to the fall of the berlin wall. in an essay bearing the provocative title ‘ash wednesday in the gdr’ heym drastically revised his positive assessment of the same ‘mob’ that had risen up against oppression only a few weeks earlier. in an outburst of disgust, he castigated the masses of east german citizens, who after the opening of the borders could be seen rummaging through the discount bins of low-budget department stores in west berlin, for their greed and consumerism (1989c, p. 55). in her response in february 1990 maron takes heym to task for clinging to a bankrupt system of values that the populace had long since abandoned. she speaks scathingly of the ‘new misery of the intellectuals’ and the ‘arrogance of the well-fed who are disgusted by the bad table-manners of someone starving’ (maron 1993, p. 83). ‘no sooner was the heroic deed of the revolution over, than the intellectuals discovered that the people had taken to the streets for the wrong reasons, because they were not their reasons,’ she concluded (p. 83). it was, she thought, especially hypocritical for intellectuals like heym to attack consumerism especially when they had always enjoyed access to consumer goods because they had been privileged to travel (p. 84). the ambivalence of many west german leftist and east german ‘critical-loyal’ intellectuals to german reunification led observers to declare 1989 a watershed in the intellectual life of the nation. intellectuals had spectacularly failed to keep abreast with the changed mood of the times and found themselves confounded time and again by the sentiments of the broad masses. not only had they failed to predict the course of events that was to change germany’s political landscape in a lasting way; they had been unable to offer any real viable alternatives or a workable vision for the future. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 19 the most telling example of intellectuals’ gross misreading of the events in november 1989 comes from a remark made by helga königsdorf, a feminist writer and nuclear physicist, who had been a ‘literary activist’ and concerned intellectual throughout the eighties. while the people of leipzig were chanting ‘we are the people’ and ‘we are one people’, königsdorf retorted in a fit of pique in an article published in the former communist party daily newspaper, neues deutschland that ‘we are the people too,’ meaning of course that the voices of east germany’s writers and intellectuals were also part of the popular revolution (1990, p. 14). the second phase of the debates of the time dealt more directly with cultural matters and the future role of the literary intellectual. from the middle of 1990 fierce debates were fought out in the west german press about the relationship between art and politics. these discussions presented a further challenge to the status of the engaged and concerned intellectual and one that effectively went to the very core of german self-understanding in the soon to be unified nation. it appeared as if the marriage of leftist politics and literature had come full circle or, to change metaphors, as if germany was witnessing a ‘stock market crash’ in which the value of the writer had plunged virtually overnight to unprecedented depths (emmerich 1991, p. 325). with the drop in share price on intellectual goods the share price of other core cultural values sank to an all-time low. as wolfgang emmerich observed: the ‘whole of west german literature of non-conformism of four decades and even more than that: littérature engagée in general’ collapsed into the bargain (p. 325). the culture debates gained momentum throughout the following two years, as germany moved from the literature debate of the summer of 1990 through to the various stasi debates of 1991-1993. the occasion for the literature debate was provided by the publication of a short novel with the title what remains (was bleibt, 1990) by christa wolf, who was at the time generally regarded as east germany’s most popular and successful writer. before it appeared in the bookshops, the book was panned by the critics, with two withering critiques of both the book and its author appearing almost simultaneously in two of the most influential daily newspapers, the conservative frankfurter allgemeine zeitung and the left-liberal die zeit. although christa wolf was not without her supporters from both ends of the political spectrum and on both sides of the east-west divide, the response to the publication of the novel portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 20 was overwhelmingly negative (anz 1991, p. 17ff). the debate was heavily politicised and ran only partially along generational lines. in general, there were no clear front lines in the dispute in which the boundaries between younger and older gdr generations, between those that had stayed and those that had left the gdr and between right-wing and left-wing critics tended to be blurred (p. 15). the conservative frank schirrmacher, for instance, joined forces with critics from the alternative-left newspaper, the tageszeitung, in condemning wolf for her timid stance on stalinism (p. 18). while the reviews of frank schirrmacher and ulrich greiner had different emphases, both interpreted the publication of wolf’s novel as an opportunistic move on the author’s part to re-invent herself as a victim of the regime (greiner 1990a, pp. 66-70; schirrmacher 1990, pp. 77-89). this was all the more galling to them in light of the fact that wolf had become more of a poet laureate (‘staatsdichterin’) who had supported the regime rather than being a critic of the regime. certainly, wolf’s recent behaviour on november 4th and her signing of the petition ‘for our country’ shortly after would seem to reinforce this view. but this took a rather short-sighted view of wolf’s public engagement with the regime, ignoring moreover the fact that she had been a victim of stasi surveillance and intimidation since the late 60s. strictly speaking, wolf was entitled to victim status on the basis of her substantial stasi file alone. at the same time, however, her status was complicated by the fact that she had continued to lend her support to the regime until the very end, endeavouring to prolong the life of the state as it was crumbling around her. it has now been widely acknowledged that the debates about christa wolf were not really about the book or even about the person of christa wolf (anz, p. 9ff). what the debates were really about was the future status and the enduring value of east german literature and culture. in many ways, the attacks on wolf and her book say more about the general feeling of outrage and disappointment that many felt at the lack of insight and guidance that was forthcoming from east germany’s privileged class of intellectuals. as huyssen was to remark: the failure of intellectuals became now the failure of christa wolf: it was a political failure in that she was never really critical enough of the sed regime; it was a moral failure in the sense portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 21 that was bleibt represented wolf’s attempt to claim victim status, to extricate herself from culpability after the wende’ (1991, p. 123). the critical failure of the book was largely due to a miss-match of expectations between her new west german audience and her east german readers. while many east germans admired her for her courage in coming forward and publishing a previously censored book about such a sensitive topic as the stasi, west german readers saw her tale about secret police observation as a calculated move to side with the victims rather than the perpetrators of the regime. christa wolf was rather unfairly, although not altogether unsurprisingly, made into a national scapegoat over the next few years, whereby she became a general ‘cipher for everything that was held to be wrong with post-war german culture’ (p. 123). what was at stake in the debates about christa wolf’s story of the day-in-the-life of a state intellectual who falls foul of the powerful was the question of how far geist should go towards accommodating macht without loss of integrity. christa wolf’s tight-tope walk with power was too reminiscent of the collaboration of german intellectuals during the third reich for comfort. it came as no surprise, therefore, that the theme of collaboration and complicity was taken up again in the debates about the east german secret police that dominated headlines towards the end of 1991 and for the following two to three years. in the stasi debates, the suggestion that intellectuals had failed to adequately resist power turned into blatant accusations of collusion and collaboration. furthermore, critics of the east german intellectuals who had stayed behind in the east (‘die dagebliebenen’), such as fritz j. raddatz and frank schirrmacher, felt vindicated when the first revelations of collaboration with the stasi made headlines towards the end of 1991 (raddatz 1993; schirrmacher 1993). why the outrage at the revealing of secrets, asked schirrmacher smugly, since it was no secret that writers like christa wolf and heiner müller were loyal to the sed and that the stasi was an arm of the sed (pp. 161-162)? no one, however, was prepared for the precise nature of the disclosures, in particular the distressing discovery that the country’s most outspoken dissidents in the underground had been secret police informers for the stasi. the first writers to be exposed were sascha anderson and rainer schedlinski, two poets in the prenzlauer portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 22 berg literary underground in berlin. other pillars of east german literature, the new opposition and rising new politicians were to fall in rapid succession, as suspicion fell on christa wolf, heiner müller as well as on key figures in the newly formed socialist democratic party and other political groups. the scandalous nature of the discoveries shattered post-war certainties to the core, serving only to further undermine the reputations and public credibility of the east german intelligentsia. if the two leading figures in the underground, sascha anderson and rainer schedlinski, had been acting on instructions from the stasi, while simultaneously working for the underground, it was only inevitable that questions had to be asked about the authenticity of their bohemian image and their avantgarde poetry, especially when it appeared to be nothing more than a fabrication or ‘simulation’ of the stasi. frank schirrmacher, who was again at the forefront of the debate, even went as far as to argue that it was time to declare the end of all genuine intact gdr-culture (1991, p. 306ff.). just how subversive were the illegal art and literature of the underground really and was it possible that oppositional literary movements were the cynical creation of the secret arm of a state apparatus that was becoming increasingly desperate to cling on to power? (bathrick 1995, p. 22; lewis 2001; lewis 2003). by the time the stasi debates had run their course, and after christa wolf had voluntarily disclosed her own brief associations with the stasi in 1993, many east germans started to wonder if there was not a hidden agenda to many of these politicised public disputes about the responsibilities of intellectuals. in the minds of east germans many contributions to the debates about the moral reprehensibility of the intelligentsia, such as those of frank schirrmacher and ulrich greiner, masked a desire to discredit writers’ reputations and in doing so to devalue the entirety of east german culture. indeed, it certainly appeared as if the debate was being used by neoconservatives associated with the reigning kohl government, and now dominating the west german literary establishment, to end the marriage of aesthetics and politics that had hitherto prevailed and to set a different agenda for the future. it is one of the ironies of the debates that conservatives were joined by sections of the left-liberal intelligentsia in what was an uneasy truce between opposing factions of the intellectual class. left-liberal intellectuals shifted positions, however, for different reasons. they abandoned writers such as christa wolf, it could be argued, out of a belated sense of guilt because the left had failed to articulate a sustained critique of portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 23 stalinism. since they had been partly to blame for encouraging east german writers like christa wolf to stay in the gdr, so that she might continue the fight for a ‘better’ germany, writers on the left shared the blame for the iconoclastic status of the critical-loyal cohort of east german intellectuals like christa wolf. the participation of many left-wing intellectuals in the literature debates was driven therefore by the need to face up to the unsavoury aspects of life in the ‘other’ germany and to admit that the left’s image of the gdr was in part a wishful projection. if the left were to acknowledge the legacy of stalinism, the emotional and ideological investments that the west had made in the ‘other’ germany as the ‘better’ half would have to be shed as well. while a sober reassessment of intellectual life in east germany was clearly in order, what was motivating much of the heated debate was the fact that many on the west german left had a bad conscience about the role it had played in promoting a particular type of east german literature. the ‘dissident bonus’ that was unceremoniously withdrawn from the personage of christa wolf was as much a western creation as it was an invention of sed apparatchiks. similarly, the dissident east german writer was not merely the unwanted by-product of east german kulturpolitik; it was also the work of a ‘western gdr industry’ and kulturindustrie (bathrick, p. 4). for this reason, the future of the entire cultural industry was at stake and not merely east german culture. the national significance of the literature wars was best encapsulated in the words of ulrich greiner: ‘the interpretation of the literary past is no academic question. who determines what was also determines what will be. the dispute about the past is a dispute about the future’ (greiner 1990b, p. 208). the two cultural critics from the literature debate, ulrich greiner from the leftliberal die zeit, and frank schirrmacher from the more conservative frankfurter allgemeine zeitung, both issued a compelling appeal for a literature unencumbered with political and moral concerns. they unilaterally called for a literature freed of ‘gesinnungsästhetik,’ a literature unencumbered by ‘an aesthetics driven by opinion or political conviction.’ according to greiner the paradigm of ‘gesinnungsästhetik’ had dominated the literature industry after the war, elevating moral and political concerns over matters of style, form and aesthetics. the alliance between aesthetics portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 24 and politics had been a ‘marriage of convenience’ whose days were now numbered. karl heinz bohrer, the free-thinking editor of merkur, a journal known for its nonaligned eclectic mix of political and aesthetic views, went even further in his condemnation of east german literature. much of it was little more than ‘gesinnungskitsch’, he contended, in obvious reference to christa wolf (1990a, p. 1016). the old guard of those responsible for meaning production, whether on the left or the right of politics, had always been a ‘religious devotee’ who wanted to see in his or her art ‘metaphysics instead of aesthetics’ (p. 1016). as a secularised society, germany had no need for quasi-religious high priests of culture; literature was ‘not a drug for the oppressed’ and ought not to be ‘a quietistic balm’ (p. 1017). as early as october 1990 the accusations of irrelevance had spread to implicate west german literature and its authors as well. both schirrmacher and greiner called for a ‘farewell to the literature of the federal republic,’ naming writers like günter grass, heinrich böll and siegfried lenz as part of a post-war ‘conscience industry’ that had outgrown its purpose. like their counterparts in the east, they too were guilty of lending their support to a morally bankrupt political system. bohrer concurred with greiner and schirrmacher and observed that by clinging to the chimera of gdr culture as a more utopian version of their own, west german writers like grass had sought to turn the gdr into a wildlife park or a ‘nature reserve for culture’ (‘kulturschutzgebiet’). in this, west germany’s ‘cultural pastors’ had merely demonstrated their narrowness of vision. ‘who are günter grass and walter jens today?,’ bohrer asked and offered the following answer: ‘two important public figures to be sure, constantly ‘committed’ and deserving, but politically and intellectually long since stretched to their limits’ (p. 1015). in several articles penned at the time bohrer continued with his polemics against this cohort of west german writers, calling for a ‘coming-of-age of the aesthetic process,’ a dawning of a new aesthetic age and a separation of powers in which literature could be literature and politics was allowed to be politics (1990b; 1990c). as klaus scherpe summarised: ‘the role of the literary intellectual that is predicated on that peculiar relationship between the good, true and beautiful [the role] as soothsayer, someone who says no and who speaks for others, as professional utopianist, as a nonconformist and representative of the whole now seems to have finally exhausted itself’ (1996, p. 106). portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 25 1990-2002: new alliances: renegades, the resurrection of fallen idols and the rise of a new generation the stock market crash in literary values of the early nineties represented an unprecedented low point in the cultural life of the nation. since that time, the ‘share price’ of the literary intellectual has managed to recuperate some of its losses, and many writers have managed to regain some of their former credibility in the eyes of the public. while scherpe’s predictions that we are witnessing the end of the post-war paradigm of the writer as the embodiment of the conscience of the nation appear in the main to be true, there are a few notable exceptions to the rule. one group of writers that quickly recovered from the public dressing-down of intellectuals that occurred in the literature debate was the generation of west german left-wing writers born between 1927 and 1945, the post-war group originally associated with the ‘gruppe 47.’ these writers, many of whom are now approaching seventy, are among the few whose interventions in the political arena are still tolerated. they have continued to speak out publicly against human rights abuses and other social and moral issues of public concern, engaging in public debate and championing various moral and political causes of the day. while their moral authority is subject to periodic attacks,1 the opinion of this older generation is regularly sought in the print media and talk shows, especially in relation to questions of national guilt and responsibility, on the holocaust and national memory. since the red-green coalition came to power in 1998, these writers’ opinions are solicited again with greater regularity. the same, however, cannot be said for the next generation of writers, those 68ers born between 1938 and 1948, who appear to have returned to more personal themes such as love and relationships. by and large, the majority of german writers, with the exception of the generation of christa wolf and günter grass, now appear to be motivated by literary rather than political concerns. increasingly, the reputations of writers, in particular the latest generation of writers to emerge, are made less on the public stance they take on issues of the day than on the basis of their literature. this is partly the result of a generational shift and the coming-of-age of the ‘grandchildren,’ as the title of an 1 the latest attack on a member of this generation came late in 2003 with the publication of a literary lexicon, which alleged that walter jens, who had been a pillar of morality in the 70s and 80s, was a member of the nazi party during his childhood. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 26 article in der spiegel in 1999 suggested: ‘the grandchildren are coming’ (hage 1999b). an additional reason for this shift away from politics towards literature has been a change in political allegiance among much of west germany’s left-wing intelligentsia. several years ago it was suggested, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, by a critic in die zeit that german intellectuals had become a bunch of ‘renegades.’ in his article from 1999, jörg lau writes: ‘never were the renegades so influential as they are today,’ and goes on to ask: ‘is their inconsequentiality smartness or opportunism?’ (lau 1999, para. 1). according to lau, times have changed and it is the renegade who has most changed with the times. branded a renegade by members of the old left, the ‘renegade’ has in fact drawn the most appropriate consequences from the loss of leftist utopias. s/he has responded to the challenges of the post-communist era and a reunified germany. unlike the typical leftist of the 70s and 80s, the ‘regenade’ lent his/her support to humanitarian military interventions such as the nato intervention in kosovo. indeed, the german response to the nato intervention in kosovo, which was lead by a newly elected red-green coalition, marked a clear turning point for leftist intellectuals and the clearest indication yet of a shift in leftist politics. for the first time in the post-war period, leftist radicals and left-liberal intellectuals previously affiliated with the sds, kpd and diverse maoist groups all ranked among the most ardent advocates of the nato intervention. among them were ‘hans magnus enzensberger, hans christoph buch, richard herzinger, peter schneider and andre glucksmann as well as alain finkielkraut and bernard-henri levy’ (para. 15). the common denominator uniting these intellectuals in their support of a military intervention was a commitment to universalist principles and human rights obligations and a disavowal of early pacifist positions. quite apart from the hefty assaults on the integrity of east german writers and their west german allies, the early nineteen-nineties saw the alliance between literature and politics come under attack from other quarters. sociologists and historians began to speak openly of the demise of the poet as public intellectual. new socio-economic elites would soon take their place in society, it was predicted, journalists and politicians would replace writers as the group of intellectuals whose competence was most in demand. according to wolfgang jäger, intellectuals can only maintain their function in society if they continue to offer a competent social critique. he is sceptical whether writers of fiction can fulfil this role as well as intellectuals with specialist portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 27 knowledge and skills (mittenzwei 2003, pp. 17-18). rainer lepsius agrees. according to him, east german intellectuals committed a major sin: they betrayed their commitment to critique by endorsing the ideals of one party. they thereby relinquished their intellectual freedom and any commitment to universal values (2001). one notable exception to the general consensus that the poet is no longer suited to fulfilling this role is werner mittenzwei. a literary historian, who worked under the communists as a professor in the tertiary sector, mittenzwei laments the passing of the era of the socially committed intellectual in a recent book titled the intellectuals (die intellektuellen) (p. 470). he argues that society has sacrificed an important part of the ‘collective memory’ that writers are so good at transmitting. he regrets that the decade since unification has not resulted in the formation of any new literary movement or any form of effective protest against the slow and steady decline of literature’s social function (p. 470). while the german media has now softened its approach to the public posturings of intellectuals of the likes of günter grass, unfortunately the same cannot be said of many prominent east german writers. most of east germany’s writers have suffered losses in both existential and social terms. this has moreover not been helped, according to mittenzwei, by defectors from their own ranks, by so-called ‘hateproducers’ and anti-patriots like monika maron (p. 466). of especial concern to mittenzwei is the lack of solidarity among east germany’s writers that has meant that some of the heaviest artillery fired at east german writers has been issued from other east germans. there is certainly some truth to the assertion that there were many impassioned battles fought between east german intellectuals such as the spat between monika maron and stefan heym over the ‘bad table-manners’ of the east german people. however, public disagreements served rather to increase the visibility of east german intellectuals, even if they did highlight the lack of unity among the country’s new intellectual classes. of east germany’s writers and intellectuals, christa wolf is one of the few icons still standing in 2004. in 1996 she had her moment of reckoning with her critics when she published an allegorical novel about the mythical figure of medea. in medea the greek heroine, who flees from a repressive regime in her home of colchis into exile in the more prosperous but corrupt corinth, is cleansed of her mythical qualities as the portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 28 murderer of her children (1996). instead, she is portrayed as an object of hatred and envy and the innocent victim of a ruthless public conspiracy to ostracize her. by the time of the publication of her second post-unification novel, leibhaftig, in 2002, the critics seemed willing to absolve her of her sins of the past, and the reviews of the book were predominantly positive. wolf still believes, however, that east german writers have not faired well under a unified germany. in a recent spiegel article, she admits that unlike many of her compatriots she has had the good fortune of retaining much of her readership. there are, she remarks, countless good east german writers of the post-war period whose works are no longer in print. the example she cites of a writer whose views do not suit the political climate of the time is irmtraud morgner (2003). it is also worth noting in this context the relative absence in more recent public debate of many east german intellectuals who were among the most outspoken commentators of the day in 1990, writers and commentators such as monika maron. instead, the arts and review pages are more likely to publish the essays of younger writers who grew up in the east and started publishing after 1989. this generation of writer arguably comes with less ideological baggage, and its representatives regularly write features for the frankfurter allgemeine zeitung on topics not strictly related to day-to-day politics. in 2002 thomas e. schmidt observed in die zeit on the occasion of the publication of the latest work by günter grass: ‘something is coming to an end’ (2002). as we witness a changing of the literary guard, the role of the public writer as public intellectual that the ‘group 47’ arrogated to itself will become increasingly hard to sustain, as the succession of public debates throughout the nineties has shown. looking back over the first decade since unification it would appear that the more pessimistic predictions of a ‘stock market crash’ in the value of literature and the intellectual have only partially come true. the first decade of unification represented for many previously ‘engaged’ east german writers such as christa wolf, christoph hein, volker braun and stefan heym a difficult period of readjustment during which they lost their privileges, much of their readership, some their publishers and all of their special links to power. for dissident writers such as monika maron, jürgen fuchs and wolf biermann, who had already severed their links to the regime before 1989, unification provided a small window of opportunity in which to cultivate a new readership, among east germans as well as west germans. however, the early portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 29 honeymoon phase when the german media sought out and published opinion pieces from east german intellectuals such as maron was relatively short-lived. both groups of east german writers have been forced to seek new public roles for themselves, new modes of operating in the public sphere and to woo new audiences for their political views as well as their works. adapting to the conditions of the west german media and publishing industry has not been easy. no longer were east german writers the high priests of culture and the sooth-sayers of the nation, having been forced to return to being mere writers of literature. the broad group of writers like christa wolf and stefan heym that stayed in the gdr, found themselves in a situation where they were no longer showered with state subsidies to write, with their works exposed for the first time to the forces of the free market. those writers denied publishing rights under the communists, also found the adjustment difficult, despite obvious advantages of being free from censorship restrictions. with few exceptions, the exponents of dissidence and reform that were vocal during 1989 and 1990 have subsequently been pushed to the margins of the media and the literature industry. towards the end of the millennium, the publishing industry proclaimed triumphantly the emergence of a new entertaining german literature and a new generation of ‘young, chic and cheerful’ stars (herzinger 1999). constantly on the look out for new talent and fresh faces to promote, the arts pages of the print media discovered first ‘das fräuleinwunder’ (hage 1999a) and then the ‘boy wonder’ in a new generation of writer, who is neither east nor west (hage 1999b). the main asset of the new ‘boy’ and ‘girl wonders’ of literature, who quickly acquired cult status, young writers such as benjamin lebert, judith hermann, karen duve, judith hermann and zoe jenny, was said to be their ability to write light-hearted, readable literature, literature above all that was not fixated on the past and perennial ‘german’ themes. the end of the cold war and communism spelt the demise of the paradigm of the socialist public intellectual and his or her affiliation with state socialism. this meant perforce a partial disengagement with politics, which was a necessary price to pay for democratisation. although the detachment from discredited socialist utopias was for most of east germany’s intellectuals a painful process, it was necessary for the ‘normalization’ of germany in a post-communist era. neither the ideal of socialism, portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 30 nor the practice of really existing socialism held out any realistic promise of redemption. the notion of a socialist alternative to the capitalist west that had led to what i have called elsewhere a ‘hopelessly depressive-paranoid sense of national identity’ among socialist intellectuals in the east was recognised for the illusion it was (lewis 1992, p. 260). the repositioning of the literary field that has occurred since was inevitable. it did not however result in a total separation of powers – the separation that bohrer called for in 1990 – between literature and politics. what occurred instead was a repositioning of the literary field to incorporate a greater diversity of themes and styles, greater pluralism in literary approaches and political habitus. this does not mean that the writer cannot simultaneously be a concerned intellectual, when the occasion arises and calls for. but it does mean that the writer has become in the main a professional and a specialist. perhaps the most telling indication that engaged writers like günter grass are an obsolete breed — a type of self-confessed ‘dinosaur’ — can be seen from a dialogue between grass and the french sociologist, pierre bourdieu about the role of critical european intellectuals — and the tradition of ‘opening one’s mouth’ — published in le monde and republished in die zeit (le monde 4 december 1999, para. 1). it was now rare, remarked grass, that intellectuals from different specializations, such as a writer and a sociologist, should cross paths and converse in public about politics. two conclusions can be drawn from the exchange in the context of this discussion. first, the interview provides a tentative answer to the question raised earlier whether germans are becoming more ‘normal’ and more like their european counterparts. according to grass german intellectuals are a sectarian lot; it would be common, he argues, to find philosophers in one corner of the room, sociologists in another and writers all alone in the backroom (para. 2). this would seem to indicate that the engagement of a writer of fiction in the public arena has become an anomaly in germany as well. the second point that can be made is that grass evidently is one of the few exceptions to the rule of non-engagement. judging from the pessimistic predictions of a loss of activism on the part of writers made in the interview, it would seem unlikely that successive generations will take over from grass and build their careers on public engagement. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 31 journalist and literary scholar richard herzinger contended in 1999 that, despite considerable convergences, there were still substantial differences between the german and american publishing industries. whilst in america the writer was an individualist, in germany the writer continued to be regarded as a ‘promoter of national values and identity’ (para. 19). even though german writers were taking their first tentative steps as individualists in 1999, he reminds his readers that germans still have a significantly different concept of the social role that literature has to play than their american counterparts (para. 18). he warns that any attempts to forcibly ‘modernise’ the german publishing industry by declaring a new affirmative literature written by a sexy new generation of cosmopolitan, profoundly un-german writers, will inevitably fail (para. 18). one of the effects of the ‘literary fräuleinwunder’ debates in 1999 has been to shift the co-ordinates of the literary field even further in the direction of a cosmopolitan, americanised understanding of literature and the role of the writer. this has hastened the disappearance of the writer as a universal intellectual and focused attention on the writer as an individualist and a professional. today’s youngest generation of writer in germany is a specialist intellectual who intervenes in political and social matters from time to time but who is not expected to take a moral-ethical stance on most issues of national and international concern. s/he is one who frequently writes about personal subjects, but may also occasionally, as witnessed after september 11, turn his or her pen to topics of global concern as in terrorism and islam. more often than not, however, writers now leave the work of commenting on political affairs to writers of the older guard and to other ‘senior’ specialist intellectuals such as the veteran philosopher and sociologist jürgen habermas. reference list anz, t. (ed.) 1991, ‘es geht nicht um christa wolf’: die literatur im vereinten deutschland, edition spangenberg, munich. bathrick, d. 1995, the powers of speech: the politics of culture in the gdr, university of nebraska press, lincoln and london. bauman, z. 2001, ‘private morality, immoral world,’ the individualized society, polity, cambridge. bohrer, k. h. 1990a, ‘kulturschutzgebiet ddr?,’ merkur 44.10/11, p. 1015-1018. bohrer, k. h. 1990b, ‘die ästhetik am ausgang ihrer unmündigkeit,’ merkur 44.10, pp. 851-65. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 32 bohrer, k. h. 1990c, ‘und die erinnerungen der beiden halbnationen?’ merkur 44.3, pp. 183-188. böll, h. 1978, ‘einigkeit der einzelgänger (1970),’ in: essayistische schriften und reden 2, kiepenheuer & witsch, cologne, pp. 482-485. böll, h. 1980, ‘einmischung erwünscht (1973),’ in: essayistische schriften und reden 3, kiepenheuer & witsch, cologne, pp. 22-26. bourdieu, p. 1989, ‘im osten erwacht die geschichte,’ liber 1.2, p. 3. ‘pierre bourdieu et günter grass: la tradition < d’ouvrir sa guile>,’ le monde interactif [online], 4 december 1999. available: http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,2320,seq-2234-33212-quo.00.html [accessed 20 november 2000] emmerich, w. 1991, ‘affirmation – utopie – melancholie: versuch einer bilanz von vierzig jahren ddr-literatur,’ german studies review (1991), pp. 325-344. evans, r. j. 1989, in hitler’s shadow: west german historians and the attempt to escape from the nazi past, tauris, london. foucault, m. 1984, ‘truth and power,’ in: the foucault reader (ed.) paul rabinow, penguin, harmondsworth, pp. 51-75 greiner, u. 1990a, ‘mangel an feingefühl,’ die zeit, 1 june, in anz, t. (ed.) 1991, ‘es geht nicht um christa wolf’, pp. 66-70. greiner, u. 1990b, ‘die deutsche gesinnungsästhetik,’ die zeit, 1 november, quoted in anz, t. (ed.) 1991, ‘es geht nicht um christa wolf’, pp. 208-216. hage, v. 1999a, ‘literarisches fräuleinwunder: ganz schön abgedreht,’ der spiegel 22 march, pp. 244-246. hage, v. 1999b, ‘die enkel kommen,’ der spiegel 11 october, pp. 244-254. herzinger, r. 1999, ‘jung, schick und heiter,’ die zeit 13 [online]. available: die zeit archiv [accessed 29 may 2004] heym, s. 1989a, ‘hurra für den pöbel,’ der spiegel, 6 november, pp. 30-31. heym, s. 1989b, ‘aufruf ‘für unser land,’’ berlin, 26 november. available: http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/dokumente/diedeutscheeinheit_aufruffuerunser land [accessed 16 may 2004] heym, s. 1989c, ‘aschermittwoch in der ddr,’ der spiegel, 4 december, pp. 55 – 58. huyssen, a. 1991. ‘after the wall: the failure of the intellectuals,’ new german critique 52, pp. 109-143. kant, i. 1922, ‘beantwortung der frage: ‘was ist aufklärung?’ (1784),’ werke in 11 bänden, eds. artur buchenau and ernst cassirer, vol 4: schriften 1783 1788, bruno cassirer verlag, berlin, pp.167-176. königsdorf, h. 1990, ‘der schmerz über das eigene versagen,’ die zeit, 8 june, p. 14. lau, j. 1999, ‘die verräter sind unter uns,’ die zeit, no. 17 [online]. available: die zeit archiv [accessed 26 may 2004] lepsius, r. 2001, ‘die deutsche vereinigung: ereignisse, optionen und entscheidungen,’ in der vereinigungsschock. vergleichende betrachtungen zehn jahre danach, ed. w. schluchter and p. e. quint, velbrück wissenschaft, weilersweit, p. 39-63. lewis, a. 1992, ‘the writers, their socialism, the people and their bad table manners: the crisis of east german writers and intellectuals,’ german studies review 15.2, p. 243-266. portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 33 http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/dokumente/diedeutscheeinheit_aufruffuerunserland http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/dokumente/diedeutscheeinheit_aufruffuerunserland lewis, a. 2001, ‘der prenzlauer berg zwischen autonomem untergrund und stasisimulation,’ internationales archiv für sozialgeschichte der deutschen literatur 26.1, p. 58-87. lewis, a. 2003, die kunst des verrats, königshausen & neumann, würzburg. maron, m. 1993, ‘das neue elend der intellektuellen,’ nach maßgabe meiner begreifungskraft. artikel und essays, fischer, frankfurt am main, pp. 80-90. moses, d. 2000, ‘die 45er: eine generation zwischen faschismus und demokratie,’ neue sammlung 40.2, pp. 233-263. moses, d. 2001, ‘coming to terms with genocidal pasts in comparative perspective: germany and australia,’ aboriginal history 25, pp. 91-115. mittenzwei, w. 2003, die intellektuellen: literatur und politik in ostdeutschland 1945-2000, aufbau, berlin and weimar. raddatz, f. j. 1993, ‘von der beschädigung der literatur durch ihre urheber,’ die zeit 28 january in vinke, h. 1993, akteneinsicht christa wolf: zerrspiegel und dialog: eine documentation, luchterhand, hamburg, pp. 168-171. reifarth, g. 2003, die macht der märchen, königshausen & neumann, würzburg. schelsky, h. 1963, die skeptische generation: eine soziologie der deutschen jugend, eugen diederichs, düsseldorf. scherpe, k. r. 1996, ‘moral im ästhetischen: andersch, weiss, enzensberger,’ weimarer beiträge 42.1, pp. 109-126. schirrmacher, f. 1990, ‘”dem druck des härteren, strengeren lebens standhalten,”’ frankfurter allgemeine zeitung 2. june in anz, t. ed. 1991, ’es geht nicht um christa wolf’, pp. 77-89. schirrmacher, f. 1991, ‘verdacht und verrat. die stasi-vergangenheit verändert die literarische szene,’ frankfurter allgemeine zeitung 5th november, reprinted in michael, k. & böthig, p. 1993, machtspiele, rowohlt, berlin, pp. 304-308. schirrmacher, f. 1993, ‘literatur und staatssicherheit,’ 28 january 1993 in vinke, h. 1993, akteneinsicht christa wolf: zerrspiegel und dialog: eine documentation, luchterhand, hamburg, pp. 161-162. schnibben, c. 2001, ‘stehen die türme noch? warum weltanschauung nach dem 11. september für intellektuelle ein schwieriges geschäft geworden ist,’ der spiegel 47, pp. 223-24. schmidt, t. e. 2002 ‘ostpreußischer totentanz,’ die zeit [online] 15 february [accessed 16 february 2002] wolf, c. 1990, was bleibt, luchterhand, darmstadt & neuwied. wolf, c. 1994, ‘sprache der wende: rede auf dem alexanderplatz,’ in auf dem weg nach tabou: texte 1990-1994, kiepenheuer & witsch, cologne, pp. 11-13. wolf, c. 1996, medea, dtv, munich. wolf, c. 2002, leibhaftig, luchterhand, darmstadt. wolf, c. 2003, ‘jeder tag ist eine erzählung,’ der spiegel 37 [online]. available: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,264727,00.html [accessed 22 may 2004] portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 34 http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,264727,00.html alison lewis, the university of melbourne writers and politics in east and west germany 1945-1989 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 18, no. 1/2 sep 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: goldenberg, n. 2022. the contemporary deconstruction of religion: how current scholarship in religious studies is changing methods and theories. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 18:1/2, 70–78. https:// doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i12.7807 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal research article (peer reviewed) the contemporary deconstruction of religion: how current scholarship in religious studies is changing methods and theories naomi goldenberg corresponding author(s): professor naomi goldenberg, faculty of arts, university of ottawa, 55 laurier ave. e, ottawa, on k1n 6n5, canada, naomi4339@rogers.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7807 article history: received 02/07/2021; accepted 27/02/2022; published 27/09/2022 abstract my paper has three goals: 1) to introduce and outline the field of ‘critical religion’; 2) to set out my contribution to this field by explaining how and why religions should be considered ‘vestigial states’; and 3) to suggest ways in which the approach to the topic of religious synthesis in india might be influenced by critical religion in general and vestigial state theory in particular. i argue that ‘religion’ as an ahistorical, eternal, indefinable category— what roland barthes called ‘depoliticized’ speech—warrants energetic critique. to this end, i survey a variety of theorists whose work deconstructs ‘religion’ and attendant binaries such as religious/secular and religion/politics. i maintain that religions function as vestigial states within contemporary states. by ‘vestigial states’ i mean practices and institutions originating in particular histories as survivals of former sovereignties. these remnants are tolerated as attenuated jurisdictions within fully functioning states. these vestigial states (religions) are always somewhat problematic because they compete with contemporary states—especially if they challenge the present state’s right to control violence. however, religions also work to ground the governments that authorize them by recalling earlier, mystified forms of sovereignty. moreover, religions are useful because they can be depicted as less progressive versions of power. thus do ‘religions,’ understood as vestigial states, both disturb and maintain current regimes. i conclude with some speculations on how insights derived from critical religion might impact work on conceptualizing ‘religious synthesis’ in india specifically and ‘interreligious’ interactions more generally in a global context. keywords critical religion; religion as vestigial state; deconstruction of religion; religion as modern category; religion as political category; modi’s use of religion 70 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7807 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7807 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7807 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:naomi4339@rogers.com https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7807 ‘the concept of religion,’ writes s. n. balagangadhara, ‘is “inapplicable” because that which is designated by the term “religion” in the west is absent from the cultures of asia’ (balagangadhara 1994: 314). such is the central contention that balagangadhara proposes in his substantial book titled ‘the heathen in his blindness…’: asia, the west and the dynamic of religion. in this volume, and in his and his colleagues’ subsequent writings, balagangadhara elaborates his thesis that ‘religion’ is an alien category that is inaccurately applied in asian contexts. some of the related arguments advanced in these works are: that the ‘religion’ of hinduism is a creation of the west; that christianity is the model into which indian culture is forced, distorted and then judged; that western secularism is another version of christianity and is not applicable to indian culture; and that the west spreads ‘religion’ by eroding the otherness of the other (balagangadhara 2012; bloch et al. 2010). balagangadhara’s work can be considered a benchmark in the discipline of religious studies, near the beginning of what daniel dubuisson refers to as ‘a veritable scientific revolution in many north american universities along with their british counterparts’ (dubuisson 2019a: 1). although balagangadhara was teaching in ghent at the time he wrote his magnum opus, his thinking about india and the trajectory of theory in which he participates has, as dubuisson writes, mostly developed in the united states, canada and the united kingdom. in the invention of religions (2019a,) and in his original french version, l’invention des religions (2019b), dubuisson synthesizes the principal themes of ‘the revolution’ and emphasizes its importance in order to enlarge the purview of this way of thinking and to bring it to the attention of a greater number of religious studies scholars. my objective in this essay is somewhat similar to dubuisson’s. i want to promote what i refer to in my title as the contemporary deconstruction of religion to researchers and theorists outside the field of religious studies. i contend that both research projects and public policy initiatives would benefit if work that dismantles the idea of religion as a universal and ancient phenomenon were more widely known. in order to further this aim, i will set out the framework of what has emerged as a controversial sub-field of religious studies, now often referred to as ‘critical religion,’ explain the focus of my own contribution to it, and briefly speculate on the possible relevance that this critical approach to ‘religion’ might have on scholarship about contemporary politics in india. my appreciation of critical religion began in 2001 when i heard robert j. baird refer to balagangadhara’s work at a panel titled ‘religious history and the construction of modernity.’ baird cited the heathen in his blindness to support his view that ‘religion’ is not ‘really real,’ but rather is constructed by historical discourse that warrants energetic critique (baird 2001; goldenberg 2019a). my understanding of the scope and implications of realizing that religion is a fiction—in the latin sense of the verb fingere, meaning to fashion, to shape, to compose—soon became the focus of my academic work. perhaps i should stress that not believing that religion is a given fact is different from not believing in god or gods. both atheists and theists tend to maintain that there is something called ‘religion’ that has, in one form or another, forever been a part of human life and that now is expressed in different ‘traditions’ throughout the world (touna 2017). the contemporary critical approach to religion, i.e. critical religion, takes issue with this characterization of religion and religious traditions as phenomena that have existed throughout the centuries. theorists of critical religion see ‘religion’ as a modern category that is used to impose an order on ideas, behaviours and groups for various, largely political, reasons. this could be considered a first tenet of critical religion. the website of my department of classics and religious studies at the university of ottawa recently stated that religion has existed ‘since the dawn of time.’ this is not an uncommon descriptive phrase that expresses the conventional idea that religion has always been present in some variety or other everywhere that human beings have lived. prehistoric cave paintings, burial customs and various architectural configurations are often cited as evidence that the earliest peoples who have left traces of their existence had goldenberg portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202271 ‘religion.’ critical religion, on the other hand, maintains that ‘religion’ is a recent idea that is read back into history as an anachronism. if ‘religion’ is assumed to be a universal, timeless and infinitely varied phenomenon, evidence for it is easy to find in ancient texts and artifacts that are imputed to demonstrate ‘religion’ in its earlier forms. however, there are several authors who effectively contest the presence of ‘religion’ in ancient texts. for example, in imagine no religion: how modern abstractions hide ancient realities (2016), carlin barton and daniel boyarin dispute the claim that early latin and greek writers who use the words religio and threskeia are expressing any idea that even roughly corresponds to ‘religion’ as the term is currently used. an especially accessible book titled before religion: a history of a modern concept (2013) by brent nongbri makes the same point more generally. nongbri shows that the oldest texts in greek, roman, jewish and muslim literature that supposedly mention ‘religion’ are in fact referring to rules, regulations, customs or ceremonial practices that do not at all correspond with the present-day notion of religion. he urges historians to verify the translations of the texts they use in research to avoid distortions. ‘religion,’ he insists, ‘was not a concept in ancient cultures’ (nongbri 2013: 152). similarly, balagangadhara points out that writings—‘from vedas through upanishads to puranas’—first became classified as ‘religious’ texts through the efforts of christian missionaries (balagangadhara 1994: 116). the ‘religionization’ of non-european cultures throughout the globe is a burgeoning area of religious studies research (chidester 1996; fitzgerald 2007; horii 2018; king 1999; wenger 2009). that ‘religion’ is a term and technology of eurocentric colonialism that has been exported through conquest and colonial encounters can be usefully thought of as a second tenet of critical religion. among theorists of critical religion, analysis of the british presence in india serves as a template for this genre of religious studies scholarship in which detailed histories of the interface of european colonists with the elites of indigenous social strata are investigated and unravelled. dubuisson’s summary of richard king’s thesis about the construction of hinduism as a religion is an example of how ‘colonial encounters’ that produce ‘religion’ tend to be theorized: … for king, what catalyzed and finished this movement [i.e. ‘national’ hinduism] remains the encounter with the british empire and the fact that european colonists favored the ideas of a unique indian society and religion. … [t]he modern notion of hinduism, he writes, was initially conceived by foreign observers … but … it emerged from the colonial encounter between indians and europeans, especially the british. the expression ‘colonial encounter’ is there to forcefully underline the fact that hinduism is not a unilateral european invention that was plastered onto a passive indian reality, but rather a result of the dynamic encounter of, on the one hand, urbanized and cultivated social groups belonging to the indian elite and, on the other hand, the influences brought by western missionaries, administrators, and scholars. (dubuisson 2019a: 131) a process similar to the ‘religionizing’ of india described by dubuisson and king has been proposed by religious studies scholars who work in other regions. for example, in savage systems: colonialism and comparative religion in south africa (1996), david chidester shows how religion developed in southern africa in stages. at first, europeans arriving in africa remarked on there being no religion in such a ‘primitive’ place. after a time, however, they found african practices that roughly resembled religion. next, they decided that africans did indeed have a rudimentary form of religion. and finally, missionaries worked to convert africans from their crude ‘native’ religion, to christianity, the one true faith. in this narrative, christianity is posited as the pinnacle of religious evolution in a preordained progression that attests to christian superiority and fundamental, eternal truth. the conjectured evolution of religion to its proposed highest form in christianity relates to a third tenet of critical religion: namely, that a ‘world religions discourse’ favouring christian hegemony is now dominant in political, academic and ecclesial contexts. according to world religions discourse, there are at present goldenberg portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202272 myriad forms of ‘religion’ whose existence testifies to the universality of the concept. although new world religions are always appearing, there are basically the big five—christianity, judaism, islam, hinduism and buddhism—each of which has some commonality with christianity, in regard to texts, personnel, ideology or sets of practices. historians differ as to when this notion about the ubiquity yet underlying similarity of religions began as a nascent trope in european intellectual history. nongbri traces it to the work of samuel purchas and alexander ross in the seventeenth century (nongbri 2013: 119); while tomoko masuzawa attributes it to the writings of ernst troeltsch in the nineteenth (masuzawa 2005: 319–320). the result of this widespread and seemingly well-intentioned world religions discourse is a homogeneity of historical and political discourse that a growing number of scholars find intellectually stifling (cotter & robertson 2016). in her widely-quoted book, the invention of world religions: or, how european universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism (2005), masuzawa calls world religions discourse a: well-rehearsed terrain ... where historians strive to recover the genius of each “tradition,” where comparativists attempt to demonstrate diversity, plurality and affinity among traditions, and where theologians seek to confess and to confirm the absoluteness of their limited particular tradition when they are among their own kind and, when with others, speak the language of ecumenical empathy, and where, in the end, all parties claim to believe in the authenticity of experience and in the deep unity of all religions in their universal yearning for spirituality and for something like world peace … such is the state of the world maintained and suspended by the discourse of world religions. (masuzawa 2005: 320). masuzawa’s insightful description of the sanguine uniformity and stasis that is enforced by world religions discourse gives rise to the question of what the paradigm might be hiding. what possible avenues of inquiry and analysis are foreclosed by assuming that religion is a given, ‘natural’ and fairly consistent fact that exists in an array of forms throughout the globe? tenet number four of critical religion theory addresses this question. a cogent statement of what i am calling tenet number four is provided by william cavanaugh in the myth of religious violence (2009). cavanaugh writes: ‘what counts as religious or secular in any given context is a function of different configurations of power’ (cavanaugh 2009: 4). if theorists or researchers take cavanaugh’s statement as their starting point instead of the conventional framework of world religions discourse, the categories of religion and secularity are de-essentialized and approached as contingent and historical discursive classifications that are determined by politics. religion, accordingly, becomes a narrative taxon, a strategic technology of order that confers power and serves the interests of specific groups depending, as cavanaugh implies, on the particular context in which it has meaning and impact. this is different from saying that religion can serve political purposes; it is rather an assertion that religion exists only as a political creation. in other writing, i have stated the principle as ‘the religious is political’ (goldenberg 2021). following this line of argument, what is hidden by world religions discourse are the ‘different configurations of power’ that are made invisible by attributing a non-contingent, ahistorical thereness to religion as an omnipresent phenomenon. my contribution to the analysis of religion as a wholly political category is to develop the hypothesis that religions ought to be imagined and discussed as vestigial states (goldenberg 2021; 2020; 2019a; 2019b; 2018a; 2018b; 2015.) i am suggesting this far-reaching and ambitious argument as a path to building better theory. of course, specialists who find the hypothesis useful will have to assess it in relation to specific histories and ideological contexts. nevertheless, there is value in what i am proposing as a way of illuminating the conditions and motivations that give rise to the continued creation, re-creation, citation and performance of ‘religion’ along with its putative cognates and opposites. the two key words in the phrase ‘vestigial state’ warrant comment and deconstruction. i am using ‘state’ in a general sense to mean government, sovereignty, or ruling authority. i rely on an oft-cited and frequently goldenberg portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202273 re-issued benchmark text in international law by james crawford titled the creation of states in international law (2007) to support my usage. crawford defines a state with six broad criteria that can be condensed down to two: 1) jurisdiction in regard to territory and/or population and 2) effective authority over such jurisdiction (crawford 2007: 37–95). the word ‘vestigial’ falls short of what i would like it to convey. i want the term to conjure a janus-like quality that references both the past and time to come. ‘once and future state’ comes closer to the meaning i’m seeking. colleagues and correspondents have suggested ‘states in waiting,’ and ‘states in hibernation’ as other possibilities. for now, i’ll stay with vestigial and its connotation of something that remains after being superseded by other structures. ideally, i want ‘vestigial’ to convey a dynamism, a quality of aspiration based on former, either real or imagined, status. the key difference between vestigial states that i am naming religions and the fully-functioning states in which the vestigial varieties exist is the control of physical violence. as max weber pointed out a hundred years ago, dominion over legalized violence is the one power that a state always reserves for itself (weber [1919] 2004). fully-functioning states have jurisdiction over police violence, military violence and also violence-in-waiting, such as that required to enforce the decisions made by courts of law. in contemporary western democracies, when institutions termed religious turn to violence, the label religion is applied to them only reluctantly. note how words and phrases like islamist, political islam, militant islam and fundamentalist islam are used to separate the so-called religion of islam from something else that is not islam because it employs violence. there is more to be said when and in what cases fully functioning states permit religions, i.e. vestigial states, to use violence. governments sometimes cede specific jurisdiction pertaining to what is called ‘family law’ to religious tribunals, panels or quasi-courts. such a practice actually gives the vestigial state some influence concerning legalized violence in two ways. first, the mechanisms of enforcement of court decisions pertaining to divorce, child custody and marital property are placed at the disposal of the state within the state; and second, instances of ‘family’ violence such as spousal assault may be addressed according to interpretations of what is called ‘religious’ law. jurisdiction over the familial thus becomes an important (and at times jealously guarded) power base for religious authority (goldenberg 2020). viewing religions as vestigial states disturbs the highly problematic but continually reiterated notion that state and religion, however defined, refer to distinct and separate spheres of ideation and activity. by highlighting the unstable and contradictory power dynamics behind the evolution and classification of what is thought of as religious in particular contexts, as opposed to what isn’t, i hope to clarify how the term religion has become part of the machinery of contemporary statecraft. demystifying religion in this way could foster clearer and more effective thinking in both scholarship and public policy. in classes and public lectures in which i set out my theory of religions as vestigial states, i frequently begin with this statement: ‘there is no religion in the bible’ (goldenberg 2018b).1 although biblical texts describe events, activities, laws and functionaries that have come to be grouped under the heading of ‘religion,’ this classification is imposed long after the creation and compilation of the texts themselves. religion, like automobiles, airplanes and computers had not yet been invented. rather than narratives about individuals and groups interacting in arenas of life that we now might try to delineate as secular or religious, clerical or political, ecclesial or governmental, in the bible we are presented with stories and reports in which these distinctions have no meaning. 1 in one sense, this sentence is an accepted truism in biblical studies since hebrew bible and new testament scholars state freely and often that religion as a separable category of identity, behavior and/or ideology did not exist in biblical times. however, paradoxically the same scholars then usually blithely proceed to ignore their own insight and continue to use the word religion as if its meaning has been unchanged throughout the centuries (goldenberg 2018b: 14–19). goldenberg portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202274 i argue that god in the hebrew bible is a vivid personification of communal allegiance and governmental authority. the same argument applies to the new testament. for decades, scholars have pointed out that given the extant narratives about the life of jesus, the romans got him right: jesus was challenging their sovereignty. matthew 22:21, the text that advises rendering to caesar what is caesar’s and to god what is ‘his,’ is only anachronistically interpreted as a directive to separate ‘religion’ from the ‘state.’ the passage is more accurately construed as a call for sedition (aslan 2013: 146–159, 240–241). key to the hypothesis that thinking about religions as vestigial, or once and future, states is that the term and concept of religion evolves as a way of coping with an important shift in governing structures. such changes have often taken place when a territory is invaded and conquered by another group. if the aggressors do not completely drive out or kill all of the local population, the conquered people might be allowed to continue with their cultures and institutions in attenuated and monitored forms. prior governmental arrangements are granted limited recognition and circumscribed power. the now marginalized group can live on practicing what gains traction over time as the notion of ‘religion.’ this process has roots that pre-date biblical history. for example, in hesiod’s theogony, uranos becomes a remote and well-meaning counsellor after he is literally castrated by the titans. in aeschylus’ eumenides, athena disempowers the furies but gives them a limited jurisdiction below the ground and promises that they will be acknowledged with ritual honours. to use the word religion in reference to the succession of deities described by hesiod and aeschylus would be anachronistic. nevertheless, the process of displacing while continuing to reference weakened deities who represent former sovereignties pertains to the development i’m tracing (goldenberg 2015: 284). the diminishment of the druids from being masters of gaul as recounted by julius caesar to their present status as conveners of a minor religion in the u.k. is another illustration. caesar describes the druids as arbiters of ‘public and private’ disagreements as well as authorities over sacrifices and ‘divine’ matters. his writing shows that in gaul what he thought of as ‘religion’ was not distinct from government (goldenberg 2015: 285). several scholars, such as the aforementioned brent nongbri, have pointed out that so-called religious rites and practices in greece and rome are co-extensive with the governing state (nongbri 2013: 138–139). after the romans invaded gaul, the druids retained power only over iona and other small territories. their spheres of influence were limited to whatever a succession of roman authorities allowed. over the centuries, druidism evolved into being considered a ‘religion;’ although it lacked official recognition as such. the druid network had to wait until 2010 to be legally named a ‘religion’ in england and wales (owen & taira 2015; goldenberg 2015: 285). jewish history illustrates the usefulness of the category of religion for both dominant and subjugated states. i cite the work of scholars such as leora batnitzky (2011) and daniel boyarin (2004; 2019) to show that the creation of jewishness j religion was broughlt about by the vanquishing, displacement, marginalization and colonization by successive empires of a group that then loosely and ambiguously coheres around the evolving category of judaism. as the institutional mechanism of religion became available, both jews and their imperial rulers used it for containment and survival. the discursive production of theological and philosophical differences should, i think, be seen as secondary to the uneven and complicated political manoeuvrings that take place over centuries between jews and a sequence of empires— i.e. assyrians, babylonians, persians, greeks, egyptians, romans and more contemporary dominating sovereignties. in this account of the origins of religion, a group becomes a religion because of displacement by a governing authority that grants it the status of attenuated – i. e. ‘vestigial’ – state. contemporary israel demonstrates that a vestigial state can be transformed into a dominant state with formidable military capability (goldenberg: 2015, 286). goldenberg portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202275 curiously, so-called ‘secular’ governments often ritually cite the deified authorities of vestigial states to justify contemporary power. president eisenhower’s move in 1954 to add the words ‘under god’ to the us pledge of allegiance is an instance of how a generalized reference to a deity as a previous and more exalted sovereign is employed to validate a government in contrast to ‘godless’ communism. the canadian constitution, adopted in 1982, opens with the words ‘whereas canada is founded on principles that recognize the supremacy of god and the rule of law …’ (constitution act 1982). this statement shows that in 1982, although canada was ready to distance itself from britain by enacting an independent, foundational document, in order to take that mature step, language indicating subordination to a different yet putatively superior entity, was still necessary. the words ‘supremacy of god’ function in the canadian constitution as a metaphor for britain. the theistic reference that now authorizes the canadian state is thus a nostalgic substitute for canada’s former cbbolonial master. i’ll briefly mention one last example of how ‘religion’ can be deployed to manage and negotiate the dislocation of a people. tenzin gyatso, the 14th dalai lama, is currently making brilliant use of the concept of ‘religion’ in his dealings with china. august 8, 2011 marked the official recognition of lopsang sangay as kalon tripa or prime minister of the central tibetan administration in dharmsala. on this occasion, the dalai lama declared that his ‘religious’ functions were now separated from the duties of a political leader who had been democratically chosen. ‘this is in keeping with the trend everywhere around the world to move towards democracy,’ he said (gyatso 2011; goldenberg 2015: 289). he no longer retained the ‘political leadership’ that he ‘inherited’ at the age of sixteen. the tibetan people, he proclaimed, were now ‘the masters of tibet and not—[that is, instead of ]—the religious heads or their heirs. … i always state that it is wrong for religious leaders to hold political positions. … i will continue to strongly speak about the importance of the separation of religion and politics’ (gyatso 2011; goldenberg 2015:289). the swearing in of the kalon tripa as a ‘political’ leader transforms the position of the present dalai lama who now becomes a wholly religious authority. an intended result is that the powers of future dalai lamas will be confined to what is considered religion. even if the chinese government accomplishes its objective of influencing the choice of the next dalai lama by manipulating the panchen lama, the stature of the now merely ‘religious’ leader will be lessened. the dalai lama as head of a ‘religion’ will have authority over a variety of tibetan buddhism that is no longer recognized as equivalent to tibet as a state in exile. in this way, contemporary tibetan buddhism is being presented as what i would call a vestigial state, i.e., a ‘religion,’ in order to contest the chinese claim to sovereignty over the tibetan people (goldenberg 2015: 289). at the beginning of this essay, i promised to speculate on the relevance of the deconstruction of religion in general and the theory of religions as vestigial states in particular to current politics in india. indologists who find this trajectory of thinking useful will of course be able to provide more productive lines of argument than i. nevertheless, i offer three possible applications of the theories i have outlined here to contemporary india. 1. narenda modi is employing the ‘religion’ of hinduism as a nostalgic referent to a mystified, glorified and supposedly ancient sovereignty in order to strengthen his authority and that of the government he heads. by claiming an authenticity that transcends current legal frameworks, he is attempting to garner popular support for policies that favour hindus as constituents of a grand and deified ruling order. this use of ‘religion’ warrants deconstruction and critique. 2. by undertaking the suppression of muslims as a minority, modi is, in a sense, acknowledging that he considers the ‘religion’ of islam to be a competitive sovereignty. perhaps realizing that clashes between hindus and muslims pertain to types of governance would clarify what is at stake in particular contexts and make conflicts seem more manageable and amenable to compromise. goldenberg portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202276 3. on a utopian note, if religions were more widely understood as contingent, historical constructions of alternative governments rather than as fundamental, rigid and essential components of personhood and community, individuals and groups might be encouraged to be less defensive and more open to those who are now portrayed as representing unique and mystified differences. such an outcome would require scholars, journalists and 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taira, t. 2015, ‘the category of “religion” in public classification: charity registration of the druid network in england and wales’ in religion as a category of governance and sovereignty (eds) t. stack, n. goldenberg & t. fitzgerald, brill, leiden: 90–114. https://doi. org/10.1163/9789004290594_006 touna, v. 2017, fabrications of the greek past: religion, tradition and the making of modern identities. brill, leiden. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004348615 weber, m. 2004 [1919], ‘politics as a vocation’ in the vocation lectures, (eds) d. owen & t. b. strong (trans) r. livingstone, hackett publishing co., indianapolis: 32–94. wenger, t. j. 2009, we have a religion: the 1920’s pueblo indian dance controversy and american religious freedom. university of north carolina press, chapel hill. goldenberg portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202278 https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.39758 https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.39758 https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.40964 https://doi.org/10.1558/equinox.35417 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315616063-2 http://tibet.net/2011/08/12/his-holines-the-dalai-lamas-speech-at-the-swearing-in-ceremony-of-the-kalon-tripa-lopsang-sangay http://tibet.net/2011/08/12/his-holines-the-dalai-lamas-speech-at-the-swearing-in-ceremony-of-the-kalon-tripa-lopsang-sangay https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226922621.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300154160.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300154160.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004290594_006 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004290594_006 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004348615 outcaste or internal exile portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ outcaste or internal exile? ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan timothy amos, australian national university introduction exile is one of the saddest fates. in pre-modern times banishment was a particularly dreadful punishment since it not only meant years of aimless wandering away from family and familiar places, but also meant being a sort of permanent outcast, someone who never felt at home, and was always at odds with the environment, inconsolable about the past, bitter about the present and the future. there has always been an association between the idea of exile and the terrors of being a leper, a social and moral untouchable (said 1994, 47). the association between exile and outcast that edward said eludes to here evokes powerful images. for said, exile, particularly in its premodern form of banishment, was tragic. this was the case not only because it physically dislodged people from cherished landscapes brimming with familiar bodies, but because it tore the subject away from a home, an environment, and indeed a history, transforming the displaced being into both a physical and emotional outcast. clearly, the exile in this passage takes on a somewhat orthodox appearance, as marie-paule ha has noted, a notion resting upon the ‘assumption of a convergence of the self and the native place’ (ha 2001, para.1). but it is this familiar exilic form that will largely inform the ensuing discussions of the subject below. certainly, the linkage between dislocation that results in a state of uprootedness and the notion of outcast is not a construction restricted to writers on exile. albert memmi, for example, when referring to those people living in ‘painful and constant ambiguity’— national groups that were ‘neither colonizers nor colonized’ within the colonial apparatus—also makes reference to the term ‘outcast’ (memmi 1965, 13-5). moreover, dhan gopal mukerji, in the mid 1920s, introduced the period of his life in the united amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan states in terms of being an ‘outcast’ (mukerji 1925). other individuals and groups too have appropriated the term outcast, including sufferers of mental disabilities and hivinfected communities, to refer to their conditions. interestingly, the conditions experienced by those actually labelled and treated as outcastes in many ways closely resemble common descriptions of exile. sukhadeo thorat, for example, describes the situation for dalits in a rural indian village: ‘from the age when you learn to walk and talk, the limits are delineated: residential, physical and social isolation combined with day-to-day humiliation. all rural dalit children face one form of humiliation or the other. at school, there is hardly any interpersonal relationship between the dalit student and the teacher, and the feeling of isolation is heightened’ (anand 2003, para. 8). babasaheb ambedkar, writing in an earlier period, clearly agreed: it is not a case of social separation, a mere stoppage of social intercourse for a temporary period. it is a case of territorial segregation and of a cordon sanitaire putting the impure people inside a barbed wire into a sort of a cage. every hindu village has a ghetto. the hindus live in the village and the untouchables in the ghetto’ (ambedkar 1948, 22). there would appear then to be a considerable link between notions of exile and outcaste. in the following sections of this paper, we will firstly analyse the linkages between the ‘exile’, ‘outcast’, and outcaste, highlighting both points of interchangeableness and departure for these concepts as they relate specifically to a certain historical context in japan. second, after a brief background discussion, we will examine the state/condition of being an outcaste in the bakumatsu or late tokugawa period, and consider how close this situation was to a state of exile. third, we will examine a specific example of the act of re-inclusion of outcastes into their local community created by the 1871 emancipation edict that led to the creation of the ‘former outcaste’ or ‘new citizen’, and analyse to what extent this embodies the process of returning from exile. lastly, the paper will conclude with a brief discussion of the extent to which a crossover between the terms outcaste and exile may be applicable in the japanese context, as well as the positive aspects of attempting such a conceptual reconfiguration. portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 2 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan outcast through space the applicability of the term outcast by displaced peoples to refer to their various states of exclusion is readily apparent. the intense pain incurred as a result of a dislocation from places of intimacy and landscapes of profound attachment is captured by many authors, but perhaps none more simplistically and eloquently then by mahmud darwish who writes of exile: ‘we travel like other people, but we return to nowhere’ (quoted in bowman 1994, 138). one visible thread of this complex tapestry of exclusion and selfidentity that can be readily teased from darwish’s discourse is the close relationship between the notion of exile and the ideas of space and belonging. nira yuval-davis further helps unravel these latter concepts for us: belonging is where the sociology of emotions interfaces with the sociology of power, where identification and participation collude, or are at least aspired to or yearned for. like other hegemonic constructions, belonging tends to become 'naturalized' and thus invisible in hegemonic formations. it is only when one's safe and stable connection to the collectivity, the homeland, the state, becomes threatened, that it becomes articulated and reflexive rather than just performative (yuval-davis 2003, para. 13). if we attempt to unravel this strand even more, putting the idea into everyday language, we can probably pronounce that one has a profound attachment to a place because complex values, meanings and associations are ascribed to it; and the tendency is for the feeling of belonging associated with that particular place to often be politically manufactured, leaving the holder of these emotions hypersensitive to any form of interference, especially intrusions that demand a separation of the physical body from a material place. and, it is at the very point where these meanings and associations are threatened that ‘protest about the meaning of place may erupt’ (buttimer 1980, 167). but while acknowledging the role of the political hand in the assembly of notions of belonging, suh kwungsik’s warning not to ‘trivialise the notion of exile’ still firmly resounds. after all, the severing of a connection with ‘the collectivity’ is often done in a calculated way and with a cold blade; as suh again cautions, ‘the nation has the power to determine the citizenship and the identity of the people living within its borders’, including the ability, for example, to ‘exile from the mother tongue’ (suh 2004, para. 28). portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 3 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan tessa morris-suzuki has clearly illustrated how the japanese policies of forced assimilation of the ainu and okinawans into the modern japanese nation state during the 19th and 20th centuries rent apart two distinctive cultures (morris-suzuki 1996; 2000). the majority of these men and women were rendered internal exiles—outcasts in their own land. therefore, it appears vital to remember that while pain resulting from any form of exile does arise out of a sense of belonging to an imagined community, it also often results from a violent act that forces relocation into very real spaces of hardship and oppression. essentially, in the case of the exile, the meanings and associations ascribed to place are not simply threatened, but the threats are actually acted upon—one’s ‘safe and stable connection to the collectivity’ is savagely incised. it is in this isolated state that our exile exists, remaining connected to ‘the collectivity’ with only the slightest of threads— perhaps more often than not an imagined thread kept taut by emotion or spirit rather than in any real or concrete sense. possibly, it is better to say that the exile is rendered incapable of belonging through the act of exile, and those who cannot belong are of course ultimately known as and indeed in time regularly come to regard themselves as outcasts. outcast through time an exile is not merely cast out of space, but also out of time. as said intimates, the exile is removed from history. for the exile, as well as for all others who lose access to a common history, ‘places are lost-destroyed, vacated, barred-but then there is some new place, and it is not the first, never can be the first [italics mine]’ (butler 2003, 468). in other words, not only the advent of the ‘new place’, but also the passage of time itself inserts a wedge between the displaced and their object of longing. we see that the movement of time drives the exile further and further away from what is familiar, creating an insurmountable distance consisting of linear moments, something that signals the irretrievability of the past. portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 4 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan clearly, time for the exile is intimately intertwined with notions of space, so that separating the two may even seem futile, but it may be worthwhile to consider some of the ways it closely contributes to the exilic condition. undoubtedly, as it purveys to our study below, the ‘moment’ that lay somewhere between premodernity and modernity—a moment particularly transparent in the japanese experience—was another important example where ‘traditional’ meanings and associations attributed to place came into sharp conflict with more ‘modern’ ones. those in the engine (ering) room of japanese modernity had a clear agenda that appeared at odds with idealist notions of community that often existed before, particularly in rural areas. this onset of modernity is a common tale and well described by anne buttimer who writes: ‘in the bustling enthusiasm of early industrialisation it was far more important to expand horizons of access to markets and clientele than to seriously try to make the city [or village] a home’ (buttimer 1980, 167). indeed, the premodern japanese subject living on the fault line between japanese ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ can also be seen as a kind of outcast of time. ‘tradition’ too, was often imagined (predominantly by japanese males) in the mid-19th century as a kind of place, where modernity existed as either a threat or a promise—or a strange concoction of both. and with the sudden inability to ascribe (and therefore to derive) a meaning and association from that place, we see that both identity as well as identity crisis came to be derived from a sense of a loss of place (chow, doak & fu 2001, 6-7). for the japanese who saw modernity as a threat, to be an outcast meant to be left behind—to be cast out by modernity, to be cast out by time.1 perhaps it is an inherent part of modernity that it tends to persuade all and sundry of their inherent ambiguity. as john lie writes, ‘we moderns are…all exiles; exile is a condition endemic to modernity’ (lei 2001, 353). yet too much reflection on the alleged homogeneity caused by modern angst can only too easily mask the multiplicities of 1 it is useful here to remember harry harootunian’s caution about how we view the ‘time-lag’ contemporaneously, being careful about partaking in the ‘scandal of imagining modernities that are not quite modern’, and of situating ‘societies like japan in a historical trajectory derived from another’s development’ (harootunian 2000, p. xvi). portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 5 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan displacement that occur across class, gender, and ethnic boundaries. there are differing degrees of permanence in this state of time-related exile, as well as differing degrees of profit that may be derived from selling such an ideology of uniform anxiety. there would also be one more important aspect related to time here, and that is the notion of future time, heavily embedded into the notions of exile and outcaste. the exile, it is assumed in the above passage by said, has once known a home, an environment, and a history, and it is the distressing act of physical dislocation and the necessity to deal with the emotions and stigmas attached to such a violent act that generate significant portions of this tragic narrative. in order to emphasize the potent sting of such a fate, said employs the imagery of the leper or the untouchable; people the reader intuits are permanently confined to such a catastrophic providence. in contrast to this, the outcaste (rather than outcast) is never really acquainted with a home, an environment, or a history apart from the one of total displacement they have experienced. while ‘exile is inexorably tied to homeland and to the possibility of return,’ the outcaste knows no home, no other state, other than exclusion (naficy 1999, 3). there can be no hope of return. it is interesting to note that very rarely do members of outcast communities, whether they are writing on exile, colonialism, modernity, or any other state of exclusion, use the term outcaste to refer to their plight, or indeed envisage themselves as one. most opt for the term outcast a seemingly innocent, yet undoubtedly deeply relevant distinction. for outcaste, purely by the inclusion of the last vowel, semantically mutates, creating a sense of permanent exclusion, a nuance that is not necessarily fully contained in the word outcast. but this hope generated through fiddling with concepts deeply touched by time is false. as john lie states, ‘in temporal displacement, the search for home (the remembered past) is inextricable from the condition of exile (the lived, and everchanging, present). the very passage of time makes this impossible’ (lei 2001, 353). we discover that there is very little difference in reality after all between the notions of exile, portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 6 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan outcast, or outcaste in the passage of time—the decision to frame it in such a way is merely one of politics.2 exile and the outcaste in time/space as we are made aware in the above discussions, there is an inseparable relationship between issues of displacement and movements of time and space. inherent in discussions of displacement are not just issues of space and place (i.e. being a space apart from somewhere), but also relationships of time (the vital questions of how long such a displacement will last and the way we frame the particular movements of time). in short, the ideas of permanence and temporality are crucial in any investigation of exiles, outcasts, or outcastes – as important as notions of displacement or exclusion. but while the time relationship between exile and outcaste may be largely different (and politically charged), there would appear to be many points of convergence between the state of being an exile and the state of being an outcaste with regards to space. the condition of exile quoted from said in the beginning strongly resonates with the experiences of not only the indian outcaste mentioned above, but also the premodern 2 this statement, of course, is at odds with the conclusions of many local historians in japan who have argued for much of the post-war period (following the mainstream japanese marxian interpretation first penned by inoue kiyoshi) for the existence of an objective ‘outcaste status’ that is believed to exist within class. in the imaginings of such scholars, the buraku problem is formed at the point that notions of outcaste-ness and pollution become attached to concrete occupational divisions within class, and these status distinctions are preserved and reinforced throughout japanese history, most notably in the tokugawa period when additional restraints placed on occupational mobility and residence served to cement outcaste groups into an outcaste status within a feudal system of class relations. subsequently, the failure to remove these status distinctions in the modern era is believed to have led to the ‘preservation’ of the ‘buraku problem’ that is essentially ‘feudal’. for the initial introduction of this argument see inoue 1998 [1950]. certainly through the scholarship of kuroda toshio (1975) and minegishi kentarō (1996) interesting variations and diversions have resulted from inoue’s original thesis, but for the most part, as tsukada takashi (2000, p. 229) argues, inoue’s original thesis has been dominant in premodern outcaste studies in japan. clearly, this paper seeks to explore other interpretative possibilities concerning the ‘buraku problem,’ particularly following the lead of scholars such as imanishi hajime (2000) and hatanaka toshiyuki (1999) who are exploring the possibilities of the ‘modern origins’ of the buraku and the relationship between modernity, the modern nation-state, and the outcaste. thinking through the relationship between outcastes and exiles (i.e., examining issues of marginalisation, boundary creation, and belonging) follows in this new tradition in attempting to reimagine the buraku problem outside of the established framework of class and status. portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 7 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan japanese outcaste (senmin / hisabetsumin) that may be detected through archival records. the junction also appears to occur on a multiplicity of levels. first, on a literal level, we may find concrete evidences of exile defined narrowly as a kind of banishment in the japanese records on outcastes. if we sift through 19th century outcaste historical records and the sparse histories written about them, we may certainly find examples of more orthodox cases of exile, where outcastes were expelled to the japanese frontiers to assist in empire-building (mccormack 2002a). or second, we may move to the still concrete yet slightly more figurative zone of exile whereby the outcaste was dislocated from communities while still remaining at ‘home’. as japanese historians from inoue kiyoshi to wakita osamu have frequently stressed, one important and central determinant of the premodern japanese outcaste status is restrictions placed upon their residence (inoue 1950; wakita 1987). some historians like seshimo hirohito have discussed this exclusion in concrete terms by referring to how outcaste settlements were predominantly found on riverbanks, outer-city limits, between hills and on slopes, and in riverbeds—areas that other members of the population did not wish to occupy (seshimo 1982, 265). on the other hand, other scholars have focused on the everyday aspects of spatial exclusion, such as the lost ability to share meals or room space with other human beings (minegishi 1996). this enforced separation from a physical space and the obvious emotional trauma and stigma attached to such an act of separation suggests that there is a great overlap between the premodern japanese outcaste and exile spoken about by said. arguably, drawing on the observations of japanese scholars, we can best understand the relationship between exile and outcaste through an even closer examination of our notions of space and place. orthodox notions of exile, similar to said’s above, often place the exilic subject outside the borders of the established collective—commonly the nation or state. there are however, forms of bodily expulsion such as internal exile, whereby the subject does not necessarily exist in exile outside these boundaries—as in the relatively recent case of the iranian academic hashem aghajari ‘exiled to three remote iranian portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 8 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan cities for eight years’(associated press newswires 7 nov. 2002). it is in this dimension of internal exile that we may detect multiple similarities between exiles and outcastes—in that these individuals/groups occupy disparate ‘spaces’ within the same ‘place.’3 the state of the outcaste in pre-1871 japan rather than leave our observations here, it is perhaps expedient to further pursue a precise moment when outcaste notions of space and place were challenged, and the space for the connection between these people and the collectivity was made. the ‘moment’ entrusted below to the historical microscope is related to the very interesting problem of 19th century japanese ‘outcaste emancipation’ where large numbers of men, women, and children were, remarkably enough, legally unshackled from their status as outcastes through the 1871 emancipation edict (mibun kaihōrei), and permitted (if not ordered) to participate in the making of modern japan as ‘new ordinary citizens’ (shinheimin). this act of emancipation promised the outcaste a life more ordinary, and in a sense, it was a historical moment akin to a return from exile—where the severed connection between body and place was re-established, and all space allegedly became equally accessible to all members of the japanese nation-state. ‘home,’ for the late premodern outcaste, was of course the same physical place as before, but it meant the ability to share spaces that were previously off limits, spaces both real and imagined that had perhaps always appeared as warm and alluring—yet unreachable. rather than drawing on images of one’s own past attachment to these places, many outcastes drew on nostalgic images of the historically privileged positions of farmers located within their communities in premodern times, and held this as their ideal. homeland was for the outcaste peaceful, productive, and largely unremarkable: the outcastes intended to exist as themselves in someone else’s space within the same place, and the emancipation edict was initially seen as that one political act that would make this vision a reality. 3 my thanks goes to tessa morris-suzuki for drawing my attention to the idea of disparate notions of place/space between exile and outcaste in these examples. it is also interesting to note that the notions of ‘internal exile’ and outcaste tend to resist the movements of time. they are decidedly premodern or antimodern in nature and are associated with backwardness. portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 9 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan but these hopeful visions grew out of an optimism that interpreted the edict in isolation from the myriad of other laws and policies designed by meiji oligarchs to lay the foundations for a modern and competitive japanese nation-state. in the decade that followed the meiji restoration of 1868, japan embraced innumerable upheavals that dramatically altered the majority of its social, political, and economic institutions and traditions. in rural areas, the most significant shifts occurred in relation to the systems of land ownership and taxation. within the tokugawa system, land was subject to rights of hereditary, and in this sense, the introduction of ‘modern’ private land ownership in the early years of meiji was clearly not an indigestible foreign concept to landed peasants. for the most part under tokugawa law, land did belong to the peasant. but at the same time, authorities were also able to confiscate individual property and banish people from their own property for reasons such as failure to pay taxes, criminal activity, or even sometimes arbitrarily—for example, during adjudication of a legal dispute between two peasants. therefore, the economic livelihood of individual peasants in the premodern era was heavily dependent upon their ability to obediently produce for the warrior class. moreover, peasants also operated within a village community that was the official unit by which taxes (paid both in cash and kind) were collected and presented to the authorities. individual land cultivation fell under the larger category of communal responsibility for tax burdens imposed from above, meaning that it was clearly in community interests to devise methods for preventing the economic collapse of individual peasants. in the face of the harsh realities confronted by peasants in the rural tokugawa village, numerous systems such as early modern forms of financial cooperatives (tanomoshikō) were established in order to help protect individuals from bankruptcy. with the sale of farm land expressly forbidden in tokugawa society, struggling farmers weighed down under the heavy yoke of taxation (sometimes reaching rates of 50 percent of total crop yield) often slipped through the creative safety nets established in village communities, and were left with little choice but to mortgage their land to wealthier village members. such peasants, after mortgaging their land, were frequently unable to generate enough capital to repay the initial sum borrowed against their land, and property therefore became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a rich farming class (gōnō) by portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 10 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan the turn of the 19th century. peasants who did not take flight were often required to become tenant farmers working for these wealthy rural households, and it is probably no coincidence that the period from the late 18th century to the meiji restoration saw unprecedented levels of peasant uprisings (walthall 1986, xi). it was optimistically hoped by some of these individuals that any changes in the land and taxation system instituted under the new meiji government might facilitate an increased share of the land for the poorer rural denizens. the land and tax policies of the new meiji government, however, worked contrary to these expectations. under the land tax reforms commenced in 1871, the meiji government set out to create a tax base founded on the principle of private land ownership and individual fiscal responsibility that maintained the same impressive levels of taxation achieved under the tokugawa regime. those landowners who presented their old deeds and titles received a 'modern' certificate of proprietorship that simply traced new lines over existing patterns of land ownership. moreover, estimating the value of land (and therefore the amount of land tax an individual had to pay) was a highly subjective calculation that was often predictably computed to line rather than deplete government coffers, and the perceived unfairness of the new system regularly incurred the wrath of both small and large landowners during the course of the 1870s. the land and tax laws introduced in the early meiji period served to further impoverish the tenant stratum, and create and entrench an elaborate landlord system in modern japan that was to last until the postwar occupation reforms. subsequently, the visions of peasant-hood conjured up in the minds of underprivileged, rural 'former outcastes' discussed above were fanciful and ephemeral, as the realities of quotidian existence in the modern era became increasingly evident in the early years of the 1870s. emancipation edict and the end of the impure exile the ‘outcaste order’ was legally abolished in 1871 through the emancipation edict that was expected to enable all members of society to become ordinary japanese citizens (heimin). the emancipation edict though, was not a piece of legislation simply plucked portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 11 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan out of thin air, as is often thought. in 1868, we see that a move towards legal emancipation was already in motion with the official elevation of the danzaemon as well as 70 of his closest aids to people of ‘ordinary status’. the document that sealed the danzaemon’s elevation in status gives several official reasons for the promotion, such as the fact that he assisted when a fire burnt down one of the main gaols in edo, and that he had gathered together an army of outcastes to assist the shogunate in an attack on chōshū fief (hirota 1990, 69). it is interesting to note here that the elevation in status was also accompanied by a change in name to dannaiki, and dannaiki was quick to spread news of his new name and status change throughout all the towns and villages (pp.70-71). perhaps we may read into this act of renaming a sense of the need for new labels of identification in order to occupy the ‘new spaces’ of a modernising japan. just as the danzaemon’s elevation in status was posited in terms of what the outcaste had done for the late feudal state, so too were subsequent requests for elevation of status by other eta groups predating the emancipation edict often based upon arguments of what the outcaste communities could provide for the shogunate. the eta of watanabe village in sesshū province, for example, listed as one of their main arguments for emancipation in 1870 the fact that they had been ready and prepared to fight foreigners encroaching on japanese soil with halberds if need be (when there was initial talk of ‘expelling the barbarian’)—a loyalist intention that was abruptly interrupted when a peace treaty was signed with the foreigners. this new development had clearly demoralized the eta community and they expressed great disconcertment that they should continue to be regarded as polluted because they were meat-eaters even though meat-eating foreigners were on peaceful terms with the rest of the population. the watanabe village community requested the authorities that the two chinese characters for eta meaning ‘much pollution’ be officially struck from their social and legal status designation (hirota 1990, pp. 71-2). we gain the impression from these examples of a very clear association in both government circles and in outcaste communities between a restoration of social status and meritorious service to the state. one way or another, outcastes such as the eta that were portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 12 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan apparently completely resolute in their ‘outcaste-ness’ through genetics only 50 years earlier, theoretically and in practice were actually able to earn their way back from their impure exile. these men and women were suddenly permitted to occupy the same spaces as other ‘japanese’ because they had been seen to contribute something to the construction of the nation. some eta though, by 1870, had taken matters of emancipation into their own hands. many attempted to terminate their expulsion as outcastes of their own volition, and endeavoured to seize the uneasily defined spaces of normality. an official inspector employed to describe popular conditions in the countryside to the central government reported in 1870 that there were rumours that farmers and merchants running restaurants, bathhouses, and barbershops were being forced out of business because eta customers were entering their stores. the inspector further records though that in okayama, the bathhouse owners were able to find ways to counter this exercising of agency. by calling themselves innertown baths (chōnai furō), and giving out wooden passes to their customers, they could refuse entry to those customers without them, presumably in this way able to maintain the regimes of exclusion set in place against the eta (hirota 1990, pp.81-2). in august 1871, through the remonstrations of mostly well-placed politicians of quite elite backgrounds, the emancipation edict was formally promulgated. when the news of the dissemination of the edict did eventually reach both outcaste and ‘ordinary’ communities, predictably enough, there were mixed reactions. some prefectural governments took the promulgation of the edict as an opportunity to lecture both ‘ordinary citizens’ and ‘new ordinary citizens’ on the importance of the edict. the ehime prefectural government, for example, advised those that had difficulty accepting the edict to understand that the eta were a product of japan before it was civilised, that eta too were most undoubtedly the emperor’s subjects, and that they were the exactly the same as ‘ordinary people’ in terms of their nature and intelligence. at the same time though, they advised the eta to work hard at their farming, to live cleanly, to tidy up after portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 13 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan themselves, to wash meat thoroughly, to be careful of body odour, and to avoid all actions that the ‘ordinary citizens’ considered to be unclean (hirota 1990, 79). several months after the promulgation of the edict in january 1872, more concrete and disturbing reactions began to surface. the eta of nakazui village in okayama prefecture, for example, used the law as a spring pad to recoil from the impure spaces they had been forced to occupy during the tokugawa period. they requested permission from the prefectural government to resign from all duties related to criminal investigation, banishing beggars, and disposal of dead animal carcasses. to this, the local citizens predictably complained that they were being inconvenienced by such a petition, and subsequently retaliated by refusing the outcastes access to communal land set aside for cropping, vegetable production, and natural fuels such as firewood. moreover, storeowners from neighbouring villages, perhaps not even directly related to the conflict, refused to sell products to members of the eta community. the problem quickly reached an impasse when a ‘former eta’ villager, turned away from a local tavern, was joined by local eta villagers in a large-scale demonstration. according to the document, the angry non-eta villagers then allegedly banded together, summoned together three ‘former eta’ village heads, and over a period of time brutally killed them all (hirota 1990, pp.83-4). what is genuinely interesting here is that the emancipation edict, while opening up spaces that were previously apparently ‘off limits’ to the outcaste community, gave no forewarning about the mass exodus into the spaces of others that would ensue, and local communities like the one above reacted in the strongest possible terms. we detect that in many ways the outcastes had already become at home in the alleged spaces of exclusion in their communities—they were obviously able to access communal farm land, and enter stores and taverns before the promulgation of the edict. the official approval for the occupation of such spaces served to agitate many who themselves increasingly felt displaced—probably mostly by the onset of japanese modernity. there can be little doubt that many of the motivations for the promulgation of the emancipation edict were directly related to the desire by oligarchs, politicians, and portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 14 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan bureaucrats to establish a more efficient national space. the eta and hinin were clearly a troublesome eyesore in the process of nation-building that was being diligently inspected by western powers. nakano itsuki, a prominent politician at the time, argued for the emancipation of the outcastes because the land of these people had traditionally been measured differently, something that he believed should be made uniform in the ‘empire’ (kōkoku) (quoted in takeki osatake 1999, pp. 64-5). kumagaya teizō and inazu itsuki, also politicians involved in the debate on outcaste emancipation, argued that there were no foreseeable problems in their view in getting members of outcaste communities to assist in performing national labour services. others too, commented on the need to include the outcastes in a national household registry (pp. 66-7). what we witness here is a push for the homogenisation of national space and an acute desire transformed into policy to evenly measure and efficiently manage that space. there would be no more room on a national level for the existence of the impure and dangerous spaces of the premodern outcaste. the outcaste was an internal exile before the promulgation of the emancipation edict, and the edict symbolised an attempt to restore the exile to the literal as well as figurative land from which they were displaced. for the elites this was about building an empire around a well-measured and tightly controlled nation-state. but we may note that it was a largely unpopular act for many members of the community that were meant to embrace ‘the return’ of the outcaste into the same spaces within the same location. the edict, precisely because it was promulgated from above, and disregardful of the grassroots attempts by many eta to be liberated in earlier years, failed to make a meaningful connection with local communities who were historically the agents who had to manage and enforce the previous policies of exclusion. the ‘non-outcaste’ communities had traditionally been asked to derive much of their identity from their privileged position that rested on their successful ability to exclude others including the outcaste, and a legislative act of emancipation threatened their own secure spaces in a rapidly transforming society. portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 15 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan historically, the outcastes, although theoretically residents in the same place, were squeezed into spaces of exile in regional communities: spaces that were slowly built into local domains of fear and hate. unsurprisingly, the large exodus of eta back from the outcaste wilderness into the promised land of the modern japanese nation was an idea that could only be accomplished if all eyes remained firmly fixed on the progress and success of the nation. but in local communities, quite predictably, many still thought in terms of local space and local privilege, and therefore, the main battles that former outcastes had to fight in the initial months after the promulgation of the edict were not necessarily with governments, but rather with local communities that refused to share space with these former outcaste bodies. the treatment of the newly returned – the case of outcastes in saitama the emancipation edict was promulgated by the council of state (daijōkan) on august 28 1871, and a copy of that edict remains with some of the other documentation concerning a certain village a found in the saitama prefectural archives.4 the copy found in the documents of the house of m, reads like any other copy of the emancipation edict—the abolition of the terms eta and hinin; the addition of all these people into the ‘family register’ (koseki) system; the statement that these people named eta and hinin were to be the same as average citizens (heimin) with regards to social status and occupation; and the order to report to the authorities if there was a custom in the village of waiving land taxes for the outcastes. where the documents from village a differ to some of the other copies of the emancipation edict in other villages is that because it is written up by the local village head as an oath of obedience (ukegaki), the outcaste headman of village a made a memo at the end of the document promising to report to the authorities if there was a custom in the village of waiving land taxes (mkm, #4). this memo clearly indicates that the last of the four parts of the edict—the one 4 the documents that figure in the following sections labelled m-kemonjo [the documents of the house of m] were gathered from the saitama prefectural archives during fieldwork in 2003. these documents are ‘designated documents’ (shitei bunsho) and are restricted because of their sensitive nature and because they contain the surnames of persons that may still live in the community. subsequently, names of documents, places, and people have all been replaced with pseudonyms to ensure the protection of the privacy of the descendants of these individuals. hereafter mkm. portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 16 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan related to taxation practices—was considered (at least by this local leader) as one of the most important in the edict. it may be deduced from this that an important reason for the promulgation of the edict by the new meiji government was related to the need to find ways to fund the many parts of the state projects of modernisation and civilisation that they were to undertake, and an important way of doing this was by creating a new and complete base of taxation. it is certainly the case that the general interpretation of this edict is highly negative; in fact, many scholars interpret this document as a legalised robbery of industries traditionally monopolized by the eta and hinin. kobayashi shigeru, one of the leading japanese scholars on the topic, elaborates his stance on the edict as follows: it is true that legally, through the ‘edict of emancipation of social status,’ the buraku became like everyone else in both status and occupation. however, that was all this measure did: administrative measures befitting an ‘edict of emancipation’ were not undertaken in the slightest. thus, the buraku were left in their poverty that was caused by discrimination and based on social status that had existed since the edo period; there were no guarantees of employment to reinforce this ‘emancipation’ (kobayashi 1988, 101). kobayashi’s perspective is certainly a very important one, a perspective that distinguishes between the ideology and practice of the meiji government. but as the term emancipation suggests, there was also the very real aspect of liberation—a promise of, and in some cases, the reality of an alleviation of previously rigid structures and status delineations. kobayashi also reproduces in his book a photostat of the 1871 kinrai nendaiki, an osaka municipal government document, where we find former outcastes running around the city with ‘great joy’ (kobayashi 1998, ii). there is little doubt that the promise of liberation from centuries of oppression as members of outcaste communities was initially a cause for great joy for many of those that would come to be known as ‘new ordinary citizens.’ in the years leading up to the promulgation of the edict, we see a great uncertainty amongst outcastes about their new position in the emerging modern japanese nationstate. in lower wana village, located in approximately the same region as village a, for portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 17 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan example, we find in 1869 in the months after the meiji restoration an official document laying out the rules after the restoration. in this document, the eta villagers are reminded that they are still responsible to the danzaemon and that they must still perform the duties that they performed for the danzaemon, even though the name of their new employer was now tokyo city (tokyo-fu). the problem with the hinin is pronounced in this document too. with new rules concerning jurisdiction, the problem arose of when a hinin should become involved in official business. temporary official duties were to be undertaken but where normal people (shirōto) or warriors were involved, the hinin were to leave it up to tokyo city. there was also the problem of the fact that hinin were allowed to wear swords and to carry arms, something that changes in the early years of meiji. in a time of rapid change, the danzaemon recognized that many of the hinin that were going to perform official duties must be armed but would not be familiar with the ‘rules’ (hōsoku) of outcaste business. in addition, the problem of earning a living by begging on auspicious occasions and during buddhist funeral rights became problematic, and suddenly there arose a need for hinin to have licences in order to peddle certain goods on the street.5 village a, the village that is central to the discussion below, was a small village with a population that averaged fewer than 100 in the latter half of the tokugawa period. the figures though are not clear but one temple register dated in the 1840s has the eta population at approximately 70, with a hinin population of 5(mkm, #6). this was not necessarily a small population for an outcaste village in eastern japan, but certainly much smaller than the village of minami ōji in osaka, written about by dana morris and thomas c. smith, which had a population of a little under 2000 by the second quarter of the 19th century, and considerably smaller than lower wana village in the same period (morris and smith 1985, 233). in the month following the promulgation of the emancipation edict, on september 16 1871, we find a record from village a of what was going on in its community at the time 5 suzukikemonjo [documents of the house of suzuki], no. 16, saitama prefectural archives. hereafter skm. portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 18 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan of the decree. the outcaste heads of village a addressed a document to the non-eta village officials divided into three sections, reporting on three different goings on in the community at that time (mkm, #11). firstly, the eta village head of village a writes that on september 15, the village officials of neighbouring village s gathered the villagers together and explained the contents of the edict of emancipation to the villagers as follows: 1. social status, as well as the office of eta village head, would be abolished 2. the eta would be allowed to bear surnames and use the title of farmer on official documentation 3. all duties, without fail, would be the same for everyone 4. the eta would be allowed to wear standard japanese dress such as haori and hakama 5. the eta would be allowed to wear what they liked 6. the eta would be permitted to enter a house of a village official regardless of whether or not they were on public or private business the second section of the document related to the concurrent activities of village h in the same county. the eta heads of village a explain in the document that the farmers of village h, after a town meeting, called the outcaste village elders of the village and all the eta villagers together, informing them that there had been an edict of emancipation, and that they now ‘were the same as everybody else.’ they were informed that in future, when they were dealing with ‘important people,’ they could give and receive documents without fear of reprisal. the author of the document (village a eta headman) then writes that some ‘important people’ of a place nearby in the township celebrated with drinks with 10 ‘nobleman,’ and then after that, they were all invited to the home of y, a ‘former outcaste leader now farmer’ where they were poured drinks and gave y four containers of sake in exchange for four trays of hors d'oeuvre’s. the third section of the document deals with village k, which is not in the same county but the same province as village a. in that village, the actual special police commissioner of eastern japan (kantō torishimariyaku) appeared in person and informed portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 19 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan the former farming village officials as well as the former eta village head t that they were now the leaders of the village. the special police commissioner of eastern japan also informed the men of the village that that were all now ‘equally ordinary men.’ then the outcaste leader t received the official documentation from the commissioner, being told he may now have a surname and the title of farmer, and that he must perform his duties as group leader the same as the other three men. we can see from this document that kobayashi’s statement that ‘administrative measures befitting an “edict of emancipation” were not undertaken in the slightest’ is somewhat problematic, for we have a clear example that it was not only possible, but in some places the practice for outcaste leaders to simply change clothes into their new modern japanese village leadership garb. in this sense, we might even say that it was easier for some outcaste leaders with higher profiles to find their way into the new spaces of a supposedly egalitarian modern japan. this was possible because these leaders were actually not receiving permission through the edict to occupy new spaces—they were in fact already part of the establishment, impure exiles only in name but not in actuality, warmly embraced into part of the new administration because they were clearly already part of the old. this was almost certainly not the case for the subclasses of outcastes resident in the village, and certainly not true for all outcaste village leaders. we can also see that while each village struggled to interpret the conditions of the emancipation edict in their own way, a common interpretation was that the former outcastes were now to be considered farmers. to outcastes living in rural communities in eastern japan, the notion of ‘average citizen’ or heimin literally meant being allowed to be a ‘farmer’, as well as changes in other more practical concerns such as the ability to wear the clothes of one’s choice, the ability to enter into someone’s house at will, and the ability to be able to use one’s own last name. philosophically, the emancipation edict for the outcaste meant, it was hoped, being able to have a ‘stable life’ (anjū), an expression that finds its way into the concluding petitions of this document as well as others of the time like it. portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 20 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan any euphoria created by the emancipation edict and the celebrations that ensued probably did not last long. on september 23, 1871 we find the following appeal sent from the former outcaste village elder in village h (a village located near village a) to the local village officials. the ‘former outcaste’ village elder persisted in signing his name on the document in the language of the pre-emancipation edict era, suggesting perhaps a tentativeness to lay claims to the freedoms spoken about at the time of the celebrations held only a week before. the appeal is subsequently broken up into two separate appeals that will be introduced here chronologically. first, in the document we read that on september 12, the outcaste village elder s and the other 47 villagers had a meeting with the local officials (including a certain official named m) and were informed about the emancipation edict. s tells the authorities in the petition that there was ‘no greater joy for them’ than the edict. after the meeting that explained the contents of the law, we find that m had requested that s and the villagers submit a document saying that they had understood what had been explained to them, providing them with an example of the kind of document he required, adding that ‘consideration’ should be shown for the surrounding villagers and that (at least temporarily) they should retain their previous status and occupation. s, obviously perturbed by this suggestion, went to another official in the village of the same rank as m presumably to complain, eventually submitting the document on september 22. we find that the local official upheld s’s complaint that m was mistaken for not allowing the edict to be applied in its entirety effective immediately. by law, s and his village should be referred to as ‘former eta’ and the local official concluded that m’s behaviour was not only illegal but caused problems for the ‘1000 or so farmers’ who had no problems with accepting the inclusion of ‘40 or so’ outcastes. but the document continued into another problem, also of great interest. s explains that traditional practices of mortgaging land saw the outcaste’s name not written directly onto the document, but rather, the name of a mortgage broker was recorded with a separate document attached that stated that the land was actually being mortgaged by the outcastes themselves. then, at the time when taxes had to be paid, the taxation notice would first portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 21 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan record the name of the broker and then secondly the name of the outcaste. the document informs that any rice produced on that land was considered ‘outcaste rice’ (etamai), and could not be submitted as taxes, but first the outcaste had to exchange his outcaste rice for normal rice and use that to pay taxes which were paid through the mortgage broker. s informs the officials that he had consistently petitioned m that the eta be allowed to have the land they owned written directly onto the temple registers, something that would legally guarantee their ownership, but until this point m had flatly refused to comply with such a request. at the end of the document we see s promising not to sue m, but requesting that the officials allow him (and his villagers) to make a living and to ensure a ‘stable life’ (anjū) and ‘continuity’ (sōzoku) for the former eta villagers (mkm, #16). this document demonstrates firstly that a national decree that altered the configurations of internal space within the nation did not really ensure that local leaders would be able to re-imagine their local communities in these terms. although an outcaste had the legal right to be called farmer, there was no assurance that spaces of agricultural production would be made available to them. even from this document, a sense that the new status of the outcaste, although deeply welcomed by the objects of the edict who perhaps interpreted it as the creation of egalitarian rural space, was sometimes interpreted in local communities by ‘non-outcaste’ groups as the homogenisation of space that was acceptable in principle, but would take time to realise. the local community, from which they had been displaced for so long, were often not ready to embrace the return of outcastes to the pure spaces of the peasant, or recognise their inclusion into the rapidly developing notion of ‘public space’. the eta, in spite of the legal and legislative changes being made, remained targets of exclusion and alienation—of exile. certainly, refusal to embrace the ‘new ordinary citizens’ was blatantly illegal, and dissidents were in danger of severe punitive measures if they persisted with such open and blatant acts of exclusion. therefore, some members of the local community persisted with the apparatus of internal exile that had been designed in previous times to hold the outcastes in their spaces. these techniques, capably designed, tapped into what were the inherent economic weaknesses that had directly resulted from their lengthy exile. there could be no quantitative or qualitative emancipation without economic emancipation, and the decision by members portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 22 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan of local communities to continue to exploit old practices that had not been legislated for yet—measures that were essential to help facilitate the rapid repatriation of the exiles back into their new environment—was decisive. the way was made for the return of the outcaste in 1871, but the absence of concrete measures that protected the economic livelihood of the exile, such as land ownership and revamped systems of taxation, threatened to sweep the recluse exile away in the flood of japanese modernisation. five months later, a new year—the year of the famous jinshin koseki or first real modern family register—arrived. subtle changes in the lives of the new citizens become visible in documents produced in this year. the style of the documents written, for example, reflect these changes. one legal document from village a (a document submitted annually during the tokugawa period) dated february 1872 includes the previously unseen statement: ‘we no longer exist [as outcastes] and we request compassion [for our current situation]’ (mkm, #9). other ‘former eta’ (moto eta) from other villages nearby however, were not enjoying emancipation to the same extent. we come across a draft of a document written by one ‘former eta’ village headman from village a that is revised in red ink, presumably by another village outcaste headman. interestingly, we find that the reason for the production of the document is that the prefectural officials in the lead up to the jinshin family register refused to offer their seal to documents because ‘former eta’ in the village, as outcastes, had not had their names included on the previous temple registers of ‘ordinary people’, and the decision to order their inclusion on the new family registers clearly created bureaucratic headaches for prefectural office officials. it was difficult to make an entire village suddenly and publicly appear out of nothing. those officiating refused to move on the issue, and the excuse made was that only the prefectural chief, who happened to be away on business, could handle this kind of thing, provoking the former outcaste village headmen to draft a legal appeal against them (mkm, #13). and amidst this tempestuous time of change, we find an extraordinary plea submitted by the former outcaste leader s from village h. at the beginning of s’s petition we find the statement that ‘we have already become ordinary citizens,’ indicating that the portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 23 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan emancipation edict of the previous year had made a significant impact on him, obviously considering this statement an appropriate building block to instigate a legal appeal. the document goes on to state that the main reason for the appeal lay in the treatment of the village eta z, who having worked in the village as a mountain guard for several decades, had suddenly been ordered to leave the village by the ‘non-outcaste’ village official sh. z enlisted the help of the villager (and presumably farmer) m who requested on z’s behalf that he be allowed to continue to live in the village for another three years—a request that was initially granted by sh. however, after a period of time significantly shorter than the three year period, sh suddenly reversed his decision and again demanded that z depart from the village declaring that matters of village population registration had become increasingly strict. z then enlisted the help of other former outcaste villagers to appeal to sh on his behalf, including the village headman s from village a, but this time to no avail. z next procured the help of a local farmer b, who lamented that such a thorny situation had been allowed to evolve, but who could offer no concrete solution on the matter, though still agreeing to participate in the process of negotiation. eventually, s, m, and z were all approached by b who became the go-between between the two groups, and in the informal discussion that proceeded were informed that ‘the village’ believed that z had received ample remuneration for the work he had completed in the village over the last few decades, but that ‘the village’ might possibly consider giving z some rice if he promptly left the community. a discussion then ensued between the four men, whereby the figure of 15 ryō of gold was suggested to b as a suitable payment for such a request. approximately a week later, a messenger came to z’s hut from sh suggesting that z could receive 5 ryō of gold and 5 bags of wheat from the local village lottery fund if he agreed to depart. z declined this offer saying that he was in extreme poverty and that he would only move under the condition that he receive 8 ryō of gold and 5 bags of wheat. sh, apparently after consultation with the village, said that he could only offer 4 bags of wheat, whereupon z broke off negotiations and took up his appeal with the officials. z concludes his formal statement to the officials by injecting the new information that at the portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 24 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan time he first moved into the village, he had requested to be allowed to build a dwelling— a petition that had been unceremoniously refused. this final appeal to a history of marginalisation showed that there were considerable pent up emotions that z was experiencing in this process of an initial restoration and subsequent re-exclusion from his community—a community in which he and his ancestors had invested so much time and effort. finally, z, in the latter stages of the document, moved on to different aspects of how the village was making it impossible for him to live in the post-emancipation edict era. he relates how another village official called him up, presumably at the time this was all happening, and a document containing the new rules and regulations for the village pertaining to the concrete meaning of the decree were read out to him. in the new rules, we find that z was ordered to greet everyone at new year’s that he passed by, something he was formerly forbidden to do as an outcaste. we also find that z was told that because he was now an ‘ordinary citizen,’ he would no longer work as a mountain guard, and that he was no longer free to gather sticks and leaves from the main road or mountain paths. z was also informed that grass to be used as feed for animals could now only be taken from his own property and not communal village land. z, predictably, also appealed these new interpretations of the emancipation edict to the officials. he informs us that he appealed these regulations because as a mountain guard he had no real land, either for cultivation or for resources, and needed to be able to collect fallen leaves (probably to use or sell as fuel) for his livelihood. he had formally requested permission from the villagers but they had refused both when he had requested personally and when he had made the application through third parties. z concludes his appeal by stating that not only had his request been denied but that the villagers had conversely counter appealed against him. z informs us that he was in extreme poverty and that all his family, both young and old, had ‘sunk into despair’ and that ‘there was no way for them to make a living,’ requesting from the authorities a guarantee of his livelihood (mkm, #12). portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 25 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan on march 23, about a month later, we find z once again addressing an appeal to the prefectural office, this time from a slightly different perspective and providing additional information. once more, z writes at the beginning of the document that he was once an eta, but now a ‘general ordinary citizen’ (ippan heimin). z goes on to write that his ancestors had been subordinates (jūboku), working for the village for about 200 years, as mountain guards for a minute allowance. and because z was poor, he had no land of his own, but rather worked on a small plot of land near his residence that was non-taxable land because it was infertile. z writes that last winter, presumably sometime between november and february, the local village official (sh) who owned the land ‘north, south, east, and west’ of z’s residence informed him that he could no longer work as a mountain guard, and that he would not be able to plant or harvest on his small plot of land (that was formerly exempt from taxation but presumably now taxable land) because he was now an ‘ordinary citizen’. he was informed therefore he should move off his land and leave the village. z tells us that there were 5 people in his family—parents, wife, and child—and that his father was over 70, and his young daughter was blind. z entreats the officials to have mercy on him and to not let the villagers ‘crush him under their feet’ (fumitsubushi). we find, we may assume to z’s great relief, at the end of this document that the prefectural officials rule in z’s favour, castigating sh for his misconduct and ordering him to treat z as he would everyone else in the village (mkm, #14). one is left to wonder though the effect such a ruling could have on sh’s attitudes to z. the plight of z was indeed an extraordinary one—historically an impure exile, both literally and in the broader senses of the term, living in a hut surrounding by rice paddies owned by the village headman, and working as a guard in the mountains relying on fallen sticks and leaves as well as the meagre salary received from guarding to live. z was officially liberated after the promulgation of the emancipation edict, and we saw through the previous documents the great joy that this edict brought to villagers in the neighbouring regions. for many, the edict was a kind of homecoming, official permission to return to normality and to occupy ordinary spaces—to move out of the ‘dangerous spaces’ of the mountains and the infertile land that fell between the rice paddies of the village elite, and to reconnect with the fertile spaces of an imagined home, portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 26 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan environment, and history that had excluded them for (in z’s words) ‘the last 200 years.’ but some people, like z, found that through the legal act of emancipation and the official opening up of local spaces, they had actually lost control of the spaces that they had formerly moved in and owned. the community, under the auspices of the village headman, had actually used the act of reconciliation to point out that the ambiguous spaces of the former outcaste were more than ambiguous—they had in fact not really existed at all, that they too were illusions. in a strange twist of logic, the former outcaste became responsible for his future exile from the village by virtue of the fact that he had once been the forced owner of irrational spaces, ones that could not exist in a rational modernity. the act of homogenising space within place that initially promised the end of the exile became the very tool that was used to reinstate a new one. conclusion it is quite understandable for those displaced—whether they be exile, colonized, or some other ambiguous body—to appropriate the imagery of the outcaste to describe their extraordinary plight. the notion of the exile, as we saw earlier, is a notion deeply touched by the ideas of space and time. the exile is sentenced to live a space apart, and time serves to further compound anxieties related to alienation and loss. but if the exile may appropriate the imagery of the outcaste, then may the outcaste do the same? we find through pursuing this question that the ideas of internal exile and the outcaste overlap considerably in their spatial dimension—both occupy the same place but different spaces within a collectivity. in the specific example drawn upon in this paper, the onset of modernity altered the structures of space for the 19th century japanese outcaste in initially a very promising way—falsifying structures of permanence that are normally associated with such a group. intense waves of spatial homogenisation produced a need to reconstruct national space and constituted a moment akin to a return from exile for the outcaste—they became momentarily the prodigal son. spatial homogenisation initially suggested a liberation of space and a liberation of structures found in those spaces. and in some ways this was true, particularly for certain sectors of portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 27 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan the former outcaste leadership. however, in many ways, the rocks and crags that comprised outcaste space—seen as dangerous, impure, and irrational spaces in earlier periods—suddenly became rational, and representative of the frontiers that would need to be conquered for a successful japanese modernisation. thus, outcastes were savagely displaced from their familiar landscapes. in addition, the national political movements to create a uniform space were not necessarily accompanied by a nationalisation of space at the local rural level. urban sites were much quicker at developing policies and systems of homogenisation than were rural areas. in a very important sense, we may say that the 19th century japanese outcaste experienced a multidimensional and a repetitive exile—literally excluded from spaces within communal place, displaced through regimes of fear and hate that are inherent in being an outcaste, and re-exiled through the exclusion inherent in modernisation. in the late premodern period, space was configured into communities whereby eta and hinin villages although existing in the same places as non-outcaste villages were dangerous, impure, and powerful places to be avoided at all costs. with the onset of japanese modernity, these spaces slowly converged into the one space—national space—whereby outcastes had to find their way to the new frontiers, as ordinary citizens, or migrate to new urban slums (mccormack 2002b). susan burns has noted too, the disintegration of premodern forms of leper communities in the early meiji years was quickly followed by the establishment of modern institutions that were designed to clean up after social outcasts that were 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colonized, the orion press, new york. minegishi, kentarō 1996, kinsei hisabetsuminshi no kenkyū: azekura shobō, tokyo. morris, dana, & smith, thomas c. 1985, ‘fertility and mortality in an outcaste village in japan, 1750-1869’ in family and population in east asian history, eds. susan b. hanley and arthur p. wolf, stanford university press, stanford, 229-246. morris-suzuki, tessa 1996, ‘the frontiers of japanese identity’ in asian forms of the nation, ed. stein tonnesson and heins antlove, curzon, richmond, 41-66. ———2000, ‘roads to otherness: ainu and identity politics in twentieth-century japan’ in japanese studies: communities, cultures, critiques, eds. v. mackie, a, skoutarides and a.tokita, monash asia institute, clayton, 35-59. mukerji, dhan gopal 1925, caste and outcast, e.p. dutton, new york. portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 29 amos ambiguous bodies in the making of modern japan naficy, hamid 1999, ‘introduction: framing exile’ in home, exile, homeland: film, media, and the politics of place, ed. hamid naficy, routledge, new york; london, 1-13. osatake, takeki 1999, meiji yonnen senshō haishi fukoku no kenkyū, hihyōsha, tokyo. hirota, masaki 1990, sabetsu no shosō, vol. 22 in nihon kindai shisō taika, ed. shūichi katō, iwanami shoten, tokyo. said, edward w. 1994, representations of the intellectual: the 1993 reith lectures, pantheon books, new york. seshimo, hirohito 1982, ‘kinsei hisabetsu buraku no shichi deiri’ in kantō / tōkai hisabetsu burakushi kenkyū, ed. kōjirō arai, akashi shoten, tokyo, 265-304. suh, kyungsik. what it means to be a 'quasi-refugee’, japan focus, available: http://japanfocus.org/080.html [accessed may 6 2004]. suzukikemonjo, saitama prefectural archives, urawa. tsukada, takashi 2000, mibunron kara rekishigaku wo kangaeru, azekura shobō, tokyo. wakita, osamu 1987, ‘kinsei mibunsei to buraku no seiritsu’ in burakushi no kenkyū, ed. buraku mondai kenkyūjo hen, buraku mondai kenkyūjo, kyoto, 127-148. walthall, anne 1986, social protest and popular culture in eighteenth-century japan, the university of arizona press, tucson. yuval-davis, nira 2003, ‘human security' and the gendered politics of belonging’, proceedings of justice, equality and dependency in the "postsocialist" condition, centre for the study of women and gender, the university of warwick, available: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/gender/events/symposium/yuval/ [accessed may 15 2004]. 7 nov. 2002, ‘reformist scholar sentenced to death in iran’, associated press newswires [online]. available: factiva [accessed may 10 2004]. portal vol.2, no.1 january 2005 30 introduction the state of the outcaste in pre-1871 japan reference list exilesleadpaper portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ introduction: exile and social transformation paul allatson and jo mccormack, institute for international studies, university of technology, sydney the death of edward said in september 2003 provided a salutary reminder in the new millennium that exile remains a personal and a communal reality for many people. as the obituary notices in the international press informed readers, aside from his extraordinary contributions to contemporary theory, said was a tireless advocate for the rights of a people that forms the world’s largest exile community, with four million refugees outside palestine, and those in palestine arguably enduring a form of internal exile. said, however, lived and worked in new york from 1963 until his death. his experiences of exile, and his conviction that exile still demands critical and creative attention, were thus further modulated by a city renowned for hosting displaced peoples. as he says in the introduction to his essay collection, reflections on exile, ‘exiles, émigrés, refugees and expatriates uprooted from their lands must make do in new surroundings, and the creativity as well as sadness that can be seen in what they do is one of the experiences that has still to find its chroniclers’ (2001, xiv). this special issue of portal appears in the late said’s shadow with one specific, if broad, brief: to discuss exile and its potential to effect social change.1 the critical and creative discussions that follow this introduction respond to a particular set of problems. what factors permit and preclude exilic individual and communal transformation? is there a need to rethink exilic agency in accord with local times, cultures and places, and to refocus attention on exile communal impacts on a host society? and, in a globalized epoch characterized by mass 1 we would like to thank the many participants at the symposium and workshop on exile and social change hosted by the institute for international studies, university of technology, sydney, in july and december 2004 respectively, for their positive and productive responses to the concerns raised in the working paper on which this introduction is based. allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation population movements across geopolitical lines, do states and national desires still have key roles to play in the production of exile? there are no straightforward answers to these questions, but all gesture toward the inadequacy of a single overarching definition or description of exile. as amy kaminsky suggests, however exile may be lived or dreamed, it is innately unstable, ‘a process rather than a singular state’ (1999, xvii). indeed, the process of exile has generated a great deal of debate regarding to whom the term exile applies and when. furthermore, a number of unresolved issues recur in the extensive literature on the topic: the problematic location of exile and its definitional dependency on a home or homeland; the multivalent struggles to attain and maintain exilic voice, representation, memory, and identity on many fronts (individual, familial, communal, national, transnational); exile’s uneasy relation to modernity, the state, and globalization; and exile’s conceptual competition with other terms, such as diaspora, exodus, refugee and migrant. intended as a selective reprise of these issues and the ways the contributors to this issue have responded to them, this introduction identifies some of the claims that have been made of exile as a space or mode of social transformation, as well as the possible limits of such claims. what, then, is exile? said’s ‘reflections on exile,’ an essay first published in granta in 1984, provides perhaps his key statement on this question: exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. it is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. and while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. the achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever. (2001, 173) in this passage, exile is cast as a disturbed physical and psychic relation to space and home. kaminsky, speaking of latin american exiles from the southern cone dictatorships of the 1970 and 1980s, goes further with her claim ‘that without the emplaced human body, there is nothing to know or represent about exile and its aftermath’ (1999, xi). however, as said points out, exile has also had a long metaphorical existence as ‘a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture’ (2001, 173). since nietzsche at least, western literary and philosophical responses to modernity have often used the exile trope to characterize a prevailing sense of unease, estrangement, and ‘spiritual’ orphanhood (2001, 173). a mood of dislocation portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 2 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation dominates western cultures, and said attributes this by no means fatal or unproductive condition to the impact of constant exile flows, so much so that western literature can be said to be a literature of ‘extraterritoriality’ (2001, 173-74). the literary realm for said thus becomes symptomatic of wider forces, one sign that exile has proliferated in an epoch marked by cataclysmic events and far-reaching processes on a global scale: imperialism and its neo-imperialist successors; decolonization and postcolonial unrest; warfare on hitherto unimagined scales; entrenched ideological enmities; competing nationalisms; revolutions, dictatorships, and fundamentalisms; holocausts and ethnic cleansings; mass migration; mass cultural production and a concomitant consumerist habitus; mass starvation and poverty; aids and other pandemics; environmental ruination; transnational capitalism, globalization, and their discontents. exile would seem to be an inevitable consequence of such pressures in what said calls ‘the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration’ (2001, 174). many other terms could be deployed—and in recent scholarship have—to designate this exilic age: diaspora, transnationalism, statelessness, homelessness, transmigrancy, errance, nomadism, deterritorialization, borderlessness, cosmopolitanism, transmodernity, translated culture, to name a few. the current epoch—and the proliferation of terms to designate its demographic mobilities— thus seems to apply pressure on the orthodox understanding of exile. most commonly, exile is defined as banishment, a geographical dislocation and a physical separation from home enacted by a state’s or a regime’s legal system, and intended to prevent certain social actors or groups from effecting change at national or regime levels. accepting this definition, thomas pavel argues that as a form of impelled ‘human mobility across geographical and political space,’ exile must be distinguished from ‘voluntary expatriation,’ as well as from slavery and immigration (1998, 26). exile is most commonly imposed on ‘those who count,’ the ‘publicly important’ competitors for, and the critics (writers, artists, politicians) of, state power (1998, 27). hamid naficy, however, takes a less prescriptive stance in his discussion of external and internal banishment. he argues that internal banishment, or ‘deprivation of means of production and communication, exclusion from public life,’ could designate the lived experience of many state subjects who may not be targeted by a state’s juridical, legal, or portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 3 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation policing apparatuses (1996, 123). that said, the notion that exile is a synonym for deprivation does not always pertain. in this issue, for example, david goodman’s essay on the salar people of north-western china—a state in which ethnic nationalities were officially, and often arbitrarily, created in the 1950s— confirms that exile is a particularly complex process in china, where a han cultural centre constructs all non-han peoples as having peripheral status. goodman, however, shows that notwithstanding the centre-periphery logic, the salar, an islamic chinese community numbering some 100,000, have self-consciously constructed a highly productive communal exile identity within the chinese state. that exilic status is not characterized by a sense of ethnic or communal victimhood. rather, it has enabled the pragmatic salar to take advantage of social and economic reforms, both as beneficiaries of such reforms and as adaptive and mobile social actors in the ongoing socio-economic and political transformation of the chinese economy. if goodman’s paper shows how the salar took advantage of a 1950s bureaucratic and administrative drive to define all chinese as having a ‘national ethnicity,’ timothy amos’s contribution to this issue also exposes the state’s ability to construct exile groups on an ad hoc and arbitrary basis. focusing on the eta and hnin during the tokugawa era in japan, amos shows that these once ‘outcaste’ communities were the subject of state legislation in 1871 that led to their new status as ‘former outcastes’ or ‘new citizens,’ names that betray the ambivalence of the purported ‘return from exile’ they purportedly signify. goodman and amos demonstrate that exile need not entail territorial or cross-border displacement. for his part, naficy’s definition of internal exile indicates that a state may discriminate against internal communities and individuals so that they are exiled at home, their potential to disrupt or challenge the state’s operations accordingly limited (1996). thus, internal exile may be manifested as a form of social death—from short term to life—within the penitentiary, the prison-camp, the asylum, the house converted into a prison, or indeed, the antipodean prison colony (internal exile transported). beyond those sites of official dislocation, supposedly benign institutions such as the familial home, and social conditions such as enforced or prolonged unemployment, may also function as sites of crushing exile. the flip side of legislated banishment at home is exile chosen to evade a state’s legal portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 4 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation apparatuses. aside from millions upon millions who have fled the rise to power and operations of totalitarian, dictatorial or simply ideologically unpalatable regimes, judicial evasion characterizes the experiences of innumerable outlaws and fugitives from the law (casanova, jessie james, ronald biggs, and so on), as well as the exiles of state leaders, often dictators, who become the target of state and international legal authorities once their regimes fall. however, freely chosen exile is not the sole preserve of significant political or criminal agents. in susana chávez-silverman’s evocative ‘zorrilla grass crónica,’ which appears in the cultural section of this issue, the author-narrator meditates on her own youthful flight from reagan-era u.s.a. to apartheid-conflicted south africa as a highly ambivalent going ‘awol,’ a fraught attempt to construct a ‘self-imposed exilio in pretoria, exiled from exile (from grad school en un flatlining job market? from reaganomics?).’ it is also possible to argue that an internal banishment of sorts applies to many native peoples. the doctrine of terra nullius applied by the british to australia, for example, provides an instance of colonization that functioned by literally excising the continent’s indigenous inhabitants from the map, a rhetorical and legalistic gesture upheld by physical dispossession, rigid assimilatory pressures, and genocide. the conquest and dispossession of indigenous peoples in their homelands are not normally included in exile debates. but according to enrique dussel, such dispossession is a consequence of a dominating modernity that arose in late fifteenth century europe, and that was in part constituted on the production of exiles. dussel argues that prior to 1492, most of europe had been a periphery for the islamic world. spain, and portugal before it, were crucial in inverting this relationship. the capture of granada in 1492, the final stage of the reconquista of the iberian peninsular, ended the islamic world’s eight-century long claims to a portion of western europe, and established a pattern of contact as conquest that would be exported to the americas and elsewhere by spain and its rivals (1993, 67). 1492 was also the year in which spain expelled its jewish population, a fate that would apply to the remaining islamic communities over the next century. however, the formative role of this conquering-and-banishing double act in the development of ‘the modern world system’ has been overlooked in contemporary understandings of modernity. as dussel puts it, the mythotrope of modernity affirms europe ‘as the “center” of a world history that it inaugurates,’ while denying that ‘the “periphery” portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 5 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition’ (1993, 65). and that denial enabled the ‘eclipse’ (exile) of ‘whatever was non-european,’ including the relegation of the iberian peninsular to the periphery of european modernity (1995, 12). it is perhaps ironic, then, that the first spanish targets of the modernity mythotrope still dominate discussions of exile in the 21st century. as osama bin laden has asserted on a number of occasions since 2001, spain (al’andalus) looms in some arab imaginaries as a lost homeland or exiled paradise, the only territory from the epoch of classical islam not in islamic hands. for the spanish jews, whose descendants are scattered in north africa, israel and turkey, and who speak a spanish-hebrew-arabic hybrid, the 1492 expulsion continues to inform their communal sense as a people of exile. that particular communal memory adds an additional exilic trajectory to a long history of jewish communal displacements out of which has arisen a resilient foundational narrative of religious and cultural identity. in turn, jewish tropes of exodus and redemptive return continue to inform exile debates in western europe and the americas, and to influence other groups’ conceptions of their own displacement. since 1959, for example, many members of the cuban sector in the u.s.a. have self-consciously embraced a judaic notion of exile— replete with parallels drawn between cuban and jewish ‘chosen people’ status—to designate their mass presence in florida. a more prolonged historical influence from jewish religious lore and intellectual production is evident in the discourses of african-american nationalism, pan-africanism, and negritude. as gilroy points out, tropes of exodus, and the associated term diaspora (from deuteronomy 28:25), were appropriated from jewish discourses by historians of slavery in the 1950s and 1960s. but the connections run deeper, with zionist rhetoric of exile and anticipated return to the promised land informing the work of many african-american and caribbean writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1993, 208). for the descendants of slaves, particularly in the u.s.a., exodus or diaspora and return provided a powerful consolatory metaphor by which to comprehend and cope with a history of enforced displacement, violence, corporeal commodification, and post-slavery discrimination (gilroy 1993, 207). a parallel example of this tendency is provided by the many post-colonial conversions of caliban, the enslaved monster from shakespeare’s the tempest, into the embodiment of the exile most familiar to slaves and their descendants in the portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 6 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation americas. for george lamming, the barbados-born writer, caliban’s paradigmatic exile—a deprivation of language, proper name, and place—also affords some pleasure. the imperial centre is now confronted by the uncountenanced return of its language, and the presence of the voiced other, in ways that invert the exilic relations of colonization (1992, 15). in jewish discourses, however, the terms exile and diaspora are not regarded as synonymous, a semantic distinction that barkan and shelton contend derives from an ideological contest within zionism exacerbated by the founding of the israeli state and the reluctance of many jewish people to live there. that reluctance incited some architects of the jewish state to seek an alternative to exile, with its historical connotations of suffering, violent dispersal, and lack of choice (1998, 4). the greek word diaspora provided a semantic solution for the problem: ‘exile connoted suffering, a negative term evoking displacement, refugee status, and above all the myth of an eventual, and possibly soon, return. in contrast, diaspora came to mean a chosen geography and identity’ (1998, 4). within israeli state discourse, the terms exile and diaspora came to signify mutually exclusive jewish conditions: ‘exile was largely revered for the cultural stamina of the exiles, their constant loyalty to the historical memory of the communal life, rejection of assimilation, and struggle for authenticity and sacrifice. in contrast, the jewish diaspora has been envied for its material success and simultaneously denigrated as selfish and failing to contribute to the general good’ (1998, 4). examining this ideological and conceptual contest, anna hartnell’s contribution to this special issue focuses on the writings of david grossman, in whose texts the tropes of zionism and diaspora compete and collaborate. hartnell deploys said’s arguments on secular and religious modes of cultural identification to argue that if the exile-diaspora dispute in jewish and zionist discourses is ‘crucial for the elaboration of israeli identity,’ it also suggests that said’s approach to exile potentially enables a conciliation between ‘homeless identities’ and an essentialist ‘identity politics.’ despite the distinction between diaspora and exile in jewish debates, exile seems to have lost ground to diaspora in recent cultural criticism. for example, while the brief of diaspora: a journal of transnational studies is to focus on the ‘traditional diasporas’—jewish, greek and armenian—its ground-breaking critical discussions of diaspora’s applicability to other portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 7 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation peoples have greatly assisted in the critical popularization of the term as a sign of new transnational social and discursive transformations. also adopting the diasporic term, rey chow suggests that ‘the goal of “writing diaspora” is … to unlearn that submission to one’s ethnicity such as “chineseness” as the ultimate signified’ (1993, 25). she thus calls for a diasporic intellectual resistance to and noncomformity with fantasy images of ‘chineseness,’ whether determined by the chinese state or western discourses of oriental ethnicity. for gilroy, an historicized account of diaspora helps to explain and learn from the intellectual traffics of the ‘black atlantic,’ most notably between black and jewish intellectual currents concerned with redemption in the face of historical oppression (1993, 211). that concern with redemption also animates dussel’s re-reading of exodus. dussel’s liberatory ethics aim to provide an array of subalterns—’the poor, the oppressed class, the peripheral nation, the female sex object’—with a praxis by which hegemonic processes may be challenged (1998, 243). in this praxis the primary biblical scenario of exodus is cast as the exilic liberation ‘from egypt, to the promised land, through the wilderness’ (1998, 241). this trajectory targets systemic material and discursive oppressions and asks how subalterns might manage ‘the passage from the “old” order to the “new,” not yet prevailing, order’ (1998, 241). exilic liberation thus requires a politicized awareness of multiple oppressions without which there is no basis for active resistance. hardt and negri also make use of the exodus trope in response to imperial postmodernity. empire is at once a concept of untrammelled global reach, an ahistorical eternity, and a deeply penetrative and hierarchized social realm that controls people, territories, and thus its own constructed world, one that appears, due to its placement outside history, as a vast zone of ‘peace’ (2000, xiv-xv). in surmising how resistance to this new empire might be managed, hardt and negri see in the ‘specter’ of migration the ideal subjects for an exodus that will lead to ‘the evacuation of the places of power’ (2000, 212-13). migration for hardt and negri encompasses economically impelled flight from the poorest parts of the world, as well as ‘flows of political refugees and transfers of intellectual labor power’ (2000, 213). nonetheless, hardt and negri note that while ‘desertion and exodus are a powerful form of class struggle within and against imperial postmodernity,’ such mobilities seem only to lead to ‘a new rootless condition of poverty and misery’ (2000, 213). faced by that predicament, portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 8 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation the authors advocate two types of exodus: an ‘anthropological exodus’ composed of resisters whose bodies are ‘incapable of submitting to command … of adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the regulations of a traditional sex life, and so forth’ (2000, 215-16); and a ‘machinic exodus,’ by which ‘the subject is transformed into (and finds the cooperation that constitutes it multiplied in) the machine’ (2000, 366-67). ideally, this exodus will engender a contest between claimants to the real and the virtual, the aim being the seizure ‘of the processes of machinic metamorphosis,’ (2000, 367). hardt and negri’s machinic exodus recalls many other postmodernist responses to globalizing pressures, evident in a widespread critical dependence on metaphors of displacement, deterritorialization, desertion, and their synonyms. yet, as kaplan points out, like ‘most euroamerican modernist versions of exilic displacement’ that emphasize ‘the freedom of disconnection and the pleasures of interstitial subjectivity,’ the escape that post-modernist discourses promise also conforms to a colonizing logic: ‘the movement of deterritorialization colonizes, appropriates, even raids other spaces’ (1995, 89). hardt and negri regard space as an ever-expanding zone of promise, of resistant potential and neo-identificatory possibility founded on mobility itself. but this faith in movement as an utopic enterprise is nonetheless predicated on an ability to access and profit from the technologies of virtuality that remain beyond the means of most of the planet’s inhabitants. such critical faith in mobility raises for us the issue of agency, particularly in an epoch when all manner of displacements, freely chosen and impelled, are challenging, and being met with resistance at, national borders. for whom precisely is cross-border displacement a desired end, and with what motives and rewards? noting the critical popularization of the diaspora concept, barkan and shelton explain that its universalization has in part arisen because many of its main proponents are cosmopolitan intellectuals, writers and critics, for whom the term designates the post-national ‘“nonnormative” intellectual community’ to which they belong and identify (1998, 5). for this community, barkan and shelton propose, the concept of diaspora itself provides a solution to the exclusionary practices of both nationalism and colonialism: ‘diaspora is a culture without a country, ironically the exact antithesis of the internal coherence and integration implied by the notion of national culture. diaspora is about portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 9 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation choice. at a political level, the choice is manifested by adopting a voice, which even though ambivalent and fragmented can provide the tools that may serve to dismantle the enduring relations of colonialism’ (1998, 5). similar claims of the counter-hegemonic credentials of cosmopolitanism were made by the editors of a special issue of public culture on cosmopolitanisms, for whom the term designates a ‘minoritarian modernity’ practiced and lived by ‘the victims of modernity, failed by capitalism’s upward mobility, and bereft of those comforts and customs of national belonging’ (breckenridge et al. 2000, 582). and yet, in what amounts to a dehistoricized list of disparate displacements that recalls hardt and negri’s migrating spectre—’refugees, peoples of the diaspora, and migrants and exiles represent the spirit of the cosmopolitan community’—the editors insist that cosmopolitanism is not to be equated with a ‘cultural pluralism’ located ‘within a national frame’ (2000, 582). nonetheless, the post-national coordinates of cosmopolitanism arguably deflects attention from the fact that this ideal ‘cosmopolitan community,’ which might include exiles, can only emerge within a frame of globally legible class mobility. jeffrey browitt’s essay in this issue explores one instance of privileged exile by focusing on the first novel of migration to the u.s.a. written in spanish, the little-known lucas guevara by the colombian émigré alirio díaz guerra. díaz guevera’s novel—evidence of his seamless integration into a latin american elite community that had access to means of production and publication—provides a vivid account of early twentieth-century new york city in which migrants from many countries have converged, only to be ontologically destabilized by their experiences of an overwhelming ‘american’ modernity and pervasive transculturating processes. as browitt demonstrates, the anxieties and threatening ‘melting-pot’ challenges laid bare in díaz guerra’s novel do not elide with the displacement experienced by the text’s author. in her analysis of modernist and post-modernist tropes of travel and displacement, kaplan is highly critical of the critical popularity of and faith in cosmopolitanism. she argues that the term has replaced ‘bourgeoisie’ to signify ‘the emergent power brokers who know and see nothing but their own self-interest yet legitimate and rationalize their actions by recourse to the rhetoric of humanism’ (1995, 126). kaplan also links cosmopolitanist rhetoric to earlier modernist understandings of exile ‘as an ideology of artistic production,’ one claimed by portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 10 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation ‘euro-american middle-class expatriates’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: euro-american modernisms celebrate singularity, solitude, estrangement, alienation, and aestheticized excisions of location in favor of locale—that is, the ‘artist in exile’ is never ‘at home,’ always existentially alone, and shocked by the strain of displacement into significant experimentations and insights. even more importantly, the modernist exile is melancholic and nostalgic about an irreparable loss and separation from the familiar or beloved. (1995, 28) as with the cosmopolitan border-crosser under globalization, glossed over in the romanticized retreat into exile chosen by hundreds of modernist artists and writers—in paris, london, berlin, new york, the south of france, the south pacific—are the socio-economic and other privileges (gender, racial, national) that fund and facilitate the line of flight, and permit the reformulation of displacement into a metaphor for artistic work, intellectual endeavour or political critique. and yet, such lines of flight could themselves generate forms of exile. jennifer higgie’s marvellous novel son, whose second and concluding part is included in the cultural section of this issue,2 provides a fictional account of an exile that may best be described as a psychic breakdown inaugurated by a ‘grand tour’ of southern europe and the middle east. inspired by the life of richard dadd, the renowned victorian painter and an inmate of bethlem hospital (bedlam), higgie’s novel reveals how the european desire to encounter, experience and represent exotic otherness—another example of the modernity mythotrope in action—was a highly ambivalent and potentially fraught enterprise for agents of the european imperium: such desires could lead to a paradoxical exile from the self. said recognized the limits to exilic agency by differentiating between voiced and voiceless exile conditions. while he concedes that the works of exiled writers ‘lend dignity’ to exiled peoples, he also argues that their texts can only partially account for exile travails: ‘to concentrate on exile as a contemporary political punishment, you must therefore map territories of experience beyond those mapped by the literature of exile itself. you must first set aside joyce and nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for whom un agencies have been created’ (2001, 175). kaplan, however, argues that said’s counterpointing of the literate, literary exile intellectual or writer with the refugee ‘masses,’ potentially relegates the refugee outside discourses of representation and ‘reduces the refugee to ultimate portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 11 2 for the first half of son, see the cultural section of portal vol. 1, no. 2, july 2004. allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation victim, pinned in lumpen opposition to the recoverable memoirs and fictions of the exiled, bourgeois modernist’ (1995, 123). kaplan emphasizes the need for an historicizing attention to refugee experiences in order to ‘bring a previously invisible category back from the wilderness of the margins of criticism and literature’ (1995, 121), and by implication, back into exile debates as well. refugees, asylum seekers, and so-called boat people are, said notes, ‘a creation of the twentieth-century state’ (2001, 181), driven by state and globalcapitalist imperatives to seek any better elsewhere, and often forced to confront the reality that ‘homecoming is out of the question’ (1995, 179). most observers would agree that since the 1970s the transnational movements of peoples have met increased resistance, and anxiety, in the states toward which these peoples are moving. the rise of ‘fortress europe’ rhetoric and policies, for example, is in part attributable to a widespread belief that western europe is not the product of immigrant waves over many millennia. the normalization in europe of this notion of belonging to a place, and of a territorial right to be at home, is paralleled by ‘fortress america’ and ‘fortress australia,’ two states founded on migration that have legislated to secure their borders from the perceived threat of unregulated migratory flows. if states are not disappearing, but reconfiguring themselves to both engender and delimit the movements of peoples, the reconstructive nationalism of many exile groups also responds to such state pressures. as said notes, ‘nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. it affirms the home created by a community of language, culture and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages’ (2001, 176). such avowed commitments to place are nonetheless haunted by the possibility of state dissolution and reconstitution in new forms. vadura’s essay in this issue deals with the exiled sudeten german population, and chronicles the challenges posed to a minority sector when the very state borders that render such minority status meaningful have shifted in line with wider european power struggles and realignments. vadura shows that despite being ‘hosted’ in germany at various times in the twentieth century, the uneasy sudeten german relation to the german host society has often encouraged a hardening of national identifications in response to czech and broader german state enterprises and nationalist rhetoric. that said, vadura provides a fascinating account of the attempts in the 1990s by sudeten germans and successive czech administrations to achieve reconciliation and restitution. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 12 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation at times, the combined weight of state practices and nationalist desire engenders a type of exile that is righteous, intractable, resolutely nostalgic, suspicious of others, and in denial over the identificatory mutations of community members separated from the originary home/land. said attributes this atrophic tendency to a communal sense that in exile ‘nothing is secure,’ that protective lines must be drawn around the exile collective whose memories must then be jealously, passionately guarded (2001, 178). for said, the intransigent case in point is provided by the israeli-palestinian conflict: what could be more intransigent than the conflict between zionist jews and arab palestinians? palestinians feel that they have been turned into exiles by the proverbial people of exile, the jews. but the palestinians also know that their own sense of national identity has been nourished in the exile milieu … where the slightest deviation from the accepted group line is an act of the rankest treachery and disloyalty. (2001, 178) another example of exilic intransigence is discussed with great sensitivity by the cubanamerican-australian writer olga lorenzo in this issue. lorenzo’s autobiographically modulated essay reflects on her own and other cuban-american writers’ fictional works in order to reveal how mechanisms of shame have dominated the cuban exile imagination in the u.s.a. and elsewhere. for lorenzo shame does not simply generate an intense and intransigent nostalgia for the lost cuban home; it also precludes dissent and prevents individuals, families and communities from reconciling themselves to the past. lorenzo asserts the need for writers to foreground exilic shame and thus ‘force it to shrivel in the glare of, for example, literary acceptance.’ the operations of exilic shame do not simply confirm kaplan’s point that exile ‘triggers strong responses’ (1995, 141). they also highlight the inherent paradox of exile communal nationalism forged beyond the originary home/land, in what said calls ‘the perilous territory of not-belonging … where in the modern era immense aggregates of humanity loiter as refugees and displaced persons’ (2001, 177). for said, the paradox presented by this extranational liminality lies in how best the exile might come to terms with ‘a fundamentally discontinuous sense of being’ when the reconstruction of ‘an exile’s broken history into a new whole.’ is at once psychically ‘unbearable’ and geopolitically ‘impossible’ (2001, 177). exploring the exilic space of liminality, guilan siassi’s contribution to this issue explores portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 13 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation said’s particular interest in erich auerbach, a jew exiled in istanbul during world war two and perhaps the paradigmatic inhabitant of said’s ‘perilous territory of not-belonging.’ siassi applies said’s arguments about liminal exile to shed light on auerbach’s attempt to pursue a secular criticism in exile, a space that permitted a resistant reconstitution of home in response to the traumatic experience of loss. another contributor to this issue, the nigerian exiled artist and writer olu oguibe, provides a personal account of why art and poetry attain heightened significance for him, and others like him, in coming to terms and making productive sense of exile. as he says, ‘the preoccupation with exile recurs in my work and those of others because art provides us with a handle on the fact and memory of dislocation and unbelonging; a safe space to dream and contemplate, even mourn.’ the extranational liminality of exile means that the terms home and homeland acquire enormous symbolic and emotive significance for exiled communities and individuals. but there is a perhaps obvious, but necessary, point to make about home and homeland. such terms, without which exile is rarely thought or lived, may introduce other axes of dispute into discussions about exile. for example, kaminsky draws attention to a ‘semantic oddity’ in spanish, a language with two words for house, casa and hogar, but no word ‘that denotes both “dwelling place” and the affective meaning connected to it that “home” does in english and heim and hem do in other germanic languages’ (1999, 3). similarly, the spanish patria, which may also signify a national home of sorts, as well as fatherland, cannot be easily transposed into english. moreover, the affective uses of such terms in common parlance indicate that pueblo (hometown and people) is preferred to patria when people name their place of origin. for kaminsky, this amounts to a domestic identification of place with its inhabitants, as opposed to the more formal public or state registers in which patria would appear (1999, 3). the key to this linguistic ‘contraction’ and ‘expansion’ is the domestic realm, the sign that in spanish at least, talk of home/land is determined by a gendered ideology that naturalizes the house/hearth as feminine, as opposed to the wider masculine space of the país (country) or patria (1999, 3-4). the implications for women, at least, are clear: how can we speak (in spanish, in any language) of women’s exile from a place (the fatherland) that traditionally has been foreclosed to them? portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 14 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation the trouble posed by the notion of home/land is also exposed by the experiences of many freely-chosen exiles, for example, the expatriates associated with imperial and colonizing projects, the ‘colonial officials, missionaries, technical experts, mercenaries, and military advisers,’ described by said as being ‘on loan,’ that is, living and dwelling away from home secure in the knowledge that return remains an option, even when that return is not realized (2001, 181). for many such expatriates, their exile may only become evident on the return to a place that no longer signifies or functions as home. the complex demographic legacies of the french-algerian conflict provide a case in point, although in this case, ‘expatriate’ status is more often imposed rather than freely chosen. significant numbers of two groups to emerge from the algerian war (1954-1962), the ‘harkis’ (algerian forces recruited into the french army but largely left to their fate after algerian independence) and ‘pieds noirs’ (‘repatriated’ european settlers), have managed the ‘return’ to france. there they have either constructed nostalgic memories of the algerian ‘home’ or occluded and repressed such memories, and have often yet to obtain a ‘home’ in france. this disturbed national scenario of exile is further complicated by the post-independence algerian community in france, the largest immigrant group in that country, which has also maintained a myth of returning for decades. that return rarely eventuated, however, given the change from the single male rotation system of the 1950s and 1960s to an immigration policy in the 1960s and 1970s intended to ease domestic unemployment by limiting the opportunities for extra-european work immigration. in reality, this policy encouraged algerian workers to stay in france, and few immigrants took up the government’s offer of a financial incentive to return home. the children of these immigrants are torn between homeliness in a france that does not fully accept them, and an algerian ‘homeland’ that is alien to them, as is evident in a host of literary and artistic attempts to construct memories of algeria despite displacement (hargreaves 1989). such projects of memorialization typify the concerns of many exile writers and artists who see in memory a vector for individual, communal and national validation. the central function of memory in exile processes is again related to the troubled exilic relation to home/land. as said puts it, ‘exiles feel … an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives’ (2001, 177) and ‘much of the exile’s life is taken up with compensating for disorientating loss by creating a new world to rule’ (2001, 181). that attempt at compensation, which arises with portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 15 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation the exilic crossing of national, legal, linguistic and cultural borders, thus characterizes the imaginative and recuperative work of remembering. but for said, the difficulties posed by exilic memory are qualified by the fact that memory is at imaginative work in a contrapuntal sense, located in the past and in the host society’s present: for an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally. there is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish orthodox judgment and elevate appreciative sympathy. there is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be. (2001, 186) as this passage confirms, exile can signal a place where past and present ‘homes’ co-exist pleasurably. this is a point taken up by obododimma oha in this issue, who proposes that europe has emerged as a productive venue for the exilic/migrant african text in the postindependence era. analysing the images of home/land in the exiled nigerian poet uche nduka’s the bremen poems, a work oha describes as a textual politics of re/identification, oha shows how nduka attempts to map his productive homeliness despite exile in the city of bremen, the ‘city of refuge,’ as well as in the europe that spreads out from that city. for marianne hirsch, however, generational factors complicate said’s notion of contrapuntal exilic memory. speaking specifically of the children of holocaust survivors, hirsch argues that these members of the generations born away from the home/land have an ‘imaginative investment’ in ‘postmemory.’ unlike the first generation of exiles, newer generations have no direct experiences of a place of departure, and hence no capacity to imaginatively rely on memories of that place (1998, 420). as a consequence, ‘postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created’ (1998, 420). this is precisely the narrative terrain that concerns australian-hungarian artist, sue hajdú. her beautifully meditative contribution to this issue represents, on the one hand, an account of her relationship to her hungarian-born father, and on the other, her response as a photographer to the disturbing photographs her father took in the last days of the 1956 uprising before leaving hungary. as hajdú says, the artwork she discusses and presents in her piece ‘emerges from portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 16 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation my position as a member of the hungarian diaspora, whereby my very existence and identity as a member of a diaspora owes itself to a historical event that i am unable to lay claim to.’ the reconstitution of exilic memory among second, third or later generations complicates pavel’s assertion that unlike immigrants, ‘exiles never break the psychological link with their point of origin. among the features of exile must thus be included the coercive nature of the displacement, its religious or political motivation, and the exiled’s faith in the possibility of homecoming’ (1998, 26). indeed, as many critics have noted, the longer the period of exile the more it may resemble a ‘long-distance nationalism’ enabled by ‘transnational social fields’ of experience and habitation. these are schiller and fouron’s terms for the understanding by which many transmigrants regard, and remain attached to, their ‘home’ country from a base in another state (2001, 3). for transmigrants, like many exiles, ‘transnational social fields’ often appear to license a ‘claim to membership in a political community that stretches beyond the territorial borders of a homeland’ (2001, 4). this notion of belonging despite distance, and despite identificatory investments in a new place, may generate new exile imaginaries and processes. kaminsky speaks of the latin american exiles who returned to argentina, uruguay and chile after the end of dictatorship, and of how many of those exiles have constructed a ‘routine of travel’ between the latin american ‘home’ and the society that hosted them as exiles (1999, 2). exile in this instance combines a complex transnational reality with the metaphorical potential encoded in the term itself. the critical and creative pieces that comprise this special issue take up and shed new light on the debates loosely sketched in this introduction. they demonstrate, in agreement with said, that more can and must be said about exile in the contemporary world. in line with the special issue’s brief to explore the nexus between exile and social transformation, these essays, autobiographical meditations, and creative responses, are also in accord with kaplan’s call for a questioning of exile and the claims made of it. as kaplan says, acknowledging the realities of exilic pain and loss, and the metaphorical resonances of exile for most residents of modernity, ought not to preclude the critical questioning of exile’s discursive, representational, and ideological parameters: ‘if anything, investigating the critical uses of exile may reinvigorate activism and resistance to state-sponsored terror by fostering a portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 17 allatson & mccormack exile and social transformation politically responsible cultural criticism’ (1996, 141-42). reference list bammer, a., ed. 1994, displacements: cultural identities in question. bloomington: indiana university press. barkan, e., and m. shelton, eds. 1998, borders, exiles, diasporas. stanford: stanford university press. breckenridge, c.a., s. pollock, h. k. bhabha, and d. chakrabarty, eds. 2000, cosmopolitanism special issue. public culture 12.3 (fall). chow, r. 1993, writing diaspora: tactics of intervention in contemporary cultural studies. bloomington: indiana university press. dussel, e. 1993, ‘eurocentrism and modernity (introduction to the frankfurt lectures).’ in the postmodernism debate in latin america. eds. j. beverley and j. oviedo. special issue of boundary 2 20.3 (fall): 65-76. dussel, e. 1995, the invention of the americas: eclipse of ‘the other’ and the myth of modernity. trans. m. d. barber. new york: continuum. dussel, e. 1998, ethics and community. trans. r. r. barr. theology and liberation series. new york: orbis. gilroy, p. 1993, the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. london and new york: verso. hardt, m., and a. negri. 2000, empire. cambridge, ma, and london: harvard university press. hargreaves, a. g. 1989, ‘resistance and identity in beur narratives.’ modern fiction studies 35.1 (spring): 87102. hirsch, m. 1998, ‘past lives: postmemories in exile.’ in exile and creativity: signposts, travelers, outsiders, backward glances. ed. s. r. suleiman. durham, nc, & london: duke university press. 418-46. kaminsky, a. 1999, after exile: writing the latin american diaspora. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. kaplan, c. 1995, questions of travel: postmodern discourses of displacement. durham: duke university press. lamming, george. 1992 [1960], the pleasures of exile. michigan: university of michigan press. naficy, h. 1996, ‘phobic spaces and liminal panics: independent transnational film genre.’ in global/local: cultural production and the transnational imaginary. eds r. wilson and w. dissanayake. durham, nc: duke university press. 119-44. pavel, t. 1998, ‘exile as romance and as tragedy.’ in exile and creativity: signposts, travelers, outsiders, backward glances. ed. s. r. suleiman. durham, nc, & london: duke university press. 25-36. said, e. 2001, reflections on exile and other essays. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. schiller, n. g., and g. e. fouron. 2001, georges woke up laughing: long distance nationalism and the search for home. durham, nc, & london: duke university press. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 18 introduction: exile and social transformation paul allatson and jo mccormack, institute for international yzportalvol6no2songyulingalley portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. post-mao, post-bourdieu: class and taste in contemporary china, special issue, guest edited by yi zheng and stephanie hemelryk donald. issn: 1449-2490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. new perspectives report mix and match or confusion?—middleclass taste in contemporary china lin songyu, guangzhou huacheng chubanshe english abstract this paper looks into the popular discourse of middleclass taste and its social cultural context in contemporary china. focusing on the historical specificity of the use of ‘middleclassness’ in popular chinese media, it suggests that the concentration on taste is both an expression of the post-reform social restratification and a symptom of cultural historical ambiguity, signaling a more general social and imaginative confusion in people’s perception of their present and past. the essay studies the figuration of the desire for iconic and tasteful luxury goods and lifestyles in the work of several urban-based women writers and embarks on a more general media discussion on taste and class in the context of contemporary chinese economic and social change. lin songyu mix and match or confusion? portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 2 混搭？抑或混乱？——中产阶级格调在中国 林宋瑜 1998年，《格调——社会等级与生活品味》一书在中国大陆出版，很快就一版再 版。这是一本引进自美国的畅销书，原英文书名为《class》。中译本面世之后， 倍受中国城市读者（主要是白领一族、小资阶层）的青睐。基本上，他们以此 作为生活方式的指南、时尚的哲学导师以及自我期待的社会等级定位的标杆。 一本书的流行，一定有其特定的精神环境及深刻的社会文化根源。本来在美国 是冒犯大众、剖析并辛辣讽刺美国人数最多的阶层（中产阶级）的一本书，在 中国却被正在富裕起来的一代城市人奉为圭臬。这是非常有意思的问题。以原 书作者的分析角度，我们看到的中产阶级在社会中就如螺丝钉一样可以被随意 替换，因而与上下阶层相比，他们是最缺少安全感、生活也最焦虑的群体。这 种心态造成的结果，是他们渴望得到别人承认，要让人家看到他们生活得既体 面又安全。因此，在日常的衣食住行与言语中，这个群体不自觉地表现为爱慕 虚荣与喜欢炫耀，这也就使他们成为最为虚荣自大和势利的阶层。而且，这个 群体是整个社会最为庞大的中坚阶层。“但是，从本质上说，他们中的大多数人 都是从更低的社会阶层奋斗上来的，所以不可避免地缺少富人阶级才会有的高 级生活品味，因而在生活里追求的恰好是那些缺乏个性的、标准的、可以明确 批示身份的物品。” 1 以当下中国而言，这样的中产阶级尚未成为中国社会的主流，尽管中国的城市 化进程正在加速发展。根据中国社会科学院最新发布的《中国城市发展报告 no.2(2009版)》（即《城市蓝皮书》丛书）, 截至2008年末，中国城镇化率达到 45.7％，拥有6.07亿城镇人口，形成建制城市655座，其中百万人口以上特大城 市118座，超大城市39座。 2 但是迅速扩张的城镇人口并未真正形成城市新生活 方式,而更多的新兴城市呈现出一种大乡镇的景象。在这6.07亿的城镇人口中, 真正达到西方标准的中产阶级生活水平及消费能力的，少之又少。作为一个发 展中国家，中国的主流阶层目前依然是由农民阶级，包括丧失土地的、作为城 市农民工的庞大群体，以及作为城市主体的工薪阶层构成。作为社会学意义的 中产阶级既是中国的新生事物，又是目前中国主流阶层所力争上游的等级，是 奋斗目标。因此，人们并未从《格调》一书中真正嗅出尖酸讥讽的味道，或者 说，尚不在意这种刻薄的冷嘲热讽与真相披露。人们所津津乐道并向往的、以 及目前充斥中国大陆各媒体版面并受到推崇的风尚，恰恰正是那种中产阶级标 签鲜明的生活方式与审美格调。 1 《格调——社会等级与生活品味》[美国]保罗·福塞尔 著；梁丽真、乐涛、石涛 译；“译者前言,”中 国社会科学出版社1998年12月第1版第5页。 2 资料来源：《中国城市发展报告no.2(2009版)》，潘家华主编,社会科学文献出版社2009年版。 lin songyu mix and match or confusion? portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 3 再看看class这个词汇，它更确切的中文意思是“阶级”。长期以来，“阶级”在 中国大陆是极为敏感的政治术语和严肃话题。文化大革命结束以后，阶级斗争 的色彩日渐淡漠。又经过二三十年的经济改革，一部分中国人已经先富起来。 富裕起来的这一群体，除极少数作为这一群体中的top进入或正在进入福布斯富 豪排行榜，其他大部分构成了一个人数不断增加的、以经济收入为标杆的阶层， 即“中等收入者”。也因此，“中产阶级”作为被受质疑的词汇开始用来指称这 一群体，并很快成为中国大陆讨论的热门话题。由于媒体宣传的推波助澜，新 大众（中等收入者）、新美学（中国特色的中等收入者美学价值观）等新词语也 纷纷诞生，并意味着这个消费时代新兴的审美取向与趣味；呈现了社会转型所 带来的新意识形态以金钱衡量作为价值符号和社会隐喻的的景象。以出身作标 准的阶级区分已成为历史，“工农兵”不再是一个荣耀的标签；此时人们以经济 为衡量，以物质积累的突飞猛进作为社会进步的标准，尚未能从文化的多项标 准来制定新的等级现象。 究竟何谓“中产阶级”？它的定义应该包含哪些？ 这个来自英文middle class的词汇，根据美国《韦氏词典》，它最早可以上溯到 1766年，意谓中间阶层，介于上等阶层(upper class)和下等阶层（lower class) 之间。特别是指主要由具有共同社会特征和价值观的商人、专业人士、官僚和 一些农民技工组成的一个庞杂多变的社会经济组合。当时正是西方资本主义进 入快速发展并走向繁荣的阶段，新兴的资产阶级日渐成为社会的主流力量，整 个社会结构开始从农业社会走向工业社会的质变。所以其概念与西方资本主义 发展过程的现实相关。而1951年，美国著名社会学家c.赖特.米尔斯出版了《白 领：美国的中产阶级》 3 一书，第一次提出了“白领”作为20世纪美国新“中产 阶级”的概念，同时详细研究了新老中产阶级之间不同的特征与状况，因此使 “中产阶级”泛化成一个全球性话题。这个“新”是相对于出现于早期美国社 会的以小业主为主要阶层的老式中产阶级而言的。它既区别于传统的老式资产 阶级（拥有财产所有权，身兼工业技术专家、金融商人的勤恳的小业主们），又 区别于纯粹的雇佣劳动者（即一般意义上的蓝领工人）。这一群体的形成不仅打 破马克思所断言的资本主义国家的两种阶级对立的设想，同时也以他们广大的 覆盖范围和庞大数量在影响着整个社会的发展进程，促使这个社会的分层标准 从财产的多寡转向职业的性质转变。 由此可见，“中产阶级”首先是从经济角度派生出来的词语。而在中国大陆它出 现在毛泽东于1926年发表的《中国社会各阶级分析》4一文中，意谓：“中产阶 级主要是指民族资产阶级”。这是从政治角度定义的。所以直到1996年版的《现 代汉语词典》，有关词条的解释依然如此：“中等资产阶级，在我国多指民族资 产阶级。”即狭义地理解为资产阶级的一部分。随着中国大陆经济发展、腾飞， 作为政治学意义的“中产阶级”这一阶级群体，逐渐成为历史记忆；而新兴的 “中产阶级”则是中国大陆市场经济改革最触目的结果之一，由于经济体制转 换而引发生产关系的变化，因此造成经济地位的变化，必然形成新的社会分层。 3 《白领：美国的中产阶级》[美国]c.赖特.米尔斯著, 周晓虹译，南京大学出版社2006年7月版。 4 此文首次发表于1925年12月《革命》半月刊；1926年 3月经作者修改载入《中国青年》第116、117期； 1951年8月,作者又作了一些修改，作为开卷篇收入《毛泽东选集》第 1卷。 lin songyu mix and match or confusion? portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 4 可以说，这是中国现代化和中国人走向富裕之路的历史进程中一个突出的现象。 它完全打乱了已经持续几十年的原有的社会主义阶级结构，也从更深层面开始 动摇中国稳定的农业社会结构。尽管也有一些学者认为中国现阶段是有中产， 而无阶级。但不可否认的是，自上世纪90年代中后期开始，中国社会经济发展 的步伐是更加快速的城市化进程，更加浓厚的商业化运作，市场经济已经完全 合法化；整个社会正在从生产社会向消费社会过渡，而社会的风尚则是物与商 品以及相关服务被赋予更多的符号意义。在这个重要的转型时期，无论你如何 命名，那个从经济学意义讲属于中等收入阶层的群体确实已经形成，实实在在 地存在着，而且朝气蓬勃，它既体现了全球资本主义中产化的特点，也显示了 中国特色小康社会的财富特征。在此基础上正在形成的人生价值观、文化生活 品味、政治话语方向等等对中国大陆普通民众也发挥越来越重要的作用及影响。 那么，由于中国经济开放改革的发展所引发的价值转换，以及民众道德经验和 审美意识由集权压抑转变为自我发展，这里面巨大的内在变化以及呈现的景象 究竟是什么？中国这个中等收入阶层—也即“中国特色的中产阶级”又对当代 中国社会崭新的文化景象产生哪些影响？其中昭显何种文化心态？ 表面上看，这个社会这个时代，“何为价值”这个问题越来越被“值多少钱”的 问询所取替。物化与实用主义是城市居民尤其中产阶级更为习惯的价值评判标 准，因此金钱与急功近利的价值取向正在迅速消解人文价值的传统影响。对于 当下中国进入消费时代之后的种种世俗喧哗与市场繁盛，学术界起初是惊惶失 措，手忙脚乱，似乎找不到理论阐释来对应这急剧的变化，因为这在中国是前 所未有的。因此才发生了上世纪末那场沸沸扬扬的“人文精神大讨论” 5 。然而 反思与批判的结果是促使更多的学者从学院和学术神圣的殿堂走下来，走到“商 业主义与大众文化”研究的行列里去。而当代中国社会的各种商业主义新景象， 被认为正是遵循市场经济逻辑、受全球化影响的消费时代文化所造成的普遍性 样态。“感官、快感、当下”成为当今时代大众文化的审美品格的起点。于是我 们经常看到一个被描绘出来的中国本土欲望都市：新贵、海归、外企人士、演 艺明星、传媒人、畅销书作家以及暴发户⋯⋯他们时尚而前卫，由香槟、波尔 多红酒、蓝山咖啡、三角钢琴、画廊、慈善晚宴、白手套诸如此类构成一个光 影驳杂的庞大的消费阶层，他们被视为正在崛起的中国中产阶级。评论家陈晓 明认为：“在中产阶级中有一大批趣味精英。上世纪80年代是思想精英领导的时 代，90年代，是知识精英时代。到21世纪，人们发现，这个时代发生了变化， 年轻一代开始成长起来，他们被ｉｔ产业所培养，被流行文化所培养，他们是 突然出现的趣味精英。他懂得ｃｄ香水、登喜路、ｆ４。你不知道，他就敢蔑 视你。” 6 事实仅仅如此吗？中国大陆的传统儒道文化基因、后极权统治与新兴资本经济 之间的错纵复杂及畸形发展的关系，实际上已经构成奇特怪异的共生链。 从历史的纵向观察，漫长的农耕时代形成的中国社会重农抑商、以官为本的价 5 指从1993年至1996年，文艺界兴起“人文精神”的大讨论。以《上海文学》和《读书》两家杂志为主，连 续以此为主题发表论文。全国多家报刊如《光明日报》、《文汇报》、《东方》、《十月》等相继发表争鸣文 章，参与讨论。1995年底上海《新民晚报》列举当年文坛十大热点，关于人文精神之争排在首位。 6 张者：“学者为美女作家‘号脉’”；《北京娱乐信报》2003年3月3日版。 lin songyu mix and match or confusion? portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 5 值标准和权力话语，已成为中华民族内部积淀已久的文化结晶，其中还包括道 德理想、审美特征、语言文字等等。虽然这种悠久的文化传统历经多次改造甚 至洗劫，已经面目全非。苟延残喘的脆弱的文化生命，目前也正面临严重的挑 战。 这种挑战主要是来自全球化。全球化意味着自由市场资本主义遍布世界各国， 它既是一个经济概念，也是人类科技创新（因特网、卫星通讯、纤维光学）的 结果，并以迅猛的发展推动国际性制度的趋势。因此，全球化不仅仅是一种现 象，不可能稍纵即逝，它也在形成一种影响深远的“地球村”文化。开放的中 国是走向世界的，因此不可避免地受到全球化的影响。 在这些因素左右之下，西方现代文明与中国农业文明之间的矛盾、全球化与地 域性的矛盾形成博弈，也造成混乱与冲突。当下中国大陆社会，传统农耕的社 会结构正在迅速解体与重新定位，阶层分化加剧、地域差别拉大。人口的重新 分布与阶层的重新形成（但又尚未实现稳定的阶层），导致传统价值观念的改变、 宗教与政治的操控发生动摇。一切都在流动，一切正在嬗变。人们也在这种新 旧快速转型中迷失，找不到精神的依靠感。可以说，正是处于一种精神分裂、 道德分裂、审美分裂的状态。在人生观、世界观方面，人们丧失共识。以2008 年“5·12汶川特大地震”为例，在这场重大灾难发生之后，社会既出现各种令 人赞叹的救死扶伤、志愿服务的事迹，也暴露出各种问题，如大批中小学校舍 倒塌事件、“范跑跑事件” 7 、媒体渲染各类捐款排行榜等等，这都形象地显示 了民众的价值取向大混乱以及道德底线的模糊。 以上作为中国当下社会文化大环境的掠影，是我们理解中国特色的中产阶级审 美格调的基础。这种审美品味，或者说审美格调，不仅仅是个体的，而且是国 家风格的。它们实际上就是一种文化的教化结果。一方面，上世纪90年代以来 城市空间不断扩张，物质主义与世俗化强力冲击新的中国人生活观念，这也对 个人、对文化传统造成不可避免的挤压。新的价值观念、新的世界观发生方向 性转折，却又处于动荡而极不稳定的状态。新兴的中国中产阶级，来自中国不 同的地域、阶层，他们没有经历象西方中产阶级那样的资产阶级阶段，而是由 于首先是经济意义上的迅速改变而带来身份的变化，而这种身份，是没有文化 意义的，或者说文化背景是复杂的。他们既有乡土农业文明的痕迹，又有社会 主义意识形态的烙印。他们所能凭藉的作为中产阶级的文化资源相当匮乏，甚 至说他们的文化资源、原有的文化身份正是他们企图蜕变的。所以“趣味”，便 成为他们寻找新身份的表达，这是一种附在表层而不是长在身体上的标签。 这样我们就不难理解，那些为2008年奥运会所准备的各种楼堂馆所、典礼仪式、 吉祥物纪念品等等赋有国家意义的标志性事物，同时也充分表达了这个国家的 “新贵”们心态，这种心态是由日渐拥有话语权的中国中产阶级群体所支配的。 这个群体的混乱状态、不确定的成员构成、迷茫的价值观念⋯⋯同时造成他们 审美话语的混乱与歧解，令人惊叹失语或者困惑的审美效果成为转型期中国典 型的艺术符号。当女子十二乐坊以改装的性感无比的超短旗袍亮相2004年希腊 7 指四川都江堰时任光亚学校教师范美忠在网上发文公开自己在5.12地震发生时，正在讲课的自己先于学 生逃生，引起媒体报道与社会关注，以及针对道德伦理引发全民大讨论的事件。 lin songyu mix and match or confusion? portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 6 奥运会闭幕式，并以中国传统乐器二胡演奏中国民俗乐曲时，观众面对那种类 似摇滚风格的扭屁股甩大腿、手舞足蹈的表演目瞪口呆。然而女子十二乐坊的 无数克隆品以及无论是国家级仪典还是夜总会场所都充斥人数庞大的青春貌美 的礼仪小姐，令高雅与庸俗的泾渭在此消失。艺术表达（也包括欣赏趣味）作 为一种文化解码行为，它的前提就是解码者必须掌握编码的秘密。以此理解上 述的现象，也同样不难理解北京西客站建筑风格常常被人形容为“穿西装戴瓜 皮帽”、以及城市建筑中随处可见的罗马柱和石狮镇门。中国当代艺术家罗子丹 曾以行为艺术作品《一半白领，一半农民》来阐释人数日渐庞大的中国社会新 阶层。 8 这是一种奇特的心理状态构成的怪异的审美景观，它既有现实联系又涉 及历史渊源。个人品味因此汇合成国家风格，这便构成当下中国极为生动却又 相互矛盾、错位、令人困惑的景象。 当西方的生活方式随着西方的先进科技、自由资本主义理念进入中国，作为西 方日常生活方式主流的中产阶级（在美国差不多占人口的80%）趣味更是以其 布尔乔亚气息诱发中国年轻一代的想象。网络作家安妮宝贝的走红不是没有理 由的。这位曾从事过金融、编辑、广告等职业的上海滩年轻白领，依托网络， 以精致的语言风格和凄美的故事情节，围绕自由、漂泊、宿命等命题思考的题 材、涉及孤独、爱、死亡诸如此类的小说主题，获得她在当下文学领域的地位。 安妮宝贝，对许多都市白领读者而言，这个名字意味着忧郁、游离、小资情调。 他们成为安妮宝贝的忠实粉丝，也因此使出版商看到安妮宝贝巨大的能量—— 她可能不费吹灰之力就攥住一大批年轻读者的思想和腰包。 事实正是如此，自从2000年出版成名作小说集《告别薇安》9以来，安妮宝贝几 乎所有作品都能进入图书销售排行榜,而且是在全国文艺类书籍畅销排行榜中 遥遥领先。那些工业化大城市中游离者如风如影的飘忽生活，那些在爱和幻觉 中追寻自我的新新人类，那些隐忍着叛逆激情、外表冷漠内心狂热、性格诡异 行踪不定的人物——他们穿着麻棉布衬衣和褪色牛仔裤，他们去星巴克喝咖啡， 吃哈根达斯甜品，听帕格尼尼、卡彭特或披头士。他们并不贫穷，但离中产阶 级还有一些距离；他们也有一点闲时与闲情，以供思考物质与精神、空虚与堕 落⋯⋯这一切，已足以构成破碎、散乱、不确定、光影迷离的物象，成为众多 追求小资趣味的年轻读者意乱情迷的语境。 文学评论家、北京大学教授戴锦华如此评价安妮宝贝：“在安妮的笔下，那（都 市）是永远的漂泊流浪的现代丛林，也是无家可归者的唯一归属。我为安妮笔 下的颓靡和绮丽所震动，在那里生命如同脆弱的琴弦，个人如同漂流中的落 叶⋯⋯安妮宝贝的作品，展现了一脉中国大陆版的世纪末的华丽，一份灰烬间 的火光的弥留。” 10 而另一位文化批评家朱大可则认为：“上海宝贝、北京宝贝 和安妮宝贝，这些在情欲超市里涌现的各款‘话语宝贝’和‘美女作家’，正在 成为小资们的带路天使。她们是一些被‘棉布裙、香水、光脚等词语掩藏的女 人’，借助对奢华的都市奢华消费品的敏感，从事着散布肉欲的香艳叙事。尽管 8 罗子丹行为艺术《一半白领，一半农民》，时间：199年12月4日；地点：成都市中心春熙路一带（耗时3 小时）；材料：一半是庄稼人装束，另一半服饰高档、时尚，真丝暗花的皮尔卡丹领带一半被细致地缝入 另一半“农民”的粗布蓝衫下。资料来源：文学刊物《山花》（贵州省文联主办）2009年第8期。 9 《告别薇安》，安妮宝贝著，中国社会科学出版社2000年1月版。 10 戴锦华：“世纪末的华丽——评〈告别薇安〉”；《中国图书商报》2000年6月13日版。 lin songyu mix and match or confusion? portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 7 此类‘现代性经验’不过是‘无法道出灵魂真相的泡沫’，却仍然为小资群体提 供了必需的中产阶级幻象。” 11 这两位批评家从不同的角度道出世纪之交中国大 陆明显的商业消费时代特征。此时，关于资本的神话已经演变为时代的现实， 沿海城市的年轻白领已构成城市新市民人群。他们追求的生活趣味、价值观及 生活方式源于对西方中产阶级生活的幻想，也即是物质性的、世俗化的、所谓 精致的生活氛围。 安妮宝贝在2000年出版的成名作《告别薇安》中，将物质生活中的咖啡、哈根 达斯、kenzo的新款香水、白棉布裙子、低音萨克斯风、樱花花瓣、法国梧桐⋯⋯ 构成小资情调的经典场景。她的字里行间充满小资阶层的凄美伤感，也引发一 大批小资读者的共鸣。随着中产阶级话语空间的不断扩张，这些在衣食住行等 方面可以体现出与国际接轨（即与西方主流社会的中产阶级趣味接轨）的“高 雅”情调、异国风情正越来越强势地影响着中国城市人群的生活。可以用金钱 标出价码的东西，把巨额财产等同高级的身份，这种货币经济式的诉求目前正 是中国社会风气与价值观所认同的标准，也成为年轻一代奋斗的生活目标。因 此不难理解为何中国正在成为全球奢侈品的主要市场。 另一位正在走红的上海女作家孙未，以长篇小说《奢华秀》、《富人秀》、《我爱 德赛洛》和都市爱情随笔《女性主义者的饭票》等作品而被媒体称为“中产写 作的著名代表人物”。这些作品以外滩三号、海岛别墅、香奈儿、蒂梵尼等奢侈 品为故事中的重要道具，并以中国新兴富人阶层为小说人物及题材。作者认为 她之所以被视为“中产代言人”，是由于“给我这个标签，大家可能是出于这几 方面的原因。其一，作品的格调和趣味略嫌优雅，被认为表露了中产阶层的生 活方式和情趣。其二，我个人的身份，由于早年从事影视行业并涉猎商界，做 过职业经理人。其三，作品的人物、题材和视角，被认为反映了中产阶级寻求 精神归属的向往与思考。” 12 如果通过推崇与模仿，能够把西方的中产阶级格调全盘移植的话，或许谈起这 个问题还比较简单。因为保罗·福塞尔的《格调》已经足够详尽而尖锐。而与 美国（甚至澳大利亚）作为移民国家不同的是，它们是不同文化基因融合、多 元文化基因共同作用下的社会标本，在变革文化传统的同时，也承载多种多样 的传统文化基因。而中国人（尤其是汉文化圈的中国人）的思维和心灵还有长 期浸染的另外一些极为顽固的东西。许多思想理念无法从人们自身或其他人的 过去中摆脱出来。也就是说，在另一方面，我们不要忘记13亿中国人骨子里的 小农情结、帝王思想，包括晋入胡润的富豪排行榜的、以及被界定为中等收入 者的群体，哪怕你是从哈佛回来的海归博士。按照文化发生学的观点，要从一 个人出生的等级逃离是非常困难的事情。而文明之间、等级之间的差异也不是 人们欲望差异造成的，更主要的是由于不同文明、不同等级的观念差异。因此， 有些学者认为当今中国有中产无阶级，中国中产阶级是个伪命题。这是有一定 道理的，因为中国中产者迄今为止尚未形成真正的主流意志，而整个中国社会 11 朱大可：“‘零年代’：大话革命与小资复兴”；《守望者的文化月历1999--2004》第150页。花城出版社2005 年4月版。 12 孙未：“揭开财富与爱情之间的潜规则”，新浪网(www.sina.com.cn)“读书频道”访谈；2008年7月2日 16：48。 lin songyu mix and match or confusion? portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 8 一方面是传统思想体系支离破碎，一方面是新社会意识形态还是混沌不清：集 体化衰退，个人性突现，而精神正处于难以进退的窄门。罗子丹正是以其行为 艺术反省当下中国不同身份异质同体的都市人格的基本矛盾，并表达他对这种 混乱语境的深重忧思。 回顾中国大陆改革开放三十年（1978年—2008年），与人们日常生活相关的事物 基本上是煽动与自然状态相脱离、支持利己主义与享乐主义的。他们来自对西 方生活的表面化模仿，并以喧哗的娱乐化取悦大众，无情击败传统中国的抒情 与“大音稀声”的审美价值观。尤其是上世纪90年代以来，社会转型的同时， 是国家的经济不断增长而审美趣味却在步步下降，对于人类真正美好生活的想 象力日渐萎缩。作为一个曾经是具有高度审美能力的农业文明国度，今天的学 术明星、作家明星、文艺生产商面对日新月异的现实眼花缭乱，已经丧失定力 与创造力；作为精神产品的文学、艺术、学术思想被商业化运作（炒作、包装 等）改造成流行文化产品，同时也由大众传媒推波助澜制造出阅读时尚。从这 点来看，倒是带有中产阶级某种善变与不安分的特性。德国哲学家齐奥尔格·西 美尔(georg simmel)对此问题有生动的阐释：“如果我们觉得一种现象消失得像 出现时那样迅速，那么，我们就把它叫做时尚，因此，在解释现在的时尚为什 么会对我们的意识发挥一种有力影响的理由中，也包含着这样的事实；主要的、 永久的、无可怀疑的信念正越来越失去它们的影响力。从而，生活中短暂的与 变化的因素获得了很多更自由的空间。与一个多世纪以来人类不停劳作、发挥 自身天赋的过去之断裂使得意识越来越专注于现在。⋯⋯时尚已经超越了它原 先只局限于穿着外观的界域，而以变幻多样的形式不断增加对品味、理论信念、 乃至生活中的道德基础的影响。” 13 而中国城乡发展的不平衡、财富分配、资源 配置的不公正不合理，生存的历史环境与文化基因的作用力，更造成经济、文 化发展的特殊性。时尚文化生产、中产阶级趣味的审美格调与小市民意识、小 农意识混杂一起，彼此浸透，从而体现出驳杂而暧昧的一面。 在中国大陆，媚雅的中产阶级趣味与流于粗鄙的、媚俗的市民口味往往是异曲 同工的。因为两者的根本共同点都是对理想、信仰、崇高、伟大等等神圣性概 念的摒弃；并都乐于将日常生活的欲望合法化、审美化。把日常生活的琐碎细 节作为审美想象的中心，然后披上各种外衣，赋予不同寻常的价值和意义。另 一方面，作为农耕时代存留下来的帝王思想、小农意识也以集体无意识的方式 修饰出中国特色的中产阶级审美格调。对布尔乔亚与封建遗老遗少的想象“土 洋结合”，在精致、闲适的“下午茶”后面还有呛人的二锅头、宫廷秘方⋯⋯ 当下中国，是一个混乱而分裂的时代，也是审美危机凸显的时代。我们需要讨 论在中国迅速崛起的中等收入阶层与新兴的市民群体的价值体系所包含的内 容，尤其重要的是关于这种价值体系的整合与提升，因为它意味着人的精神成 长以及人格的全方位提升。当大批农民离开土地进入城市工业，把他们过去的 农村生活方式更改为城市生活方式，并与全球的时尚、市场、娱乐趋势紧密相 联，他们的价值取向不可避免发生巨大的变化，其中既有失落的、迷惘的、混 乱的意识，也有创新的观念。这是一个动态的过程，这个过程将民族、传统与 市场、技术、国际政治形势融合起来，促使个体乃至民族、国家走向世界。因 13 《时尚的哲学》第77页至78页；齐奥尔格·西美尔 著；费勇、吴燕 译；文化艺术出版社2001年9月版。 lin songyu mix and match or confusion? portal, vol. 6, no. 2, july 2009. 9 此，面对种种文化症侯及混乱局面，许多学者提出了振兴国学、复兴民族传统 的主张。这是一个方向，但我认为民族的文化复兴不可能是简单地返回过去， 根本在于挖掘出基因谱系中的核心价值，并要与国家、社会的现代化相适应。 这样的文化复兴涉及政治、经济、文化、意识形态等各个方面，更涉及个体的 终极目标追求。是庞大的系统工程，任重而道远的人文建设。 参考书目 安妮宝贝,《告别薇安》，中国社会科学出版社2000年1月版。 c.赖特.米尔斯,《白领：美国的中产阶级》, 周晓虹译，南京大学出版社2006年7月版。 戴锦华,“世纪末的华丽—评〈告别薇安〉”；《中国图书商报》2000年6月13日版。 毛泽东,《中国社会各阶级分析》, 开卷篇,《毛泽东选集》第1卷, 1951。 潘家华主编, 《中国城市发展报告no.2(2009版)》，社会科学文献出版社2009年版。 保罗·福塞尔；《格调——社会等级与生活品味》 梁丽真、乐涛、石涛 译；中国社会科学出 版社1998年12月第1版。 齐奥尔格·西美尔,《时尚的哲学》；费勇、吴燕译；文化艺术出版社2001年9月版。 孙未,“揭开财富与爱情之间的潜规则”，新浪网(www.sina.com.cn)“读书频道”访谈；2008年7 月2日16：48。 张者,“学者为美女作家‘号脉’”；《北京娱乐信报》2003年3月3日版。 朱大可,“‘零年代’：大话革命与小资复兴”；《守望者的文化月历1999--2004》。花城出版社2005 年4月版。 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: georgeou, n., hawksley, c., monks, j. and ki'i, m. 2019. food security and asset creation in solomon islands: gender and the political economy of agricultural production for honiara central market. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 16:1/2, 101-118. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v16i1/2.6542 portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 14492490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu. au/ojs/index.php/portal research article food security and asset creation in solomon islands: gender and the political economy of agricultural production for honiara central market nichole georgeou1, charles hawksley2, james monks3, melina ki’i4 1 humanitarian and development research initiative (hadri), western sydney university 2 university of wollongong 3 hadri, western sydney university 4 hadri, western sydney university corresponding author: associate professor nichole georgeou, humanitarian and development research initiative (hadri), western sydney university, locked bag 1797, penrith nsw 2751, australia. email: n.georgeou@westernsydney.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6542 article history: received 04/04/2019; revised 13/08/2019; accepted 16/08/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract this article presents data from a 2017 survey of vendors selling fresh produce at the honiara central market (hcm) over a twelve-week period from july–september. it aims to understand the economic contribution of vendors, and in particular of producer-vendors, to their communities. detailed geospatial mapping of the origin of produce sold at hcm illustrates the scope of production for market. data shows that 70 percent of all produce comes from villages on guadalcanal to the east of honiara, with intensive production for market also to the west of honiara, from central province (savo, nggelas), and important market trade from parts of malaita, and new georgia. there is very limited engagement with hcm from choiseul and temotu, and none from makira and renbel. the data also indicates that the majority of producer-vendors at the hcm are women, and that the average sale of fresh produce on fridays generates amounts of income higher than the minimum daily wage. we examine these findings using a lens of food security with a focus on asset creation. we show the economic benefit of market selling for women tends to involve lower value crops of leafy declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 101 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6542 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v16i1/2.6542 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:n.georgeou%40westernsydney.edu.au?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6542 greens, nuts, fruits and root vegetables, while men are more dominant in more lucrative cash crops such as melon. keywords: food security; asset creation; gender; solomon islands; pacific islands in some parts of the pacific, particularly micronesia, subsistence agriculture is becoming increasingly precarious due to the historical effects of urbanisation, export crop plantations, resource extraction, expensive imported foods, distant water nations’ overfishing, remoteness from global supply chains, and climate change (connell 2014). these issues all resonate with food security, the most widely accepted definition of which derives from the 1996 world food summit plan of action, which describes it as a ‘state in which all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’ (fao 1996; 2002). the ‘2011–2015 pacific food security draft framework for action: toward food security in the pacific’ recognizes that the changes in food supply and demand pose a growing threat to food security and have impacts on the health of pacific populations (spc 2010: 4). following this broadly accepted definition of food security, the intersection of agricultural production, resource extraction and changing climate and other diverse factors are integral to understanding the food security challenges and opportunities of populations. the complex interplay and inter-relationship of these factors can be conceptualised as four key components that comprise food security: food availability; food access; food utilization; and asset creation. (renzaho & mellor 2010: 5). building on georgeou, hawksley and monks’s (2018) analysis of the availability of fresh produce at honiara central market (hcm), this article explores ‘asset creation’ among rural communities in solomon islands that provide the agricultural produce sold at hcm, the largest fresh produce market in the country. asset creation is understood as the ability to maintain or rehabilitate assets people rely on to obtain food, including the ability of households to produce food, that is, home gardens, and employment generation or income transfer (renzaho & mellor 2010: 5). the previous study demonstrated the diversity and quantity of fresh food available for sale at hcm and concluded: first, that fresh agricultural produce was being purchased for local consumption; and second, that produce was also being purchased at hcm by re-sellers who resold the same produce to urban honiara residents at roadside stalls. this article extends those findings and focuses on the sale of agricultural produce by farmers and resellers to argue that smallholder agricultural production can and does play an important role in asset creation for rural residents through revenue earned from market sales at the same time as increasing the food security of urban residents by guaranteeing regular access to fresh food. we examine the geographic extent of the food systems that supply hcm, and then estimate the economic importance by region of production from the sales of produce at hcm. this article has four parts. we first use a component of food security—asset creation—to examine the macro positioning of domestic agricultural within the political economy of solomon islands, making note of the health implications that have resulted from the outward orientated economy. we then present the data gathered from the survey and explain the method of map generation. third we present findings from the data, noting the important role of domestic agricultural production in the rural solomon islands economy, and the georgeou et al. portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019102 possibilities for women to earn income. in the final section we assess the contribution of market producer-vendors through the lens of asset creation making observations on the links between production for market sale, and the contribution of rural agriculture to human security and food security for solomon islanders. part i: food security and domestic agriculture in solomon islands the melanesian state of solomon islands experienced significant disruptions to its food security during the tensions (1998–2003), affecting livelihoods and wellbeing. the violence disrupted food production, food supply and sale at market. on the northern plains of guadalcanal around 25,000 people were evicted and internally displaced (fraenkel, allen & brock, 2010: 68). palm oil production ceased at the massive guadalcanal plains palm oil limited (gppol), to the east of honiara (ausaid 2006: 10). on the weather coast food gardens were abandoned as people fled from conflict—the usually carefully tended gardens were overrun by an influx of pests and diseases, with the loss of particular varieties of taro and yam (wilson 2013). while the political and social tensions mostly centred on guadalcanal, other provinces suffered through disruptions to export agricultural supply chains based in honiara, especially producers of copra and cacao. from 2003 to 2017 solomon islands hosted the regional assistance mission to solomon islands (ramsi). during this period, ramsi re-established central control through a significant policing support program (hawksley & georgeou 2015: 145-149; 2016: 199–203). the economy also turned around, largely under the tutelage of initially around 100 advisors in the ministry of finance and treasury, which by 2013 had been scaled back to 25. amongst other matter, these officials worked to tighten tax collection—state revenue increased almost tenfold, from si$258.2 million in 2002 to over si$2.5 billion in 2012 (sig/ramsi 2017: 51). there was a steady rise in gdp, which quickly rebounded from the tensions-led minus-14.26 percent contraction of 2000, to an impressive 13.19 percent growth in 2011. gdp has since stabilised at around 3 percent (world bank 2019), and while the improved solomon islands government (sig) bottom line has facilitated foreign direct investment (fdi), despite attempts to broaden its economic base solomon islands has remained largely aid dependent (ramsi 2017: 52) and thus subject to donor priorities for economic development. in the case of solomon islands this has meant boosting agricultural exports to reverse the balance of trade rather than supporting the development of smallholder (producervendor) production for domestic consumption. under ramsi solomon islands has become more integrated into the global economy. asian development bank figures (adb: 2019) show that exports are now over ten times their 2000 value: the si$331.3 million of 2000 grew to si$3,699.6 million by 2017. the country’s exports remain mostly rough wood (68 percent), and processed fish (7.5 percent), however export agriculture has become increasingly important as a source of income generation (oec 2017a). local farmers are encouraged to develop and grow specific crops: coconut (for oil and copra) and cacao (for chocolate). solomon islands exported usd$ 28.7 million of palm oil (4.1 percent of exports), predominantly from guadalcanal plains palm oil limited (gppol) to the east of honiara, which has been active since 2005, and which buys palm oil from ‘out-grower’ blocks operated by local landholders (fraenkel allen & brock 2010: 70). feeney et al. (2013: 4) note that this provides considerable income for local people, who divide their time between growing produce for market (hcm) and growing palm fruit. not all areas of portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019103 food security and asset creation in solomon islands: gender and the political economy of agricultural production for honiara central market solomon islands are as fecund as the plains east of honiara, which fraenkel, allen and brock (2010: 65) note is ‘the largest contiguous area of arable land in the pacific islands’; however growers on other islands (russel, savo) contribute to usd$18.8 million in copra (2.7 percent of exports), usd$17.8 million in coconut oil (2.6 percent) and usd$10.7 million in cacao beans (1.5 percent). developing the export of copra, coconut oil and cacao is a main focus of the australian aid programs, along with encouraging tourism. the crops destined for the global market total 10.9 percent of all exports. while exports have increased, imports have grown by almost the same magnitude, from si$469.9 million in 2000 to si$4,010 million in 2017. in terms of trade balance, the 2017 figure of minus-si$310 million was an improvement on the 2010 figure of minus si$1,442 million, yet despite increasing exports and imports, during the entire ramsi period the trade balance remained consistently negative (adb 2019: 6). a worrying feature for solomon islands is the type of imports, which has implications for diet. in 2017 usd $70.8 million was spent on imported foodstuffs (12 percent of imports), which included usd$8.57 million on pasta, over 98 percent of which came from china (46 percent) or south east asia. a further $54.4 million (9.2 percent) was spent on vegetable products, which included usd$40.7 on rice (oec 2017b).1 the imported pasta is instant noodles—quick and easy to prepare but with low nutritional value. for the last two years (2016 and 2017) 5 percent of solomon islands total imports from its largest trading partner, china, have been pasta (oec 2017c). as with other pacific islands countries, the deepening integration of solomon islands with the global market has led to changes in diet, the implications of which are reflected in the rise in noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes and obesity (world bank 2016). while aid programs focus on developing the export agricultural sector to reverse the balance of payments, sig is committed to developing policy and program options to improve access to lokal kaikai (local foods) (underhill 2018: 6) that are both cheaper and more nutritious than most processed (usually imported) foods. there is official encouragement for urban sup-sup gardens2 and some mixed farming in the peri-urban areas of honiara. the population of the capital has grown substantially—including its peri urban areas (from white river to burns creek), honiara has increased from 65,000 in the 2009 census to an estimated 100,000 people today (georgeou & hawksley 2017: 69), and it is the producer-vendors from guadalcanal and other provinces who bring their goods to hcm who largely meet the fresh fruit and vegetable needs of honiara residents. export agriculture does bring income, but arguably there is also substantial revenue to be generated from supplying fresh produce to hcm, and to other honiara markets (see keen & ride 2018a; 2018b).3 selling at market is a form of asset creation, defined as ‘putting in place structures and systems that sustain a household’s or individuals’ ability to withstand sudden shocks that threaten their access to food including economic and climatic crises (eg drought, flood) or seasonal food shortage,’ and there are five types of capital assets: human, natural, financial, social and physical. in a broad sense asset creation involves the ability to ‘maintain/rehabilitate 1 the value of imported rice and pasta (us$49.27 million) is greater than the revenue earned from exporting copra, coconut and cacao (us$ 47.3 million). 2 sup-sup gardens are small household gardens alongside a kitchen or on land close by that supplement a household. 3 roadside stalls and informal markets are present in many locations in honiara. some are established but unregulated (fishing village, henderson, white river, borderline, talise). formal markets also exist in larger towns (gizo, auki). georgeou et al. portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019104 assets people rely on to obtain food,’ which may include the ability of households to produce food, that is, home gardens, employment generation or income transfer (renzaho & mellor 2010: 5–6). in the next section we describe the method used for the survey that collected data over a three-month period. we then outline the main findings before examining them through the lens of asset creation to highlight the important role of smallholder agricultural production to the availability of fresh produce and the nutritional diversity of diet in honiara, the possibilities for income generation and increased reliance from shocks, and enhanced food security for solomon islanders. part ii: presentation of data the 2017 survey aimed to understand what produce was sold at hcm, who sold it, the quantities sold, who it was sold by, who it was sold for, at what cost, and where produce came from. it used data on quantity and price to estimate the total revenue. estimating revenue presented a particular challenge given the diversity and fluidity of measures used at hcm and the variety of produce (81 different types of fresh produce). four enumerators (three female and one male, reflecting the gender mix of market vendors) administered a pencil and paper survey in solomons (melanesian) pidgin, with answers recorded in english. data collection at hcm was undertaken every friday over a 12-week period between friday 7 july and friday 22 september. the four enumerators rotated each week through the six different sections of the market that sold fresh produce. a stratified sampling method was utilised to control the distribution of fieldwork among enumerators, specifically to ensure that vendors were not surveyed twice in one day by different enumerators. in each sector, simple random sampling of 20-25 vendors was undertaken. enumerators worked from 9am-3pm each friday, the second busiest market day, which enabled enumerators to capture the flow of vendors, i.e. those who sold fresh produce at hcm for less than one whole day. data cleaning enumerators collected a total of 1214 vendor surveys, however during the data cleaning process many of these records were deemed incomplete and were omitted from the final count, which then reduced to 965 (n=965). in compiling maps of produce types, some of the vendors surveyed sold more than one class of item. there is thus one record for each item sold by each vendor, which yields a higher overall number of produce records (n=1303). of the 965 vendor records, we were able to establish geospatial locations for 820 origins of produce and 1085 produce records. of the 965 vendor records, there were 690 (71.5 percent) individual vendors who reported as producing (growing) the goods they sold, giving us a figure of 690 ‘producervendors.’ the quantity of data gathered during the survey period enabled the generation of maps based on: gender; produce type; origin of produce; quantity of produce; density of production; modes of transport used; children; dependents; and various combinations of the above. mapping data was adapted for presentation through geo-spatial mapping, a process that involved several steps. of the 965 cleaned vendor records we were able to establish 820 village locations, which equated to 1085 produce records. the produce origin locations were divided into seven lists: east guadalcanal—all locations to the east of honiara both on the plains and in the portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019105 food security and asset creation in solomon islands: gender and the political economy of agricultural production for honiara central market mountain ranges; west guadalcanal—all villages west of honiara both on the plains and in mountain ranges; south guadalcanal (the weather coast); honiara—all settlements in the immediate hills behind honiara cdb, as well as peri-urban areas of burns creek and white river; central province—savo island, nggelas and russell islands; malaita; and other, with the latter covering fish from western province (particularly noro town on new georgia) and small amounts of produce from isabel, choiseul and temotu. these master village lists were then checked and cross-checked by solomon islands researchers for accuracy. in order to generate the maps, the raw point coordinate data was processed through assigning the longitude and latitude to the standard wgs 84 spatial reference system. this spatial data was bound to the rest of the hcm producer-vendor survey data which allowed for both spatial queries and queries on the content of the data. the google maps api (reference) was used in the dynamic fetching of the base layer maps based on bounding box queries (determined by the subset of data to be mapped). aesthetic assignments were then made from variables in the survey data to visual components of the resulting visualisation. for all the maps, other than those simply showing the location, the continuous variable of interest was assigned to the radius of the point and the grouping variable of produce category was set to its colour. a constant alpha transparency of 0.6 was assigned to these plots, allowing multiple types of produce coming from the same source to be seen. a faceting variable of gender was used to split the data into two mutually exclusive subsets, with these sets displayed on sideby-side maps with shared axes, making it easier to draw visual comparisons. this process was implemented through the r statistical computing language for the processing of the data, with the sf (simple features) package used to manage the spatial metadata. the ggplot2 package was used to implement visual aesthetic assignment of variables with the ggmap package being used to integrate these aesthetics with the google maps api for base layer images. depending on the variable requested, two maps were initially generated: one map for guadalcanal due to the quantity of produce; and one map for all other parts of solomon islands.4 in some situations the density of clustering required maps by specific provinces (i.e. central province) to see the precise geographic distribution of market activity. a gendered breakdown is presented for each map to show the economic contribution of female vendors at hcm to the food security of their communities through asset creation through the sale of fresh produce at hcm. revenue we estimate likely cash revenue from market sales on fridays only over the 12 weeks of surveys in one three-month period in a single year (in si$, and assuming full return of all moneys to the village) by declared quantity from vendors, price per unit and weight. the estimated revenue for twelve fridays between july and september 2017 should not be extrapolated—crops change due to seasons, crop production declines or increases over time, and producer-vendors are not always present every day at market or selling the same crops. 4 the one record from temotu (61 kg of root vegetables which came by air) was excluded from mapping depictions as it altered the scale and distorted the visualisation of origin of produce, produce type, density of production and estimated revenue. georgeou et al. portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019106 it was judged statistically unsafe to estimate even weekly revenue due to the large number of assumptions that would need to be made.5 at the time of the survey the average revenue of $104 per market visit was substantially (over three times) above the minimum wage of si$4 per hour. in december 2018 solomon islands’ government announced the minimum wage would rise from si$4 to si$8 per hour in 2019. this was made official from 1 august 2019 (sibc 2019). for an 8-hour working day at the new rate, the minimum wage is si$64 a day, and $320 a week, or $1280 a month for a 40–hour working week. 6 the new daily minimum wage rates of $64/day are 60 per cent lower than the 2017 average market sale rates on fridays during the survey period (si$104). limitations of study this study only examines income generated from the sale of fresh produce at hcm on fridays over a three-month period. the three-month period did not allow for seasonal variation, nor for difference or variation in market supply according to the timing of agricultural production and supply regions.7 the study was a vendor survey and not a household survey. it did not ask vendors for economic data from households and while we estimate possible revenue from hcm, this is the only form of income measured and we do not account for any other sources of household income from vendors or other members of the household (including waged employment, other casual paid employment, and other sources of income). explanation of maps maps 1 through 5 show the total number of vendor records (n=1303) by gender, and are linked to origin of produce (villages). regional maps show subsets of the total. maps 6 through 10 illustrate produce data by village (n=912) from the 690 producer-vendor records, with regional maps showing subsets of the total. with the exception of map 1, in order to represent the dispersion of villages that supply produce to hcm the scale has been reduced to cover only those areas from which records were obtained. where the focus is on produce from other islands, records of produce from guadalcanal are not included. 5 the same caveats exist for monthly, three-monthly and annual revenue. we abandoned attempts to estimate weekly revenue due to too many unreliable assumptions. weekly trading figures were initially determined by plotting the honiara city council (hcc) market vendor fees collected on survey day (friday = 1.0) and multiplying these by a factor of 5.89 (derived from hcc data for all days in october and november in 2014). in terms of estimating earning, the number of sellers at hcm increased from monday (0.89) to fridays (1.0), with most sellers present on saturdays (1.2). sunday was the quietest trading day (0.2 of friday). the figure of 5.89 was, however, unreliable as there were too many ‘unknown unknowns.’ until july 2019 sunday trading was unofficial, although people still shopped and fees were still collected. on 25 july 2019 the honiara city council announced via its facebook page that the market would formally open on sundays, effective 28 july: ‘to allow the general public to have access to fresh market produces any given time of the week. also this would help the market vendors to have access to sell their products throughout the week’ (hcc 2019). the hcc announcement of sunday trading formalised a previously informal practice. 6 the change commenced on 1 august 2019 (sibc 2019), raising the minimum wage from si$4 per hour to si$8. the minimum wage is offered as a comparison, although skilled employment often receive many multiples of the minimum wage. at august 2019 the si$ (officially the ‘sbd’) to us exchange rate was us$1 to si$8.21—minimum wage workers would get us$38.98 for a 40–hour working week. in august 2019 the si to aud exchange rate was aud$1 to si$5.54—so si$8 = aud $1.44 per hour; si$64 (aud$11.55/day), si$320 ($57.55/week) and si$1280 (aud$231.01/month). 7 a longer survey (1 to 3 years) would reveal how seasonal weather patterns affect produce supply by region. portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019107 food security and asset creation in solomon islands: gender and the political economy of agricultural production for honiara central market part iii: interpretation of data map 1 shows the geographic origins of produce sold at hcm from villages across solomon islands, which stretches some 1500 km from the shortland islands (under bougainville islands) in the west to temotu province in the east. map 1 shows a strong clustering of production on guadalcanal, adjacent islands with diminishing engagement the further from market. no produce records were recorded from renbel or makira provinces during the survey period, and just one from temotu. this is the only map that presents all produce instances for across solomon islands. hereinafter the one data set from temotu is excised for reasons of map scale. map 1. map 2 shows origins of produce on guadalcanal are heavily concentrated along the north coast, and through areas connected by the network of roads, both sealed (the highway) and unsealed (i.e. logging and access roads). data from hcm revealed producer-vendors are overwhelmingly female: 604/690 women (87.5 percent) to 86/690 (12.5 percent) men. there are many more records of women bringing produce to hcm from more villages than there are for men, including from areas difficult to access (five villages on the weather coast). map 2 georgeou et al. portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019108 map 3 shows a concentration of produce at hcm coming from villages in central province (savo/nggelas) for both women and men. vendors brought produce to hcm from as far away as western province (noro), isabel and malaita. there were also two records of women bringing produce from choiseul, and one from temotu (not shown due to scale), however no produce was recorded from the provinces of makira or renbel. map 3. map 4 indicates the large variety of produce from guadalcanal coming to hcm, and the weight. across the northern coast of guadalcanal there is a long string of villages that grow all types of produce for hcm. there is particularly strong engagement with hcm from villages and regions to the east of honiara for both women and men, and a dominance of records for women. map 4. map 5 shows women and men at hcm sell large amounts (c. 5-6,000 kg) of fish that originates from noro (western province), with smaller amounts of seafood brought by men coming from nggelas, russel, isabel and malaita. both women and men resell fish at hcm. central province vendors sell gourds, nuts, fruits and root vegetables. these are less perishable goods than leafy greens, thus minimising post-harvest loss (see also underhill 2018: 3). map 5 demonstrates that those selling seafood (primarily whole fish) that is sourced from noro at hcm are able to earn up to si$60,000 during the twelve fridays of the survey period. these vendors are not ‘producer-vendors’ but resellers, and it is likely this produce is purchased from trawlers (fish not deemed worth keeping for export), and likely in honiara. women at hcm sell more fish than men by weight. portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019109 food security and asset creation in solomon islands: gender and the political economy of agricultural production for honiara central market map 5. map 6 shows the density of women producer-vendors at hcm from east of honiara. there is high density of production of leafy greens, nuts, and beans/legumes along the central plains, and poultry from honiara. the revenue for women ranges from small (si$ 2-3,000) to substantial (around si$20,000) during the survey period. this is distributed widely between villages along the coast and up into the central mountains. there are fewer male producer-vendors overall, but some are earning larger amounts. for example, some men from the reko region (c. 50km from honiara) earned up to $30,000 from selling fruit, and some root vegetables, during the survey period. the sealed road ends at the bridge by gppol3, leaving at least one third of the journey to honiara to be undertaken by trucks on unsealed roads. map 6. map 7 shows strong market engagement from women producer-vendors in west guadalcanal, but more limited engagement from men. the largest revenue is around $15,000 during the survey period for fruit, beans/legumes and vegetables from the visale/tina region (c. 40km from honiara). there is consistent income (si$6-9,000) to villages west of honiara around to lambi (c. 60km from honiara), with revenue coming mostly from the sale of fruit and gourds. south guadalcanal has limited market engagement with five villages recording revenue from market sale of root vegetable of around si$3,000. georgeou et al. portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019110 map 7. map 8 indicates women producer-vendors from malaita bring root vegetables, leafy greens, fruit and other assorted produce, deriving revenue of up to si$8,000 for one village. men from north malaita also bring root vegetables (c.$12,000). central province has heavy concentrations of produce from savo, nggela, and to a lesser extent russel islands. map 8. map 9 shows producer-vendors from savo and nggela are important contributors to fresh food availability at hcm, especially gourds, nuts, fruits and root vegetables, and megapode eggs. both women and men derived income of up to si$12,000 during the survey period. on savo island women’s economic contribution occurs in more villages, but data from men in one village reports more revenue. map 9. portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019111 food security and asset creation in solomon islands: gender and the political economy of agricultural production for honiara central market map 10 shows women from eight villages on savo island in this survey earn up to $3000 from leafy greens, fruit and megapode eggs, while men from panueli village focus on one high value crop (melon) and earn up to si$12,000. this reflects the dominance of men in cash crops, although the overall economic contribution of women on savo (population 3,137 in 2009 census) is greater overall. map 10. asset creation by charting the estimated revenue on a sina plot,8 we can demonstrate the overall picture of how most female and male producer-vendors engage with the hcm and how many children (figure 1) and dependents (figure 2) they support. the estimate of total revenue for all clean vendor data (n=965) is si$1,451,451 for all fridays over the twelve weeks. in examining the contribution of total revenue for producer-vendors only (n=690) over same period, we derive a figure of si$861,784. figure 1 (below) shows the average revenue for any producer-vendor (outliers removed n=674) selling on fridays at hcm by gender, and the number of children in the household. this is calculated at si$1248 over the survey period, or approximately si$104 per day. figure 2 (below) shows all dependents, including elderly family members, with estimated revenue by gender. for most women the estimated total amount of hcm revenue earned on fridays during the survey period was less than si $2,000. there is considerable divergence in the mean and median earnings of women, with the mean measuring si$1,132.30 and the median just over half of that ($600). for men, the difference between mean and median was almost three times: a mean of $2,067 and a median of $712. figure 1 producer-vendors by gender, revenue and number of children in $si (outliers removed; n=674). 8 a sina plot is ‘an enhanced chart for simple and truthful representation of single observations over multiple classes,’ developed by nikos sidiropoulos, sina hadi sohi, nicolas rapin and frederik otzen bagger in 2017. a sina plot charts pairs of plots or dense overlays of these plot types (see https://cran.rproject.org/web/packages/sinaplot/vignettes/sinaplot.html). georgeou et al. portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019112 https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sinaplot/vignettes/sinaplot.html https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sinaplot/vignettes/sinaplot.html figure 2 producer-vendors, by gender, revenue and number of dependents in $si (outliers removed; n=674). at the time of the survey the average revenue of $104 per market visit was substantially (over three times) above the minimum wage of si$4 per hour. in december 2018 solomon islands’ government announced the minimum wage would rise from si$4 to si$8 per hour in 2019. this was made official from 1 august 2019 (sibc 2019). for an 8-hour working day at the new rate, the minimum wage is si$64 a day, and $320 a week, or $1280 a month for a 40–hour working week. 9 the new daily minimum wage rates of $64/day are 60 per cent lower than the 2017 average market sale rates on fridays during the survey period (si$104). part iv: discussion the discussion below addresses the findings in terms of the five aspects of asset creation: human, social, financial, physical and natural. the findings show that communities in close time proximity to hcm and with access to the road network (those in east guadalcanal) derive the greatest financial benefit from trading at hcm. other key factors that affect the physical dimension of asset creation include the legal or regulatory frameworks in place that enable people to generate income from farming, such as policy around the location of markets and security of vendors at markets. keen and ride (2018a: 2) note that ‘the current honiara city council market ordinance applies only to two markets, has no provisions for communityrun markets, and is outdated. this creates land tenure uncertainty and discourages investment 9 the change commenced on 1 august 2019 (sibc 2019), raising the minimum wage from si$4 per hour to si$8. the minimum wage is offered as a comparison, although skilled employment often receive many multiples of the minimum wage. at august 2019 the si$ (officially the ‘sbd’) to us exchange rate was us$1 to si$8.21—minimum wage workers would get us$38.98 for a 40–hour working week. in august 2019 the si to aud exchange rate was aud$1 to si$5.54—so si$8 = aud $1.44 per hour; si$64 (aud$11.55/day), si$320 ($57.55/week) and si$1280 (aud$231.01/month). portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019113 food security and asset creation in solomon islands: gender and the political economy of agricultural production for honiara central market in community markets.’10 furthermore, the ramsi intervention to secure peace and stability focused on formal processes and institutions of state building but paid little attention to community-based peace arrangements, or to solving the land disputes that were an underlying cause of the conflict (hawksley & georgeou 2015: 134). this policy disconnect raises questions about the effectiveness of existing development infrastructure for smallholder agricultural production and its potential for asset creation, especially as external interventions tend not to have community ownership, nor a focus on the processes that support the physical infrastructure initiatives that would enhance asset creation for smallholder agricultural production. for example, the australian government’s strongim bisnis (strengthening business) program promotes integration and business development11 based around cacao, coconut and tourism. its orientation is international, aiming to link solomon islands with the global economy to boost exports (australian aid 2019). despite previous donor aid attempts to advance economic development for rural women, little attention has been paid to the importance of market production to the rural economy. an added problem is that community markets’ ‘lack of legal standing means the threat of closure by government adds to livelihood insecurity and vendor reluctance to engage politically’ (keen & ride 2018b: 1–2). underhill’s (2018) study of food wastage in produce brought to hcm from malaita highlights the dimension of human capital, which includes knowledge creation and the generation of ‘key leaders in the various aspects of the food system’ (renzaho & mellor 2010: 6). georgeou et al.’s (2018: 38) survey of hcm consumers found one third of all consumers were reselling produce in other parts of honiara, a phenomenon also recorded by underhill who identified significant levels of on-selling (sometimes at lower prices) as being an important contributor to limiting waste and minimising loss at hcm. arguably this trend of on-selling within honiara facilitates nutritional diversity throughout the urban and peri-urban areas as produce is dispersed into small roadside stalls in urban settlements, rather than being left to spoil. it also provides income generation opportunities for urban on-sellers, most of whom are women from other parts of solomon islands who have moved to honiara (knot 2009: 89). factors that might influence profit include inputs into food production during growing and harvesting (seedlings, pesticides), costs of food processing, packaging, storage and transportation, food waste management, food marketing and market regulation. underhill (2018) found that the size of the fruit sold at hcm and the relative swiftness of transport (a 6-hour ferry trip) meant food wastage was limited: under 5 percent for watermelon, 12.5 percent for pineapple. it was however up to 33 percent for english cabbage. it is clear that malaitan farmers are selective, transporting to market select crops that have a lower chance of perishing quickly if they do not sell on the first day. nuts, root vegetables and larger fruits with thicker skins transport better over long distances in contrast to perishables such as leafy greens. vendors utilising several modes of transport for their produce also have to contend with high fuel prices, which would affect profitability. areas of natural fecundity can produce a range of produce for hcm. the producervendors of east guadalcanal who live in close proximity to the gppol plantations can even 10 honiara city council has authority over hcm and kukum market, the latter being a betel nut market. 11 the emphasis is on women’s business skills development and gender equity, financial literacy, and partnerships with ngos, the private sector and sig. georgeou et al. portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019114 earn extra revenue from ‘out-growing’ palm fruit for sale to the company. intense market engagement in this region indicates great interest in earning additional revenue at hcm, although the presence of the gppol (fraenkel, allen & brock 2010: 73) makes it likely this is not the only revenue in this region. the financial assets for food security encompass employment generation, income transfer and money supply through diversified loan sources and affordable credit alternatives. while we are unable to ascertain the proportion of produce immediately after harvest that is diverted to debt retirement, nor how much revenue is actually profit, from 2013 banks operating in solomon islands have developed mobile banking and financial literacy courses to reach up to 65,000 customers in rural areas for vendors (solomon times 2014), while un women’s markets for change program offers training in financial literacy (un women 2019). nutritious locally grown foods can enhance the wealth of rural communities through income generation from the sale of produce at hcm and other honiara markets. sale of agricultural produce at hcm is thus a significant enabler of solomon islands’ fresh food supply system (underhill 2018: 5), while at the same representing a key feature of community sustainability for rural solomon islanders (georgeou & hawksley 2017) through asset creation. it is likely that just from friday sales producer-vendors can, on average earn around $104 per day, which is 40 percent higher than the new minimum wage of $8 per hour ($64 per day), and over three times the previous minimum wage of $4 per hour ($32 per day).12 women are central to the agricultural sector (ward 1995: 1; pollard 2004; georgeou & hawksley 2017, 2018) and are responsible for the production of the majority of subsistence foods. despite the numerical dominance of women at hcm, they are more likely to be involved in low-income agricultural activities while men appear to be more involved in the production, sale and marketing of more financially lucrative cash crops, that is, watermelon (hedditch & manuel 2010; georgeou & hawksley 2017). agriculture is the largest sector of employment for women aged 15–49 (41 percent) and for men in the same age bracket (54.4 percent) (sinso 2015: 37), and women were less likely to be employed on malaita (24.7 percent employment), than in western province (31.9 percent), honiara (36.3 percent) or guadalcanal (43.4 percent) or in ‘other provinces’ (47.8 percent). the 2015 figures for women’s employment, based on surveys of over 6,000 women, recorded a national employment rate of 37.1 percent, with employment slightly higher in urban (40.9 percent) than rural areas (35.9 percent), however in honiara just over one third (36.3 percent) of women were employed, making reselling an attractive option. in the rest of guadalcanal, the employment figure was 43.4 percent, still less than half the population. the absence of waged employment options in many parts of rural solomon islands makes agricultural production for market an attractive means to create assets. 12 there is also evidence that suggests many vendors do not always factor in on-costs like their time or transport costs into pricing at market. author observation at hcm is that for most goods vendors appear to have a floor price, but this is usually also a ceiling price. how such prices are established is not entirely clear and does appear to be more to do with ease of providing change (something that complicates transactions) so bunches of vegetable are normally in multiples of si$5, except for larger cost items such as melon (up to si$100). portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 2019115 food security and asset creation in solomon islands: gender and the political economy of agricultural production for honiara central market conclusions with over half of the people in rural solomon islands not having regular paid employment, the sale of produce at hcm is clearly important for communities that are linked to hcm. the fact that communities from the weather coast, malaita and isabel are coming to hcm perhaps indicates as much about the absence of alternate employment opportunities as it does the absence of closer alternative markets. production of agricultural produce for global export represents one avenue rural people have for gaining income, but more attention should be paid by aid donors to recognising the significant income generation that occurs from sale of produce to the domestic market, particularly with respect to the activities of women agricultural producers and how this articulates with food security. more wealth is being generated by those who can access the market via roads, although the absence of sealed roads does not prevent people from selling at market, even from remote areas. money raised from ‘marketing’ is in some more remote communities the main or even only source of cash for households and thus the primary source of cash flow to communities. the data demonstrates that women are heavily engaged in the production and sale of a large variety of lower-value staples such as vegetables (beans, legumes), nuts and fruits, while male producer-vendors dominate the production and sale at market of heavier high-value cash crops, particularly fruits such as melon and pineapple. agricultural production for domestic consumption reproduces gendered norms and assumptions around men engaging with the cash crop economy, while women generate assets through market sale. access to and control over resources in the hands of women supports basic household expenses, as well as school fees and food & community (i.e. church) obligations. even when men sell produce at market, women hold the cash and return it to the community (georgeou & hawksley 2017: 84). estimates of revenue from this study indicate that market revenue on fridays is far more profitable than minimum wage labour, even at the new higher rate of si$8 an hour. as such, the numbers of vendors and diverse geographic links of market selling plays an important role in the asset creation of villages and communities in many parts of rural solomon islands, as well as the food security of urban honiara residents. acknowledgements the authors thank: the evaluation team in solomon islands (dr anouk ride, mary kivo, mirriam resture, debbie lukisi and emmanuelle mangalle); honiara city council; the vendors and consumers who participated in the survey of honiara central market; and the two unnamed reviewers for their constructive comments. references australian broadcasting corporation (abc), 2019, ‘long overdue rise in minimum wage is imminent in solomon islands,’ pacific beat, 2 january. online, available: https://www.abc.net.au/radio-australia/ programs/pacificbeat/sols-minimum-wage/10678548 [accessed 30 march 2019]. asian development bank (adb). 2019, ‘key indicators; solomon islands 2018.’ online, available: https://data.adb.org/dataset/solomon-islands-key-indicators [accessed 30 january 2019]. australian agency for international development (ausaid). 2006, solomon islands smallholder agriculture study: vol. 1 main findings and recommendations. report prepared by r. m. bourke, a. mcgregor, m. 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https://unwomen.org.au/our-work/projects/safer-markets/ “in search of nora luca”: tony gatlif’s adventures in gypsy land portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ the elusive search for nora luca: tony gatlif’s adventures in gypsy land. sylvie blum-reid, university of florida foreigner: who does not know, who is from another nation, who does not belong to a family, who does not belong to the matter under discussion, that is found against nature in man’s body (larousse dictionary)1 french cinema and criticism have slowly addressed immigrant and marginalized cultures and gypsy filmmaking2. gypsy studies remain in a splendid isolation as can attest a recent socio-historical approach to european gypsies (lucassen, willens & cottaar, 1998). this essay proposes to broaden the approach to contemporary gypsy culture, and more specifically looks at a gypsy film, focusing on the plight of (romanian) gypsy communities in french cinema. this minority is absent from any discourse or studies on contemporary french culture and identity and will be explored through the lens of 1 definition encountered in clément lépidis, l’arménien (paris: seuil, 1973). a novel on armenians in france: etranger: qui ne connaît pas qui est d’une autre nation qui ne fait pas partie d’une famille qui n’appartient pas à la chose dont on parle qui se trouve contre nature dans le corps de l’homme 2 i use the term ‘gypsy’ here, although the terms used in france fluctuate between ‘gitan’, ‘tzigane’, ‘romanichel’, ‘manouche’ and ‘bohémien’. gypsies discard the ‘gypsy’ term and call themselves ‘roma’ or ‘manouche’ according to gatlif. blum-reid the elusive search for nora luca filmmaker tony gatlif, writer and director of the 1997 film gadjo dilo (the crazy foreigner).3 multiple readings of gadjo dilo can be made. i will point to several approaches, which are unavoidable considering the richness of the film and its scope. i discuss the place of gatlif’s film amidst french cinema, and its reception. i investigate the genre of the film, which may fit into the road movie category as the film engages in travels. a postcolonial reading underlines the analysis of the film and the use of the term ‘other’ fits the representation of the main protagonist of gadjo dilo. the project is informed by interesting recent studies of gypsy laws. i otherwise situate this essay in what is best characterized as a ‘cultural studies’ approach—an approach to a culture, some of its products, and the vision of a filmmaker who is a cultural other. last, i suggest that a psychological analysis is necessary especially when one considers all the items listed above, and particularly the fact that the narrative follows a young male character searching for his father and in love with a voice. gadjo dilo proposes a vista into the world of romanian gypsy life from the perspective of a young white french male traveler. the young man walks the icy and deserted roads of romania and confesses that ‘he hates to walk’ as the film credits begin to roll. unfortunately, there will be a lot of walking in the film. the young man, stéphane, (played by one of france’s leading french young actors, romain duris, who is a recurring figure in gatlif’s films) is retracing his father’s footsteps into the eastern european country of romania where the latter would come and collect audio samples for his ethnographic research. equipped with a high tech cassette player and tapes, stéphane searches for nora luca, a female singer whose voice recorded by his father shapes the film and gives it breath and pretext. more or less adopted by a group of gypsies and their patriarch, izidor, the young traveler is introduced to the pain, grief and racism endured by romanian gypsies, or roma people, over centuries. tony gatlif, a gypsy filmmaker of 3gadjo dilo, ( the crazy stranger) [motion picture] written and directed by tony gatlif, produced by doru mitran, original score tony gatlif, starring romain duris, rona hartner and isidor serban. new yorker video, 1999 portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 blum-reid the elusive search for nora luca berber and andalusian descent and a musician who has been living in spain and france, and has sometimes been mistaken for a romanian gypsy, produces an interesting reversal, as the young french man becomes the ‘other’, the foreigner, the gadje, only to be rescued by two prominent community figures: the old man izidor, leader of the gypsy village, and the young gypsy woman, sabina. the woman acts as the reluctant translator and interpreter between stéphane and the gypsy community because she had previously traveled and lived in belgium and ‘speaks belgian’. as ien ang has noted, gypsies are ‘one of the oldest cultural “others” within europe’s borders, a group of people whose inferior status has not changed for centuries …because they do not form or belong to a “nation”’ (ang 1992, 29). in the nineteenth century, gypsies were also viewed as ‘europe’s negroes’ (the economist, 11 september 1999) or also a splinter group from the jews (lucassen, willems & cottaar 1998, 23 and note 2). the passionate search for the elusive nora luca, or the search for a voice, remains inconclusive, as the spectator (and stéphane) never knows if the woman/sabina is the authentic nora luca. yet, the search for nora luca drives the narrative and transports the spectator into the romanian countryside. the search may simply evidence a reflexive search—that of the traveler inside his own self, mediated by the discovery and closeness to the ‘other’ culture. in the meantime, and thanks to the woman’s assistance, stéphane is able to sample sounds and music of a disappearing culture in order to preserve it, as his ethnographer/musicologist-father did before him. this trilingual road movie (that speaks a mix of french and also romanian and rom, the language of roma people) addresses the western urge to preserve gypsy memory and the quest for ethnographic collectibles and memorabilia. in what classifies as a road movie, a genre that tony gatlif recognizes as his preferred mode—‘je fais des films sur la ‘route’ parce que la route est un pays pour moi’ (‘i make films about the road for the road is my country’), (gatlif 2004) yet is a reworking of the genre, the boundaries—which are usually applied to the vast american landscapes and roadways—are stretched. technically speaking, the film is a semi-road movie as it does not rely primarily on the use of the cars that dominate american narratives. it fits more into the european road movie category discussed by david laderman (laderman 2002, 265). road movies are atypical in french cinema. few films portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 blum-reid the elusive search for nora luca have explored the eastern european landscape. gadjo dilo in a travel narrative where the main protagonist is hitchhiking in the first part, then acquires a car that constantly breaks down in the second part. my analysis of the film is informed by postcolonial theory about the ‘other’ with the inclusion of the gypsy as europe’s others, the place of gypsies in france relegated to the margins. it is an extremely postmodern film in its representation of gender and space. the countryside scanned by the lens is bare and frozen, paved by mileposts, yet gypsy women enter that space and inhabit it fully, despite their inferior status. by inferior, i merely point to their separate space and function in the movie, as caregivers and cooks, since as we will see later, gypsy culture gives women a high status. they have become the repository of collective memory and audio soundtracks and the objects of an endless search. the film (produced by a french production house, and filmed on location) could have stayed in france, yet it opted for a journey eastward, into eastern europe, where once observed from that location, concepts of borders, gender and exoticism are interestingly displaced and have shifted. for a french moviegoer, romania evokes an exotic, oriental space, never quite traveled. it arouses a feeling, briefly described by roland barthes who romanticized the dirt roads of romania seen in a 1921 kertesz photograph, a photograph that transcends itself. the photograph shows a blind gypsy violinist being led by a boy, ‘its texture gives me the certainty of being in central europe…i recognize, with my whole body, the straggling villages i passed through on my long ago travels in hungary and rumania’ (barthes 1981, 45). exilic and diasporic filmmakers who relocate in the west, like tony gatlif, turn to their ‘indigenous local culture’ or back to an individual experience shaped by exile to ‘create a third space of alterity, creativity and insights,’ at least if one observes hamid naficy’s reading of diasporic filmmakers (naficy 2001, 82). however the case of tony gatlif might be more complex when it comes to identifying the ‘local’ part of his culture since he is not originally from eastern europe, but rather algeria, and considers himself a ‘mediterranean’ and is comfortable living in spain and france. while gatlif deploys every possible strategy to target and speak for the gypsy communities, the film reflects portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 blum-reid the elusive search for nora luca on such a community’s absence of borders and the impossibility of mapping its territory. it goes beyond familiar borders and responds to the call of the road, a familiar script in many of gatlif’s films and especially his latest one, exils (gatlif 2004). gatlif’s attempts to merge with the french film world were not successful until he assumed his identity as a gypsy (naficy 2001, 99). he indeed might be the first gypsy filmmaker in the history of french cinema. needless to say, the reception of gatlif’s film was and still is highly controversial; the film was not well received by roma communities in the united states and in romania, whereas its critical acclaim was strongest among non-gypsy western communities in france, germany and the united states, receiving a ten-minute standing ovation at the locarno film festival premiere. most critics ‘noted its emotional effect on western audiences and … loaded their reviews with adjectives such as “authentic”, “passionate”, “visceral”, “pulsating”, and “fullblooded”’ (thompson 2000). at first glance an interesting shift occurs in gadjo dilo as it includes the gypsies’ perspective on a gadje, a foreigner, yet the point of view of stéphane, that of the camera or that of tony gatlif takes over, bounces back and is also cast on ‘them,’ romanian gypsies, practicing a doubly-exoticizing gaze—by positing the gypsies as exotic, but also stéphane, the french man with ‘pink skin’, as an exotic creature for them. a recent domain of investigation in gypsy studies (weyrauch & bell 2001) has been gypsy law, which remains extremely strong considering their long history and diasporic movements. according to gypsy law a foreigner is an impure body that is polluted. the rom criteria for judging their own people are extremely strict, delimiting clear boundaries between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’. furthermore, not only do the gypsies consider non-gypsies polluted, they also believe that gypsy names and rituals lose magical effectiveness if uttered to gaje. consequently, the gypsies believe they should approach and respond to the gaje with caution, especially portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 blum-reid the elusive search for nora luca if the gaje profess good intentions, and claim to serve the best interest of the gypsies. (weyrauch & bell 2001, 25). therefore, according to the gypsy, the foreigner is ‘uncivilized.’ this view reverses the common representation of gypsies by non-gypsy cultures that perceives the gypsy mode of life as primitive, exotic and dangerous. when stéphane enters the village, he brings in his uncivilized and ‘bum-like’ manners, provoking laughter, sarcasm and disbelief among the villagers who are afraid and wary of him, as a potential chicken thief and rapist. interestingly, stéphane appears as an effeminate character in several instances in the movie, casting a doubt on the masculinity of the french male traveler. this trait provides an element of comic relief to the narrative that in itself operates on both tragic and comic levels. this position places stéphane in closer contact with the women in the community. an example of this proximity takes place when stéphane disrupts the cultural codes and cleans up izidor’s house, a task traditionally assigned to women. his search for nora luca is therefore helped by his closeness to women and his arrival into their space.4 gypsy women have the leading roles not only in the film but also in rom cultures. in gadjo dilo, they are the sometimes-hesitant transmitters of gypsy culture as well as gobetweens and translators. sabina acts as stéphane’s translator and spokesperson for the villagers. she is also a dancer and singer, whose dance movements usher a certain orientalizing function in the movie. granted, romania is part of the orient for a western french critic and audience. at the close of the film, stéphane performs a ritualistic shamanic burial of the tapes next to a milepost, in a dance witnessed by sabina, who has awoken from her sleep in his car. he actually appropriates a ritual he has seen performed by izidor by a grave at a funeral. one does not know if sabina and stéphane are going any place, away from the village, or if they are just traveling to the city. how are we to interpret the last sequence? should one read that the past is buried with the recordings of disappearing tunes therefore portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 4 interestingly, romain duris, the actor, is often in the position of proximity to women in the role of ‘friend’ in films such as in cédric klapisch’s l’auberge espagnole (2002) and more recently les poupées russes (2005). blum-reid the elusive search for nora luca privileging the persistence of oral history over technological progress and museum culture? if one senses the utter urgency of the gesture, then how can one explain that stéphane does not destroy the expensive tape recorder? if gender remains an important factor, male bonding is a key element in the narrative, with the friendship between izidor and stéphane conducive to his quasiadoption as a son by izidor prior to the loss of izidor’s ‘real’ son, adriani, a victim of the villagers’ pogrom at the end of the film. the question remains regarding the intentions of the filmmaker as to which society he is actually inscribing in gadjo dilo. is he directly discussing the situation of romanian gypsies and their ostracization from romanian society? or is he not implicitly referring to a closer situation, ‘at home’ and the french climate and laws that have been enacted since the 1990s’ surrounding immigrants, immigration, the flow of roms (from romania) entering france and the conditions they live in, the displacement of refugee populations, the homeless, and the third space of alterity created by rom exclusion? through his films gatlif has become the voice of the disenfranchised, exiles, immigrants and homeless people. according to positif critic stéphane goudet, gatlif addresses a french man among gypsies as much as gypsies among romanians, french people, belgians, and other westerners (goudet 1999, 69). gatlif started to make films in 1973 (see filmography). after the movie la terre au ventre (1978), he decided to devote himself entirely to his people, and his subsequent three movies, les princes (1983), latcho drom (1991-92) and gadjo dilo,do just that, albeit in different genres. these form part of his ‘gypsy trilogy.’ similarly, his 1996 adaptation of jean-marie le clézio’s short story mondo, about the uncanny appearance of a young nomad and gypsy boy in a mediterranean city, complement the series: depuis latcho drom, je ne fais plus des films pour régler mes comptes avec des gens qui n’aimeront jamais ni les tziganes ni les arabes parce qu’ils auront toujours besoin de boucs portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 blum-reid the elusive search for nora luca émissaires. je me bats pour l’image de ce peuple tzigane qui, depuis qu’il est arrivé en europe, a été chargé de tous les vices, de tous les péchés (quoted in virgo 1998, 2).5 gatlif, as a keeper of memory and images, also introduces a world of music to films whose scores he is known to write. one of his latest films, vengo (1999) tells a story of vengeance—gypsy style, in a spanish countryside setting. shot in black and white, sequences about dancing and gypsy music punctuate the film. however, this might be a flaw in the process, which has been critically viewed by gypsy spectators and critics. gatlif stands out as an outsider to roma culture in romania, and therefore, despite the actual location, and the use of roma actors, neither romain duris nor rona hartner, who plays the female lead role, are gypsies. scholars of gypsy culture also inform us that gypsies are reluctant and cautious about letting any information out to non-gypsies; this would of course make it impossible for a filmmaker to film gypsy culture: unlike christians, for example, the way in which gypsies choose not to reveal themselves to outsiders is in fact what is noteworthy. it is commonly reported that a gypsy, when granting an interview to a non-gypsy, uses the occasion to disseminate wrong information about gypsy culture. gypsy names and rituals lose their magical effectiveness if uttered to non-gypsies (carmichael 2001, 124). a few associations are made between the french and romanian gypsies, linking both groups, yet they occur at one brief moment when izidor, the old gypsy, proudly introduces stéphane to a small group of villagers in a small village tavern and informs them about gypsies in france: ‘in france’, he says, ‘there are gypsy [roma] doctors, engineers, advocates, they live in big houses, drive big cars, they speak romany, hell, everyone speaks romany. in france they love the gypsies’. a fat, beefy, red-eyed nongypsy european villager then asks izidor, ‘if they love you so much in france, why don't you and your people leave our country?’ (devi, n.d. retranscription of the dialogue taking place borrowed from her review.) the sarcasm directed at izidor concerning france, the country where immigrants used to flock to in order to live ‘like god in france’ is a sarcastic indictment of the current situation in france where immigrants are turned down and sent back. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 5 ‘since latcho drom, i no longer make films to settle scores with people who will never liked gypsies or arabs as they will always need scapegoats. i fight for the image of the gypsy people who, since they arrived in europe, were always made responsible for all the vices and sins.’ blum-reid the elusive search for nora luca the film may perpetrate the stereotypes associated with gypsies in their link with exoticism and act more as an ethnographic adventure into gypsy land, its music and women, initiating western spectators to the seductive qualities of gypsy music and exotic rituals, turning the frozen dirt roads of romania into a sensual road experience. gypsies and their culture, even if misunderstood, have throughout history paradoxically remained the object of curiosity and desire in literature, opera librettos, theatre plays, and more recently films: we should not also forget that most people at this time already had some notions of gypsies who had for centuries been a favorite literary theme and part of an iconographic tradition. the literate public knew them as beautiful young women and terrifying witches, as magicians and agents from a magic realm, as highwaymen and exotic misfits (lucassen, willems & cottar, 22). in gadjo dilo the french traveler accesses a gypsy culture usually off-limits to nonmembers and becomes near native. he will successfully perform or mimic the rituals that he has observed. in doing so he participates in the culture and seems to become one of them; yet, my reading of the film and of the culture questions the authenticity of such an experience. has stéphane truly become a cultural other, a gypsy, reproducing the rituals he has witnessed, running away on the roads with sabina? has not the search for nora luca been abandoned in order to pursue a more urgent one? or more importantly, has stéphane not opened to the world of roms and gained access to another culture, miles away from his origins and preoccupations? these are all questions raised by the film but which gatlif does not answer. at times, the filmmaker signals the dangers of a disappearing world, with the sudden outbreaks of violence in the village that had until then appeared unruffled and distant from paris, the other exotic site. a graphic pogrom scene takes place at the end of the film, with villagers hunting down izidor’s son and burning him alive in his hide-out. interestingly, stéphane does not witness this scene and is off-camera when it occurs. the timing of the film points to the possible entrance of romania in the european union along with other eastern european countries, such as poland, and bulgaria. as such, in 2005, romania and bulgaria are both candidates for the european union, whereas poland became part of the european union in 2004. it also, more than ever, demonstrates that europe’s borders have disappeared, and one can wander ‘freely about the continent as if portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 blum-reid the elusive search for nora luca it were your own country’ (fusel 1996, 52). ultimately, it shows the effects of globalization in a small faraway community where american inscriptions have somehow found their way onto children’s tee shirts. the traveler, stéphane, is no longer the impassible observer that is shown as traditionally white, male. however, despite his own position, he joins the ranks of other travelers in travel narratives, who shed their eurocentric notions for a part in cultural otherness. in many ways, the film participates in a renewed romanticism that accompanies the end of the twentieth century, with the figure of nomadism as the archetype of a postmodern (discontinued) temporality. the narrative is about a genealogical loss, a loss of a father, a loss of a son, a loss of roots, a loss of a culture, and about the discovery of, and thirst for, other cultures. in many ways, gatlif projects himself onto the character of stéphane and initiates the actor to rom culture. yet, as roma scholar (and linguist) ian hancock signals, the current level of awareness about gypsies shows a failure to understand the culture: new-age travellers have confused the issue, leading some to think that being a gypsy is a matter of lifestyle. the recent immigration of refugees from central and eastern europe and their demonisation by the tabloid press have only exacerbated the misunderstanding (hancock 2002, 1). gatlif’s film points to the emergence of a new area of studies, across national borders, of a group of people that have been marginalized and under-represented in fiction films thus far, with a few exceptions that usually stay with the exoticization of the gypsy as ‘other.’ ‘i even met happy gypsies’. (final lyrics in gadjo dilo) filmography 1973 max l’indien (short) 1973 maussane (short) 1975 la tête en ruines (unreleased) 1978 la terre au ventre 1982 corre gitano (unreleased) 1983 canta gitano (short) 1983 les princes portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 blum-reid the elusive search for nora luca 1985 la rue du départ 1989 pleure pas my love 1990 gaspard et robinson 1993 latcho dromsafe journey (un certain regard award, cannes 1993) 1995 lucumi, l’enfant rumbeiro de cuba (short) 1996 mondo 1997 gadjo dilo-l’etranger fou. the crazy foreigner (césar award for best musical composition. locarno silver leopard, 1997. grand prix spécial des amériques, montréal) 1999 je suis né d’une cigogne 2000 vengoi come 2002 swing 2004 visions d’europe: paris by night (segment) 2004 exilsexiles (best director award, cannes 2004; nominated for music composition, cesar 2005) reference list ‘a gypsy awakening’, the economist, 11 september 1999. ang, i. 1992, ‘hegemony-in-trouble: nostalgia and the ideology of the impossible in european cinema’, in screening europe: image and identity in contemporary european cinema, ed. d. petrie, british film institute, london. barthes, r. 1981, camera lucida: reflections on photography, trans. r howard, farrar, straus and giroux, new york. carmichael, c. 2001, ‘gypsy law and jewish law’, in gypsy law: romani legal traditions and culture, ed. w.o. weyrauch, university of california press, berkeley, 117-36. devi, g. n.d. ‘review of gadjo dilo’ [online]. available: http://www.indiastar.com/gayatridevi.html. gadjo dilo, (the crazy stranger) [motion picture] 1997, paris, prince films gatlif, t. 2004, ‘interview with bernard pivot’, double jeu, no. 29, december. goudet, s. 1999, ‘cinéma et société’, positif, 457, (mars), 68-70. hancock, i. 2002, we are the romani people, university of hertfordshire press, hatfield uk. kaplan, c. 1996, questions of travel: postmodern discourses of displacement, duke university press, durham nc. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 http://www.indiastar.com/gayatridevi.html blum-reid the elusive search for nora luca laderman, d. 2002, driving visions: exploring the road movie, university of texas press, austin tx. lepidis, clemen 1973, l’arménien, seuil, paris. lucassen, l., willems, w. & cottaar, a. 1998, gypsies and other itinerant groups: a socio-historical approach, macmillan press and st. martins press, london and new york. naficy, h. 2001, an accented cinema: exilic and diasporic filmmaking, princeton university press, princeton. thompson, n. 2000, ‘understanding the gulf: tony gatlif’s gadjo dilo’, central europe review [online], no. 41, november. available: http://www.cereview.org/00/41/kinoeye41_thompson.html. vigo, l. 1998, ‘gadjo dilo tony le fou…de cinéma. entretien avec tony gatlif’, regards, no. 34, (avril). weyrauch, w.o. & bell, m. a. 2001, ‘autonomous lawmaking’, in gypsy law: romani legal traditions and culture, ed. w.o. weyrauch, university of california press, berkeley ca. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 http://www.ce-review.org/00/41/kinoeye41_thompson.html http://www.ce-review.org/00/41/kinoeye41_thompson.html filmography 1973 maussane (short) 1997 gadjo dilo-l’etranger fou. the crazy foreigner 2002 swing (best director award, cannes 2004; nominated for music compo thompsonformatportaljan2009 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. ‘the space between: languages, translations and cultures’: special issue edited by vera mackie, ikuko nakane, and emi otsuji. issn: 1449-2490: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. plagiarism, intertextuality and emergent authorship in university students’ academic writing celia helen thompson, university of melbourne although most universities have now developed websites which offer advice on how to deal with plagiarism, the information provided tends to focus on the mechanics of referencing in academic text construction and on universal notions of concepts such as ‘academic honesty.’1 little or no attention is given to providing guidance on questions concerning the politics of text/knowledge creation and emergent authorship; issues surrounding what might constitute common knowledge or writer identity are also commonly not considered, yet all of these factors are fundamental to the processes involved in the construction of academic writing. in this paper i present two case studies selected from a larger research project, that examined the ways in which students from a range of linguistic and disciplinary backgrounds used the words and ideas of the authors of their source texts in their research-based assignments. i discuss interviews with, and the written assignments of, kirsty and georgia, two student writers whose first languages are norwegian and cantonese, respectively.2 i also explore the interview comments of rodney and celine, the academic staff members responsible for assessing the students’ writing. drawing on kristeva’s writing on intertextuality and the subject-in-process-and-on-trial (1986; 1996), and the work of penrose and geisler on the construction of knowledge 1 see for example: duke university libraries: citing sources [online resources]. 2 the names of all research participants have been changed. thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 2 (1994), my analysis reveals that kirsty and georgia are highly aware of the political and opaque nature of textual relations. in addition, they are confused by the prevailing notion of authorship as unified and autonomous, since it fails to conceptualise subjectivity and writer identity as sociohistorically constructed and multi-voiced. i also demonstrate the need to move away from a reductionist theory of text/knowledge construction that frames textual ownership only in terms of ‘academic honesty.’ finally, in order to gain a deeper understanding of how textual construction and ownership relates to student development, writer identity and the politics of emergentauthorship, i explore the value of discussing plagiarism and the creation of text/knowledge as dialogical (see bakhtin 1981; 1984; 1986). as has been argued elsewhere (thompson & pennycook 2008a), it is only by understanding how students enter into dialogue with their source texts, as well as with their lecturers, that we can assist students in their struggle to claim ownership over the text/knowledge they produce for the academy. ‘i didn’t reference this because … i’d read it in so many places’ kirsty was born in norway, speaks english as an additional language and was in her early twenties at the time of her interview. she had been studying modern history at a major australian university for seven months as part of a year-long student exchange scheme and was in her second semester. she had studied english for six years and had already undertaken two years of university study in norway, where she majored in anthropology, before arriving in australia. the assignment she submitted for this research was for a first year subject in modern european history and was the first she had completed in australia. the title of her essay was: ‘were social movements such as civil rights and feminism a product of the long boom?’ the 4,000 word assignment was completed at the end of kirsty’s first semester of study in australia and comprised the only assessment for the subject. in her interview, kirsty commented on the importance of attribution, suggesting that a failure to reference work that had been published ‘is like stealing someone else’s thoughts and ideas and make them your own,’ although she also felt that this might be considered less important at undergraduate level. nevertheless, kirsty stated with some certainty that she believed that students, or she herself, sometimes used sources without referring to the ‘original’ author. she proposed two reasons for this: first, it was possible thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 3 to forget the source of a text; second, the author of the source text might already have been referred to ‘too many times.’ she added: ‘most students from time to time forget to refer everything 100% right,’ or are unsure how to reference appropriately. it is evident that there is some confusion for kirsty over exactly how to write while, as she put it, ‘having your own voice’ and being ‘coloured from your own perspective’ yet, at the same time, ‘not referencing to yourself.’ kirsty attempts to confront the dilemma of how to create a sense of authorial presence and textual ownership in her writing without the formal trappings of the referencing conventions associated with authorship. she felt that as a student-writer she struggled to ‘get (her) voice in’ and lacked the authority to make unsupported claims in her writing: ‘you can’t just write a page about what you think and feel about things without references to other people as well.’ kirsty stated that she often became confused about exactly where the language she used in her assignments originated, saying that it was easier to ‘make it your own words’ if the author used ‘difficult words’ compared with authors who might use ‘simple and good sentences.’ in the case of the latter, it was more difficult ‘to make it your sentence.’ in such instances, said kirsty, ‘sometimes i maybe write every word. cheat.’ thus ‘writ(ing) every word’ for kirsty may also be a survival strategy, like that reported for students in several other studies into academic writing (angélil-carter 2000; currie 1998; howard 1999). although this portrayal of herself as a ‘cheat’ conflicts with kirsty’s comments above about the need to reference work that has been published, it highlights the kind of struggle that characterises her efforts to engage with the processes of academic text/knowledge production. kirsty added: ‘i think i reference more now than i did,’ thus indicating the developmental nature of academic text construction and emergent-authorship. kirsty explained that the main argument of her assignment (‘that the economic development in western countries was the predominant factor in the rise of feminism in the late 1960s’), ‘came out of the research,’ although she felt that she had simultaneously had the idea from the start, then ‘read quite a lot about it and quite a lot of books supported that view.’ kirsty added that she knew she had to ‘argue something’ and that it was easy to justify this claim. in the second paragraph of her essay (see figure 1), she stated: thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 4 kirsty (p. 1, paragraph 2) this essay will argue that the economic development in western countries was the predominant factor in the rise of feminism in the late 1960s and that.* social movements cannot be seen in isolation from their historical context; the economic boom created a social environment where women had to define their new role. feminism was a response to this new position. (*kirsty’s marker noted on her essay that this sentence was incomplete) figure 1: kirsty’s assignment extract 13 kirsty described the background to three of the propositions that she made in the above paragraph. firstly, that ‘social movements cannot be seen in isolation from their historical context,’ was a point that her history lecturer used to make and she had included it in her essay because she ‘just thought it looked good.’ the following two propositions: ‘the economic boom created a social environment where women had to define their new role’ and ‘feminism was a response to this new position,’ originated she said, from the reading she undertook for the essay. kirsty had therefore not felt it necessary to reference any of these propositions because she had encountered them in the course of her classes and also throughout her readings; they had become, she said ‘a common knowledge.’ she added: ‘you’re not trying to cheat, but maybe you don’t know how to reference it, or maybe you thought already you’d referenced it somewhere else and you don’t have to do it again. it’s quite a hard thing.’ the three sentences in figure 1 earned kirsty two ticks as signs of commendation from rodney, her marker. kirsty discussed other instances of ‘common’ knowledge stating that she had not provided a footnote for the phrase ‘the marxist theory’ (see figure 2) because it was from ‘the lecture,’ and would therefore, she believed, require no attribution. kirsty (p. 8, paragraph 1, extract) there were two influential theories behind the movement (the new ideology of feminism); the marxist analyses and the liberalization approach. the marxist theory argued that underlying economic structures, created by the upper class, were the major reason for the oppression of women, as well as of other marginal groups. women had to fight these economic structures to gain equality with men. the liberalization theory was more concerned about civil and political rights. figure 2: kirsty’s assignment extract 2 she was less clear about whether she should have sourced the expression ‘baby-boom,’ an expression she first introduced on page three of her essay (see figure 3), then proceeded to use it without punctuation markers on several subsequent occasions: 3 the extracts provided from students’ assignments have not been edited. thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 5 kirsty (p. 3, paragraph 2, extract) another important feature (of people’s lives after world war two) was the rising birth rates between 1940 and 1960, which is commonly known as the “baby-boom”. since the early nineteenth century, birth rates had declined in the western world, but during this 20-year period they rebounded. figure 3: kirsty’s assignment extract 3 kirsty commented: i think i reference more now than i did (at the time the assignment was written). i didn’t reference this because i’d read it so many times. i’d read it in so many places. i knew it because i’d read it so many times. i probably didn’t pick it from any book. i just picked it from my head. as with georgia, whose experiences are discussed below, it is notable that kirsty’s conclusion (see figure 4) offers the longest segment of continuous non-attributed writing in the whole of her essay: kirsty (pp. 9-10, final paragraph, extract) changes in women’s roles and perceptions constitute an important aspect of western history in the twentieth century … feminism can be seen as a response to women’s new position in the long boom. in the 1960s and 1970s the feminist movement also improved women’s position further. some of the achievements were inclusion of gender equalities in the civil rights act, and the rights to choose to have an abortion in several american states. it is therefore possible to view the new wave of feminism in the late 1960s, both as a response to women’s new position in the society, and as a mean of improvement of conditions. figure 4: kirsty’s assignment extract 4 kirsty explained: ‘i think most of this conclusion, it’s not new thoughts. it’s like old thoughts from the rest of the text. that’s what i thought when i didn’t reference it. ‘cos a little bit too much reference of ideas already referenced before.’ academic writing, attribution and the creation of knowledge in her account of her writing and attribution practices, kirsty raises a number of important questions concerning ‘common’ knowledge and attribution that are fundamental to the construction of academic texts and our understanding of the nature of emergent authorship. first, the knowledge that is jointly constructed between lecturers and students during lectures and tutorials in the course of a period of study becomes ‘common’ and should therefore not require attribution. as chandrasoma et al. have argued, determining exactly where the parameters of such instances of ‘intertextual intimacy’ (2004: 181-82) lie needs to be carefully negotiated between lecturers and their students and cannot be decided according to a set of universal principles. thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 6 second, kirsty suggests that once she had read the same point in a number of different texts, that this could also constitute a form of ‘common’ knowledge which could no longer be attributed to a single author. as bakhtin (1981) explains in his theory of dialogism, it is important to understand communication as linguistic interaction between interlocutors. for language to be meaningful, speakers and listeners and writers and readers are engaged dialogically in a process of negotiation over meaning-making. bakhtin’s theory of communication is sociohistorically grounded in the spaces where the boundaries delineating individual ownership of words and ideas are blurred. he believes that texts are ‘filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of “our-ownness”’ (1986: 89), each struggling for authority: ‘one’s own discourse and one’s own voice, although born of another or dynamically stimulated by another, will sooner or later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the other’s discourse’ (bakhtin 1981: 348). bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and multi-voiced texts resonates with kristeva’s concept of the poststructuralist intertextually created subject-in-process-and-on-trial. kristeva characterises textuality as ‘a mosaic of quotations’ (1986: 37). producers and readers of texts experience what she terms, the same putting-into-process of … identities (that are) capable of identifying with the different types of texts, voices, and semantic, syntactic and phonic systems at play in a given text… the final meaning of (textual) content will be neither original source nor any one of the possible meanings taken on in the text, but will be, rather, a continuous movement back and forth in the space between the origin and all the possible connotative meanings. (kristeva 1996: 190-91) for kristeva, such an intertextual framework provides the means through which all experiences of reading and writing can be understood. according to kristeva (1996: 190), the subject is forever ‘evolving’ and is in a constant process of becoming; this evolving ‘subject’ is not only dynamic and mercurial but—following the connotations of the expression in french: ‘le sujet-en-procès’—also ‘on-trial.’ such a theory of subjectivity is clearly analogous to students as emergent-authors awaiting judgement from their assessors/lecturers. kirsty states that she is sometimes unsure how to reference particular sources, particularly when she may have referenced the same point already. kirsty’s use of quotation marks for the term ‘baby-boomers’ for example, suggests an awareness on her part of what ivanič has called the ‘other-voicedness’ (1998: 190) of certain words, thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 7 which carry with them allusions to other texts and contexts, despite the absence of a full in-text reference. finally, kirsty felt that once she had read the same point several times, it would not require attribution because she felt that she then ‘knew’ it. as penrose and geisler explain, ‘domain knowledge’ becomes transformed into ‘personal knowledge’ (1994: 516-17), thereby creating the conditions which enabled kirsty to enter into the processes of text/knowledge construction in her disciplinary field, which in turn led to her developing a sense of ownership, authority and control over the writing she had produced. by confronting and attempting to work through a number of intertextual uncertainties and feelings of conflict concerning questions of textual ownership and authorship, kirsty was able to engage with the process of text/knowledge production in ways i suggest, that were epistemologically transformative (‘i knew it because i’d read it so many times’): disciplinary knowledge evolved into personal knowledge. rodney, the marker of kirsty’s assignment, was in his forties and had been lecturing in modern history at undergraduate level for more than ten years; he had completed his doctoral studies in this area of history (with a focus on the outcomes of world war two). although rodney was aware of the faculty desire to encourage a normative distribution of marks that would conform to a bell-curve (with 71 percent being the average mark expected for a first year arts subject), he explained that he nevertheless tried to encourage students to adopt an ‘individual style’ of writing because he did not want students to ‘feel alienated from the thing (their writing). if you’re teaching a “one size fits all” style and approach, i think the students definitely feel alienated from the material they’re writing.’ rodney wanted students to develop their own opinions about the issues they discussed in their essays: to write in ways that ‘break the mould.’ to do this he thought students should try to develop arguments that they could substantiate, rather than simply regurgitating other people’s work. rodney’s comments seem to echo kirsty’s realisation that what was being required of her in her assignment was to ‘have distance and seem like objective and also get your voice in.’ while such a hybridising rather than homogenising (holton 2000) approach to thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 8 pedagogy4 may have created a ‘conflict of voices’ (bakhtin 1984: 74-75), between different and competing writer identities, kirsty did not experience feelings of alienation from and lack of ownership over her writing. rather, i suggest, the forces of hybridisation sanctioned by rodney may have enabled kirsty to engage with the processes of knowledge appropriation (‘i knew it because i’d read it so many times’), which led to her developing a sense of authorial control and ownership over the text she produced. rodney contrasted concepts of ownership and research methods in the sciences with the humanities. for rodney, science students seemed to be used to ‘a different thing as to what counts as people’s work. they’ve often had a group approach. to my mind they often seem to be inadequately citing or sourcing something … it’s a totally different thing about ownership and all that.’ yet in history, rodney stated, ‘it’s regarded as your work. someone else “buying in” would be not on.’ students from very different educational backgrounds are expected to navigate through such transdisciplinary contact zones in order to meet their academic assessment requirements: in the case of kirsty, from studying anthropology in a norwegian university to studying modern history in australia. as kirsty recognised, knowing what constitutes ‘common knowledge’ is an integral part of academic writing, yet difficult to define. rodney also found this challenging: ‘we don’t have an answer for it. it’s a “feel” thing. it’s as vague as that. it’s an interesting question. it’s one that i often chew over.’ he went on to state that teachers cannot assume that everyone shares a sense of knowledge that is ‘common.’ in his essay feedback comments to kirsty, he stated that kirsty’s writing became ‘rather general’ once she wrote without referencing; it lost its ‘edge’ and status or credibility as historical discourse. kirsty’s ‘sharpness’ and ‘focus,’ in other words, the more impressive and ‘mark-worthy’ aspects of her writing, diminished as her use of footnotes decreased. as rodney wrote in his feedback: ‘towards the end of your essay, as you can tell from the fewer sources listed in the footnotes, you tend to become rather general in your writing and lose the sharpness and focus of the earlier parts of the work.’ rodney’s overall impression of kirsty’s essay was quite mixed. he found the essay 4 see thompson and pennycook (2008b: 134-36) for further discussion of this point. thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 9 ‘over-general’ and lacking in ‘historical specificity.’ for example, he noted that on page 8 of her assignment (see figure 2), kirsty had alluded to ‘the marxist theory’ without explaining the version to which this referred. as discussed above, kirsty felt that this point did not require referencing because it was from ‘the lecture.’ clearly, these kinds of issues surrounding in-text citations need to be discussed by lecturers and their students as they negotiate the terms of reference for exactly what constitutes knowledge that is ‘common’ in a given pedagogical environment. in rodney’s eyes, kirsty’s lack of referencing was not considered as ‘transgressive.’ kirsty received an h2b (between 70 and 74 percent) for her essay: an average mark for a student at her level. ‘because i’m just a student i feel that i can’t really say much about my opinion’ georgia was born in the u.k. and lived there for three years before moving to hong kong. she spoke cantonese at home and attended secondary school in hong kong, where the medium of instruction was english. she then moved to australia to complete her final two years of secondary education before enrolling in an arts degree at an australian university. the assignment georgia submitted for this research was completed at the end of the first semester of the first year of her undergraduate degree. it comprised a 4,000 word essay on tone languages: ‘what is a tone language? using a few well-described tone languages, discuss the main issues in tone language description: level vs contour tones; lexical vs grammatical tones; tone ‘sandhi’5; tone vs pitchaccent.’ it was the only piece of assessment that she submitted for this arts subject. as in kirsty’s case, the distribution of marks was expected to conform to a bell-curve with 71 percent the anticipated average. celine, her tutor, stated that she was impressed by georgia’s choice of source materials and use of in-text referencing conventions. she awarded georgia 77/100 for the assignment, with the comments: “good work, ‘georgia’. you’ve demonstrated a good understanding of the topic and good research.” georgia explained that the best way for her to understand clearly what was required of her was by example. she found it useful not only to attempt to learn different synonyms and expressions but also to try to learn how to structure her writing by following the structure of other similar genres of writing. georgia gave the example of the phrase: ‘in this research, i am blah, blah, blah’ as an instance of copying what she termed the ‘structure’ of a text, as opposed to its ‘content.’ 5 tone ‘sandhi’ refers to the ways in which tonal change occurs in specific contexts of use. thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 10 georgia struggled to reconcile her awareness as a university student of the need to reference source materials in her writing with her understanding of how learning and the construction of her ‘own’ knowledge took place: if someone has said it, then i have to reference it, then i think that all my piece will be, has to be, sourced because all the ideas i’ve learnt … so how can i differentiate when i’m actually using someone idea, or it just happens that both of us think the same? … i feel that, like, how nice to say that it’s my idea. although georgia finds it difficult to identify where ownership of ideas might lie, since she believes that all knowledge is learned from others, she nevertheless expresses a desire to claim authorial ownership for herself (‘how nice to say that it’s my idea’). georgia explains further: i feel that there’s nothing that you can strictly say is definitely my own and no-one has ever mentioned or put it in this way before. ‘cos there’s so many people in the world, i just feel that it’s impossible. everything people say, it’s just gathering information from all different sources … but … your selection of articles and information is actually … your manipulation of all these sources that present your idea. georgia raises a number of important points in relation to the construction of knowledge and textual ownership. she found the concept of originality to be highly problematic (‘there’s nothing that you can strictly say is definitely my own … there’s so many people in the world, i just feel that it’s impossible’). georgia then related this insight to the research she undertakes for her university assignments, saying that it simply involves ‘your manipulation of … sources.’ georgia explained that she had difficulty knowing whether she might be considered to be ‘stealing’ if she did not quote directly from her sources. she then became concerned that she could be thought to be making excessive use of quotations, thus clearly demonstrating her difficulties as an emergent academic writer in knowing how to textually manipulate her source materials to the satisfaction of her lecturers. the section of her assignment to which georgia is referring is presented in figure 5: georgia (p.1, paragraph 3) pike (1975: 105) suggests that “tone forms basic to a tone language” usually occur “on the shortest structural units of that language”. these include “short vowels, single short syllables, or short morphemes,” as seen in the following examples … figure 5: georgia’s assignment, extract 1 thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 11 in contrast, as in kirsty’s assignment, georgia’s concluding paragraph (see figure 6) contained no in-text references. i asked her whether this was intentional. she responded that she had presented the ideas of other people in the rest of her essay, so the conclusion was the point at which she could express her ‘own’ thoughts and ideas in her own way. furthermore, georgia wanted to believe that her efforts at performing as an academic writer would result in subsequent readers referencing her writing: she would have earned her place alongside the authors of her source texts as a legitimate member of the disciplinary community she had been engaging with. georgia concluded her essay with the following paragraph: georgia (p.8, paragraph 3) in any case, it is perhaps obvious from the above analysis in the essay that the distinction between tone and pitch-accent is just as ambiguous as that between level-tone language and contour tone language, and is thus open to further study. this gives a good overall picture of the types of issues linguists face when attempting to analyse tone languages, and shows that linguistics is indeed a dynamic and challenging field. figure 6: georgia’s assignment, extract 2 when i asked georgia to whom the rest of her essay belonged, if she was claiming ownership only of the conclusion, she replied (with a laugh): at university i feel like i’m always using, i’m just using other people’s work. i can’t, i don’t have much room to do my own thing. i think unless you’re writing, like creative pieces, that you can’t have everything that belongs to you, otherwise, most of the time, to have a good essay, it seems like you have to make a lot of references to people to show that you have understand the idea how to research … but the way you choose it and use that structure in a way that supports your argument, is yours … when you’re more credible yourself, then you probably have the room to go beyond these conventions. once again, georgia highlights the tensions surrounding textual ownership in academic writing, suggesting that the lack of credibility and status accorded to students by the academy served to constrain creative possibilities and undermine students’ struggle for authorship: i remember when i studied chinese there are certain conventions that you have to follow, but the really famous poets, they are the ones who can go beyond these conventions and they are still considered right, but they’re actually wrong, grammatically or whatever, they’re wrong. they don’t follow the rules. so i think it’s the same here. because i’m just a student and i feel that i can’t really say much about my opinion … i think to be able to produce your own ideas you can’t, you have to go beyond just like, ok reading them and ok, i just draw this conclusion. it’s more like you are really thoroughly learn it and then you can speak of new things. thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 12 intertextuality,6 originality and the creation of new knowledge georgia provides us with a crucial insight into the paradoxical nature of originality and authorship in the academy when she comments: ‘all my piece … has to be sourced because all the ideas i’ve learnt … (but) … how nice to say that it’s my idea.’ yet, georgia’s reliance on imitating the structures of academic writing in her essays not only provided her with the linguistic means for self-expression, but also with a framework for learning that enabled her as an emergent academic writer (a subject-in-process-andon-trial) to engage with the processes of text/knowledge production in her particular field of study. as bakhtin explains: ‘the better our command of genres, the more freely we employ them (and) the more fully and clearly we reveal our own individuality in them’ (1986: 80). for georgia, however, as a first year undergraduate student, being able to reveal her own ‘individuality’ by ‘freely’ using the words and structures of others was proving particularly frustrating and difficult. georgia’s lack of status and knowledge as a student writer she believes, confines her to reproducing the ideas of others using other people’s rules and conventions. she seems to be suggesting that it is only once a writer has gained mastery over these conventions, as in the case of poets, that they are then able ‘to go beyond these conventions (yet) they are still considered right, but they’re actually wrong’ in order to ‘speak of new things.’ once again, georgia’s comments not only echo bakhtin’s belief that ‘individuality’ lies in a freeing up of the traditional conventions associated with particular genres (1986: 80), but also resonates with kristeva’s view that the language of poetry provides a ‘perpetual challenge (to) past writing’ by being in ‘constant dialogue with the preceding literary corpus.’ through this dialogue with previous texts, claims kristeva, established linguistic codes can be transgressed and additional (inter)texts created in a process of ongoing ‘defiant productivity’ (kristeva 1986: 39-42). artists and the writers of novels or poetry in any society, states kristeva, are most able to embody the notion of a ‘subject-in-process’ because they have already been accorded the status of textual ‘creators,’ as opposed to ‘reproducers.’ it is precisely by becoming part of a productive (rather than re-productive) and creative process that the subjectivity of a speaker (or writer) can be affirmed (kristeva 1996: 190). 6 see chandrasoma et al. (2004) on transgressive and non-transgressive forms of intertextuality. thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 13 while georgia does not classify herself as a poet, she is nevertheless a subject-inprocess-and-on-trial struggling to ‘write herself into’ and take control of the texts she produces by textually manipulating her source materials in order to ‘present’ her own ideas. the words and ideas of others act as the dialogic medium through which georgia battles to ‘present’ her ‘own’ ideas, thus intimating the intertextual universe outlined by both bakhtin and kristeva above. celine (the marker of georgia’s essay) was in her thirties and had been employed as an undergraduate tutor in linguistics for three years; she had completed a masters degree in speech pathology, and at the time of her interview, was also working as a research assistant in linguistics. she voiced similar concerns to georgia, stating that students often discussed with her the difficulties of presenting their ‘own’ opinions in their academic writing. some were ‘scared’ and ‘unsure how much of their own opinion to present,’ while others were not clear exactly what constituted ‘their own opinion.’ celine felt she should devote more time in lectures and tutorials to discussing the documentation of sources in relation to questions of textual ownership, authorship and writer identity. she suggested that if time could be made for students to draft their essays and receive feedback on them before the allocation of grades, this would constitute a very valuable learning experience. celine went on to talk about her own lack of confidence as a student with respect to the construction of knowledge: i used to be terrified about making statements in an essay because i wanted someone else to have said it. because if they’ve said it, they obviously know better than i do, so i’d just quote them … in first year essays you get people making these broad general statements and you say, ‘you’ll have to back this up.’ other people that won’t even say two words without quoting someone else. it’s hard to get that balance between those two extremes. achieving ‘that balance’ with the use of quotations was clearly of major concern for georgia in her own writing. concluding comments despite their uncertainties and feelings of entrapment in the language of others, kirsty and georgia found ways of working with and through these ambivalent processes of text/knowledge production in order to claim ownership (at least in-part) over the texts they wrote. in their different ways these students recognised that the language, ideas and thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 14 the texts they produced were intricately tied up with accenting and re-accenting the language, ideas and texts of others, or, as kirsty put it: ‘getting your voice in.’ kirsty’s comments and academic writing practices suggest that if staff and students could make effective use of class readings and lecture materials to establish a common epistemological frame of reference (‘i knew it because i’d read it so many times’), then this could provide ways in which the processes of knowledge creation and textual authority could be explicitly and transparently co-constructed between lecturers and their students. georgia, who clearly saw the production of text/knowledge and language as an interactive and socially constructed process, was somewhat more successful in manipulating her source texts to secure a higher mark for her assignment than kirsty. although georgia knew that she was not a poet who was able to transgress linguistic conventions (‘the really famous poets, they are the ones who can go beyond these conventions … i’m just a student’), she believed that texts were multivocal (‘you combined it from some people’s findings so that it comes up with a slightly different one, but it’s still not from scratch’), thus challenging the viability of the constructs of singular authorship and originality. as scholars such as angélil-carter (2000), currie (1998) and howard (1999; howard & robillard 2008) have recognised, it is precisely by learning how to speak through the voices of others that we can begin to articulate an authoritative position of our own. by engaging with, rather than fearing, intertextual connections, we can create a dialogic pedagogy for academic writing that enables staff and students to transcend the notion of plagiarism as simply a lack of ‘academic honesty,’ and advance our understanding of the politics of text, knowledge and identity formation that characterises the complexities of the learning and teaching unfolding in today’s university classrooms (see also thompson 2005; thompson & pennycook 2008b). following the work of storch and tapper (1997) on the use of annotation in second language academic writing pedagogy, my study also indicates that students would benefit from early intervention and feedback prior to the final assessment of their academic writing. as chandrasoma et al. (2004: 190) have already highlighted, exactly what constitutes ‘common knowledge’ is fundamental to the production and assessment thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 15 of academic writing. as educational practitioners, however, our understanding of what it encompasses is contingent upon specific learning contexts and needs to be negotiated and re-negotiated with each new student group. the drafting stage, i suggest, offers lecturers and students a critical opportunity to discuss such issues of commonality, since it is during this period of intertextual creativity that the struggle to transform disciplinary knowledge into shared or ‘personal’ knowledge will be at its most intense. finally, as a researcher engaging in a ‘dialogue’ with the data of this study, i share some similarities with levi-strauss’s bricoleur who ‘always puts something of himself (sic)’ into the process of ‘continual reconstruction’ of the materials he/she works with (1996: 21). it is important therefore to acknowledge the part i have played in selecting and interpreting particular phenomena ahead of others and to realise that i am limited by my own sociohistorically constructed and partial view of the world.7 the research that is presented here is necessarily mediated (and restricted) by my belief that human understanding emerges through a process of sociohistorical struggle and that this understanding changes over time. this study has also been predicated on the assumption that there is a nexus between power and knowledge and that all forms of communication cannot be separated from the social and political contexts in which they occur. working from within such a dialogic conceptual framework, the researcher becomes a selfreflexive advocate for change. i am suggesting therefore that as university educators, we need to look beyond the mechanics of referencing when dealing with problems of attribution and plagiarism in students’ work and view academic writing as an intertextual and multivocal struggle for text/knowledge ownership, if we are to effectively assist students to become authoritative authors and contributors in their fields of disciplinary study. acknowledgements i would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their very helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. 7 namely, that of an anglo-saxon, western educated female university lecturer. thompson plagiarism, intertextuality, and emergent authorship portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 16 reference list angélil-carter, s. 2000, stolen language? plagiarism in writing, pearson education, harlow. bakhtin, m. m. 1981, the dialogic imagination: four essays, (ed.) m. holquist, trans. c. emerson & m. holquist, university of texas press, austin. _____ 1984, problems of dostoevsky’s poetics, (ed. & trans.) c. emerson, university of minnesota press, minneapolis. _____ 1986, ‘the problem of the text in linguistics, philology, and the human sciences: an experiment in the philosophical analysis,’ in m. m. bakhtin, speech genres and other late essays, (eds) c. emerson & m. holquist, trans. v. w. mcgee, university of texas press, austin, 104-31. chandrasoma, r., thompson, c. & pennycook, a. 2004, ‘beyond plagiarism—transgressive and nontransgressive intertextuality,’ journal of language, identity and education, vol. 3, no. 3, 171-93. currie, p. 1998, ‘staying out of trouble: apparent plagiarism and academic survival,’ journal of second language writing, vol. 7, 1-18. duke university libraries. 2008, ‘citing sources.’ online, available: http://library.duke.ed/research/ citing (accessed 19 march 2008). holton, r. 2000, ‘globalization’s cultural consequences,’ the annals of the american academy of political and social science, vol. 570, no. 1, 140-52. howard, r. m. 1999, ‘the new abolitionism comes to plagiarism,’ in perspectives on plagiarism and intellectual property in a postmodern world, (eds) l. buranen and a. roy, state university of new york press, albany, 87-95. howard, r. m. & robillard, a. e. (eds.) 2008, pluralizing plagiarism: identities, contexts, pedagogies. boynton/cook, portsmouth, nh. ivanič, r. 1998, writing and identity, john benjamins publishing, amsterdam. kristeva, j. 1986, the kristeva reader, (ed.) t. moi, basil blackwell, oxford. _____ 1996, julia kristeva interviews, (ed.) r. m. guberman, columbia university press, new york. levi-strauss, c. 1966, the savage mind, university of chicago press, chicago. penrose, a. & geisler, c. 1994, ‘reading and writing without authority,’ college composition and communication, vol. 45, 505-20. storch, n. & tapper, j. 1997, ‘student annotations: what nns and ns university students say about their own writing,’ journal of second language writing, vol. 6, 245-64. thompson, c. 2005, ‘“authority is everything”: a study of the politics of textual ownership and knowledge in the formation of student writer identities,’ international journal for educational integrity, vol. 1, no. 1. online, available: http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/journals/index.php/ijei (accessed 12 may 2008). thompson, c. & pennycook, a. 2008a, ‘a question of dialogues: authorship, authority, plagiarism.’ education canada, summer, 20-23. _____ 2008b, ‘intertextuality in the transcultural contact zone,’ in pluralizing plagiarism: identities, contexts, pedagogies, (eds) r. m. howard & a. e. robillard, boynton/cook, portsmouth, nh, 124-39. 907-3822-2-le portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. ‘the space between: languages, translations and cultures’: special issue edited by vera mackie, ikuko nakane, and emi otsuji. issn: 1449-2490: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal. portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. diary inside/color local crónica susana chávez-silverman, pomona college, california 23 junio, 2008 saratoga, califas para los musos: paul allatson, raphael kadushin, wim lindeque, paul saint-amour, and pablo “hugo” zambrano, in gratitude for your presence hmmm. quizás abrir con algunos de estos diary entries. these fragments of “me.” (little eye: commune con tus musos). mi instinto me dice que it’s as good a way in as any, si bien un poco nel mezzo del camin (pero quizás por esto mismo, no?). estos entries constituyen un modo más directo, a more ostensibly unmediated way (ja ja) to access, to convey la tremenda carga de intensidad y de reconocimiento de estos meses aquí en el montalvo arts center. desde el 3 de mayo i’ve been here. simón, yo. me, here. as an artist-in-residence. put that in your pipa and fúmenlo, mijos. pretty trippy, que no? anygüey, el muñeco del tim miller me recomendó; i applied y fijate que they picked me. so heme aquí, amidst a somewhat motley crew of (mainly visual, hay que recalcar eso: soy, de hecho, la única writer-in-residence) artists, residiendo en el #30 live-work studio (hagan google al montalvo art center; “my” studio es el que sale como imagen emblemática en el website) en la parte residencial de la villa montalvo arboretum. chávez-silverman diary inside/color local crónica portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 2 todo esto used to belong to james duval phelan, three-term mayor of san francisco, financista y gran filántropo que también fue el dizque first popularly elected senador de califas (1915-1921). lo que es realmente una intrigante (no) coincidencia, mejor dicho, una uncanny correspondencia: you know where el vato got the name montalvo? según me explicó mi colega y amigo josé cartagena-calderón, el escritor español garci ordóñez de montalvo, en su novela las sergas de esplandian, inventó una utopian island a la que puso el nombre de california. en algún sentido, he dreamed us, he invented us, carnales! este spanish golden age paraíso terrenal, poblado de amazonas y resguardado por griffins tiene su correlato aquí, donde estoy viviendo. josé, siendo un erudito early modernist, o colonialihta, o transatlanticista o como corno se les llame hoy en día a los antaño golden age scholars, recognized it immediately—digo, its appropriately early modern, literary origins—cuando leyó la primerísima crónica que empollé y mandé desde northern califas, a principios de mayo (it seems so long ago already …). y allí me explicó toda la historia de montalvo. for me, este lugar fue y ha sido un remoto y a la vez achingly familiar green mansions memory vortex, lately turned (con los record-breaking heatwaves and 800 nearby wildfires y el concomitante smoke, ash and singed flying hojas de eucalipto, para ni mencionar a new batch of badgersome, heteronormativos, techno-geek resident artistes), lamentablemente, terrarium. pero sabes qué? ni modo. soon i’ll be leaving. demasiado pronto. isn’t it always like that? dormí bien, after two foreshortened nights. el viernes por la ceremonia del fuego en la casa de los sentidos, luis vásquez gómez’s shamanic, slightly wicker man-esque solstice fest on a weird, way too sultry, heat-blasted san francisco night en la mission district, y anteanoche up late en una slumber fest con el serge of the berry. me levanté a las 7. el little white box ponía 60 grados; soplaba una leve brisa. ay, alivio. the sky was strange and murky, though, y había un faint pero distinct olor a humo. lavé ropa down in the commons; i carried la compu back up to la torre (absolutely uninhabitable, por la falta de cross-ventilation, cuanto el mercurio rises above about 75 grados … how ridiculous, for a structure built to house a writer, no?) con gran chávez-silverman diary inside/color local crónica portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 3 anticipación. puse esa mystical, hindú music en los i-tunes; it wafted por los speakers, down from the writing loft al high-ceilinged split level space below, e hice yoga. con pesas, eh? me sentí fofa y más bien endeble (por no haberlo hecho en más de una semana, due to extreme weather conditions), pero ni modo. i did it, al menos. luego salí en el health walk, con mi minolta. había un chingo de annoying people en el lawn de la villa. some adults, a gull of little kids. es verano. must be algún tipo de summer camp. uf. como que me estoy escapando justo a tiempo, it seems. subí los socalled poet stairs. qué poetas ni que eight rooms, as el sergio would say (en su stilltapatío even after décadas en san francisco way): nalga-busters, that’s what they are. the tilo trees donde comienza la escalera, sus florcitas, blooming and soapy-scented hace tan sólo tres semanas, now look kind of cowed, bien plain jane. las linden flowers disecaditas. ditto the verga-trees. their white-flowering phalluses flopping earthward ahora, cansados, scentless. no me gusta el verano. continué por el trail arriba, to the left of the stone staircase. primera vez que lo hago sola (ay, look how bold u r becoming, mija!). quería sacar fotos de esos air roots. big ol’ long, dangling and twisted raíces, starting, some of them, 15 or 20 feet off the ground. pocas veces he visto eso and never, que yo recuerde, in this country. en puerto rico, near that ritzy hotel en el viejo san juan y luego en magnetic island, en 2006 (both times con pierre y el paulie, fíjate). off the queensland coast, en australia. pero eso fue tropi-flora, en los mangroves, y esto a pleno oak and redwood forest. strange. o quizás no. más bien directamente emblemática del ars combinatoria que constituyen mis travels. mis vivencias. my life. varias veces estuve a punto de convencerme de que el cougar was lying in wait— sprawled or crouched, indolent or alert—en una rama arriba del sendero. eran pasadas las 11 de la mañana, not its natural hunting hour, me dije. still, confieso que me puse a cantar. de nuevo esa incongruente canción, decades-old, de silvio rodríguez. eso en sí espantaría a cualquier modern predator, no? bajé, salí disparada de ese primaeval bohque y me metí en el asian-inflected, paved path, al lado del lawn. al lado izquierdo, vi un green bush. i’d never even noticed it before, pero it had apparently flowered desde la última vez que caminé por allí. el lunes chávez-silverman diary inside/color local crónica portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 4 pasado it must’ve been, porque tuve que suspender los health walks por el extreme heat all last week. so, anygüey, muñeca, no me digas que you hate summer, ne? look what it brings: like an underwater creature right out of “the little mermaid” (ojito: versión original, no disney) se me apareció, waving and shimmying its 4-inch long, suddenly budded shoots en la brisa. some kind of impossible, moss-colored coral. sharp-looking y droopy a la vez, somehow. nunca había visto tal cosa. it was … just green. i mean, no tenía perfume ni brightly colored flowers, pero estaba outrageously, baroquely beautiful. aquí en el montalvo estoy descubriendo all the different permutations and iterations of “just” green. como en iguazú. bueno, not at all “like” iguazú in feeling—the vegetation is completely different. pero ayer por ejemplo, as i again drove (bueno, passenger-ed) the twisty backroads en el acura de la cronopia (sin mota)—roads that were hewn right through the giant redwood stands—i wished for a cuaderno, for any paper. even something like ese trashy, gossipy newspaper de misiones, in whose margins—único espacio en blanco disponible—i scribbled the notes on topografía that would become my iguazú crónica, mientras atravesamos toda la provincia de misiones en ese naftascented taxi con la deb cohen, pierre y el juvenil, camino de san ignacio de miní y la casa de horacio quiroga. this is no cal green, entonces. this is my home. después de este sudden burst of early summer green, a little farther along the path, del otro lado, observé semi-melancólica que el australian bottlebrush estaba on its last legs. bien scraggly, desplumada. en vano busqué al colibrí en sus ramas. quería ver si se repetía last week’s milagro: un colibrí posado. do you know how rare that is? pero nada. pero, isn’t that la definición misma de un miracle anyway, me pregunté medio sourly— que no se repite? i did find, sin embargo, como engarzadas en las ramas muertas del bottlebrush, a cache of those little round, spiny, sea urchiny, hollow, stemmed pods. se habían caído de un árbol vecino, and gotten lodged in the lower thicket of bottlebrush branches. hot tears saltaron, instant and automatic, as i reached up for one. these pods were, quizás, mom’s most idiosyncratic (bizarre, perfect for a scorpio) christmas decoration: we’d chávez-silverman diary inside/color local crónica portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 5 collect them for her, in the valley, y luego los hacía spray paint con esa laca. silver and gold. y luego los metía entre las ramas del christmas tree. bueno, luego de ese intensely emo-laden interlude proseguí hacia el formal garden del senator phelan (nb. supe recién que he was an anti-semite y que tenía una amante jewish. typical, hey? fixation and disavowal a la vez …). i went in, for a change, through the gate on the right. quería fotografiar las paper flowers. secretly (bueno, ni tanto), también me había sobrevenido una obsesión hacia el hummingbird. i suddenly remembered i’d seen another one last week, posado. right here, en mi secreto recinto. se había quedado absolutely still, mucho pero mucho tiempo, en la frondosísima rama de un silk tree. de hecho cuando hubo movimiento it was i, finally, who moved. me alejé only reluctantly, rubbing my neck, semi-stiff por haber estado craning, peering, tilted patrás embelesada por ese minúsculo still point. i was certain it had been here, inside my secret garden, donde lo había visto. a mano izquierda, on the way to discovering the paper flowers. pero no. me equivoqué. qué boluda—there aren’t even any trees to speak of, before you come to the shocking stand—or grove, o como corno se le diga a grupo de flores—of paper flowers. me tinca que son algún tipo de poppy (oh, i wish my mom could see them. she’d know. o marcello, el marido de la shelley). two, three, hasta five feet tall, crecen. parecen que se auto-propagan, en un sistema de runners. ¿no serán estos los famosos rhizomes, the ones d & g go on about? oh my god, pomo culti studies at the grass—o al menos— roots level. qué chévere! pero anygüey, estas flores se desbordan; they spread right out into the little pebbled path, pushing their way más allá de la frontera del flowerbed, insistentes, desobedientes, audaces. me parecen un tipo de flor inexistente. digo, unreal. de fantasía. como del tipo que habría inventado marosa di giorgio (q.e.p.d.). los tallos son extremely long, flexibles, más bien pálidos. a dusty, almost sage green. pero lo real(mente) maravilloso (pace carpentier …), astounding—aparte el perfume, pero i’ll get there just now—son los pétalos. son seis. son enormes y blancos. not optic white sino softer, creamy. casi casi del color del acura de la cronopia raz. los pétalos se ven crisp, crepe-papery. pero they flop and sway, open and closed, en la brisa matutina. versión miniatura y vegetal de oreja de elefante africano. al centro tienen (ay, no me acuerdo cómo se llama esto: chávez-silverman diary inside/color local crónica portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 6 pistil? stamen?) te lo juro, una parte yellow-green, ferozmente erecta cual falo muñequeril, rodeado de un círculo perfecto de butter-yellow, pollen fuzzy-topped, teensy citron colored antennae. y por si todo esto—the bold, fantasy look of them, quiero decir—no fuera suficientemente sublime, if you gather the papery petals together in your hand and sniff into the little cup, despiden un olor fresco, tenue, plasticky. barely even plantlike. barely even there. un poco como el creosote, quizás. (ese olor lo aprendí con el eddie muslip, en ese desert botanical garden, en phoenix. sé que suena a oxymoron, pero te juro, it wasn’t. an oxymoron, quiero decir. it was amazing, multicolor, and wildly perfumed.) pero por otra parte, no. not creosote after all. nada sharp, or oily. el perfume no es verde, ni tampoco flowery. it’s definitely culinary. closest, al ponderarlo, al olor de la masa harina.. on the other hand, it’s nothing like the scent of the flowering plums que abundaban en santa cruz y me enloquecían mientras caminaba de vuelta a casa, de la harbor high school. los mismos small, polite, purple-black leaved árboles que bordean el thompson creek trail en claramonte (my at-home health walk) y que cuando florecen—a brief profusion of tiny, pale pink blossoms—allí por marzo, early april, siempre les he dicho los tortilla-flower trees. i’ll never quite get it, i reckon. i mean, con las palabras. todo es aproximación. y eso es lo más maddening—or magic—del olfato, ¿no? por su white, insouciant, papery look, por su semejanza a la amapola (scentless a fin de cuentas, no obstante esa famosa escena de la wicked witch of the west, purring evilly, poppies, poppies will put them to sleep. sleeeep, sleep …), when i leaned in to sniff, i hadn’t been expecting any scent at all. y por eso, el cool, familiar, mounds of damp masa harina, mercado libertad en verano scent es—por lo utterly inesperado—lo más disturbingly, comfortingly hechizante que tienen las paper flowers. stay with me a little while. busquemos, together, más strange familiars. pacific utopia’s and national identities in the 21st century portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century sina va’ai, national university of samoa there is not one pacific only one common theme that development is certain though foreign and coconuts will continue to fall the pacific ocean will camouflage superficial dreams and the faint sound of drums will still be heard if we pause a while to listen vaine rasmussen vaine rasmussen’s concluding verse of her poem our pacific draws in literary form the broad concern of this essay, namely, the multiple visions, which include the dreams of pacific utopias or paradises and oceanic identities in our contemporary pacific, the fact of modernity and development introducing the foreign/strange and global into our everyday existence and the perennial constants of the measina, the ideal beauty or treasures of culture and tradition symbolised by the coconuts, the ocean and the drumbeats, which provide nourishment for our imaginative and ethical growth as human beings. in november 2003, the government of samoa celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the first motion picture which was filmed on location in samoa. the movie, return to paradise, starring gary cooper, was based on one of michener’s narratives about the south pacific. according to dunleavy, ‘this was the first time in recorded va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century motion picture history that a government had taken the initiative for such a cinematic celebration’ (dunleavy 2004, 14). such local initiatives signal the importance attached by national governments to promoting the image of the pacific paradise as an integral part of the discourse of tourism, a major source of revenue for many pacific island nations (misa telefoni 2002, www/treasury.gov.ws). these pacific utopias are usually represented as far removed from the tensions of the world haunted by the threat of terrorist activities and destruction which undermine global peace and security, especially post september 11, 2001. yet if we examine the literary form of history telling and read the literary texts as said advises, ‘…as a way of better understanding the human adventure and the cultural context from which [they] came’ (said 2000, 448), it is clear that creative writing from the pacific is full of the same angst, frustrations and dilemmas regarding multiple postcolonial identities and nationalism as those fictions from their metropolitan neighbours. this article will contextualize the writing from the pacific by remembering the pasts from which it grew and then move on to a discussion of albert wendt’s ola and vilisoni hereniko and teresia teaiwa’s drama last virgin in paradise with a view to highlighting the conflicts emerging especially in regards to the issues of political and cultural identities, indigeneity and the pacific paradise. it will focus on the ways that colonialism and postcolonialism impacted on the pacific and their related effects on the quest by pacific islanders for new post colonial cultural identities and liberalization from the past on conformity to the literary standards of european metropolitan centres. interrogating concepts involving colonizers and the colonized in the politics of dominance and subservience, an imperial centre and its peripheries or margins, the notion of a culturally superior european self versus the ‘others’ of empire, the orientalising vision which provided an imaginative cultural construct of the pacific, romanticizing and exoticising its ‘islands and beaches’ (denning 1980), peoples and cultures and the function of creative writing in promoting and affirming a decolonized sense of self, national identity and cultural liberty in pacific countries, are important gridlines for the discussion and analysis of the creative writing which is the article’s focus. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century early exploratory excursions by european men of empire laid the foundation for the literary portrayal of pacific islanders and their ‘world’ and the development of stereotypes and dominant images of the south seas which could be fruitfully linked to edward said's orientalism, defined as ‘an internally structured archive’(said 1979, 58) built up from the literature written by europeans. this archive was based on past encounters between west europeans or occidentals and the peoples of the east or orient whereby the countries and peoples of the orient were typed onto the west’s imagination, divided into several categories, alternating ‘between being an old world to which one returned, as to eden or paradise, there to set up a new version of the old and being a wholly new place to which one came...to set up a new world’ (58). this archive presented, in said’s opinion, a false perception of the orient but it provided europeans with imaginative lenses allowing them to rationalise their colonial hegemony over the orient. as for the issue involving the connection of power and knowledge and the images employed in the pursuit of colonial domination over the pacific, the cook voyages’ representations are particularly pertinent and described as falling into two different kinds. one incorporated charts and coastal profiles as an aid to ships’ navigators together with drawings of flora and fauna to detail what was of commercial value, such practical, utilitarian images being ‘specific...(using) art in the service of science, commerce and the flag’ (said 1979, 58). the second involved generalised emotive images evoking the paradise or purgatory alluded to earlier, helping mobilise europeans, like administrators and missionaries, in their decisions to enter the pacific ‘in their thousands and eventually dominate it’ (191). thus the pacific viewed imaginatively from europe became what daws called ‘a dream of islands’ (daws 1980, xi) where in the 19th century especially, the dream of a pacific utopia involved the scenario where ‘the white man stood above all others...(and)...deserved to rule: this was the truth that made the west strong...and it was a truth that the west set out to teach all the peoples of the world’ (20). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century colonialism produced the fictional worlds of oceania staked out imaginatively in varied shades of attractiveness and repulsiveness by early european writers who had spent time travelling in various capacities and living in the south seas like herman melville, (notably his novel moby dick and more importantly, for their emphasis on escapism, freedom and sexuality, his first two novels, typee and omoo, set in the marquesas and tahiti respectively), charles warren stoddard, robert louis stevenson, paul gauguin (whose noa noa along with his paintings of immobilised, available polynesian women continued the rousseauian idea1) louis becke, joseph conrad and somerset maugham (melville 1846,1851, stoddard 1873, stevenson 1893, 1894; gauguin 1957; becke 1906; conrad in watts 1990; maugham 1985). in his essay examining european literary responses to the south seas, subramani divides this colonial fiction into three categories: the first where the south pacific provides ‘local colour’, as seen in the fiction of stoddard’s; the second where it is used simply as exotic background for narrative adventure, as with the novels of robert louis stevenson; and the third, where it is symbolic in nature, as is evident in the works of melville, conrad and maugham (subramani 1976a, 6). his comments, with regard to the fiction of the three authors mentioned in the latter category, are pertinent; ‘a striking feature...is the absence of genuine polynesian characters’ (17) and ‘generally, the image of the polynesian falls into two parts; he is either a terrifying savage...or he is a friendly primitive … the polynesian character is no more than either a caliban or a friday’ (17). later, contemporary writers, notably james michener2 and paul theroux (michener 1967; theroux 1992), continued to represent oceania with their ‘imperial eyes’ exemplifying what pratt labels: a discourse of negation, domination, devaluation and fear...the official metropolitan code of the ‘third world’, its rhetoric of triviality, dehumanisation and rejection coinciding with the end of colonial rule ... the rise of national liberation movements and accelerated ... processes of modernization, industrialising and urban growth in many parts of the world (pratt, 1992, 220). 1 see teaiwa 1994 for an islander critique of noa noa, read alongside hau’ofa’s kisses in the nederends. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 2some of michener’s stories in tales of the south pacific were adapted by rogers and hammerstein into a famous broadway musical called south pacific which was later made into a movie. see sutton 1995, 127139. va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century it is therefore evident that representations of south pacific islanders by europeans looking in from the outside involve what foucault would describe as a ‘technology of the self’3 which legitimised colonial paternalism and domination in the past and postcolonial interventions in the present with stereotypical images of the passive, happy, hospitable islander, living serenely in the security of the pacific paradise. in early 1976, in the first independent issue of mana, albert wendt wrote of the collective, creative movement seen in the renaissance of pacific creative arts and in the flowering of literary and artistic productions, as a movement ‘towards a new oceania’ (wendt 1976, 49-60) redefining and reconstructing the cultures of the region into newness, free from the ‘wounds of colonialism’ (54) and ‘based firmly on their own pasts’ (53). two years later in 1978, satendra nandan’s address; ‘the fiji indian: a complex fate’ (nandan n.d., 35), described how the fiji indian, the main migrant group in fiji, was becoming aware of his fate as a pacific islander which required a sea-change that needed to: seek, establish and foster new relationships with pacific neighbours, both big and small leading to a dissolution of complexes when the fiji indian could say unselfconsciously ‘these are our people, this sea of islands make up our country’ and the multicultural islands of fiji would stand as beacons of light in a world of encircling gloom (nandan n.d., 41). this statement was made before the 1987 coups and was echoed in late 1993, when epeli hau’ofa published his theoretical essay ‘our sea of islands’ in a book titled a new oceania; rediscovering our sea of islands (hau’ofa 1993). since that time, and especially meaningful after the 2000 political coup in fiji, hau’ofa has refined his ideas in two essays titled ‘the ocean in us’ and ‘epilogue: pasts to remember’. hau’ofa called for a liberation of the mind, especially amongst pacific islanders, in the way that pacific island nations and their inhabitants are seen and represented. this newness of seeing involves a reclaiming, or a rediscovery of, the ‘ancient truth’ of the vastness and portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 3foucault 1972, 16-49. ‘technologies of the self’ are defined as that which ‘permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and a way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, affection or immorality (and) ... is associated with a certain type of domination’ (18). va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century richness of the oceanian ‘pasts’, in which islanders interacted in large exchange communities across this vast ‘sea of islands’. in his later essay, hau’ofa states: a pacific islands regional identity means a pacific islander identity. but what or who is a pacific islander? the issue should not arise if we consider oceania as comprising human beings with a common heritage and commitment, rather than as members of diverse nationalities and races. oceania refers to a world of people connected to each other …we have to search for appropriate names for common identities that are more accommodating, inclusive and flexible than what we have today (hau’ofa 1987, 36). across almost three decades, the cry from pacific writers/theorists was still basically about the same struggle for recognition and reassertion of cultural identity and selfhood. wendt states emphatically: ‘we must not consent to our own abasement’ (wendt 1976a, 54) and the same sentiment is echoed by hau’ofa: ‘we must not let anyone belittle us again’ (hau’ofa 1993, 16). ngugi wa thiong’o, in a similar call for the decolonisation of the african mind, described the legacy of empire very succinctly as a ‘cultural bomb’ (ngugi 1986, 3), the effect of which is to ‘annihilate a peoples’ belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves’ (3). even more telling is the effect of imperialism on their past, which is then viewed as ‘one wasteland of non-achievement’ (3). thus the wounds of colonialism cut back through the heritage of the past, into the now of the present and reaches over the horizon into the future. in this context, creative writing for pacific islanders and migrants like the fijian-indians who have been transplanted to an island home in the pacific, can be seen, as manoa puts it, as an attempt ‘to harmonise the split in themselves, and the splits in their changing cultural environments’, (manoa 1996, 69) to feel complete in a new world order4 that maps out for colonised and decolonised peoples experiences that emphasize their fragility and dependence. after colonisation comes the desire to be liberated, to write out the resilience of pacific peoples and their ability to survive the impact of imperial domination, blending the ‘received goods’ from the west with those of their own indigenous homelands. there is a portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 4 president bush's term in describing the future of world economies in relation to the world superpower, the usa. va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century need to celebrate and to make sense of the many facets of the pacific self which is made up of many voices and shifting identities—to externalise, to put outside what was previously held captive, often in turmoil, inside. this process of turning the inside out, creatively speaking, leads to a process that brings healing, as ‘the (pacific) other’, the coloniser, is allowed to see the inside view, the emotional and cultural terrain/s of the decolonised writer and his/her experiences, to enter imaginatively into previously silenced/silent cultural spaces and stories. for the indigenous peoples of oceania, their spaces incorporated the vast pacific ocean and strings of islands, of varying sizes and types. hau’ofa describes the world-view of these ‘ocean peoples’ as conceiving of their universe as not only land surfaces but also; the surrounding ocean as far as they could traverse and exploit it, the underworld with its firecontrolling and earth-shaking denizens, and the heavens above with their hierarchies of powerful gods and named stars and constellations that people could count on to guide their ways across the sea (hau’ofa 1993, 7). these islanders whose ‘world was anything but tiny’ (hau’ofa 1993, 3), engaged in cultural exchanges centuries before european contact with peoples of the pacific. the focus of colonisation was to divide up oceania into ‘islands in a far sea’ (3) which bound colonial and postcolonial administrators to notions of smallness which often bred a mental set of dependency and despair. hau’ofa, in turning this notion of smallness around from tiny ‘islands in a far sea’ to the vast expanse of a ‘sea of islands’, makes for a shift in emphasis which is supported by the belief held by many pacific islanders, especially by those in polynesia, that they did not originate from anywhere outside their own island groups, that in fact their homeland is the centre from which other migrations occurred. this autochthonous theory, which is advocated by most samoans and supported by its oral history and traditions,5 is represented by a response from a manua6 orator to a statement by sir peter buck about polynesian migration. ‘the polynesians may have come from asia, but the samoans, no. we originated in samoa’ (buck 1938, 294), the orator told the maori anthropologist. the concept of a sacred centre denoted in the names 5 samoans refer to their legends of the creator of samoa as tagaloa and the absence of stories of migration from other places which feature in legends and traditions of many of the other polynesian groups. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 6manua is the group of samoan islands forming part of american samoa. va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century 'samoa' (sa meaning sacred, moa meaning heart or centre) and tongatapu (tapu meaning sacred, thus sacred tonga) testifies to traditions of autochthony. similarly in fiji, it has been claimed that ‘there are no traditions in any way indicating the direction of their primeval migrations. on the contrary, a tradition states that the fijians were created in fiji, and did not migrate from another land’ (pritchard cited in geraghty 1997, 27). hau’ofa’s paper stimulated responses and discussion within the university of the south pacific (usp) community during its silver jubilee year in 1993, an important year for the usp and for the pacific region. over a decade later, it is still an on-going and important debate because it involves the horizons of minds and imaginations of the peoples of the south pacific in the desire to free them from past colonial constraints imposed from without and newer neocolonial and postcolonial constraints imposed from within. the debate is also an attempt to remind the peoples of the pacific of their origins in a vast ocean whilst not forgetting the present challenges of development in a modern world. change is a constant in modern-day life throughout the world and is most marked in the countries of the pacific. modernisation and migration have put tradition under threat and changes have occurred at all levels; social, economic, political and personal. the creative writer in the pacific, while being shaped by these changes in which s/he lives, fulfills many functions with his/her fiction. these can include commentator, shaper and prophet. in these postcolonial times in the pacific, where a national self/selves and identity/identities are slowly being addressed and defined, these roles are even more crucial. the creative writer in the contemporary pacific is often like a signpost, pointing the way beyond, to a future (whether personal, national, regional, global) which is imaginatively shaped and sketched. these outlines are the fruit of multiple, overlapping, blended, regional and global influences. the personal journey of the creative writer in these instances involves what albert wendt calls ‘maps and fictions’ (wendt 1991b). he observes: we each have preferred maps, learned maps—what we believe our cultures, our nations, ourselves were and are. our maps may be our neighbours’ fictions, we read one another through what we believe, through the mirrors of who and what we are. those maps and fictions are all in the spiral portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century which encompasses the story of us in the ever-moving present, in the va, the space between all things which defines and makes us a part of the unity that is all (wendt 1991b, 181). this definitive space between all things, the va and va-tapuia, are concepts in samoan society involving human relations/relationships in time and space, whether it is mythological (as in the watery spaces out of which tagaloa, the polynesian god, created the heavens and the earth) (kramer 1994, 539-544), temporal or personal and associated with these relations are tapu (conventions), laid down as a guide to interaction and appropriate behaviour. aiono f. le tagaloa, former professor of samoan studies at the national university in apia, explains: there is the va-tapuia between brother and sister (the feagaiga relationship, the equivalent to a ‘sacred covenant’); the va-tapuia between the parent (especially father/mother) and offspring; there is the va-tapuia between male and female, between male and male female and female; there is the va-tapuia between host and guest, there is the va-tapuia between matai; there is the vatapuia between the dead and the living; there is the va-tapuia between man and his environment sea and sky, flora and fauna; then there is the va-tapuia between the created and the creator. (tagaloa personal communication 1994). these relationships are described as sacred (tagaloa personal communication, 1994) with notions of mutual respect and courtesy that prescribe the norms of behaviour in samoan society. the spaces in-between, the va, operates not only at a physical and relational level but also metaphorically to describe postcolonial situations where pacific island peoples, especially creative writers who work within the realm of the imagination, find themselves negotiating spaces between and across different cultural worlds, redefining and repositioning themselves in the process. wendt’s notion of maps and mirrors7 has a resonance in said's theory of orientalism,8 explicitly interrogating as it does the linkages between power and knowledge and how 7 maps and mirrors are also used by borges, whom wendt lists along with camus and other writers whose books are selected by galupo to take with him when he returns to sapepe (wendt 1981, 366 as noted by subramani 1985, 157). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 8said examined orientalism as a discourse, using foucault's concept (foucault 1972 & 1979), whereby the ‘orient’ (not only adjacent to europe but also the place of europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, its cultural contestant, one of its deepest and most recurring images of the other)’ (said 1979, 1) existed primarily as a project of the west, serving to justify the treatment and exploitation of peoples culturally homogenised under this label. thus orientalism is a ‘style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the orient (most of the time) and the occident’ (said 1979, 2) whereby the west or the occident dominated, restructured and had authority over the orient. gramsci's notion of hegemony (gramsci cited in said 1979, 7-8) is employed, consequently allowing for ‘a flexible positional superiority which put(s) the westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand’ (said 1979, 7). va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century these cultural constructions impact on colonised peoples. it is pertinent to examining the ways that the south pacific, and especially polynesia (formerly labeled ‘the south seas’) was exoticised, romanticised and articulated in the european imagination. at a pacific literature conference titled ‘from the inside out theorising pacific literature’ held at hawaii in september, 1994, the focus of debate was the indigenising of literary theory pertaining to the waves of creative writing emerging from the pacific. it featured a presentation by hereniko and schwarz which looked at the role of the critic in a colonized pacific. the authors called for critics to be alert ‘to the complexity of writing that is being produced in the pacific in the 1990s and the absence of a homogeneous or unitary perspective among indigenous writers’ (hereniko and schwarz 1994, 6). reference was made to the faber controversy,9 which labeled pacific writing as unsophisticated. the authors also examined and rejected four reviews of hereniko and teaiwa's 1993 play, last virgin in paradise, as being unsatisfactory and a proposal for a holistic ‘author-friendly’ approach to literary criticism of pacific writing was made. this new approach would take into account cultural, historical and social contexts where the critic assumes the role similar to that of a samoan tulafale (talking chief)10 who employs the process of feutagai (consultation). while noting that ‘not everyone can be a tulafale’, it was also contended that the role of critic of pacific literature ‘should be reserved only 9 this controversy was also mentioned by albert wendt in his keynote address and was the subject of informal discussion. birkett (birkett 1994), in the guardian weekly, reported that the editor of the short story anthology, c. k. stead, had expressed reservations about broadening the scope beyond new zealand, adding that island writing was relatively unsophisticated in execution but that he may be able to add ‘mainly fiji and samoa to new zealand and the cook islands if there is a writer there worth including’ (my emphasis) (stead cited in birkett 1994). the action of several maori writers and albert wendt, in withdrawing their stories from the collection, seemed an appropriate protest against such an outdated and discriminatory attitude. stead expressed regret in ‘a note on absences’ (stead 1994, xv-xvii) at the absences in the collection of these major pacific writers and added pointedly, in relation to wendt, that this regret in wendt’s case was because ‘his short stories, before his recent two novels, ola and black rainbow, which suggest some kind of collapse of his talent (my emphasis), represent some of the best in pacific island writing’ ( xvii). in the face of such blatant cultural imperialism, it is obvious that the journey towards a pacific, postcolonial, independent self/selves is still impeded by the wounds of colonialism's culture. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 10 ‘the tulafale speaks on behalf of the chief, explains or clarifies when necessary, and interacts with the rest of society regarding the intentions of the chief. the tulafale can also criticise the chief in a loving and constructive manner when necessary. this relationship between the tamalii “high chief” and tulafale “talking chief” known as feutagai in samoa, is what we propose as a preferable alternative to the “expert” posturing endemic in literary circles today’ (hereniko & schwarz 1994, 6). va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century for those who know pacific cultures and peoples well and have a broad knowledge of the literature’(6). the authors proposed a decolonising of literary criticism for the pacific declaring that ‘the standards of judgment must come from inside pacific islands cultures and they should be informed by the issues, viewpoints, forms of rhetoric and artistic modalities of pacific cultures’ (hereniko and shwarz 1994, 14). the ideas raised in the proposal have yet to be fully explored and are debatable but are powerful, delineating present as well as future struggles. these struggles, similar to those of other decolonised writers in postcolonial societies are concerned with critical approaches which adopt a dialogic11 rather than a monologic stance, a postcolonial as opposed to a colonial view which attempts to affirm the various aspects of postcolonial pacific identity and to recover the dignity which had been lost in the fractured colonial past. subramani’s 1999 address at the spaclals conference imagining oceania also emphasized that pacific peoples will need all the ‘resources of their imaginations “to chart alternative paths” in the years of the new millennium, constructing answers to questions about postcolonial identities and other pressing issues of regional importance’ (subramani 2003, 12). i will now discuss two works of fiction, firstly a novel by albert wendt, the pacific’s best-known international writer, and a drama by vilisoni hereniko and teresia teaiwa. all three writers are academics, the first two teaching at the university of hawaii and the latter at victoria university in new zealand. in ola, wendt takes on the narrative voice of a woman, reshaping the life of one olamaiileoti (a name defined as ‘born from death’, as her mother had technically died before the surgeons operated to remove the child and portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 11 see holquist 1981. bakhtin (1961, 336-337) expresses his concept of dialogism as follows: ‘life is by nature dialogic. to live means to participate in a dialogue: to ask questions to heed, to respond, to agree and so forth. in this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body. he invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the symposium of the world’. in relation to the concept of self and other, bakhtin writes ‘this other human being whom i am contemplating, i shall always see and know something that he, from his place outside and over against, cannot see himself: parts of his body that are inaccessible to his own gaze (his head, his face and its expression) the world behind his back... are accessible to me but not to him. as we gaze at each other, two different worlds are reflected in the pupils of our eyes... this everpresent excess of my seeing, knowing and possessing in relation to any other human being is founded in the uniqueness and irreplacebility of my place in the world’. (bakhtin 1990, 23. va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century now seen by the aiga as a resurrection, a reincarnation of her dead mother) (wendt 1991a, 14) farou munroe—or ola (‘life’) for short. this life, and a rich assortment of papers, (including diary entries, personal letters, poems and other fictions, an account of her childhood and youth and her father's final years), are bequeathed to the author (in the person of pati tuaopepe12) in three beer cartons, left on his front veranda anonymously. in an attached letter to the writer, whom she admired, ola expresses her hope that his rearrangement of her papers will help her ‘read/find a meaning to (a) wasted life’ (7). ola's story takes her, as a companion to her seventy-five-year-old father, finau, on a pilgrimage to the holy land, the land of jesus' birth. the trip is a surprise birthday gift from the aiga to the old man with roots in sapepe, the fictional village situated on the western tip of upolu, created for sons and used also in leaves. as she explains for the reader: nearly all of us samoans are raised on the bible, and after over one-hundred-and fifty-years of christianity (mainly fundamentalist) we know almost nothing of our ancient religion. my father’s generation knows more about the biblical holy land (geographically, historically, spiritually) then our own country and more about it than the modern israelis. the biblical prophets, heroes and villains, the courageous saga of the israelites, jesus and his disciples are a vital part of their everyday lives (wendt 1991a, 11). through this journey, finau's reactions to this received (from london missionary society missionaries) and imagined holy land, as well as his defining samoanness are delineated together with the events in ola's life, both in the past and in the present. the narrator, in a conversational tone, draws on the fagogo style of wendt’s previous texts, drawing the reader closer with her direct address and expressions like ‘aue’ (wendt 1991a, 9, 44, 49), an expression used to convey emotions of surprise or suffering. the narrative takes on a global dimension, with shifts occurring to describe episodes of ola's life in western samoa, new zealand, japan, new york and of course, hinging on the basic narrative, in israel, with plane stopovers in honolulu and athens. ola herself by the end of the novel, is three-times divorced, with an illegitimate son, pita, conceived between her first and second husbands from a possible ‘gaggle of men’ (113) she had used to assuage her selfdestructive loneliness. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 12pati is albert and tuaopepe is wendt’s samoan family matai title. see afterword of ola, 347. va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century raised in the vaipe in the town of apia, she receives a scholarship for secondary education in new zealand. she ends her two-year-old marriage to her first husband, matthew browne, before completing her ba to teach english at samoa college. it is here that she meets and marries a wealthy peace corps volunteer, mark stripter (a marriage which lasts about eight years), who sets up a pacific island foundation, after the divorce, to help island countries with his maternal grandfather's fortune which he has now inherited (there is some doubt cast on the truth of mark's genealogy and inheritance which is always left hanging; the possibility that he is a trickster is suggested but never finalised). her third husband, carl fischer, is heir to a local samoan import and export company, himself already supporting two ex-wives and their households. when ola begins her trip to israel with finau, her third marriage is already shaky. like the protagonist in sons, ola too, is unconventional, often feeling out of place in sapepe and suffering when in love. her adolescent son, pita, echoes the father in sons: ‘it’s because you see too clearly, even when you don't want to...lagona (his great grandfather) told me once that to see people and things in all their flaws and weaknesses and not forgive them is to not accept what is’ (wendt 1991a, 286). their experiences in israel provide an emotional bonding for both the father and daughter. commemorating and honouring the suffering of the six million jews murdered in the holocaust, when they visit yad vashem, a memorial to the victims, finau undergoes a spiritual illumination, opening his mind to admit the common humanity shared by all peoples, including the jews, labeled and stereotyped as the crucifiers of christ in christian samoa. one memory remains vivid and lasts till finau’s death; he even mentions it in his last testament, given to ola after his death. he tells his daughter: i'll never forget their eyes ... the eyes were those of owls. and ola, our family god in pagan times, was the owl ... square and still i stood in front of the middle pillar … on a small black shelf (was) the well-used shoe of a child. a worn-out, utterly helpless shoe watching me. and i fled. rushed out onto the roof of yad vashem and the endless, silent scream of god's universe. ..that shoe will be worn by my heart for the rest of my days. it is a perfect fit (wendt 1991a, 34). the holy wanderer from pouliuli is placed firmly in the narrative with his trademark ‘silent scream’ as was his circle of pebbles at the beginning of the novel in chapter one. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century self-referentiality becomes a feature of wendt’s works as the texts are gradually woven together from his dominant, imaginative frame. later, at a dinner party at a poet’s home, the samoan visitors are asked about their homeland and finau orates the solo o le va or the samoan chant of creation, which ola translates into english. after explaining the samoan concept of the circle of life in the spiral of the present, in the va, finau states; ‘the holy land has helped me see myself and what i've become. and through that see my beginnings and my country in a new way’ (wendt 1991a, 216). finau by his oratory and pride in claiming the ancient beliefs expressed in the song, affirms the old, holistic ‘way of seeing’ and mourns the immense loss, part of the grounds of defining himself. inserted into this social conviviality is the story of a young kidnapped boy in tel aviv and when finau declares that the boy is alive, the room of hopeful jews go along with it, almost as if believing in his prophetic power. at the end of the evening, ola, ‘a drop-out christian’ is to recite the creation chant again, to see, as one in a trance, a vision of her father with the lost boy in his arms, the world once more ‘circled. healed. magical’ (221). it is only after the excitement of commercial sightseeing and shopping around the holy place that they hear that the kidnap victim has been killed. finau’s request to visit the wailing wall is understandable and his guilt is manifested in his note ‘please forgive me’ which he places into the joint of two stone blocks. following that though, the invitation to finau by an old patriarch, part of a group of yemenite jews, dancing in procession, to join them is to bring reconciliation and a sense of peace. ola observes, before we veered away from the wall, my father turned his face to me; it was alive with tears. but how he danced. held up, above the abyss by the magic of his ancient friends, the boy and the song and the rhythm, his legs and knees stepping high ... how he danced. beyond forgiveness and grief. (wendt 1991a, 306). the pilgrimage has become a journey to explore and affirm the self, and to that end some of finau’s own personal agonies and guilt surface. he tells ola a part of the family genealogy he has never revealed before, of two dead brothers, tragic figures, the first one va’a, the eldest and ideal son who provided tautua (loyal service) to their strict taskmaster father, and the aiga and who had died early of an ulcer. the second brother, portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 14 va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century pese, who died at eighteen, was deformed and finau, even though two years the younger, was expected to look after him, so to make that caring easier, he trained pese to imitate everything he did as a game. after pese’s death, the younger brother realised that the need between them had been mutual and that indeed, he misses ‘his second self’ (wendt 1991a, 166). ola’s new found uncles, part of her dead, are only some of the people cast to play out incidents from the various ‘pasts’ that inform the narrative and flesh out a fictional life, from all the papers left to the artist to reshape. others from her boarding school days as a scholarship student in new zealand are also important, especially the story concerning gill, her closest pakeha friend from school, and the latter’s struggles to truthfully claim her maoriness after years of her maori mother and pakeha father hiding the fact. this truth, about her true identity parallels ola’s search and finau’s reclaiming of their ‘pasts’ to understand previously hidden and denied aspects of their true selves. the undertones of racism are clear and the tragic accident which claims gill’s life and that of one of her daughters, karin, happens in her homeland, described by gill as ‘kiwiland, colonial empire of racists, bigots, male-chauvinist rams, and rugby players who love south africa and apartheid’ (wendt 1991a, 68). the return to samoa is eventful; carl has filed for divorce and ola goes with finau to sapepe, where malo tauilopepe galupo is the highest ali’i, his wealth expanding for everyone to witness. he is still sinister, though charismatic, and as to be expected, even more ‘into power, into the controlling, using and manipulating of it’ (wendt 1991a, 319); and ola finds his eyes watching, measuring her, an uncomfortable situation for the person watched. with his health declining, finau makes a deathbed request, a mavaega, that ola take on the matai title of lagona, which he has previously refused because of his age. after her initial refusal, ola (described previously in israel by finau as ‘the permanent traveller’ (142)), accepts when her father whispers into her head ‘accept it for the kidnapped boy who was executed in israel’ (34). she had just recalled the first visit she ever made to the village when she was six, memorable for the discovery of the ‘i, me, as separate from the them and everything else’ (339). these are reflected in samoan pronouns, extending outwards from the self; o a’u, i, me to o tatou, we, us to o tatou uma, all of us. the widening spiral of the va, the space between connecting the ‘i’, the portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 15 va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century ‘me’ to the ‘all-of-us’ in a unity that encompasses everyone is ola’s final concern and as a matai, it is a vital and legitimate concern. as she realises after the burial; ‘today i want nothing, yet my aiga wants everything of me. today i need nothing, yet i need everyone’ (345). wendt amplifies the notions of va—its workings and implications in its home society, the sacred centre in ola. it is mentioned five times in the chapters leading up to the last will and testament, from chapters 82 to 84 whereas up to that point in the narrative, it is only included twice. this has obvious significance as it is only towards the end of the novel, as finau’s death approaches, that ola accepts the ‘all-of-us’, the ‘we’ into her consciousness. prior to that, especially in the episodes connected to carl, in her affair and later marriage to him, ola is presented as very cynical, moving amongst the business and political elite of the nation’s capital, the cocktail cliques of apia, witnessing the corruption of her middle-aged peers, most ex-scholarship students like herself, who play their political power games with ease while drinking ‘alofa on the rocks’ (wendt 1991a, 294, 260). the combining of alofa (compassionate love) with alcohol implies the cheapening of this basic virtue of the fa’amatai or fa’asamoa, hinting at its commercialisation and degradation. during ola’s visit to japan, on a business trip with carl, ola talks about ‘ola-do’ (279), (do being japanese for ‘way’), her way, the way of life, at that point growing in alofa in her relationship with her third husband-to-be. also in new york with mark, she admits her love for the individualistic city where there are ‘heaps and heaps of people … cut off from one another’ (112) and where participating in perverted sex shows, ends in feelings of guilt and desperation. it is only by acknowledging the va that ola finds some sense of peace in accepting her self and her identity. ‘our va with others defines us. we can only be ourselves linked to everyone and everything else in the va, the unity-that-is-all and now’ (wendt 1991a, 307). like the jews in the holy land that finau and ola met and socialised with, making sense of multiple identities and defining ‘homeland’ is a preoccupation of the postcolonial present. it entails a resurrection, a reviving of ancient, ‘whole’ ways of seeing and turning the immense loss suffered under colonialism into a new way of life. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 16 va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century wendt’s novel puts the diasporic islander under the fictional spotlight, enabling the reader to empathise with the complex dilemmas surrounding the issues of identity for many such individuals in the postcolonial pacific. the power of the clown (known as han mane’ak su in rotuma and referred to in samoan tradition as a fa’aluma) and pacific comedy is demonstrated in vilisoni hereniko’s play, last virgin in paradise (hereniko 1993) which is based on a true story told by teresia teaiwa. it explores the same issues as wendt’s novel from another angle, using comedy and pacific humour to uncover similar insights. the play is subtitled ‘a serious comedy’ and according to the playwright ‘debunks the stereotypical images of polynesia that have been created by gauguin in his paintings and by writers like margaret mead, jack london and somerset maugham’ (hereniko 1994, c7). it deconstructs european representations of polynesians who are often shown by these outsiders as ‘people who aren’t quite fully human’. the two europeans in the play, helmut klinghorst, from no specific country in europe and jean, the inevitable australian anthropologist, visit marawa (which means happy in fijian) for different reasons but with the same cultural attitude. helmut’s country of origin in europe is kept deliberately vague; maybe to reinforce stereotypical sameness that all palagis share the same characteristics and that perception that simplifies all people of the same colour whether white, black, brown or yellow; ‘if you've seen one, you’ve seen them all’. thus from the islanders’ perspective, helmut is just like all european ‘others’ they have seen since colonisation and as hina suggests to temanu, he is gullible as well as materially wealthy. his quest for the ‘new’ in essence mirrors the colonial endeavour. he tells jean: do you know that i looked everywhere for a virgin wife and couldn’t find one? i’ve been to new guinea, vanuatu, solomons, fiji, guam, saipan, samoa, nauru … i couldn’t find one. not a single one who is untouched. then i came here and within two weeks, i find one. yes, i’ve found the perfect one (hereniko 1993, 4). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 17 jean, who holds a $20,000 fulbright grant, says directly to the audience at the end of scene one, ‘i’m here to write the definitive work on sexuality among the marawan people. my book will make me famous ... coming for sex, that’s the tentative title’ (hereniko, 13). this is an obvious mockery of margaret mead’s controversial study va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century among adolescent samoan girls in the 1920s titled coming of age in samoa a study of adolescence and sex in primitive societies (mead 1928). jean’s behaviour as the ‘nosy anthropologist’ (helmut's description) draws an angry response from temanu, a local islander just returned from twelve years of education overseas in australia, as a history graduate from the australian national university, returning in search of her identity, to find her ‘roots’. she accuses jean of being arrogant, a ‘bloody nosy foreigner who cares for nothing but her research’ (hereniko 1993, 9), lumping her together with helmut in her scathing condemnation that they’re both the same, ‘come … to plunder and steal, to take and take until there’s nothing left that’s sacred anymore’ (24). helmut’s marriage to hina, the young island ‘virgin’, and the complications associated with hina’s choice are the focus of the play. jeke, the local clown, has played the intermediary for helmut in convincing hina and her parents that it is better for the young woman to marry a rich palagi, even though the groom is old enough to be the young bride’s father. the main motivating factor for the parents is economic, so that hina can ‘send them (the parents) money’ and come in visit at christmas with a bag of presents bought in the metropolitan city. for hina, the marriage is her chance to see the world and get a good education, and she is willing to take the risks of loneliness and discrimination that temanu warns her about, even though she is also fearful of the unknown. temanu becomes personally involved in trying to dissuade hina from marrying helmut, when hina reveals that while termanu may be confused about her own identity, hina’s family are clear about their relationship with her, the returned, local academic. hina’s words are emphatic; ‘i know who you are. you temanu, daughter of etika who marry a white woman. etika is my father’s older brother. your parents take you to australia for a good education. we related’ (hereniko 1993, 7). this relationship inspires temanu to commit herself to warning, and if possible, convincing hina that the marriage should be called off. hina’s insistence as she walks to board the plane that will take her ‘out’ to the wider world that helmut is her ‘passport’ to fulfill the dreams of a global life, ends with a telling retort when temanu reminds her that she should never forget her roots. hina replies; ‘i know my roots. you come to find roots, that fine but i …i want to find wings too!’ (52). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 18 va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century the wedding feast in scene two demonstrates hereniko’s ability to blend a pacific flavour into his work with traditional forms of polynesian performance arts like secular clowning, providing a boost to pacific audiences. they provide local slang, jokes, parody with typical role reversal as seen with hina’s aunt, mere and jeke (the use of common fiji slang ‘i love you full speed’ and the answer to mere’s question ‘but are you virgin?’ elicits the current fiji colloquialism emphasising just the opposite of what is said ‘oh yes! b-i-g virgin’) combined with pacific dances like the tuiboto and other pacific songs, this creates a literary context, reflecting the hybridity of the postcolonial frame. in this theatrical setting, some members of the audience will be privileged and honoured in that it is their mother tongue and their local jokes being used and others, like europeans, will be excluded in that they may not understand the pacific language being used by the characters, and consequently the humour and the innuendos contained in the dialogue may be unclear. in this way, hereniko feels european audiences, like jean the anthropologist, will begin to get a taste of what its like for many of us who have to tolerate speaking their language all the time ... so using these languages privileges indigenous languages, gives control to the islanders, the natives because they are the ones to decide when to switch to their own tongue and lock that message in their own tongue (hereniko personal communication, 1994). the use of pacific languages also makes for more play with words especially with the clowning and the mistranslations of hina’s father’s speech at the wedding, allowing the playwright to extend the boundaries of humour and push it to its limits. these creative inclusions provide the local colour and humour which characterise pacific island festivities. an interesting feature of the production of the play in hawaii in september 199413 was the inclusion of ancestral spirits, hina’s grandma and grandpa, in traditional velinimeke attire. ancestral spirits are used by hereniko in different ways; for example in the monster (a fanstasy) they perform a threatening role and escalate the dispute whereas in the last virgin in paradise, they play a protective role. their unscripted addition in the portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 19 13 this special performance was attended by many of the participants of the 1994 pacific literature conference. va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century latter play came about due to hereniko’s experience during rehearsals for the 1994 run of the play in hawaii when, as he explained it; ‘about two weeks before the show opened, i was driving home and there was this voice ringing in my ears and basically the voice was saying “what about us, the ancestors? you have forgotten about us, we want to be in your play”’ (hereniko 1994, personal communication). the ancestors appear in scene three, looking after hina when she comes back to the hotel after the wedding feast and actually board the plane with her as she leaves with helmut for europe. they are, of course, invisible to hina and the other human characters living in the contemporary linear time frame and act as a literary mechanism to honour traditional pacific sensibilities and beliefs that dead ancestors still exist in that outer, unseen, spiritual world to protect members of their families still living in the realm of temporal mortality. their actions as they wait for hina and helmut are playful and bawdy, mirroring the actions of jeke, as he turns the social order upside down and sets the celebratory tone for the wedding feast. in this sense, the spirits display a freedom from the restraints of the human laws that prescribed their behaviour on earth. the juxtaposing of the two worlds, of the living and the dead, and their continuing interconnections, is now seen as an integral dynamic of the play, linking it to contemporary beliefs held by pacific islanders, breathing more life into the action and giving it a sense of completion (hereniko 1994, personal communication). the use of various pacific languages, samoan, fijian and rotuman, in the songs for the wedding scene and the farewell in the last scene as well as during the formal speeches made at the wedding by hina’s father, together with the varied stage backdrops for the first three scenes (of a gauguin painting in the first scene, a kava bowl during the wedding scene and a painting of a large eel about to eat a cowrie shell in the third) entrench this play firmly in the postcolonial pacific with all its ramifications of hybridity within and across marawan society. helmut’s drunken trampling on the fine mats during the wedding feast becomes a metaphor for the ignorance and arrogance often displayed by europeans as they persistently set out to achieve their colonial projects of research and discovery in the pacific. in a note to the director, hereniko suggests: portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 20 va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century casting that brings together people from different pacific islands is encouraged and where possible vernacular expressions should be used and a way found to communicate their meanings in english. another possibility is to have the non-english dialogue in the native language of the local inhabitants wherever the play is performed, for example, using the hawaiian language in hawaii (hereniko 1993, xi). he adds that the anticipated audience should influence language choices, that the success of the wedding scene will depend on the talents of clowns who know how to make people laugh and involving the audience in the singing of popular songs and in the dancing in the play is also important (xi). this improvisation, flexibility and innovation adds a pacific flavour to the play which should make each performance (since it is dependent on the ethnic composition of the audience) unique. the comedy of the play hinges on the fact that helmut is searching for a lost paradise, and that while hina and her people seem simple and naive they are all well aware of the issues and they are just as quick-witted, manipulative and shrewd as others are. they are all very aware of what they want out of life and the advantages as well as the limitations that their small island existence places upon them. ironically, it is jean, the anthropologist, who is the virgin and not hina (these confessions are made to temanu). jean is depicted as a very naive outsider with pre-determined expectations and little experience of island life. she tells helmut in scene three; ‘i came here expecting marawa to be primitive and what do i find? natives dressed to the ankle, a fledgling feminist from anu and a toupeed alcoholic from a continent called europe. we all think that paradise is a place when all the time it’s a state of mind’ (hereniko 1993, 40). this play illustrates many of the conflicts that come from expectations not grounded in the reality of the present-day pacific. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 21 in conclusion, the complexities, challenges and commonalities in the search for pacific identities are explored by pacific writers in various ways demonstrating the multiple nature of this region, as alluded to in rasmussen’s poem. in coping with postcolonial reality, we need to carefully listen and pause to appreciate what is important for our particular cultural identity so that cultural liberty for what we choose as vital and important to post colonial identities is secured and promoted for all who call the pacific their ‘home’. va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century reference list birkett, d. 1994, ‘maori mafia versus the pakeha redneck’ in guardian weekly, march 27. borofsky, r. 2000, a view from afar (middle east) – an interview with edward said in remembrance of pacific pasts – an invitation to remake history, ed. r. borfsky university of hawaii press, honolulu, 443 – 452. buck, p. 1938, vikings of the sunrise, stokes, new york. dening, g. 1980, islands and beaches discourse on a silent land: marquesas 1774 1880, university of hawaii press, hawaii. daws, g. 1980, a dream of islands: voyages of self-discovery in the south seas, the jacaranda press, milton, queensland. dunleavy. t. 2004, golden premiere of first hollywood movie filmed in samoa in polynesia, january, pacificads, apia, 14. foucault, m. 1972, the archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language, trans. a.m. sheridan smith, pantheon books, new york. ———1979, discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, vintage books, new york. geraghty, p. 1977, ‘how a myth is born: the story of the kaunitoni story’, mana, vol. 2, no. 1, (october), 25-29. hau’ofa e, 1987, ‘the new south pacific society: integration and independence’, in class and culture in the south pacific, ed. hooper et al, centre for pacific studies, university of auckland in association with the institute of pacific studies, university of the south pacific, suva. ———1993, 'our sea of islands', in a new oceania: rediscovering our sea of islands, eds. e. waddell et al, the university of the south pacific in association with beake house, suva, 2-16. ———2000, ‘epilogue: pasts to remember’ in remembrance of pacific pasts – an invitation to remake history, ed. r. borofsky, university of hawaii press, honolulu, 453 – 471. hereniko, v., and teaiwa, t. 1993, last virgin in paradise, mana publications, suva. ——— and schwarz, s. 1994, ‘”talking chief” the role of the critic in a colonized pacific’, paper presented at conference 'from the inside out: theorising pacific literature, (17 september). hooper, a., britton, s., crocombe, r., huntsman, j., & macpherson, c. 1987, class and culture in the south pacific, centre for pacific studies, university of auckland in association with institute of pacific studies, university of the south pacific, suva. holquist, m. ed. 1981, the dialogic imagination: four essays by m.m. bakhtin, university of texas press, austin, texas. holquist, m & liapunov v, eds 1990, art and answerability, university of texas press, austin, texas. kramer, a. 1994, the samoa islands, trans. t. verhaaren, polynesian press, auckland. manoa, p. 1976, ‘singing in their genealogical trees’, in mana review, vol. 1, no.1, (january), 61-69. mead, m. 1943 (1928), coming of age in samoa, penguin books, new york. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 22 va’ai pacific utopias and national identities in the twenty-first century michener, j.a. 1967, return to paradise: more classic tales of the southern seas, corgi books, london. nandan, s., n.d, (ms), beyond colonialism: exilic explorations: selected prose 1977 – 1993, crnle, the flinders university of south australia, adelaide. pratt, m.l. 1992, imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation, routledge, london. ngugi wa thiong'o. 1986, decolonising the mind the politics of language in african literature, james currey in association with heinemann, london. rasmussen v.2000, ‘our pacific’, in remembrance of pacific pasts – an invitation to remake history, r. borofsky (ed.)university of hawaii press, honolulu, pp 399 400. said, e.w. 1979, orientalism, vintage books edition, united states of america. stead, c.k. (ed.) 1994, the faber book of contemporary south pacific stories, faber and faber, london. subramani, (ed.) 1976, mana review: a south pacific journal of language and literature, jan. vol.1, no.1, mana publications in assoc. with the south pacific creative arts society, suva. ———1985, south pacific literature: from myth to fabulation, university of the south pacific, suva. ———2003, ‘the oceanic imaginary’ in pacific epistemologies, pacific writers forum, monograph series 1, 1-14. sutton m, 1995, strangers in paradise: adventurers and dreamers in the south seas, angus & robertson, sydney. theroux, p. 1992, the happy isles of oceania, gp putnam’s sons, new york. teaiwa t. k., 1994, ‘reading gaugin’s noa noa with hauofa’s nederends:militourism, feminism and the polynesian body or teha’amana, makarita and me’, paper presented at the pacific literature conference, manoa campus, university of hawaii, honolulu, september. wendt, a. 1976, 'towards a new oceania', in mana review, jan. ed. subramani, vol. 1, no.1, 49-60. ———1991a, ola, penguin books, auckland. ———1991b, 'pacific maps and fiction(s): a personal journey', in perceiving other worlds, ed. e. thumboo, times academic press, singapore. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 23 sina va’ai, national university of samoa reference list portal layout template portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal whiteness and the blackening of italy: la guerra cafona, extracommunitari and provisional street justice joseph pugliese, macquarie university introduction in his la guerra ‘cafona’ (the ‘cafona’ war), salvatore scarpino presents a detailed account of the decade long war staged by southern italian insurgents in the wake of the unification of the italian peninsula in 1861. the term cafone originated in the south and it simply referred to poor rural folk; it originally had no derogatory connotations. after italian unification, however, cafone began to be deployed by northern italians as an insulting term to describe southerners; its range of significations included ‘primitive,’ ‘barbaric,’ ‘uncivilised,’ ‘vulgar’ and ‘backward.’ in his book, scarpino maps the complex and contradictory modes of resistance exercised by southern subalterns, including landless peasants and outlaws, against the north’s violent war of colonial annexation of the south. categorised by the north as the cafona war, that is, as the war of the civilised against the barbaric, the north proceeded to deploy both colonial and paracolonial methods in order to bring the south under its control and thus secure the political, economic and cultural transformation of the south into a ‘piedmontese province’ (scarpino 2005: 29).1 as luciano salera explains, ‘this was the beginning of the use of ‘brigandage,’ the term by which the armed northerners attempted to defame the [south’s] rebellious peasants’ (2006: 31). scarpino and salera, in their respective critical accounts of southern brigandage, systematically expose how the north’s deployment of the term worked to script southern anti-unification insurgents in terms of bands of savage and petty criminals, thereby depoliticising their struggle against the 1 all translations from neapolitan, sicilian and italian are by the author. pugliese la guerra cafona violent process of unification. this politico-linguistic move ‘was essential,’ salera writes, ‘in order to whitewash minds, extirpating this “historical memory” so as, finally, to make southerners ashamed of their own origins! and this was done scientifically!’ (2006: 31). in his invocation of science, salera draws attention to the establishment, soon after unification, of the school of meridionalisti (southernists). constituted by criminal anthropologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, craniologists and ethno-linguists, the school’s members laboured assiduously to ground their theories of southern congenital inferiority in forms of scientifico-biological racism (teti 1993; schneider 1998; dickie 1999; pugliese 2002a, 2002b, 2007a; moe 2002). in the course of this essay, i want briefly to revisit the historical moment of italian unification, drawing attention to its violent colonial dimensions and the years of southern brigandage that inscribed it, and tracing the survival of this insurrectionary and anti-nationalist movement in contemporary italy. by focusing on the exuberant manner in which a statue of the italian national poet, dante, has been graffitied by southern youth in a square in naples, i want to resignify the historical tradition of southern brigandage—by returning the term back to its insurgent political roots—and thus to establish lines of connection between seemingly disparate politico-cultural practices and genealogies. specifically, i examine southern hip hop culture (specifically graffiti and rap) in relation to the history of southern anti-unification and counter-nationalist movements. as francesco mario agnoli writes, critically coming to terms with the history of southern brigandage in post-unification italy ‘is indispensable to understanding the relations between southerners and the state and the problems that followed, including the financing of public administration, immigration, and even the emergence of the northern league’ (2005: 23). this analysis of southern hip hop culture interrogates whiteness as constitutive of hegemonic italian identity, politics and culture. i conclude by bringing into contemporary focus the northern history of anti-southern discrimination and exploitation, drawing attention to the plight of recent immigrants from the global south who form the underbelly of contemporary italy’s economic prosperity. focusing on contemporary debates on extracomunitari in italy, i attempt to delineate a tactical blackening of italy in the face of a virulent and violent caucacentrism. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 2 pugliese la guerra cafona southern brigandage against a unified italian nation-state up until, and immediately after, the moment of unification, northern italians viewed the south as a type of terra incognita. knowledge of the south was largely gathered from the accounts and travelogues of european travellers who ventured into the nether regions of the peninsula and returned to tell their tales. immediately after the moment of unification, a collection of northern italian politicians, bureaucrats and academics descended into the south in order to begin the process of integrating the region into the larger body of the italian nation-state. this descent into the south was viewed as a process of discovery and colonisation (gramsci 1975, 2005). a contemporary account published in a newspaper of lombardy (one of the main loci of the unification movement) articulates the labour of discovery that lay ahead for a post-unified italy: ‘the first, the most important work we need to accomplish as italians is, and must be, the discovery of italy. for most of us—and of course it is not our fault—italy is a bit like africa for geographers … we find ourselves in terre ignote …. therefore we say that we must rise to the task of discovering italy’ (quoted in petraccone 2000: 56). africa, in fact, became the governing metaphor through which northerners began to make sense of the south. consequently, the northern dominated nationalist government utilised a colonial model that would establish ‘special careers with certain advantages like the house for indian affairs in england’ (petraccone 2000: 101). the deployment of the loaded signifier ‘africa,’ as the lens through which the south was rendered intelligible for northerners, marks how the question of italy was, from the very moment of unification, already racialised by a geopolitical fault line that split the peninsula and its islands along a black/white axis. from the beginning, then, the so-called questione meridionale (southern question) encoded a set of racialised presuppositions in which the whiteness of the north operated as an a priori, in contradistinction to the problematic racialised status of the south, with its dubious african and oriental histories and cultures. in his painstaking documentation of the atrocities perpetrated by the northern forces in the execution of the cafona war, scarpino writes: the massacres, in fact, were not absent. it is useless to list them one by one, because they were all equally atrocious and stupid. the force of the repression was proportional to the ignorance and insensibility of the political authorities and, above all, the military. there was, in many of the portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 3 pugliese la guerra cafona officials’ views of the south, an exasperated paracolonial attitude based on the observation that in the south the real war began once the official war [of unification] had actually ceased. (2005, 41) in the process of asserting its moral superiority over the south and in its attempt to contain, neutralise and recode the political dimensions of the insurgency, the north declared the south a ‘zone of brigandage’ (scarpino 2005: 150). it thereby effectively criminalised the insurgents, reducing them to lawless bands of petty criminals. by declaring the south a ‘zone of brigandage,’ the north argued that the ‘southern territories were infested with brigands, so much so as to declare the phenomenon as “endemic,” when, in fact, it became manifest only after [northern] annexation, and then not as a phenomenon of mass criminality, as northerners framed it, but as a political and social rebellion’ (salera 2006: 78). the subsequent passing of the legge pica (pica law), on august 15, 1863, in order to repress and liquidate brigandage, functioned to legalise the use of state-sponsored violence by both military and paramilitary forces (izzo 2005: 146). the anti-brigandage pica law, writes scarpino, ‘clearly indicates that the new state was exclusively preoccupied with repression and with extraordinary legislation, staging a profoundly illiberal act in the name of the liberty it was purportedly bringing to the south’ (2005: 157). as aldo de jaco makes clear in his documentary history of southern brigandage, under the aegis of the pica law northern forces indiscriminately massacred with absolute impunity children, women and men, pillaging and setting fire to entire villages, decapitating their captives, and exhibiting their heads on stakes around the captured towns and villages (de jaco 2005; scarpino 2005). roberto martucci, in his detailed account of what he terms a ‘civil war,’ draws attention to the scorched earth policies unleashed by northern forces on ‘uncooperative’ villages and towns in the south (2007: 323, 305, 419). the term ‘civil war’ has not, in fact, been anachronistically coined and imposed by contemporary historians of the south in their writings on the cafona war. on the contrary, the term was first deployed by politicians, journalists and other observers attempting to describe the scale of the violence unleashed by the northern annexation of the south (di fiore 2008: 219). in his extensive quoting of contemporany documentary sources, martucci draws attention to the indiscriminate killing of women, children and the elderly, the rape of women, and the incineration of entire families trapped in their houses as they were set portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 4 pugliese la guerra cafona alight by northern forces (see also di fiore 2008: 237-59). one eyewitness describes the massacre and incineration that took place in the town of casalduni as inscribed by a ‘horizon of extermination that knew no limits’ (quoted in martucci 2007: 294). martucci utilises the analogy of the american apache wars to describe the violent asymmetry of power that was played out in the cafona war (2007: 302-3). he underscores, furthermore, the manner in which the exterminatory violence visited upon the inhabitants of the south was viewed, in contemporary accounts, as coextensive with other colonial precedents: pietro calà d’ulloa, counsellor of the supreme court of naples … tried to solicit european public opinion by glossing a long catalogue of northern abuses in terms of past and contemporary colonial practices: ‘did not the english do the same things in india, the french in algeria, did not the spanish act with the same violent dexterity against the barbaric natives in mexico and peru?’ this invocation of past colonial practices was not in fact a novelty. already in his parliamentary speech of 20 september 1861, the member of parliament marzio proto, duke of maddaloni, raised a vibrant and unexpected protest against the policy of extermination, arguing that the ‘government of piedmont wants to treat the southern provinces as cortes or pizzaro did in peru and in mexico … as the english did in bengal.’ but the british model of colonial relations was not only invoked in order to stigmatise the arbitrary extension of force over the southern provinces of italy. precisely in turin, in 1862, an anonymous commentator had suggested that the best way to deal with the rebellious southerners was offered by the example of the british colonial troops who, in the great insurrection of 1856, indiscriminately shot down the indigenous sepoys in their thousands. (2007: 294-95) luciano salera, in turn, documents the ‘“holding” and “concentration” camps that interned the dissolved regio esercito napolitano [the neapolitan kingdom’s official army], the “lager” sabaudi of genoa and allessandria, and of fenestrelle and san maurizio; these all bring to conclusion the trilogy of massacres perpetrated by the piedmontese’ (2006: 32; see also di fiore 2008: 176-78; izzio 1999). in this violent period, the process of italian unification emerges as ‘a colonial campaign masquerading under pseudo-ideals of liberty, unity and so on … that culminated in the perverse strategies of [northern] contempt, humiliation, and the moral and material lynching of the vanquished side of this war’ (salera 2006: 31). the pica law formally ‘legalised the state of exception’ that saw the suspension of southerners’ civil and legal rights, and the execution of any southerner found to have ‘insulted’ the italian flag (martucci 2007: 337, 324). in attempting to calculate the number of southern deaths—estimated to be up to 70,000—that resulted from this civil war, martucci draws attention to italian, and, i would add, anglophone, historiography’s failure to contest what di fiore calls ‘la sacrilità del risorgimento’ (2008: 14), thereby reproducing a resounding silence on this matter through a cultural politics of discursive self-censorship and minoritisation: portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 5 pugliese la guerra cafona when historians of proven intellectual honesty and rigour, such as franco molfese, relegate the number of [southern] dead to appendices or footnotes dispatched to the bottom of a huge tome, this choice is interpreted as an indice of great scholarly prudence, when in fact it must be seen as an evasive tactic deployed so as not be accused of the embarrassing accusation of lesa patria (‘lesser motherland’). so, if the indubitable honesty of molfese does not push auto-censorship to the edges of conscious omission, then only the diligent patience of a reader habituated to the tedious practice of scrutinising microscopic notes at the end of a book will fend off the possibility of dispatching these facts to the frontiers of oblivion. (martucci 2007: 312) given these discursive historiographical and editorial tactics—deployed to avoid the charge of lesa patria and played out in an even more pronounced manner in the glaring censorship of these massacres in the numerous italian museums dedicated to romantic and mythologised accounts of the risorgimento—sandro mezzadra argues that contemporary italy has witnessed a resurgent ‘new nationalism’ in which the sense of ‘national belonging’ has been promoted as a ‘fundamental public value’ (2007: 13). as mezzadra underscores, this ‘new nationalism’ must be seen, once it is positioned with the matrix of transnational market forces and globalisation, as simultaneously underpinned by racist forces of exclusion, segregation and boundary marking—issues that i discuss in more detail below. in the closing pages of the ‘cafona’ war, scarpino emphasises that the dead of that war ‘still weigh upon us,’ and that the colonial violence inflicted upon the south has generated a lingering sense of ‘interior estrangement’ that has positioned and marked southerners as in italy, but not of italy (2005: 161). ‘from that tragic decade of the mala unità [pathological unity],’ concludes scarpino, ‘our contemporary times have been inflected by misunderstandings and poisons from which we are still attempting to liberate ourselves’ (2005: 163). the ‘poison’ to which scarpino refers includes the continuing internal racism that persists in the political, economic and cultural othering of the south by the north. ‘as if the conquest, the economic exploitation [of the south] and the imposition of a foreign cultural model were not enough,’ writes gabriele marzocco, ‘we [southerners] have had to put up with the contempt, the racism…and the allegations that we are the “assisted,” indolent bludgers’ (quoted in salera 2006: 24). reading scarpino’s book as a southerner travelling through the south, i was struck by the powerful ways in which his historical mapping of southern insurgency against the violence of enforced unification on exclusively northern terms, when applied to the contemporary geopolitical context of the south, effectively shed light on an ongoing portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 6 pugliese la guerra cafona history of ‘interior estrangement’ on the part of southerners in relation to the contemporary italian nation-state. soon after the unification of italy, the racialised ‘questione meridionale’ (southern question) was quickly formulated by the north in order to account for the ‘backward’ and ‘uncivilised’ status of the south, thus serving to justify violent forms of colonial interventions. as marzocco argues, the questione meridionale was ‘nothing other than an excuse for the subordination, cultural, in the first instance, and then economic and political, of the south by the north; in the course of the twentieth century, nothing much changed; in fact, at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, the divide between north and south continues to become ever more marked’ (2006: 24; see also galasso 2005). in his critical reframing of the unification of italy in terms of a bloody and internal colonial war, marzocco quotes the historian petrangelo buttafuoco, who argues: the conquest of the south is the bloodiest chapter of [internal] italian history and simultaneously the most ignored …. in this unpublished and terrible history, constituted by atrocities and bloodshed, the south is nothing more than a forgotten victim, an inert mummy in the closet of others’ fortunes. behind every fortune there is always a crime; behind the triumph of italian ideology, there is only the conquest of the south (2006: 25) note my qualification with the adjective ‘internal’ of buttafuoco’s claim that the conquest of the south is ‘the bloodiest chapter of italian history.’ italy’s external colonial wars of imperial expansion and conquest—that saw the occupation of somalia (1891), abyssinia (1887-1941), libya (1911-1932) and ethiopia (1935-36)—unleashed forces of violence that resulted in hundreds of thousands of north african deaths (del boca 2002, 2005, 2007). following angelo del boca’s landmark decolonising work, i have argued elsewhere that this italian colonial history has only recently begun to be critically analysed; it still has not been acknowledged in any profound way in the italian nation’s historical or cultural corpus (pugliese 2007b; ben-ghiat and fuller 2005; andall and duncan 2005). in what follows, i read the graffitying of a monument in the southern city of naples to italy’s national poet, dante alighieri (a monument dedicated in the late nineteenth century in order officially to mark and celebrate italian unification), in relation to the historical burdens of insurrectionist brigandage that scarpino maps in his the ‘cafona’ war. in resignifying the graffitying of a nationalist monument as a surviving form of portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 7 pugliese la guerra cafona anti-nationalist brigandage, i want to mark ongoing southern contestations of italian unification and hegemonic national identity in a contemporary cultural context. read as such, these tactics of contemporary politico-cultural brigandage belie the notion that the south is ‘nothing more than a forgotten victim, an inert mummy in the closet of others’ fortunes’ (buttafuoco quoted in marzocco 2006: 25). on the contrary, situated within the historical genealogy of contestatory acts of brigandage, the defacing and spectacular resignification of a statute of italy’s iconic nationalist poet evidences a vibrant southern culture connected both to its insurrectionist past and to contemporary transnational counter-hegemonic cultural movements, such as african american hip hop culture. in this light, then, i situate southern graffiti and rap in a black mediterranean-atlantic. provisional street justice: southern graffiti as contemporary cafone cultural practice in his analysis of the politics of urban graffiti, crimes of style, jeff ferrell refuses to separate the aesthetic aspects of graffiti from its political significations. ‘graffiti,’ he argues, ‘resists not only authority, but the aesthetics of authority as well’ (2001: 176). by politicising the aesthetics of authority, ferrell brings into focus the political dimensions that drive the ongoing criminalisation of graffiti practice: ‘graffiti writing breaks the hegemonic hold of corporate/government style over the urban environment and the situations of daily life. as a form of aesthetic sabotage, it interrupts the pleasant, efficient uniformity of “planned” urban space and predictable urban living’ (2001: 176). ferrell elaborates on the political significance of graffiti by pursuing its ramifications in terms of a crime of style: ‘graffiti writing thus constitutes a sort of anarchist resistance to cultural domination, a streetwise counterpoint to the increasing authority of corporate advertisers and city governments over the environment of daily life’ (2001: 176). i want to transpose ferrell’s anarchico-political reading of graffiti practice to a graffitied square in the urban centre of naples in order to flesh out the politico-cultural valency of his thesis. via toledo is naples’ grand promenade. every afternoon the street is transformed into a bustling and dynamic space of social exchange, as throngs of people of all ages parade up and down its length. when walking up via toledo, a large semi-circular piazza suddenly opens up. a concave curve of buildings displaying the characteristic colours of naples—napoli red and piperno grey—enframes the piazza. in the middle of this portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 8 pugliese la guerra cafona piazza stands a white marble statue of the italian national poet, dante (figure 1). figure 1: piazza dante, napoli.2 situated on a large white marble base, the poet raises a magisterial hand above the crowd and, in keeping with all traditional representations of dante, his face is marked by a severe scowl (figure 2). this poet of exile could not have been given a more damning space in the entire italian peninsula. the iconic white figure, symbolising the purity of the italian/tuscan tongue, is here permanently dispatched to the miscegenated african-oriental nether regions of the italian nation-state. swirling up from the very base of the statue is a babel of languages that defies at every turn doctrinal impositions of cultural purity and linguistic 2 all photographs of piazza dante, napoli, are by the author. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 9 pugliese la guerra cafona monoglossia. the neapolitans have desecrated both the poet’s call for a pure italian language and the state’s imposition of a hegemonic monolingualism, as embodied and petrified by the white stone figure. palimpsests of languages, ciphers and tags are graffitied onto the statue’s base, encroaching up to the very toes of the poet (figure 3). figure 2: statue of dante, piazza dante, napoli. in contradistinction to the petrified stiffness of dante, a vertiginous polyglossia spirals up towards this icon of the nation-state’s doctrine of linguistic purity and univocality. such unbridled polyglossia effectively mocks the poet’s own strategy of celebrating, in his de vulgaria eloquio (c. 1307), all of the peninsula’s various ‘dialects’ as having something to contribute to the ‘italian language.’ after 1860, dante’s ecumenical gesture is effectively exposed as a mere rhetorical ploy, for under the colonial regime of portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 10 pugliese la guerra cafona figure 3: the base of the dante monument, piazza dante, napoli. figure 4: plaque of the dante monument: ‘all’ unità d’italia raffigurata in dante alighieri’ (to the unity of italy configured in dante alighieri), piazza dante, napoli. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 11 pugliese la guerra cafona unification tuscan becomes the state language, and all other regional languages— including greek, catalan, albanian, romany and occitanic—and ‘dialects’ are effectively outlawed (see lepschy, lepschy and voghera 1996: 72-73). this nationstate monument enunciates as much in the cartouche, which didactically declares the political significance of this northerner situated in this southern piazza: ‘all’ unità d’italia raffigurata in dante alighieri’ (to the unity of italy configured in dante alighieri) (figure 4). up against this monumentalising and hegemonically monolinguistic gesture, the graffiti that inscribes dante’s statue must be read as an exemplary instance of linguistic heteroglossia, understood in the bakhtinian sense of contestatory language use, which symbolically and literally ‘disses’ or disrespects dante’s nationalist status and monologic authority through the ‘uninterrupted processes of [linguistic] decentralization figure 5: the ‘dissed’ dante monument, piazza dante, napoli. and disunification’ (bakhtin 1987: 272) (figure 5). the palimpsests of graffiti tags that inscribe the monument are graphic testimony to a ‘social and historical heteroglossia’ portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 12 pugliese la guerra cafona driven by ‘centrifugal, stratifying forces’ that contest and contradict the ‘cultural, national and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world [of] the higher official socio-ideological levels’ of the unified nation-state (bakhtin 1987: 273). genealogically connected to their african american cultural roots, the multicoloured, multilingual tags marking this white monument metaphorise an other coloured italy that belies the caucacentric fantasies of a pure white/european nation. in his incisive analysis of subcultural practices, dick hebdige notes how subcultural practices are represented by the dominant order as ‘noise’ that generates disorder and chaos, in contradistinction to ‘sound,’ that reproduces the order and discipline of the dominant culture (1987: 90). rather than viewing the graffiti in piazza dante in terms of ‘noise’ as opposed to ‘sound,’ i argue that the graffiti exemplifies its own type of ‘sound,’ which only makes sense when it is historically and geopolitically situated. public space in piazza dante is mobilised by the nation-state through the use of this iconic statue, in order spatially and monumentally to establish its hegemonic coordinates of power. located within the axis of hegemonic-nationalist knowledge/power, the graffiti on this monument can be seen as a form of politicocultural dissent that recalls the historical forms of southern brigandage as insurgent political practice, as mapped by scarpino, de jaco and salera map in their critical analyses of the southern cafone/barbarians. the graffiti inscribing this nationalist monument reclaims public space by resignifying the dominant understanding of the term ‘civic.’ as has been lamented in much critical literature addressing the ‘southern question,’ the south is seen to lack civic spirit and a sense of public morality (banfield 1958; putman 1993; galasso 2005, 34). i would argue, however, that this graffitied statue of dante instantiates a form of civic culture that remains illegible for dominant culture, signifying only vandalistic ‘noise.’ this graffiti represents a form of grassroots civic culture that reorients the caucacentric, monoglossic nation-state space into a place that is coextensive with southern community histories, politics and cultural practices (figure 6).3 3 space precludes me from discussing in detail the spectacular manner in which the statue of garibaldi in the piazza garibaldi, napoli, has been graffitied in the same manner as the statue of dante. this other italian nationalist ‘hero’ of unification has been brilliantly resignified by neapolitans. his statue now bears, amongst other things, a huge anarchist circle-a and five-pointed anarchist stars. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 13 pugliese la guerra cafona figure 6: piazza dante’s graffiti resignifying hegemonic concepts of the civic. the graffitied piazza dante, read in a hegemonic political frame, emerges as another example of the legendary uncivic and dirty nature of the south, captured in the northern slogan: ‘sudicio-sud’ (filthy-south). the neapolitan hip hop group, posse 99, sardonically articulates this northern view of unsanitary southerners in their song ‘napoli’: na-na-nana napoli città dimenticata sfruttata abbandonata da tutti disprezzata ma a agnelli c’è piaciuto ‘o lavoro e’ l’emigrato pacche scassate famiglie disgregate e a torino milano napulitano terrone e ignorante magnate ‘o sapone lavate cu’l idrante na-na-na-na naples forgotten city exploited abandoned by everyone scorned but liked by agnelli to work the migrant, with shabby cardboard suitcases families broken up and off to turin milan ignorant neapolitan terrone eat your soap and wash yourself with the fire hydrant scorned by northerners as a filthy city, naples is only appreciated by the likes of portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 14 pugliese la guerra cafona corporate bosses such as agnelli, owner of the giant car manufacturing company fiat, who draw on the south for cheap manual labour. the legendary ignorance and dirt of the terrone (a northern racist slur, largely deployed in the 1950s and 1960s, a period of mass southern migration to northern industrial cities, which targets southerners as ‘people of dirt, the dirt between one’s feet’) is satirised by posse 99 in the northerner’s contemptuous order that southerners, ignorant of basic sanitary practices, eat soap and wash themselves with fire hydrants. read within the contestatory history of the south, the graffitying of the statue in piazza dante transmutes the monolingual and culturally and racially sanitised space of the white nation-state into a community place hosting political rallies and protests, dance parties, buskers and activist performances. ‘clean buildings, and the appreciation of them,’ ferrell argues, ‘are as much a part of authority and control as police patrols and prisons; and the markings of graffiti writers are as much a threat to this as are protest marches or rent strikes … graffiti writing is an inherently political act, a crime of style entangled with the politics of authority and resistance’ (1996: 184). through the graffitied resignification of the monument to italian unification in piazza dante, a different modality of the civic is enacted that remains unintelligible within dominant politico-cultural frames. the graffiti challenges both the pristine caucentricity that regards italians-as-white and the raciological labour required to construct a white nation predicated on a subjugated and othered black-orientalised south (pugliese 2002a, 2002b, 2007b, 2007c; guglielmo and salerno 2003). the multicoloured and multilingual tags inscribing this white nationalist monument signify in terms of so many celebratory metonyms for the polyglot ethnicities and cultures that, in fact, constitute the south. through this graffiti, the ethnically, culturally and linguistically heterogeneous lived civic realities of the south are graphically marked and enunciated in public space. the neapolitan group spaccanapoli, who in their music draw upon the crosscultural african and arab roots of much music from the south, articulate the politico-cultural significance of piazza dante in their eponymous song: piazza dante e balla, e balla, e balla ca chi fatica nun sa juca a palla! e canta, e canta, e canta ca chi è mariuolo … campa e s’avanta … portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 15 pugliese la guerra cafona ministre, prievete e magistratura songhe po popolo na jettaturra. a vita è breve, ca tutto passa, ma sul’è strunze pavane e ttasse! piazza dante and dance, and dance, and dance ‘cause those who work can’t play ball! and sing, and sing, and sing ‘cause those who are thieves … thrive and boast … ministers, priests and magistrates are a curse for the people. life is brief, and everything passes, but only turds pay taxes! in spaccanapoli’s ‘piazza dante,’ the political, ecclesiastical and juridical power of the italian nation-state, embodied metonymically by ‘ministers, priests and magistrates,’ is resituated in southern historical terms as a ‘curse for the people.’ this curse refers historically to the punishing taxation system imposed on the south by the northern-led nationalist government soon after unification. the taxation regime enabled the legalised sacking of the south. it effectively stripped the south of the significant financial reserves it held prior to unification and consequently disabled its economic prospects (salera 2006: 477-86). indeed, the expropriated monetary reserves that flowed into northern coffers were used to finance the industrialisation of the north (di fiore 2008: 186-87). the graffitying of piazza dante exemplifies what michel de certeau eloquently terms the ‘art of the “weak” against the “strong”’ (1988: xix). in his reevaluation of the practices of everyday life, de certeau differentiates between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics.’ strategies, he argues, are deployed by those in positions of power and privilege; they occupy ‘proper’ sites and are empowered by the resources of authorising institutions such as the government and law. in contradistinction, tactics are deployed by subjects who ‘cannot count on a “proper” (a spatial or institutional localization) … the place of the tactic belongs to the other’ (1988: xix). disenfranchised in financial and political terms, tactics can only stage the provisional ‘victories of the “weak” over the “strong”’ (1988: xix). because they have no proper institutional base or authority, tactics can only ever secure fleeting victories. they temporarily subvert, but cannot overturn, dominant relations of power. the graffiti that inscribes piazza dante powerfully embodies de certeau’s contestatory concept of the tactic: it is the art of the politically and economically disenfranchised against the institutional power of the nation-state. viewed portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 16 pugliese la guerra cafona in de certeau’s terms as the ‘arts of operating’ in the face of institutional power, the graffiti comprises a fragile, multilingual and graphic network of ‘antidiscipline’ (1988: xv) that, in contemporary form, makes reference to the south’s history of insurrectionist and antidisciplinary brigandage (figure 7). as a form of antidiscipline, this graffiti can also be read as an ‘antilanguage’ that contests institutionally-sanctioned understandings of civic and cultural practice. figure 7: the polyglossia that inscribes the dante monument. the visual and kinesiological resignification and reclamation of piazza dante by various communities, including graffitists, activists, buskers and performers exemplifies what ferrell brilliantly calls ‘provisional street justice’ (2001: 38). this refers to the tactical, and thus provisional, reclamation by communities of urban space through cultural practices such as graffiti, dance parties or aural and kinesiological occupation of public spaces not officially designated for entertainment purposes. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 17 pugliese la guerra cafona figure 8: the graffiti in piazza dante as provisional street justice. the provisional street justice enacted in piazza dante powerfully evokes the anarchic and insurrectionist practices of southern brigandage, which, as politico-cultural practices of antidiscipline, were scattered, transitory and always performed on the roads and streets of the south. the dance parties, protests and activist performances staged in this culturally reclaimed public square bear testimony to the fleeting victories of communities that have no ‘proper’ institutional base. the exhortation by spaccanapoli to ‘dance, dance, dance’ and ‘sing, sing, sing’ in piazza dante because ‘life is brief, and everything passes,’ encapsulates the ephemeral nature of the politico-cultural tactics performed in the square. black mediterranean-atlantic: transnational flows and transcultural crossings the african american development of hip hop in the usa in the early 1970s saw the flourishing of three interrelated cultural forms: graffiti, break dancing and rap (toop 2002). i mark the particular interrelation between african american graffiti practice and rap in order to delineate the transposition of hip hop, ‘that most diasporic of cultural forms’ (gilroy 1993: 34), to the southern italian context. the late 1980s and early 1990s saw the enthusiastic uptake by southern musicians of african american hip hop (sciorra 2007). drawing upon the politically contestatory dimensions of the genre (kitwana 2002), southern musicians began to deploy rap in order to critique the racist history of portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 18 pugliese la guerra cafona post-unification italy (mitchell 1996, 2000; dawson and palumbo 2005; sciorra 2007). the use of local dialects and regional vernaculars in southern rap underscores the political and heteroglossic contestation of nationalist monolinguism and monologia. it signifies, in tony mitchell’s analysis of regional vernaculars in southern rap, ‘an act of defiance’ (2000: 49). through the interlacing of african american rap with the folk music traditions of the south, southern rap articulates transoceanic connections between the black atlantic and the black mediterranean. southern rap exemplifies, in paul gilroy’s terms, the politicocultural ability to ‘transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity’ (1993: 19). musically, the folk traditions of the south are inscribed with the legacies of north african, middle eastern and arab crosscultural exchanges. in other words, southern rap confirms both a transatlantic connection with african american culture and a transmediterranean reconnection with african and arab culture. the nuova compagnia di canto popolare, nour eddine and phaleg, almamegretta, posse 99, the nuovi briganti and eugenio bennato embody this type of transoceanic cultural connection and reconnection. the sicilian rappers, nuovi briganti, in their ‘sono siciliano’ (i am sicilian), identify and name this black transmeditteranean-atlantic southern culture: sono siciliano nuovo brigante come te vulcano e non dimentico il passato neanche il più lontano il suono è caldo, araba la melodia secoli di storia non si possono buttare via animo forte, pieno d’orgoglio conservo le radici, questo è quello che voglio i’m sicilian new brigand like you vulcano and i don’t forget my past, not even the most distant past the sound is hot, the melody arab centuries of history cannot be thrown away strong soul, full of pride i preserve my roots, and that is what i want the nuovi briganti here acknowledge the rich arab history of sicily as culturally constitutive of the island’s identity. in opposition to the contemporary arabophobia of northern europe, the nuovi briganti embrace, reclaim and celebrate their arab roots.4 4 on the south’s contemporary reclamation of its arab history, see pugliese (2007b). portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 19 pugliese la guerra cafona similarly, eugenio bennato, in his grande sud and che il mediterraneo sia, interlaces southern vernaculars with soloists who sing in the languages of morocco, tunisia, ethiopia, mozambique and madagascar. bennato’s polyglossic intermixing of southern vernacular and arab and african linguistic and musical texts powerfully metaphorises the musical equivalent of the graffitied piazza dante. ‘all frontiers,’ sings bennato, ‘are all the same/completely antimusical.’ bennato calls for the overthrowing of fortress europe through a music that ‘doesn’t have a passport’ and that doesn’t care ‘if it’s alien or illegal’ (che il mediterraneo sia). these crosscultural flows are not only materialised through the intermixing of heterogeneous musical styles; they are evidenced in the lyrics of the songs. in their ‘fottuto terrone’ (fucked terrone), the nuovi briganti articulate the ongoing racism of northerners towards southerners and southerners’ solidarity with black africa: etichettato terrone da quell’ignorante di un razzista nordista sporco leghista convinto della sua italianità che si traduce in ottusità chiamandomi africano… chi è puro, cosa è puro il continentale? ... amico qua la mano solidale con l’uomo africano sono un fottuto terrone fiero labelled terrone by that ignorant racist dirty northern leaguist convinced of his italianness that translates into obtuseness calling me african... who is pure, what is pure the continental? ... friend give me your hand solidarity with the african i’m a proud fucked terrone in the wake of the waves of migrants from africa and the middle east who have come to italy over the last three decades searching for a livelihood, northerners have coined the neologism sottoterrone (‘sub-dirt beneath one’s feet’) to label this new non-white population. at work here is a recalibration of racial hierarchies that effectively functions to reposition targeted racialised subjects on the vertical scale governed by whiteness as the normative standard. in tandem with the entry into the italian nation of people of portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 20 pugliese la guerra cafona colour from africa, the middle east and asia, the racialised extraneity of southerners has also been somewhat recalibrated. they no longer constitute northern italy’s absolute other; rather, this position has been assigned to those non-european subjects geopolitically extraneous to the body of the nation. i say ‘extraneous’ as they have been designated by italians as extracomunitari, that is, as people from outside the racially circumscribed national ‘community.’ as i have discussed elsewhere, a similar phenomenon of racial recalibration of southerners occurred in the contemporary australian context soon after the elimination of the exclusionary white australia policy in the early 1970s and the entry into the country of migrants from asia, the middle east and africa. the presence of these noneuropean immigrants moved southern europeans (such as italians and greeks) up the white supremacist racial hierarchy toward what i term ‘proximate whiteness’ (pugliese 2007a: 30). proximate whiteness refers to the fact that although many southern europeans fail, in phenotypical terms, to ‘look’ white, the presence of non-european immigrants allows them to be brought, politically and bureaucratically, into the proximate fold of whiteness. in ‘fottuto terrone,’ the nuovi briganti mark northern italy’s anti-southern history whilst simultaneously interrogating fortress europe’s contemporary concern to preserve its white ‘racial purity.’ in response to these ongoing racialised factors, the nuovi briganti establish lines of solidarity with africa that cut across racist borders and interdictions. in marking these forms of southern solidarity with africa, i do not wish to suggest that they are homogenously representative of the south. on the contrary, again as i have argued elsewhere, the south is marked by its own internal history of racism, racial hierarchies and violent exclusions (pugliese 2007b). perhaps nothing more graphically exemplifies this than the damning report released in 2007 by medici senza frontiere, the italian branch of médicins sans frontières, called una stagione all’inferno (a season in hell) (2007). based on field research conducted between june and november 2007, the report examines the exploitative, unsanitary and, in some cases, life-threatening conditions endured by seasonal workers from the global south (africa, the middle east and south-east asia) who live and work in the seasonally-oriented agricultural sectors of italy’s south. in their introduction, the authors of the report draw attention to the manner in which: portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 21 pugliese la guerra cafona the national and local institutions seal their eyes, ears and mouths in the face of the massive exploitation of foreigner workers who labour in the agricultural sectors of the south, precisely because they are seen as crucial to the sustainability of the local economies. the use of forced labour at minimal costs, black market recruitment of labour, the negation of basic and decent living conditions, the lack of access to medical care—all these things are well known and tolerated. the mayors, the state bodies, the inspectors of work conditions, the associations devoted to worker protection, the ministers: all know what is going on and all remain silent. (2007: 2) this report challenges any facile view of an undifferentiated south acting in solidarity with immigrants of the global south. rather, it brings into sharp focus the violent racialised relations of geopolitical and economic power that cut across the italian peninsula and its islands. those relations inscribe and reproduce the most destructive effects of globalisation—understood, in this context, as the geo-politico-economic process predicated on reproducing violently asymmetrical relations of power founded, in part, on racialised systems of discrimination, exclusion and exploitation. i opened this essay by situating the insurgent practices of southerners during the war of italian unification in the context of the cafona war. as a result of the violent imposition of northern colonial rule on the south during the period of italian unification, brigandage emerged as a tactical contestation of the north’s annexation and consequent expropriation of the south. in naming themselves the ‘new brigands,’ the nuovi briganti reflexively assume ownership of the south’s use of brigandage as a modality of contestatory politico-cultural practice. in their ‘unificazione = falsificazione’ (unification = falsification), they explicitly situate their politico-cultural interventions within this violent genealogy: tre kilometri di mare ci separano dall’italia ma è maggiore la distanza per la nostra storia 1861 è l’unificazione io mi domando: realtà o finzione? garibaldi schiavo del potere prima sobilla e poi fa massacre grandi masse di siciliani ribellati. vittorio emanuele li ha condannati. via borboni nuovi padroni ci son nuove tasse ma tutto è lo stesso. l’acqua scarseggia, dura è la terra poco mangiare è peggio che in guerra. anafalbetismo nella folla tutti contro tutti, è perso chi molla e intanto si lavora su al settentrione strade, ferrovie, industrializione three kilometres of sea separate us from italy but the distance is greater for our history 1861 is the unification portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 22 pugliese la guerra cafona but i ask: reality or fiction? garibaldi slave to power at first he incites and then he massacres great masses of rebellious sicilians. vittorio emanuele condemned them. out with the bourbons and in with the new bosses there are new taxes but everything else remains the same. water shortages, hard is the earth little to eat it is worse than in times of war. illiteracy amongst the crowd everyone against everyone, who submits is lost and in the meantime one goes to work up in the north roads, railways, industrialisation by situating themselves within a southern genealogy of anti-nationalist brigandage, the nuovi briganti refuse to romanticise contemporary southern transmutations of brigandage into the deadly forms of the mafia, ‘ndgrangheta and camorra. in the closing lines of ‘unification = falsification’ they condemn these contemporary forms of brigandage as yet another form of organised violence that is destroying the south: 1.9.9.2. cosa è cambiato? ora il brigantaggio è organizato in questa brutta, sporca situazione spina nel fianco della nazione. la mafia ha più potere ogni giorno che passa e dove passa lei la terra diventa rossa di sangue, la mia terra che piange ma nessuno la sente 1.9.9.2 what has changed? now the brigandage is organised in this ugly, dirty situation thorn in the side of the nation. the mafia gains more power with each day that passes and where it passes the earth becomes red with blood, my country [sicily] cries but no one listens. no one has more graphically or movingly captured the exorbitant violence visited upon southerners by the mafia than the sicilian photographer letizia battaglia. in a series of unflinching photographs, battaglia (2006) has documented the unvarnished, violent and brutalising reality of life under the regime of organised crime, a regime that the nuovi briganti also reject. ‘the white race has to defend itself’: blackening italy and the feral beauty of provisional street justice since the 1970s, italy has been transformed from a country that exported immigrants en masse to a place marked as a key migrant destination for people from the global south portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 23 pugliese la guerra cafona (turco 2006; mezzadra 2007). responding to the increasing flows of non-european migrants, particularly from north africa and the middle east, xenophobic media reports and articles have drawn attention to the threat posed by these immigrants to italian civic culture and national identity. writing in one of italy’s leading newspapers, la stampa, the sociologist luciano gallino vigorously condemns the increasing number of migrants entering the nation and the lack of legislative controls to screen and reduce this flow. gallino focuses in particular on what he perceives to be the negative effects of noneuropean (that is, non-white) migrants on italian culture: in many italian cities the signs are already manifest of a worrying degradation of the social fabric and of the urban spaces that is now without parallel in any other nation within the european community. whether or not you’d like to hear this, this is connected in many ways to the uncontrolled flow of migrants …. the signs of their uncontrolled arrival are entire streets transformed into ugly copies of the suk of marrakech, like via indipendenza in bologna; entire parks that have fallen into the hands of drug-dealing migrants, like the valentino in turin; squares and streets and public places in which, at certain hours, a non-immigrant fears to set foot, such as the surrounds of stazione termini in rome. (quoted in einaudi 2007: 147) gallino concludes his call for urgent legislative measures of immigration control by arguing that the increasing incursion of non-european migrants poses a ‘threat of the greatest order.’ gallino’s public call soon became a chorus that culminated, in september 2002, in the passing of the draconian anti-immigration bossi-fini law that mandates that foreigners secure a contract for employment in italy before they are granted a residency permit. in order to obtain official documents, immigrants have to agree to be fingerprinted, suggesting that the state regards all immigrants as potential criminals …. the rights of legal immigrants, who are now tied to their employers by threat of deportation should they lose their jobs, are also dramatically curtailed by this law. (dawson and palumbo 2005: 166) as ashley dawson and patrizia palumbo argue, this anti-immigrant legislation is structurally contradicted by a growing presence of undocumented immigrant labour: it is in the interest of the capitalist economy in general to maintain high levels of immigrant illegality and the draconian policing measures that ensure such illegality. for if immigrants are illegal, they can only accept ‘black’ work, which, of course, is by definition poorly paid. so-called clandestine immigrants therefore constitute a reserve army of superlative ‘flexible’ subjects, a juridically nonexistent labor force with no recourse to any of the legal protections or forms of collective bargaining that citizenship guarantees. (2005: 175) noting the exploitative juridico-economic double-logic that dawson and palumbo map, which powerfully impacts on the lives of undocumented immigrants, i want to focus on perhaps the most vulnerable and ‘flexible’ of subjects in this group: the itinerant hawkers from the global south who toil in the streets and squares of italy’s metropolitan cities. i discuss this group of workers in relation to two intersecting portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 24 pugliese la guerra cafona racialised axes, politico-economic and cultural, which bring into contemporary perspective many of the key issues regarding the south raised in this essay. these itinerant hawkers are collectively identified by italians as vu cumprà or marocchini. vu cumprà translates into the question ‘do you want to buy?’ itinerant hawkers address this question to prospective customers as they carry their loads of goods, such as sunglasses, bottles of mineral water, umbrellas, scarves and souvenirs. vu cumprà is marked by the ‘corrupted’ use of italian (vuoi comprare?), marking the speaker’s outsider status and her or his purportedly congenital inability to master a european language. as such, vu cumprà is used by italians as a racist slur. most of these itinerant workers come from africa, notably libya, morocco, algeria, tunisia, sudan, egypt, somalia, cape verde, eritrea and mauritius. given those origins, marocchini (morrocans) has thus become a racist generic that conveniently erases ethnic difference by bringing together a diverse group of people under the homogenising imprimatur of a sign that signifies, negatively, ‘blackness’ and ‘african.’ in keeping with the historical contingency and mobility of racist descriptors, vu cumprà has been largely replaced in the italian vernacular by marocchini. furthermore, the goods and services offered by these itinerant workers are categorised by italian economists and sociologists into the genres of ‘parasitical services’ and ‘just in time.’ ‘parasitical services’ refers to jobs not requested by the customer, such as the washing of windscreens at intersections or the opening of doors, and ‘just in time’ refers to the appearance of these itinerant workers in front of hotel doors or tourist sites with umbrellas, for example, if it suddenly starts raining (einaudi 2007: 92). in his groundbreaking analysis of the colonial and imperial underpinnings of liberalism as a foundational western political practice, uday mehta demonstrates how western liberal theorists in the nineteenth century ‘cast their gaze’ on those non-western subjects who appeared ‘unfamiliar’ or ‘strange,’ and designated ‘those life forms as provisional’ (1999: 191). by viewing non-western lives as provisional—that is, ‘incomplete, static, backward’—such lives were violently inserted by european powers into imperial teleologies that would ensure their assimilation into western norms: ‘that judgement of other peoples’ experiences as provisional—and the interventions in their lives that it permits—is the conceptual and normative core of the liberal justification of the empire’ (mehta 1999: 191). incomplete, static, backward—such terms framed the south as portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 25 pugliese la guerra cafona italy’s non-european other and justified the colonial project of unification. southern lives, languages and cultural practices were viewed as merely provisional in relation to the transformative teleology of northern-imposed unification. on the larger, extranational geopolitical stage, this viewpoint also enabled seventy years of italian colonial intervention, expansion, occupation and rule in north africa (del boca 2002, 2005, 2007). in the current context, the terms marocchini, vu cumprà, and just in time unequivocally position these itinerant workers in contemporary western-liberal nation-states such as italy as having wholly contingent and provisional lives. the situation of such workers, however, is more drastic than that experienced by southerners. after unification, southern italians were at least inserted into an eschatological narrative of teleological progress and future transformation as prospective pseudo-italian citizens. the itinerant workers of the global south, however, are positioned as permanent interlopers, extracomunitari, who can only occupy a provisional status that holds no prospect for the legal uptake of citizenship and its attendant rights and privileges. the provisional status of itinerant workers from the global south is most acutely demonstrated by the fact that, as economically and politically disenfranchised subjects, they are forced to find shelter and to construct makeshift homes in the cemeteries on the outskirts of italy’s metropolitan cities (einaudi 2007: 133). inhabiting empty burial vaults, these unauthorised workers literally embody the haunting category of the ‘living dead.’ as mezzadra argues, what is instantiated here are racist formations predicated on the ‘hierarchical ordering of different living bodies within a given territory, to the point of legitimating true and proper forms of segregation’ (2007: 26). what possibilities of agency are available in the face of legislative exclusion and its physically and symbolically violent effects? one answer is provisional forms of street justice. as i have argued elsewhere, the migrant flows from the global south to the italian peninsula are staging the returns of the south’s souths (pugliese 2007b). african and middle eastern returns, in which complex historico-cultural lines between the south and its mediterranean neighbours are re-connected and re-articulated, cannot be countenanced by the northern league and its racial fantasy of a pure white nation. for example, ermino boso, a member of parliament for the white supremacist northern league, advocates ‘the use of excessive force against immigrants. he “looks to defend portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 26 pugliese la guerra cafona white people from blacks,” because, “today, everyone is against the whites. the white race has to defend itself, because white faces are becoming extinct”’ (quoted in gold 2003: 85). the contemporary northern italian fear that whites are at risk of being overthrown by people of colour evokes a racist/eugenicist history that stretches back to cesare lombroso in the nineteenth century. in his l’uomo bianco e l’uomo di colore [1871] (the white man and the coloured man), lombroso raises the question as to ‘whether we whites, who proudly stand at the summit of civilisation, will one day bow our foreheads before the protruding lips of the negro and the yellow and earthy face of the mongol’ (quoted in pugliese 2002: 156). the paranoiac sense of white people under siege and facing the possibility of extinction due to the increasing presence in the italian peninsula of people of colour is graphically captured in one of the 2008 election posters of the northern league (see figure 9). figure 9. lega nord 2008 election poster, available at http://leganord.org/elezioni2008/politiche/manifesti_elletorali/indiano%2riserve%20immigrazione%0eltt 08.gif. depicting the head of a traditional native american indian, the text of the poster states: ‘they have suffered immigration. they now live in reserves!’ the colonial disavowals and ironies in this poster are multiple. arrogating the subalternised position of native americans who have suffered centuries of colonial expropriation, attempted genocide portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 27 http://leganord.org/elezioni2008/politiche/manifesti_elletorali/indiano%252riserve%20immigrazione%250eltt08.gif http://leganord.org/elezioni2008/politiche/manifesti_elletorali/indiano%252riserve%20immigrazione%250eltt08.gif pugliese la guerra cafona and displacement, the league here frames privileged northern white italians as a race that is now vulnerable to the same acts of violence experienced by native americans. here, however, the vulnerability arises because of the entry into the nation—and this, of course, is the sub-text—of immigrants of colour. in this poster, italy’s own colonial history of expropriation, attempted genocide and sequestration of indigenous african people in camps and reserves during the course of its african colonial campaigns, is resoundingly disavowed. ironically, the totemic head of a tribal native american evokes the spectre of the ‘doomed race’ theory that, in social darwinist terms, explained the ‘inevitable extinction’ of many indigenous peoples before the superior white race. as the poster foments fear and reveals an unresolved post-colonial anxiety about the inhabitants of italy’s former colonies now coming home to roost, it implies the frightening possibility that the former colonial slave will now usurp the position of the colonial master. yet another level of political irony is inherent in the northern league election poster. while its xenophobic text generates the fear that white italians are at risk of becoming a subalternised minority that will be placed in camps and reserves, the violent reality of what is occurring in the italian peninsula and its islands is effectively effaced. the poster occludes the fact that undocumented immigrants are being rounded up and incarcerated in italy’s centri di permanenza temporanea or cpts (centres of temporary permanency), legislated into existence under the infamous turco-napolitano act of 1998. cpts were initially established as centres in which refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants could be detained whilst they underwent official checks with regard to their identities. however, because these centres were given powers to detain their captive subjects, they were necessarily modelled on prisons (einaudi 2007: 275). the european union’s commission for civil liberty and justice report on italy’s cpts has condemned the centres for violating basic human rights at virtually every level and has called for their closure (la repubblica.it 2008; pugliese forthcoming). the racist anti-immigrant politics represented in this northern league election poster are thus not the mere preserve of extremist right-wing italian political parties. soon after his 2008 election victory, prime minister silvio berlusconi condemned undocumented immigrants in italy as an ‘army of evil,’ and vowed he would ‘step up neighbourhood police, who can be an army of good, placing themselves between the italian people and the army of evil’ (‘berlusconi’ 2008: 9). reproducing president bush’s language of the portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 28 pugliese la guerra cafona ‘axis of evil’ and the ‘war on terror,’ berlusconi here strategically reframes undocumented immigrants as terrorists who have declared war on the italian people, thereby at once criminalising and militarising this disenfranchised group of people who continue to perform dangerous and unsanitary of jobs, even as they contribute to the prosperity of the italian economy. beginning with the raciological and racist theories of the meridionalisti in the nineteenth century, a preoccupation with whiteness has inflected italian national identity at multiple levels,. it has shaped both internal and foreign policy, including the imperial project of colonial annexation of north african states and the racialised construction of diasporic subjectivities and cultural practices (pugliese 2002a, 2002b, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c). at the everyday level of life on italy’s streets, in cities such as seveso and treviso, northern league mayors have organised vigilante squads, or ronde, to police and patrol african and albanian itinerant workers and prostitutes. intertwining the exercise of law and order with racist arguments enables these workers to be defined as recidivist criminals—even though, as thomas gold points out, those laws and arguments do ‘little to condemn the (italian) men who frequent them’ as clients looking for sex and/or drugs (2003: 85). the point of the contemporary reconnections between the south and its souths that i broached above is eloquently articulated by a moroccan immigrant, majuba agig, facing racism in the city of milan: ‘we do not take more,’ she says, ‘than those who arrived twenty years ago, the meridionali/southerners. we are the brothers [and sisters] of the meridionali’ (quoted in parati 1997: 182). this point of reconnection is at stake through the increasingly draconian anti-immigrant laws being passed by the italian government. the souths of the south/the south of the north—this is the other of europe: coloured, illegal, politically and economically disenfranchised. and yet these souths are constitutive of the economic and cultural power, and white identity, of the north. the very naming of northern italy’s so-called ‘opulent periphery,’ comprising veneto, lombardy and pidemont, as the ‘white provinces’ or ‘white zones’ (terms that refer to the dominance of the christian democratic party in those provinces) is not a racially neutral nomenclature when situated in the dense racialogical history of the north. it confirms a long-standing northern anxiety to secure its whiteness/ europeanness by casting the south as its african-oriental other. the rise of the portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 29 pugliese la guerra cafona northern league in these ‘white zones’ was fuelled, amongst other things, by the perceived ‘threat to the well-being of these areas’ posed by ‘immigration, both from the south and from the third world, which, it was maintained,’ was ‘facilitating a rapid rise in criminality, was undermining the high level of social and cultural integration they had achieved and so the good order of society’ (allum and diamante 1996: 153). umberto bossi, the lega’s leader, exemplifies the complex intertwining of biological and cultural racisms in his argument that it is ‘impossible to assimilate’ these immigrants because ‘the cultural differences are too great. the difference in skin colour is detrimental to social peace. imagine if your street, your public square, was full of people of colour, you would feel no longer part of your own world’ (quoted in allum and diamante 1996: 153). the statement underscores the racist fiction that the chromatics of racial epidermis overdetermine behavioural and cultural practices: the two are melded here. anna cento bull confirms the intertwining of biological and cultural racisms by citing from a survey ‘among nearly 3,000 factory workers and union representatives employed in thirteen plants across the lombard provinces,’ which ‘revealed widespread prejudices … against both southern italian and coloured immigrants,’ including the fear that ‘southern immigrants pollute the local culture’ (1996: 179). the construction of racial difference in terms of a ‘pollutant’ and ‘contagion’ cuts across multiple axes. racial difference at once contaminates the ‘purity’ of the local culture whilst causing, in unreconstructed eugenicist terms, the ‘degeneration’ of the white race. in the face of this threat, an election slogan used in the 1990s by the league, ‘forza etna, fai il tuo dovere! (come on etna, do your duty!)’ (allum and diamanti 1996: 154), clearly enunciated a racist call for ‘ethnic cleansing.’ however, the increasing presence of noneuropean immigrants in italy has also generated a shift in tactics on the part of the league. the league’s explicit campaign against the south has, in recent times, largely subsided. in the 2008 elections, for example, that campaign was replaced by the dubious and opportunisitic moves to establish lines of solidarity with the sicilian centre-right separatist party movimento per l’autonomia (movement for [sicilian] autonomy). the league continues, nonetheless, to deploy xenophobic anti-immigrant slogans— including, in another 2008 election poster, the image of bosi brandishing a clenched fist and declaring that his constituency needs to ‘difendi il tuo futuro: fuori i clandestini’ (defend your future: out with undocumented immigrants). at the local level, these anti portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 30 pugliese la guerra cafona immigrant slogans assume more sinister dimensions when articulated by such lega mayors as giancarlo gentilini, mayor of treviso, ‘who has stated that the country should ship illegal immigrants out of the country in “lead wagons”’ and who advocated the ‘use of immigrants as targets for gun practice’ (gold 2003: 126). in the face of the biologico-cultural racism that i have been tracking in this essay, the transformation of italy’s urban squares and streets into ‘copies’ of the suk of marrakech typifies the material and cultural returns of the souths of the south. gallino’s revulsion at the cultural transmutation of italy’s streets and squares into suks can only achieve its xenophobic moralising force by effectively liquidating, for example, southern africanarab histories. only through the process of white historicide can the suk appear as an alien cultural practice within the civic spaces of the italian state, and people of colour be framed as interlopers in italy’s public spaces. in the south, in both sicily and calabria, cities such as tropea, saracena and, most famously, palermo, were renowned for their suks (jevolella 2005: 78). given that history, migrant flows from the global south enable lines of historical, cultural and economic re-connection between the south, africa and the middle east. for southerners, there is nothing either disturbing or new in naming their cities in terms of african or middle eastern equivalents. naples, for instance, has long been known as the cairo of the south (astarita 2005: 167), even though lord rosebury famously lamented that ‘naples is the only oriental city without a european quarter’ (quoted in allum and diamanti 1996: 165). many southern cities and towns celebrate their foundation by invoking the union of the native southern mata and the black grifone-hassam ibn-hammar; indeed, myth and legend provide multiple points of african and middle eastern origin (north african, berber, arab and turk). rather than causing, as the sociologist gallino laments, a ‘degradation’ of ‘social fabric and urban spaces,’ the transformation of italy’s squares and streets into african and middle eastern urban sites marks the cultural rearticulation of a civic sense that remains unintelligible within the eurocentric and caucacentric frames of northern citizens, politicians and cultural theorists. the cultural transcriptions in italian cities of african american-inspired graffiti, rap and north african suks must be seen as material manifestations of black-coded cultural tactics that reorient and resignify the sociocultural spaces and practices of an italian nation presumed to have a white identity. transcribed onto italy’s white-nationalist portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 31 pugliese la guerra cafona monuments and civic spaces, these provisional cultural practices are condemned by white-supremacist social commentators and politicians as exemplifying the degenerative ‘blackening of europe’ (raphael-hernandez 2004). this is further evidenced by prime minister berlusconi calling for more draconian anti-graffiti laws in order to curb graffiti practice, arguing that ‘graffiti is making our cities more like african instead of european cities’ (’il governo’ 2008: 10). racially coded cultural practices such as ‘graffiti’ and suks stand to exemplify, as gallino and others lament, forms of degrado urbano (urban decay). i would argue, in fact, that these racially-coded black cultural practices effectively solicit and interrogate the italian nation’s ongoing colonial amnesia and its violent disavowal of the constitutive role that transmediterranean north african and black transatlantic cultures have played in shaping the heterogeneous cultures of the peninsula and its islands. even as italy views itself as a postcolonial nation that has relegated its colonial ambitions to the past, these cultural metonyms of blackness—suks, rap and graffiti—challenge this myth through the racist anxieties and outbursts that they provoke. they thereby disclose the structural manner in which colonial relations of biopolitical power effectively organise italian social space, caucacentrically govern and delimit ‘legitimate’ cultural practices, and hierarchically mark and segregate targeted racialised bodies. as paul gilroy argues, ‘the racisms of europe’s colonial and imperial phase preceded the appearance of migrants inside the european citadel. it was racism, not diversity, that made their arrival into a problem’ (2004: xxi). as such, what remains to be examined is how these colonial and imperial racisms operate as structural a priori, regardless of the historical transmutations and reconfigurations of so-called postcolonial european nation-states such as italy and their racially-inflected biopolitical regimes. indeed, what also remains to be examined is the extraordinary and telling absence of a corpus of whiteness studies in italian studies, despite the fact that whiteness studies traces its genealogical roots back to the landmark work of frantz fanon’s black skin white masks (1952). this omission is extraordinary because, as i have attempted to argue over the last decade, whiteness has been absolutely constitutive in the formation of hegemonic italian identity, politics and culture—commencing with the historical movement of unification, through the italian colonial campaigns and up to the contemporary racialised debates on the extracomunitari. as many whiteness scholars have argued this omission is symptomatic of the power of whiteness to be an invisible visibility. in other words, the disavowal of the centrality of whiteness in the constitution portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 32 pugliese la guerra cafona and reproduction of italianness, in all its forms, dramatises how whiteness fundamentally informs and shapes key italian apparatuses of power and racialised subjectivities, even as it renders invisible its structural and constitutive role, effacing itself as a foundational racial category of critical inquiry. the reclamation of squares, monuments and streets through such ephemeral forms such as graffiti, rap, suks and transient markets exemplifies the agency enabling cultural modalities of the global south in the face of violent political and economic asymmetries of racialised power. this reclamation, an example of a ‘feral beauty’ (gilroy 2004: xiv), resignifies hegemonic understandings of white/civic culture. the reclamation also articulates a street justice that reorients the historical, racial, cultural, economic and legislative exclusions of provisional lives within the corpus of the contemporary italian nation. reference list alighieri, d. 1887, ‘de vulgari eloquio/sul vulgare eloquio,’ in dante alighieri: i trattati, (eds) d. p. fraticelli and g. barbèra, editore, firenze, 118-253. allum, p. and i. diamanti, 1996 ‘the autonomous leagues in the veneto,’ in italian regionalism, (ed.) c. levy, berg, oxford, 151-70. agnoli, f. m. 2005, ‘prefazione,’ in f. 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(ed.) 1998, italy’s ‘southern question’: orientalism in one country, berg, oxford. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 34 http://www.republica.it/2008/04/sezioni/cronaca/rapporto-cpt/rapporto-cpt.html http://www.republica.it/2008/04/sezioni/cronaca/rapporto-cpt/rapporto-cpt.html http://www.medicisenzafrontiere.it/msfinforma/pubblicazioni.asp?id=1644 http://www.lib.latrobe.edu/ahr/archive/issue-august-2007/pugliese.html http://www.lib.latrobe.edu/ahr/archive/issue-august-2007/pugliese.html http://www.italianrap.com/masterfr.html pugliese la guerra cafona teti, v. 1993, la razza maladetta, manifestolibri, roma. toop, d. 2002, rap attack: african rap to global hip hop, serpent’s tail, london. turco, l. 2006, i nuovi italiani, oscar mondadori, milano. discography bennato, e. 2008, grande sud, taranta power. bennato, e. n.d., che il meditteraneo sia, taranta power. 99 posse. 1993, curre curre guaglió, bmg ricordi spa. nuovi briganti. 1993, fottuto terrone, cyclope records. nour eddine and phaleg. 2003. taragnawa. compagnia nuove indye. spaccanapoli. 2000, aneme perze, real world records. portal, vol. 5, no. 2, july 2008. 35 joseph pugliese, macquarie university “globalizing the holocaust”: a jewish “useable past” in serbian and croatian nationalism portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ globalizing the holocaust: a jewish ‘useable past’ in serbian nationalism david macdonald, university of otago contrary to anthony smith’s view that national myth-makers derive meaning primarily from a nation’s own positive ‘useable past’, this article argues that the globalization and universalisation of the jewish holocaust has created new poles of identity for ethnonationalists, existing outside ‘authentic’ local conceptions of history and culture. also contrary to smith’s view of a positive golden age at the root of national mythology, i argue that negative imagery can play an equally if not more significant role in some examples of nationalism. in serbia, viewing the self through the lens of a persecuted victim became crucial during the disintegration of yugoslavia in the 1990s. as a new ‘strategic site’, the holocaust functioned as a template for re-interpreting ‘self’ and ‘other’, while re-ordering history. a ‘jewish trope’ emerged in popular discourse to legitimate the violent re-creation of national space. as živković has argued: ‘both serbs and jews are the ‘chosen peoples’—slaughtered, sacrificed, denied expression, yet always righteous, always defending themselves, never attacking’ (živković 2000, 73). in promoting this view of serbian history, both local and diaspora nationalists were involved. smith and the useable past this article problematises the work of anthony david smith, arguably one of the world’s best known theorists of nationalism. smith’s work is located in the ‘ethno-symbolist’ school which he, hutchinson, armstrong, and others styled as a species of bridge between primordialism and the later and more popular modernist school (ozkirimli 2000; macdonald globalizing the holocaust smith 1998). i have chosen to look at smith because of his school’s interest in nationalist mythology and imagery. modernists, such as gellner, breuilly, hobsbawm and anderson attach little importance to national myth. gellner, after all, famously argued that ‘[t]he cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions. any old shred and patch would have served as well’ (gellner 2000, 56; breuilly 1985, 30) anderson has completely dismissed the importance of negative imagery throughout the process of national development and ‘democratisation’. while he posits that ‘nations inspire love, and often profoundly self sacrificing love,’ inspiring such positive legacies as ‘poetry, prose fiction, music and plastic arts ... how truly rare it is to find analogous nationalist products expressing fear and loathing’ (anderson 1987, 141). anderson even advances that colonised people felt little hatred for their former colonial overlords. he was astonished at ‘how insignificant the element of hatred is in these expressions of national feeling’ (141-142). despite anderson’s musings, not all nations focus exclusively on love, and like smith, anderson commits the fallacy of deriving general rules from select examples, in this case, examples from south east asia. authenticity and the golden age in his analysis of ethnic and national myths, smith had privileged two arguments, which i will later question, using examples from serbia. the first is the idea that the local or ‘authentic’ forms the very heart of national myth, while foreign or alien ideas are rigorously purged from the early proto-nation during its development. the second advances that nationalist mythology is fundamentally positive and inspirational, dealing with heroic and ennobling époques—what smith has termed the golden age. arguably, smith’s main contribution to the discipline of nationalism studies, and hence to international relations, is his privileging of the ‘ethnie’, which he first popularised in 1986 as ‘named human populations with shared ancestry myths, histories and cultures, having an association with specific territory, and a sense of solidarity’ (smith 1998, 191). not all ethnie become nations, but most nations are derived from ethnie, particularly portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 macdonald globalizing the holocaust ’ethnic cores’ that have the requisite characteristics to absorb and assimilate other ethnie, making them part of an emerging nation. unlike the nations they may later become, core ethnie need to selectively borrow elements from other foreign groups through ‘controlled culture contact’ (smith 1990, 35-39). this allows the ethnie to become vibrant, introducing new and diverse elements into the group’s identity. as the ethnic core expands and absorbs other ethnie, it incorporates their elements within its growing ethnic (and ultimately proto-national) culture. however, once the ethnic core forms a coherent nation (with a national homeland, a unified economy and unified myths and symbols) (smith 1990, 40, 64-65), foreign elements and cultural borrowings can be perceived as a threat to the authenticity and purity of the nation. diversity is abandoned in favour of a more unified identity, and a process of purging and exclusion begins. for smith, nations are based on ‘an ideal of authenticity which presupposes a unique culture-community, with a distinct and original character’. each nation possesses its own ‘peculiar historic “genius”’ which the nationalists are tasked with rediscovering and possessing (smith 2001, 442; see also smith 1998, 194). a nation’s view of the world must be both ‘culturally distinct’ and ‘rooted’. clear-cut territorial boundaries need to be established, and a ‘keen eye’ is required to determine the identity of ‘“alien” objects throughout trade and exchange, as well as for successive migrations, invasions and colonisation.’ throughout, images of cultural purity, of ‘distinctiveness’, ‘originality’, of what is ‘“our very own” and nobody else’s’, form a crucial part of identity construction (442-443). the key to the nation’s survival and popularity for smith is its golden age mythology (smith 1979, 26). a nation must be able to ‘unfold a glorious past, a golden age of saints and heroes, to give meaning to its promise of restoration and dignity’ (smith 1983, 153154). nationalism creates secular heroes, saints, and great leaders, allowing co-nationals to dream of a glorious destiny, based on the ‘model and guide’ of the golden age. similarly, ‘the more glorious that antiquity appears, the easier it becomes to mobilise the people around a common culture’ (smith 1996b, 39, 57). revisiting and re-presenting the past as one of glory, heroism and happiness inspires national members, and unites them portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 macdonald globalizing the holocaust for collective action (smith 1990, 14). in what smith calls ‘the myth of the historical renovation,’ nationalist leaders attempt to recapture the nation’s golden past, to return to a basic national ‘essence’, a ‘basic pattern of living and being’ (22). golden ages are replete with ‘poetic spaces’, ‘nature’, as well as ‘vivid recreations of the glorious past of the community’ (65-66, see also smith 1996b, 37). for smith, local history and identity are crucial elements in the construction of national myth. the communal past of a nation forms a ‘repository or quarry from which materials may be selected in the construction and invention of nations’ (smith 1996b, 37). history is fragmented into diverse elements which become collectively a ‘useable past’, wherein nationalists choose the myths they need in order to rally people together to reclaim national greatness (37). different elements may be chosen at different times to suit the era and the state of the nation. heroic myths may be chosen in times of defeat, while myths of peace and reconciliation may be chosen in times of war (37). nevertheless, the key element is that such myths belong properly to the nation. they are rooted in the nation’s own past, not someone else’s. smith does argue that at first, foreign elements were incorporated into the nation through greek and roman classicalism. in nineteenth century europe, recasting the nation to reflect the ideals of periclean athens became ‘the standard and model for subsequent ideals of the golden age in other periods and civilizations.’ a broadening of the classical ideal occurred somewhat later to encompass ancient persia, egypt, mesopotamia, etc (smith 1996b, 37; see also smith 1996a, 181). however, as modernisation spread, and most budding nations sought to find their own golden ages, ‘the true golden age had to be located in the pasts of the ethnic community or nation and it had to be a heroic age which could dignify the nation to be’ (41). the local and the positive are both crucial to smith’s golden age. after all, its five functions buttress such ideas. it is meant to ‘satisfy the quest for authenticity’; to ‘establish and delineate the “true self”, the authentic being of the collectivity’, while similarly locating and ‘re-rooting’ the community. additionally, the golden age portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 macdonald globalizing the holocaust establishes continuity between generations, reminds co-nationals of past greatness and their own ‘inner worth’, while also pointing towards a ‘glorious destiny’ (smith 1996b, 48-51). archaeology further also allows nationalists to ‘locate “ourselves” and dignify “our communities” by reference to an ancient pedigree and time-honoured environment’ (smith 1996a, 180-181). and for smith, myths can only change so much. changes when they do take place occur only ‘within the boundaries of the nation’. he adds: [t]his ‘nation-building’ activity operates within a definite tradition; it is not made over entirely anew by each generation, but inherits the mythologies and symbolisms of previous generations. a new generation may come to reject the interpretations of the predecessor, and question its values, myths and symbols, forsaking its holy sites for new ones and replacing its golden ages and heroes by others; but all this question and replacement is carried on within definite emotional and intellectual confines, which constitute far more powerful and durable barriers to the outside than any physical boundaries. this is because a social magnetism and psychological charge attaches to the ‘myth-symbol complexes’ of particular ethnie which in turn form the basis of a nation’s core heritage (smith 1996a, 206-207). thus while some things may change, the basic character of the nation does not, and nationalists, whether consciously or not, operate within proscribed boundaries set by their forefathers. the role of negative imagery for smith, nationalism is primarily a positive phenomenon, ‘lifting present generations out of their banal reality’ (smith 1983, 154). smith’s general position on the use of holocaust imagery and negative imagery is to dismiss it. while he has argued for the importance of warfare as an important ‘mobiliser of ethnic sentiments’, and as a ‘provider of myths and memories for future generations’, he has also concluded that ‘it would be an exaggeration to deduce the sense of common ethnicity from the fear of the “outsider” and paired antagonisms’ (smith 1990, 27). as for negative myths in the nation’s past, ‘the period of decline is regarded as “unnatural”, a matter of “betrayal” from within, or “subjugation” and decay from without’. national history is meant to be linear, progressing towards a positive endpoint (smith 1996a, 191). in his discussion of ‘anticolonialism’, smith has dismissed any sort of fear or loathing of others. ‘men’, he writes, ‘do not seek collective independence and build states simply to react to a “common enemy”’ (smith 1983, 65-68). in his taxonomy of groups (tribe, ethnie, and nation) smith portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 macdonald globalizing the holocaust includes ‘in-group sentiment’, but excludes any mention of how fear or loathing of the outgroup could also be important (189). again, this is primarily because national myths are meant to promote nostalgia for the past, a simpler, better time in the nation’s past. the alienation, the anomie, the feelings of ‘estrangement and homelessness’ brought on by modernity and industrialisation are mitigated through a return to national ‘roots’—a ‘satisfying social framework’ and a ‘surrogate religion’ (smith 1996a, 174-176). everything about national history needs to be positive and glowing (200). a reading of smith’s work thus reveals that local, positive, forms of imagery are seen to be crucial to the formation of nations and nationalism. the question arises then as to the role of negative imagery and foreign or external elements and history. for smith, both seem to be relatively unimportant. this paper seeks to claim otherwise, through an examination of national identity in late twentieth century serbia. negative mythology and the holocaust as we shall later see, serbian nationalism in the 1980s and 90s relied on a series of heroic myths of the golden age. however, these myths were not wholly positive, containing elements of defeat, suffering and national tragedy. as well, nationalists having recourse to this golden age brought in inauthentic or foreign holocaust and jewish imagery, seemingly to strengthen the appeal of nationalism. why any nation would wish to do this falls squarely outside of smith’s theoretical framework. in nationalism and modernity (1998) smith purposely excludes discussion of genocide, ethnic cleansing, national minorities and several other current topics, first, in order to save space, and second and more importantly, because ‘it is by no means clear that they can further the task of explaining the origins, development and nature of nations and nationalism’ (smith 1998, xiii). this, i would argue, ignores an important aspect of nationalist mythology that has emerged since the mid-1980s, not only in serbia, but around the world. smith’s privileging of the local and positive as the only sites of ‘authentic’ meaning need to be carefully examined and problematised. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 macdonald globalizing the holocaust smith’s ideal of a positive golden age as the crucial lynchpin of nationalism has been contested. many theorists approach negative myths differently, seeing these elements as crucial to national development and consolidation (macdonald 2003, chapter 2). trevorroper’s ‘normal nationalism’ included a sense of persecution and danger, comprising such things as ‘great national defeat’, and ‘danger of being swamped by foreigners’ (trevor-roper 1962, 12). for alter, ‘social groups also tend to define their national identity and national consciousness in negative terms ...’ (alter 1992, 7,19). kecmanović has operationalised ‘counteridentification’ and ‘pseudospeciation’, both of which deal with the centrality of enemies and negative myths in a nation’s past (kecmanović 1996, 36). one sees similar perspectives in the work of claude lefort, marc howard ross, and michael ignatieff.1 both schöpflin and kecmanović have created useful ‘taxonomies’ or classifications of negative myths which counter smith’s ideal of a positive golden age. schöpflin’s work includes ‘myths of powerlessness and compensation for the powerless’—stressing the importance of justice and status reversal for those who have been wronged in the past (schöpflin 1996, 29). a second type, ‘myths of unjust treatment’, advance that ‘history is a malign and unjust actor that has singled out the community for special, negative treatment’ (29-30). schöpflin has stressed the purposeful nature of collective suffering, endowing persecution and victimisation with meaning. the world ‘owes’ such nations— they have ‘suffered a special debt … the victims of suffering are helpless because they suffered for the wider world and the wider world should recognise this, thereby legitimating the group’s special worth’ (29-30). he has placed holocaust myths here, as well as myths which copy the holocaust, appropriating its symbolism (30-31). kecmanović’s myths include such themes as ‘damage’, which highlight the historic deprivation of the nation at the hands of antagonists (kecmanović 1996, 61-63). as with 1 discussed in sandra bašić-hrvatin, “television and national/public memory’, in james gow, richard paterson, and alison preston (eds), bosnia by television (london: british film institute, 1996) pp. 63-4. marc howard ross, “psychocultural interpretation theory and peacemaking in ethnic conflicts’, political psychology, 16:3 (1995) p. 533. michael ignatieff, blood and belonging: journeys into the new nationalism (toronto: viking books, 1993) p. 14. minogue’s three stage process of nationalist awakening similarly includes a crucial “struggle” phase where the nation must confront and fight against its enemies. kenneth r. minogue, nationalism (london: b.a. batsford, 1967) pp. 25-8. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 macdonald globalizing the holocaust schöpflin, themes of ‘victim and sacrifice’ are important, where nationalists believe themselves to be ‘victims of envy, of the hegemonic and expansionist tendencies of other people, victims of minority or majority groups that continuously demand greater autonomy or more rights’ (66-67). at a general level, the above theorists have noted the importance of negative forms of identification as a means of rallying co-nationals together. such views challenge smith’s theories that members of the nation rely primarily on national history for inspiration and a sense of positive belonging. they propose that fear, anger, resentment, insecurity and defeat also form crucial aspects of national imagining. at a more specific level, the holocaust has played a crucial role in re-presenting national history. as a stock series of metaphors, images, and symbols for good and evil, righteous and demonic, the holocaust has become increasingly influential in structuring and rescripting nationalist narratives, especially since the 1970s and 80s, when the holocaust arguably became ‘industrialised’ (finkelstein 2000). i will argue that, contrary to smith’s view of authentic, local and positive myths comprising national mythology, holocaust imagery has formed its own generalized ‘useable past’ that can be used for serbs, and indeed any other group seeking to advance itself. as finkielkraut has observed in many very different cases: nazism is invoked almost religiously to represent civilization’s other ... since hitler’s time, every villain is a fascist, and every victim wears the yellow star. there is no revolution, no revolt, no struggle, no matter how minor its object, that fails to go rummaging through the past only to end up presenting itself in terms of this particular period of history. ... antifascism had established the jews as value: as the gold standard of oppression, as the paradigm of the victim (finkielkraut 1998, 99-100) arguably, the holocaust has achieved a pre-eminence unequalled by any other genocide in history. as goldstone notes: ‘no other genocide has evoked this response from the international academic community’ (goldstone 2001, 42). for rubenstein: ‘few events of the twentieth century have been the object of as much persistent and popular interest…’ (rubenstein 2001, 33), while novick describes ‘a flood of books, films, university courses, and docudramas … invoked as reference point in discussions of portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 macdonald globalizing the holocaust everything from aids to abortion’ (novick 1994, 159; see also levin 1993, 197; sydnor 1993, 74). stemming from the idea that the holocaust has been successfully commemorated or even ‘industrialized’ has emerged a debate about whether the holocaust can be compared to other tragedies, and more specifically, whether or not the word ‘holocaust’ itself should be borrowed by other groups seeking to commemorate their own histories of victimization. generally speaking, there are three main schools of thought on the subject, classified by rosenberg as ‘absolutists’, ‘relativists’ and ‘trivialists’ (rosenberg 2000, 150-151). the absolutist school stands solidly against any ‘inappropriate’ use of the term, relativists favour qualified comparisons, while trivialists advocate the application of the term and its associated imagery to a wide variety of contexts. the absolutists use terms such as ‘hijacking’; ‘grotesque competition in suffering’; a ‘growing lapse of memory’; ‘facile holocaust victimology’; and ‘word-napping’ to describe the ‘borrowing’ of holocaust imagery and vocabulary (finkielkraut 1998, 59; landau 1998, 3-5; huyssen 1994, 13; rosenbaum 2001, 13-14). such ‘absolutist’ views, rosenberg argues, negate the very idea that the holocaust can be compared to anything that preceded or followed it (rosenberg 2000, 150-151). allied to this group are what i have termed ‘hard relativists’, who compare the holocaust with other tragedies, but largely to promote the holocaust’s unique and unprecedented nature (katz, bauer and melson are good examples here) (katz 2000, 21, 26; bauer 2001, 10-11, 12; roth 2000, 155; melson 1992, 26-27, 29). some historians, however, see holocaust comparison and borrowing as inevitable. moshman argues that since our contemporary understanding of genocide is based on the holocaust, we have little choice but to invoke this ‘prototype’ as a symbol for comparison (moshman 2001, 432, 444-448). for flanzbaum, the holocaust has attained a ‘cult-like status … augmented by its use as a touchstone of victimization’ (quoted in moshman 2001, 447), while berenbaum finds in comparison a way of ‘deepen[ing] our moral sensitivity while sharpening our perception … [displaying] generosity of spirit and portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 macdonald globalizing the holocaust ethical integrity’ (berenbaum 1990, 34). charny defends the right of groups to compare their suffering with the holocaust (stannard 2001, 192), while novick accuses those who promote holocaust uniqueness of ‘gerrymandering’, and ‘an intellectual sleight of hand’ (novick 1994, 9). the third position promotes holocaust comparison and extensive borrowing, advancing that ‘holocaust’ can validly be used to describe a wide variety of tragedies. here, the holocaust becomes a generalized, universalized form of evil that can be applied to many different contexts and situations. it becomes a generic ‘useable past’ that any group can use to advance itself. for rosenberg, these ‘trivialists’ are ‘quite willing to see the holocaust as an event of major importance, but they nevertheless agree that the claim of uniqueness cannot be sustained in any non-trivial form’ (rosenberg 2000, 150). for stannard, (a ‘trivialist’ par excellence), while the holocaust (with a capital ‘h’) ‘clearly applies exclusively to the genocide that was perpetrated by the nazis against their various victims’, holocaust with a lower-case ‘h’ should ‘belong to anyone who cares to use it’ (stannard 2001, 272-273). others like chicago have universalised the holocaust as ‘a window into an aspect of the unarticulated but universal human experience of victimization’, as well as a ‘bridge towards the creation of “a new global community based on human shared values”’ (discussed in langer 1998, 12). serbia and the rise of nationalism as will hopefully become apparent in the second half of this article, while serbs had recourse to positive, local golden ages, the primary focus of serbian mythmaking during and after the collapse of yugoslavia was on negative events in the life of the nation, featuring images of persecution and genocide. in this, jewish holocaust imagery played a key role. throughout the conflict, the myth of the battle of kosovo was touted as a key moniker of serbian identity, figuring as the locus of a historic defeat, but also the awakening of serbian values and spirituality. in legend, serbian prince lazar was handed an ultimatum, where he was either to pay homage to the ottoman sultan murad i, relinquishing control portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 macdonald globalizing the holocaust of serbian lands and taxation, or bring his forces to kosovo polje to face the sultan’s army. lazar was later approached in a dream by a grey hawk (or falcon) flying from jerusalem, and was offered a choice: an earthly kingdom (implying victory for his forces against the sultan), or a heavenly kingdom, (where the serbs would be defeated in battle but become a divine and chosen people) (hall 1994, 235-290). the details of the battle are sketchy, including the identity of the actual winners and losers (kaplan1993, 35-36; marriott 1930, 65; judah 1997, 31; malcolm 1998, 75-79). however, in legend, the serbs lost, and were thereafter subject to five centuries of ottoman rule. what has emerged most prominently, however, was the heroism of the serbs, dying so that their nation could be elevated as a spiritual entity (velimirovich, nickolai and popovich 1996). the nineteenth century development of the myth through linguist vuk karadžić transformed lazar into a christ-like figure—who led the serbian nation to holy martyrdom so that it would achieve divine status. as well, lazar’s enemies became judas-like traitors (sells 1996, 31; judah 1997, 36). kosovo and its lessons would be developed further through such works as ‘the mountain wreath’, by petar petrovićnjegoš (a price-bishop from montenegro), and geographer jovan cvijić’s writings on his ‘dinaric man’—the archetypal serb, ‘consumed with a burning desire to avenge kosovo … and to revive the serbian empire about which he has never ceased to dream…’ (judah 1997, 62-63, 65-66). in many respects, kosovo does function as a golden age myth in the smithean sense. it provides heroes, villains, stimulating action, ennobling virtues, and elevates the nation to a holy and chosen entity. yet it is profoundly negative. the serbian people are victims of turkish control for 500 years, their autonomy crushed until the nineteenth century. traitors abound within their own camp, especially those who convert to islam. certainly the pull of kosovo on its own was immensely powerful. celebrations for the 600th anniversary of the battle in 1989 drew enormous crowds, as kosovo fever gripped the population. the relics of prince lazar were paraded around serbia, with full media coverage. the official celebrations helped to seal milošević’s own growing personality cult. (jacobsen 1996, 48; vulliamy 1994, 51-52; see also glenny 1993, 33-36). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 macdonald globalizing the holocaust yet in many respects, kosovo itself was not enough, and the 1980s would also herald the introduction of specifically jewish imagery into emerging conceptions of the serbian nation. this foreign imagery was certainly similar in style to kosovo victim myths. there was certainly no shortage of feeling that serbs were righteous and chosen victims. yet holocaust imagery pushed the envelope, allowing serbian nationalist goals to gain wider, more universal appeal. it could resonate with domestic serbs and those in the diaspora, as well as with jews and non-jews. the 1980s would inaugurate what živković has called the ‘jewish trope’ in serbian national identity, where myths of serbian and jewish suffering were interwoven, providing a new series of national myths. (živković 2000, 6973). serbian nationalism in the 1980s was largely a reaction to rise of nationalism amongst kosovar albanians in the former serbian province of kosovo. demands for autonomy spurred a crackdown on dissent and a fear of albanian secession in serbia’s heartland (pavković 1996, 78). while albanians constituted 90 per cent of the population, kosovo was also the seat of the early orthodox church and many of its best-loved buildings, while kosovo polje was the scene of the serbs’ epic battle against the ottoman empire in 1389 (judah 1997, 21-22). the use of the jewish trope was first in evidence by 1983, when a petition was drawn up by serbian orthodox bishops, protesting serbian persecution in kosovo. this made the links between serbian and jewish suffering clear and drew what later became common parallels between kosovo and jerusalem: the jewish people, before the menace of their annihilation and by the miracle of the uninterrupted memory, returned to jerusalem after 2,000 years of suffering, against all logic of history. in a similar manner, the serbian people have been fighting their battle at kosovo since 1389, in order to save the memory of its identity, to preserve the meaning of their existence against all odds. (quoted in yelen 1989, 132-133, my translation). by 1985, novelist and politician vuk drašković wrote his well known ‘letter to the writers of israel’, in which he argued that ‘serbs are the thirteenth, lost and the most illfated tribe of israel’ (živković 2000, 236). drašković would later link serbia and israel together, seeing both ‘liv[ing] in a hellish siege where the sworn goal is to seize and the cover with mosques or vaticanize the lands of moses and the people of st. sava [serbia’s portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 macdonald globalizing the holocaust patron saint]’ (cigar 1995, 236). further parallels emerged from here. kosovo would be compared to the jewish legend of masada, where approximately 1,000 jewish warriors committed mass suicide, after a losing battle with the attacking romans some 2,000 years ago (levinsohn 1994, 16). others saw ‘genetic’ similarities between both groups. milan bulajić, director of the museum of victims of genocide in belgrade, located serbian bravery and heroism in their ‘genes’, making them both ‘victims by destiny’ and ‘chosen people, like the jews’ (levinsohn 1994, 251). žarko korać of belgrade university similarly promoted serbs as a ‘heavenly people’ because of kosovo, making it possible for them to ‘identify themselves with the jews. as victims yes, but also with the idea of “sacred soil”’ (quoted in judah 1997, 37). rejecting the previous pro-palestinian, anti-zionist position of tito’s communist government (itself a co-founder of the non-aligned movement), the serbian academy of sciences and arts drew up a controversial memorandum in 1986—a long list of serbian grievances against their treatment within the federation. much of the document dealt with the ‘genocide’ of serbs in kosovo, and articulated the need for serbs throughout yugoslavia to assert themselves collectively. the memorandum’s architects would eventually play a prominent role in spurring nationalism, a highly controversial step for a seemingly impartial communist organisation (reprinted in čovic 1993). attempts by serbian party president ivan stambolić to deal with kosovo’s civil unrest proved ineffective, and friction between serbs and albanians escalated (denitch 1994, 119-120). slobodan milošević, a former banker and bureaucrat, would ride on the coattails of nationalism by 1987, toppling his former mentor (tanner 1997, 214). milošević appealed to an emerging sense of serbian unity, and claimed to speak for serbs throughout yugoslavia. promising to end the persecution of serbs in croatia, bosniahercegovina and kosovo, he advocated constitutional revision, a strengthening of the orthodox church and a privileging of serbian cultural and social institutions, which he argued had long been repressed under communism (magaš 1993, 110; cviic, 1993, 73). from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, almost 600,000 kosovars, over half of the adult portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 macdonald globalizing the holocaust population, would face arrest, interrogation, or police harassment (seroka and pavlović 1992, 77; thompson 1994, 128). for many, serbian claims to kosovo were no different from zionist claims to israel. serbs were a persecuted nation, as were the jews, and both deserved to have a national homeland because of past victimisation and future threats. this style of argumentation became all the more interesting when kosovar albanians likened themselves to palestinians, suffering from similar troubles. shkelsem maliqi, for example, drew out a series of links between the two cases: israel used all coercive means to ‘liberate’ and ‘redeem’ palestine as a ‘sacred land’ which had been ‘usurped’ by the palestinians. in the same way the dominant state machinery of the ‘unitary’ republic of serbia decided to apply all coercive means to the task of bringing kosova back into the national possession of the serbs, on the grounds that kosovo had been historically ‘sacred serbian soil’, which had been ‘usurped’ by the albanians a couple of centuries ago (maliqi 1996, 142).2 maliqi posited that serbian nationalists and militant zionists had much in common: …the serbs as a persecuted and historically tragic people, the notion of the historical right to gather all serbs within one state, the idea of the crusade against (in this case) the albanians as an alleged vanguard of islamic fundamentalism, the right to recolonise ‘sacred soil’, the right to impose demographic control over the ‘usurpers’ (maliqi 1996, 142). this is no doubt what the serbs intended. if it was acceptable for one chosen people to take control of ancestral lands, then surely the serbs could claim the same rights, if they too were chosen. curiously, this dilemma was also apparent in israel during the 1999 nato bombing of yugoslavia. in america, jewish groups largely sympathised with kosovar albanians. one organisation ran pictorial ads depicting trainloads of albanians, reminiscent of jews being shipped to the death camps. american jews contributed to various relief funds and 2 for an israeli commentary, see igor primoratz, ‘israel and the war in the balkans’, http://www.hr/darko/etf/isr2.html (accessed 23 november, 2000). primoratz argues that the pro-serbian bias of the israeli government had much to do with their own policies of expelling the palestinians in 194849. however, he draws the line at saying that serbian actions and israeli actions can be compared equally, since: ‘the crucial difference, of course, is the fact that “ethnic cleansing” was carried out in part by means of genocide.’ portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 14 macdonald globalizing the holocaust jewish agencies sent teams to the region to help reduce the refugee crisis (plotz 1999). in israel, the country’s top singers organized ‘israel must help’, which raised money to help establish a hospital on macedonia’s border with kosovo (andersson 1999). however, within israel there was also a different view. derfner, writing in the jerusalem post, noted a surprising ambivalence to the serbian occupation of kosovo. he cites a ‘false perception’ in israel, promoted by a ‘serbian lobby’, that serbs were completely pro-jewish during the holocaust, while the croats were consumed with anti-semitism. the reality, he argues, was substantively different. a further point of comparison concerns the belief that both serbs and israelis have been unfairly condemned as ‘neighborhood bullies’. haifa university professor arnon sofer has thus argued: ‘many israelis see the west interfering with the serbs’ affairs out of ignorance and arrogance, just like they see the west interfering in israel’ (derfner 1999). the linkages between kosovar albanians and palestinians were not lost in israel, with some politicians seeing nato airstrikes as a ‘dangerous precedent’. as well, ariel sharon (israel’s defence minister at that time), used a nuanced approach to kosovo as a means of courting the over 1 million new russian jewish immigrants to israel. while not particularly proserbian, russian jews valued sharon’s courting of russia, which included three visits to the country in mid-1999 (plotz, 1999). while most israelis remained unconvinced of serbian arguments, they found them attractive on some levels, no doubt encouraging serbs to continue this rescripting of the kosovo narrative. croatia, tudjman, and serbophobia serbian-jewish connections also became important during the war in croatia from 1991 to 1995, with croats seen as modern-day nazis, bent on exterminating the serbian people. former yugoslav general and historian franjo tudjman emerged as the head of the croatian democratic community (hrvatska demokratska zajednica, hdz), which by 1990 became the primary nationalist force in the republic (cigar 1995, 88). tudjman’s party appeared western and progressive, but did practice some discrimination against the republic’s 12 percent serbian population, leading to serbian anger and eventually, violent protest (cohen 1995, 18; silber and little 1993, 100-105). conflict began in 1990 portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 15 macdonald globalizing the holocaust between croatian serbs and croatian security forces, to which were added serbianfinanced militia groups and later, the yugoslav people’s army (silber and little 1993, 146-147). by september 1991, serbian forces controlled almost one third of croatian territory, and by october, had pushed southward to dubrovnik (silber and little 1993, 195-201). serbia at this stage was reviled internationally as the aggressor, with croats seen as hapless victims. as part and parcel of the serbian strategy of playing the victim while invading other countries, the concept of ‘serbophobia’ was introduced, denoting a historic fear, hatred, and jealousy of serbs, often likened to anti-semitism. nationalist author and politician dobrica ćosić could thus claim: ‘we serbs feel today as the jews did in hitler’s day.... today, serbophobia in europe is a concept and an attitude with the same ideological motivation and fury as anti-semitism had during the nazi era’ (ćosić 1994, 44). for smilja avramov, (an advisor to milošević): ‘the departure point for the genocide of the jews was anti-semitism, and of the serbs, serbophobia’ (avramov 1992, 18). ćosić also saw tudjman’s regime as an emerging nazi dictatorship. he had this to say in a published collection of his wartime essays: we see in croatia, many aspects of a nazi resurrection. this state is governed by a totalitarian and chauvinistic regime, which has abolished the elementary civil and national rights of the serbs by simply erasing them from its constitution. this provoked a serbian insurrection in croatia, those who justly fear a new program of extermination, the same as the one during the second world war to which they fell victim (ćosić, 1994, 5859, my translation). other writers urged croatian serbs not to surrender any weapons to the croatian police, since politics had blossomed into ‘mass chauvinist hysteria’ (vilić and todorović 1996, 14-15). world war ii era mass graves were exhumed amid great display to hammer home the point (bowman 1995, 56-57; brčin 1991, 3-5). even croatian democracy was dismissed since ‘hitler came to power in germany within the framework of a multi-party mechanism but subsequently became a great dictator, aggressor and criminal’ (ilić 1992, 93). others referred to ‘fascist state policy and kalashnikov democracy’ (dakić 1994, 48). serbophobia was developed in part to excuse land grabbing in croatia and elsewhere. past and future potential persecution was at the root of land claims outside of serbia portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 16 macdonald globalizing the holocaust proper. for drašković, the true borders of serbia were to be marked in the west by the jadovno pits, the scenes of historic massacres of serbs during world war ii. these were to be ‘pits that must become sacred places’, while the eastern border was to be kosovo, ‘sacred places that must not become pits’ (živković 2000, 72). geographer jovan ilić would also use historic persecution as the basis for territorial claims. he claimed historical serbian lands in croatia for serbia, but also claimed the croatian city of dubrovnik and several admittedly non-serbian islands in the adriatic as well. while ilić could admit that ‘according to the ethnic principle this area [dubrovnik] should belong to croatia’, the new territorial arrangements were to be seen ‘primarily [as] a therapy for the treatment of ethno-psychic disorders … primarily among the croatian population’ (ilić 1992, 98, 100-101). for ilić, serbs had an ‘additional right to self-determination and uniting’, because of their exposure to ‘genocidal extermination many times’ (ilić 1992, 31). a mixture of compensation and punishment for past crimes were often held to be at the root of serbian claims to croatia. world war ii era serbophobia and jasenovac serbophobia would reach its apogee during world war ii, when in 1941, yugoslavia was invaded by the italian and german allies, and split into different spheres of influence. 40 percent of yugoslav territory was given over to a croatian (fascist) ustasha controlled independent state of croatia (or nezavisna država hrvatska, ndh) (pawlovich 2002, 139-141). in representations of world war ii, croats were lumped together with german nazis as genocidal killers, serbs and jews as fellow victims of genocide (serbian national defence council of america 1993, 28-30; petrović 1991). according to milan bulajić et al’s never again, the ustaša regime killed 30,000 of croatia’s jews during the war, as well as a majority of the gypsy community (bulajić, miletić and lukić 1991, 2). these numbers are roughly born out by more impartial historians (goldstein 1999, 135, 158; lebor 2002, 332). avramov refers to a united ‘jewish-serbian-capitalist-democratic front’ that ‘had to disappear forever from the world ... jews and serbs were struck with the same dagger.’ (goldstein 1999, 32). for drašković: ‘jewish-serbian martyrdom was sealed and signed portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 17 macdonald globalizing the holocaust in blood’. both, after all, were ‘exterminated at the same concentration camps, slaughtered at the same bridges, burned alive in the same ovens, thrown together in the same pits’(živković 2000, 69-73). ćosić went so far as to assert that the genocide of serbs was worse than that of the jews, in terms of its methods and bestiality (ćosić 1994, 24). thus yugoslavia’s dominant and largest ethnic group lumped themselves with one of the smallest and weakest minorities as fellow victims of fascist terror. two very unlike peoples became one. in serbian eyes, the catholic church in croatia was instrumental in bringing about a serbian genocide, with the church featuring as a strong supporter of ‘policies of clericalism and racism, marked by mass killings, forced conversions and the deportation of the serbian orthodox population as well the slaughter of the jews and gypsies’ (bataković 1997). for others, the ustaša state was ‘soundly and joyously received by the majority of the croatian people’, while church leaders were ‘the most loyal [of] hitler’s collaborator[s]’ (ilić 1995b, 330). embodying ustaša crimes was the croatian-run death camp jasenovac. serbian historians have called it ‘the dark secret of the holocaust’ and ‘the suppressed chapter of holocaust history.’(www.jasenovac.org). during the milošević era, the suc (serbian unity congress) would claim jasenovac as ‘the third largest concentration camp of the ww ii occupied europe’ (serbian unity congress 1996). the serbian ministry of information also depicted jasenovac as a serbian ‘holocaust’ (serbian ministry of information). imagery of a violent, annihilatory croatian other proved central in motivating the serbs to ‘defend’ the serbian minorities in tudjman’s croatia. it was not only jasenovac, but also the covering up of the genocide after 1945 that captured the imagination of serbian writers. slobodan kljakić’s conspiracy of silence traced a communist conspiracy to lower the number of serbian dead, a project propelled in part by the vatican (kljakić 1991, 23). tudjman’s revisionist writings were also frequently attacked for their continued ’ustaša clerico-nationalism’ and ‘a certain form of clerical nazism’ (bulajić 1994, 13-14; bulajić 1993, 23). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 18 macdonald globalizing the holocaust the numbers of serbs killed at jasenovac was a frequent subject of scholarly debate, with numbers ranging (on the serbian side) from 700,000 to 2 million casualties (ilic 1995b, 333; đurđević 1995, 15; nouvel observateur et raporteurs sans frontières 1993, 277; bataković 1992; zečević 2000, 7; kontić 1995, 2; pavlovich 1988, 226; damjanov 1995, 6; avramov 1992, 170; anzulović 1994, 103-104). revisionist novels and scholarly works were also designed to maintain or increase the communist estimate of serbian deaths. some of these include strahinja kurdulija’s serbs on their own land (1993)3 and lazo kostić’s the holocaust in the independent state of croatia (1981), reprinted by the serbian government. such books, as well as shorter surveys by serbian academics, perpetuated a high number of deaths, continuing the theme that serbs were victims of the worst genocide in world war ii, with only the jews and the russians ahead of them. even after the wars in croatia and bosnia, serbian interest in jasenovac continued. in the context of escalating tensions in kosovo in 1998, diaspora serbs formed a ‘jasenovac research institute’, designed to promote the ‘serbian holocaust’ in north america (jasenovac research institute http://www.jasenovac.org/index.asp). the serbian jewish friendship society and tudjman’s croatia in 1988, a group of serbian intellectuals formed the serbian-jewish friendship society (sjfs), in the hope of paralleling the plight of serbs and jews. the sjfs was headed by klara mandić, a jewish dentist who lost 73 members of her family in the holocaust. a charismatic character with long red fingernails and two gold stars of david around her neck, mandić gained increasing fame, as connections between serbs and jews were increasingly drawn by nationalist intellectuals (lebor 2002, 331). the sjfs was in large measure affiliated with the government. it had the backing of both milošević and bosnian serb leader radovan karadžić, who was even rumoured to be mandić’s lover (331). the primary goal of the sjfs was to strengthen contact between serbia and israel, relations which had soured during the communist era. activities such as city twinning were popular, with 22 twin cities between serbia and israel, where mutual activities, from 3 see a synopsis of this at the serbian unity congress website http://suc.suc.org/~kosta/tar/knjige/atlas/index.html (accessed 18 june, 1999). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 19 http://www.jasenovac.org/index.asp macdonald globalizing the holocaust sporting events to commercial transactions were encouraged. mandić brought the mayors of fifteen serbian cities to israel during the gulf war, while serbian crown prince in exile aleksander visited israel (cohen 1996, 117). other activities included a ‘serbia week’ in israel, with much help from dušan mihajlović, the future serbian minister of internal affairs (biserko). at its height, the sjfs would claim more than 5,000 members worldwide, with american chapters in chicago, new york and los angeles. the majority of members were in yugoslavia, primarily in belgrade (yearwood 1999). mandić was well known for her glowing portrayals of the serbian people, and her constant invocation of their kindness and tolerance to jews: ‘you are really one of the rare people of the world which can be counted on the fingers of one hand, a people that simply does not know how to hate’ (mandić 1993). in token of this philosemitic ideal, belgrade dedicated its first public holocaust memorial in 1990; created by jewish sculptor nandor glid (gruber 2003). north of belgrade, in zemun, the supposed ancestral home of theodor herzl was restored and turned into a museum, to show the historic ‘jewishness’ of serbia (levinsohn 1994, 199). sanu contributed by issuing two editions of predrag palavestra’s jewish writers in serbian literature, which featured the work of 67 jewish writers based in belgrade. as the ministry of information argued, the book was designed to stress that ‘the jewish challenge to all the christians in the world, especially to the orthodox serbs, should be strengthening of one’s own religious and national identity, a call to serbs to be united, in order for them, just like the jews, to preserve, strengthen and justify their existence in the world.’ jews were to be a crucial inspiration for how serbs should see themselves (serbia info news, 12 february 1999). by 1992, mandić and her colleagues went on a lecture tour of the united states, drumming up support for the serbs while demonising the croats for their supposed antisemitism. the sjfs, together with other groups such as the serbian unity congress and serbnet began actively trying to co-opt jewish public opinion in the united states. as with mandić’s strategy, this involved primarily demonizing croats as ustaša supporters, while highlighting some bosnian moslems’ support for the grand mufti of jerusalem, a portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 20 macdonald globalizing the holocaust nazi ally during world war ii (gruber 2003; blitz 1994). the key here was to demonstrate to jews that serbs had saved jews during world war ii, unlike other groups. the sjfs would promote awareness ‘of the living historical memory about genocides committed to serbs and jews since medieval ages till nowadays, especially during world war ii…’ (‘appeal by the serbian-jewish friendship society of belgrade’ 1999). their work also included highlighting croatia’s anti-semitism, including charges that croatian jews feared for their lives from the authorities.4 laslo sekelj, in a study prepared for the vidal sassoon international center for the study of anti-semitism, noted the increased ‘functionalization’ of jews taking place through the work of the sjfs: ‘the use of jews, jewish symbols, and the holocaust for political manipulation’. sekelj notes the overtly political nature of the sjfs, specifically how an ‘enormous quantity of public statements were made in support of karadzic and serb paramilitary groups in bosnia and croatia … [e]specially in attempts to legitimize serbian ethno-nationalism …’. in reality, the sjfs enjoyed little support amongst jewish groups and indeed, were instrumental in harassing anyone critical of serbian nationalism, including some jewish intellectuals (sekelj 1997). some jewish leaders did promote such pro-serbian policies, even seeing ‘serbophobia as a twin sister of anti-semitism’, with others calling america ‘a monster of this earth’. however, some coercion on the part of the government seems to have taken place.5 serbian plans, argues živković, were naïve—to curry israeli support for the ‘reconquest of kosovo’, while petitioning the ‘american jewish lobby’ to help their cause (živković, 4 ‘excerpts from the ‘war raises old anxieties for croatian jews.’ including statement by the slain jewish leader, klara mandić from: london 'independent,' 21 october, 1991’ http://emperorsclothes.com/cos/usefula2.htm; such accusations would later be countered by the president of the zagreb jewish community nenad porges, who, in turn, accused the serbs of anti-semitism and expressed support for the croatian government. see ruth gruber, ‘our yugoslavia’ (1 june, 2003, our jerusalem). http://www.ourjerusalem.com/history/story/history20030601.html. 5 other jewish leaders were also co-opted into service. in 1995 during the nato bombing of bosnia, danon cadik, chief rabbi of yugoslavia, issued an ‘open letter to the american jewish committee’ urging american jews to stop the campaign. cadik would blame the bombing on ‘unrestrained anti-serbian propaganda, raging during all this war, following the nazi model, but much more efficient means and in a much more sophisticated and more expensive way.’ danon cadik, chief rabbi of yugoslavia, et. al., ‘open letter to the american jewish committee’ (1995) http://emperorsclothes.com/articles/danon/yugorabb.html for further claims of jewish support, see serbia info news, ‘rabbi asiel: deep sorrow for our fatherland’ (belgrade: ministry of information, april 05, 1999) portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 21 http://emperors-clothes.com/cos/usefula2.htm http://emperors-clothes.com/cos/usefula2.htm http://www.ourjerusalem.com/history/story/history20030601.html http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/danon/yugorabb.html http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/danon/yugorabb.html macdonald globalizing the holocaust 2000, 74). in neither cause were they particularly successful. the society fell from favour as the milošević regime dragged on, and in 2001, mandić was murdered in her apartment in belgrade under mysterious circumstances (lebor 2002, 336). kosovo ii: 1999 in march 1999, nato began bombing yugoslavia in operation allied force, designed to stop the ethnic cleansing of kosovar albanians by serbian militia units linked to the milošević regime (daalder and o’hanlon 2000, 101). the operation lasted 78 days, culminating in the destruction of most of yugoslavia’s military and much of its civilian infrastructure (greenberg 2000, 212; daalder and o’hanlon 2000, 143-144, 209). in the context of this air campaign, the need to stress serbian-jewish linkages increased. among some diaspora groups, there was palpable anger against jews for being at the root of nato attacks. claims of jews ‘owing’ the serbs for their goodness in world war ii emerged in sjfs rhetoric during this time, reinforcing jewish duplicity. thus heather cottin’s position a month after allied force began: today is yom hashoah. today, the little nation of yugoslavia is being bombed in a blitzkrieg more deadly then any the nazis ever leveled at any nation in world war ii. the serbs, who were the only friends jews had in yugoslavia during world war ii, have been demonized and accused of genocide (cottin 1999). cottin went on to question why a ‘false analogy’ had arisen between jews and kosovar albanians, concluding that a ‘terrible manipulation’ had been perpetrated by the media and the american government (‘borba’ 15 august 1999). similarly, ljubomir tadić, president of sanu and member of the sjfs board claimed serbs as ‘victims of monstrous lies and accusations. the inflamed serbophobia is a new, modern form of nazi racism’ (yearwood 1999). a year after the kosovo campaign, william dorich would angrily accuse the world jewish congress of having ‘set the stage for public relations sponsored serbophobia throughout the 1990s.’ he further added, accusing jews of ingratitude: portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 22 macdonald globalizing the holocaust serbs can’t count on the jews to be honest anti-genocide brokers when they have never lifted a voice to recognize the thousands of serbs who share common graves with jews because those serbs were caught hiding their jewish neighbors in their attics, barns and basement during the holocaust (dorich 2000). the ‘sacru serbian-american civil rights unlimited documenting jewish genocides on serbs’ would outline a bizarre conspiracy during the conflict, blaming the ‘jewish institute for national security affairs’ for us aggression against the serbs. the ten year history of the conflict, from 1989 to 1999 is encapsulated in the actions of various us leaders, journalists and lobbyists, labeled as ‘jew’, who are seen to be at the root of american intervention in yugoslavia (‘sacru serbain-american civil rights unlimited documenting jewish genocides on serbs’, http://www.compuserb.com/sacru/) sekelj does note the rise of anti-semitism in serbia during the 1990s, as people looked for someone to blame. the protocols of the elders of zion were reprinted on several occasions, while various academics outlined jewish conspiracies, tying jews and masons together. russian recognition of croatia and slovenia was also traced to ‘the jewish lobby in the highest echelons of russian diplomacy.’ at the same time, the anti-semitic works of ratibor đurđević and orthodox bishop nikolaj velimirović were warmly received in some quarters, while rejected in others (sekelj 1997). however, despite works by ljubica stefan and philip j cohen (stefan 1993; cohen 1997) averring the deep anti-semitism of the serbian people, sekelj sees a relatively low level of anti-semitism in yugoslavia: 20.8 percent in serbia (excluding kosovo), and 15 percent in montenegro. he thus argues: ‘anti-semitism was not of major importance in the former yugoslavia, unlike the case of poland, the former soviet union, hungary, romania, and slovakia’ (sekelj 1997) živković (himself a serbian jew) similarly argues that he has not experienced any anti-semitism in his own country (živković 2000, 80). conclusions: the holocaust and classicalism as i have tried to demonstrate, the jewish trope in serbian nationalism became a central facet of national identity in the 1980s and 90s, particularly when conflicts in kosovo, portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 23 http://www.compuserb.com/sacru/ macdonald globalizing the holocaust croatia and bosnia-hercegovina began. if nationalism in this case was formed by negative, foreign myths, must we substantially alter smith’s understanding of national identity and the role of the golden age? how would a smithean analysis respond to the above criticism? i would argue that there are aspects of smith’s work which can be used to understand the holocaust’s role in nationalist mythology. this may involve going back to his ideas of classicalism as a framework for presenting national history. the holocaust needs to be interpreted as a new frame of reference, a new form of negative classicalism. as britain, america and other countries imitated the ancient greeks and romans in their presentation of the nation, so too has serbia now used a foreign frame of reference to elevate itself, even if it does not harken back to a pristine, classical époque (smith 1998; smith 1996a, 199). in his work on the growing importance of the holocaust in national identity, furedi argues that the time of positive golden ages has passed. over the past two hundred years, myths stressing the ‘unique greatness of a particular people or culture’ have been privileged, especially those promoting ‘heroic deeds and glorious events’. such myths were designed to ‘construct a positive vision of the future’. however, modern representations of history are ‘driven by a very different impulse’—acting as a ‘monument to people’s historic suffering’. the jewish holocaust emerges as ‘the icon for therapeutic history’, and ‘[t]he language associated with holocaust discourse—particularly the imager of the traumatised survivor—has been appropriated by numerous activists determined to state a claim to the status associated with emotional suffering’.(furedi 2002). at a purely practical and pragmatic level, manipulating holocaust imagery did ultimately accomplish three main goals. domestically, it rallied the people together in a time of escalating tensions and hostilities, convincing people that genocide might well be around the corner. ‘defensive’ ethnic cleansing could thus be promoted as a means of saving members of the nation from annihilation. targeting external enemies using such vitriolic language underpinned the milošević regime and allowed violent ultra-nationalism to come to the fore. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 24 macdonald globalizing the holocaust internationally, the barrage of holocaust imagery from all sides served to confuse and obscure the true identities of the perpetrators. yes, most knew that the serbs had committed the lion’s share of atrocities, with the croats in second place. yet the frequent rhetorical attacks and claims of persecution from serbs, croats, kosovar albanians and bosnian moslems served to reinforce the idea that everyone was fighting everyone else, and that the conflicts had ancient roots that could not simply be resolved by cursory negotiations or even air strikes. inaction could thus be excused. former american ambassador lawrence eagleberger’s comments were typical in this regard: ‘until the bosnians, serbs and croats decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it’. (quoted in holbrooke 1998, 23). a third goal concerned the jewish people themselves, domestically in the rump of yugoslavia, as well as in america and in israel. such imagery was targeted to gain jewish sympathy and support for the serbian cause. it did work in israel to some extent, as discussed previously. negative imagery against croatia was also designed to reduce israeli and american support for this breakaway republic. this was also effective to some extent, although tudjman’s writings and speeches did more to alienate the israelis than any serbian undertaking. in these ways, holocaust imagery served the serbian nation in time of war, although it took an obvious destructive toll on democracy, human rights and the rule of law. whether such a framework for analysing history will be useful in times of peace is debatable. i would argue that in the post-milošević era, such imagery has become less welcome and less interesting for those struggling to overcome a decade of crippling sanctions, worldwide condemnation, violence, and corruption. reference list alter, p. 1992, nationalism, edward arnold, london. anderson, b. 1987, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, verso, london. andersson, h. 9 april 1999, ‘israel divided on kosovo’, bbc news. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 25 macdonald globalizing the holocaust anzulović, b. 1999, heavenly serbia: from myth to genocide, c. hurst & company, london. avramov, s. 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‘the wish to be a jew: the power of the jewish trope in the yugoslav conflict’, cahiers de l’urmis, no 6. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 31 http://emperors-clothes.com/cos/usefula2.htm http://www.jasenovac.org/whatwasjasenovac/index.asp http://www.jewishworldreview.com/ http://www.jewishworldreview.com/ http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0499/serb.jews1.asp portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 18, no. 1/2 sep 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: ghosh, d., davidson, l. s. 2022. boundaries and crossings: religious fluidity in twenty-first century india. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 18:1/2, 66–69. https:// doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i12.8245 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal introduction boundaries and crossings: religious fluidity in twenty-first century india devleena ghosh, lola sharon davidson corresponding author(s): honorary professor devleena ghosh, school of communication, faculty of arts and social sciences, university of technology sydney, 15 broadway ultimo nsw 2007, australia, devleena.ghosh@uts.edu.au; lola sharon davidson, research associate, school of communication, faculty of arts and social sciences, university of technology sydney, 15 broadway ultimo nsw 2007, lola.davidson@uts.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.8245 article history: received 19/06/2022; accepted 02/09/2022; published 27/09/2022 abstract following partition, newly independent india adopted a constitution based on secularism and rights for minorities. in recent years, under the bharatiya janata party government, this model of society has been steadily eroded and supplanted by one favouring hindu nationalism. this shift has changed the ways in which various religious communities relate to each other as well as their relationship with the state. in this special issue, we examine how these social and political shifts have impacted on the willingness of individuals to engage across religious boundaries and highlight instances of continuing religious cosmopolitanism. keywords indian religions; hindu nationalism; inter-religious worship; sufism, sikhism, islam/muslims in april 2020, the u.s. commission on international religious freedom designated india as a ‘country of particular concern’ for the first time since 2004 (klocek 2020). this followed rising religious and sectarian conflict in india in the last decade. these tensions have been exacerbated by the citizenship amendment act (caa) passed in december 2019, which conflates a person’s religion with their citizenship. before the covid-19 pandemic locked down the economy and created major upheavals among the poor, especially migrant workers, the caa sparked widespread opposition and protest both within india and abroad. subsequently, trade unions, opposition parties and activists came together across religious and 66 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.8245 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.8245 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.8245 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:devleena.ghosh@uts.edu.au mailto:lola.davidson@uts.edu.au https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.8245 caste divides to support the protests by farmers against the agricultural policy of prime minister narendra modi’s bharatiya janata party (bjp) (ghosh 2020). the policies and measures put into place by the bjp under modi have undoubtedly led to an increase in religious discrimination and violence within india. these developments raise crucial questions for scholars, policy makers and activists. are there indian versions of religious boundary crossings? fazal rizvi, for example, refers to the kiski kahani project in pune, india, which brings together stories from the ramayana, a south asian epic, that subvert the grand discourse of hindu nationalism by highlighting the liminal, fragmentary and improvised versions of the epic (rizvi & choo 2020). such nuances are increasingly elided in modern india where the epic is invoked to destroy mosques supposedly built on rama’s birthplace. amrita basu, on the other hand, argues that there was never ‘an ideal, golden age of unblemished democracy in india’ and that ‘although india describes itself as a secular, democratic nation, several constitutional provisions and laws, including anti-conversion and cow protection legislation, fuel anti-minority sentiment’ (2018: 44). the nature of anti-minority violence has also changed, no longer instigated predominantly by political parties but by many different groups. rumours that christians are forcibly converting hindus, or that muslims are consuming beef, are often a pretext for violence which, although the result of long-term hindu nationalist organizing and propaganda, presents itself as spontaneous and erratic (basu 2018). interfaith tensions in india have escalated to a point where the manifold dangers of politically motivated religious polarization are unmistakable. sudipta kaviraj (2010) argued that in pre-census colonial india, communities identified themselves by region, caste, religion, or profession; that is, they were ‘fuzzy,’ contingent, contextual and flexible. the implementation of the census coded, categorized, compartmentalized, and constituted communities into ‘enumerative’ categories. the fundamental ideological proposition of hindu nationalism is to replace an inclusive republic of ‘fuzzy communities’ with the ideal of india as a hindu nation. india’s famous propensity for joint worship and ritual engagement across religious boundaries thus appears increasingly imperiled. for many of india’s communities, the range of permissible ritual practices had already been reduced by a century of religious reform—whether in the shape of sanskritization, or by reformist movements such as the arya samaj, tablighi jama’at or newer movements with international backing. tribal communities practicing animism have been pressured to redefine themselves as hindu or simply recategorized as such by the indian census, even when, through the development of organizational structures, they have taken pains to assert their distinctive ethnic religious identity. since the landslide victories of the bharatiya janata party in 2014 and 2019, hindu nationalist organizations have also promoted upper-caste sensibilities as a ‘new normality’ which construes even the slightest religious transgression as inappropriate, impermissible or even offensive. the general impression is that india’s diverse population is increasingly apprehensive of venturing beyond ‘their own’ ritual spaces, practices and deities. aviraj’s ‘fuzzy’ identities appear to be disappearing before our eyes. simultaneously, however, there are contrasting reports about religious boundary crossings that recall past periods of communal harmony. the numerous stories that circulate on mainstream and digital media demonstrate that this complex country still exhibits a propensity for interreligious ritual engagement which complicates the countless reports that document a steady decline in interfaith relations. recent research shows that ritual engagement across ‘official’ religious boundaries remains surprisingly common by flying under the radar. the analysis of this phenomenon, however, requires a broader methodological repertoire than the conventional methods of witnessing public festivals or doing fieldwork in shared religious shrines, such as the archetypical sufi dargahs. ellwood-lowe et al. in their fascinating article argue that hindu children in their study showed a strong bias to equate being indian with being hindu while muslim children of all ages strongly identified with both being indian and their religion (2019: 1384). they found that children’s friendship networks tended to be segregated on the basis of religion, and that the internalization of the association between religion ghosh and davidson portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202267 and nationalism was associated with social segregation of religious groups. however, they caution against pessimistic conclusions suggesting that ‘even in a region with a history of religious conflicts, and among children who exhibit intergroup religious bias, it is possible for minority children to develop inclusive associations and beliefs of what it means to be a citizen of their country’ (ellwood-lowe et al. 2019: 1391). the ongoing protests against the caa have demonstrated that some issues are capable of bringing together people of different belief systems and faiths. in this special issue, we have called on a group of scholars who draw on a broad array of research methods to study interfaith ritual engagement in present day india. we seek to answer such questions as what explains the persisting appeal of religious spaces and practices associated with religious communities other than one’s own? which religious communities and social segments remain conducive to religious fluidity, and which ones require concealment, if not erasure of ‘other’ practices and beliefs? finally, how do we analyze the long-standing coexistence between everyday religious fluidity and religio-political tension? given that the active promotion by the bjp of a political agenda linking national unity with a narrowly defined version of hinduism is the primary force driving the deepening of religious divisions in modern india, we begin our special issue with naomi goldenberg’s examination of the relationship between religion and the state. goldenberg argues that, through the process of colonization, subjected societies may find their cultures consigned to the category of religion, where they may yet persist as something like vestigial states, or perhaps more accurately as ‘once and future states.’ it is this colonial construction of hinduism which modi draws upon in the service of his nationalist objective. the following papers present case studies of religious engagement across sectarian lines, an engagement that has long been customary in india, but which is now under threat from the hardening of boundaries promoted by the political program of the bjp. ronie parciack and rita brara examine religious mixing at mazaars in new delhi. these are roadside shrines marking the graves of generally anonymous sufi holy men. the shrines invariably feature a large tree for shade and are tended by a guardian. in stark contrast to the patriarchal organization of the large muslim shrines, some of which even deny women access to the inner sanctum, some mazaars have female guardians and some even have hindu guardians, while the devotees span the full spectrum of religious faiths. the mazaars are also notable for their success in resisting the power of the state, whose legislation and urban planning projects persistently seek their destruction. one reason for the popularity of mazaars across religious groups is the widespread belief that the entombed saint, being still spiritually present at the shrine, is more inclined to provide help with mundane problems than a more distant deity. as kathinka frøystad explains, modi’s very project of associating a normalized hinduism with an economically and technologically progressive nationalism generates inevitable tensions and contradictions. individuals find themselves beset by the conflicting pressures arising from rapid social change, frustrated by the inevitable failure of unrealizable expectations and deprived of increasingly marginalized traditional ritual remedies. in seeking relief from their problems, frøystad’s subjects find themselves constrained to move outside their accepted religious sphere into that of the transgressive other. in so doing, they must implicitly accept the power of the other, whether it be a muslim healer’s ability to counter the sorcery of hindu in-laws, or a hindu ghost’s possession of a muslim girl. while the hindu and muslim communities are the largest of india’s various religious groupings, and the ones most obviously and directly destabilized by modi’s politics, they are far from being the only ones. the problematic nature of sikhism’s relationship with the indian state became painfully clear in 1984 when the indian army attacked sikh separatists occupying the darbar sahib, one of the most sacred of sikh shrines. radhika chopra’s analysis of the presentation, or rather curation, of exhibits in the central sikh museum and of souvenirs for sale in the bazaar around the darbar sahib reveals continuing competing discourses on the relationship of sikhism to the indian state. the shopkeepers carefully curate their wares to maintain a religious hierarchy, placing the images of the gurus above the worldly ideals of popular singers ghosh and davidson portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202268 and sportsmen and plump boy babies. within this hierarchy the positioning of sikh martyrs, and especially of the more recent, is necessarily controversial. whereas one shop may choose to display portraits of the martyred leader of the 1984 insurrection, across the street another shop will prefer a sikh executed by the colonizing british during the indian nationalist struggle. that modi’s politics have hardened religious boundaries and widened the gulf between religious communities seems obvious. what is the meaning, and indeed the future, of religious crossings in such an environment? devleena ghosh has followed the impact of these political shifts on the religiously heterogenous worshippers at the shrine of the holy infant jesus in the rapidly expanding it city of bangalore. the holy infant jesus is so popular with non-christian devotees seeking the granting of boons that a separate shrine has been set aside for them next to the roman catholic church. the religious practices at the shrine present a syncretic aspect, greatly resembling those at hindu temples. the shrine is predominantly attended by christians and hindus but is also frequented by muslims, particularly women. during the fieldwork period, the priest changed from welcoming all comers to becoming defensive about the possibility of conversions. some hindu worshippers began to worry that excessive syncretism might risk their religion being corrupted by christianity and muslim women started to conceal their religious identity as they came under pressure from their menfolk to abandon the shrine. the conflation of standardized hinduism and indian nationalism promoted by the bjp has not succeeded in suppressing the tradition of cosmopolitanism which has long characterized the indian approach to religion. at the ground roots, resistance continues but the strains are increasingly making themselves felt. the future remains, necessarily, uncertain. references basu, a. 2018, ‘whither democracy, secularism, and minority rights in india?’ review of faith & international affairs, vol. 16, no. 4: 34–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2018.1535035 ellwood-lowe, m. e., berner, c., durham, y. & srinivasan, m. 2019, ‘indian = hindu? the development of nationalist attitudes among hindu and muslim children in india,’ child development, vol. 91, no. 4: 1–20. https://doi. org/10.1111/cdev.13311 ghosh, j. 2020, ‘farmers vs. the indian state,’ project syndicate, 11 december. online, available: https://www.projectsyndicate.org/commentary/india-farmer-protests-government-reaction-by-jayati-ghosh-2020-12 [accessed 19 june 2022]. kaviraj, s. 2010. the imaginary institution of india, colombia university press, new york. https://doi.org/10.7312/ kavi15222 klocek, j. 2020, ‘combatting religious discrimination in india and beyond: as india’s new citizenship law escalates religious tensions, a new usip project seeks a comprehensive solution, united states institute of peace, 13 may. online, available: https://www.usip.org/publications/2020/05/combatting-religious-discrimination-india-and-beyond [accessed 19 june 2022]. rizvi, f. & choo, s. s. 2020, ‘education and cosmopolitanism in asia: an introduction,’ asia pacific journal of education, vol. 40, no. 1: 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2020.1725282 ghosh and davidson portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202269 https://doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2018.1535035 https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13311 https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13311 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/india-farmer-protests-government-reaction-by-jayati-ghosh-2020-12 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/india-farmer-protests-government-reaction-by-jayati-ghosh-2020-12 https://doi.org/10.7312/kavi15222 https://doi.org/10.7312/kavi15222 https://www.usip.org/publications/2020/05/combatting-religious-discrimination-india-and-beyond https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2020.1725282 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 17, no. 1/2 jan 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: riseman, n. 2021. how my covid-19 disruption became my privileged boom time. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 17:1/2, 73–78. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis. v17i1-2.7491 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal essay how my covid-19 disruption became my privileged boom time noah riseman corresponding author: professor noah riseman, school of arts, australian catholic university, 115 victoria parade, fitzroy, victoria 3065, australia. noah.riseman@acu.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7491 article history: received 17/07/2020; accepted 05/11/2020, published 28/01/2021 abstract i was meant to spend the first half of 2020 on research study leave at the university of cologne. my partner and i rushed back to australia in mid-march, disrupting our plans and forcing me into a new working paradigm. the disruption wound up sending me into one of the most productive periods of my career. in this article, i reflect on how my privileges— both earned and unearned— have contributed to a boom in my academic work at the same time that it has wreaked havoc on the entire sector. i also reflect on how covid-19 has exposed and exacerbated inequalities in australian universities. keywords covid-19; privilege; higher education it all happened so fast. monday morning, 16 march, i went into my office to print a few documents, anticipating that the university of cologne would soon shut down. the cafeteria (mensa) was especially empty that day, with notices that they would be closed from wednesday. tuesday morning. my partner and i woke up to news that prime minister scott morrison advised all australians overseas who intend to return home to do so as soon as possible. but that was not us; we were not going home until the end of august, and surely we would be fine in germany. we could wait this pandemic out. wednesday morning and a covid-19 update from australian catholic university (acu). the second section: ‘acu is asking all students and staff who are overseas to return to australia as soon as possible.’ but surely we could still stay in germany, where the health system was managing the pandemic well. i emailed the dean and head of school seeking advice. no response. it was after 5:00pm declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 73 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7491 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7491 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7491 mailto:noah.riseman%40acu.edu.au?subject= http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v17i1-2.7491 in australia, but these people check their emails all the time. what was going on? wednesday night, 11:00pm in germany: qantas announced that they would stop flying internationally in the next few weeks. that was it. we may have felt safe in germany, but we did not want to be stranded. by 3:00am we had booked flights leaving from dusseldorf the next day. we landed in australia friday night— after the borders had closed— but we are both australian citizens so that was not a problem. that week was only the beginning of my covid-19 experience. the virus has disrupted lives across the planet; in the large scheme of things, though, my partner and i count ourselves lucky. we are healthy; we are in melbourne where we have emerged from our second lockdown with a sense of cautious optimism for the summer. we both have jobs, and high-paying ones at that, which also means we could afford unforeseen expenses (like two last-minute, one-way tickets from germany to australia and rent in a two-bedroom apartment in the docklands). we also have encountered goodwill from landlords, tenants, neighbours, friends and family. in an unexpectedly warped way, i have actually found myself more productive than normal. still, it has been a journey (and one which is not over yet). this is my story of how covid-19 disrupted my semester overseas and, for me at least, proved not to be a great equaliser but rather augmented several of my privileges— both earned and unearned. my partner and i arrived in cologne on 23 january. i was to spend the next six months on research study leave from acu, based at the centre for australian studies at the university of cologne. this was an exciting prospect. i have been friends with staff from that research centre since 2016, and i delivered a guest seminar there in 2018. this semester was an opportunity to collaborate on a project that would combine my background in australian history with the cologne staff ’s background in literature, cinema and cultural studies. we won a 2020-21 universities australia-daad australia-germany joint co-operation scheme grant for a project entitled ‘whom do we remember? exploring cultural narratives of war and migration.’1 the grant was funding a series of workshops and travel from our respective universities, as each researcher would be looking at different ways that literature, art, drama and cinema included and excluded social groups from national narratives of war and immigration. my particular interest was to look at how popular fiction— especially gay romance and erotic fiction— has depicted gay and bisexual australian servicemen (see riseman 2020). while in cologne, i also planned to write up material from my ongoing arc discovery project on the history of transgender australians and to finalise the manuscript for my new co-authored book pride in defence: the australian military and lgbti service since 1945 (2020). of course, i had a lot more planned for my time in cologne. i was scheduled to deliver five guest lectures in three classes. these were on topics ranging from the aboriginal tent embassy, to the history of jewish immigration through to general overviews of australian indigenous history. i also arranged for two friends from australia who were passing through europe to deliver guest seminars in june. my colleagues in the centre for australian studies put me in touch with the head of cologne’s gender studies program, who scheduled me to deliver a public lecture on the history of transgender military service in australia (which was timed around cologne pride). i was in touch with colleagues in poland, the netherlands and other universities in germany and had guest public lectures lined up across the german semester from april-july. mixed in with all of this was going to be some travel with my partner (including a long-desired pilgrimage to eurovision in rotterdam). in the end we only had just under two months in cologne. in that short time we already were making friends, had enjoyed the week-long party that is karneval (and where i took a strong liking to kolsch songs), and were just beginning to get a real feel for life in cologne. while i went to work, my partner explored the city and was enrolled in intermediate level german classes. he even started training with the 1 as of november 2020, acu still has not sorted the agreement for this grant and we have not received a single dollar. yet, the university is refusing to let us carry forward the 2020 funds which we never received. riseman portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202174 rheinland lions: cologne’s aussie rules’ football team, which we discovered on our first weekend because they trained less than 500 metres from our apartment. covid-19 ended all of these plans. the staff at the centre for australian studies were very understanding about our situation and our hasty departure. still, there were a lot of uncertainties, changes and challenges that my partner and i had to navigate— and again i count us as privileged that we were able to do so relatively unscathed. for instance, our house in melbourne was rented out through the end of august, so we needed to find a place to live. at about 2:00am on the evening before our rushed departure, i found what looked like a pretty good airbnb in docklands that was heavily discounted (covid-19 had already taken its toll on the tourism market). what was most attractive was the large outdoor space, as we would have to spend the first fourteen days in isolation. but the manager rang me the next morning and said he had made an error and the apartment would not be available until the morning after we arrived. he had another place we could stay for the first night if that was okay. fine (and that first place was absolutely awful— thank goodness it was only for one night!). once we were in melbourne, we negotiated to stay in the flat until the end of august, but with the option of leaving early as long as we gave two weeks’ notice. we arrived in melbourne before the government implemented mandatory hotel quarantine. i do not know how my partner and i would have coped being cooped up in one room together for two weeks. that said, i fully support the decision to bring in the mandatory quarantine. when we arrived at the airport, we only had to fill out a form advising where we would be self-isolating for the two weeks (we put the address of where we were staying the first night because we did not know the other address). that was it— no enforcement or other precautions were taken at the airport. it did not surprise me when the news reported people breaching the self-isolation edict (for the record: aside from the move from that first apartment after our first night, we never broke the self-isolation and stayed in our rented apartment with its spacious patio). then there was the return to work and this is where my covid-19 journey has been anything but an equaliser. i was receiving emails from colleagues, administrators and the union talking about the disruptions to acu campus life, shifts to online learning and health advice. none of this affected me because i was not teaching. i already had all of the primary and secondary sources i needed to conduct my research and write because i had already planned on doing that in cologne. so, with nothing else to do but watch netflix (which i have certainly done plenty of ), i got to work and spent the normal working hours researching and writing. very quickly my partner and i got into a rhythm, and i thrive on routine so the pandemic actually helped my work ethic. working in close proximity to my partner was eye-opening for both of us. we were fortunate that he was able to return from unpaid leave to his public service job five months earlier than originally planned. this meant doubling our income almost immediately— again a marker of our privileged positions. in the docklands flat we set up a home office for him in the lounge room with a desk and chair, while i happily worked on the sofa in the background. i would sit quietly while he had many meetings and phone conversations. i would generally go outside for my meetings because they were less frequent and less formal. he never realised how solitary academic work could be or how ‘in the zone’ i get when i write. i finally saw what he actually ‘does’ in his job, and especially was impressed with his style mentoring and supervising more junior staff. when i say i have been productive during covid-19 i do not exaggerate. as i sat to write this, i tried to tally all of the work i have done since returning to australia in march and could not recall it all. but here is the list of what i do remember: researching and writing two journal articles and one book chapter over four months (on top of two articles completed before i left cologne); assessing several arc linkage and special research initiative in australian society, history and culture grant applications; finalising the manuscript for my new book, including the copyediting and proofing; examining one mphil thesis and refereeing five publications; assessing my first marsden fund grant application (new zealand’s equivalent riseman portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202175 to the arc); preparing a rejoinder for an arc discovery application, as well as commenting on drafts of colleagues’ rejoinders; preparing to convene the international australian studies association (inasa) conference, including making arrangements to move it from november/december 2020 to february 2021 and shifting it online; delivering four guest lectures via zoom for my colleagues at cologne, a public lecture to adam mickiewicz university in poland, and a seminar to the melbourne feminist history group; delivering a webinar on lgbti military service to veterans associations and service providers from around the world; being on the panel for three hdr candidature review processes as well as supporting two of my own hdr students through confirmation and one through a completion seminar; writing two book reviews; going through approximately 92,000+ digitised index cards and requesting access to over 1,500 records at the national archives of australia; commencing preliminary research for an arc future fellowship application next year; conducting oral history interviews via zoom and/or ms teams; liaising with lgbti veterans to progress a push for a formal apology for past discrimination; preparing various letters and submissions relating to the government’s higher education reforms and the arc’s review into era and ei; being elected to and serving on acu academic board; and working with colleagues to set up an lgbtiq+ ally network at acu. i am proud of doing all of this while in iso, particularly because traditionally i have never been a workfrom-home person. yet, i know that i could only achieve so much in these circumstances because of numerous privileges which not all academics share: • i have a continuing position as a professor, which makes me one of australia’s top income earners. money and job security have not been problems for my partner or me, whereas casual academics have lost jobs and/or faced anxiety around looming job cuts and fewer employment opportunities in the tertiary sector. • we do not have children. this is not in any way to take away from the joys of parenthood, but it means that i have not had to facilitate remote learning or be a full-time academic and full-time parent. i have nothing to do but work. • this year i am in a research only role. i have not had to manage the transition to online learning, support the mental health and wellbeing of students and deal with the uncertainties of what will happen next. • my research projects are all at different stages, which has meant plenty of material to write up and other opportunities to commence pilot research from digital sources. • as a historian, i do not require laboratory facilities and can work from home. the closing of archives does affect my work, but fortunately there is so much digital material out there that i have had no problem continuing to research (and at my request the acu library subscribed to the new archives of sexuality and gender database). i have been able to conduct oral history interviews via zoom and ms teams, and hopefully i will be able to travel interstate early next year to access on-site records. my partner and i managed to navigate the financial and logistical challenges that rushing back to australia caused— and luck and goodwill have been on our side. we had paid in advance for our apartment in cologne so were out of pocket by about $7,500 when we had to rush back. the owner was travelling and rushed back to germany around the same time that we left. she kindly refunded almost all of the money we had paid in advance. the tenants who rented our house in melbourne were still working and continued to pay rent. we informed them that we were back and that if they left early we would waive the penalty for breaking the lease. we later offered them a rent discount to leave early. they declined the discount, saying they did not want our money, but left two months early anyways because they bought a house. so after 3.5 months we were able to leave the docklands flat and return home (and just before lockdown 2.0 began— so not a moment too soon). after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, acu’s travel insurance refunded my expensive riseman portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202176 one-way ticket from germany back to australia, and my partner’s travel insurance refunded all of our other cancelled travel. i tell this story to demonstrate that the effects of covid-19 on academia have been incredibly uneven. my output productivity is booming (although acu is still reducing my 2021 research allocation by 320 hours or .2 fte because i supposedly have not published in sufficiently high quality outlets— but that is another article for another day). meanwhile, staff with bigger teaching commitments have not been given adequate support to transition to online learning. those professional and academic staff with children or carer responsibilities— disproportionately women— have seen their productivity drop because they have far less time to do the double shift. staff in ‘essential’ roles have had to put their health at risk by continuing to work on campus. reflecting on my privileges and the gaps within australian academia as covid-19 wreaks havoc on the sector has been challenging. some of my privileges are unearned, most prominently being white, male, cisgender and born into an upper middle-class background. my entire life and career have been successful because of a mix of hard work, strategic networks and a bit of luck, with my privileges sometimes opening doors or— more importantly— not putting up roadblocks. but at the same time, i have worked hard to get where i am. the reason i was research only this year and have climbed the ranks to professor at such a (relatively) young age is because i have played the academia game well: publishing in the ‘right’ places, writing competitive grant applications, delivering on the promised outputs and building professional and community networks. i have been fortunate to have some amazing mentors (special shout-outs to professors shurlee swain and pat grimshaw) and colleagues (the entire history and arts crew at acu). i know that not every academic has those privileges, so i live my career by the adage of paying it forward: working to support junior colleagues and advocating for them in whatever forums are available. i am also very conscious of the storm that is devastating higher education in australia. across the sector we are witnessing huge job losses, with casual and more junior staff being the first in the firing lines. at other universities where there have been redundancies, academic and professional staff have had to apply for their own jobs and lived with heightened anxiety as they face uncertain futures. the sector has been split down the middle over whether staff should voluntarily take pay cuts to pay and other conditions to support jobs (and neither the nteu nor university administrations have handled this challenging issue well). for most of the year acu seemed like we were weathering this storm. we have a smaller international student cohort and the university is projecting a surplus of $46.4 million over the period 2020-22. still, the university has announced plans to cut $42 million in staff costs or up to 174 fte jobs. i am working with the nteu to fight this unnecessary measure, but it is a tough fight. i worry how these proposed job cuts will affect me and my colleagues in the school of arts, particularly in the wake of the government’s higher education reforms which will see student fees for most humanities units increase by 113%. acu has a high percentage of low socio-economic status or first in family students— something which we are rightfully proud of— but that means we are more vulnerable to price signals than more prestigious institutions. if from 2021 we have fewer students and less teaching in our humanities units, and if the university continues to prioritise supporting research in institutes (which has certainly been the strategy for the last seven years), then where does that leave my colleagues and me? reflecting on the bigger picture, covid-19 has not created inequities within academia: rather, it has exposed and accelerated problems which have been brewing for decades. as my colleague hannah forsyth explains in a history of the modern australian university (2014), except for a brief period when higher education expanded dramatically in the early 1970s, there was never a mythical time when phd graduates were finding it easy to get jobs. yet, the expectations to secure work have been getting harder. when i finished my phd in 2008, to be competitive for a level b position in the humanities you needed to have a riseman portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202177 few journal publications and a clear plan to publish your thesis and apply for grant funding. now it seems that to be even considered for a level b position, you need to have: • published journal articles only in a*/a ranked journals; • a book contract or book with a top academic publisher (at my university you are unlikely to get a look in unless it is with oxford, cambridge, chicago or an ivy league press); • teaching experience preferably as a lecturer-in-charge; • some experience securing grant funding; • proof of engagement and impact activities, such as partnerships or other work with end users. on the one hand, these sound like ridiculously high standards; but the difficult reality is that there are candidates who meet these standards and it is a buyer’s market for universities. all that covid-19 is likely to do is raise this bar even higher: fewer positions will mean that universities can be even choosier. covid-19 has not driven this agenda. rather, universities focus their resources to improve their international rankings and attain scores of 4 and 5 in era (trakakis 2020). universities want to hire strong researchers; when those researchers are successful (such as myself ), they teach less. that sounds fair enough, but still someone has to do the teaching, which is why so much of the work force has been casualised. so long as era exists i do not foresee anything changing the sector approach to hiring— which, unfortunately, is not an optimistic note on which to end. it also does not help that we have a government hostile to universities, and politicians and commentators across the board have little understanding of the many intersecting mechanisms that drive university managerialism (e.g. era, teqsa, arc expectations, engagement and impact, international metrics, journal rankings, funding agreements). that said, i would like to give a shout-out and thank you to senator jacqui lambie, whose statements about the recently passed higher education reforms nailed why so many of us working in the sector opposed them. my covid-19 experience shows that even with international disruptions, some of us academics have thrived – but now even we find ourselves in a precarious position as we enter the unknown world of 2021. covid-19 has exposed and accelerated the great inequities of our tertiary sector, which has been held flimsily on the backs of casual teaching and international student fees. now is anyone in power willing to listen and fix it? references forsyth, h. 2014, a history of the modern australian university. unsw press, randwick. riseman, n. 2020, ‘intimatopias and the queering of australian war fiction,’ continuum: journal of media and cultural studies [published online 30 september 2020]. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2020.1827371 riseman, n. & robinson, s. 2020, pride in defence: the australian military and lgbti service since 1945. melbourne university press, melbourne. trakakis, n. n. 2020, ‘wayne’s world: how universities are crushing academics,’ abc religion and ethics, online, available: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/universities-in-crises-and-what-to-do-about-it/12714252 [accessed 5 november 2020]. riseman portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 17, no. 1/2 january 202178 https://twitter.com/jacquilambie/status/1313949072559013888 https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2020.1827371 https://www.abc.net.au/religion/universities-in-crises-and-what-to-do-about-it/12714252 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 18, no. 1/2 sep 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: brara, r., parciack, r. 2022. the edgeways of faith: the space and language of in-betweenness in new delhi’s roadside mazaars. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 18:1/2, 79–95. https:// doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i12.7810 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal research article (peer reviewed) the edgeways of faith: the space and language of in-betweenness in new delhi’s roadside mazaars rita brara1, ronie parciack2 1 institute of economic growth, university of delhi; ashoka university 2 tel aviv university corresponding author(s): rita brara, senior fellow, institute of economic growth, university of delhi enclave, delhi. visiting professor, ashoka university, sonipat, india, ritabrara@yahoo.com; ronie parciack, senior lecturer, department of east-asian studies, tel aviv university, haim levanon street, ramat aviv, tel aviv, israel 6997801, parciack@tauex.tau.ac.il, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0544-292x doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7810 article history: received 02/07/2021; accepted 24/02/2022; published 27/09/2022 abstract this article focuses on the vernacular spaces of roadside tombs—or mazaars—of anonymous saints (commonly referred to as ‘zinda pir baba’) in the heart of the contemporary indian capital, new delhi. these mazaars are located along the megacity’s main roads and constitute a shared space where hindus, muslims, and sikhs perform rituals in ways that do not classify or identify them as members of rival religious communities. the custodians of grave-shrines shape and reshape social and religious inclusiveness along vernacular and contemporary planes. simultaneously, the makeshift environments of grave-shrines create a space of in-betweenness that ruptures gender roles, sidelines histories of power, and contests urban planning in india’s capital city. keywords india; delhi; communalism; grave-shrines; mazaar; gender introduction we saw a grave-shrine by a roadside on a thursday night in the winter of 2017, glowing with lighted lamps and covered with an embellished cloth, and it drove our curiosity. we heard visitors and caretakers recount their experiences there just after they had made their wishes, 79 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7810 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7810 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7810 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:ritabrara@yahoo.com mailto:parciack@tauex.tau.ac.il https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0544-292x https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7810 with contrasting supplicatory gestures that we associated with distinctive islamic and hindu faiths, and we were astonished. we listened to anecdotes about pir babas but never encountered the word ‘sufi’ from the mouths of our storytellers. we glimpsed a fleeting motorcycle rider bow in the direction of the shrine, marking the moment before he moved on. and that is how we learned about the space and language of worship across religious divides at roadside grave-shrines in new delhi and its nuances in the present (snehi 2019b). this article focuses on an arena of vernacular spaces comprising roadside mazaars—or shrines—of anonymous saints (commonly referred to as shrines of ‘zinda pir’ who is believed to inhabit the shrine)1 in the heart of india’s capital new delhi.2 these mazaars are visited by large audiences on thursday evenings (urdu: jummah raat), usually to make ritual offerings of flowers (mostly marigolds or rose petals), and votive objects such as candles/earthen lamps or chaddars (cloth coverings for the tombstone), while praying for boons pertaining to health, livelihoods or life’s other complications. islamic symbols dominate the visual aspects of roadside mazaars, such as tiles printed with images of mecca and medina, the islamic crescent and star, verses from the quran, and the number ‘786’ (which is believed to be a shorthand for the quranic expression bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim—‘in the name of god, the most gracious, the most merciful’). yet these shrines also attract devotees attesting non-islamic religious affiliations. a roadside mazaar on jummah raat. delhi 2017; © ronie parciack 1 falasch (2016: 63) writes similarly of a grave-shrine in uttar pradesh: ‘legends speak of perceptions of the saint virtually residing in his tomb …’ 2 the number of pir baba grave-shrines has increased in the city and there are now more of them than the 80 dargahs of venerated and well-known sufis (hifzur-rahman 2011: xv). although it is not possible for us to provide an accurate count, roadside grave-shrines (and other religious sites in public spaces, such as temples housing hindu deities) are now a dominant feature of the city’s roadscape. brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202280 ‘it’s hard to imagine that india’s political capital and power base delhi was known through much of history not as the seat of kings and rulers but as a shrine of great saints,’ writes vikramjit singh ruprai (2017: 1) at the beginning of his article ‘the sufi heart of delhi.’ but that is how it still seemed to us as we explored the roadside shrines at the very core of new delhi, dotted as it is with the graves of pir babas. in consonance with michel boivin (2016: 5), we began to wonder if there was ‘a specific kind of sainthood in the shrines,’ one that was anonymous, undocumented, and unsung except through the believers that show up on thursday nights. these grave-shrines, which occupy roadsides and marginal spaces in the city, contrast with the majestic domed structures of the famous entombed pirs, often with attached hospices (khanqahs), mosques, madrasas (schools for islamic learning), and bustling bazaars of the well-known dargahs elsewhere in delhi (parveen 2014). while the mazaars we studied are located alongside the megacity’s central vista and major traffic arteries close to the indian parliament and adjoining government offices, these shrines foster a world that appears detachable from formal institutions, whether these be state organisations deciding upon urban design or gendered religious bodies. far from the rigid categorization by religion that underpins contemporary india’s socio-political atmosphere and recent legislation— emphasizing the discourse of hindu religious nationalism and citizenry3—participation at these shrines remains fluid and looks beyond the exacerbation of communal hostility after the partition (ahmed 2002) and the rise of the hindu right. reports of atrocities against muslims are commonly attested and evidenced in newspapers and law courts. recent writings have highlighted the sharpening of religious boundaries, the communal turn, and the intimidation of muslims in india (snehi 2019a; boivin 2019). there is no doubt that these incidents are increasing. and yet, what we encountered at the roadside mazaars surprised us. these grave-shrines still attract people across faiths and speak of diverging practices within the preponderant hindu tradition. the roadside mazaars foster a space and language of in-betweenness across religious divides and, through the intercession of zinda pirs, contest contemporary practices of power, gender and urban design in the indian capital. located in open spaces, roadside mazaars employ their accessibility in innovative ways, and in so doing promote a radical grammar of interreligious becomings in delhi’s socio-religious context. in this essay, we employ methods that draw upon qualitative cultural anthropology, comparative religion as well as gender and urban studies to explore the culture of roadside mazaars. we selected 14 roadside shrines for intensive study, most of which are located within a two-kilometre radius from the central vista known as rajpath in new delhi. we also contrast the environment of the larger and more institutionalized dargah compounds in central delhi with the habitus of roadside mazaars. the latter shrines are accessible at all times, but the most significant period for worship at pir baba shrines is thursday night (jummah raat), that is, the beginning of friday, since the day in islamic terms stretches from sunset to sunset. devotees start arriving on thursday evenings and some stay on for an hour or more and others might just make fleeting visits, but this was certainly the most informative period for our fieldwork. singing, reciting quranic verses, making offerings, seeking counselling services on thursday nights and a langar-bhandar (community feast) on the pir baba’s urs (annual death anniversary celebration) are events open to all. the only written material we were ever offered was the invitation to the urs. we present three axes along which the power of the zinda pir is regarded as a counter to the force exercised by the state and dominant religious orders: the communal divide along religious lines, the patriarchal, gendered order of established religious institutions, and the hyperlocal narratives that impact the urban design proposed by state institutions. in what follows, we start by analysing the spatial settings of 3 see, for example, the citizenship amendment act (caa) that was signed into law on december 2019, and the related legislation pertaining to the national register of citizens (nrc) and the national population register (npr) which differentiate indian citizens on religious grounds and are designed to re-organise and homogenise indian society by intensifying its exclusivist hindu demography and character. brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202281 roadside mazaars; next, we explore the interreligious and gendered aspects of caretaking at the shrine and then bring to light incidents where the intercession by the zinda pir is seen to challenge the might of state officials in the city. ‘if the shrine,’ as michel boivin (2016) put it, ‘was framed by the urban, in return the urban was also framed by the shrine,’ in the contests that the shrines posed to state authority. roadside mazaars and the grammar of open space roadside mazaars, as the term indicates, are located more often than not along pavements adjoining prime traffic arteries throughout central delhi and, though less frequently, at traffic roundabouts. the mazaars we encountered vary in the degree and manner of their physical openness. we were struck by their location under the ample canopies of old, shade-bequeathing trees, sometimes bordered by low fences that could be easily climbed over or beneath. an asbestos roof that adjoined the grave to shelter devotees from the rain. only very rarely did these structures morph into gated enclosures. the stretch of pavement around the grave is often overlaid with tiles and looks visibly different from the usual rough and grimy surface of the footpath. these environmental features of fences, roofs, tiles, trees, and other visible signs such as lamps and the chaddars that cover the tombstone are orchestrated to make the space visible, open, aesthetic and accessible. their situatedness in open, public spaces comes to underpin and promote notions of openness and accessibility in spatial, social and religious ways. a typical roadside mazaar, lodhi colony, delhi 2022; © ronie parciack brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202282 this approachability develops along temporal lines as well since grave-shrines are characteristically open on all weekdays, come rain or shine, unlike mosques and temples that tend to have defined working hours. the infrastructure at the grave-shrines is remarkably robust and facilitates the performative aspects of rituals that are carried out conspicuously on thursday evenings. a part of the floor adjoining the grave is demarcated for rituals, counselling, contemplation and prayers. each shrine has arrangements for washing hands, a donation box, a clay pot for incense sticks, a place for leaving lighted oil lamps or candles, and a jar of consecrated food (tabarruk). overall, the environment of roadside grave-shrines is fluid, shaped, and reshaped through the ongoing interactions between the grave-shrine caretakers, devotees, vendors and at times the state personnel in charge of inspecting encroachments in public spaces. mazaar, dargah, pir baba and questions of authority we begin by considering the concepts of mazaar, dargah and pir baba to show how these are evidenced in local and colloquial usage. these concepts derive from sufi-islamic contexts and attain currency from the context of worship at grave-shrines. in the hindu faith, cremation is the ordinary way of disposing of dead bodies. the word mazaar, which denotes a grave, is derived from the arabic word ziyarah (‘pious visitation’), and hints at the popular practice of pilgrimage to saints’ graves, usually for the granting of personal wishes. dargah (a term of persian origin) means ‘gateway,’ thereby suggesting the liminal space where one can seek the pir’s intercession with the divine. the two words, mazaar and dargah, are both used in the city, often interchangeably, but the dargah comes to connote the graves of renowned sufi saints that are surrounded by expansive compounds. the term dargah resonates with the notion of an elaborated architecture with claims to a higher formal status and the institutionalized system behind it. such examples would include the dargahs of the illustrious pirs of delhi, including the eminent dargah of hazrat khwaja4 nizamuddin auliya in the central neighbourhood of nizamuddin, the dargahs of hazrat turkman bayabani, dargah hazrat khwaja muhammad baqi billah and dargah hazrat shah abu al-khair near the turkman gate in old delhi, the dargah of qutbuddin bakhtiar kaki in mehrauli and dargah hazrat nasiruddin mehmud in chirag, south delhi, to cite the well-known sites. in contrast to the dargahs alluded to above, the term mazaar is often used to indicate graves of anonymous, often unknown holy men, or faqeers, such as the pir babas or simply babas as they were frequently abbreviated by caretakers and devotees alike. pir baba devotees combine the word pir (sufi authority/teacher) with the word baba (faqeer/holy man) to refer to a range of holy men whose biographies, origins, religious affiliations, and identities are often unspecified by name. although the terms mazaar and pir baba originally come from sufi terminology, the roadside grave-shrine culture is usually detached from the institutionalized and hierarchical aspects of the word ‘sufi’ and the sufi world. in contrast to its image as the antithesis of the rigidness of islamic orthodoxy (knysh 2004: 5-9), sufism has institutionalized traditions (tareeqahs or silsilas) that are concerned with issues of regulation, hierarchy, and formal authority. sufi brotherhoods are established by teachers (pirs, mursheeds), who transmit their authority to an heir, ideally, a son but sometimes a disciple (mureed), thereby forming transmission lineages consisting of authorized successors. the successors are termed sajjada-nasheen (the one who holds the prayer rug and thereby represents the late founder of the silsila) or gaddi-nasheen (the one who sits on the throne). those who are formally acknowledged as successors, either through genealogical affinity or through official permission, are perceived as legitimate sufi leaders) and come to form what nile green (2017: 159) terms a ‘spiritualized aristocracy’. simultaneously, an unequivocal dividing line is drawn between those who are formally endowed with authority and those who are not. in other words, sufism can also exemplify a 4 honorific sufi terms. hazrat denotes respectful presence and khwaja refers to a sufi authority. brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202283 regime of formal, institutionalized power, hierarchies and a rigid distinction between insiders and outsiders, legitimate and illegitimate authorities.5 whereas the authorized disciples perpetuate the founder’s roles of teaching by initiating other mureeds and transmitting the shrine’s custodianship along lineage lines, the deceased founder is assigned a different role. the late pir’s demise is not interpreted as death but rather as his longed-for union or ‘spiritual marriage’ with allah. he is believed to be zinda (alive), floating ‘behind the curtain’ or living in a subterranean mode at the grave-shrine. he is believed to be able to intercede with allah on behalf of his supplicants, to impact their life events, and perform miracles (karaamat). these beliefs make his grave a space of spiritual presence and a locus for pilgrimages. the graves may become elaborate compounds around which enlarged infrastructural and economic systems develop. a whole system of custodians evolves for physically maintaining the grave-shrine and managing the economic system around it, as well as overseeing the practices performed within the shrine. caretakers are usually referred to as khadim (pl. khudam), from the arabic word khidmat (service), or ‘sacred activism’ as defined by pio and syed (2014: 574). in contrast to the formal, prestigious lineages of authorized custodians in established dargahs whose role has been passed down from generation to generation (like the sajjada/gaddi nasheens), and khudams of renowned dargahs who are endowed with strong legitimacy, power and symbolic capital, the caretakers of roadside mazaars, who maintain and serve the mazaar, are rarely affiliated with any silsila. they are often known simply as khidmatgars (caretakers) and rarely by the formal terms of sajjada or gaddi-nasheen. their role is to take charge of the graveshrine, oversee maintenance and the conduct of rituals in this locally circumscribed space and partake of its offerings. despite their affinity with dargah/sufi saint culture, most of the mazaars we encountered are separated from sufi lineages, power hubs, and institutions. how do such mazaars detach themselves from formal, institutionalized dimensions? the anonymity and individual authority of the pir actively support the distancing from established sufi exemplars. roadside mazaars often get along without a name but have an address, sometimes identified by a tree (as in ‘the neemwale baba’ or the ‘pir under the neem6 tree’ on red cross road). other shrines too are located by reference to a tree which is a noticeable feature identifiable from afar. rising above the grave, the shade-giving tree comes to be associated with the saint. its age is taken to be synchronous with the pir baba’s and indirectly (or naturally) testifies to the absence of the latter’s biographical details. whereas delhi’s centuries-old sufi luminaries have impressively documented hagiographies and histories (see, for instance, hifzur-rahman 2011), anonymous roadside mazaars are disconnected from the written history of religious authorities. the caretakers themselves tend to be poorly acquainted with the history or genealogies of these pir babas, if at all. when pressed for details, the 74-year-old caretaker of the shrine on subramania bharti marg replied: ‘he must have been somebody’s mureed, but we don’t know anymore.’ the disconnection from accounts of formal history seems to function as a powerful impetus for multiple formulations of hyperlocal history, creating nuanced spaces of possibility that advance alternative notions of community, gender, and urban design in the city. this conception resonates with deleuze’s notion of a rhizomatic multiplicity which is without a determinable point of origin or end and is ‘… rather an organization belonging to the many as such which does not need unity whatsoever to form a system’ (deleuze 1994: 182). 5 colloquially, the unauthorized are sometimes addressed as ‘fake shaikhs’ or ‘fake babas’ (syed kashif ali, personal communication, october 2018). 6 neem: azadirachta indica. brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202284 spaces of possibility: challenging communalism religious strife and riots between groups of hindus and muslims, which are often dubbed ‘communalism,’ are widely reported to have escalated in india during the last two decades. this period has been marked by the rise of ardent hindu religious nationalism (‘ethno-nationalism’, as termed by christophe jaffrelot 2017: 52–63) and the landslide wins by the hindu right in the 2014 and 2019 general elections. within this context, ishtiaq ahmed’s (2002) notion of ‘pathological politics’ elaborates the idea that communal dynamics in india comprise sharp demarcation, rejection, exclusion, subordination, social exclusion, violence, and hostility towards the large minority of indian muslims.7 during the second tenure of the bjp (bharatiya janata party) in the central government from 2019 onwards, the indian public sphere has seen the passing of legislative acts such as the superseding of articles 370 and 35a of the indian constitution (bharatiya saavidhaana) in august 2019 that ascribed special status to the muslim-majority state of jammu and kashmir (constitution 1954); the supreme court ruling on the ayodhya dispute in november 2019 (supreme court 2019); and finally, the citizenship amendment act (caa) signed into law in december 2019. that the caa can potentially deny groups of indian muslims their citizenship demonstrates the categorical manifestation of state power to intervene in communal relations. these legislative acts join campaigns enacted during the bjp’s first tenure (2014–2019). the drives included campaigns such as: ‘ghar vaapsi’ (calling for massive conversions of non-hindus ‘back’ to hinduism as part of the effort to hinduize the nation); ‘love jihad’ (accusing and at times attacking muslim men for entering into relations with non-muslim women with the alleged intention to convert them to islam); promoting ‘gau raksha’ (‘protection of the cow’), a symbol that doubles for the protection of the hindu motherland, which encouraged lynchings of muslims suspected of possessing or consuming beef; and ‘land jihad ’ (refusal to sell real estate to muslims). furthermore, even islamic worship in public, it is feared, can inflame hindu passions. in june 2019, the muslims who were conducting their friday prayers in the open in gurgaon near delhi were challenged by representatives of right-wing organizations shouting ‘jai shree ram’ (‘victory to lord ram’—a signifier for an ideal hindu state) which led to self-imposed restrictions upon islamic visibility (dey 2018). given the charged context of hindu-muslim relations, the presence of sufi/islamic places of worship and visible symbols in the open, central spaces of roadside grave-shrines prompts questions regarding a syncretic counterculture in contemporary delhi. while syncretistic sites can turn into sites of aggression (mayaram 2004: 1251–53; 2011), the recent history of these sites did not afford such evidence. we found that grave-shrines were still providing large platforms for the diversified manifestations of popular religion. roadside mazaar culture shares a convivial terrain with the culture of the larger and more well-known pilgrim sites, for instance, in malerkotla (bigelow 2010) and ajmer. these sites attract devotees of all denominations and the caretakers never inquire after the religious identity of devotees (bigelow 2010; sanyal 2007).8 during our fieldwork (2017–2019 and ongoing) we witnessed hindus, muslims, and sikhs at the grave-shrines, supplicating in the manner that they deemed right. often, distinctive practices were discernible among the devotees. raising their hands with their palms facing upwards in the dua (supplication) gesture or reciting the fatiha (the opening surah of the quran) indicated, by and large, a muslim presence. the customary namaste/namaskar more or less correctly identified the hindus for us. but on a few occasions, even such identification was belied. along the roadside shrine at zakir hussain 7 muslims constitute 14.23% of the indian population and approximately 180 million citizens according to the 2011 census (religious census 2011). 8 in her analysis of the ajmer dargah, usha sanyal noted that sufi shrines are generally frequented by pilgrims of all denominations (sanyal 2007: 183). brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202285 marg near bapa nagar we came across a hindu devotee, an engineer specializing in accident control, who identified himself as a rajput but adopted the gestures typical of a devout muslim, which he thought was the appropriate practice at this site. nor was the adherence to religious identity strict and dogmatic—a hindu lawyer who works in an office near bapa nagar told us, ‘i follow interfaith.’ at another shrine, a twenty-year-old declared: ‘god is to be seen everywhere.’ he said, ‘my religion is to follow every god. also, durga mata (a form of the mother-goddess).’ when asked about hindutva, he uttered: ‘i know that god is one, and each person has his own thoughts … [regarding divinity] … sometimes progress happens slowly, slowly.’ we also came across non-muslim caretakers at the grave-shrines which surprised us but widened the net of social inclusion in evidence at pir baba shrines (boivin 2019). the mazaar off pandit pant marg is ensconced in the middle of a garden at an intersection bounded by a residential enclave of high-ranking politicians and civil servants. initially, we identified its caretaker as a muslim since he was wearing a skull cap. he told us that he is a guru-baba (guru is a hindu/sikh term for a spiritual teacher) and that after his retirement from a government job in 2015 serving devotees has become his full-time vocation. we could see that a corner of the shrine complex was set aside for his counselling services and there were devotees at the shrine seeking out his advice. when we asked him whether he could recount any pir baba miracles for us, he declared: ‘the biggest miracle of all is that the caretaker you are talking to is a hindu.’9 we had no reason to doubt his claim but began investigating the matter closely at the other shrines as well. visitors and caretakers of roadside mazaars do not belong to a single religious denomination. sanjay, the caretaker of a mazaar on atul grove road, we discovered, is also a self-declared hindu. looking into the temporal dimension of worship at delhi’s mazaars, we discerned that mazaar practices fit into the city’s interreligious weekly calendar as well. we were told that ‘thursdays are sacred to pir baba, just as tuesdays are dedicated to hanuman [the hindu monkey-god], fridays are sacred to santoshi maa [a recent incarnation of a goddess in the hindu pantheon] and saturdays are consecrated to shiva [one of the pivotal gods of the hindu pantheon].’ at a shrine on zakir husain marg, we encountered a photograph of the sufi saint baba farid (whose verses are also included in the sacred book of the sikhs, the guru granth sahib). again, at a roadside shrine on red cross road, we noticed another photograph of baba farid that we were told was brought there by a devotee and was subsequently placed on the wall of the dargah by the caretaker. at a grave-shrine on atul grove road, we saw a framed picture of shirdi sai baba (an ascetic revered by muslims and hindus though his figure has undergone a certain ‘hinduization’ in recent decades). bhajans (hindu spiritual songs) relating to sai baba, as well as (islamic) qawwalis, were played alternately on a cassette player at this shrine. another significant dimension in the creation of shared spaces at roadside mazaars relates to linguistic accommodation. the word ‘allah’ or ‘ya allah’ was inscribed in arabic and/or devanagari (hindi) scripts. our discussions with people at the pir baba shrines further revealed verbal pairings and analogies intended to communicate across vocabularies, languages, and religious traditions. a caretaker at a shrine on parliament street who was educated at a muslim madrasa (islamic religious school) put it this way: these pir babas are sufi-saints (ascetic holy men); they practice piri-mureedi [spiritual guide-disciple relationship] like your [i.e. hindu/sikh] guru-shishya relationship (teacher-student relationship). our ibadat is like your prarthana [islamic and hindu terms respectively for devout worship and prayer] … tabarruk is like your prasad [islamic and hindu terms for a consecrated food offering]. other caretakers added to these usages: ‘allah is like your bhagwan’ (a hindu term denoting the universal god); ‘ibadat is like bhakti’ (these terms broadly signify worship in the islamic and hindu traditions). 9 we gathered that caretakers of other pir baba shrines, both in delhi (wazirpur) and elsewhere (maharashtra, assam), are occasionally hindus (see also singh 2010). brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202286 although these words have distinct resonances within scriptural traditions, analogies enabled delimited and contextual equivalences that departed from fixed meanings. these word pairings and analogies stem from the attempt to mark out, comprehend, and communicate the sense of one set of distinctive religious concepts in terms of the language and concepts generated within another religious system that suffice for the limited local context. (brara 2017: 208, 217). at the level of the indic civilization, the culture of sufi and bhakti religiosity is often paired because of their shared capacity to override all sorts of divisions. our attempt here is to draw attention to the pairings that crystallize in a local context and furnish the details which may accord with or differ from the broad canvas that the civilization lays out. the linguistic devices alluded to above compose the fabric of everyday practices that are subsumed in the conception of ‘interreligious hermeneutics.’ cornille and conway coined the felicitous expression, ‘interreligious hermeneutics’ to highlight the significance of dialogue invested in the appropriation and the reinterpretation of the other in terms of one’s own religious tradition (2010: xvii). along the same lines, patton shows how interreligious hermeneutics grows out of ‘pragmatic pluralism’ in contexts of mutual dependence and a shared civic life (2010: 248). maraldo emphasizes the importance of ritual and bodily actions oriented to the here-and-now of interreligious communication, which is removed from the relatively distant and textual emphasis of hermeneutics (2010: 96). further, moyaert brings in ricoeur’s notion of ‘linguistic hospitality’ to translate the untranslatable as a dimension of ‘interreligious hermeneutics’ (2010: 82–86). while this literature resonates with what we encountered at pir baba shrines in the city, below we illustrate how a combination of linguistic and non-linguistic signs emblazoned on ritual cloth coverings (chaddar) offered at pir baba shrines, fabricated a material and interreligious space, and the entrepreneurial striving to communicate it. a popular chaddar has an array of signs including a crescent moon and star, the number 786 (which are islamic symbols) and the phrase jai pir baba di (‘hail pir baba!’), deploying the hindi term ‘jai’ (hail!) that is imprinted as well. the script is hindi/devanagari, but the syntax of the sentence (and the last word) is punjabi and is intended to attract the city’s punjabi residents as well. the salutation of jai pir baba di also resonates with the greeting jai mata di (‘hail the mother!’) to the hindu goddess. interestingly, this significance of the chaddar was explained to us by a devotee we met at a mazaar near gurdwara rakab gunge. continuing this interreligious conversation, the caretaker drew attention to the chaddar as being akin to the red veil (chunari) that is offered to the devi (goddess) by hindus. this add-on was contributed by a woman caretaker—which constitutes another unique and women-oriented dimension of roadside mazaar culture that we delve into next. offsetting the gendered order: women caretakers at pir baba shrines although women have long been mystics, scholars, and poets in sufism’s history,10 the well-known and formally structured sufi shrines are hierarchically organized, dominated by men, and entail prescribed rules for transmitting custodianship along patrilineal lines. authoritative roles are assigned exclusively to male members. this milieu continues to be unchanged today though dargahs honouring women are active in new delhi—to cite some prominent examples: the dargah of bibi fatima sam in kaka nagar; the grave of bibi zulekha mai saheba, the mother of nizamuddin auliya on sri aurobindo marg; and the grave of jahanara begum, the daughter of shah jahan in the compound of nizamuddin dargah. further, while a large number of the devotees at dargahs and mazaars are women, they are excluded and denied entry to the sanctum sanctorum of the most famous sufi dargah compounds such as at nizamuddin, mehrauli, baqi 10 for details, see burney abbas 2002; helminski 2003; burkhalter flueckiger 2008; pemberton 2004, 2010; birchok, 2016. brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202287 billah, and abu al-khair shrines.11 however, women are employed at the larger and more established graveshrines as cleaners and sweepers on monthly wages and constitute the majority of weekly flower-sellers there as well. by contrast to the limited presence of women as stakeholders in established dargahs and mosques, some of the roadside mazaars we visited are maintained and run by women. women turned out to be the caretakers at four of the 14 roadside shrines we studied and some of them had inherited their positions matrilineally. this feature drew attention to the possibilities for women to assume positions of authority in relation to roadside shrines in contradistinction to their absence inside the patrilineal forms of social order associated with major and mainstream mazaar/dargah cultures. nonetheless, and simultaneously, it demonstrates the social contexts of subalternity, marginality, and blurred boundaries that frame roadside mazaar culture. below we present four instances of female authority over pir baba mazaars. female caretakers: between power and resistance when she was widowed at the age of 26, meena’s husband’s family evicted her from the family home. her muslim husband had been an occasional caretaker at an anonymous shrine in bapa nagar, zakir husain marg, ever since her marriage in 1985. after his death, she continued to return and care for it even after she had shifted back with her natal hindu family. she opined that gradually, with pir baba’s blessings, the donations by devotees at the grave grew and she could arrange to tile the coarse surface of the grave and a section of the surrounding pavement. thirty-five years later, meena still comes here on thursday nights, when most devotees turn up, and she continues to have the de facto right to the cash offerings that are made at the shrine. often, she is accompanied by her daughter and grandchildren who are now being acquainted with the conduct of arrangements for devotees at the shrine. mumtaz, who managed the pir baba shrine on subramania bharti marg, is now 74 years old. she was widowed very early and her aunt, who was then the caretaker at a larger shrine in kaka nagar across the road, suggested that she could tend two mazaars that had no caretakers in the 1950s. she was told that it would give her some peace of mind and enable her to augment her livelihood from offerings at the shrine. since mumtaz is now too old to carry out her responsibilities at the shrine, she has entrusted its care to her daughter and son-in-law. the latter two are well-to-do but fulfil this responsibility earnestly. farhana, a 50-year-old woman caretaker, has been serving at a shrine adjoining a taxi-stand at the corner of humayun road for about 25 years. how did she get to working here? she explains that it was a call from baba that took the form of a woman caretaker letting her know that there was a ‘vacancy’ at the shrine. farhana, who was unhappy working as a domestic help, jumped at the opportunity and for her there has been no looking back. mariam looks after a shrine in the mandi house area, that has a name (‘nanhe miyan chishti’) and the year of its establishment (1966) legibly indicated as signage on the road in a manner atypical of the smaller shrines managed by women. she took over responsibilities for the grave after her husband passed away about a decade ago. now, one of her sons has become an established caretaker at the shrine but mariam continues to come here every thursday and has assumed the new role of selling flowers.12 11 in december 2018 law students filed a public interest suit at delhi’s high court demanding to make the dargah accessible for women. denying women’s entry to shrines is customary in different sufi orders, whether the relatively flexible chishti-nizami or the more orthodox and rigid naqshbandiyya. see singh, p. p. & lakhani, s: 2018. 12 in dargah shaikh kalimullah, near kabutar market in old delhi, too, a widowed woman is fully in charge of the compound; however, the official position of sajjada-nasheen is ascribed to her son, who inherited it from his late father but works at another job to support the family. brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202288 all four women are grateful to their respective pir babas for their blessings and the donations made at their shrines. they continue to contribute through their khidmat (maintenance, selling ritual items) which translates into both material and symbolic capital. their stories speak of interreligious marriages (meena), widowhood (meena, mumtaz, mariam) and family rejection (meena) but, located betwixt and between religions and families, they have been able to claim—often through the intercession of other women—the no-man’s land of anonymous mazaars. in line with the detachment from institutionalized sufism, three of the four shrines run by women are not associated with any formal sufi order. these women caretakers were unfamiliar with the history of the shrines that they tended but rejected their respective pir baba’s affinity and their own to a site other than the grave-shrine. when mumtaz was asked about a possible relationship to the adjacent kamal masjid, she said, ‘the shrine is closer to the taxi stand than the masjid (mosque).’ when asked about an equation with established dargahs, such as nizamuddin, her answer was: ‘it is a big dargah, what do i know? it is [under] their rule.’ likewise, the other women indicated their distance from formal dargahs. the distinction between custodians and caretakers, with the latter status being claimed on the basis of an old and continuous relationship with a venerable pir, seemed to be emerging at roadside mazaars too now. some of the male caretakers at the larger mazaars were intent upon stressing their filiation with sufi orders, thereby canonizing their pirs and grave-shrines. while khidmatgar implies one who performs sacred meena at her roadside mazaar by jummah raat. delhi, 2017; © ronie parciack brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202289 service, the category seemed to be splitting into those who would speak of inheriting their status from a distinguished and named pir, those who thought of their statuses as recently inherited going back two or three generations, and women who were now having to deal with the heritability of their statuses. for instance, the khidmatgar at the bureh shah dargah opposite the oberoi hotel styled himself as a custodian when he pointed to the shrine’s gateway which has the following words emblazoned: ‘this leads straight to hazrat nizamuddin auliya dargah.’ similarly, the custodian of the hazrat sheikh imadduddin ismail firdausi qadri dargah in the same area also linked that shrine to the dargah at nizamuddin declaring: ‘this grave-shrine is 800 years old, that is to say, it is as old as the nizamuddin dargah.’ hajj abdul rasheed, the khadim of bibi fatima dargah in kaka nagar, again, laboured to connect the narratives of the dargah to the grand narrative of islam: bibi fatima [muhammed’s daughter and the most venerated woman in orthodox islam] came to delhi about 900 years ago, together with ghareeb nawaaz [the founder of the chishti silsila in india]. the place used to be a forest, and this is why they stayed here … she is considered to be the sister of all pirs. they stayed here for 100 years. while custodians at the larger dargahs pointed to the affiliations of their pirs to the great traditions of islam, the male caretakers of the roadside mazaars highlighted their present traditional and patrilineal transmission in the attempt to raise their status. the genealogies that they spoke of were, however, relatively very shallow. for instance, masood, 30, the caretaker of the neem wale baba (the baba of the neem tree) on red cross road, underscored the transmission within the patrilineage at this mazaar: ‘the caretaking role at this shrine,’ he said, ‘goes from brother-to-brother and generation-to-generation now, like the mumtaz at her roadside mazaar; delhi 2022. © ronie parciack brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202290 practice in the long-established dargahs of north india.’13 interestingly, masood inherited his position from his mother. his grandfather was a hindu who converted to islam upon marrying his grandmother. the features of blurred religious boundaries and gender roles are evidenced in his story as well, even as he seeks to ascend the ladder to custodianship and was the one who circulated the printed invitation for the urs to enhance his status. however, the fact that women serve as caretakers at roadside mazaars is either not widely known or not widely acknowledged. when we asked their male counterparts, the response was either denial (‘i haven’t seen any women khidmatgars’) or we were told that ‘this whole area was a graveyard once and many women were in charge but then some left.’ in one instance, the reaction we encountered was almost hostile. a male custodian was indeed aware of this fact, but his voice rose as he questioned the possibility of female authority. at first, he tried to undervalue the practices at these locations, ‘people there are looking for karaamat’ (miracles). this was an aspersion suggesting that they go there for instrumental purposes and not spiritual elevation/worship. he went on to undermine the value ascribed to a woman’s role by interpreting their khidmat (sacred care) as menial female work which entailed just the cleaning of the shrine: ‘there’s no need for a woman to do anything more, only this job … if they do the job, then this is good.’ unsurprisingly then, the roadside mazaar culture of women caretakers attempts to remain overtly detached from institutionalized and patriarchal constructs but the heritability of the right is an emerging concern. contending with state authorities: the pir baba shrine and the city the tension between the formal institution of the state and the authority vested in pir babas by their faithful caretakers and followers runs into conflict in the context of the state’s attempt to plan the city’s public spaces and infrastructure. the shrines discussed here are located in central delhi, in main thoroughfares and prime locations that are claimed by the government which exercises its power through appointed officials. graves, which now register as roadside grave-shrines in public spaces, often pre-existed the construction of roads and buildings in new delhi. the arc we explored, the vast expanse of land to the south of india gate, off rajpath, was formerly a vast cemetery, indeed a land of graves and grave-shrines, constructed upon by the british rulers and later by the indian state. when state authorities decided to make roads and construct buildings on this land, most of the graves in this area were flattened (taneja 2013: 147–48). the few that remained manifested the enormous power of their pirs in successfully resisting sovereign state power, we were told. the threat to grave-shrines could only be counteracted by the power of the ‘zinda pirs.’ the clash between the force of religion and the force of law continued in the years following independence in 1947 and it persists. only exceptional pir babas are still able to thwart state-imposed plans on the plane of immanence, that is to say in the here-and-now, in the view of caretakers and believers alike. and these pir babas share their following’s concerns with life’s stumbling blocks (green 2017). while religious structures built on public spaces such as pavements and road junctions are considered illegal, minor elaborations that include tiling the grave, its headstone, or the floor at the site or cordoning off an area for seating devotees, for instance, are often overlooked. in 2009, the supreme court first ordered that all ‘encroachments’ of religious structures on public space should be demolished. in 2016, again, the supreme court stipulated that: ‘everyone has the right to walk. god never intended to obstruct the path meant for the people.’ the ruling reiterated that its orders appeared to have been put ‘in cold storage’ and that these illegal structures constituted ‘an insult to god’ (bhadra 2016). yet, tales of miraculous subversion of state-mandated plans by anonymous pir babas are frequently attested at the minor roadside shrines that we studied. each story of a surviving grave-shrine, in the 13 see tanvir anjum (2009) for details on problems of hereditary succession posed to sufi pirs. brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202291 view of the caretaker and often the devotees as well, testifies to the pir baba’s presence. a contemporary hagiographic tale narrates his miraculous powers, highlighting his present resistance to state-mandated changes that could have affected the shrine adversely. these storied events, what ricciardi felicitously describes as ‘immanent miracles,’ are circulated by the mazaar’s caretakers and custodians. in her view, these miraculations ‘only emerge from a contingent and immanent perspective’ (2007: 1157). at the grave-shrine on ashoka road, right outside the gate of the election commission’s imposing office building, we were informed that the very presence of the shrine at that spot was nothing short of a miracle. in the caretaker’s words: ‘in this closely guarded area, not even a loose brick is allowed.’ he went on to relate an extraordinary and recent event at the shrine which is translated below: additional construction inside the election commission’s building complex entailed bringing in a massive earth-moving machine [ jcb] into the premises which would have involved cutting off the branches of the neem tree that towers above the grave-shrine. my protests fell on deaf ears. instead, a sermon on how superstition should have no quarter in today’s era of science and technology was delivered to one and all present by the official in charge. however, as the machine was being driven through the gate, all of a sudden the vehicle’s brakes jammed just before it got to the tree and none of the engineer’s staff could get the machine going again. the next day, we were told, the official relented and the driver managed to make his way with a smaller machine without so much as grazing a leaf of the tree. in a more recent story, akin to the above, the caretaker of a shrine located along the footpath adjoining a flyover on zakir hussain marg told us how the chief engineer had planned on demolishing the site to make way for new construction: this shrine is well over a hundred years old. our pleas to save it were ignored. but the chief engineer fell seriously ill just before the work to pull down the grave-shrine was scheduled to start. the people around him asked the chief engineer to apologize to pir baba. he did so and he recovered. along with his son, he still frequents the shrine for our pir baba’s blessings. the layout of this shrine today, with a long front alongside the flyover, without an edge or pavement between the shrine and the road, lends credibility to the caretaker’s account that the plans were indeed altered. the pir baba’s grave-shrine at the mandi house crossing is located on a plot of land abutting an intersection that is flanked by two trees. here, too, we heard a state-vs-mazaar story: this shrine, as you can see, is situated in a very prominent spot. the government’s civil engineer decided that this site would therefore be an ideal location for a fountain, and no one could dissuade him. but then, out of the blue, he had a vision of pir baba which made him change his plans. he dropped the idea of building a fountain there and, based on his new insight, donated bags of cement for the reinforcement of the shrine instead. variants of these stories can be found at shrines across the city. the dominant representations of city planners are redolent with designs for new buildings, easy mobility, and the beautification of the city. these plans, which encroach on space set aside as religious, can only be counteracted by local miracles which challenge the state and confirm the belief that public space cannot ride roughshod over demarcated sacred space. these extraordinary stories become anchored as revelatory moments in the local consciousness. quoting a former caretaker, taneja writes: ‘this is his greatest miracle, anwar sabri said, not to be reduced to dust when so many other mazaars have been’ (2013: 150). from their position in public space, pir babas and deities confront state power in the here-and-now, highlighting the view that ‘public spaces can be public and sacred at the same time’ (shivam 2016: 58). brara and parciack portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 202292 other accounts speak of the protection from accidents that pir babas confer on drivers, pedestrians and even pilots who happen to be in the vicinity of their shrines. some pilots, it is reported, pray before taking off at a pir baba shrine close to the airport’s runway in delhi, regardless of religious affiliation, because of a story narrated at the airport. accidents at the airport that occurred on two thursdays were believed to have been caused because a pir baba shrine in its vicinity had been shifted from its earlier location. after the shrine was reinstated, it is claimed that there have been no further accidents. this belief was reinforced by the fact that techno-scientific investigations into the accidents turned out to be inconclusive. in a city (and a country) marked by a high rate of accidents, the intercession of pir babas is considered invaluable. at the mandi house grave-shrine again, we were told that traffic accidents had never occurred near the shrine even though it is situated at the intersection of seven radiating roads. the custodian of the pir baba shrine on atul grove road, which is sited at a sharp blind turn in the road, too, proudly disclosed: despite the treacherous location, i have never witnessed a traffic accident in the thirty years that i have tended the shrine though it is located at a hazardous intersection. it is undoubtedly and miraculously shielded. unexpected and unintentional events in the life of urban residents can take the shape of vehicular accidents that then seem to have much in common with the force of suddenness and arbitrariness which drives state action. in such situations, faith in pir babas across the divides of religion affords a means of navigating contemporary times and bad faith. it is a quest for meaning sought in conjunction with the supernatural powers of pir babas whose grave-shrines come alive as repositories of interreligious creativity in troubled milieus. concluding remarks the vast canvas of roadside grave-shrines in new delhi is crisscrossed by varying sacred, spiritual, gendered, and entrepreneurial orientations alongside the expression of public, social, and individual religiosities that are not immediately visible. caretakers reveal diverse filiations of bi-religiosity and gender as well as the intertwining of material and sacred concerns. devotees attracted to the grave-shrines engage in diverging supplicatory gestures and performative rituals that belie the notion of monolithic or absolutist religious regimes. it is a counterculture that has not fallen by the wayside but continues to shine a light on the walkways despite the rightist and communal darkness in the polity. given the heightened polarization of muslims and hindus in the political sphere, it is salutary to note that inclusive currents are still alive and well at pir baba shrines in the city. from the city’s diverse religious and sectarian traditions, demographics, sacred symbols, and state-led urbanizing practices, the figure of the pir baba emerges as a lodestone in the present context 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sydney suburb of ashfield and via sarpi in the italian city of milan. what connects these streets is that both have become important sites for businesses in the chinese diaspora. more specifically, both are streets on which the signs displayed by chinese merchants have become controversial. white residents who have felt displaced or discomforted by the ethnic entrepreneurialism in these areas have imagined that requirements for bilingual signage would diminish their unease. in ashfield, this has resulted in the introduction of a series of measures by local government to encourage chinese shopkeepers to change their signage, including changes to regulations, information kits and annual awards. in milan, there is high public pressure to introduce legislation making chinese-italian signs mandatory. what interests me is how such measures assume the process of translation to institute an equivalence between languages. drawing on the work of naoki sakai (1997), who contests the proposition that discrete languages exist before the act of translation, i question the supposition that such measures serve to encourage interethnic dialogue, cultural hybridity and social harmony. far from establishing a bridge between languages, translation divides them. with regards to liverpool road and via sarpi, this has tangible social effects, not least as concerns the production of subjectivity in relation to understandings of community and citizenship. 1 this paper was initially prepared for the panel entitled ‘translation and citizenship’ at ‘lingua, cultura, cittadinanza,’ a conference organised by the facoltà di lingue e lettere straniere moderne of the università di bologna, 4-5 feburary 2008. i would like to thank the panel organisers and participants (giuliana benvenuti and sandro mezzadra) for the invitation to participate in this event, as well as the other panel participants (étienne balibar, naoki sakai and jon solomon). an italian version of this article will appear in a volume published by odoya. neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 2 it is doubtless a mistake to assume the production of subjectivity takes place solely within the constraints of language. key structuralist accounts emphasized the role of language in splitting the subject between the énoncé and the énonciation, the subject who speaks and the subject who is spoken about (benveniste 1971; lacan 1977). as powerful as these accounts were, particularly for exploring the relation of subjectivity to ideology, they tended not to account for the multiplicity of human languages. consequently the nexus of translation and subjectivity was sidelined in the resulting debates. poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches met this challenge by taking up issues of contact, ‘inbetweenness’ and hybridity, all the time widening the unit of translation from language to culture (pratt 1992; bhabha 1994). at the same time, there was an effort to broaden the discussion on the production of subjectivity to encompass more transversal approaches, taking into account affects, experiences and the like as well as processes of cultural signification (guattari 1995). added to this was a new emphasis on the role of contemporary capitalist transformations in the production of subjectivity. the growing tendency for capitalist production to involve linguisticsymbolic communication as well as affective relations between humans (aside from the production of material commodities) was a key factor here. as read (2003: 159) explains: ‘capital no longer relies on cooperative networks of the reproduction of subjectivity that are exterior to it; instead, it directly produces and profits from the production of subjectivity, and this transformation has been imposed on it in part by the productive powers of subjectivity.’ how to integrate the dynamics of translation into such an analysis of the production of subjectivity? the example of shop signage provides a strategic site of investigation. this is because the shop, apart from being a place of commodity exchange and profit generation, is a site of linguistic transactions and affective relations. as clear from the discussion below, it is a feeling of discomfort that accompanies the cognitive experience of incomprehension that turns many residents against the presence of street signs in chinese ideograms. the existence of such signs on streets like liverpool road and via sarpi is an effect of particular forms of chinese entrepreneurialism that have spread with recent migratory movements. although there are long standing chinese communities in sydney and milan, dwelling in the latter case in the vicinity of via sarpi, the intense entrepreneurial activity along these streets is a phenomenon that dates from the 1990s. there is a need to understand these developments, along with the growth of similar entrepreneurial neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 3 pockets in other parts of the world, with respect to the rapid economic and cultural transition experienced in china since the 1990s. part of this analysis must be a consideration of the effects of china’s transition on migratory patterns, both internal and external, as well as on the changing role of chinese language in the world. the issues regarding dual language signage must thus be analysed with a global regard. far from being merely a matter of local or national policies regarding language and cultural diversity, the institution of such signage involves a regime of translation that not only structures the production of subjectivity in the present neoliberal conjuncture but also influences the geocultural configuration of the world. liverpool road a stroll down ashfield’s major shopping street is not the same experience it was at the beginning of the 1990s. at that time, liverpool road hosted a mix of anglo, italian and greek shopping, reflecting the ethnic groups that composed the area’s population. today about eighty-five percent of the shops along the street are chinese small businesses, primarily restaurants and supermarkets. the prevalence of chinese migration to this part of sydney is directly linked to the tiananmen square massacre, that violent political rupture that marked the beginning of china’s neoliberal transition (wang 2003). at the time, the australian government granted permanent residency to some 42,000 chinese students who were studying in the country. these visa holders were then able to bring out family from china under australia’s then family reunion migration scheme, meaning that numbers swelled to an approximate 100,000 by the end of the 1990s. most of these migrants settled in sydney and many made ashfield their home. due to the preponderance of shanghainese among them, the area is sometimes known as little shanghai. as opposed to the downtown chinatown, established for well over a century as place where white australians can go to eat cantonese food, this is a place where it is possible to find restaurants serving cuisines from other regions of china, including, not surprisingly, shanghai cuisine. many of these establishments, which have erected street signs written exclusively in chinese, cater to the local migrant populations as well as the increasing numbers of tourists who visit sydney from mainland china. they are also magnets for cosmopolitan gourmets, who come mostly from the wealthier areas to the north and the east of the city, to sample the meals these restaurants have to offer. neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 4 recently, however, some members of the local white population, which has lived in the area for many years and experiences a sense of displacement due to the influx of chinese migrants, have begun to express discomfort about the lack of street signs in english. a similar area to the south of the city, hurstville, has legislated to make english signs mandatory, stipulating that chinese characters on a sign cannot be larger than the letters of the latin alphabet that comprise the english text. ashfield has now followed suit. the local government has changed the regulations about signs, employing a chinese speaking community worker and consulting academics to try to increase the presence of the english language on the suburb’s main street. in a report entitled contact zones, amanda wise (2004: 4) presents the results of research that investigated how elderly anglo-celtic and other long-term residents of ashfield ‘are experiencing cultural diversity and the rapid changes that the recent wave of chinese migrants have brought to the suburb.’ the study discovers that the ‘most prominent area of discomfort among not only anglo-celtic senior citizens but also older long-term residents of other backgrounds—especially greek, italian, polish and indian—had to do with the predominance of non-english signage without translation along the ashfield main street’ (13). apart from these street signs, residents expressed dismay at the presence of chinese language posters covering shop windows, lack of design quality, the prevalence of phone card advertisements and chinese language menus displayed in the windows of restaurants. also reported were feelings of discomfort with the inability of some chinese shopkeepers to speak english, their use of personal space, manners and social rituals. the report, which is careful also to offer positive stories about the experiences of long-term ashfield residents in chinese shops, concludes that these factors are perceived as an ‘alienating barrier’ by many older community members. it goes on to recommend an approach that would not ban chinese signage along liverpool road but rather introduce ‘a policy of translation for all signage in ashfield where possible’ (14). as a result of the contact zones report, ashfield municipal council began to work with wise in the frame of a larger project to realise the goal of increasing the presence of translated signs along the street, assisting chinese shopkeepers to make their premises more amenable to non-chinese customers and generally enhancing the contact between the chinese and other residents of ashfield. apart from intercultural meetings, this neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 5 initiative involved the production of an information kit for chinese shopkeepers, the employment of a mandarin-shanghainese speaking community worker and the institution of the annual welcome shop awards. the bilingual information kit instructs chinese shopkeepers to ‘combine beauty with business’ and offers examples of good signage practice (including professionally designed chinese ideograms and english characters of equal size), window presentation and store layout. it also provides hints about how to treat non-chinese customers, including the suggestion to smile and establish eye contact with them. the welcome shop awards provide civic recognition for chinese shopkeepers and restaurateurs who have heeded this advice. nominations can be made by any resident in the area, and prizes include plaques and paid advertising in local newspapers. these are non-coercive measures to achieve dual language signage as well as other modifications to the shops along liverpool road and adjacent streets. not surprisingly, the question of the translation of shop signs is controversial. when neighbouring marrickville council proposed to make such translation mandatory, one of the councillors, saeed khan, described the plan as ‘outright racist,’ saying: ‘i don’t mind if every business has an english name, but to force shops to translate every single word on their shopfront into english is a stupid, divisive idea’ (quoted in murray 2006). in the contact zones report, wise heads off such criticism in a number of ways. first, she acknowledges this is a controversial matter. second, she makes it clear she does not support a ban on foreign language signage in ashfield. third, she draws on the dominant, but threatened, social ideology of multiculturalism to support her claims. noting that not only anglo-celtics but also other ethnic groups in the area, including non-mandarin-shanghainese speaking chinese, are discomforted by the signs and that english is ‘the only practical common language,’ wise writes: ‘far from being a xenophobic, anti-multicultural response, requiring english translations encourages multiculturalism. translations are more likely to attract a diverse clientele into the shop creating more possibilities for intercultural and interethnic learning’ (2004: 15). there is much to unpack in this statement. what i want to remark, at this stage, involves less the status or foreignness of the chinese language in this context than the role of english as a linguistic vehicle for encouraging ‘multiculturalism.’ certainly, in the case of chinese signs that are translated into english, it is necessary to note the flattening of neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 6 an ethnic community language into the national lingua franca. there can be no doubt that translation of signs into ‘the only practical common language’ reinforces the status of english as australia’s national language. english figures here as a kind of ‘general equivalent’ that is imagined as ‘likely’ to facilitate ‘intercultural and interethnic learning’ between the chinese and the anglo-celtic, the chinese and the italian, the chinese and the indian, and so on. the use of the term ‘general equivalent’ here, which is the term marx (1887) uses to describe the role of money within the capitalist economy, is not accidental. after all, the shops along liverpool road are part of the world of business, since they buy and sell commodities in the marketplace. the emphasis on linguistic communication (street signs, greetings) as well as affective comportment (smiles, gestures, bodily distance) in the materials distributed by ashfield council to chinese shopkeepers relates not only to the role of these factors in promoting intercultural relations. but also, given the commercial setting, it reflects their growing importance in a service and consumer oriented economy increasingly driven by immaterial production. one consistent argument provided in these materials as to why chinese merchants should abide by their guidelines is that failure to do so might result in loss of customers. interestingly, in hurstville, the area in the south of sydney where government legislated to make chinese shops display dual language signs, turnover in these businesses has increased by ten to twenty percent (duffy 2006). similar figures are not available for ashfield, but perhaps the presence of tourists from china would make a difference. in any case, the parallel between the unilateral regime of translation that in ‘multicultural’ australia renders all other languages as english and the capitalist system that translates all ‘relative’ values into the general equivalent of money is no theoretical nicety but a practical matter with measurable effects. via sarpi on 12 april 2007 a full scale riot broke out on milan’s via sarpi. a home to chinese migrants since their initial arrival in italy in the 1930s, the quartiere in which this street is located has experienced a twenty-four fold increase in chinese population since 1986. at the same time, it has been undergoing a rapid process of gentrification, meaning that the local white communities, who still comprise ninety percent of the population, have become increasingly concerned about the proliferation of chinese businesses. these are neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 7 primarily wholesalers who sell cheap goods from china and attract large trucks into the area’s narrow streets. partly due to the agitation of residents’ groups such as the associazione vivisarpi, the comune di milano legislated in 2002 to restrict the hours in which the loading and unloading of materials from motor vehicles is permitted in the area. in the two months prior to 12 april 2007, the policing of these regulations had been stepped up and the installation of closed circuit security cameras had been announced to monitor ‘illegal activities’ in the vicinity of via sarpi. some members of the chinese community were so upset about these ‘zero tolerance’ measures, which made it near impossible for wholesalers to conduct their business, that they prepared banners to stage a sit-in at palazzo marino, the seat of the city government. this protest was never to occur. the riot started with an everyday dispute over a parking fine. ruowei bu, a twenty six year old chinese woman, parked her car on via sarpi while her husband unloaded shoes into their shop. she was issued with a fine. an argument ensued, which quickly escalated to push and shove when the police confiscated the car’s registration papers. by the time the police decided to take the woman and her crying child away, a crowd had gathered. word spread that ruowei had been hit by police and dozens of people began to stream on to the street, some carrying chinese flags. police called for reinforcements and, as the banners prepared for the palazzo marino protest appeared, the violence gathered pace. before the day was out, cars had been overturned, fourteen riot police had been taken to hospital, the chinese consul had appealed for calm and chinese premier wen jiabao had demanded a report on the confrontation. the reporting of the event in the chinese news media prominently featured images of milanese police trampling on chinese flags. the reasons for this conflict are complex and certainly cannot be boiled down to the question of street signage along via sarpi, although in the wake of the riot, as in sydney’s ashfield, this would emerge as a hot point for debate. as cologna (2008) points out, while via sarpi has emerged as an important site for chinese commerce, less than ten percent of the chinese in milan live in its vicinity. to some extent, the tensions in the area are a result of conflicts of interest between local residents and businesses, which have acquired a racialized character. patterns of chinese migration to milan have been shaped by the fact that the initial migrants who established themselves in the city in the 1930s came from villages in the district of qingtian, located in the mountains neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 8 behind the city of wenzhou in the south of zhejiang province (thunø 1999). when, in the 1980s, the economic boom in this area occasioned new opportunities for migration, mostly through clandestine means, the community in milan was one among others in europe that accepted the newcomers. often the new migrants, who were generally less skilled individuals than those making their way to australia or the united states, were subjected to a period of debt bondage before they were able to make their way in the wider economy (cologna & mancini 2001). not only did whole villages in qingtian begin to empty out, but across the 1990s, with the growth of internal migration in china, the composition of the migration flows also began to change. for instance, the movement of workers from qingtian to the city of sanming in fujian province meant that migration routes also opened from this city to milan. at the same time, paths opened through russia for the movement of workers from the northern industrial city of shenyang. many of these migrants, primarily women, would become domestic workers for well-off families in milan. during the 1990s, the role of chinese migrants in the italian economy also began to change. the growing number of arrivals meant that not all new migrants could be accommodated within the industries traditionally staffed by chinese workers—e.g., the manufacture of leather goods or the restaurant sector. many new migrants established themselves as travelling salespeople, selling cheap goods manufactured in china’s industrial boom. from here began the growth of the businesses along via sarpi. some of the salespeople were able to set themselves up as wholesalers, initially supplying to other chinese but expanding their market to include migrants of other nationalities, italians active in small town markets and even merchants who would come from as far as switzerland or france to stock up on cheap wares (cologna 2008). the events of 12 april 2007, however, cannot simply be understood as the result of a hostile local reaction to the urban inconveniences occasioned by the growth of the chinese wholesaling business. as sossi (2007) explains, milan has been the site of development for particular ‘forms of control’ that have acquired ‘an independent and autonomous modality of existence’ from that which is usually considered ‘normal or normative’ (my translation). sossi refers not only to the political influence of the northern league, in many ways an anti-immigrant party, but also to strategies of economic control operating at the micro level: neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 9 it is not by chance that these forms of control are developing in milan, one of the most productive cities in italy. the control of the economy and in particular of the chinese wholesalers occurs through the invention of strange forms of protectionism which are comprehensible only if one understands how this autonomous form of economy, far from being completely liberal, is directed toward ‘ethnically’ diverse people … these forms of control are ever more stringent but also ever more invisible. it is thus not by chance that the revolt in the chinese quarter exploded because of a parking fine, since the municipal police in milan have become that form of control deputised to establish new borderlines (my translation). in the case of via sarpi, these borderlines have been established through forms of policing that restrict traffic and parking in ways that force chinese wholesalers and their customers to move goods in and out of the area in large trolleys. since the events of 12 april 2007, these forms of control have only escalated. clampdowns on the use of trolleys have increased, the comune di milano has announced the closure of the area to all traffic from september 2009 (with closed circuit surveillance and loading and unloading of goods permitted only in severely restricted hours), and negotiations are underway to ban wholesaling in the area and move the chinese merchants to the periphery of the city (gallione 2008). interestingly, the call for these measures on the part of local italian residents has been accompanied by the demand that all street signs in the area should necessarily feature italian translations. a motion passed by the consiglio di zona 1, the relevant governing body for the sarpi area, makes the following recommendation to the comune: ‘with regard to shop signs, advertisements and any other visible messages, apart from a general redesign, they should always feature characters in the italian language’ (mozione 2008, my translation). apart from the fact that many signs along via sarpi already contain italian translations, this motion imagines such a requirement to be consonant with a series of measures that seek to limit the activities of chinese businesses in an area where they have been established for over eighty years. how can it be that in the case of liverpool road bilingual signs are imagined as a means of creating harmony and intercultural learning, while, in the case of via sarpi, they accompany new forms of policing, control and cultural segregation? translation and citizenship to answer the above question it is necessary to jump to the global level. the presence of chinese merchant communities, along liverpool road as well as via sarpi, is not solely related to changes in the national level in australia and italy, although an analysis of these changes must certainly inform any adequate account of the cultural neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 10 transformations along these streets. in the early 1970s, australia moved away from the so-called white australia policy, which importantly restricted immigration through the application of a language test, toward its current practices of strict border control and selectively filtered immigration through the so-called points system. during the same period, italy began its transition from an emigration to an immigration country, although, like the introduction of the official government policy of multiculturalism to australia in the early 1970s, this is by now a process largely played out, if not one that has entered into crisis. one sign of this crisis is visible in debates surrounding citizenship. the introduction in october 2007 of the australian citizenship test to assess the knowledge of australian history, values and traditions for all who wish to become citizens, like the proposal that immigrants acquiring italian citizenship will have to pass a test to show adequate knowledge of the italian language and culture, are symptomatic of this situation. there are many things one can say about such measures, which are not unrelated to the demands for dual language signage along chinese-dominated streets in sydney and milan. most importantly, they signal a transition in debates about citizenship, which once focused on universalistic issues such as democracy, political rights and responsibilities, but now shift to include concerns about culture, which were formerly confined to the particular. in a sense, one can say that these debates have pushed to a limit the traditional paradox of modern citizenship, that is, that it invoked universal rights but only in a particular territory. with the explosion of this paradox, the question of translation has come to the fore. since, in conceptual terms, the question of translation evades, or better cuts through, the unresolved (and quite possibly) irresolvable aporia of the universal and the particular. we can signal this by indicating that translation is instead a problem of the common and the singular. here, the common is not understood as the sensus communis, which kant, in his third critique, defined as that ‘subjective principle … which determines what pleases or displeases, by means of feeling only and not through concepts, but yet with universal validity’ (1982: 206). rather it describes the experience of living in, through and between the transversal relations that compose the world. to experience the common is to approach ‘the world as a heterogeneous space of intermundial intercourse, rather than thinking in the space of a community gathered around a univocal set of rules’ (karatani 2005: 99). in other words, the common designates the space between languages, the space between cultures. neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 11 the final section of this paper returns to this question of the common. since translation is a practice as well as an epistemic relation, it is important also to discuss it in practical terms, by no means limited to the interactions between languages. translation, in this sense, is a ‘relational encounter between entities, affective modulations, the visible and invisible, perceptions and imperceptions, communication and the non-communicable’ (neilson & rossiter 2008: 64). with respect to patterns of chinese migration in australia and italy, there is a need to consider how they relate to wider geopolitical, economic and cultural shifts as well as the relations between these processes on different geographical and temporal scales and in different affective registers. what occurred on milan’s via sarpi, as much as it relates to the specific forms of cultural and economic control exercised in that city, must also be analysed in its transnational dimensions. at stake are not simply the local forms of protectionism, which are filtered through lombard cultural mores, sometimes with a more racist face than others. these protectionist impulses are formed partly in reaction to the growth and international expansion of the chinese economy, announced everywhere in italy from the popular books of federico rampini (2006) to the erudite historical analyses of giovanni arrighi (2007). but this same transition lies behind the current wellspring of chinese migration and not only on the international scale. it is important to remember that the bulk of chinese migration has been rural-urban movement within the country and regulated by the so-called hukou system of housing registration (cheng & selden 1994). to understand the events on via sarpi, it is necessary to ask who gets to be a chinese wholesaler in italy, how, where and by whom are the goods they sell produced, how do the trade networks that bring these goods to europe function, and so on. relevant in this regard is that the area from which the vast majority of milan’s chinese migrants hail was the centre of the so-called ‘wenzhou model’ of industrial development in the 1980s and 1990s (parris 1993). based on household industries, wage labour, commodity markets and self-organised credit associations, the rapid economic growth in wenzhou produced the wealth that facilitated the migration of many to europe, particularly italy. also significant are the changes to internal migration patterns to and from zhejiang province, in which wenzhou is located. in the period 1990-1995, the province was the seventh largest exporter of migrant labour to other provinces of china, including zhejiang village, the largest migrant enclave in beijing neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 12 (xiang 2005). by 1995-2000, it had become the third largest net importer of migrants from other chinese provinces, and by 2000-2005 the second (chan 2008). clearly, the province’s development, which fuelled the migration from wenzhou to cities like milan, was itself enabled by labour migration within china. linked to the appearance of new borders around the sarpi area is thus the establishment of new borders that regulate migration within the chinese territory itself. as anthropologist pun ngai (2005) has shown in the case of the shenzhen special economic zone, this is crucial to productive system now in place in china. such a fracturing of territory, or what ong (2005) describes as graduated sovereignty, clearly has parallels in the proliferation of internal borders in other continental and national spaces, not least in europe itself, as thinkers such as étienne balibar (2004a) have effectively demonstrated. an understanding of this development is crucial not only to the analysis of internal migration and its importance to current productive practices in china. it is also important for the understanding of what is described above as the exhaustion of the paradox of modern citizenship, conceived as universal but also as imposed in a particular, territorially homogenous and neutrally bordered, political space. another related issue concerns language policy in the people’s republic of china. in 2001, the government adopted standard mandarin (based on the beijing dialect) or putonghua as the official language in order to meet the challenges of a growing market economy and the increasing interaction between people from different parts of the country. neither the shanghainese in ashfield nor the wenzhounese in milan are speakers of putonghua, although many can understand this standard language. both speak dialects of wu chinese, which in the case of the wenzhounese dialect is tricky for many other chinese to comprehend. this is not an issue for written language, such as that appearing on signs along liverpool road and via sarpi, since both of these wu dialects use the same simplified ideograms as putonghua. but the question of the growing dominance of putonghua is a pressing issue, especially as regards the maintenance of dialects and minority languages in china (guo 2004; poa & lapolla 2007). the introduction of putonghua as the language of instruction in local and international schools in cantonese speaking hong kong is highly controversial, and, as davison and lai (2007: 119) argue, this involves ‘both global economic and socialneilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 13 ideological factors.’ similarly, in the wider chinese diaspora, the growing status of putonghua as a language of trade and business is making itself felt. cologna (2008) notes that many of the women who migrated from shenyang to milan to work as domestic helpers have lately found employment teaching putonghua to the children of wenzhounese immigrants. the children of shanghainese immigrants in ashfield also learn putonghua, now australia’s second most spoken language, through the new south wales school system. meanwhile, several key chinese education and cultural agencies have decided to encourage the worldwide learning of putonghua. among these are the beijing-backed confucius institutes, of which over two hundred and sixty currently exist in seventy different countries. lo bianco (2007: 4-5) links the expansion of chinese language learning to china’s new economic position, seeking to understand its spread in terms of patterns of influence that relate to ‘contemporary forms of “empire” and “domination” under conditions of globalization, the decline of exclusive sovereignty and economic interdependence.’ at a time when we hear so much about ‘global english,’ it is worth keeping this aggressive linguistic reality in mind. it is insufficient to understand the introduction of dual language signs along liverpool road and via sarpi as the imposition of a dominant upon a minority language. in reality, the languages of the communities who erect these signs are also under threat from the global expansion of putonghua in the twenty first century. on co-figuration to return to the initial scene of chinese signage in sydney’s ashfield, this background puts a new perspective on the situation. no longer can we understand the introduction of dual language signs solely as the flattening of a minority into a national language under the aegis of australian multicultural ideologies of harmony, although it is important to keep this reading in play. it is probably apposite to note that the teaching of putonghua among china’s ethnic minorities is also promoted under the ethos of ‘harmonious society,’ which since the 2005 national people’s congress has emerged as the principal socio-economic vision of the chinese government. what is being legislated in the case of the sydney signs, however, is something more than harmony, which has certainly become a keyword for programs of social inclusion, no matter how differentially they may be implemented the world over. at stake is also the co-presence of two dominant global languages, which vie with each other, but also enter into unexpected forms of neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 14 complicity—with china increasingly emphasizing the learning of english (especially among university graduates) and english-speaking countries, not least australia with its fluent mandarin speaking prime minister, promoting the learning of putonghua. how then are we to read these dual language signs in a dynamic global context where the endless rerun of universality and particularity through the political figure of the citizen has been short-circuited by new patterns of intimacy, sovereignty and partitioning? i am not angling for some enthusiastic reading of these signs as ciphers of east-west harmony, competition, interpenetration or the like. i do not want to abandon the critical impulse, especially given the practices of ethnic bordering that accompany the demand for chinese signs on via sarpi to feature dual script in italian, itself a national language with global reach, although neither on the scale of english nor putonghua. what needs to be questioned, especially given the recommendations that the characters of the two languages be accorded the same size, is the very notion of interchangeability that these signs pose. at stake here is what naoki sakai (1997) calls co-figuration—the very schema that allows the representation of translation as the passage between two equivalents that resemble each other and thus makes possible their determination as conceptually different. co-figuration involves the negotiation and reification of the difference between a familiar and unfamiliar language. although this relation cannot be perceived as symmetrical, its terms can be made available for a comparison ‘in which both the familiar and the unknown are rendered representable and come to be represented by their respective figures’ (sakai 1997: 34). co-figuration thus entails the representation of translation as a movement between two already separate and internally homogeneous languages, which, in their interchangeability, allows the constitution of the figure of ‘us’ in the projective imagining of the figure of ‘them.’ for sakai, the ‘practice of translation’ is ‘radically heterogeneous to the representation of translation’ (1997: 15). through the practice of translation, ‘the incommensurability as difference that calls for the service of the translator in the first place is negotiated or worked on’ (14). translation is ‘just like other social practices that render the points of discontinuity in the social formation continuous’ (14). only after translation, does it become possible ‘to represent the initial difference as an already determined difference between one language unity and another’ (14). the representation of translation thus neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 15 involves the erasure of the oscillation, indeterminacy and encounter with the untranslatable involved in the practice of translation: only in the representation of translation can we construe the process of translation as a transfer of some message from “this” side to “that” side, as a dialogue between one person and another, between one group and another, as if dialogue should necessarily take place according to the model of communication. thus the representation of translation also enables the representation of national or ethnic subjects, and, in spite of the presence of the translator, who is always in between, translation, no longer as difference or repetition but as representation, is made to discriminatorily posit one language unity against another (and one cultural “unity” and another). (15) it is precisely such a representation of translation that is found on dual language street signs, whether understood to facilitate intercultural dialogue, as in the case of liverpool road, or to reinforce borderlines between cultural groups, as in the case of via sarpi. not only does such a representation of translation function according to the model of communication, prioritizing the transmission of a message to a certain language group (this shop sells that), but it also obscures differences within the unities figured as equivalents, for example, differences of dialect. furthermore, as sakai argues of the schema of co-figuration, these signs allow a national community to constitute itself as a subject by ‘making visible the figure of an other with whom it engages in a translational relationship’ (1997: 15-16). to further examine the question of translation and subjectivity, i would like to ask how this schema of co-figuration relates to the vision of co-citizenship that balibar (2004a) advocates as a means of thinking of citizenship not only in terms of sovereignty and formal political belonging but also as a differentiated and partial notion that might be shaped in various ways to provide cultural, political and social rights. the concept of co-citizenship seeks to work over and across the kind of representation of translation sakai finds implicit in the schema of co-figuration, imagining the production of political subjectivity within a civic and civil space where the stranger is not recognised as the enemy. at stake is the question of ‘access to rather than simply entitlement to citizenship’ (balibar 2004a: 132). balibar attempts to imagine a form of democratic political membership, which, while necessarily bounded, is continuously recreated in a politics of civility in which border crossing becomes the very substance of citizenship. furthermore, he imagines this civility to be played out in terms of a ‘conflictual model of the process of translation … where differences are neither denied nor absolutized’ (2004b: 21). how does such an understanding of citizenship relate to the politics of neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 16 translation discussed by sakai? more precisely, is the coin co-figuration the coin cocitizenship? asking this question takes us to the heart of the nexus of translation and citizenship embodied in the debates about bilingual signs that provide the focus of this paper. to interrogate the coin this way is to raise the question of the common. it is to move into a space and time where relations precede identities and differences and can be anchored to neither a stable subjectivity nor a given human nature. yet it is also to remember that the common is equivalent to neither the universal nor the public—that it implies, and issues the challenge to construct, a relation of value that does not pass through the general equivalent as described by marx. it is thus neither a system of equality—which in its modern constitutional format was always vouchsafed by a simultaneous appeal to hierarchy—nor of civility, which although a relational notion assumes a bounded political space in which hospitality might be extended or tolerance exercised. just as importantly, it is not a feature or capacity of community, whether understood as an ethnicized or nationalized organism or as an irreducibly differentiated construct (nancy 1991; esposito 1998). nor is the common, i might add in a counteractive note to some of the more recently pervasive modes of conceiving it, a positive and creative flux of vitalistic energy that is without content, open to appropriation, and thus refuses to reckon with the power of the negative that fails to disappear with the exhaustion of dialectical thought. to make only half a joke in italian, i would like to call this question of co-figuration, co-citizenship and the common, the problem of the cococo (the term is a contraction of contratto contratto contratto, contract contract contract, and is widespread to refer to the figure of the precarious worker). only half a joke, i say, since the labour contract is central to the presence of migrants in countries like australia and italy, whether under the terms of australia’s 451 visa (for the entry of skilled migrants with employer sponsorship) or italy’s bossi-fini laws (where it provides the migrant’s immunization against deportability). the coin contract posits subjects who enter into an agreement on equal terms, a formal equality, which is then played out in terms of the production of surplus value, both absolute and relative, which involves relations of exploitation. it is such a contractual arrangement, i would say, that underlies the co-figuration present on the signs in sydney’s ashfield. in neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 17 so far as these acts of translation promise recognition for an appropriate performance of difference, they embody what might be called the contract of australian multiculturalism: a contract that guarantees the official recognition of differences that will not disturb the social ordering but also, as became clear in the cronulla riots of december 2005 (involving violence against and on the part of arab men), the continued racialization of differences that do disturb. if the chinese merchant remains a disturbing difference in milan, it is not necessarily due to the presence of a similar multicultural pact. but here again the labour contract is a central question, since in play is the question of which migrants get to become a small entrepreneurs in this most commercial of italian cities. to return to the question about the coin co-figuration and co-citizenship then, it is necessary to answer both yes and no. co-figuration assumes a time and space of being alongside that can then generate infinite evaluations on the basis of differences. it is not necessarily free of the formal equality of the contractual agreement that precedes the act of labour exploitation. likewise, co-citizenship, while it implies a mode of civil cohabitation that moves beyond the binary of citizen and foreigner, is not, insofar as it involves ‘at the same time community and universality,’ sufficient to vouchsafe the construction of the common. balibar himself is clear that the emergence of cocitizenship will be a ‘long and hazardous process,’ which will not necessarily escape the ‘intrinsic antinomies’ of citizenship—that is, the tensions between rights and duties, membership and exclusion, participation and representation, formal equality and substantive inequalities, and so on (2004b: 21-23). if the coin co-figuration is the co in co-citizenship, it is not necessarily the coof the common. to construct the common it may be necessary to become co-foreigners rather than co-citizens, to practice and imagine ways of being alongside or together that do not refer to the contractual model of recognition and rights and/or its correlate sovereign arrangements. it is to invent another mode of figuration, let’s call it transfiguration, based in the realization that translation is never a finished practice—as implied by the finality of translated street signs—but a permanent process that abdicates the sovereign position of arbitration/neutrality to produce a space and time where the general equivalent is bypassed and the encounter with difference never complete. neilson translating signs, producing subjects portal, vol. 6, no. 1, january 2009. 18 reference list arrighi, g. 2007, adam smith in beijing: lineages of the twenty-first century, verso, london. balibar, é. 2004a, we, the people of europe: reflections on transnational citizenship, princeton university press, princeton. balibar, é. 2004b, ‘europe as borderland.’ online, available: http://www.ru.nl/socgeo/colloquium/europe%20as%20borderland.pdf (accessed 4 november 2008). benveniste, e. 1971, problems 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2008). thunø, m. 1999, ‘moving stones from china to europe: the dynamics of emigration from zhejiang to europe,’ in internal and international migration: chinese perspectives, (eds) h. mallee & f.n. pieke, routledge, london, 159-80. wang, h. 2003, china’s new order: society, politics, and economy in transition, trans. t. huters and r. karl, harvard university press, cambridge, ma. wise, a. 2004, contact zones: experiences of cultural diversity and rapid neighbourhood change among anglo-celtic and long term elderly residents in ashfield, centre for research on social inclusion, macquarie university, sydney. xiang, b. 2005, transcending boundaries: zhejiangcan: the story of a migrant village in beijing, brill, leiden. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 18, no. 1/2 sep 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: chopra, r. 2022. curating divinity: religious souvenirs, shopkeepers and bazaar curation. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 18:1/2, 111–124. https://doi. org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i12.7809 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal research article (peer reviewed) curating divinity: religious souvenirs, shopkeepers and bazaar curation radhika chopra corresponding author: professor radhika chopra, department of sociology, university of delhi (retired). r-151, first floor, greater kailash part one, new delhi – 110048, india, radhika.chopra@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7809 article history: received 02/07/2021; accepted 24/02/2022; published 27/09/2022 abstract this paper explores the universe of souvenirs of sikh gurus and martyrs available in the bazaars around sikhism’s most sacred shrine, the darbar sahib in amritsar. rather like objects in museum exhibitions, souvenir art actively produces ideas of divinity and martyrdom. the deliberate arrangements of guru and martyr souvenirs in shopwindows demonstrate the ‘sense’ of curation of ordinary shopkeepers in the bazaar. shop displays, i argue, resemble the care of sacred art by museum curators. but there is more to shop displays than mere imitation. i analyse the vis-à-vis between the souvenir displays of two modern martyrs, jarnail singh bhindranwale, the militant leader of separatist khalistan, and bhagat singh, the nationalist hero, that express bazaar understandings of martyr souvenirs as affective objects, possessing both ritual and political value. the curated displays in museums and shopwindows are critical in creating a conscious, purposive aura around modern sikh martyrdom. keywords shrine museums; amritsar; religious souvenirs; bazaars; curators; shopkeepers museum curators pay attention to the voice of things. they think about the affective nature of objects, consider the ability of objects to reach outward, inviting viewers to imagine the object’s history, symbolism, emotional appeal and cultural landscape. curation in the present straddles the past of the object and creates a future for the object through museum displays. but curation also encourages viewers to look at the sacred object in relation to objects that surround it, to understand a world of ritual value. curators recognise the affective quality of sacred objects, their capacity to arouse emotion and animate feelings of belief. fundamental to 111 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7809 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7809 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7809 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:radhika.chopra@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7809 displays is a curation of sacred feeling. techniques of exhibition—spotlighting, elevation, spacing, position— create an aura around sacred objects, lifting them out of the universe of ordinary things. museum curators detail the histories of sacred objects to understand the significance with which communities endow their sacred objects. sacred objects are treated as animate by curators who reach out to ecclesiastical authorities or anthropologists to develop codes for the display of such cherished objects. museums may, for example, replicate places of worship to convey the living quality of a sacred object (greene 1992; mauzé & derlon 2003; seligman & monroe 2006). the bodleian regularly makes provision for a copy of the shikshapatri, a sanskrit manuscript to be available for devotee-visitors to perform arati, the ritual lighting of a lamp as an offering to the sacred text. a curator—from the latin, cura, care1—is a keeper of heritage, an interpreter, a specialist in exhibitions and documentation, a care giver, with a ‘pastoral’ responsibility toward a sacred object. in earlier work i discussed the politics of displays in shrine museums (chopra 2013; 2018). in this paper i explore the idea of curation as care, concentrating on displays within shrine museums. curating exhibitions in shrine museums serves a double purpose: displaying sacred heritage but also recognising museum spaces as sacred. the kendriya sikh ajabghar, the central sikh museum in the darbar sahib, one of sikhism’s most sacred shrines located in the north indian city of amritsar,2 is just such a space. among its holdings of sacred art are painted chronicles of the lives of the ten sikh gurus and of martyrs of sikhism.3 the painted images of these revered persons, exemplars of virtue and morality, are more than mere exhibits in a museum: they are viewed as mazhbi tasveeran, literally religious art, akin to devotional objects. treated as sacrosanct space, the central sikh museum, which i have discussed at length in other work (chopra 2013; 2018), is to home revered beings and sacred things. viewers stand before the exhibits as devotees, in bodily attitudes of reverence, with bare feet and heads covered (fig 1), as they might before the guru granth sahib (the honoured scripture as the guru).4 viewing an image in the museum is considered an act of worship. each painting and object are carefully curated to evoke belief, memory, and history. paintings and objects signpost momentous events, visually woven together to create a chronicle of sikh pasts. the museum, therefore, approximates a memorial, actively creating and commemorating what is to be remembered as heritage and history. a momentous event of the twentieth century ‘recounted’ and remembered in the exhibits of the central sikh museum is ‘operation bluestar,’5 the military operation mounted in june 1984, when the indian 1 in the oxford english dictionary, ‘curate’ is a member of the clergy with pastoral responsibility. as a verb, curate means to select, organize and look after objects in a collection or an exhibition. the noun curate and its verb form, curate, are etymologically rooted in the latin cura, ‘care’ (lexico 2022). under the roman empire, the title of curator (caretaker) was given to officials in charge of various departments of public works with public responsibilities (kissane 2010). 2 several prominent gurudwaras have important museums within their precincts. for example, anandpur sahib in punjab (singh 2015); and the sis ganj gurudwara in delhi (singh 2019) among others. 3 very briefly, sikhism is a monotheistic religion. a number of scholars of sikhism have argued that the term ‘god’ is inappropriate as a translation of ik onkar, the timeless one, and inadequate to understand the meaning of the divine in sikhism. the word/teaching of the ten gurus established the congregation, which was sovereign, and maintained that divinity existed in everyone (fenech & singh 2014: 154, 225– 226). martyrs sacrificed their lives in defense of this idea. after the tenth guru closed the line of succession, the scripture became personified as guru and became the center around which the sikh community coalesced. martyrs constituted the mobile terrains of piety and were perceived as exemplar beings. 4 in the early years of the eighteenth century, the line of succession was closed by the tenth sikh guru and devolved upon the scripture, the granth. for sikhs, the scripture has an authoritative status as the living embodiment of the guru. 5 the orchestrated military assault on the sri darbar sahib, the eponymous golden temple complex in amritsar, during the military operation conducted in the first week of june in 1984, is referred to as operation bluestar. the army action was executed to dislodge militants who had taken shelter within the sacred complex and had fortified it. the assault on the sacred site is most frequently spoken of as a deeply traumatic event, evoking intense but uneasy remembrances (chopra 2011: 15, 121–122). the military siege, army occupation, and the shelling of the sacred buildings in the military attack are chopra portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022112 army entered the sacred precincts of the darbar sahib (chopra 2011). a bitter, violent battle was fought within the shrine between the indian army and militant separatists who were demanding a separate state of khalistan. the battle of operation bluestar left its marks upon the shrine’s landscape, including the destruction of some of the key buildings within the complex. as a momentous event, operation bluestar is widely spoken of and remembered as a wound inflicted by the indian state upon the sikh community and its sacred shrine. the wound and the loss are continuously commemorated to this day. rituals of commemoration—processions, recitations, prayer—are performed in june of every year. most spectacularly, the exhibits in the gallery spaces of the central sikh museum commemorate the experience of loss. bullet and tank shells used in the military operation, salvaged from the rubble of destroyed domes and walls, are displayed at the centre and corners of a long gallery in the museum. a 1987 painting of the damaged dome of the akal takhat (throne of the timeless one) (chopra 2011: 137) is prominently displayed. the caption of the painting baldly, but unequivocally, asserts ‘sri akal takht fauji hamleh toh baad (6 june 1984)’ (the akal takht after the army assault, 6 june 1984). the painting is surrounded by portraits of men who died during the military operation or were subsequently put to death as traitors. the captions under the portraits refer to these men as martyrs, as defenders of sikhism. their museum portraits are treated as mazhbi tasveeran, sacred art, representations of revered persons (fig 1). figure 1. visitors and the display of portraits of martyrs at the central sikh museum, amritsar; © radhika chopra (2007) the gallery opens into the corridor leading out to the museum exit. the corridor is a special exhibition space in itself. the corridor walls are a memorial inscribed with the names of those whose bodies were recovered perceived as particularly traumatic because of the place of the darbar sahib and the harmandir, the golden temple, in sikh religion and hagiography. the military action was viewed as a forcible occupation and as desecration, ordered and sanctioned by the indian state (chopra 2011: 123). chopra portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022113 from the debris and could be identified in the aftermath of operation bluestar. the blue and white liston-the-wall is arranged by name, father’s name, village and district of the corpse. for many, the corridor is a space for personal and collective remembrance and commemoration. the list-on-the-wall is a substitute for the ritual of muh dekhna, a last viewing of the face of the corpse before cremation. (chopra 2011: 138). in many different respects the museum is a mnemonic space, where politics and faith intersect, where viewing museum exhibits redraws boundaries between sacred and political. the crossing between museum and memorial is evident in the displays of post-operation bluestar portraits painted in the early years of the twenty-first century sharing gallery space with images of greater historical pedigree within the central sikh museum. the contiguity of historically disparate paintings makes the objects and exhibits an analytically important area to understand boundaries and crossings. among the exhibits, guru and martyr images are central. these images have become markers of a collective identity, evoked in numerous forms of worship, including most spectacularly, the final prayer—the ardas—recited in shrines at the end of congregational worship when martyrs are invoked and remembered. martyrs who died defending sikhism are highly valued as producers of piety. martyrs continue to be created in response to contemporary politics or social conditions. in the sikh collective imagination, the invocation of martyrs as defenders of faith is intrinsic to constituting a shared universe of belief. written and visual chronicles of martyrs become critical texts to reinforce charisma. visual and written chronicles of martyrdom are carefully compiled, deploying recognizable historical landscapes and incorporating newer events to create the habitus of modern martyrdom. martyr images are affective objects venerated as mazhbi tasveeran, or religious art. though the central sikh museum is a key space where images of sikh gurus and martyrs are exhibited, the museum is not the only place where images of divinity are found. in the bazaars surrounding the darbar sahib, poster portraits of gurus and martyrs proliferate, actively shaping memories of medieval and modern martyrdom. it is the ‘stepping out,’ as it were, of the images of gurus and martyrs, and the placement of sacred beings in ‘profane,’ mundane spaces of the bazaar that is of particular interest to me. what boundaries are crossed by the bazaar avatars of martyrs? what sense of martyrdom is evoked beyond the confines of the museum and the shrine? what particular intersections of the political with the pious are discernible in their bazaar appearances? does the contiguity of the bazaar with the shrine compel a synchronised interpretation of souvenir art with exhibits of martyrs of the central sikh museum? or does the bazaar offer a distinct point of view on martyrdom? if the location of the central sikh museum in the darbar sahib enfolds the museum within the space of the shrine, and it is therefore treated as an institutionalised sacred space, then what kinds of spaces are the bazaars, where replicas and posters of pious divine beings are displayed? what should we make of the images and objects of the sacred sold as souvenirs in the shops? in this paper, i take forward my earlier analysis of the politics of modern martyrdom (chopra 2018), to argue that displays of souvenir art of martyrs in the bazaar contests the singular discourse of martyrdom in the central sikh museum constituted by the displays of modern martyrdom. bazaars of amritsar this set of questions makes it important to enter and elucidate the complex spaces of the bazaar. the bazaars of numerous pilgrimage centres, including the bazaars of amritsar, amplify the sacred in commercial transactions. unfortunately, a comparison with the curated commerce of non-sikh shrines is beyond the scope of this paper; but the capacity of curated commerce to expand the shrine and the sacred is indisputable. to explore the intersection of commerce with the sacred in this paper i analyse the bazaars of amritsar which are promoted in tourist brochures as ‘must visit’ places. entering or leaving the darbar sahib, shop displays of mazbhbi tasveeran attract pilgrim-consumers inviting them to dip into their wallets. chopra portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022114 ingeniously crafted and packaged divine collectibles snag a tourist’s attention in the competitive spirit of the marketplace. the work of scholars of material culture (davis 1996; jain 2007; miller 2010; ramaswamy 2003) is especially interesting for my understanding of how religious art is treated in non-religious spaces like museums and bazaars. as briefly discussed above, sacred objects in museums are recognised as possessing affective, active qualities; but what makes religious souvenirs fascinating is how bazaar displays ‘are designed to ‘act’ to animate relations between the devotee and the divine’ (chopra 2018: 54). sacred souvenirs on shop shelves emphasize piety to boost commercial transactions. tourist pilgrims might have a predilection toward piety but shopkeepers of religious souvenirs are aware that religious souvenirs are placed in a universe of commercial competition. unlike a museum display, the affective quality of the sacred souvenir and its ability to access a pilgrim’s purse cannot be assumed. though a highly emotive object, a sacred souvenir is a commodity that competes for attention. ‘spotlighting’ a sacred souvenir to stand out amongst a miscellany of objects is imperative for commercial success. to accentuate its special sacred character, shopkeepers treat religious souvenirs differently, setting them apart from other commodities, curating displays that cast an aura around these souvenirs. distinctive strategies of curation are evident in fig. 2, where each object draws on each other’s ritual value to enhance it. each object will be dispersed when sold. it is the astute juxtaposition of the dashboard ornament of baba dip singh, nestled against the desk clock with the insignia of sikhism and nanak, next to a golden temple paper weight enclosed in a dome of plastic, ‘framed’ by the indian flag and the harmandir souvenirs which demonstrate the shopkeepers’ cura in creating ritual value. the faux jewellery jutting into the display belongs to the universe of the ordinary; its inclusion however, should not be understood as a careless oversight. it seems to me that the vis-à-vis between the ‘diamond’ bracelet and the plastic-domed shrine paper weight is one of mutual enrichment. both add lustre to the display and value to each other. the museum in the shrine and the shops in the bazaar share a key element: the sense of care, cura, toward religious artefacts. the deliberate arrangements of sacred souvenirs by ordinary bazaari-lok (bazaar folk) create a conscious, purposive aura around them to convey their ritual value. special packaging, as well as the goods themselves convey a shopkeepers cura, the sense of respecting objects invested with ‘feelings’ of faithfulness. at the same time, sacred souvenirs go beyond the original symbolic value of the religious object, representing the shopkeepers’ commercial skills and familiarity with the ‘audience’ of buyers and consumers. shopkeepers in shrine bazaars have an expertise located at the busy intersections of subjectivities, events, identities, social processes and the language of things that conveys their care—cura—closely resembling curation. bazaar curation, if i may use the term, impels us to think of shopkeeper as curators, offering a view of special objects in their care. the shopwindow exhibition of objects displays the shopkeeper-curator’s perspective, a sense of their being in the world. objects speak; and shopkeeper-curators speak through the displays and transactions of objects. it is the shopkeepers cura that is the focus of this paper. to elucidate with an instance of shopkeepers’ curation, i describe a souvenir produced by two brothers who run a souvenir ‘art’6 shop. the brothers have photographed frescoes painted on the walls of a nine-story samadhi (cenotaph) in which the remains of atal rai (the son of the sixth sikh guru, sri hargobind) are kept. part of the darbar sahib complex, the frescoes of the samadhi depict the janam sakhi—the life story—of the founder of the sikhism, guru nanak. pictorial and calligraphed janam sakhis were and are cultural documents that enable the spread of sikhism. analysing janam sakhis nikki guninder kaur 6 to protect privacy, i use a pseudonym for the shop, and call it sikh fine arts. the word ‘art’ in the shop sign creates a distinction with other souvenir shops in the bazaar. it indicates the shop owners view of their wares as special objects endowed simultaneously with artistic and divine significance. chopra portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022115 argues that early janam sakhis as the ‘stories’ of the life of the founder were possibly late sixteenth century hagiographies, passed down ‘through the years in a variety of renditions’ (singh 1992: 329). the frescoes emulate the style of medieval miniature prevalent in north india. the owners of the shop, sikh fine arts, have assembled the photographs of the painted frescoes into ‘art’ book, marketed as a limited edition. advertised online, the ‘art book’ can be couriered overseas in international currencies. the limited-edition book participates in the transactional universe of material objects. despite bearing all the hallmarks of bazaar souvenirs, the owners of sikh fine arts position their art book of the baba atal frescoes as a sacred object, not a common souvenir. to mark the distinction, they have ‘enclosed’ the book in an elaborately inscribed wooden case, denoting the ‘treasure’ within. the embossed wooden case endows the book with an affective presence, animating veneration. as an ‘account’ of nanak’s life the art book is a purposive object that orients the art-book souvenir, and those who purchase it, to the devotional domain. encasing it sets it apart as sacred art. the owners of sikh fine arts speak of the specially boxed book as an act of preserving a valuable heritage that belongs to amritsar (and to them). it is a view held to a greater or lesser extent by virtually all the shopkeepers who sell religious souvenirs in the bazaars around the darbar sahib complex. figure 2. a souvenir display. in the foreground an ornament for a car dashboard of baba dip singh, desk clock curio with nanak and the flag with khanda insignia, and plastic encased replicas of the harmandir sahib, the golden temple; © radhika chopra (2011) chopra portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022116 curating martyrs in the bazaar as in the central sikh museum, martyrs are a large presence in amritsar’s shrine bazaars. souvenirs of a key martyr of medieval sikhism, baba dip singh, are widely available in the bazaars. the ubiquity of dip singh souvenirs indicates both the significance of dip singh and of the value place on martyrdom. in sikh chronicles, dip singh is an uncontestably important signifier of sikh martyrdom, a saint-warrior, producing hand-written copies of the guru granth sahib, the sikh scripture7. images of baba dip singh, nestled amidst images of revered figures, are not segregated from other souvenir images. a pavement seller displays posters of guru nanak, the founder of sikhism, guru govind the tenth and last guru, and baba dip singh (fig. 3). he also sells brightly coloured posters of muscled wrestlers, plumb, cheerful naked baby boys,8 and popular folk singers. when i interviewed him, he said that he always props the guru posters above the heads of others, to indicate respect, but also to catch the attention of passers-by (fig. 3). reverence and profit intersect in the curation of his merchandise. figure 3. detail of a pavement poster-seller’s curation of gurus, martyrs and baby boys; © radhika chopra (2007) sitting in the shadow of the shrine, the pavement seller’s poster exhibition shows his astute understanding of techniques of curation—elevation, positioning, spacing—directing attention to the significance of martyrs in the pilgrim town of amritsar. his curated display allows me to reflect on two other martyr images evident in the shrine-bazaar. the first are images of jarnail singh bhindranwale, one of the key militant leaders of the khalistan movement. in the late twentieth century, bhindranwale was the 7 a number of scholars note the proficiency of baba dip singh in making copies of the sikh scripture. pashaura singh notes “another beautiful ‘golden cover volume’ (sunahiri bir) … prepared by baba dip singh in sambat 1783 (1726 ce) is in damdama sahib in bhatinda…” (singh 2014: 130). louis fenech remarks “…the famous baba dip singh (d. 1757?), the misl’s founder, who was known for his skill at copying and interpreting the adi granth…” (fenech 1997: 635 fn. 73). 8 in the pavement display of valued, though highly gendered, figures the images of baby boys seems to index the value placed on boys vis-à-vis girls, a value evident in punjab’s sex ratios. it is the nakedness of the male babies, however, which is visually significant. punjabi mothers often leave their baby boys unclothed, though little girls will always be dressed so that their genitals are completely covered. gendering sexuality is fundamental to punjabi culture; the forbidden female genitalia is never exposed though it is palpable in masculine insults and boasts (chopra 2004; das 1976; hershman, 1974). chopra portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022117 head of the seminary founded by baba dip singh. often, souvenir posters of the medieval martyr baba dip singh and the modern martyr, jarnail singh bhindranwale, are placed side by side. metonymically identified with the demand for a separate state of khalistan,9 controversy surrounded the installation of bhindranwale’s portrait in the central sikh museum. the portrait was hung many years after other martyr portraits were displayed in the gallery commemorating the modern martyrs of operation bluestar, briefly described above. while it aroused a great interest, bhindranwale’s museum portrait was also met with apprehension. i have discussed the controversy around the portrait at length elsewhere (chopra 2013; 2018); suffice to say that the legacy of bhindranwale is surrounded by uneasy remembrance. in the shrine bazaar, along with images of baba dip singh and bhindranwale, images of bhagat singh, another key martyr, circulate. bhagat singh is commonly claimed as a nationalist martyr. like baba dip singh’s political battles with the mughal regime in the late seventeenth century, both bhindranwale and bhagat were crucial to twentieth century indian politics, bhagat singh in his opposition to colonial rule, and bhindranwale’s violent conflict with the post-colonial indian state. the key difference between the medieval martyr baba dip singh whose souvenir images share space with gurus, babies, wrestlers and singers, the images of bhindranwale and bhagat are seldom juxtaposed. to my mind, this segregation of images in the bazaars of amritsar today is an exceptional example of bazaar curation. rather like the man himself, bhindranwale souvenirs, have a chequered history. in the decade immediately following operation bluestar in 1984, souvenirs of bhindranwale were not readily available; and remained largely unavailable throughout the period of the military occupation of the darbar sahib and the police operations in the state. however, a bookshop, the taksali pustak bhandar run by the seminary founded by baba dip singh, and headed by bhindranwale before he took refuge within the darbar sahib in 1982 till his death in june 1984, continuously displayed bhindranwale images. the taksali bookshop was virtually the only place where souvenir images of bhindranwale and books on the militant leader were sold through the period of the counterinsurgency. an open-fronted shop, the taksali pustak bhandar wares, especially of bhindranwale, are unusually enclosed within glass cases. its shop sign prominently displayed a photograph of bhindranwale. since i began to document street signage from 2010, the image of the militant leader has faded. it no longer catches the eye as it did when i began the visual documentation. the fading indexes the sense of anxiety around images that stirred up memories of bhindranwale. the forcible annexation of the darbar sahib, the pronouncements broadcast over the outward facing loud-speakers, the audiences held within the shrine his death in the military operation in 1984 within the precincts of the shrine are uncomfortable remembrances. the unease of memory may have been reason enough for the initial commercial failure of his souvenir images. in the immediate aftermath of operation bluestar, the indian states prohibition on assembly under various provisions of the criminal procedure code regulated spaces around the shrine and were part of the reason for the almost complete embargo on bhindranwale souvenirs. throughout this period bhindranwale souvenir images sold only in the taksali pustak bhandar which assiduously promoted his writing and his souvenir images. by 2013, another shop began stocking souvenirs of bhindranwale10. located in a busy bazaar street leading toward the darbar sahib complex, the shop has a prime location. its displayed goods are always on view for visitors enroute to the shrine. when i first walked along the busy market street in 2007 at the start of my intensive fieldwork of the areas around the shrine, the shop stocked quite run-of-the-mill 9 though bhindranwale was not the first to put forward the demand for khalistan, in popular imagination he is most closely identified with the movement. bhindranwale was killed during operation bluestar along with many of his supporters. 10 the interregnum between 1984 and 2013, when bhindranwale’s images began to be more widely available, is dense with visual politics. the politics surrounding the mounting of his portrait in the central sikh museum in 2011 and the subsequent building of a memorial in his memory are part of that period which i have analysed in detail elsewhere (chopra 2013; 2018) chopra portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022118 souvenirs. by 2013, small painted plaques of bhindranwale’s face with some of his more famous maxims inscribed directly below his painted visage, were hung right outside the shop. by november 2015, after a sizable portrait of the controversial leader was hung in a central gallery of the central sikh museum (chopra 2018), large images of bhindranwale became freely available for sale in the bazaar. many of the bazaar depictions replicated the museum portrait. some superimposed an image of the golden temple into the frame, placing the militant leader next to the shrine. from the doorway of the main street shop, bhindranwale wearing a bandolier across his chest, carrying an arrow, dressed in a choga (loose, knee length shirt) and blue turban, in the style of shrine functionaries, gazes directly at pilgrim-buyers (fig. 4). in the central sikh museum portraiture and in souvenir images available in the shrine bazaar, bhindranwale appears as pious person and martyr, sharing space with the medieval martyr dip singh, simultaneously crafting a discourse of modern martyrdom in the vis-à-vis with bhagat singh. figure 4. image of bhindranwale in front of the akal takhat, propped up on portraits of baba dip singh. the bhindranwale image is based on photographs, whereas the colourful image of guru gobind singh, the tenth guru, and of baba dip singh, are clearly drawn from painted portraiture; © radhika chopra (2015) unlike the taksali pustak bhandar devoted to bhindranwale memorabilia, the main street shop sells a miscellany of souvenir art. the shop has ‘integrated’ bhindranwale-as-object with a host of other souvenirs and goods. without overt statement, there is an internal conversation between the taksali putak bhandar and the shop in the main street through their stock of souvenirs. absolutist in its wares and partisan in its orientation, the taksali pustak bhandar harks back to memories of a militant past. over time, the taksali bookshop has faded both visually and economically, with brief moments of revival. despite the faded chopra portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022119 signage, low footfall, and meagre sales, it continues to exist, almost as of its primary purpose is just that—to exist and keep alive the memory of a singular martyr. by contrast, the main street shop positions its plentiful goods in the competitive spirit of the marketplace. it is in the vis-à-vis with other shops that line the street, that the curatorial sensibility of its shop owners is apparent. it clearly and unambiguously foregrounds the politics of martyrdom in its shop window displays. the curated arrangements of modern and medieval martyrs have galvanised the sale of bhindranwale memorabilia more actively than the taksali bookshop. the incorporation of the controversial martyr, bhindranwale, into the souvenir universe and in bazaar curations, has not remained uncontested. diagonally across from the mainstreet souvenir shop, another street facing shop refuses to ‘house’ bhindranwale in its own displays and sale of souvenirs. in the language of material cultures, shop fronts quicken a conversation between shopkeeper-curators, giving voice to their stances toward the politics of militancy and particular martyrs. through exhibits of souvenir goods, the creation and contestation of political-religious discourses of martyrdom are on display. the diagonally situated shop across the main street—i will call it picture house—has an extended frontage more elongated than most others in this street; its displayed wares have the advantage of snagging the attention of passers-by. like other little shops along the street leading to the darbar sahib, picture house primarily, though not exclusively, sells sikh religious souvenirs for pilgrims en route to the darbar sahib. in addition, its souvenir stock includes a large number of images of devi devta (gods and goddess) like bhagwati and durga, identified with hinduism. attractively displayed symbols of sikhism and hinduism are sold as items to fix onto car dashboards or hung from rear view mirrors. among the miscellany of religious souvenirs displayed by picture house, one remarkable ‘nonspiritual’ presence is that of the nationalist martyr, bhagat singh. a socialist revolutionary associated with the anti-colonial nationalist movement, bhagat singh, was executed for shooting an english police officer. photographs of bhagat singh show him dressed in a khaki uniform, with a fedora and sporting a thin, curling moustache, very much in the style of cinematic heroes. souvenir plaques, poster art, and t-shirts of bhagat singh postulate a visual orientation toward jallianwala bagh,11 a memorial that abuts the darbar sahib. it is almost universally acknowledged as the place where colonial power was exerted with brutal military muscle in the massacre of people in the park. the jallianwala bagh massacre is categorised as one of the early events that energised the nationalist struggle against colonial rule. since i began my research on the shrine bazaars of amritsar, i have always noticed a painted image of bhagat singh in uniform exhibited in the elongated frontage of picture house. more often than not, it has been a framed painting, though printed posters of a uniformed bhagat singh are available in other shops. the prominently displayed picture house painting is placed at street level, almost as if bhagat singh is stepping out into the street to become part of the restless throng. two aspects of the picture house display are striking. though bhagat singh was only an eleven-year-old child at the time of the jallianwala bagh massacre, in the painted (as indeed the printed representations) he is always depicted as an adult. the orientation toward jallianwala bagh as a site of an emergent nationalism is unmistakable. both in his painted adult form and the first-person legends printed on t-shirts (‘it seems i must return’, reads the legend in gurmukhi), suggests bhagat’s re-incarnation to rescue a polity under threat. the second striking aspect of his picture house image, is that bhagat singh does not wear a fedora or sport a curled moustache, 11 jallianwala bagh is a public garden in the vicinity of the darbar sahib. it is known for the massacre in 1919 of unarmed protesters who had gathered there on a ritually significant day, baisakhi (mid-april), to protest against the incarceration of two prominent punjabi leaders, under the provisions of the colonial rowlatt acts (1919), popularly known as the black acts. the jallianwala bagh massacre became a turning point in the indian nationalist struggle. though a museum existed for many years within its precincts, it was not an imposing one. by the late twentieth century, jallianwala bagh is one of the few open spaces within the old walled city of amritsar, providing a space to amble, hold hands or to use the public toilets, not only as a place to remember a traumatic past. history and everyday life existed companionably in the garden. in 2016, it was refurbished to become a museum-cum-memorial space commemorating past persecution and colonial violence. all the elements of commemoration—plaques, a son et lumiere and a museum—are present in jallianwala bagh. chopra portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022120 in the style promoted by state and nationalist poster art. as evident in fig. 5, he is depicted with a saffron turban (kesri pag, a colour popularly associated with protest).12 his chin sports a light beard, and a revolver, either tucked into his waist band or held in his hand is visibly painted in. the crisp white shirt and khaki trousers are evocative of modern military uniforms. souvenir memory evokes and celebrates bhagat singh as a modern martyr defending the nation, but also claims him as sikh, placing his portrait next to images of key sikh gurus. bhagat’s sikhism seems to counter the militant fundamentalist sikhism represented by the choga wearing, full-bearded bhindranwale, carrying the arrow (fig. 4). the two martyrs face each other across the street, in an unmistakeable visual dialogue, pulling remembrance and allegiance in two distinct directions. figure 5. bhagat singh, in bazaar souvenir portraits; © radhika chopra (2015) the ‘face off ’ between the portrayals of bhagat singh and bhindranwale are a clearly curated commentary, offered through souvenir objects, of the political credentials of both the khalistan ideologue and of bhagat singh. the sartorial specificity of the image of a uniformed bhagat in the picture house display suggests the shopkeeper-curator’s interpretation of visual cues to self-consciously portray bhagat singh as a modern, valued nationalist martyr, and a nationalist sikh, simultaneously referencing bhindranwale’s more religious apparel in the images available in the main street shop. both portraits are publicly displayed, though each evokes a distinct public. bazaar art bhagat denotes resistance to the 12 the popular 2006 bombay film, rang de basanti, or colours of spring (mehra 2006) celebrating bhagat singh and other significant anti-colonial revolutionaries, draws on the connotations between emergent revolutionary spirits, colours of protest, and the blossoming of the yellow mustard flower in basant, spring.. chopra portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022121 promotion of bhindranwale by militant ideologues of sikhism. bhagat singh’s portrait ‘stepping out’ into the bazaar street leading to the shrine is a ‘protest’ against the power of cliques who promote the doctrines of khalistan. the metaphoric ‘march’ to the shrine seems to be a form of resistance by way of the language of things, by those who seek to disengage sikhism from militant dogmas. museum curation seeks to fix how martyrs are imagined. bazaar curations present a variegated view of sikh philosophies of martyrdom; the bazaar view of martyrdom is dynamic, linking history, heritage, tradition, with contemporary cultures and politics. the two martyr images, of bhagat and bhindranwale, are interesting in their differences, but also in the way they seem to converse with one another in continuing the story of martyrdom that is being ‘invented’ and produced as a chronicle of sikh history within the shrine—and in the bazaar. bazaar curation, evident in the placement and spotlighting of souvenir objects is neither ad hoc nor unreflective. bazaar curations are material accounts, available to all manner of viewers: pilgrims, customers, municipal officials and anthropologists, through techniques of curation evident in shop frontages, signage and displays of souvenir art. the conspicuous curations are responsive to the politics of martyrdom. the visual is critical in foregrounding the debates over martyrdom, offering a point of view generated through transactions with viewers/consumers of images and artefacts. viewpoints are perceptible in the assembly of artefacts in each shop. inserting themselves into a discourse of religious sentiment there is a metaphoric ‘pointing’ toward two spaces that bracket the street the darbar sahib at one end and jallianwala bagh at the other. the affective value of martyr representations evokes the creation of ‘feeling’ toward revered beings housed within different shops. critical to the displays are the commentaries of shopkeepers as curators, of what, where and how the sacred is constituted and accessed. speaking through souvenir art, sold in the shrine bazaar, bazaari lok (bazaar folk) state, without overt confrontation, the right to comment on what they claim are controversial practices within the shrine museum. characterising themselves in conversations as ‘mere bazaar people’, ‘ordinary’ and ‘humble’, shopkeepers actively offer a distinct position on specific martyrs and postulate ‘care’ of martyrdom in souvenir art. through souvenir goods, shopkeeper-curators convey the virtue imbued in each material artefact sold in their respective shops, because, as they see it, those who sell such goods might be ordinary, but are steadfast believers and upholders of the faith. the intimacy between artefact and person is unmistakably voiced in the conversion of the souvenir from ‘common’ or ‘commercial’ good to an object invested with ritual value. the staging of the bazaari self as ‘ordinary’ almost humble, enables shopkeeper-curators to comment on museum curations, without the drama of overt disapproval. the muffled criticism needs to be understood as an insertion by bazaari lok into the conceptual congregational community, and the ‘right’ they accord themselves to speak through displays of souvenirs. a shrine and its surrounding bazaar are a place of intricate intersections of distinct economies creating and envisioning ‘feelings’ for the sacred. the conflicting poster art of bhagat singh and bhindranwale stand testimony to political events that have inflected the shrine and its surrounding bazaar. the political contours of events enter the universe of souvenirs. ritual objects sold in bazaars cross the threshold to enter the shrine in critical ways. small vinyl faces of bhindranwale are found on doorways within the shrine. pilgrims enter the darbar sahib wearing t-shirts on which bhagat singh is prominently displayed. in his work on the masjid and the suq, the mosque and market, gilsenan (1977) analyses the sacred canopy the mosque casts over the suq. the stamp of bazaar souvenirs upon the spaces within the shrine needs to be considered, for goods of the bazaar are affective in the creation of religious emotion and feeling for the sacred. the curated universe of religious souvenirs interrogates some recent repudiations of material manifestations of sikh religious life, denounced as posing a challenge to the pre-eminence of ‘the word’ in sikhism. on the other hand, bazaar transactions and discourses uphold the capacity of the material to delineate spaces as special and set apart, encourage worship and orient pilgrims and tourists to places of worship. the universe of ritual goods and souvenirs makes the sacred accessible and understood in the bazaar, through transactions at various levels, that ‘make’ the souvenir distinctive. ritual attitude is inculcated by visits to the shrine and views of museum displays in the central sikh museum. from the chopra portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 september 2022122 perspective of the bazaar, reverence and ritual attitude are equally inculcated by practices of piety promoted in bazaar curations. martyr images in the museum are ‘left behind’ once the pilgrim-believer leaves the museum gallery. by contrast, bazaar martyr images enter the home as souvenirs purchased as part of a pilgrimage to the shrine. the sacred souvenir keeps alive the feelings of devotion but is also treated with a degree of intimacy. it might be placed on a bedroom shelf, or at the front door to greet visitors. importantly, each souvenir emerging from a material universe, represents and reflects contemporary political events and allegiances. souvenirs are active in creating a sense of religious community and polity. souvenirs embody sentiments that go beyond conventionally classified religious feeling. the politics of remembrance that was sought to be subdued within the museum displays thrive in bazaars transactions, in shopkeeper displays and pilgrim purchases. amritsar, globally acknowledged as a sacred centre for sikhs is oriented toward the darbar sahib. but the shrine is ensconced in the midst of busy bazaars. though the shrine dominates the city skyline, it nevertheless opens out toward the bazaar and the city. in the contiguity of shrine and bazaar, the placement of martyr portraits in the museum as well as martyr souvenirs of the bazaar offer a perspective of the bazaar as a space of the sacred. rancière’s view resonates in the curation of souvenir art. ‘on the other hand, however, the aesthetic revolution is first of all the honour acquired by the commonplace….it shifts the focus from great names and events to the life of the anonymous; it finds symptoms of an epoch, a society, or a civilization in the minute details of ordinary life’ (rancière 2004: 33). visually and materially, a sense of the core and edges are created through imposing architecture and museum curations. the shrine metaphorically stands at the core. the bazaar, in this paradigm is the periphery. but the goods of the bazaar alter the landscape to tell a different story, of religious feeling marketed in religious goods. bazaar curations are presented as expressive of faith. objects are invested with thought, vital to the transaction of ideas, anchored in a key conceptualisation of the bazaar as generative of the sacred. what is presented in bazaar curations— and therefore what viewers see—is not a shop and a shrine, but spaces that jointly produce and complete the sacred. acknowledgements i would like to thank the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments and suggestions which have helped me improve my paper. the lacunae that remain are entirely mine. references chopra, r. 2004, ‘encountering masculinity: a methodological dilemma,’ in south asian masculinities: contexts of change, sites of continuity, (eds) r. chopra, c. osella & f. osella. kali for women and women unlimited, new delhi: 36–59. chopra, r. 2011, militant and migrant: the politics and social history of punjab. routledge, london. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203814048 chopra, r. 2013, ‘a museum, a memorial and a martyr: politics of memory in the 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http://www.tasveergharindia.net/essay/masculine-sikh-guru-martyr.html https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118829059.wbihms402 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199699308.001.0001 exiled by definition: portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ exiled by definition: the salar of northwest china1 david s g goodman, university of technology, sydney the scene at the crossroads seems typical of anywhere in central asia. the air is arid; walls and sidewalks are made of pressed mud; the sandy dust eddies and swirls down the road. the streetscape is unmistakeably turkic and islamic. along the road from a mosque, on one side of the cross-street leading into the junction is a row of explicitly halal eateries. outside, at stools, the customers are all men, most sporting embroidered hats and prolific beards. round the corner are a number of hardware and motor vehicle repair shops, with outside, younger men sitting around on motorcycles, smoking. women almost invariably wear a black headscarf, and have their arms, legs and shoulders also clothed. if accompanying their husbands, they walk at a discreet distance behind. at the crossroads itself, there are rows of shaded stalls where openair butchers have legs and shoulders of lamb hanging on hooks in full view, the blood dripping onto the ground. opposite, dry farming vegetables—chillies, capsicums, cabbage—are on sale from the backs of trucks. despite appearances, the location is central china rather than central asia. it is the market crossroads at gaizi (jiezi)2 the largest town in the xunhua salar autonomous county of qinghai province, though not its administrative centre.3 as a map of the 1 the research presented in this paper could not have been achieved without the cooperation and assistance of many local people in xunhua county. their participation in this research project is gratefully acknowledged. research for this article was undertaken as part of a project conducted in qinghai during 2001-2003 with the support of the australian research council. the assistance of guo jing, qinghai nationalities commission; ma chengjun, qinghai nationalities institute; and ma jianzhong, qinghai university in organizing research is also gratefully acknowledged. neither they nor any of those interviewed in connection with this project is responsible for any of the views or comments expressed in this article. 2 qinghai is an inherently multicultural environment. xunhua for example, despite its salar presence is also heavily tibetan. this makes the rendering of personal and place names and all proper nouns a little less than straightforward. names will be presented as far as possible in their most commonly used format and where appropriate reference will also be made to modern standard chinese. 3 the term ‘autonomous’ in prc usage indicates the presence of a significant non-han nationality, goodman salar of northwest china people’s republic of china [prc] quickly reveals, xunhua county is close to its physical centre; where the upper reaches of the yellow river cross from qinghai province into gansu province. xunhua in general, and gaizi in particular—with its central salar alitiuli mosque—is the epicentre of population and spiritual home for the close on 100,000 salar. the salar are described by the prc as a turkic and islamic (sunni) people. the majority live in xunhua county, with a small minority based outside in the neighbouring counties of hualong and tongren (both in qinghai) and jishishan and xiahe (both in gansu.) long before the chinese communist party [ccp] came to power in 1949 it had committed itself to the principle of a multinational state for china, in order to politically manage the approximately 6 percent of the population who were not regarded as han chinese but had been subjects of the qing empire and became (in principle) citizens of the successor republic after the collapse of the empire in 1911 (mackerras 1994;1995; chih-yu shih 2002). this was no small matter in northwest china generally, and in particular the region on either side of the contemporary border between qinghai and gansu provinces where there had been almost interminable violence after 1780 over the search for appropriate religious and political identities amongst local muslims (lipman 1997). an immediate general problem for those responsible for nationality policy in 1949 was the codification of the non-han chinese. this became a state project for the first half of the 1950s and resulted (often though not always through compromises between the state’s desire for both bureaucratic neatness and manageability, on the one hand, and local demands for self-identification, on the other) in the recognition of 55 ‘minority nationalities.’ the salar became an officially recognized nationality in the prc process of codification in this way at the beginning of the 1950s. though they were one of the smallest in numbers, they were, as already noted, geographically concentrated. they also had both a high degree of self-identity, and were fairly well known in the wider community outside xunhua, though not always for positive reasons. in addition to being long known as merchants and traders throughout the northwest, in ningxia, often involved in government and party-state activity. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 2 goodman salar of northwest china gansu, and xinjiang, as well as across qinghai, they also had a reputation for being ferocious and violent (lipman 1991, 65). the relationship between anthropological definitions of ethnicity and the prc’s nationality status is often contested, not least because for the prc conceptions of nationality are employed in very specific political and ideological contexts. differences among nationalities are always explained in terms of both stages in society’s unidirectional development towards (han) civilisation, and appeals to hereditary and racial purity (dikötter 1992). consequently the definition of any specific minority nationality usually identifies language and homeland within the prc as its major determinants.4 in the 1950s the salar became a state-recognised nationality defined through their distinctive salar language, their homeland in xunhua county, and additionally their origins as exiles from the samarkand area in today’s uzbekistan.5 exile is not only central to the definition of the salar, a sense of banishment and of being ‘outsiders’ are also part of common consciousness in xunhua county and indeed for the salar as a whole. in addition, there are various underlying accounts of migration in explanations of salar identity, including not only their origin but also their interaction with both the islamic world and chinese society. the salar understanding of exile is somewhat different to the ways in which that term has been used elsewhere, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries. in the first place, it is a pre-modern nation-state notion of banishment that is not associated with, or the consequence of a nationalist discourse. the word that is used in chinese—fangzhu— was more usually employed in imperial times for the act of being sent into exile, away from the political (and cultural centre) to the frontiers of civilised culture. given that the empire ruled ‘all under heaven’ with control and influence stronger at the centre and weaker at the periphery there was necessarily little of the 20th century notion of exile to beyond the boundaries of the state to be found in this conceptualisation. to complicate matters, in the salar case the experience now recounted as ‘exile’ was not 4 the prc interpretation of this process is outlined in fei 1981. a more critical view is provided by harrell 1994, 28 ff. 5 salazu jianshi bianxiezu 1982, 3. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 3 goodman salar of northwest china even a state-organised legal banishment, but more a migration driven by hostile conditions at a presumed point of departure; and to complicate matters still further, the centre of the universe for those who are now said to have migrated was inner asia, not the imperial court, which they moved towards, not away from. these features help explain why the self-understanding of the salar as exiles has not bequeathed an imperative to return, as is often the case for exiled communities elsewhere in the world. another, possibly more fundamental reason, is that salar identity apparently only starts with exile. there is no pre-exile homeland that is the subject of nostalgic romanticisation. indeed, there is considerable uncertainty as to the precise point (or for that matter, time) of origin for the salar, or those who are now called by that name. the lack of an imperative to return is also presumably related to the ways in which salar identity has been involved in the tortuous (and often violent) search for a sinomuslim identity, at once both politically chinese and socially muslim. originally, this was physically grounded in the area around hezhou (now linxia) in the south of gansu, which had become a major centre of islamic culture, at the end of the 17th century. for the salar, at times their interaction with the qing empire and its successor states resulted in considerable violence, as in the rebellion of 1781, the uprisings of the late 19th centuries, and the frequent outbreaks of resistance during the 1950s. in the 20th century there were though more constructive results, including the establishment of qinghai province in 1928, under first ma qi and then later his son, ma bufang, as essentially a muslim state within the chinese political system, a process in which salars from xunhua played a leading role as part of ma bufang’s military organisation (yang xiaoping 1986; chen binyuan 1986). one result of these cultural politics is that in contrast to the experience of other exiles, the salar do not present themselves as victims. on the contrary, the evidence of a recent survey of salar businessmen and community leaders suggests that discourses of exile and migration are now once again in use as instruments of salar mobilisation and wealth generation towards the positive creation of a sino-muslim identity. qinghai province was generally slow to adapt to the social and economic opportunities presented during the 1980s and 1990s by the reform of the earlier portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 4 goodman salar of northwest china system of state socialism. not so the salar, or at least a group of highly successful salar community leaders and business-people, who have been in the forefront of change throughout the province for the last two decades. xunhua and the salar xunhua county is located at the southern edge of the haidong district of qinghai province. haidong literally means ‘east of the lake’ and the lake in question is the large inland saltwater qinghai lake (sometimes more familiarly known outside china as kokonor.) the haidong district is the most heavily populated part of qinghai province6 (67.2 percent of the population live on 2.84 percent of the provincial land area) and contains almost all its arable land. xining, the provincial capital and a chinese outpost of empire from the 7th century on, is at the centre of this district. while xining is close to xunhua in terms of the scale of qinghai, it remains the best part of a day’s travel away by road. xining and haidong were for a long time part of gansu province and the region on either side of the qinghai-gansu border is perhaps best understood as china’s cultural frontier in the northwest. west to east this is where mongols and tibetans interact; south to north where chinese culture meets central asia. xunhua is a county of 2,100 square kilometres that runs for 90 kilometres along the course of the yellow river as it moves into gansu province, at between 1780 metres above sea level (the low point is exactly where the yellow river enters gansu province) and 4498 metres above sea level (the lazi mountains.) it is a county of mountains and valleys, poorly connected to the rest of china and poorly integrated in itself. until 1972 there was no paved road into or out of the county. the main communication route was along the yellow river into the linxia district of gansu. there is an extremely fertile strip along both sides of the yellow river, with a heavy clay soil, where annual yields of 800 jin of grain per mu are normal. at the same time a large part of the county is barren mountains, referred to by locals as ‘the land where nothing lives,’ and not even suitable, as elsewhere in qinghai province, for grazing. 6 for a general introduction to qinghai province see goodman 2004, 379-399. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 5 goodman salar of northwest china in 2001 xunhua county had about 120,000 people, and just under 30,000 households, living in 147 towns and villages.7 jishizhen is the county town, the seat of local government and the residence of the few han chinese who live in the county. xunhua’s population is predominantly salar (62 percent) though a substantial minority (24 percent) are tibetans, largely agriculturalists living in the tibetan villages at the east of the county. the last (10th) panchen lama was a native of xunhua. relationships between the salar and tibetans are complex. for the most part they have long lived and even worked together. most adult salar speak a fair amount of amdo tibetan. salar refer generally to tibetans in extremely friendly tones as ajiou meaning ‘maternal uncle,’ a term denoting as close a relative as can be without being parent, child or sibling (ma wei, ma jianzhong, & stuart 2001, 33), and during the 1950s the two communities cooperated on several occasions in acts of resistance to the prc. at the same time, under ma bufang and the drive to emphasise sinomuslim identity, especially in xunhua and neighbouring (and also islamic) hualong, a more aggressive policy of turning tibetans into sino-muslims was pursued(cui yonghong 1994, 71 ff). for the rest the resident population in xunhua county includes muslim hui (8 percent) and han chinese (6 percent). at the start of the 21st century county leaders are wont to describe xunhua in terms of its poverty. while this is not inaccurate against the standard of eastern china provinces, xunhua has been one of the more successful economic stories among qinghai counties since the early 1990s. by 2001 gdp had reached 30 million yuan renminbi (us$3.75 million.) the mainstays of the local economy are energy production, the export of labour outside the county, the wool industry and the production of cloths and clothing with islamic religious significance. there is a strong and growing electricity-generating industry, centred on two still fairly new hydroelectric stations on the yellow river. it is common to meet salar all over china’s northwest. some, as in the past, are travelling merchants and salesmen. in more recent developments xunhua now also supports a substantial number of 7 information on xunhua county from interview with ma fengsheng, county head, 5 august 2002, jishizhen, xunhua. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 6 goodman salar of northwest china county-based construction companies with workers sourced from the county, as well as a number of transport companies that work throughout the northwest. one consequence of this out-migration has been a demand for more salar restaurants and eateries to support migrant salars and this too has contributed to the export of labour. the increased economic development of xunhua is perhaps most apparent in the ways in which older, well-established industries have rapidly found new markets, and become mechanised and automated. in particular, the expansion of the woollen goods industry has been quite spectacular. xunhua previously had one small and inefficient mill, spinning sheep’s wool. since the late 1980s xunhua has become a major centre in china for washing and spinning sheep and yaks’ wool. it now has five large-scale enterprises all recapitalised with new technology and all led by native salars. this restructured and revitalised industry has contributed significantly to xunhua’s wealth, with the mills producing a range of products, including luxury products for export to europe and north america. the woollen goods industry aside, mechanisation and automation have also come to older industries making religious cloth, hats and embroidery, some of which is specific to the salar, and some of which has wider muslim applicability. minority nationality participation in the administration of local government and the local party-state in qinghai province is very variable, even though most of the province is organised into areas of minority nationality residence. clearly the degree of minority nationality representation is a function not only of each group’s relationship with the chinese party-state but also of that group’s self-articulation. in the case of xunhua county, there were nineteen people holding leadership positions in 2002 for the ccp, local government, local people’s congress and local chinese people’s representative conference. of those, nine were salar, two were tibetan, two hui and six han chinese. as these proportions suggest when compared to relativities in the population as a whole, there may at times have been an uneasy relationship between the salar and the chinese state. the key to understanding that interaction lies in xunhua’s cultural geography, or more accurately that of the wider environment outside the county. although for the chinese empire and even for those chinese who lived in the gansuportal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 7 goodman salar of northwest china qinghai border region this part of the world was always regarded as the extreme periphery, for other local peoples this was far from the case. specifically for local muslims the hezhou area was a major centre of islamic learning from the late 17th century on. hezhou itself just across the border in gansu from xunhua was known as ‘little mecca’ and was a centre of islamic civilisation at times when the chinese state was regarding lanzhou (the capital of gansu province) and xining as ‘wild-west’ frontier towns. looking at a current map for xunhua’s location might focus attention on new state boundaries but its interaction with xining and the rest of qinghai province is to many ends still less important than the salars’ main cultural communications with the islamic world of linxia district (lipman 1996, 97). hezhou’s islamic influence was such that it rapidly began to interact with movements beyond its immediate hinterland. at a time when the islamic world was awash with intellectual curiosity and new ideas about spirituality and social activism, new teachings from yemen and arabia which had inherently political as well as religious messages began to catch hold in the areas around hezhou. the result was initially not so much direct conflict with the chinese state as in religious and political violence in the local islamic communities. it was more the destabilising of local society rather than any particular religious ideas that brought the salars into conflict with the chinese state. when the qing empire acted to restore order it invariably acted very heavy handedly, thereby ensuring an even higher level of violence. this was a repeated pattern of violence in both the 18th and 19th centuries centred on xunhua and the salar, (lipman 1997) which presumably helps explain a large part of the salar’s reputation for ferocity and violence. it seems reasonable to assume that islam came to xunhua during the mongol conquests of the 13th century, as throughout china. many muslims saw service with the yuan dynasty and large numbers were settled in nearby areas of gansu. until the middle of the 17th century islamic social and political life in xunhua centred on the individual community and mosque. this started to change, as elsewhere in the muslim world, with the impact of sufi, a movement of both mysticism and activism that created supra-communal and often highly competitive orders. one of the first sufi proponents, muhammed yusuf visited xunhua in the late 1640s and converted the salar (mi yizhui 1982). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 8 goodman salar of northwest china during the 18th century a number of hezhou district muslim preachers and scholars started to travel to the middle east, on pilgrimage and to study. one of the more charismatic of these was ma laichi who on his return gained considerable publicity and following for his particular ideas (known as khafiya) by instigating and winning a court case about the correct order of prayer and eating during ramadan: he argued that at that time it was more appropriate to eat before evening prayers as against the then current practice of eating after (trippner 1964, 264). in 1750 ma laichi successfully converted the salar to khafiya teachings and practices. another similar, but slightly later traveller was ma mingxin, who returning in 1761 brought more radical and intolerant ideas of sufi revivalism, known as jahriya—the ‘new teaching’ as opposed to ma laichi’s ‘old teaching.’ his impact in xunhua was to lead to extremes of communal violence. at stake were access to the wealth and assets of religious institutions, and control of converts and their communities. increases in the number of law cases and the incidence of street fighting between the two schools brought the qing legal process to xunhua in 1781. the decision to outlaw the new teaching and disband its communities as a threat to social security merely escalated the level of violence. a group of salars, under su fortythree (su sishisan) raised the banner of revolt and captured hezhou. when the governor of gansu sent officials to hezhou to deal with the revolt, su fortythree had them killed, and marched on lanzhou in return. as was later to be the case on a number of occasions the salar rebels found taking lanzhou to be beyond them, and after a siege were defeated by the locally raised forces (including other muslims) of the chinese state (mi yizhi 1982, 17; salazu jianshi bianxiezu 1982, 17). just over a hundred years later, in 1894-95 a similar sequence of events was played out again when an increase in law suites between adherents of the ‘new old teaching’ and the ‘new new teaching’—which by then had become the polarities of conflict for sufi adherents— as well as an increase in communal violence led the qing legal process to find in favour of the latter (lipman 1997, 142).8 8 jonathan n lipman familiar strangers: a history of muslims in northwest china university of washington press, 1997, 142. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 9 goodman salar of northwest china after the fall of the qing the salar came to play a more central role not only in muslim china’s development, but also in the development of the chinese state. at the turn of the late 19th and early 20th centuries the continued frustrations of islamic resistance to the chinese state gave way, at least in the minds of some activists, to the construction of more sino-muslim identities and courses of action. in part these were religious and intellectual in construct, but they also produced the notion of a semiautonomous political system for sino-muslims which reached fulfilment through the establishment of qinghai province, with its capital at xining in 1928. its major proponent was the muslim hui ma qi, the onetime qing commander of xining and subsequently the local warlord, who became the province’s first governor. he was effectively succeeded in 1931 by his son, ma bufang, who had his firm base of support in xunhua and hualong counties where he had previously been the district’s leading official. many salar served with ma bufang, especially in the military, and he remains an important figure in the salar pantheon. ma bufang’s association with the republican government that had granted the establishment of qinghai province placed him firmly on the side of the nationalist party in the civil war, and the salar equally as firmly on the outer when the ccp came to power in the prc and the people’s liberation army [pla] moved into qinghai in late 1949. after the province had been secured the ccp wanted to demonstrate its human face in contrast to, in its interpretation, the more inhumane political behaviour of ma bufang. instead of keeping those of ma bufang’s soldiers it had captured or those civilians who had served with the ma bufang regime it had arrested in prison, everyone was released back into the community. this proved to be a serious mistake, as precisely those people then raised the flag of violent resistance. in xunhua in particular there were a series of serious attacks on the new regime. the most successful of these was led by han yimu during 1951-52. his forces, consisting entirely of those who had previously served with ma bufang, surrounded the local garrison of 90 pla soldiers and wiped them out. a much larger pla force was sent to retake xunhua, and han yimu left the county town to became a guerrilla (zhang pu, jia dawu & guo jing 1996, 150. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 10 goodman salar of northwest china han yimu’s act of resistance continued to the end of the decade. in 1958 he came out from working underground to lead a revolt of salar, many of whom remained ma bufang loyalists, in an attack on the chinese state alongside and in concert with the wider tibetan uprising of that time (chen 1991, 92).9 when rallying the troops and local salars in xunhua, he is reputed to have said ‘tomorrow xunhua, after two days lanzhou, and in three days we will take beijing.’ eventually captured and taken for trial and execution in beijing he is said to have reflected, perhaps apocryphally, on his misunderstanding of china’s size and scale: ‘china has more people than qinghai has yaks.’ the revolts of the 1950s in xunhua led the prc to instigate a severe crackdown on the salars in every respect in and after 1958. those thought to constitute the leaders of the salar community were imprisoned or executed. about ten per cent of the male population were rounded up and sent to ‘reform through labour camps’ elsewhere in qinghai. the use of the salar language was discouraged and religious expression was largely suppressed. an early 13th century handwritten koran (one of only three worldwide) said to have come to xunhua from samarkand with the original settlers and previously kept in the alitiuli mosque, was taken to beijing for ‘safe keeping.’10 almost needless to say, the measures employed by the state to sinicise the salar were not successful, and merely drove salar religious and social practices underground and out of sight. repression continued for the best part of twenty-four years. in the early 1980s as the reform agenda started to emerge from the ccp in beijing, a new approach was adopted towards all minority nationalities, including those such as the salar who had demonstrated their opposition in the more recent past. the more tolerant approach was almost certainly a pragmatic response to the needs of economic rationalism. nonetheless it was cautiously welcomed in xunhua, especially when all but a few (those identified as ‘the leaders’) of those arrested for involvement in the rebellions of the 1950s were pardoned. this included those who were still in ‘reform through labour camps’ as well as those who had already been released from other state 9 the 1958-59 tibetan uprising eventually led to the dalai lama’s exile. 10 details of the alitiuli koran are provided in a conversation between han jianye and ma wei, reported in ma wei, ma jianzhong, & stuart 2001, 11. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 11 goodman salar of northwest china security establishments or indeed who had subsequently died or been executed. full religious expression was permitted once again, the alitiuli mosque koran was returned from beijing (in 1982) and local mosques became totally operational again. salar community institutions came out from underground and indeed in some cases became the foundation for new economic enterprises, such as those making religious products. at the same time, salar acceptance of a more positive relationship with the prc remains both cautious and a coexistence (rather than a closer integration) in some regards. a small act of resistance was the communal refusal to adopt the new stateprovided script for the salar language. salars effectively use three languages: the salar spoken language, which they speak routinely, but which was and remains written in chinese characters; linxia chinese, which has many mongolian and turkic influences in any case; and arabic which is used for religious purposes. in the early 1980s at the direction of the central nationalities commission of the prc government, professor han jianye of qinghai nationalities college designed a new salar alphabet which was propagated in xunhua (han jianye 1988, 46-79). it did not achieve any acceptance and has been quietly shelved as an idea. another example is the experience of schooling. state school enrolments in xunhua are some of the lowest in the prc. a major reason for this is that the salar, like other muslims in the northwest, would prefer that the sexes are segregated at school and that in any case there should be more religious education for their children, as provided for through the madrasas attached to each mosque. the myth of exile the codification of nationalities in the early 1950s defined the salar as exiles, and all the available evidence would suggest that contemporary salars believe passionately in their status as a people in permanent exile. contemporary official and less formal published accounts all stress the origins of the salar in the act of banishment from central asia. visitors to xunhua all receive a similar introduction, and the fact of exile is usually the first thing mentioned by salar business-people and officials when their portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 12 goodman salar of northwest china nationality or ethnicity is being discussed with other chinese or external visitors.11 an interesting additional aspect of their belief system, which reinforces the notion of permanent exile, is the equally as strong attachment to being citizens of the chinese state, demonstrated not least by the insistence on the continued use of chinese characters in writing. one reason for this apparent passionate belief and its clear articulation may well be precisely because the fact of exile was central to the definition of the salar in the early 1950s. this provides a certainty and a consciousness that over-rides any doubts and contestations about origins that equally as clearly still remain. the official view of salar origins is met by considerable uncertainty, not least about when the people now known as the salar came to xunhua, where they came from and who the original ‘they’ may have been. the historical record, scholarly observation of local society and customs, and even local folk stories all reinforce the notion of salar exile not so much as false but more as a constructed public belief, though one that significantly predates the establishment of the prc, even if it were formulated more clearly in the 1950s and then pursued more passionately since the early 1980s in the most recent era of salar revival. the first recorded use of the name ‘salar’ appears to have been in qing records. when describing the impact of the visit of the early sufi, muhammed yusuf, to hezhou and its surrounds during the late 1640s, local magistrates described his influence in converting the salar (mi yizhi 1982; lipman 1997, 59). assuming that the salar (whether by that name or otherwise) were regarded as a well established local feature at that time, these events might explain why prior to 1949 their presence in xunhua was dated even earlier by one or two centuries. more recent accounts that followed the 1950s definition of the salar as a state-recognised nationality have started to accept an earlier and more precise date for arrival in or about 1370.12 all the same earlier sources do not provide any explanation of why the salar were or are called by that specific name. 11 certainly this was the experience of research conducted throughout qinghai during 2001-2003 and in xunhua specifically in 2002. 12 see for example: salazu jianshi bianxiezu 1982, 9. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 13 goodman salar of northwest china the current dominant discourse of exile is enshrined in the standard prc histories of the salar nationality.13 more complex versions of essentially the same story of exile from the samarkand region, though incorporating different elements that had sometimes previously been related separately, have then been elaborated in still more popular accounts of salar folk tales and culture. in the late 1980s han fude and han derong (1988) recorded (without attribution) one such folk tale about the origins of the salar—camel spring—that drew heavily on other local stories and folk practices related by other sources and observers. as related to or by han fude and han derong this story of the origin of the salars starts with two brothers in samarkand—kharimang and ahmang (gallima and akhma.) they felt that life in their home village had become intolerable because of discrimination against them by the village headman, so they decided to leave for somewhere more amenable. they set off from the village accompanied by various relatives, clanspeople and possibly others from the village. they took with them a white camel for porterage; a bowl of soil and a kettle of water from their home village; and a copy of the koran. the journey was long and arduous and involved crossing many mountain ranges and rivers. they moved eastward through present day xinjiang into present day gansu and then into present day ningxia. once there, they turned back westward. sometime after the two brothers had left their native place other of their clanspeople, villagers and relatives (about forty-five people in all) also decided to follow. they too had an arduous journey, but instead of following the brothers’ tracks exactly ended up going south of qinghai lake. a couple of this company decamped there but the others continued and were able to eventually meet up with kharimang and ahwang in present day xunhua county at mengda, from where they moved on to alitiuli. once everyone arrived in alitiuli they were all exhausted, and the camel was tired, hungry and thirsty. rest was called for. at midnight kharimang woke up to find the camel had disappeared. he woke everyone else up and they went off looking for the camel. by dawn they had not been successful but by now were very thirsty. looking for water they found the camel had turned into stone, next to a spring, with water 13 for example: gong jinghan 1981; salazu jianshi bianxiezu 1982; chen yuanfang & fan xiangshen 1988; ma chengjun 1999. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 14 goodman salar of northwest china coming out of its mouth. this was a shock to the travellers who had become quite attached to the camel during their wanderings. kharimang took up the koran they had brought with and asked for allah’s blessings for the camel and themselves. they then drank the spring water and found it more than acceptable. they then compared the water and soil in alitiuli with the water and soil they had brought with and decided both that they were the same and that allah had helped them find a good place to settle. according to this folk tale the date was the 13th day of the 5th moon in the 3rd year of the hongwu reign of the ming dynasty (7 june 1370.) the various elements of this version of the salar myth of origin are not hard to place. at its core is the camel play (döye oyna) that was performed regularly as part of wedding celebrations in mengda (munda) village of xunhua until the 1920s, but subsequently disappeared as a village-based performance (ma jianzhong & stuart 1996, 287-298). the camel play is essentially a re-enactment of how the salar came to xunhua, and was banned completely, along with other representations of salar culture, from 1958 to 1982. a version based on the memory of a seventy-four-yearold mengda native was revived in 1994 as part of the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the xunhua salar autonomous county. the play has five performers, representing the brothers kharimang and ahmang, a mongol (to portray the local people who welcome the wanderers) and two who play the camel by covering themselves with ‘a fur-robe turned inside out. one holds a sleeve high in the air to represent the camel’s head, while his partner lowers the other sleeve behind to suggest the tail. their heads protrude underneath the fur robe, resembling the camel’s humps’ (ma jianzhong & stuart 1996). the action of the camel play is fairly limited but essentially has the brother’s recounting to the mongol the difficult journey they have taken, and all the places they have stopped along the way from samarkand to mengda. interestingly in this version the camel play does not have the brothers travelling all the way to ningxia before heading back east to xunhua. it recounts how they left, taking very little with them, but mentioning the koran, and the soil and water, all borne by the ‘sublime’ white camel. it then relates how allah brings them to xunhua to settle, and has the camel turning to stone, but then moves into a final act of audience participation as befits performance at a wedding party. the mongol suggests to kharimang that he should portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 15 goodman salar of northwest china lead the camel around to entertain the guests. kharimang points out that ‘my camel has turned to stone. he can’t stand and dance unless he has food from samarkand’ and adds ‘our camel shits walnuts after eating dates, dumplings and fried bread.’ this is the key for the wedding host and bridegroom to bring food for the camel (and presumably the acting troupe) and the performance ends with the camel moving forward and showering the audience with walnuts (ma jianzhong & stuart 1996). several somewhat conflicting alternative accounts, drawn from documentary historical research, also appear to have found their way at least in part into the greater elaboration of the account of salar origins. one quite clearly is the expansion of islam into the area from today’s xinjiang through gansu to ningxia alongside the mongol expansion that led to the establishment of the yuan dynasty. the mongols brought with them both soldiers and administrators who were muslims (lipman 1997, 32). mi yizhi, a senior researcher at qinghai nationalities institute during the 1980s, traced a possible source of the salar back to a people originating as the qaluer or saluer. these people were an oghaz tribe living in the yili region (in the northwest of today’s xinjiang province.) between the 9th and 12th centuries the oghaz tribes, including the saluer, moved into northern iran and eastern anatolia. under the selzuk empire (1055-1258) the salar were forcibly removed from the areas where they had settled and separated. most moved westward but those who stayed in an area in today’s turkmenistan became the people known as turkomans. other saluer continued on eastward between 1370 and 1424 moving through samarkand, the turpan basin (in today’s xinjiang,) and the area of the gansu corridor, ending up in xunhua (mi yizhi 1981, 63). mi yizhi also highlighted another possible documentary source providing a further potential origin for the salar. in considering the various explanations and approaches that might be employed he mentions a 1917 source examining the origins of the hui, published in kashgar by a mullah suleiman. this refers to two brothers kharamang and akhmang who lived near salark, in today’s turkmenistan. according to this source, which remains unidentifiable beyond mi yizhi’s textual reference, the two brothers moved east to the area that is now qinghai with 170 members of their tribe (mi yizhi 1986 vol. 1, 295). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 16 goodman salar of northwest china the oral tradition in xunhua is equally as confusing, but this too seems to have contributed in various ways to the elaboration of the myth of origin. various salars in xining and xunhua at the start of the 21st century provided different numbers of the size of the original migratory salar who came east, ranging from 18 people to 180 households. other versions of the story of exile around kharimang and ahmang have the camel turning to stone and sinking to the bottom of a small lake fed by a spring in alitiuli. indeed in the not-so-distant past, the lake in question was turned into a walled park, not least because it was said that for the faithful it was possible to see the stone camel at the bottom of the lake. for the less faithful, a replica stone camel has been erected in the park. moreover, a much earlier observation of the oral traditions surrounding the salar has them being thrown out of their home villages because of their violent behaviour, an understandable possible cause of adverse reaction from a worried headman dealing with a troublesome family (trippner 1964, 247). these inconsistencies and confusions throw doubt upon the specific current accounts of salar exile but not necessarily exile or migration in general, for at least some of the ancestors of those now described as salar. the salar language certainly has a confirmed turkic base though it also has considerable chinese and amdo tibetan modifications and additions (dwyer 1996). the difficulties in understanding the genesis of the salar are only really irreconcilable because of the straightjacket of requirements presented by the prc for confirmation of nationality status. in this case in particular all those who are salar have to share the heritage and bloodlines of having been exiled several centuries earlier. this then excludes other possible explanations such as that while some of those whose descendants later became known as the salar might have been migrants from turkic areas (including but not exclusively from samarkand) others could also well have been local peoples with whom they intermarried or otherwise interacted. it also precludes the possibility that the different villages which are now taken to be part of the salar nationality homeland might have had different origins and experiences. in the past it was not abnormal for external observers to stress the mixed pedigree of the salar, reflecting the mixed cultural environment in the qinghai-gansu area: ‘many (have) tried to describe the salar anthropologically … such an undertaking has very little value ... the salars, at least in the past two hundred years, are the result from a mixing pot of turks, portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 17 goodman salar of northwest china mongols, tibetans, chinese and chinese speaking muslims (trippner 1964, 261).’14 if more scientific certainty is required about the genetic background of the salar, then there is clearly an interesting research project ahead for someone involved in examining their dna. social activism while there may be no solid evidence of exile or banishment, to concentrate on this omission is to miss the point. interesting as questions of historical accuracy may be they are less than relevant for understanding the role of salars in the contemporary society of northwest china. the revival of salar identity that started in the early 1980s is in many ways yet another example of the emergence of explicitly localist discourses of development that encourage and facilitate increased economic development, particularly beyond the boundaries of the state sector, that has been a fairly common feature of the prc’s political economy since the early 1990s (oakes 2002, 837-62). at the same time the salar revival is distinctive because it was not (as was the case elsewhere in the prc) state initiated, though it has clearly gained a substantial measure of later state support. 15 moreover, the salar case is particularly unusual in qinghai where almost uniquely among the prc’s provincial-level jurisdictions the encouragement of provincial and localist discourses has generally been absent from the agenda of the party-state (goodman 2004, 379-99). religion, language, and xunhua have been key pillars in the elaboration of salar identity, that reinforce feelings of community and solidarity and encourage individuals to economic activism. so too is exile, which helps the salar believe they have a competitive advantage that comes from not being fundamentally native to the area in which they live and operate, despite having been born and grown up there. they see themselves as being both more mobile than those around them and more dynamic elements in the development of society. 14 joseph trippner ‘die salaren: ihre ersten glaubensstreitigkeiten und ihr austand 1781’ [‘the salars: their first belief conflicts and rebellion, 1781’] in central asiatic survey vol.9, no.4, 1964, 261. 15 evidenced considerably in ma chengjun 1999. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 18 goodman salar of northwest china the self-attributed case for salar exceptionalism, and in particular the link between the nationality’s origins in exile, on the one hand, and social and economic activism, on the other, were constant themes in interviews with both salar community leaders and business people interviewed during 2001-2003. the following examples drawn from those interviews convey the spirit of salar activism in the development not only of xunhua, but also of qinghai and china’s northwest. these vignettes provide evidence of the range of motivations, as well as of activism and leadership to be found among community leaders and business people. in particular, they highlight the ways in which individuals proceeded to activism from an understanding of a special salar ‘outsider’ status; emphasised salar physical mobility and outwardness in outlook; and developed local products, including religious artefacts, for the wider market. the final two interviewees considered here are additionally interesting for the light they throw on the internal dynamics of salar identity formation: one with a salar folklorist, the other with a woman entrepreneur. their approach to the shaping of salar identity strongly suggests its malleability rather than its deeply entrenched social roots. ‘ever since i was young i’ve been an entrepreneur’ admitted manager ma.16 his group enterprise now owns a transport company with twelve trucks that shuttle between qinghai and the tibet autonomous region; and three hotels, one in each of xunhua, xining and ping’an (the dalai lama’s birthplace just east of xining.) at a young age he had been a trader in qinghai, the tibet autonomous region, gansu and ningxia, selling clothes and food products. with the money he generated from these activities in the 1980s and early 1990s he invested in hotels and trucks. when asked about the secret of his success he referred to the large spirit and high energy levels of the salar. ‘as our history of exile clearly demonstrates’ he said ‘salars can suffer a lot and still prosper.’ this was a message echoed both explicitly and implicitly by other interviewees. one was another ma, this time a village ccp branch secretary, and a long time leader of his village.17 a peasant in xunhua until the 1980s, he was one of the first to harness 16 interviewed in jishizhen 6 august 2002. ma and han are the most common salar surnames. ma is usually equated with muhammed, of which it is the first syllable. the names of those interviewed have been changed to preserve anonymity, except where identification is obvious, germane and explicitly approved by the interviewee. 17 interviewed in wajiangzhuang village, qingshui township 6 august 2002. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 19 goodman salar of northwest china the opportunities presented as part of the salar revival to mobilize his fellow villagers to economic goals. his village has limited arable land (less than 0.5 mu per capita) so he encouraged others to engage in economic activities outside xunhua. ‘our ancestors were forced to leave samarkand, so we can certainly travel less permanently for work.’ in the early 1980s he led a group of villagers from his home and adjacent villages to undertake odd jobs at a copper mine elsewhere in qinghai, and then to mine gold in sichuan. fifty of the village’s 215 households have now been running restaurants outside xunhua for many years. eighty of the village’s households have formed odd job teams that travel outside the county for work in summer and return for winter. in addition, nine of the village’s households have been able to afford to buy trucks or buses that shift people and goods around the northwest. for himself ma has become fairly wealthy, now has seven sons, and eventually (2001) opened a brick plant. a similar story was told by another ma, also a village leader.18 since the early 1980s he has led his village’s 310 households to such good effect that only three households now live in poverty. yields are good on the available arable land (1000 jin of wheat per mu; the village also grows prickly ash and walnuts) but there is precious little workable land. under ma’s influence and appeals to moving to the work (as opposed to expecting the work to come to it), the village now has twelve private trucks or buses, with about 100 villagers going to work outside xunhua on a regular basis. there are about 20 households from this village working in xining, 30 in golmud and over 30 households responsible for eateries in the coastal cities of the prc. as ma pointed out ‘historically, we’re used to moving about’ and ‘now [2002] salar restaurants in coastal cities can bring in about 50-60,000 yuan each per year.’ manager han has developed one of qinghai’s largest companies, based on the production of wool from sheep and yak, and attributes the success of the company directly to the fact of salars being ‘outsiders’ and so therefore willing to always go that step further in making an effort, as well as to new technology.19 in the 1980s manager han had been the manager of a small state-run enterprise in xunhua engaged in wool production. through the 1990s he restructured the company, expanded it and 18 interviewed in dasigu village, qingshui township, 6 august 2002. 19 interviewed in gaizi 4 august 2002. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 20 goodman salar of northwest china turned it into a local collective. based initially on sheep’s wool—in his view ‘qinghai xunhua sheep, and their wool, are the best’—he then thought to branch out into yak’s wool production. he traveled widely throughout north and northwest china to find out about new equipment, which he eventually ordered from italy. the company became so successful that by 2000 they had moved their headquarters operation to xining, exporting not only to italy and europe, but also to north america. as with many new salar industrialists, manager han’s localist discourse leads him not only into providing jobs and economic opportunities for his local community but ensures that he is a major donor to communal causes. ma yitzhak (yisihake)20 is an even more large-scale entrepreneur and the effective owner of qinghai’s largest private enterprise, the xuezhou sanrong group, whose snow lotus brand is familiar to many cashmere sweater-wearers outside china. this was a village-based company established in the late 1980s as a self-help endeavour led by ma. though he is clearly heavily influenced by his salar background and upbringing, like many others of those interviewed, this is not an inward-looking perspective on the world. his stated goal has been to ‘take australia’s history and economic growth on the sheep’s back as a model for qinghai’s development.’21 he has in his own words, applied ‘salar dynamism to develop pastoral products and build a business in the international market.’ the company now exports all over the world and even imports wool from australia. interestingly ma yitzhak was quite outspoken in his criticism of officials in xining whose behaviour in repeatedly telling him that xunhua was one of the most undeveloped places he found offensive. according to ma, since 1989 xunhua’s growth had been one of the strongest in china’s west, thanks to the salar. at the same time, and reflectively, he accepted that buildings and technology change faster than people’s patterns of thinking. another han is general manager of a salar cloth and hat maker, that has taken traditional salar products to a wider market, largely through automation. 22 the company grew out of a small village factory producing animal products (leather and 20 interviewed in gaizi 4 august 2002. 21 unfortunately he somewhat marred this worldliness later over lunch by remarking that he had ‘greatly enjoyed the thick chocolate cake and the alps last time he visited australia.’ a clear reference to the other australia that lies next to switzerland and that produced w. a. mozart. 22 interviewed in gaizi 5 august 2002. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 21 goodman salar of northwest china skins) in the early 1990s. through bank loans and with local government support han and his father (who runs the headquarters office in xining) have been able to expand the business significantly with sales now going all over china, even to non-salar clients. there is apparently a sizeable and growing market for minority nationalities products. necessarily because of its output the factory is a center of community focus. in particular, designs and product ideas are provided from the community. han’s own experience had previously been that of a trader around north and southwest china, which he said had provided him with a broader perspective than most people in qinghai had. manager ma runs a chili paste production factory in gaizi.23 chili paste production is a major industry in gaizi, with three other competing plants, though manager ma’s is the biggest. he buys in chilis from the nearby five villages and produces three product lines, which are then marketed quite widely in northwest china: beef complement, prickly ash paste, and chili paste. he sees his competition as coming from sichuan, anhui and gansu. according to manager ma the secret of the factory’s success has been the excellence of the xunhua chilis, grown on the soil and with the special climate that exists there; and the activism of the local salar people. at the same time, he recognizes that ‘chili production is part of poverty,’ and he was driven by a need to do something to help his native village. ‘like our earlier ancestors when they first arrived here, we do our best with the available resources.’ han zhanxiao was a quite well known salar folklorist before the suppression of salar customs and practices in the late 1950s.24 together with his family he now produces salar embroidery for ceremonial purposes as well as other salar musical and secular artifacts. in the 1950s he had been a music folklorist and had left xunhua for beijing and the central nationalities institute. amongst other activities he had been a specialist performer of and commentator on the camel play. after his release from imprisonment at the end of the cultural revolution he started work again with the beijing folklore festival which took him around the prc. by the time he eventually retired and returned to xunhua in the 1990s he had come to see the ‘need for creation and representation of our nationality. i had particularly come to realize this lack after 23 interviewed in gaizi 6 august 2002. 24 interviewed in gaizi 7 august 2002. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 22 goodman salar of northwest china a visit to inner mongolia. we need logos and symbols to represent salar identity to the outside world as well as to ourselves.’ one result was the development of his family folklore enterprise. han zenaibai (also known as han yulan)25 is an ‘outsider’ not only because she is salar, but also because she is a woman, in a society that for all its progressiveness in some ways also remains essentially fundamentalist about the role of women. she is now a well-known entrepreneur in xunhua, and even to some extent beyond, but originally she made her name as a basketball player in regional and national championship teams (1958-1964) at a time when salar society heavily disapproved of women exhibiting themselves in public in any way. nonetheless, she became something of a local celebrity even then, and was widely known as ‘player number eight,’ a nickname that persists still. she now owns and runs the tangsaishan agricultural & livestock development company of xunhua county, owning amongst other undertakings a fairly sizeable hotel (the daughter of the mountain— saina’er in salar—hotel in jishizhen) as well as several herds of sheep and cattle. clearly a bit of a tomboy in her youth, han zenaibai is probably xunhua’s first feminist. she admitted to being a salar traditionalist but explained that this meant in her interpretation that (amongst other things) the salar could achieve anything they set out to do, and from the start she could not see why all of salar customs had to privilege men. ‘in the very beginning (of reform) men started to set up businesses. i knew there were women starting businesses in foreign countries, and i wanted to try. in 1996, i successfully applied on my own to get 400,000 yuan from the development bank in xining.’ for her pains she became enshrined as the prototype of the salar woman entrepreneur in a central china television [cctv] series ‘the yellow river on the left, the river branch on the right.’ salar identity in the 21st century exiled by definition, revitalised by the opportunities presented by the changes of the reform era—especially those related to religious and nationality expression—the salar have emerged as a significant economic force for change in northwest china, and 25 interviewed in jishizhen 5 july 2002. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 23 goodman salar of northwest china particularly in qinghai province during the last two decades. the extent to which salar community leaders, the community as a whole, or individual salars believe in the fact of their ancestors’ erstwhile exile is necessarily an open question. it may truly have become an entrenched part of salar socialisation, even before 1949. certainly the evidence of the last twenty years is that the orthodoxy of salar identity has become more intense and more focussed, raising certain characteristics, of which exile is central, to an even higher level of importance. it may simply even be that the salar collectively and individually accept in various ways the need to articulate their experience and identity in terms that enable them to work peacefully within the chinese state, and see the economic advantage of going further when circumstances permit. in short, exile is a necessary myth for the salar, not in the sense of a historical deception but in the sense of public belief. in many ways the salar revival and stronger sense of communal solidarity during the last two decades seems counter-intuitive. it was certainly the case that in the wake of the cultural revolution the removal of the strictures of that era on religious observation and minority nationality customs generally led to a resurgence in their practice around china. at the same time, economic growth and development are generally assumed to be agents of greater homogenisation, and not just by the prc party-state. at least one linguistic specialist examining the use of the salar language at the beginning of the 1990s argued that it was in danger of disappearing (dwyer 1994). from the salar perspective then the myth of exile has another important role to play. the salar would by no means be the first people to have emphasised their collective suffering and survival through participation in ‘long marches.’ the experience of both the jews and more recently the ccp itself demonstrates how such migrations provide legitimacy to successor generations and may help maintain the faith. conversions 1 jin = 0.5 kilos = 1.1 pounds 1 mu = 0.06 hectares = 1/6 acre 1 yuan renminbi = 0.12 us$ = 0.16 aud$ (approximately) portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 24 goodman salar of northwest china map of xunhua and environs reference list chen, yaun 1986, ma bufang jiazu tongzhi qinghai sishinian [the ma bufang clan’s 40-year control of qinghai], rev. ed., xining, qinghai renmin chubanshe. chen yaunfang & fan xianshen 1988, salazu [the salar] beijing, minzu chubanshe. chen yunfeng 1991, dangdai zhongguode qinghai [contemporary 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chubanshe. trippner, joseph 1964,‘die salaren: ihre ersten glaubensstreitigkeiten und ihr austand 1781’ [‘the salars: their first belief conflicts and rebellion, 1781’] in central asiatic survey vol.9, no.4, 241-76. wei, xinchun 1995, ‘luotuoquan yu salazu’ [‘camel spring and the salar’] in mi yiqi (ed) huanghe shangyou diqu lishi yu wenwu [history and culture of the upstream region of the yellow river] chongqing chubanshe, 399-411. xunhua salazu zizhixian gaikuang bianxiezu (ed) 1984, xunhua salazu zizhixian gaikuang [survey of xunhua salar autonomous county] xining, qinghai renmin chubanshe. yang, xiaoping 1994, ma bufang jiazude xingshuai [the rise and fall of the clan of ma bufang] xining. ye, qingwei 1983, ‘yisalanjiao yu salazu fengsu xiguan’ [‘islam and salar customs’] in qinghai minzu xueyuan xuebao [journal of qinghai nationalities college] no.2, 71-75. zhang pu, jia dawu & guo jing 1996, dangdai qinghai jianshi [brief history of contemporary qinghai] beijing, dangdai zhongguo chubanshe. zhongguo salazu [salar people of china], journal of the nationalities research institute of qinghai nationalities college. zhu, shikui & zhou shengwen (eds) 1994, qinghai fengsu jianzhi [an introduction to qinghai customs] xining, qinghai renmin chubanshe. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 28 david s g goodman, university of technology, sydney xunhua and the salar the myth of exile social activism reference list ———1999 (ed.), xunhuaxian shehui jingji ke texu fazhan yanji welcome to the second issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies welcome to the second issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies. since the highly successful inauguration of portal in january 2004, we have received many kind expressions of support from international studies practitioners in a range of fields, and from such places as canada, italy, mexico, nigeria, new zealand, spain, trinidad, the u.k., and the u.s.a. particularly gratifying have been the endorsements of portal and its publishing aims by people involved in their own electronic publishing enterprises. for their generous responses to portal, the editorial committee would like to express its collective appreciation to the following people: professor jean-marie volet, of the university of western australia, and the guiding editor of the ground-breaking e-journal mots pluriels (www.arts.uwa.edu.au/motspluriels); and francis leo collins, member of the editorial committee for the graduate journal of asia pacific studies (gjaps), based in auckland, new zealand. portal’s readers may be interested in the current call for papers from gjaps (www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/gjaps), for a special issue on "imagining the asia-pacific" (deadline october 31, 2004). this issue of portal contains essays that cover wide terrain: the chilean diasporic community in australia; the world of german intellectuals; contemporary mexican socio-political movements; rural-urban migration in china; and transnational advocacy networks and election monitoring in the philippines, chile, nicaragua and mexico. in the cultural section of this issue, we are delighted to present a short story from the noted german studies scholar anthony stephens, and the first half of a beautiful, deeply poetic and haunting novel entitled son, from the london-based writer and art-critic jennifer higgie. the novel’s second and final part will appear in portal vol. 2, no. 1, in january 2005. on a different note, portal would like to express our support for the inaugural ubud writers and readers festival, to be held in ubud, bali, from october 11 to 17, 2004. the festuival, which is attracting interest from writers across the world, maintains a website at: http://www.ubudwritersfestival.com/ finally, i would like to remind readers that the next issue of portal (vol. 2, no. 1, january 2005) will be a special issue devoted to "exile and social transformation." i would also like to encourage international studies practitioners and cultural producers working anywhere in the world to submit material for future issues. paul allatson chair of editorial committee portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 16, no. 1/2 2019 © 2019 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: hawksley, c. and ward, r. 2019. ripples of decolonisation in the asia-pacific. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 16:1/2, 1-10. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ portalv16i1/2.6824 portal is published under the auspices of utsepress, sydney, australia. issn: 14492490; http://epress.lib.uts.edu. au/ojs/index.php/portal research article ripples of decolonisation in the asia-pacific charles hawksley and rowena ward university of wollongong corresponding author: dr charles hawksley, senior lecturer political and international studies, school of humanities and social inquiry, faculty of law, humanities and the arts, university of wollongong, northfields ave wollongong, nsw 2522, australia. email: charlesh@uow.edu.au, email: roward@uow.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6824 article history: received 01/10/2019; revised 13/10/2019; accepted 13/10/2019; published 13/11/2019 abstract the process of decolonisation has had a profound effect on the structure of the international state system, including in the asia pacific. this article surveys the results of the decolonisation of the british, french, dutch and japanese asian and pacific empires. it also discusses the end of united nations trusteeships administered by the united states, australia and new zealand, as well as the governmental arrangements of other non-self-governing or dependent territories. with two pacific territories, bougainville (november 2019) and new caledonia (august or september 2020), soon to vote on their political futures, it is timely to note that a process of self-determination does not always result in independence. the article shows that some territories have had their calls for independence ignored, while others enjoy high degrees of autonomy and self-government within nation states. in effect, this article, and the six papers included in this special edition, show that the process of decolonisation in the asia pacific has diverse economic, political and social impacts for sovereign states, as well as social and economic implications for individuals, including deportation, resettlement and ongoing struggles for self-determination. as such decolonisation was, is and will continue to be more than a political process. keywords: decolonisation; independence; asia pacific; japan; united nations; statehood; trust territories declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6824 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6824 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:charlesh@uow.edu.au mailto:roward@uow.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portalv16i1/2.6824 this special issue of portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies ‘decolonisation: ripples in the asia pacific,’ presents six articles on different aspects of empire and decolonisation.1 this introductory essay places the six articles within the larger history of political movements towards statehood, sovereignty and independence. given the upcoming november 2019 vote for the people of bougainville on either autonomy within papua new guinea or independent statehood, and a second referendum in august or september 2020 for new caledonia on either the maintenance of substantial autonomy or full independence from france, this issue is timely. independence is however just one possible result of decolonisation, and it is possible that an exercise in self-determination may decide that full independence is not the most appropriate option. while historically decolonisation has aimed to deliver independence, authors such as prinsen and blaise (2017) argue that political choices amounting to something less than independent statehood are now more likely, especially for small island territories, as the costs of independence might outweigh the apparent benefits. different political and administrative trajectories, including free association with another state, or new forms of autonomy within states, are also possible. as detailed below, the pacific islands region exhibits an astonishing variety of alternatives to statehood. as a political movement, decolonisation shook the world in the post-world war ii (wwii) era and led directly to the creation of dozens of new states in asia, africa, the caribbean, mainland south america (guyana and suriname), and the pacific. the signing of the atlantic charter in 1941 by us president franklin d. roosevelt and british prime minister winston churchill signalled the death knell of european colonial empires, and was the harbinger for the global expansion of the nation-state ideal and governmental model after wwii. the two leaders advanced several common principles, including their respect for ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’ (‘atlantic charter’ 2019). this principle was foundational to the united nations, which fashioned the un trusteeship council to give expression to this commitment, and imposed obligations on administering powers to prepare trust territories and their peoples for an independent future. as the 1960 un declaration on the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples makes clear, independence was the intended outcome of decolonisation in the decades following wwii. the preamble to the un general assembly resolution 1514 (xv ) of 14 december 1960 (‘the declaration’) clearly states that colonialism is a blight on humanity, and serves to prevent human and global development: recognizing that the peoples of the world ardently desire the end of colonialism in all its manifestations, [and] convinced that the continued existence of colonialism prevents the development of international economic co-operation, impedes the social, cultural and economic development of dependent peoples and militates against the united nations ideal of universal peace … (unga 1960) 1 most of the articles were presented originally at a university of wollongong workshop, ‘decolonisation, sovereignty and human security in the pacific islands,’ 26–27 june 2018, which included academics from japan, fiji, the usa and australia. funding for the workshop was provided by the university of wollongong’s international committee. hawksley and ward portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 20192 article 2 of the declaration states that self-determination is the desired objective for all people, and a lack of development is insufficient reason to delay such a vote. interestingly, the word ‘decolonisation’ is not used in the declaration, but it quickly became synonymous with ‘the special committee on the situation with regard to the implementation of the declaration on the granting of independence of colonial countries and peoples,’ created on 27 november 1961 following general assembly resolution (ungar 1654 of the xvi session) (unga 1961), and known colloquially as the ‘special committee on decolonization’ or the ‘committee of 24’ (or even ‘c-24’ from the original number of members). along with the un trusteeship council, the special committee on decolonization has played a prominent role in the ‘collective decolonization’ of the world (mittelman 1976: 42) by continuing to discuss the political independence of territories under the control of other powers through its annual discussions and maintenance of the list of non-self governing territories. un news (2007) notes that there were 72 non-self governing territories in 1945, and by the time of nauru’s independence in 1968, the special committee was dealing with 37 territories, which included two of the original 11 un trust territories (new guinea, and the pacific islands), the others having already come to independence (mittelman 1976: 46). at the time of writing this paper, seventeen territories are still under consideration, including six in the pacific: american samoa; french polynesia; guam; new caledonia; pitcairn; and tokelau (unga 2019). during the 1960s the business of the special committee was complicated by the noncompliance of administering powers who ‘persistently refused to acknowledge that various territories are within the scope of chapter xi of the u. n. charter’ (mittelman 1976: 46). in discussing the pacific islands, banivanua-mar (2016: 223) makes the important point that some indigenous peoples are locked out of discussions on decolonization through their integration into the national state as self-governing territories. while france attempted to evade the purview of the special committee, in 1986 independent pacific islands states were successful in having new caledonia considered as a non-self governing territory (fisher 2019). on 2 december 1986, and despite french objections, the general assembly noted the ‘inalienable right of the people of new caledonia to self-determination and independence in accord with resolutions 1514 (xv )’ (unga 1986). parts of the asia pacific are not included on the list, but this does not exclude them from histories of activism towards self-determination. west papua is one example. however on rapa nui (easter island), a colony of chile since 1888, an independence movement emerged in 1956 (crocombe 2001: 433), and since 2014 there have been moves to have easter island placed on the agenda of the special committee on decolonization (youkee 2017). the people of the australian territory of norfolk island, who argue they are an indigenous pacific people (gonschor 2017), have taken their case to the un high commissioner for human rights to argue against australia’s attempts to assert greater direct control over the territory (ohchr 2018) and allege breeches of the international covenant on civil and political rights 1966 under articles 1, 2, 25, 26 and 27. interestingly, not all votes for self-determination result in independence. two votes on self-government for the estimated 1500 people of tokelau (2006 and 2007) were rejected. in october 2007, 446 of the 692 people who voted chose self-government in free association with new zealand; however, this was 16 votes short of the two-thirds majority required to trigger a shift in status (un news 2007). the population of the uk’s sole remaining pacific territory, ripples of decolonisation in the asia-pacific portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 20193 pitcairn islands, is numbered in the dozens and has no desire for independence (crocombe 2001: 425). france integrated all of its pacific territories—french polynesia, wallis and futuna and new caledonia—into the french state in an effort to stave off independence movements, but this has not been entirely successful. the 1988 matignon accords brokered a peace for new caledonia, and the 1998 noumea accord set out a path for self-determination. the first of a possible three new caledonian referenda was held in november 2018, and it resulted in a higher vote (56 percent) for remaining with france than for independence (44 percent). the noumea accord provides for a second vote, to be held in august or september 2020, and if necessary, a third (elections nc 2019). new caledonia enjoys a high degree of autonomy, and the noumea accord does not allow for the french state to resume any powers once devolved to the new caledonian authorities. while the path is clear towards greater autonomy, it will be up to the eligible voting population to decide if independence is the preferred option. until things change, the new caledonian government has day-to-day powers and responsibility (compétence) for most aspects of government under organic law 969 of 3 august 2009, including the organisation of public services, working visas, public works, local public appointments, prices, taxes and tariffs. the french retains powers over, inter alia: nationality; justice, public order, defence, monetary and foreign affairs (gnc nd: 7–9), albeit with a degree of consultation. the ripples of empire, colonialism and decolonisation intersect in many lands, including in new caledonia. apart from the indigenous kanak people, there are immigrants from francophone europe and southeast asia, along with migrant communities from indonesia and japan. despite claims to ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’ not all have been treated equally. as benjamin ireland’s article in this volume shows, despite the best efforts of french authorities, the japanese identity of the nippo-kanak community survived deportation, and the confiscation of property. japan’s expansionism from the late 19th century, and most significantly in the 1930s and 1940s, had an enormous influence on decolonisation in the asia pacific. modern japan incorporated okinawa—which since at least the early 14th century had been the ryūkyū kingdom, paying tribute to both the satsuma domain in southern japan and imperial china (egami 1994: 828)—as a prefecture in 1879. japan’s colonisation of taiwan began in 1895. the annexation of the korean peninsula in 1910 came five years after japan made it a ‘protectorate.’ the legacies of the incorporation of all koreans as japanese citizens during the colonial period continues today with the descendants of the koreans who moved to japan at that time—often forcibly—living as zainichi or special permanent residents in japan. the establishment of manchukuo in 1932 was the impetus for japan to leave the league of nations in 1933. after world war i (wwi) allied powers received germany’s pacific territories as league of nations ‘c’ class mandates, which denoted areas ‘too savage, untutored or remote to be afforded any kind of meaningful autonomy’ (banivanua-mar 2016: 91). japan’s south pacific mandate covered the micronesian islands north of the equator: modern palau, northern marianas, federated states of micronesia and marshall islands. nauru, and nauru’s phosphate, was administered by australia on behalf of itself, new zealand and great britain. new zealand received samoa, and australia was awarded new guinea. c class mandates were administered as an integral part of the administering territory, and japan encouraged migration to its micronesian islands, many from okinawa (crocombe 2001: 433). japan’s pacific territories, however, were captured by the usa during wwii, and later incorporated into the us trust territory of the pacific islands. japanese who had settled in the micronesian hawksley and ward portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 20194 empire were forced to relocate to okinawa where they continue to experience diasporic mourning (see suzuki in this issue). the us invasion of okinawa in april 1945 involved some of the bloodiest battles and highest death rates of civilians in any theatre of world war ii. japan’s defeat and ultimate surrender on 15 august paved the way for the decolonisation of korea, and the occupation of the japanese home islands and okinawa by allied powers. under the terms of the 1951 san francisco peace treaty japan officially relinquished control of taiwan, although it was not specified to which country (hara 2015). when japan regained its sovereignty over the country’s four main islands in 1952 under the terms of the 1951 san francisco peace treaty, in line with article 3 of the treaty, okinawa and neighbouring islands were placed under us trusteeship (united nations treaty collection 1952). in reality, the us trusteeship took the form of an occupation and it was not until 1972, in accordance with an agreement between then japanese prime minister eisaku satō and former us president nixon that okinawa reverted to japanese sovereignty. the ongoing ripples of decolonisation are obvious here as the continued, controversial presence of over 26,000 us troops on okinawa prefecture acts as a means for some okinawans to seek independence from both the usa and japan (see takahashi in this issue). japan’s legacy affected other states in the asia pacific, often sponsoring independence at withdrawal. the spanish were defeated in the philippines in 1898 by a us force, which then annexed the country, prompting a bloody uprising against american rule, and only after the japanese invasion did the philippines gain its independence in 1946. likewise, indonesia’s leaders had first proclaimed their independence on 17 august 1945, two days after the japanese surrender. after conflict, several conferences and un attempts to broker peace, in december 1949 most of the netherlands east indies formally became the republic of indonesia. the dutch, however, held on to west papua, aiming to deliver independence to its melanesian people. once a a leader of the third world movement, indonesia became a colonial power as it expanded first into west papua (see mckinlay-king in this issue), where indonesia’s oppression and manipulation of the 1969 ‘act of free choice’ sparked a resistance movement that continues to this day. indonesia also expanded into timor-leste in 1975 following the portuguese withdrawal. the ripples of decolonisation continued in timorleste, through a 1999 vote on autonomy, the un transitional administration in east timor (untaet) of 1999–2002 and finally independence as the repúblika demokrátika timór-leste (tetum) or república democrática de timor-leste (portuguese)from may 2002, with several un support missions concentrating on building a culture of human rights protection for the new nation’s police and military (hawksley & georgeou 2016: 194–199). the legacies of decolonisation are also evident in the structure of the asia-pacific nationstate system, and in the tensions that empire left behind. the dissolution of the british raj resulted in the 1947 partition of the subcontinent into india and pakistan, the first major act of post-war decolonisation that has echoes today in ongoing tensions over kashmir. independence for the maldives came in 1965, and the separation of bangladesh from pakistan in 1971. burma (now myanmar) became independent in 1948, as did ceylon (now sri lanka), and both states have experienced protracted internal conflict. conflict and violence also engulfed indo-china, independent from france in 1953 (cambodia and laos) and 1954 (north vietnam), with two decades of war until the us departed south vietnam in 1975. british decolonisation of its far eastern possessions led to conflict on the malay peninsula. britain’s defeat in singapore during wwii meant ethnic chinese communists were the main opponents of the japanese occupation of malaya. when britain proposed a ripples of decolonisation in the asia-pacific portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 20195 malayan federation in 1948 with greater powers for malay sultans and citizenship restrictions for chinese, the result was a communist insurgency that lasted until 1960 (calvocoressi 2001: 553). eventually in 1957 the british managed to combine both the federated malay states and the unfederated sultanates into the federation of malaya. in 1963, singapore (independent from 1959), sarawak and north borneo (now sabah) joined into the new state of malaysia; however indonesian opposition to malaysian state expansion on borneo led to the 1963–1966 ‘konfrontasi’ with malaysia. singapore was expelled from malaysia in 1965, and went on to form perhaps the world’s most successful city-state, while the oil-rich sultanate of brunei stayed out of malaysia, and received self-government from britain in 1971 and independence in 1984. in the pacific, samoa was the first territory to attain independence, from new zealand, in 1962. cook islands received full self-government from new zealand in 1965, but remained in association. as ron crocombe (2001: 433) notes, cook islands is ‘for practical purposes’ independent with control over foreign affairs, and immigration; however new zealand manages its defence requirements. the people of niue were offered independence by new zealand in 1974, but chose instead self-government and free association. britain’s pacific withdrawal commenced with fiji and the kingdom of tonga in 1970. tonga was a protected state of the british empire from 1900, and has the distinction of being the only pacific territory not to be officially administered by another power. when fiji became a british crown colony in 1874 the population was itaukei or ethnic fijians; however migration from the indian subcontinent changed the demographic balance and the consequences echo to this day through a series of military coups and constitutional changes designed preserve the power of the itaukei. the largest pacific islands state, papua new guinea (png), achieved independence in 1975 from australia. australia’s mandate of new guinea became the un trust territory of new guinea after wwii, with the concomitant obligation to prepare the territory for independence. australia administered the trust territory of new guinea in combination with its australian territory of papua from 1949–1973 when self-government for papua new guinea ensued, and independence two years later in 1975 (hawksley 2006: 161–163). solomon islands was created from two european empires. a german protectorate existed in the north from 1885 covering bougainville, shortland islands, choiseul, isabel, and ontong java, and a british protectorate existed from 1893 in the south over new georgia, guadalcanal, malaita and makira, to which britain added rennel and belona, and the santa cruz islands (temotu) in 1898. with the exception of bougainville, which remained part of german new guinea, germany transferred its claims to britain in 1899 in the treaty of berlin, in exchange for britain dropping its claims to samoa. the british protectorate of solomon islands became self-governing in 1976 and independent from britain in 1978. independence came progressively to the gilbert and ellice islands, which britain administered together, but which separated after a referendum in 1974. the ellice islands became tuvalu in 1976, and the gilbert islands became kiribati, which attained independence in 1979. the new state of kiribati expanded its geographic reach with the kiribati-us treaty of tarawa, which extended the sovereignty of the new state over the phoenix islands and the line islands in 1983. decolonisation came to vanuatu in 1980. under a 1906 agreement britain and france jointly governed the islands of the new hebrides in that rare colonial arrangement, a condominium. this arrangement created two separate colonial administrations (woodward hawksley and ward portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 20196 2014: 70) and produced constant competition for influence that has consequences today, with some regions speaking french and others english (crocombe 2001: 418), and both european languages joining bislama as vanuatu’s official languages (see ward in this issue). nauruans had been used as forced labour by the japanese during wwii but post-war the australian administration brought in labour from other parts of the pacific, in the process helping to consolidate a nauruan identity. the un trusteeship of nauru ended in 1968 when nauruans set up ‘the world’s smallest republic’ (crocombe 2001: 426). the us trust territory of the pacific islands was different to all other trusteeships in that it required security council, rather than general assembly, permission to terminate (omsn 1984: 59). gradually and progressively the us trust territory of the pacific islands was dismantled from 1979 with the independence of marshall islands, and then in 1986, with the compact of free association for chuuk, yap, kosrae, and pohnpei that set up the federated states of micronesia. palau became a separate republic in 1994. the usa’s other pacific possessions— american samoa, the commonwealth of northern mariana islands (cnmi), and guam— are technically unincorporated us territories. those living in guam and cnmi are us citizens, but those from american samoa are us nationals. governmental arrangements vary but all inhabitants of us pacific territories can travel to the us without visas, which is useful for work (especially military) and education. independence carries with it the full duties of statehood and concomitant international responsibilities. even before the independence of png in 1975, bougainville had opted out (hawksley 2006: 166). following a decade of civil war (1988–1998) and two decades of autonomous rule, the people of bougainville will vote in november 2019 on whether to maintain their present arrangements as the autonomous region of bougainville within papua new guinea, or to move towards full independence. like new caledonia, the government of bougainville already enjoys substantial autonomy over mining, oil and gas, and while the png state retains powers over international relations it must consult the bougainville government if it is affected (wolfers 2014: 119–120). given the panguna mine was a contributing factor to the initial conflict, sources of income for an independent state may be a factor in this vote as diversifying the economic base of pacific islands countries is no simple task. even after legal decolonization colonial economic relations continue to limit the possible economic choices of independent states (mittelman 1976: 43). forty years on from independence in solomon islands, unfinished wood products remain the main export, and with a growing population and expanding urbanisation, food security is becoming a pressing concern for solomon islands. in a sense, solomon islands was recently ‘re-colonised’ with fourteen years of the australianled regional assistance mission to solomon islands (2003–2017) reimposing control after tensions over employment, land and opportunities had disrupted social life. ramsi was predominantly a policing mission, but its ‘whole of government’ approach had significant effects on the level of sovereignty for solomon islands leaders, and australia was particularly sensitive to accusations of neo-colonialism and usually involved other members of the pacific islands forum in ramsi’s operations (hawksley & georgeou 2016: 199–203). as a political process decolonisation has affected trade, migration, culture, aid, development, regional association, state cooperation, skills transfers, education and training. the articles in this volume explore some of these issues against a background where the outcomes of selfdetermination are not as clear as they once were. the six essays discuss a variety of issues related to decolonisation. benjamin ireland explores the different legal positions within new caledonia of the children born to japanese and indigenous melanesians, the ‘nippo-kanaks,’ both during and after wwii. he provides an ripples of decolonisation in the asia-pacific portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 20197 indication of how french state power had dramatic effects on the lives of people, forcing them to be removed from a territory and never to return. ireland’s essay focuses on letters from a japanese father as remembered by his daughter, letters that had to be burnt so as not to attract the ire of her mother’s new husband. ireland’s exploration of the experiences of nippo-kanak children and their engagement with japanese culture is a reminder of the resilience of familial ties when confronted with legal discrimination. whilst ireland considers those who were left behind, taku suzuki focuses on those who were forced to leave. suzuki’s okinawan subjects show the complexities of migration during both the colonial and decolonisation periods. the migrants suzuki discusses are not only the product of japan’s colonisation of okinawa; they were also encouraged to migrate to japan’s mandate of micronesia and as such became members of a colonising population. however, after the battles in the western pacific in 1944, they were forced to return to okinawa where they became ‘internal strangers’ (lubkemann 2002: 76). suzuki argues, through a discussion of the repatriates’ pilgrimages back to micronesia, for an irei (a ritual to pacify or console the spirits/souls of the dead) that these colonial migrants should be considered as diasporic migrants. shinnosuke takahashi discusses the life experiences of two members—toshio takahashi and yeongja yu—of okikan minshūrentai or okinawa-korea people’s solidarity (okps), to demonstrate the importance of considering translocal space in japan’s post-war civil movements. neither toshio takahashi nor yeongja yu are originally from okinawa, and in a location that has undergone colonisation and reversion to japanese rule, outsiders— whether those from the japanese mainland or from other locations—are often deliberately or accidentally ignored. however, takahashi shows, through his examination of the narratives of the lives of people such as takahashi and yu, that their presence can encourage reflection about representations of who was and is a colonising and colonised people. turning to west papua’s experience of flawed decolonisation, mckinlay-king’s article raises disturbing questions as to the collusion of the un secretariat in the transfer of sovereignty from the netherlands to indonesia. drawing on archival sources, this article shows un and us acceptance of indonesia’s take over as a fait accompli, and the 1969 act of free choice as a farce. given the global shift towards state sovereignty entailing responsibility for the welfare of a population, and the history of the indonesian military’s human rights abuses in west papua, the article provides grounds for revisiting the legal process of the incorporation of west papua into indonesia, which could be done by reviving the trusteeship council. rowena ward’s article explores the language choices made by independent states across the asia pacific including in indonesia, timor leste, fiji, and vanuatu to demonstrate that language selection is as much a political as a practical matter. the decision to adopt or reject the language of the administrative power may have consequences for future aid and development, as well as for national unity and the future. with bougainville and new caledonia facing future votes, the question of which official or national languages to use may need to be considered in the near future. finally, georgeou, hawksley, monks and ki’i’s article explores agriculture and asset creation as economic development in solomon islands in its independent period. the authors map the points of origin of produce at honiara central market, and calculate returns from agricultural production for producer-vendors, in order to provide an insight into food security, a matter of critical importance to many pacific societies affected by population increase, urbanisation, climate change and rising seas levels. they point out that a plan for solomon hawksley and ward portal, vol. 16, no. 1/2, 20198 island development under ramsi (the regional assistance mission to solomon islands) involved boosting agricultural exports, but neglected local agricultural development by producer-vendors, whose market production and sale leads to asset creation and enhances food security and nutrition. taken together the six articles show some of the political, social, economic and cultural effects of empire and decolonisation in the new states where formal political independence ensued after wwii, as well as in those territories that are yet to vote on their future. they highlight how decolonisation was, is and will continue to be far more than a political process. references ‘atlantic charter.’ 2019, avalon project. online, available: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp [accessed 12 october 2019]. banivanua-mar, t. 2016, decolonisation and the pacific: indigenous globalisation and the ends of empire. cambridge university press, cambridge. calvocoresi, p. 2001, world politics 1945–2000, 8th edition. pearson longman, harlow, uk. crocombe, r. 2001, the 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https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=_6g4aqaamaaj&hl=en&pg=gbs.pp5 https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=_6g4aqaamaaj&hl=en&pg=gbs.pp5 https://doi.org/10.1177/0020702017693260 https://doi.org/10.1177/0020702017693260 https://news.un.org/en/story/2007/10/237132-tokelau-narrowly-rejects-self-government-option-un-supervised-ballot https://news.un.org/en/story/2007/10/237132-tokelau-narrowly-rejects-self-government-option-un-supervised-ballot http://wwda.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/deccolcount1.pdf http://wwda.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/deccolcount1.pdf https://undocs.org/a/res/1654(xvi) https://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=a/res/41/41 https://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=a/res/41/41 https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/gacol3335.doc.htm https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/gacol3335.doc.htm https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume 136/volume-136-i-1832-english.pdf https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume 136/volume-136-i-1832-english.pdf https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p297671/pdf/book.pdf https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p297671/pdf/book.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/18/easter-island-candidate-self-rule-chile-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/18/easter-island-candidate-self-rule-chile-election microsoft word portal-2004-31-ce[1].doc a winter in bavaria or, the shadow under regensburg being the letters of professor stephens to mr mcintyre winter 1997-1998 editions mcintyre redfern & montparnasse 1998 copyright anthony stephens 1998 portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 1 preface the university of melbourne has produced some great strategic thinkers, who have contributed outstandingly to our growing magnificence. professor a. stephens was not among them. indeed, the time of his employment can best be described as a series of rolling disasters. his attempts at strategies to undo the less than strategic effects of his failure to fulfil his minute part in my great strategic plan were if i may speak so warmly of a colleague lamentable. his only saving grace, his close study of that master-strategist h.p. lovecraft, inevitably led him into regions where he was quite out of his depth. but, instead of doing the strategic thing and quietly drowning, he kept coming up for air again and again, until more finely tuned strategic intervention became inevitable. the letters he wrote from regensburg to some long-suffering acquaintance are, from the point of view of the next phase of my great strategic plan, of no interest whatsoever. as far as the plan was concerned, he was not supposed to be in regensburg at all but rather in brunei, recruiting members of the sultan’s extended family as full fee-paying students (price-category: aaa). as one who has devoted his career to implementing the thought of lovecraft in australian universities, and whose efforts are, at long last, close to fruition, i can only shake my head as i read them. parts of the text almost give the impression stephens was trying to be funny. ha! but i am reassured that he was, despite all else, a professor of the university of melbourne, and thus must have known better. nevertheless, the reader will search in vain on every page for strategic insights of the kind i am known to value. in fact, i don’t know why i am writing a preface to these letters at all. i can only conclude it must be part of some wider strategy, the aims of which i am still keeping a secret from everyone, including myself. but let me urge the reader to go back to the one pure source: h.p. lovecraft, and to waste no time at all reading stephens. alan d. gilbert vice-chancellor university of melbourne 24 april 1998 portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 2 a winter in bavaria or, the shadow under regensburg ‘and while there are those,’ the mad arab had written, ‘who have dared to seek glimpses beyond the veil, and to accept him as guide, they would have been more prudent had they avoided commerce with him; for it is written in the book of thoth how terrific is the price of a single glimpse. nor may those who pass ever return, for in the vastnesses transcending our world are shapes of darkness that seize and bind. the affair that shambleth about in the night, the evil that defieth the elder sign, the herd that stand watch at the secret portal each tomb is known to have and that thrive on that which groweth out of the tenants thereof:all these blacknesses are less than he who guardeth the gateway: he who will guide the rash one beyond all the worlds into the abyss of unnamable devourers.’ h.p. lovecraft, through the gates of the silver key portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 3 letters from professor stephens 10 december 1997 you mention the black book of glenoe in your last. flippingidly through the pages of the fax edition of the regensburger volksfeind i note that they are excavating the ruins of the synagogue that was burned down in an excess of christian zeal in the early 16th century and that they have discovered portions of a manuscript, in a lead casket, entitled liber niger glencoris. can such things be? i suspect that glencoris is simply a disguise to put the ignorant off, “glencoris” being the latin for the local hamlet of glenskorf. but who would bother putting the parish records in a lead-lined casket, eh? and hide them in a synagogue? the whole point is that what they have found aren’t the parish records of glenskorf nohow, but something else1. soon i shall be in regensburg and know … 18 december 1997 we have arrived in regensburg. haven’t been able to busy myself with the excavations of the old synagogue on the neupfarrplatz but will hopefully have the real dirt (heh-heh!) to relay in my next. htohtos-goy! 21 december 1997 the regensburg ghetto and synagogue were razed to the ground in 1519, and they are still busy trizzing up the excavation site, as they were when we were here 2 years ago. the numerological significance of 1519 will not escape you, nor will the fact that the liber niger antedates it. i feel i am coming close to secrets no mortal was meant to know. should i be found lifeless or still worse! reduced to the unhappy state of al hazred on the site of regensburg’s newest underground parking station, i pray thee to see my wife and bairn are not diddled out of my superannuation. the mortality rate among the turkish labourers on the site is said to be much higher than the german average for building sites in winter, and the workman who found the lead casket was himself discovered exsanguinated and draped over a gargoyle near the 1 namely, the finding of a copy of the necronomicon, attributed to abdul alhazred (the “mad arab”, as lovecraft calls him). it deals inter alia with how (†) yog-sothoth (†) and other interdimensional beings equally menacing may be admitted to our continuum. professor stephens believes that the necronomicon is in fact one of those books which keeps writing itself over and over throughout the ages at the expense of its human authors, including the present one. it may also do so at the expense of its readers, so watch out! portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 4 top of the left steeple of the regensburg cathedral. these weird happenings have not dampened the mood of christmas shoppers in this ancient town, originally built by the romans as a fortified bordello with the name castra regina, whence “regensburg” in the vernacular. they are predicting 3º c and drizzle for xristmas. it warms me to think of those hard-bitten romans celebrating the feast of sol invictus in the only heated bath-house for several hundred miles around. but more grim and sombre matters draw me ever on, and i trust i remain, for a little time yet, your faithful correspondent, with such wits as a lifetime of scholarship have left me still intact. 8 january 1998 your data stand in all too clear a connection with those increasing fatalities that in any other country would have stopped work on the underground car-park, pending investigations. but no: the only outward sign that the populace is at all concerned by the stirrings below is the number of local politicians and dignitaries finking out of the grand opening ceremony at the end of the month. (i have arranged a visit to nürnberg myself just in case.) playing it cool, as is my nature, i have confined my overt activities to slipping out one night to spray a two meter high graffito, saying simply: 1519, on the wall of the lutheran church built a couple of decades after the destruction of the synagogue, and then lurking inconspicuously beneath it every morning from 11 till noon. after three weeks my patience was rewarded by my being accosted by a young lady combining in her appearance the least attractive features of les murray and marty feldman who asked if i were interested in some numbers she had in her little black book i ask you! has subtlety deserted the earth forever? »you’ll have to lift your game!« i told her sharply in my fluent oberfränkisch, a dialect that adds pungency to every rebuke. she cannot entirely have understood me, as she responded with a smile of toothless evil and the words, »the master says no freebies till the opening!« and ran off hooting with eldritch mirth. i enclose two postcards. on the one showing the cathedral, i trust you remark the gargoyles that in this pic are visible about 4/5 of the way up the steeples on the left hand side. there are lots more on other parts of the structure which some power is using with increasing frequency as a peg for drained cadavers. the other is marked “regensburg”. here you have a close-up of one of said gargoyles together with some picturesque views of a town which has had to wait a long while for some real excitement. 1519 had its moments, but i fear something major is imminent. 10 january 1998 yours of 7 january got here so fast, given the vagaries of two postal systems that can portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 5 between them take up to three weeks to transmit an air-mail letter, that i have no doubt that they have intervened to facilitate our correspondence. now why would they be doing that? what advantage could there be to them in our exchanging information? the morning i find a brand-new fax machine that doesn’t need mains current or batteries outside the front door, then i shall know our earnest attempts to elucidate these horrific mysteries do make of us but catspaws in their kitty-litter. your account of new year in sydney brought »una furtiva lagrima« (donizetti) to my nostalgic eye. things were pretty tame here. the danube, regensburg’s answer to the yarra only more so, ran with blood for an hour or so after midnight, and the eyes of all the gargoyles on the cathedral (trust you got your pics) flashed with purple balefire for about as long, but otherwise deadly dull. of course, there was the sad end of herr alois stimpfl, one of regensburg’s most respected tobacconists and tosspots, who tumbled into the excavations for the new parking station on the way home from seeing in the new in the boozer and was found next morning not merely exsanguinated but with his head attached where one would expect to find his penis and scrotum and with the latter articles growing out of the top of his neck. this caught the eye of the media in a way the 67 turkish labourers deceased on the site had failed to do. »one would imagine« wrote the regensburger volksfeind »some especially cruel lusus naturae or teratogenic prodigy, had not herr stimpfl been seen for some hours the previous night consuming beer and schnaps with his head in its conventional place, and had not frau stimpfl assured us amid tears that his organs of generation had been equally conventionally located during all their twenty-nine years of marriage, for professor dr strunck, our leading forensic pathologist, claims herr stimpfl’s cadaver, on an initial examination, looks for all the world as though its unfortunate former tenant had been born with this bizarre disposition of his essentials.« and still the construction of the new parking station goes ahead. my personal hogmanay was as dry as a dead nun’s crevice, so at least poor herr stimpfl got to down a few before al hazred’s bane or one of his mates got to work. after the events on the neupfarrplatz recounted in my last missive, i decided a firmer line was fully justified, so i snuck out again under cover of darkness and heavily disguised (as a ballet-dancer in drag) and wrote a fresh graffito next to “1519”, (this time in oberpfälzisch for added oomph) to the effect: “if you think we’re in some el cheapo stephen-king-clone, think again!” i trust this will put the other side on its mettle. 16 january 1998 yours of january 12 also got here with quite unnatural speed, convincing me that they are doing all that may be done to expedite matters, though to what grisly end my mind shudders to surmise. the news from here is all bad. professor dr strunck’s full autopsy on the unhappy herr stimpfl revealed him to have been not merely re-arranged, but horribile dictu! portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 6 subjected to a full internal rewiring job so intricate that, had he not been exsanguinated, the learned strunck sees no reason why he should not have gone about most, if not all, his usual business, thus bestowing an awful poignancy to the locution “dick-head”, which, as it does not exist in standard german or any of the dialects spoken hereabouts, lends added weight to the impending suspicion that the perpetrator indeed came from regions outside and had, moreover, recently done a community access course in »human anatomy for pleasure and profit«. my researches into the events of 1519 have revealed that they were precipitated by the corpse of a popular local robber baron called justus von der jauchegrube2 being found outside the back gate of the ghetto with his plumbing redone in identical wise to that of the deceased stimpfl. suspicion fell immediately on the local rabbi, eliesar ben jonson, who stood in rumour of being both a podiatrist and a necromancer in his spare time and whose daughter, jisbellah, had been publicly seduced, rogered and fertilized by jauchegrube. now this by itself was not sufficient to obliterate both the ghetto and synagogue from the face of the earth, especially as the latter was a most substantial structure, as contemporary drawings by albrecht altdorfer attest, but it certainly was one of the warmer-uppers. back in the narrative present, the other side never ceases to amaze by its appalling lack of subtlety. bidden by a message posted to me with my bank-statement to a rendezvous on the scaffolding used for cleaning the priceless medieval stained-glass windows high above the portal of the cathedral, i scrambled up to this most insecure tryst and, of course, found no one there. nor did anyone appear in the next hour but a pigeon who appeared to be lost and looking for the exit. inevitably, i fell to studying the windows and, after a while, saw what i was clearly meant to see: in the middle of a panel depicting the martyrdom of st etfried, who is shown having his guts pulled out by a windlass at the command of a local pagan chieftain for having refused to sing the lord’s prayer backwards as an entertainment german tv is not much more entertaining today, let me tell you! at the latter’s wedding, i suddenly perceived in the scarlet and mauve glass panes of what i had taken to be some of the holy friar’s entrails yes! you’ve guessed it: the three-lobed burning eye! i suppose it was intended i should fall off the scaffolding at this point, but i had taken a stout rope along against such an eventuality and, with its help, was able to haul myself back onto my perch. sighting through the dreaded optic down onto the neupfarrplatz, what should i discover but that i was lined up dead-on with the entrance to the new parking station! how corny can you get? p.s. on the tv news tonight: there has been an outbreak of schweinepest in mecklenburg-vorpommern. 20 january 1998 i received in the mail an expensively printed invitation from the gesellschaft für die 2 “von liquid manure pit” portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 7 erhaltung der finsternis und stille, or “society for the preservation of darkness and silence”, to join them for a “quiet hour” in the crypt of st ramwolbus in the basilica of st emmeram at midnight next monday. something tells me it just might be a trap! and the crypt is unlikely to be heated. i mean: even if it’s not a trap, unheated crypts at midnight in the middle of the german winter are not really my scene. i don’t think i should go, do you? schweinepest has now reached niedersachsen, and belgium has closed its borders to all german pigs. »they tried much the same in 1914, and precious little good it did them then«, aulbranne would doubtless interject, were that stout old warhorse but among the living. ubi sunt qui ante nos? 26 january 1998 i write this with trembling hand, having sent my wife and bairn to a safe refuge in basel, switzerland, and having myself fled regensburg in peril of my life, as the other side is simply not playing fair! you will recall how in my last epistle from that place of damnation i reported receiving an invitation from a mysterious society to meet with them in a crypt at midnight. a trap! i thought. but then i thought again: who would set so obvious a trap with any thought of catching one of brunswick west’s leading intellectuals? perhaps they are quite genuine, in which case membership of a society dedicated to the preservation of darkness and silence is a damned sight more sensible than belonging to all the half-witted things i belong to anyway, like the trades union and the academy, which are dedicated to the unnecessary consumption of electricity and to endless jabber. why do i not i thought suss out the crypt of st ramwolbus by daylight and well in advance of the time specified? o vain under-estimation of their wiles that was nearly to render me as incoherent and, come to that, incontinent as the unhappy al hazred! at eleven this morning i repaired to the ancient pile that is the basilica of st emmeram, wherein lies the even more venerable crypt of st ramwolbus who was martyred in a spectacularly disgusting way in 763 by the then dux bavariorum for venturing to suggest that having 15 wives was at variance with the teachings of holy scripture. ramwolbus’ faith was vindicated when all 15 spouses gave birth to twoheaded monkeys, but that is another story. i made my way unobtrusively down into the crypt where ramwolbus lies buried and found it to be as romanesque as all hell and fitted out as a place of worship. nothing suspicious yet! i thought, as i took my place in a pew and began to say a few prophylactic ave marias to cover the sins i would likely commit over the next few days, whilst scrutinising the vault for signs of their handiwork. some time passed in this way before i became aware that there was something peculiar about the sanctuary lamp. not merely was it alight and behind red glass, but to my perception it was becoming bigger, brighter and … somehow more articulated. yes! you have guessed aright! it was none other than the three-lobed burning eye! this horror-struck realisation came almost too late, for i felt it in the same instant portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 8 compelling me to begin reciting that vile incantation in that filthiest of filthy languages, the mere grammar of which is enough two or three paradigms suffice! to make the most hardened grammarian vomit! i refer, of course, to the descending node3 which must be uttered by a human voice if you know who is to make one of his unspeakable self-manifestations. horror gripped me by the gurgler as i whipped into a spirited chant of salvum me fac, domine. but to no avail! the eye burned relentlessly into my brain, and i could feel my synapses stretching to encompass those putrid syllables! it was then that i remembered al hazred’s last frantic scrawl at the foot of his manuscript, which is rendered as: “it is fatal if they force you to use their t.......” the simple-minded editor, lovecraft, had glossed “t........” as “toothbrush”, and so it reads in the standard edition, where its inanity lets it blend perfectly with the context. now i saw that “t.........” was al hazred’s despairing attempt to write “tongue”, and that the eye was on the point of using me as a mere tool of my own destruction in the same way as it had used the wretched abdul. what was i to do? latin psalms were obviously too close to that vile idiom to be of avail as an antidote. in a flash i saw what was needed, and began singing: “the owl and 3 orthodoxy has for centuries averred that the ascending node is y’ai ‘ng’ngah / yog-sothoth/ h’ee l’geb / f’ai throdog / uaaah and that the descending node is ogthrod ai’f / geb’l ee’h / yog-sothoth / ‘ngah’ng ai’y / zhro, the second being “the first written syllabically backwards” except for ‘yog-sothoth’ and the contrasting final words. but were it so simple, old ones would be more common than motor cars on the streets as a widening circle learns the tao. as professor stephens notes, the orthodox prescription, to defend against this, is by design both misleading and incomplete. it is likely, for instance, that what orthodoxy calls the ascending node is in fact the descending node and vice versa, and that the full version of the true descending node also contains some or all of 1. iä! iä! n’gaa, n’n’ghai-ghai! iä! iä! n’ghai, n-yah, n_yah, shoggogg, phthaghn! iä! iä! y-hah y-nyah y_nyah! n’ghaa, n’n’ghai, waf’l pthaghn yog-sothoth! yog-sothoth! ... 2. n’gai, n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggogg, y’hah: yog-sothoth, yog-sothoth ... 3. ygnaiih ... ygnaaih ... thflthkh’ngha ... yog-sothoth ... y’bthnk ... h’ehye n’grkdl’lh ... 4. eh_y-ya-ya-yahaah e’yayayaaaa ... ngh’aaaaa ... ngh’aaa ... h’yuh ... h’yuh ... professor stephens has added the following powerful insight: ‘[the orthodox version] unintentionally mangles abdul’s text by including the stage direction ‘throdog as part of the incantation itself. as i showed in my gutsy little article in necronomiconolalia, vol. 17, what al hazred intends at this point is that one picks up the australian terrier, miniature dachshund, pekingese (or whatever canine of appropriate size one has obediently waiting) and hurls it into the centre of the circular congeries of grotesque and obscenely misshapen symbols of horrendous portent which one has carefully daubed on or chiseled into one’s wall: yelp splat!’ scholarly debate continues whether ogthrod is for incanting, or is the counterpart stage direction requiring the dog to be removed from the wall. the best pronunciation guide is still r. dover’s oldish for civil servants (london, 1900). portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 9 the pussycat went to sea/ in a beautiful pea-green boat” at the top of my voice. at once the eye, which had expanded to about the bigness of a prize-winning pumpkin at the royal easter show began to contract, spitting out purple flashes of fury the while. still singing fortissimo, i charged past the altar and, diving under a bolt of sizzling mauve, gained the door. unfortunately for them, a party of american tourists was being shown over the dreary wonders of st emmeram, which go back to merovingian times when european sculptors couldn’t chisel their way out of a wet paper-bag, so to speak, in the moment when i came barrelling out of the cellarage, bellowing for dear life: oh lovely pussy, oh pussy, my love, what a wonderful pussy you are! inevitably, i knocked two or three over. the rest tried to climb columns, or ducked down behind other bits of masonry. i think i may have given them a quite false impression of the state of present-day christianity in germany as i scattered them like ninepins, and did not even stop to say: “i’m so terribly sorry!”, seeing as how i was convinced i had to get to the bit where they dance by the light of the moon, before i could draw a safe breath. i sang the whole song through again before i stopped running. i mean: what would you, or murgatroyd, or even mudlark do if you were chased out of an early romanesque crypt by a … by a what? by an eye? at this point i decided that the other side were no longer playing cricket! had they ever been playing cricket, or was their game some obscene middleeastern version of baseball? most like, we shall never know. at any rate, i thought it was best to leave regensburg until things settled down again. clearly, a particular constellation of etheric forces was needed if the descending node was to have its full terrible effect. this was originally to coincide with the opening of the new underground parking station. but it said in the regensburger volksfeind this morning that the opening has been deferred sine die, since they can’t scrape together enough dignitaries to grace even the smallest podium. it is said that even felix, cardinal katzenbeisser, ceo of the office for dogma and overpopulation in the vatican, where he devotes his life to hurling anathemas at the condom industry, declined the honour of cutting the ribbon, and it can’t be said he gets all that many invitations to decline since burning heretics ceased to be a popular ecclesiastical entertainment. with the opening off, they thought they must capture, by hook or by crook, that one set of human neurons in which the descending node was firmly implanted and which happened to be within easy reach of both the etheric vortex and the parking station. hence all the nonsense with the crypt of st ramwolbus but, by xrist’s wounds, they nearly got me! as any reader of my poetic works will know, pussies have played no small role in my life, and i offer up a heartfelt prayer of thanks that, in my moment of need, i was inspired to sing that hymn to the great moist cosmic yoni that portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 10 saved my bacon (heh-heh!) and not maybe! (as my late friend a.w. dwilies was wont to remark.) 29 january 1998 back we are in this perilous burgh, where more than 2,000 years of foul-mouthed history lie in wait to spit the next dirty joke at the hapless visitor. i had a pleasantly frothy couple of days in nürnberg where, disguised as a meistersinger, i did some busking on the fringes of the red-light district where my blurry renditions of song of the vulgar boatman, the road to mandalay, because god made you mine and old man river brought in enough to keep a fairly constant stream of amber fluid going down during interval. how pleasant to have a few days’ leave from the unsewered trenches of this pestilential war for the soul of the universe, or our lady of fatima, or mother england or whoever the hell it is we are fighting for. on monday, i thought we were fighting for the great moist cosmic yoni, but after a couple of days in the stews at nürnberg, i am not really that certain any more. maybe we, like president bill clinton, are fighting for truth, justice and the perfect blow-job. who knows: if one managed to hit saddam hussein in the right place with a well-aimed choko, he might well go pop! it must be much simpler being on the other side and just going in to bat for pure, mindless evil. not that i’m tempted to switch allegiance, mind! you will recall in my last letter the group of american tourists visiting st emmeram’s basilica when i fled, singing, out of the vault of st ramwolbus. well, four of them quite misunderstood my action and its cause and decided that to judge from my apparent euphoria regensburg’s counterpart to monica lewinsky must be down there doing it for free! unzipping, they hurtled down the stairs as fast as i had hurtled up them, and there followed a horrible ululation and a vivid tangerine flash from the nether regions. when the local starforce finally ventured down there some hours later, they found, of course, that all four had been »tergiverstimpflated« or umgestimpflt, as they now say in oberpfälzisch, in no uncertain manner, and then impaled on a row of iron crucifixes that felix, cardinal katzenbeisser, used to practise on when a mere lad. since the tour they were on was organised by the first baptist church of omaha, their rearrangement has made the international press and has deferred even further the opening of the new parking station. i mean: who is going to risk both their essential plumbing and their mercedes, just to avoid a parking ticket? so the war goes on. judging that the etheric constellation that had well nigh compelled me to recite the descending node had shot its bolt for the nonce, i returned hither and took up my researches. it seems that old justus von der jauchegrube was not the first victim of whatever it is lurks under what is now the neupfarrplatz. back in roman times, i discover, there was a centurion of the local garrison called lordorius, one of those closet christians common in the imperial army in the years before constantine did his big switcheroo who sought to undermine the morale of the troops by holding portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 11 clandestine prayer meetings and sleepovers. anyway, whatever lurks had been getting on the tits of the civil population of castra regina, or ratisbon as the celtish underclass still insisted on calling it, by exacting an annual tribute of three virgins, a demand quite beyond the powers of this thriving port on the danube, then a major trade route with lots of boatsmen with bulging purses, to meet. when it was clear that in 319, castra regina was only going to be able to produce one attestable victim for the annual tribute, and she a demi-vièrge at best, then surely whatever lurks, called something like jogurtsofus by the danube celts in their malodorous dialect, was going to throw one grandaddy of a fit and cause more devastation than the floods of 295. seeing the chance for a lot of cheap propaganda, lordorius got into full armour, mounted his steed, ordered the local authorities to chain the weeping colleenella to the horse-trough in the midst of the forum vermorum and retire. this they duly did to the local taverna in such numbers that no eye-witness remained to see what actually happened in the forum. the reconstruction a year or two after the event by a local artist, which i enclose, is maybe not all that accurate in detail and has a distinctly propagandist tinge to it, but it -apart from colleenella’s not very reliable memoirs - is the only evidence we have. according to colleenella, jogurtsofus was in a very bad mood indeed, as he bit through her chain, sat down on the edge of the horse-trough, dropped his breeks and underbreeks and said » kiss it! « in a voice like nothing she had ever heard, or indeed wished to hear again. she was about to do as she was told, when lordorius thundered up on his charger, waving his lance and bellowing »christus regnat!«. what followed is a bit confused, but it seems that lordorius’ horse let him down, none too gently, into the jaws of jogurtsofus. »in a pig’s ear, he does!« said the monster, then »i really should peel it first!«, then nothing but a lot of terrible crunching noises. colleenella had the presence of mind to jump on the horse and ride it out of the forum vermorum at a smart clip, thus surviving to make a fortune out of her memoirs and notoriety. no one wasted many tears on lordorius, except some of the privates who had enjoyed his christian sleepovers, but about a decade later the emperor constantine decreed that henceforth all genocide, pillage, rape, extortion and computer fraud committed by the roman army should be done in the name of jesus, and it became at once clear that the state church lacked the kind of saints who would appeal to the simple fighting-man, as he massacred whole tribes and razed cities to the greater glory. in the recruiting drive that led up to the council of nicea, some sharp-witted cleric happened on the sad tale of lordorius as he took his ease in colleenella’s comfy castellum veneris, saw its potential, and bribed a local hack to produce the iconic representation i enclose, and so st lordorius became one of the first posthumous pillars of the new-style church militant. despite its central location, the forum vermorum never became interesting as real estate to the local gentry, which is doubtless how it ended up as the ghetto in the centuries leading up to 1519. clearly jogurtsofus went right off annual appearances, or maybe it was just the effect of a chronic infundibulum on the etheric constellations, but clearly he was back in 1914, as the moving account by flighbarton proves beyond portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 12 doubt, and, for whatever reason, what lurks has decided to go for broke in 1998. i would ask to borrow your almanach of etheric constellations with appendix of nodes, but your question about the three-lobed burning eye in your letter of 24 january betrays that fatal scots predilection for cheap but abridged editions which are fucking useless in a crisis because they lack half the essential information and for which i have, alas! had cause to reprimand you before. it is really better to pay a little more and get the whole text! i mean: who wants to be staring up the nostrils of what lurks as it becomes painfully clear that the present hypertrophic prodongular quadrella which is allowing it to manifest this instant just wasn’t included in the condensed book version? i realise that if stephen king were in charge i should now recruit some yumptious piece of local talent and go blundering down into the excavation to discover the fatal weakness in what lurks’s repertoire, but i think i’ll put that off until i have been to dinner in munich on tuesday of the week after next, at a very expensive french nosherie. time enough for witless heroics then. observe the enclosed postcard. the centurion lordorius performs the act of heroic folly in 319 that got him canonized, as portrayed by an artist of the period. 3 february 1998 life has been quiet and scholarly after the horrific adventures related in my last two dispatches. ascertaining from the kepler version of the almanach that no menacing etheric constellations would pass over regensburg for at least a week, i went back to my researches into ancient tomes full of the accumulated hilarity and malice of the ages. and so i came into possession of the exemplary legend of st emmeram, as set down in arbeonis episcopi frisingensis vitae sanctorum haimhrammi et corbininiani, expectorated in thickly accented latin in the year 765 or shortly thereafter by the same arbeo, bishop of fritzkirch, predecessor in that office by the highly significant number of 1212 years to felix, cardinal katzenbeisser, who has since gone on to excommunicate more stubborn adherents of contraception than you have had hot dinners. an aversion to contraceptive practices figured largely in the life of emmeram, bishop of regensburg back in 519, whose martyrdom may well be linked to another manifestation of what lurks, as we shall see. emmeram, arbeo relates, came from beyond the rhine, begotten on the wrong side of the blanket by ubo, king of the franks, after a brief tussle with hermenegilda, countess of poitiers, while the count was off on that boar-hunt that was to see him brought home impaled on his own spear. ubo was second to no man in his devotion to nepotism, and provided for his copious brood whenever he could identify one of them beyond reasonable doubt. since emmeram was a whizz at latin, the king bought him the bishopric of poitiers at the tender age of 25. emmeram was of able parts and hurled himself into his duties with portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 13 zeal, neglecting neither the bodies nor the souls of those entrusted to his care. he soon developed a particular enthusiasm for the sacrament of confession, and it must be remembered that in those days a bishop was not confined to one of those musty little boxes against the wall but could confess and absolve ubique dum spiritus commoveat, which is to say: in a haystack if the fancy so took him. it did, often, and with an especial care to keep pure the souls of those daughters of the wealthy citizenry who took regular baths, as emmeran was one of the most fastidious clerics of the whole dark ages and would often expel parishioners from mass without benefit of the eucharist if they came pongy to the altar-rail. he was never known to turn away a sweet-smelling young penitent from his door, even after midnight, as he well knew that the burden of sin can become particularly oppressive in the small hours, especially after a long bath in fragrant oils and spices. soon there was not a maiden left in poitiers with access to soap and hot water who did not participate in the handsome young bishop’s cure of souls, and it was not long before the city rang with protestations of parthenogenesis, as, one after another, they were found to be in the family way. eventually, a delegation of irate fathers waited on the king, who was in no position to be censorious and bought them off. a few years or so down the track, this practice began to make even the royal treasury look anaemic, as members of the impoverished nobility of all france took to sending their daughters to poitiers for a year to pick up a royal dowry. in a confrontation betwixt royal father and wayward son, ubo so arbeo records said that sowing a few wild oats was one thing; mass agriculture another; here was an offer no sensible son would refuse: ubo would buy back the bishopric of poitiers for a handsome sum three times what he paid in the first place: what could be fairer than that? in exchange, emmeram would take the money and go far away, like maybe pannonia, and stay there. bishop emmeram, it must be said, was hampered in his duties by the throngs of unwed mums who crowded the streets whenever he took the host for a solemn procession, holding up sucklings and shrill-voiced toddlers who had been taught to crow: “daddy, daddy!” the pace of constant confessing was also wearing him down. “i know!” he said brightly, “i shall go and convert the huns!” “that’s my boy!” roared ubo and signed the bill of purchase there and then, not forgetting to pay for a guard of honour of twenty-five knights to see emmeram off the paternal sod. emmeram thus became a bishop itinerant, and was not happy. one must recall it was the dark ages, when roman baths had been allowed to fall derelict all over germany, and there had not been that many to start with. the locals had gone back to their precolonial traditions of washing not at all, ever. our wandering bishop had hired on ten of his guard of honour to accompany him, and there was no dearth of heathen tribes to convert. this he did with monotonous regularity, but all the maidens seemed to feel that one quick dip in the baptismal font, which often smelt of pickles or worse, would do them for life. the young prelate was pretty dismal until the day divine providence brought him to the gates of castra regina, which the uncouth and foul-smelling locals had corrupted to regensburg, where teoto, king of the bavarians, had preserved the roman fortifications intact, as they were very useful in keeping enemies and mormons portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 14 out. “what about the plumbing?” was emmeram’s first question. “what about the what?” growled teoto. “i thought you were flogging remission of sons and eternal salivation!” he continued, his christianity being of a distinctly primitive brand. “i,” said emmeram, “am a fully paid-up bishop of royal frankish stock, and if you can but get the public baths back into working-order, i will build me a basilica here and preach therein such sermons as will make your hairy neighbouring monarchs and chieftains go green under their grime for sheer envy, and afterwards you and yours can all have named seats waiting in paradise.” “provided you pay for the renovations to the whatever-they-are,” said teoto, “you are on!” thus began the first golden age of the church in bavaria. the roman baths, adjacent to the forum vermorum, were somehow got back into nick; emmeram built his basilica and his sunday exhibitions of mellifluous latin, incomprehensible as it was, became the place to be seen in all lower bavaria. still, emmeram was not happy. whilst the public baths were fully operational, and kept so at the bishop’s personal expense, not a bavarian would venture inside, let alone wash off a lifetime’s sullage in the steaming caldarium. many claimed their reluctance was due to the presence of a demon called yosofos who lived under the forum vermorum. emmeram set out to exorcise him with lots of incense and a whole morning’s chanting, but the bavarians were unconvinced. our shepherd of souls then tried to pressure teoto into setting an example, but the king said gruffly: “salivation is one thing; my dignity another; my hide a third piss off!” and there was an end to it. so, while the faith bloomed in regensburg and environs, emmeram knew that if he shut his eyes and no one said anything or baaed, he could not distinguish between his confessional and a goat-byre: his cult of a clean soul in a clean body was locally as dead as a smoked danube sturgeon. oh, he had a couple of female body-slaves, whom he personally scrubbed in the font twice a week, for his basic needs, but he missed the fragrant days of the see of poitiers when penitent damsels competed to produce the week’s most alluring blend of bath salts on their peachy skin. so years passed, and all seemed as well for god’s church in regensburg as the general lack of personal hygiene allowed. it seems scarcely like the workings of divine providence that had teoto send his daughter ota to finishing-school in an italian convent, for there the old ways survived in the form of regular dips in the hot-tub or maybe it was, as she certainly had a hand in the making of bavaria’s first saint. anyway, she came back totally spoiled for her duties as a bavarian princess, with all sorts of airs and graces and a total aversion to smelly suitors. ota’s virginity and hand in marriage were among teoto’s chiefest political assets, useful to dangle in negotiations with the huns of pannonia and destined for strategic deployment in the forging of a beaut alliance with someone or other and garnering lots of cash thereby one day. meanwhile, ota was immured in a tower overlooking the forum vermorum and the baths, where her constant complaints on every family occasion had finally got her a large wooden vat and a team of serfs trained to heat water and pour it without flinching. whether cleanliness was her undoing, as arbeo roundly states, no one shall ever know, portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 15 as what follows is hard to disentangle from the pia fraus and sheer inanity in arbeo’s account which was, after all, written for the edification of folk who, two and a half centuries down the track, still had not had a bath in their lives and believed devils were attracted to hot water in any quantity larger than a full soup-kettle. anyway, as well as having acquired a lust for vigorous ablutions, ota had learned to sing in the italian fashion and was given to yodelling off the top of her tower on warm spring nights such perennial favourites as vir totam vigilans noctem, sicut cervus desiderat and cor irrequietum,. which brought a sharp reprimand from teoto “douse that, or you’ll wake bloody yosofos!” and ota to the attention of emmeram. all those years of mephitic absolutions is it any wonder that emmeram was tempted? at last, a nubile female penitent who did not smell like a polecat as she detailed her transgressions! so emmeram began to put a hard-sell on teoto to the effect that the purity of ota’s soul was as much an investment as her maidenhead “tell it to the huns! all they care about is her nice, round bum!” and that frequent confession would ensure it was always in tip-top form against the day when the sudden conclusion of a treaty might bring on an instant royal wedding “if she’s got perpetual salivation, who gives a stuff about the rest?” “your majesty, it’s what the buyer thinks it’s a buyer’s market out there.” “all right, give her a weekly congression and dissolution! and stop her from singing at night while you’re about it!” emmeram went about his duties with such quiet diligence and regularity that no one stopped to ask, as the months flowed by, what sins a girl shut up in a tower with nothing but a bathtub for company could possibly have to confess so often. so arbeo records it, without being quite able to suppress a hint here and there that soap and water might not have been all that was sloshing about the environs of the forum vermorum. once exorcised, yosofos had no official existence in a holy legend, but the latin text is studded with oblique references to weird meteorological phenomena some of which, such as tempora dislocata, have spawned endless scholarly conjecture, hohum! one fine summer’s day, emmeram appeared before the king and said: “summons from rome have to do a refresher course in dogma. be away about a year young vitalis is in charge.” “what sort of bishop needs to go back to school?” sneered teoto. “it’s the heresies!” emmeram replied. “so many new ones every week, the pope’s secretaries and copyists just can’t keep up. you don’t want the see of regensburg falling behind the pack, do you?” “can vitalis sell seats in paradise too?” asked teoto, who creamed off 28% of every one sold. “with cushions!” emmeram replied, and with that took his leave. scarce three days after his departure, the local wise woman appeared before the king and, in alliterative babblings, pronounced ota to be up the duff. the king’s rage was inordinate, as the wise woman had told everyone else first, so there was no point in having her strangled and thrown in the danube in a bag at night. “all right, who was it?” roared teoto. ota declined to answer. “was it that emmeram? i’ll give the bugger a ram where it hurts him most! was it him?” “oh god! i don’t think it was emmeram, but you never can tell with vatican roulette it certainly wasn’t duke sigisbald! he smells like a barrel full of weasels and never got past the portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 16 gate once!” said his daughter with a defiant sniff. “i’ll have that bishop’s balls!” roared teoto. enter at this point one lantperht, prince of bavaria, called by his sister the little stinker. “he smells like a badger’s sett whose occupants all died a month ago,” as ota was want to taunt him at the royal dinner table after her return from italy. “worth ten pounds of gold to you, be they, dad?” asked lantperht. “seven,” replied the king. “yours for eight!” said lantperht and raced off, calling for his yobbish friends to join him in some sport. they caught up with emmeram on the banks of the isar, and now we get to the bit i’d rather leave untranslated. “nice day, brother-in-law!” guffawed lantperht. “tie the bugger to that ladder if he won’t hold still! useful for helping him up things like the towers and my sister!” so emmeram, who knew a folding hand when he saw one, did as the occasion demanded, made no resistance to being tied to a ladder and admonished his offsiders to keep the faith, before beginning to chant the psalter for as long as he still had a tongue indeed, beyond that mutilation, arbeo claims. but so much that now follows buggers verisimilitude most coarsely! starting with his fingertips, emmeram was dismembered, right down to the parts worth eight pounds of gold, which were wrenched off with a primitive pair of pliers. no martyrdom worth its salt was over quickly in the dark ages, and i shall pass over emmeram’s unlikely survival as a mere talking trunk for at least another twenty-four hours, likewise the many tedious miracles that attended his death, canonisation and the transportation of his remains to their splendid tomb in regensburg, where they lie today we think! of greater interest, though no less tragic, was the fate of ota and her bairn. it was unhappily clear what the rules laid down for a bavarian princess in her situation: flogging, beheading and permanent immersion in the danube. teoto was setting about this disagreeable chore, and had his daughter standing starkers by the river bank while he got drunk enough to deliver the fatherly reproof the occasion demanded, when an embassy galloped up from godzilla, king of the pannonian huns, to present a message of utmost import: “pregnant or not, ota still has the nicest bum within two days’ ride of the danube. we will purchase her for exactly half our last offer. let her be first delivered of her foal, which is ill-omened and we want nought of it, and then let her be rendered unto us, in earnest of which we enclose 10% in gold as deposit. lack of enthusiasm for this generous offer will be construed as an invitation to begin total war. let the lash not touch those haunches, which are henceforth the property of our dreadfulness.” total war was nothing if not expensive, as adolf and friends found out 1300 years or so later, and teoto had at least the wits not to set a precedent. besides, half the quite exorbitant price he had put on ota’s now non-existent maidenhead was better than a spear’s butt up the khyber, and a girl’s bum, no matter how nice, was worth less than a fifth of godzilla’s gold to anyone he knew on this side of the danube. so, grinning like a village idiot up a sow (arbeo’s simile, not mine dark ages, remember!), he hastily had ota draped, and the royal lash beheaded and thrown in the danube in his daughter’s place as a demonstration of good faith. “his dreadfulness has a deal! i shall send ota into safe isolation in yon impregnable fortress atop the drachensberg until portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 17 she be recovered from the birth and i have all the gold. at that point i shall give his dreadfulness safe conduct to come and collect her, so let us now be total friends instead!” since we are in a piece of christian agitprop, there is no telling what really happened thereafter. it would be good to be able to relate that st emmeram appeared, beaming and reassembled, in a spirit of forgiveness, and gave ota’s bairn a gold baptismal mug, but arbeo claims that something else entirely occurred. ota spent the next five months in the fortress, closely guarded, and scarcely had a messenger reached teoto to tell him his daughter had gone into labour when a hellish detonation shook regensburg. as the dazed teoto staggered outside, it was to see a vast cloud of dust where the drachensberg should be. “go and find your sister, and leave her bum to god!” he told lantperht in a shaken voice. the dolt rode forth with his usual band of yobs, and they were about half way to the drachensberg when they were all overtaken by a wall of muddy water the isar had changed its course and drowned. in this and in the fact that not merely the fortress but the entire top half of the drachensberg were simply not there any more and so it is today, for that matter arbeo sees no more than a continuation of the stream of dreary miracles needed for emmeram’s canonisation al prestissimo. of course, lantperht and his fellow murderers had to get theirs but to suggest god blew apart a whole mountain just to chastise ota for leading emmeram into a temptation which he totally and devoutly resisted well, as i said before: it was written for simple-minded bavarians by a not very sophisticated bavarian in the dark ages. pride and prejudice, it ain’t. but suppose emmeram weren’t the father of ota’s child? arbeo’s pious ramblings conclude with the anecdote that teoto, just before being felled by a loathsome plague that took ten years to finish him off, did have the wise woman strangled, bagged and thrown into the danube at night for putting it about that it was really yosofos, the demon under the forum, who had got ota pregnant and that the demon-child’s birth was the real cause of the explosion. this, at any rate, was the version godzilla must have accepted on the advice of his shamans, since, instead of declaring total war on grounds of culpable negligence, he and his huns left pannonia and went back to central asia, never to trouble these parts again. makes you think, doesn’t it? there seems little doubt that ota and emmeram did enjoy their mutual taste for long, hot baths to the full, and i don’t think what happened to either of them was fair, since i used to have a whizz-bang jumbo-sized spa in adelaide, and i certainly got a lot of fun out of that, but what if emmeram were just so to speak the wash-cloth over the parts, like: the cover-up? i mean: if you were having it off with a demon day and night, what better alibi than having it off with the local bishop, a perfect patsy, once a week? and one can well imagine that if yosofos were, well, that yosofos jr. might be made of antimatter or something, and prove a touch volatile in our dimension. it’s hardball we are playing. play up, play up, and play the game! always the game. portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 18 3 february 1998 by fax please send under plain wrapper a dozen stuffed bull-wombats as farewell gifts for my colleagues here. if you haven’t a dozen bull-wombats, tasmanian devils will do, but no fleas please. vale, katzenbeisser 8 february 1998 by fax most learnèd and revered colleague, whosever idea it was to stuff that rock-wallaby with rocks, rather than the more conventional kapok, should be aware that professor kreutzer dropped it on his foot while trying to mount it and will be on crutches for a long time. i must also point out that it was not a happy inspiration to stuff the goannas with seconds from the factory that makes silicone breast-implants, as some are sagging and leaking none of which is likely to stimulate the frigging export trade, by which the redfern institute of taxidermy will ultimately thrive or implode. i will have some dire things to report after tuesday next, as i have a rendezvous in münchen with professor amber fluid. if i tell you that the three-lobed burning eye is not much more pleasant to look upon than shub-niggurath, haunts parking-stations and has a prehensile grip, then maybe you will start taking it all seriously. katzenbeisser 8 february 1998 mayhap thou hast received a fax or two purporting to be from felix, cardinal katzenbeisser, ceo of the office for dogma and overpopulation in the vatican, oppure? i am now at liberty to reveal to you that those faxes were not from cardinal katzenbeisser at all, but from me! it may be that i am no more when thou receivest this, and i repeat my requests to look after the legal interests of my wife and bairn – if they should this time be successful in nailing me and if indeed you know who succeeds in breaking through ah well, if that happens, this communication is otiose since neither you nor the rest of humanity will be around to read it, even if there is a postie left to deliver it, which is a bit unlikely. slowly but surely, my brilliant deductive mind had coalesced around the fact that whenever anything horrific, appalling, foul or reprehensible happened, then it was in close proximity to holy church. think for a moment if thy brain be not already fused junket! of the four luckless tourists from omaha who were umgestimpflt in the papal basilica of st emmeram. moreover, the tv news informed me that felix, cardinal katzenbeisser, was presently not in rome at all, but – strange to tell! – on a visit to this ill-omened burg. all trails seemed to lead to the bishop’s palace, and so, disguising portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 19 myself as a dominican monk, i succeeded in infiltrating this stronghold of superstition undetected, as there are very numerous weirdos in cassocks floating around looking for a quiet corner to masturbate in and otherwise doing nothing in particular. in order to get access to the episcopal fax machine, i claimed to be the prior in charge of the cardinal’s collection of stuffed animals and heretics, which accompanies him everywhere, and hence sent off imaginary orders to all my friends for taxidermised potoroos, big reds and seventh day adventists (or the like) which must have been confusing for some, since they were all signed “katzenbeisser”. still, you’d be surprised at the number of orders that were promptly filled! i suppose that’s what friends are for. your eight bull-wombats and four tasmanian devils were much appreciated if only you had not stinted on the flea-powder! now the whole palace is scratching! after several days of this, i managed to shadow katzenbeisser himself all the way to the bishop’s nuclear bomb-shelter. getting inside is going to be the tricky part, since i reckon that is where they are keeping the copy of the necronomicon they extracted from the ruins of the synagogue. the fools! they doubtless have not a clue as to the precautions one must take when having truck with the genuine article if such it be for surely the crazed rabbi eliezer ben jonson did not seal it up in lead for nothing. anyway, i shall be back there tomorrow and see if i can’t memorise the combination. katzenbeisser is looking a bit curdled, so maybe it is all coming to a head. maybe you hear from me again, or maybe, well, … 9 february 1998 by fax thanks for the livestock, albeit the untreated cetaceans were impounded by the gesundheitsamt. i have passed the bill on to the bishop’s treasury god knows he can afford it! i attach a fax number you can try, but note that i’m known here as monsignore (rather than professor) as it’s the episcopal palace and all. write in swahili or tamil or something, as these charlies, whilst as demented as “legion-forwe-are-many”, are a cunning lot of buggers withal, believe me! tomorrow we make our gallant but foolhardy attempt to crack the bishop’s bombshelter! three guesses as to whether a secret tunnel connects the bomb-shelter to the new parking station! i hate to carp, but your last crate of stuffed bandicoots all had the mange, and we have to return the echidnas as well, as they shed quills everywhere each time someone kicks one! ora pro me in hoc tempore periculi extremi animae meae, katzenbeisser 10 february 1998 written aboard the train by jesus! i just made it by the tip of my foreskin, as the late fred dwilies was wont to portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 20 say in similar situations! safe on the train or at least i hope i’m safe on the train. in local parlance, the whole of bavaria is “black as a negro’s fundament”, meaning the catholic church has a very strong presence: politically, financially, you name it! and i am on the run again, leaving the bishop’s palace a smoking ruin behind me. have i saved the world as we know it? if you are reading this, old boyhood friend, the odds are i have, although if haply you have turned into something like a giant praying mantis and have to read through the wrong end of a telescope, then the odds are the other way. but if you find your physical self more or less the way you were at xristmas, then rejoice and be exceeding glad and hie thee down to yon lotto agency and buy a ticket in memory of a heroic fortian. you recall that i had infiltrated the episcopal knocking-shop in the guise of the prior in charge of felix, cardinal katzenbeisser’s travelling collection of stuffed quadrupeds and unbelievers. this gave me access to the all-important fax machine, since a codicil to stephens’ law states: if some person of evil intent commits dark secrets that imperil the world to paper, then some other idiot will forget to remove said sheet of paper from the fax machine after sending the dark design to fell accomplices and so it was! in order to be sure of not missing that instant of fatal absent-mindedness, i had to lurk by the bloody apparatus by the hour, and, so as to always have a reason for being there, i had to fire off an endless series of orders for stuffed pangolins, numbats, methodists, anacondas and the like and complain about the quality of every shipment received, even if it had been in mint condition. i sent most of these communications to alan gilbert’s office, as such confusion habitually reigns there that a complaint about moulting polar bears would simply be referred to the swedish section. my friends also copped their share, for the simple reason that i knew their fax numbers. (if you haven’t become a giant praying mantis, then accept my apology: your bandicoots were free of mange, albeit your tasmanian devils were as flea-ridden as sir isaac newton’s underwear!) you see, i could not afford to have a lot of faxes coming back from katzenbeisser’s mob saying: what fucking siberian tigers are missing their tails? (or words to that effect). patience paid off, and sure enough old felix himself sidled up to the machine, slapped a sheet of paper on the glass and looked around darkly. in a trice i had skinned my knees, skidding to a halt before him, kissed his ring (yeah, yeah, the one out front on his hand), and began babbling: “pater doctissime, quaero lucernam pedibus meis in casu dubitando: si vir nondum seminaverit cum penis inter labia posteriora iter faciens ad vaginam.” i dangled before the prurient old bugger a real brain teaser, relating to some precocious ejaculator who, while aiming for the pussy in all good conscience, happens to be coming from behind while his wife is emptying the washing machine and … (you can guess the rest). the question of guilt in the instance of someone who involuntarily chases the bunny into the wrong burrow, while attempting piously to contribute to the world’s overpopulation, is plain irresistible for such as katzenbeisser, who has devoted a whole lifetime to such questions, and soon we were deep into the finer points of sodomy by happenstance. cunningly, i sidled up the corridor, away from the machine, as we examined the question of whether any guilt accrued to the wife, and whether it would have been altogether more sinful if the lot had spattered on the laundry floor? portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 21 “you have the right kind of intellect,” said katzenbeisser, “and i see you now as being wasted on the silent menagerie! now try this one: if a nun is having it off with an alsatian, but looking intently at a monstrance the while …” i couldn’t hardly shake him off and get back to the fax machine! and there it was! the whole monstrous plot! the flaming dingbats had installed the contents of eliezer ben jonson’s lead casket in the bishop’s nuclear bomb-shelter (clever), but then thought they could exploit it to their own self-aggrandisement (puling idiocy!) and so doom had taken its wonted course. oh, they had exorcised it, and almost strangled on the clouds of incense the while, and they had installed some rabbit in the corner to chant plainsong whenever anyone went near it, but the poor buggers really didn’t have the faintest clue! what they had was, indeed, the genuine article, and, as anyone who had done the summer school at the college of unknown kadath would know: if you deal with such, you first take precautions against mind-whispers. because of prodongular porosity, there is no genuine necronomicon (not the condensed book versions!) but emits mindwhispers. these are the real danger. what you need against them is a cantrip, but above all one that has perpetuum mobile. at the college of unknown kadath they invite you to make up your own, as it then becomes part of your brain, with no resistance or rejection, and you can activate it in an hour of need, just like you scratch yourself when you itch. i had devised a round, which, sung in my mind, goes on forever like a carousel: yar, yar, yar! the bear went into a bar, and ordered a pint of beer, and ordered a pint of beer. “we don’t serve bears here,” said the barman with a sneer! the bear biffed him about, and growled as he stalked out: “your beer is far too dear! your beer is far too dear!” this is crude, but effective. it douses mind-whispers like a bucket of god’s own water. but old felix the katz and friends had not the faintest clue as to self-defense! is it any wonder, then, that the cardinal’s perusals of the genuine article had led him and his witless co-conspirators to the conclusion that if they summoned you don’t really want to know who then he would immediately cause every condom on earth to go pop! (just like that), wipe out the entire contraceptive industry and, need it be said? make felix pope! once the mind-whispers get a grip on you, you can believe anything, and these prawns were used to strait-facèdly accepting twaddle like papal infallibility every day. anyway, his eminence was so impressed by my finer distinctions quâ the sinfulness of portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 22 wet dreams that he promoted me to the security branch on the spot and stationed me outside the bishop’s bomb-shelter to keep away profane eyes (ha!) whenever he went inside a folly to be compared only with setting a fox to guard a henhouse, or a rapist to guard a cathouse, or, if it comes to that, a cat to guard a rathouse. my palm-print was registered for the snooty hi-tech door-opener, in case i had to let his eminence out in a hurry, and so it was not long before i was treated to the full horror and idiocy of what was in train. i gave them ten minutes to become fully absorbed, then slipped in and skulked in the shadows. of course, they had the necronomicon out of its casket and the ceo of the office for dogma and overpopulation was skipping about with it open in his arms, trying to execute the intricate steps of the incantation boogie (totally superfluous, and al hazred’s one good joke) whilst scratching his fleabites (your fault!) and (oh, nameless dread!) chanting the descending node. a philological digression is necessary at this point. even lovecraft, dim as he was, had the sense to omit bits of the full text as he knew it, so that no casual reader could, without meaning to, destroy the world as we endure it. al hazred, of course, had ere his wits were scrambled forever also had a care or two for the future of the species and abstracted significant bits of the node from the version he gives with all solemnity, and concealed them in the recipe section at the back of the book. many have done the summer school at the college of unknown kadath, but if they didn’t do the cooking option, they both found out a lot of arcane nonsense and nothing of any use at all for summoning you’d wish you hadn’t. abdul’s girlfriend suleika helped him with the recipes, as is well known, and suleika taught the cooking option at kadath. when she retired, she passed it on to her niece leila, with whom i had an intimate connection and whose pussy tasted something like cardamom steeped in benedictine. what it was to be young with leila sitting on your face! but i digress from my digression. what abdul and suleika did was bury the missing bits of the operative nodes among the recipes, such that the ninth ingredient for goat’s head curry is not an exotic spice at all, but something you have to graft on to an apparently meaningless direction in the recipe for choko soufflé several pages earlier, and, when you get the lot together in the right sequence, you have to transpose it into foul language, using the anagrammatic key tattooed into leila’s armpit (as into suleika’s before her). elsewise, no node, no action, no nuttin! so why didn’t i just leave katzenbeisser to his jollities and take the train to munich in perfect tranquillity? well, we have to remember that al hazred, despite all his precautions, ended up a heap of chuckles in a pool of pee, which surely means he underestimated the utter vileness of the intergalactic horror we confront. fact is: the nodes have semiotic entelechy linked to etheric constellations, which gives them a fiendish capacity to complete themselves if chanted in certain circumstances. it’s a bit like if you say, “like as the waves make” and the cosmos replies: “towards the pibled shore/ so do our moments hasten towards their end.” but it portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 23 only happens if jupiter is sitting in venus’ lap and his toe is tickling cassiopeia’s fanny. you comprende? abdul found all this out too late, and i wasn’t about to be inflicting the knowledge on leila no way! oh god! those juices! now, by reciting what they had of the descending node, the crazy cardinal and friends were all unknowing opening an entelechial vortex, the which, given a catalyst, could cause a rubicon, which, if crossed, would enable the node to complete itself: no more world! the slight difficulty arose that the only suitable catalyst on earth, namely a. stephens’ brain, was crouching in the shadows behind them. thanks to leila, i am the only mortal whose mind has the whole descending node stored in full in the right order. once you have got it together, it never leaves your neurons, so you can imagine the irony of me crouching behind a statue of st sylvester, reciting my cantrip about the poor bear who wanted a drink, whilst stealthily the whole flaming node was composing itself in my grey-matter! after a few tries, katzenbeisser became impatient: “am i a brass monkey, or a tinkling cymbal,” he asked, “that i should dance around chanting this gibberish and nothing happens at all?” at this point, the bomb shelter was lit by a mauve flash as a three lobed burning eye appeared in the ceiling to give him a bit of encouragement. i had never before faced the dual challenge of the eye and the necronomicon at once, and i confess i froze, but then a vision of leila flashed before my inner sight! smiling, she said: “the ball!” a flood of liberating energy pulsed through me and i, even as i felt the missing bits of the node slipping into place in my brain, began to roar at the top of my voice the first stanza that came to mind: the village postman, he was there; the poor man had the pox; he couldn’a stuff tha’ lassies so he stuffed the letter box!4 total confusion among the forces of darkness! katzenbeisser stopped dancing (and chanting), which helped a piddling amount, as the main problem was with the node in my own mind! it kept noding! no wonder i had been paid an outrageous sum of money to come and sit in regensburg 4 in distant times when sexuality was routinely suppressed, it just as routinely bubbled up in other forms, such as the nude painting, the french romance, the shower tea and the rugby song, all of which fell into desuetude after liberation. they had their own strict conventions. rugby songs, for example, were sung by males 16 to 25 while drinking alcohol in groups in the absence of females. (that rugby union teams promote these conditions accounts for the name.) one such rugby song, to a cheerful and vigorous tune, was called the ball of kerrymore (kerrimuir, kirriemuir &c), perhaps after kirriemuir north of dundee. it begins, ‘oh, who’ll come with me / to the ball of kerrymore? / four and twenty prostitutes / a_lying on the floor’ and successive verses, of which this and the later ones are authentic examples, each describe a sexual excess of revellers at the imaginary ball. between each verse is a chorus: ‘singing, who’ll do me this time? / who’ll do me now? / the one who did me last time / must have used a plough.’ (as is common in oral tradition, versions differ in detail though not in thrust.) portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 24 singing all the pretty little horses to young peter! the whole point was to get katzenbeisser (who wanted to do it), the necronomicon (as gate) and me (as the only one who knew it) all together in the one place at the one time, so the flaming node could recite itself! talk about narcissism! was i outgunned? the eye groped; i sang: over in the corner the village idiot sat … it groped and i sang amusin’ himself by abusin’ himself, and a-catchin’ it in his hat! dimly, through the infinite frigidity of interdimensional refrigeration, i seemed to hear an awful voice intone: “another one blown! can’t you find better quality sphincters?” fearing the great whammo was about to wham, i crawled under the feet of st sylvester and covered my ears. nothing happened. peering out, i saw katzenbeisser and buddies frozen in time, but emitting an ominous luminescence, and my decision was made. this brave song has a finite number of stanzas, and i would not claim to know them all, so the conviction came to me that i should continue this effective incantation while getting the hell out! so i fled, bawling: four and twenty virgins came down from inverness … again, through the chill of intergalactic space i seemed to hear the words: “are you sure it’s blown? just try here,” and in that instant the whole of the descending node flashed, as if in neon, before my inner eye … “… she had the crowd in fits: a jumping off the mantelpiece and landing on her tits! singing: balls to your partner …” i shrieked, as i pelted out the front gate of the episcopal bagnio and right into the arms of the police: “if you don’t get fucked this saturday night” “aber es ist dienstag!” “you’ll never get fucked at all” “we are familiar with this word used by black members of u.s. airforce!” said the police. i sang: “the old schoolmaster he was there, he fucked by rule of thumb …” portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 25 “ah, apologies father, we have not registered before your cassock it is therefore educational?” “and when the ball was over everyone confessed, that, tho’ they liked the musick, the fucking was the best.” “father, we are required by law to request you to cease this ‘fucking’ in a public place!” “you idiots!” i howled, “it is the only thing keeping us all alive!” so we had a kind of mexican stand-off outside the palace, with me making up verses extempore and trying to edge further down the street, while they called for reinforcements on their mobile phones. at length, as i had been through every possible vocation in kirriemuir and every possible receptacle for a standing prick, the whole place began to glow in a fluorescent purple shade, and this distracted the law enough for me to get to the railway station. chance had it that an inter-city was leaving as i pelted down the platform (my wife and bairn having been sent to safety before) and i leaped aboard with all my credit-cards intact. so here we are, pant, gasp, 29 pages down the track, and thank xrist the train sells beer. whether they decided on an implosion, which might just have removed the bishop’s palace from our world, or an explosion, which might have led to hadronic contagion and yourself turning into a praying mantis, i shall know when i see it on telly. if there still is telly. at the moment, trains and beer both seem relatively stable, and i hope devoutly i saved the world for all the swindlers, perverts, public servants and fascists that inhabit it. but it was close! and one has to ask: why? if they had paused for one moment to think ... i mean: they froze katzenbeisser and pards in time. why did they not take advantage of the interval to make me a reasonable offer: a temperate island with 17 nubile lassies of different races? a$60m, or something? it can’t mean very much to them if they have to pay for something occasionally, and i think it’s plain daft if they keep expecting mindless evil just to triumph, like shoes wear out or balloons deflate. anyway, the train keeps going, the beer keeps flowing and i wish to xrist i didn’t know the descending node in all its vomitous integrity, since i doubt they will ever leave me alone, for as long as our universe has chinks. and from where i sit at the moment, it is as chinky as all hell. it’s nice to be rid of katzenbeisser, though maybe the other casualties will be more lamented, and you, poor sod, still face your valentine’s day crisis. we reach munich in a moment, so ta-ta for the time being. portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 26 14 february 1998 by fax your fax of 12 february arrived subsequent to the destruction of the episcopal palace, whither it was directed. (my strategic deployment of the bok seems to have reversed the node back on itself, so kaboom!) your missive was delivered by a nun on a bicycle who asked me to draw your attention to the fact that at the end of para (vi) utor appears to be taking the accusative, rather than the ablative, tch! tch! i think this mode of delivery means that katzenbeisser’s mob now knows my whereabouts, and they are holding off for the moment in the hope that my correspondence (which they are doing everything to facilitate) will give them some clue as to the whereabouts of katzenbeisser himself! now, that would be telling! maybe he is marrying an english policeman to your niece antonia in albury, heh-heh! a likely story! (more likely would be in the dust-bag of the cosmic hoover, whatever that is.) the kind sister even offered to wait for my reply and translate it into swahili (she served for several years in various missionary positions in africa) but i assured her you could just about manage english. i am a bit worried that holy church will whistle up a few battalions of opus dei sas, as i am stretching the budget employing the kuomintang irregulars as it is. i think i may be needing backup soon! stand by and (for god’s sake) keep your talcum dry! 16 february 1998 if my munich letter has reached you by now, you will appreciate i have a few worries about my family’s and my own security, and reading of the tragic end of sir rowell dover does not make me any more optimistic of reaching the airport on sunday next. when the usual nun arrived on her bicycle this morning, the kuomintang heavies let her through. i was a little disconcerted when she peeled off her rubber face to reveal herself as ambrosio, cardinal cespuglia, papal nuncio, who looked a little like the original nosferatu (without quite the same length of finger-nail). he whipped out a list of those who went missing with felix, cardinal katzenbeisser, when the episcopal palace imploded, and said his holiness had empowered him to offer a substantial sum of any currency i cared to designate for provably accurate information as to where all and sundry might be found, said money to be paid only on their recovery, preferably alive, but dead would do. “your eminency,” i replied, “nothing would please me more than to assure my family’s future by lightening the papal purse by the sum you name, which is truly handsome, but i have to tell you that the simplest and most practical solution for the holy father is to canonize the lot of them in private forthwith and without the usual pseudo-legalities, lengthy dramatics and blaze of publicity, as this conceivably might stand them in good stead wherever they are. for, assuredly, i have not a clue. your experts will have examined the ruins of the palace by now, and seen that the epicentre of the catastrophe was the bishop’s bomb-shelter. can you suppose that cardinal katzenbeisser had merely nipped down there to pass the time by saying the odd ave maria, and that what occurred was precipitated by himself or someone else flushing portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 27 the toilet? does not the evidence argue that more than defective plumbing totally emptied a fourstorey building of its occupants, furniture, floors, ceilings and all interior walls? to say nothing of the adjacent and almost completed parking station? and will not your experts have pronounced themselves clueless as to where all this matter, animate and inanimate, may have gone? come, your eminency are not miracles part and parcel of your trade? do your offices not attest a few score a year? declare this, then, a miracle. proclaim that the lord called cardinal katzenbeisser and staff to himself to help cope with the pressure of work upstairs: an unexpected but well-deserved promotion. you cannot pretend anyone will actually miss oldfelix the katz, or that his holiness will have the slightest trouble replacing him with another ceo of the office for dogma and overpopulation whose views are identically lacking in compassion, reactionary and rigid! cut your losses, save your cash and let me and mine depart in peace.” alas, i fear cespuglia thought i was merely trying to up the ante, as he ground his fangs, clenched his talons and looked extremely sour. he left, saying he would have to talk to the vatican’s bankers. i fear worse is to come. i trust you have the backup ready. 18 february 1998 by fax this is a mayday mayday mayday call for backup! cespuglia has bought off the kuomintang, which leaves me without a strategic figleaf to cover the family jewels. send in at least a dozen, no make that 14, and get them here p.d.q. no, not figleaves. highly trained, hard-bitten, ruthless operatives with no warm feelings towards the catholic church! jewish agnostics or ulster protestants for preference. recycled members of the japanese red army also welcome. i have tried to persuade cespuglia that there is no point increasing his offer i am in no position to persuade the other side to put the interior of the bishop’s palace back just the way it was. i have referred him to the gesellschaft für die erhaltung der finsternis und stille (not in the phone book!); i have sat for a couple of totally boring hours with him in the crypt of st ramwolbus waiting for the sanctuary lamp to give the slightest hint of turning into a three-lobed burning eye (not a debreciner!); i have talked it through with him and his stooges in a lie-detector constructed mainly of holy relics said to bleed in the presence of untruth (not a spurt!). so we now have a stalemate which looks ominously like the prelude to violence. if it be that i am destined never to gaze upon the yarra’s sparkling flood again; if my apportioned lot is never to be stuck in another melbourne traffic jam; if fate is hell-bent on depriving me of the joy of listening to alan gilbert berate the academic board about nothing in particular; if, in short, the number of my days has reached zero, then accept once more my heartfelt thanks for all those stuffed animals you sent and, by all that is holy, keep well away from half-built underground parking-stations and crypts ... portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 28 20 february 1998 gesellschaft für die erhaltung der finsternis und stille regensburg dear professor mcintyre, we are having been following with carefully controlled interest the many fascinations of your corresponds with our good friend professor stephens who, is, alas, having announced his intention of returning to the bright lights and noise of melbourne at a time when he will be sore missed at our meetings of the full benefits of which he unfortunately is as not yet in a state of reception. it has not been unobserved by our observers that he has said one or two things that are quite naughty and we are enclosing a brochure from the papal basilica of st emmeram to correct any misunderstandings he may have pullulated in his sometimes quite unbalanced and one-sided accounts of goings-on in our crypt and even in the palace of our late bishop manfred. we do not hold you responsible for the recent influx of australian indigenes with criminal records into bavaria. all were captured and processed, and it is clear you were but attempting to help a misguided compatriot down on his luck, as you aussies say idiomatically. as we are soon opening an australian branch, we have chosen you from among the whole living persons of that continent for our below rock-bottom special admission offer. we are therefore inviting you to join us for a “quiet hour” at midnight in the crypt of st mary’s cathedral, sydney, on thursday 19 march next. no special preparations are necessary. drinks will be served within reason. while we are not in the stern meaning a secret society and have no affiliation with scientology, we are however having a distinct preference that you are not informing even your nearest and dearest where you are going and why. that way we all enjoy the surprise to the fill! we are looking forward to feeling you there. yours for that extra bit of mindless evil, verm portal vol 1, no. 2 july 2004 29 winter preface the shadow under regensburg portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 18, no. 1/2 feb 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: duruz, j. 2022. kampong french: a tale of doubtful authenticity. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 18:1/2, 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/ pjmis.v18i1-2.7897 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal general articles (peer reviewed) kampong french: a tale of doubtful authenticity jean duruz corresponding author: dr. jean duruz, adjunct senior research fellow, university of south australia, gpo box 2471, adelaide sa 5001, australia. jean.duruz@unisa.edu.au doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7897 article history: received 15/09/2021; accepted 19/11/2022; published 25/02/2022 abstract this paper refers to accounts of previous journeys on the ‘laksa trail’ in search of peranakan cuisine and its sensory nuances. these journeys have produced narratives of migration and diaspora, shaped by the re-location of dishes and ingredients from local villages, coffee houses and home kitchens of malaysia and singapore to cafés and restaurants of adelaide, australia and toronto, canada. on this occasion, however, the argument comes full circle, focusing on nostalgic tastes, smells and textures that resonate in singapore itself. the intention is to trouble meanings of authenticity in terms of specific communities’ dishes, ingredients and culinary rituals, and to frame the argument through the rich body of scholarship emerging since fernando ortiz’s seminal discussion of transculturation in cuban counterpoint (1995). kampong french, established in the lush gardens of singapore’s open farm community, provides a ‘pop-up’ example of transculturation within a specific culinary contact zone (pratt 1996; farrer 2015)—a sense of the plasticity of dishes, ingredients and meanings. it may be tempting to dismiss these re-inventions of traditional dishes and ingredients as opportunistic seizure of the ‘exotic’ or simply as expressions of creative entrepreneurialism, or even as ‘inauthentic’ adventuring on behalf of the palates of privileged middle-class consumers. unravelling the political implications of these experiments in nomadism, however, suggests there is more to learn about meanings of authenticity in historically ‘mixed’ communities—about authenticity’s less obvious refractions of movement, ethnicity, identity and place and, in particular, about the complex ways these meanings are ingested in twenty-first century multi-culinary global cities. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7897 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7897 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:jean.duruz@unisa.edu.au http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v18i1-2.7897 keywords ethnography; food; singapore; authenticity; contact zone; global cities grace tay savours the sight of fish porridge, nasi lemak, ‘spicy, smelly, vermilion-coloured otak-otak wrapped in roasted banana leaves, and while she re-tells the story of her mother’s life in japaneseoccupied singapore, and then in malaysia in the 1960s, she wonders, ‘how is it that my dead mother’s tastebuds now coat my tongue and nudge my cravings?’ hsu-ming teo (2002), commenting on a scene from her novel love and vertigo [t]he familiarity of the birthland is both conjured and physically actualized through fragrant whiffs of memory. … the frying pan has the power to melt boundaries by creating an undifferentiated territoriality between france and guadeloupe, a ‘sensorial interstice’ that suspends spatial hierarchies through culinary reconstructions. brinda mehta (2005), commenting on a scene from giselle pineau’s un papillon dans la cite unlike grace tay, my tongue reminds me not of dead mothers and not even of singapore, but certainly of the ‘spicy, smelly,’ fishy tastes and aromas of market cafes in adelaide, an australian city ambivalently positioned geographically ‘in,’ and yet, not quite culturally ‘in,’ the asian region. i have told the story of my first taste of laksa many times. this is a story that continues to haunt me, prompting many retellings as a significant event in my culinary biography. the bare bones are these: having lunch with friends at adelaide’s asian gourmet café in the early 1980s, i realise i’ve never eaten before a spicy southeast asian soup known as laksa: ‘the heat of chilli, the crunch of bean sprouts and the softness of the bean curd and coconut milk—all of these dance on my tongue. i struggle with chopsticks and stain the front of my dress. it is a moment of epiphany’ (duruz 2010: 45). for nearly forty years such a moment has prompted journeys on the ‘laksa trail’ in search of one of the malacca strait’s distinctive cuisines—nyonya cooking— together with its sensory nuances.1 these journeys have produced narratives of migration and diaspora, tracing the ‘mixed’ origins and re-location of dishes from the kampongs [villages], kopitiams [coffee houses] and home kitchens of malaysia and singapore to the cafes and restaurants of adelaide, australia and toronto, canada (duruz 2007; duruz 2019a). typically, these narratives have prompted questions such as: how well do historically mixed fusion dishes travel from southeast asian port cities to cities of the west? and does the contribution of these dishes and cooking styles to fashionable global fusions and new hybrid cuisines inevitably mean loss—producing, in darra goldstein’s words, simply a ‘murky mélange’ (2005: iv)? questions like these never fail to intrigue me. on this particular journey, however, i intend to trouble meanings of authenticity—in terms of specific communities’ dishes, ingredients and culinary rituals—even further, drawing on my previous writing as well as current research preoccupations. the argument will be framed by the rich body of scholarship that has emerged since fernando ortiz’s seminal cuban counterpoint (1995)—scholarship that continues to focus on global movements of people and food, and the effect of these movements on ‘mixed’ communities. primarily following the work of katarzyna j. cwiertka (2002), james farrer (2015), and mary louise pratt (2007), i intend to unravel some of the complexities of culinary interactions between different social groups, to ground my theorising in the immediacy of everyday tastes and aromas and to use the motif of ‘entanglement’ (a way of re-imagining ortiz’s ‘transculturation,’ perhaps) to challenge sharp distinctions 1 ‘[the peranakan] community in melaka traces its ancestry back to 17th century and to intermarriages/cohabitation between baba chinese men and local melakan women … the peranakan chinese or baba-nyonya identity is ‘an indigenized chinese identity” symbolized by adoption and adaptation of malay language, fashion, methods of food preparation (including the use of specific local ingredients) … their men were known as “baba” and the women, “nyonya”. …[t]he [descended] babas were local-born [as opposed to foreign-born] chinese …’ (duruz & khoo 2015: 126). duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 20222 between historical examples of fusion cooking and supposedly ‘new’ chef-led examples of experiment in taste and ingredient combinations (crang, cited in lisa law 2001: 276; ortiz 1995: 102–03). in terms of the methodological specifics, i tease out three narratives stemming from my fieldwork in adelaide, toronto and singapore.2 in regard to the first two narratives, i have written about them at some length previously (2007; 2019a) so the discussion of these will be brief, chiefly serving to set the scene for a more substantial reflection on the third case study. at the same time, i opt for a microcosmic approach throughout. this will involve constructing textual fragments of culinary bordercrossing as ways to deploy conceptually meanings of ‘origins,’ ‘syncretism’ and ‘traditions’ in relation to southeast asian food cultures, with the intention of capturing some of their slipperiness and mutability—in fact, their doubtfulness. and here i want to draw on ien ang’s endorsement of the concept of hybridity for analysing ambivalence of identity positioning, although, for our purposes, hybridity will be mobilised to serve the productivity of doubt (ang 2001: 200–01). ang herself says: [m]ixture [in cultural/racial terms] is still often inevitably thought of as a contamination, as a breach of purity, an infringement of ‘identity’ … in short, hybridity is not only about fusion and synthesis, but also about friction and tension, about ambivalence and incommensurability, about the contestations and interrogations that go hand in hand with the heterogeneity, diversity and multiplicity we have to deal with as we live together-in-difference. (2001: 200) it is that ‘fundamental uneasiness inherent in our global condition of togetherness-in-difference’ (2001: 200; original emphasis) that ang sees as a refusal of complacency and of ‘them’ and ‘us’ distinctions. this healthy doubtfulness, this questioning, will form a useful thread throughout the argument that follows. theoretical directions to map further co-ordinates for this doubtful travel, we briefly consider, first of all, resonances from the writing of fernando ortiz. it is productive here to imagine that transculturation, a term originally coined by ortiz and employed by other writers since, might offer further nuance to the argument (ortiz 1995: 97–103). with its meanings both of cultural acquisition and loss within zones of contact, and meanings of creating something new to replace stories of origins, transculturation becomes a useful tool for confronting definitive interpretations of authenticity and ownership while shaking the illusion of a necessarily equitable exchange (ortiz 1995: 102–03; pratt 2007: 7–8; millington 2005: 228–30; farrer 2015: 8). i would never argue, for example, that my ‘borrowed’ laksa is not conveniently and enthusiastically appropriated by the anglo-celtic mainstream to enhance its own positioning within cultural imaginaries of cosmopolitanism. nevertheless, ortiz argues against transculturation as a simple act of appropriation by a dominant culture (usually assumed to be ‘the west’) from a less dominant and exoticized culture but instead insists that complexities in the process of exchange must be taken into account. he outlines these complexities in the following terms: i am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture [acculturation] … but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as a deculturation. in addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation. (102-03) 2 interviews were conducted in 2003 with khut chee lan and khut kok chin, proprietors of malacca corner, a market restaurant in adelaide, south australia and in 2015 with lauren, zenn and trish soo at their restaurant soos in toronto, canada. duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 20223 implicit in these arguments is that such interactions between two cultures are not necessarily one directional or even symmetrical but both cultures are affected, indeed changed, as a result. cwiertka expresses this as ‘the continuous tension between homogenisation and heterogenization, the interconnectedness between the global and the local’ (2002: 1–2). perhaps echoing this tension, my first-taste laksa story could be reworked as a specific migrant dish becoming mainstream (and, concomitantly, absorbed into meanings of ‘australian’ identity) on the one hand, while its tastes are localised, together forming distinctive signifiers of everyday ‘ways of operating,’ on the other (de certeau 1984: xi). this mix of gain and loss held in tension, i argue, is significant for understanding the politics of food exchanges. cwiertka’s discussion of ‘imagination as a social practice’ (2002: 7) becomes important for shaping contemporary arguments focusing on the value of recognising such interconnectedness, together with the new cultural forms, vested in hybridity, that emerge. as well as processes of transculturation, the concept of place itself as a site of human activity, is central in framing my argument. i am indebted to pratt for her discussion of contact zones which she defines as ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination—such as colonialism or slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today’ (2007: 7). furthermore, pratt, in an oblique acknowledgement of ortiz, declares ‘transculturation is a phenomenon of the contact zone’ (2007: 7). farrer, in his turn, reworks pratt’s conceptualisation of contact zones (2007: 8) as culinary contact zones (2015: 8–9). while pratt (2007: 8) views such zones as spaces of unequal encounter in which ‘people geographically and historically separated come in contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, racial inequality and intractable conflict,’ farrer uses food as a medium through which such encounters may occur, their textures shaped by culinary negotiations and exchanges. farrer elaborates: ‘as cuisines and the people producing them move across borders, the spaces of food production and consumption become culinary contact zones or spaces of cultural friction and creativity, including settings such as kitchens or virtual spaces such as online communities’ (2015: 8). the tensions of unequal encounter and the identification of spaces of ‘cultural friction and creativity’ implied by these potential analytic tools are ones i am keen to explore through the doubtful narratives outlined here. with these conceptual tools—transculturation, contact zones, culinary contact zones and imagination as social practice—and with recognition of their intellectual genealogies—i return to two earlier sites of research before entering and spending longer with the third. i pay tribute to the extant writers mentioned to date, and others like lisa heldke (2003: 45–59), uma narayan (1997: 183–84) and elspeth probyn (2000: 81–83), who have grappled with issues of authenticity and appropriation, particularly in relation to mobile food cultures, but wish to build on this intellectual heritage and, perhaps, add further nuance and indicate points of tension within it. ‘knowing laksa’: nyonya secrets relocated and transformed in remembering my epiphany in a laksa-stained dress in asian gourmet café in the early 1980s, i am not alone. tastes of chilli, lemongrass, belachan, coconut milk and candlenuts haunt adelaide central market’s, and indeed the city’s, collective imaginary. it is customary for local non-asian residents to indulge in the nostalgic exercise of exchanging laksa stories: ‘do you remember your first taste of laksa?’ they now ask, licking their lips, wondering at, and proud of, the extent to which strange tastes have become normalised. among my friends it is the asian gourmet café or malacca corner that they remember, with both businesses still thriving in the depths of adelaide’s central market. for others it is hawkers corner (the forerunner of current adelaide asian food courts) or twains. although the latter is no longer in existence it is fondly remembered by anglo-australians for their first encounter usually as university students or workers from nearby offices, with meanings of ‘hawker’ associated with the lingering tastes of cheap, spicy, ‘exotic’ street food and its providers (duruz 2007: 193–95). while for some this was the taste of home duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 20224 itself, for non-asian generations, these cafes became invested with meanings of coming of age—culinarily, culturally and multiculturally. as catherine murphy observes: ‘on friday nights customers still queue for tables at these cafés where they first tasted authentic asian food’ (2003: 129–30). central to this narrative example of the localisation of laksa in australia and in adelaide,3 are the figures of kut chee lan and her husband khut kok chin.4 after her marriage in melaka in 1959, khut chee lan became the chief cook in her husband’s household, not only achieving mastery of hakka dishes (both sets of parents were from guandong province, china) but also of classic nyonya dishes, their recipes learnt from neighbours. returning to this story nearly twenty years after its first telling, i am once again struck by its complex threads: earlier mixed relationships of chinese traders and local women in the port of melaka; the culinary heritage of their peranakan descendants; food cultures of recently arrived (at least, in this case) hakka chinese in melaka; relations of reciprocity among port city neighbours across borders of ethnicity and gastronomy (‘we exchange, we learn,’ chee lan says). the striking feature of this narrative is the mobility and plasticity of food cultures. after all, insists lily kong, ‘cuisines are not fixed things’ (2016: 230–31). with this culinary flexibility in mind, my story now has laksa leaving melaka for adelaide, an australian city that is ‘not-asian,’ at least according to mahathir, malaysia’s prime minister at that time (‘mahathir’ 2004). the khuts arrive in adelaide from melaka, malaysia in 1978, several years after the relaxation of australia’s discriminatory restrictions on asian immigration (commonly referred to as the white australia policy) ( jupp 1995). in 1982, they establish a homestyle café, and name it malacca corner.5 unlike the nearby asian gourmet, where customers were remembered as mostly asian students, the khuts’ clientele was, according to chee lan ‘mostly australian[s] … [who] have been to malaysia …that’s why [the name] malacca corner because … they know malacca and … [t]hey know what laksa is.’ for those who do not ‘know … laksa’ the khuts embark on a gentle campaign of taste education: ‘we give a little bit for them to try,’ says kok chin, and ‘once you try it, you will like it, you know,’ says chee lan. here, in the contact zone of a small café and others like it, lingering traces of the mixed histories of others, of their (sometimes enforced) travel,6 remembered palates and creative strategies of reproduction in new settings achieve moments of local recognition from those who, on the other hand, savour their first taste of authentic asian food or savour the memories of their own youthful travel to find it. we pause to reflect on the thread of local belonging—a sense of ‘hereness’ in contrast to its obverse, a sense of ‘elsewhere’—running through this account, together with hints of the dish’s distinctive flavours and its consumption rituals. for this tale of acquired belonging, the flavours of pratt’s contact zones take on particularly benign meanings, with less obvious signs of the ‘clash’ and ‘grapple’ of ‘disparate cultures’ in conflict (pratt 2007:8). however, as we continue to ponder on local belonging we find, in fact, complex intersections of here and elsewhere within a cuisine borne simultaneously in migrational movement and 3 for the localisation of chinese food, see tan 2011, 30-35. note too that i am not assuming that adelaide was the only city where laksa attained popularity and ubiquity. for discussion of its reception in other cities see duruz 2019c: 215. nevertheless, ann oliver, a local food writer and restauranteur muses, ‘for some reason laksa is peculiar to south australia, evidenced by people returning home and heading straight for the nearest laksa shop lamenting that neither sydney nor melbourne have a decent laksa’ (oliver cited in duruz 2019c: 215). 4 all biographical details and quotations attributed to either khut chee lan or to khut kok chin are drawn from transcripts of interviews conducted in adelaide in november 2003. 5 throughout, i have opted for the malay spelling of ‘melaka’ except in cases where the english/colonial spelling ‘malacca’ is appropriate. the khuts chose to use the english spelling for their café in adelaide. 6 the khuts claimed the reason for their travel and re-location was mainly economic while others interviewed mentioned racial discrimination (against ethnic chinese) in malaysia at that time, including the 1969 race riots in kuala lumpur (duruz 2007: 193-95). duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 20225 local place-making, and in one that continues to travel yet engage with other locals. at this point, perhaps, doubt creeps in, questioning these engagements as necessarily benign or uncomplicated, and raising additional questions to those i posed initially. what do authenticity, origins and traditions mean for cultures whose culinary habits enshrine a deep history of travel, mixing and exchange? at what point do borrowed tastes cease to be foreign and become firmly entangled in the local? and echoing my earlier reflections, do these doubts render a dish inauthentic? i suspect that for this laksa narrative specifically, meanings of authentic as signalling attachment to a bounded place or community, may not be so useful after all; likewise meanings of authentic tied to singularity and exclusive truths too rigid to accommodate movement and plasticity of a changing, globalising world. here, doreen massey’s conceptualisation of place as mobility and connection is possibly more useful. for massey, place is ‘accumulated history … with that history imagined as the product of layer upon layer of different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world’ (1994: 156). shaped by this definition, place becomes characterised by fluidity and connection to other places. food and food cultures then are subject to movement and change. it is also productive here to trace ortiz’ phases of transculturation (1995: 102–03) with laksa arguably removed from peranakan neighbours and its familiar identity as a traditional malaysian dish of ‘mixed’ origins to be re-introduced in a predominantly white australian context, its identity changed to fit the national narrative of australian cuisine as hybrid and multicultural (duruz 2019c: 247). however, while both parties involved in negotiations (ethnic entrepreneurs and their customers) undergo productive changes (the khuts’ business flourishes, adelaide’s foodscapes acquire new meanings especially of ‘asianness,’ defined by consumption in the marketplace) (yoshino 2019: 1–7), there are moments of counting the costs. when discussing the success of the business, mrs khut, for example, in an aside murmurs: ‘[having the shop was] so much effort. … [we] never stopped … so much effort.’ ortiz’s discomforting mix of ‘uprooting’ and ‘creation’ and its inequities resonates deeply in these moments of culinary migration and re-production. so the mobility of food cultures in turn produce its own ‘mixed’ blessings. cuisine faux: poutine, tacos and reconstructed nasi lemak? leaving behind adelaide central market’s ‘colour and chaos as fresh as its abundant produce’ (murphy 2003: 18), we now travel to the inner suburbs of toronto, canada, and to ossington, an avenue multilayered in its history and in its communities. the most recent layer, shaped by council development suggestive of international trends in urban planning (and possibly influenced by richard florida’s creative class philosophies) (florida 2003), could be a textbook case in gentrification, with the strip currently promoted as a ‘hot’ destination of bars, restaurants and cafes, especially for young people of a ‘green’ persuasion—artists, bohemians, hipsters, professionals (ossington community association 2013). here on ossington i am curious to chart the merging of singaporean and malaysian food cultures with those of downtown toronto. in other words, i want to unravel historical elements of gastronomic fusion as found in traditional peranakan (nyonya) food, from those dishes of fusion that are currently fashionable forms of industry entrepreneurialism. i suspect it may not be so easy to differentiate sharply the so-called traditional from its modern permutations. does the quest for post-industrial urban creativity inevitably lead to loss of cultural integrity and heritage? what would ‘my’ laksa taste like here (and what right do i have to even ask this anyway) (heldke 2003: 45–6)? what role does authenticity (if any) play in a restaurant’s project of ‘re-imagining malaysian street food’ (interview with lauren soo, november 2015) and how does this re-imagining capture tensions and contradictions of contemporary globalisation? in other words, how does this creative play with dishes and ingredients trouble accepted meanings of authenticity? more specifically, my focus of this re-imagining here is soos, a malaysian restaurant on ossington, established by zenn soo and his wife trish, with zenn having arrived in toronto from kuala lumpur in duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 20226 the late 1970s, trish a few years later. joined in the business by their toronto-born and now-adult children, lauren (responsible for marketing and for front-of-house alongside her father) and zac (chef-trained, working in the kitchen alongside his mother), the soos have developed a small bar-restaurant that is both stylish in décor and innovative in menu.7 however, as my diary entry shows the first encounter with this menu raises doubts: [m]y heart sinks a little. mention of poutine, tacos and “reconstructed nasi lemak” suggests a certain degree of playfulness of ingredients and technique. are these current examples of the “bad fusion” associated with the 1980s that gabbaccia (1998: 216) claimed was “often pricey and faddish”? how does a québécois dish like poutine or a mexican staple like the taco or traditional southeast asian street food like nasi lemak, its ingredients “reconstructed” to produce a different dish in appearance at least, if not in flavour, reference the tastes and smells of the remembered everyday in malaysia? (duruz 2019a: 17) good fusion, bad fusion. at what point could creative combinations of ingredients, flavours, techniques be considered as having cut loose from their culinary heritage (even from the already mixed and plastic traditions of nyonya cuisine)? is singapore and malaysia’s contribution to world cuisine to be its faux reproduction in diaspora? is this a reproduction in which culinary playfulness and fashionable, marketdriven references supersede those mixed culinary traditions of the nyonya with their deep historical roots (ripe 1993: 78)? if we pursue this line of this questioning, the ghost of inauthenticity is lurking, a ghost which cherry ripe ridicules in the face of cuisine mobility (‘what is now “tradition,” was once itself innovation’) (1993: 82). lauren soo, in her turn, is adamant on the question of authenticity or otherwise of lemongrass-flavoured chicken tacos: ‘clearly our food is fusion. after all, you won’t find tacos on the streets of malaysia! our concept is re-imagining malaysian street food.’ for soos’ non-southeast asian diners the aim is to provide a subtle referencing of the unfamiliar in the context of the familiar as a means of educating the palate (remember khut chee lan’s ‘once you try it, you will like it’?). lauren’s mantra of ‘fusion with respect’ begs the question: in deliberate cuisine bordercrossing, what constitutes respect? like authenticity, respect is elusive and difficult to define. given that no cuisine could be said to be static and beyond the influences of history, geography and politics, respect and authenticity might simply become questions of degree and subjective judgment. however, my preference would be to tie respect to the possession of cultural and culinary capital—to one’s knowledge of flavour combinations that, culturally speaking, ‘work’ and those that don’t. as charmaine solomon, popularly hailed as the queen of asian cooking in australia says: ‘if the person who is doing it doesn’t really have a deep understanding of the cuisines he [sic] is trying to fuse it can end up as confusion … but many young chefs … here in australia … seem to have a good instinct and feel about what will work and what won’t’ (britain 2002: 75). possibly for lauren the ‘what will work’ includes knowledge of the multi-ethnic, multi-culinary community in which she has grown up—the widespread, popular tastes of fast food such as tacos or tzatziki—as well as her family’s experimentation with flavour combinations that, at the very least, do not contradict each other: the mild, chewy textures of taco with the soft yet sharp spiciness of nyonya-style lemongrass chicken. meanwhile, the deconstructed nasi lemak becomes a playful nod for those who know real malaysian food—for southeast asians in diaspora, for other well-travelled toronto residents, and, if we’re mindful of soos’ customer base, for savvy hipsters—and who will only get the joke if they are familiar with fully constructed, ‘authentic’ nasi lemak. 7 all biographical details regarding members of the soo family and all quotations attributed to lauren soo are drawn from the transcript of an extended interview with zenn, trish and lauren soo, conducted in toronto in november 2015. duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 20227 the offerings at soos are neither without historical roots nor without experimental, educative and market-driven inflections. this is a menu of re-imaginings that references both a past elsewhere—a complex heritage—and a present grounded in the richly, nuanced foodscapes of a twenty-first century cosmopolis. it may also intimate the significance of generation for global cuisines and their culinary futures. after all, it is canadian-born lauren who has spearheaded for her family and for the business this project of reimagining. although betsy donald and alison blay-palmer sound a warning note against unreflective celebration of multiculturalism and creative entrepreneurialism—celebrations that tend to overlook issues of inclusivity and sustainability—these writers, quoting ken wiwa, define the continuing challenge in generational terms: [t]his fusion generation with its bicultural or multicultural heritage is the face of the new canada. a face more visible in the country’s big cities, it comprises a generation in the process of negotiating new spaces at the juncture of its cross-cultural past and its canadian future. (wiwa cited in donald and blay-palmer, 2006: 1911) reflecting on this as a doubtful tale of authenticity, tradition and cosmopolitan modernity, we return to this section’s subtitle of faux cuisine. this balancing of meanings of past and present, of authentic and inauthentic (or perhaps, instead, experimental), this subtle referencing of here and elsewhere, is never easy nor without cost. however, according to ang, such negotiations are critical, especially in global cities where the presence of mixed populations demands creative strategies for living ‘together-in-difference’ (ang 2001: 193–201). this, after all, reflects cwiertka’s ‘imagination as a social practice’ in action (2002: 10). put differently, relations within an urban contact zone are likely to involve workers in food businesses (such as restaurants, cafs, food shops and markets) needing to engage in tricky ‘tactics’ of encouraging empathy and recognition while damping down cultural friction and suspicion among their clientele (de certeau 1984: 96). the culinary contact zone of the ‘ethnic’ restaurant then demands ingenuity and compromise.8 the requirement is to meet the competing needs of its customer base—those of mainstream anglo-canadians together with the fastidious middle class of toronto’s malaysian communities, as well as the proprietors’ own need for business survival. yet a lemongrass-flavoured chicken taco is still a mundane object. nevertheless, with its origins simultaneously positioned in remembered local foodscapes, in migrational movement and in creative entrepreneurialism, this taco becomes, like laksa, a motif of mutability and ‘entanglement’ (crang cited in law 2001: 276). ironically, as with laksa in australia, the taco already has been borrowed/appropriated from its mexican origins to become a ubiquitous global street food (pilcher 2012). in the process, an accepted casual, everyday dish re-works itself in meanings of belonging into global cosmopolitan cultures (hence pilcher’s ‘planet taco’) and, at the same time and contradictorily, into cultures of global ordinariness, rather than remaining simply an authentic sign of a community’s exclusive ownership. furthermore, in answer to masakazu tanaka’s posing roughly sequential histories for relations of colonialism and globalisation in urban landscapes (2007 cited by farrer 2015: 8), the strands of the traditional and the colonial/postcolonial might be more ‘entangled’ and continuing than supposed. entanglement now begins to look a little like ortiz’ transculturation, especially in its final neoculturist phase. kampong french: ‘from paris with kampong spirit’ towards the end of 2017 open farm community, an innovative farm-to-table food business in the lush grounds of a day spa in singapore, announced an upcoming event. with open farm’s philosophy of ‘bringing fresh seafood and meat specially curated using herbs, vegetables and flowers from the restaurant’s 8 despite their usual fusion menus, the soos organise banquets on an occasional basis to meet requests for traditional dinners from toronto’s malaysian community. duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 20228 “farm” to your table’ (team tam chiak 2018), we would not be surprised that any chef in residence would favour seasonal, local and fresh foods on his/her menus. however, the attachment of ‘kampong’ (as a traditional, rustic village in malaysia and singapore) to ‘french’ (as a signifier of stylish cuisine or dress) in the announcement seems something of an anachronism. the website’s graphics and text promoting the event in question, however, provide hints to kampong french’s mysterious appearance in singapore. in green, gold and red lettering reminiscent of peranakan batik and with borders suggestive of scatterings of wild greens, the poster announces: ‘kampong french popup dining 13 nov to 3 dec,’ followed by the subheadings ‘from paris with kampong spirit’ (together with a tiny image of the eiffel tower) and ‘take restaurant over.’ the poster’s design includes miniature portraits of some of the popup protagonists, for example, of british chef harry cummins and québécoise sommelier laura vidal. the accompanying text provides further details of the event: we are welcoming award winning nomadic culinary collective paris popup for a three-week restaurant takeover – cheekily dubbed “kampong french” … join harry cummins, laura vidal and julia mitton as they helm open farm community’s kitchen wherein harry will present an all-day dining menu of 12 small sharing plates with a contemporary french flair, created using 70 to 80 per cent ingredients that are sourced from farms in and around singapore, including ofc’s very own agricultural landscape. we might consider how this story of kampong french serves as a motif for rethinking meanings and practices of culinary exchange and appropriation within modernity’s urban environments. how does this seemingly simple rustic restaurant represent a culinary contact zone? while open farm’s promotional discourse acknowledges the contradiction inherent in the popup’s cheeky title, does this venture represent a ‘stylish’ play with the unexpected, which is often the trademark of modern chefs? it is easier, perhaps, to see links between the first two stories than with this third one. at both malacca corner and soos, migrating malaysian home cooks transform themselves into restaurateurs and entrepreneurs, adapting culinary histories to new ‘homes’ in the west while attempting to preserve the integrity of traditional dishes, or, at least, to reference the palatal memories of these. how does a three-week popup, however, travelling in the reverse direction from the west to singapore (a popup rejoicing in fashionable meanings of twentyfirst century nomadism and backed up by ‘years on the road, zipping in and out of celebrated restaurants’) (chenyze 2017) insert itself into this argument? certainly, cummins has built a formidable reputation working in restaurants in london, new york, kyoto, barcelona, montreal and paris, for example, and not to mention the acquisition of a residency in fez, morocco and an internship at the michelin-famous el celler de can roca in girona, spain. in fact, the breath-taking mobility and dazzling performance of this youthful popup team (35 popups in about five years), prompted a singapore journalist to proclaim ‘how one couple conquered the world with its traveling popup dinners’ (chenyze 2017). it seems we are now exploring a very different context from that of mehta’s frying pan with its sensory, interstitial ‘power to melt boundaries … between france and guadeloupe’ (mehta 2005) or, in this case, between france and singapore. or are we? before mulling over these possibilities, i feel that as with laksa some backstory is necessary. there are two threads i want to trace here. the first of these is the current fashionability of popups and popup economies which, in previous writing (duruz: 2018), i have linked with creative city and creative class discourse, with probably its best-known exponent, the urban sociologist richard florida (2003). in my own hometown of adelaide, australia, i noted that city council reports in the last decade or so have marshalled ‘the rhetoric of “vibrancy,” “creativity” and “atmosphere”’ in relation to urban redevelopment, and that ‘the search for a city’s identity in an age of globalisation and in the aftermath of the global financial crisis takes a specifically spatial form’ (duruz 2018: 170). as a result, small-scale entrepreneurs with limited funds have been encouraged to occupy underused city spaces for their temporary businesses with these popups as a duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 20229 https://www.openfarmcommunity.com/ first stage, perhaps, to establishing more substantial bricks-and-mortar enterprises. i also have written of the class politics associated with such innovations, especially the requirement, for this council at least, that such popup businesses are unique, innovative and artistic in design to attract an imagined hipster clientele (171-73). under conditions of deindustrialisation, then, popups present a leg up for developing small-scale businesses especially those centred on the hospitality industry. in fact, the paris popup had its origins in this philosophy. while working at marchand’s restaurant frenchie, cummins and vidal discussed possibilities for setting up a hospitality business of their own. seizing opportunities for temporary occupation of friends’ restaurant premises (on days these were not officially operating) (chenyze 2017), the couple was able to begin working towards establishing their own restaurant, first in arles as owners of premises time-shared with other chefs and then in 2018 as sole owners of la mercerie in marseille.9 for cummins and vidal, these arrangements of convenience (short-term use of other people’s professional kitchens to avoid the overheads of restaurant ownership) eventually were to become a lifestyle choice. at this point the second thread of global culinary nomadism becomes important. the couple’s popups have enabled enviable international travel to exotic places and a form of nomadism that spells freedom from the burdens of sedentary life—freedom celebrated by the past hippies and present millennials alike (at least in a pre-covid-19 world). of course, not everyone needs to leave home, with technology creating forms of digital nomadism supposedly available to all. after all, says john noyes, ‘today we all want to be nomads. we travel like nomads, we shop and surf the internet like nomads, our technologies of communication release us from locality, and, when we use them, we defy the physical worlds that tie to territory’ (2004: 159). while the paris popup is a fascinating story of the ways that ingenuity, depth of expertise, sheer hard work and connections with the ‘right’ networks of international, trendsetting chefs, shape a reputation differently from its usual manifestations within global restaurant cultures, it still leaves us cause to reflect. how does this narrative confront meanings and practices of authenticity, culinary exchange and appropriation? how does a specific example of popup which by its very nature is temporary, unexpected and rooted in elsewhere confront meanings of local ingredients and local culinary histories? does popping into singapore fleetingly to insert the rigorous techniques and distinctive flavours associated with french cuisine into local foodscapes seem a somewhat outrageous thing to do? is this simply another example of neo-colonialism’s appetite for cultural commodification, with a prestigious culture (in pierre bourdieu’s ‘distinction’ terms) (1984) exerting its power over the ‘other’ and raiding tastes, aromas and memories for its own benefit? and here we also might detect the ghost of bell hooks (1992: 21) and her images of avaricious whites consuming black culinary culture to ‘spice up’ the dullness of their own. is the popup indeed a ‘takeover’ as its poster suggests—a takeover that goes beyond simply borrowing someone else’s kitchen? debates of the politics of ‘eating the other’ as i’ve already indicated have a long history.10 nevertheless, i am anxious to find a different way through the usual tenor of such debates—to see beyond hooks’ much-needed political polemic and beyond the assumption that the paris popup is engaged in rampant opportunism to something else—a position that might still be doubtful and yet politically productive, analytically speaking.11 and here, we recall the potential of ortiz’ transculturation as a way forward. 9 note that in 2021 mercerie continues to operate despite periods of varying covid-19 restrictions and has expanded entrepreneurially, offering the restaurant for popups and guest spots to other chefs, organising specific theme events and participating in local festivals, especially those of the immediate neighbourhood. 10 for a recent contribution that emphasises the asian ‘other’ within contexts of food pedagogies see the work of elaine swan and rick flowers (2012). 11 rachel slocum (2011) implies that hooks’ writing is important for anti-racist social movements with its stress on the political connections between issues of food and race but also suggests that other writers subsequently, from a variety of social science and humanities disciplines, have sought to draw out these connections with a little more subtlety and nuance. duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202210 at this point it is useful to unravel how the paris popup normally operates. in conversation with alexander lobrano for the new york times (2015), laura vidal [on the opening of a summer popup at the grand hotel nord pinus in arles] comments: ‘our sourcing is fiercely local—that’s how harry cooks and i like to pour when possible, and arles has one of the best markets in the south of france, with a huge section devoted to grower-producers and organic produce’ (vidal quoted in lobrano 2015). when talking to meryl koh about the team’s preparation for kampong french in singapore, vidal says: our menus are always product-driven … and we take inspiration from our travels. we do research on the country we’re going to. in singapore, for instance, we went to all the wet markets, tried samples of local farms’ products and went to edible garden city [a network of cafes and grocery stores growing their own fruit, vegetables and herbs]. so we use a local ingredient and cook it in a different way – like the local chye poh flat bread. the entrance to the door of any culture is through food and language. (vidal quoted in koh 2017) all this emphasis on ‘fiercely local’ ingredients and ‘product-driven’ menus may cause one to imagine that a popup’s success very much depends on thorough research, engagement with on-site culinary communities and serious excavation of meanings of locality. these meanings include those of authenticity, place-histories, traditions, origins—in the sense of products being tied gastronomically to particular foodscapes, and, in practical terms, of products’ ready availability through local suppliers. this is thus not purely a matter of imposing ‘french’ on the ‘kampong’ in an anachronistic fashion. instead, the popup becomes an attempt to negotiate, discursively, a culinary rapprochement between the two. in this case, i am imagining the kampong (with ‘kampong spirit’ in open farm’s poster hinting at this) as a place in which local people grow, cook and share food in a neighbourly fashion. elsewhere when writing about the singapore neighbourhood of katong, i have referred to these forms of everyday reciprocity as ‘the kampung effect’ (duruz & khoo 2015: 142–43).12 while open farm community’s promotional discourse represents a somewhat romanticised image of rural life and work (especially in singapore where farming and food production since the high-rise developments of the 1950s onwards has had a problematic history) (rut & davies 2018), the philosophy is one that is recognisable both in nostalgia for an agrarian past and in more modern concerns for food safety and sustainability (khoo 2019: 119– 20; probyn 2016: 47–8). meanwhile, along with traces of the ‘fiercely local’ and the ‘kampung effect,’ ‘the french effect’ is also noticeable in the shaping of this popup venture. its presence in singapore therefore becomes hardly surprising after all. there are two webs of french connections i will touch on briefly. firstly, the arrival of cummins and vidal in singapore is by no means accidental but facilitated by two french chefs. cummins and vidal first meet when both are working at frenchie in paris, a restaurant established by gregory marchand that is now part of his ‘mini-empire of restaurants on rue de nil in paris’ (sullivan 2014). marchand’s influence on cummins in regard to extolling the principles and practice of bistronomy (which i’ll discuss shortly) was to be profound. the other french chef (and ethical butcher) critical to this narrative is benjamin darnaud (team tam chiak 2018), a friend of cummins from paris days and now the partner of cynthia chua, founder of the spa esprit group with beauty salons and restaurants ranging from new york to singapore. in singapore, open farm community is one of the spa esprit group’s enterprises (wong 2016). it is at darnaud’s invitation that cummins and vidal found themselves there in december 2017. perhaps even more significant than the paris popup’s network of french connections in the hospitality industry has been, since the early 1990s, the growth of a particular philosophy and style of restaurant cooking that reacted to the perceived preciousness, expense and exclusivity of french haute cuisine: bistronomy. its proponents were heralded in 2011 as the new revolutionary chefs of paris: ‘they call it 12 ‘kampung’ is an alternate spelling for ‘kampong’. duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202211 bistronomy, their bible is lefooding, and they’ve turned the staid world of paris upside down’ (tucker 2011). their mission was to produce ‘gastronomy that was produce-driven and free from the straightjacket and exorbitant prices of fine dining … that was then taking paris by storm’ (chenyze 2017). in contrast to the ‘straightjacket’ michelin-starred chef yves camdeborde, recognised as bistronomy’s founder, presides over his modest left-bank le comptoir du relais, serving ‘top cuisine at unprecedently low prices’ in a casual, 20-seat setting (samuel 2011). to return to singapore, cummins and vidal arrived with these french connections firmly in place. under the tutelage of marchand, cummins has had a thorough grounding in bistronomy and his international experience has strengthened his commitment to principles of seasonality, locality and creativity. at open farm community, cummins, vidal and mitton (the popup’s business manager) found they were on familiar territory to some extent: existing menus already displayed concern for local ingredients (especially those actually grown in the restaurant’s gardens) rather than for rarefied, hard-to-get expensive products; a concern for technique in the kitchen as a reflection both of darnaud’s classical french training and the local practices of singaporean foodscapes; and a concern for creativity with informal dining, communal plates and fusion dishes (such as prawn pappardelle with a laksa reduction or chai poh [preserved radish] with crushed fingerling potatoes and arugula as listed on open farm’s menu on october 31, 2018), very much meshing with dishes dictated by the popup’s own philosophies. furthermore, although a week’s preparation in one place seems a perilously short time to engage with its meanings of terroir, foodscape, ethnic identities and mixed culinary cultures, there was a professional team on hand to assist the popup’s transition (‘j’aime le kampong!’ 2017). it appears that the paris popup is not imposing itself on open farm community’s menus or activities but rather seeking out synergies with, and creative possibilities of, these. in fact, with the assistance of networks of locals, the popup’s own offerings appeared to slip seamlessly into the menus and were, perhaps, not so very different from items already listed there (which, of course, begs the question of the extent to which open farm community’s menus were fashionably international and fusion anyway, given the professional background of its critical players and singapore’s embrace of global gastronomies) (kong 2016: 217–18). nevertheless, like the soos in toronto, cummins is anxious to stress he is not trying to reproduce traditional dishes but ‘to let the produce drive his imagination … chai poh … pearl grouper [a fish wellknown in singapore] …herbs from ofc’s garden … a zippy green mango salsa’ (chenyze 2017). here, at kampong french is the bridge that i mentioned earlier, stretching between global and local, between traditional and exotic, and, perhaps, between settled/rooted, and nomadic as well. (duruz 2019b: 129–31). however, in terms of intimations of authenticity, tradition and transcultural negotiations within a culinary contact zone, this last story appears more problematic than the previous two. kut chee lan and the soos, leaving home to settle elsewhere, brought their culinary cultures with them—cultures with long histories of growing, cooking, eating and remembering. these remembered tastes, smells, sights, sounds and practices inflected subsequent attempts at place-making, whether these were playful attempts to reference the new as well as the old, or thoughtful strategies to initiate present customers to the tastes of the past and of elsewhere. the frying pan (or the wok) is indeed, figuratively, an interstitial space for connecting forms of spatial referencing and sensual, gastronomic remembering. the tale of kampong french, on the other hand, is trickier to re-work in terms of frying pan imaginaries. where does authenticity fit into this narrative if indeed it does? is it sufficient simply to seize the local elements of this story (ingredients, networks, tropical setting) to justify its analysis here? rather than attempting to recast kampong french as a less doubtful tale of authenticity, i suggest a shift in the terms of reference. first of all, we might recall that authenticity and tradition do not necessarily belong exclusively to one local, to fixed places and peoples. meanings of these might move and change as do food cultures themselves. members of the popup travelled with their own accumulated memories of tastes and places—with personal, localised and internationalised culinary biographies, with meanings of local duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202212 and international tied to a sense of belonging (whether continuously or momentarily) both to particular landscapes and to global food fashions. in sum, this is to recognise that regimes of modern nomadic movement have their own places of culinary ritual and moments of memorable attachment, together with their significant zones of contact. while an anglo-australian’s ‘borrowing’ laksa, for example, is unlikely to acquire the resonance of grace tay’s ‘my dead mother’s tastebuds now coat my tongue and nudge my cravings,’ such borrowings are not without their own taste-histories and meanings, as the first taste laksa stories continue to remind us. furthermore, the settings of such culinary exchanges—their culinary contact zones and the transcultural imperatives of cultural gain and loss negotiated within these (millington 2005: 219)—take on a particular poignancy in moments of remembering. second, the spirit with which such borrowings or culinary innovations occur is significant: the marrying of the predictable with the unpredictable need not be a random act purely for the purpose of display and novelty. earlier, when discussing soos’ lemongrass chicken-filled taco, i referred to charmaine solomon’s dictum that chefs employing fusion techniques need to know ‘what will work and what won’t,’ and to show cultural respect in this regard. for the popup team, occupying multiple locations for shortish periods of time, this knowledge of ‘what will work’ might be difficult to acquire. however, the possibilities of transfer of accumulated culinary knowledge and diverse experience to new contexts might assist here (the likely outcome of marrying the flavour and texture of flatbread with the spicy softness of chai poh, for example). more importantly, an openness to the cuisine in which one is popping up is essential— to its authentic references, its iconic flavours—and to the grounded expertise of its supporting professional networks. here, lauren soo’s ‘fusion with respect’ and solomon’s ‘what will work’ both return as helpful ways to reflect on the balancing of nomadic and local knowledge, with respect aligning here with ang’s productive ‘uneasiness’ born of negotiating same-difference contradictions (2001: 200–1). third, as well as considering the popup members’ own culinary biographies and the spirit in which they approach each new location, we should take into account more substantially than to date the composition of singapore’s culinary cultures. given the multi-ethnic nature of these and established traditions of borrowing and exchange it is difficult, in some ways, to talk of authenticity in a pure sense in singapore. after all, this is where mixed cuisines, such as food of the nyonya, have long histories dating back to the seventeenth century (duruz & khoo, 2015: 126). and, if we chose, we could travel even further back in time to the culinary cultures of the orang laut, or ‘people of the sea,’ one of the original groups inhabiting the melayu kingdom (a kingdom which included what we now know as the island of singapore) from the first millennium onwards. (andaya 2019). however, it seems that even these cultures bear evidence of syncretism, at least in recent remembering (‘the food of orang laut’ 2020). returning to the stylish, class-based present of singapore’s ‘foodie’ landscapes, however, we find that layered on to such deep and mixed histories are continuing innovations by a group of creative chefs to produce fusion food. this has been dubbed ‘new asia cuisine’ and, according to kong, ‘not only involves a combination of different flavours, but inventive culinary techniques as well’ that require ‘an understanding and history of the component cuisines’ (2016: 217, italics added). the somewhat difficult to define respect, together with its concomitant understandings, once again is needed to underline these chefs’ efforts. hence, while openness to other culinary cultures is a requirement of the popup when venturing into singapore, singapore itself responds with its own history of diversity and openness. kong says: characteristic of such a city is the existence of a large expatriate community and the presence of unceasing flows of migrants, alongside a population that is well-travelled and open to media flows and influences. while significant, the roots of this openness run deeper, drawing from a historical sense of a diverse society that takes cultural flows and exchanges as given, borne of the self-definition of a multi-ethnic society and an entrepot port. these conditions have presupposed its people to welcome a range of cuisines and to celebrate a diversity of foods. (2016: 217) duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202213 kampong french thus seems less of a spectacle in singapore’s foodscapes than we imagined. instead, it is welcomed and celebrated in a fashion consistent with this city-state’s food cultures and foodie reputation and with its eateries ranging from hawker stalls to stylish bars and restaurants. at the same time, traditional foods like laksa (our nearest example here, perhaps, to a historically localised food?) are not under threat. according to joan c. henderson, these foods are ‘too deeply embedded in singapore society and culture to disappear’ (henderson cited in kong 2016: 233). in fact, we might take the reverse position to kampong french as a popup. instead, we might argue that singapore, historically a nation of accumulated popups (with its complex cultures of street food and hawkers intersecting with home cooking), easily absorbs kampong french into its lingering milieux de mémoire (nora 1989: 7), even in their gentrified, mythical forms. faced with new challenges, then, singapore’s dominant tradition of culinary mixing and its foodscapes of gastronomic expertise, aided by postcolonial forms of gentrification, casually appropriates the west’s, and in particular france’s, claims to culinary excellence. meanings of cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism and histories of traditional street food are threaded together here rather than posed (as tanaka does) as serially and historically separated (cited in farrer 2015: 8). in terms of transculturational theorising, who occupies the metropolitan centre and who is relegated to the periphery is not entirely clear here (millington 2005: 230–31). out of the frying pan …? this paper has set out to trouble meanings of authenticity especially in relation to food— to a community’s sense of ownership of dishes, ingredients and the culinary rituals of reproducing particular tastes. tracing a messy but complicated path through narratives of home cooks, ethnic entrepreneurs, culinary nomads and celebrity chefs, the analysis unravels intimations of nostalgia, creativity, authenticity, borrowing and re-invention in mundane food exchanges—exchanges that operate within, and between, mixed cities of a globalising world. in these narratives, the relation of authenticity and tradition to food has seemed rather precarious and puzzling and certainly troubling. on the other hand, doubts about this relationship have led the discussion along some less usual and more fruitful routes. both the narratives of the laksa’s journey to adelaide and of toronto’s faux cuisine on ossington muddy authenticity’s mythical meanings by stressing, in differing ways, the discursive significance of entangled dishes like laksa or chicken taco and the complex threads of these entanglements. in laksa’s travels to adelaide, for example, homogenised and static definitions of authenticity are less than useful, given the dish’s mixed history, multiple re-locations, and differing meanings for consumers’ identities. yet, local contexts and meanings remain important in a globalised world. for example, we could speculate that the australian imaginaries of ‘laksa belonging’ and ‘laksa nation’ emerge in response to australia’s ambiguous standing in the asia-pacific and its desire for recognition as a cosmopolitan nation (duruz 2019c). in laksa’s travels to toronto, on the other hand, it seems that southeast asia, as such, is geographically and emotionally more distant, at least for non-asian toronto communities. instead, malaysia and malaysian cuisine tend to become part of the richly flavoured, multi-ethnic gastronomic cultures that toronto’s foodie neighbourhoods represent (palassio & wilcox 2009). at the same time, despite their different twists and turns on the ground, threads of both narratives not only embrace meanings of the past, of tradition, but stretch forward as well to indicate productive forms of everyday cosmopolitanism in the uneasy mixed present and future of global cities (nava 2010). finally, i want to reflect on the authentic resonances of the third narrative. how troubling is it, after all? while laksa’s introduction to adelaide and toronto appears to be firmly localised in its respective contexts, the arrival of kampong french in singapore suggests a departure from this. in contrast to established cafés and restaurants, popups by their nature tend to be ephemeral and without roots in the local (though contradictorily, as we have seen, they still have place-connections in spite of their fluidity). perhaps, instead duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202214 of being framed within a specific culinary contact zone, we might speculate that kampong french is positioned within a culinary flow, with singapore a web of local interconnections flowing through its popup food enterprises as well as a city globally connected through its transnational circulation of people, food products and culinary fashions (kong 2016: 224–30). it would seem that such innovations as kampong french have many advantages for the entrepreneurial, including relief from the daily grind of establishing a local culinary community on a permanent basis. perhaps this produces a different kind of contact zone from those of adelaide or toronto. or perhaps this is simply a further development in framing culinary contact zones, though this time through displacement, troubling authenticity even more than is apparent in colonial settler societies?13 nevertheless, it is impossible to displace the local from singapore and singapore’s culinary cultures. these cultures are complex mixes of specific places and personal histories (where does one find the best kaya toast … the best traditional hawker food?), of international influences (witness the growth of sushi-eating in singapore) and of chefs’ inventiveness (risotto with lemongrass, yam jelly with edamame foam, foie gras with star anise) (kong 2016: 231–32). these local and global influences might exist side by side in separate establishments or entangled together as in the case of hawkerpreneurs where subsequent generations of hawkers, valuing their deeply rooted family traditions, rework hawker dishes as, simultaneously, nostalgic, modern and innovative (tarulevicz 2018). at kampong french, singapore’s existing mixed culinary cultures invite further layering of mixed elements that may become, in time, traditional (that is, normalised). the food itself, with its potential for offering embedded tastes and memories within its complex geo-political, colonial and postcolonial entanglements, dictates the acceptance (even appropriation) of french traditions and techniques (even when translated by british and canadian adherents) into singapore’s multi-ethnic cuisine rather than the other way around. and these ‘new’ elements, as i have been anxious to stress above, are not without their own prior histories of engagement in singapore’s foodscapes, as open farm community’s menus signal. in other words, the ‘kampong’ or ‘open farm’ is already a curated, yet respectful, performance of imagined (cosmopolitan) rurality, regardless of the contribution of recently arrived nomadic ‘others’ with their own, hopefully respectful, culinary interventions. kampong french, as such, becomes neither the ‘kampong’ (or ‘kampung’) of traditional communities, neighbourhoods and villages in singapore and malaysia nor the ‘french’ associated with the legislation of french citizenship as undifferentiated, ethnically speaking (berlinski 2004: 1) and a ‘french’ associated with a national cuisine shaped by unesco’s designations as ‘intangible cultural heritage’ (springstubb 2018). instead, kampong french becomes, in some ways, reminiscent of the frying pan motif—the fuzzy ‘sensorial interstice’—of mehta’s imagining (2005). and yet kitchens like that at kampong french are hardly the product of migrant/nomadic dreaming (the romance of re-creating guadalupe as ‘home’ in paris or paris in singapore). instead, they represent a collective claim on the nostalgia of mixed societies and their desire to incorporate both the local and the other, rendering the latter less alien and more comforting, and the former less parochial, less racially threatening and more cosmopolitan. consequently, it is in the culinary contact zones and culinary flows of kitchens, food shops, markets and restaurants that the task of different people living together through food persists, with all the tensions, inequities and shared pleasures of this. and it is here too that meanings of authenticity continue to be troubled, and to be negotiated, with foods as ‘the building blocks of imagined worlds’ providing a social practice of possibility (cwiertka 2002: 10–11). at the same time, millington, drawing on both ortiz and pratt, strikes a note of doubt: 13 of course, this is not to argue for equivalence of popups to first nations groups, such as australian indigenous communities whose position of continuing dispossession in the political landscape of settler communities is certainly very different from that of adventurous, often white, chefs (moreton-robinson 2003, 37–8). duruz portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 18, no. 1/2 february 202215 [t]he emphasis on how the periphery infiltrates and shapes the worldview of the metropolis seems to me to be important, and above all it captures a sense of the tense relations and the subterranean processes that can be in play between cultures: all may not be transparent and benign exchange. (2005: 212) while experiments like open farm community and kampong french might offer singapore’s burgeoning middle-class moments of playful, gastronomic pleasure and the satisfaction of supporting artisanal sustainability (yoshino 2019: 1-7), they also provide ‘on the ground’ opportunities for exploring, through the sensory consumption, meanings of class, ethnicity and transnational border crossing. nevertheless, while the challenge of ‘eating back’ into more equitable social relations remains, consumption at kampong french contributes to an understanding of singapore as cosmopolitan, as entangled in local-global flows of people, places, ethnic identities and food work. references andaya, b. 2019, ‘recording the past of “peoples without history”: southeast asia’s sea nomads,’ asian review, vol. 32, no. 1: 5–33. ang, i. 2001, on not speaking chinese: living between asia and the west, routledge, london. berlinski, c. 2004, ‘how a french city beat anti-semitism,’ baltimore jewish times, 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multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ son a novel by jennifer higgie to those who see spirits human skin for a long time afterwards appears most coarse. yeats part two [for part one of son, see portal vol. 1, no. 2 july 2004] higgie son what do i draw? my pencil has danced of late and would dance even faster if the sun would allow. my hand has become the choreographer of a dance that fills the space above the paper, the area that hovers perpetually between the eyes and the hand. it grabs the shapes and forms handed to me and places them gently on the page, where they rest, sun struck and soporific themselves. what have i drawn? the lights that fill me, the ones that pour from windows, from the sky, from eyes. the light that emanates from the sweet candles that soften the moons blow. the light that slips through the crack in curtains. the light of the dew that settles on leaves; the glow of broken porcelain, a sliver of glass, a splinter of polished wood. the light that slips from the dim half-light of tea rooms, the markets, the mosaics in the corner of my room. the light that embraces people from behind, in doorways. the light in cloth, in the sweet, dark robes of the women, in the shade cloths, the cloth woven for the sole purpose of keeping out the very substance that gives it form. the lovely figure of minarets, the precious cargo of secrets in every glance. the sweep of a gown. dust on a girl’s neck. variations on a theme of warmth. a sky like an egg shell. swallowing streets. one donkey and then another. the difference between eyelids, curved eyes, the movement between a mouth and its relationship to the ear. the fall of youthful hair across a pockmarked cheek. a curl on the down of a baby’s eyebrow. a rough elbow. the general hint of a belly. the ubiquity of bellies. a women close to birth, her beautiful introspection. a sturdy leg on a delicate body. the bleaching of tones and bones, a scrubbed table. the dilated pupils of a priest. the diluted sugar in a cup. the colour of honey. what do i draw? the violent, yellow sand, the desert. the hypnotic lope of camels. i draw boats made from hairlines, with flying spars. i draw their rigging, a series of connections, the points between, strung out, thin. i draw the light constantly denied me. a song a thin, high song has been coming to me. it increases in volume as we travel. i suspect that this is because i am getting closer to it. i would love to tell sir toby of my excitement. or sophia. my father. i would like to share it with someone who could hear it too. but i cannot attempt to do so, because it is impossible to write a sound. it is not a song i have ever heard, and quite despite myself, when i first encountered it, it was so clear and so loud i asked sir toby if he heard it too. he said not, and looked at me queerly and talked idiotically of cool drinks and shade. i shook him off with a clear still eye, and walked further up the worn steps to a place he could not go, and pressed my ear to the stone and listened so hard, i thought my ears would bleed. it was the sweetest sound and i know it sang for me. i could describe it in an image: imagine, if you will, bright yellow corn framed by a blue sky, the kind of sky you can’t believe won’t crack beneath the pressure of the sun. now, imagine moving away from this place and quickly you are somewhere else. a red place, of soft light and whispering, but not of wicked origins. a good, a pure whispering, that makes the listener work to hear it. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 2 higgie son that is a good description of the sounds i heard today. a conversation we are resting, a rare moment, beneath some more ruins. i am sitting on a large, warm stone, attempting to draw. the desert is spread before me as simply as a picnic rug, but unfathomable in its combinations. how something so hard and dry can dissolve so gently into an image of water, which in reality is only more sand, is beyond me. my pencil is fine and sharp. lines link with other lines, gradually. sir toby is lying, resting, his arms flung out, his face stung with dust and exhaustion. he speaks suddenly, and for once his voice does not sound like a man giving a lesser man a lecture. it sounds unusually sad. this is all so old, isaac. so old. i am about to ignore his platitude, when something in his attitude stops me. he is still. his eyes are focussed, not roaming, not closed, but staring up at the ancient stones that rise above him. even his voice is quiet. this has never happened before. and so, i answer him. yes, sir toby, they are old. he is deep in some reverie. it is so mysterious, i cannot help but stare at his portly stillness. isaac? sir toby? what is the youngest thing you know? he has thrown me. thing, sir toby, or person? not even a pause, as if he has planned this conversation. whatever, isaac. just something young. a slight impatience litters his vowels, as if i, not he, is the obtuse one. i think hard. eggs. silence. a loaded silence, which emanates from sir toby, and which wishes for more from me. i struggle with the effort of speaking honestly to him. a drawing just begun. a sigh of satisfaction from sir toby. so, i think, this is where he was leading. to another dissection of the artistic impulse. i groan. out loud, without meaning to. without sitting up, or looking at me, sir toby, speaks, sharply. isaac, you are too precious, sometimes, about something that is, after all, only lines rendered by a mortal on what was once something living. i mean paper of course. i am too astonished to reply. he continues. tell me something else. something else young. there is too much here that has suffered with age. it is tiring me today. i think hard. spring. every year, it’s young again. he doesn’t reply, but a smile spreads across his face. he looks satisfied. spring! he laughs, stretches, resumes his silence, then sleeps. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 3 higgie son i continue my attempt to capture the wilderness, in fine lines, for his album. night again tonight we sit on our hotel balcony, high above the city. it is a cool place to drink our brandy after supper. the lights of alexandria, this mongrel bazaar they call alexandria, are stretched before us. they look like wet seeds on velvet which shine and dance, but, in truth, today the whole world has danced for me as if it were fit to dance itself into the grave. considering its age, i wonder at its lack of exhaustion. comfortable on this balcony, the mouths of the city are hushed, its lights wild and abstract. sir toby laughs that we are gods in the clouds, as we were in the mountains near the rhine. ah, he sighs, remember how cool and clean the breeze was there?, and sucks on his cheroot with a wistful face, as if he would rather be sitting on a brown bench with a cold ale and a red-cheeked girl than here, where the colours are built to break hearts and inspire homes for homeless words. his large fingers drum the table beside him. he scratches his knee, as if ready to tear the cloth that covers it. i do not laugh or sigh with him. i could weep, the lights of the city are so glorious with their youthful, vivid complexions. and although so small and delicate and far away, it is easy to see now their real scale. lights to be entered, lights of doorways, of windows, of spaces to hide in. i would have run down the steps and into the throat of the lanes and been swallowed gratefully by them, passed through their portals and frames, but sir toby holds me back, with his jocularity and pedantry, his assumption that i will stay by him, that we will retire at a similar hour, eat breakfast together, look at the same things and respond with the same words, share the same thoughts. he has me by the scruff of the neck, he has me tied to him, like the legs of a donkey are tied together to stop it running. i am one leg, and he is another, but we are not the same beast. i feel very strongly the need for this fact to be reiterated. i have seen many a donkey hop to find shade. it is easy to weep for donkeys. sir toby has tied me to him with his generosity, with his money, and even with his affection, he has tied me to him. i have, and this is true, occasionally and wildly looked about me for the nosebag. to contradict him would take more energy than is worth my while, so i agree with him, for peace. it will have to do for the moment. i will make pictures of our travels to satiate his appetite for evidence. i sit quietly beside him and we sip our brandy and talk of home and archaeology, and i can feel the dust of countless digs settle on our words. i hear our voices from a distance, they are calm and measured. some small bats fly behind him, he does not notice, i laugh and wave but only to myself, and imagine, even as i speak so calmly, the shadow of a flame on a wall. the problems of plato’s cave. sir toby believes that he enters the arab spirit when he puts on their robes, and does not see the girls snigger behind their narrow brown hands. he smokes water pipes with the face of a banker, and considers himself travelled. there is something sly in his soul that i cannot trust, something not of the surface. speaking with women portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 4 higgie son everything i see was made by a man. i accompany a man in my travels and deal with men in carriages and hotels. although motherless, in my old familiar life i am normally surrounded by women. the lack of them has made me hungry for their company, despite the fact that they are secret people to me. they possess an intriguing and unique quality. men rarely say what is on their minds, but at least you can ask them, however obliquely. women demand a propriety that i find exhausting. if only you could sit quietly with one, and simply look. i need to breathe one in, from a narrow distance. their mystery reassures me about my own. so, i speak to her, a girl looking at the walls of a church. a young englishwoman, who has wandered away from her aunt. i know what they are to each other because i have been listening to their conversation. the niece speaks of history, the aunt luncheon. the niece sighs, her eyes drawn the place around her, while the aunt does not listen and expresses a need to sit. the hair of the niece is lemon-pale and her skin is soft and slightly pitted. the hair of the aunt is prickly, her skin slightly flaky. i like the plum colour of the niece’s dress and the awkward angle of her shoulders, which twist slightly, as if a weight is pressing at her side. as she gazes at the things around her, her small hands clutch a worn guidebook. her eyes are never still. i would have called her mine then, but it may have startled her. we had not yet exchanged a word, but i know her heart. it is timid, but good, and slightly bored. there is a curiosity in it. she is someone waiting for something that in all likelihood will never arrive. it is a difficult thing to do, to choose the words to speak to a woman. so i decide on the simplest ones i can think of, the kind of words that would confuse no one. excuse me. she turns and looks at me. her eyes are blank, distracted. polite. yes? i have lost my guide. may i glance at yours? certainly. she passes it over. here we are in page 67. i laugh but realise that she does not intend to be funny, and so i duly turn to the aforementioned page and look at the words, which i do not read. without looking up, i question her. have you been here long? no. a week. we are headed for thebes. ah. thebes. i imagine her naked. she is so pale and thin. i blink hard. have you been there? yes. did it interest you? yes i am warming to my subject when our intimacies are interrupted by a call from the aunt. we turn. the old harridan looks annoyed. grace. come. it is time for lunch. i hand her back her book. she looks at me. her eyes, for a moment, do not move from mine. she coughs a little. goodbye. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 5 higgie son i bow. goodbye. and then she is gone. such finality in so brief an encounter. how is it possible to hold the attention of a woman? they are always in the thrall of someone else. the ruin is empty now and i am hungry. so i leave. the impossibility of sleep my bed is too hot. the sheets slip off my hot skin, as if i were made of polished marble or eggshell. at night i wake and see small lizards fly through the night heat. the moon is appropriate here. it is not like the moon of suffolk street, nor the moon of chatham. england has a cold moon, a moon with pronounced vowels, a restrained moon. here the moon is as violent as such a city must demand. someone has beaten this moon, so it shines like a bruise, like something recovering, and it bleeds through my window and begs me to press something on it, to cool it. i dreamt god’s fist smashed into bronze and tossed the result away. tossed into the sky, the moon a failed plate, a repository of fury, a shiny, lost thing. it comes at me and i cannot bear to look at up. it falls on this terrible, slippery cloth covering my hot body and it is unbearable. the moon forces me to walk at night, to leave my bed, until i can recognise the moon i used to know, the cold and lovely one that huddles beneath the hot one here. i can hardly remember the way it used to look, but am reminded when my thoughts have become as calm and as clear as the light it used to offer. i slip out of our hotel and walk, because walking is the only activity that will still my giddy head, my restless body. the sounds draw me in before the images, the crying and laughing and sighing and wheels and hooves and soft treads of camels, the hints of lives unseen but heard that stain and animate every crack of every alexandrian breath. the egyptian night falls suddenly and all objects become shadows. i walk through the midnight heat of the city as if it were a wall i must break down with every step. the heat throbs from every cobblestone, it rises from the black water of the port, it drops like boiling sparks from the immense stars that litter the sky so beautifully and so ominously. i have read that shooting stars are stones thrown by the angels in heaven to drive off evil, eavesdropping djinns. they must be parasitical in their eavesdropping then, never have i seen so many bright flashes across the sky. heaven must be an active place, curious about its bed linen, the earth. it is difficult, however, to read such strange beauty. a shooting star is as violent and as shocking to witness as a gunfight in a forest at night. the heat rises from the bowels of the earth. the ground feels as if it has been warmed by hell itself, drugged and burnt by lucifer. the smells of humans and animals intermingle. sometimes it is difficult to tell the two apart. women of every colour greet me in doorways, copper women, like furnaces, cool lemon coloured women, earth coloured women, gold and black and painted women. they mumble and murmur and entreat me as i pass down narrow streets and i do not give them the pleasure of a response. this city does not know who or what it is, a temple, a sacrificial altar, a meeting place, a church, a sacred place or a hideously profane one. it changes its mind at every street corner. copts, greeks, jews, moslems, turks and armenians, threadbare camels with hideous grins, humble donkeys, starving cats and mildewed dogs, bejewelled whores and naked saints. the sun and the moon, the sea and the desert live side by side as if their origins were simply portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 6 higgie son ingredients for this enormous dish that has produced alexandria. confusion builds in my head like malformed bricks build an unstable house. i try to comprehend such a place, but am too mute and deaf to decipher such complex and, despite the surface of this place, often invisible information that is proffered. i remain both literally and metaphorically in the dark. i have become a night man, a moon man, an insomniac. the sea front offers me some respite, gay as it is with light and the sloping lines of its low horizon. the sea is as smooth as a young girl’s cheek, which swells occasionally with something sucked, and sways to a vague plume of music. in this place i can sit and drink mastic after mastic and feel the sea breeze stroke my head like a friend and watch the ships pull in and out and be reassured that whatever the vagaries of my imagination, and however unsettled this place may have made me, there is always the ocean and the leave-taking it offers. also, the antics of the sailors, sailors from places so far-flung i cannot identify their languages, offer me some amusement. they row ashore from their ships and immediately acquire at least one woman and copious bottles of alcohol and usually interrupt their carousing to cram their mouths and bellies full of squid, cuttlefish or pigeons. i have seen women laughing as they lick the juice from the sailors’ unshaven chins, and seen a tongue covered with fish juice enter a painted mouth. these are scenes from dante or bosch. how i wish i were a shakespeare to give them the descriptions, the moral context and the narrative they demand. but i am not. i am simply, and i say this with gorge in my throat, i am simply a scribbler of lines, of outlines and surface. like a dilettante, i observe the play but always leave before the final act. as a writer my observations are impotent. but as an artist, they are simply waiting for my interrogation. i am distracted by the bricks in every building, distracted by the hand of the person who placed it there. i am crushed by their anonymity. i pass the open door of a home. who plucked those flowers, who crushed the corn? i need to follow people, to learn who they are. as the sailors and their whores stumble from tavern to tavern, their voices and songs become louder and louder, their cheeks more violently coloured, their hearts painfully more aggressive and amorous. i have delighted in following certain couples over the course of one night. at times, i have not been able to return to my hotel, despite bone-numbing exhaustion, because i have been compelled to wait for the next instalment, the next kiss, fight or leavetaking. these players in my never ending one act play have become my mental acquaintances, and i have had to remind myself that they do not know me as i know them, as they dance and float past me with their sly floozies, pursued by clouds of aromatic smoke and nauseating perfumes. i have had to hold my hands tight in my lap so as not to greet them as old friends. i try to draw them before the mastic has become my employer, when my mind is not too overwrought. i find a certain peace in the control my pencil offers me. i slip back to the hotel before sir toby awakes, splash cold water on my face and appear before him for breakfast, pretending i have slept as soundly as he. over sweet, warm rolls and coffee, he has started to comment on my pale cheeks and trembling hands. he has begun to see through my protestations of wellness, and has requested i take a sleeping draught. he will never learn of my night rambles. i cannot tell him. he may try to make me give them up, but i will not give them up, however tired i might be. i will never sip his sleeping draught. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 7 higgie son i may never wake up. lust sir toby and i hurry through the streets of alexandria. deserted trees huddle together like naked lunatics in the silent squares. i shy away from them in fright. please isaac. we are in a hurry. hurry. poinsettias stain a wall. fugitive pockets of heat slap me intermittently. the night, and our purpose, has made me acutely aware of shadows. i do not know why we are in such a hurry. i cannot imagine that whores are particular about time. but sir toby is increasingly impatient with me. it is easy for a man with no imagination and no moral imperative to become irritated. if i was not so right and he so wrong i would be irritated with me also. sir toby was loathe to include me in his little outing, but was forced to do so when i interrupted his conversation with hamid, (a nubian sir toby has employed to show us the real world of the arab) and he did not pretend that i had not heard. i heard him as clear as daylight, as anyone would. the trembling undercurrent of his voice makes it clear – he is feeling lascivious. he has patiently explained to me that the reasons for his visit are purely anthropological. in that case, sir toby, thank you, i would be glad to come. perhaps i will gain some material. for a painting. he looks slightly aghast at the thought, and the ensuing expression in his eye makes me aware of his lack of invitation, but an imp has entered my soul and i return his gaze with limpid eyes. i am filled with curiosity. i am old enough now. i would like to touch a woman, and, if possible, to forget myself for a while. i have not, of course, expressed my desires so bluntly to sir isaac, but continue simply to articulate my purely academic interest at viewing, at first hand, the contemporary alexandrian whorehouse. but isaac, your father... my relationship with my father, sir toby (and i spoke with almost as much pomposity as he is wont to address me) is a matter between that good gentleman and myself. i am an adult, sir toby. if you hadn’t noticed. he glared at me with his bulbous eyes. he could not retract his conversation. that would negate the angle of his anthropological argument. imp roared inside me with glee. all right, isaac, if you insist. tonight, at midnight. hamid will take us. he coughs and concentrates on a distant spot on a nonexistent wall. and please, isaac, do not, despite what you have just said, i ask you especially not to mention this excursion to your father. he may not fully understand our interest. he has never been here. he does not know the (coughs) customs. i laugh quietly, but am stopped by a fierce look. of course not, sir toby. i cannot think of certain sections of his body without shuddering. he drinks more than is his usual wont tonight. his cheeks are burnished red brown. his hands cannot keep still. he has placed his silkiest, most opulently coloured cravat around his neck and, speaks to me with averted eyes and a touch of fever about egyptian representations of the cat. his sentences are pregnant with words he does not speak. what will happen in this house? portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 8 higgie son before we leave i escape to my room for a moment in a futile bid to gather my thoughts, which, i realise, at this moment, are ungatherable. the excursion begins with knock on my door. it occurs to me that this journey with sir toby could be mapped with the impressions of a thousand different knocks. isaac. are you ready? time. it is time, boy. time. i open my door. he looks away. in the foyer we meet hamid, who strides ahead, gesturing occasionally with his right hand for us to hurry, hurry. faces carved from a material more like stone than flesh pass us, hidden in heavy robes. some glance at us, dull, shining, gemlike, and murmur obscene guttural sounds in our direction. i glimpse currant eyes in a suet pudding face, a hand clutched to a chest, an earring. the smell of these men reaches out to touch me; they reek of overripe flowers. our footsteps sound loud compared to people in robes and slippers. my body feels coarse and heavy, my lips thin and puritanical. i repeat to myself, i am a man in alexandria walking towards an assignation with a whore. it is difficult to recognise myself in myself. i have just realised this: it is not necessary to understand the words these robed men utter, the sounds of the words are articulate enough, full as they are with lust and hate. this is all i need to know. after all, they would not be offering us tea at this late hour. more likely it is their sisters they would serve to us. but why do they murmur and pass on when they must know we cannot respond? what do they want us to do? how would they wish us speak to them? i have heard the songs of the funeral women, the high-pitched, frightened gurgling that spins around their mouths and eyes. i do not know the words of these songs, but they do not feel as sinister as these sly intimations of cruelty. their faces make me long for a candle, or something familiar, light. a pen, perhaps. wheels crash over ruts in the road. a man curses and it sounds like spitting. the thin, high-pitched whinnying of a beaten mule, the squeak and jangle of a harness. appropriate sounds to accompany such an assignation. hamid turns and gestures, hurry, hurry, and glides even faster along the uneven road. a girl cries out from a shadow and is as suddenly quiet. i pray the hand across her mouth is gentle. why did she cry out? i slow down to look. imagine sophia or sarah in such a situation. jane! but they are a different species. sir toby can hardly contain his anxiety. isaac, please, do not look at them, it is not our business. you do not know how angry they might become if they saw us looking. we must hurry. i am filled with a sudden desperate need to see something that will reveal god to me in these arabic eyes, a god whose name is different from mine, but who is a god nonetheless. i have questions to ask him. are we different? would you spurn us? how could we know you? would you truly burn us in eternity for our lack of love for you? would you enjoy conversing with someone like me? would you rather me dead than imaginative? this city watches us from beneath its eyelids. it is more secretive than sleepy. i can sense the knives under the mattresses. how could a man become righteous or even good in such a city? perhaps it is easy when the enemy is so tangible. sir augustine. st augustine. if he were born now would he still want in strength to resist temptation? would he have visited such a place with sir toby? portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 9 higgie son hamid stops suddenly and gestures us towards a narrow door. it is unmarked. he knocks on it, and mumbles a response to the enquiry the door has offered. the door swings open. sir toby clears his throat rapidly, three times. hamid disappears inside. we follow. a one eyed midget in a turban is blocking our way. in the place of his missing eye, he has a flap of pink, trembling skin. he has crossed his arms across his chest and thick muscles and a large tattoo dominate his shoulders. one tattoo is a picture of a tiger in the act of leaping, and the other is a simple blue circle. i am already in such a state of disorientation that the appearance of this small man seems perfectly logical. i would like to ask him why he chose these particular images for his limbs, but he glares at us out of his one eye, then steps aside to let us through. i do not think he would like to talk with me about himself. i feel as if he has printed our faces on his minds eye. his muscles are shaped for vengeance. he has the appearance of a man in whose robes a vicious implement might be concealed. the corridor is narrow and long and dimly lit. hamid walks down it with the air of a man who has walked this way before. the air is thick with incense and some other smell i find hard to place. i imagine i am in the bowels of a strange church, a catacomb, a place for hiding, a place of dreadful dreams. i would like to turn and run back, but cannot. we reach another door, and the three of us, hamid, sir toby and i, are momentarily pressed against each other, like survivors or escapees, waiting. then the next door swings open. my first impression is of a mad pool. everything is blue. the dim wall is marked with imprint of hundreds of small hands. i am shocked at first. i believe the marks to be from bloody hands, held out while the victims were dragged away. i begin to shake. then i remember. they are imprints to repel the evil eye. i should find them reassuring but do not. they have left the idea of amputation in my head that, for a moment, i cannot dissolve. the floor is covered with rugs and cushions of quite extraordinary brilliance, the cloth woven from jewels and stars. the red is tempered with ultramarine blue, and yellow ochre and sap green, but the red dominates. where it touches the other colours it trembles with particular brilliance. candles glow from hidden points in the wall. and on every cushion reclines, sits up, dances, lies back, giggles a girl, girls i can hardly bring myself to describe they are so young and bizarre to me. many of the girls are pawed by well-dressed, fattish, soporific men, who do not notice us and hardly seem capable of speech. some girls sway to the sounds of a large elaborate instrument, which looks like a deformed guitar, played by a sightless old man in a dim corner. his hands move about as if they were controlled by someone else. his eyes roll upwards. i cannot help but think of a marionette and check the ceiling for strings, but there are none. the music is mesmerising. it does not sound like a song with a beginning, middle or an end, but rather like the continuum of something snatched from the air. the girls dance in front of this blind musician, smiling at each other, giggling silently, touching their breasts and mocking his inability to witness their cruelty. their legs are covered in elaborate silks that sway and shimmer with every movement. their little breasts are naked beneath transparent beads, and bounce softly up and down as they dance as if they were soap bubbles. they have lined their eyes with charcoal. some eyes are dull and glazed, some too animated for reason. their dancing lacks joy, but not contentment. their hips circle round and round like lazy hoops. their hands build sculptures out of atmosphere. these girls are probably the same age as my sisters. i look away. there is nothing to see but the implication of lust on every surface in every corner, however small. what did i expect? my eyes, quite without my permission, drag my head around the room. it is as if every girl is identical, but within each repetition of a girl there is a sublime and subtle difference. they wriggle and writhe like exotic fish. as they gasp for air, some smile, or look tired, while others kiss men who lie almost prostrate in their portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 10 higgie son arms, clutching water pipes. the air is thick with a sweet, sickly smoke. sir toby coughs gently and puts on his anthropological face. opium, isaac. it is best to keep clear of it. if you are unused to it, it may make you sick. it may make you hallucinate apparitions you do not desire. he speaks with his familiar, lecturing tone, as if his voice might afford this extraordinary scene some degree of normalcy. our gazes return to the girls. they are so young that the rouge on their cheeks gives them the appearance of dolls and the fur between their legs is like the fur of newborn kittens. their hair has been curled, so it frames their little faces like halos. their lips are painted a vivid, murderous red. their arms are covered with bracelets that chime and jangle sweetly with their every movement. an old woman enters from a door and comes up to us. she is limping, grinning and bejewelled. her face is as soft as an old purse. she holds a limpid, sparkling girl in each hand. i realise hamid is nowhere to be seen. the girls she holds look at us with boiling little eyes. sir toby clears his throat five times. the old hag wordlessly puts a hand in one of ours. sir toby is uncommonly silent. i wonder when he will start measuring and interviewing her, but he has been rendered deliciously mute and can only gaze at the exquisite little flower who has taken his hand with the expertise of an ancient courtesan. i look at mine, this child i am buying, and could momentarily weep with shame and confusion. a tiny pink tongue comes out of her mouth and she licks her lips. she moves close to me and presses herself against my chest. my arms, without my permission, circle her body and reciprocate her embrace. she appears to be quite happy to be given to me. i do not know what is happening. she smells as hot as honey. sir toby has disappeared. my eyes are too occupied to see anything but her burning little eyes. who set fire to this child that she should burn so? she reaches up and licks my cheek. her tongue cuts my flesh like a razor. i can do nothing to stop her licking me. she takes my hand with confidence and leads me to another door, a darker door, and we pass through it. a candle is placed on a candleholder every few inches along this corridor. it is as unreal as any place i have ever seen. i feel like a flea moving along the neck of a queen. my girl leads to me to a door and we pass though it, all without a word, and the room she brings me to is small and flickering and filled with the smells of so many flowers i cannot breathe until she pushes me down, onto a deep, dark cushion and places her mouth onto mine, and fills my lungs with air. her hair falls across my face. it smells of a heavy oil i do not recognise. i do not know her name. her hair obscures her eyes. i look beneath the painted surface of her face. she has a small crooked mouth, a chipped tooth. a terrible, youthful, inquisitive expression lies deep in her eyes, tempered by something so tired and old i close my eyes, to make it disappear. when i open them, i am confronted with a tiny scar on her earlobe. i look and discover a mole on her neck, and a single white hair, in the midst of all the blackness on her head. i am filled with an overwhelming sense of doubt as to this girl’s identity and age. i must see her as god made her. i sit up and she does the same, and puts her small brown hands on my chest. i push her away. we sit on the cushions, and stare at one another. her eyes do not budge from mine. she licks her lips. i do not respond. i am sure this may be wrong, but would like, at this moment, to suspend such a judgement. i command her to remove her clothes, her beads, her jewels. at first she does not understand and leans into me, murmuring a low guttural sound like a cat with sly eyes. i push portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 11 higgie son her away, again and again. her eyes dart about the room as if she has lost something. i cannot risk it. i do not know what she may be hiding. i force her to stand up. she stands in front of me as limp as a rabbit skin, her eyes lowered and still. she holds out her arms in front of her as i slide her bracelets from her little wrists. i undress her. she does not help me. she is just a girl. there is nothing hidden on her but her heart and her thoughts, which she is welcome to. i try the door, and look on the other side of it. no one is there. i return to the girl, who is still standing in the same position, and lie down. she lies beside me. she strokes my head and wraps her narrow brown arms around me. i am then inside her and she undoes me. she is gentle and moans and then whispers something i do not understand. but i do know one thing, and that is that she is on my side. for a moment i am deluded into thinking that i know where that is. how we speak of lust the next morning sir toby and i are as correct with each other as bishops at breakfast. our mutual formality continues without respite for the next few days, until the memory of our nocturnal visit fades. i wonder about his experience of that place we went to, and of which, in truth, i am unable to consider in a calm manner. despite the fact that perfumed, somewhat horrifying images return to me again and again, i resist talking of it to myself. but i am curious: did sir toby treat that girl like a subject, like a specimen, like a curio or a hole, or did he lie beside her and look at her, his eyes on hers, and hers on his, one human to another? we will never speak of it, i know this for a certainty. i am entirely complicit. what happened that night no longer exists as something concrete. it has entered a realm inside me to which i cannot go with anyone else. i am sure we have begun to believe that we did not go there. it was two other men in a different time. but we can speak of the sphinx, even though it is far more mysterious and uncommon than lust. there is lust in every moment in every person’s heart, acted upon, or frustrated, or incomplete, or violent. it is no different from breathing, yet no one would blush to discuss the mechanics of a breath. i laugh privately and long at this. at the things we allow ourselves to think and not to think. we are master censors of our own minds. the sphinx is as rare as married virginity. i am not convinced it was built from manpower. it is as unsettling an apparition as any i have witnessed, but also organic, as correct in its shape and form as sand. but even knowing how right it is, i do not understand. it was made for a people who spoke with a different tongue to mine, whose minds were affected by stories i have not heard. it has upset me in all the thoughts i thought i understood so well, that held me upright and made me feel i knew my way around my own head. travel is, perhaps, useful in that it prompts my own imagination to greater heights, greater exertions, but nonetheless my soul is pervaded with a feeling of unease. my head and heart have become tattered maps, places where the ink has run, yet no one has appeared to clarify the routes this traveller should take. i think of my paintings and am not so convinced now of their fiction. this is a frightening thought. here, i feel that with every glance in any direction, i take something that does not belong to me. as if my admiration trivialises the most superficial qualities these countries have to offer, namely, their surfaces. my head is so full of terrible thoughts that at times i have truly doubted my own reason. i have begun to believe that paintings are not imaginary things, while the world i move through is constructed entirely from shadows. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 12 higgie son convinced of pursuit i am enjoying the lemon stall when i first notice him. i feel him looking at me, as clearly as when you hear your name spoken in the babble of a crowd. there is no reason for anyone to be so interested in me, to gaze at me from such close proximity, so why is he there? and why with his face covered? why does he raise his hands constantly to his face, as if to brush something away? he has no need for lemons, that much is apparent. i do not imagine he is an artist, he somehow appears too distracted in things other than himself. do men here simply step out to buy lemons? he does not carry himself like a servant. is he a cook, perhaps? but why would a cook look so furtive? i do not mention his presence to sir toby, who is exclaiming like a girl over the red of the tomatoes, the deep purple of the peppers. this man has made me indifferent to colour, too preoccupied, too worried about my safety. is it this mans intention to rob me? or worse? does he wish me dead? has someone sent him to spy on me? i cannot mention his presence to sir toby. he would fuss, and this dreadful shadowy man would notice and increase the deception of his sly behaviour. he is a problem i must handle on my own. it is intolerably hot, and the noises are intense and overwhelming. sweat pours from the end of my nose. there is a dog howling somewhere, men arguing, women wailing, a bell ringing, someone running fast from something, a million people haggling over a million rotting things. i would like the noise to be dulled if only for a moment, so i might collect my thoughts and pack them away somewhere safe. i am so hot i feel dizzy. my blood burns my veins, my feet in their shoes. i feel as though i must have baked my hands in an oven. my skin is wet with heat. i lift the brim of my hat and mop it with my handkerchief. i would like to stand, just for a moment, in a london downpour without an umbrella, and shiver with cold. i would like to lie in a cool, still dark room, with my eyes closed and have sophia bring me some water. but she is too far away, and i am here now, with a problem to attend to. i am all too aware of the blood pumping through my temples, and through my brain. i do not enjoy the percussion of its passage, i breathe the thick, slimy air deep into my lungs. i spend a while choosing a lemon, to test where he will go. he does not move, but stays close to me, without a word. perhaps i should speak to him. but that is what he wants, he wants to have me somehow, it will give him a way in. i shall not utter a word in his presence. i pause. he pauses. i buy lemons, he examines them and chooses one for himself. isaac, what on earth do you need with lemons? sir toby by my side, reassuringly bluff. he is genuinely amazed. for a still life, sir toby. he laughs, relieved and solicitous. perhaps, boy, you would like some other fruit, as well? no, i will do well enough with lemons. i move through the souk, and pause at a perfume stall. sir toby wanders at my side, gazing about him, making small observations, enjoying himself. the colours of this place isaac! portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 13 higgie son i feel the man near me, his breath on my neck. i cannot turn to look at him. i will not. we enter a narrow corridor of stalls. the air is suddenly and wonderfully full of flowers, sweet, fresh flowers. we are in the aisle of perfume sellers. i am momentarily distracted. sir toby covers his nose with his kerchief. goodness, isaac. it is a little too much. i tell him i would like to buy some scent for my sisters. they would enjoy the novelty. i can see sophia’s dark head bent, sniffing, exclaiming. her brown eyes laughing with pleasure. a bottle of crushed roses. some liquid gardenia. a drop of hot patchouli oil. sir toby thinks it a charming idea. but this strange man is near. i cannot think of scent, or sophia, or even the possibility of london with this man in my orbit. a group of children materialise, they cluster around us begging, grabbing at our clothes, holding their filthy paws in front of them, palms up towards us with biblical supplication. i brush them away and they return again and again. ignore them isaac, they will get bored. it is the best way. ignore them. i cannot. i ask them politely to leave me be. they will not. i ask them again and again but they feign incomprehension. i shout suddenly at them, and am surprised at the rage in my voice. they scatter like ants before a fire. sir toby turns at my anger and looks at me with anxious eyes. he takes my arm. without thinking, i shake him off. i am abrupt. sir toby looks even more anxious. isaac, you must not let these children irritate you so. we will have to deal with many more before our journey is ended. you must learn compassion and detachment. from the man who stamped on the toes of a child! he is right, for once, but his lack of memory inspires in me a desire to smash my fist into his face. i am too hot. i need to be cool. i am too hot. i will see you up ahead, isaac. i will be at the carpet stalls. he is disappointed in me. i will join you shortly, sir toby. my voice hovers above me. i doubt it belongs to me. shopkeepers entreat me, children grab again and again at my clothes, with their incessant demands of baksheesh. the perfume stall is a tiny, narrow room, filled with hundreds of wooden drawers that stretch high up to the ceiling. an old man, in a long white robe greets me and ushers me in. without a word he pours me a cup of tea. the angle of his hand as he lifts the cup, the delicacy with which he begins to pour makes me want to weep. i turn around. i see the man from the lemon stall peering intently in at me. i turn suddenly, back to the perfume shop owner and am overcome with waves of nausea. i put my head between my knees. when i straighten up, the old man is looking at me with an imperturbable expression. he passes me a cup of sweet, fragrant tea and i sip it. it calms me. the man murmurs words to me i do not understand, but his face is kind and my head cools. i do not dare to turn around again. productivity sir toby finishes his letter with a flourish, sits back and lights his pipe. hamid approaches him. he orders a brandy, glances over at me and orders one for me as well. i think he prefers my company slightly drunk. i busy myself with drawing. i draw the chairs, the tiles, the fingernail of moon through the arched window. my pencil flies about like a firefly. i portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 14 higgie son am simply the passenger on its back. i cannot talk to sir toby at the moment. we stumble about in conversation like peasants wearing clogs trying to make their way through a muddy field. his letters home are a constant reminder to me of the purpose of our trip. of why i am here with him and he with me. we are here to see other cultures, to try and understand them and to take home with us what we have seen, quite despite the fact that we cannot understand anything that anyone has said to us, and quite despite the fact that we are insensitive to these peoples’ gods. i know sir toby feels the supremacy of his own, and although i struggle against it, i cannot help but feel something in me that is equally patronising to our hosts. what can sir toby’ reasons be for such displacement? he professes a passion for travel and is known as a traveller, but all i see in his face as he walks through a foreign place is another little piece of england. when he talks to me, it is as if someone had taken a bell from a village church in hampshire and rung it from a mosque. his face, the words he speaks, the movement of his body through this foreign place, are so strange, that occasionally they endear me to him. he is as dislocated as i am, and in that, at least, we are comrades. whereas i feel uncomfortable when i look on the face of the sphinx, dwarfed by my ignorance of its function, sir toby admires the manpower that could create such a thing. he treats history like a book he is keen to finish. he treats these people as if they were no more than subjects for pictures. as if their history stopped at the same point as their skin. the desert i have been told that the egyptians believe the desert to be an emptiness populated entirely by the spirits of demons and other grotesque visitants from eblis, the moslem lucifer. i have an urge to see such a desolate place for myself, and not trust to superstition what i might be able to ascertain, or understand, with reason. (but is it possible, a voice in my head whispers, to see such a devil? his disguises would be a hundredfold more skilful than your imagination.) sir toby is excited at our imminent adventure. we set out at dawn, sir toby, hamid and i, accompanied by a swathed and taciturn guide whose name i cannot grasp. we are mounted, for once, on noble animals, delicate arab ponies that look as if they have actually been fed and cared for. mine is dappled grey and gazes at me with startled eyes. before i mount, i whisper him endearments, and he nuckers in response and mumbles his soft lips across my palm, licking the salt in my sweat. despite his arab origins, i do not doubt he can understand me. he stands as still as a hill as i mount. i lean down and stroke his neck and his ears flicker back and forward, listening, looking all around. if the devil exists in the desert, this pony will warn me, i am sure of it. he has a wise little dished head, and curved, lovely ears. his eyes are good and watchful. he has fast, fragile legs. i am proud to travel this way, on such an intelligent beast. our heads are wrapped in a cloth, bedouin fashion. i feel slightly absurd, but sir toby is as proud as an explorer. one for the sketch book isaac! he cries and strikes a heroic pose. i laugh despite myself. the air is still cool and dim, the minarets of the mosques glazed with dew. hamid has told me desert people carry the map of the desert in their heads, and orientate themselves at night by the stars. and by the sun? i ask. he looks at me queerly. and the sun he replies. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 15 higgie son the only day star, the sun. we pass beyond the long shady plantations and small lakes until we reach the final gasping borders of cultivation, a border that pockmarks the country with pestilence. it is damp and stinking and humid. sir toby rides with one hand, the other holding a handkerchief to his face, his eyes shining above it like hard, glazed stones. hamid’s face is still and forward looking, as if he does not need to breathe unless he chooses to. our silent guide rides ahead, without ever once looking back at us, without ever once raising his hands to his face. i refuse to hold anything to my nose, despite sir toby entreaties. i will smell this country as closely as i choose to look at it. but it sticks to my throat like tar. the taste of rotting fish coats my tongue. we trot by a fetid marsh of giant reeds and bulrushes. the sky is as empty as a locked waiting room. the birds have left, or perhaps were never here at all. fish float dead with white eyes on the vile salt and slime-encrusted surface. the desert, it would seem, likes to greet growth with a dead embrace. then we are past it, the ponies treading as delicately as dancers in a bog. the sky is tinged with lilac. the desert air crowds around us, ebullient, abruptly fresh. its clean breath slakes and cleanses our gagging throats. sir toby stuffs his handkerchief in his pocket and beams at the sky, his face held up to the sun like a sacrificial bowl. ah isaac, the air he cries. yes, sir toby, the air. it is all around us. i have never been surrounded by such solid air. we leave behind a no man’s land of arid land cracked with wildflowers and shifting butterflies. suddenly, the earth changes, and a limitless canvas, a blue expanse of sky undercut with raw pale sand presents itself to us. our nameless guide breaks, without warning, into a gallop. we follow him joyfully, plunging through the soft dunes with the jerky machinations of wild marionettes. such a naked expanse should feel like a wasteland but does not. it is not desolate. it is a distilled place, as beautiful as a stream of milk. our horses pant and strain for breath, foam pours from their nostrils and their sides heave with the staccato effort of their movement through space. the horizon trembles with mirages. sweat pours down my face and makes my vision tremble even more. i wonder if my horse can see the mirage. my shirt sticks to my back. i feel more alive in this desert than i ever have anywhere in my life. i now know what it means to be a centaur. we ride to a small oasis, huddled beneath a large unexpected rock. it appears in the heat like a vision and looks to my mind like a dogs head. ohh! ohh! cries sir toby. three palm trees and a small pool have never been more warmly greeted by a former mayor. our horses drink, their flanks heave in and out like bellows and we sit on the cushions hamid has brought us. our guide will not look at us, he faces away, across the sand as we nibble on dates and curd cheese and sip sweet, cold tea. hamid is in a sombre mood. perhaps he is suspicious of the desert, but if he is he will not tell us. instead he tells us stories of the smugglers’ roads between algiers and mecca, highways he says smell of spices and blood, highways of camel tracks that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years despite the shifting dunes. he tells us, his voice hushed in awe, of sheikhs’ tents as large as mansions, erected in the middle of the desert, made from cloth woven out of goat hair. he tells us of the arabic fear of blue eyes and red hair. i look at sir toby, at his thinning, greying red hair and watery blue eyes and laugh and laugh. sir toby becomes disgruntled and i have to backtrack, portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 16 higgie son work hard to alleviate his bad temper. hamid continues looking down at his crossed feet as he talks. this combination of elements, he murmurs, red hair and blue eyes, are considered evil signs in the koran, a fact consolidated by the repulsive features of examining angels who are marked by both. sir toby scratches his head nervously and coughs again. so, hamid. yes sir? do i make you nervous? no sir. you are english. good, good. sir toby is relieved. he does not seem to have noticed that hamid did not look at him as he spoke, and muttered something in arabic after his dismissal of sir toby’ potential to be the embodiment of evil. more tea isaac? thank you sir toby. i will. hamid jumps up to check the horses. our silent guide does not move. sir toby and i lie beneath the palm trees and look at the sky. it is inevitable that we fall asleep in such heat, in such silence. we sleep and we sleep and we sleep. and as i sleep i have a terrible nightmare, but i do not remember what it is that frightens me. i wake up screaming. sir toby appears at my side, slaps my face gently and holds a water bottle to my lips. i think of michelangelo’s pieta. i can smell sir toby’s english shaving soap. it is almost stranger than my dream to smell such a smell in such a place, in an oasis. i sit up and am quiet. i cannot speak. i am chilled to my core. sir toby says, enough heat for you my boy, and enough superstitions for one day. no wonder you had a nightmare. dreadful stories. he snorts softly. hamid looks away, then takes a small phial out of his satchel and brings it to me. wordlessly he takes the stopper out and holds it my nostrils. the scent of jasmine. i breathe it in deeply and it calms my nerves. our guide is kneeling, looking away from us, muttering incantations. la illah illa allah. no god but one god. the unsent letter home my dear family, i must clarify something to you, which i do not believe i have made clear. when i speak of myself as an artist, you must understand that by artist i mean a person consumed with an enthusiasm too big for containment. the impulse to create something from the interaction of the mind with the world must colour every decision the artist makes. but, conversely, the concept of decision is a fluid one. often, the artist (the good artist) feels as if there are no decisions, only extreme forms of cause and effect. as for myself, i should really fear to write to any of you about how much i feel when i see all of these treasures that the earth has revealed to me, and that i have only so lately witnessed: cities almost as big and as strange as mountains, or enormous clouds or the deep blue of the sky. in the alleys of these cities, in the chasms and gorges of these mountains, beneath the thick hot scrub of the plains, in the restraint of the desert and in the sparkling and shadowed detachment of the sky: in these places the brightest colours of the symbols of eternity are to be found. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 17 higgie son my enthusiasm betrays me into writing what it would puzzle me to explain: namely, that to be here makes my heart expand, and to dwell amongst such places is to be confronted by thoughts as great and as mysterious as the sand and sky and stone themselves. i content myself fanning the flames the world has placed before me. i wait patiently. i know it will not be long before this fire alters forever the shape of the enigmas in my mind. cairo decrepit horse cabs pull veiled women through the narrow streets. i do not notice the men. the veils of the women make me curious. the attentive desert waits in the air, and insinuates itself in particles that wedge in my eyes. my head feels as empty as the rooms of some great abandoned mansion. i am exhausted but cannot sleep. everyone around me is either moving towards something or someone. i have become inert and can only watch others. i have ceased to participate. is walking a participation? or simply a movement through someone else’s space? i no longer care. this heat has made me torpid. in the hot noon i wander through the labyrinths of cairo. sir toby sleeps the deep sleep of the self-satisfied. my mind jerks about in my head, my eyes strain to feed it the images it craves. some are stronger than others: the grimy pharmacies adorned with dried crocodile and stuffed baby elephants fill me with enough images for hours. on the raised floor of the shops sits the sleepy occupant, cross-legged, indifferent, immune to his strange commerce. he smokes a drugged cigarette or a nargileh, as i have heard it called, which droops from his exquisite, sedated hand. i move beyond his blank staring eyes and am surrounded by the cries of the sellers of fruit, coffee and dates. a young boy runs past me shrieking the shout of the sais or runner clearing the street for a carriage, which pursues him like a spurned wife. i am offered solace, treats for a man stupid enough to wonder in the hot, midday sun, sherbets, lemonade or sweetmeats. but i want none of their wares and am curiously indifferent to my strange surrounds. it is because, and it is hard for me to shape the words, i am lonely. i do not know why i am here and i have no one to ask. it is not just for the pictures or the statues or the history, it is for something else i cannot articulate. i am learning too much, yet i have learnt nothing. by nothing, i mean i am learning too much to generalise, and in this revelation i have been made aware of how often i used to express myself with the dogmatism of the ignorant. now, my head has become too stuffed with images for any conclusions to be drawn about anything apart from one: namely, for some reason, mankind has felt impelled to make marks on surfaces other than themselves. i do not, despite my immersion in some of the results, exactly know why. and i do not know why we, we being sir toby and i, have to move so quickly through so many different places. i find it difficult to recall the name of anyone i have met in the last month. today, however, i watched a woman at a well, and her still, calm face stilled me for a moment. she wore, like many of the women here, a dress of a loose blue shirt with long wide sleeves. her slim wrists peered like snakes from the mouths of her elegant sleeves. when she moved, every movement jingled to the accompaniment of her silver bracelets. her hands were tattooed with fine lines and curls. she scratched her chin and laughed and bit her lip. i would have loved to hold her hand and trace the dusty lines of her face with my fingertips! to speak with her about her life here. to enter, somehow, into this environment that is as portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 18 higgie son overwhelming as it is impenetrable. but of course i could not. i could not. her face was touched with a bluish tinge, her headdress decorated with piastres that hung like tiny moons over her eyes. these very same eyes held mine for a moment as she pulled her water towards her, and they were so gentle and good and merry i almost howled with sadness. but i did not. i looked down and when i looked up again she had forgotten me and was laughing with the children playing with pebbles at her feet. then she moved away and was gone with her heavy load swaying and secure on her head. a thousand things could have arrested my attention in that scene, but all, except her face, slipped away from me, more unreal than hallucinations. but she remained real and refused, for reasons i cannot begin to understand, to join in that dream pageant around her. i decided to apply myself to drawing her gentle beauty, which in all truth would not have been displaced in a painting of the madonna by raffaele, but, as a result, was engulfed in a situation that only managed to confuse me further. for i at once was involved in something that baffled me, despite its apparent familiarity: i am a foreigner harassed in the marketplace. what happened was this: a menagerie of pompous ruffians emerged from nowhere and overwhelmed me. they banished at once my image of the wellwoman, in fact, momentarily exiled all of my senses, which were replaced with what i can only describe as terror. how could i not have noticed them before? were they present when she was? had i walked by them and not seen them? they were so vivid, my lack of awareness of them now seems to me as if they must have appeared from another world, another dimension, another dream. these splendid savages were clothed in the most magnificent and grubby finery, wild costumes of gorgeous scarlet and blue, framed with their long matted dark hair and sleepy dark complexions. they somehow managed to look at once makeshift and gloriously aristocratic. noisy shopkeepers, stied in filth, called out to them with joy and respect, while strange and fearless half naked children pulled at their silky legs. long and vicious sabres, encased in red velvet scabbards, swung murderously on their thighs. they were more like wolves than any men i have ever seen, and all the more frightening in their astonishing resemblance to men. i tried to ignore them, hoping they would not be interested in such a pale and uninteresting specimen as myself, but when i took out my sketch book, all appeared to be forgotten except the wonder my drawing produced, and i was immediately surrounded, not only by these devils in human form, but what felt to me to be the entire population of the marketplace. how their deliciously villainous faces grinned and glowed and exhibited every variety of curiosity. oh, such expression! such heads! they closed in on me, and i found myself unable to breathe as easily as i should and so i stood and rapidly packed away my pad and pencils. i then attempted to push myself out of the melee, but they would have none of it and demanded i continue to perform my foreign magic with my pencil. i pushed through them and began to run, but was followed by troops of boys and men, about 50 or 60 in number, all of them incomprehensibly shouting at me. i dived into all sorts of miserable alleys and back ways to avoid them but alas! i might as well have tried to get rid of my own shadow. finally, i finished up crouched and trembling in the corner of a alley way slum, my hands held in front of me to ward them off, but as they approached, this terrible mob began to hoot and cry and pelt me with husks of corn. suddenly, quite without my permission, a howl erupted from deep inside me, such a loud, terrifying howl i felt its terror myself, as if i were observing the workings of parts of my mind i had not before witnessed. it was as clever a piece of strategy as any i have initiated. i could have stopped them no more effectively if i had a battering ram and a private army. the mob stopped and was momentarily silent. the eyes looked at me and grew large, their jaws, as one, dropped to their chests. then, they turned and fled, as if it were portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 19 higgie son i who would murder them and not the other way around. all the while they shouted and wailed a strange arabic song that faded into the cobblestones as they disappeared. i did not mention this episode to sir toby. i decide to study the egyptians i must make something of this tiredness. i have a new rule: to read every evening before i retire. i will learn about the significance of these harsh places. history will translate mute rocks for me. i have read that the earliest bible writers were egyptians, if not by birth, then by spirit and feeling. i read a simple sentence: moses was found on the nile. moses was found in the bullrushes of the nile. these words, read here, among places that are no longer arrangements of letters, take on an entirely different meaning. i realise, very strangely and very suddenly, what it is i am reading. we are headed to where moses was found. he is not a story. he was found. what i learnt as a child i must relearn as an adult. i must replace the story with the actual child, with moses, who once was alive. i am made acutely aware that since my childhood was replete with fiction, then the fiction must be transformed. the symbolic language of the egyptians stained every particle of dust. the stardust, the moondust, the earthdust. everything written in the air, clearly, for everyone to read. in england i remember the way i looked at the sky. my head would lean back and my face would turn in the right direction, but i would see nothing but a mess of light and stars, indeterminate constellations whose only function was to illuminate the sky and furnish my imagination with props for paintings. my lack of system, my lack of harmony, my sheer ignorance of what our canopy is composed of, has begun to disgust me. i must wheel the constellations into a line in my mind, create order out of abstractions and learn to understand the exact laws of divine creation. however, i will try not to be misled by mysteries. but the sun and the moon and the stars are above me now, and demand i take notice of their power. the lebanese mountains we have left the cities behind and entered the wilderness. we travel hard and immensely fast, rising at dawn and riding for eight to ten hours a day. i feel keenly the loss of opportunity for the improvement of my sketches. by the time we reach camp, there is usually very little daylight left in which to do anything but eat and collapse in exhaustion. i try to remember, as i lie with my tired limbs under the stars or in tents or the strange, hospitable home of occasional sheikhs, the places and people i have seen, to burn them into my memory, to place them there like a drawing in a drawer, so that i will be able, if need be, to pull them out and consult them. the poor, blighted animals that carry us, either horses or mules, are almost always in a sorry state, and i feel their misery deep in my bones. the sand and heat and sheer mileage we have covered have forced these animals to occasionally drop from beneath us without warning. i have been thrown or fallen and been injured so many times now, i have lost count of my damage, and refuse to acknowledge or look at my cuts or bruises. i have been thrown into streams and down small embankments, but cannot punish the miserable beast whose job it is to carry me: after all, no doubt i would toss them off in the first instance if i were forced to carry them. but at least, for the first time in my life, i am almost a decent horseman. i have portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 20 higgie son begun to anticipate the animal’s intention before it has had time to think it. i feel my kinship with these beasts. i will not beat them. i wear a fez tied with two handkerchiefs, one white the other red. i have grown a beard and moustache, and wear a pair of large boots of russian leather that are so soft and pliable i can shake them off and on with ease. i wear them outside my trousers. they reach half way up my legs. my upper body is adorned with a white blouse that flaps in a satisfying way in the wind. i would give any thing for my family to appear and for them to witness their brother and son dressed like a wild and romantic vagrant. sir toby gains much enjoyment from my appearance, as i do from his. he looks like a plum pudding dressed as a young boy. is he stouter, or have his clothes grown smaller? i sometimes cannot look at him, for fear of flinging myself off my mount in laughter. but he would be even funnier if he were not so dreadfully stuffed full of himself. i am obliged to pull my scarves low over my ears, in a vain attempt to stem the sound of his self-mythologizing. i long for blinkers to block the failed images of men who cluster around him every time we stop. to witness the value of my companion’s title is to witness human sycophancy as its most vile. grown men simper and oil around him as if he were a maharajah, and how he laps it up! the world, to sir toby is a place built of cream and he is an appalling, corpulent cat. witnessing the genuflection such idiocy demands makes me very tired of our planet. i have seen so much disgusting selfishness since i have left england that i am in danger of becoming a misanthrope. but the places we have seen! and having to tolerate the company of sir toby has been worth the visions granted to me. they distract my mind so intensely, that i can forget, if only for a moment, who is at my side. pinara, for example. what a most extraordinary place! a place where men are turned into midgets by the sheer scale of their environment. the atmosphere of unseen presences in this place is almost overwhelming. the wind hits the cliffs with a dreadful hissing moan. the sun beats the earth and stone to no avail: nothing will crumble them. gods must coexist uneasily with devils in the crevasses, but despite their proximity neither would be able to find each other in the day or night but in their dreams must eavesdrop on each other’s breathing. the rocks, many hundreds of feet high, tower above the city and their faces are pitted with the infection of a thousand excavations. and nothing, despite their defilement, can compare to the tombs these history thieves have revealed. from the citadel of hos we enjoy a view of eternity by the morning sunlight; and as we stand in the ruins of a roman building, so quickly do our bodies shrink into the dust of time, we fancy ourselves turned into romans; i admit without compunction that such beauty (although the word is too small) has made me too romantic to be a good companion to myself. we pass shepherds tending goats, who live in black, camel hair tents, surrounded with staring naked children. we meet one hundred and fifty camels on their way to smyrna. their bells clang and tinkle and the drivers are as gay and as bright as colours could ever be. it is difficult to reconcile myself to the idea that here before me are real men, not players in a wondrous circus, or the employees of a giant mechanical doll company. these men can bleed and weep and love! but still, despite their very real flesh, they are as insubstantial as the feathers of exotic parrots. the plains and the masicyths range of snow mountains are exquisitely beautiful, too beautiful almost to look at, as if looking with such impoverished eyes might defile such splendour. when they first appeared, i nearly leapt from my skin. had i died, and been flung portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 21 higgie son into heaven? the inability to speak isaac, look! we have been riding for hours. i am exhausted. i can no longer focus on anything but my hands and the small, curved ears of my pony. i look up but am blinded by the vibrations of my own tiredness. i turn to sir toby. what would you like me to look at? over there, isaac. it is really quite wonderful. he stands in his stirrups and points to a distant peak. i peer but cannot see anything. surely you can see it isaac? what? i do not know how to tell him what it is i cannot see. i canter away from him and hear his voice fade from my sphere. i am covered in dust. myths sir toby has lent me his book of the stories of egyptian mythology. horus and seth were brothers, who engaged in a violent conflict. in this they bear an uncanny resemblance to cain and able. this i find curious. in their fight horus lost an eye and seth a testicle but the god thoth intervened on behalf of horus and the stolen eye was restored to its owner. after gaining possession of it, horus presented it to his father, the king osiris. his eye was meant to protect the king against seth’s violence. but to no avail. osiris was slain by seth’s madness. in terrible grief the sister and wife of osiris, isis and his brother nephthys searched for their brother. they found him dead. the thought of finding the body of a sibling quickens and tears at the deepest parts of my heart. if moving through the world is to prepare oneself for some future, unknown grief, then such an image, a concrete image of horror, but built from the flesh of familiar faces is almost too hard to bear. the imagination is the greatest assassin and the cruellest image giver of all. nonetheless, the absurdity of my situation is never lost to me, quite despite the seriousness of what has been revealed. this rotund, shortsighted teasipper is responsible for my introduction to osiris. he has placed my hand in his, and his in mine. he has pulled my head close to his in order to hear his words all the more clearly. sir toby, unwitting medium, socialite to the stars, deaf man, blind man, unbeliever. o heaven speaks, earth trembles. thou shalt not be cut up, osiris. these are stories written to plague dreams. speed we travel too far and too fast for me to sketch. as a result, i am not working hard enough and the thought of such lost opportunity torments me. i must resort to making mental sketches, but sometimes my fury at my idle hands blots them with darkness. we ride so hard, and often through such filth and inconvenience, it is impossible to see around me the things that lie beneath such an infernal rocky country that grows nothing but large stones. consumed with such a mood, i reach for my history in vain but see nothing but stones. no stories. simply a brutal, incomprehensible surface. i may as well be crossing the moon, for all its mysterious connection to who i am. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 22 higgie son when this happens, i cannot speak to anyone. but now i am awake, or rather have been forced to see beyond my own narrow expectations. we have passed through the wild passes of engadi by moonlight and i have been shaken to my core, so that i can feel the movement of every drop of blood through my veins, and feel every sliver of bone in me shiver. this place looks to my eyes (my diseased eyes) like the end of the world, but what a finale it is! extinct craters of volcanoes plunge into the bowels around us, and some of the mountains bend into the most extravagant shapes. the wind howls without a mouth, and the moon beats the earth like a slave-driver. no birds but prehistoric ones. no animals but snakes and lizards that become the colour of rocks or sand at will. all of them shout at me to conceive of the possibility of shape and substance in the world, shape and substance that gives the sound of the gods a form. yes, i will open my mind, i tell the moonlight, and my mind will flourish, because the soil in which it is growing is uncommonly good. but i cannot reduce the response of my soul to mere words. this is a response that demands two things of me: action and pictures. i read i read what i have been told is the earliest expression in literature of a belief in life after death. i read: recitation: atum, this osiris is thy son; thou has caused him to flourish and live. he lives, this king lives; he is not dead, this king is not dead. he has not perished, this king has not perished. if he does not endure, this king does not endure. he endures, this king endures. i do not understand these words. but they stick in my head like a bee in honey. another letter from home sophia writes me a sad letter and speaks of how she lacks my presence. she tells me how all of my family are lacking me, but i do not believe her. how can they miss what they no longer know? i search my heart for charity, and find it crouched in a corner of my heart. i find it in the fact that they do not know that they no longer know me. she tells me that father speaks of me often, all of my family do, about what it is i could possibly be seeing, or thinking or doing. she writes that when she thinks of the drawings and sketches i will bring home, she can hardly contain her excitement and can only dream of what i am seeing. see well, she says, and remember everything. that, i think, is too much of a task for anyone. she tells me god will keep me well, because he is our god and loves us and we are good and worthy of care. i do not know whether what she says still holds true. she wonders if i have seen the pyramids and the great sphinx. she says she does not portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 23 higgie son know where i am now, as my letters reach my family from such a long away. my letters make her sad, she says, because they remind her, in such a tangible way, that i am somewhere else. i wish i could tell her where it is i have come to. some days i do not know myself. sophia does not believe i am telling her everything, and reminds me to share my thoughts with her. my thoughts, she informs me, are more precious to her than any ancient relic. she does not want her brother to drown or become lost or set upon by brigands. in london, apparently, nothing is changed. it is colder and the nights longer. the fogs have begun. she has a new coat but little energy. there is much to be seen from our front window, but she is berated by my sisters who chide her for staring and dreaming. the boys are growing and shout so. father rarely seems to find time to stay at home. if i was there, she tells me, she should not lack me. she orders me again to see well and to draw beautiful pictures, and to speed home to my loving family, but especially to see my loving sister, sophia. my head is a house i have come to the realisation that there are at least two versions of me travelling with sir toby, each as imaginary and as real as the life inside a painting. living inside my head is like dwelling in a serene and well-run household, that unfortunately has built into its foundations a few haunted rooms that guests should, at all costs, be discouraged from entering. imagine. sometimes i am in a calm antechamber eating a sunny breakfast when the sound of music will abruptly begin in a room i cannot locate. perhaps a piano trio, perhaps a persistent triangle, perhaps the clapping of an intimate audience, who, for some reason, have been issued tickets to be entertained by the deep recesses of their host’s mind. and where is the host to be found? wandering the lonely corridors, no doubt, looking for a way in. or a way out. i can only recognise myself if i look away from who i expect myself to be, a feeling not unlike when as a boy i would search for a particular star and father would say, look away isaac from the place in the sky you think it to be. you will see it out of the corner of your eye. and i would. if i avoid myself at all costs, i might, for a few hours, remain calm. but. i find myself gazing at sand and seeing green hills. i notice hideous faces glaring at me from the faces of sweet young girls. i see the silhouette of a pig in the mild eyes of a camel. i lie stuck to my bed, covered in sweat as the mattress breathes and groans beneath me. i have forgotten the names of my own sisters and my own brothers. i speak happily, for hours, with my dead mother, whose hand i feel stroke mine, and curse the breath of my father, who is revealed to me as an impostor of the highest order. i walk in sunlight and feel the hot glare of the moon burn my skin. i see scorpions the size of men haunting ruins. i crash into walls i do not see. i pluck poisonous flowers and dream i boil them for tea. i spend hours polishing teaspoons i do not need. i long to dilute my colours with mirages, to make them hot and trembling. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 24 higgie son osiris i read that osiris has his helpers and messengers, who execute his command. apparently these helpers may be objects of terror. this terror is perhaps accounted for by the fact that after being slain by his own son, became a ruler of the kingdom of the dead, the underworld. he rightly threatens those who have sinned against him and whom he condemns as a judge. he is served by demons. they are his executioners. osiris is to be dreaded, despite the fact that it was he who was wronged by his child. perhaps it is a father’s wrath that lends his anger such validity. the world is accustomed to the wrath of fathers. or, in the case of christianity, the indifference of the father who allowed his only son to be murdered. but osiris is also a man who has become a god and risen from the dead, and speaks clearly with the moon, which rises every night as he did after he was slain. osiris had parents, nut and geb. but it was his own son who slew him, who made him a god through his act of violence. and yet, i do not understand. osiris would never have become a god if his son had not slain him. but why should a son slay a father? why should a father be slain to make him a god? he was a man, then a hero, then a god. he has been, perhaps is, every man. where is the right and wrong in all of this? who is right and wrong? the solace of some words, the difficulty of others when i read, my sense of disorientation and my fear of instability passes. there is something in these histories that soothes me, challenges me, pulls me up out of chaos and into order. the order of truths that have lasted, dug deep into stones. i lie in a dark cool room and detach myself from such fancies. i say to myself again and again, no. i imagine in my hot head an artist who has taken too much laudanum. i think of this artist inside me, and order him off the premises. sometimes it works. sometimes it doesn’t. and sometimes i am so fascinated by the images this artist conjures for me, i do not want him to leave. sir toby, to whom i have only given the slightest intimation of my troubles, has, for once, been reassuring in the banality of his advice and observations. he has told me of many men who have become lightheaded with the heat. sir toby, lightheaded? i would describe this more as heavy-headed, lump-headed, dream-headed, horror-headed, wrong-headed. i am almost shrill. i hear myself from a long way off, as if i were someone else, an eavesdropper listening to me. he laughs long and loud and i will put it down to my illness that i detected a note of hysteria in his laughter. isaac, isaac. i warned you of the sun. it is a powerful drug. your mind will accustom itself, i promise you. you must drink more boiled water, more tea. you must not, on any account, let yourself become dehydrated. he tells me my illness has been caused, apparently, by a lack of water in the body. but although i have been drinking copious amounts of tea, to counteract my thirst and the apparent aridity of my interior, it has not helped me so much as made me uncomfortably bloated. it is difficult to locate cause and effect in all of this. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 25 higgie son imp whispers to me ceaselessly. who is qualified to say who is sun struck? how can something so golden, so soft, so elusive cause such harm? the sun hammers away at my head like an argumentative lover. i curse it, wrestle with it, and, during moments of respite soak its light deep into my bones, into my skin, my veins. but for all its cruelty, i do not want it to leave me. buried among the ruins of solitary limbs in ancient syria, buried among the ruins of solitary limbs, i find a pottery shard. i hold it to my cheek to visualise it all the better. the earth has delivered it to me, indeed almost tripped me up with its gift, and i would, at all costs, respect such an offering, to find ways of appreciating the earth’s generosity. i look at it from all angles and consider how best to appreciate it. a useless thing, a pottery shard, except as an aide-memoire for a memory i have never had. to think, however, of the brown hands that spun such a simple thing from clay, and placed it in a fire and then filled it with wine or milk or honey, is to breathe a little life into these ransacked and abandoned temples, to glimpse the lives of individuals threaded into a grand narrative like cotton into a carpet. i sit in the shade of a ruined wall, and ignore sir toby’s cries as he searches for me, and let the clay whisper to me. i hold it as close to my ears as a seashell. it smells of dust and sunlight and faintly of piss. it is too disappointing. i cannot, however hard i breathe, smell the wine or the honey or the milk. i have read: death is simply a phase of tiredness from which it is likely you will awake more refreshed than you ever were. some egyptians believed this. some also believed that blood restores life to the dead. all dead, or all alive, who held it before me? hardship in palestine it is too dry, too cruel, too unfriendly here. both my skin and that of sir toby is as cracked as a riverbed deprived of rain. i was, for a week, too ill to speak, wracked with the dreadful emptying of my body and a constant thirst that could never be slaked. our rooms were filthy, the housekeeper slatternly. sir toby and i could hardly speak to each other, so depressed were we with our situation. but i continued to read, when my head had cooled a little, and when my eyes ceased to burn and distort the world it is their job to inform me of. i read how god is magic reflected in the blazing sun. i read that the fruit of the god suits the soil of the living. i have read that we are reminded of cosmic renewal every time we witness the lord of the west, our sun, sinking before night. i have come to believe that man must accomplish the work of revelation for himself. when i could finally walk we ventured into the streets only to be confronted with the slaughter of a dog on the street. men chatted casually as they hacked at it and for a few seconds it shrieked horribly. even women and children walked by without giving the poor beast so much as a glance. finally, its astonished, slow-blinking eyes gave the only indication that it still lived, and then, passing quickly to somewhere else, it died. the sight forced me back to my room for a few more days. i am too foreign here even for myself. i see no point in being here, none whatsoever. sir toby readily agrees, despite his mania for adventure. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 26 higgie son he promises we shall leave as soon as i am strong enough to travel. he has a friend with a barge, or so he says. one we can drift on, and be waited upon. it is the first time i have heard him say something that has inspired affection in my soul for him. we float together, in light i have never lived in such opulence as this, on the barge of a diplomat, on the nile, the silent nile. i amuse myself play acting. i am anthony or hadrian. but not osiris. perhaps i will kneel before him. it is growing in me, the urge to do so. after all, he guards the other world, the one into which we will all eventually pass. it is important to give him his due. i am in his country, on his river, where his own son or brother cast him. i search the brown water hungrily for traces of his remains, but there is nothing to be seen beneath such an inscrutable surface. only the counterpoint of drifting, dying, hovering insects. as i look, i am niggled by a paradox: if osiris is a god to these people, and one to whom the river was his blood, then how can he, in fact, drown in himself? it is a feeling, however, if not an actuality, i know well. i read: he swims or floats under thee. i look and look for him while the nubian crew slay indifferent chickens for supper and we drift past picturesque hamlets. i read: death by drowning was blessed by the ancient egyptians, because it mirrored the death of osiris. i read: in the trial that was held in the heavens after the foul murder of osiris, osiris is granted eternal life, a vast kingdom, heaven and earth, and the fields of iaru, the horite villages, the sethite villages the cities and the nomes. osiris has become the river, and his son seth, who slew him, the desert. nothing grows from seth. everything green springs from the bounty of osiris. i read: he rode in a barque called the great ship of eternity and everlasting. his wife and sister isis and his brother nephthys became his attendant falcons. these birds are the symbols of mourning. sometimes isis is a swallow. swallows here fly thick and fast around the helm at twilight. they sometimes resemble bats, or thin, exquisite girls, diving through air. i go ashore and walk thorough bean and doura fields beneath the crazed and courtly antics of crested larks and spurwinged plovers. geese and ducks are plentiful. on sand banks large flocks of cranes perch on the rigging or awning rails. every cluster of mud huts honours the pigeons. it is customary to place large earthenware jars with protruding branches outside homes for the birds to sit on. the villages look like deserted ant hills. conglomerations of rubbish huddle around their extremities, almost lost among the occasional belt of palms that surrounds them. coloured plates and saucers hang from the doors to avert the gaze of the evil eye. this is a hopeful land, a place for birds to land. i read: the bird comes, the birds come; this is isis with nephthys. they have come seeking their brother osiris... there are truths preserved in the places they pass: recorded upon pyramids, tombs, temples, triumphant arches, statuary and churches. i look for him in the river and in the places he passed. and i look up into the sky, where his soul became a star and see the birds circle wide and flaming around me before disappearing into his bright eye. the monotonous, soothing desert nags my concentration. i do not like to step on seth, portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 27 higgie son who killed his father. he disappears eventually, fades into another region, and osiris reigns supreme. dust and dry sand has given way to plump green trees, to shade, to laboriously worked areas where seeds might grow to adulthood before suffocation. deserted estuaries and sand bars, meeting places for fish and birds, emerge before us like slow loops. sometimes the river splits in two and curves around an island thick with figtrees and exhausted palms. sometimes we float past villages where listless eyes widen at the sight of the glitter of our barge, its polish, its quiet, its lack of any function but pleasure. i am glutted on light. light above me, light below me, we are floating through egypt on light. my limbs cannot believe their lassitude, but in truth luxuriate in such inactivity after months of backbreaking, swift travel. to move through a place with such little effort. i am not sure i deserve this. but i will earn it. this barge is even aglow at night, when the sky is black and thick with pin pricks. orion shines on us. i read: orion is osiris’ star. there is a chandelier in the dining room, which sways and glitters with each gentle wave. red lights dance off the silver, reflecting the blood red cushions. blue lights scatter in the face of fluttering silk. yellow light refracts into silver goblets from the moon. this is not a place for our english god. he would be blinded by such brightness. he would cough into his clergyman’s collar and sip his tea with averted eyes. this place is someone else’s domain, someone i haven’t yet met. we are treated like princes, surrounded by servants as smooth as snakes, who wear white gloves and expressive eyes that will not look into mine. sir toby and i have become actors in a theatrical troupe whose speciality is the reenactment of ancient luxury. we pretend we are accustomed to such extravagance. i, at least, am not. my masquerade forces an hilarity from me, that has a tendency to land in chilled soup. sir toby chides me, with a tired voice. do not laugh so, isaac, they will think you mock them. i mock no one but unbelievers, sir toby i reply, then stifle my laughter again. sir toby i continue, what do you believe in? poor sir toby looks at me, sighs, continues drinking his soup and starts to read the book he has so pointedly propped up against the salt canister. i do believe he would hire a translator and hang the expense if only he could find one that spoke my language. i drink my soup and attempt to remain quiet, but find it hard to suppress the feelings that continuously erupt from me. our beds are enormous and covered in silk mosaic. the night air is fresh and cool with flower blooms. the air sucks dry any attempt at conversation. at night we anchor, as the waters are too perilous with sand banks to continue our journey in the dark. apparently no one can see the danger that lurks beneath the black water. no one. some of the servants sit around a small fire on the shore, guarding us from bandits or beasts. which is it? who knows? no one tells us, no one speaks frankly to us. i long for a fellow human being to look me in the face, as an equal. here i am above or below. it is lonely. my family have become as faint to me as apparitions. they are my blood, but even bloodstains fade. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 28 higgie son the sound of laughing servants mocks the lack of joy between sir toby and myself. i will no longer speak about nothing with him. my life is too short for such exchanges. i find it much more interesting to watch the dark river and to wonder about what lies beyond it. to be warmed by the light of distant orion. invisible dogs make the nights hideous with their howls. in the mornings swimming children paddle near our barge and beg baksheesh from us. others flick switches and drive indolent buffalo towards the water to drink. some attempt to come aboard but our servants swiftly expel them. i saw a small brown hand clutch the railing i have clutched so many times, and then witnessed a servant, supposedly in our employ, hit that same small hand with a stick. the hand disappeared but happily not the child, who swam howling to the shore. women wash clothes on the riverbank with the restraint of moths. these women are such that the masters would gladly have used for models. they disorientate me. they make me forget whether i am in a picture or observing one. it is not an altogether unpleasant disorientation. camels mumble deep into the water. trees bend their lovely arms towards us, across the river’s broad back. sir toby is almost always writing but has adopted a new, irritating habit. he drums and rolls his fingertips on tables or his thighs when he writes, and the sound is amplified in my head until i must beg him to stop. but as i am now apparently officially ill, he excuses my irritability and tries to talk to me in the soothing tones of an ancient nanny talking to the idiot offspring of a suburban doctor. i turn from him in disgust. poor sir toby. my indifferent attempts to communicate with him have become as transparent, as feeble as the wings of a dying mosquito. where do pictures go if they are not born? we drift down this eternal river as if it will never reach the sea, which has become something as unimaginable as cool skin or walking on the moon. my hands are as listless as my mind is overextended. i cannot draw. a pencil would be far too heavy for the frailty that permeates every inch of my poor fingers, those narrow brown things that dangle from my palms and have such import in the translation of the images in my mind. i wonder what i would do if i were to lose them. if some devil were to sever them and toss them away. would my toes adapt to holding the brush? my mouth? would i become a writer in images, a madman? but what would happen to all of the images imprisoned in my mind? where would they go? would people be able to see stories in my eyes? the world must be full of the ghosts of restless, unborn pictures, the ones that lived in dreams and eyes but were never realised in their material form. the very air must be a museum to such frustration. i have tried to grab the invisible shapes that crowd my head and wonder if i could hold in my head and heart the images born of artists long dead? could my body become the conduit for their aborted visions? and what of such an eventuality in reverse? could another artist paint the pictures that live on only in my head and not on my canvas? in case of such an eventuality, i am insisting of my memory that it become the artist. it must paint the pictures in the air, and claim authorship at once. i will not be thieved by spirits. i am resolute on this. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 29 higgie son almost christmas it is almost christmas, but sand and water have supplanted the snow of sussex street. but what water this is, water that changes its mind and colour at every river bend. what is it? a home for birds or people? a drink for a thirsty field? a black line built to dissect sand? it is an infinite story that refuses to reveal its purpose. i do not recall such complex rivers at home. my brothers and sisters would have chosen their tree by now and would have become once again accustomed to the fog and damp of a london winter. i have not heard a word from them for so long i struggle to recall the features of their faces, which i know, as they are young, will have already changed. the feelings they engender in me are solid, but in the way a mud hut that is too wet is solid. their details are becoming lost to me. i weep when i think of their sweetness. they are too good for their brother isaac who has become so full of images he cannot see a single picture. i am tormented with loneliness. we go ashore our boat is docked at siut and we go ashore to visit the bazaar. i wander away from sir toby and revel in the lack of his proximity. there are wonderful things on offer here. carpets, shawls and draperies of every colour and cloth, stagnant perfumes in strangely shaped and tinted bottles, the vermilion and primrose of countless turkish slippers, local pottery, covered in wild red and black patterns. i would bet that anything could be bought here. i have spied second rate german cigars, spectacles from paris and cloth from manchester. the distance these objects have covered! it is enough to boggle the mind. turks in light dresses, and large white turbans stroll about like sedate statues while bedouin arabs as dignified as gods canter down the narrow streets on delicate ponies. i am filled with a wild desire. i wish i had been born a blackguard, a robbing mountaineer, or a minstrel, so i could escape into the hills and live a life more adventurous than the one that awaits me on my return. i could have a wife with golden piastres on her forehead. i would live with her in a small hut, filled with rugs and jewels, and she would love me, and never speak. we would never learn each other’s language. we would speak only with eyes and touch. she would collect water from a well, and every day i would witness it. her silence would be her wedding gift to me. mine to her would be my protection, and my love. my future stretches before me and the thought of it does not fill me with anything even approaching the emotions that the wild sounds of the tabar inspire in my soul. i let music wash through me until i am suffused with a blissful delirium. i find a step on which to sit and sketch. for once no-one takes notice of me. my hands fly over the page and images appear both before me and beneath my hand: the strange dress of street musicians, the bubbling water fountain in the middle of this delicious square, the portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 30 higgie son generous trees, the dazzling dresses of sloe-eyed women, the stately dance of camels. i lay my reason before this place. i give it my gift of line. if only i had a friend who could hold me tight. these feelings are too big in me, too big for my body. thoughts are generated in me i do not understand. i hold my face to the sky and the heat makes me happy. the sun the sun bounces off the stone on the riverbank. it forms balls of light that spin and surprise as they race and leap towards me. i read that in many ancient languages, the meaning of the eye and the meaning of the sun are expressed in the same word. i read that the sun was named osiris; giver of life, bestower of blessings, just judge, blessed and condemned, inspector, moderator, star guider, soul of the world, governor of nature. i read that osiris is described as the son of man. how many sons of men can exist on earth? men give birth to men and men then kill men. it is endless, although being simply a son of one man has begun to feel equally bewildering. i look from my eye and penetrate the sun with my gaze. my eyes, my own two suns. the suns of one man. this sun, of course, is yellow, as light tends to be, yellow and white but filled with other colour as well. colour i could only describe with crude approximation if you were to ask, but colour nonetheless, and it is the colour of this world and the other one, for which i do not yet have a name. perhaps it is mainly blue. perhaps it was born in tones of brown, or even a cornflower, an iris, a sunflower, a child’s bright ball. when sophia was a child, my father asked her, sophia, what is you favourite colour, and without hesitation, she answered: father, my favourite colour is a rainbow. an old sun-kissed branch. a bleached shard of bone. the golden heart of a daisy, dressed in its white skirt. it bounces back and forth, so full of rhythm and light, it makes me laugh. i had never before noticed how well our largest star dances for us. sir toby repeats like an old bore, his voice rising with every syllable isaac you are sun struck, you must stay indoors. i must insist that you not sit in this glare, in this heat. i ignore his bumblings and hold my face up to the sky. struck by the sun. such an idea, a fist of heat. sir toby cannot recognise his own poetry. a delightful, clean hammer. a glorious fate. a blade of light, softened with mezzotint. as good, and as versatile as a knife that can slice butter and cut loose a noose. occasionally, i hide the joy of my discovery from him and surrender, falsely, to his solicitude. cool towels on my forehead, and my cabin is dark even in daylight. a boy with evasive eyes brings me tea, weak with lemon and too much sugar. wafers, cold soup, dry bread. occasionally a fig, but only if sir toby believes my nerves are up to accommodating its sweetness. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 31 higgie son i chew voraciously. in truth, i have never felt better. banishing sunlight i agree, with a voice so full of deceit i am astonished the world does not toss me overboard, with sir toby’ refusal to allow that which i most welcome into my domain. he comes into my cabin, uninvited and banishes the sunlight with a lumbering hand. he inspires a silence in me, a tightness in my heart despite his generosity. he is too easy to watch. he leaves himself as open as a discarded novel, but quite despite his incessant commentary, cannot see a thing. he is so rarely aware of what is actually happening around him, i wonder at his thirst for travel. he is a man who believes himself so literate with the visual world, but i do not believe he has ever looked at his own shadow. sir toby, i resist shouting without looking down, describe the colour of your shirt. i would bet my boots he could not. he is not a man, for all his travelling, who ever looks. he is round and full of himself, not unlike the sun, but definitely darker for all his cheer. i am, it is said, indebted to him, and with this i do not quarrel. he has brought me here, and quite despite himself, has revealed this place to me. it is time now to leave. we begin our slow trail home. home. it has become a curious word to me. the return now, slowly, we travel back to england. it is time, according to my mentor, to go home. the boat moves slowly, arguing with waves, ceaselessly groaning with the effort of its passage. the air is already cold, the sky more brittle, the food more foul and familiar in its foulness. i refuse to sleep in a cabin with sir toby, and he has, so far, resisted persuading me otherwise. when i am not keeping watch over my travelling companion, i wander the decks examining the heavens and reassuring stars. the moon slides slowly beneath clouds and mesmerises me. when not walking, i sit still and watch the light on the ocean, drinking ale after ale to keep me awake. occasionally fish leap high above the water, and then, in a flash of silver, disappear beneath the glittering surface of their world. is the world smaller or bigger if observed through the eye of a fish? is size dependent on the viewer or what is being viewed? i do not know. my mind’s eye is preoccupied with things not human, and my heart is full of terrible knowledge. i am certain. however far-fetched it may sound, sir toby, despite his innocuous appearance, is wrong in every decision he has ever made. i observe him, and wish, no, long for the possibility that what i have seen in his company is simply a story that could be flung aside. what a blessing that would be. if only simple stories surrounded me. but nothing i have seen or learnt is a story. they are ideas as tough and tangible as skulls. a steward interrupts my watch with a falsely solicitous smile. i grip my hands in my lap. i am so disgusted by this man’s simpering manner i can portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 32 higgie son hardly look at him. i shout at him, bring me more ale. i must speak loudly to such fools so they can hear me. they would not know the difference between a murder or an act of kindness. they would not know what they had been given if pearls were poured on their eyelids. the steward is too stupid to understand my communication, and looks at me so strangely it takes all of my will power not to throttle him for his impudent staring eyes. but i know, if i am to make headway, that i must learn to be more generous, more subtle than this. he does not know in what danger he has placed himself by working on board such a vessel, one whose cargo of flesh is so thoroughly rotten. he scuttles off on his foolish indignant legs, and i resume my watchfulness. the moon has nudged itself closer to its destination. my ale is brought to me, with a sniff and a stiff back. it tastes of salt. i would that i could swallow stars that would shoot me into the sky and let me float above all of this, but i cannot, and so have no choice in the matter. however flimsy the attempt, i must try to protect whatever innocence there may be on board this vessel. perhaps there is a child asleep somewhere. god forbid. a child on such a boat is like a piece of steak before a starving man. who will protect that child if i do not keep watch? sir toby sits, laughing comfortably, with others who must be equally corrupt or doubly stupid. he brazenly shuffles and spreads his cards as he smokes and drinks and allows his eyes to roll around his head without settling once, with honesty, on anything. he will no longer look at me. perhaps there is hope for the man, as he is so obviously satiated with his own guilt. he drinks like someone in a desert. he smokes like a sickened chimney. he is so glad to be with his fellowmen, these men who would travel with him into the depths of innocent souls to see how much they could borrow for their soulcoffers. he does not know how much i know. he would frighten himself if he did. he must not win this game. i would warn the captain if i could, but sly sir toby has warned him first, i can see it in the kindly glances he throws in my direction, as if i were a stray who begged to taste an occasional scrap of humanity. he still calls me sunstruck, but less constantly, and with, i think, less solicitousness. the captain believes sir toby, he believes in his title and his eggshell authority, he believes in his corpulence and his obese vowels and his plump, determined hands. poor captain. he has no awareness of the danger into which he has placed himself by playing cards with sir toby. they pretend the stakes are nothing more than a round of drinks. it is quite possible that sir toby will drag the ship under with him on his way home into the bowels of the earth. destroying the mark of the devil i cannot help the lifting of my hand when sir toby deals the cards. and i cannot help but feel the heat that touches my hand when it comes into contact with my forehead. and i cannot help it if i must then go to the looking glass to see what has caused such heat to come from my forehead. and should i not be then applauded for cutting away from my forehead portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 33 higgie son what the devil has placed there? he marked me at birth for observance and now the mark is gone. i will not bear sir toby’ revulsion at the blood that pours from my skin. it is only blood, which is no less natural than air, and we walk through air every moment of our lives. but of course sir toby is repulsed. i have cut away the birthmark with which the devil insisted on burning me when he fought against my arrival in the world. my heart is happy, even if i know it is a brief happiness. i cannot feel my wound, because it is not, despite the blood, a wound. it is a shield. the agents of sir toby will have a harder time recognising me now. the respite will be momentary, as i am perfectly aware that they will find a way of marking me again, but when that happens i will cut that mark away from me as well. at least i have stopped them playing cards. the captain, and any children on board, are safe now, if only for a while. until we arrive, when they, like me, will be on their own. paris the last stage of our travels. it is only a relatively short journey home now, but i have become incapable of imagining what that destination means. is it somewhere i have come from, or somewhere i must now create? it is all i can do to contain my fury without distraction, and if injury is to be prevented of someone whose name i cannot bring myself to utter, think of, or write, then i must leave. without farewell. without thanks, which would choke my throat with bile. i am stuffed full of him. i cannot have another morsel of his presence, however small the bite. for him to suggest, and in the most veiled and falsely solicitous terms, that i am unwell, that my mind has become unbalanced and over stimulated and that it should, forthwith, be seen to, that it is, in a word, me, who needs immediate expert care, would be laughable if it were not so wholly tragic that the world has become so skewed about who is, and who is not, of sound mind. for a man so ignorant, so pompous, so full of his own fictitious worth to tell me, in no uncertain terms, that he is better, more healthy, more able to navigate his way through the purely superficial realm he likes to call the present i cannot stomach. and so i will never see him again. because if i were to see him, even for a moment, i would have to remove him from this world, because it is men like him who make this planet a darker, more dishonest, more corrupt place. our views are at such variance, it seems astonishing that we share the same human shape. he makes no allowances for me as i, time and again, have made for him. of course, he will feel injured, and believe himself unthanked for his generosity. i would like an appropriate response to this hypocrisy burnt into his brain. it is not generosity that makes a man like him drag a man like me half way around the world. no, it is simply a less obvious form of selfishness and egotism than that which a more honest man would more plainly state. this man’s selfishness is actually more corrupt than its less subtle manifestations. i ask, is it generous for a man to demand sycophantic praise? to demand thanks for something that will make no mark whatsoever on his wealth, but will inflate his supposed reputation for artistic philanthropy? to demand from others conversation that will simply serve to bolster his own non-existent or borrowed opinions? no, i will say it again, and again, shout if i have to. he is not generous. these are not actions for which any vaguely portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 34 higgie son sane or sensitive person would be thankful. he has done nothing but enraged me. the rage that grows from the realisation that all that is apparent is not necessarily written on the surface of things. but perhaps, on reflection, i should thank sir toby for one thing; namely, he has cleared the clutter of sentimentality from my heart as surely as if he had taken a broom to my soul. i will return to london immediately and discover the truth. it should not be difficult to find, to recognise. i, the neophyte, shall see it written in the skies of heaven’s face. arrival, london 1843 i ring the doorbell, a deep, soft sound that ricochets through the house. i hear its journey finishing deep in the kitchen, rattling the pots, where it rests. the parlour windows are curtained thick and close against the night air. a sliver of light allows only a tantalising glimpse of the trapped warmth. an emaciated fog is guarded by a slice of moon. the rain is born sharp and dies with the caress of a pauper’s hand. it is so long since my skin has been touched that the reiteration of its existence surprises me. the drops are cold, but not unfriendly, as if the air is awake and would will all to wake with it. rain always sounds like something else. my particular journey’s end is serenaded thus: water pouring from the sky like the clapping of small hands. it applauds itself into my eyes and down my face and into my mouth, which is open to the elements. i do not have a hat, but am sure i did once. i cannot remember where i left it. i lick the water off my lips. it tastes, oddly, like me. i hear the floor creak, a young voice call out, but i do not recognise its source. a door slams. then, i hear my father’s voice call out with irritation: why does no one answer the door? the sound of it slaps into me with a feeling that has lain dormant for so long, it takes me a moment to recognise it. i do not hear anyone reply. i think i hear my father sigh in exasperation and fling a book on a table, but cannot be definite. london is so quiet and cold. the carriages on suffolk street sound muffled. even cats shiver. i did not hear a thing on my way here, but witnessed enough to satisfy my curiosity. i had forgotten the golden light of london houses, and how it spills across roads like hysterical watercolours. i had forgotten how the intimation of fire hovers at the edge of houses. i had forgotten how thickly and quickly the coal dust settles on a shirtsleeve, and how the trees twist and moan at their lack of warmth. i had forgotten that birds could look miserable. i had forgotten the armies of damp beggars, and the extent of their deprivation. i had forgotten how foul the streets are, even when washed clean by the elements. at the instant that i pull the bell, a fancy coach pursuing a pair of fine greys flies past at such a speed the details of its journey are indistinct. one of the horses cries out and stumbles. the coachman whips and curses it, his fury wrapped in cloth. a woman’s laughter erupts from nowhere. the poor beast throws me a supplicating glance, and they are gone. i utter a stern prayer on the poor animal’s behalf. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 35 higgie son a man who would beat a horse is not worthy of the name of man. my father opens the door. he has no knowledge of the date or time of my return. has it come to this, that my father should answer his own door? although i know it is dark, i do not realise i am in the shadows. he looks about, perplexed. i am made suddenly aware of my invisibility, and emerge into the shining doorway and blink. he looks at me, calls out with a look of confusion, hello?, and then stops his words as suddenly as if someone had popped a cork in his throat. his face crumples like a failed drawing. i look at him. he does not look as he did a year earlier. i have been gone a lifetime and become a ghost. can he see me as i see him? he runs his fingers through his hair and gazes at me, as if i am no longer me, but a stranger. only then does he confirm that the reality of this apparition is me. no. oh, isaac! he wraps himself around my poor body, and holds me so tight that for a moment i forget to breathe. he moves my hand up and down like a woman desperate for water from a pump. i drop my suitcase onto the sidewalk and hear a corner shatter. my soft bag slides off my shoulders, pencils rattling, unheeded. i arrive as laden as a mule and as willing. i am undone. you are so wet, my boy. my dear boy. my boy. i had no idea, why did you not contact us, and tell us of your arrival? he talks to my hair and holds me close, as if he would banish the rain with his own warmth. the darkness recedes for a moment. i am home. i am startled at the sound of a deep sob that i recognise, with surprise, as my own. i force myself to pull away from the heat with the reluctance of a traveller leaving a fire on a wet night. i cannot look any longer into the face of this father of mine that has altered its shape in such subtle and strange ways. the mouth, smaller. the eyes, less direct. the arms, larger. while i am considering him, and he, me, as if from nowhere, for i did not hear them coming, all manner of arms reach out to touch me, surround me, hold me, imprison me. faces like glowing saucers circle me like planets. shining eyes bore into my own. my face is buried in sweet smelling-hair, and the voices of the girls toll high and joyful. i taste tears on my lips. my knees wobble in exhaustion. i cannot feel my feet from the cold. names begin to attach to faces. john alfred, at least a league taller, his mouth still open, his eyes still gazing. isaac! he cries. arthur john, shaking my hand like a man, and, also like a man, unable to look into in my eyes. sarah, unaccountably weeping and holding her face in her handkerchief. isaac we did not know. we did not know where you were. i do not know who utters these words, but they affect me in a way i do not immediately understand. where am i? where was i? jane, smiling and patting my arm, father laughing and crying and talking and asking questions to break a traveller’s heart. everyone throwing words at me, as if i were a dancer and their words, violets. but beside us all, separate from the mayhem, a still, dark figure, twisting her hands, her portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 36 higgie son face focussed on mine like a telescope on a star. oh sophia. she takes my hand simply in hers, and it sits there, quiet. it is so cool and thin i cannot recognise it. surely, when i left, she had the chubby fingers of a child. she is silent, and stands with her head drooping. a still pool amidst a hurricane. she looks at me and speaks. isaac, come inside. it is raining. without another word, she leads me home, holding my hand so tightly i can feel every bone. she will not let me go. grass dim london rooms force me to walk in parks. i walk between flowerbeds and beyond the silver ponds and through the long, thin grass, towards what? i do not know what, or who, i will meet, although feel clearly that i do know where i am going, despite my ignorance of my destination. trees move towards me slowly in the breeze. conversations crowd my mind. lucky birds float over my head. i no longer know what is hidden, a fact that has ceased to worry me, for i do believe the world chooses well in what it lets me know. i hold my face up to the sky and it falls towards me, relieved to find a friend. everything that exists whispers to me. our lives lack air. we spend too many hours indoors, our skin growing paler by the second, and then have the temerity to complain about eternity in a box. i have begged my brothers and sisters to run through the rain, and embrace the cold wet air on their skin, but they turn away from me, their faces no longer the faces i knew, their voices the voices of others. they long for stories of my travels, which i cannot supply. nothing happened to me that was a story. they are too resistant to understanding how dearly i hold their wellbeing in my heart. they will not accept that stories no longer exist for me, that everything that fills the earth and sky exists for a reason. however, despite their unfamiliar appearances, the souls of my family are knit into my skin and into my heart, and keep me warm. why they resist my advice, i have yet to discover. but i will. it should not be difficult, simply a matter, as with all things, of observation. but i do feel compelled, nonetheless, to ask in the strongest terms possible, what kind of a life it is when a man or a woman or a child is deprived access to the sky? what kind of a life is it when a man is starved of sun? what kind of an existence prostitutes goodness, and invites the devil to dinner? we all wear black in our family now. father says it facilitates the cleaning of coal dust off cloth, but in truth i feel it is because we are in mourning, constantly present at the wake of our dreams. this sadness would be intolerable if i did not know that the sun is always present, even at night, somewhere. the world is full to overflowing. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 37 higgie son nourishment i dreamt i ate an owl last night. sliced. it called to me, and shivered. its feathers shone in the soft night light, and it called to me again, but i refused to listen to it and carved it so thin it was almost transparent. it was served to me on a plate garnished with flowers. i do not remember who brought it to me. a disgusting dream. i was glad, for once, to wake and indulge in the only meal i consider bearable. after much experimentation i have narrowed it down to two delicious things, both enough to sustain a man, and both, in their own way, the correct ingredients for a truthseeking man to swallow. i eat chicken eggs, and sip ale. a belly full of thwarted birth and bubbles! a mind tickled with hops! a fine meal, a perfect meal, one impossible to finish even when the food has gone. there is nothing more perfect than a cold white egg. an object with no beginning, and no edge. an infinite thing, a pure thing. who could not be inspired to dream of warm golden fields and hot summer suns, eating eggs and drinking ale? the hop-pickers fingers, flying brown and warm down the lines of hops, most decent of plants. a girl with red cheeks and clean hair, a basket on her arm, plucking eggs from the warmth of the nest, product of the kind chicken. this is food and drink to nourish more than stomach. a fine meal, a perfect meal, one impossible to finish even when the food has gone. eggshells and amber glass pile up against the walls, still lives to digest even when the hunger has been satisfied. playthings for light, objects born again with every rare ray of sunshine. bottles guard the soft pink excesses of eggshells which decorate my rooms; air, however dim or sad, hits their curves with a variation my imagination never tires of. my castle is growing from the safest and most mysterious of bricks. a visit my friends no longer come to the rooms i have taken to escape the intolerable demands of my so-called family, and i do not ask them why, but i do not care, involved as i am in making my first painting since returning to england. i have concentrated on rendering a scene of a group of water-carriers on the shore at fortuna, near mount carmel. i will call it caravan halted by the seashore. to once again have the luxury of paint and canvas at my disposal gives me greater joy that i could have imagined. creating this image has occupied my mind to the point of distraction. surprisingly, however, a girl calling herself my sister sophia came through my door today, the words falling from her mouth as suddenly as her hat from her head, which she dropped without a glance on the floor. it was a plain hat, and not bright. at first i did not recognise her and looked at her face long and hard, to dissect her disguise. she was at once as familiar to me as my own hands and a stranger. it was unnerving. without preamble she launched straight into what she had to say. isaac, please, i want you to listen to me. are you listening, isaac? the girl was well informed. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 38 higgie son i looked over her head. my room was very still. my sister (delivered sarcastically), there is no one else here i could possibly listen to but you. i meant the observation lightly, as an acknowledgement of our mutual masquerade, but she did not seem to hear the humour in my voice. her lips came together in a wrinkled worried line, while her eyes shone hard and false at my own. she was dressed in blue, and was thin. her eyes were strange, holes in her head. isaac, please. i want to talk with you quietly. i need you to listen to me. i need your full concentration. she then began to pull her handkerchief to bits. it was a mesmerising sight. it is difficult to tear cloth, and requires much strength, but this girl did not look strong. i refused, however, to be distracted by such petty details, and so, despite the destruction of her haberdashery, i stood my ground. i told her that nothing she could say to me could possibly interest me. why should i rest in the middle of the day, when there are paintings to be made and thoughts to be thought? people increasingly request the strangest things of me. to know who to welcome into my home is becoming more and more fraught. suddenly weary, i decided to sit down, to lend a polite ear to her falsehoods, to understand their provenance all the more clearly. however, an abrupt hammering on the door startled me and so, like any man whose door is hammered upon, i leapt up, confused as to who the identity of the person might be. the girl attempted to intercept my investigation, so i was forced to whisper my reproach as fiercely as a whisper will allow. girl, are you expecting someone? did someone escort you here? i was convinced the hammering and this strange girl must somehow be linked. the coincidence was too great. the thought must have frightened her, as her eyes filled with tears so bright her face was immediately covered in terrified diamonds. isaac, i’m sure it was only the footsteps of the lodger above. it is no one. it is nothing. there is no one at your door. they have left. did you hear that, isaac, the door has slammed downstairs. there is no one there. so does a woman deliver her sentence of deceit! with a jewelled face and reassuring words! how could she pretend not to hear the person who hammered so cruelly on my door. and she, supposedly my sister, my kin, my protector. impostor. i suddenly realised that i had been listening so intently for the entrance of this stranger at my door, whose presence was so demanding of my energy and concentration, that i did not, at first, register the meaning of what this sophia was saying to me, but in a flash, it struck me as solidly as that unknown fist upon my door struck my eardrums. she was trying to prevent me feeling what i know i have to feel. she would prefer i slept the sleep of the ignorant or intemperate than live as clearly as i can. she would prefer me docile to wise. despite my transparent disgust, she refused to be quiet. words flew from her mouth like pistol-shots. isaac, lie down, please! i want to talk with you, quietly. you are tired and need to rest. i have bought you some food. i will prepare it for you. rest, isaac! please, there is no one there! she still spoke to me as if i were an invalid! lie down! food! rest! her hands took hold of my own and burnt me. i pulled them away. her heat was infectious. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 39 higgie son let me make you some tea. please isaac, some hot tea. isaac, you have not been eating properly. you need to eat. i will feed you. tea! a dull brown drink for sickly throats! food! banish the thought. stuff for gluttons. i did not dignify either her question or her observation with a reply. i am filled with a fuel that propels me through the world with more energy than i should ever have thought possible. as if it were i who needed rest or nourishment! her sly hands came towards me again in a terrible, untruthful gesture of reconciliation. they clearly were shaking. i pushed her away and could not look in her diamond eyes lest the truth of her betrayal be too clear even for my compassion. i spoke above her head, to the wall. tell me where my father is, and perhaps i will talk with you. a shriek from her and then a fist rammed into her mouth. she spoke through her fingers. isaac, you must stop this. father is where he always is. at home. at work. with friends, all of whom you know. she is such a liar it makes me breathless. i obviously cannot speak with her and so, instead, i looked from the window, up at the clouds whose shapes i endlessly play with in my minds eye. the transfigured sky thrusts ideas in my mind so constantly i have begun to think of it as my apprentice. i had become absorbed in watching a baby emerge fully clothed from behind a storm cloud and could feel the sun struggling to push the blanketed clouds away from its radiance, when i was pulled back to earth by the girls howling, which i do believe she felt would convince me of her true identity. what comedy such deceit lends itself to. this actress playing my beloved sister had lost her lines! and who did she feel was best equipped to help her find them? why, me! the situation was so absurd, all i could do was laugh and laugh, which, for reasons unknown to me, seemed to replenish the water supply of her tears. her strange duplicity might be beguiling if it weren’t so repulsive. i hold my knowledge close to my heart, as it is the only dagger i know that will protect me well. i have learnt to identify the real skin beneath the surface. whoever this girl is, she will never know as much as me. the beginnings of a plan so, i must plan the most appropriate strategy for doing battle with the devil, with whom i will fight. apathy is a powerful enemy. i will not be lulled into a false sense of security, even if he refuses to fight. it is common knowledge that the devil can transform himself into any shape he wishes and is most enamoured of the ones we assume to be good. some recent examples: i have witnessed teacups rattle with horror. i have seen the mouths of puppies froth. i have seen the eyes of children radiate a hot, hard wrong. i have seen my own family replaced by impostors, who i have been impelled to paint with their punishment meted out. it has become increasingly apparent to me that the most evil of intentions can be hidden in the creases of the cup of a soft hand, in the vowels or syllables of a kind word, or in the faces of people we assume to love. after all, the devil follows the logic of men and who are we more likely to trust? the people we know, or strangers we pass on the street? so, i have built a suit of armour tight around my heart, and will use only my head to judge the righteousness of a situation. it is possible i shall not find any adversaries yet, but i do know they are there. the only information i am now lacking is their names, not necessarily the ones they utter as their own, portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 40 higgie son but the ones that have labelled their hearts. i will not be swayed by what is superficially familiar. i will not be moved by soft tongues. oh, the joy, after travelling for so long, to know with certainty what is right and what is not, causes my heart to relax. i am, at last, arriving at the home i have built from my own bricks, and it is not the one i once knew. it is apt that the only words i own to express this new state of affairs appear as drawings fine as cobwebs. however, i am doubly lucky that if my clarity falters, a host of advice will immediately, and generously un-summoned, pour into my mind and ears, sourced directly, i am convinced, from the pure intentions of osiris himself. it is enough luck to make a man whistle in the dark. a visit to a doctor we walk so quickly down a crowded street i stumble like a hack with splinters. the man calling himself my father would take me by the hand if i would allow it. (where is my father? where has my father gone?) however, my fingers resist, and curl into a tight fist, so he clings instead to my coat sleeve. i attempt to shake him off, but he persists. it is quite astonishingly irritating. an image occurs to me: a gnat on the back of an elephant. i giggle. beads of sweat tremble on his upper lip. his eyes are quite unnaturally large, and focussed on some unseen point he insists we rush towards. he has demanded i accompany him to visit a doctor, a isaac sutherland, and i, for one, am too curious about what it all means to refuse. i do not understand this preoccupation of people, none of whom i know, with the state of my health. they are constantly knocking on my door, or feeling my head, or bringing me idiotic, supposedly tasty morsels of food, or lapsing, in the middle of dull conversations, into silences fraught with a meaning i cannot fathom. i do not understand it, not in the least. i have never felt more powerful or well, and they treat me as if i were a sickly child knocking on the gates of heaven. we hurry along a street i do not recognise, dodging faces i have never seen. puffing, this father speaks to me in thin vowels, like a man with a dry mouth. isaac, he will help you. i promise you, isaac, he is a good man. he is a modern man. ah, once again, the problem of the good man. the man the whole world might support, and in their ignorance, support wrongly. father, (oh words heavy with humour), father, i cannot support you in your assumption. i do not know his heart. he does not know mine. how can a man help someone of whose heart he has no knowledge? and how can a man who has no knowledge of the helper’s heart, accept such help? the conditions are unclear. no one in their right mind would accept them. the man hurrying so quickly at my side throws his head back, follows the clouds with his eyes, and does not reply. he does, however, give his lips a little lick. if his response accords me a certain amount of satisfaction i do no reveal it, but allow that his silence acknowledges my small victory. a modern man! oh, foolish man calling himself my father. (where is my father? where has my father gone?) this is not the way to endear this so-called doctor, to me. i want to shout, what was so failed in the ancients that needed to be substituted with such flimsy falsehoods? portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 41 higgie son i cannot think of one instance that might justify such substitution. what is there in the modern world that did not exist in the ancient one? what, in heaven’s name, was in need of improvement, apart from the ever-present fundamental of men learning to recognise the truth? nothing. nothing has changed, but the design of clothes and bricks and paltry flesh. and they, for one, are easy to discard. the end, again. sometimes it is appropriate to speak dishonestly, if only to lure the dishonest closer to the net of their maker, whose responsibility it will then be to cast a cleanliness around untruth. this is a man i do not know, but who calls himself my father. (where is my father? where has my father gone?) i would give anything to have my real father back, but cannot find him until this charlatan is disposed of. to build a new house you have to pull down the bricks of the old dwelling. sometimes the bricks shriek as they are torn down, but who would heed the cry of rotten bricks? i cannot let such cries bleed into my brain and distort the truth, the truth that has solid, if seemingly invisible, foundations. this man calling himself my father, he is not my father. there is nothing to be done but to strip away the disguise he has so cunningly built, and so reveal the good, the clean, the real foundations of what we so easily call the truth. and so i tell him i must speak with him, at a place we both know. he has done his research well, and recognises the place i mention as one my father, my real father, would respond to. i tell him that once there, i will explain my motivations. i tell him i am nostalgic for my childhood. i inform him, in clear tones, that i will clarify for him the situations that i have immersed myself in, the ones that confuse him. i tell him that, once there, he will understand. i tell him that in the pure country air, all will become clear. i tell him that i need to escape the filth of london, if only for a night or two. i tell him i need fresh air and clarity and communication. i tell him i must unburden my mind. i tell him i love him. and so we travel to cobham, site of childhood happiness. we travel together, and laugh. we move towards his destination and he is happy, believing us to be close. he has become so happy his face softens at the edges. he relaxes and links his arm through mine. he thinks he has earned my trust. when we arrive we are hungry from our travels. we find beds for the night and stroll to the ship inn, where we eat our fill, and drink to ease our communication. men laugh as they drink in the rich light. i cannot hear their words but only see the shape of their mouths as they utter their meaningless sounds. the sound of a cuckoo conveys more sense to me now. our bellies are full and warm and we grow quiet with indulgence. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 42 higgie son the father impostor stretches, yawns, smiles at me, suggests we should sleep, it is late. i inform him that i would like to walk to places we once loved. i tell him the night air is a tonic. i suggest, gently, that a walk will help me rest, will calm my nerves. he is generous and listens to my request, and so, into the night, we walk. the sky, the air and the ground, all are dark and cold. the roads are empty. sleeping birds wake at our footsteps and cry out. how can a bird know that the morning will come? words drop from our mouths, fade, and then stop. i embrace the silence with a joyful heart. this man beside me shivers and attempts to hide it. he wraps his coat around him, and ignorantly talks of tomorrow. he takes a large white handkerchief from his pocket and noisily blows his nose. we walk towards water, which mirrors the moonlight. he looks at me, and does not understand. how could he? suddenly, and with immense clarity, i know the moment has come to act. everything in me converges. and so i take my blade and without warning i strike him, to propel him towards his maker who knows more than i. i am simply the messenger. at first it is as if nothing has happened. everything is still. the sky. flesh. mouths. i am all eyes. my hands are linked to my sight. my heart has disappeared. the man is astonished. his mouth opens but he makes no sound. he stares at me with bewilderment and looks down. my eyes follow his hands that he presses to his side. then he moans, but still, we do not move. we are as expectant as men waiting for a train. for a moment, his clothes are the same as they ever were, and then they are not. his dull black coat is suddenly stained with a wet dark brown. i think of a newly painted door. or mud. the colour of his face is not as it was. it is very pale, yet hot. he moans once more and looks at me with eyes that slowly slip. his body falls to one side and then stumbles. i hold my arms out and hold him tight so he cannot leave. for a few seconds we are quiet together. he whispers, please isaac. he is so corrupted he does not comprehend the magnitude of his untruthfulness. then the stillness is no longer and i am filled with fury and my heart is back where it belongs. i plunge my good clean knife into this impostor’s throat. he must not be allowed to breath a minute longer. his violent hands push me away then return to clutch at his neck. my blade drags through his skin, which is thick and difficult to cut. i summon all of my strength. i pull the blade out and push it in again and again, and then slice this man from side to side. his flesh creaks and splits. his skin bursts and then deflates. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 43 higgie son he has become something other than himself. he makes noises that i have never heard before. gargling like someone drowning, but still breathing. i remember walking on beaches beneath the sun and crushing thin shells with my boots. i remember a woman gutting fish and whistling. i recall hot poultices exploding boils. i remember my father. the memory inspires my power and my fury. this man does not receive my message well and argues with all of his dwindling strength. his arms move up and down as they attempt to push me away. his fingers drum my face. his legs scrabble to escape and then crumple. a bird shrieks, the water shimmers. mud grips the soles of my boots and i slip but hold onto him all the more tightly. he begs and begs. he bleeds, he shrieks. he faintly cries. he chokes on my name like a spell that would save him. and then he fades. my hands are red, his face is red, the mud is red. everything sticks to everything else. skin separates skin. spittle hits my face, fingernails have torn my flesh. i too am bleeding. it is distasteful. why should a man struggle at such a simple introduction to his maker? i strip the mask from his throat and eyes and then finally he is peaceful. the confusion in his eyes has gone forever. from this moment on they will never deceive another soul. he has departed into a hell of his own making and the person i once was has died. and so, it also time for me to leave, but to a different destination. i move towards the light. it is time to find my father. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 44 higgie son broadmoor hospital 1885 all men live in shells yet dead souls float upwards, into the light. it is so much more difficult to live than to die. i will welcome the weightlessness of death, when the time comes for it to claim me. i believe it will be soon. my father has never visited me here, except when i sleep. occasionally i wake with the imprint of his warm hand on my brow. sophia has long gone. my sister refused to understand what it was i had to do, even though she, too, was impersonated. my brothers, my sisters, my family have forsaken me. god knows where they are. without the consolation of spirits i would be no one. my one responsibility here has been to paint the visitations of beings whose role it is to supply solace to lost souls. i have been obliged to reveal the tangled meaning of surfaces. i have clarified distant memories of travelling through heat, escorted by the sun. i have spent many hours exploring the complex exterior of leaves, and the reflections that inhabit the heart of water. i have painted the important marriages of mythology and the underworld souls who have lent me such respite. i have painted portraits of my friends. i have painted the world that lives inside this one. my brush is never still. my pencil flies over paper on a journey more infinite than any i have ever taken. paint has become my canopy. i will be joining my father soon and the thought of it fills me with me joy. i do not know where it was he went, but am sure i will be able to find him. we will exist in harmony, i have no doubt about that. we will become members of a great community of souls enclosed in walls of air and comforted by the sun. i know my father will be the first to thank me for liberating him from that impostor. in all modesty, if will be good, finally, to be thanked. but sometimes when i wake, i wonder, where did i come from to arrive at this place? a hospital. a place for the sick, yet i have never had a single day of illness in my life. my flesh, perhaps, has been weak, but my soul overflows with rude good health. it rains so much my bones are damp and will not dry. when i die once more, my bones will dry in light. perhaps the story chooses the man and wraps him in it until he suffocates. for me, the sun made up my mind, and the sun became my story. but what of before? sometimes when i wake, i wonder, from where did i come to arrive at this place? portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 45 portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ en híbrida mezcolanza: exile and cultural anxiety in alirio díaz guerra’s lucas guevara jeff browitt, institute for international studies, university of technology, sydney in 1914, lucas guevara, a novel by the colombian exile and writer, alirio díaz guerra, was first published in new york. it remained forgotten until nicolás kanellos, the director of the ‘recovering the u.s. hispanic literary heritage project’, uncovered a copy of this first edition in a new york public library in 1976. the novel has since been claimed as the earliest about latin american immigration to the united states written in spanish. this fact alone merits its study. the novel is also unique in that typically it is literature by puerto ricans, mexicans and cubans, and not a colombian, that is most associated with the latin american migrant experience. the novel was published for a second time in 2001 by arte público press in houston, texas. this second edition comes complete with a critical-biographical introduction by kanellos and imra liz hernández, which presents the novel as the precursor of a developing genre of a certain type of latin american immigrant literature centred on the naïve migrant (el verde) who arrives in the united states inspired by the opportunities which the metropolis supposedly affords, but who nevertheless suffers a series of misfortunes because of the inability to adapt to or withstand the hostility of the new culture. the price to be paid for this failure to adapt is to return home, or to remain and die.1 díaz guerra portrays just such a hapless figure in lucas guevara. though on the level of overt content the novel is a stereotypical denunciation of a supposedly amoral and corrupting us society, it is fascinating for the 1 kanellos and hernández list several other novels among which lucas guevara seems to be the first: conrado espinosa, el sol de texas (1927); daniel venegas, las aventuras de don chipote (1928); gustavo de alemán bolaños, la factoría (1925), guillermo cotto-thorner, trópico de manhattan (1951); rené marqués, la carreta (1952); iván acosta, el súper (1977); mario bencastro, odisea del norte (1998); roberto quesada, the big banana (1998) and nunca entres por miami (2002). browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara insight it provides, through the narrative voice and the authorial presence, of the anxieties secular modernity occasioned for a certain kind of exilic subjectivity (masculine, spanish american, elite) still under the sway of a conservative, catholic morality. alirio díaz guerra was born in colombia in 1862 into a prominent family of politicians, his father being the federal treasurer for the liberal party government at one stage. he was educated at the universidad nacional de colombia en bogotá, firstly in letters and then in medicine. he began to write and publish poetry at an early age. like other hispanic letrados,2 díaz guerra early on showed a dual liking for poetry and politics. in 1884, when he was barely 22, he founded a newspaper, el liberal, in opposition to the then conservative colombian administration. shortly after the liberals rose up in armed revolt against the proposed constitutional changes by the ruling conservative party. the liberals were defeated and in 1885 díaz guerra was obliged to flee, penniless, to venezuela where he would spend the next ten years. because of his social and political standing in colombia and because of a liberal-minded government in power in venezuela, he was soon able to secure employment, firstly as surgeon general of the central railroad, subsequently as private secretary to the then venezuelan president, joaquín crespo. when crespo was deposed by the political opposition, he was still able to secure employment as director of public education. when crespo returned for a second term, he was appointed secretary of state. he married the daughter of a well-todo family and in between work and family duties, continued to publish poetry, but also, and importantly, inflammatory articles against the conservative colombian government of the day. in 1895, díaz guerra wrote a series of secret letters on government letterhead inciting a liberal revolution against the then colombian government. the letters, which also implicated crespo in the ‘colombian revolutionary cause’, were handed over by a traitorous co-conspirator to a panamanian newspaper for publication. due to the acute 2 a letrado was a patrician intellectual with a cosmopolitan and universalizing worldview whose credentials were based on the social authority of the scribal culture of ‘letters’, which straddled law, literature, politics and history, and which was crucially linked to nationalism and state-building in nineteenth-century latin america. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 2 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara embarrassment this occasioned the venezuelan government and in order to avoid a major diplomatic incident, díaz guerra was forced to go into exile (díaz guerra 1933, 223-36). the alternative was to remain and probably face a firing squad. he sailed to new york in 1895, the same year that josé martí, at the time perhaps the most prominent of latin american political exiles, left to fight (and soon die) against the spanish colonial government in cuba. little is known of díaz guerra’s early years in new york except that he was director of the general office of the republic of colombia for three years not long after his arrival and that he travelled extensively in europe before returning to the united states to take up employment as an international sales representative for sharp and dohme, a pharmaceutical company. somewhere during this period he also made the transition from exile to confirmed immigrant. except for international travels for sharp & dohme, including occasional visits to latin america, díaz guerra spent the rest of his life in new york until sometime in the late 1930s when he died, though exact details are unknown. during his time in new york he was a foreign correspondent for several latin american newspapers and published a few more volumes of poetry and a couple of novels. only one novel has survived, lucas guevara, which was published after he had been in the city for almost 20 years. not long before he died and at the instigation of venezuelan friends, díaz guerra wrote a memoir of his life in venezuela (diez años en venezuela, 1933), which, though postdating lucas guevara, was written in an almost archaic, florid, romantic style. in the very opening chapter relating his ignoble flight from colombia to caracas in a french steamboat, díaz guerra uncannily echoes the plot of his novel 20 years earlier and its denouement in the suicide of its main character, lucas guevara. he recalls his depressed state at the time of his forced exile: only someone born, brought up and educated in a social sphere of comfort and decency ... is capable of understanding how humanity can be reduced to the category of a beast without, by beneficent providence, either losing his mind or resorting to the solution of the desperate – suicide (díaz guerra 1933, 10, my translation). shortly after his arrival in venezuela, díaz guerra was immediately invited into the circles of high-print culture as a member of the venezuelan academy of language and portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 3 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara by having his poems published in the most popular daily newspaper. his literary success was due to his ability to craft verse in the ornate style of spanish and latin american romanticism, singing the praises of the great men and deeds of the venezuelan republic or writing hymns about chaste virgins and religious devotion: ‘christian faith/you are the blessed one/the magical flower of paternal dwelling/which in the rough squalls of life/conserves its verdure and fragrance’ (54, my translation). but literary success was no doubt also due to the social and political capital which elite credentials afforded, a capital which was transferable across national boundaries in spanish america. díaz guerra was therefore soon able to ingratiate himself with the liberal venzuelan power elite, which ensured a succession of government postings. the venezuelan memoirs have only minor historical interest, but for the purposes of this reading of his novel what is important to note is the way díaz guerra carefully constructs his own persona: christian, virtuous, maritally faithful, noble, loyal, altruistic, nationalistic, and so forth. these values embedded in his literary and autobiographical writings provide the prism through which he would subsequently come to judge the supposed failings of society and culture in new york as portrayed in his novel. the novel follows the trajectory of a young man (lucas guevara) from a middle-class family who arrives in new york from santa catalina, a rural town in a south or central american country. he has a stipend to support him while he studies, the idea being that he will return with some sort of technological training that will be put to good use in his own country at some future date. the specific country is never named, but there are clues to suggest it is colombia, though this has no real bearing on the structure of the novel or its interpretation. the novel’s theme is common to nineteenth-century bildungsroman in which a young man sets out for the big city in search of success and fulfilment, but only finds disillusion. there is, however, no self-development or overcoming of obstacles, no final triumph. through the novel we get a feel for the texture of daily experience in new york in the first decade of the twentieth century and the cultural consequences of modern capitalism: the metropolis’s feverish tempo and anonymous encounters, the play of desires unleashed by consumerism and secularism, the exploitation of the newly-arrived immigrants, the bowery as representative of the human detritus of capitalist modernity, portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 4 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara and a skyline dominated by the wonders of modern technology, including the brooklyn bridge and the aerial railways, and that symbol of promise, the statue of liberty. soon after his arrival, lucas is met by jacinto peñuela, a street-wise new york latino pícaro, who seems to specialize in preying on the ingenuous. peñuela is not so much a swindler as a sponger who attaches himself as guide and counsellor to greenhorns, shows them around the city and gets them to pay for everything. peñuela takes lucas to meet the new york businessmen from lucas’s home country to whom lucas must present his letters of introduction, the businessmen agreeing to monitor lucas’s progress as well as his monthly allowance. peñuela also directs lucas to a boarding house, to the chagrin of guevara’s businessmen compatriots, equally versed in exploiting the naïve. these businessmen, like peñuela, make money on the side directing novitiates like guevara to stores, bars, and boarding houses from which a kickback is to be gained. there is a very real sociological background to this story since at least forty percent of new york’s inhabitants were immigrants during the period of the novel and boarding houses and tenement slums were the principal housing options available. peñuela gradually introduces lucas to new york life around the lower east side, famously the home to many a generation of immigrants, where he is quickly enthused by new york’s women, especially the ‘siren temptresses of the bowery’ (29, my translation). he is soon having affairs with the women at the boarding house, frequenting bars and visiting prostitutes and generally dissipating his energies in nights of debauchery. new york, or more particularly in the novel, the lower east side, thus becomes a moral landscape against which lucas’s misfortunes are played out. he has a run-in with his first boarding-house proprietor and has to move to another lodging. he has a brief and disastrous (forced) marriage, manages to spend his monthly stipend too quickly, has a falling out with his father’s acquaintances because of his irresponsible behaviour, is briefly jailed for hurling a vase in the face of one of them in a fit if rage, and is bailed out by a widow who, finding him attractive, invites him to live with her as a kept man. when his stipend is suspended, he soon begins to take on a role similar to peñuela, preying on newly arrived latin american immigrants and visitors keen to know the portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 5 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara lower east side. he is eventually thrown out by the widow and progressively slides into poverty and depression, living the life of the most destitute and homeless in the big metropolis, falling victim to all kinds of abuse and exploitation. he works a summer on coney island, but is once again on the street when the vacation season finishes. at the end, broke and disillusioned, he commits suicide by throwing himself of the brooklyn bridge. though he is the main protagonist whose tragic suicide is supposed to command our attention as readers, by the end of the novel his self-indulgent behaviour leaves the reader feeling unsympathetic. whatever the shortcomings of the novel on the level of content, it seems to want to function as a condensed allegory of the indignities and lost dreams suffered by latin americans who arrive in the united states, principally men who feel themselves symbolically emasculated in what is portrayed as a hostile, godless, exploitative and racist anglo-american culture. nevertheless, there are limits to this allegorical dimension, most notably in terms of the class position of both the narrative voice and the protagonist. i will return to this issue in the conclusion. in their critical introduction, kanellos and hernández point out how lucas guevara is not only the earliest known novel of immigration written in spanish, but also that it is the precursor in ‘structure and formula’ of many novels to follow throughout the twentieth century, both in spanish and english, which deal with a similar theme: the disingenuous latin american immigrant, el verde (greenhorn), victim of all kinds of abuse in the united states, including at the hands of anglo-american women, who personify the avarice and treachery of anglo-saxon culture and civilization. in the process, such novels establish a counter-myth in spanish, which is: [...] the opposite of the american dream ... the opposite of what occurs in the novel of immigration in english, which upholds that dream as the essence of the american bildungsroman, whose most clear examples are the american by howard fast, studs lonigan by james farell, america, america by elia kazan and call it sleep by henry roth. in fact hispanics themselves who write their ethnic autobiographies in english scrupulously follow this bildungsroman of the american dream: oscar hijuelos, edward rivera, esmeralda santiago, víctor villaseñor, etc. (kanellos & hernández 2001, iv-v, my translation). nevertheless, kanellos and hernández highlight both the simplistic binary on which lucas guevara is based – ‘new york is babylon while santa catalina is an eden; new portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 6 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara york is the seat of corruption and santa catalina, though poor and backward, is the realm of purity and innocence’ – and the novel’s ‘misogynist vision of us women’ (vii; x, my translation) devouring incautious immigrant men. metropolitan culture and its materialism and licentiousness are thus strongly contrasted with the supposed more authentic and more worthy spiritual and cultural values embodied in the immigrant’s own ‘hispanic’ nation.3 hence the moral to be drawn from such tales for latin american readers is that it is better that ‘they should remain at home and not allow themselves to be deceived by the myth of the united states, because the metropolis, instead of being the path to perfection, is the path to destruction’ (xv, my translation). kanellos and hérnandez’s critical introduction to the second edition of lucas guevara performs a valuable service in rescuing the book from oblivion and provides a highly commendable commentary. yet it fails to sufficiently separate out the narrative voice from an analysis of the overt content (the storyline), missing an opportunity to engage with the contradictory tensions in the moral centre and filter through which this overt content is framed, interpreted and ideologised. lucas guevara may very well be received by the average or ‘non-intellectual’ reader on the level of manifest content – the ideological ‘message’ kanellos and hernández wish to extract about the rejection of anglo-american culture and the preservation of authentic or higher, hispanic moral values – but there is also a much deeper conflict at work in the stance of the narrative voice and by implication the implied author: the attempt to maintain a stable latino masculinity in face of the secularising and emasculating metropolis. for instance, though kanellos and hernández call attention to the blatant misogyny of the novel, they do not investigate what is clearly an unconscious and ambivalent attitude on the part of the narrative voice towards sexuality nor the class and racial anxieties unleashed by social mixing in the modern metropolis. 3 here the word ‘hispanic’ is used ironically to signal the controversy over its use vis-à-vis the more aceptable (though still problematic) ‘latino’. hispanic ‘spiritual and cultural values’, certainly those foregrounded in the narrative voice in the novel, could be said to be those derived from an idealised, upper-class version of the legacy of iberian colonialism and its social, cultural and religious overlay on those societies now deemed ‘latin american’. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 7 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara though lucas guevara is a lachrymose, stereotypical and conventional denunciation of the supposed evils of an amoral us society and the libertine and materialistic values underpinning it, a closer reading of the novel leads away from a concentration on the main character and the storyline or récit: the least interesting personage in the novel is lucas guevara himself. as opposed to most other latino immigrants from the underclasses doing it tough on the lower east side, guevara lives off a stipend and has a semi-comfortable existence to return to if he so chooses. he is far removed from the fate of those hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken immigrants and exile who were flooding into new york at the same time. nor does he arouse our sympathy because of his self-indulgence and inability to learn from bitter experience: he seems constitutionally incapable of resisting problematic relationships with women, though he seems perfectly capable of absorbing other lessons of survival in the slums imparted by the street-wise peñuela; in short, he is too much of a cardboard figure to be believable. at the end of the novel the reader herself would be quite justified in pushing him off the brooklyn bridge. therefore, though the novel can no doubt be read as a cautionary tale of moral ruination within the context of its underlying christian allegory, there is a certain kind of farcical quality to the story. on a much deeper level, however, a picture emerges of díaz guerra himself as once a displaced, disenchanted intellectual exile who suffers an acute cultural and class anxiety in the transition from a patrician arcadia to the secular, metropolitan culture of new york – the heart of capitalist, industrial modernity; thus his recognisably ambivalent experience of exile/immigration. the almost obsessive concentration on sexual activity and temptation highlight this dissonance and díaz guerra’s own hesitant positioning visà-vis the united states and colombia. through a reading of the narrative voice, and by extension the implied author, and by juxtaposing the public persona carefully crafted through díaz guerra’s memoirs of his ten-year sojourn in venezuela, we witness his difficult coming to terms with a highly-charged new york society (in comparison to his homeland), not only because of the problems of an exile attempting to insert himself in a new society at the level to which he is accustomed (educated, middle-class, morally pious), but also the influences of sexual liberation brought on by secular modernity and portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 8 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara the close proximity of volatile, eroticised bodies on the over-crowded lower east side of new york, the scene of the novel and díaz guerra’s point of entry into the united states. it is significant, for example, that the attacks on us society are carried out by the narrative voice and not the voice of the protagonist. the narrator gives a survey of the lower east side from the point of view of a detached, cultured, middle-class, latin american male. because this narrative voice is an ostensibly ‘reliable’ voice of authority and omniscience and because there is no countervailing discourse to overtly contradict or undermine its perspective, we can fairly assume that certain elements in the narrative perspective are consonant with that of the implied author. this implied authorial presence in the narration expresses a kind of ‘surplus’, an excess which appears to escape conscious, authorial control, unaware of its own freudian investments in the story. such a discordant surplus centres on three recognizable thematic anxieties, of which the narrator/implied author seems only partially aware: firstly, an obsessive concern with female bodies, sexual promiscuity and uncontrollable desires (primarily blamed on stereotypical, libertine anglo-american women); secondly, an acute class, racial and cultural anxiety in relation to the social and cultural mixing in the secular, rapidly modernizing metropolis; and thirdly, an ambivalent appreciation of technological modernity. it is through narrative commentary and focalisation that a picture emerges of a writer who initially lived a difficult relationship to new york, the tensions and negotiations of which cannot simply be banished at the end by a romanticized scene of suicide. this dissonance in the narrative perspective paradoxically makes lucas guevara an open text, in spite of its stereotypical plot. how, then, is narrative perspective fashioned in the novel? the narrator establishes himself very early on as cultured via references to high european culture, as when, for instance, he names the operas from which the street musicians in the neighbourhood form their repertoire: ‘wandering musicians who, with the greatest audacity, destroy fragments of opera and attack, in particular, trovador, traviata, rigoletto y la fille de madame angot’ (díaz guerra 2001, 35, my translation). so too his reference to guevara’s wife’s letters of emotional outpouring, ‘more eloquent, moving and passionate than all the portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 9 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara epistles of lord chesterfield to his son’ (63, my translation). these and similar nods to music and literature create an image of the cultured, ideal reader díaz guerra may have had in mind, and sets the novel apart from the more desperate tales of those who did not arrive in the united states with a stipend and had to endure untold hardships from the first moment. the dense use of figurative language also distances the narrator’s voice from the main character and makes implied links with the knowing reader, since such elegant prose style is not the language of lucas guevara or the common, immigrant man in the street. who, then, is the ideal reader? most likely fellow middleor upper-middleclass, cultured and morally pious latin americans, either in new york or would-be immigrants at home, who have taken their distance from both their compatriots and the host culture. another key characteristic of the narrative perspective is the repeated concern, expressed with irony and parodic humour, with sexuality and temptation and from a decidedly male perspective. early on we have a characteristic, ironic aside when the narrator describes the belongings that guevara packs for his trip to the united states, including ‘few clothes, but abundant scapularies, rosaries and other pious odds and ends, articles which … save souls from the temptations of satan’ (7, my translation). this seems none other than a mocking reference to what is to come – the precise inability of the protagonist to avoid such temptations. when jacinto peñuela takes guevara to a sleazy cabaret, the narrator describes a scene in which ‘around hundreds of small tables, men and women of all age and condition gathered in crude and licentious mix, repugnant even to the least observant gaze’ (73, my translation). the narrator then goes on to describe the women as made up with lipstick, ‘from the languidly pallid to the most intense; bare backs, lewd and heaving breasts, naked arms’ (73, my translation); and focalises through the consciousness of guevara, who ‘couldn’t understand how those female heads, sporting hats adorned with flowers and feathers, those busts covered with ribbons and lace, those waists wrapped in velvet and silk, could be bought with money and at cheap prices’ (75, my translation). this is not exactly fictional verisimilitude, especially given the description of the bar that precedes this meditation and given that the sons of well-to-do estate owners and other ruling-class males in latin america have historically had a portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 10 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara reputation for availing themselves of prostitutes. furthermore, the description of the bar and the females is eroticised by the narrator, not guevara, which leads the reader to conjecture about the implied author’s own proclivities for the well-contoured female body in the metropolis. this impression of the implied author’s own erotic investments in the novel is reinforced by the narrator’s descriptions of the rituals and financial transactions of prostitution in the cabarets and small hotels (72-8) as well of the interior and the workers of a brothel (97-104), the minute details of which seems nothing short of a knowledge born of experience. such knowledge may derive from the author himself having frequented the bars and bordellos of the lower east side, or perhaps it derives from díaz guerra having possibly worked as an unregistered immigrant physician in such an industry, though there is no evidence to support the latter claim. in a comic spoof, the narrator ridicules don emeterio, a businessman from the republic of ‘x’ who is on a visit to new york. by this stage lucas guevara has adopted jacinto peñuela’s style: preying on naïve paisanos who have just arrived from the homeland. acccording to the narrator, don emeterio is apparently incapable of ‘committing a marital infidelity’ and desires to ‘return without delay to his consort’s side, whose absence was tearing apart his soul, ruining his appetite and depriving him of sleep’ (206, my translation). the reader immediately senses a set-up: hearing him speak in such terms of his domestic bliss and the way in which he dutifully complied with his maritial vows, lucas was comforted by the thought that ... there still existed people who resisted the daily provocations of sin and that they are, for this reason, the bulwarks of society (2067, my translation). nevertheless, and in spite of telling lucas that ‘the day we separated, she placed around my neck the scapulary that i now wear ... and that is why i never commit indiscrections’ (208, my translation), don emeterio gives in to temptation when lucas offers him the chance to ‘study and observe’ the young women of new york: ‘well, that wouldn’t be so bad, if i could,’ replied don emeterio, ‘because in all sincerity it would give me great pleasure to have the opportunity to see close up those places where they say chastity is commericalised; and i’d like to see them because ... a man should get to know everything, even the dens of vice, in order to better appreciate virtue. there are people who perhaps go to those places with base desires; others, like me, go to study’. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 11 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara ‘well then, whenever you’re ready, let’s go to school’, replied lucas (209, my translation). though these two passages are satirical, more importantly they show the narrative voice obviously delighting in the tale, neither denunciatory nor moralistic here, but rather hilarious, which leads one to surmise, along with other clues throughout the novel, that the style of a lot of the book is highly comic irony, rather than just a moralistic denunciation of the sins of the flesh. in chapter 32, the reader is given a detailed description so detailed of the interior and the functioning of a brothel: ‘the investigative eye of the visitor is not satisfied with the simple panorama of the salon and wants to always discover the mysteries and intimacies hidden by the thick, damask curtains that shield the entrance to the contiguous room’ (214, my translation). really? the reader gets to enter the brothel, not through the focalization of lucas guevara or don emeterio, but that of the narrator, in spite of the reference to the ‘investigator’. this description occurs before lucas takes don emeterio to the brothel; in other words, it is not projected through the consciousness of one of the protagonists. a little further on, díaz guerra has one of the characters ironically declare: ‘now is when one can appreciate the treasure of christian morality that we possess in our homeland’ (214, my translation). rather than a simplistic moral denunciation, we are witness to an ambivalent staging of voyeuristic pleasure. in yet another scene, the narrator mocks a pair of self-important latin american financiers. peñuela, feeling sorry for lucas, who by this stage is penniless and in gaol for assault, goes to ask a couple of business acquaintances and friends of lucas’s family if they would help out. the visit becomes an occasion to send up the pompous christian morality of the bankers as they hold forth on family values. remember, we are reminded by the narrator, and kanellos and hernández in the introduction, that counterpoised to the licentiousness of us culture are more traditional, conservative ‘hispanic’ values embodied in the native language and culture, in the hispanic family, in the catholic religion, in female chastity, and so forth: portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 12 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara don nicomedes, with the characteristic eloquence his admirers claim he possesses, expounded his theories of marriage and ended by advising peñuela to try and establish a home, for this is the foundation of morality, the source of love and peace and a positive base for the economy. don patrocinio couldn’t avoid adding his five cents worth to his companion’s luminous and civilizing exposition, limited, fortunately, to the passionate advice that in case he should have a family, that he not allow his children, least of all his daughters, read novels, for there exists no book of that nature that does not contain love affairs, which would be the equivalent of exposing virgin imaginations to the serpent of lust (170, my translation). this is díaz guerra at his ironic and self-mocking best, not only sending up the stuffy and sham moralizing, but also gesturing tongue in cheek to his own novel, replete with sexual activity. nor is the narrator averse to indulging in a bit of ribald masculine fantasy and stereotyping when he describes how female boarding house owners are attracted to latin men: ‘certain skins toasted by the sun of the tropics, certain black and somnolent eyes and certain anatomical traits, not common in the races of the north, generally impress the eves with alabaster skin, blue eyes and blonde hair; probably a question of contrast’ (196, my translation). much of this satirical humour in lucas guevara is consonant with the picaresque style in spanish literature. it is significant that díaz guerra uses many of the tropes of the picaresque form, including the naïve life story, the initiation of the protagonist into the corrupt underworld of vice, a genuine picaresque character in the person of peñuela, social satire aimed at the deceitfulness and hypocrisy of a variety of class representatives of the pious and the powerful who prey on the most vulnerable, and so forth. díaz guerra also displays a genuine talent for caricature and satire underpinned by a moral vision, a hallmark of the best picaresque novelists. but so too does the novel diverge significantly from the picaresque form: it does not present the life story of a low-born central character who manages to climb the social ladder, who is transformed through self-knowledge; that is, there is no happy ending. furthermore, the protagonist is not morally indifferent, but rather us society is portrayed as such. indeed it is the protagonist who is portrayed as victim of deceitful women, and not the reverse, as in zorilla’s don juan tenorio,4 echoes of which abound in the novel. in fact the novel in many ways is more dickensian than anything else, in its contrast between the bourgeois gentility of the narrative perspective 4 zorilla, josé. (1844) don juan tenorio. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 13 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara and the portrayal of the daily grind of lower-class survival, in its portrayal of the hypocrisy and corruption of a society dominated by utilitarian industrialism, by materialistic values, in its contrast between moral pretensions and actual behaviour. but more importantly for the purposes of this essay, what is obviously under threat throughout the novel, and by extension in the authorial stance, is a hitherto seemingly stable, latino male subjectivity, now made vulnerable by an unfamiliar cultural and moral environment – the secular, modernising metropolis and its devouring women and its technology, symbolised respectively by two key landmarks: the statue of liberty (‘libertinism’); and the brooklyn bridge (technological progress). this hitherto stable, creole elite sense of self is also threatened by a loss of legislative hegemony by the developing massification of society. chapter 37, for instance, is a set piece: a mini-chronicle of coney island, a descriptive break in the narrative progression similar to the meditation on the brooklyn bridge, the bowery, boarding houses, new york reporters, and so forth. like martí’s coney island crónica, it is an ambivalent portrait of the incipient culture industries and the massification and democratisation of ‘bad taste’, as well as social and cultural mixing. one scene in particular is significant for the narrative focus on the ‘brazen’ bodies at play on the beach: in coney island … there is an agitated abandon and fearful competition, forming an indescribable labyrinth, a heterogeneous group, a drawing without profile, a figure without contour, a formless agglomeration that injures the senses, delights, tires, makes one dizzy, annoyed and crazy … [on the beach] the bathers, that is to say, the thousands of adams and eves of all classes and standings, romp for hours in the waves or writhe and rollick even more daringly on the sand, with a shamelessness capable of offending even the most trivial precepts of chastity, with their wet shirts stuck to their bodies and their naked arms and calves … showing off provocative shapes (262, my translation). this is publically-licensed sensuality, a phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in new york, which, along with cabaret culture, provided an avenue of release for an urban culture in rapid transformation, a ‘new consumption, entertainment, sexuality’, which, for lewis erenberg, culminates in the 1920s. this transformation was particularly vexing for cultural conservatives, who saw only ‘cultural decline and urban portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 14 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara pathology. the anonymity of city life, in their estimation, produced cultural decay’ (erenberg 1981, xiv).5 in lucas guevara, such metropolitan urbanisation and massification provoke a culturalnationalist rejection of anglo-saxons. there are constant references to the raza [española], which are cultural and moral, rather than biological, seeking to reinforce a perceived hierarchy of values and identity centred on the purported moral superiority of hispanismo. from early on in the narrative, the panorama that greets the immigrant in new york is described as a ‘seething mass of people of all races and all customs’ (díaz guerra, 9, my translation). new york’s population is variously described throughout the novel as the ‘multitudes’, ‘the swarming crowd’, ‘a human wave’, ‘the whirlwind’, and so forth. the anxiety at losing one’s individuality within the crowd is expressed in a striking description of new york, in which díaz guerra unwittingly presages josé eustasio rivera’s renowned 1928 novel, la vorágine (the vortex), where the incautious and adventurous male is overwhelmed and ultimately destroyed by the colombian jungle. here, it is the burgeoning metropolis that threatens masculine individuality: the future opened its maw and threatened to devour him ... he found himself in the entrails of new york, the frightful vortex that envelops everything, where the value of individuals is measured by the amount of money in their pockets; where nobody knows anybody; where the beggar is pursued with more vigour than the criminal; where every job, no matter how insignificant, has thousands of candidates who struggle and submit themselves to all kinds of indignity in order to win it ... where crammed into unhealthy buildings, succumb hundreds of people disinherited by luck, hungry and cold in the winter, starving and asphyxiated in summer. thus he regarded new york, that immense, heterogeneous and hybrid mass, seat of all cultures, support of all customs, centre of all vices, ocean of all passions, market of honour, barrel in which all ambitions are amassed, desert in which all souls are sterilized and with the heat of mercantile fever, all hearts are petrified (143, my translation). the anxieties of both the protagonist and the narrator in the face of modern life are remarkably similar to georg simmel’s attempts to come to terms with modern urban life in his classic essay, ‘the metropolis and mental life’, written at the turn of the nineteenth century (1903). simmel stresses the overwhelming impact the modern 5 ‘from the late nineteenth century through world war i, men of all racial and class backgrounds found a lively round of entertainments and cheap amusements in the bowery, tenderloin, and coney island. in the 1850s, the vice and amusement center readied in the bowery in lower new york, but by the 1870s and 1880s, it followed the mass of population northward to the tenderloin ... and eastward to coney island in brooklyn’ (erenberg 1981, 21); ‘by 1900 coney island lured urban males in search of ‘moist-lipped, slender girls’ to its free and easy saloons and dancehalls’ (22). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 15 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara metropolis and its ethos, proscribed by the money economy, has on the individual. the metropolis, as the ‘locale of freedom’ and the ‘seat of cosmopolitanism’, offers the possibility of anonymity and independence in comparison to the tightly-knit, conformist pressures of the small town; but it also takes the form of an indifferent and unresponsive juggernaut ruled by the logic of exchange value: money, with all its colorlessness and its indifferent quality, can become a common denominator of all values, it becomes the frightful leveller – irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair (simmel 2002, 14). for simmel, then, the metropolis becomes the theatre of a struggle between the individual and overwhelming social and technological forces: here in buildings and in educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technique, in the formations of social life and in the concrete institutions of the state is to be found such a tremendous richness of crystallizing, de-personalized cultural accomplishments that the personality can, so to speak, scarcely maintain itself in the face of it (19). when guevara is gaoled for assault, the prison cell comes to represent the lower east side in concentrated microcosm: ‘in hybrid mix [en híbrida mezcolanza], irregardless of sex or class, are gathered beings whose misfortune, desperation, hunger and vice have torn them from the bosom of society’ (díaz guerra 2001, 159, my translation). this trope of negative cultural mixing is also utilised to frame anglo-american women. chapter 36, for example, is an extraordinary diatribe against the women of new york, a negative and sexist description of incipient women’s liberation: ‘the mixture of races, religion, tastes, aspirations, necessities and even languages has made of this woman a disaster’ (252, my translation). whereas references to the raza in lucas guevara are clearly cultural and refer to all latin americans, the novel is nevertheless noteworthy for its overt racism against jews and chinese, which shades into cultural anxiety, especially faced with the social and cultural mixing for which new york has always been famous. the narrator attacks racism in the us press against individuals of the raza española (150), but is not averse to perpetuating racial stereotypes himself, as is witness the following passage: portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 16 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara in lucas’s cell, a chinese laundry owner was held for two or three days. he was accused of seducing a ten-year old girl, a practice to which are particularly addicted the sons of the celestial empire who, in spite of their apparent submissive, quiet and respectful temperament, all harbour the most artful tricks for doing away with the innocence of young girls barely out of the cradle, without the police being able, no matter what the effort, to effectively combat such appetites and customs of these sectarians of confucious (162-3, my translation). as if this were not enough, the man is described as emitting ‘a few guttural sounds, like the barking of a dog with a cold’ (164, my translation). in another context, the description could have been quite humorous, but after the accusations about child molestation, it reinforces the negative and racist stereotype. given that the ideal reader for a novel written in spanish was no doubt other latin americans, one can only confirm a general attitude in those days by the majority of ethnicities, including latinos, towards the chinese of the lower east side. it is easy enough here to draw the obvious conclusion that the narrative point of view is class-conscious, racist and bigoted against non-latin americans. but in counterpoint to his criticisms of racism in the new york press, the opportunism of us newspaper reporters (151-7), the atrocious new york slums, especially the bowery (28-35), new york women (250-6), mass culture in the form of the coney island amusement park (257-63) and so forth, the narrator also ridicules what he considers the pomposity and backwardness of a parade of spanish american character types to be found around lower manhattan, whether it is through the rantings of the bombastic don cesareo holding forth about ‘the shameful spectacle of yet another fraticidal war’, which explains why ‘the great nations, driven by a charitable and civilizing spirit, want to conquer us!’ (146, my translation), or the criticisms of the don juanesque pretensions of latin american male immigrants who think that it is a rare woman who can resist their amorous advances once they look into their eyes, though not because they are seduced by youth in bloom, but because they can’t help being fascinated by the way they converse by shouting in a strange language, and because each word is accompanied by all manner of gestures in a tireless gymnastics of hands, arms, legs and feet (222, my translation). this is a most revealing comment: the narrator has adopted one of the formal prejudices of anglo-saxon culture vis-à-vis latinos: ‘they’ speak in agitated discourse animating portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 17 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara their speech with exaggerated bodily movements (still ‘too close’ to nature). a partial distance is established with respect to the cultural traits and mannerisms of the narrator’s own culture (perhaps unconsciously signalling díaz guerra’s own acculturation in the transition from exile to settled immigrant). the latin american dignitaries who flock to the grand hotels of new york in search of some sort of change in their personal circumstance, especially the ‘rich fatcats’ who provide a ‘discordant and comic note’ to the hotel scene, are also subjected to merciless description: having the financial resources necessary to pay the elevated prices, they think they have the right to take all sorts of liberties, making their presence felt by being loud while sitting at the tables in the sumptuous eateries dressed in full campaign regalia, as the saying goes, but without even taking the precaution of washing their hands or shaving, and after making the obligatory spit balls out of bread crumbs and realising how ridiculous they look, they start to use letter openers or toothpicks to clean their nails, not caring about the repugnance such lack of inhibition occasions ... there one can marvel at the mob which arrives with their suitcases full of parade uniforms and three-cornered hats with ostrich feathers, travelling to the united states or in transit to europe to represent their respective governments, who are distinguished by their dark skin and a horrid vulgarity ... it doesn’t matter if their business is commercial, political, religious, social or diplomatic, as regards their conjugal fidelity and thirst for knowledge, they follow the edifying example set by don emeterio [he of the visit to the brothel], with the only difference that given the financial standing of the pupil, they carry out their studies with more richly bound works (240-1, my translation). the graphic description of the excessive satisfaction of bodily impulses toward consumption and sex are positively rabelaisian and over the top, the writer obviously delighting in the vulgarity, irreverence and sheer carnality of the satirical portraits. the narrator goes on to ridicule the rusticity and ignorance of other latinos, too, like the ‘inventors who couldn’t explain why there were no buyers for a patented project like the fabrication of sandals made with banana tree fibre and return to their homeland screaming that the yankees were ignorant’ (233, my translation); or those who: because of ignorance about the mechanism of toilet bowl flushing, were always on the point of flooding the building; and others, who alleged that as they were victims of malaria or had a cold, they couldn’t use flush toilets for fear that being splashed might make them even sicker, and thus demanded ... that they be provided with receptacles more consonant with what they were used at home (243-4, my translation). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 18 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara clerics are also lampooned and in the most sarcastic fashion: members of the ecclesiastical fraternity, generally in transit to rome and without their sacramental clothes, instead of swarming through the doors of temples, sneak quietly and with more eagerness than the most vulgar public into mansions identical to the ones chosen by peñuela in that memorable night when lucas guevara sacrificed his virginity. (233, my translation). what is significant here is that, while the novel pretends to function as a cautionary moral, it nevertheless overflows such functional limits and is transformed into a uniformly negative image of latin americans – for the narrator there is no redemptive dignity or altruism, save for the chaste virgins of paradise lost. even the latin american political radicals who use new york as a base for their activities feel the heat of the narrator’s scorn, as lucas guevara also provides an occasion to contrast how díaz-guerra deals with the condition of exile, in contrast to the likes of josé martí: lucas was honoured with invitations to various hispanic-american clubs, some literary, others political or social, which in general aspired to organize or had organized furious adversaries of yankee imperialism who imagine, perhaps because of some cultural atavism, that it is enough for a citizen of santa catalina to frown such that the government in washington catches its breath, and that availing himself of inflammatory pamphlets, manages to recruit a few dozen tabacco workers or analogous elements so that in the name of the ‘pan american alliance’, the ‘circle of free nations’ or other such titles, swears to defend the privileges of religion and blood, or even of language, for reasons not hard to figure out (244, my translation). the reference to cuban and puerto rican political activists is absolutely clear here. what is going on? let us speculate. the image that comes out of such social satire is wholly pessimistic – there are no counter exceptions, no altruistic political gestures by exiled latin americans. let us also recall that díaz guerra was himself somewhat of a radical in colombia and was ordered to leave venezuela for this very reason. somewhere along the way something has occasioned such disillusion, perhaps the perception that political radicals are part of the problem and not the solution in latin america, or perhaps through the prism of a long residence in the united states his zeal had been tempered. either way, díaz guerra obviously had no compunction about reprising martí’s use of coney island portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 19 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara to write an exemplary chronicle of mass culture in the novel.6 a reading of both martí’s chronicle and the relevant chapter in lucas guevara reveals many similarities, especially an abhorrence of mass cultural entertainment, indeed the massification of society in general. both display a deep ambivalence towards us modernity. as kanellos and hernández point out, in lucas guevara ‘the technological marvels of their “advanced” civilization do away with humanism, dignity and respect. the immigrant is only a beast of burden or “camel” necessary for the physical construction of this technological marvel’ (kanellos & hernández 2001, v-vi, my translation). nor do the parallels with martí end there. in divergent modernities (2001), his magisterial study of the cultural politics of latin america’s nineteenth-century intellectual elites, including their attitude towards the cultural modernity of the united states, julio ramos contends that, in spite of martí’s sense of alienation, he stayed in new york, not only in order to have a base from which to prosecute his revolutionary activities, but also to be near a functioning ‘literary market’ (to use marti’s own words, cited in ramos 2001, 63). paradoxically, therefore, ‘the city, in the very movement that it generated such a ‘crisis’, an ‘alienation’, or ‘exile’, is nevertheless the condition of possibility for the intellectual’s autonomy from traditional institutions, an autonomy that was indispensable for the modern intellectual (in contrast to the letrado or ‘civil’ writer)’ (ramos 2001, 64). no doubt díaz guerra also took advantage of such autonomy to refashion himself, but away from that of the activist letrado to that of the detached, ironic literato. conclusion the historical context for the writing of lucas guevara was the onset of capitalist, socioeconomic modernisation driven by the second industrial revolution, in full swing in the west by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (1880 6 martí’s chronicle on coney island appeared in a bogotá newspaper, la pluma, december 3, 1881 (ramos 2001, 215). díaz guerra would have been 19 years old at the time and given his integration into the lettered culture of colombian journalism and politics, one imagines he read the chronicle and was suitably impressed. portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 20 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara 1914). the united states was in a more advanced industrial stage than any other country at this time, with the possible exception of germany, certainly in its major urban centres and in its combination of democratic and religious freedoms. coupled with a rapidlyexpanding economy and a beneficent immigration policy until the 1920s, it became attractive to immigrants and exiles alike.7 lucas guevara can be regarded, then, as díaz guerra’s aesthetic impulse to recover from, compensate for, or simply come to terms with, the shock of secular, urban modernity and the condition of exile/immigration. embedded within the novel is thus the accumulated experience and observation of a latino flâneur reflecting on urban massification and the impact of technological change on the quality of individual experience. historical studies and memoirs like harry roskolenko’s moving portrait of his jewish childhood on the lower east side in the early decades of the twentieth century corroborate the ambience sketched in díaz guerra’s novel. roskolenko’s description of the jewish exodus from eastern europe to new york doubles for most immigrants: all of them were seeking the goldeneh medina – the golden land – within a few square miles of the lower east side. but what they found became new york’s triumphs and tragedies of reckless architecture, sudden slums, terrible factories – and the high-rises that still signify rush, hurry, ghetto gutting, and today’s city living and dying from every pore (roskolenko 1971, 5). that díaz guerra has lucas guevara throw himself off the brooklyn bridge, that symbol of modernity in the novel’s finale, echoes the difficult relationship with modernity that many latin americans would henceforth have, whether in the united states or at home. equally significant, of course, is that díaz guerra himself eventually managed to accommodate to the circumstances, as many exiles and immigrants eventually do. along with this socio-economic modernisation came cultural change, not only in the arts, but in social behaviour, especially in relation to changing sexual mores: secular humanism and the discovery of sensuality, eroticism and furtive love in the civil life of the mushrooming capital cities. the period when díaz guerra arrives in new york also coincided with the boom of modernismo, the first authentically literary-cultural 7 ‘in fifteen years, between 1899 and 1914, more than one million and a half immigrants came to ellis island – and most remained in new york’ (roskolenko 1971, 18). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 21 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara movement to be generated in latin america and subsequently to be transplanted to spain. its new aesthetic left díaz guerra’s poetry writing untouched, he being still mired in style and content in a sentimental romanticism. but neither was he accepting of modernismo’s libertine sexual politics, which everywhere was invading souls, especially among liberals. thus the accumulated images of eroticism that are expressed through the narrative voice in lucas guevara are consistent with the commonplace perception on the part of latin americans, especially immigrant writers, about the predatory and emasculating potential of us women vis-à-vis latino males. there is therefore a conventional (in terms of immigrant literature) movement of attraction/rejection of modernity and its sensuality: their appeal, but also the anxiety they unleash. this tension between attraction and repulsion is nicely captured in a most revealing aside towards the end of the novel, when the narrator in apologetic mode attempts to explain why guevara cannot resist temptations that lead to disaster: it would not be entirely justified to place the full weight of guilt upon the misfortunate lad [guevara], above all if one keeps in mind that in the overpowering milieu in which he was spinning, one needs nerves of steel to withstand the trial by fire of the myriad temptations that lay siege to mortals, and like the nymphs in faust’s dream, there is no corner where they don’t entice with their gratifying sensations (díaz guerra 2001, 299, my translation). the problem should be obvious: even the narrator finds it hard to resist – all latinos are doomed to succumb to the corrupting influence of secular modernity. aside from its uniqueness as the first known novel of latin american immigration to the united states written in spanish, lucas guevara has sociological value because it is a not only a witness to the metropolis of new york in one of its most expansive phases, but also to an incipient women’s liberation from traditional sexual roles, which highlights the way secular modernity unleashes both desire and social mobility. furthermore, it draws attention, in almost laboratory fashion, to the assault on latino male subjectivity, at least that of an elite creole exile-cum-immigrant. male exiles found themselves living in a society which protected their freedoms of expression and assembly, but which embodied values alien to supposedly more traditional latino conceptions of family values, portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 22 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara including filial piety, female chastity, and masculinist codes of honour. though it is always risky to equate narrative point of view with that of the author, implied or otherwise, nevertheless the accumulative logic of lucas guevara seems to strongly suggest that with the passing years, díaz guerra himself was able to distance himself from both the host culture and his own, while acknowledging the positive in both: the practical knowledge and technological achievements of the united states (and there are certainly positive references to the country’s achievements and freedoms); and the ‘more authentic’ values of latinos, though as we have seen, these are no where to be found in the new york of lucas guevara. the composite perspective or world view that seems to issue from the narrative voice, then, is that of suitably chastened and detached, cultured intellectual who looks upon life in general in an ironic and mocking way. furthermore, the image of the narrator does indeed seem to be an instance of a ‘mordacious and moralizing satire ... [which] reinforces the rejection of anglo-american culture and the conservation of the hispanic-american identity of the immigrants’ (xv, my translation), as kanellos and hernández claim. the life of the lower east side in the novel, therefore, parallels a real-life both then and now in new york and the united states in general: the desire to assimilate immigrants to the dominant cultural ethos and the immigrant’s resistance to, or difficult negotiation of, such homogenising tendencies. the literature of immigration of this period stands out for its thematization at times satirical and critical of the problems encountered by the minority immigrant (especially southern italians, eastern european jews, chinese and mexicans), including labour exploitation and racial and cultural discrimination.8 in face of such hostility, native language and culture and conservative values are doubly asserted and confirmed. as kanellos points out, historically one of the functions of latin american literature and periodicals in the us was to ‘protect hispanic language, culture and values’ (kanellos 2000, 69) even if those values were masculinist: 8 alan kraut: ‘the late nineteenth century brought to the united states millions of catholics and jews and darker-skinned people, duskier complexions, many of them in much greater levels of poverty than those who had come at an earlier time. the result is that there was a tremendous belief on the part of american nativists that these newcomers were of inferior stock, that they simply were not as good as the western and northern europeans that had come at an earlier time . . .’. http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/kraut.htm portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 23 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara these authors assign responsibility for preserving hispanic language and customs and thus protecting identity to latina women: thus they punish them severely when they adopt the liberal customs of the anglo-saxons or dare to behave like ‘bitches’’ (kanellos 2002, xxxv, my translation). modernity unlocks what has always been an uneasy and fragile divide between the sexual self and the spiritual self, a divide that seems difficult to bridge within the precepts of orthodox religions. this unresolved tension is often displaced onto convenient scapegoats: licentious women, other cultures, or simply modernity. when these tensions are combined with the condition of exile or immigration, they can become volatile, or simply lead to welcome change. díaz guerra seems to be one exile who largely made his peace with his adopted country, if not with modern sexuality, though such a transformation was obviously made possible by his privileged starting point – the social and cultural capital accumulated though his patrician upbringing. thus, even though lucas guevara touches on exilic themes of loss, isolation, incarceration, and exploitation as its protagonist descends into social and moral ruin, díaz guerra’s ethnic and racist profiling of jews, chinese, dark-skinned people and anglosaxons and his position as a privileged creole elite, distances him (and his fictional, middle-class student protagonist) from the more typical trajectory of the hundreds of thousands of underclass latino immigrants, exiles, and political refugees who flooded into the us over the course of the twentieth century. though he arrived in the us with probably very little economic capital, díaz guerra nevertheless possessed enough class status to obtain work as a correspondent for several spanish american newspapers, to secure a senior sales position with an international pharmaceutical company, to even act as director of the colombian information office in new york, evidence that he had largely resolved his differences with the colombian conservative government and had been transformed from exile to confirmed immigrant. he belongs, then, to a particular fraction of a displaced, educated latino creole elite, and one moreover with a decidedly conservative cast of mind, nostalgic for the loss of status and legislative hegemony that attached to them within the class and gendered social hierarchies in their home countries, portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 24 browitt díaz guerra’s lucas guevara a loss that becomes sublimated into the puritanical and overweening moralism of catholic conservatism. reference list díaz guerra, alirio (1933), diez años en venezuela, editorial élite, caracas. —— (2001) lucas guevara, intro.n. kanellos & i. hernández, arte público press, houston. erenberg, lewis (1981), stepping out: new york nightlife and the transformation of american culture, 1890-1930, university of chicago press, chicago. kanellos, nicolás, (unpublished manuscript) ‘la expresión cultural de los inmigrantes mexicanos en los estados unidos, desde el porfiriato hasta la depresión’. —— (2002), ‘panorama de la literatura hispana de los estados unidos’ en kanellos, nicolás et al. (2002) en otra voz: antología de la literatura hispana de los estados unidos, arte publico press, houston. —— & martell, helvetia (2000), hispanic periodicals in the united states: origins to 1960. houston: arte público press, houston. —— & hernández, imra l (2001), ‘introducción. lucas guevara: la primera novela de inmigración hispana a los estados unidos’, en díaz guerra, alirio lucas guevara, arte público press, houston. —— et al. (2002), en otra voz: antología de la literatura hispana de los estados unidos, arte público press, houston. kraut, alan, interview, available at http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/kraut.htm. accessed november 3, 2004. maffi, mario (1995), gateway to the promised land: ethnic cultures in new york’s lower east side, new york university press, new york & london. ramos, julio (2001), divergent modernities: culture and politics in nineteenth-century latin america, trans. by john d. blanco, duke university press,durham & london. roskolenko, harry (1971), the time that was then. the lower east side: 1900-1913 – an intimate chronicle, dial press, new york. simmel, georg ([1903] 2002), ‘the metropolis and mental life’ in gary bridge & sophie watson (eds), the blackwell city reader, blackwell, london. zorilla, josé (1844), don juan tenorio (play). portal vol. 2, no. 1 january 2005 25 http://www.pbs.org/fmc/interviews/kraut.htm jeff browitt, institute for international studies, universit conclusion portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 2023 © 2023 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: chan, s. k.-l. 2023. migration, brokerage and recruitment: socio-cultural factors surrounding thai phinoy undocumented migrant workers in south korea. portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 19:1/2, 8–23. https:// doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v19i12.7680 issn 1449-2490 | published by uts epress | http://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/ portal general article (peer reviewed) migration, brokerage and recruitment: socio-cultural factors surrounding thai phi-noy undocumented migrant workers in south korea steve kwok-leung chan corresponding author: steve kwok-leung chan, assistant professor of sociology, keimyung university, daegu 42601, south korea, stevec@kmu.ac.kr doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v19i1-2.7680 article history: received 12/04/2021; accepted 17/01/2023; published 22/05/2021 abstract this study investigates the phenomenon of unskilled labour migration facilitated by private intermediaries in south korea from a socio-cultural perspective of migration. the research was conducted using a qualitative approach, including semi-structured interviews with thai undocumented workers in daegu, as well as a supplementary trip to bangkok, thailand to explore the migration origin. the study examines the process of documented and undocumented labour migration in the context of the culture of migration. the findings help to explain why more thai workers choose to work undocumented in south korea compared to other southeast asian nationals. these undocumented migrant workers are known as “phi-noy” in thai slang which means “little ghosts”. formal or informal agencies or brokers are very popular in thailand though excluded in south korea’s employment permit system. these intermediaries still play a role in the brokerage of labour migration into south korea. the study aims to provide a better understanding of the labour migration process and the existing empirical research on the culture of migration, including the brokerage role of labour recruitment agencies. keywords culture of migration; informal broker; labour recruitment agency; undocumented migrant worker(s); thailand; south korea 8 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v19i1-2.7680 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v19i1-2.7680 https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v19i1-2.7680 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal mailto:stevec@kmu.ac.kr https://doi.org/10.5130/pjmis.v19i1-2.7680 1. introduction labour migration is a popular research topic in the era of globalisation due to the increasing movement of people across international borders, which is a result of the interconnectedness of nations, economies, cultures, and transnational activities. south korea is a mature economy facing population ageing and a labour shortage and has responded by gradually adjusting its foreign labour policy by opening its door to more migrant workers, including the signing of memoranda of understanding with 16 southeast asian countries to ensure that the labour migratory process strictly follows a well-designed employment permit system (eps). despite excluding private agencies from the application procedure, private agencies and individual brokers have flourished, particularly in the case of thai workers, who also frequently work undocumented in south korea by taking advantage of a 90-day visa exemption for thai passport holders. thai workers enter south korea for sightseeing but overstay and breach the conditions of their visa. while existing literature covers a wide range of topics related to the migration process, empirical research addressing the culture of migration is rare. this research seeks to address this gap by exploring cultural factors that may help to explain why more thai workers choose to work undocumented in south korea compared to other southeast asian nationals. formal or informal agencies or brokers are very popular in thailand and it is therefore worth closely examining their role in the brokerage of labour migration. despite previous studies on the role of intermediaries, their aspirations have rarely been connected to the culture of migration, making this research unique in its approach. by filling this gap, the study aims to provide a better understanding of the labour migration process and the brokerage role of labour recruitment agencies. 2. methodology the aim of this research was to investigate the role of private agencies or brokers in the labour migration process of thai undocumented workers in south korea. specifically, the study sought to understand why korea’s employment permit system fails to exclude private agencies or brokers from the migratory process. how do these agencies or brokers attract and facilitate thai workers to come without going through the formal procedure? and does the culture of thai migration draw them to the undocumented path of labour migration? the qualitative research design consisted of a semi-structured interviews as the primary method of data collection, supplemented with key informants’ interviews and archive research. the initial key informants’ interviews were conducted in bangkok and several cities in korea. several thai ngos on labour and development were interviewed in 2018, including the pattanarak foundation, the human rights development foundation, and the labor rights promotion network. the author also visited the asia center of migration research, chulalongkorn university in bangkok to meet with researchers who had recently conducted empirical research on the management of thai labour out-migration. in south korea, various trade unions and ngos were approached, including the korean confederation of trade unions, the osan migrants workers culture center, the sungseo industrial complex trade union, and the women migrant human rights center in daegu. these visits enabled the author to gain a better understanding of the empirical situation of undocumented workers in korea and the role of migration agencies in the process. in addition to interviews, the author conducted archive research on eight facebook groups and seven pages related to undocumented workers and labour recruitment agencies. these groups and pages were searched using the keyword “ผ-ีนอ้ย kr” (or romanized as phi-noy kr) which literally means ‘little ghosts in south korea,’ a term used to allegorically represent undocumented labourers. it included three open groups set up by thai undocumented workers in south korea for connection and sharing and five closed groups created by labour recruitment agencies to target clients in thailand. the closed groups needed the hosts’ approval to be accessed, which helps these intermediaries maintain a low profile to hide information chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 20239 from the authorities and the general public. the other seven facebook pages contained general information and experiences of undocumented working in south korea and included messages to recruit prospective undocumented workers to use the services of these agencies or brokers. further contact was needed to add the hosts’ line (instant messenger) account. all these groups and pages are in the thai language. table 1 summarises the type and titles of these facebook pages. table 1. the type and titles of “phi-noy kr” facebook groups & pages title of facebook groups & pages type 1 labor in south korea, the life of phi-noy open group 2 phi-noy sk: garden work, hotel work, farm work open group 3 healthy, strong, wealthy, the news of phi-noy sk open group 4 thai workers in south korea, the life of phi-noy closed group 5 free work, not free work, phi-noy escaping immigrants in south korea closed group 6 find a job in south korea to all phi-noy closed group 7 know the news of phi-noy sk closed group 8 phi-noy sk turning crisis into opportunity closed group 9 search for jobs in south korea, job guarantee, high-paid jobs page 10 south korea work, good work, well-paid, accommodation provided, take care of all the journey, training provided for passing the immigration page 11 money for sure, work for sure in south korea, book a tour page 12 work in south korea: farm, factory, garden page 13 find workers to work in korea page 14 looking for a job in korea, thai-to-korea delivery page 15 looking for a job in south korea: garden, farm & factory; selling air tickets page source: produced by the author (accessed in april to june 2019) the study conducted semi-structured interviews with thai undocumented workers in south korea, with a focus on the role of private agencies or brokers in the labour migration process. the researcher initially recruited interviewees through the sungseo industrial complex trade union and a thai worker from an ngo concerning women migrant workers in daegu. additional interviewees were found through snowball sampling. a semi-structured questionnaire that guided the interviews consisted of four sections covering job and visa status, job searching and agency, hardship in korea, details of undocumented experience and the interviewees’ demographic information. repeat interviews were conducted for shortlisted interviewees for clarification and further probing into their situations and experiences as undocumented workers. bilingual korean and thai students, speaking both korean and english, or thai and english, were hired as translators during the interviews, transcription, and translation of the website(s) and thai documents. all the interviews were conducted anonymously to protect the privacy of the interviewees. eighteen thai undocumented workers were interviewed in daegu in 2019 and their personal particulars are not disclosed chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 202310 in this paper to ensure their anonymity. the interviewees’ background is listed in the appendix at the end of this paper (appendix 1). 3. literature review 3.1 the culture of migration although some studies have employed cultural factors to explain migration trends, little research connects it with migration intermediaries. by examining the migration culture of a specific group or community, a broader picture of the causes can be provided by including the ‘history and socio-cultural setting of the movers’ (cohen 2011: 2). the culture of migration includes ‘those ideas, practices and cultural artefacts that reinforce the celebration of migration and migrants. this includes beliefs, desire, symbols, myths, education, celebrations of migration in various media, and material goods’ (ali 2007: 39). the sustainment of the migrant flow in a sending community occurs because a culture or practice becomes established over time. many younger members of the community follow in their predecessors’ footsteps. previous migrants act as role models (kandel & massey 2002). their decent earnings and frequent remittances become a ‘demonstration effect’ to promote the labour flow (galam 2015: 141). these material gains subsequently turn into consumer behaviours and fixed assets for the left behind family members and return migrants, who build new houses, buy large plots of farmland, and are willing to spend money for a better standard of living. in a study of the mexican culture of migration into the usa, wilson (2010) emphasises the social relationships at the sending origin, suggesting householding1 and ‘reciprocity networks based on social, kinship and ritual kinship ties’ (415) constitute the driving forces for the out-migration. conflict can also be a driving force for out-migration, as perceived insecurity over time can lead to the development of a culture of migration (sirkeci & cohen 2016). kandel & massey (2002) claim that the migration experience is the rite of passage in the migration origin, becoming a challenge that the younger generation must undergo to move on to another life stage. peers leave their community, usually in a group, sharing their overseas experience during long holiday sojourns back home, or tell their stories to other community members when they relocate back to the migration origin years later. those who do not pass through this challenge may be regarded by others as ‘lazy, unenterprising, and undesirable’ in the community (kandel & massey 2002: 982). however, a study on rural youth in post-cold war romania found that these young people were less willing to further their studies at a tertiary college when the local labour market became precarious. they tried to explore the external labour market, not for the ‘[proof ] of adult-like abilities, but to prolong the transition to adulthood’ (horvath 2008: 783). moreover, the cultural factors that gradually accumulate in the communities of origin are not limited to material things such as remittances and capital brought back by the migrants. this cultural fact consists of new artefacts, habits, skills, ideas and entrepreneurship learnt or developed in the destinations (horvath 2008). these incoming mentalities may bring along corresponding adjustments to value systems in their hometown, leading to the shifts in lifestyle, economic modernisation, a rise of individualism, and wider aspects of social change. the returnees bring along these changes, which may happen in a more dynamic sense as migrants communicate back home through transnational social space. the flourishing of social media benefitting from the advancement in technology in the internet age, facilitates the maintenance of transnational connections and communication. however, frequent contacts between emigrants and their hometowns may or may not promote migration aspirations. van mol et al. (2017) found no significant difference between people living in highand low-migration-sending regions in ukraine regarding 1 ‘householding’ is a process of capitalist economy that forces subsistence farmers to abandon their farms and migrate to cities where they become ‘wage-labourers’ and earn money to finance their farming expenses and to pay rent back home in the sending origin (wilson 2010: 410-411). chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 202311 migration aspiration. another similar study in turkey showed that contacts might produce negative feedback that discouraged emigration in times of economic downturn in europe because there exists an identified culture of migration at the sending origin (timmerman et al. 2014). the desire to work overseas is often instilled in younger generations in labour-sending countries through a gradual development of migration norms. the migrants themselves can serve as an intermediary or broker of these norms, beliefs and practices, facilitating the diffusion of the migration culture. many returnees act as migration brokers, providing valuable information and services to prospective migrants in their home communities. usually, those who possess bilingual skills, maintain connections across country borders, and are familiar with the receiving country, are highly qualified to perform the brokerage role. these private brokers have the knowledge, connections, and client base to run the microbusinesses (sakaew & tangpratchakoon 2009). migration intermediaries can be sizable, profit-making firms, unofficial or licensed, usually taking the form of a labour recruitment agent. almost all of them offer a wide range of services to prospective migrants or migrant workers, from documentation, language training, transportation, jobmatching, and for some, even remittances (chantavanich 2008; chan 2018, 2022). the labour recruitment industry has become a lucrative market for many individuals, companies, and organisations. in recent decades, the industry has seen a surge in profit-making agencies, both official and unofficial, that offers services to prospective and current migrants (lindquist et al. 2012). the international labor organization (chantavanich 2008) recommends the institutionalisation of the labour migration process through the formulation of a memorandum of understanding (mou) between the labour-sending and labour-receiving countries. with an mou, the two governments may set quotas and criteria for the importation of migrant workers, establish application procedures for employers and employees, and even licence official agents to recruit and provide pre-departure training, arrange transportation and handle documentation, to prospective migrant workers. however, many migrant workers still rely on informal channels to enter and work in receiving countries. thailand has both licensed agencies and informal brokers in its labour immigration and emigration industry. existing literature rarely associates the role of these brokers in facilitating the formation of the migration culture in labour-sending communities. 3.2 korean employment permit system south korea is a mature economy experiencing an ageing population and labour shortage. in order to tackle these challenges, unskilled foreign labourers are imported into the country. the industrial trainee scheme (its), a quasi-labour migration program, was established and enforced from 1992 to 2006 but was criticised for exploiting ‘trainees’ as cheap labour for unskilled 3ds work. the its was subsequently replaced by an employment permit system (eps) in 2003, with a limited quota of migrant workers and a list of eligible industry sectors that include agriculture and stockbreeding, fishery, construction, and manufacturing. companies employing less than 300 regular workers are allowed to hire foreign workers.2 from the onset, the eps tried to close the loopholes of the former its by excluding agencies from the application process (hahn & choi 2006) leaving the korean government to administer all steps of the application process, from applying in the sending countries to arriving in south korea (eps, n.d.). to be eligible for the eps, prospective migrant workers from the 16 labour-sending countries that have signed a memorandum of understanding (mou) with south korea must pass in advance the test of proficiency in korean (epstopik), a korean language examination whose result is valid for two years. however, the examination does not guarantee a job in korea as applicants are put in a pool for korean employers to consider (oecd 2019). about 962,000 migrant workers have come to work in south korea under the eps, many of whom 2 about 45 percent of the companies participating in the eps have fewer than four employees and another 20 percent are small enterprises with five to nine workers only (cho et al. 2018). chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 202312 work in low-paying jobs in small companies (kim 2016). before the covid-19 pandemic, the estimated number of unregistered immigrants was 356,095, or 14.9% of the 2,379,805 foreign residents in south korea (lee 2019).3 3.3 migrant workers from thailand thailand is one of the countries that have signed an mou to send workers to korea. in fact, thailand is both a labour-sending and labour-receiving country in the region. despite having a working-age population of about 55.8 million, of which 37.9 million are available for work, population ageing and increases in salary level have encouraged en masse import labour from neighbouring countries (national statistics office, thailand 2019). in 2018, thailand had an estimated 3.9 million migrants, mainly from cambodia, lao pdr, myanmar and vietnam (harkins 2019). of these, about 3 million people came from myanmar with approximately 2.2 million people undocumented workers registering officially in thailand by the end of 2018 (nyein 2018). cambodians were the second-largest group of migrants in thailand, after the myanmarese, with about 750,000 people working in thailand and 350,840 registered (kijewski 2018). it should be noted that the status of ‘registered’ is not equal to holding a ‘work permit’ in thailand. the formal procedure, according to the mous signed between thailand and its three neighbouring countries, should be applied in their country of origin before working in thailand. however, there have been more than three million undocumented workers smuggled into thailand or overstaying their work permits, leading to temporary measures of registration and country verification being adopted in 2017–18, similar to the asylum offered in thailand. for decades, several million undocumented myanmarese and cambodians have crossed the border to enter and work in thailand and were tolerated by the thai government due to economic pragmatism, accepting undocumented foreign workers to ease the labour shortage of the country. although various studies have been undertaken into in-migrant workers in thailand, out-migrant workers who went to work in other countries are seldom addressed in existing research. smutkupt’s (2014) research note on his fieldwork in a designated ‘multicultural zone’ for migrant workers in south korea provides some information on the undocumented working experience in the destination. it is a case study of a thai national who initially worked as documented in korea and subsequently became an undocumented migrant worker. one reason for this switching from documented to undocumented workers is the korean government setting a ceiling to limit the duration of their stay. the typical practice is that upon the contract expiring, the originally documented worker overstays and becomes undocumented. the undocumented workers call themselves a khon phi, literally ‘ghost person’ which means an undocumented migrant worker hiding like a ghost in the hosting society. the latest figures show that about 25,000 thais work in south korea under the employment permit system (eps), but an estimated 140,000 thai labourers are undocumented (charoensuthipan 2022). to understand how the culture of working overseas is aspired, one must consider it is a two-way process. on the one hand, the involvement of a migration broker facilitates the build-up of the prospective migrants’ nonmaterial desire, which is ‘a process from initial desire creation to motivation accumulation and then, transformation into a concrete plan’ (chan, 2022). on the other hand, prospective migrants under economic pressure turn to such services to actualise the move, even though they may not be eligible for a work permit. a comprehensive study of both documented and undocumented migrant workers using korean brokers found that brokers play a role during the migratory process despite the existing eps mechanism purposively excluding them (laodamrongchai 2016). despite the existence of legal application channels, many thai workers migrate to work undocumented in korea. they are all unskilled workers working in the agricultural sector, small factories, and thai massage parlours. they take advantage of the 90-day tourist visa exemption 3 the latest figure recorded a total of 395,068 undocumented foreign nationals living in korea. the increase could be the result of individuals being stranded in the country during the covid-19 pandemic (lee 2022). chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 202313 to enter the country, pretending to be tourists, but going straight to the workplace. some work for less than 90 days and leave the country without breaching the law, but most others overstay from several years to over ten years. workers who are residing and working illegally will not be afforded protection under the korean labor protection act, nor will they receive any health benefits. how do prospective undocumented workers entering korea manage to find employment and bypass immigration control? according to research by laodamrongchai (2016), three common methods were identified: independent travel, joining a package tour, and travelling with a broker. first of all, those who are well-connected with friends and relatives in korea often travel in small groups of two or three persons. to avoid suspicion at immigration, they dress and pack like genuine tourists, carry round-trip air tickets, print out hotel booking confirmations and carry sightseeing brochures to create the impression that they are legitimate tourists. many workers of this type have previous working experience abroad and are able to communicate in limited english. the second type of workers join either a genuine package tour, or a labour recruitment agency that operates a travel agency for its clients. package tours are a good cover for those who lack connections and cannot speak english or korean. upon arrival, they inform the tour guide that they will not be joining the itinerary as they will stay with friends or relatives in korea. for those recruitment agencies that also run a travel agency, they coordinate not only transportation but also provide job-matching services for their clients (laodamrongchai 2016). the last type of worker requires a broker to accompany them in-person from thailand to korea. many of these thai workers are employed in the agricultural sector, small factories and thai massage parlours. whether they are sizable recruitment agencies or sole-proprietors who serve as brokers for labour migration, these intermediaries primarily rely on social media to advertise their services. they prepare all the documents, brochures and logistics required for the journey into the country: the broker usually takes these workers in small groups of five to eight people with the thai broker or sometimes a korean broker travels with them […] [i]n case the korean immigration officer at the airport is suspicious of these thais, the korean broker’s presence and answering helps to ease the officer’s doubts [hence there is more chance for smuggling these workers through the immigration check]. (laodamrongchai 2016) in fact, overstaying a visa and working without proper documentation in a country constitutes a violation of immigration and labour laws, which may result in fines, imprisonment, and repatriation. however, both thailand and south korea appear to tolerate these undocumented workers to alleviate their labour shortages. consequently, both societies have effectively decriminalised undocumented workers, treating their actions as ‘illegal but licit.’ the author uses the term ‘licit’ to describe such acts as minor offenses or necessary evils that can be morally tolerated in order to achieve a more pressing objective. this study aimed to review the eps of south korea, with a specific focus on thai undocumented migrant workers. the author acknowledges the common use of private agents by these thai workers even though the eps purposively excludes these intermediaries from taking part. the research findings contribute to our understanding of the relationship among culture of migration, private agents, undocumented workers and the eps. does the culture of migration in thailand exacerbate the influx of undocumented workers? do these popular labour recruitment agencies facilitate this culture and facilitate labour migration? 4. findings 4.1 information from social media social media is the main source of information for prospective thai workers who desire to work in south korea. many of them learn of these agencies or brokers from facebook and online forums in thailand (such chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 202314 as the popular pantip forum). they either search for these facebook groups on their own or are referred to them by their thai friends or relatives. when they search for the keyword phi-noy meaning ‘little ghost’ (in thai: ผ-ีนอ้ย), these sites appear. phi-noy is an open-secret keyword used to refer to working undocumented overseas via the services of an agency. the agencies’ facebook pages are not open to the public and access approval is required. for the open facebook groups reviewed in this study the hosts were not necessarily brokers but rather shared their undocumented working experience in south korea and provided a platform for further information seeking and discussion. closed facebook groups serve as the virtual office of agencies and brokers to recruit clients who opt to use their services. the agencies’ facebook pages generally advertise available jobs and conditions in south korea. for further contact, details of the service and cost, one needs to contact them via line. we acknowledge that social media offers a transnational social space that connects prospective workers in thailand with undocumented workers currently in south korea, as well as connecting thai workers with migration business intermediaries. the author was able to gain access to one of the closed facebook groups, ‘free work, not free work, phi-noy escaping immigrants in south korea,’ believed to be hosted by a labour recruitment agency. the company operates like a travel agency and provides air ticket booking services, as well as organised package tours to south korea and other countries. but many of the posts were actually job advertisements for the recruitment of migrant workers. for example, one post advertised a small restaurant’s need for a migrant worker, as shown in table below (table 2). table 2. example of an advertisement on a facebook group4 item job description and requirement title small restaurant in central part of south korea recruiting one female worker duties washing dishes, cutting vegetables, preparation work in the kitchen and serving in the sitting area requirement female below 30 years old salary 1,500,000 krw per month (us$1,247) working hours 07.00 ~ 21.00 (break-time 15.00 ~ 16.30), day off every saturday other benefits free accommodation at the restaurant and free meals supplied charge job allocation fee + local transportation (one time, from the airport to the workplace) = 250,000 krw (us$208) contact let’s get people ready to move. interested parties, please chat with us. source: the table presented by the author was based on information obtained from the facebook group found at https:// www.facebook.com/groups/1664843747120423/?ref=br_rs (accessed on february 9 2019). the facebook pages were explicitly posting recruitment ads, which were clearly shown on their page titles, including ‘south korea work, good work, well-paid, accommodation provided, take care of all the journey, training provided for passing the immigration,’ ‘money for sure, work for sure in south korea, book a tour,’ ‘looking for a job in korea, thai-to-korea delivery.’ the content of the ads consisted of flowery words aimed at convincing the reader to enlist their services in order to find jobs in south korea. 4 the author presented the original advertisement, which was in bullet point format, in a table for improved readability. furthermore, the facebook group post advertising the workplace included a picture, which was translated into thai and english by the thai research assistant involved in this project. chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 202315 https://www.facebook.com/groups/1664843747120423/?ref=br_rs https://www.facebook.com/groups/1664843747120423/?ref=br_rs for instance, on the ‘work in south korea: farm, factory, garden’ facebook page, the page administrator stated: ‘our job pool always has job openings for everyone ready to travel […] what kind of work? farm work, gardening, factories, restaurants, hotels, etc.’ another facebook page with the title ‘looking for a job in south korea: garden, farm, & factory, selling air tickets’ advertised its full range of services and job guarantee, including: going to work is on a voluntary basis of the commuters; no one forces you. the travel cost is 60,000 thai baht [us$1,958] per person, including all expenditure in thailand, such as an air ticket, the tuition for training, hotel/accommodation [in bangkok] before the trip, and documentation fee […] 30,000 thai baht [us$979] down-payment to be paid before departure from thailand, and the remaining 30,000 thai baht [us$979] to be paid upon arrival in south korea [after passing through immigration] […] free airport pick up and bring you directly to the workplace. no need to wait for a job, a job is waiting for you there. many of these pages feature the success stories of former clients, including photos taken on passing through immigration in a south korean airport, and photos of their workplaces and living quarters in south korea, which help to build up the confidence of the readers. some of the photos’ captions include ‘from the flight this morning,’ ‘greeting our customers on their safe arrival,’ ‘after passing through immigration, we don’t waste time, bringing clients to go shopping, open a bank account and sending them to the factory.’ they even provide ‘passing through immigration training,’ which includes tips on appearance, dressing, and list of standard q&a to help clients pass through immigration without korean language proficiency. however, it is important to note that korean language proficiency is a basic requirement for the application through eps. these facebook pages make it seems as though passing illegally into south korea is simple and accessible. for example, the ‘looking for a korean job with thai-korea delivery’ facebook page advertised their ‘business trip’ as follows: two more vacancies [...] we have organized a “business meeting” with a company in south korea for you to go on a business trip, with high credibility. anyone ready to fly can chat with me. the owner of our company will also fly with you on this business trip […] 25,000 thai baht [us$816] for the flight ticket and 45,000 thai baht [us$1,469] for the job referral fee. the information posted on facebook pages offering illegal migration services is often quite misleading and deceptive. they exaggerate potential incomes and minimise the risk of working undocumented in an overseas country, leaving prospective migrant workers with an incomplete and unrealistic understanding of the situation. 4.2 prefer an agent to eps the study found that interviewees who desired to work undocumented in south korea skipped the legal application procedure of the eps, and instead many turned to private agents. the author identified several reasons for this including: 1) unwillingness to learn the korean language, 2) lack of confidence in their ability to pass the eps-topik examination, 3) no desire to wait for job allocation, 4) flexible financial arrangements, 5) the freedom to choose a job, 6) being over the eligible age of 40, and 7) the exclusion of small businesses and some industries5 from the eps. the eps procedure is lengthy and takes about half a year to allocate a job after the applicant has passed the eps examination in their home country. the prospective migrant workers in this study were generally less educated individuals who were unwilling to attend classes and sit for a test. 5 the eps accepts only five industrial sectors in which foreign workers can be employed, namely 1) manufacturing, 2) construction, 3) agriculture and breeding, 4) fisheries and 5) the service sector. chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 202316 i followed initially the eps application procedure, passed the examination but no korean employer chose me. more farm jobs were available but i prefer factory jobs. the examination result was valid for two years only. after it expired, i had to sit for the examination again. so i switched to an agent. (a female interviewee who had been working for 5 years in south korea) [s/n# 4] the individuals in question are a low-income group, often working in precarious jobs, serving on their family’s farms, or unemployed when in thailand. due to their financial situation, they prefer not to wait for an extended period for a job to be allocated to them in south korea through the formal eps procedure. while the cost of complying with the formal eps procedure is relatively inexpensive with tuition fees for language classes and examination fees costing about 30,000 to 40,000 thai baht (us$984–$1,312), many workers opt for private agencies instead. these agencies typically charge a down-payment of about 40,000 to 60,000 thai baht (us$1,312–$1,969), which covers the cost of the worker’s airfare and all-inclusive services, with the remaining amount deducted from the worker’s salary in instalments. some brokers take advantage of these workers by seizing their passport and even atm cards to prevent them from running away and not paying back the debt. although the lower immediate cost of the eps compared to agency fees, almost all agents provide flexible financial arrangements that allow their clients to pay a down-payment, with the remainder of the agency fee being deducted directly from their salary. south korean jobs generally offer a decent salary, and some individuals even choose to immediately enter the country as a tourist and get a job through an agent. the salary earned during the first few months is enough to cover the agency fee. moreover, undocumented workers are free to choose their jobs, whereas under the eps program, korean employers select the workers, not the other way around. also, undocumented workers are free to change jobs as they wish, while eps regulations allow for only a maximum of three job changes, which require the former korean employer’s signed approval for release. some korean employers take advantage of undocumented workers by not paying them any wages. in such cases, the workers are left with no option but to leave the job which could result in their deportation if reported to the authorities (sn#4, s/n#8). temporary jobs and small enterprises that are excluded from the eps also offer opportunities for undocumented workers. for example, farms may need additional manpower during the harvest season and may hire some undocumented workers to work for a few months before moving on to other jobs. however, there might be hidden costs that ultimately result in undocumented workers paying more than they anticipated: i initially paid 35,000 thai baht [us$1,142], then another 25,000 thai baht [us$] upon getting a job [which could be paid by instalment from the salary during the first few months]; if i change job, the first time, an additional 25,000 thai baht [us$816] will be charged by the agent and subsequently 200,000 to 500,000 krw each [us$166 to us$416] […] i have been in korea for one year but changed jobs several times: strawberry farm first, then vegetable garden, then another strawberry farm […] if i keep on changing job, i will earn no wage. [the case of an interviewee, s/n#3] 4.3 a casual decision for the move while working overseas ought to be a serious decision that requires careful consideration, some individuals are pressured to come by their partners, even if they have no desire to go. as a result, they leave in a rush, without a plan. a 33-year-old male interviewee talked about his story as follows: i have been working in south korea undocumented for 3 years. it was my wife who wanted to come [to work in south korea] but i didn’t want to. her sister came here first and mentioned that the salary was good.[…] we didn’t have much time to prepare [for the move], the eps process takes chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 202317 too long and sometimes you may not even get a job allocated [so, i used a broker instead]. she went back to thailand last year to take care of our kid. [s/n#10] for others, the decision is made in a rush without considering the costs, benefits, and risks. their decision is often based on hearsay and emotional factors rather than comprehensive information checks. these incautious individuals may not have a clear plan for what they will do once they arrive overseas and simply just wait and see what happens: my friend who is also an undocumented worker in south korea suggested that i come. my facebook friend recommended me for a job here; we are casual friends only. they said this way (undocumented) is faster so i tried […] [the author asked about his plan] i don’t know; i can’t answer […] i feel strange and a bit excited here; i’m just trying it out; it’s just fun here. (the interviewee is a male, 26 years old, primary school level educated). [s/n#12] some individuals embark on their journey to work overseas with little consideration or planning, treating it almost like a short vacation. they may hastily look for a broker and pack their luggage without fully weighing the potential risks and benefits. the decision to go or not go may seem just a whim. one of the interviewees, a 32-year-old masseuse shared her dramatic journey with the author: i worked in a massage parlour in malaysia before, and then i went back to thailand. i decided to work overseas again, and this time, in south korea. i searched for information on the web and found a broker. i paid the agency fee by crediting his bank account and headed to the airport in bangkok, but the broker did not show up. i was cheated and lost my money. i immediately searched on the internet again at the airport and found another broker. i left on the same day to south korea and work in the present massage parlour. [s/n#14] not all masseuses’ experience is like this, and their decision to work abroad is not necessarily occupation related. in this case, the woman’s 36-year-old partner hired a broker on her friend’s recommendation and came to south korea safely (s/n#13). it is important to note that massage parlour jobs are reserved solely for blind masseuses in south korea and not included in the foreign labour supplied by the eps. therefore, all foreign masseuses working in korea are undocumented and usually need the help of a broker to find work. in fact, the government tolerates the existence of thai massage parlours in the country, as evidenced by the numerous signboards found throughout the business districts in major korean cities. discussion and concluding remarks despite south korea’s eps excluding private agencies from its application procedure, they continue to play a significant role in the undocumented labour migration process from thailand into the country. in thailand, both licensed agencies and informal brokers are commonly used to facilitate labour migration. the thai government has adopted flexible measures concerning undocumented migrant workers, mainly from myanmar and cambodia. regardless of the existence of mous and a concrete policy on the requirement of a work permit to work in thailand, about three million migrant workers are staying in the country. policy adjustments have been made through cabinet resolutions instead of law amendment, or by an executive decree (chantavanich et al. 2007). this demonstrates the government’s flexible approach to cater to the economically needy on the one hand and avoid too much incitement of the strong labour unions and ngos in thailand on the other. the en masse importation of foreign workers can be a politically sensitive topic in a middle-low-income country like thailand, which is both a labour-sending and labour-receiving country. over time, this tolerant practice has socialised its citizens, such that the culture of migration does not just promote an outflow of migrant workers, but also decriminalises undocumented migration as ‘illegal but licit.’ similar tolerance is observed in south korea, where labour shortage in some industries has long been chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 202318 a problem leading to reduced productivity. furthermore, depopulation since 2020 has further intensified pressure on the country (stokes 2021).6 this study reveals that many prospective thai migrant workers accept using a private agent to help them secure employment in south korea, even if it requires them paying for the smuggling services. loopholes in the eps provide avenues for market opportunities of for-profit intermediaries. korean employers who run small businesses or thai massage parlours, as well as those in industrial sectors excluded from the eps, rely on agencies to recruit foreign laborers. some migrant workers choose to work undocumented because it offers them the freedom to choose and change jobs as they please. others find themselves in this situation because they might have exceeded their allowed duration of stay or their age exceeds the limit, and undocumented work becomes the only option for them to continue to stay in south korea. but for a small group of thai migrant workers, their decision to migrate to south korea is purely based on impulse rather than rational decision-making. they do not have a concrete plan and instead follow the migration flow or treat the move as a rite-of-passage. they rely on hearsay and often obtain limited information about the migration process and the destination country. some even rely only on browsing the internet without bothering to verify anything with friends or relatives who have previous experience with the process, such as the reputation of a broker. this group of migrant workers tends to adopt a casual and relaxed attitude towards labour migration and that everything is ‘happy-go-lucky.’ as a result, this group of people is unlikely to attend korean language classes and sit for the eps test, but instead arbitrarily pick a broker from the internet, pack and go on the journey. the visa exemption and 90-day stay permission for thais entering south korea for tourism purposes provide them with the opportunity to breach the visaexemption condition and overstay. recruitment agencies and brokers for undocumented workers play an active role in their business, drawing on their own experience as former migrant workers familiar with the process. some of them are multicultural couples, usually comprising a thai wife and a korean husband. many are sole-proprietor brokers and several others are sizable korean language schools and travel agencies. these intermediaries establish groups and pages on facebook and other social networking sites to recruit potential clients. however, their advertising content is somewhat misleading, as they exaggerate the rewards and working conditions without disclosing any potential risks. in fact, some of the jobs are precarious, with some korean employers cheating undocumented workers and failing to pay them as promised. these workers lack any legal protection or contracts. there are also hidden costs such as change-job fees, leading to frequent job changes that workers have no control over. while some lucky workers get a job within a very short time of arrival, others may need to wait in south korea, incurring food and accommodation costs until the agency allocates them a job. one broker even failed to show up at the airport, as reported by one interviewee. finally, although flexible payment options for agency fees are available, the agent usually seizes workers’ passports and even atm cards until their debt is cleared, which can take several months. in this regard, undocumented workers’ freedom is restricted and they are put in a less secure situation under human trafficking. the schema below shows the social construction process of undocumented thai labour migration into south korea (figure 1). labour migration agencies and brokers, therefore, have constructed a biased and misleading image of smuggling and undocumented pathways to work in south korea, presenting an easy and optimistic but incomplete picture of the rewards and risks involved. the biased messages is matched to typical thais’ perception of undocumented laborers as ‘illegal but licit.’ interestingly, south korea also tolerates illegality. the brokers thus actively cultivate this culture of migration, bypassing the formal eps application procedure 6 the ministry of the interior and safety of the republic of korea reported that the country’s population decreased by 20,838 individuals, representing a 0.04% decline since 2019, with a total population of 51,829,023 in 2020 (stokes 2021). chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 202319 for undocumented labour migration. crackdowns and forced deportation of undocumented workers are therefore rare. the aforementioned labour shortage and depopulation may explain the phenomenon. many migrants who were unable to pass the strict requirements of the eps thus turn to underground brokerage services out of pressing economic needs. these brokers also cater to a small, atypical group of workers with a fuzzy and casual attitude towards labour migration. however, these agencies or brokers do not just facilitate the labour migration process from thailand into korea. the findings reveal that the brokerage fees charged by these agencies are substantial and place heavy a burden on migrant workers, and some even fall into debt. the brokers’ profit-making practices further victimise the migrants who are already in difficult economic circumstances. we distinguish these brokers from conventional ‘passive’ brokers who facilitate the labour flow, as they actively promote a culture of migration with misleading messages and a biased image, bypassing the formal eps application procedure for undocumented labour migration. the term thai phi-noy (or ‘little ghost’) is not just a negative identification, but rather a constructed identification that portrays undocumented migrant workers as ‘smart’ and resourceful for bypassing the formal procedure. the thai workers, mainly comprised of low-income groups from rural areas, are under immense economic pressure to bypass the eps. as a result, they become easy targets for profit-making underground brokerage services. this study addresses the role of private agencies in the labour migration process beyond the eps in south korea. with their increasing importance in the labour migration process, undocumented workers are keen to use their services. previous research has focused mainly on the material aspects of private agencies in facilitating labour migration but seldom investigates the cultural dimension. this research enriches the existing literature in this regard. however, the finding and conclusion in this paper are based on a small sample of interviewees and key informants, which was constrained by limited research funding. as such, future studies may benefit from a larger sample that includes different countries and cultures. socially constructed former migrant workers, multicultural couples, korean language schools, and travel agencies possessing the knowledge & maintaining connections become informal brokers. informal brokers: to construct a positive image in snss with misleading messages & hiding the risks to promote the move atypical group: fuzzy attitude of some thais decide to try their luck in korea as undocumented workers without a plan typical group: socialization of tolerance measures of the thai government toward undocumented workers as ‘illegal but licit’ thai phi-noy (or “little ghost”) undocumented migrant workers are brokered to come to south korea to work, as an alternative to the eps m atched & reinforcing m atched & reinforcing figure 1. 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the jobs south koreans sneer at,’ foreign policy, 28 january. online, available: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/28/south-korea-migrant-workers/ [accessed 12 september 2022]. timmerman, c., hemmerechts, k. & de clerck, h. m. 2014, ‘the relevance of a “culture of migration” in understanding migration aspirations in contemporary turkey,’ turkish studies, vol. 15, no. 3: 496–518. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/14683849.2014.954748 van mol, c., snel, e., hemmerechts, k. & timmerman, c. 2018, ‘migration aspirations and migration cultures: a case study of ukrainian migration towards the european union,’ population, space and place, vol. 24, no. 5: 21–31. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2131 wilson, t. m., 2010, ‘the culture of mexican migration,’ critique of anthropology, vol. 30, no. 4: 399–420. https://www. jstor.org/stable/3086463. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x10382728 chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 202322 https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2022/09/281_335432.html https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/print/893725.html https://doi.org/10.5509/20128517 https://doi.org/10.5509/20128517 http://web.nso.go.th/en/survey/data_survey/200260_summary_jan_2017.pdf https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/struggle-continues-myanmar-migrants-thailand.html https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264307872-en https://doi.org/10.1017/s1062798716000119 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43187166 https://doi.org/10.1355/sj29-3g https://doi.org/10.1355/sj29-3g https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/28/south-korea-migrant-workers/ https://doi.org/10.1080/14683849.2014.954748 https://doi.org/10.1080/14683849.2014.954748 https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2131 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3086463 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3086463 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x10382728 appendix 1. the background of interviewees s/n age sex duration of stay remarks 1 20-29 f less than one year a factory with machines and mobile parts 2 20-29 f 5 gardening work 3 20-29 f 1 gardening initially, automobile parts factory now 4 20-29 f 5 factory, gardening, factory again 5 40-49 f 3 factory work 6 40-49 f 6 documented turning into undocumented 7 30-39 f 1.5 paper factory 8 over 50 m 1 part-time job, unstable 9 20-29 m 1 car parts factory 10 30-39 m 3 gardening, factory work 11 20-29 m less than one year automobile parts factory 12 30-39 m less than one year factory work 13 30-39 f 1 thai massage 14 30-39 f 5 thai massage 15 20-29 m 2 factory work 16 30-39 m 3 automobile parts factory 17 20-29 m 2 factory work 18 30-39 m 1 factory work source: produced by the author chan portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol. 19, no. 1/2 may 202323 te kauae māro o muri-ranga-whenua: portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua (the jawbone of muriranga-whenua): globalising local indigenous culture māori leadership, gender and cultural knowledge transmission as represented in the film whale rider tānia m. ka‘ai, university of otago introduction the demi-god māui-tikitiki-a-taranga (māui) is a central character in the many traditions of the māori (indigenous people of aotearoa/new zealand). these traditions provide māori with an understanding of how aspects of their environmental world were created. these range from the slowing of the sun, tama-nui-te-rā, the fishing up of the north island (te ika-a-māui), the attainment of fire and mortality. the subplot to all of māui’s adventures is his relationship with his tīpuna kuia (female ancestors) who provide māui with the knowledge to undertake his feats. one of his tīpuna kuia, muri-ranga-whenua, gave her jawbone to māui, among many things, symbolising the importance of women in leadership roles in māori society. the metaphorical use of this title symbolises the intent of this article to challenge the way in which the film whale rider portrays many māori cultural concepts. this article will illustrate how various tribal traditions are represented, and more importantly misrepresented, in the film. furthermore, this article concentrates on the education and social status of young māori women, demonstrating how the patriarchy/feminism division operates very differently in the ngāti porou tribe, where whale rider is based, than it does either in the film or in eurocentric feminisms. a description of why a māori/pākehā (a non-māori person of european ancestry) film production aiming at a global market intervenes on tribal cultural reproductions so as to transfigure the role of elders and girls, provides an account of various sites for tribal ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua reproduction (from the local meeting place to the globally popular film) and their relative power. whale rider is a new zealand film of unprecedented international success. it is based on the novel by the highly acclaimed māori writer and scholar, witi ihimaera, who is heralded by māori people as their most famous male novelist. his numerous novels capture many of his experiences as a child growing up in a predominantly māori community around the ngāti porou tribal boundary on the east coast of the north island. the essence of his work resonates well with māori people as culturally specific themes are developed which reflect a māori world-view. his ability to capture the particular nuances contained within māori society are often overlooked and misunderstood by the unenculturated non-māori, thus making his work appealing as an ‘exotic’ piece of fiction. his novel whale rider reflects his connection to the māori world as the inspiration behind this story is based on a ngāti porou tribal narrative and tradition; ‘a modern retelling of a maori legend’ with ihimaera creating the central figure as a female ‘in reponse to his daughter complaining about the boy always being the hero’ (ihimaera in mottesheard 2005,1). conversely, niki caro, who wrote the screenplay and directed the film, is a pākehā. it is apparent that she enlists eurocentric feminisms as the basis of her writing and film directing. therefore, the portrayal of a young woman’s struggle for leadership within her tribe becomes the focus of this film irrespective of whether this was the intention by ihimaera in his novel. produced after the hard-hitting film, once were warriors (directed by lee tamahori), the whale rider appears to be of a genre which appeals to the masses much like a 1960 walt disney family story. although the former film focused on a dispossessed urban māori family, caro takes the audience to a contrived māori rural community that appears to be locked in a time warp, as there appears to be no contact with pākehā. this is an unlikely situation as pākehā people settled in aotearoa/new zealand in the early 1800s including in rural communities. furthermore, throughout the film there are numerous indicators of european contact such as empty bottles of alcohol, cars and the chassis of old cars, clothing, tobacco, and technology such as bicycles and a portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua slide projector. the uncertainty of the timeframe in which whale rider is located dissipates the authenticity of the film. there is a danger in this as it is a form of recolonization and a mode of primitivism driven by globalisation of world culture underpinned by first world economic imperatives. although caro purports to have undertaken a cultural audit, in that she sought approval and guidance from a māori community who live in the area in which whale rider was actually filmed, it is difficult to ascertain how much caro negotiated to ensure her eurocentric feminist ideals were sustained in the film. she states, ‘…i can only look at it differently. because i’m not inside the culture’ (caro in mottesheard 2005, 2). this supports the theories of knudtson and suzuki (in barnhardt 1992, 3) that we all carry around our own sub-conscious filters to make sense of the world around us. however, when we confront people with a very different set of filters, we are asked to face up to the assumptions, predispositions and beliefs that we take for granted and make us who we are (ka‘ai 1995, 24). therefore, caro can only ever be expected to use her own set of cultural filters in her role as director, and for this reason is unable to reproduce the peculiar nuances in the film that ihimaera captured so well in the novel. this article does not attempt to provide a comparison between ihimaera’s novel, whale rider, and caro’s film of the same title. however, it is important to understand that a defining feature of differentiation between the novel and the film is that ihimaera integrates a much wider cultural history pertaining to the east coast tribes and their ancestors, to develop the theme of māori female leadership, while caro confines her portrayal of the novel in the film solely to one ancestor, paikea. therefore, the film whale rider can be viewed as a confined and limited adaptation of the novel. caro challenges society to debate ‘who should tell indigenous stories’ (caro in mottesheard 2005, 2) through the medium of film. the appropriation of indigenous knowledge, and specifically māori knowledge, has long been the focus of debate between māori people and non-māori people. the misuse of māori knowledge by non-māori is currently the basis of the wai: 262 (intellectual property) claim that is being prepared portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua for the waitangi tribunal. therefore, if caro’s suggestion of her portrayal of an ‘indigenous’ story is appropriate, how then does this line up to the cultural paradigms of a māori world-view? it is these cultural paradigms that will be discussed in this article and more specifically māori concepts relating to leadership, gender and cultural knowledge transmission that critique caro’s portrayal of māori cultural concepts and the concrete ways in which these concepts are constructed within the film whale rider. overview of the film whale rider tells the story of a young girl, paikea, who demonstrates many leadership qualities. however, tradition prevents her grandfather koro paka from seeing paikea as the natural leader of their tribe. indeed, paikea is a constant reminder to him of ill fortune because the intended leader of the tribe, paikea’s twin brother, died along with their mother in childbirth. koro paka’s eldest son (paikea’s father) leaves the tribe due to the pressure of imminent leadership, while the obvious leadership qualities of koro paka’s second son are ignored because he is not the eldest son. thus, koro paka begins a search amongst the local eldest boys for a new chief to rejuvenate and lead the tribe. he starts a whare wānanga (traditional school of learning) to train the boys, hoping the true male leader will emerge, while ignoring, or else admonishing, paikea’s persistence in demonstrating her leadership qualities. a central theme of the film is koro paka’s blindness to what he is searching for; a male leader. the blindness is caused by supposed traditional sexism and also traditional birthright (i.e. the eldest son). koro paka’s blindness is overcome when he finally realises paikea’s leadership abilities when she rides the whale to safety after it had been stranded along with its pod. paikea’s leadership qualities are realised by the whānau (family), hapū (sub-tribe, clan), iwi (tribe) because, just like their founding ancestor and her name-sake, paikea—who rode to aotearoa/new zealand on a whale—she is a whale rider. understanding the cultural context as stated earlier, muri-ranga-whenua was the tīpuna kuia of the demi-god, māui. this wise woman provided māui with her sacred jawbone which he used as the hook to fish up te ika-amāui (the north island). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua the themes which permeate the title of this article include the transmission of knowledge through generations, the importance of women in leadership roles in māori society, the relationship māori have with the natural environment and the cultural concepts of aroha (love), whanaungatanga (a term describing a kinship network which links māori to their whānau, hapū, iwi and to te ao māori (the māori world)) (ka’ai & higgins 2003, 18), and manaaki (a sense of reciprocity, of giving and receiving) (reilly in ka’ai et al 2003, 68). muri-ranga-whenua was motivated by these cultural concepts to rip her jawbone, te kauae mārō, from her lower face and offer this to her mokopuna (grandchild) providing him with the technology to assist him in his journey for the advancement of te ao māori. without this assistance, māui would have failed. te kauae mārō means ‘a strong jawbone.’ however, kauae also refers to knowledge; te kauae runga means esoteric knowledge and te kauae raro means practical knowledge. in traditional māori society, this knowledge was handed down from generation to generation through tribal whare wānanga. the transmission of knowledge, and who received this knowledge, was not premised on either age or gender; more to the point it was driven by cultural markers such as rangatiratanga (right to exercise authority in relation to sovereignty, leadership and identity) and the preservation of whānau, hapū and iwi. people were chosen on this basis. traditional māori leadership was either inherited through genealogical links or ascribed based on the display of outstanding personal qualities and achievements or ability. leadership was not at all gender orientated. this is particularly so in ngāti porou (east coast tribe in the north island) where women are traditionally known to assume key leadership roles in the iwi. for example; there are 58 marae (traditional māori complexes where particular rituals occur including rituals of encounter) within the ngāti porou tribal boundary; all but two of these are named after women, reflecting the dominance of women in the tribe. for portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua example, hine-matioro, who was a prominent female leader in ngāti porou history, was considered too tapu (sacred) to walk on the ground like other human beings because of her leadership status in the tribe. consequently, she was carried from place to place by male servants. such was her power that she was reported in international circles as, ‘the great queen who possessed a large territory and numerous subjects’ (ballara 1990, 192). another example of female leadership in ngāti porou is the story of the union of ruataupare and tūwhakairiora, who were both of chiefly rank and equal status. over time however, due to power struggles between them, ruataupare grew tired of tūwhakairiora and eventually left him, moving from wharekāhika to tokomaru bay. she established her genealogical links with the ngāti ira and wahine-iti hapū in the area, quickly establishing her leadership over the people and the land, thus creating her own hapū, te whānau a ruataupare (i am a descendant of ruataupare). similarly, ngāti porou and ngāi tahu share a history concerning a woman called hamo who, too, was a prominent female leader. she was the wife of porourangi, the eponymous ancestor of ngāti porou, and according to ngāti porou tradition, upon his death she married his younger brother, tahu pōtiki. this was a common customary practice in traditional māori society. it is against this background that it can be assumed that the film whale rider is located within the tribal boundary of ngāti porou. this can be attributed to the names paikea and porourangi, which belong to two of the lead characters in the film. the marae where the film is set is the home of ngāti konohi, a hapū of the ngāti porou tribe located within the tribal territory at whangarā. paikea is a prominent ancestor in ngāti porou history. yet this film has failed to recognise the importance of women in ngāti porou. the few examples of female leaders of ngāti porou discussed previously are only a small sample of this tribe’s tradition of acknowledging the status of women. this tradition has always been prevalent from traditional society through to contemporary māori society. it is well known amongst all māori iwi that ngāti porou is the most pro-female iwi of them all. the film contradicts the histories and traditions of this iwi that it is based on. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua in the novel whale rider, however, ihimaera develops it further by referring to the well known māori narrative of muriwai, the ancestress of te whānau-a-apanui, who called out to the gods, ‘kia whakatāne au i ahau’ (‘now i shall make myself a man’), in order for her to save the mātaatua canoe (ihimaera 1987, 17). this reference indicates ihimaera’s respect for, and deep understanding of, the status of women in traditional māori society. in māori society, the relationship between a grandparent and grandchild is described as being sacrosanct. it is about tiaki (protection), aroha and manaaki. the primary role of grandparents in the whānau was to raise, protect and teach their grandchildren. parents ensured the physical well-being of the child while the grandparents provided spiritual, mental, educational and emotional sustenance for the mokopuna. the concept of whānau is represented in the fan shaped dimensions of the harakeke (flax bush or phornium tenax). each blade of this plant is used as an analogy for the whānau. the rito (centre shoot) is the ‘child’, protected on either side by its ‘parents’, and the outer blades are the ‘extended family’ (higgins nd: ii). if the rito is removed, the plant will die. therefore, the role of the whānau is to ensure the protection of the rito and the child, which will ensure the survival of the plant and the whānau, hapū and iwi. mokopuna who are raised by their grandparents form a strong bond that cannot be penetrated. furthermore, mokopuna who are raised by their grandparents are easy to identify as they behave in a particular way as a consequence of being given access to tribal knowledge well ahead of their chronological years. it is against this background that the reaction by koro paka toward his newly born granddaughter is best understood in a cultural context as not one of rejection because he dismissed the female in favour of the male; rather it was one of protection and love for his granddaughter. it was also premised on a combination of love and the fear that her name, paikea, could expose her vulnerability as a woman in terms of the cultural concept of whare tangata (womb) and the ability to have children. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua people are considered the most important objects in the māori world and the survival and continued procreation of the whānau rests on the protection of women and their whare tangata. exposing women to tapu areas puts them, and future generations, at risk. kanga (curses) were used when whānau, hapū, or iwi allowed their women to tread in these sacred areas. one such area is the marae ātea (the courtyard in front of the main house on the marae). the marae ātea is recognised as being the domain of tūmatauenga, the god of warfare and people. the female role in this context is assigned to the karanga (call), which in traditional society was executed by a kuia (elderly woman) because she had more often than not finished her child-bearing days. this role was not given to young women for fear that kanga would be placed on their whare tangata, leaving them barren, thus extinguishing a genealogical line in the whānau. this traditional cultural practice was distorted in the film, as paikea was invited by her grandmother to perform the karanga. this is simply inconceivable in māori society, for her grandmother was exposing her to the risk of kanga. regardless of paikea’s inherited status, she is vulnerable because she has not yet reached puberty and therefore a prime candidate for such practices. furthermore, paikea behaved as if she was a child brought up by her father in germany, with no knowledge of māori culture, when she sat on the front pew with the men. a child raised by her grandparents would simply not behave in this way. this is an example of the eurocentric feminist belief that women can challenge a supposed male hegemonic practice that appears to discriminate against māori women and, therefore, relegates them to lesser positions in māori society. the disregard for the cultural significance of the marae and the protection of women is masked by this eurocentric feminist challenge, thus portraying māori as a ‘barbaric’ people who have no respect for women. early pākehā ethnographers of māori culture and society documented how they perceived the life and customs of the indigenous people of aotearoa/new zealand. however, like caro, these writings are ‘subconsciously filtered’ through their own western world-view. it is apparent in early colonial history that pākehā women played subordinate roles within their society. furthermore, it is this subordinate position portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua that forms the basis from which eurocentric feminism is derived. it, therefore, can be assumed that early pākehā ethnographers believed māori women held inferior positions in society because they did not, in the main, partake in the formal speech making on the marae. consequently, it is perceived by pākehā that because only men appear to debate and voice their concerns during this formal speech making ritual that they are the obvious leaders in māori society. it is clear that in the film koro paka expected his son, porourangi, to inherit his leadership role. however, porourangi rejected this role, and left the settlement as a way of escaping this responsibility. it is not uncommon in māori tribal history for the tuakana (older sibling) to reject his or her hereditary position of rangatira (chief, leader). what is unusual is that a good leader did not recognise that his second son, rāwiri, possessed the attributes of leadership demonstrated by his ability in mau taiaha (weaponry), despite being the teina (younger sibling). the film failed to depict this. there are numerous accounts of the teina acquiring the mantle of rangatira for their ability to lead. māori culture was not fixed in its position that only the tuakana can claim their inherited rights. leadership fell to those who had the right characteristics to be leaders, regardless of age and gender. one such example of a teina assuming a leadership role is the first character introduced in this article, māui-tikitiki-a-taranga. māui was the pōtiki (last born) of five brothers, yet through his many achievements demonstrated and acquired the position of leader within his whānau. the early ethnographic writings of elsdon best, one of new zealand’s most notable pākehā ethnographers of māori culture and society, in 1898 described the eight characteristics of a rangatira in traditional māori society as being: 1. industrious in obtaining or cultivating food. 2. good at settling disputes, etc. 3. brave. 4. a good leader in war—an able general. 5. expert at carving, tattooing and at ornamental weaving. 6. hospitable. 7. clever at building a house or pa [fortified villages], and in canoe-making. 8. knowledgeable about the boundaries of tribal land. (best 1898, 242; cited in patterson 1992, 105) portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua an important aspect to note in best’s list of characteristics is that senior genealogical descent is not included. although some of his characteristics include distinctive male roles, such as carving, building of houses, pā and canoes, it also includes the female art of ornamental weaving. it can be assumed that best’s focus on male characteristics is derived from his own world view, however, it is important to note that he does not dismiss women altogether. ascribed and inherited leadership as evident in traditional māori society is still relevant in contemporary māori society. the impact of colonisation upon māori society (such as the 1847 education ordinance act which was a policy of assimilation, and the 1907 tohunga suppression act which outlawed māori experts applying traditional knowledge and customary practices) has for 130 years forced the declining māori population to prioritise individual needs such as education and employment, often ahead of the needs of their iwi. therefore, māori leadership has evolved in contemporary māori society to embrace this demographic change. while ascribed and inherited leadership are still very relevant in contemporary māori society, combinations of these two categories also apply. for example, one group might have ascribed leadership, another might have inherited leadership, and others may have a combination of the two. therefore, it is proposed that the attributes of māori leadership in contemporary society are: • ability to strategise and plan for the future to ensure the wellbeing and survival of the people they are managing—politically, socially, economically, spiritually and intellectually. • ability to make sound judgements. • ability in te reo me ngā tikanga māori (māori language and customs). • ability to communicate effectively. • ability to represent the people in all forums, in an effective and efficient manner. • to be a role model for those they are representing. • to have excellent organisational skills. • ability to motivate, inspire and mobilise the people. • ability to critically reflect and evaluate their own performance as a leader. • ability to manage conflict amongst the people, seek resolution and make difficult decisions. • well developed negotiation and facilitation skills. • sophisticated knowledge of, and experience in te ao māori. • ability to be multi-tasked. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua • active participation in māori cultural activities at a grass-roots level, such as attending tangihanga and tribal hui. (ka‘ai & reilly 2003, 95-96) had koro paka been observant in his role as a respected tribal leader, a caregiver, a protector and a teacher of his grand-daughter paikea, he would have known and acknowledged that she most certainly possessed some of these leadership qualities, and more importantly that she had hereditary rights to assume a leadership role in the whānau and hapū. there are many instances where the film is a corruption of māori cultural practices, particularly within ngāti porou. for example, the whare wānanga was not a school of learning solely for men or boys and it is simply inconceivable that a child, male or female, would beat an elder let alone a tribal leader with their taiaha (a weapon and oratory staff). to do so would be to commit a hara (a cultural offence of the worst order). another important point to make concerns the haka (posture dance) performed at the end of the film. the haka, ka mate was chosen and not rūaumoko, or poropeihana, which are two famous ngāti porou compositions. rūaumoko and poropeihana are automatically identified by iwi māori as haka of ngāti porou. the haka, poropeihana would have been more appropriate and would have resonated well as it was composed about the introduction of a parliamentary bill on the prohibition of alcohol. the basis of this haka was an outcry by the people of ngāti porou to one of their own son’s, sir āpirana ngata, who at the time, was a minister of parliament supporting the prohibition bill. such protestation by the people was a sign that they had grown tired of colonial laws and an expression of continuing their quest for tino rangatiratanga (self determination) in relation to te tiriti o waitangi (the treaty of waitangi) and their rights as indigenous people of the land. the use of ka mate is likely to have been chosen because of the international reputation it has gained through its use by the all blacks, new zealand’s premiere rugby team, prior to the start of a game. it is this icon that is used so that the global mass can identify with a new zealand identity as opposed to a tribally specific identity. the acquisition of ka mate by mainstream new zealand society has become an portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua identity marker by pākehā for the global market, in the absence of their own unique culture. furthermore, it would appear to non-new zealanders that te reo me ngā tikanga māori has been afforded respect within new zealand society, yet this is not the case. furthermore, it is the recognition of te reo me ngā tikanga māori that has been the basis of māori assertions to sovereignty since the signing of the treaty of waitangi in 1840. while caro had no obligation to provide an authentic portrayal based on a māori cultural reality, from an indigenous context, if she had attempted this, the film might have given rise to a work with more integrity, creating a vastly more powerful film in culturalpolitical terms. for this reason, the power of the film is diluted. this is best understood from the viewpoint that the film is aimed at a global market and necessitated intervening on iwi (tribal) cultural reproduction, so as to transfigure the role of māori elders and girls to align with the division of patriarchy and eurocentric feminisms. to do so is to make the film more appealing and sexier for the global market. having said this, the reality for māori is that the film is a distortion and misrepresentation of the māori world and in particular of ngāti porou tikanga and kawa. its appeal to māori lies in the cinematography, which captures the beautiful landscape of the east coast of the north island, where thousands of holidaymakers swarm each year to enjoy the hot temperatures and the fine beaches. the return of cliff curtis (one of māoridom’s finest actors, who has broken into the hollywood market and appeared in films such as training day with denzel washington), to appear in a low budget new zealand film such as whale rider, symbolises to the national māori community that curtis is very much connected to te ao māori, to his roots and his cultural heritage. furthermore, it makes a strong statement that he has not abandoned his culture (the local meeting place) nor the advancement of film-making in aotearoa/new zealand for the fame and fortune of the hollywood film world (the global market). the theme of rural community life and the significance of the papakāinga (a community of māori people living around the mara, which is central to their lifestyle) and ahikā (the people who remain at home within their tribal community and keep the fires burning) to ensure the preservation of cultural knowledge and practices for transmission to the younger generation, grabs at the portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua very heartstrings of māori as an indigenous people who struggle to this day to combat the sins of colonisation at the cost of becoming rāwaho (those māori who live outside of their tribal community—often because of the need to find employment). furthermore, it is a reminder to many māori of their own upbringing in rural māori communities where fishing and living off the land was key to their survival; where kapa haka (māori performing arts) at the marae was a regular activity; where māori humour abounds and where your identity is understood within the context of mana māori (authority, power, influence, prestige and status). glossary aroha love, compassion haka posture dance hapū sub-tribe, clan harakeke flax-bush iwi tribe kanga curse kapa haka māori performing arts karanga formal call by a woman welcoming visitors on to a marae kawa protocol kuia elderly woman manaaki a sense of reciprocity of giving and receiving māori indigenous people of aotearoa/new zealand marae a traditional māori complex where particular rituals occur including rituals of encounter marae ātea courtyard in front of the main house on the marae mau taiaha weaponry mokopuna grandchild pā fortified village pākehā a non-māori person of european ancestry pōtiki last born rangatira chief, noble man rangatiratanga the right to exercise authority in relation to sovereignty, leadership and identity rito centre shoot taiaha weapon and oratory staff tapu sacred te ao māori the māori world teina younger sibling te ika-a-māui north island of aotearoa/new zealand te kauae mārō strong jawbone te kauae raro practical knowledge te kauae runga esoteric knowledge portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua te reo me ngā tikanga māori māori language and customs te tiriti o waitangi the treaty of waitangi is a founding document of aotearoa/new zealand between the british crown and the māori people. it was signed in 1840 and has been a controversial issue as two versions were produced with māori only signing the māori text, but the english text has been used as the definitive version by the crown and bares little resemblance to the māori version. tiaki protection tino rangatiratanga self determination tipuna ancestor tīpuna kuia female ancestors tohunga traditional māori expert or priest tuakana older sibling whānau family whanaungatanga expressions of support, love within a family; term describing a kinship network which links māori to their whānau, hapū, iwi and to te ao māori. whare tangata womb whare wānanga traditional schools of learning reference list ballara, a. 1990, ‘hinematioro: ?-1823’, in dictionary of new zealand biography, allen & unwin, wellington, 192-193. best, e. 1898, ‘omens and superstitious beliefs of the māori’, in journal of the polynesian society 7, 119-36 and 233-43; cited in patterson j. 1992, exploring maori values, dunmore press, palmerston north. higgins, r. nd, ‘foreward’, in members of each other:building communities in company with people with developmental disabilities, eds j. o’brien & c.l. o’brien, inclusion press, toronto, ii-iv. ihimaera, w. 1987, the whale rider, heinemann, auckland. ka‘ai, t.m. and r. higgins 2003, ‘te ao māori: māori world-view’, in ki te whaiao: introduction to māori society, eds t.m. ka‘ai, j.c. moorfield, m. p. j reilly & s. mosley, pearson education, auckland, 13-25. ______, moorfield j. c., reilly m. p. j.& mosley, s eds. 2003, ki te whaiao: introduction to māori society, pearson education, auckland. ______ & reilly, m.p.j. 2003, ‘rangatiratanga: traditional and contemporary leadership’, in ki te whaiao: introduction to māori society, eds t.m. ka‘ai, j.c. moorfield, m.p.j. reilly & s. mosley, pearson education, auckland, 91-102. mottesheard, r. 2005, ‘girl power: new zealand writer/director niki caro talks about whale rider’ [online] available: http://www.indiewire.com/people/people_030606caro.html patterson j. 1992, exploring maori values, dunmore press, palmerston north. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 14 http://www.indiewire.com/people/people_030606caro.html ka‘ai te kauae mārō o muri-ranga-whenua reilly, m.p.j. 2003, ‘whanaungatanga: kinship’, in ki te whaiao: introduction to māori society, eds t.m. ka‘ai, j.c. moorfield, m.p.j. reilly & s. mosley, pearson education, auckland, 61-72. whale rider (motion picture) 2002, south pacific pictures. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 15 overview of the film understanding the cultural context ethan frome portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 issn: 1449-2490 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/portal/splash/ what was multiculturalism? vijay mishra, murdoch university justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought -john rawls. let me begin with an ungainly and selective potted summary of the movement of people over the past two hundred years: 1830-1916: half a million from india to the caribbean, fiji, mauritius 1850-1930: one million japanese to north america and brazil 1890-1920: one million per year from southern and eastern europe to the usa 1920s: three million spanish, portuguese, italians to brazil and argentina 1930s: seventy thousand jews from nazi germany to the uk 1955-1962: sixty-seven thousand people a year move from the caribbean, africa and india to the uk 1963-1970: one million each year from southern europe and turkey to germany 1975: flow of workers from south and east asia to the middle east rises from 100,000 to one million a year 1989-2000: one million to israel from the former soviet union 1990s: an average of 150,000 non-uk citizens move to britain each year late 1990s: about 100,000 migrants move to australia each year mainly from asia; an average of 350,000 mexicans to the usa each year; 200,000 indians and chinese to the usa each year early twentieth century: 250,000 peruvians migrate to argentina, chile and the usa. these figures, although partial and incomplete, emphasize migration (both of refugees and those seeking better lives elsewhere) as a dominant feature of modernity. the figures also indicate the mix of people on the move and their destinations. where once these mishra what was multiculturalism? figures were historical facts about migration patterns and necessary for a proper writing of a country’s history (the contribution of migrants to nation building for instance), they are now looked at in somewhat different terms, terms that place migrants in a different kind of history. the latter history is one in which it is not simply facts and figures about migration that are discussed, but the definition of the nation-state itself and the migrants’ ambiguous sense of attachment to it. in other words, in addition to a type of economic history (objective accounts of demographic shifts in a nation) we now theorize, from precisely these figures, how the nation-state defines itself in ways that lead to a radical rethinking of a nation as a ‘multination,’ one in which the grand narrative of a nation’s founding communities (and the presumption of assimilation upon which the grand narrative was always based) gives way to a multiply-centred narrative attuned to questions of unequal power relations, racism, exploitation and so on. multiculturalism as a theory has arisen out of this shift and presents itself not as an explanatory model of a given situation but as a problematic in need of continuous theorization. it is considered chic for a nation to declare itself multicultural: airports say so enthusiastically, politicians declare it interminably, and the media celebrate it. there are essentially two kinds of multicultural nations. there are those old nations that have always been multicultural but which created the idea of a nation-state as a means of transcending difference. here the nation subsumed cultures as its enlightenment ethos (or so it was argued) allowed principles of liberal humanism to create a just society to which all could belong and for which all could die. so in them cultures were part of the nation, without the nation itself sensing the need to theorize itself in terms of its multiplicity of cultures. in these european old nations, ‘multiculturalism’ as theory comes as a challenge to an earlier definition of it as empirical fact. the second multicultural nation is one where gerd baumann’s ‘multicultural riddle’ has special force (1999). these are settler nations – almost all of the new world (the usa, canada and also much of latin america), australia, new zealand and, until recently, south africa. in all these nations territorialization presumed the existence of a non-nation, the land as a tabula rasa, so that there was no inuit nation, no maori nation, no aboriginal nation, no american indian nation, no aztec or mayan nation, and, in the case of apartheid south africa, no african portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 2 mishra what was multiculturalism? nation, prior to european colonization. in these settler nations, settler ethos became identical with the nation and immigration policies (often a white-only immigration policy that, until the late 1960s, was offered as an article of faith, and proudly too) aimed at creating a monolingual (or as in the case of south africa and canada a bilingual) nation under the celebratory sign of (white) assimilation. in spite of the multiplicity of claims that have been made on behalf of every ethnic community to declare itself part of a multicultural mosaic (because it is fashionable to do so) the multicultural agenda itself is not of the making of ethnic minorities but of the dominant (white) community for whom the management of what the canadians have referred to as ‘visible minorities’ is the principal issue. in many ways the excessive zeal with which non-visible minorities have claimed to occupy this space as well, has meant that multiculturalism has often lost much of its political and social (as well as critical) edge, for if every group within a nation is itself a migrant community (except of course the nation’s first nation people), then every nation is by definition multicultural. this argument is quite frankly nonsense because it overlooks a fundamental feature of nations and their link to power. a nation’s dominant community (whether as an exclusive group such as the bhumiputras of malaysia or those who have declared themselves to be part of the nation’s grand narrative through ease of assimilation) is never part of the multicultural mosaic; everyone else is. to repeat: a multicultural nation or a multicultural polity is meaningless if each community within a nation-state can equally claim to be part of the nation’s multicultural communities. in other words, in any multicultural nation there will always be a cultural imbalance between those (one or two communities) whose history is foundational to the nation and those who have come, as equal citizens no doubt, but whose presence can only have the same legitimacy (in terms of national ideology) retrospectively and even then only after their discrepant narratives have been incorporated into the ‘foundational narrative’ or when the necessity for the latter has been dispensed with altogether. there is then a presumption of recognition of the other over time as participants in the historical narrative of the land. failure to recognize this fundamental fact often leads to an idealist or romantic theory of multiculturalism that is often way off the mark. a critical multicultural theory should be wary of this. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 3 mishra what was multiculturalism? it is important, for my argument, to locate multiculturalism as a problematic essentially around the visible, for without that cultural visibility (colour, religion, dress, food) multicultural theory may be replaced by a theory of ‘critical assimilation.’ the nexus between the ‘visible’ and multiculturalism is readily evident in ‘ethnic’ tv programming in aotearoa/new zealand. in a recent essay on television and multiculturalism in aotearoa/new zealand, the authors shuchi kothari, sarina pearson and nabeel zuberi (2003) use two programs, tagata pasifika and asia down under, as their proof texts to read national readings of multiculturalism. the choice of these programs by the authors locates the central issues of new zealand multiculturalism in two domains: the pacific islands and asia. in doing so the authors go outside of the country’s de jure biculturalism – a biculturalism built on a pakeha (white) accommodation of the maori (and vice versa) – to work through a more capacious principle that would make the key partners of new zealand biculturalism confront the changing face of the country. in this changing face pacific islanders – whose homelands survive as remittance cultures – and asians must have a role to play. so the writers suggest that the uncompleted project of biculturalism should not mean that multiculturalism cannot be part of the full national agenda until that other issue (the maori-pakeha question) is resolved. the matter raises interesting questions: first, how can the two targeted groups (asian 5% of the population, pacific islander 6%) become part of the larger discussions about land rights, and indeed of the waitangi tribunal and therefore an integral part of debates on new zealand biculturalism? is this a simple matter of a coalition of island peoples and maori, a coalition based on ‘common’ origin, for minority rights? where do we locate the asian in this? are the interests of the asians identical with those of the pacific islanders? is it not the case that pacific islanders are more likely to be sympathetic towards maori claims (the indigenous fijians certainly given their own problems with a migrant community back home) than asians? what is this category ‘asian’? is the fiji indian an asian or a pacific islander or something yet again?1 is it not true that when it comes to portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 4 1 after a lecture at the university of canterbury on 13 october 2003, an indian phd student asked me why fiji indians (or indo-fijians) and indians were so different. ‘why the antagonism when this is a neutral space for them?’ she asked. but is new zealand a neutral place for pacific islanders (including fiji indians) when there has been such a long history of new zealand engagement with the pacific? so many fiji indians were taught by new zealand teachers, sat through new zealand university examinations, studied there, worked there that for them the idea of the country as a ‘neutral space’ does not even arise. for them mishra what was multiculturalism? understanding the flows of capital, the acquisition of wealth and an understanding of the protestant work ethic asians are in fact almost white, though not quite? failure to address these questions leads programmes like the tagata pasifika and asia down under becoming on the one hand occasions for momentary self-identity (spectators viewing selves as actors) and on the other anthropological diversion for the dominant group. it has been said that asia down under is attractive to mainstream (white) new zealanders because of its weekly food component. 2 what the attraction reinforces is food, ‘one of the seemingly benign representational systems’ of multicultural difference as the positive face of multiculturalism (gunew 1999, 147).3 theories of multiculturalism multiculturalism for whom? who lays down the ground rules? who are its beneficiaries? in the end do hegemonic systems (like the nation) always neutralize dissent by incorporating it within a relatively innocuous system? here are some questions posed in a standard multicultural reader. is multiculturalism antiracist or oblivious to racism? is multiculturalism cultural autonomy or common culture revisited? is multiculturalism grounded in grassroots alliances or diversity management? does multiculturalism link politics and culture or separate them? who consumes multiculturalism, the salad that it is? is multiculturalism no more than a managerial strategy to get greater productivity from the work force? in the well-known debate in the pages of critical inquiry between stanley fish (1997) and donald pease (1997), the latter declared: ‘multiculturalism new zealand is what fiji has ceased to be, an enlightened democracy where the indian work ethic has value and where, ironically enough, the lost peace of the pax brittanica may be reprised. 2 in an episode of at home with the braithwaites (2003), the musical excesses of bollywood cinema (via andrew lloyd webber and a. r. rahman’s west end musical bombay dreams) frames a wedding ceremony where, i suspect, chicken tikka masala is served. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 5 3 in sneja gunew’s argument (1999) something rather more interesting is at work here. food displaces ‘word’ (which implies knowledge and dialogue) so that to eat the other’s food (which also generates a series that leads to ingestion followed by abjection) implies that one need not engage with the other in any dialogic sense. which is why local multicultural food fairs are so popular with the general public; they are a safe way of acknowledging multicultural difference without the need to engage with those differences. as gunew points out, early migrants were always registered in dominant consciousnesses in terms of their alien (and disgusting) food habits. the undisguised disgust towards the indian curry in britain to begin with and then its celebration as a quintessentially british dish (chicken tikka masala is as british as yorkshire pudding) demonstrates the power of cuisine as well as the symbolic incorporation of the alien through food. the point is that food signifies a particular history of accommodation and abjection for, as gunew says, ‘the insistence on invoking food whenever multiculturalism is represented in a positive way is not quite so benign as it may at first appear’ (151). mishra what was multiculturalism? (whether the boutique-form of appreciation or the strong form of tolerating) does not exist. it cannot exist because the laws regulating the norms internal to a specific culture necessarily result in incommensurable rationalities’ (398). so how does one argue between rationalities that are equally legitimate but incommensurable? is multiculturalism indeed, as angela davis observes, a mode of ‘diversity management,’ a means of ‘preserving and fortifying power relations based on class, gender, and race?’ (1996, 41). for the fact is that multicultural programs are not simply enlightened cultural credos, they are means of control that operate across the board from entrepreneurial organizations to the prison correctional system, where it is a means of reestablishing ‘control over inmate populations’ (42). in angela davis’ argument one needs to be wary of the ‘corporate compartmentalization of multiculturalism’ and address how any cultural theory challenges those gender, class and race hierarchies that are at the heart of the american nation-state. in the guise of a democratic utopianism, multiculturalism may even be complicit in a process that obliterates the corporeality of the other. in this task a critical multicultural theory should always gloss, even as it locates itself as a progressive idea, the historical mechanisms of ‘control’ that pre-date multiculturalism.4 a discourse, as cynthia willett observes, which ‘demands a coalition of authors, and is especially suited to the genre of anthology’ (1998, 1) cannot offer a definitive answer, nor can it close off the argument. nevertheless it is clear that multiculturalism is very much a discourse of the white liberal nation-state to which in the second half of the twentieth century many more post-colonial peoples began to arrive. whereas an earlier ‘multiracialism’ remained defiantly colonial in its conception of race (natives, slaves and coolies were its categories of analysis) and had no capacity for self-critique (and hence portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 6 4 this consciousness is crucial before we can appreciate toni morrison’s observation that on the pequod (in melville’s great tale moby dick) a mainly ‘multicultural … proletariat is at work to produce a commodity’ (1996, 27). the necessity of an historical consciousness is particularly true of our age, the age of the informational network society about which manuel castells has written so persuasively. according to castells, informational society has created a bipolar world of ‘abstract universal instrumentalism’ and ‘historically rooted, particularistic identities,’ in other words an opposition designated by the ‘net’ and ‘the self’ (3). how the information technology revolution finally plays out questions posed by multiculturalism or how indeed we can speak about a multicultural society where identities are governed by the net and not by the self, are matters that would require research well beyond my ability to do so. i allude to it because of the presumption, perhaps unduly optimistic, that the net will finally bring to an end questions about individual and collective identities, about class and gender, issues that underpin multicultural theory. mishra what was multiculturalism? never used the term ‘multiculturalism’), the later form (as ‘multiculturalism’) growing as it did from a post-colonial ethos of multiply-centred cultures and histories began to challenge the glue that had hitherto bound the liberal nation-state together.5 but in doing so it never altered real power or class relations, never radically altered the definition of justice itself and saw the nation-state as a ‘context’ (as trudeau himself had observed) in which other cultures located themselves and not as a space that may be radically transformed. it remained a structure of control that kept minorities where they are in the guise of a ‘colonialist’ (white) respect of cultural difference without changing the unified selves of the ‘managers’ themselves. in the end, multiculturalism remains a thing of the past, a way in which the project of the enlightenment and matters of justice may be rethought (but not radically altered) so as to accommodate the ‘alien’ within. and it is for this reason – because of its pastness – that it requires constant critique and re-evaluation, the need to specify the real, material conditions of racism and their relation to capital at every point. like much else in the liberal agenda, the agenda of multiculturalism too may be readily located within unthreatening humanist parameters: individual versus collective rights, the presumption of cultural value (we recognize complex communities that have offered something to world civilization generally), accommodation of minority rights and those of first nation peoples within a dual definition of multiculturalism, the need for benign, liberal, non-racist, non-exclusive policies, the limits to tolerance and the legacy of the colonial order. to give these a further critical turn and to be able to make a case for the ‘pastness’ of multicultural theory we need to critically examine the received discourses of multiculturalism. i want to consider these under nine headings: portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 7 5 following on from homi bhabha’s distinction between multiculturalism as a ‘portmanteau term for anything’ and the multicultural as a ‘floating signifier’ (1998), barnor hesse thinks through a multiculturalism that ‘had become a contested frame of reference for thinking about the quotidian cohesion of western civil societies uncertain about their national and ethnic futures’ (2000, 1). aware of the differences between american and british readings of cultural diversity/pluralism, hesse hones in on the differences between multiculturalism and the multicultural (as suggested by bhabha). for hesse ‘multiculturalism refers to particular discourses or social forms which incorporate marked cultural differences and diverse ethnicities … [it] can be named, valued, celebrated and repudiated from various political perspectives’ (2). multicultural, a ‘colonial formation,’ is, on the other hand, a ‘signifier of the unsettled meanings of cultural differences in relation to multiculturalism as the signified of attempts to fix their meaning in national imaginaries’ (2). simply put, whereas multiculturalism, the signified, is a discourse or governmental policy that may be discussed in terms of an increasingly diversified nation-state, multicultural, the signifier, refers to those religious, social, linguistic and racial bodies that are grouped ‘differently’ in everyday social practice. in western nation-states what is really at stake is the nation’s prior construction of itself as a unified, homogeneous imagined community. mishra what was multiculturalism? (1)the politics of recognition. (2) the morally required versus the morally permissible. (3) absolute tolerance. (4) the politics of compromise. (5) the inclusive community. (6) the spectres of class. (7) the figure of woman. (8) the post-colonial condition. (9) the radical imaginary. (1) the politics of recognition at the heart of the politics of multiculturalism is the demand for recognition. no theoretician has made the connection as elegantly or as powerfully as charles taylor and any meditation on the pastness of multiculturalism must begin with taylor’s influential essay first published in 1992, and slightly expanded in 1994. taylor uses the words ‘politics’ advisedly to imply the proactive and indeed interventionist nature of the multicultural point of view. the demand for recognition, of course, is crucial because of the fear of its opposite, of misrecognition or non-recognition, the latter enforcing a caricatured, a distorted, a false mirror of an other in need of adequate, legitimate, culturally complex and full representation. to not recognize or to misrecognize demeans the other, condemns her to an image (as it is mirrored in the dominant community) which is negatively stereotypical and lacking in all those characteristics (cultural complexity, philosophical and aesthetic sophistication) by which the other has defined its being in itself, its own self-consciousness. but the ascendancy of recognition is a recent social event, it came with hegel’s master-slave dialectic which bequeathed a terminology of recognition that, later, fused with democratic ideals so as to make recognition a matter of individual worth and dignity inherent in democracy itself. ‘democracy,’ writes taylor, ‘has ushered in a politics of equal recognition’ (1994, 27). the modern age, synonymous with the democratic age, also ushered in the idea of individual worth, where an individual declares his ‘individuality’ and right to be different. here the older notion of adherence to a higher morality (the mark of a person and a characteristic shared by all and hence not portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 8 mishra what was multiculturalism? individuated) is superseded by a new idea of a model to live by that is within us, the ideal of authenticity (31). the insistence on the individual, this monological obsession with the self, is ultimately unreal because the essential element of human life is (as bakhtin understood so well) its ‘dialogical character’ (32). the dialogic, then, is crucial for the making of one’s identity and it follows that equal recognition when withdrawn or denied, can be a form of oppression since it attacks the very heart of the ideal of ‘authenticity.’ the politics of universalism has now produced, in the public sphere, the idea of equal dignity of all citizens (so that there cannot be a second-class citizen) and a modern ‘notion of identity,’ the latter instrumental in giving rise to a ‘politics of difference’ (taylor 1994, 38). the two, however, are not necessarily assimilable or symmetrical as the demand for the latter (identity) in essence wishes to particularize what is, as a principle, universal (dignity), a difference-blind view of people. there is then no room for qualification (say between an evolved, complex culture and an evolving less complex one, the latter proposition itself being contrary to the universal principle of equality and hence racist) which leads taylor to examine further the politics of dignity. the politics of equal dignity (via rousseau and hegel) bequeathed ‘a regime of reciprocal recognition among equals’ (50). the regime functions in a society with a tight unity of purpose (a common purpose) that conflicts with a regime of differentiation (50). the legacy then of freedom linked to non-differentiation and a common purpose has a homogenizing role which is what is contested in the modern world. the argument is made clearly by ronald dworkin who refers to two kinds of moral commitment: a commitment to ends of life, the good life, which is a ‘substantive’ commitment; and a commitment to deal ‘fairly and equally with each other’ which is a ‘procedural’ commitment (1996, 56). since the idea of a good life is a fact of individual autonomy (after kant) it follows that a ‘liberal society must remain neutral on the good life’ (57), from which it follows as well that a liberal society cannot espouse publicly ‘notions of the good’ (58). taylor, however, looks at the case of quebec and that province’s reading of the canadian charter of rights (1982) and endorses the manner in which in quebec legislation (governing the survival of the french language for instance) portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 9 mishra what was multiculturalism? makes ‘substantive’ part of the ‘procedural’ commitment of the province whenever questions about the ‘integrity of a culture’ becomes decisive. how then does one address procedural liberalism? does it homogenize difference even if, as in the quebec example, it patently does not? what are the dangers of the politics of equal respect? can liberalism offer ‘a neutral ground on which people of all cultures can meet and co-exist?’ (taylor 1994, 62). alluding to the rushdie affair and mainstream islam’s reading of politics and religion as a unified field, taylor’s argument is that liberalism is not neutral, it is a fighting creed (for its values) but given that societies are now becoming multicultural how can one deal with an essentially diasporic sense of marginalization on the part of many people ‘without compromising our basic political principles’ (63). and given the legacy of colonization, dispossession and racism that created ‘deprecating self-images’ of native peoples (fanon) that the ‘our’ here carries, how can one ask people to conform without being accused of relapsing into erstwhile, colonialist practices. so liberal democracies are faced with a demand: ‘that we all recognize the equal value of different cultures; that we not only let them survive, but acknowledge their worth’ (64). taylor formulates this as a presumption: ‘all human cultures that have animated whole societies over some considerable stretch of time have something important to say to all human beings’ (1994, 66). taylor is careful to emphasize that he has deliberately used the word ‘presumption’ because the claim, to him, has to be demonstrated through a ‘fusion of horizons’ (after gadamer) whereby a judgement of another culture would require, through research and analysis, a transformation of our own values or standards. to taylor the presumption we owe all cultures may be of this kind, which is different from demanding, as a right, this presumption about all cultures. the demand itself is, of course, contrary to the ‘difference-blindness’ principle of liberal democracies. furthermore, while we may approach all cultures with the presumption of equal value, it does not follow that our judgement itself would be uncritically uniform; that all cultures are of equal value. respect, as distinct from condescension requires critical judgment in which there is also implicit a judgment transformed by our understanding of the target culture. if portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 10 mishra what was multiculturalism? we didn’t all cultures, as being uniformly of equal value, are capable of being homogenized and distinctions totally collapsed. the point is made in a footnote (taylor 1994, fn 41): ‘in the end, the presumption of worth imagines a universe in which different cultures complement each other with quite different kinds of contribution. this picture not only is compatible with, but demands judgments of, superiority-in-a-certain-respect.’ the overriding choice for taylor is not between a repressive west and a multicultural utopia; rather it is between culture and barbarism, achoice that requires all cultures (including one’s own) to undergo comparative analysis. and for us to accept the worth of cultures generally the presumption has to be re-stated as: ‘cultures that have provided the horizon of meaning for large numbers of human beings, of diverse characters and temperaments, over a long period of time – that have, in other words, articulated their sense of the good, the holy, the admirable – are almost certain to have something that deserves our admiration and our respect, even if it is accompanied by much that we have to abhor and reject’ (72-73). taylor is a liberal canadian and a prominent philosopher. his argument centres on the question of recognition, some transcendental definition of the subject, the value of cultures and recognition of the special status of the french in quebec even if the latter may mean the necessity of laws that dictate that except for anglo-québécois everyone else should go to french schools. recognition is the key to taylor’s concept of the multicultural – that in a multicultural polity the foundational fathers of the nation (in the case of canada its white settlers) are already part of a larger continuous civilization which therefore must have the right to ‘recognize’ those cultures with a similar continuity.6 how does one put the ideal of recognition to practical use? in his challenging book, theory in an uneven world r. radhakrishnan (2003) suggests that one may have to think portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 11 6 both habermas (1994) and bhabha (1998), in their commentaries on this essay, see dangers in this presumption: for bhabha a ‘presumption of equality’ gets transformed into a ‘judgement of worth’ (33) which denies the contestatory value of minorities in a nation; for habermas taylor’s assumption that the ‘protection of collective identities’ competes with ‘the right to equal individual [subjektive] liberties’ – kant’s original one human right – (1994, 110) overlooks the fact that both ‘private and public autonomy are equiprimordial’ with an ‘internal … conceptually necessary connection between them’ (112-113). mishra what was multiculturalism? through a radical alterity in the form of the subaltern, precisely the figure whose self is excluded from charles taylor’s politics of recognition simply because he, the subaltern, has nothing of value to offer. his demands are therefore those of the filibustering truculent who has no exchange value since his contribution to anything culturally worthwhile is zero. but it is precisely at the point of the subaltern gaze that recognition needs to play itself out. in phenomenological parlance the subaltern is the limit situation, kant’s native excluded from the category of the sublime, the tierra del fuegan or the aboriginal, from which a politics of mutual recognition may take shape. taylor had indeed shown the importance of the dialogic in this politics. the subaltern subject position and that of the dominant subject are morphed into a dialogical situation. and again from this new perspective who or what constitutes a legitimate object of knowledge becomes problematic. however we look at it, though, a politics of recognition implies accepting the persistence of difference. that the latter exists cannot be ignored or deferred through a politics of assimilation. the all-important issue is ‘how to receive and practice difference relationally and non-hierarchically’ (taylor 1994, 65). how can one value difference without implying that some differences are to be valued higher than others? again this is suggestively present in taylor’s essay. if only difference can be located in the inbetween, within a semantics of the hyphen as something that is not located in the identitarian binary of self-other but in what derrida called différance, the always differing/deferring condition of subjecthood that does not close off identity, is the theoretical challenge to taylor’s principle of recognition. if the mainstream is itself ethnic and has no absolute subject position, if the mainstream declaration of a collective self is built around an illusory unity of the other (which then confirms its own spurious unity), then it too needs to interrogate its own identity. of course, it does not (and should not) follow that this recognition of itself would therefore create a level playing field on which distributive justice may be ‘liberally’ applied. what is the point of a multicultural identity politics when there is universal equality, when ‘distributive justice has been achieved?’ (taylor 1994, 67) this utopian moment is of course unreal, and even if realized cannot dissolve difference/différance itself. and at any rate the moment is portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 12 mishra what was multiculturalism? predicated on the idea of a universal reason that has its own roots in the history of liberalism. multicultural reason, so to speak, would struggle for justice by emphasizing the hyphen, by suggesting that selves may remain ‘authentic’ while being recognized. the horizons of different cultural pasts, these other frames of references, are important to bring new multicultural perspectives to acts of consciousness. in this respect phenomenology confronts cultural difference and redefines consciousness in terms of its placement in different cultures and its investments in them. for the argument is not that everything is therefore culture-specific (the ‘one man’s meat is another’s poison’ thesis) but that acts of consciousness must be based on comparisons that recognize the other as an object of knowledge, that recognize positions of power and presumption, and are able to modify truth conditions accordingly. in other words, the ‘episteme of eurocentrism’ and a historicization of western thought ‘with reference to the rest of the world’ (81) become urgent in any attempt at a proper comparative work. what becomes crucial to a multicultural poetic are a re-definition of ‘value’ in a multicultural economy, a retreat from the centrist/identitarian binary into a politics of relationality and the location of the self and other within rigorously theorized historical realities. (83) in these dialogues the divide between civilization and barbarism cannot be mapped on to the west and the rest; the divide inheres within each for both are ‘ubiquitous’ in culture. but can recognition – even multicultural recognition – attend to matters of distributive justice? redistribution or recognition? this is the title of a book in which nancy fraser and axel honneth (2003) debate the relative merits of these two propositions. how best can we create a society where opportunities are available to all regardless of race, class or creed and at the same time where individual and group differences are recognized? can the two co-exist? or is each driven by quite specific objectives so that to collapse both into one would dilute the force of either. for nancy fraser the division of the claims for social justice into two – redistributive claims and recognition claims – is a false antithesis because as she says ‘justice today requires both redistribution and recognition’ (9). what is necessary is a ‘two dimensional conception of justice’ that can accommodate both claims in spite of the divergent historical origins of the two: the first, redistribution, is a portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 13 mishra what was multiculturalism? liberal, post-marxist position, the second, recognition, is pure hegelian. to handle this adequately, one needs to see that both these claims are less philosophical but more ‘folk.’ they are as nancy fraser says, ‘folk paradigms of justice’ (11). in a sense the failure to merge the two is a result of a critical practice that has seen the two paradigms as advancing different agendas. whereas the redistribution paradigm focuses on injustices related to economic marginalization, economic restructuring, and working class exploitation and sees these as ‘unjust differentials’ (15), the recognition paradigm focuses on matters such as cultural domination, the need to radically transform ‘societal patterns of representation,’ the low status of ethnic groups and either attempts at revaluing devalued social groups or deconstructing the very terms in which such revaluation and celebration occurs. but since neither can nor should subsume the other, it follows that a proper theory of justice, as nancy fraser proposes, must involve a ‘“perspectival dualist” analysis that casts the two categories as co-fundamental and mutually irreducible dimensions of justice’ (3). the respondent to this position, axel honneth, does not disagree with fraser’s primary principle – that to understand justice both recognition and distribution should be equally addressed and that recognition is not simply a matter of a superstructure governed by distribution alone. he parts company with fraser by linking the two but in a dynamic and reciprocal fashion. what honneth advances is a ‘normative monism’ paradigm of recognition. in this paradigm rights (economic, class, labour, and so on) inhere in the principle of recognition which has been hitherto defined largely in terms of ‘cultural appreciation.’ to recognize entails a post-hegelian, and fundamentally marxist understanding of cultural value which is a value that is as much about the exchange value of the unit of labour as it is the use value of cultural forms. the case is implicit in his response which is titled ‘redistribution as recognition’ where the argument is one that effectively says that unless redistribution occurs, cultural value, however well defined or recognized as difference, cannot alter social and economic inequality. and fraser herself recognizes that ‘the just distribution of material resources continues to deserve priority on account of its moral urgency’ (112). but fraser is not a normative monist as she reads the two aspects of social justice as parallel aims that must work hand in hand. for honneth a portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 14 mishra what was multiculturalism? nation-state that distributes unjustly also misrecognizes or in his own words, ‘even distributional injustices must be understood as the institutional expression of social disrespect’ (114). recognition delineated by taylor, and refined by radhakrishnan, fraser and honneth, anticipate my concluding argument. and the paper perhaps has not much more to offer. nevertheless, even as we locate the ‘great debates’ within the principle of recognition, there are additional theories of multiculturalism, some deferring to taylor, others parting company radically, that require critical commentary. to these we must now turn our attention. (2) the morally required versus the morally permissible: joseph carens there are of course theories that contest basic liberal principles without sacrificing the ethos of liberalism. the chicana poet gloria anzaldúa collapses texas/california and the chicano homeland aztlán: ‘this land was mexican once,/ was indian always/ and is./ and will be again’ (1987, 3). the canadian political theorist joseph carens (2000) defends aboriginal demands for self-government as well as quebec’s language legislation in ways that are contrary to principles of liberal democracy in that procedural rights become substantial rights. these special demands, seemingly contrary to the ideal of state neutrality on group aspirations, are seen as being contextually neutral and compatible with liberalism because, as carens argues, actual practice may ‘recognize’ fundamental principles of democracy (such as freedom of speech, of religion, majority rule) differently. this is not to say that a generic culture of democracy is not a prerequisite for liberal institutions to flourish; rather the cultural specificity of a democratic regime (and let’s face it ‘every liberal democratic regime is culturally specific’) has to be nourished and supported, its virtues constantly disseminated. in his book he pursues this with reference to the very vexed fijian example. in brief, referring to fiji, carens points out that right from the moment when fijians ceded their islands to great britain in 1874, colonial policies ensured that traditional fijian way of life was preserved, so much so that even fijian labour was not allowed on european plantations in the colony. the early governors of fiji took this principle so seriously that they created, at times artificially, portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 15 mishra what was multiculturalism? communal structures of authority (such as the bose levu vakaturaga, ‘the great council of chiefs’) that would reinforce a traditional life-style against current late nineteenthcentury english preference for liberal individualism. to this end the british brought indentured labourers from india to work on the colonial sugar refining company controlled (the csr is an australian company) sugar-cane plantations. into a highlycontrolled and structured world was introduced a people who saw individualism as escape from both their erstwhile peasant indian and current indenture bondage. what emerged as a consequence were two radically divergent views of liberal democratic principles of two divergent groups: one indigenous, subsistent and collective, the other migrant, entrepreneurial and individualistic. had native fijians not been cushioned by interventionist colonial patronage, the introduction of liberal democratic values on them would have been disastrous. carens, therefore, defends exclusive (and even nonaccountable in legislative terms) policies that were deliberately aimed at preserving fijian culture: ‘the creation of a system of inalienable collective ownership of the land and the institutional reinforcement of deference to chiefly authority through various means’ (2000, 202). at this point carens adds: ‘i consider and reject arguments that these measures were inauthentic, unfair, and undemocratic’ (202). the difficulty with carens’s position arises when he has to work through conflicting readings of the nation – one instrumental (of the indians), the other ‘primal’ (of the fijians) – within the first democratic principle of equal citizenship. no matter how careful one is in postulating this first principle as being fundamental to everything else that liberal nation-states stand for, it will come under some form of attack (or at least be valued discrepantly) if one group has privileges so over-riding that their effect is to create a two-tier citizenship. the distinction between the ‘morally required’ (equal citizenship to indo-fijians) and the ‘morally permissible’ (special rights in favour of fijian cultural preservation) although a good one with which to begin discussing a delicate fijian national problematic, nevertheless may be subject to different orders of interpretation. by the latter i mean a shift in reading that would begin to value the ‘permissible’ above the portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 16 mishra what was multiculturalism? ‘required,’ so as to save a race from extinction.7 western nation-states have been careful not to make laws on ‘moral’ grounds with respect to either their native populations (where they exist) or oppressed minorities. but the immense value of carens’s chapter on the fijian example is that it explores a context that problematizes so many of the recurrent themes of multiculturalism that a steadfast adherence to liberal principles (in charles taylor subtextually [1994] and in john rawls formally[1971]) does not address. (3) absolute tolerance: chandran kukathas what is morally permissible may be reconstituted as a principle of absolute tolerance above what is morally required. such is the argument of chandran kukathas (1997) who takes issue with the subordination of toleration to some other principle (such as equal rights) and effectively asks us to think of tolerance itself as a first, abiding and overarching principle. to do this one has to immediately de-link rights and freedoms from the authority of the state or, put differently, one needs to accept that state authorization is not the only legitimating force behind key democratic ideals such as justice and freedom. kukathas examines liberal theories of tolerance and finds them wanting. in the case of rawls (for whom justice is the first virtue of liberal institutions) a just society honours liberty and equality provided that the premises on which they are based can be established by commonly recognized principles of reason (1971). with minor variations here and there, the fundamental fact in liberal theories is that the public sphere itself is a ‘reasoning sphere’ (in other words the public sphere constitutes the ‘law of reason’). this being so, rights and privileges can be incorporated into a polity only if they are ‘reasonable.’ when they are not, a consensus has to be found based upon ‘reasoned’ debate and without violating the liberal principle of individual autonomy. how could discrepant minority practices be tolerated if they go against the established (and accepted) values of the public sphere? the later rawls had, of course, admitted that minority opinion should be acknowledged through reasoned consensus for the establishment of a just society (1996, 1999). kukathas believes that current liberal theory (of rawls (1996), kymlicka (2001) and fitzmaurice (1993), for instance) ‘does not give portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 17 7 the discourse of many first nation people is one where questions of racial survival are often raised. in new zealand, attempts to ‘water down’ maori privileges (in the name of the morally required) are seen as the first steps in the gradual process by which the race itself may become extinct. mishra what was multiculturalism? sufficient toleration to minority communities’ (1997, 79) because the theory assumes that there is a common standpoint which is encapsulated in the idea of public reason. this is largely because it is linked to acknowledged and settled principles. for kukathas toleration is a principle dependent neither on the state, justice, nor reason; rather it is intrinsic to reason: ‘if toleration is forsaken then so is reason’ (83). the obvious question that kukathas directs at himself is: without a common standpoint, how is any kind of moral engagement possible? the solution is adherence to a range of different moralities, reasons, experiences, all functioning within a ‘rules of the commons.’ we note the following crucial passage from kukathas’s essay: rather than conceive of the public realm as embodying an established standpoint of morality which reflects a desirable level of stability and social unity, we should think of the public realm as an area of convergence of different moral practices … what has to be recognized about this public realm is that it is the product of a convergence which produces a stability and social unity that falls short of the permanence or durability many thinkers seek. (84-85) the social order envisaged here, although lacking values that have been entrenched or institutionalized, is characterized by an underlying toleration. kukathas would rather have toleration than stability and social unity along the lines outlined by liberal thinkers like rawls for whom shared values alone give a state its legitimacy. (3.1) critique of absolute tolerance: shacher and the tyranny of minority rights but absolute tolerance may pose serious problems to minorities within minorities (such as ‘visible minority’ women) should kukathas’s principle lead to the creation of absolute minority rights. this worry provides the crux to ayelet shachar’s multicultural jurisductions (2001). writes shacher: multicultural accommodation presents a problem, however, when pro-identity group policies aimed at leveling the playing field between minority communities and the wider society unwittingly allow systematic maltreatment of individuals within the accommodated group – an impact which in certain cases is so severe that it can nullify these individuals’ citizenship rights. (2) shachar calls this state of affairs the ‘paradox of multicultural vulnerability,’ a paradox for her because rights (based on kukathas’s principle/law of absolute tolerance) given to minorities may be inimical to the more general liberal values of many of the individuals portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 18 mishra what was multiculturalism? who ‘inhabit’ minority spaces. the phrase and the recognition of vulnerability is not new (many liberals have indeed advanced precisely this argument) but what is new, or rather what is inflected differently, are the juridicial implications of individual rights in the context of minority rights. put blandly: if subject a has certain rights because she belongs to a minority that, collectively, has been given these rights, then how could this very subject claim rights in addition to those which, when claimed, contradict the rights (strenuously fought for and achieved) of the group as a whole. let us say that a devout muslim minority group in new zealand is successful in gaining friday as their sabbath day and are willing to work on sundays to compensate for it. and this right is legally vested to them so that each member of the community now has a friday sabbath. subject a is a devout muslim too, but does not see this as a workable solution as she has children at school with whom she wishes to spend her sundays (saturdays are taken up by other household work for her). can she opt out without creating a chink in the principle itself? can she continue to work on fridays and take her sundays off? will she be accepted by other muslims as part of their societal culture? the liberal state will, of course, ensure that the freedom to dissociate is always there but then again we come face to face with individual rights versus collective rights. are collective rights worth fighting for if individuals within a community can readily dissociate once these rights have been given? if many more take on this option, are we not making a farce of minority rights based on absolute tolerance, enlightened as the idea itself is? in the end, the argument is one that exposes a significant ideological divide among multiculturalists. on the one hand there are those liberals who argue that liberal democratic institutions have sufficient flexibility to accommodate, on an ad hoc basis, legitimate claims that may come from any group or even from a single individual. on the other hand, there are those liberals who believe that an active legislative culture is crucial to accommodate the needs of a genuine multicultural polity so that minority groups may invoke the power of legislation rather than rely on the whim of juridicial interpretation (the courts) to meet their demands. the latter group of liberals are adherents of a portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 19 mishra what was multiculturalism? differentiated concept of citizenship which is seen as decisively multicultural. jurisdictional autonomy is, however, viewed with unease by most multiculturalists of whatever ilk although there are few, if any, examples of such autonomy being granted in the modern western nation-state. for example, it would be unfair if all muslims in britain were to be governed by islamic marriage practices, antiquated rituals such as female circumcision and hence matters such as divorce, alimony, sexuality and multiple wives were a matter to be handled by an autonomous muslim body in britain.8 for shachar ‘a conception of differentiated citizenship which is guided by an ambitiously innovative principle’ and ‘one that strives for the reduction of injustice between groups, together with the enhancement of justice within them’ (2001, 4) is the answer to the general issue of minority rights rather than a prima facie principle of toleration. (3.2) critique of absolute tolerance: michael walzer and differential participation for michael walzer (1997) the trouble with tolerence as an absolute principle is that groups have participated differentially and at different historical periods in the negotiated settlement of common rules and social practices in any given state. implicit in this reading is of course the prioritization (after taylor) of the longest continuous inhabitants in power or those who were the first to usurp power from native peoples: american puritans, british migrants in australia and new zealand, british and french in canada, and so on. unless one accepts the negotiated settlement of these early settlers on matters relating to principles of morality and justice, we would end up with a (postmodern) sense of a settlement that was always provisional and immediately open to other regimes of thinking. although the latter is an historical fact as shift in power has produced different political and legal systems (the historical expansion of islam is a case in point) this is not a likely scenario in our own age. the point, however, is that there is no historical instantiation of a society at work that considers its own negotiated settlement to be provisional. in waltzer’s argument a ‘pluralistic solidarity’ would be far superior to mere tolerance because it has the advantage of leading to a rethinking of reason without portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 20 8 see also the australian april 4 2005, 4: ‘a specialist islamic court is among proposals muslim leaders have raised with howard government ministers to resolve religious disputes such as divorce within australian muslim communities.’ under islamic law, a sharia court alone resolves disputes about divorce as a nation’s civil court ruling is not binding. mishra what was multiculturalism? foregoing a sense of a unified social order and its principles. here public reason would grow out of a dialogue among various communities provided that adequate institutional structures and resources are available to all through the state. the recent history of liberal democracies has shown a remarkable acceptance of liberal values by people whose own cultures have values markedly different from those of the liberal west. the fact that democratic institutions continue to flourish in countries like australia, canada, the usa and the uk, multicultural polities all, through what robert putnam said were networks of civic engagement that fostered ‘sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity and encourage[d] the emergence of social trust’ (gutmann 1998, 6) bear ample testimony to this fact. what must be avoided is ‘particularized discourse’ (laclau’s phrase, 2003) that does not link up with the large trans-ethnic or national concerns about endemic class exploitation and justice in a multicultural polity.9 western democracies are attractive to people not only because of the freedom they give to the individual; they are attractive because of the many material benefits that accrue to citizens therein. and these rights and privileges may be threatened by an uncritical rendition of particularized rights, as a blind extension of what carens referred to as morally permissible exclusionist rights. in theories of diversity very often the connection between material benefits and support of liberal institutions are overlooked. and tolerance too may not be the self-evident primary concern of minorities who, generally, adapt to the norms established by those responsible for the original negotiated settlement. so what is all the fuss about multiculturalism? (4) the politics of compromise in declared multiculturalists such as bhikhu parekh the fuss is about accommodation and representation. as part of this agenda we get in parekh a politics of compromise under the sign of a liberal and humane nation-state (a minimum universalism) which can bend portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 21 9 ernesto laclau is concerned here with the us version of multiculturalism that aims at recognizing and celebrating difference. the danger is that the celebration then distorts precisely the ongoing struggle for recognition and improvement that takes place within ethnic communities. a further danger is that the celebration of difference also produces demands by groups for narrow advancement policies that are linked to individual groups. laclau prefers the development of a more comprehensive multicultural discourse, less particularized but one that does not destroy particularity per se. he does not deny the significance of multiculturalism as a means of creating a more participatory democracy; but he is wary of a multiculturalism that could lead to such particularized claims that it fails to address precisely those social forces that threaten to destroy access to justice and equal opportunity. see olson and worsham (1999, 129162). mishra what was multiculturalism? its rules on matters such as separate schools or the teaching of vernacular languages, representations in key public institutions (the police force, the judiciary), fairer readings of the literary canon, incorporation of migrant contributions in the grand narrative of the nation, and so on. thus bhikhu parekh’s the future of multi-ethnic britain (‘the parekh report’ 2000a) and rethinking multiculturalism (2000b), endorse universalist or liberal presumptions, which means that in the end forced marriages, female circumcision, rejection of the autonomy of art (within limits), or other practices contrary to majoritarian values of decency or morality or aesthetics are not acceptable. what is elided as a consequence of the universalist presumption underlying parekh’s politics of compromise – and something that has been noted by only a few commentators – are identity politics that work on the basis of, for lack of a better word, postmodern notions of mobility and hybridity. there are in britain and elsewhere a growing number of people (an entire generation in fact) whose sense of nationality (being british, french, canadian, australian or kiwi) is interpellated through a complex mode of intersubjective engagement and definition of the self. for these people the symbolic struggle over sikhs and helmets, women and circumcision, backyard killing of animals for halaal meat, the self-evident power of the mullah or priest over congregations in mosque and temple are less important than the ways in which they can become fully-fledged, legitimate subjects in a nation where being british is seen as a racially exclusive category or right. here fighting mainstream battles about justice and equality at the behest of the underprivileged generally transcends the narrow concerns of ethnic groups. of course, parekh’s brief is different since his presumption is that racism is endemic because racists are not given the right kind of information about minorities. in this argument what for parekh is paramount is the need to redress an educational system that makes little concession to other ethnic values. in the name of a hegemonic liberalism and individual rights, little is done to educate people about non-western values of consensus, reverence of authority and social hierarchy. what is worse, no adequate historical explanations of seemingly pernicious social practices such as caste, first-cousin marriage and polygamy are given. for parekh, then, only those societies that believe in (and can legislate) a form of minimum universalism can offer ‘the most coherent response to moral and cultural diversity’ (2000a, 126). for this reason he gives postmodern definitions of subjectivity short shrift. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 22 mishra what was multiculturalism? those who believe in contingent and changing selves lack historical depth, and their lives, being ungrounded in culture, are generally shallow and unstable. jacob levy (2000) takes minimum universalism further by stating that the politics of fear and exclusion should be avoided. this is not quite the politics of absolute tolerance in that cultural practices are not so much absolutely tolerated but subtly modified so as to make them acceptable to both the community under fear and the nation’s legislators. he refers to the request by somali immigrants in seattle for doctors at the harborview medical center to perform female genital cutting. the medical centre agreed to a lesser form of genital circumcision, referred to as ‘sunna circumcision,’ which is a ‘small incision on the clitoral hood.’ this met the cultural needs of the immigrants and is less harmful than infibulation which is what normally happened to girls as a coming of age ritual. a bitter public dispute ensued which led to the passing of a federal statute criminalizing genital mutilation. now it is clear from levy’s commentary at this point that the harborview medical center solution responded to a need, albeit in a manner contrary to acceptable public norms, and contained the kinds of public humiliation the somali ethnic community would have had to suffer (and will suffer) if a culturally enforced female genital mutilation remained the norm for girls aged six in that community. clearly the principle governing levy’s thesis is self-evidently realist because what is important to him are ways in which real structures are put in place to pre-empt racial abuse and vilification. while the thesis leads to a less fluent and certainly a less engaging mode of theoretical writing, the argument has the merit of informing theory with counter-factual scenarios with which to test many liberal assumptions. here again absolute tolerance is filtered through a realist principle of least pain to either party (a nation-state that sees certain acts as barbaric and a relic of its own medieval past; a minority group in which members feel incomplete in the absence of the ritual). (5) the inclusive community the multicultural state is a political reality. given this fact, how to work towards an inclusive community is the task of liberal theory. iris young (2000), for instance, prefer a portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 23 mishra what was multiculturalism? deliberative rather than an aggregative model of an inclusive democracy.10 a deliberative model would be based on a critical reading of preferences and would not simply endorse, as the aggregative model does, ‘the most widely held preferences in the population’ (2000). when democratic processes simply reflect an aggregation of preferences, there is little room for debate between holders of these preferences; nor is there a consciousness about how preferences, collectively, link up to what the state represents as a morally legitimate polity. nancy fraser had referred to them as affirmative and transformative remedies (1998).11 still, as with stephen macedo (2000) (for whom diversity is to be acknowledged but not at the expense of sacrificing fundamental liberal democratic values), and david miller (1999) (for whom social justice is the key to any theorizing of the good since the distribution of good and bad things in life among the members of a human society holds the key to its principles12), how do citizens become part of an 10 young’s argument is that the decision-making process is the democratic ideal and exclusions from it on the grounds of cultural intolerance, racism, sexism and so on are proof that a democratic society is not living up to its promise (2000, 13-14). in her two models of democracy, the aggregative is a ‘pluralist or interest group pluralist’ form of democracy since here decisions reflect the ‘most widely held preferences of the population.’ the trouble with this model is that it is not built upon a critical history of its preferences, nor are the preferences somehow connected to some larger self-justifying or transcendental principle of being, such as justice. when democratic processes simply reflect an aggregation of preferences, there is little room for debate between holders of these preferences, nor is there a consciousness about how preferences, collectively, link up to what the state represents as a morally legitimate polity. deliberative democracy on the other hand is marked by ‘an open discussion and the exchange of views leading to agreed-upon policies’ (22). 11 in terms of fraser’s distinctions, multiculturalism has generally been addressed with reference to affirmative remedies. in other words, remedies have been suggested within the existing socio-economic and juridical frameworks of the liberal nation-state. against this, transformative remedies (those pursued by queer theorists for instance) question the very basis on which sexual norms get established and are therefore ‘deconstructive.’ affirmative remedies have been associated historically with the liberal democratic ethos, transformative with a socialist ethos: the point, as marx emphatically declared, ‘is to change it.’ thus on the question of exploitation of people within a nation-state (poorly paid women of colour for instance) affirmative remedies do not abolish class difference but effectively ‘support … and shape it’ (fraser 1998, 33). the project of mainstream multiculturalism is ‘the cultural analogue of the liberal welfare state’ (35) since its aim is not to restructure the relations of recognition (as a deconstructive/transformative policy would do) but to superficially re-allocate respect to existing groups and identities. fraser concludes with the observation that the relations of production in any state must change before real redistribution of wealth can take place. conversely, cultural practices must be taken out of their presumed and erstwhile norms before group differentiation can be blurred and real recognition given. for the multicultural project, only a nationstate committed to socialist ideals can deliver both. nancy fraser’s socialist critique of current multicultural practices is nothing new, but it remains very much a minoritarian point of view in the post-soviet world. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 24 12 miller clearly belongs to the school of thinking that finds principles of social justice that would include the whims of almost every conceivable group of people contrary to the overarching values of democracy, individuality and social harmony. in short, a theory of social justice (as distributive justice) has to be based on what he calls ‘modes of human relationship’ (1999, 25). these modes are: solidaristic community, instrumental association and citizenship. clearly questions about social justice need to address, finally, a growing cultural dominant of western nation-states: the fact that the contemporary polity is becoming mishra what was multiculturalism? inclusive community remains paramount especially when the influential american pragmatic philosopher richard rorty (giroux 1996, 195-99) constructs multiculturalism as a monolithic conspiracy aimed at toppling the consensual basis of american democracy even as he agrees, one presumes with satya mohanty that ‘human personhood’ is a moral notion and individual human worth is non-negotiable as a progressively multicultural. not surprisingly even miller’s book ends with a discussion of globalization and multiculturalism. globalization, of course, poses a rather different and altogether new challenge to social justice. if capital now moves to those countries with the highest return and the lowest forms of social justice (the establishment of sweat shops from china to fiji are predicated on this correlation), then it is not in the economic interest of a state to emphasize distributive justice (which would include minimum wages, superannuation contribution by the employer, and so on) if it means outflow of capital to other nations. multiculturalism poses similar threats to the national ethos. miller uses the term multiculturalism ‘specifically to describe the fragmentation of national cultures and the rise of distinct cultural groups – whether within or across national borders – whose members’ personal identities are linked to their participation in the group’ (252). miller suggests that multiculturalism has three main consequences for social justice. first in the absence of a shared sense of a political community, people may see the distribution of justice either far too narrowly (‘what is there for my own ethnic group’ argument, for instance) or transnationally (what is there for my global brethren to whom i am inextricably linked through religion, for instance). second, difference may mean that consensus is no longer something that can be the basis for distributive justice. although the later rawls arrived at the conclusion that divergent groups can reach an ‘overlapping consensus on principles of justice,’ (252) miller is of the opinion that this is really a forlorn hope. third, and notably after iris young (2000) and nancy fraser (1998), the assumption that multiculturalism acts as a corrective to the materialistic base of social justice principles because of its emphasis on the politics of cultural recognition is not an issue of distributive justice. not surprisingly miller decisively rejects the argument that holds that we should respond to the challenges of globalization and multiculturalism by inventing new and more complex forms of justice: if nations are no longer the primary site of justice, then let’s have ethnic justice and regional justice and transnational justice all thrown together in one glorious casserole! (1999, 252) portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 25 a minimal starting point, consistency of application, and equality of citizenship are the requirements for justice to operate. in an unusual move, miller speaks about the need to respond more directly to the challenges posed by multiculturalism. embedded in the phrase is of course an implicit value judgment: that multiculturalism poses a threat to theories of justice. the case for it has been vastly overstated, he argues, and it needs to be dispassionately examined. in the end miller does not believe cultural differences (of language, religion, cuisine, and so on) ‘inevitably translate into conflicting conceptions of social justice’ (261). the tradition from which miller is writing (the post-kantian tradition which includes isaiah berlin, rawls and habermas) is one that sees pluralism as ways of knowing, as a mode of being where all its various (and multifaceted) components are driven by the enlightenment project of daring to know and where an ethos of commonality, a language of shared values, may be either taken for granted or has to be socially invented. on the matter of social justice at any rate, an enlightened liberal democracy can ensure that it is equally and fairly distributed. the threat to democracy comes when group identities overtake national identities: ‘the real challenge of multiculturalism, then, is not that it makes agreement about principles of social justice impossible to achieve, but that it makes it harder for people to see themselves as members of an inclusive community across which these principles are to be implemented’ (263). the trouble with this conclusion is that miller continues to read ‘inclusive community’ as an abstract polity and not as fully-fledged citizens with degrees of social distinctions at the level of felt-life. as someone like parekh would retort: to whose definition of the inclusive community should we subscribe, high tory or those of the royle family in the popular tv show? mishra what was multiculturalism? category of social analysis (1997).13 as with many liberal thinkers the fear is that multiculturalism may introduce a variable concept to the absolute, not negotiable, morality of human worth. (6) the spectres of class the outstanding absence in multicultural theory is a theory of class largely because multicultural theory has been primarily concerned with identity politics, minority rights and how the liberal nation-state accommodates these. class, of course, does not belong to the same category as gender, race or ethnicity. it is not, in edna bonacich’s words, ‘an identity, but a system of economic power and domination. class relations are not relations of identity, but relations of dominance and resistance’ (1999, 298). what then is the nature of capitalist intervention in multiculturalism? is it, as žižek (1997) and garcía canclini (2001) have suggested, the new logic/ideology of global capitalism and really a policy of containment necessary because of the need for labour in western democracies?14 13 richard rorty wrote in the new york times that left-wing supporters of multiculturalism were in fact ‘unpatriotic’ as their position rocked the very foundations upon which national identity and national pride were based. the trouble with rorty’s position, as giroux demonstrates, is not that it ‘equates cultural differences with a threat to national unity’ (1996, 197) but that it constructs multiculturalism as a monolithic conspiracy aimed at toppling the consensual basis of american democracy. what rorty overlooks is that national unity is itself a ‘shifting, unsettled complex of historical struggles and experiences’ (198). mohanty argues that multiculturalism is a ‘form of epistemic cooperation across cultures.’ he makes a case for a realist version of multiculturalism (where the presumption of the value of human worth is a not-negotiable transcendental principle) against what are the dominant ‘relativist or liberal versions’ (1997, 198). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 26 14 for garcía canclini, however, latin american societies have a distinctly hybrid norm in the figure of the mestizo or mixed race person. garcía canclini suggests that anglo-americans and latin americans have different experiences of globalization because they define the multicultural nature of their nations rather differently: ‘what in latin america has been called cultural pluralism or heterogeneity is conceived as part of the nation, whereas in the u.s. debate, as various authors explain, “multiculturalism means separatism” (hughes, taylor, waltzer)’ (2001, 10). in latin america societies are ‘not structured by a multiplicity of ethnocommunitarian groupings’ but by practices that go back to ‘models of secular republicanism and jacobin individualism’ (11). of course, arguments in favour of ‘a single absolutist patrimony’ for the state (as its dominant cultural ethos) and movements ‘affirming exclusivistic self-affirmations’ have indeed been a feature of latin american life. but the dominant tendency in latin america has been towards an affirmation of national identities as being hybrid and located across cultures in an ‘asymmetrically interdependent’ fashion. it may well be that inherent in charles taylor’s multiculturalism of recognition is a principle of anticipatory hybridity as recognition of value in the other may also mean creating identities that would grow out of all these ‘recognized’ values. for garcía canclini what happened in latin american societies may become a feature of all societies not through an historical imperative (as in the case of latin america) but through the impact of modes of consumption upon ‘forms of citizenship’: we are what we consume. the logic of the market may well shape (post)modern identities, making them ‘transterritorial and multilinguistic’ (29), which, of course implies, that multicultural jurisdictions themselves may well have to be alert to changes that transcend the solidarity principles governing any given nomos. often the case for minority rights for a group reprises the older definition of identity as belonging to a nation – the same mishra what was multiculturalism? and in the name of racial and gender diversity do capitalist institutions like universities appoint people other than those who belong to the middle class anyway? to stretch bonacich’s point (1999), the argument really is that multiculturalism is an ideology (a distorted system of beliefs, dare one say even a false consciousness?) that hides the fact that capitalism generates economic and political inequality. thus it could be said with elizabeth povinelli (1998) that the mabo decision in australia (that finally put to rest precolonial australia as a terra nulius) is a control mechanism which keeps the values of the monoculture intact so that claims under mabo, or even under the waitangi tribunal (in new zealand) must take place under capitalist regimes of thinking.15 language, customs, family practices, religion and so on. the shift from a monadic definition of identity (the latter remains an important factor when we address minority rights) to a global multicultural identity (based on consumption) is a matter that has not been subjected to thorough critique. if we were to shift our attention from western nation-states with large diasporic communities to latin american nation-states where multitemporal, multiethnic and multicultural heterogeneity is the norm, we may become less anxious about the on-going necessity of state intervention for the creation of a multicultural polity. of course, in garcía canclini’s postmodern scenario of consumption based citizenship, there is a postcolonial idealism (the inevitability of hybrid identities) that may not be able to address the here-and-now relations of unequal power and representation. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 27 15 liberal investment in multiculturalism takes povinelli to advance what her essay seeks to understand: ‘how the state uses a multicultural imaginary to solve the problems that capital, (post)-colonialism, and human diasporas pose to national identity in the late twentieth century’ (1998, 579). povinelli makes an archival reading of the 1992 australian high court ruling on the native title rights of indigenous australians (the mabo ruling). the mabo decision has been the single most important symbolic moment in australian-indigenous race relations since the founding of the (white) australian nation. the decision was celebrated by the liberal left and grudgingly accepted by the center-right more or less on the same grounds: the decision was accepted only because australia had recently reconstituted itself (albeit without a multicultural act) as a ‘multicultural nation.’ yet in this declaration what really happens is that monoculture accepts difference and diversity (under a multicultural template) because the dominant monoculture (as the french/english biculture in canada) sees this as the proper thing to do by its own enlightenment rules. in other words, even as multiculturalism is embraced (and land rights to a point endorsed) the transcendental sign of the nation as defined by its enlightened monocultural values remains paramount. this is normative theorizing in a sense, but very powerful because povinelli is not simply acting out a form of multicultural activism. for povinelli the (post)narrative of mabo shows the ways in which multiculturalism becomes the grounds for ‘a new form of national monoculturalism’ (580). in this new gloss over the old order, the state inflects the registers in which it had hitherto represented itself. where there was, in the case of aboriginal land rights, the doctrine of terra nullius (australia as a tabula rasa upon which territorial rights could be unproblematically superimposed), there are now rights based on common law (from which native peoples had been excluded). where there was expansionism and the frontier mentality, there is now the language of shame, dispossession, guilt and trauma. place the two together and the native other enters the symbolic order of (white) human sciences. seen in this light the nation-state’s juridical and social conscience defuse and divert liberation movements and anti-colonial struggles that native peoples in european settler nations (aborigines, maoris, north american indians) had never participated in. this is as true of the new zealand maoris as it is of native fijians whose own version of land rights must be connected to the absence of a narrative of anti-colonial struggle in their lives. in the case of fiji, the discourse of anti-colonialism was primarily an indo-fijian struggle for independence (modeled on the experience of the indian motherland). in this struggle the native fijian lumpen proletariat played no part. and for george speight and his nationalist followers both the british and the indo-fijians mishra what was multiculturalism? the cynical reading of multiculturalism is that multiculturalism, as a state ideology, deflects possibilities of a class struggle against a system of economic domination and distorted distribution through an excessive emphasis on ethnic difference. in a timely reminder bonacich states: ‘somewhere along the line, our concerns over gender and race have led us to lose sight of property relations, or to treat them as an old issue whose time has passed. marxist ideas are denounced as male and eurocentric’ (1999, 303). like bonacich, richard p. appelbaum also declares that ethnicity and gender surface as important elements in global capitalism because ‘global capitalism has meant the feminization of labor worldwide, and the ethnicizing of labor on the home front’ (1999, 338). it becomes important that the discourse of multicuturalism is read in materialist terms to explore the extent to which ‘a highly volatile multiculturalism’ is now predicated on exploitation and class ‘differences based on race and ethnicity.’ in capital volume 1 (1967) marx distinguished between constant capital (investment in machinery whose value is fixed and must be paid off), variable capital (costs as indicated by the wage bill) and surplus value (the unpaid labor extracted by the capitalist which is the source of the capitalist’s profit). since capitalism survives on surplus value, it needs to ensure maximum disparity between variable capital and surplus value. in a period of everincreasing global capitalism, multiculturalism becomes a coded word for the feminization and ethnicization of cheap labour, and hence a source of surplus value: ‘from cars to clothing to electronics, the hands that produce our goods and services reveal the exploitative side of multiculturalism: they are hands of color, of women, of impoverished third world peoples driven by hardship and hunger to labor in the global factory’ (appelbaum 1999, 340). to make this point, appelbaum points out that in los angeles county alone there are around 125,000 garment workers, many of whom are illegal were equally vulagis (‘foreigners’). so a monoculture uses multiculturalism to institutionalise (and neutralise) difference. ‘in this liberal imagination,’ writes povinelli: the state apparatuses, as well as its law, principles of governance, and national attitude, need merely be adjusted to accommodate others; they do not need to experience the fundamental alterity of, in this case, indigenous discourses, desires, and practices or their potentially radical challenge to the nation and its core institutions and values such as ‘democracy’ and the common law. (1998, 581) portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 28 the subaltern then gets incorporated into a liberal world order of enlightened values even as difference, under the template of multiculturalism, continues to be celebrated. mishra what was multiculturalism? immigrants and people of colour. the factory owners are not necessarily white, and racialized exploitation is not necessarily a replay of the old white master/ person-ofcolour slave opposition. no racial group or nation – koreans and chinese in los angeles or china and japan – escapes the exploitative logic of racism.16 since capitalism thrives on class distinctions, racism becomes simply a means of rationalizing class. (7) the figure of woman theories of class take us directly to the figure of absolute exploitation already alluded to: the figure of the marginalized, subaltern woman of colour under the patronage of multiculturalism. in a powerful essay nira yuval-davis (1999) has examined the largely under-theorized area of gender relations and multiculturalism. the role of women of colour, especially among minority groups, she argues, is fundamental to any study of multiculturalism. multiculturalism does not therefore address power relations within ethnic contexts or, at a broader level, discriminatory practices or even policies that affect the lives of many people, and especially women of colour. it follows that a major criticism of multicultural policies is the absence in them of any real theorizing of class positions and ‘internal power conflicts and interest differences within the minority collectivity’ (yuval-davis 1999, 118). when all individuals from a minority community can be rendered authentic, they become equal recipients of benefits that would otherwise go to only those who are most in need of them. in many ways a celebration of cultural pluralism where ‘hybrids’ challenge (and even erase) the ‘totalizing boundaries’ of nation-states is marked by an absence of any real engagement with class differences for which as yuval-davis suggests a ‘transversal politics’ is essential. transversal politics is based on dialogue that takes into account the different positionings of women, or people portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 29 16 of course, as étienne balibar’s often reprinted essay ‘class racism’ (1999, 322-333) shows, one should not rush headlong into any simple relationship of ‘“expression” (or, equally, of substitution) between racism and class struggle’ (323). the problematic (into which theories of multiculturalism too locate themselves) may be reformulated as follows: nationalism neutralises class conflict by positing a higher mystical unity based on common destiny but transforms the intrinsic narrative of class struggle into a xenophobic exclusion of the other. in other words, nationalism is intrinsically racist but denotes that the social relation it transcends has a built-in tendency towards racism. this social relation was obviously the class racism upon which ‘aristocratic racism’ and its avatar ‘colonial racism’ (the imperialist always defined himself in aristocratic terms regardless of his own real class origins) were based. although balibar does not address multiculturalism as such, it is clear that the kinds of reciprocal determinations he discusses between nationalism and racism, and between class racism and ethnic racism, have invaded discussions about multiculturalism. mishra what was multiculturalism? in general, but does not grant any of them a priori privileged access to ‘truth.’ in ‘transversal politics,’ perceived unity and homogeneity are replaced by dialogues that give recognition to the specific positionings of those who participate in them, as well as the ‘unfinished knowledge’ that each such situated positioning can offer (121). in a rather different discourse susan okin (1999) also raised these issues with reference to patriarchal endorsement of personal laws affecting women from various cultures: clitoridectomy, forced or child marriage, patriarchal laws governing rape, sexual servitude, purdah and so on (all of which contravene the case for a woman’s dignity as being equal to that of a man’s). to okin, claims by minorities that these practices should continue reflect age-old power structures that get transplanted in their new, primarily western, homes. their defense by the multicultural body politic (the new enlightened nation-state) cannot be justified as these rights do not adequately represent the rights of the weak within ethnic cultures. for the feminist, multiculturalism and feminism (which challenges all cultural traditions) are mutually exclusive unless multicultural communities undergo the kinds of reform on matters of women’s rights that has been a feature of the west for at least a century. there are no group rights that can presuppose unequal gender roles. so for okin unless a culture is willing to alter itself (and adopt liberal democratic views on women) or failing that become extinct, there can be no moral support for a multicultural policy that defends personal religious laws and practices that are patently anti-feminist. for yuval-davis the solution lies not so much in a collective transformation (which can only be an ideal although historically inevitable) but dialogic intervention and self-critique.17 portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 30 17 gayatri gopinath in her essay ‘nostalgia, desire, diaspora’ (2003) makes an important statement about the patriarchal, heterosexual politics of the immigrant indian communities in the united states. since these communities position women as ‘repositories of an essential “indianness”… any form of transgression on the part of women may result in their literal and symbolic exclusion from the multiple “homes” that they as immigrant women inhabit’ (264-265). the ‘non-heterosexual indian woman’ is therefore unimaginable in the ‘dominant diasporic and nationalist logics’ (265) of the community. gopinath refers to the case of the federation of indian associations (fia) sponsored annual india day parade in new york. in 1995 the fia refused members of the south asian lesbian and gay association (salga) to march in the parade. fia’s position on ‘indian queers’ and ‘indian lesbians’ is not uncommon among multicultural communities generally; gopinath’s essay with reference to the indian diaspora draws our attention to the gender politics of multicultural communities generally and the general ‘unrepresentability of a non-heteronormative (female) subject’ in what continues to be a heavily patriarchal and heterosexual understanding of minority rights by minorities themselves. mishra what was multiculturalism? (8) the post-colonial condition britain, a key player in the formation of the modern idea of empire, has been used as the ‘cite’ to think through recognition and its denial as a legacy of colonialism itself. barnor hesse, using the conceptual neologism ‘transruption’18 in the introduction to his edited volume un/settled multiculturalisms (2000, 5) asks, ‘why is it that in britain there has been no serious debate about multiculturalism as part of the mainstream political agenda?’19 in other words, as a ‘spectre’ and as the threatening return of the repressed within, multiculturalism is silenced, debates about it seen as a way of ‘splintering’ the nation. hesse then goes on to trace the ‘reasons why the politics of multiculturalism [became] a non-debate in britain by the middle of the 1990s’ (5). in britain, of course, multiculturalism is directly linked to the question of post-1945 ‘nonwhite’ immigration and to the various right wing (expulsionist) and liberal (from assimilationist to cultural ‘celebrationist’) responses to the question of national integration. having recognized, with floya anthias and nira yuval-davis, that ‘ethnic and racial divisions get reproduced from generation to generation (1992, 158), the liberal response was to actively valorize the aesthetic domain of cultural difference without addressing the questions of power relations. this very same valorization was then read as a threat to things essentially british by the right. in the end, as hesse points out, the fundamental issue of racism in britain was sidelined. the difficulty with multiculturalism in britain was with its generalized conception, as if in its generality (equal value of all cultures without, in charles taylor’s terms, a theory of recognition) it could offer full explanations about discrepant, indeed contradictory, social representations and national 18 ‘transruption,’ says hesse ‘comprises any series of contestatory cultural and theoretical interventions which, in their impact as cultural differences, unsettle social norms and threaten to dismantle hegemonic concepts and practices.’ they ‘disarticulate the logic of discourses that seek to repress, trivialize or silence difference’ (17). portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 31 19 for hesse ‘multiculturalism refers to particular discourses or social forms which incorporate marked cultural differences and diverse ethnicities … [it] can be named, valued, celebrated and repudiated from various political perspectives’ (2000, 2). multicultural, a ‘colonial formation,’ is, on the other hand, a ‘signifier of the unsettled meanings of cultural differences in relation to multiculturalism as the signified of attempts to fix their meaning in national imaginaries.’ simply put, whereas multiculturalism, the signified, is a discourse or governmental policy that may be discussed in terms of an increasingly diversified nationstate, multicultural, the signifier, refers to those religious, social, linguistic and racial bodies that are grouped ‘differently’ in everyday social practice. in western nation-states what is really at stake is the nation’s prior construction of itself as a unified, homogeneous imagined community. mishra what was multiculturalism? identity to all and sundry. what is now urgent, and this is hesse’s primary point, is the necessity to contest british multiculturalism (in its however residual form) ‘as symptomatic of an unresolved post-colonial condition following decolonization, the dismantling of the british empire and post-war migration from the erstwhile colonies’ (11). it is then the particular – diasporic formations in britain, the nation’s imperialist legacy – that requires factoring in a theory of multiculturalism. the latter must address the legacy of colonialism at the heart of the british nation and difficulties the british have had in coming to terms with its ‘post-colonial’ condition. in britain especially the need for a ‘particularized’ post-colonial british multiculturalism sensitive to the nation’s historical formation is therefore essential. for what has happened is that the particular has been subsumed by the idea of a ‘tolerant british nation which is intrinsically uninformed by historically racist processes’ (12). in britain, then, multicultural theory (and practice) must address the nation’s colonial history and its ‘incomplete process of colonization’ so as to readdress the impact of black and asian migration on ‘the racially exclusive narcissism of the nation’ (15). multiculturalism needs to be aware of discrepant ways in which diaspora thought affects the nation, the ways in which ‘unresolved discrepancies’ need to be acknowledged as being crucial to an understanding of the modern nation. what the dominant discourse must acknowledge is the continuing validity of these alternative points of view, alternative life worlds that cannot be repressed. hesse calls these discrepancies, these eruptions, multicultural ‘transruption,’ which signifies the constant and ‘recurrent exposure’ of the discrepant in the nation-state. in the concluding essay to hesse’s volume stuart hall too argues that the new multiethnic and multi-cultural nation-states grew out of the ‘dismantling of the old empires’ and ‘reflect their prior conditions of existence under colonialism’ (2000, 212). an understanding of the connection between the two is necessary before one can explain, especially in the context of britain, the neo-imperial character of race relations in multicultural britain. at the same time we need to be conscious of three broad shifts: the end of the old european imperial system, the end of the cold war and the spectre of globalization. at one level these three forces may well suggest a new world order no longer marked by ethnic or class difference, or an agonistic politics since the triumph of portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 32 mishra what was multiculturalism? individualism and capitalism introduces an order marked by wealth and not ethnic, religious and cultural difference. reality in fact tells a rather different story. for instance, even as globalization signals the idea of the universal subject, it produces the figure of the subaltern who stresses his or her difference. indeed the ‘classic enlightenment binary between traditionalism and modernity is displaced by a disseminated set of “vernacular modernities”’ (hall 2000, 215). in other words, the symbols of modernity are acquired but on their own terms so that global and local interests remain in tension. hall reads this tendency as an instance of what derrida referred to as ‘différance’ and suggests (after homi bhabha) that différance is played out best in the ‘borderline time’ of minorities. what is produced is a localism which is not simply a residue of the past (such as a return to absolute religious beliefs) but ‘something new – globalization’s accompanying shadow; what is left aside in globalization’s panoramic sweep, but returns to trouble and disturb globalization’s cultural settlements’ (hall 2000, 216). the form this localism takes (progressive, creative, fundamentalist, integrative) depends upon the politics of the host nation in which minorities are located. as the concluding essay in hesse’s edited volume, hall’s essay looks at the particular case of britain in terms of hesse’s idea of the ‘transruptive force.’ the british have seen themselves as a unified culture suddenly threatened with the arrival of blacks and asians in their midst. the ‘multicultural question’ is therefore seen as something that came with the arrival of the ss empire windrush in 1948, bringing the first caribbean migrants, a history so powerfully shown in andrea levy’s remarkable novel small island (2004). hall’s point is that the multicultural question has been part of britain’s domestic and colonial histories and that british attitudes towards coloured immigration simply replicated the older colonial attitude of subordination and exclusion. it is this attitude that has blinded the nation from addressing the new ‘racialized, ethno-cultural and religious identities’ in the country. given the nation’s prior belief in its own unified culture (a culture into which admission for the colonized outsider was a non-issue) the british (like their settler nation counterparts elsewhere in australia, canada, new zealand, the united states and for a long while south africa) simply worked on the presumption of final assimilation of subaltern difference. what happened in fact was that these coloured portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 33 mishra what was multiculturalism? diasporic communities offered a ‘novel cultural configuration’ (as ‘cosmopolitan communities’) contrary to the logic of full assimilation. they were also seen both as a relic of a communal sense that ‘liberal society is supposed to have lost’ and as ‘the most advanced signifiers of the urban postmodern metropolitan experience’ (hall 2000, 221). the first ‘transuptive impact’ of these diasporas was on the received definitions of ‘race’ and ethnicity. as with the idea of a unified british culture so too with race as the british saw themselves as a unified body (to which the term race cannot be applied) against which ethnic difference may be measured. indirectly then race has reared its head albeit ‘under erasure.’ hall argues that of the two major non-white communities in britain the term ‘race’ is applied to afro-caribbeans and ‘ethnicity’ to asians. although ‘race’ is not a scientific but a social category, its implied application primarily to blacks incorporates in its very definition racist characteristics (skin colour, shape of the nose, and so on) that transform a social definition into a genetic or ‘natural’ one. and although ‘ethnicity’ (not ‘race’) is applied to asians because the latter’s cultures and religions are most on display, even here the biological referent that characterizes race is never totally absent. if the category of ‘race’ had defined blacks as being indolent and congenitally indisposed towards the work ethic, the category of ‘ethnicity’ brought genetic characteristics (feminization of the body, incapable of playing sport) to the asians as well. the multicultural question then becomes twofold: on the one hand it must address questions of racism (because the reading of both black and asian is ultimately racist) and at the same time engage with racial difference because even after two generations these multicultural communities have not become part of an unproblematic britishness. this leads naturally to the ‘transruptive’ effect multicultural communities have had on definitions of culture. post-enlightenment modernity has offered the opposition of ‘particularism versus universalism, or tradition versus modernity’ as the framework within which to examine culture. to combine categories that are in opposition is seen as a relic of the middle ages and a logical impossibility in the modern world. so modernity cannot understand the idea of a traditional islamic modernity or diasporas espousing antimodern sentiments (such as the burning of a book, female genital mutilation or the fatwa) portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 34 mishra what was multiculturalism? while at the same time claiming to be modern. here hall, once again borrowing from bhabha, puts forward the ‘transruptive’ category of ‘hybridity’ as the cultural logic of translation, the mark of the place of the incommensurable in diaspora when seen from the post-enlightenment tradition/modern divide. writes hall, ‘in diasporic conditions people are often obliged to adopt shifting, multiple or hyphenated positions of identification’ (2000, 227). a hyphenated declaration of citizenship is often the norm as black and british or british-asian descriptions are not uncommon. what these imply is the presence of the principle of heterogeneity and hybridity in the life of diaspora. ‘they are all,’ writes hall, ‘negotiating culturally somewhere along the spectrum of différance, in which disjunctures of time, generation, spatialization and dissemination refuse to be neatly aligned’ (227). a third ‘transruptive effect’ of the new multiculturalism is the challenge the latter poses to what looked like a settled terrain of differences between the liberals and the communitarians. what is at issue primarily is the self-evident universalism of postenlightenment liberalism. in other words, the latter tradition looks less and less like a universal principle of reason and proper governance and more and more like a particularity (a european historical particularism) that masquerades as a universalism since it is grounded ‘in the customs, habits and rituals of everyday life’ (hall 2000, 229). its tenets of universal citizenship and cultural neutrality no longer hold good in multicultural polities; multicultural difference is now making headway into the domain of the rational and the universal as personal and communal codes transform the neutrality of law and introduce exceptions as not unqualified precedent. recall the right of sikhs to wear turbans and the acceptance of ‘consensual arranged marriages’ (hall 2000, 231). these transruptive effects lead hall to pose the question: ‘what are the premises behind a radically distinctive form of british multiculturalism?’ (231). the nation will have to reflect on its racism and the ways in which biological racism continues to shadow questions of cultural or ethnic difference; the nation will have to critically rethink its own majoritarian logic and reconfigure itself in a ‘radical post-national form’ (232); it needs to understand that migrant communities ‘bear the imprint of diaspora’ (232) since they are portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 35 mishra what was multiculturalism? vertically integrated into their own communities even as they laterally link with other communities. a greater cultural diversity at the heart of modernity without relapsing into ethnic absolutism or closure should be the aim as one rethinks, after laclau, ‘one’s relation to [the] past as a critical reception’ (233). if indeed ‘western particularism’ came to be rewritten as ‘global universalism’ as hall says (234), can we not see how difference, the particular, can be located in the heart of the universal? is it a matter of reaffirming democracy or of accepting, as hall argues, that democracy is always a struggle for justice, for the right balance between competing, and equally defensible, positions? one has to, in short, ‘effect a radical reconfiguration of the particular and the universal, of liberty and equality with difference’ (236). a deepening of the democratic ethos must work hand in hand with an ‘unrelenting contestation of every form of racialized and ethnicized exclusionary closure (whether practiced by others on minority communities, or within communities)’ (236). a more inclusive britishness should be the ultimate goal. (9) the radical imaginary stuart hall is aware that this new political logic is a lot harder to put into practice than to theorize and it is the former (the practice) that has invariably led to arguments that are in the end circuitous, offering the right critique but unable to transform national consciousness. the need for a transformation is at the heart of richard j. f. day’s capacious multiculturalism and the history of canadian diversity (2000). the book has an historical sweep – the extent to which canadian multiculturalism continues the discourse on diversity begun with herodotus – and theoretical investigation – is ‘the current state policy of multiculturalism … a stage on the way to a ‘post-industrial sittlichkeit?’ (3). on both these premises, day’s conclusions verge on the cautious. he sees canadian multiculturalism not as a solution to the age-old problem of diversity but as an extension and re-thinking of that problem. in other words, herodotus’s diversity scheme, the problematic that it is, continues to fester. and as for the new post-industrial ethical order implied in canadian multicultural policy as suggested by charles taylor, the goal remains elusive as the policy has become a way of managing diverse identities and portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 36 mishra what was multiculturalism? not the establishment of a new order that transcends the relations of power (master and slave) ‘found in the “deficient” hegelian forms of recognition’ (3). lest this position is seen as endorsing the conservative criticism of multiculturalism as the royal road to the destruction of a fragile canadian unity, day argues that he is not against the policy as such. what he critiques is the claim that the policy should create a state of total recognition of difference and reconciliation of disparate claims. the history of diversity has had this underlying ideological thrust – to create a unity out of diversity, initially a franco-british diversity, and now a multi-ethnic diversity. day argues that the canadian citizen must go beyond the ‘fantasy of unity,’ that unity is the final goal of multiculturalism or indeed of the nation itself. for him multiculturalism as ‘radical imaginary’ has to be separated from multiculturalism as ‘state policy.’ the latter leads to ‘management, discipline and uniformity,’ the former to a creative and ‘spontaneous emergence’ of a vibrant, though not necessarily reconcilable, nation-state. the trouble with canadian multiculturalism is that it continues to see diversity as a problem to be solved and canadian history is replete with attempts at managing ‘ethnocultural identities’ (5). against this the canadian state claims that diversity has been solved or is a non-issue because the canadian state has been multicultural from its very inception with claims made that cultural diversity was part of canada’s aboriginal peoples as well as, of course, the two dominant european settler communities: the french and the british. this claim is not uncommon as many other nations, including european nations, have said as much in defence of their own policies managing post-war ethnic diversity. stuart hall’s essay had made this clear with reference to britain. day does not buy this self-aggrandising reading of multiculturalism but pursues critically how recognition may be granted or attained. drawing upon hegel, lacan, taylor, kymlicka, bhabha, žižek and derrida, day argues that ‘multiculturaist theory and practice must traverse the fantasy of fullness associated with the modern nation-state’ (12). he continues, ‘only by abandoning the dream of unity, canada may, after all, lead the way towards a future that will be shared by many other nation-states; it may, in its failure to achieve a universal mass identity, or even a universal mass of identities, inadvertently portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 37 mishra what was multiculturalism? come closer to its goal of mutual and equal recognition amongst all who have chanced to find themselves within its borders’ (12). the project should not imply that questions of race, sex and gender should remain private concerns and justice is dispensed with. towards the end of his book day returns to the question whether multiculturalism (‘as political theory and philosophy’) points towards ‘an ethical community of equal and mutual recognition – a sittlichkeit’ (177). the difficulties posed by in some sense this utopian ideal cannot be disentangled from the history of the nation itself. in the case of canada the ongoing will to control and manage, to dissociate language from culture (trudeau’s well-known references to two official languages of canada but no official culture) continues to present diversity as a problem in need of fixing rather than diversity as an energizing principle that redefines the nation. the multicultural after all begins with the presumption that a homogeneous group (or groups who have created a sense of this homogeneity as in the franco-british compromise in canada) must find ways of controlling a growing diversity. it does not begin with diverse ethnocultural groups finding ways in which they may respond to the presumed homogeneous group. day does not articulate it in quite this fashion but his references to the counter epistemology of the hybrid and his general unease about the primacy given to the hegelian model of recognition suggests some such unease. working through kymlicka’s theory of a non-procedural liberalism which would allow for a theory of minority rights to exist alongside traditional human rights and individual freedom and taylor’s well-known thesis about recognition granted to cultures of value and historical depth, day concludes with notes towards a multicultural ‘radical imaginary.’ first, multiculturalism as theory and philosophy should go outside the fold, outside the domain of a state-sponsored ‘rational-bureaucratic action’ to solve the problem of diversity (2000, 222). the state must cease to see itself as the neutral ground in which dialogue between diverse ethnic groups can take place. it should also deconstruct its own locale in a colonialist, in this case, canadian, history. the point that day makes, and forcefully too, is that the state has its own ideological roots, its own bias, its own stake in ensuring that its version of culture and society remains the norm. portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 38 mishra what was multiculturalism? although the liberal argument is that the personal is not the business of the state, the fact remains that the state has always been based on some values of some ‘persons.’ day formulates this as a question: ‘if the current forms of social and political organization are ‘not necessarily’ connected to any particular culture or ethnicity, then why is there such resistance to putting them at risk?’ (223). day refers to the ‘fantasmatic structure of canadian multiculturalism’ because it is predicated on the prior condition of a canadian culture and this culture can be readily recovered or accessed. the fullness and harmony associated with these reveries is no more than a myth not because this harmony is glaringly spurious but because this harmony represses those exclusionary principles necessary to hold the myth together. day’s history of canadian diversity acknowledges the repressed, the dark side of canadian history. to do so canadian multiculturalism must, as he puts it, ‘(i) openly admit and orient to the impossibility of full identity; (ii) affirm the value of difference and the other as such; and (iii) recognize the necessity of a negotiation of all universal horizons, including that of the nation(s)-state’ (224). the state must therefore acknowledge that there is no correct ‘person-type’ to which the polity should aspire since the type has never existed. the state must acknowledge difference and not strategically incorporate difference into its own system of quasi-assimilation. what the other does is that it ‘demands’ that the self modifies its own structures, to acknowledge that both the self and the other are situated ‘in an impossible quest for identity amidst the endless play of difference’ (225). it follows that no identity can be prioritized over another and if it has been we must confront the reason: colonial institutions that replicate only its own hegemonic form of subjecthood. for day then, the role of the canadian state should be to provide a space for a degree of free play, without necessarily endorsing any particular ideology. in this space of free play anything could be on the ascendant but the ascendancy may be only momentary as it would be subject to revision. what is preferred is not a ‘static, solidified order, but a dynamic and fluid chaos’ (225). to dissolve the problem of canadian diversity, says day, the project of multiculturalism as advancing canadian unity must end. the québécois nationalist position and the canadian first nation position on this are absolutely identical: both recognize that they are seen by portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 39 mishra what was multiculturalism? english canada as ‘competitive aberrations to be eliminated, absorbed, or merely recognized’ (227). and isn’t this the agenda of (canadian) multiculturalism? concludes day: in affirming difference as such, recognizing the impossibility of identity, and accepting the necessity of an ongoing negotiation of all universal horizons, canada could start to move from multiculturalism as deep diversity – as ‘more well-managed difference’ within an authoritarian and hierarchical capitalist state form – to multiculturalism as radical imaginary, as différance, deterriorialization, more-than-life. (227) conclusion: the universal and the particular in general terms the issues raised above congeals around the question of subjectivity, especially in the wake of the structuralist declaration of the ‘death of the subject.’ the ramifications of this declaration (which governed the field of literary and cultural theory for some time in the 70s and 80s) were felt across disciplines and led to an insistence on multiple identities against the idea of a singular, transcendental one. i want to use ernesto laclau’s brilliant essay ‘universalism, particularism and the question of identity’ (2003) to make a case for a realist understanding of the ‘pastness’ of multiculturalism. the essay does not see diversity as a problem; rather it makes a case, with which i am in agreement, that the post-marxist principles of universalism (class, gender, and so on) have to be internalized within the particular not because of any hegemonic stipulation but because the principles of universalism were themselves ‘particular’ (linked to a specific western historical formation) and this particularity (now rendered as a universal) is a particularity that may be located within all particularisms. if the place/terrain from which the universal subject spoke is non-existent, then a space is created for the evolution of multiple identities, and new forms of multicultural subjectivities. the divide now is not between a subject position and the absolute signified of transcendentalism, but between the particularism of the multicultural other versus the implied universalism of the self. or, presented as a question, can particularism now dictate an economy of differences in terms of other ‘particularisms?’ in the latter, identity simply becomes particular outside of the universal. the relative merits of the particular and the universal have been traditionally located within two propositions: first there is an absolute divide between the two, in that one portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 40 mishra what was multiculturalism? cannot be both, and second the universal must have priority over the particular because the universal alone can be rationally defended. the universal is therefore a principle that inheres post-enlightenment modes of thinking, the particular is its aberrant and even recalcitrant other. but this universal, in post-enlightenment europe, was nothing more than a european particularism which presented itself as the universal. nowhere is this more evident than in the history of imperialism, which may be seen as the ‘universalization’ of a european ‘particularism’ (laclau 2003, 362). here of course particularism was hoisted on to colonized peoples, peoples without history, who were in need of the civilizing mission of europe. laclau’s narrative moves to its inevitable conclusion: ‘the universal is no more than a particular that at some moment has become dominant and there is no way of reaching a reconciled society’ (363). but the ‘proliferation of particularisims’ as we have seen in recent times (and which certainly shadows multicultural thinking) does not offer an easy solution to current problems about difference. at its most awkward, defence of particularisms (which may inform the principle of absolute tolerance) produces the following logic: i can defend the right of sexual, racial and national minorities in the name of particularism; but if particularism is the only valid principle, i have to also accept the rights to self-determination of all kinds of reactionary groups involved in antisocial practices. even more: as the demands of various groups will necessarily clash with each other, we have to appeal – short of postulating some kind of pre-established harmony – to some more general principles in order to regulate such clashes. in actual fact, there is no particularism which does not make appeal to such principles in the construction of its own identity. (laclau 2003, 363) pure particularism thus produces the ideal of harmonious co-existence within a coherent whole. but this ideal overlooks power relations within the groups that make up the coherent whole. it also overlooks the principle of separate developments along the lines of apartheid because each and every particular is its own self-contained universe. realistically though the identity of an ethnic minority, for instance, can be fully achieved only if it is recognized as such by the nation-state. laclau uses the word ‘integration’ instead of ‘recognition’ because he wishes to make it clear that along with the realization of an ethnic identity there is also an implicit demand that the achieved identity will share equally in the universal principles of social justice and fair play available to all citizens within the nation. this leads laclau to put forward a further definition of the universal portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 41 mishra what was multiculturalism? and the particular: ‘the universal is the symbol of a missing fullness and the particular exists only in the contradictory movement of asserting at the same time a differential identity and canceling it through its subsumption in the non-differential medium’ (364). for laclau, then, self-enclosed identities that make no reference to what is outside are neither ‘viable’ nor ‘progressive.’ it makes no sense for minorities in europe for instance to refuse to participate in european institutions because to maintain pure identities plays to the logic of apartheid and forever creates the binary of the oppressor and the oppressed. ‘a particularism really committed to change,’ must therefore reject ‘both what denies its own identity and that identity itself’ (365). so identity requires constant negotiation so as to critique the dominant group (which denies minority identity) as well as self-reflect on its own demands for particularism. the shaping and re-shaping of identities within a dialectical and not oppositional politics is at the heart of multicultural thinking too. for laclau there are a number of divergent courses that multiculturalism can follow. one is to ‘affirm, purely and simply, the right of the various cultural and ethnic groups to assert their differences and their separate development’ (366). this is, in other words, no more than the opposition of one particularism with another and is ultimately segregationist. the proper proactive solution is for particularism/difference to be asserted within a ‘global community’ in an a priori principle that is dictated by coexistence. laclau asks a question that holds the key to multicultural thinking: ‘now, how could that coexistence be possible without some shared universal values, without a sense of belonging to a community larger than each of the particular groups in question?’ (366). the role of negotiation remarked above is, however, fraught with difficulties since the outcomes of negotiation are ultimately a matter of a balance of power within competing communities and are never something undertaken on a level playing field. there may be alliances based on mutual give and take but neither a sense of ‘collective will’ nor of community can arise out of such a fundamentally undertheorized notion of negotiation. what needs to be undertaken is based on a proper understanding of universalism itself. for, ‘it is one thing to say that universalistic values of the west are the preserve of its traditional dominant groups; it is very different to assert that the historical link between portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 42 mishra what was multiculturalism? the two is a contingent and unacceptable fact which can be modified through political and social struggles’ (366). this was indeed the argument of mary wollstonecraft who said that it made no sense to have universalistic human rights that ignored women as a group and simply advanced the rights of one section of the community. the historicizing of universalism would show that it was an ideology that began with the presumption that a nation was homogeneous, that europe was the centre of the world and that it was selfevidently rational. the world as it is cannot be understood in terms of this understanding of universalism. the unresolved tension between universalism and particularism now brings us closer to a different, a lot more energetic democracy that would take us away from western eurocentrism through an operation that could be called ‘a systematic decentring of the west’ (laclau 2003, 367). ‘eurocentrism [itself],’ writes laclau, ‘was the result of a discourse which did not differentiate between the universal values that the west was advocating and the concrete social agents that were incarnating them’ (367). laclau then proceeds to separate these ‘two aspects.’ if minority struggles show that actual practice restricts the ‘universalism of our political ideals to limited sectors of the population’ (here the majority population), then its spheres of application must be widened even as its ‘universal dimension’ is retained. the ‘concrete contents’ of this new universality can then be defended more fully: ‘through this process, universalism as a horizon is expanded at the same time as its necessary attachment to a particular content is broken.’ to reject universalism outright on the grounds that it belongs to a single group doesn’t do anyone any good. if we can see the universal not in terms of a definable content but as a ‘receding horizon’ that is flexible enough to accommodate demands other than those enshrined in its putative content, then we can enter creatively into the heart of the paradox: which is that universality is incommensurable with particularity but ‘cannot exist apart from the particular’ (367). the paradox cannot be resolved, nor should it be resolved for the tension between the two, their non-resolution, creates the vibrant social conditions within which a democracy can thrive. the solution, if there were one, would imply that the true content of the universal has been found once and for all and there is no need for a ‘radical imaginary.’ this would then be contrary to democracy as a social politics in which there must always be a struggle between competing groups for a certain particularity to become universal. in a very real sense multicultural theory makes us portal vol. 2, no. 2 july 2005 43 mishra what was multiculturalism? recognize a process of competition as well as the impossibility of arriving at a society secure in its universality. laclau’s brilliant essay spells out a dichotomy in (multi)culture that need not be resolved but an understanding of which is crucial to a healthy democratic polity. for, after all, multicultural theory can only exist within the confines of such a democracy. reference list alcoff, l. m. & mendieta, e. 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